#talks to teachers# on psychology: and to students on some of life's ideals, by william james #new york henry holt and company# # # #copyright, , # #by william james# #press of geo. h. ellis co. (inc.) boston# preface. in i was asked by the harvard corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to the cambridge teachers. the talks now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. i have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical application. so i have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced; and now, that i have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and are practical and popular in the extreme. some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences i believe that i am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more genuine public need. teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to prop their minds. but my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. _he_ doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my book to make it look, when printed, like a baedeker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. so far as books printed like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so far i am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions. readers acquainted with my larger books on psychology will meet much familiar phraseology. in the chapters on habit and memory i have even copied several pages verbatim, but i do not know that apology is needed for such plagiarism as this. the talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's colleges. the first one was to the graduating class of the boston normal school of gymnastics. properly, it continues the series of talks to teachers. the second and the third address belong together, and continue another line of thought. i wish i were able to make the second, 'on a certain blindness in human beings,' more impressive. it is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. it connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that i mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. according to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the absolute,' to know the whole of it. the facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. there is no point of view absolutely public and universal. private and uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know _where_. the practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. these phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. once they had a passionate inner meaning. such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions _vi et armis_ upon orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess. cambridge, mass., march, . contents. talks to teachers. i. psychology and the teaching art the american educational organization,--what teachers may expect from psychology,--teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,--the science of teaching and the science of war,--the educational uses of psychology defined,--the teacher's duty toward child-study. ii. the stream of consciousness our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields,'--they have a focus and a margin,--this description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas,'--wundt's conclusions, note. iii. the child as a behaving organism mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,--the latter view the more fashionable one to-day,--it will be adopted in this work,--why so?--the teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior. iv. education and behavior education defined,--conduct is always its outcome,--different national ideals: germany and england. v. the necessity of reactions no impression without expression,--verbal reproduction,--manual training,--pupils should know their 'marks'. vi. native and acquired reactions the acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,--illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching,--man has more instincts than other mammals. vii. what the native reactions are fear and love,--curiosity,--imitation,--emulation,--forbidden by rousseau,--his error,--ambition, pugnacity, and pride. soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse,--ownership,--its educational uses,--constructiveness,--manual teaching,--transitoriness in instincts,--their order of succession. viii. the laws of habit good and bad habits,--habit due to plasticity of organic tissues,--the aim of education is to make useful habits automatic,--maxims relative to habit-forming: . strong initiative,-- . no exception,-- . seize first opportunity to act,-- . don't preach,--darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay,--the habit of mental and muscular relaxation,--fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,--sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit,--momentous influence of habits on character. ix. the association of ideas a case of habit,--the two laws, contiguity and similarity,--the teacher has to build up useful systems of association,--habitual associations determine character,--indeterminateness of our trains of association,--we can trace them backward, but not foretell them,--interest deflects,--prepotent parts of the field,--in teaching, multiply cues. x. interest the child's native interests,--how uninteresting things acquire an interest,--rules for the teacher,--'preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,--all later interests are borrowed from original ones. xi. attention interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,--voluntary attention comes in beats,--genius and attention,--the subject must change to win attention,--mechanical aids,--the physiological process,--the new in the old is what excites interest,--interest and effort are compatible,--mind-wandering,--not fatal to mental efficiency. xii. memory due to association,--no recall without a cue,--memory is due to brain-plasticity,--native retentiveness,--number of associations may practically be its equivalent,--retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual,--memory _versus_ memories,--scientific system as help to memory,--technical memories,--cramming,--elementary memory unimprovable,--utility of verbal memorizing,--measurements of immediate memory,--they throw little light,--passion is the important factor in human efficiency,--eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,--the rate of forgetting, ebbinghaus's results,--influence of the unreproducible,--to remember, one must think and connect. xiii. the acquisition of ideas education gives a stock of conceptions,--the order of their acquisition,--value of verbal material,--abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable,--false conceptions of children. xiv. apperception often a mystifying idea,--the process defined,--the law of economy,--old-fogyism,--how many types of apperception?--new heads of classification must continually be invented,--alteration of the apperceiving mass,--class names are what we work by,--few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five. xv. the will the word defined,--all consciousness tends to action,--ideo-motor action,--inhibition,--the process of deliberation,--why so few of our ideas result in acts,--the associationist account of the will,--a balance of impulses and inhibitions,--the over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type,--the perfect type,--the balky will,--what character building consists in,--right action depends on right apperception of the case,--effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma,--vital importance of voluntary attention,--its amount may be indeterminate,--affirmation of free-will,--two types of inhibition,--spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,--conclusion. talks to students. i. the gospel of relaxation ii. on a certain blindness in human beings iii. what makes a life significant? * * * * * talks to teachers i. psychology and the teaching art in the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in american life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. in whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. the renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the state, and spreads slowly outward and downward. the teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. the earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions. the outward organization of education which we have in our united states is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any country. the state school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an important scale. the independence of so many of the colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from the older american recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in germany and scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the english tutorial system would seem too often to entail),--all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, i say, are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn. having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two america may well lead the education of the world. i must say that i look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an accomplished fact. no one has profited more by the fermentation of which i speak, in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. the desire of the schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. and in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, i am sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside. far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes. psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. and yet i confess that, acquainted as i am with the height of some of your expectations, i feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. in other words, i am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. that would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. the air has been full of rumors. the editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and i am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. 'the new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening. altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. the matter of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. where the disciples are not independent and critical-minded enough (and i think that, if you teachers in the earlier grades have any defect--the slightest touch of a defect in the world--it is that you are a mite too docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a license to lay down the law to them from above. as regards this subject of psychology, now, i wish at the very threshold to do what i can to dispel the mystification. so i say at once that in my humble opinion there _is_ no 'new psychology' worthy of the name. there is nothing but the old psychology which began in locke's time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the teacher's use. it is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.--i trust that you will see better what i mean by this at the end of all these talks. i say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. an intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality. the science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. the most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. a science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. one genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the lines. the art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. even where (as in the case of herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. the two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. and so everywhere the teaching must _agree_ with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws. to know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. to advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. that ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. the science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of either. in war, all you have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners. just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are. the principles being so plain, there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. the mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for the teacher as for the general to find out. divination and perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the only helpers here. but, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the same. it certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. we know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. it makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. we gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. most of all, it fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles,--to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim. fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. and, as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great. those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. but for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one's hand. least of all need you, merely _as teachers_, deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible manner. i fear that some of the enthusiasts for child-study have thrown a certain burden on you in this way. by all means let child-study go on,--it is refreshing all our sense of the child's life. there are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling statistics, and computing the per cent. child-study will certainly enrich their lives. and, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more intimately with our pupils. our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as noted in the children,--processes of which we might otherwise have remained inobservant. but, for heaven's sake, let the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. let not the prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. i cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, professor münsterberg, when he says that the teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is abstract and analytic. although some of us may conjoin the attitudes successfully, in most of us they must conflict. the worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist. our teachers are overworked already. every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of education. a bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden; yet i know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well, have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent pedagogic breast. i should indeed be glad if this passing word from me might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic mystification of which i have already complained. the best teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best contributor may be the poorest teacher. no fact is more palpable than this. so much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention. ii. the stream of consciousness i said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with for his purposes. now the _immediate_ fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the most general fact. it is the fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), _some kind of consciousness is always going on_. there is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. the existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science. so far as we class the states or fields of consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the descriptive or analytic level. so far as we ask where they come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level. in these talks with you, i shall entirely neglect the questions that come up on the explanatory level. it must be frankly confessed that in no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution which they do have. they certainly follow or accompany our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences and education. but, if we ask just _how_ the brain conditions them, we have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most abstract, general, and conjectural terms. on the other hand, if we should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our soul, which reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy, our words would be familiar enough, it is true; but i think you will agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. the truth is that we really _do not know_ the answers to the problems on the explanatory level, even though in some directions of inquiry there may be promising speculations to be found. for our present purposes i shall therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. this state of things was what i had in mind when, a moment ago, i said there was no 'new psychology' worthy of the name. _we have thus fields of consciousness_,--that is the first general fact; and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always complex. they contain sensations of our bodies and of the objects around us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in every variety of permutation and combination. in most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree, though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very shifting. one state will seem to be composed of hardly anything but sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. but around the sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe of thought or will, and around the memory some margin or penumbra of emotion or sensation. in most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that is very pronounced. you, for example, now, although you are also thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensations of my face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. the sensations are the _centre_ or _focus_, the thoughts and feelings the _margin_, of your actually present conscious field. on the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have become the focus of your mental attention even while i am speaking,--your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture; and, in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there a very faint and marginal place. again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even while i speak. the expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we owe to mr. lloyd morgan, require, i think, no further explanation. the distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are the first technical terms which i shall ask you to remember. * * * * * in the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the process by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts of inner rearrangements of contents occur. sometimes the focus remains but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. sometimes the focus alters, and the margin stays. sometimes focus and margin change places. sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. there can seldom be a sharp description. all we know is that, for the most part, each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like. vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be, it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. an influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp. the various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary mental states, mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically combined. according to some thinkers,--spencer, for example, or taine,--these resolve themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of 'mind-stuff,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built up. locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form. simple 'ideas' of sensation and reflection, as he called them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built up. if i ever have to refer to this theory again, i shall refer to it as the theory of 'ideas.' but i shall try to steer clear of it altogether. whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and, for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.[a] [a] in the light of some of the expectations that are abroad concerning the 'new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually candid confession of its founder wundt, after his thirty years of laboratory-experience: "the service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as i believe, in making this really possible, in any exact sense. well, has our experimental self-observation, so understood, already accomplished aught of importance? no general answer to this question can be given, because in the unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body of psychologic doctrine.... "in such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank the newer methods. and if i were asked in what for me the worth of experimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still consists, i should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of our inner processes. i learned in the achievements of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental synthesis.... from my inquiry into time-relations, etc.,... i attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually separated by artificial abstractions and names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and i saw the indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of the mental life. the chronometric study of association-processes finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental 'images' [_reproducirten vorstellungen_] was one of those numerous self-deceptions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forthwith thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. i learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less melting and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and i comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to be no longer tenable.... besides all this, experimental observation yielded much other information about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact numerical value of certain psychophysical data, and the like. but i hold all these more special results to be relatively insignificant by-products, and by no means the important thing."--_philosophische studien_, x. - . the whole passage should be read. as i interpret it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names. iii. the child as a behaving organism i wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelligible way assign its _functions_. it has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge, and it leads to action. can we say which of these functions is the more essential? an old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. popular belief has always tended to estimate the worth of a man's mental processes by their effects upon his practical life. but philosophers have usually cherished a different view. "man's supreme glory," they have said, "is to be a _rational_ being, to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. the uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 'the theoretic life' is his soul's genuine concern." nothing can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the practical or the theoretical ideal. in the latter case, abstraction from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the highest human perfection. in the former, the man of contemplation would be treated as only half a human being, passion and practical resource would become once more glories of our race, a concrete victory over this earth's outward powers of darkness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the test of every education worthy of the name. it is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational function, where plato and aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. the theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction. consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super-added biological perfection,--useless unless it prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration. deep in our own nature the biological foundations of our consciousness persist, undisguised and undiminished. our sensations are here to attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encourage us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable æsthetic perception or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors might at this rate be regarded as only part of the incidental excess of function that necessarily accompanies the working of every complex machine. i shall ask you now--not meaning at all thereby to close the theoretic question, but merely because it seems to me the point of view likely to be of greatest practical use to you as teachers--to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life. in the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only aspect; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other features which complete the case. no one believes more strongly than i do that what our senses know as 'this world' is only one portion of our mind's total environment and object. yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the _sine qua non_ of all the rest. if you grasp the facts about it firmly, you may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. as our time must be so short together, i prefer being elementary and fundamental to being complete, so i propose to you to hold fast to the ultra-simple point of view. the reasons why i call it so fundamental can be easily told. first, human and animal psychology thereby become less discontinuous. i know that to some of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason, but there are others whom it will affect. second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs parallel therewith. but the brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for practical behavior. every current that runs into it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from which the current came. it therefore generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose. third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer directly to this world's environment, the ethical utopias, æsthetic visions, insights into eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human individual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also able to produce more practically useful products. the latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial results. fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities are themselves far more connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the environment than at first sight might appear. no truth, however abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably at some time influence our earthly action. you must remember that, when i talk of action here, i mean action in the widest sense. i mean speech, i mean writing, i mean yeses and noes, and tendencies 'from' things and tendencies 'toward' things, and emotional determinations; and i mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. as i talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed. you might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical result. but it _must_ have a practical result. it cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. if not to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer some question differently by reason of what you are thinking now. some of you will be led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books. these will develop your opinion, whether for or against. that opinion will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. we cannot escape our destiny, which is practical; and even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out. these few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence in my proposal. as teachers, i sincerely think it will be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful psychological phenomena handed over to your inspection if you consider them from the point of view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor. sufficient at any rate as a first conception and as a main conception. you should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in _training the pupil to behavior_; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense, as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life. the reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. _not_ to speak, _not_ to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies. "thou shalt refrain, renounce, abstain"! this often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge. iv. education and behavior in our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of what an education means. in the last analysis it consists in the organizing of _resources_ in the human being, of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical world. an 'uneducated' person is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. on the contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was placed before. education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it _the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior_. to illustrate. you and i are each and all of us educated, in our several ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different conduct. it would be quite impossible for me, with my mind technically and professionally organized as it is, and with the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and inactive. something tells me that i am expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. my organs of articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their form and order determined altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and reading. your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive,--leaving out those among you who happen to be taking notes. but the very listening which you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. all the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen. your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. and, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as i said on the previous occasion: you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words which i now let fall.--so it is with the impressions you will make there on your pupil. you should get into the habit of regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior,--emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not. and, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of something given us for practical use. that conception will certainly cover the greater part of your own educational work. if we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct. this is most immediately obvious in germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. the german universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant human information on that subject. little else is recognized in germany as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient instrument of research. in england, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of character rather than at the development of what one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency. professor jowett, when asked what oxford could do for its students, is said to have replied, "oxford can teach an english gentleman how to _be_ an english gentleman." but, if you ask what it means to 'be' an english gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and behavior. an english gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in advance. here, as elsewhere, england expects every man to do his duty. v. the necessity of reactions if all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the classroom. _no reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. an impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. it is physiologically incomplete. it leaves no fruits behind it in the way of capacity acquired. even as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it. some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with the impression. the most durable impressions are those on account of which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed. the older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. verbal recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much forgotten. when we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. verbal reactions, useful as they are, are insufficient. the pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. in a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. he must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. he must do in his fashion what is often laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for the doing of original work thereafter. the most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre. laboratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. they confer precision; because, if you are _doing_ a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. they give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. they beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's disciplinary functions to a minimum. of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is concerned, the swedish sloyd system, if i may have an opinion on such matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. manual training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced into all our large cities. but there is still an immense distance to traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are destined ultimately to possess. * * * * * no impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something instrumental to adaptive behavior. but a word may be said in continuation. the expression itself comes back to us, as i intimated a moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression,--the impression, namely, of what we have done. we thus receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. we hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct. now this return wave of impression pertains to the completeness of the whole experience, and a word about its importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place. it would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally get some return impression of result, it must be well to let the pupil get such a return impression in every possible case. nevertheless, in schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there are persons who defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. of course, here as elsewhere, concrete experience must prevail over psychological deduction. but, so far as our psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very definite reasons indeed. acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects, unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for not so doing. vi. native reactions and acquired reactions we are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make them numerous and perfect. _our education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities of reaction,_ acquired at home, at school, or in the training of affairs. the teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring process. this being the case, i will immediately state a principle which underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire activity of the teacher. it is this:-- _every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on a native reaction, or a substitute for a native reaction, which the same object originally tended to provoke._ _the teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there_. without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or conduct. you may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react. he must take the first step himself. he must _do_ something before you can get your purchase on him. that something may be something good or something bad. a bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if bad, you can couple it with consequences which awake him to its badness. but imagine a child so lifeless as to react in _no_ way to the teacher's first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his education? to make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case of a young child's training in good manners. the child has a native tendency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under these latter conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's gestures. suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a present for him. no sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch it. you slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. you then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "beg for it nicely,--so!" the child stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure; and that little cycle of training is complete. you have substituted the new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when that kind of impression comes. now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. no matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reactions would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see, snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. but, with memory there, the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. if a child's first snatching impulse be excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice. one can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. such a diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so i subjoin it. [illustration: figure . the brain-processes before education.] figure shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the lower or instinctive centres. the dotted lines that lead from them to the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the processes of memory and association which the reactions impress upon the higher centres as they take place. [illustration: figure . the brain-process after education.] in figure we have the final result. the impression _see_ awakens the chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the _beg_ and _smile_. the thought of the _slap_, connected with the activity of centre , inhibits the _snatch_, and makes it abortive, so it is represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the terminus. ditto of the _cry_ reaction. these are, as it were, short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from _see_ to _smile_. _beg_ and _smile_, thus substituted for the original reaction _snatch_, become at last the immediate responses when the child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands. the first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native reactive tendencies,--the impulses and instincts of childhood,--so as to be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial objects. * * * * * it is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and impulses than they, but this is a great mistake. man, of course, has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal, that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate in a very high degree. the monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width of imitativeness. his instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus man loses the _simply_ instinctive demeanor. but the life of instinct is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways. i will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies which are the most important from the teacher's point of view. vii. what the native reactions are first of all, _fear_. fear of punishment has always been the great weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in the conditions of the schoolroom. the subject is so familiar that nothing more need be said about it. the same is true of _love_, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. the teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure. next, a word might be said about _curiosity_. this is perhaps a rather poor term by which to designate the _impulse toward better cognition_ in its full extent; but you will readily understand what i mean. novelties in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is assuaged. in its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic curiosity. in both its sensational and its intellectual form the instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after life. young children are possessed by curiosity about every new impression that assails them. it would be quite impossible for a young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now listening to me. the outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry his attention off. and, for most people in middle life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his greek or latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the question. the middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of his capacity. the sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly by certain determinate kinds of objects. material things, things that move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. here again comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training methods. the pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on any one's part. the teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown or acts performed or described. theoretic curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. the sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made god, and why they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. but, when the theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of pedagogic relations begins for him. reasons, causes, abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers are familiar. and, both in its sensible and in its rational developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest. of this latter point i will say more anon. _imitation_. man has always been recognized as the imitative animal _par excellence_. and there is hardly a book on psychology, however old, which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. it is strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become adequately recognized. m. tarde led the way in his admirably original work, "les lois de l'imitation"; and in our own country professors royce and baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired. each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. we become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others--the consciousness of what the others are precedes--the sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. the entire accumulated wealth of mankind--languages, arts, institutions, and sciences--is passed on from one generation to another by what baldwin has called social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last. into the particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology i have no time to go. the moment one hears tarde's proposition uttered, however, one feels how supremely true it is. invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked. imitation shades imperceptibly into _emulation_. emulation is the impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the manifestations of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects. emulation is the very nerve of human society. why are you, my hearers, sitting here before me? if no one whom you ever heard of had attended a 'summer school' or teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by fashion? probably not. nor would your pupils come to you unless the children of their parents' neighbors were all simultaneously being sent to school. we wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut off from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable privileges. in the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts. every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by whole bands of children at a time. the teacher who meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable. a teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do herself. "come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better stimulus than "go and do it as the book directs." children admire a teacher who has skill. what he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. it is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest. she must first take one herself; then her example is effective, as no exhortation can possibly be. every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. and this tone is a mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an aggressive and dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year, so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new patterns and not merely to copy the old. the classic example of this sort of tone is the often quoted case of rugby under dr. arnold's administration. he impressed his own character as a model on the imagination of the oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required to impress theirs upon the younger set. the contagiousness of arnold's genius was such that a rugby man was said to be recognizable all through life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school. it is obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no precepts of detail. as in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example. among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the schoolroom, has often made itself heard. more than a century ago, rousseau, in his 'Ã�mile,' branded rivalry between one pupil and another as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal education. "let Ã�mile," he said, "never be led to compare himself to other children. no rivalries, not even in running, as soon as he begins to have the power of reason. it were a hundred times better that he should not learn at all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity. but i would mark out every year the progress he may have made, and i would compare it with the progress of the following years. i would say to him: 'you are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped over, there is the burden which you raised. there is the distance to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over without losing breath. see how much more you can do now!' thus i should excite him without making him jealous of any one. he would wish to surpass himself. i can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his former self." unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young. but to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. the feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. there is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. all games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away? ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should be forever banished from our schools? as a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, i must confess my doubts. the wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a french critic of rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in another. the spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort. no runner running all alone on a race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels, about to pass. when a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must go beside him to keep him to the pace. as imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into _ambition_; and ambition connects itself closely with _pugnacity_ and _pride_. consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an interconnected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination of a great deal of our conduct. the _ambitious impulses_ would perhaps be the best name for the whole group. pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to appeal to in the young. but in their more refined and noble forms they play a great part in the schoolroom and in education generally, being in some characters most potent spurs to effort. pugnacity need not be thought of merely in the form of physical combativeness. it can be taken in the sense of a general unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of difficulty. it is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character. we have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything, difficulties must be smoothed away. _soft_ pedagogics have taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. but from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. it is nonsense to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. the fighting impulse must often be appealed to. make the pupil feel ashamed of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best moral faculties. a victory scored under such conditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his character. it represents the high-water mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his self-imitation. the teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of usefulness. the next instinct which i shall mention is that of _ownership_, also one of the radical endowments of the race. it often is the antagonist of imitation. whether social progress is due more to the passion for keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. the sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. among the first words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,' and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in duplicate. the depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms of communistic utopia. private proprietorship cannot be practically abolished until human nature is changed. it seems essential to mental health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he may defend adversely against the world. even those religious orders who make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinterested terms. the monk must have his books: the nun must have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room. in education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be appealed to in many ways. in the house, training in order and neatness begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. in the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. an object possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series. much of the scholarly work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal which it makes to our cravings after rationality. a man wishes a complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else. the teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is fortunate. almost all children collect something. a tactful teacher may get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make. neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. even such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information which she desires to impart. sloyd successfully avails itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. collecting is, of course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when a boy. _constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance. up to the eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are two names for the same manual activity. both signify the production of change, and the working of effects, in outward things. the result of all this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really the foundation of human _consciousness_. to the very last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the notion of what we can _do with them_. a 'stick' means something we can lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things together. for most people these objects have no other meaning. in geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going through certain processes of construction, revolving a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. the more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives. an unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. but the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching. i need not recapitulate here what i said awhile back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods. they occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous interests of his age. they absorb him, and leave impressions durable and profound. compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real education. there are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity, shyness and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too familiar to need it. you can easily pursue the subject by your own reflection. there is one general law, however, that relates to many of our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little importance in education; and i must refer to it briefly before i leave the subject. it has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. many of our impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are acquired which last. but, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the impulse may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. the sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after birth. in children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain determinate order. creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a semi-frantic and exclusive sort. later, the interest in any one of these things may wholly fade away. of course, the proper pedagogic moment to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native impulse is most acutely present. crowd on the athletic opportunities, the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. the hour may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the child's other occupations take a second place. in this way you economize time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months. one can draw no specific rules for all this. it depends on close observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great advantage over teachers. in fact, the law of transitoriness has little chance of individualized application in the schools. such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he must become accustomed. he must start with the native tendencies, and enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. he must ply him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the bare immediate impression. as the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical scheme. respect then, i beg you, always the original reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point as good behavior. in fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point than good behavior would be. the acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are appropriate. therefore habit is the next subject to which your attention is invited. viii. the laws of habit it is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. we speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word 'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. they talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. but the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. all our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as i am now about to talk of it to you. i believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. the plasticity of the living matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. our nervous systems have (in dr. carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds. habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the duke of wellington said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which were originally there. ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. to each sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. my very words to you now are an example of what i mean; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, i find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and repeating almost literally what i said before. so far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. and since this, under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. to quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is to _make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy_. it is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _for this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. there is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. if there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right. in professor bain's chapter on 'the moral habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. two great maxims emerge from the treatment. the first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. this will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. i remember long ago reading in an austrian paper the advertisement of a certain rudolph somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of ambrosius so-and-so. 'this i do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of a promise which i have made my wife.' with such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe to stake one's money on rudolph's ultimate success. the second maxim is, _never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life_. each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. as professor bain says:-- "the peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. it is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. the essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. this is the theoretically best career of mental progress." a third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain._ it is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. no matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. with good intentions, hell proverbially is paved. this is an obvious consequence of the principles i have laid down. a 'character,' as j.s. mill says, 'is a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. a tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. when a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. there is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but never does a concrete manly deed. this leads to a fourth maxim. _don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract_. lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. the strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore. * * * * * there is a passage in darwin's short autobiography which has been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit, i must now quote again. darwin says: "up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy i took intense delight in shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. i have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great delight. but now for many years i cannot endure to read a line of poetry. i have tried lately to read shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. i have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.... my mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, i cannot conceive.... if i had to live my life again, i would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." we all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. we wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. we mean all this in youth, i say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? surely, in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given. we make ourselves into darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the essential practical conditions of our case. we say abstractly: "i mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. i fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc." but we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin _to-day. _we forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. we postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire. by neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities. this is a point concerning which you teachers might well give a little timely information to your older and more aspiring pupils. according as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes a different kind of being in later life. we have lately had a number of accomplished hindoo visitors at cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. more than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual american over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression. "i do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. it is an invariable part of our hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. every hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age." the good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and imperturbability of manner of these orientals. i felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. how many american children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm. i beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. perhaps you can help our rising generation of americans toward the beginning of a better set of personal ideals.[b] [b] see the address on the gospel of relaxation, later in this volume. * * * * * to go back now to our general maxims, i may at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day._ that is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. the tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. but, if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. so with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. he will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. * * * * * i have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by my doctrine. of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do occur. but there is no incompatibility between the general laws i have laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of character. new habits _can_ be launched, i have expressly said, on condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. now life abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of ideas. in such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regenerate 'nature.' all this kind of fact i fully allow. but the general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. the hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. the drunken rip van winkle, in jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "i won't count this time!" well, he may not count it, and a kind heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. as we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. if he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. he can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. silently, between all the details of his business, the _power of judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. young people should know this truth in advance. the ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together. ix. the association of ideas in my last talk, in treating of habit, i chiefly had in mind our _motor_ habits,--habits of external conduct. but our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the association of ideas.' to that phenomenon i ask you now to turn. you remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. we saw already that its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. describing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. at first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, everything is indeterminate. but inspection shows that each wave has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the constitution of the waves just passed away. and this relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of association,' so-called, of which the first is named the law of contiguity, the second that of similarity. the _law of contiguity_ tells us that objects thought of in the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were _next_ to the objects represented in the wave that is passing away. the vanishing objects were once formerly their neighbors in the mind. when you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind. the _law of similarity_ says that, when contiguity fails to describe what happens, the coming objects will prove to _resemble_ the going objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. in our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case. if, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question, "how came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we can almost always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. the entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the law of contiguity. the words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. in dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition and suggestion. in witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human thinking it had never once before been coupled. the link here is usually some _analogy_ between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow. * * * * * psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but that either presupposes the presence of the other. i myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational beings. in other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws. these questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and i hope that some of you will be interested in following them there. but i will, on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reducible, to one. your pupils, whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. their education consists in the organizing within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on indefinitely. the more copious the associative systems, the completer the individual's adaptations to the world. the teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of 'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' it is mainly that of _building up useful systems of association_ in the pupil's mind. this description sounds wider than the one i began by giving. but, when one thinks that our trains of association, whatever they may be, normally issue in acquired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both formulas. it is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association. the great problem which association undertakes to solve is, _why does just this particular field of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before my mind?_ it may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of objects remembered or of objects perceived; it may include an action resolved on. in either case, when the field is analyzed into its parts, those parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously before consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of association just laid down. those laws _run_ the mind: interest, shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course. to grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple understanding of the psychological machinery. the 'nature,' the 'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations. to break up bad associations or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. but here, as with all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in the application. psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and talent alone can work them to useful results. meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest experience that our minds may pass from one object to another by various intermediary fields of consciousness. the indeterminateness of our paths of association _in concreto_ is thus almost as striking a feature of them as the uniformity of their abstract form. start from any idea whatever, and the entire range of your ideas is potentially at your disposal. if we take as the associative starting-point, or cue, some simple word which i pronounce before you, there is no limit to the possible diversity of suggestions which it may set up in your minds. suppose i say 'blue,' for example: some of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now are suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly of meteorology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the physiology of color-vision, and glide into x-rays and recent physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. to others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue may be 'apperceived' as a synonym for melancholy, and a train of associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to unroll themselves. in the same person, the same word heard at different times will provoke, in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of a number of diverse possible associative sequences. professor münsterberg performed this experiment methodically, using the same words four times over, at three-month intervals, as 'cues' for four different persons who were the subjects of observation. he found almost no constancy in their associations taken at these different times. in short, the entire potential content of one's consciousness is accessible from any one of its points. this is why we can never work the laws of association forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never cipher out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five minutes later. the elements which may become prepotent in the process, the parts of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indeterminable before the fact. but, although we cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them backwards. we cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what we are thinking now. what so baffles our prevision is the shifting part played by the margin and focus--in fact, by each element by itself of the margin or focus--in calling up the next ideas. for example, i am reciting 'locksley hall,' in order to divert my mind from a state of suspense that i am in concerning the will of a relative that is dead. the will still remains in the mental background as an extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my field of consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until i come to the line, "i, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." the words 'i, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection with the marginal thought of the will; that, in turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of my possible legacy, so that i throw down the book and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my future fortune pouring through my mind. any portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities of emotional excitement than another may thus be roused to predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the sparks run in burnt-up paper. * * * * * one more point, and i shall have said as much to you as seems necessary about the process of association. you just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous track. the fact is that every portion of the field _tends_ to call up its own associates; but, if these associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind. seldom, however, as in our example, does the process seem to turn round a single item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in the act of passing. it is a matter of _constellation_, into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to enter and have their say. thus, to go back to 'locksley hall,' each word as i recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse. "ages," for example, calls up "in the foremost files of time," when preceded by "i, the heir of all the"--; but, when preceded by "for i doubt not through the,"--it calls up "one increasing purpose runs." similarly, if i write on the blackboard the letters a b c d e f,... they probably suggest to you g h i.... but, if i write a b a d d e f, if they suggest anything, they suggest as their complement e c t or e f i c i e n c y. the result depending on the total constellation, even though most of the single items be the same. my practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it follows from it that, in working associations into your pupils' minds, you must not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as possible. couple the desired reaction with numerous constellations of antecedents,--don't always ask the question, for example, in the same way; don't use the same kind of data in numerical problems; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as you can. when we come to the subject of memory, we shall learn still more about this. so much, then, for the general subject of association. in leaving it for other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly find it involved again), i cannot too strongly urge you to acquire a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms. all governors of mankind, from doctors and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, instinctively come so to conceive their charges. if you do the same, thinking of them (however else you may think of them besides) as so many little systems of associating machinery, you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their operations and at the practicality of the results which you will gain. we think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized by certain 'tendencies.' these tendencies will in almost every instance prove to be tendencies to association. certain ideas in them are always followed by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent or decline. if the topic arouse one of those first ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well foreseen. 'types of character' in short are largely types of association. x. interest at our last meeting i treated of the native tendencies of the pupil to react in characteristically definite ways upon different stimuli or exciting circumstances. in fact, i treated of the pupil's instincts. now some situations appeal to special instincts from the very outset, and others fail to do so until the proper connections have been organized in the course of the person's training. we say of the former set of objects or situations that they are _interesting_ in themselves and originally. of the latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that interest in them has first to be acquired. no topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers than that of interest. it is the natural sequel to the instincts we so lately discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next subject which we take up. since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the natively interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming associated with some of these natively interesting things. the native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of sensation. novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always divert the attention from abstract conceptions of objects verbally taken in. the grimace that johnny is making, the spitballs that tommy is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells ringing,--these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being interesting have incessantly to cope. the child will always attend more to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. during the performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. i have seen a roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he began to explain the experiment. a lady told me that one day, during a lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention of one of her young charges. he did not remove his eyes from her face; but he said to her after the lesson was over, "i looked at you all the time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" that was the only fact that he had taken in. living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else; and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these. instruction must be carried on objectively, experimentally, anecdotally. the blackboard-drawing and story-telling must constantly come in. but of course these methods cover only the first steps, and carry one but a little way. can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the child brings with him to the school? fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the acquired and the native interests with each other. _any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. the two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ the odd circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the originally interesting portion was by itself. this is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of the principle of association of ideas in psychology. an idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total. as there is no limit to the various associations into which an interesting idea may enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived. you will understand this abstract statement easily if i take the most frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from their connection with our own personal welfare. the most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. we accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. lend the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes. he takes a new kind of care of them altogether. in mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal fortunes. what more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a railroad time-table? yet where will you find a more interesting object if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? at such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life. _from all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these_. the kindergarten methods, the object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all recognize this feature. schools in which these methods preponderate are schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard. _next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system of objects of thought._ this is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier to understand. it is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions which the other shows. one teacher's mind will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson and the circumstances of the children's other experience. anecdotes and reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a lively and entertaining way. another teacher has no such inventive fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. this is the psychological meaning of the herbartian principle of 'preparation' for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. it is the psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies of which you have been recently hearing so much. when the geography and english and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the line. * * * * * if, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. that something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole. fortunately, almost any kind of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. what a help is our philippine war at present in teaching geography! but before the war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and where they supposed the pepper came from. or ask them if glass is a stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are formed and glass manufactured. external links will serve as well as those that are deeper and more logical. but interest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. our acquisitions become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little, as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree. an adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely artificial: they have slowly been built up. the objects of professional interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle life a man profoundly cares. but in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but the principles first laid down. if we could recall for a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of those primitively there. the interest now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. as the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the _original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed. xi. attention whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it excites attention. but in addition to the attention which any object already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or uninteresting in themselves. the distinction between active and passive attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with the deeper aspects of the topic. from our present purely practical point of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive attention to natively interesting material requires no further elucidation on this occasion. all that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on. i must say a few more words, however, about this latter process of voluntary and deliberate attention. one often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of sustained attention, and the popular impression probably prevails that men of genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in this direction. _but a little introspective observation will show any one that voluntary attention cannot be continuously sustained,--that it comes in beats._ when we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and takes it off. then the processes of volitional recall must be repeated once more. voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair. the process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act; and, unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to follow it at all. the sustained attention of the genius, sticking to his subject for hours together, is for the most part of the passive sort. the minds of geniuses are full of copious and original associations. the subject of thought, once started, develops all sorts of fascinating consequences. the attention is led along one of these to another in the most interesting manner, and the attention never once tends to stray away. in a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops much less numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his attention back to it by a violent wrench. in him, therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention receives abundant opportunity for cultivation in daily life. it is your despised business man, your common man of affairs, (so looked down on by the literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to be most developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the faculty in question is always kept in training. a genius, on the contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. he breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind. voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair. you can claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. but, unless the subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and their minds will soon be wandering again. to keep them where you have called them, you must make the subject too interesting for them to wander again. and for that there is one prescription; but the prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit. the prescription is that _the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change_. from an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. you can test this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. you presently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are looking at something else. but, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot,--how big it is, how far, of what shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of associates,--you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time. this is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows. and this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. in all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect results. the teacher who can get along by keeping spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill. there is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is impossible in any continuous way to contribute an interest associatively derived. there are, therefore, certain external methods, which every teacher knows, of voluntarily arousing the attention from time to time and keeping it upon the subject. mr. fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be changed; places can be changed. questions, after being answered singly, may occasionally be answered in concert. elliptical questions may be asked, the pupil supplying the missing word. the teacher must pounce upon the most listless child and wake him up. the habit of prompt and ready response must be kept up. recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine,--all these are means for keeping the attention alive and contributing a little interest to a dull subject. above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, and must use the contagion of his own example. but, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their exercises interesting, while others simply cannot. and psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the task. * * * * * a brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive process may serve still further to elucidate these practical remarks, and confirm them by showing them from a slightly different point of view. what is the attentive process, psychologically considered? attention to an object is what takes place whenever that object most completely occupies the mind. for simplicity's sake suppose the object be an object of sensation,--a figure approaching us at a distance on the road. it is far off, barely perceptible, and hardly moving: we do not know with certainty whether it is a man or not. such an object as this, if carelessly looked at, may hardly catch our attention at all. the optical impression may affect solely the marginal consciousness, while the mental focus keeps engaged with rival things. we may indeed not 'see' it till some one points it out. but, if so, how does he point it out? by his finger, and by describing its appearance,--by creating a premonitory image of _where_ to look and of _what_ to expect to see. this premonitory image is already an excitement of the same nerve-centres that are to be concerned with the impression. the impression comes, and excites them still further; and now the object enters the focus of the field, consciousness being sustained both by impression and by preliminary idea. but the maximum of attention to it is not yet reached. although we see it, we may not care for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may quickly take our mind away. if, however, our companion defines it in a significant way, arouses in the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended from it,--names it an enemy or as a messenger of important tidings,--the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far from being its rivals, become its associates and allies. they shoot together into one system with it; they converge upon it; they keep it steadily in focus; the mind attends to it with maximum power. the attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways, from without and from within. incoming currents from the periphery arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres of memory and imagination re-enforce these. in this process the incoming impression is the newer element; the ideas which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older possessions of the mind. and the maximum of attention may then be said to be found whenever we have a systematic harmony or unification between the novel and the old. it is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting: the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. the old _in_ the new is what claims the attention,--the old with a slightly new turn. no one wants to hear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its slight modification of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye. the genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly learned. the principle is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is difficult in the extreme. and a knowledge of such psychology as this which i am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill. a certain doubt may now occur to some of you. a while ago, apropos of the pugnacious instinct, i spoke of our modern pedagogy as being possibly too 'soft.' you may perhaps here face me with my own words, and ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to repulsive work, does not savor also of sentimentalism. the greater part of schoolroom work, you say, must, in the nature of things, always be repulsive. to face uninteresting drudgery is a good part of life's work. why seek to eliminate it from the schoolroom or minimize the sterner law? a word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious misunderstanding here. it is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then. this is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will. it flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the learning mind. the repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps of mathematical identity, and the like, must borrow their interest at first from purely external sources, mainly from the personal interests with which success in mastering them is associated, such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not being beaten by a difficulty and the like. without such borrowed interest, the child could not attend to them at all. but in these processes what becomes interesting enough to be attended to is not thereby attended to _without effort_. effort always has to go on, derived interest, for the most part, not awakening attention that is _easy_, however spontaneous it may now have to be called. the interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest sufficient _to let loose the effort_. the teacher, therefore, need never concern himself about _inventing_ occasions where effort must be called into play. let him still awaken whatever sources of interest in the subject he can by stirring up connections between it and the pupil's nature, whether in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of pugnacious impulse. the laws of mind will then bring enough pulses of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the direction of the subject. there is, in fact, no greater school of effort than the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their association as means, with some remote ideal end. the herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in principle to be reproached with making pedagogy soft. if it do so, it is because it is unintelligently carried on. do not, then, for the mere sake of discipline, command attention from your pupils in thundering tones. do not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preaching the importance of the subject. sometimes, indeed, you must do these things; but, the more you have to do them, the less skilful teacher you will show yourself to be. elicit interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic yourself, and by following the laws i have laid down. if the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. if it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. if it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. if it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your subject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity being the secret of all interesting talk and thought. the relation of all these things to the native genius of the instructor is too obvious to need comment again. one more point, and i am done with the subject of attention. there is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of their attention. some of us are naturally scatterbrained, and others follow easily a train of connected thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. this seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. in some persons this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. in others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. persons of the latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. the others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment before they come back to the outer world. the possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a great boon. those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear. i am inclined to think that no one who is without it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a very high degree. its amount is probably a fixed characteristic of the individual. but i wish to make a remark here which i shall have occasion to make again in other connections. it is that no one need deplore unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. this concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the laboratory. but, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. the total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. he is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. if any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this. no matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort. some of the most efficient workers i know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type. one friend, who does a prodigious quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming through his mind-wanderings. this is perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on his part; but i seriously think that no one of us need be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. our mind may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it may be extremely efficient all the same. xii. memory we are following a somewhat arbitrary order. since each and every faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention next. but, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take memory now without farther delay; for the phenomena of memory are among the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind is essentially an associating machine. there is no more pre-eminent example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as principles of psychological analysis. memory, moreover, is so important a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help. in old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed with a faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function of this faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment must have a cognition of that portion of the past. this explanation by a 'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded altogether. if, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. but if, by faculty, you mean a principle of _explanation of our general power to recall_, your psychology is empty. the associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the general faculty. the 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ultimate explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association of ideas. nothing is easier than to show you just what i mean by this. suppose i am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "remember! recollect!" does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past? certainly not. it stands staring into vacancy, and asking, "what kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?" it needs in short, a _cue_. but, if i say, remember the date of your birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. and if you now look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. the words, 'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of do, ré, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. the laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations breaking on us from without. whatever appears in the mind must be _introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something already there. this is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of everything else you think of. reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. were memory such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter. that we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. but if we remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths, we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open, those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. the laws of our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain. we may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative processes, these themselves in the last analysis being most probably due to the workings of our brain. descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and its actual aspect as recollection now of a particular event. our memory contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. both the general retention and the special recall are explained by association. an educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number. let us consider each of these points in turn. first, the persistency of the associations. this gives what may be called the _quality of native retentiveness_ to the individual. if, as i think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic condition by which the vestiges of our experience are associated with each other, we may suppose that some brains are 'wax to receive and marble to retain.' the slightest impressions made on them abide. names, dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon becomes a walking cyclopædia of information. all this may occur with no philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials acquired into anything like a logical system. in the books of anecdotes, and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and they are often otherwise very stupid men. it is, of course, by no means incompatible with a philosophic mind; for mental characteristics have infinite capacities for permutation. and, when both memory and philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the highest sort of intellectual efficiency. your walter scotts, your leibnitzes, your gladstones, and your goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this type. efficiency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require it. for, although your philosophic or systematic mind without good desultory memory may know how to work out results and recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready type of individual the economical advantage. the extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at all. if they are also deficient in logical and systematizing power, we call them simply feeble intellects; and no more need to be said about them here. their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state. but it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances, that an impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other parts of it. in cases of this sort, although the immediate impression may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the impression may be reproduced if they ever get excited again. and its liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. each path is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent tenacity of the original impression. as i have elsewhere written: each of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. together they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. the 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. but this forming of associations with a fact,--what is it but thinking _about_ the fact as much as possible? briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences, _the one who thinks over his experiences most_, and weaves them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. but, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important pædagogic consequence follows. _there can be no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of associated things_; and this latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are woven into association with each other in the mind. intricately or profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. and no amount of training, drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which objects belonging to a wholly disparate system--the system of facts of chemistry, for instance--tend to be retained. that system must be separately worked into the mind by itself,--a chemical fact which is thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then to stay, but otherwise easily dropping out. we have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of memory. we have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought of in connection with each other. a given object is held in the memory by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively. learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other system. we see examples of this on every hand. most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. a college athlete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. the reason is that he is constantly going over these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. they form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they stick. so the merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily explains. the great memory for facts which a darwin or a spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as heard. an ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of its web. those of you who have had much to do with scholars and _savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind i mean. the best possible sort of system into which to weave an object, mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the best of all possible ways. a 'science' is thus the greatest of labor-saving contrivances. it relieves the memory of an immense number of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. if you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. the law of refraction, for example: if you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. but, if you don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with each of the three kinds of effect. a 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means would bring about the greatest richness of results. so that, if we have poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the philosophic turn of mind. there are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold as secrets. they are all so many devices for training us into certain methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to retain. even were i competent, i could not here go into these systems in any detail. but a single example, from a popular system, will show what i mean. i take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollecting numbers and dates. in this system each digit is represented by a consonant, thus: is _t_ or _d_; , _n_; , _m_; , _r_; , _l_; , _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; , _c, k, g_, or _qu_; , _f_ or _v_; , _b_ or _p_; , _s, c_, or _z_. suppose, now, you wish to remember the velocity of sound, , feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are the letters you must use. they make the consonants of _tight run_, and it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. so , the date of the execution of charles i., may be remembered by the word _sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe. apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much better. he has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. he knows the historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs. the artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas. thus the student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word _vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. the student of anatomy may remember the position of the mitral valve on the left side of the heart by thinking that l.m. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books. you now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. but a thing thus learned can form but few associations. on the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure. this is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application. there is no moral turpitude in cramming. it would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led to the results desired. but it does not, and your older pupils can readily be made to see the reason why. it follows also, from what has been said, that _the popular idea that 'the memory,' in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be improved by training, is a great mistake_. your memory for facts of a certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to recall. but other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and, unless one have been also trained and versed in _their_ class, will be at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. nevertheless, one often hears people say: "a great sin was committed against me in my youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. if they had only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, i should not be, as i am now, forgetful of everything i read and hear." this is a great mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of chemistry and geography. but, after what i have said, i am sure you will need no farther argument on this point; and i therefore pass it by. but, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by heart, i think that a general practical remark about verbal memorizing may now not be out of place. the excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing, and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much despised. for, when all is said and done, the fact remains that verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most useful material in which thinking can be carried on. abstract conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought, and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words. statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life, they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more use of words. one of the first things that mr. galton discovered was that this appeared to be the case with the members of the royal society whom he questioned as to their mental images. i should say, therefore, that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound education. nothing is more deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now exactly recollect. nothing, on the other hand, is more convenient to its possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. in every branch of study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an incomparable way sum up results. the mind that can retain such formulas is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks. in learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. the best method is of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. for example, if the pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and learn, "the best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "the best method is of course not to hammer in _the sentences_, but to analyze _them and think_." then finally insert the words '_by mere reiteration_,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method. * * * * * in conclusion, i must say a word about the contributions to our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the laboratory-psychologists. many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call _immediate memory_ admits of easy measurement. all we need do is to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer space of time. according to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known. now i can only repeat here what i said to you when treating of attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its consensus in the working whole. such an exercise as this, dealing with incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to perform. in real life, our memory is always used in the service of some interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the 'scientifically accurate' list. this preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. no elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the long run. a blind man like huber, with his passion for bees and ants, can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can through their own. a man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late kavanagh, m.p.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. mr. romanes studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. he found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. but not,--and this is my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested by the results of what mr. romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow readers. in the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific pedagogy. such measurements can give us useful information only when we combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts. depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. what tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. you can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. in almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. if you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. if you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. one of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have recently been made in psychology is that of mr. galton and others concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their imagination. every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and extent of their visual images. these are singularly perfect in a large number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to exist. the same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical basis for such variations and discrepancies. the facts, as i said, are nowadays so popularly known that i need only remind you of their existence. they might seem at first sight of practical importance to the teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. you should interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words. then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel. if the class were very small, results of some distinctness might doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. but it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most lasting ones for himself. in all primary school work this principle of multiple impressions is well recognized, so i need say no more about it here. this principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for teaching them to understand. it runs, in fact, through the whole teaching art. one word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our acquisitions, and i shall have done with the topic of memory. professor ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind. his method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by heart unhesitatingly. the number of repetitions required for this was a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. now, after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes, we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating manner. we must read it over again to revive some of the syllables, which have already dropped out or got transposed. ebbinghaus now systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. the number of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. and he found some remarkable facts. the process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more rapid at first than later on. thus full half of the piece seems to be forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. he made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as to touch the zero-line. in other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it again. in short, professor ebbinghaus's experiments show that things which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. we are different for having once learned them. the resistances in our systems of brain-paths are altered. our apprehensions are quickened. our conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would be if those modifications were not there. the latter influence the whole margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the field. the teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. we are all too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we always underestimate the value. the boy who tells us, "i know the answer, but i can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. but this is a great mistake. it is but a small part of our experience in life that we are ever able articulately to recall. and yet the whole of it has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to judge and act. although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education. this is true even in professional education. the doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. they differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms. be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. it may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important. such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call to your notice under the head of memory. we can sum them up for practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of _thinking_; and by adding, with dr. pick, that, when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it with something else already there. the connecting _is_ the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall. i shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new knowledge,--the process of 'apperception,' as it is called, by which we receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved conceptions. xiii. the acquisition of ideas the images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be, visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word. that is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_. they may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its type or class. in this undated condition, we call them products of 'imagination' or 'conception.' imagination is the term commonly used where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing. conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. for our present purpose the distinction is not important; and i will permit myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word 'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'julius cæsar,' or classes of things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.' the result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. in the illustration i used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child eventually proceeded to act. the sciences of grammar and of logic are little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. the forms of relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other. so you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. the lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience. in all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. there is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age. during the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties of material things. _constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world through life. object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the sphere of this order of acquisition. clay, wood, metals, and the various kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. a youth brought up with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the world. he stands within the pale. he is acquainted with nature, and nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. whereas the youth brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel himself perfectly at home. i already said something of this in speaking of the constructive impulse, and i must not repeat myself. moreover, you fully realize, i am sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance with the world of material things. to have grown up on a farm, to have haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. after adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of these primitive things. the instinctive propensions have faded, and the habits are hard to acquire. accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound system of education. _feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information. it is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences. rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this order form the next phase of education. later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions. this general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in the schoolroom. it is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate that general psychological principle of the successive order of awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. i have spoken of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. just as many a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study (although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age) through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. i think i have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having taken that study up a year too soon. in all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the mind thinks. the abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. this is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and rational, and not merely confined to description. so i go back to what i said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. the more accurately words are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they signify is also understood. it is the failure of this latter condition, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with to-day. a friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography. glancing, at the book, she said: "suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" none of the class replying, the teacher said: "i'm sure they know, but i think you don't ask the question quite rightly. let me try." so, taking the book, she asked: "in what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received the immediate answer from half the class at once: "the interior of the globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." better exclusive object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. our modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. these lend themselves better to explicit treatment; and i myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least resistance in describing. yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms. the object-teaching is mainly to _launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas. to hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract treatment. i heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately." too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting. even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little tommies and little jennies are the only kind of things their minds can digest. but here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the right effect. the great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. the words may sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. so varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. and a strange secret does it often prove. a relative of mine was trying to explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "suppose that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and i, who am killed, am in the passive voice." "but how can you speak if you're killed?" said the child. "oh, well, you may suppose that i am not yet quite dead!" the next day the child was asked, in class, to explain the passive voice, and said, "it's the kind of voice you speak with when you ain't quite dead." in such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied. every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect, never corrected. i remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of lord ullin's daughter. yet i thought that the staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman said, "i'll row you o'er the ferry. it is not for your silver bright, but for your winsome lady," he was to receive the lady for his pay. similarly, i recently found that one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of tennyson's in memoriam as "ring out the _food_ of rich and poor, ring in _redness_ to all mankind," and finding no inward difficulty. the only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to insist on varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be possible, to some sort of practical test. let us next pass to the subject of apperception. xiv. apperception 'apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of the present day. read, for example, this advertisement of a certain text-book, which i take from an educational journal:-- #what is apperception?# for an explanation of apperception see blank's psychology, vol. ---- of the ---- education series, just published. the difference between perception and apperception is explained for the teacher in the preface to blank's psychology. many teachers are inquiring, "what is the meaning of apperception in educational psychology?" just the book for them is blank's psychology in which the idea was first expounded. the most important idea in educational psychology is apperception. the teacher may find this expounded in blank's psychology. the idea of apperception is making a revolution in educational methods in germany. it is explained in blank's psychology, vol. ---- of the ---- education series, just published. blank's psychology will be mailed prepaid to any address on receipt of $ . . such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned; and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing i had in view when i said at our first meeting that the teachers were suffering at the present day from a certain industrious mystification on the part of editors and publishers. perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any other single thing. the conscientious young teacher is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered. and yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,--meaning nothing more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our minds,--that she fears she must have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate to her mission. now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and offers a convenient name for a process to which every teacher must frequently refer. but it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing into the mind. it corresponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in psychology, being only one of the innumerable results of the psychological process of association of ideas; and psychology itself can easily dispense with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics. the gist of the matter is this: every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. the particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them. if, for instance, you hear me call out a, b, c, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly articulating d, e, f. the impression arouses its old associates: they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' it is the fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. educated as we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us completely nondescript: it always _reminds_ of something similar in quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and which it now in some way suggests. this mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. we _conceive_ the impression in some definite way. we dispose of it according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of 'ideas.' this way of taking in the object is the process of apperception. the conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by herbart the 'apperceiving mass.' the apperceived impression is engulfed in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous contents of the mind. i think that you see plainly enough now that the process of apperception is what i called it a moment ago, a resultant of the association of ideas. the product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which it is often impossible to distinguish the share of the two factors. for example, when we listen to a person speaking or read a page of print, much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. we overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong ones; and how little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is not so much that we cannot understand what the actors say as that we cannot hear their words. the fact is that we hear quite as little under similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of english verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension upon a much slighter auditory hint. in all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law makes itself felt,--the law of economy. in admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. we always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. we hate anything _absolutely_ new, anything without any name, and for which a new name must be forged. so we take the nearest name, even though it be inappropriate. a child will call snow, when he sees it for the first time, sugar or white butterflies. the sail of a boat he calls a curtain; an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato; an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. caspar hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the polynesians called captain cook's horses pigs. mr. rooper has written a little book on apperception, to which he gives the title of "a pot of green feathers," that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never seen ferns before. in later life this economical tendency to leave the old undisturbed leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' a new idea or a fact which would entail extensive rearrangement of the previous system of beliefs is always ignored or extruded from the mind in case it cannot be sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously with the system. we have all conducted discussions with middle-aged people, overpowered them with our reasons, forced them to admit our contention, and a week later found them back as secure and constant in their old opinion as if they had never conversed with us at all. we call them old fogies; but there are young fogies, too. old fogyism begins at a younger age than we think. i am almost afraid to say so, but i believe that in the majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five. in some of the books we find the various forms of apperception codified, and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way so delightful to the pedagogic eye. in one book which i remember reading there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from each other. there was associative apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. it is needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' the flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long greek and latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence. there is no reason, if we are classing the different types of apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred. there are as many types of apperception as there are possible ways in which an incoming experience may be reacted on by an individual mind. a little while ago, at buffalo, i was the guest of a lady who, a fortnight before, had taken her seven-year-old boy for the first time to niagara falls. the child silently glared at the phenomenon until his mother, supposing him struck speechless by its sublimity, said, "well, my boy, what do you think of it?" to which, "is that the kind of spray i spray my nose with?" was the boy's only reply. that was his mode of apperceiving the spectacle. you may claim this as a particular type, and call it by the greek name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you like; and, if you do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than are some of the authors of the books. m. perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example of the different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which are possible at different stages of individual experience. a dwelling-house took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing the conflagration from the arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed nothing but the liveliest delight at its brilliancy. but, when the bell of the fire engine was heard approaching, the child was thrown by the sound into a paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as you know, very alarming to young children. in what opposite ways must the child's parents have apperceived the burning house and the engine respectively! the self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be in, or to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression quite differently on different occasions. a medical or engineering expert retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts in the same way as if the other side had retained him. when people are at loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually shows that they have too few heads of classification to apperceive by; for, as a general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough to show that neither one of their rival interpretations is a perfect fit. both sides deal with the matter by approximation, squeezing it under the handiest or least disturbing conception: whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be better to enlarge their stock of ideas or invent some altogether new title for the phenomenon. thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to whether certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables, until haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of protista, which ended the disputes. in law courts no _tertium quid_ is recognized between insanity and sanity. if sane, a man is punished: if insane, acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two experts who will take opposite views of his case. all the while, nature is more subtle than our doctors. just as a room is neither dark nor light absolutely, but might be dark for a watchmaker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or play in, so a man may be sane for some purposes and insane for others,--sane enough to be left at large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial affairs. the word 'crank,' which became familiar at the time of guiteau's trial, fulfilled the need of a _tertium quid_. the foreign terms 'déséquilibré,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 'psychopathic' subject, have arisen in response to the same need. the whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of newly forged technical names whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects of phenomena,--phenomena which could only be squeezed with violence into the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of conceptions. as time goes on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and more voluminous, having to keep up with the ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiving ideas. in this gradual process of interaction between the new and the old, not only is the new modified and determined by the particular sort of old which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the old itself, is modified by the particular kind of new which it assimilates. thus, to take the stock german example of the child brought up in a house where there are no tables but square ones, 'table' means for him a thing in which square corners are essential. but, if he goes to a house where there are round tables and still calls them tables, his apperceiving notion 'table' acquires immediately a wider inward content. in this way, our conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. the extension of the notion 'beast' to porpoises and whales, of the notion 'organism' to society, are familiar examples of what i mean. but be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them large or small, they are all we have to work with. if an educated man is, as i said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to name and classify the actual emergency. the more adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to be. when later we take up the subject of the will, we shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the finding of the right _names_ under which to class the proposed alternatives of conduct. he who has few names is in so far forth an incompetent deliberator. the names--and each name stands for a conception or idea--are our instruments for handling our problems and solving our dilemmas. now, when we think of this, we are too apt to forget an important fact, which is that in most human beings the stock of names and concepts is mostly acquired during the years of adolescence and the earliest years of adult life. i probably shocked you a moment ago by saying that most men begin to be old fogies at the age of twenty-five. it is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with individual cases connected with his profession or business life. in this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his knowledge grows more extensive and minute. but the larger categories of conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a comparatively youthful date. few men ever do acquaint themselves with the principles of a new science after even twenty-five. if you do not study political economy in college, it is a thousand to one that its main conceptions will remain unknown to you through life. similarly with biology, similarly with electricity. what percentage of persons now fifty years old have any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or how the trolley-cars are made to run? surely, a small fraction of one per cent. but the boys in colleges are all acquiring these conceptions. there is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives. such good intentions are hardly ever carried out. the conceptions acquired before thirty remain usually the only ones we ever gain. such exceptional cases of perpetually self-renovating youth as mr. gladstone's only prove, by the admiration they awaken, the universality of the rule. and it may well solemnize a teacher, and confirm in him a healthy sense of the importance of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his present ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's future life is probably bound to be. xv. the will since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the final chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. but the word 'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense. in the broader sense, it designates our entire capacity for impulsive and active life, including our instinctive reactions and those forms of behavior that have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent repetition. in the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as cannot be inattentively performed. a distinct idea of what they are, and a deliberate _fiat_ on the mind's part, must precede their execution. such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not carry with it a further feeling of effort. in my earlier talks, i said so much of our impulsive tendencies that i will restrict myself in what follows to volition in this narrower sense of the term. all our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be due to a peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat action could not occur. thoughts and impressions, being intrinsically inactive, were supposed to produce conduct only through the intermediation of this superior agent. until they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no outward behavior could occur. this doctrine was long ago exploded by the discovery of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible impressions, as you know, produce movement immediately and of themselves. the doctrine may also be considered exploded as far as ideas go. the fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to discharge into some motor effect. the motor effect need not always be an outward stroke of behavior. it may be only an alteration of the heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears, or what not. but, in any case, it is there in some shape when any consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of any sort, conscious processes merely as such, _must_ pass over into motion, open or concealed. the least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a mind possessed by only a single idea. if that idea be of an object connected with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately proceed to discharge. if it be the idea of a movement, the movement will occur. such a case of action from a single idea has been distinguished from more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor' action, meaning action without express decision or effort. most of the habitual actions to which we are trained are of this ideo-motor sort. we perceive, for instance, that the door is open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive some raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand and carry one of them to our mouth without interrupting the conversation; or, when lying in bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for breakfast, and instantly we get up with no particular exertion or resolve. all the ingrained procedures by which life is carried on--the manners and customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation, etc.--are executed in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be concerned in them, while the focus may be occupied with widely different things. but now turn to a more complicated case. suppose two thoughts to be in the mind together, of which one, a, taken alone, would discharge itself in a certain action, but of which the other, b, suggests an action of a different sort, or a consequence of the first action calculated to make us shrink. the psychologists now say that the second idea, b, will probably arrest or _inhibit_ the motor effects of the first idea, a. one word, then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case more clear. one of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the discovery, made simultaneously in france and germany fifty years ago, that nerve currents do not only start muscles into action, but may check action already going on or keep it from occurring as it otherwise might. _nerves of arrest_ were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves. the pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimulated, arrests the movements of the heart: the splanchnic nerve arrests those of the intestines, if already begun. but it soon appeared that this was too narrow a way of looking at the matter, and that arrest is not so much the specific function of certain nerves as a general function which any part of the nervous system may exert upon other parts under the appropriate conditions. the higher centres, for example, seem to exert a constant inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. the reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part removed become exaggerated. you all know that common reflex in dogs, whereby, if you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding hind leg will begin to make scratching movements, usually in the air. now in dogs with mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex is so incessant that, as goltz first described them, the hair gets all worn off their sides. in idiots, the functions of the hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the lower impulses, not inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings, often express themselves in most odious ways. you know also how any higher emotional tendency will quench a lower one. fear arrests appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the like; and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if the whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium. the force of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now not only possible, but easy, because of their inhibition. this has been well called the 'expulsive power of the higher emotion.' it is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our ideational processes. i am lying in bed, for example, and think it is time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the pleasantness of the warm bed. in such a situation the motor consequences of the first idea are blocked; and i may remain for half an hour or more with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation. in a case like this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either of two ways:-- ( ) i may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and then the idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: i shall suddenly find that i have got up--or ( ) still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of inhibition. in the latter case, i have a sense of energetic moral effort, and consider that i have done a virtuous act. all cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these latter patterns. so you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. the interesting thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibitive machinery. a strong and urgent motor idea in the focus may be neutralized and made inoperative by the presence of the very faintest contradictory idea in the margin. for instance, i hold out my forefinger, and with closed eyes try to realize as vividly as possible that i hold a revolver in my hand and am pulling the trigger. i can even now fairly feel my finger quivering with the tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a recording apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by registering incipient movements. yet it does not actually crook, and the movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. why not? simply because, all concentrated though i am upon the idea of the movement, i nevertheless also realize the total conditions of the experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its fringe and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is not to take place. the mere presence of that marginal intention, without effort, urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement from my attention, suffices to the inhibitive effect. and this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in point of fact, produce their motor consequences. life would be a curse and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin keeps the centre inoperative most of the time. in all this, you see, i speak as if ideas by their mere presence or absence determined behavior, and as if between the ideas themselves on the one hand and the conduct on the other there were no room for any third intermediate principle of activity, like that called 'the will.' if you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which seem to follow this conception, i beg you to suspend your judgment for a moment, as i shall soon have something more to say about the matter. but, meanwhile yielding one's self to the mechanical conception of the psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character of human life. man's conduct appears as the mere resultant of all his various impulsions and inhibitions. one object, by its presence, makes us act: another object checks our action. feelings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and another: emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive effects, the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept away. the life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as nothing but the 'ideas' themselves,--ideas for the whole system of which what we call the 'soul' or character' or 'will' of the person is nothing but a collective name. as hume said, the ideas are themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the spectators, and the play. this is the so-called 'associationist' psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it is useless to ignore its power as a conception. like all conceptions, when they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on the subject. no one can have an adequate notion of modern psychological theory unless he has at some time apprehended this view in the full force of its simplicity. let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of exposition. _voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhibitions._ from this it immediately follows that there will be two types of will, in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other inhibitions. we may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate and the obstructed will, respectively. when fully pronounced, they are familiar to everybody. the extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac: his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive, and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of hesitation. certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited type. their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life is impossible. so they show a condition of perfect 'abulia,' or inability to will or act. they cannot change their posture or speech or execute the simplest command. the different races of men show different temperaments in this regard. the southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and precipitate: the english race, especially our new england branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of scruples and checks. the highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be full of scruples and inhibitions. but action, in such a character, far from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the line where they lie thinnest. just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of him whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole field into consideration,--so, i say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind that we should seek to reproduce in our pupils. purely impulsive action, or action that proceeds to extremities regardless of consequences, on the other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and the lowest in type. any one can show energy, when made quite reckless. an oriental despot requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he succeeds, for he has absolutely his own way; and, when the world can no longer endure the horror of him, he is assassinated. but not to proceed immediately to extremities, to be still able to act energetically under an array of inhibitions,--that indeed is rare and difficult. cavour, when urged to proclaim martial law in , refused to do so, saying: "any one can govern in that way. i will be constitutional." your parliamentary rulers, your lincoln, your gladstone, are the strongest type of man, because they accomplish results under the most intricate possible conditions. we think of napoleon bonaparte as a colossal monster of will-power, and truly enough he was so. but, from the point of view of the psychological machinery, it would be hard to say whether he or gladstone was the larger volitional quantity; for napoleon disregarded all the usual inhibitions, and gladstone, passionate as he was, scrupulously considered them in his statesmanship. a familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the inhibitive effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. nowhere does conversation seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in france during the last century. but, if we read old french memoirs, we see how many brakes of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were then removed. where mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and malignity find unhampered expression, talk can be brilliant indeed. but its flame waxes dim where the mind is stitched all over with conscientious fear of violating the moral and social proprieties. the teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an abnormal type of will, which we may call the 'balky will.' certain children, if they do not succeed in doing a thing immediately, remain completely inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally impossible for them to understand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it if it be an outward operation, as long as this particular inhibited condition lasts. such children are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or else the teacher pits his or her will against the child's will, considering that the latter must be 'broken.' "break your child's will, in order that it may not perish," wrote john wesley. "break its will as soon as it can speak plainly--or even before it can speak at all. it should be forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times running. break its will, in order that its soul may live." such will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous wear and tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, and the victory not always with the would-be will-breaker. when a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the child is all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of neural pathology rather than as one of moral culpability. so long as the inhibiting sense of impossibility remains in the child's mind, he will continue unable to get beyond the obstacle. the aim of the teacher should then be to make him simply forget. drop the subject for the time, divert the mind to something else: then, leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of association, spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it, and as likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. it is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert his attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a circle, and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him more invincible. a tactful teacher will never let these strained situations come up at all. you perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. psychology can state your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish the elements of its practical solution. when all is said and done, and your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the pupil's psychological constitution than on anything else. some persons appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions seem to exert peculiarly easy sway. but let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the education of the will. your task is to build up a _character_ in your pupils; and a character, as i have so often said, consists in an organized set of habits of reaction. now of what do such habits of reaction themselves consist? they consist of tendencies to act characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain characteristically when possessed by other ideas. our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively. how is it when an alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what you ought to do? you first hesitate, and then you deliberate. and in what does your deliberation consist? it consists in trying to apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to fit it exactly. if that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. if, on the other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result, if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain. the problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the case. this search for the right conception may take days or weeks. i spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found. often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which i should now like you to look with me a little nearer. the proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits of action. or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. in either of these latter cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the attention to let it exert its adequate effects. whether it be stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our consideration. we shy away from the thought of it. it twinkles and goes out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and motor effects to be exerted. every one knows only too well how the mind flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the reigning mood of feeling. once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our consciousness and our nervous system provide for the action then taking place. our moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast to the appropriate idea. if, then, you are asked, "_in what does a moral act consist_ when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?" you can make only one reply. you can say that _it consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea_ which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies that are there. _to think_, in short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of memory. this comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "i never _thought_," they say. "i never _thought_ how mean the action was, i never _thought_ of these abominable consequences." and what do we retort when they say this? we say: "why _didn't_ you think? what were you there for but to think?" and we read them a moral lecture on their irreflectiveness. the hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an habitual drunkard under temptation. he has made a resolve to reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. his moral triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right _name_ for the case. if he says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. his choice of the wrong name seals his doom. but if, in spite of all the plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard," his feet are planted on the road to salvation. he saves himself by thinking rightly. thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable; and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter to which they have been successfully trained. in all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole procedure. just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our moral destiny turns. you remember that, when we were talking of the subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. if they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an almost incredibly small portion of our lives. but i also said, you will remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their significance, and that i should return to the subject again. so i return to it now. it is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. our acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies. the exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. i hope that you appreciate this now without any further explanation. i have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. i have called it an organism and a machine. i have spoken of its reaction on the environment as the essential thing about it; and i have referred this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous system. i have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly whether i am a complete materialist, or not. now in these lectures i wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to keep free from all speculative complications. nevertheless, i do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and i will therefore say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do i count myself a materialist. i cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though i can perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the _order_ of the machine's operations. our habitual associations of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. and the possible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain. if this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which i sketched for you but a short while ago. our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws. but, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual causation is still open to us. the duration and amount of this attention _seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. we _feel_ as if we could make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny and that of others might hinge. the whole question of free will concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "is or is not the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?" it is plain that such a question can be decided only by general analogies, and not by accurate observations. the free-willist believes the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an illusion. i myself hold with the free-willists,--not because i cannot conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because i fail to understand its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance. considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself. i accordingly believe freely in my freedom; i do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such psychological and psychophysical theories as i hold do not necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist. let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith conclude both that important subject and these lectures. there are two types of will. there are also two types of inhibition. we may call them inhibition by repression or by negation, and inhibition by substitution, respectively. the difference between them is that, in the case of inhibition by repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhibiting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain along with each other in consciousness, producing a certain inward strain or tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits, and the latter quickly vanishes from the field. for instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening to a sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting enough to claim all their attention. you can call the latter back again by bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to keep their minds on their books or on what you are saying. and, by thus keeping them conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you may produce a good effect. but it will be a wasteful effect and an inferior effect; for the moment you relax your supervision the attractive disturbance, always there soliciting their curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be just as they were before: whereas, if, without saying anything about the street disturbances, you open a counter-attraction by starting some very interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget the distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along. there are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of negation. to a man in love, for example, it is literally impossible, by any effort of will, to annul his passion. but let 'some new planet swim into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately cease to engross his mind. it is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ the method of inhibition by substitution. he whose life is based upon the word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked, and who has constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and mean propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. your born gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being than your "crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils," even though in god's sight the latter may, as the catholic theologians say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.' spinoza long ago wrote in his ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. he who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by spinoza. to him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. see to it now, i beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their enthusiasm for honor and veracity. wean them from their native cruelty by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's inner springs of joy. and, in the lessons which you may be legally obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful intoxicants. i have now ended these talks. if to some of you the things i have said seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in consequence of some of the conceptions i have tried to make more clear. i cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive, impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. understand him, then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. and if, in addition, you can also see him _sub specie boni_, and love him as well, you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers. #talks to students# i. the gospel of relaxation i wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and show their practical applications to mental hygiene,--to the hygiene of our american life more particularly. our people, especially in academic circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines. the reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the lange-james theory. according to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. an emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not so much _feel_ fear as call the situation fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was indeed astonishing. one enthusiast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because we run away, and not conversely. some of you may perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. now, whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and i doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. there is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. if we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. if such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. so to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. one hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. to wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an arab, and silently steals away. the best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. in an admirable and widely successful little book called 'the christian's secret of a happy life,' by mrs. hannah whitall smith, i find this lesson on almost every page. _act_ faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "it is your purpose god looks at," writes mrs. smith, "not your feelings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend to.... let your emotions come or let them go, just as god pleases, and make no account of them either way.... they really have nothing to do with the matter. they are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of your present physical condition." but you all know these facts already, so i need no longer press them on your attention. from our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of psychology which i will therefore proceed to assume. * * * * * a viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written about the _binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings. no doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's _binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. this inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. in the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should be with him. half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary anæsthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at all. in the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and readiness for anything that may turn up. consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_, nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. they tell us that in norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. fifteen years ago the norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence' sort of thing. now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every educational and social reform. i cannot but think that the tennis and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our american life. i hope that here in america more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike. the strength of the british empire lies in the strength of character of the individual englishman, taken all alone by himself. and that strength, i am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport. i recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an american doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. i have forgotten its author's name and its title, but i remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system. human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his own account. so that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of well-developed muscles at all? and why, pursued this writer, should we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? nay, i have heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man' direction. with our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? they may go, along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute our most congenial occupation. i am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. mine certainly did so; and i cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a superfluity. even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach. weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness. and that blessed internal peace and confidence, that _acquiescentia in seipso_, as spinoza used to call it, that wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance. and now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which i believe is one of paramount patriotic importance to us yankees. many years ago a scottish medical man, dr. clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since. "you americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your faces. you are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. the duller countenances of the british population betoken a better scheme of life. they suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. this inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, i regard," continued dr. clouston, "as the great safeguard of our british people. the other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. you really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life." now dr. clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which i quote seems to me to mean a great deal. and all americans who stay in europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores. they find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. it is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. it is true that we do not all feel about it as dr. clouston felt. many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. we say: "what intelligence it shows! how different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the british isles!" intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to dr. clouston's. in a weekly paper not very long ago i remember reading a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was irresistibly conveyed. bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our american ideals, even of a young girl's character! now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak. besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the more or less of tension about which i am making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about. well, in one sense the more or less of tension in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical work is done by these contractions. but it is not always the material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and function. one of the most philosophical remarks i ever heard made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house many years ago. "there is very little difference between one man and another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. but what little there is, is very important." and the remark certainly applies to this case. the general over-contraction may be small when estimated in foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. this follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which i made reference at the beginning of this article. for by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. if you never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly forsake your mind? on the other hand, how can they gain admission to your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed? now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning quality in us americans? the explanation of it that is usually given is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. well, our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are found. and the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every great capital of europe as they are here. to me both of these pretended causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts. to explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology and sociology. the latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. first bagehot, then tarde, then royce and baldwin here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is social. the american over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena. they are _bad habits_, nothing more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. how are idioms acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about? through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality chimed in. just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. we, here in america, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically nothing at all to do. this type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. now no type can be _wholly_ disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. dr. clouston was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. the even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run. your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes backward or breaks down. your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.' we say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. i suspect that this is an immense mistake. i suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and from which a european who should do the same work would nine times out of ten be free. these perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the american camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and tear and fatigue. the voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired and plaintive sound. some of us are really tired (for i do not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. and if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to _do_ more by the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different. there would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. but the exact reverse is the case. it is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. my colleague, professor münsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently, has written some notes on america to german papers. he says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy in america is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of our people. i think myself that it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof. well, my friends, if our dear american character is weakened by all this over-tension,--and i think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts,--where does the remedy lie? it lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease. if a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed. and, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. we must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease. so we go back to the psychology of imitation again. there is only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads from east to west. some of us are in more favorable positions than others to set new fashions. some are much more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. but no living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. thackeray somewhere says of the irish nation that there never was an irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn't work contagiously in _some_ particular. the very idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities. and, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is dropped into a lake. fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. even now in new york they have formed a society for the improvement of our national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. and, better still than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by miss annie payson call, of boston, in her admirable little volume called 'power through repose,' a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and student in america of either sex. you need only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. but of one thing be confident: others still will follow you. and this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical life, to which i will call attention briefly, and then close. if one's example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed. _become the imitable thing_, and you may then discharge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation. the laws of social nature will take care of that result. now the psychological principle on which this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we americans most grievously neglect. stated technically, the law is this: that _strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of one's objective ideas and motor processes_. we get the extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia. a melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. he is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. his mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. his associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. and this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is _painful_. joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. a saint in ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. and, without going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. ask young people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "oh, it was _fine_! it was _fine_! it was _fine_!" is all the information you are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. probably every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece of good fortune. "_good_! good! good!" is all we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very foolishness. now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. if, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about their results. such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. but confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and keep them out of the details. when once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. _unclamp_, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the recitation-room? those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. who are those who do recite well? often those who are most indifferent. _their_ ideas reel themselves out of their memory of their own accord. why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in new england is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? to what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? how can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? on the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will. they talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. to some extent this is useful. but we yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine should be preached. we are only too careful as it is. the advice i should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. prepare yourself in the _subject so well that it shall be always on tap_: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care. my advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat similar. just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one's mind. take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination impending. one ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. if you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "i won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and i don't care an iota whether i succeed or not." say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and i am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. i have heard this advice given to a student by miss call, whose book on muscular relaxation i quoted a moment ago. in her later book, entitled 'as a matter of course,' the gospel of moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not 'caring,' is preached with equal success. not only our preachers, but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping on this string. and with the doctors, the delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects, and such writers as mr. dresser, prentice mulford, mr. horace fletcher, and mr. trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start might be made in the direction of changing our american mental habit into something more indifferent and strong. worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss of effective power. of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. the turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. the really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth. this is charmingly illustrated by a little work with which i recently became acquainted, "the practice of the presence of god, the best ruler of a holy life, by brother lawrence, being conversations and letters of nicholas herman of lorraine, translated from the french."[c] i extract a few passages, the conversations being given in indirect discourse. brother lawrence was a carmelite friar, converted at paris in . "he said that he had been footman to m. fieubert, the treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. that he had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should sacrifice to god his life, with its pleasures; but that god had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state...." [c] fleming h. revell company, new york. "that he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about it: _i engaged in a religious life only for the love of god, and i have endeavored to act only for him; whatever becomes of me, whether i be lost or saved, i will always continue to act purely for the love of god. i shall have this good at least, that till death i shall have done all that is in me to love him_.... that since then he had passed his life in perfect liberty and continual joy." "that when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed himself to god, saying, 'lord, i cannot do this unless thou enablest me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. that, when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to god, 'i shall never do otherwise, if you leave me to myself; it is you who must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' that after this he gave himself no further uneasiness about it." "that he had been lately sent into burgundy to buy the provision of wine for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. that, however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. that he said to god, 'it was his business he was about,' and that he afterward found it well performed. that he had been sent into auvergne, the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the matter passed, but that it proved very well." "so, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for the love of god, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he had been employed there." "that he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of god." "that the goodness of god assured him he would not forsake him utterly, and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no occasion to consult with anybody about his state. that, when he had attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed." the simple-heartedness of the good brother lawrence, and the relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing spectacle. * * * * * the need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached long enough in our new england. long enough exclusively, at any rate,--and long enough to the female sex. what our girl-students and woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions. even now i fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life. it is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. the way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. then, possibly, by the grace of god, you may all at once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of god) be enabled to go on. and that something like this may be the happy experience of all my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish. ii. on a certain blindness in human beings our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. if we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other. now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves. we are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. but this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. the others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals. take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. as you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? with all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. to sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! what queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? the african savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our american travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the new york _commercial advertiser_, and was devouring it column by column. when he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: "for an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface. the spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. the subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less. let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:-- some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of north carolina, i passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. the impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. the settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. the larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. he had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions. the forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of nature's beauty. ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations. talk about going back to nature! i said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as i drove by. talk of a country life for one's old age and for one's children! never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! the beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. they are our heritage and birthright. no modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation. then i said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "what sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?" "all of us," he replied. "why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation." i instantly felt that i had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, i thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. but, when _they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. the chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. the cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. in short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle, and success. i had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at cambridge. * * * * * wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. but, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be. robert louis stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which i really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form. "toward the end of september," stevenson writes, "when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. the thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of great britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. we wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. they smelled noisomely of blistered tin. they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. the fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, i suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. the police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. but take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us. "when two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'have you got your lantern?' and a gratified 'yes!' that was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. woe is me that i cannot give some specimens!... but the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. the essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge. "it is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. it may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. his life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt." ... "there is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. it is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. he sings in the most doleful places. the miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. with no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, i have evoked him on the naked links. all life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for that bird and hearing him. and it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. and it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. there, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news." ... "say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. to the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern." "for, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. it may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... it has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... in such a case the poetry runs underground. the observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. for to look at the man is but to court deception. we shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. and the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. and the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing." "for to miss the joy is to miss all. in the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. that is the explanation, that the excuse. to one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. and hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... in each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[d] [d] 'the lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'across the plains.' abridged in the quotation. these paragraphs are the best thing i know in all stevenson. "to miss the joy is to miss all." indeed, it is. yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. and it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found. the change is well described by my colleague, josiah royce:-- "what, then, is our neighbor? thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. thou hast said, 'a pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' he seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... so, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. thou hast made [of him] a thing, no self at all. have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. in all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart. lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_ that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[e] [e] the religious aspect of philosophy, pp. - (abridged). * * * * * this higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. as emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. the passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day. this mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. i take this passage from 'obermann,' a french novel that had some vogue in its day: "paris, march .--it was dark and rather cold. i was gloomy, and walked because i had nothing to do. i passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. a jonquil in bloom was there. it is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. i felt all the happiness destined for man. this unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. i never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. i know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... i shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[f] [f] de sénancour: obermann, lettre xxx. wordsworth and shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. in wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.' "to every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower, even the loose stones that cover the highway, i gave a moral life: i saw them feel or linked them to some feeling: the great mass lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all that i beheld respired with inward meaning."[g] [g] the prelude, book iii. "authentic tidings of invisible things!" just what this hidden presence in nature was, which wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying authority:-- "magnificent the morning rose, in memorable pomp, glorious as ere i had beheld. in front the sea lay laughing at a distance; near the solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; and in the meadows and the lower grounds was all the sweetness of a common dawn,-- dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, and laborers going forth to till the fields." "ah! need i say, dear friend, that to the brim my heart was full; i made no vows, but vows were then made for me; bond unknown to me was given, that i should be, else sinning greatly, a dedicated spirit. on i walked, in thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[h] [h] the prelude, book iv. as wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. it surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. and yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy. richard jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled the story of my heart. it tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. on a certain hill-top he says:-- "i was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. lying down on the grass, i spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight.... with all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion i held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these i prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... the great sun, burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. with this inflatus, too, i prayed.... the prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. i hid my face in the grass. i was wholly prostrated, i lost myself in the wrestle, i was rapt and carried away.... had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought i was resting a few minutes. i made no outward show. who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as i reclined there!"[i] [i] _op. cit._, boston, roberts, , pp. , . surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. yet in what other _kind_ of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains? yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective scale. only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. you may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success. walt whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. he abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. for this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. his verses are but ejaculations--things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. he felt the human crowd as rapturously as wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. as he crosses brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels:-- flood-tide below me! i watch you, face to face; clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! i see you also face to face. crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! on the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; and you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; others will watch the run of the flood-tide; others will see the shipping of manhattan north and west, and the heights of brooklyn to the south and east; others will see the islands large and small; fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high. a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide. it avails not, neither time or place--distance avails not. just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so i felt; just as any of you is one of a living crowd, i was one of a crowd; just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, i was refresh'd; just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, i stood, yet was hurried; just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, i looked. i too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half an hour high; i watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls--i saw them high in the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, i saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, i saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south. saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor, the sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars; the scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening; the stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks; on the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high ... into the night, casting their flicker of black ... into the clefts of streets. these, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.[j] [j] 'crossing brooklyn ferry' (abridged). and so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. and, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:-- "new york, oct. , . "_dear pete_,--it is splendid here this forenoon--bright and cool. i was out early taking a short walk by the river only two squares from where i live.... shall i tell you about [my life] just to fill up? i generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and i feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on broadway from rd street to bowling green, three miles each way. (every day i find i have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) you know it is a never ending amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a broadway stage in this way. you see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama--shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else--in fact a perfect stream of people--men too dressed in high style, and plenty of foreigners--and then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."[k] [k] calamus, boston, , pp. , . truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. and yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,--whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites? when your ordinary brooklynite or new yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up broadway, _his_ fancy does not thus 'soar away into the colors of the sunset' as did whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. there is life; and there, a step away, is death. there is the only kind of beauty there ever was. there is the old human struggle and its fruits together. there is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. but to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. "hech! it is a sad sight!" says carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. and that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in _secula seculorum_, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a schopenhauer, with the emotional anæsthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. what is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world. to be rapt with satisfied attention, like whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. but how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? there is no receipt which one can follow. being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. it blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. benvenuto cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the castle of san angelo. the place is horrible. rats and wet and mould possess it. his leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. but his thoughts turn to god as they have never turned before. he gets a bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. he has religious visions. he sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns. and thinking, on the last day of july, of the festivities customary on the morrow in rome, he says to himself: "all these past years i celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world: from this year henceforward i will do it with the divinity of god. and then i said to myself, 'oh, how much more happy i am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'"[l] [l] vita, lib. , chap. iv. but the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is tolstoï. they throb all through his novels. in his 'war and peace,' the hero, peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the russian empire. during the french invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life's values. "here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. when at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [i abridge here tolstoï's description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. this emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver.... he learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance.... when calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. the woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. then peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'all that is mine,' he thought. 'all that is in me, is me! and that is what they think they have taken prisoner! that is what they have shut up in a cabin!' so he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[m] [m] la guerre et la paix, paris, , vol. iii. pp. , , . the occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. it all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "crossing a bare common," says emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, i have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. i am glad to the brink of fear." life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. but we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from nature. we are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. we are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys. the remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. to be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. the good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. the savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. this, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, i have seen them plough by moonlight. what is their life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? blind that they are, they lose it all! but we live in the present."[n] [n] quoted by lotze, microcosmus, english translation, vol. ii. p. . the intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--mr. w.h. hudson, in his volume, "idle days in patagonia." "i spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author, "at a point on the rio negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea." ... "it was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would i climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than i would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. so wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns.... not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day i returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. and yet i had no object in going,--no motive which could be put into words; for, although i carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... sometimes i would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. the weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... at a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, i would ride about for hours together at a stretch. on arriving at a hill, i would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. on every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. how gray it all was! hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. descending from my outlook, i would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. and at noon i would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. one day in these rambles i discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. this grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, i made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. i did not ask myself why i made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. i thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time i wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time i formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot." "it was, perhaps, a mistake to say that i would sit down and rest, since i was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, during which i sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. all day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. one day, while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if i were to shout aloud. this seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. but during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. in the state of mind i was in, thought had become impossible. my state was one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet i had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as i feel now while sitting in a room in london. the state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and i did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until i returned to my former self,--to thinking, and the old insipid existence [again]." "i had undoubtedly _gone back_; and that state of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. he thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. he is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him."[o] [o] _op. cit._, pp. - (abridged). for the spectator, such hours as mr. hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. they are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. to him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. i am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. the holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell. * * * * * and now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? it is negative in one sense, but positive in another. it absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. it is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field. iii. what makes a life significant in my previous talk, 'on a certain blindness,' i tried to make you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. the meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. there lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. it has the most tremendous practical importance. i wish that i could convince you of it as i feel it myself. it is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. the forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. the first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. no one has insight into all the ideals. no one should presume to judge them off-hand. the pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep. every jack sees in his own particular jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. and which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? which has the more vital insight into the nature of jill's existence, as a fact? is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anæsthesia as regards jill's magical importance? surely the latter; surely to jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor jill's palpitating little life-throbs _are_ among the wonders of creation, _are_ worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like jack. for jack realizes jill concretely, and we do not. he struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named jill should be for us as if it were not. jill, who knows her inner life, knows that jack's way of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. may the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! where would any of _us_ be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for _our_ insight by making recognizant return? we ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. if you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, i merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. the vice of ordinary jack and jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. leave those out, and you see that the ideal i am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd. we have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revelations of the truth. it is vain to hope for this state of things to alter much. our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily short of sight. but, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places? cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the truth? for the remainder of this hour i invite you to seek with me some principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. and, as i began my previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, i am going to ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now. a few summers ago i spent a happy week at the famous assembly grounds on the borders of chautauqua lake. the moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. it is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. you have a first-class college in full blast. you have magnificent music--a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. you have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. you have kindergartens and model secondary schools. you have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. you have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. you have the best of company, and yet no effort. you have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. you have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. you have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners. i went in curiosity for a day. i stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. and yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "ouf! what a relief! now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. this order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. this human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--i cannot abide with them. let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. there are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity." such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! there had been spread before me the realization--on a small, sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a utopia. there seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which i, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if i could. so i meditated. and, first of all, i asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. and i soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. what excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. but in this unspeakable chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. the ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. but what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. the moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still--this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. at chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field. such absence of human nature _in extremis_ anywhere seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest. but was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? it looks indeed, thought i, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. an irremediable flatness is coming over the world. bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. and, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's or the poet's pages. the whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere chautauqua assembly on an enormous scale. _was im gesang soll leben muss im leben untergehn_. even now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. the higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[p] [p] this address was composed before the cuban and philippine wars. such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere tending toward the chautauquan ideals. with these thoughts in my mind, i was speeding with the train toward buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. and now i perceived, by a flash of insight, that i had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, i had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, i had failed to see it present and alive. i could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. and yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. on freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. there, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. and wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain. as i awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything i had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul. it began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. these are our soldiers, thought i, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our life. many years ago, when in vienna, i had had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their business at the market for the day. old hags many of them were, dried and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. for where would any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the fields? and so with us: not to our generals and poets, i thought, but to the italian and hungarian laborers in the subway, rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like boston to be reared. * * * * * if any of you have been readers of tolstoï, you will see that i passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious natural man. where now is _our_ tolstoï, i said, to bring the truth of all this home to our american bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched culture--as it calls itself--is fed? divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. could a howells or a kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? must we wait for some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of heaven, shall also find a literary voice? and there i rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight into life. in god's eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. the exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may manifest their effects. at this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. and, if any human attributes exist only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show. thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show. yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions and merits. and then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to arise--the buddha, the christ, or some saint francis, some rousseau or tolstoï--to redispel our blindness. yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent increase. this, as i said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great content. i have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so that i might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so save time. but now i am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal way. tolstoï's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'my confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works. in his masterpiece 'war and peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human novels,--the rôle of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named karataïeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by tolstoï to let god into the world again for the reader. poor little karataïeff is taken prisoner by the french; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from moscow. the last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end. "the more," writes tolstoï in the work 'my confession,' "the more i examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded i became that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibility of life.... contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... the more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. we see only a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with joy.... there are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life. those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. they labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. i had to love these people. the more i entered into their life, the more i loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. it came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes. all our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. i understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. i understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and i accepted it."[q] [q] my confession, x. (condensed). in a similar way does stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind. "what a wonderful thing," he writes,[r] "is this man! how surprising are his attributes! poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? ... [yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,--ah! if i could show you this! if i could show you these men and women all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls." [r] across the plains: "pulvis et umbra" (abridged). all this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our tolstoïs and stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. yet you remember the irishman who, when asked, "is not one man as good as another?" replied, "yes; and a great deal better, too!" similarly (it seems to me) does tolstoï overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he does. grant that at chautauqua there was little moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. still, deep down in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when required. and, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself upon us, is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing water, just to keep himself alive? tolstoï's philosophy, deeply enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. it savors too much of that oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to be a cunning fraud. * * * * * a mere bare fraud is just what our western common sense will never believe the phenomenal world to be. it admits fully that the inner joys and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. if it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. it is with us really under every disguise: at chautauqua; here in your college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar of russia's court. but, instinctively, we make a combination of two things in judging the total significance of a human being. we feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly taken, but both conjoined. if the outer differences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? they _must_ be significant elements of the world as well. just test tolstoï's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts. this is what mr. walter wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at west point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to belong:-- "the salient features of our condition are plain enough. we are grown men, and are without a trade. in the labor-market we stand ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each day. we are thus in the lowest grade of labor. and, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. it is all the capital that we have. we have no reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a 'reserve price.' we sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our labor. "our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. the gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. he has sole command of us. he never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the débris is cleared away. in the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of. if he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take our places. "we are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest. he has paid high, and he must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we can. from work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. we feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer. there is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end. "and being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks. "all this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren, hopeless lives." and such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. and why is this so? is it because they are so dirty? well, nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. is it the insensibility? our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. is it the poverty? poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures? such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary devotion all over the world. it is not any one of these things, then, taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life undesirable. a man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of god's creatures. quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it. if there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? it can only have been this,--that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. these ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are there. in mr. wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal was. partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. for this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. but it is easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals. to say nothing of wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the salvation army, and had a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. or there might have been an apostle like tolstoï himself, or his compatriot bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious mission. class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. and who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which phillips brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang? "a rugged, barren land," says phillips brooks, "is poverty to live in,--a land where i am thankful very often if i can get a berry or a root to eat. but living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. behold! no land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral geology of the world. see how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and solid. no life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in god.... i know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... but i am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of god. let him resist the characterlessness which often goes with being poor. let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives. let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long."[s] [s] sermons. th series, new york, , pp. , . the barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. the backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what? to gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can. this really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the subway, even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. and this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. the soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none. you see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop under our hands. we have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it. and now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal. * * * * * but what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? can we give no definite account of such a word? to a certain extent we can. an ideal, for instance, must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual facts. secondly, there must be _novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. this shows that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. to keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals. now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. everybody has them in some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale. education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. and your college professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men. tolstoï would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off the track of truth. but such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous. the more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them realized. it is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. inner joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own private sentimental matter. to extort from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character. the significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents, either of whom alone is barren. the ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. and let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present. to recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call intelligence. not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are ideal. for many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the older more familiar good. in this case character, though not significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. so, if we are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with tolstoï, and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any common unintellectual man can show. * * * * * but, with all this beating and tacking on my part, i fear you take me to be reaching a confused result. i seem to be just taking things up and dropping them again. first i took up chautauqua, and dropped that; then tolstoï and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, i took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. but please observe in what sense it is that i drop them. it is when they pretend _singly_ to redeem life from insignificance. culture and refinement all alone are not enough to do so. ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. but neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. there must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result. of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. but in a question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. the answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. but it is an answer, all the same, a real conclusion. and, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things. some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. and, when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision. in any case, your imagination is extended. you divine in the world about you matter for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life. such joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be able to impart. to show the sort of thing i mean by these words, i will just make one brief practical illustration and then close. we are suffering to-day in america from what is called the labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and all of you be caught up in its perplexities. i use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they provoke. so far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and i think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other half. they miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. they are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible mistakes. often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless affectation. what he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a bank-account. and a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the dissatisfied poor. and, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! each, in short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody else's sight. society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time. but if, after all that i have said, any of you expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. the solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's pains.--and, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place. fitz-james stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more eloquent than any i can speak: "the 'great eastern,' or some of her successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land. the voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility. progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. they will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. they will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. but it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[t] [t] essays by a barrister, london, , p. . in this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no real history. the changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show. the altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us for new ideals. but, with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world. i am speaking broadly, i know, and omitting to consider certain qualifications in which i myself believe. but one can only make one point in one lecture, and i shall be well content if i have brought my point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _there are compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of different men's hearts. that is the main fact to remember. if we could not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each other, would soften down! if the poor and the rich could look at each other in this way, _sub specie æternatis_, how gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live, would come into the world! the end. school efficiency monographs the reconstructed school by francis b. pearson superintendent of public instruction for ohio author of _the evolution of the teacher_, _the high school problem_, _reveries of a schoolmaster_, and _the vitalized school_ world book company preface in our school processes there are many constants which have general recognition as such by thoughtful people. on the other hand, there are many variables which should be subjected to close scrutiny to the end that they may be made to yield forth the largest possible returns upon the investment of time and effort. these phases of school procedure constitute the real problem in the work of reconstruction, and the following pages represent an effort to point the way toward larger and better results in the realm of these variables. in general, the aims and purposes of the worker determine the quality of the work done. if, therefore, this volume succeeds in stimulating teachers to elevate the goals of their endeavors, it will have accomplished its purpose.--f.b.p. contents chapter i. a preliminary survey of the task before the school ii. the past as related to the present iii. the future as related to the present iv. integrity v. appreciation vi. aspiration vii. initiative viii. imagination ix. reverence x. sense of responsibility xi. loyalty xii. democracy xiii. serenity xiv. life index the reconstructed school chapter one a preliminary survey of the task before the school when people come to think alike, they tend to act alike; unison in thinking begets unison in action. it is often said that the man and wife who have spent years together have grown to resemble each other; but the resemblance is probably in actions rather than in looks; the fact is that they have had common goals of thinking throughout the many years they have lived together and so have come to act in unison. the wise teacher often adjusts difficult situations in her school by inducing the pupils to think toward a common goal. in their zeal for a common enterprise the children forget their differences and attain unison in action as the result of their unison in thinking. the school superintendent knows full well that if he can bring teachers, pupils, and parents to think toward a common goal, he will soon have unity of action. when people catch step mentally, they do the same physically, and as they move forward along the paths of their common thinking, their ways converge until, in time, they find themselves walking side by side in amiable and agreeable converse. in the larger world outside the school, community enterprises help to generate unity of thinking and consequent unity of action. the pastor finds it one of his larger tasks to establish a focus for the thinking of his people in order to induce concerted action. if the enterprise is one of charity, the neighbors soon find themselves vying with one another in zeal and good will. in the zest of a common purpose they see one another with new eyes and find delight in working with people whose society they once avoided. they can now do teamwork, because they are all thinking toward the same high and worthy goal; lines of demarcation are obliterated and spirits blend in a common purpose. unity of action becomes inevitable as soon as thinking becomes unified. coöperation follows close upon the heels of community thinking. in the presence of a great calamity, rivalries, differences of creed and party, and long-established animosities disappear in the zeal for beneficent action. in the case of fire or flood people are at one in their actions because they are thinking toward the common goal of rescue. they act together only when they think together. indeed, coöperation is an impossibility apart from unified thinking. herein lies the efficacy of leadership. it is the province of the leader to induce unity of thinking, to animate with a common purpose, knowing that united action will certainly ensue. if he can cause the thinking of people to center upon a focal point, he establishes his claim to leadership. what is true of individuals is true, also, of nations. before they can act in concert, they must think in concert, and, to do this, they must acquire the ability to think toward common goals. if, to illustrate, all nations should come to think toward the goal of democracy, there would ensue a closer sympathy among them, and, in time, modifications of their forms of government would come about as a natural result of their unity of thinking. again, if all nations of the world should set up the quality of courage as one of the objectives of their thinking they would be drawn closer together in their feelings and in their conduct. if the parents and teachers of all these nations should strive to exorcise fear in the training of children, this purpose would constitute a bond of sympathy among them and they would be encouraged by the reflection that this high purpose was animating parents and teachers the world around. courage, of course, is of the spirit and typifies many spiritual qualities that characterize civilization of high grade. it is quite conceivable that these qualities of the spirit may become the goals of thinking in all lands. thus the nations would be brought into a relation of closer harmony. had a score of boys shared the experience of the lad who grew into the likeness of the great stone face, their differences and disparities would have disappeared in the zeal of a common purpose and they would have become a unified organization in thinking toward the same goal. we cannot hope to achieve the brotherhood of man until the nations of the world have directed their thinking toward the same goals. what these goals shall be must be determined by competent leadership through the process of education. when we think in unison we are taken out of ourselves and become merged in the spirit of the goal toward which we are thinking. if we were to agree upon courage as one of the spiritual qualities that should characterize all nations and organize all educational forces for the development of this quality, we should find the nations coming closer to one another with this quality as a common possession. courage gives freedom, and in this freedom the nations would touch spiritual elbows and would thus become spiritual confederates and comrades. by generating and developing this and other spiritual qualities the nations would become merged and unity of feeling and actions would surely ensue. since love is the greatest thing in the world, this quality may well be made the major goal toward which the thinking of all nations shall be directed. when all peoples come to think and yearn toward this goal, hatred and strife will be banished and peace and righteousness will be enthroned in the hearts of men. when there has been developed in all the nations of the earth an ardent love for the true, the beautiful, and the good, civilization will step up to a higher level and we shall see the dawn of unity. we who are indulging in dreams of the brotherhood of man must enlarge our concept of society before we can hope to have our dreams come true. it is a far cry from society as a strictly american affair to society as a world affair. the teaching of our schools has had a distinct tendency to restrict our notion of society to that within our own national boundaries. in this we convict ourselves of provincialism. society is far larger than america, or china, or russia, or all the islands of the sea in combination. it may entail some straining at the mental leash to win this concept of society, but it must be won as a condition precedent to a fair and just estimate of what the function of education really is and what it is of which the schoolhouse must be an exponent. society must be thought of as including all nations, tribes, and tongues. in our thinking, the word "society" must suggest the hut that nestles on the mountain-side as well as the palace that fronts the stately boulevard. it must suggest the cape that indents the sea as well as the vast plain that stretches out from river to river. and it must suggest the toiler at his task, the employer at his desk, the man of leisure in his home, the voyager on the ocean, the soldier in the ranks, the child at his lessons, and the mother crooning her baby to sleep. we descant volubly upon the subjects of citizenship and civilization but, as yet, have achieved no adequate definition of either of the terms upon which we expatiate so fluently. our books teem with admonitions to train for citizenship in order that we may attain civilization of better quality. but, in all this, we imply american citizenship and american civilization, and here, again, we show forth our provincialism. but even in this restricted field we arrive at our hazy concept of a good citizen by the process of elimination. we aver that a good citizen does not do this and does not do that; yet the teachers in our schools would find it difficult to describe a good citizen adequately, in positive terms. our notions of good citizenship are more or less vague and misty and, therefore, our concept of civilization is equally so. granting, however, that we may finally achieve satisfactory definitions of citizenship and civilization as applying to our own country, it does not follow that the same definitions will obtain in other lands. a good citizen according to the chinese conception may differ widely from a good citizen in the united states. topography, climate, associations, occupations, traditions, and racial tendencies must all be taken into account in formulating a definition. before we can gain a right concept of good citizenship as a world affair we must make a thoughtful study of world conditions. in so doing, we may have occasion to modify and correct some of our own preconceived notions and thus extend the horizon of our education. what society is and should be in the world at large; what good citizenship is and ought to be in the whole world; and what civilization is, should be, and may be as a world enterprise--these considerations are the foundation stones upon which we must build the temple of education now in the process of reconstruction. otherwise the work will be narrow, illiberal, spasmodic, and sporadic. it must be possible to arrive at a common denominator of the concepts of society, citizenship, and civilization as pertaining to all nations; it must be possible to contrive a composite of all these concepts to which all nations will subscribe; and it must be possible to discover some fundamental principles that will constitute a focal point toward which the thinking of all nations can be directed. once this focal point is determined and the thinking of the world focused upon it, the work of reconstruction has been inaugurated. but the task is not a simple one by any means; quite the contrary, for it is world-embracing in its scope. however difficult the task, it is, none the less, altogether alluring and worthy. it is quite within the range of possibilities for a book to be written, even a textbook, that would serve a useful purpose and meet a distinct need in the schools of all lands. at this point the question of languages obtrudes itself. when people think in unison a common language is reduced to the plane of a mere convenience, not a necessity. the buyer and the seller may not speak the same language but, somehow, they contrive to effect a satisfactory adjustment because their thinking is centered upon the same objective. when thinking becomes cosmopolitan, conduct becomes equally so. if this be conceded, then it is quite within the range of possibilities to formulate a course of study for all the schools of the world, if only we set up as goals the qualities that will make for the well-being of people in all lands. true, the means may differ in different lands, but, even so, the ends will remain constant. a thousand people may set out from their homes with rome as their destination. they will use all means of travel and speak many languages as they journey forward, but their destination continues constant and they will use the best means at their command to attain the common goal. similarly, if we set up the quality of loyalty as one of our educational goals, the means may differ but the goal does not change and, therefore, the nations will be actuated by a common purpose in their educational endeavors. the one thing needful for the execution of this ambitious program of securing concerted thinking is to have in our schools teachers who are world-minded, who think in world units. such teachers, and only such, can plan for world education and world affairs, and bring their plans to a successful issue. some teachers seem able to think only of a schoolroom; others of a building; others of a town or township; still others of a state; some of a country; and fewer yet of the world as a single thing. a person can be no larger than his unit of thinking. one who thinks in small units convicts himself of provincialism and soon becomes intolerant. such a person arrogates to himself superiority and inclines to feel somewhat contemptuous of people outside the narrow limits of his thinking. if he thinks his restricted horizon bounds all that is worth knowing, he will not exert himself to climb to a higher level in order that he may gain a wider view. he is disdainful and intolerant of whatever lies beyond his horizon, and his attitude, if not his words, repeats the question of the culpable cain, "am i my brother's keeper?" he is encased in an armor that is impervious to ordinary appeal. he is satisfied with himself and asks merely to be let alone. he is quite content to be held fast bound in his traditional moorings without any feeling of sympathy for the world as a whole. the reverse side of the picture reveals the teacher who is world-minded. such a teacher is never less than magnanimous; intolerance has no place in his scheme of life; he is in sympathy with all nations in their progress toward light and right; and he is interested in all world progress whether in science, in art, in literature, in economics, in industry, or in education. to this end he is careful to inform himself as to world movements and notes with keen interest the trend and development of civilization. being a world-citizen himself, he strives, in his school work, to develop in his pupils the capacity and the desire for world-citizenship. with no abatement of thoroughness in the work of his school, he still finds time to look up from his tasks to catch the view beyond his own national boundaries. if the superintendent who is world-minded has the hearty coöperation of teachers who are also world-minded, together they will be able to develop a plan of education that is world-wide. to produce teachers of this type may require a readjustment and reconstruction of the work of colleges and training schools to the end that the teachers they send forth may measure up to the requirements of this world-wide concept of education. but these institutions can hardly hope to be immune to the process of reconstruction. they can hardly hope to cite the past as a guide for the future, for traditional lines are being obliterated and new lines are being marked out for civilization, including education in its larger and newer import. chapter two the past as related to the present in a significant degree the present is the heritage of the past, and any critical appraisement of the present must take cognizance of the influence of the past. that there are weak places in our present civilization, no one will deny; nor will it be denied that the sources of some of these may be found in the past. we have it on good authority that "the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." had the eating of sour grapes in the past been more restricted, the present generation would stand less in need of dentistry. when we take an inventory of the people of the present who are defective in body, in mind, or in spirit, it seems obvious that the consumption of sour grapes, in the past, must have been quite extensive. if the blood of the grandfather was tainted, it is probable that the blood of the grandchild is impure. the defects of the present would seem to constitute a valid indictment against the educational agencies of the past. these agencies are not confined to the school but include law, medicine, civics, sociology, government, hygiene, eugenics, home life, and physical training. had all these phases of education done their perfect work in the past, the present would be in better case. it seems a great pity that it required a world war to render us conscious of many of the defects of society. the draft board made discoveries of facts that seem to have eluded the home, the school, the family physician, and the boards of health. many of these discoveries are most disquieting and reflect unfavorably upon some of the educational practices of the past. the many cases of physical unfitness and the fewer cases of athletic hearts seem to have escaped the attention of physical directors and athletic coaches, not to mention parents and physicians. seeing that one fourth of our young men have been pronounced physically unsound, it behooves us to turn our gaze toward the past to determine, if possible, wherein our educational processes have been at fault. the thoughtful person who stands on the street-corner watching the promiscuous throng pass by and making a careful appraisement of their physical, mental, and spiritual qualities, will not find the experience particularly edifying. he will note many facts that will depress rather than encourage and inspire. in the throng he will see many men and women, young and old, who, as specimens of physical manhood and womanhood, are far from perfect. he will see many who are young in years but who are old in looks and physical bearing. they creep or shuffle along as if bowed down with the weight of years, lacking the graces of buoyancy and abounding youth. they are bent, gnarled, shriveled, faded, weak, and wizened. their faces reveal the absence of the looks that betoken hope, courage, aspiration, and high purpose. their lineaments and their gait show forth a ghastly forlornness that excites pity and despair. they seem the veriest derelicts, tossed to and fro by the currents of life without hope of redemption. their whole bearing indicates that they are languid, morbid, misanthropic, and nerveless. they seem ill-nourished as well as mentally and spiritually starved. they seem the victims of inherited or acquired weaknesses that stamp them as belonging among the physically unfit. if the farmer should discover among his animals as large a percentage of unfitness and imperfection, he would reach the conclusion at once that something was radically wrong and would immediately set on foot well-thought-out plans to rectify the situation. but, seeing that these derelicts are human beings and not farm stock, we bestow upon them a sneer, or possibly a pittance by way of alms, and pass on our complacent ways. looking upon the imperfect passersby, the observer is reminded of the tens of thousands of children who are defective in mind and body and are hidden away from public gaze, a charge upon the resources of the state. such a setting forth of the less agreeable side of present conditions would seem out of place, if not actually impertinent, were we inclined to ignore the fact that diagnosis must precede treatment. the surgeon knows full well that there will be pain, but he is comforted by the reflection that restoration to health will succeed the pain. we need to look squarely at the facts as they are in order to determine what must be done to avert a repetition in the future. we have seen the sins of the fathers visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation and still retained our complacency. we preach temperance to the young men of our day, but fail to set forth the fact that right living on their part will make for the well-being of their grandchildren. we exhibit our thoroughbred live stock at our fairs and plume ourselves upon our ability to produce stock of such quality. in the case of live stock we know that the present is the product of the past, but seem less ready to acknowledge the same fact as touching human animals. we may know that our ancestors planted thorns and yet we seem surprised that we cannot gather a harvest of grapes, and we would fain gather figs from a planting of thistles. but this may not be. we harvest according to the planting of our ancestors, and, with equal certainty, if we eat sour grapes the teeth of our descendants will surely be put on edge. if we are to reconstruct our educational processes we must make a critical survey of the entire situation that we may be fully advised of the magnitude of the problem to which we are to address ourselves. we may not blink the facts but must face them squarely; otherwise we shall not get on. we may take unction to ourselves for our philanthropic zeal in caring for our unfortunates in penal and eleemosynary institutions, but that will not suffice. we must frankly consider by what means the number of these unfortunates may be reduced. if we fail to do this we convict ourselves of cowardice or impotence. we pile up our millions in buildings for the insane, the feeble-minded, the vicious, the epileptic, and plume ourselves upon our munificence. but if all these unfortunates could be redeemed from their thralldom, and these countless millions turned back into the channels of trade, civilization would take on a new meaning. here is one of the problems that calls aloud to education for a solution and will not be denied. one of the avowed purposes of education is to lift society to a higher plane of thinking and acting, and it is always and altogether pertinent to make an inventory to discover if this laudable purpose is being accomplished. such an inventory can be made only by an analyst; the work cannot be delegated either to a pessimist or to an optimist. in his efforts to determine whether society is advancing or receding, the analyst often makes disquieting discoveries. it must be admitted by the most devoted and patriotic american that our civilization includes many elements that can truly be denominated frivolous, superficial, artificial, and inconsequential. as a people, we seek to be entertained, but fail to make a nice distinction between entertainment and amusement. war, it is true, has caused us to think more soberly and feel more deeply; but the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial still make a strong appeal to us. we are quite happy to wear paste diamonds, provided only that they sparkle. so long have we been substituting the fictitious for the genuine that we have contracted the habit of loose, fictitious thinking. so much does the show element appeal to us that we incline to parade even our troubles. simplicity and sincerity, whether in dress, in speech, or in conduct, have so long been foreign to our daily living and thinking that we incline to style these qualities as old-fogyish. a hundred or more young men came to a certain city to enlist for the war. as they marched out through the railway station they rent the air with whooping and yells and other manifestations of boisterous conduct. these young fellows may have hearts of gold, but their real manhood was overlaid with a veneer of rudeness that could not commend them to the admiration of cultivated persons. inside the station was another group of young men in khaki who were quiet, dignified, and decorous. the contrast between the two groups was most striking, and the bystanders were led to wonder whether it requires a world-war to teach our young men manners and whether the schools and homes have abdicated in favor of the cantonment in the teaching of deportment. in the schools and the homes that are to be in our good land we may well hope that decorum will be emphasized and magnified; for decorum is evermore the fruitage of intellectuality and genuine culture. as a nation, we have been prodigal of our resources and, especially, of our time. we have failed to regard our leisure hours as a liability but, like the lotus eaters, have dallied in the realm of pleasure. like children at play, we have gone on our pleasure-seeking ways all heedless of the clock, and, when misfortune came and necessity arose, many of us were unwilling and more of us unable to engage in the work of production. in some localities legislation was invoked to urge us toward the fields and gardens. we have shown ourselves a wasteful people, and in the wake of our wastefulness have followed a dismal train of disasters, cold, hunger, and many another form of distress. deplore and repent of our prodigality as we may, the effects abide to remind us of our decline from the high plane of industry, frugality, and conservation of leisure. nor can we hope to avert a repetition of this crisis unless education comes in to guide our minds and hands aright. again, we have been wont to estimate men by what they have rather than by what they are, and to regard as of value only such things as are quoted in the markets. wall street takes precedence over the university and to the millionaire we accord the front seat even in some of our churches. we accept the widow's mite but do not inscribe her name upon the roll of honor. we give money prizes for work in our schools and thus strive to commercialize the things of the mind and of the spirit. we have laid waste our forests, impoverished our fields, and defiled our landscapes to stimulate increased activity in our clearing-houses. like jason of old, we have wandered far in quest of the golden fleece. we welcome the rainbow, not for its beauty but for the bag of gold at its end. we seek to scale the heights of olympus by stairways of gold, fondly nursing the conceit that, once we have scaled these heights, we shall be equal to the gods. to indulge in even such a brief review of some of the weak places and defections of society is not an agreeable task, but diagnosis must necessarily precede the application of remedies. if we are to reconstruct education in order to effect a reconstruction of society we must know our problem in advance, that we may proceed in a rational way. reconstruction cannot be made permanently effective by haphazard methods. we must visualize clearly the objectives of our endeavors in order to obviate wrong methods and futility. we must have the whole matter laid bare before our eyes or we shall not get on in the work of reconstruction. it were more agreeable to dwell upon our achievements, and they are many, but the process of reconstruction has to do with the affected parts. these must be our special care, these the realm for our kindly surgery and the arts of healing. we need to become acutely conscious that the present will become the past and that there will be a new present which will take on the same qualities that now characterize our present. we need to feel that the future will look back to our present and commend or condemn according to the practices of this generation. and the only way to make a sane and right future is to create a sane and right present. chapter three the future as related to the present in planning a journey the one constant is the destination. all the other elements are variable, and, therefore, subordinate. so, also, in planning a course of study. the qualities to be developed through the educational processes are the constants, while the agencies by which these qualities are to be attained are subject to change. the course of study provides for the school activities for the child for a period of twelve years, and it is altogether pertinent to inquire what qualities we hope to develop by means of these school activities. to do this effectively we must visualize the pupil when he emerges from the school period and ask ourselves what qualities we hope to have him possess at the close of this period. if we decide upon such qualities as imagination, initiative, aspiration, appreciation, courage, loyalty, reverence, a sense of responsibility, integrity, and serenity, we have discovered some of the constants toward which all the work of the twelve years must be directed. in planning a course of study toward these constants we do not restrict the scope of the pupil's activities; quite the reverse. we thus enlarge the concept of education both for himself and his teachers and emphasize the fact that education is a continuous process and may not be marked by grades or subjects. for the teachers we establish goals of school endeavor and thus unify and articulate all their efforts. we focus their attention upon the pupil as they would all wish to see him when he completes the work of the school. if children are asked why they go to school, nine out of ten, perhaps, will reply that they go to school to learn arithmetic, grammar, geography, and history. asked what their big purpose is in teaching, probably three out of five teachers will answer that they are actuated by a desire to cause their pupils to know arithmetic, grammar, geography, and history. one of the other five teachers may echo something out of her past accumulations to the effect that her work is the training for citizenship, and the fifth will say quite frankly that she is groping about, all the while, searching for the answer to that very question. it would be futile to ask the children why they desire knowledge of these subjects and there might be hazard in propounding the same question to the three teachers. they teach arithmetic because it is in the course of study; it is in the course of study because the superintendent put it there; and the superintendent put it there because some other superintendent has it in his course of study. now arithmetic may, in reality, be one of the best things a child can study; but the child takes it because the teacher prescribes it, and the teacher takes it on faith because the superintendent takes it on faith and she cannot go counter to the dictum of the superintendent. besides, it is far easier to teach arithmetic than it would be to challenge the right of this subject to a place in the course of study. to most people, including many teachers, arithmetic is but a habit of thinking. they have been contracting this habit through all the years since the beginning of their school experience, until now it seems as inevitable as any other habitual affair. it is quite as much a habit of their thinking as eating, sleeping, or walking. if there were no arithmetic, they argue subconsciously, there could be no school; for arithmetic and school are synonymous. again, let it be said that there is no thought here of inveighing against arithmetic or any other subject of the curriculum. not arithmetic in itself, but the arithmetic habit constitutes the incubus, the evil spirit that needs to be exorcised. this arithmetic habit had its origin, doubtless, in the traditional concept of knowledge as power. an adage is not easily controverted or eradicated. the copy-books of the fathers proclaimed boldly that knowledge is power, and the children accepted the dictum as inviolable. if it were true that knowledge is power, the procedure of the schools and the course of conduct of the teachers during all these years would have ample justification. the entire process would seem simplicity itself. so soon as we acquire knowledge we should have power--and power is altogether desirable. the trouble is that we have been confusing knowledge and wisdom in the face of the poet's declaration that "knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, have ofttimes no connection." our experience should have taught us that many people who have much knowledge are relatively impotent for the reason that they have not learned how to use their knowledge in the way of generating power. gasoline is an inert substance, but, under well-understood conditions, it affords power. water is not power, but man has learned how to use it in generating power. knowledge is convenient and serviceable, but its greatest utility lies in the fact that it can be employed in producing power. we are prone to take our judgments ready-made and have been relying upon the copy-books of the fathers rather than our own reasoning powers. if we had only learned in childhood the distinction between knowledge and wisdom; if we had learned that knowledge is not power but merely potential; and if we had learned that knowledge is but the means to an end and not the end itself, we should have been spared many a delusion and our educational sky would not now be so overcast with clouds. we have been proceeding upon the agreeable assumption that arithmetic, geography, and history are the goals of every school endeavor, the ultima thule of every educational quest. the child studies arithmetic, is subjected to an examination that may represent the bent or caprice of the teacher, manages to struggle through seventy per cent of the answers, is promoted to the next higher grade, and, thereupon, starts on his journey around another circle. and we call this education. these processes constitute the mechanics of education, but, in and of themselves, they are not education. one of the big problems of the school today is to emancipate both teachers and pupils from the erroneous notion that they are. the child does not go to school to learn arithmetic and spelling and grammar. the goal to be attained is far higher and better than either of these or all combined. the study of arithmetic may prove a highly profitable means, never the end to be gained. this statement will be boldly challenged by the traditional teacher, but it is so strongly intrenched in logic and sound pedagogy that it is impregnable. the goal might, possibly, be reached without the aid of arithmetic, but, if a knowledge of this subject will facilitate the process, then, of course, it becomes of value and should be used. let us assume, for the moment, that the teacher decides to set up thoroughness as one of the large objectives of her teaching. while she may be able to reach this goal sooner by means of arithmetic, no one will contend that arithmetic is indispensable. nor, indeed, will any one contend that arithmetic is comparable to thoroughness as a goal to be attained. if the teacher's constant aim is thoroughness, she will achieve even better results in the arithmetic and will inculcate habits in her pupils that serve them in good stead throughout life. for the quality of thoroughness is desirable in every activity of life, and we do well to emphasize every study and every activity of the school that helps in the development of this quality. if the superintendent were challenged to adduce a satisfactory reason why he has not written thoroughness into his course of study he might be hard put to it to justify the omission. he hopes, of course, that the quality of thoroughness will issue somehow from the study of arithmetic and science, but he lacks the courage, apparently, to proclaim this hope in print. he says that education is a spiritual process, while his course of study proves that he is striving to produce mental acrobats, relegating the spiritual qualities to the rank of by-products. his course of study shows conclusively that he thinks that knowledge is power. once disillusion him on this point and his course of study will cease to be to him the sacrosanct affair it has always appeared and he will no longer look upon it as a sort of sacrilege to inject into this course of study some elements that seem to violate the sanctities of tradition. advancing another brief step, we may try to imagine the superintendent's suggesting to the teachers at the opening of the school year that they devote the year to inculcating in their pupils the qualities of thoroughness, self-control, courage, and reverence. the faces of the teachers, at such a proposal, would undoubtedly afford opportunity for an interesting study and the linguistic reactions of some of them would be forcible to the point of picturesqueness. the traditional teachers would demand to know by what right he presumed to impose upon them such an unheard-of program. others might welcome the suggestion as a means of relief from irritating and devastating drudgery. in their quaint innocence and guilelessness their souls would revel in rainbow dreams of preachments, homilies, and wise counsel that would cause the qualities of self-control and reverence to spring into being full-grown even as minerva from the head of jove. but their beatific visions would dissolve upon hearing the superintendent name certain teachers to act as a committee to determine and report upon the studies that would best serve the purpose of generating reverence, and another committee to select the studies that would most effectively stimulate and develop self-control, and so on through the list. it is here that we find the crux of the whole matter. here the program collides with tradition and with stereotyped habits of thinking. many superintendents and teachers will contend that such a problem is impossible of solution because no one has ever essayed such a task. no one, they argue, has ever determined what subjects will effectually generate the specific qualities self-control or reverence, no one has ever discovered what school studies will function in given spiritual qualities. according to their course of reasoning nothing is possible that has not already been done. however, there are some progressive, dynamic superintendents and teachers who will welcome the opportunity to test their resourcefulness in seeking the solution of a problem that is both new and big. to these dynamic ones we must look for results and when this solution is evolved, the work of reconstruction will move on apace. reverting, for the moment, to the subject of thoroughness: it must be clear that this quality is worthy a place in the course of study because it is worthy the best efforts of the pupil. furthermore, it is worthy the best efforts of the pupil because it is an important element of civilization. these statements all need reiteration and emphasis to the end that they may become thoroughly enmeshed in the social consciousness. if we can cause people to think toward thoroughness rather than toward arithmetic or other school studies, we shall win the feeling that we are making progress. thoroughness must be distinguished, of course, from a smattering knowledge of details that have no value. in the right sense thoroughness must be interpreted as the habit of mastery. we may well indulge the hope that the time will come when parents will invoke the aid of the schools to assist their children in acquiring this habit of mastery. when that time comes the schools will be working toward larger and higher objectives and education will have become a spiritual process in reality. it will be readily conceded that the habit of mastery is a desirable quality in every vocation and in every avocation. it is a very real asset on the farm, in the factory, in legislative halls, in the offices of lawyer and physician, in the study, in the shop, and in the home. when mastery becomes habitual with people in all these activities society will thrill with the pulsations of new life and civilization will rise to a higher level. but how may the child acquire this habit of mastery? on what meat shall this our pupil feed that he may become master of himself, master of all his powers, and master of every situation in which he finds himself? how shall he win that mastery that will enable him to interpret every obstacle as a new challenge to his powers, and to translate temporary defeat into ultimate victory? how may he enter into such complete sense of mastery that he will not quail in the presence of difficulties, that he will never display the white flag or the white feather, that he will ever show forth the spirit of henley's _invictus_, and that nothing short of death may avail to absolve him from his obligations to his high standards? these questions are referred, with all proper respect, to the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers, whose province it is to vouchsafe satisfactory answers. if they tell us that arithmetic will be of assistance in the way of inculcating this habit of mastery, then we shall hail arithmetic with joyous acclaim and accord it a place of honor in the school regime,--but only as an auxiliary, only as a means to the great end of mastery. if they assure us that science will be equally serviceable in our enterprise of developing mastery, then we shall give to science an equally hearty welcome. however, we shall emphasize the right to stipulate that, in the course of study, the capitals shall be reserved for the big objective thoroughness, of the habit of mastery, and that the means be given in small letters and as sub-heads. we may indulge in the conceit that a flag floats at the summit of a lofty and more or less rugged elevation. the youth who essays the task of reaching that flag will need to reinforce his strength at supply stations along the way. if we style one of these stations arithmetic, it will be evident, at once, that this station is a subsidiary element in the enterprise and not the goal, for that is the flag at the top. these supply stations are useful in helping the youth to reach his goal. we may conceive of many of these stations, such as algebra, or history, or greek, or chinese. whatever their names, they are all but means to an end and when that end has been attained the youth can afford to forget them, in large part, save only in gratitude for their help in enabling him to win the goal of thoroughness. the child eats beefsteak because it is palatable; the mother prescribes beefsteak and prepares it carefully with the child's health as the goal of her interests. moreover, she has a more vital interest in beefsteak because she is thinking of health as the goal. for another child, she may prescribe eggs and, for still another, milk or oatmeal, according to each one's needs. health is the big goal and these foods are the supply stations along the way. the physician must assist in determining what articles of food will best serve the purpose and to this end he must cooperate with the mother in knowing his patients. he must have knowledge of foods and must know how to adapt means to ends, never losing sight of the real goal. the inference is altogether obvious. a superintendent must write the prescription in the form of a course of study and he may not with impunity mistake a supply station for the goal. he must have knowledge of the pupils and know their individual needs and native interests. having gained this knowledge, he will supply abundant electives in order to assist each child in the best possible way toward the goal. if, then, the relation between major ends and minor means has been made clear, we are ready for the statement that these major ends may be made the common goals of endeavor in the schools of all lands. thoroughness is quite as necessary in the rice fields of china as in the wheat fields of america, as necessary in the banks of rome as in the banks of new york, quite as essential to mercantile transactions in cape town as in chicago, and quite as essential to home life in tokyo as in san francisco. if these big objectives are set up in the schools of all countries pupils, teachers, and people will come to think in unison and thus their ways will converge and they will come to act in unison. the same high purposes will actuate and animate society as a whole and this, in turn, will make for a higher type of civilization and accelerate progress toward unity in school procedure. chapter four integrity integrity connotes many qualities that are necessary to success in the high art of right and rational living and that are conspicuous, therefore, in society of high grade. it is an inclusive quality, and is, in reality, a federation of qualities that are esteemed essential to a highly developed civilization. the term, like the word from which it is derived, _integer_, signifies completeness, wholeness, entirety, soundness, rectitude, unimpaired state. it implies no scarification, no blemish, no unsoundness, no abrasion, no disfigurement, no distortion, no defect. in ordinary parlance integrity and honesty are regarded as synonyms, but a close analysis discovers honesty to be but one of the many manifestations of integrity. lincoln displayed honesty in returning the pennies by way of rectifying a mistake, but that act, honest as it was, did not engage all his integrity. this big quality manifested itself at gettysburg, in the letter to mrs. bixby, in visiting the hospitals to comfort and cheer the wounded soldiers, and in his magnanimity to those who maligned him. in every individual the inward quality determines the outward conduct in all its ramifications, whether in his speech, in his actions, or in his attitude toward other individuals. it is quite as true in a pedagogical sense as in the scriptural sense that "men do not gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles," and, also, that "by their fruits ye shall know them." the stream does not rise higher than the source. what a man is doing and how he is doing it tells us what he is. when we would appraise a man's character we take note of his habits, his daily walk and conversation in all his relations to his fellows. if we find a blemish in his conduct, we arrive at the judgment that his character is not without blemish. in short, his habitual acts and speech, in the marts of trade, in the office, in the field, in the home, and in the forum betoken the presence or absence of integrity. it follows, then, as a corollary that, if we hope to have in the stream of life that we call society the elements that make for a high type of civilization we must have integrity at the source; and with this quality at the source these elements will inevitably issue forth into the life currents. this being true, we have clear warrant for the affirmation that integrity is a worthy goal toward which we do well to direct the activities of the school. integrity in its large import implies physical soundness, mental soundness, and moral soundness. in time we may come to realize that physical soundness and mental soundness are but sequences of moral soundness, or, in other words, that a sound body and a sound mind are manifestations of a right spirit. but, for the present, we may waive this consideration and think of the three phases of integrity--physical, mental and moral. if, at the age of eighteen years, the boy or girl emerges from school experience sound in body, in mind, and in spirit, society will affirm that education has been effective. to develop young persons of this type is a work that is worthy the best efforts of the home, the school, the church and society, nor can any one of these agencies shift or shirk responsibility. the school has a large share of this responsibility, and those whose duty it is to formulate a course of study may well ask themselves what procedure of the school will best assist the child to attain integrity by means of the school activities. in our efforts to generate this quality of integrity, or, indeed, any quality, it must be kept clearly in mind every day and every hour of the day that the children with whom we have to do are not all alike. on the contrary, they differ, and often differ widely, in respect of mental ability, environment, inheritances, and native disposition. if they were all alike, it would be most unfortunate, but we could treat them all alike in our teaching and so fix and perpetuate their likeness to one another. some teachers have heard and read a hundred times that our teaching should attach itself to the native tendencies of the child; yet, in spite of this, the teacher proceeds as if all children were alike and all possessed the same native tendencies. herein lies a part of the tragedy of our traditional, stereotyped, race-track teaching. we assume that children are all alike, that they are standardized children, and so we prescribe for them a standardized diet and serve it by standardized methods. if we were producing bricks instead of embryo men and women our procedure would be laudable, for, in the making of bricks, uniformity is a prime necessity. each brick must be exactly like every other brick, and, in consequence, we use for each one ingredients of the same quality and in like amount, and then subject them all to precisely the same treatment. this procedure is well enough in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. it would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. the native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of nature, but, all heedless of this big fact, we bind him hard and fast to some academic post with traditional bonds of rules and regulations and then strive to coerce him into partaking of our traditional pabulum. his inevitable rebellion against this regime we style incorrigibility, or stupidity, and then by main strength and authority strive to reduce him to submission and, failing in this, we banish him from the school branded for life. our treatment of this boy is due to the fact that another boy in the school is endowed with other native tendencies and the teacher is striving to fashion both boys in the same mold. in striving to inculcate the quality of integrity, wholeness, soundness, rectitude in sam brown our aim is to develop this specific boy into the best sam brown possible and not to try to make of him another harry smith. we need one best sam brown and one best harry smith but not two harry smiths. if we try to make our sam brown into a second harry smith, society is certain to be the loser to the value of sam brown. we want to see sam brown realize all his possibilities to the utmost, for only so will he win integrity. better a complete sam brown, though only half the size of harry smith, than an incomplete sam brown of any size. if the native tendencies of sam brown lead toward nature, certain it is that by denying him the stimulus of nature study, we shall restrict his growth and render him less than complete. if we would produce a complete sam brown, if we would have him attain integrity, we must see to it that the process of teaching engages all his powers and does not permit some of these powers to lie fallow. if sam brown is a nature boy, no amount of coercion can transform him into a mathematics boy. true he may, in time, gain proficiency in mathematics, but only if he is led into the field of mathematics through the gateway of nature. he may ultimately achieve distinction as a writer, but not unless his pen becomes facile in depicting nature. unless his native interests are taken fully into account and all his powers are enlisted in the enterprise of education toward integrity, he will never become the sam brown he might have been and the teacher cannot win special comfort in the reflection that she has helped to produce a cripple. we can better afford to depart from the beaten path, and even do violence to the sanctity of the course of study, than to lose or deform sam brown. if his soul yearns for green fields and budding trees, it is cruel if not criminal to fail to cater to this yearning. and only by cultivating and ministering to this native disposition can we hope to be of service in aiding him to achieve integrity. it needs to be emphasized that integrity signifies one hundred per cent, nothing less, and that such a goal is quite worth working toward. on the physical side, the problem looms large before us. since we can produce thoroughbred live stock that scores one hundred per cent, we ought to produce one hundred per cent men and women. in a great university, physical examinations covering a period of seventeen years discovered one physically perfect young woman and not one physically perfect young man. our live stock records make a better showing than this. for years we have been quoting "a sound mind in a sound body" in various languages but have failed in a large degree to achieve sound bodies. nor, indeed, may we hope to win this goal until we become aroused to the importance of physical training in its widest import for all young people and not merely for the already physically fit, who constitute the ball teams. if the child is physically sound at the age of six, he ought to be no less so at the age of eighteen. if he is not so, there must have been some blundering in the course of his school life, either on the part of the school itself or of the home. when we set up physical soundness as the goal of our endeavors and this ideal becomes enmeshed in the consciousness of all citizens, then activities toward this end will inevitably ensue. physical training will be made an integral part of the course of study, medical and dental inspection will obtain both in the school and in the home, insanitary conditions will no longer be tolerated, intemperance in every form will disappear, and every child will receive the same careful nurture that we now bestow upon the prize winners at our live-stock exhibition. the thinking of people will be intent toward the one hundred per cent standard and, in consequence, they will strive in unison to achieve this goal. the large amount of incompleteness that is to be found among the products of our schools may be traced, in a large measure, to our irrational and fictitious procedure in the matter of grading. we must keep records, of course, but it will be recalled that in the parable of the talents men were commended or condemned according to the use they made of the talents they had and were not graded according to a fixed standard. seeing that seventy-five per cent will win him promotion, the boy devotes only so much of himself to the enterprise as will enable him to attain the goal and directs the remainder of himself to adventures along the line of his native tendencies. the only way by which we can develop a complete sam brown is so to arrange matters that the whole of sam brown is enlisted in the work. otherwise we shall have one part of the boy working in one direction and another part in another direction, and that plan does not make for completeness. we must enlist the whole boy or we shall fail to develop a complete boy. if we can find some study to which he will devote himself unreservedly, then we may well rejoice and can afford to let the traditional subjects of the course of study wait. we are interested in sam brown just now and he is far more important than some man-made course of study. we are interested, too, in one hundred per cent of sam brown, and not in three fourths of him. if arithmetic will not enlist all of this boy and nature will enlist all of him, then arithmetic must be held in abeyance in the interest of the whole boy. the seventy-five per cent standard is repudiated by the world of affairs even though it is emphasized by the school. seventy-five per cent of accuracy will not do in the transactions of the bank. the accounts must balance to the penny. the figures are right or else they are wrong. there is no middle ground. in the school the boy solves three problems but fails with the fourth. none the less he wins the goal of promotion. not so at the bank. he is denied admission because of his failure with the fourth problem. seventy-five will not do in joining the spans of the great bridge across the river. we must have absolute accuracy if we would avoid a wreck with its attendant horrors. the druggist must not fall below one hundred per cent in compounding the prescription unless he would face a charge of criminal negligence. the wireless operator must transcribe the message with absolute accuracy or dire consequences may ensue. the railway crew must read the order without a mistake if they would save life and property from disaster. but, in the school, the teachers rejoice and congratulate one another when their pupils achieve a grade of seventy-five. it matters nothing, apparently, that this grade of seventy-five is a fictitious thing with no basis in logic or reason, in short a mere habit that has no justification save in tradition, and that, in very truth, it is a concession to inaccuracy and ignorance. when we promote the boy for solving three out of four problems we virtually say to him that the fourth problem is negligible and he may as well forget all about it. sometimes a teacher grieves over a grade of seventy-three, never realizing that another teacher might have given to that same paper a grade of eighty-three. we proclaim education to be a spiritual process, and then, in some instances, employ mechanics to administer this process. by what process of reasoning the superintendent or the teacher arrives at the judgment that seventy-five is good enough is yet to be explained. our zeal for grades and credits indicates a greater interest in the label than in the contents of the package. teaching is a noble work if only it is directed toward worthy goals. nothing in the way of human endeavor can be more inspiring than the work of striving to integrate boys and girls. the mere droning over geography, and history, and grammar is petty by comparison. and yet all these studies and many others may be found essential factors in the work and they will be learned with greater thoroughness as means to a great end than as ends in themselves. the supply stations take on a new meaning to the boy who is yearning to reach the flag at the top. but it needs to be said here that the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan with a supercilious smile. they will call it visionary, unpractical, and idealistic--then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. it is ever so with the traditional teacher. he seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his complacent way without hindrance. to him every innovation is an interference, if not a positive impertinence. but, in spite of the traditional teacher, the school is destined to rise to a higher level and enter upon a more rational procedure. and we must look to the dynamic teacher to usher in the renaissance--the teacher who has the vitality and the courage to break away from tradition and write integrity into the course of study as one of the big goals and think all the while toward integrity, physical, mental, and moral. chapter five appreciation education may be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation. this definition will stand the ultimate test. here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education. appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. it must be so or civilization cannot be. without appreciation there can be no distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not. just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process. it is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing. in his heart he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers and to all others concerned. it is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the other pages should be justified. these other pages must serve some useful purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, certainly, no harm would ensue from a revelation of this purpose. if they are studied as a means to some high end, they will prove no less important after this fact has been explained. we may need more arithmetic than we have, but it is our due to be informed why we need it; to what use it is to be put. these things we have a right to know, and no superintendent, who is charged with the responsibility of making the course of study, has a right to withhold the information. if he does not know the explanation of the course of study he has devised, he ought to make known that fact and throw himself "on the mercy of the court." in these days of conservation and elimination of waste every subject that seeks admission to the course of study should be challenged at the door and be made to show what useful purpose it is to serve. nor should any subject be admitted on any specious pretext. if there are subjects that are better adapted to the high purposes of education than the ones we are now using, then, by all means, let us give them a hearty welcome. above all, we should be careful not to retain a subject unless it has a more valid passport than old age to justify its retention. if chinese will help us win the goal of appreciation more effectively than latin, then, by all means, we should make the substitution. but, in doing so, we must exercise care not to be carried away by a yearning for novelty. least of all should any subject be admitted to the course of study that does not have behind it something more substantial and enduring than whim or caprice. the subjects that avail in generating and stimulating the growth of appreciation are many and of great variety. nor are they all found in the proverbial course of study of the schools. when the boy first really sees an ear of corn from another viewpoint than the economic, he finds it eloquent of the marvelous adaptations of nature. from being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. no change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. it is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. though it defies analysis and the rule of thumb, the boy is conscious of it and can say with the man who was born blind, "one thing i know, that, whereas i was blind, now i see," and no cabalistic marks in a grade-book can express the value of the change indicated by that statement. the sluggard deems the sunrise an impertinence because it disturbs his morning slumber; but such a change may be wrought in him as to cause him to stand in reverence before the very thing he once condemned. the sunrise, once an affront, is now nothing less than a miracle, and he stands in the sublime presence with uncovered and lowered head. he is a reverent witness of the re-birth of the world. an hour ago there was darkness; now there is light. an hour ago the world was dead; now it is gloriously alive. an hour ago there was silence; now there is sound of such exquisite quality as to ravish the soul with delight. as the first beams of sunlight come streaming over the hills, ten thousand birds join in a mighty chorus of welcome to the newborn day and the world is flooded with song; and the whilom sluggard thrills under the spell of the scene and feels himself a part of the world that is vibrant with music. can it be denied that this man is all the better citizen for his ability to appreciate the wonderfulness of a sunrise? but while we extol and magnify the quality of appreciation, it is well to note that it cannot be superinduced by any imperial mandate nor does it spring into being at the behest of didacticism. it can be caught but not taught. indeed, it is worthy of general observation that the choice things which young people receive from the schools, colleges, and normal schools are caught and not taught, however much the teachers may plume themselves upon their ability to impart instruction. education, at its best, is a process of inoculation. the teacher is an important factor in this process of generating situations that render inoculation far more easy; and we omit one of the most vital things in education when we refer only to the teacher's ability to "impart instruction." the pupil gets certain things in that room, but the teacher does not give them. the teacher's function is to create situations in which the spirit of the pupil will become inoculated with the germs of truth in all its aspects. if he could give the things that the pupils get, then all would share alike in the distribution. if the teacher could impart instruction, he certainly would not fail to lift all his pupils over the seventy-five per cent hurdle. if instruction or knowledge could be imparted, education would no longer be a spiritual process but rather one of driving the boy into a corner, imparting such instruction as the teacher might decree and keeping on until the point of saturation was reached or the supply of instruction became exhausted, when the trick would be done. the process would be as simple as pouring water from one vessel into another. sometimes the teacher of literature strives to engender appreciation in a pupil by rhapsodizing over some passage. she reads the passage in a frenzy of simulated enthusiasm, with a quaver in her voice and moisture in her eyes, only to find, at the end, that her patient has fallen asleep. appreciation cannot be generated in such fashion. the boy cannot light his torch of appreciation at a mere phosphorescent glow. there must be heat behind the light or there can be no ignition. the boy senses the fictitious at once and cannot react to what he knows to be spurious. only the genuine can win his interest. napoleon bonaparte once said that no one can gaze into the starry sky at night for five minutes and not believe in the existence of god. but to people who lack such appreciation the night sky is devoid of significance. there are teachers who never go forth to revel in the glories of this star-lit masterpiece of creation, because, forsooth, they are too busy grading papers in literature. such a teacher is not likely to be the cause of a spiritual ignition in her pupils, for she herself lacks the divine fire of appreciation. if she only possessed this quality no words would be needed to reveal its presence to the boy; he would know it even as the homing-pigeon knows its course. when the spirits of teacher and pupils become merged as they must become in all true teaching, the boy will find himself in possession of this spiritual quality. he knows that he has it, the teacher knows that he has it, and his associates know that he has it, and one and all know that it is well worth having. it is related of keats that in reading spenser he was thrown into a paroxysm of delight over the expression "sea-shouldering whales." the churl would not give a second thought to the phrase, or, indeed, a first one; but the man of appreciation finds in it a source of pleasure. arlo bates speaks with enthusiasm of the word "highly" as used in the gettysburg speech, and the teacher's work reaches a high point of excellence when it has given to the pupil such a feeling of appreciation as enables him to discover and rejoice in such niceties of literary expression. it widens the horizon of life to him and gives him a deeper and closer sympathy with every form and manifestation of life. every phase of life makes an appeal to him, from bird on the wing to rushing avalanche; from the blade of grass to the boundless plains; from the prattle of the child to the word miracles of shakespeare; from the stable of bethany to the mount of transfiguration. geography lends itself admirably to the development of appreciation if it is well taught. indeed, to develop appreciation seems to be the prime function of geography, and the marvel is that it has not been so proclaimed. in this field geography finds a clear justification, and the superintendent who sets forth appreciation as the end and geography as the means is certain to win the plaudits of many people who have long been wondering why there is so much geography in the present course of study. certainly no appreciation can develop from the question and answer method, for no spiritual quality can thrive under such deadening conditions. if the questions emanated from the pupils, the situation would be improved, but such is rarely the case. teaching is, in reality, a transfusion of spirit, and when this flow of spirit from teacher to pupil is unimpeded teaching is at high tide. when the subject is artfully and artistically developed the effect upon the child is much the same as that of unrolling a great and beautiful picture. the mississippi river can be taught as a great drama, from its rise in lake itasca to its triumphal entry into the gulf. as it takes its way southward pine forests wave their salutes, then wheat fields, then corn fields, and, later, cotton fields. then its tributaries may be seen coming upon the stage to help swell the mighty sweep of progress toward the sea. when geography is taught as a drama, appreciation is inevitable. the resourceful teacher can find a thousand dramas in the books on geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of appreciation. such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the added charm of being true to the teachings of science. a raindrop seems a common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. it slides from the roof of the house and finds its way into the tiny rivulet, then into the brook, then into the river and thus finally reaches the sea. by the process of evaporation, it is transformed into vapor and is carried over the land by currents of air. as it comes into contact with colder currents, condensation ensues and then precipitation, and our raindrop descends to earth once more. sinking into the soil at the foot of the tree it is taken up into the tree by capillary attraction, out through the branches and then into the fruit. then comes the sunshine to ripen the fruit, and finally this fruit is harvested and borne to the market, whence it reaches the home. here it is served at the breakfast table and the curtain of our drama goes down with our raindrop as orange-juice on the lip of the little girl. when we come to realize, in our enlarged vision, the possibilities of geography in fostering the quality of appreciation, our teaching of the subject will be changed and vitalized, our textbooks will be written from a different angle, and our pupils will receive a much larger return upon their investment of time and effort. the study of geography will be far less like the conning of a gazetteer or a city directory and more like a fascinating story. in our astronomical geography we shall make many a pleasing excursion into the far spaces and win stimulating glimpses into the infinities. in our physical geography we shall read marvelous stories that outrival the romances of dumas and hugo. and geography as a whole will reveal herself as the cherishing mother of us all, providing us with food, and drink, and shelter, and raiment, giving us poetry, and song, and story, and weaving golden fancies for the fabric of our daily dreams. and when, at length, through the agency of geography and the other means at hand, our young people have achieved the endowment of appreciation, life will be for them a fuller and richer experience and they will be better fitted to play their parts as intelligent, cultivated men and women. the gateways will stand wide open through which they can enter into the palace of life to revel in all its beauteous splendor. they will receive a welcome into the friendship of the worthy good and great of all ages. when they have gained an appreciation of the real meaning of literature, children who have become immortal will cluster about them and nestle close in their thoughts and affections,--tiny tim, little jo, little nell, little boy blue, and eppie. a visitor in turner's studio once said to the artist, "really, mr. turner, i can't see in nature the colors you portray on canvas." whereupon the artist replied, "don't you wish you could?" when our pupils gain the ability to read and enjoy the message of the artist they will be able to hold communion with raphael, michael angelo, murillo, rembrandt, rosa bonheur, titian, corot, andrea del sarto, correggio, fra angelico, and ghiberti. in the realms of poetry they will be able to hold agreeable converse with shelley, keats, southey, mrs. browning, milton, victor hugo, hawthorne, poe, and shakespeare. and when the great procession of artists, poets, scientists, historians, dramatists, statesmen, and philanthropists file by to greet their gaze, entranced they will be able to applaud. chapter six aspiration browning says, "'tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do." the boy who has acquired the habit of wishing ardently in right directions is well on the way toward becoming educated. for earnest wishing precedes and conditions every achievement that is worthy the name. the man who does not wish does not achieve, and the man who does wish with persistency and consistency does not fail of achievement. had columbus not wished with consuming ardor to circumnavigate the globe, he would never have encountered america. the atlantic cable figured in the dreams and wishes of cyrus w. field long before even the preliminaries became realities. the wish evermore precedes the blueprint. it required forty-two years for ghiberti to translate his dream into the reality that we know as the bronze doors of the baptistry. but had there been no dreams there had been no bronze doors, and the world of art would have been the poorer. every tunnel that pierces a mountain; every bridge that spans a river; every building whose turrets pierce the sky; every invention that lifts a burden from the shoulders of humanity; every reform that gilds the world with the glow of hope, was preceded by a wish whose gossamer strands were woven in a human brain. the red cross of today is but a dream of henri dunant realized and grown large. the student who scans the records of historical achievements and of the triumphs of art, music, science, literature, and philanthropy must realize that ardent wishing is the condition precedent to further extension in any of these lines, and he must be aware, too, that the ranks of wishers must be recruited from among the children of our schools. the yearning to achieve is the urge of the divine part of each one of us, and it naturally follows that whoever does not have this yearning has been reduced to the plane of abnormality in that the divine part of him has been subordinated, submerged, stifled. every fervent wish is a prayer that emanates from this divine part of us, and, in all reverence, it may be said that we help to answer our own prayers. when we wish ardently we work earnestly to cause our dreams to come true. we are told that every wish comes true if we only wish hard enough, and this statement finds abundant confirmation in the experiences of those who have achieved. the child's wishes have their origin and abode in his native interests and when we have determined what his wishes are, we have in hand the clue that will lead us to the inmost shrine of his native tendencies. this, as has been so frequently said, is the point of attack for all our teaching, this the particular point that is most sensitive to educational inoculation. if we find that the boy is eager to have a wireless outfit and is working with supreme intensity to crystallize his wish into tangible and workable form, quite heedless of clock hours, it were unkind to the point of cruelty and altogether unpedagogical to force him away from this congenial task into some other work that he will do only in a heartless and perfunctory way. if we yearn to have him study latin, we shall do well to carry the wireless outfit over into the latin field, for the boy will surely follow wherever this outfit leads. but if we destroy the wireless apparatus, in the hope that we shall thus stimulate his interest in latin, the scar that we shall leave upon his spirit will rise in judgment against us to the end of life. the latin may be desirable and necessary for the boy, but the wireless comes first in his wishes and we must go to the latin by way of the wireless. it is the high privilege of the teacher to make and keep her pupils hungry, to stimulate in them an incessant ardent longing and yearning. this is her chief function. if she does this she will have great occasion to congratulate herself upon her own progress as well as theirs. if they are kept hungry, the sources of supply will not be able to elude them, for children have great facility and resourcefulness in the art of foraging. they readily discover the lurking places of the substantials as well as of the tid-bits and the sweets. they easily scent the trail of the food for which their spiritual or bodily hunger calls. the boy who yearns for the wireless need not be told where he may find screws, bolts, and hammer. the girl who yearns to paint will somehow achieve pigments, brushes, palette, and teachers. appetite is the principal thing; the rest comes easy. the hungry child lays the whole world under tribute and cheerfully appropriates whatever fits into his wishes. if his neighbor a mile distant has a book for which he feels a craving, the two-mile walk in quest of that book is invested with supreme charm, no matter what the weather. the apple may be hanging on the topmost bough, but the boy who is apple-hungry recks not of height nor of the labyrinth of hostile branches. he gets the apple. as some one has said, "the soul reaches out for the cloak that fits it." there is nothing more pathetic in the whole realm of school procedure than the frantic efforts of some teachers to feed their pupils instead of striving to create spiritual hunger. they require pupils to "take" so many problems, con so many words of spelling, turn so many pages of a book on history, and then have them try to repeat in an agony of effort words from a book that they neither understand nor feel an interest in. the teacher would feed them whether they have any craving for food or not. such teachers seem to be immune to the teachings of psychology and pedagogy; they continue to travel the way their grandparents trod, spurning the practices of pestalozzi, froebel, and francis parker. they seem not to know that their pupils are predatory beings who are quite capable of ransacking creation to get the food for which they feel a craving. not appreciating the nature of their pupils, they continue the process of feeding and stuffing them and thus fall into the fatal blunder of mistaking distention for education. ruth mcenery stuart has set out this whole matter most lucidly and cogently in her volume entitled _sonny_. in this story the boy had four teachers who took no account of his aspirations and natural tendencies, but insisted upon feeding him traditional food by traditional methods. to them it mattered not that he was unlike other boys. what was suitable for them must be equally suitable for him. the story goes that a certain school-master was expounding the passage "be ye pure in heart." turning to the boys he exclaimed, "are you pure in heart? if you're not, i'll flog you till you are." so with sonny's four teachers. if he had no appetite for their kind of food, they'd feed it to him till he had. but when the appetite failed to come as the result of their much feeding, they banished him to outer darkness with epithets expressive of their disappointment and disgust. they washed their hands of him and were glad to be rid of him. his next teacher, however, was different. she sensed his unlikeness to other boys and knew, instinctively, that his case demanded and deserved special treatment. she consulted his aspirations and appraised his native tendencies. in doing so, she discovered an embryo naturalist and thus became aware of the task to which she must address herself. so she spread her nets for all living and creeping things, for the beasts of the forest, the birds of the air, for plants, and flowers, and stones,--in short, for all the works of nature. in name she was his teacher, but in reality she was his pupil, and his other four teachers might have become members of the class with rich profit to themselves. in his examination for graduation the boy utterly confounded and routed the members of the examining committee by the profundity and breadth of his knowledge and they were glad to check his onslaught upon the ramparts of their ignorance by awarding him a diploma. it devolves upon the superintendent and teachers, therefore, to determine what studies already in the schools or what others that may be introduced will best serve the purpose of fostering aspiration. they cannot deny that this quality is an essential element in the spiritual composition of every well-conditioned child as well as of every rightly constituted man and woman. for aspiration means life, and the lack of aspiration means death. the man who lacks aspiration is static, dormant, lifeless, inert; the man who has aspiration is dynamic, forceful, potent, regnant. aspiration is the animating power that gives wings to the forces of life. it is the motive power that induces the currents of life. the man who has aspiration yearns to climb to higher levels, to make excursions into the realms that lie beyond his present horizon, and to traverse the region that lies between what he now is and what he may become. it is the dove that goes forth from the ark to make discovery of the new lands that beckon. in a former book the author tried to set forth the influence of the poet in generating aspiration, and in this attempt used the following words: "when he would teach men to aspire he writes _excelsior_ and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. they see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb and thrill of new life, and experience the swing and sweep of spiritual impulses. he makes them to know that the man who aspires recks not of cold, of storm, or of snow, if only he may reach the summit and lave his soul in the glory that crowns the marriage of earth and sky. they feel that the aspirant is but yielding obedience to the behests of his better self to scale the heights where sublimity dwells." it were useless for teachers to pooh-pooh this matter as visionary and inconsequential or to disregard aspiration as a vital factor in the scheme of education. this quality is fundamental and may not, therefore, be either disregarded or slurred. fundamental qualities must engage the thoughtful attention of all true educators, for these fundamentals must constitute the ground-work of every reform in our school procedure. there can be life without arithmetic, but there can be no real life without aspiration. it points to higher and fairer levels of life and impels its possessor onward and upward. this needs to be fully recognized by the schools that would perform their high functions worthily, and no teacher can with impunity evade this responsibility. somehow, we must contrive to instill the quality of aspiration into the lives of our pupils if we would acquit ourselves of this obligation. to do less than this is to convict ourselves of stolidity or impotence. chief among the agencies that may be made to contribute generously in this high enterprise is history, or more specifically, biography, which is quintessential history. a boy proceeds upon the assumption that what has been done may be done again and, possibly, done even better. when he reads of the beneficent achievements of edison he becomes fired with zeal to equal if not surpass these achievements. obstacles do not daunt the boy who aspires. everything becomes possible in the light and heat of his zeal. since edison did it, he can do it, and no amount of discouragement can dissuade him from his lofty purpose. he sets his goal high and marches toward it with dauntless courage. if a wireless outfit is his goal, bells may ring and clocks may strike, but he hears or heeds them not. to be effective the teaching of history must be far more than the mere droning over the pages of a book. it must be so vital that it will set the currents of life in motion. in his illuminating report upon the schools of denmark, mr. edwin g. cooley quotes bogtrup on the teaching of history as follows: "history does not mean books and maps; it is not to be divided into lessons and gone through with a pointer like any other paltry school subject. history lies before our eyes like a mighty and turbulent ocean, into which the ages run like rivers. its rushing waves bring to our listening ears the sound of a thousand voices from the olden time. with our pupils we stand on the edge of a cliff and gaze over this great sea; we strive to open their eyes to its power and beauty; we point out the laws of the rise and fall of the waves, and of the strong under-currents. we strive by poetic speech to open their ears to the voices of the sea which in our very blood run through the veins from generation to generation, and, humming and singing, echo in our innermost being." such teaching of history as is here portrayed will never fall upon dull ears or unresponsive spirits. it will thrill the youth with a consuming desire to be up and doing. he will ignite at touch of the living fire. his soul will become incandescent and the glow will warm him into noble action. he yearns to emulate the triumphs of those who have preceded him on the stage of endeavor. if he reads "the message to garcia" he feels himself pulsating with the zeal to do deeds of valor and heroism. whether the records deal with clara barton, nathan hale, frances willard, mrs. stowe, columbus, lincoln, william the silent, erasmus, or raphael, if these people are present as vital entities the young people will thrill under the spell of the entrancing stories. then will history and biography come into their own as means to a great end, and then will aspiration take its rightful place as one of the large goals in the scheme of education. as browning says, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" and again: what i aspired to be and was not, comforts me. chapter seven initiative no one who gives the matter thoughtful consideration will ever deprecate or disparage the possession of the virtue of obedience; but, on the other hand, no such thoughtful person will attempt to deny that this virtue, desirable as it is, may be fostered and emphasized to such a degree that its possessor will become a mere automaton. and this is bad; indeed, very bad. we extol obedience, to be sure, but not the sort of blind, unthinking obedience that will reduce its possessor to the status of the mechanical toy which needs only to be wound up and set going. the factory superintendent is glad to have men about him who are able to work efficiently from blueprints; but he is glad, also, to have men about him who can dispense with blueprints altogether or can make their own. the difference between these two types of operatives spells the difference between leadership and mere blind, automatic following. were all the workers in the factory mere followers, the work would be stereotyped and the factory would be unable to compete with the other factory, where initiative and leadership obtain. one psychologist avers that ninety per cent of our education comes through imitation; but, even so, it is quite pertinent to inquire into the remaining ten per cent. conceding that we adopt our styles of wearing apparel at the behest of society; that we fashion and furnish our homes in conformity to prevailing customs; that we permit press and pulpit to formulate for us our opinions and beliefs; in short, that we are imitators up to the full ninety per cent limit, it still must seem obvious to the close observer that the remaining ten per cent has afforded us a vast number and variety of improvements that tend to make life more agreeable. this ten per cent has substituted the modern harvester for the sickle and cradle with which our ancestors harvested their grain; it has brought us the tractor for the turning of the soil in place of the primitive plow; it has enabled us to use the auto-truck in marketing our products instead of the ox-teams of the olden times; it has brought us the telegraph and telephone with which to send the message of our desires across far spaces; and it has supplied us with conveniences and luxuries that our grandparents could not imagine even in their wildest fancies. a close scrutiny will convince even the most incredulous that many teachers and schools arc doing their utmost, in actual practice if not in theory, to eliminate the ten per cent margin and render their pupils imitators to the full one hundred per cent limit. we force the children to travel our standard pedagogical tracks and strive to fashion and fix them in our standard pedagogical molds. and woe betide the pupil who jumps the track or shows an inclination to travel a route not of the teacher's choosing! he is haled into court forthwith and enjoined to render a strict accounting for his misdoing; for anything that is either less or more than a strict conformity to type is accounted a defection. we demand absolute obedience to the oracular edicts of the school as a passport to favor. conformity spells salvation for the child and, in the interests of peace, he yields, albeit grudgingly, to the inevitable. in world affairs we deem initiative a real asset, but one of the saddest of our mistakes in ordering school activities consists in our fervid attempts to prove that the school is detached from life and something quite apart from the world. we would have our pupils believe that, when they are in school, they are neither in nor of the world. at our commencement exercises we tell the graduates that they are now passing across a threshold out into the world; that they are now entering into the realms of real life; and that on the morrow they will experience the initial impact of practical life. these time-worn expressions pass current, at face value, among enthusiastic relatives and friends, but there are those in the audience who know them to be the veriest cant, with no basis either in logic or in common sense. it is nothing short of foolishness to assert that a young person must attain the age of eighteen years before he enters real life. the child knows that his home is a part of the world and an element in life, that the grocery is another part, the post-office still another part, and so on through an almost endless list. equally well does he know that the school is a part of life, because it enters into his daily experiences the same as the grocery and the post-office. full well does he know that he is not outside of life when he is in school, and no amount of sophistry can convince him otherwise. if the school is not an integral part of the world and of life, so much the worse for the school and, by the same token, so much the worse for the teacher. either the school is a part of the world or else it is neither a real nor a worthy school. the hours which the child spends in school are quite as much a part of his life as any other portion of the day, no matter what activities the school provides, and we do violence to the facts when we assume or argue otherwise. here is a place for emphasis. here is the rock on which many a pedagogical bark has suffered shipwreck. we become so engrossed in the mechanics of our task--grades, tests, examinations, and promotions--that we lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with real life in a situation that is a part of the real world. the best preparation for life is to practice life aright, and this is the real function of the school. if teachers only could or would give full recognition to this simple, open truth, there would soon ensue a wide departure from some of our present mechanized methods. but so long as we cling to the traditional notion that school is detached from real life, so long shall we continue to pursue our merry-go-round methods. if we could fully realize that we are teaching life by the laboratory method, many a vague and misty phase of our work would soon become clarified. seeing, then, that the school is a cross-section of life, it follows, naturally, that it embodies the identical elements that constitute life as a whole. we all know, by experience, that life abounds in vicissitudes, discouragements, trials, and obstacles, and the school, being a part of real life, must furnish forth the same elements even if of less magnitude. there are obstacles, to be sure, and there should be. abraham lincoln once said, "when you can't remove an obstacle, plow around it." but teachers are prone to remove the obstacles from the pathway of their pupils when they should be training them to surmount these obstacles or, failing that for the time being, to plow around them. it is far easier, however, for the teacher to solve the problem for the boy than to stimulate him to solve it independently. if we would train the boy to leap over hurdles, we must supply the hurdles and not remove them from his path. still further, we must elevate the hurdles, by easy gradations, if we would increase the boy's powers and prowess. professor edgar james swift says, "man expends just energy enough to satisfy the demands of the situation in which he is placed." this statement is big with meaning for all who have a true conception of pedagogy and of life. in this sentence we see the finger-board that points toward high achievements in teaching. if the hurdles are too low, the boy becomes flaccid, flabby, sluggish, and lethargic. the hurdles should be just high enough to engage his full strength, physical, mental, and moral. they should ever be a challenge to his best efforts. but they should never be so high that they will invite discouragement, disaster, and failure. the teacher should guard against elevating hurdles as an exhibition of her own reach. the gymnasium is not a stage for exhibitions. on the contrary, it is a place for graduated, cumulative training. our inclination is to make life easy and agreeable to our pupils rather than real. to this end we help them over the difficulties, answer questions which they do not ask, and supply them with crutches when we should be training them to walk without artificial aids. the passing mark rather than real training seems to be made the goal of our endeavors even if we enfeeble the child by so doing. we seem to measure our success by the number of promotions and not by the quality of the training we give. we seem to be content to produce weaklings if only we can push them through the gateway of promotion. it matters not that they are unable to find their way alone through the mazes of life; let them acquire that ability later, after they have passed beyond our control. again quoting from professor swift, "following a leader, even though that leader be the teacher, tends to take from children whatever latent ability for initiative they may have." there is a story of an indulgent mother who was quite eager that her boy should have a pleasant birthday and so asked him what he would most like to do. the answer came in a flash: "thank you, mother, i should most like just to be let alone." this answer leads us at once to the inner sanctuary of childhood. children yearn to be let alone and must grow restive under the incessant attentions of their elders. in school there is ever such a continuous fusillade of questions and answers, assigning of lessons, recitations, corrections, explanations, and promulgations, rules and restrictions that the children have no time for growing inside. they are not left to their own devices but are pulled and pushed about, and managed, and coddled or coerced all day long, so that there is neither time nor scope for the exercise and development of initiative. the teacher, at times, seems to think of the school as a mammoth syringe with which she is called upon to pump information into her bored but passive pupils. silence is the element in which initiative thrives, but our school programs rarely provide any periods of silence. they assume that to be effective a school must be a place of bustle, and hurry, and excitement, not to mention entertainment. sometimes the child is intent upon explorations among the infinities when the teacher summons him back to earth to cross a _t_ or dot an _i_. the teacher who would implant a thought-germ in the minds of her pupils and then allow fifteen minutes of silence for the process of germination, should be ranked as an excellent teacher. when the child is thinking out things for himself the process is favorable to initiative; but when the teacher directs his every movement, thought, and impulse, she is repressing the very quality that makes for initiative and ultimate leadership. when the boy would do some things on his own, the teacher is striving to force him to travel in her groove. henderson well says: "we do not invariably cultivate initiative by letting children alone, but in nine cases out of ten it is a highly effective method. in our honest desire for their betterment, the temptation is always to jump in and to do for them, when we would much better keep hands off, and allow them, under favorable conditions, to do for themselves. they may do something which, from an objective point of view, is much less excellent than our own well-considered plan. but education is not an objective process. it is subjective and was wrapped up in the funny blundering little enterprise of the child, rather than in our own intrusive one." the crude product of the boy's work in manual training is far better for him and for the whole process of education than the finished product of the teacher's skill which sometimes passes for the boy's own work. some manual training teachers have many a sin charged to their account in this line that stands in dire need of forgiveness. there are many worthy enterprises through which initiative may be fostered. prominent among these are some of the home and school projects that are in vogue. these projects, when wisely selected with reference to the child's powers and inclination, give scope for the exercise of ingenuity, resourcefulness, perseverance, and unhampered thinking and acting. besides, some of the by-products are of value, notably self-reliance and self-respect. a child yearns to play a thinking part in the drama of life and not the part of a marionette or jumping-jack that moves only when someone pulls the string. he yearns to be an entity and not a mere echo. paternalism, in our school work, does not make for self-reliance, and, therefore, is to be deplored. there is small hope for the child without initiative, who is helped over every slightest obstacle, and who acquires the habit of calling for help whenever he encounters a difficulty. here we have ample scope for the problem element in teaching and we are recreant to our opportunities and do violence to child-nature if we fail to utilize this method. we are much given to the analytic in our teaching, whereas the pupil enjoys the synthetic. he yearns to make things. constructing problems in arithmetic, or history, or physics makes a special appeal to him and we do violence to his natural bent if we fail to accord him the opportunity. we can send him in quest of dramatic situations in the poem, or derivatives in his reading lesson, set him thinking of the construction of farm buildings or machinery, or lead him to seek the causes that led up to events in history. in brief, we can appeal to his curiosity and intelligence and so engage the intensest interest of the whole boy. a school girl assumed the task of looking after all the repairs in the way of plumbing in the home and, certainly, was none the worse for the experience. she is now a dentist and has achieved distinction both at home and abroad in her chosen profession. she gained the habit of meeting difficult situations without abatement of dignity or refinement. the school, at its best, is a favorable situation for self-education and the wise teacher will see to it that it does not decline from this high plane. only so will its products be young men and women who need no leading strings, who can find their way about through the labyrinth of life and not be abashed. they are the ones to whom we must look for leadership in all the enterprises of life, for they have learned how to initiate work and carry it through to success. that school will win distinction which makes initiative one of its big goals and is diligent in causing the activities of the pupils to reach upward toward the achievement of this end. we may well conclude with a quotation from dr. henry van dyke: "the mere pursuit of knowledge is not necessarily an emancipating thing. there is a kind of reading which is as passive as massage. there is a kind of study which fattens the mind for examination like a prize pig for a county fair. no doubt the beginning of instruction must lie chiefly in exercises of perception and memory. but at a certain point the reason and the judgment must be awakened and brought into voluntary play. as a teacher i would far rather have a pupil give an incorrect answer in a way which showed that he had really been thinking about the subject, than a literally correct answer in a way which showed that he had merely swallowed what i had told him, and regurgitated it on the examination paper." chapter eight imagination in his very stimulating book, _learning and doing_, professor swift quotes from a business man as follows: "modern business no longer waits for men to qualify after promotion. through anticipation and prior preparation every growing man must be largely ready for his new job when it comes to him. i find very few individuals make any effort to think out better ways of doing things. they do not anticipate needs, do not keep themselves fresh at the growing point. if ever they had any imagination they seem to have lost it, and imagination is needed in a growing business, for it is through the imagination that one anticipates future changes and so prepares for them before they come. accordingly, as a general proposition, the selection of a man for a vacancy within the organization is more or less a matter of guesswork. now and then an ambitious, wide-awake young man works into the organization and in a very short time is spotted by various department managers for future promotion, but the number of such individuals is discouragingly small. the difficulty with which we are always confronted is that our business grows faster than do those within it. the men do not keep up with our changes. the business grows away from them, and quite reluctantly the management is frequently compelled to go outside for necessary material. we need, at the present time, four or five subordinate chiefs in various parts of the factory and i can fill none of the positions satisfactorily from material in hand." this business man, unconsciously perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the weak places in our school procedure. he convicts us of stifling and repressing the imagination of our pupils. for it is a matter of common knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when he enters school. no one will challenge this statement who has entered into the heart of childhood through the gateway of play. he has seen a rag doll invested with all the graces of a princess; he has seen empty spools take on all the attributes of the railway train; and he has seen the child's world peopled with entities of which the unimaginative person cannot know. children revel in the lore of fairyland, and in this realm nothing seems impossible to them. their toys are the material which their imagination uses in building new and delightful worlds for them. if this imagination is unimpaired when they become grown-ups, these toys are called ideals, and these ideals are the material that enter into the lives of poets, artists, inventors, scientists, orators, statesmen, and reformers. if the child lacks this quality at the end of his school life, the school must be held responsible, at least in part, and so must face the charge of doing him an irreparable injury. it were better by far for the child to lose a leg or an arm somewhere along the school way than to lose his imagination. better abandon the school altogether if it tends to quench the divine fire of imagination. better still, devise some plan of so reconstructing the work of the school that we shall forever forestall the possibility of producing a generation of spiritual cripples. the business man already quoted gives to the schools their cue. he shows the need of imagination in practical affairs and, by implication, shows that the school has been recreant to its opportunities in the way of stimulating this requisite quality. we must be quite aware that the men and women who have done things as well as those who are doing things have had or have imagination. otherwise no achievements would be set down to their credit. it is the very acme of unwisdom to expect our pupils to accomplish things and then take from them the tools of their craft. imagination is an indispensable tool, and the teacher assumes a grave responsibility who either destroys or blunts it. unless the school promotes imagination it is not really a school, seeing that it omits from its plans and practices this basic quality. too much emphasis cannot be laid upon this patent truth, nor can we deplore too earnestly the tendency of many teachers to strangle imagination. we all recognize c. hanford henderson as one of our most fertile and sane writers on educational themes and we cannot do better just here than to quote, even at some length, from his facile pen: "to say of man or woman that they have no imagination is to convict them of many actual and potential sins. such a defect means obtuseness in manners and morals, sterility in arts and science, blundering in the general conduct of life. children are often accused of having too much imagination, but in reality that is hardly possible. the imagination may run riot, and, growing by what it feeds upon, come dangerously near to untruthfulness,--the store of facts may have been too small. but the remedy is not to cripple or kill the imagination; it is rather to provide the needed equipment of facts and to train the imagination to work within the limits of truth and probability. the unimaginative man is exceedingly dull company. from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night, he is prone to the sins of both omission and commission. no matter how good his intentions, he constantly offends. no matter how great his industry, he fails to attain. one can trace many immoralities, from slight breaches of manners to grave criminal offenses, to a simple lack of imagination. the offender failed to see,--he was, to all intents and purposes, blind. at its best, imagination is insight. it is the direct source of most of our social amenities, of toleration, charity, consideration,--in a word, of all those social virtues which distinguish the child of light." another fertile writer says: "many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood when they were in reality repressing the imagination--the faculty which master-artists denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind." some of our boys will be farmers but, if they lack imagination, they will be dull fellows, at the very best, and, relatively speaking, not far above the horse that draws the plow. the girls will be able to talk, but if they lack imagination they can never become conversationalists. the person who has imagination can cause the facts of the multiplication table to scintillate and glow. the person who lacks imagination is unable to invest with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or the poem. the gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real conversation. we hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. a sociologist states the case in this fashion: "wealth, the transient, is material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. the products of achievement are not material things at all. they are not ends, but means. they are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. in a word, they are _inventions_." in short, to say that one is an inventor is but another way of saying that he has imagination. it is one thing to know facts but quite another thing to know the significance of facts. and imagination is the alembic that discovers the significance of the facts. a thousand men of england knew the facts touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the facts remained mere facts until the imagination of dickens interpreted them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and cruelty. a thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from the tea-kettle, but not until watts discovered the significance of the fact did the tea-kettle become the precursor of the steam-engine that has transformed civilization. it required the imagination of newton to interpret the falling of the apple and to cause this simple, common fact to lead on to the discovery of the great truth of gravitation. had galileo lacked imagination, the chandelier might have kept on swinging but the discovery of the rotation of the earth would certainly have been postponed. in this view of the matter we can see one of the weaknesses of some of the work in our colleges as well as in other schools. the teachers are fertile in arriving at facts, but seem to think their tasks completed with these discoveries and so proclaim the discovery of facts to be education. it matters not that the facts are devoid of significance to their students, they simply proceed to the discovery of more facts. they combine two or more substances in a test-tube and thus produce a new substance. this fact is solemnly inscribed in a notebook and the incident is closed. but the student who has imagination and industry inquires "what then?" and proceeds with investigations on his own initiative that result in a positive boon to humanity. imagination takes the facts and makes something of them, while the college teacher has disclosed his inability to cope with his own students in fields that only imagination can render productive. to quote henderson once again: "in most of our current education, instead of cultivating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all that we can to suppress it. we have not sufficiently studied the actual boy before us to find out what he is up to, and what end he has in mind. on the contrary, we proclaim, with curious indifference, some end of our own devising, and with what really amounts to spiritual brutality, we try to drive him towards it. we do this, we irresponsible parents and teachers, because we ourselves lack imagination, and do not see that we are blunting, instead of sharpening, our human tool. yet we define education in terms of imagination when we say that education is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit; or, that education is a setting-up in the heart of the child of a moral and æsthetic revelation of the universe; for the human spirit which we are trying to establish is not a fact, but a gracious possibility of the future." happy is the child whose teacher possesses imagination; who can touch the common things of life with the magic wand of her fancy and invest them with supreme charm; who can peer into the future with her pupils and help them translate the bright dreams of today into triumphs in the realms of art, music, science, philosophy, language, and philanthropy; and who builds air-castles of her own and thus has the skill to help the children build theirs. it is not easy, if, indeed, it is possible, for the teacher to quicken imagination in her pupils unless she herself is endowed with this animating quality. dr. henry van dyke puts the case thus: "i care not whether a man is called a tutor, an instructor, or a full professor; nor whether any academic degrees adorn his name; nor how many facts or symbols of facts he has stored away in his brain. if he has these four powers--clear sight, quick imagination, sound reason, strong will--i call him an educated man and fit to be a teacher." and, of a surety, imagination is not the least of these. to this end every teacher should use every means possible to keep her imagination alive and luxuriant, and never, on any account, permit the exigencies of her task to repress it. the success of her pupils depends upon her, and she should strive against stagnation as she would against death. the passing out, the evaporation of imagination is an insidious process, and when it is gone she is but a barren fig-tree. if her imagination is strong and healthy she cannot have a poor school and her pupils will bless her memory throughout the years. as applying to every grade of school we may well note the words of van dyke: "every true university should make room in its scheme for life out-of-doors. there is much to be said for john milton's plan of a school whose pupils should go together each year on long horseback journeys and sailing cruises to see the world. walter bagehot said of shakespeare that he could not walk down a street without knowing what was in it. john burroughs has a college on a little farm beside the hudson; and john muir has a university called yosemite. if such men cross a field or a thicket they see more than the seven wonders of the world. that is culture. and without it, all scholastic learning is arid, and all the academic degrees known to man are but china oranges hang on a dry tree." and without imagination this type of culture is impossible. all reforms and, indeed, all progress depend upon imagination. we must be able to picture the world as it ought to be before we can set on foot plans for betterment. it is the high province of the imagination to enter into the feelings and aspirations of others and so be able to lend a hand; to build a better future out of the materials of the present; to soar above the solemnities and conventions of tradition and to smile while soaring; to see the invisible and touch the intangible; and to see the things that are not and call them forth as realities. seeing that the business man, the fertile-brained essayist, and the gifted poet agree in extolling the potential value of imagination, we have full warrant for according to it an honored place in the curriculum of the school. too long has it been an incidental minor; it is now high time to advance it to the rank of a major. chapter nine reverence at the basis of reverence is respect; and reverence is respect amplified and sublimated. a boy must be either dull or heedless who can look at a bird sailing in the air for five minutes and not become surcharged with curiosity to know how it can do it. his curiosity must lead him to an examination of the wing of a bird, and his scrutiny will reveal it as a marvelous bit of mechanism. the adjustment and overlapping of the feathers will convince him that it presents a wonderful design and a no less wonderful adaptation of means to ends. he sees that when the bird is poised in the air the wing is essentially air-tight and that when the bird elects to ascend or descend the feathers open a free passage for the air. even a cursory examination of the bird's wing must persuade the boy that, with any skill he might attain, he could never fabricate anything so wonderful. this knowledge must, in the nature of things, beget a feeling of respect, and thereafter, whenever the boy sees a bird, he will experience a resurgence of this feeling. some one has said, "everything is infinitely high that we can't see over," and because the boy comes to know that he cannot duplicate the bird's wing it becomes infinitely high or great to him and so wins his respect. to the boy who has been taught to think seriously, the mode of locomotion of a worm or a snake is likewise a marvel, and he observes it with awe. the boy who treads a worm underfoot gives indisputable evidence that he has never given serious thought to its mode of travel. had he done so, he would never commit so ruthless an act. the worm would have won his respect by its ability to do a thing at which he himself would certainly fail. he sees the worm scaling the trunk of a tree with the greatest ease, but when he essays the same task he finds it a very difficult matter. so he tips his cap figuratively to the worm and, in boyish fashion, admits that it is the better man of the two. and never again, unless inadvertently, will he crush a worm. even a snake he will kill only in what he conceives to be self-defense. an american was making his first trip to europe. on the way between the azores and gibraltar the ship encountered a storm of great violence. for an hour or more the traveler stood on the forward deck, watching the titanic struggle, feeling the ship tremble at each impact of the waves, and hearing the roar that only a storm at sea can produce. upon returning to his friends he said, "never again can i speak flippantly of the ocean; never again can i use the expression, 'crossing the pond.' the sea is too vast and too sublime for that." he had achieved reverence. many a child in school can spell the name of the ocean and give a book definition rather glibly, who, nevertheless, has not the faintest conception of what an ocean really is. the tragedy of the matter is that the teacher gives him a perfect mark for his parrot-like definition and spelling and leaves him in crass ignorance of the reality. the boy deals only with the husk and misses the kernel. when he can spell and define, the work has only just begun, and not until the teacher has contrived to have him emotionalize the ocean will he enter into the heart of its greatness, and power, and utility in promoting life, and so come to experience a feeling of respect for it. when it has won his respect he can read victor hugo's matchless description of the sea with understanding, measurable appreciation, and, certainly, a thrill of delight. it is rare fun for children, and even for grown-ups, to locate the constellations, planets, and stars. of course, the north star is everybody's favorite because it is so steady, so reliable, so dependable. we know just where to find it, and it never disappoints us. two boys who once were crossing from new york to naples found great delight in a star in the southern sky that retained its relative position throughout the journey. at the conclusion of dinner in the evening the boys were wont to repair to the deck to find their star and receive its greetings. in their passage through the mediterranean they became curious, wondering how it came about that the star failed to change its relative position in their journey of three thousand miles. when they realized that their star is the apex of a triangle whose base is three thousand miles but whose other legs are so long that the base is infinitesimally short by comparison, their amazement knew no bounds and for the first time in their lives they gained a profound respect for space. this new concept of space was worth the trip across the ocean to those boys, and the wonder is that space had never before meant anything more or other than a word to be spelled. the school and the home had had boundless opportunities to inculcate in them a sense of space, yet this delightful task was left to a passenger on board the ship. but for his kindly offices those boys might have gone on for years conceiving of space as merely a word of five letters. it would have been easy for parent or teacher to engender in them some appreciation of space by explaining to them that if they were to travel thirty miles a day it would require twenty-two years to reach the moon,--which is, in reality, our next-door neighbor,--and that to reach the sun, at the same rate of travel, would require more than eight thousand years, or the added lifetimes of almost three hundred generations. but they were sent abroad to see the wonders of the old world with no real conception of space and, therefore, no feeling of respect for it. before their trip abroad they never could have read the last two verses of the eighth chapter of romans with any real appreciation. still our schools go on their complacent way, teaching words, words, words that are utterly devoid of meaning to the pupils, and, sad to relate, seem to think their mission accomplished. the pupils are required to spell words, define words, write words, and parse words day after day as if these words were lifeless and meaningless blocks of wood to be merely tossed up and down and moved hither and thither. so soon as a word becomes instinct with life and meaning, it kindles the child's interest at its every recurrence and it becomes as truly an entity as a person. it is then endowed with attributes that distinguish it clearly from its fellows and becomes, to the child, a vivid reality in the scheme of life. to our two boys every star that meets their gaze conjures up a host of memories and helps to renew their spiritual experience and widen their horizon. space is a reality, to them, a mighty reality, and they cannot think of it without a deep sense of respect. there are people of mature years who have never given to their hands a close examination. such an examination will disclose the fact that the hand is an instrument of marvelous design. it will be seen that the fingers all differ in length but, when they grasp an orange or a ball, it will be noted that they are conterminous--that the ends form a straight line. this gives them added purchase and far greater power of resistance. were they of equal length the pressure upon the ball would be distributed and it could be wrested from the grasp far more readily. no mechanical contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. it can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. it can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. it can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. it can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. its versatility is altogether worthy of notice, and we may well hold the lesson in history in abeyance, for the nonce, while we inculcate due respect for the hand. for no one can contemplate his hand for five minutes and not gain for it a feeling of profound respect. what is true of the hand is true of the whole human body. this is the very acme of created things; this is god's masterpiece. how any one can fail to respect such a wonderful piece of work is beyond explanation. the process of walking or of breathing must hold the thoughtful person enthralled and enchanted. but, strange as it may seem, there are those who seem not to realize in what a marvelous abode their spirits have their home. such scant respect do they have for their bodies that they defile them and treat them with shameless ignominy. they saturate them with poisons and vulgarize them with unseemly practices. they seem to regard them as mere property to be used or abused at pleasure and not temples to be honored. the man who does not respect his own body can feel no respect or reverence for its creator nor for the soul that dwells within it. such a man lacks self-respect and self-respect is the fertile soil in which many virtues flourish. the teaching of physiology that fails to generate a feeling of deep respect for the human body is not the sort of teaching that should obtain in our schools. again, a person who is possessed of fine sensibilities sees in the apple tree in full bloom a creation of transcendant beauty and charm. the poet cannot describe it, nor can the artist reproduce it. it is both a mystery and a miracle. into this miracle nature has poured her lavish treasures of fertility, of rain, of sunshine, and of zephyrs, and from it at the zenith of its beauty the full-throated robin pours forth his heart in melodious greeting. it may be well to dismiss the school to see the circus parade, but even more fitting is it to dismiss the school to see this burst of splendor. in its glorious presence silence is the only language that is befitting. in such a presence sound is discord, for such enchantment as it begets cannot be made articulate. its influence steals into the senses and lifts the spirit up. to defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. but the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. his response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. his spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. he feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere along the line his spiritual education was neglected. he excites our sympathy and our hope that his children may not share his fate. in the way of illustrating this quality of respect, we reach the climax in the thirty-eighth chapter of the book of job and following. the dramatic element of literature here reaches its zenith. god is the speaker, the stricken, outcast job is the sole auditor, and the stage is a whirlwind. it is related of the late professor hodge that, on one occasion when he was about to perform an experiment in his laboratory, he said to some students who stood near, "gentlemen, please remove your hats; i am about to ask god a question." but here in this chapter we have a still more sublime situation, for god is here asking questions of the man. and these questions dig deep into the life of the man and show him how puny and impotent is the finite in the presence of the infinite. in this presence there is neither pomp, nor parade, nor vaunting, nor self-aggrandizement, nor arrogance. even the printed page cannot but induce respect, devoutness, and profound reverence, for it tells of nature's wonders--the snow-crystals, the rain, the dewdrop, the light, the cloud, the lightning--and reveals to the bewildered sight some apprehension of the author of them all. the reader must, by now, have divined the conclusion of the whole matter. without respect there can be no reverence; and, without reverence, there can be neither education nor civilization that is worth while. some one has defined reverence as "that exquisite constraint which leads a man to hate all that is unsuitable and sordid and exaggerated and to love all that is excellent and temperate and beautiful." this definition is both comprehensive and inclusive, and the superintendent may well promulgate it in his directions to his teachers. all teaching has to do with truth and, in the presence of truth, whether in mathematics, or science, or history, or language, the teacher should feel that he stands in the presence of the burning bush and hears the command, "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." it seems a thousand pities that even college students rush into the presence of the burning bush in hobnailed shoes, shouting forth the college yell as they go. the man who is reverent disclaims everything that is cheap, or vulgar, or coarse, or unseemly. he is so essentially fine that the gaudy, the bizarre, and the intemperate, in whatever form, grate upon his sensibilities. he respects himself too much to be lacking in respect to others. he instinctively shrinks away from ugly vulgarization as from a pestilence. he is kindly, charitable, sympathetic, and sincere. exaggeration, insinuation, and caricature are altogether foreign to his spirit. in his society we feel inspired and ennobled. his very presence is a tonic, and his tongue distills only purity. his example is the lodestar of our aspirations, and we fain would be his disciples. we feel him to be something worshipful in that his life constantly beckons to our better selves. to be reverent is to be liberally educated, while to be irreverent is to dwell in darkness and ignorance. to be reverent is to live on the heights, where the air is pure and tonic and where the sunlight is free from taint. to be reverent is to acknowledge our indebtedness to all those who, in art, in science, in literature, in music, or in philanthropy, have caused the waters of life to gush forth in clear abundance. to be reverent is to stand uncovered in the presence of life and to experience the thrill of the spiritual impulses that only an appreciation of life can generate. if this is reverence, then the school honors itself by giving this quality a place of honor. chapter ten sense of responsibility every one who has had to do with harvey's grammar will readily recall the sentence, "milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf." aside from the interest which this sentence aroused as to the antecedent of the pronoun, it also enunciated a bit of philosophy which caused the pupils to wonder about the possibility of such a feat. they were led to consider such examples of physical strength as samson, hercules, and the more modern sandow and to wonder, perhaps, just what course of training brought these men to their attainment of physical power. it is comparatively easy for adults to realize that such feats as these men accomplished could only come through a long process of training. if a man can lift a given weight on one day, he may be able to lift a slightly heavier weight the next day, and so on until he has achieved distinction by reason of his ability to lift great weights. so it is in this matter of responsibility. it need hardly be said that responsibility is the heaviest burden that men and women are called upon to lift or carry. we need only think of the responsibilities pertaining to the office of the chief ruler of a country in time of war, or of the commanding general of armies, or of the president of large industrial concerns, and so on through the list. such men bear burdens of responsibility that cannot be estimated in terms of weights or measures. we can easily think of the time when the manager of a great industrial concern was a child in school, but it is not so easy to think of the six-year-old boy performing the functions of this same manager. however, we do know that the future rulers, generals, managers, and superintendents are now sitting at desks in the schools and it behooves all teachers to inquire by what process these pupils may be so trained that in time they will be able to execute these functions. in some such way we gain a right concept of responsibility. we cannot think of the six-year-old boy as a bank president but, in our thinking, we can watch his progress, in one-day intervals, from his initial experience in school to his assumption of the duties pertaining to the presidency of the bank. in thus tracing his progress there is no strain or stress in our thinking nor does the element of improbability obtrude itself. we think along a straight and level road where no hills arise to obstruct the view. each succeeding day marks an inch or so of progress toward the goal. but should we set the responsibilities of the bank president over against the powers of the child, the disparity would overwhelm our thinking and our minds would be thrown into confusion. our thinking is level and easy only when we conceive of strength and responsibility advancing side by side and at the same rate. it would be an interesting experience to overhear the teacher inquiring of the superintendent how she should proceed in order to inculcate in her pupils a sense of responsibility. we should be acutely alert to catch every word of the superintendent's reply. if he were dealing with such a concrete problem as milo and the calf, his response would probably be satisfactory; but when such an abstract quality as responsibility is presented to him his reply might be vague and unsatisfactory. his thinking may have had to do with concrete problems so long that an abstract quality presents a real difficulty to his mental operations. yet the question which the teacher propounds is altogether pertinent and reasonable and, if he fails to give a satisfactory reply, he will certainly decline in her esteem. the normal child welcomes such a measure of responsibility as falls within the compass of his powers and acquits himself of it in a manner that is worthy of commendation. this open truth encourages the conviction that the superintendent who can give to the teacher a definite plan by which she will be able to develop a sense of responsibility, will commend himself to her favor, if not admiration. they both know full well that if the pupil emerges from the school period lacking this quality he will be a helpless weight upon society and a burden to himself and his family, no matter what his mental attainments. he will be but a child in his ability to cope with situations that confront him and cannot perform the functions of manhood. though a man in physical stature he will shrink from the ordinary duties that fall to the lot of a man and, like a child, will cling to the hand of his mother for guidance. in all situations he will show himself a spiritual coward. the problem is easy of statement but by no means so easy of solution. at the age of six the boy takes his place at a desk in the school. twenty years hence, let us say, he will be a railway engineer. as such he must drive his engine at forty miles an hour through blinding storm, or in inky darkness, or through menacing and stifling tunnels, or over dizzy bridges, or around the curve on the edge of the precipice--and do this with no shadow of fear or hint of trepidation, but always with a keen eye, a cool head, and a steady hand. in his keeping are the lives of many persons, and any wavering or unsteadiness, on his part, may lead to speedy disaster. somewhere along the way between the ages of six and twenty-six he must gain the ability to assume a heavy responsibility, and it would seem a travesty upon rational education to force him to acquire this ability wholly during the eight years succeeding his school experience. if, at the age of eighteen, he does not exhibit some ability in this respect, the school may justly be charged with dereliction. or, twenty years hence, this boy may be a physician. if so, he will find a weeping mother clinging to him and imploring him to save her baby. he will see a strong man broken with sobs and offering him a fortune to save his wife from being engulfed in the dark shadows. his ears will be assailed with delirious ravings that call to him for relief and life. he will be importuned by the grief-crushed child not to let her mother go. he will be called upon to grapple with plague, with pestilence, with death itself. unless he can give succor, hope departs and darkness enshrouds and blights. he alone can hold disease and death at bay and bid darkness give place to light and cause sorrow to vanish before the smile of joy. he stands alone at the portal to do battle against the demons of devastation and desolation. and, if he fails, the plaints of grief will penetrate the innermost chambers of his soul. he must not fail. so he toils on through the long night watches, disdaining food and rest, that the breaking day may bring in gladness and crown the arts of healing. and the school that does not share in the glory of such achievement misses a noble opportunity. again, twenty years hence, the little girl who now sits at her desk, crowned with golden ringlets, will be a wife and mother, and the mistress of a well-conditioned home. she is a composite of mary and martha and in her kingdom reigns supreme and benign. in her home there is no hint of "raw haste, half-sister to delay," for long since she acquired the habit of serene mastery. she meets her manifold responsibilities with a smile and sings her way through them all. if clouds arise, she banishes them with the magic of her poise and amiability. she can say with napoleon, "i do not permit myself to become a victim of circumstances; i make circumstances." back in the school she learned order, system, method, and acquired the sense of responsibility. at first the teacher's desk was her special care, and by easy gradations the scope of her activities was widened until she came to feel responsible for the appearance of the entire schoolroom. now in her womanhood she is a delight to her husband, her children, her guests, and her neighbors. emergencies neither daunt her nor render her timorous, but, serene and masterful, she meets the new situation as a welcome novelty, and, with supreme amiability, accepts it as a friendly challenge to her resourcefulness. she needs not to apologize or explain, for difficulties disappear at her approach because, in the school, responsibility was one of the major goals of her training. or, again, two decades hence this child may have attained to a position in the world of affairs where good taste, judgment, perseverance, self-control, graciousness, and tact are accounted assets of value. but these qualities, gained through experience, are as much a part of herself as her hands. a thousand times in the past has the responsibility been laid upon her of making selections touching shapes, colors, materials, or types, till now her judgment is regarded as final. her self-control has become proverbial, but it is not the miracle that it seems, for it has become grooved into a habit by much experience. she met all these lions in her path at school and vanquished them all, with the aid of the teacher's counsel and encouragement. she can perform heroisms now because she long since contracted the habit of heroisms. and responsibility is most becoming to her now because in the years past she learned how to wear it. she has multiplied her powers and usefulness a hundred-fold by reason of having learned to assume responsibility. she has learned to lift her eyes and scan the far horizon and not be afraid. with gentle, kindly eyes she can look into the faces of men and women in all lands and not be abashed in their presence. she can soothe the child to rest and prove herself a scourge to evil-doers, all within the hour. she knows herself equal to the best, but not above the least. she does not need to pose, for she knows her own power without ever vaunting it. her simplicity and sincerity are the fragrant bloom of her sense of responsibility both to herself and her kind. she gives of herself and her means as a gracious discharge of obligation to the less fortunate, but never as charity. she feels herself bound up in the interests of humanity and would do her full part in helping to make life more worth while. her touch has the gift of healing and her tongue distills kindness. her obligations to the human family are privileges to be esteemed and enjoyed and not bur-dens to be endured and reviled. and she thinks of her superintendent and teachers with gratitude for their part in the process of developing her into what she is, and what she may yet become. only such as the defiant, wicked, and rebellious cain can ask the question, "am i my brother's keeper?" the man who feels no responsibility for the character and good name of the community of which he is a member is a spiritual outcast and will become a social pariah if he persists in maintaining his attitude of indifference. for, after all, responsibility amounts to a spiritual attitude. if the man feels no responsibility to his community he will begrudge it the taxes he pays, the improvements he is required to make, and will be irked by every advance that makes for civic betterment. to him the church and school will seem excrescences and superfluities, nor would he grieve to see them obliterated. his exodus would prove a distinct boon to the community. he may have a noble physique, good mentality, much knowledge, and large wealth, and yet, with all these things in his favor, he is nevertheless a liability for the single reason that he lacks a sense of responsibility. could his teachers have foreseen his present attitude no efforts, on their part, would have seemed too great if only they could have forestalled his misfortune. and it is for the teachers to determine whether the boy of today shall become a duplicate of the man here portrayed. every man who lives under a democratic form of government has the opportunity before him each day to raise or lower the level of democracy. when the night comes on, if he reflects upon the matter, he must become conscious that he has done either the one or the other. either democracy is a better thing for humanity because of his day's work and influence, or it is a worse thing. this is a responsibility that he can neither shift nor shirk. it is fastened upon him with or against his will. it rests with him to determine whether he would have every other man and every boy in the land select him as their model and follow his example to the last detail. he alone can decide whether he would have all men indulge in the practices that constitute his daily life, consort with his companions, hold his views on all subjects, read only the books that engage his interest, duplicate his thoughts, aspirations, impulses, and language, and become, each one, his other self. every boy who now sits in the school must answer these questions for himself sooner or later, nor can he hope to evade them. happy is that boy, therefore, whose teacher has the foresight and the wisdom to train him into such a sense of responsibility as will enable him to answer them in such a way that the future will bring to him no pang of remorse. thomas a. edison is one of the benefactors of his time. he reached out into space and grasped a substance that is both invisible and intangible, harnessed it with trappings, pushed a button, and the world was illumined. there were years of unremitting toil behind this achievement, years of discouragement bordering on despair, but years in which the light of hope was kept burning. we accept his gift with the very acme of nonchalance and with little or no feeling of gratitude. perhaps he would not have it otherwise. we do not know. but certain it is that his marvelous achievement has made life more agreeable to millions of people and he must be conscious of this fact. at some time in his life he must have achieved a sense of responsibility to his fellows and this worthy sentiment must have become the guiding principle in all his labors. if some teacher fostered in him this sense of responsibility, she did a piece of work for the world that can never be measured in terms of salary. she did not teach arithmetic, or grammar, or geography. she taught edison. and one of the big results of her teaching was his attainment of this sense of responsibility which far overtops all the arithmetic and history that he ever learned. the man who carried the message to garcia is another fitting illustration of this same principle. in executing his commission he overcame difficulties that would have seemed insurmountable to a less intrepid man. he kept his eye on the goal and endured almost unspeakable hardships in pressing forward toward this goal. somehow and somewhere in his life he had learned the meaning of responsibility and so felt that he must not fail. the world came to know him as a hero because he was a hero at heart and his heroic achievement had its origin in the training that led him to feel a sense of responsibility. chapter eleven loyalty when the boy overhears a companion put a slight upon the good name of his mother, he does not deliberate but, like a flash, smites the mouth that defames. he may deliberate afterward, for the mind then has a fact upon which to work, but if he is a worthy son it is not till afterwards. spiritual impulses are as quick as powder and as direct as a shaft of light. so quick are they that we are prone to disregard them in our contemplation of their results. we see the boy strike and conclude, in a superficial way, that his hand initiated the action, nor take pains to trace this action back to the primal cause in the spiritual impulse. true, both mind and body are called into action, but only as auxiliaries to carry out the behests of the spirit. when the man utters an exclamation of delight at sight of his country's flag in a foreign port, the sound that we hear is but the conclusion or completion of the series of happenings. it is not the initial happening at all. on the instant when his eyes caught sight of the flag something took place inside the man's nature. this spiritual explosion was telegraphed to the mind, the mind, in turn, issued a command to the body, and the sound that was noted was the final result. in a general way, education is the process of training mind and body to obey and execute right commands of the spirit. this definition will justify our characterization of education as a spiritual process. seeing, then, that the body is but a helper whose function is to execute the mandates of the spirit, and seeing, too, that education is a process of the spirit, it follows that our concern must be primarily and always with the spirit as major. it is the spirit that reacts, not the mind or the body, and education is, therefore, the process of inducing right reactions of the spirit. the nature of these reactions depends upon the quality of the external stimuli. if we provide the right sort of stimuli the reactions will be right. if, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions to beauty in every form will become habitual. if we can induce reactions, day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace. by inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music, and the lower type makes no appeal. by such a process we shall finally produce an educated, cultivated man or woman, the crowning glory of education. the measure of our success in this process of education will be the number of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli. in this, we shall have occasion to make many substitutions. the boy who has been reacting to ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty. the beautiful picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a picture will give pleasure and satisfaction. indeed, the substitution of beauty for ugliness will, in time, induce a revolt against what is ugly and stimulate the boy to desire to transform the ugly thing into a thing of beauty. many a home shows the effects of reaction in the school to artistic surroundings. the child reacts to beauty in the school and so yearns for the same sort of stimuli in the home. when the little girl entreats her mother to provide for her such a ribbon as the teacher wears, we see an exemplification of this principle. when only the best in literature, in art, in nature, in music, and in conduct avail to produce reactions, we may well proclaim the one who reacts to these stimuli an educated person. it is well to repeat that these reactions are all spiritual manifestations and that the conduct of mind and body is a resultant. to casual thinking it may seem a far cry from reactions and external stimuli to loyalty, but not so by any means. the man or woman who has been led to react to the madonna of the chair, the plow oxen, or the ceiling of the sistine chapel will experience a revival and recurrence of the reaction at every sight of the masterpiece, whether the original or a reproduction. that masterpiece has become this person's standard of art and neither argument, nor persuasion, nor sophistry can divorce him from his ideal. the boy's mother is one of his ideals. he believes her to be the best woman alive, and it were a sorry fact if he did not. hence, when her good qualities are assailed his spirit explodes and commands his right arm to become a battering-ram. the kindness of the mother has caused the boy's spirit to react a thousand times, and his reaction in defending her name from calumny was but another evidence of an acquired spiritual habit. hence it is that we find loyalty enmeshed in these elements that pertain to the province of psychology. it must be so, seeing that these elements and loyalty have to do with the spirit, for loyalty is nothing other than a reaction to the same external stimuli that have induced reactions many times before. in setting up loyalty, therefore, as one of the big goals of school endeavor the superintendent has only to make a list of the external stimuli that will induce proper reactions and so groove these reactions into habit. his problem, thus stated, seems altogether simple but, in working out the details, he will find himself facing the entire scheme of education. if he would induce reactions that spell loyalty he must make no mistake in respect of external stimuli, for it must be reiterated that the character of the stimuli conditions the reactions. we may not hope to achieve loyalty unless through the years of training we have provided stimuli of the right sort. if the sentiment of loyalty concerns itself with the teachings of the bible and the tenets of the church, we call it religion; if it has to do with one's country and what its flag represents, we call it patriotism; and in many another relation we call it fidelity. hence it is obvious that loyalty is an inclusive quality and in its ramifications reaches out into every phase of life. this gives us clear warrant for making it one of the prime objectives in a rational, as distinguished from a traditional, scheme of education. the progressive superintendent who is endowed with perspicacity, resourcefulness, altruism, and faith in himself will consult the highest interests of the boys and girls of his school before he relegates the matter to oblivion. to such as he we must look for advance and for the redemption of our schools from their traditional moorings. to such as he we must look for the inoculation of the teachers with such virus as will render them vital, dynamic, and eager to essay any new task that gives promise of a larger and better outlook for their pupils. in the second chapter of revelation, tenth verse, we read, "be thou faithful unto death and i will give thee the crown of life." now this is quite as true in a psychological sense as it is in a scriptural sense. it is a great pity that we do not read the bible far more for lessons in pedagogy. however, too many people misread the quoted passage. they interpret the expression "unto death" as if it were "until death." this interpretation would weaken the expression. the martyrs would not recant even when the fires were blazing all about them or when their bodies were lacerated. they were faithful unto death. in his poem _invictus_ henley says, in the fell clutch of circumstance i have not winced nor cried aloud; under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed. and only so can the spirit hope to achieve emancipation and win out into the clear. this is the crown of life. michael angelo represents joseph of arimathea standing at the tomb of the master with head erect and with the mien of faith. he did not understand at all, and yet his faithful heart encouraged him to hope and to hold his head from drooping. he was faithful even in the darkness and on the morning of the resurrection he received his crown. when we set up loyalty as one of our major goals we shall become alert to every illustration of it that falls under our gaze. the story of nathan hale will become newly alive and will thrill as never before. over against nathan hale we shall set philip nolan for the sake of comparison and contrast. even though our pupils may regard joan of arc as a fanatic, her heroism and her fidelity to her convictions will shine forth as a star in the night and her example as illustrating loyalty will be as seed planted in fertile soil. in our quest for exemplars we shall find the pages of history palpitating with life. we may sow dead dragon's teeth, but armed men will spring into being. thermopylæ will become a new story, while william tell and arnold winkelried will take rank among the demigods. sidney carton will become far more than a mere character of fiction, for on his head we shall find a halo, and horace mann will become far more than a mere schoolmaster. historians, poets, novelists, statesmen, and philanthropists will rally about us to reinforce our efforts and to cite to us men and women of all times who shone resplendent by reason of their loyalty. our objective being loyalty, we shall omit the lesson in grammar for today in order to induce the spirits of our pupils to react to the story of jephthah's daughter. for once they have emotionalized it, have really felt its power, this story will become to them a rare possession and will entwine itself in the warp and woof of their lives and form a pattern of exceeding beauty whose colors will not fade. they shall hear the solemn vow of the father to sacrifice unto the lord the first living creature that meets his gaze after the victory over his enemies. they shall see him returning invested with the glory of the victor. then the child will be seen running forth to meet him, the first living creature his gaze has fallen upon since the battle. they will note her gladness to see him and to know that he is safe. they will see the dancing of her eyes and hear her rippling, joyous laughter. they will become tense as the father is telling her of his vow. but the climax is reached when they hear her saying, "my father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth." and, with bated breath, they see her meeting death with a smile that her father may keep his covenant with the lord. ever after this story will mark to them the very zenith of loyalty, and the lesson in grammar can await another day. again, instead of the regular reading lesson the school may well substitute the story of david, as given in the eleventh chapter of chronicles. "now three of the thirty captains went down to the rock to david, into the cave of adullam; and the host of the philistines encamped in the valley of rephaim. and david was then in the hold, and the philistines' garrison was then at bethlehem. and david longed, and said, 'o that one would give me drink of the water of the well of bethlehem that is at the gate.' and the three brake through the host of the philistines, and drew water out of the well of bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to david; but david would not drink of it, but poured it out to the lord, and said, 'my god forbid it me, that i should do this thing. shall i drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their lives they brought.' therefore he would not drink it." without any semblance of irreverence we may paraphrase this story slightly and have our own general pershing stand in the place of david asking for water. then we can see three of his soldiers going across no man's land in quest of the water which he craves. when they return, bearing the water to him from the spring in the enemy's territory, we can see him pouring the water upon the ground and refusing to drink it because of the hazard of the enterprise. no fulsome explanation will need to be given to impress upon the pupils the loyalty of the soldiers to their general, nor yet the loyalty of the general to his soldiers. or again, in the oral english two of the pupils may be asked to tell the stories of ruth and esther, and certain it is, if these stories are told effectively, the pupils will thrill with admiration for the loyalty of these two noble characters. on his way home for vacation a college student was telling his companion on the train of the trip ahead, relating that at such a time he would reach the junction and at a certain hour he would walk into his home just in time for supper; he concluded by paying a tribute to the noble qualities of his mother. this man is now an attorney in a large city and it is inconceivable that he can ever be guilty of apostasy from the ideals and principles to which he reacted in his boyhood in that village home. whatever temptations may come to him, the mother's face and voice and the memory of her high principles will forbid his yielding and hold him steady and loyal to that mother and her teaching. he must feel that if he should debase himself he would dishonor her, and that he cannot do. he can still hear her voice echoing from the years long gone, and feel the kindly touch of her hand upon his brow. when troubles came, mother knew just what to do and soon the sun was shining again. it was her magic that made the rough places smooth, her voice that exorcised all evil spirits. she it was who drove the lions from his path and made it a place of peace and joy. to be disloyal to her would be to lose his manhood. whatever vicissitudes befall, we yearn to return to the old homestead, for there, and there alone, can we experience, in full measure, the reactions that came from our early associations with the old well, the bridge that spans the brook, the trees bending low with their luscious fruit, the grape arbor, the spring that bubbles and laughs as it gives forth its limpid treasure, the fields that are redolent of the harvest season, and the royal meal on the back porch. the man who does not smile in recalling such scenes of his boyhood days is abnormal, disloyal, and an apostate. these are the scenes that anchor the soul and give meaning to civilization. the man who will not fight for the old home, and for the memory of father and mother, will not fight for the flag of his country and is, at heart, an alien. but the man who is loyal to the home of his early years, loyal to the memory of his parents, and loyal to the principles which they implanted in his life, such a man can never be less than loyal to the flag that floats over him, loyal to the land in which he finds his home, and ever loyal to the best and highest interests of that land. never, because of him, will the colors of the flag lose their luster or the stars grow dim. he will be faithful even unto death, because loyalty throbs in his every pulsation, is proclaimed by his every word, is enmeshed in every drop of his blood and has become a vital part of himself. chapter twelve democracy in a recent book h.g. wells says that education has lost its way. whether we give assent to this statement or not, it must be admitted that it is a direct challenge to the school, the home, the pulpit, the press, to government, and to society. if education has indeed lost its way, the responsibility rests with these educational agencies. if education has lost its way, these agencies must unite in a benevolent conspiracy to help it find it again. the war has brought these agencies into much closer fellowship and they are now working in greater harmony than ever before. this is due to the fact that they are working to a common end, that they are animated by a common purpose. the war is producing many readjustments and a new scale of values. many things that were once considered majors are now thought of as minors, and the work of reconstruction has only just begun. civilization is now in the throes of a re-birth and people are awakening from their complacency and thinking out toward the big things of life. they are lifting their gaze above and beyond party, and creed, and racial ties, and territorial boundaries, and fixing it upon their big common interests. more and more has their thinking been focused upon democracy, until this has become a watchword throughout the world. about this focal point people's thoughts are rallying day by day, and their community of feeling and thinking is leading to community of action. primarily, democracy is a spiritual impulse, the quintessence of the golden rule. "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he," and this spiritual quality inevitably precedes and conditions democracy in its outward manifestations. feeling, thinking, willing, doing--these are the stages in the law of life. the golden rule in action has its inception in the love of man for his fellow-man. the action is but the visible fruitage of the invisible spiritual impulse. the soldier in the trench, the sailor on the ship, the nurse in the hospital, the worker in the factory, and the official at his desk, all exemplify this principle. the outward manifestations of the inward impulse, democracy, are many and varied, and the demands of the war greatly increased both the number and variety. people essayed tasks that, a few years ago, would have seemed impossible; nor did they demean themselves in so doing. the production and conservation of food has become a national enterprise that has enlisted the active coöperation of men, women, and children of all classes, creeds, and conditions. rich and poor joined in the work of war gardens, thinking all the while not only of their own larders but quite as much of their friends across the sea. and while they helped win the war, they were winning their own souls, for they were yielding obedience to a spiritual impulse and not a mere animal desire. thus americans and the people of other lands, like children at school, are learning the lesson of democracy. moreover, they are now appalled at the wastage of former years and at the cheapness of many of the things that once held their interest. in this process of achieving an access of democracy it holds true that "there is no impression without expression." each reaction of the spirit tends to groove the impression into a habit, and this process has had a thousand exemplifications before our eyes since the opening of the war. people who were only mildly inoculated with the democratic spirit at first became surcharged with this spirit because of their many reactions. they have been obeying the behests of spiritual impulse, working in war gardens, eliminating luxuries, purchasing bonds, contributing to benevolent enterprises, until democracy is their ruling passion. every effort a man puts forth in the interest of humanity has a reflex influence upon his inner self and he experiences a spiritual expansion. so it has come to pass that men and women are doing two, three, or ten times the amount of work they did in the past and doing it better. their aroused and enlarged spiritual impulses are the enginery that is driving their minds and bodies forward into virgin territory, into new and larger enterprises, and thus into a wider, deeper realization of their own capabilities. so the leaven of democracy is working through difficulties of surpassing obduracy and resolving situations that seemed, in the past, to be beyond human achievement. and of democracy it may be said, as of dame rumor of old, "she grows strong by motion and gains power by going. small at first through fear, she presently raises herself into the air, she walks upon the ground and lifts her head among the clouds." on the side of democracy, at any rate, it would seem that education is beginning to find its way again. in the thinking of most people democracy is a form of government; but primarily it is not this at all. rather it is a spiritual attitude. the form of government is an outward manifestation of the inward feeling. our ancestors held democracy hidden in their hearts as they crossed the ocean long before it became visible as a form of government. the form of government was inevitable, seeing that they possessed the feeling of democracy, and that they were journeying to land in obedience to the dictates of this feeling. in education for democracy the form of government is an after-consideration; that will come as a natural sequence. the chief thing is to inoculate the spirits of people with a feeling for democracy. this germ will grow out into a form of government because of the unity of feeling and consequent thinking. when this spiritual attitude is generated, not only does the form of government follow, but people meet upon the plane of a common purpose and give expression to their inner selves in like movements. they come to realize that, in a large way, each one is his brother's keeper. they are drawn together in closer sympathy and good-will; artificial barriers disappear; and they all become interested in the common good. their interests, purposes, and activities become unified, and life becomes better and richer. actuated by a common impulse, they exemplify what kipling says in his _sons of martha_: lift ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat, lo, it is black already with blood some son of martha spilled for that, not as a ladder from earth to heaven, not as an altar to any creed, but simple service, simply given, to their own kind, in their common need. as dr. henry van dyke well says, "it is the silent ideal in the hearts of the people which molds character and guides action." it will be admitted without qualification that the school, when well administered, constitutes a force that a altogether favorable to the development of the spirit of democracy, and no one will deny that democracy is a worthy goal toward which the activities of the school should be directed. it is easy to see just how geography, for instance, may be made a means to this end. the members of the class represent many conditions of society, but in the study of geography they unite in a common enterprise and have interests in common. thus their spirits merge and, for the time, they become unified in a common quest. they become coordinates and confederates in this quest of geography, and the spirit of democracy expands in an atmosphere so favorable to growth. these pupils may differ in race, in creed, or in color, but these differences are submerged in the zeal of a common purpose. lines of demarcation are obliterated and they are drawn together because of their thinking and feeling in unison. the caste system does not thrive in the geography class and snobbery languishes. the pupils have the same books, the same assignments, the same teacher, and share alike in all the privileges and pleasures which the class provides. their grades are given on merit, with no semblance of discrimination. in short, they achieve the democratic attitude of spirit by means of the study of geography. if the teacher holds democracy in mind, all the while, as the goal of endeavor, she will find abundant opportunities to inculcate and develop the democratic ideal. by tactful suggestion she directs the activities of the children into channels that lead to unity of purpose. where help is needed, she arranges that help may be forthcoming. where sympathy will prove a solace, sympathy will be given, for sympathy grows spontaneously in a democratic atmosphere. books, pictures, and flowers come forth as if by magic to bear their kindly messages and to render their appointed service. by the subtle alchemy of her very presence, the teacher who is deeply imbued with the spirit of democracy fuses the spirits of her pupils and causes them to blend in the pursuit of truth. thus she brings it to pass that the spirit of democracy dominates the school and each pupil comes to feel a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all the others. so the school achieves the goal of democracy by means of the studies pursued, and the pupils come to experience the altruism, the impulse to serve, and the centrifugal urge of the democratic spirit. chapter thirteen serenity serenity does not mean either stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. it does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. it means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. it means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much sail it spreads. when we see serenity, we are quite aware of other spiritual qualities that foster it and lift it into view. we know that courage is one of the hidden pillars on which it rests and that sincerity contributes to its grace and charm. it is a vital crescent quality as staunch as the oak and as graceful as the rainbow. it evermore stands upon a pedestal, and a host of devotees do it homage. it is as majestic and beautiful as the iceberg but as warm-hearted as love. it has reserve, and yet it attracts rather than repels. a thousand influences are poured into the alembic of the spirit, and serenity issues forth in modest splendor. this quality of the spirit both betokens and embodies power, and power governs the universe. its power is not that of the storm that harries and devastates, but rather that of the sunshine that fructifies, purifies, chastens, and ripens. it does not rush or crash into a situation but steals in as quietly as the dawn, without noise or bombast, and, by its gentle influence, softens asperities and wins a smile from the face of sorrow, or discouragement, or anger. its presence transforms discord into harmony, irradiates gloom, and evokes rare flowers from the murky soil of discontent. whatever storms may rage elsewhere and whatever darkness may enshroud, it ever keeps its place as the center of a circle of calm and light. it is venus of milo come to life, silently distilling the beauty and splendor of living. in its presence harshness becomes gentleness, hysteria becomes equanimity, and sound becomes silence. from its presence vaunting and vainglory and arrogance hasten away to be with their own kind. by its power, as of a miracle, it changes the dross into fine gold, the grotesque into the seemly, the vulgar into the pure, the water into wine. into the midst of commotion and confusion it quietly moves, saying, "peace, be still!" and there is quiet and repose. like the sun-crowned summit of the mountain, it stands erect and sublime nor heeds the cloudy tumult at its feet. in the school, the teacher who exemplifies and typifies this quality of serenity is never less than dignified but, withal, is never either cold or rigid. children nestle about her in their affections and expand in her presence as flowers open in the sunshine. she cannot be a martinet nor, in her presence, can the children become sycophants. her very presence generates an atmosphere that is conducive to healthy growth. there is that impelling force about her that draws people to her as iron filings are drawn to the magnet. her smile stills the tumult of youthful exuberance and when the children look at her they gain a comprehensive definition of a lady. her poise steadies the children in all the ramifications of their work, her complete mastery of herself wins their admiration, and her complete mastery of the situation wins their respect. they become inoculated with her spirit and make daily advances toward the goal of serenity. knowledge is her meat and drink and, through the subtle alchemy of sublimation, her knowledge issues forth into wisdom. she does not pose, for her simplicity and sincerity have no need of artificial garnishings. her outward mien is but the expression of her spiritual power, and when we contemplate her we know of a truth that education is a spiritual process. to the teacher without serenity, the days abound in troubles. she is nervous, peevish, querulous, and irritable, and her pupils become equally so. she thinks of them as incorrigibles and tells them so. to her they seem bad and she tells them so. her animadversions reflect upon their parents and their home life as well as themselves and she takes unction to herself by reason of her strictures. her spiritual ballast is unequal to the sail she carries and her craft in consequence careens and every day ships water of icy coldness that chills her pupils to the heart. she has knowledge, indeed much knowledge, but she lacks wisdom, hence her knowledge becomes weakness and not power. she has spiritual hysteria which manifests itself in her manner, in her looks, and in her voice. her spiritual strength is insufficient for the load she tries to carry and her path shows uneven and tortuous. she nags and scolds in strident tones that ruffle and rasp the spirits of her pupils and beget in them a longing to become whatever she is not. she is noisy where quiet is needful; she causes disturbance where there should be peace; and she disquiets where she should soothe. she may have had training, but she lacks education, for her spiritual qualities show only chaos. the waters of her soul are shallow and so are lashed into tumult by the slightest storm. she lacks serenity. the test of a real teacher is not whether she will be good _to_ the children but, rather, whether she will be good _for_ the children, and these concepts are wide apart. if our colleges and normal schools could but gain the notion that their function is to prepare teachers who will be good _for_ children they might find occasion to modify their courses radically. unless she has serenity the teacher is not good for children, for serenity is one of the qualities which they themselves should possess as the result of their school experience and it is not easy for them to achieve this quality if the teacher's example and influence are adverse. we test prospective teachers for their knowledge of this subject and that, when, in reality, we should be trying to determine whether they will be good for the pupils. but we have contracted the habit of thinking that knowledge is power and so test for knowledge, thinking, futilely, that we are testing for power. we judge of a teacher's efficacy by some marks that examiners inscribe upon a bit of paper, "a thing laughable to gods and men." she may be proficient in languages, sciences, and arts and still not be good for the children by reason of the absence of spiritual qualities. none the less, we admit her to the school as teacher when we would decline to admit her to the hospital as nurse. we say she would not be good for the patients in the hospital but nevertheless accept her as the teacher of our children. in ephesians we read, "but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance," and such an array of excellent spiritual qualities should attract the attention of all the agencies that have to do with the preparation of teachers. we need only to make a list of the opposites of these qualities to be convinced that the teacher who possesses these opposites would not be good for the children. now serenity embodies all the foregoing excellent qualities and, therefore, the teacher who has serenity has a host of qualities that will make for the success and well-being of her pupils. again, quoting from henderson: "my whole point is that these spiritual qualities in a boy are infinitely more important to his present charm and future achievement than any amount of academic training, than the most complete knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, grammar, spelling, classics, and natural science. for charm and achievement are of the spirit. it is very clear, then, that we ought to make these spiritual qualities the major end of all our endeavor during those wonderful years of grace; and that we ought to allow the intellectual development, up to fourteen years at least, to be a by-product, valuable and welcome certainly, but not primarily sought after. in the end we should get much the larger harvest of intellectual power, and much the larger man." we cannot hope to achieve the reconstructed school until our notion of teaching and teachers has been reconstructed. when we secure teachers who have education and not mere knowledge, we may begin to hope. we must look to the colleges and normal schools to furnish such teachers. if they cannot do so, our schools must plod along on the path of tradition without hope of finding the better way. there are faint indications, however, here and there, that the colleges and normal schools are beginning to stir in their sleep and are becoming somewhat aware of their opportunities and responsibilities. we shall hail with acclaim the glad day when they come to realize that the preparation of teachers for their work is a task of large import and goes deeper than facts, and statistics, and theories, and knowledge. if they furnish a teacher who has the quality of serenity, we shall all be fully alive to the fact that that quality is the luscious and nutritious fruitage of scholarship, of wide knowledge, of much reading, of deep meditation, and keen observation. but these elements, either singly or in combination, are but veneer unless they strike their roots into the spiritual nature and are thus nourished into spiritual qualities. excavating into serenity, we shall discover the pure gold of scholarship; we shall find knowledge in great abundance; we shall find the spirit of the greatest and best books; and we shall come upon the cloister in which meditation has done its perfect work. the machine that is run to the extreme limit of its capacity splutters, sizzles, hisses, and quivers, and finally shakes itself into a condition of ineffectiveness. but the machine that is run well within the limits of its capacity is steady, noiseless, serene, effective, and durable. so with people. the person who essays a task that is beyond his capacity is certain to come to grief and to create no end of disturbance to himself and others before the final catastrophe. if the steam-chest or boiler is not equal to the task, wisdom and safety would counsel the installation of a larger one. here is one of the tragedies of our scheme of education. the spirit is the power-plant of all life's operations and in this plant are many boilers. instead of calling more and more of these into action, we seem intent upon repressing them and thus we reduce the capacity of the plant as a whole. when we should be lighting or replenishing the fires under the boilers of imagination, initiative, aspiration, and reverence, we spend our time striving to bank or quench these fires and in playing and dawdling with the torches of arithmetic, grammar, and history with which we should be kindling the fires. thus we diminish the power of the plant while life's activities are calling for extension and enlargement. we seem to be trying to train our pupils to work with one or but few boilers when there are scores of them available if only we knew how to utilize them. hence, it must appear that reserve-power and serenity are virtually synonymous. the teacher who has achieved serenity never uses all the power at her command and, in consequence, all her actions are easy, quiet, and even. she is always stable and never mercurial or spasmodic. she encounters steep grades, to be sure, but with ease and grace she applies a bit more power from her abundant supply and so compasses the difficulty without disturbing the calm. she is fully conscious of her reservoir of power and can concentrate all her attention upon the work in hand. the ballast in the hold keeps the mast perpendicular and the sails in position to catch the favoring breeze. we admire and applaud the graceful ship as it speeds along its course, giving little heed to the ballast in the hold that gives it poise and balance. but the ballast is there, else the ship would not be moving with such majestic mien. nor was this ballast provided in a day. rather it has been accumulating through the years, and bears the mark of college halls, of libraries, of laboratories, of the auditorium, of the mountain, the ocean, the starry night, of the deep forest, of the landscape, and of communion with all that is big and fine. socrates drinking the hemlock is a fitting and inspiring illustration of serenity. in the presence of certain and imminent death he was far less perturbed than many another man in the presence of a pin-prick. and his imperturbability betokened bigness and not stolidity. while his disciples wept about him, he could counsel them to calmness and discourse to them upon immortality. he wept not, nor did he shudder back from the ordeal, but calm and masterful he raised the cup to his lips and smiled as he drank. his serenity won immortality for his name; for wherever language may be spoken or written, the story of socrates will be told. history will not permit his name to be swallowed up in oblivion, not alone because he was the victim of ignorance and prejudice but also because his serenity, which was the offspring and proof of his wisdom, did not fail him and his friends in the supreme test. it is not a slight matter, then, to set up serenity as one of the goals in our school work. nor is it a slight matter for the teacher to show forth this quality in all her work and so inspire her pupils to follow in her footsteps. we hope, of course, that the boys and girls of our schools may attain serenity so that, even in their days of youth, urged on as they are by youthful exuberance, they may be orderly, decorous, and kindly-disposed. we would have them polite, as a matter of course, but we would hope that their politeness may be a part of themselves and not a mere accretion. they will have joy of life, but so does their teacher who is possessed of serenity. joy is not necessarily boisterous. the strains of music are no less music because they are mellow. we would have our young people think soberly but not solemnly. and when all our people, young and old, reach the goal of serenity they will extol the teachers and the schools that showed them the way. chapter fourteen life finally, we come to the chief among the goals, which is life itself. in fact, life is the super-goal. we study manual arts, science, and language that we may achieve the goals of integrity, imagination, aspiration, and serenity, and these qualities we weave into the fabric of life. upon the spiritual qualities we weave into it, depend the texture and pattern of this fabric and the generating and developing of these qualities and the weaving of them into this fabric--this we call life. when we look upon a person who is well-conditioned and whose life is well-ordered, in body, in mind, and in spirit, we know, at once, that he possesses integrity, initiative, a sense of responsibility, reverence, and other high qualities that compose the person as we see him. we do not reflect upon what he knows of history, of geography, or of music, for we are taking note of an exemplification of life. indeed, the presence or absence of these qualities determines the character of the person's life. hence it is that life is the supreme goal of endeavor. life is a composite and the crown-piece of all the qualities toward which we strive by means of arithmetic and grammar--in short, of all our activities both in school and out. one of our mistakes is that we confuse life and lifetime, and construe life to mean the span of life. in this conception the unit of measurement is so large that our concept of life evaporates into a vague generalization. life is too specific, too definite for that. the quality of life may better be measured and tested in one-hour periods of duration. when the clock strikes nine, we know that in just sixty minutes it will strike ten. in the space of those sixty minutes we may find a cross-section of life. in a single hour we may experience a thousand sensations, arrive at a thousand judgments, and make a thousand responses to things about us. in that hour we may experience joy, sorrow, love, hate, envy, malice, sympathy, kindliness, courage, cowardice, pettiness, magnanimity, egoism, altruism, cruelty, mercy--a list, in fact, that reaches on almost interminably. if we only had a spiritual cyclometer attached to us, when the clock strikes ten we should have an interesting moment in noting the record. only in some such way may each one of us gain a true notion of what his own life is. the one-hour period is quite long enough for a determination of the spiritual attitude and disposition of the individual. it is no small matter to achieve life, big, full, round, abounding, pulsating life; but it is certainly well worth striving for. some one has defined sin as the distance between what one is and what he might have been; and this distance measures his decline from the sphere of life to which he had right and title. for life is a sphere, seeing that it extends in all directions. its limits are conterminous with the boundaries of time and space. the feeble-minded person has life, but only in a very restricted sphere. he eats; he drinks; he sleeps; he wanders in narrow areas; and that is all. his thinking is weak, meager, and fitful. to him darkness means a time for sleeping, and light a time for eating and waiting. he produces nothing either of thought or substance, but is a pensioner upon the thinking and substance of others. his eyesight is strong and his hearing unimpaired; but he neither sees nor hears as normal persons do, because his spirit is incapable of positive reactions, and his mind too weak to give commands to his bodily organs at the behest of the spirit. in the language of psychology, he lacks a sensory foundation by which to react to external stimuli. in striking contrast is the man whose sphere of life is large, whose spirit is capable of reacting to the orient and the occident, to height and depth, and whose mind flashes across the space from the dawn to the sunset, and from nadir to zenith. space is his playground, and his companions are the stars. such a man feels and knows more life in an hour than his antithesis could feel and know in a century. to his spirit there are no metes and bounds; it has freedom and strength to make excursions to the far limits of space and time. life comes to him from a thousand sources and in a thousand ways because he is able to go out to meet it. there has been developed in him a sensory foundation by which he can react to every influence the universe affords, to light and shadow, to joy and sorrow, to the near and the far, to the then and the now, to the lowly and the sublime, and to the finite and the infinite. he has a big spirit, which is first in command; he has a strong, active mind, which is second in command; and he has a loyal company of bodily organs that are able and willing to obey and execute commands. to such a man we apply all the epithets of compliment and commendation which the language yields and cite him as an exemplification of life at high tide, of life in its supreme fullness and splendor. the knowledge of the world comes to his doors to do his bidding; before him the arts and sciences make their obeisance; and wisdom is his pillar of cloud by day and his pillar of fire by night. therefore we call him educated; we call him a man of culture; we call him a gentleman; and all because he has achieved life in abundant measure. having imagination, he is able to peer into the future, anticipate world movements, and visualize the paths on which progress will travel. having initiative as his badge of leadership, he is able to rally hosts of men to his standard to execute his behests for civic, national, and world betterment. having aspiration, he obeys the divine urge within him and moves onward and upward, eager to plant the flag of progress upon the summit that others may see and be stimulated to renewed hope and courage. and he has integrity, for he is a real man. he has wholeness, completeness, soundness, and roundness. he is an integer and never counts for less than one in any relation of life. he cannot be a mere cipher, for he is dynamic. he rings true at every impact of life, is free from dross and veneer, and is genuine through and through. there was arithmetic, back along the line somewhere, but it has been absorbed in the big quality which it helped to generate and develop. and it is better so. for if he were now solving decimals and square root he would be but a cog and not the great wheel itself. he has grown beyond his arithmetic as he has grown beyond his boyhood warts and freckles, for the larger life has absorbed them. yet he feels no disdain either for freckles or arithmetic, but regards them as gracious incidents of youth and growth. he cannot read his latin as he once could, but he does not grieve; for he knows it has not been lost but, in changed form, is enshrined in the heart of integrity. again, he has the qualities of thoroughness, concentration, a sense of responsibility, loyalty, and serenity. he is big enough, and true enough both to himself and others, to pursue a straight and steady course. to him, life is a boon, a privilege, an investment, an opportunity, a responsibility, and, therefore, a gift too precious to be squandered or frivoled away. to him, hours are of fine gold and should be seized that they may be fused and fashioned into a statue of beauty. being loyal to this conception, he moves on from achievement to achievement nor stops to note that fragrant flowers of blessing and benediction are springing forth luxuriantly in his path. his spirit is big with rightness, his brain is clear, his conscience is clean, his eyes look upward, his words are sincere, his thoughts are lofty, his purposes are true, and his acts distill blessings. he is no mere figment of fancy, but rather a noble reality whose prototype may be found on the bench, in the forum, in the study, in the sanctum, in the school and the college, in the factory, on the farm, and in the busy mart. and, withal, he is a success as a human being. his sincerity is proverbial in all things, both great and small. in him there is nothing of the mystic, the hermit, or the sybarite. he has great joy of life, and this joy is true, honest, and real, and never simulated. he drinks in life at every pore, and gives forth life that invigorates and inspires whomsoever it touches. his laugh is the expression of his wholesome nature; his words are jewels of discrimination; his every sentence bears a helpful message; his fine sense of humor mellows and illumines every situation; and his face always shows forth the light within. children find delight in his society, and the exuberant vitality of his nature wins for him the friendship of all living creatures. birds seem to sing for him, and flowers to exhale their odors for his delight. for the influences of birds, flowers, streams, trees, meadows, and mountains are enmeshed in his life. nature reveals her secrets to him and gives to him of her treasures because he goes out to meet her. because he smiles at nature she smiles back at him, and the union of their smiles gives joy to those who see. moreover, he is a product of the reconstructed school, for this school does already exist, though in conspicuous isolation. but the oasis is accentuated by its isolation in the desert which spreads about it and is the more inviting by contrast. when, as a child, he entered school, the teacher, who was in advance of her time in her conception of the true function of the school, made a close and sympathetic appraisement of his aptitudes, his native dispositions, his daily environment, and the bent of his inherent spiritual qualities. first of all, she won his confidence. thus he found freedom, ease, and pleasure in her presence. thus, too, there ensued unconscious self-revelation and nothing in his life evaded her kindly scrutiny. he opened his mind to her frankly and fully, and never after did she permit the closing of the door. only so could she become his teacher. she regarded him as an opportunity for the testing of all her knowledge, all her skill, and the full measure of her altruism. nor was he the proverbial mass of plastic clay to be molded into some preconceived form. her wisdom and modernity interdicted such a conception of childhood as that. rather, he was a growing plant, waiting for her skill to nurture him into blossom and fruitage. some of his qualities she found good; others not. the good ones she made the objects of her special care; the others she allowed to perish from neglect. her experience in gardening had taught her that, if we cultivate the potatoes assiduously, the weeds will disappear and need not concern us. she discerned in him a tender shoot of imagination and this she nurtured as a priceless thing. she fertilized it with legend, story, song, and myth, and enveloped it in an atmosphere of warmth and joyousness. she led him into nature's realm, that his imagination might plume its wings for greater flights by its efforts to interpret the heart of things that live. thus his imagination learned to traverse space, to explore sights and sounds his senses could not reach, and to construct for him another world of beauty and delight. so, too, with the other spiritual qualities. upon these goals her gaze was fixed and she gently led him toward them. she taught the arithmetic with zest, with large understanding, and in a masterly way, for she was causing it to serve a high purpose. whatever study she found helpful, this she used as a means with gratitude and gladness. if she found the book ill adapted to her purpose, she sought or wrote another. if pictures proved more potent than books, the galleries obeyed the magic of her skill and yielded forth their treasures. she yearned to have her pupil win the goals before him; everything was grist that came to her mill if only it would serve her purpose. she disdained nothing that could afford nourishment to the spirit of the child and give him zeal, courage, and strength for the upward journey. if more arithmetic was needful, she found it; if more history, she gave it; and if the book on geography was inadequate, she supplemented from libraries or from her own abundant storehouse of knowledge. she dared to deviate from the course of study, if thereby the child might more certainly win the goals toward which she ever looked and worked. in the boy, she saw a poet, a philosopher, a prophet, an artist, a musician, a statesman, or a philanthropist, and she worked and prayed that the artist in the child might not die but that he might grow to stalwart manhood to glorify the work of her school. in each girl she saw another ruth, or esther, or cordelia, or clara barton, or frances willard, or florence nightingale, or rosa bonheur, or mrs. stowe, or mrs. browning. and her heart yearned over each one of these and strove with power to nourish them into vigorous life that they might become jewels in her crown of rejoicing. she must not allow one to perish through her ignorance or malpractice, for she would keep her soul free from the charge of murder. and in the fullness of manhood and womanhood her pupils achieved the full symphony of life. they had won the goals toward which their teacher had been leading. their spiritual qualities had converged and become life, and they had attained the super-goal. in the joy of their achievement their teacher repeated the words of her own teacher, "i am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." index [transcriber's note: page numbers converted to chapter numbers.] altruism, american civilization, apple tree, arithmetic, as means, never as end, aspiration, , bible, body, mind, spirit, bogtrup, browning, cant, children, let alone when, citizenship, concept of, civilization, clean living, columbus, concept of life, cooley, course of study, culture, david, democracy, , spiritual attitude, democratic ideal, destination, dickens, draft board, dynamic teacher, edison, education, newer import of, definition of, a spiritual process, esther, excelsior, farmers, field, froebel, future as related to present, galileo, geography, grandchildren, great stone face, hand, harvey's grammar, henderson, c. hanford, hercules, history, hodge, hugo, victor, hungry pupils, ideals, imagination, "impart instruction," incompleteness, incorrigibility, initiative, integrity, meaning of, inventions, job, jove, keats, kipling, knowledge and wisdom, life, lincoln, loyalty, madonna of the chair, major ends, man-made course of study, manual training, minerva, minor ends, model man, model woman, mother, napoleon, north star, objects of teaching, old age, old glory, olympus, parker, past as related to the present, paternalism, pestalozzi, physical training, physician, preliminary survey of task before reconstructed school, present, as related to the past, as related to the future, process of reconstruction, question and answer method, reactions, reconstructed school, survey of, relation of past to present, reserve-power, respect, responsibility, revelation, reverence, ruth, samson, sandow, school is cross-section of life, serenity, defined, shakespeare, sin, sluggard, socrates, spiritual attitude, spiritual coward, spiritual hysteria, standardized children, statistics, stimuli, stuart, ruth mcenery, survey of task before reconstructed school, swift, edgar james, , teachers, kinds of, test of, teaching, objects of, thoroughness, tractor, tradition, traditional teacher, truth, unity, dawn of, van dyke, henry, , wall street, war gardens, wells, h.g., words, world-minded superintendents and teachers, world war, * * * * * world book company the house of applied knowledge established, , by caspar w. hodgson yonkers-on-hudson, new york prairie avenue, chicago publishers of the following professional works: school efficiency series, edited by paul h. hanus, complete in thirteen volumes; educational survey series, seven volumes already issued and others projected; school efficiency monographs, eleven numbers now ready, others in active preparation. * * * * * school efficiency monographs anderson education of defectives in the public schools arp rural education and the consolidated school butterworth problems in state high school finance cody commercial tests and how to use them baton record forms for vocational schools mcandrew the public and its school mahoney standards in english mead an experiment in the fundamentals pearson the reconstructed school reed newsboy service richardson making a high school program tidyman the teaching of spelling proofreading team. the high school failures a study of the school records of pupils failing in academic or commercial high school subjects by francis p. obrien submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in the faculty of philosophy, columbia university published by teachers college, columbia university new york city copyright, , by francis p. obrien preface grateful acknowledgment is due the principals of each of the high schools whose records are included in this study, for the courteous and helpful attitude which they and their assistants manifested in the work of securing the data. thanks are due dr. john s. tildsley for his generous permission to consult the records in each or any of the new york city high schools. but the fullest appreciation is felt and acknowledged for the ready criticism and encouragement received from professor thomas h. briggs and professor george d. strayer at each stage from the inception to the completion of this study. f.p.o. contents page i.--the general introduction of the subject . the relevance of this study . the meaning of failure in this study . scope and content of the field covered . sources of the data employed . selection and reliability of these sources . summary of chapter, and references ii.--how extensive are the failures of the high school pupils? . a distribution of all entrants in reference to failure . the later distribution of the pupils by semesters . the distribution of the failures--by ages and by semesters . distribution of the failures by subjects . the pupils dropping out--time and age . summary of chapter, and references iii.--what basis is discoverable for a prognosis of the occurrence or the number of failures? . some possible factors--attendance, mental and physical defects, size of classes . employment of the school entering age for the purpose of prognosis . the percentage of failure at each age on the possibility of failures for that age . the initial record in high school . prognosis of failure by subject selection . the time period and the number of failures . similarity of facts for boys and girls . summary of chapter, and references iv.--how much is graduation or the persistence in school conditioned by the occurrence or by the number of failures? . comparison of the failing and the non-failing groups in reference to graduation and persistence . the number of failures and the years required to graduate . the number of failures and the semesters of dropping out, for non-graduates . the percentages that the non-graduate groups form of the pupils who have each successively higher number of failures . time extension for the failing graduates . summary of chapter, and references v.--are the school agencies employed in remedying the failures adequate for the purpose? . repetition as a remedy for failures a. size of schedule and results of repeating. b. later grades in the same kind of subjects, following repetition and without it. c. the grades in repeated subjects and in new work. d. the number and results of identical repetitions. . discontinuance of the subject or course, and the substitution of others . the employment of school examinations . the service rendered by the regents' examinations in new york . continuation of subjects without repetition or examination . summary of chapter, and references vi.--do the failures represent a lack of capability or of fitness for high school work on the part of those pupils? . some are evidently misfits . most of the failing pupils lack neither ability nor earnestness . the school emphasis and the school failures are both culminative in particular school subjects . an indictment against the subject-matter and the teaching ends as factors in producing failures . summary of chapter, and references vii.--what treatment is suggested by the diagnosis of the facts of failure? . organization and adaptation in recognition of the individual differences in abilities and interests . faculty student advisers from the time of entrance . greater flexibility and differentiation required . provision for the direction of the pupils' study . a greater recognition and exposition of the facts as revealed by accurate and complete school records . summary of chapter, and references a study of the school records of the pupils failing in academic or commercial high school subjects chapter i general introduction of the subject . the relevance of this study as the measuring of the achievements of the public schools has become a distinctive feature of the more recent activities in the educational field, the failure in expected accomplishment by the school, and its proficiency in turning out a negative product, have been forced upon our attention rather emphatically. the striking growth in the number of school surveys, measuring scales, questionnaires, and standardized tests, together with many significant school experiments and readjustments, bears testimony of our evident demand for a closer diagnosis of the practices and conditions which are no longer accepted with complacency. the american people have expressed their faith in a scheme of universal democratic education, and have committed themselves to the support of the free public high school. they have been liberal in their financing and strong in their faith regarding this enterprise, so typically american, to a degree that a secondary education may no longer be regarded as a luxury or a heritage of the rich. no longer may the field be treated as either optional or exclusive. the statutes of several of our states now expressly or impliedly extend their compulsory attendance requirements beyond the elementary years of school. many, too, are the lines of more desirable employment for young people which demand or give preference to graduates of a high school. at the same time there has been no decline in the importance of high school graduation for entering the learned or professional pursuits. accordingly, it seems highly probable that, with such an extended and authoritative sphere of influence, a stricter business accounting will be exacted of the public high school, as the great after-war burdens make the public less willing to depend on faith in financing so great an experiment. they will ask, ever more insistently, for facts as to the expenditures, the finished product, the internal adjustments, and the waste product of our secondary schools. such inquiries will indeed seem justifiable. it is estimated that the public high schools had per cent of all the pupils (above , , ) enrolled in the secondary schools of the united states in .[ ] the majority of these pupils are lost from school--whatever the cause--before the completion of their courses; and, again, the majority of those who do graduate have on graduation ended their school days. consequently, it becomes more and more evident how momentous is the influence of the public high school in conditioning the life activities and opportunities of our youthful citizens who have entered its doors. before being entitled to be considered a "big business enterprise,"[ ] it seems imperative that our "american high school" must rapidly come to utilize more of business methods of accounting and of efficiency, so as to recognize the tremendous waste product of our educational machinery. the aim of this study is to trace as carefully and completely as may be the facts relative to that major portion of our high school population, the pupils who fail in their school subjects, and to note something of the significance of these findings. if we are to proceed wisely in reference to the failing pupils in the high school, it is admittedly of importance that such procedure should be based on a definite knowledge of the facts. the value of such a study will in turn be conditioned by the scrupulous care and scientific accuracy in the securing and handling of the facts. it is believed that the causes of and the remedies for failure are necessarily closely linked with factors found in the school and with the school experiences of failing pupils, so that the problem cannot be solved by merely labeling such pupils as the unfit. there is no attempt in this study to treat all failures as in any single category. the causes of the failures are not assumed at the start nor given the place of chief emphasis, but are regarded as incidental to and dependent upon what the evidence itself discloses. the success of the failing pupils after they leave the high school is not included in this undertaking, but is itself a field worthy of extended study. even our knowledge of what later happens to the more successful and the graduating high school pupils is limited mainly to those who go on to college or to other higher institutions. one of the more familiar attempts to evaluate the later influence of the high school illustrates the fallacy of overlooking the process of selection involved, and of treating its influence in conjunction with the training as though it were the result of school training alone.[ ] . the meaning of 'failure' in this study the term 'failure' is employed in this study to signify the non-passing of a pupil in any semester-subject of his school work. the school decision is not questioned in the matter of a recorded failure. and although it is usually understood to negate "ability plus accomplishment," it may, and undoubtedly does, at times imply other meanings, such as a punitive mark, a teacher's prejudice, or a deferred judgment. the mark may at times tell more about the teacher who gave it than about the pupil who received it. these peculiarities of the individual teacher or pupil are pretty well compensated for by the large number of teachers and of pupils involved. the decisive factor in this matter is that the school refuses to grant credit for the work pursued. the failure for a semester seems to be a more adaptable unit in this connection than the subject-failure for a year. however, it necessitates the treatment of the subject-failure for a year as equivalent to a failure for each of the two semesters. two of the schools involved in this study (comprising about per cent of the pupils) recorded grades only at the end of the year. it is quite probable that the marking by semesters would actually have increased the number of failures in these schools, as there are many teachers who confess that they are less willing to make a pupil repeat a year than a semester. by employing this unit of failure, the failures in the different subjects are regarded as comparable. since only the academic and commercial subjects are considered, and since they are almost uniformly scheduled for four or five hours a week, the failures will seem to be of something near equal gravity and to represent a similar amount of non-performance or of unsatisfactory results. there were also a few failures included here for those subjects which had only three hours a week credit, mainly in the commercial subjects. but failures were unnoted when the subject was listed for less than three hours a week. there are certain other elements of assumption in the treatment of the failures, which seemed to be unavoidable. they are, first, that failure in any subject is the same fact for boys and for girls; second, that failures in different years of work or with different teachers are equivalent; third, that failures in elective and in required subjects are of the same gravity. it was found practically impossible to differentiate required and elective subjects, however desirable it would have been, for the subjects that are theoretically elective often are in fact virtually required, the electives of one course are required in another, and on many of the records consulted neither the courses nor the electives are clearly designated. . the scope and content of the field covered as any intensive study must almost necessarily be limited in its scope, so this one comprises for its purposes the high school records for , pupils belonging to eight different high schools located in new york and new jersey. for two of these schools the records for all the pupils that entered are included here for five successive years, and for their full period in high school. in two other schools the records of all pupils that entered for four successive years were secured. in four of the schools the records of all pupils who entered in february and september of one year constituted the number studied. there is apparently no reason to believe that a longer period of years would be more representative of the facts for at least three of these four schools, in view of the situation that they had for years enjoyed a continuity of administration and that they possess a well-established organization. the fourth one of these schools had less complete records than were desired, but even in that the one year was representative of the other years' records. the distribution of the , pupils by schools and by years of entering high school is given below. high school pupils in: entering high school number in the years studied white plains, n.y. , ' , ' , ' , ' dunkirk, n.y. , ' , ' , ' mount vernon, n.y. montclair, n.j. , ' , ' , ' , ' hackensack, n.j. , ' , ' , ' elizabeth, n.j. morris h.s.--bronx erasmus hall h.s.--brooklyn ---- total as it is essential for the purposes of this study to have the complete record of the pupils for their full time in the high school, the , pupils include none who entered later than . thus all were allowed at least five and one-half or six years in which to terminate their individual high school history, of successes or of failures, before the time of making this inquiry into their records. no pupils who were transferred from another high school or who did not start with the class as beginning high school students were included among those studied. post-graduate records were not considered, neither was any attempt made to trace the record of drop-outs who entered other schools. manifestly the percentage of graduation would be higher in any school if the recruits from other schools and the drop-backs from other classes in the school were included. no attempt has been made to trace the elementary school or college records of the failing pupils, for our purpose does not reach beyond the sphere of the high school records. in reference to the differentiation by school courses, some facts were at first collected, but these were later discarded, as the courses represent no standardization in terminology or content, and they promised to give nothing of definite value. as might be expected, the schools lacked agreement or uniformity in the number of courses offered. one school had no commercial classes, as that work was assigned to a separate school; another school offered only typewriting and stenography of the commercial subjects; a third had placed rather slight emphasis on the commercial subjects until recently. only four of the schools had pupils in greek. the spanish classes outnumbered the greek both by schools and by enrollment. in the classification by subjects, english is made to include (in addition to the usual subjects of that name) grammar, literature, and business english. mathematics includes all subjects of that class except commercial arithmetic, which is treated as a commercial subject, and shop-mathematics, which is classed as non-academic. industrial history, and 'political and social science' are regarded along with academic subjects; likewise household chemistry is included with the science classification. economics is treated as a commercial subject. at least a dozen other subjects, not classified as academic or commercial, including also spelling and penmanship, were taken by a portion of these pupils, but the records for these subjects do not enter this study in determining the successful and failing grades or the sizes of schedule. yet it is true that such subjects do demand time and work from those pupils. . sources of the data employed the only records employed in this whole problem of research were the official school records. no questionnaires were used, and no statements of pupils or opinions of teachers as such were sought. the facts are the most authoritative and dependable available, and are the very same upon which the administrative procedure of the school relative to the pupil is mainly dependent. the individual, cumulative records for the pupils provided the chief source of the facts secured. these school records, as might be expected, varied considerably as to the form, the size, the simplicity in stating facts, and the method of filing; but they were quite similar in the facts recorded, as well as in the completeness and care with which the records were compiled. it may be added that only schools having such records were included in the investigation. after the meanings of symbols and devices and the methods of recording the facts had been fully explained and carefully studied for the records of any school, the selection of the pupil records was then made, on the basis of the year of the pupils' entrance to the school, including all the pupils who had actually entered and undertaken work. (pupils who registered but failed to take up school work were entirely disregarded.) these individual records were classified into the failing and the non-failing divisions, then into graduating and non-graduating groups, with the boys and girls differentiated throughout. as fast as the records were read and interpreted into the terms required they were transcribed, with the pupils' names, by the author himself, to large sheets ( x ) from which the tabulations were later made. there was always an opportunity to ask questions and to make appeals for information either to the principal himself or to the secretary in charge of the records. this tended to reduce greatly the danger of mistakes other than those of chance error. the task of transcribing the data was both tedious and prolonged. this process alone required as much as four weeks for each of the larger schools, and without the continued and courteous cooperation of the principals and their assistants it would have been altogether impossible in that time. some arbitrary decisions and classifications proved necessary in reference to certain facts involved in the data employed in this study. all statements of age will be understood as applying to within the nearest half year; that is, fifteen years of age will mean within the period from fourteen years and a half to fifteen years and a half. the classification in the following pages by school years or semesters (half-years) is dependent upon the time of entrance into school. in this sense, a pupil who entered either in september or in february is regarded as a first semester pupil, however the school classes are named. as promotions are on a subject basis in each of the schools there is no attempt to classify later by promotions, but the time-in-school basis is retained. in reference to school marks or grades, letters are here employed, although four of the eight schools employ percentage grading. whether the passing mark is , as in some of the schools, or , as in others, the letter c is used to represent one-third of the distance from the failing mark to per cent; b is used to represent the next third of the distance; and a is used to express the upper third of the distance. the plus and minus signs, attached to the gradings in three of the schools, are disregarded for the purposes of this study, except that when d+ occurred as a conditional passing mark it was treated as a c. otherwise d has been used to signify a failing grade in a subject, which means that the grade is somewhere below the passing mark. the term 'graduates' is meant to include all who graduate, either by diploma or by certificate. any statement made in the following pages of 'time in school' or of time spent for 'securing graduation' will not include as a part of such period a semester in which the pupil is absent all or nearly all of the time, as in the case of absence due to illness. . the selection and reliability of these sources of data by employing data secured only from official school records and in the manner stated, this study has been limited to those schools that provide the cumulative pupil records, with continuity and completeness, for a sufficient period of years. some schools had to be eliminated from consideration for our purposes because the cumulative records covered too brief a period of years. in other schools administrative changes had broken the continuity of the records, making them difficult to interpret or undependable for this study. the shortage of clerical help was the reason given in one school for completing only the records of the graduates. in addition to the requirements pertaining to records, only publicly administered and co-educational schools have been included among those whose records are used. it was also considered important to have schools representing the large as well as the small city on the list of those studied. since many schools do not possess these important records, or do not recognize their value, it is quite probable that the conditions prescribed here tended to a selection of schools superior in reference to systematic procedure, definite standards, and stable organization, as compared to those in general which lack adequate records. the reliability and correctness of these records for the schools named are vouched for and verbally certified by the principals as the most dependable and in large part the only information of its kind in the possession of the schools. in each of these schools the principals have capable assistants who are charged with the keeping of the records, although they are aided at times by teachers or pupils who work under direction. in three of the larger schools a special secretary has full charge of the records, and is even expected to make suggestions for revisions and improvements of the forms and methods. in view of such facts it seems doubtful that one could anywhere find more dependable school records of this sort. it was true of one of the schools that the records previous to proved to be unreliable. there is no inclination here to deny the existence of defects and limitations to these records, but the intimate acquaintance resulting from close inquiry, involving nearly every factor which the records contain, is convincing that for these schools at least the records are highly dependable. however, there is some tendency for even the best school records to understate the full situation regarding failure, while there is no corresponding tendency to overstate or to record failures not made. not infrequently the pupils who drop out after previously failing may receive no mark or an incomplete one for the last semester in school. although a portion or all of such work may obviously merit failure, yet it is not usually so recorded. in a similar manner pupils who remain in school one or two semesters or less, but take no examinations and receive no semester grades, might reasonably be considered to have failed if they shunned examinations merely to escape the recording of failures, as sometimes appears to be the case when judged from the incomplete grades recorded for only a part of the semester. a few pupils will elect to 'skip' the regular term examination, and then repeat the work of that semester, but no failures are recorded in such instances. some teachers, when recording for their own subjects, prefer to indicate a failure by a dash mark or by a blank space until after the subject is satisfied later, and the passing mark is then filled in. one school indicates failure entirely by a short dash in the space provided, and then at times there occurs the 'cond' (conditioned) in pencil, apparently to avoid the classification as a failure by the usual sign. one finds some instances of a '?' or an 'inc' (incomplete) as a substitute for a mark of failure. again, where there is no indication of failure recorded, the dates accompanying the grades for the subjects may tell the tale that two semesters were required to complete one semester's work in a subject. some of these situations were easily discernible, and the indisputable failures treated as such in the succeeding tabulations; but in many instances this was not possible, and partial statement of these cases is all that is attempted. how far these selected schools, their pupils, and the facts relating to them are representative or typical of the schools, the pupils, and the same facts for the states of new jersey and new york, cannot be definitely known from the information that is now available. it seems indisputable, however, that the schools concerned in this study are at least among the better schools of these two states. if we may feel assured that the , pupils here included are fairly and generally representative of the facts for the eight schools to which they belong and which had an enrollment of , pupils in ; and if we are justified in classing these schools as averaging above the median rank of the schools for these states, then the statistical facts presented in the following pages may seem to be a rather moderate statement regarding the failures of high school pupils for the states referred to. it must be noted in this connection, however, that it is not unlikely that such schools, with their adequate records, will have the facts concerning failure more certainly recorded than will those whose records are incomplete, neglected, or poorly systematized. a partial comparison of the teachers is possible between the schools represented here and those of new york and new jersey. more than four hundred teachers comprised the teaching staff for the , pupils of the eight schools reported here. of these about per cent were men, while the percentage of men of all high school teachers in new jersey and new york[ ] was about for the year . the men in these schools comprised per cent of the teachers in the subjects which prove most difficult by producing the most failures, and they were more frequently found teaching in the advanced years of these subjects. it is not assumed here that men are superior as high school teachers, but the endeavor is rather to show that the teaching force was by its constitution not unrepresentative. it may be added here that few high schools anywhere have a more highly selected and better paid staff of teachers than are found in this group of schools. it is indeed not easy to believe that the situation in these eight selected schools regarding failure and its contributing factors could not be readily duplicated elsewhere within the same states. a summary of chapter i the american people have a large faith in the public high school. it enrolls approximately per cent of the secondary school pupils of the united states. high school attendance is becoming legally and vocationally compulsory. the size of the waste product demands a diagnosis of the facts. this study aims to discover the significant facts relative to the failing pupils. failure is used in the unit sense of non-passing in a semester subject. failures are then counted in terms of these units. this study includes , pupils belonging to eight different high schools and distributed throughout two states. the cumulative, official, school records for these pupils formed the basis of the data used. the schools were selected primarily for their possession of adequate records. more dependable school records than those employed are not likely to be found, yet they tend to understate the facts of failure. it is quite possible that a superior school, and one with a high grade teaching staff, is actually selected by the requirements of the study. references: . _annual report of united states commissioner of education for ._ . josslyn, h.w. chapter iv, in johnson's _modern high school_. . _the money value of education._ bulletin no. , , united states bureau of education. . new york and new jersey _state school reports for _. chapter ii how extensive are the failures of the high school pupils? . a distribution of all entrants in reference to failure with no purpose of making this a comparative study of schools, the separate units or schools indicated in chapter i will from this point be combined into a composite and treated as a single group. it becomes possible, with the complete and tabulated facts pertaining to a group of pupils, after their high school period has ended, to get a comprehensive survey of their school records and to answer such questions as: ( ) what part of the total number of boys or of girls have school failures? ( ) to what extent are the non-failing pupils the ones who succeed in graduating? ( ) to what extent do the failing pupils withdraw early? the following tabulation will show how two of these questions are answered for the , pupils here reported on. all all entrants failing graduates failing totals , , ( . %) , , ( . %) boys , , ( . %) ( . %) girls , , ( . %) , ( . %) from this distribution we readily compute that the percentage of pupils who fail is . per cent (boys-- . , girls-- . ). but this statement is itself inadequate. it does not take into account the pupils who received no grades and had no chance to be classed as failing, but who were in most cases in school long enough to receive marks, and a portion of whom were either eliminated earlier or deterred from examinations by the expectation of failing. it seems entirely safe to estimate that no less than per cent of this non-credited number should[ ] be treated as of the failing group[ ] of pupils. then the percentage of pupils to be classed as failing in school subjects becomes per cent (boys-- . , girls-- . ). in considering the second inquiry above, we find from the preceding distribution of pupils that . per cent (boys-- . , girls-- . ) of all pupils that graduate have failed in one or more subjects one or more times. this percentage varies from per cent to per cent by schools, but in only two instances does the percentage fall below per cent, and in one of these two it is almost per cent. we may now ask, when do the failing and the non-failing non-graduates drop out of school? of the total number of non-graduates ( , ), there are , who drop out after failing one or more times, and , who drop out without failing. the cumulative percentages of the non-graduates in reference to dropping out are here given. cumulative percentages of the failing non-graduates as they are lost by semesters lost by end of semester per cent . . . . . . . . . cumulative percentages of non-failing non-graduates as they are lost by semesters lost by end of semester per cent . . . . . . . .. .. briefly stated, the above percentages assert that more than three fourths of those who neither fail nor graduate have left school by the end of the first year, while only . per cent of those non-graduates who fail have left so early. more than per cent of the failing non-graduates continue in school to near the end of the second year. by that time about per cent of the non-failing non-graduates have been lost from school. by a combination of the above groups we get the percentages of all non-graduates lost by successive semesters. cumulative percentages of all non-graduates lost by successive semesters lost by end of semester per cent . . . . . . . . these percentages of non-graduates indicate that more than per cent of those who do not graduate are gone by the end of the first year, but that there are a few who continue beyond four years without graduating. . the later distribution of pupils by semesters consideration is here given to the number of the total entrants remaining in school for each successive semester, and then to the accompanying percentages of failure for each group. the following figures show the rapid decline in numbers. the persistence of pupils in school, by semesters end of semester graduate , (total) , , , , , , , percentages . . . . . . . as was pointed out in section of chapter i, the above group does not include any increment to its own numbers by means of transfer from other classes or schools. we find, accompanying this reduction in the number of pupils, which shows more than per cent gone by the end of the second year in school, that there is no corresponding reduction in the percentage of pupils failing each semester on the basis of the number of those in school for that semester. percentage of pupils failing of the pupils in school for that period semesters per cent . . . . . . . . there is no difficulty in grasping the simple and definite significance of these figures, for they tell us that the percentage of pupils failing increases for the first four semesters, slightly declines for two semesters, with a greater decline for two more semesters. these percentages of failures are based on the number of pupils enrolled at the beginning of the semester, and are accordingly lower than the facts would really warrant since that number is in each case considerably reduced by the end of the same semester. . the distribution of failures that the failures are widely distributed by semesters, by ages, and for both boys and girls, is shown in table i. table i the distribution of failures according to the age and the semester of their occurrence[a] semes- ages undistrib- ters uted totals b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. summary b. g. , [footnote a: the expression of the above facts in terms of percentages for each age group was found to be difficult, since failures and not pupils are designated. but the total failures for each age group are expressed (on p. ) as percentages of the entire number of subjects taken by these pupils for the semesters in which they failed. such percentages increase as the ages rise. a similar statement of the percentages of failure by semesters will be found on p. .] table i reads: the boys had failures and the girls had failures in the first semester and at the age of thirteen; in the second semester, at the age of thirteen, the boys had failures and the girls . for each semester, the first line represents boys, the second line girls. there is a total of , failures listed in this table. in addition to this number there are , uncompleted grades for the failing non-graduates. the semesters were frequently completed by such pupils but the records were left incomplete. their previous records and their prospects of further partial or complete failure seem to justify an estimate of per cent ( , ) of these uncompleted grades as either tentative or actual but unrecorded failures. therefore we virtually have , other failures belonging to these pupils which are not included in table i. accordingly, since the number can only be estimated, the fact that they are not incorporated in that table suggests that the information which it discloses is something less than a full statement of the school failures for these pupils. in the distribution of the totals for ages, the mode appears plainly at , but with an evident skewness toward the upper ages. the failures for the years , , and , when added together, form . per cent of the total failures. if those for years are also included, the result is per cent of the total. of the total failures, . per cent are found in the first two years ( , out of the total of , ). but the really striking fact is that . per cent of the failures occur after the end of the first two years, after . per cent of the pupils are gone, and with other hundreds leaving in each succeeding semester before even the end of the eighth. in table ii we have similar facts for the pupils who graduate. table ii the distribution of failures according to the ages and the semesters of their occurrence for the graduating pupils ages semesters totals b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. g. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. summary b. .. g. [footnote: in the facts which are involved and in the manner of reading them, this table is similar to table i. the mode of the distribution of totals for the ages is at in this table. further reference will be made to both tables i and ii in later chapters of this study. (see pages , , , ).] a further analysis of the failures is here made in reference to the number of pupils and the number of failures each. table iii a distribution of failing pupils according to the number of failures per pupil, in each semester no. of semesters totals failures b. g. --------------------------- . % b. g. --------------------------- . % b. g. --------------------------- % b. g. --------------------------- . % b. .. g. .. --------------------------- . % b. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. --------------------------- % tot. b. g. , table iii tells us that boys and girls have one failure each in the first semester of their high school work; boys and the same number of girls have two failures in the first semester, and so on, for the ten semesters and for as many as six failures per pupil. the failures represented by these pupils give a total of , . a distribution of the total failures per pupil, and the facts relative thereto, will be considered in chapter iv of this study. the above distribution of table iii is repeated here in table iv, so far as it relates to the failing graduates only. table iv a distribution of the failing pupils who graduate, according to the number of failures per pupil in each semester no. of semesters totals failures b. g. ---------------------------- % b. g. ---------------------------- . % b. g. ---------------------------- . % b. .. g. .. ---------------------------- . % b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. ---------------------------- . % b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ---------------------------- % tot. b. g. this table reads similarly to table iii. there is not the element of continuous dropping out to be considered, as in table iii, until after the sixth semester is passed, for no pupils graduate in less than three years. the failures represented in this table number , . this same distribution will be the subject of further comment later on. it discloses some facts that table iii tends to conceal, for instance, that the greater number of graduating pupils who have , , , , and failures in a semester are found after the end of the second year. . distribution of the failures in reference to the subjects in which they occur the following tabulation of failures will show how they were shared by both boys and girls in each of the school subjects which provided the failures here listed. number of failures distributed by school subjects total math. eng. latin ger. fr. hist. sci. bus. span. or subj's. greek b. g. per cent of total . . . . . . . . . the abbreviated headings above will be self-explanatory by reference to section of chapter i. the first line of numbers gives the failures for the boys, the second line for the girls. mathematics has . per cent of all the failures for all the pupils. latin claims . per cent and english . per cent of all the failures. these three subjects make a total of nearly per cent of the failures for the nine subject groups appearing here. but still this is only a partial statement of the facts as they are, since the total enrollment by subjects is an independent matter and far from being equally divided among all the subjects concerned. the subject enrollment may sometimes be relatively high and the percentage of failure for that subject correspondingly lower than for a subject with the same number of failures but a smaller enrollment. this fact becomes quite apparent from the following percentages taken in comparison with the ones just preceding: percentages enrolled in each subject of the sum total of the subject enrollments for all pupils and all semesters math. eng. latin ger. fr. hist. sci. bus. span. or subj's. greek . . . . . . . . . we note that the percentages for mathematics and english, which represent their portions of the grand total of subject enrollments, are virtually the reverse of the percentages which designate the amount of total failures produced by the same two subjects. that means that the percentage of the total failures produced by mathematics is really greater than was at first apparent, while the percentages of failures for english is not so great relatively as the statement of the total failures above would alone indicate. in a similar manner, we note that latin has . per cent of all the failures, but its portion of the total enrollment for all subjects is only . per cent. if the failures in this subject were in proportion to the enrollment, its percentage of the failures would be reduced by . per cent. on the other hand, if the failures for english were in the same proportion to the total as is its subject enrollment, it would claim . per cent more of all the failures. in the same sense, french, history, science, and the business subjects have a smaller proportion of all the failures than of all the subject enrollments. the comparison of failures by subjects may be continued still further by computing the percentage of failures in each subject as based on the number enrolled in that subject. such percentages are here presented for each subject. percentage of the number taking the subject who fail in that subject latin math. ger. fr. hist. sci. eng. bus. span. or subj's. greek . . . . . . . . . it becomes evident at once that the largest percentage of failures, based on the pupils taking the subject, is in latin, although we have already found that mathematics has the greatest percentage of all the failures recorded (p. ). but here mathematics follows latin, with german coming next in order as ranked by its high percentage of failure for those enrolled in the subject. history has the median percentage for the failures as listed for the nine subjects above. the failures as reported by subjects for other schools and other pupils will provide a comparison which may indicate something of the relative standing of this group of schools in reference to failures. the failures are presented below for thirteen high schools in new jersey, involving , grades, as reported by d.c. bliss[ ] in . as the schools were reported singly, the median percentage of failure for each subject is used here for our purpose. but mr. bliss' figures are computed from the promotion sheets for june, , and include none of those who had dropped out. in this sense they are not comparable to the percentages of failure as presented in this study. yet with the one exception of latin these median percentages are higher. the percentages as presented below for st. paul[ ] are in each case based on the total number taking the subject for a single semester, and include about , pupils, in all the classes, in the four high schools of the city.[b] [footnote b: it is a significant fact, and one worthy of note here, that the report for st. paul is apparently the only one of the surveys which also states the number taking each subject, as well as the percentages of failure. percentages alone do not tell the whole story, and they do not promote the further utilization of the facts to discover other relationships.] the facts presented for st. louis[ ] are for one school only, with , pupils, as recorded for the first half of the year - . all foreign languages as reported for this school are grouped together. history is the only subject that has a percentage of failure lower than that of the corresponding subjects for our eight schools. the figures for both st. paul and st. louis are based on the grades for all classes in school, but for only a single semester. one cannot avoid feeling that a statement of facts for so limited a period may or may not be dependable and representative for all periods. the percentages for paterson[ ] are reported for about , pupils, in all classes, for two successive semesters, and are based on the number examined. for denver,[ ] the records are reported for , pupils, and cover a two-year period. the percentages for butte[ ] are based on the records for , pupils, for one school semester. the figures reported by rounds and kingsbury[ ] are for only two subjects, but for forty-six widely separated high schools, whose enrollment for these two subjects was , . percentages of failure by subjects--quoted for other schools math. latin ger. fren. eng. hist. sci. bus. subj's. n.j. h.s.'s. . . . .. . . .. . st. paul . . . . . . . . st. louis . [------- ------] . . . .. paterson . . . .. . . . . denver . . . .. . . . . butte . . . . . . . . r and k . .. .. .. . .. .. .. our h.s.'s . . . . . . . . in some schools the reports were not available for all subjects. it is not at all probable, so far as information could be obtained, that the failures of the drop-out pupils for any of the schools were included in the percentages as reported above, or that the percentages are based on the total number in the given subjects, with the exception of one school. moreover, it is certain for at least some of the schools that neither the failures of the drop-outs nor the pupils who were in the class for less than a whole semester were considered in the percentages above. so far, however, as these comparisons may be justified, the suggestion made in chapter i that the schools included in this study are doubtless a superior group with respect to failures appears to be strengthened by the comparisons made above. it becomes more apparent, as we attempt to offer a statement of failures as taken from the various reports, that they are not truly comparable. the bases of such percentages are not at all uniform. the basis used most frequently is the number enrolled at the end of the period rather than the total number enrolled for any class, for which the school has had to provide, and which should most reasonably form the basis of the percentage of failure. furthermore, the failures for pupils who drop out are not usually counted. yet, in most of the reports, the situation is not clearly indicated for either of the facts referred to. still more difficult is the task of securing a general statement of failures by subjects, since the percentages are most frequently reported separately for each class, in each subject, and for different buildings, but with the number of pupils stated for neither the failures nor the enrollment. the st. paul report[ ] is an exception in this regard. to present the full situation it is indeed necessary to know the failures for particular teachers, subjects, and buildings, but it is also frequently necessary to be able to make a comparison of results for different systems. consequently, in order to use the varied reports for the attempted comparison above, the plan was pursued of averaging the percentages as stated for the different classes, semesters, and years of a subject, in each school separately, and then selecting the median school thus determined as the one best representing the city or the system. this method was employed to modify the reports, and to secure the percentages as stated above for denver, paterson, and butte. any plan of averaging the percentages for the four years of english, or similarly for any other subject, may actually tend to misstate the facts, when the percentages or the numbers represented are not very nearly equal. but, in an incidental way, the difficulty serves to emphasize the inadequacy and the incomparability in the reporting of failures as found in the various studies, as well as to warn us of the hopelessness of reaching any conclusions apart from a knowledge of the procedure employed in securing the data. the basis is also provided for some interesting comparisons by isolating from the general distribution of failures by school subjects (p. ) the same facts for the failing graduates. that gives the following distribution. the failures by school subjects for graduates only total math. eng. latin ger. fr. hist. sci. bus. span. or subj's. greek b. g. per cent of totals . . . . . . . . . similar percentages for the non-graduates as above . . . . . . . . . it is a noteworthy fact that the percentages of failure (based on the total failures for the graduates) run higher in mathematics, latin, history, french, and science for the graduates than for the whole composite number (page ). the non-graduates have a correspondingly lower percentage of failure in these subjects, as is indicated above. the school influences in respect to the failures of the non-graduates differ from those of the graduates chiefly in the fact that the failures of the former tend to occur to a greater extent in the earlier years of these subjects, since so many of the non-graduates are in the school for only those earlier years; while the failures of the graduates range more widely and have a tendency to predominate in the upper years of the subject, as will be further emphasized in the later pages of this report (see also table iv). . distribution of pupils dropping out--semesters--ages table v presents the facts concerning the time and the age at which the failing pupils drop out of school. table vi furnishes the corresponding facts for the non-failing drop-outs. table v distribution of the failing non-graduates, showing the semester and the age at the time of dropping out ages undis- semesters trib. totals b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. tot. b. g. table v reads: in the first semester boy and girls drop out at age ; boys and girls drop out at the age of ; boys and girls, at the age of . in this table, as elsewhere, age means from ½ to ½, and so on. any drop-out, as for the second semester, means either during or at the end of that semester. table vi distribution of the non-failing non-graduates, showing the semester and the age at the time of dropping out ages semester totals b. g. b. .. g. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. tot. b. g. table vi reads similarly to table v. the distribution of the age totals for the pupils dropping out gives us medians which, for both boys and girls, fall within the -year group for the failing pupils, but within the -year group for the non-failing pupils. for table v the mode of the distribution is at , but for table vi it is at . the percentages of dropping out for each age group are given below. first, all the pupils of tables v and vi are grouped together for this purpose, then the boys and the girls for tables v and vi are considered separately to facilitate the comparison of facts. percentages in each age group of the total number dropping out ages per cent . . . . . . . . . it is readily seen from the above percentages that, as would be expected, the drop-outs are most frequent for the very ages which are most common in the high school. there is no special accumulation of drop-outs for either the earlier or the later ages. but, if in any semester we consider the drop-outs for each age as a percentage of the total pupils represented for that age, the facts are more fully revealed, as is indicated below for certain semesters. percentages of drop-outs for each age, on the totals for such age in the first, second and fourth semesters ages semester . . . . . . . . .. semester . . . . . . . . .. semester . . . . . . . .. if these semesters may be taken as indicative of all, an almost steady increase will be expected in the percentages of drop-outs as the ages of the pupils rise. it follows, then, that the older ages have the higher percentages of drop-outs when this basis of the computation is employed. we may, however, make some helpful comparisons of the ages of drop-outs for boys and for girls by merely using the percentages of total drop-outs for the purpose. percentages of failing drop-outs in each age group, for boys and girls separately ages boys . . . . . . . . girls . . . . . . . . . here it appears that, of all the boys and girls who fail before dropping out, the school loses at the age of , for example, . per cent for the boys and . per cent for the girls. as a matter of mere convenience, the percentages for age are made to include also the undistributed pupils in table v. percentages of the non-failing drop-outs in each age group, for boys and girls separately ages boys . . . . . . . . girls . . . . . . . . these percentages are computed from the age totals in table vi, just as the ones preceding are computed from table v. it seems worthy of note here that close to per cent of the non-failing drop-outs occur under years of age, for both the boys and the girls; but that the number of the failing pupils who drop out does not reach per cent for the boys or the girls in these same years. it is likewise remarkable in these distributions that the percentages for boys and for girls show such slight differences in either of the two groupings. summary of chapter ii if to the recorded failures the virtual but unrecorded ones are added, the percentage of failing pupils is per cent. this percentage is higher for the boys than for the girls by a difference of per cent. of the graduating pupils, . per cent fail one or more times. of the non-failing non-graduates per cent are lost from school by the end of their first year. but the failing non-graduates have not lost such a percentage before the end of the third year. the percentage of pupils failing increases for the first four semesters, and lowers but little for two more semesters. one third to one half of the pupils fail in each semester to seventh. in the distribution of failures by ages and semesters, per cent are found from ages to inclusive. thirty-four per cent of the failures occur after the end of the second year, when . per cent of the pupils have been lost and others are leaving continuously. mathematics, latin, and english head the list in the percentages of total failures, and together provide nearly per cent of the failures; but english has a large subject-enrollment to balance its count in failures. mathematics, latin, and german fail the highest percentages on the number of pupils taking the subjects. in several subjects the percentages of failure based on the total failures are higher for the graduates than for the non-graduates. for the pupils dropping out without failure the median age is at , with the mode at . for the failing drop-outs both the median and the mode are at the age of . nearly per cent of the non-failing drop-outs occur under age , but not per cent of the failing non-graduates are gone by that age. the percentage of drop-outs is higher for older pupils. references: . kelley, t.l. "a study of high school and university grades, with reference to their intercorrelation and the causes of elimination," _journal of educational psychology_, : . . johnson, g.r. "qualitative elimination in high school," _school review_, : . . bliss, d.c. "high school failures," _educational administration and supervision_, vol. . . strayer, g.d., coffman, l.d., prosser, c.a. _report of a survey of the school system of st. paul, minnesota_. . meredith, a.b. _survey of the st. louis public schools_, , vol. iii, p. . . _annual report of the board of education, paterson, new jersey_, . . bobbitt, j.f. _report of the school survey of denver_, . . strayer, g.d. _a survey of the public schools of butte_, . . rounds, c.r., kingsbury, h.b. "do too many students fail?" _school review_, : . chapter iii what basis is discoverable for prognosticating the occurrence of or the number of failures? . attendance, mental or physical defects, and size of classes are possible factors any definite factors available for the school that have a prognostic value in reference to school failures will help to perform a function quite comparable to the science of preventive medicine in its field, and in contrast with the older art of doctoring the malady after it has been permitted to develop. such prognostication of failure, however, need not imply a complete knowledge of the causes of the failures. it may simply signify that in certain situations the causes are less active or are partly overcome by other factors. perhaps one of the simplest factors with a prognostic value on failure may be found in the facts of attendance. persistent or repeated absence from school may reach a point where it tends to affect the number of failures. it happened, unfortunately, that the reports for attendance were incomplete or lacking in a considerable portion of the records employed in this study. consequently the influence of attendance is given no especial consideration in these pages, except as explained in chapter i, that the pupil must have been present enough of any semester to secure his subject grades, else no failure is counted and no time is charged to his period in school. in this connection, dr. c.h. keyes[ ] found in a study of elementary school pupils that of , pupils losing four weeks or more in a single year belonged to the accelerate pupils, to those arrested, and to pupils normal in their school work. he accredits such large loss of time as almost invariably the result of illness and of contagious disease. he also says, "prolonged absence from school is appreciable in producing arrest especially when it amounts to more than days in one school year." but the diseases of childhood, with the resultant absence, are less prevalent in the high school years than earlier. furthermore, the losses due to change of residence will not be met with here, for, as explained in chapter i, no transferred pupils are included subsequent to the time of the transference either to or from the school. the influence of physical or mental defects also deserves recognition here as a possible factor relative to school failures, although this study has no data to offer of any statistical value in that regard. a few pupils in high school may actually reach the limits prescribed by their 'intelligence quotient'[ ] or general mental ability, or perhaps, as bronner[ ] so interestingly points out, be handicapped by some special mental disability. if such be true, they will doubtless be found in the number of school drop-outs later referred to as failing in per cent or more of their work; but we have no measurement of intelligence recorded for them to serve our purposes of prognostication. in the matter of physical defects alone, the report of dr. l.p. ayres[ ] on a study of , pupils, ten to fourteen years old, in new york city, states that "in every case except in that of vision the children rated as 'dull' are found to be suffering from physical defects to a greater degree than 'normal' or 'bright' children." the defects of vision, which is the exception noted, may be even partly the result of the studious habits of the pupils. bronner[ ] remarks on the "relationships between mental and physical conditions," and also on how "the findings on tests were altogether different after the child had been built up physically." but gulick and ayres[ ] conclude that it is evident from the facts at hand that if vision were omitted the percentage of defects would dwindle and become comparatively small among the upper grades. this would probably be still more true for the high school; but this whole field has not yet been completely and thoroughly investigated. it would be very desirable to have ascertained the size of the classes in which the failures were most frequent, as well as the relative success of the pupils repeating subjects in larger or in smaller classes. but, as such facts were unobtainable, it is permitted here simply to recognize the possible influence of this factor. it seems deserving in itself of careful and special study. from the standpoint of the pupil, the kind of subject, the kind of teacher, and the sort of discipline employed will tend to influence the size of class to be called normal, and to make it a sort of variable. thirty pupils is regarded by the north central association as the maximum size of class in high school.[ ] surely the size of class will react on the pupil by affecting the teacher's spirit and energy. reference is made by hall-quest[ ] to an experiment, whose author is not named, in which pupils stated that their "most helpful teachers were pleasant, cheerful, optimistic, enthusiastic, and young." if such be true then the very large size of classes will tend to reduce the teacher's helpfulness. . the employment of the school entering age for prognosis a promising but less emphasized basis of prognosticating the school success or failure of the pupils is found in the employment of the school entering ages for this purpose. the distribution of all the pupils (except undistributed ones, for whom the records were incomplete), according to entering age, is here presented, independently for the boys and for the girls. distribution of pupils by their entrance ages to high school ages undis- total tributed b. g. the entering ages of these , pupils are distributed from to , with of them for whom the age records were not given. the median age for all the entrants is . . but in order to compare this with the median entering age ( . ) of the , pupils reported by king[ ] for the iowa city high school, or with the median entering age ( . ) of high school pupils in new york city, as reported by van denburg,[ ] it is necessary to reduce these medians to the same basis of age classification. since age for this study starts at ½, then . would be only . ( . -. ) as by their classification. the percentages of the total number of pupils for each age are given below. percentages of pupils for each entering age ages undistributed total . . . . . . . . boys . . . . . . . . girls . . . . . . . . we see that per cent of the pupils enter at age , , and , or, what is perhaps more important, that nearly per cent enter under years of age. the similarity of percentages for boys and for girls is pronounced. the slight advantage of the boys for ages and may be due to home influence in restricting the early entrance of the girls, thus causing a corresponding superiority for the girls at age . the mode of this percentage distribution is at for both boys and girls. what portion of each entering-age-group has no failures? this question and the answer presented below direct our attention to the superiority of the pupils of the earlier entering ages. that these groups of earlier ages of entrance are comprised of pupils selected for their capabilities is shown by the successive decrease in the percentages of the non-failing as the ages of their entrance increases, up to age . distribution of the pupils who do not fail, for each entering-age-group ages totals b. g. % of ----------------- entrants . . . . . . . here is definite evidence that the pupils of the earlier entering ages are less likely to fail in any of their school subjects than are the older ones. those entering at ages or escape school failures altogether for per cent or more of their numbers. those entering at age are somewhat less successful but still seem superior to those of later entrance ages. it is encouraging, then, that these three ages of entrance include nearly per cent of the , pupils. there is, of course, nothing in this situation to justify any deduction of the sort that pupils entering at the age of would have been more successful had they been sent to high school earlier, except that had they been able to enter high school earlier they would have represented a different selection of ability by that fact alone. there is also a sort of selection operative for the pupils entering at ages , , or , which tends to account at least partly for the rise in the percentage of the non-failing for these years. it is safe to believe that for the most part only the more able, ambitious, and purposeful individuals are likely to display the energy required or to discern the need of their entering high school when they have reached the age of or later. the appeal of school athletics will in this case seem very inadequate to explain their entrance so late, since the girls predominate so strongly for these years. then it may be contended further that the added maturity and experience of those later entrants may partly compensate for a lack of native ability, if such be the case, and thereby result in a relatively high percentage of non-failing pupils for this group. it is readily conceded that the avoidance of failure in school work serves as only one criterion for gauging the pupils' accomplishment. it is accordingly important to inquire how the different age-groups of school entrants compare with reference to the persistence and ability which is represented by school graduation. a truly striking array of percentages follows in reference to the question of how many of the entering pupils in each age-group do graduate. distribution of the pupils graduating for each entering-age group ages totals b. g. % of entrants . . . . . . . . . these percentages bear convincing testimony in support of the previous evidence that the pupils of the earlier entering years are highly selected in ability. of all the high school entrants they are the 'most fit,' the least likely to fail, and the most certain to graduate. the percentage of pupils graduating who entered at the age of is approximately four times that of pupils who entered at the age of . thirteen is more than four times as fruitful of graduates as age ; fourteen bears a similar relationship to age ; and the percentage for fifteen is three times that for age , as is apparent from the above figures. the fact that the decline of these percentages ceases at age is probably due to the greater maturity of such later entrants. when we make inquiry as to what portion of the graduates in each of the above groups 'goes through' in four years or less, we get the series of percentages indicated below. percentage of the graduates who finish in four years or less, for each of the entering-age groups ages % of each group . . . . . . it appears that the ones in the older age-groups who do graduate are not so handicapped in reference to the time requirement for graduation as we might have expected them to be from the facts of the preceding pages. perhaps that fact is partly accounted for by the not unusual tendency to restrain the more rapid progress of the younger pupils or to promote the older ones partly by age, so that by our school procedure the younger and the brighter pupils may at times actually be more retarded, according to mental age, than are the older and slower ones. since the same teachers, the same schools, and the same administrative policy were involved for the different entrance-age groups, the prognostic value of the factor of age at entrance will seem to be unimpaired, whether it operates independently as a gauge of rank in mental ability, or conjointly with and indicative of the varying influence on these pupils of other concomitant factors, such as the difference of economic demands, the difference of social interests, the difference in permanence of conflicting habits of the individual, or the difference in effectiveness of the school's appeal as adapted for the several ages. one may contend, and with some success, that the high school régime is better adjusted to the younger pupils, with the consequent result that they are more successful in its requirements. the distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. in reference to the social distractions of girls, margaret slattery says,[ ] "this mania for 'going' seizes many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring." but surely such distractions are not peculiar to the girls alone. the economic needs that arise at the age of sixteen and later are often considered to constitute a pressing factor regarding the continuance in school. but vandenburg[ ] was convinced by the investigation, in new york city, of rentals for the families of pupils that "on the whole the economic status of these pupils seems to be only a slight factor in their continuance in school." a similar conclusion was reached by wooley,[ ] in cincinnati, after investigating families, in which it was estimated that per cent of the families did not need the earnings of the children who left school to go to work. the corresponding report by a commission[ ] in massachusetts shows per cent. the same facts for new york city[ ] indicate that per cent of such families are independent of the child's wages. but holley concludes,[ ] from a study of certain towns in illinois, that "there is a high correlation between the economic, educational, and social advantages of a home and the number of years of school which its children receive." it will hardly be denied that even aside from the relation of the family means to the school persistence, the economic needs may have a direct influence on the failing of the children in their school work, either because home conditions may be decidedly unfavorable for required home study, or because of the larger portion of time that must be given to outside employment, with its consequent reduction of the normal vitality of the individual or of his readiness to study. but, in spite of the possible interrelationship of these factors, it still appears that the school entrance age of pupils will serve as a valuable sort of educational compass to foretell in part the probable direction of their later accomplishment. . the amount of failure at each age and its relation to the possibility of failing for that age we have considered at some length the prognostic value of the age at entrance. here we shall briefly consider the prognostic value of age in reference to the time when failures occur and the amount of failure for such age. if we were to total all the failures for a given age, as shown in table i, what part will that form of the total subjects taken by these pupils at the time the failures occur? in other words, what are the percentages formed by the total failures on the possibility of failing, for the same pupils and the same semesters, considered by age groups? the summary line of table i gives the total failures according to the ages at which they occurred. the number of pupils sharing in each group of these failures is also known by a separate tabulation. then the full number of subjects per pupil is taken as ½, since approximately per cent of the pupils take five or more subjects each semester and the other per cent take four or less (see p. ). with the number of pupils given, and with a schedule of ½ subjects per pupil, we are able to compute the percentages which the failures form of the total subjects for these failing pupils at the time. these percentages are given below. the percentages formed by failures at each age on the possibilities of failing at that age and time, for the same pupils ages % . . . . . . . . . [footnote: these percentages are computed from the data secured in table i, as noted above.] there is an almost unbroken rise in these percentages from . for age to . for age . not only do a greater number of the older pupils fail, as was previously indicated, but they also have a greater percentage of failure for the subjects which they are taking. it seems appropriate here to offer a caution that, in reading the above percentages, one must not conclude that all of age fail in per cent of their work, but rather that those who do fail at age fail in per cent of their work for that semester. the evidence does not seem to indicate that the maturity of later years operates to secure any general reduction of these percentages. the prognostic value of such facts seems to consist in leading us to expect a greater percentage of failures (on the total subjects) from the older pupils who fail than from the younger ones who fail. if it were possible to translate the above percentages to a basis of the possibility of failure for all pupils, instead of the possibility for failing pupils only, the disparity for the different ages would become more pronounced, as the earlier ages have more non-failing pupils. but this we are not able to do, as our data are not adequate for that purpose. . the initial record in high school for prognosis of failure for this purpose the pupil record for the first year, in reference to failures, is deemed more adequate and dependable than the record for the first semester only. accordingly, the pupils have been classified on their first year's record into those who had , , , , and up to or more failures. then these groups were further distributed into those who failed , , , , and up to or more times after the first year. from such a double distribution we may get some indication of what assurance the first year's record offers on the expectation of later failures. table vii presents these facts. table vii is read in this manner: of all the pupils who have failures the first year ( boys, and , girls) boys and girls have failures later, boys and girls have failure later, boys and girls have failures later, while boys and girls have seven or more failures later. the column of totals to the right gives the pupils for each number of failures for the first year. the line of totals at the bottom gives the pupils for each number of failures subsequent to the first year. the table includes , pupils, since those who did not remain in school more than three semesters are not included ( , boys, , girls). obviously, those who do not stay more than one year would have no subsequent school record, and those remaining only a brief time beyond one year would not have a record of comparable length. it seems quite significant, too, for the purposes of our prognosis, that of the , pupils dropping out in three semesters or less only about per cent have ever failed (boys-- per cent, girls-- per cent). in contrast to this, nearly per cent ( . ) of those continuing in school more than three semesters fail one or more times. those who drop out without failure, in the three semesters or less, constitute nearly per cent of the total non-failing pupils ( , ), but the failing pupils who drop out in that same period constitute less than per cent of the total who fail ( , ). this situation received some emphasis in chapter ii and will be further treated in chapter iv, under the comparison of the failing and non-failing groups. table vii subsequent record of failures for pupils failing , , , etc., times the first year failures of st failures subsequent to first year year + totals b. g. b. g. b. g. b. g. b. g. b. g. b. g. + b. g. tot. b. g. referring directly now to table vii, we find that . per cent of those not failing the first year do fail later. of all those who fail the first year, . per cent escape any later failures. of all the pupils included in this table . per cent have or more failures, while of those failing in the first year per cent later have or more failures. for the number included in this table . per cent have no failures assigned to them. percentage of first year failing groups, who later have no failures no. of f's. in first year + per cent of groups having no failures later . . . . . . . about the same percentage of the boys and of the girls (near per cent) is represented in table vii. the girls have an advantage over the boys of about per cent for those belonging to the group with no failures, and of about per cent for the group with seven or more failures. no unconditional conclusion seems justified by this table. in the first year's record of failures there are good grounds for the promise of later performance. we may safely say that those who do not fail the first year are much less likely to fail later, and that if they do fail later, they have less accumulation of failures. yet some of this group have many failures after the first year, and others who have several failures the first year have none subsequently. generally, however, the later accumulations are in almost direct ratio to the earlier record, and the later non-failures are in inverse ratio to the debits of the first year. . the prognosis of failures by the subject selection from the distribution of failures by school subjects as presented in chapter ii, this will seem to be the easiest and almost the surest of all the factors thus far considered to employ for a prognosis of failure. for of all pupils taking latin we may confidently expect an average of a little less than one pupil in every five to fail each semester. for the entire number taking mathematics, the expectation of failure is an average of about one in six for each semester. german comes next, and for each semester it claims for failure on the average nearly one pupil in every seven taking it. similarly french claims for failure one in every nine; history, one in every ten; english and business subjects, less than one in every twelve. it will be noted that the average on a semester basis is employed in this part of the computation. consequently, it is not the same as saying that such a percentage of pupils fail at some time, in the subject. the pupil who fails four times in first year mathematics is intentionally regarded here as representing four failures. likewise, the pupil who completes four years of latin without failure represents eight successes for the subject in calculating these percentages. every recorded failure for each pupil is thus accounted for. it was also noted in chapter ii that the percentages of the total failures run higher in mathematics, latin, history, and science, for the graduates than for the non-graduates. this fact is not due to the greater number of failures of graduates in the earlier semesters, when most of the non-graduate failures occur, but to the increase of failures for the graduates in the later years, as is disclosed in tables ii and iv. accordingly, we may say that those two subjects which are most productive of school failures are increasingly fruitful of such results in the upper years. this does not seem to be the usual or accepted conviction. certain of the school principals have expressed the assurance that it would be found otherwise. such deception is easily explainable, for the number of failures show a marked reduction, and the rise of percentages is consequently easily overlooked. it is quite possible, too, that in some individual schools there is not such a rise of the percentages of failure for the graduates in any of the school subjects. in a single one of the eight schools reported here neither latin nor mathematics showed a higher percentage of failure for the graduate pupils over the non-graduates. in the other seven schools the graduates had the higher percentage in one or both of these subjects. . the time period and the number of failures the statement that the number of failures will be greater for the failing pupils who remain in school the longer time may seem rather commonplace. but it will not seem trite to state that the percentage of the total failures on the total subject enrollments increases by school semesters up to the seventh; that the percentage of possible failures for all graduating pupils increases likewise; or that the failures per pupil in each single semester tend to increase as the time period extends to the later semesters. yet radical as these statements may sound, they are actually substantiated by the facts to be presented. percentage of the total failures on the total subject enrollment, by semesters semester per cent . . . . . . . . . . the pupils who received no marks, and many of whom dropped out early in the first semester, are not included in the subject enrollment for the above percentages. otherwise the enrollments taken are for the beginning of each semester and inclusive of all the pupils. these percentages rise from . in the first semester to . in the sixth semester. then the percentages drop off, doubtless due to the increasing effect by this time of the non-failing graduates on the total enrollment. the graduates alone are next considered in this respect. percentages of the total failures for the graduates on the total subject enrollment for graduates, by semesters semester per cent . . . . . . . . . . these percentages are based on the total possibility of failure, and reach their highest point in the sixth semester, where the percentage of failure is nearly twice that for the first semester. these same facts may be effectively presented also by the percentages of such failures for the graduates on the total subject enrollment for only the failing graduates in each semester. percentages of the total failures for the graduates on the total subject enrollment for failing graduates, by semesters semester per cent . . . . . . . . . . the percentages here are limited to the total possibilities of failure for those graduates who do fail in each semester. they reach the highest point in the ninth semester, with a gradual increase from the first. the high point is reached later in this series than in the one immediately preceding, because while the percentage of pupils failing decreases in the final semesters (p. ), there is an increase in the number of failures per failing pupil (table iv). this increase of percentages by semesters for the graduates on the total possibility of failure, as just noted, is due to an actual increase in the number of failures for the later semesters. by the distribution of failures in table ii more than per cent of the failures are found after the completion of the second year, in spite of the fact that about per cent of the pupils who graduate do so in three or three and a half years. the failures of the graduates are simply the more numerous after the first two years in school. that this situation is no accident due to the superior weight of any single school in the composite group, is readily disclosed by turning to the units which form the composite. for these schools the percentages of the graduates' failures that are found after the second year range from per cent to per cent. in only three of the schools are such percentages under per cent, while in three others they are above per cent. further confirmation of how the increase of failures accompanies the pupils who stay longer in school is offered in the facts of table iv. here are indicated the number of pupils who before graduating fail , , , etc., times, in semesters , , , etc., up to . of all the occurrences of only one failure per pupil in a semester, per cent are distributed after the fourth semester. in this same period (after the fourth semester) are found . per cent of those with two failures in a semester; . per cent of those with three failures in a semester; . per cent of those having four; . per cent of those having five; and all of those having six failures in a single semester. one could almost say that the longer they stay the more they fail. the statements presented herein regarding the relative increase of failures for at least the first three years in school are likely to arouse some surprise among that portion of the people in the profession, with whom the converse of this situation has been quite generally accepted as true. such an impression has indeed not seemed unwarranted according to some reports, but the responsibility for it must be due in part to the manner of presenting the data, so that at times it actually serves to misstate or to conceal certain important features of the situation. since the dropping out is heaviest in the early semesters, and since the school undertakes the expense of providing for all who enter, it does not seem to be a correct presentation of the facts to compute the percentage of failure on only the pupils who finish the whole semester. such a practice tends to assign an undue percentage of failures to the earlier semesters, one that is considerably too high in comparison with that of the later semesters where the dropping out becomes relatively light. it is not sufficient to report merely what part of our final product is imperfect, instead of reporting, as do most institutions outside of the educational field, what part of all that is taken in becomes waste product. this situation is sufficiently grievous to demand further comment. in his study of the new jersey high schools, bliss states [ ] that one of the striking facts found is the "steady decrease of failure from the freshman to the senior year." if we bear in mind that bliss used only the promotion sheets for his data, and took no account of the drop-outs preceding promotion, and if we then estimate that an average of per cent may drop out before the end of the first semester (the percentage is . for our eight schools), then the percentages of failure recorded for the first year will be reduced by one-eleventh of their own respective amounts for each school reported by bliss, as we translate the percentages to the total enrollment basis. as a consequence of such a procedure, bliss' percentages, as reported for the second year, will be as high as or higher than those for the first year in six of the ten schools concerned, and nearly equal in two more of the schools. it is also evident that his percentages of failure as reported for the junior and senior years are not very different from each other in six of the ten schools, although there is no inclusion of the drop-outs in the percentages stated. the only pronounced or actual decrease in the percentages of failures as bliss reports them, occurs between the sophomore and junior years, and it is doubtless a significant fact that this decided drop appears at the time and place where the opportunity for elective subjects is first offered in many schools. yet apparently it has not seemed worth while to most persons who report the facts of failure to compute separately from the other subjects the percentages for the - and -year required subjects. a rather small decline is shown in the percentages of failure for the successive semesters, as quoted below for , high school pupils of paterson[ ] (the average of two semesters), although these percentages are based upon the number of pupils examined at the completion of the semester. it may further be noted that these percentages do not follow the same pupils by semesters, but state the facts for successive classes of pupils. the same criticisms may be offered for the percentages as quoted from wood[ ] for pupils. percentages of pupils failing, by semesters semesters paterson . . . . . . . . wood . . . . . . . .. obrien (p. ) . . . . . . . . the above series of percentages tend to agree at least in showing little or no decline in the percentages of failure for the first five or six semesters in school. another tendency to conceal important features in relation to the facts of school failures may be found in the grouping together of non-continuous and continuous subjects, the latter of which are generally required. f.w. johnson found in the university of chicago high school[ ] that the percentage of failures by successive years indicated little or no decrease for mathematics and for english (which were - and -year subjects respectively). the figures were based on the records for a period of two years. in regard to st. paul, it was possible to compute similar information from the data which were available.[ ] the percentages of failure are presented separately in each case for latin, german, and french, not more than two years of which are required in the schools referred to above. a contrast is thus presented that is both interesting and suggestive. percentages of pupils failing, by years. (johnson, f.w.) years english . . . . math . . . . latin . . . .. german . . .. .. french . . . .. percentages of pupils failing, by semesters. (st. paul) semesters english and math . . . . . . .. .. latin, german, french . . . . . .. .. .. apparently the full story has by no means been told when we simply say that there is a general decline in the percentages of failure by years or semesters. first, the failures of the drop-outs should be included, so far as it is at all feasible; second, the percentage should be based on the total enrollment in the subject, not on the final product, if we wish to disclose the real situation; third, the continuous or required subjects should be distinguished in order to give a full statement of the facts. on page are presented the percentages of failure for the , failing graduates alone, as found in this study, the greater portion of whose work, as it actually happened, consisted of - and -year subjects continuous from the time of entrance, and for whom the percentages of failure increase to the ninth semester. . similarity of facts for boys and girls nowhere is there any definite indication that any of these factors of prognosis operates more distinctly or more pronouncedly on either boys or girls. some variations do occur, but differences between the sexes in personal attitudes, social interests, or conventional standards may account for slight differences such as have been already noted. to simplify the statement of facts, no comparison of facts for boys and girls has, in general, been attempted where there was only similarity to be shown. a summary of chapter iii the influence of non-attendance as a factor in school failure is partly provided for here, but no statistical data were secured. the percentage of physical and mental defects are doubtless comparatively small for high school pupils except in the case of vision. the facts regarding size of classes were unobtainable. the pupils are distributed by their ages of entrance from to , with the mode of the distribution at . the younger entering pupils are distinctly more successful in escaping failure. they are also strikingly more successful in their ability to graduate. the older pupils who fail have a higher percentage of failure on the subjects taken. the first year's record has real prognostic value for pupils persisting more than three semesters. but per cent of those leaving earlier have no failures. this includes nearly per cent of all the non-failing pupils, but less than per cent of the failing ones have gone that early. prediction of failure by subjects is relatively easy and sure, and the later years seem more productive of this result. the percentage of failure on the total possibility of failure increases with the time period up to the seventh semester. the same facts are true for the graduates when considered alone. fifty-six per cent of the failures for the graduates occur after the second year. the longer stay in school actually begets an increase of failures. the boys and girls are similarly affected by these factors of prognosis. references: . keyes, c.h. _progress through the grades_, pp. , . . terman, l.m. _the measurement of intelligence_, p. . . bronner, a.e. _psychology of special abilities and disabilities_. . ayres, l.p. "the effect of physical defects on school progress," _psychological clinic_, : . . gulick, l.h., ayres, l.p. _medical inspection in the schools_, p. . . _standards of the north central association of colleges and secondary schools_. . hall-quest, a.l., in johnson's _modern high school_, p. . . king, i. _the high school age_, p. . . vandenburg, j.k. _the elimination of pupils from public secondary schools_, p. . . slattery, m. _the girl in her teens_, p. . . wooley, h.t. "facts about the working children of cincinnati," _elementary school teacher_, : . . _report of commission on industrial and technical education_ (mass.), , p. . . barrows, alice p. _report of vocational guidance survey_ (new york city), public education association, new york city, bull. no. , . . holley, c.e. _the relationship between persistence in school and home conditions_, fifteenth yearbook, pt. ii, p. . . bliss, d.c. "high school failures," _educational administration and supervision_, vol. iii. . _annual report of board of education, paterson_, . . wood, j.w. "a study of failures," _school and society_, i, . . johnson, f.w. "a study of high school grades," _school review_, - . . strayer, g.d., coffman, l.d., prosser, c.a. _report of a survey of the school system of st. paul_, . chapter iv how much is the graduation or the persistence in school conditioned by the occurrence or the number of failures? . comparison of the failing and the non-failing groups in reference to graduation and persistence it has been noted in section of chapter ii that . per cent of all the graduates have school failures. here we mean to carry the analysis and comparison in reference to graduation and failure somewhat further. to this end the following distribution is significant. distribution of pupils in reference to failure and graduation the non-failing the failing pupils--graduating pupils--graduating totals ( . %) ( . %) boys ( . %) ( . %) girls ( . %) ( . %) we have presented here the numbers that graduate without failures, together with the total group to which they belong, and the same for the graduates who have failed. by a mere process of subtraction we may determine the number of non-graduates, as well as the number of these that fail, and then compute the percentage of the non-graduates who fail. thus we get . per cent (boys-- . , girls-- . ) as the percentage of the non-graduates failing. it is apparent at once that this is almost identical with the percentage of failure for the ones who graduate (chapter ii), but for the non-graduates the boys and girls are a little further apart. it may be remarked in this connection that no effort was made to include any of the non-credited pupils among the ones who fail. the inclusion of per cent of this number as potentially failing pupils, as was done in chapter ii, will raise the above percentage of failing non-graduates by . per cent. the above distribution of pupils enables us to determine what percentage of the failing and of the non-failing groups graduate. these percentages are identical-- . per cent in each case. the boys and girls are further apart in the former group (boys-- . , girls-- ) than in the latter group (boys-- . , girls-- . ). it follows, then, that the percentage who graduate of all the original entrants is . per cent. this fact varies by schools from . per cent to . per cent. and such percentage is in each case exclusive of the pupils who join the class by transfers from other schools or classes. our particular interest is not in how many pupils the school graduates in any year, but rather in how many of the entering pupils in any one year stay to graduate. the greater persistence of the failing non-graduates, or the greater failing for the more persistent non-graduates, has already been given some attention in both chapters ii and iii. in the following distribution the non-graduates alone are considered. the number persisting in school to each succeeding semester is first stated, and then the percentage of that number which is composed of the non-failing pupils is given. distribution of the non-graduates according to the numbers persisting to each successive semester by end of semesters total ( ) per cent of non-failing ( . ) . . . . . . . . .. only per cent of the non-graduates who remain to the end of the first year (second semester) do not fail. although the failing non-graduates outnumber the non-failing ones when all the pupils who finally drop out are considered, their percentage of the majority increases rapidly for each successive semester continued in school. that the non-failing non-graduates are in general not the ones who persist long in school is shown by these percentages. . the number of failures and the years to graduate the following table shows how the number of failures are related to the time period required for graduation. the distribution in table viii shows a range from to failures per pupil, and a time period for graduation ranging from to years. it is evident from this distribution that the increase of time period for graduating is not commensurate with the number of failures for the individual. by far the largest number graduate in four years in spite of their numerous failures. nearly per cent of the failing graduates require four years or less for graduation. the number who finish in three years is greater than the number who require either five and one-half or six years. the median number of failures per pupil is . the pupils with fewer than failures who take more than four years to graduate are not representative of any particular school in this composite, nor are those having or more failures who take less than years to graduate. table viii distribution of pupils graduating, according to the total failures each and the time taken to graduate no. of years to graduate failures ½ ½ ½ totals boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. girls .. boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. girls .. boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. .. .. girls .. .. .. boys .. .. girls .. .. boys .. girls .. boys .. .. girls .. .. - boys .. girls .. - boys .. .. girls .. .. - boys .. .. girls .. .. total boys girls in reading table viii, we find that boys and girls who have no failures graduate in three years; boys and girls fail once and graduate in years; boys and girls have one failure and graduate in ½ years, and so on. the median period is years for those with no failures and it remains at for all who have fewer than failures; but the median time period is not above years for the highest number of failures. . the number of failures and the semester of dropping out for the non-graduates the pages preceding this point have given evidence that the failing pupils are not mainly the ones who drop out early. but we may still ask whether the number of failures per individual tends to determine how early he will be eliminated? this question calls for the facts of the next table. in this table the semesters of dropping out are indicated at the top. the failures range as high as per pupil, and it is evident that not all pupils have left school until the eleventh semester. the distribution includes the boys and the girls who failed and did not graduate; also the boys and the girls who dropped out without failing. the wide distribution of these non-graduates both relative to the number of failures and to the time of dropping out, is forcibly brought to our attention by the table which follows. table ix distribution of the non-graduates, according to the total failures each and the time of dropping out no. of semester of dropping out failures total b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. g. .. .. b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. - b. .. .. g. .. .. - b. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. - b. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. g. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. total b. g. table ix reads in a manner similar to table viii: boys and girls, having failures, drop out in the first semester; boys and girls drop out in the first semester with a single failure; boys and girls drop out in the first semester with five failures each. for a small portion of these drop-outs the number of failures is undoubtedly the prime or immediate factor in securing their elimination. it seems probable that such is the situation for most of those pupils who drop out after per cent or more of their school work has resulted in failures. yet a few of these pupils manage to continue for an extended time in school, as the following distribution shows. drop-outs failing in per cent or more of their total work, and their distribution by semesters of dropping out semesters b. g. % of total . . . . . . . . . . this grouping includes pupils, or . per cent of the total number of , drop-outs. but whatever the part may be that is played by failing it is evident that it does not operate to cause their early loss to the school in nearly all of these instances. it may be noted here that it is difficult to find any justification for allowing or forcing these pupils to endure two, three, or four years of a kind of training for which they have shown themselves obviously unfitted. to be sure, they have satisfied a part of these failures by repetitions or otherwise, but only to go on adding more failures. a device of 'superannuation' is employed in certain schools by which a pupil who has failed in half of his work for two semesters, and is sixteen years of age, is supposed to be dropped automatically from the school. this device seems designed to evade a difficulty in the absence of any real solution for it, and harmonizes with the school aims that are prescribed in terms of subject matter rather than in terms of the pupils' needs. from the standpoint of the individual pupil his peculiar qualities are not likely to be fashioned to the highest degree of usefulness by this procedure. it simply serves notice that the pupil must make the adjustment needed, as the school cannot or will not. notwithstanding the testimony furnished by the accumulation of failures shown in table ix, there are grounds for believing that for the major portion of all the non-graduates the number of failures is not a prime nor perhaps a highly important cause of their dropping out of school. this conviction seems to be substantiated by the statement of percentages below. the percentage of non-graduates who drop out with or or fewer or fewer or fewer or fewer failures failures failures failures failures failures . . . . . . the fact that nearly per cent of the non-graduates have only failures or less, taken in comparison with the fact that approximately one fourth of the failing graduates have or more failures, argues that the number of failures alone can hardly be considered one of the larger factors in causing the dropping out. in a report concerning the working children of cincinnati, h.t. wooley remarks[ ] that "two-thirds of our children leaving the public schools are the failures." this seems to suppose failing a large cause of the dropping out. but this investigation of failure indicates that the percentage of failure for those leaving is no higher than for the ones who do not leave. a similar illustration is credited to o.w. caldwell[ ], who makes reference to the large percentage of the failing pupils who leave high school, without taking any recognition of the equally large percentage of the failing pupils who continue in the high school. there is in no sense any intention here to condone the large number of failures simply because it is pointed out that they do not operate chiefly to cause elimination from school. the above facts may lead to some such conviction as that expressed by wooley,[ ] after giving especial attention to those who had left school, that "the real force that is sending a majority of these children out into the industrial field is their own desire to go to work, and behind this desire is frequently the dissatisfaction with school." a somewhat similar conviction seems to be shared by king,[ ] in saying that "the pupil who yields unwillingly to the narrow round of school tasks ... will grasp at almost any pretext to quit school." w.f. book tabulated the reasons why pupils leave high school,[ ] as given by , pupils. he found that discouragement, loss of interest, and disappointment affect more pupils than all the other causes combined. likewise bronner notes[ ] that the 'irrational' sameness of school procedure for all pupils often leads to "serious loss of interest in school work, discouragement, truancy, and disciplinary problems." still it may be that the worst consequences of multiplied failures are not to those dropping out. w.d. lewis observes[ ] that the failing pupil "speedily comes to accept himself as a failure," and that "the disaster to many who stay in the schools is greater than to those who are shoved out." to the same point hanus tells[ ] us that "during the school period aversion and evasion are more frequently cultivated than power and skill, through the forced pursuit of uninteresting subjects." a pupil who acquires the habit of failing and the attitude of accepting it as a necessary evil may soon give up trying to win and become satisfied to accept himself as less gifted, or even to accept life in general as necessarily a matter of repeated failures. in a similar connection, james e. russell says,[ ] "the boy who becomes accustomed to second place soon fails to think at his best." such psychological results in regard to habits and attitude accruing from repeated failures are both certain and insidious. and an education which purports to be for all and to offer the highest training to each must abandon the inculcation of attitudes of mind so detrimental to the individual and to the very society which educates him. . the percentages that the non-graduate groups form of the pupils who have each successively higher number of failures by merely adding the columns of totals for tables viii and ix, we are able to obtain the full number of pupils who have each number of failures from to . we may readily secure the percentages for the non-graduates in each of these groups by referring again to the numbers in the totals column of table ix. the following series of percentages are thus obtained. the percentage formed by non-graduates with , , , , etc., failures on the total number who have , , , , etc., failures no. of failures per cent . . . . . . . . . no. of failures + per cent . . . . . . . . . that these percentages would be higher for the non-graduates than for the graduates (that is, above per cent) would certainly be expected by a glance at their higher numbers in every group of their distribution. but it would hardly be expected by most of us that the percentages would show no general tendency to rise as the failures per pupil increase in number, yet such is the truth as found here. the reverse of these facts was found by aaron i. dotey, with a smaller group of high school pupils[ ] ( , ), studied in one of the new york city high schools. still he also asserts that failure in studies is not a cause of elimination to the extent that it is generally supposed to be. we may gain some advantage for judging the general tendency of the extended and varied series of percentages above, by computing them in groups of larger size, thus yielding a briefer series, as follows: (a condensed form of the preceding statement) no. of failures to to to to to per cent . . . . . . not only do the percentages of non-graduates not increase relatively as the numbers of failure go higher, but there is a slight general decline in these percentages until we reach ' or more' failures per pupil. then for ' to ' failures per pupil there is an increase of only per cent over that for failures. the number of failures does not seem directly to condition the pupil's ability to graduate or to continue to in school. . time extension for the failing graduates we shall now inquire further what extension of time for graduating characterizes the failing graduates in comparison with the non-failing ones. the distribution according to the period for graduation for the , pupils who graduate was shown by the summary lines of table viii. in the same table the non-failing graduates are included (but distinct). no pupil graduates in less than three years and none takes longer than six years; . per cent of the number finish in less than years; . per cent take more than years. the small number that finish earlier than four years may be due in part to the single annual graduation in several of the schools. some of the schools admitting two classes each year graduated only one, and the records made it plain that some pupils had a half year more credit than was needed for graduating. considering, however, that about per cent of the graduates had no failures, they should have been able to speed up more on the time period of getting through. they were doubtless not unable to do that. but some principals hold the conviction that four years will result in a rounding out of the pupil more than commensurate with the extended time. more than per cent of those who did finish in less than four years are graduates who had failed from to times. in the conventional period of four years per cent of the non-failing and per cent of the failing graduates complete their work and graduate (see p. , for the means employed). the percentages of non-failing graduates for each time period are given below. the percentages of non-failing graduates for each period time period in years ½ ½ ½ per cent of non-failing . . . . . .. .. this continuous decline of percentages representing the non-failing graduates shows that they have an evident advantage in regard to the time period for graduating. their percentages are high for the shorter time periods and low for the longer periods. but by reference to table viii we quickly find that the slight extension of the time period for the failing graduates is not at all commensurate with the number of failures which they have. the failures are provided for in various ways, as chapter v will explain. no striking differences are observed for the boys and girls in any division of this chapter. a summary of chapter iv the percentages of graduates and of non-graduates that fail are almost identical. the percentages of the failing pupils who graduate and of the non-failing pupils who graduate are identical ( . per cent); hence, graduation is not perceptibly conditioned by the occurrence of failure. the non-failing non-graduates do not persist long in school, as compared with the failing non-graduates. the short persistence partly accounts for their avoidance of failure. as the number of failures per pupil increase for the failing graduates, the time extension is not commensurate with the number of failures. for . per cent of the non-graduates who fail in per cent or more of their work, failure is probably a chief cause of dropping out. failure is probably not a prime cause of dropping out for most of the non-graduates, as per cent have only failures or fewer. the worst consequences of failure are perhaps in acquiring the habit of failing, and in coming to accept one's self as a failure. the number of drop-outs does not tend to increase as the number of failures per pupil increases. the time period for graduating ranges from three to six years, with approximately per cent of all graduates finishing in four years or less. the failing graduates take, on the average, a little longer time than the non-failing, but not an increase that is proportionate to the number of failures. the boys and girls present no striking differences in the facts of chapter iv. references: . wooley, h.t. "facts about the working children of cincinnati," _elementary school teacher_, vol. xiv, . . caldwell, o.w. "laboratory method and high school efficiency," _popular science monthly_, - . . king, irving. _the high school age._ . book, w.f. "why pupils fail," _pedagogical seminary_, : . . bronner, a.e. _the psychology of special abilities and disabilities_, p. . . lewis, w.d. _democracy's high school_, pp. , . . hanus, p.h. _school aims and values._ . russell, j.e. "co-education in high school. is it a failure?" reprint from _good housekeeping_. . dotey, a.i. _an investigation of scholarship records of high school pupils_. high school teachers association of new york city. bulletins - , p. . chapter v are the school agencies employed in remedying failures adequate for the purpose? the caption of this chapter suggests the inquiry as to what are the agencies employed by the school for this purpose, and how extensively does each function? the different means employed and the number attempting in the various ways to satisfy for the failures charged are classified and stated below, but the success of each method is considered later in its turn. one might think also of time extension, night school, summer school, correspondence courses, and tutoring as possible factors deserving to be included here in the list of remedies for failures made. the matter of time extension has already been partly treated in chapter iv, while the facts for the other agencies mentioned are rather uncertain and difficult to trace on the records. however, they all tend to eventuate finally in one of the methods noted below. the disposition made of the school failures repeat school exam. contin. both total no. the final or regents' discon. or no repeat failures subject spec. exam's. substitution repet. and or exam. exam. b. g. per cent of total . . . . . . it is obvious from these percentages that school practice puts an inclusive faith in the repetition of the subject, as . per cent of all the failures are referred to this one remedy for the purpose of being rectified, although one school made practically no use of this means (see section of this chapter). we shall proceed to find how effectively it operates and how much this faith is warranted by the results. the cases above designated as both repeating and taking examination ( . per cent) have been counted twice, and their percentage must be subtracted from the sum of the percentages in order to give per cent. . repetition as a remedy for failures we already know how many of the failing pupils repeat the subject of failure, but the success attending such repetition is entitled to further attention. accordingly, the grades received in the , repetitions are presented here. grades secured in the subjects repeated grades total repetitions a b c d inc. boys girls ----------------- per cent of total . . . . less than per cent of the repeaters secure a's, while only about in ever secures either an a or a b. the first three are passing grades, with values as explained in chapter i, and d represents failure. of the repeated subjects . per cent result in either a d or an unfinished status. it is a fair assumption that the unfinished grade usually bore pretty certain prospects of being a failing grade if completed, and it is so treated here. there is a difference of less than per cent in the failures assigned to boys and girls for the repeated subjects. the hope was entertained in the original plan of this study to secure several other sorts of information about the repeaters, but these later proved to be unobtainable. the influence of repeating with the same teacher as contrasted with a change of teachers in the same subject, the comparative facts for the repetition with men or with women teachers, the varying results for the different sizes of classes, and the apparent effect of supervised study of some sort before or after failing, were all sought for in the records available; but the schools were not able to provide any definite and complete information of the sorts here specified. _a. size of schedule and results of repeating_ it would seem plausible that the failing pupils who were permitted and who possessed the energy would want to take one or more extra subjects to balance the previous loss of credit due to failure. then it becomes important at once for the administrative head to know whether the proportion of failures bears a definite relationship to the size of the pupil's schedule of subjects. a normal schedule for most purposes and for most of the schools includes, on the average, four subjects or twenty weekly hours. in this study the schedule which each individual school claimed as normal schedule, has been accepted as such, all larger schedules being considered extra size and all smaller ones reduced. for instance, in one of the schools five subjects are considered a normal schedule even though they totaled points, which is not usual. but in the other schools a normal schedule includes the range from to points irrespective of those carried in the subjects outside of the classification included in this study; while above points is an extra schedule and below a reduced schedule in the same sense as above. for the most part this meant that five or more of such subjects form an extra schedule, and that three form a reduced schedule. in this manner all the repeated subjects are classed as part of a reduced, a normal, or an extra sized schedule as follows. size of schedules for pupils taking repeated subjects total reduced normal extra boys girls per cent of total . . . this distribution indicates that relatively few of the pupils take a reduced schedule in repeating. for the succeeding comparison with the grades of extra schedule pupils, those having a normal or reduced schedule are grouped together. grades for subjects repeated by failing pupils who carried a reduced or normal schedule total repetitions a b c d .. boys girls ---------------- per cent of total . . . . in this distribution are the grades for instances of repetition. of these, . per cent fail to pass after repeating. it is not possible to say definitely how many of these pupils actually determine their schedule by a free choice, and how many are restricted by school authorities or by home influence. but certain it is that a policy of opposition exists in some schools and with some teachers to allowing repeaters to carry more than a prescribed schedule; and in most schools at least some form of discrimination or regulation is exercised in this matter. it will appear from the next distribution that a rule of uniformity in regard to size of schedule, without regard to the individual pupils, is here, as elsewhere, lacking in wisdom and is in disregard of the facts. grades for the subjects repeated, with an extra schedule total repetitions a b c d .. boys girls ---------------- per cent of total . . . . out of the , repeated subjects in this distribution, . per cent secure passing grades, . per cent result in failures. this means that the repeaters with an extra schedule have . per cent fewer failing grades than the repeaters who carry only a normal or a reduced schedule. they also excel in the percentage of a's and b's secured for repeated subjects. in only one of the eight schools was the reverse of these general facts found to be true. in one other school the difference was more than to in favor of the extra schedule repeaters as judged by the percentages of failure for each group. it seems that at least three factors operate to secure superior results for repeaters with heavier schedule. first, they are undoubtedly a more highly selected group in reference to ability and energy. second, they have the advantage of the spur and the motivation which comes from the consciousness of a heavier responsibility, and from which emanates greater earnestness of effort. third, it is probable that some teachers are more helpful and considerate in the aiding and grading of pupils who appear to be working hard. it is, at any rate, a plain fact that those who are willing and who are permitted to take extra work are the more successful. excessive emphasis must not be placed on the latter requirement alone, as willingness frequently seems to be the only essential condition imposed. _b. later grades in the same kind of subjects, following repetition and without it_ next in importance to the degree of success attending the repetition of failing subjects is the effect which such repetition has upon the results in later subjects of the same kind. by tabulating separately the later grades in like subjects for those who had repeated and for those who had not repeated after failure, we have the basis for the following comparison of results. it should be stated at this point that by the same kind of subject is not meant a promiscuous grouping together of all language or of all history courses. but for languages a later course in the same language is implied, with the single exception that latin and french are treated as though french were a mere continuation of the latin preceding it. certain other decisions are as arbitrary. greek, roman, and ancient history are considered as in the same class; so are modern, english, and american history. the general and the biological sciences are grouped together, but the physical sciences are distinguished as a separate group. the various commercial subjects are considered to be of the same kind only when they are the same subject. all mathematics subjects are regarded as the same kind of subjects except commercial arithmetic which is classed as a commercial subject. all the later marks given in what was regarded as the same kind of subject, are included in the two distributions of grades which follow. later grades in the same kind of subject, after failure and repetition of the subject total a b c d boys girls per cent of total . . . . this distribution shows a marked tendency for failures in any subject to be accompanied by further failures ( . per cent), not only in the subjects for which it is a prerequisite but in subjects closely akin to it. if this tendency to succeeding failures is really dependent upon thoroughness in the preceding subject, then the repetition of the subject should offer an opportunity for greater thoroughness and should prove to be a distinct advantage in this regard. when we compare the percentage of failures above with that in the following distribution, we fail to find evidence of such an advantage in repetition. the continuity of failures by subjects and the ineffectiveness of repetition are pointed out by t.h. briggs[ ] as found in an unpublished study by j.h. riley, showing that after repeating and passing the subjects of failure, per cent of those who continued the subject failed again the next semester. later grades in the same kind of subjects, following failure but with no repetition total a b c d boys girls per cent of total . . . . here the same pronounced tendency is disclosed for the occurrence of other subsequent failures in the subjects closely similar. but for this distribution of grades, secured without any preceding repetitions, the unsuccessful result is . per cent lower than that found for those who had repeated. this group is not so large in numbers as the one above, and undoubtedly there is some distinct element of pupil selection involved, for it is not easy to believe that the repetition should work a positive injury to the later grades. nevertheless, our faith in the worth of unconditional repetitions should properly be disturbed by such disclosures. _c. the grades in repeated subjects and in the new work, for the same semester and the same pupils_ if it is granted that the teachers of the repeaters are equally good as compared with the others, then the previous familiarity with the work that is being repeated might be expected to serve as an advantage in its favor when compared with the new and advanced work in other subjects. but the grades for the new and advanced work as presented below, and the grades for the repeated subjects as presented earlier in this chapter (section ), deny the validity of such an assumption and give us a different version of the facts. the grades secured in new work, at same time and by same pupils as the grades secured in the repeated subjects total a b c d , boys , girls per cent of total . . . . the facts not only show a lower percentage (by . per cent) of unsuccessful grades in the new work, but they also show a higher percentage of a's, of b's, and of c's than for the repeated subjects. there is definite suggestion here that often the particular subject of failure may be more responsible and more at fault than the particular pupil. certainly uniformity and an arbitrary routine of tasks ignore the individual differences of interests and abilities. but by their greater and their repeated failures in the same deficient subjects (see p. ) these pupils seem to have reasserted stoutly the facts ignored. they have been asked to repeat and repeat again subjects which they have already indicated their unfitness to handle successfully. this pursuance of an unsuccessful method is not good procedure in the business world. the doctor does not employ such methods. _d. the number and results of identical repetitions_ it has become apparent before this that some pupils fail several times and in identical subjects because of their unsuccessful repetitions after each failure. final success might at times justify multiplied repetitions, but in such instances it becomes increasingly important that the repetition should eventually end in success after the subject has been repeated two, three or four times. if such is not the result, then the method is at best a misdirection of energy; or still worse it is an irreparable error, expensive to the individual and the school alike, which only serves to accentuate the inequalities and perversions of opportunity imposed by an arbitrary requirement of the same subjects, the same methods, and the same scheme of education for all pupils alike, regardless of their capacities and interests. in using the term identical it is intended to designate just one unit of the course, as english i, or latin ii. the following table will disclose the facts as to the success resulting from each number of such successive and identical repetitions per pupil. table x the numbers and results of repeated repetitions, for identical subjects no. of grades no per cent repet. a b c d grade totals failing boys girls . boys girls . boys .. girls .. . boys .. .. .. girls .. .. .. . boys .. .. .. .. girls .. .. .. .. . boys .. .. .. .. girls .. .. .. .. . tot. boys girls although a smaller number of pupils make each higher number of repetitions, a higher percentage of each successive group meets with final failure in the subject repeated, and the facts are indicative of what should be expected however large the numbers making such multiplied repetitions. it seems almost incredible that pupils should anywhere be required or permitted to make the fourth, fifth, or sixth repetition of subjects so manifestly certain of leading to further disappointment. it must be understood, too, that five and six repetitions means six and seven times over the same school work. the existence of such a situation testifies to a sort of deep-seated faith in the dependence of the pupil's educational salvation on the successful repetition of some particular school subject. it shows no recognition that the duty of the school is to give each pupil the type of training best suited to his individual endowments and limitations, and at the same time in keeping with the needs of society. such indiscriminate repetition becomes a matter of thoughtless duplicating and operates, first, to increase the economic, educational, and human waste, where the school is especially the agency charged with conserving the greatest of our national resources. second, it operates to fix more permanently the habit and attitude of failing for such pupils, and bequeaths to society the fruit of such maladjustments, which cannot fail to function frequently and seriously in the production of industrial dissatisfactions and misfits later in life. such probabilities are merely in keeping with the psychological fact that habits once established are not likely to be easily lost. indiscriminate repetition is an expensive way of failing to do the thing which it assumes to do. surely one finds in the preceding pages rather slight grounds to warrant the almost unqualified faith in repetition such as the school practice exhibits (table x), or in the importance of the particular subjects so repeated. there may be evidence in this faith and practice of what snedden[ ] calls the "undue importance attached to the historic instruments of secondary education ... now taught mainly because of the ease with which they can be presented ... and which may have had little distinguishable bearing on the future achievement of those young people so gifted by nature as to render it probable that they should later become leaders." but such instruments will not lack direct bearing on the productions of failures for pupils whose interests and needs are but remotely served by such subjects. a recent ruling in the department of secondary education,[ ] in new york city, denies high school pupils permission "to repeat the same grade and type of work for the third consecutive time" after failing a second time. and further it is prescribed that "students who have failed twice in any given grade of a foreign language should be dropped from all classes in that language." our findings in this study will seem to verify the wisdom of these rulings. another ruling that "students who have failed successfully four prepared subjects should not be permitted to elect more than four in the succeeding term," or if they "have passed four subjects and failed in one," should be permitted to take five only provisionally, seems to judge the individual's capacities pretty much in terms of failure. we have found that for approximately , repetitions with an extra schedule, however or by whomever they may have been determined, the percentage getting a's and b's was higher and the percentage of failing was substantially lower than for approximately , repetitions with only three or four subjects for each schedule. it does not appear that the number of subjects is uniformly the factor of prime importance, or that such a ruling will meet the essential difficulty regarding failure. the failure in any subject will more often tend to indicate a specific difficulty rather than any general lack of 'ability plus application' relative to the number of subjects. the maladjustment is not so often in the size of the load as in the kind or composition of the load for the particular individual concerned. the burden is sometimes mastered by repeated trials. but often the particular adjustment needed is clearly indicated by the antecedent failures. . discontinuance of subject or course, and the substitution of others earlier in this chapter appears the number and percentage of failures whose disposition was effected by discontinuance or by substitution. twenty-four and five-tenths per cent of the failures were accounted for in this way. this grouping happens to be a rather complex one. many of such pupils simply discontinue the course and then drop out of school. some discontinue the subject but because they have extra credits take no substitute for it; others substitute in a general way to secure the needed credits but not specifically for the subject dropped. only a few shift their credits to another curriculum. in some instances the subject is itself an extra one, and needs no substitute. for the graduating pupils only about per cent of the failures are disposed of by discontinuing and by substitution of subjects. this fact may be due to the greater economy in examinations, or to the relatively inflexible school requirements for completing the prescribed work by repetition whether for graduation or for college entrance. in only one school was there a tendency to discontinue the subject failed in. so far as failures represent a definite maladjustment between the pupil and the school subject, the substitution of other work would seem to be the most rational solution of the difficulty. a consideration of the success following a substitution of vocational or shop subjects, to replace the academic subjects of failure, offers an especially promising theme for study. no opportunity was offered in the scope of this study to include that sort of inquiry, but its possibilities are recognized and acknowledged herein as worthy of earnest attention. in only two of the eight schools was any shop-work offered, and only one of these could probably claim vocational rank. apart from the difficulty in reference to comparability of standards, there were not more than a negligible number of cases of such substitution, due partly to the relative recency in the offering of any vocational work. in this reference a report comes from w.d. lewis of an actual experiment[ ] in which "fifty boys of the school loafer type ... selected because of their prolific record in failure--as they had proved absolute failures in the traditional course--were placed in charge of a good red-blooded man in a thoroughly equipped wood work shop." "the shop failed to reach just one." at the same time the academic work improved. one cannot be sure of how much to credit the type of work and how much the red-blooded man for such results. but we may feel sure of further contributions of this sort in due time. . employment of school examinations the school examinations employed to dispose of the failures are of two types. the 'final' semester examination, employed by certain schools and required of pupils who have failed, operates to remove the previous failure for that semester of the subject. the success of this plan is not high, because of the insufficient time available to make any adequate reparation for the failures already charged. of the , examinations of this kind to satisfy for failures, . per cent result in success. the boys are more successful than the girls by . per cent. this particular procedure is not employed by more than two of the eight schools. the other form of school examination employed for disposing of failures is the special examination, usually following some definite preparation, and given at the discretion of the teacher or department head. its employment seems also to be limited pretty much to two of the schools, because for most of the subjects the regents' examinations tend to displace it in the schools of the new york state and city systems. as only the successes were sure of being recorded in these tests we do not know the percentage of success attributable to this plan of removing failures. it probably deserves to be credited with a fairly high degree of success, for relatively few pupils (less than ) utilize it, and then frequently after some extra preparation or study--such as summer school courses or tutoring. these two forms of school examinations jointly yield . per cent of successes on the number attempted, so far as such are recorded. . the service rendered by the regents' examinations in new york state whatever may be the merits or demerits of the regents' examination system in general for academic school subjects, these tests certainly perform a saving function for the failing pupils, by promptly rectifying so many of their school failures and thus rescuing them from the burden of expensive repetition. a pupil's success in the regents' examination has the immediate effect of satisfying the school failure charged to him. at the same time, it is possible, as is sometimes asserted, that the anticipation of these tests inclines some teachers to a more gratuitous distribution of failing marks as a spur to their pupils to brace up and perform well in reference to the regents' questions. however, there is no trace of that policy found so far as the schools included in this study are concerned. for the three new jersey schools considered jointly have a higher percentage of failing pupils, and a slightly higher average in the number of failures for each failing pupil than have the three new york state schools. but it is more probable that the attitude referred to operates to exclude the failing pupils from being freely permitted to enter the regents' tests in the failing subjects, and thus to restrain them from what threatens to lower the school percentage of successful papers, except that in new york city such discrimination is prohibited.[ ] on the percentages of success for these examination results teachers and even schools are wont to be popularly judged. annual school reports may feature the passing percentage for the school in regents' examinations, with a spirit of pride or rivalry, but with no word of what that percentage costs as real cost must be reckoned. it is interesting to note in this connection that the percentage of unsuccessful repetitions for the three new jersey schools is . per cent lower than for the three new york schools. in addition to this, for the latter schools per cent more of the subject failures are repeated than for the former ones mentioned. it is important also to bear in mind that the success percentage for the regents' tests is computed on the number admitted to the examinations--not on the number instructed in the subject. the regulations are flexible and admit of considerable latitude in matters of classification and interpretation. accordingly, if it happens anywhere in the state that those who are the less promising candidates, in the teacher's judgment, are debarred from attempting regents' examinations by failing marks, by demotion and exclusion from their class, or by other means, the school's percentage of pupils passing may be kept high as a result, but the injustice worked upon the pupil in such manner is vicious and reprehensible. yet the whole intolerableness of the practice will center in the rule for exclusion of pupils from these examinations because of school failure. no one can predict with any safe degree of certainty that the outcome of any individual's efforts will be a failure in the regents' tests, even though he has failed in a school subject. if failure should happen to result, it is chiefly the school pride that suffers; if the pupil is denied a free trial, he may suffer an injustice to aid the pretension of the school. our school sanctions are not characterized by such acumen or infallibility as to warrant our refusing to give a pupil the benefit of the doubt. he is entitled to his chance to win success in these examinations if he is able, and it appears that only results in the regents' tests can be truly trusted to tell us that he is or is not able to pass them. the facts depicted here may lead to the belief that the recorded success in regents' examinations may sometimes be artificially high, due to the subtle influences at work to make it so. in new york city absence is the sole condition for debarring any pupil, since he must have pursued a subject the prescribed time. such a ruling is highly commendable, and it should not in fairness to the pupil be otherwise anywhere in the state. the following distribution discloses that . per cent of the , failing pupils who were recorded as taking the regents' examinations were successful, and that per cent of those succeeding passed in the same semester in which the school failure occurred. success of the failing pupils in the regents' examinations pass the pass a fail first, same semester later semester then pass only fail boys girls ------------------------------------------ per cent of total . . the divisions of the above distribution are distinct, with no overlapping or double counting. of the pupils who pass these examinations in a later semester than that in which the failure occurs, a major part belong to the two schools which restrict their pupils mainly to a repetition of the subject after failing before they attempt the regents' tests. otherwise many of them would pass the regents' examinations at once, as in the other schools, and would not need to repeat the subject. it was pointed out in the initial part of this chapter that . per cent of the instances of failure were followed by both repetition and examination. in one of the two schools referred to . per cent of the pupils failing and later taking regents' examinations repeat the subject first. that most of such repetition is almost entirely needless is suggested by the fact that only . per cent more of their pupils pass, of the ones attempting, than of the total number reported above, and that too in spite of the loss of pupils' time and public money by such repetition. it may be, and doubtless is, true that an occasional omission occurs in recording the results after such tests have been taken, but, since it is the avowed policy of each school to have complete records for their own constant reference (excepting that the practice of the smallest of the five units was not to record the regents' failures, and for this school they had to be estimated), the failing results would not be expected to be omitted more often than the successes, so that only the totals would be perceptibly affected by such errors. one may rightly be permitted to speculate a bit here as to the most probable reaction of the pupil in regard to his respect for the school standards and for the judgment and opinion of his teacher, when he so readily and repeatedly passes the official state tests almost immediately after his school has classed his work as of failing quality. perhaps it becomes easier for him to feel that failure is not a serious matter but an almost necessary incident that accompanies the expectations of the usual school course, just as gout is sometimes regarded as a mere contingency of ease and plenty. if such be true, and the evidence establishes a strong probability that it is, then it is not a helpful attitude to develop in the pupil nor one of benefit to the school and to society. . continuation of subject without repetition a limited number of records were available in one school for the pupils who failed in the first semester of a subject, and who were permitted to continue the subject conditionally a second semester without first repeating it. not all pupils were given this privilege, and the conditions of selection were not very definite beyond a sort of general confidence and promise relative to the pupil. the after-school conference was the only specific means provided for aiding such pupils. but per cent of such subjects were passed in this manner, and the subsequent passing compensated for the previous failure as to school credit. grades for failing pupils who continue the subject without repetition a b c d boys .. girls .. ------------------ per cent of total .. a difference of judgments may prevail as to the significance of these facts. although the passing grades secured are not high, per cent have thus been relieved from the subject repetition, which on the average results in . per cent of failures, as has been noted in section of this chapter. a much more ingenious device for enabling at least some pupils to escape the repetition and yet to continue the subject was discovered in one school, in which it had been employed. briefly stated, the scheme involved a nominal passing grade of per cent, but a passing average of per cent; and so long as the average was attained, the grade in one or two of the subjects might be permitted to drop as low as per cent. then in the event of a lower average than per cent, it might be raised by a new test in the favorite or easiest subject, rather than in the low subject. by this scheme the grades could be so juggled as to escape repetition or other direct form of reparation in spite of repeated failures, unless perchance the grades fell below per cent. by a change of administration in the school this whole scheme has been superseded. but it had been utilized to the extent that the records for this school showed practically no repetitions for the failing pupils. a summary of chapter v among the school agencies for disposing of the failures, repetition of the subject is the most extensively employed. thirty-three and three-tenths per cent of the repeated grades are repeated failures. few of the repeaters take reduced schedules. the repeaters with an extra schedule are more successful in each of the passing grades, and have . per cent less failures than repeaters with a normal or reduced schedule. in the later subjects of the same kind, after failure and repetition, the unsuccessful grades are . per cent higher than for a similar situation without any repetition. the grades in new work for repeaters are markedly superior to those in the repeated subjects, for the same semester. as the number of identical repetitions are increased (as high as six), the percentage of final failure rapidly rises. the emphasis placed on repetition is excessive, and the faith displayed in it by school practice is unwarranted by the facts. relatively few of the failing pupils who continue in school discontinue the subject or substitute another after failure. school examinations are employed for . per cent of the failures, with . per cent of success on the attempts. the regents' examinations are employed for . per cent of the failures, of which . per cent succeed in passing, and in most cases immediately after the school failure. of those who continue the subject of failure without any repetition per cent get passing grades. no form of school compensation can be considered as adequate which does not adapt the treatment to the kind and cause of the malady, as manifested by the failure symptoms. references: . briggs, t.h. report on secondary education, u.s. comm. of educ. report, . . snedden, d. in johnson's _modern high school._ ii, , . . official bulletin on promotion and students' programs, , from assoc. supt. in charge of secondary schools, for n.y. city. . lewis, w.d. _democracy's high school_, p. . . ruling of board of supt's., new york city, june, . chapter vi do the failures represent a lack of capability or of fitness for high school work on the part of those pupils? in view of the fact that some of the pupils do not fail in any part of their school work, there is a certain popular presumption that failure must be significant of pupil inferiority when it occurs. that connotation will necessarily be correct if we are to judge the individual entirely by that part of his work in which he fails, and to assume that the failing mark is a fair indication of both achievement and ability. although the pupil is only one of the contributing factors in the failure, nevertheless it happens that cherished opportunity, prizes, praise, honors, employment, and even social recognition are frequently proffered or withheld according to his marks in school. still further, the pupil who accumulates failures may soon cease to be aggressively alive and active; he is in danger of acquiring a conforming attitude of tolerance toward the experience of being unsuccessful. therefore it is particularly momentous to the pupil, should the school record ascribed to him prove frequently to be incongruous with his potential powers. it has already been pointed out in these pages that the failures frequently tend to designate specific difficulties rather than what is actually the negative of 'ability plus application.' this does not at all deny that in some instances there appears to be the ability minus the application, and that in other cases the pupils are simple unfitted for the work required of them. . some are evidently misfits there is a strong presumption that many of the pupils who failed in per cent of their school work and dropped out (reported in chapter iv) represent misfits for at least the kind of school subjects offered or required. one cannot say that even hopeless failing in any particular subject is a safe criterion of general inability, or that failure in abstract sort of mental work would be a sure prophecy of failure in more concrete hand work. it is altogether probable that some of the individuals in the above number were not endowed to profit by an academic high school course, and that others were the restless ones at a restless age, who just would not fit in, whatever their abilities. but even of these pupils a considerable number display sufficient resourcefulness to satisfy many of their failures and to persist in school two, three, or four years. there are perhaps at least a few others who, without failing, drop out early, prompted by the conviction of their own unfitness to succeed in the high school. yet collectively this group is by no means a large one. this conclusion is in harmony with the judgment of former superintendent maxwell, of new york city,[ ] who stated that "the number of children leaving school because they have not the native ability to cope with high school studies, is, in my judgment, small." likewise van denburg[ ] reached the conclusion that "at least per cent of the pupils who enter (high school) have the brains, the native ability to graduate, if they chose to apply themselves." with many who fail not even is the application lacking, as the facts of section will seem to prove. . most of the failing pupils lack neither ability or earnestness when we take into account that by the processes of selection and elimination only thirty to forty per cent of the pupils who enter the elementary school ever reach high school,[ ] it is readily admitted that the high school population is a selected group, of approximately in . then of this number we again select less than in to graduate. this gives a in selection, let us say, of the elementary school entrants. for relatively few general purposes in life may we expect to find so high a degree of selection. yet in this in group (who graduate) the percentage of the failing pupils is as high as that of the non-failing ones, and the percentage of graduates does not drop even as the number of failures rise. so far as ability is required to meet the conditions of graduation they are manifestly provided with it. following this comparison still further, the failing pupils who do not graduate have an average number of failures that is only . higher than for the failing graduates ( . - . ); but barring those non-graduates considered in section of this chapter, the average is practically the same as for the failing graduates. moreover, the failing non-graduates continue in school, even in the face of failure, much longer than do the non-failing non-graduates. that gives evidence of the same quality to which the manager of a new york business firm paid tribute when he said that he preferred to employ a high school graduate for the simple reason that the graduate had learned, by staying to graduate, how to 'stick to' a task. the success of the failing pupils in passing the regents' examinations does not give endorsement to the suggestion that they are in any true sense weaklings. that they succeed here almost concurrently with the failure in the school testifies that 'they can if they will,' or conversely, as regards the school subject, that 'they can but they won't.' of course it is possible that differences in the type of examinations or in the standards of judgment as employed by the school and the regents may be a factor in the difference of results secured. the great difficulty then seems to resolve itself into a technical problem of more successfully enlisting the energy and ability which they so irrefutably do possess in order to secure better school results, but perhaps in work that is better adapted to them. again, the success with which these pupils carry a schedule of five or six subjects, besides other work not recognized in the treatment of this study, and retrieve themselves in the unattractive subjects of failure pleads for a recognition of their ability and enterprise. their difficulty is without doubt frequently more physiological than psychological, except as they are the victims of a false psychology, that either disregards or misapplies the principles which thorndike terms the law of readiness[ ] to respond and the law of effect, and consequently depend largely on the one law of exercise of the function to secure the desired results. some additional evidence that the failing pupils can and do succeed in most of their subjects is provided by their earlier and later records, as disclosed by the total grades received for the semester first preceding and the one next following that in which the failure occurs. there were of course no preceding grades for the failures that occur in the first semester, and none succeeding those that occur in the last semester spent in school. it is quite apparent from the following distribution of grades that these pupils are far from helpless in regard to the ability required to do school work in general. grades of the failing pupils in the semester next preceding the failures total a b c d , boys , girls per cent of total . . . . grades of the failing pupils in the semester next succeeding the failures total a b c d , boys , girls per cent of total . . . . more than per cent of the grades in the former and nearly per cent of the grades in the latter distribution are a's or b's, per cent more in each case are given a lower passing grade, while approximately per cent in each distribution have failing grades. though some tendency toward a continuity of failures is apparent, there is also evident a pronounced tendency in the main for pupils to succeed. that these same pupils could do better is not open to doubt. teachers in two of the larger schools asserted that with many pupils a kind of complacency existed to feel satisfied with a c, and to consider greater effort for the sake of higher passing marks as a waste of time. such pupils openly advocate a greater number of subjects with at least a minimum passing mark in each, in preference to fewer subjects and the higher grades, which they claim count no more in essential credit than a lower passing grade. that attitude may account for some of the low marks as well as for some of the failures shown above, even though the pupils may possess an abundance of mental ability. still another element, apart from the real ability of the pupils, which is contributory to school failures is found in punitive marking or in the giving of a failing grade for disciplinary effect. it is probably a relatively small element, but it is difficult to establish any certain estimate of its amount. numerous teachers are ready to assert its reality in practice. two cases came directly to the author's personal attention by mere chance--one, by the frank statement of a teacher who had used this weapon; another, by the ready advice of an older to a younger teacher, in the midst of recording marks, to fail a boy "because he was too fresh." the advice was followed. such a practice, however prevalent, is intolerable and indefensible. if the school failure is to be administered as a retaliation or convenience by the teacher, how is the moral or educational welfare of the pupil to be served thereby? it is certain to be more efficacious for vengeance than for purposes of reforming the individual if employed in this way. the regents' rules take recognition of this inclination toward a perversion of the function of examination by forbidding any exclusion from regents' examinations as a means of discipline. many teachers cultivate a finesse for discerning weaknesses and faults, without perceiving the immeasurable advantage of being able to see the pupils' excellences. in one school there was employed a plan by which a percentage discount was charged for absence, and in some instances it reduced a passing mark to a failing mark. this comes close to the assignment of marks of failure for penalizing purposes, which is unjustified and vicious. it is certain that some of the pupils are failures only in the narrow academic sense. information in reference to a few such cases was volunteered by principals, without any effort being made to trace such pupils in general. one of the pupils in this study who had graduated after failing times, was able to enter a reputable college, and had reached the junior year at the time of this study. two others with a record of more than failures each had made a decided success in business--one as an automobile salesman and manager, the other in a telegraph office. it is not unrecognized that the school has many notable failures to indicate how even the fittest sometimes do not survive the school routine. among such cases were darwin, beecher, seward, pasteur, linnaeus, webster, edison, and george eliot, who were classed by their schools as stupid or incompetent.[ ] in reference to the pupil's responsibility for the failures, thorndike remarks[ ] that "something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who enters high school, or in the particular kind of education given in the united states, is at fault. the fact that the elimination is so great in the first year of the high school gives evidence that a large share of the fault lies with the kind of education given in the united states." some of the facts for those are not eliminated so early are still more definitely indicative that something is wrong with the kind of education given, as the facts of the following section seem to point out. . the school emphasis and the school failures are both culminative in particular school subjects as soon as we find any subject forced upon all pupils alike as a school requirement we may be quite sure that it will not meet the demands of the individual aptitudes and capacities of some portion of those pupils. as a result an accumulation of failures will tend to mark out such a uniformly required subject, whether it be mathematics, science or latin. it was pointed out in section of chapter ii that latin and mathematics, although admittedly in charge of teachers ranking with the best, have both a high percentage of the total failures and the highest percentage of failures reckoned on the number taking the subject. in both regards there is a heaping up of failures for those two subjects, but furthermore there is an arbitrary emphasis culminating in these two subjects beyond any others excepting that english is a very generally required subject. in reference to these two required subjects the pupils who graduate are not more successful than those who do not. when the emphasis is on the teaching of the subject rather than on the teaching of the pupil there is no incongruity in making the subject a requirement for all, but both are incongruous with what psychology has more lately recognized and pointed out as to the wide range of individual differences. a similar situation is evidenced by the percentage of failure in science as reported for the st. louis high school in chapter ii. a year of physics had been made compulsory for all, and taught in the second year.[ ] its percentage of failures accordingly mounts to the highest place. mr. meredith, who conducted that portion of the survey, rightly regards the policy as a mistake, and recommends that the needs of individual pupils be considered. it is indeed striking how failures of the pupils are grouped under particular subjects of difficulty, and how the pupils fail again and again in the same general subject. no educational expert would seem to be needed to diagnose a goodly number of these chronic cases of failing and to detect a productive source of the whole trouble if only the following distribution were presented to him. distribution of pupils according to the number of times they have failed in the same subject no. of times boys girls by 'same subjects' the same general divisions are designated, as english, latin, mathematics. we may be led to note first that a major portion of the above distribution of pupils belongs to those who fail but once in the same subject; but then we note that by far the greater number of failures comprised by that distribution belong to those who fail two or more times in the same subject. to state that fact more specifically, . per cent of the total , failures involved in this study are made by two or more failures in the same subject, while . per cent of the failures belong to a more promiscuous and varied collection of failures, of not more than one in any subject. it will be noted here that some subjects do not have a greater continuity than one year or even one semester on the school program. such subjects provide the least possibility of successive failures in the same field. a further analysis shows that the failures incurred by three or more instances occurring in the same subject form . per cent of the entire number; and that per cent of the total is comprised of four or more instances of failure in the same subject. there is small probability that such a multiplication of failures by subjects will characterize the subjects which are least productive of failures in general, and such is not the case in fact. latin and mathematics are again the chief contributors, and this would seem to be a fact also for those schools quoted from outside of this study, for purposes of comparison in chapter ii. the above distribution speaks with graphic eloquence of how the school tends to focus emphasis on the subject prescribed and then to demand that the pupil be fitted or become fitted to the courses offered. such heaping up of failures will more likely mark those subjects which seem to the pupil to be furthest from meeting his needs and appealing to his interests. in two of the schools studied, an x, y, and z division was formed in certain difficult subjects for the failing pupils, by which they take three semesters to complete two semesters of work. this plan, as judged by results, is obviously insufficient for such pupils and tends to prove further that the kind of work is more at fault in the matter of failing than is the amount. frequently a pupil who fails in the a semester (first) will also fail in the x division of that subject as he repeats it, while at the same time his work is perhaps not inferior in the other subjects. the data for these special divisions were not kept distinct in transcribing the records, so that it is not possible to offer the tabulated facts here. there are numerous recognized illustrations of how some pupils find some particular subject as history, mathematics, or language distinctively difficult for them. . an indictment against the subject-matter and the teaching ends, as factors in producing failures the evidence already disclosed to the effect that the high school entrants are highly selected, that few of the failing pupils lack sufficient ability for the work, that they have manifested their ability and energy in diverse ways, and that particular subjects are unduly emphasized and by the uniformity of their requirement cause much maladjustment, largely contributing to the harvest of failures, seems to warrant an indictment against both the subject-matter and the teaching ends for factoring so prominently in the production of failures. there is clearly an administrative and curriculum problem involved here in the sense that not a few of the failures seem to represent the cost at which the machinery operates. this is in no sense intended as a challenge to any subject to defend its place in the high school curriculum, but it is meant to challenge the policy of the indiscriminate requirement of any subject for all pupils, allowing only that english of some kind will usually be a required subject for the great majority of the pupils. it is simply demanded that latin and mathematics shall stand on their own merits, and that the same shall apply to history and science or other subjects of the curriculum. so far as they are taught each should be taught as earnestly and as efficiently as possible; but it should not be asked that any teacher take the responsibility for the unwilling and unfitted members of a class who are forced into the subject by an arbitrary ruling which regards neither the motive, the interest or the fitness of the individual. this indictment extends likewise to the teaching method or purpose which focalizes the teachers' attention and energy chiefly on the subject. certain basic assumptions, now pretty much discredited, have led to the avowed teaching of the subject for its own sake, and often without much regard to any definite social utility served by it. this charge seems to find an instance in the handling of the subject of english so that . per cent of all the failures are contributed by it, without giving even the graduate a mastery of direct, forceful speech, as is so generally testified. strangely enough, except in the light of such teaching ends, the pupils who stay through the upper years and to graduate have more failures in certain subjects than the non-graduates who more generally escape the advanced classes of these subjects. the traditional standards of the high school simply do not meet the dominant needs of the pupils either in the subject-content or in the methods employed. some of these traditional methods and studies are the means of working disappointment and probably of inculcating a genuine disgust rather than of furnishing a valuable kind of discipline. the school must provide more than a single treatment for all cases. in each subject there must be many kinds of treatment for the different cases in order to secure the largest growth of the individuals included. this does not in any sense necessitate the displacement of thoroughness by superficiality or trifling, but on the contrary greater thoroughness may be expected to result, as helpful adaptations of method and of matter give a meaningful and purposeful motive for that earnest application which thoroughness itself demands. summary of chapter vi the pupil is but one of several factors involved in the failure, yet the consequences are most momentous for him. the pupils who lack native ability sufficient for the work are not a large number. the high school graduates represent about a in selection of the elementary school entrants, but in this group is included as high a percentage of the failing pupils as of the non-failing ones. the success of the failing pupils in the regents' examinations, and also in their repeating with extra schedules, bears witness to their possession of ability and industry. in the semester first preceding and that immediately subsequent to the failure, per cent of all the grades are passing, per cent are a's or b's. many of them "can if they will." the early elimination of pupils, the number that fail, and the notable cases of non-success in school are evidence of something wrong with the kind of education. the characteristic culmination of failures for latin and mathematics can hardly be considered a part of the pupils' responsibility. of all the failures . per cent are incurred by instances of two or more failures in the same subject. much maladjustment of the subject assignments is almost inevitable by a prescribed uniformity of the same content and the same treatment for all. the traditional methods and emphasis probably account for more disappointment and disgust than for valuable discipline. references: . maxwell, w.h. _a quarter century of public school development_, p. . . van denburg, j.k. _the elimination of pupils from public secondary schools_, p. . . annual report of the u.s. commissioner of education, . . thorndike, e.l. _educational psychology_, vol. ii, chap. i. . swift, e.j. _mind in the making_, chap. i. . thorndike, e.l. _elimination of pupils from school_, u.s. bull. , . . meredith, a.b. _survey of the st. louis public schools_, , vol. iii, pp. , . chapter vii what treatment is suggested by the diagnosis of the facts of failure? it is not the purpose of this chapter to formulate conclusions that are arbitrary, fixed, or all-complete. there are definite reasons why that should not be attempted. the author merely undertakes to apply certain well recognized and widely accepted principles of education and of psychology, as among the more important elements recommending themselves to him in any endeavor to derive an adequate solution for the situation disclosed in the preceding chapters. the significance of those preceding chapters in reference to the failures of the high school pupils is not at all conditioned by this final chapter. since as a problem of research the findings have now been presented, it is possible that others may find the basis therein for additional or different conclusions from the ones suggested here. for such persons chapter vii need not be considered an inseparable or essentially integral part of this report on the field of the research. indeed the purpose of this study will not have been served most fully until it has been made the subject of discussion and of criticism; and the treatment that is recommended here will not necessarily preclude other suggestions in the general effort to devise a solution or solutions that are the most satisfactory. it appears from the analysis made in chapter vi of the pupils' capability and fitness relative to the school failures that it is impossible to make any definite apportionment of responsibility to the pupils, until we have first frankly faced and made an effective disposition of the malfunctioning and misdirection as found in the school itself. it does not follow from this that any radical application of surgery need be recommended, but instead, a practical and extended course of treatment should be prescribed, which will have due regard for the nature and location of the ills to be remedied. anything less than this will seem to be a mere external salve and leave untouched the chronic source of the systematic maladjustment. it is not assumed that a school system any more than any other institution or machine can be operated without some loss. but the failure of the school to make a natural born linguist pass in a subject of technical mathematics is perhaps unfortunate only in the thing attempted and in the uselessness of the effort. we must take into account at the very beginning the fundamental truth stated by thorndike,[ ] that "achievement is a measure of ability only if the conditions are equal." corollary to that is the fact that the same uniform conditions and requirements are often very unequal as applied to different individuals. the equalization of educational opportunity does not at all mean the same duplicated method or content for all. that interpretation will controvert the very spirit and purpose of the principle stated. any inflexible scheme which attempts to fashion all children into types, according to preconceived notions, and whose perpetuity is rooted in a psychology based on the uniformity of the human mind, simply must give way to the newer conception which harmonizes with the psychic laws of the individual, or else continue to waste much time and energy in trying to force pupils to accomplish those things for which they have neither the capacity nor the inclination. it is accordingly obligatory on the school to give intelligent and responsive recognition to the wide differentiation of social demands, and to the extent and the continuity of the individual differences of pupils. . organization and adaptation in recognition of the individual differences in abilities and interests if the school failures are to be substantially reduced, the teaching of the school subjects with the chief emphasis on the pupil must surely replace the practice of teaching the subjects primarily for their own sake. this 'subject first' treatment must give place to the 'pupil first' idea. no subject then will overshadow the pupil's welfare, and the pupil will not be subjected to the subject. education in terms of subject-matter is well designed to produce a large crop of failures. neither the addition or subtraction of subjects is urged primarily, but the adaptation and utilization of the school agencies so as to make the pupils as efficient and as productive as possible, by recognizing first of all their essential lack of uniformity in reference to capacities and interests,--not only as between different individuals, but in the same individual at different ages, at different stages of maturity, and in different kinds of subjects. this conception precludes the school employment of subjects and methods for all alike which are obviously better adapted to the younger than to the older. neither does it overlook the fact that the attitude of more mature pupils toward authority and discipline is essentialy different from that of the younger boys and girls; that a subject congenial to some pupils will be intolerable and nearly if not quite impossible for others; or that an appeal designed mainly to reach the girls will not reach boys equally well. in brief, the treatment proposed here is neither radical nor novel, but it is simply the institution of applied psychology as pertaining to school procedure. what the more modern experimental psychology has established must be utilized in the school, at the expense of the more obsolete and traditional. psychology now generally recognizes the existence of what the general school procedure implies does not exist, namely, the wide range of individual differences. the situation clearly demands that our public schools shall not, by clinging to precedent and convention, fall notably behind industry and government in appropriating the fruits of modern scientific research. as the doctor varies the diet to the needs of each patient and each affliction, so must the school serve the intellectual and social needs of the pupils by such an organization and attitude that the selection of subjects for each pupil may take an actual and specific regard of the individual to be served. the change all important is not necessarily in the school subject or curriculum, but rather a change in the attitude as to how a subject shall be presented--to whom and by whom. the latter will also determine the character of the pupil's response and the subject's educational value to him. by securing a genuine response from the pupils a subject or course of study is thereby translated into pupil achievement and human results. the authority of the school is impotent to get these results by merely commanding them or by requiring all to pursue the same subject. an experience, in order to have truly educational value, must come within the range of the pupils comprehension and interest. quoting newman,[ ] "to get the most out of an experience there must be more or less understanding of its better possibilities. the social and ethical implications must somewhere and at some time be lifted very definitely into conscious understanding and volition." the pupil's responsiveness is then much more important both for securing results and for reducing failures than is any subject content or method that is not effective in securing a tolerable and satisfying sort of mental activity. . faculty student advisers from the time of entrance not only the failure of pupils in their school subjects but the failure also of per cent of them to remain in school even to the end of the first semester, or of . per cent to remain beyond the first semester (tables v and vi)--of whom a relatively small number had failed (about ¼)--make a strong appeal for the appointment of sympathetic and helpful teachers as student advisers from the very time of their entrance. one teacher is able to provide personal advice and educational guidance for from to pupils. the right type of teachers, their early appointment, and the keeping of some sort of confidential and unofficial record, all seem highly important. superintendent maxwell mentioned among the reasons why pupils leave school[ ] that "they become bewildered, sometimes scared, by the strange school atmosphere and the aloofness of the high school teachers." there is a strangeness that is found in the transition to high school surroundings and to high school work which certainly should not be augmented by any further handicap for the pupil. there are no fixed limitations to what helpfulness the advisers may render in the way of 'a big brother' or 'big sister' capacity. it is all incidental and supplementary in form, but of inestimable value to the pupils and the school. a further service that is far more unusual than difficult may be performed by the pupils who are not new, in the way of removing strangeness for those who are entering what seems to them a sort of new esoteric cult in the high school. the girls of the washington irving high school[ ] of new york city recently put into practice a plan to give a personal welcome to each entering girl, and a personal escort for the first hour, including the registration and a tour of the building, in addition to some friendly inquiries, suggestions, and introductions. the pupil is then more at home in meeting the teachers later. here is the sort of courtesy introduced into the school that commercial and business houses have learned to practice to avoid the loss of either present or prospective customers. some day the school must learn more fully that the faith cure is much cheaper than surgery and less painful as well. . greater flexibility and differentiation required the recognition of individual differences urged in section necessitates a differentiation and a flexibility of the high school curriculum that is limited only by the social and individual needs to be served, the size of the school, and the availability of means. the rigid inflexibility of the inherited course of study has contributed perhaps more than its full share to the waste product of the educational machinery. the importance of this change from compulsion and rigidity toward greater flexibility has already received attention and commendation. one authority[ ] states that "one main cause of (h.s.) elimination is incapacity for and lack of interest in the sort of intellectual work demanded by the present courses of study," and further that "specialization of instruction for different pupils within one class is needed as well as specialization of the curriculum for different classes." there must be less of the assumption that the pupils are made for the schools, whose regime they must fit or else fail repeatedly where they do not fit. theoretically considerable progress has already been made in the differentiation of curricula, but in practice the opportunity that is offered to the pupils to profit thereby is curtailed, because of the rigid organization of courses and the uniform requirements that are dictated by administrative convenience or by the college entrance needs of the minority. the only permissible limitations to the variables of the curriculum should be such as aim to secure a reasonable continuity and sequence of subjects in one or more of the fields selected. one of the chief barriers to a more general flexibility has been the notion of inequality between the classical and all other types of education. this assumption has had its foundations heavily shaken of late. the quality of response which it elicits has come to receive precedence over the name by which a subject happens to be classified. "france has come out boldly and recognized at least officially the exact parity between the scientific education and the classical education."[ ] indeed one may doubt whether this parity will ever again be seriously questioned, because of the elevation of scientific training and accomplishment in the great world wars as well as in its adaptation for the direct and purposeful dealing with the problems of modern life. especially for the early classes in the high school does the situation demand a relatively flexible curriculum, else the only choice will be to drop out to escape drudgery or failure. inglis maintains that the selective function of the high school may operate by a process of differentiation rather than by a wholesale elimination.[ ] the pupil surely cannot know in advance what he is best fitted for, but the school must help him find that out, if it is to render a very valuable service, and one at all comparable to the success of the industrial expert in utilizing his material and in minimizing waste. the junior high school especially aims to perform this function that is so slighted in the senior high school. yet neither the organization nor the purpose of the two are so far apart as to excuse the helplessness of the latter in this important duty. there is apparently no constitutional impediment to a still further extension of the principle of flexibility and to the minimizing of loss by what has been a costly trial and error method of fitting the pupils and the subjects to each other. short unit courses are not unfamiliar in certain educational fields, and they lend themselves very readily to definite and specific needs. their usefulness may be regarded as a warrant of a wider adoption of them. although they are as yet employed mainly for an intensive form of training or instruction to meet specific needs of a particular group in a limited time,[ ] the principle of their use is no longer novel. a unit course of an extensive nature is also conceivable, for instance, a semester of any subject entitled to two credits might allow a division into two approximately equal portions. if then both teacher and pupil feel, when one unit is completed, that the pupil is in the wrong subject or that his work is hopeless in that subject, he might be permitted to withdraw and be charged with a failure of only one point, that is, just one-half the failure of a semester's work in the subject--or one-fourth that for a whole year with no semester divisions. even if this scheme would not work equally well in all subjects, it implies no extensive reorganization to employ it in the ones adapted. it is not incredible that, as the people more generally understand that physics, chemistry, and biology have become vital to national self-preservation and social well-being, their emphasis as subjects required or as subjects sought by most of the pupils may lead to a high percentage of failures, such as is found for latin and mathematics usually, or for science as reported in st. louis, where it was required of all and yielded the highest percentage of failures. now the teaching of most sciences by the unit plan will comprise no greater difficulty than is involved in overcoming text-book methods and the conservatism of convention. the project device, as employed in vocational education, will also lend itself in many instances to the unit division of work. the first consequence of this plan will be a reduction of failures for the pupil in those subjects whose continued pursuit would mean increased failure. the second consequence may be to relieve teachers of hopeless cases of misfit in any subject, for if the pupils no longer have intolerable subjects imposed on them the teachers will come to demand only tolerable work in the subjects of their choice. the third consequence will probably be to encourage pupils to find themselves by trying out subjects at less risk of such cumulative failures as are disclosed in section of the preceding chapter. . provision for the direction of the pupils' study the forms of treatment suggested in the first three sections of this chapter for the diminution of failures will find their natural culmination of effectiveness in a plan for helping the pupils to help themselves. this has been notably lacking in most school practice. every improvement of the school adaptation still assumes that the pupils are to apply themselves to honest, thorough study. but the high school must bear in mind that good studying implies good teaching. it cannot be trusted to intuition or to individual discovery. real, earnest studying is hard work. the teachers have usually presupposed habits of study on the part of the pupils, but one of the important lessons for the school to teach the pupil is how to use his mind and his books effectively and efficiently. even the simplest kinds of apprenticeship instruct the novice in the use of each device and in the handling of each tool to a degree which the school most often disregards when requiring the pupil to use even highly abstract and complex instrumentalities. the practice of the school almost glorifies drudgery as a genuine virtue. e.r. breslich refers to this fact,[ ] saying, "so it happens that the preparation for the classwork, not the classwork itself burdens the lives of the pupils." the indefensibleness of the indiscriminate lesson giving consists in the fact that it is not the load but the harness that is too heavy. the harness is more exhausting and burdensome than the load appointed. the destination sought and the course to be followed in the lesson preparation are very many times not clearly indicated, lest the discipline, negative and repressive though it be, should be extracted from the struggle. the fact is that discouragement and failure are too often the best of testimony that teachers are not much concerned about how the pupil employs his time or books in studying a lesson. the point is illustrated admirably by the report in the _ladies home journal_, for january, , of a request from a hardworking widow that the teacher of one of her children in school try teaching the child instead of just hearing the lessons which the mother had taught. directing the pupils' study is sometimes regarded as a more or less formalized scheme of organization and procedure, which requires extra time, extra teachers, and a lesser degree of independence on the part of the pupils. but here too the important things are differentiation and specific direction as adapted to the needs of the subject, the topic or the pupils. it must be insisted that supervised study is not the same thing in all schools, in all subjects, or for all pupils. in other words, its very purpose is defeated if it is overformalized. an experiment is reported by j.h. minnick with two classes in plane geometry,[ ] of practically the same size, ability, and time allowance for study, which indicated that the supervised pupils were the less dependent as judged by their success in tests consisting of new problems. the pupils also liked the method, in spite of their early opposition, and no one failed, while two of the unsupervised class failed. william wiener also speaks of the wonderful self-control which springs from the supervised study program.[ ] as to the need of extra teachers for the purpose there is not much real agreement, since the plans of adaptation are so different in themselves. increased labor for the same teachers will rightly imply greater renumeration. colvin makes mention of the additional expense imposed by the larger force of teachers required.[ ] but j.s. brown finds that the failures are so largely reduced that with fewer repeaters there is a consequent saving in the teaching force.[ ] with a faculty of teachers, he reports classes in which there was no failure, and a marked reduction of failures in general by the use of supervised study. it is interesting and significant to note here that by allowing daily pupil recitations to the teacher the repeated subjects reported in this study would require teachers for one semester or teachers for the full four years. this fact represents more than $ , in salaries alone. buildings, equipment, heat, and other expenses will more than double the amount. but such expense is incomparable with what the pupils pay in time, in struggles, and in disappointment in order to succeed later in only . per cent of the subjects repeated. as none of the eight schools provided anything more definite than a general after school hour for offering help, and which often has a punitive suggestion to it, the possibility of saving many of these pupils from failure and repetition by the wise and helpful direction of their study is simply unmeasured. a conclusion that is particularly encouraging is reported by w.c. reavis to the effect that the poorer pupils--the ones who most need the direction--are the ones that supervised study helps the most.[ ] there is nothing novel in saying that good teaching and good studying are but different aspects of the same process, but it would be an innovation to find this conception generally realized in the school practice. . a greater recognition and exposition of the facts as revealed by accurate and complete school records it is unfortunate that the detailed and complete records which tell the whole story about the failures in the school and for the individual are found in relatively few schools, even when on all sides business enterprises find a complete system of detailed records, filed and indexed, altogether indispensable for their intelligent operation and administration. the school still proceeds in its sphere too much by chance and faith, forgetting mistakes and recalling successes. this is possible because there is no question of self-support or of solvency to face, and because neither the teachers nor the institution are in danger of direct financial loss by their waste, duplication, or failures. in the absence of records it is always possible to calmly assume that the facts are not so bad as for other schools which do report their recorded facts. the prevailing unfamiliarity with statistical methods may also favor a skepticism as to their proper application to education, since it is not an exact science. but the fact remains established that it is always possible to measure qualitative differences if stated in terms of their quantitative amounts. admirable and complete as are the records for the many schools of the minority group possessing them, their more general value and information are still quite securely hidden away in the files which contain them. peculiarly interesting was the surprise expressed by the principals at the extensive and significant information which their own school records provided, when they received individual reports on the data collected and tabulated for this study. yet they received only the portions of the tabulations which seemed most likely to interest them. the principals do not have the time or the assistance to study in a collective way the facts which are provided by their own records, but they are entitled to much credit for so courteously cooperating with any competent person for utilizing their records for approved purposes and in turn sharing their results with the school. to proceed wisely in the administration of the school we must have a chance to know and discuss the facts. it is not possible to know the facts without adequate records. the absence of evidence gives prominence to opinion and precedent. accordingly, it is entirely incredible that the number, the repetition, and the accumulation of failures would remain unchanged after a fair exposition and discussion of the evidence presented in a collective and comprehensive form. it may be necessary to admit that a few teachers will hold opinions so strong that they will discredit all testimony not in support of such opinions. but the high school teachers in general seem fairly and earnestly disposed, even about revising their notions concerning the truth in any situation. in regard to the relative number and time of the failures, the actual and relative success in repeated work, the advantage of repetition for later work, the relation of success to the size of the schedule, the influence of the number of failures on graduation, and numbers of other vital facts, it could be said of the teachers in general that they simply knew not what they were doing. they even thought they were doing what they were not. the school records must be disclosed and utilized more fully if their value and importance are to be realized. it will be a large source of satisfaction if this report helps to direct attention to the official school records, from which a frequent 'trial balance' will help to rectify and clarify the school practice. both are needed. summary of chapter vii the contributing factors found in the school must first be remedied, before responsibility for the failures can be fairly apportioned to the pupils. the provision of uniform conditions for all is based on the false doctrine of the uniformity of the human mind. such conditions may prove very unequal for some individuals, and achievement is not then a real measure of ability. by applying a functioning psychology to school practice, more adaptation and specialization are required to meet the individual differences of pupils. no change of subjects is in general necessitated, but a change of the attitude which subjects pupils to the subjects seems essential. the genuineness of the pupil's response depends on the pupil and the subject. a policy of coercion will usually beget only dislike or failure. properly selected student advisers, appointed early, may transform the school for the pupil, save the pupil for the school, and his work from failures. a relatively high degree of flexibility and specialization of the curriculum will help the pupil find what he is best fitted for, and thereby minimize waste. this will include a virtual parity between the classical and scientific subjects. the reduction of some subjects to smaller units will tend to facilitate flexibility and a reduction of failures. the provision of directed study will help the pupils to help themselves. good teaching demands it. the harness is often heavier than the load. failures are inevitable. the plan of study direction must be varied according to the varying needs of pupils, subjects, and schools. the poorer pupils are aided most. they are made even more reliant on themselves. the reduction of failures tends to balance any added expense. records adequate and complete should be a part of the business and educational equipment of every school. the exposition and use of these facts as recorded will then give direction to school progress, and dethrone the authority of assumption and opinion. references: . thorndike, e.l. _individuality_, pp. , . . neuman, h. _moral values in secondary education_, united states bureau of education bulletin, no. , , pp. , . . maxwell, w.h. _a quarter century of public school development_, p. . . thorndike, e.l. _the elimination of pupils from school_, u.s. bureau of education bulletin, no. , , p. . . farrington, f.e. _french secondary schools_, p. . . inglis, a. _principles of secondary education_, p. . . committee of n.e.a. _vocational secondary education_, u.s. bureau of education bulletin no. , , p. . . breslich, e.r. _supervised study as supplementary instruction, thirteenth yearbook_, p. . . minnick, j.h. "the supervised study of mathematics," _school review_, - . . wiener, w. "home study reform," _school review_, - . . colvin, s.s. _an introduction to high school teaching_, p. . . brown, j.s. _school and home education_, february, , p. . . reavis, w.c. "supervised study," in parker's _methods of teaching in the high school_, p. . vita francis paul obrien was born at overton, pa., november , . he received his early education in the village school of overton, pa., and graduated from the high school at wilkesbarre, pa., in . he was a student at lafayette college, easton, pa., receiving the bachelor of arts degree in . he was a graduate student at teachers college, columbia university, from to , receiving the degree of master of arts in education in . during - he was high school teacher of science and history at south river, n.j.; - , principal of the high school, and - superintendent of schools at south river, n.j. he received honors and held offices in college as follows: competitive prize scholarship at lafayette college, and junior oratorical prize at the same college, ; officer in college debating club, - ; vice-president of y.m.c.a., teachers college, ; member of columbia chapter, phi delta kappa, . thoughts on educational topics and institutions. by george s. boutwell. boston: phillips, sampson and company. mdccclix. entered according to act of congress, in the year , by george s. boutwell, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. stereotyped by hobart and robbins, boston. to the teachers of massachusetts, whose enlightened devotion to their duties has contributed effectually to the advancement of learning, this volume is respectfully dedicated. g. s. b. contents. page the intrinsic nature and value of learning, and its influence upon labor, education and crime, reformation of children, the care and reformation of the neglected and exposed classes of children, elementary training in the public schools, the relative merits of public high schools and endowed academies, the high school system, normal school training, female education, the influence, duties, and rewards, of teachers, liberty and learning, massachusetts school fund, a system of agricultural education, the intrinsic nature and value of learning, and its influence upon labor. [lecture before the american institute of instruction.] words and terms have, to different minds, various significations; and we often find definitions changing in the progress of events. bailey says learning is "skill in languages or sciences." to this, walker adds what he calls "literature," and "skill in anything, good or bad." dr. webster enlarges the meaning of the word still more, and says, "learning is the knowledge of principles or facts received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "and though a linguist," says milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only."--"language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." this is kindred to the saying of locke, that "men of much reading are greatly learned, but may be little knowing." we must give to the term _learning_ a broad definition, if we accept milton's statement that its end "is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know god aright;" for this necessarily implies that we are to study carefully everything relating to the nature of our existence, to the spot and scene of our existence, with its mysterious phenomena, and its comparatively unexplained laws. and we must, moreover, always keep in view the personal relations and duties which the creator has imposed upon the members of the human race. the knowledge of these relations and duties is one form of learning; the disposition and the ability to observe and practise these relations and duties, is another and a higher form of learning. the first is the learning of the theologian, the schoolman; the latter is the learning of the practical christian. both ought to exist; but when they are separated, we place things above signs, facts above forms, life above ideas. law and justice ought always to be united; but when by error, or fraud, or usurpation, they are separated, we observe the forms of law, but we respect the principles of justice. this is a good illustration of the principles which guide to a true distinction in the forms of learning. of all the definitions enumerated, we must give to the word _learning_ the broadest signification. it is safe to accept the statement of the great poet, that a man may be acquainted with many languages, and yet not be learned; even as the apostle said he should become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, if he had not charity, though he spoke with the tongues of men and angels. learning includes, no doubt, a knowledge of the languages, the sciences, and all literature; but it includes also much else; and this much else may be more important than the enumerated branches. the term _learned_ has been limited, usually, by exclusive application to the schoolmen; but it is a matter of doubt, especially in this country, upon the broad definition laid down, whether there is more learning in the schools, or out of them. this remark, if true, is no reflection upon the schools, but much in favor of the world. those were dark ages when learning was confined to the schools; and, though we can never be too grateful for their existence, and the fidelity with which they preserved the knowledge of other days, that is surely a higher attainment in the life of the race, when the learning of the world exceeds the learning of the cloister, the school, and the college. in a private conversation, professor guyot made a remark which seems to have a public value. "you give to your schools," said he, "credit that is really due to the world. looking at america with the eye of an european, it appears to me that your world is doing more and your schools are doing less, in the cause of education, than you are inclined to believe." for one, though i ought, as much as any, to stand for the schools, i give a qualified assent to the truth of this observation. there is much learning among us which we cannot trace directly to the schools; but the schools have introduced and fostered a spirit which has given to the world the power to make itself learned. it is much easier to disseminate what is called the spirit of education, than it was to create that spirit, and preserve it when there were few to do it homage. for this we are indebted to the schools. unobserved in the process of change, but happy in its results, the business of education is not now confined to professional teachers. the greatest change of all has been wrought by the attention given to female education, so that the mother of this generation is not compelled to rely exclusively upon the school and the paid teacher, public or private, but can herself, as the teacher ordained by nature, aid her children in the preparatory studies of life. this power does not often manifest itself in a regular system of domestic school studies and discipline, but its influence is felt in a higher home preparation, and in the exhibition of better ideas of what a school should be. and we may assume, with all due respect to our maternal ancestry, that this fact is a modern feature, comparatively, in american civilization. female education has given rise to some excesses of opinion and conduct; but the world is entirely safe, especially the self-styled lords of creation, and may wisely advocate a system of general education without regard to sex, and leave the effect to those laws of nature and revelation which are to all and in all, and cannot permanently be avoided or disobeyed. the number of educators has strangely increased, and they often appear where they might least be expected. we speak of the revival of education, and think only of the change that has taken place in the last twenty years in the appropriations of money, the style of school-houses, and the fitness of professional teachers for the work in which they are engaged; but these changes, though great, are scarcely more noteworthy than those that have occurred in the management of our shops, mills, and farms. when we write the sign or utter the sound which symbolizes _teacher_, what figure, being, or qualities, are brought before us? we _should_ see a person who, in the pursuit of knowledge, is self-moving, and, in the exercise of the influence which knowledge gives, is able to appreciate the qualities of others; and who, moreover, possesses enough of inventive power to devise means by which he can lead pupils, students, or hearers, in the way they ought to go. we naturally look for such persons in the lecture-room, the school, and the pulpit. and we find them there; but they are also to be found in other places. there are thousands of such men in america, engaged in the active pursuits of the day. they are farmers, mechanics, merchants, operatives. they do not often follow text-books, and therefor are none the worse, but much the better teachers. insensibly they have taken on the spirit of the teacher and the school, and, apparently ignorant of the fact, are, in the quiet pursuits of daily life, leaders of classes following some great thought, or devoted to some practical investigation. and in one respect these teachers are of a higher order than _some_--not all, nor most--of our professional teachers. they never cease to be students. when a man or woman puts on the garb of the teacher, and throws off the garb of the student, you will soon find that person so dwindled and dwarfed, that neither will hang upon the shoulders. this happens sometimes in the school, but never in the world. the last twenty-five years have produced two new features in our civilization, that are at once a cause and a product of learning. i speak of the press, and of associations for mutual improvement. the newspaper press of america, having its centre in the city of new york, is more influential than the press of any other country. it may not be conducted with greater ability; though, if compared with the english press, the chief difference unfavorable to america is found in the character of the leading editorial articles. in enterprise, in telegraphic business, maritime, and political news and information, the press of the united states is not behind that of great britain. it must, however, be admitted that a given subject is usually more thoroughly discussed in a single issue from the english press; but it is by no means certain that public questions are, upon the whole, better canvassed in england than in america. indeed, the opposite is probably true. our press will follow a subject day after day, with the aid of new thoughts and facts, until it is well understood by the reader. european ideas of journalism cannot be followed blindly by the press of america. the journalist in europe writes for a select few. his readers are usually persons of leisure, if they have not always culture and taste; and the issue of the morning paper is to them what the appearance of the quarterly, heavy or racy, is to the cultivated american reader. but the american journalist, whatever his taste may be, cannot afford to address himself to so small an audience. he writes literally for the million; for i take it to be no exaggeration to say that paragraphs and articles are often read by millions of people in america. this fact is an important one, as it furnishes a good test of the standard taste and learning of the people. our press answers the demand which the people make upon it. the mass of newspaper readers are not, in a scholastic sense, well-educated persons. newspaper writers do not, therefore, trouble themselves about the colleges with their professors, but they seek rather to gain the attention and secure the support of the great body of the people, who know nothing of colleges except through the newspapers. we have always been permitted to infer the intellectual and moral character of the audiences of demosthenes, from the orations of demosthenes; and may we not also infer the character of the american people, from the character of the press that they support? in a single issue may often be found an editorial article upon some question of present interest; a sermon, address, or speech, from a leading mind of the country or the world; letters from various quarters of the globe; extracts from established literary and scientific journals; original essays upon political, literary, scientific, and religious subjects; and items of local or general interest for all classes of readers. this product of the press, in quantity and quality, could not be distributed, week after week, and year after year, among an ignorant class of people. it could be accepted by intelligent, thinking, progressive minds only; and, as a fact necessarily coëxisting, we find the newspaper press equally essential to the best-educated persons among us. the newspaper press in america is a century and a half old; but its power does not antedate this century, and its growth has been chiefly within the last twenty-five years. what that growth has been may be easily seen by any one who will compare the daily sheet of the last generation with the daily sheet of this; and the future of the american press may be easily predicted by those who consider the progressive influences among us, of which the newspaper must always be the truest representative. within the same brief period of time it has become the fixed custom of the people to associate together for educational objects. as a consequence, we have the lyceum for all, libraries for all, professional institutes and clubs for merchants, mechanics, and farmers, and, at last, free libraries and lectures for the operatives in the mills. where these institutions can exist, there must be a high order of general learning; and where these institutions do exist, and are sustained, the learning of the people, whether high or low at any given moment, must be rapidly improved. yet some of these agencies--lectures and libraries, for example--are not free from serious faults. it may seem rash and indefensible to criticize lectures upon the platform of the lecturer; but, as the audience can inflict whatever penalty they please upon the speaker, he will so far assume responsibility as to say that amusement is not the highest object of a single lecture, and when sought by managers as the desirable object of a whole course, the lecture-room becomes a theatre of dissipation; surely not so bad as other forms of dissipation, but yet so distinctly marked, and so pernicious in its influence, as to be comparatively unworthy of general support. let it not, however, be inferred that wit, humor, and drollery even, are to be excluded from the lecture-room; but they should always be employed as means by which information is communicated. between lecturers equal in other respects, one with the salt of humor, native to the soil, should be preferred; but it is a sad reflection upon public taste, when a person whose entire intellectual capital is wit, humor, or buffoonery, is preferred to men of solid learning. but it is a worse view of human nature, when men of real merit and worth depreciate themselves and lower the public taste, by attempting to do what, at best, they can have but ill success in, and what they would despise themselves for, were they to succeed completely. shakspeare says of a jester: "this fellow's wise enough to play the fool; and to do that well, craves a kind of wit: * * * * * this is a practice as full of labor as a wise man's art: for folly, that he wisely shows, is fit; but wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit." a kindred mental dissipation follows in the steps of progress, and demands aliment from our public libraries. in the selection of books there is a wide range, from the trashy productions of the fifth-rate novelist, to stately history and exact science. it is, however, to be assumed that libraries will not be established until they are wanted, and that the want will not be pressing until there is a taste for reading somewhat general. where this taste exists, it is fair to assume that it is in some degree elevated. the direction, however, which the taste of any community is to take, after the establishment of a public library, depends, in a great degree, upon the selection of books for its shelves. two dangers are to be avoided. the first, and greatest, is the selection of books calculated to degrade the morals or intellect of the reader. this danger is apparent, and to be shunned needs but to be seen. books, of more or less intrinsic value, are so abundant and cheap, that common men must go out of their way to gather a large collection that shall not contain works of real merit. but the object should be to exclude all worthless and pernicious works, and meet and improve the public taste, by offering it mental food better than that to which it has been accustomed. the other danger is negative, rather than positive; but, as books are comparatively worthless when they are not read, it becomes a matter of great moment to select such as will touch the public mind at a few points, at least. it is indeed possible, and, under the guidance of some persons, it would be natural, to encumber the shelves of a library with _good books_ that might ever remain so, saving only the contributions made to mould and mice. now, if you will pardon a little more fault-finding,--which is, i confess, a quality without merit, or, as byron has it, "a man must serve his time to every trade save censure--critics all are ready made,"-- i will hazard the opinion that the practice of establishing libraries in towns for the benefit of a portion of the inhabitants only is likely to prove pernicious in the end. to be sure, reading for some is better than reading for none; but reading for all is better than either. in massachusetts there is a general law that permits cities and towns to raise money for the support of libraries; yet the legislature, in a few cases, has granted charters to library associations. with due deference, it may very well be suggested, that, where a spirit exists which leads a few individuals to ask for a charter, it would be better to turn this spirit into a public channel, that all might enjoy its benefits. and it will happen, generally, that the establishment of a public library will be less expensive to the friends of the movement, and the advantages will be greater; while there will be an additional satisfaction in the good conferred upon others. we shall act wisely if we apply to books a maxim of the greeks: "all things in common amongst friends." under this maxim cicero has enumerated, as principles of humanity, not to deny one a little running water, or the lighting his fire by ours, if he has occasion; to give the best counsel we are able to one who is in doubt or distress; which, says he, "are things that do good to the person that receives them, and are no loss or trouble to him that confers them." and he quotes, with approbation, the words of ennius: "he that directs the wandering traveller doth, as it were, light another's torch by his own; which gives him ne'er the less of light, for that it gave another." a good book is a guide to the reader, and a well-selected library will be a guide to many. and shall we give a little running water, and turn aside or choke up the streams of knowledge? light the evening torch, and leave the immortal mind unillumined? give free counsel to the ignorant or distressed, when he might easily be qualified to act as his own counsellor? in july , mr. everett gave five hundred dollars toward a library for the high school in his native town of dorchester; and in mr. abbott lawrence gave an equal sum to his native town for the establishment of a public library. these are not large donations, if we consider only the amount of money given; but it is difficult to suggest any other equal appropriation that would be as beneficial, in a public sense. these donations are noble, because conceived in a spirit of comprehensive liberality. they are examples worthy of imitation; and i venture to affirm, there is not one of our new england towns that has not given to the world a son able to make a similar contribution to the cause of general learning. is it too much to believe that a public library in a town will double the number of persons having a taste for reading, and consequently double the number of well-educated people? for, though we are not educated by mere reading, it is yet likely to happen that one who has a taste for books will also acquire habits of observation, study, and reflection. professional institutes and clubs also serve to increase the sum of general learning. they have thus far avoided the evil which has waited or fastened upon similar associations in europe,--subserviency to political designs. every profession or interest of labor has peculiar ideas and special purposes. these ideas and purposes may be wisely promoted by distinct organizations. who can doubt the utility of associations of merchants, mechanics, and farmers? they furnish opportunities for the exchange of opinions, the exhibition of products, the dissemination of ideas, and the knowledge of improvements, that are thus wisely made the property of all. knowledge begets knowledge. what is the distinguishing fact between a good school and a poor one? is it not, that in a good school the prevailing public sentiment is on the side of knowledge and its acquisition? and does not the same fact distinguish a learned community from an ignorant community? if, in a village or city of artisans, each one makes a small annual contribution to the general stock of knowledge, the aggregate progress will be appreciable, and, most likely, considerable. if, on the other hand, each one plods by himself, the sum of professional knowledge cannot be increased, and is likely to be diminished. the moral of the parable of the ten talents is eminently true in matters of learning. "unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." we cannot conceive of a greater national calamity than an industrial population delving in mental sluggishness at unrelieved and unchanging tasks. the manufacture of pins was commenced in england in , and for two hundred and fifty years she had the exclusive control of the trade; yet all that period passed away without improvement, or change in the process; while in america the business was revolutionized, simplified, and economized one-half, in the period of five years. in the valuation of massachusetts was about three hundred millions of dollars; but it is certain that a large portion of this sum should have been set off against the constant impoverishment of the land, commencing with the settlement of the state,--the natural and unavoidable result of an ignorant system of farm labor. the revival of education in america was soon followed by a marked improvement in the leading industries of the people, and especially in the department of agriculture. the principle of association has not yet been as beneficial to the farmers as to the mechanics; but the former are soon to be compensated for the delay. with the exception of the business of discovering small planets, which seem to have been created for the purpose of exciting rivalry among a number of enthusiastic, well-minded, but comparatively secluded gentlemen, agricultural learning has made the most marked progress in the last ten years. but an agricultural population is professionally an inert population; and, therefore, as in the accumulation of john jacob astor's fortune, it was more difficult to take the first step than to make all the subsequent movements. now, however, the principle of association is giving direction and force to the labors of the farmer; and it is easy for any person to draw to himself, in that pursuit, the results of the learning of the world. libraries and lectures for the operatives in the manufactories constitute another agency in the cause of general learning. the city of lawrence, under the lead of well-known public-spirited gentlemen there, has the honor of introducing the system in america. a movement, to which this is kindred, was previously made in england; but that movement had for its object the education of the operatives in the simple elements of learning, and among the females in a knowledge of household duties. an english writer says: "many employers have already established schools in connection with their manufactories. from many instances before us, we may take that of mr. morris, of manchester, who has risen, himself, from the condition of a factory operative, and who has felt in his own person the disadvantages under which that class of workmen labor. he has introduced many judicious improvements. he has spent about one hundred and fifty pounds in ventilating his mills; and has established a library, coffee-room, class-room, weekly lectures, and a system of industrial training. the latter has been established for females, of whom he employs a great many. this class of girls generally go to the mills without any knowledge of household duties; they are taught in the schools to sew, knit," etc. but, in the provision made at lawrence for intellectual culture, it is assumed, very properly, that the operatives are familiar with the branches usually taught in the public schools. this could not be assumed of an english manufacturing population, nor, indeed, of any town population, considered as a whole. herein america has an advantage over england. our laborers occupy a higher standpoint intellectually, and in that proportion their labors are more effective and economical. the managers and proprietors at lawrence were influenced by a desire to improve the condition of the laborers, and had no regard to any pecuniary return to themselves, either immediate or remote. and it would be a sufficient satisfaction to witness the growth of knowledge and morality, thereby elevating society, and rendering its institutions more secure. these higher results will be accompanied, however, by others of sufficient importance to be considered. when we _hire_, or, what is, for this inquiry, the same thing, _buy_ that commodity called, _labor_, what do we expect to get? is it merely the physical force, the animal life contained in a given quantity of muscle and bone? in ordinary cases we expect these, but in all cases we expect something more. we sometimes buy, and at a very high cost, too, what has, as a product, the least conceivable amount of manual labor in it,--a professional opinion, for example; but we never buy physical strength merely, nor physical strength at all, unless it is directed by some intellectual force. the descending stream has power to drive machinery, and the arm of the idiot has force for some mechanical service, but they equally lack the directing mind. we are not so unwise as to purchase the power of the stream, or the force of the idiot's arm; but we pay for its application in the thing produced, and we often pay more for the skill that has directed the power than for the power itself. the river that now moves the machinery of a factory in which many scores of men and women find their daily labor, and earn their daily bread, was employed a hundred years ago in driving a single set of mill-stones; and thus a man and boy were induced to divide their time lazily between the grist in the hopper and the fish under the dam. the river's power has not changed; but the inventive, creative genius of man has been applied to it, and new and astonishing results are produced. with man himself this change has been even greater. in proportion to the population of the country, we are daily dispensing with manual labor, and yet we are daily increasing the national production. there is more mind directing the machinery propelled by the forces of nature, and more mind directing the machinery of the human body. the result is, that a given product is furnished by less outlay of physical force. formerly, with the old spinning-wheel and hand-loom, we put a great deal of bone and muscle into a yard of cloth; now we put in very little. we have substituted mind for physical force, and the question is, which is the more economical? or, in other words, is it of any consequence to the employer whether the laborer is ignorant or intelligent? before we discuss this point abstractly, let us notice the conduct of men. is any one willing to give an ignorant farm laborer as much as he is ready to pay for the services of an intelligent man? and if not, why the distinction? and if an ignorant man is not the best man upon a farm, is he likely to be so in a shop or mill? and if not, we see how the proprietors of factories are interested in elevating the standard of learning, in the mills and outside. but they are not singular in this. all classes of employers are equally concerned in the education of the laborer; for learning not only makes his labor more valuable to himself, but the market price of the product is generally reduced, and the change affects favorably all interests of society. this benefit is one of the first in point of time, and the one, perhaps, most appreciable of all which learning has conferred upon the laborer. as each laborer, with the same expenditure of physical force, produces a greater result, of course the aggregate products of the world are vastly increased, although they represent only the same number of laborers that a less quantity would have represented under an ignorant system. the division of these products upon any principle conceivable leaves for the laborer a larger quantity than he could have before commanded; for, although the share of the wealthy may be disproportionate, their ability to consume is limited; and, as poverty is the absence or want of things necessary and convenient for the purposes of life, according to the ideas at the time entertained, we see how a laboring population, necessarily poor while ignorance prevails, is elevated to a position of greater social and physical comfort, as mind takes the place of brute force in the industries of the world. learning, then, is not the result of social comfort, but social comfort is the product of intelligence, and increases or diminishes as intelligence is general or limited. it is not, however, to be taken as granted that each laborer's position corresponds or answers to the sum of his own knowledge. it might happen that an ignorant laborer would enjoy the advantages of a general culture, to which he contributed little or nothing; and it must of necessity also happen that an intelligent laborer, in the midst of an ignorant population, as in ireland or india, for example, would be compelled to accept, in the main, the condition of those around him. but there is no evidence on the face of society now, or in its history, that an ignorant population, whether a laboring population or not, has ever escaped from a condition of poverty. and the converse of the proposition is undoubtedly true, that an intelligent laboring community will soon become a wealthy community. learning is sure to produce wealth; wealth is likely to contribute to learning, but it does not necessarily produce it. hence it follows that learning is the only means by which the poor can escape from their poverty. in this statement it is assumed that education does not promote vice; and not only is this negative assumption true, but it is safe to assume, further, that education favors virtue, and that any given population will be less vicious when educated than when ignorant. this, i cannot doubt, is a general truth, subject, of course, to some exceptions. the educational struggle in which the english people are now engaged has made distinct and tangible certain opinions and impressions that are latent in many minds. there has been an attempt to show that vice has increased in proportion to education. this attempt has failed, though there may be found, of course, in all countries, single facts, or classes of facts, that seem to sustain such an opinion. now, suppose this case,--and neither this case nor any similar one has ever occurred in real life,--but suppose crime to increase as a people were educated, though there should be no increase of population; would this fact prove that learning made men worse? by no means. our answer is apparent on the face of the change itself. by education, the business, and pecuniary relations and transactions of a people are almost indefinitely multiplied; and temptations to crime, especially to crimes against property, are multiplied in an equal ratio. would person or property be better respected in new york or boston, if the most ignorant population of the world could be substituted for the present inhabitants of those cities? the business nerves of men are frequently shocked by some unexpected defalcation, and short-sighted moralists, who lack faith, exclaim, "all this is because men know so much!" such certainly forget that for every defaulter in a city there are hundreds of honest men, who receive and render justly unto all, and hold without check the fortunes of others. so mr. drummond argued in the british house of commons against a national system of education, because what he was pleased to call _instruction_ had not saved william palmer and john sadlier. but the truth in this matter is not at the bottom of a well; it is upon the surface. where it is the habit of society generally to be ignorant, you will find it the necessity of that society to be poor; and where ignorance and poverty both abound, the temptations to crime are unquestionably few, but the power to resist temptation is as unquestionably weak. the absence of crime is owing to the absence of temptation, rather than to the presence of virtue. such a condition of society is as near to real virtue as the mental weakness of the idiot is to true happiness. turning again to the discussion in the british parliament of april, , we are compelled to believe that some english statesmen are, in principle and in their ideas of political economy, where a portion of the english cotton-spinners were a hundred years ago. the cotton-spinners thought the invention of labor-saving machinery would deprive them of bread; and a mr. ball gravely argues that schools will so occupy the attention of children, that the farmers' crops will be neglected. i am inclined to give you his own words; and i have no doubt you will be in a measure relieved of the dulness of this essay, when you listen to what was actually cheered, in the british commons. speaking of the resolutions in favor of a national system of instruction, mr. ball said: "it was important to consider what would be their bearing on the agricultural districts of the country. he had obtained a return from his own farm, and, supposing the principles advocated by the noble lord were adopted, the results would be perfectly fearful. the following was the return he had obtained from his agent: william chapman, ten years a servant on his (mr. ball's) farm; his own wages thirteen shillings, besides a house; he had seven children, who earned nine shillings a week; making together twenty-two shillings a week. robert arbor, fifteen years on the farm; wages thirteen shillings a week, and a house; six children, who earned six shillings a week; making together nineteen shillings. john stevens, thirty-three years a servant on the farm; his own wages fourteen shillings a week; he had brought up ten children, whose average earnings had been twelve shillings weekly, making together twenty-six shillings a week. robert carbon, twenty-two years a servant on the farm; wages thirteen shillings a week; having ten children, who earned ten shillings a week; making together twenty-three shillings a week. thus it appeared that in these four families the fathers earned fifty-three shillings weekly, and the children thirty-seven shillings a week; so that the children earned something more than two-thirds of the amount of the earnings of the fathers. he would ask the house, if the fathers were to be deprived of the earnings of the children, how could they provide bread for them? it was perfectly impossible. they must either increase the parent's wages to the amount of the loss he thus sustained, or they must make it up to him from a rate. then, again, those who were at all conversant with agriculture knew that if they deprived the farmer of the labor of children, agriculture could not be carried on. there was no machinery by which they could get the weeds out of the land."--_london times_. the light which this statement furnishes is not hid under a bushel. the argument deserves a more logical form, and i proceed gratuitously to give the author the benefit of a scientific arrangement. "if a national system of education is adopted, the children of my tenants will be sent to school; if the children of my tenants are sent to school, my turnips will not be weeded; if my turnips are not weeded, i shall eat fat mutton no more." after this from a statesman, we need not wonder that a correspondent of lord john russell writes, "that a farmer near him has been heard to say, he would not give anything to a day-school; he finds that since sunday-schools have been established the birds have increased and eat his corn, and because he cannot now procure the services of the boys, whom he used to employ the whole of sunday, in protecting his fields."--_london times, april th, ._ now, i do not go to england for the purpose of making an attack upon her opinions; but, as kindred ideas prevail among us, though to a limited extent only, the folly of them may be seen in persons at a distance, when it would not be realized by ourselves. moreover, the presentation of these somewhat ridiculous notions brings ridicule upon a whole class of errors; and when errors are so ingrained that men cannot reason in regard to them, ridicule is often the only weapon of successful attack. and it is no compliment to an american audience for the speaker to say that their own minds already suggest the refutation which these errors demand. if the chief end of man, for which boyhood should be a preparation, were to weed turnips or to frighten blackbirds from corn-fields, then surely the objection of mr. ball, and the complaint and spirit of resistance offered by lord john russell's farmer, would be eminently proper. but lord john russell did not himself assent to the view furnished by his correspondent. mr. ball's theory evidently is, "take good care of the turnips, and leave the culture of the boys and girls to chance;" and lord john russell's wise farmer unquestionably thinks that cereal peculations of blackbirds are more dangerous than the robberies committed by neglected children, grown to men. mr. clay, chaplain of preston jail, says: "thirty-six per cent. come into jail unable to say the lord's prayer; and seventy-two per cent. come in such a state of moral debasement that it is in vain to give them instruction, or to teach them their duty, since they cannot understand the meaning of the words used to them." here we have, as cause and effect, the philosophy of mr. ball, and the facts of mr. clay. and, further, this philosophy is as bad in principle, when tried by the rules of political economy, as when subjected to moral and christian tests. mr. ball says there is no machinery by which the farmers can get the weeds out of the land. this may be true; and once there was no machinery by which they could get the seed into the land, or the crops from it. once there was little or no inventive power among the mechanics, or scientific knowledge, or even spirit of inquiry, among the farmers. how have these changes been wrought? by education, surely, and that moral and religious culture for which secular education is a fit preparation. the contributions of learning to labor, in a pecuniary aspect alone, have far exceeded the contributions of labor to learning. it is impossible to enumerate the evidences in support of this statement, but single facts will give us some conception of their aggregated value and force. it was stated by mr. flint, secretary of the massachusetts board of agriculture, in his annual report for , "that the saving to the country, from the improvements in ploughs alone, within the last twenty-five years, has been estimated at no less than ten millions of dollars a year in the work of teams, and one million in the price of ploughs, while the aggregate of the crops is supposed to have been increased by many millions of bushels." from this fact, as the representative of a great class of facts, we may safely draw two conclusions. first, these improvements are the products of learning, the contribution which learning makes to labor, far exceeding in amount any tax which the cause of learning, in schools or out, imposes upon labor. secondly, we see that a given amount of adult labor upon a farm, with the help of the improved implements of industry, will accomplish more in , than the same amount of adult labor, with its attendant juvenile force, could have accomplished in . if we were fully to illustrate and sustain the latter inference, we should be required to review the improvements made in other implements of farming, as well as in ploughs. their positive pecuniary value, when considered in the aggregate, is too vast for general belief; and in england alone it must exceed the anticipated cost of a system of public instruction, say six millions of pounds, or thirty millions of dollars, per year. but learning, as we have defined it, has contributed less to farming than to other departments of labor. the very existence of manufactures presupposes the existence of learning. there is no branch of manufactures without its appropriate machine; and every machine is the product of mind, enlarged and disciplined by some sort of culture. the steam engine, the spinning-jenny, the loom, the cotton-gin, are notable instances of the advantages derived by manufacturing industry from the prevalence of learning. it was stated by chief justice marshall, about thirty years ago, that whitney's cotton-gin had saved five hundred millions of dollars to the country; and the saving, upon the same basis, cannot now be less than one thousand millions of dollars,--a sum too great for the human imagination to conceive. when we contemplate these achievements of mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely, with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty! ancient commerce, if we omit to notice the conjecture that the mariner's compass was in possession of the old phoenician and indian navigators, reproduced, rather than invented, in modern times, did not rest upon any enlarged scientific knowledge; but, in this era, many of the sciences contribute to the extension and prosperity of trade. after what has been accomplished by science, and especially by physical geography, for commerce and navigation, we have reason to expect a system, based upon scientific knowledge and principles, which shall render the highway of nations secure against the disasters that have often befallen those who go down to the sea in ships. science gave to the world the steamship, which promised for a time to engross the entire trade upon the ocean; but science again appears, constructs vessels upon better scientific principles, traces out the path of currents in the water and the air, and thus restores the rival powers of wind and steam to an equality of position in the eye of the merchant. will any one say that all this inures to capital, and leaves the laborer comparatively unrewarded? we are accustomed to use the word prosperity as synonymous with accumulation; and yet, in a true view, a man may be prosperous and accumulate nothing. suppose we contrast two periods in the life of a nation with each other. since the commencement of this century, the wages of a common farm laborer in america have increased seventy-five or one hundred per cent., while the articles necessary and convenient for his use have, upon the whole, diminished in price. admit that there was nothing for accumulation in the first period, and that there is nothing for accumulation now,--is not his condition nevertheless improved? and, if so, has he not participated in the general prosperity? indeed, we may all accept the truth, that there is no exclusiveness in the benefits which learning confers; and this leads me to say, next, that there ought to be no exclusiveness in the enjoyment of educational privileges. in america we agree to this; and yet, confessedly, as a practical result we have not generally attained the end proposed. there are two practical difficulties in the way. first, our aim in a system of public instruction is not high enough; and, secondly, we do not sufficiently realize the importance of educating each individual. our aim is not high enough; and the result, like every other result, is measured and limited by the purpose we have in view. our public schools ought to be so good that private schools for instruction in the ordinary branches would disappear. mr. everett said, in reply to inquiries made by mr. twistleton, "i send my boy to the public school, because i know of none better." it should be the aim of the public to make their schools so good that no citizen, in the education of his children, will pass them by. it is as great a privilege for the wealthy as for the poor to have an opportunity to send their children to good public schools. it is a maxim in education that the teacher must first comprehend the pupil mentally and morally; and might not many of the errors of individual and public life be avoided, if the citizen, from the first, were to have an accurate idea of the world in which he is to live? the demand of labor upon education, as they are connected with every material interest of society, is, that no one shall be neglected. the mind of a nation is its capital. we are accustomed to speak of money as capital; and sometimes we enlarge the definition, and include machinery, tools, flocks, herds, and lands. but for this moment let us do what we have a right to do,--go behind the definitions of lexicographers and political economists, and say, "_capital_ is the producing force of society, and that force is mind." without this force, money is nothing; machinery is nothing; flocks, herds, lands, are nothing. but all these are made valuable and efficient by the power of mind. what we call civilization,--passing from an inferior to a superior condition of existence,--is a mental and moral process. if mind is the capital,--the producing force of society,--what shall we say of the person or community that neglects its improvement? certainly, all that we should say of the miser, and all that was said of the timid servant who buried his talent in the earth. if one mind is neglected, then we fail as a generation, a state, a nation, as members of the human family, to answer the highest purposes of existence. some possible good is unaccomplished, some desirable labor is unperformed, some means of progress is neglected, some evil seed, it may be, is sown, for which this generation must answer to all the successions of men. but let us not yield to the prejudice, though sanctioned by custom, that learning unfits men for the labors of life. the _schools_ may sometimes do this, but _learning_ never. we cannot, however, conceal from our view the fact that this prejudice is a great obstacle to progress, even in new england; an obstacle which may not be overcome without delay and conflict, in many states of this union; and especially in great britain is it an obstacle in the way of those who demand a system of universal education. in the house of commons, mr. drummond opposes a national system of education in this wise: "and, pray, what do you propose to rear your youth for? are you going to train them for statesmen? no. (a laugh.) the honorable gentleman laughs at the notion, and so would i. but you are going to fit them to be--what? why, cotton-spinners and pin-makers, or, if you like, blacksmiths, mere day laborers. these are the men whom you are to teach foreign languages, mathematics, and the notation of music. (hear, hear.) was there ever anything more absurd? it really seems as if god had withdrawn common sense from this house." now, what does this language of mr. drummond mean? does he not intend to say that it is unwise to educate that class of society from which cotton-spinners, pin-makers, blacksmiths, mere day laborers, are taken? is it not his opinion that the business of pin-making is to be perpetuated in some families and classes, and the business of statesmanship is to be perpetuated in others? and, if so, does he not believe that the best condition of society is that which presents divisions based upon the factitious distinctions of birth and fortune? most certainly these questions indicate his opinions, as they indicate the opinions of those who cheered him, and as they also indicate the opinions of a few in this country, who, through ignorance, false education, prejudice, or sympathy with castes and races, fear to educate the laborer, lest he may forsake his calling. with us these fears are infrequent, but they ought not to exist at all. the question in a public sense is not, "from what family or class shall the pin-maker or the statesman be taken?" there is no question at all to be answered. educate the whole people. education will develop every variety of talent, taste, and power. these qualities, under the guidance of the necessities of life and the public judgment, will direct each man to his proper place. if the son of a cotton-spinner become a statesman, it is because statesmanship needs him, and he has some power answering to its wants. and if mr. drummond's son become a cotton-spinner, it is because that is his right place, and the world will be the better and the richer that mr. drummond's son is a cotton-spinner, and that he is a learned man too; but, if mr. drummond's son occupy the place of a statesman because he is mr. drummond's son, though he be no statesman at all himself, then the world is all the worse for the mistake, and poor compensation is it that mr. drummond's son is a learned man in something that he is never called to put in practice. when it is said that the statesmen, or those engaged in the business of government, shall come from one-tenth of the population, is not the state, according to the doctrine of chances, deprived of nine-tenths of its governing force? and may not the same suggestion be made of every other branch of business? but i pass now to the last leading thought, and soon to the conclusion of my address. the great contribution of learning to the laborer is its power, under the lead of christianity, to break down the unnatural distinctions of society, and to render labor of every sort, among all classes, acceptable and honorable. ignorance is the degradation of labor, and when laborers, as a class, are ignorant, their vocation is necessarily shunned by some; and, being shunned by some, it is likely to be despised by others. wherever the laboring population is in a condition of positive, or, by a broad distinction, of comparative ignorance, society will always divide itself into two, and oftentimes into three classes. we shall find the dominant class, the servient class, and then, generally, the despised class; the dominant class, comparatively intelligent, possessing the property, administering the government, giving to social life its laws, and enjoying the fruits of labor which they do not perform; the servient class, unwittingly in a state of slavery, whether nominally bond or free, having little besides physical force to promote their own comfort or to contribute to the general prosperity, and furnishing security in their degradation for a final submission to whatever may be required of them; and last, a despised class, too poor to live without labor, and too proud to live by labor, assuming a position not accorded to them, and finally yielding to a social and political ostracism even more degrading, to a sensitive mind, than the servient condition they with so much effort seek to shun. all this is the fruit of ignorance; all this may be removed by general learning. if all men are learned, the work of the world will be performed by learned men; and why, under such circumstances, should not every vocation that is honest be equally honorable? but if this, in a broad view, seem utopian, can we not agree that learning is the only means by which a poor man can escape from his poverty? and, if it furnish certain means of escape for one man, will it not furnish equally certain means of escape for many? and if so, is not learning a general remedy for the inequalities among men? education and crime. [extract from the twenty-first annual report of the secretary of the massachusetts board of education.] the public schools, in their relations to the morals of the pupils and to the morality of the community, are attracting a large share of attention. in some sections of the country the system is boldly denounced on account of its immoral tendencies. in states where free schools exist there are persons who doubt their utility; and occasionally partisan or religious leaders appear who deny the existence of any public duty in regard to education, or who assert and maintain the doctrine that free schools are a common danger. as the people of this commonwealth are not followers of these prophets of evil, nor believers in their predictions, there is but slight reason for discussion among us. it is not probable that a large number of the citizens of massachusetts entertain doubts of the power and value of our institutions of learning, of every grade, to resist evil and promote virtue, through the influence they exert. but, as there is nothing in our free-school system that shrinks from light, or investigation even, i have selected from the annual reports everything which they contain touching the morality of the institution. in so doing, i have had two objects in view. first, to direct attention to the errors and wrongs that exist; and, secondly, to state the opinion, and enforce it as i may be able, that the admitted evils found in the schools are the evils of domestic, social, municipal, and general life, which are sometimes chastened, mitigated, or removed, but never produced, nor even cherished, by our system of public instruction. in the extracts from the school committees' reports there are passages which imply some doubt of the moral value of the system; but it is our duty to bear in mind that these reports were prepared and presented for the praiseworthy purpose of arousing an interest in the removal of the evils that are pointed out. the writers are contemplating the importance of making the schools a better means of moral and intellectual culture; but there is no reason to suppose that in any case a comparison is instituted, even mentally, between the state of society as it appears at present and the condition that would follow the abandonment of our system of public instruction. there are general complaints that the manners of children and youth have changed within thirty or fifty years; that age and station do not command the respect which was formerly manifested, and that some license in morals has followed this license in manners. the change in manners cannot be denied; but the alleged change in morals is not sustained by a great amount of positive evidence. the customs of former generations were such that children often manifested in their exterior deportment a deference which they did not feel, while at present there may be more real respect for station, and deference for age and virtue, than are exhibited in juvenile life. in this explanation, if it be true, there is matter for serious thought; but i should not deem it wise to encourage a mere outward show of the social virtues, which have no springs of life in the affections. and, notwithstanding the tone of the reports to which i have called attention, and notwithstanding my firm conviction that many moral defects are found in the schools, i am yet confident that their moral progress is appreciable and considerable. in the first place, teachers, as a class, have a higher idea of their professional duties, in respect to moral and intellectual culture. many of them are permanently established in their schools. they are persons of character in society, with positions to maintain, and they are controlled by a strong sense of professional responsibility to parents and to the public. it has been, to some extent, the purpose and result of teachers' associations, teachers' institutes, and normal schools, to create in the body of teachers a better opinion concerning their moral obligations in the work of education. it must also be admitted that the changes in school government have been favorable to learning and virtue. for, while it is not assumed that all schools are, or can be, controlled by moral means only, it is incontrovertible that a government of mild measures is superior to one of force. this superiority is as apparent in morals as in scholarly acquisitions. it is rare that a teacher now boasts of his success over his pupils in physical contests; but such claims were common a quarter of a century ago. the change that has been wrought is chiefly moral, and in its influence we find demonstrative evidence of the moral superiority of the schools of the present over those of any previous period of this century. before we can comprehend the moral work which the schools have done and are doing, we must perceive and appreciate with some degree of truthfulness the changes that have occurred in general life within a brief period of time. the activity of business, by which fathers have been diverted from the custody and training of their children; the claims of fashion and society, which have led to some neglect of family government on the part of mothers; the aggregation of large, populations in cities and towns, always unfavorable to the physical and moral welfare of children; the comparative neglect of agriculture, and the consequent loss of moral strength in the people, are all facts to be considered when we estimate the power of the public school to resist evil and to promote good. if, in addition to these unfavorable facts and tendencies, our educational system is prejudicial to good morals, we may well inquire for the human agency powerful enough to resist the downward course of new england and american civilization. to be sure, christianity remains; but it must, to some extent, use human institutions as means of good; and the assertion that the schools are immoral is equivalent to a declaration that our divine religion is practically excluded from them. this declaration is not in any just sense true. the duty of daily devotional exercises is always inculcated upon teachers, and the leading truths and virtues of christianity are made, as far as possible, the daily guides of teachers and pupils. the tenets of particular sects are not taught; but the great truths of christianity, which are received by christians generally, are accepted and taught by a large majority of committees and teachers. it is not claimed that the public schools are religious institutions; but they recognize and inculcate those fundamental truths which are the basis of individual character, and the best support of social, religious, and political life. the statement that the public schools are demoralizing must be true, if true at all, for one of three reasons. either because all education is demoralizing; or, secondly, because the particular education given in the public schools is so; or, thirdly, because the public-school system is corrupting, and consequently taints all the streams of knowledge that flow through or emanate from it. for, if the public system is unobjectionable as a system, and education is not in itself demoralizing, then, of course, no ground remains for the charge that i am now considering. i. _is all education demoralizing?_ an affirmative answer to this question implies so much that no rational man can accept it. it is equivalent to the assertion that barbarism is a better condition than civilization, and that the progress of modern times has proceeded upon a misconception of the true ideal perfection of the human race. as no one can be found who will admit that his happiness has been marred, his powers limited, or his life degraded, by education, so there is no process of logic that can commend to the human understanding the doctrine that bodies of men are either less happy or virtuous for the culture of the intellect. i am not aware of any human experience that conflicts with this view; for individual cases of criminals who have been well educated prove nothing in themselves, but are to be considered as facts in great classes of facts which indicate the principles and conduct of bodies of men who are subject to similar influences. in fact, the statistics to which i have had access tend to show that crime diminishes as intelligence increases. on this point the experience of great britain is probably more definite, and, of course, more valuable, than our own. the aberdeen feeding schools were established in , and during the ten years succeeding the commitments to the jails of children under twelve years of age were as follows:[ ] in , in , , , , , , , , , ___ ___ in the work of mr. hill it is also stated that "the number of children under twelve committed for crime to the aberdeen prisons, during the last six years, was as follows: males. females. total. - , - , - , - , - , - , "it will be observed that in the last three years there has been a great increase of boy crime, contemporaneously with an almost total absence of girl crime, though formerly the amount of the latter was considerable. now, since this extraordinary difference coïncides in point of time with the fact of full girls' schools and half empty boys' schools, the inference can hardly be avoided that the two facts bear the relation of cause and effect, and that, so far from the late increase of youthful crime in aberdeen any-wise impairing the soundness of the principle on which the schools are based, it is its strongest confirmation. in moral as in physical science, when the objections to a theory are, upon further investigation, explained by the theory itself, they become the best evidence of its truth. indeed, it is proved, by the experience, not only of aberdeen, but, as far as i have been able to ascertain, of every town in scotland in which industrial schools have been established, that the number of children in the schools and the number in the jail are like the two ends of a scale-beam; as the one rises the other falls, and _vice versa_. "the following list of imprisonments of children attending the schools of the bristol ragged school union shows considerable progress in the right direction: ____________________________________________________________________ | .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| _____________|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____| imprisoned, | | | | | | | - | | - | _____________|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____| imprisonments in } , averaging . per year on number of the first four years} children. in subsequent five } , averaging . per year on number of years, } children. ____ difference, . . : . :: : . . "thus," says mr. thornton, "it appears that the diminution of the average annual number of children attending our schools imprisoned in the latter period of five years, as compared with the annual average of the previous four years, is ninety-six per cent.--a striking fact, which is, i think, a manifest proof of the benefit conferred on them by the religious and secular instruction they receive in our schools, or, at the very least, of the advantages of rescuing them from the temptations of idleness, and from evil companionship and example." i also copy, from the work already referred to, an extract from a paper on the reformatory institutions in and near bristol, by mary carpenter: "in numberless instances children may be seen growing up decently, who owe their only training and instruction to the school. young persons are noticed in regular work, who, before they attended the ragged schools, were vagrants, or even thieves. not unfrequently a visit is paid at the school by a respectable young man, who proves to have been a wild and troublesome scholar of former times." mr. hill, recorder of birmingham, in a charge to the grand jury, made in , speaking of the means of repressing crime, says: "it is to education, in the large and true meaning of the word, that we must all look as the means of striking at the root of the evil. indeed, of the close connection between ignorance and crime the calendar which i hold in my hand furnishes a striking example. each prisoner has been examined as to the state of his education, and the result is set down opposite his name. it appears, then, that of forty-three prisoners only one can read and write well. the majority can neither read nor write at all; and the remainder, with the solitary exception which i have noted down, are said to read and write imperfectly; which necessarily implies that they have not the power of using those great elements of knowledge for any practical object. of forty-three prisoners, forty-two, then, are destitute of instruction." these authorities are not cited because they refer to schools that answer in character to the public schools of massachusetts, for the latter are far superior in the quality of their pupils, and in the opportunities given for intellectual and moral education; but these cases and opinions are presented for the purpose of showing what has been done for the improvement of children and the repression of crime under the most unfavorable circumstances that exist in a civilized community. if such benign results have followed the establishment of schools of an inferior character, is it unreasonable to claim that education and the processes of education, however imperfect they may be, are calculated to increase the sum of human progress, virtue, and happiness? ii. _is the particular education given in the public schools unfavorable to the morals of the pupils, and, consequently, to the morality of the community?_ i have already presented a view of the moral and religious education given in the schools, and it only remains to consider the culture that is in its leading features intellectual. it may be said, speaking generally, that education is a training and development of the faculties, so as to make them harmonize in power, and in their relations to each other. among other things, the ability to read is acquired in the public schools. in the individual, this is a power for good. it opens to the mind and heart the teachings of the sacred scriptures; it secures the companionship of the great, the wise, and the good, of every age; and it is a possession that, in all cases, must be the foundation of those scientific acquisitions, intellectual, moral, and natural, which show the beneficence and power of the creator, and indicate the fact and the law of human responsibility. the natural and general effect of the sciences taught in the schools is an illustration of the last statement. moreover, the mere presence of a child, though he took no part in the studies of the school, is to him a moral lesson. he feels the force of government, he acquires the habit of obedience, and, in time, he comprehends the reason of the rules that are established. this discipline is essentially moral, and furnishes some basis, though partial and unsatisfactory, for the proper discharge of the duties of life. but it is to be remembered that the power of the school is but in its beginning when the presence of a pupil is recognized. the constancy and punctuality of attendance required by all judicious parents and faithful teachers are important moral lessons, whose influence can never be destroyed. the fixedness of purpose that is required, and is essential in school, remains as though it were a part of the nature of the child and the man. school-life strengthens habits of industry when they exist, and creates them when they do not. it is, indeed, the only means, of universal application, that is competent to train children in habits of industry. private schools can never furnish this training; for large numbers of children, by the force of circumstances, are deprived of the tuition of such schools. business life cannot furnish this training; for the habits of the child are usually moulded, if not hardened, before he arrives at an age when he can be constantly employed in any industrial vocation. the public school is no doubt justly chargeable with neglects and omissions; but its power for good, measured by the character of the education now furnished, is certainly very great. it inculcates habits of regularity, punctuality, constancy, and industry, in the pursuits of business; through literature and the sciences in their elements, and, under some circumstances, by an advanced course of study, it leads the pupil towards the fountain of life and wisdom; and, by the moral and religious instruction daily given, some preparation is made for the duties of life and the temptations of the world. iii. _is the public school system, as a system, in itself necessarily corrupting?_ as preliminary to the answer to be given to this question, it is well to consider what the public-school system is. . every inhabitant is required to contribute to its support. . it contemplates the education of every child, regardless of any distinction of society or nature. . the system is subject in many respects to the popular will; and ultimately its existence and character are dependent upon the public judgment. . in the massachusetts schools, the daily reading of the scriptures is required. the consideration of these topics will conclude my remarks upon the general subject of the moral influence of the american system of public instruction. in new england it is very unusual to hear the right of the state to provide for the support of schools by general taxation called in question; but i am satisfied, from private conversations, and from occasional public statements, that there are leading minds in some sections of the country that are yet unconvinced of the moral soundness of the basis on which a system of public instruction necessarily rests. taxation is simply an exercise of the right of the whole to take the property of an individual; and this right can be exercised justly in those cases only where the application of the property so taken is, morally speaking, to a public use. the judgment of the public determines the legality of the proceeding; but it is possible that in some cases a public judgment might be secured which could not be supported by a process of moral reasoning. on what moral grounds, then, does the right of taxation for educational objects rest? i answer, first, education diminishes crime. the evidence in support of this statement has already been presented. it is a manifest individual duty to make sacrifices for this object; and, as every crime is an injury, not only to him who is the subject of it, but to every member of society, the prevention of crime becomes a public as well as an individual duty. the conviction of a criminal is a public duty; and, under all governments of law, it is undertaken at the public charge. offences are not individual merely; they are against society also, inasmuch as it is the right of society that all its members shall behave themselves well. and, if it is the right of society that its members shall behave themselves well, is it not the duty of society to so provide for their education that each individual part may meet the demand which the whole body asserts? and, further, as a majority of persons cannot individually provide for their own protection, it is the duty of society, or the state, or the government, to furnish the needed protection in the most economical and effective manner possible. the state has no moral right to jeopard property, life, and reputation, when, by a different policy, all these might be secure; nor has the state a moral right to make the security furnished, whether perfect or not, unnecessarily expensive. it is the dictate of reason and the experience of governments that the most effectual method of repressing crime is to diminish the number of criminals; and, though punitive measures may accomplish something, our chief reliance must be upon the education and training of children and youth. the facts drawn from the experience of england and scotland, which have been quoted, lead to the conclusion that schools diminish the number of criminals, and consequently lessen the amount of crime; but i think it proper to add some extracts from a communication made, in august, , by mr. dunne, chief constable of newcastle-upon-tyne, to the secretary of the national reformatory union.[ ] "i know, from my own personal knowledge and observation, that, since parental responsibility has been enforced in the district, under the direction of the secretary of state, the number of juvenile criminals in the custody of the police has decreased one-half. i know that many of the parents, who were in the habit of sending their children into the streets for the purposes of stealing, begging, and plunder, have quite discontinued that practice, and several of the children so used, and brought up as thieves and mendicants, are now at some of the free schools of the town; others are at work, and thereby obtain an honest livelihood; and, so far as i can ascertain, they seem to be thoroughly altered, and appear likely to become good and honest members of society. i have, for my own information, conversed with some of the boys so altered, and, during the conversation i had with them, they declared that they derived the greatest happiness and satisfaction from their change in life. i don't at all doubt the truth of these statements, for their evident improvement and individual circumstances fully bear them out; and i believe them to be really serious in all they say, and truly anxious to become honest and respectable. i attribute, in a great measure, this salutary change to the effects arising in many respects from the establishment of reformatory schools; but i have more particularly found that greater advantages have emanated from those institutions since the parents of the children confined in them have been made to pay contributions to their maintenance; for it appears beyond doubt that the effect of the latter has been to induce the parents of other young criminals to withdraw them from the streets, and, instead of using them for the purposes of crime, they seem to take an interest in their welfare. and i know that many of them are now really anxious to get such employment for their children as will enable them to obtain a livelihood; and it is my opinion that the example thus set to older and more desperate criminals, belonging in many instances to the same family as the juvenile thief, has had the effect of reforming them also; for many of them have left off their course of crime, and are now living by honest labor. the result is that serious crime has considerably decreased in this district, so much so that there were only six cases for trial at the assizes, whereas, at the previous assizes, the average number of cases was from twenty-five to thirty, which fact was made the subject of much comment and congratulation by mr. justice willes, the presiding judge." these remarks relate chiefly to the reformatory schools, but we know that the prevention of crime by education is much easier than its reformation by the same means. indeed, it is the result of the experience of massachusetts that the necessity for reform schools has in a large degree arisen from neglect of the public schools. it is stated in the tenth annual report of the chaplain of the state reform school that of nineteen hundred and nine boys admitted since the establishment of the institution, thirteen hundred and thirty-four are known to have been truants. it is also quite probable that the number reported as truants is really less than the facts warrant. it may not be out of place to suggest, in this connection, that when a boy sentenced to the reform school is known to have been guilty of truancy, if the parents were subjected to some additional burdens on that account, the cause of education would be promoted, and the number of criminals in the community would be diminished. from the views and facts presented, as well as from the daily observation and experience of men, i assume that ignorance is the ally of crime, and that education is favorable to virtue. it is also the result of experience and the dictate of reason that general taxation is the only means by which universal education can be secured. all other plans and theories will prove partial in their application. if, then, it is the duty of the state to protect itself against crime, and of course to diminish the number of criminals; if education is the most efficient means for securing these results; if this education must be universal in order to be thoroughly effective; if the state is the only agent or instrumentality of sufficient power to establish schools and furnish education for all; and if general taxation is the only means which the state itself can command, is not every inhabitant justly required and morally bound to contribute to the support of a system of public instruction? it will not necessarily happen that public schools will furnish to every child and youth the desired amount of education. professional schools, classical schools, and academies of various grades, will be continued; but there is an amount of intellectual and moral training needed by every child which can be best given in the public school. this training in the public schools ought to be carried much further than it usually is. in the city of newburyport, as i have been informed, there are no exceptions to the custom of educating all the children of the town in the public schools up to the moment when young men enter college. in large towns and cities there is no excuse for the existence of private schools to do the work now done in such schools as those of newburyport and other places where equal educational privileges exist. the chief objection brought against the public school, touching its morality, is derived from the fact that children who are subject to proper moral influences at home are brought in contact with others who are already practised in juvenile vices, if they have not been guilty of petty crimes. i am happy to believe that this statement is not true of many new england communities. the objection was considered in the last annual report,--it has been often considered elsewhere; and i do not propose to repeat at length the views which are entertained by the friends of public education. i have, however, to suggest that while this objection applies with some force to the public school, it applies also to every other school, and that the evil is the least dangerous when the pupil is intrusted to the care of a qualified teacher, who is personally responsible to the public for his conduct, and when the child is also subject to the restraints, and influenced by the daily example and teachings, of the parents. moreover, it is to be remembered that the great value of education, in a moral aspect, is the development of the power to resist temptation. this power is not the growth of seclusion; and while neither the teacher nor the parent ought wantonly to expose the child to vicious influences, the school may be even a better preparation for the world from the fact that temptation has there been met, resisted, and overcome. it is also to be remembered that the judgment of parents in a matter so difficult and delicate as a comparison between their own children and other children would not always prove trustworthy nor just; and that a judgment of parties not interested would prove eminently fruitful of dissatisfaction and bitterness. if all are to be educated, it only remains, then, that they be educated together, subject to the general rule of society, that when a member is dangerous to the safety or peace of his associates, he is to be excluded or restrained. nor is this necessity of association destitute of moral advantages. if the comparatively good were separated from the relatively vicious, it is not improbable that the latter would soon fall into a state of barbarity. it seems to be the law of the school and of the world that the most rapid progress is made when the weight of public sentiment is on the side of improvement and virtue. it is not necessary for me to remark that such a public sentiment exists in every town and school district of the state; but who would take the responsibility in any of these communities, great or small, of separating the virtuous classes from the dangerous classes? parents, from the force of their affections, are manifestly incompetent to do this; and those who are not parents are probably equally incompetent. but, if it were honestly accomplished, who would be responsible for the crushing effects of the measure upon those who were thus excluded from the presence and companionship of the comparatively virtuous? these, often the victims of vicious homes, need more than others the influence and example of the good; and it should be among the chief satisfactions of those who are able to train their own children in the ways of virtue, that thereby a healthful influence is exerted upon the less fortunate of their race. there is also in this course a wise selfishness; for, although _children_ may be separated from each other, the circumstances of maturer years will often make the virtuous subject to the influence of the vicious. the safety of society, considered individually or collectively, is not in the virtuous training of any part, however large the proportion, but in the virtuous training of all. i cannot deem it wise policy, whether parental or public, that takes the child from the school on account of the immoral associations that are ordinarily found there, or, on the other hand, that drives the vicious or unfortunate from the presence of those who are comparatively pure. when it is considered that the school is often the only refuge of the unhappy subject of orphanage, or the victim of evil family influences, it seems an unnecessary cruelty to withhold the protection, encouragement, and support, which may be so easily and profitably furnished. it is said that a sparrow pursued by a hawk took refuge in the bosom of a member of the sovereign assembly of athens, and that the harsh areopagite threw the trembling bird from him with such violence that it was killed on the spot. the assembly was filled with indignation at the cruelty of the deed; the author of it was arraigned as an alien to that sentiment of mercy so necessary to the administration of justice, and by the unanimous suffrages of his colleagues was degraded from the senatorial dignity which he had so much dishonored. it does not seem necessary to offer an argument in support of the position that the public school is not unfavorably affected, morally, by the fact that it is subject to the popular judgment. this judgment can be rendered only at stated times, and under the forms and solemnities of law. the history of public schools would probably furnish but few instances of wrong in this respect. the people are usually sensitive in regard to the moral character of teachers; they contribute liberally for the support of the schools, are anxious for their improvement, and there is no safer depositary of a trust that is essential to a nation in which is the hope of freedom and free institutions. and, last, a school cannot be truly said to be destitute of moral character and influence in which the sacred scriptures are daily read. the observance of this requirement is a recognition of the existence of the supreme being, of the bible as containing a record of his will concerning men, and of the common duty of rational creatures to live in obedience to the obligations of morality and religion. it has been no part of my purpose, in this discussion of the public school as an institution fitted to promote morality, to deny the existence of serious defects, or to screen them from the eyes of men. the public school needs a more thorough discipline, a purer morality, a clearer conception and a more practical recognition of the truths of christianity. but, viewed as a human institution, it claims the general gratitude for the good it has already accomplished. the public school was established in massachusetts that "learning might not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth;" and, in some measure, at least, the early expectation thus quaintly expressed has been realized. learning has ever been cherished and honored among us. the means of education have been the possession of all; and the enjoyment of these means, often inadequate and humble, has developed a taste for learning, which has been gratified in higher institutions; and thus continually have the resources of the state been magnified, and its influence in the land has been efficient in all that concerns the welfare of the human race on the american continent. footnotes: [ ] the repression of crime. by m. d. hill. [ ] the repression of crime, pp. , . reformation of children. [address at the inauguration of william e. starr, superintendent of the state reform school at westborough.] neither the invitation of the trustees nor my own convenience will permit a detailed examination of the topics which the occasion suggests; and it is my purpose to address myself to those who are assembled to participate in the exercises of the day, trusting to familiar and unobserved visits for other and better opportunities for conference with the inmates of the institution. as the mariner, though cheered by genial winds and canopied by cloudless skies, tests and marks his position and course by repeated observations, so we now desire to note the progress of this humanity-freighted vessel in its voyage over an uncertain sea, yet, as we trust, toward lands of perpetual security and peace. all are voyagers on the sea of life. some, with the knowledge of ancient days only, grope their way by headlands, or trust themselves occasionally to the guidance of the sun or the stars; while others, with the chart and compass of the christian era, move confidently on their course, attracted by the source and centre of all good. and it is a blessing of this state of existence, though it may sometimes seem to be a curse, that the choice between good and evil yet remains. the wisdom of a right choice is here manifested in the benevolence of this foundation. the state reform school for boys has now enjoyed eight full years of life and progress; and, though we cannot estimate nor measure the good it may have induced, or the evil it may have prevented, yet enough of its history and results is known to justify the course of its patrons, both public and private, and to warrant the ultimate realization of their early cherished hopes. the state is most honored in the honor awarded to its sons; and the name of lyman, now and evermore associated with a work of benevolence and reform, will always command the admiration of the citizens of the commonwealth, and stimulate the youth of the school to acquire and practise those virtues which their generous patron cherished in his own life and honored in others. governor washburn, in the dedication address, said, "we commend this school, with its officers and inmates, to a generous and grateful public, with the trust that the future lives of the young, who may be sent hither for correction and reform, may prove the crowning glory of an enterprise so auspiciously begun." since these words were uttered, and this hope, the hope of many hearts, was expressed, nearly two thousand boys, charged with various offences,--many of them petty, and others serious or even criminal,--have been admitted to the school; and the chaplain, in his report for the year , says that "the institution will be instrumental in saving a majority of those who come under its fostering care." this opinion, based, no doubt, upon the experience which the chaplain and other officers of the institution had had, is to be taken as possessing a substantial basis of truth; and it at once suggests important reflections. massachusetts is relieved of the presence of a thousand criminal, or, at best, viciously disposed persons. a thousand active, capable, industrious, productive, full-grown men have been created; or, rather, a thousand consumers of the wealth of others, enemies of the public order and peace, have been transformed into intelligent supporters of social life, into generous, faithful guardians of public virtue and tranquillity. nor would the influences of this degraded population, if unreformed, have ceased with its own existence; every succeeding generation must have gathered somewhat of a harvest of crime and woe. a thousand boys, hardened by neglect, educated in vice, and shunned by the virtuous, would, as men, have been efficient missionaries of lawlessness, wrong, and crime. and who shall estimate how much their reform adds, in its results, to the wealth, the intellectual, moral, and religious character, of the state? the criminal class is never a producing class; and the labor of a thousand men here reclaimed, if estimated for the period of twenty years only, is equal to the labor of twenty thousand men for one year, which, at a hundred dollars each, yields two millions of dollars. the pecuniary advantages of this school, as of all schools, we may estimate; but there are better and higher considerations, in the elevated intellectual, moral, and religious life of the state, that are too pure, too ethereal, to be weighed in the balance against the grosser possessions and acquisitions of society. we thus get glimpses of the prophetic wisdom which led mr. lyman to say, "i do not look on this school as an experiment; on the contrary, it strikes me that it is an institution which will produce decidedly beneficial results, not only for the present day, but for many years to come. i do not, therefore, think that it should, even now, be treated in any respect in the light of an experiment, to be abandoned if not successful; for, if the school is introduced to public notice on no better footing and with no more preparation than usually attend trial-schemes of most kinds, the probability is that it will fail, considering the peculiar difficulties of the case." here is a high order of faith in its application to human affairs; but mr. lyman saw, also, that the work to be performed must encounter obstacles, and that its progress toward a perfect result would be slow. these obstacles have been encountered; and yet the progress has been more rapid than the words of our founder imply. but are we not at liberty to forget the trials, crosses, and perplexities, of this movement, as we behold the fruits, already maturing, of the wisdom and christian benevolence of our honored commonwealth? we are assembled to review the past, and to gather from it strength and courage for the future; and we may with propriety congratulate all, whether present or absent, who have been charged with the administration of this school, and have contributed their share, however humble, to promote these benign results. and we ought, also, to remember those, whether living or dead, whose faith and labors laid the foundation on which the state has built. of the dead, i mention lyman, lamb, denny, woodward, shaw, and greenleaf,--all of whom, with money, counsel, or personal service, contributed to the plan, progress, and completion, of the work. the good that they have done is not interred with their bones; and their example will yet find many imitators, as men more generally and more perfectly realize the importance of faith in childhood and youth, as the element of a true faith in our race. if this enterprise, in the judgment of its founder, was not an experiment ten years ago, it cannot be so regarded now; yet the public will look with anxiety, though with hope, upon every change of the officers of the institution. the trustees having appointed a new superintendent, he now assumes the great responsibility. it may not be second to any in the state; yet a man of energy, who is influenced by a desire to do good, and who will not measure his reward by present emoluments or temporary fame, can bear steadily and firmly the weight put upon him. the superintendent elect has been a teacher elsewhere, and he is to be a teacher here also. his work will not, in all particulars, correspond with the work that he has left; yet the principles of government and education are in substance the same. the head of a school always occupies a position of influence; the characters of the children and youth confided to him are in a great degree subject to his control. here the teacher is neither aided nor impeded by the usual home influences. this institution is at once a home and a school; and its head has the united power and responsibility of the parent and the teacher. here are to be combined the social and moral influences of home, the religious influences of the sunday-school, with the intellectual and moral training of the public school. he who to-day enters upon this work should have both faith and courage. he is to deal with the unfortunate rather than with the exceptional cases of humanity; for all these are children whom the father of the race, in his providence, has confided to earthly parents to be educated for a temporal and an immortal existence. that these parents, through crime, ignorance, indolence, carelessness, or misfortune, have failed in their work, is no certain evidence that we are to fail in ours. may we not hope to see in this school the kindness, consideration, affection, and forethought, of the parent, without the delusion which sometimes causes the father or mother to treat the vices of the child as virtues, to be encouraged? and may we not expect from the superintendent, to whom, practically, the discipline of the school is confided, one characteristic of good government, not always, it is feared, found in punitive and reformatory institutions? i speak of the attributes of equality, uniformity, and certainty, in the administration of the law. to be sure, a school, a prison, or a state, will suffer when its code is lax; and it will also suffer when its system is oppressive or sanguinary; but these peculiarities in themselves do not so often, in any community, produce dissatisfaction, disorder, and violence, as an unequal, partial, and uncertain administration of the laws. if at times the laws are administered strictly according to the letter, and if at other times they are reluctantly enforced or altogether disregarded; if it can never be known beforehand whether a violation is to be followed by the prescribed penalty--especially if this uncertainty becomes systematic, and a portion are favored, while the remainder are required to answer strictly for all their delinquencies; and if, above all, these favored ones are recognized as sentinels, or spies, or informers in the service of the officers,--then not only will the spirit of insubordination manifest itself, but that spirit may ripen into alienations, feuds, and personal enmities, dangerous to the prosperity of the institution. here the scales of justice should be evenly balanced, and the boy should learn, from his own daily experience, to measure equal and exact justice unto others. i do not speak of systems of government: they are essential, no doubt; but they are not to be regarded as of the first importance in institutions for punishment or reformation. establish as wise a system as you can; but never trust to that alone. administer the system that you have with all the equality, uniformity, and certainty, that you can command. as a general truth, it may be said that the law is respected when these qualities are exhibited in its administration; and, when these qualities are wanting, the spirit of obedience is driven from the hearts and minds of the people. but we are not to rely altogether, nor even chiefly, upon the visible weapons of authority. especially must the mind and heart of childhood and youth be approached and quickened and strengthened by judicious appeals to the sentiments of veneration and love, and to the principles of the christian faith. in this institution, one serious obstacle is present; yet it may be overcome by energy, industry, and a spirit of benevolence. i speak of the large number of inmates to be superintended by one person. men act in masses for the removal of general evils; but the reformation of children must be individual, and to a great extent dependent upon the agency, or at least upon the coöperation, of the subjects of it. it is not easy for the superintendent to make himself acquainted with the persons and familiar with the lives of six hundred boys; yet this knowledge is quite essential to the exercise of a salutary influence over them. he may be aided by the subordinate officers of the institution; and that aid, under any circumstances, he will need: but, after all, his own influence and power for good will be measured by the extent of his personal acquaintance with the inmates as individuals. first, then, government is essential to this school; not a reign of terror, but a government whose majesty, power, equality, certainty, uniformity, and consequent justice, shall be experienced by all alike; and, being experienced by all alike, will be respected, reverenced, and obeyed. and next the social, intellectual, and moral influences of the school and the home should be combined and mingled, or else the visible forms of government become a skeleton, merely indicating the figure, structure, and outline, of the perfect body, but destitute of the vital principle which alone could render it of any value to itself or to the world. this institution is not an end, but a means. the home itself is only a preparatory school for life. this is a substitute for the home, but is not, and never can be, its equal. it therefore follows that a boy should be removed whenever a home can be secured, especially if his reformation has been previously so far accomplished as to render the completion of the work probable. a great trust has been confided to the officers of the reform school; but the power to do good is usually proportionate to the responsibility imposed upon the laborer. in this view, much will be expected; but the expectations formed ought not to relate so much to results as to the wisdom and humanity with which the operations are conducted. massachusetts is charged with the support of a great number of charitable and reformatory institutions. their necessity springs from the defects of social life; therefore their existence is a comparative rather than a positive good; and he is the truest friend of the race who does most to remove the causes of poverty, ignorance, insanity, mental and physical weakness, moral waywardness, and crime. the care and reformation of the neglected and exposed classes of children. [an address delivered at the opening of the state industrial school for girls, at lancaster, massachusetts.] in man's limited view, the moral world presents a sad contrast to the natural. the natural world is harmonious in all its parts; but the moral world is the theatre of disturbing and conflicting forces, whose laws the finite mind cannot comprehend. the majesty and uniformity of the planetary revolutions, which bring day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, know no change. worlds and systems of worlds are guided by a law of the infinite mind; and so, through unnumbered years and myriads of years, birth and death, creation and decay, decrees whose fixedness enables finite minds to predict the future, and rules whose elasticity is seen in a never-ending variety of nature, all alike prove that the sin of disobedience is upon man alone. but, if man only, of all the varied creations of earth, may fall from his high estate, so to him only is given the power to rise again, and feebly, yet with faith, advance towards the divine excellence. this, then, is the great thought of the occasion, to be accepted by the hearts and illustrated in the lives of all. the fallen may be raised up, the exposed may be shielded, the wanderers may be called home, or else this house is built upon the sand, and doomed to fall when the rains shall descend, the floods come, and the winds blow. the returning autumn, with its harvest of sustenance and wealth, bids us contemplate again the mystery and harmony of the natural world. the tree and the herb produce seed, and the seed again produces the tree and the herb, each after its kind. there is a continued production and reproduction; but of responsibility there is none. as there is no intelligent violation of law, there is no accountability. man, however, is an intelligent, dependent, fallible, and, of course, responsible being. he is responsible for himself, responsible in some degree for his fellow-man. there is not a chapter in the history of the human race, nor a day of its experience, which does not show that the individual members are dependent upon, and responsible to, each other. this great fact, of six thousand years' duration, at once presents to us the necessity for government, and defines the limits of its powers and duties. government, then, is a union of all for the protection and welfare of each. this definition presents, in its principles and statement, the highest form of human government,--a form not yet perfectly realized on earth. it sets forth rather what government ought to be, than what it has been or is. too often historical governments, and living governments even, may be defined as a union of a few for their benefit, and for the oppression of many. the reason of man has not often been consulted in their formation, and the interests and principles of the masses have usually been disregarded in their administration. a true government is at once representative, patriarchal, and paternal. in the path of duty for this day and this occasion, we shall consider the last-named quality only,--governments should be paternal. the paternal government is devoted to the elevation and improvement of its members, with no ulterior motive except the necessary results of internal purity and strength. every government is, in some degree, no doubt, paternal. nor are those governments to be regarded as eminently so, where the people are most controlled in their private, personal affairs. these are mere despotisms; and despotism is not a just nor necessary element of the paternal relation. that government is most truly paternal which does most to enable its citizens or subjects to regulate their own conduct, and determine their relations to others. in the midst of general darkness, the paternal element of government has been a light to the human race. it modified the patriarchal slavery of the hebrews, relieved the iron rule of sparta, made european feudalism the hope of civilization in the dark ages, and the basis of its coming glories in the near future; and it now leads men to look with toleration upon the despotism of russia, and with kindness upon the simplicity and arrogance of the celestial empire. we complain, justly enough, that the world is governed too much; and yet, in a great degree, we neglect the means by which the proper relations of society could be preserved, and the world be governed less. in what works are the so-called christian governments principally engaged? are they not seeking, by artifice, diplomacy, and war, to extend national boundaries, preserve national honor, or enforce nice distinctions against the timid and weak? yet it is plain that a nation is powerful according to the character of the living elements of which it is composed. if it is disorganized morally, uncultivated in intellect, ignorant, indolent, or wasteful in its labor, its claims to greatness are destitute of solid foundation, and it must finally yield to those that have sought and gained power by the elevation of the individual as the element of the nation. that nation, then, is wise, and destined to become truly great, which cultivates the best elements of individual life and character. it is not enough to read the parable of the lost sheep, and of the ninety and nine that went not astray, and then say, "even so, it is not the will of your father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish," while the means of salvation, as regards the life of this world merely, are very generally neglected. such neglect is followed by error and crime; and error and crime are followed by judgment not always tempered with mercy. while human governments debate questions of war and peace, of trade and revenue, of annexations with ceremony, and appropriations of territory without ceremony, who shall answer to the governor and judge of all for the neglect, indifference, and oppression, which beget and foster the delinquencies of childhood, and harden the criminals of adult life? and who shall answer for those distinctions of caste and systems of labor which so degrade and famish masses of human beings, that the divine miracle of the feeding of the five thousand must be multiplied many times over before the truths of nature or revelation can be received into teachable minds or susceptible hearts? and who shall answer for the hereditary poverty, ignorance and crime, which constitute a marked feature of english life, and are distinctly visible upon the face of american civilization? these questions may point with sufficient distinctness to the sources of the evils enumerated; but we are not to assume that mere human governments can furnish an adequate and complete remedy. yet this admitted inability to do everything is no excuse for neglecting those things which are plainly within their power. taking upon themselves the parental character, forgetting that they have wrongs to avenge, and seeking reformation through kindness, criminals and the causes of crime will diminish, if they do not disappear. this is the responsibility of the nations, and the claim now made upon them. individual civilization and refinement have always been in advance of national; and national character is the mirrored image of the individual characters, not excepting the humblest, of which the nation is composed. each foot of the ocean's surface has, in its fluidity or density or position, something of the quality or power of every drop of water which rests or moves in the depths of the sea. what is called national character is the face of the great society beneath; and, as that society in its elements is elevated or debased, so will the national character rise or fall in the estimation of all just men, and upon the page of impartial history. government, which is the organized expression of the will of society, should represent the best elements of which society is composed; and it ought, therefore, to combat error and wrong, and seek to inaugurate labor, justice, and truth, as the elements of stability, growth, and power. it must accept as its principles of action the best rules of conduct in individuals. the man who avenges his personal wrongs by personal attacks or vindictive retaliation, must sacrifice in some measure the sympathy of the wise, the humane, and the good. so the nation which avenges real or fancied wrongs crushes out the elements of humanity and a higher life, which, properly cultivated, might lead an erring mortal to virtue and peace. the proper object of punishment is not vengeance, but the public safety and the reformation of the criminal. indeed, we may say that the sole object of punishment is the reformation of the criminal; for there can be no safety to the public while the criminal is unreformed. the punishment of the prison must, from its nature, be temporary; perpetual confinement can be meted out to a few great crimes only. if, then, the result of punishment be vengeance, and not reformation, the last state of society is worse than its first. the prison must stand a sad monument of the want of true paternal government in the family and the state; but, when it becomes the receptacle merely of the criminal, and all ideas of reformation are banished from the hearts of convicts and the minds of keepers, its influence is evil, and only evil continually. vice, driven from the presence of virtue, with no hope of reformation or of restoration to society, begets vice, and becomes daily more and more loathsome. misery is so universal that some share falls to the lot of all; but that misery whose depths cannot be sounded, whose heights cannot be scaled, is the fortune of the prison convict only, who has no hope of reformation to virtue or of restoration to the world. his is the only misery that is unrelieved; his is the only burden that is too great to be borne. to him the foliage of the tree, the murmur of the brook, the mirror of the quiet lake, or the thunder of the heaving ocean, would be equally acceptable. his separation from nature is no less burdensome than his separation from man. the heart sinks, the spirit turns with a consuming fire upon itself, the soul is in despair; the mind is first nerved and desperate, then wandering and savage, then idiotic, and finally goes out in death. governments cannot often afford to protect themselves, or to avenge themselves, at such a cost. there may be great crimes on which such awful penalties should be visited; but, for the honor of the race, let them be few. we may err in our ideas of the true relations of the prison to the prisoner. we call a prison good or bad when we see its walls, cells, workshops, its means of security, and points of observation. these are very well. they are something; but they are not all. we might so judge a hospital for the sick; and we did once so judge an asylum for the insane. but what to the sick man are walls of wood, brick, granite, or marble? what are towers and turrets, what are wards, halls, and verandas, if withal he is not cheered and sustained by the sympathizing heart and helping hand? and similar preparations furnish for the insane personal security and physical comfort; but can they "minister to a mind diseased; pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; raze out the written troubles of the brain?" and it may be that the old almshouse at philadelphia, which was nearly destitute of material aids, and had only superintendent, matrons, and assistants, was, all in all, the best insane asylum in america. we cannot neglect the claims of security, discipline, and labor, in the erection of jails and prisons; but to acknowledge these merely will never produce the proper fruit of punishment--reformation. indeed, walls of stone, gates of iron, bolts, locks, and armed sentinels, though essential to security, without which there could be neither punishment nor reformation, are in themselves barriers rather than helps to moral progress. standing outside, we cannot say what should be done either in the insane hospital or the prison; but we can deduce from the experience of modern times a safe rule for general conduct. in the insane hospital the patient is to be treated as though he were sane; and in the jail the prisoner is to be treated, nearly as may be, as though he were virtuous. this rule, especially as much of it as applies to the prisoner, may be recklessness to some, to others folly, to others sin. "the court awards it, and the law doth give it," is no doubt the essence and strength of governmental justice in the sentence decreed; but it would be a sad calamity if there were no escape from its literal fulfilment. and let no one borrow the words of portia to the jew, and say to the state, "nor cut thou less nor more, but just a pound of flesh." as the criminal staggers beneath the accumulated weight of his sin and its penalty, he should feel that the state is not only just in the language of its law, but merciful in its administration; that the government is, in truth, paternal. this feeling inspires confidence and hope; and without these there can be no reformation. and, following this thought, we are led to say, it is a sad and mischievous public delusion that the pardoning power is useless or pernicious. it is a _delusion_; for it is the only means by which the state mingles mercy with its justice,--the means by which the better sentiments of the prison are marshalled in favor of order, of law, of progress. it is a _public delusion_; for it has infected not only the masses of society, who know little of what is going on in courts and prisons, but its influence is observed upon the bench and in the bar, especially among those who are accustomed to prosecute and try criminals. this is not strange, nor shall it be a subject of complaint; but we must not always look upon the prisoner as a criminal, and continually disregard his claims as a man. it is not often easy, nor always possible, to make the proper distinction between the _character_ and _condition_ of the prisoner. but the prison, strange as it may seem, follows the general law of life. it has its public sentiment, its classes, its leading minds, as well as the university or the state; it has its men of mark, either good or bad, as well as congress or parliament. as the family, the church, or the school, is the reflection of the best face of society, so the prison is the reflection of the worst face of society. but it nevertheless is society, and follows its laws with as much fidelity as the world at large. it is said that abbé fissiaux, the head of the colony of marseilles, when visiting mettray, a kind of reform school, at which boys under sixteen years of age, who have committed offences without discernment, are sent, asked the colonists to point out to him the three best boys. the looks of the whole body immediately designated three young persons whose conduct had been irreproachable to an exceptional degree. he then applied a more delicate test. "point out to me," said he, "the worst boy." all the children remained motionless, and made no sign; but one little urchin came forward, with a pitiful air, and said, in a very low tone, "_it is me._" such were the public sentiment and sense of honor, even in a reform school. this frankness in the lad was followed by reformation; and he became in after years a good soldier,--the life anticipated for many members of the institution. the pardoning power is not needed in reform and industrial schools, where the managers have discretionary authority; but it is quite essential to the discipline of the prison to let the light of hope into the prisoner's heart. not that all are to enjoy the benefits of executive clemency,--by no means: only the most worthy and promising are to be thus favored. but, for many years, the massachusetts prison has been improved and elevated in its tone and sentiment above what it would have been; while, as it is believed, over ninety per cent. of the convicts thus discharged have conducted themselves well. if the prisoner's conduct has not been, upon the whole, reasonably good, and for a long time irreproachable, he has no chance for clemency; and, whatever may be his conduct, and whatever may be the hopes inspired, he should not be allowed to pass without the prison walls until a friend, labor, and a home, are secured for him. and the exercise of the pardoning power, if it anticipate the expiration of the legal sentence but a month, a week, or a day even, may change the whole subsequent life. men, criminals, convicts, are not insensible to kindness; and when the government shortens the legal sentence, which is usually their measure of justice, they feel an additional obligation to so behave as to bring no discredit upon a power which has been a source of inestimable joy to them. and prisoners thus discharged have often gone forth with a feeling that the hopes of many whom they had left behind were centred in them. mr. charles forster, of charlestown, says, in a letter to me: "i have been connected with the massachusetts state prison for a period of thirty-eight years, and have always felt a strong interest in the improvement, welfare, and happiness, of the unfortunate men confined within its walls. i am conversant with many touching cases of deep and heartfelt gratitude for kindly acts and sympathy bestowed upon them, both during and subsequent to their imprisonment." and the same gentleman says further, "i think that the proportion of persons discharged from prison by executive clemency, who have subsequently been convicted of penal offences, is very small indeed." to some, whose imaginations have pictured a broad waste or deep gulf between themselves and the prisoner class, these may seem strange words; but there is no mystery in this language to those who have listened to individual cases of crime and punishment. men are tried and convicted of crimes according to rules and definitions which are necessarily arbitrary and technical; but the moral character of criminals is not very well defined by the rules and definitions which have been applied to their respective cases. our prisons contain men who are great and professional criminals,--men who advisedly follow a life of crime themselves, and deliberately educate generation after generation to a career of infamy and vice. as a general thing, mercy to such men would be unpardonable folly. of them i do not now speak. but there is another class, who are involved in guilt and its punishment through the defects of early education, the misfortune of orphanage, accident, sudden temptation, or the influence of evil companionship in youth. the field from which this class is gathered is an extensive one, and its outer limits are near to every hearthstone. to all these, prison life, unless it is relieved by a hope of restoration to the world at the hand of mercy, is the school of vice, and a certain preparation for a career of crime. as a matter of fact, this class does furnish recruits to supply the places of the hardened villains who annually die, or permanently forsake the abodes of civilized men. what hope can there be for a young man who remains in prison until the last day of his sentence is measured by the sun in his course, and then passes into the world, with the mark of disgrace and the mantle of shame upon him, to the society of the companions by whose influence he first fell? for such a one there can be no hope. and be it always remembered that there are those without the prison walls, as well as many within, who resist every effort to bring the wanderers back to obedience and right. i was present at the prison in charlestown when the model of a bank-lock was taken from a young man whose term had nearly expired. the model was cut in wood, after a plan drawn upon sand-paper by an experienced criminal, then recently convicted. this old offender was so familiar with the lock, that he was able to reproduce all its parts from memory alone. this fact shows the influence that may be exerted, even in prison, upon the characters of the young and less vicious. now, can any doubt that these classes, as classes, ought to be separated? nor let the question be met by the old statement, that all communication between prisoners should be cut off. humanity cannot defend, as a permanent system, the plan which shuts up the criminal, unless he is a murderer, from the light of the human countenance. such penalties foster crimes, whose roots take hold of the state itself. the result of the exercise of the pardoning power is believed to have been, upon the whole, satisfactory. this is the concurrent testimony of officers and others whose opinions are entitled to weight. permit the statement of a single case, to which many similar ones might be added. in a remote state of the west there is a respectable and successful farmer, who was once sentenced to the penitentiary for life. his crime was committed in a moment of desperation, produced by the contrast between a state of abject poverty in a strange land, at the age of twenty-three, and the recollection of childhood and youth passed beneath the parental roof, surrounded by the comforts and conveniences of the well-educated and well-conditioned classes of english society. this, it is true, was a peculiar case. it was marked in the circumstances and enormity of the crime, and marked in the subsequent good conduct of the prisoner. but can any one object, that, after ten years' imprisonment, this man was allowed to try his fortunes once more among his fellow-men? are there those who would have had no faith in his uninterrupted good conduct; in the abundant evidence of complete reformation; in the fact that, in prison and poverty and disgrace, he had allied to him friends of name and fortune and christian virtues, who were ready to aid him in his good resolutions? if any such there be, let them visit the solitary cell of the despairing convict, whose crime is so great that executive clemency fears to approach it. crime and despair have made the features appalling; all the worst passions of our nature riot together in the temple made for the living god; and the death of the body is almost certainly to be preceded by madness, insanity, and idiocy of the mind. or, if any think that this person escaped with too light an expiation for so great a crime, let them recall the incident of the youth who was questioned because he looked with fond affection into the babbling face of the running brook, and, apologizing, as it were, in reply said, "o, yes, it is very beautiful, and especially to me, who have seen no water for four years, beside what i have had to drink!" nor is it assumed, in all that is said upon this subject, that the laws are severe, or that the judicial administration of them is not characterized by justice and mercy. in the ordinary course of affairs, the pardoning power is not resorted to for the correction of any error or injustice of the courts; but it is the means by which the state tempers its justice with mercy; and, if the penalties for crime were less than they are, the necessity for the exercise of this power would still remain. it assumes that the object of the penal law is reformation; and if this object, in some cases, can be attained by the exercise of the pardoning power, while the rigid execution of the sentence would leave the criminal, as it usually will, still hardened and unrepenting, is it not wise for the state to benefit itself, and save the prisoner, by opening the prison-doors, and inviting the convict to a life of industry and virtue? and let it never be forgotten, though it is the lowest view which can be taken of crime and prisons, that the criminal class is the most expensive class of society. in general, it is a non-producing class, and, whether in prison or out, is a heavy burden upon the public. the mere interest of the money now expended in prisons of approved structure is, for each cell, equal annually to the net income of a laboring man; and professional thieves, when at large, often gather by their art, and expend in profligacy, many thousand dollars a year. and here we see how much wiser it is, in an economical point of view, to save the child, or reform the man, than to allow the adult criminal to go at large, or provide for his safe-keeping at the expense of the state. under the influence of the pardoning power, wisely executed, the commonwealth becomes a family, whose law is the law of kindness. it is the paternal element of government applied to a class of people who, by every process of reasoning, would be found least susceptible to its influence. it is the great power of the state, both in the wisdom required for its judicious exercise, and in the beneficial results to which it may lead. men may desire office for its emoluments in money or fame; they may seek it in a spirit of rivalry, or for personal pride, or for the opportunity it brings to reward friends and punish enemies; but all these are poor and paltry compared with the divine privilege, exercised always in reference to the public welfare, of elevating the prisoner to the companionship of men, and cheering him with words of encouragement on his entrance anew to the duties of life. yet think not that the prison is a reformatory institution: far from it. if the prison should be left to the influence of legitimate prison discipline merely, it is doubtful whether the sum of improvement would equal the total of degradation. this may be said of the best prisons of america, of new england. the prison usually contains every class, from the hardened convict, incarcerated for house-breaking, robbery, or murder, to the youth who expiates his first offence, committed under the influence of evil companions, or sudden temptation. the contact of these two persons must be injurious to one of them, without in any degree improving the other. therefore the prison, considered without reference to the elevating influence of the pardoning power, has but little ability to reform the bad, and yet possesses a sad tendency to debase the comparatively good. we miss, too, in the prison, another essential element of a reformatory institution. reformation in individual cases may take place under the most adverse circumstances; but an institution cannot be called reformatory unless its prevailing moral sentiment is actively, vigorously, and always, on the side of progress and virtue. this moral influence must proceed from the officers of the institution; but it should be increased and strengthened by the sympathy and support of the inmates. this can hardly be expected of the prison. the number of adult persons experienced in crime and hardened by its penalties is usually so large, that the moral sentiment of the officers, and the weak resolutions of the small class of prisoners, who, under favorable circumstances, might be saved, are insufficient to give a healthy tone to the whole institution. the prison is a battle-field of vice and virtue, with the advantage of position and numbers on the side of vice. indeed, there can hardly be a worse place for the young or the inexperienced in crime. this is the testimony of reason and of all experience; yet the public mind is slow to accept the remedy for the evil. it is a privilege to believe that the worst scenes of prison life are not found in the united states. consider this case, reported in an english journal, _the ragged-school magazine_: "d. f., aged about fourteen. mother dead several years; father a drunkard, and deserted him about three years ago. has since lived as he best could,--sometimes going errands, sometimes begging and thieving. slept in lodging-houses when he had money; but very often walked the streets at night, or lay under arches or door-steps. has only one brother; he lives by thieving. does not know where he is; has no other friend that he knows; never learnt to read; was badly off; picked a handkerchief out of a gentleman's pocket, and was caught by a policeman; sent to giltspur-street prison; was fed on bread and water; instructed every day by chaplain and schoolmaster; much impressed with what the chaplain said; felt anxious to do better; behaved well in prison; _was well flogged the morning he left; back bruised, but not quite bleeding_; was then turned into the street, ragged, barefooted, friendless, homeless, penniless; walked about the streets till afternoon, when he received a penny from a gentleman to buy a loaf; met, next day, some expert thieves in the minories; went along with them, and continues in a course of vagrancy and crime." and what else could have been expected? the government, having sown tares, had no right to gather wheat. yet, had this boy been provided with a home, either in a family or a reform school, with sufficient labor, and proper moral and intellectual culture, he might have been saved. of the three thousand persons annually in prison at newgate, four hundred are less than sixteen years of age; and twenty thousand children and youth under seventeen years of age yearly pass through the prisons of england. "many of the juvenile prisoners," it is said, "have been frequently in prison, and are very hardened. some, from nine to eleven, have been in prison repeatedly, and have very little fear of it." the officers of the liverpool borough jail are united in the opinion that, when a boy comes once, he is almost certain to come again and again, until he is transported. and, of every one hundred young persons discharged from the principal prisons of paris, seventy-five are in the custody of the law within the next three months. a professed thief said to the rev. mr. clay, of england, "i am convinced of this, having too bitterly experienced it, that communication in a prison has brought thousands to ruin. i speak not of boys only, but of men and women also." and mr. hill, recorder of birmingham, says of the sentences imposed in his court, "we are compelled to carry into operation an ignorant and vengeful system, which augments to a fearful extent the very evils it was framed to correct." a few years ago, there was a lad in a new england prison whose experience is a pertinent illustration of the evil we are now considering. his father, a resident of a city, died while the boy was in infancy. he, however, soon passed beyond the control of his mother, and at an early age was selected by a brace of thieves, who petted, caressed, and humored him, until he was completely subject to their will. he was then made useful to them in their profession; but at last they were all arrested while engaged in robbing a store,--the boy being within the building, and the men stationed as sentinels without. in this case, the discretion of the court, which distinguished in the sentence between the hardened villains and the youth, was inadequate to the emergency. the child, unfit for the prison, and sure to be contaminated by it, ought to have been sent to a house of reformation, a reform school, or, perhaps better than either, to the custody of a well-regulated, industrious family. now, in such cases, the distinction which the law, judicially administered, does not make, and cannot make, must be made by the executive in the wise exercise of the pardoning power. but this power, in the nature of things, has its limits; and on one side it is limited to those who have been convicted of crime. at this point, we may see how faulty, and yet how constantly improving, has been the administration of the criminal law. first, we have the prison without the pardoning power, except in cases of mal-administration of the law,--a receptacle of the bad and good, where the former are not improved, and the latter are hurried rapidly on in the path of degradation and crime. then we have the prison under the influence of the pardoning power, more or less wisely administered, but, in its best form, able only to arrest and counteract partially the tendencies to evil. next, from the imperfections of this system an advancing civilization has evoked the reform school, which gathers in the young criminals and viciously inclined youth, and prepares them, by labor, and culture of the mind and heart, to resist the temptations of life. but this institution seems to wait, though it may not always in reality do so, until the candidate is actually a criminal. hence the necessity which calls us to-day to consider the means adopted elsewhere, and the means now to be employed here, to save the young and exposed from the dangers which surround them. passing, then, in review, ladies and gentlemen, the thoughts which have been presented, i deduce from them for your assent and support, if so it please you, the following propositions as the basis of what i have yet to say: i. government, in the prevention and punishment of crime, should be paternal. ii. the object of punishment should be reformation, and not revenge. iii. the law of reformation in the state, as in the family, is the law of kindness. iv. as criminals vary in age and in experience as criminals, so should their treatment vary. v. prisons and jails are not, in their foundation and management, reformatory institutions, and only become so through influences not necessarily nor ordinarily acting upon them. vi. as prisons and jails deter from crime through fear only, exert very little moral influence upon the youth of either sex, and fail in many respects and in a majority of cases as reformatory institutions, we ought to avail ourselves of any new agency which promises success. influenced, as we may reasonably suppose, by these or kindred sentiments, and aided by the noblest exhibitions of private benevolence, the state has here founded a school for the prevention of crime. as we have everywhere among us schools whose _leading_ object is the development of the intellect, so we now dedicate a school whose _leading_ object is the development of the affections as the basis of the cardinal virtues of life. the design of this institution is so well expressed by the trustees, that it is a favor to us all for me to read the first chapter of the by-laws, which, by the consent of the governor and council, have been established: "the intention of the state government, and of the benevolent individuals who have contributed to the establishment of this institution, is to secure a _home_ and a _school_ for such girls as may be presented to the magistrates of the state, appointed for that purpose, as vagrants, perversely obstinate, deprived of the control and culture of their natural guardians, or guilty of petty offences, and exposed to a life of crime and wretchedness. "for such young persons it is proposed to provide, not a prison for their restraint and correction, but a family school, where, under the firm but kind discipline of a judicious home, they shall be carefully instructed in all the branches of a good education; their moral affections be developed and cultivated by the example and affectionate care of one who shall hold the relation of a mother to them; be instructed in useful and appropriate forms of female industry; and, in short, be fitted to become virtuous and happy members of society, and to take respectable positions in such relations in life as providence shall hereafter mark out for them. "it is to be distinctly understood that the institution is not to be considered a _place of punishment_, or its subjects as criminals. it is to be an inviting refuge, into which the exposed may be gathered to be saved from a course which would inevitably end in penal confinement, irretrievable ruin, or hopeless degradation. "the inmates are to be considered hopeful and promising subjects of appropriate culture, and to be instructed and watched over with the care and kindness which their peculiar exposures demand, and with the confidence which youth should ever inspire. "the restraint and the discipline which will be necessary are to be such as would be appropriate in a christian family or in a small boarding-school; and the 'law of kindness' should be written upon the heart of every officer of the institution. the chief end to be obtained, in all the culture and discipline, is the proper development of the faculties and moral affections of the inmates, however they may have been heretofore neglected or perverted; and to teach them the art, and aid them in securing the power, of self-government." under the influence of these sentiments, we pass, if possible, in the work of reformation, from the rigor of the prison to the innocent excitement and rivalry of the school, the comfort, confidence and joys of home. this institution assumes that crime, to some extent at least, is social, local, or hereditary, in its origin; that the career of hardened criminals often takes its rise in poverty, idleness, ignorance, orphanage, desertion, or intemperance of parents, evil example, or the indifference, scorn and neglect of society. it assumes, also, that there is a period of life--childhood and youth--when these, the first indications of moral death, may be eradicated, or their influence for evil controlled. in this land of education, of liberty, of law, of labor and religion, we may not easily imagine how universal the enumerated evils are in many portions of europe. the existence of these evils is in some degree owing to institutions which favor a few, and oppress the masses; but it is also in a measure due to the fact that europe is both old and multitudinous. america, though still young, is even now multitudinous. hence, both here and there, crime is social and local. the truth of this statement is proportionate to the force of the causes in the respective countries. we are assembled upon a sloping hillside, over-looking a quiet country village. happy homes are embowered in living groves, whose summer foliage is emblematical of innocence, progress, and peace. we have here a social life, with natural impulses, cultivated worldly interests, moral and religious sentiments, all on the side of virtue. crime here is not social. if it appear at all, it is segregated; and, as the burning taper expires when placed at the centre of the spirit lamp's coiling sheet of flame, so vice and crime cannot thrive in the genial embrace of virtue. circumstances are here unfavorable to crime; it is never social; but sometimes, though not often, it is hereditary. a family for many generations seems to have a criminal tendency. perhaps the members are not in any generation guilty of great crimes, but often of lesser ones; and are, moreover, in the daily practice of vices that give rise to suspicion, neglect, and reproach. here together are associated, and made hereditary, poverty, ignorance, idleness, beggary, and vagrancy. surely these instances are not common, probably not so common as they were in the last generation. but how is the boy or girl of such a family to rise above these circumstances, and throw off these weights? occasionally one of great energy of character may do so; but, if the children of more fortunate classes can scarcely escape the influence of temporary evil example, how shall they who are born to a heritage of poverty, ignorance, and ever-present evil counsel and conduct under the guise of parental authority, pass to the position of intelligent, industrious, respectable members of society? some external influence must be applied; by some means from without, the spell must be broken; the fatal succession of vicious homes must be interrupted. the family has here failed to discharge its duty to itself and to the state; and shall not the state do its duty to itself, by assuming the paternal relation under the guidance of that law of kindness, which we have seen effectual to control the insane, and melt the hardened criminal? but in cities we find vice, not only hereditary in families, but local and social; so that streets and squares are given up, as it were, to the idle and vicious, whose numbers and influence produce and perpetuate a public sentiment in support of their daily practices. this phase of life is not due to the fact that cities are wealthy, or that they are engaged in manufactures or commerce; but to the single fact that they are multitudinous, and their inhabitants are, therefore, in daily contact with each other, while, in the country, individuals and families are comparatively isolated. yet some may very well doubt whether such an institution as this, with all the benign influences of home which we hope to see centred and diffusive here, will save a child of either sex, whose first years shall have been so unfavorable to a life of virtue. the answer is plain: as in other reformatory institutions, there will be some successes and some failures. the failures will be reckoned as they were; the successes will be a clear gain. but investigation and trial will show a natural aptitude or instinct in children that will aid in their improvement and reformation. there has been in one of our public schools a lad, who, at the age of fourteen years, could not recall distinctly the circumstances of his life previous to the time when he was a newsboy in the city of new york. he was ignorant of father, mother, kindred, family name, and nation. at an early age, he travelled through the middle, southern and south-western states, engaged in selling papers and trash literature; and, for a time, he was employed by a showman to stand outside the tent and describe and exaggerate the attractions within. when he was in his fourteenth year, he accepted the offer of a permanent home; his chief object being, as he said, to obtain an education. "i have found," said he, "that a man cannot do much in this country unless he has some learning." this truth, simple, and resting upon a low view of education, may yet be of infinite value if accepted by those who, even among us, are advancing to adult life without the preparation which our common schools are well fitted to furnish. and the case of this lad may be yet further useful by showing how compensation is provided for evils and neglects in mental and moral relations, as well as in the physical and natural world. though ignorant of books, he was thoroughly and extensively acquainted with things, and consequently made rapid progress in the knowledge of signs; for they were immediately applied, and of course remembered. in a few months, he took a respectable position among lads of his age. the world had done for this boy what good schools do not always accomplish,--made him familiar with things before he was troubled with the signs which stand for them. there is an ignorance in manhood; an ignorance under the show of profound learning; an ignorance for which schools, academies and colleges, are often responsible; an ignorance that neither schools, academies nor colleges, can conceal from the humblest intellects; an ignorance of life and things as they are within the sphere of our own observation. from this most deplorable ignorance this boy had escaped; and the light of learning illumined his mind, as the sun in his daily return reveals anew those forms of life, which, even in an ungenial spring and early summer, his rays had warmed into existence, and nourished and cherished in their progress towards perfection. and, ladies and gentlemen, let us indulge the hope that the events of this day and the faith of this assembly will declare that it is possible to save the children of orphanage, intemperance, neglect, scorn and ignorance, from many of the evils which surround them. let it not be assumed and believed that the task of training and saving girls is less hopeful than similar labors in behalf of the other sex. it has been found true in europe, and it is a prevailing opinion in this country, that, among adults, the reformation of females is more difficult than the reformation of males. but an analysis of this fact, assuming it to be true, will unfold qualities of female character that render it peculiarly easy to shield and save girls who are exposed to a life of crime; for, be it remembered, this institution deals with mere children, who are exposed, but not yet lost. it differs, in this respect, from most institutions, although many include this class with others. and it may be well to remark, that every reformatory school in europe, even those altogether penal,--as parkhurst in england, and mettray in france,--have had some measure of success. eighty-nine per cent. of the colons, or convicts, at mettray, have become respectable and useful; while, of the youth sent to the ordinary jails and prisons, seventy-five per cent. are totally lost. it is not fair, therefore, to assume that this attempt will fail. the degree of success will depend upon circumstances and causes, to a great extent, within human control. there are, however, three elements of success, so distinct that they may well stand as the appropriate divisions of what remains for consideration. they are the right action of the government; the faithful conduct of superintendent, matrons, and assistants; the sympathy and aid of the people of the state in matters which do not admit of legislative interference. the act of the legislature, though voluminous in its details, contemplates only this: a home for girls between seven and sixteen years of age, who are found "in circumstances of want and suffering, or of neglect, exposure, or abandonment, or of beggary." the first idea of _home_ precludes the possibility of the inmates being sent here as a punishment for crime; therefore they are neither adjudged nor actual criminals, but persons exposed to a vicious life. secondly, the idea of home involves the necessity of reproducing the family relation, as circumstances may permit. hence, the members of this institution are to be divided into families; and over each a matron will preside, who is to be a kind, affectionate, discreet mother to the children. and here, for once, in massachusetts, a public institution has escaped the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than the seat of a vast edifice, which may provoke the wonder of the sight-seer, inflame local or state pride, but can never be an effectual, economical agency in the work of reformation. every public institution has some great object. architecture should bend itself to that object, and become its servant; and it must ever be deemed a mistake, when utility is sacrificed that art or fancy may have its way. reformation, if wrought by external influences, is the result of personal kindness. personal kindness can exist only where there is intimate personal acquaintance; this acquaintance is impossible in an institution of two, three, or five hundred inmates. but, in a family of ten, twenty, or thirty, this knowledge will exist, and this kindness abound. warm personal attachments will grow up in the family, and these attachments are likely to become safeguards of virtue. nor let the objection prevail that the expense is to be increased. it is not the purpose to set up an establishment and maintain it for a specific sum of money, but to provide thorough mental and moral training for the inmates. make the work efficient, though it be limited to a small number, rather than inaugurate a magnificent failure. the state has wisely provided that the "trustees shall cause the girls under their charge to be instructed in piety and morality, and in such branches of useful knowledge as shall be adapted to their age and capacity; they shall also be instructed in some regular course of labor, either mechanical, manufacturing, or horticultural, or a combination of these, and especially in such domestic and household labor and duties as shall be best suited to their age and strength, disposition and capacity; also in such other arts, trades, and employments, as may seem to the trustees best adapted to secure their reformation, amendment, and future benefit." it is sometimes the bane of the poor that they do not work, and it is often equally the bane of the rich that they have nothing to do. the idle, both rich and poor, carry a weight of reproach that not all ought to bear. the disposition and the ability to labor are both the result of education; and why should the uneducated be better able to labor than to read greek and latin? surely only that there are more teachers in one department than in the others; but a good teacher of labor may be as uncommon as a good teacher of latin or greek. there is a false, vicious, unmanly pride, which leads our youth of both sexes to shun labor; and it is the business of the true teacher to extirpate this growth of a diseased civilization. and we could have no faith in this school, if it were not a school of industry as well as of morality,--a school in which the divine law of labor is to be observed equally with the laws of men. industry is near to all the virtues. in this era every branch of labor is an art, and sometimes it is necessary for the laborer to be both an artist and a scientific person. how great, then, the misfortune of those, whether rich or poor, who are uninstructed in the business of life! we should hardly know what judgment to pass upon a man of wealth who should entirely neglect the education of his children in schools; but the common indifference to industrial learning is not less reprehensible. labor should be systematic; not constant, indeed, but always to be reckoned as the great business of life, never to be avoided, never to cease. labor gives us a better knowledge of the fulness, magnificence and glory, of the divine blessing of creation. this lesson may be learned by the farmer in the wonderful growth of vegetation; by the artist, in the powers of invention and taste of the human mind and soul; by the man of science, in the beauty of an insect or the order of a universe. the vision of the idle is limited. the ability to see may be improved by education as much as the ability to read, remember, or converse. with many people, not seeing is a habit. near-sighted persons are generally those who declined to look at distant objects; and so nature, true to the most perfect rules of economy, refused to keep in order faculties that were entirely neglected. the laborer's recompense is not money, nor the accumulation of worldly goods chiefly; but it is in his increased ability to observe, appreciate, and enjoy the world, with its beauties and blessings. nor is labor, the penalty for sin, a punishment merely, but a divine means of reformation. it is, therefore, a moral discipline that all should submit to; and especially is it a means by which the youth here are to be prepared for the duties of life. but industry is not only near to all the virtues; it is itself a virtue, as idleness is a vice. the word _labor_ is, of course, used in the broadest signification. labor is any honest employment, or use of the head or hands, which brings good to ourselves, and consequently, though indirectly, brings good to our fellow-men. the state has now furnished a home, reproduced, as far as practicable, the family relation, and provided for a class of neglected and exposed girls the means of mental, industrial, moral, and religious culture. the plan appears well; but its practical value depends upon the fidelity of its execution by the superintendent, matrons and assistants. i venture to predict in advance, that the degree of success is mainly within their control. this is a school, they are the teachers; and they must bend to the rule which all true teachers willingly accept. the teacher must be what he would have his pupils become. this was the standard of the great teacher; this is the aim of all who desire to make education a matter of reality and life, and not merely a knowledge of signs and forms. here will be needed a spirit and principle of devotion which will be fruitful in humility, patience, earnestness, energy, good words and works for all. here must be strictness, possibly sternness of discipline; but this is not incompatible with the qualities mentioned. it is a principle at mettray to combine unbounded personal kindness with a rigid exclusion of personal indulgence. this principle produces good results that are two-fold in their influence. first, personal kindness in the teacher induces a reciprocal quality in the pupils. the habit of personal kindness, proceeding from right feelings, is a potent element of good in the family, the school, and the prison. indeed, it is an element of good citizenship; and no one destitute of this quality ought to be intrusted with the education of children, or the punishment and reformation of criminals. secondly, the rigid exclusion of personal indulgence trains the inmates in the virtue of self-control. and may it not be forgotten that all apparent reformation must be hedged by this cardinal virtue of practical life! otherwise the best-formed expectations will fail; the highest hopes will be disappointed; and the life of these teachers, and the promise of the youth who may be gathered here, will be like the sun and the winds upon the desert, which bring neither refreshing showers nor fruitful harvests. every form of labor requires faith. this labor requires faith in yourselves, and faith in others;--faith in yourselves, as teachers here, based upon your own knowledge of what you are and are to do; and faith in others upon the divine declaration that god breathed into man the breath of life, and he became a living soul,--not merely as the previous creations, possessed of animal life; but as a sentient, intellectual, and moral being, capable of a progressive, immortal existence. "'tis nature's law that none, the meanest of created things, * * * * * should exist divorced from good,--a spirit and pulse of good, a life and soul, to every mode of being inseparably linked. see, then, your only conflict is with men; and your sole strife is to defend and teach the unillumined, who, without such care, must dwindle." and always, as in the beginning, the reliance of this school is upon the people of the commonwealth, whose voice has spoken into existence another instrumentality to give eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, a heart for the work of this life, and a hope for an hereafter, to those who from neglect and vicious example would soon pass the period of reformation. but may the people always bear in mind the indisputable truth, that schools for the criminal and the exposed yield not their perfect fruits in a day or a year! they must, if they will know whether the seed here planted produces a harvest, wait for the birth and growth of one generation, the decay and death of another. yet these years of delay will not be years of uncertainty. the public faith will be strengthened continually by cases of reformation, usefulness, and virtue. but, whether these cases be few or many, let no one despond. the career of the criminal is, often in money and always in influence, the heaviest burden which an individual can impose upon society. this is a school for girls; and we may properly appeal to the women of massachusetts to do their duty to this institution, and to the cause it represents. we can already see the second stage in the existence of many of those who are to be sent here; and there is good reason to fear that the relation of mistress and servant among us is in some degree destitute of those moral qualities that make the house a home for all who dwell beneath its roof. but, whether this fear be the voice of truth or the suggestion of prejudice, that woman shall not be held blameless, who, under the influence of indolence, pride, fashion, or avarice, shall neglect, abuse, or oppress, the humblest of her sex who goes forth from these walls into the broad and dangerous path of life. but this day shall not leave the impression that they who are most interested in the elevation and refinement of female character are indifferent to the means employed, and the results which are to wait on them. the greatest delineator of human character in this age says, as the images of neglected children pass before his vision: "there is not one of them--not one--but sows a harvest mankind _must_ reap. from every seed of evil in this boy a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are over-spread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another deluge. open and unpunished murder in a city's streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration than one such spectacle as this. there is not a father, by whose side, in his daily or nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible, in his or her degree, for this enormity. there is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. there is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people on earth that it would not put to shame." this institution, then, in the true relation of things, is not the glory of the state, but its shame. it speaks of families, of schools, of the church, of the state, not yet educated to the discharge of their respective duties in the right way. but it is the glory of the state as a visible effort to correct evils, atone for neglects, and compensate for wrongs. it comes to do, in part at least, what the family, the school, the press, the library, the sabbath, have nest yet perfectly accomplished. as these agencies partially failed, so will this; but, as the law of progress exists for all, because perfection with us is unattainable, we may reasonably have faith in human improvement, and trust that the life of each succeeding generation shall unite, in ever-increasing proportions, the innocence of childhood with the wisdom of age. elementary training in the public schools. [extract from the twenty-second annual report of the secretary of the massachusetts board of education.] we are still sadly defective in methods of education. until recently teaching was almost an unknown art; and we are at present struggling against ignorance without any well-defined plan, and attempting to develop and build up the immortal character of children, without a philosophical and generally accepted theory of the nature of the human mind. there are complaints that the duties and exactions of the schools injure the health and impair the constitutions of pupils; that the progress in intellectual attainments is not always what it should be; that the training given is sometimes determined by the wishes of committees against the better judgment of competent teachers; that the text-books are defective; that the studies in the common schools are too numerous; that the elements are consequently neglected; and that, in fine, too much thought is bestowed upon exhibitions and contests for public prizes, to the injury of good learning, and of individual and general character. for these complaints there is some foundation; but care should be exercised lest incidental and necessary evils become, in the public estimation, great wrongs, and exceptional cases the evidence of general facts. it is to some extent true that the duties and exactions of the schools seriously test the health of pupils; but it is, as i believe, more generally true that many pupils are physically unable to meet the ordinary and proper duties of the school-room. school life, as usually conducted, is physically injurious, and our best efforts thus far have been limited to the dissemination of elementary knowledge of physiology as a science, and to an acquaintance with a limited number of important physiological facts. yet even here little has been accomplished in comparison with what may be done. in this department there is much instruction given that has no practical value, and children are often permitted to live in daily and uniform neglect of the most essential truths of science and the facts of human experience. neither physiology nor hygiene can be of much value in the schools, as a study, unless there is an application of what is taught. great proficiency cannot be made in these branches in the brief period of school life; but a competent teacher may induce the pupils to put in practice the lessons that are applicable to childhood and youth. if, however, as is sometimes the case, pupils are undermining the physical constitution in their efforts to know how they are made, the loss is, unquestionably, more than the gain. physical health and growth depend, first, upon opportunity; and hence it happens that, where physical life is most defective, there the greatest difficulties in the way of its improvement are found. boys born in the country, living upon farms, accustomed continually to outdoor labors and sports, walking a mile or more every day to school, have but little use, in their own persons, for the science or facts of physiology; and it is a very rare thing, where such conditions have existed, that any teacher is able to exact an amount of intellectual service that proves in any perceptible degree injurious. but these opportunities are not so generally enjoyed by girls, and the mass of children in cities are wholly deprived of them. in the country, and even in villages and towns of considerable size, there is no excuse, better than ignorance or indifference, for the lack of judicious and efficient physical training of children and youth of both sexes. but ignorance and indifference are facts; and, while and where they exist, they are prejudicial to the growth of mind and body. the age at which children should be admitted to school has not been ascertained, nor can a satisfactory rule upon this point ever be laid down. if children are not in schools, they are yet subject to influences that are formative of character. when proper government and methods of education exist at home, the presence of the child in school at an early age is not desirable. even when education at home is not methodical, it may be continued until the child is seven or even eight years of age, if it is at once moral, intelligent, and controlling. it is not, however, wise to expect a child who is infirm physically to perform the labors imposed by the necessary and proper regulations of school. when children enjoy good health, and are not blessed with suitable training at home, they may be introduced to the school, at the age of five years, with positive advantage to themselves and to society. when the child is a member of the school, what shall be done with him? he must first be taught to take an interest in the exercises by making the exercises interesting to him. that the transition from home to the school may be easy, he should first occupy himself with those topics and studies that are presented to the eye and to the ear, and may be mastered, so as to produce the sensation that follows achievement with only a moderate use of the reasoning and reflective faculties. among these are reading, writing, music, and drawing. this is also the time when object lessons may be given with great advantage. the forms and names of geometrical solids may be taught. exercises may be introduced tending to develop those powers by which we comprehend the qualities of color, size, density, form, and weight. important moral truths may be presented with the aid of suitable illustrations. in every school the teacher and text-books may be considered a positive quality which should balance the negative power of the school itself. in primary schools text-books have but little value, and the chief reliance is, therefore, upon the teacher. instruction must be mainly oral; hence the mind of the teacher should be well furnished, and her capacities chastened by considerable experience. as the pupils are unable to study, the teacher must lead in all their exercises, and find profitable employment for the children, or they will give themselves up to play or to stupid listlessness. of these alternatives, the latter is more objectionable than the former. it is, of course, not often possible for a teacher to occupy herself six hours a day with a single class in a primary school, especially if she confines her attention to the studies enumerated. in many schools, of various grades, gymnastic exercises have been introduced with marked advantage. there are many such exercises which do not need apparatus, and in which the teacher can properly lead. these furnish a healthful variety to the studies usually pursued, and they prepare the pupils to receive appropriate instruction in sitting, standing, and in the modulation and use of the voice. indeed, gymnastic exercises are indispensable aids to proper training in reading, which, as an art of a high order, is immediately dependent upon position, habits of breathing, the consequent power of voice, and expressiveness of tone. i am fully satisfied that much more may be done in the early period of school life than is usually accomplished. in the district mixed schools the primary pupils receive but little attention, and they are not infrequently occupied from one to three years in obtaining an imperfect knowledge of the alphabet. usually much better results are attained by the combined agency of the home and the school, but there is an average loss of one-fourth of the time employed in teaching and learning the elements of our language. mr. philbrick, superintendent of public schools in boston, has taught and trained a class of fifty primary-school pupils with a degree of success which fully sustains the statement of the average waste in schools generally. twenty-two lessons of a half-hour each were given; and in this brief period of time the class, with a few exceptions, were so well advanced that they could write the alphabet in capital and script hand, give the elementary sounds of the letters, produce and name the arabic characters and the common geometrical figures found upon holbrook's slates. i saw a girl, five and a half years of age, write the alphabet without delay in script hand, in a manner that would have been creditable to a pupil in a grammar school. i present mr. philbrick's own account of his mode of proceeding, in an extract from his third quarterly report to the school committee of the city of boston. "the regulations relating to the primary schools require every scholar to be provided with a slate, and to employ the time not otherwise occupied in drawing or writing words from their spelling lessons, on their slates, in a plain script hand. it is further stated, in the same connection, that the teachers are expected to take special pains to teach the first class to write--not print--all the letters of the alphabet on slates. "the language of this requirement seems to imply that the classes below the first are to draw and write words, in a plain script hand, without any special pains to teach them, and that by such occupation they were to be kept from idleness. as i saw neither of these objects accomplished in any primary school, i thought it worth while to satisfy myself, by actual experiment, what can and ought to be done, in the use of the slate and blackboard, in teaching writing and drawing in primary schools. to accomplish this object, i have given a course of lessons in a graded or classified school of the third class. the number of pupils instructed in the class was about fifty. the materials of the school are rather below the average; about twenty of the pupils being of that description usually found in schools for special instruction. the school-room is furnished, as every primary school-room should be, with stationary chairs and desks, and holbrook's primary slates. twenty-two lessons, of from thirty to forty minutes each, were given, about one-third of the time being devoted to drawing, and two-thirds to writing. as to the method pursued, the main points were, to present but a single element at a time; to illustrate on the blackboard defects and excellences in execution; frequent review of the ground passed over, especially in the _first_ steps of the course; a vigorous exercise of all the mental faculties requisite for the performance of the task; and a desire for improvement, encouraged and stimulated by the best and strongest available motives; the greater part of the time being bestowed upon the dull and backward pupils. "the result has exceeded my expectations. about three-fourths of the number taught can draw most of the simple mathematical lines and figures, given as copies on the slates used, with tolerable accuracy, and write all the letters of the alphabet in a fair script hand. this experiment satisfies me that, with the proper facilities, the three upper classes in graded primary schools can be taught to write the letters of the alphabet in a plain script hand, and even to join them into words, without any material hindrance to the other required studies; and, moreover, that the great remedy for the complaint of want of time, in these schools, is the increase of skill in the art of teaching." it is well known that in this country and in europe methods of teaching the alphabet have been introduced which materially diminish the labor of teachers, and lessen the drudgery to which children are usually subjected. the alphabet is taught as an object lesson. the object is usually an animal, plant, or flower. more frequently the first. the mind of the child is awakened either by the presence of the animal, or by a brief but vivid description of its characteristics. the children are first required to pronounce properly the name of the animal. here is an opportunity for training in the use of the voice, and in the art of breathing, with which the general health, as well as the vocal power, is intimately connected. the word which is the name of the animal is analyzed into its elementary sounds. it may then be reconstructed without the aid of visible signs, either written or printed. next the teacher produces the signs which stand for the several sounds, and gives their names. the letters are presented in any way that suits the teacher. there may be no better method than to produce them upon the blackboard, as this course encourages the pupils to draw them upon their slates, and thus they are at once, and without formal preliminaries, engaged in writing. an outline of the animal may be drawn upon the blackboard, which the pupils will eagerly copy; and though this exercise may not be valuable in a high degree, as preparation for the systematic study of drawing, yet it trains the perceptive and reflective faculties in a manner that is pleasant to the great majority of children. it is also in the power of the teacher, at any point in the exercises, and with reference both to variety and usefulness, to give the most apparent facts, which to children are the most interesting facts, in the natural history of the animal. this plan contemplates instruction in pronunciation in connection with exercises in breathing, in the elementary sounds of words both consonant and vowel, in the names of letters, in writing and drawing, to all of which may be added something of natural history. it is of course to be understood that such exercises would be extended over many lessons, be subject to frequent reviews, and valuable in proportion to the teacher's ability to interest children. the outline given is suggestive, merely, and it is not presented as a plan of a model course; but enough has been done and is doing in this department to warrant increased attention, and to justify the belief that a degree of progress will soon be made in teaching the elements that will mark the epoch as a revolution in educational affairs. it is to be observed that the system indicated requires a high order of teaching talent. only thorough professional culture, or long and careful experience, will meet the claims of such a course. it is quite plain, however, that no advantage would arise from keeping pupils in school six hours each day; and that, regarding only the intellectual advancement of the child during the elementary course, his presence might be reduced to two hours, or possibly in some cases to one: provided, always, that he could enjoy, with his class associates, the undivided attention of the teacher. in this view of the subject, it would be possible, where the primary schools are graded, as in portions of the city of boston, for one teacher to take charge of two classes or schools, each for an hour in the forenoon and an hour in the afternoon. this arrangement would apply only to the younger pupils; yet i am aware that parents and the public would be solicitous concerning the manner of employing the time that would remain. in the cities this question is one of magnitude, and there are strong reasons for declining any proposition to reduce the school day full one-half, which does hot provide occupation for the children during the remainder of the time. it is only in connection with such a proposition that projects for gymnastic training are practicable. when children are employed six hours in school, it is not easy to find time for a course of systematic physical education; and physical education, to be productive of appreciable advantages, must be systematic. when left to children and youth, or to the care of parents, very little will be accomplished. children will participate in the customary sports, and perform the allotted labors; but in cities these sports and labors are inadequate even for boys, and in country, as well as city, girls are often the victims of neglect in this respect. availing ourselves, then, of the light shed by recent experience upon the subject of primary instruction, it seems possible to diminish the length of the school day with a gain rather than a loss of educational power. this change may be followed by the establishment, in cities and large towns, of public gymnasiums, where teachers answering in moral qualifications to the requisitions of the laws shall be employed, and where each child, for one, two, or three years, shall receive discreet and careful, but vigorous physical training. after a few years thus passed in corresponding and healthful development of the mind and body, the pupil is prepared for admission to the advanced schools, where he can submit, with perfect safety, to greater mental requirements even than are now made. the school, as at present constituted, cannot do much for physical education; and it must, as a necessity and a duty, graduate its demands to the physical as well as the intellectual abilities of its pupils. but i am satisfied that it is occasionally made to bear a weight of reproach that ought to be laid upon the customs and habits of domestic, social and general life. assuming that the principal work of the primary schools, after moral and physical culture, should be to give instruction in reading, spelling, writing, music and drawing, it is just to say that special attention should be bestowed upon the two branches first named. so imperfectly is reading sometimes taught, that pupils are found in advanced classes, and in advanced schools, whose progress in other branches is retarded by their inability to read the language fluently and intelligently. when children are well educated in reading, they find profitable employment; and they are, of course, by the knowledge of language acquired, able to comprehend, with greater facility, every study to which they are called. pupils often appear dull in grammar, geography and arithmetic, merely because they are poor readers. a child is not qualified to use a text-book of any science until he is able to read with facility, as we are accustomed to speak, in groups of words. this ability he cannot acquire without a great deal of practice. if phonetic spelling is commenced with the alphabet, he will be accurately trained in that art also. it is certain that reading, writing and spelling, have been neglected in our schools generally. if there is to be a reform, it must be commenced, and in a considerable degree accomplished, in the primary schools. these studies will be taught afterwards; but the grammar and high schools can never compensate for any defect permitted, or any wrong done, in the primary schools. reading is first mechanical, and then intellectual and emotional. in the primary schools attention is first given to mechanical training, while the intellectual and emotional culture is necessarily in a degree postponed. when the first part of the work is thoroughly done, there is no ground for complaint, and we may look to the teachers of advanced classes and schools for the proper performance of the remaining duty. the ability to spell arbitrarily, either in writing or orally, and the ability to read mechanically,--that is, the ability to seize the words readily, and utter them fluently and accurately,--must be acquired by much spelling and much reading. this work belongs to the early years of school-life; and, if it can be faithfully performed, the introduction of text-books in grammar, geography and arithmetic, may be wisely postponed. but it is a sad condition of things, which we are often compelled to contemplate, when a pupil, who might have become a respectable reader had the elementary training been careful, accurate and long-continued, is introduced to an advanced class, and there struggles against obstacles which he cannot comprehend, and which the teacher cannot remove, and finally leaves the school without the ability to read in a manner intelligible to himself, or satisfactory to others. it is the appropriate work of primary schools, and of the teachers of primary classes in district schools, to develop and chasten the moral powers of children, to train them in those habits and practices that are favorable to health and life, whether anything is known of physiology as a science or not, and to give the best culture possible to the eye, the ear, the hand and the voice. this plan is comprehensive enough for any teacher, and it will be found sufficient for any pupil less than ten years of age. nor am i speaking of that culture which is merely preparatory for the life of the artist, but of that practical training which will enable the subject of it so to use his powers as to render his life valuable to himself, and valuable to the world. there will be, in the exercises comprehended by this outline, sufficient mental discipline. it will, of course, be chiefly incidental, and it may well be doubted whether studies that are merely disciplinary should ever be introduced into our schools. there are useful occupations for pupils that, at the same time, tax and test the mind sufficiently. the plan indicated does not exclude grammar, geography and mental arithmetic, but text-books will not at first be needed. grammar should be taught by conversation, and in connection with the exercises in reading. grammar is the appreciation of the power of the words of the language in any given relations to each other, and a knowledge of grammar is essential to the ability to speak, read and write properly. therefore, grammatical rules and definitions are, or should be, deduced from the language. hence children should be first trained to speak with accuracy, so that habit shall be on the side of taste and science; next the offices which words perform in simple sentences should be illustrated and made clear; and thus far without text-books; when, finally, with their help, the pupils in the higher schools may acquire a knowledge of the science, and, at once, as the result of previous training, discern the reason for each rule and definition. the study of grammar requires some use of mental power; but when it is presented to pupils by the aid of an object which, in itself and in what it does, illustrates the subject and the predicate of a sentence, the work of comprehending the offices which words perform is rendered comparatively easy. having the skeleton thus furnished, and with the eyes and minds of the pupils fixed upon an object that possesses known and appreciable powers and qualities, it is not difficult for the teacher to construct a sentence that shall contain words of several parts of speech, all understood, because the grammatical office of each was seen even before the word itself was used. this work may be commenced when the child is young, and very satisfactory results ought to be secured as soon as the pupil is in other respects qualified to enter a grammar school. the pupil should be trained in reading as an art; that is, with the purpose of expressing whatever is intellectual and emotional in the text. satisfactory results cannot at first be secured by much reading; it seems wiser for the teacher to select an extract, paragraph, or single sentence only, and drill a pupil or a class until the meaning of the author is comprehended, and accurately or even artistically expressed. this can be done only when the teacher reads the passage again and again in the best manner possible. the contrary practice of reading volumes of extracts from the writings of the most gifted men of ancient and modern times, without preparation by the pupil, without example, explanation, correction, or questionings, by the teacher, cannot be too strongly condemned. the time will come when these selections may be read with profit; but it is better to read something well than to read a great deal; or there should be at least thorough drill in connection with every exercise, until the pupils have attained some degree of perfection. it may not be best to confine advanced pupils to the exercises in the text-books. if such pupils are invited occasionally to make selections from their entire range of reading, the teacher will have an opportunity to correct whatever is vicious in taste; and the pupil making the selection will be compelled to read in such a manner that those who listen can understand, which is not always the case when the language is addressed to the eye as well as to the ear. the introduction of colburn's intellectual arithmetic was an epoch in the science. it wrought a radical change in the ability of the people to apply the power of numbers to the practical business of life. its excellence does not consist in rules and illustrations by which examples and problems are easily solved, but in leading the mind of the pupil into natural and apparent processes of reasoning, by which he is enabled to comprehend a proposition as an independent fact. herein is a mental discipline of great value, not only in the sciences, but in the daily affairs of men of all classes and conditions. it is to be feared that equally satisfactory results have not been attained in what is called written arithmetic. this partial failure deserves consideration. the first cause may be found in an erroneous opinion concerning the difference between mental and written arithmetic. written arithmetic is mental arithmetic merely, with a record at given stages of the process of what at that point is accomplished. but, as written arithmetic tends to lessen the power of the pupil for the performance of those operations that are purely mental, he should be subjected, each day, to a searching and rapid drill in mental arithmetic also. this neglect on the part of teachers explains the singular fact that pupils, well trained in mental arithmetic, after attending to written arithmetic for three or six months, appear to have lost rather than gained in their knowledge of the science as a whole. the second cause of failure may be found in the fact that rules, processes and simple methods of solution, contained in the books, are substituted for the power of comprehension by the pupil. he should be trained to seize an example mentally, whether the slate is to be used or not, and hold it until he can determine by what process the solution is to be wrought. nor is it a serious objection that he may not at first avail himself of the easiest method. the difference between methods or ways is altogether a subordinate consideration. there may be many ways of reaching a truth, but no one of them is as important as the truth itself. the text-books should contain all the facts needed for the comprehension and the solution of the examples given; the teacher should furnish explanations and other aids, as they are needed; but the practice of adopting a process and following it to an apparently satisfactory conclusion, without comprehending the problem itself, is a serious educational evil, and it exerts a permanent pernicious influence. the remarks i have now made upon methods of teaching, which may seem to have been offered in a spirit of severe criticism, should be qualified and relieved by the statement that our teachers are as well educated as any in the country, and that they are yearly making progress in their profession. indeed, i am encouraged to suggest that better things are possible, by the consideration that many instances of distinguished success in teaching the alphabet, reading and grammar, are known to me; and that teachers are themselves aware that the work is, upon the whole, inadequately performed. if, as is generally conceded, the highest order of teaching talent is required in the primary schools, then that talent should be sought out by committees; the persons possessing it should enjoy the best means of preparation; they should receive the highest rewards, both in money and public consideration, and they should be induced to labor, without change or interruption, in the same schools and the same people. the relative merits of public high schools and endowed academies. [remarks before the american institute of instruction, at manchester, n. h.] indebted to my friend on the other side, and to you, sir, and this audience, for inviting me to take a position on this floor, i am still without any special preparation to discuss the subject. i have thought upon it, because any one, however humbly connected with free schools in this country, must have done so. and especially just now, when, in the educational journal of massachusetts, a discussion has been conducted between one of its editors and mr. gulliver, the able originator of a school in norwich, ct., and the advocate of the system of school government established there. and, therefore, every one who has had his eyes open must have seen that here is a great contest, and that underlying it is a principle which is important to society. the distinguishing difference between the advocates of endowed schools and of free schools is this: those who advocate the system of endowed academies go back in their arguments to one foundation, which is, that in education of the higher grades the great mass of the people are not to be trusted. and those who advocate a system of free education in high schools put the matter where we have put the rights of property and liberty, where we put the institutions of law and religion--upon the public judgment. and we will stand there. if the public will not maintain institutions of learning, then, i say, let institutions of learning go down. if i belong to a state which cannot be moved from its extremities to its centre, and from its centre to its extremities, for the maintenance of a system of public instruction, then, in that respect, i disown that state; and if there be one state in this union whose people cannot be aroused to maintain a system of public instruction, then they are false to the great leading idea of american principles, and of civil, political, and religious liberty. it is easy to enumerate the advantages of a system of public education, and the evils--i say evils--of endowed academies, whether free or charging payment for tuition. endowed academies are not, in all respects, under all circumstances, and everywhere, to be condemned. in discussing this subject, it may be well for me to state the view that i have of the proper position of endowed academies. they have a place in the educational wants of this age. this is especially true of academies of the highest rank, which furnish an elevated and extended course of instruction. to such i make no objection, but i would honor and encourage them. yet i regard private schools, which do the work usually done in public schools, as temporary, their necessity as ephemeral, and i think that under a proper public sentiment they will soon pass away. they cannot stand,--such has been the experience in massachusetts,--they cannot stand by the side of a good system of public education. yet where the population is sparse, where there is not property sufficient to enable the people to establish a high school, then an endowed school may properly come in to make up the deficiency, to supply the means of education to which the public wealth, at the present moment, is unequal. endowed institutions very properly, also, give a professional education to the people. at this moment we cannot look to the public to give that education which is purely professional. but what we do look to the public for is this: to furnish the means of education to the children of the whole people, without any reference to social, pecuniary, political, or religious distinctions, so that every person may have a preliminary education sufficient for the ordinary business of life. it is said that the means of education are better in an endowed academy, or in an endowed free school, than they can be in a public school. what is meant by _means_ of education? i understand that, first and chiefly, as extraneous means of education, we must look to a correct public sentiment, which shall animate and influence the teacher, which shall give direction to the school, which shall furnish the necessary public funds. an endowed free academy can have none of these things permanently. take, for example, the free school established at norwich by the liberality of thirty or forty gentlemen, who contributed ninety thousand dollars. what security is there that fifty years hence, when the educational wants of the people shall be changed, when the population of norwich shall be double or treble what it is now, when science shall make greater demands, when these forty contributors shall have passed away, this institution will answer the wants of that generation? according to what we know of the history of this country, it will be entirely inadequate; and, though none of us may live to see the prediction fulfilled or falsified, i do not hesitate to say that the school will ultimately prove a failure, because it is founded in a mistake. then look and see what would have been the state of things if there had been public spirit invoked to establish a public high school, and if the means for its support had been raised by taxation of all the people, so that the system of education would have expanded according to the growth of the city, and year by year would have accommodated itself to the public wants and public zeal in the cause. though these means seem now to be ample, they will by and by be found too limited. the school at norwich is encumbered with regulations; and so every endowed institution is likely to be, because the right of a man to appropriate his property to a particular object carries with it, in the principles of common law, and in the administration of the law, in all free governments, the right to declare, to a certain extent, how that property shall be applied. rules have been established--very proper and judicious rules for to-day. but who knows that a hundred years hence they will be proper or acceptable at all? they have also established a board of trustees, ultimately to be reduced to twenty-five. these trustees have power to perpetuate themselves. who does not see that you have severed this institution from the public sentiment of the city of norwich, and that ultimately that city will seek for itself what it needs; and that, a hundred years hence, it will not consent to live, in the civilization of that time, under the regulations which forty men have now established, however wise the regulations may at the present moment be? one hundred and fifty years ago, thomas hollis, of london, made a bequest to the university at cambridge, with a provision that on every thursday a professor should sit in his chair to answer questions in polemic theology. all well enough then; but the public sentiment of to-day will not carry it out. so it may be with the school at norwich a hundred years hence. the man or state that sacrifices the living public judgment to the opinion of a dead man, or a dead generation, makes a great mistake. we should never substitute, beyond the power of revisal, the opinion of a past generation for the opinion of a living generation. i trust to the living men of to-day as to what is necessary to meet our existing wants, rather than to the wisest men who lived in greece or rome. and, if i would not trust the wise men of greece and rome, i do not know why the people, a hundred years hence, should trust the wise men of our own time. and then look further, and see how, under a system of public instruction, you can build up, from year to year, in the growth of the child, a system according to his wants. private instruction cannot do this. what do we do where we have a correct system? a child goes into a primary school. he is not to go out when he attains a certain age. he might as well go out when he is of a certain height; there would be as much merit in one case as in the other. but he is advanced when he has made adequate attainments. who does not see that the child is incited and encouraged and stimulated by every sentiment to which you should appeal? and, then, when he has gone up to the grammar school, we say to him, "you are to go into the high school when you have made certain attainments." and who is to judge of these attainments? a committee appointed by the people, over whom the people have some ultimate control. and in that control they have security for two things: first, that the committee shall not be suspected of partiality; and secondly, that they shall not be actually guilty of partiality. in the same manner, there is security for the proper connection between the high school and the schools below. but in the school at norwich--of which i speak because it is now prominent--you have a board of twenty-five men, irresponsible to the people. they select a committee of nine; that committee determines what candidates shall be transferred from the grammar schools to the high school. may there not be suspicion of partiality? if a boy or girl is rejected, you look for some social, political, or religious influence which has caused the rejection, and the parent and child complain. here is a great evil; for the real and apparent justice of the examination and decision by which pupils are transferred from one school to another is vital to the success of the system. there is another advantage in the system of public high schools, which i imagine the people do not always at first appreciate. it is, that the private school, with the same teachers, the same apparatus, and the same means, cannot give the education which may be, and usually is, furnished in the public schools. this statement may seem to require some considerable support. we must look at facts as they are. some people are poor; i am sorry for them. some people are rich, and i congratulate them upon their good fortune. but it is not so much of a benefit, after all, as many think. it is worth something in this world, no doubt, to be rich; but what is the result of that condition upon the family first, the school afterwards, and society finally? it is, that some learn the lesson of life a little earlier than others; and that lesson is the lesson of self-reliance, which is worth more than--i will not say a knowledge of the english language--but worth more than latin or greek. if the great lesson of self-reliance is to be learned, who is more likely to acquire it early,--the child of the poor, or the child of the rich; the child who has most done for him, or the child who is under the necessity of doing most for himself? plainly, the latter. now, while a system of public instruction in itself cannot be magnified in its beneficial influences to the poor and to the children of the poor, it is equally beneficial to the rich in the facility it affords for the instruction of their children. is it not worth something to the rich man, who cannot, from the circumstances of the case, teach self-reliance around the family hearth, to send his child to school to learn this lesson with other children, that he may be stimulated, that he may be provoked to exertions which he would not otherwise have made? for, be it remembered that in our schools public sentiment is as well marked as in a college, or a town, or a nation; that it moves forward in the same way. and the great object of a teacher should be to create a public sentiment in favor of virtue. there should be some pioneers in favor of forming a correct public sentiment; and when it is formed it moves on irresistibly. it is like the river made up of drops from the mountain side, moving on with more and more power, until everything in its waters is carried to the destined end. so in a public school. and it is worth much to the man of wealth that there may be, near his own door, an institution to which he may send his children, and under the influence of which they may be carried forward. for, depend upon it, after all we say about schools and institutions of learning, it is nevertheless true of education, as a statesman has said of the government, that the people look to the school for too much. it is not, after all, a great deal that the child gets there; but, if he only gets the ability to acquire more than he has, the schools accomplish something. if you give a child a little knowledge of geography or arithmetic, and have not developed the power to accomplish something for himself, he comes to but little in the world. but put him into the school,--the primary, grammar, and high school, where he must learn for himself,--and he will be fitted for the world of life into which he is to enter. you will see in this statement that, with the same parties, the same means of education, the same teachers, the public schools will accomplish more than private schools. i find everywhere, and especially in the able address of mr. gulliver, to which i have referred, that the public schools are treated as of questionable morality, and it is implied that something would be gained by removing certain children from the influence of these schools. if i were speaking from another point of view, very likely i should feel bound to hold up the evils and defects which actually exist in public schools; but when i consider them in contrast with endowed and private schools, i do not hesitate to say that the public schools compare favorably; and, as the work of education goes on, the comparison will be more and more to their advantage. why? i know something of the private institutions in massachusetts; and there are boys in them who have left the public schools because they have fallen in their classes, and the public interest would not justify their continuance in the schools. it was always true that private schools did not represent the world exactly as it was. it is worth everything to a boy or girl, man or woman, to look the world in the face as it is. therefore, the public school, when it represents the world as it is, represents the facts of life. the private school never has done and never will do this; and as time goes on, it will be less and less a true representative of the world. from this point of view, it seems to be a mistake on the part of parents to exclude their children from the world. is it not better that the child should learn something of society, even of its evils, when under your influence, and when you can control him by your counsel and example, than to permit him finally to go out, as you must when his majority comes, perhaps to be seduced in a moment, as it were, from his allegiance to virtue? virtue is not exclusion from the presence of vice; but it is resistance to vice in its presence. and it is the duty of parents to provide safeguards for the support of their children against these temptations. when cicero was called on to defend muræna against the slander that, as he had lived in asia, he had been guilty of certain crimes, and when the testimony failed to substantiate the charge, the orator said, "and if asia does carry with it a suspicion of luxury, surely it is a praiseworthy thing, not never to have seen asia, but to have lived temperately in asia." and we have yet higher authority. it is not the glory of christ, or of christianity, that its divine author was without temptation, but that, being tempted, he was without sin. this is the great lesson of the day. the duty of the public is to provide means for the education of all. to do that, we need the political, social, and moral power of all, to sustain teachers and institutions of learning; and, endowed or free schools, depending upon the contributions of individuals, can never, in a free country, be raised to the character of a system. if you rob the public schools of the influence of our public-spirited men, if they take away a portion of their pupils from them, our system is impaired. it must stand as a whole, educating the entire people, and looking to all for support, or it cannot be permanently maintained. the high school system. [an address delivered at the dedication of the powers institute, bernardston.] there cannot be a more gratifying spectacle than the universal homage offered to education and to the young. childhood is attractive in itself; and it is peculiarly an object of solicitude for its promises concerning the future. hence the labors of philanthropists, reformers, and christians, as well as of teachers, are devoted to the culture and improvement of the rising generation, as the chief security possible for the prevalence of better ideas in the state and in the world. massachusetts has been peculiarly favored in the means of education; and we ought ever to recognize the divine influence in the wisdom which led our fathers to lay the foundations of a system that contemplated the education of the whole people. the power of this great idea, universal education, has not been limited to massachusetts; the states of the west, the states of the south, receive it as the basis of a wise public policy; and had our ancestors contributed nothing else to the glory of the republic, they would yet be entitled to the distinguished consideration of every age and people. the vigor of our culture and the hardihood of our institutions are more manifest out of massachusetts than in it. the immigrant in his new home in the great valley of prairies, on the northern shores of the american lakes, in oregon, california, or the islands of the pacific, invokes the spirit of new england in the establishment of a free church and a free school. and in the spirit and discipline of new england, the thoughts of her sons are turned homeward in adversity, seeking consolation at the sources of early, vigorous, and happy life; or, in prosperity, that they may offer, in gratitude to man and to god, some tribute, always noble, however humble, to the principles and institutions that first formed their characters, and then controlled their destiny; or, in old age, the wanderer, like jacob in egypt, with his blessing upon the tribes and families of men, says, "i am to be gathered unto my people; bury me with my fathers." this occasion and its honors are due to the memory of him whose name this institution bears; and his last will and testament is an illustration, or rather the cause, of these prefatory remarks. as the reasonably extended and eminently prosperous life of your wise benefactor approached its close, he, in the principles of old england and of new england, ordered and directed the payment of all his just debts; and then, secondly, expressed the wish, "if practicable, to be buried by the side of his parents in the cemetery at bernardston." first justice, and then affection for parents, kindred, and home, animated the vital, never-dying soul, as the life of the body ebbed and flowed, and flowed and ebbed, to flow no more. for every good the ancients imagined and named a divinity; and there is in every good something divine. we do not deify the living nor the dead; yet such foundations and institutions as the lawrence scientific school, the peabody institute, the powers institute, will bear to a grateful posterity a knowledge of the virtues of their respective founders, and of the exactness, rectitude, and wisdom, of the public sentiment which religiously consecrates the means provided to the ends proposed. but just eulogy of the dead is the appropriate duty of those who were the associates and friends of the founder of this school.--it will be my purpose, in the humble part i take in the services of this honored occasion, to point out, as i may be able, the connection between learning and wisdom, and then, by the aid of some general remarks upon education, to examine the fitness of this foundation, and the rules here established, to promote human progress and virtue. the actual available power of a state is in its adult population; but its hope is in the classes of children and youth whose plastic minds yield to good influences, and are moulded to higher forms of beauty than have been conceived by italian or grecian art. excellence is always adorable and to be adored. if it appear in beauty of person, it commands our admiration; and how much more ought wisdom, which is the beauty of the mind and the excellency of the soul, to be cultivated and cherished by every human being! "for what is there, o, ye gods!" says cicero, "more desirable than wisdom? what more excellent and lovely in itself? what more useful and becoming for a man? or what more worthy of his reasonable nature?" but wisdom cannot be acquired in a day, nor without devotion and toil. it is the achievement of a life. it is to be pursued carefully through schools, colleges, and the world,--to be mastered by study, intense thought, rigid mental discipline, and an extensive acquaintance with the best authors of ancient and modern times. it is not the child of ease, indolence, or luxury; and it is well that it is not, the best of human possessions are cheapened their attainment is no longer difficult. the wealth of california and australia has made silver, as an article of luxury, the rival of gold; and the pearl loses its beauty when the mountain streams are as fertile as the depths of the sea. wisdom comprehends learning, but learning is often found where wisdom is wanting. wisdom is not accomplishment in study, or perfection in art, or supremacy in poetry or eloquence. learning is essential to wisdom, for we cannot imagine a wise man who is not also a learned man; and the extent and soundness of his learning may be a measure of his wisdom. wisdom must always have a basis of learning, but learning is not always a basis of wisdom. learning is a knowledge of particulars, of details; wisdom is such a combination of these particulars as enables us to harmonize our lives with the laws of nature and of god. learning is manifested in what we know; wisdom in what we are, based upon what we know. philosophy, even, is love for wisdom rather than wisdom itself. the old philosophers defined wisdom to be "the knowledge of things, both divine and human, together with the causes on which they depend;" and in the proverb of solomon, "the fear of the lord is the instruction of wisdom." purity, truth, and justice, are also of its foundation. wise men of the jewish and pagan world built on this foundation, and the christian can build on none other. having combined learning with these essential virtues, a liberal, symmetrical, comprehensive character may be built up. in the formation of such a character, industry, powers of observation, strength of will and intellectual humility, are requisite. the virtue and the glory of industry cannot be presented too often to the young. i know of no worldly good or human excellence that can be attained without it; nor is there any inherited possession of name, or wealth, or position, that can be preserved in its extent and quality without active, systematic, judicious labor. it is not necessary to consider industry as habitual diligence in a pursuit, manual or intellectual; but rather as a judicious arrangement of business and recreation, so as always to have time for the necessary duties of life. mere diligence is not industry in a good sense; it is labor in a bad sense. our time should be systematically appropriated to our employments, and each measure of time should be equal to the work or duty appointed for it. moreover, each work or duty should be accomplished in its appointed time; and this can be secured only by a strong will. the power of will admits of education, culture, improvement, as much as any faculty of the mind or quality of character. a fickle, planless life cannot accomplish much. system in our plans, and firmness of will in their execution, will place us beyond the reach of ordinary disasters; yet how often do young men go through a course of school studies without a plan, even for the moment, and enter upon life the slaves of chance, the victims of what they call fortune, while they might by industry, system and firmness of will, rise superior to circumstances, and extort a measure of success not unworthy of a noble ambition! idleness is a wasting disease, a consuming fire, a destroying demon; in youth it is a calamity, in the vigor of manhood it is a disgrace and a sin, and in old age it can be honorably accepted only as the symbol of reflective leisure earned by a life of industry and virtue. industry is a badge of honor, an introduction everywhere to the true nobility of the world, the security that each may take of the future for his own happiness and prosperity in it. cardinal, personal virtues shrink and wither, or are blasted and die, in the company of idleness; and, without firmness of will, the noblest principles and purest sentiments sometimes wear the livery of vice, and often they give encouragement to it. good principles, good purposes, good ideas, are made fruitful by a strong resolution; while without it they are like bubbles of water, brilliant in the sun-light, but destined to collapse by the changing, silent force of the medium in which they float. and can any life, not positively vicious and criminal, be less desirable than that of the young man who quietly accepts whatever condition circumstances assign to him? i speak now of his moral and intellectual condition rather than of his social position among men. the latter is not in itself important, and only becomes so through the exhibition of high qualities of mind and character. social and political consideration we cannot demand as a right; but we may acquire knowledge, develop qualities of character, give evidences of wisdom that entitle us to the respect of our fellows. it may be agreeable, but it is not absolutely essential, for us to enjoy the public confidence, or even the public consideration; though we can be happy ourselves only when we are conscious of not being totally unworthy. but no social or political concession or consideration is acceptable to a noble mind, that is grudgingly yielded or doubtingly bestowed; and the lustre of great intellects is dimmed when they become subservient to claims that they despise. but can we acquire a knowledge of things, either divine or human, unless we cultivate our powers of observation? partial or inaccurate observation, especially of natural things, is a great defect of character; and in new england, where the aim of educators and of the public in matters of education is elevated, a remedy for this defect ought at once to be sought and applied. our ideas are vague concerning many subjects of common sight and common observation. is adult life, even among the educated classes, equal to a description of the common animals, trees, fruits and flowers? who will paint with words the elm or the oak so that its species will be known while the name is withheld? the introduction of drawing into the schools will improve the power of observation among the people, especially if the pupils are required to make nature their model. and this should always be done. o, how is education belittled and the mind dwarfed by those teachers who keep their pupils' thoughts upon signs and definitions, when they ought to deal continually with the facts, things and life of the world! it is no fable that a student of the higher mathematics, when his master, a practical engineer upon the boston water-works, required his services, exclaimed, "i had no idea that you had sines and tangents out of doors." with such, "nothing goes for sense or light that will not with old rules jump right; as if rules were not in the schools derived from truth, but truth from rules." and butler, in his satirical description of sir hudibras, ascribes to his hero more practical philosophy than he appears to have intended, and more, certainly, than is found in some modern systems of education: "in mathematics he was greater than tycho brahe or erra pater; for he, by geometric scale, could take the size of pots of ale; resolve by sines and tangents straight, if bread or butter wanted weight; and wisely tell what hour o' th' day the clock does strike, by algebra." another prerequisite of wisdom is intellectual humility, solomon, says, "before honor is humility;" and humility is before wisdom, and even before learning. we ought not to be ashamed of involuntary ignorance. franklin, when asked how he came to know so much, replied, "by never being ashamed to ask a question." it is idle for any one to imagine that there is nothing more for him to learn. indeed, such a theory is good evidence of defective education and limited attainments, if not of a defective mental and moral structure. naturalists delight and instruct their pupils and auditors with the wonderful truths folded in the flower, garnered in the plant, or imprisoned in the rock. yet how much more there must be of god's wisdom in the humblest of the beings created in his image! there are distinctions among men; and out of these distinctions come the truth and the necessity that each may be both a teacher and a pupil of every other. no man, however learned he may be, does know or can know all that is known by his neighbor, though that neighbor be the humblest of shepherds or of fishermen. we are not independent of each other in anything. the earnest and faithful disciple of wisdom goes through life everywhere diffusing knowledge, and everywhere gathering it up. over the great gateway of life is the inscription, "none but learners enter here;" and along its paths and in its groves are tablets, on which is written, "none but learners sojourn here." he is a poor teacher who is not a learner, and he is but little of a learner who is not something of a teacher also. the best teachers are they who are pupils, and the best pupils are already teachers. such was the real and avowed character of the great teachers of antiquity; such is the best practice of modern continental europe, and such is the requirement of nature in all ages. he who does not learn cannot teach. socrates professed to know only this, that he knew nothing. plato was a disciple of socrates and euclid; a pupil in the school of pythagoras; and, as a traveller, under the disguise of a merchant and a seller of oil, he visited egypt, and thus gained a knowledge of astronomy, and added something to his learning in other departments. he numbered among his pupils isocrates, lycurgus, aristotle, and demosthenes; and for eight years alexander the great was the pupil of aristotle, while demosthenes "wielded at will that fierce democratie, shook the arsenal, and fulmined over greece to macedon, and artaxerxes' throne." thus we trace demosthenes and alexander, the master spirits in the struggle of grecian independence against macedonian supremacy, through teachers and culture up to socrates, the wanderer in the streets, and the disturber of the peace of athens. it is stated that a distinguished modern philosopher often says, "i don't know," when the curiosity or science of his pupils suggests questions that he has not considered. if we respect and admire the wisdom of the wise, how ought we to be humbled, intellectually, by the reflection that the unknown far exceeds the known, and that all become as little children when they enter the temple of the sages! the ancients prized schools, teachers, and learning, because they were essential to wisdom; and wisdom enabled them to live temperately, justly, and happily, in the present world; while we prize schools, teachers, and learning, because they contribute to what we call success in life. the population of new england, is composed of skilful artisans, intelligent merchants, shrewd or eloquent lawyers, industrious and intelligent farmers; and to these results our system of education is too exclusively subservient. these results are not to be condemned, nor are the processes by which they are secured to be neglected. but our schools ought to do something always and for every one, for the full development of a character that is essential to artisans, merchants, lawyers, or farmers. learning should not be prized merely as an aid to the daily work of life,--though this it properly is and ever ought to be,--but for its expansive power in the mind and soul, by which we attain to a more perfect knowledge of things human and divine. there are many persons who accomplish satisfactorily the tasks assigned them, but who do not always comprehend the processes of life, in its political, social, literary, scientific and industrial relations, by which the affairs of the world are guided. something of this is due, speaking of america, and especially of new england, to the universal desire to be engaged in active business. young men destined for the farm or the shop, the counting-house or the store, leave home and school so early that their apprenticeship is ended long before their majority commences; and they are thus prepared to enter early and vigorously upon the business of life. this course has its advantages, and it is also attended by many evils. our youth have but little opportunity for observation, and a great deal of time for experience. they fall into mistakes that should have been observed, and consequently shunned. moreover, this custom tends to make business men too exclusively and rigidly technical and professional; that is, in plain language, speaking relatively, they know too much of their own vocation, and too little of everything else. business life follows so closely upon home life and school life, that the lessons of the latter fail to exert an immediate and controlling influence, and it is often only in maturer years that the fruits of early training are seen. the connection is such that the boy or youth becomes a devotee of business before he is developed into complete manhood. this is movement, but not true progress; activity, but not culture; appropriation and accumulation, but not natural development. this peculiarity is less prominent in england, and it is hardly known in the central states of europe. it is to some extent a national, and especially is it a new england characteristic. it is a manifestation of the forward moving spirit of our people, and it is also at once a promise and the security for the ultimate supremacy of the american race and nation in the affairs of the world. in athens young men attained their majority when they were sixteen; but they usually prosecuted their studies afterwards, and aristotle thought them unfit for marriage until they were thirty-seven years of age. this rule was observed by aristotle in his own case; but we are unable to say whether the rule was made before or after his marriage, which is a fact of much importance when we consider the wisdom of the precept, and the real principles and philosophy of its famous author. moreover, regardless of one-half of creation, he has neither stated the age at which females are marriageable, nor given us that of his own wife. this neglect justly detracts from his authority; and it will not be strange if young men and women view with distrust an opinion that is so manifestly partial and one-sided. if schools make merely learned people, in a narrow and technical sense, they are not doing their whole work. such learning makes an efficient population, which is certainly desirable; but it ought also to be a well-educated population in a broad, comprehensive, philosophic sense. by the force of nature and the developing influences of society, including the church, the school, and the home, we ought first to be educated men and women, and then apply that education to the particular work we have in hand. by learning, in this connection, i do not mean the learning of agassiz as a naturalist, the learning of choate as a lawyer, or the learning of everett as an orator; but a more general and less minute culture, by which men are prepared to form an accurate judgment upon subjects that usually attract public attention. in the gardens of the wealthy, we often see peach-trees and pear-trees trained against brick or stone walls, to which they are attached by substantial thongs. these trees are carefully and systematically trained, and they are trained so as to accomplish certain results. they present a large surface, in proportion to the whole, to the sun and air; in addition to the direct rays of the sun, they receive the reflected and accumulated heat of the walls to which they are fastened; and they furnish ripe fruit much in advance of trees in the gardens and fields of the common farmers. here art and nature, in brick walls, manure, the germinating power of the peach or pear, and rigid training and pruning, have produced very good machines for the manufacture of fruit; but for the full-grown, symmetrically developed tree, or even for the choicest fruit in its season, we must look elsewhere. and who does not perceive, if all the trees of the gardens, fields, and forests, were treated in the same way, that the world would be deprived of a part of its beauty and glory, and that many species of trees would soon become extinct? who would not give back the luscious pear and peach to their native acritude, rather than subject the highest forms of vegetable life to such irreverence? and, upon reflection, we shall say that such cruelty to inanimate life can be justified only as we justify the naturalist who dexterously and suddenly extracts a vital organ from a reptile, that he may observe the effect upon that form of animal existence. but the tree is not to be left in its native state. by culture its growth is so aided, that it is first and always a tree after its own kind, whether it be peach, pear, apple, elm, or oak; at once ornamental and graceful, stately or majestic, according to the germinating principle which diffuses itself through each individual creation. "for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." so in the human heart, mind, and soul, nature bringeth forth fruit of herself; and it is the work of schools and teachers to aid nature in developing a full and attractive character, that shall yield fruit while all its powers are enlarged and strengthened, as the almond in the peach is not only more luscious in its fruit, but more graceful in its branches. culture, in a broad sense, is the aid rendered to each individual creation in its work of self-improvement. it is not a noble and generous culture which dwarfs the tree that early ripened or peculiarly flavored fruit may be obtained; and it is not a noble and generous culture of the child which forces into unnatural activity certain faculties or powers that surprise us by their precocity, or excite wonder by the skill exhibited in their use. rather let the child grow, expand, mature, according to the law of its own being, giving it only encouragement and example, which are the light and air of mental and moral life. i am not conscious that any one has given us a philosophical, logical system of development, that relates to the physical, intellectual, and moral character; and to-day i state the educational want in this particular, but i do not attempt to supply it. yet in nature such a system there must be, and only powers of observation are needed that we may avail ourselves of it. and in stating this want more particularly, i offer, as my first suggestion, the opinion, common among educators, that, speaking generally and with reference to a system, we have no physical training whatever. in the days of our ancestors, one hundred or two hundred years ago, this training, as a part of a system of education, was not needed. we had no cities, and but few large towns. agriculture and the ruder forms of mechanical labor were the chief occupations of the people. populous cities, narrow streets, dark lanes, cellar habitations, crowded workshops, over-filled and over-heated factories, and the number of sedentary pursuits that tax and wear and destroy the physical powers, and undermine the moral and mental, were unknown. these are the attendants of our civilization, and they have brought a melancholy train of evils with them. in the seventeenth century, men perished from exposure, from ignorance of the laws of health, from the prevalence of malignant diseases that defied the science of the times; and, as a consequence, the average length of human life was not greater than it now is. at present, there is but little exposure that is followed by fatal results; malignant diseases are deprived of many of their terrors; rules of living, founded upon scientific principles, are accessible to all; and yet we daily meet young men and women who are manifestly unequal to the lot that is before them. in some cases, the sin of the parent is visited upon the children, and the measure of life meted out to them is limited and insufficient. in other cases, the individuals, first yielding in their own persons, are the victims of positive vice, or of some of the evils stated. civilization is not an unmixed good; and we cannot offer to the city or the factory any adequate compensation for the loss of pure water, pure air, and the healthful exercise of body, which may be enjoyed in the country villages and agricultural districts of the state. yet even in cities and large towns the culture of home and school should diminish these evils; and it is a pleasure to believe that our system of domestic and public education is doing something at the present moment in behalf of the too much neglected body; but nowhere, either in city or country, do we observe the evidences of juvenile health and strength that a friend of the race would desire to see. and it is, i fear, specially true of schools, and to some extent it is true of teachers, as a class, that too little attention is given to those exercises and habits which secure good health. there are many causes which tend to lower the average health and strength of our people. st. the practice of sending children to school at the tender age of five, four, or even three years. every school necessarily imposes some restraint upon the pupils; and i assume that no child under five years of age should be subject to such restraints. but the education of the child is not, therefore, to be neglected. parents, brothers and sisters, may all do something for the young inquirer; but he should never have lessons imposed, nor be subject to the rules of a school of any description. the moment of his admission must be determined by circumstances, and the force of the circumstances must be judged of by parents. if a child is blessed with kind, considerate, intelligent parents, the first eight years of his life can be spent nowhere else as profitably as at home. the true mother is the model teacher. no other person can ever acquire the control over her off-spring that is her own rightful possession. when she neglects the trust confided to her, she is guilty of a serious wrong; and when she transfers it to another, she takes upon herself a greater responsibility than she yields up. the instinctive judgment of the world cannot be an erroneous judgment. the mother has always, to a great extent, been made responsible for the child; and the honor of his virtues or the disgrace of his crimes has been traced through him to her. dly. some portion of every school-day should be systematically and strictly devoted to recreation, physical exercise and manual labor; and the hours given to study ought to be defined and limited. some persons say, "let a child study as much as he will, there is time enough to play." this may be generally true, but it is not universally so. i cannot but think that the practice of assigning lessons and giving the pupil the free use of the four-and-twenty hours is a bad practice. would it not be better to give to each pupil certain hours for study?--assign him lessons, by topics if possible, allow him to do what he can in the allotted time, and then prohibit the appropriation of an additional minute? why should a dull scholar, or one who has but little taste or talent for a given study, be required to plod twelve, sixteen, or eighteen hours at unwelcome tasks, while another more favored disposes of his work in six? why should a pupil, who is laboring under some mental or physical debility, be required to apply his mind unceasingly when he most needs rest and recreation? why should the pages of a spelling-book, grammar, geography, or arithmetic, be the measure of each pupil's capacity? lessons are to be assigned, not necessarily to be mastered by the pupil, though they should have just reference to his capacity, but as the subject of his studies for a given period of time. the pupil should be responsible for nothing but the proper use of that time. two advantages might result from this practice. first, the pupil would acquire the habit of performing the greatest amount of labor possible in the given time; and, secondly, he would naturally throw off all care for books and school when the hour for relaxation arrived. if particular studies are assigned to specified hours, the pupil must master his thoughts, and give them the required direction. this in itself is a great achievement. i put it, in practical value, before any of the studies that are taught and learned in the schools. the danger to which pupils are often exposed, in this connection, is quite apparent. a lesson is assigned for a succeeding day. the attention is not immediately fixed upon it. one hour passes, and then another. nothing is accomplished, yet the pupil is continually oppressed by the consciousness of duty unperformed, and the result is, that he neither does what he ought to do, nor does anything else. would it not be better to measure and assign his time, and then require him to abandon all thought of the matter? this practice might give our people the faculty and the habit of throwing off cares and occupations, when they leave the scenes of them. it is a just criticism upon american character, that our business men carry their occupations with them wherever they go. i should put high up among the elements of worldly success the ability to give assiduously, studiously and devotedly, the necessary time to a subject of business, and then to throw off all thought of it. there can be no peace of mind for the business man who does not possess this quality; and i think it will contribute essentially to a long life and a quiet old age. no wise man ever attempts more than one thing at a time; and the man who attempts to do more than one thing at a time has no security that he can do anything well. the statements of biography and history, that napoleon was accustomed to do several things at once, rest upon a misconception of the operations of the human mind. his facility for the direction and transaction of business depended upon the quality i am now considering. he had the faculty of giving his attention, undivided and strongly fixed, to a subject for an hour, half-hour, minute, half-minute, or second, and then of dismissing the matter altogether, and directing his thoughts, without loss of time, to whatever next might be presented. one thing at a time is a law which no finite power can violate; and ability in execution depends upon the ability to concentrate all the powers of the mind, at a given moment, upon the assigned topic, and then to change, without friction or loss of time, to something else. the institution is a high school, and the question is now agitated, especially in the state of connecticut, "how can the advantages of a high school education be best secured?" this question i propose to consider. and, first, the high school must be a public school. a _public school_ i understand to be a school established by the public,--supported chiefly or entirely by the public, controlled by the public, and accessible to the public upon terms of equality without special charge for tuition. private schools may be established and controlled by an individual, or by an association of individuals, who have no corporate rights under the government, but receive pupils upon terms agreed upon, subject to the ordinary laws of the land. private schools may be founded also by one or more persons, and by them endowed with funds, for their partial or entire support. in such cases, the founder, through the money given, has the right to prescribe the rules by which the school shall be controlled, and also to provide for the appointment of its managers or trustees through all time. in such cases, corporate powers are usually granted by the government for the management of the business. but the chief rights of such an institution are derived from the founder, and the facilities for their easy exercise and quiet enjoyment are derived from the state. such schools are sometimes, upon a superficial view, supposed to be public, because they receive pupils upon terms of equality, and no rule of exclusion exists which does not apply to all. and especially has it been assumed that a free school thus founded, as the norwich free academy, which makes no charges for tuition, and is open to all the inhabitants of the city, is therefore a public school. these institutions are public in their use, but not in their foundation or control, and are therefore not public schools. the character of a school, as of any eleemosynary institution, is derived from the will of the founder; and when the beneficial founder is an individual, or a number of individuals less than the whole political organization of which the individuals are a part, the institution is private, whatever the rules for its enjoyment may be. to say that a school is a public school because it receives pupils free of charge for tuition, or because it receives them upon conditions that are applied alike to all, is to deny that there are any private schools, for all come within the definition thus laid down. nor is there any good reasoning in the statement that a school is public because it receives pupils from a large extent of country. dartmouth college is a private school, though its pupils come from all the land or all the world; while the boston latin school is a public school; though it receives those pupils only whose homes are within the limits of the city. the first is a private school, because it was founded by president wheelock, and has been controlled by him and his successors, holding and governing and enjoying through him, from the first until now; while the boston latin school is a public school, because it was established by the city of boston, through the votes of its inhabitants, under the laws of the state, and is at all times subject, in its government and existence, to the popular will which created it. when we speak of the public we do not necessarily mean the world, nor the nation, nor even the state; but the word _public_, in a legal sense, may stand for any legal political organization, territorially defined, and intrusted in any degree with the administration of its own affairs. and the public character of a particular school, as the boston latin school, for example, may be determined, by a process of reasoning quite independent of that already presented. the state of massachusetts, a complete sovereignty in itself, has provided by her constitution and laws, which are the expressed judgment of her people, for the establishment of a system of public schools, through the agency and action of the respective cities and towns of the commonwealth. these towns and cities, under the laws, set up the schools; and of course each school partakes of the public character which the action of the state, followed by the corporate public action of the city or town, has given to it. thus it is seen that our public schools answer to the requirement already stated. they are established by the public, supported chiefly or entirely by the public, controlled by the public, and accessible to the public upon terms of equality, without special charge for tuition. nor is the public character of a school changed by the fact that private citizens may have contributed to its maintenance, if such contributors do not assume to stand in the relation of founders. it is well understood that the beneficial founder of a school is he who makes the first gift or bequest to it, and the legal founder is the government which grants a charter, or in any way confers upon it a corporate existence. if a town establish a high school, as in bernardston to-day, and accept a gift or bequest, the character of the school is not changed thereby. mr. powers did not attempt to establish a new school. he gave the income of ten thousand dollars for the aid of schools then existing, and for the aid of a school whose existence was already contemplated by the laws of the state. no change has been wrought in your institutions; they are still public,--your generous testator has only contributed to their support. and, in considering yet further the question, "how can the advantages of a high-school education be best secured?" i shall proceed to compare, with what brevity i can command, the public high school with the free high school or academy upon a private foundation. my reasoning is general, and the argument does not apply to all the circumstances of society. it is not everywhere possible to establish a public high school. in some cases the population may not be sufficient, in others there may not be adequate wealth, and in others there may not be an elevated public sentiment equal to the emergency. in such circumstances, those who desire education must obtain it in the best manner possible; and academies, whether free or not, and private schools, whether endowed or not, should be thankfully accepted and encouraged. nor will high schools meet all the wants of society. there must always be a place for classical schools, scientific schools, professional schools, which, in their respective courses of study, either anticipate or follow, in the career of the student, his four years of college life. with these conditions and limitations stated, the point i seek to establish is that a public high school can do the work usually done in such institutions more faithfully, thoroughly, and economically, than it can be done anywhere else. st. the supervision of the public school is more responsible, and consequently more perfect. in private schools, academies and free high schools which are endowed, there is a board of trustees, who perpetuate, as a corporation, their own existence. each member is elected for life, and he is not only not responsible to the public, but he is not even responsible, except in extraordinary cases, to his associates. responsibility is, in all governments, the security taken for fidelity. the election of representatives, in the state or national legislature, for life, would be esteemed a great and dangerous innovation. it maybe said that boards of trustees are usually better qualified to manage a school than the committees elected by the respective cities and towns. judged as individuals, this is probably true; though upon this point i prefer to admit a claim rather than to express an opinion. but positively incompetent school committees are the exception in massachusetts; usually the people make the selection from their best men. but in the public school you get the immediate, direct supervision of the public. not merely in the election of committees, but in a daily interest and vigilance whose results are freely disclosed to the superintending committee, as every inhabitant feels that his contribution, as a tax-payer, gives him the right to judge the character of the school, and makes it his duty to report its defects to those charged with its management. the real defects of a school, especially of a high school, will be first discovered by pupils; and they are likely to report these defects to their parents. in the case of the endowed private school, the parent feels that he buys whatever the trustees have to sell, or takes as a gift whatever they have to offer free; and he does not, logically nor as a matter of fact, infer from either of these relations his right to participate in the government of the school. in one case you have the observation, the judgment, the supervision, of the whole community; in the other case you have the learning and judgment of five, seven, ten, or twelve men. dly. the faithfulness of the teacher is very much dependent upon the supervision to which he is subject. this is only saying that the teacher is human. in the public school there is no motive which can influence a reasonable man that would lead him to swerve in the least from his fidelity to the interest of the school as a whole. no partiality to a particular individual, no desire to promulgate a special idea, can ever stand in the place of that public support which is best secured by a just performance of his duties. in the private school, with a self-perpetuating board of trustees, the temptation is strong to make the organization subservient to some opinion in politics, religion, or social life. this may not always be done; but in many cases it has been done, and there is no reason to expect different things in the future. i concur, then, unreservedly in the judgment which has placed this institution, in all its interests and in all its duties, under the control of the inhabitants of bernardston. when they who live in its light and enjoy its benefits cease to respect it, when they to whom it is specially dedicated cease to love and cherish it, it will no longer be entitled to the favorable consideration of a more extended public sentiment. as all trustworthy national patriotism must be built on love for state, town, and home, so every school ought to esteem its power for usefulness in its own neighborhood its chief means of good. it will naturally be inferred, from the remarks made upon the singleness of purpose and fidelity of the public school to the cause of education, that the instruction given in it is more thorough than is usually given in the private school. but, in examining yet further the claim of the public school to superior thoroughness, i must assume that it enjoys the advantages of comfortable rooms, adequate apparatus and competent teachers. and this assumption ought to be supported by the facts. there is no good reason why any town in massachusetts should be negligent or parsimonious in these particulars. true economy requires liberal appropriations. with these appropriations, the best teachers, even from private schools and academies, can be secured, and all the aids and encouragements to liberal culture can be provided. is it possible that any of the means of a common-school education are necessarily denied to a million and a quarter of industrious people, who already possess an aggregate capital of seven or eight hundred millions of dollars? but the character of a high school must always depend materially upon the previous training of the pupils, and the qualifications required for admission. when the high school is a public school, the studies of the primary and grammar or district schools are arranged with regard to the system as a system. there is no inducement to admit a pupil for the sake of the tuition fees, or for the purpose of adding to the number of scholars. the applicant is judged by his merits as a scholar; and where there is a wise public sentiment, the committee will be sustained in the execution of just rules. in the public high school we avoid a difficulty that is almost universal in academies and private schools--the presence of pupils whose attainments are so various that by a proper classification they would be assigned to two, if not to three grades, where the graded system exists. the vigilance, industry and fidelity of teachers, cannot overcome this evil. the instruction given is inevitably less systematic and thorough. the character which the high school, whether public or private, presents, is not its own character merely; it reflects the qualities and peculiarities of the schools below. it follows, then, that the attention of the public should be as much directed to the primary and grammar or district schools as to the high school itself. of course, it ought not to be assumed that the existence of a high school will warrant any abatement of appropriations for the lower grades; indeed, the interest and resources of these schools ought continually to increase. nor can it be assumed that your contributions to the cause of education will be diminished by the bequest of your generous testator. he did not seek to lessen your burdens, but to add to the means of education among you. there is also an inherent power of discipline in the public schools, where they are graded and a system of examinations exists, that is not found elsewhere. neither the pupil nor the parent is viewed by the teacher in the light of a patron; hence, he seeks only to so conduct his school as to meet the public requirement. moreover, as admission to a high school can be secured by merit only, the results of the preliminary training must have been such as to create a reasonable presumption in favor of the applicant, mentally and morally. hence, the public schools are filled by youth who are there as the reward of individual, personal merit. practically, the motive by which the pupils are animated has much to do with their success. if they are moved by a love for learning, they attain the object of their desires even without the aid of teachers; but where they are aided and encouraged by faithful teachers, the school is soon under the control of a public sentiment which secures the end in view. this public sentiment is not as easily built up in a private school; for, in the nature of things, some pupils will find their way there who are not true disciples of learning; and such persons are obstacles to general progress, while they advance but little themselves. and, gentlemen trustees and citizens of bernardston, may i not personally and especially invite you to consider the importance of a fixed standard of admission and a careful examination of candidates? this course is essential to the improvement of your district and village schools. it is essential to the true prosperity of this seminary, and it is also essential to the intellectual advancement of the people within your influence. you expect pupils from the neighboring towns. your object is not pecuniary profit, but the education of the people. if your requirements are positive, though it may not be difficult to meet them in the beginning, every town that depends upon this institution for better learning than it can furnish at home will be compelled to maintain schools of a high order. on the other hand, negligence in this particular will not only degrade the school under your care here, but the schools in this town and the cause of education in the vicinity will be unfavorably affected. nor let the objection that a rigid standard of qualifications will exclude many pupils, and diminish the attendance upon the school, have great weight; for you perform but half your duty when you provide the means of a good education for your own students. you are also, through the power inherent in this authority, to do something to elevate the standard of learning in other schools, and in the country around. what harm if this school be small, while by its influence other schools are made better, and thus every boy and girl in the vicinity has richer means of education than could otherwise have been secured? thus will tens, and hundreds, and thousands, of successive generations, have cause to bless this school, though they may never have sat under its teachers, or been within its walls. in a system of public schools, everything may be had at its prime cost. there need be no waste of money, or of the time or power of teachers. as the public system must everywhere exist, it is a matter of economy to bring all the children under its influence. the private system never can educate all; therefore the public system cannot be abandoned, unless we consent to give up a part of the population to ignorance. it may, then, be said that the private schools, essential in many cases, ought to give way whenever the public schools are prepared to do the work; and when the public schools are so prepared, the existence of private schools adds their own cost to the necessary cost of popular education. but we are not to encourage parsimony in education; for parsimony in this department is not true economy. it is true economy for the state and for a town to set up and maintain good schools as cheaply as they can be had, yet at any necessary cost, so only that they be good. massachusetts is prosperous and wealthy to-day, respected in evil report as well as in good, because, faithful to principle and persistent in courage, she has for more than two hundred years provided for the education of her children; and now the re-flowing tide of her wealth from seaboard and cities will bear on its wave to these quiet valleys and pleasant hill-sides the lovers of agriculture, friends of art, students of science, and such as worship rural scenes and indulge in rural sports; but the favored and first-sought spots will be those where learning has already chosen her seat, and offers to manhood and age the culture and society which learning only can give, and to childhood and youth, over and above the training of the best schools, healthful moral influences, and elements of physical growth and vigor, which ever distinguish life in the country and among the mountains from life in the city or on the plain. and over a broader field and upon a larger sphere shall the benignant influence of this system of public instruction be felt. in the affairs of this great republic, the power of a state is not to be measured by the number of its votes in congress. public opinion is mightier than congress; and they who wield or control that do, in reality, bear rule. power in the world, upon a large view, and in the light of history, has not been confided to the majorities of men. greece, unimportant in extent of territory, a peninsula and archipelago in the sea, led the way in the civilization of the west, and, through her eloquence, poetry, history and art, became the model of modern culture. rome, a single city in italy, that stretches itself into the sea as though it would gaze upon three continents, subjugated to her sway the savage and civilized world, and impressed her arms and jurisprudence upon all succeeding times; then venice, without a single foot of solid land, guarded inviolate the treasure of her sovereignty for thirteen hundred years against the armies of the east and the west; while, in our own time, england, unimportant in the extent of her insular territory, has been able, by the intelligence and enterprise of her people, to make herself mistress of the seas, arbiter of the fortunes of europe, and the ruler of a hundred millions of people in asia. these things have happened in obedience to a law which knows no change. power in america is with those who can bring the greatest intellectual and moral force to bear upon a given point. and massachusetts, limited in the extent of her territory, without salubrity of climate, fertility of soil, or wealth of mines, will have influence, through her people at home and her people abroad, proportionate to her fidelity to the cause of universal public education. normal school training. [an address delivered at the dedication of the state normal school, at salem.] the human race may be divided into two classes. one has no ideal of a future different from the present; or, if it is not always satisfied with this view, it has yet had no clear conception of a higher existence. the other class is conscious of the power of progress, is making continual advances, and has an ideal of a future such as, in its judgment, the present ought to be. both of these classes have institutions; for institutions are not the product of civilization, as they exist wherever our social nature is developed. man is also a dependent being, and he therefore seeks the company, counsel and support of his fellows. from the right of numbers to act comes the necessity of agreement, or at least so much concurrence in what is to be done as to secure the object sought. the will of numbers can only be expressed through agencies; and these, however simple, are indeed institutions--the evidence of civilization, rather than its product. they are always the sign, symbol, or language, by which the living man expresses the purpose of his life. therefore, institutions differ, as the purposes of men vary. the savage and the man of culture do not seek the same end; hence they will not employ the same means. the institutions of the savage are those of the family, clan, or tribe, to which he belongs. there the child is instructed in the art of dress, in manners and language, in the rude customs of agriculture, the chase, and war. this with him is life, and the history of one generation is often the history of many generations. their ideal corresponds with their actual life; and, as a necessary result, there is little or no progress. but the other class establishes institutions which indicate the existence of new relations, and exact the performance of new duties. as man is a social being, he necessarily creates institutions of government and education corresponding to the sphere in which he is to act. if a nation desires to educate only a part of its people, its institutions are naturally exclusive; but wherever the idea of universal education has been received, the institutions of the country look to that end. when massachusetts was settled there were no truly popular institutions in the world, for there was really no belief in popular rights. and why should those be encouraged to think who have no right to act? the principle that every man is to take a part in the affairs of the community or state to which he belongs seems to be the foundation of the doctrine that every man should be educated to think for himself. free schools and general education are the natural results of the principles of human equality, which distinguish the people and political systems of america. the purposes of a people are changeable and changing, but institutions are inflexible; therefore these latter often outlast the ideas in which they originated, or the ideas may be acting in other bodies or forms. institutions are the visible forms of ideas, but they are useful only while those ideas are living in the minds of men. if an institution is suffered to remain after the idea has passed away, it embarrasses rather than aids an advancing people. such are monastic establishments in protestant countries; such is the church of england, as an institution of religion and government, to all classes of dissenters; such are many seminaries of learning in europe, and some in america. massachusetts has had one living idea, from the first,--that general intelligence is necessary to popular virtue and liberty. this idea she has expressed in various ways; the end it promises she has sought by various means. in obedience to this idea, she has established colleges, common schools, grammar schools, academies, and at last the normal school. the _institution_ only of the normal school is new; the _idea_ is old. the normal system is but a better expression of an idea partially concealed, but nevertheless to be found in the college, grammar school and academy of our fathers. nor have we accepted the institution so readily from a knowledge of its results in other countries, as from its manifest fitness to meet a want here. it is not, then, our fortune to inaugurate a new idea, but only to clothe an old one again, so that it may more efficiently advance popular liberty, intelligence and virtue. and this is our duty to-day. the proprieties of this occasion would have been better observed, had his excellency, governor washburn, found it convenient to deliver the address, which, at a late moment, has been assigned to me. but we are all in some degree aware of the nature and extent of his public duties, and can, therefore, appreciate the necessity which demands relief from some of them. massachusetts has founded four normal schools, and at the close of the present century she may not have established as many more, for she now satisfies the just demands of every section of her territory, and presents the benefits of this system of instruction to all her inhabitants. the building we here set apart, and the school we now inaugurate to the service of learning, are to be regarded as the completion of the original plan of the state, and any future extension will depend upon the success of the normal system as it shall appear in other years to other generations of men. but we have great faith that the normal system, in itself and in its connections, will realize the cherished idea of our whole history; and if so, it will be extended until every school is supplied with a normal teacher. this, then, is an occasion of general interest; but to the city of salem, and the county of essex, it is specially important. similar institutions have been long established in other parts of the state; but some compensation is now to be made to you, in the experience and improvements of the last fifteen years. intelligent labor sheds light upon the path of the laborer, and, though the direct benefits of this system have not been here enjoyed, many resulting advantages from the experience of similar institutions in other places will now inure to you. the city of salem, with wise forecast, anticipated these advantages, and generously contributed a sum larger even than that appropriated by the state itself. this bounty determined the location of the school, but determined it fortunately for all concerned. salem is one of the central points of the state; and in this respect no other town in the vicinity, however well situated, is a competitor. pupils may reside at their homes in newburyport, lynn, lawrence, haverhill, gloucester and lowell, or at any intermediate place, and enjoy the benefit of daily instruction within these walls. this is a great privilege for parents and pupils; and it could not have been so well secured at any other point. here, also, pupils and teachers may avail themselves of the libraries, literary institutions and cabinets of this ancient and prosperous town. these are no common advantages. we are wiser and better for the presence of great numbers of books, though we may never know what they contain. we see how much perseverance and labor have accomplished, and are sensible that what has been may be equalled if not excelled. in great libraries, we realize how the works of the ambitious are neglected, and their names forgotten, while we cannot fail to be impressed with the value of the truth, that the only labor which brings a certain reward is that performed under a sense of duty. salem is itself the intelligent and refined centre of an intelligent and prosperous population; and we may venture so far, in just eulogy, as to attribute to it the united advantages of city and country, without a large share of the privations of the one, or the vices of the other. of the four normal schools, this is, unquestionably, the most fortunate in its position and surroundings. we, therefore, ask for the concurrence of the public in the judgment which has established it in this city. if it shall be the fortune of the government to assemble a body of instructors qualified for their stations, there will then remain no reason why these accommodations and advantages should not be fully enjoyed. the normal school differs from all other seminaries of learning, and only because it is an auxiliary to the common schools can it be deemed their inferior in importance. the academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the normal school is truly the helper of the common schools. it receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. the normal schools are sustained by the common schools; and these latter, in return, draw their best nutriment from the former. this institution stands with the common school; it is as truly popular, as really democratic in a just sense, and its claim for support rests upon the same foundation. in massachusetts we have abandoned the idea, never, i think, general, that instruction in the art of teaching is unnecessary. the normal school is, with us, a necessity; for it furnishes that tuition which neither the common school, academy, nor college can. these institutions were once better adapted to this service than now. there has been a continual increase of academic studies, until it has become necessary to establish institutions for special purposes; and of these the normal school is one. its object is definite. the _true_ normal school instructs only in the art of teaching; and, in this respect, it must be confessed we have failed, sadly failed, to realize the ideal of the system. it is not a substitute for the common school, academy, or college, though many pupils, and in some degree the public, have been inclined thus to treat it. there should be no instruction in the departments of learning, high or low, except what is incidental to the main business of the institution; yet some have gone so far in the wrong course as to suggest that not only the common branches should be studied, but that tuition should be given in the languages and the higher mathematics. a little reflection will satisfy us how great a departure this would be from the just idea of the normal school. yet circumstances, rather than public sentiment, have compelled the government to depart in practice, though never in theory, from the true system. it so happens that much time is occupied in instruction in those branches which ought to be thoroughly mastered by the pupil before he enters the normal school,--that is, before he begins to acquire the art of teaching what he has not himself learned. such is the state of our schools that we are obliged to accept as pupils those who are not qualified, in a literary point of view, for the post of teachers. by sending better teachers into the public schools, you will effectually aid in the removal of this difficulty. the normal school is, then, no substitute for the high school, academy, or college. nor do we ask for any sympathy or aid which properly belongs to those institutions. he is no friend of education, in its proper signification, who patronizes some one institution, and neglects all others. we have no seminaries of learning which can be considered useless, and he only is a true friend who aids and encourages any and all as he has opportunity. what is popularly known as learning is to be acquired in the common school, high school, academy and college, as heretofore. the normal school does not profess to give instruction in reading and arithmetic, but to teach the art of teaching reading and arithmetic. so of all the elementary branches. but, as the art of teaching a subject cannot be acquired without at the same time acquiring a better knowledge of the subject itself, the pupil will always leave the normal school better grounded than ever before in the elements and principles of learning. it is not, however, to be expected that complete success will be realized here more than elsewhere; yet it is well to elevate the standard of admission, from time to time, so that a larger part of the exercises may be devoted to the main purpose of the institution. the struggle should be perpetual and in the right direction. first, elevate your common schools so that the education there may be a sufficient basis for a course of training here. if the normal school and the public schools shall each and all do their duty, candidates for admission will be so well qualified in the branches required, that the art of teaching will be the only art taught here. when this is the case, the time of attendance will be diminished, and a much larger number of persons may be annually qualified for the station of teachers. next, let the committees and others interested in education make special efforts to fill the chairs of your hall with young women of promise, who are likely to devote themselves to the profession. it is, however, impossible for human wisdom to guard against one fate that happens to all, or nearly all, the young women who are graduated at our normal schools. but this remark is not made publicly, lest some anxious ones avail themselves of your bounty as a means to an end not contemplated by the state. the house you have erected is not so much dedicated to the school as to the public; the institution here set up is not so much for the benefit of the young women who may become pupils, as for the benefit of the public which they represent. the appeal is, therefore, to the public to furnish such pupils, in number and character, that this institution may soon and successfully enter upon the work for which it is properly designed. but the character and value of this school depend on the quality of its teachers more than on all things else. they should be thoroughly instructed, not only in the branches taught, but in the art of teaching them. the teacher ought to have attained much that the pupil is yet to learn; if he has not, he cannot utter words of encouragement, nor estimate the chances of success. it is not enough to know what is contained in the text-book; the pupil should know that, at least; the teacher should know a great deal more. a person is not qualified for the office of teacher when he has mastered a book; and has, in fact, no right to instruct others until he has mastered the subject. text-books help us a little on the road of learning; but, by and by, whatever our pursuit or profession, we leave them behind, or else content ourselves with a subordinate position. practical men have made book-farmers the subject of ridicule; and there is some propriety in this; for he is not a master in his profession who has not got, as a general thing, out of and beyond the books which treat of it. books are necessary in the school-room; but the good teacher has little use for them in his own hands, or as aids in his own proper work. he should be instructed in his subject, aside from and above the arbitrary rules of authors; and he will be, if he is himself inspired with a love of learning. _inspired with a love of learning!_ whoever is, is sure of success; and whoever is not, has the best possible security for the failure of his plans. there cannot be a good school where the love of learning in teacher and pupil is wanting; and there cannot be a bad one where this spirit has control. as the master, so is the disciple; as the teacher, so is the pupil; for the spirit of the teacher will be communicated to the scholars. there must also be habits of industry and system in study. we have multitudes of scholars who study occasionally, and study hard; but we need a race of students who will devote themselves habitually, and with love, to literature and science. on the teachers, then, is the chief responsibility, whether the young women who go out from this institution are well qualified for their profession or not. the study of technicalities is drudgery of the worst sort to the mere pupil; but the scholar looks upon it as a preparation for a wide and noble exercise of his intellectual powers--as a key to unlock the mysteries of learning. it is the business of the teacher to lighten the labors of to-day by bright visions of to-morrow. there is a school in medicine, whose chief claim is, that it invites and prepares nature to act in the removal of disease. we pass no judgment upon this claim; but he is, no doubt, the best teacher who does little for his pupils, while he incites and encourages them to do much for themselves. extensive knowledge will enable the teacher to do this. he is a poor instructor of mathematics who sees only the dry details of rules, tables and problems, and never ascends to the contemplation of those supreme wonders of the universe which mathematical astronomy has laid open. the grammar of a language is defined to be the art of reading and writing that language with propriety. the study of its elements is dry and uninteresting; and, while the teacher dwells with care upon the merits of the text, he should also lift the veil from that which is hidden, and lead his pupils to appreciate those riches of learning which the knowledge of a language may confer upon the student. it is useful to know the division of the globe into continents and oceans, islands and lakes, mountains and rivers--and this knowledge the text-books contain; but it is a higher learning to understand the effect of this division upon climate, soil and natural productions--upon the character and pursuits of the human race. books are so improved that they may very well take the place of poor, or even ordinary teachers. explanations and illustrations are numerous and appropriate, and very little remains for the mere text-book teacher to do. but, when the duties of teacher and the exercises of the school-room are properly performed, the entire range of science, business, literature and art, is presented to the student. may it be your fortune to see education thus elevated here, and then will the same spirit be infused into the public schools of the vicinity. the massachusetts system of education is a noble tribute to freedom of thought. the power of educating a people, which is, in fine, the chief power in a state, has been often, if not usually, perverted to the support of favored opinions in religion and government. the boasted system of prussia is only a prop and ally of the existing order of things. in france, napoleon makes the press, which has become in civilized countries an educator of the people, the mere instrument of his will. tyrants do not hesitate to pervert schools and the press, learning and literature, to the support of tyranny. but with us the press and the school are free; and this freedom, denied through fear in other countries, is the best evidence of the stability of our institutions. it is now a hundred years since an attempt was made in massachusetts to exercise legal censorship over the press; but we occasionally hear of movements to make the public schools of america subservient to sect or party. the success of these movements would be as great a calamity as can ever befall a free people. ignorance would take the place of learning, and slavery would usurp the domain of liberty. no defence, excuse, or palliation, can be offered for such movements; and their triumph will safely produce all the evils which it is possible for an enlightened people to endure. our system of instruction is what it professes to be,--a public system. as sects or parties, we have no claim whatever upon it. a man is not taxed because he is of a particular faith in religion, or party in politics; he is not taxed because he is the father of a family, or excused because he is not; but he contributes to the cause of education because he is a citizen, and has an interest in that general intelligence which decides questions of faith and practice as they arise. it is for the interest of all that all shall be educated for the various pursuits and duties of the time. the education of children is, no doubt, first in individual duty. it is the duty of the parent, the duty of the friend; but, above all, it is the duty of the public. this duty arises from the relations of men in every civilized state; but in a popular government it becomes a necessity. the people are the source of power--the sovereign. and is it more important in a monarchy than in a republic that the ruler be intelligent, virtuous, and in all respects qualified for his duties? the institution here set up is an essential part of our system of public instruction, and, as such, it claims the public favor, sympathy and support. this is a period of excitement in all the affairs and relations of men, and america is fast becoming the central point of these activities. they are, no doubt, associated with many blessings, but they may also be attended by great evils. we claim for our country preëminence in education. this may be just, but it is also true that americans, more than any other people, need to be better educated than they are. where else is the field of statesmanship so large, or the necessity for able statesmen so great? with the single exception of great britain, there is no nation whose relations are such as to require a union in rulers of the rarest practical abilities with accurate, sound and varied learning; and there is no nation whose people are so critical in the tests they apply to their public agents. we need men thoroughly educated in all the departments of learning; to which ought to be added, travel in foreign countries, and an intimate acquaintance with every part of our own. such men we have had--such men we have now; but they will be more and more important as we advance in numbers, territory and power. a corresponding culture is necessary in theology, in law, and in all the pursuits of industry. no other nation has so great a destiny. that destiny is manifest, and may be read in the heart and purpose of the people. they seek new territories, an increase of population, the prosperity of commerce, of all the arts of industry, and preëminence in virtue, learning and intellectual power. and all this they can attain; for the destiny of a people, within the limits prescribed by reason, is determined by themselves. if, however, by conquest, annexation and absorption, we acquire new territories, and strange races and nations of men, and yet neglect education, every step will but increase our burdens and perils, and hasten our decay. female education. [an address before the newburyport female high school.] i accepted, without a moment's delay, the invitation of the principal of this school to deliver the customary address on this, the fifteenth anniversary of its establishment. my presence here in connection with public instruction is not a proper subject for comment by myself; but i have now come, allow me to say, with unusual alacrity, that we may together recognize the claims of an institution which furnishes the earliest evidence existing among us of a special design on the part of the public to provide adequate intellectual and moral training for the young women of the state. those movements which have accomplished most for religion, liberty, and learning, have not been sudden in their origin nor rapid in their progress. christianity has been preached eighteen hundred years, yet it is not now received, even intellectually, by the larger part of the human race. magna charta is six centuries old, but its principles are not accepted by all the nations of europe and america; and it is not, therefore, strange that a system of public instruction, originated by the puritans of new england, should yet be struggling against prejudice and error. in asia woman is degraded, and in europe her common condition is that of apparent and absolute inferiority. when america was settled she became a participator in the struggles and sufferings which awaited the pioneers of civilization and liberty on this continent, and she thus earned a place in family, religious, and even in public life, which foreshowed her certain and speedy disenthrallment from the tyranny of tradition and time. her rights with us are secure, and the anxiety and boisterous alarm exhibited by some strong-minded women, and the horror-fringed apprehensions and prophecies of some weak-minded men, are equally unreasonable and absurd. woman is sharing the lot of humanity, and therewith she ought to be content. man does not remove the burden of ignorance and oppression from his sex, merely, but generally from his kind. at least, this is the experience and promise of america. if woman does not vote because she is woman, so and for the same reason she is not subject to personal taxation. it is an error to suppose that voting is a privilege, and taxation, ever and always, a burden. both are duties; and the privilege of the one and the burden of the other are only incidental and subordinate. the human family is an aggregation of families; and the family, not the man nor the woman, is the unit of the state. the civil law assumes the existence of the family relation, and its unity where it exists; hence taxation of the woman brings no revenue to the state that might not have been secured by the taxation of the man; and hence the exercise of the elective franchise by the woman brings no additional political power; for, in the theory of the relation to which there are, in fact, but few exceptions, there is in the household but one political idea, and but one agent is needed for its expression. the ballot is the judgment of the family; not of the man, merely, nor of the woman, nor yet, indeed, always of both, even. the first smile that the father receives from the child affects every subsequent vote in municipal concerns, and likely enough also in national affairs. from that moment forward, he judges constables, selectmen, magistrates, aldermen, mayors, school-committees, and councillors, with an altered judgment. the result of the election is not the victory or defeat of the man alone; it is the triumph or prostration of a principle or purpose with which the family is identified. is it said that there is occasionally, if not frequently, a divided judgment in the household upon those questions that are decided by the ballot? this must, of course, be granted as an exceptional condition of domestic life; but, for the wisest reasons of public policy, whose avoidance by the state would be treachery to humanity, the law universal can recognize only the general condition of things. so, and for kindred but not equally strong reasons, the elective franchise is exercised by men without families, and denied to those women who by the dispensations of divine providence are called to preside in homes where the father's face is seen no more. but why, in the eye of the state, shall the man stand as the head of the family, rather than the woman? because god has so ordained it; and no civil community has ever yet escaped from the force of his decree in this respect. those whose physical power defends the nation, or tribe, or family, are naturally called upon to decide what the means of defence shall be. is not woman, then, the equal of man? we cannot say of woman, with reference to man, that she is his superior, or his inferior, or his equal; nor can we say of man, with reference to woman, that he is her superior, or her inferior, or her equal. he is her protector, she is his helpmeet. his strength is sufficient for her weakness, and her power is the support of his irresolution and want of faith. woman's rights are not man's rights; nor are man's rights the measure of woman's rights. if she should assert her independence, as some idiosyncratic persons desire, she could only declare her intention to do all those acts and things which woman may of right do. given that this is accomplished, and i know not that she would possess one additional domestic, political, or public right, or enjoy one privilege in the family, neighborhood, or state, to which she is not, in some degree, at least, already accustomed. these views and reflections may serve to illustrate and enforce the leading position of this address--that we are to educate young women for the enjoyments and duties of the sphere in which they are to move. we speak to-day of public instruction; but it should ever be borne in mind that the education of the schools is but a part, and often only the least important part, of the training that the young receive. there is the training of infancy and early childhood, the daily culture of home, with its refining or deadening influences, and then the education of the street, the parlor, the festive gathering, and the clubs, which exert a power over the youth of both sexes that cannot often be controlled entirely by the school. womanhood is sometimes sacrificed in childhood, when the mother and the family fail to develop the womanly qualities of modesty, grace, generosity of character, and geniality of temper, which dignify, adorn, and protect, "the sex whose presence civilizes ours." the child, whether girl or boy, reflects the character of its home; and therefore we are compelled to deal with all the homes of the district or town, and are required often to counteract the influences they exert. early vicious training is quite as disastrous to the girl as to the boy; for, strange as it may seem, the world more readily tolerates ignorance, coarseness, rudeness, immodesty, and all their answering vices, in man than in woman. in the period of life from eight to twenty years of age the progress of woman is, to us of sterner mould, inconceivably rapid; but from twenty to forty the advantages of education are upon the other side. it then follows that a defective system of education is more pernicious to woman than to man. we may contemplate woman in four relations with their answering responsibilities--as pupil, teacher, companion, and mother. as a pupil, she is sensitive, conscientious, quick, ambitious, and possesses in a marvellous degree, as compared with the other sex, the power of intuition. the boy is logical, or he is nothing; but logic is not necessary for the girl. not that she is illogical; but she usually sees through, without observing the steps in the process which a boy must discern before he can comprehend the subject presented to his mind. in the use of the eye, the ear, the voice, and in the appropriation of whatever may be commanded without the highest exercise of the reasoning and reflective faculties, she is incomparably superior. she accepts moral truth without waiting for a demonstration, and she obeys the law founded upon it without being its slave. she instinctively prefers good manners to faulty habits; and, in the requirements of family, social, and fashionable life, she is better educated at sixteen than her brother is at twenty. she is an adept in one only of the vices of the school--whispering--and in that she excels. but she does not so readily resort to the great vice--the crime of falsehood--as do her companions of the other sex. i call falsehood the great vice, because, if this were unknown, tardiness, truancy, obscenity, and profanity, could not thrive. holmes has well said that "sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that will fit them all." in many primary and district schools the habits and manners of children are too much neglected. we associate good habits and good manners with good morals; and, though we are deceived again and again, and soliloquize upon the maxim that "all is not gold that glitters," we instinctively believe, however often we are betrayed. habits and manners are the first evidence of character; and so much of weight do we attach to such evidence, that we give credit and confidence to those whom in our calmer moments we know to be unworthy. the first aim in the school should be to build up a character that shall be truthfully indicated by purity and refinement of manner and conversation. it does, indeed, sometimes happen that purity of character is not associated with refinement of manners. this misfortune is traceable to a defective early education, both in the school and the home; for, had either been faithful and intelligent, the evil would have been averted. and, as there are many homes in city and country where refinement of manners is not found, and, of course, cannot be taught, the schools must furnish the training. in this connection, the value of the high school for females--whether exclusively so or not, does not seem to me important--is clearly seen. young women are naturally and properly the teachers of primary, district, and subordinate schools of every grade; and society as naturally and properly looks to them to educate, by example as well as by precept, all the children of the state in good habits, good manners, and good morals. we are also permitted to look forward to the higher relations of life, when, as wives and mothers, they are to exert a potent influence over existing and future generations. the law and the lexicons say "_home_ is the house or the place where one resides." this definition may answer for the law and the lexicons, but it does not meet the wants of common life. the wife will usually find in her husband less refinement of manners than she herself possesses; and it is her great privilege, if not her solemn duty, to illustrate the line of cowper, and show that she is of "the sex whose presence civilizes ours." it is the duty of the teacher to make the school attractive; and what the teacher should do for the school the wife should do for the home. the home should be preferred by the husband and children to all other places. much depends upon themselves; they have no right to claim all of the wife and mother. but, without her aid, they can do but little. with her aid, every desirable result may be accomplished. that this result may be secured, female education must be generous, critical, and pure, in everything that relates to manners, habits, and morals. much may be added to these, but nothing can serve in their stead. we should add, no doubt, thorough elementary training in reading, writing, and spelling, both for her own good and for the service of her children. intellectual training is defective where these elements are neglected, and their importance to the sexes may be equal. we should not omit music and the culture of the voice. the tones of the voice indicate the tone of the mind; but the temper itself may finally yield to a graceful and gentle form of expression. it is not probable that we shall ever give due attention to the cultivation of the human voice for speaking, reading, and singing. this is an invaluable accomplishment in man. many of us have listened to new england's most distinguished living orator, and felt that well-known lines from the english poets derived new power, if not actual inspiration, from the classic tones in which the words were uttered. a cultivated voice in woman is at once the evidence and the means of moral power. as the moral sensibilities of the girl are more acute than those of the boy, so the moral power of the woman is greater than that of the man. many young women are educating themselves for the business of teaching; and i can commend nothing more important, after the proper ordering of one's own life, than the discreet and careful training of the voice. it is itself a power. it demands sympathy before the suffering or its cause is revealed by articulate speech; its tones awe assemblies, and command silence before the speaker announces his views; and the rebellious and disorderly, whether in the school, around the rostrum, or on the field, bow in submission beneath the authority of its majestic cadences. it is hardly possible to imagine a good school, and very rare to see one, where this power is wanting in the teacher. women are often called to take charge of schools where there are lads and youth destitute of that culture which would lead them to yield respect and consequent obedience. physical force in these cases is not usually to be thought of; but nature has vouchsafed to woman such a degree of moral power, of which in the school the voice is the best expression, as often to fully compensate for her weakness in other respects. it is unnecessary to commend reading as an art and an accomplishment; but good readers are so rare among us, that we cannot too strongly urge teachers to qualify themselves for the great work. i say _great work_, because everything else is comparatively easy to the teacher, and comparatively unimportant to the pupil. grammar is merely an element of reading. it should be introduced as soon as the child's reasoning faculties are in any degree developed, and presented by the living voice, without the aid of books. the alphabet should be taught in connection with exercises for strengthening and modulating the voice, and the elementary sounds of the letters should be deemed as important as their names. all this is the proper work of the female teacher; and, when she is ignorant or neglects her duty, the evil is usually so great as to admit of no complete remedy. reading is at once an imitative and an appreciative art on the part of the pupil. he must be trained to appreciate the meaning of the writer; but he will depend upon the teacher at first, and, indeed, for a long time, for an example of the true mode of expression. this the teacher must be ready to give. it is not enough that she can correct faults of pronunciation, censure inarticulate utterances, and condemn gruff, nasal, and guttural sounds; but she must be able to present, in reasonable purity, all the opposite qualities. the young women have not yet done their duty to the cause of education in these respects; nor is there everywhere a public sentiment that will even now allow the duty to be performed. it is difficult to see why the child of five, and the youth of fifteen, should be kept an equal number of hours at school. each pupil should spend as much time in the school-room as is needed for the preparation of the exercise and the exercise itself. the danger from excessive confinement and labor is with young pupils. those in grammar and high schools may often use additional hours for study; but a pupil should be somewhat advanced, and should possess considerable physical strength and endurance, before he ventures to give more than six hours a day to severe intellectual labor. it must often happen that children in primary schools can learn in two hours each day all that the teacher has time to communicate, or they have power to receive and appropriate. indeed, i think this is usually so. it may not, however, be safe to deduce from this fact the opinion that children should never be kept longer in school than two hours a day; but it seems proper to assume that, if blessed with good homes, they may be relieved from the tedium of confinement in the school-room, when there is no longer opportunity for improvement. we are beginning to realize the advantages of well-educated female teachers in primary schools; nor do i deem it improbable that they shall become successful teachers and managers of schools of higher grade, according to the present public estimation. but, in regard to the latter position, i have neither hope, desire, nor anxiety. whenever the public judge them, generally, or in particular cases, qualified to take charge of high schools and normal schools, those positions will be assigned to them; and, till that degree of public confidence is accorded, it is useless to make assertions or indulge in conjectures concerning the ability of women for such duties. it is my own conviction that a higher order of teaching talent is required in the primary school, or for the early, judicious education of children, than is required in any other institutions of learning. nor can it be shown that equal ability for government is not essential. there must be different manifestations of ability in the primary and the high school; but, where proper training has been enjoyed, pupils in the latter ought to be far advanced in the acquisition of the cardinal virtue of self-control, whose existence in the school and the state renders government comparatively unnecessary. where there is a human being, there are the opportunity and the duty of education. but our present great concern, as friends of learning, is with those schools where children are first trained in the elements. if in these we can have faithful, accurate, systematic, comprehensive teaching, everything else desirable will be added thereunto. but, if we are negligent, unphilosophical, and false, the reasonable public expectation will never be realized in regard to other institutions of learning. the work must be done by women, and by well-educated women; and, when it is said that in massachusetts alone we need the services of six thousand such persons, the magnitude of the work of providing teachers may be appreciated. have we not enough in this field for every female school and academy, where high schools are not required, or cannot exist, and for every high school and normal school in the commonwealth? if it is asserted that the supply of female teachers is already greater than the demand, it must be stated, in reply, that there are persons enough engaged in teaching, but that the number of competent teachers is, and ever has been, too small. it is something, my friends, it is often a great deal, to send into a town a well-qualified female teacher. she is not only a blessing to those who are under her tuition, but her example and influence are often such as to change the local sentiment concerning teachers and schools. when may we expect a supply of such persons? the hope is not a delusion, though its realization may be many years postponed. how are competent persons to be selected and qualified? the change will be gradual, and it is to be made in the public opinion as well as in the character of teachers and schools. and is it not possible, even in view of all that has been accomplished, that we are yet groping in a dark passage, with only the hope that it leads to an outward-opening door, where, in marvellous but genial light we shall perceive new truths concerning the philosophy of the human mind, and the means of its development? at this moment we are compelled to admit that practical teachers and theorists in educational matters are alike uncertain in regard to the true method of teaching the alphabet, and divided and subdivided in opinion concerning the order of succession of the various studies in the primary and grammar schools. perfect agreement on these points is not probable; it may not be desirable. i am satisfied that no greater contribution can be made to the cause of learning than a presentation of these topics and their elucidation, so that the teacher shall feel that what he does is philosophical, and therefore wise. the only way to achieve success is to apply faithfully the means at hand. generations of children cannot wait for perfection in methods of teaching; but teachers of primary schools ought not to neglect any opportunity which promises aid to them as individuals, or progress in the profession that they have chosen. as teachers improve, so do schools; and, as schools improve, so do teachers. the influence exerted by teachers is first beneficial to pupils, but, as a result, we soon have a class of better qualified teachers. with these ideas of the importance of the teacher's vocation to primary instruction, and, consequently, to all good learning, it is not strange that i place a high value upon professional training. a degree of professional training more or less desirable is, no doubt, furnished, by every school; but the admission does not in any manner detract from the force of the statement that a young man or woman well qualified in the branches to be taught, yet without experience, may be strengthened and prepared for the work of teaching, by devoting six, twelve, or eighteen months, under competent instructors, in company with a hundred other persons having a similar object in view, to the study, examination, and discussion, of those subjects and topics which are sometimes connected with, and sometimes independent of, the text-books, but which are of daily value to the teacher. at present only a portion of this necessary professional training can be given in the normal schools. if, however, as i trust may sometimes be the case, none should be admitted but those who are already qualified in the branches to be taught, the time of attendance might be diminished, and the number of graduates proportionately increased. there are about one hundred high schools in the state, and, within the sphere of their labors, they are not equalled by any institutions that the world has seen. young men are fitted for the colleges, for mechanical, manufacturing, commercial, agricultural, and scientific labors, and young men and young women are prepared for the general duties of life. they are also furnishing a large number of well-qualified teachers. some may say that with these results we ought to be content. regarding only the past, they are entirely satisfactory; but, animated with reasonable hopes concerning the future, we claim something more and better. it is not disguised that the members of normal schools, when admitted, do not sustain an average rank in scholarship with graduates of high schools. this is a misfortune from which relief is sought. it is a suggestion, diffidently made, yet with considerable confidence in its practicability and value, that graduates of high schools will often obtain additional and necessary preparation by attending a normal school, if for the term of six months only. and i am satisfied, beyond all reasonable doubt, that, when the normal schools receive only those whose education is equivalent to that now given in the high schools, a body of teachers will be sent out who will surpass the graduates of any other institution, and whose average professional attainments and practical excellence will meet the highest reasonable public expectation. nor is it claimed that this result will be due to anything known or practised in normal schools that may not be known and practised elsewhere; but it is rather attributable to the fact that in these institutions the attention of teachers and pupils is directed almost exclusively to the work of teaching, and the means of preparation. the studies, thoughts, and discussions, are devoted to this end. if, with such opportunities, there should be no progress, we should be led to doubt all our previous knowledge of human character, and of the development of the youthful mind. and now, ladies and gentlemen, before i conclude, allow me to remove, or at least to lessen, an impression that these remarks are calculated to produce. i have assumed that teaching is a profession--an arduous profession--and that perfection has not yet been attained. i have assumed, also, that there are many persons engaged in teaching, especially in the primary and mixed district schools, whose qualifications are not as great as they ought to be. but let it not be thence inferred that i am dissatisfied with our teachers and schools. there has been continual progress in education, and a large share of this progress is due to teachers; but the time has not yet come when we can wisely fold our arms, and accept the allurements of undisturbed repose. nor have i sought, on this occasion, to present even an outline of a system of female education. in all the public institutions of learning among us, it should be as comprehensive, as minute, as exact, as that furnished for youth of the other sex. nor is it necessary to concern ourselves about the effect of this liberal culture upon the character and fortunes of society. i do not anticipate any sudden or disastrous effects. the right of education is a common right; and it is unquestionably the right of woman to assert her rights; and it is a wrong and sin if we withhold any, even the least. having faith in humanity, and faith in god, let us not shrink from the privilege we enjoy of offering to all, without reference to sex or condition, the benefits of a public and liberal system of education, which seeks, in an alliance with virtue and religion, whose banns are forbidden by none, to enlighten the ignorant, restrain and reform the depraved, and penetrate all society with good learning and civilization, so that the highest idea of a well-ordered state shall be realized in an advanced and advancing condition of individual and family life. the influence, duties, and rewards, of teachers. [a lecture delivered at teachers' institutes.] it is the purpose, and we believe that it will be the destiny, of massachusetts, to build up a comparatively perfect system of public instruction. to this antiquity did not aspire; and it is the just boast of modern times, and especially of the american states, that learning is not the amusement of a few only, whom wealth and taste have led into its paths, but that it is encouraged by governments, and cherished by the whole people. antiquity had its schools and teachers; but the latter were, for the most part, founders of sects in politics, morals, philosophy, religion, or the habits of daily life; while its schools were frequented and sustained by those who sought to build on the civilization of the times such structures as their tastes conceived or their opinions dictated. there were not in athens or rome, according to the american idea, any schools for the people; and carlyle, brownson, and emerson, are such teachers in kind, though not in power and influence, as were socrates, plato, and aristotle. these men were leaders as well as teachers, and their followers were disciples and controversialists rather than pupils. but it is not possible for modern leaders in politics, philosophy, and social life, to rival the ancients. manual labor is not more divided and subdivided than is the influence of the human intellect. the newspaper has inspired every man with the love of self-judgment, and the common school has qualified him, in some degree, for its exercise. the ancients, whose names and fame have come down to us, taught by conversations, discussions, and lectures; the moderns, as carlyle, brownson, and emerson, by lectures, essays, and reviews. but these systems are quite inadequate to meet the wants of american civilization. indeed, however men of talent may strive, there cannot be another socrates, plato, or aristotle; for the printing-press has come, and their occupation has gone. teachers were philosophers, pupils were followers and disciples, while learning was devoted to the support of speculations and theories. but, while we have no such teachers as those of athens, and need no such schools as they founded, we have teachers and schools whose character and genius correspond to the age in which we live. teaching is a profession; not merely an ignoble pursuit, nor a toy of scholastic ambition, but a profession enjoying the public confidence, requiring great talents, demanding great industry, and securing, permit me to say, great rewards. to be the leader of a sect or the founder of a school, is something; but the acceptable teacher is superior to either; he is the first and chief exponent of a popular sovereignty which seeks happiness and immortality for itself by elevating and refining the parts of which it is composed. the ancient teacher gathered his hearers, disciples, and pupils, in the streets, groves, and public squares. the modern teacher is comparatively secluded; but let him not hence infer that he is without influence. socrates, plato, and aristotle, had their triumphs; but none more distinguished than that of a massachusetts teacher, who, at the age of fourscore years, on a festive day, received from his former pupils--and among them were the most eminent of the land--sincere and affectionate assurances of esteem and gratitude. the pupil may be estranged from the master in opinion, for our system does not concern itself with opinions, political or religious; but the faithful teacher will always find the evidence of his fidelity in the lives of those intrusted to his care. no position is more important than the teacher's; and his influence is next to that of the parent. it is his high and noble province to touch the youthful mind, test its quality, and develop its characteristics. he often stands in the place of the parent. he aids in giving character to the generations of men; which is at once a higher art and a purer glory than distinguishes those who build the walls of cities, or lay the foundations of empires. the cities which contested for the honor of being the birthplace of homer are forgotten, or remembered only because they contested for the honor, while homer himself is immortal. if, then, the mere birth of a human being is an honor to a city, how illustrious the distinction of those who guide the footsteps of youth along the rugged paths of learning, and develop in a generation the principles of integrity and mercy, justice and freedom, government and humanity! if in a lifetime of toil the teacher shall bring out of the mass of common minds one franklin, or howard, or channing, or bowditch, he will have accomplished more than is secured by the devotees of wealth, or the disciples of pleasure. as the man is more important than the mere philosopher, so is the modern teacher more elevated than the ancient. the true teacher takes hold of the practical and elementary, as distinguished from the learning whose chief or sole value is in display. present gratification is desirable, especially to parents and teachers; but it may be secured at the cost of solid learning and real progress. this is a serious error among us, and it will not readily be abandoned; but it is the duty of teachers, and of all parents who are friends to genuine learning, to aid in its removal. we are inclined to treat the period of school-life as though it covered the entire time that ought properly to be devoted to education. the first result--a result followed by pernicious consequences--is that the teacher is expected to give instruction in every branch that the pupil, as child, youth, or adult, may need to know. it is impossible that instruction so varied should always be good. learning is knowledge of subjects based and built upon a thorough acquaintance with their elements. the path of duty, therefore, should lead the teacher to make his instruction thorough in a few branches, rather than attempt to extend it over a great variety of subjects. this, to the teacher who is employed in a district or town but three or six months, is a hard course, and many may not be inclined to pursue it. something, no doubt, must be yielded to parents; but they, too, should be educated to a true view of their children's interests. as the world is, a well-spoken declamation is more gratifying to parents, and more creditable to teachers, than the most careful training in the vowel-sounds; yet the latter is infinitely more valuable to the scholar. neither progress in the languages nor knowledge of mathematics can compensate for the want of a thorough etymological discipline. this training should be primary in point of time, as well as elementary in character; and a classical education is no adequate compensation. elements are all-important to the teacher and the student. it is not possible to have an idea of a square without some idea of a straight line, nor to express with pencil or words the arc of a circle without a previous conception of the curve. combination follows in course. we are driven to it. our own minds, all nature, all civilization, tend to the combination of elements. we think fast, live fast, learn fast, and, as the fashion of the world requires a knowledge of many things, we crowd the entire education of our children into the short period of school-life. here, and just here, public sentiment ought to relieve the teacher by reforming itself. it should be understood that school-life is to be devoted to the thorough discipline of the mind to study, and to an acquaintance with those simple, elementary branches, which are the foundation of all good learning. when a knowledge of the elements is secured, then the languages, mathematics, and all science, may be pursued with enthusiasm and success by a class of men well educated in every department. public sentiment must allow the teacher to give careful instruction in reading and spelling, for example, in the most comprehensive meaning of those terms--in the sound and power of letters, in the composition and use of words, and in the natural construction of sentences. this, of course, includes a knowledge of grammar, not as a dry, philological study, but as a science; not as composed of arbitrary rules, merely, but as the common and best judgment of men concerning the use and power of language, of which rules and definitions are but an imperfect expression. nor do we herein assign the teacher to neglect or obscurity. he, as well as others, must have faith in the future. his reward may be distant, but it is certain. it is, however, likely that the labors of a faithful elementary teacher will be appreciated immediately, and upon the scene of his toil. but, if they are not, his pupils, advancing in age and increasing in knowledge, will remember with gratitude and in words the self-sacrificing labors of their master. we are not so constituted as to labor without motive. with some the motive is high, with others it is low and grovelling. the teacher must be himself elevated, or he cannot elevate others. the pupil may, indeed, advance to a higher sphere than that occupied by the teacher; but it is only because he draws from a higher fountain elsewhere. in such cases the success of the pupil is not the success of the master. he who labors as a teacher for mere money, or for temporary fame, which is even less valuable, cannot choose a calling more ignoble, nor can he ever rise to a higher; for his sordid motives bring all pursuits to the low level of his own nature. yet it is not to be assumed that the teacher, more than the clergyman, is to labor without pecuniary compensation; for, while money should not be the sole object of any man's life, it is, under the influence of our civilization, essential to the happiness of us all. wealth, properly acquired and properly used, may become a means of self-education. it purchases relief from the harassing toil of uninterrupted manual labor. it is the only introduction we can have to the thoroughfares of travel by which we are made acquainted personally with the globe that we inhabit. it brings to our firesides books, paintings, and statuary, by which we learn something of the world as it is and as it was. it gives us the telescope and the microscope, by whose agency we are able to appreciate, even though but imperfectly, the immensity of creation on the one hand, and its infinity on the other. the teacher is not to labour without money, nor to despise it more than other men; and the public might as well expect the free services of the minister, lawyer, physician, or farmer, as to expect the gratuitous or cheap education of their children. while the teacher is educating others, he must also educate himself. this he cannot do without both leisure and money. the advice of iago is, therefore, good advice for teachers: "go, make money. * * put money enough in your purse." the teacher's motives should be above mere gain; though this view of the subject does not, as some might infer, lead to the conclusion that he ought to labor for inadequate compensation. when george iii. was first insane, dr. willis was called to the immediate personal charge of the king. dr. willis had been educated to the church, and a living had been assigned him; but, becoming interested in the subject of insanity, he had established an asylum, and gained a distinguished position in his new profession. the suffering monarch was sadly puzzled to know why dr. willis was with him, and how he had been brought there. the custodian was not very definite in his explanations, but suggested that he came to comfort the king in his afflictions; and, said he, "you know that our saviour went about doing good."--"yes," said the king, "but he never received seven hundred pounds a year for it." this was good wit, especially good royal wit, because unexpected. but there is no reason why actual monarchs of england, or coming monarchs of america, should be treated or taught gratuitously. the compensation, the living of the teacher, is one thing; the motive may and ought to be quite different. the teacher should labor in his profession because he loves it, because he does good in it, and because he can in that sphere answer a high purpose of existence. these being the motives of the teacher, he should educate, draw out, corresponding ones in his pupils. the teacher is not to create--he is to draw out. every child has the germs of many, and, it may be, quite different qualities of character. look at the infant. it is so constituted that it may have a stalwart arm, broad chest, and well-rounded, vigorous muscles; but yet it may come to adult age destitute of these physical excellences. yet you will not say that the elements did not exist in the child. they were there; but, being neglected, they followed a law of our nature, that the development of a faculty depends upon its exercise. nature will develop some quality in every man; for our existence demands the exercise of a part of our faculties. the faculty used will be developed in excess as compared with other faculties. it is the business of the teacher to aid nature. for the most part, he must stimulate, encourage, draw out, develop, though it may happen that he will be required occasionally to check a tendency which threatens to absorb or overshadow all the others. he must, at any rate, prevent the growth of those powers which tend towards the savage state. while the teacher creates nothing, he must so draw out the qualities of the child that it may attain to perfect manhood. he moulds, he renders symmetrical, the physical, the intellectual, the moral man. nature sometimes does this herself, as though she would occasionally furnish a model man for our imitation, as she has given lines, and forms, and colors, which all artists of all ages shall copy, but cannot equal. but, do the best we can, education is more or less artificial; and hence the child of the school will suffer by comparison with the child of nature, when she presents him in her best forms. in a summer ramble i met a man so dignified as to attract the notice and command the respect of all who knew him. i was with him upon the lakes and mountains several days and nights, and never for a moment did the manliness of his character desert him. i have seen no other person who could boast such physical beauty. accustomed to a hunter's life; carrying often a pack of thirty or forty or fifty pounds; sleeping upon the ground or a bed of boughs; able, if necessity of interest demanded, to travel in the woods the ordinary distance which a good horse would pass over upon our roads; with every organ of the arm, the leg, the trunk, fully expressed; with a manly, kind, intelligent countenance, a beard uncut, in the vigor of early manhood, he seemed a model which the statuaries of greece and rome desired to see, but did not. he had at once the bearing of a soldier and the characteristics of a gentleman. he was ignorant of grammatical rules and definitions, yet his conversation would have been accepted in good circles of new england society. this man had his faults, but they were not grievous faults, nor did they in any manner affect the qualities of which i have spoken. this is what nature sometimes does; this is what we should always strive to do, extending this symmetry, if possible, to the moral as well as to the intellectual and physical organization. this man is ignorant of science, of books, of the world of letters, and the world of art, yet we respect him. why? because nature has chosen to illustrate in him her own principles, power and beauty. that we may draw out the qualities of the human mind as they exist, we must first appreciate our influence upon childhood and youth. our own experience is the best evidence of what that influence is. all along our lives the lessons of childhood return to us. the hills and valleys, the lakes, rivers, and rivulets, of our early home, come not in clearer visions before us than do the exhortations to industry, the incentives to progress, the lessons of learning, and the principles of truth, uttered and offered by the teachers of early years. in the same way the lines of the poet, the reflections of the philosopher, the calm truths of the historian, read once and often carelessly, and for many years forgotten, return as voices of inspiration, and are evermore with us. that the teacher may have influence, his ear must be open to the voice of truth, and his mouth must be liberal with words of consolation, encouragement, and advice. he rules in a little world, and the scales of justice must be balanced evenly in his hands. he should go in and out before his scholars free from partiality or prejudice; indifferent to the voice of envy or detraction; shunning evil and emulous of good; patient of inquiries in the hours of duty; filled with the spirit of industry in his moments of leisure; gathering up and spreading before his pupils the choicest gems of literature, art, and science, that they may be early and truly inspired with the love of learning. the public school is a little world, and the teacher rules therein. it contains the rich and the poor, the virtuous and the corrupt, the studious and the indifferent, the timid and the brave, the fearful and the hearts elate with hope and courage. life is there no cheat; it wears no mask, it assumes no unnatural positions, but presents itself as it is. deformed and repulsive in some of its features, yet to him whose eye is as quick to discover its beauty as its deformity, its harmony as its discord, there is always a bright spot on which he may gaze, and a fond hope to which he may cling. artificial life, whether in the select school or the select party, tends to weaken our faith in humanity; and a want of faith in our race is an omen of ill-success in life. teachers should have faith in humanity, and should labor constantly to inspire others with the belief that the true law of our nature is the law of progress. those who come early in life to the conclusion that the many cannot be moved by the higher sentiments and ideas which control a few favored mortals, cease to labor for the advancement of the race. they consequently lose their hold upon society, and society neglects them. for such men there can be no success. others, like jefferson and channing, never lose confidence in their species, and their species never lose confidence in them. when the teacher comes to believe that the world is worse than it was, and never can be better, he need wait for no other evidence that his days of usefulness are over. the school-room will teach the child, even as the prison will instruct maturity and age, that few persons are vicious in the extreme, and that no one lives without some ennobling traits of character and life. the teacher's faith is the measure of the teacher's usefulness. it is to him what conception is to the artist; and, if the sculptor can see the image of grace and beauty in the fresh-quarried marble, so must the teacher see the full form of the coming man in the trembling child or awkward youth. the teacher ought not to grow old. to be sure, time will lay its hand on him, as it does on others; but he should always cultivate in himself the feelings, sentiments, and even ambitions of youth. far enough removed from his pupils in age and position to stimulate them by his example, and encourage them by his precepts, he should yet be so near them that he can appreciate the steps and struggles which mark their progress in the path of learning. there must be some points of contact, something common to teacher and pupils. indeed, for us all it is true that age loses nothing of its dignity or respect when it accepts the sentiments and sports of youth and childhood. but above all should the teacher remember the common remark of la place, in his celestial mechanics, and the observation of dr. bowditch upon it. "whenever i meet in la place with the words, 'thus it plainly appears,' i am sure that hours, and perhaps days, of hard study, will alone enable me to discover _how_ it plainly appears." the good teacher will seek first to estimate each scholar's capacity, and then adapt his instructions accordingly. though he may be far removed from his pupils in attainments, he should be able to mark the steps by which ordinary minds pass from common principles to their noblest application. this observation may by some be deemed unnecessary; but there are living teachers who, having mastered the noblest sciences, are unable to appreciate and lead ordinary minds. the teacher must be in earnest. this is the price of success in every profession. the law, it is said, is a jealous mistress, and permits no rivals; the indifferent, careless minister is but a blind leader of the blind, and the "undevout astronomer is mad." sincerity of soul and earnestness of purpose will achieve success. according to an eminent authority, there are three kinds of great men: those who are born great, those who achieve greatness, and those who have greatness thrust upon them. if we take greatness of birth to be in greatness of soul and intellect, and not in the mere accident of ancestry, it is such only who have greatness thrust upon them; for the world, after all, rarely makes a mistake in this respect. but there is a larger and a nobler class, whose greatness, whatever it is, must be achieved; and to this class i address myself. success is practicable. there need be no failures. a man of reflection will soon find whether he can succeed in his pursuit; if not, he has mistaken his calling, or neglected the proper means of success. in either case, a remedy is at hand. if a teacher is indifferent to his calling, and cannot bring himself to pursue it with ardor, it is a duty to himself, to his profession, to his pupils, to abandon it at once. it is idle to suppose that we are doing good in a work to which we are not attracted by our sympathies, and in which we are not sustained by our faith and hopes. the men who succeed are the men who believe that they can succeed. the men who fail are those to whom success would have been a surprise. there is no doubt some appropriate pursuit in life for every man of ordinary talents; but no one can tell whether he has found it for himself until he has made a vigorous and persistent application of his powers. if the teacher fail to do this, he need not seek for success in another profession, when he has already declined to pay its price. the choice of a profession is one of the great acts of life. it should not be done hastily, nor without a careful examination and just appreciation of the elements of character. a competent teacher may aid his pupils in this respect. a mistake in occupation is a calamity to the individual, and an injury to the public. our school-rooms contain artists, farmers, mathematicians, mechanics, poets, lawyers, statesmen, orators, and warriors; but some one must do for them what shakspeare says the monarch of the hive has done for all his subjects--assigned them "officers of sorts; where some, like magistrates, correct at home; others, like merchants, venture trade abroad; others, like soldiers, armed in their stings, make boot upon the summer's velvet buds; which pillage, they with merry march bring home to the tent-royal of their emperor; who, busied in his majesty, surveys the singing masons, building roofs of gold; the civil citizens kneading up the honey; the poor mechanic porters crowding in their heavy burdens at his narrow gate; the sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, delivering o'er to executors pale the lazy, yawning drone." teachers are so situated that they may give wholesome advice; while parents--and i say it with respect--are quite likely, under the influence of an instinctive belief that their children are fitted for any place within the range of human labor or human ambition, to make fatal mistakes. while all pursuits and professions, if honest, are equally honorable, the individual selection must be determined by taste, circumstances, individual habits, and often by physical facts. it is not for one person to do everything, but it is for each person to do at least one thing well. as a general rule, the painter, who has spent his youth and manhood in studying the canvas, had better not study the stars; and the artist, who has power to bring the form of life from the cold marble, has no right to solve problems in geometry, weigh planets, or calculate eclipses. the proper choice of the business of life may do much to perfect our social system, and it will certainly advance our material prosperity. there is everywhere in our civilization mutual dependence, and there must be mutual support. in no other way can we advance to our destiny as becomes an enlightened people. but all of life and education, either to pupil, teacher, or man, is not to be found in the school-room. the common period of school-life is sufficient only for elementary education. the average school-going period is ten years. of this, one-half is spent in vacations and absences, so that each child has about five years of school-life. only one-fourth of each day is spent in the school-room; and the continuous attendance, therefore, is about fifteen months, equal to the time which most of us give to sleep, every four or five years of our existence. this view leads me to say again that it is the duty of the teacher in this brief period to lay a good foundation for subsequent scientific and classical culture. more than this cannot be accomplished; and, where this is accomplished, and a taste for learning is formed, and the means to be employed are comprehended, a satisfactory school-life has been passed. education--universal education--is a necessity; and, as there is no royal road to learning, so there is no aristocracy of mental power depending upon social or pecuniary distinctions. the new england colonies, and massachusetts first of all, established the system of education now called universal or public. it was not then easy to comprehend the principle which lies at the foundation of a system of public instruction. we are first to consider that a system of public instruction implies a system of universal taxation. the only rule on which taxes can be levied justly is that the object sought is of public necessity, or manifest public convenience. it quite often happens that men of our own generation are insensible or indifferent to the true relation of the citizen to the cause of education. some seem to imagine that their interest in schools, and of course their moral obligation to support them, ceases with the education of their own children. this is a great error. the public has no right to levy a tax for the education of any particular child, or family of children; but its right of taxation commences when the education or plan of education is universal, and ceases whenever the plan is limited, or the operations of the system are circumscribed. no man can be taxed properly because he has children of his own to educate; this may be a reason with some for cheerful payment, but it has in itself no element of a just principle. when, however, the people decide that education is a matter of public concern, then taxation for its promotion rests upon the same foundation as the most important departments of a government. yet, many generations of men came and passed away before the doctrine was received that, as a public matter, a man is equally interested in the education of his neighbor's children as in the education of his own. as parents, we have a special interest in our children; as citizens, it is this, that they may be honest, industrious, and effective in their labors. this interest we have in all children. the safety of our persons and property demands their honesty; our right to be exempt from pauper and criminal taxes requires habits of universal industry; and our part in the general wealth and prosperity is increased by the intelligent application of manual labor in all the walks of life. a man may, indeed, be proud of the attainments of his family, as men are often proud of their ancestry; yet they possess little real value as a family possession. the pride of ancestry has no value; it "is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself till, by broad-spreading, it disperse to naught." i pass from this digression to the statement that the chief means of self-improvement are five: observation, conversation, reading, memory, and reflection. it is an art to observe well--to go through the world with our eyes open--to see what is before us. all men do not see alike, nor see the same things. our powers of observation take on the hues of daily life. the artist, in a strange city or foreign land, observes only the specimens of taste and beauty or their opposites; the mechanic studies anew the principles of his science as applied to the purposes of life; the architect transfers to his own mind the images of churches, cathedrals, temples, and palaces; while the philanthropist rejoices in cellars and lanes, that he may know how poverty and misery change the face and heart of man. an american artist, following the lead of mr. jefferson, has beautifully illustrated the nature of the power of observation. we do not see even the faces of our common friends alike. the stranger observes a family likeness which is invisible to the familiar acquaintance. the former sees only the few points of agreement, and decides upon them; while the latter has observed and studied the more numerous points of difference, until he is blind to all others. hence a portrait may appear true to a stranger, which, to an intimate acquaintance, is barren in expression, and destitute of character. therefore, the artist wisely and properly esteemed himself successful when his work was approved by the wife or the mother. the world around us is full of knowledge. we should so behold it as to be instructed by all that is. the distant star paints its image on our eye with a ray of light sent forth thousands of years ago; yet its lesson is not of itself, but of the universe and its mysteries, and of the creator out of whose divine hand all things have come. conversation is at once an art, an accomplishment, and a science. it leads to valuable practical results. it has a place, and by no means an inferior place, in the schools. facts stated, questions proposed, or theories illustrated, in conversation, are permanently impressed upon the mind. it is in the power of the teacher to communicate much information in this way, and it is in the power of us all to make conversation a means of improvement. but, when the pupil leaves the school, _reading_, so systematic and thorough as to be called study, is, no doubt, the best culture he can enjoy. in the first place, books are accessible to all, and they may be had at all times. they can be used in moments of leisure, in solitude, in the hours when sleep is too proud to wait on us, and when friends are absent or indifferent to our lot. conversation may be patronizing, or it may leave us a debtor; when the book-seller's bill is settled, we have no account with the author. if i am permitted to speak to all, pupils as well as teachers, i am inclined to say, "do not consider your education finished when you leave home and the school." your labors of a practical sort ought then to commence. with system and care, you may read works of literature and history, or devote yourself to mathematics in the higher departments of science. as a general thing, however, it is not wise to attempt too much at once. the custom of the schools is to require each pupil to attend to several branches at the same time; but this course cannot be recommended to adult persons with disciplined minds. it seems better to select one subject, and make it the leading topic, for a time, of our studies and thoughts. it may also be proper to suggest that works of fiction, poetry, and romance, ought not to be read until the mind is well disciplined, and a good foundation of solid learning is laid. such works tend to make one's style of thought and writing easy, flowing, and agreeable; but they are also calculated to make us dissatisfied with the more substantial labors of intellectual life. having obtained the elements of learning, one thing is absolutely essential--system in study. i fancy that there are two prevalent errors among us. first, that men often attain intellectual eminence without study; and, secondly, that exclusive devotion to books is the price of success. whoever neglects study, whatever his natural abilities, will find himself distanced by inferior men; and, on the other hand, whoever will devote three hours each day to the systematic improvement of his mind will finally be numbered among the leading persons of the age. but, while we observe, converse, and read, the power of memory and the habit of reflection should be cultivated. the habit of reflection is a great aid to the memory, and together they enable us to use the knowledge we daily acquire. no previous age of the world has offered so great encouragement, whether in fame or money, to men of science and literature, as the present. formerly, authors flourished under the patronage of princes, or withered by their neglect; but now they are encouraged and paid by the people, and reap where they have sown, whether kings will or not. the poverty of authors was once proverbial; but now the only authors who are poor are poor authors. good learning, integrity, and ability, are well compensated in all the professions. some one remarked to mr. webster, "that the profession of the law was crowded."--"yes," said he, "rather crowded below, but there is plenty of room above." littleness and mediocrity always seek the paths worn by superior men; and the truly illustrious in literature and science are few in number compared with those who attempt to tread in the footsteps of their illustrious predecessors; but none of these things ought to deter young men of ability, industry, and integrity, from boldly entering the lists, without fear of failure. the world is usually just, and it will ultimately award the tokens of its approbation to those who deserve success. and there is a happy peculiarity in talent,--the variety is so great that the competition is small. of all the living authors, are there two so alike that they can be considered competitors or rivals? the nation has applauded and set the seal of its approbation upon the eloquence of henry, otis, adams, ames, pinckney, wirt, calhoun, clay, and webster, not because these men resembled one another, but because each had peculiarities and excellences of his own. the same variety of excellence is seen in living orators, and in all the eloquence and learning of antiquity which time has spared and history has transmitted to us. it is said that when aristides wrote the sentence of his own banishment for a humble and unknown enemy, the only reason given by the peasant was that he was "tired with hearing him called the just." and the world sometimes appears to be restive under the influence of men of talent; but that influence, whether always agreeable or not, is both permanent and beneficial. not only does each generation respect its own leading minds, but it is submissive to the learning and intellect of other days. the influence of ancient greece still remains. we copy her architecture, borrow from her philosophy, admire her poetry, and bow with humility before the remnants of her majestic literature. so the policy of rome is perceptible in the civilization of every european country, and it is a potent element in the laws and jurisprudence of america. the eloquence of demosthenes has been impressed upon every succeeding generation of civilized men; the genius of hannibal has stimulated the ambition of warriors from his own time to that of napoleon; while shakspeare's power has been the wonder of all modern authors and readers. it is a great representative fact in mental philosophy, which we cannot too much contemplate, that demosthenes and cicero not only enchained the thousands of greece and rome in whose presence they stood, but that their eloquence has had a controlling influence over myriads to whom the language in which they spoke was unknown. the words that the houseless homer sung in the streets of smyrna have commanded the admiration of all later times; and even the mud walls around plato's garden, on which are preserved the fragments of statuary with which the garden was once adorned, attract and instruct the wanderers and students about athens. but let us not deceive ourselves with the idea that we can illustrate anew the greatness which has distinguished a few men only in all the long centuries of the world's existence. be not imitators nor followers of other men's glory. there is a path for each one, and his duty lies therein. yet the leading men of the world are lights which ought not to be hid from the young, for they serve to show the extent of the field in which human powers may be employed. the rule of the successful life is to neglect no present opportunity of good either to yourself or to others; and the rule of the successful student is to gather information from whatever source he may, not doubting that it will prove useful to himself or to his fellow-men. our own age has furnished two men,--one living, the other dead,--quite opposite in talents and attainments, whose power and influence may not have been surpassed in ancient or modern times. i speak of kossuth and webster. our history has no parallel for the first. most men, young or old, gay or severe, radical or conservative, were touched by his mournful strains, and influenced by his magic words. he came from a land of which we knew little, and so laid open the history of its wrongs that he enlisted multitudes in its behalf. i speak not now of the views he presented, nor of the demands he made upon the american people. if he taught error and asked wrong, so the more wonderful was his career. no doubt his cause did much for him; but other patriots and exiles have had equal opportunities with kossuth, yet no one has so swayed the public mind. he was distinguished in intellect, a master of much learning, a man of nice moral feeling and strong religious sentiments, all of which were combined and blended in his addresses to the people. but he spoke a language whose rudiments he first learned in manhood. in his speech he neglected the chief rule of grecian eloquence. with one theme, only,--the wrongs of hungary; with one object, only,--her relief and elevation,--he commanded the general attention of the american mind. the mission of kossuth in america deserves to be remembered as an intellectual phenomenon, whose like, we of this generation may not again see. mr. webster had never great personal popularity. his presence was majestic, but forbidding. his manners were agreeable, and sometimes fascinating to his friends, when he was in a genial mood; but he was often reserved or even austere to strangers, and terrible to his enemies. his style of thought was mathematical, his language expressive, but never popular. he wrote as a man would dictate an essay which was to appear as a posthumous work. his eloquence was not that which often passes for eloquence upon the stump or at the bar. he seldom attempted to court the people, and when he did, it was as if he mocked himself, and scorned the spirit which could be moved by the breezes of popular favor. he was not free from faults, personal and political; yet he acquired a control which has not been possessed by any man since washington. whenever he was to speak, the public were anxious to hear and to read. hardly any man has had the fortune to present his views in addresses, letters, and speeches, to so large a portion of his countrymen; yet the people whom he addressed, and who were anxious for his words and opinions, did not always, or even generally, agree with him. mr. webster's power was chiefly, if not solely, intellectual. he had not the personal qualities of mr. clay or general jackson; he was not, like mr. jefferson the chosen exponent of a political creed, and the admitted leader of a great political party; nor had he the military character and universally acknowledged patriotism of general washington, which made him first in the hearts of his countrymen. mr. webster stands alone. his domain is the intellect, and thus far in america he is without a rival. to mr. webster, and to all men proportionately, according to the measure of their gifts and attainments, we may apply his great words: "a superior and commanding human intellect, a truly great man, when heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift, is not a temporary flame, burning brightly for a while, and then giving place to returning darkness. it is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as radiant light, with power to enkindle the common mass of human mind; so that, when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows, but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit." some humble measure of this greatness may be attained by all; and, if i have sought to lead you in the way of improvement by considerations too purely personal and selfish, i will implore you, in conclusion, as teachers and as citizens, to consider yourselves as the servants of your country and your race. there can be no real greatness of mind without generosity of soul. if a superior human intellect seems to be specially the gift of god, how is he wanting in true religion who fails to dedicate it to humanity, justice, and virtue! an eminent historian, seeing at one view, and as in the present moment, the fall of great states, ancient and modern, and anticipating a like fate for his own beloved land, has predicted that in two centuries there will be three hundred millions of people in north america speaking the language of england, reading its authors, and glorying in their descent. if this be so, what limits can we assign to the work, or how estimate the duty, of those intrusted with the education of the young? who can say what share of responsibility for the future of america is upon the teachers of the land? liberty and learning. [an address delivered at montague, july th, .] i congratulate you upon the auspicious moments of this, the eighty-first anniversary of our national independence; and its return, now and ever, should be the occasion of gratitude to the author of all good, that he hath vouchsafed to our fathers and to their descendants the wisdom to establish and the wisdom to preserve the institutions of liberty in america. and i congratulate you that you accept this anniversary as the occasion for considering the subject of education. ignorant and blind worshippers of liberty can do but little for its support; but, whatever of change or decay may come to our institutions, liberty itself can never die in the presence of a people universally and thoroughly educated. it is not, then, inappropriate nor unphilosophical for us to connect education and liberty together; and i therefore propose, after presenting some thoughts upon the declaration of independence, and its relations to the american union, to consider the value of political learning, its neglect, and the means by which it may be promoted. the events and epochs of life are logical in their nature, and are harmonious or inharmonious as the affairs of men are controlled by principle, policy, or accident. humboldt, maury, and guyot, arago, agassiz, and pierce, by observation, philosophy, and mathematics, demonstrate the harmony of the physical creation. in the microscopic animalculæ; in the gigantic remains, whether vegetable or animal, of other ages and conditions of life; in the coral reef and the mountain range; in the hill-side rivulet that makes "the meadows green;" in the ocean current that bathes and vivifies a continent; in the setting of the leaf upon its stem, and the moving of uranus in its orbit, they trace a law whose harmony is its glory, and whose mystery is the evidence of its divinity. national changes, the movements and progress of the human race, as a whole and in its parts, are obedient, likewise, to law; and are, therefore, logical in their character, though generally lacking in precision of connection and order of succession. or it may be, rather, that we lack power to trace the connection between events that depend in part, at least, upon the prejudices, passions, vices, and weaknesses, of men. the development of the logic of human affairs waits for a philosopher who shall study and comprehend the living millions of our race, as the philosophers now study and comprehend the subjects of physical science. we have no guaranty that this can ever be done. as mind is above matter, the mental philosopher enters upon the most varied and difficult field of labor. keeping this fact in mind, it appears to be true that every person of observation, reading, and reflection, is something of a mental philosopher, though much the larger number have no knowledge of physical science. and especially must the student of history have a system of mental philosophy; but often, no doubt, his system is too crude for general notice. every historian connects the events of his narrative by some thread of philosophy or speculation; every reader observes some connection, though he may never develop it to himself, between the events and changes of national and ethnological life; and even the observer whose vision is limited by his own horizon in time and space marks a dependence, and speaks of cause and effect. all this follows from the existence and nature of man. man is not inert, nor even passive, merely; and his activity will continually organize itself into facts and forms, ever changing in character, it may be, yet subject to a law as wise and fixed as that of planetary motion. the independence of the british colonies in america, declared on the th of july, , is not an isolated fact; nor is the declaration itself a hasty and overwrought production of a young and enthusiastic adventurer in the cause of liberty. the passions and the reason of men connected the declaration of independence with the massacre in king-street, of march th, ; with the passage and repeal of the stamp act; with the attempt to enforce the writs of assistance; with the act to close the port of boston; with the peace of ; with the act of settlement of ; with the execution of charles i., and the protectorate of cromwell; with the death of hampden; with the confederation of ; with the royal charters granted to the respective colonies; with the compact made on board the mayflower; and, finally, and distinctly, and chiefly,--as the basis of the greatest legal argument of modern times, made by the massachusetts house of representatives, from to ,--with the events at runnymede, and the grant of the great charter to the nobles and people of england in , which is itself based upon the concessions of edward the confessor, and the affirmation of the saxon laws in the eleventh century. our independence is, then, one logical fact or event in a long succession, to the enumeration of which we may yet add the confederation of , the constitution of , the french revolution of , the rapid increase of american territory and states, the revolutionary spirit of continental europe, the reforms in the british government at home, the wise modifications of its colonial policy, and for us a long career of prosperity based upon the cardinal doctrine of the equality of all men before the law. nor can any reader of the declaration itself assume that it contains one statement, proposition, idea, or word, not carefully considered, and carefully expressed. it was not the production of hasty, thoughtless, or reckless men. the country had been gradually prepared for the great event. states, counties, and towns, had made the most distinct expressions of opinion upon the relations of the colonies to the mother country. on the th of june, , richard henry lee, of virginia, moved, in the congress of the united colonies, a resolution declaring, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. the subject was considered on the tenth; and, on the eleventh instant, the committee, consisting of thomas jefferson, john adams, dr. franklin, roger sherman, and robert r. livingston, was appointed. on the twenty-fifth of june, a declaration of the deputies of pennsylvania, in favor of independence, was read. on the twenty-eighth, the credentials of the delegates from new jersey, in which they were instructed to favor independence, were presented; and on the first of july similar instructions to the maryland delegates were laid before congress. at this time congress proceeded to consider the declaration and resolution reported by the committee. the declaration was carefully considered, and materially amended in committee of the whole, on the first, second, third, and fourth, when it was finally adopted. it was then signed by the president and secretary, and copies were transmitted to the several colonies. the order for its engrossment, and for the signature by every member, was not passed until the nineteenth of july, and it was not really signed until the second of august following. it is not likely, considering the circumstances, and the known character of the members of congress, among whom may be mentioned john hancock, samuel adams, benjamin rush, robert morris, benjamin harrison, elbridge gerry, john witherspoon, a descendant of john knox, the scottish reformer, charles carroll, and samuel huntington,--all distinguished for coolness, probity, and patriotism,--that the immortal document can contain one thought or word unworthy its sacred associations, and the character of the american people! and it is among the alarming symptoms of public sentiment that the declaration of independence is by some publicly condemned, and by others quietly accepted as entitled to just the consideration, and no more, that is given to an excited advocate's speech to a jury, or a demagogue's electioneering harangue, or the daily contribution of the partisan editor to the stock of political capital that aids the election of his favorite candidates. and upon this evidence is the nation and the world to be taught that but little was meant by the assertions, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? would it not be wiser to test the government we have, by a statesmanlike application of the principles of the declaration of independence in the management of public affairs? the union is connected with the declaration of independence. the union is an institution: the declaration of independence is an assertion of rights, and an exposition of principles. when principles are disregarded, institutions do not, for any considerable time, retain their original value. and it would be the folly of other nations, without excuse in us, were we to worship blindly any institution, whatever its origin or its history. i do not, myself, doubt the value of the american union. it was the necessity of the time when it was formed; it is the necessity of the present moment; it was, indeed, the claim of our whole colonial life, and its recognition could be postponed no longer when the colonies crossed the threshold of national existence. the colonies had carried on a correspondence among themselves upon important matters; the new england settlements formed a confederation in , that was the prototype of the present union; and the convention at albany, in , considered in connection with various resolutions and declarations, indicated a growing desire "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty" to the successive generations that should occupy the american continent. for these exalted purposes the constitution was framed, and the union established; and the constitution and the union will remain as long as these exalted purposes, with any considerable share of fidelity, are secured. the union will not be destroyed by declamation, nor can declamation preserve it. words have power only when they awaken a response in the minds of those who listen. the union will be judged, finally, by its merits; and they are not powerful enemies for evil who attack it through the press and from the rostrum; but rather they who, clothed with authority, brief or permanent, interpret the constitution so as to defeat the end for which it was framed. nor are they the best friends of the union who lavishly bestow upon it nicely-wrought encomiums, as though the gilding of rhetoric and the ornament of praise could shield a human institution from the judgment of a free people; but rather they who, under heaven, and in the presence of men, seek to so interpret the constitution as, in the language and in the order of its preamble, "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty" to themselves and their posterity. words are powerless, and enemies--envious, jealous, or deluded--are powerless, when they war upon a system of government that secures such exalted results. and, if in these later days of our national existence patriotism has been weakened, respect and reverence for the constitution and the union have been diminished, it is because the actual government under the constitution has, in the judgment of many, failed to realize the government of the constitution. but let no one despair of the republic. men are now building better than they know; possibly, better than they wish. a great government, powerful in its justice, and therefore to be respected and maintained, must also be powerful in its errors, prejudices, and wrongs, and therefore to be changed and reformed in these respects. the declaration "that all men are created equal" is vital, and will live in the presence of all governments, strong as well as weak, hostile as well as friendly. it has no respect for worldly authority, so evidently is it a direct emanation of the divine mind, and so does it harmonize with the highest manifestations of the nature of man. but the declaration of independence does not, in this particular, assert that all men are created equal in height or weight, equal in physical strength, intellectual power, or moral worth. it is not dealing with these qualities at all, but with the natural political rights and relations of men. in its view, all are born free from any political subordination to others on account of the accidents or incidents of family or historic name. and hence it follows that no man, by birth or nature, has any right in political affairs to control his fellow-man; and hence it follows further, as there is neither subjection anywhere nor authority anywhere, that all men are created equal, that governments derive their "just powers from the consent of the governed." and hence it must, ere long, be demonstrated by this country, under the light of christianity, and in the presence of the world, that man cannot have property in his fellow-man. and, again, let no one despair of the republic or of the union; nor let any, with rash confidence, believe that they are indestructible. they are human institutions built up through great sacrifices, and by the exercise of a high order of worldly wisdom. but the government is not an end--it is a means. the end is liberty regulated by law; and the means will exist as long as the end thereof is attained. but, should the time ever come when the institutions of the country fail to secure the blessings of liberty to the living generation, and hold out no promise of better things in the future, i know not that these institutions could longer exist, of that they ought longer to exist. to be sure, the horizon is not always distinctly seen. the sky is not always clear; there are dark spots upon the disk of liberty, as upon the sun in the heavens; but, like the sun, its presence is for all. and, whether there be night, or clouds, or distance, its blessings can never be wholly withdrawn from the human race. it is not to be concealed, however, that the affections of the people have been alienated from the american union during the last seven years, as they were from the union with great britain during the years of our colonial life immediately previous to the massacre in king-street, in . this solemn personal and public experience is fraught with a great lesson. it should teach those who are intrusted with the administration of public affairs to translate the language of the constitution into the stern realities of public policy, in the light of the declaration of independence, and of liberty; and it should warn those who constitute the government, and who judge it, not to allow their opposition to men or to measures to degenerate into indifference or hostility to the institutions of the country. a little distrust of ourselves, who see not beyond our own horizon, might sometimes lend charity to our judgment, and discretion to our opposition; for, in the turmoil of politics, and the contests of statesmanship, even, it is not always "----the sea that sinks and shelves, but ourselves, that rook and rise with endless and uneasy motion, now touching the very skies, now sinking into the depths of ocean." and, as there must be in every society of men something of evil that can be traced to the government, and something of good neglected that a wise and efficient government might have accomplished, it is easy to build up an argument against an existing government, however good when compared with others. this is a narrow, superficial, unsatisfactory, dangerous view to take of public affairs. we should seek to comprehend the relations of the government, the principles on which it is founded; and, while we justly complain of its defects, and seek to remedy them, we ought also to compare it with other systems that exist, or that might be established. this proposition involves an intelligent realization by the people of the character of their institutions; and i am thus led to express the apprehension that the popular political education of our day is inferior to that of the revolutionary era, and of the age that immediately succeeded it. there is, no doubt, a disposition and a tendency to extol the recent past. the recollections of childhood are quite at variance with the real truth, and tradition is often the dream of old age concerning the events of early life. as rivers, hills, mountains, roads, and towns, are all magnified by the visions of childhood, it is not strange that men should be also. hence comes, in part, the popular belief in the superior physical strength and greater longevity of the people who lived fifty or a hundred years ago. each generation is familiar with its predecessor; but of the one next remote it knows only the marked characters. those who possessed great physical excellences remain; but they are not so much the representatives of their generation as its exceptions. the weak, the diseased, have fallen by the way; and, as there is an intimate connection between physical and intellectual power, the remnant of any generation, whatever its common character, will retain a disproportionate number of strong-minded men. hence it is not safe to judge a generation as a whole by those who remain at the age of sixty or seventy years; especially if we reflect that public opinion and tradition are most likely to preserve the names and qualities of those who were distinguished for physical or mental power. yet, after making due allowance for these exaggerations, i cannot escape the conclusion that we have, as a people, deteriorated in average sound political learning; and i proceed to mention some of the causes and evidences of our degeneracy, and of the superiority of our ancestors. i. _the political condition of the country has been essentially changed._--general personal and family comfort, according to the ideas now entertained, was not a feature of american society for one hundred and seventy years from the settlement at plymouth. life was a continual contest--a contest with the forest, with the climate, with the indians, and especially was it a continual contest with the mother country. the colonists sought to maintain their own rights without infringement, while they accorded to the sovereign his constitutional privileges. conflicts were frequent, and apprehensions of conflict yet more frequent. hence those who had the conduct of public affairs were compelled to give some attention to english history, and to the constitutional law of great britain. moreover, it was always important to secure and keep a strong public sentiment on the side of liberty; and there were usually in every town men who thoroughly investigated questions of public policy. there was one topic, more absorbing than any other, that involved the study of the legal history and usage of great britain, and a careful consideration of the general principles of liberty; namely, the constitutional rights of a british subject. here was a broad field for inquiry, investigation, and study; and it was faithfully cultivated and gleaned. there has never been a political topic for public discussion in america more important in itself, or better calculated to educate an american in a knowledge of his political rights, than the examination of the political relations of the subject to the crown and parliament of great britain previous to the declaration of independence. it was not an abstraction. it had a practical value to every man in the colonies, and it was the prominent feature of the masterly exposition made by the massachusetts house of representatives, to which i have already referred. and we can better estimate the political education which the times furnished, when we consider that the revolutionary war was made logical and necessary through a knowledge of positions, facts, and arguments, scattered over the history of the colonies. but, when our independence had been established and recognized, constitutions had been framed, and the governments of the states and nation set in motion, the beauty and harmony of our political system seemed to render continued attention to political principles and the rights of individual men unnecessary. hence, we may anticipate the judgment of impartial history in the admission that public attention was gradually given to contests for office which did not always involve the maintenance of a fundamental principle of government, or the recognition of an essential human right. it does not, however, follow, from this admission, that we are indifferent to our political lot,--occasional contests upon principle refute such a conjecture,--but that men are not anxious concerning those things which appear to be secure. and the differences of political parties of the last fifty years have not been so much concerning the nature of human rights, as in regard to the institutions by which those rights can be best protected. therefore our political questions have been questions of expediency rather than of principle. and, if there is any foundation for the popular impression that public offices are conferred on men less eminently qualified to give dignity to public employments, the reason of this degeneracy--less noteworthy than it is usually represented--is to be found in this connection. governments and political organizations accept the common law of society. when an individual or a corporation is prosperous, places of trust and emolument are often gained and occupied by unworthy men; but, when profits are diminished, or when they disappear entirely; when dividends are passed, when loss and bankruptcy are imminent, then, if hope and courage still remain, places of importance are filled by the appointment of abler and worthier men. the charge made against official character, to whatever extent true, is better evidence of confidence and prosperity than it is of the degeneracy of the people; and a public exigency, serious and long-continued, would call to posts of responsibility the highest talent and integrity which the country could produce. but it is, nevertheless, to be admitted as a necessary consequence of the facts already stated, and the views presented, that the average amount of sound political learning among those engaged in public employments is less than it was during the revolutionary era. it is, however, also to be observed, that, when such learning seems to be specially required, the people demand it and secure it. hence the work of framing constitutions, even in the new states, has, in its execution, commanded the approval of political writers in this country and in europe. and it must, also, be admitted that peace and prosperity render sound political learning and great experience less necessary, and at the same time multiply the number of men who are considered eligible to office. candidates are put in nomination and elected because they have been good neighbors, honorable citizens, competent teachers of youth, or faithful spiritual guides; or, possibly, because they have been successful in business, are of the military or of the fire department, or because they are leaders and benefactors of special classes of society. in ordinary times these facts are all worthy of consideration and real deference; but when, as in the revolution, every place of public service is a post of responsibility, or sacrifice, or danger, candidates and electors will not meet upon these grounds, but, disregarding such circumstances, the canvass will have special reference to the work to be done. for civil employments, political learning and experience are required; and for military posts, skill, sagacity, and courage. it may be said that our whole colonial life was a preparatory school for the revolutionary contest; and, therefore, the major part of the enterprise, ambition, and patriotism, of the country, was given to the training, studies, and pursuits, calculated to fit men for so stern a struggle. but now that other avenues are inviting in themselves, and promise political preferment, we are liable to the criticism that our young men, well educated in the schools and in a knowledge of the world, are not well grounded in political history and constitutional law, without which there can be no thorough and comprehensive statesmanship. and, as i pass from this branch of my subject, i may properly say that i do not seek to limit the number of candidates for public office; for every office is a school, and the public itself is a great and wise teacher. nor do i ask any to abandon the employments and duties, or to neglect the claims of business and of social life; but i seek to impress upon our youth a sense of the importance of adding something thereto. the knowledge of which i have spoken is valuable in the ordinary course of public business, and absolutely essential in the exigences of political and national life. and it is with an eye single to the happiness of individuals, and the welfare of the public, that i invite my fellow-citizens, and especially the young men of the state, to take something from the hours of labor, where labor is excessive; or something from amusement, where amusement has ceased to be recreation; or something from light reading, which often is neither true, nor reasonable, nor useful; or something from indolence and dissipation; and, in the minutes and hours thus gained, treasure up valuable knowledge for the circumstances and exigences of citizenship and public office. ii. _the claims of business and society are unfavorable to political learning._--i assume it to be true of massachusetts that the proportion of freehold farmers to the whole population is gradually diminishing, and that the amount of labor performed by each is gradually increasing. from the settlement of the country to the commencement of the present century, there was a great deal of privation, hardship, and positive suffering; but the claim for continuous labor was not exacting. the necessary articles of food and clothing were chiefly supplied from the land, and the majority did not contemplate any great accumulation of worldly goods, but sought rather to place their political and religious privileges upon a sure foundation. agriculture was in a rude state, and consequently did not furnish steady employment to those engaged in it. it is only when there are valuable markets, scientific, or at least careful cultivation, and large profits, that the farmer can use his evenings and long winters in his profession. these circumstances did not exist until the present century; and we have thus in this discussion found both the motive and the opportunity for political learning among our ancestors. it is also possible that the increased activity of business and business men is unfavorable to those studies and thoughts that are essential to political learning. commerce and trade are stimulated by never-ceasing competition; and manufacturers are not free from the influence of markets, and the necessity of variety, taste, and skill, in the management of their business. if the larger share of the physical and mental vigor of a man is given to business, his hours of leisure must be hours of relaxation; and to most minds the study of history and of kindred topics is by no means equivalent to recreation. moreover, society presents numerous claims which are not easily disregarded. fashionable life puts questions that but few people have the courage to answer in the negative. have you read the last novel? the new play? the reviews of the quarter? the magazines of the month? or the greatest satire of the age? these questions have puzzled many young men into customary neglect of useful reading, that they may not admit their ignorance in the presence of those whom they respect or admire. but, everything valuable is expensive, and learning can be secured only by severe self-sacrifice. with our ancestors, after religious culture, historical and political reading was next immediately before them; but the youth of this generation who seek such learning are compelled to make their way without deference to the daily customs of society. there is no fashionable or tolerated society that invites young men to read the history of england prior to the time when macaulay begins. nor does public sentiment recommend de lolme on the british constitution, the federalist, the writings of jefferson, madison, marshall, story, and webster, upon the constitution of the united states, and the practice of the government under it. not but that these topics are considered in the higher institutions of learning; but i address myself to those who have enjoyed the advantages of our common schools only, where thorough instruction in national and general political history cannot be given. this kind of learning must be self-acquired, and acquired by some temporary sacrifice; and the sooner, in the case of every young man, this sacrifice is contemplated and offered, the more acceptable and useful it will be. and the acquisition of this kind of learning does not, in a majority of cases, admit of delay. it should be the work of youth and early manhood. the duties of life are so constant and pressing that we find it difficult to abstract ourselves and our thoughts from the world; but, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-five, the attention may be concentrated upon special subjects, and their elements mastered. by the athenian law, minority terminated at the age of sixteen years; and demosthenes, at that period of his life, commenced a course of self-education by which he became the first orator of athens, and the admiration of the after-world. the father of demosthenes died worth fourteen talents; and the son, though defrauded by his guardians, was, as his father had been, enrolled in the wealthiest class of citizens; yet he did not hesitate to subject himself to the severest mental and physical discipline, in preparation for the great life he was to lead. "demosthenes received, during his youth, the ordinary grammatical and rhetorical education of a wealthy athenian.... it appears also that he was, from childhood, of sickly constitution and feeble muscular frame; so that, partly from his own disinclination, partly from the solicitude of his mother, he took little part, as boy or youth, in the exercises of the palæstra.... such comparative bodily disability probably contributed to incite his thirst for mental and rhetorical acquisitions, as the only road to celebrity open. but it at the same time disqualified him from appropriating to himself the full range of a comprehensive grecian education, as conceived by plato, isokrates, and aristotle; an education applying alike to thought, word, and action--combining bodily strength, endurance, and fearlessness, with an enlarged mental capacity, and a power of making it felt by speech. "the disproportion between the physical energy and the mental force of demosthenes, beginning in childhood, is recorded and lamented in the inscription placed on his statue after his death.... demosthenes put himself under the teaching of isæus; ... and also profited largely by the discourse of plato, of isokrates, and others. as an ardent aspirant, he would seek instruction from most of the best sources, theoretical as well as practical--writers as well as lecturers. but, besides living teachers, there was one of the last generation who contributed largely to his improvement. he studied thucydides with indefatigable labor and attention; according to one account, he copied the whole history eight times over with his own hand; according to another, he learnt it all by heart, so as to be able to rewrite it from memory, when the manuscript was accidentally destroyed. without minutely criticizing these details, we ascertain, at least, that thucydides was the peculiar object of his study and imitation. how much the composition of demosthenes was fashioned by the reading of thucydides, reproducing the daring, majestic, and impressive phraseology, yet without the overstrained brevity and involutions of that great historian,--and contriving to blend with it a perspicuity and grace not inferior to lysias,--may be seen illustrated in the elaborate criticism of the rhetor dionysius. "while thus striking out for himself a bold and original style, demosthenes had still greater difficulties to overcome in regard to the external requisites of an orator. he was not endowed by nature, like Æschines, with a magnificent voice; nor, like demades, with a ready flow of vehement improvisation. his thoughts required to be put together by careful preparation; his voice was bad, and even lisping; his breath short; his gesticulation ungraceful; moreover, he was overawed and embarrassed by the manifestations of the multitude.... the energy and success with which demosthenes overcame his defects, in such manner as to satisfy a critical assembly like the athenians, is one of the most memorable circumstances in the general history of self-education. repeated humiliation and repulse only spurred him on to fresh solitary efforts for improvement. he corrected his defective elocution by speaking with pebbles in his mouth; he prepared himself to overcome the noise of the assembly by declaiming in stormy weather on the sea-shore of phalerum; he opened his lungs by running, and extended his powers of holding breath by pronouncing sentences in marching up-hill; he sometimes passed two or three months without interruption in a subterranean chamber, practising night and day either in composition or declamation, and shaving one-half of his head in order to disqualify himself from going abroad."[ ] yet all this effort and sacrifice were accompanied by repeated and humiliating failures; and it was not until he was twenty-seven years of age that the great orator of the world achieved his first success before the athenian assembly. but how can the youth of this age hope to be followers, even at a distance, of demosthenes, and of those his peers, who, by eloquence, poetry, art, science, and general learning, have added dignity to the race, and given lustre to generations separated by oceans and centuries, unless they are animated by a spirit of progress, and cheered by a faith that shall be manifested in the disposition and the power to overcome the obstacles that lie in every one's path? such a course of training requires individual effort and personal self-sacrifice. it would not be wise to follow the plan of the athenian orator; he adapted his training to his personal circumstances, and the customs of the country. his history is chiefly valuable for the lessons of self-reliance, and the example of perseverance under discouragements, that it furnishes. but it is always a solemn duty to hold up before youth noble models of industry, perseverance, and success, that they may be stimulated to the work of life by the assurance of history that, "not enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end or way; but to act, that each to-morrow find us further than to-day." iii. _the popular reading of the day does not contribute essentially to the education of the citizen and statesman._--it is not, of course, expected that every man is to qualify himself for the life of a statesman; but it does seem necessary for all to be so well instructed in political learning as to possess the means of forming a reasonable and philosophical opinion of the policy of the government. it is as discreditable to the intellect and judgment of a free people to complain of that which is right in itself, and rests upon established principles of right, as to submit without resistance or murmur to usurpation or misgovernment. i do not mean to undervalue the periodical press; but it must always assume something in regard to its readers, and in politics it must assume that the principles of government and the history of national institutions are known and understood. but the young man should subject himself to a systematic course of training; and i know of nothing more valuable in political studies than a thorough acquaintance with english history. our principles of government were derived from england; and it is in the history of the mother country that the best discussion of principles is found, as in that country many of the contests for liberty occurred. but, as our government is the outgrowth rather than a copy of british principles and institutions, the american citizen is not prepared for his duties until he has made himself familiar with american history, in all its departments. how ill-suited, then, for the duties of citizenship and public life, in the formation of taste and habits of thought, is much of the reading of the present time! and i may here call attention to the fact that each town in massachusetts is invested with authority to establish a public library by taxation. this, it seems to me, is one of the most important legislative acts of the present decennial period; and, indeed, a public library is essential to the view i am taking of the necessity and importance of political education. private libraries exist, but they are not found in every house, nor can every person enjoy their advantages. public libraries are open to all; and, when the selection of books is judicious, they furnish opportunities for education hardly less to be prized than the common schools themselves. the public library is not only an aid to general learning, a contributor to political intelligence and power, but it is an efficient supporter of sound morals, and all good neighborhood among men. if the public will not offer to its youth valuable reading, such as its experience, its wisdom, its knowledge of the claims of society, its morality may select, shall the public complain if its young men and women are tempted by frivolous and pernicious mental occupations? it is, moreover, the duty of the public to furnish the means of self-education, especially in the science of government; and political learning, for the most part, must be gained after the school-going period of life has passed. let american liberty be an intelligent liberty, and therefore a self-sustaining liberty. freedom, more or less complete, has been found in two conditions of life. man, in a rude state, where his condition seemed to be normal, rather than the result of a process of mental and moral degeneracy, has often possessed a large share of independence; but this should by no means be confounded with what in america is called liberty. the independence of the savage, or nomad, is manifested in the absence of law; but the liberty of an american citizen is the power to do whatever may be beneficial to himself, and not injurious to his neighbor nor to the state. the first leaves self-protection and self-regulation to the individual, while the latter restrains the aggressive tendencies of all for the security of each. the first is natural equality without law; the second is natural equality before the law. with the first, might makes right; with the latter, right makes might. with the first, the power of the law, or of the will of an individual or clan, is in the rigor and success of execution; with the latter, the power of the law is in the justice of its demand. we, as a people, have passed the savage and nomadic state, and can return to it only after a long and melancholy process of decay and change, out of which ultimately might come a new and savage race of men. this, then, is not our immediate, even if it be a possible danger. but we are to guard against intellectual, political, and moral degeneracy. we are, through family, religious, and public education, to take security of the childhood and youth of the land for the preservation of the institutions we have, and for the growth, greatness, and justice, of the republic. liberty in america, if you will admit the distinction, is a growth and not a creation. the institutions of liberty in america have the same character. by many centuries of trial, struggle, and contest, through many years of experience, sometimes joyous, and sometimes sad, the fact and the institutions of liberty in america have been evolved. it has not been a work of destruction and creation, but a process of change and progress. and so it must ever be. reformation does not often follow destruction; and they who seek to destroy the institutions of a country are not its friends in fact, however they may be in purpose. ignorance can destroy, but intelligence is required to reform or build up. let the prejudice against learning, not common now, but possibly existing in some minds, be forever banished. learning is the friend of liberty. of this america has had evidence in her own history, and in her observation of the experience of others. the literary institutions and the cultivated men of america, like milton and hampden in england, preferred "hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp." it was the intelligence of the country that everywhere uttered and everywhere accepted the declaration of the town of boston, in the revolutionary struggle, "we can endure poverty, but we disdain slavery." ignorance is quicksand on which no stable political structure can be built; and i predict the future greatness of our beloved state, in those historical qualities that outlast the ages, from the fact that she is not tempted by her extent of territory, salubrity of climate, fertility of soil, or by the presence and promise of any natural source of wealth, to falter in her devotion to learning and liberty. and i anticipate for massachusetts a career of influence beneficial to all, whether disputed or accepted, when i reflect that, with less good fortune in the presence and combination of learning and liberty, greece, rome, venice, holland, and england, enjoyed power disproportionate to their respective populations, territory, and natural resources. and, while the object for which we are convened may pardon something to local attachments and state pride, the day and the occasion ought not to pass without a grateful and hearty acknowledgment of the interest manifested by other states and sections in the cause of general learning, and especially in common-school education. the canadas are our rivals; the states of the west are our rivals; the states of the south are our rivals; and, were our greater experience and better opportunities reckoned against us, i know not that there would be much in our systems of education of which we could properly boast. it is, indeed, possible that north carolina, untoward circumstances having their due weight, has made more progress in education, since , than any other state of the union. education is not only favorable to liberty, but, when associated with liberty, it is the basis of the union and power of the american states. as citizens of the republic, we need a better knowledge of our national institutions, a better knowledge of the institutions of the several states, a more intimate acquaintance with one another, and the power of judging wisely and justly the policies and measures of each and all. these ends, aided or accomplished by general learning, will so strengthen the union as no force of armies can--will so strengthen the union as that by no force of armies can it be overthrown. footnote: [ ] grote's hist., vol. xi., p. , et seq. massachusetts school fund. [extract from the twenty-second annual report of the secretary of the board of education.] the massachusetts school fund was established by the legislature of (stat. , chap. ), and it was provided by the act that all moneys in the treasury on the first of january, , derived from the sale of lands in the state of maine, and from the claim of the state on the government of the united states for military services, and not otherwise appropriated, together with fifty per centum of all moneys thereafter to be received from the sale of lands in maine, should be appropriated to constitute a permanent fund, for the aid and encouragement of common schools. it was provided that the fund should never exceed one million of dollars, and that the income only should be appropriated to the object in view. the mode of distribution was referred to a subsequent legislature. it was, however, provided that a greater sum should never be paid to any city or town than was raised therein for the support of common schools. there are two points in the law that deserve consideration. first, the object of the fund was the aid and encouragement of the schools, and not their support; and secondly, the limit of appropriation to the respective towns was the amount raised by each. there is an apparent inconsistency in this restriction when it is considered that the income of the entire fund would have been equal to only forty-three cents for each child in the state between the ages of five and fifteen years, and that each town raised, annually, by taxation, a larger sum; but this inconsistency is to be explained by the fact that the public sentiment, as indicated by resolves reported by the same committee for the appointment of commissioners on the subject, tended to a distribution of money among the towns according to their educational wants. as early as , the committee on education of the house of representatives, in a report made by hon. w. b. calhoun, declared, "that means should be devised for the establishment of a fund having in view not the _support_, but the _encouragement_, of the common schools, and the instruction of school teachers." this report was made in the month of january, and in february following the same committee say: "the establishment of a fund should look to the support of an institution for the instruction of school teachers in each county in the commonwealth, and to the distribution, annually, to all the towns, of such a sum for the benefit of the schools as shall simply operate as an encouragement to proportionate efforts on the part of the towns. a fund which should be so large as to suffice for the support of the whole school establishment of the state, as is the case in connecticut, would, in the opinion of the committee, be rather detrimental than advantageous; it would only serve to draw off from the mass of the community that animating interest which will ever be found indispensable where a resolute feeling upon the subject is wished for or expected. such a result is, in every sense, to be deprecated, and whatever may tend to it, even remotely, should be anxiously avoided. a fund which should admit of the distribution of one thousand dollars to any town which should raise three thousand dollars, in any manner within itself, or in that proportion, would operate as a strong incentive to high efforts; and, if to this should be added the further requisition of a faithful return to the legislature, annually, of the condition of the schools, the consequences could not be otherwise than decidedly favorable." this report was accompanied by a bill "for the establishment of the massachusetts literary fund." the bill followed the report in regard to the proportionate amount of the income of the fund to be distributed to the several towns. this bill failed to become a law. in january, , the house of representatives, under an order introduced by mr. marsh, of dalton, appointed a committee "to consider the expediency of investing a portion of the proceeds of the sales of the lands of this commonwealth in a permanent fund, the interest of which should be annually applied, as the legislature should from time to time direct, for the encouragement of common schools." the adoption of this order was the incipient measure that led to the establishment of the massachusetts school fund. on the twenty-third of the same month, mr. marsh submitted the report of the committee. the committee acted upon the expectation that all moneys then in the treasury derived from the sale of public lands, and the entire proceeds of all subsequent sales, were to be set apart as a fund for the encouragement of common schools; but, as blanks were left in the bill reported, they seem not to have been sanguine of the liberality of the legislature. the cash and notes on hand amounted to $ , . , and three and a half millions of acres of land unsold amounted, at the estimated price of forty cents per acre, to $ , , more; making together a fund with a capital of $ , , . . the income was estimated at $ , . . it was also stated that there were , children in the state between the ages of five and fifteen years, and it was therefore expected that the income of the fund would permit a distribution to the towns of seventy cents for each child between the afore-named ages. this certainly was a liberal expectation, compared with the results that have been attained. the distributive share of each child has amounted to only about one-third of the sum then contemplated. the committee were careful to say, "it is not intended, in establishing a school fund, to relieve towns and parents from the principal expense of education; but to manifest our interest in, and to give direction, energy, and stability to, institutions essential to individual happiness and the public welfare." in conclusion, the committee make the following inquiries and suggestions: "should not our common schools be brought nearer to their constitutional guardians? shall we not adopt measures which shall bind, in grateful alliance, the youth to the governors of the commonwealth? we consider the application, annually, of the interest of the proposed fund, as the establishment of a direct communication betwixt the legislature and the schools; as each representative can carry home the bounty of the government, and bring back from the schools returns of gratitude and proficiency. they will then cheerfully render all such information as the legislature may desire. a new spirit would animate the community, from which we might hope the most happy results. this endowment would give the schools consequence and character, and would correct and elevate the standard of education. "therefore, to preserve the purity, extend the usefulness, and perpetuate the benefits of intelligence, we recommend that a fund be constituted, and the distribution of the income so ordered as to open a direct and more certain intercourse with the schools; believing that by this measure their wants would be better understood and supplied, the advantages of education more highly appreciated and improved, and the blessings of wisdom, virtue, and knowledge, carried home to the fireside of every family, to the bosom of every child." the bill reported by this committee was read twice, and then, upon mr. marsh's motion, referred to the next legislature. in , the bill from the files of the last general court to establish the massachusetts school fund, and so much of the petition of the inhabitants of seekonk as related to the same subject, were referred to the committee on education. in the month of february, hon. a. d. foster, of worcester, chairman of the committee, made a report, and submitted a bill which was the basis of the law of march , . the committee were sensible of the importance of establishing a fund for the encouragement of the common schools. these institutions were languishing for support, and in a great degree destitute of the public sympathy. there were no means of communication between the government and the schools, and in some sections towns and districts had set themselves resolutely against all interference by the state. in , an effort was made to ascertain the amount raised for the support of schools. returns were received from only ninety-nine towns, showing an annual average expenditure of one dollar and ninety-eight cents for each pupil. the interest in this subject does not seem to have been confined to the legislature, nor even to have originated there. the report of the committee contains an extract from a communication made by rev. william c. woodbridge, then editor of the _american annals of education and instruction_. his views were adopted by the committee, and they corresponded with those which have been already quoted. the dangers of a large fund were presented, and the example of connecticut, and some states of the west, where school funds had diminished rather than increased the public interest in education, was tendered as a warning against a too liberal appropriation of public money. on the other hand, mr. woodbridge claimed that the establishment of a fund which should encourage efforts rather than supply all wants, and, without sustaining the schools, give aid to the people in proportion to their own contributions, was a measure indispensable to the cause of education. he also referred to the experience of new jersey, which had made a general appropriation to be paid to those towns that should contribute for the support of their own schools; but, such was the public indifference, that after many years the money was still in the treasury. hence it was inferred that all these measures were ineffectual, and that mere taxation was, upon the whole, to be preferred to any imperfect system. but the example of new york was approved, where the distribution of a small sum, equal to about twenty cents for each pupil, had increased the public interest, and wrought what then seemed to be an effectual and permanent revolution in educational affairs. these facts and reasonings, say the committee, seem to be important and sound, and to result in this,--that no provision ought to be made which shall diminish the present amount of money raised by taxes for the schools, or the interest felt by the people in their prosperity; that a fund may be so used as satisfactorily to increase both--and that further information in regard to our schools is requisite to determine the best mode of doing this. these opinions are supported generally by the judgment of the present generation. yet it is to be remarked, by way of partial dissent, that the public apathy in connecticut and the states of the west was not in a great degree the effect of the funds, but was rather a coëxisting, independent fact. it ought not, therefore, to have been expected that the mere offer of money for educational purposes, while the people had no just idea of the importance of education or of the means by which it could be acquired, would lead them even to accept the proffered boon; and it certainly, in their judgment, furnished no reason for self-taxation. it is, however, no doubt true that the power of local taxation for the support of schools is in its exercise a means of provoking interest in education; and it is reasonable to assume that a public system of instruction will never be vigorous and efficient at all times and under all circumstances where the right of local taxation does not exist or is not exercised. when the entire expenditure is derived from the income of public funds, or obtained by a universal tax, and the proceeds distributed among the towns, parishes, or districts, there will often be general conditions of public sentiment unfavorable, if not hostile, to schools; and, there will always be found in any state, however small, local indifference and lethargy which render all gifts, donations, and distributions, comparatively valueless. the subject of self-taxation annually is important in connection with a system of free education. it is the experience of the states of this country that the people themselves are more generous in the use of this power than are their representatives; and it is also true that when the power has been exercised by the people, there is usually more interest awakened in regard to modes of expenditure, and more zeal manifested in securing adequate returns. the private conversations and public debates often arouse an interest which would never have been manifested had the means of education been furnished by a fund, or been distributed as the proceeds of a general tax assessed by the government of the state. i have no doubt that much of our success is due to the fact that in all the towns the question of taxation is annually submitted to the people. it is quite certain that the sum of our municipal appropriations never could have been increased from $ , . , in , to $ , , . , in , without the influence of the statistical tables that are appended to the annual reports of the board of education; and it is also true that the materials for these tables could not have been secured without the agency of the school fund. our experience as a state confirms the wisdom of the reports of and ; and i unreservedly concur in the opinion that a fund ought not to be sufficient for the support of schools, but that such a fund is needed to give encouragement to the towns, to stimulate the people to make adequate local appropriations, to secure accurate and complete returns from the committees, and finally to provide means for training teachers, and for defraying the necessary expenses of the educational department. the law of , establishing the school fund, was reënacted in the revised statutes (chap. , sects. and ). the revised statutes (chap. , sects. , , , , , and ) also required that returns should be made, each year, from all the towns of the commonwealth, of the condition of the schools in various important particulars. the income of the fund was to be apportioned among the towns that had raised, the preceding year, the sum of one dollar by taxation for each pupil, and had complied with the laws in other respects; and it was to be distributed according to the number of persons in each between the ages of four and sixteen years. these provisions have since been frequently and variously modified; but at all times the state has imposed similar conditions upon the towns. by the statute of , chapter , the income of the school fund was to be apportioned among those towns that had raised by taxation for the support of schools the sum of one dollar and twenty-five cents for each person between the ages of four and sixteen years; and, by the law of , chapter , the income was to be apportioned among those towns which had raised by taxation the sum of one dollar and fifty cents for the education of each person between the ages of five and fifteen years. this provision is now in force. by an act of the legislature, passed april th, , it was provided that all sums of money which should thereafter be drawn from the treasury, for educational purposes, should be considered as a charge upon the moiety of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands set apart for the purpose of constituting a school fund. this provision continued in force until the reörganization of the fund, in . by the law of that year (chap. ), it was provided that one half of the annual income of the fund should be apportioned and distributed among the towns according to the then existing provisions of law, and that the educational expenses before referred to should be chargeable to and paid from the other half of the income of said fund. these provisions are now in force. the limitation of the act of , establishing the fund, and of the revised statutes, was removed by the law of , chapter , and the amount of the fund was then fixed at one million and five hundred thousand dollars. by the act of the principal was limited to two millions of dollars. the constitutional convention of had, with great unanimity, declared it to be the duty of the legislature to provide for the increase of the school fund to the sum of two millions of dollars; and, though the proposed constitution was rejected by the people, the provision concerning the fund was generally, if not universally, acceptable. under these circumstances, the legislature of may be said to have acted in conformity to the known opinion and purpose of the state. on the st of june, , the principal of the fund was $ , , . , including the sum of $ , . , added during the year preceding that date. in this statement no notice is taken of the rights of the school fund in the western railroad loan sinking fund. it may be observed that the committee of contemplated the establishment of a fund, with a capital of $ , , . , and yet, after twenty-five years, the massachusetts school fund amounts to only $ , , . . its present means of increase are limited to the excess of one-half of the annual income over the current educational expenses. the increase for the year - was $ , . ; and for the year - , $ , . . with this resource only, and at this rate of increase, about one hundred and sixty years will be required for the augmentation of the capital to the maximum contemplated by existing laws. but the educational wants of the state are such that even this scanty supply must soon cease. it is then due to the magnitude of the proposition for the considerable and speedy increase of the school fund, that its necessity, if possible, or its utility, at least, should be satisfactorily demonstrated; and it is for this purpose that i have already presented a brief sketch of its history in connection with the legislation of the commonwealth, and that i now proceed to set forth its relations to the practical work of public instruction. when the fund was instituted, public sentiment in regard to education was lethargic, if not retrograding. the mere fact of the action of the legislature lent new importance to the cause of learning, inspired its advocates with additional zeal, gave efficiency to previous and subsequent legislation, and, as though there had been a new creation, evoked order out of chaos. previous to there was no trustworthy information concerning the schools of the state. the law of , chapter , section , required each town to make a report to the secretary of the commonwealth, of the amount of money paid, the number of schools, the aggregate number of months that the schools of each city and town were kept, the number of male and female teachers, the whole number of pupils, the number of private schools and academies and the number of pupils therein, the amount of compensation paid to the instructors of private schools and academies, and the number of persons between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one years who were unable to read and write. the legislature did not provide a penalty for neglect of this provision, nor does there seem to have been any just method of compelling obedience. the secretary of the commonwealth sent out blank forms of returns, and replies were received from two hundred and fourteen towns, while eighty-eight were entirely silent. the returns received furnish a series of interesting facts for the year . there were one thousand seven hundred and twenty-six district schools, supported at an expense of two hundred and twenty-six thousand two hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety cents ($ , . ), while there were nine hundred and fifty-three academies and private schools maintained at a cost of $ , . . the whole number of children attending public schools was , , and the number educated in private schools and academies was , . the expense, therefore, was $ . per pupil in the private schools, and only $ . each in the public schools. these facts are indicative of the condition of public sentiment. about one-sixth of the children of the state were educated in academies and private schools, at a cost equal to about six-sevenths of the amount paid for the education of the remaining five-sixths, who attended the public schools. the returns also showed that there were , children between the ages of seven and fourteen years who did not attend school, and persons over fourteen years of age who were unable to read and write. the incompleteness of these returns detracts from their value; but, as those towns where the greatest interest existed were more likely to respond to the call of the legislature, it is probable that the actual condition of the whole state was below that of the two hundred and eighty-eight towns. the interest which the law of had called forth was temporary; and in march, , the committee on education, to whom was referred an order with instructions to inquire into the expediency of providing a fund to furnish, in certain cases, common schools with apparatus, books, and such other aid as may be necessary to raise the standard of common school education, say that they desire more accurate knowledge than could then be obtained. the returns required by law were in many cases wholly neglected, and in others they were inaccurately made. in the year returns were received from only eighty-six towns. in order to obtain the desired information, a special movement was made by the legislature. the report of the committee was printed in all the newspapers that published the laws of the commonwealth, and the secretary was directed to prepare and present to the legislature an abstract of the returns which should be received from the several towns for the year . the result of this extraordinary effort was seen in returns from only ninety-nine of three hundred and five towns, and even a large part of these were confessedly inaccurate or incomplete. they present, however, some remarkable facts. the following table, prepared from the returns of , shows the relative standing and cost of public and private schools in a part of the principal towns. it appears that the towns named in the table were educating rather more than two-thirds of their children in the public schools, at an expense of $ . each, and nearly one-third in private schools, at a cost of $ . each, and that the total expenditure for public instruction was about thirty-six per cent. of the outlay for educational purposes. column headings: a - amount paid for public instruction during the year. b - whole no. of pupils in the public schools in the course of the yr. c - number of academies and private schools. d - number of pupils in academies and private schools and not attending public schools. e -estimated amount of compensation of instructors of academies and private schools. ==============+============+========+=====+=======+============ towns. | a | b | c | d | e --------------+------------+--------+-----+-------+------------ beverly, | $ , | | | | $ , bradford, | | | | | , danvers, | , | | | | , marblehead, | , | | | | , cambridge, | , | | | | , medford, | , | | | | , newton, | , | | | | , amherst, | | | | | , springfield, | , | , | | | , greenfield, | | | | | , dorchester, | , | | | | , quincy, | , | | | | , roxbury, | , | | | | , new bedford, | , | , | | | , hingham, | , | | | | , provincetown, | | | | | edgartown, | | | | | , nantucket, | , , | | | , | , |------------|--------|-----|-------+------------ towns, | $ , | , | | , | $ , ==============+============+========+=====+=======+============ the evidence is sufficient that the public schools were in a deplorable and apparently hopeless condition. the change that has been effected in the eighteen towns named may be seen by comparing the following table with the one already given. in , per cent. of the amount paid for education was expended in academies and private schools, while in only per cent. was so expended. in the same period the amount raised for public schools increased from less than thirty-seven thousand dollars to more than two hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars. at the first period, the attendance of pupils upon academies and private schools was nearly per cent. of the whole number, while in it was only per cent. the private schools of some of these towns were established recently, and are sustained in a degree by pupils who are not inhabitants of the state, but who have come among us for the purpose of enjoying the culture which our teachers and schools, private as well as public, are able to furnish. if, as seems probable, the number of foreign pupils was less in than in , the decrease of pupils in private schools would be greater than is indicated by the tables. the cost of education, as it appears by this table, is rather more than thirty dollars per pupil in the private schools, and only eight dollars and forty-nine cents in the public schools. in the following table, bradford includes groveland, danvers includes south danvers, springfield includes chicopee, and roxbury includes west roxbury. this is rendered necessary for the purposes of comparison, as groveland, south danvers, chicopee, and west roxbury, have been incorporated since . column headings: a - amount paid for public schools in - , including tax, income of surplus revenue, and of state school fund, when such income is appropriated for such schools, and exclusive of sums paid for school-houses. b - whole no. of pupils attending public schools in - --the largest no. returned as in attendance during any one term. c - number of incorporated and unincorporated academies and private schools returned in . d - estimated attendance in academies and private schools in - . e - estimated amount of tuition paid in academies and priv. schools in - . =============+=============+========+=====+=======+============ towns. | a | b | c | d | e -------------+-------------+--------+-----+-------+------------ beverly, | $ , | , | | | $ bradford, | , | | | | , danvers, | , | , | | | marblehead, | , | , | | | , cambridge, | , | , | | | , medford, | , | | | | , newton, | , | , | | | , amherst, | , | | | | , springfield, | , | , | | -- | -- greenfield, | , | | | | , dorchester, | , | , | | | quincy, | , | , | | | roxbury, | , | , | | | , new bedford, | , | , | | | , hingham, | , | | | | , provincetown,| , | | -- | -- | -- edgartown, | , | | | | nantucket, | , | , | | | , -------------+-------------+--------+-----+-------+------------ totals, | $ , | , | | , | $ , =============+=============+========+=====+=======+============ the legislature of acted with wisdom and energy. the school fund having been established, the towns were next required to furnish answers to certain questions that were substituted for the requisition of the statute of , and any town whose committee failed to make the return was to be deprived of its share of the income of the school fund, whenever it should be first distributed. (res. , chap. .) those measures were in the highest degree salutary. there were towns in the state, and returns were received from . there was still a want of accuracy and completeness; but from this time forth the state secured what had never before been attained,--intelligent legislation by the government, and intelligent coöperation and support by the people. in december, , the secretary of the commonwealth prepared an aggregate of the returns received, of which the following is a copy: number of towns from which returns have been received, number of school districts, , number of male children attending school from four to sixteen years of age, , number of female children attending school from four to sixteen years of age, , number over sixteen and under twenty-one unable to read and write, number of male instructors, , number of female instructors, , amount raised by tax to support schools, $ , amount raised by contribution to support schools, , average number of scholars attending academies and private schools, , estimated amount paid for tuition in academies and private schools, $ , local funds--yes, local funds--no, thus, by the institution of the school fund, provision was made for a system of annual returns, from which has been drawn a series of statistical tables, that have not only exhibited the school system as a whole and in its parts, but have also contributed essentially to its improvement. these statistics have been so accurate and complete, for many years, as to furnish a safe basis for legislation; and they have at the same time been employed by the friends of education as means for awakening local interest, and stimulating and encouraging the people to assume freely and bear willingly the burdens of taxation. it is now easy for each town, or for any inhabitant, to know what has been done in any other town; and, as a consequence, those that do best are a continual example to those that, under ordinary circumstances, might be indifferent. the establishment and efficiency of the school-committee system is due also to the same agency. there are, i fear, some towns that would now neglect to choose a school committee, were there not a small annual distribution of money by the state; but, in , the duty was often either neglected altogether, or performed in such a manner that no appreciable benefit was produced. the superintending committee is the most important agency connected with our system of instruction. in some portions of the state the committees are wholly, and in others they are partly, responsible for the qualifications of teachers; they everywhere superintend and give character to the schools, and by their annual reports they exert a large influence over public opinion. the people now usually elect well-qualified men; and it is believed that the extracts from the local reports, published annually by the board of education, constitute the best series of papers in the language upon the various topics that have from time to time been considered.[ ] by the publication of these abstracts, the committees, and indeed the people generally, are made acquainted with everything that has been done, or is at any time doing, in the commonwealth. improvements that would otherwise remain local are made universal; information in regard to general errors is easily communicated, and the errors themselves are speedily removed, while the system is, in all respects, rendered homogeneous and efficient. nor does it seem to be any disparagement of massachusetts to assume that, in some degree, she is indebted to the school fund for the consistent and steady policy of the legislature, pursued for more than twenty years, and executed by the agency of the board of education. in this period, normal schools have been established, which have educated a large number of teachers, and exerted a powerful and ever increasing influence in favor of good learning. teachers' institutes have been authorized, and the experiment successfully tested. agents of the board of education have been appointed, so that it is now possible, by the aid of both these means, as is shown by accompanying returns and statements, to afford, each year, to the people of a majority of the towns an opportunity to confer with those who are specially devoted to the work of education. in all this period of time, the legislature has never been called upon to provide money for the expenses which have thus been incurred; and, though a rigid scrutiny has been exercised over the expenditures of the educational department, measures for the promotion of the common schools have never been considered in relation to the general finances of the commonwealth. while some states have hesitated, and others have vacillated, massachusetts has had a consistent, uniform, progressive policy, which is due in part to the consideration already named, and in part, no doubt, to a popular opinion, traditional and historical in its origin, but sustained and strengthened by the measures and experience of the last quarter of a century, that a system of public instruction is so important an element of general prosperity as to justify all needful appropriations for its support. it may, then, be claimed for the massachusetts school fund, that the expectations of those by whom it was established have been realized; that it has given unity and efficiency to the school system; that it has secured accurate and complete returns from all the towns; that it has, consequently, promoted a good understanding between the legislature and the people; that it has increased local taxation, but has never been a substitute for it; and that it has enabled the legislature, at all times and in every condition of the general finances, to act with freedom in regard to those agencies which are deemed essential to the prosperity of the common schools of the state. having thus, in the history of the school fund, fully justified its establishment, so in its history we find sufficient reasons for its sacred preservation. while other communities, and even other states, have treated educational funds as ordinary revenue, subject only to an obligation on the part of the public to bestow an annual income on the specified object, massachusetts has ever acted in a fiduciary relation, and considered herself responsible for the principal as well as the income of the fund, not only to this generation, but to every generation that shall occupy the soil, and inherit the name and fame of this commonwealth. it only remains for me to present the reasons which render an increase of the capital of the fund desirable, if not necessary. the annual income of the existing fund amounts to about ninety-three thousand dollars, one-half of which is distributed among the towns and cities, in proportion to the number of persons in each between the ages of five and fifteen years. the distribution for the year - amounted to twenty cents and eight mills for each child. the following table shows the annual distribution to the towns from the year ; the whole number of children for each year except and , when the entire population was the basis; and the amount paid on account of each child since the year , when the law establishing the present method of distribution was enacted: =================================================== | | | income | | | per year. | children. | income. | pupil. ---------+--------------+---------------+---------- . | , |$ , [ ] | -- . | , | , [ ] | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , [ ] | -- . | , | , [ ] | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , | -- =================================================== =================================================== | | | per pupil | | | in cents year. | children. | income. | & mills. ---------+--------------+---------------+---------- . | , |$ , | -- . | , | , | -- . | , | , [ ] | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . . | , | , | . =================================================== it was contemplated by the founders of the school fund that an amount might safely be distributed among the towns equal to one-third of the sums raised by taxation, but the state is really furnishing only one-thirtieth of the annual expenditure. a distribution corresponding to the original expectation is neither desirable nor possible; but a substantial addition might be made without in any degree diminishing the interest of the people, or relieving them from taxation. the income of the school fund has been three times used as a means of increasing the appropriations in the towns. it is doubtful whether, without an addition to the fund, this power can be again applied; and yet there are, according to the last returns, twenty-two towns that do not raise a sum for schools equal to $ . for each child between the ages of five and fifteen years; and there are fifty-two towns whose appropriations are less than three dollars. when the average annual expenditure is over six dollars, the minimum ought not to be less than three. it is to be considered that, as population increases, the annual personal distribution will diminish, and consequently that the bond now existing between the legislature and people will be weakened. moreover, any definite sum of money is worth less than it was twenty years ago; and it is reasonably certain that the same sum will be less valuable in , and yet less valuable in , than it is now. hence, if the fund remain nominally the same, it yet suffers a practical annual decrease. it is further to be presumed that the legislature will find it expedient to advance in its legislation from year to year. a small number of towns, few or many, may not always approve of what is done, and it is quite important that the influence of the fund should be sufficient to enable the state to execute its policy with uniformity and precision. as is well known, the expenses of the educational department are defrayed from the other half of the income of the fund. from this income the forty-eight scholarships in the colleges, the normal schools, the teachers' institutes, the agents of the board of education, are supported, and the salaries of the secretary and the assistant-secretary are paid. as has been stated, the surplus carried to the capital of the fund in june last was only $ , . . the objects of expenditure, already named, may be abolished, but no reasonable plan of economy can effect much saving while they exist. it is also reasonably certain that the expenses of the department must be increased. the law now provides for twelve teachers' institutes, annually, and there were opportunities during the present year for holding them; but, in order that one agent might be constantly employed, and a second employed for the term of six months, i limited the number of sessions to ten. the salaries of the teachers in the normal schools are low, and the number of persons employed barely adequate to the work to be done. some change, involving additional expense, is likely to be called for in the course of a few years. in view of the eminent aid which the school fund has rendered to the cause of education, with due deference to the wisdom and opinions of its founders, and with just regard to the existing and probable necessities of the state in connection with the cause of education, i earnestly favor the increase of the school fund by the addition of a million and a half of dollars. nor does the proposition for the state to appropriate annually $ , in aid of the common schools seem unreasonable, when it is considered that the military expenses are $ , , the reformatory and correctional about $ , , the charitable about $ , , and the pauper expenses nearly $ , more, all of which will diminish as our schools are year by year better qualified to give thorough and careful intellectual, moral, and religious culture. this increase seems to be necessary in order that the massachusetts school fund may furnish aid to the common schools during the next quarter of a century proportionate to the relative influence exerted by the same agency during the last twenty-five years. nor will such an addition give occasion for any apprehension that the zeal of the people will be diminished in the least. were there to be no increase of population in the state, the distribution for each pupil would never exceed forty cents, or about one-fifteenth of the amount now raised by taxation. so convinced are the people of massachusetts of the importance of common schools, and so much are they accustomed to taxation for their support, that there is no occasion to hesitate, lest we should follow the example of those communities where large funds, operating upon an uneducated and inexperienced popular opinion, have injured rather than benefited the public schools. the ancient policy of the commonwealth will be continued; but, whenever the people see the government, by solemn act, manifesting its confidence in schools and learning, they will be encouraged to guard and sustain the institutions of the fathers. footnotes: [ ] an eminent friend of education, and an englishman, speaking of the reports for the year - , says: "the views enunciated by your local committees, while they have the sobriety indicative of practical knowledge, are at the same time enlightened and expansive. the writers of such reports must be of inestimable aid to your schoolmasters, standing as they do between the teacher and the parent, and exercising the most wholesome influence on both. let me remark, in passing, that i am struck with the power of composition evinced in these provincial papers. clear exposition, great command of the best english, correctness and even elegance of style, are their characteristics." [ ] distributed among the cities and towns, according to an act of . (stat. , § .) [ ] distributed among the cities and towns, according to the number of persons in each between the ages of four and sixteen years. (rev. stat., chap. , § .) [ ] income distributed among the cities and towns, according to population, under an act passed feb. , . (stat. , chap. .) this act was repealed by an act passed feb. , . (stat. , chap. , § .) [ ] distributed among the cities and towns, according to the number of persons in each between the ages of four and sixteen years. (stat. , chap. , § .) [ ] distributed among the cities and towns, according to the number of persons in each between the ages of five and fifteen years. (stat. , chap. , § .) a system of agricultural education. [an address before the barnstable agricultural society, oct. , .] in the month of february, , a distinguished american, who has read much, and acquired, by conversation, observation, and travels in this country and europe, the highest culture of american society, wrote these noticeable sentences: "the farmers have not kept pace, in intelligence, with the rest of the community. they do not put brain-manure enough into their acres. our style of farming is slovenly, dawdling, and stupid, and the waste, especially in manure, is immense. i suppose we are about, in farming, where the lowlands of scotland were fifty years ago; and what immense strides agriculture has made in great britain since the battle of waterloo, and how impossible it would have been for the farmers to have held their own without!"[ ] it would not be civil for me to endorse these statements as introductory to a brief address upon agricultural education; but i should not accept them at all did they not contain truth enough to furnish a text for a layman's discourse before an assembly of farmers. competent american travellers concur in the opinion that the europeans generally, and especially our brethren of england, ireland, and scotland, are far in advance of us in scientific and practical agriculture. this has been stated or admitted by mr. colman, president hitchcock, and last by mr. french, who has recently visited europe under the auspices of the national agricultural society. there are good reasons for the past and for the existing superiority of the old world; and there are good reasons, also, why this superiority should not much longer continue. europe is old,--america is young. land has been cultivated for centuries in europe, and often by the same family; its capacity tested, its fitness or unfitness for particular crops proved, the local and special effects of different fertilizers well known, and the experience of many generations has been preserved, so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the present occupants of the soil. in america there are no family estates, nor long occupation by the same family of the same spot. cultivated lands have changed hands as often as every twenty-five years from the settlement of the country. the capacity of our soils to produce, when laboriously and systematically cultivated, has not been ascertained; there has been no accumulation of experience by families, and but little by the public; and the effort, in many sections, has been to draw as much as possible from the land, while little or nothing was returned to it. farming, as a whole, has not been a system of cultivation, which implies improvement, but a process of exhaustion. it has been easier for the farmer, though, perhaps, not as economical, if all the elements necessary to a correct opinion could be combined, to exchange his worn-out lands for fresh soils, than to adopt an improving system of agriculture. the present has been consulted; the future has been disregarded. as the half-civilized hunters of the pampas of buenos ayres make indiscriminate slaughter of the myriads of wild cattle that roam over the unfenced prairies of the south, and preserve the hides only for the commerce and comfort of the world, so we have clutched from nature whatever was in sight or next at hand, regardless of the actual and ultimate wrong to physical and vegetable life; and, as the pioneers of a better civilization now gather up the bones long neglected and bleaching under tropical suns and tropical rains, and by the agency of trade, art, and industry, extort more wealth from them than was originally derived from the living animals, so we shall find that worn-out lands, when subjected to skilful, careful, scientific husbandry, are quite as profitable as the virgin soils, which, from the day of the migration into the connecticut valley to the occupancy of the missouri and the kansas, have proved so tempting to our ancestors and to us. but there has been some philosophy, some justice, and considerable necessity, in the course that has been pursued. subsistence is the first desire; and, in new countries where forests are to be felled, dwellings erected, public institutions established, roads and bridges built, settlers cannot be expected, in the cultivation of the land, to look much beyond the present moment. and they are entitled to the original fertility of the soil. europe passed through the process of settlement and exhaustion many centuries ago. her recovery has been the work of centuries,--ours may be accomplished in a few years, even within the limits of a single life. the fact from which an improving system of agriculture must proceed is apparent in the northern and central atlantic states, and is, in a measure, appreciated in the west. we have all heard that certain soils were inexhaustible. the statement was first made of the valley of the connecticut, then of the genesee country, then of ohio, then of illinois, and occasionally we now hear similar statements of kansas, or california, or the valley of the willamette. in the nature of things these statements were erroneous. the idea of soil, in reason and in the use of the word, contains the idea of exhaustion. soil is not merely the upper stratum of the earth; it is a substance which possesses the power, under certain circumstances, of giving up essential properties of its own for the support of vegetable and ultimately of animal life. what it gives up it loses, and to the extent of its loss it is exhausted. it is no more untrue to say that the great cities of the world have not, in their building, exhausted the forests and the mines to any extent, than to say that the annual abundant harvests of corn and wheat have not, in any degree, exhausted the prairies and bottom lands of the west. some lands may be exhausted for particular crops in a single year; others in five years, others in ten, while others may yield undiminished returns for twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years. but it is plain that annual cropping without rotation, and without compensation by nature or art, must finally deprive the soil of the required elements. nor should we deceive ourselves by considering only those exceptions whose existence is due to the fact that nature makes compensation for the loss. annual or occasional irrigation with rich deposits,--as upon the nile and the connecticut,--allowing the land to lie fallow, rotation of crops and the growth of wood, are so many expedients and provisions by which nature increases the productiveness of the earth. nor is a great depth of soil, as two, five, ten, or twenty feet, any security against its ultimate impoverishment. only a certain portion is available. it has been found in the case of coal-mines which lie at great depths, that they are, for the present, valueless; and we cannot attach much importance to soil that is twenty feet below the surface. neither cultivation nor vegetation can go beyond a certain depth; and wherever vegetable life exists, its elements are required and appropriated. great depth of soil is desirable; but, with our present knowledge and means of culture, it furnishes no security against ultimate exhaustion. the fact that all soils are exhaustible establishes the necessity for agricultural education, by whose aid the processes of impoverishment may be limited in number and diminished in force; and the realization of this fact by the public generally is the only justification necessary for those who advocate the immediate application of means to the proposed end. and, gentlemen, if you will allow a festive day to be marred by a single word of criticism, i feel constrained to say, that a great obstacle to the increased usefulness, further elevation, and higher respectability, of agriculture, is in the body of farmers themselves. and i assume this to be so upon the supposition that agriculture is not a cherished pursuit in many farmers' homes; that the head of the family often regards his life of labor upon the land as a necessity from which he would willingly escape; that he esteems other pursuits as at once less laborious, more profitable, and more honorable, than his own; that children, both sons and daughters, under the influence of parents, both father and mother, receive an education at home, which neither school, college, nor newspaper, can counteract, that leads them to abandon the land for the store, the shop, the warehouse, the professions, or the sea. the reasonable hope of establishing a successful system of agricultural education is not great where such notions prevail. agriculture is not to attain to true practical dignity by the borrowed lustre that eminent names, ancient and modern, may have lent to it, any more than the earth itself is warmed and made fruitful by the aurora borealis of an autumn night. our system of public instruction, from the primary school to the college, rests mainly upon the public belief in its importance, its possibility, and its necessity. it is easy on a professional holiday to believe in the respectability of agriculture; but is it a living sentiment, controlling your conduct, and inspiring you with courage and faith in your daily labor? does it lead you to contemplate with satisfaction the prospect that your son is to be a farmer also, and that your daughter is to be a farmer's wife? these, i imagine, are test questions which not all farmers nor farmers' wives can answer in the affirmative. else, why the custom among farmers' sons of making their escape, at the earliest moment possible, from the labors and restraints of the farm? else, why the disposition of the farmer's daughter to accept other situations, not more honorable, and in the end not usually more profitable, than the place of household aid to the business of the home? how, then, can a system of education be prosperous and efficient, when those for whom it is designed neither respect their calling nor desire to pursue it? you will not, of course, imagine that i refer, in these statements, to all farmers; there are many exceptions; but my own experience and observation lead me to place confidence in the fitness of these remarks, speaking generally of the farmers of new england. it is, however, true, and the statement of the truth ought not to be omitted, that the prevalent ideas among us are much in advance of what they were ten years ago. in what has been accomplished we have ground for hope, and even security for further advancement. i look, then, first and chiefly to an improved home culture, as the necessary basis of a system of agricultural education. christian education, culture, and life, depend essentially upon the influences of home; and we feel continually the importance of kindred influences upon our common school system. it will not, of course, be wise to wait, in the establishment of a system of agricultural education, until we are satisfied that every farmer is prepared for it; in the beginning sufficient support may be derived from a small number of persons, but in the end it must be sustained by the mass of those interested. other pursuits and professions must meet the special claims made upon them, and in the matter of agricultural education they cannot be expected to do more than assent to what the farmers themselves may require. an important part of a system of agricultural education has been, as it seems to me, already established. i speak of our national, state, county, and town associations for the promotion of agriculture. the first three may educate the people through their annual fairs, by their publications, and by the collection and distribution of rare seeds, plants, and animals, that are not usually within reach of individual farmers. by such means, and others less noticeable, these agencies can exert a powerful influence upon the farmers of the country; but their thorough, systematic education must be carried on at home. and for local and domestic education i think we must rely upon our public schools, upon town clubs or associations of farmers, and upon scientific men who may be appointed by the government to visit the towns, confer with the people, and receive and communicate information upon the agricultural resources and defects of the various localities. it will be observed that in this outline of a plan of education i omit the agricultural college. this omission is intentional, and i will state my reasons for it. i speak, however, of the present; the time may come when such an institution will be needed. in massachusetts, mr. benjamin bussey has made provision for a college at roxbury, and mr. oliver smith has made similar provision for a college at northampton; but these bequests will not be available for many years. in england, ireland, scotland, france, belgium, prussia, russia, austria, and the smaller states of europe, agricultural schools and colleges have been established; and they appear to be the most numerous where the ignorance of the people is the greatest. england has five colleges and schools, ireland sixty-three, while scotland has only a professorship in each of her colleges at aberdeen and edinburgh. in france, there are seventy-five agricultural schools; but in seventy of them--called inferior schools--the instruction is a compound of that given in our public schools and the discipline of a good farmer upon his land, with some special attention to agricultural reading and farm accounts. such schools are not desired and would not be patronized among us. when an agricultural school is established, it must be of a higher grade,--it must take rank with the colleges of the country. president hitchcock, in his report, published in , states that six professors would be required; that the first outlay would be sixty-seven thousand dollars, and that the annual expense would be six thousand and two hundred dollars. by these arrangements and expenditures he contemplates the education of one hundred students, who are to pay annually each for tuition the sum of forty dollars. it was also proposed to connect an agricultural department with several of the existing academies, at an annual expense of three thousand dollars more. these estimates of cost seem low, nor do i find in this particular any special objection to the recommendation made by the commissioners of the government; any other scheme is likely to be quite as expensive in the end. my chief objection is, that such a plan is not comprehensive enough, and cannot, in a reasonable time, sensibly affect the average standard of agricultural learning among us. the graduation of fifty students a year would be equal to one in a thousand or fifteen hundred of the farmers of the state; and in ten years there would not be one professionally educated farmer in a hundred. we are not, of course, to overlook the indirect influence of such a school, through its students annually sent forth: the better modes of culture adopted by them would, to some extent, be copied by others; nor are we to overlook the probability of a prejudice against the institution and its graduates, growing out of the republican ideas of equality prevailing among us. but the struggle against mere prejudice would be an honorable struggle, if, in the hour of victory, the college could claim to have reformed and elevated materially the practices and ideas of the farmers of the country. i fear that even victory under such circumstances would not be complete success. an institution established in new england must look to the existing peculiarities of our country, rather than venture at once upon the adoption of schemes that may have been successful elsewhere. here every farmer is a laborer himself, employing usually from one to three hands, and they are often persons who look to the purchase and cultivation of a farm on their own account; while in england the master farmer is an overseer rather than a laborer. the number of men in europe who own land or work it on their own account is small; the number of laborers whose labors are directed by the proprietors and farmers is quite large. under these circumstances, if the few are educated, the work will go successfully on; while here, our agricultural education ought to reach the great body of those who labor upon the land. will a college in each state answer the demand for agricultural education now existing? is it safe in any country, or in any profession or pursuit, to educate a few, and leave the majority to the indirect influence of the culture thus bestowed? and is it philosophical, in this country, where there is a degree of personal and professional freedom such as is nowhere else enjoyed, to found a college or higher institution of learning upon the general and admitted ignorance of the people in the given department? or is it wiser, by elementary training and the universal diffusion of better ideas, to make the establishment of the college the necessity of the culture previously given? every new school, not a college, makes the demand for the college course greater than it was before; and the advance made in our public schools increases the students in the colleges and the university. we build from the primary school to the college; and without the primary school and its dependents,--the grammar, high school, and academy,--the colleges would cease to exist. this view of education supports the statement that an agricultural college is not the foundation of a system of agricultural training, but a result that is to be reached through a preliminary and elementary course of instruction. what shall that course be? i say, first, the establishment of town or neighborhood societies of farmers and others interested in agriculture. these societies ought to be auxiliary to the county societies, and they never can become their rivals or enemies unless they are grossly perverted in their management and purposes. as such societies must be mutual and voluntary in their character, they can be established in any town where there are twenty, ten, or even five persons who are disposed to unite together. its object would, of course, be the advancement of practical agriculture; and it would look to theories and even to science as means only for the attainment of a specified end. the exercises of such societies would vary according to the tastes and plans of the members and directors; but they would naturally provide for discussions and conversations among themselves, lectures from competent persons, the establishment of a library, and for the collection of models and drawings of domestic animals, models of varieties of fruit, specimens of seeds, grasses, and grains, rocks, minerals, and soils. the discussions and conversations would be based upon the actual observation and experience of the members; and agriculture would at once become better understood and more carefully practised by each person who intended to contribute to the exercises of the meeting. until the establishment of agricultural journals, there were no means by which the results of individual experience could be made known to the mass of farmers; and, even now, men of the largest experience are not the chief contributors. wherever a local club exists, it is always possible to compare the knowledge of the different members; and the results of such comparison may, when deemed desirable, be laid before the public at large. it is also in the power of such an organization thoroughly and at once to test any given experiment. the attention of this section of the country has been directed to the culture of the chinese sugar-cane; and merchants, economists, and statesmen, as well as the farmers themselves, are interested in the speedy and satisfactory solution of so important an industrial problem. had the attention of a few local societies in different parts of new england been directed to the culture, with special reference to its feasibility and profitableness, a definite result might have been reached the present year. the growth of flax, both in the means of cultivation and in economy, is a subject of great importance. many other crops might also be named, concerning which opposite, not to say vague, opinions prevail. the local societies may make these trials through the agency of individual members better than they can be made by county and state societies, and better than they can usually be made upon model or experimental farms. it will often happen upon experimental farms that the circumstances do not correspond to the condition of things among the farmers. the combined practical wisdom of such associations must be very great; and i have but to refer to the published minutes of the proceedings of the concord club to justify this statement in its broadest sense. the meetings of such a club have all the characteristics of a school of the highest order. each member is at the same time a teacher and a pupil. the meeting is to the farmer what the court-room is to the lawyer, the hospital to the physician, and the legislative assembly to the statesman. moot courts alone will not make skilful lawyers; the manikin is but an indifferent teacher of anatomy; and we may safely say that no statesman was ever made so by books, schools, and street discussions, without actual experience in some department of government. it is, of course, to be expected that an agricultural college would have the means of making experiments; but each experiment could be made only under a single set of circumstances, while the agency of local societies, in connection with other parts of the plan that i have the honor diffidently to present, would convert at once a county or a state into an experimental farm for a given time and a given purpose. the local club being always practical and never theoretical, dealing with things always and never with signs, presenting only facts and never conjectures, would, as a school for the young farmer, be quite equal, and in some respects superior, to any that the government can establish. but, it may be asked, will you call that a school which is merely an assembly of adults without a teacher? i answer that technically it is not a school, but that in reality such an association is a school in the best use of the word. a school is, first, for the development of powers and qualities whose germs already exist; then for the acquisition of knowledge previously possessed by others; then for the prosecution of original inquiries and investigations. the associations of which i speak would possess all these powers, and contemplate all these results; but that their powers might be more efficient, and for the advancement of agriculture generally, it seems to me fit and proper for the state to appoint scientific and practical men as agents of the board of agriculture, and lecturers upon agricultural science and labor. if an agricultural college were founded, a farm would be required, and at least six professors would be necessary. instead of a single farm, with a hundred young men upon it, accept gratuitously, as you would no doubt have opportunity, the use of many farms for experiments and repeated trials of crops, and, at the same time, educate, not a hundred only, but many thousand young men, nearly as well in theory and science, and much better in practical labor, than they could be educated in a college. six professors, as agents, could accomplish a large amount of necessary work; possibly, for the present, all that would be desired. assume, for this inquiry, that massachusetts contains three hundred agricultural towns; divide these towns into sections of fifty each; then assign one section to each agent, with the understanding that his work for the year is to be performed in that section, and then that he is to be transferred to another. by a rotation of appointments and a succession of labors, the varied attainments of the lecturers would be enjoyed by the whole commonwealth. but, it may be asked, what, specifically stated, shall the work of the agents be? only suggestions can be offered in answer to this inquiry. an agent might, in the summer season, visit his fifty towns, and spend two days in each. while there, he could ascertain the kinds of crops, modes of culture, nature of soils, practical excellences, and practical defects, of the farmers; and he might also provide for such experiments as he desired to have made. it would, likewise, be in his power to give valuable advice, where it might be needed, in regard to farming proper, and also to the erection and repair of farm-buildings. i am satisfied that a competent agent would, in this last particular alone, save to the people a sum equal to the entire cost of his services. after this labor was accomplished, eight months would remain for the preparation and delivery of lectures in the fifty towns previously visited. these lectures might be delivered in each town, or the agent might hold meetings of the nature of institutes in a number of towns centrally situated. in either case, the lectures would be at once scientific and practical; and their practical character would be appreciated in the fact that a judicious agent would adapt his lectures to the existing state of things in the given locality. this could not be done by a college, however favorably situated, and however well accomplished in the material of education. it is probable that the lectures would be less scientific than those that would be given in a college; but when their superior practical character is considered, and when we consider also that they would be listened to by the great body of farmers, old and young, while those of the college could be enjoyed by a small number of youth only, we cannot doubt which would be the most beneficial to the state, and to the cause of agriculture in the country. an objection to the plan i have indicated may be found in the belief that the average education of the farmers is not equal to a full appreciation of the topics and lectures to be presented. my answer is, that the lecturers must meet the popular intelligence, whatever it is. nothing is to be assumed by the teacher; it is his first duty to ascertain the qualifications of his pupils. i am, however, led to the opinion that the schools of the country have already laid a very good basis for practical instruction in agriculture; and, if this be not so, then an additional argument will be offered for the most rapid advance possible in our systems of education. in any event, it is true that the public schools furnish a large part of the intellectual culture given in the inferior and intermediate agricultural schools of europe. the great defect in the plan i have presented is this: that no means are provided for the thorough education needed by those persons who are to be appointed agents, and no provision is made for testing the qualities of soils, and the elements of grains, grasses, and fruits. my answer to this suggestion is, that it is in part, at least, well founded; but that the scientific schools furnish a course of study in the natural sciences which must be satisfactory to the best educated farmer or professor of agricultural learning, and that analyses may be made in the laboratories of existing institutions. it is my fortune to be able to read a letter from professor horsford, which furnishes a satisfactory view of the ability of the scientific school at cambridge. "_cambridge, sept. , ._ "my dear sir: the occupation incident to the opening of the term has prevented an earlier answer to your letter of inquiry in regard to the scientific school. "the scientific school furnishes, i believe, the necessary scientific knowledge for students of agriculture (such as you mention), 'who have been well educated at our high schools, academies, or colleges, and have also been trained practically in the business of farming.' it provides: " st. practical instruction in the modes of experimental investigation. this is, i know, an unrecognized department, but it is, perhaps, the better suited name to the course of instruction of our chemical department. it qualifies the student for the most direct methods of solving the practical problems which are constantly arising in practical agriculture. it includes the analysis of soils, the manufacture and testing of manures, the philosophy of improved methods of culture, of rotation of crops, of dairy production, of preserving fruits, meats, &c. it applies more or less directly to the whole subject of mechanical expedients. " d. practical instruction in surveying, mensuration, and drawing. " d. and by lectures--in botany, geology, zoology, comparative anatomy, and natural philosophy. "some of them--indeed, all of them, if desired--might be pursued practically, and with the use of apparatus and specimens. "this course contemplates a period of study of from one year to two and a half years, according to the qualification of the pupil at the outset. he appears an hour each day at the blackboard, where he shares the drill of a class, and where he acquires a facility of illustration, command of language, an address and thorough consciousness of real knowledge, which are of more value, in many cases, as you know, than almost any amount of simple acquisition. he also attends, on an average, about one lecture a day throughout the year. during the remaining time he is occupied with experimental work in the laboratory or field. "the great difficulty with students of agriculture, who might care to come to the scientific school, is the expense of living in cambridge. if some farmer at a distance of three or four miles from college, where rents for rooms are low, would open a boarding-house for students of agriculture in the scientific school, where the care of a kitchen garden and some stock might be intrusted to them, and where a farmer's plain table might be spread at the price at which laborers would be received, we might hope that our facilities would be taken advantage of on a larger scale. as it is, but few, comparatively, among our students, come to qualify themselves for farming." i should, however, consider the arrangements proposed as temporary, and finally to be abandoned or made permanent, as experience should dictate. it may be said, i think, without disparagement to the many distinguished and disinterested men who have labored for the advancement of agriculture, that the operations of the government and of the state and county societies have no plan or system by which, as a whole, they are guided. the county societies have been and are the chief means of influence and progress; but they have no power which can be systematically applied; their movements are variable, and their annual exhibitions do not always indicate the condition of agriculture in the districts represented. they have become, to a certain extent, localized in the vicinity of the towns where the fairs are held; and yet they do not possess the vigor which institutions positively local would enjoy. the town clubs hold annual fairs; and these fairs should be made tributary, in their products and in the interest they excite, to the county fairs. let the town fairs be held as early in the season as practicable, and then let each town send to the county fairs its first-class premium articles as the contributions of the local society, as well as of the individual producers. thus a healthful and generous rivalry would be stirred up between the towns of a county as well as among the citizens of each town; and a county exhibition upon the plan suggested would represent at one view the general condition of agriculture in the vicinity. no one can pretend that this is accomplished by the present arrangements. moreover, the county society, in its management and in its annual exhibitions, would possess an importance which it had not before enjoyed. as each town would be represented by the products of the dairy, the herd, and the field, so it would be represented by its men; and the annual fair of the county would be a truthful and complete exposition of its industrial standing and power. out of a system thus broad, popular, and strong, an agricultural college will certainly spring, if such an institution shall be needed. but is it likely that in a country where the land is divided, and the number of farmers is great, the majority will ever be educated in colleges, and upon strict scientific principles? i am ready to answer that such an expectation seems to me a mere delusion. the great body of young farmers must be educated by the example and practices of their elders, by their own efforts at individual and mutual improvement, and by the influence of agricultural journals, books, lecturers, and the example of thoroughly educated men. and, as thoroughly educated men, lecturers, journals, and books of a proper character, cannot be furnished without the aid of scientific schools and thorough culture, the farmers, as a body, are interested in the establishment of all institutions of learning which promise to advance any number of men, however small, in the mysteries of the profession; but, when we design a system of education for a class, common wisdom requires us to contemplate its influence upon each individual. the influence of a single college in any state, or in each state of this union, would be exceedingly limited; but local societies and travelling lecturers could make an appreciable impression in a year upon the agricultural population of any state, and in new england the interest in the subject is such that there is no difficulty in founding town clubs, and making them at once the agents of the government and the schools for the people. in the plan indicated, i have, throughout, assumed the disposition of the farmers to educate themselves. this assumption implies a certain degree of education already attained; for a consciousness of the necessity of education is only developed by culture, learning, and reflection. such being the admitted fact, it remains that the farmers themselves ought at once to institute such means of self-improvement as are at their command. they are, in nearly every state of this union, a majority of the voters, and the controlling force of society and the government; but i do not from these facts infer the propriety of a reliance on their part upon the powers which they may thus direct. however wisely said, when first said, it is not wise to "look to the government for too much;" and there can be no reasonable doubt of the ability of the farmers to institute and perfect such measures of self-education as are at present needed. but the spirit in which they enter upon this work must be broad, comprehensive, catholic. they will find something, i hope, of example, something of motive, something of power, in their experience as friends and supporters of our system of common school education; and something of all these, i trust, in the facts that this system is kept in motion by the self-imposed taxation of the whole people; that all individuals and classes of men, forgetting their differences of opinion in politics and religion, rally to its support, as being in itself a safe basis on which may be built whatever structures men of wisdom and virtue and piety may desire to erect, whether they labor first and chiefly for the world that is, or for that which is to come. footnote: [ ] hon. george s. hillard. advertisements juvenile books. the most beautiful and most entertaining books for children ever published. mr. cranch's illustrated stories. the last of the huggermuggers: a giant story. by christopher pearse cranch, with illustrations on wood, from drawings by the author. printed on fine, hot-pressed paper, from large, fair type. price $ . . this book has been received with the utmost delight by all the children. mr. cranch is at once painter and poet, and his story and illustrations are both characteristic of a man of genius. kobboltozo; being a sequel to "the last of the huggermuggers." by christopher pearse cranch. with illustrations by the author. the hand of the author in the tale, and especially in the drawings, is freer than in his former work. the pictures are exquisite, and much more numerous than in the "huggermuggers." both these books will please the larger or grown-up children, as well as those still in the nursery. uniform in style with its predecessor. price $ . . cousin fannie's juvenile books. every beginning is easy for children who love study. translated from the german, by cousin fannie. largo quarto, with elegantly colored lithographic plates. price $ . . altogether one of the most attractive books, both in matter and style, ever issued in this country. aunty wonderful's stories. translated from the german, by cousin fannie. with spirited lithographic illustrations. it has proved immensely popular among the little folks. price cents. red beard's stories for children. translated from the german, by cousin fannie. the illustrations for this book are of a most novel and taking character. they are in imitation of the _silhouettes_ or pictures cut out by scissors, in which our ancestors' portraits have often been preserved. the pictures are numerous, spirited and effective. the stories are worthy of their elegant dress. price cents. bright pictures of child-life. translated from the german, by cousin fannie. illustrated by numerous highly-finished colored engravings. price cents. violet; a fairy story. illustrated by billings. price cents; gilt, cents. the publishers desire to call attention to this exquisite little story. it breathes such a love of nature in all her forms; inculcates such excellent principles, and is so full of beauty and simplicity, that it will delight not only children, but all readers of unsophisticated tastes. the author seems to teach the gentle creed which coleridge has embodied in those familiar lines-- "he prayeth well who loveth well both man, and bird, and beast." daisy; or the fairy spectacles. by the author of "violet." illustrated. price cents; gilt, cents. the great rosy diamond. by mrs. anne augusta carter with illustrations by billings. price cents; gilt cents. this is a most charming story, from an author of reputation in this department, both in england and america. the machinery of fairy land is employed with great ingenuity; the style is beautiful, imaginative, yet simple. the frolics of robin goodfellow are rendered with the utmost grace and spirit. tales from shakspeare. designed for the use of young persons. by charles lamb. from the fifth london edition. mo. illustrated. price, bound in muslin, $ . ; gilt, $ . . these tales are intended to interest children and youth in some of the plays of shakspeare. the form of the dialogue is dropped, and instead the plots are woven into stories, which are models of beauty. what hawthorne has lately done for the classical mythology, lamb has here done for shakspeare. published by phillips, sampson & co., boston, and for sale by all booksellers in the united states. juvenile books. the rollo books. by rev. jacob abbott. in fourteen volumes. new edition, with finely executed engravings from original designs by billings. price $ ; single, cents, any volume sold separately. rollo learning to talk. rollo learning to read. rollo at work. rollo at play. rollo at school. rollo's vacation. rollo's experiments. rollo's museum. rollo's travels. rollo's correspondence. rollo's philosophy--water. rollo's philosophy--fire. rollo's philosophy--air. rollo's philosophy--sky. this is undoubtedly the most popular series of juvenile books ever published in america. this edition is far more attractive externally than the one by which the author first became known. nearly one hundred new engravings, clear and fine paper, a new and beautiful cover, with a neat box to contain the whole, will give to this series, if possible, a still wider and more enduring reputation. the same, without illustrations, fourteen volumes, muslin, $ . . excelsior gift books. six volumes, large mo., illustrated. price, in cloth, cents per volume; gilt, $ . . christmas roses. favorite story book. little messenger birds. the ice king. youth's diadem. juvenile keepsake. a beautiful series of books, and universally popular. vacation story books. six volumes, with fine wood engravings. price, in cloth, cents per volume; gilt, cents. estelle's stories about dogs. the cheerful heart. little blossom's reward. holidays at chestnut hill. country life. the angel children. a series of stories that will give unfailing entertainment and instruction. juvenile story books. seven volumes, illustrated. price, in cloth, - cents per volume: gilt, cents. aunt mary's stories. gift story book. good child's fairy gift. frank and fanny. country scenes and characters. peep at the animals. peep at the birds. little mary; or, talks and tales for children. by h. trusta. beautifully printed and finely illustrated. mo. price, muslin, cents; muslin, full gilt, cents. uncle frank's boys' and girls' library. a beautiful series, comprising six volumes, square mo., with eight tinted engravings in each volume. the following are their titles respectively; i. the pedler's boy; or, i'll be somebody. ii. the diving bell; or, pearls to be sought for. iii. the poor organ grinder; and other stories. iv. loss and gain; or, susy lee's motto. v. mike marble; his crotchets and oddities. vi. the wonderful letter bag of kit curious. by francis c. woodworth. price, bound in muslin, cents per volume; muslin, gilt, cents per volume. catalogues of the publications p. s. & co. sent, post paid, upon application. published by phillips, sampson & co., boston, and for sale by all booksellers in the united states. what is and what might be a study of education in general and elementary education in particular by edmond holmes author of "the creed of christ," "the creed of buddha," "the silence of love," "the triumph of love," etc. london constable & company first published, may . second impression, july . third impression, september . fourth impression, november . fifth impression, january . sixth impression, october . +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |transcriber's note: obvious printer errors have been corrected. all | |other inconstancies in spelling or punctuation are as in the original.| +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ preface my aim, in writing this book, is to show that the _externalism_ of the west, the prevalent tendency to pay undue regard to outward and visible "results" and to neglect what is inward and vital, is the source of most of the defects that vitiate education in this country, and therefore that the only remedy for those defects is the drastic one of changing our standard of reality and our conception of the meaning and value of life. my reason for making a special study of that branch of education which is known as "elementary," is that i happen to have a more intimate knowledge of it than of any other branch, the inside of an elementary school being so familiar to me that i can in some degree bring the eye of experience to bear upon the problems that confront its teachers. i do not for a moment imagine that the elementary school teacher is more deeply tainted than his fellows with the virus of "occidentalism." nor do i think that the defects of his schools are graver than those of other educational institutions. in my judgment they are less grave because, though perhaps more glaring, they have not had time to become so deeply rooted, and are therefore, one may surmise, less difficult to eradicate. also there is at least a breath of healthy discontent stirring in the field of elementary education, a breath which sometimes blows the mist away and gives us sudden gleams of sunshine, whereas over the higher levels of the educational world there hangs the heavy stupor of profound self-satisfaction.[ ] i am not exaggerating when i say that at this moment there are elementary schools in england in which the life of the children is emancipative and educative to an extent which is unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, in any other type or grade of school. i am careful to say all this because i foresee that, without a "foreword" of explanation, my adverse criticism of what i have called "a familiar type of school" may be construed into an attack on the elementary teachers as a body. i should be very sorry if such a construction were put upon it. no one knows better than i do that the elementary teachers of this country are the victims of a vicious conception of education which has behind it twenty centuries of tradition and prescription, and the malign influence of which was intensified in their case by thirty years or more[ ] of code despotism and "payment by results." handicapped as they have been by this and other adverse conditions, they have yet produced a noble band of pioneers, to whom i, for one, owe what little i know about the inner meaning of education; and if i take an unduly high standard in judging of their work, the reason is that they themselves, by the brilliance of their isolated achievements, have compelled me to take it. i will therefore ask them to bear with me, while i expose with almost brutal candour the shortcomings of many of their schools. they will understand that all the time i am thinking of education in general even more than of elementary education, and using my knowledge of the latter to illustrate statements and arguments which are really intended to tell against the former. they will also understand that at the back of my mind i am laying the blame of their failures, not on them but on the hostile forces which have been too strong for many of them,--on the false assumptions of western philosophy, on the false standards and false ideals of western civilisation, on various "old, unhappy, far-off things," the effects of which are still with us, foremost among these being that deadly system of "payment by results" which seems to have been devised for the express purpose of arresting growth and strangling life, which bound us all, myself included, with links of iron, and which had many zealous agents, of whom i, alas! was one. part i what is or the path of mechanical obedience chapter i salvation through mechanical obedience the function of education is to foster growth. by some of my readers this statement will be regarded as a truism; by others as a challenge; by others, again, when they have realised its inner meaning, as a "wicked heresy." i will begin by assuming that it is a truism, and will then try to prove that it is true. the function of education is to foster growth. the end which the teacher should set before himself is the development of the latent powers of his pupils, the unfolding of their latent life. if growth is to be fostered, two things must be liberally provided,--nourishment and exercise. on the need for nourishment i need not insist. the need for exercise is perhaps less obvious, but is certainly not less urgent. we make our limbs, our organs, our senses, our faculties grow by exercising them. when they have reached their maximum of development we maintain them at that level by exercising them. when their capacity for growth is unlimited, as in the case of our mental and spiritual faculties, the need for exercise is still more urgent. to neglect to exercise a given limb, or organ, or sense, or faculty, would result in its becoming weak, flabby, and in the last resort useless. in childhood, when the stress of nature's expansive forces is strongest, the neglect of exercise will, for obvious reasons, have most serious consequences. if a healthy child were kept in bed during the second and third years of his life, the damage done to his whole body would be incalculable. these are glaring truisms. let me perpetrate one more,--one which is perhaps the most glaring of all. the process of growing must be done by the growing organism, by the child, let us say, and by no one else. the child himself must take in and assimilate the nourishment that is provided for him. the child himself must exercise his organs and faculties. the one thing which no one may ever delegate to another is the business of growing. to watch another person eating will not nourish one's own body. to watch another person using his limbs will not strengthen one's own. the forces that make for the child's growth come from within himself; and it is for him, and him alone, to feed them, use them, evolve them. all this is-- "as true as truth's simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of truth." but it sometimes happens that what is most palpable is least perceptible; and perhaps it is because the truth of what i say is self-evident and indisputable, that in many elementary schools in this country the education given seems to be based on the assumption that my "truisms" are absolutely false. in such schools the one end and aim of the teacher is to do everything for the child;--to feed him with semi-digested food; to hold him by the hand, or rather by both shoulders, when he tries to walk or run; to keep him under close and constant supervision; to tell him in precise detail what he is to think, to feel, to say, to wish, to do; to show him in precise detail how he is to do whatever may have to be done; to lay thin veneers of information on the surface of his mind; never to allow him a minute for independent study; never to trust him with a handbook, a note-book, or a sketch-book; in fine, to do all that lies in his power to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself. the result is that the various vital faculties which education might be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless, resourceless, without a single interest, without a single purpose in life. the contrast between elementary education as it too often is, and as it ought to be if the truth of my "truisms" were widely accepted, is so startling that in my desire to account for it i have had recourse to a paradox. "trop de vérité," says pascal, "nous étonne: les premiers principes ont trop d'évidence pour nous." i have suggested that the inability of so many teachers to live up to the spirit, or even to the letter, of my primary "truism," may be due to its having too much evidence for them, to their being blinded by the naked light of its truth. but there may be another explanation of the singular fact that a theory of education to which the teacher would assent without hesitation if it were submitted to his consciousness, counts for nothing in the daily routine of his work. failure to carry an accepted principle into practice is sometimes due to the fact that the principle has not really been accepted; that its inner meaning has not been apprehended; that assent has been given to a formula rather than a truth. the cause of the failure may indeed lie deeper than this. it may be that the nominal adherents of the principle are in secret revolt against the vital truth that is at the heart of it; that they repudiate it in practice because they have already repudiated it in the inner recesses of their thought. "this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me." tell the teacher that the function of education is to foster growth; that therefore it is his business to develop the latent faculties of his pupils; and that therefore (since growth presupposes exercise) he must allow his pupils to do as much as possible by and for themselves,--place these propositions before him, and the chances are that he will say "amen" to them. but that lip assent will count for nothing. one's life is governed by instinct rather than logic. to give a lip assent to the logical inferences from an accepted principle is one thing. to give a _real_ assent to the essential truth that underlies and animates the principle is another. the way in which the teacher too often conducts his school leads one to infer that the intuitive, instinctive side of him--the side that is nearest to practice--has somehow or other held intercourse with the inner meaning of that "truism" which he repeats so glibly, and has rejected it as antagonistic to the traditional assumptions on which he bases his life. or perhaps this work of subconscious criticism and rejection has been and is being done for him, either by the spirit of the age to which he belongs or by the genius of the land in which he lives. why is the teacher so ready to do everything (or nearly everything) for the children whom he professes to educate? one obvious answer to this question is that for a third of a century ( - ) the "education department" did everything (or nearly everything) for him. for a third of a century "my lords" required their inspectors to examine every child in every elementary school in england on a syllabus which was binding on all schools alike. in doing this, they put a bit into the mouth of the teacher and drove him, at their pleasure, in this direction and that. and what they did to him they compelled him to do to the child. so far as the action of the "education department" was concerned, this policy was abandoned--in large measure, if not wholly--in ; but its consequences are with us still. what conception of the meaning and purpose of education could have induced "my lords" to adopt such a policy, and, having adopted it, to adhere to it for more than thirty years? had one asked "my lords" at any time during those thirty years what they regarded as the true function of education, and had one suggested to them (as they had probably never turned their minds to the question) that the function of education was to foster the growth of the child, they might possibly have given an indolent assent to that proposition. but their educational policy must have been dictated by some widely different conception. they must have believed that the mental progress of the child--the only aspect of progress which concerned educationalists in those days--would best be tested by a formal examination on a prescribed syllabus, and would best be secured by preparation for such a test; and they must have accepted, perhaps without the consent of their consciousness, whatever theory of education may be implicit in that belief. in acting as they did, "my lords" fell into line with the universities, the public schools, the preparatory schools, the civil service commissioners, the professional societies, and (to make a general statement) with all the "boards" and "bodies" that controlled, directly or indirectly, the education of the youth of england. we must, therefore, widen the scope of our inquiry, and carry our search for cause a step farther back. how did the belief that a formal examination is a worthy end for teacher and child to aim at, and an adequate test of success in teaching and in learning, come to establish itself in this country? and not in this country only, but in the whole western world? in every western country that is progressive and "up to date," and in every western country in exact proportion as it is progressive and "up to date," the examination system controls education, and in doing so arrests the self-development of the child, and therefore strangles his inward growth. what is the explanation of this significant fact? in my attempt to account for the failure of elementary education in england to foster the growth of the educated child, i have travelled far. but i must travel farther yet. the western belief in the efficacy of examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated tendency,--the tendency to judge according to the appearance of things, to attach supreme importance to visible "results," to measure inward worth by outward standards, to estimate progress in terms of what the "world" reveres as "success." it is the western standard of values, the western way of looking at things, which is in question, and which i must now attempt to determine. that i should have to undertake this task is a proof of the complexity of education, of the bewildering tanglement of its root-system, of the depths to which some of its roots descend into the subsoil of human-life. the defect in our system of education which i am trying to diagnose is one which the "business man," who may have had reason to complain of the output of our elementary schools, will probably account for in one sentence and propound a remedy for in another. but i, who know enough about education to realise how little is or can be known about it, find that if i am to understand why so many schools turn out helpless and resourceless children, i must go back to the first principles of modern civilisation, or in other words to the cardinal axioms of the philosophy of the west. this does not mean that i must make a systematic study of western metaphysics. professional thinkers abound in the west; but the rank and file of the people pay little heed to them. it is true that they take themselves very seriously; but so does every clique of experts and connoisseurs. the indirect influence of their theories has at times been considerable; but their direct influence on human thought is, and has always been, very slight. for the plain average man, who cannot rid himself of the suspicion that the professional thinker is a professional word-juggler, has a philosophy of his own which was formulated for him by an unphilosophical people, and which, though it is now beginning to fail him, was once sufficient for all his needs. at the present moment there are two schools of popular thought in the west. for many centuries there was only one. for many centuries men were content to believe that the outward and visible world--the world of their normal experience--was the all of nature. but they were not content to believe that it was the "all of being." the latter conception would have said "no" to certain desires of the heart which refuse to be negatived,--desires which are as large and lofty as they are pure and deep: and in order to provide a refuge for these, men added to their belief in a natural world which was bounded by the horizon of experience (as they understood the word), the complementary belief in a world which transcended the limits of experience, and in which the dreams and hopes for which nature could make no provision might somehow or other be realised and fulfilled. with the development of physical science, the conception of the supernatural has become discredited, and a materialistic monism has begun to dispute the supremacy of that dualistic philosophy which had reigned without a rival for many hundreds of years. but antagonistic as these philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in common. the popular belief that the world of man's normal experience is the alpha and omega of _nature_, is the very platform on which their controversies are carried on. were any one to suggest to them that this belief was without foundation, that there was room and to spare in nature for the "supernatural" as well as for the normal, that the supernatural world (as it had long been miscalled) was nothing more nor less than "la continuation occulte de la nature infinie,"--they would at once unite their forces against him, and assail him with an even bitterer hatred than that which animates them in their own intestine strife. the dualistic philosophy which satisfied the needs of the west for some fifteen centuries was systematised and formulated for it, in the language of myth and poetry, by an eastern people. the acceptance of official christianity by the graeco-roman world was the result of many causes, two of which stand out as central and supreme. the first of these was the personal magnetism of christ, in and through which men came in contact with, and responded to, the attractive forces of those moral and spiritual ideas which christ set before his followers. the second was the readiness of the western mind to accept the philosophy of israel,--a philosophy with the master principles of which it had long been subconsciously familiar, and for the clear and convincing presentation of which it had long been waiting. of the personal magnetism of christ and the part that it has played in the life of christendom, i need not now speak. my present concern is to show how the philosophy of israel--accepted nominally for christ's sake, but really for its own--has influenced the educational policy of the west. in the old testament the western mind found itself face to face with the philosophical theories--theories about the world and its origin, about man and his destiny, about conduct and its consequences--to which its own mythologies had given inadequate expression, but which the poetical genius of a practical people was able to formulate to the satisfaction of a practical world. in the philosophy of israel "nature" was conceived of, not as animated by an indwelling life or soul, but as the handiwork of an omnipotent god. in six days--so runs the story--"god created the heavens and the earth." whether by the word which we translate as "days" were meant terrestrial days or cosmic ages matters nothing, for in either case the broad fact remains that according to the biblical narrative the work of creation occupied a definite period of time, and that on a certain day in the remote past the creator rested from his labours, surveyed his handiwork, and pronounced it to be very good. his next step was to stand aside from the world that he had made, leave it to its own devices and see how it would behave itself in the person of its lord and his viceroy,--man. that the creator should place creation on its trial and that it should speedily misbehave itself, may be said to have been preordained. the idea of a creator postulates the further idea of a fall. the finished work of an omnipotent creator is presumably good,--good in this sense, if in no other, that its actualities must needs determine the creature's ideals and standards of good. but the world, as man knows it, seems to be deeply tainted with evil. how is this anomaly to be accounted for? the story of the fall is the answer to this question. whether modern theology regards the story of the fall as literally or only as symbolically true, i cannot say for certain. the question is of minor importance. what is of supreme importance is that christian theology accepts and has always accepted the consequences of the _idea_ of the fall, and that in formulating those consequences it has provided the popular thought of the west with conceptions by which its whole outlook on life has been, and is still, determined and controlled. the idea of the fall, as dramatised by israel and interpreted by the "doctors" of the west, gives adequate expression--on the highest level of his thinking--to the crude dualism which constitutes the philosophy of the average man. hence the immense attractiveness of the idea to the practical races of the west,--to peoples whose chief idea is to get their mental problems solved for them as speedily, as authoritatively, and as intelligibly as possible, that they may thus be free to devote themselves to "business," to the tangible affairs of life. let us follow the philosophy of the fall into some of its more obvious consequences. the universe (to use the most comprehensive of all terms) is conceived of as divided into two dissevered worlds,--the world of nature, which is fallen, ruined, and accursed, and the supernatural world, which shares in the perfection and centres in the glory of god. between these two worlds intercourse is, _in the nature of things_, impossible. but man is not content that his state of godless isolation should endure for ever. as a thinker, he has exiled god from nature and therefore from his own daily life. but, as a "living soul," he craves for reunion with god; and so long as the gulf between the two worlds remains impassable, his philosophy will be felt to be incomplete. a supplementary theory of things must therefore be devised. corrupt and fallen as he is, man cannot hope to climb to heaven; but god, with whom nothing is impossible, can at his own good pleasure come down to earth. and come he will, whenever that sense of all-pervading imperfection which exiled him, in its premature attempt to explain itself, to his supernatural heaven, is realised in man's heart as a desire for better things. but what will be the signs of his advent? the philosophy of the fall is at no loss for an answer to this question. there was a time when nature was the mirror of god's face. but it is so no longer. the mirror was shattered when adam fell. henceforth it is only by troubling the waters of nature, by suspending the operation of its laws, by turning its order into confusion, by producing _supernatural_ phenomena, or "miracles" as they are vulgarly called, that god can announce his presence to man. the question of the miraculous is one into which we need not enter. let us assume that god can somehow or other come to man, and that man can somehow or other recognise god's presence and interpret his speech. we have now to ask ourselves one vital question. with what purpose does god visit the world which has forfeited his favour, and what does he propose to do for ruined nature and fallen man? for nature, nothing. for man, to provide a way of escape from nature. the dualism of popular thought must needs control the very efforts that men make to deliver themselves from its consequences. the irremediable corruption of man's _nature_ is the assumption on which the whole scheme of salvation is to be hinged. his deliverance from sin and death will be effected, not by the development of any natural capacity for good, but by his being induced to quit the path (or paths) of nature, and to walk, under divine direction, in some new and narrow path. but how will this end be achieved? that man cannot discover the path of salvation for himself will, of course, be taken for granted. the catastrophe of the fall has corrupted his whole nature, and has therefore blinded him to the light of truth. "the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." the promptings of his own nature, which he would follow if left to himself, can do nothing but lead him astray. it will also be taken for granted that the path of salvation is a path of action. when the whole inward disposition is hopelessly corrupt, the idea of achieving salvation by growing, by bringing one's hidden life to the perfection of maturity, must perforce be abandoned. it is only by _doing_ god's will that man can hope to regain his favour. one thing, then, is clear. man must be told in exact detail what he is to do and also (should this be necessary) how he is to do it. in other words, an elaborate code of law, covering the whole range of human life and regulating all the details of conduct, must be delivered by god to man. if man will obey this law he will be saved. if he will not obey it, he will be lost. there is another aspect of the idea of a supernatural revelation on which it is necessary to touch. as intercourse between nature and the supernatural world takes place, not in the natural order of things but at the good pleasure of the supernatural god, revelation must needs be conceived of as a highly-specialised process. a revelation which was addressed to the whole human race, and to which the whole human race was able to respond, could scarcely be regarded as of supernatural origin. the distinction between the supernaturalness of the appeal and the naturalness of the response would gradually tend to efface itself: for "what is universal is natural," and the voice which every man was able to recognise would come at last to be regarded as a voice from within oneself. if the supernatural character of an alleged revelation is to be established, its uniqueness must be duly emphasised. a particular people must be chosen for the purpose of the divine experiment. a particular law-giver must be commissioned to declare to the chosen people the will of the supernatural god. and from time to time a particular prophet must be sent to rebuke the chosen people for its backslidings, to show it where it has gone astray, and to exhort it to turn again to its god. for if it is far from man to discern good, it is still farther from him to desire it. how, then, shall he be induced to walk in the path which the law has prescribed for him? to this question there can be but one answer: by the promise of external reward, and the threat of external punishment. to set before man an ideal of life--an ideal which would be to him an unfailing fountain of magnetic force and guiding light--is not in the power of legalism. for if an ideal is to appeal to one, it must be the consummation of one's own natural tendencies; but the current of man's natural tendencies is ever setting towards perdition, and the vanishing point of his heart's desires is death. were an ideal revealed to the law-giver and by him presented to his fellow-men, and were the heart of man to respond to the appeal that it made to him, the basic assumption of legalism--that of the corruption of man's nature--would be undermined; for man would have proved that it belonged to his nature to turn towards the light,--in other words, that he had a natural capacity for good. the plain truth is that legalism is precluded, by its own first principles from appealing to any motive higher than that instinctive desire for pleasure which has as its counterpart a quasi-physical fear of pain. it is impossible for the lawgiver to appeal to man's better nature, to say to him: "cannot you see for yourself that this course of action is better than that,--that love is better than hatred, mercy than cruelty, loyalty than treachery, continence than self-indulgence?" what he can and must say to him is this, and this only; "if you obey the law you will be rewarded. if you disobey it you will be punished." and this he must say to him again and again. it is true that among the many commandments which the law sets before its votaries, there are some--the moral commandments, properly so called--which do in point of fact, and in defiance of the philosophical assumption of legalism, appeal to the better nature of man. but these are at best an insignificant minority; and their relative importance will necessarily diminish with the development into its natural consequences of the root idea of legalism. for legalism, just so far as it is strong, sincere, and self-confident, will try to cover the whole of human life. the religion that is content to do less than this, the religion that acquiesces in the distinction between what is religious and what is secular, is, as we shall presently see, a religion in decay. religion may perhaps be defined as man's instinctive effort to bring a central aim into his life and so provide himself with an authoritative standard of values. in its highest and purest form, religion controls man's life, both as a whole and in all its essential details, through the central aim or spiritual ideal which it sets before him and the consequent standard of values with which it equips him. but legalism is debarred by its distrust of human nature from trying to control the details of life through any central aim or ideal; and its assumption that all the commandments of the law are of divine origin, and therefore equally binding upon man, is obviously incompatible with the conception of a standard of moral worth. its attempt to cover the whole of life must therefore resolve itself into an attempt to control the details of conduct _in all their detail_; to deal with them, one by one, bringing each in turn under the operation of an appropriate commandment, and if necessary deducing from the commandment a special rule to meet the special case. in other words, besides being told what he is not to do (in the more strictly moral sphere of conduct), and what he is to do (in the more strictly ceremonial sphere), man must be told, in the fullest detail, how he is to do whatever may have to be done in the daily round of his life. such at least is the aim of legalism. the nets of the law are woven fine, and flung far and wide. if there are any acts in a man's life which escape through their clinging meshes, the force of nature is to be blamed for this partial failure, not the zeal of the doctors of the law. it is towards this inverted ideal that the doctrine of salvation through obedience will lead its votaries, when its master principle--that of distrust of human nature--has been followed out into all its natural consequences,--followed out, as it was by pharisaism, with a fearless logic and a fixed tenacity of purpose. an immense and ever-growing host of formulated rules, not one in a hundred of which makes any appeal to the heart of man or has any meaning for his higher reason, will crush his life down, slowly and inexorably, beneath their deadly burden. "at every step, at the work of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at home and abroad, from early morning till late in the evening, from youth to old age, the dead, the deadening formula"[ ] will await him. the path of obedience for the sake of obedience speedily degenerates into the path of mechanical obedience; and the end of that path is the triumph of machinery over life. for it is to the letter of the law, rather than to the spirit, that the strict legalist is bound to conform. the letter of the law is divine; and obedience to it is within the power of every man who will take the trouble to learn its commandments. what the spirit of the law may be, is beyond the power of fallen man to determine; and were an attempt made to interpret it, the result would be a state of widespread moral chaos, for there would be as many interpretations of it as there were minds that had the courage and the initiative to undertake so audacious a task. as it is with the law as such, so it is with each of its numerous commandments. the man who professes to obey the spirit of a commandment is in secret revolt against its divine authority. for he is presuming to criticise it in the light of his own conscience and insight, and to limit his obedience to it to that particular aspect of it which he judges to be worthy of his devotion. from such a criticism of the fourth commandment as "the sabbath is made for man, not man for the sabbath" to open violation of the letter of the commandment (on this occasion or on that) there is but a single step. the whole structure of legalism would collapse if men were allowed to absolve themselves from obedience to the letter of the law, out of regard for what they conceived to be its spirit. to interpret a commandment, in the sense of providing for its application to the fresh cases that may arise for treatment, is the work, not of poets and prophets but of doctors and scribes. the path of literal, and therefore of mechanical, obedience is the only path of safety; and the more punctiliously the letter is obeyed, the more perfect will be the machinery of salvation, and the nearer will legalism get to the appointed goal of its labours,--the extinction of spiritual life. as is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it constrains us to lead it. the materialisation of life that takes place under the sway of the law is accurately matched and measured by the materialisation of the doctrine of moral retribution. the general idea that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is profoundly true. but the idea is easily misinterpreted; and it necessarily shares in the degradation of one's general conception of life. virtue rewards the virtuous by making them more virtuous. vice punishes the vicious by making them more vicious. so long as the rewards for which we hope and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and spiritual, we are on safe ground. but such a scheme of rewards and punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. it is not by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. it is not by becoming more vicious that we are lost. we are saved by obedience, we are lost by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a divinely-delivered law. to appeal to man's higher self, when there is no higher self to appeal to,--to set before him as the supreme reward of virtue the development of his better nature, when his nature is intrinsically evil,--would be an obvious waste of labour. and as, apart from the presumed repugnance of the "natural man" to the presumed delights of the law, the intrinsic attractiveness of the life that legalism prescribes must needs diminish in exact proportion as the authority of the law becomes oppressive and vexatious, and the letter of it tends to establish itself at the expense of the spirit,--it is clear that a scheme of rewards and punishments will become, in effect as well as in theory, the only weapon in the armoury of the legalist. it is also clear that there will be much work for that one weapon to do. the central tendencies of man's nature, besides being _ex hypothesi_ evil, are antagonistic _de facto_ to the galling despotism and the irrational requirements of the law; and the lawgiver, far from being able to enlist those tendencies under his banner by appealing to the highest of them--the natural leaders of the rest,--must be prepared to overcome their collective resistance by winning to his side the lowest of them, by terrifying man's weaker self with threats, by corrupting his baser self with bribes. the ruin of man's nature, whether hypothetical or actual,[ ] has left intact (or relatively intact) only the animal base of it. it is to his animal instincts, then, that legalism must appeal in its endeavour to influence his conduct. in other words, the punishments and the rewards to which man is to look forward must be of the same _genus_, if not of the same _species_, as the lash of the whip that punishes the lagging race-horse, or the lump of sugar that rewards his exertions. and with the inevitable growth of egoism and individualism in the demoralising atmosphere with which legalism (and its lineal successors) must needs invest human life, man's conception of the rewards and punishments that await him will deteriorate rather than improve. the jewish desire for national prosperity was an immeasurably nobler motive to action than is the christian's fear of the quasi-material fires of hell. indeed it is nothing but our familiarity with the latter motive that has blinded us to its inherent baseness. it is no exaggeration to say that there have been epochs in the history of christendom (as there are still quarters of christian thought and phases of christian faith) in which the trumpet-call that was meant to rouse the soldiers of god to renewed exertion has rung in their ears as an ignominious "_sauve qui peut_." the tendency of legalism to externalise life has another aspect. in the eyes of the strict legalist there is no such thing as an inward state of human worth. the doctrine of the corruption of man's nature is incompatible with the idea of "goodness" being measurable (potentially if not actually) in terms of the health and happiness of the "inward man." goodness, as the legalist conceives it, is measurable in terms of correctness of outward conduct, and of that only. and when life is regulated by an elaborate law, the rules of which are familiar to all men, there is no reason why a man's outward conduct should not be appraised, with some approach to accuracy, by his neighbours and friends. hence it is that in the atmosphere of legalism an excessive deference is wont to be paid to public, and even to parochial, opinion. the life of the votary of the law is lived under strict and constant _surveillance_; and a man learns at last to value himself as his conduct is valued by a critical onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to produce "results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle, unobtrusive growth. were i to try to prove that the _régime_ of the law was necessarily fatal to the development of man's higher faculties--conscience, freedom, reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--i should waste my time. legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the assumption that development along the lines of man's nature is a movement towards perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having arrested the growth of the human spirit by the pressure of the law were to provoke the rejoinder that he had done what he intended to do. the two schemes of salvation--the mechanical and the evolutional--have so little in common that neither can pass judgment on the other without begging the question that is in dispute. when i come to consider the effect of legalism--or rather of the philosophy that underlies legalism--on education, i may perhaps be able to find some court of law in which the case between the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of both. meanwhile i can but note that in the atmosphere of the law growth is as a matter of fact arrested,--arrested so effectually that the counter process of degeneration begins to take its place. the proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of pharisaism, and that it is possible for the pharisee to "count himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has closed his account with god. pharisaism is at once the logical consummation and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of legalism. it is to the genius of israel that we owe that practical interpretation of the fundamental principle of supernaturalism, which was embodied in the doctrine of salvation through obedience to the letter of a law. and it is to the genius of israel that we owe that rigorously logical interpretation of the _axiomata media_ of legalism, which issued in due season in pharisaism. the world owes much to the courage and sincerity of israel,--to his unique force of character, to his fanatical earnestness, to his relentless tenacity of purpose. in particular, it owes a debt which it can never liquidate to what was at once the cause and the result of his over-seriousness,--to his lack of any sense of humour,--a negative quality which allowed his practical logic to run its course without let or hindrance, and prevented the "brakes" of common-sense from acting when he found himself, in his very zeal for the law, descending an inclined plane into an unfathomable abyss of turpitude and folly. the man (or people) who is able, of his own experience, to tell the rest of mankind what a given scheme of life really means and is really worth, owing to his having offered himself as the _corpus vile_ for the required experiment, is one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. had israel been less sincere or less courageous, we might never have known what deadly fallacies lurk in the seemingly harmless dualism of popular thought. * * * * * but the west, it will be said, is christian, not jewish. is it christian? if the word "christian" connotes acceptance of the teaching as well as devotion to the person of christ, it is scarcely applicable either to the official or to the popular religion of the west. for christ, the stern denouncer of the pharisees, was the whole-hearted enemy of legalism; and the legal conception of salvation through mechanical obedience still dominates the religion and life of christendom. the jewish law tried to cover, and tended more and more to cover, the whole of human life. it is true that it controlled the details rather than the totality of life; but the reason why it dealt with life, detail by detail, was that its exponents, owing to their spiritual purblindness, were unable to see the wood for the trees. in christendom, while the doctrine of salvation through mechanical obedience was retained, the authority of a church was substituted for that of a code of law. the growth of the idea of humanity, as opposed to that of mere nationality, made this necessary. as the former idea began to compete with the latter, the need for a divinely-commissioned society which should declare the will and communicate the grace of god, not to one nation only but to all men who were willing to hearken and obey,--and whose action, as a channel of intercourse between god and man, should be continuous rather than spasmodic,--began to make itself felt. a code of law might conceivably suffice to regulate the life of one small nation; but when we consider under what varying conditions of climate, occupation, custom, tradition, and so forth, the general life of humanity is carried on, we see clearly that no one code can even begin to suffice for the needs of the whole human race. hence, and for other reasons which we need not now consider, the west, in accepting the philosophy of israel, translated its master idea of salvation through mechanical obedience into the notation of ecclesiastical, as distinguished from legal, control. that obedience to a supernaturally-commissioned church, or rather to the one supernaturally-commissioned church, is the first and last duty of man, is the fundamental assumption on which the stately fabric of catholic christianity has been reared. in various ways the church has striven to exact implicit obedience from her children. through the medium of the confessional she has secured some measure of control over their morals. by regulating the worship of god--both public and private--she has been able to rule off a sphere of human conduct in which her own authority is necessarily paramount. by supplying the faithful with rations of "theological information" (to quote the apt phrase of a pillar of orthodoxy), and requiring them to accept these on her authority as indisputably true, she has succeeded in imposing her yoke on thought as well as on conduct. by claiming to control the outflow of divine grace, through the channels of the sacraments, she has been able to threaten the rebellious with the dread penalty of being cut off from intercourse with god. and by telling men, with stern insistence, that the choice between obedience and disobedience to herself is the choice between eternal happiness and eternal misery, she has sought to extend her dominion beyond the limits of time and to raise to an infinite power her supremacy over the souls of men. but just because the life of collective humanity is large, complex, and full of change and variety, the church which aspires to be universal, however strong may be her desire to superintend all the details of human thought and conduct, and however ready she may be to adapt herself to local and temporal variations, must needs allow whole aspects and whole spheres of human life to escape from her control. the history of christendom is the history of the gradual emancipation of the western world from the despotism of the church. the various activities of the human spirit--art, science, literature, law, statecraft, and the rest--have, one and all, freed themselves by slow degrees from ecclesiastical control, till little or nothing has been left for the church to regulate but her own rites and ceremonies, the morals (in a narrow and ever-narrowing sense of the word), and the faith (in the theological sense of the word), of the faithful. with the emancipation of man's higher activities from ecclesiastical control, the distinction between the _religious_ and the _secular_ life has gradually established itself. that this should happen was inevitable. mechanical obedience being of the essence of supernatural religion, the secularising of human life became absolutely necessary if any vital progress was to be made. the church patronised art, music, and the drama so far as they served her purposes. when they outgrew those purposes, in response to the expansive forces of human nature, she treated them as secular and let them go their several ways. in the interests of theology she tried to keep physical science in leading-strings; but when, after a bitter struggle, science broke loose from her control, she treated it too as secular and let it go its way. let us see what this distinction involves. as salvation is to be achieved by obedience to the church and in no other way, it follows that in all those spheres of life which are outside the jurisdiction of the church (except, of course, so far as questions of "morals" may arise in connection with them), man's conduct and general demeanour are supposed to have no bearing on his eternal destiny. this is the view of the secular life which is taken by the church. and not by the church alone. as, little by little, the institution--be it church, or sect, or code, or scripture--which claims to be the sole accredited agent of the eternal god, relaxes its hold upon the ever-expanding life of humanity, all those developments of human nature which cease to be amenable to its control come to be regarded as mundane, as unspiritual, as carnal, as matters with which god has no concern. were this view of the secular life confined to those who call themselves religious, no great harm would be done. unfortunately, the secular life, which is under the influence of the current conception of god as one who holds no intercourse with man except through certain accredited agents, is ready to acquiesce in the current estimate of itself as godless, and to accept as valid the distinction between the religious life and its own. hence comes a general lowering of man's aims. as the secular life is content to regard itself as godless, and so deprives itself of any central and unifying aim, it is but natural that success in each of its many branches should come to be regarded as an end in itself. it is but natural, to take examples at random, that the artist should follow art for art's sake, that the man of science should deify positive knowledge, that the statesman should regard political power as intrinsically desirable, that the merchant and the manufacturer should live to make money, and that the highest motive which appeals to all men alike should be the desire to bulk large in the eyes of their fellow-men. even the ardent reformer, whose enthusiasm makes him unselfish, pursues the ideal to which he devotes himself, as an end in itself, and makes no attempt to define or interpret it in terms of its relation to that supreme and central ideal which he ought to regard as the final end of human endeavour. when we remind ourselves, further, that secularism, equally with supernaturalism, tends to identify "nature" with lower nature--in other words, with the material side of the universe and the carnal side of man's being,--we shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost, through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of materialism,--a materialism of conduct as well as of thought. but if the loss to the secular life, from its compulsory despiritualisation, is great, the loss to religion, from the secularisation of so much of man's rational activity, is greater still. the very distinction between the secular and the religious life is profoundly irreligious, in that it rests on the tacit assumption that there is no unity, no central aim, in human life; and the fact that official religion is ready to acquiesce in the distinction, is ready, in other words, to make a compromise with its enemy "the world," is a proof that it is secretly conscious of its own failing power, and is even beginning to despair of itself. as it resigns itself to this feeling (as yet perhaps but dimly realised), its reasons for entertaining it must needs grow stronger. the progressive enlargement of the sphere of man's secular activities is accompanied, step for step, by the devitalisation of the idea of the divine. what kind of intercourse can god be supposed to hold with man if the latter is to be left to his own devices in what he must needs regard as among the more important aspects of his life,--in his commercial and industrial enterprises, in his art, in his literature, in his study of nature's laws, in his mastery of nature's forces, in his pursuit of positive truth and practical good? as in these matters man frees himself, little by little, from the yoke of supernaturalism, which he has been accustomed to identify with religion, his formal conception of his relation to god and of the part that god plays in his life--the conception that is defined and elucidated for him by religious "orthodoxy"--becomes of necessity more irrational, more mechanical, more unreal, more repugnant to his better nature and to the higher developments of his "common-sense." the tendency to exalt the letter of what is spoken or written, at the expense of the spirit, is as much of the essence of ecclesiasticism as of legalism. "_si dans les règles du salut le fond l'emporterait sur la forme, ce serait la ruine du sacerdoce._" and, as a matter of experience, the hair-splitting puerilities of pharisaism under the old dispensation have been matched, and more than matched, in the spheres of ritual, of dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality, under the new. as man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this puerile element in religion--the element of ultra-formalism, of irrationality, of unreality--tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but is now degenerating into a "body of death." if, in these days of absorbing secular activity, man continues to tolerate the theories and practices of the religious experts, the reason is--apart from the influence of custom and tradition and of his respect for venerable and "established" institutions--that they are things which he has neither time nor inclination to investigate, and which he can therefore afford to tolerate as being far removed from what is vital and central in his life. i am told that the catholic church holds, in the case of a dying man, "that the eternal fate of the soul, for good or for evil, may depend upon the reception or the non-reception of absolution, and even of extreme unction." that the truly appalling conception of god which is implicit in this sentence should still survive, that it should not yet have been swept out of existence by the outraged common-sense and good feeling of humanity, is a proof of the immense indifference with which the western world, absorbed as it is in secular pursuits, regards religion. it may indeed be doubted if men have ever been so non-religious as are at the present day the inhabitants of our highly-civilised and thoroughly-christianised west. at any rate the absence of a central aim in human life has never been so complete as it is now. most men are content to drift through life, toiling for the daily bread which will enable them to go on living, yet neither knowing nor caring to know why they are alive. there is a minority of stronger and more resolute men who devote life with unwavering energy to the pursuit of what i may call private and personal ends. thus the man of business lives for the acquisition of riches; the scholar and the scientist, of knowledge; the statesman, of power; the speculator, of excitement; the libertine, of pleasure; and so forth. few are they who ever dream of devoting life as a whole to the pursuit of an end which is potentially attainable by all men, and which is therefore worthy of man as man. the idea of there being such an end has indeed been almost wholly lost sight of. those among us who are of larger discourse than the rest and less absorbed by personal aims, ask themselves mournfully: what is the meaning of life? why are we here? is life worth living? and other such questions; and being unable to answer them to their satisfaction, or get them answered, resign themselves to a state of quasi-stoical endurance. that religion cannot be expected to answer these questions--the very questions which it is its right and its duty to answer--seems to be taken for granted by all who ask them. religion, as it is now conceived of, is a thing for priests and ministers, for churches and chapels, for sundays and saints'-days, for the private devotions of women and children, for educational debates in parliament, for the first lesson on the time-table ( . to . a.m.) of a public elementary school. the "unbeliever" is eager to run a tilt against religion. the "non-believer" is content to ignore it. the "believer" is careful to exclude it from nine-tenths of his life. it is to this pass that the gospel of salvation by machinery has brought the most "progressive" part of the human race. the phase of non-religiousness through which the west is passing has, we may rest assured, a meaning and a purpose. at the meetings of the catholic truth society it is customary for the speakers to deplore the steady relapse of christendom into paganism, which is going on before their eyes. as the church had things her own way for ten centuries or more, these complaints on the part of her champions are equivalent to a confession on her part of disastrous failure. why is the church, after having evangelised the west and ruled it for a thousand years, allowing it to slide back into paganism? the answer to this question is that she herself is unwittingly paganising it. i mean by this that, without intending to do so, she is compelling it to choose between secularised life and arrested growth. were a growing tree encircled with an iron band, the day would surely come when the tree, by the force of its own natural expansion, would either shatter the band or allow it to cut deep into its own stem. the growing consciousness of humanity has long been encircled by a rigid and inadequate conception of god. the gradual secularisation of the west means that the soul of man is straining that particular conception of god to breaking-point: and it is infinitely better that it should be broken to pieces than that its iron should be allowed to sink deep into the soul. the secularisation of contemporary life means this, and more than this. it means the gradual handing back of man's life to the control of nature,--of nature which is as yet unequal to the task that is being set it, owing to its having been through all these centuries identified with its lower self, taught to distrust itself, and otherwise misinterpreted and mismanaged, but which, in obedience to the primary instinct of self-preservation, will gradually rise to the level of the responsibility that is being laid upon it. with the further secularisation of man's life, the need for religion to make effective the control of nature, by pointing out to it its own ideal and so co-ordinating and organising all its forces, will gradually make itself felt, and the regeneration of religion will at last have begun. * * * * * for many centuries the current of religious belief in the west was almost entirely confined to the one channel of catholic christianity. there the mighty river pursued his course, "brimming and bright and large," till the time came when, with the gradual loss of his pristine energy-- "sands began to hem his wintry march, and dam his streams and split his currents"; side channels were formed, and grew in number; and though catholicism is still the central channel for the moving waters, the river has now fallen on evil days, and "strains along," "shorn and parcelled," like the river of the asian desert-- "forgetting the bright speed he bore in his high mountain cradle." of the many side streams into which western christianity has split, the majority may be spoken of collectively as protestant. protestantism claims to have liberated a large part of christendom from the yoke of rome; and it is therefore right that we should ask ourselves in what sense and to what extent it has brought freedom to the human spirit. the answer to this question is, i think, that though protestantism has fought a good fight for the _principle_ of freedom, it has failed--for many reasons, the chief of which is that it began its work before men were ripe for freedom--to lead its votaries into the path of spiritual life and growth. confronted by the uncompromising dogmatism of rome, it had to devise a counter dogmatism of its own in order to rally round it the faint-hearted who, though eager to absolve themselves from obedience to the despotism of the church, yet feared to walk by their own "inward light." in making this move, which was not the less false because it was in a sense inevitable, protestantism may be said to have renounced its mission. that it has done much, in various ways, for human progress is undeniable; but the fact remains that it has failed to revitalise christianity. its master-stroke in its struggle with priestcraft--the substitution of "faith" for "works" as the basis of salvation--has done little or nothing to relieve the west from the deadly pressure of israel's philosophy. for faith, as protestantism understands the word, is the movement of the soul, not towards the ideal end of its being but towards an alleged supernatural transaction,--the redemption of the world by the death of christ on the cross. gratitude to christ for his love and self-sacrifice may indeed be an effective motive to action, but faith in the efficacy of christ's atoning sacrifice is no guide to conduct. the inability of protestantism to deduce a scheme of life from its own master-principle of salvation by "faith" has compelled it, in its desire to avoid the pitfalls of antinomianism, to revive in a modified form the practical legalism of the old testament. the protestant desires to show his gratitude to christ by leading a correct life; but his distrust of his own higher nature compels him to go to some external authority for ethical guidance; and as he has repudiated the authority of the supernaturally-inspired church, he is compelled to have recourse to the supernaturally-inspired bible. hence the traditional alliance between protestantism and the old testament, in which the path of duty is far more clearly and consistently defined than in the new. and hence the singular fact that calvinism, which is the backbone of protestantism, and which in theory, and even (at times) in practice, regards "works" as "filthy rags," finds its other self in puritanism, which is in the main a recrudescence of jewish legalism in the more strictly _moral_ sphere of conduct. it is owing to its alliance with the legalism of israel, that protestantism has been in some respects an even greater enemy of human freedom than catholicism, and has on the whole done more than the latter to narrow and maim human life. the strict legalist tries, as we have seen, to bring the whole of human life under the direct control of the law; and when he finds, as the puritan did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that whole aspects of life have in point of fact escaped from the control of religion and won from the latter a tacit acceptance of themselves as secular, he not unnaturally tends to regard these non-religious aspects of life as "carnal," and therefore as unacceptable to god. hence the antipathy of the protestant, in his seasons of puritanical fanaticism, to art, music, the drama, and other noble fruits of the human spirit. catholicism has found itself compelled to tolerate the secular activities of the layman; protestantism, while tolerating those activities by which man earns his daily bread and which may be spoken of collectively as "business," has from time to time waged war against all the developments of human nature which are neither spiritual (in the narrow and rigid sense of the word) nor obviously useful, and has sought to extirpate the corresponding desires from the heart of man. on the more artistic side of human life, it has done as much to impede the growth of the soul as catholicism has done on the more intellectual side; and through its influence on character it has done as much to harden the fibre of the soul as catholicism has done to relax it, the tendency of both religions being to destroy that elasticity of fibre which mediates between hardness and flabbiness, and which has its counterpart in vigorous health and strength. the truth is--but it is a truth which protestantism is apt to misinterpret, and which catholicism finds it expedient to ignore--that religion is not a branch or department of human life, but a way of looking at life as a whole. indeed, it is of the essence of religion (as has been already suggested) that it should look at life as a whole, and so be able to look at each of its details in the light of that supreme synthesis which we call divine. and the religion which sanctions, and by its own action necessitates, the division of life into two branches--the secular and the religious--has obviously missed its destiny and betrayed its trust. * * * * * a brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way for the next. the movements of higher thought in the west have been dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the average man. as a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic. enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil, the creator to the creation, god to man; and in each case he fixes a great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given antithesis. confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained it by the story of creation. confronted by the twin mysteries of sin and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the fall. from the story of the fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin, to the belief that nature in general, and human nature in particular, is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. shrinking from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he has found refuge in the conception of another world,--of a world above and beyond nature, a world of divine perfection from which information and guidance can at god's good pleasure be doled out to man. for a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this sending of help from god to man) special instruments are obviously needed,--a special people, a special scripture, a special lawgiver, a special prophet, a special church. hence has arisen the idea that certain persons, certain castes, certain institutions have a monopoly of divine truth and grace, and are therefore in a position to dictate to their fellow-men how they are to bear themselves if they wish to be "saved," what they are to believe, what they are to do. from this the transition has been easy to the further idea that salvation is to be achieved by blind and mechanical obedience,--by renouncing the right to follow one's own higher nature, to obey one's own conscience, to use one's own reason, to map out one's own life. in order to induce men to yield the obedience which is required of them, their lower instincts have had to be appealed to (for the higher, ruined by the fall, have presumably ceased to operate),--their desire for pleasure by the promise of heaven, their fear of pain by the threat of hell. and in order that their lives may be kept under close supervision and their merits accurately appraised, an ever-increasing stress has had to be laid on what is outward, visible, and measurable in human life, as distinguished from what is inward and occult,--on correctness in the details of prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. as the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. in other words, the channel of soul growth--the only channel that leads to spiritual health, and therefore to "salvation"--becomes gradually obstructed, with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to dissipate themselves and run to waste, or to make new channels for themselves,--channels of degenerative tendency, the end of which is spiritual death. footnotes: [ ] by "self-satisfaction" i mean satisfaction with the existing system _as a system_. that strenuous efforts are being made to improve the system, within its own limits, i can well believe. but the system itself, with the defects and limitations which are of its essence, seems to be regarded as adequate, and even as final, by nearly all who work under it. [ ] to a.d. [ ] the _jewish people in the time of jesus christ_, by dr. emil schürer. [ ] in its extreme form legalism tends to bring about that ruin of human nature which it starts by postulating; for, by forbidding man's higher faculties to energise, it necessarily arrests their development, and so makes it possible for the lower faculties to draw to themselves an undue share of the rising sap of man's life. chapter ii education through mechanical obedience the god of popular theology has been engaged for more than thirty centuries in educating his child, man. his system of education has been based on complete distrust of man's nature. in the schools which man has been required to attend--the legal school under the old dispensation, the ecclesiastical school under the new--it has been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true, nor desire what is good. the truth of things has therefore been formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and profess his belief in it, clause by clause. his duty has also been formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing code, or to the direction of an all-controlling church. it has further been taken for granted that man's instincts and impulses are wholly evil, and that "right faith" and "right conduct" are entirely repugnant to his nature. in order to overcome the resistance which his corrupt heart and perverse will might therefore be expected to offer to the authority and influence of his teachers, a scheme of rewards and punishments has had to be devised for his benefit. as there is no better nature for the scheme to appeal to, an appeal has had to be made to fears and hopes which are avowedly base. the refractory child has had to be threatened with corporal punishment in the form of an eternity of torment in hell. and he has had to be bribed by the offer of prizes, the chief of which is an eternity of selfish enjoyment in heaven,--enjoyment so selfish that it will consist with, and even (it is said) be heightened by, the knowledge that in the final examination the failures have been many and the prize-winners few. and as, under this system of education, obedience is the first and last of virtues, so self-will--in the sense of daring to think and act for oneself--is the first and last of offences. it is for the sin of spiritual initiative--the sin of trying to work out one's own salvation by the exercise of reason, conscience, imagination, aspiration, and other spiritual faculties--that the direst penalties are reserved. the path of salvation is the path of blind, passive, mechanical obedience. to deviate even a little from that path is to incur the penalty of eternal death. * * * * * as man is educated by his father, god, so must the child be educated by his father, the adult man. if the nature of man is intrinsically evil, the child must needs have been conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. if man, even in his maturity, cannot be trusted to think or desire or do what is right, still less can he be so trusted when he is that relatively immature and helpless being, the child. if the adult man has to be told in the fullest detail (whether by a formulated law or by a living church) how he is to conduct himself, still greater is the need for such or similar direction to be given to the child. if the adult is to be "saved" by strict and mechanical obedience, and by no other method, still greater is the need for such obedience on the part of the child. if a system of external and quasi-material rewards and punishments is indispensable in the education of the adult, still less can it be dispensed with in the education of the child. these _a fortiori_ arguments are strong; but there is a stronger. the child will develop into the adult, and he cannot too soon be initiated into the life which, as the adult, he will have to lead. the process of educating the child is not merely analogous to the process of "saving" the man. it is a vital part of it. for childhood is the time when human nature is most easily moulded; and the bent that is given to it then is, in nine cases out of ten, decisive of its ultimate destiny. it is clear, then, that if man is to be "saved" by a _régime_ of mechanical obedience, his education in his childhood must be based on the same general conception of life and duty. this means, in the first place, that the child must be brought up in an atmosphere of severity. the god of the old testament--the deity whose _nimbus_ overshadows the life of the west--combines in his own person the functions of law-giver, governor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. his subjects are a race of vile offenders, whose every impulse is bad, and whose nature turns towards evil as inevitably as a plant turns towards the light. as he cannot trust them to know good from evil, he has had to provide them with an elaborate code of law; and he has had to take for granted that, left to themselves, they will break his commandments, and find pleasure in doing so. from the very outset, then, his attitude towards them has been one of suspicion and rising anger. he is always on the look-out for disobedience, and he is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to commit the offence. his pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for living _down_ to the evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. to persuade a man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading him into the path of sin. systematic distrust paralyses and demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the cruelty into which it too readily develops. the penalties which god has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their very horror has numbed man's imagination, and made it impossible for him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom. in the west men have loyally striven to reproduce towards their children the supposed attitude of their god of wrath towards themselves. from very tender years the child has been brought up in an atmosphere of displeasure and mistrust. his spontaneous activities have been repressed as evil. his every act has been looked upon with suspicion. he has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the dock. he has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. he has been cuffed, kicked, caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle--but to him appalling--threats. in his misery he has shed a whole ocean of tears,--the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled from sorrow by the sunshine of love. but of all the cruelties to which he has been subjected, the most devilish has been that of making him believe in his own criminality, in the corruption of his innocent heart. in the deadly shade of that chilling cloud, the flower of his opening life has too often withered before it has had time to expand. for what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years--to harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive, to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life. all this the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness. but that belief, with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days, necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his heart. we tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his congenital depravity, and thank god that we believe in "original sin."[ ] in the next place, if man is to be faithful to his model, he must bring up the child in an atmosphere of vexatious interference and unnatural restraint. that man himself has been brought up in such an atmosphere in both his schools--the legal and the ecclesiastical--i need not take pains to prove. what he has suffered at the hands of his schoolmaster--the god of israel (and of christendom)--he has taken good care to inflict on his pupil, the child. such phrases as: "don't talk," "don't fidget," "don't worry," "don't ask questions," "don't make a noise," "don't make a mess," "don't do this thing," "don't do that thing," are ever falling from his lips. and they are supplemented with such positive instructions as: "sit still," "stand on the form," "hold yourself up," "fold arms," "hands behind backs," "hands on heads," "eyes on the blackboard." at every turn--from infancy till adolescence, "from early morning till late in the evening"--these "dead and deadening formulas" await the unhappy child. the aim of his teachers is to leave nothing to his nature, nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to repress all his natural impulses; to drill his energies into complete quiescence; to keep his whole being in a state of sustained and painful tension. and in order that we may see a meaning and a rational purpose in this _régime_ of oppressive interference, we must assume that its ultimate aim is to turn the child into an animated puppet, who, having lost his capacity for vital activity, will be ready to dance, or rather go through a series of jerky movements, in response to the strings which his teacher pulls. it is the inevitable reaction from this state of tension which is responsible for much of the "naughtiness" of children. the spontaneous energies of the child, when education has blocked all their lawful outlets, must needs force new outlets for themselves,--lawless outlets, if no others are available. the child's instinct to live will see to that. it sometimes happens that, when the channel of a river has been blocked by winter's ice, the river, on its awakening in spring, will suddenly change its course and carve out a new channel for itself, reckless of the destruction that it may cause, so long as an outlet can by any means be found for its baffled current. it is the same with the river of the child's expanding life. the naughtiest and most mischievous boy not infrequently develops into a hero, or a leader of men. the explanation of this is that through his very naughtiness the current of soul-growth, which ran stronger in him than in his school-mates, kept open the channel which his teachers were doing their best to close. even hooliganism--to take the most serious of the periodic outbursts of juvenile criminality--resolves itself, when thoughtfully considered, into a sudden and violent change in the channel of a boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels) of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational repression. his wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself, before it finally gives up the struggle for active existence. * * * * * when severity and constraint have done their work, when the spirit of the child has been broken, when his vitality has been lowered to its barest minimum, when he has been reduced to a state of mental and moral serfdom, the time has come for the system of education through mechanical obedience to be applied to him in all its rigour. in other words, the time has come for man to do to the child, what the god whom he worships is supposed to have done to him,--to tell him in the fullest and minutest detail what he is to do to be "saved," and to stand over him with a scourge in his hand and see that he does it. in the two great schools which god is supposed to have opened for man's benefit, freedom and initiative have ever been regarded (and with good reason) as the gravest of offences. literal obedience has been exacted by the law; blind obedience by the church; passive obedience--the obedience of a puppet, or at best of an automaton--by both. the need for this insistence on the part of law and church is obvious. if any lingering desire to think things out for himself, if any intelligent interest in what he was taught, survived in the disciple, the whole system of salvation by machinery would be in danger of being thrown out of gear. as it has been, and still is, in the schools which god has opened for man, so it has been, and still is, in the schools which man has opened for the child. blind, passive, literal, unintelligent obedience is the basis on which the whole system of western education has been reared. the child must distrust himself absolutely, must realise that he is as helpless as he is ignorant, before he can begin to profit by the instruction that will be given to him. his mind must become a _tabula rasa_ before his teacher can begin to write on it. the vital part of him--call it what you will--must become as clay before his teacher can begin to mould him to his will. the strength of the child, then, is to sit still, to listen, to say "amen" to, or repeat, what he has heard. the strength of the teacher is to bustle about, to give commands, to convey information, to exhort, to expound. the strength of the child is to efface himself in every possible way. the strength of the teacher is to assert himself in every possible way. the golden rule of education is that the child is to do nothing for himself which his teacher can possibly do, or even pretend to do, for him. were he to try to do things by or for himself, he would probably start by doing them badly. this is not to be tolerated. imperfection and incorrectness are moral defects; and the child must as far as possible be guarded from them as from the contamination of moral guilt. he must therefore trust himself to his teacher, and do what he is told to do in the precise way in which he is told. his teacher must stand in front of him and give such directions as these: "look at me," "see what i am doing," "watch my hand," "do the thing this way," "do the thing that way," "listen to what i say," "repeat it after me," "repeat it all together," "say it three times." and the child, growing more and more comatose, must obey these directions and ask no questions; and when he has done what he has been told to do, he must sit still and wait for the next instalment of instruction. what is all this doing for the child? the teacher seldom asks himself this question. if he did, he would answer it by saying that the end of education is to enable the child to produce certain outward and visible results,--to do by himself what he has often done, either in imitation of his teacher, or in obedience to his repeated directions; to say by himself what he has said many times in chorus with his class-mates; to disgorge some fragments of the information with which he has been crammed; and so forth. what may be the value of these outward results, what they indicate, what amount or kind of mental (or other) growth may be behind them,--are questions which the teacher cannot afford to consider, even if he felt inclined to ask them. his business is to drill the child into the mechanical production of quasi-material results; and his success in doing this will be gauged in due course by an "examination,"--a periodic test which is designed to measure, not the degree of growth which the child has made, but the industry of the teacher as indicated by the receptivity of his class. the truth is that inward and spiritual growth, even if it were thought desirable to produce it and measure it, could not possibly be measured. the real "results" of education are in the child's heart and mind and soul, beyond the reach of any measuring tape or weighing machine. it follows that if the work of the teacher is to be tested, an external test must be applied. this means that external results, results which can be weighed and measured, must be aimed at by both teacher and child, and that the value of these as symbols of what is inward and intrinsic must be wholly ignored. not that the inward results of education would in any case be seriously considered. when education is based on the passivity of the child, nothing matters to him or to his teacher except the accuracy with which he can reproduce what he has been taught,--can repeat what he has been told, or do by himself what he has been told how to do. what connection there may be between these achievements and his mental state matters so little that the bare idea of there being such a connection is, as a rule, entirely lost sight of. the externalisation of religion in the west, as evidenced by its ceremonialism and its casuistry, has faithfully mirrored itself in the externality of western education. the examination system (which i will presently consider) keeps education in the grooves of externality, and drives those grooves so deep as to make escape from them impossible. yet it does but give formal recognition to, and in so doing crown and complete--as the keystone crowns and completes the arch--the whole system of education in the west. it is because what is outward and visible counts for everything in the west, first in the life of the adult and then in the life of the child, that the idea of weighing and measuring the results of education--with its implicit assumption that the real results of education are ponderable and measurable (a deadly fallacy which now has the force and authority of an axiom)--has come to establish itself in every western land. * * * * * the tendency of the western teacher to mistake the externals for the essentials of education, and to measure educational progress in terms of the "appearance of things," gives rise to many misconceptions, one of the principal of which is the current confusion between information and knowledge. to generate knowledge in his pupils is a legitimate end of the teacher's ambition. in schools and other "academies" it tends to become the chief, if not the sole, end; and, things being what they are, the teacher may be pardoned for regarding it as such. but what is knowledge? the vulgar confusion between knowledge and information is the accepted answer to this question. but the answer is usually given before the question has been seriously considered. one who allowed himself to reflect on it, however briefly or cursorily, would quickly realise that it is possible to have intimate and effective knowledge of a subject without being able to impart any information about it. successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. on the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of the subject in question. the truth is that knowledge, which may perhaps be provisionally defined as a correct attitude towards one's environment, has almost as wide a range as that of human nature itself. at one end of the scale we have the quasi-animal instinct which governs successful physical action. at the other end we have the knowledge, of which, and of the possession of which, its possessor is clearly, conscious. between these extremes there is an almost infinite series of strata, ranging through every conceivable degree of subconsciousness. the knowledge that is real and effective is absorbed into one or more of the subconscious strata, from which it gradually ascends, under the influence of attention and reflection, towards the more conscious levels, gaining, as it ascends, in scope and outlook what it may possibly lose in subtlety and nearness to action. when knowledge, after passing upwards through many subconscious strata, rises to what i may call the surface-level of consciousness, it is ready, on occasion, to give itself off as information. this exhalation from the surface of consciousness is genuine information, not to be confounded with knowledge, to which it is related as the outward to the inward state, still less to be confounded with that spurious information which floats, as we shall presently see, like a film on the surface of the mind, meaning nothing and indicating nothing except that it has been artificially deposited, and that in due season it will be skimmed off, if the teacher's hopes are fulfilled, for the delectation of an examiner. there are, of course, many cases in which the conscious acquisition of information is a necessary stage in the acquisition of knowledge. but in all such cases, if the information acquired is to have any educative value, it must be allowed to sink down into the subconscious strata, whence, after having been absorbed and assimilated and so converted into knowledge, it will perhaps reascend towards the surface of the mind, just as the leaves which fall in autumn are dragged down into the soil below, converted into fertile mould, and then gradually lifted towards the surface; or as the fresh water that the rivers pour into the sea has to be slowly absorbed into the whole mass of salt water before it (or its equivalent) can return to the land as rain. when information which has been received and assimilated rises to the surface of the mind, it will be ready, when required to do so, to reappear as information, and perhaps to return in that form to the source from which it came. but the information which is given off will differ profoundly from that which has been received, for between the two will have intervened many stages of silent absorption and silent growth. it may be necessary, then, in the course of education, both to supply and to demand information. but the information which is supplied must be regarded as the raw material of knowledge, into which it is to be converted by a subtle and secret process. and the information which is demanded must be regarded as an exhalation (so to speak) from the surface of a mind which has been saturated with study and experience, and therefore as a proof of the possession of knowledge. to assume that knowledge and information are interchangeable terms, that to impart information is therefore to generate knowledge, that to give back information is therefore to give proof of the possession of knowledge,--is one of the greatest mistakes that a teacher can make. but the mistake is almost universally made. information being related to knowledge, as what is outward to what is inward, it is but natural that education in the west, which on principle concerns itself with what is outward, and ignores what is inward, should have always regarded, and should still regard, the supplying of information as the main function of the teacher, and the ability of the child to retail the information which has been supplied to him as a convincing proof that the work of the teacher has been successfully done. in nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child's mind, and then, after a brief interval, in skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they had been duly laid. he cannot afford to do otherwise. if the child, like the man, is to be "saved" by passive obedience, his teacher must keep his every action and operation under close and constant supervision. were the information which is supplied to him allowed to descend into the subconscious strata of his being, there to be dealt with by the secret, subtle, assimilative processes of his nature, it would escape from the teacher's supervision and therefore from his control. in other words, the teacher would have abdicated his function. he must therefore take great pains to keep the processes by which the child acquires knowledge (or what passes for such) as near to the surface of his mind as possible; in rivalry of the nurse who should take so much interest in the well-being of her charges that she would not allow them to digest the food which she had given them, but would insist on their disgorging it at intervals, in order that she might satisfy herself that it had been duly given and received. it is no doubt right that the teacher should take steps to test the industry of his pupils; but the information which the child has always to keep at the call of his memory, in order that he may give it back on demand in the form in which he has received it, is the equivalent of food which its recipient has not been allowed to digest. the confusion between information and knowledge lies at the heart of the religion, as well as of the education, of the west. in this, as in other matters, the training of the child by his teacher has been modelled on the supposed training of man by god. it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole scheme of salvation by mechanical obedience is pivoted on the assumed identity of information and knowledge. in both the schools which man has attended three things have always been taken for granted. the first is that salvation depends upon right knowledge of god. the second, that right knowledge of god and correct information about god are interchangeable phrases. the third, that correct information about god is procurable by, and communicable to, man. from these premises it has been inferred that if man can be duly supplied with correct information about god, and can be induced to receive and retain it, he will be able to "save his soul alive." the difference between the two schools is, that in the legal school the information supplied to man has been largely concerned with the _will_ of god, so far as it bears on the life of man, and has therefore taken the form of a code of formulated commandments; whereas in the ecclesiastical school it has mainly been concerned with the _being_ of god, as interpreted from his doings and especially from his dealings with man, and has therefore taken the form of catechisms and creeds. and there is, of course, the further difference that in the legal school man's acceptance of what he is taught has taken the _practical_ form of doing what he is told to do, detail by detail; whereas in the ecclesiastical school it has been mainly _oral_ (though also partly ceremonial), the business of the disciple being to commit to memory the creed or catechism which has been placed in his hands, and recite it, formula by formula, with flawless accuracy. but the difference between the two schools is wholly superficial, being, in fact, analogous to that between the conventional teaching of drawing, in which the pupil finds salvation in doing what he is told to do, line by line, and stroke by stroke, and the conventional teaching of history and geography, in which the pupil finds salvation in saying what he is told to say, name by name, and date by date. the relation between the two great branches of education, the education of man by god, and the education of the child by the man, is one, not of analogy merely, but also of cause and effect. it is because the jew thought to "save his soul alive" by obeying, blindly and unintelligently, a multitude of vexatious rules, that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils in drawing by telling them in the fullest detail (either in his own person or by means of a diagram) what lines and strokes they are to make. and it is because the christian has thought to "save his soul alive" by reciting with parrot-like accuracy the formulæ of his creeds and catechisms, that the teacher of to-day thinks to educate his pupils in history and geography by making them repeat from memory a series of definitions, dates, events, names of persons, names of places, articles of commerce, and the like. i do not say that the modern teacher consciously imitates his models; but i say that he and they have been inspired by the same conception of life, and that the influence of that conception has been, in part at least, transmitted by them to him. * * * * * that education in the west should ultimately be controlled by a system of formal examination, may be said to have been predestined by the general trend of religious thought and belief. wherever literal obedience is regarded as the first, if not the last, condition of salvation, the tendency to measure worth and progress by the outward results that are produced will inevitably spring up and assert itself. in this tendency we have the whole examination system in embryo. when israel, with characteristic thoroughness, had embodied in pharisaism the logical inferences from his religious conceptions, a merciless examination system came into being, in which every one was at once examiner and examinee, and in which the whole of human life was dragged out (as far as that was possible) into the fierce light of public criticism, and placed under vigilant and unintermittent supervision. when pharisaism was revived, with many modifications but with no essential change of character, under the name of puritanism, the tendency to arraign human life at the bar of public opinion reasserted itself, and gave rise, as in new england and covenanting scotland, to an intolerable spiritual tyranny. in catholic countries the believer is subjected in the confessional to a periodical oral examination, in which he passes in review the outward aspect of his inward and spiritual life, detailing for the benefit of his confessor his sins of ceremonial omission or laxity, and such lapses from moral rectitude as admit of being formulated in words and accurately valued in terms of expiatory penance. even in the anglican church, which has too great a regard for the englishman's traditional love of personal freedom to be unduly inquisitorial, the clergyman is apt to measure the spiritual health and progress of his parishioners by the frequency with which they attend church and "celebration," while the bishop measures the spiritual health and progress of each parish by the number of its communicants and the frequency with which they communicate, statistics under both heads being (i am told) regularly forwarded to him from all parts of his diocese. it was inevitable, then, the relation between that sooner or later the education of the young should come under the control of a system of formal religion and education being what it was and is, examination, and that it should be as much easier to apply the system to education than to religion as it is easier to test knowledge (in the conventional sense of the word) than conduct. it is to the vulgar confusion between knowledge and information that we owe the formal examination, as it is now conducted in most western countries. in a society which mistakes the externals for the essentials of life, it is but natural that the teacher, with the full consent of the parents of his pupils, should regard the imparting of knowledge as the end and aim of his professional life, and that the parents should demand some guarantee that knowledge has been successfully imparted to their children. if by knowledge were meant a correct attitude of mind, the teacher would realise that the idea of testing it in any way which would satisfy the average parent was chimerical; and his clients, if they continued to ask for a guarantee of successful teaching, would require something widely different from that which has hitherto contented them. but when information is regarded as the equivalent of knowledge, the testing of the teacher's work becomes a simple matter, for it is quite easy to frame an examination which will ascertain, with some approach to accuracy, the amount of information that is floating on the surface of the child's mind; and it is also easy to tabulate the results of such an examination,--to find a numerical equivalent for the work done by each examinee, and then arrange the whole class in what is known as the "order of merit," and accepted as such, without a moment's misgiving, by all concerned. unfortunately, however, it is equally easy to prepare children for an examination of this, the normal type. as children have receptive memories, it is easy for the teacher to lay films of information on the surface of their minds. as they have capacious and fairly retentive memories, it is easy for the teacher, especially if he is a strict disciplinarian, to make his pupils retain the greater part of what they have been taught. to skim off and give back to the teacher (or examiner) portions of the floating films of information, is a knack which comes with practice, and which the average child easily acquires. the teacher will, of course, demand that his school shall be examined on a clearly-defined syllabus; and the examiner, in his own interest, will gladly comply with this demand. the examiner will go further than this. if he happens to be employed by the state or by a local authority, and has, therefore, many schools of the same type to examine, he will, in order to save himself unnecessary trouble, prescribe the syllabus on which all the schools in his area are to be examined. this means that he will dictate to the teacher what subjects he is to teach, how much ground he is to cover in each year (or term), in what general order he is to treat each subject, and on what general principles he is to teach it. intentionally he will do all this. unintentionally he will do far more than this. as he wishes his examination to be a test and not a mere formality, as he wishes to sift the examinees and not to set the seal of approval on all of them indiscriminately, he will take care that some at least of his questions are different from what the teacher might expect them to be. also, as he is himself a rational being, he will probably endeavour to test intelligence as well as memory; and, with this end in view, he will set questions, the precise nature of which it will be difficult for the teacher to forecast. but the teacher will make a practice of studying the questions set in the periodical examinations and of preparing his pupils accordingly, equipping them (if he is an expert at his work) with a stock of superficial intelligence as well as of information, and putting them up to whatever knacks, tricks, and dodges will enable them to show to advantage on the examination day. in his desire to outwit the teacher, the examiner will turn and double like a hare who is pursued by a greyhound. but the teacher will turn and double with equal agility, and will never allow himself to be outdistanced by his quarry. the more successful the teacher is in keeping up with the examiner, the more fatal will his success be to his pupils and to himself. in the ardour of the chase he is being lured on into a region of treacherous quicksands; and the longer he is able to maintain the pursuit, the more certain is it that he will lose himself at last in depths and mazes of misconception and delusion. it is only by stripping himself of his own freedom and responsibility that the teacher is able to keep pace with the examiner, and each turn or double that he makes involves a fresh surrender of those prerogatives. in consenting to work on a prescribed syllabus he has given up the idea of planning out his work for himself. in attempting to adapt his teaching to the questions set by the examiner, he is allowing the latter to dictate to him, in the minutest detail, how each subject is to be taught. in other words, in order to achieve the semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against his will, to become a providence to him and to order all his goings. this means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself, as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path. it is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product and a symptom. the examination system is, as i have said, the keystone of the arch of western education, crowning and completing the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous heap. education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the west, could not continue to exist without the support of the examination system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its own inherent defects. the plight of an organism is indeed desperate when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life. it is notorious that the application of the examination principle to religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is. when applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one really is, of knowing more than one really knows. so long as the hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. but when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. in a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. the teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. the child who is being crammed for an examination, and who is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is being led into crooked ways. if he has not that feeling, if the crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he has been compelled to breathe. nor, if that is his case, will he lack companionship in his delusion. in the atmosphere of the examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of the system--pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of labour, ministers of religion, members of parliament, and the rest--fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived machinery for the subtle processes of life. of the many evils inherent in western education, which the examination system tends to intensify, one of the greatest is that of starving the child's activities, of making him helpless, apathetic, and inert. original sin finds its equivalent, in the sphere of mental action, in original impotence and stupidity. it is not in the child to direct his steps, and the teacher must therefore direct them for him, and, if necessary, support him with both hands while he makes them. even if the outward results which are the goal of the teacher's ambition were to be produced for his own satisfaction only, he would take care to leave as little as possible to the child's independent effort. but when the results in question have to satisfy an examiner, and when, as may well happen, the teacher's own professional welfare depends on the examiner's verdict, it is but natural that he should hold himself responsible for every stroke and dot that his pupil makes. when the education given in a school is dominated by a periodical examination on a prescribed syllabus, suppression of the child's natural activities becomes the central feature of the teacher's programme. in such a school the child is not allowed to do anything which the teacher can possibly do for him. he has to think what his teacher tells him to think, to feel what his teacher tells him to feel, to see what his teacher tells him to see, to say what his teacher tells him to say, to do what his teacher tells him to do. and the directions given to him are always minute. not the smallest room for free action is allowed him if his teacher can possibly help it. indeed, it is the function of the skilful teacher to search for such possible nooks and crannies, and fill them up. it is true that if an examination is to be passed with credit some thinking has to be done. but the greater part of this thinking must be done by the teacher, the _rôle_ of the pupil, even when he is an adult student, being essentially passive and receptive. the pupil must indeed be actively passive and industriously receptive; but for the rest, he must as far as possible leave himself in the teacher's hands. how to outwit the examiner is the one aim of both the teacher and the examinee; and as the teacher is presumably older, wiser, and far more skilful at the examination game than his pupil, the duty of thinking--of planning, of contriving, and even (in the deeper sense of the word) of studying--necessarily devolves on the former; and the latter, instead of relying upon himself and learning to use his own wits and resources, becomes more and more helpless and resourceless, and gradually ceases to take any interest in the work that he is doing, for its own sake, his chief, if not his sole, concern being to outwit the examiner and pass a successful examination. (one frequently meets with clever university students who, having read a certain book for a certain examination and had no question set from it, regard the time given to the study of it as wasted, and have no compunction about expressing this opinion!) if these are evils incidental--i might almost say essential--to the examination of adult scholars, it stands to reason that they will be greatly aggravated when the examinees are young children. for the younger the child, the more ignorant and helpless he is (however full he may be of latent capacity and spontaneous activity), and therefore the more ready he is to lean upon his teacher and to look to him for instruction and direction. the desire to outwit, and so win approval from, an examiner, is not the only reason why the teacher so often reduces to an absurdity the traditional distrust of the child. his own inability to educate the child on other lines is another and not less potent reason. the examination _régime_ to which he has been subjected himself, partly, perhaps, under compulsion, but also and in larger measure of his own choice, deprives him, as we have already seen, of much of his freedom, initiative, and responsibility; and that being so, it is inevitable that within the limited range of free action which is left to him, he in his turn should devote his energies to depriving his pupils of the same vital qualities, and to making them the helpless creatures of habit and routine which he himself is tending to become. to give free play to a child's natural faculties and so lead him into the path of self-development and self-education, demands a high degree of intelligence on the part of the teacher, combined with the constant exercise of thought and initiative within a wide range of free action. if you tell a teacher in precise detail, whether directly or indirectly, that he is to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing, he will not be able to carry out your instructions, except by telling his pupils, again in precise detail, that they are to do this thing, and that thing, and the next thing. he cannot help himself. he has no choice in the matter. he is the victim of a quasi-physical compulsion. the pressure which is put upon him will inevitably be transmitted by him and through him to his pupils, and will inevitably be multiplied (the relations between teacher and pupil being what they are) in the course of transmission. there is nothing that a healthy child hates so much as to have the use of his natural faculties and the play of his natural energies unduly restricted by parental or pedagogic control. we may therefore take for granted that the child will find himself ill at ease in a school in which every vital activity is rigidly repressed, and in which he spends most of his time in sitting still and waiting for orders. nor will it add to his happiness to live habitually in an atmosphere of constraint, of austerity, of suspicion, of gloom. but i need not take pains to prove that education, as it is conducted in western countries, is profoundly repugnant to the natural instincts of the healthy child. for that is precisely what it is intended to be. the idea of a child enjoying his "lessons" is foreign to the genius of the west. dominated as he is by the inherited conviction that man's nature is corrupt and that his instincts are evil, the western teacher has set himself the task of doing violence to the child's instinctive tendencies, of thwarting his inborn desires, of working against the grain of his nature. he has expected the child to rebel against this _régime_, and he has welcomed his rebellion as a proof of the corruption of man's nature, and therefore of the soundness of the traditional philosophy of education. but if education is hateful to the child, how is he to be induced to submit to being educated? some co-operation on his part will be necessary. how is it to be secured? by precisely the same methods as those by which man, in the course of his education, has been induced to co-operate with god. the child, like man, is to be "saved"--to be rescued from nature and from himself--by being led into the path of mechanical obedience. the child, like man, is to be kept in that path by a system of external rewards and punishments. if he will not do what he is told to do, he will be punished by his teacher. if he will do what he is told to do, he will escape punishment, and he may possibly, when his merits have accumulated sufficiently, receive a reward. in the education of man by the god of israel the balance between rewards and punishments has been kept fairly even. hell has been balanced by heaven, calamity by prosperity, death by life. it has been far otherwise with the child. his punishments have been many, and his rewards few. at the present day men are more humane than they used to be; and corporal punishment, though still resorted to, counts for less than it used to do in the training of the child. but punishments of various kinds are still regarded as indispensable adjuncts to school discipline; and it is still taken for granted in far too many schools that the fear of punishment and the hope of reward are the only effective motives to educational effort. it is difficult to say which of the two motives is the more likely to demoralise the child. a _régime_ of punishment is not necessarily a _régime_ of cruelty; but punishment can scarcely fail to savour of severity, and when the doctrine of original sin is in the ascendant, and the inborn wilfulness and stubbornness of the child are postulated by his teachers, the indefinable boundary line between severity and cruelty is easily crossed. of the tendency of cruelty to demoralise its victims i have already spoken. but the effect of punishment on the child must be considered in its relation to his mental, as well as to his moral, development. scholarships, prizes, high places in class, and other such rewards are for the few, not for the many. if the many are to be roused to exertion, the fear of punishment (in the hypothetical absence of any other motive) must be ever before them. what will happen to them when that motive is withdrawn, as it will be when the child becomes the adolescent? his education has been distasteful to the child, partly because his teachers have assumed from the outset that it would be and must be so, but chiefly because in their ignorance they have taken pains to make it so, his school life having been so ordered as to combine the maximum of strain with the maximum of _ennui_. his teachers have done everything for him, except those mechanical and monotonous exercises which they felt they might trust him to do by himself. some of his mental faculties have become stunted and atrophied through lack of exercise. others have been allowed to wither in the bud. if he happens to belong to the "masses," he will have completed his school education at the age of thirteen or fourteen. what will he do with himself when there is no longer a teacher at his elbow to tell him what to do and how to do it, and to stand over him (should this be necessary) while he does it? why should he go on with studies which he has neither the inclination nor the ability to pursue, and which, in point of fact, he has never really begun? and why should he continue to exert himself when, owing to his being at last beyond the reach of punishment, the need for him to do so--the only need which he has been accustomed to regard as imperative--has ceased to exist? the objections to the hope of reward as a motive to educational effort are of another kind. prizes, as i have said, are for the few; and it is the consciousness of being one of the elect which invests the winning of a prize with its chief attraction. the prize system makes a direct appeal to the vanity and egoism of the child. it encourages him to think himself better than others, to pride himself on having surpassed his class-mates and shone at their expense. the clever child is to work hard, not because knowledge is worth winning for its own sake and for his own sake, but because it will be pleasant for him to feel that he has succeeded where others have failed. it is a just reproach against the examination system that while, by its demand for outward results it does its best to destroy individuality, the essence of which is sincerity of expression, it also does its best to foster individualism, by appealing, with its offer of prizes and other "distinctions," to those instincts which predispose each one of us to affirm and exalt that narrow, commonplace, superficial aspect of his being which he miscalls his _self_. thus the hope of reward tends to demoralise the clever child by making an appeal to basely selfish motives. at the same time it is probably deluding him with the belief that he has more capacity than he really has. if the examination system is, as i have suggested, the keystone of the arch of western education, it is by means of the prize system that the keystone has been firmly cemented into its place. an examination which had no rewards or distinctions to offer to the competitors would not be an effective stimulus to exertion. that being so, our educationalists have taken care that to every examination some external reward or rewards shall be attached. even if there are no material prizes to appeal to the child's cupidity, there is always the class-list, with its so-called "order of merit," to appeal to his vanity. our educationalists have also taken care that during the periods of childhood, adolescence, and even early maturity, every prize that is offered for competition shall be awarded after a formal examination and on the consideration of its tabulated results. the appointments in the home, colonial, and indian civil services, the promotions in the army and navy, the fellowships and scholarships at the universities, the scholarships at the public schools, the medals, books, and other prizes that are offered to school-children, are all awarded to those who have distinguished themselves in the corresponding examinations, no other qualification than that of ability to shine in an examination being looked for in the competitors. there are, no doubt, exceptions to these general statements, but they are so few that they scarcely count. we have seen that the ascendency of the examination system in our schools and colleges is largely due to the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge; and we have also seen that the examination system reacts upon that fatal confusion and tends to strengthen and perpetuate it. if, then, the effect of the prize system is to consolidate the authority of the formal examination and intensify its influence, we shall not go far wrong in assuming that in the various competitions for prizes the confusion between information and knowledge will play a vital part. and, in point of fact, the cleverness which enables the child--i ignore for the moment the adolescent and the adult student--to win prizes of various kinds is found, when carefully analysed, to resolve itself, in nine cases out of ten, into the ability to receive, retain, and retail information. as this particular, ability is but a small part of that mental capacity which education is supposed to train, it is clear that the clever child who gets to the top of his class, and wins prizes in so doing, may easily be led to over-estimate his powers, and to take himself far more seriously than it is either right or wise of him to do. his over-confidence may for a time prove an effective stimulus to exertion; but the exertion will probably be misdirected; and later on, when he finds himself confronted by the complex realities of life, and when problems have to be solved which demand the exercise of other faculties than that of memory, his belief in himself, which is the outcome of a false criterion of merit, may induce him to undertake what he cannot accomplish, and may lead at last--owing to his having lost touch with the actualities of things--to his complete undoing. and as under the prize system the child who is high in his class is apt to over-estimate his ability, so the child who is low in his class is apt to accept the verdict of the class-list as final, and to regard himself as a failure because he lacks the superficial ability which enables a child to shine on the examination day. again and again it happens that the dunce of his class goes to the front in the battle of life. but numerous and significant as these cases are, they are unfortunately exceptions to a general rule. for one dunce who emerges from the depths of "apparent failure," there are ten who go under after a more or less protracted struggle, and sink contentedly to the bottom. the explanation of this is that though every child has capacity (apart, of course, from the congenital idiot and the mentally "defective"), there are many kinds of capacity which a formal examination fails to discover, and which the education that is dominated by the prize system fails to develop. the child whose particular kind of capacity does not count, either in the ordinary school lesson or on the examination day, is not aware that he is capable; and as he is always low on the class-list, and is therefore regarded by his teachers as dull and stupid, he not unnaturally acquiesces in the current and apparently authoritative estimate, of his powers, and, losing heart about himself, ends by becoming the failure which he has been taught to believe himself to be. in brief, while the prize system breeds ungrounded and therefore dangerous self-esteem in the child whom it labels as bright, it breeds ungrounded but not the less fatal self-distrust in the child whom it labels as dull. we have seen that there comes a time in the life of every man when the fear of punishment ceases to act as a stimulus to educational exertion. it is the same with the hope of reward. examinations, and the prizes which reward success in examinations, are for the young. what will happen to the prize-winner when there are no more prizes for him to compete for? will he continue to pursue knowledge for its own sake? alas! he has never pursued it for its own sake. he has pursued it for the sake of the prizes and other honours which it brought him. when he has won his last prize the chances are that he will lose all interest in that branch of learning in which he achieved distinction, unless, indeed, he has to earn his livelihood by teaching it. of the scores of young men who distinguish themselves in "classics" at oxford and cambridge, how many will continue to study the classical writers when they have gained the "firsts" for which they worked so diligently? apart from those who are going to teach classics in the public schools or universities, a mere handful,--one in ten perhaps, though that is probably an extravagant estimate. and yet the poets, philosophers, and historians whom they have studied are amongst the greatest that the world has produced. what is it, then, that kills, in nine cases out of ten, the classical student's interest in the masterpieces of antiquity? the obvious fact that he was never interested in them for their own sakes--that he studied them, not in order to enjoy them or profit by them, but in order to pass an examination in them, of which he might be able to say in after years: "i am named and known by that hour's feat, there took my station and degree." how many wranglers, other than those who have or will become schoolmasters or college tutors, continue to study mathematics? how many of the first classmen in science, history, law, and other honour "schools" continue to study their respective subjects? in every case an utterly insignificant minority. but if the prize system does this to the young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, if it kills his interest in learning, if it makes him register an inward vow never again to open the books which he has crammed so successfully for his examinations, what may it be expected to do to the child whose school education comes to an end when he is only thirteen or fourteen years old? when, with the fear of punishment, the complementary hope of reward is withdrawn from him, is it reasonable to expect him to continue his education, to continue to apply himself to subjects with which his acquaintance has been entirely formal and superficial, and which he has never been allowed to digest and assimilate? the utter indifference of the average ex-elementary scholar to literature, to history, to geography, to science, to music, to art, is the world-wide answer to this question. for what is, above all, hateful in any scheme of rewards and punishments, when applied to the school life of the young, is that it wholly externalises what is really an inward and spiritual process, the evolution of the youthful mind. just as in the sphere of religion it is postulated as a self-evident truth that righteousness is not its own reward, nor iniquity its own punishment,--so in the sphere of education it is postulated as a self-evident truth, that knowledge is not its own reward, nor ignorance its own punishment. and just as in the sphere of religion the appeal to man's selfish hopes and ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and purpose of righteousness, which has caused his moral and spiritual energies to be diverted into irreligious or anti-religious channels, to the detriment of his inward and spiritual growth,--so in the sphere of education the appeal to the child's selfish desires and ignoble fears has generated a radical misconception of the meaning and purpose of knowledge, which has caused his mental energies to be diverted into uneducational channels, to the detriment of his mental growth. in each case the scheme of rewards and punishments, acting like an immense blister, when applied to a healthy body, draws to the surface the life-blood which ought to nourish and purify the vital organs of the soul (or mind), thereby impoverishing the vital organs, and inflaming and disfiguring the surface. for if the surface life, with its outward and visible "results," is to be happy and productive, the health of the vital organs must be carefully maintained. this is the fundamental truth which those who control education in the west have persistently ignored. the system of education which i have tried to describe is a practical embodiment of the ideas that govern the popular philosophy of the west. one who had studied that philosophy, and who wished to ascertain what provision it made for the education of the young, would in the course of his inquiry construct _a priori_ the precise system of education which is in vogue in all western countries. the supposed relation between god and his fallen and rebellious offspring, man, is obviously paralleled by the relation between the teacher and the child; and it is therefore clear that the supposed dealings of god with man ought to be paralleled by the dealings of the teacher with the child. that they are so paralleled--that salvation by machinery has found its most exact counterpart in education by machinery--the history of education has made abundantly clear. whatever else the current system of education may do to the child, there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,--to blight his mental growth. what particular form or forms this blighting influence may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of circumstances. experience tells us that what happens in most cases is that western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts the growth of a fourth. is it intended that education should do all this? this question is not so paradoxical as it sounds. my primary assumption that the function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the eyes of those who agree with it; but western orthodoxy, just so far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it as a pestilent heresy. for if what grows is intrinsically evil, what can growth do for it but carry it towards perdition? what is it that grows? it is time that i should ask myself this question. my answer to it is, in brief, that it is the whole human being that grows, the whole nature of the child,--body, mind, heart and soul. when i use these familiar words, i am far from wishing to suggest that human nature is divisible into four provinces or compartments. in every stage of its development human nature is a living and indivisible whole. each of the four words stands for a typical aspect of man's being, but one of the four may also be said to stand for the totality of man's being,--the word _soul_. for it is the soul which manifests as _body_, which thinks as _mind_, which feels and loves as _heart_, and which is what it is--though not perhaps what it really or finally is--as _soul_. the function of education, then, is to foster the growth of the child's whole nature, or, in a word, of his soul. i ought, perhaps, to apologise for my temerity in using this now discredited word. in the west man does not believe in the soul. how can he? he does not believe in god either as the eternal source or as the eternal end of his own nature. it follows that he does not and cannot believe in the unity of his own being. he has been taught that his nature is corrupt, evil, godless; and that the "soul," which is somehow or other attached to his fallen nature during his "earthly pilgrimage," was supernaturally created at the moment of his birth. he is now beginning to reject this conception of the soul; but he cannot yet rise to the higher conception of it as the vital essence of his being, as the divine germ in virtue of which his nature is no mere aggregate of parts or faculties, but a living whole. so deeply rooted in the western mind is disbelief in the reality of the soul that it is difficult to use the word, when speaking to a western audience, without exposing oneself to the charge of insincerity,--not to speak of the graver charge of "bad form." a savour either of _cant_ or _gush_ hangs about the word, and is not easily detached from it. that being so, it must be clearly understood that i mean by the soul the nature of man considered in its unity and totality,--no more than this, and no less. in the opening paragraph of this book i said that some of my readers would regard my fundamental assumption as a truism, others as a challenge, and others again as a wicked heresy. whether it shall be regarded as a truism, a challenge, or a heresy, will depend on the way in which it is worded. to say that the function of education is to foster the growth of human nature, is to invite condemnation from those who regard human nature as ruined and corrupt. to say that the function of education is to foster the growth of the soul, is to issue a challenge to western civilisation, which is based on the belief that the end of man's being is not the growth of his soul, but the growth of his balance at the bank of material prosperity. to say that the function of education is to foster the growth of certain faculties, is to insist on what no one who had given his mind to the matter would care to deny. for even the orthodox, who regard man's nature in its totality as intrinsically evil, admit without hesitation that there are faculties in man which can be and ought to be trained; while the "man of the world," whom we may regard as the most typical product of western civilisation, is clamorous in his demand that education shall foster the growth of certain mental faculties which will enable the child to become an efficient clerk or workman, and so contribute to the enrichment of his employer and the community to which he belongs. the western educationalist will admit, then, that the function of education is to foster growth; and if you ask him what it is that grows or ought to grow under education's fostering care, he will give you a long list of faculties--mental, for the most part, but also moral and physical--and then break off under the impression that he has set education an adequate and a practicable task. but he has set it an inadequate and an impracticable task. for behind all the faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul. and because he cannot bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their interdependence, their organic unity. in other words he devitalises each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act of taking thought for its growth. he forgets that every faculty which is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to, the general life of the growing child. he forgets that the child himself--"the living soul"--is growing in and through the growth of each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush. but the whole question may be looked at from another point of view. let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties have been duly trained the teacher has done his work. what, then, are the faculties which education is supposed to train? in my attempt to answer this question i will confine myself to the elementary school,--the only school which i can pretend to know well. a glance at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained--those which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those which give out. when such subjects as history, geography, or science are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained. when such subjects as composition, drawing or singing are being taught, the child's expressive faculties are being trained. so at least one might be disposed to assume. in what relation do the perceptive faculties stand to the expressive? is it possible to cultivate either group without regard to the other? it must be admitted that the methods employed in the ordinary elementary school seem to be governed by the assumption that the perceptive and the expressive faculties are two distinct groups which admit of being separately trained. in the ordinary drawing lesson, for example, the child is trying to express what he does not even pretend to have perceived; whereas in the ordinary history or science lesson the process is reversed, and the child pretends to perceive what he makes no attempt to express. but is the assumption correct? do the two groups of faculties admit of being separately trained? is it possible to devote this hour or half-hour to the training of perception, and that to the training of expression? surely not. perception and expression are not two faculties, but one. each is the very counterpart and correlate, each is the very life and soul, of the other. each, when divorced from the other, ceases to be its own true self. when perception is real, living, informed with personal feeling, it must needs find for itself the outlet of expression. when expression is real, living, informed with personal feeling, perception--the child's own perception of things--must needs be behind it. more than that. _the perceptive faculties_ (at any rate in childhood) _grow through the interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way. and the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no other way_. the child who tries to draw what he sees is training his power of observation, not less than his power of expression. as he passes and repasses between the object of his perception and his representation of it, there is a continuous gain both to his vision and to his technique. the more faithfully he tries to render his impression of the object, the more does that impression gain in truth and strength; and in proportion as the impression becomes truer and stronger, so does the rendering of it become more masterly and more correct. so, again, if a man tries to set forth in writing his views about some difficult problem--social, political, metaphysical, or whatever it may be--the very effort that he makes to express himself clearly and coherently will tend to bring order into the chaos and light into the darkness of his mind, to widen his outlook on his subject, to deepen his insight into it, to bring new aspects of it within the reach of his conscious thought. and here, as in the case of the child who tries to draw what he sees, there is a continuous reciprocal action between perception and expression, in virtue of which each in turn helps forward the evolution of the other. even in so abstract and impersonal a subject as mathematics, the reaction of expression on perception is strong and salutary. the student who wishes to master a difficult piece of bookwork should try to write it out in his own words; in the effort to set it out concisely and lucidly he will gradually perfect his apprehension of it. were he to solve a difficult problem, he would probably regard his grasp of the solution as insecure and incomplete until he had succeeded in making it intelligible to the mind of another. when perception is deeply tinged with emotion, as when one sees what is beautiful, or admires what is noble, the attempt to express it in language, action, or art, seems to be dictated by some inner necessity of one's nature. the meaning of this is that the perception itself imperatively demands expression in order that, in and through the struggle of the artistic consciousness to do full justice to it, it may gradually realise its hidden potentialities, discover its inner meaning, and find its true self. once we realise that expression is the other self of perception, it becomes permissible for us to say that to train the perceptive faculties--the faculties by means of which man lays hold upon the world that surrounds him, and draws it into himself and makes it his own--is the highest achievement of the teacher's art. even from the point of view of my primary truism, this conception of the meaning and purpose of education holds good. for according to that truism the business of the teacher is to foster the growth of the child's soul; and the soul grows by the use of its perceptive faculties, which, by enabling it to take in and assimilate an ever-widening environment, cause a gradual enlargement of its consciousness and a proportionate expansion of its life. but the perceptive faculties in their turn grow by expressing themselves; and unless they are allowed to express themselves--unless the child is allowed to express himself (for expression, if it is genuine, is always self-expression)--their growth will be arrested, and the mission which _all_ educationalists assign to education will not have been fulfilled. the question is, then, does the system of education which prevails in all western countries provide for self-expression on the part of the child? footnotes: [ ] i mean by the words "original sin" what the plain, unsophisticated, believing christian means by them. a modern poet, in a moment of impulsive orthodoxy, praises christianity because it "taught original sin, the corruption of man's heart ..." this definition is sufficiently accurate. "original sin," says the ninth article of the anglican church, "... is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man ... whereby man is of his own nature inclined to evil ... and therefore, in every person born into the world, it deserveth god's wrath and damnation." how far the popular interpretation of the doctrine of original sin coincides with the latest theological refinement of the doctrine, i cannot pretend to say. when it finds it convenient to explain things away, theology, like voltaire's minor prophet, "est capable de tout"; and the need for reconciling the doctrine of original sin with the teaching of modern science has in recent years laid a heavy tax on its ingenuity. chapter iii a familiar type of school[ ] in this chapter i shall have in my mind a type of school which is familiar to all who are interested in elementary education. what percentage of the schools of england are of that particular type i cannot pretend to say. in the days of payment by results the percentage was unquestionably very high. the system under which we all worked made that inevitable. the days of payment by results are over, but their consequences are with us still. the pioneer is abroad in the land, but he has had, and still has, formidable difficulties to overcome. the percentage of routine-ridden schools is considerably lower than it used to be, and it is falling from year to year. of this there can be no doubt. each teacher in turn who reads this chapter will, i hope, be able to say that the school which is in my mind is not his. but i can assure him that there are thousands of schools in which all or most of the evils on which i am about to comment are still rampant; and i will add, for his consolation, that it would be a miracle if this were not so. the first forty minutes of the morning session are given, in almost every elementary school, to what is called _religious instruction_. this goes on, morning after morning, and week after week. the child who attends school regularly and punctually, as many children do, will have been the victim of upwards of two thousand "scripture lessons" by the time he leaves school. the question of religious education in elementary schools has long been the centre of a perfect whirlpool of controversial talk. the greater part of this talk is, to speak plainly, blatant cant. every candidate for a seat in the house of commons thinks it incumbent upon him to say something about religious education, but not one in a hundred of them has ever been present in an elementary school while religious instruction was being given. the bishops of the established church wax eloquent in the house of lords over the wickedness of a "godless education" and the virtue of "definite dogmatic teaching," but it may be doubted if there is a bishop in the house who has in recent years sat out a scripture lesson in a church of england school. it would be well if all who talked publicly about religious education could be sentenced to devote a month to the personal study of religious instruction as it is ordinarily given in elementary schools. at the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men, and in future they would probably talk less about religious education and think more. the scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make the children of england religious, in the special sense which each church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good catholics, good churchmen, good wesleyans, good bible christians, good jews. but as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that england is relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for half a century or more--has been entirely successful. while the fact that the english parent, who must himself have attended from , to , scripture lessons in his schooldays, is not under any circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that those who control the religious education of the youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their system on the religious life and faith of the english people. they have good ground for their subconscious distrust of it. we have seen that the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge is at the root of much that is unsound in education. there is no branch of education in which this confusion is so fallacious or so fatal as in that which is called religious. the process of converting information into knowledge is a comparatively easy one when we are dealing with matters of detailed fact. information as to the dates of the kings of england, as to the bays and capes of the british isles, as to the exports and imports of liverpool, as to the weights and measures of this or that country, is in each case readily convertible into knowledge of the given facts. but directly we get away from mere facts, and begin to concern ourselves with what is large, vague, subtle, and obscure,--with forces, for example, with causes, with laws, with principles,--the difficulty of collecting adequate and appropriate information about our subject becomes great, and the difficulty of converting such information into knowledge becomes greater still. information as to the dates and names of the english kings, and other historical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of english history. information as to the names and positions of capes and bays, as to areas and populations, and other geographical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of geography. information as to arithmetical rules and tables, as to weights and measures, and other arithmetical facts, is easily converted into knowledge of those facts, but it is not easily converted into knowledge of arithmetic. in each case a _sense_ must be evolved if the information is to be assimilated, and so converted into real knowledge; and though it is true that the sense in question grows, in part at least, by feeding on appropriate information, it is equally true that if, owing to defective training, the sense remains undeveloped, the information supplied will remain unassimilated, and the tacit assumption that the possession of information is equivalent to the possession of real knowledge will delude both the teacher and the taught. it is possible, as one knows from experience, for a boy to have mastered all the arithmetical rules and tables with which his master has supplied him, and to have all his measures and weights at his fingers' ends, and yet to be so destitute of the arithmetical sense as to give without a moment's misgiving an entirely nonsensical answer to a simple arithmetical problem,--to say, for example, as i have known half a class of boys say, that a _room_ is _five shillings and sixpence wide_. such a boy, though his head may be stuffed with arithmetical information, has no knowledge of arithmetic. the gulf between memorised information and real knowledge becomes deep and wide in proportion as the subject matter is one which demands for its effective apprehension either intellectual effort or emotional insight. when both these variables are demanded, the gulf widens and deepens at a ratio which is "geometrical" rather than "arithmetical"; and when a high degree of each is demanded, the separation between knowledge and information is complete. the art master who should try to train the æsthetic sense of his pupils by making them learn by heart a string of propositions in which he had set out the artistic merits of sundry masterpieces of painting and sculpture, would expose himself to well-merited ridicule. so would the teacher who should try to train the scientific sense of his pupils by no other method than that of making them learn scientific formulæ by heart. what shall we say, then, of the teacher who tries to train the religious sense of his pupils by supplying them with rations of theological and theologico-historical information? whatever else we may mean by the word god, we mean what is infinitely great, and therefore beyond the reach of human thought, and we mean what is "most high," and therefore beyond the reach of the heart's desire. it follows that for knowledge of god the maximum of intellectual effort is needed, in conjunction with the maximum of emotional insight; and it follows further that the gulf between knowledge of god and information about god is unimaginably wide and deep,--so wide and so deep that out of our very attempts to span or fathom it the doubt at last arises whether the idea of acquiring information about god may not, after all, be the idlest of dreams. nevertheless the pastors and masters of our elementary schools are, with few exceptions, engaged, _sanctâ simplicitate_, in trying to make the children of england religious by cramming them with theological and theologico-historical information,--information as to the nature and attributes of god, as to the inner constitution of his being, as to his relations to man and the universe, as to his reported doings in the past. and in order that the giving, receiving, and retaining of this unverifiable information may be regarded by all concerned as the central feature of the scripture lesson, to the neglect of all the other aspects of religious education, the spiritual "powers that be" (and also, i am told, some of the local education authorities) have decreed that the schools under their jurisdiction shall be subjected to a yearly examination in "religious knowledge" at the hands of a "diocesan inspector," or some other official. to one who has convinced himself, as i have, that a right attitude towards the thing known is of the essence of knowledge, and that reverence and devotion--to go no further--are of the essence of a right attitude towards god, the idea of holding a formal examination in religious knowledge seems scarcely less ridiculous than the idea of holding a formal examination in unselfishness or brotherly love. the phrase "to examine in religious knowledge" has no meaning for me. the verb is out of all relation to its indirect object. what the diocesan inspector attempts to do cannot possibly be done. the test of religious knowledge is necessarily practical and vital, not formal and mechanical. even if i were to admit, for argument's sake, that the information with which we cram the elementary school child between . and . a.m. had been supernaturally communicated by god to man, my general position would remain unaffected. for experience has amply proved that a child--or, for the matter of that, a man--may know much theology and even be "mighty in the scriptures," and yet show by his conduct that his religious sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he has no knowledge of god; just as we have seen that a child may know by heart all arithmetical rules and tables, and yet show, by his helplessness in the face of a simple problem, that his arithmetical sense has not been awakened, and that therefore he has no knowledge of arithmetic. the time given to religious instruction is, to make a general statement, the only part of the session in which the children are being prepared for a formal _external_ examination. that being so, it is no matter for wonder that many of the glaring faults of method and organisation which the examination system fostered in our elementary schools between the years and , and which are now being abandoned, however slowly, reluctantly, and sporadically, during the hours of "secular" instruction, still find a refuge in the scripture lesson. overgrouping of classes, overcrowding of school-rooms, collective answering, collective repetition, scribbling on slates, and other faults with which inspectors were only too familiar in bygone days, are still rampant while religious instruction is being given.[ ] the diocesan inspector is an examiner, pure and simple, and is never present when the scripture lesson is in progress. whether he would find anything to criticise if he were present, may be doubted. i have frequently been told by teachers that it is his demand for a good volume of sound, when he is catechising the children, which keeps alive during the scripture lesson the pestilent habit of collective answering, in defiance of the obvious fact that what is everybody's business is nobody's business, and that an experienced bell-wether can easily give a lead to a whole class. an inconvenient train service may compel h.m. inspector to be present when religious instruction is being given; but though he may find much to deplore in what he sees and hears, he must abstain from criticism, and be content to play the _rôle_ of the man who looks over a hedge while a horse is being stolen. in most elementary schools religion is taught on an elaborate syllabus which is imposed on the teacher by an external authority, and which therefore tends to destroy his freedom and his interest in the work. it is not his business to take thought for the religious training of his pupils, to consider how the religious instinct may best be awakened in them, how their latent knowledge of god may best be evolved. his business is to prepare them for their yearly examination, to cram them with catechisms, hymns, texts, and collects, and with stories of various kinds,--stories from the folk-lore of israel, from the history of the jews, from the gospel narratives. to appeal to the reasoning powers of his pupils would be foreign to his aim, and foreign, let me say in passing, to the whole tradition of religious teaching in the west. the burden of preparing for an examination, whatever the examination may be, falls mainly on the faculty of memory. this is a rule to which there are very few exceptions. when the examination is one in "religious knowledge," the burden of preparing for it falls wholly on the faculty of memory. to appeal to the reasoning powers of the scholars might conceivably provoke them to ask inconvenient questions, and might even give rise to a spirit of rationalism in the school,--the spirit which "orthodoxy" has always regarded as the very antipole to religious faith. but what of the child's emotional faculties? will not the beauty of the gospel stories, will not the sublimity of the old testament poetry, make their own appeal to these? they might do so if they were allowed to exert their spiritual magnetism. but what chance have they? the chilling shadow of the impending examination falls upon them and cancels their educative influence. it is not because the gospel stories are full of beauty and spiritual meaning that the child has to learn them, but because he will be questioned on them by the diocesan inspector. it is not because certain passages from the old testament are poetry of a high order that the child commits them to memory, but because he may have to repeat them to the diocesan inspector. we cannot serve god and mammon,--the god of poetry and the inward life, the mammon of outward results. the thing is not to be done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud. the compulsory preparation of the plays of shakespeare and other literary masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy, or the college student, a permanent distaste for english literature. the study of the ancient classics for the oxford "schools" or the cambridge "tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a permanent distaste for the literatures of greece and rome. does it not follow _a fortiori_ that to cram a young child, for the purposes of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the idyllic stories of the new testament and the poetic beauties of the old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of the bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such? i do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. there are teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. as i write, i recall two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening their religious instincts into vital activity. the first was a schoolmaster,--a "strong churchman," and a sincerely religious man. the second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the evolution of these to foster the growth of his religious sense. i can never feel quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet healthily, religious her children were. if she did not, i can but apply to her what diderot said to david the painter, when the latter confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "quoi! c'est à votre insu? c'est encore mieux." to make children religious without intending to do so is a profoundly significant achievement, for it means that the fatal distinction between religious and secular education has been "utterly abolished and destroyed." both these teachers fell, as it happened, under the ban of the diocesan inspector's displeasure. the schoolmaster took over a school which was not only inefficient in the eyes of the education department, in respect of instruction and discipline, but was also tainted in its upper classes with moral depravity. he speedily restored it to efficiency, and reformed its moral tone. in accomplishing these salutary changes, he relied mainly on an appeal which he made, in all manly sincerity, to the religious sense of the older boys. the faith in human nature which prompted him to make this appeal was justified by the response which it evoked. in less than a year the school was transformed beyond recognition. in less than two years it was one of the best in its county; indeed in respect of moral tone and religious atmosphere it was perhaps _the_ best. meanwhile the work of cramming the children for the yearly diocesan examination must have fallen into arrears; for the school, which under my friend's incompetent predecessor had always been classed as "excellent," sank to the level of "good" in the year after he left, and in the following year to the level of "fair." any one who has any acquaintance with the reports of the diocesan inspector knows that the summary mark "fair," when employed by him, is equivalent to utter damnation. the schoolmistress always had a horror of formal teaching, and a special horror of cramming young children for formal examinations; and i can only wonder that her downfall was so long delayed. sooner or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her work was bound to incur the condemnation of the diocesan inspector. nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised how lavish of praise and chary of blame the diocesan inspector usually is, i am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received. i am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient, from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the school a strongly adverse report. immorality and irreligiousness as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious orthodoxy. what it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and religious in any but the "orthodox" ways. apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely, from the daily scripture lesson. but the net result of giving formal and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of england to a point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the nation. my schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious (in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious instruction, as given in the normal church of england school (his experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising the people of england,--paganising them because it presents religion to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste. the boy who, having attended two thousand scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: "if this is religion, i will have no more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. he is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands. that england is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the sincere conviction of many earnest christians. why this should be so, they cannot understand. in their desire to account for so distressing a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the masses. if the churches could have their way, they would doubtless try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to religious instruction, by making the diocesan inspector's visit a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the children for it with redoubled energy. in their refusal to reckon with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their religion and their philosophy. but it is possible to buy consistency at too high a price. the laws and tendencies of nature are what they are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. to those who refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.[ ] when the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious education of the child is over for the day, and his secular instruction has begun. that the religious education of the child should be supposed to end when the scripture lesson is over, is the last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education, religious and secular, has been based. after scripture comes as a rule arithmetic. during the former lesson the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen, to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. during the latter, he not infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. in each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. the conditions under which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. if we are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and trace the steps by which the "education department" forced elementary education in england into the grooves in which, in many schools, it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape. in the royal commission (under the duke of newcastle as chairman), which had been appointed in in order to inquire into "the state of popular education in england, and as to the measures required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people," issued its report, in which it recommended _inter alia_ that the grants paid to elementary schools should be expressly apportioned on the examination of individual children. this recommendation was carried into effect in the lowe revised code of ; and from that date till a considerable part of the grant received by each school was paid on the results of a yearly examination held by h.m. inspector on an elaborate syllabus, formulated by the department and binding on all schools alike. on the official report which followed this examination depended the reputation and financial prosperity of the school, and the reputation and financial prosperity of the teacher.[ ] the consequent pressure on the teacher to exert himself was well-nigh irresistible; and he had no choice but to transmit that pressure to his subordinates and his pupils. the result was that in those days the average school was a hive of industry. but it was also a hive of misdirected energy. the state, in prescribing a syllabus which was to be followed, in all the subjects of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence. it did all his thinking for the teacher. it told him in precise detail what he was to do each year in each "standard," how he was to handle each subject, and how far he was to go in it; what width of ground he was to cover; what amount of knowledge, what degree of accuracy was required for a "pass," in other words it provided him with his ideals, his general conceptions, his more immediate aims, his schemes of work; and if it did not control his methods in all their details, it gave him (by implication) hints and suggestions with regard to these on which he was not slow to act; for it told him that the work done in each class and each subject would be tested at the end of each year by a careful examination of each individual child; and it was inevitable that in his endeavour to adapt his teaching to the type of question which his experience of the yearly examination led him to expect, he should gradually deliver himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the officials of the department,--the officials at whitehall who framed the yearly syllabus, and the officials in the various districts who examined on it. what the department did to the teacher, it compelled him to do to the child. the teacher who is the slave of another's will cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils the slaves of his own will. the teacher who has been deprived by his superiors of freedom, initiative, and responsibility, cannot carry out his instructions except by depriving his pupils of the same vital qualities. the teacher who, in response to the deadly pressure of a cast-iron system, has become a creature of habit and routine, cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils as helpless and as puppet-like as himself. but it is not only because mechanical obedience is fatal, in the long run, to mental and spiritual growth, that the regulation of elementary or any other grade of education by a uniform syllabus is to be deprecated. it is also because a uniform syllabus is, in the nature of things, a bad syllabus, and because the degree of its badness varies directly with the area of the sphere of educational activity that comes under its control. it is easy for us of the twentieth century to laugh at the syllabuses which the department issued, without misgiving, year after year, in the latter half of the nineteenth. we were all groping in the dark in those days; and our whole attitude towards education was so fundamentally wrong that the absurdities of the yearly syllabus were merely so much by-play in the evolution of a drama which was a grotesque blend of tragedy and farce. but let us of the enlightened twentieth century try our hands at constructing a syllabus on which all the elementary schools of england are to be prepared for a yearly examination, and see if we can improve appreciably on the work of our predecessors. some improvement there would certainly be, but it would not amount to very much. were the "board" to re-institute payment by results, and were they, with this end in view, to entrust the drafting of schemes of work in the various subjects to a committee of the wisest and most experienced educationalists in england, the resultant syllabus would be a dismal failure. for in framing their schemes these wise and experienced educationalists would find themselves compelled to take account of the lowest rather than of the highest level of actual educational achievement. what is exceptional and experimental cannot possibly find a place in a syllabus which is to bind all schools and all teachers alike, and which must therefore be so framed that the least capable teacher, working under the least favourable conditions, may hope, when his pupils are examined on it, to achieve with decent industry a decent modicum of success. under the control of a uniform syllabus, the schools which are now specialising and experimenting, and so giving a lead to the rest, would have to abandon whatever was interesting in their respective curricula, and fall into line with the average school; while, with the consequent lowering of the current _ideal_ of efficiency, the level of the average school would steadily fall. a uniform syllabus is a bad syllabus, for this if for no other reason, that it is compelled to idealise the average; and that, inasmuch as education, so far as it is a living system, grows by means of its "leaders," the idealisation of the average is necessarily fatal to educational growth and therefore to educational life. it was preordained, then, that the syllabuses which the department issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have few merits and many defects. yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle, they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the teachers in england had to work by them would have made them potent agencies for evil. to be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for a teacher, and a misfortune for the school that he teaches. to be in bondage to a syllabus which is binding on all schools alike, is a graver misfortune. to be in bondage to a bad syllabus which is binding on all schools alike, is of all misfortunes the gravest. or if there is a graver, it is the fate that befell the teachers of england under the old _régime_,--the fate of being in bondage to a syllabus which was bad both because it had to come down to the level of the least fortunate school and the least capable teacher, and also because it was the outcome of ignorance, inexperience, and bureaucratic self-satisfaction. of the evils that are inherent in the examination system as such--of its tendency to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties, to externalise what is inward, to materialise what is spiritual, to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception--i have already spoken at some length. in the days of payment by results various circumstances conspired to raise those evil tendencies to the highest imaginable "power." when inspectors ceased to examine (in the stricter sense of the word) they realised what infinite mischief the yearly examination had done. the children, the majority of whom were examined in reading and dictation out of their own reading-books (two or three in number, as the case might be), were drilled in the contents of those books until they knew them almost by heart. in arithmetic they worked abstract sums, in obedience to formal rules, day after day, and month after month; and they were put up to various tricks and dodges which would, it was hoped, enable them to know by what precise rules the various questions on the arithmetic cards were to be answered. they learned a few lines of poetry by heart, and committed all the "meanings and allusions" to memory, with the probable result--so sickening must the process have been--that they hated poetry for the rest of their lives. in geography, history, and grammar they were the victims of unintelligent oral cram, which they were compelled, under pains and penalties, to take in and retain till the examination day was over, their ability to disgorge it on occasion being periodically tested by the teacher. and so with the other subjects. not a thought was given, except in a small minority of the schools, to the real training of the child, to the fostering of his mental (and other) growth. to get him through the yearly examination by hook or by crook was the one concern of the teacher. as profound distrust of the teacher was the basis of the policy of the department, so profound distrust of the child was the basis of the policy of the teacher. to leave the child to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself, to think out anything for himself, would have been regarded as a proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher, and would have led to results which, from the "percentage" point of view, would probably have been disastrous. there were few inspectors who were not duly impressed from onwards by the gravity of the evils that inspection, as distinguished from mere examination, revealed to them; but it may be doubted if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,--as symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher and the child, of the gradual substitution in the elementary school of machinery for life. for us of the twentieth century who know enough about education to be aware of the shallowness of our knowledge of it, and of the imperfection of the existing educational systems of our country, it may be difficult to realise that in the years when things were at their worst, at any rate in the field of elementary education, the nation in general and the "department" in particular were well content that things should remain as they were,--well content that the elementary school should be, not a nursery of growing seedlings and saplings, but a decently efficient mill, and that year after year this mill should keep on grinding out its dreary and meaningless "results." but in truth that ignorant optimism, that cheap content with the actual, was a sure proof that things _were_ at their worst;--for "when we in our viciousness grow hard, (o misery on't) the wise gods seal our eyes in our own filth; drop our clear judgments: make us adore our errors"; and the multiform discontent with education in its present stage of development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable to the smooth working of our educational machinery, has the merit of being a healthy and hopeful symptom. but bad as things were in those days, there was at least one redeeming feature. the children were compelled to _work_, to exert themselves, to "put their backs into it." the need for this was obvious. the industry of the child meant so much professional reputation and, in the last resort, so much bread and butter to his teacher. it is true that the child was not allowed to do anything by or for himself; but it is equally true that he had to do pretty strenuously whatever task was set him. he had to get up his two (or three) "readers" so thoroughly that he could be depended upon to pass both the reading and the dictation test with success. he had to work his abstract sums in arithmetic correctly. he had to take in and remember the historical and geographical information with which he had been crammed. and so forth. there must be no shirking, no slacking on his part. his teachers worked hard, though "not according to knowledge"; and he must do the same. active, in the higher sense of the word, he was never allowed to be; but he had to be actively receptive, strenuously automatic, or his teacher would know the reason why. such was the old _régime_. its defects were so grave and so vital that, now that it has become discredited (in theory, if not in practice), we can but wonder how it endured for so long. as an ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child, and deadening all his higher faculties, it has never had, and i hope will never have, a rival. far from fostering the growth of those great expansive instincts--sympathetic, æsthetic, and scientific--which nature has implanted in every child, it set itself to extirpate them, one and all, with ruthless pertinacity. as a partial compensation for this work of wanton destruction, it made the child blindly obedient, mechanically industrious, and (within very narrow limits) accurate and thorough. i have described it at some length because i see clearly that no one who does not realise what the elementary school used to be, in the days of its sojourn in the land of bondage, can even begin to understand why it is what it is to-day. having for thirty-three years deprived the teachers of almost every vestige of freedom, the department suddenly reversed its policy and gave them in generous measure the boon which it had so long withheld. whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be doubted. what is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage. a man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad daylight. this is what was done in to the teachers of england, and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind ever since. for thirty-three years they had been treated as machines, and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. for thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him freedom and responsibility,--words which for many of them had well-nigh lost their meaning. to comply with these unreasonable demands was beyond their power. the grooves into which they had been forced were far too deep for them. the routine to which they had become accustomed had far too strong a hold on them. the one change which they could make was to relax their own severe pressure on the child. this they did, perhaps without intending to do it. indeed, now that there was no external examination to look forward to, the pressure on the child may be said to have automatically relaxed itself. what happened--i will not say in all schools, but in far too many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and less industrious. not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a time when there was nothing to take its place. exercise is in itself a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational; but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong external stimulus. under the old examination system an adequate stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of competition and fear (chiefly the latter). when the examination system was abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. had it then been possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before. but it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the department to expect him to do so. apart from an honourable minority, who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. the younger ones had been through the mill themselves, first in the elementary school, then in the pupil-teacher centre, and then in the training college (both the latter having been in too many cases cramming establishments like the elementary school); and when they went back to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and carrying out his wishes. if a young teacher, fresh from an exceptionally enlightened training college, became an assistant under an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the staff. but it was not only because the teachers of england had got accustomed to the land of bondage, that they shrank from entering the promised land. there was, and still is, another and a stronger reason. wherever the teacher looks, he sees that the examination system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education; and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has been exempted (in part at least) from its pressure. the board of education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as uncertificated assistants, for the teacher's certificate. they expect head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the classes in their schools. they allow local authorities to examine children in their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to hold examinations for county scholarships, for which children from elementary schools are eligible. admission to secondary schools of all grades depends on success in passing entrance examinations. so does admission to the various colleges and universities. in the schools which prepare little boys for the "great public schools," the whole scheme of education is dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. in the "great public schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible at the oxford and cambridge colleges. in the universities all the undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," civil service examinations, and the like. officers in the army and navy have never done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which can be entered through any door but that of a public examination. wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to produce results which an outside examiner would accept as satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or not. the air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value. how can we expect the teacher to look inward when all the conditions of his existence, not as a teacher only but also as a citizen and a man, conspire to make him look outward? but if the fates are against his looking inward, to what purpose has he been emancipated from the direct control of a system which had at least the merit of being in line with all the central tendencies of western civilisation? how does it profit him to be free if, under the pressure of those tendencies, the chief use that he makes of his freedom is to grind out from his pupils results akin to those which were asked for in the days of schedules and percentages? freedom was given him in order that he might be free to take thought for the vital welfare of his pupils. or, if freedom was not given to him for that purpose, it were better that it had been withheld from him until those who were able to give or withhold it had formed a juster conception of its meaning. the truth is that the exemption of the elementary school, and of it alone among schools, from the direct pressure of the examination system, is an isolated and audacious experiment, which is carried on under conditions so unfavourable to its success that nothing but a high degree of intelligence and moral courage (not to speak of originality) on the part of the teacher can make it succeed. can we wonder that in many cases the experiment has proved a failure? at the end of the previous chapter i asked myself whether the education that was given in the ordinary elementary school tended to foster self-expression on the part of the child. we can now see what the answer to this question is likely to be. for a third of a century--from to --self-expression on the part of the child may be said to have been formally prohibited by all who were responsible for the elementary education of the children of england, and also to have been prohibited _de facto_ by all the unformulated conditions under which the elementary school was conducted. in the formal prohibition of self-expression ceased, but the _de facto_ prohibition of it in the ordinary school is scarcely less effective to-day than it was in the darkest days of the old _régime_. for "the evil that men do lives after them," and the old _régime_, though nominally abrogated, overshadows us still. when i say this i do not merely mean that many teachers who were brought up under the old _régime_ have been unable to emancipate themselves from its influence. i mean that the old _régime_ was itself the outcome and expression of traditional tendencies which are of the essence of western civilisation, of ways of thinking and acting to which we are all habituated from our earliest days, and that these tendencies and these ways of thinking and acting overshadow us still. the formal abrogation of the old _régime_ counts for little so long as the examination system, with its demand for visible and measurable results and its implicit invitation to cram and cheat, is allowed to cast its deadly shadow on education as such,--and so long as the whole system on which the young of all classes and grades are educated is favourable to self-deception on the part of the teacher and fatal to sincerity on the part of the child. constrained by every influence that is brought to bear upon him to judge according to the appearance of things, the teacher can ill afford to judge righteous judgment,--can ill afford to regard what is outward and visible as the symbol of what is inward and spiritual, can ill afford to think of the work done by the child except as a thing to be weighed in an examiner's balance or measured by an examiner's rule. things being as they are in the various grades of education and in the various strata of social life, it is inevitable that the education given in many of our elementary schools should be based, in the main, on complete distrust of the child. in such schools, whatever else the child may be allowed to do, he must not be allowed to do anything by or for himself. he must not express what he really feels and sees; for if he does, the results will probably fall short of the standard of neatness, cleanness, and correctness which an examiner might expect the school to reach. at any rate, the experiment is much too risky to be tried. in the lower classes the results produced would certainly be rough, imperfect, untidy. therefore self-expression must not be permitted in that part of the school. and if not there, it must not be permitted anywhere, for the longer it is delayed the greater will be the difficulty of starting it and the greater the attendant risk. the child must not express what he really perceives; and as genuine perception forces for itself the outlet of genuine expression, he must not be allowed to exercise his perceptive faculties. instead of seeing things for himself, he must see what his teacher directs him to see, he must feel what his teacher directs him to feel, he must think what his teacher directs him to think, and so on. but to forbid a child to use his own perceptive faculties is to arrest the whole process of his growth. i will now go back to the _arithmetic_ lesson. during the years in which the children in elementary schools were examined individually in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the one virtue which was inculcated while the arithmetic lesson was in progress was that of obedience to the formulated rule. on the yearly examination day it was customary to give each child four questions in arithmetic, of which only one was a "problem." two sums correctly worked secured a "pass"; and it was therefore possible for the child to achieve salvation in arithmetic by blindly obeying the various rules with which his teacher had equipped him. he had, indeed, to decide for himself in each case which rule was to be followed; but he did this (in most schools), not by thinking the matter out, but by following certain by-rules given him by his teacher, which were based on a careful study of the wording of the questions set by the inspector, and which held good as long as that wording remained unchanged. for example, if a subtraction sum was to be dictated to "standard ii," the child was taught that the number which was given out first was to be placed in the upper line, and that the number which came next was to be subtracted from this. he was not taught that the lesser of the two numbers was always to be subtracted from the larger; for in order to apply that principle he would have had to decide for himself which was the larger of the two numbers, and the consequent mental effort was one which his teacher could not trust him to make. it is true that in his desire to save the child from the dire necessity of thinking, the teacher ran the risk of being discomfited by a sudden change of procedure on the part of an inspector. the inspector, for example, who, having been accustomed to say "from take ," chose to say, for a change, "take from ," would cause widespread havoc in the first two or three schools that were the victims of his unlooked-for experiment. but the risks which the teacher ran who taught his pupils to rely on trickery rather than thought were worth running; for the inspectors, like the teachers and the children, were ever tending to become creatures of routine, and the vagaries of those who had the reputation of being tiresomely versatile could be provided against--largely, if not wholly--by increased ingenuity on the part of the teacher, and increased attention to tricky by-rules on the part of the child. the number of schools in which arithmetic is intelligently and even practically taught is undoubtedly much larger than it was in the days of payment by results; but there are still thousands of schools in which obedience to the rule for its own sake is the basis of all instruction in arithmetic. now to live habitually by rule instead of by thought is necessarily fatal, in every field of action, to the development of that _sense_ or perceptive faculty, on which right action ultimately depends. following his reputed guide blindly, mechanically, and with whole-hearted devotion, the votary of the rule never allows his intuition, his faculty of direct perception and subconscious judgment, to play even for a moment round the matters on which he is engaged; and the result is that the faculty in question is not merely prevented from growing, but is at last actually blighted in the bud. this is but another way of saying what i have already insisted upon,--that to forbid self-expression on the part of the child is to starve his perceptive faculties into non-existence. there is no folly perpetrated in the elementary school of to-day for which there are not authoritative precedents to be found in the conduct of one or other of the two great schools which the god of western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of man. and it is in that special development of the legal school which is known as pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools. the ultra-legalism of the pharisee in the days of christ finds its exact counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and which are still widely prevalent. in the one case there was, in the other case there is, an entire inability on the part of the zealous votary of the rule to estimate the intrinsic value of the results of his blind and unintelligent action. the sense of humour, which is a necessary element in every other healthy sense, and which so often keeps us from going astray, by suddenly revealing to us the inherent absurdity of our proposed action, is one of the first faculties to succumb to the blighting influence of an ultra-legal conception of life. as an example of the unwavering seriousness of the pharisee in the presence of what was intrinsically ridiculous, let us take his attitude towards the problem of keeping food warm for the sabbath day. "according to exodus xvi. , it was forbidden to bake and to boil on the sabbath. hence the food, which it was desired to eat hot on the sabbath, was to be prepared before its commencement, and kept warm by artificial means. in doing this, however, care must be taken that the existing heat was not increased, which would have been 'boiling.' hence the food must be put only into such substances as would maintain its heat, not into such as might possibly increase it. 'food to be kept warm for the sabbath must not be put into oil-dregs, manure, salt, chalk, or sand, whether moist or dry, nor into straw, grape-skins, flock, or vegetables, if these are damp, though it may if they are dry. it may, however, be put into clothes, amidst fruits, pigeons' feathers, and flax tow. r. jehudah declares flax tow unallowable and permits only coarse tow.'"[ ] following his rule out, step by step, with unflinching loyalty, into these ridiculous consequences, the pharisee had entirely lost the power of seeing that they were ridiculous, and was well content to believe, with jehudah, that the difference between keeping food warm in coarse tow and in flax tow was the difference between life and death. this _reductio ad absurdum_ of legalism is exactly paralleled, in many of our elementary schools, in the answers to arithmetical questions given by the children. the "fifth standard" boys who told their inspector, as an answer to an easy problem, that a given room was five shillings and sixpence wide, had followed out their rule--they had unfortunately got hold of a wrong rule--step by step, till it led them to a conclusion, the intrinsic absurdity of which they were one and all unable to see.[ ] there are many elementary schools in england in which a majority of the answers given to quite easy problems would certainly be wrong, and a respectable minority of them ludicrously wrong. nor is this to be wondered at; for though the types of problems that can be set in elementary schools are not numerous, to provide his pupils with the by-rules which shall enable them in all, or even in most cases, to determine which of the recognised rules are appropriate to the given situation, passes the wit of the teacher. but if the helplessness of so many elementary scholars in the face of an arithmetical problem is lamentable, still more lamentable is the fact that the scholar is seldom met with who, having given an entirely wrong answer to an easy problem, is able to see for himself that, whatever the right answer may be, the answer given is and must be wrong. so fatal to the development of the arithmetical sense is the current worship of the rule for its own sake, and so deadly a narcotic is the conventional arithmetic lesson to all who take part in it! it is not in the arithmetic lesson, then, that provision is ordinarily made for the development of a sense, or perceptive faculty, through the medium of self-expression on the part of the child. on the contrary, the very _raison d'être_ of the arithmetic lesson, as it is still given in many schools, is to destroy the arithmetical sense, and make the child an inefficient calculating machine, which, even when working, is too often inaccurate and clumsy, and which the slightest change of environment throws at once and completely out of gear. after the arithmetical lesson come, as a rule, lessons in "_reading_" and "_writing_"--in reading in some classes, in writing in others. the first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress, is that the children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word. they are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. they are standing up, one by one, even in the highest class of all, and reading aloud to their teacher. why are they doing this? is it in order that their teacher may show them how to master the more difficult words in their reading lesson? this may be the reason, in some schools; but there are others, perhaps a majority, in which the teacher tells his pupils the words that puzzle them instead of helping them to make them out for themselves. besides, if reading were properly taught in the lower classes, the children in the upper classes would surely be able to master unaided the difficulties that might confront them. or is it in order that elocution may be cultivated? but elocution is seldom, if ever, cultivated in the ordinary elementary school, the veriest mumbling on the part of the child being accepted by his teacher (who follows him with an open book in his hand), provided that he can read correctly and with some attempt at "phrasing." indeed, the indistinct utterance of so many school children may be attributed to the fact that they have read aloud to their teachers for many years, and that during the whole of that time a very low standard of distinctness has been accepted as satisfactory. or is it in order that the teacher may help his pupils to understand what they are reading? this may be one of his reasons for hearing them read aloud; but so far as the higher classes are concerned it is a bad reason, for the older the child the more imperative is it that he should try to make out for himself the meaning of what he reads; and the teacher who spoon-feeds his pupils during the reading lesson is doing his best to make them incapable of digesting the contents of books for themselves. no, there are two chief reasons why the teacher makes children of eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen years of age read aloud to him as if they were children of six or seven. the first reason is that the unemancipated teacher instinctively does to-day what he did twenty years ago, and that twenty years ago, when children were examined in reading from their own books, the teacher heard them read aloud, day after day in order that he might make sure that they knew their books well enough to pass the inspector's test. the second reason, which is wider than the first, and may be said to include and account for it, is that the reading-aloud lesson fits in with the whole system of western education, being the outcome and expression of that complete distrust of the child which is, and always has been, characteristic of the popular religion and philosophy of the west. if you ask the teacher why the children, even in the highest classes, are never allowed to work at such subjects as history and geography by themselves, he will tell you frankly that he cannot trust them to do so, that they do not know how to use a book. and he cannot see that in giving this excuse he is condemning himself, and making open confession of the worthlessness of the training that he has given to his pupils. whatever else the reading-aloud lesson may be, it is a dismal waste of time. child after child stands up, reads for a minute or so, and then sits down, remaining idle and inert (except when an occasional question is addressed to him) for the rest of the time occupied by the so-called lesson. in this, as in most oral lessons, the elementary school child passes much of his time in a state which is neither activity nor rest,--a state of enforced inertness combined with unnatural and unceasing strain. activity is good for the child, and rest, which, is the complement of activity, is good for the child; but the combination of inertness with strain is good for neither his body nor his mind. indeed, it may be doubted if there is any state of mind and body which is so uneducational as this, or so unfavourable to healthy growth. but the main objection to the reading-aloud lesson is, i repeat, that while it is going on the children are not reading at all, in the proper sense of the word, not attacking the book, not enjoying it, not extracting the honey from it. and the consequences of the inability to read which is thus engendered are far-reaching and disastrous. the power to read is a key which unlocks many doors. one of the most important of these doors--perhaps, from the strictly scholastic point of view, _the_ most important--is the door of study. the child who cannot read to himself cannot study a book, cannot master its contents. it is because the elementary school child cannot be trusted to do any independent study, that the oral lesson, or lecture, with its futile expenditure of "chalk and talk," is so prominent a feature in the work of the elementary school. and it is because the oral lesson necessarily counts for so much, that the over-grouping of classes, with all its attendant evils, is so widely practised. the grouping together of "standards" v, vi, and vii, with the result that the children who go through all those standards are compelled to waste the last two years of their school life, is a practice which is almost universal in elementary schools of a certain size. and there are few schools of that size in which those standards could not be broken up into two, if not three, independent classes, if the children, whose ages range as a rule between eleven and fourteen, could be trusted to work by themselves. in many cases this over-grouping is wholly inexcusable, the headmaster having no class of his own to teach, and being therefore free to do what obviously ought to be done,--to separate the older and more advanced children from the rest of the top class, and form them into a separate class (a real top class) for independent study and self-education under his direction and supervision. but so strong is the force of habit, and so deeply rooted in the mind of the teacher is distrust of the child, that it is rare to find the head teacher to whom the idea of breaking up an over-grouped top class has suggested itself as practicable, or even as intrinsically desirable. we owe it, then, to the reading-aloud fetich that in many of our schools the children are compelled to spend the last two (or even three) years of their school life--the most important years of all from the point of view of their preparation for the battle of life--in marking time, in staying where they were. it is to those years of enforced stagnation that the reluctance of the ex-elementary scholar to go on with his education is largely due; for no one can keep on moving who is not already on the move, and the desire to continue education is scarcely to be looked for in one who has been given to understand that his education has come to an end. but there is another and a shorter cut from the conventional reading lesson to the early extinction of the child's educational career. the child who leaves school without having learned how to use a book, will find that the one door through which access is gained to most of the halls of learning--the door of independent study--is for ever slammed in his face. not that he will seriously try to open it; for with the ability to read the desire to read will have aborted. the distrust of the child, on which western education is based, is a bottomless gulf in which educational effort, whatever form it may take or in whatever quarter it may originate, is for the most part swallowed up and made as though it had not been. the child who leaves school at the age of fourteen will have attended some , or , reading lessons in the course of his school life. from these, in far too many cases, he will have carried nothing away but the ability to stumble with tolerable correctness through printed matter of moderate difficulty. he will not have carried away from them either the power or the desire to read. in the days of percentages, instruction in "_writing_" below standard v was entirely confined to handwriting and spelling; and even in the higher standards the teacher thought more about handwriting and spelling than any other aspect of this composite subject. now handwriting and spelling are merely means to an end,--the end of making clear to the reader the words that have been committed to paper by the writer. but it is the choice rather than the setting out of words that really matters, and the name that we give to the choosing of words is composition. the excessive regard that has always been paid in our elementary schools to neat handwriting and correct spelling is characteristic of the whole western attitude towards education. no "results" are more easily or more accurately appraised than these, and it follows that no "results" are more highly esteemed by the unenlightened teacher. for wherever the outward standard of reality has established itself at the expense of the inward, the ease with which worth (or what passes for such) can be measured is ever tending to become in itself the chief, if not the sole, measure of worth. and in proportion as we tend to value the results of education for their measureableness, so we tend to undervalue and at last to ignore those results which are too intrinsically valuable to be measured. * * * * * hence the neglect of _composition_ in so many elementary schools. i mean by composition the sincere expression in language of the child's genuine thoughts and feelings. the effort to "compose," whether orally or on paper, is one of the most educational of all efforts; for language is at once the most readily available and the most subtle and sympathetic of all media of expression; and the effort to express himself in it tends, in proportion as it is sincere and strong, to give breadth, depth, and complexity to the child's thoughts and feelings, and through the development of these to weave his experiences into the tissue of his life. but sincerity of expression is not easily measured, and the true value of the thoughts and feelings that are struggling to express themselves in a child's composition is beyond the reach of any rule or scale; whereas neatness of handwriting and correctness of spelling are, as we have seen, features which appeal even to the carelessly observant eye. knowing this, the teacher takes care that the exercise-books of his pupils shall be filled with neat and accurate composition exercises, and that some of the neatest and most accurate of these shall be exhibited on the walls of his school. the visitor whose eye ranges over these exercises and goes no further may be excused if he forms a highly favourable opinion of the school which can produce such seemingly excellent work. but let him spend a morning in the school, and see how these "results" have been produced. he will probably change his mind as to their value. the teaching of composition in the ordinary elementary school is too often fraudulent and futile. indeed, there is no lesson in which the teacher's traditional distrust of the child goes further than in this. in the lower classes the child is taught how to construct simple sentences (as if he had never made one in the previous course of his life), and he is not trusted to do more than this. he listens to a so-called object lesson, and when it is over he is told to write a few simple sentences about the cow or the horse, or whatever the subject of the lesson may have been; and lest his memory (the only faculty which he is allowed to exercise) should fail him, the chief landmarks of the lesson are placed before him on the blackboard. this string of simple sentences reproduced from memory passes muster as composition. and yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex sentences with freedom and skill. in the upper classes the composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere as in the lower. sometimes a given subject is worked out by the teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill one page of an ordinary exercise book. then the whole essay (if one must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and carefully, by every child in the class; and the result is shown to the inspector as original composition. at other times or in other schools the class teacher does not go quite so far as this. he contents himself with talking the subject over with the class, and then writing a series of headings[ ] on the blackboard. or, again, trusting to the child's red-hot memory, he will allow him to write out what he remembers of an object-lesson, or a history lesson, or whatever it may be. composition exercises which are the genuine expression of genuine perception, which have behind them what the child has experienced, what he has felt or thought, what he has read, what he has studied, are the exception rather than the rule; for in such exercises there would probably be faults of spelling, faults of grammar, colloquialisms, careless writing (due to the child's eagerness), and so forth; and the work would therefore be unsatisfactory from the showman's point of view. the child's natural capacity for expressing himself in language is systematically starved in order that outward and visible results, results which will win approval from those who judge according to the appearance of things, may be duly produced. the case of oral composition in the unemancipated elementary school is even more hopeless than that of written composition. the latter has a time set apart for it on the time-table, and is at any rate supposed to be taught. the former is wholly ignored. many teachers seem to have entirely forgotten that the desire and the ability to talk are part of the normal equipment of every healthy child. there was, indeed, a time when children were taught to answer questions in complete sentences even when one-word answers would have amply sufficed. for example, when a child was asked how many pence there were in a shilling, he was expected to answer, "there are twelve pence in a shilling"; when he was asked what was the colour of snow, he was expected to answer, "the colour of snow is white "; and so on. and both he and his teacher flattered themselves that this waste of words was oral composition! in point of fact the sentence in each of these cases was worth no more, as an effort of self-expression, than its one important word--_twelve_, _white_, or whatever it might be; and the child, who was allowed to think that he had produced a real sentence, had in effect done no more than envelop one real word in a hollow formula. there are still many schools in which this ridiculous practice lingers, and in which it constitutes the only attempt at oral composition that the child is allowed to make. where it has died out the idea of teaching oral composition has too often died with it. young children are, as a rule, voluble talkers, with a considerable command of language. but it not infrequently happens that at the close of his school life the once talkative child has lapsed into a state of sullen taciturnity. in common with other vital faculties, his power of expressing himself in speech has withered in the repressive atmosphere to which he has so long been exposed. it is in the oral lesson that one would expect oral composition to be taught or at any rate practised. in such subjects as _history_, _geography_, _english_, _elementary science_, the teaching in most elementary schools is mainly, if not wholly, oral. in the days of payment by results separate and variable grants were given for these subjects; and which, if either, of two grants should be recommended depended in each case on the result of an oral examination conducted by h.m. inspector, the employment of a written test in any class being strictly forbidden by "my lords." in this examination proof of the possession of information was all that the inspector could demand; and the quickest and easiest way of obtaining such proof was to ask the class questions which could be briefly answered by the children individually. questions which were designed to test intelligence might, of course, have been asked, and in some districts were freely asked; but to have reduced the grant because the children failed to answer these would have provoked an outcry; while, had the inspector asked questions which demanded long answers, he would, in the limited time at his command, have given but few children the chance of showing that they had been duly prepared for the examination. the consequence was that the oral lesson on a "class subject" usually took the form of stuffing the children with pellets of appropriate information, some of which they would, in all probability, have the opportunity of disgorging when they were questioned by the inspector on the yearly "parade day." not only, then, did the official examination in history, geography and elementary science direct the teaching of these subjects into channels in which the golden opportunities that they offer for the practice of written composition were perforce thrown away, but also the examination was so framed that even the practice of oral composition, in preparation for it, was actively discouraged. and the neglect of composition acted disastrously on the teaching of the subjects in question; for wherever self-expression on the part of the child is forbidden, the appropriate "sense," or perceptive faculty, cannot possibly evolve itself,--perception and expression being, as we have elsewhere seen, the very life and soul of each other; and in the absence (to take pertinent examples) of the historical or the geographical sense, the possession of historical or geographical information cannot possibly be converted into knowledge of history or geography. the prompt, accurate, and general answering which was rewarded by the award of the higher grants for "class subjects" was, in nine cases out of ten, the outcome of assiduous and unintelligent cram,--a mode of preparation for which the policy of the education department was mainly responsible. but when separate grants ceased to be paid for class subjects, were not the teachers free to teach them by rational methods? no doubt they were--in theory. in point of fact they were in bondage to the strongest of all constraining influences,--the force of inveterate habit. for twenty years they had taught the class subjects by the one safe method of vigorous oral cram. this method had answered their purpose, and it was but natural that they should continue to teach by it. what happened, when separate grants ceased to be paid, was that the need for responsiveness on the part of the scholar gradually lessened. the pellets of information were still imparted, but it became less and less incumbent upon the teacher to see that his pupils were ready to disgorge them at a moment's notice. and so the cramming lesson gradually transformed itself into a _lecture_, in which the teacher did all or nearly all the talking, while the children sat still and listened or pretended to listen, an occasional yawn giving open proof of the boredom from which most of them were suffering. that is the type of oral lesson which is most common at the present day. "results" in history, geography, nature study and english are seldom asked for by the inspector; and the teacher takes but little trouble to produce them. but his distrust of the child is as firmly rooted as ever, and his unwillingness to allow the child to work by or for himself is as strong as it ever was. the consequence is that there are many schools in which the teacher now does everything during the oral lesson, while the child does as nearly as possible nothing. formerly the child was at any rate allowed (or rather required) to be actively receptive. now he is seldom allowed to do anything more active than to yawn. and all the time he is secretly longing to energise--to do something with himself--to use his mental, if not his physical faculties--to work, if not to play. one might have thought that in the history and geography lessons, if in no other, "standards vi" and "vii" (where the numbers were too small to admit of these standards having a teacher to themselves) would be separated from "standard v," and allowed to work out their own salvation by studying suitable text-books under proper supervision and guidance. but no; the force of habit is too strong for the machine-made teacher. twenty years ago history and geography were "class subjects," and as such were taught orally to whole classes of children. and they must still be taught as "class subjects," even if this should involve the "sixth" and "seventh standards" being brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level of the "fifth,"--kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than that of being the passive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk," and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved into inanition. i will deal with one more "secular" subject before i bring this sketch to a close. there are still many schools in which the hours that are set apart for _drawing_ are devoted in large measure to the slavish reproduction of flat copies. a picture of some familiar object--outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not infrequently highly conventionalised--hangs in front of the class; and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. as long practice at work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy of a place on the school wall. but what is the value, what is the meaning of work of this kind? when such a drawing lesson as i have described is in progress, the divorce between perception and expression is complete. and as each of these master faculties is the very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one another involves the complete eclipse of each. the child who copies a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with flawless accuracy, line by line. indeed, it may well happen that he does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended to represent. nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his model in any sense or degree his own. thus, during the whole of a lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert. each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. and each of them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse. the extent to which the copying of copies can injure a child's power of observation exceeds belief. i have seen a bowl placed high above the line of sight of a class of fifty senior boys, each one of whom (his memory being haunted, i suppose, by some diagram which he had once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. not one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather as it really was to be seen. a child who had never drawn a stroke in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than any of those quasi-experts. and with the wasting of the power of observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression; and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning. four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while drawing was being taught, such a lesson as i have just described would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred. since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the board against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which its use has been discontinued. but the number of schools in which drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing steadily, is still small. in those schools, indeed, the results are surprisingly good,--so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education through self-reliance and self-expression. but elsewhere there has been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. in some schools the formula or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. there is a formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulæ while the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to reproduce them. in other schools an object is placed before the class, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard, explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really copy his blackboard copy of it. in this, as in other matters, the teacher who has become a victim of routine will give a facile but mainly "notional" assent to the suggestions that are placed before him, will promise to try them, and will make an unintelligent and half-hearted attempt to do so, but will as often as not slide back into practices which do not materially differ from those which he professes to have abandoned. the pressure of the whole system of western education--not to speak of western civilisation--will be too strong for him. the flat copy, with its demand for mechanical work and servile obedience, fits into that system. drawing from the object, with its demand for initiative and self-reliance, does not. hence the attractive force of the former,--a secret attractive force which will neutralise the efforts that the teacher consciously makes to free himself from its influence, and will arm him, as with a hidden shirt of mail, against the missionary zeal of his inspector.[ ] even the zeal of the inspector will be affected by his possible inability to harmonise his gospel of self-expression in drawing with any general system of self-education. it is because the educational reformer is fighting, in his sporadic attempts at reform, against his own deepest conviction, that he achieves so little even in the particular directions in which he sees clearly that reform is needed. but how, it will be asked, is such a school as i have described to be kept going? the whole _régime_ must be eminently distasteful to the healthy child, and it can scarcely be attractive to his teacher. by what motive force, then, is the school to be kept in motion,--in motion, if not along the path of progress, at any rate along the well-worn track of routine? by the only motive force which the religion and the civilisation of the west recognise as effective,--the hope of external reward, with its complement, the fear of external punishment. from highest to lowest, from the head teacher of the school to the youngest child in the bottom class, all the teachers and all the children are subjected to the pressure of this quasi-physical force. the teachers hope for advancement and increase of salary, and fear degradation and loss of salary, or at any rate loss of the hoped-for increment.[ ] the children hope for medals, books, high places in their respective classes, and other rewards and distinctions, and fear corporal and other kinds of punishment. the thoroughly efficient school is one in which this motive force is duly transmitted to every part of the school by means of a well-planned and carefully-elaborated machinery, analogous to that by which water and gas are laid on at every tap in every house in a well-governed town. only those who are intimately acquainted with the inside of the elementary school can realise to what an extent the machinery of education has in recent years encroached upon the vital interests of the school and the time and thought of the teacher. in schools which are administered by business-like and up-to-date local authorities, this encroachment is becoming as serious as that of drifting sands on a fertile soil. time-tables, schemes of work, syllabuses, record books, progress books, examination result books, and the rest,--hours and hours are spent by the teachers on the clerical work which these mechanical contrivances demand. and the hours so spent are too often wholly wasted. the worst of this machinery is that, so long as it works smoothly, all who are interested in the school are satisfied. but it may all work with perfect smoothness, and yet achieve nothing that really counts. i know of hundreds of schools which are to all appearance thoroughly efficient,--schools in which the machinery of education is as well contrived as it is well oiled and cleaned,--and yet in which there is no vital movement, no growth, no life. from highest to lowest, all the inmates of those schools are cheating themselves with forms, figures, marks, and other such empty symbols. the application of the conventional motive force to the school children goes by the name of _discipline_. if the pressure at each tap is steady, constant, and otherwise effective, the discipline is good. if it is variable, intermittent, and otherwise ineffective, the discipline is bad. the life of the routine-ridden school is so irksome to the child, that if he is healthy and vigorous he will long to find a congenial outlet for his vital energies, which are as a rule either pent back (as when he sits still listening to a lecture), or forced into uninteresting and unprofitable channels. when this desire masters him during school hours, it goes by the name of "naughtiness," and is regarded as a proof of the inborn sinfulness of his "fallen" nature. to repress the desire, to keep the child in a state either of absolute inaction or of mechanically regulated activity, is the function of school discipline. whatever in the child's life is free, natural, spontaneous, wells up from an evil source. if educational progress is to be made, that source must be carefully sealed. as an educator, the teacher must do his best to reduce the child to the level of a wire-pulled puppet. as a disciplinarian, he must overcome the child's instinctive repugnance to being subjected to such unworthy treatment. the better the "discipline" of the school, the easier it will be for the mechanical education given in it to achieve its deadly work. in making this sketch of what is still a common type of elementary school, my object has been to provide myself with materials for answering the question: does elementary education, as at present conducted in this country, tend to foster the growth of the child's faculties? if my sketch is even approximately faithful to its original, the answer to the question, so far at least as thousands of schools are concerned, must be an emphatic no. for in the school, as i have sketched it, the one end and aim of the teacher is to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself; and where independent effort is prohibited, the growth of faculty must needs be arrested, the growth of every faculty, as of every limb and organ, being dependent in large measure on its being duly and suitably exercised by its owner. if this statement is true of faculty as such, and of effort as such, still more is it true of the particular faculties which school life is supposed to train, the faculties which we speak of loosely as perceptive,--and of the particular effort by which alone the growth of the perceptive faculties is effected, the many-sided effort which we speak of loosely as self-expression. far perception and expression are, as i have endeavoured to prove, the face and obverse of the same vital process; and the educational policy which makes self-expression, or, in other words, sincere expression, impossible, is therefore fatal to the outgrowth of the whole range of the perceptive faculties. the education given in thousands of our elementary schools is, then, in the highest degree anti-educational. the end which education ought to aim at achieving is the very end which the teacher labours unceasingly to defeat. the teacher may, indeed, contend that his business is not to evoke faculty but to impart knowledge. the answer to this argument is that the type of education which impedes the outgrowth of faculty is necessarily fatal to the acquisition of knowledge. for the teacher can no more impart knowledge to his pupils than a nurse can impart flesh and blood to her charges. what the teacher imparts is information, just as what the nurse imparts is food; and until information has been converted into knowledge the child is as far from being educated as the infant, whose food remains unassimilated, is from being nourished. the teacher may pump information into the child in a never-ending stream; but so long as he compels the child to adopt an attitude of passive receptivity, and forbids him to react, through the medium of self-expression, on the food that he is receiving, so long will the food remain unassimilated and even undigested, and the soul and mind of the child remain uneducated and unfed. whether, then, we concern ourselves, as educationalists, with the growth of the child's whole nature, or with the growth of his master faculties, or again with the growth of those special "senses" which evolve themselves in response to the stimulus of special environments, we see that in each case the effect of the teacher's policy of distrust and repression is to arrest growth. when the stern supernaturalist reminds us that the child's nature is intrinsically evil, and that therefore in arresting its growth education renders him a priceless service, we answer that, in arresting the growth of the child's nature as a whole, education arrests the growth of all the master faculties of his being, and that there are some at least among these which, even in the judgment of the supernaturalist, imperatively need to be trained. when the strait-laced, result-hunting teacher reminds us that his sole business is to teach certain subjects, and that therefore he cannot concern himself with growth, we answer that, in neglecting to foster growth, he makes it impossible for the child to put forth a special "sense," a special faculty of direct perception, in response to each new environment, and so (for reasons which have already been given) incapacitates him for mastering any subject. there is always one point of view, if no more, from which my primary assumption--that the function of education is to foster growth--is seen to be a truism. and from that point of view, if from no other, the failure of the routine-ridden school to fulfil its destiny is seen to be final and complete. yet to say that elementary education, as it is given in such a school, tends to arrest growth, is to under-estimate its capacity for mischief. in the act of arresting growth it must needs distort growth, and in doing this it must needs deaden and even destroy the life which is ever struggling to evolve itself. it is well that from time to time we should ask ourselves what compulsory education has done for the people of england. how much it has done to civilise and humanise the masses is beginning to be known to all who are interested in social progress, and i for one am ready to second any vote of thanks that may be proposed to it for this invaluable service.[ ] but when we ask ourselves what it has done to _vitalise_ the nation, we may well hesitate for an answer. twenty years ago, in the days of "schedules" and "percentages," elementary education was, on balance, an actively devitalising agency. the policy of the education department made that inevitable. but things have changed since then; and it is probable that the balance is now in favour of the elementary school. but the balance, though growing from year to year, is as yet very small compared with what it will be when the teacher, relieved from the pressure of the still prevailing demand for "results," is free to take thought for the vital interests of the child. whom shall we blame for the shortcomings of our elementary schools? the board of education? their inspectors? the teachers? the training colleges? the local authorities? we will blame none of these. we will blame the spirit of western civilisation, with its false philosophy of life and its false standard of reality. shall we blame the board because, in the days when they called themselves the department, they made the teachers of england the serfs of their soul-destroying code? for my own part i prefer to honour the board, not only because on a certain day they liberated their serfs by a departmental edict, but also and more especially because, in defiance of the protests and criticisms of members of parliament, employers of labour, chairmen of education committees, and others, in defiance of the ubiquitous pressure of western externalism and materialism, in defiance of the trend of contemporary opinion, in defiance of their own practice,--for they themselves are an examining body whose nets are widely spread,--they refuse to revoke the gift of freedom, which they gave, perhaps over-hastily, to the teachers of england, and continue to exempt them, so far as their own action is concerned, from the pressure of a formal examination on a uniform scheme of work. shall we blame the teachers as a body because too many of them are machine-made creatures of routine? for my own part i honour the teachers as a body, if only because here and there one of them has dared, with splendid courage, to defy the despotism of custom, of tradition, of officialdom, of the thousand deadening influences that are brought to bear upon him, and to follow for himself the path of inwardness and life. to blame the average teacher for being unable to resist the pressure to which he is unceasingly exposed would be almost as unfair as to blame a pebble on the seashore for being unable to resist the grinding action of the waves, and would ill become one who has special reason to remember how the department, in its misguided zeal for efficiency, strove for thirty years or more to grind the teachers of england to one pattern in the mill of "payment by results." it is to a certificated teacher that, as an educationalist (if i may give myself so formidable a title), "i owe my soul." and there are many other teachers to whom my debts, though less weighty than this, are by no means light. most of the failings of the elementary teachers are wounds and strains which adverse fate has inflicted on them. most of their virtues are their own. shall we blame the training colleges because, with an unhappy past behind them, they have yet many things to unlearn? shall we blame the local education authorities because, with an unknown future before them, they have yet many things to learn? no, i repeat, we will blame none of these. we will lay the blame on broader shoulders. we will blame our materialistic philosophy of life, which we complacently regard--orthodox and heretics alike--as "_the_ truth"; and we will blame our materialised civilisation, which we complacently regard--cultured and uncultured alike--as civilisation, pure and simple, whatever lies beyond its confines being lightly dismissed as "barbarism." these are the forces against which every teacher, every manager, every inspector, who strives for emancipation and enlightenment, has to fight unceasingly. if the fight is an unequal one; if there are many would-be reformers who have shrunk from it; if there are others who retired from it early in the day; if there are others, again, who have been crushed in it;--we will blame the forces of darkness for these disasters; we will not blame their victims. on the contrary, we will honour all who have fought and fallen; for when the cause is large and worthy of devotion, failure in the service of it is only less triumphant than success. but if there is honour for failure what shall be the guerdon of success? what tribute shall we pay to those who have fought and won? for there are some who have fought and won. footnotes: [ ] it must be clearly understood that throughout this chapter the school that i have in mind is one for "older children" only. whatever may be the defects of the elementary infant schools, an excessive regard for outward and visible results is not one of them. exemption from the pressure of a formal external examination has meant much more to them than to the schools for older children; and the atmosphere of the good infant schools is, in consequence, freer, happier, more recreative, and more truly educative than that of the upper schools of equivalent merit. and when we compare grade with grade, we find that the superiority of the elementary infant schools is still more pronounced. the "great public schools," and the costly preparatory schools that lead up to them, may or may not be worthy of their high reputation; but as regards facilities for the education (in school) of their "infants," the "classes" are unquestionably much less fortunate than the "masses." [ ] not long ago i happened to enter the boys' department of an urban church school at about . a.m. the headmaster was sitting at his desk, drawing up schemes of "secular" work. all the boys above "standard iii"-- in number--were grouped together, listening, or pretending to listen, to a "chalk-and-talk" lecture on "prayer" [of which there are apparently five varieties, viz., ( ) invocation, ( ) deprecation, ( ) obsecration, ( ) intercession, ( ) supplication]. the headmaster explained to me that "of course it was only during the scripture lesson" that this overgrouping went on. the lecture on prayer was given by a young assistant-master, whose naive delight in the long words that he rolled out _ore rotundo_ and then chalked up on the blackboard, had blinded him to the obvious fact that he was making no impression whatever on his audience. the boys, one and all, reminded me forcibly of the "white-headed boy" in dickens' village school, who displayed "in the expression of his face a remarkable capacity of totally abstracting his mind from the spelling on which his eyes were fixed." [ ] there are many elementary schools which the diocesan inspector does not enter. in the "provided" or "council" schools "undenominational bible teaching" takes the place of the "definite dogmatic instruction in religious knowledge" which is tested by diocesan inspection. but even when undogmatic bible teaching is given, the shadow of an impending examination, external or internal as the case may be, too often sterilises the efforts of the teacher. not that the efforts of the teacher would in any case be productive so long as the attitude of popular thought towards the bible remained unchanged. to go into this burning question would involve me in an unjustifiable digression; but i must be allowed to express my conviction that the teaching of the bible in our elementary schools will never be anything but misguided and mischievous until those who are responsible for it have realised that the old testament is the inspired literature of a particular people, and have ceased to regard it as the authentic biography of the eternal god. it is to the current misconception of the meaning and value of the bible, and the consequent misconception of the relation of god to nature and to man, that the externalism of the west, which is the source of all the graver defects of modern education, is (as i contend) largely due; and it is useless to try to remedy those defects so long as we allow our philosophy of life to be perennially poisoned at its highest springs. [ ] in far too many cases the teacher received a certain proportion of the grant; and in any case his value in the market tended to vary directly with his ability to secure a large grant for his school by his success in the yearly examination. [ ] _the jewish people in the time of jesus christ_, by dr. emil schürer. [ ] here is another example of the mental blindness which rule-worship in arithmetic is apt to induce. the boys in a large "standard ii," who had been spending the whole year in adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing tens of thousands, were given the following sum: a farmer had sheep. he bought nine. how many had he then? out of boys, one only worked the sum correctly. of the remaining , about a third _multiplied_ by , another third _divided_ by , while the remaining third _subtracted_ from . [ ] reinforced in many cases by suggestive words. i recently found myself in an urban school while the "fourth standard" boys were doing "composition." the subject--trees--had already been dealt with in a preparatory "talk." in front of the class was a blackboard, on which were written the following words: "fruit, flowers, i. _roots_ tough, strong, stretch, extend. ii. _trunk_ thick, branches, bark. iii. _branches_ strong, tough, leaves. iv. _leaves_ green, shapes, sizes, beautiful, clothe, autumn, brown." i am told that sometimes as many as twelve headings are given, each with its own list of suggestive words. [ ] i was recently present at a large gathering of teachers who had assembled to discuss the teaching of drawing and other kindred topics. the district is one in which the gospel of self-help in drawing has been preached with diligence and with much apparent success. one of the teachers, who was expected to support the board in their crusade against the "flat copy," played the part of balaam by reading out letters from certain distinguished r.a.'s, in which the use of the flat copy in elementary schools was openly advocated. it was evident that those distinguished r.a.'s knew as much about elementary education as the man in the street knows about naval tactics, for the arguments by which they supported their paradoxical opinions were worth exactly nothing. but the salvos of applause, renewed again and again, which greeted the extracts from their letters showed clearly in which direction the current of subconscious conviction was running in that evangelised and apparently converted district. [ ] there are few teachers who do not also work from higher motives than these; but there are very few who are exempt from the pressure of these. [ ] it is pleasant to read that at southend on easter monday ( ) there were , excursionists and only two cases of drunkenness. it is also pleasant to hear from an officer who has served for many years in india that the modern english private soldier in india is an infinitely superior being to his predecessors, and that india could not now be held by the old type of british soldier. we must not, however, forget that the "old type" conquered india. part ii what might be or the path of self-realisation chapter iv a school in utopia having painted in gloomy colours some of the actualities of elementary education, i will now try to set forth its possibilities. in opposing the actual to the possible, i am perhaps running the risk of being misunderstood. the possible, as i conceive it, is no mere "fabric of a dream." what are possibilities for the elementary school, as such, are already actualities in certain schools. were it not so, i should not speak of them as possibilities. i do not pretend to be a prophet, in the vulgar sense of the word. the ends which i am about to set before managers and teachers are ends which have been achieved, and are being achieved, _under entirely normal conditions_, in various parts of the country, and which are therefore not impracticable. there are many elementary schools in england in which bold and successful departures have been made from the beaten track; and in each of these cases what is at present a mere possibility for most schools has been actually realised. and there is one elementary school at least in which the beaten track has been entirely abandoned, with the result that possibilities (as i may now call them) which i might perhaps have dismissed on _a priori_ grounds as too fantastic for serious consideration, have become part of the everyday life of the scholars. that school shall now become the theme of my book; for i feel that i cannot serve the cause of education better than by trying to describe and interpret the work that is being done in it. the school belongs to a village which i will call utopia. it is not an imaginary village--a village of nowhere--but a very real village, which can be reached, as all other villages can, by rail and road. it nestles at the foot of a long range of hills; and if you will climb the slope that rises at the back of the village, and look over the level country that you have left behind, you will see in the distance the gleaming waters of one of the many seas that wash our shores. the village is fairly large, as villages go in these days of rural depopulation; and the school is attended by about children. the head teacher, whose genius has revolutionised the life, not of the school only, but of the whole village, is a woman. i will call her egeria. she has certainly been my egeria, in the sense that whatever modicum of wisdom in matters educational i may happen to possess, i owe in large measure to her. i have paid her school many visits, and it has taken me many months of thought to get to what i believe to be the bed-rock of her philosophy of education,--a philosophy which i will now attempt to expound. two things will strike the stranger who pays his first visit to this school. one is the ceaseless activity of the children. the other is the bright and happy look on every face. in too many elementary schools the children are engaged either in laboriously doing nothing,--in listening, for example, with ill-concealed yawns, to _lectures_ on history, geography, nature-study, and the rest; or in doing what is only one degree removed from nothing,--working mechanical sums, transcribing lists of spellings or pieces of composition, drawing diagrams which have no meaning for them, and so forth. but in this school every child is, as a rule, actively employed. and bearing in mind that "unimpeded energy" is a recognised source of happiness, the visitor will probably conjecture that there is a close connection between the activity of the children and the brightness of their faces. that the latter feature of the school will arrest his attention is almost certain. utopia belongs to a county which is proverbial for the dullness of its rustics, but there is no sign of dullness on the face of any utopian child. on the contrary, so radiantly bright are the faces of the children that something akin to sunshine seems always to fill the school. when he gets to know the school, the visitor will realise that the brightness of the children is of two kinds,--the brightness of energy and intelligence, and the brightness of goodness and joy. and when he gets to know the school as well as i do, he will realise that these two kinds of brightness are in their essence one. let me say something about each of them. the utopian child is alive, alert, active, full of latent energy, ready to act, to do things, to turn his mind to things, to turn his hand to things, to turn his desire to things, to turn his whole being to things. there is no trace in this school of the mental lethargy which, in spite of the ceaseless activity of the teachers, pervades the atmosphere of so many elementary schools; no trace of the fatal inertness on the part of the child, which is the outcome of five or six years of systematic repression and compulsory inaction. the air of the school is electrical with energy. we are obviously in the presence of an active and vigorous life. and the activity of the utopian child is his own activity. it is a fountain which springs up in himself. unlike the ordinary school-child, he can do things on his own account. he does not wait, in the helplessness of passive obedience, for his teacher to tell him what he is to do and how he is to do it. he does not even wait, in the bewilderment of self-distrust, for his teacher to give him a lead. if a new situation arises, he deals with it with promptitude and decision. his solution of the problem which it involves may be incorrect, but at any rate it will be a solution. he will have faced a difficulty and grappled with it, instead of having waited inertly for something to turn up. his initiative has evidently been developed _pari passu_ with his intelligence; and the result of this is that he can think things out for himself, that he can devise ways and means, that he can purpose, that he can plan. in all these matters the utopian child differs widely and deeply from the less fortunate child who has to attend a more ordinary type of elementary school. but when we turn to the other aspect of the utopian brightness, when we consider it as the reflected light of goodness and joy, we find that the difference between the two children is wider and deeper still. there are many schools outside utopia that pride themselves on the excellence of their discipline; but i am inclined to think that in some at least of these the self-satisfaction of the teacher is equivalent to a confession of failure. there was a time when every elementary school received a large grant for instruction and a small grant for discipline; and inspectors were supposed to report separately on each of these aspects of the school's life. a strange misconception of the meaning and purpose of education underlay this artificial distinction; but on that we need not dwell. were an inspector called upon to report on the discipline of the utopian school, his report would be brief. there is no discipline in the school. there is no need for any. the function of the strict disciplinarian is to shut down, and, if necessary, sit upon, the safety-valve of misconduct. but in utopia, where all the energies of the children are fully and happily employed, that safety-valve has never to be used. each child in turn is so happy in his school life that the idea of being naughty never enters his head. one cannot remain long in the school without realising that in its atmosphere love is an unerring light, and joy its own security. it recently happened that on a certain day one of the assistant-teachers had to go to a hospital, that another had to take her there, that the third was ill in bed, and that egeria--the only available member of the staff--was detained by one of the managers for half-an-hour on her way to school. the school was thus left without a teacher. on entering it, egeria found all the children in their places and at work. they had looked at the time-table, had chosen some of the older scholars to take the lower classes, and had settled down happily and in perfect order. this incident proves to demonstration that the _morale_ of the school has somehow or other been carried far beyond the limits of what is usually understood by discipline. i have seen historical scenes acted with much vigour by some of the children in the first class, and applauded with equal vigour by their class-mates, while all the time the children in the second class, who were drawing flowers in the same room, never lifted their eyes from their desks. yet no children can laugh more merrily or more unrestrainedly than these, or make a greater uproar when it is fitting that they should do so. and if there is no need for punishment, or any other form of repression, in this school, it is equally true that there is no need for rewards. to one who has been taught to regard competition in school as a sacred duty, and the winning of prizes as a laudable object of the scholar's ambition, this may seem strange. but so it is. no child has the slightest desire to outstrip his fellows or rise to the top of his class. joy in their work, pride in their school, devotion to their teacher, are sufficient incentives to industry. were the stimulus of competition added to these, neither the zeal nor the interest of the children would be quickened one whit, but a discordant element would be introduced into their school life. happy as he obviously is in his own school life, it would add nothing to the happiness of the utopian to feel that he had outstripped his class-mates and won a prize for his achievement. so far, indeed, are these children from wishing to shine at the expense of others, that if they think egeria has done less than justice to the work of some one child, the rest of the class will go out of their way to call her attention to it. if some children are brighter, cleverer, and more advanced than others, the reward of their progress is that they are allowed to help on those who lag behind. this is especially noticeable in drawing, in which the pre-eminence of one or two children has again and again had the effect of lifting the work of the whole class to a higher level. but the laggards are as far from being discouraged by their failure as are the more advanced scholars from being puffed up by their success. from the highest to the lowest, all are doing their best and all are happy together. from morals to manners the transition is obvious and direct. be the explanation what it may, the whole atmosphere of this school is evidently fatal to selfishness and self-assertion; and in such an atmosphere good manners will spring up spontaneously among the children, and will scarcely need to be inculcated, for the essence of courtesy is forgetfulness of self and consideration of others in the smaller affairs of social life. the general bearing of the utopian children hits the happy mean between aggressive familiarity and uncouth shyness,--each a form of self-conscious egoism,--just as their bearing in school hits the happy mean between laxity and undue constraint. they welcome the stranger as a friend, take his goodwill for granted, take him into their confidence, and show him, tactfully and unostentatiously, many pretty courtesies. and they do all this, not because they have been drilled into doing it, but because it is their nature to do it, because their overflowing sympathy and goodwill must needs express themselves in and through the channels of courtesy and kindness. there is no trace of sullen self-repression in this school. accustomed (as we shall presently see) to express themselves in various ways, the children cannot entertain kindly feelings without seeking some vent for them. but whether their kindly feelings lead them to dance in a ring round their own inspector, singing "for he's a jolly good fellow," or to escort another visitor, on his departure, through the playground with their arms in his, their tact,--which is the outcome, partly of their self-forgetfulness, partly of the training which their perceptive faculties are always receiving,--is unfailing, and they never allow friendliness to degenerate into undue familiarity. there is one other feature of the school life which i cannot pass over. i have never been in a school in which the love of what is beautiful in nature is so strong or so sincere as in this. the æsthetic sense of the utopian child has not been deliberately trained, but it has been allowed, and even encouraged, to unfold itself; and the appeal that beauty makes to the heart meets in consequence with a ready response. of the truth of this statement i could, if necessary, give many proofs. one must suffice. the children, who are adepts at drawing with brush and pencil, wander in field and lane with sketch-books in their hands; and one of them at least was so moved by the beauty of a winter sunrise, as seen from his cottage window, that, in his own words, he felt he _must_ try to paint it, the result being a water-colour sketch which i have shown to a competent artist, who tells me that the _feeling_ in the sky is quite wonderful. in this brief preliminary sketch of the more salient features of the utopian school, i have, i hope, said enough to show that its scholars differ _toto coelo_ from those who attend that familiar type of school which i have recently described. yet the utopian children are made of the same clay as the children of other villages. if anything, indeed, the clay is heavier and more stubborn in utopia than elsewhere. some ten or twelve years ago, when egeria took charge of the school, the children were dull, lifeless, listless, resourceless. now they are bright, intelligent, happy, responsive, overflowing with life, interested in many things, full of ability and resource. how has this change been wrought? not by veneering or even inoculating the children with good qualities, but simply by allowing their better and higher nature to evolve itself freely, naturally, and under favourable conditions. that the child's better and higher nature is his real nature, is the assumption--let me rather say, the profound conviction--on which egeria's whole system of education has been based. in basing it on this assumption, she has made a bold departure from the highway which has been blindly followed for many centuries. we have seen that the basis of education in this country, as in christendom generally, is the doctrine of original sin. it is taken for granted by those who train the child that his nature, if allowed to develop itself freely, will grow in the wrong direction, and will therefore lead him astray; and that it is the function of education to counteract this tendency, to do violence to the child's nature, to compel it by main force to grow (or make a pretence of growing) in the right direction, to subject it to perpetual repression and constraint. the wild whoops to which children so often give vent, when released from school, show that a period of unnatural tension has come to an end; and in these, and in the further conduct of the released child--in the roughness, rudeness, and bad language, of which the passer-by (especially in towns) not infrequently has to complain--we see a rebound from this state of tension, an instinctive protest against the constraint to which he has been subjected for so many hours. the result of all this is that the child leads two lives, a life of unnatural repression and constraint in school, and a life--also unnatural, though it is supposed to be the expression of his nature--of reaction and protest out of school. such a dislocation of the child's daily life is not likely to conduce to his well-being; while the teacher's assumption that his _rôle_ in school is essentially active, and that of the child essentially passive, will lead at last to his turning his back on the root-idea of growth, to his forgetting that the child is a living and therefore a growing organism, to his regarding the child as clay in his hands, to be "remoulded" by him "to his heart's desire," or even as a _tabula rasa_, on which he is to inscribe words and other symbols at his will. in utopia the training which the child receives may be said to be based on the doctrine of original goodness. it is taken for granted by egeria that the child is neither a lump of clay nor a _tabula rasa_, but a "living soul"; that growth is of the very essence of his being; and that the normal child, if allowed to make natural growth under reasonably favourable conditions, will grow happily and well. it is taken for granted that the potencies of his nature are well worth realising; that the end of his being--the ideal type towards which the natural course of his development tends to take him--is intrinsically good; in fine, that he is _by nature_ a "child of god" rather than a "child of wrath." it is therefore taken for granted that growth is in itself a good thing, a move in the right direction; and that to foster growth, to make its conditions as favourable as possible, to give it the food, the guidance, and the stimulus that it needs, is the best thing that education can do for the child. it is further taken for granted that the many-sided effort to grow which is of the essence of the child's nature is the mainspring of, and expresses itself in, certain typical instincts which no one who studies the child with any degree of care can fail to observe; and that by duly cultivating these instincts,--_expansive_ instincts, as one may perhaps call them, since each of them tends to take the child away from his petty self,--the teacher will make the best possible provision for the growth of the child's nature as a whole. above all, it is taken for granted that the growth which the child makes must come from within himself; that no living thing can grow vicariously; that the rings of soul-growth, like the rings of tree-growth, must be evolved from an inner life; that the teacher must therefore content himself with giving the child's expansive instincts fair play and free play; and that, for the rest, he must as far as possible efface himself, bearing in mind that not he, but the child, is the real actor in the drama of school life. but though so much is left to the child in utopia, and so much demanded of him, it is not feared that the effort to grow will be repugnant to him. on the contrary, it is taken for granted that in growing, in developing his expansive instincts, the child will be following the lines and obeying the laws of his own nature; that he will be fulfilling the latent desires of his heart; that he will be seeking his own pleasure; in fine, that he will be leading a happy life. all this is taken for granted in utopia, and the child's life is therefore one of unimpeded, though duly guided and stimulated, activity. every instinct that makes for the expansion and elevation (for growth is always upward as well as outward) of the child's nature is given the freest possible play, and the whole organisation of the school is subordinated to this central end. in order to find out what are the instincts which make for the expansion and elevation of the child's nature, and which education ought therefore to foster, we must do what egeria has always done, we must observe young children, and study their ways and works. now every healthy child wants to eat and drink, and to run about. here are two instincts--the instinctive desire for physical nourishment, and the instinctive desire for physical exercise--through which nature provides for the growth of the body. how does she provide for the growth of what we have agreed to call the soul? we need not be very careful observers of young children in order to satisfy ourselves that, apart from physical nourishment and exercise, there are six things which the child instinctively desires, namely: ( ) to talk and listen: ( ) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word): ( ) to draw, paint, and model: ( ) to dance and sing: ( ) to know the why of things: ( ) to construct things. let us consider each of these instincts, and try to determine its meaning and purpose. ( ) the child instinctively desires to enter into communion with other persons,--his parents, his brothers and sisters, his nurse, his governess, his little friends. he wants to talk to them, to tell them what he has done, seen, felt, thought; and he wants to hear what they have to tell him,--not only of what they themselves have done, but also of what other persons and other living things have done, in other times, in other countries, in other worlds. later on, the desire to talk and listen will develop into the desire to write and read; but the desire will still be one for communion, for intercourse with other lives. we will call this the _communicative instinct_. ( ) the child desires, not only to enter into communion with other persons and other living things, but also, in some sort, to identify his life with theirs. watch him when he is playing with other children, or even when he is alone, except for the companionship of his dolls and toys. he is pretty sure to be _acting_, playing at make-believe, pretending to be something that he is not, some grown-up person of his acquaintance, some hero of history or romance, some traveller or other adventurer, some giant, dwarf, or fairy, some animal, wild or tame. he plays the part of one or other of these, and his playmates play other parts, and so a little drama is enacted. if he has no playmates, his dolls have to play their parts, or his toy animals have to be endowed with life, so that they may become fellow-actors with him on the stage that he has selected. no instinct is more inevitable, more sure to energise, than this. we will call it the _dramatic instinct_. in both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the medium of sympathy and imagination--twin aspects of the same vital tendency--into the lives of other living beings. we will therefore call these the _sympathetic instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves. ( ) from his very babyhood the child delights in colour, and at a very early age he learns to love and understand pictures. then comes the desire to make these for himself. give him pencil and paper, give him chalk, charcoal, a paint-box, and other suitable materials, and he will set to work of his own accord to depict what he sees or has seen, either with his outward or his inward eye. give him a lump of clay, and he will try to mould it into the likeness of something that has either attracted his attention, or presented itself to his imagination. in all these attempts he is trying, unknown to himself, to express his perception of, and delight in, the visible beauty of nature. this instinct will expand, in the fullness of time, into a strong and subtle feeling for visible beauty, and into a restless desire to give expression to that feeling. we will call this the _artistic instinct_, the word _artistic_ being used, for lack of a more suitable term, in its narrow and conventional sense. ( ) while the child is still a baby in arms, his mother will sing to him, and dance him on her knee. this is her first attempt to initiate him into the mystery of music; and the response that he makes to her proves that she is a wise teacher, and is appealing to a genuinely natural faculty. it will not be long before he begins to dance and sing for himself. watch the children in a london court or alley when a barrel-organ appears on the scene. without having any one to direct or teach them, they will come together and dance in couples, often with abundant grace and charm. nature is their tutor. her own rhythm, of which the musician must have caught an echo, is passing through their ears into their hearts and into their limbs. no instinct is so spontaneous as this. a child will whistle or sing while his mind is engaged on other things. if he is happy he will dance about as naturally, and almost as inevitably, as the leaves dance when the breeze passes through them. we will call this the _musical instinct_. so elemental is it that man shares it, in some degree, with other living things. the birds are accomplished musicians, and their movements, and those of many other creatures, are full of rhythm and grace. in both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, in response to the attractive force of beauty, into that larger life which is at the heart of nature, but which is not ours until we have made it our own. we will therefore call these the _Æsthetic instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves. ( ) from a very early age the child desires to know the why and wherefore of things, to understand how effects are produced, to discover new facts, and pass on, if possible, to their causes. in response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and the other "olympians." no instinct is more insistent in the early days of the child's life. no instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. no instinct dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type has done its deadly work. it has been said that children go to school ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. this gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth. we will call this the _inquisitive instinct_. ( ) after analysis comes synthesis. the child pulls his toys to pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be the better able to control the working of them. the ends that he sets before himself are those which comte set before the human race,--"savoir pour prévoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour déduire, afin de construire." the desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in his soul. give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. set him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats into which the sea may be duly admitted. or he will make harness and whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate, boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other implements of wood. we will call this the _constructive instinct_. in both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels of theory and practice, into what i may call the machinery of nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of eastern philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the many, rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the one.[ ] whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then passing out of the other,--his concern is always for "facts," for the actualities of things, for "objective truth." we will therefore call these the _scientific instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves. there are six instincts, then,--six formative and expansive instincts--which nature has implanted in every normal child, and which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to nature, should take account of and try to foster. two of these are _sympathetic_; two are _æsthetic_; two are _scientific_. in and through the sympathetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _love_. in and through the æsthetic instincts the soul grows in the direction of _beauty_. in and through the scientific instincts the soul grows in the direction of _truth_. it is towards this triune goal that nature herself is ever directing the growth of the growing child. the significance of this conclusion will unfold itself as we proceed. these instincts manifest themselves in various ways, but chiefly in the direction that they give to that very serious occupation of young children which we call play. it is clear, then, that if these instincts are to be duly cultivated, the work of the school must be modelled, as far as possible, on the lines which children, when at play, spontaneously follow. this egeria, with her inspired sagacity, has clearly seen; and she has taken her measures accordingly. in utopia the school life of the child is all play,--play taken very seriously, play systematised, organised, provided with ample materials and ample opportunities, encouraged and stimulated in every possible way. each of the fundamental instincts that manifest themselves in the child's play, and in doing so give a clear indication of nature's aims in the child's life, and of the directions in which she wishes him to grow, is duly ministered to in this school, the current that wells up in and through it being skilfully guided into a suitable channel, and every obstacle to its free development being carefully removed. but the guidance which egeria gives tends, as we shall see, to foster rather than fetter the freedom of the child. when the current has been led into a suitable channel, it is expected to shape its own further course, and even to impose on itself the limits--the containing walls--which are needed if its depth and strength are to be maintained. let us now consider each of the six instincts in turn, and see what special steps egeria takes to foster its growth. ( ) _the communicative instinct_. through this instinct the child goes out of himself into the lives of other persons and other living things. the desire is in its essence one for intercourse, for communion, for the interchange of thoughts, of feelings, of experiences. the normal child is, as we all know, an inveterate chatterbox; but he is also a rapt listener. if he desires, as he certainly does, to tell others about himself, he desires, in no less a degree, to hear about others, either from themselves, or from those who are best able to tell him about them. the balance between the two desires is well maintained by nature; and it should be carefully maintained by those who train the young, if the communicative instinct as a whole is to make healthy growth. in too many elementary schools the instinct is systematically starved, the scholars being strictly forbidden to talk among themselves, while their conversational intercourse with their teacher is limited to receiving a certain amount of dry information, and giving this back, collectively or individually, when they are expressly directed to do so. the child's instinctive desire to converse, being deprived by education of its natural outlets, must needs force for itself the subterranean and illicit outlet of whispering in class, either under the teacher's nose, if he happens to be unobservant or indolent, or behind his back, if he happens to be vigilant and strict. and as the child is forbidden to talk about things which are wholesome and interesting, it is but natural that in his surreptitious conversations he should talk about things which are less edifying, things which are trivial and vulgar, or even unwholesome and unclean. children are naturally obedient and truthful; but in their attempts to find outlets for healthy activities which are wantonly repressed, they will go far down the inclined plane of disobedience and deceit. in utopia free conversation is systematically encouraged. no elementary school is supposed to open before a.m.; but egeria is in the habit of coming to school at . or earlier, so that the children who wish to do so may come and talk to her freely about the things that interest them,--what they have observed on their walks to or from school, what they have heard or read at home, what they think about things in general, and so on. the school has a good library of books which are worth reading, both in prose and verse. these the children read in school and out of school, and are thus brought into communication with other minds, with other times, with other lands. they are also accustomed to talk freely to one another about the books that they are reading. whatever lesson may be going on, they are encouraged to ask questions about the matter in hand, and even to express their own views about it. they go out into the playground in groups and make up games and plays, discussing things freely among themselves. when they are preparing to act an historical scene or a passage from some dramatic author, they hold a sort of informal parliament, in which the actors are selected and various important questions are provisionally settled. they write letters in school to real people. the older girls take the little ones in hand, and talk to them and draw them out. when an interesting phenomenon is noticed, _e.g._ in a nature ramble, the children are accustomed to discuss it in groups, and to try to think out among themselves its cause and its meaning. gossip is of course discouraged; but it is scarcely necessary for egeria to proscribe it; for idle talk has no attraction for children who are allowed to talk freely and frankly, at all times and in all places, about things that are really worth discussing. life is full of interest for children who are allowed, as these are, to take an active interest in it; and subjects of conversation are therefore ever presenting themselves, in school and out of school, to the happy children of utopia. this means that the life of each individual child is overflowing through many channels, an overflow which will carry the out-welling life into the lives of other living beings--human and infra-human, actual and imaginary--and even beyond these, when it has been met and reinforced by other surging currents, into the impersonal life of humanity and of nature. ( ) _the dramatic instinct_. whatever else young children may be, they are all born actors; and in a school which bases its scheme of education on the actualities of child life, it is but natural that the dramatic instinct should be fostered in every possible way. "work while you work, and play while you play," is one of those trite maxims which have been unintelligently repeated till they have lost whatever value they may once have possessed. "work while you play, and play while you work," seems to be egeria's substitute for it; and she would, i think, do well to write those words over the porch of her school. in the ordinary elementary school a fair amount of acting goes on in the infant department, and an occasional attempt is made, in one of the higher classes of the upper department, to act a scene from shakespeare or an episode in english history. but during the five years or so of school life which intervene between the infant department and "standard vi," the dramatic instinct is as a rule entirely neglected; and the consequent outgrowth of self-consciousness in the children is too often a fatal obstacle to the success of the spasmodic attempts at dramatisation which are made in the higher classes. in utopia "acting" is a vital part of the school life of every class, and every subject that admits of dramatic treatment is systematically dramatised. in history, for example, when the course of their study brings them to a suitable episode, the children set to work to dramatise it. with this end in view, they consult some advanced text-book or historical novel or other book of reference, and having studied with care the particular chapter in which they are interested, and having decided among themselves who are to play what parts, they proceed to make up their own dialogues, and their own costumes and other accessories. they then act the scene, putting their own interpretation on the various parts, and receiving the stimulus and guidance of egeria's sympathetic and moeutic criticism. their class-mates and the rest of the children in the main room look on, with their history books open in front of them, and applaud; and, by gradually familiarising themselves with the various parts, qualify themselves half-unconsciously to act as under-studies in the particular scene, and in due course to play their own parts as interpreters of some other historical episode. i know of no treatment of history which is so effective as this for young children. the actual knowledge of the facts of history which a child carries away with him from an elementary school cannot well be large, and is, in many cases, a negligible quantity. but the child who has once acted history will always be interested in it, and being interested in it will be able, without making a formal study of it, to absorb its spirit, its atmosphere, and the more significant of its facts. nor do the advantages of the dramatic treatment of history end with the subject itself. the actors in these historical scenes are, as i have said, expressing their own interpretation of the various parts, and their own perception of the meaning of each episode as a whole. this means that they are training their imaginative sympathy,--a sovereign faculty which of all faculties is perhaps the most emancipative and expansive,--and training it, as i can testify, with striking success; for the dramatic power which they display is remarkable, and can have been generated by nothing less than sympathetic insight into the feelings of the various historical personages and the possibilities of the various situations. it is probable that history lends itself more readily to dramatic treatment than any other subject, but it is by no means the only subject that is dramatised in utopia. an interest in geography is awakened by scenes in foreign lands and episodes from books of travel being acted by the children. an interest in arithmetic, by a shop being opened, which is well equipped with weights, measures, and cardboard money, and in which a salesman stands behind the counter and sells goods to a succession of customers. an interest in literature by the acting, with improvised costumes, of passages from shakespeare's plays, or scenes from scott's and dickens' novels. simple plays to illustrate nature-study are acted by the younger children; while the folk songs, which, as we shall see, play a prominent part in the musical life of the children, are acted as well as sung. however rude and simple the histrionic efforts of the children may be, they are doing two things for the actors. they are giving them a living interest in the various subjects that are dramatised; and, by teaching them to identify themselves, if only for a moment, with other human beings, they are leading them into the path of tolerance, of compassion, of charity, of sympathy,--the ever-widening path which makes at last for nirvânic oneness with the one life.[ ] ( ) _the artistic instinct_. the desire to reproduce with pencil, paint, or clay the form and colour of the outward world will, if duly cultivated, gradually transform itself into the desire to feel, to understand, to interpret, to express, not the form and colour only of the outward world, but also that less palpable but more spiritual quality which we call beauty. but in order that this transformation may take place, the child must always endeavour to reproduce with due fidelity the more palpable qualities of colour and form. in this endeavour he must bring many faculties into play. he must observe closely and attentively. he must reflect on what he observes. he must reflect on what he himself is doing. he must compare his work with the original, and try to discover how far he has succeeded, and where he has gone astray. the more faithfully he tries to reproduce what he has seen, the clearer and surer will be his insight into the less palpable properties of things,--into those details, those aspects, those qualities, which do not reveal themselves to the first careless glance, but which will gradually reveal themselves to those who will take the trouble to discover them. when he is asked to reproduce things which are intrinsically beautiful--flowers, branches, buds, shells, butterflies, and the like--he begins to realise that if his work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable, though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of beauty. so the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of fidelity--fidelity to _feeling_ rather than to _fact_ (if i may speak for the moment in the delusive language of dualism)--begins to weave itself into his artistic consciousness. if there is any school in england in which fidelity to feeling has evolved itself out of fidelity to fact, that school is in the village of utopia. some ten or twelve years ago a decree went out from whitehall that drawing was to be taught in all the elementary schools in england. egeria at once took the children into her confidence, and said to them: "you have now got to learn to draw: you don't know how to draw, and i don't know how to draw, but we must all set to work and see what we can do." a few years later the school was visited by the inspector to whose zeal as a prophet, and skill as an expositor and teacher, the transformation in the teaching of drawing which is gradually taking effect in all parts of the country, has been largely due. here is the report[ ] that he wrote after his visit-- "in this school the teaching of drawing reaches the highest educational level i have hitherto met with in our elementary schools, and the results are the genuine expression of the children's own thoughts. flat copies are not used, and the scholars evolve their own technique, for the head teacher is not strong herself in this respect. the development of thought carries with it the development of skill, and this is clearly seen in the children's drawings, which show good form and proportion, some knowledge of light and shade, a delicate and refined perception of colour, and a wonderful power of dealing with the difficulties of foreshortening. the central law is self-effort,--confidence and self-reliance follow. the spontaneous activities of the children are duly recognised, and the latter decide what to draw, how to draw it, and the materials to be used. one cannot remain long in the school without observing the absence of that timidity, that haunting fear of making a mistake, which paralyses the minds and bodies of so many of our children. under the influence of the head teacher the children become acute critics. her methods coincide so exactly with those which i have long been advocating, that i give them in her own words-- "'i gave each child an ivy-leaf and said, "now look well at it." we talked about its peculiarities, looking at it all the time, and then i told them to draw one, still looking back to the leaf from time to time. then i examined their drawings. a good many were, of course, faulty. in those cases i did not say, "no, you are wrong; this is the way," and go to the blackboard. i said, "in such and such a part is yours the same as the leaf? what is different? how can you alter it?" etc., etc. i make _them tell me_ their faults. there was no blackboard demonstration.' "from a careful examination of their work it is clear that the children have not only been taught to draw, but that they love and enjoy their drawing. form and colour are not only seen, but understood and felt. the children are impelled by an irresistible desire to reach and express the truth, and are thus carried along an ever-moving path of educative action." i have already spoken of the love of visible beauty which is a characteristic feature of the life of this school. it is in the drawing lesson that this love of beauty has in the main evolved itself. other influences have no doubt been at work. nature-study and literature, for example, have, as taught in this school, done much to foster the children's latent love of beauty; but had drawing never been taught, the influence of those subjects would have been much less effective than it has been. it is in the struggle to express what he perceives that the utopian child has gradually strengthened and deepened his perceptive powers, till his sight has transformed itself into insight, and form and colour have come to be interpreted by him through the medium of the beauty which is behind them,--his feeling of beauty having, little by little, been awakened and evolved by his unceasing efforts to interpret the _vraie vérité_ of form and colour, which, as he now begins to learn, are beauty's outward self. ( ) _the musical instinct_. in the development of the artistic sense the path of imitation is followed until it leads at last to heights which it cannot scale. the development of the musical sense takes from the first a widely different path. nature has a beautiful music of her own, but the child seldom attempts to imitate this. music belongs to the soul even more than to the outward world. so at least one feels disposed to think. but perhaps it is more correct to say that in the presence of music the provisional distinction between inward and outward, between the soul and the surrounding world, becomes wholly effaced. expression is always the counterpart of perception; and we may rest assured that the deep, subtle, and elusive feelings to which music gives utterance have reality for their counterpart. the musician does not often reproduce in his compositions the audible sounds of the outward world,--the voices of animals, the songs of birds, the rustle of leaves, the murmur of the sea, the sighing of the breeze, the thunder of the storm. what he does reproduce is the music that awakes in his soul when the emotions which these sounds kindle begin to struggle for expression,--the music that is behind all the audible sounds, and perhaps also behind all the inaudible vibrations of nature,--the music that is in his heart because it is also at the heart of nature,--_the rhythm of the universe_, as one may perhaps call it for lack of a fitter phrase. it is the sense of this rhythm which inspires the great composer when he builds up his masterpieces. it is the sense of this rhythm which inspires the child when, in the joy of his heart, he breaks spontaneously into dance and song. to bring the rhythm of the universe into the daily life of the child, to give free play to his instinctive sense of its all-pervading presence, is one of the highest functions of the teacher. and the more carefully the sense of rhythm is cultivated, the more does it tend to spiritualise itself, and the more profound and more vital is the life which it struggles to interpret and evolve. there is no instinct which is so deeply seated as the musical. it is possible for a child, it is possible for a whole class of children, to sing out of the depths of the soul; and when this happens we may be sure that a fountain of spiritual joy has been unsealed, and that a great and sacred mystery has been unveiled. there is a school in one of the poorest slums of a large town, in which, some two or three years ago, the children were taught to sing, and the teachers to teach singing, by an inspired "master" who believes that to lift the sluices of spiritual feeling is to quicken into ever-increasing activity its hidden springs; and neither the teachers nor the children have yet forgotten their lesson. the children are poor, pale, thin, unkempt, ill-clad, unlovely; but i am told that when they sing their faces are transfigured, and they all become beautiful. egeria is an accomplished musician, and though utopia belongs to one of the unmusical counties of england, she has found it easy to awaken the musical instinct in the hearts of its children. a few years ago she introduced the old english folk songs and morris dances into the school. the children took to them at once as ducklings take to the water; and within a year they were able to give an admirably successful performance of some two dozen songs and dances in the village hall. some of these had been rehearsed only once; but the children, thanks to their having been systematically trained to educate themselves, are so versatile and resourceful that every item on their programme was a complete success. the folk songs and morris dances are still the delight of the children. they are ever adding to their repertory of songs; and when they go into the playground for recreation, they at once form into small groups for morris dancing, the older children taking the little ones in hand, and initiating them into the pleasures of rhythmical movement. there is another way in which egeria brings music into the lives of the children. in her own words, she "sets many of their lessons to music." for example, when they are doing needlework or drawing or any other quiet lesson, she plays high-class music to them, which forms a background to their efforts and their thoughts, and which gradually weaves itself, on the one hand into the outward and visible work that they are doing, and on the other hand into the mysterious tissue of their inward life. ( ) _the inquisitive instinct_. as the inquisitive instinct makes the child an intolerable nuisance to his ignorant and indolent elders, it is but natural that in the unenlightened school, as in the unenlightened home, it should be forcibly exterminated. it is through the agency of the formula "don't speak till you are spoken to," that its destruction is usually effected. but under egeria's ægis conversation in school hours is, as we have seen, freely encouraged, and the child's right to ask questions fully recognised; and one may therefore conjecture that this proscribed and outlawed instinct will find a safe asylum in her school. whatever lesson may be in progress, the utopian children are allowed, and even expected, to seek for illumination whenever they find themselves in the dark, to pause inquiringly at every obstacle to their understanding what they have seen or heard or read. the encouragement which is given in utopia to the child who seeks to gratify his desire for knowledge, is positive as well as negative. when the obstacles which education usually places in his path have been removed, it is found that the whole atmosphere of the school is favourable to the growth of his inquisitive instinct. at every turn he is called upon to plan and contrive, and is thus made to realise his own limitations, and to try to escape from them. whatever he may have in hand,--be it the preparation for acting a new scene, or the interpretation of a new folk song or morris dance, or the invention of a new school game, or the thinking out some new way of treating a "subject,"--he is sure to find that knowledge is needed if he is to achieve success; and his desire for knowledge is therefore continually stimulated by the demands that his own initiative and activity are ever making upon him. but it is in the "nature lesson" that the inquisitive instinct finds in utopia its freest scope and its fullest opportunity. to one who had persuaded himself of the innate stupidity of the average english child, a nature lesson in utopia would come as a revelation. he would learn for the first time that, far from being innately stupid, the average english child has it in him to reach a very high level of keenness, acuteness, and intellectual activity. whenever a lesson is given on a natural object, _e.g._ a flower or a leaf, every child has a specimen and a lens. the object is then closely and carefully observed, in the hope of discovering features in it which might escape the unobservant. whenever such features are discovered the children try to account for them. in these attempts they display much ingenuity and intelligence, and are led on by egeria in the direction of the true explanation of each phenomenon, and the relation of this to what they know of the object as a whole, and of its meaning and function. the eagerness of the children to volunteer explanations of the facts that they observe is only equalled by the intelligence with which they grasp the general bearing of the problems that confront them, and the resourcefulness and quickness of wit with which they make repeated attempts to solve them. and these are not the only qualities to which the nature lesson gives free play. it is interesting to note that as on the one hand the inquisitive instinct is obviously near of kin to the communicative, so on the other hand it is ever tending to link itself to the artistic. the closeness of observation which is the basis of success in nature-study, and by means of which the inquisitive instinct is fed and strengthened, is also the basis of success in drawing; and in each case it leads beyond itself into a region in which it has to be supplemented by, and even transfigured into, imagination, the faculty by means of which we observe what is at once impalpable and real.[ ] and in that region the distinction between truth and beauty is ever tending to efface itself. the master sculptor is always an accomplished anatomist; and the genuine naturalist is a lover and admirer, as well as a student, of nature. it has been well said that "to see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth"; and it is perhaps equally, though more remotely, true that to see things in their truth is to see them in their beauty. that being so, we need not wonder that among the utopian children the love of what is beautiful in nature has grown continuously with the growth of their interest in nature-study, and that the inquisitive instinct is ever reinforcing and being reinforced by the artistic. ( ) _the constructive instinct_. active, intelligent, resourceful, self-helpful, the utopian child takes to handwork of various kinds as readily and almost as spontaneously as the birds in spring-time take to the work of nest-building. it must indeed be admitted that the systematic instruction in gardening, cookery, and woodwork which warrants the payment of special grants for these "subjects" is not given. but informal gardening, informal cookery, and informal woodwork are vital features of the school life. nor are the children's essays in handwork limited to these subjects. whatever implement, instrument, or other contrivance may be needed in order to illustrate or otherwise help forward the general work of the school will be made by the children, so far as their technical ability and the resources of the school permit. for example, they will make fences, seats, frames, and sheds for their gardens, and "properties" and dresses for their dramatic performances. they will illustrate their games and lessons by means of simple modelling and paper-cutting. the older girls will dress dolls for the little ones to their own fancy, using their own discretion as regards material, style of dress, and method of dress-making. and so on. but ready as the utopian children are to use their hands, and clever as they are at using them, it is not through manual activity only that the development of their constructive instinct is carried on. one of the characteristic features of the school is the largeness of the scale on which the constructive powers of the children are encouraged to energise, and the frequency and variety of the demands that are made upon them. the utopian child is expected to educate himself, not merely in the sense of doing by and for himself whatever task may be set him, but also in the sense of devising new tasks for himself, in thinking out new ways of treating the different subjects that appear on the school time-table, in taking thought for the whole scheme of his education. as the years go by, egeria makes more and greater demands on the initiative and the intelligence of the children, her aim being apparently to transform the school by slow degrees into a self-governing community which, under her presidency, shall order its own life and work out its own salvation. this means, as i have lately pointed out, that at every turn the utopian child is being called upon to plan and contrive; and this, again, means that his constructive instinct, with his inquisitive instinct as its other self, is being continually exercised on the widest possible field and under the most stimulating of all influences. the result of this is that reciprocal action is ever going on in his mind between the faculties that acquire knowledge and the faculties that apply it,--action which makes for the rapid and healthy growth of both sets of faculties, and which is therefore ever tending to strengthen the child's capacity for thinking and to raise the plane of its activity. what is the culture of the child's expansive instincts likely to do for him? i will weave into my answer to this question my knowledge of what has been done and is being done in utopia. it is through the medium of his own exertions that the evolution of the child's instincts is carried on by egeria. it may be possible to lay veneers of information on the surface of a child's mind, but it is not possible to lay on veneers of growth; and growth, not information, is the end at which egeria has always aimed. if a child is to grow, he must exercise his own limbs, his own organs, his own faculties. no one else can do this for him; and unless he does it himself, it will never be done. the school life in utopia is therefore one of constant activity. the habit of doing things, of doing things for himself, of doing things by himself, is gradually built up in each child. there is no forced inertness in utopia, no slackness, no boredom, no yawning. and the activity which is characteristic of the school is always the child's own activity. the child himself is behind everything that he does. the child himself is expressing himself in his every action. mechanical activity, the doing of things, not merely at the bidding of another, but also under his minutely detailed direction, is as foreign to the genius of the school as is the passivity of the helpless victims of the unenlightened teacher's "chalk and talk." the first consequence, then, of the training of the expansive instincts which is given in utopia is the building up in each scholar of what i may call the habit of rational activity. in many schools the energies of the child are systematically dammed back, till at last the springs of his activity, finding that no demand is made upon them, cease to flow. in utopia the sluices, though always regulated, are permanently lifted, and the energies of the child are ever moving, with a strong and steady current, in whatever channel they may have chanced to enter. so strong, indeed, and so steady is the current that it maintains its movement long after the child has left school. the employers of labour in the neighbourhood of utopia will tell you that there are no slackers or loafers in the yearly output of the school. egeria recently received a visit from one of her ex-pupils, a girl of fourteen who is at home keeping house for her father, and who said to her in the course of their conversation: "i do just love washing days; i get up before six and start. then, when all the washing is done, i scrub everything bright in the copper while i have the hot soapsuds." accustomed as he (or she) is from his (or her) earliest days to sincere and fearless self-expression, the utopian child is entirely incapable of indulging in cant; and the genuineness of the sentiment which dictated those words is therefore above suspicion. to work vigorously, to do well whatever he (or she) has to do, is a real pleasure to the utopian child. indeed his whole being is a living response to the familiar precept: "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." and what he does with his might is always well worth doing. his constant effort to express himself has, as its necessary counterpart, a constant effort to find out what is worth expressing, to get to the truth of things, to see things as they are. the consequent growth of his perceptive powers may be looked at from two points of view. on the one hand his growing capacity for getting on terms with things--for feeling his way among them, for "getting, the hang" of them, for making himself at home with them, for learning their ins and outs, for understanding their ways and works--will give him the power of putting forth an appropriate _sense_ in response to the demands of each new environment, and, through the medium of this sense, of converting information into knowledge. for this reason new "subjects" have no terror for egeria and her pupils. though she has never thought in subjects, she is ready to extend her curriculum in any direction in which she thinks that her children are likely to find interest or profit. the versatility, the mental agility, of the children is as remarkable as their activity. the current of their energy is ready to adapt itself to every modifying influence, to every change of geological formation, that it may encounter in its course, and to shape its channel or channels accordingly. on the other hand, as healthy vigorous growth is always upward (and downward) as well as outward, the lateral extension of the child's perceptive powers must needs be balanced in utopia by the gradual elevation of his standpoint, with a corresponding widening of his outlook, and the proportionate deepening of his insight. when the school life of the child is one of continuous self-expression, opportunities for "putting his soul" into what he says and does will often present themselves to him; and if only a few of these are made use of, his outlook on life will widen, and his imaginative sympathy with life will deepen, to an extent which to one who had never visited utopia might well seem incredible. i have spoken of the utopian child's love of the beautiful. this is one aspect of the spiritual growth that he is always making. other aspects of it are his strong sympathy with life in all its forms, and a certain large and free way of looking at things, which, as far as my experience of school children goes, is all his own. there is yet another aspect of his spiritual growth which is perhaps the most vital and the most typical of all. when we say that the child is growing both laterally and vertically (like a shapely tree), we mean that he is growing as a whole, as a living soul. now the growth of the soul as such must needs take the form of outgrowth, of escape from "self." growth is, in its essence, an emancipative process; and though it sometimes intensifies selfishness and widens the sphere of its activity, that is invariably due to its being one-sided and therefore inharmonious and unhealthy. when the child or the man is growing as a living whole, with a happy, harmonious, many-sided growth, his growth is of necessity outgrowth, and he must needs be escaping from the thraldom of his lower and lesser self. this conclusion is no mere inference from accepted or postulated premises. what i have seen in utopia has forced it upon me. the unselfishness, the natural, easy, spontaneous self-forgetfulness, of the utopian child, is the central feature of his moral life,--so marked and withal so unique a feature that its presence proves to demonstration, first, that growth of the right sort is necessarily emancipative, and, next, that the growth made in utopia is growth of the right sort. i have already commented on the singular charm of manner which distinguishes the children of utopia. their self-forgetfulness, their entire lack of self-consciousness, is one source of this charm. the tactfulness which their life of self-expression, and therefore of trained perception, tends to engender, is another. but the moral aspect of utopianism is one of such surpassing interest, and also of such profound significance from the point of view of my fundamental "truism," that i must limit myself for the moment to this passing reference to it, and reserve it for fuller treatment in the remaining chapters. i could easily make a long list of utopian virtues and graces, but i must content myself with touching on one more typical product of egeria's philosophy of education,--the joy which the children wear in their faces and bear in their hearts. the sense of well-being which must needs accompany healthy and harmonious growth is realised by him who experiences it as joy. the utopian children are by many degrees the happiest that i have met with in an elementary school, and i must therefore conclude that all is well with them, that their well-being--the true end of all education--has been, and is being, achieved. if you look at any of them with more than a mere passing glance, you will be sure to win from him the quick response of a sunny smile,--a smile which is half gladness, half goodwill. and the joy of their hearts goes with them when their schooldays are over and they begin to work for their bread. last year one of the boys, on leaving school, found employment in a large field on the lower slopes of the hills, where he had to collect flints and pile them in heaps, his wage for this dull and tiresome work being no more than fivepence a day. but he found the work neither dull nor tiresome; for as he marched up and down the field, collecting and piling the flints with cheery goodwill, he sang his folk songs with all the spontaneous happiness of a soaring lark. activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a wide and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--these are qualities which might be expected to unfold themselves under the influence of the utopian training, and which do, in point of fact, flourish vigorously in the soil and atmosphere of utopia. they are the outcome of a type of education which differs radically from that which has hitherto been accepted as orthodox,--differing from it with the unfathomable difference between vital and mechanical obedience, between life and machinery. footnotes: [ ] the child is struggling to do this, and more than this. the search for order resolves itself into the search for cause; and the search for cause will resolve itself, in the last resort, into the greatest of all adventures,--the search for that pure essence of things on which all the deeper desires of the soul converge, which imagination dreams of as absolute beauty, and reason as a beacon-lamp of all-illuminating light, flashing forth alternately as absolute reality and absolute truth. [ ] i shall perhaps be told that my extravagant idealism is out of place in a book on elementary education. to this possible reproach i can but answer, in mrs. browning's words, that-- it takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off the dust of the actual. my experience of utopia has convinced me that in taking thought for the education of the young it is impossible to be too idealistic, and that the more "commonsensical" and "utilitarian" one's philosophy of education, the shallower and falser it will prove to be. [ ] an informal report to me, not a formal report to the board of education. [ ] real, in the sense that the beauty of form and colour is more real than either form or colour, and that a law of nature is more real than an isolated fact. chapter v education through self-realisation activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--are there many schools in england in which the soil and atmosphere are favourable to the vigorous growth of all these qualities? i doubt it. in the secondary schools, of all grades and types, the education given is so one-sided, thanks to the inexorable pressure of the scholarship system, that the harmonious development of the child's nature is not to be looked for. in the elementary schools, from which the chilling shadow cast by thirty years of "payment by results" is passing slowly--very slowly--away, the instinct of the teacher is to distrust the child and do everything, or nearly everything, for him, the result being that the whole _régime_ is still unfavourable to the spontaneous outgrowth of the child's higher qualities. there are of course schools, both secondary and elementary, in which one or more of the utopian qualities flourish with considerable vigour. there are elementary schools, for example, in which the children, being allowed by enterprising teachers to walk in new paths without leading strings, have become unexpectedly active and versatile. and there are others--mostly in the slum regions of great towns--in which the devotion, the sympathetic kindness, and the gracious bearing of the teachers have won from the children the response of unselfish affection, attractive manners, and happy faces.[ ] yet even in these exceptional cases it may be doubted if the development of the particular quality or qualities for which the school is distinguished reaches the high-water mark which is reached in each and all of the seven qualities in utopia. as for the elementary schools which remain faithful, as so many still do, to the traditions of the old régime,--if in these any of the seven qualities manage to resist the adverse influences to which they are all exposed, they have at best but a starved and stunted life. i have spoken much and with unsparing frankness of the shortcomings of our elementary schools. the time has come for me to say with emphasis that however grave and however numerous may be the defects of elementary education in england, they are defects which it shares with all other branches of education, and which england shares with all other western lands. the plain truth is that education as such is a failure in the west, a failure in the sense that the very qualities which it ought to foster--the cardinal virtues, mental, moral, and spiritual, which are present in embryo in every child, waiting to be realised--are not merely neglected by it, in its insane ardour for "results," but are also exposed, in most of its schools, to strongly adverse influences. and the reason why education as such is a failure in the west is that from its earliest days it has been a house divided against itself, those who were and are responsible for it having been under the influence of two mutually destructive assumptions, which they have vainly tried to reconcile with one another. the first of these assumptions is my initial "truism,"--that the function of education is to foster growth. this is admitted, implicitly if not directly, by all who think and speak about education, and even, in their unguarded moments, by most of those who teach. it is generally admitted, for example, that such mental qualities as attention, memory, judgment, intelligence, reason, such moral qualities as loyalty, courage, truthfulness, kindness, unselfishness, such semi-moral qualities as cleanliness, orderliness, carefulness, alertness, industry, punctuality, are capable of being developed by education. it is further admitted that such special qualities as literary or artistic taste, the mathematical or the historical sense, an aptitude for business or finance, are ready to evolve themselves, in response to the fostering influence of practical experience directed by skilful teaching. it is admitted, in other words, that there is much in human nature, apart from what is purely or mainly physical, which is both capable and worthy of cultivation, and which education ought therefore to try to cultivate. so far, so good. these admissions, with the fundamental admission which underlies them all, might form the basis of a sound philosophy of education, if they were not liable to be stultified and even nullified by the counter assumption that human nature is innately evil and corrupt. for from the latter assumption has followed, both logically and naturally, a theory of education which is not merely unfavourable but fatal to growth. if human nature is innately evil, if it has no inborn capacity for goodness or truth, what is there in it that is worth training? so far as the "great matters" of life are concerned, the child must be educated by being told in minute detail what to do, and by being alternately bribed and bullied into doing it. as he can neither think, nor believe, nor desire, nor do what is right, he must be told what to think, what to believe, what to desire, what to do; and as it is assumed that the tasks set him by his teacher will not be intrinsically attractive, he must be induced to perform them by the threat of external punishments and the promise of external rewards. in other words, in the spheres of religion and morals, so far as these can be walled off from the rest of human life, he must be educated, not by being helped to grow, but by being compelled to obey; and as the spheres of religion and morals cannot possibly be walled off from the rest of human life, the idea of educating the child through the medium of passive and mechanical obedience will gradually extend its influence over all the other departments and aspects of his home and school life, his innate sinfulness finding its equivalent, in secular matters, in his innate helplessness and stupidity, while in the place of the creeds, codes, and catechisms by which his spiritual welfare is provided for, he will be fed during the hours of secular instruction on rations of information, formulated rules, and minute directions of various kinds. under this _régime_ of wire-pulling on the part of the teacher and puppet-like dancing on the part of the child, the growth of the child's faculties,--of the whole range of his faculties, for they will all come under the blighting influence of the current misconception of the bent of his nature and the consequent under-estimate of his powers,--far from being fostered, will be systematically thwarted and starved. this is the fate which might be expected to befall the child if the doctrine of his innate sinfulness were allowed to dominate his education; and this is the fate which has befallen and is befalling him in all grades of society and in all the countries of the west. it is the doctrine of original sin, of the congenital depravity of man's nature, which blocks the way to the reform of education,--blocks the way to it by compelling education to become the destroying angel instead of the foster-nurse of the child's expanding life. in criticising the defects of our educational system, we have too long mistaken symptoms for causes, and believed that we were removing the latter when we were only palliating or at best excising the former. to pinch off a withered bud, to lop off a withered limb, of the diseased tree of education, to train in this or that direction a branch which is as yet unaffected, is but lost labour so long as the tree is being slowly poisoned at its roots by a fundamental misconception of the character and capacity of the child. it is time that we should reconsider our whole attitude towards human nature. the widespread belief that sundry faculties, physical, mental, and moral, admit of being cultivated and ought to be cultivated in the schoolroom--a belief which is ever affirming itself against the educational systems and practices that are ever giving it the lie--may surely be construed into an admission that my primary truism is at least a truth. if this is so, if the business of the teacher is, as i contend, to help the child to grow, healthily, vigorously, and symmetrically, on all the planes of his being, the inference is irresistible that education will achieve nothing but failure until its foundations have been entirely relaid. for faith in the inherent soundness, in the natural goodness, of the seed or sapling, or whatever else he may undertake to rear, is the first condition of success on the part of the grower. and to ask education to bring to sane and healthy maturity the plant which we call human nature, and in the same breath to tell it that human nature is intrinsically corrupt and evil, is to set it an obviously impracticable task. one might as well supply a farmer with the seeds of wild grasses and poisonous weeds, and ask him to grow a crop of wheat. growth can and does transform potential into actual good, but no process of growth can transform what is innately evil into what is finally good. a poisonous seed will ripen of inner necessity into a poisonous plant; and the more carefully it is fed and tended, the larger and stronger will the poisonous plant become. the time has come, then, for us to throw to the winds the time-honoured, but otherwise dishonoured and discredited, belief that the child is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and that therefore his nature, if allowed to obey its own laws and follow its own tendencies, will ripen into death, instead of into a larger and richer life. i shall perhaps be told that if this belief is abandoned, other religious beliefs will go with it. let them go. they have kept bad company, and if they cannot dissociate themselves from it, they had better share its fate. what is real and vital in our religious beliefs will gain incalculably by being disengaged from what may once have had a life and a meaning of its own but is now nothing better than a morbid growth. to tell a man that, apart from a miracle, he is predestined to perdition, is the surest way to send him there; and it is probable that the doctrine of his own innate depravity is the deadliest instrument for achieving his ruin, that man, in his groping endeavours to explain to himself the dominant facts of his existence, has ever devised. nor is the practical failure of the doctrine--its failure to achieve any lasting result but the strangulation of man's expanding life--the only proof that it is inherently unsound. there is positive proof that the counter doctrine, the doctrine of man's potential goodness, is inherently true. we have seen that the great arterial instincts which manifest themselves in the undirected play of young children, are making for three supreme ends,--the sympathetic instincts for the goal of _love_, the artistic instincts for the goal of _beauty_, the scientific instincts for the goal of _truth_. we have seen, in other words, that the push of nature's forces in the inner life of the young child is ever tending to take him out of himself in the direction of a triune goal which i may surely be allowed to call _divine_. if we follow towards "infinity" the lines of love, of beauty, and of truth, we shall begin at last to dream of an ideal point--the meeting-point of all and the vanishing-point of each--for which no name will suffice less pregnant with meaning or less suggestive of reality than that of god. it is towards god, then, not towards the devil, that the ripening, expansive forces of nature which are at work in the child, are directing the process of his growth. we are taught that man is by nature a "child of wrath." the more closely we study his ways and works when, as a young child, he is left (more or less) to his own devices, the stronger does our conviction become that he is by nature a "child of god." those who are in a position to speak tell us that the normal child is born physically healthy. if the men of science would study the other sides of his being as carefully as they have studied his physique, they would, i feel sure, be able to tell us that he is also born mentally, morally, and spiritually healthy, and that on these sides, as well as on the physical side, his growth might be and ought to be a natural movement towards perfection. for some of my readers such arguments as these are perhaps too much in the air to be convincing. well, then, let us appeal to experience. let us see what the systematic cultivation of his natural faculties has done for the child in utopia. i have already pointed out that the unselfishness of the children--the complete absence of self-seeking and self-assertion--is one of the most noticeable features of the life of their school. now there is no place for moral teaching on the time-table of the school: and i can say without hesitation that the direct inculcation of morality is wholly foreign to egeria's conception of education. how, then, has the emancipation of the child from the first enemy of man's well-being--from all those narrowing, hardening, and demoralising influences which we speak of collectively as egoistic or selfish--been effected in utopia? by no other means than that of allowing the child's nature to unfold itself, on many sides of its being and under thoroughly favourable conditions. the twofold desire which we all experience,--to accept and rest in the ordinary undeveloped self, and at the same time to exalt and magnify it,--is the surest and most fruitful source of moral evil. indeed, it may be doubted if there is any source of moral evil, apart from those which are purely sensual, which has not at least an underground connection with this. if we are to "cap" this deadly fountain, and so prevent it from desolating human life, we must realise, once and for all, that the two desires which master us cannot be simultaneously gratified; that we cannot both rest in the ordinary self and magnify it; that we can magnify it only by _making it great_, by helping it to grow. when we have realised this, we shall be ready to receive the further lesson that in proportion as the self magnifies itself by the natural process of growth, so does its desire to magnify itself gradually die away,--die away with the dawning consciousness that in and through the process of its growth it is outgrowing itself, forgetting itself, escaping from itself, that the thing which so ardently desired to be magnified is in fact ceasing to be. this vital truth,--which my visits to utopia have borne in upon me,--that healthy and harmonious growth is in its very essence _out_growth or escape from self, has depths of meaning which are waiting to be fathomed. for one thing, it means, if it has any meaning, that what is central in human nature is, not its inborn wickedness but its infinite capacity for good, not its rebellious instincts and backsliding tendencies but its many-sided effort to achieve perfection. we must now make our choice between two alternatives. we must decide, once and for all, whether the function of education is to foster growth or to exact mechanical obedience. if we choose the latter alternative, we shall enter a path which leads in the direction of spiritual death. if we choose the former, we must cease to halt between two opinions, and must henceforth base our system of education, boldly and confidently, on the conviction that growth is in its essence a movement towards perfection, and therefore that self-realisation is the first and last duty of man. it is by answering possible objections to utopianism that i shall best be able to unfold egeria's philosophy of education. i shall perhaps be told that in my advocacy of that philosophy _i am preaching dangerous doctrines; that the only alternative for obedience is the lawlessness of unbridled licence; and that anarchy, social, moral, and spiritual, is the ultimate goal of the path which i am urging the teacher to enter._ let me point out, in answer to this protest, that it is mechanical obedience which i condemn, not obedience as such. if i condemn mechanical obedience, i do so because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher faculties of man's being, the faculties which are distinctively human--reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the like--take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an automaton, not of a living soul. what i wish to oppose to it is _vital obedience_, obedience to the master laws of man's being, obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme, obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that hierarchy of laws--(the superior law always claiming the fuller measure and the higher kind of obedience)--which, if we are to use the divine name, we must needs identify with the will of god. obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep effort in which all the higher faculties of man's being take part, an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at which he is to aim. that the path of soul-growth is the path of vital obedience can scarcely be doubted. the effort to grow is always successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws; and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of the very faculties by which knowledge--the higher knowledge which makes further growth possible--is to be gained. here, as elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and more significant obedience. and, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature, which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible. growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the gradual escape from the ordinary self. a man is to cling to and affirm his individuality, not in order that he may rest in it and make much of it, but in order that he may outgrow it and pass far beyond it in that one way--the best way for him--which it, and it alone, is able to mark out for him. in other words, he is to assert his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority, in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy and cant. what i may call the utopian scheme of education, far from making for antinomianism and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and therefore, _a fortiori_, of everything that savours of licence. it is the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to social and political chaos. the whole _régime_ of mechanical obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of anarchy. let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its moral equivalent. what will happen to it when its subjects begin to ask it for its credentials? the fact that it has always demanded from them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of punishment and renewed promises of reward. but the very fact that it is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make people believe that it can punish and reward, is being called in question and is therefore crumbling away. and behind that power there is nothing but chaos. for the _régime_ of mechanical obedience, by arresting the spontaneous growth of man's higher nature, and by making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind, is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. this is what is happening in the west, in our self-conscious and critical age. in every field of human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in letters, authority is being asked for its credentials; and as this demand, besides being a disintegrating influence, is a sign that the force on which authority relies is weakening, it is not to be wondered at that there is a steady drift in many western countries in the direction of anarchy,--religious, political, social, artistic, literary,--or that this _régime_ of incipient anarchy is taking the form of an ignoble scramble for wealth, for power, for position, for fame, for notoriety, for anything in fine which may serve to exalt a man above his fellows, and so minister to the aggrandizement of his lower self. in this drift towards anarchy the school is playing its part. i do not wish to suggest that the boys and girls of this or any other western country are beginning to ask their teachers for their credentials, or are likely to rise in rebellion against them. the preparation for anarchy that is going on in the school is not only quite compatible with what is known as "strict discipline," but is also, in part at least, the effect of it. what is happening is that in an acutely critical age the _régime_ of mechanical obedience to external authority which has been in force in the west for nearly years, and which is now taking its victims straight towards anarchy, is being carefully rehearsed in our schools of all types and grades. during the years when human nature is most pliable (owing to its richness in sap), most easily trained, and most amenable to influence, good or evil, the child's spontaneous effort to outgrow himself and so escape from his lower self,--an end which is not to be reached except by the path of free self-expression,--is persistently thwarted till at last it dies away; blind and literal obedience to external authority, for which the consent of his higher faculties is not asked, and in the giving of which they are not allowed to take part, is persistently exacted from him till at last his higher faculties cease to energise, and his lower nature begins to monopolise the rising sap of his life; in order to enforce the blind obedience that is asked for, an appeal is made, by an elaborate system of external rewards and external punishments, to his selfish desires and ignoble fears; while the examination system, with its inevitable accompaniments of prizes and class-lists, makes a special appeal to his competitive instincts,--instincts which are anti-social, and may even, in extreme cases, become anti-human in their tendency. and when authority has thus been presented to him, in a form which he has never been expected to welcome, and when, by the same process, the growth of his higher self has been arrested, and his anarchical instincts--his selfishness and self-assertion--have been systematically cultivated, the critical spirit and temper will be deliberately aroused in him, especially if he happens to attend one of those secondary schools which are regarded as highly efficient because their lists of university distinctions and other "successes" are inordinately long; for the education given to him in such a school by his scholarship-hunting teachers is of necessity so bookish and so one-sided that his intellectual, dialectically critical faculties are apt to become hypertrophied, while other faculties which might have kept these in check are neglected and starved. the product of such a system of education,--benumbed or paralysed on many sides of his being by the repressive _régime_ to which he has so long been subjected, but vigorously alive on the sides of egoism and intellectual criticism,--will be an anarchist _in posse_ (unless, indeed, his vitality has been depressed by his school-life below the point at which reaction becomes possible);--an anarchist _in posse_, even though, in his terror of anarchism in others, he should become a pillar of the established church of his country, a j.p. of his town or county, and an active member of the nearest conservative association. in utopia, on the other hand, where selfishness is outgrown and forgotten, and where the spirit of comradeship and brotherhood pervades the school, there can be no preparation for anarchy, if only for the reason that there is no authority--no despotic authority, forcibly imposing its will on the school _ab extra_--to be potentially dethroned. for all her scholars, egeria is the very symbol and embodiment of love, the centre whence all happy, harmonious, life-giving, peace-diffusing influences radiate, and to which, when they have vitalised the souls of the children and transformed themselves into sentiments of loyalty and devotion, they all return. i am not exaggerating a whit when i say that the utopian school is an ideal community, a community whose social system, instead of being inspired by that spirit of "competitive selfishness" which makes "each for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" its motto, seems to have realised the socialistic dream of "each for all, and all for each." i shall perhaps be asked _what provision is made in utopia for enabling the children to go through the drudgery of school-life, to master the " r's," to "get up" the various subjects which the code prescribes, and so forth_. to this question there is but one answer: the best possible provision. "qui veut la fin veut les moyens." in the life of organised play which the children lead, attractive ends are ever being set before them. if they are to achieve these ends, they must take the appropriate means. what children in other schools might regard as drudgery, the utopian takes in his stride. reading, writing, and arithmetic are means to ends beyond themselves, ends which are constantly presenting themselves to the utopian. if he is to gratify his communicative instinct, he must learn to read and write. if he is to gratify his dramatic instinct, he must, _inter alia_, read with intelligence books of reference which would be considered too advanced for the ordinary school-child. if he is to gratify his inquisitive and constructive instincts, he must learn to count, measure, and calculate. for whatever means may have to be taken, must be taken by him. egeria, as he knows well, will do nothing for him which he can reasonably be expected to do for himself. there are subjects, such as drawing, dancing, and singing, which are, or at any rate ought to be, intrinsically delightful, as being natural channels of self-expression. there are other subjects, such as history, geography, and english, which can be made delightful by being treated dramatically. the word "drudgery" has no meaning for the utopian child. a group of children in the highest class recently committed to memory the whole "trial scene" of the _merchant of venice_--some lines or so of blank verse--in order that they might give themselves the pleasure of acting it. they accomplished this feat in a little more than a month. in the ordinary elementary school the child who has committed lines to memory in the course of a year has done all that is required of him. the getting up of a subject is drudgery only when the child can see no meaning in what he is doing, only when the getting up of the subject is regarded as an end in itself. in utopia no subject, apart from those which i have spoken of as intrinsically delightful, is taught for its own sake. subjects are taught there either as the means to desired ends, or because they afford opportunities for the training of the expansive instincts, the gratification of which is a pure pleasure to every healthy child. but not only does the utopian child, with his eyes always fixed on desirable ends, find a pleasure in doing things which other children are wont to regard as drudgery, but he has the further advantage of being able to master with comparative facility what other children find difficult as well as distasteful. from first to last, the training given in utopia makes, as we have seen, for the development of faculty. in my last chapter i set forth in detail some of the ways and means by which egeria tries to cultivate the expansive instincts of her pupils. behind all these ways and means stands the master method--or shall i say the master principle?--of self-expression. recognising, as she does, that each of the expansive instincts is a definite expression of the soul's spontaneous effort to grow, and a clear indication of a particular direction in which nature wishes the soul to grow,--and recognising, as she also does, that the business of growing must be done by the growing organism and cannot be delegated to any one else,--egeria entrusts the work of self-realisation to the child himself, and makes no attempt to relieve him of an obligation which no one but himself can discharge. now self-realisation is a twofold process. in the absence of a fitter and more adequate word, i have applied the term _perceptive_ to those faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own. and i have contended that this group of faculties has, as its counterpart and correlate, another group of faculties which i have called _expressive_,--the faculties by means of which we go out of ourselves into the world that surrounds us, and give ourselves to it and try to identify ourselves with it,--and that the relation between these two groups is so vital and so intimate that each in turn may be regarded as the very life and soul of the other. in words which i have already used, the perceptive faculties, at any rate in childhood, grow through the interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way, and the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no other way. that these two groups of faculties are, as it were, the reciprocating engines by means of which the vital movement which we call self-realisation is effected, is the conviction on which egeria's whole scheme of education may be said to be pivoted. in utopia self-expression is the medium through which the expansive instincts are encouraged to unfold themselves. and this life of self-expression has as its necessary counterpart the continuous development of the perceptive faculties along the whole range of the child's nature. hence the all-round capacity of the utopian child. the development of his perceptive faculties which his life of self-expression tends to produce, takes many forms. one of these, and one which in some sort underlies and interpenetrates all the rest, is the outgrowth of what i may call the _intuitional_ faculty,--a general capacity for getting into touch with any new environment in which the child may find himself, of subconsciously apprehending its laws and properties, of feeling his way through its unexplored land. it is by means of this capacity for putting forth a new _sense_ in response to the stimulus of each new environment, that the utopian child is able to master with comparative ease the various subjects which he is expected to learn. and not with ease only, but with effect. it is, as we have seen, through the action of an appropriate sense, and in no other way, that the information which is supplied to the scholar, when he is learning this or that subject, is converted into _knowledge_, and is so made available both for the further understanding of the given subject and for the nutrition of the scholar's own inner life. from every point of view, then, the utopian scholar has a marked advantage, in respect of the things with which education is supposed to be mainly concerned--the mastery of subjects and the acquisition of knowledge--over the product of the conventional type of school. whatever the utopian may have to learn, is a pleasure to him either for its own sake or as a means to some desirable end. whatever he may have to learn, he learns with comparative ease, because his perceptive faculties have been systematically trained, and he is therefore at home, in greater or lesser degree, in any new environment. and whatever he may have to learn, he learns with effect, because he is able to digest the information that he receives, and convert it into knowledge, and so retain it in the form in which it will best conduce both to his further progress in that particular branch of study and to the general building up of his mind. in the ordinary result-hunting school the scholar fares very differently from this. as a rule, he takes but little pleasure in his work, for subjects which have their chief value as means to desirable ends are presented to him as ends in themselves, and as such are rightly regarded by him as meaningless and therefore as intolerably dull; while subjects which are either intrinsically attractive, as being natural channels of self-expression, or potentially attractive as providing opportunities for self-expression, have no attraction for him, as in neither case is self-expression on his part permitted. again, he finds great difficulty in mastering the subjects on his time-table, or even in making the first step towards mastering them, for, owing to his perceptive faculties as a whole having been starved by the repressive _régime_ which denied them the outlet of expression, he has not evolved the power of putting forth an appropriate sense in response to the stimulus of a new environment, and is therefore helpless in the presence of what is unfamiliar or unexpected. one of his faculties, his memory, has indeed been hypertrophied by being unduly exercised, and his capacity for receiving information is in consequence unhealthily great; but because he lacks, in this case or in that, the _sense_ which might enable him to digest the information received and convert it into knowledge, the food with which he has been crammed speedily passes through him, undigested and unassimilated, and the hours which he has spent in acquiring information will have done as little for his progress in the given subject as for the general growth of his mind. the difference between the two schemes of education--that which exacts mechanical obedience, and that which seeks to foster growth--may be looked at from another point of view. under the former, interference with what i may call the subconscious processes of nature is at its maximum. under the latter, at its minimum. in order to realise what this means let us suppose that such interference were possible where fortunately it is and must ever be impossible,--in the first and second years of the child's life. fortunately for the child, it is impossible for us to educate him, in any formal sense of the word, until he has mastered his mother tongue. were it otherwise, his mother tongue would never be mastered. before he reaches the age of two the child accomplishes the marvellous feat of acquiring an entirely new language. while he is learning it nature is his only teacher, and under her tuition he masters the new language without the least strain and with complete success. but let us suppose that it was possible for a teacher of the conventional type to give minute directions to a child by some other medium of expression than that of language. and let us suppose that such a teacher made up her mind that she, and not nature, was to teach the child his mother tongue. one can readily imagine what would happen. the teacher would probably have a theory that no child should begin to talk till he was two or even two and a half years old; and if so, the child would be kept in a state of enforced dumbness till he reached that age. in any case, he would be strictly forbidden to speak till his teacher gave him formal permission to do so. half-an-hour in the morning, and half-an-hour in the afternoon would probably be set aside for the language lesson. for so many weeks or months the child would be strictly limited to words of two or three letters. for so many more weeks or months, to words of four or five letters. things which had names of more than the prescribed number of letters would be kept away from the child; or, if that was impossible, he would not be allowed to talk about them. for half a year perhaps he would be limited to the use of nouns and verbs. prepositions might then be introduced into his vocabulary; and, later, adjectives and adverbs. and so on; and so on. and the outcome of all this elaborate training would be that the child would never learn to talk his mother tongue. it is by methods analogous in all respects to this that many of the subjects on the time-table are taught in thousands of our schools. the teacher seems to imagine that he knows, fully and precisely, how each subject ought to be taught; and instead of standing aside, and trying to learn how nature wishes this or that subject to be taught (if nature can be said to take any interest in "subjects"), and then trying to co-operate with her subconscious tendencies, he makes out his elaborate scheme of instruction, sets before the child as the goal of his efforts the production of certain formal results, and drives him towards these with whip and bridle, satisfied that if he succeeds in producing them, the subject will have been duly mastered. and all the time he will not have given a thought to what is happening to the child's inner life. yet it is more than probable that the teacher's disregard of, and therefore incessant interference with, the subconscious processes of nature has quite as disastrous results in the teaching of composition, let us say, or drawing, as it would certainly have in the hypothetical case of the teaching of the child's mother tongue. but in truth the utopian conception of what constitutes efficiency differs so radically from the current conception, that little is to be gained by comparing them. if i am asked by those who value outward and visible results for their own sake, whether the training given in utopia is "efficient," i can but answer: "yes, but efficient in a sense which you cannot even begin to understand,--efficient in the sense of developing faculty and fostering life, whereas the price paid for your boasted efficiency is the starvation of faculty and the destruction of life." * * * * * "_but how_," it will be asked, "_are the utopian children, one and all, induced to exert themselves? the standard of activity in the school is, on your own showing, exceptionally high. much is expected of the children. yet there are no rewards for them to hope for, and no punishments for them to fear. how, then, are those who are by nature less energetic or less persevering than the rest to be induced to rise to the level of the teacher's expectation?_" by implication this question has been answered again and again. but it deserves a direct answer, and i will try to give it one. to begin with, it is incorrect to say that there are no rewards or punishments in utopia. outward rewards and outward punishments are entirely unknown there; but there are inward rewards to be had for the seeking, and there are inward punishments to be feared, though it must be admitted that the fear of them seldom overshadows, even for a passing moment, the sunlit life of the utopian child. what induces the utopian child to work is, in brief, delight in his work. he is allowed and even encouraged to energise along the lines which his nature seems to have marked out for him, and in response to the stress of forces which seem to be welling up from the depths of his inner life. exertion of this kind is in itself a delight. nature has taken care to make all the exercises by which growth is fostered, at any rate in the days of childhood when growth is most rapid and vigorous, intrinsically attractive. had she done otherwise she would have failed to make due provision for the growth of man's being during the years which precede the outgrowth of self-consciousness, and the possibility of self-discipline, of the narrower and sterner kind. and not only are the exercises by which healthy and harmonious growth is secured intrinsically attractive, but also the sense of well-being which accompanies such growth is an unfailing source of happiness. in utopia the end for which the children are working is not an external reward or prize to be conferred on them if they achieve certain prescribed results, but rather the actual goal to which the path that they have entered is taking them,--a goal which is ever lighting the path with its foreglow, and which is therefore at once an infinitely distant lodestar and an ever present delight. for the consummation of any process of growth is always the perfection, the final well-being, of the thing that grows; and therefore in each successive stage of the process there is a truer prefigurement of the perfection which is being gradually achieved, and a fuller sense of that well-being which, at its highest level, is perfection's other self. for the utopian, then, to walk in the path of self-realisation is its own reward; and to wander from that path is its own punishment. but as the forces of nature are all co-operating to keep the child in the path of self-realisation, and as egeria has allied herself with those forces and is working with them in every possible way, the rewards which the utopian wins for himself are very many, while the punishments which he inflicts on himself are very few. in other words, the pressure on him to exert himself is so strong, his opportunities for exerting himself (under egeria's sympathetic rule) are so many, and the pleasure of exerting himself is found to be so great, that the temptation to be idle or rebellious can scarcely be said to exist. it is indeed in respect of the motives to exertion which they respectively supply, that the superiority of the utopian to the conventional type of education is perhaps most pronounced. i have said that egeria allies herself with the expansive forces of nature. the teacher of the conventional type has to fight against those forces. let us assume that the two teachers are on a level in respect of their capacity for influencing and stimulating their pupils, and let us indicate that level by the algebraical symbol _x_. then the difference between the motive force which egeria exerts, and the motive force which her rival exerts, is the difference between _x_ + _y_, and _x_ - _y_, _y_ being used to symbolise the aggregate motive force of the expansive tendencies of the child's inner nature. such a difference is incalculable. the scheme of education which is based on distrust of the child's nature and belief in its intrinsic sinfulness and stupidity, necessarily arrays against itself the hidden forces of that maligned and despised nature, and must needs overcome their resistance before it can hope to achieve its proposed end. while egeria is helping nature to provide suitable channels for the various expansive tendencies that are at work in the child, and to guide them all into the central channel of self-realisation, her rival is engaged in digging a canal (to be filled, when finished, with dead, stagnant water) which is so designed that not only will no use be made by it of the life stream of the child's latent energies, but also costly culverts and other works will have to be constructed for it in order to divert and send to waste that troublesome current. the waste of motive force which goes on under any scheme of education through mechanical obedience, is indeed enormous. and what is most lamentable is that the energies of the teacher are being largely wasted in the effort to neutralise the latent energies of the child. no wonder that, in order to produce his meagre and illusory, "results," the teacher should have to resort to motive forces which, by appealing to the lower side of the child's nature, will enable him to bear down the resistance, and, in doing so, to impede the outgrowth of the higher,--to the hope of external rewards and the threat of external punishments. and no wonder that, owing to the teacher having to work unceasingly against the grain of the child's nature, of these two demoralising forces, the fear of punishment--which, if not the more demoralising, is certainly the more wasteful of energy--should bulk the more largely in the eyes of the child. in fine, then, whereas the conventional type of education is so wasteful of motive force that it dissipates the greater part of the teachers' and the scholars' energies in needless friction,--in utopia, on the other hand, there is such an economy of motive force that the very joy which, under its scheme of education, always accompanies the child's expenditure of energy, and which might be regarded as merely a waste by-product, becomes in its turn a powerful incentive to further exertion. * * * * * "_but is there not too much joy in utopia? is not the sky too cloudless? is not the atmosphere too clear? does the utopian never act from a sense of duty? has he never to do anything that is distasteful to him?_" this objection raises an interesting question. is the function of the sense of duty to enable us to do distasteful things? and if so, are we to regard it as the highest of motives to moral action? in the days when kant's idea of the "moral imperative" was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of virtue was to do what you hated doing. looking back to my oxford days, i recall some doggerel lines, of german origin, in which this belief finds apt expression. a disciple who is in trouble about his soul says to his master: "willing serve i my friends, but do it, alas! with affection, and so gnaws me my heart, that i'm not virtuous yet." to this the master replies: "help except this there is none: you must strive with might to contemn them, and with horror perform then what the law may enjoin." if this conception of morality is correct, if it is true that the atmosphere of the virtuous life should be one of horror and even of hatred, then it must be admitted that the utopian children are receiving a seriously defective education. but the "if" is a large one; and for my part i incline to the belief that love, as a motive to action, is better than hatred, joy than horror, sunshine than gloom. the day will indeed come when the utopian--a child no longer--will have to do things, either for his own sake or in order to discharge obligations to others, which will be, or will seem to be, against the grain even of his happy nature; and the sense of duty will then have to come to his aid. but there is no reason why he, or his teachers, should anticipate that day. to compel him, while still a child, to work against the grain of his nature, when there was no real need for this, would not be the best preparation for the trials that await him. to compel him to spend the greater part of his school-life in doing what was distasteful to him, would be the worst possible preparation for them. for, to begin with, the sense of duty is not the highest motive to action. a far higher motive is love. if the sense of duty to god, for example, had not devotion to god and love of god behind it, the object of one's worship would be a malignant rather than a beneficent deity, a devil rather than a god. or let us take the case of a child who is dangerously ill, and who needs to be carefully and even devotedly nursed. by whom will he be the more effectively nursed,--by his mother who loves him passionately, or by a hired nurse who cannot be expected to love him but who has a strong sense of duty to her employers? (i am assuming that as regards professional skill, and the sense of duty to god, the two women are on a level.) surely the mother, sustained by love in the endurance of sleeplessness and fatigue, and in the exercise of that unceasing vigilance which lets no symptom escape it, will be the better nurse. love, as a motive to moral action, has the immense advantage over the sense of duty of being able to rob the hour of trial of its gloom, by strengthening the lover to make light of labour and difficulty till at last the sense of effort is lost in the sense of joy. but if love is the highest of all motives, is it not well that the child's life should as far as possible, and for as long as possible, be kept under its influence, to the exclusion of other motives. we have seen that the utopian child takes many things in his stride which other children would regard as distasteful. if they are not distasteful to him, the reason is that he does them, not from a sense of duty, but under the inspiration of love,--love of life, love of egeria, love of his schoolmates, love of his school. and the longer he can remain on the high plane of love, the better it will be for his after life. and when the time comes for him to yield himself to the "saving arms" of duty, he will have had the best of all preparations for that hour of trial, for he will have been braced and strengthened for it by the most moralising of all disciplines, that of growth. what is the sense of duty? we too seldom ask ourselves this question. is it not a feeling of obligation, of being in debt, to some person, or persons, or institution, or society, or even to some invisible power;--to a friend, for example, a relative, a dependent, an employer, a "contracting party," a commanding officer,--or, again, to one's trade or profession, to one's political party, to one's church, to one's country,--or, in the last resort, to god? and is not this feeling accompanied by the secret conviction that until the debt has been liquidated, to the best of the debtor's ability, justice will not have been done? the sense of duty is, i think, a derivative sense, an offshoot from the more primitive sense of justice,--a sense so primitive that it may almost be said to have made possible our social life. if this is so, if the sense of duty is resolvable into the sense of justice, then the training which is given in utopia--a training which makes for healthy and harmonious growth, and therefore (as we have seen) for outgrowth or escape from self--is the best preparation for a life of duty, that can possibly be given. for under its influence the sense of justice, which is essentially a social instinct, knowing no distinction between oneself and one's neighbour, will be relieved of the hostile pressure of its arch-enemy, the anti-social instinct of selfishness,[ ] and will therefore make rapid and vigorous growth. the sense of justice is, as might be expected, strongly developed in the selfless atmosphere of utopia, where indeed it has helped, in no small degree, to evolve the wonderful social life of the school; and, that being so, there is no fear but what the utopian will be sustained by the sense of duty when the time comes for him to work against the grain of his nature. but however strong may be his sense of duty, he will always have the great advantage of being seldom called upon to do what he dislikes, and therefore of being able to keep the fibre of his sense of duty from being either unduly relaxed or unduly hardened by overwork; for he has been accustomed from his earliest days to make light of, and even find a pleasure in, what is usually accounted drudgery, and he has been accustomed to work, in school and out of school, under the inspiration of joy and love. _but is the education given in utopia useful?_ i wish i knew who was asking this question, for i cannot hope to answer it to his satisfaction until i know what is his standard of values. what end does he set before the teachers of our elementary schools? if he would tell me this, i might be able to say yes or no to his question. at present there seems to be no agreement among educationalists, professional or amateur, as to what constitutes usefulness in education. those who belong to the "upper classes" are apt to assume that the "lower orders" will have been adequately educated when they have been taught reading, writing, arithmetic, needlework, and "religion," subjected to a certain amount of repressive discipline, and compelled to go to church or chapel. if, after having passed through this mill, the children of the "lower orders" do not develop into good men and women and useful citizens, it is not their education which is to blame, but the inborn sinfulness of their corrupt and fallen natures. such an education is regarded by those who advocate it as pre-eminently _useful_. there is no nonsense about it, no cant of idealism, no taint of socialism. it keeps the "lower orders" in their places, and forbids them to dream of rising above "that state of life unto which it" has pleased "god to call them." as it is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the conventional type of education, my objection to it is that it makes the best possible provision for securing the end which the conventional type seems to have set before itself,--in other words, for depressing the vitality of the child, for starving his faculties, for arresting his growth. as such, it has not even the merit of being sordidly useful; for unless stupidity is a better thing than intelligence, slowness than alertness, helplessness than initiative, lifelessness than vital activity, the child who has passed through that dreary mill will be far less effective, even as a day-labourer, than the child whose school-life has been one of continuous and many-sided growth. it is strange that the reactionary members of the "upper classes" should be too short-sighted to discern this obvious truth. but perhaps they have a secret conviction that by so educating the "lower orders" as to make them slow and stupid, helpless and lifeless, they will be the better able to keep them in a state of subservience to and dependence on themselves.[ ] if this is so, there is method in the madness of the "upper classes"; and their conception of the course that education ought to take has the merit of being entirely true to their basely selfish conception of the end that education ought to serve. i have alluded to this pseudo-utilitarian theory, not because it is intrinsically worthy of serious attention, but because there is undoubtedly a strong and influential current of opinion which sets in its direction. there are other advocates of a "useful" education who seem to regard the elementary school, not as a training ground for good men and women, but as a kind of technical institute in which the children are to be trained for the various callings by which, when they grow up, they will have to earn their daily bread. this theory need not be seriously considered, for its inherent absurdity has caused it to be tacitly abandoned by all whose opinion carries weight; and the more reasonable theory that the education given in the elementary school should be as far as possible adapted to the environment of the school--that it should be given a rural bias, for example, or a marine bias, or even an urban bias--has begun to take its place. that it should ever have found advocates is interesting as showing how easy it is for unenlightened public opinion to misinterpret the word "useful."[ ] there is a third class of critics, composed for the most part of members of local education committees, who seem to think that ability to pass a "leaving" examination is the only valid proof of the usefulness of elementary education. if these influential critics, who are showing in various ways that they care more for machinery than for life, could have their will, they would probably revert to the "good old days" of cut-and-dried syllabuses, formal examinations of individual scholars, percentages of passes, and the like. as i have already taken pains to explain what the _régime_ of the "good old days" really meant, i need not waste my time in exposing the fallacies which underlie this conception of "usefulness." here, then, are three distinct standards of usefulness in elementary education. according to the first, education is useful in proportion as it tends, by repressing the activities and atrophying the faculties of the scholars, to keep the "lower orders" in their places, and in so doing to provide the "upper classes" with a sufficiency of labourers and servants. according to the second, it is useful in proportion as it is able to prepare the scholars for their various callings in after life.[ ] according to the third, in proportion as it enables the scholars to pass with credit certain "leaving" and other examinations of a formal type. i will now assume that the end of education is to produce, or at any rate contribute to the production of, good men and women; and that the education given in elementary schools is useful in exact proportion as it serves this end. i am not using the word "good" in its sunday school sense. nor does the word suggest to my mind that blend of stupidity, patience, and submissiveness which sometimes passes for "goodness" when the "upper classes" are taking thought for the welfare of the "lower orders." the good man, as i understand the phrase, is a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, a good townsman, a good workman, a good servant, a good master. in fine, he is a good specimen of his kind, well grown and well developed, efficient on all the planes of his being,--physical, mental, moral, spiritual. this conception of what constitutes useful education differs radically from those which i have just been considering; but i believe that when it has been adequately expounded, and submitted to the judgment of those whose opinion is worth having, it will not be seriously gainsaid. if education is useful in proportion as it tends to produce good men and women, the education given in utopia is useful to the highest degree. for a child cannot become a good man (or woman) except by _growing_ good; and if he is to grow good, his nature must be allowed to develop itself freely and harmoniously (for just so far as it is normal and healthy it is necessarily making for its own perfection), and the one end and aim of the teacher must be to stimulate and direct this process of spontaneous growth. this, as we have seen, is the one end and aim of egeria; and it is therefore clear that she is taking effective steps--the most effective that can possibly be taken--to produce good men and women. we have but to name the qualities which are characteristic, as we have already seen, of her pupils and ex-pupils,--activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--in order to convince ourselves that those who have passed through the utopian school are on the high road which leads to "goodness." so obvious is all this, that in defining the word "useful" i may be said to have decided the question in favour of utopia; and what is now in dispute is not whether utopianism is "useful," in any sense of the word, but whether my sense of the word is the right one. i cannot go much further into this question without exceeding the limits of the theme which i am handling in this chapter. for in considering the after life of the utopian child, i am entering a region in which the idea of _education_ begins to merge itself in the larger idea of _salvation_; and though education, as begun in utopia, is in its essence a life-long process, i must pay some heed to the limits which tradition and custom have imposed on the meaning of the word. but before i close this chapter i must be allowed to give one illustration in support of my contention that the education given in utopia is useful. of the many complaints that are brought against the output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for their special benefit. the reason why they take so readily to this garbage is that they have lost their appetite for wholesome food. they are not interested in healthy literature, in nature-study, in music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates to a subordinate position and places under effective control. it is the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. his taste for false and meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime. the "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received a "useful" education. that vice and crime--whether practised or imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered, is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the utopian school, and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst utopian ex-scholars. the unwholesome literature which gives so much concern to those who are interested in the welfare of the young, is unknown in utopia. and in this, as in other matter, the "goodness" of the children and "young persons" is due, not to any lack of life and spirit, but to the very abundance of their vitality. apart from the fact that vigorous growth, whether in plant or animal or human soul, is in itself a sure prophylactic against the various evils to which growing life is exposed, the utopians are guarded against the danger of demoralising books and demoralising amusements by their many-sided interest in life. their instinct to live, finding natural and adequate outlets in many directions, has no need to force for itself the artificial outlet of morbid excitement,--an outlet for imprisoned energies, which has too often proved an opening to a life of vice and crime. there is a shakespeare in every cottage in utopia; but the advocates of a repressive and restrictive education for the "lower orders" need not be alarmed at this, for the utopians, who have found the secret of true happiness, are freer than most villagers from social discontent. nor are egeria's ex-pupils less efficient as labourers or domestic servants because they are interested in good literature, in nature-study, in acting, or because they can still dance the morris dances and sing the folk songs which they learned in school. footnotes: [ ] i am thinking more particularly of some of the roman catholic schools in the irish quarter of liverpool, where the singularly kind and gracious bearing of the teaching "sisters" towards their poor, ill-fed, and ill-clad pupils is an educative influence of incalculable value. [ ] the sense of justice, which would give to each his due, and therefore not more than his due to oneself, seems to hold the balance between selfishness and love, being as it were, equidistant from the greed and self-indulgence of the former and the lavishness and self-devotion of the latter. if this is so, and if the sense of duty is, as i have suggested, an offshoot from the sense of justice, one can understand why, on the one hand, the sense of duty should be needed to hold the self-seeking instincts in check, and why, on the other hand, it should be an altogether lower and weaker motive than love, by which indeed, _in its own interest_, it should always be ready to be superseded. [ ] i was once present when the utopian children were going through a programme of folk songs and morris dances in the village hall. a lady who was looking on remarked to me: "this is all very fine; but if this sort of thing goes on, where are we going to find our servants?" the selfishness of this remark is obvious. what is less obvious, but more significant, is its purblindness. in point of fact the utopian girls make excellent domestic servants, and are well content to "go into service." [ ] some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary schools of a certain maritime county! [ ] the parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "please do not teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness. chapter vi salvation through self-realisation in utopia the transition from _education_ to _salvation_, both in theory and practice, is obvious and direct. the difference between education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence the two processes are one. as the education given in utopia is, in the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature (with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should be continued as long as he lives. in other words, the path of salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it passes beyond our thought. outside utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be achieved. the idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a part in western education. salvation, which is the highest of all external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness to be won and enjoyed. it follows that the relation between education and salvation is, in the main, one of analogy, rather than of identity (as in utopia), or even of vital connection. or shall we say that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation as the first rehearsal of the play? there are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the west, just as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the supernatural world and the world of nature. in what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained admission to heaven, and, in doing so, to have escaped the torment and misery of hell. there was a time when hell was taken very seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found, when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming interchangeable terms. but if all men are to be admitted to heaven (or to its ante-room, purgatory) at the end of this, their one earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection between conduct and salvation. for though there may be degrees of happiness in heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss of difference which yawns between heaven and hell; and the practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men--the self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent--are to reap the same reward. if a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to hell, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters. but though the doors of heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of mankind; and the maxim, "live anyhow, and you will be saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular attitude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny. i do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is formally countenanced by the churches and sects. they would doubtless repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their own teaching is largely responsible for it. for not only is the idea of _natural_ retribution wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of western theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital. at any rate the sacramental teaching of the catholic church, and the calvinistic doctrine of salvation through faith in the finished work of christ, readily lend themselves to such an interpretation. so ineffective is the current eschatology, in its bearing on conduct, that the latent energy of man's nature--his latent desire to have a central purpose in life--is compelling him to work out for himself another and a more mundane conception of salvation, to set before himself as the end of life the winning of certain temporal prizes, and to keep this end steadily in view from day to day and from year to year. such a conception of salvation has always had a strong attraction for him, though in his more orthodox days he found it desirable to subordinate it to, or if possible harmonise it with, the conception which his religion dictated to him; and of late its attractiveness has been increased by the fact that he is beginning to throw his eschatology (even in its present emasculated form) to the winds. so far, i have had in my mind those quarters of western thought in which the belief in the reality of the soul and the kindred belief in immortality still survive. but in point of fact both beliefs are dying before our eyes,--dying as a dumb protest against the inadequacy of the popular philosophy, against the intrinsic incredibility of its premises, against its fundamental misconception of the meaning of life and the nature and conditions of salvation, above all against the way in which the beliefs themselves have been persistently misinterpreted and travestied. and where the beliefs are dying, the latent externalism and materialism of western thought and western life are able to assert themselves without let or hindrance. "to be saved," as the phrase is now widely understood, means to get on in life, to succeed in business or in a profession, to make money, to rise in the social scale (if necessary, on the shoulders of others), to force one's way to the front (if necessary, by trampling down others), to be talked about in the daily papers, to make a "splash" in some circle or coterie,--in these and in other ways to achieve some measure of what is called "success." and in proportion as this mundane conception of salvation tends to establish itself, so does the drift towards social and political anarchy, which is now beginning to alarm all the lovers of order and "progress," tend to widen its range and accelerate its movement. for though the current idea of achieving salvation through "success" is a comfortable doctrine for the successful few, it is the reverse of comfortable for the unsuccessful many, among whom the idea is gaining ground that as salvation is the reward, not of virtue, but of a judicious blend of cleverness, unscrupulousness, selfishness, and greed, there is no reason, in the moral order of things, why it should not be wrested from those who are enjoying it, either by organised social warfare or by open violence and crime. and even if an anarchical outbreak should result in perdition all round instead of salvation all round, it would at least be some consolation to the "lost" to feel that they had dragged the "saved" down into their own bottomless pit. this would not be a lofty sentiment; yet i do not see who is in a position to condemn it,--not the supporter of the existing social order, which legalises a general scramble, first for the "prizes" of life and then for the bare means of subsistence, and is well content that in that scramble the weak, the ignorant, and the unfortunate should go to the wall,--not the exponent of the conventional theology, which has taught men to dream of a heaven in which the happiness of the "elect" will be unruffled by the knowledge that an eternity of misery is the doom of perhaps a majority of their fellow-men. in the west, then, there are two conceptions of salvation,--a selfish, worldly conception which is daily becoming more effective, and a selfish other-worldly conception which is daily becoming more ineffective, and is therefore less and less able to compete with or control its rival. out of the attempts that are made to realise both these conceptions and to keep them on friendly terms with one another, there is emerging a state of chaos--political, social, moral, spiritual,--a weltering chaos of new and old ideals, new and old theories of life, new and old standards of values, new and old centres of authority, new and old ambitions and dreams. and in this chaos there are only two principles of order, the first (which is also the ultimate cause of all our disorder) being the pathetic fact that nearly all the actors in the bewildering drama are still seeking for happiness outside themselves, the second being the fundamental goodness of man's heart. i will now go back to utopia. there a new conception of salvation is implicit in the new theory of education which has revolutionised the life of the school. humble as is the sphere and small as is the scale of egeria's labours, her work is, i firmly believe, of world-wide importance and lasting value, for she has provided an experimental basis for the idea that salvation is to be achieved by growth, and growth alone. i will now try to interpret that idea. the education of the child in school begins when he is four or five years old, and lasts till he is thirteen or fourteen. but he enters the path of salvation the day he is born. he comes into the world a weak, helpless baby; but, like every other seedling, he has in him all the potencies of perfection,--the perfection of his kind. to realise those potencies, so far as they can be realised within the limits of one earth-life, is to achieve salvation. are those potencies worth realising? to this question i can but answer: "such as they are, they are our all." we might ask the same question with regard to an acorn or a grain of wheat; and in each case the answer would be the same. there are, indeed, plants and animals which are noxious _from our point of view_. but that is not the view which they take of themselves. each of them regards his own potencies in the light of a sacred trust, and strives with untiring energy to realise them. if the potencies of our nature are not worth realising we had better give up the business of living. if they are, we had better fall into line with other living things. an unceasing pressure is being put upon us to do so. the perfect manhood which is present in embryo in the new-born infant, just as the oak-tree is present in embryo in the acorn, will struggle unceasingly to evolve itself. with the dawn of self-consciousness, we shall gradually acquire the power of either co-operating with, or thwarting, the spontaneous energies that are welling up in us and making for our growth. in this respect we stand, in some sort, apart from the rest of living things. but the power to co-operate with our own spontaneous energies is to the full as natural as are the energies themselves. to fathom the mystery of self-consciousness is beyond my power and beside my present purpose; but we may perhaps regard our power of interfering, for good or ill, with the spontaneous energies of our nature, as the outcome of a successful effort which our nature has made both to widen the sphere of its own life and to accelerate the process of its own growth. but just because we possess that power, it is essential that we, above all other living things, should believe in ourselves, should believe in the intrinsic value of our natural potencies, with a whole-hearted faith. for if we do not, we shall hinder instead of helping the forces that are at work in us, and we shall retard instead of accelerating the process of our growth. we have seen that education in the west has hitherto been a failure because, owing to the ascendency of the doctrine of original sin, it has been based on distrust of human nature; and we have seen that in utopia, where egeria's faith in human nature is so profound that she has allowed the children to go far towards educating themselves, the results achieved have gone beyond my wildest dream of what was practicable, at any rate within the limits of the school life of village children. what is true of education is true _a fortiori_ of salvation. if it is impossible to construct a satisfactory scheme of education on the basis of distrust of human nature, it is even more impossible (if there are degrees in impossibility) to construct on the same basis a satisfactory scheme of salvation. i have already contended that if education is to be reformed, the doctrine of original sin must go; and i now contend that if our philosophy of life is to be reformed, we must abandon, not that doctrine only, but the whole dualistic philosophy which centres in the opposition of nature to the supernatural. for trust in human nature--the microcosm--is impossible, so long as nature--the macrocosm--is liable to be disparaged and discredited (in our minds) by the visionary splendours of the supernatural world; and to devise a harmonious scheme of life is impossible so long as an inharmonious conception of the universe dominates our thought,--a conception so inharmonious that it divides the universe, the all of being, into two hostile camps, and in doing so introduces the "war of the worlds" into each individual life. when a fruit-grower plants a fruit-tree, he does three things for it. by choosing an appropriate soil and aspect, he brings adequate supplies of _nourishment_ within reach of it. by manuring it at the right season, he both adds to its store of nourishment and gives it the _stimulus_ which will help it to absorb and assimilate the nourishment that is immediately available for its use. and, by pruning and training it judiciously, he gives it the _guidance_ which will enable it to develop itself to the best advantage from the fruit-bearing point of view (fruit-bearing being the end which he sets it). he does these three things for it, but he does no more than these. he realises that in all these operations he is only taking advantage of the innate powers and tendencies of the tree, and enabling these to deploy themselves under as favourable conditions as possible; and he is therefore well content to leave the rest to the tree itself, feeling sure that its own spontaneous effort to achieve perfection will do all that is needed. his trust in the ability and willingness of the tree to work out its salvation is complete. these are the lines on which the farmer and the fruit-grower conduct their business,--lines, the neglect of which would involve them in early disaster and in ultimate ruin. and these are the lines on which human nature ought to be trained, in school and out of school, from the day of birth to the day of death. but they are lines on which it will never be trained so long as the doctrine of the depravity of nature in general and human nature in particular controls our philosophy of life. the doctrine of natural depravity, or original sin, is the outcome of man's attempt to explain to himself the glaring fact of his own imperfection. the doctrine grew up in an age when men were ignorant of the fundamental laws of nature, and among a people who, though otherwise richly gifted, had no turn for sustained thought. so long as men were ignorant of nature's master law of evolution, it was but natural that they should account for their own imperfection by looking back to a golden age,--a state of innocence and bliss from which they had somehow fallen, and to which they could not, by any effort or process of their corrupted nature, hope to return. while this idea--half myth and half doctrine--was growing up in the mind of israel, the counter idea of the evolution or growth of the soul, of its ascent from "weak beginnings" towards a state of spiritual perfection, was growing up among the thinkers of india, and the derivative doctrine of salvation through the natural process of soul-growth was being gradually elaborated. but though the philosophy of india produced some impression on the conscious thought, and a far deeper impression on the subconscious thought, of the west, its master idea of spiritual evolution--_through a long sequence of lives_--was wholly foreign to the genius of christendom, which had borrowed its _ideas_ from the commonplace philosophy of israel; and it was not till the nineteenth century of our era that the idea of evolution began to make its way, from the quarter of physical science, into western thought. the doctrine of original sin must once have had a meaning and a purpose. for one thing, it must have been generated by a sudden rise in man's moral standard; and as such it must have had a salutary influence on his conduct and inward life. but it is now outstaying its welcome. the biblical story of the fall, in virtue of which it was once authoritatively taught, is ceasing to be regarded as serious history; and the doctrine must therefore either justify itself to critical thought or resign itself to rejection as inadequate and unsound. but there is only one line of defence which its supporters can take. as the doctrine was the outcome of man's premature attempt to explain the fact of his own imperfection, if it is to survive in the world of ideas it must be able to show, first and foremost, that the fact in question cannot be accounted for on other grounds. will it be able to do this, at a time when the idea of evolution is beginning to impregnate our mental atmosphere, and in doing so is making us realise that we are near of kin to all other living things, and that our lives, like theirs, are dominated by the master-law of _growth_? that there is much moral evil in the world is undeniable. are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's heart and soul? but there is also much physical evil in the world,--pain, weakness, disease, decay, and death. are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's body? and this physical evil, this liability to disease, is not confined to man, but also affects all other living things. are we therefore to predicate original depravity of a new-born lamb, of a new-laid egg, of an acorn, of a grain of wheat? let us consider certain typical forms of moral evil, and see if we can account for them, without having recourse to the hypothesis of original sin. the vicious propensities which manifest themselves in children and "young persons" may be divided into two main classes, _apparent_ and _actual_.[ ] of the former class the chief cause is, in a word, _immaturity_. of the latter, _environment_. analogies drawn from plant life may help us to understand how these causes operate. _immaturity._ if an englishman who had never before tasted an apple were to eat one in july, he would probably come to the conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, "conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity," and fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a dustheap, or elsewhere). but if the same man were to wait till october and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would form a wholly different conception of its value. he would find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness into that firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the palate, makes the apple "keep" better than any other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities; and so on. it is the same with the growing child. _most of his vices are virtues in the making_. during the first year or so of his life he is a monster of selfishness; and selfishness is the most comprehensive and far-reaching of all vicious tendencies. does this mean that he has been conceived in sin? not in the least. it means that he is making a whole-hearted effort to guard and unfold the potencies of life--in the first instance, of physical life--which have been entrusted to him. it means that he has entered the path of self-realisation, and that if he will be as faithful to that path during the rest of his life as he has been during those early months of uncompromising selfishness, he will be able at last to scale the loftiest heights of self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice. _environment._ the influences which environment exerts seem to fall under three heads-- ( ) general influences of a more or less permanent character, such as home, neighbourhood, social grade, etc. ( ) general influences of a more or less variable character, such as education, employment, friendship, etc. ( ) particular influences, such as companionship (good or bad), literature (wholesome or pernicious), places of amusement (elevating or debasing), special opportunities for self-sacrifice or self-indulgence, etc. corresponding to these in plant-life we have-- ( ) soil, situation, and climate: ( ) cultivation and weather: ( ) the various insects and micro-organisms which are ready to assail or protect growing life. ( ) if two acorns from the same tree were sown, the one in a deep clay soil and a favourable situation, the other in a light sandy soil and an unfavourable situation, the former would in time develop into a large and shapely, the latter into a puny and misshapen oak-tree. it would be the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with two human beings who were exposed from their earliest days to widely different permanent influences. ( ) if wheat of a certain strain were sown on the same day in two adjoining fields, one of which was well farmed and the other badly farmed, the resulting crops would differ widely in yield and value. it would be the same with two human beings, one of whom (to take a pertinent example) attended a school of utopian tendencies, and the other a school of a more conventional type. of all moralising (or demoralising) influences education is by far the most important, owing to the fact that it can do more, and is in a position to do more, than any other influence either to foster or to hinder growth. the influence of weather on plant-life is, of course, enormous. in one year the fruit-crop in a given neighbourhood is a failure: in another year it gluts the market. one explanation of this fact, which has its exact analogies in human life, will be given in the next paragraph. ( ) all forms of life are exposed to the attacks of enemies of various kinds. whether they shall beat off those attacks or succumb to them depends in large measure on the nature of the growth that they are making; and this again depends, largely if not wholly, on the nature of the general influences to which they have been exposed. for many years i lived in a district in which hops were grown on a large scale; and i naturally took an interest in the staple industry of my adopted county. i noticed that whenever (during the summer months) there came a spell of cold winds from the north-east--winds which tend to arrest plant-growth--the hop-bines were at once assailed by blight and other pests, and the safety of the growing crop was imperilled. and i noticed further that when the wind got round to the south-west, and warm showers began to stimulate the growth of the flagging plants, the pests that had assailed them disappeared as if by magic, and the anxieties of the growers were relieved. as it is with plants, so it is with human beings. they too have their enemies,--temptations of various kinds and other evil influences that "war against the soul." and they too will be able to beat off their assailants just so far as their own growth is vigorous and healthy; and will succumb to their attacks, to their own serious detriment, just so far as their own growth is feeble and sickly. the bearing of this fact on the problem of the origin of moral evil is obvious. that the evils which assail the organism, be it a plant or a human being, are not inherent in its nature, is proved by the fact that when the growth of the organism is normal and unimpeded, the assailants are always beaten off. as it is the growth of the organism--the development of its own nature--which enables it to resist the evils that threaten it, we must assume that its nature is good. indeed the evils that threaten it are called evils for no other reason than that they imperil its well-being; and it follows that in calling them evils we imply that the organism is intrinsically good. when we have eliminated from human nature the vicious tendencies which are due either to immaturity or to the numberless influences that come under the general head of environment, we shall find that a very small percentage remain to be accounted for. we need not have recourse to the doctrine of original sin in order to account for these. so far i have said nothing about heredity, partly because its influence on the moral development of the individual is, i think, very small compared with that of environment, and partly because it is impossible to consider the extent and character of its influence, without going deeply into certain large and complicated problems. for example, it would be impossible for me to say much about the current, though gradually waning, belief in the force of heredity, without saying something about its far eastern equivalent, the belief in re-incarnation,--in other words, without asking whether a man inherits from his parents and other ancestors, or from his former selves. that different persona are born with widely different moral tendencies and propensities, is as certain as that some strains of wheat are hardier and more productive than others. and it is possible, and even probable, that there are exceptional cases of moral evil which point to congenital depravity, and cannot otherwise be accounted for. but in these admissions i am making no concession to the believer in original sin; for he regards human nature as such as congenitally depraved, and therefore can take no cognisance of exceptional cases of congenital depravity, cases which by breaking the rule that the new-born child is morally and spiritually healthy, may be said to prove it. in fine, then, all moral evil can be accounted for on grounds which are quite compatible with the assumption that the normal child is healthy, on all the planes of his being, at the moment of his birth. that he carries with him into the world the capacity for being affected by adverse influences of various kinds, is undeniable; but so does every other living thing; and if congenital depravity is to be predicated of him for that reason, it must also be predicated of every new-born animal and plant. but the final proof that man is by nature a child of god, is one which has already been hinted at, and will presently be further developed,--namely, that growth--the healthy, vigorous growth of the whole human being, the harmonious development of his whole nature--is in its essence a movement towards moral and spiritual perfection. and the final proof that the doctrine of man's congenital depravity is false is the practical one that the doctrine is ever tending to fulfil its own gloomy predictions, and to justify its own low estimate of human nature,--in other words, that by making education repressive and devitalising, by introducing externalism, with its endless train of attendant evils, into man's daily life, and by making him disbelieve in and even despair of himself, it has done more perhaps than all other influences added together to deprave his heart and to wreck his life. to one who has convinced himself that human nature is fundamentally good, in the sense that the new-born child is as a rule sound and healthy on all the planes of his being, it must be clear that the path of soul-growth or self-realisation is the only way of salvation. what salvation means, what the path of self-realisation will do for him who enters it, is a theme to which i could not hope to do justice within the limits of this work. i will therefore content myself with indicating certain typical aspects of the process which i have called self-realisation, and saying something about each of these. four aspects suggest themselves to me as worthy of special consideration,--the _mental_, the _moral_, the _social_, and the _religious_.[ ] _the mental aspect of self-realisation._ there are two features of the process of self-realisation, on the importance of which i cannot insist too often or too strongly. the first is that the growth which the life of self-realisation fosters is, in its essence, harmonious and many-sided. the second is that the life of self-realisation is, from first to last, a life of self-expression, and that self-expression and perception are the face and obverse of the same mental effort. if the life of self-realisation did not provide for the growth of the self in its totality, the self as a living whole, it would not be worthy of its name. one-sided growth, inharmonious growth, growth in which some faculties are hypertrophied and others atrophied, is not self-realisation. when trees are planted close together, as in the beech-forests of the continent, they climb to great heights in their struggle for air and light, but they make no lateral growth. when trees are pollarded, they make abundant lateral growth, but they cease to climb upward. when trees are exposed to the prevailing winds of an open sea-coast, they are blown over away from the sea, and make all their growth, such as it is, on the landward side. when trees are on the border of a thick plantation, they make all their growth towards the open air, and are bare and leafless on the opposite side. in each of these cases the growth made is inharmonious and one-sided: the balance between the two intersecting planes of growth, or between the two opposite sides, has been lost. but when a tree is planted in the open, and when all the other conditions of growth are favourable, it grows harmoniously in all directions,--upward, outward, and all around. in other words, it is growing as a whole, growing, as it ought to grow, through every fibre of its being, and yet maintaining a perfect symmetry of form and the harmony of true proportion among its various parts. this is the kind of growth which the soul makes in the life of self-realisation; and if it falls appreciably short of this standard, if it develops itself on this side or that, to the neglect of all other sides, then we must say of it that, though it is realising this or that faculty or group of faculties, it is not realising itself. i have spoken of the six great expansive instincts which indicate the main lines of the child's natural growth, and i have shown that in utopia the cultivation of all those instincts is duly provided for. in the life of self-realisation the soul would continue to grow on the lines which those instincts had marked out for it. i do not mean that when the child goes out into the work-a-day world, he must give to all six instincts the systematic training which they received, or ought to have received, in school. the exigencies of the daily round of life are such as to make that impossible, in all but the most exceptional cases. but that is all the more reason why the expansive instincts should be carefully and skilfully trained in school. for where they are so trained, an impetus is given to each of them which will keep it alive and active long after the direct influence of the school has ceased, and will enable it to absorb and assimilate whatever nutriment may come in its way. if the utopian training cannot be followed up, in its entirety, in the child's after-life, it can at least initiate a movement which need never be arrested,--a movement in the direction of the triune goal of man's being, the goal towards which his expansive instincts are ever tending to take him, the goal of love, beauty, and truth. the life of many-sided growth is also a life of self-expression. this means that the self-expression, like the growth which it fosters, is many-sided; and this again means that the perceptive faculties, which unfold themselves through the medium of self-expression, are not so much separate faculties as a general capacity for getting on terms with one's environment and gaining an insight into its laws and properties. in a school which lays itself out to teach one or two subjects thoroughly, to the neglect of others, a sense, or special perceptive faculty, will gradually be evolved by the study of each subject, provided, of course, that the path of self-expression is followed,--a literary sense, a historical sense, a mathematical sense, and so on. but while these special senses are being developed, the remaining perceptive faculties are being starved, and no attempt is being made to cultivate that general capacity of which i have just spoken. the consequent loss to the child, both in his school-life and in his after-life, is very great. for not only is his mental growth one-sided and inharmonious, but even in the subjects in which he specialises he will lose appreciably, owing to his special perceptive faculties not having as their background any general capacity for seeing things as they are. i will try to explain what i mean. in what is known as "society" there is a valuable quality called "tact," in virtue of which the man or woman who is endowed with it always says and does "the right thing." this quality is compounded partly of sympathetic insight into the feelings, actual and possible, of others, and partly of a keen and subtle sense for all the _nuances_ of social propriety. like every other perceptive faculty, it is the outcome of self-expression,--of years of self-expression on the plane of social intercourse. that general perceptive faculty, or perceptive capacity, which is the outcome of years of self-expression on many sides of one's being, has so much in common with the _tact_ of the man of society, that the epithet _tactful_ may perhaps be applied to it. the larger, like the lesser, faculty is compounded, partly of sympathetic insight into latent possibilities, and partly of a delicate sense for _nuances_ of all kinds. but even this formula does less than justice to its complex nature. generated as it is by a life of many-sided self-expression, it reflects its origin in its internal constitution. many elements of thought and feeling have woven themselves into it; and it is ready to take a colour from each new environment or even from each new situation. it can become emotional, for example, when the matter in hand appeals, in any sort or degree, to the emotions; and there are occasions when its latent sense of humour becomes an invaluable antidote to that over-seriousness which so often leads men astray. above all, it is in its essence, imaginative, for it is ever learning to picture things to itself as they are or as they might be; and the higher the level and the wider the sphere of its activity, the more boldly imaginative it becomes. a faculty so subtle and so sympathetic must needs play a vitally important _rôle_, not only when its possessor is studying "subjects" or handling concrete problems, but also, and more especially, when he is dealing with the "affairs of life"; and we can understand that when it is wholly or largely lacking, each of the special faculties which specialising is supposed to foster will suffer from not being tempered and yet vitalised by its all-penetrating influence. that we may the better understand this, and the better understand what the path of self-realisation does for the mental development of him who walks in it, let us ask ourselves what type of mind the conventional type of education is likely to produce. and let us study the conventional type of education on what is supposed to be its highest level. let us consider the education given to the sons of the "upper classes." and let us take this highest level at its own highest level. let us take the case of those who go through that tri-partite course of education which begins in a high-class "preparatory school," is continued in one of the "great public schools," and is completed at oxford or cambridge. a boy enters a preparatory school at the age of eight or nine, and is there prepared, in general for entrance into one of the great public schools, and in particular for one of the competitive examinations on the results of which the entrance scholarships of the great public schools are awarded. he enters one of the great public schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and is there prepared, in general for admission to oxford or cambridge, and in particular for the scholarship examinations of the various oxford and cambridge colleges. he enters oxford or cambridge at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and is there prepared, directly for his degree examination--"pass" or "honours" as the case may be--and indirectly for the public examination which admits to the indian and colonial, and the higher grades of the home, civil service. this course of education lasts about fourteen years, and costs from £ , to £ , . what will it do for the boy who goes through it? the education given in the preparatory school is completely dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations at the great public schools. the lines on which those examinations are conducted are the lines on which the preparatory schoolmaster must educate his pupils. he has no choice in the matter. the title "preparatory" seals his doom. his business is, not to give his pupils the education that is best suited to their capacities and their years, but to prepare them for admission to a more advanced school. the more scholarships he can win at eton, harrow, winchester, rugby, and the rest, the higher will be the repute of his school; and as the competition between school and school is fierce and unintermittent, he cannot afford to throw away a single chance. in other words, he cannot afford to make a single serious experiment. the education given in the great public schools is similarly dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations held by the oxford and cambridge colleges. the lines on which those examinations are conducted are in the main the lines on which the boys must be educated. it is possible that the great public schools are freer to go their own ways than are the preparatory schools; but if they are, they make but little use of their freedom. so far as the rank and file of the boys are concerned, it may be doubted if the word "educative" is applicable, in any sense or degree, to the daily round of their work. of the six great expansive instincts which are struggling to evolve themselves in every healthy child, not one can be said to find a congenial soil or a stimulating atmosphere in the ordinary classroom either of the preparatory or of the public school. four of the six--the _dramatic_, the _artistic_, the _musical_, and the _constructive_--are entirely or almost entirely neglected. music and handwork[ ] are "extras" (a fatally significant word); the teaching of drawing is, as a rule, quite perfunctory; and acting is not a recognised part of the school curriculum. the truth is that marks are not given for these "subjects"--for in the eyes of the schoolmaster they are all "subjects"--in any entrance or scholarship examination, and that therefore it does not _pay_ to teach them. there remain two instincts,--the _communicative_ and the _inquisitive_. the study of the "humanities"--history and literature, ancient and modern--ought to train the former; and the study of science ought to train the latter. but in the case of the average boy, the study of the humanities resolves itself, in the main, into a prolonged and unsuccessful tussle with the difficulties of the greek and latin languages, the mastering of which is regarded as an end in itself instead of as the gateway to the wonder-worlds of ancient life and thought; and the study of science is, as a rule, a pure farce.[ ] not one, then, of the expansive instincts of the average boy receives any training during the nine or ten years of his school life; and as, in his struggle for the "pass" degree of his university, he will follow the lines on which he has been accustomed to work in both his schools, he will go out into the world at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, the victim of a course of education which has lasted for fourteen years and cost thousands of pounds, and which has done nothing whatever to foster his mental or spiritual growth. it is true that in all the public schools a certain amount of informal education is done through the medium of musical societies, natural history societies, debating societies, school magazines, and the like; that the discipline of a public school, with its system of school and house prefects, has considerable educational value; that the playing fields do something towards the formation of character; that the boys, by exchanging experiences and discussing things freely among themselves, help to educate one another; and that during the four months of each year which the schoolboy spends away from school, he is, or may be, exposed to educative influences of various kinds.[ ] but the broad fact remains that the _studies_ of the youthful graduate, whether in school classroom or college lecture-room, have been wholly unformative and therefore wholly uneducative. but let us consider the education given in our public schools and universities, at what is presumably the highest of all its levels. let us see what is done for the boys who have sufficient ability to win scholarships and read for honours at oxford and cambridge. it is to the supposed interests of these brighter boys that the vital interests of their duller schoolfellows are perforce sacrificed. are the results worth the sacrifice? the brighter boys fall into two main groups,--those who have a turn for the "humanities," and those who have a turn for mathematics and science. where the "humanities" are effectively taught,--where, for example, the scholar is allowed to pass through the portals of latin and greek grammar and composition into the wonder-world that lies beyond them,--the _communicative_ instinct receives a valuable training. it is, unfortunately, quite possible for a boy, or even for a man, to be what is called a "good scholar," and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or literature of greece and rome; and the examination system undoubtedly tends to foster this bastard type of humanism. but when, as a result of his school and university training, a scholar has passed the linguistic portals and found pleasure in the worlds beyond, we may say of him that his education has fostered the growth of one of his expansive instincts,--perhaps the most important of all, but still only one. when science is effectively taught, the growth of the _inquisitive_ instinct is similarly fostered; but the inquisitive instinct, though of great value, when trained in conjunction with other instincts, has but little value as a "formative" when trained by itself. from this point of view it compares unfavourably with the communicative instinct, being as much less formative than the latter, as the mysteries of the material world are less significant and less able to inspire and vitalise their interpreter than the mysteries of human life; and a purely (or mainly) scientific training is therefore worth far less as an instrument of education than a purely (or mainly) humanistic training. but why should the boys at our great public schools and the young men at our universities have to choose between a scientific and a humanistic training? why should these ancient and famous institutions be content to train one only of the six expansive instincts instead of at least _two_? here, as elsewhere, the scholarship system blocks the way. some scholarships are given for classics, others for history, others for mathematics, others for natural science. not a single scholarship is given, at either university, for general capacity, as measured by the results of a many-sided examination. why should this be? the answer is that under any system of formal examination many-sidedness in education necessarily means _smattering_; and that against smattering the universities have, very properly, set their faces. but, after all, there is no necessary connection between many-sidedness and smattering. in utopia, where the concentric rings of growth are formed by the gradual evolution of an inner life, whatever feeds that inner life is a contribution, however humble, to the growth of the whole tree; and many-sidedness, far from being a defect, is one of the first conditions of success in education. but in the great public schools, where veneers of information are being assiduously laid on the surface of the boy's mind with a view to his passing some impending examination, the greater the number and variety of such veneers, the more certain they all are to split and waste and perish. indeed the real reason why specialising has to be resorted to in the case of the brighter boys, is that in no other way can provision be made for the fatal process of veneering being dispensed with, and for faculty being evolved by growth from within. but a heavy price has to be paid for the growth of these specialised faculties. if science is to be seriously studied the student must give the whole of his time to it. this means that he must give up the idea of educating himself. it is only by turning his back on history, on literature, on philosophy, on music, on art, that he can hope to meet the exacting and ever-growing demands which science makes on those who desire to be initiated into its mysteries. to say that when he has "taken his degree" he is only half-educated, is greatly to over-estimate the formative influence of his highly specialised training. a sense has undoubtedly been developed in him, an instinct has been awakened, one or two of his mental faculties have been vigorously cultivated; but his training has been the reverse of humanising; and as his studies and his consequent attitude towards nature have been essentially _analytical_, he may, in the absence of those correctives which his compulsory specialising has withheld from him, have learned to regard the dead side of things as the real side,--a conception which, if it mastered him, would materialise his whole outlook on life. the case of the "humanist" is different. the subjects which he studies appeal to many sides of his being; and if he could respond to their appeal, they might do much for his mental and spiritual development. that he should be able to respond to their appeal is of vital importance. when he has become a decent "scholar," a chance is given to him, which if he neglects he will probably lose for ever,--the chance of making good, in part at least, the deficiencies of his early education. had he lived in utopia, his life of many-sided self-expression would have given a general training to his perceptive faculties, in which the twin faculties of imagination and sympathy would have had their share. but neither in his preparatory school nor in the lower classes of his public school has any serious attempt been made during school hours to ripen either of those mighty faculties, whereas much has been done in both schools to retard their growth. he is doomed, then, to begin his study of the history and literature of the ancient world with a considerable knowledge of the latin and greek languages, but (in too many cases) with an unimaginative mind and an unsympathetic heart. there is, however, much in that history and that literature,--not to speak of the history and the literature of his own and other modern countries,--which, if it could but have its way, would appeal strongly to his imagination and his sympathy, dormant and undeveloped as these faculties are,--appeal to them so strongly as to awaken them at last from their slumber and quicken them into active life. but alas! the shadow of an impending examination is always falling on his humanistic studies, nullifying the appeal that they make to him, and compelling him to look at them from a sordidly utilitarian point of view. for to give marks for the response that he might make to their appeal, or even to set questions which would afford free scope for the play of his imagination or the flow of his sympathy, is beyond the power of any examiner. there are two things, and two only, which "pay" on the examination day,--the possession of information and the power to make use of it; and the humanist who would win prizes at his school or gain high honours at his university, must therefore regard the memorable doings and the imperishable sayings of his fellow-men, not as things to be imagined and felt, admired and loved, wondered at and pondered over, but as things to be pigeon-holed in his memory, to be taken out and arranged under headings, to be dissected and commented on and criticised.[ ] of the part that memory plays in the education of our humanist, i need not speak. an undue burden is probably laid upon it; but that is a matter of minor importance. what is of supreme importance is that in cultivating his critical faculty with an almost intensive culture, while they starve, or at any rate leave untended, his more vital and more emancipative faculties of imagination and sympathy, our great public schools and universities are doing him a serious and lasting injury. let us take the case of a young man of energy and ability who has just left oxford or cambridge, having won high honours in one of the humanistic "schools." let us assume that, like so many of his kind, he has a keenly critical mind, but is deficient in imagination and sympathy; and let us then try to forecast his future. that the faith of his childhood, undermined by his criticism, has already fallen to pieces or will shortly do so, is more than probable. that he will be too unimaginative to attempt to construct a new faith out of the ruins of the old, is practically certain. his lack of faith, in the broader sense of the word, will incapacitate him for high seriousness (which he will regard as "bad form"), and _a fortiori_ for enthusiasm (which he will shun like the plague), and will therefore predispose him to frivolity. being fully persuaded, owing to his lack of imaginative sympathy, that his own outlook on life is alone compatible with mental sanity, and yet being too clear-sighted to accept that outlook as satisfactory, he will mingle with his frivolity a strain of bitterness and discontent,--the bitterness of self-corroding scepticism, and the discontent which grows apace through its very effort to ignore its own existence. in a word, his attitude towards life will be one of _cynicism_,--that blend of hardness and bitterness with frivolity which exactly inverts the ideal of the modern poet, when he dreams of an age in the far-off future, which without hardness will be sage, and gay without frivolity.[ ] and the bitterness of his cynicism will be made bitterer still by the fact that, owing to his being (in all probability) unmusical, inartistic, and unable to amuse himself with any form of handwork, he will have no taste or hobby to distract him from himself. for a time, indeed, the "genial sense of youth" will keep his sinister tendencies in check; and in the middle period of life, his struggle to achieve "success"--for of course he will be an externalist to the core--will tend to keep them in the background. but in his later years, when he will have either failed to achieve "success" or discovered--too late--that it was not worth achieving, his cynicism will assert itself without let or hindrance, and, with his growing incapacity for frivolity, will become harder and bitterer, till at last the dark shadow of incurable pessimism will fall on him and involve his declining years in ever deepening gloom. i do not say that many of our university humanists will conform to this type; but i do say that the type is easily recognisable and is becoming increasingly familiar. even the intellectual development of our humanist, who is nothing if not intellectual, will be adversely affected by the one-sidedness of his education. well-informed and acutely critical he will probably be; but he will lack the saving grace of that "tactful" faculty which years of many-sided self-expression can alone evolve,--a faculty which (as we have seen) is subtly adaptive when it deals with small matters, boldly imaginative when it deals with great matters, and delicately sympathetic along the whole range of its activity. this sinuous and penetrative sense is to the more logically critical faculty what equity is to law; and in its absence the intellectuality of our young "intellectual" will be as incomplete as would be the legal system of a country which knew nothing of equity and tried to bring all legal problems under the direct control of positive law. for it will be his business, as he goes through life, to deal in and with words and phrases; and as words and phrases are ever tending to change their force, and even their meaning, under our hands, and as his use and treatment of them will be logical and "legal" rather than tactful and "equitable," he will again and again misinterpret and misuse them, and will so do badly the very thing which he is expected to do well. the man who, though endowed with an acute and vigorous intellect, can neither think imaginatively nor reason tactfully, has grave intellectual defects; and the blinder he is to the existence of these defects the more pronounced will they become. the pity of it is that when these unimaginative "intellectuals" go out into the world, they will fill posts in which they will have unrivalled opportunities for establishing and disseminating their unwholesome influence. a section of them will go into the teaching profession, the higher grades of which are almost entirely recruited from oxford and cambridge. another section will go into the legal profession, and through it will enter parliament in considerable numbers, where, being trained advocates, they will exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength. and a third section will man the higher grades of the home, colonial, and indian civil services. teachers, legislators, administrators,--if there are any walks in life in which cynicism and a capacity for merely destructive criticism are out of place, and in which imagination and sympathy are imperatively demanded, they are these three; and it is nothing short of a national calamity that these great and commanding professions should be manned, in part at least, by men whose mission in life is to paralyse rather than to vitalise, to fetter rather than to set free. the further pity of it is that the training of these "intellectuals" might easily have taken an entirely different course. much of the specialising which goes on in our great public schools and universities, and which is so destructive of mental and spiritual vitality, is wholly unnecessary. the course of education which the sons of the "upper classes" go through has this in common with elementary education, that in neither case need "utilitarian" considerations weigh with the teachers. the parents of a large proportion of our public school boys can afford to give their sons a _liberal_ education (in the truest and fullest sense of the word) up to the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and in the case of these boys, at any rate, the excessive specialisation which makes their education so illiberal is done, not in response to the demands of professions (such as the medical or the engineering) which necessitate early specialising, but solely in response to the demands of an examination system which we adopted before we had begun to ask ourselves what education meant, and which, partly from the force of habit and partly because it is in keeping with our general attitude towards life, we still bow down before with a devotion as ardent and as irrational as that which inspired the cry of "great is diana of the ephesians."[ ] at its best, then, the education given by the great public schools and universities fosters the growth of one of the expansive instincts,--the _communicative_, a mighty instinct which opens up to imagination and sympathy the whole wide world of human life; but because it leaves all the other expansive instincts untended, it gives that one instinct an inadequate and unsymmetrical training, a training which checks the growth of the very faculties--imagination and sympathy--of which the instinct is largely compounded and for the sake of which it may almost be said to exist. at its second best, this costly education fosters the growth of the _inquisitive_ instinct,--a grandly expansive instinct when trained in conjunction with the others, but one which is constrictive rather than expansive when trained by itself and for its own sake. at its ordinary level, it trains no instinct whatever, and is therefore unworthy of the name of education. why should this be so? why should a course of education which lasts so long and costs so much do so little for its victims, and do that little so badly or, at any rate, so inadequately? because from first to last it has looked outward instead of inward; because it has laboured unceasingly to produce "results," and has never given a thought to growth.[ ] let us now go to the other end of the social scale. what the path of self-realisation might do for the children of the "upper classes" if they were allowed to follow it, we may roughly calculate, partly by measuring what the alternative scheme of education has failed to do for them, partly by reminding ourselves of what the path has done for the village children of utopia. the children of the "upper classes" have such an advantage over the children of utopia in the matter of environment,--to say nothing of inherited capacity,--that one would expect the path to do much more for their mental development than it has done for the mental development of the utopians, especially as they could afford to remain much longer in the first and most important of its stages, the stage of self-education (in the more limited sense of the word). the gain to the whole nation if the mental development of the highest social stratum could be raised as much above its normal level as the mental development of youthful utopia has been raised above the normal level of an english rural village, would be incalculably great. but greater still--incalculably greater--would be the gain to the nation if the rank and file of its children could be led into the path of self-realisation, and therein rise to the high level of brightness, intelligence, and resourcefulness which has been reached in utopia. nor is this dream so wildly impracticable as some might imagine. so far as the natural capacity of the average child is concerned, there is no bar to its realisation. egeria has taught me that the mental capacity of the average child, even in a rustic village belonging to a county which is proverbial for the slow wits of its rustics, is very great. it is sometimes said that of the children who have been trained in our elementary schools, not one in twenty is fit to profit by the education given in a secondary school: and if by this is meant that in nineteen cases out of twenty the elementary scholar, _educated as he has probably been_, is unlikely to profit by the education given in a secondary school, _conducted as those schools usually are_, i am not prepared to say offhand that the statement is untrue. but if it means that the average mental capacity of the children of our "lower orders" is hopelessly inferior to that of the children of our middle and upper classes, i can say without hesitation that it is a slander and a lie. whether there is any difference, in respect of innate mental capacity, between level and level of our social scale, may be doubted; but the utopian experiment has proved to demonstration that in the lowest level of all the innate mental capacity is so great that we cannot well expect to find any considerable advance on it even in the highest level of all. but where, it will be asked, are we to find egerias to man our elementary schools? for the moment this problem does not admit of a practical solution. but that need not discourage us. i admit that in far too many of our schools the teachers, through no fault of their own, are what i may call machine-made, and that they are engaged in turning out machine-made scholars, some of whom in the fullness of time will develop into machine-made teachers. but there is a way of escape from this vicious circle,--the path of self-realisation. that path has transformed the children of a rustic village in a slow-witted county into utopians. why should it not transform some at least among the boys and girls who are thinking of entering the teaching profession into egerias, or at any rate into teachers of egeria's type? even as it is, replicas of egeria,--not exact replicas, for she is too original to be easily replicated, but teachers who, like her, preach and practise the gospel of self-education,--are beginning to spring up in various parts of the country; and each of their schools, besides being a centre of light, may well become a nursery for teachers who will follow in the footsteps of those who have trained them, and will in their turn do pioneer work in other schools. the thin end of the wedge is even now being driven into the close-grained mass of tradition and routine; and each successive blow that is struck by a teacher of intelligence and initiative will widen the incipient cleft. the dream, then, of leading the children of england--the children of the "masses" as well as of the "classes"--into the path of self-realisation, is not so widely impracticable as to convict the dreamer of insanity. and if we could realise the dream, if we could go but a little way towards realising it, how immense would be the gain to our country! if the average level of mental development in england were as high as it is in utopia, to what height would not the men and women of exceptional ability be able to rise? the mountain peaks that spring from an upland plateau soar higher towards the sky than the peaks, of the same apparent height, that spring from a low-lying plain. and "the great mountains lift the lowlands on to their sides." but this is not the only reason why the gospel of self-realisation should be preached in all parts of the land. there is another reason which is becoming more and more urgent. if the utopian scheme of education were widely adopted, an antidote would be found to a grave and growing evil which is beginning to imperil the mental health of every civilised community, and of this more than any other. the more civilised (in the western sense of the word) a country becomes, the less educative does life--the rough-and-tumble life of the work-a-day world--tend to become. in a thoroughly "civilised" country, where the material conditions of life are highly organised, and where industry is highly specialised, so much is done for the individual by those who organise his life and labour, that it ceases to be necessary for him, except within narrow limits, to shift for himself. in a less civilised community men have to use their wits as well as their hands at every turn; and resourcefulness and versatility are therefore in constant demand. the industrial life of a russian peasant, who is of necessity a jack-of-many-trades, is incomparably more educative than that of the lancashire cotton operative, most of whose thinking and much of whose operating may be said to be done for him by the complicated machinery which he controls; who does, indeed, learn to do one thing surpassingly well, but in doing that one thing becomes, as he progresses, more and more automatic, so that the highest praise we can give him is to say that he does his work with the sureness and accuracy of a machine. it follows that the more civilised a country becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school plays in the life of the nation,--and that not merely because the ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what life will not do for him in his manhood, or will do for him but in scant measure, to stimulate his vital powers into healthful activity, to foster the growth of his soul. and the more the people in a civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate faculties, should bring sunshine rather than frost into his adolescent life. in such a country as ours the responsibilities of the teacher are only equalled by his opportunities; for the child is in his hands during the most impressionable years of life; and those years will have been wasted, and worse than wasted, unless they have fitted the child to face the world with resourcefulness, intelligence, and vital energy, ready to wrest from his environment, by enlarging and otherwise transforming it, those educative influences which are still to be had for the seeking, but are no longer automatically supplied. _the moral aspect of self-realisation._ if man, if each man in turn, is born _good_, the process of growth, or self-realisation, which is presumably taking him towards the perfection of which his nature admits, must needs make him continuously _better_. in other words, growth, provided that it is healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, provided that it is growth of the whole being, is in itself and of inner necessity the most moralising of all processes. nay, it is the only moralising process, for in no other way can what is naturally good be transformed into what is ideally best. this argument, apart from its being open to the possible objection that it plays on the meaning of the word "good," is perhaps too conclusive to be really convincing. i will therefore try to make my way to its conclusion by another line of thought. the desire to grow, to advance towards maturity, to realise his true self--the self that is his in embryo from the very beginning--is strong in every living thing, and is therefore strong in every child of man. but the desire, which necessarily takes its share in the general process of growth, must needs pass through many stages on its way to its own highest form. in infancy, it is a desire for physical life, for the preservation and expansion of the physical self; and in this stage it is, as i have already pointed out, uncompromisingly selfish. the new-born baby is the incarnation of selfishness; and it is quite right that he should be so. it is his way of trying to realise himself. as the child grows older, the desire to grow becomes a desire for self-aggrandisement,--a desire to shine in various ways, to surpass others, to be admired, to be praised; and though in this stage it may give rise to much vanity and selfishness, still, so long as it has vigorous growth behind it and is in its essence a desire for further growth, it is in the main a healthy tendency, and to call it sinful or vicious would be a misuse of words. but when, in the course of time, the average, ordinary, surface self--the self with which we are all only too familiar--has been fully evolved and firmly established, the day may come when, owing to various adverse conditions, the growth of the soul will be arrested, and the ordinary self will come to be regarded as the true self, as the self which the man may henceforth accept and rest in, as the self in virtue of which he is what he is. should the desire for self-aggrandisement survive that day, the door would be thrown open to selfishness of a malignant type and to general demoralisation. and this is what would assuredly come to pass. in the first place, the desire for self-aggrandisement, which always has the push of nature's expansive forces behind it, would certainly survive that ill-omened day. indeed, it were well that it should do so; for "while there is life, there is hope," and when the soul is ceasing to grow, it is through the desire for self-aggrandisement that nature makes her last effort to keep it alive, by compelling it to energise on one or two at least of the many sides of its being. in the second place, the desire would gradually cease to be resolvable into the desire for continued growth, and would gradually transform itself into the desire to glorify and make much of the ordinary self, to minister to its selfish demands, to give it possessions, riches, honour, power, social rank, and whatever else might serve to feed its self-esteem, and make it think well of itself because it was well thought of by "the world." and in the third place, in its effort to glorify and make much of the ordinary self, the desire would, without a moment's compunction, see other persons pushed to the wall, trampled under foot, slighted and humiliated, robbed of what they valued most, outraged and wounded in their tenderest feelings. it is my firm conviction that at the present day three-fourths of the moral evil in the world, or at any rate in the western world, are the direct or indirect outcome of egoism,--egoism which, as a rule, is mean, petty, and small-minded, but is often cruel and ruthless, and can on occasion become heroic and even titanic in its capacity for evil and in the havoc that it works,--egoism which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is generated by the desire for self-aggrandisement having outlived its better self, the desire to grow. if arrested growth is the chief source of malignant egoism, there is an obvious remedy for the deadly malady. the egoist must re-enter the path of self-realisation. his great enemy is his lower self;[ ] and the surest way to conquer this enemy is to outgrow it, to leave it far behind. when the path of self-realisation has been re-entered, when the soul has resumed the interrupted process of its growth, the desire for self-aggrandisement will spontaneously transform itself, first into the desire for further growth, and then into the desire for outgrowth or escape from self, and will cease to minister to the selfish demands of the lower self; and as the lower self is all the while being gradually left behind by the growing soul, and is therefore ceasing to assert itself, and ceasing to clamour, like a spoilt child, for this thing and for that,--it will not be long before the antidote to the poison of egoism will have taken due effect, and the health of the soul will have been restored. but let me say again--for i can scarcely say it too often--that the growth which emancipates from self is many-sided growth, the growth, not of any one faculty, or group of faculties, but of the soul as such. were it not so, the life of self-realisation might easily become a life of glorified and therefore intensified selfishness. it is quite possible, as we know from experience, for a high degree of "culture" to co-exist with a high degree of egoism. it is possible, for example, for the æsthetic instincts, when not kept aglow by the sympathetic, or hardened with an alloy of the scientific, to evolve a peculiar form of selfishness which leads at last to looseness of life and general demoralisation. and it is possible for the scientific instincts, when developed at the expense of the æsthetic and the sympathetic, to evolve a hard, unemotional type of character which is self-centred and selfish owing to its positiveness and lack of imagination. but these are instances of inharmonious growth. when growth is harmonious and many-sided, it leads of necessity to out-growth, to escape from self. for the expansive instincts are so many ways of escape from self which nature opens up to the soul;--the sympathetic instincts, a way of escape into the boundless æther of love; the æsthetic instincts, a way of escape into the wonder-world of beauty; the scientific instincts, a way of escape into the world of mysteries which is lighted by the "high white star of truth." it is only when one of the expansive instincts is allowed to aggrandise itself at the expense of the others, that the consequent outgrowth of selfishness in what i may call the internal economy of one's nature begins to reflect itself in a general selfishness of character. an instinct may readily become egoistic in its effort to affirm or over-affirm itself, to grasp at its share or more than its share of the child's rising life: and if it does, it may gradually suck down into the vortex of its egoism the whole character of the child as he ripens into the man. but growth, as such, is anti-egoistic just because it is growth, because it is a movement towards a larger, fuller, and freer life: and it is restricted, even more than one-sided growth,--it is the apathy, the helplessness, the deadness of soul that overtakes, first the child and then the man, when his expansive instincts are systematically starved and thwarted,--which is the chief cause of his incarceration in his petty self. if three-fourths of the moral evil in the world are due to malignant egoism, the source of the remaining fourth is, in a word, _sensuality_. by sensuality i mean the undue or perverted development of the desires and passions of the animal self,--the desire for food and drink, the sexual desires, the desire for physical or semi-physical excitement, the animal passion of anger, and the rest. as an enemy of the soul, sensuality is less dangerous, because more open and less insidious, than egoism. the egoist, who mistakes his ordinary for his real self, may well lead a life of systematic selfishness without in the least realising that he is living amiss. but the animal self is never mistaken for the real self; and the sensualist always has an uneasy feeling in the back of his mind that, in indulging his animal desires and passions to excess, he is doing wrong. this feeling may, indeed, die out when he "grows hard" in his "viciousness"; but in the earlier stages of the sensual life it is sure to "give pause"; and there are, i think, few persons who do not feel that the sensual desires and passions are so remote from the headquarters of human life, that in yielding to them beyond due measure they are acting unworthily of their higher selves. at any rate we may regard the temptations to sensual indulgence that lie in our path as evil influences which are assailing us from without rather than from within; and we may therefore liken them to the blight, rust, mites, mildew, and other pests that assail hops, fruit, wheat, and other growing plants. and, like the pests that assail growing plants, the sensual pests that war against the soul must be beaten off by vigorous and continuous growth. no other prophylactic is so sure or so effective as this. when i was asked whether the utopian education was useful or not, i adduced, as an instance of its usefulness, its power of protecting the young from the allurements of a pernicious literature, to which the victims of the conventional type of education, with their lowered vitality and their lack of interest in life, too readily succumb. this is a typical example of the way in which the rising sap of life strengthens the soul to resist the temptations to undue sensual indulgence by which it is always liable to be assailed. the victim of a repressive, growth-arresting type of education, having few if any interests in life, not infrequently takes to the meretricious excitements of sensuality in order to relieve the intolerable monotony of his days. but the training which makes for many-sided growth, by filling the life of the "adolescent" with many and various interests, removes temptations of this particular type from his path. and it does more for him than this. it generates in him a state of health and well-being, in which the very vigour and elasticity of his spiritual fibre automatically shields him from temptation by refusing to allow the germs of moral disease to effect a lodgment in his soul. it would be well if our moralists could realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and _ennui_, and on the other hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of education which will foster rather than hinder growth. we are now in a position to estimate the respective values, as moralising influences, of the path of self-realisation and the path that leads to "results." whatever tends to arrest growth tends also and in an equal degree to demoralise man's life; for, on the one hand, by transforming the healthy desire for continued growth into the unhealthy desire for mere self-aggrandisement, it generates malignant egoism, with its endless train of attendant evils; and, on the other hand, by depressing the vitality of the soul and so weakening its powers of resistance, it exposes it to the attacks of those powers and desires which we speak of in the aggregate as sensuality. if this is so, the inference is irresistible that the externalism of "civilised" life, with the repressive and devitalising system of education which it necessitates, is responsible for the greater part of the immorality--i am using the word in its widest sense--of the present age. contrariwise, whatever tends to foster growth tends also, and in an equal degree, to moralise man's life; for, on the one hand, by transforming the desire for self-aggrandisement into the desire, first for continued growth and then for out-growth, it gives the soul strength to eliminate the poison of egoism from its system; and, on the other hand, by vitalising the soul and so strengthening its powers of resistance, it enables it to beat off the attacks of those enemies of its well-being which serve under the banner of sensuality. if this is so, the inference is irresistible that self-realisation is the only effective remedy for the immorality of the present age. the comparison between the two schemes of life may be carried a stage further. if egoism and sensuality are the two primary vices, the secondary vices will be the various ways and means by which egoism and sensuality try to compass their respective ends. let us select for consideration one group of these vices,--the important group which fall under the general head of _untruthfulness_. insincerity, disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery, evasion, intrigue, _suppressio veri_, _suggestio falsi_, fraud, mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,--their name is legion. that externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother of the whole brood, is almost too obvious to need demonstration. in school the child lives in an atmosphere of unreality and make-believe. the demand for mechanical obedience which is always pressing upon him is a demand that he shall be untrue to himself. sincerity of expression, which is the fountain-head of all truthfulness, is not merely slighted by his teacher, but is systematically proscribed. he is always (under compulsion) pretending to be what he is not,--to know what he does not know, to see what he does not see, to think what he does not think, to believe what he does not believe. and he lives, from hour to hour, under the dark shadow of severity and distrust,--severity which is too often answered by servility, and distrust which is too often answered by deceit. when he goes out into the world, he finds that though there are many sins for which there is forgiveness, there is one for which there is no forgiveness,--the sin of being found out; and he orders his life accordingly. he finds that he must give account of himself to public opinion, which necessarily judges according to the appearance of things, and is only too ready to be hoodwinked and gulled. he finds that to "succeed" is to achieve certain outward and visible results,--results which are out of relation to the _vraie vérité_ of things, which are in no way symbolical of merit, and for the winning of which any means may be resorted to provided that scandals are avoided and the letter of the law is obeyed. he finds that the system of advertising which plays so large a part in modern life, and without which it is so hard to "succeed," is in the main a system of organised mendacity. finally, and above all, he finds that the examination system, with its implicit demands for trickery and shiftiness, and its almost open invitation to cram and cheat, is not confined to the school but has its equivalent in "the world," and is in fact the basis of civilisation as well as of education in the west. this is the provision that externalism makes for the practical inculcation of truthfulness,--a virtue which its religion and its ethics profess to honour above all others. the life of self-realisation, on the other hand, is a life of genuine self-expression; and a life of genuine self-expression is obviously a life of fearless sincerity. in such a life there is no place for untruthfulness or any member of its impish brood. the one concern of the child, as of the man, is to be loyal to intrinsic reality, to be true to his true self. his standard is always inward, not outward. he knows that he is what he is, not what he is reputed to be. _quantum unusquisque est in oculis tuis, tantum est et non amplius._ here, then, as elsewhere, we see that the difference between the morality of externalism and the morality of self-realisation is a difference, not of degree but of direct antagonism,--the difference between a poison and its antidote, between the cause of a malady and the cure. while the path of self-realisation is emancipating us from egoism and sensuality, in what general direction is it leading us? is its ethical ideal positive or merely negative? and if it is positive, what is its character, and how is it to be realised? the answer to this question will be given in the remaining sections. _the social aspect of self-realisation._ he must either be richly endowed with "the good things of life" or be of an exceptionally optimistic disposition, who can view the existing social order with complete satisfaction. even among those who are richly endowed with "the good things of life" there must be many who realise that the "have-nots" have some cause for complaint. and even among those who are of an exceptionally optimistic disposition there must be some who realise that the grounds of their optimism are personal to themselves, and that they cannot expect many others to share their satisfaction with things as they are. the phrase "the good things of life" is significant, and explains much. it means that an outward standard of reality has fully established itself in the community, that money and the possessions of various kinds which money can buy are regarded as the good things of life,--things which are intrinsically good, and therefore legitimate ends of man's ambition and endeavour, things to pursue which is to fulfil one's destiny and to win which is to achieve salvation. it means, in other words, that the life of the community is a scramble for material possessions and outward and visible "results"--a scramble which on its lowest level becomes a struggle for bare existence, and on the next level a struggle for the "necessaries of life"--and that this legalised scramble is the basis of the whole social order. in such a scramble the great prizes are necessarily few, and the number of complete failures is always considerable; for the wealthier a country, the higher is its standard of comfort, so that the _proportion_ of failures--the percentage of men who are submerged and outcast, who are in want and misery--is at least as great in the wealthiest as in the poorest community, while the extremes of wealth and poverty are as a rule greatest where the pursuit of riches is carried on with the keenest vigour and the most complete success. there are many persons, rich as well as poor, who, viewing the legalised scramble from an entirely impersonal standpoint, are filled with disgust and dismay, and who dream of making an end of it, by substituting what they call _collectivism_ for the individualism which they regard as the source of all our troubles. these persons are known as _socialists_. their ruling idea is that the "state" should become the sole owner of property, and that this radical change should be effected by a series of legislative measures. with their social ideal, regarded as an ideal, one has of course the deepest sympathy. their motto is, i believe, "each for all, and all for each"; and if this ideal could be realised, the social millennium would indeed have begun. but in trying to compass their ends by legislation, _before the standard of reality has been changed_, they are making a disastrous mistake. for, to go no further, our schools are hotbeds of individualism, the spirit of "competitive selfishness" being actively and systematically fostered in all of them, with a few exceptions; and so long as this is so, so long as our highly individualised society is recruited, year by year, by a large contingent of individualists of all ranks, drawn from schools of all grades, for so long will the socialistic ideal remain an impracticable dream. an impracticable and a mischievous dream; for in the attempt to realise it, the community will almost inevitably be brought to the verge of civil war. when the seeds of socialistic legislation, or even of socialistic agitation, are sown in a soil which is highly charged with the poison of individualism, the resulting crop will be class hatred and social strife. no, we must change our standard of reality before we can hope to reform society. where the outward standard prevails, where material possessions are regarded as "the good things of life," the basis of society must needs be competitive rather than communal, for there will never be enough of those "good things" to satisfy the desires of _all_ the members of any community. and even if the socialistic dream of state-ownership could be universally realised, the change--so long as the outward standard of reality prevailed--would not necessarily be for the better, and might well be for the worse. competition for "the good things of life" would probably go on as fiercely as ever; but it would be a scramble among nations rather than individuals, and it might conceivably take the form of open warfare waged on a titanic scale.[ ] even now there are indications that such a struggle, or series of struggles, if not actually approaching, is at any rate not beyond the bounds of possibility. and on the way to the realisation of the collectivist ideal, we should probably have in each community a similar struggle for wealth and power among political parties,--a struggle which would generate many social evils, of which civil war might not be the most malignant. but if we are to change our standard of reality we must change it, first and foremost, in the school. the way to do this is quite simple. we need not give lessons on altruism. we need not teach or preach a new philosophy of life. all that we need do is to foster the growth of the child's soul. when the growth of the soul is healthy and harmonious, the cultivation of all the expansive instincts having been fully provided for, the _communal_ instinct will evolve itself in its own season; and when the communal instinct has been fully evolved, the social order will begin to reform itself. this is what has happened in utopia. there, where competition is unknown, where prizes are undreamed of, where the growth of the child's natural faculties, and the consequent well-being of his soul, is "its own exceeding great reward," the communal instinct has grown with the growth of the child's whole nature, and has generated an ideal social life. at the end of the last section i asked myself what was the ethical ideal of the life of self-realisation,--the positive ideal as distinguished from the more negative ideal of emancipating from egoism and sensuality. i will now try to answer this question. emancipation from egoism and sensuality is effected by the outgrowth of a larger and truer self. this larger and truer self, as it unfolds itself, directs our eyes towards the ideal self--the goal of the whole process of growth--which is to the ordinary self what the full-grown tree, embodying in itself the perfection of oakhood, is to the sapling oak, or what the ripe peach, embodying in itself the perfection of peachhood, is to the green unripened fruit. the ideal self is, in brief, perfect manhood. what perfect manhood may be, we need not pause to inquire. whatever it may be, it is the true self of each of us. it follows that the nearer each of us gets to it, the nearer he is to the true self of each of his fellow-men; that the more closely he is able to identify himself with it, the more closely he is able to identify himself with each of his fellow-men; that in realising it, he is realising, he is entering into, he is becoming one with, the real life of each of his fellow-men. and not of each of his fellow-men only. he is also entering into the life of the whole community of men--(for it is the presence of the ideal self in each of us which makes communal life possible)--and, through this, of each of the lesser communities to which he may happen to belong. in other words, he is losing himself in the lives of others, and is finding his well-being, and therefore his happiness, in doing so. but self-loss, with joy in the loss of self, is, in a word, love. the path of self-realisation is, then, in its higher stages, a life of love. he who walks in that path must needs lead a life of love. he will love and serve his fellow-men, both as individuals and as members of this or that community, not because he is consciously trying to live up to a high ideal, but because he has reached a stage in his development beyond which he cannot develop himself except by leading a life of love, because the path of self-realisation has led him into the sunshine of love, and if he will not henceforth walk in that sunshine he will cease to follow his path. he has indeed long walked in the foreglow of the sunshine of love. the dawn of the orb of love is heralded by a gradual twilight, which lights the path of self-realisation, even in its earlier stages. in utopia the joy on the faces of the children is the joy of goodwill not less than of well-being. or rather it is the joy of goodwill because it is the joy of well-being, because well-being would not be well-being if it did not ceaselessly generate goodwill. that love is "the fulfilling of the law," and therefore the keystone of every sound system of ethics, is a truth on which i need scarcely insist. the final proof that the ethics of self-realisation are sound to the core lies in the fact that the path of self-realisation, besides emancipating from egoism and sensuality, leads all who walk in it, first into the foreglow and then into the sunshine of love. but it is with the social rather than the ethical aspect of self-realisation that i am now concerned. and the social aspect of the fact which has just been stated is obviously of vital importance. love, which is commensurate with life, has innumerable phases. one of these is what i have called the communal instinct,--the sense of belonging to a community, of being a vital part of it, of sharing in its life, of being what one is (in part at least) because one shares in its life. if socialism is to realise its noble dream, this instinct, strongly developed and directed towards the well-being of the whole social order, must become part of the normal equipment of every citizen. and if this is to come to pass, self-realisation must be made the basis of education in all our schools. what it has done for the children of utopia, in the way of developing their communal instinct and making their school an ideal community, it is capable of doing for every school in england,--i might almost say for every school on the face of the earth. there are faddists who advocate the teaching of _patriotism_ in our elementary schools. there are local education committees which insist on _citizenship_ being taught in the schools under their control. by teaching patriotism, and citizenship is meant treating them as "subjects," finding places for them on the "time-table," and giving formal lessons on them. where this is done, the time of the teachers and the children is wasted. the teaching of patriotism and citizenship, if it is to produce any effect, must be entirely informal and indirect. let the child be so educated that he will develop himself freely on all the sides of his being, and his communal instinct will, as i have said, evolve itself in its own season. until it has evolved itself, patriotism and citizenship will be mere names to him, and what he is taught about them will make no impression on him. when it has evolved itself, he will be a patriot and a good citizen in _posse_, and will be ready on occasion to prove his patriotism and his good citizenship by his deeds, or, better still, by his life.[ ] while the communal instinct is evolving itself, first in the school and then in the community at large, the standard of reality will, by a parallel or perhaps identical process, be transforming itself in all the grades of society. the inward will be taking the place of the outward standard; and men will be learning to form a different conception of "the good things of life" from that which now dominates our social life. the socialist will then have his opportunity. that any member of the community should be in physical want or irremediable misery, will begin to be felt, partly as a personal grief, partly as a reflection on himself, by each member of the community in turn; and steps will begin to be taken--what steps i cannot pretend to forecast--to make physical want and irremediable misery impossible. meanwhile, with the gradual substitution of the inward for the outward standard of reality, the mad scramble for wealth and possessions and distinctions will gradually cease, the conception of what constitutes "comfort" and of what are the real "necessaries of life" will be correspondingly changed, and men will begin to realise that of the genuine "good things of life"--the good things which the children of utopia carry with them into the world, and which make them exceedingly rich in spite of their apparent poverty--there are enough and more than enough "to go round." _the religious aspect of self-realisation._ the oak-tree is present in embryo in the acorn. what is it that is present in embryo in the new-born child? to achieve salvation is to realise one's true self. but what is one's true self? the "perfection of manhood" is an obvious answer to this question; but it explains so little that we cannot accept it as final. we may, however, accept it as a resting-place in our search for the final answer. it is on the religious aspect of self-realisation that i now propose to dwell. the function of religion is to bring a central aim into man's life, to direct his eyes towards the true end of his being and to help him to reach it. the true end of man's being is the perfection of his nature; and the way to this end is the process which we call growth. when i speak of man's nature i am thinking of his universal nature, of the nature which is common to all men, the nature of man as man. each of us has his own particular nature, his individuality, as it is sometimes called. the nature of man as man is no mere common measure of these particular natures, but is rather what i may call their organised totality, the many-sided nature which includes, explains, and even justifies them all. what perfection may mean when we predicate the term of our common nature, we cannot even imagine. the potentialities of our nature seem to be infinite, and our knowledge of them is limited and shallow. when we compare an untutored savage or a brutal, ignorant european with a christ or a buddha, or again with a shakespeare or a goethe, we realise how vast is the range--the lineal even more than the lateral range--of man's nature, and we find it easy to believe that in any ordinary man there are whole tracts, whole aspects of human nature, in which his consciousness has not yet been awakened, and which therefore seem to be nonexistent in him, though in reality they are only dormant or inert. these, however, are matters with which we need not at present concern ourselves. let the potentialities of our common nature be what they may. our business is to realise them as, little by little, they present themselves to us for realisation. let the end of the process of growth be what it may. our business is to grow. in the effort to grow we are not left without guidance. the stimulus to grow, the forces and the tendencies that make for growth, all come from within ourselves. yet it is only to a limited extent that they come under our direct control. so, too, the goal of growth, the ideal perfection of our nature, is our own; and yet on the way to it we must needs outgrow ourselves. what part do we play in this mighty drama? the mystery of selfhood is unfathomable. the word _self_ changes its meaning the moment we begin to think about it. so does the word _nature_. the range of meaning is in each case unlimited. yet there are limits beyond which we cannot use either word without some risk of being misunderstood. when we are meditating on our origin and our destiny, some other word seems to be needed to enable us to complete the span of our thoughts. is not that word _god_? the source of our life, the ideal end of our being,--how shall we think about these if we may not speak of them as _divine_? and in using the word "divine," do we not set ourselves free to stretch the respective meanings of the words "self" and "nature" beyond what would otherwise have been the breaking point of each? the true self is worthier of the name of "self" than the apparent self. the true nature is worthier of the name of "nature" than the lower nature. but the true self is the divine self; and the highest nature is the nature of god. if this is so, we serve god best and obey god best by trying to perfect our nature in response to a stimulus, a pressure, and a guidance which is at once natural and divine. in other words, we serve god best by following the path of self-realisation. and the better we serve god, the more truly and fully do we learn to know him. if to know him, and to live up to our knowledge of him, is to be truly religious, then the life of self-realisation is, in the truest and deepest sense of the word, a _religious_ life. or rather it is the only religious life, for in no other way can knowledge of god be won. let me try to make good this statement. knowledge of god is the outcome, not of definite dogmatic instruction in theology, but of spiritual growth. knowledge, whatever may be its object, is always the outcome of growth. even knowledge of _number_ is the outcome, not of definite dogmatic instruction in the arithmetical rules and tables, but of the growth of the arithmetical sense. it is the same with literature, the same with history, the same with chemistry, the same with "business," the same with navigation, the same with the driving of vehicles in crowded streets, the same with every art, craft, sport, game, and pursuit. in evolving a special sense, the soul is growing in one particular direction, a direction which is marked out for it by the environment in which it finds it needful or desirable to energise. the soul has, as we have seen, a general power of adapting itself to its environment, of permeating it, of feeling its way through it, of getting to understand it, of dealing with it at last with skill and success. as is the particular environment, so is the subtle, tactful, adaptive, directly perceptive, subconsciously cognitive faculty,--the "sense," as i have called it--by means of which the soul acquires the particular knowledge that it needs. the more highly specialised (whether by subdivision or by abstraction) the environment, the more highly specialised the sense. the larger and more comprehensive the environment, the larger and more "massive" the sense. the acquired aptitude which enables an omnibus driver to steer his bulky vehicle through the traffic of london is a highly specialised sense. at the other end of the scale we have the "massive" spiritual faculties which deal with whole aspects of life or nature, such as the sense of beauty or of moral worth. but there is a sense which is larger and more "massive" even than these. when the environment is all-embracing, when it covers the whole circle of which the soul is or can be the centre, the growth made in response to it is the growth of the soul as such, and the knowledge which rewards that growth is the knowledge of supreme reality, or, in the language of religion, the knowledge of god. the highest of all senses is the religious sense, the sense which gives us knowledge of god. but the religious sense is not, as we are apt to imagine, one of many senses. no one individual sense, however "massive" or subtle it might be, could enable its possessor to get on terms, so to speak, with the totality of things, with the all-vitalising life, with the all-embracing whole. _the religious sense is the well-being of the soul._ for the soul as such grows in and through the growth of its various senses,--its own growth being reinforced by the growth of each of these when nature's balance is kept, and retarded by the growth of one or more of them when nature's balance is lost,--and in proportion as its own vital, central growth is vigorous and healthy, its power of apprehending reality unfolds itself little by little. that power is of its inmost essence. when reality, in the full sense of the word, is its object, it sees with the whole of its being; it is itself, when it is at the centre of its universe, its own supreme perceptive faculty, its own religious sense. if this is so, if the soul in its totality, the soul acting through its whole "apperceptive mass," is its own religious sense, it is abundantly clear that the path of self-realisation is the only path which leads to knowledge of god, and through knowledge of god to salvation. for self-realisation is the only scheme of life which provides for the growth of the soul in its totality, for the harmonious, many-sided development of the soul as such. i have often dwelt on this point. if we have never before realised its importance we must surely do so now. a one-sided training, even when its one-sidedness takes the form of specialising in theology, is a non-religious, and may well become an irreligious training, for it does not lead to, and may well lead away from, knowledge of god. and if we have never before realised how great are the opportunities and responsibilities of the teacher, we must surely do so now. for a certain number of years--the number varies with the social standing of the child, and the financial resources of his parents--the teacher can afford to disregard utilitarian considerations and think only of what is best for the child. what use will he make of those years? will he lead the child into the path of self-realisation, and so give a lifelong impetus to the growth of his soul? or will he, in his thirst for "results," lead him into the path of mechanical obedience, or, at best, of one-sided development, and so blight his budding faculties and arrest the growth of his soul? on the practical answer that he gives to this question will depend the fate of the child. for to the child the difference between the two paths will be the difference between fulfilling and missing his destiny, between knowledge and ignorance of god. if any of my readers have imagined that i am an advocate of what is called "secular education," they will, i hope, now realise that they have misread this book. far from wishing to secularise education, i hold that it cannot be too religious. and, far from wishing to limit its religious activities to the first forty minutes of the morning sessions, i hold that it should be actively religious through every minute of every school session, that whatever it does it should do to the glory of god. but how does knowledge of god show itself? knowledge, so far as it is real, always shows itself in right bearing, and (if action is called for) in right action. knowledge of arithmetic and of other more or less abstract subjects, shows itself in the successful working of the corresponding problems, theoretical or practical as the case may be. knowledge of the laws of physical nature shows itself in practical mastery of the forces and resources of physical nature. knowledge of history and geography, in a right attitude towards the problems and sub-problems of these complex and comprehensive subjects, an attitude which may on occasion translate itself into right action. and so on. knowledge of god, being a state or attitude of the soul as such, must show itself in the right bearing and the right action of the soul as such, in other words, of man as man,--not as mathematician, not as financier, not as sculptor, not as cricketer, but simply as man. now man as man has to bear himself aright towards the world in which he finds himself, and in particular towards the world which touches him most closely and envelops him most completely,--the world of human life. therefore knowledge of god will show itself, principally and chiefly, though by no means wholly, in dealing aright with one's fellow-men, in being rightly disposed towards them, and in doing the right things to them. i have found it convenient to disconnect the moral from the religious aspect of self-realisation. we can now see that in the last resort the two aspects are one. from every point of view, then, and above all from that of religion, the path of self-realisation is seen to be the path of salvation. for it is the only scheme of life which enables him who follows it to attain to knowledge of god; and knowledge of god has, as its necessary counterpart, a right attitude, in general towards the world which surrounds him, and in particular towards his fellow-men. but is it possible, within the limits of one earth-life, to follow the path of self-realisation to its appointed goal? and if not, will the path be continued beyond that abrupt turn in it which we call death? the respective attitudes of the two great schools of popular thought towards the problem of the grave, are in brief as follows. the materialists (or naturalists, as they miscall themselves) believe that death is the end of life. the supernaturalists believe that one earth-life (or even a few years or months) of mechanical obedience to supernatural direction will be rewarded by an eternity of happiness in "heaven." but those who walk in the path of self-realisation, and whose unswerving loyalty to nature is rewarded by some measure of insight into her deeper laws, know that the goal of the path is infinitely far away, and in their heart of hearts they laugh both the current eschatologies to scorn. and the higher they ascend, as they follow the path, the more vividly do they realise how unimaginably high above them is the summit of the mountain which the path is ascending in spiral coils. the utopian experiment, humble as it is, can, i think, throw some light on these mighty problems. the relations between the type and the various sub-types, between the type and the individual, between the sub-type and the individual--whether in plant or beast or man--are matters which could not be handled within the limits of this book, and which i have therefore as far as possible ignored. nor have i attempted to deal with the difficult problems that are presented by the existence of races, such as the negro, which seem to be far below the normal level of human development. there is, however, in the vast region of thought which these and kindred problems open out to us, one by-way which i must be allowed to follow for a while. the wild _bullace_ is, i believe, the ancestor of many of our yellow _plums_. in other words, bullacehood can develop into plumhood, and even into the perfection of plumhood. similarly human nature can develop into something so high above the normal level of human nature that it might almost seem to belong to another _genus_. but there is a difference between the two cases. the bullace ideal is in the individual bullace tree. so, in a sense, is the plum ideal. but the latter cannot be realised, or even approached, by the individual bullace tree. it cannot be realised, or even approached, by the bullace species except through a long course of culture and breeding. is it the same with man? let us take english rusticity as a particular type of human nature,--the equivalent of bullacehood for the purpose of argument. this is a distinct type, and may be said to have its own ideal.[ ] emerging from this, and gradually transforming it, is the ideal of human nature, the ideal for man as man. as the bullace ideal is to the plum ideal, so is the ideal of english rusticity to the ideal of human nature. but whereas the plum ideal cannot be realised in any appreciable degree by the individual bullace, the human ideal can be realised in a quite appreciable degree by the individual english rustic. there have always been and will always be isolated cases to prove that this is so,--cases of men of quite humble origin who have attained to high degrees of mental and spiritual development. these have hitherto been regarded as exceptional cases. but egeria has convinced me that under favourable conditions the _average_ child can become the rare exception, and attain to what is usually regarded as a remarkably high degree of mental and spiritual development. innocent joy, self-forgetfulness, communal devotion, heartfelt goodwill, gracious manners--to speak of spiritual development only--are characteristics of _every_ utopian child. what are we to infer from this? the bullace ideal is realisable (under favourable conditions) by each individual bullace tree,--but the plum ideal is not. the english rustic ideal is realisable by each individual rustic child. _but so is the human ideal in utopia._ but what of the children who do not belong to utopia? what would have happened to the utopian children if there had been no egeria to lead them into the path of self-realisation? they would have lived and died ordinary english rustics,--healthy bullaces, but in no respect or degree plums. egeria has convinced me that the average child, besides being born mentally and spiritually healthy, has immense capacity on every side of his being. the plum ideal is the true nature of the plum, but is not the true nature of the bullace. but egeria has convinced me that the human ideal--the divine self--is the true nature of each of us, even of the average rustic child; and she has also convinced me that each of us can go a long way towards realising that ideal. had there been no egeria in utopia, the utopians would have lived and died undeveloped, having arrived at a maturity of a kind, the maturity of the bullace as distinguished from that of the plum, but having failed to realise in any appreciable degree what the utopian experiment has proved to be their true nature. what then? is this the end of the average man? will nature admit final defeat? the curve of a man's life, as it sweeps round from birth to death, passes through the point of apparent maturity; but the real nature of the man has never ripened, and when he descends into the grave he is still the embryo of his true self. will the true self never be realised? never, if death is indeed the end of life. but in that case the man will have failed to fulfil the central purpose of nature, and, alone among her children, will have escaped from the control of her all-pervading law of growth. it is in their desire to keep man in line with the rest of nature's children that so many thinkers and scientists in the west forbid him to look beyond the horizon of the grave. but in truth it is only by being allowed to look beyond that horizon that man can be kept in line with the rest of nature's children; for if death means extinction to him, as it means (or seems to mean) to the beetle or the fly, he will have lived to no purpose, having failed to realise in any appreciable degree what every other living thing realises within its appointed limits,--the central tendencies of his being. that a living thing, an average specimen of its kind, should within the limits of a normal life fail completely to realise those potentialities which are distinctive of its real nature,--fail so completely that the very existence of those potentialities might, but for an occasional and quite exceptional revelation, have remained unsuspected,--is entirely at variance with what we know of the ways and works of nature. yet failure to realise his true manhood is, outside the confines of utopia, the apparent lot of nine men out of ten. an entire range of qualities, spiritual and mental, which blossom freely in the stimulating atmosphere of utopia, and which must therefore exist in embryo in every normal child, fail to germinate (or at best only just begin to germinate) within the lifetime of the average non-utopian.[ ] the inference to be drawn from these significant facts is that the apparent limits of man's life are not the real limits; that the one earth-life of which each of us is conscious, far from being the whole of one's life, is but a tiny fragment of it,--one term of its ascending "series," one day in its cycle of years. in other words, the spiritual fertility of the average utopian child, taken in conjunction with the spiritual sterility of the average non-utopian child (and man), points to the conclusion which the thinkers of the far east reached thousands of years ago,--that for the full development of human nature a plurality of lives is needed, which will do for the individual soul what generations of scientific breeding and culture will do for the bullace that is to be transformed into a plum. this is one lesson which utopia has taught me. there is another which had also been anticipated by the thinkers of the far east. if under exceptionally favourable conditions certain spiritual and mental qualities are able to blossom freely in the space of a few years, which under normal conditions would remain undeveloped during a lifetime of seventy or eighty years, may we not infer that there is a directer path to spiritual maturity than that which is ordinarily followed? may we not infer that there are ways of living, ways into which parents and teachers can lead the young, which, if faithfully followed, will allow the potencies of man's higher nature to evolve themselves with what we, with our limited experience, must regard as abnormal celerity, and which will therefore shorten appreciably man's journey to his goal?[ ] and if there is a directer path to spiritual maturity than that which is ordinarily followed, is not the name for it _self-realisation_? i will not pursue these speculations further. but, speaking for myself, i will say that the vista which the idea of self-realisation opens up to me goes far beyond the limits of any one earth-life or sequence of earth-lives, and far, immeasurably far, beyond the limits of the sham eternity of the conventional heaven and hell. but even if there is the fullest provision in nature (whether by a spiral ascent through a long chain of lives, or by some directer path) for the final development in each individual man of the potencies of perfect manhood, for the final realisation of the divine or true self,--what then? what does it all mean? why are we to follow the path of self-realisation? what is the purpose of the cycle of existence? there is an answer to this obstinate question,--an answer which explains nothing, and yet is final, in that it leaves nothing to be explained. the expansive energies and desires, to yield to which is our wisdom and our happiness, are ever transforming themselves, as we yield to them, into the might and the ardour of love. and for love there is no final resting-place but the sea of divine love from which it came. "_amor ex deo natus est, nec potest nisi in deo requiescere._" footnotes: [ ] there is of course an intermediate class of vicious tendencies, which may be described as apparent rather than actual, and which are caused partly by immaturity, partly by environment. many of the "naughtinesses" of school children belong to this class. [ ] the _physical_ aspect is, of course, of incalculable importance. my only reason for ignoring it is that i am not competent to deal with it. the _æsthetic_ aspect is also of incalculable importance; but i know so little about music or art, that i must limit my treatment of this aspect to pointing out that until the musical and artistic instincts of the masses are systematically trained in our elementary schools, through the medium of free self-expression on the part of the children, we shall have neither a national music nor a national art. [ ] workshops, for the use of the engineering classes, are, i believe, attached to the "modern side" of some of our great public schools; but i doubt if there is one among the great public schools, or even among the preparatory schools which lead up to them, in which "hand-work" is part of the _normal_ curriculum. [ ] i know a youth who recently attended science lectures for two years at one of the most famous of our great public schools, and at the end of that time had not the faintest idea what branch of science he had been studying. science is, i believe, seriously taught in the great public schools to those who wish to take it seriously; but, if taught at all, it is certainly not taught seriously to the rank and file of the boys who belong to the "classical side" of their respective schools. [ ] see also footnote to page . [ ] when i was an undergraduate at oxford, there was one at least of my friends who took a genuine delight in the literary masterpieces of greece and rome,--the delight, not of a fastidious scholar but of a born lover of good literature. he got a "third" in classical "mods," and was "gulfed" in "greats." "serve him right," his "dons" must have said, for i am afraid he cut their lectures. [greek: hôs apoloito kai allos hotis toiauta ge rhezoi.] [ ] _stanzas on the grande chartreuse_, by matthew arnold. [ ] when i apply the epithet "irrational" to the outcry at ephesus, i am thinking of the mob, not of the silversmiths. the latter knew what they were about. [ ] having said so much in disparagement of the mental training given in the great public schools and the older universities, let me now try to make my peace with my old school and my university by expressing my conviction that those who are studying the "humanities," whether at school or college, _and finding pleasure in their studies_, are receiving the best education that is at present procurable in england. an old oxonian may perhaps be allowed to make public profession of his faith in the special efficacy of that course of study which is known familiarly as "greats," the examination in which is, of all examinations, the most difficult to cram for and the most profitable to read for. it is scarcely necessary for me to add that in the older universities, as in the great public schools, many valuable educative influences are at work outside the lecture-room. for one thing, the undergraduates, who come from all parts of the world, are always educating one another. for another thing, the "atmosphere" of oxford and cambridge does much for the mental and spiritual development of those who are able to respond to its stimulus. even the _genius loci_ is educative, in its own quiet, subtle way. but it would be an impertinence on my part to labour this point. it is because oxford and cambridge educate their _alumni_ in a thousand ways, the worth of which no formal examination can test or measure, that they stand apart from all other universities. [ ] i mean by the "lower self," not the animal base of one's existence, but the ordinary self _claiming to be the true self_, and so rising in rebellion against its lawful lord. [ ] in other words, it might conceivably take the form of _clan_ warfare, highly organised and waged on a world-wide field; and we learn from the history of the highlands of scotland and of old japan that of all forms of warfare the most cruel and relentless, with the exception of that which is waged in the name of religion, is the warfare between clan and clan. [ ] there is such a thing as communal egoism, when a man regards the community or society to which he belongs as a kind of "possession," to be paraded and bragged about, just as in personal love there is such a thing as egoism _à deux_. but the communal instinct which is generated by self-realisation readily purges itself of every egoistic taint. [ ] i mean by the "ideal" the true nature of the given species and the true self of each individual specimen. [ ] when i compare the average utopian with the average non-utopian, i am of course thinking of the "masses," not of the "classes." if the comparison is to have any value, the conditions in the two cases must be fairly equal. mentally, the "classes" are, on the whole, more highly developed (thanks to their more favourable environment) than the "masses." spiritually and morally, they are perhaps on a par with them. [ ] this was the idea which inspired the founder of buddhism, and led him to formulate a scheme of life, in virtue of which he takes rank (as it seems to me) as the greatest educationalist, as well as the greatest moralist, that the world has ever known. the end education and the higher life by bishop spalding. education and the higher life. mo. $ . . things of the mind. mo. $ . . means and ends of education. mo. $ . . thoughts and theories of life and education. mo. $ . . opportunity and other essays and addresses. mo. $ . . songs: chiefly from the german. mo, gilt top. $ . . a. c. mcclurg & co. chicago. education and the higher life by j. l. spalding bishop of peoria the business of education is not, as i think, to perfect the learner in any of the sciences, but to give his mind that freedom and disposition, and those habits, which may enable him to attain every part of knowledge himself.--locke sixth edition chicago a. c. mcclurg & co. _copyright_, by a. c. mcclurg and co., a. d. . contents. chapter page i. ideals ii. exercise of mind iii. the love of excellence iv. culture and the spirit of the age v. self-culture vi. growth and duty vii. right human life viii. university education education and the higher life. chapter i. ideals. a noble aim, faithfully kept, is as a noble deed. wordsworth. to few men does life bring a brighter day than that which places the crown upon their scholastic labors, and bids them go forth from the halls of the alma mater to the great world's battlefield. there is a freshness in these early triumphs which, like the bloom and fragrance of the flower, is quickly lost, never to be found again even by those for whom fortune reserves her most choice gifts. fame, though hymned by myriad tongues, is not so sweet as the delight we drink from the tear-dimmed eyes of our mothers and sisters, in the sacred hours when we can yet claim as our own the love of higher things, the faith and hope which make this mortal life immortal, and fill a moment with a wealth of memories which lasts through years. the highest joy is serious, and in the midst of supreme delight there comes to the soul a stillness which permits it to rise to the serene sphere where truth is most gladly heard and most easily perceived; and in such exaltation, the young see that life is not what they take it to be. they think it long; it is short. they think it happy; it is full of cares and sorrows. this two-fold illusion widens the horizon of life and tinges it with gold. it gives to youth its charm and makes of it a blessed time to which we ever turn regretful eyes. but i am wrong to call illusion that which in truth is but an omen of the divine possibilities of man's nature. to the young, life is not mean or short, because the blessed freedom of youth may make it noble and immortal. the young stand upon the threshold of the world. of the many careers which are open to human activity, they will choose one; and their fortunes will be various, even though their merits should be equal. but if position, fame, and wealth are often denied to the most persistent efforts and the best ability, it is consoling to know they are not the highest; and as they are not the end of life, they should not be made its aim. an aim, nevertheless, we must have, if we hope to live to good purpose. all men, in fact, whether or not they know it, have an ideal, base or lofty, which molds character and shapes destiny. whether it be pleasure or gain or renown or knowledge, or several of these, or something else, we all associate life with some end, or ends, the attainment of which seems to us most desirable. this ideal, that which in our inmost souls we love and desire, which we lay to heart and live by, is at once the truest expression of our nature and the most potent agency in developing its powers. now, in youth we form the ideals which we labor to body forth in our lives. what in these growing days we yearn for with all our being, is heaped upon us in old age. all important, therefore, is the choice of an ideal; for this more than rules or precepts will determine what we are to become. the love of the best is twin-born with the soul. what is the best? what is the worthiest life-aim? it must be something which is within the reach of every one, as nature's best gifts--air and sunshine and water--belong to all. what only the few can attain, cannot be life's real end or the highest good. the best is not far removed from any one of us, but is alike near to the poor and the rich, to the learned and the ignorant, to the shepherd and the king, and only the best can give to the soul repose and contentment. what then is the true life-ideal? recalling to mind the thoughts and theories of many men, i can find nothing better than this, "seek ye first the kingdom of god." "love not pleasure," says carlyle, "love god. this is the everlasting yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." to the high and aspiring heart of youth, fame, honor, glory, appeal with such irresistible power, and appear clad in forms so beautiful, that at a time of life when all of us are unreal in our sentiments and crude in our opinions, they are often mistaken for the best. but fame is good only in so far as it gives power for good. for the rest, it is nominal. they who have deserved it care not for it. a great soul is above all praise and dispraise of men, which are ever given ignorantly and without fine discernment. the popular breath, even when winnowed by the winds of centuries, is hardly pure. and then fame cannot be the good of which i speak, for only a very few can even hope for it. to nearly all, the gifts which make it possible are denied; and to others, the opportunities. many, indeed, love and win notoriety, but such as they need not detain us here. a lower race of youth, in whom the blood is warmer than the soul, think pleasure life's best gift, and are content to let occasion die, while they revel in the elysium of the senses. but to make pleasure an end is to thwart one's purpose, for joy is good only when it comes unbidden. the pleasure we seek begins already to pall. it is good, indeed, if it come as refreshment to the weary, solace to the heavy-hearted, and rest to the careworn; but if sought for its own sake, it is "the honey of poison flowers and all the measureless ill." only the young, or the depraved, can believe that to live for pleasure is not to be foreordained to misery. whoso loves god or freedom or growth of mind or strength of heart, feels that pleasure is his foe. "a king of feasts and flowers, and wine and revel, and love and mirth, was never king of glory." of money, as the end or ideal of life, it should not be necessary to speak. as a fine contempt for life, a willingness to throw it away in defence of any just cause or noble opinion, is one of the privileges of youth, so the generous heart of the young holds cheap the material comforts which money procures. to be young is to be free, to be able to live anywhere on land or sea, in the midst of deserts or among strange people; is to be able to fit the mind and body to all circumstance, and to rise almost above nature's iron law. he who is impelled by this high and heavenly spirit will dream of flying and not of hobbling through life on golden crutches. let the feeble and the old put their trust in money; but where there is strength and youth, the soul should be our guide. and yet the very law and movement of our whole social life seem to point to riches as the chief good. "what is that which i should turn to, lighting upon days like these? every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys." money is the god in whom we put our trust, to whom instinctively we pay homage. we believe that the rich are fortunate, are happy, that the best of life has been given to them. we have faith in the power of money, in its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from sneers and insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take away the poverty of mind, the narrowness of heart, the dullness of imagination, which make us weak, hard, and common. even our hatred of the rich is but another form of the worship of money. the poor think they are wretched, because they think money the chief good; and if they are right, then is it a holy work to strive to overthrow society as it is now constituted. buckle and strauss find fault with the christian religion because it does not inculcate the love of money. but in this, faith and reason are in harmony. wealth is not the best, and to make it the end of life is idolatry, and as saint paul declares, the root of evil. man is more than money, as the workman is more than his tools. the soul craves quite other nourishment than that which the whole material universe can supply. man's chief good lies in the infinite world of thought and righteousness. fame and wealth and pleasure are good when they are born of high thinking and right living, when they lead to purer faith and love; but if they are sought as ends and loved for themselves, they blight and corrupt. the value of culture is great, and the ideal it presents points in the right direction in bidding us build up the being which we are. but since man is not the highest, he may not rest in himself, and culture therefore is a means rather than an end. if we make it the chief aim of life, it degenerates into a principle of exclusion, destroys sympathy, and terminates in a sort of self-worship. what remains, then, but the ideal which i have proposed?--"seek ye first the kingdom of god." unless the light of heaven fall along our way, thick darkness gathers about us, and in the end, whatever our success may have been, we fail, and are without god and without hope. so long as any seriousness is left, religion is man's first and deepest concern; to be indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease. difficulties assuredly there are, underlying not only faith, but all systems of knowledge. how am i certain that i know anything? is a question, debated in all past time, debatable in all future time; but we are none the less certain that we know. the mind is governed by laws which neither science nor philosophy can change, and while theories and systems rise and pass away, the eternal problems present themselves ever anew clothed in the eternal mystery. but little discernment is needed to enable us to perceive how poor and symbolic are the thoughts of the multitude. half in pity, half in contempt, we rise to higher regions only to discover that wherever we may be there also are the laws and the limitations of our being; and that in whatsoever sanctuaries we may take refuge, we are still of the crowd. we cannot grasp the infinite; language cannot express even what we know of the divine being, and hence there remains a background of darkness, where it is possible to adore, or to mock. but religion dispels more mystery than it involves. with it, there is twilight in the world; without it, night. we are in the world to act, not to doubt. leaving quibbles to those who can find no better use for life, the wise, with firm faith in god and man, strive to make themselves worthy to do brave and righteous work. distrust is the last wisdom a great heart learns; and noble natures feel that the generous view is, in the end, the true view. for them life means good; they find strength and joy in this wholesome and cheerful faith, and if they are in error, it can never be known, for if death end all, with it knowledge ceases. perceiving this, they strive to gain spiritual insight, they look to god; toward him they turn the current of their thought and love; the unseen world of truth and beauty becomes their home; and while matter flows on and breaks and remakes itself to break again, they dwell in the presence of the eternal, and become co-workers with the infinite power which makes goodness good, and justice right. they love knowledge, because god knows all things; they love beauty, because he is its source; they love the soul, because it brings man into conscious communion with him and his universe. if their ideal is poetical, they catch in the finer spirit of truth which the poet breathes, the fragrance of the breath of god; if it is scientific, they discover in the laws of nature the harmony of his attributes; if it is political and social, they trace the principles of justice and liberty to him; if it is philanthropic, they understand that love which is the basis, aim, and end of life is also god. the root of their being is in him, and the illusory world of the senses cannot dim their vision of the real world which is eternal. by self-analysis the mind is sublimated until it becomes a shadow in a shadowy universe; and the criticism of the reason drives us to doubt and inaction, from which we are redeemed by our necessary faith in our own freedom, in our power to act, and in the duty of acting in obedience to higher law. knowledge comes of doing. never to act is never to know. the world of which we are conscious is the world against which we throw ourselves by the power of the will; hence life is chiefly conduct, and its ideal is not merely religious, but moral. the duty of obedience to our better self determines the purpose and end of action, for the better self is under the impulse of god. whether we look without or within, we find things are as they should not be; and there awakens the desire, nay, the demand that they be made other and better. the actual is a mockery unless it may be looked upon as the means of a higher state. if all things come forth only to perish and again come forth as they were before; if life is a monster which destroys itself that it may again be born, again to destroy itself,--were it not better that the tragedy should cease? for many centuries men have been struggling for richer and happier life; and yet when we behold the sins, the miseries, the wrongs, the sorrows, of which the world is full, we are tempted to think that progress means failure. the multitude are still condemned to toil from youth to age to provide the food by which life is kept in the body; immortal spirits are still driven by hard necessity to fix their thoughts upon matter from which they with much labor dig forth what nourishes the animal. like the savage, we still tremble before the pitiless might of nature. floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely frosts, destroy in a moment what with long and painful effort has been provided. pestilence still stalks through the earth to slay and make desolate. each day a hundred thousand human beings die; and how many of these perish as the victims of sins of ignorance, of selfishness, of sensuality. to-day, as of old, it would seem man's worst enemy is man. what hordes still wander through asia and africa, seeking opportunity for murder and rapine; what multitudes are still hunted like beasts, caught and sold into slavery. in europe millions of men stand, arms in hand, waiting for the slaughter. they still believe, because they were born on different sides of a river and speak different languages, that they are natural enemies, made to destroy one another. and in our own country, what other sufferings and wrongs,--greed, sensuality, injustice, deceit,--make us enemies one of another! there is a general struggle in which each one strives to get the most, heedless of the misery of others. we trade upon the weaknesses, the vices, and the follies of our fellow-men; and every attempt at reform is met by an army of upholders of abuse. when we consider the murders, the suicides, the divorces, the adulteries, the prostitutions, the brawls, the drunkenness, the dishonesties, the political and official corruptions, of which our life is full, it is difficult to have complacent thoughts of ourselves. consider, too, our prisons, our insane asylums, our poor-houses; the multitudes of old men and women, who having worn out strength and health in toil which barely gave them food and raiment, are thrust aside, no longer now fit to be bought and sold; the countless young people, who have, as we say, been educated, but who have not been taught the principles and habits which lead to honorable living; the thousands in our great cities who are driven into surroundings which pervert and undermine character. and worse still, the good, instead of uniting to labor for a better state of things, misunderstand and thwart one another. they divide into parties, are jealous and contentious, and waste their time and exhaust their strength in foolish and futile controversies. they are not anxious that good be done, nor asking nor caring by whom; but they seek credit for themselves, and while they seem to be laboring for the general welfare, are striving rather to satisfy their own selfish vanity. but the knowledge of all this does not discourage him who, guided by the light of true ideals, labors to make reason and the will of god prevail. if things are bad he knows they have been worse. never before have the faith and culture which make us human, which make us strong and wise, been the possession of so large a portion of the race. religion and civilization have diffused themselves, from little centres--from athens and jerusalem and rome--until people after people, whole continents, have been brought under their influence. and in our day this diffusion is so rapid that it spreads farther in a decade than formerly in centuries. for ages, mountains and rivers and oceans were barriers behind which tribes and nations entrenched themselves against the human foe. but we have tunneled the mountains; we have bridged the rivers; we have tamed the oceans. we hitch steam and electricity to our wagons, and in a few days make the circuit of the globe. all lands, all seas, are open to us. the race is getting acquainted with itself. we make a comparative study of all literatures, of all religions, of all philosophies, of all political systems. we find some soul of goodness in whatever struggles and yearnings have tried man's heart. as the products of every clime are carried everywhere, like gifts from other worlds, so the highest science and the purest religion are communicated and taught throughout the earth: and as a result, national prejudices and antagonisms are beginning to disappear; wars are becoming less frequent and less cruel; established wrongs are yielding to the pressure of opinion; privileged classes are losing their hold upon the imagination; and opportunity offers itself to ever-increasing numbers. now, in all this, what do we perceive but the purpose of god, urging mankind to wider and nobler life? history is his many-chambered school. here he has taught this lesson, and there another, still leading his children out of the darkness of sin and ignorance toward the light of righteousness and love, until his kingdom come, until his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. to believe in god and in this divine education, and to make co-operation with his providential guidance of the race a life-aim is to have an ideal which is not only the highest, but which also blends all other true ideals into harmony. and the lovers of culture should be the first to perceive that intellectual good is empty, illusory, unless there be added to it the good of the heart, the good of conscience. to live for the cultivation of one's mind, is, after all, to live for one's self, and therefore out of harmony with the eternal law which makes it impossible for us to find ourselves except in what is not ourselves. "it is the capital fault of all cultivated men," says goethe, "that they devote their whole energies to the carrying out of a mere idea, and seldom or never to the realization of practical good." whatever may be said in praise of culture, of its power to make its possessor at home in the world of the best thought, the purest sentiment, the highest achievements of the race; of the freedom, the mildness, the reasonableness of the temper it begets; of its aim at completeness and perfection,--it is nevertheless true, that if it be sought apart from faith in god and devotion to man, its tendency is to produce an artificial and unsympathetic character. the primal impulse of our nature is to action; and unless we can make our thought a kind of deed, it seems to be vain and unreal; and unless the harmonious development of all the endowments which make the beauty and dignity of human life, give us new strength and will to work with god for the good of men, sadness and a sense of failure fall upon us. to have a cultivated mind, to be able to see things on many sides, to have wide sympathy and the power of generous appreciation,--is most desirable, and without something of all this, not only is our life narrow and uninteresting, but our energy is turned in wrong directions, and our very religion is in danger of losing its catholicity. culture, then, is necessary. we need it as a corrective of the tendency to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of machines and measures. we need it to make our lives less unlovely, less hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals of industrialism. but if culture is to become a mighty transforming influence it must be wedded to religious faith, without which, while it widens the intellectual view, it weakens the will to act. to take us out of ourselves and to urge us on to labor with god that we may leave the world better because we have lived, religion alone has power. it gives new vigor to the cultivated mind; it takes away the exclusive and fastidious temper which a purely intellectual habit tends to produce; it enlarges sympathy; it teaches reverence; it nourishes faith, inspires hope, exalts the imagination, and keeps alive the fire of love. to lead a noble, a beautiful, and a useful life, we should accept and follow the ideals both of religion and of culture. in the midst of the transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help. large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of christian faith. they who are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered, must both know and believe. they must understand the age, must sympathize with whatever is true and beneficent in its aspirations, must hail with thankfulness whatever help science, and art, and culture can bring; but they must also know and feel that man is of the race of god, and that his real and true life is in the unseen, infinite, and eternal world of thought and love, with which the actual world of the senses must be brought into ever-increasing harmony. liberty and equality are good, wealth is good, and with them we can do much, but not all that needs to be done. the spirit of christ is not merely the spirit of liberty and equality; it is more essentially the spirit of love, of sympathy, of goodness; and this spirit must breathe upon our social life until it becomes as different from what it is as is fragrant spring from cheerless winter. sympathy must become universal; not merely as a sentiment prompting to deeds of helpfulness and mercy, but as the informing principle of society until it attains such perfectness that whatever is loss or gain for one, shall be felt as loss or gain for all. the narrow, exclusive self must lose itself in wider aims, in generous deeds, in the comprehensive love of god and man. the good must no longer thwart one another; the weak must be protected; the wicked must be surrounded by influences which make for righteousness; and the forces of nature itself must more and more be brought under man's control. pestilence and famine must no longer bring death and desolation; men must no longer drink impure water and adulterated liquors, no longer must they breathe the poisonous air of badly constructed houses; dwellings which are now made warm in winter, must be made cool in summer; miasmatic swamps must be drained; saloons, which stand like painted harlots to lure men to sin and death, must be closed. women must have the same rights and privileges as men; children must no longer be made the victims of mammon and offered in sacrifice in his temple, the factory; ignorance, which is the most fruitful cause of misery, must give place to knowledge; war must be condemned as public murder, and our present system of industrial competition must be considered worse than war; the social organization, which makes the few rich, and dooms the many to the slavery of poorly paid toil, must cease to exist; and if the political state is responsible for this cruelty, it must find a remedy, or be overthrown; society must be made to rest upon justice and love, without which it is but organized wrong. these principles must so thoroughly pervade our public life that it can no more be the interest of any one to wrong his fellow, to grow rich at the cost of the poverty and misery of another. life must be prolonged both by removing many of the physical causes of death, and by making men more rational and religious, more willing and able to deny themselves those indulgences which are but a kind of slow suicide. never before have questions so vast, so complex, so pregnant with meaning, so fraught with the promise of good, presented themselves; and it can hardly be vanity or conceit which prompts us to believe that in this mighty movement toward a social life in harmony with our idea of god and with the aspirations of the soul, america is the divinely appointed leader. but if this faith is not to be a mere delusion, it must become for the best among us the impulse to strong and persevering effort. not by millionaires and not by politicians shall this salvation be wrought; but by men who to pure religion add the best intellectual culture. the american youth must learn patience; he must acquire that serene confidence in the power of labor, which makes workers willing to wait. he must not, like a foolish child, rush forward to pluck the fruit before it is ripe, lest this be his epitaph: the promise of his early life was great, his performance insignificant. do not our young men lack noble ambition? are they not satisfied with low aims? to be a legislator; to be a governor; to be talked about; to live in a marble house,--seems to them a thing to be desired. unhappy youths from whom the power and goodness of life are hidden, who, standing in the presence of the unseen, infinite world of truth and beauty, can only dream some aldermanic nightmare. they thrust themselves into the noisy crowd, and are thrown into contact with disenchanting experience at a time of life when the mind and heart should draw nourishment and wisdom from communion with god and with great thoughts. amid the universal clatter of tongues, and in the overflowing ceaseless stream of newspaper gossip, the soul is bewildered and stifled. in a blatant land, the young should learn to be silent. the noblest minds are fashioned in secrecy, through long travail like,-- "wines that, heaven knows where, have sucked the fire of some forgotten sun and kept it thro' a hundred years of gloom yet glowing in a heart of ruby." is it not worth the labor and expectation of a life-time to be able to do, even once, the right thing excellently well? the eager passion for display, the desire to speak and act in the eyes of the world, is boyish. will is concentration, and a great purpose works in secrecy. oh, the goodness and the seriousness of life, the illimitable reach of achievement, which it opens to the young who have a great heart and noble aims! with them is god's almighty power and love, and his very presence is hidden from them by a film only. from this little islet they look out upon infinite worlds; heaven bends over them, and earth bears them up as though it would have them fly. how is it possible to remain inferior when we believe in god and know that this age is the right moment for all high and holy work? the yearning for guidance has never been so great. we have reached heights where the brain swims, and thoughts are confused, and it is held to be questionable whether we are to turn backward or to move onward to the land of promise; whether we are to be overwhelmed by the material world which we have so marvelously transformed, or with the aid of the secrets we have learned, are to rise godward to a purer and fairer life of knowledge, justice, and love. is the material progress of the nineteenth century a cradle or a grave? are we to continue to dig and delve and peer into matter until god and the soul fade from our view and we become like the things we work in? to put such questions to the multitude were idle. there is here no affair of votes and majorities. human nature has not changed, and now, as in the past, crowds follow leaders. what the best minds and the most energetic characters believe and teach and put in practice, the millions will come to accept. the doubt is whether the leaders will be worthy,--the real permanent leaders, for the noisy apparent leaders can never be so. and here we touch the core of the problem which americans have to solve. no other people has such numbers who are ready to thrust themselves forward as leaders, no other has so few who are really able to lead. in mitigation of this fact, it may be said with truth, that nowhere else is it so difficult to lead; for nowhere else does force rule so little. every one has opinions; the whole nation is awakened; thousands are able to discuss any subject with plausibility; and to be simply keen-witted and versatile is to be of the crowd. we need men whose intellectual view embraces the history of the race, who are familiar with all literature, who have studied all social movements, who are acquainted with the development of philosophic thought, who are not blinded by physical miracles and industrial wonders, but know how to appreciate all truth, all beauty, all goodness. and to this wide culture they must join the earnestness, the confidence, the charity, and the purity of motive which christian faith inspires. we need scholars who are saints, and saints who are scholars. we need men of genius who live for god and their country; men of action who seek for light in the company of those who know; men of religion who understand that god reveals himself in science, and works in nature as in the soul of man, for the good of those who love him. let us know the right moment, and let us know that it comes for those alone who are prepared. chapter ii. exercise of mind. o heavens! how awful is the might of souls and what they do within themselves while yet the yoke of earth is new to them, the world nothing but a wild field where they were sown. wordsworth. learning is acquaintance with what others have felt, thought, and done; knowledge is the result of what we ourselves have felt, thought, and done. hence a man knows best what he has taught himself; what personal contact with god, with man, and with nature has made his own. the important thing, then, is not so much to know the thoughts and loves of others, as to be able ourselves to think truly, and to love nobly. the aim should be to rouse, strengthen, and illumine the mind rather than to store it with learning; and the great educational problem has been, and is, how to give to the soul purity of intention, to the conscience steadfastness, and to the mind force, pliability, and openness to light; or in other words, how to bring philosophy and religion to the aid of the will so that the better self shall prevail and each generation introduce its successor to a higher plane of life. to this end the efforts of all teachers have, with more or less consciousness, tended; and in this direction too, along winding ways and with periods of arrest or partial return, the race of man has for ages been moving; and he who aspires to gain a place in the van of the mighty army on its heavenward march,-- "and draw new furrows 'neath the healthy morn and plant the great hereafter in this now,"-- may be rash, but his spirit is not ignoble. to him it may not be given "to fan and winnow from the coming step of time the chaff of custom;" but if he persevere he may confidently hope that his thought and love shall at length rise to fairer and more enduring worlds. he weds himself to things of light, seeks aids to true life within, learns to live with the noble dead, and with the great souls of the present who have uttered the truth whereby they live, in a way more intimate and higher than that granted to those who are with them day by day; for minds are not separated by time and space, but by quality of thought. but to be able to love this life, and with all one's heart to seek this close communion with god, with noble souls, and with nature is not easy, and it may be that it is impossible for those who are not drawn to it by irresistible instincts. for the intellect, at least, attractions are proportional to destiny; and the art of intellectual life is not most surely learned by those whom circumstances favor, but by those whom will impels onward to exercise of mind; whom neither daily wants, nor animal appetites, nor hope of gain, nor low ambition, nor sneers of worldlings, nor prayers of friends, nor aught else can turn from the pursuit of wisdom; who, with ceaseless labor and with patient thought, eat their way in silence, like caterpillars, to the light, become their own companions, walk uplifted by their own thoughts, and by slow and imperceptible processes are transformed and grow to be the embodiment of the truth and beauty which they see and love. the overmastering love of mental exercise, of the good of the intellect, is probably never found in formal and prosaic minds; or if so, its first awakening is in the early years when to think is to feel, when the soul, fresh from god, comes trailing clouds of glory, and the sun and moon and stars, and the hills and flowing waters seem but made to crown with joy hearts that love. it is in these dewy dawns that the image of beauty is imprinted on the soul and the sense of mystery awakens. we move about and become a part of all we see, grow akin to stones and leaves and birds, and to all young and happy things. we lose ourselves in life which is poured round us like an unending sea; are natural, healthful, alive to all we see and touch; have no misgivings, but walk as though the eternal god held us by the hand. these are the fair spring days when we suck honey that shall nourish us in the winters of which we do not dream; when sunsets interfuse themselves with all our being until we are dyed in the many-tinted glory; when the miracle of the changing year is the soul's fair seed-time; when lying in the grass, the head resting in clasped hands, while soft white clouds float lazily through azure skies, and the birds warble, and the waters murmur, and the flowers breathe fragrance, we feel a kind of unconscious consciousness of a universal life in nature. the very rocks seem to be listening to what the leaves whisper; and through the silent eternities we almost see the dead becoming the living, the living the dead, until both grow to be one, and whatever is, is life. he who has never had these visions; has never heard these airy voices; has never seemed about to catch a glimpse of the inner heart of being, pulsing beneath the veil of visible things; has never felt that he himself is a spirit looking blindly on a universe, which if his eyes could but see and his ears hear, would be revealed as the very heaven of the infinite god,--must forever lack something of the freshness, of the eager delight, with which a poetic mind contemplates the world and follows whither the divine intimations point. this early intercourse with nature nourishes the soul, deepens the intellect, exalts the imagination, and fills the memory with fair and noble forms and images which abide with us, and as years pass on, gain in softness and purity what they may lose in distinctness of outline and color. this is the source of intellectual wealth, of tranquil moods, of patience in the midst of opposition, of confidence in the fruitfulness of labor and the transforming power of time. here is given the material which must be molded into form; the rude blocks which must be cut and dressed and fitted together until they become a spiritual temple wherein the soul may rest at one with god and nature, and with its own thought and love. to run, to jump, to ride, to swim, to skate, to sit in the shade of trees by flowing water, to watch reapers at their work, to look on orchards blossoming, to dream in the silence that lies amid the hills, to feel the solemn loneliness of deep woods, to follow cattle as they crop the sweet-scented clover,--to learn to know, as one knows a mother's face, every change that comes over the heavens from the dewy freshness of early dawn to the restful calm of evening, from the overpowering mystery of the starlit sky to the tender human look with which the moon smiles upon the earth,--all this is education of a higher and altogether more real kind than it is possible to receive within the walls of a school; and lacking this, nothing shall have power to develop the faculties of the soul in symmetry and completeness. hence a philosopher has said there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace. the daily intercourse with nature in childhood and youth intertwines with noble and enduring objects the passions which form the mind and heart of man, whereas those who are shut out from such communion are necessarily thrown into contact with what is mean and vulgar; and since our early years, whatever our surroundings may have been, seem to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a clear-flowing fountain, they cannot help blending the memory of that innocent and happy time with thoughts of base and mechanical objects, or, it may be, of low and ignoble associates. he is fortunate who, during the first ten years of his life, escapes the confinement and repression of school, and lives at home in the country amid the fields and the woods, day by day growing familiar with the look on nature's face, with all her moods, with every common object, with living things in the air and the water and on the earth; who sees the corn sprout, and watches it grow week after week until the yellow harvest waves in the sunlight; who looks with unawed eye on rising thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and to feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. he will carry with him to the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which only those can own who have drunk at nature's deep flowing fountain, and come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the fragrance of her flowers on their breath. in the eyes of the old greeks, who first made education a science, the scholar was an idler,--one who had leisure to look about him, to stroll amid the olive groves, to let his eye rest upon the purple hills or the blue sea studded with green isles, to listen to the brooks and the nightingales, to read the lesson the fair earth teaches more than that imprinted on parchment; and the school must still preserve something of this freedom from constraint, must encourage the play of body and of mind, the delight natural to the young in the exercise of strength of whatever kind, and thus as far as possible lighten the labor and drudgery of elementary studies with thoughts of liberty, of beauty, and of excellence. let the boy feel how good it is to be alive though life meant only the narrow world and the mere surfaces of things with which alone it is possible for him to be acquainted; and then when we ask him to believe that in high thinking and in noble acting he will find a life infinitely more worthy, his eager soul will be inflamed with a desire for knowledge and virtue, and bearing in his heart the strength and wealth of imagination gained from his early experience, his thoughts will turn to great and good men. dim visions of mighty conquerors, of poets at whose song the woods and waves grow calm, of orators whose words with storm-like force, whatever way they take, sweep with them the wills of men,--will rise before his mind. his young fancy will endow them with preternatural qualities; and he will yearn to draw near, to mingle with them and to catch the secret of their divine power. the germ of the godlike within his bosom bursts and springs. what they were, why may not he also become? what bars are thrown athwart his path, what obstacles hem his way, which, whoever in any age has excelled, has not had to break down and surmount? here the wise teacher comes to cheer him, to tell him his faith is not wrong, his hope not without promise of attainment if he but trust himself, and bend his whole mind to the task; that whatever goal within the scope of human power, the will sets to itself, it may reach. in order to develop, strengthen, and confirm this high mood, this noble temper, let him by all means be made acquainted with the language and genius of greece. here he will be introduced to a world of thought and sentiment almost as fresh, as fair and many-sided as nature herself,--the fragrant blossoming in myriad hues and forms of the life and mind of the most richly endowed portion of the human race. not only are the greeks the most highly-gifted of all people, but in this classical age they have also this special charm and power,--that the keenest intellectual faculties are in them united with the feelings, hopes, and fancies of a noble and great-hearted youth. even socrates and plato talk like high-souled boys who can see the world only in the light of ideals, for whom what the mind beholds and the heart loves is alone real. how healthfully they look on life, with what delight they breathe the air! what fine contempt have they not of death, thinking no fortune so good as that which comes to the hero who dies in a worthy cause! there is athens, already the world's university; but no books, no libraries, no lecture-halls, only great teachers who walk about followed by a crowd of youths eager to drink in their words. here is the acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylæum, fair and chaste as though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this attic mound by the hands of angels. there in the parthenon are the sculptures of phidias, and yonder in the temple of the dioscuri, the paintings of polygnotus,--ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to unseen and eternal worlds. if they turn to the east, the isles of the Ã�gean look up to them like virgins who welcome happy lovers; to the west, mount pentelicus, from whose heart the architectural glory of the city has been carved, bids them think what patience will enable man's genius to accomplish; and to the north, hymettus, fragrant with the breath of a thousand herbs and musical with the hum of bees, stoops with gentle undulations to their feet. they live in the air; their temples are open to the sunlight; their theatres are uncovered to the heavens; and whithersoever they move, they are surrounded by what is fair, noble, and inspiring. this free and happy life in the company of great teachers becomes the stimulus to the keenest exercise of mind. they are as eager to see things in a true light as they are quick to sympathize with whatever is heroic or beautiful; and all their talk is of truth and justice, the good, the fair, the excellent, of philosophy, religion, poetry, and art, and of whatever else seems favorable to human life and to the development of ideal manhood. of the merely useful they have the scorn of young and inexperienced minds; and hippocrates proclaims himself ready to give protagoras, not only whatever he himself possesses, but also the property of his friends, if he will but teach him wisdom. superior knowledge was to them of all things the most admirable and the most to be desired. what noble thoughts have they not concerning education? "an intelligent man," says plato, "will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and will less value the others." the culture of the mind is made a kind of religion, in the spreading of which the personal influence of the teacher is not less active than the truths he sets forth. bonds of affection bind the disciple to the master whose words have for him the sacredness of wisdom and the charm of genius, power to confirm the will, and warmth and color whereby the imagination is raised. this secret of making knowledge attractive, of clothing truth in chaste and beautiful language, of associating it with whatever is fair and noble in nature, and of relating it to life and conduct, which is part of the genius of greece, still lives in her literature; and to read the words of her poets, orators, and philosophers is to feel the presence of a high and active spirit, is to breathe in an intellectual atmosphere of light and liberty, is of itself enlargement and cultivation of mind. hence, in the realms of thought, the greeks are the civilizers and emancipators of the world; and whoever thinks, is to some extent their debtor. the music of their eloquence and poetry can never grow silent; the forms of beauty their genius has created can never perish, and never cease to win the admiration and love of noble minds and gentle hearts, or to be the inspiration, generation after generation, to high thoughts and heroic moods. so long as glory, beauty, freedom, light, and gladness shall seem good and fair, so long will the finer spirits of the world feel the attraction and the charm of greece, and know the sweet surprise which thrilled the heart of keats when first he read homer:-- "then felt i like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, or like stout cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in darien." in a less degree, roman literature, which is the offspring of greek culture, has value as an intellectual stimulus and discipline. here also the youthful mind is brought into the presence of a great and noble people, who, if they have less genius and a duller sense of beauty than the greeks, excel them in steadiness of purpose, in dignity of character, in reverence for law and religion, and above all in the art of governing. the educational value of the classics does not lie so much in the greek and latin languages as in the type of mind, the sense of proportion and beauty, the heroic temper, the philosophic mood, the keen relish for high enterprise, and the joyful love of life which they make known to us. the world to which they introduce us is so remote that the pre-occupations and vulgarities of the present, by which we all are hemmed and warped, fall away from us; and it is at the same time so real and of such absorbing interest that we are caught up in spirit and carried to the attic plain and the hills of latium. they are useful, not because they teach us anything that may not be learned and learned more accurately from modern books, but because they move the mind, fire the heart, ennoble and refine the imagination in a way which nothing else has power to do. they are sources of inspiration; they first roused the modern mind to activity; and the potency of their influence can never cease to be felt by those whose aptitudes lead them to the love of intellectual perfection, who delight in the free play of the mind, who are attracted by what is symmetrical, who have the instinct for beauty, who swim in a current of ideas as naturally as birds fly in the air. they appeal to the mind as a whole, stimulate all its faculties, awaken a many-sided sympathy both with nature and with the world of men. they widen our view of life, bring forth in us the consciousness of our kinship with the human race, and of the application to ourselves, however common and uninspiring our surroundings may be, of the best thoughts and noblest deeds which have ever sprung from the brain and heart of man. they help to make one, again to quote plato, "a lover, not of a part of wisdom, but of the whole; who has a taste for every sort of knowledge, and is curious to learn and is never satisfied; who has magnificence of mind, and is a spectator of all time and all existence; who is harmoniously constituted, of a well-proportioned and gracious mind, whose own nature will move spontaneously toward the true being of everything; who has a good memory, and is quick to learn, noble, gracious, the friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance." the ideal presented is that of complete harmonious culture, the aim of which is not to make an artisan, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, but a man alive in all his faculties, touching the world at many points, for whom all knowledge is desirable, all beauty lovable, and for whom fine bearing and noble acting are indispensable. it is needless to point out in what, or why, the greeks failed, since here there is question only of intellectual life, and in this they did not fail. nor is there any thought, in what has here been said, of depreciating the worth of the study of science, without a certain knowledge of which no one, in this age, can in any true sense, be called educated. whoever, indeed, learns a language properly, acquires scientific knowledge; and the greeks are not only the masters in poetry and eloquence, they are also the guides to the right use of reason and to scientific method, and the teachers of mathematics, logic, and physics. he who pursues culture, in the greek spirit, who desires to see things as they are, to know the best that has been thought and done by men, will fear nothing so much as the exclusion of any truth, and he will be anxious to acquaint himself not only with the method, but as far as possible with the facts, of physical science. still he perceives that however great the value of natural knowledge may be, it is, as an instrument of culture, inferior to literature. we are educated by what calls forth in us love and admiration, by what creates the exalted mood and the steadfast purpose. in bowing with reverence to what is above us, we are uplifted. when we are moved, we are more alive; we are stronger, tenderer, nobler. now to look upon nature with the detective eye of the man of science is to be cold and unsympathetic; to learn by methodic experiment is to gain knowledge, which, since it is only remotely or indirectly related to life, is but little interesting. such knowledge is a fragment, and a fragment extremely difficult to fit into the temple built by thought and love, by hope and imagination; and hence when we have learned a great deal about chemical elements, geologic epochs, correlation of forces, and sidereal spaces, we are rather astonished than enlightened. we are brought into the presence of a world which is not that of the senses, nor yet that which faith, hope, and love forebode; and the bearing it may have upon human life is of more interest to us than the facts made known. we are, indeed, curious to know whatever may, with any certainty, be told us of atoms and biogenesis; but our real concern is to learn what significance such truth may have in its relation to questions of god and the soul. there is doubtless a disciplinary value in the study of physical science. it trains the mind to habits of patient attention, of careful observation, teaches the danger of hasty generalization, and diminishes intellectual conceit; but these results may also be obtained by other means. the aim of education is not simply to develop this or the other faculty, however indispensable, nor yet to make one thoroughly conversant with a particular order of facts, but the aim is to bring about a conscious participation in the life of the race, to evoke all the powers of man, so that his whole being shall be quickened and made responsive to the touch of things seen and unseen; and the study of science is less adapted to the attainment of this end than the study of human letters. the scientific temper draws to specialties; and specialists are narrow, are incomplete. they, each in his own line, do good work, and are the chief agents for the increase of natural knowledge, and are, we may grant, leaders in every kind of improvement; but like the operatives who provide our comforts and luxuries, they are themselves warped and crippled by what they do. the habit of looking at a single order of facts, coldly and always from the same point of view, takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist, is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's powers. we do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single kind. religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential to our well-being as science. human life is knowledge, is faith, is conduct, is beauty, is manners; it unfolds itself in many directions and shoots its roots into infinitude; and for the general purposes of education, science is learned to best advantage when it is embodied in literature, and its methods and results, rather than the details of its work, are presented to us. whatever it is able to do, to improve the mind, to widen the range of thought, to give true notions of the workings of nature,--it will do for whoever learns accurately its general conceptions and results; and these cannot remain unknown to him whose aim is culture, for such an one is, as plato says, "a lover not of a part of wisdom, but of the whole, and has a taste for every sort of knowledge, and is curious to learn, and is never satisfied; and though he will not know medicine like a physician, or the heavens like an astronomer, or the vegetable kingdom like a botanist, his mind will play over all these realms with freedom, and he will know how to relate the principles and facts of all the sciences to our sense for beauty, for conduct, for life and religion in a way which a mere specialist can never find." and his view will not only be wider and less impeded, it will also be deeper than that of the man of science; for he who sees but one order of things sees only their surfaces, just as he who sees but one thing sees nothing at all. it would be a mistake to imagine that the ideal here commended, means superficial accomplishments, an excessive love of style and the ornaments of poetry and eloquence, or preoccupation in favor of aught external or frivolous. it is the very opposite of dilettantism, and if it mean anything, means thoroughness, and a thoroughness which can come only of untiring labor carried on through many years; for time and intercourse with men and varied experience are indispensable elements. it is like the ideal of religion which makes the saint think himself a sinner; it is as exacting as the miser's thought which makes millions seem to be beggary; like the artist's vision, like the poet's dream, it allures and yet forbids hope of attainment. the seeker after wisdom must have a high purpose, a strong soul, and the purest love of truth. he cannot live in the senses alone, nor in the mind, nor in the heart alone, but the spiritual being, which is himself, yearns for whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is fair, and so he finds himself akin to the infinite god and to all that he has made. when his thought is carried out to atoms weaving the garment which is our body, and molding the world we see and touch; when he beholds motion lighting, warming, thrilling the universe,--he is filled with intellectual joy, but at the same time he perceives that all this is but a phase of truth; that god and the boundless facts are infinitely more than drilled atomics marshaled rank on rank until they form the countless hosts of the heavens. when the men of science have labeled the elements, and put tickets upon all natural compounds, and with complacency declare that this is the whole truth, he looks on the flowers around him and the blooming children, on the stars above his head, on the sun slow wheeling down the western horizon, on the moon climbing some eastern hill, and his inmost soul is glad because he feels the thrill of the infinite, living spirit, and forebodes to what fair countries we are bound. and when they proclaim the wonders science has wrought,--increase of physical enjoyment and social comfort; the yoking of lightning and steam to make them work for man; the providing of more abundant food; the building of more wholesome dwellings; the lengthening of life; temporal benefits of every kind,--he joins with those who utter praise, but knows that infinitely more than all this goes to the making of man's life. so he turns his mind in many directions, and while he looks on the truth in science, does not grow blind to the truth in religion; while he knows the value of what is practically useful, understands also the priceless worth of what is noble and beautiful, and his acquaintance with many kinds of thought, with many shades of opinion confirms him, as joubert says, in the acceptance of the best. chapter iii. the love of excellence. why is this glorious creature to be found one only in ten thousand? what one is, why may not millions be? what bars are thrown by nature in the way of such a hope? wordsworth. he teaches to good purpose who inspires the love of excellence, and who sends his pupils forth from the school's narrow walls with such desire for self-improvement that the whole world becomes to them a god-appointed university. and why shall not every youth hope to enter the narrow circle of those for whom to live, is to think, who behold "the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." an enlightened mind is like a fair and pleasant friend who comes to cheer us in every hour of loneliness and gloom; it is like noble birth which admits to all best company; it is like wealth which surrounds us with whatever is rarest and most precious; it is like virtue which lives in an atmosphere of light and serenity, and is itself enough for itself. whatever our labors, our cares, our disappointments, a free and open mind, by holding us in communion with the highest and the fairest, will fill the soul with strength and joy. the artist, day by day, year in and year out, hangs over his work, and finds enough delight in the beauty he creates; and shall not the friend of the soul be glad in striving ceaselessly to make his knowledge and his love less unlike the knowledge and the love of god? seldom is opportunity of victory offered to great captains, the orator rarely finds fit theme and audience, hardly shall the hero meet with occasions worthy of the sacrifice of life; but he who labors to shape his mind to the heavenly forms of truth and beauty beholds them ever present and appealing. life without thought and love is worthless; and to the best men and women belong only those who cultivate with earnestness and perseverance their spiritual faculties, who strive daily to know more, to love more, to be more beautiful. they are the chosen ones, and all others, even though they sit on thrones, are but the crowd. without a free and open mind there is no high and glad human life. you may as well point to the savage drowsing in his tent, or to cattle knee-deep in clover, and bid me think them high, as to ask me to admire where i can behold neither intelligence nor love. all that we possess is qualified by what we are. gold makes not the miser rich, nor its lack a true man poor; and he who has gained insight into the fair truth that he is a part of all he sees and loves, is richer than kings, and lives like a god in his universe. possibilities for us are measured by the kind of work in which we put our hearts. if a man's thoughts are wholly busy with carpentering do not expect him to become anything else than a carpenter; but if his aim is to build up his own being, to make his mind luminous, his heart tender and pure, his will steadfast, who but god shall fix a limit beyond which he may not hope to go. education, indeed, cannot confer organic power; but it alone gives us the faculty to perceive how infinitely wonderful and fair are man's endowments, how boundless his inheritance, how full of deathless hope is that to which he may aspire. religion, philosophy, poetry, science,--all bring us into the presence of an ideal of ceaseless growth toward an all-perfect infinite, dimly discerned and unapproachable, but which fascinates the soul and haunts the imagination with its deep mystery, until what we long for becomes more real than all that we possess, and yearning is our highest happiness. ah! who would throw a veil over the vision on which young eyes rest when young hearts feel that ideal things alone are real? who would rob them of this divine principle of progress which makes growth the best of life? "many are our joys in youth; but oh, what happiness to live when every hour brings palpable access of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight!" in all ages, we know those made wise by experience, which teaches us to expect little, whether of ourselves or others, have made the thoughts and hopes of youth a jest, even as men have made religion a jest, having nothing to offer us in compensation for its loss, but witticisms and despair. this is the fatal fault of life, that when we have obtained what is good,--as wealth, position, wife, and friends,--we lose all hope of the best, and with our mockery discourage those who have ideal aims; who, remembering how the soul felt in life's dawn, retain a sense of god's presence in the world, to whom with growing faculties they aspire, feeling that whatsoever point they reach, they still have something to pursue. this is the principle of the diviner mind in all high and heroic natures; this is the spring-head of deeds that make laws, of "thoughts that enrich the blood of the world;" this is the power which gives to resolve the force of destiny, and clothes the soul with the heavenliest strength and beauty when it stands single and alone, of men abandoned and almost of god. there is little danger that too many shall ever hearken to the invitation from the fair worlds to which all souls belong, and where alone they can be luminous and free. for centuries, now, what innumerable voices have pleaded with men to make themselves worthy of heaven; while they have moved on heedless of the heaven that lies about us here, placing their hopes and aims in material and perishable elements, athirst neither for truth, nor beauty, nor aught that is divinely good! they sleep, they wake, they eat, they drink; they tread the beaten path with ceaseless iteration, and so they die. if one come appealing for culture of intellect, not because they who know, are stronger than the ignorant and make them their servants, but because an open, free, and flexible mind is good and fair, better than birth, position, and wealth, they turn away as though he trifled with their common-sense. life, they say, is not for knowledge, but knowledge for life; and they neither truly know, nor live. and if here and there some nobler soul stand forth, he degrades himself to an aspirant to fame, forgetting truth and love. enough there are on earth who reap and sow, enough who give their lives to common gain, enough who toil with spade and axe and plane, enough who sail the seas where rude winds blow; enough who make their life unmeaning show, enough who plead in courts, who physic pain; enough who follow in the lover's train, and taste of wedded hearts the bliss and woe. a few at least may love the poet's song, may walk with him, their visionary guide, far from the crowd, nor do the world a wrong; or on his wings through deep blue skies may glide and float, by light transfused, like clouds along above the earth and over oceans wide. with unresting, wearing thought and labor we are striving to make earth more habitable. we drag forth from its inner parts whatever treasures are hidden there; with steam's mighty force we mold brute matter into every fair and serviceable form; we build great cities, we spread the fabric of our trade; the engine's iron heart goes throbbing through tunneled mountains and over storm-swept seas to bear us and our wealth to all regions of the globe; we talk to one another from city to city, and from continent to continent along ocean's oozy depths the lightning flashes our words, spreading beneath our eyes each morning the whole world's gossip,--but in the midst of this miraculous transformation, we ourselves remain small, hard, and narrow, without great thoughts or great loves or immortal hopes. we are a crowd where the highest and the best lose individuality, and are swept along as though democracy were a tyranny of the average man under which superiority of whatever kind is criminal. our population increases, our cities grow, our roads are lengthened, our machinery is made more perfect, the number of our schools is multiplied, our newspapers are read in ever-widening circles, the spirit of humanity and of freedom breathes through our life; but the individual remains common-place and uninteresting. he lacks intelligence, has no perception of what is excellent, no faith in ideals, no reverence for genius, no belief in any highest sort of man who has not shown his worth in winning wealth, position, or notoriety. we have a thousand poets and no poetry, a thousand orators and no eloquence, a thousand philosophers and no philosophy. every city points to its successful men who have millions, but are themselves poor and unintelligent; to its writers who, having sold their talent to newspapers and magazines, sink to the level of those they address, dealing only with what is of momentary interest, or if the question be deep, they move on the surface, lest the many-eyed crowd lose sight of them. the preacher gets an audience and pay on condition that he stoop to the gossip which centres around new theories, startling events, and mechanical schemes for the improvement of the country. if to get money be the end of writing and preaching, then must we seek to please the multitude who are willing to pay those who entertain and amuse them. will not our friends, even, conceive a mean opinion of our ability, if we fail to gain public recognition? so we make ourselves "motleys to the view, and sell cheap what is most dear." we must, perforce, show the endowment which can be brought to perfection only if it be permitted to grow in secrecy and solitude. the worst foe of excellence is the desire to appear; for when once we have made men talk of us, we seem to be doing nothing if they are silent, and thus the love of notoriety becomes the bane of true work and right living. to be one of a crowd is not to be at all; and if we are resolved to put our thoughts and acts to the test of reason, and to live for what is permanently true and great, we must consent, like the best of all ages, to be lonely in the world. all life, except the life of thought and love, is dull and superficial. the young love for a while, and are happy; a few think; and for the rest existence is but the treadmill of monotonous sensation. there are but few, who, through work and knowledge, through faith and hope and love, seek to escape from the narrowness and misery of life to the summits of thought where the soul breathes a purer air, and whence is seen the fairer world the multitude forebodes. there are but few whose life is "effort and expectation and desire, and something evermore about to be;" but few who understand how much the destiny of man hangs upon single persons; but few who feel that what they love and teach, millions must know and love. "a people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life of one; and those who live as models for the mass are singly of more value than them all." only the noblest souls awaken within us divine aspirations. they are the music, the poetry, which warms and illumines whole generations; they are the few who, born with rich endowments, by ceaseless labor develop their powers until they become capable of work which, were it not for them, could not be done at all. history is the biography of aristocrats, of the chosen ones with whom all improvement originates, who found states, establish civilizations, create literatures, and teach wisdom. they work not for themselves; for in spite of human selfishness and the personal aims of the ambitious, the poet, the scholar, and the statesman bless the world. they lead us through happy isles; they clothe our thoughts and hopes with beauty and with strength; they dissipate the general gloom; they widen the sphere of life; they bring the multitude beneath the sway of law. now, here in america, once for all, whatever the thoughtless may imagine, we have lost faith in the worth of artificial distinctions. indeed plausible arguments may be found to prove that the kind of man democracy tends to form, has no reverence for distinctions of whatever kind, and is without ideals, and that as he is envious of men made by money, so he looks with the contempt of unenlightened common-sense upon those whom character and intellect raise above him. this is not truth. the higher you lift the mass, the more will they acknowledge and appreciate worth, the clearer will they see that what makes man human, beautiful, and beneficent is conduct and intelligence; and so increasing enlightenment will turn thought and admiration from position and wealth, from the pomp and show of life to what makes a man's self, his character, his mind, his manners even,--for the source of manners lies within us. in a society like ours, the chosen ones, the best, the models of life, and the leaders of thought will be distinguished from the crowd not by accident or circumstance, but by inner strength and beauty, by finer knowledge, by purer love, by a deeper faith in god, by a more steadfast trust that it must, and shall be, well with a world which god makes and rules, and which to the fairest mind is fairest, and to the holiest soul most sacred. here and now, if ever anywhere at any time, there is need of men, there is appeal to what is godlike in man, calling upon us to rise above our prosperities, our politics, our mechanical aims and implements, and to turn the courage, energy, and practical sense which have wrought with miraculous power in developing the material resources of america, to the cultivation of our spiritual faculties. we alone of the great modern nations are without classical writers of our own, without a national literature. the thought and love of this people, its philosophy, poetry, and art lies yet in the bud; and our tens of thousands of books, even the better sort, must perish to enrich the soil that nourishes a life of heavenly promise. hitherto we have been sad imitators of the english, but not the best the english have done will satisfy america. their language indeed will remain ours, and their men of genius, above all their poets, will enrich our minds with great thoughts nobly expressed. but a literature is a national growth; it is the expression of a people's life and character, the more or less perfect utterance of what it loves, aims at, believes in, hopes for; it has the qualities and the defects of the national spirit; it bears the marks of the thousand influences that help to make that spirit what it is,--and english literature cannot be american literature, for the simple reason that americans are not englishmen, any more than they are germans or frenchmen. we must be ourselves in our thinking and writing, as in our living, or be insignificant, for it is a man's life that gives meaning to his thought; and to write as a disciple is to write in an inferior way, since the mind at its best is illumined by truth itself and not taught by the words of another. it is not to be believed that this great, intelligent, yearning american world will content itself with the trick and mannerism of foreign accent and style, or that those who build on any other than the broad foundation of our own national life shall be accepted as teachers and guides. there is, of course, no method known to man by which a great author may be formed; no science which teaches how a literature may be created. the men who have written what the world will not permit to die have written generally without any clear knowledge of the worth of their work, just as great discoverers and inventors seem to stumble on what they seek; nevertheless one may hope by right endeavor to make himself capable of uttering true thoughts so that they shall become intelligible and attractive to others; he may educate himself to know and love the best that has been spoken and written by men of genius, and so become a power to lift the aims and enlarge the views of his fellow-men. if many strive in this way to unfold their gifts and to cultivate their faculties, their influence will finally pervade the life and thought of thousands, and it may be of the whole people. i do not at all forget aristotle's saying that "life is practice and not theory;" that men are born to do and suffer, and not to dream and weave systems; that conduct and not culture is the basis of character and the source of strength; that a knowledge of nature is of vastly more importance to our material comfort and progress than philosophy, poetry, and art. this is not to be called in question; but in this country and age it seems hardly necessary that it be emphasized, for what is the whole world insisting upon but the necessity of scientific instruction, the importance of practical education, the cultivation of the money-getting faculty and habit, and the futility of philosophy, poetry, and art? who is there that denies the worth of what is useful? where is there one who does not approve and encourage whatever brings increase of wealth? are we not all ready to applaud projects which give promise of providing more abundant food, better clothing, and more healthful surrounding for the poor? does not our national genius seem to lie altogether in the line of what is practically useful? is it not our boast and our great achievement that we have in a single century made the wilderness of a vast continent habitable, have so ploughed and drained and planted and built that it can now easily maintain hundreds of millions in gluttonous plenty? is not our whole social and political organization of a kind which fits us to deal with questions and affairs that concern our temporal and material welfare? what innumerable individuals among us are congressmen, legislators, supervisors, bank and school directors, presidents of boards and companies, committee-men, councilmen, heads of lodges and societies, lawyers, professors, teachers, editors, colonels, generals, judges, party-leaders, so that the sovereign people seems to have life and being only in its titled representatives! what does this universal reign of title and office mean but the practical education which responsibility gives? if from the midst of this paradise of utility, materialism, and business, a voice is raised to plead for culture, for intelligence, for beauty, for philosophy, poetry, and art, why need any one take alarm? while human nature remains what it is, can there be danger that the many will be drawn away from what appeals to the senses, to what the soul loves and yearns for? if the almighty god does not win the multitude to the love of righteousness and wisdom, how shall the words of man prevail? it is a mistake to oppose use to beauty, the serviceable to the excellent, since they belong together. beauty is the blossom that makes the fruit-tree fair and fragrant. life means more than meat and drink, house and clothing. to live is also to admire, to love, to lose one's self in the contemplation of the splendor with which nature is clothed. human life is the marriage of souls with things of light. its basis, aim, and end is love, and love makes its object beautiful. man may not even consent to eat, except with decency and grace; he must have light and flowers and the rippling music of kindly speech, that as far as possible he may forget that his act is merely animal and useful. he will lose sight of the fact that clothing is intended for protection and comfort, rather than not dress to make himself beautiful. to speak merely to be understood, and not to speak also with ease and elegance, is not to be a gentleman. how easily words find the way to the heart when uttered in melodious cadence by the lips of the fair and young. home is the centre and seat of whatever is most useful to us; and yet to think of home is to think of spring-time and flowers, of the songs of birds and flowing waters, of the voices of children, of floating clouds and sunsets that linger as though heaven were loath to bid adieu to earth. the warmth, the color, and the light of their boyish days still glow in the hearts and imagination of noble men, and redeem the busy trafficking world of their daily life from utter vulgarity. what hues has not god painted on the air, the water, the fruit, and the grain that are the very substance and nutriment of our bodies? beauty is nobly useful. it illumines the mind, raises the imagination, and warms the heart. it is not an added quality, but grows from the inner nature of things; it is the thought of god working outward. only from drunken eyes can you with paint and tinsel hide inward deformity. the beauty of hills and waves, of flowers and clouds, of children at play, of reapers at work, of heroes in battle, of poets inspired, of saints rapt in adoration,--rises from central depths of being, and is concealed from frivolous minds. even in the presence of death, the hallowing spirit of beauty is felt. the full-ripe fruit that gently falls in the quiet air of long summer days, the yellow sheaves glinting in the rays of autumn's sun, the leaf which the kiss of the hoar frost has made blood-red and loosened from the parent stem,--are images of death but they suggest only calm and pleasant thoughts. the bedouin, who, sitting amid the ruins of ephesus, thinks but of his goats and pigs, heedless of diana's temple, alexander's glory, and the words of saint paul, is the type of those who place the useful above the excellent and the fair; and as men who in their boards of trade buy and sell cattle and corn, dream not of green fields and of grain turning to gold in the sun of june, so we all, in the business and worry of life, lose sight of beauty which makes the heart glad and keeps it young. the mind of man is the earthly home of beauty, and if any real thing were fair as the tender thought of imaginative youth, heaven were not far. all we love is but our thought of what only thought makes known and makes beautiful, and for what we know love's thought may be the essence of all things. fairer than waters where soft moonlight lies, than flowers that slumber on the breast of spring, than leafy trees in june when glad birds sing, than a cool summer dawn, than sunset skies; than love, gleaming through beauty's deep blue eyes, than laughing child, than orchards blossoming; than girls whose voices make the woodland ring, than ruby lips that utter sweet replies,-- fairer than these, than all that may be seen, is the poetic mind, which sheds the light of heaven on earthly things, as night's young queen forth-looking from some jagged mountain height clothes the whole earth with her soft silvery sheen and makes the beauty whereof eyes have sight. nature is neither sad nor joyful. we but see in her the reflection of our own minds. gay scenes depress the melancholy, and gloomy prospects have not the power to rob the happy of their contentment. the spring may fill us with fresh and fragrant thoughts, or may but remind us of all the hopes and joys we have lost; and autumn will speak to one of decay and death, to another of sleep and rest, after toil, to prepare for a new and brighter awakening. all the glory of dawn and sunset is but etheric waves thrilling the vapory air and impinging on the optic nerve; but behind it all is the magician who sees and knows, who thinks and loves. "it is the mind that makes the body rich." thoughts take shape and coloring from souls through which they pass; and a free and open mind looks upon the world in the mood in which a fair woman beholds herself in a mirror. the world is his as much as the face is hers. if we could live in the fairest spot of earth, and in the company of those who are dear, the source of our happiness would still be our own thought and love; and if they are great and noble, we cannot be miserable however meanly surrounded. what is reality but a state of soul, finite in man, infinite in god? theory underlies fact, and to the divine mind all things are godlike and beautiful. the chemical elements are as sweet and pure in the buried corpse as in the blooming body of youth; and it is defective intellect, the warp of ignorance and sin, which hides from human eyes the perfect beauty of the world. "earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes." what we all need is not so much greater knowledge, as a luminous and symmetrical mind which, whatsoever way it turn, shall reflect the things that are, not in isolation and abstraction, but in the living unity and harmony wherein they have their being. the worth of religion is infinite, the value of conduct is paramount; but he who lacks intellectual culture, whatever else he may be, is narrow, awkward, unintelligent. the mirror of his soul is dim, the motions of his spirit are sluggish, and the divine image which is himself is blurred. but let no one imagine that this life of the soul in the mind is easy; for it is only less difficult than the life of the soul in god. to learn many things; to master this or that science; to have skill in law or medicine; to acquaint one's self with the facts of history, with the opinions of philosophers or the teachings of theologians,--is comparatively not a difficult task; and there are hundreds who are learned, who are skillful, who are able, who have acuteness and depth and information, for one who has an open, free, and flexible mind,--which is alive and active in many directions, touching the world of god and nature at many points, and beholding truth and beauty from many sides; which is serious, sober, and reasonable, but also fresh, gentle, and sympathetic; which enters with equal ease into the philosopher's thought, the poet's vision, and the ecstasy of the saint; which excludes no truth, is indifferent to no beauty, refuses homage to no goodness. the ideal of culture indeed, like that of religion, like that of art, lies beyond our reach, since the truth and beauty which lure us on, and flee the farther the longer we pursue, are nothing less than the eternal and infinite god. and culture, if it is not to end in mere frivolity and gloss, must be pursued, like religion and art, with earnestness and reverence. if the spirit in which we work is not deep and holy, we may become accomplished but we shall not gain wisdom, power, and love. the beginner seeks to convert his belief into knowledge; but the trained thinker knows that knowledge ends in belief, since beyond our little islets of intellectual vision, lies the boundless, fathomless expanse of unknown worlds where faith and hope alone can be our guides. once individual man was insignificant; but now the earth itself is become so,--a mere dot in infinite space, where, for a moment, men wriggle like animalcules in a drop of water. and if at times a flash of light suddenly gleam athwart the mind, and it seem as though we were about to get a glimpse into the inner heart of being, the brightness quickly dies, and only the surfaces of things remain visible. oh, the unimaginable length of ages when on the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slimy beginnings; then the conscious soul's fitful dream stretching forth to endless time and space; then the final sleep in abysmal night with its one star of hope twinkling before the all-hidden throne of god, in the shadow of whose too great light faith kneels and waits! why shall he whose mind is free, symmetrical, and open, be tempted to vain glory, to frivolous boasting? shall not life be more solemn and sacred to him than to another? shall he indulge scorn for any being whom god has made, for any thought which has strengthened and consoled the human heart? shall he not perceive, more clearly than others, that the unseen power by whom all things are, is akin to thought and love, and that they alone bring help to man who make him feel that faith and hope mean good, and are fountains of larger and more enduring life? the highest mind, like the purest heart, is a witness of the soul and of god. chapter iv. culture and the spirit of the age. but try, i urge,--the trying shall suffice: the aim, if reached or not, makes great the life. browning. the mass of mankind, if we pass the whole race in review, are sunk in gross ignorance; and even in civilized nations, where education is free, the multitude have but a rude acquaintance with the elements of knowledge. their ability to read and write hardly serves intellectual and moral ends; and such learning as they possess seems only to weaken their power to admire and love what is best in life and thought. if we turn to the more cultivated, whose numbers even in the most enlightened countries are not great, we find but here and there an individual who has anything better than a sort of mechanical cleverness. students, it has been said, on leaving college, quickly divide into two classes,--those who have learned nothing, and those who have forgotten everything. in the professions, the lawyer tends to become an advocate, the physician an empiric, the theologian a dogmatist; and these are but instances of a general falling away from ideals. the student of physical science is subdued to what he works in; the man of letters loses depth and earnestness; and the teacher, whose business it is to rouse and illumine souls, shrivels until he becomes merely a repeater of facts and doctrines in which there is no life, no power to exalt the imagination or to give tone to the intellect. the teacher cannot create talent, and his best work lies in stimulating and directing energy and impulse; but this he seldom strives to do or to make himself capable of doing; and hence pupils very generally leave school as men quit a prison, with a sense of emancipation, and with a desire to forget both the place and the kind of life there encouraged. a talent is like seed-corn,--it bears within itself the power to break the confining walls and to spring upward to light, if only it be sown in proper soil, where the rain and the sunshine fall; but this is a truth which those who make education a business are slow to accept. they repress; they overawe; they are dictatorial; they prescribe rules and methods for minds which can gain strength and wisdom only by following the bent given by their endowments,--and thus the young, who are most easily discouraged in things which concern their highest gifts, lose heart, turn away from ideals, and abandon the pursuit of excellence. the nobler the mind, the greater the danger of its being wrongly dealt with. we seldom find a man whose thinking has helped to form opinion and to create literature, who, if he care to say what he feels, will not declare that his scholastic training was bad. milton, gray, dryden, wordsworth, byron, cowley, addison, gibbon, locke, shelley, and cowper had no love for the schools to which they were sent; swift and goldsmith received no college honors; and pope, thomson, burns, and shakespeare had little or nothing to do with institutions of learning. a man educates himself; and the best work teachers can do, is to inspire the love of mental exercise and a living faith in the power of labor to develop faculty, and to open worlds of use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must rediscover for himself. it is the educator's business to cherish the aspirations of the young, to inspire them with confidence in themselves, and to make them feel and understand that no labor can be too great or too long, if its result be cultivation and enlightenment of mind. for them ideals are real; their life is as yet wrapped in the bud; and to encourage them to believe that if they are but true to themselves, the flower and the fruit will be fair and health-bringing, is to open for them the fountain of hope and noble endeavor. what men have done, men can still do. nay, shall we not rather believe that the best is yet to be done? the peoples whom we call ancient were but rude beginners. we are the true ancients, the inheritors of all the wisdom and all the heroism of the past. we stand in a wider world, and move forward with more conscious purpose along more open ways. of the past we see but the summits, illumined by the rays of genius and glory. could we look upon the plains where the multitudes lie in darkness, wearing the triple chain of servitude, ignorance, and want, we should understand how fair and beneficent our own age is. enthusiasm for the past cannot inspire the best intellectual work. the heart turns to the past; but the mind looks to the future, and is forever untwisting the cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy. to grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the very word implies, because it is still living and applicable here and now. let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and godlike is gone. good and the means of good are not harder to reconcile to-day than they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, and they who have a heart may now, as the best have done in the past, wring even from despair the courage on which victory loves to smile. if we are weak and inferior the fault lies in ourselves, not in the age. we are the age; and if we but will and work, opportunities are offered us to become and to perform whatever may crown and glorify a human soul. the time for doing best things, like eternity, is ever present. let but the man stand forth, and he will find and do his work. we are too near our own age to discern its true glory, which shall best appear from the vantage-ground of another century; but surely we can feel that it throbs with life, with immortal yearnings, with ever-growing desire to give to all men higher thoughts and purer loves. society, the state, the church, the individual, are striving with conscious purpose to make life moral and intelligent. we have become more humane than men have ever been, and accept more fully the duty and the task of extending the domain of justice, of goodness, and of truth. the aim of our civilization is not merely to instruct the ignorant, but to make ignorance impossible; not merely to feed the hungry, but to do away with famine; not merely to visit the captive, but to make captivity the means of his regeneration. already the chains of the slave have been broken, and the earth has become the home of god's free children. disease has been tracked to its secret hiding-places, and barriers have been built against pestilence and contagion. war has become less frequent and less barbarous; persecution for opinion and belief has become rare; man's inhumanity to woman, which is the deepest stain upon the history of the race, has yielded to the influence of religion and knowledge; and with ever-increasing force the truth is borne in upon those who think and observe, that the fate of the rich and high-placed cannot be separated from that of the poor and lowly. while we earnestly strive to control and repress every kind of moral evil, we feel that society itself is responsible for sin and crime, and that social and political conditions and constitutions must change, until the weak and the heavy-laden are protected from the heartlessness of the strong and fortunate. not only must those who labor with their hands have larger opportunities than hitherto have ever been given them, but in the whole social life of man there must be more justice, more love, more tenderness, more of the spirit of christ, than hitherto has ever been found there. what marvelous, intellectual work are we not doing? what admirable expression of the highest truth do we not find in the best writers of our age! it is not all pure gold; but whether we take a religious, a moral, or an intellectual point of view, we may not affirm of the literature of any age or country that it is perfect. when man clothes in words what he thinks and loves, what he knows and believes, his work bears the marks of his defects not less than those of his qualities. nay, if we turn to the bible itself, how much do we not find there which we either fail to comprehend or are unable to apply! has not the mind of christendom been trained and illumined by the literatures of greece and rome, which in moral purity, in elevation of sentiment, in breadth and depth of thought, in the knowledge of the laws of nature, in scientific accuracy, in sympathy and tenderness, are altogether inferior to the best writings of our own day? it is a mistake to suppose that this is a material age in which the love of religion, of poetry, of art, of excellence of whatever kind, is dead. the love of what is best has never at any time been alive save in the hearts of the chosen few; and in such souls it burns now with as sweet and steady a glow as when plato spoke, and the blessed saviour uttered words of divine wisdom. here and now, in and around us, there is the heavenly presence of budding life, of widening vision, of "new thoughts urgent as the growth of wings." let us turn the white forehead of hope to the fair time, and deem no labor great by which we shall become less unfit to do the work of god and man. "nay, never falter; no great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty. no good is certain but the steadfast mind, the undivided will to seek the good: 't is that compels the elements and wrings a human music from the indifferent air. the greatest gift the hero leaves his race is to have been a hero. say we fail! we feed the high tradition of the world and leave our spirit in our children's breasts." but to enter upon such a course of life with well-founded hope of success, we must be reverent and devout. the thrill of awe is, as goethe says, the best thing humanity has. we must understand and feel that the visible is but the shadow of the invisible, that the soul has its roots in god, whose kingdom is within us. we must perceive that what we know, believe, admire, love, and yearn for makes our real life; that we are worth what we _are_, and not what we possess and use. we must be lovers of perfection, as the divine saviour bids us become,--"be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect." we must be conscious of the immortal spirit which is ourself, and walk in the company of god and of just men made perfect, striving after light and purity and strength, which are of the soul. we must love the inward, the true, and the eternal rather than the outward and transitory. we must believe that in very truth we are akin to god, that god is in us, and we in him, and consequently that it is our first duty to follow after perfection, completeness of life, in thought, in love, and in conduct. as it is good to know, so is it good to be strong, to be patient, to be humble, to be helpful; so is it good to do right, though the deed should be our only reward. but we are beset by all manner of temptations to turn aside from a high and noble way of living. the line of least resistance for us is the common highway of money-getters and place-winners; and the moment a man gives evidence of ability, the whole world urges him to put it to immediate use. our public opinion identifies the good with the useful, all else is visionary and unreal. the average man controls us not only in politics, but in religion, in art, and in literature. to turn away from material good in order to gain spiritual and intellectual benefit is held to be evidence of a feeble or perverted understanding. if a man is eloquent, let him become a lawyer, a politician, or a preacher; if he have a talent for science, let him become a physician, a practical chemist, or a civil engineer; if he have skill in writing, let him become a journalist or a contributor to magazines. no one asks himself, what shall i do to gain wisdom, strength, virtue, completeness of life; but the universal question is, how shall i make a living, get money, position, notoriety? in our hearts we should rather have the riches of a rothschild than the mind of plato, the imagination of shakespeare, or the soul of saint theresa. we believe the best is outside of us, that the aids to the most desirable kind of life are to be found in material and mechanical things. we talk with pride of our numbers, our institutions, our machines; we love the display and noise of life, are eager to mingle in crowds, to live in great cities, and to listen to exaggerated and declamatory speech. the soberness of wisdom, the humility of religion, the plainness of worth, are unattractive and unrecognized. we rush after material things, like hunters after game; and in the excitement of the chase our pulse grows quick, and our vision confused. we have lost the art of patient work and expectation. we are no more capable of living in our work, of making it the means of our growth and happiness. what we do, must be quickly done, must have immediate results. our success in solving the political and social problems has spoiled us. when we hear of a man who has been prosperous for years, whom no misfortune has sobered and softened, we expect him to be narrow and supercilious; and in the same way, a prosperous people are exposed to the danger of becoming self-complacent and superficial. we exaggerate the importance of our own achievements and think that which we have accomplished is the best; whereas the wise hold what they have done in slight esteem, and think only of becoming themselves nobler and wiser. instead of boasting of our civilization, because we have industrial and commercial prosperity, wealth and liberty, churches, schools, and newspapers, we ought to ask ourselves whether civilization does not imply something more and higher than this,--what kind of soul lives and loves and thinks in this environment? instead of trying to persuade ourselves that we are the greatest and most enlightened people, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, in a dispassionate temper, whether our best men and women are the most intellectual, the most interesting, and the most christian men and women to be found in the world? do they not lack repose, distinction, a sense for complete and harmonious living? must we not still look to europe for our best religious and philosophic thought, our best poetry, painting, music, and architecture? "let the passion for america," says emerson, "cast out the passion for europe." this is desirable, but numbers and wealth will not bring it about. while the best is said and done in europe, the better sort of americans will look thither,--just as europe looks to us for corn and cotton, or mechanical appliances. we have done much, and much that it was well to do. we have, as matthew arnold says, solved the political and social problems better than any other people, though we ourselves perceive that the solution is by no means final. the conditions of our life are favorable to the many. it is easier for a man to assert himself here, than it is or has ever been elsewhere. a little sense, a little energy, is all that any one needs to make himself independent and comfortable; and because success of this kind is so easy it threatens to absorb our whole life. they alone seem to be living worthily who are doing practical work, who are developing the natural wealth of the country, starting new enterprises and inventing new machines. the political problems which interest us are financial; schools are maintained and fostered because they protect and strengthen our institutions; religious beliefs are tolerated and encouraged because they are aids to morality,--and morality means sobriety, honesty, industry, which lead to thrift. then there is an idea that religion is a conservative power, useful as a bulwark against the assaults of anti-social fanatics. philosophy, poetry, and art are not considered seriously, because they are not seen to bear any clear relation to our institutions and temporal well-being. opinion rules the wide world over; and in the face of this strong public opinion which lays stress chiefly upon external things,--the environment, the machinery of life,--and not upon spiritual and intellectual qualities, it is not easy to love knowledge and virtue for themselves, for the strength and beauty they give to the soul, for their power to build up the being which is a man's very self. it is rare that men have faith in what but few believe in; they are gregarious, and need the encouragement that comes of having aims and hopes of which the millions approve. the predominance of the average man, of which our public opinion is the result, puts other obstacles in the way of culture. it makes us self-complacent, easily satisfied with what we perform. a representative man will become a lawyer, a soldier, a merchant, a legislator, an author, in turns, as occasion offers, and he has no doubt of his sufficiency; because average work is all that is expected of any one. to be able to do anything fairly well seems to us a more desirable accomplishment than to be able to do some one thing better than anybody else. but this is a view which only those may take who live in an imperfectly developed society. as men become more cultivated, they more and more want only the best; and the noblest natures feel the desire to do their best, not with their actual power, but with the skill which forty or fifty years of discipline and effort might give them. they are laborious; they are patient; they persevere in one direction; they believe that if they but continue to observe, to think, to read, to compare, and to express in plain words what they know, their power of seeing and of uttering will continue to grow. the charm of increasing faculty in an infinite world sways and controls them. they never know enough; they are never able to say well enough what they know; and so they grow old still learning many things. they work in a spirit wholly different from that of the common man, who if he get through with what he has in hand is satisfied. they have an artist's sense of perfection; and like virgil would burn the works which if they once escape their own hands, the world will never permit to perish. it is hard to resist when many invite to utterance; and with us whoever has ability is urged to put himself forward, and consequently to dissipate in crude performances energies which if employed in self-culture might make of him a philosopher, a poet, or a man of science. as it is easier to act than to think, the multitude of course will be only talkers, writers, and performers; but a great and civilized people must have at least a few men who take rank with the profound thinkers and finished scholars of the world. no lover of america can help thinking it undesirable that any one should be able to say of us with truth, what locke has said, "the americans are not all born with worse understandings than the europeans, though we see none of them have such reaches in the arts and sciences." it is our aim to create the highest civilization; but the highest civilization is favorable to the highest life, which implies and requires more than the possession of material things. conduct is necessary, knowledge is necessary, beauty is necessary, manners are necessary, and a civilized people must develop life in all these directions, and as far as such a thing is possible, harmoniously. whoever excels in conduct, or in knowledge, or in a sense for the beautiful, or in manners, helps to raise the standard of living,--helps to give worth, dignity, charm, and refinement to life. it is hard to take interest in a people who have no profound thinkers, no great artists, no accomplished scholars, for only such men can lift a people above the provincial spirit, and bring them into conscious relationship with former ages and the wide world. the rule of the people looks to something higher than opportunity for every man to have food and a home; to something more than putting a church, a school, and a newspaper at every man's door. saints and heroes, philosophers and poets, are a people's glory. they give us nobler loves, higher thoughts, diviner aims. they show us how like a god man may become; and political and social institutions which make saints and heroes, philosophers and poets, impossible, can have but inferior value. and there is some radical wrong where the noblest manhood and womanhood are not appreciated and reverenced. not to recognize genuine worth is the mark of a superficial and vulgar character. the servile spirit has no conception of the heroic nature; and they who measure life by material standards, do not perceive the infinite which is in man and which makes him godlike. a few only in any age or nation love the best, follow after ideal aims; but when these few are wanting, all life becomes common-place, and the millions pass from the cradle to the grave and leave no lasting impression upon the world. the practical turn of mind which finds expression in our commercial and industrial achievements, makes itself felt also in our intellectual activity, and those among us who have knowledge and power of utterance are expected, almost required, to throw themselves into the breakers of controversy, to discuss the hundred political, social, religious, financial, sanitary, and educational problems which are ever waiting to be solved. let them enter the lists, let them take sides, let them strive to see clear in an atmosphere of smoke and fog; and not to do this is, in the estimation of the many, to be a dreamer, a dilettante, a thinker to no purpose. but this is precisely what those who seek to cultivate themselves, who seek to learn and communicate the best that is known, ought not to do. they should live in a serene air, in a world of tranquility and peace, where the soul is not troubled by contention, where the view is not perturbed by passion. they should have leisure, which is the original meaning of school and scholar; for the mind, like the soul, is refreshed and strengthened by quiet meditation. its improvement is slow, is imperceptible often; its training is the result of delicate methods which require patience and perseverance, faith in ideals, and a constant looking to the all-perfect infinite; and to throw it into the noise and confusion of the busy excited world of practical affairs is to stunt and warp its growth. we do not hitch a race-horse to the plough, nor should we ask the best intellects to do the common work of which every man is capable. they render the best service, when living in communion with the highest and most cultivated minds of the past and present, they learn and teach the way of looking and thinking, of behaving and doing, which has been followed by the greatest and noblest of the race. political and social questions are forever changing; views which commend themselves to-day will in a few years seem absurd; measures which are thought to be of vital importance will grow to be inapplicable. to talk and write about such things is well,--may help to prevent stagnation and corruption in public life; but they exercise altogether a higher office, who live in the presence of what is permanently true and good and beautiful, who believe in ideal aims and ends and prevent the masses from losing sight of what constitutes man's real worth. they do what they alone can do, whereas the practical and the useful may be any one's work. they may not, of course, isolate themselves; on the contrary they must live closer than other men not only to god and nature, but also to the past and present history of their country and of mankind. they study the movements of the age, but they study them in a philosophic and not in a partisan spirit. they seek to know, not what is popular, but what is right and good; and they often see clearly where the view of others is uncertain and confused. encouragements and rewards are not necessary for them, for they are drawn to the knowledge and love of the best by irresistible attractions, and the more they learn and love the more beneficent and joy-giving does their life become. their aims and ends are in harmony with the highest reason and the highest faith. the world they live in abides; and if they are neglected or forgotten now, they can wait, for truth and goodness and beauty can never lose their power or their charm. "the worthiest poets have remained uncrowned till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone." chapter v. self-culture. there is one great society alone on earth the noble living and the noble dead. wordsworth. the passion for truth and for the culture which makes its possession possible is not rightly felt by the heart of boy or of youth; it is the man's passion, and its power over him is most irresistibly asserted when outward restraint has been removed, when escaping from the control of parents and teachers he is left to himself to shape his course and seek his own ends. when his companions have finished their studies he feels that his own are now properly only about to begin; when they are dreaming of liberty and pleasure, of wealth and success, of the world and its honors, his mind is haunted by the mystery of god and nature, by visions of dimly discerned truth and beauty which he must follow whithersoever they lead; and already he perceives that wisdom comes to those alone who toil and cease not from labor, who suffer and are patient. hitherto he has learned the lessons given him by teachers appointed by others; henceforth he is himself to choose his instructors. as once, half-unconscious, he played in the smile or frown of nature, and drank knowledge with delight, so now in the world of man's thought, hope, and love, he is, with deliberate purpose, to seek what is good for the nourishment of his soul. happy is he, for nearly all men toil and suffer that they may live; but he is also to have time to labor, to make life intelligent and fair. he must know not only what the blind atoms are doing, but what saints, sages, and heroes have loved, thought, and done. he will still keep close to nature who, though she utters myriad sounds, never speaks a human word; but he will also lend his ear to the voice of wisdom which lies asleep in books, and to sympathetic minds whispers from other worlds whatever high or holy truth has consecrated the life of man. his guiding thought must be how to make the work by which he maintains himself in the world subserve moral and intellectual ends; for his aim is not merely or chiefly to have goods, but to be wise and good, and therefore to build up within himself the power of conduct and the power of intelligence which makes man human, and distinguishes him from whatever else on earth has life. it is our indolence and frivolity that make routine duties, however distracting or importunate, incompatible with the serious application which the work of self-culture demands; but we are by nature indolent and frivolous, and only education can make us earnest and laborious. none but a cultivated mind can understand that if the whole human race could be turned loose, to eat and drink and play like thoughtless children, life would become meaningless; that a paradise in which work should not be necessary would become wearisome. the progress of the race is the result of effort, physical, religious, moral, and intellectual; and the advance of individuals is proportional to their exertion. nature herself pushes the young to bodily exercise; but though activity is for them a kind of necessity, only the discipline of habit will lead them to prefer labor to idleness; and they will not even use their senses properly unless they are taught to look and to listen,--just as they are taught to walk and to ride. the habit of manual labor, as it is directly related to the animal existence to which man is prone, and supplies the physical wants whose urgency is most keenly felt, is acquired with least difficulty, and it prepares the way for moral and intellectual life; but it especially favors the life which has regard to temporal ends and conduces to comfort and well-being. they whose instrument is the brain rarely aim at anything higher than wealth and position; and if they become rich and prominent, they remain narrow and uninteresting. they talk of progress, of new inventions and discoveries, and they neglect to improve themselves; they boast of the greatness of their country, while their real world is one of vulgar thought and desire; they take interest in what seems to concern the general welfare, but fail to make themselves centres of light and love. what is worse they have the conceit of wisdom,--they lack reverence; they are impatient, and must have at once what they seek. but the better among us see the insufficiency of the popular aims, and begin to yearn for something other than a life of politics, newspapers, and financial enterprise. they desire to know and love the best that is known, and they are willing to be poor and obscure, if they may but gain entrance into this higher world. "i shall ever consider myself," says descartes, "more obliged to those who leave me to my leisure, than i should to any who might offer me the most honorable employments." this is the thought of every true student and lover of wisdom; for he feels that whatever a man's occupation may be, his business is to improve his mind and to form his character. he desires not to be known and appreciated, but to know and appreciate; not to _have_ more, but to _be_ more; not to have friends, but to be the friend of man,--which he is when he is the lover of truth. he turns from vulgar pleasures as he turns from pain, because both pleasure and pain in fastening the soul to the body deprive it of freedom and hinder the play of the mind. he loves the best with single heart and without thought what gifts it bring. unless one have deep faith in the good of culture he will easily become discouraged in the work which is here urged upon him. he must be drawn to the love of intellectual excellence by an attraction such as a poet feels in the presence of beauty; he must believe in it as a miser believes in gold; he must seek it as a lover seeks the beloved. our wants determine our pleasures, and they who have no intellectual cravings feel not the need of exercise of mind. they are born and remain inferior. they are content with the world which seems to be real, forgetting the higher one, which alone is real; they are not urged to the intellectual life by irresistible instincts. they are discouraged by difficulties, thwarted by obstacles which lie in the path of all who strive to move forward and to gain higher planes. it is not possible to advance except along the road of toil, of struggle, and of suffering. we cannot emerge even from childish ignorance and weakness without experiencing a sense of loss. mental work in the beginning and for a long time is weariness, is little better than drudgery. we labor, and there seems to be no gain; we study and there seems to be no increase of knowledge or power; and if we persevere, we are led by faith and hope, not by any clear perception of the result of persistent application. genius itself is not exempt from this law. poets and artists work with an intensity unknown to others, and are distinguished by their faith in the power of labor. the consummate musician must practice for hours, day by day, year in and year out. the brain is the most delicate and the finest of instruments, and it is vain to imagine that anything else than ceaseless, patient effort will enable us to use it with perfect skill; indeed, it is only after long study that we become capable of understanding what the perfection of the intellect is, that we become capable of discerning what is excellent, beautiful, and true in style and thought. discouragement and weariness will, again and again, suggest doubts concerning the wisdom of this ceaseless effort to improve one's self. why persist in the pursuit of what can never be completely attained? why toil to gain what the mass of men neither admire nor love? why wear out life in a course of action which leads neither to wealth nor honors? why turn away from pleasures which lie near us to follow after ideal things? these are questions which force themselves upon us; and it requires faith and courage not to be shaken by this sophistry. visions of ideal life float before young eyes, and if to be attracted by what is high and fair were enough, it were not difficult to be saint, sage, or hero; but when we perceive that the way to the best is the road of toil and drudgery, that we must labor long and accomplish little, wander far and doubt our progress, must suffer much and feel misgivings whether it is not in vain,--then only the noblest and the bravest still push forward in obedience to inward law. the ideal of culture appeals to them with irresistible force. they consent to lack wealth, and the approval of friends and the world's applause; they are willing to turn away when fair hands hold out the cup of pleasure, when bright eyes and smiling lips woo to indulgence. if, you ask, how long? they answer, until we die! they are lovers of wisdom and do not trust to hope of temporal reward. their aim is light and purity of mind and heart; these they would not barter for comfort and position. as saints, while doing the common work of men, walk uplifted to worlds invisible, so they, amid the noise and distractions of life still hear the appealing voice of truth; and as parted lovers dream only of the hour when they shall meet again, so these chosen spirits, in the midst of whatever cares and labors, turn to the time when thought shall people their solitude as with the presence of angels. they hear heavenly voices asking, why stay ye on the earth, unless to grow? vanity, frivolity, and fickleness die within them; and they grow to be humble and courageous, disinterested and laborious, strong and persevering. the cultivation of their higher nature becomes the law of their life; and the sense of duty, "stern daughter of the voice of god," which of all motives that sway the heart, best stands the test of reason, becomes their guide and support. thus culture, which looks to the infinite and all-wise as to its ideal, rests upon the basis of morality and religion. to think is difficult, and they who wish to grow in power of thought must hoard their strength. excess, of whatever kind, is a waste of intellectual force. the weakness of men of genius has impoverished the world. sensual indulgence diminishes spiritual insight; it perverts reason, and deadens love; it enfeebles the physical man, and weakens the organs of sense, which are the avenues of the soul. the higher self is developed harmoniously only when it springs from a healthful body. it is the lack of moral balance which makes genius akin to madness. nothing is so sane as reason, and great minds fall from truth only when they fail in the strength which comes of righteous conduct. let the lover of wisdom then strive to live in a healthy body that his senses may report truly of the universe in which he dwells. but this is not easy; for mental labor exhausts, and if the vital forces are still further diminished by dissipation, disease and premature decay of the intellectual faculties will be the result. the ideal of culture embraces the whole man, physical, moral, religious, and intellectual; and the loss of health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development of the mind itself. passion is the foe of reason, and may easily become strong enough to extinguish its light. he who wishes to educate himself must learn to resist the desires of his lower nature, which if indulged deaden sensibility, weaken the will, take from the imagination its freshness, and from the heart the power of loving. the task he has set himself is arduous, and he cannot have too much energy, too much warmth of soul, too much capacity for labor. let him not waste, like a mere animal, the strength which was given him that he might learn to know and love infinite truth and beauty. the dwelling with one's self and with thoughts of what is true and high, which is an essential condition of mental growth, is impossible when the sanctuary of the soul is filled with unclean images. intellectual honesty, the disinterested love of truth, without which no progress can be made, will hardly be found in those who are the slaves of unworthy passions. the more religious a man is, the more does he believe in the worth and sacredness of truth, and the more willing does he become to throw all his energies with persevering diligence into the work of self-improvement. they who fail to see in the universe an all-wise, all-holy, and all-powerful being, from whom are all things and to whom all things turn, easily come to doubt whether it holds anything of true worth. history teaches this, and it requires little reflection to perceive that it must be so. of the solitary, wordsworth says,-- "but in despite of all this outside bravery, within he neither felt encouragement nor hope; for moral dignity and strength of mind were wanting, and simplicity of life and reverence for himself; and, last and best, confiding thoughts, through love and fear of him before whose sight the troubles of this world are vain." the corrupt and the ignorant easily learn to feel contempt, but the scholar is reverent. he moves in the midst of infinite worlds, and knows that the least is part of the whole. now, how shall he who is resolved to educate himself set about his work? what advice shall be given him? what rules shall be made for him that he may not waste time and energy? he who yearns for the cultivation of mind which makes wisdom possible must work his way to the light. all intellectual men strive to educate themselves, but each one strives in a different way. they all aim at insight rather than information, at the perfect use of their faculties rather than learning. the power to see things as they are, is what they want; and therefore they look, observe, examine, compare, analyze, meditate, read, and write. and they keep doing this day by day; and the longer they work, the more attractive their work grows to be. descartes, who is a typical lover of the intellectual life, looked upon himself simply as a thinking being, and gave all his thought to the cultivation of his higher faculties in the hope that he might finally discover some truth which would bring blessings to men. he had no thought of literary fame, published little, and sedulously avoided whatever might bring him into notoriety. "those," he says, "who wish to know how to speak of everything and to acquire a reputation for learning, will succeed most easily if they content themselves with the semblance of truth, which may readily be found." the love of truth is the mark of the real student. what is, is; it is man's business to know it. he is the foe of pretense; sham for him means shame. he will have sound knowledge; he will do his work well; whether men shall applaud or reward him for it, is a foreign consideration. he obeys an inward law, and the praise of those who cannot understand him sounds to him like mockery. true thought, like right conduct, is its own reward. to see truth and to love it is enough,--is more than to have the worship of the world. the important thing is to be a man, to have a serious purpose, to be in earnest, to yearn for what is good and holy; and without this the culture of the intellect will not avail. we must build upon the broad foundation of man's life, and not upon any special faculty. the merely literary man is often the most pitiful of men,--able, it may be, to do little else than complain that his merits are not recognized. let it not be imagined then that the lover of wisdom, the follower of intellectual good, should propose to himself a literary career. he may of course be or become a man of letters, but this is incidental to his life-purpose, which is to develop within himself the power of knowing and loving. he will learn to think rightly and to act well, first of all; for he knows that a man's writing cannot be worth more than he himself is worth. he is a seeker after truth and perfection; and understanding at the price of what countless labors these may be hoped for, he is slow to imagine that words of his may be of help to others. observation, reading, and writing are the chief means by which thought is stimulated, the mind developed, and the intellect cultivated. the habit of looking and the habit of thinking are closely related. a man thinks as he sees; and for a mind like shakespeare's, for instance, observation is almost the only thing that is necessary for its development. the boundless world breaks in upon him with creative force. his sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. he sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. every little bird and every little flower are known to him. he contemplates falstaff and poor tom with as much interest as though they were hamlet and king lear. in all original minds the power of observation is great. it is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. when the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade of trees, or lying on the banks of murmuring streams, he is not only learning more delightful things than books will ever teach him, but he is also acquiring the habit of attention, of looking at what he sees, which nowhere else can be gotten in so natural and pleasant a way. hence the best minds have either been born in the country or have passed there some of their early years. unless we have first learned to look with the eye, we shall never learn to look with the mind. they who walk unmoved beneath the starlit heavens, or by the ever-moving ocean, or amid the silent mountains; who do not find, like wordsworth, that the meanest flower that blows gives thoughts which often lie too deep for tears, will not derive great help from the world of books. but in the world of books the intellectual must also make themselves at home and live, must thence draw nourishment, light, wisdom, strength, for there as nowhere else the mind of man has stamped its image; and there the thoughts of the master spirits still breathe, still glow with truth and beauty. the best books are powers "forever to be hallowed; only less, for what we are and what we may become, than nature's self, which is the breath of god, or his pure word, by miracle revealed." but it is as difficult to know books as to know men. there are but few men who can be of intellectual service to us; and there are but few books which stimulate and nourish the mind. the best books are, as milton says, "the precious life-blood of a master spirit;" and it is absurd to suppose that they will reveal their secret to every chance comer, to every heedless reader. as it takes a hero to know a hero, so only an awakened mind can love and understand the great thinkers. the reading of the ignorant is chiefly a mechanical proceeding; and, indeed, for men in general reading is little better than waste of time. their reading, like their conversation, leaves them what they were, or worse. the mass of printed matter has no greater value from an intellectual point of view at least than the wide ever-flowing stream of talk; and for the multitude it is all the same whether they gossip and complain, or read and nod. however much they read, they remain unintelligent; what knowledge they gain is fragmentary, unreal; they learn merely enough to talk about what they do not understand. we may of course read for entertainment, as we may talk for entertainment; but this is merely a recreation of the mind, which is good only because it rests and prepares us for work. the wise read books to be enlightened, uplifted, and inspired. their reading is a labor in which every faculty of the mind is awake and active. they are attentive; they weigh, compare, judge. they re-create within their own minds the images produced by the author; they seek to enter into his inmost thought; they admire each well-turned phrase, each happy epithet; they walk with him, and make themselves at home in the wonderland which his genius has called into being; past centuries rise before them, and they almost forget that they did not hear plato discourse in the academy, or stroll with horace along the sacred way. as they are brought thus intimately into the company of the noblest minds, they think as they thought, feel as they felt, and so are enlightened and inspired. they drink the spirit of the mighty dead, and gradually come to live in a higher and richer world. the best in life and literature is seen to be such only by those who have made themselves worthy of the heavenly vision; and once we have learned to love the few real books of the world, or rather what in these few is eternally true and beautiful, we breathe the atmosphere of the intellectual life. what is frivolous, or false, or vulgar can no longer please us; having seen and loved what is high we may not sink to the lower. knowledge may be useful, and yet have little power to nourish, train, and enlarge the mind, and it is its disciplinary and educational value which we are here considering. medicine for a physician, law for an attorney, theology for a clergyman, is the most useful knowledge; but they are not therefore the best means of intellectual culture. natural science, though it is most useful, ministering as it does in a thousand ways and with ever-increasing efficacy to our wants and comforts, has but an inferior educational power. acquaintance with the uniform co-existences and sequences of phenomena is not a mental tonic. such knowledge not only leaves us unmoved,--it has a tendency even to fetter the free play of the mind and to chill the imagination. it unweaves the rainbow, and leaves us the dead chemical elements. the information we have gained is practical, but it does not exalt the soul or render us more keenly alive to the divine beauty which rests on nature's face. it does not enable us, as does the knowledge of literature and history, to participate in the conscious life of the race. it makes no appeal to our nobler human instincts. there is no book on natural science, nor can there ever be one, which may take a place among the few immortal works which men never cease to read and love. physical science has its own domain, and its study will continue to enrich the world, to make specialists of a hundred kinds; but it never can take the place of literature and history as a means of culture; and as an educational force its value is greatest when it is studied not experimentally, but as literature,--though of course, every cultivated man should be familiar with the inductive method, and should receive consequently a certain scientific training. history, in bringing us into the presence of the greatest men and in showing us their mightiest achievements, rouses our whole being. it sets the mind aglow, awakens enthusiasm, and fires the imagination. it makes us feel how blessed a thing it is "to scorn delights and live laborious days;" how divine to perish in bringing truth and holiness to men. we commingle with the makers of the world; we hear them speak and see them act; we catch the spirit of their lofty purpose, their high courage, their noble eloquence. when we drink deeply of the wisdom which history teaches, we come to understand that truth and justice, heroism and religion, which are the virtues of the greatest men, may be ours as easily as theirs; that opportunity for true men is ever present, and that the task set for each one of us is as sacred and important as any which has ever been entrusted to the human mind and will. our thought is widened, our hearts are strengthened, and we come to feel that it shall be well for others that we too have lived. when we have learned to be at home with lofty and generous natures, the heroic mood becomes natural to us. there are of course but few histories which have this tonic effect upon the mind and the will, but with these the lover of culture should make himself familiar. each one must find the book he needs; and though he should find no help in a volume which time and the consent of the learned have consecrated, let him not be discouraged, but continue to seek and to read until he meet with the author who fills his soul with joy and opens to his wondering eyes visions of new worlds. to love any great book so that we read it--or at least those portions of it which especially appeal to us--many times, and always with new pleasure (as a mother never wearies of looking upon her child), until the thought and style of the author become almost our own, is to learn the secret of self-education; for he who understands and loves one great book is sure to find his way to the love and knowledge of other works of genius. he will not read chiefly to gain information, but he will read for exaltation of spirit, for enlightenment, for strength of soul, for the help which springs from contact with generous and awakened minds. he will mark his favorite passages and refer to them often, as one loves to revisit places where he has been happy; and these very pencil-marks will become dear to him as tokens of truth revealed, of wisdom gained, of joy bestowed. the best reading is that which most profoundly stimulates thought, which brings our own minds into active, conscious communion with the mind of the author; and hence the best poetry is the most efficacious and the most delightful aid to mental improvement. poetry is, as aristotle says, the most philosophic of all writing. it is also the writing which is most instinct with passion, with life. it springs from intense thought and feeling, and bears within itself the power to call forth thought and feeling. it is thought transfused with the glow of emotion, and consequently thought made beautiful, attractive, contagious. it is, to quote wordsworth, "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." the poet has more enthusiasm and tenderness than other men, a more sensitive soul, a more comprehensive mind. his wider sympathy gives him greater insight; and his power to see absent things as though they were present enables him to bring the distant and the past before our eyes, to make them live again in a new and immortal world; he stimulates the whole mind and appeals to every faculty of the soul. the greatest philosophers are, like plato, poets too; and unless the historian is also a poet, there is no inspiration, no life in what he writes. it is as superficial and vulgar to sneer at poetry as to sneer at religion; and they alone are mockers who have eyes but for some counterfeit. to be able to read a true poet is not a gift of nature; it is a faculty to be acquired. he creates, as wordsworth says, the taste by which he is appreciated. to imagine we may read him as we read a frivolous novel is absurd; it may well happen we shall see no truth or beauty in him until patient study has made it plain. it often takes the world a hundred years or more to recognize a great poet; and a knowledge of his worth can be had by the student only at the price of patient labor. wordsworth will attract scarcely any one at the first glance; the great number of readers will soon weary of him and throw him aside; but those who learn to understand him find in his writings treasures above all price. there are but a few great poems in the literatures of the different nations, but he who wishes to have a cultivated mind must, at the cost of whatever time and labor, make himself familiar with them; for there alone are found the best thoughts clothed in fittest words; there alone are rightly portrayed the noblest characters; there alone is the world of men and things transfigured by the imagination and illumined by the pure light of the mind. true poets help us to see, they teach us to admire, they lift our thoughts, they appeal to our higher nature; they give us nobler loves, more exalted aims, more spiritual purposes; they make us feel that to live for money or place is to lead a narrow and a slavish life; and to men around whom the fetters of material and hardening cares are growing, they cry and bid them-- "look abroad and see to what fair countries they are bound." but even the greatest poets have weaknesses, and are great only by comparison. there is not one who however he may enchant and strengthen, does not also disappoint us. the perfect poet the future will bring; and to his coming we shall look with more eager expectation than if we foresaw man dowered with wings. the elevation we forebode is of the soul, not of the body. progress we have already made. it is no longer possible for a true poet to sing of sensual delights; the man he creates is now no more the slave "of low ambition or distempered love." his theme is rather-- "no other than the heart of man as found among the best of those who live, not unexalted by religious faith, nor uninformed by books, good books, though few, in nature's presence." writing is as great an aid to the cultivation of the mind as reading. it is indeed indispensable, and the accuracy of thought and expression of which bacon speaks, is but one of its good results. "by writing," says saint augustine, "i have learned many things which nothing else had taught me." there is, of course, no question here of writing for publication. to do this no one should be urged. the farther we are from all thought of readers, the nearer are we to truth; and once an author has published, a sort of madness comes over him, and he seems to be doing nothing unless he continue to publish. the truly intellectual man leads an interior life; he dwells habitually in the presence of god, of nature, and of his own soul; he swims in a current of ideas, looks out upon a world of truth and beauty; he would rather gain some new vision of the eternal reality than to have a mountain of gold or the suffrages of a whole people. the great hindrance is lack of the power of prolonged attention, of sustained thought; and this the habit of serious writing gives. but the habit itself is difficult to acquire. at first in attempting to write we are discouraged to find how crude, how unreal, how little within our control our knowledge is; and it will often happen that we shall simply hold the pen in idleness, either because we find nothing to write, or because the proper way to express what we think eludes our efforts. when this happens day after day, the temptation will come to abandon our purpose, and to seek easier and less effective means of developing mental strength, or else we shall write carelessly and without thought, which is even a greater evil than not to write at all. in the writing of which i am thinking there is no question of style, of what critics and readers will say; all that is asked is that we apply our minds to things as they appear to us, and put in plain words what we see. thus our style will become the expression of our thought and life. it will be the outgrowth of a natural method, and consequently will have genuine worth. what is written in this way should be preserved, not that others may see it, but that we ourselves by comparing our earlier with our later essays may be encouraged by the evidence of improvement. it is not necessary to make choice of a subject,--whatever interests us is a fit theme; and if nothing should happen specially to interest us, by writing we shall gain interest in many things. the method here proposed requires serious application, perseverance, diligence: it is difficult; but they who have the courage to continue to write, undeterred by difficulties, will gain more than they hope for. they will grow in strength, in accuracy, in pliancy, in openness of mind; they will become capable of profound and just views, and will gradually rise to worlds of truth and beauty of which the common man does not dream. and it will frequently happen that there will be permanent value in what is written not to please the crowd or to flatter a capricious public opinion, or to win gold or applause, but simply in the presence of god and one's own soul to bear witness to truth. as the painter takes pallet and brush, the musician his instrument, each to perfect himself in his art, so he who desires to learn how to think should take the pen, and day by day write something of the truth and love, the hope and faith, which make him a living man. chapter vi. growth and duty. why stay we on the earth unless to grow? browning. what life is in itself we do not know, any more than we know what matter is in itself; but we know something of the properties of matter, and we also have some knowledge of the laws of life. here it is sufficient to call attention to the law of growth, through which the living receive the power of self-development,--of bringing their endowments into act, of building up the being which they are. whatever living thing is strong or beautiful has been made so by growth, since life begins in darkness and impotence. to grow is to be fresh and joyous. hence the spring is the glad time; for the earth itself then seems to renew its youth, and enter on a fairer life. the growing grass, the budding leaves, the sprouting corn, coming as with unheard shout from regions of the dead, fill us with happy thoughts, because in them we behold the vigor of life, bringing promise of higher things. nature herself seems to rejoice in this vital energy; for the insects hum, the birds sing, the lambs skip, and the very brooks give forth a merry sound. growth leads us through wonderland. it touches the germs lying in darkness, and the myriad forms of life spring to view; the mists are lifted from the valleys, and flowers bloom and shed fragrance through the air. only the growing--those who each moment are becoming something more than they were--feel the worth and joyousness of life. upon the youth nothing palls, for he is himself day by day rising into higher and wider worlds. to grow is to have faith, hope, courage. the boy who has become able to do what a while ago was impossible to him, easily believes that nothing is impossible; and as his powers unfold, his self-confidence is nourished; he exults in the consciousness of increasing strength, and cannot in any way be made to understand the doubts and faint-heartedness of men who have ceased to grow. each hour he puts off some impotence, and why shall he not have faith in his destiny, and feel that he shall yet grow to be poet, orator, hero, or what you will that is great and noble? and as he delights in life, we take delight in him. in the same way a young race of people possesses a magic charm. homer's heroes are barbarians; but they are inspiring, because they belong to a growing race, and we see in them the budding promise of the day when alexander's sword shall conquer the world; when plato shall teach the philosophy which all men who think must know; and when pericles shall bid the arts blossom in a perfection which is the despair of succeeding generations. and so in the middle ages there is barbarism enough, with its lawlessness and ignorance; but there is also faith, courage, strength, which tell of youth, and point to a time of mature faculty and high achievement. there is the rich purple dawn which shall grow into the full day of our modern life. here in this new world we are the new people, in whose growth what highest hopes, what heavenly promises lie! all the nations which are moving forward, are moving in directions in which we have gone before them,--to larger political and religious liberty; to wider and more general education; to the destroying of privilege and the disestablishment of churches; to the recognition of the equal rights not only of all men, but of all men and women. we also lead the way in the revolution which has been set in motion by the application of science to mechanical purposes, one of the results of which is seen in the industrial and commercial miracles of the present century. it is our vigorous growth which makes us the most interesting and attractive of the modern peoples. for whether men love us, or whether they hate us, they find it impossible to ignore us, unless they wish to argue themselves unknown; and the millions who yearn for freedom and opportunity turn first of all to us. but observant minds, however much they may love america, however great their faith in popular government may be, cannot contemplate our actual condition without a sense of disquietude; for there are aspects of our social evolution which sadden and depress even the most patriotic and loyal hearts. it would seem, for instance, that with us, while the multitude are made comfortable and keen-witted, the individual remains common-place and weak; so that on all sides people are beginning to ask themselves what is the good of all this money and machinery if the race of godlike men is to die out, or indeed if the result is not to be some nobler and better sort of man than the one with whom we have all along been familiar. is not the yearning for divine men inborn? in the heroic ages such men were worshiped as gods, and one of the calamities of times of degeneracy is the dying out of faith in the worth of true manhood caused by the disappearance of superior men. such men alone are memorable, and give to history its inspiring and educating power. the ruins of athens and rome, the cathedrals and castles of europe, uplift and strengthen the heart, because they bid us reflect what thoughts and hopes were theirs who thus could build. how quickly kings and peasants, millionaires and paupers, become a common, undistinguished crowd! but the hero, the poet, the saint, defy the ages and remain luminous and separate like stars. they-- "waged contention with their time's decay, and of the past are all that cannot pass away." the soul, which makes man immortal, has alone the power to make him beneficent and beautiful. but in this highest kind of man, in whom soul--that is, faith, hope, love, courage, intellect--is supreme, we americans, who are on the crest of the topmost waves of the stream of tendency, are not rich. we have our popular heroes; but so has every petty people, every tribe its heroes. the dithyrambic prose in which it is the fashion to celebrate our conspicuous men has a hollow sound, very like cant. a marvelous development of wealth and numbers has taken place in america; but what american--poet, philosopher, scientist, warrior, ruler, saint--is there who can take his place with the foremost men of all this world? the american people seem still to be somewhat in the position of our new millionaires: their fortune is above them, overshadows, and oppresses them. they live in fine houses, and have common thoughts; they have costly libraries, and cheap culture; and their rich clothing poorly hides their coarse breeding. nor does the tendency seem to be toward a nobler type of manhood. the leaders of the revolution, the framers of the federal constitution, the men who contended for state-rights, and still more those who led in the great struggle for human rights were of stronger and nobler mold than the politicians who now crowd the halls of congress. the promise of a literature which a generation ago budded forth in new england was, it appears, delusive. what a sad book is not that recently issued from the press on the poets of america! it is the chapter on snakes in ireland which we have all read,--there are none. and are not our literary men whom it is possible to admire and love either dead or old enough to die? all this, however, need not be cause for discouragement, if in the generations which are springing up around us, and which are soon to enter upon the scene of active life, we could discover the boundless confidence, the high courage, the noble sentiments, which make the faults of youth more attractive than the formal virtues of a maturer age. but youth seems about to disappear from our life, to leave only children and men. for a true youth the age of chivalry has not passed, nor has the age of faith, nor the age of poetry, nor the age of aught that is godlike and ideal. to our young men, however, high thoughts and heroic sentiments are what they are to a railroad president or a bank cashier,--mere nonsense. life for them is wholly prosaic and without illusions. they transform ideas into interests, faith into a speculation, and love into a financial transaction. they have no vague yearnings for what cannot be; hardly have they any passions. they are cold and calculating. they deny themselves, and do not believe in self-denial; they are active, and do not love labor; they are energetic, and have no enthusiasm; they approach life with the hard, mechanical thoughts with which a scientist studies matter. their one idea is success, and success for them is money. money means power, it means leisure, it means self-indulgence, it means display; it means, in a word, the thousand comforts and luxuries which, in their opinion, constitute the good of life. in aristocratic societies the young have had a passion for distinction. they have held it to be an excellent thing to belong to a noble family, to occupy an elevated position, to wear the glittering badges of birth and of office. in ages of religious faith they have been smitten with the love of divine ideals; they have yearned for god, and given all the strength of their hearts to make his will prevail. but to our youth distinction of birth is fictitious, and god is problematic; and so they are left face to face with material aims and ends; and of such aims and ends money is the universal equivalent. now, it could not ever occur to me to think of denying that the basis of human life, individual and social, is material. matter is part of our nature; we are bedded in it, and by it are nourished. it is the instrument we must use even when we think and love, when we hope and pray. upon this foundation our spiritual being is built; upon this foundation our social welfare rests. concern for material interests is one of the chief causes of human progress; since nothing else so stimulates to effort, and effort is the law of growth. the savage who has no conception of money, but is satisfied with what nature provides, remains forever a savage. habits of industry, of order, of punctuality, of economy and thrift, are, to a great extent, the result of our money-getting propensities. our material wants are more urgent, more irresistible; they press more constantly upon us than any other; and those whom they fail to rouse to exertion are, as a rule, hopelessly given over to indolence and sloth. in the stimulus of these lower needs, then, is found the impulse which drives men to labor; and without labor welfare is not possible. the poor must work, if they would drink and eat; the weak must work, if they in strength would grow; the ignorant must work, if they would know; the sad must work, if they sweet joy would meet. the strong must work, if they would shun defeat; the rich must work, if they would flee from woe; the proud must work, if they would upward go; the brave must work, if they would not retreat. so for all men the law of work is plain; it gives them food, strength, knowledge, vict'ry, peace; it makes joy possible, and lessens pain; from passion's lawless power it wins release, confirms the heart, and widens reason's reign, makes men like god, whose work can never cease. whatever enables man to overcome his inborn love of ease is, in so far, the source of good. now, money represents what more than anything else has this stimulating power. it is the equivalent of what we eat and drink, of the homes we live in, of the comforts with which we surround ourselves, of the independence which makes us free to go here or there, to do this or that,--to spend the winter where orange blossoms perfume the soft air, and the summer where ocean breezes quicken the pulse of life. it unlocks for us the treasury of the world, opens to our gaze whatever is sublime or beautiful; introduces us to the master-minds who live in their works; it leads us where orators declaim, and singers thrill the soul with ecstasy. nay, more, with it we build churches, endow schools, and provide hospitals and asylums for the weak and helpless. it is, indeed, like a god of this nether world, holding dominion over many spheres of life and receiving the heart-worship of millions. yet, if we make money and its equivalents a life-purpose--the aim and end of our earthly hopes--our service becomes idolatry, and a blight falls upon the nobler self. money is the equivalent of what is venal,--of all that may be bought or sold; but the best, the godlike, the distinctively human, cannot be bought or sold. a rich man can buy a wife, but not a woman's love; he can buy books, but not an appreciative mind; he can buy a pew, but not a pure conscience; he can buy men's votes and flattery, but not their respect. the money-world is visible, material, mechanical, external; the world of the soul, of the better self, is invisible, spiritual, vital. god's kingdom is within. what we have is not what we are; and the all-important thing is to be, and not to have. our possessions belong to us only in a mechanical way. the poet's soul owns the stars and the moonlit heavens, the mountains and rivers, the flowers and the birds, more truly than a millionaire owns his bonds. what i know is mine, and what i love is mine; and as my knowledge widens and my love deepens, my life is enlarged and intensified. but, since all human knowledge is imperfect and narrow, the soul stretches forth the tendrils of faith and hope. looking upon shadows, we believe in realities; possessing what is vain and empty, we trust to the future to bring what is full and complete. all noble literature and life has its origin in regions where the mind sees but darkly; where faith is more potent than knowledge; where hope is larger than possession, and love mightier than sensation. the soul is dwarfed whenever it clings to what is palpable and plain, fixed and bounded. its home is in worlds which cannot be measured and weighed. it has infinite hopes, and longings, and fears; lives in the conflux of immensities; bathes on shores where waves of boundless yearning break. borne on the wings of time, it still feels that only what is eternal is real,--that what death can destroy is even now but a shadow. to it all outward things are formal, and what is less than god is hardly aught. in this mysterious, super-sensible world all true ideals originate, and such ideals are to human life as rain and sunshine to the corn by which it is nourished. what hope for the future is there, then, when the young have no enthusiasm, no heavenly illusions, no divine aspirations, no faith that man may become godlike, more than poets have ever imagined, or philosophers dreamed?--when money, and what money buys, is the highest they know, and therefore the highest they are able to love?--when even the ambitious among them set out with the deliberate purpose of becoming the beggars of men's votes; of winning an office the chief worth of which, in their eyes, lies in its emoluments?--when even the glorious and far-sounding voice of fame for them means only the gabble and cackle of notoriety? the only example which i can call to mind of an historic people whose ideals are altogether material and mechanical, is that of china. are we, then, destined to become a sort of chinese empire, with three hundred millions of human beings, and not a divine man or woman? is what carlyle says is hitherto our sole achievement--the bringing into existence of an almost incredible number of bores--is this to be the final outcome of our national life? is the commonest man the only type which in a democratic society will in the end survive? does universal equality mean universal inferiority? are republican institutions fatal to noble personality? are the people as little friendly to men of moral and intellectual superiority as they are to men of great wealth! is their dislike of the millionaires but a symptom of their aversion to all who in any way are distinguished from the crowd? and is this the explanation of the blight which falls upon the imagination and the hearts of the young? ah! surely, we who have faith in human nature, who believe in freedom and in popular government, can never doubt what answer must be given to all these questions. a society which inevitably represses what is highest in the best sort of men is an evil society. a civilization which destroys faith in genius, in heroism, in sanctity, is the forerunner of barbarism. individuality is man's noblest triumph over fate, his most heavenly assertion of the freedom of the soul; and a world in which individuality is made impossible is a slavish world. there man dwindles, becomes one of a multitude, the impersonal product of a general law; and all his godlike strength and beauty are lost. is not one true poet more precious than a whole generation of millionaires; one philosopher of more worth than ten thousand members of congress; one man who sees and loves god dearer than an army of able editors? the greater our control of nature becomes, the more its treasures are explored and utilized, the greater the need of strong personality to counteract the fatal force of matter. just as men in tropical countries are overwhelmed and dwarfed by nature's rich profusion, so in this age, in which industry and science have produced resources far beyond the power of unassisted nature, only strong characters, marked individualities, can resist the influence of wealth and machinery, which tend to make man of less importance than that which he eats and wears,--to make him subordinate to the tools he uses. from many sides personality, which is the fountain-head of worth, genius, and power, is menaced. the spirit of the time would deny that god is a person, and holds man's personality in slight esteem, as not rooted in the soul, but in aggregated atoms. the whole social network, in whose meshes we are all caught, cripples and paralyzes individuality. we must belong to a party, to a society, to a ring, to a clique, and deliver up our living thought to these soulless entities. or, if we remain aloof from such affiliation, we must have no honest conviction, no fixed principles, but fit our words to business and professional interests, and conform to the exigencies of the prevailing whim. the minister is hired to preach not what he believes, but what the people wish to hear; the congressman is elected to vote not in the light of his own mind, but in obedience to the dictates of those who send him; the newspaper circulates not because it is filled with words of truth and wisdom, but because it panders to the pruriency and prejudice of its patrons; and a book is popular in inverse ratio to its individuality and worth. our national library is filled with books which have copyright, but no other right, human or divine, to exist at all; and when one of us does succeed in asserting his personality, he usually only makes himself odd and ridiculous. he rushes into polygamous mormonism, or buffoon revivalism, or shallow-minded atheism; nay, he will even become an anarchist, because a few men have too much money and too little soul. what we need is neither the absence of individuality nor a morbid individuality, but high and strong personalities. if our country is to be great and forever memorable, something quite other than wealth and numbers will make it so. were there but question of countless millions of dollars and people, then indeed the victory would already have been gained. if we are to serve the highest interests of mankind, and to mark an advance in human history, we must do more than establish universal suffrage, and teach every child to read and write. as true criticism deals only with men of genius or of the best talent, and takes no serious notice of mechanical writers and book-makers, so true history loses sight of nations whose only distinction lies in their riches and populousness. the noblest and most gifted men and women are alone supremely interesting and abidingly memorable. we have already reached a point where we perceive the unreality of the importance which the chronicles have sought to give to mere kings and captains. if the king was a hero, we love him; but if he was a sot or a coward, his jeweled crown and purple robes leave him as unconsidered by us as the beggar in his rags. whatever influence, favorable or unfavorable, democracy may exert to make easy or difficult the advent of the noblest kind of man, an age in which the people think and rule will strip from all sham greatness its trappings and tinsel. the parade hero and windy orator will be gazed at and applauded, but they are all the while transparent and contemptible. the scientific spirit, too, which now prevails, is the foe of all pretense; it looks at things in their naked reality, is concerned to get a view of the fact as it is, without a care whether it be a beautiful or an ugly, a sweet or a bitter truth. the fact is what it is, and nothing can be gained by believing it to be what it is not. this is a most wise and human way of looking at things, if men will only not forget that the mind sees farther than the eye, that the heart feels deeper than the hand; and that where knowledge fails, faith is left; where possession is denied, hope remains. the young must enter upon their life-work with the conviction that only what is real is true, good, and beautiful; and that the unreal is altogether futile and vain. now, the most real thing for every man, if he is a man, is his own soul. his thought, his love, his faith, his hope, are but his soul thinking, loving, believing, hoping. his joy and misery are but his soul glad or sad. hence, so far as we are able to see or argue, the essence of reality is spiritual; and since the soul is conscious that it is not the supreme reality, but is dependent, illumined by a truth higher than itself, nourished by a love larger than its own, it has a dim vision of the infinite being as essentially real and essentially spiritual. a living faith in this infinite spiritual reality is the fountain-head not only of religion, but of noble life. all wavering here is a symptom of psychic paralysis. when the infinite reality becomes questionable, then all things become material and vile. the world becomes a world of sight and sound, of taste and touch. the soul is poured through the senses and dissipated; the current of life stagnates, and grows fetid in sloughs and marshes. minds for whom god is the unknowable have no faith in knowledge at all, except as the equivalent of weight and measure, of taste and touch and smell. now, if all that may be known and desired is reduced to this material expression, how dull and beggarly does not life become,--mere atomic integration and disintegration, the poor human pneumatic-machine purring along the dusty road of matter, bound and helpless and soulless as a clanking engine! no high life, in individuals or nations, is to be hoped for, unless it is enrooted in the infinite spiritual reality,--in god. it is forever indubitable that the highest is not material, and no argument is therefore needed to show that when spiritual ideals lose their power of attraction, life sinks to lower beds. sight is the noblest sense, and the starlit sky is the most sublime object we can behold. but what do we in reality see there? only a kind of large tent, dimly lighted with gas jets. this is the noblest thing the noblest sense reveals. but let the soul appear, and the tent flies into invisible shreds; the heavens break open from abyss to abyss, still widening into limitless expanse, until imagination reels. the gas jets grow into suns, blazing since innumerable ages with unendurable light, and binding whole planetary systems into harmony and life. so infinitely does the soul transcend the senses! the world it lives in is boundless, eternal, sublime. this is its home; this the sphere in which it grows, and awakens to consciousness of kinship with god. this is the fathomless, shoreless abyss of being wherein it is plunged, from which it draws its life, its yearning for the absolute, its undying hope, its love of the best, its craving for immortality, its instinct for eternal things. to condemn it to work merely for money, for position, for applause, for pleasure, is to degrade it to the condition of a slave. it is as though we should take some supreme poet or hero and bid him break stones or grind corn,--he who has the faculty to give to truth its divinest form, and to lift the hearts of nations to the love of heavenly things. whatever our lot on earth may be--whether we toil with the hand, with the brain, or with the heart--we may not bind the soul to any slavish service. let us do our work like men,--till the soil, build homes, refine brute matter, be learned in law, in medicine, in theology; but let us never chain our souls to what they work in. no earthly work can lay claim to the whole life of man; for every man is born for god, for the universe, and may not narrow his mind. we must have some practical thing to do in the world,--some way of living which will place us in harmony with the requirements and needs of earthly life; and what this daily business of ours shall be, each one, in view of his endowments and surroundings, must decide for himself. it is well to bear in mind that every kind of life has its advantages, except an immoral life. whatever we make of ourselves, then,--whether farmers, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, or priests,--let us above all things first have a care that we are men; and if we are to be men, our special business work must form only a part of our life-work. the aim--at least in this way alone can i look at human life--is not to make rich and successful bankers, merchants, farmers, lawyers, and doctors, but to make noble and enlightened men. hence the final thought in all work is that we work not to have more, but to be more; not for higher place, but for greater worth; not for fame, but for knowledge. in a word, the final thought is that we labor to upbuild the being which we are, and not merely to build round our real self with marble and gold and precious stones. this is but the christian teaching which has transformed the world; which declares that it is the business of slaves even, of beggars and outcasts, to work first of all for god and the soul. the end is infinite, the aim must be the highest. not to know this, not to hear the heavenly invitation, is to be shut out from communion with the best; is to be cut off from the source of growth; is to be given over to modes of thought which fatally lead to mediocrity and vulgarity of life. to live for common ends is to be common. the highest faith makes still the highest man; for we grow like the things our souls believe, and rise or sink as we aim high or low. no mirror shows such likeness of the face as faith we live by of the heart and mind. we are in very truth that which we love; and love, like noblest deeds, is born of faith. the lover and the hero reason not, but they believe in what they love and do. all else is accident,--this is the soul of life, and lifts the whole man to itself, like a key-note, which, running through all sounds, upbears them all in perfect harmony. we cannot set a limit to the knowledge and love of man, because they spring from god, and move forever toward him who is without limit. that we have been made capable of this ceaseless approach to an infinite ideal is the radical fact in our nature. through this we are human; through this we are immortal; through this we are lifted above matter, look through the rippling stream of time on the calm ocean of eternity, and beyond the utmost bounds of space, see simple being,--life and thought and love, deathless, imageless, absolute. this ideal creates the law of duty, for it makes the distinction between right and wrong. hence the first duty of man is to make himself like god, through knowledge ever-widening, through love ever-deepening, through life ever-growing. so only can we serve god, so only can we love him. to be content with ignorance is infidelity to his infinite truth. to rest in a lesser love is to deny the boundless charity which holds the heavens together and makes them beautiful, which to every creature gives its fellow, which for the young bird makes the nest, for the child the mother's breast, and in the heart of man sows the seed of faith and hope and heavenly pity. ceaseless growth toward god,--this is the ideal, this is the law of human life, proposed and sanctioned alike by religion, philosophy, and poetry. _dulcissima vita sentire in dies se fieri meliorem._ upward to move along a godward way, where love and knowledge still increase, and clouds and darkness yield to growing day, is more than wealth or fame or peace. no other blessing shall i ever ask. this is the best that life can give; this only is the soul's immortal task for which 't is worth the pain to live. it is man's chief blessedness that there lie in his nature infinite possibilities of growth. the growth of animals comes quickly to an end, and when they cease to grow they cease to be joyful; but man, whose bodily development even is slow, is capable of rising to wider knowledge and purer love through unending ages. hence even when he is old,--if he has lived for what is great and exalted,--his mind is clear, his heart is tender, and his soul is glad. only those races are noble, only those individuals are worthy, who yield without reserve to the power of this impulse to ceaseless progress. behold how the race from which we have sprung--the aryan--breaks forth into ever new developments of strength and beauty in greece, in italy, in france, in england, in germany, in america; creating literature, philosophy, science, art; receiving christian truth, and through its aid rising to diviner heights of wisdom, power, freedom, love, and knowledge. and so there are individuals--and they are born to teach and to rule--for whom to live is to grow; who, forgetting what they have been, and what they are, think ever only of becoming more and more. their education is never finished; their development is never complete; their work is never done. from victories won they look to other battlefields; from every height of knowledge they peer into the widening nescience; from all achievements and possessions they turn away toward the unapproachable infinite, to whom they are drawn. walking in the shadow of the too great light of god, they are illumined, and they are darkened. this makes newton think his knowledge ignorance; this makes saint paul think his heroic virtue naught. oh, blessed men, who make us feel that we are of the race of god; who measure and weigh the heavens; who love with boundless love; who toil and are patient; who teach us that workers can wait! they are in love with life; they yearn for fuller life. life is good, and the highest life is god; and wherever man grows in knowledge, wisdom, and strength, in faith, hope, and love, he walks in the way of heaven. to you, young gentlemen, who are about to quit these halls, to continue amid other surroundings the work of education which here has but begun, what words shall i more directly speak? if hitherto you have wrought to any purpose, you will go forth into the world filled with resolute will and noble enthusiasm to labor even unto the end in building up the being which is yourself, that you may unceasingly approach the type of perfect manhood. this deep-glowing fervor of enthusiasm for what is highest and best is worth more to you, and to any man, than all that may be learned in colleges. if ambition is akin to pride, and therefore to folly, it is none the less a mighty spur to noble action; and where it is not found in youth, budding and blossoming like the leaves and flowers in spring, what promise is there of the ripe fruit which nourishes life? the love of excellence bears us up on the swift wing and plumes of high desire,-- without which whosoe'er consumes his days, leaveth such vestige of himself on earth as smoke in air or foam upon the wave. do not place before your eyes the standard of vulgar success. do not say, i will study, labor, exercise myself, that i may become able to get wealth or office, for to this kind of work the necessities of life and the tendency of the age will drive you; whereas, if you hope to be true and high, it is your business to hold yourselves above the spirit of the age. it is our worst misfortune that we have no ideals. our very religion, it would seem, is not able to give us a living faith in the reality of ideals; for we are no longer wholly convinced that souls live in the atmosphere of god as truly as lungs breathe the air of earth. we find it difficult even to think of striving for what is eternal, all-holy, and perfect, so unreal, so delusive do such thoughts seem. who will understand that to be is better than to have, and that in truth a man is worth only what he is? who will believe that the kingdom of this world, not less than the kingdom of heaven, lies within? who, even in thinking of the worth of a pious and righteous life, is not swayed by some sort of honesty-best-policy principle? we love knowledge because we think it is power; and virtue, because we are told as a rule it succeeds. ah! do you love knowledge for itself?--for it is good, it is godlike to know. do you love virtue for its own sake?--for it is eternally and absolutely right to be virtuous. instead of giving your thoughts and desires to wealth and position, learn to know how little of such things a true and wise man needs; for the secret of a happy life does not lie in the means and opportunities of indulging our weaknesses, but in knowing how to be content with what is reasonable, that time and strength may remain for the cultivation of our nobler nature. ask god to inspire you with some great thought, some abiding love of what is excellent, which may fill you with gladness and courage, and in the midst of the labors, the trials, and the disappointments of life, keep you still strong and serene. chapter vii. right human life. what do we gather hence but firmer faith that every gift of noble origin is breathed upon by hope's perpetual breath; that virtue and the faculties within are vital, and that riches are akin to fear, to change, to cowardice, and death? wordsworth. what is so delightful as spring weather? to it, whatever mystery life can make plain, it reveals. there is universal utterance. water leaps from its winding sheet of snow; the streams spring out to wander till they find their source; the corn sprouts to receive the sun's warm kiss; the buds unfold, the blossoms send forth fragrance, the heavens weep for joy; the birds sing, the children shout, and the fuller pulse of life gives, even to the old, fresh thoughts and young desires. now, what is all this but a symbol of the soul, which feels the urgency of god calling upon it to make itself alive in him and in his universe of truth and beauty? but the season of growth is also the time of blight. a hundred germs perish for one that ripens into wholesome fruit; a hundred young lives suffer physical or moral ruin for one that develops into some likeness of true manhood. and upon what slight causes success or failure seems to depend! as a mere word, a glance, will bring the blood to a maiden's cheek, so may it sow the germ of moral death in the heart of youth. how helpless and ignorant the young are in their seeming strength and smartness: how self-sufficient in their unwisdom, how little amenable to reason, how slow to perceive true ideals. what patient, persevering effort is required to form character, and what a little thing will poison life in its source! how easy it is to see and understand what is coarse and evil, how difficult to appreciate what is pure and excellent. how quickly a boy learns to find pleasure in what is animal or brutal; but what infinite pains must be taken before he is won to the love of truth and goodness. caricature delights him, and he has no eyes for the chaste beauty of perfect art. the story of an outlaw fills him with enthusiasm, and the heroic struggles of godlike souls are for him meaningless. he gazes with envious awe upon some vulgar rich man, and finds a philosopher, or a saint, only queer. he studies because he has been sent to school, where ignorance will expose him to ridicule and humiliation, and possibly too, because he is told that knowledge will help him to win money and influence. however great his proficiency, he is in truth but a barbarian, without wisdom, without reverence, without gentleness. he has been brought only in a vague way into communion with the conscious life of the race; he has no true conception of the dignity of souls, no sense of the beauty of modest and unselfish action. he mistakes rudeness for strength, boastfulness for ability, disrespect for independence, profanity for manliness, brutality for courage. and to add to his misfortune, he is blind to his own weakness and ignorance. a sneer or a jest is his reply to the voice of wisdom, as with a light heart he walks in the road to ruin; and thus it happens that for one who becomes a true and noble man, a hundred go astray or sink into an unintelligent and vulgar kind of life. this fact is concealed from the eyes of the young, from the eyes of the multitude, indeed. as we hide the dead in the earth that we may quickly forget our loss, so society buries from sight and thought those who fail. their number is so great that the oblivion which soon overwhelms them is needful to save even the brave from discouragement. of a hundred college boys the lives of twenty-five will be ruined by dissipation, by sensual indulgence; twenty-five others will be wrecked by unhappy marriages, foolish financial schemes, dishonesty and indolence; of the remaining fifty, forty, let us say, will manage to get on without loss of respectability, while the ten (who are still left) will win a sort of notoriety by getting rich or by getting elected to office. of the hundred will one become a saint, a philosopher, a poet, a statesman, or even a man of superior ability in natural knowledge or literature? and if this estimate is rightly made they all fail; and the emergence of a high and noble mind is so improbable that it may almost be looked upon, like the birth of a genius, as an accident, so impossible is it, with our limited view, to bring such cases within the domain of law. these hundred college boys have been taken from a thousand youths. the nine hundred have remained outside the doors which open into the halls of culture, away from the special influences which thought and ingenuity have created to develop and perfect man's endowments. as they are less favored, we demand less of them, and are content to have them reinforce the unenlightened army of laborers and money-getters. but when we come among those to whom leisure and opportunity are given that they may learn to think truly and to act nobly, and find that they fail in this, as nearly all of them do fail, we are disappointed and saddened. the thoughtless imagine that those who provide food and shelter do the most important work; but such work is the most important only where there is no intellectual, moral, or religious life. that is most necessary which nourishes the highest faculty, and wherever civilization exists, enlightened minds and great characters are indispensable. the animal and the savage, without much difficulty, find what satisfies appetite; but god appoints that only living souls shall provide what keeps souls alive. now this soul-life, which manifests itself in thought, in conduct, in hope, faith, and love, makes us human and lifts us above every other kind of earthly existence. it is our distinctive attribute, the godlike side of our being, which, under penalty of sinking to lower worlds, we must bring out and cultivate. the plant is alive. by its own energy it springs from darkness, it grows, it waves its green leaves beneath the blue heavens; but it is blind, deaf and dumb, senseless, dead to the world of sight and sound, of taste and smell. the animal too is alive, and in a higher way: for all the glories of nature are painted upon its eye; all sounds strike upon its ear; it moves about and has all the sensations of physical pleasure of which man is capable; but it is without thought, without sense of right and wrong, without imagination, without hope and faith. it is plain then that human life, in its highest sense, is life of the soul,--a life of thought and love, of faith and hope, of imagination and desire; and men are high or low as they partake more or less of this true life. by this standard, and by no other, reason requires that we form an estimate of human worth. to be a king, to have money, to live in splendor, to meet with approval from few or many,--is accidental, is something which may happen to an ignorant, a heartless, a depraved, a vulgar man. the most vicious and brutal of men have, again and again, held the most exalted positions, and as a rule cringing and lying, trickery and robbery, or speculation and gambling, have been and are the means by which great fortunes are acquired. position, then, and money are distinguishable from worth; and they may be and often are found where the life of thought and love, of faith and hope, of imagination and desire, is almost wholly wanting. now, it is this life--the only true human life--which education should bring forth and strengthen; and the failure to lead this life, of those who pass through our institutions of learning, is a subject of deep concern for all who observe and reflect; for among them we look for the leaders who shall cause wisdom and goodness to prevail over ignorance and appetite. if those who receive the best nurture and care remain on the low plains of a hardly more than animal existence, what hope is there that the multitude shall rise to nobler ways of living? there is question here of the most vital interests; and if we discover the causes of the evil, a remedy may be found. these causes of failure lie partly in our environment and partly within ourselves. in the home, in which we receive the first and the most enduring impressions, true views and noble aims are frequently wanting; and thus false and low estimates of life are formed at a time when what we learn sinks into the very substance of the mind, and colors and shapes all our future seeing and loving. this primal experience accompanies us, and hangs about us like a mist to shut out the view of fairer worlds. enthusiasm for intellectual and moral excellence is never roused, because our young souls were not made magnetic by the words and deeds of those whom we looked up to as gods. fortunate is he who bears with him into the life-struggle pure memories of a happy home. when i think of the bees i have seen coming back to the hive, honey-laden, in the golden light of setting suns, when i was a boy at home, a feeling comes over me as though i had lived in paradise and been driven forth into a bleak world. when one is young, and one's father and mother are full of health and joy; when the roses are blooming and the brooks are laughing to themselves from simple gladness, and the floating clouds and the silent stars seem to have human thoughts,--what more could we ask of god but to know that all this is eternal, and is from him? in such a mood, how easy it is to turn the childlike soul to the world of spiritual and immortal things. with what efficacy then a mother's soft voice teaches us that we were born upon this earth for no other purpose than to know truth, to love goodness, to do right, that so, having made ourselves godlike, we may forever be with god. and if these high lessons blend in our thought with memories which make home a type of heaven, how shall they not through life be a spur to noble endeavor to accomplish the task thus set us? when great-hearted, high-souled boys go forth to college from homes of intelligence and love, then is there well-founded hope that they shall grow to be wise and helpful men, who know and teach truth, who see and create beauty, who do and make others do what becomes a man. of hardly less importance is the neighborhood in which our early years are passed, and next to the companionship of the home fireside, a boy's best neighbor is nature. well for him shall it be, if, like colts and calves, and all happy young things, he is permitted to breath the wholesome air of woods and fields, to drink from flowing streams, to lie in the shade of trees on the green sward, or to stand alone beneath the silent starlit heavens until the thought and feeling of the infinite and eternal sink deep into his soul, and make it impossible that he should ever look upon the universe of time and space, or the universe of duty's law within his breast, in a shallow or irreverent spirit. little shall be said to him, and little shall he speak, and to the unobservant he shall seem dull; but he is nature's nursling, and she paints her colors on his brain and infuses her strength into his heart. she hardens him and teaches him patience; she shows him real things, fills him with the love of truth, and makes him understand that sham is shame. his progress may be slow; but he will persevere, he will have faith in the power of labor and of time, and when in after years we shall look about for a man with some diogenes' lantern, there are a thousand chances to one that when we find him we shall find him country-born, not city-bred. too soon is the town-boy made self-conscious; he is precocious; all the tricks and devices of civilization are known to him; all artifices and contrivances he sees in shop-windows; the street, the theatre, the newspaper are the rivals of the home, and they quickly teach him irreverence and disobedience. he loses innocence, experience of evil gives him flippant views. he becomes wise in his own conceit; having eyes only for the surfaces of things, he easily persuades himself that he knows all. of such a youth how shall any college make an enlightened, a noble, and a reverent man? but the home and the neighborhood are not our whole environment. as we are immersed in an atmospheric ocean, so do we swim in the current of our national life. to praise this life is easy. we all see and feel how vigorous it is, how confident, how eager. here is a world of busy men and women, active in many directions. they found states, they build cities, they create wealth, they discuss all problems, they try all experiments, they hurry on to new tasks, and think they have done nothing while aught remains to do. they live in the midst of the excitement of ever-recurring elections, of speculation, of financial schemes and commercial enterprises. it is an unrestful, feverish, practical life, in which all the strong natures are thinking of doing something, of gaining something,--a life in the market-place, where high thought and noble conduct are all but impossible, where the effort to make one's self a man, instead of striving to get so many thousands of money, would seem ridiculous. it is a life of inventions and manufactures, of getting and spending, in which we bring forth and consume in a single century what it has taken nature many thousand years to hoard. our aim is to have more rather than to be more; our ideal is that of material progress; our praise is given to those who invent and discover the means of augmenting wealth. liberty is opportunity to get rich; education is the development of the money-getting faculty. our national life may, of course, be looked at from many sides, but the general drift of opinion and effort is in the direction here pointed out. nine tenths of our thought and energy are given to material interests, and these interests represent nine tenths of our achievements. this may be true of men in general, it may be true also that material progress is a condition of moral and intellectual growth; but none the less is it true that right human life is a life of thought and love, of hope and faith, of imagination and desire. consequently in a well-ordered society, the chief aim--nine tenths of all effort, let us say--will have for its object the creation of enlightened and loving men and women, whom faith and hope shall make strong, whom imagination shall refresh, and the desire of perfection shall keep active. the aims which the ideals of democracy suggest are not wholly or chiefly material. we strive, indeed, to create a social condition in which comfort and plenty shall be within the reach of all; but the better among us understand that this is but an inferior part of our work, and they take no delight whatever in our great fortunes and great cities. if democracy is the best government, it follows that it is the kind of government which is most favorable to virtue, intelligence, and religion. it is faint praise to say that in america there is more enterprise, more wealth, than elsewhere. what we should strive to make ourselves able to say, is, that there is here a more truly human life, more public and private honesty, purity, sympathy, and helpfulness; more love of knowledge, more perfect openness to light, greater desire to learn, and greater willingness to accept truth than is to be found elsewhere. it should be our endeavor to create a world of which it may be said, there life is more pleasant, beauty more highly prized, goodness held in greater reverence, the sense of honor finer, the recognition of talent and worth completer than elsewhere. wealth and population should be considered merely as means, which, if we ourselves do not sink beneath our fortune, we shall use to help us to develop on a vast scale, a nobler, freer, and fairer life than hitherto has ever existed. we americans have a great capacity for seeing things as they are. a thousand shams and glittering vanities have gone down before our straight-looking eyes; and because such things fail to impress us, we seem to be irreverent. we must look more steadfastly, deeper still, until we clearly perceive and understand that to live for money is to lead a false and vulgar life, to rest with complacency in mere numbers is to have a superficial and unreal mind. to form a right judgment of a people, as of individuals, we must consider what they are; not what they have, except in so far as their possessions are the result of work which at once forms and reveals character. and we must know that work is good only in as much as it helps to make life human,--that is, intelligent, moral and religious. and what we have the right to demand of those to whom we give a higher education is, that they shall body forth these principles in their lives and become leaders in the task of spreading them among the multitude. we demand, first of all, that they become men whose hearts are pure and loving, whose minds are open and enlightened, whose motives are benevolent and generous, whose purposes are high and religious; and if they are such men, it shall matter little to what special pursuits they turn, for whatever their occupation, honor, truth, and intelligence shall go with them, bearing, like mercy, a blessing for those who give and a blessing for those who receive. the spirit in which they work shall be more than what they do, as they themselves shall be more than what they accomplish. a right spirit transforms the whole man, and the first and highest aim of the educator should be to impart a new heart, a new purpose, which shall bring into play forces that may oppose and overcome those faults of the young of which i have spoken, and which, if not corrected, lead to failure. and here we come to the causes of ill success which lie within ourselves. we have our individual qualities and defects, and we have also the qualities and defects of the people whence we are sprung, and of the time-spirit into which we are born. it is the aim of education, as it is the aim of religion, to lift us above the spirit of the age; but in attempting to do this, they who lose sight of what is true and beneficent in that spirit, commit a serious blunder. a national spirit, too, is a narrow, and often a harsh and selfish spirit; but when culture and religion strive to make us citizens of the world and universally benevolent, a care must be had that we retain what is strong and noble in the character we inherit from our ancestors. the lover of intellectual excellence, however, is little inclined to dwell with complacency either upon his own qualities, or upon the greatness of his country or his age. the untaught optimism which leads the crowd to exaggerate the worth of whatever they in any way identify with themselves, he looks upon with suspicion, if not with aversion. self-complacency is pleasant; but truth alone is good, and they who think least are best content with themselves and with their world. he who seeks to improve his mind, neither boasts of his age and country, nor rails at them; but tries to understand them as he tries to know himself. the important knowledge here is of obstacles and defects; for when these are removed, to advance is easy. the first lesson which we must learn is that in the work of mental culture, time and patience are necessary elements. the young, who are eager and restless, find it difficult to work with patience and perseverance, especially when the reward of labor is remote, and in the excitement and hurry of american life, such work often seems to be impossible. but by this kind of work alone can true culture be acquired. it is this buffoon means when he calls genius a great capacity for taking pains. when albert dürer said, "sir, it cannot be better done;" he simply meant that he had bestowed infinite pains upon his work. now, they who are in a hurry cannot take pains; and they who work for money will take pains only in so far as it is profitable to do so. we must live in our work and love it for its own sake. to do work we love makes us happy, makes us free, and according to its kind educates us; and whatever its kind, it will at least teach us the sovereign virtue of patience, and give us something of the spirit of the old masters who in dingy shops ceased not from labor, and kept their cheerful serenity to the end, though the outcome was only the most perfect fiddle, or a deathless head. but they themselves had the souls of artists, and were honest men, who in their work found joy and freedom, and therefore what they did remains as a source of delight and inspiration. if we find it impossible to put our hearts into our work and consequently impossible to take infinite pains with it, then this is work for which we were not born. the impatient cannot love the labor by which the mind is cultivated, because impatience implies a sense of restraint, a lack of freedom. they are restless, easily grow weary or despondent, find fault with themselves and their task, and either throw off the yoke or bear it in a spirit of disappointment and bitterness. as they fail to make themselves strong and serene, their work bears the marks of haste and feebleness, for work reveals character; it is the likeness of the doer, as style shows the man. then the young are blinded by the glitter and glare of life, by the splendors of position and wealth; they are drawn to what is external; they would be here and there; they love the unchartered liberty of chance desires, and are easily brought to look upon the task of self-improvement as a slavish work. they would have done with study that they may be free, may enter into what they suppose to be a fair and rich heritage. they cannot understand that so long as they are narrow, sensual, and unenlightened, the possession of a world could not make them high or happy. they do not know that to have liberty, without the power of using it for worthy ends, is a curse not a blessing. they imagine that experience of the world's ways and wickedness will make them wise, whereas it will make them depraved. how can they realize that the good of life consists in being, and not in having? that we are worth what our knowledge, love, admiration, hope, faith, and desire make us worth? they will not perceive that happiness and unhappiness are conditions of soul, and consequently that the wise, the loving, and the strong, whatever their outward fortune, are happy, while the ignorant, the heartless, and the weak are miserable. to know ourselves, we should seek to discover the kind of life our influence tends to create. consider the kind of world college boys make for themselves, the things they admire, the companions they find pleasant, the subjects in which they take interest, the books that delight them,--and one great cause of the failure of education will be made plain; for though they are sent to school to be taught by professors, their influence upon one another is paramount. instead of helping one another to see that their real business is to educate themselves, they persuade one another that life is given for common ends and vulgar pleasures. hence they look with envy upon their companions who are the sons of rich men, as they have not lived long enough to learn that the fate of four fifths of the sons of rich men in this country, is moral and physical ruin. if such is the public opinion of the world in which they live; and if even strong men are feeble in the presence of public opinion,--how shall we find fault with them for not being attracted by the ideals of intellectual and moral excellence. for the trained mind even to think is difficult, and for them independent thought is almost impossible. they do not know the little less than creative power of right education, or that as we are changed by action, we are transformed by thought. what patient labor may do to exalt and refine the mental faculties, until we become capable of entering into the life of every age and every people, has not been shown to them; and hence they are not inspired by the high hope of dwelling, in very truth, with all the noble and heroic souls who have passed through this world and left record of themselves. we bid the youth learn many things which he cannot but find both useless and uninteresting. and yet unless we discover the secret of winning him to the love of study, the educational value of what he learns is lost; for what leaves him unmoved, leaves him unimproved. his information and accomplishments are comparatively unimportant. what he himself is, and what his real self gives us grounds for hoping he shall become, is the true concern. to be able to translate Ã�schylus or plato is not a great thing; but it is a great thing to have the greek's sense of what is fair, noble and intellectual. to be able to solve a complex mathematical problem may be unimportant; but to have the mental habit of accurate, close, patient thinking is important. it is easy to forget one's greek or the higher mathematics; but an intellectual or a moral habit is not easily lost. he who has right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has only brilliant attainments. it is an error, and a very common one, to suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of knowledge are best taught. our whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral, is subject to the law of education. we may educate the eye, the ear, the hand, the foot; and each member of the body may be trained in many ways. the eye of the microscopist has received a training different from that of the painter; the sculptor's hand has been taught a cunning unlike that of the surgeon; the voice of the orator is developed in one way, that of the singer in another. and so the faculties of the mind may be drawn forth, and each one in various ways. the powers of observation, of reflection, of intuition, of imagination, are all educable. one of the most important and most difficult lessons to learn is that of attention. we know only what we are conscious of, and we are conscious only of that to which we give heed. if we but hold the mind to any subject with perseverance, it will deliver its secret. the little knowledge we have is often vague and unreal, because we are heedless, because we have never taught ourselves to dwell in conscious communion with the objects of thought. the trained eye sees innumerable beauties which are hidden from others, and so the mind which is taught to look right sees truths the uneducated can never know. we may be taught to judge as well as to look. indeed, once we have learned to see things as they are, correct opinions and judgments naturally follow. all faculty is the result of education. poets, orators, philosophers, and saints bring not their gifts into the world with them; but by looking and thinking, doing and striving, they rise from the poor elements of half-conscious life to the clear vision of truth and beauty. natural endowments are not equal; but the chief cause of inequality lies in the unequal efforts which men make to develop their endowments. the lack of imagination in the multitude makes their life dull, uninteresting, and material, and it is assumed that we are born with, or without, imagination, and that there is no remedy for this misery. and those who admit that imagination is subject to the law of development, frequently hold that it should be repressed rather than strengthened. doubtless the imagination can be cultivated, just as the eye or the ear, the judgment or the reason, can be cultivated; and since imagination, like faith, hope, and love, helps us to live in higher and fairer worlds, an educator is false to his calling when he leaves it unimproved. the classics, and especially poetry, are the great means of intellectual culture, because more than anything else they have power to exalt and ennoble the imagination. to suppose that this faculty is one which only poets and artists need, is to take a shallow and partial view. the historian, the student of nature, the statesman, the minister of religion, the teacher, the mechanic even, if they are to do good work, must possess imagination, which is at once an intellectual, a moral, and a religious faculty. it is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. it is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its solemn mystery. those powers within us which are directly related to conduct, the impulses to self-preservation, and to the propagation of the race, are subject to the law of education, not less than our physical and intellectual endowments. and the importance of dealing rightly with these powers is readily perceived if we reflect that conduct is the greater part of human life, which is a life of thought and love, of hope and faith, of imagination and desire. as we can educate the faculties of thought and imagination, so can we develop the power to love, to hope, to believe, and to desire. when there is question of the intellect, teachers seek to impart information rather than to strengthen the mind, and when there is question of the moral nature, they have recourse to precepts and maxims instead of striving to confirm the will and to direct impulse. it is generally held, in fact, that will is a gift, not a growth, and the same view is taken of all our moral dispositions. we are supposed to receive from nature a warm or a cold heart, a hopeful or a despondent temper, a believing or a skeptical turn of mind, a spiritual or a sensual bent. now as i have already admitted, endowments are unlike; but what has this to do with the drift of the argument? minds, though by nature unequal, may all be educated; and so wills may be educated, and so that which makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth, strengthened, and refined. emerson, whose thought is predominantly spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties, confusing strength of will with health. "courage," he says, "is the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... when one has a plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." but will is a moral rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it may be cultivated and directed to noble aims and ends. and if the teacher perform this work with fine knowledge and tact, he becomes an educator; for upon the will, more than upon the intellectual faculties, success or failure depends. whatever we are able to will, we are able to learn to do; and the best service we can render another is to rouse and confirm within him the will to live and to work, that he may make himself a complete man, that thus he may become a benefactor of men and a co-worker with god. the rational will, which is the educated will, should give impulse and guidance to all our thinking, loving, and doing. it should control appetite; it should nourish faith and hope; it should lead us on through the illusory world of sensual delights, through the hardly less illusory world of wealth and power, still bidding us look and see that the world to which the conscious self really belongs, is infinite and eternal, and that to seek to rest in aught else is to apostatize from reason and conscience. thus it would awaken in us a divine discontent, a sacred unrest, which might urge us on through the darkness of appetite and the unwholesome air of avarice and ambition, whispering to us that our life-work is to know truth, to love beauty, to do righteousness. to none is the education of the will so necessary as to the lovers of intellectual excellence, for they who live in the world of ideas are easily content to let the world of deeds take care of itself. as the astronomer sees the earth lost like a grain of sand in infinite space, so to the wide and deep view of one who is familiar with the course of human thought and action, what any man, what the whole race of man, may do, can seem but insignificant. from the vanity and noise of actors who fret and storm for their brief hour, and then pass forever from life's stage, he flies to ideal worlds where truth never changes, where beauty never grows old, and lives more richly blest than lovers in tempe or the dales of arcady. and then the habit of looking at things from many sides leads to doubt, hesitation, and inaction. while the wise deliberate, the young and inexperienced have won or lost the battle. thus the purely intellectual life tends to weaken faith, hope, and desire, which are the sources whence conduct springs, the drying up of which leaves us amid barren wastes, where high thinking, if it be not impossible, brings neither strength nor joy; for the secret of strength and joy lies in doing and not in thinking. it is a law of our nature that conduct brings the most certain and the most permanent satisfaction, and hence whatever our ideals, the pursuit should be inspired by the sense of duty. "stern law-giver! yet thou dost wear the godhead's most benignant grace; nor know we anything so fair as is the smile upon thy face. flowers laugh before thee on their beds and fragrance in thy footing treads." then only do we move with certain step when we hear god's voice bidding us go forward, as he commands the starry host to fly onward, and all living things to spring upward to light and warmth. when we understand that he has made progress the law of life, we learn to feel that not to grow is not to live. then our view is enlarged; we become lovers of perfection; we cherish every gift, and in many ways we strive to cultivate the many powers which go to the making of a man. they all are from him, and from him is the effort by which they are improved. we were born to make ourselves alive in him and in his universe, and like the setter in the field, we stretch eye and ear and nose to catch whatever message may be borne to us from his boundless game park. we observe, reflect, compare; we read best books; we listen to whoever speaks what he knows and feels to be truth. we take delight in whatever in nature is sublime or beautiful, and fresh thoughts and innocent hearts make us glad. wherever an atom thrills, there too is god, and in him we feel the thrill and are at home. our faith grows pure; our hope is confirmed; and our love and sympathy identify us with an ever-widening sphere of life beyond us. the exclusive self passes into the larger movement of the social and religious world around us, which, as we now realize, is also within us, giving aims and motives to our love and self-devotion. we understand that what hurts another can never help us, and that our private good must tend to become a general blessing. thus we find and love ourselves in the intellectual, moral, and religious life of the race, which is a type and symbol of the infinite life of god, the omen and promise of the soul's survival. as we become conscious of ourselves only through communion with what is not ourselves, so we truly live only when we live for god and the world he creates,--losing life that we may find it; dying, like seed-corn, that we may rise to a new and richer life. not what gratifies our selfish or sensual nature will help us to lead this right human life; but that which illumines and deepens thought and love, which gives to faith a boundless scope, to hope an everlasting foundation, to desire the infinite beauty which, though unseen, is felt, like memory of music fled. the unseen world ceases to be a future world; and is recognized as the very world in which we now think and love, and so intellectual and moral life passes into the sphere of religion. we no longer pursue ideals which forever elude us, but we become partakers of the divine life; for in giving ourselves to the eternal and infinite we find god in our souls. the ideal is made real; god is with us, and through faith, hope, and love we are one with him, and all is well. henceforth in seeking to know more, to become more, we are animated by a divine spirit. now we may grow old, still learning many things, still smitten with the love of beauty, still finding delight in fresh thoughts and innocent pleasures, and it may be that we shall be found to be teachers of wisdom and of holiness. then, indeed, shall we be happy, for it is better to teach truth than to win battles. a war-hero supposes a barbarous condition of the race, and when all shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be the greatest and the best. chapter viii. university education. as they who look on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass away, while the moving element remains,--so we to-day beholding ancient faith, laying, in the new world, the cornerstone of an institution which better than anything else symbolizes the aim and tendency of modern life, find ourselves dwelling in thought upon what has been and what will be. on the one hand rises the venerable form of that religion whose voice re-echoed in the hearts of abraham, moses, david, and isaiah; whose lips, when the saviour spoke, uttered diviner truth and thrilled the hearts of men with purer love, living with them in deserts and catacombs, leading them along bloodstained ways to victory and peace, until at length the church gleamed forth from amid the parting storm-clouds and shone like a mountain-built city bathed in sunlight. on the other stands the genius of the republic, the embodied spirit of the sovereign people, who, accepting as literal truth the christian principles that god is a father, and men brothers and therefore equal, strive to take from political society the blindness and fatality of natural law, and to endow it with the divine and human attributes of justice, mercy, and intelligence. from the very beginning our american history is full of religious zeal, of high courage and strong endeavor. when columbus, saddened by the frivolousness or the perfidy of courts, but unshaken in his purpose, walked the streets of the spanish capital, lonely and forsaken, the children, as he passed along, would point to their foreheads and smile, for was not his mind unhinged, and did he not believe the world was round and on the other side men walked like flies upon a ceiling? but a woman's heart understood that his folly was of the kind which is the wisdom of god, and with her help he set sail, not timidly or doubting like the portuguese who for fifty years hugged the african coast, advancing and then receding, but facing the awful and untraveled ocean with a heart stronger than its storm-swept billows, he steered due west. in his journal, day after day, he wrote these simple but sublime words, "that day he sailed westward, which was his course." and still, as hope rose and fell, as misgivings and terrors seized on his men, as the compass varied in inexplicable ways as though they were entering regions where the very laws of nature change, the soul of the great admiral stood firm and each evening he wrote again the self-same words, "that day he sailed westward which was his course," until at length seeing what he foresaw, he gave to christendom another world and enlarged the boundaries and scope of earthly life. what hearts had not the men who in new england, in virginia, in maryland, and elsewhere, settled in little bands on the edge of vast and unexplored regions, covered by interminable forests, where savages lay in wait, athirst for blood. we hear without surprise that wise and prudent men looked upon the early attempts to take possession of america as not less wild and visionary than the legendary exploits of amadis de gaul; but what utopian dreamer, what poet soaring in the high regions of his fancy, could have imagined two centuries and a half ago the beauty, the power, the free and majestic sweep of the stream of human life which has poured across this continent? who could have dared to hope that the religious exiles who sought here a home for the christian conscience were a seed, the least of all, which was destined to grow into a tree whose boughs should shelter the land, and bring refreshment to the weary and heavy-laden from every part of the earth? who could have thought that these fugitives from the tyrant's power would, in little more than a century, grow like the tribes of israel into a people able to withstand the onslaughts of the oppressor, and to abolish forever within their borders despotic rule? who could have had faith that men of different creeds, speaking various tongues, bred in unlike social conditions, would here coalesce and co-operate for the general purposes of free government? above all, who could have believed that a form of government rarely tried, even in small states, and when tried found practicable only for brief periods, would here become so stable, so strong, that every hamlet, every village, is self-poised and manages its own affairs? the achievement is greater than we are able to know; nor does it lie chiefly in the millions who coming from many lands have here made homes and found themselves free; nor in the building of cities, the clearing of forests, the draining of swamps, the binding of two oceans, and the opening of lines of rapid communication in every direction. not to numbers or wealth do we owe our significance among the nations; but to the fact that we have shown that respect for law is compatible with civil and religious liberty; that a free people can become prosperous and strong, and preserve order without king or standing army; that the state and the church can move in separate orbits and still co-operate for the common welfare; that men of different races and beliefs may live together in peace; that in spite of an abnormally rapid increase of population and of wealth, and of the many evils thence resulting, the prevailing tendency is to sanity of thought and sentiment, thus plainly manifesting the vigor of our life and institutions; that the government of the majority, where men put their trust in god and in knowledge, is in the end the government of the good and the wise. we have thus helped to establish confidence in human nature; to prove that man's instincts, like the laws of nature, are conservative; to show that the enthusiasts who would overturn everything, destroy everything, have no abiding place or influence in the affairs of a free people, as volcanic and cyclonic forces are but transitory and superficial in their action upon the earth. we have shown in a word that under a popular government, where men are faithful and intelligent, it is as impossible that society should become chaotic as that the planets should dissolve into star dust. it is difficult to realize what an advance this is on all previous views of political life; how full it is of promise, how accordant with the sentiments of the noblest minds in every part of the world. it gives us the leading place among the nations which are moving along rising ways to higher and freer life. to turn to the catholic church in america; all observers remark its great development here, the rapid increase in the number of its adherents, its growth in wealth and influence, the firm yet gentle hand with which it brings heterogeneous populations under the control of a common faith and discipline, the ease with which it adapts itself to new conditions and organizes itself in every part of the country. it is not a little thing, in spite of unfriendly public opinion and of great and numerous obstacles, in spite of the burden which high achievements impose and of the lack of easy and supple movement which gathering years imply, to enter new fields, to bend one's self to unaccustomed work, and to struggle for the right to live in the midst of a generation heedless of the good, and mindful only of the evil which has been associated with one's life. this is what the catholic church in america has had to do, and has done with a success which recalls the memory of the spread of christianity through the roman empire. it counts its members here by millions, while a hundred years ago it counted them by thousands; and its priests, churches, schools, and institutions of charity it reckons by the thousand, while then they could be counted hardly by tens. public opinion which was then hostile is no longer so in the same degree. prejudice has not indeed ceased to exist; for where there is question of religion, of society, of politics, even the fairest minds fail to see things as they are, and the multitude, it may be supposed, will never become impartial; but the tendency of our life and of the age is opposed to bigotry, and as we lose faith in the justice and efficacy of persecution, we perceive more clearly that true religion can neither be defended nor propagated by violence and intolerance, by appeals to sectarian bitterness and national hatred. by none is this more sincerely acknowledged, or more deeply felt, than by the catholics of the united states. the special significance of our american catholic history is not found in the phases of our life which attract attention, and are a common theme for declamation; but it lies in the fact that our example proves that the church can thrive where it is neither protected nor persecuted, but is simply left to itself to manage its own affairs and to do its work. such an experiment had never been made when we became an independent people, and its success is of world-wide import, because this is the modern tendency and the position toward the church which all the nations will sooner or later assume; just as they all will be forced finally to accept popular rule. the great underlying principle of democracy,--that men are brothers and have equal rights, and that god clothes the soul with freedom,--is a truth taught by christ, is a truth proclaimed by the church; and the faith of christians in this principle, in spite of hesitations and misgivings, of oppositions and obstacles and inconceivable difficulties, has finally given to it its modern vigor and beneficent power. the spirit of love and mercy, which is the spirit of christ, breathes like a heavenly zephyr through the whole earth, and under its influence the age is moved to attempt greater things than hitherto have seemed possible. never before has sympathy among men been so widespread; never has the desire to come to the relief of all who suffer pain or wrong been so general or so intelligent. to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick, seems now comparatively a little thing. our purpose is to create a social condition in which none shall lack food or clothing or shelter; following the divine command: "o israel, thou shalt not suffer that there be a beggar or a pauper within thy borders." kindness to slaves ceased to be a virtue for us when we abolished slavery; and we look forward to the day when nor man nor woman nor child shall work and still be condemned to a life of misery. that great blot upon the page of history, woman's fate, has partly been erased, and we are drawing near to the time when in the world as in christ there shall be made no distinction between slave and freeman, between man and woman. if we compare modern with ancient and medieval epochs, wars have become less frequent, and in war men have become more humane and merciful. increasing knowledge of human life as it is found in the savage, in the barbarian, and in the civilized man, fixes us more unalterably in our belief in the worth of progress. the savage and the barbarian are hopelessly ignorant, and therefore weak and wretched, since ignorance is the chief source of man's misery. "my people," says the prophet, "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." from ignorance rather than from depravity have sprung the most appalling crimes, the most pernicious vices. in darkness of mind men have worshiped senseless material things, have deified every cruel and carnal passion; at the dictate of unenlightened conscience they have oppressed, laid waste, and murdered; for lack of knowledge they have perished in the snows of winter, been wasted by miasmatic air, have fallen victims to famine and pestilence, and have bowed for centuries beneath the degrading yoke of tyranny. science is a ministering angel. the jesuits by bringing quinine to the knowledge of civilized man have done more to relieve suffering than all the builders of hospitals. vaccine has wrought more potently than the all-forgetful love of mothers; more than all the patriots gunpowder has won victories over tyrants; and the printing-press is a greater teacher than philosophers, writers, poets, schools, and universities. like a heavenly messenger the compass guides man whithersoever he will go, still turning to the one fixed point, as turn the hearts of the children of men to god. the nations intermingle and lose their jealousies and hatreds, borne everywhere by the power of steam; and the thoughts of men are carried by lightning round the whole earth. commerce has become a world-wide interchange of good offices; and while it adds to the comfort of all, it enlarges thought and strengthens sympathy. our greater knowledge has enabled us to lengthen human life; to extinguish some of the most virulent diseases; to perform surgical operations without pain; to increase the fertility of the soil; to make pestilential regions habitable; to illumine our cities and homes at night with the brilliancy of day; to give to laborers better clothing and dwellings than princes in other ages have had. it has opened to our vision the limitless sidereal expanse, and revealed to us a heavenly glory which transcends the imagination of inspired poets. before this new light the earth has dwindled away and become an atom, as the stars hide when the great sun wheels upward from out the night. we have looked into the very heart of the sun itself, and know of what it is made; and with the microscope we have caught sight of the marvelous world of the infinitesimally small, have seen what human eye had never beheld, and have watched unseen life building up and breaking down all living organisms. we have learned how to walk secure in the depths of ocean, to soar in mid-air, to rush on our way unimpeded through the stony hearts of mountains. we see the earth grow from a fire-ball to be the home of man; we know its anatomy; we read its history; and we behold races of animals which passed away ages before the eye of man looked forth upon the boundless mystery and saw the shadow of the presence of the infinite god. better than the greeks we know the history of greece; than the romans that of rome. words that were never written have whispered to us the dreams and hopes of people that perished and left no record; and the more we have learned of the past the more clearly do we perceive how far the present age surpasses all others in knowledge and in power. the mighty movement by which this development has been caused, has not slackened, but seems each day to gain new force; and the marvelous changes, political, social, moral, intellectual, and physical, which give character to the nineteenth century are but the prelude to a drama which shall make all past achievements of our race appear weak and contemptible. to imagine that our superiority is merely mechanical and material is to fail to see things as they are. greater individuals may have lived than now are living, but never before has the world been governed with so much wisdom and so much justice; and the power back of our progress is intellectual, moral, and religious. science is not material. it is the product of intellect and will; and the great founders of modern science, copernicus, kepler, bacon, descartes, galileo, newton, leibnitz, ampère, liebig, fresnel, faraday, and mayer, were christians. "however paradoxical it may sound," says dubois-reymond, "modern science owes its origin to christianity." since the course of events is left chiefly to the direction of natural causes, and since science enables man to bend the stars, the lightning, the winds, and the waves to his purposes, what shall resist the onward march of those who are armed with such power? since life is a warfare, a struggle, how shall the ignorant and the thoughtless survive in a conflict in which natural knowledge has placed in the hands of the wise forces which the angels may not wield? since the prosperity of the church is left subject to human influence, shall the son of man find faith on earth when he comes if the most potent instrument god has given to man is abandoned to those who know not christ? why should we who reckon it a part of the glory of the church in the past that she labored to civilize barbarians, to emancipate slaves, to elevate woman, to preserve the classical writings, to foster music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and eloquence, think it no part of her mission now to encourage scientific research? to be catholic is to be drawn not only to the love of whatever is good and beautiful, but also to the love of whatever is true; and to do the best work the catholic church must fit herself to a constantly changing environment, to the character of every people, and to the wants of each age. has not christ declared that whoever is not against us is for us; and may we not therefore find friends in all who work for worthy ends,--for liberty and knowledge, for increase of power and love? this large sympathy, which true religion and the best culture promote, is catholic, and it is also american; for here with us, i think, the whole world is for men of good-will who are not fools. we who are the children of ancient faith, who inherit the boon from fathers who held it to be above all price, are saved, where there is question of former times, from irreverent thoughts and shallow views. for us the long past ages have not flown; like our own deeds they travel with us still; reviling them, we but ourselves disown; we are the stream their many currents fill. from their rich youth our manhood has upgrown, and in our blood their hopes and loves yet thrill. but if like the old, the church can look to the past, like the young, she can look to the future. if there are catholics who linger regretful amid glories that have vanished, there are also catholics who in the midst of their work feel a confidence which leaves no place for regret; who well understand that the earthly environment in which the church lives is subject to change and decay, and that new surroundings imply new tasks and impose new duties. the splendor of the medieval church, its worldly power, the pomp of its ceremonial, the glittering pageantry in which its pontiffs and prelates vied with kings and emperors in gorgeous display, are gone, or going; and were it given to man to recall the past, the spirit whereby it lived would still be wanting. but it is the mark of youthful and barbarous natures to have eyes chiefly for the garb and circumstance of religion, to see the body only and not the soul. at all events the course of life is onward, and enthusiasm for the past cannot become the source of great and far reaching action. the present alone gives opportunity; and the face of hope turns to the future, and the wise are busy with what lies at hand, with immediate duty, and not with schemes for bringing back the things that have passed away. leaving their dead with the dead, they work for life and for the living. as in each individual there is a better and a worse self, so in each age there are conflicting tendencies; but it is the part of enlightened minds and generous hearts to see what is true, and to love what is good. the fault-finder is hateful both in life and in literature; and it is iago, the most despicable of characters, whom shakespeare makes say, "i am nothing if not critical." a christian of all men is without excuse for being fretful and sour, for thinking and acting as though this were a devil's world, and not the eternal god's, as though there were danger lest the almighty should not prevail. we know that god is, and therefore that all will be well; and if it were conceivable that god is not, it would still be the part of a true man to labor to make knowledge and virtue prevail. the criticism of the age which gives a better understanding of its needs is good; all other is baneful. opinion rules the world, and a right appreciation of the influences by which opinion is molded is the surest guide to a knowledge of the time. in ignorant and barbarous ages the notions and beliefs of men are crude, and are controlled by a few, for only a few possess knowledge and influence; and even in the age of pericles and augustus, the thought of mankind means the thoughts of some dozens of men. a few vigorous minds founded schools of opinion and style, became intellectual dictators, and asserted their authority for centuries. as the art of printing was yet unknown, and books were rare, the teacher was the speaker; orators held sway over the destiny of nations; and the christian pulpit became the world's university. but the printing-press in giving to thought a permanent form which is placed under the eyes of the whole world has made the passion, the splendor, the majestic phrase of oratory seem unreal as an actor's speech, evanescent as a singer's tones; and hence the pulpit and the rostrum, though they still have influence, can never again exercise the control over opinion which belonged to them when all men had not become readers. what is true of eloquence may be affirmed of all art. in spite of ourselves, even the best of us find it difficult to make art a serious business; and unless taken seriously, it is vain, loses its soul, and falls into the hands of pretenders and sentimentalists. once painting, sculpture, architecture, and song were the expression of thoughts and moods which irresistibly appealed for utterance; but with us they are a fashion, like cosmetics and laces. poetry, the highest of arts, has lost its original character of song, and the poet now deals, in an imaginative way, with problems which puzzle metaphysicians and theologians. the causes that have robbed art of so much of its charm and power have necessarily diminished the influence of ceremonial worship, which is the artistic expression of the soul's faith and love, of its hopes and yearnings. we are, indeed, still subdued by the majesty of dimly lighted cathedrals, by solemn music, and the various symbolism of the ritual, but we feel not the deep awe of our fathers whose knees furrowed the pavement stones, and whose burning lips kissed them smooth; and to blame ourselves for this would serve no purpose. to those who find no pleasure in sweet sounds, we pipe in vain, and argument to show that one ought to be moved by what leaves him cold, is meaningless. emotion is spontaneous, and adorers, like lovers, neither ask nor care for reasons. there is in fact an element of illusion in feeling; passion is non-rational; and when the spirit of the time is intellectual, men are seldom devout, however religious they may be. the scientific habit of mind is not favorable to childlike and unreasoning faith; and the new views of the physical universe which the modern mind is forced to take, bring us face to face with new problems in religion and morals, in politics and society. whatever we may think of the past, whatever we may fear or hope for the future, if we would make an impression on the world around us, we must understand the thoughts, the purposes, and the methods of those with whom we live; and we must at the same time recognize that though the truth of religion be unchangeable, the mind of man is not so, and that the point of view varies not only from people to people, and from age to age, but from year to year in the growing thought of the individual and of the world. as in travelling round the earth, time changes, and when it is morning here, it is evening there, so with difference of latitude and longitude, of civilization and barbarism, the opinions and manners of men grow different. they who observe from positions widely separate do not see the same things, or do not see them in the same light. proof for a peasant is not proof for a philosopher; and arguments which in one age are held to be unanswerable, in another lose power to convince, or become altogether meaningless. it is not to be imagined that the hearts of christians should again burn with the devotional enthusiasm and the warlike ardor of the crusaders; and just as little is it conceivable that men should again become passionately interested in the questions which in the fourth and fifth centuries filled the world with the noise of theological disputation. it were mere loss of time to beat now the waste fields of the protestant controversy. wiseman's book on science and revealed religion, which fifty years ago attracted attention, lies like a stranded ship on a deserted shore, and attempts of the kind are held in slight esteem. the immature mind is eager to reduce faith to knowledge; but the accomplished thinker understands that knowledge begins and ends in faith. there is oppugnancy between belief in an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful god, and belief in the divine origin of nature, whose face is smeared with filth and blood; but we hold that the conflicting faiths and increasing knowledge cannot add to the difficulty. on the contrary, the higher the intelligence, the purer nature seems to grow. the chemical elements are as fair and sweet in the corpse as in the living body, and the earthquake and the cyclone obey the same laws which make the waters flow and the zephyrs breathe perfume. it is the imagination and not the reason that is overwhelmed by the idea of unending space and time. to the intellect, eternity is not more mysterious than the present moment, and the distance which separates us from the remotest stars is not more incomprehensible than a hand's breadth. science is the widening thought of man, working on the hypothesis of universal intelligibility toward universal intelligence; and religion is the soul, escaping from the labyrinth of matter to the light and love of the infinite; and on the heights they meet and are at peace. meanwhile they who seek natural knowledge must admit that faith, hope, and love are the everlasting foundations of human life, and that a philosophic creed is as sterile as platonic love; and they who uphold religion must confess that faith which ignorance alone can keep alive is little better than superstition. to strive to attain truth under whatever form is to seek to know god; and yet no ideal can be true for man, unless it can be made to minister to faith, hope, and love; for by them we live. let us then teach ourselves to see things as they are, without preoccupation or misgivings lest what is should ever make it impossible, for us to believe and hope in the better yet to be. science and morality need religion as much as thought and action require emotion; and beyond the utmost reach of the human mind lie the boundless worlds of mystery where the soul must believe and adore what it can but dimly discern. the copernican theory of the heavens startled believers at first; but we have long since grown accustomed to the new view which reveals to us a universe infinitely more glorious than aught the ancients ever imagined. we do not rightly see either the things which are always around us, or those which for the first time are presented to our eyes; and when novel theories of the visible world, which in some sense is part of our very being, profoundly alter our traditional notions, the mind is disturbed and overclouded, and the lapse of time alone can make plain the real bearing of the new learning upon life, upon religion, and upon society. there can be no doubt but increase of knowledge involves incidental evils, just as the progress of civilization multiplies our wants; but the wise are not therefore driven to seek help from ignorance and barbarism. whatever the loss, all knowledge is gain. the evils that spring from enlightenment of mind will find their remedy in greater enlightenment. such at least is the faith of an age whose striking characteristic is confidence in education. men have ceased to care for the bliss there may be in ignorance, and those who dread knowledge, if such there still be, are as far away from the life of this century as the dead whose bones crumbled to dust a thousand years ago. the aim the best now propose to themselves is to provide not wealth or pleasure, or better machinery or more leisure, but a higher and more effective kind of education; and hence whatever one's preoccupation, whether social, political, religious, or industrial, the question of education forces itself upon his attention. pedagogy has grown to be a science, and chairs are founded in universities to expound the theory and art of teaching. the learning of former times has become the ignorance of our own; and the classical writings have ceased to be the treasure-house of knowledge, and in consequence their educational value has diminished. whoever three hundred years ago wished to acquaint himself with philosophic, poetic, or eloquent expression of the best that was known, was compelled to seek for it in the greek and latin authors; but now greek and latin are accomplishments chiefly, and a classical scholar, if unacquainted with modern science and literature, is hopelessly ignorant. "if any one," said hegius, the teacher of erasmus, "wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read greek;" and in his day this was as true as it is false and absurd in our own. in the middle ages, latin was made the groundwork of the educational system, not on account of any special value it may have been supposed to possess as a mental discipline, but because it was the language of the learned, of all who spoke or wrote on questions of religion, philosophy, literature, and science; but now, who that is able to think dreams of burying his thought in a greek or roman urn? the germans in philosophy, the english in poetry, have surpassed the greeks; and french prose is not inferior in qualities of style to the ancient classics, and in wealth of thought and knowledge so far excels them as to preclude comparison. the life of greece and rome, compared with ours, was narrow and superficial; their ideas of nature were crude and often grotesque; they lacked sympathy; the greek had no sense of sin; the roman none of the mercy which tempers justice. in their eyes the child was not holy, woman was not sacred, the slave was not man. their notion of liberty was political and patriotic merely; the human soul, standing forth alone, and appealing from states and emperors to the living god, was to them a scandal. now literature is the outgrowth of a people's life and thought, and the nobler the life, the more enlightened the thought, the more valuable will the expression be; and since there is greater knowledge, wisdom, freedom, justice, mercy, goodness, power, in christendom now than ever existed in the pagan world, it would certainly be an anomaly if modern literature were inferior to the classical. the ancients, indeed, excel us in the sense for form and symmetry. there is also a freshness in their words, a joyousness in their life, a certain heroic temper in their thinking and acting, which give them power to engage the emotions; and hence to deny them exceptional educational value is to take a partial view. but even though we grant that the study of their literatures is in certain respects the best intellectual discipline, education, it must be admitted, means knowledge as well as training; and thorough training is something more than refined taste. it is strength as well, and ability to think in many directions and on many subjects. nothing known to men should escape the attention of the wise; for the knowledge of the age determines what is demanded of the scholar. and since it is our privilege to live at a time when knowledge is increasing more rapidly even than population and wealth, we must, if we hope to stand in the front ranks of those who know, keep pace with the onward movement of mind. to turn away from this outburst of splendor and power; to look back to pagan civilization or christian barbarism,--is to love darkness more than light. aristotle is a great mind, but his learning is crude and his ideas of nature are frequently grotesque. saint thomas is a powerful intellect; but his point of view in all that concerns natural knowledge has long since vanished from sight. what poverty of learning does not the early medieval scheme of education reveal; and when in the twelfth century the idea of a university rises in the best minds, how incomplete and vague it is! amid the ruins of castles and cathedrals we grow humble, and think ourselves inferior to men who thus could build. but they were not as strong as we, and they led a more ignorant and a blinder life; and so when we read of great names of the past, the mists of illusion fill the skies, and our eyes are dimmed by the glory of clouds tinged with the splendors of a sun that has set. certainly a true university will be the home both of ancient wisdom and of new learning; it will teach the best that is known, and encourage research; it will stimulate thought, refine taste, and awaken the love of excellence; it will be at once a scientific institute, a school of culture, and a training ground for the business of life; it will educate the minds that give direction to the age; it will be a nursery of ideas, a centre of influence. the good we do men is quickly lost, the truth we leave them remains forever; and therefore the aim of the best education is to enable students to see what is true, and to inspire them with the love of all truth. professional knowledge brings most profit to the individual; but philosophy and literature, science and art, elevate and refine the spirit of the whole people, and hence the university will make culture its first aim, and its scope will widen as the thoughts and attainments of men are enlarged and multiplied. here if anywhere shall be found teachers whose one passion is the love of truth, which is the love of god and of man; who look on all things with a serene eye; who bring to every question a calm, unbiased mind; who, where the light of the intellect fails, walk by faith and accept the omen of hope; who understand that to be distrustful of science is to lack culture, to doubt the good of progress is to lack knowledge, and to question the necessity of religion is to want wisdom; who know that in a god-made and god-governed world it must lie in the nature of things that reason and virtue should tend to prevail, in spite of the fact that in every age the majority of men think foolishly and act unwisely. how divine is not man's apprehensive endowment! when we see beauty fade, the singer lose her charm, the performer his skill, we feel no commiseration; but when we behold a noble mind falling to decay, we are saddened, for we cannot believe that the godlike and immortal faculty should be subject to death's power. it is a reflection of the light that never yet was seen on sea or land; it is the magician who shapes and colors the universe, as a drop of water mirrors the boundless sky. is not this the first word the eternal speaks?--"let there be light." and does not the blessed saviour come talking of life, of light, of truth, of joy, and peace? have not the christian nations moved forward following after liberty and knowledge? is not our religion the worship of god in spirit and in truth? is not its motive love, divine and human, and is not knowledge love's guide and minister? the future prevails over the present, the unseen over what touches the senses only in high and cultivated natures; and it is held to be the supreme triumph of god over souls when the young, to whom the earth seems to be heaven revealed and made palpable, turn from all the beauty and contagious joy to seek, to serve, to love him who is the infinite and only real good. yet this is what we ask of the lovers of intellectual excellence, who work without hope of temporal reward and without the strength of heart which is found in obeying the divine will; for mental improvement is seldom urged as a religious duty, although it is plain that to seek to know truth is to seek to know god, in whom and through whom and by whom all things are, and whose infinite nature and most awful power may best be seen by the largest and most enlightened mind. mind is heaven's pioneer making way for faith, hope, and love, for higher aims and nobler life; and to doubt its worth and excellence is to deny the reasonableness of religion, since belief, if not wholly blind, must rest on knowledge. the best culture serves spiritual and moral ends. its aim and purpose is to make reason prevail over sense and appetite; to raise man not only to a perception of the harmonies of truth, but also to the love of whatever is good and fair. not in a darkened mind does the white ray of heavenly light break into prismatic glory; not through the mists of ignorance is the sweet countenance of the divine saviour best discerned. if some have pursued a sublime art frivolously; have soiled a fair mind by ignoble life,--this leaves the good of the intellect untouched. some who have made strongest profession of religion, who have held high and the highest places in the church, have been unworthy, but we do not thence infer that the tendency of religion is to make men so. they who praise the bliss and worth of ignorance are sophists. stupidity is more to be dreaded than malignity; for ignorance, and not malice, is the most fruitful cause of human misery. let knowledge grow, let truth prevail. since god is god, the universe is good, and the more we know of its laws, the plainer will the right way become. the investigator and the thinker, the man of culture and the man of genius, cannot free themselves from bias and limitation; but the work they do will help me and all men. indifference or opposition to the intellectual life is but a survival of the general anti-educational prejudices of former ages. it is also a kind of envy, prompting us to find fault with whatever excellence is a reproach to our unworthiness. the disinterested love of truth is a rare virtue, most difficult to acquire and most difficult to preserve. if knowledge bring power and wealth, if it give fame and pleasure, it is dear to us; but how many are able to love it for its own sake? do not nearly all men strive to convince themselves of the truth of those opinions which they are interested in holding? what is true, good, or fair is rarely at once admitted to be so; but what is practically useful men quickly accept, because they live chiefly in the world of external things, and care little for the spiritual realms of truth and beauty. the ignorant do not even believe that knowledge gives power and pleasure, and the educated, except the chosen few, value it only for the power and pleasure it gives. as the disinterested love of truth is rare, so is perfect sincerity. indeed, insincerity is here the radical vice. good faith is essential to faith; and a sophistical mind is as immoral and irreligious as a depraved heart. let a man be true, seek and speak truth, and all good things are possible; but when he persuades himself that a lie may be useful and ought to be propagated, he becomes the enemy of his own soul and the foe of all that makes life high and godlike. now, to be able to desire to see things as they are, whatever their relations to ourselves may be, and to speak of them simply as they appear to us, is one result of the best training of the intellect, which in the world of thought and opinion gives us that sweet indifference which is the rule of saints when they submit the conduct of their lives wholly to divine guidance. why should he whose mind is strong, and rests on god, be disturbed? it is with opinion as with life. we cannot tell what moment truth will overthrow the one and death the other; but thought cannot change the nature of things. the clouds dissolve, but the eternal heavens remain. over the bloodiest battlefields they bend calm and serene, and trees drink the sunlight and flowers exhale perfume. the moonbeam kisses the crater's lip. over buried cities the yellow harvest waves, and all the catastrophes of endless time are present to god, who dwells in infinite peace. he sees the universe and is not troubled, and shall not we who are akin to him learn to look upon our little meteorite without losing repose of mind and heart? were it not a sweeter piety to trust that he who made all things will know how to make all things right; and therefore not to grow anxious lest some investigator should find him at fault or thwart his plans? as living bodies are immersed in an invisible substance which feeds the flame of life, so souls breathe and think and love in the atmosphere of god, and the higher their thought and love the more do they partake of the divine nature. many things, in this age of transition, are passing away; but true thoughts and pure love are immortal, and whatever opinions as to other things a man may hold, all know that to be human is to be intelligent and moral, and therefore religious. a hundred years hence our present machinery may seem to be as rude as the implements of the middle age look to us, and our political and social organization may appear barbarous,--so rapid has the movement of life become. but we do not envy those who shall then be living, partly it may be because we can have but dim visions of the greater blessings they shall enjoy, but chiefly because we feel that after all the true worth of life lies in nothing of this kind, but in knowing and doing, in believing and loving; and that it would not be easier to live for truth and righteousness were electricity applied to aerial navigation and all the heavens filled with argosies of magic sail. it is not possible to love sincerely the best thoughts, as it is not possible to love god when our aim is something external, or when we believe that what is mechanical merely has power to regenerate and exalt mankind. "it takes a soul to move a body; it takes a high-souled man to move the masses ... even to a cleaner sty; it takes the ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off the dust of the actual--ah, your fouriers failed, because not poets enough to understand that life develops from within." he who believes in culture must believe in god; for what but god do we mean when we talk of loving the best thoughts and the highest beauty? no god, no best; but at most better and worse. and how shall a man's delight in his growing knowledge not be blighted by a hidden taint, if he is persuaded that at the core of the universe there is only blind unconscious force? but if he believe that god is infinite power working for truth and love, then can he also feel that in seeking to prepare his mind for the perception of truth and his heart for the love of what is good and fair, he is working with god, and moves along the way in which his omnipotent hand guides heavenly spirits and all the countless worlds. he desires that all men should be wiser and stronger and more loving, even though he should be doomed to remain as he is, for then they would have power to help him. he is certain of himself, and feels no fear nor anger when his opinions are opposed. he learns to bear what he cannot prevent, knowing that courage and patience make tolerable immedicable ills. he feels no self-complacency, but rather the self-dissatisfaction which comes of the consciousness of possessing faculties which he can but imperfectly use. and this discontent he believes to be the infinite god stirring within the soul. as the earthquake which swallows some island in another hemisphere disturbs not the even tenor of our way, so the passions of men whose world is other than his, who dwell remote from what he contemplates and loves, shake not his tranquil mind. while they threaten and pursue, his thought moves in spheres unknown to them. he knows how little life at the best can give, and is not hard to console for the loss of anything. there is no true thought which he would not gladly make his own, even though it should be the watchword of his enemies. since morality is practical truth, he understands that increasing knowledge will make it at once more evident and more attractive. hatred between races and nations he holds to be not less unchristian than the hatred which arms the individual against his fellow-man. it is impossible for him to be a scoffer; for whatever has strengthened or consoled a human soul is sacred in his eyes; and wherever there is question of what is socially complex, as of a religion or a civilization, there is question of many human lives, their hopes, their joys, their strivings, their yearnings, disappointments, agonies, and deaths; and he is able to perceive that in the ports of levity there is no refuge for hearts that mourn. does not love itself, in its heaven of bliss, turn away from him who mocks? the lover of the intellectual life knows neither contempt nor indignation, is not elated by success or cast down by failure; money cannot make him rich, and poverty helps to make him free. his own experience teaches him that men in becoming wiser will become nobler and happier; and this sweet truth has in his eyes almost the elements of a religion. with growing knowledge his power of sympathy is enlarged; until like saint francis, he can call the sun his brother and the moon his sister; can grieve with homeless winds, and feel a kinship with the clod. the very agonies by which his soul has been wrung open to his gaze visions of truth which else he had never caught, and so he finds even in things evil some touch of goodness. praise and blame are for children, but to him impertinent. he is tolerant of absurdity because it is so all-pervading that he whom it fills with indignation can have no repose. while he labors like other men to keep his place in the world, he strives to make the work whereby he maintains himself, and those who cling to him, serve intellectual and moral ends. he has a meek and lowly heart, and he has also a free and illumined mind, and a soul without fear. he knows that no gift or accomplishment is incompatible with true religion; for has not the church intellects as many-sided and as high as augustine and chrysostom, dante and calderon, descartes and da vinci, de vega and cervantes, bossuet and pascal, saint bernard and gregory the seventh, aquinas and michael angelo, mozart and fénelon? ah! i behold the youthful throng, happier than we, who here, in their own sweet country,--in this city of government and of law with its wide streets, its open spaces, its air of freedom and of light,--undisturbed by the soul-depressing hum of commerce and the unintellectual din of machinery, shall hearken to the voice of wisdom and walk in the pleasant ways of knowledge, alive, in every sense, to catch whatever message may come to them from god's universe; who, as they are drawn to what is higher than themselves, shall be drawn together, like planets to a sun; whose minds, aglow with high thinking, shall taste joy and delight fresher and purer than merriest laughter ever tells. who has not seen, when leaden clouds fill the sky and throw gloomy shadows on the earth, some little meadow amid the hills, with its trees and flowers, its grazing kine and running brook, all bathed in sunlight, and smiling as though a mother said, come hither, darling? such to my fancy is this favored spot, whose invitation is to the fortunate few who believe that "the noblest mind the best contentment has," and that the fairest land is that which brings forth and nurtures the fairest souls. when youthful friends drift apart, and meet again after years, they find they have been living not only in different cities, but in different worlds. those who shall come up to the university must turn away from much the world holds dear; and while the companions they leave behind shall linger in pleasant places or shall get money, position, and applause, they must move on amid ever-increasing loneliness of life and thought. xanthippe would have had altogether a better opinion of socrates had he not been a philosopher, and the best we do is often that for which our age and our friends care the least; but they who have once tasted the delights of a cultivated mind would not exchange them for the gifts of fortune, and to have beheld the fair face of wisdom is to be forever her votary. words spoken for the masses grow obsolete; but what is fit to be heard by the chosen few shall be true and beautiful while such minds are found on earth. in the end, it is this little band--this intellectual aristocracy--who move and guide the world. they see what is possible, outline projects, and give impulse, while the people do the work. that which is strongest in man is mind; and when a mind truly vigorous, open, supple, and illumined reveals itself, we follow in its path of light. how it may be i do not know; but the very brain and heart of genius throbs forever in the words on which its spirit has breathed. let this seed, though hidden like the grain in mummy pits for thousands of years, but fall on proper soil, and soon the golden harvest shall wave beneath the dome of azure skies; let but some generous youth bend over the electric page, and lo! all his being shall thrill and flame with new-born life and light. genius is a gift. but whoever keeps on doing in all earnestness something which he need not do, and for which the world cares hardly at all, if he have not genius, has at least one of its chief marks; and it is, i think, an important function of a university to create an intellectual atmosphere in which the love of excellence shall become contagious, which whosoever breathes shall, like the sibyl, feel the inspiration of divine thoughts. sweet home! where wisdom, like a mother, shall lead her children in pleasant ways, and to their thoughts a touch of heaven lend! from thee i claim for my faith and my country more blessings than i can speak,-- our scattered knowledges together bind; our freedom consecrate to noble aims. to music set the visions of the mind; give utterance to the truth pure faith proclaims. lead where the perfect beauty lies enshrined, whose sight the blood of low-born passion tames. and now, how shall i more fittingly conclude than with the name of her whose generous heart and enlightened mind were the impulse which has given to what had long been hope deferred and a dreamlike vision, existence and a dwelling-place,--mary gwendolen caldwell. the end. by rt. rev. j. l. spalding. =thoughts and theories of life and education=. mo, pages, $ . . the bishop writes out of the fullness of his heart, and with abundant love and charity. his works make the world wiser, happier, and better. these "thoughts and theories" are couched in polished english, in sentences terse and full of meaning; few living writers command a more charming style. =education and the higher life=. mo, pages, $ . . bishop spalding has struck a note which must vibrate in every heart which loves the glory of christianity and the progress of humanity.... the book is a stimulant, a tonic, a trumpet-call to higher things, a beacon light for better days.--_the catholic union and times_. =things of the mind=. mo, pages, $ . . out of a disciplined and fertile mind he pours forth epigrammatic sentences and suggestions in a fashion which recalls emerson. he is always and everywhere american, and the last chapter is at once wisely critical and soundly laudatory of our country.--_the sunday school times, philadelphia_. =means and ends of education=. mo, pages, $ . . bishop spalding comes nearer being an essayist in education than any other american. he has that rarest of educational gifts,--the ability to throw light brilliantly, and yet softly, making his paragraphs both bright and mellow, all without "preaching," without pedantry, and without being cranky.--_journal of education_, boston. =opportunity, and other essays and addresses=. mo, pages, $ . . in this volume, as in his other books, bishop spalding is occupied with the larger problems of education. in addition to the specifically educational subjects there are themes of the widest possible interest, to the treatment of which the ripe experience of the writer gives high value. =songs, chiefly from the german=. mo, gilt top, $ . . he has gathered the flowers from the german garden of song and translated them, giving a literal rendering, but still preserving the melody,--an art which was thought to have been lost with longfellow.--_the chicago record_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers, chicago. by mrs. elizabeth wormeley latimer. _judea: from cyrus to titus, b. c.-- a. d._ handsomely illustrated. vo. $ . . this is a book for the people rather than for scholars, but written with the resources of scholarship at command. not entering into the mooted questions of criticism, it is a well written narrative of the eventful period it covers, presenting the story of judea in its connection with the general movement of the world, as well as with the career of illustrious men.--_the outlook_, new york. mrs. latimer's former works. _my scrap book of the french revolution._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _spain in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _italy in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _europe in africa in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _england in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _russia and turkey in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _france in the th century._ illustrated. vo. $ . . _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers, chicago. a general survey of american literature by mary fisher gilt top, deckle edges, mo. $ . in this volume miss fisher has treated a subject of vital interest and importance for all american lovers of literature, and she has accomplished her task with rare feminine appreciation and sympathy, with a clear and decisive interest, with a catholicity of judgment and a fine sense of discrimination and proportion and with a warmth and delicacy of treatment that transform these biographical sketches into little gems of portraiture.--_the commercial advertiser_, new york. the great value of the book lies in the fact that while miss fisher has a thorough familiarity with the subjects of her essays, she writes as she might if she were ignorant of the estimation in which they are held by the public or by the critics. she applies discriminating reason and sound principles of judgment to the work of the various writers, without the slightest reference to their personal dignity or their literary fame.--_the book buyer_, new york. the whole range of notable writers are dealt with in a style at once discriminating and attractive. the "human touch" is pleasingly apparent throughout the book.--_the living age_, boston. a group of french critics by mary fisher mo. $ . . those who are in the habit of associating modern french writing with the materialistic view of life and the realistic method, will find themselves refreshed and encouraged by the vigorous protest of men like scherer and other french critics against the dominance of these elements in recent years.--_the outlook_, new york. "a group of french critics" deserves a friendly welcome from everybody who desires to know something of the best in contemporary french letters.--_the philadelphia press_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers, chicago. tales from foreign lands. memories. a story of german love. translated from the german of max muller by george p. upton. graziella. a story of italian love. translated from the french of a. de lamartine, by james b. runnion. marie. a story of russian love. from the russian of alexander pushkin, by marie h. de zielinska. madeleine. a story of french love (crowned by the french academy). translated from the french of jules sandeau by francis charlot. marianela. a story of spanish love. translated from the spanish of b. perez galdos, by helen w. lester. cousin phillis. a story of english love. by mrs. gaskell. karine. a story of swedish love. translated from the german of wilhelm jensen, by emma a. endlich. maria felicia. a story of bohemian love. translated from the bohemian of caroline svetla by antonie krejsa. handsomely printed on fine laid paper, mo, gilt tops, per volume, $ . . the six volumes in neat box, per set, $ . ; in half calf or half morocco, gilt tops, $ . ; in half calf or half morocco, gilt edges, $ . ; limp calf or morocco, gilt edges, $ . . this series of volumes forms perhaps the choicest addition to the literature of the english language that has been made in recent years. an attractive series of stories of love in different countries,--all gems of literature, full of local coloring.--_journal of education, boston_. the stories are attractive for their purity, sweetness, and pathos.... a rare collection of representative national classics. _new york telegram_. a series especially to be commended for the good taste displayed in the mechanical execution of the works. type and paper are everything that could be desired, and the volumes are set off with a gilt top which adds to their general appearance of neatness.--_herald, rochester_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by the publishers._ a. c. mcclurg & co., chicago. the book-lover. a guide to the best reading. by james baldwin, ph. d. sixth edition, mo, cloth, gilt top, pages. price, $ . . =in half calf or half morocco=, $ . . of this book, on the best in english literature, which has already been declared of the highest value by the testimony of the best critics in this country, an edition of one thousand copies has just been ordered for london, the home of english literature,--a compliment of which its scholarly western author may justly be proud. we know of no work of the kind which gives so much useful information in so small a space.--_evening telegram, new york_. sound in theory and in a practical point of view. the courses of reading laid down are made of good books, and in general, of the best.--_independent, new york_. mr. baldwin has written in this monograph a delightful eulogium of books and their manifold influence, and has gained therein two classes of readers,--the scholarly class, to which he belongs, and the receptive class, which he has benefited.--_evening mail and express, new york_. if a man needs that the love of books be cultivated within him, such a gem of a book as dr. baldwin's ought to do the work. perfect and inviting in all that a book ought outwardly to be, its contents are such as to instruct the mind at the same time that they answer the taste, and the reader who goes carefully through its two hundred pages ought not only to love books in general better than he ever did before, but to love them more wisely, more intelligently, more discriminatingly, and with more profit to his own soul.--_literary worlds, boston_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. life of abraham lincoln, by the hon. isaac n. arnold. with steel portrait. vo, cloth, pages. price, $ . . in half calf or half morocco, $ . . it is decidedly the best and most complete life of lincoln that has yet appeared.--_contemporary review, london_. mr. arnold succeeded to a singular extent in assuming the broad view and judicious voice of posterity and exhibiting the greatest figure of our time in its true perspective.--_the tribune, new york_. it is the only life of lincoln thus far published that is likely to live,--the only one that has any serious pretensions to depict him with adequate veracity, completeness, and dignity.--_the sun, new york_. the author knew mr. lincoln long and intimately, and no one was better fitted for the task of preparing his biography. he has written with tenderness and fidelity, with keen discrimination, and with graphic powers of description and analysis.--_the interior, chicago_. mr. arnold's "life of president lincoln" is excellent in almost every respect.... the author has painted a graphic and life-like portrait of the remarkable man who was called to decide on the destinies of his country at the crisis of its fate.--_the times, london_. the book is particularly rich in incidents connected with the early career of mr. lincoln; and it is without exception the most satisfactory record of his life that has yet been written. readers will also find that in its entirety it is a work of absorbing and enduring interest that will enchain the attention more effectually than any novel.--_magazine of american history, new york_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. laurel-crowned tales. abdallah; or, the four-leaved shamrock. by edouard laboulaye. translated by mary l. booth. rasselas, prince of abyssinia. by samuel johnson. raphael; or, pages of the book of life at twenty. from the french of alphonse de lamartine. the vicar of wakefield. by oliver goldsmith. the epicurean. by thomas moore. picciola. by x. b. saintine. an iceland fisherman. by pierre loti. paul and virginia. by bernardin de st. pierre. handsomely printed from new plates, on fine laid paper, mo, cloth, with gilt tops, price per volume, $ . . in half calf or half morocco, per volume, $ . . in planning this series, the publishers have aimed at a form which should combine an unpretentious elegance suited to the fastidious book-lover with an inexpensiveness that must appeal to the most moderate buyer. it is the intent to admit to the series only such tales as have for years or for generations commended themselves not only to the fastidious and the critical, but also to the great multitude of the refined reading public,--tales, in short, which combine purity and classical beauty of style with perennial popularity. a contribution to current literature of quite unique value and interest. they are furnished with a tasteful outfit, with just the amount of matter one likes to find in books of this class, and are in all ways very attractive.--_standard, chicago_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. laurel-crowned verse edited by francis f. browne. the lady of the lake. by sir walter scott. childe harold's pilgrimage. a romaunt. by lord byron. lalla rookh. an oriental romance. by thomas moore. idylls of the king. by alfred, lord tennyson. paradise lost. by john milton. the iliad of homer. translated by alexander pope. vols. each volume is finely printed and bound; mo, cloth, gilt tops, price per volume, $ . . in half calf or half morocco, per volume, $ . . _all the volumes of this series are from a specially prepared and corrected text, based upon a careful collation of all the more authentic editions._ the special merit of these editions, aside from the graceful form of the books, lies in the editor's reserve. whenever the author has provided a preface or notes, this apparatus is given, and thus some interesting matter is revived, but the editor himself refrains from loading the books with his own writing.--_the atlantic monthly_. a series noted for their integral worth and typographical beauties.--_public ledger, philadelphia_. the typography is quite faultless.--_critic, new york_. for this series the publishers are entitled to the gratitude of lovers of classical english.--_school journal, new york_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers, chicago. laurel-crowned letters best letters of lord chesterfield. with an introduction by edward gilpin johnson. best letters of lady mary wortley montagu. with an introduction by octave thanet. best letters of horace walpole. with an introduction by anna b. mcmahan. best letters of madame de sÃ�vignÃ�. with an introduction by edward playfair anderson. best letters of charles lamb. with an introduction by edward gilpin johnson. best letters of percy bysshe shelley. with an introduction by shirley c. hughson. best letters of william cowper. with an introduction by anna b. mcmahan. handsomely printed from new plates, on fine laid paper, mo, cloth, with gilt tops, price per volume, $ . . in half calf or half morocco, per volume, $ . . amid the great flood of ephemeral literature that pours from the press, it is well to be recalled by such publications as the "laurel-crowned letters" to books that have won an abiding place in the classical literature of the world.--_the independent, new york_. the "laurel-crowned series" recommends itself to all lovers of good literature. the selection is beyond criticism, and puts before the reader the very best literature in most attractive and convenient form. the size of the volumes, the good paper, the clear type and the neat binding are certainly worthy of all praise.--_public opinion, washington_. these "laurel-crowned" volumes are little gems in their way, and just the books to pick up at odd times and at intervals of waiting.--_herald, chicago_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. chicago. the standard operas. their plots, their music, and their composers. by george p. upton, author of "woman in music," etc., etc. mo, flexible cloth, yellow edges $ . the same, extra gilt, gilt edges . "mr. upton has performed a service that can hardly be too highly appreciated, in collecting the plots, music, and the composers of the standard operas, to the number of sixty-four, and bringing them together in one perfectly arranged volume.... his work is one simply invaluable to the general reading public. technicalities are avoided, the aim being to give to musically uneducated lovers of the opera a clear understanding of the works they hear. it is description, not criticism, and calculated to greatly increase the intelligent enjoyment of music."--_boston traveller_. "among the multitude of handbooks which are published every year, and are described by easy-going writers of book-notices as supplying a long-felt want, we know of none which so completely carries out the intention of the writer as 'the standard operas,' by mr. george p. upton, whose object is to present to his readers a comprehensive sketch of each of the operas contained in the modern repertory.... there are thousands of music-loving people who will be glad to have the kind of knowledge which mr. upton has collected for their benefit, and has cast in a clear and compact form."--_r. h. stoddard, in "evening mail and express" (new york)_. "the summaries of the plots are so clear, logical, and well written, that one can read them with real pleasure, which cannot be said of the ordinary operatic synopses. but the most important circumstance is that mr. upton's book is fully abreast of the times."--_the nation (new york)_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. the standard oratorios. their stories, their music, and their composers. a handbook. by george p. upton. mo, pages, yellow edges, price, $ . ; extra gilt, gilt edges, $ . . in half calf, gilt top $ . in half morocco, gilt edges . music lovers are under a new obligation to mr. upton for this companion to his "standard operas,"--two books which deserve to be placed on the same shelf with grove's and riemann's musical dictionaries.--_the nation, new york_. mr. george p. upton has followed in the lines that he laid down in his "standard operas," and has produced an admirable handwork, which answers every purpose that such a volume is designed to answer, and which is certain to be popular now and for years to come.--_the mail and express, new york_. like the valuable art handbooks of mrs. jamison, these volumes contain a world of interesting information, indispensable to critics and art amateurs. the volume under review is elegantly and succinctly written, and the subjects are handled in a thoroughly comprehensive manner.--_public opinion, washington_. the book is a masterpiece of skillful handling, charming the reader with its pure english style, and keeping his attention always awake in an arrangement of matter which makes each succeeding page and chapter fresh in interest and always full of instruction, while always entertaining.--_the standard, chicago_. the author of this book has done a real service to the vast number of people who, while they are lovers of music, have neither the leisure nor inclination to become deeply versed in its literature.... the information conveyed is of just the sort that the average of cultivated people will welcome as an aid to comprehending and talking about this species of musical composition.--_church magazine, philadelphia_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. the standard cantatas. their stories, their music, and their composers. a handbook. by george p. upton. mo, pages, yellow edges, price, $ . ; extra gilt, gilt edges, $ . . in half calf, gilt top $ . in half morocco, gilt edges . * * * * * the "standard cantatas" forms the third volume in the uniform series which already includes the now well known "standard operas" and the "standard oratorios." this latest work deals with a class of musical compositions, midway between the opera and the oratorio, which is growing rapidly in favor both with composers and audiences. as in the two former works, the subject is treated, so far as possible, in an untechnical manner, so that it may satisfy the needs of musically uneducated music lovers, and add to their enjoyment by a plain statement of the story of the cantata and a popular analysis of its music, with brief pertinent selections from its poetical text. the book includes a comprehensive essay on the origin of the cantata, and its development from rude beginnings; biographical sketches of the composers; carefully prepared descriptions of the plots and the music; and an appendix containing the names and dates of composition of all the best known cantatas from the earliest times. this series of works on popular music has steadily grown in favor since the appearance of the first volume on the operas. when the series is completed, as it will be next year by a volume on the standard symphonies, it will be, as the new york "nation" has said, indispensable to every musical library. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. the standard symphonies. their history, their music, and their composers. a handbook. by george p. upton. mo, pages, yellow edges, price $ . ; extra gilt, gilt edges, $ . . in half calf, gilt top $ . in half morocco, gilt edges . * * * * * the usefulness of this handbook cannot be doubted. its pages are packed full of these fascinating renderings. the accounts of each composer are succinct and yet sufficient. the author has done a genuine service to the world of music lovers. the comprehension of orchestral work of the highest character is aided efficiently by this volume. the mechanical execution of the volume is in harmony with its subject. no worthier volume can be found to put into the hands of an amateur or a friend of music.--_public opinion, washington_. none who have seen the previous books of mr. upton will need assurance that this is as indispensable as the others to one who would listen intelligently to that better class of music which musicians congratulate themselves americans are learning to appreciatively enjoy.--_home journal, new york_. there has never been, in this country at least, so thorough an attempt to collate the facts of programme music.... as a definite helper in some cases and as a refresher in others we believe mr. upton's book to have a lasting value.... the book, in brief, shows enthusiastic and honorable educational purpose, good taste, and sound scholarship.--_the american, philadelphia_. upton's books should be read and studied by all who desire to acquaint themselves with the facts and accomplishments in these interesting forms of musical composition.--_the voice, new york_. it is written in a style that cannot fail to stimulate the reader, if also a student of music, to strive to find for himself the underlying meanings of the compositions of the great composers. it contains, besides, a vast amount of information about the symphony, its evolution and structure, with sketches of the composers, and a detailed technical description of a few symphonic models. it meets a recognized want of all concert goers.--_the chautauquan_. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. ground arms! _the story of a life._ by bertha von suttner. mo, pages. price, $ . . * * * * * this story is one of the strongest works of fiction of the present decade. the author is a philosopher and a philanthropist. her clear, incisive reasoning, her large sympathies, combined with rare power of description, enable her to give the world a story which will hold in its thrall even the most shallow novel-reader who can appreciate good literature.--_the arena_, boston. the author pierces to the marrow of the thing that has taken hold of her. by that thing she is verily possessed; it has made of her a seer.... the bare, bald outline of "die waffen nieder!" ("ground arms!"), which is all we have been able to attempt, can give but a faint, feeble idea of its power and pathos, and none at all of the many light and humorous touches, the well-drawn minor characters, the thrilling episodes, the piquant glimpses of the great world of austria and france, which relieve the gloom of the tragic story.--_international journal of ethics_. we have here unquestionably a very remarkable work. as a plea for a general disarmament it stands unrivaled. for a familiarity with the details of the subject treated, for breadth of view, for logical acumen, for dramatic effect and literary excellence, it stands unequaled by any work written with a purpose.--_literary digest_. with a powerful pen the author tells of the horrors of war; not alone the desolation of battlefields, but the scourges of typhus and cholera that follow in their wake, and the wretchedness, misery, and poverty brought to countless homes. the story in itself is simple but pathetic.... the book, which is sound and calm in its logic and reasoning, has made a grand impression upon military circles of europe, and its influence is destined to extend far into the future.--_public opinion_, new york. _sold by all booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of price, by_ a. c. mcclurg & co., publishers. file was produced from images produced by core historical literature in agriculture (chla), cornell university) riverside educational monographs edited by henry suzzallo professor of the philosophy of education teachers college, columbia university new ideals in rural schools by george herbert betts, ph. d. professor of psychology cornell college, iowa [illustration] houghton mifflin company boston, new york and chicago the riverside press cambridge copyright, , by george herbert betts all rights reserved contents editor's introduction v preface ix i. the rural school and its problem ii. the social organization of the rural school iii. the curriculum of the rural school iv. the teaching of the rural school outline editor's introduction in presenting a second monograph on the rural school problem in this series we register our sense of the importance of rural education. too long have the rural schools suffered from neglect. both the local communities and the state have overlooked the needs of the rural school system. at the present hour there is an earnest awakening of interest in rural life and its institutions. already there is a small but certain movement of people toward the country and the vocation of agriculture. a period of agricultural prosperity, the reaction of men and women against the artificialities of city life, the development of farming through the application of science, and numerous other factors have made country life more congenial and have focused attention upon its further needs. it is natural, therefore, that the rural school should receive an increased share of attention. educational administrators, legislators, and publicists have become aware of their responsibility to provide the financial support and the efficient organization that is needed to develop country schools. the more progressive of them are striving earnestly to provide laws that will aid rather than hamper the rural school system. in his monograph on _the improvement of the rural school_, professor cubberley has done much to interpret current efforts of this type. from the standpoint of state administration he has contributed much definite information and constructive suggestion as to how the state shall respond to the fundamental need for ( ) more money, ( ) better organization, and ( ) real supervision for rural schools. it is not so clear, however, that rural patrons, school directors, and teachers have become fully aware of their duty in the matter of rural school improvement. to be sure much has been done by way of experiment in many rural communities; but it can scarcely be said that rural communities in general are thoroughly awake to the importance of their schools. the evidence to the contrary is cumulative. the first immediate need is to reawaken interest in the school as a center of rural life, and to suggest ways and means of transmuting this communal interest into effective institutional methods. to this end, professor betts has been asked to treat the rural school problem from a standpoint somewhat different from that assumed by professor cubberley; that is, from the point of view of the local community immediately related to, and concerned with, the rural school. in consequence his presentation emphasizes the things that ought to be done by the local authorities,--parent, trustee, and teacher. its soundness may well be judged by the pertinent order of his discussion. having stated his problem, he initiates his discussion by suggesting how the social relations of the school are to be reorganized; only later does he pass to the detail of curricula and teaching methods. it is a clear recognition of the fact that the community is the crucial factor in the making of a school. the state by sound fiscal and legislative policies may do much to make possible a better country school; but only the local authorities can realize it. the trained teacher with modern notions of efficiency may attempt to enlarge the curriculum and to employ newer methods of teaching, but his talents are useless if he is hampered by a conservative, unappreciative, and indifferent community. when the school becomes a social center of the community's interest and life, there will be no difficulty in achieving any policy which the state permits or which a skilled teacher urges. scattered schools will be consolidated, and isolated ungraded schools will be improved. given an interested community, the modern teacher can vitalize every feature of the school, changing the formal curriculum into an interesting and liberalizing interpretation of country life and the pedantic drills and tasks of instruction into a skillful ministry to real and abiding human wants. preface no rural population has yet been able permanently to maintain itself against the lure of the town or the city. each civilization at one stage of its development comprises a large proportion of rural people. but the urban movement soon begins, and continues until all are living in villages, towns, and cities. such has been the movement of population in all the older countries of high industrial development, as england, france, and germany. a similar movement is at present going on rapidly in the united states. no great social movement ever comes by chance; it is always to be explained by deep-seated and adequate causes. the causes lying back of the rapid growth of our cities at the expense of our rural districts are very far from simple. they involve a great complex of social, educational, and economic forces. as the spirit of adventure and pioneering finds less to stimulate it, the gregarious impulse, the tendency to flock together for our work and our play, gains in ascendancy. growing out of the greater intellectual opportunities and demands of modern times, the standard of education has greatly advanced. and under the incentive of present-day economic success and luxury, comfortable circumstances and a moderate competence no longer satisfy our people. hence they turn to the city, looking to find there the coveted social, educational, or economic opportunities. it is doubtful, therefore, whether, even with improved conditions of country life, the urbanization of our rural people can be wholly checked. but it can be greatly retarded if the right agencies are set at work. the rural school should be made and can be made one of the most important of these agencies, although at the present time its influence is chiefly negative. with the hope of offering some help, however slight, in adjusting the rural school to its problem, this little volume is written by one who himself belongs to the rural community by birth and early education and occupation. g. h. b. cornell college, _february_, . new ideals in rural schools i the rural school and its problem _the general problem of the rural school_ the general problem of the rural school is the same as that of any other type of school--to render to the community the largest possible returns upon its investment in education with the least possible waste. schools are great education factories set up at public expense. the raw material consists of the children of succeeding generations, helpless and inefficient because of ignorance and immaturity. the school is to turn out as its product men and women ready and able to take up their part in the great world of activities going on about them. it is in this way, in efficient education, that society gets its return for its investment in the schools. the word "education" has in recent years been taking on a new and more vital meaning. in earlier times the value of education was assumed, or vaguely taken on faith. education was supposed to consist of so much "learning," or a given amount of "discipline," or a certain quantity of "culture." under the newer definition, education may include all these things, but it must do more; it _must relate itself immediately and concretely to the business of living_. we no longer inquire of one how much he knows, or the degree to which his powers have been "cultivated"; but rather to what extent his education has led to a more fruitful life in the home, the state, the church, and other social institutions; how largely it has helped him to more effective work in a worthy occupation; and whether it has resulted in greater enjoyment and appreciation of the finer values of personal experience,--in short, whether for him education spells _efficiency_. we are thus coming to see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. it must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same time increase his working efficiency. this is to say that one's education must ( ) furnish him with the particular _knowledge_ required for the life that he is to live, whether it be in the shop, on the farm, or in the profession. for knowledge lies at the basis of all efficiency and success in whatever occupation. education must ( ) shape the _attitude_, so that the individual will confront his part of the world's work or its play in the right spirit. it must not leave him a parasite, whether from wealth or from poverty, ready to prey upon others; but must make him willing and glad to do his share. education must ( ) also give the individual training in _technique_, or the skill required in his different activities; not to do this is at best but to leave him a well-informed and well-intentioned bungler, falling far short of efficiency. the great function of the school, therefore, is to supply the means by which the requisite _knowledge_, _attitude_, and _skill_ can be developed. it is true that the child does not depend on the school alone for his knowledge, his attitude, and his skill. for the school is only one of many influences operating on his life. much of the most vital knowledge is not taught in the school but picked up outside; a great part of the child's attitude toward life is formed through the relations of the home, the community, and the various other points of contact with society; and much of his skill in doing is developed in a thousand ways without being taught. yet the fact remains that the school is organized and supported by society to make sure about these things, to see that the child does not lack in knowledge, attitude, or skill. they must not be left to chance; where the educative influences outside the school have not been sufficient, the school must take hold. its part is to supplement and organize with conscious purpose what the other agencies have accomplished in the education of the child. the ultimate purpose of the school is _to make certain of efficiency_. the means by which the school is to accomplish these ends are ( ) the _social organization_ of the school, or the life and activities that go on in the school from day to day; ( ) the _curriculum_, or the subject-matter which the child is given to master; and ( ) the _instruction_ or the work of the teacher in helping the pupils to master the subject-matter of the curriculum and adjust themselves to the organization of the school. these factors will of necessity differ, however, according to the particular type of school in question. it will therefore be necessary to inquire into the special problem of the rural school before entering into a discussion of the means by which it is to accomplish its aim. _the special problem of the rural school_ each type of school has not only its general problem which is common to all schools, but also its special problem which makes it different from every other class of schools. the special problem of any type of school grows out of the nature and needs of the community which supports the school. thus the city school, whose pupils are to live the industrial and social life of an urban community, confronts a different problem from that of a rural school, whose pupils are to live in a farming community. each type of school must suit its curriculum, its organization, and its instruction to the demands to be met by its pupils. the knowledge taught, the attitudes and tastes developed, and the skill acquired must be related to the life to be lived and the responsibilities to be undertaken. the rural school must therefore be different in many respects from the town and city school. in its organization, its curriculum, and its spirit, it must be adapted to the requirements of the rural community. for, while many pupils from the rural schools ultimately follow other occupations than farming, yet the primary function of the rural school is to educate for the life of the farm. it thus becomes evident that the only way to understand the problem of the rural school is first to understand the rural community. what are its industries, the character of its people, their economic status, their standards of living, their needs, their social life? the rural community is industrially homogeneous. there exists here no such a diversified mixture of industries as in the city. all are engaged in the same line of work. agriculture is the sole occupation. hence the economic interests and problems all center around this one line. the success or failure of crops, the introduction of a different method of cultivation or a new variety of grain, or the invention of an agricultural implement interests all alike. the farmer engaged in planting his corn knows that for miles around all other farmers are similarly employed; if he is cutting his hay or harvesting his grain, hundreds of other mowing machines and harvesters are at work on surrounding farms. this fund of common interest and experience tends to social as well as industrial homogeneity. good-fellowship, social responsiveness and neighborliness rest on a basis of common labor, common problems, and common welfare. like-mindedness and the spirit of coöperation are after all more a matter of similar occupational interests than of nationality. another factor tending to make the rural community socially more homogeneous than the city community is its relatively stable population, and the fact that the stream of immigration is slow in reaching the farm. it is true that the european nations are well represented among our agricultural population; but for the most part they are not foreigners of the first generation. they have assimilated the american spirit, and become familiar with american institutions. the great flood of raw immigrants fresh from widely diverse nations stops in the large centers of population, and does not reach the farm. the prevailing spirit of democracy is still another influence favoring homogeneity in the rural community. much less of social stratification exists in the country than in the city. social planes are not so clearly defined nor so rigidly maintained. financial prosperity is more likely to take the direction of larger barns and more acres than of social ostentation and exclusiveness. america has no servile and ignorant peasantry. the agricultural class constituting our rural population represents a high grade of natural intelligence and integrity. great political and moral reforms find more favorable soil in the rural regions than in the cities. the demagogue and the "boss" find farmers impossible to control to their selfish ends. vagabonds and idlers are out of place among them. they are a hard-headed, capable, and industrious class. as a rule, american farmers are well-to-do, not only earning a good living for their families, but constantly extending their holdings. their farms are increasingly well improved, stocked, and supplied with labor-saving and efficient machinery. their land is constantly growing in value, and at the same time yielding larger returns for the money and labor invested in it. the standard of living is distinctly lower in farm homes than in town and city homes of the same financial status. the house is generally comfortable, but small. it is behind the times in many easily accessible modern conveniences possessed by the great majority of city dwellers. the bath, modern plumbing and heating, the refrigerator, and other kindred appliances can be had in the country home as well as the city. their lack is a matter of standards rather than of necessity. they will be introduced into thousands of rural homes as soon as their need is realized. the possibilities for making the rural home beautiful and attractive are unequaled in the city for any except the very rich. it is not necessary that the farmhouse shall be crowded for space; its outlook and surroundings can be arranged to give it an æsthetic quality wholly impossible in the ordinary city home. that this is true is proved by many inexpensive farmhouses that are a delight to the eye. on the other hand, it must be admitted that a large proportion of farmhouses are lacking in both architectural attractiveness and environmental effect. not infrequently the barns and sheds are so placed as to crowd the house into the background, and the yards for stock allowed to infringe upon the domain of the garden and the lawn. all this can be easily remedied and will be when the æsthetic taste of the dwellers on the farm comes to be offended by the incongruous and ugly. no stinting in the abundance of food is known on the farm. the farmer supplies the tables of the world, and can himself live off the fat of the land. grains, vegetables, meats, eggs, butter, milk, and fruits are his stock in trade. if there is any lack in the farmer's table, it is due to carelessness in providing or preparing the food, and not to forced economy. while the farming population in general live well, yet many tables are lacking in variety, especially in fruit and vegetables. time and interest are so taken up with the larger affairs of crops and stock, that the garden goes by default in many instances. there is no market readily at hand offering fruit and vegetables for sale as in the city, and hence the farm table loses in attractiveness to the appetite and in hygienic excellence. it is probable that the prosperous city workman sits down to a better table than does the farmer, in spite of the great advantage possessed by the latter. the population of rural communities is necessarily scattering. the nature of farming renders it impossible for people to herd together as is the case in many other industries. this has its good side, but also its bad. there are no rural slums for the breeding of poverty and crime; but on the other hand, there is an isolation and monotony that tend to become deadening in their effects on the individual. stress and over-strain does not all come from excitement and the rush of competition; it may equally well originate in lack of variety and unrelieved routine. how true this is is seen in the fact that insanity, caused in this instance chiefly by the stress of monotony, prevails among the farming people of frontier communities out of all proportion to the normal ratio. farming is naturally the most healthful of the industrial occupations. the work is for the greater part done in the open air and sunshine, and possesses sufficient variety to be interesting. the rural population constitutes the high vitality class of the nation, and must be constantly drawn upon to supply the brain, brawn, and nerve for the work of the city. the farmer is, on the whole, prosperous; he is therefore hopeful and cheerful, and labors in good spirit. that so many farmers and farmers' wives break down or age prematurely is due, not to the inherent nature of their work, but to a lack of balance in the life of the farm. it is not so much the work that kills, as the _continuity of the work_ unrelieved by periods of rest and recreation. with the opportunities highly favorable for the best type of healthful living, no inconsiderable proportion of our agricultural population are shortening their lives and lowering their efficiency by unnecessary over-strain and failure to conform to the most fundamental and elementary laws of hygienic living, especially with reference to the relief from labor that comes through change and recreation. the rural community affords few opportunities for social recreations and amusements. not only are the people widely separated from each other by distance, but the work of the farm is exacting, and often requires all the hours of the day not demanded for sleep. while the city offers many opportunities for choice of recreation or amusement, the country affords almost none. the city worker has his evenings, usually saturday afternoon, and all day sunday free to use as he chooses. such is not the case on the farm; for after the day in the field the chores must be done, and the stock cared for. and even on sunday, the routine must be carried out. the work of the farm has a tendency, therefore, to become much of a grind, and certainly will become so unless some limit is set to the exactions of farm labor on the time and strength of the worker. it separates the individual from his fellows in the greater part of the farm work and gives him little opportunity for social recreations or play. one of the best evidences that the conditions of life and work on the farm need to be improved is the number of people who are leaving the farm for the city. this movement has been especially rapid during the last thirty years of our history, and has continued until approximately one half our people now live in towns or cities. not only is this loss of agricultural population serious to farming itself, creating a shortage of labor for the work of the farm, but it results in crowding other occupations already too full. there is no doubt that we have too many lawyers, doctors, merchants, clerks, and the like for the number of workers engaged in fundamental productive vocations. smaller farms, cultivated intensively, would be a great economic advantage to the country, and would take care of a far larger proportion of our people than are now engaged in agriculture. all students of social affairs agree that the movement of our people to towns and cities should be checked and the tide turned the other way. so important is the matter considered that a concerted national movement has recently been undertaken to study the conditions of rural life with a view to making it more attractive and so stopping the drain to the city. middle-aged farmers move to the town or city for two principal reasons: to educate their children and to escape from the monotony of rural life. young people desert the farm for the city for a variety of reasons, prominent among which are a desire for better education, escape from the monotony and grind of the farm life, and the opportunity for the social advantages and recreations of the city. that the retired farmer is usually disappointed and unhappy in his town home, and that the youth often finds the glamour of the city soon to fade, is true. but this does not solve the problem. the flux to the town or city still goes on, and will continue to do so until the natural desire for social and intellectual opportunities and for recreation and amusement is adequately met in rural life. farming as an industry has already felt the effects of a new interest in rural life. probably no other industrial occupation has undergone such rapid changes within the last generation as has agriculture. the rapid advance in the value of land, the introduction of new forms of farm machinery, and above all the application of science to the raising of crops and stock, have almost reconstructed the work of the farm within a decade. special "corn trains" and "dairy trains" have traversed nearly every county in many states, teaching the farmers scientific methods. lecturers on scientific agriculture have found their way into many communities. the federal government has encouraged in every way the spread of information and the development of enthusiasm in agriculture. the agricultural schools have given courses of instruction during the winter to farmers. farmers' institutes have been organized; corn-judging and stock-judging contests have been held; prizes have been offered for the best results in the raising of grains, vegetables, or stock. new varieties of grains have been introduced, improved methods of cultivation discovered, and means of enriching and conserving the soil devised. stock-breeding and the care of animals is rapidly becoming a science. farming bids fair soon to become one of the skilled occupations. such, then, is a brief view of the situation of which the rural school is a part. it ministers to the education of almost half of the american people. this industrial group are engaged in the most fundamental of all occupations, the one upon which all national welfare and progress depend. they control a large part of the wealth of the country, the capital invested in agriculture being more than double that invested in manufactures. agricultural wealth is rapidly increasing, both through the rise in the value of land and through improved methods of farming. the conditions of life on the farm have greatly improved during the last decade. rural telephones reach almost every home; free mail delivery is being rapidly extended in almost every section of the country; the automobile is coming to be a part of the equipment of many farms; and the trolley is rapidly pushing out along the country roads. yet, in spite of these hopeful tendencies, the rural community shows signs of deterioration in many places. rural population is steadily decreasing in proportion to the total aggregate of population. interest in education is at a low ebb, the farm children having educational opportunities below those of any other class of our people. for, while town and city schools have been improving until they show a high type of efficiency, the rural school has barely held its own, or has, in many places, even gone backward. the rural community confronts a puzzling problem which is still far from solution. certain points of attack upon this problem are, however, perfectly clear and obvious. _first_, educational facilities must be improved for rural children, and their education be better adapted to farm life; _second_, greater opportunities must be provided for recreation and social intercourse for both young and old; _third_, the program of farm work must be arranged to allow reasonable time for rest and recreation; _fourth_, books, pictures, lectures, concerts, and entertainments must be as accessible to the farm as to the town. these conditions must be met, not because of the dictum of any person, but because they are a fundamental demand of human nature, and must be reckoned with. what, then, is the relation of the rural school to these problems of the rural community? how can it be a factor in their solution? what are its opportunities and responsibilities? _the adjustment of the rural school to its problem_ as has been already stated, the problem of any type of school is to serve its constituency. this is to be done through relating the curriculum, the organization, and the teaching of the school to the immediate interests and needs of the people dependent on the school for their education. that the rural school has not yet fully adjusted itself to its problem need hardly be argued. it has as good material to work upon in the boys and girls from the farm as any type of schools in the country. they come of good stock; they are healthy and vigorous; and they are early trained to serious work and responsibility. yet a very large proportion of these children possess hardly the rudiments of an education when they quit the rural school. many of them go to school for only a few months in the year, compulsory education laws either being laxly enforced or else altogether lacking. a very small percentage of the children of the farm ever complete eight grades of schooling, and not a large proportion finish more than half of this amount. this leaves the child who has to depend on the rural school greatly handicapped in education. he has but a doubtful proficiency in the mechanics of reading, and has read but little. he knows the elements of spelling, writing, and number, but has small skill in any of them. he knows little of history or literature, less of music, nothing of art, and has but a superficial smattering of science. of matters relating to his life and activities on the farm he has heard almost nothing. the rural child is not illiterate, but he is too close to the border of illiteracy for the demands of a twentieth-century civilization; it is fair neither to the child nor to society. the rural school seems in some way relatively to have lost ground in our educational system. the grades of the town school have felt the stimulus of the high school for which they are preparing, and have had the care and supervision of competent administrators. the rural school is isolated and detached, and has had no adequate administrative system to care for its interests. no wonder, then, that certain grave faults in adjustment have grown up. a few of the most obvious of these faults may next claim our attention. _the rural school is inadequate in its scope._ the children of the farm have as much need for education and as much right to it as those who live in towns and cities. yet the rural school as a rule never attempts to offer more than the eight grades of the elementary curriculum, and seldom reaches this amount. it not infrequently happens that no pupils are in attendance beyond the fifth or the sixth grade. this may be due either to the small number of children in the district, or, more often, to lack of interest to continue in school beyond the simplest elements of reading, writing, and number. it is true that certain states, such as illinois and wisconsin, have established a system of township high schools, where secondary education equal to that to be had in the cities is available to rural children. in other states a county high school is maintained for the benefit of rural school graduates. in still others, arrangements are made by which those who complete the eight grades of rural schools are received into the town high schools with the tuition paid by the rural school districts. the movement toward secondary education supplied by the rural community for its children is yet in its infancy, however, and has hardly touched the larger problem of affording adequate opportunities for the education of farm children. _the grading and organization of the rural school is haphazard and faulty._ this is partly because of the small enrollment and irregular attendance, and partly because of the inexperience and lack of supervision of the teacher. children are often found pursuing studies in three or four different grades at the same time. and even more often they omit altogether certain fundamental studies because they or their parents have a notion that these studies are unnecessary. sometimes, owing to the small number in attendance, or to the poor classification, several grades are entirely lacking, or else they are maintained for only one or two pupils. on the other hand, classes are often found following each other at an interval of only a few weeks, thereby multiplying classes until the teacher is frequently attempting the impossible task of teaching twenty-five or thirty classes a day. children differing in age by five or six years, and possessing corresponding degrees of ability, are often found reciting in the same classes. that efficient work is impossible under these conditions is too obvious to require discussion. _the rural schools possess inadequate buildings and equipment._ the average rural schoolhouse consists of one room, with perhaps a small hallway. the building is constructed without reference to architectural effect, resembling nothing so much as a large box with a roof on it. it is barren and uninviting as to its interior. the walls are often of lumber painted some dull color, and dingy through years of use. the windows are frequently dirty, and covered only by worn and tattered shades. there is usually no attempt to decorate the room with pictures, or to relieve its ugliness and monotony in any way. the library consists of a few dozens of volumes, not always supplied with a case for their protection. of apparatus there is almost none. the work of the farm is done with efficient modern equipment, the work of the farmer's school with inadequate and antiquated equipment. while the length of the school year is increasing in the rural districts, _the term is yet much shorter than in town and city schools_. many communities have not more than six months of school, and few more than eight. this shortage is rendered all the more serious by the irregular attendance of the rural school children. a considerable amount of absence on the part of the younger ones is unavoidable under present conditions when the distance is great and the weather bad. after all allowance is made for this fact, however, there is still an immense amount of unnecessary waste of time through non-attendance. many rural schools show an average attendance for the year of not more than sixty per cent of the enrollment. going to school is not yet considered a serious business by many of the rural patrons, and truant officers are not so easily available in the country as in the city. _in financial support the rural school has of necessity been behind the city school._ wealth is not piled up on a small area in agricultural communities as is the case in the city. it would often require square miles of land to equal in value certain city blocks. but making full allowance for this difference, the farmers have not supported their schools as well as is done by the patrons of town and city schools. the school taxes for rural districts are much lower than in city districts, in most instances not more than half as high. it is this conservatism in expenditure that is responsible for many of the defects in the rural school, and particularly for the relatively inefficient teaching that is done. the rural teachers are the least educated, the least experienced, and the most poorly paid of any class of our teachers. they consist almost wholly of girls, a large proportion of whom are under twenty years of age, and who continue teaching not more than a year or two. not only is this the case, but effective supervision of the teaching is wholly impossible because of the large area assigned to the county or district superintendent of rural schools. in no great industrial project should we think of placing our youngest and most inexperienced workers in the hardest and most important positions, and this without supervision of their work. the rural school has not, therefore, yet been adjusted to its problem. it has a splendid field of work, but is not developing it. our farming population have capacity for education and need it, but they are not securing it. there is plenty of money available for the support of the rural school, but the school is not getting it. enough well-equipped teachers can be had for the rural schools, but the standards have not yet required adequate preparation, nor the pay been sufficient to warrant extensive expenditure for it. in the rural school is found the most important and puzzling educational problem of the present day. if our agricultural population are not to fall behind other favored classes of industrial workers in intelligence and preparation for the activities that are to engage them, the rural school must begin working out a better adjustment to its problem. its curriculum must be broader and richer, and more closely related to the life and interests of the farm. the organization of the school, both on the intellectual and the social side, must bring it more closely into touch with the interests and needs of the rural community. the support and administration of rural education must be improved. teachers for the rural schools must be better educated and better paid, and their teaching must be correspondingly more efficient. the following pages will be given to a discussion of these problems of adjustment. ii the social organization of the rural school every school possesses two types of organization: ( ) an _intellectual_ organization involving the selection and arrangement of a curriculum, and its presentation through instruction; and ( ) a _social_ organization involving, on the one hand, the inter-relations of the school and the community, and on the other the relations of the pupils with each other and the teacher. _the rural school and the community_ the rural school and community are not at present in vital touch with each other. the community is not getting enough from the school toward making life larger, happier, and more efficient; it is not giving enough to the school either in helpful coöperation or financial support. in general, it must be said that most of our rural people, the patrons of the rural school, have not yet conceived education broadly. they think of the school as having fulfilled its function when it has supplied the simplest rudiments of reading, writing, and number. and, naturally enough, the rural school has conceived its function in the same narrow light; for it is controlled very completely by its patrons, and a stream cannot rise higher than its source. because of its isolation, the pressing insistence of its toil, and the monotony of its environment, the rural community is in constant danger of intellectual and social stagnation. it has far more need that its school shall be a stimulating, organizing, socializing force than has the town or city. for the city has a dozen social centres entirely outside the school: its public parks, theatres, clubs, churches, and streets, even, serve to stimulate, entertain, and educate. but the rural community is wanting in all these social forces; it is lacking in both intellectual and social stimulus and variety. one of the most pressing needs of country districts is a common neighborhood center for both young and old, which shall stand as an organizing, welding, vitalizing force, uniting the community on a basis of common interests and activities. for while, as we have seen, the rural population as a whole are markedly homogeneous, there is after all but little of common acquaintanceship and mingling among them. thousands of rural families live lives of almost complete social isolation and lack of contact with neighbors. this condition is one of the gravest drawbacks to farm life. the social impulse and the natural desire for recreation and amusement are as strong in country boys and girls as in their city cousins, yet the country offers young people few opportunities for satisfying these impulses and desires. the normal social tendencies of youth are altogether too strong to be crushed out by repression; they are too valuable to be neglected; and they are too dangerous to be left to take their own course wholly unguided. the rural community can never hope to hold its boys and girls permanently to the life of the farm until it has recognized the necessity for providing for the expression and development of the spontaneous social impulses of youth. furthermore, the social monotony and lack of variety of the rural community is a grave moral danger to its young people. it is a common impression that the great city is strewn thick with snares and pitfalls threatening to morals, but that the country is free from such temptations. the public dance halls and cheap theaters of the city are beyond doubt a great and constant menace to youthful ideals and purity. but the country, going to the opposite extreme, with its almost utter lack of recreation and amusement places, offers temptations no less insidious and fatal. the great difficulty at this point is that young people in rural communities are thrown together almost wholly in isolated pairs instead of in social groups; and that there are no objective resources of amusement or entertainment to claim their interest and attention away from themselves. they are freed from all chaperonage and the restraints of the conventions obtaining in social groups at the very time in their lives when these are most needed as steadying and controlling forces. the result is that the country districts, which ought to be of all places in the world the freest from temptation and peril to the morals of our young people, are really more dangerous than the cities. the sequel is found in the fact that a larger proportion of country girls than of city girls go astray. nor is the rural community more successful in the morals of its boys than its girls. in other words, the lack of opportunities for free and normal social experience, the consequent ignorance of social conventions, and the absence of healthful amusement and recreation, make the rural community a most unsafe place in which to rear a family. but the necessity for social recreation and amusement does not apply to the young people alone. their fathers and mothers are suffering from the same limitations, though of course with entirely different results. the danger here is that of premature aging and stagnation. while the toil of the city worker is relieved by change and variety, his mind rested and his mood enlivened by the stimulus from many lines of diversion, the lives of the dwellers on the farm are constantly threatened by a deadly sameness and monotony. the indisputable tendency of farmers and their wives to age so rapidly, and so early to fall into the ranks of "fogyism," is due far more to lack of variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to hard labor, severe as this often is. age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. the farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." and his wife should now and then have an opportunity to meet people other than those for whom she cooks and sews. but what has all this to do with the social organization of the rural school? much. the country cannot have its theaters, parks, and crowded thoroughfares like the city. but it needs and must have _some_ social center, where its people may assemble for recreation, entertainment, and intellectual growth and development. and what is more natural and feasible than that the public school should be this center? here is an institution already belonging to the whole people, and set apart for the intellectual training of the young. why should it not also be made to minister to the intellectual needs of their elders as well, and to the social needs of all? _why should not the public school building, now in use but six hours a day for little more than half the year, be open at all times when it can be helpful to any portion of the community?_ if young people are to develop naturally, if they are to make full use of their social as well as their intellectual powers, if they are to be satisfied with their surroundings, they must be provided with suitable opportunities for social mingling and recreation in groups. this is nature's way; there is no other way. the school might and should afford this opportunity. there is not the least reason why the school building, when it is adapted to this purpose, should not be the common neighborhood meeting place for all sorts of young people's parties, picnics, entertainments, athletic contests, and every other form of amusement approved in the community. such a use of the school property would yield large returns to the community for the small additional expense required. it would serve to weld the school and community more closely together. it would vastly change the attitude of the young toward the school. it would save much of the dissatisfaction of young people with the life of the farm. it would prove a great safeguard to youthful morals. it would lead the community itself to a new sense of its duty toward the social life of the young, and to a new concept of the school as a part of the community organization. finally, this broadened service of the school to its community would have a reflex influence on the school itself, vitalizing every department of its activities, and giving it a new vision of its opportunities. the first obstacle that will appear in the way of such a plan is the inadequacy of the present type of country schoolhouse. and this is a serious matter; for the barren, squalid little building of the present day would never fit into such a project. but this type of schoolhouse must go--is going. it is a hundred years behind our civilization, and wholly inadequate to present needs. passing for later discussion the method by which these buildings are to be supplanted by better ones, let us consider further the details of the plan of making the school the neighborhood center. first of all, each school must supply a larger area and a greater number of people than at present. it is financially impossible to erect good buildings to the number of our present schools. nor are there pupils enough in the small district as now organized to make a school, nor people enough successfully to use the school as a neighborhood center. let each township, or perhaps somewhat smaller area, select a central, well-adapted site and thereon erect a modern, well-equipped school building. but this building must not be just the traditional schoolhouse with its classrooms and rows of desks. for it is to be more than a place where the children will study and recite lessons from books; it is to be the place where all the people of the neighborhood, _old and young_, will assemble for entertainment, amusement, and instruction. here will be held community picnics, social entertainments, young people's parties, lectures, concerts, debating contests, agricultural courses for the farmers, school programs, spreads and banquets, and whatever else may belong to the common social and intellectual life of the community. the modern rural school building will therefore be home-like as well as school-like. in addition to its classrooms it will contain an assembly room capable of seating several hundred people. the seating of this room may be removable so that the floor can be cleared for social purposes or the room used for a dining-room. one or two smaller rooms will be needed for social functions, club and committee meetings. these rooms should be made attractive with good furniture, rugs, couches, and pictures. the building will contain well-equipped laboratories for manual training and domestic science, the latter of which will be found serviceable in connection with serving picnics, "spreads," and the like. the entire building should be architecturally attractive, well heated and ventilated, commodious, well furnished, and decorated with good pictures. in it should be housed a library containing several thousand well-selected books, besides magazines and newspapers. the laboratories and equipment should be fully equal to those found in the town schools, but should be adapted to the work of the rural school. the grounds surrounding the rural school building can easily be ample in area, and beautiful in outlook and decoration. here will be the neighborhood athletic grounds for both boys and girls, shade trees for picnics, flowers and shrubs, and ground enough for a school garden connected with the instruction in agriculture. nor is it too much to believe that the district will in the future erect on the school grounds a cottage for the principal of the school and his family, and thus offer an additional inducement for strong, able men to devote their energies to education in the rural communities. now contrast this schoolhouse and equipment with the typical rural building of the present. adjoining a prosperous farm, with its large house, its accompanying barns, silos, machine houses, and all the equipment necessary to modern farming, is the little schoolhouse. it is a dilapidated shell of a rectangular box, barren of every vestige of beauty or attractiveness both inside and out. at the rear are two outbuildings which are an offense to decency and a menace to morals. within the schoolhouse the painted walls are dingy with smoke and grime. the windows are broken and dirty, no pictures adorn the walls. the floor is washed but once or twice a year. the room is heated by an ugly box of a stove, and ventilated only by means of windows which frequently are nailed shut. the grounds present a wilderness of weeds, rubbish, and piles of ashes. it is all an outrage against the rights of the country child, and an indictment of the intelligence and ideals of a large proportion of our people. if it is said that the plan proposed to remedy this situation is revolutionary, it will be admitted. what our rural schools of to-day need is _not improvement but reorganization_. for only in this radical way can they be made a factor in the vitalizing and conserving of the rural community which, unless some new leaven is introduced, is surely destined to disorganization and decay. _the consolidation of rural schools_ the first step in reorganizing the rural schools is _consolidation_. our rural school organization, buildings, and equipment are a full century behind our industrial and social advancement. the present plan of attempting to run a school on approximately every four square miles of territory originated at a time of poverty, and when the manufacturing industries were all carried on in the homes and small shops. our rural people are now well-to-do, and manufacturing has moved over into a well-organized set of factories; but the isolated little school, shamefully housed, meagerly equipped, poorly attended, and unskillfully taught, still remains. such a system of schools leaves our rural people educationally on a par with the days of cradling the grain and threshing it with a flail; of planting corn by hand and cultivating it with a hoe; of lighting the house with a tallow dip, and traveling by stage-coach. the well-meant attempts to "improve" the rural school as now organized are futile. the proposal to solve the problem by raising the standards for teachers, desirable as this is; by the raising of salaries; or by bettering the type of the little schoolhouse, are at best but temporary makeshifts, and do not touch the root of the problem. the first and most fundamental step is to eliminate the little shacks of houses that dot our prairies every two miles along the country roads. for not only is it impossible to supply adequate buildings so near together, but it is even more impossible to find children enough to constitute a real school in such small districts. there is no way of securing a full head of interest and enthusiasm with from five to ten or twelve pupils in a school. the classes are too small and the number of children too limited to permit the organization of proper games and plays, or a reasonable variety of association through mingling together. furthermore, it will never be possible to pay adequate salaries to the teachers in these small schools. nor will any ambitious and well-prepared teacher be willing to remain in such a position, where he is obliged to invest his time and influence with so few pupils, and where all conditions are so adverse. the chief barrier to the centralization of rural education has been local prejudice and pride. in many cases a true sentimental value has attached to "the little red schoolhouse." its praises have been sung, and orator and writer have expanded upon the glories of our common schools, until it is no wonder that their pitiful inadequacy has been overlooked by many of their patrons. in other cases opposition has arisen to giving up the small local school because of the selfish fear that the loss of the school would lower the value of adjacent property. still others have feared that consolidation would mean higher school taxes, and have opposed it upon this ground. but whatever the causes of the opposition to consolidation, this opposition must cease before the rural school can fulfill its function and before the rural child can have educational opportunities even approximating those given the town child. and until this is accomplished, the exodus from the farm will continue and ought to continue. pride, prejudice, and penury must not be allowed to deprive the farm boys and girls of their right to education and normal development. the movement toward consolidation of rural schools and transportation of the children to a central school has already attained considerable headway in many regions of the country.[ ] it is now a part of the rural school system in thirty-two states. massachusetts, the leader in consolidation, began in . the movement at first grew slowly in all the states, not only having local opposition to overcome, but also meeting the problem of bad country roads interfering with the transportation of pupils. during the past half-dozen years, however, consolidation has been gaining headway, and is now going on at least five times as fast as the average for the twenty-five years preceding . indiana is at present the banner state in the rapidity of consolidation, the expenditure for conveyance having considerably more than trebled since . the broad and general sweep of the movement, together with the fact that it is practically unheard of for schools that have once tried consolidation to go back to the old system, seems to indicate that the rural education of the not distant future will, except in a few regions, be carried on in consolidated schools. the relative cost of maintaining district and consolidated schools is an important factor. yet this factor must not be given undue prominence. it is true that the cost of education must be kept at a reasonable ratio with the standard of living of a community. but it is also true that the consolidated rural school must be looked upon as an indispensable country-life institution, and hence as having claim to a more generous basis of support than that accorded the district school. while it is impossible, owing to such widely varying conditions, to make an absolutely exact statement of the relative expense of the two types of schools, yet it has been shown in many different instances that the cost of schooling per day in consolidated schools is but slightly, if any, above that in most district schools. the aggregate annual cost is usually somewhat higher in the consolidated schools, owing to the fact of a greatly increased attendance. a comparison made between the cost per day's schooling in the smaller district schools and consolidated schools almost invariably shows a lower expenditure for the latter. for example, the fifteen districts in hardin county, iowa, having in an enrollment of nine or less, averaged a cost of . cents a day for each pupil.[ ] at the same time the cost per day in the consolidated rural schools of northeastern ohio was only . cents a day, the district schools being more than fifty-seven per cent higher than the consolidated. similar comparisons show the same trend in many other localities. in a great many of the small district schools the cost per pupil is as high as in consolidated schools where a high school course is also provided. it has been found that the average cost per year of schooling a child in a consolidated school is but little above thirty dollars, while in practically all smaller district schools it far exceeds this amount, not infrequently going above fifty dollars. this means that average rural districts that are putting at least thirty dollars a year into the schooling of each child can, by consolidating their schools, secure greatly improved educational facilities with no heavier financial burden. not the least important of the advantages growing out of rural school consolidation is the improved attendance. experience has shown that fully twenty-five per cent more children of school age are enrolled under the consolidated than under the district system. the advantage of this one factor alone can hardly be over-estimated, but the increase in regularity of attendance is also as great. the average daily attendance of rural schools throughout the country is approximately sixty per cent of the enrollment, and in entire states falls below fifty per cent. it has been found that consolidation, with its attendant conveyance of pupils, commonly increases the average daily attendance by as much as twenty-five per cent. it is true that in many regions it may at present prove impossible to consolidate all the rural schools. in places where the population is so sparse as to require transportation for very long distances, or where the country roads are still in such a condition in wet seasons as to be practically impassable, consolidation must of necessity be delayed. in such communities, however, the rural school need not be completely at a standstill. much can be done to make even the one-room schoolhouse attractive and hygienic. with almost no expense, the grounds can be set with shade trees, shrubs, and perennial flowering plants. the yard can be made into a lawn in front, and into an athletic ground at the sides or the rear. enough ground can be added to provide for all these things, and a school garden besides. the building can be rendered more inviting through better architecture, and more attention to decoration and cleanliness. an adequate supply of books and other equipment can be provided. while the isolated rural school can never take the place of the consolidated school, while it should always be looked upon as only temporarily occupying a place later to be filled by a more efficient type of school, it can after all be rendered much more efficient than it is at present. and since the one-room school will without doubt for years to come be required as a supplement of the consolidated school, it should receive the same careful thought and effort toward its improvement that is being accorded the school of better type. _financial support of the rural school_ the rural school has never had adequate financial support. there has been good reason for this in many regions of the country where farm property was low in value, the land sparsely settled and not all improved, or else covered by heavy mortgages. as these conditions have gradually disappeared and the agricultural population become more prosperous, the school has in some degree shared the general prosperity. but not fully. a smaller proportion of the margin of wealth above living necessities is going into rural education now than in the earlier days of less prosperity. while the farmer has vastly "improved" his farm, he has improved his school but little. while he has been adding modern machinery and adopting scientific methods in caring for his grain and stock, his children have not had the advantage of an increasingly efficient school. the poverty of the rural school finds its explanation in two facts: ( ) the relatively low value of the taxable property of the rural as compared with the town or city district, and ( ) the lower rate of local school tax paid in country than in urban districts. the first of these disadvantages of the rural district cannot be remedied; but for the second, there seems to be no valid economic reason. the approximate difference in the local school-tax rate paid in urban and rural districts is shown in the following instances, which might be duplicated from other states:-- in kansas, the local school tax paid in by towns and cities was above eighty per cent more than that paid by country districts. in missouri, the current report of the state superintendent shows towns and cities seventy-five per cent higher than the country. in minnesota, towns and cities average nearly three times the rate paid by rural districts. in ohio, towns and cities are more than ten per cent higher than rural districts, even where the rural district maintains a full elementary and high school course. in nebraska and iowa, the town and city rate is about double that of country districts. when there is added to this difference the further fact that town and city property is commonly assessed at more nearly its full value than rural property, the discrepancy becomes all the greater. it is not meant, of course, that farmers should pay as high a school-tax rate for the elementary rural school as that paid by town patrons who also have a high school available. but, on the other hand, if better school facilities are to be furnished the country children, rural property should bear its full share of the taxes required. the farmer should be willing to pay as much for the education of his child as the city dweller pays for a similar education for his. during the last generation farmers have been increasing in wealth faster than any other class of industrial workers. their land has doubled in value, barns have been built, machinery has been added, automobiles purchased, and large bank credits established. yet very little of this increased prosperity has reached the school. library, reference works, maps, charts, and other apparatus are usually lacking. in iowa, as a fair example, a sum of not less than ten nor more than fifteen cents a year for each pupil of school age in the district is required by law to be expended for library books. yet in not a few districts the law is a dead letter or the money grudgingly spent! in many rural schools the teacher has to depend on the proceeds of a "social," an "exhibition," or a "box party" to secure a few dollars for books or pictures for the neighborhood school, and sometimes even buys brooms and dust pans from the fund secured in this way. this is all wrong. the school should be put on a business basis. it should have the necessary tools with which to accomplish its work, and not be forced to waste the time and opportunity of childhood for want of a few dollars expended for equipment. its patrons should realize that just as it pays to supply factory, shop, or farm with the best of instruments for carrying on the work, so it pays in the school. cheap economy is always wasteful, and never more wasteful than when it cripples the efficiency of education. state aid for rural schools has been proposed and in some instances tried, as a mode of solving their financial problem. where this system has been given a fair trial, as for example in minnesota, it has resulted in two great advantages: ( ) it has encouraged the local community to freer expenditure of their own money for school purposes, since the contribution of the state is conditioned on the amount expended by the district. this is an important achievement, since it serves to train the community to the idea of more liberal local taxation for school purposes, and it is probable that the greater part of the support of our schools will continue to come from this source. another advantage of state aid is ( ) that it serves to equalize educational opportunities, and hence to maintain a true educational democracy. wealthier localities are caused to contribute to the educational facilities of those less favored, and a common advancement thereby secured. while the theory of state aid to rural education is wholly defensible, and while it has worked well in practice, yet there is one safeguard that needs to be considered. it is manifestly unfair to ask the people of towns and cities to help pay for the support of the rural schools through the medium of the state treasury except on condition that the patrons of the rural schools themselves do their fair share. mr. "a," living in a town where he pays twenty mills school tax, ought not to be asked to help improve mr. "b's" rural school, while mr. "b" is himself paying but ten mills of school tax. the farmer is as able as any one else to pay a fair rate of taxation for his school, and should be willing to do so before asking for aid from other taxation sources. rural education must not be placed on the basis of a missionary enterprise. state aid should be used to compensate for the difference in the economic _basis_ for taxation in different localities, and not for a difference in the _rates_ of taxation between localities equally able to pay the same rate. * * * * * we may conclude, then, that while neither the rural school nor the community has been fully aware of the possibilities for mutual helpfulness and coöperation, yet there are many hopeful signs that both are awakening to a sense of responsibility. federal and state commissions have been created to study the rural problem, national and state teachers' associations are seeking a solution of the rural school question, and, better still, the patrons of the rural schools are in many places alive to the pressing need for better educational facilities for their children. growing out of these influences and the faithful work of many state and county superintendents, and not a few of the rural teachers themselves, a spirit of progress is gaining headway. several thousand consolidated schools are now rendering excellent service to their patrons and at the same time acting as a stimulus to other communities to follow their example. state aid to rural education is no longer an experiment. the people are in many localities voluntarily and gladly increasing their taxes in order that they may improve their schools. teachers' salaries are being increased, better equipment provided, and buildings rendered more habitable. the great educational problem of the immediate future will be to encourage and guide the movement which is now getting under way. for mistakes made now will handicap both community and school for years to come. the attempt to secure better schools by "improving" conditions in local districts should be definitely abandoned except in localities where conditions make consolidation impracticable for the present. the new consolidated school building should take definitely into account the fact that the school is to become the _neighborhood social center_, and the structure should be planned as much with this function in view as with its uses for school purposes. the new type of rural school is not to aim simply to give a better intellectual training, but is at the same time to relate this training to the conditions and needs of our agricultural population. and all who have to do with the rural schools in any way are to seek to make the school a true vitalizing factor in the community--a leaven, whose influence shall permeate every line of interest and activity of its patrons and lead to a fuller and richer life. _the rural school and its pupils_ one of the surest tests of any school is the attitude of the pupils--the spirit of loyalty, coöperation, and devotion they manifest with reference to their education. do they, on the whole, look upon the school as an opportunity or an imposition? do they consider it _their_ school, and make its interests and welfare their concern, or do they think of it as the teacher's school, or the board's school or the district's school? these questions are of supreme importance, for the question of attitude, quite as much as that of ability, determines the use made of opportunity. it must be admitted that throughout our entire school system there remains something to be desired in the spirit of coöperation between pupils and schools. the feeling of loyalty which the child has for his home does not extend commensurately to the school. too often the school is looked upon as something forced upon the child, for his welfare, perhaps, but after all not as forming an interesting and vital part of his present experience. it is often rather a place where so much time and effort and inconvenience must be paid for so many grades and promotions, and where, incidentally, preparation is supposed to be made for some future demands very dimly conceived. at best, there is frequently a lack of feeling of full identity of interests between the child and the school. the youth, immaturity, and blindness of childhood make it impossible, of course, for children to conceive of their school in a spirit of full appreciation. on the other hand, the very nature of childhood is responsiveness and readiness of coöperation in any form of interesting activity,--is loyalty of attitude toward what is felt to minister to personal happiness and well-being. in so far, therefore, as there exists any lack of loyalty and coöperation of pupils toward their school, the reasons for such defection are to be sought first of all in the school, and not in the child. while this negative attitude of the pupils exists in some degree in all our schools, it is undoubtedly more marked in our rural schools than in others. in a negligible number of cases does this lack of coöperation take the form of overt rebellion against the authority of the school. it is manifested in other ways, many of them wholly unconscious to the child, as, for example, lack of desire to attend school, and indifference to its activities when present. attending school is the most important occupation that can engage the child. yet the indifference of children and their parents alike to the necessity for schooling makes the small and irregular attendance of rural school pupils one of the most serious problems with which educators have to deal. county superintendents have in many places offered prizes and diplomas with the hope of bettering attendance, but such incentives do not reach the source of the difficulty. the remedy must finally lie in a fundamental change of attitude toward the school and its opportunities. good attendance must spring from interest in the school work and a feeling of its value, rather than from any artificial incentives. how great a problem poor attendance at rural schools is, may be realized from the fact that, in spite of compulsory education laws, not more than seventy per cent of the children accessible to the rural school are enrolled, and of this number only about sixty per cent are in daily attendance. this is to say that under one half of our farm children are daily receiving the advantages of even the rural school. in some states this proportion will fall as low as three tenths instead of one half. in many rich agricultural counties of the middle west, having a farming population of approximately ten thousand, not more than forty or fifty pupils per year complete the eight grades of the rural school. if the rural school is to be able to claim the regular attendance and spontaneous coöperation of the children it must ( ) be reasonably accessible to them, ( ) be attractive and interesting in itself, and ( ) offer work the value and application of which are evident. the inaccessibility of the rural school has always been one of its greatest disadvantages. in a large proportion of cases, a walk of from a mile to a mile and a half along country roads or across cultivated fields has been required to reach the schoolhouse. during inclement weather, or when deep snow covers the ground, this distance proves almost prohibitive for all the smaller children. wet feet and drenched clothing have been followed by severe colds, coughs, bronchitis, or worse, and the children have not only suffered educationally, but been endangered physically as well. it has been found in all instances that public conveyance of pupils to the consolidated schools greatly increases rural school patronage. it makes the school accessible. the regular wagon service does away with the "hit-and-miss" method of determining for each succeeding day whether it is advisable for the child to start for school. so important is this factor in securing attendance, that a careful study by knorr[ ] of the attendance in ohio district and consolidated schools shows twenty-seven per cent more of the total school population in school under the influence of public conveyance and other features peculiar to consolidation than under the district system. he concludes that, broadly speaking, by a system of consolidated schools with public conveyance, rural school attendance can be increased by at least one fourth. the life in the typical rural school is not sufficiently interesting and attractive to secure a strong hold upon the pupils. the dreary ugliness of the physical surroundings has already been referred to. and even in districts where the building and grounds have been made reasonably attractive, there is yet wanting a powerful factor--the influence of the social incentive that comes from numbers. in hundreds of our rural schools the daily attendance is less than a dozen pupils, frequently not representing more than three or four families. the classes can therefore contain not more than two or three pupils, and often only one. there is no possibility of organizing games, or having the fun and frolic possible to larger groups of children. add to this the fact that the teaching is often spiritless and uninspiring, and the reason becomes still more plain why so many rural children drop out of school with scarcely the rudiments of an education. here, again, the consolidated school, with its attractive building, its improved equipment, its larger body of pupils, and its better teaching, appears as a solution of the difficulty. for it does what the present type of district school can never do--it makes school life interesting and attractive to its pupils, and this brings to bear upon them one of the strongest incentives to continue in school and secure an education. finally, much of the work of the school has not appealed to the pupils as interesting or valuable. this has not been altogether the fault of the curriculum, but often has come from the lack of adaptability of the work to the pupils studying it. through frequent changes of teachers, poor classification, and irregularity of attendance, rural pupils have often been forced to go over and over the same ground, without any reference to whether they were ready to advance or not. in other cases, careless grading has placed children in studies for which they were utterly unprepared, and from which they could get nothing but discouragement and dislike for school. in still other instances the course pursued has been ill-balanced, and in no degree correlated. often the whim of the child determines whether he will or will not study certain subjects, the teacher lacking either the knowledge or insistence to bring about a better organization of the work. the unskilled character of the rural school-teaching force, and the impossibility of securing any reasonable supervision as the system is at present organized, make us again turn to the consolidated school as the remedy for these adverse conditions. for with its improved attendance, its skilled teaching, and its better supervision, it easily and naturally renders such conditions impossible. give the consolidated school, in addition, the greatly enriched curriculum which it will find possible to offer its pupils, and the vexing question of the relation of the rural school to its pupils will be far toward solution. let us next consider somewhat in detail the curriculum of the rural school. footnotes: [footnote : see "consolidated rural schools," bulletin , u. s. department of agriculture.] [footnote : bulletin , u. s. department of agriculture, p. .] [footnote : bulletin , u. s. department of agriculture, p. .] iii the curriculum of the rural school if we grant the economic ability to support good schools, then the curriculum offered by any type of school, the scope of subject-matter given the pupils to master, is a measure of the educational ideals of those maintaining and using the schools. if the curriculum is broad, and representative of the various great fields of human culture; if it relates itself to the life and needs of its patrons; if it is adapted to the interests and activities of its pupils, it may be said that the people believe in education as a right of the individual and as a preparation for successful living. but if, on the other hand, the curriculum is meager and narrow, consisting only of the rudiments of knowledge, and not related to the life of the people or the interests of the pupils, then it may well be concluded that education is not highly prized, that it is not understood, or that it is looked upon as an incidental. _the scope of the rural school curriculum_ modern conditions require a broader and more thorough education than that demanded by former times, and far more than the typical district rural school affords. the old-time school offered only the "three r's," and this was thought sufficient for an education. but these times have passed. not only has society greatly increased in wealth during the last half-century, but it has also grown much in intelligence. many more people are being educated now than formerly, and they are also being vastly better educated. for the concept of what constitutes an education has changed, and the curriculum has grown correspondingly broader and richer. it is therefore no longer possible to express the educational status of a community in the percentage of people who can merely read and write. educational progress has become a national ideal. the elementary schools in towns and cities have been greatly strengthened both in curriculum and teaching. high schools have been organized and splendidly equipped, and their attendance has rapidly increased. but all this development has hardly touched the rural school. the curriculum offered is pitifully narrow even for an elementary school, and very few high schools are supported by rural communities. in fact, a large proportion of our rural population are receiving an education but little in advance of that offered a hundred years ago in similar schools. this is not fair to the children born and reared on the farm; it is not fair to one of the greatest and most important industries of our country; and it cannot but result disastrously in the end. if the rural school is to meet its problem, it must extend the scope of its curriculum. it was formerly thought by many that education, except in its simplest elements, was only for those planning to enter the "learned professions." but this idea has given way before the onward sweep of the spirit of democracy, and we now conceive education as the right and duty of _all_. nor by education do we mean the simple ability to read, write, and number. our present-day civilization demands not only that the child shall be taught to read, but also that he shall be supplied with books and guided in his reading. through reading as a tool he is to become familiar with the best in the world's literature and its history. he is not only to learn number, but is to be so educated that he may employ his number concepts in fruitful ways. he must not only be familiar with the mechanics of writing, but must have knowledge, interests, experience that will give him something to write about. the "three r's" are necessary tools, but they are only tools, and must be utilized in putting the child into possession of the best and most fruitful culture of the race. and, practically, they must put him into command of such phases of culture as touch his own life and experience and make him more efficient. the rural school cannot extend the scope of its curriculum simply by inserting in the present curriculum new studies related to the life and work of the farm. the modification must be deeper and more thoroughgoing than this. _a full elementary course of eight years and a high school course of four years should be easily accessible to every rural child._ less than this amount of education is inadequate to prepare for the life of the farm, and fails to put the individual into full possession of his powers. nor, in most instances, should the high schooling be left to some adjacent town, which is to receive the rural pupils upon payment of tuition to the town district. unless the town is small, and practically a part of the rural community, it cannot supply, either in the subject-matter of the curriculum or the spirit of the school, the type of education that the rural children should have. for in so far as the town or city high school leads to any specific vocation, it certainly does not lead toward industrial occupations, and least of all toward agriculture. it rather prepares for the professions, or for business careers. its tendency is very strongly to draw the boys and girls away from the farm instead of preparing them for it. while the rural child, therefore, must be provided with a better and broader education, he should usually not be sent to town to get it. if he is, the chances are that he will stay in town and be lost to the farm. indeed, this is precisely what has been happening; the town or city high school has been turning the country boy away from the farm. for not only does what one studies supply his knowledge; it also determines his _attitude_. if the curriculum contains no subject-matter related to the immediate experience and occupation of the pupil, his education is certain to entice him away from his old interests and activities. the farm boy whose studies lack all point of contact with his life and work will soon either lose interest in the curriculum or turn his back upon the farm. if the boys and girls born on the farm are to be retained in this form of industry, the rural school must be broadened to give them an education equal to that afforded by town or city for its youth. if the rural community cannot accomplish this end, it has no claim on the loyalty and service of its youth. rural children have a right to a well-organized, well-equipped, and well-taught elementary school of eight years and a high school of four years, with a curriculum adapted especially to their interests and needs. it is not meant, of course, that the rural school, with its present organization and administration, can extend the scope of its curriculum to make it the equal of that offered in the grades of the town or city school. radical changes, such as those discussed in the preceding chapter, will have to be made in the rural district system before this is possible. that these changes are being made and the full elementary and high school course offered in many consolidated rural schools, scattered from florida to idaho, is proof both of the feasibility of the plan and of an awakened public demand for better rural education. the broadened curriculum of the rural school must contain subject-matter especially related to the interests and activities of the farm; upon this all are agreed. but it must not stop with vocational subjects alone. for, while one's vocation is fundamental, it is not all of life. education should help directly in making a living; it must also help to live. broad and permanent lines of interest must be set up and trained to include many forms of experience. the child must come to know something of the great social institutions of his day and of the history leading to their development. he must become familiar with the marvelous scientific discoveries and inventions underlying our modern civilization. he must be led to feel appreciation for the beautiful in art, literature, and music; and must have nurtured in his life a love for goodness and truth in every form. in short, through the curriculum the latent powers constituting the life capital of every normal child are to be stimulated and developed to the end that his life shall be more than mere physical existence--to the end that it shall be crowned with fullness of knowledge, richness of feeling, and the victory of worthy achievement. this is the right of every child in these prosperous and enlightened times,--the right of the country child as well as the city child. and society will not have done its duty in providing for the education of its youth until the children of the farm have full opportunities for such development. _the rural elementary school curriculum_ by the elementary school is meant the eight grades of work below the high school which the rural school is now meant to cover. whatever is put into the curriculum of a nation's schools finally becomes a part of national character and achievement. what the children study in school comes to determine their attitudes and shape their aptitudes. the old greek philosophers, becoming teachers of youth, turned the nation into a set of students and disputants over philosophical questions. sparta taught her boys the arts of war, and became the chief military nation of her time. germany introduces technological studies into her schools, and becomes the leading country in the world in the arts of manufacture. let any people emphasize in their schools the studies that lead to commercial and professional interests, and neglect those that prepare for industrial vocations, and the industrial welfare of the nation is sure to suffer. the curriculum of the rural school must, therefore, contain the basic subjects that belong to all culture,--the studies that every normal, intelligent person should have just because he belongs to the twentieth-century civilization, and in addition must include the subjects that afford the knowledge and develop the attitude and technique belonging to the life of the farm. let us now consider this curriculum somewhat more in detail. _the mother tongue._ mastery of his mother tongue is the birthright of every child. he should first of all be able to speak it correctly and with ease. he should next be able to read it with comprehension and enjoyment, and should become familiar with the best in its literature. he should be able to write it with facility, both as to its spelling and its composition. finally, he should know something of the structure, or grammar, of the language. this requirement suggests the content of the curriculum as to english. the child must be given opportunity to use the language orally; he must be led to talk. but this implies that he must have something to say, and be interested in saying it. formal "language lessons," divorced from all the child's interests and activities, will not meet the purpose. facility in speech grows out of enthusiasm in speaking. every recitation is a lesson in english, and should be used for this purpose; nor should the aim be correctness only, but ease and fluency as well. the child must also learn to read; not alone to pronounce the printed words of a page, but to grasp the thought and feeling, and express them in oral reading. this presupposes a mastery of the mechanics of reading, the letters, words, and marks employed. the only way to learn to read is by reading. this is true whether we refer to learning the mechanics of reading, to learning the apprehension and expression of thought, or to learning the art of appreciating and enjoying good literature. yet, trite and self-evident as this truism is, it is constantly violated in teaching reading in the rural school. for the course in reading usually consists of a series of five readers, expected to cover seven or eight years of study. these readers contain less than one hundred pages of reading matter to the year, or but little more than half a page a day for the time the child should be in school. the result is that the same reader is read over and over, to no purpose. with a rich literature available for each of the eight years of the elementary school, comparatively few of the rural schools have supplied either supplementary readers or other reading books for the use of the children. the result is that most rural school children learn to read but stumblingly, and seldom attain sufficient skill and taste in reading so that it becomes a pleasure. such a situation as this indicates the same lack of wisdom that would be shown in employing willing and skillful workmen to garner a rich harvest, and then sending them into the fields with wholly insufficient and inadequate tools. the rural school must not only teach the child the mechanics of reading, but lead him to read and love good books. this can be done only _by supplying the books and giving the child an opportunity to read them_. comparatively few people like to write. the pathway of expression finds its way out more easily through the tongue than through the hand. yet it is highly necessary that every one should in this day be able to write. nor does this mean merely the ability to form letters into words and put them down with a pen so that they are legible. this is a fundamental requisite, but the mastery of penmanship, spelling, and punctuation is, however, only a beginning. one must be able to formulate his thoughts easily, to construct his sentences correctly, and to make his writing effective; he must learn the art of composition. here again the principle already stated applies. the way to learn to write is by writing; not just by the dreary treadmill of practicing upon formal "compositions," but by having something to write that one cares to express. the written language lessons should, therefore, always grow out of the real interests and activities of the child in the home, the school, or on the farm, and should include the art of letter-writing, argumentation and exposition, as well as narration and description. the subject of formal grammar has little or no place in the grades of the elementary school. the grammatical relations of the language are complicated and beyond the power of the child at an early age. nor does the study of such relations result in efficiency in the use of language, as is commonly supposed. children are compelled in many schools to waste weary years in the study of logical relations they are too young to comprehend, when they should be reading, speaking, and writing their mother tongue under the stimulus and guidance of a teacher who is himself a worthy and enthusiastic model in the use of speech. only the simpler grammatical forms and relations should be taught in the grades, and these should have immediate application to oral and written speech. _arithmetic._ arithmetic has for more than two hundred years formed an important part of the elementary school curriculum. it has been taught with the double object of affording mental discipline for the child, and of putting him into possession of an important tool of practical knowledge. it is safe to say that a large proportion of the patrons of the rural schools of the present look upon arithmetic as the most important subject taught in the school after the simple mechanics of reading. ability to "cipher" has been thought of as constituting a large and important part of the educational equipment of the practical man. without doubt, number is an essential part of the education of the child. yet there is nothing in the mere art of numbering things as we meet them in daily experience that should make arithmetic require so large a proportion of time as it has been receiving. the child is usually started in number in the first grade, and continues it the full eight years of the elementary course, finally devoting three or more years of the high school course to its continued study. thus, nearly one fourth of the entire school time of the pupil is demanded by the various phases of the number concept. the only ground upon which the expenditure of this large proportion of time upon number can be defended is that of _discipline_. and modern psychology and experimental pedagogy have shown the folly and waste of setting up empty discipline as an educational aim. education time is too short, and the amount of rich and valuable material waiting to be mastered too great, to devote golden years to a relatively barren grind. it is probable that at least half the time at present devoted to arithmetic in the elementary school could be given to other subjects with no loss to the child's ability in number, and with great gain to his education as a whole. not that the child knows number any too well now. he does not. in fact, few children finishing the elementary school possess any considerable degree of ability in arithmetic. they can work rather hard problems, if they have a textbook, and the answers by which to test their results. but give them a practical problem from the home, the farm, or the shop, and the chances are two to one that they cannot secure a correct result. this is not the fault of the child, but the fault of the kind of arithmetic he has been given, and the way it has been taught. we have taught him the solution of various difficult, analytical problems not in the least typical of the concrete problems to be met daily outside of school; but we have not taught him to add, subtract, multiply, and divide with rapidity and accuracy. we have required him to solve problems containing fractions with large and irreducible denominators such as are never met in the business world, but he cannot readily and with certainty handle numbers expressed in halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and eighths. he has been compelled to sacrifice practical business efficiency in number to an attempt to train his powers of logical analysis. the arithmetic of the district school should be greatly simplified and reduced in quantity. its quality should be greatly improved both as to accuracy and speed in the fundamental operations and in the various concrete types of problems to be met in the home, on the farm, and in the shop. there need be no fear that the mental training will be less efficient with this type of arithmetic. for mental development comes only where there is mastery, and there is no mastery of the arithmetic as it is taught in the rural school to-day. _history and civics._ every american child should know the history and mode of government of his country. this is true first of all because this knowledge is necessary to intelligent participation in the affairs of a republic; but it is also necessary to the right development of the individual that he shall realize something of the heroism and sacrifice required to produce the civilization which he enjoys. every person needs to extend his thought and appreciation until it is large enough to include other peoples and times than his own. for only in this way can he come to feel kinship with the race at large, and thus save himself from provincialism and narrowness. this is equivalent to saying that the curriculum should afford ample opportunity for the study of history. nor should the history given the child deal chiefly with the military and political activities of the nation. many text books have been little more than an account of wars and politics. these are not the aspects of national life that most interest and concern the child, especially at the age when he is in the elementary school. he should at this time be told about the _people_ of his country,--their home life, their industries, their schools and churches, their bravery, their hardships, adventures, and achievements. he must come to know something of the great men and women of his nation and state, the writers, inventors, explorers, scientists, artists, and musicians, as well as the soldiers and statesmen. not only does this require that the child shall have suitable textbooks in history, but that he shall also have an adequate library of interesting histories, biographies, and historical fiction adapted to his age and interests. for it is not enough that the child shall learn the elementary facts of history while he is in the elementary school; more important still is it that he shall develop a real interest in history, and form the taste for reading historical matter. the course in history must, therefore, contain such matter as the child will love to read; for only then will it leave the desire to read. it must so put a premium upon patriotism, loyalty to country, and high-grade citizenship that the child shall feel the impulse to emulate the noble men and women who have contributed to our happiness and welfare. the study of history, even in the elementary school, should eventuate in loyal, efficient citizenship. the civics taught in the elementary school should be very practical and concrete. the age has not yet come for a study of the federal or state constitution. it is rather the _functional_ aspect of government that should be presented at this time--the points of contact of school district, township, county, state and federal government with the individual. how the school is supported and controlled; how the bridges are built and roads repaired; the work of township and county affairs; the powers and duties of boards of health; the right of franchise and the use of the ballot; the work of the postal system; the making and enforcing of laws,--these and similar topics suggest what the child should come to know from the study of civics. the great problem here is to influence conduct in the direction of upright citizenship, and to give such a knowledge of the machinery, especially of local government, as will lead to efficient participation in its activities. _geography and nature study._ the rural school has a great advantage over the city school in the teaching of geography and nature study. for the country child is closer to the earth and its products than the city child. the broad expanse of nature is always before him; life in its multiple forms constantly appeals to his eye and ear. he watches the seeds planted, and sees the crops cultivated and harvested. he has a very concrete sense of the earth as the home of man, and possesses a basis of practical knowledge for understanding the resources and products of his own and other countries. geography should, therefore, be one of the most vital and useful branches in the rural school. it is to begin wherever the life of the child touches nature in his immediate environment, and proceed from this on out to other parts of his home land, and finally to all lands. but the geography taught must not be of the old catechism type, which resulted in children committing to memory the definitions of geographical terms instead of studying the real objects ready at hand. it must not concern itself with the pupil's learning the names and locations of dozens of places and geographical forms of no particular importance, instead of coming into immediate touch with natural environment and with the earth in the larger sense as it bears upon his own life. the author has expressed this idea in another place as follows:-- "the content of geography is, therefore, synonymous with the content of the experience of the child as related to his own interests and activities, in so far as they grow out of the earth as his home. towns and cities begin with the ones nearest at hand. the concept of rivers has its rise in the one that flows past the child's home. valleys, mountains, capes, and bays are but modifications of those that lie within the circle of personal experience. generalizations must come to be made, but they must rest upon concrete and particular instances if they are to constitute a reality to the learner. "what kind of people live in a country, what they work at, what they eat, and how they live in their homes and their schools, what weather they have, and what they wear, how they travel and speak and read,--these are more vital questions to the child than the names and locations of unimportant streams, towns, capes, and bays. for they are the things that touch his own experience, and hence appeal to his interest. only as geography is given this social background, and concerns itself with the earth as related to social activities, can it fulfill its function in the elementary school."[ ] _hygiene and health._ since health is at the basis of all success and happiness, nothing can be more important in the education of the child than the subject of practical hygiene. it has been the custom in our schools until recently, however, to give the child a difficult and uninteresting text book dealing with physiology and anatomy, but containing almost nothing on hygiene and the laws of health. not only should the course in physiology emphasize the laws of hygiene, but this hygiene should in part have particular bearing on right living under the conditions imposed by the farm. food, its variety, adaptability, and preparation; clothing for the different seasons; work, recreation, and play; care of the eyes and teeth; bathing; the ventilation of the home, and especially of sleeping-rooms; the effects of tobacco and cigarettes in checking growth and reducing efficiency; the more simple and obvious facts bearing on the relation of bacteria to the growth, preparation, and spoiling of foods; the means to be taken to prevent bacterial contagion of diseases,--these are some of the practical matters that every child should know as a result of his study of physiology and hygiene. but we must go one step further still. it is not enough to teach these things as matters of abstract theory or truth. plenty of people know better hygiene than they are practicing. the subject must be presented so concretely and effectively and be supported by such incentives that it will actually lead to better habits of living--that it will _result in higher physical efficiency_. _agriculture._ agriculture is of course preeminently a subject for the rural school. not only is it of immediate and direct practical importance, but it is coming to be looked upon as so useful a cultural study that it is being introduced into many city schools. it has been objected that agriculture as a science cannot be taught in the elementary school because of the lack of age and development of the pupils. this is true, but neither can any other subject be taught to children of this age as a complete science. it is possible, however, to give children in the rural elementary school much useful information concerning agriculture. perhaps better still, it is possible to develop a scientific attitude and interest that will lead to further study of the subject in the high school or agricultural college, and that will in the mean-time serve to attach the boys and girls to the farm. the rural school pupils can be made familiar with the best modes of planting and cultivating the various crops, and with the diseases and insect enemies which threaten them; the selection of seed; the rotation of crops, and many other practical things applying directly to their home life. school gardens of vegetables and flowers constitute another center of interest and information, and serve to unite the school and the home. similarly the animal life of the farm can be studied, and a knowledge gained of the best varieties of farm stock, their breeding and care. insects and bird life can be observed, and their part in the growth or destruction of crops understood. all this is not only practicable, but necessary as part of the rural school curriculum. anything less than this amount of practical agriculture leaves the rural school in some degree short of fulfilling its function. _domestic science and manual training._ in general what is true of agriculture is true of domestic science and manual training. they can be presented in the elementary school only in the most concrete and applied form. but they can be successfully presented in this form, and must be if the rural school child is to have an equal opportunity with the town and city child. the girls can be taught the art of sewing, cooking, and serving, if only the necessary equipment and instruction are available. they are ready to learn, the subject-matter is adapted to their age and understanding, and nothing could be more vital to their interests and welfare. likewise the boys can be taught the use of tools, the value and finishing of different kinds of woods, and can develop no little skill with their hands, while they are at the same time receiving mental development and the cultivation of practical interests from this line of work. it is not in the least a question of the readiness of the boys to take up and profit by this subject, but is only a matter of equipment and teaching. _music and art._ nor should the finer aspects of culture be left out of the education of the country child. he will learn music as readily as the city child, and love it not less. indeed, he needs it even more as a part of his schooling, since the opportunities to hear and enjoy music are always at hand in the city, and nearly always lacking in the country. the child should be taught to sing and at least to understand and appreciate music of worthy type. the same principle will apply to art. the great masterpieces of painting and sculpture have as much of beauty and inspiration in them as the great masterpieces of literature. yet most rural children complete their schooling hardly having seen in the schoolroom a worthy copy of a great picture, and much less have they been taught the significance of great works of art or been led to appreciate and love them. _physical training._ it has been argued by many that the rural child has enough exercise and hence does not need physical training. but this position entirely misconceives the purpose of physical training. one may have plenty of exercise, even too much exercise, without securing a well-balanced physical development. indeed, certain forms of farm work done by children are often so severe a tax on their strength that a corrective exercise is necessary in order to save stooped forms, curved spines, and hollow chests. furthermore, the farm child, lacking the opportunities of the city child for gaining social ease and control, needs the development that comes from physical training to give poise, ease of bearing, and grace of movement. nor must the athletic phase of physical training be overlooked. while it is undoubtedly true that athletics have come to occupy too large a part of the time and absorb too great a proportion of the interest in many schools, yet this is no reason for omitting avocational training wholly from the rural school. children require the training and development that come from games and play quite as much as they need that coming from work. the school owes a duty to the avocational side of life as well as to the vocational. the curriculum here proposed is so much broader and richer than that now offered in the rural district school that it will appear to many to be visionary and impossible. that it is impossible for the old type of rural school will be readily admitted. but it is entirely practicable and possible in the reorganized consolidated school, and is being successfully presented, in its general aspects, at least, in many of these schools. it is only such an education as every rural child is entitled to, and is no more than the urban child is already receiving in the better class of town and city elementary schools. if the rural school cannot give the farm child an elementary education approximating the one out-lined, it has no claim on his loyalty or time; and he should in justice to himself be taken where he can receive a worthy education, even if he is thereby lost to the farm. but the rural boy and girl need not only a good elementary education, but a high school education as well. let us next consider the rural high school curriculum. _the rural high school curriculum_ this section is presented in the full knowledge that comparatively few localities have as yet established the rural high school. it now forms, however, an integral part of the consolidated rural school in not a few places, and is abundantly justifying the expenditure made upon it. in other localities the tendency is growing to send the rural child to the town high school, or even for the family to move to town to secure high schooling for the children. in still other cases, and we are obliged to admit that these yet constitute the rule rather than the exception, the farm boy or girl has no opportunity for a high school education. if we succeed in working out the so-called rural problem of our country, in maintaining a high standard of agricultural population and rural life, the rural high school must be an important factor in our problem. for the children of our farms need and must have an education reaching beyond that of the elementary school. and this schooling must prepare them to find the most satisfactory and successful type of life on the farm, instead of drawing them away from the farm. it goes without saying that the rural high school should be an agricultural high school. this does not mean that it shall devote itself exclusively to teaching agriculture; but rather that, while it offers a broad range of culture and information, it shall emphasize those phases of subject-matter that will best fit into the interests and activities of farm life, instead of those phases that tend to lead toward the city or the market-place. its four years of work must be fully equal to that of the best town or city high schools, but must in some degree be different work. it must result in _efficiency_, and efficiency here must relate itself to agricultural life and pursuits. a detailed discussion of the rural high school curriculum will not be required. the principles already suggested as applying to the elementary school will govern here as well. the studies must cultivate breadth of view and a wide range of interests, and must at the same time bear upon the immediate life and experience of the pupils. the lines of study begun in the elementary school will be continued, with the purpose of securing deeper insight, more detailed knowledge, and greater independence of judgment and action. english should form an important part of the curriculum, with the double aim of securing facility in the use of the mother tongue and of developing a love for its literature. the rural high school graduate should be able to write english correctly as to spelling, punctuation, and grammar; he should be able to express himself effectively, either in writing, conversation, or the more formal speech of the rostrum. above all, he should be an enthusiastic and discriminating reader, with a catholicity of taste and interest that will lead him beyond the agricultural journal and newspaper, important as these are, to the works of fiction, material and social science, travel and biography, current magazines and journals, and whatever else belongs to the intellectual life of an intelligent, educated man of affairs. this is asking more than is being accomplished at present by the course in english in the town high school, but not more than is easily within the range of possibility. the average high school graduate of to-day cannot always spell and punctuate correctly, and commonly cannot write well even an ordinary business letter; nor, it must be feared, has his study of literature had a very great influence in developing him into a good reader of worthy books. but all this can be remedied by vitalizing the teaching of the mother tongue; by lessening the proportion of time and emphasis placed upon critical analysis and technical literary criticism, and increasing that given to the drill and practice that alone can make sure of the fundamentals of spelling, punctuation, and the common forms of composition emphasized by all; and by the sympathetic, enthusiastic teaching of good literature adapted to the age and interests of the pupils from the standpoint of synthetic appreciation and enjoyment, rather than from the standpoint of mechanical analysis. the rural high school course in social science should be broad and thorough. the course in history should not give an undue proportion of time to ancient and medieval history, nor to war and politics. emphasis should be placed on the social, industrial, and economic phases of human development in modern times and in our own country. political economy should form an important branch. especially should it deal with the problems of production, distribution, and consumption as they relate to agriculture. matters of finance, taxation, and investment, while resting on general principles, should be applied to the problems of the farm. nor should the economic basis of support and expenditure in the home be overlooked. the course in civics should not only present the general theory of government, but should apply concretely to the civic relations and duties of a rural population. especially should it appeal to the civic conscience and sense of responsibility which we need among our rural people to make the country an antidote to the political corruption of the city. material science should constitute an important section of the rural high school curriculum. not only does its study afford one of the best means of mental development, but the subject-matter of science has a very direct bearing on the life and industries of the farm. to achieve the best results, however, the science taught must be presented from the concrete and applied point of view rather than from the abstract and general. this does not mean that a hodge-podge of unrelated facts shall be taught in the place of science; indeed, such a method would defeat the whole purpose of the course. it means, however, that the general laws and principles of science shall be carried out to their practical bearing on the problems of the home and the farm, and not be left just as general laws or abstract principles unapplied. the botany and zoölogy of the rural high school will, of course, have a strong agricultural trend. it will sacrifice the old logical classifications and study of generic types of animals and plants for the more interesting and useful study of the fauna and flora of the locality. the various farm crops, their weed enemies, the helpful and harmful insects and birds, the animal life of the barnyard, horticulture and floriculture, and the elements of bacteriology, will constitute important elements in the course. the course in physics will develop the general principles of the subject, and will then apply these principles to the machinery of the farm, to the heating, lighting, and ventilation of houses, to the drainage of soil, the plumbing of buildings, and a hundred other practical problems bearing on the life of the farm. chemistry will be taught as related to the home, foods, soils, and crops. a concrete geology will lead to a better understanding of soils, building materials, and drainage. physiology and hygiene will seek as their aim longer life and higher personal efficiency. the course in agriculture, whether presented separately or in conjunction with botany and zoölogy, must be comprehensive and thorough. not only should it give a complete and practical knowledge of the selection of seed; the planting, cultivating, and harvesting of crops; the improvement and conservation of the soil; the breeding and care of stock, etc., but it must serve to create and develop a scientific attitude toward farming. the farmer should come to look upon his work as offering the largest opportunities for the employment of technical knowledge, judgment, and skill. that such an attitude will yield large returns in success is attested by many farmers to-day who are applying scientific methods to their work. manual training and domestic science should receive especial emphasis in the rural high school. both subjects have undoubted educational value in themselves, and their practical value and importance to those looking forward to farm life can hardly be over-estimated. and in these as in other subjects, the course offered will need to be modified from that of the city school in order to meet the requirements of the particular problems to which the knowledge and training secured are to be applied. mathematics should form a part of the rural high school curriculum, but the traditional courses in algebra and geometry do not meet the need. the ideal course would probably be a skillful combination of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry occupying the time of one or two years, and applied directly to the problems of mechanics, measurements, surveying, engineering, and building on the farm. such an idea is not new, and textbooks are now under way providing material for such a course. in addition, there should be a thorough course in practical business arithmetic. by this is not meant the abstract, analytical matter so often taught as high school arithmetic, but concrete and applied commercial and industrial arithmetic, with particular reference to farm problems. in connection with this subject should be given a course in household accounts, and book-keeping, including commercial forms and commercial law. it is doubtful whether foreign language has any place in the rural high school. if offered at all, it should be only in high schools strong enough to offer parallel courses for election, and should never displace the subjects lying closer to the interests and needs of the students. the study of music and art begun in the elementary school should be continued in the high school, and a love for the beautiful cultivated not only by the matter taught, but also by the æsthetic qualities of the school buildings and grounds and their decoration. on the practical sides these subjects will reach out to the beautifying of the farm homes and the life they shelter. when a well-taught curriculum of some such scope of elementary and high school work as that suggested is as freely available to the farm child as his school is available to the city child, will the country boys and girls have a fair chance for education. and when this comes about, the greatest single obstacle to keeping our young people on the farm will have been removed. footnotes: [footnote : _social principles of education_, p. .] iv the teaching of the rural school _the importance of teaching_ teaching is the fundamental purpose for which the school is run. taxes are levied and collected, buildings erected and equipped, and curriculum organized solely that teaching may go on. children are clothed and fed and sent to school instead of being put at work in order that they may be taught. the school is classified into grades, programs are arranged, and regulations are enforced only to make teaching possible. normal schools are established, teachers are trained, and certificates required in order that teaching may be more efficient. the teacher confronts a great task. on the one hand are the children, ignorant, immature, and undeveloped. in them lie ready to be called forth all the powers and capacities that will characterize their fully ripened manhood and womanhood. given the right stimulus and direction, these powers will grow into splendid strength and capacity; lacking this stimulus and guidance, the powers are left crippled and incomplete. on the other hand is the subject-matter of education, the heritage of culture which has been accumulating through the ages. in the slow process of human experience, running through countless generations, men have made their discoveries in the fields of mathematics and science; they have lived great events and achievements which have become history; they have developed the social institutions which we call the state, the church, the home, and the school; they have organized great industries and carried on complex vocations; they have crystallized their ideals, their hopes, and their aspirations in literature; and have with brush and chisel expressed in art their concepts of truth and beauty. the best of all this human experience we have collected in what we call a curriculum, and placed it before the child for him to master, as the generations before him have mastered it in their common lives. for only in this way can the child come into full possession of his powers, and set them at work in a fruitful way in accomplishing his own life-purpose. it is the function of the teacher, therefore, to stand as an intermediary, as an interpreter, between the child and this great mass of subject-matter that lies ready for him to learn. the race has lived its thousands or millions of years; the individual lives but a few score. what former generations took centuries to work out the child can spend only a few months or a few years upon. hence he must waste no time and opportunity; he must make no false step in his learning, for he cannot in his short life retrieve his mistakes. it is the work of the teacher, through instruction and guidance, that is, through teaching, to save the child time in his learning and development, and to make sure that he does not lose his opportunity. and this is a great responsibility. thus the teacher confronts a problem that has two great factors, the _child_ and the _subject-matter_. he must have a knowledge of both these factors if his work is to be effective; for he cannot teach matter that he does not know, and neither can he teach a person whose nature he does not understand. but in addition to a knowledge of these factors, the teacher must also master a technique of instruction, he must train himself in the art of teaching. _the teacher must know the child._ it has been a rather common impression that if one knows a certain field of subject-matter, he will surely be able to teach it to others. but nothing could be further from the truth than such an assumption. indeed, it is proverbial that the great specialists are the most wretched teachers of their subjects. the nature of the child's mental powers, the order of their unfoldment, the evolution of his interests, the incentives that appeal to him, the danger points in both his intellectual and his moral development,--these and many other things about child nature the intelligent teacher must clearly understand. and the teacher of the younger children needs this knowledge even more than the teacher of older ones. for the earlier years of the child's schooling are the most important years. it is at this time that he lays the foundation for all later learning, that he forms his habits of study and his attitude toward education, and that his life is given the bent for all its later development. nothing can be more irrational, therefore, than to put the most untrained and inexperienced teachers in charge of the younger children. the fallacious notion that "anyone can teach little children" has borne tragic fruit in the stagnation and mediocrity of many lives whose powers were capable of great achievements. _the teacher must know the subject-matter._ the blind cannot successfully lead the blind. one whose grasp of a subject extends only to the simplest rudiments cannot teach these rudiments. he who has never himself explored a field can hardly guide others through that field; at least, progress through the field will be at the cost of great waste of time and failure to grasp the significance or beauty of what the field contains. expressed more concretely, it is impossible to transplant arithmetic, or geography, or history, or anything else that one would teach, immediately from the textbook into the mind of the child. the subject must first come to be very fully and completely a true possession of the teacher. the successful teacher must also know vastly more of a subject than he is required to teach. for only then has he freedom; only then has he outlook and perspective; only then can he teach the _subject_, and not some particular textbook; only then can he inspire others to effort and achievement through his own mastery and interest. enthusiasm is _caught_ and not taught. _the teacher must know the technique of instruction._ for teaching is an art, based upon scientific principles and requiring practice to secure skill. one of the greatest tasks of the teacher is to _psychologize_ the subject-matter for his pupils,--that is, so to select, organize, and present it that the child's mind naturally and easily grasps and appropriates it. teaching, when it has become an art, which is to say, when the teacher has become an artist, is one of the most highly skilled vocations. it is as much more difficult than medicine as the human mind is more baffling than the human body; it is as much more difficult than preaching as the child is harder to comprehend and guide than the adult; it is as much more difficult than the law as life is more complex than logic. yet, while we require the highest type of preparation for medicine, the ministry, or the law, we require but little for teaching. we pay enormous salaries to trained experts to apply the principles of scientific management to our industries or our business, but we have been satisfied with inexpert service for the teaching of our children. we are making fortunes out of the stoppage of waste in our factories, but allowing enormous waste to continue in our schools. _if we were to put into practice in teaching the thoroughly demonstrated and accepted scientific principles of education as we know them, we could beyond doubt double the educational results attained by our children._ _teaching in the rural school_ the criticisms just made on our standards of teaching will apply in some degree to all our schools from the kindergarten to the university; but they apply more strongly to the rural schools than to any other class. for the rural schools are the training-ground for young, inexperienced, and relatively unprepared teachers. except for the comparatively small proportion of the town or city teachers who are normal school or college trained, nearly all have served an apprenticeship in the rural schools. thus the rural school, besides its other handicaps, is called upon to train teachers for the more favored urban schools. careful statistical studies[ ] have shown that many rural teachers, both men and women, have had no training beyond that of the elementary school. and not infrequently this training has taken place in the rural school of the type in which they themselves take up teaching. the average schooling of the men teaching in the rural schools of the entire country is less than two years above the elementary school, and of women, slightly more than two years. this is to say that our rural schools are taught by those who have had only about half of a high school course. it is evident, therefore, that the rural teacher cannot meet the requirement urged above in the way of preparation. he does not know his subject-matter. not only has he not gone far enough in his education to have a substantial foundation, breadth of view, and mental perspective, but he frequently lacks in the simplest rudiments of the immediate subject-matter which he is supposed to teach. the examination papers written by applicants for certificates to begin rural school teaching often betray a woful ignorance of the most fundamental knowledge. inability to spell, punctuate, or effectively use the english language is common. the most elementary scientific truths are frequently unknown. a connected view of our nation's history and knowledge of current events are not always possessed. the great world of literature is too often a closed book. and not seldom the simple relations of arithmetical number are beyond the grasp of the applicant. in short, our rural schools, as they average, require no adequate preparation of the teacher, and do not represent as much education in their teaching force as that needed by the intelligent farmer, merchant, or tradesman. the rural teacher does not know the child. but little more than children themselves, and with little chance for observation or for experience in life, it would be strange if they did. they have had no opportunity for professional study, and psychology and the science of education are unknown to them. the attempts made to remedy this fatal weakness by the desultory reading of a volume or two in a voluntary reading-circle course do not serve the purpose. the teacher needs a thorough course of instruction in general and applied psychology, under the tutelage of an enthusiastic expert who not only knows his subject, but also understands the problems of the teacher. the rural teacher does not know the technique of the schoolroom. the organizing of a school, the proper classification of pupils, the assignment of studies, the arrangement of a program of studies and recitation, the applications of suitable regulations and rules for the running of the school, are all matters requiring expert knowledge and skill. yet the rural teacher has to undertake them without instruction in their principles and without supervisory guidance or help. no wonder that the rural school is poorly organized and managed. it presents problems of administration more puzzling than the town school, and yet here is where we put out our novices, boys and girls not yet out of their "teens"--young people who themselves have no concept of the problems of the school, no knowledge of its complex machinery, and no experience to serve as a guide in confronting their work. no industrial enterprise could exist under such irrational conditions; and neither could the schools, except that mental waste and bankruptcy are harder to measure than economic. nor does the rural teacher know the technique of instruction any better than that of organization and management. the skillful conducting of a recitation is at least as severe a test upon mental resourcefulness and skill as making a speech, preaching a sermon, or conducting a lawsuit. for not only must the subject-matter be organized for immature minds unused to the formal processes of learning, but the effects of instruction upon the child's mind must constantly be watched by the teacher and interpreted with reference to further instruction. this skill cannot be attained empirically, by the cut-and-dried method, except at a frightful cost to the children. it is as if we were to turn a set of intelligent but untrained men loose in the community with their scalpels and their medicine cases to learn to be surgeons and doctors by experimenting upon their fellows. as would naturally be expected, therefore, the teaching in the average rural school is a dreary round of inefficiency. handicapped to begin with by classes too small to be interesting, the rural teacher is mechanically hearing the recitations of some twenty-five to thirty of these classes per day. lacking at the beginning the breadth of education that would make teaching easy, he finds it impossible to prepare for so many different exercises daily. the result is that the recitations are dull, spiritless, uninteresting. the lessons are poorly prepared by the pupils, poorly recited, and hence very imperfectly mastered. the more advanced work cannot stand on such a foundation of sand, and so, discouraged, the child soon drops out of school. when it is also remembered that the tenure of service of the teacher is very short in the rural schools, the problem becomes all the more grave. the average term of service in the rural schools is probably not above two years, and in many states considerably below this amount. this requires that half of the rural teachers each year shall be beginners. it will be impossible, of course, as long as teaching is done so largely by girls, who naturally will, and should, soon quit teaching for marriage, to secure a long period of service in the vocation. yet the rural school is, as we have seen, also constantly losing its trained teachers to the town and city, and hence breaking in more than its share of novices. added to the disadvantage inevitably coming from the brief period of service in teaching is a similar one growing out of a faulty method of administration. in a large majority of our rural schools the contract is made for but one term of not more than three months. this leaves the teacher free to accept another school at the end of the term, and not infrequently a school will have two or even three different teachers within the same year. there is a great source of waste at this point, owing to a change of methods, repetition of work, and the necessity of starting a new system of school machinery. industrial concerns would hardly find it profitable to change superintendents and foremen several times a year. we do this in our schools only because we have not yet learned that it pays to apply rational business methods to education. nothing that has been said in criticism of rural teaching ought to be construed as a reflection on the rural teachers personally. the fact that they can succeed as well as they do under conditions that are so adverse is the best warrant for their intelligence and devotion. it is not their fault that they begin teaching with inadequate knowledge of subject-matter, with ignorance of the nature of childhood, and without skill in the technique of the schoolroom. the system, and not the individual, is at fault. the public demands a pitifully low standard of efficiency in rural teaching, and the excellence of the product offered is not likely greatly to surpass what society asks and is ready to pay for. once again we must turn to the consolidated school as the solution of our difficulty. the isolated district school will not be able to demand and secure a worthy grade of preparation for teaching. the educational standards will not rise high enough under this system to create a public demand for skilled teachers. nor can such salaries be paid as will encourage thorough and extensive study and preparation for teaching. and, finally, the professional incentives are not sufficiently strong in such schools to create a true craft spirit toward teaching. while it is impossible to measure the improved results in teaching coming from the consolidated school in the same objective way that we can measure increased attendance, yet there is no doubt that one of the strongest arguments for the consolidated school is its more skillful and inspiring teaching. the increased salaries, the possibility of professional association with other teachers, the improved equipment, the better supervision, and above all, the spirit of progress and enthusiasm in the school itself, all serve to transform teaching from a treadmill routine into a joyful opportunity for inspiration and service. _the training of rural teachers_ the training of the rural teacher has never been given the same consideration as that of town or city teachers. it is true that normal schools are available to all alike, and that in a few states the rural schools secure a considerable number of teachers who have had some normal training. but this is the exception rather than the rule. in the middle western states, for example, where there is a rich agricultural population, whole counties can be found in which no rural teacher has ever had any special training for his work. professional requirements have been on a par with the meager salaries paid, and other incentives have not been strong enough to insure adequate preparation. state normal schools have, therefore, been of comparatively little assistance in fitting teachers for the rural school. first of all the rural school teacher ordinarily does not go to the normal school, for it is not demanded of him. again, if perchance a prospective rural teacher should attend a normal school, a town or city grade position is usually waiting for him when he graduates. for, in spite of the growth of our normal schools, they are as yet far from being able to supply all the teachers required for the urban grade positions, to say nothing about the rural schools. the colleges and universities are, of course, still further removed from the rural school, since the high schools stand ready to employ those of their graduates who enter upon teaching. in some states, as for example, wisconsin, county normal schools have been established with the special aim of preparing teachers for the rural schools. while this movement has helped, it does not promise to secure wide acceptance as a method of dealing with the problem. greater possibilities undoubtedly exist in the comparatively recent movement toward combining normal training with the regular high school course. provision for such courses now exists in new york, pennsylvania, ohio, texas, minnesota, iowa, kansas, nebraska, and a number of other states. combining normal training with high school education has first of all the advantage of bringing such training _to_ prospective teachers, instead of requiring the teachers to leave home and incur additional expense in seeking their training. from the standpoint of the public it has the merit of economy, in that it utilizes buildings, equipment, and organization already in existence instead of requiring new. but whatever may be the method employed, the rural teachers should receive better preparation for their work than they now have. this means, _first_, that the state must make adequate provision for the teacher to receive his training at a minimum of expense and trouble; and _second_, that the standard of requirement must be such that the teacher will be obliged to secure adequate preparation before being admitted to the school. even with the present status of our rural schools it is not too much to require that every teacher shall have had _at least a four-year high school education_, and that _a reasonable amount of normal training_ be had either in conjunction with the high school course, or subsequent to its completion. indiana, for example, has found this requirement entirely feasible, and a great influence in bettering the tone of the rural school. wherever the rural teacher secures his training, however, one condition must obtain: this preparation must familiarize him with the spirit and needs of the agricultural community, and imbue him with enthusiasm for service in this field. it is not infrequently the case that town high school graduates, themselves never having lived in the country, possess neither the sympathy nor the understanding necessary to enable them to offer a high grade of service in the rural school. not a few of them feel above the work of such a position, and look with contempt or pity upon the life of the farm. the successful rural teacher must be able to identify himself very completely with the interests and activities of the community; nor can this be done in any half-hearted, sentimental, or professional manner. it must be a spontaneous and natural response arising from a true interest in the people, a knowledge of their lives, and a sincere desire for their welfare. any preparation that does not result in this spirit, and train in the ability to realize it in action, does not fit for the rural school. _salaries of rural teachers_ the salaries paid teachers in general in different types of schools are one measure, though not a perfect one, of their efficiency. salary is not a perfect measure of efficiency, ( ) because economic ability to pay is a modifying influence. when the early new england teacher was receiving ten or twelve dollars a month and "boarding round," he was probably getting all that the community could afford to pay him, although he was often a college student, and not infrequently a well-trained graduate. the salaries paid in the various occupations are not ( ) based upon any definite standards of the value of service. for example, the _chef_ in a hotel may receive more than the superintendent of schools, and the football coach more than the college president; yet we would hardly want to conclude that the services of the cook and the athlete are worth more to society than the services of educators. and within the vocation of teaching itself there is ( ) no fixed standard for judging teaching efficiency. nevertheless, in general, teaching efficiency is in considerable degree measured by differences in salaries paid in different localities and in the various levels of school work. based on the standard of salary as a measure, the teaching efficiency of rural teachers is, as we should expect from starting nearly all of our beginners here, considerably below that in towns or cities. a study by coffman[ ] of more than five thousand widely distributed teachers as to age, sex, salary, etc., shows that the average man in the rural school receives an annual salary of $ ; in town schools, of $ ; and in city schools, of $ . the average woman in the rural school receives an annual salary of $ ; in town schools, of $ ; and in city schools, of $ . men in towns, therefore, receive one and one half times as much as men in the country, and in cities, two and one half times as much as in the country. women in towns receive a little more than one and one third times as much as women in the country, and in the cities almost one and two thirds times as much as women in the country. the actual amount of salary paid rural teachers is perhaps more instructive than the comparative amounts. the income of the rural teacher is barely a living wage, and not even that if the teacher has no parental home, or a gainful occupation during vacation times. out of an amount of less than four hundred dollars a year the teacher is expected to pay for a certificate, a few school journals and professional books, and attend teachers institutes or conventions, besides supporting himself as a teacher ought to live. it does not need argument to show that this meager salary forces a standard of living too low for efficiency. it would, therefore, be unfair to ask for efficiency with the present standard of salaries. nor is it to be overlooked that efficiency and salaries must mount upward together. it would be as unjust to ask for higher salaries without increasing the grade of efficiency as to ask for efficiency on the present salary basis. it is probable that the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boys and girls starting in to teach the rural school, with but little preparation above the elementary grades, are receiving all they are worth, at least as compared with what they could earn in other lines. the great point of difficulty is that they are not worth enough. the community cannot afford to buy the kind of educational service they are qualified to offer; it would be a vastly better investment for the public to buy higher teaching efficiency at larger salaries. no statistics are available to show the exact percentage of increase in rural teachers' salaries during recent years, but this increase has been considerable; and the tendency is still upward. in this as in other features of the rural school problem, however, it will be impossible to meet reasonable demands without forsaking the rural district system for a more centralized system of consolidated schools. to pay adequate salaries to the number of teachers now required for the thousands of small rural schools would be too heavy a drain on our economic resources. under the consolidated system a considerably smaller number of teachers is required, and these can receive higher salaries without greatly increasing the amount expended for teaching. in this as in other phases of our educational problems, what is needed is rational business method, and a willingness to devote a fair proportion of our wealth to the education of the young. _supervision of rural teaching_ our rural school teaching has never had efficient supervision. the very nature of rural school organization has rendered expert supervision impossible, no matter how able the supervising officer might be. with slight modifications, the office of _county superintendent_ is, throughout the country, typical of the attempt to provide supervision for the rural school. while such a system may have afforded all that could be expected in the pioneer days, its inadequacy to meet present-day demands is almost too patent to require discussion. first of all, it is physically impossible for a county superintendent to visit and supervise one hundred and fifty teachers at work in as many different schools scattered over four or five hundred square miles of territory. if he were to devote all his time to visiting country schools, he would have only one day to each school per year. when it is remembered that the county superintendent must also attend to an office that has a large amount of correspondence and clerical work, that he is usually commissioned with authority to oversee the building of all schoolhouses in his county, that he must act as judge in hearing appeals in school disputes, that he must conduct all teachers' examinations and in many instances grade the papers, and, finally, that country roads are often impassable, it is seen that his time for supervision is greatly curtailed. as a matter of fact some rural schools receive no visit from the county superintendent for several years at a time. a still further obstacle comes from the fact of the frequent changes of teachers among rural schools. a teacher visited by the county superintendent in a certain school this term, and advised as to how best to meet its problems, is likely to be in a different school next term, and required to meet an entirely new set of problems. this is all very different from the problem of supervision met by the town or city superintendent. for the town or city district is of small area, and the schools few and close together. if the number of teachers is large, the superintendent is assisted by principals of different schools, and by deputies. the teaching force is better prepared, and hence requires less close supervision. school standards are higher, and the coöperation of patrons more easily secured. the course of study is better organized, the schools better graded and equipped, and all other conditions more favorable to efficient supervision. it would not, therefore, be just to compare the results of supervision in the country districts with those in urban schools without making full allowance for these fundamental differences. the county superintendent is in many states discriminated against in salary as compared with other county officers, and, as a rule, no provision is made to compensate for traveling expenses incurred in visiting schools. this, in effect, places a financial penalty on the work of supervision, as the superintendent can remain in his office with considerably less expense to himself than when he is out among the schools. in some instances, however, an allowance is made for traveling expenses in addition to the regular salary, thus encouraging the visiting of schools, or at least removing the handicap existing under the older system. an attempt has also been made in some states to relieve the county superintendent of the greater part of the clerical work of his office by employing for him at county expense a clerk for this purpose. these two provisions have proved of great help to the supervisory function of the county superintendent's work, but the task yet looms up in impossible magnitude. the county superintendency is throughout the country almost universally a political office. in some states, as, for example, in indiana, it is appointive by a non-partisan board. but, in general, the candidate of the prevailing party, or the one who is the best "mixer," secures the office regardless of qualifications. sharing the fortunes of other political offices, the county superintendency frequently has applied to it the unwritten party rule of "two terms and out," thus crippling the efficiency of the office by frequent changes of administration and uncertainty of tenure. no fixed educational or professional standard of preparation for the county superintendency exists in the different states. if some reasonably high standard were required, it would do much to lessen the mischievous effects of making it a political office. in a large proportion of cases the county superintendent is only required to hold a middle-class certificate, and has enjoyed no better educational facilities than dozens of the teachers he is to supervise. the author has conducted teachers' institutes in the middle west for county superintendents who had never attended an institute or taught a term of school. the salary and professional opportunities of the office are not sufficiently attractive to draw men from the better school positions; hence the great majority of county superintendents come from the village principalships, the grades of town schools, or even from the rural schools. a marked tendency of recent years has been to elect women as county superintendents. in iowa, for example, half of the present county superintendents are women, and the proportion is increasing. in not a few instances women have made exceptional records as county superintendents, and, as a whole, are loyally devoted to their work. they suffer one disadvantage in this office, however, which is hard to overcome: they find it impossible, without undue exposure, to travel about the county during the cold and stormy weather of winter or when the roads are soaked with the spring rains. whether they will be able to effect the desired coördination between the rural school and the agricultural interests of the community is a question yet to be settled. in spite of the limitations of the office of county superintendent, however, it must not be thought that this office has played an unimportant part in our educational development. it has exerted a marked influence in the upbuilding of our schools, and accomplished this under the most unfavorable and discouraging circumstances. among its occupants have been some of the most able and efficient men and women engaged in our school system. but the time has come in our educational advancement when the rural schools should have better supervision than they are now getting or can get under the present system. the first step in improving the supervision, as in improving so many other features of the rural schools, is the reorganization of the system through consolidation, and the consequent reduction in the number of schools to be supervised. the next step is to remove the supervising office as far as possible from "practical" politics by making it appointive by a non-partisan county board, who will be at liberty to go anywhere for a superintendent, who will be glad to pay a good salary, and who will seek to retain a superintendent in office as long as he is rendering acceptable service to the county. the third step is to raise the standard of fitness for the office so that the incumbent may be a true intellectual leader among the teachers and people of his county. nor can this preparation be of the scholastic type alone, but must be of such character as to adapt its possessor to the spirit and ideals of an agricultural people. a wholly efficient system of supervision of rural teaching, then, would be possible only in a system of consolidated schools, each under the immediate direction of a principal, himself thoroughly educated and especially qualified to carry on the work of a school adapted to rural needs. over these schools would be the supervision of the county superintendent, who will stand in the same relation to the principals as that of the city superintendent to his ward or high school principals. the county superintendent will serve to unify and correlate the work of the different consolidated schools, and to relate all to the life and work of the farm. if it is said that systems of superintendence for rural schools could be devised more effective than the county superintendency, this may be granted as a matter of theory; but as a practical working program, there is no doubt that the office of county superintendent is a permanent part of our rural school system, unless the system itself is very radically changed. all the states, except the new england group, ohio, and nevada, now have the office of county superintendent. it is likely, therefore, that the plan of district superintendence permissive under the laws of certain states will hardly secure wide acceptance. the county as the unit of school administration is growing in favor, and will probably ultimately come to characterize the rural school system. the most natural step lying next ahead would, therefore, seem to be to make the conditions surrounding the office of county superintendent as favorable as possible, and then give the superintendent a sufficient number of deputies to make the supervision effective. these deputies should be selected, of course, with reference to their fitness for supervising particular lines of teaching, such as primary, home economics, agriculture, etc. a beginning has already been made in the latter line by the employment in some counties, with the aid of the federal government, of an agricultural expert who not only instructs the farmers in their fields, but also correlates his work with the rural schools. this principle is capable of almost indefinite extension in our school system. footnotes: [footnote : see coffman, _the social composition of the teaching force_.] [footnote : _the social composition of the teaching population._] outline i. the rural school and its problem =the general problem of the rural school= . the general problem of the rural school identical with that of all schools . the newer concept measures education by efficiency . this efficiency involves ( ) knowledge,( ) attitude, ( ) technique, or skill . the purpose of the school is to make sure of these factors of efficiency =the special problem of the rural school= . each type of school has its special problem . the rural school problem originates in the nature of the rural community . characteristics of the rural community _a._ its industrial homogeneity _b._ its social homogeneity _c._ fundamental intelligence of the rural population _d._ economic status and standards of living _e._ rural isolation and its social effects _f._ rural life and physical efficiency _g._ lack of recreations and amusement . recent tendencies toward progress in agricultural pursuits . the loss of rural population to the cities =the adjustment of the rural school to its problem= . failure in adjustment of the rural school to its problem . the rudimentary education received by rural children . failure of the rural school to participate in recent educational progress . the rural school inadequate in its scope . need of better organization in the rural school . inadequacy of rural school buildings and equipment . the financial support of the rural school . summary and suggestions ii. the social organization of the rural school =the rural school and the community= . the fundamental relations of school and community . low community standards of education . the rural community's need of a social center _a._ its social isolation a serious drawback _b._ grave moral dangers arising from social isolation _c._ rural environment more dangerous to youth than city environment _d._ effects of monotony on adults . the rural school as a social center . the ideal rural school building and equipment . social activities centering in the school . reorganization needed to make the rural school effective as a social and intellectual center =the consolidation of rural schools= . consolidation the first step toward rural school efficiency . irrationality of present district system . obstacles in the way of consolidation . the present movement toward consolidation . effects of consolidation _a._ on attendance _b._ on expense _c._ on efficiency . the one-room school yet needed as a part of the rural system =financial support of the rural school= . lack of adequate financial support of rural schools . difference in city and rural basis for taxation . low school tax characteristic of rural communities . state aid for rural schools . safeguards required where the principle of state aid is supplied . summary and conclusion =the rural school and its pupils= . the spirit of the pupils as a test of the school . the negative attitude of rural pupils toward their school . causes of this defection to be sought in the school . the problem of poor rural school attendance . the consolidated school as a cure for indifferent attitude and poor attendance iii. the curriculum of the rural school =the scope of the rural school curriculum= . the modern demand for a broader education . the meagerness of the rural school curriculum . the rural child requires full elementary and high school course . disadvantages of sending rural child to town school . necessary reorganization in rural school offering broadened curriculum . general nature of the new curriculum =the rural elementary school curriculum= . relation of the curriculum to social standards and ideals . the mother tongue _a._ necessity for its mastery _b._ learning the mechanics of the language _c._ developing the art of expression, oral and written _d._ creation of love for reading _e._ formal grammar out of place in the elementary school . number _a._ the prominent place occupied by arithmetic _b._ importance of development of the number concept _c._ an undue proportion of time devoted to arithmetic _d._ desirable changes in the teaching of arithmetic . history and civics _a._ the right and duty of every person to know the history and government of his country _b._ history not to deal chiefly with war and politics, but to emphasize the social and industrial side _c._ the library of historical books _d._ functional versus analytical civics . geography and nature study _a._ advantage of the rural school in this field _b._ the social basis of geography _c._ application of geography and nature study to the farm . hygiene and health _a._ criticism of older concept of physiology for the elementary school _b._ content of practical course in hygiene _c._ application of hygiene to the child's health and growth . agriculture _a._ adaptability to the rural elementary school _b._ content of the elementary course in agriculture _c._ relation to farm life . domestic science and manual training _a._ place in elementary rural school _b._ what can be taught _c._ its practical application . music and art _a._ necessity in a well-balanced curriculum _b._ appreciation rather than criticism the aim . physical training _a._ need of physical training of rural children _b._ rural school athletics =the rural high school curriculum= . rural high schools not yet common . the functions of the rural high school . english in the rural high school _a._ its aim _b._ points of difference from present high school course . social science to have an applied trend . the material sciences as related to the problems of the farm . manual training and domestic science . a modified course in high school mathematics . foreign language not to occupy an important place . the high school course to include music and art iv. the teaching of the rural school =the importance of teaching= . teaching the fundamental purpose of the school . the child and the subject-matter . the teacher as an intermediary between child and subject-matter . hence the teacher must know the nature of the child . the teacher must know the subject-matter of education . failure to measure up to this requirement =teaching in the rural school= . the degree of training of rural teachers in the subject-matter . present lack of professional training . the effects of inexperience . short tenure of service in rural schools . level of teaching efficiency low . improvement through consolidated schools =the training of rural teachers= . inexperienced and untrained teachers begin in the rural schools . normal schools supply few teachers to rural schools . a reasonable demand for training of rural teachers . rural teacher training in normal high schools . the rural teacher's training must be adapted to spirit of rural school =salaries of rural teachers= . salary as a measure of efficiency . salaries of rural teachers compared with town and city teachers . necessity of increased salaries . increase in salary and in efficiency must go together . salaries in consolidated schools =supervision of rural teaching= . impossibility of giving district schools efficient supervision . obstacle in number of schools and frequent change of teachers . comparison of work of county superintendent with city superintendent . political handicaps on county superintendent . the necessity of better educational standards and better salary for the county superintendent . women as county superintendents . efficient supervision possible only under a consolidated system riverside educational monographs _general educational theory_ dewey's moral principles in education . eliot's education for efficiency . eliot's tendency to the concrete and practical in modern education . emerson's education . fiske's the meaning of infancy . hyde's the teacher's philosophy . palmer's the ideal teacher . prosser's the teacher and old age . terman's the teacher's health . thorndike's individuality . _administration and supervision of schools_ betts's new ideals in rural schools . bloomfield's vocational guidance of youth . cabot's 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of literature in the illinois state normal university. $ . , _net_. postpaid. the kindergarten by susan blow, patty hill, and elizabeth harrison, assisted by other members of the committee of nineteen of the international kindergarten union. with a preface by lucy wheelock and an introduction by annie laws, chairman of the committee. mo. $ . _net_. postpaid. houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) the mind and its education by george herbert betts, ph.d. professor of psychology in cornell college revised and enlarged edition new york d. appleton and company copyright, , , by d. appleton and company printed in the united states of america preface to the revised edition authors, no doubt, are always gratified when their works find favorable acceptance. the writer of this text has been doubly gratified, however, at the cordial reception and widespread use accorded to the present volume. this feeling does not arise from any narrow personal pride or selfish interest, but rather from the fact that the warm approval of the educational public has proved an important point; namely, that the fundamental truths of psychology, when put simply and concretely, can be made of interest and value to students of all ages from high school juniors up, and to the general public as well. more encouraging still, it has been demonstrated that the teachings of psychology can become immediately helpful, not only in study or teaching, but also in business or profession, in the control and guidance of the personal life, and in the problems met in the routine of the day's work or its play. in effecting the present revision, the salient features of the original edition have been kept. the truths presented are the most fundamental and important in the field of psychology. disputed theories and unsettled opinions are excluded. the subject matter is made concrete and practical by the use of many illustrations and through application to real problems. the style has been kept easy and familiar to facilitate the reading. in short, there has been, while seeking to improve the volume, a conscious purpose to omit none of the characteristics which secured acceptance for the former edition. on the other hand, certain changes and additions have been made which, it is believed, will add to the strength of the work. first of all, the later psychological studies and investigations have been drawn upon to insure that the matter shall at all points be abreast of the times in scientific accuracy. because of the wide use of the text in the training of teachers, a more specific educational application to schoolroom problems has been made in various chapters. exercises for the guidance of observation work and personal introspection are freely used. the chapter on sensation and perception has been separated into two chapters, and each subject given more extensive treatment. a new chapter has been added on association. the various chapters have been subdivided into numbered sections, and cut-in paragraph topics have been used to facilitate the study and teaching of the text. minor changes and additions occur throughout the volume, thus adding some forty pages to the number in the original edition. many of the modifications made in the revision are due to valuable suggestions and kindly criticisms received from many teachers of the text in various types of schools. to all who have thus helped so generously by freely giving the author the fruits of their judgment and experience he gladly renders grateful thanks. cornell college, iowa. contents chapter i the mind, or consciousness page . how the mind is to be known: personal character of consciousness--introspection the only means of discovering nature of consciousness--how we introspect--studying mental states of others through expression--learning to interpret expression. . the nature of consciousness: inner nature of the mind not revealed by introspection --consciousness as a process or stream--consciousness likened to a field--the "piling up" of consciousness is attention. . content of the mental stream: why we need minds--content of consciousness determined by function--three fundamental phases of consciousness. . where consciousness resides: consciousness works through the nervous system. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . chapter ii attention . nature of attention: the nature of attention--normal consciousness always in a state of attention. . the effects of attention: attention makes its object clear and definite--attention measures mental efficiency. . how we attend: attention a relating activity--the rhythms of attention. . points of failure in attention: lack of concentration--mental wandering. . types of attention: the three types of attention--interest and nonvoluntary attention--the will and voluntary attention--not really different kinds of attention--making different kinds of attention reënforce each other--the habit of attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter iii the brain and nervous system . the relations of mind and brain: interaction of mind and brain--the brain as the mind's machine. . the mind's dependence on the external world: the mind at birth--the work of the senses. . structural elements of the nervous system: the neurone--neurone fibers--neuroglia--complexity of the brain--"gray" and "white" matter. . gross structure of the nervous system: divisions of the nervous system--the central system--the cerebellum--the cerebrum--the cortex--the spinal cord. . localization of function in the nervous system: division of labor--division of labor in the cortex. . forms of sensory stimuli: the end-organs and their response to stimuli--dependence of the mind on the senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter iv mental development and motor training . factors determining the efficiency of the nervous system: development and nutrition--undeveloped cells--development of nerve fibers. . development of nervous system through use: importance of stimulus and response--effect of sensory stimuli--necessity for motor activity--development of the association centers--the factors involved in a simple action. . education and the training of the nervous system: education to supply opportunities for stimulus and response--order of development in the nervous system. . importance of health and vigor of the nervous system: the influence of fatigue--the effects of worry--the factors in good nutrition. . problems for introspection and observation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter v habit . the nature of habit: the physical basis of habit--all living tissue plastic--habit a modification of brain tissue--we must form habits. . the place of habit in the economy of our lives: habit increases skill and efficiency--habit saves effort and fatigue--habit economizes moral effort--the habit of attention--habit enables us to meet the disagreeable--habit the foundation of personality--habit saves worry and rebellion. . the tyranny of habit: even good habits need to be modified--the tendency of "ruts." . habit-forming a part of education: youth the time for habit-forming--the habit of achievement. . rules for habit-forming: james's three maxims for habit-forming--the preponderance of good habits over bad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter vi sensation . how we come to know the external world: knowledge through the senses--the unity of sensory experience--the sensory processes to be explained--the qualities of objects exist in the mind--the three sets of factors. . the nature of sensation: sensation gives us our world of qualities--the attributes of sensation. . sensory qualities and their end-organs: sight--hearing--taste--smell--various sensations from the skin--the kinæsthetic senses--the organic senses. . problems in observation and retrospection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter vii perception . the function of perception: need of knowing the material world--the problem which confronts the child. . the nature of perception: how a percept is formed--the percept involves all relations of the object--the content of the percept--the accuracy of percepts depends on experience--not definitions, but first-hand contact. . the perception of space: the perceiving of distance--the perceiving of direction. . the perception of time: nature of the time sense--no perception of empty time. . the training of perception: perception needs to be trained--school training in perception. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter viii mental images and ideas . the part played by past experience: present thinking depends on past experience--the present interpreted by the past--the future also depends on the past--rank determined by ability to utilize past experience. . how past experience is conserved: past experience conserved in both mental and physical terms--the image and the idea--all our past experience potentially at our command. . individual differences in imagery: images to be viewed by introspection--the varied imagery suggested by one's dining table--power of imagery varies in different people--imagery types. . the function of images: images supply material for imagination and memory--imagery in the thought processes--the use of imagery in literature--points where images are of greatest service. . the cultivation of imagery: images depend on sensory stimuli--the influence of frequent recall--the reconstruction of our images. . problems in introspection and observation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter ix imagination . the place of imagination in mental economy: practical nature of imagination--imagination in the interpretation of history, literature, and art--imagination and science--everyday uses of imagination--the building of ideals and plans--imagination and conduct--imagination and thinking. . the material used by imagination: images the stuff of imagination--the two factors in imagination--imagination limited by stock of images--limited also by our constructive ability--the need of a purpose. . types of imagination: reproductive imagination--creative imagination. . training the imagination: gathering of material for imagination--we must not fail to build--we should carry our ideals into action. . problems for observation and introspection . . . . . . . . chapter x association . the nature of association: the neural basis of association--association the basis of memory--factors determining direction of recall--association in thinking--association and action. . the types of association: fundamental law of association--association by contiguity--at the mercy of our associations--association by similarity and contrast--partial, or selective, association--the remedy. . training in association: the pleasure-pain motive in association--interest as a basis for association--association and methods of learning. . problems in observation and introspection . . chapter xi memory . the nature of memory: what is retained--the physical basis of memory--how we remember--dependence of memory on brain quality. . the four factors involved in memory: registration--retention--recall--recognition. . the stuff of memory: images as the material of memory--images vary as to type--other memory material. . laws underlying memory: the law of association--the law of repetition--the law of recency--the law of vividness. . rules for using the memory: wholes versus parts--rate of forgetting--divided practice--forcing the memory to act--not a memory, but memories. . what constitutes a good memory: a good memory selects its material--a good memory requires good thinking--memory must be specialized. . memory devices: the effects of cramming--remembering isolated facts--mnemonic devices. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . chapter xii thinking . different types of thinking: chance, or idle thinking--uncritical belief--assimilative thinking--deliberative thinking. . the function of thinking: meaning depends on relations--the function of thinking is to discover relations--near and remote relations--child and adult thinking. . the mechanism of thinking: sensations and percepts as elements in thinking. . the concept: the concepts serve to group and classify--growth of a concept--definition of concept--language and the concept--the necessity for growing concepts. . judgment: nature of judgment--judgment used in percepts and concepts--judgment leads to general truths--the validity of judgments. . reasoning: nature of reasoning--how judgments function in reasoning--deduction and the syllogism--induction--the necessity for broad induction--the interrelation of induction and deduction. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter xiii instinct . the nature of instinct: the babe's dependence on instinct--definition of instinct--unmodified instinct is blind. . law of the appearance and disappearance of instincts: instincts appear in succession as required--many instincts are transitory--seemingly useless instincts--instincts to be utilized when they appear--instincts as starting points--the more important human instincts. . the instinct of imitation: nature of imitation--individuality in imitation--conscious and unconscious imitation--influence of environment--the influence of personality. . the instinct of play: the necessity for play--play in development and education--work and play are complements. . other useful instincts: curiosity--manipulation--the collecting instinct--the dramatic instinct--the impulse to form gangs and clubs. . fear: fear heredity--fear of the dark--fear of being left alone. . other undesirable instincts: selfishness--pugnacity, or the fighting impulse. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter xiv feeling and its functions . the nature of feeling: the different feeling qualities--feeling always present in mental content--the seeming neutral feeling zone. . mood and disposition: how mood is produced--mood colors all our thinking--mood influences our judgments and decisions--mood influences effort--disposition a resultant of moods--temperament. . permanent feeling attitudes, or sentiments: how sentiments develop--the effect of experience--the influence of sentiment--sentiments as motives. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter xv the emotions . the producing and expressing of emotion: physiological explanation of emotion--origin of characteristic emotional reactions--the duration of an emotion--emotions accompanying crises in experience. . the control of emotions: dependence on expression--relief through expression--relief does not follow if image is held before the mind--growing tendency toward emotional control--the emotions and enjoyment--how emotions develop--the emotional factor in our environment--literature and the cultivation of the emotions--harm in emotional overexcitement. . emotions as motives: how our emotions compel us--emotional habits. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . chapter xvi interest . the nature of interest: interest a selective agent--interest supplies a subjective scale of values--interest dynamic--habit antagonistic to interest. . direct and indirect interest: interest in the end versus interest in the activity--indirect interest as a motive--indirect interest alone insufficient. . transitoriness of certain interests: interests must be utilized when they appear--the value of a strong interest. . selection among our interests: the mistake of following too many interests--interests may be too narrow--specialization should not come too early--a proper balance to be sought. . interest fundamental in education: interest not antagonistic to effort--interest and character. . order of development of our interests: the interests of early childhood--the interests of later childhood--the interests of adolescence. . problems in observation and introspection . . . . . . chapter xvii the will . the nature of the will: the content of the will--the function of the will--how the will exerts its compulsion. . the extent of voluntary control over our acts: simple reflex acts--instinctive acts--automatic, or spontaneous acts--the cycle from volitional to automatic--volitional action--volition acts in the making of decisions--types of decision--the reasonable type--accidental type: external motives--accidental type: subjective motives--decision under effort. . strong and weak wills: not a will, but wills--objective tests a false measure of will power. . volitional types: the impulsive type--the obstructed will--the normal will. . training the will: will to be trained in common round of duties--school work and will-training. . freedom of the will, or the extent of its control: limitations of the will--these limitations and conditions of freedom. . problems in observation and introspection. . chapter xviii self-expression and development . interrelation of impression and expression: the many sources of impressions--all impressions lead toward expression--limitations of expression. . the place of expression in development: intellectual value of expression--moral value of expression--religious value of expression--social value of expression. . educational use of expression: easier to provide for the impression side of education--the school to take up the handicrafts--expression and character--two lines of development. . problems in introspection and observation . . . . . index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the mind and its education chapter i the mind, or consciousness we are to study the mind and its education; but how? it is easy to understand how we may investigate the great world of material things about us; for we can see it, touch it, weigh it, or measure it. but how are we to discover the nature of the mind, or come to know the processes by which consciousness works? for mind is intangible; we cannot see it, feel it, taste it, or handle it. mind belongs not to the realm of matter which is known to the senses, but to the realm of _spirit_, which the senses can never grasp. and yet the mind can be known and studied as truly and as scientifically as can the world of matter. let us first of all see how this can be done. . how mind is to be known the personal character of consciousness.--mind can be observed and known. but each one can know directly only his own mind, and not another's. you and i may look into each other's face and there guess the meaning that lies back of the smile or frown or flash of the eye, and so read something of the mind's activity. but neither directly meets the other's mind. i may learn to recognize your features, know your voice, respond to the clasp of your hand; but the mind, the consciousness, which does your thinking and feels your joys and sorrows, i can never know completely. indeed i can never know your mind at all except through your bodily acts and expressions. nor is there any way in which you can reveal your mind, your spiritual self, to me except through these means. it follows therefore that only _you_ can ever know _you_ and only _i_ can ever know _i_ in any first-hand and immediate way. between your consciousness and mine there exists a wide gap that cannot be bridged. each of us lives apart. we are like ships that pass and hail each other in passing but do not touch. we may work together, live together, come to love or hate each other, and yet our inmost selves forever stand alone. they must live their own lives, think their own thoughts, and arrive at their own destiny. introspection the only means of discovering nature of consciousness.--what, then, is mind? what is the thing that we call consciousness? no mere definition can ever make it clearer than it is at this moment to each of us. the only way to know what mind is, is to look in upon our own consciousness and observe what is transpiring there. in the language of the psychologist, we must _introspect_. for one can never come to understand the nature of mind and its laws of working by listening to lectures or reading text books alone. there is no _psychology_ in the text, but only in your living, flowing stream of thought and mine. true, the lecture and the book may tell us what to look for when we introspect, and how to understand what we find. but the statements and descriptions about our minds must be verified by our own observation and experience before they become vital truth to us. how we introspect.--introspection is something of an art; it has to be learned. some master it easily, some with more difficulty, and some, it is to be feared, never become skilled in its use. in order to introspect one must catch himself unawares, so to speak, in the very act of thinking, remembering, deciding, loving, hating, and all the rest. these fleeting phases of consciousness are ever on the wing; they never pause in their restless flight and we must catch them as they go. this is not so easy as it appears; for the moment we turn to look in upon the mind, that moment consciousness changes. the thing we meant to examine is gone, and something else has taken its place. all that is left us then is to view the mental object while it is still fresh in the memory, or to catch it again when it returns. studying mental states of others through expression.--although i can meet only my own mind face to face, i am, nevertheless, under the necessity of judging your mental states and knowing what is taking place in your consciousness. for in order to work successfully with you, in order to teach you, understand you, control you or obey you, be your friend or enemy, or associate with you in any other way, i must _know_ you. but the real you that i must know is hidden behind the physical mask that we call the body. i must, therefore, be able to understand your states of consciousness as they are reflected in your bodily expressions. your face, form, gesture, speech, the tone of voice, laughter and tears, the poise of attention, the droop of grief, the tenseness of anger and start of fear,--all these tell the story of the mental state that lies behind the senses. these various expressions are the pictures on the screen by which your mind reveals itself to others; they are the language by which the inner self speaks to the world without. learning to interpret expression.--if i would understand the workings of your mind i must therefore learn to read the language of physical expression. i must study human nature and learn to observe others. i must apply the information found in the texts to an interpretation of those about me. this study of others may be _uncritical_, as in the mere intelligent observation of those i meet; or it may be _scientific_, as when i conduct carefully planned psychological experiments. but in either case it consists in judging the inner states of consciousness by their physical manifestations. the three methods by which mind may be studied are, then: ( ) text-book _description and explanation_; ( ) _introspection_ of my own conscious processes; and ( ) _observation_ of others, either uncritical or scientific. . the nature of consciousness inner nature of the mind not revealed by introspection.--we are not to be too greatly discouraged if, even by introspection, we cannot discover exactly _what_ the mind is. no one knows what electricity is, though nearly everyone uses it in one form or another. we study the dynamo, the motor, and the conductors through which electricity manifests itself. we observe its effects in light, heat, and mechanical power, and so learn the laws which govern its operations. but we are almost as far from understanding its true nature as were the ancients who knew nothing of its uses. the dynamo does not create the electricity, but only furnishes the conditions which make it possible for electricity to manifest itself in doing the world's work. likewise the brain or nervous system does not create the mind, but it furnishes the machine through which the mind works. we may study the nervous system and learn something of the conditions and limitations under which the mind operates, but this is not studying the mind itself. as in the case of electricity, what we know about the mind we must learn through the activities in which it manifests itself--these we can know, for they are in the experience of all. it is, then, only by studying these processes of consciousness that we come to know the laws which govern the mind and its development. _what_ it is that thinks and feels and wills in us is too hard a problem for us here--indeed, has been too hard a problem for the philosophers through the ages. but the thinking and feeling and willing we can watch as they occur, and hence come to know. consciousness as a process or stream.--in looking in upon the mind we must expect to discover, then, not a _thing_, but a _process_. the _thing_ forever eludes us, but the process is always present. consciousness is like a stream, which, so far as we are concerned with it in a psychological discussion, has its rise at the cradle and its end at the grave. it begins with the babe's first faint gropings after light in his new world as he enters it, and ends with the man's last blind gropings after light in his old world as he leaves it. the stream is very narrow at first, only as wide as the few sensations which come to the babe when it sees the light or hears the sound; it grows wider as the mind develops, and is at last measured by the grand sum total of life's experience. this mental stream is irresistible. no power outside of us can stop it while life lasts. we cannot stop it ourselves. when we try to stop thinking, the stream but changes its direction and flows on. while we wake and while we sleep, while we are unconscious under an anæsthetic, even, some sort of mental process continues. sometimes the stream flows slowly, and our thoughts lag--we "feel slow"; again the stream flows faster, and we are lively and our thoughts come with a rush; or a fever seizes us and delirium comes on; then the stream runs wildly onward, defying our control, and a mad jargon of thoughts takes the place of our usual orderly array. in different persons, also, the mental stream moves at different rates, some minds being naturally slow-moving and some naturally quick in their operations. consciousness resembles a stream also in other particulars. a stream is an unbroken whole from its source to its mouth, and an observer stationed at one point cannot see all of it at once. he sees but the one little section which happens to be passing his station point at the time. the current may look much the same from moment to moment, but the component particles which constitute the stream are constantly changing. so it is with our thought. its stream is continuous from birth till death, but we cannot see any considerable portion of it at one time. when we turn about quickly and look in upon our minds, we see but the little present moment. that of a few seconds ago is gone and will never return. the thought which occupied us a moment since can no more be recalled, just as it was, than can the particles composing a stream be re-collected and made to pass a given point in its course in precisely the same order and relation to one another as before. this means, then, that we can never have precisely the same mental state twice; that the thought of the moment cannot have the same associates that it had the first time; that the thought of this moment will never be ours again; that all we can know of our minds at any one time is the part of the process present in consciousness at that moment. [illustration: fig. ] [illustration: fig. ] the wave in the stream of consciousness.--the surface of our mental stream is not level, but is broken by a wave which stands above the rest; which is but another way of saying that some one thing is always more prominent in our thought than the rest. only when we are in a sleepy reverie, or not thinking about much of anything, does the stream approximate a level. at all other times some one object occupies the highest point in our thought, to the more or less complete exclusion of other things which we might think about. a thousand and one objects are possible to our thought at any moment, but all except one thing occupy a secondary place, or are not present to our consciousness at all. they exist on the margin, or else are clear off the edge of consciousness, while the one thing occupies the center. we may be reading a fascinating book late at night in a cold room. the charm of the writer, the beauty of the heroine, or the bravery of the hero so occupies the mind that the weary eyes and chattering teeth are unnoticed. consciousness has piled up in a high wave on the points of interest in the book, and the bodily sensations are for the moment on a much lower level. but let the book grow dull for a moment, and the make-up of the stream changes in a flash. hero, heroine, or literary style no longer occupies the wave. they forfeit their place, the wave is taken by the bodily sensations, and we are conscious of the smarting eyes and shivering body, while these in turn give way to the next object which occupies the wave. figs. - illustrate these changes. [illustration: fig. ] consciousness likened to a field.--the consciousness of any moment has been less happily likened to a field, in the center of which there is an elevation higher than the surrounding level. this center is where consciousness is piled up on the object which is for the moment foremost in our thought. the other objects of our consciousness are on the margin of the field for the time being, but any of them may the next moment claim the center and drive the former object to the margin, or it may drop entirely out of consciousness. this moment a noble resolve may occupy the center of the field, while a troublesome tooth begets sensations of discomfort which linger dimly on the outskirts of our consciousness; but a shooting pain from the tooth or a random thought crossing the mind, and lo! the tooth holds sway, and the resolve dimly fades to the margin of our consciousness and is gone. the "piling up" of consciousness is attention.--this figure is not so true as the one which likens our mind to a stream with its ever onward current answering to the flow of our thought; but whichever figure we employ, the truth remains the same. our mental energy is always piled up higher at one point than at others. either because our interest leads us, or because the will dictates, the mind is withdrawn from the thousand and one things we might think about, and directed to this one thing, which for the time occupies chief place. in other words, we _attend_; for this piling up of consciousness is nothing, after all, but attention. . content of the mental stream we have seen that our mental life may be likened to a stream flowing now faster, now slower, ever shifting, never ceasing. we have yet to inquire what constitutes the material of the stream, or what is the stuff that makes up the current of our thought--what is the _content_ of consciousness? the question cannot be fully answered at this point, but a general notion can be gained which will be of service. why we need minds.--let us first of all ask what mind is for, why do animals, including men, have minds? the biologist would say, in order that they may _adapt_ themselves to their environment. each individual from mollusc to man needs the amount and type of mind that serves to fit its possessor into its particular world of activity. too little mind leaves the animal helpless in the struggle for existence. on the other hand a mind far above its possessor's station would prove useless if not a handicap; a mollusc could not use the mind of a man. content of consciousness determined by function.--how much mind does man need? what range and type of consciousness will best serve to adjust us to our world of opportunity and responsibility? first of all we must _know_ our world, hence, our mind must be capable of gathering knowledge. second, we must be able to _feel_ its values and respond to the great motives for action arising from the emotions. third, we must have the power to exert self-compulsion, which is to say that we possess a _will_ to control our acts. these three sets of processes, _knowing_, _feeling_, and _willing_, we shall, therefore, expect to find making up the content of our mental stream. let us proceed at once to test our conclusion by introspection. if we are sitting at our study table puzzling over a difficult problem in geometry, _reasoning_ forms the wave in the stream of consciousness--the center of the field. it is the chief thing in our thinking. the fringe of our consciousness is made up of various sensations of the light from the lamp, the contact of our clothing, the sounds going on in the next room, some bit of memory seeking recognition, a "tramp" thought which comes along, and a dozen other experiences not strong enough to occupy the center of the field. but instead of the study table and the problem, give us a bright fireside, an easy-chair, and nothing to do. if we are aged, _memories_--images from out the past--will probably come thronging in and occupy the field to such extent that the fire burns low and the room grows cold, but still the forms from the past hold sway. if we are young, visions of the future may crowd everything else to the margin of the field, while the "castles in spain" occupy the center. our memories may also be accompanied by emotions--sorrow, love, anger, hate, envy, joy. and, indeed, these emotions may so completely occupy the field that the images themselves are for the time driven to the margin, and the mind is occupied with its sorrow, its love, or its joy. once more, instead of the problem or the memories or the "castles in spain," give us the necessity of making some decision, great or small, where contending motives are pulling us now in this direction, now in that, so that the question finally has to be settled by a supreme effort summed up in the words, _i will_. this is the struggle of the will which each one knows for himself; for who has not had a raging battle of motives occupy the center of the field while all else, even the sense of time, place and existence, gave way in the face of this conflict! this struggle continues until the decision is made, when suddenly all the stress and strain drop out and other objects may again have place in consciousness. the three fundamental phases of consciousness.--thus we see that if we could cut the stream of consciousness across as we might cut a stream of water from bank to bank with a huge knife, and then look at the cut-off section, we should find very different constituents in the stream at different times. we should at one time find the mind manifesting itself in _perceiving_, _remembering_, _imagining_, _discriminating_, _comparing_, _judging_, _reasoning_, or the acts by which we gain our knowledge; at another in _fearing_, _loving_, _hating_, _sorrowing_, _enjoying_, or the acts of feeling; at still another in _choosing_, or the act of the will. these processes would make up the stream, or, in other words, these are the acts which the mind performs in doing its work. we should never find a time when the stream consists of but one of the processes, or when all these modes of mental activity are not represented. they will be found in varying proportions, now more of knowing, now of feeling, and now of willing, but some of each is always present in our consciousness. the nature of these different elements in our mental stream, their relation to each other, and the manner in which they all work together in amazing perplexity yet in perfect harmony to produce the wonderful _mind_, will constitute the subject-matter we shall consider together in the pages which follow. . where consciousness resides i--the conscious self--dwell somewhere in this body, but where? when my finger tips touch the object i wish to examine, i seem to be in them. when the brain grows weary from overstudy, i seem to be in it. when the heart throbs, the breath comes quick, and the muscles grow tense from noble resolve or strong emotion, i seem to be in them all. when, filled with the buoyant life of vigorous youth, every fiber and nerve is a-tingle with health and enthusiasm, i live in every part of my marvelous body. small wonder that the ancients located the soul at one time in the heart, at another in the pineal gland of the brain, and at another made it coextensive with the body! consciousness works through the nervous system.--later science has taught that the _mind resides in and works through the nervous system, which has its central office in the brain_. and the reason why _i_ seem to be in every part of my body is because the nervous system extends to every part, carrying messages of sight or sound or touch to the brain, and bearing in return orders for movements, which set the feet a-dancing or the fingers a-tingling. but more of this later. this partnership between mind and body is very close. just how it happens that spirit may inhabit matter we may not know. but certain it is that they interact on each other. what will hinder the growth of one will handicap the other, and what favors the development of either will help both. the methods of their coöperation and the laws that govern their relationship will develop as our study goes on. . problems in observation and introspection one should always keep in mind that psychology is essentially a laboratory science, and not a text-book subject. the laboratory material is to be found in ourselves and in those about us. while the text should be thoroughly mastered, its statements should always be verified by reference to one's own experience, and observation of others. especially should prospective teachers constantly correlate the lessons of the book with the observation of children at work in the school. the problems suggested for observation and introspection will, if mastered, do much to render practical and helpful the truths of psychology. . think of your home as you last left it. can you see vividly just how it looked, the color of the paint on the outside, with the familiar form of the roof and all; can you recall the perfume in some old drawer, the taste of a favorite dish, the sound of a familiar voice in farewell? . what illustrations have you observed where the mental content of the moment seemed chiefly _thinking_ (knowledge process); chiefly _emotion_ (feeling process); chiefly _choosing_, or self-compulsion (willing process)? . when you say that you remember a circumstance that occurred yesterday, how do you remember it? that is, do you see in your mind things just as they were, and hear again sounds which occurred, or feel again movements which you performed? do you experience once more the emotions you then felt? . what forms of expression most commonly reveal _thought_; what reveal emotions? (i.e., can you tell what a child is _thinking about_ by the expression on his face? can you tell whether he is _angry_, _frightened_, _sorry_, by his face? is speech as necessary in expressing feeling as in expressing thought?) . try occasionally during the next twenty-four hours to turn quickly about mentally and see whether you can observe your thinking, feeling, or willing in the very act of taking place. . what becomes of our mind or consciousness while we are asleep? how are we able to wake up at a certain hour previously determined? can a person have absolutely _nothing_ in his mind? . have you noticed any children especially adept in expression? have you noticed any very backward? if so, in what form of expression in each case? . have you observed any instances of expression which you were at a loss to interpret (remember that "expression" includes every form of physical action, voice, speech, face, form, hand, etc.)? chapter ii attention how do you rank in mental ability, and how effective are your mind's grasp and power? the answer that must be given to these questions will depend not more on your native endowment than on your skill in using attention. . nature of attention it is by attention that we gather and mass our mental energy upon the critical and important points in our thinking. in the last chapter we saw that consciousness is not distributed evenly over the whole field, but "piled up," now on this object of thought, now on that, in obedience to interest or necessity. _the concentration of the mind's energy on one object of thought is attention._ the nature of attention.--everyone knows what it is to attend. the story so fascinating that we cannot leave it, the critical points in a game, the interesting sermon or lecture, the sparkling conversation--all these compel our attention. so completely is our mind's energy centered on them and withdrawn from other things that we are scarcely aware of what is going on about us. we are also familiar with another kind of attention. for we all have read the dull story, watched the slow game, listened to the lecture or sermon that drags, and taken part in conversation that was a bore. we gave these things our attention, but only with effort. our mind's energy seemed to center on anything rather than the matter in hand. a thousand objects from outside enticed us away, and it required the frequent "mental jerk" to bring us to the subject in hand. and when brought back to our thought problem we felt the constant "tug" of mind to be free again. normal consciousness always in a state of attention.--but this very effort of the mind to free itself from one object of thought that it may busy itself with another is _because attention is solicited by this other_. some object in our field of consciousness is always exerting an appeal for attention; and to attend _to_ one thing is always to attend _away from_ a multitude of other things upon which the thought might rest. we may therefore say that attention is constantly _selecting_ in our stream of thought those aspects that are to receive emphasis and consideration. from moment to moment it determines the points at which our mental energy shall be centered. . the effects of attention attention makes its object clear and definite.--whatever attention centers upon stands out sharp and clear in consciousness. whether it be a bit of memory, an "air-castle," a sensation from an aching tooth, the reasoning on an algebraic formula, a choice which we are making, the setting of an emotion--whatever be the object to which we are attending, that object is illumined and made to stand out from its fellows as the one prominent thing in the mind's eye while the attention rests on it. it is like the one building which the searchlight picks out among a city full of buildings and lights up, while the remainder are left in the semilight or in darkness. attention measures mental efficiency.--in a state of attention the mind may be likened to the rays of the sun which have been passed through a burning glass. you may let all the rays which can pass through your window pane fall hour after hour upon the paper lying on your desk, and no marked effects follow. but let the same amount of sunlight be passed through a lens and converged to a point the size of your pencil point, and the paper will at once burst into flame. what the diffused rays could not do in hours or in ages is now accomplished in seconds. likewise the mind, allowed to scatter over many objects, can accomplish but little. we may sit and dream away an hour or a day over a page or a problem without securing results. but let us call in our wits from their wool-gathering and "buckle down to it" with all our might, withdrawing our thoughts from everything else but this _one thing_, and concentrating our mind on it. more can now be accomplished in minutes than before in hours. nay, _things which could not be accomplished at all before_ now become possible. again, the mind may be compared to a steam engine which is constructed to run at a certain pressure of steam, say one hundred and fifty pounds to the square inch of boiler surface. once i ran such an engine; and well i remember a morning during my early apprenticeship when the foreman called for power to run some of the lighter machinery, while my steam gauge registered but seventy-five pounds. "surely," i thought, "if one hundred and fifty pounds will run all this machinery, seventy-five pounds should run half of it," so i opened the valve. but the powerful engine could do but little more than turn its own wheels, and refused to do the required work. not until the pressure had risen above one hundred pounds could the engine perform half the work which it could at one hundred and fifty pounds. and so with our mind. if it is meant to do its best work under a certain degree of concentration, it cannot in a given time do half the work with half the attention. further, there will be much _which it cannot do at all_ unless working under full pressure. we shall not be overstating the case if we say that as attention increases in arithmetical ratio, mental efficiency increases in geometrical ratio. it is in large measure a difference in the power of attention which makes one man a master in thought and achievement and another his humble follower. one often hears it said that "genius is but the power of sustained attention," and this statement possesses a large element of truth. . how we attend someone has said that if our attention is properly trained we should be able "to look at the point of a cambric needle for half an hour without winking." but this is a false idea of attention. the ability to look at the point of a cambric needle for half an hour might indicate a very laudable power of concentration; but the process, instead of enlightening us concerning the point of the needle, would result in our passing into a hypnotic state. voluntary attention to any one object can be sustained for but a brief time--a few seconds at best. it is essential that the object change, that we turn it over and over incessantly, and consider its various aspects and relations. sustained voluntary attention is thus a repetition of successive efforts to bring back the object to the mind. then the subject grows and develops--it is living, not dead. attention a relating activity.--when we are attending strongly to one object of thought it does not mean that consciousness sits staring vacantly at this one object, but rather that it uses it as a central core of thought, and thinks into relation with this object the things which belong with it. in working out some mathematical solution the central core is the principle upon which the solution is based, and concentration in this case consists in thinking the various conditions of the problem in relation to this underlying principle. in the accompanying diagram (fig. ) let a be the central core of some object of thought, say a patch of cloud in a picture, and let _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, etc., be the related facts, or the shape, size, color, etc., of the cloud. the arrows indicate the passing of our thought from cloud to related fact, or from related fact to cloud, and from related fact to related fact. as long as these related facts lead back to the cloud each time, that long we are attending to the cloud and thinking about it. it is when our thought fails to go back that we "wander" in our attention. then we leave _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, etc., which are related to the cloud, and, flying off to _x_, _y_, and _z,_ finally bring up heaven knows where. [illustration: fig. ] the rhythms of attention.--attention works in rhythms. this is to say that it never maintains a constant level of concentration for any considerable length of time, but regularly ebbs and flows. the explanation of this rhythmic action would take us too far afield at this point. when we remember, however, that our entire organism works within a great system of rhythms--hunger, thirst, sleep, fatigue, and many others--it is easy to see that the same law may apply to attention. the rhythms of attention vary greatly, the fluctuations often being only a few seconds apart for certain simple sensations, and probably a much greater distance apart for the more complex process of thinking. the seeming variation in the sound of a distant waterfall, now loud and now faint, is caused by the rhythm of attention and easily allows us to measure the rhythm for this particular sensation. . points of failure in attention lack of concentration.--there are two chief types of inattention whose danger threatens every person. _first_, we may be thinking about the right things, but not thinking _hard_ enough. we lack mental pressure. outside thoughts which have no relation to the subject in hand may not trouble us much, but we do not attack our problem with vim. the current in our stream of consciousness is moving too slowly. we do not gather up all our mental forces and mass them on the subject before us in a way that means victory. our thoughts may be sufficiently focused, but they fail to "set fire." it is like focusing the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. they lack energy. they will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. this kind of attention means mental dawdling. it means inefficiency. for the individual it means defeat in life's battles; for the nation it means mediocrity and stagnation. a college professor said to his faithful but poorly prepared class, "judging from your worn and tired appearance, young people, you are putting in twice too many hours on study." at this commendation the class brightened up visibly. "but," he continued, "judging from your preparation, you do not study quite half hard enough." happy is the student who, starting in on his lesson rested and fresh, can study with such concentration that an hour of steady application will leave him mentally exhausted and limp. that is one hour of triumph for him, no matter what else he may have accomplished or failed to accomplish during the time. he can afford an occasional pause for rest, for difficulties will melt rapidly away before him. he possesses one key to successful achievement. mental wandering.--_second_, we may have good mental power and be able to think hard and efficiently on any one point, but lack the power to think in a straight line. every stray thought that comes along is a "will-o'-the-wisp" to lead us away from the subject in hand and into lines of thought not relating to it. who has not started in to think on some problem, and, after a few moments, been surprised to find himself miles away from the topic upon which he started! or who has not read down a page and, turning to the next, found that he did not know a word on the preceding page, his thoughts having wandered away, his eyes only going through the process of reading! instead of sticking to the _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, etc., of our topic and relating them all up to a, thereby reaching a solution of the problem, we often jump at once to _x_, _y_, _z_, and find ourselves far afield with all possibility of a solution gone. we may have brilliant thoughts about _x_, _y_, _z_, but they are not related to anything in particular, and so they pass from us and are gone--lost in oblivion because they are not attached to something permanent. such a thinker is at the mercy of circumstances, following blindly the leadings of trains of thought which are his master instead of his servant, and which lead him anywhere or nowhere without let or hindrance from him. his consciousness moves rapidly enough and with enough force, but it is like a ship without a helm. starting for the intellectual port _a_ by way of _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, he is mentally shipwrecked at last on the rocks _x_, _y_, _z_, and never reaches harbor. fortunate is he who can shut out intruding thoughts and think in a straight line. even with mediocre ability he may accomplish more by his thinking than the brilliant thinker who is constantly having his mental train wrecked by stray thoughts which slip in on his right of way. . types of attention the three types of attention.--attention may be secured in three ways: ( ) it is demanded by some sudden or intense sensory stimulus or insistent idea, or ( ) it follows interest, or ( ) it is compelled by the will. if it comes in the first way, as from a thunderclap or a flash of light, or from the persistent attempt of some unsought idea to secure entrance into the mind, it is called _involuntary_ attention. this form of attention is of so little importance, comparatively, in our mental life that we shall not discuss it further. if attention comes in the second way, following interest, it is called _nonvoluntary_ or spontaneous attention; if in the third, compelled by the will, _voluntary_ or active attention. nonvoluntary attention has its motive in some object external to consciousness, or else follows a more or less uncontrolled current of thought which interests us; voluntary attention is controlled from within--_we_ decide what we shall attend to instead of letting interesting objects of thought determine it for us. interest and nonvoluntary attention.--in nonvoluntary attention the environment largely determines what we shall attend to. all that we have to do with directing this kind of attention is in developing certain lines of interest, and then the interesting things attract attention. the things we see and hear and touch and taste and smell, the things we like, the things we do and hope to do--these are the determining factors in our mental life so long as we are giving nonvoluntary attention. our attention follows the beckoning of these things as the needle the magnet. it is no effort to attend to them, but rather the effort would be to keep from attending to them. who does not remember reading a story, perhaps a forbidden one, so interesting that when mother called up the stairs for us to come down to attend to some duty, we replied, "yes, in a minute," and then went on reading! we simply could not stop at that place. the minute lengthens into ten, and another call startles us. "yes, i'm coming;" we turn just one more leaf, and are lost again. at last comes a third call in tones so imperative that it cannot be longer ignored, and we lay the book down, but open to the place where we left off, and where we hope soon to begin further to unravel the delightful mystery. was it an effort to attend to the reading? ah, no! it took the combined force of our will and of mother's authority to drag the attention away. this is nonvoluntary attention. left to itself, then, attention simply obeys natural laws and follows the line of least resistance. by far the larger portion of our attention is of this type. thought often runs on hour after hour when we are not conscious of effort or struggle to compel us to cease thinking about this thing and begin thinking about that. indeed, it may be doubted whether this is not the case with some persons for days at a time, instead of hours. the things that present themselves to the mind are the things which occupy it; the character of the thought is determined by the character of our interests. it is this fact which makes it vitally necessary that our interests shall be broad and pure if our thoughts are to be of this type. it is not enough that we have the strength to drive from our minds a wrong or impure thought which seeks entrance. to stand guard as a policeman over our thoughts to see that no unworthy one enters, requires too much time and energy. our interests must be of such a nature as to lead us away from the field of unworthy thoughts if we are to be free from their tyranny. the will and voluntary attention.--in voluntary attention there is a conflict either between the will and interest or between the will and the mental inertia or laziness, which has to be overcome before we can think with any degree of concentration. interest says, "follow this line, which is easy and attractive, or which requires but little effort--follow the line of least resistance." will says, "quit that line of dalliance and ease, and take this harder way which i direct--cease the line of least resistance and take the one of greatest resistance." when day dreams and "castles in spain" attempt to lure you from your lessons, refuse to follow; shut out these vagabond thoughts and stick to your task. when intellectual inertia deadens your thought and clogs your mental stream, throw it off and court forceful effort. if wrong or impure thoughts seek entrance to your mind, close and lock your mental doors to them. if thoughts of desire try to drive out thoughts of duty, be heroic and insist that thoughts of duty shall have right of way. in short, see that _you_ are the master of your thinking, and do not let it always be directed without your consent by influences outside of yourself. it is just at this point that the strong will wins victory and the weak will breaks down. between the ability to control one's thoughts and the inability to control them lies all the difference between right actions and wrong actions; between withstanding temptation and yielding to it; between an inefficient purposeless life and a life of purpose and endeavor; between success and failure. for we act in accordance with those things which our thought rests upon. suppose two lines of thought represented by _a_ and _b_, respectively, lie before you; that _a_ leads to a course of action difficult or unpleasant, but necessary to success or duty, and that _b_ leads to a course of action easy or pleasant, but fatal to success or duty. which course will you follow--the rugged path of duty or the easier one of pleasure? the answer depends almost wholly, if not entirely, on your power of attention. if your will is strong enough to pull your thoughts away from the fatal but attractive _b_ and hold them resolutely on the less attractive _a_, then _a_ will dictate your course of action, and you will respond to the call for endeavor, self-denial, and duty; but if your thoughts break away from the domination of your will and allow the beckoning of your interests alone, then _b_ will dictate your course of action, and you will follow the leading of ease and pleasure. _for our actions are finally and irrevocably dictated by the things we think about._ not really different kinds of attention.--it is not to be understood, however, from what has been said, that there are _really_ different kinds of attention. all attention denotes an active or dynamic phase of consciousness. the difference is rather _in the way we secure attention_; whether it is demanded by sudden stimulus, coaxed from us by interesting objects of thought without effort on our part, or compelled by force of will to desert the more interesting and take the direction which we dictate. . improving the power of attention while attention is no doubt partly a natural gift, yet there is probably no power of the mind more susceptible to training than is attention. and with attention, as with every other power of body and mind, the secret of its development lies in its use. stated briefly, the only way to train attention is by attending. no amount of theorizing or resolving can take the place of practice in the actual process of attending. making different kinds of attention reËnforce each other.--a very close relationship and interdependence exists between nonvoluntary and voluntary attention. it would be impossible to hold our attention by sheer force of will on objects which were forever devoid of interest; likewise the blind following of our interests and desires would finally lead to shipwreck in all our lives. each kind of attention must support and reënforce the other. the lessons, the sermons, the lectures, and the books in which we are most interested, and hence to which we attend nonvoluntarily and with the least effort and fatigue, are the ones out of which, other things being equal, we get the most and remember the best and longest. on the other hand, there are sometimes lessons and lectures and books, and many things besides, which are not intensely interesting, but which should be attended to nevertheless. it is at this point that the will must step in and take command. if it has not the strength to do this, it is in so far a weak will, and steps should be taken to develop it. we are to "_keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day_." we are to be systematically heroic in the little points of everyday life and experience. we are not to shrink from tasks because they are difficult or unpleasant. then, when the test comes, we shall not find ourselves unnerved and untrained, but shall be able to stand in the evil day. the habit of attention.--finally, one of the chief things in training the attention is _to form the habit of attending_. this habit is to be formed only by _attending_ whenever and wherever the proper thing to do is to attend, whether "in work, in play, in making fishing flies, in preparing for an examination, in courting a sweetheart, in reading a book." the lesson, or the sermon, or the lecture, may not be very interesting; but if they are to be attended to at all, our rule should be to attend to them completely and absolutely. not by fits and starts, now drifting away and now jerking ourselves back, but _all the time_. and, furthermore, the one who will deliberately do this will often find the dull and uninteresting task become more interesting; but if it never becomes interesting, he is at least forming a habit which will be invaluable to him through life. on the other hand, the one who fails to attend except when his interest is captured, who never exerts effort to compel attention, is forming a habit which will be the bane of his thinking until his stream of thought shall end. . problems in observation and introspection . which fatigues you more, to give attention of the nonvoluntary type, or the voluntary? which can you maintain longer? which is the more pleasant and agreeable to give? under which can you accomplish more? what bearing have these facts on teaching? . try to follow for one or two minutes the "wave" in your consciousness, and then describe the course taken by your attention. . have you observed one class alert in attention, and another lifeless and inattentive? can you explain the causes lying back of this difference? estimate the relative amount of work accomplished under the two conditions. . what distractions have you observed in the schoolroom tending to break up attention? . have you seen pupils inattentive from lack of ( ) change, ( ) pure air, ( ) enthusiasm on the part of the teacher, ( ) fatigue, ( ) ill health? . have you noticed a difference in the _habit_ of attention in different pupils? have you noticed the same thing for whole schools or rooms? . do you know of children too much given to daydreaming? are you? . have you seen a teacher rap the desk for attention? what type of attention was secured? does it pay? . have you observed any instance in which pupils' lack of attention should be blamed on the teacher? if so, what was the fault? the remedy? . visit a school room or a recitation, and then write an account of the types and degrees of attention you observed. try to explain the factors responsible for any failures in attention, and also those responsible for the good attention shown. chapter iii the brain and nervous system a fine brain, or a good mind. these terms are often used interchangeably, as if they stood for the same thing. yet the brain is material substance--so many cells and fibers, a pulpy protoplasmic mass weighing some three pounds and shut away from the outside world in a casket of bone. the mind is a spiritual thing--the sum of the processes by which we think and feel and will, mastering our world and accomplishing our destiny. . the relations of mind and brain interaction of mind and brain.--how, then, come these two widely different facts, mind and brain, to be so related in our speech? why are the terms so commonly interchanged?--it is because mind and brain are so vitally related in their processes and so inseparably connected in their work. no movement of our thought, no bit of sensation, no memory, no feeling, no act of decision but is accompanied by its own particular activity in the cells of the brain. it is this that the psychologist has in mind when he says, _no psychosis without its corresponding neurosis_. so far as our present existence is concerned, then, no mind ever works except through some brain, and a brain without a mind becomes but a mass of dead matter, so much clay. mind and brain are perfectly adapted to each other. nor is this mere accident. for through the ages of man's past history each has grown up and developed into its present state of efficiency by working in conjunction with the other. each has helped form the other and determine its qualities. not only is this true for the race in its evolution, but for every individual as he passes from infancy to maturity. the brain as the mind's machine.--in the first chapter we saw that the brain does not create the mind, but that the mind works through the brain. no one can believe that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile, or that it grinds it out as a mill does flour. indeed, just what their exact relation is has not yet been settled. yet it is easy to see that if the mind must use the brain as a machine and work through it, then the mind must be subject to the limitations of its machine, or, in other words, the mind cannot be better than the brain through which it operates. a brain and nervous system that are poorly developed or insufficiently nourished mean low grade of efficiency in our mental processes, just as a poorly constructed or wrongly adjusted motor means loss of power in applying the electric current to its work. we will, then, look upon the mind and the brain as counterparts of each other, each performing activities which correspond to activities in the other, both inextricably bound together at least so far as this life is concerned, and each getting its significance by its union with the other. this view will lend interest to a brief study of the brain and nervous system. . the mind's dependence on the external world but can we first see how in a general way the brain and nervous system are primarily related to our thinking? let us go back to the beginning and consider the babe when it first opens its eyes on the scenes of its new existence. what is in its mind? what does it think about? nothing. imagine, if you can, a person born blind and deaf, and without the sense of touch, taste, or smell. let such a person live on for a year, for five years, for a lifetime. what would he know? what ray of intelligence would enter his mind? what would he think about? all would be dark to his eyes, all silent to his ears, all tasteless to his mouth, all odorless to his nostrils, all touchless to his skin. his mind would be a blank. he would have no mind. he could not get started to think. he could not get started to act. he would belong to a lower scale of life than the tiny animal that floats with the waves and the tide in the ocean without power to direct its own course. he would be but an inert mass of flesh without sense or intelligence. the mind at birth.--yet this is the condition of the babe at birth. it is born practically blind and deaf, without definite sense of taste or smell. born without anything to think about, and no way to get anything to think about until the senses wake up and furnish some material from the outside world. born with all the mechanism of muscle and nerve ready to perform the countless complex movements of arms and legs and body which characterize every child, he could not successfully start these activities without a message from the senses to set them going. at birth the child probably has only the senses of contact and temperature present with any degree of clearness; taste soon follows; vision of an imperfect sort in a few days; hearing about the same time, and smell a little later. the senses are waking up and beginning their acquaintance with the outside world. [illustration: fig. .--a neurone from a human spinal cord. the central portion represents the cell body. n, the nucleus; p, a pigmented or colored spot; d, a dendrite, or relatively short fiber,--which branches freely; a, an axon or long fiber, which branches but little.] the work of the senses.--and what a problem the senses have to solve! on the one hand the great universe of sights and sounds, of tastes and smells, of contacts and temperatures, and whatever else may belong to the material world in which we live; and on the other hand the little shapeless mass of gray and white pulpy matter called the brain, incapable of sustaining its own shape, shut away in the darkness of a bony case with no possibility of contact with the outside world, and possessing no means of communicating with it except through the senses. and yet this universe of external things must be brought into communication with the seemingly insignificant but really wonderful brain, else the mind could never be. here we discover, then, the two great factors which first require our study if we would understand the growth of the mind--_the material world without, and the brain within_. for it is the action and interaction of these which lie at the bottom of the mind's development. let us first look a little more closely at the brain and the accompanying nervous system. . structural elements of the nervous system it will help in understanding both the structure and the working of the nervous system to keep in mind that it contains _but one fundamental unit of structure_. this is the neurone. just as the house is built up by adding brick upon brick, so brain, cord, nerves and organs of sense are formed by the union of numberless neurones. [illustration: fig. .--neurones in different stages of development, from _a_ to _e_. in _a_, the elementary cell body alone is present; in _c_, a dendrite is shown projecting upward and an axon downward.--after donaldson.] the neurone.--what, then, is a neurone? what is its structure, its function, how does it act? a neurone is _a protoplasmic cell, with its outgrowing fibers_. the cell part of the neurone is of a variety of shapes, triangular, pyramidal, cylindrical, and irregular. the cells vary in size from / to / of an inch in diameter. in general the function of the cell is thought to be to generate the nervous energy responsible for our consciousness--sensation, memory, reasoning, feeling and all the rest, and for our movements. the cell also provides for the nutrition of the fibers. [illustration: fig. .--longitudinal (a) and transverse (b) section of nerve fiber. the heavy border represents the medullary, or enveloping sheath, which becomes thicker in the larger fibers.--after donaldson.] neurone fibers.--the neurone fibers are of two kinds, _dendrites_ and _axons_. the dendrites are comparatively large in diameter, branch freely, like the branches of a tree, and extend but a relatively short distance from the parent cell. axons are slender, and branch but little, and then approximately at right angles. they reach a much greater distance from the cell body than the dendrites. neurones vary greatly in length. some of those found in the spinal cord and brain are not more than / of an inch long, while others which reach from the extremities to the cord, measure several feet. both dendrites and axons are of diameter so small as to be invisible except under the microscope. neuroglia.--out of this simple structural element, the neurone, the entire nervous system is built. true, the neurones are held in place, and perhaps insulated, by a kind of soft cement called _neuroglia_. but this seems to possess no strictly nervous function. the number of the microscopic neurones required to make up the mass of the brain, cord and peripheral nervous system is far beyond our mental grasp. it is computed that the brain and cord contain some , millions of them. complexity of the brain.--something of the complexity of the brain structure can best be understood by an illustration. professor stratton estimates that if we were to make a model of the human brain, using for the neurone fibers wires so small as to be barely visible to the eye, in order to find room for all the wires the model would need to be the size of a city block on the base and correspondingly high. imagine a telephone system of this complexity operating from one switch-board! "gray" and "white" matter.--the "gray matter" of the brain and cord is made up of nerve cells and their dendrites, and the terminations of axons, which enter from the adjoining white matter. a part of the mass of gray matter also consists of the neuroglia which surrounds the nerve cells and fibers, and a network of blood vessels. the "white matter" of the central system consists chiefly of axons with their enveloping or medullary, sheath and neuroglia. the white matter contains no nerve cells or dendrites. the difference in color of the gray and the white matter is caused chiefly by the fact that in the gray masses the medullary sheath, which is white, is lacking, thus revealing the ashen gray of the nerve threads. in the white masses the medullary sheath is present. . gross structure of the nervous system divisions of the nervous system.--the nervous system may be considered in two divisions: ( ) the _central_ system, which consists of the brain and spinal cord, and ( ) the _peripheral_ system, which comprises the sensory and motor neurones connecting the periphery and the internal organs with the central system and the specialized end-organs of the senses. the _sympathetic_ system, which is found as a double chain of nerve connections joining the roots of sensory and motor nerves just outside the spinal column, does not seem to be directly related to consciousness and so will not be discussed here. a brief description of the nervous system will help us better to understand how its parts all work together in so wonderful a way to accomplish their great result. the central system.--in the brain we easily distinguish three major divisions--the _cerebrum_, the _cerebellum_ and the _medulla oblongata_. the medulla is but the enlarged upper part of the cord where it connects with the brain. it is about an inch and a quarter long, and is composed of both medullated and unmedullated fibers--that is of both "white" and "gray" matter. in the medulla, the unmedullated neurones which comprise the center of the cord are passing to the outside, and the medullated to the inside, thus taking the positions they occupy in the cerebrum. here also the neurones are crossing, or changing sides, so that those which pass up the right side of the cord finally connect with the left side of the brain, and vice versa. the cerebellum.--lying just back of the medulla and at the rear part of the base of the cerebrum is the cerebellum, or "little brain," approximately as large as the fist, and composed of a complex arrangement of white and gray matter. fibers from the spinal cord enter this mass, and others emerge and pass on into the cerebrum, while its two halves also are connected with each other by means of cross fibers. [illustration: fig. .--view of the under side of the brain. b, basis of the crura; p, pons; mo, medulla oblongata; ce, cerebellum; sc, spinal cord.] the cerebrum.--the cerebrum occupies all the upper part of the skull from the front to the rear. it is divided symmetrically into two hemispheres, the right and the left. these hemispheres are connected with each other by a small bridge of fibers called the _corpus callosum_. each hemisphere is furrowed and ridged with convolutions, an arrangement which allows greater surface for the distribution of the gray cellular matter over it. besides these irregularities of surface, each hemisphere is marked also by two deep clefts or _fissures_--the fissure of rolando, extending from the middle upper part of the hemisphere downward and forward, passing a little in front of the ear and stopping on a level with the upper part of it; and the fissure of sylvius, beginning at the base of the brain somewhat in front of the ear and extending upward and backward at an acute angle with the base of the hemisphere. [illustration: fig. .--diagrammatic side view of brain, showing cerebellum (cb) and medulla oblongata (mo). f' f'' f''' are placed on the first, second, and third frontal convolutions, respectively; af, on the ascending frontal; ap, on the ascending parietal; m, on the marginal; a, on the angular. t' t'' t''' are placed on the first, second, and third temporal convolutions. r-r marks the fissure of rolando; s-s, the fissure of sylvius; po, the parieto-occipital fissure.] the surface of each hemisphere may be thought of as mapped out into four lobes: the frontal lobe, which includes the front part of the hemisphere and extends back to the fissure of rolando and down to the fissure of sylvius; the parietal lobe, which lies back of the fissure of rolando and above that of sylvius and extends back to the occipital lobe; the occipital lobe, which includes the extreme rear portion of the hemisphere; and the temporal lobe, which lies below the fissure of sylvius and extends back to the occipital lobe. the cortex.--the gray matter of the hemispheres, unlike that of the cord, lies on the surface. this gray exterior portion of the cerebrum is called the _cortex_, and varies from one-twelfth to one-eighth of an inch in thickness. the cortex is the seat of all consciousness and of the control of voluntary movement. [illustration: fig. .--different aspects of sections of the spinal cord and of the roots of the spinal nerves from the cervical region: , different views of anterior median fissure; , posterior fissure; , anterior lateral depression for anterior roots; , posterior lateral depression for posterior roots; and , anterior and posterior roots, respectively; , complete spinal nerve, formed by the union of the anterior and posterior roots.] the spinal cord.--the spinal cord proceeds from the base of the brain downward about eighteen inches through a canal provided for it in the vertebræ of the spinal column. it is composed of white matter on the outside, and gray matter within. a deep fissure on the anterior side and another on the posterior cleave the cord nearly in twain, resembling the brain in this particular. the gray matter on the interior is in the form of two crescents connected by a narrow bar. the _peripheral_ nervous system consists of thirty-one pairs of _nerves_, with their end-organs, branching off from the cord, and twelve pairs that have their roots in the brain. branches of these forty-three pairs of nerves reach to every part of the periphery of the body and to all the internal organs. [illustration: fig. .--the projection fibers of the brain. i-ix, the first nine pairs of cranial nerves.] it will help in understanding the peripheral system to remember that a _nerve_ consists of a bundle of neurone fibers each wrapped in its medullary sheath and sheath of schwann. around this bundle of neurones, that is around the nerve, is still another wrapping, silvery-white, called the neurilemma. the number of fibers going to make up a nerve varies from about , to , . nerves can easily be identified in a piece of lean beef, or even at the edge of a serious gash in one's own flesh! bundles of sensory fibers constituting a sensory nerve root enter the spinal cord on the posterior side through holes in the vertebræ. similar bundles of motor fibers in the form of a motor nerve root emerge from the cord at the same level. soon after their emergence from the cord, these two nerves are wrapped together in the same sheath and proceed in this way to the periphery of the body, where the sensory nerve usually ends in a specialized _end-organ_ fitted to respond to some certain stimulus from the outside world. the motor nerve ends in minute filaments in the muscular organ which it governs. both sensory and motor nerves connect with fibers of like kind in the cord and these in turn with the cortex, thus giving every part of the periphery direct connection with the cortex. [illustration: fig. .--schematic diagram showing association fibers connecting cortical centers with each other.--after james and starr.] the _end-organs_ of the sensory nerves are nerve masses, some of them, as the taste buds of the tongue, relatively simple; and others, as the eye or ear, very complex. they are all alike in one particular; namely, that each is fitted for its own particular work and can do no other. thus the eye is the end-organ of sight, and is a wonderfully complex arrangement of nerve structure combined with refracting media, and arranged to respond to the rapid ether waves of light. the ear has for its essential part the specialized endings of the auditory nerve, and is fitted to respond to the waves carried to it in the air, giving the sensation of sound. the end-organs of touch, found in greatest perfection in the finger tips, are of several kinds, all very complicated in structure. and so on with each of the senses. each particular sense has some form of end-organ specially adapted to respond to the kind of stimulus upon which its sensation depends, and each is insensible to the stimuli of the others, much as the receiver of a telephone will respond to the tones of our voice, but not to the touch of our fingers as will the telegraph instrument, and _vice versa_. thus the eye is not affected by sounds, nor touch by light. yet by means of all the senses together we are able to come in contact with the material world in a variety of ways. . localization of function in the nervous system division of labor.--division of labor is the law in the organic world as in the industrial. animals of the lowest type, such as the amoeba, do not have separate organs for respiration, digestion, assimilation, elimination, etc., the one tissue performing all of these functions. but in the higher forms each organ not only has its own specific work, but even within the same organ each part has its own particular function assigned. thus we have seen that the two parts of the neurone probably perform different functions, the cells generating energy and the fibers transmitting it. it will not seem strange, then, that there is also a division of labor in the cellular matter itself in the nervous system. for example, the little masses of ganglia which are distributed at intervals along the nerves are probably for the purpose of reënforcing the nerve current, much as the battery cells in the local telegraph office reënforce the current from the central office. the cellular matter in the spinal cord and lower parts of the brain has a very important work to perform in receiving messages from the senses and responding to them in directing the simpler reflex acts and movements which we learn to execute without our consciousness being called upon, thus leaving the mind free from these petty things to busy itself in higher ways. the cellular matter of the cortex performs the highest functions of all, for through its activity we have consciousness. [illustration: fig. .--side view of left hemisphere of human brain, showing the principal localized areas.] the gray matter of the cerebellum, the medulla, and the cord may receive impressions from the senses and respond to them with movements, but their response is in all cases wholly automatic and unconscious. a person whose hemispheres had been injured in such a way as to interfere with the activity of the cortex might still continue to perform most if not all of the habitual movements of his life, but they would be mechanical and not intelligent. he would lack all higher consciousness. it is through the activity of this thin covering of cellular matter of the cerebrum, the _cortex_, that our minds operate; here are received stimuli from the different senses, and here sensations are experienced. here all our movements which are consciously directed have their origin. and here all our thinking, feeling, and willing are done. division of labor in the cortex.--nor does the division of labor in the nervous system end with this assignment of work. the cortex itself probably works essentially as a unit, yet it is through a shifting of tensions from one area to another that it acts, now giving us a sensation, now directing a movement, and now thinking a thought or feeling an emotion. localization of function is the rule here also. certain areas of the cortex are devoted chiefly to sensations, others to motor impulses, and others to higher thought activities, yet in such a way that all work together in perfect harmony, each reënforcing the other and making its work significant. thus the front portion of the cortex seems to be devoted to the higher thought activities; the region on both sides of the fissure of rolando, to motor activities; and the rear and lower parts to sensory activities; and all are bound together and made to work together by the association fibers of the brain. in the case of the higher thought activities, it is not probable that one section of the frontal lobes of the cortex is set apart for thinking, one for feeling, and one for willing, etc., but rather that the whole frontal part of the cortex is concerned in each. in the motor and sensory areas, however, the case is different; for here a still further division of labor occurs. for example, in the motor region one small area seems connected with movements of the head, one with the arm, one with the leg, one with the face, and another with the organs of speech; likewise in the sensory region, one area is devoted to vision, one to hearing, one to taste and smell, and one to touch, etc. we must bear in mind, however, that these regions are not mapped out as accurately as are the boundaries of our states--that no part of the brain is restricted wholly to either sensory or motor nerves, and that no part works by itself independently of the rest of the brain. we name a tract from the predominance of nerves which end there, or from the chief functions which the area performs. the motor localization seems to be the most perfect. indeed, experimentation on the brains of monkeys has been successful in mapping out motor areas so accurately that such small centers as those connected with the bending of one particular leg or the flexing of a thumb have been located. yet each area of the cortex is so connected with every other area by the millions of association fibers that the whole brain is capable of working together as a unit, thus unifying and harmonizing our thoughts, emotions, and acts. . forms of sensory stimuli let us next inquire how this mechanism of the nervous system is acted upon in such a way as to give us sensations. in order to understand this, we must first know that all forms of matter are composed of minute atoms which are in constant motion, and by imparting this motion to the air or the ether which surrounds them, are constantly radiating energy in the form of minute waves throughout space. these waves, or radiations, are incredibly rapid in some instances and rather slow in others. in sending out its energy in the form of these waves, the physical world is doing its part to permit us to form its acquaintance. the end-organs of the sensory nerves must meet this advance half-way, and be so constructed as to be affected by the different forms of energy which are constantly beating upon them. [illustration: fig. .--the prism's analysis of a bundle of light rays. on the right are shown the relation of vibration rates to temperature stimuli, to light and to chemical stimuli. the rates are given in billions per second.--after witmer.] the end-organs and their response to stimuli.--thus the radiations of ether from the sun, our chief source of light, are so rapid that billions of them enter the eye in a second of time, and the retina is of such a nature that its nerve cells are thrown into activity by these waves; the impulse is carried over the optic nerve to the occipital lobe of the cortex, and the sensation of sight is the result. the different colors also, from the red of the spectrum to the violet, are the result of different vibration rates in the waves of ether which strike the retina; and in order to perceive color, the retina must be able to respond to the particular vibration rate which represents each color. likewise in the sense of touch the end-organs are fitted to respond to very rapid vibrations, and it is possible that the different qualities of touch are produced by different vibration rates in the atoms of the object we are touching. when we reach the ear, we have the organ which responds to the lowest vibration rate of all, for we can detect a sound made by an object which is vibrating from twenty to thirty times a second. the highest vibration rate which will affect the ear is some forty thousand per second. thus it is seen that there are great gaps in the different rates to which our senses are fitted to respond--a sudden drop from billions in the case of the eye to millions in touch, and to thousands or even tens in hearing. this makes one wonder whether there are not many things in nature which man has never discovered simply because he has not the sense mechanism enabling him to become conscious of their existence. there are undoubtedly "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy." dependence of the mind on the senses.--only as the senses bring in the material, has the mind anything with which to build. thus have the senses to act as messengers between the great outside world and the brain; to be the servants who shall stand at the doorways of the body--the eyes, the ears, the finger tips--each ready to receive its particular kind of impulse from nature and send it along the right path to the part of the cortex where it belongs, so that the mind can say, "a sight," "a sound," or "a touch." thus does the mind come to know the universe of the senses. thus does it get the material out of which memory, imagination, and thought begin. thus and only thus does the mind secure the crude material from which the finished superstructure is finally built. chapter iv mental development and motor training education was long looked upon as affecting the mind only; the body was either left out of account or neglected. later science has shown, however, that the mind cannot be trained _except as the nervous system is trained and developed_. for not sensation and the simpler mental processes alone, but memory, imagination, judgment, reasoning and every other act of the mind are dependent on the nervous system finally for their efficiency. the little child gets its first mental experiences in connection with certain movements or acts set up reflexly by the pre-organized nervous system. from this time on movement and idea are so inextricably bound together that they cannot be separated. the mind and the brain are so vitally related that it is impossible to educate one without performing a like office for the other; and it is likewise impossible to neglect the one without causing the other to suffer in its development. . factors determining the efficiency of the nervous system development and nutrition.--ignoring the native differences in nervous systems through the influence of heredity, the efficiency of a nervous system is largely dependent on two factors: ( ) the development of the cells and fibers of which it is composed, and ( ) its general tone of health and vigor. the actual number of cells in the nervous system increases but little if at all after birth. indeed, it is doubtful whether edison's brain and nervous system has a greater number of cells in it than yours or mine. the difference between the brain of a genius and that of an ordinary man is not in the _number_ of cells which it contains, but rather in the development of the cells and fibers which are present, potentially, at least, in every nervous system. the histologist tells us that in the nervous system of every child there are tens of thousands of cells which are so immature and undeveloped that they are useless; indeed, this is the case to some degree in every adult person's nervous system as well. thus each individual has inherent in his nervous system potentialities of which he has never taken advantage, the utilizing of which may make him a genius and the neglecting of which will certainly leave him on the plane of mediocrity. the first problem in education, then, is to take the unripe and inefficient nervous system and so develop it in connection with the growing mind that the possibilities which nature has stored in it shall become actualities. undeveloped cells.--professor donaldson tells us on this point that: "at birth, and for a long time after, many [nervous] systems contain cell elements which are more or less immature, not forming a functional part of the tissue, and yet under some conditions capable of further development.... for the cells which are continually appearing in the developing cortex no other source is known than the nuclei or granules found there in its earliest stages. these elements are metamorphosed neuroblasts--that is, elementary cells out of which the nervous matter is developed--which have shrunken to a volume less than that which they had at first, and which remain small until, in the subsequent process of enlargement necessary for their full development, they expand into well-marked cells. elements intermediate between these granules and the fully developed cells are always found, even in mature brains, and therefore it is inferred that the latter are derived from the former. the appearances there also lead to the conclusion that many elements which might possibly develop in any given case are far beyond the number that actually does so.... the possible number of cells latent and functional in the central system is early fixed. at any age this number is accordingly represented by the granules as well as by the cells which have already undergone further development. during growth the proportion of developed cells increases, and sometimes, owing to the failure to recognize potential nerve cells in the granules, the impression is carried away that this increase implies the formation of new elements. as has been shown, such is not the case."[ ] development of nerve fibers.--the nerve _fibers_, no less than the cells, must go through a process of development. it has already been shown that the fibers are the result of a branching of cells. at birth many of the cells have not yet thrown out branches, and hence the fibers are lacking; while many of those which are already grown out are not sufficiently developed to transmit impulses accurately. thus it has been found that most children at birth are able to support the weight of the body for several seconds by clasping the fingers around a small rod, but it takes about a year for the child to become able to stand. it is evident that it requires more actual strength to cling to a rod than to stand; hence the conclusion is that the difference is in the earlier development of the nerve centers which have to do with clasping than of those concerned in standing. likewise the child's first attempts to feed himself or do any one of the thousand little things about which he is so awkward, are partial failures not so much because he has not had practice as because his nervous machinery connected with those movements is not yet developed sufficiently to enable him to be accurate. his brain is in a condition which flechsig calls "unripe." how, then, shall the undeveloped cells and system ripen? how shall the undeveloped cells and fibers grow to full maturity and efficiency? . development of nervous system through use importance of stimulus and response.--like all other tissues of the body, the nerve cells and fibers are developed by judicious use. the sensory and association centers require the constant stimulus of nerve currents running in from the various end-organs, and the motor centers require the constant stimulus of currents running from them out to the muscles. in other words, the conditions upon which both motor and sensory development depend are: ( ) a rich environment of sights and sounds and tastes and smells, and everything else which serves as proper stimulus to the sense organs, and to every form of intellectual and social interest; and ( ) no less important, an opportunity for the freest and most complete forms of response and motor activity. [illustration: fig. .--schematic transverse section of the human brain showing the projection of the motor fibers, their crossing in the neighborhood of the medulla, and their termination in the different areas of localized function in the cortex. s, fissure of sylvius; m, the medulla; vii, the roots of the facial nerves.] an illustration of the effects of the lack of sensory stimuli on the cortex is well shown in the case of laura bridgman, whose brain was studied by professor donaldson after her death. laura bridgman was born a normal child, and developed as other children do up to the age of nearly three years. at this time, through an attack of scarlet fever, she lost her hearing completely and also the sight of her left eye. her right eye was so badly affected that she could see but little; and it, too, became entirely blind when she was eight. she lived in this condition until she was sixty years old, when she died. professor donaldson submitted the cortex of her brain to a most careful examination, also comparing the corresponding areas on the two hemispheres with each other. he found that as a whole the cortex was thinner than in the case of normal individuals. he found also that the cortical area connected with the left eye--namely, the right occipital region--was much thinner than that for the right eye, which had retained its sight longer than the other. he says: "it is interesting to notice that those parts of the cortex which, according to the current view, were associated with the defective sense organs were also particularly thin. the cause of this thinness was found to be due, at least in part, to the small size of the nerve cells there present. not only were the large and medium-sized cells smaller, but the impression made on the observer was that they were also less numerous than in the normal cortex." effect of sensory stimuli.--no doubt if we could examine the brain of a person who has grown up in an environment rich in stimuli to the eye, where nature, earth, and sky have presented a changing panorama of color and form to attract the eye; where all the sounds of nature, from the chirp of the insect to the roar of the waves and the murmur of the breeze, and from the softest tones of the voice to the mightiest sweep of the great orchestra, have challenged the ear; where many and varied odors and perfumes have assailed the nostrils; where a great range of tastes have tempted the palate; where many varieties of touch and temperature sensations have been experienced--no doubt if we could examine such a brain we should find the sensory areas of the cortex excelling in thickness because its cells were well developed and full sized from the currents which had been pouring into them from the outside world. on the other hand, if we could examine a cortex which had lacked any one of these stimuli, we should find some area in it undeveloped because of this deficiency. its owner therefore possesses but the fraction of a brain, and would in a corresponding degree find his mind incomplete. necessity for motor activity.--likewise in the case of the motor areas. pity the boy or girl who has been deprived of the opportunity to use every muscle to the fullest extent in the unrestricted plays and games of childhood. for where such activities are not wide in their scope, there some areas of the cortex will remain undeveloped, because unused, and the person will be handicapped later in his life from lack of skill in the activities depending on these centers. halleck says in this connection: "if we could examine the developing motor region with a microscope of sufficient magnifying power, it is conceivable that we might learn wherein the modification due to exercise consists. we might also, under such conditions, be able to say, 'this is the motor region of a piano player; the modifications here correspond precisely to those necessary for controlling such movements of the hand.' or, 'this is the motor tract of a blacksmith; this, of an engraver; and these must be the cells which govern the vocal organs of an orator.'" whether or not the microscope will ever reveal such things to us, there is no doubt that the conditions suggested exist, and that back of every inefficient and awkward attempt at physical control lies a motor area with its cells undeveloped by use. no wonder that our processes of learning physical adjustment and control are slow, for they are a growth in the brain rather than a simple "learning how." the training of the nervous system consists finally, then, in the development and coördination of the neurones of which it is composed. we have seen that the sensory cells are to be developed by the sensory stimuli pouring in upon them, and the motor cells by the motor impulses which they send out to the muscles. the sensory and the motor fibers likewise, being an outgrowth of their respective cells, find their development in carrying the impulses which result in sensation and movement. thus it is seen that the neurone is, in its development as in its work, a unit. development of the association centers.--to this simpler type of sensory and motor development which we have been considering, we must add that which comes from the more complex mental processes, such as memory, thought, and imagination. for it is in connection with these that the association fibers are developed, and the brain areas so connected that they can work together as a unit. a simple illustration will enable us to see more clearly how the nervous mechanism acts to bring this about. suppose that i am walking along a country road deeply engaged in meditation, and that i come to a puddle of water in my pathway. i may turn aside and avoid the obstruction without my attention being called to it, and without interruption of my train of thought. the act has been automatic. in this case the nerve current has passed from the eye (_s_) over an afferent fiber to a sensory center (_s_) in the nervous system below the cortex; from there it has been forwarded to a motor center (_m_) in the same region, and on out over a motor fiber to the proper muscles (_m_), which are to execute the required act. the act having been completed, the sensory nerves connected with the muscles employed report the fact back that the work is done, thus completing the circuit. this event may be taken as an illustration of literally thousands of acts which we perform daily without the intervention of consciousness, and hence without involving the hemispheres. [illustration: fig. .--diagram illustrating the paths of association.] if, however, instead of avoiding the puddle unconsciously, i do so from consideration of the danger of wet feet and the disagreeableness of soiled shoes and the ridiculous appearance i shall make, then the current cannot take the short circuit, but must pass on up to the cortex. here it awakens consciousness to take notice of the obstruction, and calls forth the images which aid in directing the necessary movements. this simple illustration may be greatly complicated, substituting for it one of the more complex problems which are continually presenting themselves to us for solution, or the associated trains of thought that are constantly occupying our minds. but the truth of the illustration still holds. whether in the simple or the complex act, there is always a forward passing of the nerve current through the sensory and thought centers, and on out through the motor centers to the organs which are to be concerned in the motor response. the factors involved in a simple action.--thus it will be seen that in the simplest act which can be considered there are the following factors: ( ) the stimulus which acts on the end-organ; ( ) the ingoing current over an afferent nerve; ( ) the sensory or interpreting cells; ( ) the fibers connecting the sensory with a motor center; ( ) the motor cells; ( ) the efferent nerve to carry the direction for the movement outward to the muscle; ( ) the motor response; and, finally, ( ) the report back that the act has been performed. with this in mind it fairly bewilders one to think of the marvelous complexity of the work that is going on in our nervous mechanism every moment of our life, even without considering the higher thought processes at all. how, with these added, the resulting complexity all works out into beautiful harmony is indeed beyond comprehension. . education and the training of the nervous system fortunately, many of the best opportunities for sensory and motor training do not depend on schools or courses of study. the world is full of stimuli to our senses and to our social natures; and our common lives are made up of the responses we make to these stimuli,--the movements, acts and deeds by which we fit ourselves into our world of environment. undoubtedly the most rapid and vital progress we make in our development is accomplished in the years before we have reached the age to go to school. yet it is the business of education to see that we do not lack any essential opportunity, to make sure that necessary lines of stimuli or of motor training have not been omitted from our development. education to supply opportunities for stimulus and response.--the great problem of education is, on the physical side, it would seem, then, to provide for ourselves and those we seek to educate as rich an environment of sensory and social stimuli as possible; one whose impressions will be full of suggestions to response in motor activity and the higher thought processes; and then to give opportunity for thought and for expression in acts and deeds in the largest possible number of lines. and added to this must be frequent and clear sensory and motor recall, a living over again of the sights and sounds and odors and the motor activities we have once experienced. there must also be the opportunity for the forming of worthy plans and ideals. for in this way the brain centers which were concerned in the original sensation or thought or movement are again brought into exercise, and their development continued. through recall and imagination we are able not only greatly to multiply the effects of the immediate sensory and motor stimuli which come to us, but also to improve our power of thinking by getting a fund of material upon which the mind can draw. order of development in the nervous system.--nature has set the order in which the powers of the nervous system shall develop. and we must follow this order if we would obtain the best results. stated in technical terms, the order is _from fundamental to accessory_. this is to say that the nerve centers controlling the larger and more general movements of the body ripen first, and those governing the finer motor adjustments later. for example, the larger body muscles of the child which are concerned with sitting up come under control earlier than those connected with walking. the arm muscles develop control earlier than the finger muscles, and the head and neck muscles earlier than the eye muscles. so also the more general and less highly specialized powers of the mind ripen sooner than the more highly specialized. perception and observation precede powers of critical judgment and association. memory and imagination ripen earlier than reasoning and the logical ability. this all means that our educational system must be planned to follow the order of nature. children of the primary grades should not be required to write with fine pencils or pens which demand delicate finger adjustments, since the brain centers for these finer coördinations are not yet developed. young children should not be set at work necessitating difficult eye control, such as stitching through perforated cardboard, reading fine print and the like, as their eyes are not yet ready for such tasks. the more difficult analytical problems of arithmetic and relations of grammar should not be required of pupils at a time when the association areas of the brain are not yet ready for this type of thinking. for such methods violate the law of nature, and the child is sure to suffer the penalty. . importance of health and vigor of the nervous system parallel with opportunities for proper stimuli and response the nervous system must possess good _tonicity_, or vigor. this depends in large degree on general health and nutrition, with freedom from overfatigue. no favorableness of environment nor excellence of training can result in an efficient brain if the nerve energy has run low from depleted health, want of proper nourishment, or exhaustion. the influence of fatigue.--histologists find that the nuclei of nerve cells are shrunk as much as fifty per cent by extreme fatigue. reasonable fatigue followed by proper recuperation is not harmful, but even necessary if the best development is to be attained; but fatigue without proper nourishment and rest is fatal to all mental operations, and indeed finally to the nervous system itself, leaving it permanently in a condition of low tone, and incapable of rallying to strong effort. for rapid and complete recuperation the cells must have not only the best of nourishment but opportunity for rest as well. extreme and long-continued fatigue is hostile to the development and welfare of any nervous system, and especially to that of children. not only does overfatigue hinder growth, but it also results in the formation of certain _toxins_, or poisons, in the organism, which are particularly harmful to nervous tissue. it is these fatigue toxins that account for many of the nervous and mental disorders which accompany breakdowns from overwork. on the whole, the evil effects from mental overstrain are more to be feared than from physical overstrain. the effects of worry.--there is, perhaps, no greater foe to brain growth and efficiency than the nervous and worn-out condition which comes from loss of sleep or from worry. experiments in the psychological laboratories have shown that nerve cells shrivel up and lose their vitality under loss of sleep. let this go on for any considerable length of time, and the loss is irreparable; for the cells can never recuperate. this is especially true in the case of children or young people. many school boys and girls, indeed many college students, are making slow progress in their studies not because they are mentally slow or inefficient, not even chiefly because they lose time that should be put on their lessons, but because they are incapacitating their brains for good service through late hours and the consequent loss of sleep. add to this condition that of worry, which often accompanies it from the fact of failure in lessons, and a naturally good and well-organized nervous system is sure to fail. worry, from whatever cause, should be avoided as one would avoid poison, if we would bring ourselves to the highest degree of efficiency. not only does worry temporarily unfit the mind for its best work, but its evil results are permanent, since the mind is left with a poorly developed or undone nervous system through which to work, even after the cause for worry has been removed and the worry itself has ceased. not only should each individual seek to control the causes of worry in his own life, but the home and the school should force upon childhood as few causes for worry as may be. children's worry over fears of the dark, over sickness and death, over prospective but delayed punishment, over the thousand and one real or imaginary troubles of childhood, should be eliminated so far as possible. school examinations that prey on the peace of mind, threats of failure of promotion, all nagging and sarcasm, and whatever else may cause continued pain or worry to sensitive minds should be barred from our schoolroom methods and practice. the price we force the child to pay for results through their use is too great for them to be tolerated. we must seek a better way. the factors in good nutrition.--for the best nutrition there is necessity first of all plenty of nourishing and healthful food. science and experience have both disproved the supposition that students should be scantily fed. o'shea claims that many brain workers are far short of their highest grade of efficiency because of starving their brains from poor diet. and not only must the food be of the right quality, but the body must be in good health. little good to eat the best of food unless it is being properly digested and assimilated. and little good if all the rest is as it should be, and the right amount of oxidation does not go on in the brain so as to remove the worn-out cells and make place for new ones. this warns us that pure air and a strong circulation are indispensable to the best working of our brains. no doubt many students who find their work too hard for them might locate the trouble in their stomachs or their lungs or the food they eat, rather than in their minds. . problems for introspection and observation . estimate the mental progress made by the child during the first five years and compare with that made during the second five years of its life. to do this make a list, so far as you are able, of the acquisitions of each period. what do you conclude as to the importance of play and freedom in early education? why not continue this method instead of sending the child to school? . which has the better opportunity for sensory training, the city child or the country child? for social training? for motor development through play? it is said by specialists that country children are not as good players as city children. why should this be the case? . observe carefully some group of children for evidences of lack of sensory training (interest in sensory objects, skill in observation, etc.). for lack of motor training (failure in motor control, awkwardness, lack of skill in play, etc.). do you find that general mental ability seems to be correlated with sensory and motor ability, or not? . what sensory training can be had from ( ) geography, ( ) agriculture, ( ) arithmetic, ( ) drawing? what lines of motor training ought the school to afford, ( ) in general, ( ) for the hand, ( ) in the grace and poise of carriage or bearing, ( ) in any other line? make observation tests of these points in one or more school rooms and report the results. . describe what you think must be the type of mental life of helen keller. (read "the world i live in," by helen keller.) . study groups of children for signs of deficiency in brain power from lack of nutrition. from fatigue. from worry. from lack of sleep. chapter v habit habit is our "best friend or worst enemy." we are "walking bundles of habits." habit is the "fly-wheel of society," keeping men patient and docile in the hard or disagreeable lot which some must fill. habit is a "cable which we cannot break." so say the wise men. let me know your habits of life and you have revealed your moral standards and conduct. let me discover your intellectual habits, and i understand your type of mind and methods of thought. in short, our lives are largely a daily round of activities dictated by our habits in this line or that. most of our movements and acts are habitual; we think as we have formed the habit of thinking; we decide as we are in the habit of deciding; we sleep, or eat, or speak as we have grown into the habit of doing these things; we may even say our prayers or perform other religious exercises as matters of habit. but while habit is the veriest tyrant, yet its good offices far exceed the bad even in the most fruitless or depraved life. . the nature of habit many people when they speak or think of habit give the term a very narrow or limited meaning. they have in mind only certain moral or personal tendencies usually spoken of as one's "habits." but in order to understand habit in any thorough and complete way we must, as suggested by the preceding paragraph, broaden our concept to include every possible line of physical and mental activity. habit may be defined as _the tendency of the nervous system to repeat any act that has been performed once or many times_. the physical basis of habit.--habit is to be explained from the standpoint of its physical basis. habits are formed because the tissues of our brains are capable of being modified by use, and of so retaining the effects of this modification that the same act is easier of performance each succeeding time. this results in the old act being repeated instead of a new one being selected, and hence the old act is perpetuated. even dead and inert matter obeys the same principles in this regard as does living matter. says m. leon dumont: "everyone knows how a garment, having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion; a lock works better after having been used some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain roughness in the mechanism. the overcoming of this resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. it costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already. this saving of trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required. the sounds of a violin improve by use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibers of the wood at last contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. this is what gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged to great masters. water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes when it flows again the path traced for itself before. just so, the impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur under similar excitements from without, when they have been interrupted for a certain time."[ ] all living tissue plastic.--what is true of inanimate matter is doubly true of living tissue. the tissues of the human body can be molded into almost any form you choose if taken in time. a child may be placed on his feet at too early an age, and the bones of his legs form the habit of remaining bent. the flathead indian binds a board on the skull of his child, and its head forms the habit of remaining flat on the top. wrong bodily postures produce curvature of the spine, and pernicious modes of dress deform the bones of the chest. the muscles may be trained into the habit of keeping the shoulders straight or letting them droop; those of the back, to keep the body well up on the hips, or to let it sag; those of locomotion, to give us a light, springy step, or to allow a shuffling carriage; those of speech, to give us a clear-cut, accurate articulation, or a careless, halting one; and those of the face, to give us a cheerful cast of countenance, or a glum and morose expression. habit a modification of brain tissue.--but the nervous tissue is the most sensitive and easily molded of all bodily tissues. in fact, it is probable that the real _habit_ of our characteristic walk, gesture, or speech resides in the brain, rather than in the muscles which it controls. so delicate is the organization of the brain structure and so unstable its molecules, that even the perfume of the flower, which assails the nose of a child, the song of a bird, which strikes his ear, or the fleeting dream, which lingers but for a second in his sleep, has so modified his brain that it will never again be as if these things had not been experienced. every sensory current which runs in from the outside world; every motor current which runs out to command a muscle; every thought that we think, has so modified the nerve structure through which it acts, that a tendency remains for a like act to be repeated. our brain and nervous system is daily being molded into fixed habits of acting by our thoughts and deeds, and thus becomes the automatic register of all we do. the old chinese fairy story hits upon a fundamental and vital truth. these celestials tell their children that each child is accompanied by day and by night, every moment of his life, by an invisible fairy, who is provided with a pencil and tablet. it is the duty of this fairy to put down every deed of the child, both good and evil, in an indelible record which will one day rise as a witness against him. so it is in very truth with our brains. the wrong act may have been performed in secret, no living being may ever know that we performed it, and a merciful providence may forgive it; but the inexorable monitor of our deeds was all the time beside us writing the record, and the history of that act is inscribed forever in the tissues of our brain. it may be repented of bitterly in sackcloth and ashes and be discontinued, but its effects can never be quite effaced; they will remain with us a handicap till our dying day, and in some critical moment in a great emergency we shall be in danger of defeat from that long past and forgotten act. we must form habits.--we _must_, then, form habits. it is not at all in our power to say whether we will form habits or not; for, once started, they go on forming themselves by day and night, steadily and relentlessly. habit is, therefore, one of the great factors to be reckoned with in our lives, and the question becomes not, shall we form habits? but _what habits we shall form._ and we have the determining of this question largely in our own power, for habits do not just happen, nor do they come to us ready made. we ourselves make them from day to day through the acts we perform, and in so far as we have control over our acts, in that far we can determine our habits. . the place of habit in the economy of our lives habit is one of nature's methods of economizing time and effort, while at the same time securing greater skill and efficiency. this is easily seen when it is remembered that habit tends towards _automatic_ action; that is, towards action governed by the lower nerve centers and taking care of itself, so to speak, without the interference of consciousness. everyone has observed how much easier in the performance and more skillful in its execution is the act, be it playing a piano, painting a picture, or driving a nail, when the movements involved have ceased to be consciously directed and become automatic. habit increases skill and efficiency.--practically all increase in skill, whether physical or mental, depends on our ability to form habits. habit holds fast to the skill already attained while practice or intelligence makes ready for the next step in advance. could we not form habits we should improve but little in our way of doing things, no matter how many times we did them over. we should now be obliged to go through the same bungling process of dressing ourselves as when we first learned it as children. our writing would proceed as awkwardly in the high school as the primary, our eating as adults would be as messy and wide of the mark as when we were infants, and we should miss in a thousand ways the motor skill that now seems so easy and natural. all highly skilled occupations, and those demanding great manual dexterity, likewise depend on our habit-forming power for the accurate and automatic movements required. so with mental skill. a great portion of the fundamentals of our education must be made automatic--must become matters of habit. we set out to learn the symbols of speech. we hear words and see them on the printed page; associated with these words are meanings, or ideas. habit binds the word and the idea together, so that to think of the one is to call up the other--and language is learned. we must learn numbers, so we practice the "combinations," and with × , or × we associate . habit secures this association in our minds, and lo! we soon know our "tables." and so on throughout the whole range of our learning. we learn certain symbols, or facts, or processes, and habit takes hold and renders these automatic so that we can use them freely, easily, and with skill, leaving our thought free for matters that cannot be made automatic. one of our greatest dangers is that we shall not make sufficiently automatic, enough of the necessary foundation material of education. failing in this, we shall at best be but blunderers intellectually, handicapped because we failed to make proper use of habit in our development. for, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, there is a limit to our mental energy and also to the number of objects to which we are able to attend. it is only when attention has been freed from the many things that can always be thought or done _in the same way_, that the mind can devote itself to the real problems that require judgment, imagination or reasoning. the writer whose spelling and punctuation do not take care of themselves will hardly make a success of writing. the mathematician whose number combinations, processes and formulæ are not automatic in his mind can never hope to make progress in mathematical thinking. the speaker who, while speaking, has to think of his gestures, his voice or his enunciation will never sway audiences by his logic or his eloquence. habit saves effort and fatigue.--we do most easily and with least fatigue that which we are accustomed to do. it is the new act or the strange task that tires us. the horse that is used to the farm wearies if put on the road, while the roadster tires easily when hitched to the plow. the experienced penman works all day at his desk without undue fatigue, while the man more accustomed to the pick and the shovel than to the pen, is exhausted by a half hour's writing at a letter. those who follow a sedentary and inactive occupation do not tire by much sitting, while children or others used to freedom and action may find it a wearisome task merely to remain still for an hour or two. not only would the skill and speed demanded by modern industry be impossible without the aid of habit, but without its help none could stand the fatigue and strain. the new workman placed at a high-speed machine is ready to fall from weariness at the end of his first day. but little by little he learns to omit the unnecessary movements, the necessary movements become easier and more automatic through habit, and he finds the work easier. we may conclude, then, that not only do consciously directed movements show less skill than the same movements made automatic by habit, but they also require more effort and produce greater fatigue. habit economizes moral effort.--to have to decide each time the question comes up whether we will attend to this lecture or sermon or lesson; whether we will persevere and go through this piece of disagreeable work which we have begun; whether we will go to the trouble of being courteous and kind to this or that poor or unlovely or dirty fellow-mortal; whether we will take this road because it looks easy, or that one because we know it to be the one we ought to take; whether we will be strictly fair and honest when we might just as well be the opposite; whether we will resist the temptation which dares us; whether we will do this duty, hard though it is, which confronts us--to have to decide each of these questions every time it presents itself is to put too large a proportion of our thought and energy on things which should take care of themselves. for all these things should early become so nearly habitual that they can be settled with the very minimum of expenditure of energy when they arise. the habit of attention.--it is a noble thing to be able to attend by sheer force of will when the interest lags, or some more attractive thing appears, but far better is it so to have formed the habit of attention that we naturally fall into that attitude when this is the desirable thing. to understand what i mean, you only have to look over a class or an audience and note the different ways which people have of finally settling down to listening. some with an attitude which says, "now here i am, ready to listen to you if you will interest me, otherwise not." others with a manner which says, "i did not really come here expecting to listen, and you will have a large task if you interest me; i never listen unless i am compelled to, and the responsibility rests on you." others plainly say, "i really mean to listen, but i have hard work to control my thoughts, and if i wander i shall not blame you altogether; it is just my way." and still others say, "when i am expected to listen, i always listen whether there is anything much to listen to or not. i have formed that habit, and so have no quarrel with myself about it. you can depend on me to be attentive, for i cannot afford to weaken my habit of attention whether you do well or not." every speaker will clasp these last listeners to his heart and feed them on the choicest thoughts of his soul; they are the ones to whom he speaks and to whom his address will appeal. habit enables us to meet the disagreeable.--to be able to persevere in the face of difficulties and hardships and carry through the disagreeable thing in spite of the protests of our natures against the sacrifice which it requires, is a creditable thing; but it is more creditable to have so formed the habit of perseverance that the disagreeable duty shall be done without a struggle, or protest, or question. horace mann testifies of himself that whatever success he was able to attain was made possible through the early habit which he formed of never stopping to inquire whether he _liked_ to do a thing which needed doing, but of doing everything equally well and without question, both the pleasant and the unpleasant. the youth who can fight out a moral battle and win against the allurements of some attractive temptation is worthy the highest honor and praise; but so long as he has to fight the same battle over and over again, he is on dangerous ground morally. for good morals must finally become habits, so ingrained in us that the right decision comes largely without effort and without struggle. otherwise the strain is too great, and defeat will occasionally come; and defeat means weakness and at last disaster, after the spirit has tired of the constant conflict. and so on in a hundred lines. good habits are more to be coveted than individual victories in special cases, much as these are to be desired. for good habits mean victories all along the line. habit the foundation of personality.--the biologist tells us that it is the _constant_ and not the _occasional_ in the environment that impresses itself on an organism. so also it is the _habitual_ in our lives that builds itself into our character and personality. in a very real sense we _are_ what we are in the habit of doing and thinking. without habit, personality could not exist; for we could never do a thing twice alike, and hence would be a new person each succeeding moment. the acts which give us our own peculiar individuality are our habitual acts--the little things that do themselves moment by moment without care or attention, and are the truest and best expression of our real selves. probably no one of us could be very sure which arm he puts into the sleeve, or which foot he puts into the shoe, first; and yet each of us certainly formed the habit long ago of doing these things in a certain way. we might not be able to describe just how we hold knife and fork and spoon, and yet each has his own characteristic and habitual way of handling them. we sit down and get up in some characteristic way, and the very poise of our heads and attitudes of our bodies are the result of habit. we get sleepy and wake up, become hungry and thirsty at certain hours, through force of habit. we form the habit of liking a certain chair, or nook, or corner, or path, or desk, and then seek this to the exclusion of all others. we habitually use a particular pitch of voice and type of enunciation in speaking, and this becomes one of our characteristic marks; or we form the habit of using barbarisms or solecisms of language in youth, and these cling to us and become an inseparable part of us later in life. on the mental side the case is no different. our thinking is as characteristic as our physical acts. we may form the habit of thinking things out logically, or of jumping to conclusions; of thinking critically and independently, or of taking things unquestioningly on the authority of others. we may form the habit of carefully reading good, sensible books, or of skimming sentimental and trashy ones; of choosing elevating, ennobling companions, or the opposite; of being a good conversationalist and doing our part in a social group, or of being a drag on the conversation, and needing to be "entertained." we may form the habit of observing the things about us and enjoying the beautiful in our environment, or of failing to observe or to enjoy. we may form the habit of obeying the voice of conscience or of weakly yielding to temptation without a struggle; of taking a reverent attitude of prayer in our devotions, or of merely saying our prayers. habit saves worry and rebellion.--habit has been called the "balance wheel" of society. this is because men readily become habituated to the hard, the disagreeable, or the inevitable, and cease to battle against it. a lot that at first seems unendurable after a time causes less revolt. a sorrow that seems too poignant to be borne in the course of time loses some of its sharpness. oppression or injustice that arouses the fiercest resentment and hate may finally come to be accepted with resignation. habit helps us learn that "what cannot be cured must be endured." . the tyranny of habit even good habits need to be modified.--but even in good habits there is danger. habit is the opposite of attention. habit relieves attention of unnecessary strain. every habitual act was at one time, either in the history of the race or of the individual, a voluntary act; that is, it was performed under active attention. as the habit grew, attention was gradually rendered unnecessary, until finally it dropped entirely out. and herein lies the danger. habit once formed has no way of being modified unless in some way attention is called to it, for a habit left to itself becomes more and more firmly fixed. the rut grows deeper. in very few, if any, of our actions can we afford to have this the case. our habits need to be progressive, they need to grow, to be modified, to be improved. otherwise they will become an incrusting shell, fixed and unyielding, which will limit our growth. it is necessary, then, to keep our habitual acts under some surveillance of attention, to pass them in review for inspection every now and then, that we may discover possible modifications which will make them more serviceable. we need to be inventive, constantly to find out better ways of doing things. habit takes care of our standing, walking, sitting; but how many of us could not improve his poise and carriage if he would? our speech has become largely automatic, but no doubt all of us might remove faults of enunciation, pronunciation or stress from our speaking. so also we might better our habits of study and thinking, our methods of memorizing, or our manner of attending. the tendency of "ruts."--but this will require something of heroism. for to follow the well-beaten path of custom is easy and pleasant, while to break out of the rut of habit and start a new line of action is difficult and disturbing. most people prefer to keep doing things as they always have done them, to continue reading and thinking and believing as they have long been in the habit of doing, not so much because they feel that their way is best, but because it is easier than to change. hence the great mass of us settle down on the plane of mediocrity, and become "old fogy." we learn to do things passably well, cease to think about improving our ways of doing them, and so fall into a rut. only the few go on. they make use of habit as the rest do, but they also continue to attend at critical points of action, and so make habit an _ally_ in place of accepting it as a _tyrant_. . habit-forming a part of education it follows from the importance of habit in our lives that no small part of education should be concerned with the development of serviceable habits. says james, "could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar." any youth who is forming a large number of useful habits is receiving no mean education, no matter if his knowledge of books may be limited; on the other hand, no one who is forming a large number of bad habits is being well educated, no matter how brilliant his knowledge may be. youth the time for habit-forming.--childhood and youth is the great time for habit-forming. then the brain is plastic and easily molded, and it retains its impressions more indelibly; later it is hard to modify, and the impressions made are less permanent. it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks; nor would he remember them if you could teach them to him, nor be able to perform them well even if he could remember them. the young child will, within the first few weeks of its life, form habits of sleeping and feeding. it may in a few days be led into the habit of sleeping in the dark, or requiring a light; of going to sleep lying quietly, or of insisting upon being rocked; of getting hungry by the clock, or of wanting its food at all times when it finds nothing else to do, and so on. it is wholly outside the power of the mother or the nurse to determine whether the child shall form habits, but largely within their power to say what habits shall be formed, since they control his acts. as the child grows older, the range of his habits increases; and by the time he has reached his middle teens, the greater number of his personal habits are formed. it is very doubtful whether a boy who has not formed habits of punctuality before the age of fifteen will ever be entirely trustworthy in matters requiring precision in this line. the girl who has not, before this age, formed habits of neatness and order will hardly make a tidy housekeeper later in her life. those who in youth have no opportunity to habituate themselves to the usages of society may study books on etiquette and employ private instructors in the art of polite behavior all they please later in life, but they will never cease to be awkward and ill at ease. none are at a greater disadvantage than the suddenly-grown-rich who attempt late in life to surround themselves with articles of art and luxury, though their habits were all formed amid barrenness and want during their earlier years. the habit of achievement.--what youth does not dream of being great, or noble, or a celebrated scholar! and how few there are who finally achieve their ideals! where does the cause of failure lie? surely not in the lack of high ideals. multitudes of young people have "excelsior!" as their motto, and yet never get started up the mountain slope, let alone toiling on to its top. they have put in hours dreaming of the glory farther up, _and have never begun to climb_. the difficulty comes in not realizing that the only way to become what we wish or dream that we may become is _to form the habit of being that thing_. to form the habit of achievement, of effort, of self-sacrifice, if need be. to form the habit of deeds along with dreams; to form the habit of _doing_. who of us has not at this moment lying in wait for his convenience in the dim future a number of things which he means to do just as soon as this term of school is finished, or this job of work is completed, or when he is not so busy as now? and how seldom does he ever get at these things at all! darwin tells that in his youth he loved poetry, art, and music, but was so busy with his scientific work that he could ill spare the time to indulge these tastes. so he promised himself that he would devote his time to scientific work and make his mark in this. then he would have time for the things that he loved, and would cultivate his taste for the fine arts. he made his mark in the field of science, and then turned again to poetry, to music, to art. but alas! they were all dead and dry bones to him, without life or interest. he had passed the time when he could ever form the taste for them. he had formed his habits in another direction, and now it was forever too late to form new habits. his own conclusion is, that if he had his life to live over again, he would each week listen to some musical concert and visit some art gallery, and that each day he would read some poetry, and thereby keep alive and active the love for them. so every school and home should be a species of habit-factory--a place where children develop habits of neatness, punctuality, obedience, politeness, dependability and the other graces of character. . rules for habit-forming james's three maxims for habit-forming.--on the forming of new habits and the leaving off of old ones, i know of no better statement than that of james, based on bain's chapter on "moral habits." i quote this statement at some length: "in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reënforce right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, develop your resolution with every aid you know. this will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. "the second maxim is: _never suffer an exception to occur until the new habit is securely rooted in your life._ each lapse is like letting fall a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. _continuity_ of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right.... the need of securing success nerves one to future vigor. "a third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain._ it is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing _motor effects_, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain."[ ] the preponderance of good habits over bad.--and finally, let no one be disturbed or afraid because in a little time you become a "walking bundle of habits." for in so far as your good actions predominate over your bad ones, that much will your good habits outweigh your bad habits. silently, moment by moment, efficiency is growing out of all worthy acts well done. every bit of heroic self-sacrifice, every battle fought and won, every good deed performed, is being irradicably credited to you in your nervous system, and will finally add its mite toward achieving the success of your ambitions. . problems in observation and introspection . select some act which you have recently begun to perform and watch it grow more and more habitual. notice carefully for a week and see whether you do not discover some habits which you did not know you had. make a catalog of your bad habits; of the most important of your good ones. . set out to form some new habits which you desire to possess; also to break some undesirable habit, watching carefully what takes place in both cases, and how long it requires. . try the following experiment and relate the results to the matter of automatic control brought about by habit: draw a star on a sheet of cardboard. place this on a table before you, with a hand-mirror so arranged that you can see the star in the mirror. now trace the outline of the star with a pencil, looking steadily in the mirror to guide your hand. do not lift the pencil from the paper from the time you start until you finish. have others try this experiment. . study some group of pupils for their habits ( ) of attention, ( ) of speech, ( ) of standing, sitting, and walking, ( ) of study. report on your observations and suggest methods of curing bad habits observed. . make a list of "mannerisms" you have observed, and suggest how they may be cured. . make a list of from ten to twenty habits which you think the school and its work should especially cultivate. what ones of these are the schools you know least successful in cultivating? where does the trouble lie? chapter vi sensation we can best understand the problems of sensation and perception if we first think of the existence of two great worlds--the world of physical nature without and the world of mind within. on the one hand is our material environment, the things we see and hear and touch and taste and handle; and on the other hand our consciousness, the means by which we come to know this outer world and adjust ourselves to it. these two worlds seem in a sense to belong to and require each other. for what would be the meaning or use of the physical world with no mind to know or use it; and what would be the use of a mind with nothing to be known or thought about? . how we come to know the external world there is a marvel about our coming to know the external world which we shall never be able fully to understand. we have come by this knowledge so gradually and unconsciously that it now appears to us as commonplace, and we take for granted many things that it would puzzle us to explain. knowledge through the senses.--for example, we say, "of course i see yonder green tree: it is about ten rods distant." but why "of course"? why should objects at a distance from us and with no evident connection between us and them be known to us at all merely by turning our eyes in their direction when there is light? why not rather say with the blind son of professor puiseaux of paris, who, when asked if he would like to be restored to sight, answered: "if it were not for curiosity i would rather have long arms. it seems to me that my hands would teach me better what is passing in the moon than your eyes or telescopes." we listen and then say, "yes, that is a certain bell ringing in the neighboring village," as if this were the most simple thing in the world. but why should one piece of metal striking against another a mile or two away make us aware that there is a bell there at all, let alone that it is a certain bell whose tone we recognize? or we pass our fingers over a piece of cloth and decide, "that is silk." but why, merely by placing our skin in contact with a bit of material, should we be able to know its quality, much less that it is cloth and that its threads were originally spun by an insect? or we take a sip of liquid and say, "this milk is sour." but why should we be able by taking the liquid into the mouth and bringing it into contact with the mucous membrane to tell that it is milk, and that it possesses the quality which we call _sour_? or, once more, we get a whiff of air through the open window in the springtime and say, "there is a lilac bush in bloom on the lawn." yet why, from inhaling air containing particles of lilac, should we be able to know that there is anything outside, much less that it is a flower and of a particular variety which we call lilac? or, finally, we hold a heated flatiron up near the cheek and say, "this is too hot! it will burn the cloth." but why by holding this object a foot away from the face do we know that it is there, let alone knowing its temperature? the unity of sensory experience.--further, our senses come through experience to have the power of fusing, or combining their knowledge, so to speak, by which each expresses its knowledge in terms of the others. thus we take a glance out of the window and say that the day looks cold, although we well know that we cannot see _cold_. or we say that the melon sounds green, or the bell sounds cracked, although a _crack_ or _greenness_ cannot be heard. or we say that the box feels empty, although _emptiness_ cannot be felt. we have come to associate cold, originally experienced with days which look like the one we now see, with this particular appearance, and so we say we see the cold; sounds like the one coming from the bell we have come to associate with cracked bells, and that coming from the melon with green melons, until we say unhesitatingly that the bell sounds cracked and the melon sounds green. and so with the various senses. each gleans from the world its own particular bit of knowledge, but all are finally in a partnership and what is each one's knowledge belongs to every other one in so far as the other can use it. the sensory processes to be explained.--the explanation of the ultimate nature of knowledge, and how we reach it through contact with our material environment, we will leave to the philosophers. and battles enough they have over the question, and still others they will have before the matter is settled. the easier and more important problem for us is to describe the _processes_ by which the mind comes to know its environment, and to see how it uses this knowledge in thinking. this much we shall be able to do, for it is often possible to describe a process and discover its laws even when we cannot fully explain its nature and origin. we know the process of digestion and assimilation, and the laws which govern them, although we do not understand the ultimate nature and origin of _life_ which makes these possible. the qualities of objects exist in the mind.--yet even in the relatively simple description which we have proposed many puzzles confront us, and one of them appears at the very outset. this is that the qualities which we usually ascribe to objects really exist in our own minds and not in the objects at all. take, for instance, the common qualities of light and color. the physicist tells us that what we see as light is occasioned by an incredibly rapid beating of ether waves on the retina of the eye. all space is filled with this ether; and when it is light--that is, when some object like the sun or other light-giving body is present--the ether is set in motion by the vibrating molecules of the body which is the source of light, its waves strike the retina, a current is produced and carried to the brain, and we see light. this means, then, that space, the medium in which we see objects, is not filled with light (the sensation), but with very rapid waves of ether, and that the light which we see really occurs in our own minds as the mental response to the physical stimulus of ether waves. likewise with color. color is produced by ether waves of different lengths and degrees of rapidity. thus ether waves at the rate of billions a second give us the sensation of red; of billions a second, orange; of billions a second, yellow; of billions a second, green; of billions a second, blue; of billions a second, indigo; of billions a second, violet. what exists outside of us, then, is these ether waves of different rates, and not the colors (as sensations) themselves. the beautiful yellow and crimson of a sunset, the variegated colors of a landscape, the delicate pink in the cheek of a child, the blush of a rose, the shimmering green of the lake--these reside not in the objects themselves, but in the consciousness of the one who sees them. the objects possess but the quality of reflecting back to the eye ether waves of the particular rate corresponding to the color which we ascribe to them. thus "red" objects, and no others, reflect back ether waves of a rate of billions a second: "white" objects reflect all rates; "black" objects reflect none. the case is no different with regard to sound. when we speak of a sound coming from a bell, what we really mean is that the vibrations of the bell have set up waves in the air between it and our ear, which have produced corresponding vibrations in the ear; that a nerve current was thereby produced; and that a sound was heard. but the sound (i.e., sensation) is a mental thing, and exists only in our own consciousness. what passed between the sounding object and ourselves was waves in the intervening air, ready to be translated through the machinery of nerves and brain into the beautiful tones and melodies and harmonies of the mind. and so with all other sensations. the three sets of factors.--what exists outside of us therefore is a _stimulus_, some form of physical energy, of a kind suitable to excite to activity a certain end-organ of taste, or touch, or smell, or sight, or hearing; what exists within us is the _nervous machinery_ capable of converting this stimulus into a nerve current which shall produce an activity in the cortex of the brain; what results is the _mental object_ which we call a _sensation_ of taste, smell, touch, sight, or hearing. . the nature of sensation sensation gives us our world of qualities.--in actual experience sensations are never known apart from the objects to which they belong. this is to say that when we see _yellow_ or _red_ it is always in connection with some surface, or object; when we taste _sour_, this quality belongs to some substance, and so on with all the senses. yet by sensation we mean only _the simple qualities of objects known in consciousness as the result of appropriate stimuli applied to end-organs_. we shall later see how by perception these qualities fuse or combine to form objects, but in the present chapter we shall be concerned with the qualities only. sensations are, then, the simplest and most elementary knowledge we may get from the physical world,--the red, the blue, the bitter, the cold, the fragrant, and whatever other qualities may belong to the external world. we shall not for the present be concerned with the objects or sources from which the qualities may come. to quote james on the meaning of sensation: "all we can say on this point is that _what we mean by sensations are first things in the way of consciousness_. they are the _immediate_ results upon consciousness of nerve currents as they enter the brain, and before they have awakened any suggestions or associations with past experience. but it is obvious that _such immediate sensations can be realized only in the earliest days of life_." the attributes of sensation.--sensations differ from each other in at least four respects; namely, _quality_, _intensity_, _extensity_, and _duration_. it is a difference in _quality_ that makes us say, "this paper is red, and that, blue; this liquid is sweet, and that, sour." differences in quality are therefore fundamental differences in _kind_. besides the quality-differences that exist within the same general field, as of taste or vision, it is evident that there is a still more fundamental difference existing between the various fields. one can, for example, compare red with blue or sweet with sour, and tell which quality he prefers. but let him try to compare red with sweet, or blue with sour, and the quality-difference is so profound that there seems to be no basis for comparison. differences in _intensity_ of sensation are familiar to every person who prefers two lumps of sugar rather than one lump in his coffee; the sweet is of the same quality in either case, but differs in intensity. in every field of sensation, the intensity may proceed from the smallest amount to the greatest amount discernible. in general, the intensity of the sensation depends on the intensity of the stimulus, though the condition of the sense-organ as regards fatigue or adaptation to the stimulus has its effect. it is obvious that a stimulus may be too weak to produce any sensation; as, for example, a few grains of sugar in a cup of coffee or a few drops of lemon in a quart of water could not be detected. it is also true that the intensity of the stimulus may be so great that an increase in intensity produces no effect on the sensation; as, for example, the addition of sugar to a solution of saccharine would not noticeably increase its sweetness. the lowest and highest intensity points of sensation are called the lower and upper _limen_, or threshold, respectively. by _extensity_ is meant the space-differences of sensations. the touch of the point of a toothpick on the skin has a different space quality from the touch of the flat end of a pencil. low tones seem to have more volume than high tones. some pains feel sharp and others dull and diffuse. the warmth felt from spreading the palms of the hands out to the fire has a "bigness" not felt from heating one solitary finger. the extensity of a sensation depends on the number of nerve endings stimulated. the _duration_ of a sensation refers to the time it lasts. this must not be confused with the duration of the stimulus, which may be either longer or shorter than the duration of the sensation. every sensation must exist for some space of time, long or short, or it would have no part in consciousness. . sensory qualities and their end-organs all are familiar with the "five senses" of our elementary physiologies, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. a more complete study of sensation reveals nearly three times this number, however. this is to say that the body is equipped with more than a dozen different kinds of end-organs, each prepared to receive its own particular type of stimulus. it must also be understood that some of the end-organs yield more than one sense. the eye, for example, gives not only visual but muscular sensations; the ear not only auditory, but tactual; the tongue not only gustatory, but tactual and cold and warmth sensations. sight.--vision is a _distance_ sense; we can see afar off. the stimulus is _chemical_ in its action; this means that the ether waves, on striking the retina, cause a chemical change which sets up the nerve current responsible for the sensation. the eye, whose general structure is sufficiently described in all standard physiologies, consists of a visual apparatus designed to bring the images of objects to a clear focus on the retina at the _fovea_, or area of clearest vision, near the point of entrance of the optic nerve. the sensation of sight coming from this retinal image unaided by other sensations gives us but two qualities, _light and color_. the eye can distinguish many different grades of light from purest white on through the various grays to densest black. the range is greater still in color. we speak of the seven colors of the spectrum, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. but this is not a very serviceable classification, since the average eye can distinguish about , color effects. it is also somewhat bewildering to find that all these colors seem to be produced from the four fundamental hues, red, green, yellow, and blue, plus the various tints. these four, combined in varying proportions and with different degrees of light (i.e., different shades of gray), yield all the color effects known to the human eye. herschel estimates that the workers on the mosaics at rome must have distinguished , different color tones. the _hue_ of a color refers to its fundamental quality, as red or yellow; the _chroma_, to its saturation, or the strength of the color; and the _tint,_ to the amount of brightness (i.e., white) it contains. hearing.--hearing is also a distance sense. the action of its stimulus is mechanical, which is to say that the vibrations produced in the air by the sounding body are finally transmitted by the mechanism of the middle ear to the inner ear. here the impulse is conveyed through the liquid of the internal ear to the nerve endings as so many tiny blows, which produce the nerve current carried to the brain by the auditory nerve. the sensation of hearing, like that of sight, gives us two qualities: namely, _tones_ with their accompanying pitch and timbre, and _noises_. tones, or musical sounds, are produced by isochronous or equal-timed vibrations; thus _c_ of the first octave is produced by vibrations a second, and if this tone is prolonged the vibration rate will continue uniformly the same. noises, on the other hand, are produced by vibrations which have no uniformity of vibration rate. the ear's sensibility to pitch extends over about seven octaves. the seven-octave piano goes down to - / vibrations and reaches up to , vibrations. notes of nearly , vibrations can be heard by an average ear, however, though these are too painfully shrill to be musical. taking into account this upper limit, the range of the ear is about eleven octaves. the ear, having given us _loudness_ of tones, which depends on the amplitude of the vibrations, _pitch_, which depends on the rapidity of the vibrations, and _timbre_, or _quality_, which depends on the complexity of the vibrations, has no further qualities of sound to reveal. taste.--the sense of taste is located chiefly in the tongue, over the surface of which are scattered many minute _taste-bulbs_. these can be seen as small red specks, most plentifully distributed along the edges and at the tip of the tongue. the substance tasted must be in _solution_, and come in contact with the nerve endings. the action of the stimulus is _chemical_. the sense of taste recognizes the four qualities of _sour_, _sweet_, _salt_, and _bitter_. many of the qualities which we improperly call tastes are in reality a complex of taste, smell, touch, and temperature. smell contributes so largely to the sense of taste that many articles of food become "tasteless" when we have a catarrh, and many nauseating doses of medicine can be taken without discomfort if the nose is held. probably none of us, if we are careful to exclude all odors by plugging the nostrils with cotton, can by taste distinguish between scraped apple, potato, turnip, or beet, or can tell hot milk from tea or coffee of the same temperature. smell.--in the upper part of the nasal cavity lies a small brownish patch of mucous membrane. it is here that the olfactory nerve endings are located. the substance smelled must be volatile, that is, must exist in gaseous form, and come in direct contact with the nerve endings. chemical action results in a nerve current. the sensations of smell have not been classified so well as those of taste, and we have no distinct names for them. neither do we know how many olfactory qualities the sense of smell is capable of revealing. the only definite classification of smell qualities is that based on their pleasantness or the opposite. we also borrow a few terms and speak of _sweet_ or _fragrant_ odors and _fresh_ or _close_ smells. there is some evidence when we observe animals, or even primitive men, that the human race has been evolving greater sensibility to certain odors, while at the same time there has been a loss of keenness of what we call scent. various sensations from the skin.--the skin, besides being a protective and excretory organ, affords a lodging-place for the end-organs giving us our sense of pressure, pain, cold, warmth, tickle, and itch. _pressure_ seems to have for its end-organ the _hair-bulbs_ of the skin; on hairless regions small bulbs called the _corpuscles of meissner_ serve this purpose. _pain_ is thought to be mediated by free nerve endings. _cold_ depends on end-organs called the _bulbs of krause_; and _warmth_ on the _ruffinian corpuscles_. cutaneous or skin sensation may arise from either _mechanical_ stimulation, such as pressure, a blow, or tickling, from _thermal_ stimulation from hot or cold objects, from _electrical_ stimulation, or from the action of certain _chemicals_, such as acids and the like. stimulated mechanically, the skin gives us but two sensation qualities, _pressure_ and _pain_. many of the qualities which we commonly ascribe to the skin sensations are really a complex of cutaneous and muscular sensations. _contact_ is light pressure. _hardness_ and _softness_ depend on the intensity of the pressure. _roughness_ and _smoothness_ arise from interrupted and continuous pressure, respectively, and require movement over the rough or smooth surface. _touch_ depends on pressure accompanied by the muscular sensations involved in the movements connected with the act. pain is clearly a different sensation from pressure; but any of the cutaneous or muscular sensations may, by excessive stimulation, be made to pass over into pain. all parts of the skin are sensitive to pressure and pain; but certain parts, like the finger tips, and the tip of the tongue, are more highly sensitive than others. the skin varies also in its sensitivity to _heat_ and _cold_. if we take a hot or a very cold pencil point and pass it rather lightly and slowly over the skin, it is easy to discover certain spots from which a sensation of warmth or of cold flashes out. in this way it is possible to locate the end-organs of temperature very accurately. [illustration: fig. .--diagram showing distribution of hot and cold spots on the back of the hand. c, cold spots; h, hot spots.] the kinÆsthetic senses.--the muscles, tendons, and joints also give rise to perfectly definite sensations, but they have not been named as have the sensations from most of the other end-organs. _weight_ is the most clearly marked of these sensations. it is through the sensations connected with movements of muscles, tendons, and joints that we come to judge _form_, _size_, and _distance_. the organic senses.--finally, to the sensations mentioned so far must be added those which come from the internal organs of the body. from the alimentary canal we get the sensations of _hunger_, _thirst_, and _nausea_; from the heart, lungs, and organs of sex come numerous well-defined but unnamed sensations which play an important part in making up the feeling-tone of our daily lives. thus we see that the senses may be looked upon as the sentries of the body, standing at the outposts where nature and ourselves meet. they discover the qualities of the various objects with which we come in contact and hand them over to the mind in the form of sensations. and these sensations are the raw material out of which we begin to construct our material environment. only as we are equipped with good organs of sense, especially good eyes and ears, therefore, are we able to enter fully into the wonderful world about us and receive the stimuli necessary to our thought and action. . problems in observation and introspection . observe a schoolroom of children at work with the aim of discovering any that show defects of vision or hearing. what are the symptoms? what is the effect of inability to hear or see well upon interest and attention? . talk with your teacher about testing the eyes and ears of the children of some school. the simpler tests for vision and hearing are easily applied, and the expense for material almost nothing. what tests should be used? does your school have the test card for vision? . use a rotator or color tops for mixing discs of white and black to produce different shades of gray. fix in mind the gray made of half white and half black; three-fourths white and one-fourth black; one-fourth-white and three-fourths black. . in the same way mix the two complementaries yellow and blue to produce a gray; mix red and green in the same way. try various combinations of the four fundamental colors, and discover how different colors are produced. seek for these same colors in nature--sky, leaves, flowers, etc. . take a large wire nail and push it through a cork so that it can be handled without touching the metal with the fingers. now cool it in ice or very cold water, then dry it and move the point slowly across the back of the hand. do you feel occasional thrills of cold as the point passes over a bulb of krause? heat the nail with a match flame or over a lamp, and perform the same experiment. do you feel the thrills of heat from the corpuscles of ruffini? . try stopping the nostrils with cotton and having someone give you scraped apple, potato, onion, etc., and see whether, by taste alone, you can distinguish the difference. why cannot sulphur be tasted? chapter vii perception no young child at first sees objects as we see them, or hears sounds as we hear them. this power, the power of perception, is a gradual development. it grows day by day out of the learner's experience in his world of sights and sounds, and whatever other fields his senses respond to. . the function of perception need of knowing the material world.--it is the business of perception to give us knowledge of our world of material _objects_ and their relations in _space_ and _time_. the material world which we enter through the gateways of the senses is more marvelous by far than any fairy world created by the fancy of story-tellers; for it contains the elements of all they have conceived and much more besides. it is more marvelous than any structure planned and executed by the mind of man; for all the wonders and beauties of the coliseum or of st. peter's existed in nature before they were discovered by the architect and thrown together in those magnificent structures. the material advancement of civilization has been but the discovery of the objects, forces, and laws of nature, and their use in inventions serviceable to men. and these forces and laws of nature were discovered only as they were made manifest through objects in the material world. the problem lying before each individual who would enter fully into this rich world of environment, then, is to discover at first hand just as large a part of the material world about him as possible. in the most humble environment of the most uneventful life is to be found the material for discoveries and inventions yet undreamed of. lying in the shade of an apple tree under the open sky, newton read from a falling apple the fundamental principles of the law of gravitation which has revolutionized science; sitting at a humble tea table watt watched the gurgling of the steam escaping from the kettle, and evolved the steam engine therefrom; with his simple kite, franklin drew down the lightning from the clouds, and started the science of electricity; through studying a ball, the ancient scholars conceived the earth to be a sphere, and columbus discovered america. the problem which confronts the child.--well it is that the child, starting his life's journey, cannot see the magnitude of the task before him. cast amid a world of objects of whose very existence he is ignorant, and whose meaning and uses have to be learned by slow and often painful experience, he proceeds step by step through the senses in his discovery of the objects about him. yet, considered again, we ourselves are after all but a step in advance of the child. though we are somewhat more familiar with the use of our senses than he, and know a few more objects about us, yet the knowledge of the wisest of us is at best pitifully meager compared with the richness of nature. so impossible is it for us to know all our material environment, that men have taken to becoming specialists. one man will spend his life in the study of a certain variety of plants, while there are hundreds of thousands of varieties all about him; another will study a particular kind of animal life, perhaps too minute to be seen with the naked eye, while the world is teeming with animal forms which he has not time in his short day of life to stop to examine; another will study the land forms and read the earth's history from the rocks and geological strata, but here again nature's volume is so large that he has time to read but a small fraction of the whole. another studies the human body and learns to read from its expressions the signs of health and sickness, and to prescribe remedies for its ills; but in this field also he has found it necessary to divide the work, and so we have specialists for almost every organ of the body. . the nature of perception how a percept is formed.--how, then, do we proceed to the discovery of this world of objects? let us watch the child and learn the secret from him. give the babe a ball, and he applies every sense to it to discover its qualities. he stares at it, he takes it in his hands and turns it over and around, he lifts it, he strokes it, he punches it and jabs it, he puts it to his mouth and bites it, he drops it, he throws it and creeps after it. he leaves no stone unturned to find out what that thing really is. by means of the _qualities_ which come to him through the avenues of sense, he constructs the _object_. and not only does he come to know the ball as a material object, but he comes to know also its uses. he is forming his own best definition of a ball in terms of the sensations which he gets from it and the uses to which he puts it, and all this even before he can name it or is able to recognize its name when he hears it. how much better his method than the one he will have to follow a little later when he goes to school and learns that "a ball is a spherical body of any substance or size, used to play with, as by throwing, kicking, or knocking, etc.!" the percept involves all relations of the object.--nor is the case in the least different with ourselves. when we wish to learn about a new object or discover new facts about an old one, we do precisely as the child does if we are wise. we apply to it every sense to which it will afford a stimulus, and finally arrive at the object through its various qualities. and just in so far as we have failed to use in connection with it every sense to which it can minister, just in that degree will we have an incomplete perception of it. indeed, just so far as we have failed finally to perceive it in terms of its functions or uses, in that far also have we failed to know it completely. tomatoes were for many years grown as ornamental garden plants before it was discovered that the tomatoes could minister to the taste as well as to the sight. the clothing of civilized man gives the same sensation of texture and color to the savage that it does to its owner, but he is so far from perceiving it in the same way that he packs it away and continues to go naked. the orientals, who disdain the use of chairs and prefer to sit cross-legged on the floor, can never perceive a chair just as we do who use chairs daily, and to whom chairs are so saturated with social suggestions and associations. the content of the percept.--the percept, then, always contains a basis of _sensation_. the eye, the ear, the skin or some other sense organ must turn in its supply of sensory material or there can be no percept. but the percept contains more than just sensations. consider, for example, your percept of an automobile flashing past your windows. you really _see_ but very little of it, yet you _perceive_ it as a very familiar vehicle. all that your sense organs furnish is a more or less blurred patch of black of certain size and contour, one or more objects of somewhat different color whom you know to be passengers, and various sounds of a whizzing, chugging or roaring nature. your former experience with automobiles enables you to associate with these meager sensory details the upholstered seats, the whirling wheels, the swaying movement and whatever else belongs to the full meaning of a motor car. the percept that contained only sensory material, and lacked all memory elements, ideas and meanings, would be no percept at all. and this is the reason why a young child cannot see or hear like ourselves. it lacks the associative material to give significance and meaning to the sensory elements supplied by the end-organs. the dependence of the percept on material from past experience is also illustrated in the common statement that what one gets from an art exhibit or a concert depends on what he brings to it. he who brings no knowledge, no memory, no images from other pictures or music will secure but relatively barren percepts, consisting of little besides the mere sensory elements. truly, "to him that hath shall be given" in the realm of perception. the accuracy of percepts depends on experience.--we must perceive objects through our motor response to them as well as in terms of sensations. the boy who has his knowledge of a tennis racket from looking at one in a store window, or indeed from handling one and looking it over in his room, can never know a tennis racket as does the boy who plays with it on the court. objects get their significance not alone from their qualities, but even more from their use as related to our own activities. like the child, we must get our knowledge of objects, if we are to get it well, from the objects themselves at first hand, and not second hand through descriptions of them by others. the fact that there is so much of the material world about us that we can never hope to learn it all, has made it necessary to put down in books many of the things which have been discovered concerning nature. this necessity has, i fear, led many away from nature itself to books--away from the living reality of things to the dead embalming cases of words, in whose empty forms we see so little of the significance which resides in the things themselves. we are in danger of being satisfied with the _forms_ of knowledge without its _substance_--with definitions contained in words instead of in qualities and uses. not definitions, but first-hand contact.--in like manner we come to know distance, form and size. if we have never become acquainted with a mile by actually walking a mile, running a mile, riding a bicycle a mile, driving a horse a mile, or traveling a mile on a train, we might listen for a long time to someone tell how far a mile is, or state the distance from chicago to denver, without knowing much about it in any way except word definitions. in order to understand a mile, we must come to know it in as many ways as possible through sense activities of our own. although many children have learned that it is , miles around the earth, probably no one who has not encircled the globe has any reasonably accurate notion just how far this is. for words cannot take the place of perceptions in giving us knowledge. in the case of shorter distances, the same rule holds. the eye must be assisted by experience of the muscles and tendons and joints in actually covering distance, and learn to associate these sensations with those of the eye before the eye alone can be able to say, "that tree is ten rods distant." form and size are to be learned in the same way. the hands must actually touch and handle the object, experiencing its hardness or smoothness, the way this curve and that angle feels, the amount of muscular energy it takes to pass the hand over this surface and along that line, the eye taking note all the while, before the eye can tell at a glance that yonder object is a sphere and that this surface is two feet on the edge. . the perception of space many have been the philosophical controversies over the nature of space and our perception of it. the psychologists have even quarreled concerning whether we possess an _innate_ sense of space, or whether it is a product of experience and training. fortunately, for our present purpose we shall not need to concern ourselves with either of these controversies. for our discussion we may accept space for what common sense understands it to be. as to our sense of space, whatever of this we may possess at birth, it certainly has to be developed by use and experience to become of practical value. in the perception of space we must come to perceive _distance_, _direction_, _size_, and _form_. as a matter of fact, however, size is but so much distance, and form is but so much distance in this, that, or the other direction. the perceiving of distance.--unquestionably the eye comes to be our chief dependence in determining distance. yet the muscle and joint senses give us our earliest knowledge of distance. the babe reaches for the moon simply because the eye does not tell it that the moon is out of reach. only as the child reaches for its playthings, creeps or walks after them, and in a thousand ways uses its muscles and joints in measuring distance, does the perception of distance become dependable. at the same time the eye is slowly developing its power of judging distance. but not for several years does visual perception of distance become in any degree accurate. the eye's perception of distance depends in part on the sensations arising from the muscles controlling the eye, probably in part from the adjustment of the lens, and in part from the retinal image. if one tries to look at the tip of his nose he easily feels the muscle strain caused by the required angle of adjustment. we come unconsciously to associate distance with the muscle sensations arising from the different angles of vision. the part played by the retinal image in judging distance is easily understood in looking at two trees, one thirty feet and the other three hundred feet distant. we note that the nearer tree shows the _detail_ of the bark and leaves, while the more distant one lacks this detail. the nearer tree also reflects more _light_ and _color_ than the one farther away. these minute differences, registered as they are on the retinal image, come to stand for so much of distance. the ear also learns to perceive distance through differences in the quality and the intensity of sound. auditory perception of distance is, however, never very accurate. the perceiving of direction.--the motor senses probably give us our first perception of direction, as they do of distance. the child has to reach this way or that way for his rattle; turn the eyes or head so far in order to see an interesting object; twist the body, crawl or walk to one side or the other to secure his bottle. in these experiences he is gaining his first knowledge of direction. along with these muscle-joint experiences, the eye is also being trained. the position of the image on the retina comes to stand for direction, and the eye finally develops so remarkable a power of perceiving direction that a picture hung a half inch out of plumb is a source of annoyance. the ear develops some skill in the perception of direction, but is less dependable than the eye. . the perception of time the philosophers and psychologists agree little better about our sense of time than they do about our sense of space. of this much, however, we may be certain, our perception of time is subject to development and training. nature of the time sense.--how we perceive time is not so well understood as our perception of space. it is evident, however, that our idea of time is simpler than our idea of space--it has less of content, less that we can describe. probably the most fundamental part of our idea of time is _progression_, or change, without which it is difficult to think of time at all. the question then becomes, how do we perceive change, or succession? if one looks in upon his thought stream he finds that the movement of consciousness is not uniformly continuous, but that his thought moves in pulses, or short rushes, so to speak. when we are seeking for some fact or conclusion, there is a moment of expectancy, or poising, and then the leap forward to the desired point, or conclusion, from which an immediate start is taken for the next objective point of our thinking. it is probable that our sense of the few seconds of passing time that we call the _immediate present_ consists of the recognition of the succession of these pulsations of consciousness, together with certain organic rhythms, such as heart beat and breathing. no perception of empty time.--our perception does not therefore act upon empty time. time must be filled with a procession of events, whether these be within our own consciousness or in the objective world without. all longer periods of time, such as hours, days, or years, are measured by the events which they contain. time filled with happenings that interest and attract us seems short while passing, but longer when looked back upon. on the other hand, time relatively empty of interesting experience hangs heavy on our hands in passing, but, viewed in retrospect, seems short. a fortnight of travel passes more quickly than a fortnight of illness, but yields many more events for the memory to review as the "filling" for time. probably no one has any very accurate feeling of the length, that is, the actual _duration_ of a year--or even of a month! we therefore divide time into convenient units, as weeks, months, years and centuries. this allows us to think of time in mathematical terms where immediate perception fails in its grasp. . the training of perception in the physical world as in the spiritual there are many people who, "having eyes, see not and ears, hear not." for the ability to perceive accurately and richly in the world of physical objects depends not alone on good sense organs, but also on _interest_ and the habit of _observation_. it is easy if we are indifferent or untrained to look at a beautiful landscape, a picture or a cathedral without _seeing_ it; it is easy if we lack interest or skill to listen to an orchestra or the myriad sounds of nature without _hearing_ them. perception needs to be trained.--training in perception does not depend entirely on the work of the school. for the world about us exerts a constant appeal to our senses. a thousand sights, sounds, contacts, tastes, smells or other sensations, hourly throng in upon us, and the appeal is irresistible. we must in some degree attend. we must observe. yet it cannot be denied that most of us are relatively unskilled in perception; we do not know how, or take the trouble to observe. for example, a stranger was brought into the classroom and introduced by the instructor to a class of fifty college students in psychology. the class thought the stranger was to address them, and looked at him with mild curiosity. but, after standing before them for a few moments, he suddenly withdrew, as had been arranged by the instructor. the class were then asked to write such a description of the stranger as would enable a person who had never seen him to identify him. but so poor had been the observation of the class that they ascribed to him clothes of four different colors, eyes and hair each of three different colors, a tie of many different hues, height ranging from five feet and four inches to over six feet, age from twenty-eight to forty-five years, and many other details as wide of the mark. nor is it probable that this particular class was below the average in the power of perception. school training in perception.--the school can do much in training the perception. but to accomplish this, the child must constantly be brought into immediate contact with the physical world about him and taught to observe. books must not be substituted for things. definitions must not take the place of experiment or discovery. geography and nature study should be taught largely out of doors, and the lessons assigned should take the child into the open for observation and investigation. all things that live and grow, the sky and clouds, the sunset colors, the brown of upturned soil, the smell of the clover field, or the new mown hay, the sounds of a summer night, the distinguishing marks by which to identify each family of common birds or breed of cattle--these and a thousand other things that appeal to us from the simplest environment afford a rich opportunity for training the perception. and he who has learned to observe, and who is alert to the appeal of nature, has no small part of his education already assured. . problems in observation and introspection . test your power of observation by walking rapidly past a well-filled store window and then seeing how many of the objects you can name. . suppose a tailor, a bootblack, a physician, and a detective are standing on the street corner as you pass by. what will each one be most likely to observe about you? _why?_ . observe carefully green trees at a distance of a few rods; a quarter of a mile; a mile; several miles. describe differences ( ) in color, ( ) in brightness, or light, and ( ) in detail. . how many common birds can you identify? how many kinds of trees? of wild flowers? of weeds? . observe the work of an elementary school for the purpose of determining: a. whether the instruction in geography, nature study, agriculture, etc., calls for the use of the eyes, ears and fingers. b. whether definitions are used in place of first-hand information in any subjects. c. whether the assignment of lessons to pupils includes work that would require the use of the senses, especially out of doors. d. whether the work offered in arithmetic demands the use of the senses as well as the reason. e. whether the language lessons make use of the power of observation. chapter viii mental images and ideas as you sit thinking, a company of you together, your thoughts run in many diverse lines. yet with all this diversity, your minds possess this common characteristic: _though your thinking all takes place in what we call the present moment, it goes on largely in terms of past experiences._ . the part played by past experience present thinking depends on past experience.--images or ideas of things you have seen or heard or felt; of things you have thought of before and which now recur to you; of things you remember, such as names, dates, places, events; of things that you do not remember as a part of your past at all, but that belong to it nevertheless--these are the things which form a large part of your mental stream, and which give content to your thinking. you may think of a thing that is going on now, or of one that is to occur in the future; but, after all, you are dependent on your past experience for the material which you put into your thinking of the present moment. indeed, nothing can enter your present thinking which does not link itself to something in your past experience. the savage indian in the primeval forest never thought about killing a deer with a rifle merely by pulling a trigger, or of turning a battery of machine guns on his enemies to annihilate them--none of these things were related to his past experience; hence he could not think in such terms. the present interpreted by the past.--not only can we not think at all except in terms of our past experience, but even if we could, the present would be meaningless to us; for the present is interpreted in the light of the past. the sedate man of affairs who decries athletic sports, and has never taken part in them, cannot understand the wild enthusiasm which prevails between rival teams in a hotly contested event. the fine work of art is to the one who has never experienced the appeal which comes through beauty, only so much of canvas and variegated patches of color. paul says that jesus was "unto the greeks, foolishness." he was foolishness to them because nothing in their experience with their own gods had been enough like the character of jesus to enable them to interpret him. the future also depends on the past.--to the mind incapable of using past experience, the future also would be impossible; for we can look forward into the future only by placing in its experiences the elements of which we have already known. the savage who has never seen the shining yellow metal does not dream of a heaven whose streets are paved with gold, but rather of a "happy hunting ground." if you will analyze your own dreams of the future you will see in them familiar pictures perhaps grouped together in new forms, but coming, in their elements, from your past experience nevertheless. all that would remain to a mind devoid of a past would be the little bridge of time which we call the "present moment," a series of unconnected _nows_. thought would be impossible, for the mind would have nothing to compare and relate. personality would not exist; for personality requires continuity of experience, else we should be a new person each succeeding moment, without memory and without plans. such a mind would be no mind at all. rank determined by ability to utilize past experience.--so important is past experience in determining our present thinking and guiding our future actions, that the place of an individual in the scale of creation is determined largely by the ability to profit by past experience. the scientist tells us of many species of animals now extinct, which lost their lives and suffered their race to die out because when, long ago, the climate began to change and grow much colder, they were unable to use the experience of suffering in the last cold season as an incentive to provide shelter, or move to a warmer climate against the coming of the next and more rigorous one. man was able to make the adjustment; and, providing himself with clothing and shelter and food, he survived, while myriads of the lower forms perished. the singed moth again and again dares the flame which tortures it, and at last gives its life, a sacrifice to its folly; the burned child fears the fire, and does not the second time seek the experience. so also can the efficiency of an individual or a nation, as compared with other individuals or nations, be determined. the inefficient are those who repeat the same error or useless act over and over, or else fail to repeat a chance useful act whose repetition might lead to success. they are unable to learn their lesson and be guided by experience. their past does not sufficiently minister to their present, and through it direct their future. . how past experience is conserved past experience conserved in both mental and physical terms.--if past experience plays so important a part in our welfare, how, then, is it to be conserved so that we may secure its benefits? here, as elsewhere, we find the mind and body working in perfect unison and harmony, each doing its part to further the interests of both. the results of our past experience may be read in both our mental and our physical nature. on the physical side past experience is recorded in modified structure through the law of habit working on the tissues of the body, and particularly on the delicate tissues of the brain and nervous system. this is easily seen in its outward aspects. the stooped shoulders and bent form of the workman tell a tale of physical toil and exposure; the bloodless lips and pale face of the victim of the city sweat shop tell of foul air, long hours, and insufficient food; the rosy cheek and bounding step of childhood speak of fresh air, good food and happy play. on the mental side past experience is conserved chiefly by means of _images_, _ideas_, and _concepts_. the nature and function of concepts will be discussed in a later chapter. it will now be our purpose to examine the nature of images and ideas, and to note the part they play in the mind's activities. the image and the idea.--to understand the nature of the image, and then of the idea, we may best go back to the percept. you look at a watch which i hold before your eyes and secure a percept of it. briefly, this is what happens: the light reflected from the yellow object, on striking the retina, results in a nerve current which sets up a certain form of activity in the cells of the visual brain area, and lo! a _percept_ of the watch flashes in your mind. now i put the watch in my pocket, so that the stimulus is no longer present to your eye. then i ask you to think of my watch just as it appeared as you were looking at it; or you may yourself choose to think of it without my suggesting it to you. in either case _the cellular activity in the visual area of the cortex is reproduced_ approximately as it occurred in connection with the percept, and lo! an _image_ of the watch flashes in your mind. an image is thus an approximate copy of a former percept (or several percepts). it is aroused indirectly by means of a nerve current coming by way of some other brain center, instead of directly by the stimulation of a sense organ, as in the case of a percept. if, instead of seeking a more or less exact mental _picture_ of my watch, you only think of its general _meaning_ and relations, the fact that it is of gold, that it is for the purpose of keeping time, that it was a present to me, that i wear it in my left pocket, you then have an _idea_ of the watch. our idea of an object is, therefore, the general meaning of relations we ascribe to it. it should be remembered, however, that the terms image and idea are employed rather loosely, and that there is not yet general uniformity among writers in their use. all our past experience potentially at our command.--images may in a certain sense take the place of percepts, and we can again experience sights, sounds, tastes, and smells which we have known before, without having the stimuli actually present to the senses. in this way all our past experience is potentially available to the present. all the objects we have seen, it is potentially possible again to see in the mind's eye without being obliged to have the objects before us; all the sounds we have heard, all the tastes and smells and temperatures we have experienced, we may again have presented to our minds in the form of mental images without the various stimuli being present to the end-organs of the senses. through images and ideas the total number of objects in our experience is infinitely multiplied; for many of the things we have seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, we cannot again have present to the senses, and without this power we would never get them again. and besides this fact, it would be inconvenient to have to go and secure afresh each sensation or percept every time we need to use it in our thought. while _habit_, then, conserves our past experience on the physical side, the _image_ and the _idea_ do the same thing on the mental side. . individual differences in imagery images to be viewed by introspection.--the remainder of the description of images will be easier to understand, for each of you can know just what is meant in every case by appealing to your own mind. i beg of you not to think that i am presenting something new and strange, a curiosity connected with our thinking which has been discovered by scholars who have delved more deeply into the matter than we can hope to do. every day--no, more than that, every hour and every moment--these images are flitting through our minds, forming a large part of our stream of consciousness. let us see whether we can turn our attention within and discover some of our images in their flight. let us introspect. i know of no better way to proceed than that adopted by francis galton years ago, when he asked the english men of letters and science to think of their breakfast tables, and then describe the images which appeared. i am about to ask each one of you to do the same thing, but i want to warn you beforehand that the images will not be so vivid as the sensory experiences themselves. they will be much fainter and more vague, and less clear and definite; they will be fleeting, and must be caught on the wing. often the image may fade entirely out, and the idea only be left. the varied imagery suggested by one's dining table.--let each one now recall the dining table as you last left it, and then answer questions concerning it like the following: can i see clearly in my "mind's eye" the whole table as it stood spread before me? can i see all parts of it equally clearly? do i get the snowy white and gloss of the linen? the delicate coloring of the china, so that i can see where the pink shades off into the white? the graceful lines and curves of the dishes? the sheen of the silver? the brown of the toast? the yellow of the cream? the rich red and dark green of the bouquet of roses? the sparkle of the glassware? can i again hear the rattle of the dishes? the clink of the spoon against the cup? the moving up of the chairs? the chatter of the voices, each with its own peculiar pitch and quality? the twitter of a bird outside the window? the tinkle of a distant bell? the chirp of a neighborly cricket? can i taste clearly the milk? the coffee? the eggs? the bacon? the rolls? the butter? the jelly? the fruit? can i get the appetizing odor of the coffee? of the meat? the oranges and bananas? the perfume of the lilac bush outside the door? the perfume from a handkerchief newly treated to a spray of heliotrope? can i recall the touch of my fingers on the velvety peach? on the smooth skin of an apple? on the fretted glassware? the feel of the fresh linen? the contact of leather-covered or cane-seated chair? of the freshly donned garment? can i get clearly the temperature of the hot coffee in the mouth? of the hot dish on the hand? of the ice water? of the grateful coolness of the breeze wafted in through the open window? can i feel again the strain of muscle and joint in passing the heavy dish? can i feel the movement of the jaws in chewing the beefsteak? of the throat and lips in talking? of the chest and diaphragm in laughing? of the muscles in sitting and rising? in hand and arm in using knife and fork and spoon? can i get again the sensation of pain which accompanied biting on a tender tooth? from the shooting of a drop of acid from the rind of the orange into the eye? the chance ache in the head? the pleasant feeling connected with the exhilaration of a beautiful morning? the feeling of perfect health? the pleasure connected with partaking of a favorite food? power of imagery varies in different people.--it is more than probable that some of you cannot get perfectly clear images in all these lines, certainly not with equal facility; for the imagery from any one sense varies greatly from person to person. a celebrated painter was able, after placing his subject in a chair and looking at him attentively for a few minutes, to dismiss the subject and paint a perfect likeness of him from the visual image which recurred to the artist every time he turned his eyes to the chair where the sitter had been placed. on the other hand, a young lady, a student in my psychology class, tells me that she is never able to recall the looks of her mother when she is absent, even if the separation has been only for a few moments. she can get an image of the form, with the color and cut of the dress, but never the features. one person may be able to recall a large part of a concert through his auditory imagery, and another almost none. in general it may be said that the power, or at least the use, of imagery decreases with age. the writer has made a somewhat extensive study of the imagery of certain high-school students, college students, and specialists in psychology averaging middle age. almost without exception it was found that clear and vivid images played a smaller part in the thinking of the older group than of the younger. more or less abstract ideas and concepts seemed to have taken the place of the concrete imagery of earlier years. imagery types.--although there is some difference in our ability to use imagery of different sensory types, probably there is less variation here than has been supposed. earlier pedagogical works spoke of the _visual_ type of mind, or the _audile_ type, or the _motor_ type, as if the possession of one kind of imagery necessarily rendered a person short in other types. later studies have shown this view incorrect, however. the person who has good images of one type is likely to excel in all types, while one who is lacking in any one of the more important types will probably be found short in all.[ ] most of us probably make more use of visual and auditory than of other kinds of imagery, while olfactory and gustatory images seem to play a minor rôle. . the function of images binet says that the man who has not every type of imagery almost equally well developed is only the fraction of a man. while this no doubt puts the matter too strongly, yet images do play an important part in our thinking. images supply material for imagination and memory.--imagery supplies the pictures from which imagination builds its structures. given a rich supply of images from the various senses, and imagination has the material necessary to construct times and events long since past, or to fill the future with plans or experiences not yet reached. lacking images, however, imagination is handicapped, and its meager products reveal in their barrenness and their lack of warmth and reality the poverty of material. much of our memory also takes the form of images. the face of a friend, the sound of a voice, or the touch of a hand may be recalled, not as a mere fact, but with almost the freshness and fidelity of a percept. that much of our memory goes on in the form of ideas instead of images is true. but memory is often both aided in its accuracy and rendered more vital and significant through the presence of abundant imagery. imagery in the thought processes.--since logical thinking deals more with relations and meanings than with particular objects, images naturally play a smaller part in reasoning than in memory and imagination. yet they have their place here as well. students of geometry or trigonometry often have difficulty in understanding a theorem until they succeed in visualizing the surface or solid involved. thinking in the field of astronomy, mechanics, and many other sciences is assisted at certain points by the ability to form clear and accurate images. the use of imagery in literature.--facility in the use of imagery undoubtedly adds much to our enjoyment and appreciation of certain forms of literature. the great writers commonly use all types of images in their description and narration. if we are not able to employ the images they used, many of their most beautiful pictures are likely to be to us but so many words suggesting prosaic ideas. shakespeare, describing certain beautiful music, appeals to the sense of smell to make himself understood: ... it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor! _lady macbeth_ cries: here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of arabia will not sweeten this little hand. milton has _eve_ say of her dream of the fatal apple: ... the pleasant sav'ry smell so quickened appetite, that i, methought, could not but taste. likewise with the sense of touch: ... i take thy hand, this hand as soft as dove's down, and as white as it. imagine a person devoid of delicate tactile imagery, with senseless finger tips and leaden footsteps, undertaking to interpret these exquisite lines: thus i set my printless feet o'er the cowslip's velvet head, that bends not as i tread. shakespeare thus appeals to the muscular imagery: at last, a little shaking of mine arm and thrice his head thus waving up and down, he raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being. many passages like the following appeal to the temperature images: freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, thou dost not bite so nigh as benefits forgot! to one whose auditory imagery is meager, the following lines will lose something of their beauty: how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony. note how much clear images will add to browning's words: are there not two moments in the adventure of a diver--one when a beggar he prepares to plunge, and one, when a prince he rises with his pearl? points where images are of greatest service.--beyond question, many images come flooding into our minds which are irrelevant and of no service in our thinking. no one has failed to note many such. further, we undoubtedly do much of our best thinking with few or no images present. yet we need images. where, then, are they most needed? _images are needed wherever the percepts which they represent would be of service._ whatever one could better understand or enjoy or appreciate by seeing it, hearing it, or perceiving it through some other sense, he can better understand, enjoy or appreciate through images than by means of ideas only. . the cultivation of imagery images depend on sensory stimuli.--the power of imaging can be cultivated the same as any other ability. in the first place, we may put down as an absolute requisite _such an environment of sensory stimuli as will tempt every sense to be awake and at its best_, that we may be led into a large acquaintance with the objects of our material environment. no one's stock of sensory images is greater than the sum total of his sensory experiences. no one ever has images of sights, or sounds, or tastes, or smells which he has never experienced. likewise, he must have had the fullest and freest possible liberty in motor activities. for not only is the motor act itself made possible through the office of imagery, but the motor act clarifies and makes useful the images. the boy who has actually made a table, or a desk, or a box has ever afterward a different and a better image of one of these objects than before; so also when he has owned and ridden a bicycle, his image of this machine will have a different significance from that of the image founded upon the visual perception alone of the wheel he longingly looked at through the store window or in the other boy's dooryard. the influence of frequent recall.--but sensory experiences and motor responses alone are not enough, though they are the basis of good imagery. _there must be frequent recall._ the sunset may have been never so brilliant, and the music never so entrancing; but if they are never thought of and dwelt upon after they were first experienced, little will remain of them after a very short time. it is by repeating them often in experience through imagery that they become fixed, so that they stand ready to do our bidding when we need next to use them. the reconstruction of our images.--to richness of experience and frequency of the recall of our images we must add one more factor; namely, that of their _reconstruction_ or working over. few if any images are exact recalls of former percepts of objects. indeed, such would be neither possible nor desirable. the images which we recall are recalled for a purpose, or in view of some future activity, and hence must be _selective_, or made up of the elements of several or many former related images. thus the boy who wishes to construct a box without a pattern to follow recalls the images of numerous boxes he may have seen, and from them all he has a new image made over from many former percepts and images, and this new image serves him as a working model. in this way he not only gets a copy which he can follow to make his box, but he also secures a new product in the form of an image different from any he ever had before, and is therefore by so much the richer. it is this working over of our stock of old images into new and richer and more suggestive ones that constitutes the essence of constructive imagination. the more types of imagery into which we can put our thought, the more fully is it ours and the better our images. the spelling lesson needs not only to be taken in through the eye, that we may retain a visual image of the words, but also to be recited orally, so that the ear may furnish an auditory image, and the organs of speech a motor image of the correct forms. it needs also to be written, and thus given into the keeping of the hand, which finally needs most of all to know and retain it. the reading lesson should be taken in through both the eye and the ear, and then expressed by means of voice and gesture in as full and complete a way as possible, that it may be associated with motor images. the geography lesson needs not only to be read, but to be drawn, or molded, or constructed. the history lesson should be made to appeal to every possible form of imagery. the arithmetic lesson must be not only computed, but measured, weighed, and pressed into actual service. thus we might carry the illustration into every line of education and experience, and the same truth holds. _what we desire to comprehend completely and retain well, we must apprehend through all available senses and conserve in every possible type of image and form of expression._ . problems in introspection and observation . observe a reading class and try to determine whether the pupils picture the scenes and events they read about. how can you tell? . similarly observe a history class. do the pupils realize the events as actually happening, and the personages as real, living people? . observe in a similar way a class in geography, and draw conclusions. a pupil in computing the cost of plastering a certain room based the figures on the room _filled full of plaster_. how might visual imagery have saved the error? . imagine a three-inch cube. paint it. then saw it up into inch cubes, leaving them all standing in the original form. how many inch cubes have paint on three faces? how many on two faces? how many on one face? how many have no paint on them? answer all these questions by referring to your imagery alone. . try often to recall images in the various sensory lines; determine in what classes of images you are least proficient and try to improve in these lines. . how is the singing teacher able, after his class has sung through several scores, to tell that they are flatting? . study your imagery carefully for a few days to see whether you can discover your predominating type of imagery. chapter ix imagination everyone desires to have a good imagination, yet not all would agree as to what constitutes a good imagination. if i were to ask a group of you whether you have good imaginations, many of you would probably at once fall to considering whether you are capable of taking wild flights into impossible realms of thought and evolving unrealities out of airy nothings. you would compare yourself with great imaginative writers, such as stevenson, poe, de quincey, and judge your power of imagination by your ability to produce such tales as made them famous. . the place of imagination in mental economy but such a measure for the imagination as that just stated is far too narrow. a good imagination, like a good memory, is the one which serves its owner best. if dequincey and poe and stevenson and bulwer found the type which led them into such dizzy flights the best for their particular purpose, well and good; but that is not saying that their type is the best for you, or that you may not rank as high in some other field of imaginative power as they in theirs. while you may lack in their particular type of imagination, they may have been short in the type which will one day make you famous. the artisan, the architect, the merchant, the artist, the farmer, the teacher, the professional man--all need imagination in their vocations not less than the writers need it in theirs, but each needs a specialized kind adapted to the particular work which he has to do. practical nature of imagination.--imagination is not a process of thought which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities, and which has for its chief end our amusement when we have nothing better to do than to follow its wanderings. it is, rather, a commonplace, necessary process which illumines the way for our everyday thinking and acting--a process without which we think and act by haphazard chance or blind imitation. it is the process by which the images from our past experiences are marshaled, and made to serve our present. imagination looks into the future and constructs our patterns and lays our plans. it sets up our ideals and pictures us in the acts of achieving them. it enables us to live our joys and our sorrows, our victories and our defeats before we reach them. it looks into the past and allows us to live with the kings and seers of old, or it goes back to the beginning and we see things in the process of the making. it comes into our present and plays a part in every act from the simplest to the most complex. it is to the mental stream what the light is to the traveler who carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it casts its beams in all directions around him, lighting up what otherwise would be intolerable gloom. imagination in the interpretation of history, literature, and art.--let us see some of the most common uses of the imagination. suppose i describe to you the battle of the marne. unless you can take the images which my words suggest and build them into struggling, shouting, bleeding soldiers; into forts and entanglements and breastworks; into roaring cannon and whistling bullet and screaming shell--unless you can take all these separate images and out of them get one great unified complex, then my description will be to you only so many words largely without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the historical event in any complete way. unless you can read the poem, and out of the images suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which was in the mind of the author as he wrote "the village blacksmith" or "snowbound," the significance will have dropped out, and the throbbing scenes of life and action become only so many dead words, like the shell of the chrysalis after the butterfly has left its shroud. without the power of imagination, the history of washington's winter at valley forge becomes a mere formal recital, and you can never get a view of the snow-covered tents, the wind-swept landscape, the tracks in the snow marked by the telltale drops of blood, or the form of the heartbroken commander as he kneels in the silent wood to pray for his army. without the power to construct this picture as you read, you may commit the words, and be able to recite them, and to pass examination upon them, but the living reality of it will forever escape you. your power of imagination determines your ability to interpret literature of all kinds; for the interpretation of literature is nothing, after all, but the reconstruction on our part of the pictures with their meanings which were in the mind of the writer as he penned the words, and the experiencing of the emotions which moved him as he wrote. small use indeed to read the history of the centuries unless we can see in it living, acting people, and real events occurring in actual environments. small use to read the world's great books unless their characters are to us real men and women--our brothers and sisters, interpreted to us by the master minds of the ages. anything less than this, and we are no longer dealing with literature, but with words--like musical sounds which deal with no theme, or like picture frames in which no picture has been set. nor is the case different in listening to a speaker. his words are to you only so many sensations of sounds of such and such pitches and intensities and quality, unless your mind keeps pace with his and continually builds the pictures which fill his thought as he speaks. lacking imagination, the sculptures of michael angelo and the pictures of raphael are to you so many pieces of curiously shaped marble and ingeniously colored canvas. what the sculptor and the painter have placed before you must suggest to you images and thoughts from your own experience, to fill out and make alive the marble and the canvas, else to you they are dead. imagination and science.--nor is imagination less necessary in other lines of study. without this power of building living, moving pictures out of images, there is small use to study science beyond what is immediately present to our senses; for some of the most fundamental laws of science rest upon conceptions which can be grasped only as we have the power of imagination. the student who cannot get a picture of the molecules of matter, infinitely close to each other and yet never touching, all in vibratory motion, yet each within its own orbit, each a complete unit in itself, yet capable of still further division into smaller particles,--the student who cannot see all this in a clear visual image can never at best have more than a most hazy notion of the theory of matter. and this means, finally, that the explanations of light and heat and sound, and much besides, will be to him largely a jumble of words which linger in his memory, perchance, but which never vitally become a possession of his mind. so with the world of the telescope. you may have at your disposal all the magnificent lenses and the accurate machinery owned by modern observatories; but if you have not within yourself the power to build what these reveal to you, and what the books tell you, into the solar system and still larger systems, you can never study astronomy except in a blind and piecemeal sort of way, and all the planets and satellites and suns will never for you form themselves into a system, no matter what the books may say about it. everyday uses of imagination.--but we may consider a still more practical phase of imagination, or at least one which has more to do with the humdrum daily life of most of us. suppose you go to your milliner and tell her how you want your spring hat shaped and trimmed. and suppose you have never been able to see this hat _in toto_ in your mind, so as to get an idea of how it will look when completed, but have only a general notion, because you like red velvet, white plumes, and a turned-up rim, that this combination will look well together. suppose you have never been able to see how you would look in this particular hat with your hair done in this or that way. if you are in this helpless state shall you not have to depend finally on the taste of the milliner, or accept the "model," and so fail to reveal any taste or individuality on your own part? how many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress, because when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as to get the full effect; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so be able to judge whether it suited you! how many homes have in them draperies and rugs and wall paper and furniture which are in constant quarrel because someone could not see before they were assembled that they were never intended to keep company! how many people who plan their own houses, would build them just the same again after seeing them completed? the man who can see a building complete before a brick has been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in its details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the building in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the structure. and this is the man who is drawing a large salary as an architect, for imaginations of this kind are in demand. only the one who can see in his "mind's eye," before it is begun, the thing he would create, is capable to plan its construction. and who will say that ability to work with images of these kinds is not of just as high a type as that which results in the construction of plots upon which stories are built! the building of ideals and plans.--nor is the part of imagination less marked in the formation of our life's ideals and plans. everyone who is not living blindly and aimlessly must have some ideal, some pattern, by which to square his life and guide his actions. at some time in our life i am sure that each of us has selected the person who filled most nearly our notion of what we should like to become, and measured ourselves by this pattern. but there comes a time when we must idealize even the most perfect individual; when we invest the character with attributes which we have selected from some other person, and thus worship at a shrine which is partly real and partly ideal. as time goes on, we drop out more and more of the strictly individual element, adding correspondingly more of the ideal, until our pattern is largely a construction of our own imagination, having in it the best we have been able to glean from the many characters we have known. how large a part these ever-changing ideals play in our lives we shall never know, but certainly the part is not an insignificant one. and happy the youth who is able to look into the future and see himself approximating some worthy ideal. he has caught a vision which will never allow him to lag or falter in the pursuit of the flying goal which points the direction of his efforts. imagination and conduct.--another great field for imagination is with reference to conduct and our relations with others. over and over again the thoughtless person has to say, "i am sorry; i did not think." the "did not think" simply means that he failed to realize through his imagination what would be the consequences of his rash or unkind words. he would not be unkind, but he did not imagine how the other would feel; he did not put himself in the other's place. likewise with reference to the effects of our conduct on ourselves. what youth, taking his first drink of liquor, would continue if he could see a clear picture of himself in the gutter with bloated face and bloodshot eyes a decade hence? or what boy, slyly smoking one of his early cigarettes, would proceed if he could see his haggard face and nerveless hand a few years farther along? what spendthrift would throw away his money on vanities could he vividly see himself in penury and want in old age? what prodigal anywhere who, if he could take a good look at himself sin-stained and broken as he returns to his "father's house" after the years of debauchery in the "far country" would not hesitate long before he entered upon his downward career? imagination and thinking.--we have already considered the use of imagination in interpreting the thoughts, feelings and handiwork of others. let us now look a little more closely into the part it plays in our own thinking. suppose that, instead of reading a poem, we are writing one; instead of listening to a description of a battle, we are describing it; instead of looking at the picture, we are painting it. then our object is to make others who may read our language, or listen to our words, or view our handiwork, construct the mental images of the situation which furnished the material for our thought. our words and other modes of expression are but the description of the flow of images in our minds, and our problem is to make a similar stream flow through the mind of the listener; but strange indeed would it be to make others see a situation which we ourselves cannot see; strange if we could draw a picture without being able to follow its outlines as we draw. or suppose we are teaching science, and our object is to explain the composition of matter to someone, and make him understand how light, heat, etc., depend on the theory of matter; strange if the listener should get a picture if we ourselves are unable to get it. or, once more, suppose we are to describe some incident, and our aim is to make its every detail stand out so clearly that no one can miss a single one. is it not evident that we can never make any of these images more clear to those who listen to us or read our words than they are to ourselves? . the material used by imagination what is the material, the mental content, out of which imagination builds its structures? images the stuff of imagination.--nothing can enter the imagination the elements of which have not been in our past experience and then been conserved in the form of images. the indians never dreamed of a heaven whose streets are paved with gold, and in whose center stands a great white throne. their experience had given them no knowledge of these things; and so, perforce, they must build their heaven out of the images which they had at command, namely, those connected with the chase and the forest. so their heaven was the "happy hunting ground," inhabited by game and enemies over whom the blessed forever triumphed. likewise the valiant soldiers whose deadly arrows and keen-edged swords and battle-axes won on the bloody field of hastings, did not picture a far-off day when the opposing lines should kill each other with mighty engines hurling death from behind parapets a dozen miles away. firearms and the explosive powder were yet unknown, hence there were no images out of which to build such a picture. i do not mean that your imagination cannot construct an object which has never before been in your experience as a whole, for the work of the imagination is to do precisely this thing. it takes the various images at its disposal and builds them into _wholes_ which may never have existed before, and which may exist now only as a creation of the mind. and yet we have put into this new product not a single _element_ which was not familiar to us in the form of an image of one kind or another. it is the _form_ which is new; the _material_ is old. this is exemplified every time an inventor takes the two fundamental parts of a machine, the _lever_ and the _inclined plane_, and puts them together in relations new to each other and so evolves a machine whose complexity fairly bewilders us. and with other lines of thinking, as in mechanics, inventive power consists in being able to see the old in new relations, and so constantly build new constructions out of old material. it is this power which gives us the daring and original thinker, the newton whose falling apple suggested to him the planets falling toward the sun in their orbits; the darwin who out of the thigh bone of an animal was able to construct in his imagination the whole animal and the environment in which it must have lived, and so add another page to the earth's history. the two factors in imagination.--from the simple facts which we have just been considering, the conclusion is plain that our power of imagination depends on two factors; namely, ( ) _the materials available in the form of usable images capable of recall_, and ( ) _our constructive ability_, or the power to group these images into new _wholes, the process being guided by some purpose or end_. without this last provision, the products of our imagination are daydreams with their "castles in spain," which may be pleasing and proper enough on occasions, but which as an habitual mode of thought are extremely dangerous. imagination limited by stock of images.--that the mind is limited in its imagination by its stock of images may be seen from a simple illustration: suppose that you own a building made of brick, but that you find the old one no longer adequate for your needs, and so purpose to build a new one; and suppose, further, that you have no material for your new building except that contained in the old structure. it is evident that you will be limited in constructing your new building by the material which was in the old. you may be able to build the new structure in any one of a multitude of different forms or styles of architecture, so far as the material at hand will lend itself to that style of building, and providing, further, that you are able to make the plans. but you will always be limited finally by the character and amount of material obtainable from the old structure. so with the mind. the old building is your past experience, and the separate bricks are the images out of which you must build your new structure through the imagination. here, as before, nothing can enter which was not already on hand. nothing goes into the new structure so far as its constructive material is concerned except images, and there is nowhere to get images but from the results of our past experience. limited also by our constructive ability.--but not only is our imaginative output limited by the _amount_ of material in the way of images which we have at our command, but also and perhaps not less by our _constructive ability_. many persons might own the old pile of bricks fully adequate for the new structure, and then fail to get the new because they were unable to construct it. so, many who have had a rich and varied experience in many lines are yet unable to muster their images of these experiences in such a way that new products are obtainable from them. these have the heavy, draft-horse kind of intellect which goes plodding on, very possibly doing good service in its own circumscribed range, but destined after all to service in the narrow field with its low, drooping horizon. they are never able to take a dash at a two-minute clip among equally swift competitors, or even swing at a good round pace along the pleasant highways of an experience lying beyond the confines of the narrow _here_ and _now_. these are the minds which cannot discover relations; which cannot _think_. minds of this type can never be architects of their own fate, or even builders, but must content themselves to be hod carriers. the need of a purpose.--nor are we to forget that we cannot intelligently erect our building until we know the _purpose_ for which it is to be used. no matter how much building material we may have on hand, nor how skillful an architect we may be, unless our plans are guided by some definite aim, we shall be likely to end with a structure that is fanciful and useless. likewise with our thought structure. unless our imagination is guided by some aim or purpose, we are in danger of drifting into mere daydreams which not only are useless in furnishing ideals for the guidance of our lives, but often become positively harmful when grown into a habit. the habit of daydreaming is hard to break, and, continuing, holds our thought in thrall and makes it unwilling to deal with the plain, homely things of everyday life. who has not had the experience of an hour or a day spent in a fairyland of dreams, and awakened at the end to find himself rather dissatisfied with the prosaic round of duties which confronted him! i do not mean to say that we should _never_ dream; but i know of no more pernicious mental habit than that of daydreaming carried to excess, for it ends in our following every will-o'-the-wisp of fancy, and places us at the mercy of every chance suggestion. . types of imagination although imagination enters every field of human experience, and busies itself with every line of human interest, yet all its activities can be classed under two different types. these are ( ) _reproductive_, and ( ) _creative_ imagination. reproductive imagination.--reproductive imagination is the type we use when we seek to reproduce in our minds the pictures described by others, or pictures from our own past experience which lack the completeness and fidelity to make them true memory. the narration or description of the story book, the history or geography text; the tale of adventure recounted by traveler or hunter; the account of a new machine or other invention; fairy tales and myths--these or any other matter that may be put into words capable of suggesting images to us are the field for reproductive imagination. in this use of the imagination our business is to follow and not lead, to copy and not create. creative imagination.--but we must have leaders, originators--else we should but imitate each other and the world would be at a standstill. indeed, every person, no matter how humble his station or how humdrum his life, should be in some degree capable of initiative and originality. such ability depends in no small measure on the power to use creative imagination. creative imagination takes the images from our own past experience or those gleaned from the work of others and puts them together in new and original forms. the inventor, the writer, the mechanic or the artist who possesses the spirit of creation is not satisfied with _mere_ reproduction, but seeks to modify, to improve, to originate. true, many important inventions and discoveries have come by seeming accident, by being stumbled upon. yet it holds that the person who thus stumbles upon the discovery or invention is usually one whose creative imagination is actively at work _seeking_ to create or discover in his field. the world's progress as a whole does not come by accident, but by creative planning. creative imagination is always found at the van of progress, whether in the life of an individual or a nation. . training the imagination imagination is highly susceptible of cultivation, and its training should constitute one of the most important aims of education. every school subject, but especially such subjects as deal with description and narration--history, literature, geography, nature study and science--is rich in opportunities for the use of imagination. skillful teaching will not only find in these subjects a means of training the imagination, but will so employ imagination in their study as to make them living matter, throbbing with life and action, rather than so many dead words or uninteresting facts. gathering of material for imagination.--theoretically, then, it is not hard to see what we must do to cultivate our imagination. in the first place, we must take care to secure a large and usable _stock of images_ from all fields of perception. it is not enough to have visual images alone or chiefly, for many a time shall we need to build structures involving all the other senses and the motor activities as well. this means that we must have a first-hand contact with just as large an environment as possible--large in the world of nature with all her varied forms suited to appeal to every avenue of sense; large in our contact with people in all phases of experience, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those who weep; large in contact with books, the interpreters of the men and events of the past. we must not only let all these kinds of environment drift in upon us as they may chance to do, but we must deliberately _seek_ to increase our stock of experience; for, after all, experience lies at the bottom of imagination as of every other mental process. and not only must we thus put ourselves in the way of acquiring new experience, but we must by recall and reconstruction, as we saw in an earlier discussion, keep our imagery fresh and usable. for whatever serves to improve our images, at the same time is bettering the very foundation of imagination. we must not fail to build.--in the second place, we must not fail _to build_. for it is futile to gather a large supply of images if we let the material lie unused. how many people there are who put in all their time gathering material for their structure, and never take time to do the building! they look and listen and read, and are so fully occupied in absorbing the immediately present that they have no time to see the wider significance of the things with which they deal. they are like the students who are too busy studying to have time to think. they are so taken up with receiving that they never perform the higher act of combining. they are the plodding fact gatherers, many of them doing good service, collecting material which the seer and the philosopher, with their constructive power, build together into the greater wholes which make our systems of thought. they are the ones who fondly think that, by reading books full of wild tales and impossible plots, they are training their imagination. for them, sober history, no matter how heroic or tragic in its quiet movements, is too tame. they have not the patience to read solid and thoughtful literature, and works of science and philosophy are a bore. these are the persons who put in all their time in looking at and admiring other people's houses, and never get time to do any building for themselves. we should carry our ideals into action.--the best training for the imagination which i know anything about is that to be obtained by taking our own material and from it building our own structure. it is true that it will help to look through other people's houses enough to discover their style of building: we should read. but just as it is not necessary for us to put in all the time we devote to looking at houses, in inspecting doll houses and chinese pagodas, so it is not best for us to get all our notions of imaginative structures from the marvelous and the unreal; we get good training for the imagination from reading "hiawatha," but so can we from reading the history of the primitive indian tribes. the pictures in "snowbound" are full of suggestion for the imagination: but so is the history of the puritans in new england. but even with the best of models before us, it is not enough to follow others' building. we must construct stories for ourselves, must work out plots for our own stories; we must have time to meditate and plan and build, not idly in the daydream, but purposefully, and then make our images real by _carrying them out in activity_, if they are of such a character that this is possible; we must build our ideals and work to them in the common course of our everyday life; we must think for ourselves instead of forever following the thinking of others; we must _initiate_ as well as imitate. . problems for observation and introspection . explain the cause and the remedy in the case of such errors as the following: children who defined mountain as land , or more feet in height said that the factory smokestack was higher than the mountain because it "went straight up" and the mountain did not. children often think of the horizon as fastened to the earth. islands are thought of as floating on the water. . how would you stimulate the imagination of a child who does not seem to picture or make real the descriptions in reading, geography, etc.? is it possible that such inability may come from an insufficient basis in observation, and hence in images? . classify the school subjects, including domestic science and manual training, as to their ability to train ( ) reproductive and ( ) creative imagination. . do you ever skip the descriptive parts of a book and read the narrative? as you read the description of a bit of natural scenery, does it rise before you? as you study the description of a battle, can you see the movements of the troops? . have you ever planned a house as you think you would like it? can you see it from all sides? can you see all the rooms in their various finishings and furnishings? . what plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at present following? can you describe the process by which your plans or ideals change? do you ever try to put yourself in the other person's place? . take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual experiences. . what use do you make of imagination in the common round of duties in your daily life? what are you doing to improve your imagination? chapter x association whence came the thought that occupies you this moment, and what determines the next that is to follow? introspection reveals no more interesting fact concerning our minds than that our thoughts move in a connected and orderly array and not in a hit-and-miss fashion. our mental states do not throng the stream of consciousness like so many pieces of wood following each other at random down a rushing current, now this one ahead, now that. on the contrary, our thoughts come, one after the other, as they are beckoned or _caused_. the thought now in the focal point of your consciousness appeared because it sprouted out of the one just preceding it; and the present thought, before it departs, will determine its successor and lead it upon the scene. this is to say that our thought stream possesses not only a continuity, but also a _unity_; it has coherence and system. this coherence and system, which operates in accordance with definite laws, is brought about by what the psychologist calls _association_. . the nature of association we may define association, then, as the tendency among our thoughts to form such a system of bonds with each other that the objects of consciousness are vitally connected both ( ) as they exist at any given moment, and ( ) as they occur in succession in the mental stream. the neural basis of association.--the association of thoughts--ideas, images, memory--or of a situation with its response, rests primarily on a neural basis. association is the result of habit working in neurone groups. its fundamental law is stated by james as follows: "when two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on recurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other." this is but a technical statement of the simple fact that nerve currents flow most easily over the neurone connections that they have already used. it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks, because the old tricks employ familiar, much-used neural paths, while new tricks require the connecting up of groups of neurones not in the habit of working together; and the flow of nerve energy is more easily accomplished in the neurones accustomed to working together. one who learns to speak a foreign language late in life never attains the facility and ease that might have been reached at an earlier age. this is because the neural paths for speech are already set for his mother-tongue, and, with the lessened plasticity of age, the new paths are hard to establish. the connections between the various brain areas, or groups of neurones, are, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, accomplished by means of _association fibers_. this function requires millions of neurones, which unite every part of the cortex with every other part, thus making it possible for a neural activity going on in any particular center to extend to any other center whatsoever. in the relatively unripe brain of the child, the association fibers have not yet set up most of their connections. the age at which memory begins is determined chiefly by the development of a sufficient number of association fibers to bring about recall. the more complex reasoning, which requires many different associative connections, is impossible prior to the existence of adequate neural development. it is this fact that makes it futile to attempt to teach young children the more complicated processes of arithmetic, grammar, or other subjects. they are not yet equipped with the requisite brain machinery to grasp the necessary associations. [illustration: fig. .--diagrammatic scheme of association, in which v stands for the visual, a for the auditory, g for the gustatory, m for the motor, and t for the thought and feeling centers of the cortex.] association the basis of memory.--without the machinery and processes of association we could have no memory. let us see in a simple illustration how association works in recall. suppose you are passing an orchard and see a tree loaded with tempting apples. you hesitate, then climb the fence, pick an apple and eat it, hearing the owner's dog bark as you leave the place. the accompanying diagram will illustrate roughly the centers of the cortex which were involved in the act, and the association fibers which connect them. (see fig. .) now let us see how you may afterward remember the circumstance through association. let us suppose that a week later you are seated at your dining table, and that you begin to eat an apple whose flavor reminds you of the one which you plucked from the tree. from this start how may the entire circumstance be recalled? remember that the cortical centers connected with the sight of the apple tree, with our thoughts about it, with our movements in getting the apple, and with hearing the dog bark, were all active together with the taste center, and hence tend to be thrown into activity again from its activity. it is easy to see that we may ( ) get a visual image of the apple tree and its fruit from a current over the gustatory-visual association fibers; ( ) the thoughts, emotions, or deliberations which we had on the former occasion may again recur to us from a current over the gustatory-thought neurones; ( ) we may get an image of our movements in climbing the fence and picking the apple from a current over the gustatory-motor fibers; or ( ) we may get an auditory image of the barking of the dog from a current over the gustatory-auditory fibers. indeed, we are _sure_ to get some one or more of these unless the paths are blocked in some way, or our attention leads off in some other direction. factors determining direction of recall.--_which_ of these we get first, which of the images the taste percept calls to take its place as it drops out of consciousness, will depend, other things being equal, on which center was most keenly active in the original situation, and is at the moment most permeable. if, at the time we were eating the stolen fruit, our thoughts were keenly self-accusing for taking the apples without permission, then the current will probably discharge through the path gustatory-thought, and we shall recall these thoughts and their accompanying feelings. but if it chances that the barking of the dog frightened us badly, then more likely the discharge from the taste center will be along the path gustatory-auditory, and we shall get the auditory image of the dog's barking, which in turn may call up a visual image of his savage appearance over the auditory-visual fibers. it is clear, however, that, given any one of the elements of the entire situation back, the rest are potentially possible to us, and any one may serve as a "cue" to call up all the rest. whether, given the starting point, we get them all, depends solely on whether the paths are sufficiently open between them for the current to discharge between them, granting that the first experience made sufficient impression to be retained. since this simple illustration may be made infinitely complex by means of the millions of fibers which connect every center in the cortex with every other center, and since, in passing from one experience to another in the round of our daily activities, these various areas are all involved in an endless chain of activities so intimately related that each one can finally lead to all the others, we have here the machinery both of retention and of recall--the mechanism by which our past may be made to serve the present through being reproduced in the form of memory images or ideas. through this machinery we are unable to escape our past, whether it be good or bad; for both the good and the bad alike are brought back to us through its operations. when the repetition of a series of acts has rendered habit secure, the association is relatively certain. if i recite to you a-b-c-d, your thought at once runs on to e, f, g. if i repeat, "tell me not in mournful numbers," association leads you to follow with "life is but an empty dream." your neurone groups are accustomed to act in this way, so the sequence follows. memorizing anything from the multiplication table to the most beautiful gems of poetic fervor consists, therefore, in the setting up of the right associative connections in the brain. association in thinking.--all thinking proceeds by the discovery or recognition of relations between the terms or objects of our thought. the science of mathematics rests on the relations found to exist between numbers and quantities. the principles and laws of natural science are based on the relations established among the different forms of matter and the energy that operates in this field. so also in the realm of history, art, ethics, or any other field of human experience. each fact or event must be linked to other facts or events before it possesses significance. association therefore lies at the foundation of all thinking, whether that of the original thinker who is creating our sciences, planning and executing the events of history, evolving a system of ethics, or whether one is only learning these fields as they already exist by means of study. other things being equal, he is the best thinker who has his knowledge related part to part so that the whole forms a unified and usable system. association and action.--association plays an equally important part in all our motor responses, the acts by which we carry on our daily lives, do our work and our play, or whatever else may be necessary in meeting and adapting ourselves to our environment. some sensations are often repeated, and demand practically the same response each time. in such cases the associations soon become fixed, and the response certain and automatic. for example, we sit at the table, and the response of eating follows, with all its complex acts, as a matter of course. we lie down in bed, and the response of sleep comes. we take our place at the piano, and our fingers produce the accustomed music. it is of course obvious that the influence of association extends to moral action as well. in general, our conduct follows the trend of established associations. we are likely to do in great moral crises about as we are in the habit of doing in small ones. . the types of association fundamental law of association.--stated on the physiological side, the law of habit as set forth in the definition of association in the preceding section includes all the laws of association. in different phrasing we may say: ( ) neurone groups accustomed to acting together have the tendency to work in unison. ( ) the more frequently such groups act together the stronger will be the tendency for one to throw the other into action. also, ( ) the more intense the excitement or tension under which they act together the stronger will be the tendency for activity in one to bring about activity in the other. the corresponding facts may be expressed in psychological terms as follows: ( ) facts accustomed to being associated together in the mind have a tendency to reappear together. ( ) the more frequently these facts appear together the stronger the tendency for the presence of one to insure the presence of the other. ( ) the greater the tension, excitement or concentration when these facts appear in conjunction with each other, the more certain the presence of one is to cause the presence of the other. several different types of association have been differentiated by psychologists from aristotle down. it is to be kept in mind, however, that all association types _go back to the elementary law of habit-connections among the neurones_ for their explanation. association by contiguity.--the recurrence in our minds of many of the elements from our past experience is due to the fact that at some time, possibly at many times, the recurring facts were contiguous in consciousness with some other element or fact which happens now to be again present. all have had the experience of meeting some person whom we had not seen for several months or years, and having a whole series of supposedly forgotten incidents or events connected with our former associations flood into the mind. things we did, topics we discussed, trips we took, games we played, now recur at the renewal of our acquaintance. for these are the things that were contiguous in our consciousness with our sense of the personality and appearance of our friend. and who has not in similar fashion had a whiff of perfume or the strains of a song recall to him his childhood days! contiguity is again the explanation. at the mercy of our associations.--through the law thus operating we are in a sense at the mercy of our associations, which may be bad as well as good. we may form certain lines of interest to guide our thought, and attention may in some degree direct it, but one's mental make-up is, after all, largely dependent on the character of his associations. evil thoughts, evil memories, evil imaginations--these all come about through the association of unworthy or impure images along with the good in our stream of thought. we may try to forget the base deed and banish it forever from our thinking, but lo! in an unguarded moment the nerve current shoots into the old path, and the impure thought flashes into the mind, unsought and unwelcomed. every young man who thinks he must indulge in a little sowing of wild oats before he settles down to a correct life, and so deals in unworthy thoughts and deeds, is putting a mortgage on his future; for he will find the inexorable machinery of his nervous system grinding the hated images of such things back into his mind as surely as the mill returns to the sack of the miller what he feeds into the hopper. he may refuse to harbor these thoughts, but he can no more hinder their seeking admission to his mind than he can prevent the tramp from knocking at his door. he may drive such images from his mind the moment they are discovered, and indeed is guilty if he does not; but not taking offense at this rebuff, the unwelcome thought again seeks admission. the only protection against the return of the undesirable associations is to choose lines of thought as little related to them as possible. but even then, do the best we may, an occasional "connection" will be set up, we know not how, and the unwelcome image stands staring us in the face, as the corpse of eugene aram's victim confronted him at every turn, though he thought it safely buried. a minister of my acquaintance tells me that in the holiest moments of his most exalted thought, images rise in his mind which he loathes, and from which he recoils in horror. not only does he drive them away at once, but he seeks to lock and bar the door against them by firmly resolving that he will never think of them again. but alas! that is beyond his control. the tares have been sown among the wheat, and will persist along with it until the end. in his boyhood these images were given into the keeping of his brain cells, and they are only being faithful to their trust. association by similarity and contrast.--all are familiar with the fact that like tends to suggest like. one friend reminds us of another friend when he manifests similar traits of character, shows the same tricks of manner, or has the same peculiarities of speech or gesture. the telling of a ghost or burglar story in a company will at once suggest a similar story to every person of the group, and before we know it the conversation has settled down to ghosts or burglars. one boastful boy is enough to start the gang to recounting their real or imaginary exploits. good and beautiful thoughts tend to call up other good and beautiful thoughts, while evil thoughts are likely to produce after their own kind; like produces like. another form of relationship is, however, quite as common as similars in our thinking. in certain directions we naturally think in _opposites_. black suggests white, good suggests bad, fat suggests lean, wealth suggests poverty, happiness suggests sorrow, and so on. the tendency of our thought thus to group in similars and opposites is clear when we go back to the fundamental law of association. the fact is that we more frequently assemble our thoughts in these ways than in haphazard relations. we habitually group similars together, or compare opposites in our thinking; hence these are the terms between which associative bonds are formed. partial, or selective, association.--the past is never wholly reinstated in present consciousness. many elements, because they had formed fewer associations, or because they find some obstacle to recall, are permanently dropped out and forgotten. in other words, association is always _selective_, favoring now this item of experience, now that, above the rest. it is well that this is so; for to be unable to escape from the great mass of minutiæ and unimportant detail in one's past would be intolerable, and would so cumber the mind with useless rubbish as to destroy its usefulness. we have surely all had some experience with the type of persons whose associations are so complete and impartial that all their conversation teems with unessential and irrelevant details. they cannot recount the simplest incident in its essential points but, slaves to literalness, make themselves insufferable bores by entering upon every lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. dickens, thackeray, george eliot, shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. james, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from miss austen's "emma": "'but where could _you_ hear it?' cried miss bates. 'where could you possibly hear it, mr. knightley? for it is not five minutes since i received mrs. cole's note--no, it cannot be more than five--or at least ten--for i had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out--i was only gone down to speak to patty again about the pork--jane was standing in the passage--were not you, jane?--for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. so i said i would go down and see, and jane said: "shall i go down instead? for i think you have a little cold, and patty has been washing the kitchen." "oh, my dear," said i--well, and just then came the note.'" the remedy.--the remedy for such wearisome and fruitless methods of association is, as a matter of theory, simple and easy. it is to emphasize, intensify, and dwell upon the _significant and essential_ in our thinking. the person who listens to a story, who studies a lesson, or who is a participant in any event must apply a _sense of value_, recognizing and fixing the important and relegating the trivial and unimportant to their proper level. not to train one's self to think in this discriminating way is much like learning to play a piano by striking each key with equal force! . training in association since association is at bottom nothing but habit at work in the mental processes, it follows that it, like other forms of habit, can be encouraged or suppressed by training. certainly, no part of one's education is of greater importance than the character of his associations. for upon these will largely depend not alone the _content_ of his mental stream, the stuff of his thinking, but also its _organization_, or the use made of the thought material at hand. in fact, the whole science of education rests on the laws and principles involved in setting up right systems of associative connections in the individual. the pleasure-pain motive in association.--a general law seems to obtain throughout the animal world that associative responses accompanied by pleasure tend to persist and grow stronger, while those accompanied by pain tend to weaken and fall away. the little child of two years may not understand the gravity of the offense in tearing the leaves out of books, but if its hands are sharply spatted whenever they tear a book, the association between the sight of books and tearing them will soon cease. in fact, all punishment should have for its object the use of pain in the breaking of associative bonds between certain situations and wrong responses to them. on the other hand, the dog that is being trained to perform his tricks is rewarded with a tidbit or a pat when the right response has been made. in this way the bond for this particular act is strengthened through the use of pleasure. all matter studied and learned under the stimulus of good feeling, enthusiasm, or a pleasurable sense of victory and achievement not only tends to set up more permanent and valuable associations than if learned under opposite conditions, but it also exerts a stronger appeal to our interest and appreciation. the influence of mental attitude on the matter we study raises a question as to the wisdom of assigning the committing of poetry, or bible verses, or the reading of so many pages of a literary masterpiece as a punishment for some offense. how many of us have carried away associations of dislike and bitterness toward some gem of verse or prose or scripture because of having our learning of it linked up with the thought of an imposed task set as penance for wrong-doing! one person tells me that to this day she hates the sight of tennyson because this was the volume from which she was assigned many pages to commit in atonement for her youthful delinquencies. interest as a basis for association.--associations established under the stimulus of strong interest are relatively broad and permanent, while those formed with interest flagging are more narrow and of doubtful permanence. this statement is, of course, but a particular application of the law of attention. interest brings the whole self into action. under its urging the mind is active and alert. the new facts learned are completely registered, and are assimilated to other facts to which they are related. many associative connections are formed, hence the new matter is more certain of recall, and possesses more significance and meaning. association and methods of learning.--the number and quality of our associations depends in no small degree on our methods of learning. we may be satisfied merely to impress what we learn on our memory, committing it uncritically as so many facts to be stored away as a part of our education. we may go a step beyond this and grasp the simplest and most obvious meanings, but not seek for the deeper and more fundamental relations. we may learn separate sections or divisions of a subject, accepting each as a more or less complete unit, without connecting these sections and divisions into a logical whole. but all such methods are a mistake. they do not provide for the associative bonds between the various facts or groups of facts in our knowledge, without which our facts are in danger of becoming but so much lumber in the mind. meanings, relations, definitely recognized associations, should attach to all that we learn. better far a smaller amount of _usable_ knowledge than any quantity of unorganized and undigested information, even if the latter sometimes allows us to pass examinations and receive honor grades. in short, real mastery demands that we _think_, that is _relate_ and _associate_, instead of merely _absorbing_ as we learn. . problems in observation and introspection . test the uncontrolled associations of a group of pupils by pronouncing to the class some word, as _blue_, and having the members write down words in succession as rapidly as they can, taking in each instance the first word that occurs to them. the difference in the scope, or range, of associations, can easily be studied by applying this test to, say, a fourth grade and an eighth grade and then comparing results. . have you ever been puzzled by the appearance in your mind of some fact or incident not thought of before for years? were you able to trace out the associative connection that caused the fact to appear? why are we sometimes unable to recall, when we need them, facts that we perfectly well know? . you have observed that it is possible to be able to spell certain words when they occur in a spelling lesson, but to miss them when employing them in composition. it is possible to learn a conjugation or a declension in tabular form, and then not be able to use the correct forms of words in speech or writing. relate these facts to the laws of association, and recommend a method of instruction that will remove the discrepancy. . to test the quickness of association in a class of children, copy the following words clearly in a vertical column on a chart; have your class all ready at a given signal; then display the chart before them for sixty seconds, asking them to write down on paper the exact _opposite_ of as many words as possible in one minute. be sure that all know just what they are expected to do. bad, inside, slow, short, little, soft, black, dark, sad, true, dislike, poor, well, sorry, thick, full, peace, few, below, enemy. count the number of correct opposites got by each pupil. . can you think of garrulous persons among your acquaintance the explanation of whose tiresomeness is that their association is of the _complete_ instead of the _selective_ type? watch for such illustrations in conversation and in literature (e.g., juliet's nurse). . observe children in the schoolroom for good and poor training in association. have you ever had anything that you otherwise presumably would enjoy rendered distasteful because of unpleasant associations? pass your own methods of learning in review, and also inquire into the methods used by children in study, to determine whether they are resulting in the best possible use of association. chapter xi memory every hour of our lives we call upon memory to supply us with some fact or detail from out our past. let memory wholly fail us, and we find ourselves helpless and out of joint in a world we fail to understand. a poor memory handicaps one in the pursuit of education, hampers him in business or professional success, and puts him at a disadvantage in every relation of life. on the other hand, a good memory is an asset on which the owner realizes anew each succeeding day. . the nature of memory now that you come to think of it, you can recall perfectly well that columbus discovered america in ; that your house is painted white; that it rained a week ago today. but where were these once-known facts, now remembered so easily, while they were out of your mind? where did they stay while you were not thinking of them? the common answer is, "stored away in my memory." yet no one believes that the memory is a warehouse of facts which we pack away there when we for a time have no use for them, as we store away our old furniture. what is retained.--the truth is that the simple question i asked you is by no means an easy one, and i will answer it myself by asking you an easier one: as we sit with the sunlight streaming into our room, where is the darkness which filled it last night? and where will all this light be at midnight tonight? answer these questions, and the ones i asked about your remembered facts will be answered. while it is true that, regardless of the conditions in our little room, darkness still exists wherever there is no light, and light still exists wherever there is no darkness, yet for this particular room _there is no darkness when the sun shines in_, and _there is no light when the room is filled with darkness_. so in the case of a remembered fact. although the fact that columbus discovered america some four hundred years ago, that your house is of a white color, that it rained a week ago today, exists as a fact regardless of whether your minds think of these things at all, yet the truth remains as before: for the particular mind which remembers these things, _the facts did not exist while they were out of the mind_. _it is not the remembered fact which is retained_, but the power to reproduce the fact when we require it. the physical basis of memory.--the power to reproduce a once-known fact depends ultimately on the brain. this is not hard to understand if we go back a little and consider that brain activity was concerned in every perception we have ever had, and in every fact we have ever known. indeed, it was through a certain neural activity of the cortex that you were able originally to know that columbus discovered america, that your house is white, and that it rained on a day in the past. without this cortical activity, these facts would have existed just as truly, but _you_ would never have known them. without this neural activity in the brain there is no consciousness, and to it we must look for the recurrence in consciousness of remembered facts, as well as for those which appear for the first time. how we remember.--now, if we are to have a once-known fact repeated in consciousness, or in other words _remembered_, what we must do on the physiological side is to provide for a repetition of the neural activity which was at first responsible for the fact's appearing in consciousness. the mental accompaniment of the repeated activity _is the memory_. thus, as _memory is the approximate repetition of once-experienced mental states or facts, together with the recognition of their belonging to our past, so it is accomplished by an approximate repetition of the once-performed neural process in the cortex which originally accompanied these states or facts_. the part played by the brain in memory makes it easy to understand why we find it so impossible to memorize or to recall when the brain is fatigued from long hours of work or lack of sleep. it also explains the derangement in memory that often comes from an injury to the brain, or from the toxins of alcohol, drugs or disease. dependence of memory on brain quality.--differences in memory ability, while depending in part on the training memory receives, rest ultimately on the memory-quality of the brain. james tells us that four distinct types of brains may be distinguished, and he describes them as follows: brains that are: ( ) like _marble_ to receive and like _marble_ to retain. ( ) like _wax_ to receive and like _wax_ to retain. ( ) like _marble_ to receive and like _wax_ to retain. ( ) like _wax_ to receive and like _marble_ to retain. the first type gives us those who memorize slowly and with much heroic effort, but who keep well what they have committed. the second type represents the ones who learn in a flash, who can cram up a lesson in a few minutes, but who forget as easily and as quickly as they learn. the third type characterizes the unfortunates who must labor hard and long for what they memorize, only to see it quickly slipping from their grasp. the fourth type is a rare boon to its possessor, enabling him easily to stock his memory with valuable material, which is readily available to him upon demand. the particular type of brain we possess is given us through heredity, and we can do little or nothing to change the type. whatever our type of brain, however, we can do much to improve our memory by obeying the laws upon which all good memory depends. . the four factors involved in memory nothing is more obvious than that memory cannot return to us what has never been given into its keeping, what has not been retained, or what for any reason cannot be recalled. further, if the facts given back by memory are not recognized as belonging to our past, memory would be incomplete. memory, therefore, involves the following four factors: ( ) _registration_, ( ) _retention_, ( ) _recall_, ( ) _recognition_. registration.--by registration we mean the learning or committing of the matter to be remembered. on the brain side this involves producing in the appropriate neurones the activities which, when repeated again later, cause the fact to be recalled. it is this process that constitutes what we call "impressing the facts upon the brain." nothing is more fatal to good memory than partial or faulty registration. a thing but half learned is sure to be forgotten. we often stop in the mastery of a lesson just short of the full impression needed for permanent retention and sure recall. we sometimes say to our teachers, "i cannot remember," when, as a matter of fact, we have never learned the thing we seek to recall. retention.--retention, as we have already seen, resides primarily in the brain. it is accomplished through the law of habit working in the neurones of the cortex. here, as elsewhere, habit makes an activity once performed more easy of performance each succeeding time. through this law a neural activity once performed tends to be repeated; or, in other words, a fact once known in consciousness tends to be remembered. that so large a part of our past is lost in oblivion, and out of the reach of our memory, is probably much more largely due to a failure to _recall_ than to _retain_. we say that we have forgotten a fact or a name which we cannot recall, try as hard as we may; yet surely all have had the experience of a long-striven-for fact suddenly appearing in our memory when we had given it up and no longer had use for it. it was retained all the time, else it never could have come back at all. an aged man of my acquaintance lay on his deathbed. in his childhood he had first learned to speak german; but, moving with his family when he was eight or nine years of age to an english-speaking community, he had lost his ability to speak german, and had been unable for a third of a century to carry on a conversation in his mother tongue. yet during the last days of his sickness he lost almost wholly the power to use the english language, and spoke fluently in german. during all these years his brain paths had retained the power to reproduce the forgotten words, even though for so long a time the words could not be recalled. james quotes a still more striking case of an aged woman who was seized with a fever and, during her delirious ravings, was heard talking in latin, hebrew and greek. she herself could neither read nor write, and the priests said she was possessed of a devil. but a physician unraveled the mystery. when the girl was nine years of age, a pastor, who was a noted scholar, had taken her into his home as a servant, and she had remained there until his death. during this time she had daily heard him read aloud from his books in these languages. her brain had indelibly retained the record made upon it, although for years she could not have recalled a sentence, if, indeed, she had ever been able to do so. recall.--recall depends entirely on association. there is no way to arrive at a certain fact or name that is eluding us except by means of some other facts, names, or what-not so related to the missing term as to be able to bring it into the fold. memory arrives at any desired fact only over a bridge of associations. it therefore follows that the more associations set up between the fact to be remembered and related facts already in the mind, the more certain the recall. historical dates and events should when learned be associated with important central dates and events to which they naturally attach. geographical names, places or other information should be connected with related material already in the mind. scientific knowledge should form a coherent and related whole. in short, everything that is given over to the memory for its keeping should be linked as closely as possible to material of the same sort. this is all to say that we should not expect our memory to retain and reproduce isolated, unrelated facts, but should give it the advantage of as many logical and well grounded associations as possible. recognition.--a fact reproduced by memory but not recognized as belonging to our past experience would impress us as a new fact. this would mean that memory would fail to link the present to the past. often we are puzzled to know whether we have before met a certain person, or on a former occasion told a certain story, or previously experienced a certain present state of mind which seems half familiar. such baffling mental states are usually but instances of partial and incomplete recognition. recognition no longer applies to much of our knowledge; for example, we say we remember that four times six is twenty-four, but probably none of us can recall when and where we learned this fact--we cannot _recognize_ it as belonging to our past experience. so with ten thousand other things, which we _know_ rather than remember in the strict sense. . the stuff of memory what are the forms in which memory presents the past to us? what are the elements with which it deals? what is the stuff of which it consists? images as the material of memory.--in the light of our discussion upon mental imagery, and with the aid of a little introspection, the answer is easy. i ask you to remember your home, and at once a visual image of the familiar house, with its well-known rooms and their characteristic furnishings, comes to your mind. i ask you to remember the last concert you attended, or the chorus of birds you heard recently in the woods; and there comes a flood of images, partly visual, but largely auditory, from the melodies you heard. or i ask you to remember the feast of which you partook yesterday, and gustatory and olfactory images are prominent among the others which appear. and so i might keep on until i had covered the whole range of your memory; and, whether i ask you for the simple trivial experiences of your past, for the tragic or crucial experiences, or for the most abstruse and abstract facts which you know and can recall, the case is the same: much of what memory presents to you comes in the form of _images_ or of _ideas_ of your past. images vary as to type.--we do not all remember what we call the same fact in like images or ideas. when you remembered that columbus discovered america in , some of you had an image of columbus the mariner standing on the deck of his ship, as the old picture shows him; and accompanying this image was an idea of "long agoness." others, in recalling the same fact, had an image of the coast on which he landed, and perchance felt the rocking of the boat and heard it scraping on the sand as it neared the shore. and still others saw on the printed page the words stating that columbus discovered america in . and so in an infinite variety of images or ideas we may remember what we call the same fact, though of course the fact is not really the same fact to any two of us, nor to any one of us when it comes to us on different occasions in different images. other memory material.--but sensory images are not the only material with which memory has to deal. we may also recall the bare fact that it rained a week ago today without having images of the rain. we may recall that columbus discovered america in without visual or other images of the event. as a matter of fact we do constantly recall many facts of abstract nature, such as mathematical or scientific formulæ with no imagery other than that of the words or symbols, if indeed these be present. memory may therefore use as its stuff not only images, but also a wide range of facts, ideas and meanings of all sorts. . laws underlying memory the development of a good memory depends in no small degree on the closeness with which we follow certain well-demonstrated laws. the law of association.--the law of association, as we have already seen, is fundamental. upon it the whole structure of memory depends. stating this law in neural terms we may say: brain areas which are _active together at the same time tend to establish associative paths_, so that when one of them is again active the other is also brought into activity. expressing the same truth in mental terms: if two facts or experiences _occur together in consciousness_, and one of them is later recalled, it tends to cause the other to appear also. the law of repetition.--the law of repetition is but a restatement of the law of habit, and may be formulated as follows: the _more frequently_ a certain cortical activity occurs, the more easily is its repetition brought about. stating this law in mental terms we may say: the more often a fact is recalled in consciousness the easier and more certain the recall becomes. it is upon the law of repetition that reviews and drills to fix things in the memory are based. the law of recency.--we may state the law of recency in physiological terms as follows: the _more recently_ brain centers have been employed in a certain activity, the more easily are they thrown into the same activity. this, on the mental side, means: the more recently any facts have been present in consciousness the more easily are they recalled. it is in obedience to this law that we want to rehearse a difficult lesson just before the recitation hour, or cram immediately before an examination. the working of this law also explains the tendency of all memories to fade out as the years pass by. the law of vividness.--the law of vividness is of primary importance in memorizing. on the physical side it may be expressed as follows: the _higher the tension_ or the more intense the activity of neural centers the more easily the activity is repeated. the counterpart of this law in mental terms is: _the higher the degree of attention_ or concentration when the fact is registered the more certain it is of recall. better far one impression of a high degree of vividness than several repetitions with the attention wandering or the brain too fatigued to respond. not drill alone, but drill with concentration, is necessary to sure memory,--in proof of which witness the futile results on the part of the small boy who "studies his spelling lesson over fifteen times," the while he is at the same time counting his marbles. . rules for using the memory much careful and fruitful experimentation in the field of memory has taken place in recent years. the scientists are now able to give us certain simple rules which we can employ in using our memories, even if we lack the time or opportunity to follow all their technical discussions. wholes versus parts.--probably most people in setting to work to commit to memory a poem, oration, or other such material, have a tendency to learn it first by stanzas or sections and then put the parts together to form the whole. many tests, however, have shown this to be a less effective method than to go over the whole poem or oration time after time, finally giving special attention to any particularly difficult places. the only exception to this rule would seem to be in the case of very long productions, which may be broken up into sections of reasonable length. the method of committing by wholes instead of parts not only economizes time and effort in the learning, but also gives a better sense of unity and meaning to the matter memorized. rate of forgetting.--the rate of forgetting is found to be very much more rapid immediately following the learning than after a longer time has elapsed. this is to say that of what one is going to forget of matter committed to memory approximately one-half will fall away within the first twenty-four hours and three-fourths within the first three days. since it is always economy to fix afresh matter that is fading out before it has been wholly forgotten, it will manifestly pay to review important memory material within the first day or two after it has once been memorized. divided practice.--if to commit a certain piece of material we must go over it, say, ten different times, the results are found to be much better when the entire number of repetitions are not had in immediate succession, but with reasonable intervals between. this is due, no doubt, to the well-known fact that associations tend to take form and grow more secure even after we have ceased to think specifically of the matter in hand. the intervals allow time for the associations to form their connections. it is in this sense that james says we "learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer." forcing the memory to act.--in committing matter by reading it, the memory should be forced into activity just as fast as it is able to carry part of the material. if, after reading a poem over once, parts of it can be repeated without reference to the text, the memory should be compelled to reproduce these parts. so with all other material. re-reading should be applied only at such points as the memory has not yet grasped. not a memory, but memories.--professor james has emphasized the fact, which has often been demonstrated by experimental tests, that we do not possess a memory, but a collection of memories. our memory may be very good in one line and poor in another. nor can we "train our memory" in the sense of practicing it in one line and having the improvement extend equally to other lines. committing poetry may have little or no effect in strengthening the memory for historical or scientific data. in general, the memory must be trained in the specific lines in which it is to excel. general training will not serve except as it may lead to better modes of learning what is to be memorized. . what constitutes a good memory let us next inquire what are the qualities which enter into what we call a good memory. the merchant or politician will say, "ability to remember well people's faces and names"; the teacher of history, "the ability to recall readily dates and events"; the teacher of mathematics, "the power to recall mathematical formulæ"; the hotel waiter, "the ability to keep in mind half-a-dozen orders at a time"; the manager of a corporation, "the ability to recall all the necessary details connected with the running of the concern." while these answers are very divergent, yet they may all be true for the particular person testifying; for out of them all there emerges this common truth, that _the best memory is the one which best serves its possessor_. that is, one's memory not only must be ready and exact, but must produce the right kind of material; it must bring to us what we need in our thinking. a very easy corollary at once grows out of this fact; namely, that in order to have the memory return to us the right kind of matter, we must store it with the right kind of images and ideas, for the memory cannot give back to us anything which we have not first given into its keeping. a good memory selects its material.--the best memory is not necessarily the one which impartially repeats the largest number of facts of past experience. everyone has many experiences which he never needs to have reproduced in memory; useful enough they may have been at the time, but wholly useless and irrelevant later. they have served their purpose, and should henceforth slumber in oblivion. they would be but so much rubbish and lumber if they could be recalled. everyone has surely met that particular type of bore whose memory is so faithful to details that no incident in the story he tells, no matter however trivial, is ever omitted in the recounting. his associations work in such a tireless round of minute succession, without ever being able to take a jump or a short cut, that he is powerless to separate the wheat from the chaff; so he dumps the whole indiscriminate mass into our long-suffering ears. dr. carpenter tells of a member of parliament who could repeat long legal documents and acts of parliament after one reading. when he was congratulated on his remarkable gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him, it was often a source of great inconvenience, because when he wished to recollect anything in a document he had read, he could do it only by repeating the whole from the beginning up to the point which he wished to recall. maudsley says that the kind of memory which enables a person "to read a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind's eye is not, indeed, commonly associated with high intellectual power," and gives as a reason that such a mind is hindered by the very wealth of material furnished by the memory from discerning the relations between separate facts upon which judgment and reasoning depend. it is likewise a common source of surprise among teachers that many of the pupils who could outstrip their classmates in learning and memory do not turn out to be able men. but this, says whately, "is as reasonable as to wonder that a cistern if filled should not be a perpetual fountain." it is possible for one to be so lost in a tangle of trees that he cannot see the woods. a good memory requires good thinking.--it is not, then, mere re-presentation of facts that constitutes a good memory. the pupil who can reproduce a history lesson by the page has not necessarily as good a memory as the one who remembers fewer facts, but sees the relations between those remembered, and hence is _able to choose what he will remember_. memory must be _discriminative_. it must fasten on that which is important and keep that for us. therefore we can agree that "_the art of remembering is the art of thinking_." discrimination must select the important out of our mental stream, and these images must be associated with as many others as possible which are already well fixed in memory, and hence are sure of recall when needed. in this way the old will always serve as a cue to call up the new. memory must be specialized.--and not only must memory, if it is to be a good memory, omit the generally worthless, or trivial, or irrelevant, and supply the generally useful, significant, and relevant, but it must in some degree be a _specialized memory_. it must minister to the particular needs and requirements of its owner. small consolation to you if you are a latin teacher, and are able to call up the binomial theorem or the date of the fall of constantinople when you are in dire need of a conjugation or a declension which eludes you. it is much better for the merchant and politician to have a good memory for names and faces than to be able to repeat the succession of english monarchs from alfred the great to edward vii and not be able to tell john smith from tom brown. it is much more desirable for the lawyer to be able to remember the necessary details of his case than to be able to recall all the various athletic records of the year; and so on. in order to be a good memory for _us_, our memory must be faithful in dealing with the material which constitutes the needs of our vocations. our memory may, and should, bring to us many things outside of our immediate vocations, else our lives will be narrow; but its chief concern and most accurate work must be along the path of our everyday requirements at its hands. and this works out well in connection with the physiological laws which were stated a little while since, providing that our vocations are along the line of our interests. for the things with which we work daily, and in which we are interested, will be often thought of together, and hence will become well associated. they will be frequently recalled, and hence more easily remembered; they will be vividly experienced as the inevitable result of interest, and this goes far to insure recall. . memory devices many devices have been invented for training or using the memory, and not a few worthless "systems" have been imposed by conscienceless fakers upon uninformed people. all memorizing finally must go back to the fundamental laws of brain activity and the rules growing out of these laws. there is no "royal road" to a good memory. the effects of cramming.--not a few students depend on cramming for much of their learning. if this method of study would yield as valuable permanent results, it would be by far the most sensible and economical method to use; for under the stress of necessity we often are able to accomplish results much faster than when no pressure is resting upon us. the difficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established associates; learned in an hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the application which gave them to us. facts which are needed but temporarily and which cannot become a part of our body of permanent knowledge may profitably be learned by cramming. the lawyer needs many details for the case he is trying, which not only are valueless to him as soon as the case is decided, but would positively be in his way. he may profitably cram such facts. but those facts which are to become a permanent part of his mental equipment, such as the fundamental principles of law, he cannot cram. these he must have in a logical chain which will not leave their recall dependent upon a chance cue. crammed facts may serve us during a recitation or an examination, but they never really become a part of us. nothing can take the place of the logical placing of facts if they are to be remembered with facility, and be usable in thinking when recalled. remembering isolated facts.--but after all this is taken into consideration there still remain a large number of facts which refuse to fit into any connected or logical system. or, if they do belong with some system, their connection is not very close, and we have more need for the few individual facts than for the system as a whole. hence we must have some means of remembering such facts other than by connecting them with their logical associations. such facts as may be typified by the multiplication table, certain dates, events, names, numbers, errands, and engagements of various kinds--all these need to be remembered accurately and quickly when the occasion for them arises. we must be able to recall them with facility, so that the occasion will not have passed by before we can secure them and we have failed to do our part because of the lapse. with facts of this type the means of securing a good memory are the same as in the case of logical memory, except that we must of necessity forego the linking to naturally related associates. we can, however, take advantage of the three laws which have been given. if these methods are used faithfully, then we have done what we can in the way of insuring the recall of facts of this type, unless we associate them with some artificial cue, such as tying a thread around our finger to remember an errand, or learning the multiplication table by singing it. we are not to be too ready to excuse ourselves, however, if we have forgotten to mail the letter or deliver the message; for our attention may have been very lax when we recorded the direction in the first place, and we may never have taken the trouble to think of the matter between the time it was given into our keeping and the time we were to perform the errand. mnemonic devices.--many ingenious devices have been invented to assist the memory. no doubt each one of you has some way of your own of remembering certain things committed to you, or some much-needed fact which has a tendency to elude you. you may not tie the traditional string around your finger or place your watch in the wrong pocket; but if not, you have invented some method which suits your convenience better. while many books have been written, and many lectures given exploiting mnemonic systems, they are, however, all founded upon the same general principle: namely, that of _association of ideas_ in the mind. they all make use of the same basis for memory that any of us use every time we remember anything, from the commonest event which occurred last hour to the most abstruse bit of philosophy which we may have in our minds. they all tie the fact to be remembered to some other fact which is sure of recall, and then trust the old fact to bring the new along with it when it again comes into the mind. artificial devices may be permissible in remembering the class of facts which have no logical associates in which we can relate them; but even then i cannot help feeling that if we should use the same care and ingenuity in carefully recording the seemingly unrelated facts that we do in working out the device and making the association in it, we should discover hidden relations for most of the facts we wish to remember, and we should be able to insure their recall as certainly and in a better way than through the device. then, also, we should not be in danger of handing over to the device various facts for which we should discover relations, thus placing them in the logical body of our usable knowledge where they belong. . problems in observation and introspection . carefully consider your own powers of memory and see whether you can decide which of the four types of brain you have. apply similar tests to your classmates or a group of school children whom you have a chance to observe. be sure to take into account the effects of past training or habits of memory. . watch in your own memorizing and also that of school children for failures in recall caused by lack of proper associations. why is it particularly hard to commit what one does not understand? . observe a class in a recitation or an examination and seek to discover whether any defects of memory revealed are to be explained by lack of ( ) repetition, ( ) recency, ( ) vividness in learning. . make a study of your own class and also of a group of children in school to discover their methods of memorizing. have in mind the rules for memorizing given in section of this chapter. . observe by introspection your method of recall of historical events you have studied, and note whether _images_ form an important part of your memory material; or does your recall consist chiefly of bare _facts_? in how far does this depend on your method of _learning_ the facts in the first place? . carefully consider your experience from cramming your lessons. does the material learned in this way stay with you? do you _understand_ it and find yourself able to _use_ it as well as stuff learned during a longer interval and with more time for associations to form? chapter xii thinking no word is more constantly on our lips than the word _think_. a hundred times a day we tell what we think about this thing or that. any exceptional power of thought classes us among the efficient of our generation. it is in their ability to think that men stand preëminently above the animals. . different types of thinking the term _think_, or _thinking_, is employed in so many different senses that it will be well first of all to come to an understanding as to its various uses. four different types of thinking which we shall note are:[ ] ( ) _chance_, or idle, thinking; ( ) thinking in the form of _uncritical belief_; ( ) _assimilative_ thinking; and ( ) _deliberative_ thinking. chance or idle thinking.--our thinking is of the chance or idle kind when we think to no conscious end. no particular problem is up for solution, and the stream of thought drifts along in idleness. in such thinking, immediate interest, some idle fancy, the impulse of the moment, or the suggestions from our environment determine the train of associations and give direction to our thought. in a sense, we surrender our mental bark to the winds of circumstance to drive it whithersoever they will without let or hindrance from us. since no results are sought from our thinking, none are obtained. the best of us spend more time in these idle trains of thought than we would like to admit, while inferior and untrained minds seldom rise above this barren thought level. not infrequently even when we are studying a lesson which demands our best thought power we find that an idle chain of associations has supplanted the more rigid type of thinking and appropriated the field. uncritical belief.--we often say that we think a certain thing is true or false when we have, as a matter of fact, done little or no thinking about it. we only _believe_, or uncritically accept, the common point of view as to the truth or untruth of the matter concerned. the ancients believed that the earth was flat, and the savages that eclipses were caused by animals eating up the moon. not a few people today believe that potatoes and other vegetables should be planted at a certain phase of the moon, that sickness is a visitation of providence, and that various "charms" are potent to bring good fortune or ward off disaster. probably not one in a thousand of those who accept such beliefs could give, or have ever tried to give, any rational reason for their point of view. but we must not be too harsh toward such crude illustrations of uncritical thinking. it is entirely possible that not all of us who pride ourselves on our trained powers of thought could give good reasons discovered by our own thinking why we think our political party, our church, or our social organization is better than some other one. how few of us, after all, really _discover_ our creed, _join_ a church, or _choose_ a political party! we adopt the points of view of our nation or our group much as we adopt their customs and dress--not because we are convinced by thinking that they are best, but because they are less trouble. assimilative thinking.--it is this type of thinking that occupies us when we seek to appropriate new facts or ideas and understand them; that is, relate them to knowledge already on hand. we think after this fashion in much of our study in schools and textbooks. the problem for our thought is not so much one of invention or discovery as of grasp and assimilation. our thinking is to apprehend meanings and relations, and so unify and give coherence to our knowledge. in the absence of this type of thinking one may commit to memory many facts that he does not understand, gather much information that contains little meaning to him, and even achieve very creditable scholastic grades that stand for a small amount of education or development. for all information, to become vital and usable, must be thought into relation to our present active, functioning body of knowledge; therefore assimilative thinking is fundamental to true mastery and learning. deliberative thinking.--deliberative thinking constitutes the highest type of thought process. in order to do deliberative thinking there is necessary, first of all, what dewey calls a "split-road" situation. a traveler going along a well-beaten highway, says dr. dewey, does not deliberate; he simply keeps on going. but let the highway split into two roads at a fork, only one of which leads to the desired destination, and now a problem confronts him; he must take one road or the other, but _which_? the intelligent traveler will at once go to _seeking for evidence_ as to which road he should choose. he will balance this fact against that fact, and this probability against that probability, in an effort to arrive at a solution of his problem. before we can engage in deliberative thinking we must be confronted by some problem, some such "_split-road_" situation in our mental stream--we must have something to think about. it is this fact that makes one writer say that the great purpose of one's education is not to solve all his problems for him. it is rather to help him ( ) to _discover_ problems, or "_split-road_" situations, ( ) to assist him in gathering the facts necessary for their solution, and ( ) to train him in the weighing of his facts or evidence, that is, in deliberative thinking. only as we learn to recognize the true problems that confront us in our own lives and in society about us can we become thinkers in the best sense. our own plans and projects, the questions of right and wrong that are constantly arising, the social, political and religious problems awaiting solution, all afford the opportunity and the necessity for deliberative thinking. and unhappy is the pupil whose school work does not set the problems and employ the methods which will insure training in this as well as in the assimilative type of thinking. every school subject, besides supplying certain information to be "learned," should present its problems requiring true deliberative thinking within the range of development and ability of the pupil, and no subject--literature, history, science, language--is without many such problems. . the function of thinking all true thinking is for the purpose of discovering relations between the things we think about. imagine a world in which nothing is related to anything else; in which every object perceived, remembered, or imagined, stands absolutely by itself, independent and self-sufficient! what a chaos it would be! we might perceive, remember, and imagine all the various objects we please, but without the power to think them together, they would all be totally unrelated, and hence have no meaning. meaning depends on relations.--to have a rational meaning for us, things must always be defined in terms of other things, or in terms of their uses. _fuel_ is that which feeds _fire_. _food_ is what is eaten for _nourishment_. a _locomotive_ is a machine for _drawing a train_. _books_ are to _read_, _pianos_ to _play_, _balls_ to _throw_, _schools_ to _instruct_, _friends_ to _enjoy_, and so on through the whole list of objects which we know or can define. everything depends for its meaning on its relation to other things; and the more of these relations we can discover, the more fully do we see the meaning. thus balls may have other uses than to throw, schools other functions than to instruct, and friends mean much more to us than mere enjoyment. and just in the degree in which we have realized these different relations, have we defined the object, or, in other words, have we seen its meaning. the function of thinking is to discover relations.--now it is by _thinking_ that these relations are discovered. this is the function of thinking. thinking takes the various separate items of our experience and discovers to us the relations existing among them, and builds them together into a unified, related, and usable body of knowledge, threading each little bit on the string of relationship which runs through the whole. it was, no doubt, this thought which tennyson had in mind when he wrote: flower in the crannied wall, i pluck you out of the crannies, i hold you here, root and all, in my hand, little flower--but if i could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, i should know what god and man is. starting in with even so simple a thing as a little flower, if he could discover all the relations which every part bears to every other part and to all other things besides, he would finally reach the meaning of god and man. for each separate thing, be it large or small, forms a link in an unbroken chain of relationships which binds the universe into an ordered whole. near and remote relations.--the relations discovered through our thinking may be very close and simple ones, as when a child sees the relation between his bottle and his dinner; or they may be very remote ones, as when newton saw the relation between the falling of an apple and the motion of the planets in their orbits. but whether simple or remote, the seeing of the relationships is in both cases alike thinking; for thinking is nothing, in its last analysis, but the discovering of the relationships which exist between the various objects in our mental stream. thinking passes through all grades of complexity, from the first faint dawnings in the mind of the babe when it sees the relation between the mother and its feeding, on to the mighty grasp of the sage who is able to "think god's thoughts after him." but it all comes to the same end finally--the bringing to light of new meanings through the discovery of new relations. and whatever does this is thinking. child and adult thinking.--what constitutes the difference in the thinking of the child and that of the sage? let us see whether we can discover this difference. in the first place the relations seen by the child are _immediate_ relations: they exist between simple percepts or images; the remote and the general are beyond his reach. he has not had sufficient experience to enable him to discover remote relations. he cannot think things which are absent from him, or which he has never known. the child could by no possibility have seen in the falling apple what newton saw; for the child knew nothing of the planets in their orbits, and hence could not see relations in which these formed one of the terms. the sage, on the other hand, is not limited to his immediate percepts or their images. he can see remote relations. he can go beyond individuals, and think in classes. the falling apple is not a mere falling apple to him, but one of a _class of falling bodies_. besides a rich experience full of valuable facts, the trained thinker has acquired also the habit of looking out for relations; he has learned that this is the method _par excellence_ of increasing his store of knowledge and of rendering effective the knowledge he has. he has learned how to think. the chief business of the child is the collection of the materials of thought, seeing only the more necessary and obvious relations as he proceeds; his chief business when older grown is to seek out the network of relations which unites this mass of material, and through this process to systematize and give new meanings to the whole. . the mechanism of thinking it is evident from the foregoing discussion that we may include under the term thinking all sorts of mental processes by which relations are apprehended between different objects of thought. thus young children think as soon as they begin to understand something of the meaning of the objects of their environment. even animals think by means of simple and direct associations. thinking may therefore go on in terms of the simplest and most immediate, or the most complex and distant relationships. sensations and percepts as elements in thinking.--relations seen between sensations would mean something, but not much; relations seen between _objects_ immediately present to the senses would mean much more; but our thinking must go far beyond the present, and likewise far beyond individual objects. it must be able to annihilate both time and space, and to deal with millions of individuals together in one group or class. only in this way can our thinking go beyond that of the lower animals; for a wise rat, even, may come to see the relation between a trap and danger, or a horse the relation between pulling with his teeth at the piece of string on the gate latch, and securing his liberty. but it takes the farther-reaching mind of man to _invent_ the trap and the latch. perception alone does not go far enough. it is limited to immediately present objects and their most obvious relations. the perceptual image is likewise subject to similar limitations. while it enables us to dispense with the immediate presence of the object, yet it deals with separate individuals; and the world is too full of individual objects for us to deal with them separately. it is in _conception_, _judgment_, and _reasoning_ that true thinking takes place. our next purpose will therefore be to study these somewhat more closely, and see how they combine in our thinking. . the concept fortunately for our thinking, the great external world, with its millions upon millions of individual objects, is so ordered that these objects can be grouped into comparatively few great classes; and for many purposes we can deal with the class as a whole instead of with the separate individuals of the class. thus there are an infinite number of individual objects in the world which are composed of _matter_. yet all these myriads of individuals may be classed under the two great heads of _inanimate_ and _animate_. taking one of these again: all animate forms may be classed as either _plants_ or _animals_. and these classes may again be subdivided indefinitely. animals include mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, mollusks, and many other classes besides, each class of which may be still further separated into its _orders_, _families_, _genera_, _species_, and _individuals_. this arrangement economizes our thinking by allowing us to think in large terms. the concepts serve to group and classify.--but the somewhat complicated form of classification just described did not come to man ready-made. someone had to _see_ the relationship existing among the myriads of animals of a certain class, and group these together under the general term _mammals_. likewise with birds, reptiles, insects, and all the rest. in order to accomplish this, many individuals of each class had to be observed, the qualities common to all members of the class discriminated from those not common, and the common qualities retained as the measure by which to test the admission of other individuals into this class. the process of classification is made possible by what the psychologist calls the _concept_. the concept enables us to think _birds_ as well as bluebirds, robins, and wrens; it enables us to think _men_ as well as tom, dick, and harry. in other words, _the concept lies at the bottom of all thinking which rises above the seeing of the simplest relations between immediately present objects_. growth of a concept.--we can perhaps best understand the nature of the concept if we watch its growth in the thinking of a child. let us see how the child forms the concept _dog_, under which he is able finally to class the several hundred or the several thousand different dogs with which his thinking requires him to deal. the child's first acquaintance with a dog is, let us suppose, with a pet poodle, white in color, and named _gyp_. at this stage in the child's experience, _dog_ and _gyp_ are entirely synonymous, including gyp's color, size, and all other qualities which the child has discovered. but now let him see another pet poodle which is like gyp except that it is black in color. here comes the first cleavage between _gyp_ and _dog_ as synonyms: _dog_ no longer means white, but may mean _black_. next let the child see a brown spaniel. not only will white and black now no longer answer to _dog_, but the roly-poly poodle form also has been lost; for the spaniel is more slender. let the child go on from this until he has seen many different dogs of all varieties: poodles, bulldogs, setters, shepherds, cockers, and a host of others. what has happened to his _dog_, which at the beginning meant the one particular little individual with which he played? _dog_ is no longer white or black or brown or gray: _color_ is not an essential quality, so it has dropped out; _size_ is no longer essential except within very broad limits; _shagginess_ or _smoothness_ of coat is a very inconstant quality, so this is dropped; _form_ varies so much from the fat pug to the slender hound that it is discarded, except within broad limits; _good nature_, _playfulness_, _friendliness_, and a dozen other qualities are likewise found not to belong in common to _all_ dogs, and so have had to go; and all that is left to his _dog_ is _four-footedness_, and a certain general _form_, and a few other dog qualities of habit of life and disposition. as the term _dog_ has been gaining in _extent_, that is, as more individuals have been observed and classed under it, it has correspondingly been losing in _content_, or it has been losing in the specific qualities which belong to it. yet it must not be thought that the process is altogether one of elimination; for new qualities which are present in all the individuals of a class, but at first overlooked, are continually being discovered as experience grows, and built into the developing concept. definition of concept.--a concept, then, is _our general idea or notion of a class of individual objects_. its function is to enable us to classify our knowledge, and thus deal with classes or universals in our thinking. often the basis of a concept consists of an _image_, as when you get a hazy visual image of a mass of people when i suggest _mankind_ to you. yet the core, or the vital, functioning part of a concept is its _meaning_. whether this meaning attaches to an image or a word or stands relatively or completely independent of either, does not so much matter; but our meanings must be right, else all our thinking is wrong. language and the concept.--we think in words. none has failed to watch the flow of his thought as it is carried along by words like so many little boats moving along the mental stream, each with its freight of meaning. and no one has escaped the temporary balking of his thought by failure to find a suitable word to convey the intended meaning. what the grammarian calls the _common nouns_ of our language are the words by which we name our concepts and are able to speak of them to others. we define a common noun as "the name of a class," and we define a concept as the meaning or idea we have of a class. it is easy to see that when we have named these class _ideas_ we have our list of common nouns. the study of the language of a people may therefore reveal much of their type of thought. the necessity for growing concepts.--the development of our concepts constitutes a large part of our education. for it is evident that, since thinking rests so fundamentally on concepts, progress in our mental life must depend on a constant growth in the number and character of our concepts. not only must we keep on adding new concepts, but the old must not remain static. when our concepts stop growing, our minds have ceased to grow--we no longer learn. this arrest of development is often seen in persons who have settled into a life of narrow routine, where the demands are few and of a simple nature. unless they rise above their routine, they early become "old fogies." their concepts petrify from lack of use and the constant reconstruction which growth necessitates. on the other hand, the person who has upon him the constant demand to meet new situations or do better in old ones will keep on enriching his old concepts and forming new ones, or else, unable to do this, he will fail in his position. and the person who keeps on steadily enriching his concepts has discovered the secret of perpetual youth so far as his mental life is concerned. for him there is no old age; his thought will be always fresh, his experience always accumulating, and his knowledge growing more valuable and usable. . judgment but in the building up of percepts and concepts, as well as in making use of them after they are formed, another process of thinking enters; namely, the process of _judging_. nature of judgment.--judging enters more or less into all our thinking, from the simplest to the most complex. the babe lies staring at his bottle, and finally it dawns on his sluggish mind that this is the object from which he gets his dinner. he has performed a judgment. that is, he has alternately directed his attention to the object before him and to his image of former nursing, discovered the relation existing between the two, and affirmed to himself, "this is what gives me my dinner." "bottle" and "what-gives-me-my-dinner" are essentially identical to the child. _judgment is, then, the affirmation of the essential identity of meaning of two objects of thought._ even if the proposition in which we state our judgment has in it a negative, the definition will still hold, for the mental process is the same in either case. it is as much a judgment if we say, "the day is not-cold," as if we say, "the day is cold." judgment used in percepts and concepts.--how judgment enters into the forming of our percepts may be seen from the illustration just given. the act by which the child perceived his bottle had in it a large element of judging. he had to compare two objects of thought--the one from past experience in the form of images, and the other from the present object, in the form of sensations from the bottle--and then affirm their essential identity. of course it is not meant that what i have described _consciously_ takes place in the mind of the child; but some such process lies at the bottom of every perception, whether of the child or anyone else. likewise it may be seen that the forming of concepts depends on judgment. every time that we meet a new object which has to be assigned its place in our classification, judgment is required. suppose the child, with his immature concept _dog_, sees for the first time a greyhound. he must compare this new specimen with his concept _dog_, and decide that this is or is not a dog. if he discovers the identity of meaning in the essentials of the two objects of thought, his judgment will be affirmative, and his concept will be modified in whatever extent _greyhound_ will affect it. judgment leads to general truths.--but judgment goes much farther than to assist in building percepts and concepts. it takes our concepts after they are formed and discovers and affirms relations between them, thus enabling us finally to relate classes as well as individuals. it carries our thinking over into the realm of the universal, where we are not hampered by particulars. let us see how this is done. suppose we have the concept _man_ and the concept _animal_, and that we think of these two concepts in their relation to each other. the mind analyzes each into its elements, compares them, and finds the essential identity of meaning in a sufficient number to warrant the judgment, _man is an animal_. this judgment has given a new bit of knowledge, in that it has discovered to us a new relation between two great classes, and hence given both, in so far, a new meaning and a wider definition. and as this new relation does not pertain to any particular man or any particular animal, but includes all individuals in each class, it has carried us over into universals, so that we have a _general_ truth and will not have to test each individual man henceforth to see whether he fits into this relation. judgments also, as we will see later, constitute the material for our reasoning. hence upon their validity will depend the validity of our reasoning. the validity of judgments.--now, since every judgment is made up of an affirmation of relation existing between two terms, it is evident that the validity of the judgment will depend on the thoroughness of our knowledge of the terms compared. if we know but few of the attributes of either term of the judgment, the judgment is clearly unsafe. imperfect concepts lie at the basis of many of our wrong judgments. a young man complained because his friend had been expelled from college for alleged misbehavior. he said, "mr. a---- was the best boy in the institution." it is very evident that someone had made a mistake in judgment. surely no college would want to expel the best boy in the institution. either my complainant or the authorities of the college had failed to understand one of the terms in the judgment. either "mr. a----" or "the best boy in the institution" had been wrongly interpreted by someone. likewise, one person will say, "jones is a good man," while another will say, "jones is a rascal." such a discrepancy in judgment must come from a lack of acquaintance with jones or a lack of knowledge of what constitutes a good man or a rascal. no doubt most of us are prone to make judgments with too little knowledge of the terms we are comparing, and it is usually those who have the least reason for confidence in their judgments who are the most certain that they cannot be mistaken. the remedy for faulty judgments is, of course, in making ourselves more certain of the terms involved, and this in turn sends us back for a review of our concepts or the experience upon which the terms depend. it is evident that no two persons can have just the same concepts, for all have not had the same experience out of which their concepts came. the concepts may be named the same, and may be nearly enough alike so that we can usually understand each other; but, after all, i have mine and you have yours, and if we could each see the other's in their true light, no doubt we should save many misunderstandings and quarrels. . reasoning all the mental processes which we have so far described find their culmination and highest utility in _reasoning_. not that reasoning comes last in the list of mental activities, and cannot take place until all the others have been completed, for reasoning is in some degree present almost from the dawn of consciousness. the difference between the reasoning of the child and that of the adult is largely one of degree--of reach. reasoning goes farther than any of the other processes of cognition, for it takes the relations expressed in judgments and out of these relations evolves still other and more ultimate relations. nature of reasoning.--it is hard to define reasoning so as to describe the precise process which occurs; for it is so intermingled with perception, conception, and judgment, that one can hardly separate them even for purposes of analysis, much less to separate them functionally. we may, however, define reasoning provisionally as _thinking by means of a series of judgments with the purpose of arriving at some definite end or conclusion_. what does this mean? professor angell has stated the matter so clearly that i will quote his illustration of the case: "suppose that we are about to make a long journey which necessitates the choice from among a number of possible routes. this is a case of the genuinely problematic kind. it requires reflection, a weighing of the _pros_ and _cons_, and giving of the final decision in favor of one or other of several alternatives. in such a case the procedure of most of us is after this order. we think of one route as being picturesque and wholly novel, but also as being expensive. we think of another as less interesting, but also as less expensive. a third is, we discover, the most expedient, but also the most costly of the three. we find ourselves confronted, then, with the necessity of choosing with regard to the relative merits of cheapness, beauty, and speed. we proceed to consider these points in the light of all our interests, and the decision more or less makes itself. we find, for instance, that we must, under the circumstances, select the cheapest route." how judgments function in reasoning.--such a line of thinking is very common to everyone, and one that we carry out in one form or another a thousand times every day we live. when we come to look closely at the steps involved in arriving at a conclusion, we detect a series of judgments--often not very logically arranged, to be sure, but yet so related that the result is safely reached in the end. we compare our concept of, say, the first route and our concept of picturesqueness, decide they agree, and affirm the judgment, "this route is picturesque." likewise we arrive at the judgment, "this route is also expensive, it is interesting, etc." then we take the other routes and form our judgments concerning them. these judgments are all related to each other in some way, some of them being more intimately related than others. which judgments remain as the significant ones, the ones which are used to solve the problem finally, depends on which concepts are the most vital for us with reference to the ultimate end in view. if time is the chief element, then the form of our reasoning would be something like this: "two of the routes require more than three days: hence i must take the third route." if economy is the important end, the solution would be as follows: "two routes cost more than $ , ; i cannot afford to pay more than $ ; i therefore must patronize the third route." in both cases it is evident that the conclusion is reached through a comparison of two or more judgments. this is the essential difference between judgment and reasoning. whereas judgment discovers relations between concepts, _reasoning discovers relations between judgments, and from this evolves a new judgment which is the conclusion sought_. the example given well illustrates the ordinary method by which we reason to conclusions. deduction and the syllogism.--logic may take the conclusion, with the two judgments on which it is based, and form the three into what is called a _syllogism_, of which the following is a classical type: all men are mortal; socrates is a man, therefore socrates is mortal. the first judgment is in the form of a proposition which is called the _major premise_, because it is general in its nature, including all men. the second is the _minor premise_, since it deals with a particular man. the third is the _conclusion_, in which a new relation is discovered between socrates and mortality. this form of reasoning is _deductive_, that is, it proceeds from the general to the particular. much of our reasoning is an abbreviated form of the syllogism, and will readily expand into it. for instance, we say, "it will rain tonight, for there is lightning in the west." expanded into the syllogism form it would be, "lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain; there is lightning in the west this evening; therefore, it will rain tonight." while we do not commonly think in complete syllogisms, it is often convenient to cast our reasoning in this form to test its validity. for example, a fallacy lurks in the generalization, "lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain." hence the conclusion is of doubtful validity. induction.--deduction is a valuable form of reasoning, but a moment's reflection will show that something must precede the syllogism in our reasoning. the _major premise must be accounted for_. how are we able to say that all men are mortal, and that lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain? how was this general truth arrived at? there is only one way, namely, through the observation of a large number of particular instances, or through _induction_. induction is the method of proceeding from the particular to the general. many men are observed, and it is found that all who have been observed have died under a certain age. it is true that not all men have been observed to die, since many are now living, and many more will no doubt come and live in the world whom _we_ cannot observe, since mortality will have overtaken us before their advent. to this it may be answered that the men now living have not yet lived up to the limit of their time, and, besides, they have within them the causes working whose inevitable effect has always been and always will be death; likewise with the men yet unborn, they will possess the same organism as we, whose very nature necessitates mortality. in the case of the premonitions of rain, the generalization is not so safe, for there have been exceptions. lightning in the west at night is not always followed by rain, nor can we find inherent causes as in the other case which necessitates rain as an effect. the necessity for broad induction.--thus it is seen that our generalizations, or major premises, are of all degrees of validity. in the case of some, as the mortality of man, millions of cases have been observed and no exceptions found, but on the contrary, causes discovered whose operation renders the result inevitable. in others, as, for instance, in the generalization once made, "all cloven-footed animals chew their cud," not only had the examination of individual cases not been carried so far as in the former case when the generalization was made, but there were found no inherent causes residing in cloven-footed animals which make it necessary for them to chew their cud. that is, cloven feet and cud-chewing do not of necessity go together, and the case of the pig disproves the generalization. in practically no instance, however, is it possible for us to examine every case upon which a generalization is based; after examining a sufficient number of cases, and particularly if there are supporting causes, we are warranted in making the "inductive leap," or in proceeding at once to state our generalization as a working hypothesis. of course it is easy to see that if we have a wrong generalization, if our major premise is invalid, all that follows in our chain of reasoning will be worthless. this fact should render us careful in making generalizations on too narrow a basis of induction. we may have observed that certain red-haired people of our acquaintance are quick-tempered, but we are not justified from this in making the general statement that all red-haired people are quick-tempered. not only have we not examined a sufficient number of cases to warrant such a conclusion, but we have found in the red hair not even a cause of quick temper, but only an occasional concomitant. the interrelation of induction and deduction.--induction and deduction must go hand in hand in building up our world of knowledge. induction gives us the particular facts out of which our system of knowledge is built, furnishes us with the data out of which general truths are formed; deduction allows us to start with the generalization furnished us by induction, and from this vantage ground to organize and systematize our knowledge and, through the discovery of its relations, to unify it and make it usable. deduction starts with a general truth and asks the question, "what new relations are made necessary among particular facts by this truth?" induction starts with particulars, and asks the question, "to what general truth do these separate facts lead?" each method of reasoning needs the other. deduction must have induction to furnish the facts for its premises; induction must have deduction to organize these separate facts into a unified body of knowledge. "he only sees well who sees the whole in the parts, and the parts in the whole." . problems in observation and introspection . watch your own thinking for examples of each of the four types described. observe a class of children in a recitation or at study and try to decide which type is being employed by each child. what proportion of the time supposedly given to study is given over to _chance_ or idle thinking? to _assimilative_ thinking? to _deliberative_ thinking? . observe children at work in school with the purpose of determining whether they are being taught to _think_, or only to memorize certain facts. do you find that definitions whose meaning is not clear are often required of children? which should come first, the definition or the meaning and application of it? . it is of course evident from the relation of induction and deduction that the child's natural mode of learning a subject is by induction. observe the teaching of children to determine whether inductive methods are commonly used. outline an inductive lesson in arithmetic, physiology, geography, civics, etc. . what concepts have you now which you are aware are very meager? what is your concept of _mountain?_ how many have you seen? have you any concepts which you are working very hard to enrich? . recall some judgment which you have made and which proved to be false, and see whether you can now discover what was wrong with it. do you find the trouble to be an inadequate concept? what constitutes "good judgment"? "poor judgment"? did you ever make a mistake in an example in, say, percentage, by saying "this is the base," when it proved not to be? what was the cause of the error? . can you recall any instance in which you made too hasty a generalization when you had observed but few cases upon which to base your premise? what of your reasoning which followed? . see whether you can show that validity of reasoning rests ultimately on correct perceptions. what are you doing at present to increase your power of thinking? . how ought this chapter to help one in making a better teacher? a better student? chapter xiii instinct nothing is more wonderful than nature's method of endowing each individual at the beginning with all the impulses, tendencies and capacities that are to control and determine the outcome of the life. the acorn has the perfect oak tree in its heart; the complete butterfly exists in the grub; and man at his highest powers is present in the babe at birth. education _adds_ nothing to what heredity supplies, but only develops what is present from the first. we are a part of a great unbroken procession of life, which began at the beginning and will go on till the end. each generation receives, through heredity, the products of the long experience through which the race has passed. the generation receiving the gift today lives its own brief life, makes its own little contribution to the sum total and then passes on as millions have done before. through heredity, the achievements, the passions, the fears, and the tragedies of generations long since moldered to dust stir our blood and tone our nerves for the conflict of today. . the nature of instinct every child born into the world has resting upon him an unseen hand reaching out from the past, pushing him out to meet his environment, and guiding him in the start upon his journey. this impelling and guiding power from the past we call _instinct_. in the words of mosso: "instinct is the voice of past generations reverberating like a distant echo in the cells of the nervous system. we feel the breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who lived on acorns and struggled like wild beasts, dying naked in the forests, down to the virtue and toil of our father, the fear and love of our mother." the babe's dependence on instinct.--the child is born ignorant and helpless. it has no memory, no reason, no imagination. it has never performed a conscious act, and does not know how to begin. it must get started, but how? it has no experience to direct it, and is unable to understand or imitate others of its kind. it is at this point that instinct comes to the rescue. the race has not given the child a mind ready made--that must develop; but it has given him a ready-made nervous system, ready to respond with the proper movements when it receives the touch of its environment through the senses. and this nervous system has been so trained during a limitless past that its responses are the ones which are necessary for the welfare of its owner. it can do a hundred things without having to wait to learn them. burdette says of the new-born child, "nobody told him what to do. nobody taught him. he knew. placed suddenly on the guest list of this old caravansary, he knew his way at once to two places in it--his bedroom and the dining-room." a thousand generations of babies had done the same thing in the same way, and each had made it a little easier for this particular baby to do his part without learning how. definition of instinct.--_instincts are the tendency to act in certain definite ways, without previous education and without a conscious end in view._ they are a tendency to _act_; for some movement, or motor adjustment, is the response to an instinct. they do not require previous _education_, for none is possible with many instinctive acts: the duck does not have to be taught to swim or the baby to suck. they have no conscious _end_ in view, though the result may be highly desirable. says james: "the cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, etc., not because he has any notion either of life or death, or of self, or of preservation. he has probably attained to no one of these conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. he acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he _must_ pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears he _must_ retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he _must_ withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. his nervous system is to a great extent a pre-organized bundle of such reactions. they are as fatal as sneezing, and exactly correlated to their special excitants as it to its own."[ ] you ask, why does the lark rise on the flash of a sunbeam from his meadow to the morning sky, leaving a trail of melody to mark his flight? why does the beaver build his dam, and the oriole hang her nest? why are myriads of animal forms on the earth today doing what they were countless generations ago? why does the lover seek the maid, and the mother cherish her young? _because the voice of the past speaks to the present, and the present has no choice but to obey._ instincts are racial habits.--instincts are the habits of the race which it bequeaths to the individual; the individual takes these for his start, and then modifies them through education, and thus adapts himself to his environment. through his instincts, the individual is enabled to short-cut racial experience, and begin at once on life activities which the race has been ages in acquiring. instinct preserves to us what the race has achieved in experience, and so starts us out where the race left off. unmodified instinct is blind.--many of the lower animal forms act on instinct blindly, unable to use past experience to guide their acts, incapable of education. some of them carry out seemingly marvelous activities, yet their acts are as automatic as those of a machine and as devoid of foresight. a species of mud wasp carefully selects clay of just the right consistency, finds a somewhat sheltered nook under the eaves, and builds its nest, leaving one open door. then it seeks a certain kind of spider, and having stung it so as to benumb without killing, carries it into the new-made nest, lays its eggs on the body of the spider so that the young wasps may have food immediately upon hatching out, then goes out and plasters the door over carefully to exclude all intruders. wonderful intelligence? not intelligence at all. its acts were dictated not by plans for the future, but by pressure from the past. let the supply of clay fail, or the race of spiders become extinct, and the wasp is helpless and its species will perish. likewise the _race_ of bees and ants have done wonderful things, but _individual_ bees and ants are very stupid and helpless when confronted by any novel conditions to which their race has not been accustomed. man starts in as blindly as the lower animals; but, thanks to his higher mental powers, this blindness soon gives way to foresight, and he is able to formulate purposeful ends and adapt his activities to their accomplishment. possessing a larger number of instincts than the lower animals have, man finds possible a greater number of responses to a more complex environment than do they. this advantage, coupled with his ability to reconstruct his experience in such a way that he secures constantly increasing control over his environment, easily makes man the superior of all the animals, and enables him to exploit them for his own further advancement. . law of the appearance and disappearance of instincts no child is born with all its instincts ripe and ready for action. yet each individual contains within his own inner nature the law which determines the order and time of their development. instincts appear in succession as required.--it is not well that we should be started on too many different lines of activity at once, hence our instincts do not all appear at the same time. only as fast as we need additional activities do they ripen. our very earliest activities are concerned chiefly with feeding, hence we first have the instincts which prompt us to take our food and to cry for it when we are hungry. also we find useful such abbreviated instincts, called _reflexes_, as sneezing, snuffling, gagging, vomiting, starting, etc.; hence we have the instincts enabling us to do these things. soon comes the time for teething, and, to help the matter along, the instinct of biting enters, and the rubber ring is in demand. the time approaches when we are to feed ourselves, so the instinct arises to carry everything to the mouth. now we have grown strong and must assume an erect attitude, hence the instinct to sit up and then to stand. locomotion comes next, and with it the instinct to creep and walk. also a language must be learned, and we must take part in the busy life about us and do as other people do; so the instinct to imitate arises that we may learn things quickly and easily. we need a spur to keep us up to our best effort, so the instinct of emulation emerges. we must defend ourselves, so the instinct of pugnacity is born. we need to be cautious, hence the instinct of fear. we need to be investigative, hence the instinct of curiosity. much self-directed activity is necessary for our development, hence the play instinct. it is best that we should come to know and serve others, so the instincts of sociability and sympathy arise. we need to select a mate and care for offspring, hence the instinct of love for the other sex, and the parental instinct. this is far from a complete list of our instincts, and i have not tried to follow the order of their development, but i have given enough to show the origin of many of our life's most important activities. many instincts are transitory.--not only do instincts ripen by degrees, entering our experience one by one as they are needed, but they drop out when their work is done. some, like the instinct of self-preservation, are needed our lifetime through, hence they remain to the end. others, like the play instinct, serve their purpose and disappear or are modified into new forms in a few years, or a few months. the life of the instinct is always as transitory as is the necessity for the activity to which it gives rise. no instinct remains wholly unaltered in man, for it is constantly being made over in the light of each new experience. the instinct of self-preservation is modified by knowledge and experience, so that the defense of the man against threatened danger would be very different from that of the child; yet the instinct to protect oneself in _some_ way remains. on the other hand, the instinct to romp and play is less permanent. it may last into adult life, but few middle-aged or old people care to race about as do children. their activities are occupied in other lines, and they require less physical exertion. contrast with these two examples such instincts as sucking, creeping, and crying, which are much more fleeting than the play instinct, even. with dentition comes another mode of eating, and sucking is no more serviceable. walking is a better mode of locomotion than creeping, so the instinct to creep soon dies. speech is found a better way than crying to attract attention to distress, so this instinct drops out. many of our instincts not only would fail to be serviceable in our later lives, but would be positively in the way. each serves its day, and then passes over into so modified a form as not to be recognized, or else drops out of sight altogether. seemingly useless instincts.--indeed it is difficult to see that some instincts serve a useful purpose at any time. the pugnacity and greediness of childhood, its foolish fears, the bashfulness of youth--these seem to be either useless or detrimental to development. in order to understand the workings of instinct, however, we must remember that it looks in two directions; into the future for its application, and into the past for its explanation. we should not be surprised if the experiences of a long past have left behind some tendencies which are not very useful under the vastly different conditions of today. nor should we be too sure that an activity whose precise function in relation to development we cannot discover has no use at all. each instinct must be considered not alone in the light of what it means to its possessor today, but of what it means to all his future development. the tail of a polliwog seems a very useless appendage so far as the adult frog is concerned, yet if the polliwog's tail is cut off a perfect frog never develops. instincts to be utilized when they appear.--a man may set the stream to turning his mill wheels today or wait for twenty years--the power is there ready for him when he wants it. instincts must be utilized when they present themselves, else they disappear--never, in most cases, to return. birds kept caged past the flying time never learn to fly well. the hunter must train his setter when the time is ripe, or the dog can never be depended upon. ducks kept away from the water until full grown have almost as little inclination for it as chickens. the child whom the pressure of circumstances or unwise authority of parents keeps from mingling with playmates and participating in their plays and games when the social instinct is strong upon him, will in later life find himself a hopeless recluse to whom social duties are a bore. the boy who does not hunt and fish and race and climb at the proper time for these things, will find his taste for them fade away, and he will become wedded to a sedentary life. the youth and maiden must be permitted to "dress up" when the impulse comes to them, or they are likely ever after to be careless in their attire. instincts as starting points.--most of our habits have their rise in instincts, and all desirable instincts should be seized upon and transformed into habits before they fade away. says james in his remarkable chapter on instinct: "in all pedagogy the great thing is to strike while the iron is hot, and to seize the wave of the pupils' interest in each successive subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and a habit of skill acquired--a headway of interest, in short, secured, on which afterwards the individual may float. there is a happy moment for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in natural history, and presently dissectors and botanists; then for initiating them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of physical and chemical law. later, introspective psychology and the metaphysical and religious mysteries take their turn; and, last of all, the drama of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the term. in each of us a saturation point is soon reached in all these things; the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless the topic is associated with some urgent personal need that keeps our wits constantly whetted about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and live on what we learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive, without adding to the store." there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. the more important human instincts.--it will be impossible in this brief statement to give a complete catalogue of the human instincts, much less to discuss each in detail. we must content ourselves therefore with naming the more important instincts, and finally discussing a few of them: _sucking_, _biting_, _chewing_, _clasping objects with the fingers_, _carrying to the mouth_, _crying_, _smiling_, _sitting up_, _standing_, _locomotion_, _vocalization_, _imitation_, _emulation_, _pugnacity_, _resentment_, _anger_, _sympathy_, _hunting and fighting_, _fear_, _acquisitiveness_, _play_, _curiosity_, _sociability_, _modesty_, _secretiveness_, _shame_, _love_, _and jealousy_ may be said to head the list of our instincts. it will be impossible in our brief space to discuss all of this list. only a few of the more important will be noticed. . the instinct of imitation no individual enters the world with a large enough stock of instincts to start him doing all the things necessary for his welfare. instinct prompts him to eat when he is hungry, but does not tell him to use a knife and fork and spoon; it prompts him to use vocal speech, but does not say whether he shall use english, french, or german; it prompts him to be social in his nature, but does not specify that he shall say please and thank you, and take off his hat to ladies. the race did not find the specific _modes_ in which these and many other things are to be done of sufficient importance to crystallize them in instincts, hence the individual must learn them as he needs them. the simplest way of accomplishing this is for each generation to copy the ways of doing things which are followed by the older generation among whom they are born. this is done largely through _imitation_. nature of imitation.--_imitation is the instinct to respond to a suggestion from another by repeating his act._ the instinct of imitation is active in the year-old child, it requires another year or two to reach its height, then it gradually grows less marked, but continues in some degree throughout life. the young child is practically helpless in the matter of imitation. instinct demands that he shall imitate, and he has no choice but to obey. his environment furnishes the models which he must imitate, whether they are good or bad. before he is old enough for intelligent choice, he has imitated a multitude of acts about him; and habit has seized upon these acts and is weaving them into conduct and character. older grown we may choose what we will imitate, but in our earlier years we are at the mercy of the models which are placed before us. if our mother tongue is the first we hear spoken, that will be our language; but if we first hear chinese, we will learn that with almost equal facility. if whatever speech we hear is well spoken, correct, and beautiful, so will our language be; if it is vulgar, or incorrect, or slangy, our speech will be of this kind. if the first manners which serve us as models are coarse and boorish, ours will resemble them; if they are cultivated and refined, ours will be like them. if our models of conduct and morals are questionable, our conduct and morals will be of like type. our manner of walking, of dressing, of thinking, of saying our prayers, even, originates in imitation. by imitation we adopt ready-made our social standards, our political faith, and our religious creeds. our views of life and the values we set on its attainments are largely a matter of imitation. individuality in imitation.--yet, given the same model, no two of us will imitate precisely alike. your acts will be yours, and mine will be mine. this is because no two of us have just the same heredity, and hence cannot have precisely similar instincts. there reside in our different personalities different powers of invention and originality, and these determine by how much the product of imitation will vary from the model. some remain imitators all their lives, while others use imitation as a means to the invention of better types than the original models. the person who is an imitator only, lacks individuality and initiative; the nation which is an imitator only is stagnant and unprogressive. while imitation must be blind in both cases at first, it should be increasingly intelligent as the individual or the nation progresses. conscious and unconscious imitation.--the much-quoted dictum that "all consciousness is motor" has a direct application to imitation. it only means that _we have a tendency to act on whatever idea occupies the mind_. think of yawning or clearing the throat, and the tendency is strong to do these things. we naturally respond to smile with smile and to frown with frown. and even the impressions coming to us from our material environment have their influence on our acts. our response to these ideas may be a conscious one, as when a boy purposely stutters in order to mimic an unfortunate companion; or it may be unconscious, as when the boy unknowingly falls into the habit of stammering from hearing this kind of speech. the child may consciously seek to keep himself neat and clean so as to harmonize with a pleasant and well-kept home, or he may unconsciously become slovenly and cross-tempered from living in an ill-kept home where constant bickering is the rule. often we deliberately imitate what seems to us desirable in other people, but probably far the greater proportion of the suggestions to which we respond are received and acted upon unconsciously. in conscious imitation we can select what models we shall imitate, and therefore protect ourselves in so far as our judgment of good and bad models is valid. in unconscious imitation, however, we are constantly responding to a stream of suggestions pouring in upon us hour after hour and day after day, with no protection but the leadings of our interests as they direct our attention now to this phase of our environment, and now to that. influence of environment.--no small part of the influences which mold our lives comes from our material environment. good clothes, artistic homes, beautiful pictures and decoration, attractive parks and lawns, well-kept streets, well-bound books--all these have a direct moral and educative value; on the other hand, squalor, disorder, and ugliness are an incentive to ignorance and crime. hawthorne tells in "the great stone face" of the boy ernest, listening to the tradition of a coming wise man who one day is to rule over the valley. the story sinks deep into the boy's heart, and he thinks and dreams of the great and good man; and as he thinks and dreams, he spends his boyhood days gazing across the valley at a distant mountain side whose rocks and cliffs nature had formed into the outlines of a human face remarkable for the nobleness and benignity of its expression. he comes to love this face and looks upon it as the prototype of the coming wise man, until lo! as he dwells upon it and dreams about it, the beautiful character which its expression typifies grows into his own life, and he himself becomes the long-looked-for wise man. the influence of personality.--more powerful than the influence of material environment, however, is that of other personalities upon us--the touch of life upon life. a living personality contains a power which grips hold of us, electrifies us, inspires us, and compels us to new endeavor, or else degrades and debases us. none has failed to feel at some time this life-touch, and to bless or curse the day when its influence came upon him. either consciously or unconsciously such a personality becomes our ideal and model; we idolize it, idealize it, and imitate it, until it becomes a part of us. not only do we find these great personalities living in the flesh, but we find them also in books, from whose pages they speak to us, and to whose influence we respond. and not in the _great_ personalities alone does the power to influence reside. from _every life_ which touches ours, a stream of influence great or small is entering our life and helping to mold it. nor are we to forget that this influence is reciprocal, and that we are reacting upon others up to the measure of the powers that are in us. . the instinct of play small use to be a child unless one can play. says karl groos: "perhaps the very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, but he is young because he must play." play is a constant factor in all grades of animal life. the swarming insects, the playful kitten, the frisking lambs, the racing colt, the darting swallows, the maddening aggregation of blackbirds--these are but illustrations of the common impulse of all the animal world to play. wherever freedom and happiness reside, there play is found; wherever play is lacking, there the curse has fallen and sadness and oppression reign. play is the natural rôle in the paradise of youth; it is childhood's chief occupation. to toil without play, places man on a level with the beasts of burden. the necessity for play.--but why is play so necessary? why is this impulse so deep-rooted in our natures? why not compel our young to expend their boundless energy on productive labor? why all this waste? why have our child labor laws? why not shut recesses from our schools, and so save time for work? is it true that all work and no play makes jack a dull boy? too true. for proof we need but gaze at the dull and lifeless faces of the prematurely old children as they pour out of the factories where child labor is employed. we need but follow the children, who have had a playless childhood, into a narrow and barren manhood. we need but to trace back the history of the dull and brutish men of today, and find that they were the playless children of yesterday. play is as necessary to the child as food, as vital as sunshine, as indispensable as air. the keynote of play is _freedom_, freedom of physical activity, and mental initiative. in play the child makes his own plans, his imagination has free rein, originality is in demand, and constructive ability is placed under tribute. here are developed a thousand tendencies which would never find expression in the narrow treadmill of labor alone. the child needs to learn to work; but along with his work must be the opportunity for free and unrestricted activity, which can come only through play. the boy needs a chance to be a barbarian, a hero, an indian. he needs to ride his broomstick on a dangerous raid, and to charge with lath sword the redoubts of a stubborn enemy. he needs to be a leader as well as a follower. in short, without in the least being aware of it, he needs to develop himself through his own activity--he needs freedom to play. if the child be a girl, there is no difference except in the character of the activities employed. play in development and education.--and it is precisely out of these play activities that the later and more serious activities of life emerge. play is the gateway by which we best enter the various fields of the world's work, whether our particular sphere be that of pupil or teacher in the schoolroom, of man in the busy marts of trade or in the professions, or of farmer or mechanic. play brings the _whole self_ into the activity; it trains to habits of independence and individual initiative, to strenuous and sustained effort, to endurance of hardship and fatigue, to social participation and the acceptance of victory and defeat. and these are the qualities needed by the man of success in his vocation. these facts make the play instinct one of the most important in education. froebel was the first to recognize the importance of play, and the kindergarten was an attempt to utilize its activities in the school. the introduction of this new factor into education has been attended, as might be expected, by many mistakes. some have thought to recast the entire process of education into the form of games and plays, and thus to lead the child to possess the "promised land" through aimlessly chasing butterflies in the pleasant fields of knowledge. it is needless to say that they have not succeeded. others have mistaken the shadow for the substance, and introduced games and plays into the schoolroom which lack the very first element of play; namely, _freedom of initiative and action_ on the part of the child. educational theorists and teachers have invented games and occupations and taught them to the children, who go through with them much as they would with any other task, enjoying the activity but missing the development which would come through a larger measure of self-direction. work and play are complements.--work cannot take the place of play, neither can play be substituted for work. nor are the two antagonistic, but each is the complement of the other; for the activities of work grow immediately out of those of play, and each lends zest to the other. those who have never learned to work and those who have never learned to play are equally lacking in their development. further, it is not the name or character of an activity which determines whether it is play for the participant, but _his attitude toward the activity_. if the activity is performed for its own sake and not for some ulterior end, if it grows out of the interest of the child and involves the free and independent use of his powers of body and mind, if it is _his_, and not someone's else--then the activity possesses the chief characteristics of play. lacking these, it cannot be play, whatever else it may be. play, like other instincts, besides serving the present, looks in two directions, into the past and into the future. from the past come the shadowy interests which, taking form from the touch of our environment, determine the character of the play activities. from the future come the premonitions of the activities that are to be. the boy adjusting himself to the requirements of the game, seeking control over his companions or giving in to them, is practicing in miniature the larger game which he will play in business or profession a little later. the girl in her playhouse, surrounded by a nondescript family of dolls and pets, is unconsciously looking forward to a more perfect life when the responsibilities shall be a little more real. so let us not grudge our children the play day of youth. . other useful instincts many other instincts ripen during the stage of youth and play their part in the development of the individual. curiosity.--it is inherent in every normal person to want to investigate and _know_. the child looks out with wonder and fascination on a world he does not understand, and at once begins to ask questions and try experiments. every new object is approached in a spirit of inquiry. interest is omnivorous, feeding upon every phase of environment. nothing is too simple or too complex to demand attention and exploration, so that it vitally touches the child's activities and experience. the momentum given the individual by curiosity toward learning and mastering his world is incalculable. imagine the impossible task of teaching children what they had no desire or inclination to know! think of trying to lead them to investigate matters concerning which they felt only a supreme indifference! indeed one of the greatest problems of education is to keep curiosity alive and fresh so that its compelling influence may promote effort and action. one of the greatest secrets of eternal youth is also found in retaining the spontaneous curiosity of youth after the youthful years are past. manipulation.--this is the rather unsatisfactory name for the universal tendency to _handle_, _do_ or _make_ something. the young child builds with its blocks, constructs fences and pens and caves and houses, and a score of other objects. the older child, supplied with implements and tools, enters upon more ambitious projects and revels in the joy of creation as he makes boats and boxes, soldiers and swords, kites, play-houses and what-not. even as adults we are moved by a desire to express ourselves through making or creating that which will represent our ingenuity and skill. the tendency of children to destroy is not from wantonness, but rather from a desire to manipulate. education has but recently begun to make serious use of this important impulse. the success of all laboratory methods of teaching, and of such subjects as manual training and domestic science, is abundant proof of the adage that we learn by doing. we would rather construct or manipulate an object than merely learn its verbal description. our deepest impulses lead to creation rather than simple mental appropriation of facts and descriptions. the collecting instinct.--the words _my_ and _mine_ enter the child's vocabulary at a very early age. the sense of property ownership and the impulse to make collections of various kinds go hand in hand. probably there are few of us who have not at one time or another made collections of autographs, postage stamps, coins, bugs, or some other thing of as little intrinsic value. and most of us, if we have left youth behind, are busy even now in seeking to collect fortunes, works of art, rare volumes or other objects on which we have set our hearts. the collecting instinct and the impulse to ownership can be made important agents in the school. the child who, in nature study, geography or agriculture, is making a collection of the leaves, plants, soils, fruits, or insects used in the lessons has an incentive to observation and investigation impossible from book instruction alone. one who, in manual training or domestic science, is allowed to own the article made will give more effort and skill to its construction than if the work be done as a mere school task. the dramatic instinct.--every person is, at one stage of his development, something of an actor. all children like to "dress up" and impersonate someone else--in proof of which, witness the many play scenes in which the character of nurse, doctor, pirate, teacher, merchant or explorer is taken by children who, under the stimulus of their spontaneous imagery and as yet untrammeled by self-consciousness, freely enter into the character they portray. the dramatic impulse never wholly dies out. when we no longer aspire to do the acting ourselves we have others do it for us in the theaters or the movies. education finds in the dramatic instinct a valuable aid. progressive teachers are using it freely, especially in the teaching of literature and history. its application to these fields may be greatly increased, and also extended more generally to include religion, morals, and art. the impulse to form gangs and clubs.--few boys and girls grow up without belonging at some time to a secret gang, club or society. usually this impulse grows out of two different instincts, the _social_ and the _adventurous_. it is fundamental in our natures to wish to be with our kind--not only our human kind, but those of the same age, interests and ambitions. the love of secrecy and adventure is also deep seated in us. so we are clannish; and we love to do the unusual, to break away from the commonplace and routine of our lives. there is often a thrill of satisfaction--even if it be later followed by remorse--in doing the forbidden or the unconventional. the problem here as in the case of many other instincts is one of guidance rather than of repression. out of the gang impulse we may develop our athletic teams, our debating and dramatic clubs, our tramping clubs, and a score of other recreational, benevolent, or social organizations. not repression, but proper expression should be our ideal. . fear probably in no instinct more than in that of fear can we find the reflections of all the past ages of life in the world with its manifold changes, its dangers, its tragedies, its sufferings, and its deaths. fear heredity.--the fears of childhood "are remembered at every step," and so are the fears through which the race has passed. says chamberlain: "every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long. the bravest old soldier, the most daring young reprobate, is incapable of forgetting them all--the masks, the bogies, ogres, hobgoblins, witches, and wizards, the things that bite and scratch, that nip and tear, that pinch and crunch, the thousand and one imaginary monsters of the mother, the nurse, or the servant, have had their effect; and hundreds of generations have worked to denaturalize the brains of children. perhaps no animal, not even those most susceptible to fright, has behind it the fear heredity of the child." president hall calls attention to the fact that night is now the safest time of the twenty-four hours; serpents are no longer our most deadly enemies; strangers are not to be feared; neither are big eyes or teeth; there is no adequate reason why the wind, or thunder, or lightning should make children frantic as they do. but "the past of man forever seems to linger in his present"; and the child, in being afraid of these things, is only summing up the fear experiences of the race and suffering all too many of them in his short childhood. fear of the dark.--most children are afraid in the dark. who does not remember the terror of a dark room through which he had to pass, or, worse still, in which he had to go to bed alone, and there lie in cold perspiration induced by a mortal agony of fright! the unused doors which would not lock, and through which he expected to see the goblin come forth to get him! the dark shadows back under the bed where he was afraid to look for the hidden monster which he was sure was hiding there and yet dare not face! the lonely lane through which the cows were to be driven late at night, while every fence corner bristled with shapeless monsters lying in wait for boys! and that hated dark closet where he was shut up "until he could learn to be good!" and the useless trapdoor in the ceiling. how often have we lain in the dim light at night and seen the lid lift just a peep for ogre eyes to peer out, and, when the terror was growing beyond endurance, close down, only to lift once and again, until from sheer weariness and exhaustion we fell into a troubled sleep and dreamed of the hideous monster which inhabited the unused garret! tell me that the old trapdoor never bent its hinges in response to either man or monster for twenty years? i know it is true, and yet i am not convinced. my childish fears have left a stronger impression than proof of mere facts can ever overrule. fear of being left alone.--and the fear of being left alone. how big and dreadful the house seemed with the folks all gone! how we suddenly made close friends with the dog or the cat, even, in order that this bit of life might be near us! or, failing in this, we have gone out to the barn among the chickens and the pigs and the cows, and deserted the empty house with its torture of loneliness. what was there so terrible in being alone? i do not know. i know only that to many children it is a torture more exquisite than the adult organism is fitted to experience. but why multiply the recollections? they bring a tremor to the strongest of us today. who of us would choose to live through those childish fears again? dream fears, fears of animals, fears of furry things, fears of ghosts and of death, dread of fatal diseases, fears of fire and of water, of strange persons, of storms, fears of things unknown and even unimagined, but all the more fearful! would you all like to relive your childhood for its pleasures if you had to take along with them its sufferings? would the race choose to live its evolution over again? i do not know. but, for my own part, i should very much hesitate to turn the hands of time backward in either case. would that the adults at life's noonday, in remembering the childish fears of life's morning, might feel a sympathy for the children of today, who are not yet escaped from the bonds of the fear instinct. would that all might seek to quiet every foolish childish fear, instead of laughing at it or enhancing it! . other undesirable instincts we are all provided by nature with some instincts which, while they may serve a good purpose in our development, need to be suppressed or at least modified when they have done their work. selfishness.--all children, and perhaps all adults, are selfish. the little child will appropriate all the candy, and give none to his playmate. he will grow angry and fight rather than allow brother or sister to use a favorite plaything. he will demand the mother's attention and care even when told that she is tired or ill, and not able to minister to him. but all of this is true to nature and, though it needs to be changed to generosity and unselfishness, is, after all, a vital factor in our natures. for it is better in the long run that each one _should_ look out for himself, rather than to be so careless of his own interests and needs as to require help from others. the problem in education is so to balance selfishness and greed with unselfishness and generosity that each serves as a check and a balance to the other. not elimination but equilibrium is to be our watchword. pugnacity, or the fighting impulse.--almost every normal child is a natural fighter, just as every adult should possess the spirit of conquest. the long history of conflict through which our race has come has left its mark in our love of combat. the pugnacity of children, especially of boys, is not so much to be deprecated and suppressed as guided into right lines and rendered subject to right ideals. the boy who picks a quarrel has been done a kindness when given a drubbing that will check this tendency. on the other hand, one who risks battle in defense of a weaker comrade does no ignoble thing. children need very early to be taught the baseness of fighting for the sake of conflict, and the glory of going down to defeat fighting in a righteous cause. the world could well stand more of this spirit among adults! * * * * * let us then hear the conclusion of the whole matter. the undesirable instincts do not need encouragement. it is better to let them fade away from disuse, or in some cases even by attaching punishment to their expression. they are echoes from a distant past, and not serviceable in this better present. _the desirable instincts we are to seize upon and utilize as starting points for the development of useful interests, good habits, and the higher emotional life. we should take them as they come, for their appearance is a sure sign that the organism is ready for and needs the activity they foreshadow; and, furthermore, if they are not used when they present themselves, they disappear, never to return._ . problems in observation and introspection . what instincts have you noticed developing in children? what ones have you observed to fade away? can you fix the age in both cases? apply these questions to your own development as you remember it or can get it by tradition from your elders. . what use of imitation may be made in teaching ( ) literature, ( ) composition, ( ) music, ( ) good manners, ( ) morals? . should children be _taught_ to play? make a list of the games you think all children should know and be able to play. it has been said that it is as important for a people to be able to use their leisure time wisely as to use their work time profitably. why should this be true? . observe the instruction of children to discover the extent to which use is made of the _constructive_ instinct. the _collecting_ instinct. the _dramatic_ instinct. describe a plan by which each of these instincts can be successfully used in some branch of study. . what examples can you recount from your own experience of conscious imitation? of unconscious imitation? of the influence of environment? what is the application of the preceding question to the esthetic quality of our school buildings? . have you ever observed that children under a dozen years of age usually cannot be depended upon for "team work" in their games? how do you explain this fact? chapter xiv feeling and its functions in the psychical world as well as the physical we must meet and overcome inertia. our lives must be compelled by motive forces strong enough to overcome this natural inertia, and enable us besides to make headway against many obstacles. _the motive power that drives us consists chiefly of our feelings and emotions._ knowledge, cognition, supplies the rudder that guides our ship, but feeling and emotion supply the power. to convince one's head is, therefore, not enough; his feelings must be stirred if you would be sure of moving him to action. often have we _known_ that a certain line of action was right, but failed to follow it because feeling led in a different direction. when decision has been hanging in the balance we have piled on one side obligation, duty, sense of right, and a dozen other reasons for action, only to have them all outweighed by the one single: _it is disagreeable._ judgment, reason, and experience may unite to tell us that a contemplated course is unwise, and imagination may reveal to us its disastrous consequences, and yet its pleasures so appeal to us that we yield. our feelings often prove a stronger motive than knowledge and will combined; they are a factor constantly to be reckoned with among our motives. . the nature of feeling it will be our purpose in the next few chapters to study the _affective_ content of consciousness--the feelings and emotions. the present chapter will be devoted to the feelings and the one that follows to the emotions. the different feeling qualities.--at least six (some writers say even more) distinct and qualitatively different feeling states are easily distinguished. these are: _pleasure_, _pain_; _desire_, _repugnance_; _interest_, _apathy._ pleasure and pain, and desire and repugnance, are directly opposite or antagonistic feelings. interest and apathy are not opposites in a similar way, since apathy is but the absence of interest, and not its antagonist. in place of the terms pleasure and pain, the _pleasant_ and the _unpleasant_, or the _agreeable_ and the _disagreeable_, are often used. _aversion_ is frequently employed as a synonym for repugnance. it is somewhat hard to believe on first thought that feeling comprises but the classes given. for have we not often felt the pain from a toothache, from not being able to take a long-planned trip, from the loss of a dear friend? surely these are very different classes of feelings! likewise we have been happy from the very joy of living, from being praised for some well-doing, or from the presence of friend or lover. and here again we seem to have widely different classes of feelings. we must remember, however, that feeling is always based on something _known_. it never appears alone in consciousness as _mere_ pleasures or pains. the mind must have something about which to feel. the "what" must precede the "how." what we commonly call a feeling _is a complex state of consciousness in which feeling predominates_, but which has, nevertheless, _a basis of sensation, or memory, or some other cognitive process_. and what so greatly varies in the different cases of the illustrations just given is precisely this knowledge element, and not the feeling element. a feeling of unpleasantness is a feeling of unpleasantness whether it comes from an aching tooth or from the loss of a friend. it may differ in degree, and the entire mental states of which the feeling is a part may differ vastly, but the simple feeling itself is of the same quality. feeling always present in mental content.--no phase of our mental life is without the feeling element. we look at the rainbow with its beautiful and harmonious blending of colors, and a feeling of pleasure accompanies the sensation; then we turn and gaze at the glaring sun, and a disagreeable feeling is the result. a strong feeling of pleasantness accompanies the experience of the voluptuous warmth of a cozy bed on a cold morning, but the plunge between the icy sheets on the preceding evening was accompanied by the opposite feeling. the touch of a hand may occasion a thrill of ecstatic pleasure, or it may be accompanied by a feeling equally disagreeable. and so on through the whole range of sensation; we not only _know_ the various objects about us through sensation and perception, but we also _feel_ while we know. cognition, or the knowing processes, gives us our "whats"; and feeling, or the affective processes, gives us our "hows." what is yonder object? a bouquet. how does it affect you? pleasurably. if, instead of the simpler sensory processes which we have just considered, we take the more complex processes, such as memory, imagination, and thinking, the case is no different. who has not reveled in the pleasure accompanying the memories of past joys? on the other hand, who is free from all unpleasant memories--from regrets, from pangs of remorse? who has not dreamed away an hour in pleasant anticipation of some desired object, or spent a miserable hour in dreading some calamity which imagination pictured to him? feeling also accompanies our thought processes. everyone has experienced the feeling of the pleasure of intellectual victory over some difficult problem which had baffled the reason, or over some doubtful case in which our judgment proved correct. and likewise none has escaped the feeling of unpleasantness which accompanies intellectual defeat. whatever the contents of our mental stream, "we find in them, everywhere present, a certain color of passing estimate, an immediate sense that they are worth something to us at any given moment, or that they then have an interest to us." the seeming neutral feeling zone.--it is probable that there is so little feeling connected with many of the humdrum and habitual experiences of our everyday lives, that we are but slightly, if at all, aware of a feeling state in connection with them. yet a state of consciousness with absolutely no feeling side to it is as unthinkable as the obverse side of a coin without the reverse. some sort of feeling tone or mood is always present. the width of the affective neutral zone--that is, of a feeling state so little marked as not to be discriminated as either pleasure or pain, desire or aversion--varies with different persons, and with the same person at different times. it is conditioned largely by the amount of attention given in the direction of feeling, and also on the fineness of the power of feeling discrimination. it is safe to say that the zero range is usually so small as to be negligible. . mood and disposition the sum total of all the feeling accompanying the various sensory and thought processes at any given time results in what we may call our _feeling tone_, _or mood._ how mood is produced.--during most of our waking hours, and, indeed, during our sleeping hours as well, a multitude of sensory currents are pouring into the cortical centers. at the present moment we can hear the rumble of a wagon, the chirp of a cricket, the chatter of distant voices, and a hundred other sounds besides. at the same time the eye is appealed to by an infinite variety of stimuli in light, color, and objects; the skin responds to many contacts and temperatures; and every other type of end-organ of the body is acting as a "sender" to telegraph a message in to the brain. add to these the powerful currents which are constantly being sent to the cortex from the visceral organs--those of respiration, of circulation, of digestion and assimilation. and then finally add the central processes which accompany the flight of images through our minds--our meditations, memories, and imaginations, our cogitations and volitions. thus we see what a complex our feelings must be, and how impossible to have any moment in which some feeling is not present as a part of our mental stream. it is this complex, now made up chiefly on the basis of the sensory currents coming in from the end-organs or the visceral organs, and now on the basis of those in the cortex connected with our thought life, which constitutes the entire feeling tone, or _mood_. mood colors all our thinking.--mood depends on the character of the aggregate of nerve currents entering the cortex, and changes as the character of the current varies. if the currents run on much the same from hour to hour, then our mood is correspondingly constant; if the currents are variable, our mood also will be variable. not only is mood dependent on our sensations and thoughts for its quality, but it in turn colors our entire mental life. it serves as a background or setting whose hue is reflected over all our thinking. let the mood be somber and dark, and all the world looks gloomy; on the other hand, let the mood be bright and cheerful, and the world puts on a smile. it is told of one of the early circuit riders among the new england ministry, that he made the following entries in his diary, thus well illustrating the point: "wed. eve. arrived at the home of bro. brown late this evening, hungry and tired after a long day in the saddle. had a bountiful supper of cold pork and beans, warm bread, bacon and eggs, coffee, and rich pastry. i go to rest feeling that my witness is clear; the future is bright; i feel called to a great and glorious work in this place. bro. brown's family are godly people." the next entry was as follows: "thur. morn. awakened late this morning after a troubled night. i am very much depressed in soul; the way looks dark; far from feeling called to work among this people, i am beginning to doubt the safety of my own soul. i am afraid the desires of bro. brown and his family are set too much on carnal things." a dyspeptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist always keeps a bright mood. mood influences our judgments and decisions.--the prattle of children may be grateful music to our ears when we are in one mood, and excruciatingly discordant noise when we are in another. what appeals to us as a good practical joke one day, may seem a piece of unwarranted impertinence on another. a proposition which looks entirely plausible under the sanguine mood induced by a persuasive orator, may appear wholly untenable a few hours later. decisions which seemed warranted when we were in an angry mood, often appear unwise or unjust when we have become more calm. motives which easily impel us to action when the world looks bright, fail to move us when the mood is somber. the feelings of impending peril and calamity which are an inevitable accompaniment of the "blues," are speedily dissipated when the sun breaks through the clouds and we are ourselves again. mood influences effort.--a bright and hopeful mood quickens every power and enhances every effort, while a hopeless mood limits power and cripples effort. the football team which goes into the game discouraged never plays to the limit. the student who attacks his lesson under the conviction of defeat can hardly hope to succeed, while the one who enters upon his work confident of his power to master it has the battle already half won. the world's best work is done not by those who live in the shadow of discouragement and doubt, but by those in whose breast hope springs eternal. the optimist is a benefactor of the race if for no other reason than the sheer contagion of his hopeful spirit; the pessimist contributes neither to the world's welfare nor its happiness. youth's proverbial enthusiasm and dauntless energy rest upon the supreme hopefulness which characterizes the mood of the young. for these reasons, if for no other, the mood of the schoolroom should be one of happiness and good cheer. disposition a resultant of moods.--the sum total of our moods gives us our _disposition_. whether these are pleasant or unpleasant, cheerful or gloomy, will depend on the predominating character of the moods which enter into them. as well expect to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles, as to secure a desirable disposition out of undesirable moods. a sunny disposition never comes from gloomy moods, nor a hopeful one out of the "blues." and it is our disposition, more than the power of our reason, which, after all, determines our desirability as friends and companions. the person of surly disposition can hardly make a desirable companion, no matter what his intellectual qualities may be. we may live very happily with one who cannot follow the reasoning of a newton, but it is hard to live with a person chronically subject to "black moods." nor can we put the responsibility for our disposition off on our ancestors. it is not an inheritance, but a growth. slowly, day by day, and mood by mood, we build up our disposition until finally it comes to characterize us. temperament.--some are, however, more predisposed to certain types of mood than are others. the organization of our nervous system which we get through heredity undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling tone into which we most easily fall. we call this predisposition _temperament_. on the effects of temperament, our ancestors must divide the responsibility with us. i say _divide_ the responsibility, for even if we find ourselves predisposed toward a certain undesirable type of moods, there is no reason why we should give up to them. even in spite of hereditary predispositions, we can still largely determine for ourselves what our moods are to be. if we have a tendency toward cheerful, quiet, and optimistic moods, the psychologist names our temperament the _sanguine_; if we are tense, easily excited and irritable, with a tendency toward sullen or angry moods, the _choleric_; if we are given to frequent fits of the "blues," if we usually look on the dark side of things and have a tendency toward moods of discouragement and the "dumps," the _melancholic_; if hard to rouse, and given to indolent and indifferent moods, the _phlegmatic_. whatever be our temperament, it is one of the most important factors in our character. . permanent feeling attitudes, or sentiments besides the more or less transitory feeling states which we have called moods, there exists also a class of feeling attitudes, which contain more of the complex intellectual element, are withal of rather a higher nature, and much more permanent than our moods. we may call these our _sentiments_, or _attitudes_. our sentiments comprise the somewhat constant level of feeling combined with cognition, which we name _sympathy_, _friendship_, _love_, _patriotism_, _religious faith_, _selfishness_, _pride_, _vanity, etc._ like our dispositions, our sentiments are a growth of months and years. unlike our dispositions, however, our sentiments are relatively independent of the physiological undertone, and depend more largely upon long-continued experience and intellectual elements as a basis. a sluggish liver might throw us into an irritable mood and, if the condition were long continued, might result in a surly disposition; but it would hardly permanently destroy one's patriotism and make him turn traitor to his country. one's feeling attitude on such matters is too deep seated to be modified by changing whims. how sentiments develop.--sentiments have their beginning in concrete experiences in which feeling is a predominant element, and grow through the multiplication of these experiences much as the concept is developed through many percepts. there is a residual element left behind each separate experience in both cases. in the case of the concept the residual element is intellectual, and in the case of the sentiment it is a complex in which the feeling element is predominant. how this comes about is easily seen by means of an illustration or two. the mother feeds her child when he is hungry, and an agreeable feeling is produced; she puts him into the bath and snuggles him in her arms, and the experiences are pleasant. the child comes to look upon the mother as one whose especial function is to make things pleasant for him, so he comes to be happy in her presence, and long for her in her absence. he finally grows to love his mother not alone for the countless times she has given him pleasure, but for what she herself is. the feelings connected at first wholly with pleasant experiences coming through the ministrations of the mother, strengthened no doubt by instinctive tendencies toward affection, and later enhanced by a fuller realization of what a mother's care and sacrifice mean, grow at last into a deep, forceful, abiding sentiment of love for the mother. the effect of experience.--likewise with the sentiment of patriotism. in so far as our patriotism is a true patriotism and not a noisy clamor, it had its rise in feelings of gratitude and love when we contemplated the deeds of heroism and sacrifice for the flag, and the blessings which come to us from our relations as citizens to our country. if we have had concrete cases brought to our experience, as, for example, our property saved from destruction at the hands of a mob or our lives saved from a hostile foreign foe, the patriotic sentiment will be all the stronger. so we may carry the illustration into all the sentiments. our religious sentiments of adoration, love, and faith have their origin in our belief in the care, love, and support from a higher being typified to us as children by the care, love, and support of our parents. pride arises from the appreciation or over-appreciation of oneself, his attainments, or his belongings. selfishness has its genesis in the many instances in which pleasure results from ministering to self. in all these cases it is seen that our sentiments develop out of our experiences: they are the permanent but ever-growing results which we have to show for experiences which are somewhat long continued, and in which a certain feeling quality is a strong accompaniment of the cognitive part of the experience. the influence of sentiment.--our sentiments, like our dispositions, are not only a natural growth from the experiences upon which they are fed, but they in turn have large influence in determining the direction of our further development. our sentiments furnish the soil which is either favorable or hostile to the growth of new experiences. one in whom the sentiment of true patriotism is deep-rooted will find it much harder to respond to a suggestion to betray his country's honor on battlefield, in legislative hall, or in private life, than one lacking in this sentiment. the boy who has a strong sentiment of love for his mother will find this a restraining influence in the face of temptation to commit deeds which would wound her feelings. a deep and abiding faith in god is fatal to the growth of pessimism, distrust, and a self-centered life. one's sentiments are a safe gauge of his character. let us know a man's attitude or sentiments on religion, morality, friendship, honesty, and the other great questions of life, and little remains to be known. if he is right on these, he may well be trusted in other things; if he is wrong on these, there is little to build upon. literature has drawn its best inspiration and choicest themes from the field of our sentiments. the sentiment of friendship has given us our david and jonathan, our damon and pythias, and our tennyson and hallam. the sentiment of love has inspired countless masterpieces; without its aid most of our fiction would lose its plot, and most of our poetry its charm. religious sentiment inspired milton to write the world's greatest epic, "paradise lost." the sentiment of patriotism has furnished an inexhaustible theme for the writer and the orator. likewise if we go into the field of music and art, we find that the best efforts of the masters are clustered around some human sentiment which has appealed to them, and which they have immortalized by expressing it on canvas or in marble, that it may appeal to others and cause the sentiment to grow in us. sentiments as motives.--the sentiments furnish the deepest, the most constant, and the most powerful motives which control our lives. such sentiments as patriotism, liberty, and religion have called a thousand armies to struggle and die on ten thousand battlefields, and have given martyrs courage to suffer in the fires of persecution. sentiments of friendship and love have prompted countless deeds of self-sacrifice and loving devotion. sentiments of envy, pride, and jealousy have changed the boundary lines of nations, and have prompted the committing of ten thousand unnamable crimes. slowly day by day from the cradle to the grave we are weaving into our lives the threads of sentiment, which at last become so many cables to bind us to good or evil. . problems in observation and introspection . are you subject to the "blues," or other forms of depressed feeling? are your moods very changeable, or rather constant? what kind of a disposition do you think you have? how did you come by it; that is, in how far is it due to hereditary temperament, and in how far to your daily moods? . can you recall an instance in which some undesirable mood was caused by your physical condition? by some disturbing mental condition? what is your characteristic mood in the morning after sleeping in an ill-ventilated room? after sitting for half a day in an ill-ventilated schoolroom? after eating indigestible food before going to bed? . observe a number of children or your classmates closely and see whether you can determine the characteristic mood of each. observe several different schools and see whether you can note a characteristic mood for each room. try to determine the causes producing the differences noted. (physical conditions in the room, personality of the teacher, methods of governing, teaching, etc.) . when can you do your best work, when you are happy, or unhappy? cheerful, or "blue"? confident and hopeful, or discouraged? in a spirit of harmony and coöperation with your teacher, or antagonistic? now relate your conclusions to the type of atmosphere that should prevail in the schoolroom or the home. formulate a statement as to why the "spirit" of the school is all-important. (effect on effort, growth, disposition, sentiments, character, etc.) . can you measure more or less accurately the extent to which your feelings serve as _motives_ in your life? are feelings alone a safe guide to action? make a list of the important sentiments that should be cultivated in youth. now show how the work of the school may be used to strengthen worthy sentiments. chapter xv the emotions feeling and emotion are not to be looked upon as two different _kinds_ of mental processes. in fact, emotion is but _a feeling state of a high degree of intensity and complexity_. emotion transcends the simpler feeling states whenever the exciting cause is sufficient to throw us out of our regular routine of affective experience. the distinction between emotion and feeling is a purely arbitrary one, since the difference is only one of complexity and degree, and many feelings may rise to the intensity of emotions. a feeling of sadness on hearing of a number of fatalities in a railway accident may suddenly become an emotion of grief if we learn that a member of our family is among those killed. a feeling of gladness may develop into an emotion of joy, or a feeling of resentment be kindled into an emotion of rage. . the producing and expressing of emotion nowhere more than in connection with our emotions are the close inter-relations of mind and body seen. all are familiar with the fact that the emotion of anger tends to find expression in the blow, love in the caress, fear in flight, and so on. but just how our organism acts in _producing_ an emotion is less generally understood. professor james and professor lange have shown us that emotion not only tends to produce some characteristic form of response, but that _the emotion is itself caused by certain deep-seated physiological reactions_. let us seek to understand this statement a little more fully. physiological explanation of emotion.--we must remember first of all that _all_ changes in mental states are accompanied by corresponding physiological changes. hard, concentrated thinking quickens the heart beat; keen attention is accompanied by muscular tension; certain sights or sounds increase the rate of breathing; offensive odors produce nausea, and so on. so complete and perfect is the response of our physical organism to mental changes that one psychologist declares it possible, had we sufficiently delicate apparatus, to measure the reactions caused throughout the body of a sleeping child by the shadow from a passing cloud falling upon the closed eyelids. the order of the entire event resulting in an emotion is as follows: ( ) something is _known_; some object enters consciousness coming either from immediate perception or through memory or imagination. this fact, or thing known, must be of such nature that it will, ( ) set up deep-seated and characteristic _organic response_; ( ) the feeling _accompanying and caused by these physiological reactions constitutes the emotion_. for example, we may be passing along the street in a perfectly calm and equable state of mind, when we come upon a teamster who is brutally beating an exhausted horse because it is unable to draw an overloaded wagon up a slippery incline. the facts grasped as we take in the situation constitute the _first_ element in an emotional response developing in our consciousness. but instantly our muscles begin to grow tense, the heart beat and breath quicken, the face takes on a different expression, the hands clench--the entire organism is reacting to the disturbing situation; the _second_ factor in the rising emotion, the physiological response, thus appears. along with our apprehension of the cruelty and the organic disturbances which result we feel waves of indignation and anger surging through us. this is the _third_ factor in the emotional event, or the emotion itself. in some such way as this are all of our emotions aroused. origin of characteristic emotional reactions.--why do certain facts or objects of consciousness always cause certain characteristic organic responses? in order to solve this problem we shall have first to go beyond the individual and appeal to the history of the race. what the race has found serviceable, the individual repeats. but even then it is hard to see why the particular type of physical response such as shrinking, pallor, and trembling, which naturally follow stimuli threatening harm, should be the best. it is easy to see, however, that the feeling which prompts to flight or serves to deter from harm's way might be useful. it is plain that there is an advantage in the tense muscle, the set teeth, the held breath, and the quickened pulse which accompany the emotion of anger, and also in the feeling of anger itself, which prompts to the conflict. but even if we are not able in every case to determine at this day why all the instinctive responses and their correlate of feeling were the best for the life of the race, we may be sure that such was the case; for nature is inexorable in her dictates that only that shall persist which has proved serviceable in the largest number of cases. an interesting question arises at this point as to why we feel emotion accompanying some of our motor responses, and not others. perceptions are crowding in upon us hour after hour; memory, thought, and imagination are in constant play; and a continuous motor discharge results each moment in physical expressions great or small. yet, in spite of these facts, feeling which is strong enough to rise to an emotion is only an occasional thing. if emotion accompanies any form of physical expression, why not all? let us see whether we can discover any reason. one day i saw a boy leading a dog along the street. all at once the dog slipped the string over its head and ran away. the boy stood looking after the dog for a moment, and then burst into a fit of rage. what all had happened? the moment before the dog broke away everything was running smoothly in the experience of the boy. there was no obstruction to his thought or his plans. then in an instant the situation changes. the smooth flow of experience is checked and baffled. the discharge of nerve currents which meant thought, plans, action, is blocked. a crisis has arisen which requires readjustment. the nerve currents must flow in new directions, giving new thought, new plans, new activities--the dog must be recaptured. it is in connection with this damming up of nerve currents from following their wonted channels that the emotion emerges. or, putting it into mental terms, the emotion occurs when the ordinary current of our thought is violently disturbed--when we meet with some crisis which necessitates a readjustment of our thought relations and plans, either temporarily or permanently. the duration of an emotion.--if the required readjustment is but temporary, then the emotion is short-lived, while if the readjustment is necessarily of longer duration, the emotion also will live longer. the fear which follows the thunder is relatively brief; for the shock is gone in a moment, and our thought is but temporarily disturbed. if the impending danger is one that persists, however, as of some secret assassin threatening our life, the fear also will persist. the grief of a child over the loss of someone dear to him is comparatively short, because the current of the child's life has not been so closely bound up in a complexity of experiences with the lost object as in the case of an older person, and hence the readjustment is easier. the grief of an adult over the loss of a very dear friend lasts long, for the object grieved over has so become a part of the bereaved one's experience that the loss requires a very complete readjustment of the whole life. in either case, however, as this readjustment is accomplished the emotion gradually fades away. emotions accompanying crises in experience.--if our description of the feelings has been correct, it will be seen that the simpler and milder feelings are for the common run of our everyday experience; they are the common valuers of our thought and acts from hour to hour. the emotions, or more intense feeling states, are, however, the occasional high tide of feeling which occurs in crises or emergencies. we are angry on some particular provocation, we fear some extraordinary factor in our environment, we are joyful over some unusual good fortune. . the control of emotions dependence on expression.--since all emotions rest upon some form of physical or physiological expression primarily, and upon some thought back of this secondarily, it follows that the first step in controlling an emotion is to secure _the removal of the state of consciousness_ which serves as its basis. this may be done, for instance, with a child, either by banishing the terrifying dog from his presence, or by convincing him that the dog is harmless. the motor response will then cease, and the emotion pass away. if the thought is persistent, however, through the continuance of its stimulus, then what remains is to seek to control the physical expression, and in that way suppress the emotion. if, instead of the knit brow, the tense muscles, the quickened heart beat, and all the deeper organic changes which go along with these, we can keep a smile on the face, the muscles relaxed, the heart beat steady, and a normal condition in all the other organs, we shall have no cause to fear an explosion of anger. if we are afraid of mice and feel an almost irresistible tendency to mount a chair every time we see a mouse, we can do wonders in suppressing the fear by resolutely refusing to give expression to these tendencies. inhibition of the expression inevitably means the death of the emotion. this fact has its bad side as well as its good in the feeling life, for it means that good emotions as well as bad will fade out if we fail to allow them expression. we are all perfectly familiar with the fact in our own experience that an interest which does not find means of expression soon passes away. sympathy unexpressed ere long passes over into indifference. even love cannot live without expression. religious emotion which does not go out in deeds of service cannot persist. the natural end and aim of our emotions is to serve as motives to activity; and missing this opportunity, they have not only failed in their office, but will themselves die of inaction. relief through expression.--emotional states not only have their rise in organic reactions, but they also tend to result in acts. when we are angry, or in love, or in fear, we have the impulse _to do something about it_. and, while it is true that emotion may be inhibited by suppressing the physical expressions on which it is founded, so may a state of emotional tension be relieved by some forms of expression. none have failed to experience the relief which comes to the overcharged nervous system from a good cry. there is no sorrow so bitter as a dry sorrow, when one cannot weep. a state of anger or annoyance is relieved by an explosion of some kind, whether in a blow or its equivalent in speech. we often feel better when we have told a man "what we think of him." at first glance this all seems opposed to what we have been laying down as the explanation of emotion. yet it is not so if we look well into the case. we have already seen that emotion occurs when there is a blocking of the usual pathways of discharge for the nerve currents, which must then seek new outlets, and thus result in the setting up of new motor responses. in the case of grief, for example, there is a disturbance in the whole organism; the heart beat is deranged, the blood pressure diminished, and the nerve tone lowered. what is needed is for the currents which are finding an outlet in directions resulting in these particular responses to find a pathway of discharge which will not produce such deep-seated results. this may be found in crying. the energy thus expended is diverted from producing internal disturbances. likewise, the explosion in anger may serve to restore the equilibrium of disturbed nerve currents. relief does not follow if image is held before the mind.--all this is true, however, only when the expression does not serve to keep the idea before the mind which was originally responsible for the emotion. a person may work himself into a passion of anger by beginning to talk about an insult and, as he grows increasingly violent, bringing the situation more and more sharply into his consciousness. the effect of terrifying images is easily to be observed in the case of one's starting to run when he is afraid after night. there is probably no doubt that the running would relieve his fear providing he could do it and not picture the threatening something as pursuing him. but, with his imagination conjuring up dire images of frightful catastrophes at every step, all control is lost and fresh waves of terror surge over the shrinking soul. growing tendency toward emotional control.--among civilized peoples there is a constantly growing tendency toward emotional control. primitive races express grief, joy, fear, or anger much more freely than do civilized races. this does not mean that primitive man feels more deeply than civilized man; for, as we have already seen, the crying, laughing, or blustering is but a small part of the whole physical expression, and one's entire organism may be stirred to its depths without any of these outward manifestations. man has found it advisable as he has advanced in civilization not to reveal all he feels to those around him. the face, which is the most expressive part of the body, has come to be under such perfect control that it is hard to read through it the emotional state, although the face of civilized man is capable of expressing far more than is that of the savage. the same difference is observable between the child and the adult. the child reveals each passing shade of emotion through his expression, while the adult may feel much that he does not show. . cultivation of the emotions there is no other mental factor which has more to do with the enjoyment we get out of life than our feelings and emotions. the emotions and enjoyment.--few of us would care to live at all, if all feeling were eliminated from human experience. true, feeling often makes us suffer; but in so far as life's joys triumph over its woes, do our feelings minister to our enjoyment. without sympathy, love, and appreciation, life would be barren indeed. moreover, it is only through our own emotional experience that we are able to interpret the feeling side of the lives about us. failing in this, we miss one of the most significant phases of social experience, and are left with our own sympathies undeveloped and our life by so much impoverished. the interpretation of the subtler emotions of those about us is in no small degree an art. the human face and form present a constantly changing panorama of the soul's feeling states to those who can read their signs. the ability to read the finer feelings, which reveal themselves in expression too delicate to be read by the eye of the gross or unsympathetic observer, lies at the basis of all fine interpretation of personality. feelings are often too deep for outward expression, and we are slow to reveal our deepest selves to those who cannot appreciate and understand them. how emotions develop.--emotions are to be cultivated as the intellect or the muscles are to be cultivated; namely, through proper exercise. our thought is to dwell on those things to which proper emotions attach, and to shun lines which would suggest emotions of an undesirable type. emotions which are to be developed must, as has already been said, find expression; we must act in response to their leadings, else they become but idle vaporings. if love prompts us to say a kind word to a suffering fellow mortal, the word must be spoken or the feeling itself fades away. on the other hand, the emotions which we wish to suppress are to be refused expression. the unkind and cutting word is to be left unsaid when we are angry, and the fear of things which are harmless left unexpressed and thereby doomed to die. the emotional factor in our environment.--much material for the cultivation of our emotions lies in the everyday life all about us if we can but interpret it. few indeed of those whom we meet daily but are hungering for appreciation and sympathy. lovable traits exist in every character, and will reveal themselves to the one who looks for them. miscarriages of justice abound on all sides, and demand our indignation and wrath and the effort to right the wrong. evil always exists to be hated and suppressed, and dangers to be feared and avoided. human life and the movement of human affairs constantly appeal to the feeling side of our nature if we understand at all what life and action mean. a certain blindness exists in many people, however, which makes our own little joys, or sorrows, or fears the most remarkable ones in the world, and keeps us from realizing that others may feel as deeply as we. of course this self-centered attitude of mind is fatal to any true cultivation of the emotions. it leads to an emotional life which lacks not only breadth and depth, but also perspective. literature and the cultivation of the emotions.--in order to increase our facility in the interpretation of the emotions through teaching us what to look for in life and experience, we may go to literature. here we find life interpreted for us in the ideal by masters of interpretation; and, looking through their eyes, we see new depths and breadths of feeling which we had never before discovered. indeed, literature deals far more in the aggregate with the feeling side than with any other aspect of human life. and it is just this which makes literature a universal language, for the language of our emotions is more easily interpreted than that of our reason. the smile, the cry, the laugh, the frown, the caress, are understood all around the world among all peoples. they are universal. there is always this danger to be avoided, however. we may become so taken up with the overwrought descriptions of the emotions as found in literature or on the stage that the common humdrum of everyday life around us seems flat and stale. the interpretation of the writer or the actor is far beyond what we are able to make for ourselves, so we take their interpretation rather than trouble ourselves to look in our own environment for the material which might appeal to our emotions. it is not rare to find those who easily weep over the woes of an imaginary person in a book or on the stage unable to feel sympathy for the real suffering which exists all around them. the story is told of a lady at the theater who wept over the suffering of the hero in the play; and at the moment she was shedding the unnecessary tears, her own coachman, whom she had compelled to wait for her in the street, was frozen to death. our seemingly prosaic environment is full of suggestions to the emotional life, and books and plays should only help to develop in us the power rightly to respond to these suggestions. harm in emotional overexcitement.--danger may exist also in still another line; namely, that of emotional overexcitement. there is a great nervous strain in high emotional tension. nothing is more exhausting than a severe fit of anger; it leaves its victim weak and limp. a severe case of fright often incapacitates one for mental or physical labor for hours, or it may even result in permanent injury. the whole nervous tone is distinctly lowered by sorrow, and even excessive joy may be harmful. in our actual, everyday life, there is little danger from emotional overexcitement unless it be in the case of fear in children, as was shown in the discussion on instincts, and in that of grief over the loss of objects that are dear to us. most of our childish fears we could just as well avoid if our elders were wiser in the matter of guarding us against those that are unnecessary. the griefs we cannot hope to escape, although we can do much to control them. long-continued emotional excitement, unless it is followed by corresponding activity, gives us those who weep over the wrongs of humanity, but never do anything to right them; who are sorry to the point of death over human suffering, but cannot be induced to lend their aid to its alleviation. we could very well spare a thousand of those in the world who merely feel, for one who acts, james tells us. we should watch, then, that our good feelings do not simply evaporate as feelings, but that they find some place to apply themselves to accomplish good; that we do not, like hamlet, rave over wrongs which need to be righted, but never bring ourselves to the point where we take a hand in their righting. if our emotional life is to be rich and deep in its feeling and effective in its results on our acts and character, it must find its outlet in deeds. . emotions as motives emotion is always dynamic, and our feelings constitute our strongest motives to action and achievement. how our emotions compel us.--love has often done in the reformation of a fallen life what strength of will was not able to accomplish; it has caused dynasties to fall, and has changed the map of nations. hatred is a motive hardly less strong. fear will make savage beasts out of men who fall under its sway, causing them to trample helpless women and children under feet, whom in their saner moments they would protect with their lives. anger puts out all the light of reason, and prompts peaceful and well-meaning men to commit murderous acts. thus feeling, from the faintest and simplest feeling of interest, the various ranges of pleasures and pain, the sentiments which underlie all our lives, and so on to the mighty emotions which grip our lives with an overpowering strength, constitutes a large part of the motive power which is constantly urging us on to do and dare. hence it is important from this standpoint, also, that we should have the right type of feelings and emotions well developed, and the undesirable ones eliminated. emotional habits.--emotion and feeling are partly matters of habit. that is, we can form emotional as well as other habits, and they are as hard to break. anger allowed to run uncontrolled leads into habits of angry outbursts, while the one who habitually controls his temper finds it submitting to the habit of remaining within bounds. one may cultivate the habit of showing his fear on all occasions, or of discouraging its expression. he may form the habit of jealousy or of confidence. it is possible even to form the habit of falling in love, or of so suppressing the tender emotions that love finds little opportunity for expression. and here, as elsewhere, habits are formed through performing the acts upon which the habit rests. if there are emotional habits we are desirous of forming, what we have to do is to indulge the emotional expression of the type we desire, and the habit will follow. if we wish to form the habit of living in a chronic state of the blues, then all we have to do is to be blue and act blue sufficiently, and this form of emotional expression will become a part of us. if we desire to form the habit of living in a happy, cheerful state, we can accomplish this by encouraging the corresponding expression. . problems in observation and introspection . what are the characteristic bodily expressions by which you can recognize a state of anger? fear? jealousy? hatred? love? grief? do you know persons who are inclined to be too expressive emotionally? who show too little emotional expression? how would you classify yourself in this respect? . are you naturally responsive to the emotional tone of others; that is, are you sympathetic? are you easily affected by reading emotional books? by emotional plays or other appeals? what is the danger from overexciting the emotions without giving them a proper outlet in some practical activity? . have you observed a tendency among adults not to take seriously the emotions of a child; for example, to look upon childish grief as trivial, or fear as something to be laughed at? is the child's emotional life as real as that of the adult? (see ch. ix, betts, "fathers and mothers.") . have you known children to repress their emotions for fear of being laughed at? have you known parents or others to remark about childish love affairs to the children themselves in a light or joking way? ought this ever to be done? . note certain children who give way to fits of anger; what is the remedy? note other children who cry readily; what would you suggest as a cure? (why should ridicule not be used?) . have you observed any teacher using the lesson in literature or history to cultivate the finer emotions? what emotions have you seen appealed to by a lesson in nature study? what emotions have you observed on the playground that needed restraint? do you think that on the whole the emotional life of the child receives enough consideration in the school? in the home? chapter xvi interest the feeling that we call interest is so important a motive in our lives and so colors our acts and gives direction to our endeavors that we will do well to devote a chapter to its discussion. . the nature of interest we saw in an earlier chapter that personal habits have their rise in race habits or instincts. let us now see how interest helps the individual to select from his instinctive acts those which are useful to build into personal habits. instinct impartially starts the child in the performance of many different activities, but does not dictate what particular acts shall be retained to serve as the basis for habits. interest comes in at this point and says, "this act is of more value than that act; continue this act and drop that." instinct prompts the babe to countless movements of body and limb. interest picks out those that are most vitally connected with the welfare of the organism, and the child comes to prefer these rather than the others. thus it is that out of the random movements of arms and legs and head and body we finally develop the coördinated activities which are infinitely more useful than the random ones were. and these activities, originating in instincts, and selected by interest, are soon crystallized into habits. interest a selective agent.--the same truth holds for mental activities as for physical. a thousand channels lie open for your stream of thought at this moment, but your interest has beckoned it into the one particular channel which, for the time, at least, appears to be of the greatest subjective value; and it is now following that channel unless your will has compelled it to leave that for another. your thinking as naturally follows your interest as the needle does the magnet, hence your thought activities are conditioned largely by your interests. this is equivalent to saying that your mental habits rest back finally upon your interests. everyone knows what it is to be interested; but interest, like other elementary states of consciousness, cannot be rigidly defined. ( ) subjectively considered, interest may be looked upon as _a feeling attitude which assigns our activities their place in a subjective scale of values_, and hence selects among them. ( ) objectively considered, an interest is _the object which calls forth the feeling_. ( ) functionally considered, interest is _the dynamic phase of consciousness_. interest supplies a subjective scale of values.--if you are interested in driving a horse rather than in riding a bicycle, it is because the former has a greater subjective value to you than the latter. if you are interested in reading these words instead of thinking about the next social function or the last picnic party, it is because at this moment the thought suggested appeals to you as of more value than the other lines of thought. from this it follows that your standards of values are revealed in the character of your interests. the young man who is interested in the race track, in gaming, and in low resorts confesses by the fact that these things occupy a high place among the things which appeal to him as subjectively valuable. the mother whose interests are chiefly in clubs and other social organizations places these higher in her scale of values than her home. the reader who can become interested only in light, trashy literature must admit that matter of this type ranks higher in his subjective scale of values than the works of the masters. teachers and students whose strongest interest is in grade marks value these more highly than true attainment. for, whatever may be our claims or assertions, interest is finally an infallible barometer of the values we assign to our activities. in the case of some of our feelings it is not always possible to ascribe an objective side to them. a feeling of ennui, of impending evil, or of bounding vivacity, may be produced by an unanalyzable complex of causes. but interest, while it is related primarily to the activities of the self, is carried over from the activity to the object which occasions the activity. that is, interest has both an objective and a subjective side. on the subjective side a certain activity connected with self-expression is worth so much; on the objective side a certain object is worth so much as related to this self-expression. thus we say, i have an interest in books or in business; my daily activities, my self-expression, are governed with reference to these objects. they are my interests. interest dynamic.--many of our milder feelings terminate within ourselves, never attaining sufficient force as motives to impel us to action. not so with interest. its very nature is dynamic. whatever it seizes upon becomes _ipso facto_ an object for some activity, for some form of expression of the self. are we interested in a new book, we must read it; in a new invention, we must see it, handle it, test it; in some vocation or avocation, we must pursue it. interest is impulsive. it gives its possessor no opportunity for lethargic rest and quiet, but constantly urges him to action. grown ardent, interest becomes enthusiasm, "without which," says emerson, "nothing great was ever accomplished." are we an edison, with a strong interest centered in mechanical invention, it will drive us day and night in a ceaseless activity which scarcely gives us time for food and sleep. are we a lincoln, with an undying interest in the union, this motive will make possible superhuman efforts for the accomplishment of our end. are we man or woman anywhere, in any walk of life, so we are dominated by mighty interests grown into enthusiasm for some object, we shall find great purposes growing within us, and our life will be one of activity and achievement. on the contrary, a life which has developed no great interest lacks motive power. of necessity such a life must be devoid of purpose and hence barren of results, counting little while it is being lived, and little missed by the world when it is gone. habit antagonistic to interest.--while, as we have seen, interest is necessary to the formation of habits, yet habits once formed are antagonistic to interest. that is, acts which are so habitually performed that they "do themselves" are accompanied by a minimum of interest. they come to be done without attentive consciousness, hence interest cannot attach to their performance. many of the activities which make up the daily round of our lives are of this kind. as long as habit is being modified in some degree, as long as we are improving in our ways of doing things, interest will still cling to the process; but let us once settle into an unmodified rut, and interest quickly fades away. we then have the conditions present which make of us either a machine or a drudge. . direct and indirect interest we may have an interest either ( ) in the doing of an act, or ( ) in the end sought through the doing. in the first instance we call the interest _immediate_ or _direct_; in the second instance, _mediate_ or _indirect_. interest in the end versus interest in the activity.--if we do not find an interest in the doing of our work, or if it has become positively disagreeable so that we loathe its performance, then there must be some ultimate end for which the task is being performed, and in which there is a strong interest, else the whole process will be the veriest drudgery. if the end is sufficiently interesting it may serve to throw a halo of interest over the whole process connected with it. the following instance illustrates this fact: a twelve-year-old boy was told by his father that if he would make the body of an automobile at his bench in the manual training school, the father would purchase the running gear for it and give the machine to the boy. in order to secure the coveted prize, the boy had to master the arithmetic necessary for making the calculations, and the drawing necessary for making the plans to scale before the teacher in manual training would allow him to take up the work of construction. the boy had always lacked interest in both arithmetic and drawing, and consequently was dull in them. under the new incentive, however, he took hold of them with such avidity that he soon surpassed all the remainder of the class, and was able to make his calculations and drawings within a term. he secured his automobile a few months later, and still retained his interest in arithmetic and drawing. indirect interest as a motive.--interest of the indirect type, which does not attach to the process, but comes from some more or less distant end, most of us find much less potent than interest which is immediate. this is especially true unless the end be one of intense desire and not too distant. the assurance to a boy that he must get his lessons well because he will need to be an educated man ten years hence when he goes into business for himself does not compensate for the lack of interest in the lessons of today. yet it is necessary in the economy of life that both children and adults should learn to work under the incitement of indirect interests. much of the work we do is for an end which is more desirable than the work itself. it will always be necessary to sacrifice present pleasure for future good. ability to work cheerfully for a somewhat distant end saves much of our work from becoming drudgery. if interest is removed from both the process and the end, no inducement is left to work except compulsion; and this, if continued, results in the lowest type of effort. it puts a man on a level with the beast of burden, which constantly shirks its work. indirect interest alone insufficient.--interest coming from an end instead of inhering in the process may finally lead to an interest in the work itself; but if it does not, the worker is in danger of being left a drudge at last. to be more than a slave to his work one must ultimately find the work worth doing for its own sake. the man who performs his work solely because he has a wife and babies at home will never be an artist in his trade or profession; the student who masters a subject only because he must know it for an examination is not developing the traits of a scholar. the question of interest in the process makes the difference between the one who works because he loves to work and the one who toils because he must--it makes the difference between the artist and the drudge. the drudge does only what he must when he works, the artist all he can. the drudge longs for the end of labor, the artist for it to begin. the drudge studies how he may escape his labor, the artist how he may better his and ennoble it. to labor when there is joy in the work is elevating, to labor under the lash of compulsion is degrading. it matters not so much what a man's occupation as how it is performed. a coachman driving his team down the crowded street better than anyone else could do it, and glorying in that fact, may be a true artist in his occupation, and be ennobled through his work. a statesman molding the affairs of a nation as no one else could do it, or a scholar leading the thought of his generation is subject to the same law; in order to give the best grade of service of which he is capable, man must find a joy in the performance of the work as well as in the end sought through its performance. no matter how high the position or how refined the work, the worker becomes a slave to his labor unless interest in its performance saves him. . transitoriness of certain interests since our interests are always connected with our activities it follows that many interests will have their birth, grow to full strength, and then fade away as the corresponding instincts which are responsible for the activities pass through these same stages. this only means that interest in play develops at the time when the play activities are seeking expression; that interest in the opposite sex becomes strong when instinctive tendencies are directing the attention to the choice of a mate; and that interest in abstract studies comes when the development of the brain enables us to carry on logical trains of thought. all of us can recall many interests which were once strong, and are now weak or else have altogether passed away. hide-and-seek, pussy-wants-a-corner, excursions to the little fishing pond, securing the colored chromo at school, the care of pets, reading blood-and-thunder stories or sentimental ones--interest in these things belongs to our past, or has left but a faint shadow. other interests have come, and these in turn will also disappear and other new ones yet appear as long as we keep on acquiring new experience. interests must be utilized when they appear.--this means that we must take advantage of interests when they appear if we wish to utilize and develop them. how many people there are who at one time felt an interest impelling them to cultivate their taste for music, art, or literature and said they would do this at some convenient season, and finally found themselves without a taste for these things! how many of us have felt an interest in some benevolent work, but at last discovered that our inclination had died before we found time to help the cause! how many of us, young as we are, do not at this moment lament the passing of some interest from our lives, or are now watching the dying of some interest which we had fondly supposed was as stable as gibraltar? the drawings of every interest which appeals to us is a voice crying, "now is the appointed time!" what impulse urges us today to become or to do, we must begin at once to be or perform, if we would attain to the coveted end. the value of a strong interest.--nor are we to look upon these transitory interests as useless. they come to us not only as a race heritage, but they impel us to activities which are immediately useful, or else prepare us for the later battles of life. but even aside from this important fact it is worth everything just to be interested. for it is only through the impulsion of interest that we first learn to put forth effort in any true sense of the word, and interest furnishes the final foundation upon which volition rests. without interest the greatest powers may slumber in us unawakened, and abilities capable of the highest attainment rest satisfied with commonplace mediocrity. no one will ever know how many gladstones and leibnitzes the world has lost simply because their interests were never appealed to in such a way as to start them on the road to achievement. it matters less what the interest be, so it be not bad, than that there shall be some great interest to compel endeavor, test the strength of endurance, and lead to habits of achievement. . selection among our interests i said early in the discussion that interest is selective among our activities, picking out those which appear to be of the most value to us. in the same manner there must be a selection among our interests themselves. the mistake of following too many interests.--it is possible for us to become interested in so many lines of activity that we do none of them well. this leads to a life so full of hurry and stress that we forget life in our busy living. says james with respect to the necessity of making a choice among our interests: "with most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. i am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. not that i would not, if i could, be both handsome and fat, and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year; be a wit, a bon vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and african explorer, as well as a 'tone poet' and saint. but the thing is simply impossible. the millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon vivant and the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to man. but to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation." interests may be too narrow.--on the other hand, it is just as possible for our interests to be too narrow as too broad. the one who has cultivated no interests outside of his daily round of humdrum activities does not get enough out of life. it is possible to become so engrossed with making a living that we forget to live--to become so habituated to some narrow treadmill of labor with the limited field of thought suggested by its environment, that we miss the richest experiences of life. many there are who live a barren, trivial, and self-centered life because they fail to see the significant and the beautiful which lie just beyond where their interests reach! many there are so taken up with their own petty troubles that they have no heart or sympathy for fellow humanity! many there are so absorbed with their own little achievements that they fail to catch step with the progress of the age! specialization should not come too early.--it is not well to specialize too early in our interests. we miss too many rich fields which lie ready for the harvesting, and whose gleaning would enrich our lives. the student who is so buried in books that he has no time for athletic recreations or social diversions is making a mistake equally with the one who is so enthusiastic an athlete and social devotee that he neglects his studies. likewise, the youth who is so taken up with the study of one particular line that he applies himself to this at the expense of all other lines is inviting a distorted growth. youth is the time for pushing the sky line back on all sides; it is the time for cultivating diverse and varied lines of interests if we would grow into a rich experience in our later lives. the physical must be developed, but not at the expense of the mental, and vice versa. the social must not be neglected, but it must not be indulged to such an extent that other interests suffer. interest in amusements and recreations should be cultivated, but these should never run counter to the moral and religious. specialization is necessary, but specialization in our interests should rest upon a broad field of fundamental interests, in order that the selection of the special line may be an intelligent one, and that our specialty shall not prove a rut in which we become so deeply buried that we are lost to the best in life. a proper balance to be sought.--it behooves us, then, to find a proper balance in cultivating our interests, making them neither too broad nor too narrow. we should deliberately seek to discover those which are strong enough to point the way to a life vocation, but this should not be done until we have had an opportunity to become acquainted with various lines of interests. otherwise our decision in this important matter may be based merely on a whim. we should also decide what interests we should cultivate for our own personal development and happiness, and for the service we are to render in a sphere outside our immediate vocation. we should consider avocations as well as vocations. whatever interests are selected should be carried to efficiency. better a reasonable number of carefully selected interests well developed and resulting in efficiency than a multitude of interests which lead us into so many fields that we can at best get but a smattering of each, and that by neglecting the things which should mean the most to us. our interests should lead us to live what wagner calls a "simple life," but not a narrow one. . interest fundamental in education some educators have feared that in finding our occupations interesting, we shall lose all power of effort and self-direction; that the will, not being called sufficiently into requisition, must suffer from non-use; that we shall come to do the interesting and agreeable things well enough, but fail before the disagreeable. interest not antagonistic to effort.--the best development of the will does not come through our being forced to do acts in which there is absolutely no interest. work done under compulsion never secures the full self in its performance. it is done mechanically and usually under such a spirit of rebellion on the part of the doer, that the advantage of such training may well be doubted. nor are we safe in assuming that tasks done without interest as the motive are always performed under the direction of the will. it is far more likely that they are done under some external compulsion, and that the will has, after all, but very little to do with it. a boy may get an uninteresting lesson at school without much pressure from his will, providing he is sufficiently afraid of the master. in order that the will may receive training through compelling the performance of certain acts, it must have a reasonably free field, with external pressure removed. the compelling force must come from within, and not from without. on the other hand, there is not the least danger that we shall ever find a place in life where all the disagreeable is removed, and all phases of our work made smooth and interesting. the necessity will always be rising to call upon effort to take up the fight and hold us to duty where interest has failed. and it is just here that there must be no failure, else we shall be mere creatures of circumstance, drifting with every eddy in the tide of our life, and never able to breast the current. interest is not to supplant the necessity for stern and strenuous endeavor but rather to call forth the largest measure of endeavor of which the self is capable. it is to put at work a larger amount of power than can be secured in any other way; in place of supplanting the will, it is to give it its point of departure and render its service all the more effective. interest and character.--finally, we are not to forget that bad interests have the same propulsive power as good ones, and will lead to acts just as surely. and these acts will just as readily be formed into habits. it is worth noticing that back of the act lies an interest; in the act lies the seed of a habit; ahead of the act lies behavior, which grows into conduct, this into character, and character into destiny. bad interests should be shunned and discouraged. but even that is not enough. good interests must be installed in the place of the bad ones from which we wish to escape, for it is through substitution rather than suppression that we are able to break from the bad and adhere to the good. our interests are an evolution. out of the simple interests of the child grow the more complex interests of the man. lacking the opportunity to develop the interests of childhood, the man will come somewhat short of the full interests of manhood. the great thing, then, in educating a child is to discover the fundamental interests which come to him from the race and, using these as a starting point, direct them into constantly broadening and more serviceable ones. out of the early interest in play is to come the later interest in work; out of the early interest in collecting treasure boxes full of worthless trinkets and old scraps comes the later interest in earning and retaining ownership of property; out of the interest in chums and playmates come the larger social interests; out of interest in nature comes the interest of the naturalist. and so one by one we may examine the interests which bear the largest fruit in our adult life, and we find that they all have their roots in some early interest of childhood, which was encouraged and given a chance to grow. . order of development of our interests the order in which our interests develop thus becomes an important question in our education. nor is the order an arbitrary one, as might appear on first thought; for interest follows the invariable law of attaching to the activity for which the organism is at that time ready, and which it then needs in its further growth. that we are sometimes interested in harmful things does not disprove this assertion. the interest in its fundamental aspect is good, and but needs more healthful environment or more wise direction. while space forbids a full discussion of the genetic phase of interest here, yet we may profit by a brief statement of the fundamental interests of certain well-marked periods in our development. the interests of early childhood.--the interests of early childhood are chiefly connected with ministering to the wants of the organism as expressed in the appetites, and in securing control of the larger muscles. activity is the preëminent thing--racing and romping are worth doing for their own sake alone. imitation is strong, curiosity is rising, and imagination is building a new world. speech is a joy, language is learned with ease, and rhyme and rhythm become second nature. the interests of this stage are still very direct and immediate. a distant end does not attract. the thing must be worth doing for the sake of the doing. since the young child's life is so full of action, and since it is out of acts that habits grow, it is doubly desirous during this period that environment, models, and teaching should all direct his interests and activities into lines that will lead to permanent values. the interests of later childhood.--in the period from second dentition to puberty there is a great widening in the scope of interests, as well as a noticeable change in their character. activity is still the keynote; but the child is no longer interested merely in the doing, but is now able to look forward to the end sought. interests which are somewhat indirect now appeal to him, and the how of things attracts his attention. he is beginning to reach outside of his own little circle, and is ready for handicraft, reading, history, and science. spelling, writing, and arithmetic interest him partly from the activities involved, but more as a means to an end. interest in complex games and plays increases, but the child is not yet ready for games which require team work. he has not come to the point where he is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of all. interest in moral questions is beginning, and right and wrong are no longer things which may or may not be done without rebuke or punishment. the great problem at this stage is to direct the interest into ways of adapting the means to ends and into willingness to work under voluntary attention for the accomplishment of the desired end. the interests of adolescence.--finally, with the advent of puberty, comes the last stage in the development of interests before adult life. this period is not marked by the birth of new interests so much as by a deepening and broadening of those already begun. the end sought becomes an increasingly larger factor, whether in play or in work. mere activity itself no longer satisfies. the youth can now play team games; for his social interests are taking shape, and he can subordinate himself for the good of the group. interest in the opposite sex takes on a new phase, and social form and mode of dress receive attention. a new consciousness of self emerges, and the youth becomes introspective. questions of the ultimate meaning of things press for solution, and what and who am i, demands an answer. at this age we pass from a régime of obedience to one of self-control, from an ethics of authority to one of individualism. all the interests are now taking on a more definite and stable form, and are looking seriously toward life vocations. this is a time of big plans and strenuous activity. it is a crucial period in our life, fraught with pitfalls and dangers, with privileges and opportunities. at this strategic point in our life's voyage we may anchor ourselves with right interests to a safe manhood and a successful career; or we may, with wrong interests, bind ourselves to a broken life of discouragement and defeat. . problems in observation and introspection . try making a list of your most important interests in order of their strength. suppose you had made such a list five years ago, where would it have differed from the present list? are you ever obliged to perform any activities in which you have little or no interest, either directly or indirectly? can you name any activities in which you once had a strong interest but which you now perform chiefly from force of habit and without much interest? . have you any interests of which you are not proud? on the other hand, do you lack certain interests which you feel that you should possess? what interests are you now trying especially to cultivate? to suppress? have you as broad a field of interests as you can well take care of? have you so many interests that you are slighting the development of some of the more important ones? . observe several recitations for differences in the amount of interest shown. account for these differences. have you ever observed an enthusiastic teacher with an uninterested class? a dull, listless teacher with an interested class? . a father offers his son a dollar for every grade on his term report which is above ninety; what type of interest relative to studies does this appeal to? what do you think of the advisability of giving prizes in connection with school work? . most children in the elementary school are not interested in technical grammar; why not? histories made up chiefly of dates and lists of kings or presidents are not interesting; what is the remedy? would you call any teaching of literature, history, geography, or science successful which fails to develop an interest in the subject? . after careful observation, make a statement of the differences in the typical play interests of boys and girls; of children of the third grade and the eighth grade. chapter xvii the will the fundamental fact in all ranges of life from the lowest to the highest is _activity_, _doing_. every individual, either animal or man, is constantly meeting situations which demand response. in the lower forms of life, this response is very simple, while in the higher forms, and especially in man, it is very complex. the bird sees a nook favorable for a nest, and at once appropriates it; a man sees a house that strikes his fancy, and works and plans and saves for months to secure money with which to buy it. it is evident that the larger the possible number of responses, and the greater their diversity and complexity, the more difficult it will be to select and compel the right response to any given situation. man therefore needs some special power of control over his acts--he requires a _will._ . the nature of the will there has been much discussion and not a little controversy as to the true nature of the will. just what _is_ the will, and what is the content of our mental stream when we are in the act of willing? is there at such times a new and distinctly different content which we do not find in our processes of knowledge or emotion--such as perception, memory, judgment, interest, desire? or do we find, when we are engaged in an act of the will, that the mental stream contains only the familiar old elements of attention, perception, judgment, desire, purpose, etc., _all organized or set for the purpose of accomplishing or preventing some act_? the content of the will.--we shall not attempt here to settle the controversy suggested by the foregoing questions, nor, for immediately practical purposes, do we need to settle it. it is perhaps safe to say, however, that whenever we are willing the mental content consists of elements of cognition and feeling _plus a distinct sense of effort_, with which everyone is familiar. whether this sense of effort is a new and different element, or only a complex of old and familiar mental processes, we need not now decide. the function of the will.--concerning the function of the will there can be no haziness or doubt. _volition concerns itself wholly with acts, responses._ the will always has to do with causing or inhibiting some action, either physical or mental. we need to go to the dentist, tell some friend we were in the wrong, hold our mind to a difficult or uninteresting task, or do some other disagreeable thing from which we shirk. it is at such points that we must call upon the will. again, we must restrain our tongue from speaking the unkind word, keep from crying out when the dentist drills the tooth, check some unworthy line of thought. we must here also appeal to the will. we may conclude then that the will is needed whenever the physical or mental activity must be controlled _with effort_. some writers have called the work of the will in compelling action its _positive_ function, and in inhibiting action its _negative_ function. how the will exerts its compulsion.--how does the will bring its compulsion to bear? it is not a kind of mental policeman who can take us by the collar, so to speak, and say _do this_, or _do not do that_. the secret of the will's power of control lies in _attention_. it is the line of action that we hold the mind upon with an attitude of intending to perform it that we finally follow. it is the thing we keep thinking about that we finally do. on the other hand, let us resolutely hold the mind away from some attractive but unsuitable line of action, directing our thoughts to an opposite course, or to some wholly different subject, and we have effectually blocked the wrong response. to control our acts is therefore to control our thoughts, and strength of will can be measured by our ability to direct our attention. . the extent of voluntary control over our acts a relatively small proportion of our acts, or responses, are controlled by volition. nature, in her wise economy, has provided a simpler and easier method than to have all our actions performed or checked with conscious effort. classes of acts or response.--movements or acts, like other phenomena, do not just happen. they never occur without a cause back of them. whether they are performed with a conscious end in view or without it, the fact remains the same--something must lie back of the act to account for its performance. during the last hour, each of us has performed many simple movements and more or less complex acts. these acts have varied greatly in character. of many we were wholly unconscious. others were consciously performed, but without feeling of effort on our part. still others were accomplished only with effort, and after a struggle to decide which of two lines of action we should take. some of our acts were reflex, some were chiefly instinctive, and some were volitional. simple reflex acts.--first, there are going on within every living organism countless movements of which he is in large part unconscious, which he does nothing to initiate, and which he is largely powerless to prevent. some of them are wholly, and others almost, out of the reach and power of his will. such are the movements of the heart and vascular system, the action of the lungs in breathing, the movements of the digestive tract, the work of the various glands in their process of secretion. the entire organism is a mass of living matter, and just because it is living no part of it is at rest. movements of this type require no external stimulus and no direction, they are _reflex_; they take care of themselves, as long as the body is in health, without let or hindrance, continuing whether we sleep or wake, even if we are in hypnotic or anæsthetic coma. with movements of reflex type we shall have no more concern, since they are almost wholly physiological, and come scarcely at all within the range of the consciousness. instinctive acts.--next there are a large number of such acts as closing the eyes when they are threatened, starting back from danger, crying out from pain or alarm, frowning and striking when angry. these may roughly be classed as instinctive, and have already been discussed under that head. they differ from the former class in that they require some stimulus to set the act off. we are fully conscious of their performance, although they are performed without a conscious end in view. winking the eyes serves an important purpose, but that is not why we wink; starting back from danger is a wise thing to do, but we do not stop to consider this before performing the act. and so it is with a multitude of reflex and instinctive acts. they are performed immediately upon receiving an appropriate stimulus, because we possess an organism calculated to act in a definite way in response to certain stimuli. there is no need for, and indeed no place for, anything to come in between the stimulus and the act. the stimulus pulls the trigger of the ready-set nervous system, and the act follows at once. acts of these reflex and instinctive types do not come properly within the range of volition, hence we will not consider them further. automatic or spontaneous acts.--growing out of these reflex and instinctive acts is a broad field of action which may be called _automatic_ or _spontaneous_. the distinguishing feature of this type of action is that all such acts, though performed now largely without conscious purpose or intent, were at one time purposed acts, performed with effort; this is to say that they were volitional. such acts as writing, or fingering the keyboard of a piano, were once consciously purposed, volitional acts selected from many random or reflex movements. the effects of experience and habit are such, however, that soon the mere presence of pencil and paper, or the sight of the keyboard, is enough to set one scribbling or playing. stated differently, certain objects and situations come to suggest certain characteristic acts or responses so strongly that the action follows immediately on the heels of the percept of the object, or the idea of the act. james calls such action _ideo-motor_. many illustrations of this type of acts will occur to each of us: a door starts to blow shut, and we spring up and avert the slam. the memory of a neglected engagement comes to us, and we have started to our feet on the instant. a dish of nuts stands before us, and we find ourselves nibbling without intending to do so. the cycle from volitional to automatic.--it is of course evident that no such acts, though they were at one time in our experience volitional, now require effort or definite intention for their performance. the law covering this point may be stated as follows: _all volitional acts, when repeated, tend, through the effects of habit, to become automatic, and thus relieve the will from the necessity of directing them._ [illustration: fig. .--star for mirror drawing. the mirror breaks up the automatic control previously developed, and requires one to start out much as the child does at the beginning. see text for directions.] to illustrate this law try the following experiment: draw on a piece of cardboard a star, like figure , making each line segment two inches. seat yourself at a table with the star before you, placing a mirror back of the star so that it can be seen in the mirror. have someone hold a screen a few inches above the table so as to hide the star from your direct view, but so that you can see it in the mirror. now reach your hand under the screen and trace with a pencil around the star from left to right, not taking your pencil off the paper until you get clear around. keep track of how long it takes to go around and also note the irregular wanderings of your pencil. try this experiment five times over, noting the decrease in time and effort required, and the increase in efficiency as the movements tend to become automatic. volitional action.--while it is obvious that the various types of action already described include a very large proportion of all our acts, yet they do not include all. for there are some acts that are neither reflex nor instinctive nor automatic, but that have to be performed under the stress of compulsion and effort. we constantly meet situations where the necessity for action or restraint runs counter to our inclinations. we daily are confronted by the necessity of making decisions in which the mind must be compelled by effort to take this direction or that direction. conflicting motives or tendencies create frequent necessity for coercion. it is often necessary to drive our bark counter to the current of our desires or our habits, or to enter into conflict with a temptation. volition acts in the making of decisions.--everyone knows for himself the state of inward unrest which we call indecision. a thought enters the mind which would of itself prompt an act; but before the act can occur, a contrary idea appears and the act is checked; another thought comes favoring the act, and is in turn counterbalanced by an opposing one. the impelling and inhibiting ideas we call _motives_ or _reasons_ for and against the proposed act. while we are balancing the motives against each other, we are said to _deliberate_. this process of deliberation must go on, if we continue to think about the matter at all, until one set of ideas has triumphed over the other and secured the attention. when this has occurred, we have _decided_, and the deliberation is at an end. we have exercised the highest function of the will and made a _choice_. sometimes the battle of motives is short, the decision being reached as soon as there is time to summon all the reasons on both sides of the question. at other times the conflict may go on at intervals for days or weeks, neither set of motives being strong enough to vanquish the other and dictate the decision. when the motives are somewhat evenly balanced we wisely pause in making a decision, because when one line of action is taken, the other cannot be, and we hesitate to lose either opportunity. a state of indecision is usually highly unpleasant, and no doubt more than one decision has been hastened in our lives simply that we might be done with the unpleasantness attendant on the consideration of two contrary and insistent sets of motives. it is of the highest importance when making a decision of any consequence that we should be fair in considering all the reasons on both sides of the question, allowing each its just weight. nor is this as easy as it might appear; for, as we saw in our study of the emotions, our feeling attitude toward any object that occupies the mind is largely responsible for the subjective value we place upon it. it is easy to be so prejudiced toward or against a line of action that the motives bearing upon it cannot get fair consideration. to be able to eliminate this personal factor to such an extent that the evidence before us on a question may be considered on its merits is a rare accomplishment. types of decision.--a decision may be reached in a variety of ways, the most important ones of which may now briefly be described after the general plan suggested by professor james: the reasonable type.--one of the simplest types of decision is that in which the preponderance of motives is clearly seen to be on one side or the other, and the only rational thing to do is to decide in accordance with the weight of evidence. decisions of this type are called _reasonable_. if we discover ten reasons why we should pursue a certain course of action, and only one or two reasons of equal weight why we should not, then the decision ought not to be hard to make. the points to watch in this case are (a) that we have really discovered all the important reasons on both sides of the case, and (b) that our feelings of personal interest or prejudice have not given some of the motives an undue weight in our scale of values. accidental type: external motives.--it is to be doubted whether as many of our decisions are made under immediate stress of volition as we think. we may be hesitating between two sets of motives, unable to decide between them, when a third factor enters which is not really related to the question at all, but which finally dictates the decision nevertheless. for example, we are considering the question whether we shall go on an excursion or stay at home and complete a piece of work. the benefits coming from the recreation, and the pleasures of the trip, are pitted against the expense which must be incurred and the desirability of having the work done on time. at this point, while as yet we have been unable to decide, a friend comes along, and we seek to evade the responsibility of making our own decision by appealing to him, "you tell me what to do!" how few of us have never said in effect if not in words, "i will do this or that if you will"! how few have never taken advantage of a rainy day to stay from church or shirk an undesirable engagement! how few have not allowed important questions to be decided by some trivial or accidental factor not really related to the choice in the least! this form of decision is _accidental decision_. it does not rest on motives which are vitally related to the case, but rather on the accident of external circumstances. the person who habitually makes his decisions in this way lacks power of will. he does not hold himself to the question until he has gathered the evidence before him, and then himself direct his attention to the best line of action and so secure its performance. he drifts with the tide, he goes with the crowd, he shirks responsibility. accidental type: subjective motives.--a second type of _accidental_ decision may occur when we are hesitating between two lines of action which are seemingly about equally desirable, and no preponderating motive enters the field; when no external factor appears, and no advising friend comes to the rescue. then, with the necessity for deciding thrust upon us, we tire of the worry and strain of deliberation and say to ourselves, "this thing must be settled one way or the other pretty soon; i am tired of the whole matter." when we have reached this point we are likely to shut our eyes to the evidence in the case, and decide largely upon the whim or mood of the moment. very likely we regret our decision the next instant, but without any more cause for the regret than we had for the decision. it is evident that such a decision as this does not rest on valid motives but rather on the accident of subjective conditions. habitual decisions of this type are an evidence of a mental laziness or a mental incompetence which renders the individual incapable of marshaling the facts bearing on a case. he cannot hold them before his mind and weigh them against each other until one side outweighs the other and dictates the decision. of course the remedy for this weakness of decision lies in not allowing oneself to be pushed into a decision simply to escape the unpleasantness of a state of indecision, or the necessity of searching for further evidence which will make the decision easier. on the other hand, it is possible to form a habit of _indecision_, of undue hesitancy in coming to conclusions when the evidence is all before us. this gives us the mental dawdler, the person who will spend several minutes in an agony of indecision over whether to carry an umbrella on this particular trip; whether to wear black shoes or tan shoes today; whether to go calling or to stay at home and write letters this afternoon. such a person is usually in a stew over some inconsequential matter, and consumes so much time and energy in fussing over trivial things that he is incapable of handling larger ones. if we are certain that we have all the facts in a given case before us, and have given each its due weight so far as our judgment will enable us to do, then there is nothing to be gained by delaying the decision. nor is there any occasion to change the decision after it has once been made unless new evidence is discovered bearing on the case. decision under effort.--the highest type of decision is that in which effort is the determining factor. the pressure of external circumstances and inward impulse is not enough to overcome a calm and determined _i will_. two possible lines of action may lie open before us. every current of our being leads toward the one; in addition, inclination, friends, honors, all beckon in the same direction. from the other course our very nature shrinks; duty alone bids us take this line, and promises no rewards except the approval of conscience. here is the crucial point in human experience; the supreme test of the individual; the last measure of man's independence and power. winning at this point man has exercised his highest prerogative--that of independent choice; failing here, he reverts toward the lower forms and is a creature of circumstance, no longer the master of his own destiny, but blown about by the winds of chance. and it behooves us to win in this battle. we may lose in a contest or a game and yet not fail, because we have done our best; if we fail in the conflict of motives we have planted a seed of weakness from which we shall at last harvest defeat. jean valjean, the galley slave of almost a score of years, escapes and lives an honest life. he wins the respect and admiration of friends; he is elected mayor of his town, and honors are heaped on him. at the height of his prosperity he reads one day that a man has been arrested in another town for the escaped convict, jean valjean, and is about to be sent to the galleys. now comes the supreme test in jean valjean's life. shall he remain the honored, respected citizen and let an innocent man suffer in his stead, or shall he proclaim himself the long-sought criminal and again have the collar riveted on his neck and take his place at the oars? he spends one awful night of conflict in which contending motives make a battle ground of his soul. but in the morning he has won. he has saved his manhood. his conscience yet lives--and he goes and gives himself up to the officers. nor could he do otherwise and still remain a _man_. . strong and weak wills many persons will admit that their memory or imagination or power of perception is not good, but few will confess to a weak will. strength of will is everywhere lauded as a mark of worth and character. how can we tell whether our will is strong or weak? not a will, but wills.--first of all we need to remember that, just as we do not have a memory, but a system of memories, so we do not possess a will, but many different wills. by this i mean that the will must be called upon and tested at every point of contact in experience before we have fully measured its strength. our will may have served us reasonably well so far, but we may not yet have met any great number of hard tests because our experience and temptations have been limited. nor must we forget to take into account both the negative and the positive functions of the will. many there are who think of the will chiefly in its negative use, as a kind of a check or barrier to save us _from_ doing certain things. that this is an important function cannot be denied. but the positive is the higher function. there are many men and women who are able to resist evil, but able to do little good. they are good enough, but not good for much. they lack the power of effort and self-compulsion to hold them up to the high standards and stern endeavor necessary to save them from inferiority or mediocrity. it is almost certain that for most who read these words the greatest test of their will power will be in the positive instead of the negative direction. objective tests a false measure of will power.--the actual amount of volition exercised in making a decision cannot be measured by objective results. the fact that you follow the pathway of duty, while i falter and finally drift into the byways of pleasure, is not certain evidence that you have put forth the greater power of will. in the first place, the allurements which led me astray may have had no charms for you. furthermore, you may have so formed the habit of pursuing the pathway of duty when the two paths opened before you, that your well-trained feet unerringly led you into the narrow way without a struggle. of course you are on safer ground than i, and on ground that we should all seek to attain. but, nevertheless, i, although i fell when i should have stood, may have been fighting a battle and manifesting a power of resistance of which you, under similar temptation, would have been incapable. the only point from which a conflict of motives can be safely judged is that of the soul which is engaged in the struggle. . volitional types several fairly well-marked volitional types may be discovered. it is, of course, to be understood that these types all grade by insensible degrees into each other, and that extreme types are the exception rather than the rule. the impulsive type.--the _impulsive_ type of will goes along with a nervous organism of the hair-trigger kind. the brain is in a state of highly unstable equilibrium, and a relatively slight current serves to set off the motor centers. action follows before there is time for a counteracting current to intervene. putting it in mental terms, we act on an idea which presents itself before an opposing one has opportunity to enter the mind. hence _the action is largely or wholly ideo-motor and but slightly or not at all deliberate_. it is this type of will which results in the hasty word or deed, or the rash act committed on the impulse of the moment and repented of at leisure; which compels the frequent, "i didn't think, or i would not have done it!" the impulsive person may undoubtedly have credited up to him many kind words and noble deeds. in addition, he usually carries with him an air of spontaneity and whole-heartedness which goes far to atone for his faults. the fact remains, however, that he is too little the master of his acts, that he is guided too largely by external circumstances or inward caprice. he lacks balance. impulsive action is not to be confused with quick decision and rapid action. many of the world's greatest and safest leaders have been noted for quickness of decision and for rapidity of action in carrying out their decisions. it must be remembered, however, that these men were making decisions in fields well known to them. they were specialists in this line of deliberation. the motives for and against certain lines of action had often been dwelt upon. all possible contingencies had been imaged many times over, and a valuation placed upon the different decisions. the various concepts had long been associated with certain definite lines of action. deliberation under such conditions can be carried on with lightning rapidity, each motive being checked off as worth so much the instant it presents itself, and action can follow immediately when attention settles on the proper motive to govern the decision. this is not impulse, but abbreviated deliberation. these facts suggest to us that we should think much and carefully over matters in which we are required to make quick decisions. of course the remedy for the over-impulsive type is to cultivate deliberative action. when the impulse comes to act without consideration, pause to give the other side of the question an opportunity to be heard. check the motor response to ideas that suggest action until you have reviewed the field to see whether there are contrary reasons to be taken into account. form the habit of waiting for all evidence before deciding. "think twice" before you act. the obstructed will.--the opposite of the impulsive type of will is the _obstructed_ or _balky_ will. in this type there is too much inhibition, or else not enough impulsion. images which should result in action are checkmated by opposing images, or do not possess vitality enough as motives to overcome the dead weight of inertia which clogs mental action. the person knows well enough what he should do, but he cannot get started. he "cannot get the consent of his will." it may be the student whose mind is tormented by thoughts of coming failure in recitation or examination, but who yet cannot force himself to the exertion necessary safely to meet the ordeal. it may be the dissolute man who tortures himself in his sober moments with remorse and the thought that he was intended for better things, but who, waking from his meditations, goes on in the same old way. it may be the child undergoing punishment, who is to be released from bondage as soon as he will promise to be good, but who cannot bring himself to say the necessary words. it not only may be, but is, man or woman anywhere who has ideals which are known to be worthy and noble, but which fail to take hold. it is anyone who is following a course of action which he knows is beneath him. no one can doubt that the moral tragedies, the failures and the shipwrecks in life come far more from the breaking of the bonds which should bind right ideals to action than from a failure to perceive the truth. men differ far more in their deeds than in their standards of action. the remedy for this diseased type of will is much easier to prescribe than to apply. it is simply to refuse to attend to the contrary thoughts which are blocking action, and to cultivate and encourage those which lead to action of the right kind. it is seeking to vitalize our good impulses and render them effective by acting on them whenever opportunity offers. nothing can be accomplished by moodily dwelling on the disgrace of harboring the obstructing ideas. thus brooding over them only encourages them. what we need is to get entirely away from the line of thought in which we have met our obstruction, and approach the matter from a different direction. the child who is in a fit of sulks does not so much need a lecture on the disagreeable habit he is forming as to have his thoughts led into lines not connected with the grievance which is causing him the trouble. the stubborn child does not need to have his will "broken," but rather to have it strengthened. he may be compelled to do what he does not want to do; but if this is accomplished through physical force instead of by leading to thoughts connected with the performance of the act, it may be doubted whether the will has in any degree been strengthened. indeed it may rather be depended upon that the will has been weakened; for an opportunity for self-control, through which alone the will develops, has been lost. the ultimate remedy for rebellion often lies in greater freedom at the proper time. this does not mean that the child should not obey rightful authority promptly and explicitly, but that just as little external authority as possible should intervene to take from the child the opportunity for _self_-compulsion. the normal will.--the golden mean between these two abnormal types of will may be called the _normal_ or _balanced_ will. here there is a proper ratio between impulsion and inhibition. ideas are not acted upon the instant they enter the mind without giving time for a survey of the field of motives, neither is action "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" to such an extent that it becomes impossible. the evidence is all considered and each motive fully weighed. but this once done, decision follows. no dilatory and obstructive tactics are allowed. the fleeting impulse is not enough to persuade to action, neither is action unduly delayed after the decision is made. . training the will the will is to be trained as we train the other powers of the mind--through the exercise of its normal function. the function of the will is to direct or control in the actual affairs of life. many well-meaning persons speak of training the will as if we could separate it from the interests and purposes of our daily living, and in some way put it through its paces merely for the sake of adding to its general strength. this view is all wrong. there is, as we have seen, no such thing as _general_ power of will. will is always required in specific acts and emergencies, and it is precisely upon such matters that it must be exercised if it is to be cultivated. will to be trained in common round of duties.--what is needed in developing the will is a deep moral interest in whatever we set out to do, and a high purpose to do it up to the limit of our powers. without this, any artificial exercises, no matter how carefully they are devised or how heroically they are carried out, cannot but fail to fit us for the real tests of life; with it, artificial exercises are superfluous. it matters not so much what our vocation as how it is performed. the most commonplace human experience is rich in opportunities for the highest form of expression possible to the will--that of directing us into right lines of action, and of holding us to our best in the accomplishment of some dominant purpose. there is no one set form of exercise which alone will serve to train the will. the student pushing steadily toward his goal in spite of poverty and grinding labor; the teacher who, though unappreciated and poorly paid, yet performs every duty with conscientious thoroughness; the man who stands firm in the face of temptation; the person whom heredity or circumstance has handicapped, but who, nevertheless, courageously fights his battle; the countless men and women everywhere whose names are not known to fame, but who stand in the hard places, bearing the heat and the toil with brave, unflinching hearts--these are the ones who are developing a moral fiber and strength of will which will stand in the day of stress. better a thousand times such training as this in the thick of life's real conflicts than any volitional calisthenics or priggish self-denials entered into solely for the training of the will! school work and will training.--the work of the school offers as good an opportunity for training powers of will as of memory or reasoning. on the side of inhibition there is always the necessity for self-restraint and control so that the rights of others may not be infringed upon. temptations to unfairness or insincerity in lessons and examinations are always to be met. the social relations of the school necessitate the development of personal poise and independence. on the positive side the opportunities for the exercise of will power are always at hand in the school. every lesson gives the pupil a chance to measure his strength and determination against the resistance of the task. high standards are to be built up, ideals maintained, habits rendered secure. the great problem for the teacher in this connection is so to organize both control and instruction that the largest possible opportunity is given to pupils for the exercise of their own powers of will in all school relations. . freedom of the will, or the extent of its control we have seen in this discussion that will is a mode of control--control of our thoughts and, through our thoughts, of our actions. will may be looked upon, then, as the culmination of the mental life, the highest form of directive agent within us. beginning with the direction of the simplest movements, it goes on until it governs the current of our life in the pursuit of some distant ideal. limitations of the will.--just how far the will can go in its control, just how far man is a free moral agent, has long been one of the mooted questions among the philosophers. but some few facts are clear. if the will can exercise full control over all our acts, it by this very fact determines our character; and character spells destiny. there is not the least doubt, however, that the will in thus directing us in the achievement of a destiny works under two limitations: _first_, every individual enters upon life with a large stock of _inherited tendencies_, which go far to shape his interests and aspirations. and these are important factors in the work of volition. _second_, we all have our setting in the midst of a great _material and social environment_, which is largely beyond our power to modify, and whose influences are constantly playing upon us and molding us according to their type. these limitations the conditions of freedom.--yet there is nothing in this thought to discourage us. for these very limitations have in them our hope of a larger freedom. man's heredity, coming to him through ages of conflict with the forces of nature, with his brother man, and with himself, has deeply instilled in him the spirit of independence and self-control. it has trained him to deliberate, to choose, to achieve. it has developed in him the power _to will_. likewise man's environment, in which he must live and work, furnishes the problems which his life work is to solve, and _out of whose solution will receives its only true development_. it is through the action and interaction of these two factors, then, that man is to work out his destiny. what he _is_, coupled with what he may _do_, leads him to what he may _become_. every man possesses in some degree a spark of divinity, a sovereign individuality, a power of independent initiative. this is all he needs to make him free--free to do his best in whatever walk of life he finds himself. if he will but do this, the doing of it will lead him into a constantly growing freedom, and he can voice the cry of every earnest heart: build thee more stately mansions, o my soul! as the swift seasons roll! leave thy low-vaulted past! let each new temple, nobler than the last, shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, till thou at length art free, leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! . problems in observation and introspection . give illustrations from your own experience of the various types of action mentioned in this discussion. from your own experience of the last hour, what examples of impulsive action can you give? would it have been better in some cases had you stopped to deliberate? . are you easily influenced by prejudice or personal preference in making decisions? what recent decisions have been thus affected? can you classify the various ones of your decisions which you can recall under the four types mentioned in the text? under which class does the largest number fall? have you a tendency to drift with the crowd? are you independent in deciding upon and following out a line of action? what is the value of advice? ought advice to do more than to assist in getting all the evidence on a case before the one who is to decide? . can you judge yourself well enough to tell to which volitional type you belong? are you over-impulsive? are you stubborn? what is the difference between stubbornness and firmness? suppose you ask your instructor, or a friend, to assist you in classifying yourself as to volitional type. are you troubled with indecision; that is, do you have hard work to decide in trivial matters even after you know all the facts in the case? what is the cause of these states of indecision? the remedy? . have you a strong power of will? can you control your attention? do you submit easily to temptation? can you hold yourself up to a high degree of effort? can you persevere? have you ever failed in the attainment of some cherished ideal because you could not bring yourself to pay the price in the sacrifice or effort necessary? . consider the class work and examinations of schools that you know. does the system of management and control throw responsibility on the pupils in a way to develop their powers of will? . what motives or incentives can be used to encourage pupils to use self-compulsion to maintain high standards of excellence in their studies and conduct? does it pay to be heroic in one's self-control? chapter xviii self-expression and development we have already seen that the mind and the body are associated in a copartnership in which each is an indispensable and active member. we have seen that the body gets its dignity and worth from its relation with the mind, and that the mind is dependent on the body for the crude material of its thought, and also for the carrying out of its mandates in securing adaptation to our environment. we have seen as a corollary of these facts that the efficiency of both mind and body is conditioned by the manner in which each carries out its share of the mutual activities. let us see something more of this interrelation. . inter-relation of impression and expression _no impression without corresponding expression_ has become a maxim in both physiology and psychology. inner life implies self-expression in external activities. the stream of impressions pouring in upon us hourly from our environment must have means of expression if development is to follow. we cannot be passive recipients, but must be active participants in the educational process. we must not only be able to _know_ and _feel_, but to _do_. [illustration: fig. ] the many sources of impressions.--the nature of the impressions which come to us and how they all lead on toward ultimate expression is shown in the accompanying diagram (fig. ). our material environment is thrusting impressions upon us every moment of our life; also, the material objects with which we deal have become so saturated with social values that each comes to us with a double significance, and what an object _means_ often stands for more than what it _is_. from the lives of people with whom we daily mingle; from the wider circle whose lives do not immediately touch ours, but who are interpreted to us by the press, by history and literature; from the social institutions into which have gone the lives of millions, and of which our lives form a part, there come to us constantly a flood of impressions whose influence cannot be measured. so likewise with religious impressions. god is all about us and within us. he speaks to us from every nook and corner of nature, and communes with us through the still small voice from within, if we will but listen. the bible, religious instruction, and the lives of good people are other sources of religious impressions constantly tending to mold our lives. the beautiful in nature, art, and human conduct constantly appeals to us in æssthetic impressions. all impressions lead toward expression.--each of these groups of impressions may be subdivided and extended into an almost indefinite number and variety, the different groups meeting and overlapping, it is true, yet each preserving reasonably distinct characteristics. a common characteristic of them all, as shown in the diagram, is that they all point toward expression. the varieties of light, color, form, and distance which we get through vision are not merely that we may know these phenomena of nature, but that, knowing them, we may use the knowledge in making proper responses to our environment. our power to know human sympathy and love through our social impressions are not merely that we may feel these emotions, but that, feeling them, we may act in response to them. it is impossible to classify logically in any simple scheme all the possible forms of expression. the diagram will serve, however, to call attention to some of the chief modes of bodily expression, and also to the results of the bodily expressions in the arts and vocations. here again the process of subdivision and extension can be carried out indefinitely. the laugh can be made to tell many different stories. crying may express bitter sorrow or uncontrollable joy. vocal speech may be carried on in a thousand tongues. dramatic action may be made to portray the whole range of human feelings. plays and games are wide enough in their scope to satisfy the demands of all ages and every people. the handicrafts cover so wide a range that the material progress of civilization can be classed under them, and indeed without their development the arts and vocations would be impossible. architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature have a thousand possibilities both in technique and content. likewise the modes of society, conduct, and religion are unlimited in their forms of expression. limitations of expression.--while it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is somewhat harder in the doing; for more of the self is, after all, involved in expression than in impression. expression needs to be cultivated as an art; for who can express all he thinks, or feels, or conceives? who can do his innermost self justice when he attempts to express it in language, in music, or in marble? the painter answers when praised for his work, "if you could but see the picture i intended to paint!" the pupil says, "i know, but i cannot tell." the friend says, "i wish i could tell you how sorry i am." the actor complains, "if i could only portray the passion as i feel it, i could bring all the world to my feet!" the body, being of grosser structure than the mind, must always lag somewhat behind in expressing the mind's states; yet, so perfect is the harmony between the two, that with a body well trained to respond to the mind's needs, comparatively little of the spiritual need be lost in its expression through the material. . the place of expression in development nor are we to think that cultivation of expression results in better power of expression alone, or that lack of cultivation results only in decreased power of expression. intellectual value of expression.--there is a distinct mental value in expression. an idea always assumes new clearness and wider relations when it is expressed. michael angelo, making his plans for the great cathedral, found his first concept of the structure expanding and growing more beautiful as he developed his plans. the sculptor, beginning to model the statue after the image which he has in his mind, finds the image growing and becoming more expressive and beautiful as the clay is molded and formed. the writer finds the scope and worth of his book growing as he proceeds with the writing. the student, beginning doubtfully on his construction in geometry, finds the truth growing clearer as he proceeds. the child with a dim and hazy notion of the meaning of the story in history or literature discovers that the meaning grows clear as he himself works out its expression in speech, in the handicrafts, or in dramatic representation. so we may apply the test to any realm of thought whatever, and the law holds good: _it is not in its apprehension, but in its expression, that a truth finally becomes assimilated to our body of usable knowledge._ and this means that in all training of the body through its motor expression we are to remember that the mind must be behind the act; that the intellect must guide the hand; that the object is not to make skillful fingers alone, but to develop clear and intelligent thought as well. moral value of expression.--expression also has a distinct moral value. there are many more people of good intentions than of moral character in the world. the rugged proverb tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. and how easy it is to form good resolutions. who of us has not, after some moral struggle, said, "i will break the bonds of this habit: i will enter upon that heroic line of action!" and then, satisfied for the time with having made the resolution, continued in the old path, until we were surprised later to find that we had never got beyond the resolution. it is not in the moment of the resolve but in the moment when the resolve is carried out in action that the moral value inheres. to take a stand on a question of right and wrong means more than to show one's allegiance to the right--it clears one's own moral vision and gives him command of himself. expression is, finally, the only true test for our morality. lacking moral expression, we may stand in the class of those who are merely good, but we can never enter the class of those who are good for something. one cannot but wonder what would happen if all the people in the world who are morally right should give expression to their moral sentiments, not in words alone, but in deeds. surely the millennium would speedily come, not only among the nations, but in the lives of men. religious value of expression.--true religious experience demands expression. the older conception of a religious life was to escape from the world and live a life of communion and contemplation in some secluded spot, ignoring the world thirsting without. later religious teaching, however, recognized the fact that religion cannot consist in drinking in blessings alone, no matter how ecstatic the feeling which may accompany the process; that it is not the receiving, but this along with the giving that enriches the life. to give the cup of cold water, to visit the widow and the fatherless, to comfort and help the needy and forlorn--this is not only scriptural but it is psychological. only as religious feeling goes out into religious expression, can we have a normal religious experience. social value of expression.--the criterion of an education once was, how much does he know? the world did not expect an educated man to _do_ anything; he was to be put on a pedestal and admired from a distance. but this criterion is now obsolete. society cares little how much we know if it does not enable us to do. people no longer admire mere knowledge, but insist that the man of education shall put his shoulder to the wheel and lend a hand wherever help is needed. education is no longer to set men apart from their fellows, but to make them more efficient comrades and helpers in the world's work. not the man who _knows_ chemistry and botany, but he who can use this knowledge to make two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, is the true benefactor of his race. in short, the world demands services returned for opportunities afforded; it expects social expression to result from education. and this is also best for the individual, for only through social service can we attain to a full realization of the social values in our environment. only thus can we enter fully into the social heritage of the ages which we receive from books and institutions; only thus can we come into the truest and best relations with humanity in a common brotherhood; only thus can we live the broader and more significant life, and come to realize the largest possible social self. . educational use of expression the educational significance of the truths illustrated in the diagram and the discussion has been somewhat slow in taking hold in our schools. this has been due not alone to the slowness of the educational world to grasp a new idea, but also to the practical difficulties connected with adapting the school exercises as well to the expression side of education as to the impression. from the fall of athens on down to the time of froebel the schools were constituted on the theory that pupils were to _receive_ education; that they were to _drink in_ knowledge, that their minds were to be _stored_ with facts. children were to "be seen and not heard." education was largely a process of gorging the memory with information. easier to provide for the impression side of education.--now it is evident that it is far easier to provide for the passive side of education than for the active side. all that is needed in the former case is to have teachers and books reasonably full of information, and pupils sufficiently docile to receive it. but in the latter case, the equipment must be more extensive. if the child is to be allowed to carry out his impressions into action, if he is actually to _do_ something himself, then he must be supplied with adequate equipment. so far as the home life was concerned, the child of several generations ago was at a decided advantage over the child of today on the expression side of his education. the homes of that day were beehives of industry, in which a dozen handicrafts were taught and practiced. the buildings, the farm implements, and most of the furniture of the home were made from the native timber. the material for the clothing of the family was produced on the farm, made into cloth, and finally into garments in the home. nearly all the supplies for the table came likewise from the farm. these industries demanded the combined efforts of the family, and each child did his or her part. but that day is past. one-half of our people live in cities and towns, and even in the village and on the farm the handicrafts of the home have been relegated to the factory, and everything comes into the home ready for use. the telephone, the mail carrier, and the deliveryman do all the errands even, and the child in the home is deprived of responsibility and of nearly all opportunity for manual expression. this is no one's fault, for it is just one phase of a great industrial readjustment in society. yet the fact remains that the home has lost an important element in education, which the school must supply if we are not to be the losers educationally by the change. the school to take up the handicrafts.--and modern educational method is insisting precisely on this point. a few years ago the boy caught whittling in school was a fit subject for a flogging; the boy is today given bench and tools, and is instructed in their use. then the child was punished for drawing pictures; now we are using drawing as one of the best modes of expression. then instruction in singing was intrusted to an occasional evening class, which only the older children could attend, and which was taught by some itinerant singing master; today we make music one of our most valuable school exercises. then all play time was so much time wasted; now we recognize play as a necessary and valuable mode of expression and development. then dramatic representation was confined to the occasional exhibition or evening entertainment; now it has become a recognized part of our school work. then it was a crime for pupils to communicate with each other in school; now a part of the school work is planned so that pupils work in groups, and thus receive social training. then our schoolrooms were destitute of every vestige of beauty; today many of them are artistic and beautiful. this statement of the case is rather over-optimistic if applied to our whole school system, however. for there are still many schools in which all forms of handicraft are unknown, and in which the only training in artistic expression is that which comes from caricaturing the teacher. singing is still an unknown art to many teachers. the play instinct is yet looked upon with suspicion and distrust in some quarters. a large number of our schoolrooms are as barren and ugly today as ever, and contain an atmosphere as stifling to all forms of natural expression. we can only comfort ourselves with holmes's maxim, that it matters not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving. and we certainly are moving toward a larger development and greater efficiency in expression on the part of those who pass through our schools. expression and character.--finally, all that has been said in this discussion has direct reference to what we call character--that mysterious something which we so often hear eulogized and so seldom analyzed. character has two distinct phases, which may be called the _subjective_ phase and the _social_ phase; or, stating it differently, character is both what we _are_ and what we _do_. the first of these has to do with the nature of the real, innermost self; and the last, with the modes in which this self finds expression. and it is fair to say that those about us are concerned with what we are chiefly from its relation to what we do. character is not a thing, but a process; it is the succession of our thoughts and acts from hour to hour. it is not something which we can hoard and protect and polish unto a more perfect day, but it is the everyday self in the process of living. and the only way in which it can be made or marred is through the nature of this stream of thoughts and acts which constitute the day's life--is through _being_ or _doing_ well or ill. two lines of development.--the cultivation of character must, then, ignore neither of these two lines. to neglect the first is to forget that it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks; that a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; that the act is the true index of the soul. to omit the second is to leave the character half formed, the will weak, and the life inefficient and barren of results. the mind must be supplied with noble ideas and high ideals, with right emotions and worthy ambitions. on the other hand, the proper connection must be established between these mental states and appropriate acts. and the acts must finally grow into habits, so that we naturally and inevitably translate our ideas and ideals, our emotions and ambitions into deeds. our character must be strong not in thought and feeling alone, but also in the power to return to the world its finished product in the form of service. . problems in introspection and observation . do you find that you understand better some difficult point or problem after you have succeeded in stating it? do you remember better what you have expressed? . in which particular ones of your studies do you think you could have done better if you had been given more opportunity for expression? explain the psychology of the maxim, we learn to do by doing. . observe various schools at work for the purpose of determining whether opportunities for expression in the recitations are adequate. have you ever seen a class when listless from listening liven up when they were given something to _do_ themselves? . make a study of the types of laughter you hear. why is some laughter much more pleasant than other laughter? what did a noted sculptor mean when he said that a smile at the eyes cannot be depended upon as can one at the mouth? . what examples have you observed in children's plays showing their love for dramatic representation? what handicrafts are the most suitable for children of primary grades? for the grammar school? for the high school? . do you number those among your acquaintance who seem bright enough, so far as learning is concerned, but who cannot get anything accomplished? is the trouble on the expression side of their character? what are you doing about your own powers of expression? are you seeking to cultivate expression in new lines? is there danger in attempting too many lines? index action, automatic, classes of, factors involved in, reflex, volitional, activity, necessity for motor, adolescence, interests of, association, and action, chapter on, development of centers, laws of, and methods of learning, and memory, nature of, neural basis of, partial or selective, pleasure-pain motive in, and thinking, training in, types of, attention, chapter on, effects of, and efficiency, points of failure in, habit of, , improvement of, method of, attention, nature of, rhythms of, types of, belief, in thinking, brain, chapter on, and nervous system, quality and memory, relations of mind and, cerebellum, the, cerebrum, the, concept, the, definition of, function of, growth of, and language, consciousness, content of, known by introspection, the mind or, nature of, personal character of, as a stream, where it resides, cord, the spinal, cortex, the, division of labor in, decision, under effort, types of, decision and will, deduction, development, of association centers, chapter on, and instinct, mental and motor training, of nervous system, through play, direction, perception of, disposition, and mood, , and temperament, education, as habit forming, emotion, chapter on, control of, , cultivation of, and feeling, james-lange theory of, as a motive, physiological explanation of, end-organ(s) of hearing, kinæsthetic, and sensory qualities, of skin, of smell, of taste, of vision, environment, influence of, expression, and character, educational use of, expression, and impression, learning to interpret, limitations of, self-, and development, , fatigue, and habit, and nervous system, fear, instinct of, types of, feeling, chapter on, effects of, and mood, nature of, qualities, forgetting, rate of, habit, of attention, , chapter on, effects of, emotional, forming as education, and life economy, nature of, and personality, physical basis of, rules for forming, tyranny of, handicrafts, and education, hearing, idea, and image, , image(ry), ability in, chapter on, classes of, image(ry), cultivation of, and past experience, functions of, and ideas, , and imagination, types of, imagination, chapter on, and conduct, cultivation of, , function of, the stuff of, and thinking, types of, imitation, conscious and unconscious, individuality in, the instinct of, in learning, induction, instinct(s), chapter on, definition of, of fear, of imitation, laws of, nature of, of play, as starting points in development, transitory nature of, various undesirable, various useful, interest(s), chapter on, direct and indirect, and education, and habit, nature of, interest(s) and nonvoluntary attention, order of development of, selection among, transitoriness of certain, introspection, and imagery, method of, james, quoted, theory of emotion, judgment, functions of, nature of, in percepts and concepts, and reasoning, validity of, knowledge, raw material of, through senses, language, and the concept, laws, of association, of instinct, of memory, learning, and association, localization of function in cortex, meaning, dependence on relations, memorizing, rules for, memory, and association, and brain quality, chapter on, devices, factors involved in, what constitutes good, laws of, material of, nature of, physical basis of, mind, or consciousness, at birth, and brain, chapter on, dependence on senses, and external world, mood, and disposition, , influence of, how produced, motive, emotion as a, neuroglia, neurone, the, nerve cells, and nutrition, undeveloped, nerve fibers, nervous system, and association, and consciousness, division of labor in, factors determining efficiency of, and fatigue, gross structure of, nervous system, and nutrition, order of development, structural elements in, and worry, objects, defined through perception, physical qualities of, , percept, content of, functions of, perception, chapter on, of direction, function of, nature of, of space, of time, training of, personality, and habit, influence of, play, and education, instinct of, and work, qualities, sensory, auditory, cutaneous, kinæsthetic, objects known through, olfactory, organic, taste, visual, reason, and judgment, nature of, and the syllogism, registration, and attention, and memory, recall, recognition, rhythm, of attention, self expression and development, sensation, attributes of, chapter on, cutaneous, factors conditioning, kinæsthetic, nature of, organic, qualities of, qualities of auditory, qualities of olfactory, qualities of taste, qualities of visual, senses, dependence of mind on, knowledge through, work of, sentiments, development of, influence of, nature of, smell, space, perception of, stimuli, education and, effects of sensory, end-organs and, sensory, stimuli, and response, syllogism, the taste, temperament, thinking, and association, chapter on, child and adult, elements in, good and memory, types of, time, perception of, validity, of judgment, vision, volition, see will, and decision, volitional types, will, and attention, chapter on, content of, freedom of, function of, measure of power, nature of, strong and weak, training of, types of, work, and play, worry, effects of, youth, and habit-forming, * * * * * * a valuable book for teachers principles of educational practice by paul klapper, ph.d., department of education, college of the city of new york. vo, cloth, $ . . this book studies the basic principles underlying sound and progressive pedagogy. in its scope and organization it aims to give ( ) a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the principles of education, ( ) the modern trend and interpretation of educational thought, ( ) a transition from pure psychology to methods of teaching and discipline, and ( ) practical applications of educational theory to the problems that confront the teacher in the course of daily routine. every practical pedagogical solution that is offered has actually stood the test of classroom demonstration. the book opens with a study of the function of education and a contrast of the modern social conception with those aims which have been guiding ideals in previous educational systems. part ii deals with the physiological aspects of education. part iii is taken up with the problem of socializing the child through the curriculum and the school discipline. the last part of the book, part iv, the mental aspect of education, is developed under the following sections: _section a._ the instinctive aspect of mind. mind and its development through self-expression. self-activity. instincts. _section b._ intellectual aspect of mind. the functions of intellect, perception, apperception, memory, imagination, thought activities. the doctrine of formal discipline and its influence upon educational endeavor. _section c._ emotional aspect of mind. _section d._ volitional aspect of mind. study of will, kinds of volitional action, habit vs. deliberative consciousness. the education of the will. education and social responsibility, the problems of ethical instruction, and the social functions of the school. in order to increase the usefulness of the book to teachers of education there is added a classified bibliography for systematic, intensive reference reading and a list of suggested problems suitable for advanced work. d. appleton and company new york--chicago * * * * * * appletons' new teachers' books a student's text-book in the history of education by stephen pierce duggan, ph. d. head of the department of education, college of the city of new york mo., cloth, $ . net professor duggan has produced the text-book in the history of education which has been such a need in our pedagogical work. growing out of his work as a teacher and lecturer, this book combines the practical pedagogy of a teacher with the scholarship of an undisputed authority on education and its study. there is no book in this field containing such a fund of useful material arranged along such a skillful outline. an experience of years is here condensed and solidified into a splendid unit. "a student's text-book in the history of education" presents an authentic account of every educational system which has influenced our present-day scheme of pedagogy from the times of the hebrews to the age of the montessori method. no time is wasted on detailed considerations of other systems. professor duggan's book aids the teacher by giving him a better understanding of present-day problems in education; by explaining how western civilization developed the educational ideals, content, organization, and practices which characterize it today; and by developing the manner in which each people has worked out the solution of the great problem of reconciling individual liberty with social stability. d. appleton and company new york--chicago * * * * * * appletons' new teachers' books education for social efficiency by irving king, ph. d. _professor of education, the state university of iowa, iowa city, iowa_. mo., cloth, $ . net written not so much for the educational specialist as for the practical needs of busy teachers, "education for social efficiency" presents through the medium of illustration, a social view of education which is very prominent. it shows concretely various ways in which parents as well as teachers may contribute something towards the realization of the ideal of social efficiency as the goal of our educational enterprise. the idea that the school, especially the country school, should provide more than instruction in lessons for the scholars is professor king's main point. excellent chapters are included on the school as a social center, the school and social progress, and the social aim of education. in discussing the rural schools particularly, the author writes on the rural school and the rural community, adapting the country school to country needs, and an especially valuable chapter on the consolidated school and socially efficient education for the country. the response with which professor king's "education for social efficiency" has met throughout the country is evidenced by the fact that the states of iowa, missouri, tennessee, south dakota, and virginia have adopted it for reading circle use. it has also been adopted by the national bureau of education for use in its rural teachers' reading circles. d. appleton and company new york--chicago * * * * * * footnotes: footnote : donaldson, "the growth of the brain," pp. , . footnote : quoted by james, "psychology," briefer course, p. . footnote : "psychology," vol. i, pp. , ; also, "briefer course," p. . footnote : see betts, "the distribution and functions of mental imagery." footnote : cf. dewey, "how we think," p. ff. footnote : "psychology," p. . the elements of general method based on the principles of herbart. by charles a. mcmurry, ph.d. second edition public-school publishing co., publishers, bloomington, illinois. copyright, . by c. a. mcmurry, normal, ill. preface. the herbart school of pedagogy has created much stir in germany in the last thirty years. it has developed a large number of vigorous writers on all phases of education and psychology, and numbers a thousand or more positive disciples among the energetic teachers of germany. those american teachers and students who have come in contact with the ideas of this school have been greatly stimulated. in such a miscellaneous and many-sided thing as practical education, it is deeply gratifying to find a clear and definite leading purpose that prevails throughout and a set of mutually related and supporting principles which in practice contribute to the realization of this purpose. the following chapters cannot be regarded as a full, exact, and painfully scientific account of herbartian ideas, but as a simple explanation of their leading principles in their relations to each other and in their application to our own school problems. in the second edition the last chapter of the first edition has been omitted, while the other chapters have been much modified and enlarged. the chapter on the formal steps is reserved for enlargement and publication in a separate form. normal, ill., november , . table of contents. chapter i. the chief aim of education chapter ii. relative value of studies chapter iii. nature of interest chapter iv. concentration chapter v. induction chapter vi. apperception chapter vii. the will chapter viii. herbart and his disciples books of reference chapter i. the chief aim of education. what is the central purpose of education? if we include under this term all the things commonly assigned to it, its many phases as represented by the great variety of teachers and pupils, the many branches of knowledge and the various and even conflicting methods in bringing up children, it is difficult to find a definition sufficiently broad and definite to compass its meaning. in fact we shall not attempt in the beginning to make a definition. we are in search not so much of a comprehensive definition as of a central truth, a key to the situation, an aim that will simplify and brighten all the work of teachers. keeping in view the end from the beginning, we need a central organizing principle which shall dictate for teacher and pupil the highway over which they shall travel together. we will assume at least that education means the whole bringing up of a child from infancy to maturity, not simply his school training. the reason for this assumption is that home, school, companions, environment, and natural endowment, working through a series of years, produce a character which is a unit as the resultant of these different influences and growths. again, we are compelled to assume that this aim, whatever it is, is the same for all. now what will the average man, picked up at random, say to our question: what is the chief end in the education of your son? a farmer wishes his boy to read, write, and cipher, so as to meet successfully the needs of a farmer's life. the merchant desires that his boy get a wider reach of knowledge and experience so as to succeed in a livelier sort of business competition. a university professor would lay out a liberal course of training for his son so as to prepare him for intellectual pursuits among scholars and people of culture. this utilitarian view, which points to success in life in the ordinary sense, is the prevailing one. we could probably sum up the wishes of a great majority of the common people by saying, "they desire to give their children, through education, a better chance in life than they themselves have had." yet even these people, if pressed to give reasons, would admit that the purely utilitarian view is a low one and that there is something better for every boy and girl than the mere ability to make a successful living. turn for a moment to the great _systems_ of education which have held their own for centuries and examine their aims. the jesuits, the humanists, and the natural scientists all claimed to be liberal, culture-giving, and preparatory to great things; yet we only need to quote from the histories of education to show their narrowness and incompleteness. the training of the jesuits was linguistic and rhetorical, and almost entirely apart from our present notion of human development. the humanists or classicists who for so many centuries constituted the educational elite, belonged to the past with its glories rather than to the age in which they really lived. though standing in a modern age, they were almost blind to the great problems and opportunities it offered. they stood in bold contrast to the growth of the modern spirit in history, literature, and natural science. but in spite of their predominating influence over education for centuries, there has never been the shadow of a chance for making the classics of antiquity the basis of common, popular education. the modern school of natural scientists is just as one-sided as the humanists in supposing that human nature is narrow enough to be compressed within the bounds of natural science studies, however broad their field may be. but the systems of education in vogue have always lagged behind the clear views of educational _reformers_. two hundred fifty years ago comenius projected a plan of education for every boy and girl of the common people. his aim was to teach all men all things from the highest truths of religion to the commonest things of daily experience. being a man of simple and profound religious faith, religion and morality were at the foundation of his system. but even the principles of intellectual training so clearly advocated by comenius have not yet found a ready hearing among teachers, to say nothing of his great moral-religious purpose. among later writers, locke, rousseau, and pestalozzi have set up ideals of education that have had much influence. but locke's "gentleman" can never be the ideal of all because it is intrinsically aristocratic and education has become with us broadly democratic. after all, locke's "gentleman" is a noble ideal and should powerfully impress teachers. the perfect human animal that rousseau dreamed of in the emile, is best illustrated in the noble savage, but we are not in danger in america of adopting this ideal. in spite of his merits the noblest savage falls short in several ways. yet it is important in education to perfect the physical powers and the animal development in every child. pestalozzi touched the hearts of even the weakest and morally frailest children, and tried to make improved physical conditions and intellectual culture contribute to heart culture, or rather to combine the two in strong moral character. he came close upon the highest aim of education and was able to illustrate his doctrine in practice. the educational reformers have gone far ahead of the schoolmasters in setting up a high aim in education. let us examine a few well-known definitions of education by great thinkers, and try to discover a central idea. "the purpose of education is to give to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable."--_plato_. "education includes whatever we do for ourselves and whatever is done for us by others for the express purpose of bringing us nearer to the perfection of our nature."--_john stuart mill_. "education is the preparation for complete living."--_herbert spencer_. "education is the harmonious and equable evolution of the human faculties by a method based upon the nature of the mind for developing all the faculties of the soul, for stirring up and nourishing all the principles of life, while shunning all one-sided culture and taking account of the sentiments upon which the strength and worth of men depend."--_stein_. "education is the sum of the reflective efforts by which we aid nature in the development of the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of man in view of his perfection, his happiness, and his social destination."--_compayre_. these attempts to bring the task of education into a comprehensive, scientific formula are interesting and yet disappointing. they agree in giving great breadth to education. but in the attempt to be comprehensive, to omit nothing, they fail to specify that wherein the _true worth_ of man consists; they fail to bring out into relief the highest aim as an organizing idea in the complicated work of education and its relation to secondary aims. we desire therefore to approach nearer to this problem: _what is the highest aim of education_? we will do so by an inquiry into the aims and tendencies of our public schools. to an outward observer the schools of today confine their attention almost exclusively to the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge and to intellectual training, to the mental discipline and power that come from a varied and vigorous exercise of the faculties. the great majority of good schoolmasters stand squarely upon this platform, knowledge and mental discipline. but they are none the less deeply conscious that this is not the highest aim of education. we scarcely need to be told that a person may be fully equipped with the best that this style of education can give, and still remain a criminal. a good and wise parent will inevitably seek for a better result in his child than mere knowledge, intellectual ability, and power. all good schoolmasters know that behind school studies and cares is the still greater task of developing manly and womanly character. perhaps, however, this is too high and sacred a thing to formulate. perhaps in the attempt to reduce it to a scientific form we should lose its spirit. admitting that strong moral character is the noblest result of right training, is it not still incidental to the regular school work? perhaps it lies in the teacher and in his manner of teaching subjects, and not in the subject-matter itself nor in any course of study. this is exactly the point at which we wish to apply the lever and to lift into prominence the _moral character-building aim_ as the central one in education. this aim should be like a loadstone, attracting and subordinating all other purposes to itself. it should dominate in the choice, arrangement, and method of studies. let us examine more carefully the convictions upon which the moral aim rests. every wise and benevolent parent knows that the first and last question to ask and answer regarding a child is "what are his moral quality and strength?" now, who is better able to judge of the true aim than thoughtful and solicitous _parents_? in the second place, it is inconceivable that a conscientious _teacher_ should close his eyes to all except the intellectual training of his pupils. it is as natural for him to touch and awaken the moral qualities as it is for birds to sing. again, the _state_ is more concerned to see the growth of just and virtuous citizens than in seeing the prosperity of scholars, inventors, and merchants. it is also concerned with the success of the latter, but chiefly when their knowledge, skill, and wealth are equaled by their virtues. our country may have vast resources and great opportunities, but everything in the end depends upon the _moral quality_ of its men and women. undermine and corrupt this and we all know that there is nothing to hope for. the uncorrupted stock of true patriots in our land is firmly rooted in this conviction, which is worth more to the country than corn-fields and iron mines. the perpetual enticement and blandishment of worldly success so universal in our time can not move us if we found one theory and practice upon the central doctrine of moral education. education, therefore, in its popular, untrammeled, moral sense, is the greatest concern of society. in projecting a general plan of popular education we are beholden to the prejudices of no man nor class of men. not even the traditional prejudices of the great body of teachers should stand in the way of setting up the noblest ideal of education. educational thinkers are in duty bound to free themselves from utilitarian notions and narrowness, and to adopt the best platform that children by natural birthright can stand upon. they are called upon to find the best and to apply it to as many as possible. let it be remembered that each child has a complete growth before him. his own possibilities and not the attainments of his parents and elders are the things to consider. shall we seek to avoid responsibility for the moral aim by throwing it upon the family and the church? but the more we probe into educational problems the more we shall find the essential unity of all educational forces. the citadel of a child's life is his moral character, whether the home, the school, or the church build and strengthen its walls. if asked to define the relation of the school to the home we shall quickly see that they are one in spirit and leading purpose, that instead of being separated they should be brought closer together. in conclusion, therefore, shall we make _moral character_ the clear and conscious aim of school education, and then subordinate school studies and discipline, mental training and conduct, to this aim? it will be a great stimulus to thousands of teachers to discover that this is the real purpose of school work, and that there are abundant means not yet used of realizing it. having once firmly grasped this idea, they will find that there is no other having half its potency. it will put a substantial foundation under educational labors, both theoretical and practical, which will make them the noblest of enterprises. can we expect the public school to drop into such a purely subordinate function as that of intellectual training; to limit its influence to an almost mechanical action, the sharpening of the mental tools? stated in this form, it becomes an absurdity. is it reasonable to suppose that the rank and file of our teachers will realize the importance of this aim in teaching so long as it has no recognition in our public system of instruction? the moral element is largely present among educators as an _instinct_, but it ought to be evolved into a _clear purpose_ with definite means of accomplishment. it is an open secret in fact, that while our public instruction is ostensibly secular, having nothing to do directly with religion or morals, there is nothing about which good teachers are more thoughtful and anxious than about the means of moral influence. occasionally some one from the outside attacks our public schools as without morals and godless, but there is no lack of staunch defenders on moral grounds. theoretically and even practically, to a considerable extent, we are all agreed upon the great value of moral education. but there is a striking inconsistency in our whole position on the school problem. while the supreme value of the moral aim will be generally admitted, it has no open recognition in our school course, either as a principal or as a subordinate aim of instruction. moral education is not germane to the avowed purposes of the public school. if it gets in at all it is by the back door. it is incidental, not primary. the importance of making the leading aim of education clear and _conscious_ to teachers, is great. if their conviction on this point is not clear they will certainly not concentrate their attention and efforts upon its realization. again, in a business like education, where there are so many important and necessary results to be reached, it is very easy and common to put forward a subordinate aim, and to lift it into undue prominence, even allowing it to swallow up all the energies of teacher and pupils. owing to this diversity of opinion among teachers as to the results to be reached, our public schools exhibit a chaos of conflicting theory and practice, and a numberless brood of hobby-riders. how to establish the moral aim in the center of the school course, how to subordinate and realize the other educational aims while keeping this chiefly in view, how to make instruction and school discipline contribute unitedly to the formation of vigorous moral character, and how to unite home, school, and other life experiences of a child in perfecting the one great aim of education--these are some of the problems whose solution will be sought in the following chapters. it will be especially our purpose to show how _school instruction_ can be brought into the direct service of character-building. this is the point upon which most teachers are skeptical. not much effort has been made of late to put the best moral materials into the school course. in one whole set of school studies, and that the most important (reading, literature, and history), there is opportunity through all the grades for a vivid and direct cultivation of moral ideas and convictions. the second great series of studies, the natural sciences, come in to support the moral aims, while the personal example and influence of the teacher, and the common experiences and incidents of school life and conduct, give abundant occasion to apply and enforce moral ideas. that the other justifiable aims of education, such as physical training, mental discipline, orderly habits, gentlemanly conduct, practical utility of knowledge, liberal culture, and the free development of individuality will not be weakened by placing the moral aim in the forefront of educational motives, we are convinced. to some extent these questions will be discussed in the following pages. chapter ii. relative value of studies. being convinced that the controlling aim of education should be moral, we shall now inquire into the relative value of different studies and their fitness to reach and satisfy this aim. as measured upon this cardinal purpose, what is the intrinsic value of each school study? the branches of knowledge furnish the materials upon which a child's mind works. before entering upon such a long and up-hill task as education, with its weighty results, it is prudent to estimate not only the end in view, but the best means of reaching it. many means are offered, some trivial, others valuable. a careful measurement, with some reliable standard, of the materials furnished by the common school, is our first task. to what extent does history contribute to our purpose? what importance have geography and arithmetic? how do reading and natural science aid a child to grow into the full stature of a man or woman? these questions are not new, but the answer to them has been long delayed. since the time of comenius, to say the least, they have seriously disturbed educators. but few have had the courage, industry, and breadth of mind of a comenius, to sound the educational waters and to lay out a profitable chart. in spite of comenius' labors, however, and those of other educational reformers be they never so energetic, practical progress toward a final answer, as registered in school courses, has been extremely slow. herbert spencer says: "if there needs any further evidence of the rude, undeveloped character of our education, we have it in the fact that the comparative worths of the different kinds of knowledge have been as yet scarcely even discussed, much less discussed in a methodic way with definite results. not only is it that no standard of relative values has yet been agreed upon, but the existence of any such standard has not been conceived in any clear manner. and not only is it that the existence of such a standard has not been clearly conceived, but the need of it seems to have been scarcely even felt. men read books on this topic and attend lectures upon that, decide that their children shall be instructed in these branches and not in those; and all under the guidance of mere custom, or liking, or prejudice, without ever considering the enormous importance of determining in some rational way what things are really most worth learning. * * * * * men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion." spencer, _education_, p. . spencer sees clearly the importance of this problem and gives it a vigorous discussion in his first chapter, "what knowledge is of most worth?" but the question is a broad and fundamental one and in his preference for the natural sciences he seems to us not to have maintained a just balance of educational forces in preparing a child for "complete living." his theory needs also to be worked out into greater detail and applied to school conditions before it can be of much value to teachers. it can scarcely be said that any other englishman or american has seriously grappled with this problem. great changes and reforms indeed have been started, especially within the last fifty years, but they have been undertaken under the pressure of general popular demands and have resulted in compromises between traditional forces and urgent popular needs. an adequate philosophical inquiry into the relative merit of studies and their adaptability to nurture mental, moral, and physical qualities has not been made. the germans have worked to a better purpose. quite a number of able thinkers among them have given their best years to the study of this problem of relative educational values and to a working out of its results. herbart, ziller, stoy, and rein have been deeply interested in philosophy and psychology as life-long teachers of these subjects at the university, but in their practice schools in the same place they also stood daily face to face with the primary difficulties of ordinary teaching. at the outset, and before laying out a course of study, they were compelled to meet and settle the aim of education and the problem of relative values. having answered these questions to their own satisfaction, they proceeded to work out in detail a common school course. the herbart school of teachers has presumed to call its interpretation of educational ideas "scientific pedagogy," a somewhat pretentious name in view of the fact that many leading educators in germany, england, and elsewhere, deny the existence of such a science. but if not a science, it is at least a serious attempt at one. the exposition of principles that follow is chiefly derived from them. with us the present time is favorable to a rational inquiry into relative educational values and to a thorough-going application of the results to school courses and methods. _in the first place_ the old _classical monopoly_ is finally and completely broken, at least so far as the common school is concerned. it ruled education for several centuries, but now even its methods of discipline are losing their antique hold. the natural sciences, modern history, and literature have assumed an equal place with the old classical studies in college courses. freed from old traditions and prejudice, our common school is now grounded in the vernacular, in the national history and literature, and in home geography and natural science. its roots go deep into native soil. _secondly_, the door of the common school has been thrown open to the new studies and they have entered in a troop. history, drawing, natural science, modern literature, and physical culture have been added to the old reading, writing, and arithmetic. the common school was never so untrammeled. it is free to absorb into its course the select materials of the best studies. teachers really enjoy more freedom in selecting and arranging subjects and in introducing new things than they know how to make use of. there is no one in high authority to check the reform spirit and even local boards are often among the advocates of change. _in the third place_, by multiplying studies, the common school course has grown more complex and heterogeneous. the old reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar could not be shelved for the sake of the new studies and the same amount of time must be divided now among many branches. it is not to be wondered at if all the studies are treated in a shallow and fragmentary way. some of the new studies, especially, are not well taught. there is less of unity in higher education now than there was before the classical studies and "the three r's" lost their supremacy. our common school course has become a batch of miscellanies. we are in danger of overloading pupils, as well as of making a superficial hodge-podge of all branches. there is imperative need for sifting the studies according to their value, as well as for bringing them into right connection and dependence upon one another. _fourthly_, there is a large body of thoughtful and inquiring teachers and principals who are working at a revision of the school course. they seek something tangible, a working plan, which will help them in their present perplexities and show them a wise use of drawing, natural science, and literature, in harmony with the other studies. _finally_, since we are in the midst of such a breaking-up period, we need to take our bearings. in order to avoid mistakes and excesses there is a call for deep, impartial, and many-sided thinking on educational problems. supposing that we know what the controlling aim of education is, we are next led to inquire about and to determine the relative value of studies as tributary to this aim. it is not however our purpose to give an original solution to this problem and to those which follow it. we must decline to attempt a philosophical inquiry into fundamental principles and their origin. ours is the humbler task of explaining and applying principles already worked out by others; that is, to give the results of herbartian pedagogy as applied to our schools. instead of discussing the many branches of study one after another, it will be well to make a broad division of them into three classes and observe the marked features and value of each. first, _history_, including the subject matter of biography, history, story, and other parts of literature. second, the _natural sciences_. third, _the formal studies_, grammar, writing, much of arithmetic, and the symbols used in reading. the first two open up the great fields of real knowledge and experience, the world of man and of external nature, the two great reservoirs of interesting facts. we will first examine these two fields and consider their value as constituent parts of the school course. _history_, in our present sense, includes what we usually understand by it, as u. s. history, modern and ancient history, also biography, tradition, fiction as expressing human life and the novel or romance, and historical and literary masterpieces of all sorts, as the drama and the epic poem, so far as they delineate man's experience and character. in a still broader sense, history includes language as the expression of men's thoughts and feelings. but this is the formal side of history with which we are not at present concerned. history deals with men's motives and actions as individuals or in society, with their dispositions, habits, and institutions, and with the monuments and literature they have left. the relations of persons to each other in society give rise to morals. how? the act of a person--as when a fireman rescues a child from a burning building--shows a disposition in the actor. we praise or condemn this disposition as the deed is good or bad. but each moral judgment, rightly given, leaves us stronger. to appreciate and judge fairly the life and acts of a woman like mary lyon, or of a man such as samuel armstrong, is to awaken something of their spirit and moral temper in ourselves. whether in the life of david or of shylock, or of the people whom they represent, the study of men is primarily a study of morals, of conduct. it is in the personal hardships, struggles, and mutual contact of men that motives and moral impulses are observed and weighed. in such men as john bunyan, william the silent, and john quincy adams, we are much interested to know what qualities of mind and heart they possessed, and especially what human sympathies and antipathies they felt. livingstone embodied in his african life certain christian virtues which we love and honor the more because they were so severely and successfully tested. although the history of men and of society has many uses, its best influence is in illustrating and inculcating moral ideas. it is teaching morals by example. even living companions often exert less influence upon children than the characters impressed upon their minds from reading. the deliberate plan of teachers and parents might make this influence more salutary and effective. it will strike most teachers as a surprise to say that _the chief use of history study is to form moral notions in children_. their experience with this branch of school work has been quite different. they have not so regarded nor used history. it has been generally looked upon as a body of useful information that intelligent persons must possess. our history texts also have been constructed for another purpose, namely, to summarize and present important facts in as brief space as possible, not to reveal personal actions and character as a formative moral influence in the education of the young. even as sources of valuable information, spencer shows that our histories have been extremely deficient; but for moral purposes they are almost worthless. now, moral dispositions are a better fruitage and test of worth in men than any intellectual acquirements. history is already a recognized study of admitted value in the schools. it is a shame to strip it of that content and of that influence which are its chief merit. to study the conduct of persons as illustrating right actions is, in quality, the highest form of instruction. other very important things are also involved in a right study of history. there are economic, political, and social institutions evolved out of previous history; there are present intricate problems to be approached and understood. but all these questions rest to a large extent upon moral principles. but while these political, social, and economic interests are beyond the present reach of children, biography, individual life and action in their simple forms, are plain to their understanding. they not only make moral conduct real and impressive, but they gradually lead up to an appreciation of history in its social and institutional forms. some of the best historical materials (from biography, tradition, and fiction) should be absorbed by children in each grade as an essential part of the substratum of moral ideas. this implies more than a collection of historical stories in a supplementary reader for intermediate grades. it means that history in the broad sense is to be an important study in every grade, and that it shall become a center and reservoir from which reading books and language lessons draw their supplies. these biographies, stories, and historical episodes must be the best which our history and classic literature can furnish, and whatever is of like virtue in the life of other kindred peoples, of england, germany, greece, etc. if history in this sense can be made a strong auxiliary to moral education in common schools, the whole body of earnest teachers will be gratified. for there is no theme among them of such perennial interest and depth of meaning as _moral culture_ in schools. it is useless to talk of confining our teachers to the intellectual exercises outlined in text books. they are conscious of dealing with children of moral susceptibility. in our meetings, discussions on the means of moral influence are more frequent and earnest than on any other topic; and in their daily work hundreds of our teachers are aiming at moral character in children more than at anything else. as they free themselves from mechanical requirements and begin to recognize their true function, they discover the transcendent importance of moral education, that it underlies and gives meaning to all the other work of the teacher. but teachers heretofore have taken a narrow view of the moral influences at their disposal. their ever-recurring emphatic refrain has been "_the example of the teacher_," and, to tell the truth, there is no better means of instilling moral ideas than the presence and inspiration of a high-toned teacher. we know, however, that teachers need moral stimulus and encouragement as much as anybody. it will not do to suppose that they have reached the pinnacle of moral excellence and can stand as all-sufficient exemplars to children. the teacher himself must have food as well as the children. he must partake of the loaf he distributes to them. the clergyman also should be an example of christian virtue, but he preaches the gospel as illustrated in the life of christ, of st. paul, and of others. in pressing home moral and religious truths his appeal is to great sources of inspiration which lie outside of himself. why should the teacher rely upon his own unaided example more than the preacher? no teacher can feel that he embodies in himself, except in an imperfect way, the strong moral ideas that have made the history of good men worth reading. no matter what resources he may have in his own character, the teacher needs to employ moral forces that lie outside of himself, ideals toward which he struggles and towards which he inspires and leads others. the very fact that he appreciates and admires a man like longfellow or peter cooper will stir the children with like feelings. in this sense it is a mistake to center all attention upon the conduct of the teacher. he is but a guide, or, like goldsmith's preacher, he allures to brighter worlds and leads the way. it is better for pupil and teacher to enter into the companionship of common aims and ideals. for them to study together and admire the conduct of roger williams is to bring them into closer sympathy, and what do teachers need more than to get into _personal sympathy_ with their children? let them climb the hill together, and enjoy the views together, and grow so intimate in their aims and sympathies that afterlife cannot break the bond. when the inspirations and aims thus gained have gradually changed into tendencies and habits, the child is morally full-fledged. it is high ground upon which to land youth, or aid in landing him, but it is clearly in view. it is only gradually that moral ideas gain an ascendency, first over the thoughts and feelings of a child and later still over his conduct. many good impressions at first seem to bear no fruit in action. but examples and experience reiterate the truth till it finds a firm lodgment and begins to act as a check upon natural impulses. many a child reads the stories in the _youth's companion_ with absorbing interest but in the home circle fails noticeably to imitate the conduct he admires. but moral ideas must grow a little before they can yield fruit. the seed of example must drop into the soil of the mind under favorable conditions; it must germinate and send up its shoots to some height before its presence and nature can be clearly seen. the application of moral ideas to conduct is very important even in childhood, out patience and care are necessary in most cases. there must be timely sowing of the seed and judicious cultivation, if good fruits are to be gathered later on. there is indeed much anxiety and painful uncertainty on the part of those who charge themselves with the moral training of children. labor and birth pains are antecedent to the delivery of a moral being. then again a child must develop according to what is in him, his nature and peculiar disposition. the processes of growth are within him and the best you can do is to give them scope. he is _free_ and you are _bound_ to minister to his best freedom. the common school age is the _formative period_. at six a child is morally immature; at fifteen the die has been stamped. this youthful wilderness must be crossed. we can't turn back. there is no other way of reaching the promised land. but there are rebellions and baitings and disorderly scenes. this is a tortuous road! isn't there a quicker and easier way? the most speedily constructed road across this region is _a short treatise_ on morals for teacher and pupil. in this way it is possible to have all the virtues and faults tabulated, labeled, and transferred in brief space to the minds of the children (if the discipline is rigorous enough). swallow a catechism, reduced to a verbal memory product. pack away the essence of morals in a few general laws and rules and have the children learn them. some day they may understand. what astounding faith in memory cram and dry forms! we _can_ pave such a road through the fields of moral science, but when a child has traveled it is he a whit the better? no such paved road is good for anything. it isn't even comfortable. it has been tried a dozen times in much less important fields of knowledge than morals. moral ideas spring up out of experience with persons either in real life or in the books we read. examples of moral action drawn from life are the only thing that can give meaning to moral precepts. if we see a harsh man beating his horse, we get an ineffaceable impression of harshness. by reading the story of the black beauty we acquire a lively sympathy for animals. then the maxim "a merciful man is merciful to his beast" will be a good summary of the impressions received. moral ideas always have a concrete basis or origin. some companion with whose feelings and actions you are in close personal contact, or some character from history or fiction by whose personality you have been strongly attracted, gives you your keenest impressions of moral qualities. to begin with abstract moral teaching, or to put faith in it, is to misunderstand children. in morals as in other forms of knowledge, children are overwhelmingly interested in personal and individual examples, things which have form, color, action. the attempt to sum up the important truths of a subject and present them as abstractions to children is almost certain to be a failure, pedagogically considered. it has been demonstrated again and again, even in high schools, that botany, chemistry, physics, and zoology can not be taught by such brief scientific compendia of rules and principles--"words, words, words," as hamlet said. we can not learn geography from definitions and map questions, nor morals from catechisms. and just as in natural science we are resorting perforce to plants, animals, and natural phenomena, so in morals we turn to the deeds and lives of men. columbus in his varying fortunes leaves vivid impressions of the moral strength and weakness of himself and of others. john winthrop gives frequent examples of generous and unselfish good-will to the settlers about boston. little lord fauntleroy is a better treatise on morals for children than any of our sermonizers have written. we must get at morals without moralizing and drink in moral convictions without resorting to moral platitudes. educators are losing faith in words, definitions, and classifications. it is a truism that we can't learn chemistry or zoology from books alone, nor can moral judgments be rendered except from individual actions. a little reflection will show that we are only demanding _object lessons_ in the field of moral education, extensive, systematic object lessons; choice experiences and episodes from human life, simple and clear, painted in natural colors, as shown by our best history and literature. to appreciate the virtues and vices, to sympathize with better impulses, we must travel beyond words and definitions till we come in contact with the personal deeds that first give rise to them. the life of martin luther, with its faults and merits honestly represented, is a powerful moral tonic to the reader; the autobiography of franklin brings out a great variety of homely truths in the form of interesting episodes in his career. adam bede and romola impress us more powerfully and permanently than the best sermons, because the individual realism in them leads to a vividness of moral judgment of their acts unequalled. king lear teaches us the folly of a rash judgment with overwhelming force. evangeline awakens our sympathies as no moralist ever dreamed of doing. uncle tom in mrs. stowe's story was a stronger preacher than wendell phillips. william tell in schiller's play kindles our love for heroic deeds into an enthusiasm. the best myths, historical biographies, novels, and dramas, are the richest sources of moral stimulus because they lead us into the immediate presence of those men and women whose deeds stir up our moral natures. in the representations of the masters we are in the presence of moral ideas clothed in flesh and blood, real and yet idealized. generosity is not a name but the act of a person which wins our interest and, favor. to get the impress of kindness we must see an act of kindness and feel the glow it produces. when sir philip sidney, wounded on the battle field and suffering with thirst, reached out his hand for a cup of water that was brought, his glance fell upon a dying soldier who viewed the cup with great desire; sidney handed him the water with the words, "thy necessity is greater than mine." no one can refuse his approval for this act. after telling the story of the man who went down to jericho and fell among thieves, and then of the priest, the levite, and the samaritan who passed that way, jesus put the question to his critic, "who was neighbor to him that fell among thieves?" and the answer came even from unwilling lips, "he that showed mercy." when nathan hale on the scaffold regretted that he had but one life to lose for his country, we realize better what patriotism is. on the other hand it is natural to _condemn wrong deeds_ when presented clearly and objectively in the action of another. nero caused christians to be falsely accused and then to be condemned to the claws of wild beasts in the arena. when such cruelty is practiced against the innocent and helpless, we condemn the act. when columbus was thrown into chains instead of being rewarded, we condemn the spaniards. in the same way the real world of persons about us, the acts of parents, companions, and teachers are powerful in giving a good or bad tone to our sentiments, because, as living object lessons, their impress is directly and constantly upon us. in such cases taken from daily experience and from illustrations of personal conduct in books, it is possible to observe _how moral judgments originate_ and by repetition grow into convictions. they spring up naturally and surely when we understand well the circumstances under which an act was performed. the interest and sympathy felt for the persons lends great vividness to the judgments expressed. each individual act stands out clearly and calls forth a prompt and unerring approval or disapproval. (but later the judgment must react upon our own conduct.) the examples are simple and objective, free from selfish interest on the child's part, so that good and bad acts are recognized in their true quality. these simple moral judgments are only a beginning, only a sowing of the seed. but harvests will not grow and ripen unless seed has been laid in the ground. it is a long road to travel before these early moral impressions develop into firm convictions which rule the conduct of an adult. but education is necessarily a slow process, and it is likely to be a perverted one unless the foundation is carefully laid in early years. the fitting way then to cultivate moral judgments, that is, to start just ideas of right and wrong, of virtues and vices, is by a regular and systematic presentation of persons illustrating noble and ignoble acts. a preference for the right and an aversion for the wrong will be the sure result of careful teaching. habits of judging will be formed and strong moral convictions established which may be gradually brought to influence and control action. a good share of the influences that are thrown around an ordinary child need to be counteracted. it can be done to a considerable extent _by instruction_. many of the interesting characters of history are better company for us and for children than our neighbors and contemporaries. for the purposes of moral example and inspiration we may select as companions for them the best persons in history, provided we know how to select for ourselves and others. their acts are personal, biographical, and interesting, and appeal at once to children as well as to their elders. there is no good reason why a much greater number of our school children should not be brought under the influence of the best books suited to their age. here is a source of educational influence of high quality which is left too much to accident and to the natural, unaided instinct of children. a few get the benefit but many more are capable of receiving it. how much better the school choice and treatment of such books may be than the loose and miscellaneous reading of children, is discussed in special method. a fit introduction of children to this class of literature should be in the hands of teachers, and all the later reading of pupils will feel the salutary effect. if this is the proper origin and culture of moral ideas, we desire to know how to utilize it in the common school course. it can only be done by an extensive use of historical and literary materials in all grades with the _conscious purpose_ of shaping moral ideas and character. that the school has such influence at its disposal can not be reasonably denied by any one who believes that the family or the church can affect the moral character of their children. it may be objected that the school thus takes up the proper work of the home, when it ought to be occupied with other things. would that the homes were all good! but even if they were the teacher could not fold his arms over a responsibility removed. as soon as a boy enters school, if not sooner, he begins, in some sense, to outgrow the home. new influences and interests find a lodgment in his affections. companions, the wider range of his acquaintances, studies, and ambitions, share now with the home. john locke objected radically to english public schools on this account. but even if we desired, we could not resort to private tutors as locke did. the child is growing and changing. who shall organize unity out of this maze of thoughts, interests, and influences, casting out the useless and bad, combining and strengthening the good? the more service the home renders the better. the child's range of thought and ambition is expanding. who has the best survey of the field? in many cases at least, the teacher, especially where parents lack the culture and the children need a guide. who spends six hours a day directing these currents of thought and interest? we are not disposed to underestimate the magnitude of the task here laid upon the teacher. the rights and duties of the home are not put in question. indeed the spirit of this kind of teaching is best illustrated in a good home. a teacher who has a father's anxiety in the real welfare of children will not forget his duty in watching their moral growth. the moral atmosphere of a good home will remain the ideal for the school. in fact, herbart's plan of education originated not in a school-room, but in an excellent home in switzerland, where he spent three years in the private instruction of three boys. the conscientious zeal with which he devoted himself to the moral and mental growth of these children is a model for teachers. the shaping of three characters was, according to his view, entrusted to him. the common notion of intellectual growth and strength which rules in such cases was at once subordinated to _character development_ in the moral sense. not that the two ideas are at all antagonistic, but one is more important than the other. the selection of reading matter, of studies, and of employments, was adapted to each boy with a view to influencing conduct and moral action. the herbart school adheres to this view of education, and has _transferred its spirit and method to the schools_. the herbartians have the hardihood, in this age of moral skeptics, to believe not only in moral example but also in moral teaching. (by moral skeptics we mean those who believe in morals but not in moral instruction.) they seek first of all historical materials of the richest moral content, in vivid personification, upon which to nourish the moral spirit of children. if properly treated, this subject matter will soon win the children by its power over feeling and judgment. with crusoe the child goes through every hardship and success; with abraham he lives in tents, seeks pastures for his flocks, and generously marches out to the rescue of his kinsmen. he should not read caesar with a slow and toilsome drag (parsing and construing) that would render a bright boy stupid. if he goes with caesar at all, he must build an _agger_, fight battles, construct bridges, and approve or condemn caesar's acts. but we doubt the moral value of caesar's gallic wars. by reading plutarch we may see that the latins and greeks, before the days of their degeneracy, nourished their rising youth upon the traditions of their ancestry. the education produced a tough and sinewy brood of moral qualities. their great men were great characters, largely because of the mother-milk of national tradition and family training. in scotch, english, and german history we are familiar with alfred, bruce, siegfried, and many other heroes of similar value in the training of youth. it will be well for us to look into our own history and see what sort of a moral heritage of educative materials it has left us. what noble examples does it furnish of right thought and action? have we any home-bred food like this for the nourishment of our growing youth? our native american history is indeed nobler in tone and more abundant. for moral educative purposes in the training of the young the history of america, from the early explorations and settlements along the atlantic coast to the present, has scarcely a parallel in history. it was a race of moral heroes that led the first colonies to many of the early settlements. winthrop, penn, williams, oglethorpe, raleigh, and columbus were great and simple characters, deeply moral and practical. for culture purposes, where can their equals be found? and where was given a better opportunity for the display of personal virtues than by the leaders of these little danger-encircled communities? the leaven of purity, piety, and manly independence which they brought with them and illustrated, has never ceased to work powerfully among our people. why not bring the children into direct contact with these characters in the intermediate grades, not by short and sketchy stories, but by full life pictures of these men and their surroundings? we have not been wholly lacking in literary artists who have worked up a part of these materials into a more durable and acceptable form for our schools. we need to make an abundant use of this and other history for our boys and girls, not by devoting a year in the upper grades to a barren outline of american annals, but by a proper distribution of these and other similar rich treasures throughout the grades of the common school. tradition and fiction are scarcely less valuable than biography and history because of their vivid portrayal of strong and typical characters. our own literature, and the world's literature at large, are a store-house well-stocked with moral educative materials, properly suited to children at different ages, if only sorted, selected, and arranged. but this requires broad knowledge of our best literature and clear insight into child character at different ages. this problem will not be solved in a day, nor in a life-time. in making a progressive series of our best historical and literary products, it is necessary to select those materials which are better adapted than anything else to interest, influence, and mould the character of children at each time of life. it is now generally agreed by the best teachers that these selections shall be classical masterpieces, not in fragments but as wholes. they should be those classical materials that bear the stamp of genuine nobility. goethe says "_the best is good enough for children_." for some years past in our grammar grades we have been using some of the best selections of whittier, longfellow, bryant, and others, and we are not even frightened by the length of such productions as evangeline, the lady of the lake, or julius caesar. a simple, adapted version of robinson crusoe is used in some schools as a second reader. from time immemorial choice selections of prose and verse have formed the staple of our readers above the third. but generally these selections are scrappy or fragmentary. few of the great masterpieces have been used because most of them are supposed to be too long. broken fragments of our choice literary products have been served up, but the best literary works as wholes have never been given to the children in the schools. the greek youth were better served with the iliad and odyssey, and some of our grandfathers with the tales of the old testament. we now go still further back in the child-life and make use of fairy tales in the first grade. but many are not yet able to realize that select fairy stories are genuinely classical, that they are as well adapted to stimulate the minds of children as hamlet the minds of adults. (see special method.) the chief aim of our schools all along has not been an appreciation of literary masterpieces either in their moral or art value, but to acquire skill in reading, fluency, and naturalness, of expression. our schools have been almost completely absorbed in the purely _formal_ use of our literary materials, learning to read in the earlier grades and learning to read with rhetorical expression and confidence in the later ones. in the present argument our chief concern is not with the formal use of literary materials for practice in reading, but with the moral culture, conviction, and habit of life they may foster. nor have we chiefly in view the _art_ side of our best literary pieces. appreciation of beauty in poetry and of strength in prose, admirable as they may be, are quite secondary to the main purpose. coming in direct and vivid contact with manly deeds or with unselfish acts as personified in choice biography, history, fiction, and real life, will inspire children with thoughts that make life worth living. neither formal skill in reading nor appreciation of literary art can atone for the lack of _direct moral incentive_ which historical studies should give. all three ends should be reached. many teachers are now calling for a change in the spirit with which the best biography and literature are used. they call for an improvement in the quality and an increase in the quantity of complete historical episodes and of literary masterpieces. an appreciative reading of ivanhoe revives the spirit of that age. the life of samuel adams is an epic that gives the youth a chance to live amid the stirring scenes of boston in a notable time. children are to live in thought and interest the lives of many men of other generations, as of tell, columbus, livingstone, lincoln, penn, franklin, fulton. they are to partake of the experiences of the best typical men in the story of our own and of other countries. the use of the best historical and literary works as a means of strengthening moral motives and principles with children whose minds and characters are developing, is a high aim in itself. and it will add _interest and life_ to the formal studies, such as reading, spelling, grammar, and composition, which spring out of this valuable subject-matter. history, in the broad sense, should be the chief constituent of a child's education. that subject-matter which contains the essence of moral culture in generative form deserves to constitute the chief mental food of young people. the conviction of the high moral value of historic subjects and of their peculiar adaptability to children at different ages, brings us to a positive judgment as to their relative value among studies. the first question, preliminary to all others in the common school course, "what is the most important study?" is answered by putting _history_ at the head of the list. _natural science_ takes the second place. in many respects it is co-ordinate with history. the object-world, which is so interesting, so informing, and so intimately interwoven with the needs, labors, and progress of men, furnishes the second great constituent of education for all children. botany, zoology, and the other natural sciences, taken as a unit, constitute the field of nature apart from man. they furnish us an understanding of the varied objects and complex phenomena of nature. it is one of the imperative needs of all human minds that have retained their childlike thoughtfulness and spirit of inquiry, to desire to understand nature, to classify the variety of objects and appearances, to trace the chain of causes, and to search out the simple laws of nature's operations. the command early came to men to subdue the earth, and we understand better than primitive man that it is subdued through investigation and study. all the forces and bounties of nature are to be made serviceable to us and it can only be done by understanding her facts and laws. the road to mastery leads through patient observation, experiment, and study. but we are concerned with the _educational_ value of the natural sciences. waitz says: "a correct philosophy of the world and of life is possible to a person only on the basis of a knowledge of one's self and of one's relation to surrounding nature." diesterweg says: "no one can afford to neglect a knowledge of nature who desires to get a comprehension of the world and of god according to human possibility, or who desires to find his proper relation to him and to real things. he who knows nothing of human history is an ignoramus, likewise he who knows nothing of natural science. to know nothing of either is a pure shame. ignorance of nature is an unpardonable perversion." kraepelin speaks as follows; "instruction should open up to a pupil an understanding of the present, and thereby furnish a basis for a frank and many-sided philosophy of life, resting upon reality. but to the present belongs the world outside of us. of this present there can be no such thing as an understanding unless it relates not only to inter-human relations but also to relations of man to animal, of animal to plant, and of organic life to inorganic life. the necessity of assuming a relation to our environment is unavoidable and this can only be done by acquainting ourselves with the surrounding world in every direction. this requirement would remain in force though man, like a god, were set above nature and her laws. but man lives, acts, and dies not outside of, but within the circle of nature's laws. this maxim is axiomatic and contains the final judgment against those who claim that a comprehensive but unified philosophy of life is possible without a knowledge of nature." herbart says: "here (in nature) lies the abode of real truth, which does not retreat before tests into an inaccessible past (as does history). this genuinely empirical character distinguishes the natural sciences and makes their loss irretrievable. it is here (in nature) that the object disentangles itself from all fancies and opinions and constantly stimulates the spirit of observation. here then is found an obstruction to extravagant thinking such as the sciences themselves could not better devise." ziller says: "the natural sciences are necessary in education because from the province of nature (as well as from history) are derived those means and resources which are necessary to accomplish the purposes of the will in action. means and forces are the natural conditions for the realization of aims. without knowledge of and intelligent power over nature, it is difficult to realize that certain aims are possible; action cannot be successful; will effort, based upon the firm conviction of ability, that is, judicious exercise of will, is impossible." we quote also from professor rein: "let us observe in passing that in the great industrial contest between civilized nations, that people will suffer defeat which falls behind in the culture of natural science, and for this reason the motive of self-protection would demand natural science instruction. in favor of this teaching, the claim is further made that no science is so well adapted to train the mind to inductive thought processes as that which rests entirely upon induction, and that natural science study is in a position to resist more easily and successfully than all other studies, the deeply-rooted tendency in all branches to substitute words for ideas." rein (das vierte schuljahr) explains further the leading ideas and standpoints which have appeared in historical order among science teachers in the common school. from the first crude ideas there has been marked progress toward higher aims in science teaching. . natural history stories for _entertainment_. many curious and entertaining facts in connection with animal life were searched out, more especially unusual and spicy anecdotes of shrewdness and intelligence. some of the old readers, and even of the recent ones, are enriched with such marvels. . _utility_, or the study of things in nature that are directly useful or hurtful to man. whatever fruits or animals or herbs are of plain service to man, as well as things poisonous or dangerous, were studied because such information would be of future service. it was a purely practical aim, at first very narrow, but in an enlarged and liberal sense of much importance. . _training of the senses_ and of _the observing power_. by a study and description of natural objects, sense perception was to be sharpened and a habit of close observation formed. among science teachers today no aim is more emphasized than this. it also stores away a body of useful ideas of great future value. this is an intellectual aim that accords better with the purpose of the school than the preceding. . _analysis_ and _determination of specimens_. to examine and trace a plant, mineral, or insect, to its true classification and name, has occupied much of the time of students. it requires nice discrimination, a comprehensive grasp of relations, and a power to seize and hold common characteristics. many of our text-books and courses of study are based chiefly upon this idea. . _system-making_, or the reduction of all things in nature to a systematic whole, with a place for everything. some of the greatest scientists, linnaeus, for example, looked upon scientific classification as the chief aim of nature study. it has had a great influence upon schools and teachers. the attempt to compress everything into a system has led to many text-books which are but brief summaries of sciences like zoology, botany, and physics. scientific classification is very important, but the attempt to make it a leading aim in teaching children is a mistake. we may add that nature study is felt by all to offer abundant scope to the exercise of the esthetic faculty. there is great variety of beauty and gracefulness in natural forms in plant and animal; the rich or delicate coloring of the clouds, of birds, of insects, and of plants, gives constant pleasure. then there are grand and impressive scenery and phenomena in nature, and melody and harmony in nature's voices. these various aims of science study are valuable to the teacher as showing him the scope of his work. but a higher and more comprehensive standpoint has been reached. we now realize that the great purpose of this study is _insight into nature_, into this whole physical environment, with a view to a better appreciation of her objects, forces, and laws, and of their bearing on human life and progress. all these purposes thus far developed in schools are to be considered as valuable subsidiary aims, leading up to the central purpose of the study of natural sciences, which is, "an understanding of life and of the powers and of the unity which express themselves in nature;" or, as kraepelin says: "nature should not appear to man as an inextricable chaos, but as a well-ordered mechanism, the parts fitting exactly to each other, controlled by unchanging laws, and in perpetual action and production." humboldt is further quoted: "nature to the mature mind is unity in variety, unity of the manifold in form and combination, the content or sum total of natural things and natural forces as a living whole. the weightiest result, therefore, of deep physical study is, by beginning with the individual, to grasp all that the discoveries of recent times reveal to us, to separate single things critically and yet not be overcome by the mass of details, mindful of the high destiny of man, to comprehend the mind of nature, which lies concealed under the mantle of phenomena." this sounds visionary and impracticable for children of the common school, especially when we know that much lower aims have not been successfully reached. in fact it cannot be said that the natural sciences have any recognized standing in the common school course. but it is worth the while to inquire whether natural sciences will ever be taught as they should be until the best attainable aims become the dominant principles for guiding teachers. stripped of its rhetoric, the above mentioned aim, "an understanding of life and of the unity in nature," may prove a practical and inspiring guide to the teacher. if we look upon nature as a field of observation and study which can be grasped as a whole both as a work of creation and as contributing in multiplied ways to man's needs, its proper study gives a many-sided culture to the mind. this leading purpose will bring into relation and unity all the subordinate aims of science teaching, such as information, utility, training of the senses and judgment, and of the power to compare and classify. for the accomplishment of this great purpose of gaining _insight_ into nature's many-sided activities, there are several simple means not yet mentioned. running through nature are great principles and laws which can be studied upon concrete examples, plain and interesting to a child. the study of the squirrel in its home, habits, organs, and natural activities in the woods, will show how strangely adapted it is to its surroundings. but an observation of birds in the air and of fishes in water reveals the same curious fitness to surrounding nature. the study of plants and animals in their adaptation to environment, of the relation between organ and function; between organs, mode of life, and environment, leads up to a general law which applies to all plants and animals. the law of growth and development from the simple germ to the mature life form can be seen in the butterfly, the frog, and the sunflower. these laws and others in biology, if developed on concrete specimens, give much insight into the whole realm of nature, more stimulating by far than that based on scientific classifications, as orders, families and species. the great and simple outlines of nature's work begin to appear out of such laws. again the study of the whole _life history_ of a plant or animal, in its relations to the inorganic world and to other plants and animals, is always a cross-section in the sciences and shows how all the natural sciences are knit together into a causal unity. take the life history of a _hickory tree_. as it germinates and grows from the seed how it draws from the earth and air; the effect of storms, seasons, and lightning upon it; how it later furnishes nuts to the squirrels and boys; its branches may be the nesting place for birds and its bark for insects. finally, the uses of its tough wood for man are seen. the life of a squirrel or of a honey-bee furnishes also a cross-section through all the sciences from the inorganic world up to man. if in tracing life histories we take care to select _typical_ subjects which exemplify perhaps thousands of similar cases, we shall materially shorten the road leading toward insight into nature. these types are concrete and have all the interest and attractiveness of individual life, but they also bring out characteristics which explain myriads of similar phenomena. a careful and detailed study of a single tree like the maple, with the circulation of the sap and the function of roots, bark, leaves, and woody fiber, will give an insight into the processes of growth upon which the life of the tree depends and these processes will easily appear to be true of all tree and plant forms. in nature as it shows itself in the woods or in the pond, there is such a _mingling and interdependence_ of the natural sciences upon each other that the book of nature seems totally different from books of botany, physics, and zoology as made by men. in the forest we find close together trees of many kinds, shrubs, flowering plants, vines, mosses, and ferns; grasses, beetles, worms, and birds; squirrels, owls and sunshine; rocks, soil, and springs; summer and winter; storms, frost, and drouth. plants depend upon the soil and upon each other. the birds and squirrels find their home and food among the trees and plants. the trees seem to grow together as if they needed each other's companionship. all the plants and animals depend upon the soil, air, and climate, and the whole wood changes its garb and partly its guests with the seasons. a forest is a _life society_, consisting of mutually dependent parts. how nature disregards our conventional distinctions between the natural sciences! we need no better proof than this that they should not be taught chiefly from books. a child might learn a myriad of things in the woods and gain much insight into nature's ways without making any clear distinction between botany, zoology, and geology. herein is also the proof that text-books are needed as a guide in nature's labyrinth. if the frequency and intimacy of mutual relations are any proof of unity, the natural sciences are a unit and have a right to be called by one name, _nature study_. in the study of laws, life histories, and life groups, the _causal relations_ in nature are found to be wonderfully stimulating to those who have begun to trace them out. the child as well as the mature scientist finds in these causal connections materials of absorbing interest. it is plain, therefore, that the lines tending toward unity in nature study are numerous and strong; such as the scientific classifications of our text-books, the working out of general laws whether in biology or physics, the study of life histories in vegetable and animal, and the observation of life societies in the close mutual relations of the different parts or individuals. if a course of nature studies is begun in the first grade and carried systematically through all the years up to the eighth grade, is it not reasonable to suppose that real insight into nature, based on observation taken at first hand, may be reached? it will involve a study of living plants and animals, minerals, physical apparatus and devices, chemical experiments, the making of collections, regular excursions for the observation of the neighboring fields, forests, and streams, and the working over of these and other concrete experiences from all sources through skillful class teaching. the first great result to a child of such a series of studies is an intelligent and rational understanding of his home, the world, his natural environment. he will have a seeing eye and an appreciative mind for the thousand things surrounding his daily life where the ignorant toiler sees and understands nothing. a second advantage which we can only hint at, while incidental is almost equally important. we have been considering nature chiefly as a realm by itself, apart from man. but the utilities of natural science in individual life and in society are so manifold that we accept many of the finest products of skill and art as if they were natural products--as if gold coins, silk dresses, and fine pictures grew on the bushes and only waited to be picked. the thousand-fold applications of natural science to human industry and comfort deserve to be perceived as _the result of labor and inventive skill_. our much-lauded steam engines, telegraph microscopes, sewing machines, reapers, iron ships, and printing presses, are not examples of a few, but of myriads of things that natural science has secured. but how many children on leaving the common school understand the principle involved in any one of the machines mentioned, subjects of common talk as they are? as children leave the schools at fourteen or fifteen they should know and appreciate many such things, wherein man, by his wit and ingenious use of natures forces, has triumphed over difficulties. how are glass and soap made? what has a knowledge of natural science to do with the construction of stoves, furnaces, and lamps? how are iron, silver, and copper ore mined and reduced? how is sugar obtained from maple trees, cane, and beet root? how does a suction pump work and why? without a knowledge of such applications of natural science we should be thrown back into barbarism. these things also, since they form such an important part of every child's environment, should be understood, but not for direct utility. historically considered, the study of natural science is the study of man's long continued struggle with nature and of his gradual triumph. it ends with insight into nature and into those contrivances of men by which her laws and forces are utilized. the whole subject of nature, her laws and powers, must not remain a sealed book to the masses of the people. scientists, inventors, and scholars may lead the way, but they are only pioneers. the thousands of the children of the people are treading at their heels and must be initiated into the mysteries. our knowledge of these principles and appliances constitute in fact a good share of the foundation upon which our whole _culture status_ rests. without natural science we should understand neither nature nor society. spencer shows the wide-reaching value of science knowledge in our modern life: "for leaving out only some very small classes, what are all men employed in? they are employed in the production, preparation, and distribution of commodities. and on what does efficiency in the production, preparation, and distribution of commodities depend? it depends on the use of methods fitted to the respective nature of these commodities, it depends on an adequate knowledge of their physical, chemical, or vital properties, as the case may be; that is, it depends on science. this order of knowledge which is in great part ignored in our school courses, is the order of knowledge underlying the right performance of all those processes by which civilized life is made possible. undeniable as is this truth, and thrust upon us as it is at every turn, there seems to be no living consciousness of it. its very familiarity makes it unregarded. to give due weight to our argument, we must therefore realize this truth to the reader by a rapid review of the facts." he then illustrates, in interesting detail, the varied applications of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social science to the industries and economies of real life, and concludes as follows: "that which our school courses leave almost entirely out, we thus find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life. all our industries would cease were it not for that information which men begin to acquire as they best may after their education is said to be finished. and were it not for this information that has been from age to age accumulated and spread by unofficial means, these industries would never have existed. had there been no teaching but such as is given, in our public schools, england would now be what it was in feudal times. that increasing acquaintance with the laws of nature which has through successive ages enabled us to subjugate nature to our needs, and in these days gives to the common laborer comforts which a few centuries ago kings could not purchase, is scarcely in any degree owed to the appointed means of instructing our youth. the vital knowledge--that by which we have grown as a nation to what we are, and which now underlies our whole existence--is a knowledge that has got itself taught in nooks and corners, while the ordained agencies for teaching have been mumbling little else but dead formulas." spencer, _education_, pp. , . not only the specialists in natural science, whose interest and enthusiasm are largely absorbed in these studies, but many other energetic teachers are persuaded that the culture value of nature studies is on a par with that of historical studies. but on account of the present lack of system and of clear purpose in natural science teachers, the first great problem in this field of common school effort is to select the material and perfect the method of studying nature with children. our estimate of the value of natural science for culture and for discipline is confirmed by the opinion of educational _reformers_ and by the changes and progress in schools. an inquiry into the history of education in europe and in america since the reformation will show that the movement towards nature study has been accumulating momentum for more than three hundred years. in spite of the failure of such men as comenius, ratich, basedow, and rousseau to secure the introduction of these studies in a liberal degree, in spite of the enormous influence of custom and prejudice in favor of latin and other traditional studies, the natural sciences have made recently such surprising advances and have so penetrated and transformed our modern life that we are simply compelled, even in the common school, to take heed of these great, living educational forces already at work. the _universities_ of england and of the united states have been largely transformed within the last forty years by the introduction, on a grand scale, of modern studies, particularly of the natural sciences. the fitting schools, academies, and high schools have had no choice but to follow this lead. since the forces that produced this result in higher education sprang up largely outside of our institutions of learning, the movement is not likely to cease till the common school has been changed in the same way. the educational question of the future is not whether historical or natural science or formal studies are to monopolize the school course, but rather how these three indispensable elements of every child's education may be best harmonized and wrought into a unit. but the question that confronts us at every turn is, _what is the disciplinary value of nature study_? we know, say the opponents, what a vigorous training in ancient languages and mathematics can do for a student. what results in this direction can the natural sciences tabulate? the champions of natural science point with pride to the great men who have been trained and developed in such studies. for inductive thinking the natural sciences offer the best materials. to cultivate self-reliance there is nothing like turning a student loose in nature under a skilled instructor. the spirit of investigation and of accurate thinking is claimed as a peculiar product of nature study. it is called, _par excellence_, "the scientific spirit." the undue reverence for authority produced by literary studies is not a weakness of natural science pursuits. but intense interest and devotion are combined with scientific accuracy and fidelity to nature and her laws. we do not feel called upon to attempt a settlement of this dispute. we have already assumed that _history_ in the broad sense (including languages) and _natural science_ (or nature study) are the two great staples of the common school course, and that so far as discipline is concerned one is as important as the other. but we believe that those educators whose first, middle, and last question in education is, "what is the _disciplinary_ value of a study?" have mistaken the primary problem of education. just as in the proper training of the body, the strength and skill of a professional athlete are, in no sense, the true aim, but physical soundness, health, and vigor; so in mind culture, not extraordinary skill in mental gymnastics of the severest sort, is the essential aim, but mental soundness, integrity, and motive. the under-lying question in education is not, how strong or incisive is his mind? (this depends largely upon heredity and native endowment) but, what is its quality and its temper? if might is right, then mental strength is to be gained at all hazards. but if right is higher than might, then mental skill and power are only secondary aims. so long as we are dealing with fundamental aims in such a serious business as education, why stop short of that ideal which is manifestly the best? we have no controversy with the highest mental discipline and strength that are consistent with all-round mental soundness. our better teachers are not lacking in appreciation for the value of what is called _formal mental discipline_, but they do generally lack faith in the innate power of the best studies to arouse interest and mental life. they emphasize the _drill_ more than the _content_ and the inspiration of the author. both in theory and in practice they are greatly lacking in the intellectual sympathy and moral power which result from bringing the minds of students into direct contact with the noblest products of god's work in history and in the object world. here we can put our finger on the radical weakness of our school work. the really soul-inspiring teachers have not been formalists nor drill-masters alone. friedrich august wolf, for example, the great german philologist, was probably the most inspiring teacher of classical languages that germany has had. but to what was his remarkable influence as a teacher of young men due? we usually think of a philologist as one who digs among the roots of dead languages, who worships the forms of speech and the laws of grammar. doubtless he and his pupils were much taken up with these things, but they were not the prime source of his and their interest. wolf defined philology as "the knowledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity." he studied with great avidity everything that could throw light upon the lives, character, and language of the ancients. their biographies, histories, geography, climate, dress, implements, their sculpture, monuments, buildings, tombs. approaching the literature and language of the greeks with this abundant knowledge of their real surroundings and conditions of life, he saw the deeper, fuller significance of every classical author and the great literary masterpieces were perceived as the expression of the national life. he appreciated language as the wonderful medium through which the more wonderful life of the versatile greek expressed itself. the reason he was such a great philologist was because he was so great a realist, a man who was intensely interested in the greek people, their history and life. words alone had little charm for him. no great teacher has been simply a word-monger. for the present we leave the question of discipline unanswered, though we are disposed to think that those studies which introduce children to the two great fields of real knowledge, and which arouse a strong desire to solve the problems found there, will also furnish the most valuable discipline. the _formal studies_ such as reading, spelling, writing, language, and much of arithmetic, have thus far appropriated the best share of school time. they are the tools for acquiring and formulating knowledge rather than knowledge itself. they are so indispensable in life that people have acquired a sort of superstitious respect for them. they are generally considered as of primary importance while other things are taken as secondary. by virtue of this excessive estimation the formal studies have become so strongly intrenched in the practice of the schools that they are really a heavy obstacle to educational progress. they have been so long regarded as the only gateway to knowledge that anyone who tries to climb in some other way is regarded as a thief and robber. we forget that homer's great poems were composed and preserved for centuries before letters were invented. as more thought is expended on studies and methods of learning, the more the thinkers are inclined to exactly reverse the educational machinery. they say: "thought studies must precede form studies." we should everywhere begin with valuable and interesting thought materials in history and natural science and let language, reading, spelling, and drawing follow. it is a thing much more easily said than done, but many active teachers are really doing it, and many others are wondering how it may be done. the advantage of putting the concrete realities of thought before children at first is that they give a powerful impetus to mental life, while pure formal studies in most cases have a deadening effect and gradually put a child to sleep. one of the great problems of school work is how to get more interest and instructive thought into school exercises. we are now in a position to give a concluding estimate upon the relative value of these three elements in school education. history contributes the materials from which motives and moral impulses spring. it cultivates and strengthens moral convictions by the use of inspiring examples. the character of each child should be drawn into harmony with the highest impulses that men have felt. a desire to be the author of good to others should be developed into a practical ruling motive. natural science on the other hand supplies a knowledge of the ordinary means and appliances by which the purposes of life are realized. it gives us proper insight into the conditions of life and puts us into intelligent relation to our environment. not only must a child be supplied with the necessaries of life but he must appreciate the needs of health and understand the economies of society, such as the necessity of mental and manual labor, the right use of the products and forces of nature, and the advantage of men's inventions and devices. in a plan of popular education these two culture elements should mingle (history and natural science). in the case of all sorts of people in society the ability to execute high moral purposes depends largely upon a ready, practical insight into natural conditions. we are not thinking of the bread-and-butter phase of life and of the aid afforded by the sciences in making a living, but of the all-round, practical utility of natural science as a necessary supplement to moral training. one of the best tests of a system of education is the preparation it gives for life in a liberal sense. when a child, leaving school behind, develops into a citizen, what tests are applied to him? the questions submitted to his judgment in his relations to the family and to society call for a quick and varied knowledge of men, insight into character, and for a large amount of practical information of natural science. he is asked to vote intelligently on social, political, sanitary, and economic questions; to judge of men's motives, opinions, and character; to vote upon or perhaps to direct the management of poor-houses, asylums, and penitentiaries; in towns to decide questions of drainage, police, water supply, public health, and school administration; to make contracts for public buildings, and bridges; to grant licenses and franchises; to serve on juries or as representatives of the people. these are not professional matters alone; they are the common duties of all citizens of a sound mind. these things each person should know how to judge, whether he be a blacksmith, a merchant, or a house keeper. in all such matters he must be not only a judge of others but an actor under the guidance of right motives and information. again, in the bringing up of children, in the domestic arrangements of every home and in a proper care for the minds and bodies of both parents and children, a multitude of practical problems from each of the great fields of real knowledge must be met and solved. a medical missionary illustrates this combination of historical and natural science elements. his life purpose is drawn from history, from the life of christ, and from the traditional incentives of the church. the means by which he is to make himself practically felt are obtained from his study of medicine and from the sciences upon which it depends. these elements form the basis of his influence. this illustration however savors of professional rather than of general education, and we are concerned only with the latter. but the education of every child is analogous to that of the medical missionary in its two constituent elements. as a matter of fact neither history nor natural science occupies any such prominence in the school course as we have judged fitting. much thoughtful study, experience in teaching, and pioneer labor in partially new fields will be necessary in order to bring into existence such a course of study based upon the best materials. many teachers already recognize the necessity for it and see before them a land of plenty as compared with the half-desert barrenness revealed in our present school course. two powerful convictions in the minds of those responsible for education have contributed to produce this desert-like condition in children's school employments, and this brings us to a discussion of the overestimation in which purely _formal studies_ are held. the first article of faith rests upon the unshaken belief in the _practical studies_, reading, writing, and arithmetic. they are still looked upon as a barrier that must be scaled before the real work of education can begin. learn to read, write, and figure and then the world of knowledge as well as of business is at your command. but many children find the barrier so difficult to scale that they really never get into the fields of knowledge. many of our most thorough-going educators still firmly believe that a child can not learn anything worth mentioning till he has first learned to read. but however deeply rooted this confidence in the purely formal work of the early school years may be, it must break down as soon as means are devised for putting the realities of interesting knowledge before and underneath all the forms of expression. let the necessity for expression spring from the real objects of study. those children to whom the memorizing and drill upon forms of expression becomes tedious deserve our sympathy. there is a kind of knowledge adapted to arouse these dull ones to their full capacity of interest. "or what man is there of you whom if his son ask bread will he give him a stone?" with many a child the first reader, the arithmetic, or the grammar becomes a veritable stone. there is no good reason why the sole burden of work in early school grades should rest upon the learning of the pure formalities of knowledge. children's minds are not adapted to an exclusive diet of this kind. the fact that children have good memories is no reason why their minds should be gorged with the dryest memory materials. they have a healthy interest in people, whether in life or in story, and in the objects in nature around them. what is thus pre-eminently true of the primary grades is true to a large extent throughout all the grades of the common school. it seems almost curious that the more tender the plants the more barren and inhospitable the soil upon which they are expected to grow. fortunately these little ones have such an exuberance of life that it is not easily quenched. formal knowledge stands first in our common school course and real studies are allowed to pick up such crumbs of comfort as may chance to fall. we believe in formal studies and in their complete mastery in the common school, but they should stand in the place of service to real studies. how powerful the tendency has been and still is toward pure formal drill and word memory is apparent from the fact that even geography and history, which are not at all formal studies, but full to overflowing with interesting facts and laws, have been reduced to a dry memorizing of words, phrases, and stereotyped sentences. it is not difficult to understand why the numerous body of teachers, who easily drift into mechanical methods, has a preference for formal studies. they are comparatively easy and humdrum and keep pupils busy. real studies, if taught with any sort of fitness, require energy, interest, and versatility, besides much outside work in preparing materials. the second article of faith is a still stronger one. the better class of energetic teachers would never have been won over to formal studies on purely utilitarian grounds. a second conviction weighs heavily in their minds. "_the discipline of the mental faculties_" is a talisman of unusual potency with them. they prize arithmetic and grammar more for this than for any direct practical value. the idea of mental discipline, of training the faculties, is so ingrained into all our educational thinking that it crops out in a hundred ways and holds our courses of study in the beaten track of formal training with a steadiness that is astonishing. these friends believe that we are taking the back-bone out of education by making it interesting. the culmination of this educational doctrine is reached when it is said that the most valuable thing learned in school or out of it is to do and do vigorously that which is most disagreeable. the training of the will to meet difficulties unflinchingly is their aim, and we can not gainsay it. these stalwart apostles of educational hardship and difficulty are in constant fear lest we shall make studies interesting and attractive and thus undermine the energy of the will. but the question at once arises: does not the will always act from _motives_ of some sort? and is there any motive or incentive so stimulating to the will as a steady and constantly increasing _interest_ in studies? it is able to surmount great difficulties. we wish to assure our stalwart friends that we still adhere to the good old doctrine that "there is no royal road to learning." there is no way of putting aside the real difficulties that are found in every study, no way of grading up the valleys and tunneling through the hills so as to get the even monotony of a railroad track through the rough or mountainous part of education. every child must meet and master the difficulties of learning for himself. there are no palace cars with reclining chairs to carry him to the summit of real difficulties. the _character-developing power_ that lies in the mastery of hard tasks constitutes one of their chief merits. accepting this as a fundamental truth in education, the problem for our solution is, how to stimulate children to encounter difficulties. many children have little inclination to sacrifice their ease to the cause of learning, and our dull methods of teaching confirm them in their indifference to educational incentives. any child, who, like hugh miller or abraham lincoln, already possesses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, will allow no difficulties or hardships to stand in the way of progress. this original appetite and thirst for knowledge which the select few have often manifested in childhood is more valuable than anything the schools can give. with the majority of children we can certainly do nothing better than to nurture such a taste for knowledge into vigorous life. it will not do to assume that the average of children have any such original energy or momentum to lead them to scale the heights of even ordinary knowledge. nor will it do to rely too much upon a _forcing process_, that is, by means of threats, severity, and discipline, to carry children against their will toward the educational goal. "be not like dumb driven cattle, be a hero in the strife" is sound educational doctrine. the thing for teachers to do is to cultivate in children all healthy appetites for knowledge, to set up interesting aims and desires at every step, to lead the approach to different fields of knowledge in the spirit of conquest. in the business world and in professional life men and women work with abundant energy and will because they have desirable ends in view. the hireling knows no such generous stimulus. business life is full of irksome and difficult tasks but the aim in view carries people through them. we shall not eliminate the disagreeable and irksome from school tasks, but try to create in children such a spirit and ambition as will lead to greater exertions. to implant vigorous aims and incentives in children is the great privilege of the teacher. we shall some day learn that when a boy cracks a nut he does so because there may be a kernel in it, not because the shell is hard. in concluding the discussion of relative values we will summarize the results. _history_, in the liberal sense, surveys the field of human life in its typical forms and furnishes the best illustrative moral materials. _nature study_ opens the door to the real world in all its beauty, variety, and law. the _formal studies_ constitute an indispensable part of useful and disciplinary knowledge, but they should occupy a secondary place in courses of study because they deal with the _form_ rather than with the _content_ of the sciences. it is a fundamental error to place formal studies in the center of the school course and to subordinate everything to their mastery. history and natural science, on the contrary, having the richest knowledge content, constitute a natural center for all educative efforts. they make possible a strong development of will-energy because their interesting materials furnish strong and legitimate incentives to mental activity and an enlarged field and opportunity to voluntary effort in pursuit of clear and attractive aims. chapter iii. nature of interest. by interest we mean the natural bent or inclination of the mind to find satisfaction in a subject when it is properly presented. it is the natural attractiveness of the subject that draws and holds the attention. interest belongs to the feelings but differs from the other feelings, such as desire or longing for an object, since it is satisfied with the simple contemplation without asking for possession. the degree of interest with which different kinds of knowledge are received, varies greatly. indeed, it is possible to acquire knowledge in such a manner as to produce dislike and disgust. a proper interest in a subject leads to a quiet, steady absorption of the mind with it, but does not imply an impetuous, passionate, and one-sided devotion to one thing. interest keeps the mind active and alert without undue excitement or partiality. it would be well if every study and every lesson could be sustained by such an interest as this. it would be in many cases like lubricating oil poured upon dry and creaking axles. knowledge might then have a flavor to it and would be more than a consumption of certain facts and formulas coldly turned over to the memory machine. the child's own personality must become entangled in the facts and ideas acquired. there should be a sort of affinity established between the child's soul and the information he gains. at every step the sympathy and life experiences from without the school should be intertwined with school acquisitions. all would be woven together and permeated by _feeling_. we forget that the feelings or sensibilities awakened by knowledge are what give it personal significance to us. the interest we have in mind is _intrinsic_, native to the subject, and springs up naturally when the mind is brought face to face with something attractive. the things of sense in nature and the people whom we see and read about, have a perennial and inexhaustible attraction for us all. it is among these objects that poets and artists find their materials and their inspiration. for the same reason the pictures drawn by the artist or poet have a charm which does not pass away. they select something concrete and individual; they clothe it with beauty and attractiveness; they give it some inherent quality that appeals to our admiration and love. it must call forth some esthetic or moral judgment by virtue of its natural quality. like luscious grapes the objects presented to the thought of the children should have an unquestionable quality that is desirable. we just spoke of interest, not as fluctuating and variable, but steady and persistent. it contains also the elements of ease, pleasure, and needed employment; that is, in learning something that has a proper interest, there is greater ease and pleasure in the acquisition, and occupation with the object satisfies an inner need. "when interest has been fully developed, it must always combine pleasure, facility, and the satisfaction of a need. we see again that in all exertions, power and pleasure are secured to interest. it does not feel the burden of difficulties but often seems to sport with them."--_ziller_. a natural interest is also awakened by what is strange, mysterious, and even frightful, but these kinds of interest concern us from a speculative rather than a pedagogical point of view. we are seeking for those interests which contribute to a normal and permanent mental action. _severe effort and exertion_ are a necessary part of instruction, but a proper interest in the subject will lead children to exert themselves with greater energy even when encountering disagreeable tasks. there are places in every subject when work is felt as a burden rather than as a pleasure, but the interest and energy aroused in the more attractive parts will carry a child through the swamps and mires at a speedier rate. it is not at all desirable to conceal difficulties under the guise of amusement. but by means of a natural interest it is possible to bring the mind into the most favorable state for action. in opposition to a lively and humane treatment of subjects, a dry and dull routine has often been praised as the proper discipline of the mind and will. "it was a mistake," says ziller, "to find in the simple pressure of difficulties a source of culture, for it is the opposite of culture. it was a mistake to call the pressure of effort, the feeling of burden and pain, a source of proper training, simply because will power and firmness of character are thus secured and preserved to youth. pedagogical efforts looking towards a lightening and enlivening of instruction should not have been answered by an appeal to severe methods, to strict, dry, and dull learning, that made no attempt to adapt itself to the natural movement of the child's mind." (ziller, lehre vom e. u., p. .) not those studies which are driest, dullest, and most disagreeable should be selected upon which to awaken the mental forces of a child, but those which naturally arouse his interest and prompt him to a lively exercise of his powers. for children of the third and fourth grade to narrate the story of the golden fleece is a more suitable exercise than to memorize the cxixth psalm, or a catechism. a proper interest aims, finally, at the highest form of _quiet, sustained will exertion_. the succession of steps leading up to will energy, is interest, desire, and will. before attempting to realize the higher forms of will effort, we must look to the fountains and sources out of which it springs. if a young man has laid up abundant and interesting stores of knowledge of architecture, he only needs an opportunity, and there is likely to be great will-energy in the work of planning and constructing buildings. but without this interest and knowledge there will be no effort along this line. in like manner children cannot be expected to show their best effort unless the subject is made strongly interesting from the start, or unless interest-awakening knowledge has already been stored in the mind. to make great demands upon the will power in early school years, is like asking for ripe fruits before they have had time to mature. knowledge, feelings, and will-incentives of every sort must be first planted in the mind, before a proper will-energy can be expected. in teaching, we should aim to develop will power, not to take it for granted as a ready product. as the will should ultimately control all the mental powers, its proper maturity is a later outcome of education. even supposing that the will has considerable original native power, it is a power that is likely to lie dormant or be used in some ill-direction, unless proper incentives are brought to bear upon it. the will is so constituted that it is open to appeal, and in all the affairs of school and life, incentives of all sorts are constantly brought to bear upon it. why not make an effort to bring to bear the incentives that spring out of interest, that steady force, which is able to give abiding tendency and direction to the efforts? why not cultivate those nobler incentives that spring out of culture-bringing-knowledge? there are, therefore, important preliminaries to full will energy, which are secured by the cultivation of knowledge, the sensibilities, and desires. there is a common belief that any subject can be made interesting if only the teacher knows the secret of the how; if only he has proper _skill_. but it is hard even for a skillful workman "to make bricks without straw," to awaken mental effort where interest in the subject is entirely lacking. it is often claimed that if there is dullness and disgust with a study it is the fault of the teacher. as mr. quick says, "i would go so far as to lay it down as a rule, that whenever children are inattentive and apparently take no interest in a lesson, the teacher should always look first to himself for the reason. there are perhaps no circumstances in which a lack of interest does not originate in the mode of instruction adopted by the teacher." this statement assumes that all knowledge is about equally interesting to pupils, and everything depends upon the _manner_ in which the teacher deals with it. but different kinds of knowledge differ widely in their power to awaken interest in children. the true idea of interest demands that the subject matter be _in itself_ interesting, adapted to appeal to a child, and to secure his participation. if the interest awakened by bringing the mind in contact with the subject is not spontaneous, it is not genuine and helpful in the best sense. one of the first and greatest evils of all school courses has been a failure to select those subjects, which in themselves are adapted to excite the interest of children at each age of progress. if we could assume that lessons had been so arranged, we might then with mr. quick justly demand of a teacher a manner of teaching that must make the subjects interesting, or in other words a manner of treatment that would be appropriate to an interesting subject. there are two kinds of interest that need to be clearly distinguished: _direct_ interest, which is felt for the thing itself, for its own sake, and _indirect_ interest which points to something else as the real source. a miser loves gold coins for their own sake, but most people love them only because of the things for which they may be exchanged. the poet loves the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the florist adds to this a mercenary interest. a snow-shovel may have no interest for us ordinarily, but just when it is needed, on a winter morning, it is an object of considerable interest. it is simply a means to an end. the kind of interest which we think is so valuable for instruction is direct and intrinsic. the life of benjamin franklin calls out a strong direct interest in the man and his fortunes. a humming bird attracts and appeals to us for its own sake. indirect interest, so called, has more of the character of _desire_. a desire to restore one's health will produce great interest in a certain health resort, like the hot springs, or in some method of treatment, as the use of koch's lymph. the desire for wealth and business success will lead a merchant in the fur trade to take interest in seals and seal-fishing, and in beavers, trapping, etc. the wish to gain a prize will cause a child to take deep interest in a lesson. but in all these cases desire _precedes_ interest. interest, indeed, in the thing itself for its own sake, is frequently not present. it is true in many cases that indirect interest is not interest at all. it is a dangerous thing in education to substitute _indirect_ for _direct_ or true interest. the former often means the cultivation, primarily, of certain inordinate desires or feelings, such as rivalry, pride, jealousy, ambition, reputation, love of self. by appealing to the selfish pride of children in getting lessons, hateful moral qualities are sometimes started into active growth in the very effort to secure the highest intellectual results and discipline. giving a prize for superiority often produces jealousy, unkindness, and deep-seated ill-will where the cultivation of a proper natural interest would lead to more kindly and sympathetic relations between the children. the cultivation of direct interest in all valuable kinds of knowledge, on the other hand, leads also to the cultivation of desires, but the desires thus generated are pure and generous, the desire for further knowledge of botany or history, the desire to imitate what is admirable in human actions and to shun what is mean. the desires which spring out of direct interest are elevating, while the desires which are associated with indirect interest are in many cases egotistic and selfish. we often say that it is necessary to make a subject interesting so that it may be more _palatable_, more easily learned. this is the commonly accepted idea. it is a means of helping us to swallow a distasteful medicine. if the main purpose were to get knowledge into the mind, and interest only a means to this end, the cultivation of such indirect interests would be all right. but interest is one of the qualities which we wish to see permanently associated with knowledge even after it is safely stored in the mind. if interest is there, future energy and activity will spring spontaneously out of the acquirements. indirect interest indeed is often necessary and may be a sign of tact in teaching. but it is negative and weak in after results. so far as it produces motives at all they may be dangerous. it cannot build up and strengthen character but threatens to undermine it by cultivating wrong motives. there is no assurance that knowledge thus acquired can affect the will and bear fruit in action, even though it be the right kind of knowledge, because it is not the knowledge in this case that furnishes the incentives. the interest that is awakened in a subject because of its innate attractiveness, leaves incentives which may ripen sooner or later into action. the higher kind of interest is direct, intrinsic, not simply receptive, but active and progressive. in the knowledge acquired it finds only incentives to further acquisition. it is life giving and is prompted by the objects themselves, just as the interest of boys is awakened by deeds of adventure and daring or by a journey into the woods. the interest in an object that springs from some other source than the thing itself, is indirect, as the desire to master a lesson so as to excel others, or gain a prize, or make a money profit out of it. in speaking of interest in school studies, teachers quite commonly have only the indirect in mind; _i.e._, the kind that leads children to take hold of and master their lessons more readily. interest is thus chiefly a means of overcoming distasteful tasks. it is the merit of a direct or genuine interest that it aids in mastering difficulties and in addition to this gives a permanent pleasure in studies. one of the high aims of instruction is to implant a strong permanent interest in studies that will last through school days and after they are over. a live interest springs most easily out of _knowledge subjects_ like history and natural science. formal studies like grammar and arithmetic awaken it less easily. herbart has classified the chief kinds and sources of interest as follows: interest in nature apart from man, and interest in man, society, etc. in _nature_ and natural objects as illustrated in the natural sciences there are three chief kinds of interest. _empirical_, which is stirred by the variety and novelty of things seen. there is an attractiveness in the many faces and moods of nature. between the years of childhood and old age there is scarcely a person who does not enjoy a walk or a ride in the open air, where the variety of plant, bird, animal, and landscape makes a pleasing panorama. _speculative_ interest goes deeper and inquires into the relations and causal connections of phenomena. it traces out similarities and sequences, and detects law and unity in nature. it is not satisfied with the simple play of variety, but seeks for the cause and genesis of things. even a child is anxious to know how a squirrel climbs a tree or cracks a nut; where it stores its winter food, its nest and manner of life in winter. why is it that a mole can burrow and live under ground? how is it possible for a fish to breathe in water? _esthetic_ interest is awakened by what is beautiful, grand, and harmonious in nature or art. the first glance at great overhanging masses of rock, oppresses us with a feeling of awe. the wings of an insect, with their delicate tracery and bright hues, are attractive, and stir us with pleasure. the graceful ferns beside the brooks and moss-stained rocks suggest fairy-land. but stronger even than these interests which attach us to the things of nature, are the interests of _humanity_. the concern felt for others in joy or sorrow is based upon our interest in them individually, and is _sympathetic_. in this lies the charm of biography and the novel. take away the personal interest we have in ivanhoe, quenten durward, etc., and scott's glory would quickly depart. what empty and spiritless annals would the life of frederic the great and patrick henry furnish! _social_ interest is the regard for the good or evil fortune of societies and nations. upon this depends our concern for the progress of liberty and the struggle for free institutions in england and other countries. on a smaller scale clubs, fraternities, and local societies of all kinds are based on the social interest. _religious_ interest finally reveals our consciousness of man's littleness and weakness, and of god's providence. as pestalozzi says, "god is the nearest resource of humanity." as individuals or nations pass away their fate lies in his hand. the _sources_ of interest therefore are varied and productive. any one of the six is unlimited in extent and variety. together they constitute a boundless field for a proper cultivation of the emotional as well as intellectual nature of man. a study of these sources of genuine interest and a partial view of their breadth and depth, reveals to teachers what our present school courses tend strongly to make them forget, namely, that the right kind of knowledge contains in itself the stimulus and the germs to great mental exertion. the dull drill upon grammar, arithmetic, reading, spelling, and writing, which are regarded as so important as to exclude almost everything else, has convinced many a child that school is veritably a dull place. and many a teacher is just as strongly convinced that keeping school is a dull and sleepy business. and yet the sources of interest are abundant to overflowing for him who has eyes to see. that these sources and materials of knowledge, arousing deep and lasting interests, are above other things adapted to children and to the school room, is a truth worthy of all emphasis. interest is a good test of the _adaptability_ of knowledge. when any subject is brought to the attention at the right age and in the proper manner, it awakens in children a natural and lively feeling. it is evident that certain kinds of knowledge are not adapted to a boy at the age of ten. he cares nothing about political science, or medicine, or statesmanship, or the history of literature. these things may be profoundly interesting to a person two or three times as old, but not to him. other things, however, the story of ulysses, travel, animals, geography, and history, even arithmetic, may be very attractive to a boy of ten. it becomes a matter of importance to select those studies and parts of studies for children at their changing periods of growth, which are adapted to awaken and stimulate their minds. we shall be saved then from doing what the best of educators have so frequently condemned, namely, when the child asks for bread give him a stone, or when he asks for fish give him a serpent. the neglect to take proper cognizance of this principle of _interest_ in laying out courses of study and in the manner of presenting subjects is certainly one of the gravest charges that ever can be brought against the schools. it is a sure sign that teachers do not know what it means "to put yourself in his place," to sympathize with children and feel their needs. the educational reformers who have had deepest insight into child-life, have given us clear and profound warnings. rousseau says: "study children, for be sure you do not understand them. let childhood ripen in children. the wisest apply themselves to what it is important to _men_ to know, without considering what _children_ are in a condition to learn. they are always seeking the man in the child, without reflecting what he is before he can be a man." it is well for us to take these words home and act upon them. it is worth the trouble to inquire whether it is possible to select subjects for school study which will prove essentially attractive and interesting from the age of six on. _are_ there materials for school study which are adapted fully to interest first grade children? we know that fairy stories appeal directly to them, and they love to reproduce them. reading and spelling in connection with these tales are also stirring studies. reading a familiar story is certainly a much more interesting employment than working at the almost meaningless sentences of a chart or first reader. number work when based upon objects can be made to hold the attention of little ones, at least in the last half of the first grade. they love also to see and describe flowers, rocks, plants, and pictures. it probably requires more skillful teaching to awaken and hold the interest in the first grade than in the second or any higher grade, unless older children have been dulled by bad instruction. on what principle is it possible to select both interesting and valuable materials for the successive grades? we will venture to answer this difficult question. the main interest of children must be attracted by what we may call _real knowledge_ subjects; that is, those treating of people (history stories, etc.,) and those treating of plants, animals, and other natural objects (natural science topics). grammar, arithmetic, and spelling are chiefly form studies and have less native attraction for children. secondly, it may be laid down as a fact of experience that children will be more touched and stimulated by _particular_ persons and objects in nature than by any _general_ propositions, or laws, or classifications. they prefer seeing a particular palm tree to hearing a general description of palms. a narrative of some special deed of kindness moves them more than a discourse on kindness. they feel a natural drawing toward real, definite persons and things, and an indifference or repulsion toward generalities. they prefer the story to the moral. children are little materialists. they dwell in the sense-world, or in the world of imagination with very clear and definite pictures. but while dealing with _things of sense_ and with particulars, it is necessary in teaching children to keep an eye directed toward general classes and toward those laws and principles that will be fully appreciated later. in geography, arithmetic, language lessons, and natural science, we must collect more materials in the lower grades; more simple, concrete illustrations. they are the basis upon which we can soon begin to generalize and classify. the more attractive the illustrative materials we select, the stronger the appeal to the child's own liking, the more effective will be the instruction. a way has been discovered to make the study of the concrete and individual lead up with certainty to the grasp of general notions and even of scientific laws as fast as the children are ready for them. if the concrete object or individual is carefully selected it will be a _type_, that is, it illustrates a whole class of similar objects. such a typical concrete object really combines the particular and the general. it has all the advantage of object-teaching, the powerful attraction of real things, but its comparison with other objects will also show that it illustrates a general law or principle of wide-reaching scientific importance. in both these steps natural interest is provided for in the best way. a full and itemized examination of some attractive object produces as strong an interest as a child is capable of. then to find out that this object is a sort of key to the right interpretation of other objects, more or less familiar to him, has all the charm of discovery. the _sunflower_, for example, is a large and attractive object for itemized study. it the examination leads a step further to a comparison with other composite flowers, there will be an interesting discovery of kinship with dandelions, asters, thistles, etc. this principle of the type, as illustrating both the particular and general, is true also of geographical topics that lead a child far from home and call for the construction of mental pictures. the study of _pike's peak_ and vicinity is very interesting and instructive for fourth grade children. the valleys, springs at manitou, garden of the gods, cheyenne canon and falls, the cave of the winds, the ascent of the peak by trail or by railroad, the views of distant mountains, the summit house on the barren and rugged top, the snow fields even in summer, the drifting mists that shut off the view, the stories of hardship and early history--these things take a firm hold on a child's interest and desire for knowledge. when this whole picture is reasonably complete a brief comparison of pike's peak with mt. washington, mt. marcy, mt. shasta, and mt. rainier, will bring forth points of contrast and similarity that will surprise and instruct a child. in every branch of study there are certain underlying principles and forms of thought whose thorough mastery in the lower grades is necessary to successful progress. they are the important and central ideas of the subject. it was a marked quality of pestalozzi to sift out these simple fundamentals and to master them. it is for us to make these simple elements intelligible and interesting by the use of concrete _types_ and illustrations drawn from nature and from human life. if we speak of history and nature as the two chief subjects of study, the simple, fundamental relations of persons to each other in society, and the simple, typical objects, forces, and laws of nature constitute the basis of all knowledge. these elements we desire to master. but to make them attractive to children, they should not be presented in bald and sterile outlines, but in typical forms. all actions and human relations must appear in attractive _personification_. persons speak and act and virtues shine forth in them. we do not study nature's laws at first, but the beautiful, _typical life forms_ in nature, the lily, the oak, cinderella, and william tell. for children, then, the underlying ideas and principles of every study, in order to start the interest, must be revealed in the most beautiful illustrative forms which can be furnished by nature, poetry, and art. the story of william tell, although it comes all the way from the alps and from the distant traditional history of the swiss, is one of the best things with which to illustrate and impress manliness and patriotism. the fairy stories for still younger children, are the best means for teaching kindness or unselfishness, because they are so chaste, and beautiful, and graceful, even to the child's thought. the most attractive type-forms and life-personifications of fundamental ideas in history and nature are the really interesting objects of study for children. to put it in a simple, practical form--objects and human actions, if well selected, are the best means in the world to excite curiosity and the strong spirit of inquiry. while dwelling upon this thought of the attractiveness of type-forms as personified in things or persons, we catch a glimpse of a far-reaching truth in education. the idea of _culture epochs_, as typical of the steps of progress in the race, and also of the periods of growth in the child, offers a deep perspective into educational problems. in the progress of mankind from a primitive state of barbarism to the present state of culture in europe and in the united states, there has been a succession of not very clearly defined stages. in point of government, for example, there has been the savage, nomad, patriarch, kingdom, constitutional monarchy, democracy, republic, federal republic. there have been great epochs of political convulsion in the conflicts with external powers and in civil struggles and revolutions. in the growth of handicrafts, arts, manufactures, and inventions, there has been a series of advances from the time when men first began to cultivate the ground, to reduce the metals, and to bring the forces of nature into service. in the development of human society, therefore, and in the progress of arts and human knowledge, there are certain typical stages whose proper use may help us to solve some of the difficult problems in educating the young. all nations have passed through some of these important epochs. the united states, for example, since the first settlements upon the east coast, have gone rapidly through many of the characteristic epochs of the world's history, in politics, commerce, and industry; in social life, education, and religion. the importance of the culture epochs for schools lies in the theory, accepted by many great writers, that children in their growth from infancy to maturity, pass through a series of steps which correspond broadly to the historical epochs of mankind. a child's life up to the age of twenty, is a sort of epitome of the world's history. our present state of culture is a result of growth, and if a child is to appreciate society as it now is, he must grow into it out of the past, by having traveled through the same stages it has traced. but this is only a very superficial way of viewing the relation between child and world history. the periods of child life are so similar to the epochs of history, that a child finds its _proper mental food_ in the study of the materials furnished by these epochs. let us test this. a child eight years old cares nothing about reciprocity or free silver, or university extension. robinson crusoe, however, who typifies mankind's early struggle with the forces of nature, claims his undivided attention. a boy of ten will take more delight in the story of king alfred or william tell than in twenty gladstones or bismarcks. not that gladstone's work is less important or interesting to the right person, but the boy does not live and have his being in the gladstonian age. not all parts of history, indeed, are adapted to please and instruct some period of youth. whole ages have been destitute of such materials, barren as deserts for educational purposes. but those epochs which have been typical of great experiences, landmarks of progress, have also found poets and historians to describe them. the great works of poets and historians contain also the great _object lessons_ upon which to cultivate the minds of children. some of the leading characters of fiction and history are the best personifications of the steps of progress in the history of the race; crusoe, abraham, ulysses, alfred, tell, david, charlemagne, moses, columbus, washington. these men, cast in a large and heroic mold, represent great human strivings and are adapted to teach the chief lessons of history, if properly selected and arranged. these typical individual characters illustrate the fundamental ideas that will give insight and appreciation for later social forms. they contain, hidden as it were, the essential part of great historical and social truths of far-reaching importance. the culture epochs will be seen later to be important in solving the problem of the _concentration of instruction_ along certain lines, but in the present discussion their value is chiefly seen in their adaptability to arouse the interest of children, by supplying peculiarly congenial materials of instruction in the changing phases of child progress. the interest most worth awakening in pupils is not only direct but _permanent_. hawthorne's golden touch embodies a simple classic truth in such transparent form that its reperusal is always a pleasure. in the same way, to observe the autumn woods and flowers, the birds and insects, with sympathy and delight, leaves a lasting pleasure in the memory. the best kind of knowledge is that which lays a permanent hold upon the affections. the best method of learning is that which opens up any field of study with a growing interest. to awaken a child's permanent interest in any branch of knowledge is to accomplish much for his character and usefulness. an enduring interest in american history, for example, is valuable in the best sense, no matter what the method of instruction. any companion or book that teaches us to observe the birds with growing interest and pleasure has done what a teacher could scarcely do better. this kind of knowledge becomes a living, generative culture influence. knowledge which contains no springs of interest is like faith divorced from works. information and discipline may be gained in education without any lasting interest, but the one who uses such knowledge and discipline is only a machine. a cambridge student who had taken the best prizes and scholarships said at the end of his university career: "i am at a loss to know what to do. i have already gained the best distinctions, and i can see but little to work for in the future." the child of four years, who opens his eyes with unfeigned interest and surprised inquiry into the big world around him, has a better spirit than such a dead product of university training. but happily this is not the spirit of our universities now. the remarkable and characteristic idea in university life today is the spirit of investigation and scientific inquiry which it constantly awakens. we happen to live in a time when university teachers are trying to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge in every direction, to solve problems that have not been solved before. no matter what the subject, the real student soon becomes an explorer, an investigator in fields of absorbing interest. the common school can scarcely do better than to receive this generous impulse into its work. can our common studies be approached in this inquisitive spirit? can growth in knowledge be made a progressive investigation? a true interest takes pleasure in acquired knowledge, and standing upon this vantage looks with inquiring purpose into new worlds. children in our schools are sometimes made so dyspeptic that no knowledge has any relish. but the soul should grow strong, and healthy, and elastic, upon the food it takes. if the teaching is such that the appetite becomes stronger, the mental digestion better, and if the spirit of interest and inquiry grows into a steady force, the best results may be expected. the cultivation of a _many-sided interest_ is desirable in order to _avoid_ narrowness, and to open up the various sources of mental activity, _i.e._, to stimulate mental vigor along many lines. we believe that most children are capable of taking interest in many kinds of study. the preference which some children show for certain branches and the dislike for others may be due to peculiar early surroundings, and is often the result of good or poor teaching as much as to natural gifts. as every child has sympathies for companions and people, so every child may take a real interest in story, biography, and history, if these subjects are rightly approached. so also the indifference to plant and animal life shown by many persons is due to lack of culture and suitable suggestion at the impressionable age. unquestionably the lives of most people run in too narrow a channel. they fail to appreciate and enjoy many of the common things about them, to which their eyes have not been properly opened. the particular trade or business so engrosses most people's time that their sympathies are narrowed and their appreciation of the duties and responsibilities of life is stunted. the common school, more than all other institutions, should lay broad foundations and awaken many-sided sympathies. the trade school and the university can afford to specialize, to prepare for a vocation. the common school, on the contrary, is preparing all children for general citizenship. the narrowing idea of a trade or calling should be kept away from the public school, and as far as possible varied interests in knowledge should be awakened in every child. but this variety of interests may lead to scattering and _superficial knowledge_. and in its results many-sided interest would seem to point naturally to many-sided activity; that is, to multiplicity of employments, to that character which in yankee phrase is designated as "jack of all trades and master of none." if instead of being allowed to spread out so much, the educational stream is confined between narrow banks, it will show a deep and full current. if allowed to spread over the marshes and plains, it becomes sluggish and brackish. our course of study for the common schools in recent years, has been largely added to and has been extended over the whole field of knowledge. history, geography, natural science lessons and drawing have been added to the old reading, writing, arithmetic, and grammar. there may appear to be more variety, but less strength. when in addition to this greater variety of studies, enthusiastic teachers desire to increase the _quantity_ of knowledge in each branch and to present as many interesting facts as possible, at every point, we have the _over-loading_ of the school course. this effect will be noticed in a later chapter in its bearing upon concentration. children have too much to learn. they become pack-horses, instead of free spirits walking in the fields of knowledge. _mental vigor_, after all, is worth more than a mind grown corpulent and lazy with an excess of pabulum, overfed. the cultivation therefore of a many-sided interest ceases to be a blessing as soon as encyclopedic knowledge becomes its aim. in fact the desire on the part of teachers to make the knowledge of any subject complete and encyclopedic destroys all true interest. the solution of this great problem does not consist in identifying many-sided interest with encyclopedic knowledge, but in such a detailed study of _typical_ forms in each case as will give insight into that branch without any pretension to exhaustive knowledge. certainly a true interest in plants does not require that we become acquainted with all the species of all the genera. but a proper study of a few typical forms in a few of the families and genera might produce a much deeper interest in nature and in her laws. the culture of a many-sided interest is essential to a full development and _perfection_ of the mental activities. it is easy to see that interest in any subject gives all thought upon it a greater vigor and intensify. mental action in all directions is strengthened and vivified by a direct interest. on the other hand mental life diminishes with the loss of interest, and even in fields of knowledge in which a man has displayed unusual mastery, a loss of interest is followed by a loss of energy. excluding interest is like cutting off the circulation from a limb. perfect vigor of thought which we aim at in education, is marked by strength along three lines, the vigor of the individual ideas, the extent and variety of ideas under control, and the connection and harmony of ideas. it is the highest general aim of intellectual education to strengthen mental vigor in these three directions. many-sided interest is conducive to all three. every thought that finds lodgment in the mind is toned up and strengthened by interest. it is also easier to retain and reproduce some idea that has once been grasped with full feeling of interest. an interest that has been developed along all leading lines of study has a proper breadth and comprehensiveness and cannot be hampered and clogged by narrow restraints and prejudice. we admire a person not simply because he has a few clear ideas, but also for the extent and variety of this sort of information. our admiration ceases when he shows ignorance or prejudice or lack of sympathy with important branches of study. finally, the unity and harmony of the varied kinds of knowledge are a great source of interest. the tracing of connections between different studies and the insight that comes from proper associations, are among the highest delights of learning. the connection and harmony of ideas will be discussed under concentration. the six interests above mentioned are to be developed along parallel lines. they are to be kept in proper _equipoise_. it is not designed that anyone shall be developed to the overshadowing of the others. they are like six pillars upon which the structure of a liberal education is rested. a cultivation of any one, exclusively, may be in place when the work of general education is complete and a profession or life labor has been chosen. it is also true that a proper interest is a _protection_ against the desires, disorderly impulses, and passions. one of the chief ends of education is to bring the inclinations and importunate desires under mastery, to establish a counterpoise to them by the steady and persistent forces of education. a many-sided interest cultivated along the chief paths of knowledge, implies such mental vigor and such preoccupation with worthy subjects as naturally to discourage unworthy desires. locke says, self-restraint, the mastery over one's inclinations, is the foundation of virtue. "he that has found a way how to keep a child's spirit easy, active, and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from many things he has a mind to, and to draw him to things that are uneasy to him; he, i say, that knows how to reconcile these seeming contradictions, has, in my opinion, got the true secret of education." but it is a secret still; the central question remains unanswered. how is the teacher to approach and influence the will of the child? is it by supposing that the child has a will already developed and strong enough to be relied upon on all occasions? on the contrary, must not the teacher put incentives in the path of the pupil, ideas and feelings that prompt him to self-denial? interest as a source of _will-stimulus_ has peculiar advantages. it is not desired that the inclinations and feelings shall get the mastery of the mind, certainly not the disorderly and momentary desires. higher desires, indeed, should properly influence the will, as the desire of the approval of conscience, the desire to attain excellence, to gain strength and mastery, to serve others, etc. but the importance of awakening interest as a basis of will cultivation is found in the favorable mental state induced by interest as a preliminary to will action along the best lines. interest is not an impetuous force like the desires, prompting to instant action, but a quiet, permanent undertone, which brings everything into readiness for action, clears the deck, and begins the attack. it would be a vast help to many boys and girls if the irksomeness of study in arithmetic or grammar, which is so fatal to will energy, could give way to the spur of interest, and when the wheels are once set in motion, progress would not only begin but be sustained by interest. it is pretty generally agreed to by thoughtful educators, that in giving a child the broad foundations of education, we should aim not so much at knowledge as at capacity and _appreciation_ for it. a universal receptivity, such as rousseau requires of emile, is a desideratum. scarcely a better dowry can be bestowed upon a child by education, than a desire for knowledge and an intelligent interest in all important branches of study. herbart's many-sided interest is to strengthen and branch out from year to year during school life, and become a permanent tendency or force in later years. no school can give even an approach to full and encyclopedic knowledge, but no school is so humble that it may not throw open the doors and present many a pleasing prospect into the fields of learning. with herbart, therefore, a many-sided, harmonious interest promotes _will-energy_ through all the efforts of learning from childhood up, and when the work of general education has been completed, the youth is ready to launch out into the world with a strong, healthy appetite for information in many directions. the best fruitage of such a course will follow in the years that succeed school life. interest is a very practical thing. it is that which gives force and momentum to ideas. it is not knowledge itself, but, like the invisible principle of life, it converts dead matter into living energy. in our schools thus far we have had too much faith in the mechanics of education. too much virtue has been imputed to facts, to knowledge, to sharp tools. we have now to learn that _incentive_ is a more important thing in education; that is, a direct, permanent, many-sided interest. chapter iv. concentration. by concentration is meant such a connection between the parts of each study and such a spinning of relations and connecting links between different sciences that unity may spring out of the variety of knowledge. history, for example, is a series and collocation of facts explainable on the basis of cause and effect, a development. on the other hand, history is intimately related to geography, language, natural science, literature, and mathematics. it would be impossible to draw real history out by the roots without drawing all other studies out bodily with it. is there then any reason why school history should ignore its blood relationships to other branches of knowledge? concentration is so bound up with the idea of _character-forming_ that it includes more than school studies. it lays hold of _home influences_ and all the experiences of life outside of school and brings them into the daily service of school studies. it is just as important to bind up home experience with arithmetic, language, and other studies as it is to see the connection between geography and history. in the end, all the knowledge and experience gained by a person at home, at school, and elsewhere should be classified and related, each part brought into its right associations with other parts. nor is it simply a question of throwing the varied sorts of _knowledge_ into a net-work of crossing and interwoven series so that the person may have ready access along various lines to all his knowledge stores. concentration draws the _feelings_ and the _will_ equally into its circle of operations. to imagine a character without feeling and will would be like thinking a watch without a mainspring. all knowledge properly taught generates feeling. the will is steadily laying out, during the formative period of education, the highways of its future ambitions and activities. habits of willing are formed along the lines of associated thought and feeling. the more feeling and will are enlisted through all the avenues of study and experience, the more permanent will be their influence upon character. in attempting to solve the problem of concentration the question has been raised whether a _single study_, the most important, of course, should constitute a concentrating nucleus, like the hub in a wheel, or whether _all studies_ and _experience_ are to be brought into an organic whole of related parts. it is evident that history and natural science at least hold a leading place among studies and determine to some extent the selection of materials in reading and language lessons. the _center_ for concentrating efforts in education is not so much the knowledge given in any school course as the _child's mind_ itself. we do not desire to find in the school studies a new center for a child's life so much as the means for fortifying that original stronghold of character which rests upon native mental characteristics and early home influences. we have in mind not the objective unity of different studies considered as complete and related sciences, nor any general model to which each mind is to be conformed, but the practical union of all the experiences and knowledge that find entrance into a particular mind. the _unity of the personality_ as gradually developed in a child by wise education is essential to strength of character. ackerman says on this point, ("ueber concentration," p. .) "in behalf of character development, which is the ultimate aim of all educative effort, pedagogy requires of instruction that it aid in forming the _unity of the personality_, the most primitive basis of character. in requiring that the unity of the personality be formed it is presupposed that this unity is not some original quality, but something to be first developed. it remains for psychology to prove this and to indicate in what manner the unity of the personality originates. now, psychology teaches that the personality, the ego, is not something original, but something that must be first developed and is also changeable and variable. the ego is nothing else than a psychological phenomenon, namely, the consciousness of an interchange between the parts of an extensive complex of ideas, or the reference of all our ideas and of the other psychical states springing out of them to each other. experience teaches this. in infancy the ego, the personality, is consciously realized in one person sooner, in another later. in the different ages of life, also, the personality possesses a different content. the deeper cause for the mutual reference of all our manifold ideas to each other and for their union in a single point, as it were, may be found in the _simplicity of the soul_, which constrains into unity all things that are not dissociated by hindrance or contradiction. the soul, therefore, in the face of the varied influences produced by contact with nature and society, is active in concentrating its ideas, so that with mental soundness as a basis, the ego, once formed, in spite of all the transitions through which it may pass, still remains the same." there is then a natural _tendency_ of the mind _to unify_ all its ideas, feelings, incentives. on the other hand the knowledge and experiences of life are so varied and seemingly contradictory that a young person, if left to himself or if subjected to a wrong schooling, will seldom work his way to harmony and unity. in spite of the fact that the soul is a simple unit and tends naturally to unify all its contents, the common experience of life discovers in it unconnected and even antagonistic thought and knowledge-centers. people are sometimes painfully surprised to see how the same mind may be lifted by exalted sentiments and depressed by the opposite. the frequent examples that come to notice of men of superiority and virtue along certain lines, who give way to weakness and wrong in other directions, are sufficient evidence that good and evil may be systematically cultivated in the same character, and that instead of unity and harmony education may collect in the soul heterogeneous and warring elements which make it a battle ground for life. all such disharmony and contradiction lend inconsistency and weakness to character. not only can incompatible lines of thought and of moral action become established in the same person, but even those studies which could be properly harmonized and unified by education may lie in the mind so disjointed and unrelated as to render the person awkward and helpless in spite of much knowledge. in unifying the various parts of school education, and in bringing them into close connection with children's other experiences, the school life fulfills one of its chief duties. among other things tending toward consistency of character there must be _harmony between the school and home_ life of a child. at home or among companions, perhaps unknown to the teacher, a boy or girl may be forming an habitual tendency and desire, more powerful than any other force in his life, and yet at variance with the best influence of the school. if possible the teacher should draw the home and school into a closer bond so as to get a better grasp of the situation and of its remedy. the school will fail to leave an effective impress upon such a child unless it can get a closer hold upon the sympathies and thus neutralize an evil tendency. it must league itself with better home influences so as to implant its own impulses in home life. how to unify home and school influences is one of those true and abiding problems of education that appeals strongly and sympathetically to parents and teachers. concentration evidently involves a solution of the question as to the relative value of studies. all the light that the discussion of _relative values_ can furnish will be needed in selecting the different lines of appropriate study and in properly adjusting them to one another. the theory of _interest_ will also aid us in this field of investigation. accepting therefore the results of the two preceding chapters, that history (in the broad sense) is the study which best cultivates moral dispositions; secondly, that natural science furnishes the indispensable insight into the external world, man's physical environment; and, thirdly, that language, mathematics, and drawing are but the formal side and expression of the two realms of real knowledge, we have the _broad outlines_ of any true course of education. in more definitely laying out the parts of this course the natural interests and capacities of children in their successive periods of growth must be taken into the reckoning. when a course of study has been laid out on this basis, bringing the three great threads or cables of human knowledge into proper juxtaposition at the various points, we shall be ready to speak of the manner of really executing the plan of concentration. even after the general plan is complete and the studies arranged, the real work of concentration consists in _fixing the relations_ as the facts are learned. concentration takes for granted that the facts of knowledge will be acquired. it is but half the problem to learn the facts. the other half consists in understanding the facts by fixing the relations. most teachers will admit that each lesson should be a collection of connected facts and that every science should consist of a series of derivative and mutually dependent lessons. and yet the study and mastery of arithmetic as a connection of closely related principles is not generally appreciated. with proper reflection it is not difficult to see that the facts of a single study like grammar or botany should stand in close serial or causal relation. if they are seen and fixed with a clear insight into these connections, by touching the chain of associations at any point one may easily bring the whole matter to remembrance. concentration, however, is chiefly concerned with the _relation of different studies_ to each other. in this larger sense of an intimate binding together of all studies and experience into a close network of interwoven parts, concentration is now generally ignored by the schools. in fact it would almost seem as if the purpose of teachers were to make a clear separation of the different studies from one another and to seal up each one in a separate bottle, as it were. the _problem_ appears in two phases: . taking the school studies as they now are, is it desirable to pay more attention to the natural connections between such studies as reading, geography, history, and language, to open up frequent communicating avenues between the various branches of educational work? . or if concentration is regarded as still more important, shall the subject matter of school studies be rearranged and the lessons in different branches so adjusted to each other that the number of close relations between them may be greatly increased? then with the intentional increase of such connecting links would follow a more particular care in fixing them. we have assumed the latter position, and claim that the whole construction of the school course and the whole method of teaching should contribute powerfully to the _unification_ of all the knowledge and experience in each child's mind. without laying any undue stress upon simple knowledge, we believe that a small amount of well articulated knowledge is more valuable than a large amount of loose and fragmentary information. a small, disciplined police force is able to cope with a large, unorganized mob. "the very important principle here involved is that the value of knowledge depends not only upon the _distinctness_ and _accuracy_ of the ideas, but also upon the _closeness and extent of the relations_ into which they enter. this is a fundamental principle of education. it was herbart who said, 'only those thoughts come easily and frequently to the mind which have at some time made a strong impression and which possess numerous connections with other thoughts.' and psychology teaches that those ideas which take an isolated station in the mind are usually weak in the impression they make, and are easily forgotten. a fact, however important in itself, if learned without reference to other facts, is quite likely to fade quickly from the memory. it is for this reason that the witticisms, sayings, and scattered pieces of information, which we pick up here and there, are so soon forgotten. there is no way of bringing about their frequent reproduction when they are so disconnected, for the reproduction of ideas is largely governed by the law of association. one idea reminds us of another closely related to it; this of another, etc., till a long series is produced. they are bound together like the links of a chain, and one draws another along with it just as one link of a chain drags another after it. a mental image that is not one of such a series cannot hope to come often to consciousness; it must as a rule sink into oblivion, because the usual means of calling it forth are wanting." (f. mcmurry, "relation of natural science to other studies.") we are not conscious of the constant dependence of our thinking and conversation upon the _law of association_. it may be frequently observed in the familiar conversation of several persons in a company. the simple mention of a topic will often suggest half a dozen things that different ones are prompted to say about it, and may even give direction to the conversation for a whole evening. now if it is true that ideas are more easily remembered and used if associated, let us _increase the associations_. why not bind all the studies and ideas of a child as closely together as possible by natural lines of association? why not select for reading lessons those materials which will throw added light upon contemporaneous lessons in history, botany, and geography? then if the reading lesson presents in detail the battle of _king's mountain_, take the pains to refer to this part of the history and put this lesson into connection with historical facts elsewhere learned. if a reading lesson gives a full description of the _palm tree_, its growth and use, what better setting could this knowledge find than in the geography of northern africa and the west indies? the numerous associations into which ideas enter, without producing confusion make them more _serviceable_ for every kind of use. "it is only by associating thoughts closely that a person comes to possess them securely and have command over them. one's reproduction of ideas is then rapid enough to enable him to comprehend a situation quickly, and form a judgment with some safety, his knowledge is all present and ready for use; while on the other hand, one whose related thoughts have never been firmly welded together reproduces slowly, and in consequence is wavering and undecided. his knowledge is not at his command and he is therefore weak." (f. mcmurry.) the greater then the number of clear mental relations of a fact to other facts in the same and in other studies the more likely it is to render instant _obedience_ to the will when it is needed. such ready mastery of one's past experiences and accumulations promotes confidence and power in action. concentration is manifestly designed to give strength and decision to character. but a careless education by neglecting this principle, by scattering the mind's forces over broad fields and by neglecting the connecting roads and paths that should bind together the separate fields, can actually undermine force and decision of character. in later years when we consider the _results of school methods_ upon our own character we can see the weakness of a system of education which lacks concentration, a weakness which shows itself in a lack of _retentiveness_ and of ability to use acquired knowledge. we are only too frequently reminded of the loose and scrappy state of our acquired knowledge by the ease with which it eludes the memory when it is needed. to escape from this disagreeable consciousness in after years, we begin to spy out a few of the mountain peaks of memory which still give evidence of submerged continents. around these islands we begin to collect the wreckage of the past and the accretions of later study and experience. a thoughtful person naturally falls into the habit of collecting ideas around a few centers, and of holding them in place by links of association. in american history, for instance, it is inevitable that our knowledge becomes congested in certain important epochs, or around the character and life of a few typical persons. the same seems to be true also of other studies, as geography and even geometry. the failure to acquire proper _habits of thinking_ is also exposed by the experience of practical life. in life we are compelled to see and respect the causal relations between events. we must calculate the influences of the stubborn forces and facts around us. but in school we often have so many things to learn that we have no time to think. at least half the meaning of things lies not in themselves, but in their relations and effects. therefore, to get ideas without getting their significant relations, is to encumber the mind with ill-digested material. a sensible man of the world has little respect for this kind of learning. one reason why knowledge is so poorly understood and remembered is because its _real application_ to other branches of knowledge, whether near or remote, is so little observed and fixed. looking back upon our school studies we often wonder what botany, geometry, and drawing have to do with each other and with our present needs. each subject was so compactly stowed away on a shelf by itself that it is always thought of in that isolation,--like hammerfest or the falkland islands in geography,--out of the way places. are the various sciences so distinct and so widely separated in nature and in real life as they are in school? an observant boy in the woods will notice important relations between animals and plants, between plants, soil, and seasons that are not referred to in the text-books. in a carpenter shop he will observe relations of different kinds of wood, metals, and tools to each other that will surprise and instruct him. in the real life of the country or town the objects and materials of knowledge, representing the sciences of nature and the arts of life, are closely jumbled together and intimately dependent upon each other. the very closeness of causal and local connections and the lack of orderly arrangement shown by things in life make it necessary in schools to classify and arrange into sciences. but it is a vital mistake to suppose that the knowledge is complete when classified and learned in this scientific form. classification and books are but a faulty means of getting a clear insight into nature and human life or society. knowledge should not only be mastered in its scientific classifications but also constantly referred back to things as seen in practical life and closely traced out and fixed in those connections. the vital connections of different studies with each other are best known and realized by the study of nature and society. in later life we are convinced at every turn of the need of being able to recognize and use knowledge _outside of its scientific connections_. a lawyer finds many subjects closely mingled and causally related in his daily business which were never mentioned together in textbooks. the ordinary run of cases will lead him through a kaleidoscope of natural science, human life, commerce, history, mathematics, literature, and law, not to speak of less agreeable things. but the same is true of a physician, merchant, or farmer, in different ways. shall we answer to all this that schools were never designed to teach such things? they belong to professions or to the school of life, etc. but it is not simply in professions and trades that we find this close mingling and dependence of the most divergent sorts of knowledge, this unscientific mixing of the sciences. everywhere knowledge, however well classified, is one-sided and misleading, which does not conform to the conditions of real life. a wise _mother_ in her household has a variety of problems to meet. from cellar to garret, from kitchen to library, from nursery to drawing-room, her good sense must adapt all sorts of knowledge to real conditions. in bringing up her children she must understand physical and mental orders and disorders. she must judge of foods and cooking, of clothing, as to taste, comfort, and durability; of the exercises and employments of children, etc. whether she is conscious of it or not, she must mingle a knowledge of chemistry, psychology, physiology, medicine, sanitation, the physics of light and air, with the traditional household virtues in a sort of universal solvent from which she can bring forth all good things in their proper time and place. as spencer says, education should be a preparation for complete living; or, according to the old latin maxim, we learn _non scholae sed vitae_. the final test of a true mastery and concentration of knowledge in the mind is the ability to use it readily in the varied and tangled relations of actual experience. we are accustomed to take refuge behind the so-called "mental discipline" that results from studies, whether or not anything is remembered that bears upon the relations of life. there are doubtless certain formal habits of mind that result from study even though, like latin, it is cast aside as an old garment at the end of school days. transferring our argument then to this ground, is there any "habit of thinking" more valuable than that _bent of mind_ which is not satisfied with the mere memorizing of a fact but seeks to interpret its value by judging of its influence upon other facts and their influence upon it? no subject is understood by itself nor even by its relation to other facts in the same science, but by its relation to the whole field of knowledge and experience. unless it can be proven that the study of relations is above the schoolboy capacity, it is doubtful if there is any mental habit so valuable at the close of school studies as the disposition to _think_ and _ponder_, to trace relations. the relations which are of interest and vital importance are those which in daily life bind all the realms of science into a network of causally connected parts. the multiplication of studies in the common school in recent years will soon compel us to pay more attention to concentration or the mutual relation of knowledges. there is a resistless tendency to convert the course of studies into an _encyclopedia_ of knowledge. to perceive this it is only necessary to note the new studies incorporated into the public school within a generation. drawing, natural science, gymnastics, and manual training are entirely new, while language lessons, history, and music have been expanded to include much that is new for lower grades. still other studies are even now seeking admission, as modern languages, geometry, and sewing. in spite of all that has been said by educational reformers against making the acquisition of knowledge the basis of education, the range and variety of studies has been greatly extended and chiefly through the influence of the reformers. this expansive movement appears in schools of all grades. the secondary and fitting schools and the universities have spread their branches likewise over a much wider area of studies. we are in the full sweep of this movement along the whole line and it has not yet reached its flood. the _simplicity_ of the old course both in the common school and in higher institutions is in marked contrast to the present multiplicity. it was a narrow current in which education used to run, but it was deep and strong. in higher institutions the mastery of latin and of latin authors was the _sine qua non_. in the common school arithmetic was held in almost equal honor. strong characters have often been developed by a narrow and rigid training along a single line of duty as is shown in the case of the jesuits, the humanists, and the more recent devotees of natural science. as contrasted with this, the most striking feature of our public schools now is their _shallow and superficial_ work. it is probable that the teaching in lower grades is better than ever before, but as the tasks accumulate in the higher grades there is a great amount of smattering. the prospect is, however, that this disease will grow worse before a remedy can be applied. the first attempt to cultivate broader and more varied fields of knowledge in the common school must necessarily exhibit a shallow result. teachers are not familiar with the new subjects, methods are not developed, and the proper adjustments of the studies to each other are neglected. no one who is at all familiar with our present status will claim that drawing, natural science, geography, and language are yet properly adjusted to each other. the task is a difficult one, but it is being grappled with by many earnest teachers. it is obvious that the first serious effort to _remedy_ this shallowness will be made by deepening and intensifying the culture of the new fields. the knowledge of each subject must be made as complete and detailed as possible. well-qualified teachers and specialists will of course accomplish the most. they will zealously try to teach all the important things in each branch of study. but where is the limit? the capacity of children! and it will not be long before philanthropists, physicians, reformers, and all the friends of mankind will call a decisive halt. children were not born simply to be stuffed with knowledge, like turkeys for a christmas dinner. it appears, therefore, that we must steer between scylla and charybdis, or that we are in a first-class educational _dilemma_. this conviction is strengthened by the reflection that there is no escape from fairly facing the situation. having once put our hand to the plow we can not look back. the common school course has greatly expanded in recent years and there is no probability that it will ever contract. it has expanded in response to proper universal educational demands. for we may fairly believe that most of the studies recently incorporated into the school course are essential elements in the education of every child that is to grow up and take a due share in our society. it is too late to sound the retreat. the educational reformers have battled stoutly for three hundred years for just the course of study that we are now beginning to accept. the edict can not be revoked, that every child is entitled to an harmonious and equable development of all its human powers, or as herbart calls it, a harmonious culture of many-sided interests. the nature of every child imperatively demands such broad and liberal culture, and the varied duties and responsibilities of the citizen make it a practical necessity. no narrow, one-sided culture will ever equip a child to act a just part in the complex social, political, and industrial society of our time. but the demand for _depth_ of knowledge is just as imperative as that for _comprehensiveness_. it is clear that two serious _dangers_ threaten the quality of our education: first, loose and shallow knowledge; second, overloading with encyclopedic knowledge. what can concentration do to remedy the one and check the other? the _cure_ for these two evils will be found in so adjusting the studies to each other, in so building them into each other, as to secure a mutual support. the study of a topic not only as it is affected by others in the same subject, but also by facts and principles in other studies, as an antidote against superficial learning. in tracing these causal relations, in observing the resemblances and analogies, the interdependence of studies, as geography, history, and natural science, a thoughtfulness and clearness of insight are engendered quite contrary to loose and shallow study. secondly, concentration at once discards the idea of encyclopedic knowledge as an aim of school education. it puts a higher estimate upon related ideas and a lower one upon that of complete or encyclopedic information. all the cardinal branches of education indeed shall be taught in the school, but only the _essential_, the _typical_, will be selected and an exhaustive knowledge of any subject is out of the question. concentration will put a constant check upon over-accumulation of facts, and will rather seek to strengthen an idea by association with familiar things than to add a new fact to it. no matter how thorough and enthusiastic a specialist one may be, he is called upon to curtail the quantity of his subject and bring it into proper dependence upon other studies. _historically_ considered the principle of concentration has been advocated and emphasized by many writers and teachers. the most striking and decided attempt to apply it was made by jacotot in the first quarter of this century and had great success in france. mr. joseph payne, in interpreting jacotot (lectures on the science and art of ed. p. ), lays down as his main precept, "_learn something thoroughly and refer everything else to it._" he emphasized above everything else _clearness_ of insight and _connection_ between the parts of knowledge. it was principally applied to the study of languages and called for perfect memorizing by incessant repetition and rigid questioning by the teacher to insure perfect understanding, in the first instance, of new facts acquired; and secondly, firm association with all previous knowledge. jacotot and his disciples reached notable results by an heroic and consistent application of this principle and some of our present methods in language are based upon it. but on the whole the principle was only partially and mechanically applied. its aim was primarily intellectual, even linguistic, not moral. there was no philosophical effort made to determine the relative value of studies and thus find out what study or series of studies best deserved to take the leading place in the school course. the importance of _interest_, as a means of rousing mental vigor and as a criterion for selecting concentrating materials suited to children at different ages, was overlooked. a kind of concentration has long been practiced in germany and to a considerable extent in our own schools which is known as the _concentric circles_. in our schools it is illustrated by the treatment of geography, grammar, and history. in beginning the study of geography in the third or fourth grade it has been customary to outline the whole science in the first primary book. the earth as a whole and its daily and yearly motion, the chief continents and oceans, the general geographical notions, mountain, lake, river, etc., are briefly treated by definition and illustration. having completed this general framework of geographical knowledge during the first year, the second year, or at least the second book, takes up the _same round of topics_ again and enters into a somewhat fuller treatment of continents, countries, states, and political divisions. the last two years of the common school may be spent upon a large, complete geography; which, with larger, fuller maps and more names, gives also a more detailed account of cities, products, climate, political divisions, and commerce. finally, physical geography is permitted to spread over much the same ground from a natural-science standpoint, giving many additional and interesting facts and laws concerning zones, volcanoes, ocean-beds and currents, atmospheric phenomena, geologic history, etc. the same earth, the same lands and oceans, furnish the outline in each case, and we travel over the same ground three or four times successively, each time adding new facts to the original nucleus. there is an old proverb that "repetition is the mother of studies," and here we have a systematic plan for repetition, extending through the school course, with the advantage of new and interesting facts to add to the grist each time it is sent through the mill. it is an attractive plan at first sight, but if we appeal to experience, are we not reminded rather that it was dull repetition of names, boundaries, map questions, location of places, etc., and after all not much detailed knowledge was gained even in the higher grades? again, is it not contrary to reason to begin with definitions and general notions in the lower grades and end up with the interesting and concrete in the higher? in language lessons and grammar it has been customary to learn the kinds of sentence and the parts of speech in a simple form in the third and fourth grades and in each succeeding year to review these topics, gradually enlarging and expanding the definitions, inflections, and constructions into a fuller etymology and syntax. in united states history we are beginning to adopt a similar plan of repetitions, and the frequent reviews in arithmetic are designed to make good the lack of thoroughness and mastery which should characterize each successive grade of work. the course of religious instruction given in european schools is based upon the same reiteration year by year of essential religious ideas. the whole plan, as illustrated by different studies, is based upon a successive enlargement of a subject in concentric circles with the implied constant repetition and strengthening of leading ideas. a framework of important notions in each branch is kept before the mind year after year, repeated, explained, enlarged, with faith in a constantly increasing depth of meaning. there is no doubt that under good teaching the principle of the concentric circles produces some excellent fruits, a mastery of the subject, and a concentration of ideas within the limits of a single study. the disciples of herbart, while admitting the merits of the concentric circles, have subjected the plan to a severe _criticism_. they say it begins with general and abstract notions and puts off the interesting details to the later years, while any correct method with children will take the interesting particulars first, will collect abundant concrete materials, and by a gradual process of comparison and induction reach the general principles and concepts at the close. it inevitably leads to a dull and mechanical repetition instead of cultivating an interesting comparison of new and old and a thoughtful retrospect. it is a clumsy and distorted application of the principle of apperception, of going from the known to the unknown. instead of marching forward into new fields of knowledge with a proper basis of supplies in conquered fields, it gleans again and again in fields already harvested. for this reason it destroys a proper interest by hashing up the same old ideas year after year. finally the concentric circles are not even designed to bring the different school studies into relation to each other. at best they contribute to a more thorough mastery of each study. they leave the separate branches of the course isolated and unconnected, an aggregation of unrelated thought complexes. true concentration should leave them an organic whole of intimate knowledge-relations, conducing to strength and unity of character. there is a growing conviction among teachers that we need a closer _articulation_ of studies with one another. the expansion of the school course over new fields of knowledge and the multiplication of studies already discussed compels us to seek for a simplification of the course. a hundred years ago, yes, even fifty years ago, it was thought that the extension of our territory and government to the present limits would be impossible. it was plainly stated that one government could never hold together people so widely separated. mr. fiske says: (the critical period of am. hist., p. ) "even with all other conditions favorable, it is doubtful if the american union could have been preserved to the present time without the railroad. railroads and telegraphs have made our vast country, both for political and for social purposes, more snug and compact than little switzerland was in the middle ages or new england a century ago." the analogy between the realm of government and of knowledge is not at all complete but it suggests at least the change which is imperatively called for in education. in education as well as in commerce there must be trunk lines of thought which bring the will as monarch of the mind into close communication with all the resources of knowledge and experience. indeed in the mind of a child or of an adult there is much stronger necessity for centralization than in the government and commerce of a country. the will should be an undisputed monarch of the whole mental life. it is the one center where all lines of communication meet. london is not so perfect a center for the commerce and finance of england as is the conscious _ego_ (smaller than a needle's point) for all its forms of experience. besides the central trunk lines of knowledge in history and natural science there are branches of study which are _tributary_ to them, which serve also as connecting chains between more important subjects. reading, for instance, is largely a relative study. not only is the art of reading merely a preparation for a better appreciation of history, geography, arithmetic, etc., but even the subject-matter of reading lessons is now made largely tributary to other studies. the supplementary readers consist exclusively of interesting matter bearing upon geography, history, and natural science. it is a fact that reading is becoming more and more a relative study, and selections are regularly made to bear on other school work. geography especially serves to establish a network of connections between other kinds of knowledge. it is a very important supplement to history. in fact history cannot dispense with its help. geography lessons are full of natural science, as with plants, animals, rocks, climate, inventions, machines, and races. indeed there are few if any school studies which should not be brought into close and important relations to geography. again the more important historical and scientific branches not only receive valuable aid from the tributary studies but they abundantly supply such aid in return. language lessons should receive all their subject-matter from history and natural science. while the language lessons are working up such rich and interesting materials for purposes of oral and written language, the more important branches are also illustrated and enriched by the new historical and scientific subjects thus incidentally treated. an examination of these mutual relations and courtesies between studies may discover to us the fact that we are now unconsciously or thoughtlessly _duplicating_ the work of education to a surprising extent. for example, by isolating language lessons and cutting them off from communication with history, geography, and natural science, we make a double or triple series of lessons necessary where a single series would answer the purpose. moreover, by excluding an interesting subject-matter derived from other studies, the interest and mental life awakened by language lessons are reduced to a minimum. interest is not only awakened by well selected matter taken from other branches but the relationships themselves between studies, whether of cause and effect as between history and geography, or of resemblance as between the classifications in botany and grammar--the relations themselves are matters of unusual interest to children. many teachers have begun to realize in some degree the value of these relations, their effect in enlivening studies, and the better articulation of all kinds of knowledge in the mind. but as yet all attempts among us to properly relate studies are but weak and ineffective approaches toward the solution of the great problem of concentration. the links that now bind studies together in our work are largely accidental and no great stress has been laid upon their value, but if concentration is grappled with in earnest it involves _relations at every step_. not only are the principal and tributary branches of knowledge brought into proper conjunction, but there is constant forethought and afterthought to bring each new topic into the company of its kindred, near and remote. the mastery of any topic or subject is not clear and satisfactory till the grappling hooks that bind it to the other kinds of knowledge are securely fastened. concentration on a large scale and with consistent thoroughness has been attempted in recent years by the scholars and teachers of the _herbart school_. it is based upon moral character as the highest aim, and upon a correlation of studies which attributes a high moral value to historical knowledge and consequently places a series of historical materials in the center of the school course. the ability of the school to affect moral character is not limited to the personal influence of the teacher and to the discipline and daily conduct of the children; but instruction itself, by illustrating and implanting moral ideas, and by closely relating all other kinds of knowledge to the historical series, can powerfully affect moral tendency and strength. if historical matter of the most interesting and valuable kind be selected for the central series, and the natural sciences and formal studies be closely associated with it, there will be harmony and union between the culture elements of the school course. the culture epochs. the problem that confronts us at the outset, when preparing a plan of concentration, is _how to select_ the best historical (moral educative) materials, which are to serve as the central series of the course. the _culture epochs_ (cultur-historische stufen) are, according to the herbartians, the key to the situation. (this subject was briefly discussed under _interest_.) according to the theory of the _culture epochs_, the child, in its growth from infancy to maturity, is an epitome of the world's history and growth in a profoundly significant sense for the purpose of education. from the earliest history of society and of arts, from the first simple family and tribal relations, and from the time of the primitive industries, there has been a series of upward steps toward our present state of culture (social, political, and economic life). some of the periods of progress have been typical for different nations or for the whole race; for example, the stone age, the age of barbarism, the age of primitive industries, the age of nomads, the heroic age, the age of chivalry, the age of despotism, the age of conquest, wars of freedom, the age of revolution, the commercial age, the age of democracy, the age of discovery, etc. what relation the leading epochs of progress in the race bear to the steps of change and growth in children, has become a matter of great interest in education. the assumption of the _culture epochs_ is that the growth of moral and secular ideas in the race, represented at its best, is similar to their growth in children, and that children may find in the representative historical periods select materials for moral and intellectual nurture and a natural access to an understanding of our present condition of society. the culture epochs are those representative periods in history which are supposed to embody the elements of culture suited to train the young upon in their successive periods of growth. goethe says, "childhood must always begin again at the first and pass through the epochs of the world's culture." herbart says, "the whole of the past survives in each of us," and again, "the receptivity (of the child) changes continually with progress in years. it is the function of the teacher to see to it that these modifications advance steadily in agreement with these changes (in the world's history)." ziller has attempted more fully to "justify this culture-historical course of instruction on the ground of a certain _predisposition_ of the child's mental growth for this course." again, "we are to let children pass through the culture development of mankind with accelerated speed." herbart says, "the treasure of advice and warning, of precept and principle, of transmitted laws and institutions, which earlier generations have prepared and handed down to the latter, belongs to the strongest of psychological forces." that is, choice historical illustrations produce a weighty effect upon the minds of children, if selected from those epochs which correspond to a child's own periods of growth. the culture epochs imply _an intimate union between history and natural science_, the two main branches of knowledge, at every step. the isolation between these studies, which has often appeared and is still strong, is unnatural and does violence to the unity of education historically considered. men at all times have had physical nature in and around them. every child is an intimate blending of historical and physical (natural science) elements. the culture epochs illustrate a _constant change and expansion of history and natural science_ together and in harmony (despite the conflict between them). as men have progressed historically and socially from age to age their interpretation of nature has been modified with growing discovery, insight, invention, and utilization of her resources. children also pass through a series of metamorphoses which are both physical and psychological, changing temper and mental tendency as the body increases in vigor and strength. the culture epochs, by beginning well back in history, with those early epochs which correspond to a child's early years and tracing up the steps of progress in their origin and growth, pave the way for a clear insight into our present state of culture, which is a complex of historical and natural science elements. it is comparatively easy for us to see that to understand the present political, economic, and social conditions of the united states we are compelled to go back to the early settlements with their simple surroundings and slowly trace up the growth and increasing complexity of government, religion, commerce, manufactures, and social life. the theory of the culture epochs implies that the child began where primitive man began, feels as he felt, and advances as he advanced, only with more rapid strides; that as his physique is the hereditary outcome of thousands of years of history, and his physical growth the epitome of that development, so his mental progress is related to the mind progress of his ancestry. they go still further and assume that the subject-matter of the leading epochs is so well adapted to the changing phases and impulses of child life that there is a strong predisposition in children in favor of this course, and that the series of historical object lessons stirs the strongest intellectual and moral interests into life. as a _theory_ the culture epochs may seem too loose and unsubstantial to serve as the basis for such a serious undertaking as the education of children to moral character. there is probably no exact agreement as to what the leading epochs of the world's history are, nor of the true order of succession even of those epochs which can be clearly seen. the value of this theory is rather in its suggestiveness to teachers in their efforts to select suitable historical materials for children not in any exact order but approximately. so far as we are informed no one has yet tried to prove, in logical form, the necessary correspondence between the epochs of history and the periods of growth in children. it is rather an instinct which has been felt and expressed by many great writers. the real test of the value of this theory is not so much in a positive argument as in a general survey of the educational materials furnished by the historical epochs, and an experimental use of them in schools to see whether they are suited to the periods of child growth. there are, however, certain _limits_ to the theory of race progress that need to be drawn at once. it is easy to perceive that not all races have left such epochs behind them, because some are still in barbarism; others have advanced to a considerable height and then retrograded. of those which have advanced with more or less steadiness for two thousand years, like england, france, and germany, not every period of their history contains valuable culture elements. the great epochs are not clearly distinguishable in their origin and ending. again, only those periods whose deeds, spirit, and tendency have been well preserved by history or, still better, have found expression in the work of some great poet or literary artist, can supply for children the best educative material. the culture epochs of history can be of no service to us in schools except as they have been suitably _described_ by able writers. in history and literature, as handed down to us by the great literary artists, many of the culture epochs have been portrayed by a master hand. in the iliad, homer gives us vivid and delightfully attractive scenes from life in the heroic age. the historical parts of the old testament furnish clear and classic expression to great typical historical scenes as illustrated in the lives of abraham, joseph, moses, joshua, david, and solomon. the chief poets have expended a full measure of their art in presenting to posterity attractive events from striking epochs of the world's history. homer, virgil, dante, tennyson, and longfellow have left for us such historical paintings as the iliad, odyssey, the aeneid, the divine comedy, idyls of a king, miles standish, etc. some of the best historians also have described such epochs of history in scarcely less attractive form. xenophon's anabasis, livy's punic wars, plutarch's lives, caesar's gallic wars, the best biographies of charlemagne, columbus, luther, cromwell, washington, are designed to give us a clear view of some of the great typical characters and events of history. some of the leading novelists and imaginative writers in prose have performed a like service. hypatia, ivanhoe, last days of pompeii, romola, uarda, and robinson crusoe are examples. the story of siegfried, of king arthur, of bayard, of tell, of bruce, of alfred, and the heroic myths of greece, all bring out representative figures of the mythical age. the typical epochs of the world's struggle and progress are reflected, therefore, in the _literary masterpieces_ of great writers, whether poets, historians, biographers, or novelists. the simplest and choicest of these literary and historical materials, selected, arranged, and adapted for children, have been regarded by some thinkers as the strongest and best meat that can be supplied to children during their periods of growth. the history of each nation that has had a progressive civilization contains some such elements and masterpieces. it would be fortunate for each nation if it could find first in its own history all such leading epochs and corresponding materials. then it could draw upon the historical and literary resources of other countries to complete and round out the horizon of thought. since the best materials selected from history are calculated to build a strong foundation of moral ideas and sentiments, this carefully selected _historical series_ of studies has been chosen as the basis for a concentration of all the studies of the school course. ziller, as a disciple of herbart, was the first to lay out a course of study for the common school with history materials as a central series, based upon the idea of the culture epochs. since religious instruction drawn from the old and new testament has always been an important study in german schools, he established a double historical series. the first was scriptural, representing the chief epochs of jewish and christian history from the time of abraham to the reformation; the second was national german history from the early traditional stories of thuringia and the saxon kings down to the napoleonic wars and the entry of emperor william into paris in . it should be remarked that in the first and second grade religious instruction does not appear in regular form, but in devotional exercises, christmas stories, etc. fairy stories and robinson crusoe are the chief materials used in the first and second grades, so that the regular historical series begin in the third. the two lines of religious and secular history are designed to illustrate for each grade corresponding epochs of national history, both jewish and german. the parallel series stand as follows: religious. secular. st grade. fairytales. nd grade. robinson crusoe. d grade. the patriarchs, stories of thuringia. abraham, joseph, moses. th grade. judges and kings. the nibelungen song, samuel, saul, david, siegfried. solomon. th grade. life of christ. henry i., charlemagne, boniface, armenius. th grade. life of christ. teutonic migrations, crusades, attila, barbarossa, rudolph. th grade. life of paul. discovery of america, reformation, thirty years' war. th grade. life of luther. frederick the great, wars against napoleon, william i. the above outline is ziller's plan, modified by professor rein. in each grade is selected a body of classical or choice historical materials, representing a great period of german as well as of jewish or christian life, and especially suited to interest and instruct children, while illustrating moral ideas and deepening moral convictions. the body of historical narrative selected for any one grade is calculated to form a _center_ or nucleus for concentrating all the studies of that year. reading, language, geography, drawing, music, and arithmetic largely spring out of and depend upon this historical center, while they are also bound to each other by many links of connection. a full course for the eight grades of the common school, with this double historical series as a nucleus, has been carefully worked out and applied by professor rein and his associates. it has been applied also with considerable success in a number of german schools. this great undertaking has had to run the gauntlet of a severe _criticism_. its fundamental principles, as well as its details of execution, have been sharply questioned. but a long-continued effort, extending through many years, by able and thoroughly-equipped teachers, to solve one of the greatest problems of education, deserves careful attention. the general theory of concentration, the selection and value of the materials, the previous history of method, and the best present method of treating each subject, with detailed illustrations, are all worked out with great care and ability. the jewish and german historical materials, which are made the moral-educative basis of the common school course by the herbartians, can be of no service to us except by way of example. neither sacred nor german history can form any important part of an american course of study. religious instruction has been relegated to the church, and german history touches us indirectly if at all. the epochs of history from which american schools must draw are chiefly those of the united states and great britain. france, germany, italy, and greece may furnish some collateral matter, as the story of tell, of siegfried, of alaric, and of ulysses; but some of the leading epochs must be those of our own national history. has the _english-speaking race_ in north america passed through a series of historical epochs which, on account of their moral-educative worth, deserve to stand in the center of a common school course? is this history adapted to cultivate the highest moral and intellectual qualities of children as they advance from year to year? there are few, if any, single nations whose history could furnish a favorable answer to this question. the english in america began their career so late in the world's history and with such advantages of previous european culture that several of the earlier historical epochs are not represented in our country. but perhaps great britain and europe will furnish the earlier links of a chain whose later links were firmly welded in america. the _history of our country_ since the first settlements less than three hundred years ago is by far the best epitome of the world's progress in its later phases that the life of any nation presents. on reaching the new world the settlers began a hand-to-hand, tooth-and-nail conflict with hard conditions of climate, soil, and savage. the simple basis of physical existence had to be fought for on the hardest terms. the fact that everything had to be built up anew from small beginnings on a virgin soil gave an opportunity to trace the rise of institutions from their infancy in a puritan dwelling or in a town meeting till they spread and consolidated over a continent. in this short time the people have grown from little scattered settlements to a nation, have experienced an undreamed-of material expansion; have passed through a rapid succession of great political struggles, and have had an unrivaled evolution of agriculture, commerce, manufactures, inventions, education, and social life. all the elements of society, material, religious, political, and social have started with the day of small things and have grown up together. there is little in our history to appeal to children below the fourth grade, that is, below ten years; but from the beginning of the fourth grade on, american history is rich in moral-educative materials of the best quality and suited to children. we are able to distinguish _four principal epochs_: . the age of pioneers, the ocean navigators, like columbus, drake, and magellan, and the explorers of the continent like smith, champlain, lasalle, and fremont. . the period of settlements, of colonial history, and of french and indian wars. . the revolution and life under the articles of confederation till the adoption of the constitution. . self-government under the union and the growth and strengthening of the federal idea. while drawing largely upon general history for a full and detailed treatment of a few important topics in each of these epochs, we should make a still more abundant use of the _biographical_ and _literary_ materials furnished by each. the concentration of school studies, with a historical series suggested by the culture epochs as a basis, would utilize our american history, biography, and literature in a manner scarcely dreamed of heretofore. we shall attempt to illustrate briefly this concentration of studies about materials selected from one of the culture epochs. take, for example, _the age of pioneers_ from which to select historical subject-matter for children of the fourth and fifth grades. it comprehends the biographies of eminent navigators and explorers, pioneers on land and sea. it describes the important undertakings of columbus, magellan, cabot, raleigh, drake, and others, who were daring leaders at the great period of maritime discovery. the pioneer explorers of new england and the other colonies bring out strongly marked characters in the preparatory stage of our earliest history. smith, champlain, winthrop, penn, oglethorpe, stuyvesant, and washington are examples. in the mississippi valley de soto, la salle, boone, lincoln, and robertson, are types. still farther west lewis and clarke, and the pioneers of california complete this historical epoch in a series of great enterprises. most of them are pioneers into new regions beset with dangers of wild beasts, savages, and sickness. a few are settlers, the first to build cabins and take possession of land that was still claimed by red men and still covered with forests. the men named were leaders of small bands sent out to explore rivers and forests or to drive out hostile claimants at the point of the sword. any one who has tried the effect of these stories upon children of the fourth grade will grant that they touch a deep native _interest_. but this must be a genuine and permanent interest to be of educative value. the _moral quality_ in this interest is its virtue. standish, boone, la salle, and the rest were stalwart men, whose courage was keenly and powerfully tempered. they were leaders of men by virtue of moral strength and superiority. their deeds have the stamp of heroism and in approving them the moral judgments of children are exercised upon noble material. these men and stories constitute an epoch in civilization because they represent that stage which just precedes the first form of settled society. in fact some of the stories fall in the transition stage, where men followed the plow and wielded the woodman's axe, or turned to the war-path as occasion required. in every part of the united states there has been such a period, and something corresponding to it in other countries. we are prepared to assume, therefore, that these historical materials arouse a strong interest, implant moral ideas, and illustrate a typical epoch. they are also very _real_. these men, especially the land pioneers, were our own predecessors, traversing the same rivers, forests, and prairies where we now live and enjoy the fruits of their hardihood and labor. let us suppose that such a historical series of stories has its due share of time on the school program and that the stories are properly presented by the teacher and orally reproduced by the pupils. into what _relations_ shall the other studies of the school enter to these historical materials? how shall language, reading, geography, natural science, and arithmetic be brought into the close relation to history required by the idea of concentration. the oral reproduction of the stories by the children is the best possible _oral language_ drill, while their partial written review is the basis of much of the regular _composition_ work. language lessons on isolated and unconnected topics can thus be entirely omitted. the element of interest will be added to oral and written language lessons by the use of such lively stories. _reading_ is chiefly tributary to the historical series. such selections should be made for reading lessons as will throw additional light upon pioneer history and its related geography. descriptions of natural scenery and choice selections from our best historians, as irving and bancroft, describing events or men of this period, should be used for reading lessons. especially the best literary selections are to be utilized, as the landing of the pilgrims, webster's and everett's orations at plymouth, evangeline and hiawatha, indian legends and life, miles standish, the knickerbocker history, and some of the original papers and letters of the early settlers. whatever poems or prose selections from our best literature are found to bear directly or indirectly upon pioneer events, will add much interest and beauty to the whole subject. a second series of reading materials for these grades would be those masterpieces and traditions of european literature, which are drawn from a corresponding pioneer epoch in those countries; for example, siegfried in germany, alaric in italy, and ulysses in greece. a selection of reading material along these lines would exhibit much variety of prose and poetry, history, and geography. unity would be given to it by the spirit and labors of a typical age and an intimate relation to history at all points established. _geography_ has an equally close relation to history stories. for these grades geography and history cover the same geographical regions. instead of being totally isolated from each other they should be purposely laid out on parallel lines with interlacing topics. north america and the atlantic ocean are the field of action in both cases. these maritime explorers opened up the geography of this hemisphere at its most interesting stage. no part of the atlantic ocean or of its north american coasts was overlooked by the navigators. the climate, vegetation and people upon its islands and coasts were curious objects to european adventurers. the first pioneers surveyed the eastern coast and the adjacent interior of a new continent, with its bays, rivers, forests, and mountains. the stories themselves are not intelligible without full geographical explanations, and the personal interest in the narratives throws a peculiar charm upon the geography. the _mississippi valley_ is a great field for both history and geography. it is one of the striking physical features of north america and the best of stories find their setting in this environment. not a great river of this region but is the scene of one of the stories. the lakes and streams were the natural highways of the explorers and settlers. the mountains obstructed their way, presenting obstacles but not limits to their enterprise. the great forests housed their game, concealed their enemies, and had to be cut down to make space for their homes and cornfields. the prairies farther west were a camping ground for them as well as for the deer and buffalo. there are no important physical features of the great valley that are not touched more or less in detail by the stories. it is the work of the geography of this year to enlarge and complete the pictures suggested by the stories, to multiply details, to compare and arrange and to associate with these the facts of our present political and commercial geography. the relation between history and geography is so intimate that it requires some pedagogical skill to determine which of the two should take the lead. but we have already adjudged the history to be by far the more important of the two. its subject-matter is of greater intrinsic interest to children, and as it already stands in the commanding center of the school course, we are disposed to bring the geography lessons into close dependence upon it. in these grades _natural science_ or nature study form a necessary complement to the circle of historical and geographical topics treated. many interesting natural-science subjects, suggested by history and geography, can not be dealt with satisfactorily in those studies; for example, the tobacco plant, the cactus, the deer, the hot springs, the squirrel, the mariner's compass. natural science studies begin naturally with the home neighborhood, with its plants, trees, animals, rocks, inventions, and products. but having surveyed and learned many of these things at home in his earlier years, the child is prepared, when geography and history begin, to extend his natural-science information to the larger geographical regions. the history stories and geography suggest a large number of _natural-science topics_, so that there is abundant choice of materials while remaining in close connection with those studies. the vegetable and animal life and products of the sea, suggested by the voyages, are fishes, dolphins, whales, sea-birds, shells. other topics are the construction of ships, the mariner's compass, and astronomy. the stories of the land pioneers open up a still richer field of natural science study for the common schools. among animals are the beaver, otter, squirrel, coon, bear, fox, wildcat, deer, buffalo, domestic animals, wild turkeys, ducks, pigeons, eagle, hawk, wild bees, cat-fish, sword-fish, turtle, alligator, and many more. among native products and fruits are mentioned corn, pumpkins, beans, huckleberries, grapes, strawberries, cranberries, tobacco, pawpaw, mulberry, haw, plum, apple, and persimmon. of trees are oak, hickory, walnut, cypress, pine, birch, beech, and others. tools, instruments, and inventions are mentioned, with their uses, as guns, indian weapons, compass, thermometer, barometer, boats, carpenter's tools; also, the uses of iron, lead, leather, and many of the simple arts and economies of life, such as weaving, tempering of metals, tanning, and cooking. the natural wonders of the country, such as falls, caves, hot-springs, canons, salt licks, plains, interior deserts, and salt lakes, kinds of rocks, soils, forests and other vegetation, the phenomena of the weather and differences in climate, are referred to. all these and other topics from the broad realm of nature are suggested, any of which may serve as the starting point for a series of science lessons. how far the natural science lessons can _heed the suggestions_ of history and geography and still follow out and develop important science principles, is one of the great problems for solution. it would seem that the large number of natural-science topics touched upon by the history, when increased by the variety of home objects in nature and by still others called up by the geography work of these years, would give sufficient variety to the natural science work of the same period. by omitting some of these topics and enlarging upon others, developing the notions of classes and principles so far as is desirable, the natural-science lessons may be made sufficiently scientific without losing the close relation to the central subject-matter for the year. there is no doubt but the science-lessons will add greatly to many topics suggested by the stories and will bring the whole realm of nature into close relation to history and geography. the subjects thus far discussed, that may be brought into close relation to the central stories, are oral and written language, reading and literature, geography, and the natural sciences. the connection between these branches are numerous and strong at every step. _drawing_ has a very intimate and important relation to the objects described in history, natural science, arithmetic, and geography; while the _songs_ learned should express in those poetic and rhythmic forms which appeal so strongly to the feelings, many of the noblest ideas suggested by travel, scenery, history, and the experiences of home life. _arithmetic_, finally, seems to stand like an odd sheep among the studies. it is certainly the least social of the common school branches. while avoiding all forced connection between arithmetic and other studies, we shall find some points where the relations are simple and clear. children in the first grade should see numbers in the leaves, flowers, trees, and animals they study. at the beginning of the first grade this would be a good informal way of beginning numbers. the value of _objects_ in first and second grade number is so great that it is only a question as to how far the objects suggested by other lessons may be used. but we are speaking of concentration in the fourth and fifth grades. in the stories and in geography we deal with journeys up great rivers, with the height of mountains, with the extent of valleys and lakes, with regular forts, mounds, and enclosures, with companies and bodies of men, with railroads, cities, and agricultural products, and with many other topics which suggest excellent practical problems in arithmetic for these grades. all such careful arithmetical computations add clearness and definiteness to historical and geographical ideas. the natural sciences have been so little systematically taught in our common schools, that we are scarcely able to realize what connection may be made between them and arithmetic. we know that in the advanced study and applications of some of the natural sciences, mathematics is an essential part. a brief retrospect will make it appear that the history stories, natural sciences, and geography, with the more formal studies, such as reading, language, and arithmetic, may be brought into a _close organic harmony_. each of them depends upon and throws light upon the other; and while the connections are natural, not forced, there is a concentration upon the central historical and literary matter that makes moral character the highest aim of teaching. since real concentration is practically a new educational undertaking, it involves a number of _unsolved subordinate problems_; for instance, how far shall science lessons, grammar, and geography follow their own principles of selection, based on the nature and scientific arrangement of their materials, while keeping up the dependence upon and connections with the central subject. but if concentration is a true principle of education, it is evident that none of these problems can be solved until concentration has been agreed upon and made fundamental. in this case those teachers who are trying to lay out courses of study in geography, natural science, or history, without regard to the relation of studies to each other, will have most of their work to do over again. a little reflection will convince us, perhaps, that a year's work thus concentrated will produce a much more powerful and lasting impression upon children than the loose aggregation of facts which is usually collected during a year's work. not only will the moral effect be intensified, but the close dependence of each study upon the others will be perceptibly felt as valuable and stimulating to the children. if now we can conceive of the eight grades of the common school as eight stages passing naturally from one to another, each a unit composed of a net-work of well related facts, but the epochs closely related to each other in a rising series, from childhood almost to maturity, or from the beginning of history up to the present state of culture, we shall be able also to think of education as a succession of powerful culture influences, that will bring the child to our present standpoint fully conscious of his duties and surroundings. note.--a careful criticism of the theory of the culture epochs is found in lange's apperception translated by the herbart club, published by d. c. heath, p. , etc. chapter v. induction. we are now prepared to inquire into the mind's method of approach to any and all subjects. we have considered the aim of education, the value of different subjects as helping toward that aim, the natural interests which give zest to studies, and finally the general plan of combining and relating topics so as to bring about unity of purpose and unity of matter in the mind. as a child enters upon the work of acquisition are there any regulatives to guide the process of learning? _induction_, or the _concept-bearing process_, shows the tendency of our minds to advance from the inspection of particular objects and actions to the understanding of general notions or concepts. the study and analysis of this process casts us forthwith into the midst of psychology, and calls for a knowledge of that succession and net-work of mental activities discussed in all the psychologies; sensation, discrimination, perception, analysis and synthesis, comparison, judgment, generalization or concept, reasoning. an inquiry into these mental activities, which are among the most important in psychology, is necessary as a basis of induction and of general method. but even the more profound study of psychology does not necessarily give insight into correct methods of teaching. many great psychologists have had little or no interest in teaching. even eminent specialists in electricity and chemistry have not often been those to draw the immediate practical benefit from their studies. the application of psychology to the work of instruction constitutes a distinct field of inquiry and experiment. the output of the best experimental thinking in this direction may be called pedagogy. the process of induction or concept-building leads the mind, as above indicated, through a series of different acts. we may first observe how far the mind is unnaturally inclined to follow this process, and whether it is a mark of healthy mental action in children and in adults. later we may examine more closely the successive stages in the process itself. to get at the _natural process_ it is well to observe first the action of a _child's_ mind. by analyzing a simple case of a farmer's child we may trace the mental steps in forming a general notion. so long as it has seen no barn except that on its father's farm, the word _barn_ means to it only that particular object. but when it discovers that one of the neighbors has a similar building called a barn, it learns to put these different objects under one head, and the general notion _barn_ as a building for horses, cattle, and feed, gradually rises in the mind. long before the child is six years old (school age) it may have seen enough of such barns for the general notion to be distinctly formed. by observing different objects, by comparing and grouping similar things together, it has formed a general notion in a regular process of induction, and that without any help from teachers. at two and three years of age, or as soon as a child begins to recognize and name new objects (because of their resemblance to things previously seen) this tendency to concept-building is manifest. another illustration: the child has seen the family horse several times till the word horse becomes associated with that animal. while out walking it sees another horse, and pointing its finger says "horse." the memory of the first horse and the similarity calls forth the natural conclusion that this is a horse, though it may not be able to formulate the sentence. more horses are seen and compared till the word becomes the name of a whole class of animals. by a gradual process of observation, comparison, and judgment the word horse comes to stand for a large group of objects in nature. a child's mind is naturally very _active_ in detecting resemblances and in grouping similar objects together. it notices that there are certain people called women, others called men; that certain animals are called sheep, others cattle. one class of objects receives the name book, another stove, etc. the work of observing, comparing, and classifying is a perpetual operation in the child's active moods. in this way, what may appear at first as an interminable confusion or blur of objects in nature begins to fall into groups and classes with appropriate names. it is the child's own way of bringing order out of the apparent chaos of his surroundings. all this process of classification is natural and nearly unconscious, and results in a better understanding and interpretation of the things around him. observe next the work of an educated _adult_, and how he increases and arranges his knowledge. if he is an incipient dry-goods merchant he learns by sight and touch to detect the quality of goods. he compares and classifies his experiences and becomes in time an expert in judging textile fabrics. on the other hand he becomes acquainted by personal contact with various customers and learns how to classify and judge them both as buyers and as debtors. if a _botanist_ finds a new plant he examines its stem, leaves, root, flower, seed, and environment. while entering into these details he is also comparing it with familiar classes of plants. finally, he is not satisfied till he can definitely locate it in his previous system. with every new plant that he discovers he travels over the whole road from the individual particulars to the general classes of his whole system. the merchant and the scientist follow out with painstaking care and industry the same course which was involuntarily taken by the child; namely, observation of particulars, comparing and grouping into classes. the same habit of mind may be observed in all people who are growing knowledgewards and who possess any thoughtful instincts. in building up concepts, especially with the adult, induction is constantly mingled with deduction. as fast as general notions are formed they are used to interpret new objects. as the amount of this organized and classified knowledge increases, we reason more and more deductively. in acquiring knowledge along the line of induction, we are on the road to the solution of the _puzzle_, that nature puts to every child. to every infant, indeed, the world is an enormous riddle or puzzle, whose parts lie in fragments about him, waiting the operation of his curious and inventive mind toward the reconstruction of the whole. endless variety and complexity confront us all in the beginning. there is indeed an order and classification of things in nature, but it does not appear on the surface, and for centuries men remained ignorant of the underlying harmony. nature is full of valuable secrets, but they lie concealed from the careless eye. they are to be detected by prying deeper into individual facts, by putting a thing here and a thing there together, by pondering on the relationship of things to each other in their nature, appearance, and cause. it is a remarkable fact that we not only increase knowledge best by analyzing, comparing, and classifying objects, experience, and phenomena--even into old age--but that the deeper we penetrate into the individual qualities and inner nature of objects, the more we extend and classify our information, the simpler all the operations of nature become to our understanding. the surprising simplicity and unity of nature in her varied phenomena is one of the mature products of scientific study. the most scientific thinker, then, is only trying to reduce to a simple explanation the same puzzle which confronted the infant in its cradle. the problem is the same and the method similar. it is plain that the process of classifying objects and phenomena in nature and in society is the _beginning of scientific knowledge_. a child begins to learn as soon as it notices the resemblances in things and arranges them into groups. it will appear later that the mind does not follow a strictly logical method in gaining its groups, that it falls into natural errors and misconceptions; but in spite of these eccentric movements, the general trend is toward classifications and toward the language symbols that express them. in this power to associate, classify, and symbolize the products of experience in words is seen the marked difference between man and the animals. the latter have little power to compare and generalize, that is, to think. on a still higher plane, the difference between a careless, loose observer and a well-trained scientific thinker is largely a difference in accuracy, in inductive and deductive processes. the important thing for the teacher to determine is whether this inductive or concept-building tendency furnishes any _solid ground upon which to base the work of instruction_. admitting that it is a natural process, common to both old and young in acquiring knowledge, perhaps it can be neglected because it will take care of itself. if it is self-active, needing no artificial stimulus, let it alone. on the contrary, if in a healthy pursuit of knowledge it brings the varied mental powers into a natural sequence where they will strengthen and support one another, it should be studied and used by teachers. it would be very commonplace to say that each of the faculties or activities involved in the inductive process should be disciplined and strengthened by school studies. there is but little difference of opinion on this subject, though some would lay more stress upon sense training, some on memory, some on reasoning. the ground for this general conviction is the notorious fact that with children every one of these acts, is performed in a _faulty and superficial manner_. the observations of children are very careless and unreliable. even adults are extremely negligent and inaccurate in their observations of natural objects, persons, and phenomena. but the mental powers brought to bear in observation are simple and elementary. the exercise of higher mental powers, such as analysis, comparison, judgment, and reasoning, is prone to be still more accidental and erroneous. acknowledging then the necessity for training all these powers, how can it best be done? not by delegating to each study the cultivation of one kind or set of mental activities, but by observing that _the same general process_ underlies the acquisition of knowledge in each subject, and that all the kinds of mental life are brought into action in nearly every study. in short, the inductive process is a natural highway of human thought in every line of study, bringing all the mental forces into an orderly, successive, healthful activity. we may yet discover that the inductive process not only gives the key to an interesting method of mastering different branches of knowledge, but in developing mental activity it brings the various mental powers into a strong natural sequence. one of the great ends of intellectual culture is gradually _to transform this careless, unconscious, inductive tendency in children into the painstaking and exact scrutiny of the student, and later of the specialist_. although the inductive process is a common highway of thought in all stages of intellectual growth from childhood to maturity, certain parts of the road are much more frequently traveled in childhood, and still others in youth and maturity. it is the work of pedagogy to adapt its materials to these _changing phases_ of soul life in children. in the analysis of the inductive and deductive processes we desire to come at the solution of this problem. considered as a whole, there is a simple phase of the inductive process which is best explained by the terms absorption and reflection. it appears in the study of simple as well as of complex objects, and indicates clearly the fundamental rhythm of the mind in acquiring and elaborating its knowledge. this action of the mind is a shuttle-like movement, a constant running back and forth between two extremes, _absorption_ and _reflection_. we will test this statement upon examples. when we are in the mood for learning let some new object, a _sawmill_, attract the attention. a quick general glance at the place and its surroundings tells us what it is. now trace the operation of the mill as it draws up the logs singly from the rafts lying on the margin of the river and converts them into lumber. you observe first how the logs are carried up an inclined slide by means of an endless chain with hooks, into the mill. you examine this first piece of machinery and notice its mode of action. as the logs enter the upper story of the mill, they are thrown by heavy levers to either side and roll down toward the saws. here is another piece of machinery in its proper place. having been stripped of the loose pieces of bark, the logs are grasped by another set of iron hands, lifted firmly to the carriage and passed to the circular or band-saw, which takes off the side slabs and squares them for the gang-saw. the squared logs are then carried along over rollers and collected before the gang-saws. from two to four of them are clasped firmly together and then forced up against the teeth of the parallel group of saws, issuing from them as a batch of lumber. the boards are then passed on to a set of men at small circular saws, by whom they are sorted and the edges trimmed, while still others with trucks carry them to the yard for stacking. take note of the operation of the mind as it passes from one part of the machinery to another. each part is first examined by itself to get its construction and method. then its relation to what precedes and what follows is noted. finally, in review you survey the whole process in its successive stages and understand each part and its relation to the whole and to the purpose of the mill. we might call this an analysis and synthesis of the process of making lumber, or in other words absorption and reflection. in the observation of such a complex piece of machinery as a large mill the mind swings back and forth many times between absorption in the study of parts and reflection upon their relation to each other. having examined the mill in detail and grasped its parts as a connected whole, the next step is to observe its relation to the river, to the rafts and rafting-boats, and further back to the pineries and logging-camps up the river. (northern minnesota and wisconsin.) the occupations and sights along the upper mississippi and its head-waters, the pineries, and even the spring floods, are intimately connected, causally, with the saw-mills and lumber yards lower down. or going in the opposite direction from the saw-mill, we follow the lumber till it is used in the various forms of construction. some of it enters the planing-mills and is converted into moldings, finishing lumber, sashes, blinds, etc. in all forms it is loaded upon the cars, and shipped westward to be used in the construction of houses and bridges. before we get through with the line of thought engendered by observing the saw-mill, we have canvassed the whole lumber industry from the pineries to the plans of architects and builders in the actual work of construction. not only has there been this progress of the mind from one object or machine to another of a _series_ connected by cause and effect, but there has been also a constant tendency to pass from the individual machines of which the series is composed to the classes of which these objects are typical. a circular-saw or a gang-saw is each typical of a class of saws. the same is true of each part of the machinery, as well as of the saw-mill or planing-mill considered as a whole. each of these objects, whether simple or complex, suggests others similar which we have observed or seen represented in pictures. each part of the machinery in turn becomes the center of a set of comparisons leading from the concrete object in question to the general notion of the class to which it belongs. for example, the steam engine in a mill is typical of all stationary engines used for driving machinery. but the parts of the engine are also typical of similar parts in other engines and machines, as the drive-wheel, cylinder, boiler, etc. in all these cases we become absorbed in one thing for a while, only to recover ourselves and to reflect upon the thing in its wider relations, either tracing out connections of cause and effect, as in a series of machines, or passing from the single example to the class of which it is typical. absorption and reflection! the mind swings back and forth like a pendulum between these two operations. herbart, who closely defined this process, called it the _mental act of breathing_, because of the constancy of its movement. as regularly as the air is drawn into the lungs and again expelled, so regularly does the mind lose itself in its absorption with objects only to recover itself and reflect upon them. in the inspection of a large _printing press_ in one of our newspaper publishing-houses we meet with a similar experience. the attention becomes centered upon the press for a close analysis and synthesis of its parts. the cogs, wheels, rollers, inking-plate, the chases for the type, the application of the power, the springs and levers, each part receives a close inspection, and the secret of its connection with other parts is sought for. there is a vigorous effort not only to understand each part but also the connection of the whole. the shuttle-like movement of the mind back and forth between the parts, absorbed for a moment, reflecting for a moment, continues until the complex mechanism is understood. when this process has been satisfactorily completed, we are ready to turn our minds again to the other objects and rooms of the printing establishment. the work of the compositors, setting up different kinds of type, the proof-reading, the editorial work, the reporters, all come in for a share of attention. the reporters lead us to the great world outside whose happenings are brought here for publication. on the other hand, following the distribution of papers as they issue from the press, we think of news-boys, news-stands, mail-service, railroads, and postoffices. but the inspection of a printing press also leads the thoughts in other directions and suggests other presses, great and small, in other times and places, other printing establishments, until the whole business of printing and publishing books and papers springs into the thought. if we desire to understand clearly the business of publishing a newspaper, we must enter into an observation of the parts of the process from the collection of its news to its distribution by the mails and carriers. besides noting these parts we must observe their causal connection with each other and the rôle that each plays in the economy of the whole. the causal series thus clearly outlined produces insight into an occupation, while every typical machine or appliance is one of a cross series intercepting the original series. the acquisition and assimilation of knowledge in different subjects will be found to exhibit the mental states of absorption and reflection as just illustrated. observe the manner in which we study a poem. it is first read and interpreted sentence by sentence, glancing from verse to verse to get the connections. when the whole piece has been read and understood in its parts and connections, the suggested lines of thought are taken up and followed out in their wider applications. take for example the "burial of moses," and in the proper analysis and study of the poem, such a process of absorption and reflection is observable. in tracing the biography of john quincy adams or of alexander hamilton, the facts of personal experience and action first absorb the attention from step to step in the study of his life. but reflection on the bearings of these personal events, upon contemporaries, and upon public affairs is noticed all along. the same mental process is observed in studying a battle in history, a sentence in grammar, a squirrel in natural history, or a picture in art. the effect of such mental absorption and reflection is to build up _concepts_. series of causally related parts are also formed, but each series in the end becomes a more complete complex concept; that is, a representative of many similar series. the inspection of one printing establishment suggests others which are brought into comparison till the general notion, publishing-house, is more clearly conceived. the same is true in the lumber trade. the concept lumber-business is not confined to minneapolis or chicago, but is common to the great lake region, maine, washington, norway, and other countries. concepts become more varied and complex with the advance of studies, and there is scarcely anything we learn by observation or reflection that does not ultimately illustrate and build up our concepts. the observation of even the miscellaneous objects in a large city leads to a variety of concepts, and in the end, by comparison, to the general notion, _city_. how strong the concept-creating tendency of all experience and thought is, can be seen in the _words_ of language. the processes of thought become petrified in language. all progress in knowledge and acquisition of new ideas is reflected in language by an increase of words. but an examination of words in common use will show that they are nearly all the names of concepts. proper names are the principal exception. every common noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition is the name of a concept; for example, horse, beauty, to steal, running, over, early, yellow, grape, ocean, etc. to understand these concepts there must be somewhere a progress from the individual to the abstract, an induction from particulars to a general concept. abstract or general notions cannot be acquired at first hand without specific illustrations. even where the deductive process is supposedly employed, a closer examination will uncover the concrete or individual illustrations in the background, and until these are reached the concept has no clear meaning. the _concrete examples_, whether introduced sooner or later by way of explanation, are the real basis of the understanding of the concept. it is customary to invert the inductive process and to drive it stern forwards through grammar, geography, and other studies. take, for example, the word boomerang as it comes up in a geography or reading lesson. webster's dictionary, which is recommended to children as a first resort in such difficulties, calls it "a remarkable missile weapon used by the natives of australia." this gives a faint notion by using the familiar word _weapon_. the picture accompanying the word in the dictionary gives a more accurate idea because nearer the concrete. the best possible explanation would be a real boomerang thrown by a native south-sea islander. in the absence of these, a picture and a vivid description are the best means at our disposal. the common mistake is in learning and reciting the definition while neglecting the concrete basis. by way of further illustration, try to explain to children, who have never heard of them before, the egg-plant, palm-tree, cactus, etc. it would be of interest to inquire into the process of concept-building in each of the _school studies_, where it appears under quite varying forms. the natural sciences are perhaps the best examples of concept-building from concrete materials, advancing regularly through a series of concepts from the individuals and species to the most general classes of plants, animals, etc. in chemistry and physics the laws and general principles are based on substances, experiments, and processes observable by the senses. grammar and language, when studied as a science, advance from concept to concept through etymology and syntax. in geography and history the concepts are less definite and more difficult to formulate, and yet there are many typical ideas which are to be developed and illustrated in each of these studies; in history, for example, colony, legislature, governor, general, revolution, institutions and customs, political party, laws of development, causal relations, inventions, etc.; in geography, continents, oceans, forms of relief, kinds of climate and causes, occupations, products, commerce, etc. the fundamental truths and relations and rules of arithmetic must be developed from objects and illustrations. reading, spelling, and writing are arts, not sciences, and are more concerned with skill in execution than with the acquisition of a body of scientific truths. and yet certain general truths are emphasized and applied in these studies. much needless confusion has been caused by raising the question _where to begin_ in learning. do we proceed from the whole, to the parts, or from the parts to the whole? in making the acquaintance of sense objects it seems clear that we first perceive wholes (somewhat vaguely and indefinitely). the second impulse is to analyze this whole into its parts, then recombine them (synthesis) into a whole which is more definitely and fully grasped. a house, for example, is generally first perceived as a whole; and later it is examined more particularly as to its materials, rooms, stairways, conveniences, furnishings, etc. the same is true with a mountain, a butterfly, a man. thus far we have proceeded from the whole to the parts and then back again; analysis and synthesis. the next movement is from this whole or object toward a group of similar objects, a class notion. by comparing one thing with others similar, a class notion is formed which includes them all. each individual is a whole, but is also a type of the entire group. the general mental movement is successively in two directions from any particular object; first, from the whole to the parts, then grasping this whole in a richer, fuller sense, the mind seeks for relations which bind this object with others similar into a group, a more complex product, a concept. there may appear to be an exception to this rule in the case of a city, a continent, a railroad, or any concrete object so large and complex that it cannot be grasped by a single effort of sense perception. but even here it is usual with us first to represent the whole object to our thought by means of a sketch, map, or figure of speech, so as first to get a quick survey of the whole thing. in history, also, we first grasp at wholes, then enter into a detailed account of an event, a campaign, a voyage, a revolution, etc. there are many complex wholes in geography and history with which it is not wise to begin, because it requires a long and painful effort to get at the notion of the whole. the wholes we have in mind are those which can be almost instantly grasped. not, for example, an outline of american history or of the world's history. the choice of suitable wholes with which to begin is based upon the child's interest and apperceptive powers. having thus examined into the general nature of the inductive process and the extent of its application to school studies and to other forms of acquiring knowledge, we are led to a closer practical discussion of each of the two chief stages of induction: first, _observation or intuition_; that is, the direct perception through the senses or through consciousness, of the realities of the external world and of the mind. second, association of ideas with a view to generalizing and _forming concepts_. _intuition_[ ] implies object lessons in a wide sense. by object lessons is usually meant things in nature perceived through the senses. but it is necessary to extend the idea of object lessons beyond the objects and phenomena of the physical world, to which it has been usually limited. it includes perception of our own mental states. these direct experiences of our own inner states are the primary basis of our understanding of other people's feelings, mental states, and actions. in short, an understanding of the phenomena of individual life, (the acts of persons) of society, and of history, is based upon a knowledge of our own feelings and mental acts, and upon the accuracy with which we have observed and interpreted similar things in other persons. we have already seen that a right appreciation of companions, biographies, social life, and history, is the strongest of psychological forces in its formative influence upon character. for this reason, also, history includes the first and most important body of school studies. but object lessons drawn from physical nature do not measurably qualify us for a better appreciation of individual and social life and action. the fundamental illustrative materials for history are drawn from another source, from the depth of the heart and inner experience of each person. many words in our own school books can be illustrated and explained by objects and activities in physical nature, but a large part of the words in common use in our readers and school books can be explained by no external objects. they depend for their interpretation upon the child's own feelings, desires, joys, griefs, etc., and upon similar phenomena observed in others. object lessons in this liberal sense point to the direct exercise of the senses and intuitions in the acquisition of experience of all sorts. they include the objects, persons, and events that we see around us and our own experiences in ordinary life--the grass, plants, trees, and soils; the animals, wild and tame, with their structure, habits, and uses; the rocks, woods, hills, streams, seasons, clouds, heat, and cold. there is also the observation of devices and inventions; tools, machinery and their workings, the different raw and manufactured products, with their ways of growth and transformation. besides these are the various kinds and dispositions of men, different classes and races of people, with great variety of character, occupation, and education. their actions, modes of dress, and customs are included. but we have many other primary and indispensable lessons to learn from the playground, the street, from home and church, from city and country, from travel and sight seeing, from holidays and work days, from sickness, and healthful excursions. even a child's own tempers, faults, and successes are of the greatest value to himself and to the teacher in a proper self-understanding and mastery. by object lessons, therefore, we mean all that a child becomes conscious of through the direct action of his senses and of his mind upon external nature or inner experience. it is desired that a child's knowledge in all direct experience be simple, clear, and according to the facts. all words that he uses become only signs of the realities of his experience. every word stands for a potent thought in his own life history. of course object lessons in this rich and real sense can not be confined to such few objects--birds, leaves, models, and straws--as can be brought into a school room. all the world, especially the outside world, becomes "a complex chinese toy fashioned for a barefoot boy." many of the most interesting objects and phenomena in nature and of man's construction can not be observed in the school room at all, for instance, the river, the bridge, the forest, the flight of birds, the sunrise, the storm, the stars, etc. still they must know these very things and know how to use them better in constructing the mind's treasures than they are wont to do. in reading, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and nature study, we desire to ground school discussions daily upon the clear facts of experience, of personal observation. we need to clear up all confused and faulty perceptions and to stimulate children to make their future observations more reliable. we have already seen the importance of object lessons in this full and real sense to _interest_. interest in every study is awakened and constantly reenforced by an appeal, not to books, but to life. much of the dull work in arithmetic, geography, and other studies is due to the neglect of these real, illustrative materials. of the six great sources of interest, (herbart's) three, the _empirical_, the _esthetic_, and the _sympathetic_, deal entirely with concrete objects or with individuals, while even the _speculative_ and _social_ interests are often based directly upon particular persons or phenomena. in addition to this it may be said that the interests of children are overwhelmingly with the concrete and imaginative phases of every subject, and only secondarily with general truths and laws. the latter are of greater concern to older children and adults. object lessons therefore contain a life-giving element that should enter into every subject of study. nor should these interesting, illustrative object lessons be limited to the lower grades. they contain the combustible material upon which an abiding interest in any subject is to be kindled. there are indeed other and perhaps higher sources of interest, but they are largely dependent upon these original springs that flow from the concrete beginnings. in the second place, object lessons supply a stock of _primary ideas_ which form the foundation of all later progress in knowledge. this is not a question of interest merely, but of _understanding_, of capacity to get at the meaning of an idea. concepts are not the raw materials with which the mind works, but they are elaborated out of the raw products furnished by the senses and other forms of intuition. as cloth is manufactured out of the raw cotton and wool produced on the farm or in southern fields, so concepts are a manufactured article, into whose texture materials previously gathered enter. concepts do not grow up directly from the soil of the mind any more than ready-made clothing grows on bushes or on the backs of the wearers. concepts must be made out of stuff that is already in the mind, as woolen blankets are spun and woven out of fleeces. our present contention is that the mind shall be filled up with the best quality of raw stuff, otherwise there will be defect and deficiency in its later products. the stuff out of which concepts are built is drawn from the varied experiences of life. on account of this intimate relation between the realities of life and school studies they cannot be separated. every branch, especially in elementary studies, must be treated concretely and be built up out of sense materials. every study has its concrete side, its illustrative materials, its colors of individual things taken from life. every study has likewise its more general scientific truths and classifications. the prime mistake in nearly all teaching and in the text-book method is in supposing that the great truths are accessible in some other way than through the concrete materials that lie properly at the entrance. the text-books are full of the abstractions and general formulae of the sciences; but they can, in the very nature of the case, deal only in a meager way with the individual objects and facts upon which knowledge in different subjects is based. this necessary defect in a text-book method must be made good by excursions, by personal observation, by a constant reference of lessons to daily experience outside of school, by more direct study of our surroundings, by the teacher perfecting himself in this kind of knowledge and in its skillful use. there was a current belief at one time that object lessons should form a _special study_ for a particular period of school life, namely, the first years. it was thought that sufficient sense-materials could be collected in two or three years to supply the whole school curriculum. but this thought is now abandoned. children in the earlier grades may properly spend more time in object study than in later grades, but there is no time in school life when we can afford to cut loose from the real world. there is scarcely a lesson in any subject that can not be clarified and strengthened by calling in the fresh experiences of daily life. the discussion of the concept and of the inductive process has shown that _concepts cannot be found at first hand_. there must be observation of different objects, comparison, and grouping into a class. a person who has never seen an elephant nor a picture of one, can form no adequate notion of elephants in general. we can by no shift dispense with the illustrations. the more the memory is filled with vivid pictures of real things, the more easy and rapid will be the progress to general truths. not only are general notions of classes of objects in nature, or of personal actions built up out of particulars, but the general laws and principles of nature and of human society must be observed in real life to be understood. we should have no faith in _electricity_ if it were simply a scientific theory, if it had not demonstrated its power through material objects. the idea of _cohesion_ would never have been dreamed of, if it had not become necessary to explain certain physical facts. the spherical form of the earth was not accepted by many even learned men until sailors with ships had gone around it. political ideas of popular government which a few centuries ago were regarded as purely utopian are now accepted as facts because they have become matters of common observation. the _circulation of the blood_ remained a secret for many centuries because of the difficulties of bringing it home to the knowledge of the senses. these examples will show how difficult it is to go beyond the reach of sense experience. even those philosophers who have tried to construct theories without the safe foundation of facts have labored for naught. the more our thought is checked and guided by nature's realities the less danger of inflation with pretended knowledge. bacon found that in this tendency to theorize loosely upon a slender basis of facts was the fundamental weakness of ancient philosophy. nature if observed will reiterate her truths till they become convincing verities, while the study of words and books alone produces a _quasi-knowledge_ which often mistakes the symbol for the thing. having this thought in mind, _comenius_, more than two and a half centuries ago, said, "it is certain that there is nothing in the understanding which has not been previously in the senses, and consequently to exercise the senses carefully in discriminating the differences of natural objects is to lay the foundation of all wisdom, all eloquence, and of all good and prudent action. the right instruction of youth does not consist in cramming them with a mass of words, phrases, sentences, and opinions collected from authors. in this way the youth are taught, like aesop's crow in the fable, to adorn themselves with strange feathers. why should we not, instead of dead books, open the living book of nature? not the shadows of things, but the things themselves, which make an impression upon the senses and imagination, are to be brought before the youth." there has always been a strong tendency in the schools to teach _words, definitions, and rules_ without a sufficient knowledge of the objects and experiences of life that put meaning into these abstractions. the result is that all the prominent educational reformers have pointedly condemned the practice of learning words, names, etc., without a knowledge of the things signified. the difference is like that between learning the names of a list of persons at a reception, and being present to enter into acquaintance and conversation with the guests. the oft-quoted dictum of kant is a laconic summary of this argument. "general notions (concepts) without sense-percepts are empty." the general definition of composite flowers means little or nothing to a child; but after a familiar acquaintance with the sunflower, dandelion, thistle, etc., such a general statement has a clear meaning. concepts without the content derived from objects are like a frame without a picture, or a cistern without water. the table is spread and the dishes placed, but no refreshments are supplied. having completed the discussion of _intuition_, including object lessons, that is, the preparatory step to the inductive process, we reach the second, _reflection_ and _survey_. we are seeking for a general term that covers the several steps in the latter part of the inductive process. it includes comparison, classification, and abstraction. it may be discussed from the standpoint of "association of ideas," and contributes directly to concentration. we have in mind, chiefly, that thoughtful habit which is not satisfied with simply acquiring a new fact or set of ideas, but is impelled to trace them out along their various connections. we have to do now not with the acquisition but with the _elaboration_ and _assimilation_ of knowledge. the _acquisition_ of knowledge in the ordinary sense is one thing; its _elaboration_ in a full sense sets up a standard of progress which will put life into all school work and reach far beyond it, and in fact is limited only by the individual capacity for thought. in school, in reading and study, we have been largely engaged in acquiring knowledge on the principle that "knowledge is power." but no practical man needs to be told that much so-called school knowledge is not power. facts which have been simply stored in the memory are often of little ready use. it is like wheat in the bin, which must first pass through the mill and change its entire form before it will perform its function. facts, in order to become the personal property of the owner, must be worked over, sifted, sorted, classified, and connected. the process of elaborating and assimilating knowledge is so important that it requires more time and pains than the first labor of acquisition. philosophers will admit this at once, but it is hard for us to break loose from the traditions of the schoolmasters. the mind is not in all respects like a _lumber-yard_. it is, to be sure, a place for storing up knowledge, just as the yard is a deposit for lumber. but there the analogy ceases and the mind begins to resemble more the contractor and builder. there is planing, sawing, and hammering; the materials collected are prepared, fitted, and mortised together, and a building fit for use begins to rise. knowledge also is for use, and not primarily for storage. that simple acquisition and quantity of knowledge are not enough is illustrated by the analogy of an army. numbers do not make an army, but a rabble. a general first enlists raw recruits, drills and trains them through a long period, and finally combines them into an effective army. many of our ideas when first received are like disorderly raw recruits. they need to be disciplined into proper action and to ready obedience. in connection with assimilation the analogy between the _stomach_ and the mind is of still greater interest. the food received into the stomach is taken up by the organs of digestion, assimilated and converted into blood. the process, however, takes its course without our conscious effort or co-operation. knowledge likewise enters the mind, but how far will assimilation go on without conscious effort? if kept in a healthy state the organs of digestion are self active. not so the mind. ideas entering the mind are not so easily assimilated as the food materials that enter the stomach. a cow chews her cud once, but the ideas that enter our minds may be drawn from their receptacle in the memory and worked over again and again. ideas have to be put side by side, separated, grouped, and arranged into connected series. there is, no doubt, some tendency in the mind toward involuntary assimilation, but it greatly needs culture and training. many people never reach the _thinking_ stage, never learn to survey and reflect. the tendency of the mind to work over and digest knowledge should receive ample culture in the schools. there is a mental inertia produced by pure memory exercise that is unfavorable to reflection. it requires an extra exertion to arrange and organize facts even after they are acquired. but when the habit of reflection has been inaugurated it adds much interest and value to all mental acquisitions. there are also well-established principles which guide the mind in elaborating its facts. the _laws of the association_ of ideas indicate clearly the natural trend of mental elaboration. the association of things because of contiguity in time and place is the simplest mode. the classification of objects or activities on the basis of resemblance, is the second form and that upon which the inductive process is principally founded. in the third case objects and series are easily retained in memory when the relation of cause and effect is perceived between them. these natural highways of association, especially the second and third, should be frequently traveled in linking the facts of school study with each other. indeed the outcome of a rational survey of an object or fact in its different relations is an association of ideas which is one of the best results of study. such connections of resemblance and difference or of cause and effect are abundant and interesting in the natural sciences and physical geography, also in history and languages. the herbartians draw an important distinction between _psychical_ and _logical_ concepts or general notions. the _psychical_ concept is worked out naturally by a child or an adult as a result of the chance experiences of life. it is usually a work of accident; is incomplete, faulty, and often misleading. the _logical_ concept, on the other hand, is scientifically correct and complete. it includes all the common characteristics of the group and excludes all that are not essential. it is a product of accurate and mature thinking. we all possess an abundance of psychical concepts drawn from the miscellaneous experiences of life. it is a large share of the school work, as we have seen, to develop logical concepts out of these immature and faulty psychical concepts. a child is disposed to call tadpoles fishes; and later porpoises and whales are faultily classed with the fishes in the same way. nearly all our psychical concepts are subject to such loose and faulty judgments. even where one is accurate in his observations, the conclusions naturally drawn are often wrong. for example, a child that has seen none but red squirrels would naturally think all squirrels red, and include the quality red in his general notion. most of our empirically derived general notions are spotted with such defects. what relation have these facts to induction? we claim that general notions should be experimentally formed; that is, by a gradual collection of concrete or illustrative materials, and that the logical concepts are the final outcome of comparison and reasoning toward conclusions. in other words, we must begin with psychical concepts with all their faults; we must make mistakes and correct them as our experience enlarges, and gradually work out of psychical into logical methods and results. our text-books usually give us the logical concept first, the rule, definition, principle, in its most complete and accurate statement. this does violence to the child's natural mental movement. the final stage of induction is the _formulation_ of the general truths, the concepts, principles, and laws which constitute the science of any branch of knowledge. these truths should be well formulated in clear and expressive language and mastered in this form. moreover, the results reached, when reduced to the strict scientific form, are the same in the inductive methods as in the deductive or common text-book method. not that the effect on the mind of the learner is the same but the body of truth is unaltered. the general truths of every subject can be easily found well arranged in text-books. but we are more anxious to know how the youth may best approach and appreciate these truths than simply to see them stored in the mind in a well-classified form. a rich man in leaving a fortune to his son would more than double the value of the inheritance if he could teach him properly to _appreciate_ wealth and form in him the disposition and ability to use it wisely. in the same way the best part of knowledge is not simply its possession, but an appreciation of its value. the method of reaching scientific knowledge through the inductive process, that is by the collection and comparison of data with a view to positive insight, will give greater meaning to the results. interest is awakened and self-activity exercised at every step in the progress toward general truths. by the reflective habit these truths will be seen in their origin and causal connection, and the line of similarity, contrast, causal relation, analogy and coincidence will be thoughtfully traced. possibly the progress toward formulated knowledge will be less rapid by induction, but it will be real progress with no backward steps. it may well be doubted whether, with average minds, real scientific knowledge is attainable except by a strong admixture of inductive processes. perfection in the form and structure of our concepts is not to be attained by children nor by adults, but the ideal of scientific accuracy in general notions is to be kept constantly in view and approximated to the extent of our ability. after all, _deduction_ performs a much more important part in the work of building up concepts than the previous discussion would indicate. as fast as psychical concepts are formed we clamber upon them and try to get a better view of the field around us. like captured guns, we turn them at once upon the enemy and make them perform service in new fields of conquest. if a new case or object appears we judge of it in the light of our acquired concepts, no matter whether they are complete and accurate or not. this is deduction. we are glad to gain any vantage ground in judging the objects and phenomena constantly presenting themselves. in fact, it is inevitable that inductive and deductive processes will be constantly dovetailed into each other. the faulty concepts arrived at are brought persistently into contact with new individual cases. they are thus corrected, enlarged, and more accurately grasped. this is the series of mental stepping-stones that leads up gradually to logical concepts. the inductive process is the fundamental one and deduction comes in at every step to brace it up. this is only another illustration that mental processes are intimately interwoven, and, except in thought, not to be separated. in the discussion of apperception in the following chapter we shall see that, in the process of gaining knowledge, our acquired ideas and concepts play a most important role. they are really the chief assimilating agencies. but in spite of all this we shall scarcely be led again to the standpoint that logical or scientific concepts should be the starting point in the study of any subject. [ ] intuition is popularly used in a sense different from the above. we are in need of a word which has the same meaning as the german word, _anschauung_, for which there is no popular equivalent in english. intuition, as defined by webster, is nearly the same: "direct apprehension, or cognition; immediate knowledge, as in perception or consciousness." for a discussion of this term, see quick's educational reformers, p. , appleton's edition. chapter vi. apperception. we have now to deal with a principle of pedagogy upon which all the leading ideas thus far discussed largely depend for their realization. interest, concentration, and induction set up requirements relative to the matter, spirit and method of school studies. apperception is a practical principle, obedience to which will contribute daily and hourly to making real in school exercises the ideas of interest, concentration and induction. we observe in passing that the important principles already discussed stand in close mutual relation and dependence. interest aids concentration by bringing all kinds of knowledge into close touch with the feelings. interest puts incentives into every kind of information so as to arouse the will, which, in turn, unifies and controls the mental actions. but concentration has a reflex influence upon interest, because unity and conscious mastery give added pleasure to knowledge. the culture epochs are expected to contribute powerfully to both concentration and interest; to the former by supplying a series of rallying-points for educative effort, to the latter by furnishing matter suited to interest children. induction is a natural method of acquiring and unifying knowledge in an interesting way. apperception, in turn, is a principle of mental action which puts life and interest into inductive and concentrating processes. every hour of school labor illustrates the value of apperception and teachers should find in it a constant antidote to faulty methods. apperception may be roughly defined at first as the process of _acquiring new ideas by the aid of old ideas_ already in the mind. it makes the acquisition of new knowledge easier and quicker. not that there is any easy road to learning, but there is a natural process which greatly accelerates the progress of acquisition, just as it is better to follow a highway over a rough country than to betake one's self to the stumps and brush. for example, if one is familiar with peaches, apricots will be quickly understood as a kindred kind of fruit, even though a little strange. a person who is familiar with electrical machinery will easily interpret the meaning and purpose of every part of a new electrical plant. one may _perceive_ a new object without understanding it, but to _apperceive_ it is to interpret its meaning by the aid of similar familiar notions. if one examines a _typewriter_ for the first time, it will take some pains and effort to understand its construction and use; but after examining a remington, another kind will be more easily understood, because the principle of the first interprets that of the second. suppose the _steppes of russia_ are mentioned for the first time to a class. the word has little or no meaning or perhaps suggests erroneously a succession of stairs. but we remark that the steppes are like the prairies and plains to the west of the mississippi river, covered with grass and fed on by herds. by awakening a familiar notion already in the mind and bringing it distinctly to the front, the new thing is easily understood. again, a boy goes to town and sees a _banana_ for the first time, and asks, "what is that? i never saw anything like that." he thinks he has no class of things to which it belongs, no place to put it. his father answers that it is to eat like an orange or a pear, and its significance is at once plain by the reference to something familiar. again, two men, the one a _machinist_ and the other an observer unskilled in machines, visit the machinery hall of an exposition. the machinist observes a new invention and finds in it a new application of an old principle. as he passes along from one machine to another he is much interested in noting new devices and novel appliances and at the end of an hour he leaves the hall with a mind enriched. the other observer sees the same machines and their parts, but does not detect the principle of their construction. his previous knowledge of machines is not sufficient to give him the clue to their explanation. after an hour of uninterested observation he leaves the hall with a confused notion of shafts, wheels, cogs, bands, etc., but with no greater insight into the principles of machinery. why has one man learned so much and the other nothing? because the machinist's previous experience served as an interpreter and explained these new contrivances, while the other had no sufficient previous knowledge and so acquired nothing new. "to him that hath shall be given." in the act of apperception the old ideas dwelling in the mind are not to be regarded as dead treasures stored away and only occasionally drawn out and used by a purposed effort of the memory, but they are _living forces_ which have the active power of seizing and appropriating new ideas. lazarus says they stand "like well-armed men in the inner stronghold of the mind ready to sally forth and overcome or make serviceable whatever shows itself at the portals of sense." it is then through the active aid of familiar ideas that new things find an introduction to soul life. if old friends go out to meet the strangers and welcome them, there will be an easy entrance and a quick adoption into the new home. but frequently these old friends who stand in the background of our thoughts must be _awakened_ and called to the front. they must stand as it were on tiptoe ready to welcome the stranger. for if they lie asleep in the penetralia of the home the new comers may approach and pass by for lack of a welcome. it is often necessary, therefore, for the teacher to revive old impressions, to call up previously acquired knowledge and to put it in readiness to receive and welcome the new. the success with which this is done is often the difference between good and poor teaching. we might suppose that when two persons look at the same object they would get the _same impression_, but this is not true at all. where one person faints with fright or emotion another sees nothing to be disturbed at. two travelers come in sight of an old homestead. to one it is an object of absorbing interest as the home of his childhood; to the other it is much like any other old farm house. what is the cause of this difference? not the house. it is the same in both cases. it is remarkable how much color is given to every idea that enters into the mind by the ideas already there. some visitors at the world's fair can tell almost at a glance to what states many of the buildings belong; other visitors must study this out on the maps and notices. one who is familiar with the history, architecture, and products of the different states is able to classify many of the buildings with ease. his previous knowledge of these states interprets their buildings. mt. vernon naturally belongs to virginia, independence hall to pennsylvania, john hancock's house to massachusetts. in a still more striking manner, a knowledge of foreign countries enables the observer to classify such buildings as the french, the german, the swedish, the japanese, etc. again, in viewing any exhibit our enjoyment and appreciation depend almost entirely upon our previous knowledge, not upon our eye-sight or our physical endurance. many objects of the greatest value we pass by with an indifferent glance because our previous knowledge is not sufficient to give us their meaning. if a dry goods merchant, a horse jockey, and an architect pass down a city street together, what will each observe? the merchant notices all the dry goods stores, their displays, and their favorable or unfavorable location. the jockey sees every horse and equipage; he forms a quiet but quick judgment upon every passing animal. the architect sees the buildings and style of construction. if in the evening each is called upon to give his observations for the day, the jockey talks of horses and describes some of the best specimens in detail; the merchant speaks of store-fronts and merchandise; the architect is full of elevations of striking or curious buildings. the architect and merchant remember nothing, perhaps, about the horses; the jockey nothing of stores or buildings. three people may occupy the same pew in a church; the one can tell you all about the music, the second the good points in the sermon, and the third the style and becomingness of the bonnets and dresses. each one sees what he has in his own mind. a teacher describes yosemite valley to a geography class. some of the children construct a mental picture of a gorge with steep mountain sides, but no two pictures are alike; some have mental pictures that resemble nothing in heaven above or earth below; some have constructed----nothing at all! only the echo of a few spoken words. if the teacher, at the close of her description, could have the mental state of each child photographed on the blackboard of her schoolroom she would be in mental distress. in presenting such topics to children, much depends upon the previous content of their minds, upon the colors out of which they paint the pictures. we are now prepared for a more accurate _definition_ of apperception. "the transformation of a newer (weaker) concept by means of an older one surpassing the former in power and inner organization bears the name of apperception, in contrast to the unaltered reception of the same perception." (lindner's psychol. p. , trans. by de garmo.) lindner remarks further, "apperception is the reaction of the old against the new--in it is revealed the preponderance which the older, firmer, and more self-contained concept groups have in contrast to the concepts which have just entered consciousness." again, "it is _a kind of process of condensation of thought_ and brings into the mental life a certain stability and firmness, in that it subordinates new to older impressions, puts everything in its right place and in its right relation to the whole, and in this way works at that organic formation of our consciousness which we call _culture_." (lindner p. .) "apperception may be defined as that interaction between two similar ideas or thought-complexes in the course of which the weaker, unorganized, isolated idea or thought-complex is incorporated into the richer, better digested, and more firmly compacted one." (lange, apperception, p. .) oftentimes, therefore, older ideas or thought masses, being clear, strong, and well-digested receive a new impression to modify and appropriate it. this is especially true where opinions have been carefully formed after thought and deliberation. a well-trained political economist, for example, when approaching a new theory or presentation of it by a george or bellamy, meets it with all the resources of a well-stored, thoughtful mind; and admits it, if at all, in a modified form to his system of thought. sometimes, however, a new theory, which strikes the mind with great clearness and vigor, is able to make a powerful assault upon previous opinions, and perhaps modify or overturn them. this is the more apt to be the case if one's previous ideas have been weak and undecided. in the interaction between the old and new the latter then become the apperceiving forces. upon the untrained or poorly-equipped mind a strong argument has a more decisive effect than it may justly deserve. as we noticed above, new ideas, especially those coming directly through the senses, are often more vivid and attractive than similar old ones. for this reason they usually occupy greater attention and prominence at first than later, when the old ideas have begun to revive and reassert themselves. old ideas usually have the advantage over the new in being better organized, more closely connected in series and groups; and having been often repeated, they acquire a certain permanent ascendency in the thoughts. in this interaction between similar notions, old and new, the differences at first arrest attention, then gradually sink into the background, while the stronger points of resemblance begin to monopolize the thought and bind the notions into a unity. the use of familiar notions in acquiring an insight into new things is a _natural tendency_ or drift of the mind. as soon as we see something new and desire to understand it, at once we involuntarily begin to ransack our old stock of ideas to discover anything in our previous experience which corresponds to this or is like it. for whatever is like it or has an analogy to it, or serves the same uses, will explain this new thing, though the two objects be in other points essentially different. we are, in short, constantly falling back upon our old experiences and classifications for the explanation of new objects that appear to us. so far is this true that the _most ordinary things_ can only be explained in the light of experience. when john smith wrote a note to his companions at jamestown, and thus communicated his desires to them, it was unintelligible to the indians. they had no knowledge of writing and looked on the marks as magical. when _columbus' ships_ first appeared on the cost of the new world, the natives looked upon them as great birds. they had never seen large sailing vessels. to vary the illustration, the _art of reading_, so easy to a student, is the accumulated result of a long collection of knowledge and experience. there is an unconscious employment of apperception in the practical affairs of life that is of interest. we often see a person at a distance and by some slight characteristic of motion, form, or dress, recognize him at once. from this slight trace we picture to ourselves the person in full and say we saw him in the street. sitting in my room at evening i hear the regular passenger train come in. the noise alone suggests the engine, cars, conductor, passengers, and all the train complete. as a matter of fact i saw nothing at all but have before my mind the whole picture. on sunday morning i see some one enter a familiar church door, and going on my way the whole picture of church, congregation, pastor, music and sermon come distinctly to my mind. only a passing glance at one person entering suggests the whole scene. in looking at a varied landscape we see many things which the sensuous eye alone would not detect, distances, perspective and relative size, position and nature of objects. this apperceptive power is of vast importance in practical life as it leads to quick judgment and action, when personal examinations into details would be impossible. in apperception we never pass from the known to things which are _entirely new_. absolutely new knowledge is gained by perception or intuition. when an older person meets with something totally new, he either does not notice it or it staggers him. apperception does not take place. in many cases we are disturbed or frightened, as children, by some new or sudden noise or object. but most so-called new things bear sufficient resemblance to things seen before to admit of explanation. strange as the sights of a chinese city might appear, we should still know that we were in a city. in most "new" objects of observation or study, the familiar parts greatly preponderate over the unfamiliar. in a new reading lesson, for example, most of the words and ideas are well known, only an occasional word requires explanation and that by using familiar illustrations. the flood of our familiar and oft-repeated ideas sweeps on like a great river, receiving here and there from either side a tributary stream, that is swallowed up in its waters without perceptible increase. so strong is the apperceiving force of familiar notions that they drag far-distant scenes in geography and history into the home neighborhood and locate them there. the _imagination_ works in conjunction with the apperceiving faculty and constructs real pictures. children are otherwise inclined to substitute one thing for another by imagination. with boys and girls, geographical objects about home are often converted by fancy into representatives of distant places. it is related of _byron_ that while reading in childhood the story of the trojan war, he localized all the places in the region of his home. an old hill and castle looking toward the plain and the sea were his troy. the stream flowing through the plain was the simois. the places of famous conflicts between the trojans and greeks were located. so vivid were the pictures which these home scenes gave to the child, that years later in visiting asia minor and the sight of the real troy, he was not so deeply impressed as in his boyhood. a _german professor_ relates that he and his companions, while reading the indian stories of cooper, located the important scenes in the hills and valleys about eisenach in the thuringian mountains. many other illustrations of the same imaginative tendency to substitute home objects for foreign ones are given. but whether or not this experience is true of us all, it is certain that we can form no idea of foreign places and events except as we _construct_ the pictures out of the _fragments_ of things that we have known. what we have seen of rivers, lands, and cities must form the materials for picturing to ourselves distant places. since the old ideas have so much to do with the proper reception of the new, let us examine more closely the _interaction_ of the two. if a _new idea_ drops into the mind, like a stone upon the surface of the water, it produces a commotion. it acts as a stimulus or wakener to the old ideas sleeping beneath the surface. it draws them up above the surface-level; that is, into consciousness. but what ideas are thus disturbed? there are thousands of these latent ideas, embryonic thoughts, beneath the surface. those which possess sufficient kinship to this new-comer to hear his call, respond. for in the mind "birds of a feather flock together." ideas and thoughts which resemble the new one answer, the others sleep on undisturbed, except a few who are so intimately associated with these kinsmen as to be disturbed when they are disturbed. or, to state it differently, certain thought-groups or complexes, which contain elements kindred to the new notion, are agitated and raised into conscious thought. they seem to respond to their names. the new idea may continue for some time to stimulate and agitate. there appears to be a sort of telegraphic inquiry through the regions of the mind to find out where the kindred dwell. the distant relatives and strangers (the unrelated or unserviceable ideas) soon discover that they have responded to the wrong call and drop back to sleep again. but the real kindred wake up more and more. they come forward to inspect the new-comer and to examine his credentials. soon he finds that he is surrounded by inquisitive friends and relatives. they threaten even to take possession of him. up to this point the new idea has taken the lead, he has been the aggressor. but now is the time for the awakened kindred ideas to assume control and lead the stranger captive, to bring him in among themselves and give him his appropriate place and importance. the _old body of ideas_, when once set in motion, is more powerful than any single-handed stranger who happens to fall into their company. the outcome is that the stranger, who at first seemed to be producing such a sensation, now discovers that strong arms are about him and he is carried captive by vigorous friends. new ideas when first entering the mind are very strong, and, if they come through the senses, are especially rich in the color and vigor of real life. they therefore absorb the attention at first and seem to monopolize the mental energies; but the older thought masses, when fully aroused, are better organized, more firmly rooted in habit, and possess much wider connections. they are almost certain, therefore, to apperceive the new idea; that is, to conquer and subdue it, to make it tributary to their power. let us examine more closely the _effect_ of the process of apperception upon the new and old ideas that are brought in contact. first, observe the effect upon the _new_: many an idea which is not strong enough in itself to make a lasting impression, upon the mind would quickly fade out and be forgotten were it not that in this process the old ideas throw it into a clear light, give it more meaning, associate it closely with themselves, and thus save it. two persons look at the sword of washington; one examines it with deep interest, the other scarcely gives it a second glance. the one remembers it for life, the other forgets it in an hour. the sense perception was the same in both persons at first, but the reception given to the idea by one converts it into a lasting treasure. a little lamp-black, rolled up between finger and thumb, suggested to edison his carbon points for the electric light. a piece of lamp-black would produce no such effect in most peoples minds. the difference is in the reception accorded to an idea. the meaning and importance of an idea or event depend upon the interpretation put upon it by our previous experience. "many a weak, obscure, and fleeting perception would pass almost unnoticed into obscurity, did not the additional activity of apperception hold it fast in consciousness. this sharpens the senses, _i.e._, it gives to the organs of sense a greater degree of energy, so that the watching eye now sees, and the listening ear now hears, that which ordinarily would pass unnoticed. the events of apperception give to the senses a peculiar keenness, which underlies the skill of the money-changer in detecting a counterfeit among a thousand bank-notes, notwithstanding its deceptive similarity; of the jeweler who marks the slightest, apparently imperceptible, flaw in an ornament; of the physicist who perceives distinctly the overtones of a vibrating string. according to this we see and hear not only with the eye and ear, but quite as much with the help of our present knowledge, with the apperceiving content of the mind." (apperception, lange, de garmo, p. .) some even intelligent and sensible people can walk through westminster abbey and see nothing but a curious old church with a few graves and monuments. to a person well-versed in english history and literature it is a shrine of poets, a temple of heroes, the common resting-place of statesmen and kings. secondly, what is the _effect on the old ideas_? every idea that newly enters the mind produces changes in the older groups and series of thought. any one new idea may cause but slight changes, but the constant influx of new experiences works steadily at a modification and rearrangement of our previous stores of thought. faulty and incomplete groups and concepts are corrected or enlarged; that is, changed from psychical into logical notions. children are surprised to find little flowers on the oaks, maples, walnuts, and other large forest trees. on account of the small size of the blossoms, heretofore unnoticed, they had not thought of the great trees as belonging to the flowering plants. their notion of flowering plants is, therefore, greatly enlarged by a few new observations. the bats flying about in the twilight have been regarded as birds; but a closer inspection shows that they belong to another class, and the notion bird must be limited. as already observed in the discussion of induction, most of our psychical notions are thus faulty and incomplete; _e.g._, the ideas fruit, fish, star, insect, mineral, ship, church, clock, dog, kitchen, library, lawyer, city, etc. our notions of these and of hundreds of other such classes are at first both incomplete and faulty. the inflow of new ideas constantly modifies them, extending, limiting, explaining, and correcting our previous concepts. sometimes, however, a single new thought may have wide-reaching effects; it may even revolutionize one's previous modes of thinking and reorganize one's activities about a new center. with luther, for instance, the idea of justification by faith was such a new and potent force, breaking up and rearranging his old forms of thought. st. paul's vision on the way to damascus is a still more striking illustration of the power of a new idea or conviction. and yet, even in such cases, the old ideas reassert themselves with great persistence and power. luther and st. paul remained, even after these great changes, in many respects the same kind of men as before. their old habits of thinking were modified, not destroyed; the direction of their lives was changed, but many of their habits and characteristics remained almost unaltered. apperception, however, is not limited to the effects of _external objects_ upon us, to the influence of ideas coming from without upon our old stores of knowledge. old ideas, long since stored in the mind, may be freshly called up and brought into such contact with each other that new results follow, new apperceptions take place. in moments of reflection we are often surprised by conclusions that had not presented themselves to us before. a new light dawns upon us and we are surprised at not having seen it before. in fact, it makes little difference whether the idea suggested to the mind comes from within or from without if, when it once enters fairly into consciousness, it has power to stimulate other thoughts, to wake up whole thought complexes and bring about a process of action and reaction between itself and others. the result is new associations, new conclusions, new mental products--apperceptions. this _inner apperception_, as it has been sometimes called, takes place constantly when we are occupied with our own thoughts, rather than with external impressions. with persons of deep, steady, reflective habits, it is the chief means of organizing their mental stores. the feelings and the will have much also to do with this process. the laws of association draw the _feelings_ as much as the intellectual states into apperceptive acts. i hear of a friend who has had disasters in business and has lost his whole fortune. if i have never experienced such difficulties myself, the chances are that the news will not make a deep impression upon me. but if i have once gone through the despondency of such a crushing defeat, sympathy for my friend will be awakened, and i may feel his trouble almost as my own. the meaning of such an item of news depends upon the response which it finds in my own feelings. it is well known that those friends can best sympathize with us in our trouble who have passed through the same troubles. even enemies are not lacking in sympathy with each other when an appeal is made to deep feelings and experiences common to both. the feeling of _interest_, which we have emphasized so much, is chiefly, if not wholly, dependent upon apperceptive conditions. select a lesson adapted to the age and understanding of a child, present it in such a way as to recall and make use of his previous experience, and interest is certain to follow. the outcome of a successful act of apperception is always a feeling of pleasure, or at least of interest. when the principle of apperception is fully applied in teaching, the progress from one point to another is so gradual and clear that it gives pleasure. the clearness and understanding with which we receive knowledge adds greatly to our interest in it. on the contrary, when apperception is violated, and new knowledge is only half understood and assimilated there can be but little feeling of satisfaction. "the overcoming of certain difficulties, the accession of numerous ideas, the success of the act of knowledge or recognition, the greater clearness that the ideas have gained, awaken a feeling of pleasure. we become conscious of the growth of our knowledge and power of understanding. the significance of this new impression for our ego is now more strongly felt than at the beginning or during the course of the progress. to this pleasurable feeling is easily added the effort, at favorable opportunity, to reproduce the product of the apperception, to supplement and deepen it, to unite it to other ideas, and so further to extend certain chains of thought. the summit or sum of these states of mind we happily express with the word interest. for in reality the feeling of self appears between the various stages of the process of apperception (_inter esse_); with one's whole soul does one contemplate the object of attention. if we regard the acquired knowledge as the objective result of apperception, interest must be regarded as the subjective side." (lange, apperception, page .) finally, the _will_ has much to do with conscious efforts at apperception. it holds the thought to certain groups; it excludes or pushes back irrelevant ideas that crowd in; it holds to a steady comparison of ideas, even where perplexity and obscurity trouble the thinker. when the process of reaching a conclusion takes much time, when conflict or contradiction have to be removed or adjusted, when reflection and reasoning are necessary, the will is of great importance in giving coherency and steadiness to the apperceptive effort. a conscious effort at apperception, therefore, may include many elements, sense perceptions, ideas recalled, feeling, _will_. "let us now sum up the essentials in the process of apperception. first of all, an external or internal perception, an idea, or idea-complex appears in consciousness, finding more or less response in the mind; that is, giving rise to greater or less stimulation to thought and feeling. "in consequence of this, and in accordance with the psychical mechanism or an impulse of the will, one or more groups of thoughts arise, which enter into relation to the perception. while the two masses are compared with one another, they work upon one another with more or less of a transforming power. new thought-combinations are formed, until, finally, the perception is adjusted to the stronger and older thought combination. in this way all the factors concerned gain in value as to knowledge and feeling; especially, however, does the new idea gain a clearness and activity that it never would have gained for itself. _apperception is, therefore, that psychical activity by which individual perceptions, ideas, or idea-complexes are brought into relation to our previous intellectual and emotional life, assimilated with it, and thus raised to greater clearness, activity, and significance._" (lange, apperception, page .) important _conclusions_ drawn from a study of apperception: . _value of previous knowledge_. if knowledge once acquired is so _valuable_ we are first of all urged to make the acquisition permanent. thorough mastery and frequent reviews are necessary to make knowledge stick. careless and superficial study is injurious. it is sometimes carelessly remarked by those who are supposed to be wise in educational matters that it makes no difference how much we forget if we only have proper drill and training to study. that is, how we study is more important than what we learn. but viewed in the light of apperception, acquired knowledge should be retained and used, for it unlocks the door to more knowledge. _thorough mastery and retention_ of the elements of knowledge in the different branches is the only solid road to progress. in this connection we can see the importance of learning only what is _worth remembering_, what will prove a valuable treasure in future study. in the selection of material for school studies, therefore, we must keep in mind knowledge which, as comenius says, is of _solid utility_. having once selected and acquired such materials, we are next impelled to make _constant use_ of them. if the acquisition of new information depends so much upon the right use of previous knowledge, we are called upon to build constantly upon this foundation. this is true whether the child's knowledge has been acquired at school or at home. in order to make things clear and interesting to boys and girls we must refer every day to what they have before learned in school and out of school. again, if we accept the doctrine that old ideas are the materials out of which we constantly build _bridges_ across into new fields of knowledge, we must _know the children_ better and what store of knowledge they have already acquired. just as an army marching into a new country must know well the country through which it has passed and must keep open the line of communication and the base of supplies, so the student must always have a safe retreat into his past, and a base of supplies to sustain him in his onward movements. the tendency is very strong for a grade teacher to think that she needs to know nothing except the facts to be acquired in her own grade. but she should remember that her grade is only a station on the highway to learning and life. in teaching we cannot by any shift dispense with the ideas children have gained at home, at play, in the school and outside of it. this, in connection with what the child has learned in the previous grades, constitutes a stock of ideas, a capital, upon which the teacher should freely draw in illustrating daily lessons. . the use of our acquired stock of ideas involves a constant _working over_ of old ideas, and this working-over process not only reviews and strengthens past knowledge, keeping it from forgetfulness, but it throws new light upon it and exposes it to a many-sided criticism. in the first place familiar ideas should not be allowed to rest in the mind _unused_. like tools for service they must be kept bright and sharp. one reason why so many of the valuable ideas we have acquired have gradually disappeared from the mind is because they remained so long unused that they faded out of sight. the old saying that "repetition is the mother of studies" needs to be recalled and emphasized. by being put in contact, with new ideas, old notions are seen and appreciated in new relations. facts that have long lain unexplained in the mind, suddenly receive a _new interpretation_, a vivid and rational meaning. or the old meaning is intensified and vivified by putting a new fact in conjunction with it. where the climate and products of the british isles have been studied in political geography, and later on, in physical geography, the gulf stream is explained in its bearings on the climate of western europe, the whole subject of the climate of england is viewed from a new and interesting standpoint. in arithmetic, where the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right-angled triangle is illustrated by an example and later on in geometry the same proposition is taken up in a different way and proved as a universal theorem, new and interesting light is thrown upon an old problem of arithmetic. in _united states history_, after the revolution has been studied, the biography of a man like samuel adams throws much additional and vivid light upon the events and actors in boston and massachusetts. the life of john adams would give a still different view of the same great events; just as a city, as seen from different standpoints, presents different aspects. . we have thus far shown that new ideas are more easily understood and assimilated when they are brought into close contact with what we already know; and secondly, that our old knowledge is often explained and illuminated by new facts brought to bear upon it. we may now observe the result of this double action--_the welding_ of old and new into one piece, the close mingling and association of all our knowledge, _i.e._, its unity. apperception, therefore, has the same final tendency that was observed in the _inductive process_, the unification of knowledge, the concentration of all experience by uniting its parts into groups and series. the smith, in welding together two pieces of iron, heats both and then hammers them together into one piece. the teacher has something similar to do. he must revive old ideas in the child's mind, then present the new facts and bring the two things together while they are still fresh, so as to cause them to coalesce. to prove this observe how long division may be best taught. call up and review the method of short division, then proceed to work a problem in long division calling attention to the similar steps and processes in the two, and finally to the difference between them. the defect of much teaching in children's classes is that the _teacher_ does not properly provide for the welding together of the new and old. the important practical question after all is whether instructors see to it that children recall their previous knowledge. it is necessary to take special pains in this. nothing is more common than to find children forgetting the very thing which, if remembered, would explain the difficult point in the lesson. teachers are often surprised that children have forgotten things once learned. but, in an important sense, we encourage children to forget by not calling into use their acquisitions. lessons are learned too much, each by itself, without reference to what precedes or what follows, or what effect this lesson of to-day may have upon things learned a year ago. putting it briefly, children and teachers do not _think_ enough, pondering things over in their minds, relating facts with each other, and bringing all knowledge into unity, and into a clear comprehension. the habit of _thoughtfulness_, engendered by a proper combining of old and new, is one of the valuable results of a good education. it gives the mind a disposition to glance backward or forward, to judge of all old ideas from a broader, more intelligent standpoint. thinking everything over in the light of the best experience we can bring to bear upon it, prevents us from jumping at conclusions. the general _plan of all studies_ is based upon this notion of acquiring knowledge by the assistance of accumulated funds. in _arithmetic_ it would be folly to begin with long division before the multiplication table is learned. in _geometry_, later propositions depend upon earlier principles and demonstrations. in _latin_, vocabularies and inflections and syntactical relations must be mastered before readiness in the use of language is reached. and so it is to a large degree in the general plan of all studies. in spite of this no principle is more commonly violated in daily recitations than that of apperception. its value is self-evident as a principle for the arrangement of topics in any branch of study, but it is overlooked in daily lessons. instead of this new knowledge is acquired by a thoughtless memory drill. in this welding process we desire to determine how far an actual concentration may take place _between school studies_ and _the home and outside life of children_. the stock of ideas and feelings which a child from its infancy has gathered from its peculiar history and home surroundings is the primitive basis of its personality. its thought, feeling, and individuality are deeply interwoven with home experience. no other set of ideas, later acquired, lies so close to its heart or is so abiding in its memory. the memory of work and play at home; of the house, yard, trees, and garden; of parents, brothers, and sisters, and in addition to this the experiences connected with neighbors and friends, the town and surrounding country, the church and its influence, the holidays, games, and celebrations, all these things lie deeper in the minds of children than the facts learned about grammar, geography, or history in school. any plan of education that ignores these home-bred ideas, these events, memories, and sympathies of home and neighborhood life, will make a vital mistake. a concentration that keeps in mind only the school studies and disregards the rich funds of ideas that every child brings from his home, must be a failure, because it only includes the weaker half of his experience. home knowledge itself does not need to be made a concentrating center, but all its best materials must be drawn into the concentrating center of the school. but children bring many faulty, mistaken, and even vicious ideas from their homes. it is well to know the actual situation. it is the work of the school, at every step, while receiving, to correct, enlarge, or arrange the faulty or disordered knowledge brought into the school by children. we unconsciously use these materials, and depend upon them for explaining new lessons, more constantly than we are aware of. in fact, if we were wise teachers, we would consciously make a more frequent use of them and, in order to render them more valuable, take special pains to review, correct, and arrange them. we would teach children to observe more closely and to remember better the things they daily see. we shall appreciate better the value of _home knowledge_ if we take note of the direct and constant dependence of the most important studies upon it. we usually think of history as something far away in new england, or france, or egypt. history is mainly the study of the actions, customs, homes, and institutions of men in different countries. but what an abundance of similar facts and observations a child has gathered about home before he begins the study of history. from his infancy he has seen people of all sorts and conditions, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, honorable and mean. he has seen all sorts of human actions, learned to know their meaning and to pass judgment upon them. he has seen houses, churches, public buildings, trade and commerce, and a hundred human institutions. the child has been studying human actions and institutions in the concrete for a dozen years before he begins to read and recite history from books. without the knowledge thus acquired out of school, society, government, and institutions would be worse than greek. geography as taught in the books would be totally foreign and strange but for the abundance of ideas the child has already picked up about hills, streams, roads, travel, storms, trees, animals, and people. natural science lessons must be based on a more careful study of things already seen about home--rocks and streams, flowers and plants, animals wild and tame. these with the forests, fields, brooks, seasons, tools, and inventions, are the necessary object lessons in natural science which can serve daily to illustrate other lessons. how near then do the natural science topics, geography and history, stand to the daily home life of a child! how intimate should be the relations which the school should establish between the parts of a child's experience! this is concentration in the broadest sense. a proper appreciation of this principle will save us from a number of common errors. besides constantly associating home and school knowledge, we shall try to know the home and parents better, and the disposition and surroundings of each child. we shall be ready at any time to render home knowledge more clear and accurate, to correct faulty observation and opinion. while the children will be encouraged to illustrate lessons from their own experience, we shall fall into the excellent habit of explaining new and difficult points by a direct appeal to what the pupils have seen and understood. in short, there will be a disposition to draw into the concentrating work of the school all the deeper but outside life-experiences which form so important an element in the character of every person, which, however, teachers so often overlook. no other institution has such an opportunity or power to concentrate knowledge and experience as the school. . another valuable educative result of apperception, cultivated in this manner, is a _consciousness of power_ which springs from the ability to make a good use of our knowledge. the oftener children become aware that they have made a good use of acquired knowledge, the more they are encouraged. they see the treasure growing in their hands and feel conscious of their ability to use it. there is a mental exhilaration like that coming from abundant physical strength and health. "let us look back again at the results of our investigation. we observed first what essential services apperception performs for the human mind in the acquisition of new ideas, and for what an extraordinary easement and unburdening the acquiring soul is indebted to it. should apperception once fail, or were it not implied in the very nature of our minds, we should, in the reception of sense-impressions, daily expend as much power as the child in its earliest years, since the perpetually changing objects of the external world would nearly always appear strange and new. we should gain the mastery of external things more slowly and painfully, and arrive much later at a certain conclusion of our external experience than we do now, and thereby remain perceptibly behind in our mental development. like children with their a b c, we should be forced to take careful note of each word, and not, as now, allow ourselves actually to perceive only a few words in each sentence. in a word, without apperception our minds, with strikingly greater and more exhaustive labor, would attain relatively smaller results. indeed, we are seldom conscious of the extent to which our perception is supported by apperception; of how it releases the senses from a large part of their labor, so that in reality we listen usually with half an ear or with a divided attention; nor, on the other hand, do we ordinarily reflect that apperception lends the sense organs a greater degree of energy, so that they perceive with greater sharpness and penetration than were otherwise possible. we do not consider that apperception spares us the trouble of examining ever anew and in small detail all the objects and phenomena that present themselves to us, so as to get their meaning, or that it thus prevents our mental power from scattering and from being worn out with wearisome, fruitless detail labors. the secret of its extraordinary success lies in the fact that it refers the new to the old, the strange to the familiar, the unknown to the known, that which is not comprehended to what is already understood and thus constitutes a part of our mental furniture; that it transforms the difficult and unaccustomed into the accustomed and causes us to grasp everything new by means of old-time, well-known, ideas. since, then, it accomplishes great and unusual results by small means, in so far as it reserves for the soul the greatest amount of power for other purposes, it agrees with the general principle of the least expenditure of force, or with that of the best adaptability of means to ends. "as in the reception of new impressions, so also in working over and developing the previously acquired content of the mind, the helpful work of apperception shows itself. by connecting isolated things with mental groups already formed, and by assigning to the new its proper place among them, apperception not only increases the clearness and definiteness of ideas, but knits them more firmly to our consciousness. _apperceiving ideas are the best aids to memory_. again, so often as it subordinates new impressions to older ones, it labors at the association and articulation of the manifold materials of perception and thought. by condensing the content of observation and thinking into concepts and rules, or general experiences and principles, or ideals and general notions, apperception produces connection and order in our knowledge and volition. with its assistance there spring up those universal thought complexes, which, distributed to the various fields to which they belong, appear as logical, linguistic, aesthetic, moral, and religious norms or principles. if these acquire a higher degree of value for our feelings, if we find ourselves heartily attached to them, so that we prefer them to all those things which are contradictory, if we bind them to our own self, they will thus become powerful mental groups, which spring up independent of the psychical mechanism as often as kindred ideas appear in the mind. in the presence of these they now make manifest their apperceiving power. we measure and estimate them now according to universal laws. they are, so to speak, the eyes and hand of the will, with which, regulating and supplementing, rejecting and correcting, it lays a grasp upon the content as well as upon the succession of ideas. they hinder the purely mechanical flow of thought and desire, and our involuntary absorption in external impressions and in the varied play of fancy. we learn how to control religious impulses by laws, to rule thoughts by thoughts. in the place of the mechanical, appears the regulated course of thinking; in the place of the psychical rule of caprice, the monarchical control of higher laws and principles, and the spontaneity of the ego as the kernel of the personality. by the aid of apperception, therefore, we are lifted gradually from psychical bondage to mental and moral freedom. and now when ideal norms are apperceivingly active in the field of knowledge and thought, of feeling and will, when they give laws to the psychical mechanism, true culture is attained." (lange's apperception, edited by degarmo, p. , etc.) note.--the freedom with which we quote extensively from lange is an acknowledgement of the importance of his treatise. we are indebted to it throughout for many of the ideas treated. chapter vii. the will. we have now completed the discussion of the concept-bearing or inductive process in learning and apperception, and find that they both tend to the unifying of knowledge and to the awakening of interest. it remains to be seen how the will may be brought into activity and placed in command of the resources of the mind. the _will_ is that power of the mind which chooses, decides, and controls action. according to psychology there are three distinct activities of the mind, _knowing_, _feeling_, and _willing_. these three powers are related to one another on a basis of equality, and yet the will should become the _monarch of the mind_. it is expected that all the other activities of the mind will be brought into subjection to the will. for strong _character_ resides in the will. strength of character depends entirely upon the mastery which the will has acquired over the life; and _the formation of character_, as shown in a strong moral will, is the highest aim of education. the _great problem_ for us to solve is: . how far can teaching stimulate and develop such a will? there is an apparent contradiction in saying that the _will_ is the monarch of the mind, the power which must control and subject all the other powers; and yet that it can be trained, educated, moulded, and chiefly too by a proper cultivation of the other powers, _feeling_ and _knowing_. knowledge and feeling, while they are subject to the will, still constitute its strength, just as the soldiers and officers of an army are subject to a commander and yet make him powerful. we shall first notice the dependence of the will upon the _knowing_ faculty. it is an old saying "that knowledge is power." but it is power only as a strong will is able to convert knowledge into action. before the will can _decide_ to do any given act it must see its way clearly. it must at least believe in the possibility. _in trying to get across a stream_, for example, if one can not swim and there is no bridge nor boat nor means of making one, the will can not act. it is helpless. the will must be shown the way to its aims or they are impossible. the more clear and distinct our knowledge, the better we can lay our plans and _will_ to carry them out. it would be impossible for one of us _to will_ to run a steam engine from chicago to st. paul to-day. we don't know how, and we should not be permitted to try. in every field of action we must have knowledge, and clear knowledge, before the will can act to good advantage. it is only knowledge, or at least faith in the possibility of accomplishing an undertaking, that opens the way to will. much successful _experience_ in any line of work brings increasing confidence and the will is greatly strengthened, because one knows that certain actions are possible. the simple acquisition of facts therefore, the increase of knowledge so long as it is well digested, makes it possible for the will to act with greater energy in various directions. the more clear this knowledge is, the more thoroughly it is cemented, together in its parts and subject to control, the greater and more effective can be the will action. all the knowledge we may acquire can be used by the will in planning and carrying out its purposes. knowledge, therefore, derived from all sources, is a _means_ used by the will, and increases the possibilities of its action. but, secondly, there are found still more immediate means of stimulating and strengthening the will, namely, in the _feelings_. the feelings are more closely related to will than knowledge, at least in the sense of cause and effect. there is a gradual transition from the feelings up to will, as follows: interest in an object, inclination, desire and purpose, or will to secure it. we might say that will is only the final link in the chain, and the feelings and desires lead up to and produce the act of willing. even will itself has been called a feeling by some psychologists and classed with the feelings. but the thing in which we are now most concerned is how to reach and strengthen the will through the feelings. some of the feelings which powerfully influence the will are desire of approbation, ambition, love of knowledge, appreciation of the beautiful and the good; or, on the other side, rivalry, envy, hate, and ill-will. now, it is clear that a cultivation of the feelings and emotions is possible which may strongly influence the purposes and decisions of the will, either in the right or wrong direction. it is just at this point that education is capable of a vigorous influence in moulding the character of a child. the cultivation of the _six interests_ already mentioned is little else than a cultivation of the great classes of feeling, for interest always contains a strong element of feeling. it is certain in any case that a child's, and eventually a man's will, is to be guided largely by his feelings. whether any _care is taken_ in education or not, feeling, good or bad, is destined to guide the will. most people, as we know, are too much influenced by their feelings. this is apparent in the adage, "think twice before you speak." feelings of malice and ill-will, of revenge and envy, of dislike and jealously, get the control in many lives, because they have been permitted to grow and nothing better has been put in their place. the teacher by _selecting the proper materials_ of study is able to cultivate and strengthen such feelings as sympathy and kindliness toward others; appreciation of brave, unselfish acts in others; the feeling of generosity, charity, and a forgiving spirit; a love for honesty and uprightness; a desire and ambition for knowledge in many directions. on the other hand, the teacher may gently instill a _dislike_ for cowardice, meanness, selfishness, laziness, and envy, and bring the child to master and control these evil dispositions. not only is it possible to cultivate those feelings which we may summarize as the love of the virtues and develop a dislike and turning away from vices, but this work of cultivating the feelings may be carried on so systematically that great _habits_ of feeling are formed, and these habits become the very strongholds of character. they are the forces acting upon the will and guiding its choice. it is _freedom of the will_ to chose the best that we are after. we desire to limit the choice of the will if possible to good things. we desire to make the character so strong and so noble and consistent in its desires that it will not be strongly tempted by evil. the will in the end, while it controls all the life and action, is itself under the guidance of those _habits_ of thought and feeling that have been gradually formed. sully says, "thus it is feeling that ultimately supplies the stimulus or force to volition and intellect which guides or illumines it." a study of the will in its relation to knowledge and feeling reveals that the training and development of the will depend upon _exercise_ and upon _instruction_. there are two ways of exercising will power. first, by requiring it to obey authority promptly and to control the body and the mind at the direction of another. the discipline of a school may exert a strong influence upon pupils in teaching them concentration and will power under the direction of another. especially is this true in lower grades. children in the first grade have but little power or habit of concentrating the attention. the will of the teacher, combined with her tact, must aid in developing the energies of the will in these little ones. the primary value of quick obedience in school, of exact discipline in marching, rising, etc., is twofold. it secures the necessary orderliness and it trains the will. even in higher and normal schools such a perfect discipline has a great value in training to alertness and quickness of apprehension associated with action. secondly, by the training of the mind to freedom of action, to _self-activity_, to independence. as soon as children begin to develop the power of thought and action their self-activity should be encouraged. even in the lowest grades the beginnings may be made. an _aim_ may be set before them which they are to reach by their own efforts. for example, let a class in the first reader be asked to make a list of all the words in the last two lessons containing _th_, or _oi_, or some other combination. _activity_ rather than repose is the nature of children, and even in the kindergarten this activity is directed to the attainment of definite ends. with number work in the first grade the objects should be handled by the children, the letters made, rude drawings sketched, so as to give play to their active powers as well as to lead them on to confidence in doing, to an increase of self-activity. as children grow older, the problems set before them, the aims held out, should be more difficult. of course they should be of _interest_ to the child, so that it will have an impulse and desire of its own to reach them. there are few things so valuable as setting up _definite aims_ before children and then supplying them with incentives to reach them through their own efforts. it has been often supposed that the only way to do this is to use _reference books_, to study up the lesson or some topics of it outside of the regular order. but self-activity is by no means limited to such outside work. a child's self-activity may be often aroused by the manner of studying a simple lesson from a text-book. when a reading or geography lesson is so studied that the pupil thoroughly sifts the piece, hunts down the thought till he is certain of its meaning; when all the previous knowledge the pupil can command is brought to bear upon this, to throw light upon it; when the dictionary and any other books familiar to the child are studied for the sake of reference and explanation, self-activity is developed. whenever the disposition can be stimulated to look at a fact or statement from _more than one standpoint_, to _criticise_ it even, to see how true it is, or if there are exceptions, self-activity is cultivated. the pursuit of definite aims always calls out the will and their satisfactory attainment strengthens one's confidence in his ability to succeed. every step should be toward a clearly seen aim. at least this is our ideal in working with children. they should not be led on blindly from one point to another, but try to reach definite results. there is a gradual _transition_ in the course of a child's schooling from training of the will under guidance to its independent exercise. throughout the school course there must be much obedience and will effort under the guidance of one in authority. but there should be a gradual increase of self-activity and self-determination. when the pupil leaves school he should be prepared to launch out and pursue his own aims with success. will effort, however, to be valuable, must have its roots in those _moral convictions_ which it is the chief aim of the school to foster and strengthen. we have attempted to show in the preceding chapters how the central subject matter of the school could be chosen, and the other studies concentrated about it with a view to accomplishing this result. in concluding our discussion of general principles of education, and in summing up the results, basing our reasoning upon psychology, we are always forced to the conclusion that education aims at the _will_, and more particularly at the will as influenced and guided by moral ideas. this is the same as saying that we have completed the circle and come around to our starting point, that _moral character is the chief aim of education_. teachers who are interested in this phase of pedagogy will do well to study the _science of ethics_. not that it will much aid them directly in school work, but it will at least give them a more comprehensive and definite notion of the field of morals and perhaps indicate more clearly where the _materials_ of moral education are to be sought, and the leading ideas to be emphasized. herbart projected a system of ethics, based on psychology, with the intention of classifying the chief moral notions and of showing their relation to each other. he also developed a theory of the _origin_ of moral ideas and their best means of cultivation, and then based his system of pedagogy upon it. the chief classes of ethical ideas of herbart are briefly explained as follows: . _good will_. it is manifested in the sympathy we feel for the sorrow or joy of another person. it is illustrated by the example of sidney and howard already cited. . _legal right_. it serves to avoid strife by some agreement or established rule; _e.g._, the government of the united states fixes the law for pre-empting land and for homestead claims so that no two persons can lay claim to the same piece of land. . _justice_, as expressed by reward or punishment. when a person purposely does an injury to another, all men unite in the judgment, "he must be punished." likewise, if a kind act is done to anyone, we insist upon a return of gratitude at least. . _perfection of will_. this implies that the will is strong enough to resist all opposition. david's will to go out and meet goliath was perfect. a boy desires to get his lesson, but indolence and the love of play are too strong for his will. there is nothing which goes so far to make up the character of the hero as strength of will which yields to no difficulties. . _inner freedom_. this is the obedience of the will to its _highest_ moral incentive. it is ability to set the will free from all selfish or wrong desires and to yield implicit obedience to moral ideas. this of course depends upon the cultivation of the other ideas and their proper subordination, one to another. the five moral ideas just given indicate the lines along which strength of moral character is shown. they are of some interest to the teacher as a systematic arrangement of morals, but they are of no direct value in teaching. they are the most abstract and general classes of moral ideas and are of no interest whatever to children. in morals the only thing that interests children is _moral action_. whether it be in actual life or in a story or history, the child is aroused by a deed of kindness or courage. but all talk of kindness or goodness in general, disconnected from particular persons and actions, is dry and uninteresting. this gives us _the key to the child's_ mind in morals. not moralizing, not preaching, not lecturing, not reproof, can ever be the _original source_ of moral ideas with the young, but the _actions_ of people they see, and of those about whom they read or hear. moral judgments and feelings spring up originally only in connection with human action in the concrete. if we propose then to _adapt moral teaching_ to youthful minds, we must make use of concrete materials, observations of people taken from what the children have seen, stories and biographies of historical characters. a story of a man's life is interesting because it brings out his particular motives and actions. this is the field in which instruction has its conquests to make over youthful minds. we will gather up the fruits of our discussion in the preceding chapters. having fixed the chief aim in the effort to influence and strengthen moral character, we find _concentration_ to be the central principle in which all others unite. it is the focusing of life and school experiences in the unity of the personality. the worth and choice of studies is determined by this. interest unites knowledge, feeling, and will. the culture epochs supply the nucleus of materials for moral-educative purposes. apperception assimilates new ideas by bringing each into the bond of its kindred and friends, spinning threads of connection in every direction. the inductive process collects, classifies, and organizes knowledge, everywhere tending toward unity. chapter viii. herbart and his disciples. "then, only, can a person be said to draw education under his control, when he has the wisdom to bring forth in the youthful soul a great circle or body of ideas, well knit together in its inmost parts--a body of ideas which is able to outweigh what is unfavorable in environment and to absorb and combine with itself the favorable elements of the same." (herbart.) herbart was an empirical psychologist, and believed that the mind grows with what it feeds upon; that is, that it develops its powers slowly by experience. we are dependent not only upon our habits, upon the established trends of mental action produced by exercise and discipline, but also upon our acquired ideas, upon the thought materials stored up and organized in the mind. these thought-materials seem to possess a kind of vitality, an energy, an attractive or repulsive power. when ideas once gain real significance in the mind, they become active agents. they are not the blocks with which the mind builds. they are a part of the mind itself. they are the conscious reaction of the mind upon external things. the conscious ego itself is a product of experience. in thus referring all mental action and growth to experience, in the narrow limits he draws for the original powers of the mind, herbart stands opposed to the older and to many more recent psychologists. he has been called the father of empirical psychology. kant, with many other psychologists, gives greater prominence to the original powers of the mind, to the _innate ideas_, by means of which it receives and works over the crude materials furnished by the senses. the difference between kant and herbart in interpreting the process of apperception is an index of a radical difference in their pedagogical standpoints. with kant, apperception is the assimilation of the raw materials of knowledge through the fundamental categories of thought (quality, quantity, relation, modality, etc.) kant's categories of thought are original properties of the mind; they receive the crude materials of sense-perception and give them form and meaning. with herbart, the ideas gained through experience are the apperceiving power in interpreting new things. practically, the difference between kant and herbart is important. for kant gives controlling influence to innate ideas in the process of acquisition. our capacity for learning depends not so much upon the results of experience and thought stored in the mind, as upon original powers, unaided and unsupported by experience. with herbart, on the contrary, great stress is laid upon the _acquired fund_ of empirical knowledge as a means of increasing one's stores, of more rapidly receiving and assimilating new ideas. upon this is also based psychologically the whole educational plan of herbart and of his disciples. as fast as ideas are gained they are used as means of further acquisition. the chief care is to supply the mind of a child at any stage of his growth with materials of knowledge suited to his previous stores, and to see that the new is properly assimilated by the old and organized with it. this accumulated fund of ideas, as it goes on collecting and arranging itself in the mind, is not only a favorable condition but an active agency in our future acquisition and progress. moreover, it is the business of the teacher to guide and, to some extent, to control the inflow of new ideas and experiences into the mind of a child; to superintend the process of acquiring and of building up those bodies of thought and feeling which eventually are to influence and guide a child's voluntary action. the critics therefore accuse herbart of a sort of _architectural_ design or even of a _mechanical_ process in education. if our ability and character depend to such an extent upon our acquirements, and if the teacher is able to control the supply of ideas to a child and to guide the process of arrangement, he can build up controlling centers of thought which may strongly influence the action of the will. in other words, he can construct a character by building the right materials into it. this seems to leave small room for spontaneous development toward self-activity and freedom. herbart, on the other hand, criticises kant's idea of the transcendental freedom of the will, on the ground that, if true, it makes deliberate, systematic education impossible. if the will remains absolutely free in spite of acquired knowledge, in spite of strongly developed tendencies of thought and feeling; if the child or youth, at any moment, even in later years, is able to retire into his trancendental _ego_ and arrive at decisions without regard to the effect of previously acquired ideas and habits, any well-planned, intentional effort at education is empty and without effect. john friedrich herbart, the founder of this movement in education, was born at oldenburg in , and died at göttingen in [transcriber's note: this should be ]. he labored seven years at göttingen at the beginning of his career as professor, and a similar period at its close. but the longest period of his university teaching was at königsberg, where, for twenty-five years, he occupied the chair of philosophy made famous before him by kant. his writings and lectures were devoted chiefly to philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. previous to beginning his career as professor at the university, he had spent three years as private tutor to three boys in a swiss family of patrician rank. in the letters and reports made to the father of these boys, we have strong proof of the practical wisdom and earnestness with which he met his duties as a teacher. the deep pedagogical interest thus developed in him remained throughout his life a quickening influence. one of his earliest courses of lectures at the university resulted in the publication, in , of his allgemeine pädagogik, his leading work on education, and to-day one of the classics of german educational literature. his vigorous philosophical thinking in psychology and ethics gave him the firm basis for his pedagogical system. at königsberg, so strong was his interest in educational problems that he established a training-school for boys, where teachers, chosen by him and under his direction, could make practical application of his decided views on education. though small, this school continued to furnish proof of the correctness of his educational ideas till he left königsberg in . this, we believe, was the first practice-school of its kind established in connection with pedagogical lectures in any german university. it should be remembered that, while herbart was a philosopher of the first rank, even among the eminent thinkers of germany and of the world, he attested his profound interest in education, not only by systematic lectures and extensive writings on education, but by maintaining for nearly a quarter of a century a practice-school at the university, for the purpose of testing and illustrating his educational convictions. lectures on pedagogy are more or less common-place, and often nearly worthless. the lecturer on pedagogy who shuns the life of the school room is not half a man in his profession. the example thus set by herbart of bringing the maturest fruit of philosophical study into the school room, and testing it day by day and month by month upon children has been followed by several eminent disciples of herbart at important universities. karl volkmar stoy ( - ) in began his career of more than forty years as professor of pedagogy and leader of a teachers' seminary and practice-school at jena. (a part of this time was spent at heidelberg.) during these years more than six hundred university students received a spirited introduction to the theory and practice of education under stoy's guidance and inspiration. his seminary for discussion and his practice-school became famous throughout germany and sent out many men who gained eminence in educational labors. tuiskon ziller, in , set up at leipzig, in connection with his lectures on teaching, a pedagogical seminary and practice-school, which, for twenty years, continued to develop and extend the application of herbart's ideas. ziller and several of his disciples have attained much prominence as educational writers and leaders. a year after the death of stoy, , dr. wilhelm rein was called to the chair of pedagogy at jena. he had studied both with stoy and ziller, and had added to this an extensive experience as a teacher and as principal of a normal school. his lectures on pedagogy, both theoretical and practical, in connection with his seminary for discussion and his practice school for application of theory, furnish an admirable introduction to the most progressive educational ideas of germany. the herbart school stands for certain progressive ideas which, while not exactly new, have, however, received such a new infusion of life-giving blood that the vague formulae of theorists have been changed into the definite, mandatory requirements and suggestions of real teachers. the fact that a pedagogical truth has been vaguely or even clearly stated a dozen times by prominent writers, is no reason for supposing that it has ever had any vital influence upon educators. the history of education shows conclusively that important educational ideas can be written about and talked about for centuries without finding their way to any great extent into school rooms. what we now need in education is definite and well-grounded theories and plans, backed up by honest and practical execution. the herbartians have patiently submitted themselves to thorough-going tests in both theory and practice. after years of experiment and discussion, they come forward with certain propositions of reform which are designed to infuse new life and meaning into educational labors. the first proposition is to make the foundation of education immovable by resting it upon _growth in moral character_, as the purpose which serious teachers must put first. the selection of studies and the organization of the school course follow this guiding principle. the second is _permanent, many-sided interest_. the life-giving power which springs from the awakening of the best interests in the two great realms of real knowledge should be felt by every teacher. though not entirely new, this idea is better than new, because its deeper meaning is clearly brought out, and it is rationally provided for by the selection of interesting materials and by marking out an appropriate method of treatment. all knowledge must be infused with feelings of interest, if it is to reach the heart and work its influence upon character by giving impulse to the will. thirdly, the idea of _organized unity_, or concentration, in the mental stores gathered by children, in all their knowledge and experience, is a thought of such vital meaning in the effort to establish unity of character, that, when a teacher once realizes its import, his effort is toned up to great undertakings. fourthly, the _culture epochs_ give a suggestive bird's-eye view of the historical meaning of education, and of the rich materials of history and literature for supplying suitable mental food to children. they help to realize the ideas of interest, concentration, and apperception. _apperception_ is the practical key to the most important problems of education, because it compels us to keep a sympathetic eye upon the child in his moods, mental states, and changing phases of growth; to build hourly upon the only foundation he has, his previous acquirements and habits. finally, the herbartians have grappled seriously with that great and comprehensive problem _the common school course_. the obligation rests upon them to select the materials and to lay out a course of study which embodies all their leading principles in a form suited to children and to our school conditions. some of the principal books published in english bearing on herbart are as follows: de garmo, charles. essentials of method. d. c. heath, boston. felkin. the science of education; a translation of some of herbart's most important writings on education, with a short biography of herbart. d. c. heath & co., boston. lange. ueber apperception, translated by the herbart club and edited by dr. de garmo. d. c. heath & co., boston. lindner's psychology, translated by dr. de garmo. d. c. heath & co., boston. smith, miss m. k. herbart's psychology, translated. international ed. series. appleton. van liew. outlines of pedagogics, by rein and van liew. c. w. bardeen, syracuse, n. y. the latter book contains a full bibliography of the german works of the herbart school as well as of those thus far published in english. riverside textbooks in education edited by ellwood p. cubberley professor of education leland stanford junior university division of secondary education under the editorial direction of alexander inglis professor of education harvard university the measurement of intelligence an explanation of and a complete guide for the use of the stanford revision and extension of _the binet-simon intelligence scale_ by lewis m. terman professor of education leland stanford junior university [illustration] houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago san francisco the riverside press cambridge copyright, , by lewis m. terman all rights reserved the riverside press cambridge · massachusetts printed in the u.s.a. to the memory of alfred binet patient researcher, creative thinker, unpretentious scholar; inspiring and fruitful devotee of inductive and dynamic psychology editor's introduction the present volume appeals to the editor of this series as one of the most significant books, viewed from the standpoint of the future of our educational theory and practice, that has been issued in years. not only does the volume set forth, in language so simple that the layman can easily understand, the large importance for public education of a careful measurement of the intelligence of children, but it also describes the tests which are to be given and the entire procedure of giving them. in a clear and easy style the author sets forth scientific facts of far-reaching educational importance, facts which it has cost him, his students, and many other scientific workers, years of painstaking labor to accumulate. only very recently, practically only within the past half-dozen years, have scientific workers begun to appreciate fully the importance of intelligence tests as a guide to educational procedure, and up to the present we have been able to make but little use of such tests in our schools. the conception in itself has been new, and the testing procedure has been more or less unrefined and technical. the following somewhat popular presentation of the idea and of the methods involved, itself based on a scientific monograph which the author is publishing elsewhere, serves for the first time to set forth in simple language the technical details of giving such intelligence tests. the educational significance of the results to be obtained from careful measurements of the intelligence of children can hardly be overestimated. questions relating to the choice of studies, vocational guidance, schoolroom procedure, the grading of pupils, promotional schemes, the study of the retardation of children in the schools, juvenile delinquency, and the proper handling of subnormals on the one hand and gifted children on the other,--all alike acquire new meaning and significance when viewed in the light of the measurement of intelligence as outlined in this volume. as a guide to the interpretation of the results of other forms of investigation relating to the work, progress, and needs of children, intelligence tests form a very valuable aid. more than all other forms of data combined, such tests give the necessary information from which a pupil's possibilities of future mental growth can be foretold, and upon which his further education can be most profitably directed. the publication of this revision and extension of the original binet-simon scale for measuring intelligence, with the closer adaptation of it to american conditions and needs, should mark a distinct step in advance in our educational procedure. it means the perfection of another and a very important measuring stick for evaluating educational practices, and in particular for diagnosing individual possibilities and needs. just now the method is new, and its use somewhat limited, but it is the confident prediction of many students of the subject that, before long, intelligence tests will become as much a matter of necessary routine in schoolroom procedure as a blood-count now is in physical diagnosis. that our schoolroom methods will in turn become much more intelligent, and that all classes of children, but especially the gifted and the slow, will profit by such intellectual diagnosis, there can be but little question. that any parent or teacher, without training, can give these tests, the author in no way contends. however, the observations of dr. kohs, cited in chapter vii, as well as the experience of the author and others who have given courses in intelligence testing to teachers, alike indicate that sufficient skill to enable teachers and school principals to give such tests intelligently is not especially difficult to acquire. this being the case it may be hoped that the requisite training to enable them to handle these tests may be included, very soon, as a part of the necessary pedagogical equipment of those who aspire to administrative positions in our public and private schools. besides being of special importance to school officers and to students of education in colleges and normal schools, this volume can confidently be recommended to physicians and social workers, and to teachers and parents interested in intelligence measurements, as at once the simplest and the best explanation of the newly-evolved intelligence tests, which has so far appeared in print. ellwood p. cubberley. preface the constant and growing use of the binet-simon intelligence scale in public schools, institutions for defectives, reform schools, juvenile courts, and police courts is sufficient evidence of the intrinsic worth of the method. it is generally recognized, however, that the serviceableness of the scale has hitherto been seriously limited, both by the lack of a sufficiently detailed guide and by a number of recognized imperfections in the scale itself. the stanford revision and extension has been worked out for the purpose of correcting as many as possible of these imperfections, and it is here presented with a rather minute description of the method as a whole and of the individual tests. the aim has been to present the explanations and instructions so clearly and in such an untechnical form as to make the book of use, not only to the psychologist, but also to the rank and file of teachers, physicians, and social workers. more particularly, it is designed as a text for use in normal schools, colleges, and teachers' reading-circles. while the use of the intelligence scale for research purposes and for accurate diagnosis will of necessity always be restricted to those who have had extensive training in experimental psychology, the author believes that the time has come when its wider use for more general purposes should be encouraged. however, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that no one, whatever his previous training may have been, can make proper use of the scale unless he is willing to learn the method of procedure and scoring down to the minutest detail. a general acquaintance with the nature of the individual tests is by no means sufficient. perhaps the best way to learn the method will be to begin by studying the book through, in order to gain a general acquaintance with the tests; then, if possible, to observe a few examinations; and finally to take up the procedure for detailed study in connection with practice testing. twenty or thirty tests, made with constant reference to the procedure as described in part ii, should be sufficient to prepare the teacher or physician to make profitable use of the scale. the stanford revision of the scale is the result of a number of investigations, made possible by the coöperation of the author's graduate students. grateful acknowledgment is especially due to professor h. g. childs, miss grace lyman, dr. george ordahl, dr. louise ellison ordahl, miss neva galbreath, mr. wilford talbert, mr. j. harold williams, and mr. herbert e. knollin. without their assistance this book could not have been written. stanford university, _april, _. contents part i. problems and results chapter i the uses of intelligence tests intelligence tests of retarded school children. intelligence tests of the feeble-minded. intelligence tests of delinquents. intelligence tests of superior children. intelligence tests as a basis for grading. intelligence tests for vocational fitness. other uses of intelligence tests. chapter ii sources of error in judging intelligence are intelligence tests superfluous? the necessity of standards. the intelligence of retarded children usually overestimated. the intelligence of superior children usually underestimated. other fallacies in the estimation of intelligence. binet's questionnaire on teachers' methods of judging intelligence. binet's experiment on how teachers test intelligence. chapter iii description of the binet-simon method essential nature of the scale. how the scale was derived. list of tests. how the scale is used. special characteristics of the binet-simon method. the use of age standards. the kind of mental functions brought into play. binet would test "general intelligence." binet's conception of general intelligence. other conceptions of intelligence. guiding principles in choice and arrangement of tests. some avowed limitations of the binet tests. chapter iv nature of the stanford revision and extension sources of data. method of arriving at a revision. list of tests in the stanford revision and extension. summary of changes. effects of the revision on the mental ages secured. chapter v analysis of one thousand intelligence quotients the distribution of intelligence. the validity of the intelligence quotient. sex differences. intelligence of the different social classes. the relation of the i q to the quality of the child's school work. the relation between i q and grade progress. correlation between i q and the teachers' estimates of the children's intelligence. the validity of the individual tests. chapter vi the significance of various intelligence quotients frequency of different degrees of intelligence. classification of intelligence quotients. feeble-mindedness. border-line cases. examples of border-line deficiency. dull normals. average intelligence. superior intelligence. very superior intelligence. examples of very superior intelligence. genius and "near" genius. is the i q often misleading? chapter vii reliability of the binet-simon method general value of the method. dependence of the scale's reliability on the training of the examiner. influence of the subject's attitude. the influence of coaching. reliability of repeated tests. influence of social and educational advantages. part ii guide for the use of the stanford revision and extension chapter viii general instructions necessity of securing attention and effort. quiet and seclusion. presence of others. getting into _rapport_. keeping the child encouraged. the importance of tact. personality of the examiner. the avoidance of fatigue. duration of the examination. desirable range of testing. order of giving the tests. coaxing to be avoided. adhering to formula. scoring. recording responses. scattering of successes. supplementary considerations. alternative tests. finding mental age. the use of the intelligence quotient. how to find the i q of adult subjects. material for use in testing. chapter ix instructions for year iii . pointing to parts of the body . naming familiar objects . enumeration of objects in pictures . giving sex . giving the family name . repeating six to seven syllables alternative test: repeating three digits chapter x instructions for year iv . comparison of lines . discrimination of forms . counting four pennies . copying a square . comprehension, first degree . repeating four digits alternative test: repeating twelve to thirteen syllables chapter xi instructions for year v . comparison of weights . naming colors . Æsthetic comparison . giving definitions in terms of use . the game of patience . three commissions alternative test: giving age chapter xii instructions for year vi . distinguishing right and left . finding omissions in pictures . counting thirteen pennies . comprehension, second degree . naming four coins . repeating sixteen to eighteen syllables alternative test: forenoon and afternoon chapter xiii instructions for year vii . giving the number of fingers . description of pictures . repeating five digits . tying a bow-knot . giving differences from memory . copying a diamond alternative test  : naming the days of the week alternative test  : repeating three digits reversed chapter xiv instructions for year viii . the ball-and-field test . counting backwards from  to  . comprehension, third degree . giving similarities, two things . giving definitions superior to use . vocabulary (  definitions,  words) alternative test  : naming six coins alternative test  : writing from dictation chapter xv instructions for year ix . giving the date . arranging five weights . making change . repeating four digits reversed . using three words in a sentence . finding rhymes alternative test  : naming the months alternative test  : counting the value of stamps chapter xvi instructions for year x . vocabulary (  definitions,  words) . detecting absurdities . drawing designs from memory . reading for eight memories . comprehension, fourth degree . naming sixty words alternative test  : repeating six digits alternative test  : repeating twenty to twenty-two syllables alternative test  : healy's construction puzzle a chapter xvii instructions for year xii . vocabulary (  definitions,  words) . defining abstract words . the ball-and-field test (superior plan) . dissected sentences . interpretation of fables (score  ) . repeating five digits reversed . interpretation of pictures . giving similarities, three things chapter xviii instructions for year xiv . vocabulary (  definitions,  words) . induction test: finding a rule . giving differences between a president and a king . problem questions . arithmetical reasoning . reversing hands of a clock alternative test: repeating seven digits chapter xix instructions for "average adult" . vocabulary (  definitions, ,  words) . interpretation of fables (score ) . differences between abstract terms . problem of the enclosed boxes . repeating six digits reversed . using a code alternative test  : repeating twenty-eight syllables alternative test  : comprehension of physical relations chapter xx instructions for "superior adult" . vocabulary (  definitions, ,  words) . binet's paper-cutting test . repeating eight digits . repeating thought of passage . repeating seven digits reversed . ingenuity test selected references index figures and diagrams . distribution of mental ages of normal adults . distribution of i q's of unselected children, -  years of age . median i q of  boys and  girls, for the ages -  years . diamond drawn by r. w.; age  - ; mental age  - . writing from dictation. r. m., age  ; mental age  . ball and field test. i. m., age  - ; mental age  . diamond drawn by a. w. . drawing designs from memory. h. s., age  ; mental age  - . ball and field test. s. f., age  ; mental age  - . writing from dictation. c. p., age  - ; mental age  - . ball and field test. m. p., age  ; mental age  - . ball and field test. r. g., age  - ; mental age  - . ball and field test. e. b., age  - ; i q  . ball and field test. f. mca., age  - ; mental age  - . drawing designs from memory. e. m., age  - ; mental age  , i q  . ball and field test. b. f., age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  . healy and fernald construction puzzle the measurement of intelligence part i problems and results the measurement of intelligence chapter i the uses of intelligence tests intelligence tests of retarded school children. numerous studies of the age-grade progress of school children have afforded convincing evidence of the magnitude and seriousness of the retardation problem. statistics collected in hundreds of cities in the united states show that between a third and a half of the school children fail to progress through the grades at the expected rate; that from  to   per cent are retarded two years or more; and that from  to   per cent are retarded at least three years. more than  per cent of the $ , , annually expended in the united states for school instruction is devoted to re-teaching children what they have already been taught but have failed to learn. the first efforts at reform which resulted from these findings were based on the supposition that the evils which had been discovered could be remedied by the individualizing of instruction, by improved methods of promotion, by increased attention to children's health, and by other reforms in school administration. although reforms along these lines have been productive of much good, they have nevertheless been in a measure disappointing. the trouble was, they were too often based upon the assumption that under the right conditions all children would be equally, or almost equally, capable of making satisfactory school progress. psychological studies of school children by means of standardized intelligence tests have shown that this supposition is not in accord with the facts. it has been found that children do not fall into two well-defined groups, the "feeble-minded" and the "normal." instead, there are many grades of intelligence, ranging from idiocy on the one hand to genius on the other. among those classed as normal, vast individual differences have been found to exist in original mental endowment, differences which affect profoundly the capacity to profit from school instruction. we are beginning to realize that the school must take into account, more seriously than it has yet done, the existence and significance of these differences in endowment. instead of wasting energy in the vain attempt to hold mentally slow and defective children up to a level of progress which is normal to the average child, it will be wiser to take account of the inequalities of children in original endowment and to differentiate the course of study in such a way that each child will be allowed to progress at the rate which is normal to him, whether that rate be rapid or slow. while we cannot hold all children to the same standard of school progress, we can at least prevent the kind of retardation which involves failure and the repetition of a school grade. it is well enough recognized that children do not enter with very much zest upon school work in which they have once failed. failure crushes self-confidence and destroys the spirit of work. it is a sad fact that a large proportion of children in the schools are acquiring the habit of failure. the remedy, of course, is to measure out the work for each child in proportion to his mental ability. before an engineer constructs a railroad bridge or trestle, he studies the materials to be used, and learns by means of tests exactly the amount of strain per unit of size his materials will be able to withstand. he does not work empirically, and count upon patching up the mistakes which may later appear under the stress of actual use. the educational engineer should emulate this example. tests and forethought must take the place of failure and patchwork. our efforts have been too long directed by "trial and error." it is time to leave off guessing and to acquire a scientific knowledge of the material with which we have to deal. when instruction must be repeated, it means that the school, as well as the pupil, has failed. every child who fails in his school work or is in danger of failing should be given a mental examination. the examination takes less than one hour, and the result will contribute more to a real understanding of the case than anything else that could be done. it is necessary to determine whether a given child is unsuccessful in school because of poor native ability, or because of poor instruction, lack of interest, or some other removable cause. it is not sufficient to establish any number of special classes, if they are to be made the dumping-ground for all kinds of troublesome cases--the feeble-minded, the physically defective, the merely backward, the truants, the incorrigibles, etc. without scientific diagnosis and classification of these children the educational work of the special class must blunder along in the dark. in such diagnosis and classification our main reliance must always be in mental tests, properly used and properly interpreted. intelligence tests of the feeble-minded. thus far intelligence tests have found their chief application in the identification and grading of the feeble-minded. their value for this purpose is twofold. in the first place, it is necessary to ascertain the degree of defect before it is possible to decide intelligently upon either the content or the method of instruction suited to the training of the backward child. in the second place, intelligence tests are rapidly extending our conception of "feeble-mindedness" to include milder degrees of defect than have generally been associated with this term. the earlier methods of diagnosis caused a majority of the higher grade defectives to be overlooked. previous to the development of psychological methods the low-grade moron was about as high a type of defective as most physicians or even psychologists were able to identify as feeble-minded. wherever intelligence tests have been made in any considerable number in the schools, they have shown that not far from  per cent of the children enrolled have a grade of intelligence which, however long they live, will never develop beyond the level which is normal to the average child of  or   years. the large majority of these belong to the moron grade; that is, their mental development will stop somewhere between the -year and -year level of intelligence, more often between  and  . the more we learn about such children, the clearer it becomes that they must be looked upon as real defectives. they may be able to drag along to the fourth, fifth, or sixth grades, but even by the age of  or   years they are never able to cope successfully with the more abstract and difficult parts of the common-school course of study. they may master a certain amount of rote learning, such as that involved in reading and in the manipulation of number combinations but they cannot be taught to meet new conditions effectively or to think, reason, and judge as normal persons do. it is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. this will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. it is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for the state to assume. intelligence tests of delinquents. one of the most important facts brought to light by the use of intelligence tests is the frequent association of delinquency and mental deficiency. although it has long been recognized that the proportion of feeble-mindedness among offenders is rather large, the real amount has, until recently, been underestimated even by the most competent students of criminology. the criminologists have been accustomed to give more attention to the physical than to the mental correlates of crime. thus, lombroso and his followers subjected thousands of criminals to observation and measurement with regard to such physical traits as size and shape of the skull, bilateral asymmetries, anomalies of the ear, eye, nose, palate, teeth, hands, fingers, hair, dermal sensitivity, etc. the search was for physical "stigmata" characteristic of the "criminal type." although such studies performed an important service in creating a scientific interest in criminology, the theories of lombroso have been wholly discredited by the results of intelligence tests. such tests have demonstrated, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the most important trait of at least  per cent of our criminals is mental weakness. the physical abnormalities which have been found so common among prisoners are not the stigmata of criminality, but the physical accompaniments of feeble-mindedness. they have no diagnostic significance except in so far as they are indications of mental deficiency. without exception, every study which has been made of the intelligence level of delinquents has furnished convincing testimony as to the close relation existing between mental weakness and moral abnormality. some of these findings are as follows:-- miss renz tested  girls of the ohio state reformatory and reported  per cent as certainly feeble-minded. in every one of these cases the commitment papers had given the pronouncement "intellect sound." under the direction of dr. goddard the binet tests were given to juvenile court cases, chosen at random, in newark, new jersey. nearly half were classified as feeble-minded. one boy  years old had -year intelligence; another of ½ had -year intelligence. of delinquent girls  to   years of age tested by hill and goddard, almost half belonged either to the - or the -year level of intelligence. dr. g. g. fernald's tests of  prisoners at the massachusetts state reformatory showed that at least  per cent were feeble-minded. of  girls tested by miss dewson at the state industrial school for girls at lancaster, pennsylvania,  per cent were found to have subnormal intelligence. dr. katherine bement davis's report on  cases entered in the bedford home for women, new york, stated that there was no doubt but that at least were feeble-minded. recently there has been established at this institution one of the most important research laboratories of the kind in the united states, with a trained psychologist, dr. mabel fernald, in charge. of  prostitutes investigated by dr. anna dwyer in connection with the municipal court of chicago, only  per cent had gone beyond the fifth grade in school. mental tests were not made, but from the data given it is reasonably certain that half or more were feeble-minded. tests, by dr. george ordahl and dr. louise ellison ordahl, of cases in the geneva school for girls, geneva, illinois, showed that, on a conservative basis of classification, at least  per cent were feeble-minded. at the joliet prison, illinois, the same authors found  per cent of the female prisoners feeble-minded, and  per cent of the male prisoners. at the st. charles school for boys  per cent were feeble-minded. tests, by dr. j. harold williams, of  delinquents in the whittier state school for boys, whittier, california, gave  per cent feeble-minded and  per cent at or near the border-line. about other juvenile delinquents tested by mr. williams gave approximately the same figures. as a result of these findings a research laboratory has been established at the whittier school, with dr. williams in charge. in the girls' division of the whittier school, dr. grace fernald collected a large amount of psychological data on more than delinquent girls. the findings of this investigation agree closely with those of dr. williams for the boys. at the state reformatory, jeffersonville, indiana, dr. von klein-schmid, in an unusually thorough psychological study of young adult prisoners, finds the proportion of feeble-mindedness not far from  per cent. but it is needless to multiply statistics. those given are but samples. tests are at present being made in most of the progressive prisons, reform schools, and juvenile courts throughout the country, and while there are minor discrepancies in regard to the actual percentage who are feeble-minded, there is no investigator who denies the fearful rôle played by mental deficiency in the production of vice, crime, and delinquency.[ ] [ ] see references at end of volume. heredity studies of "degenerate" families have confirmed, in a striking way, the testimony secured by intelligence tests. among the best known of such families are the "kallikaks," the "jukes," the "hill folk," the "nams," the "zeros," and the "ishmaelites." _the kallikak family._ martin kallikak was a youthful soldier in the revolutionary war. at a tavern frequented by the militia he met a feeble-minded girl, by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. in there were known direct descendants of this temporary union. it is known that of these were illegitimates, that were sexually immoral, that were confirmed alcoholics, and that kept houses of ill-fame. the explanation of so much immorality will be obvious when it is stated that of the  descendants, were known to be feeble-minded, and that many of the others were of questionable mentality. a few years after returning from the war this same martin kallikak married a respectable girl of good family. from this union  individuals have been traced in direct descent, and in this branch of the family there were no illegitimate children, no immoral women, and only one man who was sexually loose. there were no criminals, no keepers of houses of ill-fame, and only two confirmed alcoholics. again the explanation is clear when it is stated that this branch of the family did not contain a single feeble-minded individual. it was made up of doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, and landholders.[ ] [ ] h. h. goddard: _the kallikak family_. ( .)  pp. _the hill folk._ the hill folk are a new england family of which  persons have been traced. of the married women,  per cent had given birth to illegitimate offspring, and  per cent were prostitutes. criminal tendencies were clearly shown in  members of the family, while alcoholism was still more common. the proportion of feeble-minded was  per cent. it was estimated that the hill folk have in the last sixty years cost the state of massachusetts, in charitable relief, care of feeble-minded, epileptic, and insane, conviction and punishment for crime, prostitution pauperism, etc., at least $ , .[ ] [ ] danielson and davenport: _the hill folk_. eugenics record office, memoir no.  . .  pp. the nam family and the jukes give equally dark pictures as regards criminality, licentiousness, and alcoholism, and although feeble-mindedness was not as fully investigated in these families as in the kallikaks and the hill folk, the evidence is strong that it was a leading trait. the  nams who were traced included  alcoholics,  women and  men known to be licentious, and who became prisoners. it is estimated that the nams have already cost the state nearly $ , , .[ ] [ ] estabrook and davenport: _the nam family_. eugenics record office memoir no.  . ( ).  pp. of  jukes, practically one fifth were born out of wedlock, were known to be syphilitic, had been in the poorhouse, had been sentenced to prison, and of  women of marriageable age were prostitutes. the economic damage inflicted upon the state of new york by the jukes in seventy-five years was estimated at more than $ , , , to say nothing of diseases and other evil influences which they helped to spread.[ ] [ ] r. l. dugdale: _the jukes_. (fourth edition, .)  pp. g. p. putnam's sons. but why do the feeble-minded tend so strongly to become delinquent? the answer may be stated in simple terms. morality depends upon two things: (a) the ability to foresee and to weigh the possible consequences for self and others of different kinds of behavior; and (b) upon the willingness and capacity to exercise self-restraint. that there are many intelligent criminals is due to the fact that (a) may exist without (b). on the other hand, (b) presupposes (a). in other words, not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals. that every feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by any one. moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence. morality cannot flower and fruit if intelligence remains infantile. all of us in early childhood lacked moral responsibility. we were as rank egoists as any criminal. respect for the feelings, the property rights, or any other kind of rights, of others had to be laboriously acquired under the whip of discipline. but by degrees we learned that only when instincts are curbed, and conduct is made to conform to principles established formally or accepted tacitly by our neighbors, does this become a livable world for any of us. without the intelligence to generalize the particular, to foresee distant consequences of present acts, to weigh these foreseen consequences in the nice balance of imagination, morality cannot be learned. when the adult body, with its adult instincts, is coupled with the undeveloped intelligence and weak inhibitory powers of a -year-old child, the only possible outcome, except in those cases where constant guardianship is exercised by relatives or friends, is some form of delinquency. considering the tremendous cost of vice and crime, which in all probability amounts to not less than $ , , per year in the united states alone, it is evident that psychological testing has found here one of its richest applications. before offenders can be subjected to rational treatment a mental diagnosis is necessary, and while intelligence tests do not constitute a complete psychological diagnosis, they are, nevertheless, its most indispensable part. intelligence tests of superior children. the number of children with very superior ability is approximately as great as the number of feeble-minded. the future welfare of the country hinges, in no small degree, upon the right education of these superior children. whether civilization moves on and up depends most on the advances made by creative thinkers and leaders in science, politics, art, morality, and religion. moderate ability can follow, or imitate, but genius must show the way. through the leveling influences of the educational lockstep such children at present are often lost in the masses. it is a rare child who is able to break this lockstep by extra promotions. taking the country over, the ratio of "accelerates" to "retardates" in the school is approximately  to  . through the handicapping influences of poverty, social neglect, physical defects, or educational maladjustments, many potential leaders in science, art, government, and industry are denied the opportunity of a normal development. the use we have made of exceptional ability reminds one of the primitive methods of surface mining. it is necessary to explore the nation's hidden resources of intelligence. the common saying that "genius will out" is one of those dangerous half-truths with which too many people rest content. psychological tests show that children of superior ability are very likely to be misunderstood in school. the writer has tested more than a hundred children who were as much above average intelligence as moron defectives are below. the large majority of these were found located below the school grade warranted by their intellectual level. one third had failed to reap any advantage whatever, in terms of promotion, from their very superior intelligence. even genius languishes when kept over-long at tasks that are too easy. our data show that teachers sometimes fail entirely to recognize exceptional superiority in a pupil, and that the degree of such superiority is rarely estimated with anything like the accuracy which is possible to the psychologist after a one-hour examination. _b. f._, for example, was a little over ½ years old when tested. he was in the third grade, and was therefore thought by his teacher to be accelerated in school. this boy's intelligence, however, was found to be above the -year level. there is no doubt that his mental ability would have enabled him, with a few months of individual instruction, to carry fifth or even sixth-grade work as easily as third, and without injury to body or mind. nevertheless, the teacher and both the parents of this child had found nothing remarkable about him. in reality he belongs to a grade of genius not found oftener than once in several thousand cases. another illustration is that of a boy of ½ years who tested at the "average adult" level. he was doing superior work in the sixth grade, but according to the testimony of the teacher had "no unusual ability." it was ascertained from the parents that this boy, at an age when most children are reading fairy stories, had a passion for standard medical literature and textbooks in physical science. yet, after more than a year of daily contact with this young genius (who is a relative of meyerbeer, the composer), the teacher had discovered no symptoms of unusual ability.[ ] [ ] see p.   _ff._ for further illustrations of this kind. teachers should be better trained in detecting the signs of superior ability. every child who consistently gets high marks in his school work with apparent ease should be given a mental examination, and if his intelligence level warrants it he should either be given extra promotions, or placed in a special class for superior children where faster progress can be made. the latter is the better plan, because it obviates the necessity of skipping grades; it permits rapid but continuous progress. the usual reluctance of teachers to give extra promotions probably rests upon three factors: ( ) mere inertia; ( ) a natural unwillingness to part with exceptionally satisfactory pupils; and ( ) the traditional belief that precocious children should be held back for fear of dire physical or mental consequences. in order to throw light on the question whether exceptionally bright children are specially likely to be one-sided, nervous, delicate, morally abnormal, socially unadaptable, or otherwise peculiar, the writer has secured rather extensive information regarding  children whose mental age was found by intelligence tests to be  per cent above the actual age. this degree of intelligence is possessed by about  children out of , and is nearly as far above average intelligence as high-grade feeble-mindedness is below. the supplementary information, which was furnished in most cases by the teachers, may be summarized as follows:-- . _ability special or general._ in the case of out of the ability is decidedly general, and with it is mainly general. the talents of are described as more or less special, but only in one case is it remarkably so. doubtful . . _health._ are said to be perfectly healthy; have one or more physical defects; of the are described as delicate; have adenoids; have eye-defects; lisps; and stutters. these figures are about the same as one finds in any group of ordinary children. . _studiousness._ "extremely studious," ; "usually studious" or "fairly studious," ; "not particularly studious," ; "lazy," . . _moral traits._ favorable traits only, ; one or more unfavorable traits, ; no answer, . the eight with unfavorable moral traits are described as follows: are "very self-willed"; "needs close watching"; is "cruel to animals"; is "untruthful"; is "unreliable"; is "a bluffer"; is "sexually abnormal," "perverted," and "vicious." it will be noted that with the exception of the last child, the moral irregularities mentioned can hardly be regarded, from the psychological point of view, as essentially abnormal. it is perhaps a good rather than a bad sign for a child to be self-willed; most children "need close watching"; and a certain amount of untruthfulness in children is the rule and not the exception. . _social adaptability._ socially adaptable, ; not adaptable, ; doubtful, . . _attitude of other children._ "favorable," "friendly," "liked by everybody," "much admired," "popular," etc., ; "not liked," ; "inspires repugnance," ; no answer, . . _is child a leader?_ "yes," ; "no," or "not particularly," ; doubtful, . . _is play life normal?_ "yes," ; "no," ; "hardly," ; doubtful, . . _is child spoiled or vain?_ "no," ; "yes," ; "somewhat," ; no answer, . according to the above data, exceptionally intelligent children are fully as likely to be healthy as ordinary children; their ability is far more often general than special, they are studious above the average, really serious faults are not common among them, they are nearly always socially adaptable, are sought after as playmates and companions, their play life is usually normal, they are leaders far oftener than other children, and notwithstanding their many really superior qualities they are seldom vain or spoiled. it would be greatly to the advantage of such children if their superior ability were more promptly and fully recognized, and if (under proper medical supervision, of course) they were promoted as rapidly as their mental development would warrant. unless they are given the grade of work which calls forth their best efforts, they run the risk of falling into lifelong habits of submaximum efficiency. the danger in the case of such children is not over-pressure, but under-pressure. intelligence tests as a basis for grading. not only in the case of retarded or exceptionally bright children, but with many others also, intelligence tests can aid in correctly placing the child in school. the pupil who enters one school system from another is a case in point. such a pupil nearly always suffers a loss of time. the indefensible custom is to grade the newcomer down a little, because, forsooth, the textbooks he has studied may have differed somewhat from those he is about to take up, or because the school system from which he comes may be looked upon as inferior. teachers are too often suspicious of all other educational methods besides their own. the present treatment accorded such children, which so often does them injustice and injury, should be replaced by an intelligence test. the hour of time required for the test is a small matter in comparison with the loss of a school term by the pupils. indeed, it would be desirable to make all promotions on the basis chiefly of intellectual ability. hitherto the school has had to rely on tests of information because reliable tests of intelligence have not until recently been available. as trained binet examiners become more plentiful, the information standard will have to give way to the criterion which asks merely that the child shall be able to do the work of the next higher grade. the brief intelligence test is not only more enlightening than the examination; it is also more hygienic. the school examination is often for the child a source of worry and anxiety; the mental test is an interesting and pleasant experience. intelligence tests for vocational fitness. the time is probably not far distant when intelligence tests will become a recognized and widely used instrument for determining vocational fitness. of course, it is not claimed that tests are available which will tell us unerringly exactly what one of a thousand or more occupations a given individual is best fitted to pursue. but when thousands of children who have been tested by the binet scale have been followed out into the industrial world, and their success in various occupations noted, we shall know fairly definitely the vocational significance of any given degree of mental inferiority or superiority. researches of this kind will ultimately determine the minimum "intelligence quotient" necessary for success in each leading occupation. industrial concerns doubtless suffer enormous losses from the employment of persons whose mental ability is not equal to the tasks they are expected to perform. the present methods of trying out new employees, transferring them to simpler and simpler jobs as their inefficiency becomes apparent, is wasteful and to a great extent unnecessary. a cheaper and more satisfactory method would be to employ a psychologist to examine applicants for positions and to weed out the unfit. any business employing as many as five hundred or a thousand workers, as, for example, a large department store, could save in this way several times the salary of a well-trained psychologist. that the industrially inefficient are often of subnormal intelligence has already been demonstrated in a number of psychological investigations. of "hoboes" tested under the direction of the writer by mr. knollin, at least  per cent belonged to the moron grade of mental deficiency, and almost as many more were border-line cases. to be sure, a large proportion were found perfectly normal, and a few even decidedly superior in mental ability, but the ratio of mental deficiency was ten or fifteen times as high as that holding for the general population. several had as low as - or -year intelligence, and one had a mental level of  years. the industrial history of such subjects, as given by themselves, was always about what the mental level would lead us to expect--unskilled work, lack of interest in accomplishment, frequent discharge from jobs, discouragement, and finally the "road." the above findings have been fully paralleled by mr. glenn johnson and professor eleanor rowland, of reed college, who tested unemployed charity cases in portland, oregon. both of these investigators made use of the stanford revision of the binet scale, which is especially serviceable in distinguishing the upper-grade defectives from normals. it hardly needs to be emphasized that when charity organizations help the feeble-minded to float along in the social and industrial world, and to produce and rear children after their kind, a doubtful service is rendered. a little psychological research would aid the united charities of any city to direct their expenditures into more profitable channels than would otherwise be possible. other uses of intelligence tests. another important use of intelligence tests is in the study of the factors which influence mental development. it is desirable that we should be able to guard the child against influences which affect mental development unfavorably; but as long as these influences have not been sifted, weighed, and measured, we have nothing but conjecture on which to base our efforts in this direction. when we search the literature of child hygiene for reliable evidence as to the injurious effects upon mental ability of malnutrition, decayed teeth, obstructed breathing, reduced sleep, bad ventilation, insufficient exercise, etc., we are met by endless assertion painfully unsupported by demonstrated fact. we have, indeed, very little exact knowledge regarding the mental effects of any of the factors just mentioned. when standardized mental tests have come into more general use, such influences will be easy to detect wherever they are really present. again, the most important question of heredity is that regarding the inheritance of intelligence; but this is a problem which cannot be attacked at all without some accurate means of identifying the thing which is the object of study. without the use of scales for measuring intelligence we can give no better answer as to the essential difference between a genius and a fool than is to be found in legend and fiction. applying this to school children, it means that without such tests we cannot know to what extent a child's mental performances are determined by environment and to what extent by heredity. is the place of the so-called lower classes in the social and industrial scale the result of their inferior native endowment, or is their apparent inferiority merely a result of their inferior home and school training? is genius more common among children of the educated classes than among the children of the ignorant and poor? are the inferior races really inferior, or are they merely unfortunate in their lack of opportunity to learn? only intelligence tests can answer these questions and grade the raw material with which education works. without them we can never distinguish the results of our educational efforts with a given child from the influence of the child's original endowment. such tests would have told us, for example, whether the much-discussed "wonder children," such as the sidis and wiener boys and the stoner girl, owe their precocious intellectual prowess to superior training (as their parents believe) or to superior native ability. the supposed effects upon mental development of new methods of mind training, which are exploited so confidently from time to time (e.g., the montessori method and the various systems of sensory and motor training for the feeble-minded), will have to be checked up by the same kind of scientific measurement. in all these fields intelligence tests are certain to play an ever-increasing rôle. with the exception of moral character there is nothing as significant for a child's future as his grade of intelligence. even health itself is likely to have less influence in determining success in life. although strength and swiftness have always had great survival value among the lower animals, these characteristics have long since lost their supremacy in man's struggle for existence. for us the rule of brawn has been broken, and intelligence has become the decisive factor in success. schools, railroads, factories, and the largest commercial concerns may be successfully managed by persons who are physically weak or even sickly. one who has intelligence constantly measures opportunities against his own strength or weakness and adjusts himself to conditions by following those leads which promise most toward the realization of his individual possibilities. all classes of intellects, the weakest as well as the strongest, will profit by the application of their talents to tasks which are consonant with their ability. when we have learned the lessons which intelligence tests have to teach, we shall no longer blame mentally defective workmen for their industrial inefficiency, punish weak-minded children because of their inability to learn, or imprison and hang mentally defective criminals because they lacked the intelligence to appreciate the ordinary codes of social conduct. chapter ii sources of error in judging intelligence are intelligence tests superfluous? binet tells us that he often encountered the criticism that intelligence tests are superfluous, and that in going to so much trouble to devise his measuring scale he was forcing an open door. those who made this criticism believed that the observant teacher or parent is able to make an offhand estimate of a child's intelligence which is accurate enough. "it is a stupid teacher," said one, "who needs a psychologist to tell her which pupils are not intelligent." every one who uses intelligence tests meets this attitude from time to time. this should not be surprising or discouraging. it is only natural that those who are unfamiliar with the methods of psychology should occasionally question their validity or worth, just as there are many excellent people who do not "believe in" vaccination against typhoid and small pox, operations for appendicitis, etc. there is an additional reason why the applications of psychology have to overcome a good deal of conservatism and skepticism; namely, the fact that every one, whether psychologically trained or not, acquires in the ordinary experiences of life a certain degree of expertness in the observation and interpretation of mental traits. the possession of this little fund of practical working knowledge makes most people slow to admit any one's claim to greater expertness. when the astronomer tells us the distance to jupiter, we accept his statement, because we recognize that our ordinary experience affords no basis for judgment about such matters. but every one acquires more or less facility in distinguishing the coarser differences among people in intelligence, and this half-knowledge naturally generates a certain amount of resistance to the more refined method of tests. it should be evident, however, that we need more than the ability merely to distinguish a genius from a simpleton, just as a physician needs something more than the ability to distinguish an athlete from a man dying of consumption. it is necessary to have a definite and accurate diagnosis, one which will differentiate more finely the many degrees and qualities of intelligence. just as in the case of physical illness, we need to know not merely that the patient is sick, but also why he is sick, what organs are involved, what course the illness will run, and what physical work the patient can safely undertake, so in the case of a retarded child, we need to know the exact degree of intellectual deficiency, what mental functions are chiefly concerned in the defect, whether the deficiency is due to innate endowment, to physical illness, or to faults of education, and what lines of mental activity the child will be able to pursue with reasonable hope of success. in the diagnosis of a case of malnutrition, the up-to-date physician does not depend upon general symptoms, but instead makes a blood test to determine the exact number of red corpuscles per cubic millimeter of blood and the exact percentage of hæmoglobin. he has learned that external appearances are often misleading. similarly, every psychologist who is experienced in the mental examination of school children knows that his own or the teacher's estimate of a child's intelligence is subject to grave and frequent error. the necessity of standards. in the first place, in order to judge an individual's intelligence it is necessary to have in mind some standard as to what constitutes normal intelligence. this the ordinary parent or teacher does not have. in the case of school children, for example, each pupil is judged with reference to the average intelligence of the class. but the teacher has no means of knowing whether the average for her class is above, equal to, or below that for children in general. her standard may be too high, too low, vague, mechanical, or fragmentary. the same, of course, holds in the case of parents or any one else attempting to estimate intelligence on the basis of common observation. the intelligence of retarded children usually overestimated. one of the most common errors made by the teacher is to overestimate the intelligence of the over-age pupil. this is because she fails to take account of age differences and estimates intelligence on the basis of the child's school performance in the grade where he happens to be located. she tends to overlook the fact that quality of school work is no index of intelligence unless age is taken into account. the question should be, not, "is this child doing his school work well?" but rather, "in what school grade should a child of this age be able to do satisfactory work?" a high-grade imbecile may do average work in the first grade, and a high-grade moron average work in the third or fourth grade, provided only they are sufficiently over-age for the grade in question. our experience in testing children for segregation in special classes has time and again brought this fallacy of teachers to our attention. we have often found one or more feeble-minded children in a class after the teacher had confidently asserted that there was not a single exceptionally dull child present. in every case where there has been opportunity to follow the later school progress of such a child the validity of the intelligence test has been fully confirmed. the following are typical examples of the neglect of teachers to take the age factor into account when estimating the intelligence of the over-age child:-- _a. r. girl, age  ; in low second grade._ she was able to do the work of this grade, not well, but passably. the teacher's judgment as to this child's intelligence was "dull but not defective." what the teacher overlooked was the fact that she had judged the child by a -year standard, and that, instead of only being able to do the work of the second grade indifferently, a child of this age should have been equal to the work of the fifth grade. in reality, a. r. is definitely feeble-minded. although she is from a home of average culture, is  years old, and has attended school five years, she has barely the intelligence of the average child of six years. _d. c. boy, age  ; in fifth grade._ his teacher knew that he was dull, but had not thought of him as belonging to the class of feeble-minded. she had judged this boy by the -year standard and had perhaps been further misled by his normal appearance and exceptionally satisfactory behavior. the binet test quickly showed that he had a mental level of approximately  years. there is little probability that his comprehension will ever surpass that of the average -year-old. _r. a. boy, age  ; mental age  ; sixth grade; school work "nearly average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ test plainly shows this child to be a high-grade moron, or border-liner at best. had attended school regularly  years and had made  grades. teacher had compared child with his -year-old classmates. _h. a. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; low fourth grade; school work "inferior"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ the teacher blamed the inferior quality of school work to "bad home environment." as a matter of fact, the boy's father is feeble-minded and the normality of the mother is questionable. an older brother is in a reform school. we are perfectly safe in predicting that this boy will not complete the eighth grade even if he attends school till he is  years of age. _f. i. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; third grade; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average"; social environment "average"; health good and attendance regular._ intelligence and school success are what we should expect of an average -year-old. _d. a. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; third grade; school work "inferior"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ teacher imputes inferior school work to "absence from school and lack of interest in books"; we have yet to find a child with a mental age   per cent below chronological age who _was_ particularly interested in books or enthusiastic about school. _c. u. girl, age  ; mental age  - ; second grade; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ teacher blames adenoids and bad teeth for retardation. no doubt of child's mental deficiency. _p. i. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; has been in first grade ½ years; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ the mother and one brother of this girl are both feeble-minded. _h. o. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; first grade for  years; school work "inferior"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ the teacher nevertheless adds, "this child is not normal, but her ability to respond to drill shows that she has intelligence." it is of course true that even feeble-minded children of -year intelligence are able to profit a little from drill. their weakness comes to light in their inability to perform higher types of mental activity. the intelligence of superior children usually underestimated. we have already mentioned the frequent failure of teachers and parents to recognize superior ability.[ ] the fallacy here is again largely due to the neglect of the age factor, but the resulting error is in the opposite direction from that set forth above. the superior child is likely to be a year or two younger than the average child of his grade, and is accordingly judged by a standard which is too high. the following are illustrations:-- [ ] see p.   _ff._ _m. l. girl, age  - ; mental age "average adult" ( ); sixth grade; school work "superior"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ teacher credits superior school work to "unusual home advantages." father a college professor. the teacher considers the child accelerated in school. in reality she ought to be in the second year of high school instead of in the sixth grade. _h. a. boy, age  ; mental age  ; sixth grade; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ according to the supplementary information the boy is "wonderfully attentive," "studious," and possessed of "all-round ability." the estimate of "average intelligence" was probably the result of comparing him with classmates who averaged about a year older. _k. r. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; second grade; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "superior"; social environment "average."_ is it not evident that a child from ordinary social environment, who does work of average quality in the second grade when barely  years of age, should be judged "very superior" rather than merely "superior" in intelligence? the intelligence quotient of this girl is , which is not reached by more than one child in two hundred. _s. a. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; fourth grade; school work "average"; teacher's estimate of intelligence "average."_ teacher attributed school acceleration to "studiousness" and "delight in school work." it would be more reasonable to infer that these traits are indications of unusually superior intelligence. other fallacies in the estimation of intelligence. another source of error in the teacher's judgment comes from the difficulty in distinguishing genuine dullness from the mental condition which results sometimes from unfavorable social environment or lack of training. _v. p. boy, age  ._ had attended school one year and had profited very little from the instruction. he had learned to read very little, spoke chiefly in monosyllables, and seemed "queer." the teacher suspected his intelligence and asked for a mental examination. the binet test showed that except for vocabulary, which was unusually low, there was practically no mental retardation. inquiry disclosed the fact that the boy's parents were uneducated deaf-mutes, and that the boy had associated little with other children. four years later this boy was doing fairly well in school, though a year retarded because of his unfavorable home environment. _x. y. boy, age  ._ son of a successful business man, he was barely able to read in the second reader. the binet test revealed an intelligence level which was absolutely normal. the boy was removed to a special class where he could receive individual attention, and two years later was found doing good work in a regular class of the fifth grade. his bad beginning seemed to have been due to an unfavorable attitude toward school work, due in turn to lack of discipline in the home, and to the fact that because of the father's frequent change of business headquarters the boy had never attended one school longer than three months. another source of error in judging intelligence from common observation is the tendency to overestimate the intelligence of the sprightly, talkative, sanguine child, and to underestimate the intelligence of the child who is less emotional, reacts slowly, and talks little. one occasionally finds a feeble-minded adult, perhaps of only - or -year intelligence, whose verbal fluency, mental liveliness, and self-confidence would mislead the offhand judgment of even the psychologist. one individual of this type, a border-line case at best, was accustomed to harangue street audiences and had served as "major" in "kelly's army," a horde of several hundred unemployed men who a few years ago organized and started to march from san francisco to washington. binet's questionnaire on teachers' methods of judging intelligence.[ ] aroused by the skepticism so often shown toward his test method, binet decided to make a little study of the methods by which teachers are accustomed to arrive at a judgment as to a child's intelligence. accordingly, through the coöperation of the director of elementary education in paris, he secured answers from a number of teachers to the following questions:-- [ ] see p.   _ff._ of reference  , at end of this book . _by what means do you judge the intelligence of your pupils?_ . _how often have you been deceived in your judgments?_ about  replies were received. most of the answers to the first question were vague, one-sided, "verbal," or bookish. only a few showed much psychological discrimination as to what intelligence is and what its symptoms are. there was a very general tendency to judge intelligence by success in one or more of the school studies. some thought that ability to master arithmetic was a sure criterion. others were influenced almost entirely by the pupil's ability to read. one teacher said that the child who can "read so expressively as to make you feel the punctuation" is certainly intelligent, an observation which is rather good, as far as it goes. a few judged intelligence by the pupil's knowledge of such subjects as history and geography, which, as binet points out, is to confound intelligence with the ability to memorize. "memory," says binet, is a "great simulator of intelligence." it is a wise teacher who is not deceived by it. only a small minority mentioned resourcefulness in play, capacity to adjust to practical situations, or any other out-of-school criteria. some suggested asking the pupil such questions as the following:-- "why do you love your parents?" "if it takes three persons seven hours to do a piece of work, would it take seven persons any longer?" "which would you rather have, a fourth of a pie, or a half of a half?" "which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?" "if you had twenty cents what would you do with it?" a great many based their judgment mainly on the general appearance of the face and eyes. an "active" or "passive" expression of the eyes was looked upon as especially significant. one teacher thought that a mere "glance of the eye" was sufficient to display the grade of intelligence. if the eyes are penetrating, reflective, or show curiosity, the child must be intelligent; if they are heavy and expressionless, he must be dull. the mobility of countenance came in for frequent mention, also the shape of the head. no one will deny that intelligence displays itself to a greater or less extent in the features; but how, asks binet, are we going to _standardize_ a "glance of the eye" or an "expression of curiosity" so that it will serve as an exact measure of intelligence? the fact is, the more one sees of feeble-minded children, the less reliance one comes to place upon facial expression as a sign of intelligence. some children who are only slightly backward have the general appearance of low-grade imbeciles. on the other hand, not a few who are distinctly feeble-minded are pretty and attractive. with many such children a ready smile takes the place of comprehension. if the smile is rather sweet and sympathetic, as is often the case, the observer is almost sure to be deceived. as regards the shape of the head, peculiar conformation of the ears, and other "stigmata," science long ago demonstrated that these are ordinarily of little or no significance. in reply to the second question, some teachers stated that they never made a mistake, while others admitted failure in one case out of three. still others said, "once in ten years," "once in twenty years," "once in a thousand times," etc. as binet remarks, the answers to this question are not very enlightening. in the first place, the teacher as a rule loses sight of the pupil when he has passed from her care, and seldom has opportunity of finding out whether his later success belies her judgment or confirms it. errors go undiscovered for the simple reason that there is no opportunity to check them up. in the second place, her estimate is so rough that an error must be very great in order to have any meaning. if i say that a man is six feet and two inches tall, it is easy enough to apply a measuring stick and prove the correctness or incorrectness of my assertion. but if i say simply that the man is "rather tall," or "very tall," the error must be very extreme before we can expose it, particularly since the estimate can itself be checked up only by observation and not by controlled experiment. the teachers' answers seem to justify three conclusions:-- . teachers do not have a very definite idea of what constitutes intelligence. they tend to confuse it variously with capacity for memorizing, facility in reading, ability to master arithmetic, etc. on the whole, their standard is too academic. they fail to appreciate the one-sidedness of the school's demands upon intelligence. in a quaintly humorous passage discussing this tendency, binet characterizes the child in a class as _dénaturé_, a french word which we may translate (though rather too literally) as "denatured." too often this "denatured" child of the classroom is the only child the teacher knows. . in judging intelligence teachers are too easily deceived by a sprightly attitude, a sympathetic expression, a glance of the eye, or a chance "bump" on the head. . although a few teachers seem to realize the many possibilities of error, the majority show rather undue confidence in the accuracy of their judgment. binet's experiment on how teachers test intelligence.[ ] finally, binet had three teachers come to his laboratory to judge the intelligence of children whom they had never seen before. each spent an afternoon in the laboratory and examined five pupils. in each case the teacher was left free to arrive at a conclusion in her own way. binet, who remained in the room and took notes, recounts with playful humor how the teachers were unavoidably compelled to resort to the much-abused test method, although their attempts at using it were sometimes, from the psychologist's point of view, amusingly clumsy. [ ] see p.   _ff._ of reference  at end of this book. one teacher, for example, questioned the children about some canals and sluices which were in the vicinity, asking what their purpose was and how they worked. another showed the children some pretty pictures, which she had brought with her for the purpose, and asked questions about them. showing the picture of a garret, she asked how a garret differs from an ordinary room. one teacher asked whether in building a factory it was best to have the walls thick or thin. as king edward had just died, another teacher questioned the children about the details of this event, in order to find out whether they were in the habit of reading the newspapers, or understood the things they heard others read. other questions related to the names of the streets in the neighborhood, the road one should take to reach a certain point in the vicinity, etc. binet notes that many of the questions were special, and were only applicable with the children of this particular school. the method of proposing the questions and judging the responses was also at fault. the teachers did not adhere consistently to any definite formula in giving a particular test to the different children. instead, the questions were materially altered from time to time. one teacher scored the identical response differently for two children, giving one child more credit than the other because she had already judged his intelligence to be superior. in several cases the examination was needlessly delayed in order to instruct the child in what he did not know. the examination ended, quite properly for a teacher's examination, with questions about history, literature, the metric system, etc., and with the recitation of a fable. a comparison of the results showed hardly any agreement among the estimates of the three teachers. when questioned about the standard that had been taken in arriving at their conclusions, one teacher said she had taken the answers of the first pupil as a point of departure, and that she had judged the other pupils by this one. another judged all the children by a child of her acquaintance whom she knew to be intelligent. this was, of course, an unsafe method, because no one could say how the child taken as an ideal would have responded to the tests used with the five children. in summarizing the result of his little experiment, binet points out that the teachers employed, as if by instinct, the very method which he himself recommends. in using it, however, they made numerous errors. their questions were often needlessly long. several were "dilemma questions," that is, answerable by _yes_ or _no_. in such cases chance alone will cause fifty per cent of the answers to be correct. some of the questions were merely tests of school knowledge. others were entirely special, usable only with the children of this particular school on this particular day. not all of the questions were put in the same terms, and a given response did not always receive the same score. when the children responded incorrectly or incompletely, they were often given help, but not always to the same extent. in other words, says binet, it was evident that "the teachers employed very awkwardly a very excellent method." the above remark is as pertinent as it is expressive. as the statement implies, the test method is but a refinement and standardization of the common-sense approach. binet remarks that most people who inquire into his method of measuring intelligence do so expecting to find something very surprising and mysterious; and on seeing how much it resembles the methods which common sense employs in ordinary life, they heave a sigh of disappointment and say, "is that all?" binet reminds us that the difference between the scientific and unscientific way of doing a thing is not necessarily a difference in the _nature_ of the method; it is often merely a difference in _exactness_. science does the thing better, because it does it more accurately. it was of course not the purpose of binet to cast a slur upon the good sense and judgment of teachers. the teachers who took part in the little experiment described above were binet's personal friends. the errors he points out in his entertaining and good-humored account of the experiment are inherent in the situation. they are the kind of errors which any person, however discriminating and observant, is likely to make in estimating the intelligence of a subject without the use of standardized tests. it is the writer's experience that the teacher's estimate of a child's intelligence is much more reliable than that of the average parent; more accurate even than that of the physician who has not had psychological training. indeed, it is an exceptional school physician who is able to give any very valuable assistance to teachers in the classification of mentally exceptional children for special pedagogical treatment. this is only to be expected, for the physician has ordinarily had much less instruction in psychology than the teacher, and of course infinitely less experience in judging the mental performances of children. even if graduated from a first-rank medical school, the instruction he has received in the important subject of mental deficiency has probably been less adequate than that given to the students of a standard normal school. as a rule, the doctor has no equipment or special fitness which gives him any advantage over the teacher in acquiring facility in the use of intelligence tests. as for parents, it would of course be unreasonable to expect from them a very accurate judgment regarding the mental peculiarities of their children. the difficulty is not simply that which comes from lack of special training. the presence of parental affection renders impartial judgment impossible. still more serious are the effects of habituation to the child's mental traits. as a result of such habituation the most intelligent parent tends to develop an unfortunate blindness to all sorts of abnormalities which exist in his own children. the only way of escape from the fallacies we have mentioned lies in the use of some kind of refined psychological procedure. binet testing is destined to become universally known and practiced in schools, prisons, reformatories, charity stations, orphan asylums, and even ordinary homes, for the same reason that babcock testing has become universal in dairying. each is indispensable to its purpose. chapter iii description of the binet-simon method essential nature of the scale. the binet scale is made up of an extended series of tests in the nature of "stunts," or problems, success in which demands the exercise of intelligence. as left by binet, the scale consists of  tests, so graded in difficulty that the easiest lie well within the range of normal -year-old children, while the hardest tax the intelligence of the average adult. the problems are designed primarily to test native intelligence, not school knowledge or home training. they try to answer the question "how intelligent is this child?" how much the child has learned is of significance only in so far as it throws light on his ability to learn more. binet fully appreciated the fact that intelligence is not homogeneous, that it has many aspects, and that no one kind of test will display it adequately. he therefore assembled for his intelligence scale tests of many different types, some of them designed to display differences of memory, others differences in power to reason, ability to compare, power of comprehension, time orientation, facility in the use of number concepts, power to combine ideas into a meaningful whole, the maturity of apperception, wealth of ideas, knowledge of common objects, etc. how the scale was derived. the tests were arranged in order of difficulty, as found by trying them upon some normal children of different ages from  to   years. it was found, for illustration, that a certain test was passed by only a very small proportion of the younger children, say the -year-olds, and that the number passing this test increased rapidly in the succeeding years until by the age of or  years, let us say, practically all the children were successful. if, in our supposed case, the test was passed by about two thirds to three fourths of the normal children aged  years, it was considered by binet a test of -year intelligence. in like manner, a test passed by  to   per cent of the normal -year-olds was considered a test of -year intelligence, and so on. by trying out many different tests in this way it was possible to secure five tests to represent each age from  to   years (excepting age  , which has only four tests), five for age  , five for , and five for adults, making  tests in all. list of tests. the following is the list of tests as arranged by binet in , shortly before his untimely death:-- _age  :_ . points to nose, eyes, and mouth. . repeats two digits. . enumerates objects in a picture. . gives family name. . repeats a sentence of six syllables. _age  :_ . gives his sex. . names key, knife, and penny. . repeats three digits. . compares two lines. _age  :_ . compares two weights. . copies a square. . repeats a sentence of ten syllables. . counts four pennies. . unites the halves of a divided rectangle. _age  :_ . distinguishes between morning and afternoon. . defines familiar words in terms of use. . copies a diamond. . counts thirteen pennies. . distinguishes pictures of ugly and pretty faces. _age  :_ . shows right hand and left ear. . describes a picture. . executes three commissions, given simultaneously. . counts the value of six sous, three of which are double. . names four cardinal colors. _age  :_ . compares two objects from memory. . counts from  to  . . notes omissions from pictures. . gives day and date. . repeats five digits. _age  :_ . gives change from twenty sous. . defines familiar words in terms superior to use. . recognizes all the pieces of money. . names the months of the year, in order. . answers easy "comprehension questions." _age  :_ . arranges five blocks in order of weight. . copies drawings from memory. . criticizes absurd statements. . answers difficult "comprehension questions." . uses three given words in not more than two sentences. _age  :_ . resists suggestion. . composes one sentence containing three given words. . names sixty words in three minutes. . defines certain abstract words. . discovers the sense of a disarranged sentence. _age  :_ . repeats seven digits. . finds three rhymes for a given word. . repeats a sentence of twenty-six syllables. . interprets pictures. . interprets given facts. _adult:_ . solves the paper-cutting test. . rearranges a triangle in imagination. . gives differences between pairs of abstract terms. . gives three differences between a president and a king. . gives the main thought of a selection which he has heard read. it should be emphasized that merely to name the tests in this way gives little idea of their nature and meaning, and tells nothing about binet's method of conducting the  experiments. in order to use the tests intelligently it is necessary to acquaint one's self thoroughly with the purpose of each test, its correct procedure, and the psychological interpretation of different types of response.[ ] [ ] see part ii of this volume, and references  and  , for discussion and interpretation of the individual tests. in fairness to binet, it should also be borne in mind that the scale of tests was only a rough approximation to the ideal which the author had set himself to realize. had his life been spared a few years longer, he would doubtless have carried the method much nearer perfection. how the scale is used. by means of the binet tests we can judge the intelligence of a given individual by comparison with standards of intellectual performance for normal children of different ages. in order to make the comparison it is only necessary to begin the examination of the subject at a point in the scale where all the tests are passed successfully, and to continue up the scale until no more successes are possible. then we compare our subject's performances with the standard for normal children of the same age, and note the amount of acceleration or retardation. let us suppose the subject being tested is  years of age. if he goes as far in the tests as normal -year-old children ordinarily go, we can say that the child has a "mental age" of  years, which in this case is normal (our child being  years of age). if he goes only as far as normal -year-old children ordinarily go, we say that his "mental age" is  years. in like manner, a mentally defective child of  years may have a "mental age" of only  years, or a young genius of  years may have a mental age of  or   years. special characteristics of the binet-simon method. psychologists had experimented with intelligence tests for at least twenty years before the binet scale made its appearance. the question naturally suggests itself why binet should have been successful in a field where previous efforts had been for the most part futile. the answer to this question is found in three essential differences between binet's method and those formerly employed. . _the use of age standards._ binet was the first to utilize the idea of age standards, or norms, in the measurement of intelligence. it will be understood, of course, that binet did not set out to invent tests of -year intelligence, -year intelligence, etc. instead, as already explained, he began with a series of tests ranging from very easy to very difficult, and by trying these tests on children of different ages and noting the percentages of successes in the various years, he was able to locate them (approximately) in the years where they belonged. this plan has the great advantage of giving us standards which are easily grasped. to say, for illustration, that a given subject has a grade of intelligence equal to that of the average child of  years is a statement whose general import does not need to be explained. previous investigators had worked with subjects the degree of whose intelligence was unknown, and with tests the difficulty of which was equally unknown. an immense amount of ingenuity was spent in devising tests which were used in such a way as to preclude any very meaningful interpretation of the responses. the binet method enables us to characterize the intelligence of a child in a far more definite way than had hitherto been possible. current descriptive terms like "bright," "moderately bright," "dull," "very dull," "feeble-minded," etc., have had no universally accepted meaning. a child who is designated by one person as "moderately bright" may be called "very bright" by another person. the degree of intelligence which one calls "moderate dullness," another may call "extreme dullness," etc. but every one knows what is meant by the term -year mentality, -year mentality, etc., even if he is not able to define these grades of intelligence in psychological terms; and by ascertaining experimentally what intellectual tasks children of different ages can perform, we are, of course, able to make our age standards as definite as we please. why should a device so simple have waited so long for a discoverer? we do not know. it is of a class with many other unaccountable mysteries in the development of scientific method. apparently the idea of an age-grade method, as this is called, did not come to binet himself until he had experimented with intelligence tests for some fifteen years. at least his first provisional scale, published in , was not made up according to the age-grade plan. it consisted merely of  tests, arranged roughly in order of difficulty. although binet nowhere gives any account of the steps by which this crude and ungraded scale was transformed into the relatively complete age-grade scale of , we can infer that the original and ingenious idea of utilizing age norms was suggested by the data collected with the scale. however the discovery was made, it ranks, perhaps, from the practical point of view, as the most important in all the history of psychology. . _the kind of mental functions brought into play._ in the second place, the binet tests differ from most of the earlier attempts in that they are designed to test the higher and more complex mental processes, instead of the simpler and more elementary ones. hence they set problems for the reasoning powers and ingenuity, provoke judgments about abstract matters, etc., instead of attempting to measure sensory discrimination, mere retentiveness, rapidity of reaction, and the like. psychologists had generally considered the higher processes too complex to be measured directly, and accordingly sought to get at them indirectly by correlating supposed intelligence with simpler processes which could readily be measured, such as reaction time, rapidity of tapping, discrimination of tones and colors, etc. while they were disputing over their contradictory findings in this line of exploration, binet went directly to the point and succeeded where they had failed. it is now generally admitted by psychologists that higher intelligence is little concerned in such elementary processes as those mentioned above. many of the animals have keen sensory discrimination. feeble-minded children, unless of very low grade, do not differ very markedly from normal children in sensitivity of the skin, visual acuity, simple reaction time, type of imagery, etc. but in power of comprehension, abstraction, and ability to direct thought, in the nature of the associative processes, in amount of information possessed, and in spontaneity of attention, they differ enormously. . _binet would test "general intelligence."_ finally, binet's success was largely due to his abandonment of the older "faculty psychology" which, far from being defunct, had really given direction to most of the earlier work with mental tests. where others had attempted to measure memory attention, sense discrimination, etc., as separate faculties or functions, binet undertook to ascertain the _general level_ of intelligence. others had thought the task easier of accomplishment by measuring each division or aspect of intelligence separately, and summating the results. binet, too, began in this way, and it was only after years of experimentation by the usual methods that he finally broke away from them and undertook, so to speak, to triangulate the height of his tower without first getting the dimensions of the individual stones which made it up. the assumption that it is easier to measure a part, or one aspect, of intelligence than all of it, is fallacious in that the parts are not separate parts and cannot be separated by any refinement of experiment. they are interwoven and intertwined. each ramifies everywhere and appears in all other functions. the analogy of the stones of the tower does not really apply. memory, for example, cannot be tested separately from attention, or sense-discrimination separately from the associative processes. after many vain attempts to disentangle the various intellective functions, binet decided to test their combined functional capacity without any pretense of measuring the exact contribution of each to the total product. it is hardly too much to say that intelligence tests have been successful just to the extent to which they have been guided by this aim. memory, attention, imagination, etc., are terms of "structural psychology." binet's psychology is dynamic. he conceives intelligence as the sum total of those thought processes which consist in mental adaptation. this adaptation is not explicable in terms of the old mental "faculties." no one of these can explain a single thought process, for such process always involves the participation of many functions whose separate rôles are impossible to distinguish accurately. instead of measuring the intensity of various mental states (psycho-physics), it is more enlightening to measure their combined effect on adaptation. using a biological comparison, binet says the old "faculties" correspond to the separate tissues of an animal or plant, while his own "scheme of thought" corresponds to the functioning organ itself. for binet, psychology is the science of behavior. binet's conception of general intelligence. in devising tests of intelligence it is, of course, necessary to be guided by some assumption, or assumptions, regarding the nature of intelligence. to adopt any other course is to depend for success upon happy chance. however, it is impossible to arrive at a final definition of intelligence on the basis of _a-priori_ considerations alone. to demand, as critics of the binet method have sometimes done, that one who would measure intelligence should first present a complete definition of it, is quite unreasonable. as stern points out, electrical currents were measured long before their nature was well understood. similar illustrations could be drawn from the processes involved in chemistry physiology, and other sciences. in the case of intelligence it may be truthfully said that no adequate definition can possibly be framed which is not based primarily on the symptoms empirically brought to light by the test method. the best that can be done in advance of such data is to make tentative assumptions as to the probable nature of intelligence, and then to subject these assumptions to tests which will show their correctness or incorrectness. new hypotheses can then be framed for further trial, and thus gradually we shall be led to a conception of intelligence which will be meaningful and in harmony with all the ascertainable facts. such was the method of binet. only those unacquainted with binet's more than fifteen years of labor preceding the publication of his intelligence scale would think of accusing him of making no effort to analyze the mental processes which his tests bring into play. it is true that many of binet's earlier assumptions proved untenable, and in this event he was always ready, with exceptional candor and intellectual plasticity, to acknowledge his error and to plan a new line of attack. binet's conception of intelligence emphasizes three characteristics of the thought process: ( ) its tendency to take and maintain a definite direction; ( ) the capacity to make adaptations for the purpose of attaining a desired end; and ( ) the power of auto-criticism.[ ] [ ] see binet and simon: "l'intelligence des imbeciles," in _l'année psychologique_ ( ), pp.  - . the last division of this article is devoted to a discussion of the essential nature of the higher thought processes, and is a wonderful example of that keen psychological analysis in which binet was so gifted. how these three aspects of intelligence enter into the performances with various tests of the scale is set forth from time to time in our directions for giving and interpreting the individual tests.[ ] an illustration which may be given here is that of the "patience test," or uniting the disarranged parts of a divided rectangle. as described by binet, this operation has the following elements: "( ) to keep in mind the end to be attained, that is to say, the figure to be formed; ( ) to try different combinations under the influence of this directing idea, which guides the efforts of the subject even though he may not be conscious of the fact; and ( ) to judge the combination which has been made, to compare it with the model, and to decide whether it is the correct one." [ ] see especially pages  and  . much the same processes are called for in many other of the binet tests, particularly those of arranging weights, rearranging dissected sentences, drawing a diamond or square from copy, finding a sentence containing three given words, counting backwards, etc. however, an examination of the scale will show that the choice of tests was not guided entirely by any single formula as to the nature of intelligence. binet's approach was a many-sided one. the scale includes tests of time orientation, of three or four kinds of memory, of apperception, of language comprehension, of knowledge about common objects, of free association, of number mastery, of constructive imagination, and of ability to compare concepts, to see contradictions, to combine fragments into a unitary whole, to comprehend abstract terms, and to meet novel situations. other conceptions of intelligence. it is interesting to compare binet's conception of intelligence with the definitions which have been offered by other psychologists. according to ebbinghaus, for example, the essence of intelligence lies in comprehending together in a unitary, meaningful whole, impressions and associations which are more or less independent, heterogeneous, or even partly contradictory. "intellectual ability consists in the elaboration of a whole into its worth and meaning by means of many-sided combination, correction, and completion of numerous kindred associations.... it is a _combination activity_." meumann offers a twofold definition. from the psychological point of view, intelligence is the power of independent and creative elaboration of new products out of the material given by memory and the senses. from the practical point of view, it involves the ability to avoid errors, to surmount difficulties, and to adjust to environment. stern defines intelligence as "the general capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to new requirements: it is general adaptability to new problems and conditions of life." spearman, hart, and others of the english school define intelligence as a "common central factor" which participates in all sorts of special mental activities. this factor is explained in terms of a psycho-physiological hypothesis of "cortex energy," "cerebral plasticity," etc. the above definitions are only to a slight extent contradictory or inharmonious. they differ mainly in point of view or in the location of the emphasis. each expresses a part of the truth, and none all of it. it will be evident that the conception of binet is broad enough to include the most important elements in each of the other definitions quoted. guiding principles in choice and arrangement of tests. in choosing his tests binet was guided by the conception of intelligence which we have set forth above. tests were devised which would presumably bring into play the various mental processes thought to be concerned in intelligence, and then these tests were tried out on normal children of different ages. if the percentage of passes for a given test increased but little or not at all in going from younger to older children this test was discarded. on the other hand, if the proportion of passes increased rapidly with age, and if children of a given age, who on other grounds were known to be bright, passed more frequently than children of the same age who were known to be dull, then the test was judged a satisfactory test of intelligence. as we have shown elsewhere,[ ] practically all of binet's tests fulfill these requirements reasonably well, a fact which bears eloquent testimony to the keen psychological insight of their author. [ ] see p.  . in arranging the tests into a system binet's guiding principle was to find an arrangement of the tests which would cause an average child of any given age to test "at age"; that is, the average -year-old must show a mental age of  years, the average -year-old a mental age of  years, etc. in order to secure this result binet found that his data seemed to require the location of an individual test in that year where it was passed by about two thirds to three fourths of unselected children. it was in the assembling of the tests that the most serious faults of the scale had their origin. further investigation has shown that a great many of the tests were misplaced as much as one year, and several of them two years. on the whole, the scale as binet left it was decidedly too easy in the lower ranges, and too difficult in the upper. as a result, the average child of  years was caused to test at not far from  years, the average child of  years not far from . in the stanford revision an effort has been made to correct this fault, along with certain other generally recognized imperfections. some avowed limitations of the binet tests. the binet tests have often been criticized for their unfitness to perform certain services which in reality they were never meant to render. this is unfair. we cannot make a just evaluation of the scale without bearing in mind its avowed limitations. for example, the scale does not pretend to measure the entire mentality of the subject, but only _general intelligence_. there is no pretense of testing the emotions or the will beyond the extent to which these naturally display themselves in the tests of intelligence. the scale was not designed as a tool for the analysis of those emotional or volitional aberrations which are concerned in such mental disorders as hysteria, insanity, etc. these conditions do not present a progressive reduction of intelligence to the infantile level, and in most of them other factors besides intelligence play an important rôle. moreover, even in the normal individual the fruitfulness of intelligence, the direction in which it shall be applied, and its methods of work are to a certain extent determined by the extraneous factors of emotion and volition. it should, nevertheless, be pointed out that defects of intelligence, in a large majority of cases, also involve disturbances of the emotional and volitional functions. we do not expect to find perfectly normal emotions or will power of average strength coupled with marked intellectual deficiency, and as a matter of fact such a combination is rare indeed. in the course of an examination with the binet tests, the experienced clinical psychologist is able to gain considerable insight into the subject's emotional and volitional equipment, even though the method was designed primarily for another purpose. a second misunderstanding can be avoided by remembering that the binet scale does not pretend to bring to light the idiosyncrasies of special talent, but only to measure the general level of intelligence. it cannot be used for the discovery of exceptional ability in drawing, painting, music, mathematics, oratory, salesmanship, etc., because no effort is made to explore the processes underlying these abilities. it can, therefore, never serve as a _detailed chart_ for the vocational guidance of children, telling us which will succeed in business, which in art, which in medicine, etc. it is not a new kind of phrenology. at the same time, as we have already pointed out, _it is capable of bounding roughly the vocational territory in which an individual's intelligence will probably permit success, nothing else preventing_.[ ] [ ] see p.  . in the third place, it must not be supposed that the scale can be used as a complete pedagogical guide. although intelligence tests furnish data of the greatest significance for pedagogical procedure, they do not suggest the appropriate educational methods in detail. these will have to be worked out in a practical way for the various grades of intelligence, and at great cost of labor and patience. finally, in arriving at an estimate of a subject's grade of intelligence and his susceptibility to training, it would be a mistake to ignore the data obtainable from other sources. no competent psychologist, however ardent a supporter of the binet method he might be, would recommend such a policy. those who accept the method as all-sufficient are as much in error as those who consider it as no more important than any one of a dozen other approaches. standardized tests have already become and will remain by far the most reliable single method for grading intelligence, but the results they furnish will always need to be interpreted in the light of supplementary information regarding the subject's personal history, including medical record, accidents, play habits, industrial efficiency, social and moral traits, school success, home environment, etc. without question, however, the improved binet tests will contribute more than all other data combined to the end of enabling us to forecast a child's possibilities of future improvement, and this is the information which will aid most in the proper direction of his education. chapter iv nature of the stanford revision and extension although the binet scale quickly demonstrated its value as an instrument for the classification of mentally-retarded and otherwise exceptional children, it had, nevertheless, several imperfections which greatly limited its usefulness. there was a dearth of tests at the higher mental levels, the procedure was so inadequately defined that needless disagreement came about in the interpretation of data, and so many of the tests were misplaced as to make the results of an examination more or less misleading, particularly in the case of very young subjects and those near the adult level. it was for the purpose of correcting these and certain other faults that the stanford investigation was planned.[ ] [ ] the writer wishes to acknowledge his very great indebtedness to miss grace lyman, dr. george ordahl, dr. louise ellison ordahl, miss neva galbreath, mr. wilford talbert, dr. j. harold williams, mr. herbert e. knollin, and miss irene cuneo for their coöperation in making the tests on which the stanford revision is chiefly based. without their loyal assistance the investigation could not have been carried through. grateful acknowledgment is also made to the many public school teachers and principals for their generous and invaluable coöperation in furnishing subjects for the tests, and in supplying, sometimes at considerable cost of labor, the supplementary information which was called for regarding the pupils tested. their contribution was made in the interest of educational science, and without expectation of personal benefits of any kind. their professional spirit cannot be too highly commended. sources of data. our revision is the result of several years of work, and involved the examination of approximately  subjects, including  normal children,  defective and superior children, and more than  adults. tests of of the normal children had been made by childs and terman in - , and of  children by trost, waddle, and terman in - . for various reasons, however, the results of these tests did not furnish satisfactory data for a thoroughgoing revision of the scale. accordingly a new investigation was undertaken, somewhat more extensive than the others, and more carefully planned. its main features may be described as follows:-- . the first step was to assemble as nearly as possible all the results which had been secured for each test of the scale by all the workers of all countries. the result was a large sheet of tabulated data for each individual test, including percentages passing the test at various ages, conditions under which the results were secured, method of procedure, etc. after a comparative study of these data, and in the light of results we had ourselves secured, a provisional arrangement of the tests was prepared for try-out. . in addition to the tests of the original binet scale, additional tests were included for try-out. this, it was expected, would make possible the elimination of some of the least satisfactory tests, and at the same time permit the addition of enough new ones to give at least six tests, instead of five, for each age group. . a plan was then devised for securing subjects who should be as nearly as possible representative of the several ages. the method was to select a school in a community of average social status, a school attended by all or practically all the children in the district where it was located. in order to get clear pictures of age differences the tests were confined to children who were within two months of a birthday. to avoid accidental selection, _all_ the children within two months of a birthday were tested, in whatever grade enrolled. tests of foreign-born children, however, were eliminated in the treatment of results. there remained tests of approximately  children, of whom were between  and   years of age. . the children's responses were, for the most part, recorded _verbatim_. this made it possible to re-score the records according to any desired standard, and thus to fit a test more perfectly to the age level assigned it. . much attention was given to securing uniformity of procedure. a half-year was devoted to training the examiners and another half-year to the supervision of the testing. in the further interests of uniformity all the records were scored by one person (the writer). method of arriving at a revision. the revision of the scale below the -year level was based almost entirely on the tests of the above-mentioned , unselected children. the guiding principle was to secure an arrangement of the tests and a standard of scoring which would cause the median mental age of the unselected children of each age group to coincide with the median chronological age. that is, a correct scale must cause the _average_ child of  years to test exactly at , the _average_ child at to test exactly at , etc. or, to express the same fact in terms of intelligence quotient,[ ] a correct scale must give a median intelligence quotient of unity, or  per cent, for unselected children of each age. [ ] the intelligence quotient (often designated as i q) is the ratio of mental age to chronological age. (see pp.  _ff._ and  _ff._) if the median mental age resulting at any point from the provisional arrangement of tests was too high or too low, it was only necessary to change the location of certain of the tests, or to change the standard of scoring, until an order of arrangement and a standard of passing were found which would throw the median mental age where it belonged. we had already become convinced, for reasons too involved for presentation here, that no satisfactory revision of the binet scale was possible on any theoretical considerations as to the percentage of passes which an individual test ought to show in a given year in order to be considered standard for that year. as was to be expected, the first draft of the revision did not prove satisfactory. the scale was still too hard at some points, and too easy at others. in fact, three successive revisions were necessary, involving three separate scorings of the data and as many tabulations of the mental ages, before the desired degree of accuracy was secured. as finally revised, the scale gives a median intelligence quotient closely approximating for the unselected children of each age from  to  . since our school children who were above  years and still in the grades were retarded left-overs, it was necessary to base the revision above this level on the tests of adults. these included business men and "migrating" unemployed men tested by mr. h. e. knollin, adolescent delinquents tested by mr. j. harold williams, and high-school students tested by the writer. the extension of the scale in the upper range is such that ordinarily intelligent adults, little educated, test up to what is called the "average adult" level. adults whose intelligence is known from other sources to be superior are found to test well up toward the "superior adult" level, and this holds whether the subjects in question are well educated or practically unschooled. the almost entirely unschooled business men, in fact, tested fully as well as high-school juniors and seniors. figure  shows the distribution of mental ages for  adults, including the business men and the high-school pupils who were over  years of age. it will be noted that the middle section of the graph represents the "mental ages" falling between  and  . this is the range which we have designated as the "average adult" level. those above are called "superior adults," those between  and  , "inferior adults." subjects much over  years of age who test in the neighborhood of  years may ordinarily be considered border-line cases. [illustration: fig.  . distribution of mental ages of normal adults] the following method was employed for determining the validity of a test. the children of each age level were divided into three groups according to intelligence quotient, those testing below , those between  and  , and those with an intelligence quotient of or above. the percentages of passes on each individual test at or near that age level were then ascertained separately for these three groups. if a test fails to show a decidedly higher proportion of passes in the superior i q group than in the inferior i q group, it cannot be regarded as a satisfactory test of intelligence. on the other hand, a test which satisfies this criterion must be accepted as valid or the entire scale must be rejected. henceforth it stands or falls with the scale as a whole. when tried out by this method, some of the tests which have been most criticized showed a high degree of reliability; certain others which have been considered excellent proved to be so little correlated with intelligence that they had to be discarded. after making a few necessary eliminations,  tests remained, or more than the number included in the binet scale. there are at each age level from  to  ,  at ,  at , at "average adult," at "superior adult," and alternative tests. the alternative tests, which are distributed among the different groups, are intended to be used only as substitutes when one or more of the regular tests have been rendered, by coaching or otherwise, undesirable.[ ] [ ] see p.   _ff._ for explanations regarding the calculation of mental age and the use of alternative tests. of the new tests, were added and standardized in the various stanford investigations. two tests were borrowed from the healy-fernald series, one from kuhlmann, one was adapted from bonser, and the remaining five were amplifications or adaptations of some of the earlier binet tests. following is a complete list of the tests of the stanford revision. those designated _al._ are alternative tests. the guide for giving and scoring the tests is presented at length in part ii of this volume. _the stanford revision and extension_ _year iii._ (_  tests,  months each._) . points to parts of body. (  to  .) nose; eyes; mouth; hair. . names familiar objects. (  to  .) key, penny, closed knife, watch, pencil. . pictures, enumeration or better. (at least  objects enumerated in one picture.) (a) dutch home; (b) river scene; (c) post-office. . gives sex. . gives last name. . repeats  to  syllables. (  to  .) al. repeats  digits. (  success in  trials. order correct.) _year iv._ (_  tests,  months each._) . compares lines. (  trials, no error.) . discrimination of forms. (kuhlmann.) (not over  errors.) . counts  pennies. (no error.) . copies square. (pencil.  to  .) . comprehension, st degree. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) "what must you do": "when you are sleepy?" "cold?" "hungry?" . repeats  digits. (  to  . order correct.) (stanford addition.) al. repeats  to  syllables. (  to  absolutely correct, or with  error each.) _year v._ (_  tests,  months each._) . comparison of weights. (  to  .) - ; - ; - . . colors. (no error.) red; yellow; blue; green. . Æsthetic comparison. (no error.) . definitions, use or better. (  to  .) chair; horse; fork; doll; pencil; table. . patience, or divided rectangle. (  to  trials.  minute each.) . three commissions. (no error. order correct.) al. age. _year vi._ (_  tests,  months each._) . right and left. (no error.) right hand; left ear; right eye. . mutilated pictures. (  to  correct.) . counts  pennies. (  to  trials, without error.) . comprehension, d degree. (  to  .) "what's the thing for you to do": (a) "if it is raining when you start to school?" (b) "if you find that your house is on fire?" (c) "if you are going some place and miss your car?" . coins. (  to  .) nickel; penny; quarter; dime. . repeats  to  syllables. (  to  absolutely correct, or with  error each.) al. morning or afternoon. _year vii._ (_  tests,  months each._) . fingers. (no error.) right; left; both. . pictures, description or better. (over half of performance description:) dutch home; river scene; post-office. . repeats  digits. (  to  . order correct.) . ties bow-knot. (model shown.  minute.) (stanford addition.) . gives differences. (  to  .) fly and butterfly; stone and egg; wood and glass. . copies diamond. (pen.  to  .) al.  . names days of week. (order correct.  to  checks correct.) al.  . repeats  digits backwards. (  to  .) _year viii._ (_  tests,  months each._) . ball and field. (inferior plan or better.) (stanford addition.) . counts  to  . (  seconds.  error allowed.) . comprehension, d degree. (  to  .) "what's the thing for you to do": (a) "when you have broken something which belongs to some one else?" (b) "when you are on your way to school and notice that you are in danger of being tardy?" (c) "if a playmate hits you without meaning to do it?" . gives similarities, two things. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) wood and coal; apple and peach; iron and silver; ship and automobile. . definitions superior to use. (  to  .) balloon; tiger; football; soldier. . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition. for list of words used, see record booklet.) al.  . first six coins. (no error.) al.  . dictation. ("see the little boy." easily legible. pen.  minute.) _year ix._ (_  tests,  months each._) . date. (allow error of  days in _c_, no error in _a_, _b_, or _d_.) (a) day of week; (b) month; (c) day of month; (d) year. . weights. ( , , , , . procedure not illustrated.  to  .) . makes change. (  to  . no coins, paper, or pencil.) -- ; -- ; -- . . repeats  digits backwards. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) . three words. (  to  . oral.  sentence or not over  coördinate clauses.) boy, river, ball; work, money, men; desert, rivers, lakes. . rhymes. (  rhymes for two of three words.  minute for each part.) day; mill; spring. al.  . months. (  seconds and  error in naming.  checks of  correct.) al.  . stamps, gives total value. (second trial if individual values are known.) _year x._ (_  tests,  months each._) . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition.) . absurdities. (  to  . warn. spontaneous correction allowed.) (four of binet's, one stanford.) . designs. (  correct,  half correct. expose  seconds.) . reading and report. (  memories.  seconds and  mistakes in reading.) (binet's selection.) . comprehension, th degree. (  to  . question may be repeated.) (a) "what ought you to say when some one asks your opinion about a person you don't know very well?" (b) "what ought you to do before undertaking (beginning) something very important?" (c) "why should we judge a person more by his actions than by his words?" . names  words. (illustrate with clouds, dog, chair, happy.) al.  . repeats  digits. (  to  . order correct.) (stanford addition.) al.  . repeats  to  syllables. (  to  correct, or with  error each.) al.  . form board. (healy-fernald puzzle a.  times in  minutes.) _year xii._ (_  tests,  months each._) . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition.) . abstract words. (  to  .) pity; revenge; charity; envy; justice. . ball and field. (superior plan.) (stanford addition.) . dissected sentences. (  to  .  minute each.) . fables. (score  ; i.e., two correct or the equivalent in half credits.) (stanford addition.) hercules and wagoner; maid and eggs; fox and crow; farmer and stork; miller, son, and donkey. . repeats  digits backwards. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) . pictures, interpretation. (  to  . "explain this picture.") dutch home; river scene; post-office; colonial home. . gives similarities, three things. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) snake, cow, sparrow; book, teacher, newspaper; wool, cotton, leather; knife-blade, penny, piece of wire; rose, potato, tree. _year xiv._ (_  tests,  months each._) . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition.) . induction test. (gets rule by th folding.) (stanford addition.) . president and king. (power; accession; tenure.  to  .) . problems of fact. (  to  .) (binet's two and one stanford addition.) . arithmetical reasoning. (  minute each.  to  .) (adapted from bonser.) . clock. (  to  . error must not exceed  or   minutes.) . . . . . . al. repeats  digits. (  to  . order correct.) "average adult." (_  tests,  months each._) . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition.) . interpretation of fables. (score  .) (stanford addition.) . difference between abstract words. ( real contrasts out of .) laziness and idleness; evolution and revolution; poverty and misery; character and reputation. . problem of the enclosed boxes. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) . repeats  digits backwards. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) . code, writes "come quickly." (  errors. omission of dot counts half error. illustrate with "war" and "spy.") (from healy and fernald.) al.  . repeats  syllables. (  to  absolutely correct.) al.  . comprehension of physical relations. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) path of cannon ball; weight of fish in water; hitting distant mark. "superior adult." (_  tests,  months each._) . vocabulary,  words. (stanford addition.) . binet's paper-cutting test. (draws, folds, and locates holes.) . repeats  digits. (  to  . order correct.) (stanford addition.) . repeats thought of passage heard. (  to  .) (binet's and wissler's selections adapted.) . repeats  digits backwards. (  to  .) (stanford addition.) . ingenuity test. (  to  .  minutes each.) (stanford addition.) summary of changes. a comparison of the above list with either the binet or series will reveal many changes. on the whole, it differs somewhat more from the binet scale than from that of . thus, of the  tests below the "adult" group in the scale, are eliminated and are relocated. of these, are moved downward and upward. the shifts are as follows:-- down  year, down  years, down  years, down  years, up  year, up  years, of the adult group in binet's series is eliminated, are moved up to "superior adult," and is moved up to . accordingly, of binet's entire  tests, we have eliminated and relocated , leaving only in the positions assigned them by binet. the eliminated are: repeating  digits, resisting suggestion, and "reversed triangle." the revision is really more extensive than the above figures would suggest, since minor changes have been made in the scoring of a great many tests in order to make them fit better the locations assigned them. throughout the scale the procedure and scoring have been worked over and made more definite with the idea of promoting uniformity. this phase of the revision is perhaps more important than the mere relocation of tests. also, the addition of numerous tests in the upper ranges of the scale affects very considerably the mental ages above the level of  or   years. effects of the revision on the mental ages secured. the most important effect of the revision is to reduce the mental ages secured in the lower ranges of the scale, and to raise considerably the mental ages above  or   years. this difference also obtains, though to a somewhat smaller extent, between the stanford revision and those of goddard and kuhlmann. for example, of  adult individuals testing by the stanford revision between  and   years, and who were therefore somewhat above the level of feeble-mindedness as that term is usually defined,  per cent tested below  years by the goddard revision. that the dull and border-line adults are so much more readily distinguished from the feeble-minded by the stanford revision than by other binet series is due as much to the addition of tests in the upper groups as to the relocation of existing tests. on the other hand, the stanford revision causes young subjects to test lower than any other version of the binet scale. at  or   years the mental ages secured by the stanford revision average from  to   months lower than other revisions yield. the above differences are more significant than would at first appear. an error of  months in the mental age of a -year-old is as serious as an error of  months in the case of a -year-old. stating the error in terms of the intelligence quotient makes it more evident. thus, an error of  months in the mental age of a -year-old means an error of almost  per cent in the intelligence quotient. a scale which tests this much too low would cause the child with a true intelligence quotient of (which ordinarily means feeble-mindedness or border-line intelligence) to test at , or only slightly below normal. three serious consequences came from the too great ease of the original binet scale at the lower end, and its too great difficulty at the upper end:-- . in young subjects the higher grades of mental deficiency were overlooked, because the scale caused such subjects to test only a little below normal. . the proportion of feeble-mindedness among adult subjects was greatly overestimated, because subjects who were really of the - or -year mental level could only earn a mental age of about  years. . confusion resulted in efforts to trace the mental growth of either feeble-minded or normal children. for example, by other versions of the binet scale an average -year-old will show an intelligence quotient probably not far from  or  ; at , an intelligence quotient of about ; and at , an intelligence quotient of about  or  . by such a scale the true border-line case would test approximately as follows:-- at age  ,  i q (apparently not far below normal). at age  ,  i q (border-line). at age  ,  i q (moron deficiency). on the other hand, re-tests of children by the stanford revision have been found to yield intelligence quotients almost identical with those secured from two to four years earlier by the same tests. those who graded feeble-minded in the first test graded feeble-minded in the second test: the dull remained dull, the average remained average, the superior remained superior, and always in approximately the same degree.[ ] [ ] see "some problems relating to the detection of border-line cases of mental deficiency," by lewis m. terman and h. e. knollin, in _journal of psycho-asthemes_, june, . it is unnecessary to emphasize further the importance of having an intelligence scale which is equally accurate at all points. absolute perfection in this respect is not claimed for the stanford revision, but it is believed to be at least free from the more serious errors of other binet arrangements. chapter v analysis of intelligence quotients an extended account of the  tests on which the stanford revision is chiefly based has been presented in a separate monograph. this chapter will include only the briefest summary of some of those results of the investigation which contribute to the intelligent use of the revision. the distribution of intelligence. the question as to the manner in which intelligence is distributed is one of great practical as well as theoretical importance. one of the most vital questions which can be asked by any nation of any age is the following: "how high is the average level of intelligence among our people, and how frequent are the various grades of ability above and below the average?" with the development of standardized tests we are approaching, for the first time in history, a possible answer to this question. most of the earlier binet studies, however, have thrown little light on the distribution of intelligence because of their failure to avoid the influence of accidental selection in choosing subjects for testing. the method of securing subjects for the stanford revision makes our results on this point especially interesting.[ ] it is believed that the subjects used for this investigation were as nearly representative of average american-born children as it is possible to secure. [ ] see p.   _ff._ for method used to avoid accidental selection of subjects for the stanford investigation. the intelligence quotients for these unselected children were calculated, and their distribution was plotted for the ages separately. the distribution was found fairly symmetrical at each age from  to  . at the range is on either side of as a median, and at on either side of as a median. that the - and -year-olds test low is due to the fact that these children are left-over retardates and are below average in intelligence. [illustration: fig.  . distribution of i q's of unselected children. -  years of age] the i q's were then grouped in ranges of ten. in the middle group were thrown those from  to  ; the ascending groups including in order the i q's from  to  ,  to  , etc.; correspondingly with the descending groups. figure  shows the distribution found by this grouping for the children of ages  to  combined. the subjects above are not included in this curve because they are left-overs and not representative of their ages. the distribution for the ages combined is seen to be remarkably symmetrical. the symmetry for the separate ages was hardly less marked, considering that only  to  children were tested at each age. in fact, the range, including the middle  per cent of i q's, was found practically constant from  to   years. the tendency is for the middle  per cent to fall (approximately) between  and  . three important conclusions are justified by the above facts:-- . since the frequency of the various grades of intelligence decreases _gradually_ and at no point abruptly on each side of the median, it is evident that there is no definite dividing line between normality and feeble-mindedness, or between normality and genius. psychologically, the mentally defective child does not belong to a distinct type, nor does the genius. there is no line of demarcation between either of these extremes and the so-called "normal" child. the number of mentally defective individuals in a population will depend upon the standard arbitrarily set up as to what constitutes mental deficiency. similarly for genius. it is exactly as we should undertake to classify all people into the three groups: abnormally tall, normally tall, and abnormally short.[ ] [ ] see chapter vi for discussion of the significance of various i q's. . the common opinion that extreme deviations below the median are more frequent than extreme deviations above the median seems to have no foundation in fact. among unselected school children, at least, for every child of any given degree of deficiency there is another child as far above the average i q as the former is below. we have shown elsewhere the serious consequences of neglect of this fact.[ ] [ ] see p.   _ff._ . the traditional view that variability in mental traits becomes more marked during adolescence is here contradicted, as far as intelligence is concerned, for the distribution of i q's is practically the same at each age from  to  . for example, -year-olds differ from one another fully as much as do -year-olds. the validity of the intelligence quotient. the facts presented above argue strongly for the validity of the i q as an expression of a child's intelligence status. this follows necessarily from the similar nature of the distributions at the various ages. the inference is that a child's i q, as measured by this scale, remains relatively constant. re-tests of the same children at intervals of two to five years support the inference. children of superior intelligence do not seem to deteriorate as they get older, nor dull children to develop average intelligence. knowing a child's i q, we can predict with a fair degree of accuracy the course of his later development. the mental age of a subject is meaningless if considered apart from chronological age. it is only the ratio of retardation or acceleration to chronological age (that is, the i q) which has significance. it follows also that if the i q is a valid expression of intelligence, as it seems to be, then the binet-simon "age-grade method" becomes transformed automatically into a "point-scale method," if one wants to use it that way. as such it is superior to any other point scale that has been proposed, because it includes a larger number of tests and its points have definite meaning.[ ] [ ] for discussion of the supposed advantages of the "point-scale method," see yerkes and bridges: _a new point scale for measuring mental ability_. (warwick and york, .) sex differences. the question as to the relative intelligence of the sexes is one of perennial interest and great social importance. the ancient hypothesis, the one which dates from the time when only men concerned themselves with scientific hypotheses, took for granted the superiority of the male. with the development of individual psychology, however, it was soon found that as far as the evidence of mental tests can be trusted the _average_ intelligence of women and girls is as high as that of men and boys. if we accept this result we are then confronted with the difficult problem of finding an explanation for the fact that so few of those who have acquired eminence in the various intellectual fields have been women. two explanations have been proposed: ( ) that women become eminent less often than men simply for lack of opportunity and stimulus; and ( ) that while the average intelligence of the sexes is the same, extreme variations may be more common in males. it is pointed out that not only are there more eminent men than eminent women, but that statistics also show a preponderance of males in institutions for the mentally defective. accordingly it is often said that women are grouped closely about the average, while men show a wider range of distribution. [illustration: fig.  . median i q of  boys (unbroken line) and  girls (dotted line) for the ages -  years] many hundreds of articles and books of popular or quasi-scientific nature have been written on one aspect or another of this question of sex difference in intelligence; but all such theoretical discussions taken together are worth less than the results of one good experiment. let us see what our  i q's have to offer toward a solution of the problem. . when the i q's of the boys and girls were treated separately there was found a small but fairly constant superiority of the girls up to the age of  years. at , however, the curve for the girls dropped below that for boys. this is shown in figure  . the supplementary data, including the teachers' estimates of intelligence on a scale of five, the teachers' judgments in regard to the quality of the school work, and records showing the age-grade distribution of the sexes, were all sifted for evidence as to the genuineness of the apparent superiority of the girls age for age. the results of all these lines of inquiry support the tests in suggesting that the superiority of the girls is probably real even up to and including age  , the apparent superiority of the boys at this age being fully accounted for by the more frequent elimination of -year-old girls from the grades by promotion to the high school.[ ] [ ] it will be remembered that this series of tests did not follow up and test those who had been promoted to high school. . however, the superiority of girls over boys is so slight (amounting at most ages to only  to   points in terms of i q) that for practical purposes it would seem negligible. this offers no support to the opinion expressed by yerkes and bridges that "at certain ages serious injustice will be done individuals by evaluating their scores in the light of norms which do not take account of sex differences." . apart from the small superiority of girls, the distribution of intelligence in the two sexes is not different. the supposed wider variation of boys is not found. girls do not group themselves about the median more closely than do boys. the range of i q including the middle fifty per cent is approximately the same for the two sexes.[ ] [ ] for an extensive summary of other data on the variability of the sexes see the article by leta s. hollingworth, in _the american journal of sociology_ (january, ), pp.  - . it is shown that the findings of others support the conclusions set forth above. . when the results for the individual tests were examined, it was found that not many showed very extreme differences as to the per cent of boys and girls passing. in a few cases, however, the difference was rather marked. the boys were decidedly better in arithmetical reasoning, giving differences between a president and a king, solving the form board, making change, reversing hands of clock, finding similarities, and solving the "induction test." the girls were superior in drawing designs from memory, æsthetic comparison, comparing objects from memory, answering the "comprehension questions," repeating digits and sentences, tying a bow-knot, and finding rhymes. accordingly, our data, which for the most part agree with the results of others, justify the conclusion that the intelligence of girls, at least up to  years, does not differ materially from that of boys either as regards the average level or the range of distribution. it may still be argued that the mental development of boys beyond the age of  years lasts longer and extends farther than in the case of girls, but as a matter of fact this opinion receives little support from such tests as have been made on men and women college students. the fact that so few women have attained eminence may be due to wholly extraneous factors, the most important of which are the following: ( ) the occupations in which it is possible to achieve eminence are for the most part only now beginning to open their doors to women. women's career has been largely that of home-making, an occupation in which eminence, in the strict sense of the word, is impossible. ( ) even of the small number of women who embark upon a professional career, a majority marry and thereafter devote a fairly large proportion of their energy to bearing and rearing children. ( ) both the training given to girls and the general atmosphere in which they grow up are unfavorable to the inculcation of the professional point of view, and as a result women are not spurred on by deep-seated motives to constant and strenuous intellectual endeavor as men are. ( ) it is also possible that the emotional traits of women are such as to favor the development of the sentiments at the expense of innate intellectual endowment. intelligence of the different social classes. of the  children, were classified by their teachers according to social class into the following five groups: _very inferior_, _inferior_, _average_, _superior_, and _very superior_. a comparative study was then made of the distribution of i q's for these different groups.[ ] [ ] the results of this comparison have been set forth in detail in the monograph of source material and some of the conclusions have been set forth on p.   _ff._ of the present volume. the data may be summarized as follows:-- . the median i q for children of the superior social class is about  points above, and that of the inferior social class about  points below, the median i q of the average social group. this means that by the age of inferior class children are about one year below, and superior class children one year above, the median mental age for all classes taken together. . that the children of the superior social classes make a better showing in the tests is probably due, for the most part, to a superiority in original endowment. this conclusion is supported by five supplementary lines of evidence: (a) the teachers' rankings of the children according to intelligence; (b) the age-grade progress of the children; (c) the quality of the school work; (d) the comparison of older and younger children as regards the influence of social environment; and (e) the study of individual cases of bright and dull children in the same family. . in order to facilitate comparison, it is advisable to express the intelligence of children of all social classes in terms of the same objective scale of intelligence. this scale should be based on the median for all classes taken together. . as regards their responses to individual tests, our children of a given social class were not distinguishable from children of the same intelligence in any other social class. the relation of the i q to the quality of the child's school work. the school work of  children was graded by the teachers on a scale of five grades: _very inferior_, _inferior_, _average_, _superior_, and _very superior_. when this grouping was compared with that made on the basis of i q, fairly close agreement was found. however, in about one case out of ten there was rather serious disagreement; a child, for example, would be rated as doing _average_ school work when his i q would place him in the _very inferior_ intelligence group. when the data were searched for explanations of such disagreements it was found that most of them were plainly due to the failure of teachers to take into account the age of the child when grading the quality of his school work.[ ] when allowance was made for this tendency there were no disagreements which justified any serious suspicion as to the accuracy of the intelligence scale. minor disagreements may, of course, be disregarded, since the quality of school work depends in part on other factors than intelligence, such as industry, health, regularity of attendance, quality of instruction, etc. [ ] see p.   _ff._ the relation between i q and grade progress. this comparison, which was made for the entire  children, showed a fairly high correlation, but also some astonishing disagreements. nine-year intelligence was found all the way from grade  to grade  , inclusive; -year intelligence all the way from grade  to grade  ; and -year intelligence all the way from grade  to grade  . plainly the school's efforts at grading fail to give homogeneous groups of children as regards mental ability. on the whole, the grade location of the children did not fit their mental ages much better than it did their chronological ages. when the data were examined, it was found that practically every child whose grade failed to correspond fairly closely with his mental age was either exceptionally bright or exceptionally dull. those who tested between  and   i q were never seriously misplaced in school. the very dull children, however, were usually located from one to three grades above where they belonged by mental age, and the duller the child the more serious, as a rule, was the misplacement. on the other hand, the very bright children were nearly always located from one to three grades below where they belonged by mental age, and the brighter the child the more serious the school's mistake. the child of -year mental age in the second grade, for example, is almost certain to be about  or   years old; the child of -year intelligence in the sixth grade is almost certain to be  to   years of age. all this is due to one fact, and one alone: _the school tends to promote children by age rather than ability_. the bright children are held back, while the dull children are promoted beyond their mental ability. the retardation problem is exactly the reverse of what we have thought it to be. it is the bright children who are retarded, and the dull children who are accelerated. the remedy is to be sought in differentiated courses (special classes) for both kinds of mentally exceptional children. just as many special classes are needed for superior children as for the inferior. the social consequences of suitable educational advantages for children of superior ability would no doubt greatly exceed anything that could possibly result from the special instruction of dullards and border-line cases.[ ] [ ] see chapter vi for further discussion of the school progress possible to children of various i q's. special study of the i q's between  and  revealed the fact that a child of this grade of intelligence _never_ does satisfactory work in the grade where he belongs by chronological age. by the time he has attended school four or five years, such a child is usually found doing "very inferior" to "average" work in a grade from two to four years below his age. on the other hand, the child with an i q of or above is almost never found below the grade for his chronological age, and occasionally he is one or two grades above. wherever located, his work is always "superior" or "very superior," and the evidence suggests strongly that it would probably remain so even if extra promotions were granted. correlation between i q and the teachers' estimates of the children's intelligence. by the pearson formula the correlation found between the i q's and the teachers' rankings on a scale of five was . . this is about what others have found, and is both high enough and low enough to be significant. that it is moderately high in so far corroborates the tests. that it is not higher means that either the teachers or the tests have made a good many mistakes. when the data were searched for evidence on this point, it was found, as we have shown in chapter ii, that the fault was plainly on the part of the teachers. the serious mistakes were nearly all made with children who were either over age or under age for their grade, mostly the former. in estimating children's intelligence, just as in grading their school success, the teachers often failed to take account of the age factor. for example, the child whose mental age was, say, two years below normal, and who was enrolled in a class with children about two years younger than himself, was often graded "average" in intelligence. the tendency of teachers is to estimate a child's intelligence according to the quality of his school work _in the grade where he happens to be located_. this results in overestimating the intelligence of older, retarded children, and underestimating the intelligence of the younger, advanced children. the disagreements between the tests and the teachers' estimates are thus found, when analyzed, to confirm the validity of the test method rather than to bring it under suspicion. the validity of the individual tests. the validity of each test was checked up by measuring it against the scale as a whole in the manner described on p.  . for example, if -year-old children having -year intelligence succeed with a given test decidedly better than -year-old children who have -year intelligence, then either this test must be accepted as valid or the scale as a whole must be rejected. since we know, however, that the scale as a whole has at least a reasonably high degree of reliability, this method becomes a sure and ready means of judging the worth of a test. when the tests were tried out in this way it was found that some of those which have been most criticized have in reality a high correlation with intelligence. among these are naming the days of the week, giving the value of stamps, counting thirteen pennies, giving differences between president and king, finding rhymes, giving age, distinguishing right and left, and interpretation of pictures. others having a high reliability are the vocabulary tests, arithmetical reasoning, giving differences, copying a diamond, giving date, repeating digits in reverse order, interpretation of fables, the dissected sentence test, naming sixty words, finding omissions in pictures, and recognizing absurdities. among the somewhat less satisfactory tests are the following: repeating digits (direct order), naming coins, distinguishing forenoon and afternoon, defining in terms of use, drawing designs from memory, and æsthetic comparison. binet's "line suggestion" test correlated so little with intelligence that it had to be thrown out. the same was also true of two of the new tests which we had added to the series for try-out. tests showing a medium correlation with the scale as a whole include arranging weights, executing three commissions, naming colors, giving number of fingers, describing pictures, naming the months, making change, giving superior definitions, finding similarities, reading for memories, reversing hands of clock, defining abstract words, problems of fact, bow-knot, induction test, and comprehension questions. a test which makes a good showing on this criterion of agreement with the scale as a whole becomes immune to theoretical criticisms. whatever it appears to be from mere inspection, it is a real measure of intelligence. henceforth it stands or falls with the scale as a whole. the reader will understand, of course, that no single test used alone will determine accurately the general level of intelligence. a great many tests are required; and for two reasons: ( ) because intelligence has many aspects; and ( ) in order to overcome the accidental influences of training or environment. if many tests are used no one of them need show more than a moderately high correlation with the scale as a whole. as stated by binet, "let the tests be rough, if there are only enough of them." chapter vi the significance of various intelligence quotients frequency of different degrees of intelligence. before we can interpret the results of an examination it is necessary to know how frequently an i q of the size found occurs among unselected children. our tests of unselected children enable us to answer this question with some degree of definiteness. a study of these  i q's shows the following significant facts:-- the lowest % go to or below, the highest % reach or above " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " % " " " " " " % " " " " " + / % " " " " " " + / % " " " or, to put some of the above facts in another form:-- the child reaching is equaled or excelled by out of " " " (about) " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " conversely, we may say regarding the subnormals that:-- the child testing at (about) is equaled or excelled by out of " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " classification of intelligence quotients. what do the above i q's imply in such terms as feeble-mindedness, border-line intelligence, dullness, normality, superior intelligence genius, etc.? when we use these terms two facts must be borne in mind: ( ) that the boundary lines between such groups are absolutely arbitrary, a matter of definition only; and ( ) that the individuals comprising one of the groups do not make up a homogeneous type. nevertheless, since terms like the above are convenient and will probably continue to be used, it is desirable to give them as much definiteness as possible. on the basis of the tests we have made, including many cases of all grades of intelligence, the following suggestions are offered for the classification of intelligence quotients:-- _i q_ _classification_ above "near" genius or genius. - very superior intelligence. - superior intelligence. - normal, or average, intelligence. - dullness, rarely classifiable as feeble-mindedness. - border-line deficiency, sometimes classifiable as dullness, often as feeble-mindedness. below definite feeble-mindedness. of the feeble-minded, those between  and   i q include most of the morons (high, middle, and low), those between  or  and are ordinarily to be classed as imbeciles, and those below  or  as idiots. according to this classification the adult idiot would range up to about -year intelligence as the limit, the adult imbecile would have a mental level between  and   years, and the adult moron would range from about -year to -year intelligence. it should be added, however, that the classification of i q's for the various sub-grades of feeble-mindedness is not very secure, for the reason that the exact curves of mental growth have not been worked out for such grades. as far as the public schools are concerned this does not greatly matter, as they never enroll idiots and very rarely even the high-grade imbecile. school defectives are practically all of the moron and border-line grades, and these it is important teachers should be able to recognize. the following discussions and illustrative cases will perhaps give a fairly definite idea of the significance of various grades of intelligence.[ ] [ ] the clinical descriptions to be given are not complete and are designed merely to aid the examiner in understanding the significance of intelligence quotients found. feeble-mindedness (rarely above  i q.) there are innumerable grades of mental deficiency ranging from somewhat below average intelligence to profound idiocy. in the literal sense every individual below the average is more or less mentally weak or feeble. only a relatively small proportion of these, however, are technically known as feeble-minded. it is therefore necessary to set forth the criterion as to what constitutes feeble-mindedness in the commonly accepted sense of that word. the definition in most general use is the one framed by the royal college of physicians and surgeons of london, and adopted by the english royal commission on mental deficiency. it is substantially as follows:-- _a feeble-minded person is one who is incapable, because of mental defect existing from birth or from an early age, (a) of competing on equal terms with his normal fellows; or (b) of managing himself or his affairs with ordinary prudence._ two things are to be noted in regard to this definition: in the first place, it is stated in terms of social and industrial efficiency. such efficiency, however, depends not merely on the degree of intelligence, but also on emotional, moral, physical, and social traits as well. this explains why some individuals with i q somewhat below can hardly be classed as feeble-minded in the ordinary sense of the term, while others with i q a little above could hardly be classified in any other group. in the second place, the criterion set up by the definition is not very definite because of the vague meaning of the expression "ordinary prudence." even the expression "competing on equal terms" cannot be taken literally, else it would include also those who are merely dull. it is the second part of the definition that more nearly expresses the popular criterion, for as long as an individual manages his affairs in such a way as to be self-supporting, and in such a way as to avoid becoming a nuisance or burden to his fellowmen, he escapes the institutions for defectives and may pass for normal. the most serious defect of the definition comes from the lax interpretation of the term "ordinary prudence," etc. the popular standard is so low that hundreds of thousands of high grade defectives escape identification as such. moreover, there are many grades of severity in social and industrial competition. for example, most of the members of such families as the jukes, the nams, the hill folk, and the kallikaks are able to pass as normal in their own crude environment, but when compelled to compete with average american stock their deficiency becomes evident. it is therefore necessary to supplement the social criterion with a more strictly psychological one. for this purpose there is nothing else as significant as the i q. all who test below  i q by the stanford revision of the binet-simon scale should be considered feeble-minded, and it is an open question whether it would not be justifiable to consider  i q as the lower limit of "normal" intelligence. certainly a large proportion falling between  and  can hardly be classed as other than feeble-minded, even according to the social criterion. _examples of feeble-minded school children_ _f. c. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q approximately ._ from a very superior home. has had the best medical care and other attention. attended a private kindergarten until rejected because he required so much of the teacher's time and appeared uneducable. will probably develop to about the - or -year mental level. high grade imbecile. has since been committed to a state institution. cases as low as f. c. very rarely get into the public schools. _r. w. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q approximately ._ home excellent. is pubescent. because of age and maturity has been promoted to the third grade, though he can hardly do the work of the second. has attended school more than six years. will probably never develop much if any beyond  years, and will never be self-supporting. low-grade moron. [illustration: fig.  . diamond drawn by r. w., age  - ; mental age  - ] _m. s. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father a gardener, home conditions and medical attention fair. has twice attempted first grade, but without learning to read more than a few words. in each case teacher requested parents to withdraw her. "takes" things. is considered "foolish" by the other children. will probably never develop beyond a mental level of  years. _r. m. boy, age  ; mental age  ; i q  ._ decidedly superior home environment and care. after attending school eight years is in fifth grade, though he cannot do the work of the fourth grade. parents unable to teach him to respect property. boys torment him and make his life miserable. at middle-moron level and has probably about reached the limit of his development. has since been committed to a state institution. [illustration: fig.  . writing from dictation. r. m., age  ; mental age  ] _s. m. girl, age  - ; mental age  ; i q approximately  (not counting age beyond )._ from very superior family. has attended public and private schools twelve years and has been promoted to seventh grade, where she cannot do the work. appears docile and childlike, but is subject to spells of disobedience and stubbornness. did not walk until  years old. plays with young children. susceptible to attention from men and has to be constantly guarded. writing excellent, knows the number combinations, but missed all the absurdities and has the vocabulary of an average -year-old. the type from which prostitutes often come. _r. h. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father irish, mother spanish. family comfortable and home care average. has attended school eight years and is unable to do fourth-grade work satisfactorily. health excellent and attendance regular. reads in fourth reader without expression and with little comprehension of what is read. fair skill in number combinations. writing and drawing very poor. cannot use a ruler. has no conception of an inch. r. h. is described as high-tempered, irritable, lacking in physical activity, clumsy, and unsteady. plays little. just "stands around." indifferent to praise or blame, has little sense of duty, plays underhand tricks. is slow, absent-minded, easily confused, in thought, never shows appreciation or interest. so apathetic that he does not hear commands. voice droning. speech poor in colloquial expressions. three years later, at age of , was in a special class attempting sixth-grade work. reported as doing "absolutely nothing" in that grade. still sullen, indifferent, and slow in grasping directions, and lacking in play interests. "no apperception of anything, but has mastered such mechanical things as reading (calling the words) and the fundamentals in arithmetic." in school work, moral traits, and out-of-school behavior r. h. shows himself to be a typical case of moron deficiency. _i. m. girl, age  - ; mental age  ; i q approximately ._ father a laborer. does unsatisfactory work in fourth grade. plays with little girls. a menace to the morals of the school because of her sex interests and lack of self-restraint. rather good-looking if one does not hunt for appearances of intelligence. mental reactions intolerably slow. will develop but little further and will always pass as feeble-minded in any but the very lowest social environment. [illustration: fig.  . ball and field test. i. m., age  - ; mental age  ] _g. v. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father spanish, mother english. family poor but fairly respectable. brothers and sisters all retarded. in high first grade. work all very poor except writing, drawing, and hand work, in all of which he excels. is quiet and inactive, lacks self-confidence, and plays little. mentally slow, inert, "thick," and inattentive. health fair. three years later g. v. was in the low third grade and still doing extremely poor work in everything except manual training, drawing, and writing. is not likely ever to go beyond the fourth or fifth grade however long he remains in school. _v. j. girl, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  ._ has been tested three times in the last five years, always with approximately the same result in terms of i q. home fair to inferior. has been in a special class two years and in school altogether nearly six years. is barely able to do third-grade work. her feeble-mindedness is recognized by teachers and by other pupils. belongs at about middle-moron to high-moron level. _a. w. boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  ._ a year and a half ago he tested at - . from superior family, brothers of very superior intelligence. in school three years and has made about a grade and a half. has higher i q than v. j. described above, but his deficiency is fully as evident. is generally recognized as mentally defective. slyly abstracted one of the pennies used in the test and slipped it into his pocket. has caused much trouble at school by puncturing bicycle tires. high-grade moron. [illustration: fig.  . diamond drawn by a. w.] _a. c. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ from portuguese family of ten children. has a feeble-minded brother. parents in comfortable circumstances and respectable. a. c. has attended school regularly since he was  years old. trying unsuccessfully to do the work of the fourth grade. reads poorly in the third reader. hesitates, repeats, miscalls words, and never gets the thought. writes about like a first-grade pupil. cannot solve such simple problems as "how many marbles can you buy for ten cents if one marble costs five cents?" even when he has marbles and money in his hands. described by teacher as "mentally slow and inert, inattentive, easily distracted, memory poor, ideas vague and often absurd, does not appreciate stories, slow at comprehending commands." is also described as "unruly, boisterous, disobedient, stubborn, and lacking sense of propriety. tattles." three years later, at age of , was in a special class and was little if any improved. he had, however, learned the mechanics of reading and had mastered the number combinations. deficiencies described as "of wide range." conduct, however, had improved. was "working hard to get on." a. c. must be considered definitely feeble-minded. _h. s. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; i q approximately ._ at  years tested at . parents highly educated, father a scholar. brother and sister of very superior intelligence. started to school at , but was withdrawn because of lack of progress. started again at and is now doing poor work in the second grade. weakly and nervous. painfully aware of his inability to learn. during the test keeps saying, "i tried anyway," "it's all i can do if i try my best, ain't it?" etc. regarded defective by other children. will probably never be able to do work beyond the fourth or fifth grade and is not likely to develop above the -year level, if as high. [illustration: fig.  . drawing designs from memory. h. s., age  ; mental age  - ] _i. s. boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  ._ german parentage. started to school at . now in low second grade and unable to do the work. health good. inattentive, mentally slow and inert, easily distracted, speech is monotone. equally poor in reading, writing, and numbers. i. s. is described as quiet, sullen, indifferent, lazy, and stubborn. plays little. three years later had advanced from low second to low fourth grade, but was as poor as ever in his school work. "miscalls the simplest words." moral traits unsatisfactory. may reach sixth or seventh grade if he remains in school long enough. i. s. learned to walk at  years and to talk at . the above are cases of such marked deficiency that there could be no disagreement among competent judges in classifying them in the group of "feeble-minded." all are definitely institutional cases. it is a matter of record, however, that one of the cases, h. s., was diagnosed by a physician (without test) as "backward but not a defective." and with the added encouragement that "the backwardness will be outgrown." of course the reverse is the case; the deficiency is becoming more and more apparent as the boy approaches the age where more is expected of him. in at least three of the above cases (s. m., i. s., and i. m.) the teachers had not identified the backwardness as feeble-mindedness. not far from  children out of , or out of , in the average public school are as defective as some of those just described. teachers get so accustomed to seeing a few of them in every group of  or  pupils that they are likely to regard them as merely dull,--"dreadfully dull," of course,--but not defective. children like these, for their own good and that of other pupils, should be kept out of the regular classes. they will rarely be equal to the work of the fifth grade, however long they attend school. they will make a little progress in a well-managed special class, but with the approach of adolescence, at latest, the state should take them into custodial care for its own protection. border-line cases (usually between  and   i q). the border-line cases are those which fall near the boundary generally recognized as such and the higher group usually classed as normal but dull. they are the doubtful cases, the ones we are always trying (rarely with success) to restore to normality. it must be emphasized, however, that this doubtful group is not marked off by definite i q limits. some children with i q as high as or even will have to be classified as feeble-minded; some as low as  i q may be so well endowed in other mental traits that they may manage as adults to get along fairly well in a simple environment. the ability to compete with one's fellows in the social and industrial world does not depend upon intelligence alone. such factors as moral traits, industry, environment to be encountered, personal appearance, and influential relatives are also involved. two children classified above as feeble-minded had an i q as high as . in these cases the emotional, moral, or physical qualities were so defective as to render a normal social life out of the question. this is occasionally true even with an i q as high as . some of the border-line cases, with even less intelligence, may be so well endowed in other mental traits that they are capable of becoming dependable unskilled laborers, and of supporting a family after a fashion. _examples of border-line deficiency_ _s. f. girl, age  ; mental age  - ; i q approximately (disregarding age above  years)._ father intelligent; mother probably high-grade defective. lives in a good home with aunt, who is a woman of good sense and skillful in her management of the girl. s. f. has attended excellent schools for eleven years and has recently been promoted to the seventh grade. the teacher admits, however, that she cannot do the work of that grade, but says, "i haven't the heart to let her fail in the sixth grade for the third time." she studies very hard and says she wants to become a teacher! at the time the test was made she was actually studying her books from two to three hours daily at home. the aunt, who is very intelligent, had never thought of this girl as feeble-minded, and had suffered much concern and humiliation because of her inability to teach her to conduct herself properly toward men and not to appropriate other people's property. [illustration: fig.  . ball and field test s. f., age  ; mental age  - ] s. f. is ordinarily docile, but is subject to fits of anger and obstinacy. she finally determined to leave her home, threatening to take up with a man unless allowed to work elsewhere. since then she has been tried out in several families, but after a little while in a place she flies into a rage and leaves. she is a fairly capable houseworker when she tries. this young woman is feeble-minded and should be classed as such. she is listed here with the border-line cases simply for the reason that she belongs to a group whose mental deficiency is almost never recognized without the aid of a psychological test. probably no physician could be found who would diagnose the case, on the basis of a medical examination alone, as one of feeble-mindedness. _f. h. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q approximately (disregarding age above  years)._ tested for three successive years without change of more than four points in i q. father a laborer, dull, subject to fits of rage, and beats the boy. mother not far from border-line. f. h. has always had the best of school advantages and has been promoted to the seventh grade. is really about equal to fifth-grade work. fairly rapid and accurate in number combinations, but cannot solve arithmetical problems which require any reasoning. reads with reasonable fluency, but with little understanding. appears exceedingly good-natured, but was once suspended from school for hurling bricks at a fellow pupil. played a "joke" on another pupil by fastening a dangerous, sharp-pointed, steel paper-file in the pupil's seat for him to sit down on. he is cruel, stubborn, and plays truant, but is fairly industrious when he gets a job as errand or delivery boy. discharged once for taking money. f. h. is generally called "queer," but is not ordinarily thought of as feeble-minded. his deficiency is real, however, and it is altogether doubtful whether he will be able to make a living and to keep out of trouble, though he is now (at age  ) employed as messenger boy for the western union at $  per month. this is considerably less than pick-and-shovel men get in the community where he lives. delinquents and criminals often belong to this level of intelligence. _w. c. boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  (disregarding age above  years)._ father a college professor. all the other children in the family of unusually superior intelligence. when tested (four years ago) was trying to do seventh-grade work, but with little success. wanted to leave school and learn farming, but father insisted on his getting the usual grammar-school and high-school education. made $ one summer by raising vegetables on a vacant lot. in the four years since the test was made he has managed to get into high school. teachers say that in spite of his best efforts he learns next to nothing, and they regard him as hopelessly dull. is docile, lacks all aggressiveness, looks stupid, and has head circumference an inch below normal. here is a most pitiful case of the overstimulated backward child in a superior family. instead of nagging at the boy and urging him on to attempt things which are impossible to his inferior intelligence, his parents should take him out of school and put him at some kind of work which he could do. if the boy had been the son of a common laborer he would probably have left school early and have become a dependable and contented laborer. in a very simple environment he would probably not be considered defective. _c. p. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ portuguese boy, son of a skilled laborer. one of eleven children, most of whom have about this same grade of intelligence. has attended school regularly for four years. is in the third grade, but cannot do the work. except for extreme stubbornness his social development is fairly normal. capable in plays and games, but is regarded as impossible in his school work. like his brother, m. p., the next case to be described, he will doubtless become a fairly reliable laborer at unskilled work and will not be regarded, in his rather simple environment, as a defective. from the psychological point of view, however, his deficiency is real. he will probably never develop beyond the - or -year level or be able to do satisfactory school work beyond the fifth or sixth grade. [illustration: fig.  . writing from dictation. c. p., age  - ; mental age  - ] _m. p. boy, age  ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ has been tested four successive years, i q being always between  and  . brother to c. p. above. in school nearly eight years and has been promoted to the fifth grade. at was doing poor work in the sixth grade. good school advantages, as the father has tried conscientiously to give his children "a good education." perfectly normal in appearance and in play activities and is liked by other children. seems to be thoroughly dependable both in school and in his outside work. will probably become an excellent laborer and will pass as perfectly normal, notwithstanding a grade of intelligence which will not develop above  or   years. [illustration: fig.  . ball and field test. m. p., age  ; mental age  - ] what shall we say of cases like the last two which test at high-grade moronity or at border-line, but are well enough endowed in moral and personal traits to pass as normal in an uncomplicated social environment? according to the classical definition of feeble-mindedness such individuals cannot be considered defectives. hardly any one would think of them as institutional cases. among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them. they are the world's "hewers of wood and drawers of water." and yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. these boys are uneducable beyond the merest rudiments of training. no amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the true sense of the word. judged psychologically they cannot be considered normal. it is interesting to note that m. p. and c. p. represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among spanish-indian and mexican families of the southwest and also among negroes. their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. the fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among indians, mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. the writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture. children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. they cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. there is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding. dull normals (i q usually  to  ). in this group are included those children who would not, according to any of the commonly accepted social standards, be considered feeble-minded, but who are nevertheless far enough below the actual average of intelligence among races of western european descent that they cannot make ordinary school progress or master other intellectual difficulties which average children are equal to. a few of this class test as low as  to   i q, but the majority are not far from . the unmistakably normal children who go much below this (in california, at least) are usually mexicans, indians, or negroes. _r. g. negro boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q approximately ._ normal in appearance and conduct, but very dull. is attempting fifth-grade work in a special class, but is failing. from a fairly good home and has had ordinary school advantages. in the examination his intelligence is very even as far as it goes, but stops rather abruptly after the -year tests. will unquestionably pass as normal among unskilled laborers, but his intelligence will never exceed the -year level and he is not likely to advance beyond the seventh grade, if as far. [illustration: fig.  . ball and field. r. g., age  - , mental age  - ] _f. d. boy, tested at age  - ; i q  , and again at - ; i q  ._ mental age in the first test was - and in the second test . son of a barber. father dead; mother capable; makes a good home, and cares for her children well. at was doing unsatisfactory work in the fourth grade, and at unsatisfactory work in low sixth. good-looking, normal in appearance and social development, and though occasionally obstinate is usually steady. any one unacquainted with his poor school work and low i q would consider him perfectly normal. no physical or moral handicaps of any kind that could possibly account for his retardation. is simply dull. needs purely a vocational training, but may be able to complete the eighth grade with low marks by the age of  or  . _g. g. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ from average home. excellent educational advantages and no physical handicaps. at  years was doing very poor work in fifth grade. appearance, play life, and attitude toward other children normal. simply dull. will probably never go beyond the - or -year level and is not likely to get as far as the high school. those testing  and  will usually be able to reach the eighth grade, but ordinarily only after from one to three or four failures. they are so very numerous (about  per cent of the school enrollment) that it is doubtful whether we can expect soon to have special classes enough to accommodate all. the most feasible solution is a differentiated course of study with parallel classes in which every child will be allowed to make the best progress of which he is capable, without incurring the risk of failure and non-promotion. the so-called mannheim system, or something similar to it, is what we need. average intelligence (i q  to  ). it is often said that the schools are made for the average child, but that "the average child does not exist." he does exist, and in very large numbers. about  per cent of all school children test between  and   i q, and about  per cent between  and  . that these children are average is attested by their school records as well as by their i q's. our records show that, of more than  children below  years of age and with i q between  and  , not one was making much more nor much less than average school progress. four were two years retarded, but in each case this was due to late start, illness, or irregular attendance. children who test close to , however, often fail to get along satisfactorily, while those testing near are occasionally able to win an extra promotion. the children of this average group are seldom school problems, as far as ability to learn is concerned. nor are they as likely to cause trouble in discipline as the dull and border-line cases. it is therefore hardly necessary to give illustrative cases here. the high school, however, does not fit their grade of intelligence as well as the elementary and grammar schools. high schools probably enroll a disproportionate number of pupils in the i q range above . that is, the average intelligence among high-school pupils is above the average for the population in general. it is probably not far from . college students are, of course, a still more selected group, perhaps coming chiefly from the range above . the child whose school marks are barely average in the elementary grades, when measured against children in general, will ordinarily earn something less than average marks in high school, and perhaps excessively poor marks in college. superior intelligence (i q  to  ). children of this group ordinarily make higher marks and are capable of making somewhat more rapid progress than the strictly average child. perhaps most of them could complete the eight grades in seven years as easily as the average child does in eight years. they are not usually the best scholars, but on a scale of excellent, good, fair, poor, and failure they will usually rank as good, though of course the degree of application is a factor. it is rare, however, to find a child of this level who is positively indolent in his school work or who dislikes school. in high school they are likely to win about the average mark. intelligence of  to   i q is approximately five times as common among children of superior social status as among children of inferior social status; the proportion among the former being about  per cent of all, and among the latter only  per cent of all. the group is made up largely of children of the fairly successful mercantile or professional classes. the total number of children between  and  is almost exactly the same as the number between  and  ; namely, about  per cent. the distance between these two groups (say between  and  ) is as great as the distance between average intelligence and border-line deficiency, and it would be absurd to suppose that they could be taught to best advantage in the same classes. as a matter of fact, pupils between  and  are usually held back to the rate of progress which the average child can make. they are little encouraged to do their best. very superior intelligence (i q  to  ). children of this group are better than somewhat above average. they are unusually superior. not more than out of go as high as  i q, and only about out of as high as . in the schools of a city of average population only about  child in  or  tests as high as  i q. in a series of unselected children there was not a single one reaching whose social class was described as "below average."[ ] of the children of superior social status, about  per cent reached or better. the - group is made up almost entirely of children whose parents belong to the professional or very successful business classes. the child of a skilled laborer belongs here occasionally, the child of a common laborer very rarely indeed. at least this is true in the smaller cities of california among populations made up of native-born americans. in all probability it would not have been true in the earlier history of the country when ordinary labor was more often than now performed by men of average intelligence, and it would probably not hold true now among certain immigrant populations of good stock, but limited social and educational advantages. [ ] in other investigations, however, we have found even brighter children from very inferior homes. see p.  for an example. what can children of this grade of ability do in school? the question cannot be answered as satisfactorily as one could wish, for the simple reason that such children are rarely permitted to do what they can. what they do accomplish is as follows: of  children (of the unselected cases) falling in this group, ½ per cent were advanced in the grades two years, approximately  per cent were advanced one year,  per cent were in the grade where they belonged by chronological age, and three children, or ½ per cent, were actually retarded one year. but wherever located, such children rarely get anything but the highest marks, and the evidence goes to show that most of them could easily be prepared for high school by the age of  years. serious injury is done them by schools which believe in "putting on the brakes." the following are illustrations of children testing between  and  . not all are taken from the unselected tests. the writer has discovered several children of this grade as a result of lectures before teachers' institutes. it is his custom, in such lectures, to ask the teachers to bring in for a demonstration test the "brightest child in the city" (or county, etc.). the i q resulting from such a test is usually between  and  , occasionally a little higher. _examples of very superior intelligence_ _margaret p. age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father only a skilled laborer (house painter), but a man of unusual intelligence and character for his social class. home care above average. m. p. has attended school a little less than three years and is completing fourth grade. marks all "excellent." health perfect. social and moral traits of the very best. is obedient, conscientious, and unusually reliable for her age. quiet and confident bearing, but no touch of vanity. m. p. is known to be related on her father's side to john wesley, and her maternal grandfather was a highly skilled mechanic and the inventor of an important train-coupling device used on all railroads. although she is not yet  years old and is completing the fourth grade, she is still about a grade below where she belongs by mental age. she could no doubt easily be made ready for high school by the age of . _j. r. girl, age  - ; mental age  (average adult); i q approximately ._ daughter of a university professor. in first year of high school. from first grade up her marks have been nearly all of the a rank. for first semester of high school four of six grades were a, the others b. a wonderfully charming, delightful girl in every respect. play life perfectly normal. _j. r.'s_ parents have moved about a great deal and she has attended eight different schools. she is two years above grade in school, but of this gain only one-half grade was made in school; _the other grade and a half she gained in a little over a year by staying out of school and working a little each day under the instruction of her mother_. but for this she would doubtless now be in the seventh grade instead of in high school. as it is she is at least a grade below where she belongs by mental age. something better than an average college record may be safely predicted for j. r. _e. b. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ e. b. was selected by the teachers of a small california city as the brightest school child in that city (school population about ). her parents are said to be unusually intelligent. e. b. is in the third grade, a year advanced, but her mental level shows that she belongs in the fourth. the test was made as a demonstration test in the presence of about  teachers, all of whom were charmed by her delightful personality and keen responses. no trace of vanity or queerness of any kind. health excellent. e. b. ought to be ready for high school at ; she will really have the intelligence to do high-school work by . [illustration: fig.  . ball and field test. e. b., age - ; i q  ] _l. b. girl, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ tested nearly three years earlier, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  . daughter of a university professor. at age of - was doing very superior work in the fifth grade. later, at age of - , is in the seventh grade with all her marks excellent. has two sisters who test almost as high, both completing the eighth grade at barely  years of age. l. b. looks rather delicate, and though a little nervous is ordinarily strong. we have known her since her early childhood. like both her sisters, she is a favorite with young and old, as nearly perfection as the most charming little girl could be. _r. s. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ when tested at age  - he had a mental age of - , i q  . father a university professor. r. s. entered school at exactly  years of age, and at the present writing is ½ years old and is entering the third grade. leads his class in school and takes delight in the work. is normal in play life and social traits and is dependable and thoughtful beyond his years. should enter high school not later than ; could probably be made ready a year earlier, but as he is somewhat nervous this might not be wise. _t. f. boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  ._ at -  tested at "superior adult," and had vocabulary of , (also "superior adult"). son of a college professor. did not go to school till age of  years and was not taught to read till ½. at this writing he is ½ years old and is a senior in high school. he will complete the high-school course in three and one-half years with a to b marks, mostly a. gets his hardest mathematics lessons in five to ten minutes. science is his play. when he discovered hodge's _nature study and life_ at age of  years he literally slept with the book till he almost knew it by heart. since age  he has given much time to magazines on mechanics and electricity. at he installed a wireless apparatus without other aid than his electrical magazines. he has, for a boy of his age, a rather remarkable understanding of the principles underlying electrical applications. he is known by his playmates as "the boy with a hobby." stamp collections, butterfly and moth collections (over different varieties), seashore collections, and wireless apparatus all show that the appellation is fully merited. he chooses his hobbies and "rides" them entirely on his own initiative. _j. s. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father was a lawyer, parents now dead. is in high fourth grade. leads his class. attractive, healthy, normal-appearing lad. full of good humor. is loving and obedient, strongly attached to his foster mother (an aunt). composes verses and fables for pastime. here are a couple of verses composed before his eighth birthday. they are reproduced without change of spelling or punctuation:-- _christmas_ hurrah for christmas and all it's joy's that come that day for girls and boy's. _flowers_ flowers in the garden. that is all you see who likes them best? that's the honey bee. j. s. ought to be in the fifth grade, instead of the fourth. he will easily be able to enter college by the age of if he is allowed to make the progress which would be normal to a child of his intelligence. but it is too much to expect that the school will permit this. _f. mca. boy, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ father a school principal. f. is leading his class of  pupils in the high seventh grade. has received so many extra promotions only because his father insisted that the teachers allow him to try the next grade. the dire consequences which they predicted have never followed. f. is perfectly healthy and one of the most attractive lads the writer has ever seen. he has the normal play instincts, but when not at play he has the dignified bearing of a young prince, although without vanity. his vocabulary is (  years), and his ability is remarkably even in all directions. f. should easily enter college by the age of . [illustration: fig.  . ball and field f. mca., age  - , mental age  - ] _e. m. boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q  ._ learned to read at age of without instruction and shortly afterward had learned from geography maps the capitals of all the states of the union. started to school at ½. entered the first grade at  a.m. and had been promoted to the fourth grade by  p.m. of the same day! has now attended school a half-year and is in the fifth grade, age   years,  months. father is on the faculty of a university. e. m. is as superior in personal and moral traits as in intelligence. responsible, sturdy, playful, full of humor, loving, obedient. health is excellent. has had no home instruction in school work. his progress has been perfectly natural. [illustration: fig.  . drawing designs from memory. e. m., age  - ; mental age  , i q  (this performance is satisfactory for year  )] the above list of "very superior" children includes only a few of those we have tested who belong to this grade of intelligence. every child in the list is so interesting that it is hard to omit any. we have found all such children (with one or two exceptions not included here) so superior to average children in all sorts of mental and moral traits that one is at a loss to understand how the popular superstitions about the "queerness" of bright children could have originated or survived. nearly every child we have found with i q above is the kind one feels, before the test is over, one would like to adopt. if the crime of kidnaping could ever be forgiven it would be in the case of a child like one of these. genius and "near" genius. intelligence tests have not been in use long enough to enable us to define genius definitely in terms of i q. the following two cases are offered as among the highest test records of which the writer has personal knowledge. it is doubtful whether more than one child in , goes as high as either. one case has been reported, however, in which the i q was not far from . such a record, if reliable, is certainly phenomenal. _e. f. russian boy, age  - ; mental age  ; i q approximately ._ mother is a university student apparently of very superior intelligence. e. f. has a sister almost as remarkable as himself. e. f. is in the sixth grade and at the head of his class. although about four grades advanced beyond his chronological age he is still one grade retarded! he could easily carry seventh-grade work. in all probability e. f. could be made ready for college by the age of  years without injury to body or mind. his mother has taken the only sensible course; she has encouraged him without subjecting him to overstimulation. e. f. was selected for the test as probably one of the brightest children in a city of a third of a million population. he may not be the brightest in that city, but he is one of the three or four most intelligent the writer has found after a good deal of searching. he is probably equaled by not more than one in several thousand unselected children. how impatiently one waits to see the fruit of such a budding genius! _b. f. son of a minister, age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  ._ vocabulary (  years). this test was not made by the writer, but by one of his graduate students. the record included the _verbatim_ responses, so that it was easy to verify the scoring. there can be no doubt as to the substantial accuracy of the test. this i q of is the highest one in the stanford university records. b. f. has excellent health, normal play interests, and is a favorite among his playfellows. parents had not thought of him as especially remarkable. he is only in the third grade, and is therefore about three grades below his mental age. [illustration: fig.  . ball and field. b. f., age  - ; mental age  - ; i q  (this is a -year performance)] it is especially noteworthy that not one of the children we have described with i q above has ever had any unusual amount or kind of home instruction. in most cases the parents were not aware of their very great superiority. nor can we give the credit to the school or its methods. the school has in most cases been a deterrent to their progress, rather than a help. these children have been taught in classes with average and inferior children, like those described in the first part of this chapter. their high i q is only an index of their extraordinary cerebral endowment. this endowment is for life. there is not the remotest probability that any of these children will deteriorate to the average level of intelligence with the onset of maturity. such an event would be no less a miracle (barring insanity) than the development of an imbecile into a successful lawyer or physician. is the i q often misleading? do the cases described in this chapter give a reliable picture as to what one may expect of the various i q levels? does the i q furnish anything like a reliable index of an individual's general educational possibilities and of his social worth? are there not "feeble-minded geniuses," and are there not children of exceptionally high i q who are nevertheless fools? we have no hesitation in saying that there is not one case in fifty in which there is any serious contradiction between the i q and the child's performances in and out of school. we cannot deny the existence of "feeble-minded geniuses," but after a good deal of search we have not found one. occasionally, of course, one finds a feeble-minded person who is an expert penman, who draws skillfully, who plays a musical instrument tolerably well, or who handles number combinations with unusual rapidity; but these are not geniuses; they are not authors, artists, musicians, or mathematicians. as for exceptionally intelligent children who appear feeble-minded, we have found but one case, a boy of  years with an i q of about . this boy, whom we have tested several times and whose development we have followed for five years, was once diagnosed by a physician as feeble-minded. his behavior among other persons than his familiar associates is such as to give this impression. nothing less than an entire chapter would be adequate for a description of this case, which is in reality one of disturbed emotional and social development with superior intelligence. it should be emphasized, however, that what we have said about the significance of various i q's holds only for the i q's secured by the use of the stanford revision. as we have shown elsewhere (p.   _ff._) the i q yielded by other versions of the binet tests are often so inaccurate as to be misleading. we have not found a single child who tested between  and   i q by the stanford revision who was able to do satisfactory school work in the grade where he belonged by chronological age. such children are usually from two to three grades retarded by the age of  years. on the other hand, the child with an i q of or above is almost never found below the grade for his chronological age, and occasionally he is one or two grades above. wherever located, his school work is so superior as to suggest strongly the desirability of extra promotions. those who test between  and  are almost never more than one grade above or below where they belong by chronological age, and even the small displacement of one year is usually determined by illness, age of beginning school, etc. chapter vii reliability of the binet-simon method general value of the method. in a former chapter we have noted certain imperfections of the scale devised by binet and simon; namely, that many of the tests were not correctly located, that the choice of tests was in a few cases unsatisfactory, that the directions for giving and scoring the tests were sometimes too indefinite, and that the upper and lower ranges of the scale especially stood in need of extensions and corrections. all of these faults have been quite generally admitted. the method itself, however, after being put to the test by psychologists of all countries and of all faiths, by the skeptical as well as the friendly, has amply demonstrated its value. the agreement on this point is as complete as it is regarding the scale's imperfections. the following quotations from prominent psychologists who have studied the method will serve to show how it is regarded by those most entitled to an opinion:-- there can be no question about the fact that the binet-simon tests do not make half as frequent or half as great errors in the mental ages (of feeble-minded children) as are included in gradings based on careful, prolonged general observation by experienced observers.[ ] [ ] dr. f. kuhlmann: "the binet-simon tests of intelligence in grading feeble-minded children," in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), p.  . all of the different authors who have made these researches (with binet's method) are in a general way unanimous in recognizing that the principle of the scale is extremely fortunate, and all believe that it offers the basis of a most useful method for the examination of intelligence.[ ] [ ] dr. otto bobertag: "l'échelle métrique de l'intelligence," in _l'année psychologique_ ( ), p.  . it serves as a relatively simple and speedy method of securing, by means accessible to every one, a true insight into the average level of ability of a child between  and   years of age.[ ] [ ] dr. ernest meumann: _experimentelle pädagogik_ ( ), vol. ii, p.  . that, despite the differences in race and language, despite the divergences in school organization and in methods of instruction, there should be so decided agreement in the reactions of the children--is, in my opinion, the best vindication of the _principle_ of the tests that one could imagine, because this agreement demonstrates that _the tests do actually reach and discover the general developmental conditions of intelligence_ (so far as these are operative in public-school children of the present cultural epoch), and not mere fragments of knowledge and attainments acquired by chance.[ ] [ ] dr. w. stern: _the psychological methods of testing intelligence._ translated by whipple ( ), p.  . it is without doubt the most satisfactory and accurate method of determining a child's intelligence that we have, and so far superior to everything else which has been proposed that as yet there is nothing else to be considered.[ ] [ ] dr. h. h. goddard: "the binet measuring scale of intelligence; what it is and how it is to be used," in _the training school bulletin_ ( ). the value of the method lies both in the swiftness and the accuracy with which it works. one who knows how to apply the tests correctly and who is experienced in the psychological interpretation of responses can in forty minutes arrive at a more accurate judgment as to a subject's intelligence than would be possible without the tests after months or even years of close observation. the reasons for this have already been set forth.[ ] the difference is something like that between measuring a person's height with a yardstick and estimating it by guess. that this is not an unfair statement of the case is well shown by the following candid confession by a psychologist who tested juvenile delinquents brought before judge lindsey's court:-- [ ] see this volume, p.   _ff._ as a matter of interest i estimated the mental ages of of my subjects before testing them. in of the estimates the error was not more than one year in either direction; of the subjects were estimated too high, the average error being  years and  months; of the subjects were estimated too low, the average error being  years and  months. _these figures would seem to imply that an estimate with nothing to support it is wholly unreliable, more especially as many of the estimates were four or five years wide of the mark._[ ] [ ] c. s. bluemel: "binet tests on  delinquents," in _the training school bulletin_ ( ), p.  . (italics inserted.) criticisms of the binet method have also been frequently voiced, but chiefly by persons who have had little experience with it or by those whose scientific training hardly justifies an opinion. it cannot be too strongly emphasized that eminence in law, medicine, education, or any other profession does not of itself enable any one to pass judgment on the validity of a psychological method. dependence of the scale's reliability on the training of the examiner. on this point two radically different opinions have been urged. on the one hand, some have insisted that the results of a test made by other than a thoroughly trained psychologist are absolutely worthless. at the opposite extreme are a few who seem to think that any teacher or physician can secure perfectly valid results after a few hours' acquaintance with the tests. the dispute is one which cannot be settled by the assertion of opinion, and, unfortunately, thoroughgoing investigations have not yet been made as to the frequency and extent of errors made by untrained or partially trained examiners. the only study of this kind which has so far been reported is the following:--[ ] [ ] samuel c. kohs: "the binet test and the training of teachers," in _the training school bulletin_ ( ), pp.  - . dr. kohs gives the results of tests made by inexperienced teachers who were taking a summer course in the training school at vineland. the class met three times a week for instruction in the use of the binet scale. during the first week the students listened to three lectures by dr. goddard. the second week was given over to demonstration testing. each student saw four children tested, and attended two discussion periods of an hour each. during the third, fourth, and fifth weeks each student tested one child per week, and observed the testing of two others. the student was allowed to carry the test through in his own way, but received criticism after it was finished. twice a week dr. goddard spent an hour with the class, discussing experimental procedure. the subjects tested were feeble-minded children whose exact mental ages were already known, and for this reason it was possible to check up the accuracy of each student's work. kohs's table of results for the trial testing of the  children showed:-- ( ) that  per cent of the work was as exact as any one in the laboratory could make it; ( ) that in an additional  per cent the results were within three fifths of a year of being exact; ( ) that nearly  per cent of the work of the summer students was sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes; ( ) that the records improved during the brief training so that during the third week only one test missed the real mental age by as much as a year. since hardly any of these students had had any previous experience with the binet tests, dr. kohs seems to be entirely justified in his conclusion that it is possible, in the brief period of six weeks, to teach people to use the tests with a reasonable degree of accuracy. what shall we say of the teacher or of the physician who has not even had this amount of instruction? the writer's experience forces him to agree with binet and with dr. goddard, that any one with intelligence enough to be a teacher, and who is willing to devote conscientious study to the mastery of the technique, can use the scale accurately enough to get a better idea of a child's mental endowment than he could possibly get in any other way. it is necessary, however, for the untrained person to recognize his own lack of experience, and in no case would it be justifiable to base important action or scientific conclusions upon the results of the inexpert examiner. as binet himself repeatedly insisted, the method is not absolutely mechanical, and cannot be made so by elaboration of instructions. it is sometimes held that the examination and classification of backward children for special instruction should be carried out by the school physicians. the fact is, however, that there is nothing in the physician's training to give him any advantage over the ordinary teacher in the use of the binet tests. because of her more intimate knowledge of children and because of her superior tact and adaptability, the average teacher is perhaps better equipped than the average physician to give intelligence tests. finally, it should be emphasized that whatever the previous training or experience of the examiner may have been, his ability to adjust to the child's personality and his willingness to follow conscientiously the directions for giving the tests are important factors in his equipment. influence of the subject's attitude. one continually meets such queries as, "how do you know the subject did his best?" "possibly the child was nervous or frightened," or, "perhaps incorrect answers were purposely given." all such objections may be disposed of by saying that the competent examiner can easily control the experiment in such a way that embarrassment is soon replaced by self-confidence, and in such a way that effort is kept at its maximum. as for mischievous deception, it would be a poor clinicist who could not recognize and deal with the little that is likely to arise. cautions regarding embarrassment, fatigue, fright, illness, etc. are given in chapter ix. most of the errors which have been reported along this line are such as can nearly always be avoided by ordinary prudence, coupled with a little power of observation.[ ] we must not charge the mistakes of untrained and indiscreet examiners against the validity of the method itself. [ ] see, for example, the rather ludicrous "errors" of the binet method reported in _the psychological clinic_ for , pp.   _ff._ and  _ff._ it is possibly true that even if the examiner is tactful and prudent an unfavorable attitude on the part of the subject may occasionally affect the results of a test to some extent, but it ought not seriously to invalidate one examination out of five hundred. the greatest danger is in the case of a young subject who has been recently arrested and brought before a court. even here a little common sense and scientific insight should enable one to guard against a mistaken diagnosis. the influence of coaching. it might be supposed that after the intelligence scale had been used with a few pupils in a given school all of their fellows would soon be apprised of the nature of the tests, and so learn the correct responses. experience shows, however, that there is little likelihood of such influence except in the case of a small minority of the tests. experiments in the psychology of testimony have demonstrated that children's ability to report upon a complex set of experiences is astonishingly weak. in testing with the stanford revision a child is ordinarily given from twenty-four to thirty different tests, many of which are made up of three or more items. of the total forty to fifty items the child is ordinarily able to report but few, and these not always correctly. such tests as memory for sentences and digits, drawing the square and diamond, reproducing the designs from memory, comparing weights and lines, describing and interpreting pictures, æsthetic comparison, vocabulary, dissected sentences, fables, reading for memories, finding differences and similarities, arithmetical reasoning, and the form-board test, are hardly subject to report at all. while almost any of the other tests might, theoretically, be communicated, there is little danger that many of them will be. it is assumed, of course, that the examiner will take proper precautions to prevent any of his blanks or other materials from falling into the hands of those who are to be examined. the following tests are the ones most subject to the influence of coaching: ball and field, giving date, naming sixty words, finding rhymes, changing hands of clock, comprehension of physical relations, "induction test," and "ingenuity test." in several instances we have interviewed children an hour or two after they had taken the examination, in order to find out how many of the tests they could recall. a boy of  years, after repeated questioning, could only say: "he showed me some pictures. he had a knife and a penny. he told me to shut the door." a girl of  years could recall nothing whatever that was intelligible. an -year-old boy said: "he made me tie a knot. he asked me about a ship and an auto. he wanted me to count backwards. he made me say over some things, numbers and things." a boy of  years said: "he told me to say all the words i could think of. he said some foolish things and asked what was foolish [he could not repeat a single absurdity]. i had to put some blocks together. i had to do some problems in arithmetic [he could not repeat a single problem]. he read some fables to me. [asked about the fables he was able to recall only part of one, that of the fox and the crow.] he showed me the picture of a field and wanted to know how to find a ball." it is evident from the above samples of report that the danger of coaching increases considerably with the age of the children concerned. with young subjects the danger is hardly present at all; with children of the upper-grammar grades, in the high school, and most of all in prisons and reformatories, it must be taken into account. alternative tests may sometimes be used to advantage when there is evidence of coaching on any of the regular tests. it would be desirable to have two or three additional scales which could be used interchangeably with the binet-simon. reliability of repeated tests. will the same tests give consistent results when used repeatedly with the same subject? in general we may say that they do. something depends, however, on the age and intelligence of the subject and on the time interval between the examinations. goddard proves that feeble-minded individuals whose intelligence has reached its full development continue to test at exactly the same mental age by the binet scale, year after year. in their case, familiarity with the tests does not in the least improve the responses. at each retesting the responses given at previous examinations are repeated with only the most trivial variations. of feeble-minded children tested at vineland, three years in succession, gave absolutely no variation, showed a variation of not more than two fifths of a year, while gained as much as one year in the three tests. the latter, presumably, were younger children whose intelligence was still developing. goddard has also tested public-school children for three successive years. approximately half of these showed normal progress or more in mental age, while most of the remainder showed somewhat less than normal progress. bobertag's retesting of normal children after an interval of a year gave results entirely in harmony with those of goddard. the reapplication of the tests showed absolutely no influence of familiarity, the correlation of the two tests being almost perfect (. ). those who tested "at age" in the first test had advanced, on the average, exactly one year. those who tested _plus_ in the first test advanced in the twelve months about a year and a quarter, as we should expect those to do whose mental development is accelerated. correspondingly, those who tested _minus_ at the first test advanced only about three fourths of a year in mental age during the interval.[ ] [ ] otto bobertag: "ueber intelligenz prüfungen," in _zeitsch. f. angew. psychol._ ( ), p.   _ff._ our own results with a mixed group of normal, superior, dull and feeble-minded children agree fully with the above findings. in this case the two tests were separated by an interval of two to four years, and the correlation between their results was practically perfect. the average difference between the i q obtained in the second test and that obtained in the first was only  per cent, and the greatest difference found was only  per cent.[ ] [ ] see _the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon scale for measuring intelligence_. (warwick and york, .) the repetition of the test at shorter intervals will perhaps affect the result somewhat more, but the influence is much less than one might expect. the writer has tested, at intervals of only a few days to a few weeks, backward children of  to   years, and normal children of  to   years. the backward children showed an average improvement in the second test of about two months in mental age, the normal children an average improvement of little more than three months. no child varied in the second test more than half a year from the mental age first secured. on the whole, normal children profit more from the experience of a previous test than do the backward and feeble-minded. berry tested normal children and defectives with the binet and scales at brief intervals. the author does not state which scale was applied first, but the mental ages secured by the two scales were practically the same when allowance was made for the slightly greater difficulty of the series of tests.[ ] [ ] charles scott berry: "a comparison of the binet tests of and ," in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - . we may conclude, therefore, that while it would probably be desirable to have one or more additional scales for alternative use in testing the same children at very brief intervals, the same scale may be used for repeated tests at intervals of a year or more with little danger of serious inaccuracy. moreover, results like those set forth above are important evidence as to the validity of the test method. influence of social and educational advantages. the criticism has often been made that the responses to many of the tests are so much subject to the influence of school and home environment as seriously to invalidate the scale as a whole. some of the tests most often named in this connection are the following: giving age and sex; naming common objects, colors, and coins; giving the value of stamps; giving date; naming the months of the year and the days of the week; distinguishing forenoon and afternoon; counting; making change; reading for memories; naming sixty words; giving definitions; finding rhymes; and constructing a sentence containing three given words. it has in fact been found wherever comparisons have been made that children of superior social status yield a higher average mental age than children of the laboring classes. the results of decroly and degand and of meumann, stern, and binet himself may be referred to in this connection. in the case of the stanford investigation, also, it was found that when the unselected school children were grouped in three classes according to social status (superior, average, and inferior), the average i q for the superior social group was , and that of the inferior social group . this is equivalent to a difference of one year in mental age with -year-olds, and to a difference of two years with -year-olds. however, the common opinion that the child from a cultured home does better in tests solely by reason of his superior home advantages is an entirely gratuitous assumption. practically all of the investigations which have been made of the influence of nature and nurture on mental performance agree in attributing far more to original endowment than to environments. common observation would itself suggest that the social class to which the family belongs depends less on chance than on the parents' native qualities of intellect and character. the results of five separate and distinct lines of inquiry based on the stanford data agree in supporting the conclusion that the children of successful and cultured parents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for the simple reason that their heredity is better. the results of this investigation are set forth in full elsewhere.[ ] [ ] see _the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence_. (warwick and york, ) it would, of course, be going too far to deny all possibility of environmental conditions affecting the result of an intelligence test. certainly no one would expect that a child reared in a cage and denied all intercourse with other human beings could by any system of mental measurement test up to the level of normal children. there is, however, no reason to believe that _ordinary_ differences in social environment (apart from heredity), differences such as those obtaining among unselected children attending approximately the same general type of school in a civilized community, affects to any great extent the validity of the scale. a crucial experiment would be to take a large number of very young children of the lower classes and, after placing them in the most favorable environment obtainable, to compare their later mental development with that of children born into the best homes. no extensive study of this kind has been made, but the writer has tested twenty orphanage children who, for the most part, had come from very inferior homes. they had been in a well-conducted orphanage for from two to several years, and had enjoyed during that time the advantages of an excellent village school. nevertheless, all but three tested below average, ranging from  to   i q. the impotence of school instruction to neutralize individual differences in native endowment will be evident to any one who follows the school career of backward children. the children who are seriously retarded in school are not normal, and cannot be made normal by any refinement of educational method. as a rule, the longer the inferior child attends school, the more evident his inferiority becomes. it would hardly be reasonable, therefore, to expect that a little incidental instruction in the home would weigh very heavily against these same native differences in endowment. cases like the following show conclusively that it does not:-- x is the son of unusually intelligent and well-educated parents. the home is everything one would expect of people of scholarly pursuits and cultivated tastes. but x has always been irresponsible, troublesome, childish, and queer. he learned to walk at  years, to talk at , and has always been delicate and nervous. when brought for examination he was  years old. he had twice attempted school work, but could accomplish nothing and was withdrawn. his play-life was not normal, and other children, younger than himself, abused and tormented him. the binet tests gave an i q of approximately ; that is, the retardation amounted to about two years. the child was examined again three years later. at that time, after attending school two years, he had recently completed the first grade. this time the i q was . strange to say, the mother is encouraged and hopeful because she sees that her boy is learning to read. she does not seem to realize that at his age he ought to be within three years of entering high school. the forty-minute test had told more about the mental ability of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily and hourly observation. for x is feeble-minded; he will never complete the grammar school; he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen. let us change the picture. z is a bright-eyed, dark-skinned girl of  years. she is dark-skinned because her father is a mixture of indian and spanish. the mother is of irish descent. with her strangely mated parents and two brothers she lives in a dirty, cramped, and poorly furnished house in the country. the parents are illiterate, and the brothers are retarded and dull, though not feeble-minded. it is z's turn to be tested. i inquire the name. it is familiar, for i have already tested the two stupid brothers. i also know her ignorant parents and the miserable cabin in which she lives. the examination begins with the -year tests. the responses are quick and accurate. we proceed to the -year group. there is no failure, and there is but one minor error. successes and failures alternate for a while until the latter prevail. z has tested at  years. in spite of her wretched home, she is mentally advanced nearly  per cent. by the vocabulary test she is credited with a knowledge of nearly  words, or nearly four times as many as x, the boy of cultured home and scholarly parents, had learned by the age of  years. five years have passed. when given the test, z was in the fourth grade and, as we have already stated,  years of age. as a result of the test she was transferred to the fifth grade. later she skipped again and at the age of is a successful student in the second year of high school. to assay her intelligence and determine its quality was a task of forty-five minutes. the above cases, each of which could be paralleled by many others which we have found, will serve to illustrate the fact that exceptionally superior endowment is discoverable by the tests, however unfavorable the home from which it comes, and that inferior endowment cannot be normalized by all the advantages of the most cultured home. quoting again from stern, "the tests actually reach and discover the general developmental conditions of intelligence, and not mere fragments of knowledge and attainments acquired by chance." part ii guide for the use of the stanford revision and extension chapter viii general instructions necessity of securing attention and effort. the child's intelligence is to be judged by his success in the performance of certain tasks. these tasks may appear to the examiner to be very easy, indeed; but we must bear in mind that they are often anything but easy for the child. real effort and attention are necessary for his success, and occasionally even his best efforts fall short of the desired result. if the tests are to display the child's real intellectual ability it will be necessary, therefore, to avoid as nearly as possible every disturbing factor which would divide his attention or in any other way injure the quality of his responses. to insure this it will be necessary to consider somewhat in detail a number of factors which influence effort, such as degree of quiet, the nature of surroundings, presence or absence of others, means of gaining the child's confidence, the avoidance of embarrassment, fatigue, etc. one should not expect, however, to secure an absolutely equal degree of attention from all subjects. the power to give sustained attention to a difficult task is characteristically weak in dull and feeble-minded children. what we should labor to secure is the maximum attention of which the child is capable, and if this is unsatisfactory without external cause, we are to regard the fact as symptomatic of inferior mental ability, not as an extenuating factor or an excuse for lack of success in the tests. attention, of course, cannot be normal if any acute physical or mental disturbance is present. toothache, headache, earache, nausea, fever, cold, etc., all render the test inadvisable. the same is true of mental anxiety or fear, as in the case of the child who has just been arrested and brought before the court. quiet and seclusion. the tests should be conducted in a quiet room, located where the noises of the street and other outside distractions cannot enter. a reasonably small room is better than a very large one, because it is more homelike. the furnishings of the room should be simple. a table and two chairs are sufficient. if the room contains a number of unfamiliar objects, such as psychological apparatus, pictures on the walls, etc., the attention of the child is likely to be drawn away from the tasks which he is given to do. the halls and corridors which it is sometimes necessary to use in testing school children are usually noisy, cold, or otherwise objectionable. presence of others. a still more disturbing influence is the presence of other persons. generally speaking, if accurate results are to be secured it is not permissible to have any auditor, besides possibly an assistant to record the responses. even the assistant, however quiet and unobtrusive, is sometimes a disturbing element. though something of a convenience, the assistant is by no means necessary, after the examiner has thoroughly mastered the procedure of the tests and has acquired some skill in the use of abbreviations in recording the answers. if an assistant or any other person is present, he should be seated somewhat behind the child, not too close, and should take no notice of the child either when he enters the room or at any time during the examination. at all events, the presence of parent, teacher, school principal, or governess is to be avoided. contrary to what one might expect, these distract the child much more than a strange personality would do. their critical attitude toward the child's performance is very likely to cause embarrassment. if the child is alone with the examiner, he is more at ease from the mere fact that he does not feel that there is a reputation to sustain. the praise so lavishly bestowed upon him by the friendly and sympathetic examiner lends to the same effect. as binet emphasizes, if the presence of others cannot be avoided, it is at least necessary to require of them absolute silence. parents, and sometimes teachers, have an almost irrepressible tendency to interrupt the examination with excuses for the child's failures and with disturbing explanations which are likely to aid the child in comprehending the required task. without the least intention of doing so, they sometimes practically tell the child how to respond. parents, especially, cannot refrain from scolding the child or showing impatience when his answers do not come up to expectation. this, of course, endangers the child's success still further. the psychologist is not surprised at such conduct. it would be foolish to expect average parents, even apart from their bias in the particular case at hand, to adopt the scientific attitude of the trained examiner. since we cannot in a few moments at our disposal make them over into psychologists, our only recourse is to deal with them by exclusion. this is not to say that it is impossible to test a child satisfactorily in the presence of others. if the examiner is experienced, and if the child is not timid, it is sometimes possible to make a successful test in the presence of quite a number of auditors, provided they remain silent, refrain from staring, and otherwise conduct themselves with discretion. but not even the veteran examiner can always be sure of the outcome in demonstration testing. getting into "rapport." the examiner's first task is to win the confidence of the child and overcome his timidity. unless _rapport_ has first been established, the results of the first tests given are likely to be misleading. the time and effort necessary for accomplishing this are variable factors, depending upon the personality of both the examiner and the subject. in a majority of cases from three to five minutes should be sufficient, but in a few cases somewhat more time is necessary. the writer has found that when a strange child is brought to the clinic for examination, it is advantageous to go out of doors with him for a little walk around the university buildings. it is usually possible to return from such a stroll in a few minutes, with the child chattering away as though to an old friend. another approach is to begin by showing the child some interesting object, such as a toy, or a form-board, or pictures not used in the test. the only danger in this method is that the child is likely to find the object so interesting that he may not be willing to abandon it for the tests, or that his mind will keep reverting to it during the examination. still another method is to give the child his seat as soon as he is ushered into the room, and, after a word of greeting, which must be spoken in a kindly tone but without gushiness, to open up a conversation about matters likely to be of interest. the weather, place of residence, pets, sports, games, toys, travels, current events, etc., are suitable topics if rightly employed. when the child has begun to express himself without timidity and it is clear that his confidence has been gained, one may proceed, as though in continuance of the conversation, to inquire the name, age, and school grade. the examiner notes these down in the appropriate blanks, rather unconcernedly, at the same time complimenting the child (unless it is clearly a case of serious retardation) on the fine progress he has made with his studies. keeping the child encouraged. nothing contributes more to a satisfactory _rapport_ than praise of the child's efforts. under no circumstances should the examiner permit himself to show displeasure at a response, however absurd it may be. in general, the poorer the response, the better satisfied one should appear to be with it. an error is always to be passed by without comment, unless it is painfully evident to the child himself, in which case the examiner will do well to make some excuse for it; e.g., "you are not quite old enough to answer questions like that one; but, never mind, you are doing beautifully," etc. exclamations like "fine!" "splendid!" etc., should be used lavishly. almost any innocent deception is permissible which keeps the child interested, confident, and at his best level of effort. the examination should begin with tests that are fairly easy, in order to give the child a little experience with success before the more difficult tests are reached. the importance of tact. it goes without saying that children's personalities are not so uniform and simple that we can adhere always to a single stereotyped procedure in working our way into their good graces. suggestions like the above have their value, but, like rules of etiquette, they must be supported by the tact which comes of intuition and cannot be taught. the address which flatters and pleases one child may excite disgust in another. the examiner must scent the situation and adapt his method to it. one child is timid and embarrassed; another may think his mental powers are under suspicion and so react with sullen obstinacy; a third may be in an angry mood as a result of a recent playground quarrel. situations like these are, of course, exceptional, but in any case it is necessary to create in the child a certain mood, or indefinable attitude of mind, before the test begins. personality of the examiner. doubtless there are persons so lacking in personal adaptability that success in this kind of work would be for them impossible. the wooden, mechanical, matter-of-fact and unresponsive personality is as much out of place in the psychological clinic as the traditional bull in the china shop. it would make an interesting study for some one to investigate, by exact methods, the influence on test results of the personality of different examiners who have been equally trained in the methods to be employed and who are equally conscientious in applying them according to rules. on the whole, differences of this kind are probably not very great among experienced and reasonably competent examiners. adaptability grows with experience and with increase of self-confidence. after a few score tests there should be no serious failure from inability to get into _rapport_ with the child. even in those rare cases where the child breaks down and cries from timidity, or perhaps refuses to answer out of embarrassment, the difficulty can be overcome by sufficient tact so that the examination may proceed as though nothing had happened. if the examiner has the proper psychological and personal equipment, the testing of twenty or thirty children forms a fairly satisfactory apprenticeship. without psychological training, no amount of experience will guarantee absolute accuracy of the results. the avoidance of fatigue. against the validity of intelligence tests it is often argued that the result of an examination depends a great deal on the time of day when it is made, whether in the morning hours when the mind is at its best, or in the afternoon when it is supposedly fatigued. although no very extensive investigation has been made of this influence, there is no evidence that the ordinary fatigue incident to school work injures the child's performance appreciably. our tests of  children showed no inferiority of results secured from  to   p.m., as compared with tests made from  to   a.m. an explanation for this is not hard to find. although school work causes fatigue, in the sense that a part of the child's available supply of mental energy is used up, there is always a reserve of energy sufficient to carry the child through a thirty-to fifty-minute test. the fact that the required tasks are novel and interesting to a high degree insures that the reserve energy will really be brought into play. this principle, of course, has its natural limits. the examiner would avoid testing a child who was exhausted either from work or play, or a child who was noticeably sleepy. duration of the examination. about the only danger of fatigue lies in making the examination too long. young children show symptoms of weariness much more quickly than older children, and it is therefore fortunate that not so much time is needed for testing them. the following allowances of time will usually be found sufficient:-- children -  years old -  minutes " - " " - " " - " " - " " - " " - " adults - " this allowance ordinarily includes the time necessary for getting into _rapport_ with the child, in addition to that actually consumed in the tests. but the examiner need not expect to hold fast to any schedule. some subjects respond in a lively manner, others are exasperatingly slow. it is more often the mentally retarded child who answers slowly, but exceptions to this rule are not uncommon. one -year-old boy examined by the writer answered so hesitatingly that it required two sittings of nearly an hour each to complete the test. the result, however, showed a mental age of ½ years, or an i q of . it is permissible to hurry the child by an occasional "that's fine; now, quickly," etc., but in doing this caution must be exercised, or the child's mental process may be blocked. the appearance of nagging must be carefully avoided. if the test goes so slowly that it cannot be completed in the above limits of time, it is usually best to stop and complete the examination at another time. when this is not possible, it is advisable to take a ten-minute intermission and a little walk out of doors. time can be saved by having all the necessary materials close at hand and conveniently arranged. the coins should be kept in a separate purse, and the pictures, colors, stamps, and designs for drawing should be mounted on stiff cardboard which may be punched and kept in a notebook cover. the series of sentences, digits, comprehension questions, fables, etc., should either be mounted in similar fashion, or else printed in full on the record sheets used in the tests. the latter is more convenient.[ ] all other materials should be kept where they will not have to be hunted for. [ ] examiners will find it a great convenience to use the record booklet which has been specially devised for testing with the stanford revision. it contains all the necessary printed material, including digits, sentences, absurdities, fables, the vocabulary list, the reading selection, the square and diamond for copying, etc., and in addition gives with each test the standard for scoring. it is so arranged as to afford ample room for a _verbatim_ record of all the child's responses, and contains other features calculated to make testing easy and accurate. regarding purchasing of supplies see p.  . besides saving valuable time, a little methodical foresight of this kind adds to the success of the test. if the child is kept waiting, the test loses its interest and attention strays. see to it, if possible, that no lull occurs in the performance. inexperienced examiners sometimes waste time foolishly by stopping to instruct the child on his failures. this is doubly bad, for besides losing time it makes the child conscious of the imperfection of his responses and creates embarrassment. adhere to the purpose of the test, which is to ascertain the child's intellectual level, not to instruct him. desirable range of testing. there are two considerations here of equal importance. it is necessary to make the examination thorough, but in the pursuit of thoroughness we must be careful not to produce fatigue or ennui. unless there is reason to suspect mental retardation, it is usually best to begin with the group of tests just below the child's age. however, if there is a failure in the tests of that group, it is necessary to go back and try all the tests of the previous group. in like manner the examination should be carried up the scale, until a test group has been found in which all the tests are failed. it must be admitted, however, that because of time limitations and fatigue, it is not always practicable to adhere to this ideal of thoroughness. in testing normal children, little error will result if we go back no farther than the year which yielded only one failure, and if we stop with the year in which there was only one success. _this is the lowest permissible limit of thoroughness._ defectives are more uneven mentally than normal children, and therefore scatter their successes and failures over a wider range. with such subjects it is absolutely imperative that the test be thorough. in the case of defectives it is sometimes necessary to begin with random testing, until a rough idea is gained of the mental level. but the skilled observer soon becomes able to utilize symptoms in the child's conversation and conduct and to dispense with most of this preliminary exploration. order of giving the tests. the child's efforts in the tests are sometimes markedly influenced by the order in which they are given. if language tests or memory tests are given first, the child is likely to be embarrassed. more suitable to begin with are those which test knowledge or judgment about objective things, such as the pictures, weights, stamps, bow-knot, colors, coins, counting pennies, number of fingers, right and left, time orientation, ball and field, paper-folding, etc. tests like naming sixty words, finding rhymes, giving differences or similarities, making sentences, repeating sentences, and drawing are especially unsuitable because they tend to provoke self-consciousness. the tests as arranged in this revision are in the order which it is usually best to follow, but one should not hesitate to depart from the order given when it seems best in a given case to do so. it is necessary to be constantly alert so that when the child shows a tendency to balk at a given type of test, such as those of memory, language, numbers, drawing, "comprehension," etc., the work can be shifted to more agreeable tasks. when the child is at his ease again, it is usually possible to return to the troublesome tests with better success. in the case of -year-old d. c., who is a speech defective but otherwise above normal, it was quite impossible at the first sitting to give such tests as sentence-making, naming sixty words, reading, repeating sentences, giving definitions, etc.; at each test of this type the child's voice broke and he was ready to cry, due, no doubt, to sensitiveness regarding his speech defect. others do everything willingly except the drawing and copying. the younger children sometimes refuse to repeat the sentences or digits. in all such cases it is best to pass on to something else. after a few minutes the rejected task may be done willingly. coaxing to be avoided. although we should always encourage the child to believe that he can answer correctly, if he will only try, we must avoid the common practice of dragging out responses by too much urging and coaxing. the sympathies of the examiner tend to lead him into the habit of repeating and explaining the question if the child does not answer promptly. this is nearly always a mistake, for the question is one which should be understood. besides, explanations and coaxing are too often equivalent to answering the question for the child. it is almost impossible to impress this danger sufficiently upon the untrained examiner. one who is not familiar with the psychology of suggestion may put the answer in the child's mouth without suspecting what he is doing. adhering to formula. it cannot be too strongly emphasized that unless we follow a standardized procedure the tests lose their significance. the danger is chiefly that of unintentionally and unconsciously introducing variations which will affect the meaning of the test. one who has not had a thorough training in the methods of mental testing cannot appreciate how numerous are the opportunities for the unconscious transformation of a test. many of these are pointed out in the description of the individual tests, but it would be folly to undertake to warn the experimenter against every possible error of this kind. sometimes the omission or the addition of a single phrase in giving the test will alter materially the significance of the response. only the trained psychologist can vary the formula without risk of invalidating the result, and even he must be on his guard. all sorts of misunderstandings regarding the correct placing of tests and regarding their accuracy or inaccuracy have come about through the failure of different investigators to follow the same procedure. one who would use the tests for any serious purpose, therefore, must study the procedure for each and every test until he knows it thoroughly. after that a considerable amount of practice is necessary before one learns to avoid slips. during the early stages of practice it is necessary to refer to the printed instructions frequently in order to check up errors before they have become habitual. the instructions hitherto available are at fault in not defining the procedure with sufficient definiteness, and it is the purpose of this volume to make good this deficiency as far as possible. it is too much, however, to suppose that the instructions can be made "fool-proof." with whatever definiteness they may be set forth, situations are sure to arise which the examiner cannot be formally prepared for. there is no limit to the multitude of misunderstandings possible. after testing hundreds of children one still finds new examples of misapprehension. in a few such cases the instruction may be repeated, if there is reason to think the child's hearing was at fault or if some extraordinary distraction has occurred. but unless otherwise stated in the directions, the repetition of a question is ordinarily to be avoided. supplementary explanations are hardly ever permissible. in short, numberless situations may arise in the use of a test which may injure the validity of the response, events which cannot always be dealt with by preconceived rule. accordingly, although we must urge unceasingly the importance of following the standard procedure, it is not to be supposed that formulas are an adequate substitute either for scientific judgment or for common sense. scoring. the exact method of scoring the individual tests is set forth in the following chapters. reference to the record booklet for use in testing will show that the records are to be kept in detail. each subdivision of a test should be scored separately, in order that the clinical picture may be as complete as possible. this helps in the final evaluation of the results. it makes much difference, for example, whether success in repeating six digits is earned by repeating all three correctly or only one; or whether the child's lack of success with the absurdities is due to failure on two, three, four, or all of them. time should be recorded whenever called for in the record blanks. recording responses. plus and minus signs alone are not usually sufficient. whenever possible the entire response should be recorded. if the test results are to be used by any other person than the examiner, this is absolutely essential. any other standard of completeness opens the door to carelessness and inaccuracy. in nearly all the tests, except that of naming sixty words, the examiner will find it possible by the liberal use of abbreviations to record practically the entire response _verbatim_. in doing so, however, one must be careful to avoid keeping the child waiting. occasionally it is necessary to leave off recording altogether because of the embarrassment sometimes aroused in the child by seeing his answer written down. the writer has met the latter difficulty several times. when for any reason it is not feasible to record anything more than score marks, success may be indicated by the sign +, failure by -, and half credit by ½. an exceptionally good response may be indicated by ++ and an exceptionally poor response by --. if there is a slight doubt about a success or failure the sign? may be added to the + or -. in general, however, score the response either + or -, avoiding half credit as far as it is possible to do so. if the entire response is not recorded it is necessary to record at least the score mark for each test _when the test is given_. it must be borne in mind that the scoring is not a purely mechanical affair. instead, the judgment of the examiner must come into play with every record made. if the scoring is delayed, there is not only the danger of forgetting a response, but the judgment is likely to be influenced by the subject's responses to succeeding questions. our special record booklet contains wide margins, so that extended notes and observations regarding the child's responses and behavior can be recorded as the test proceeds. scattering of successes. it is sometimes a source of concern to the untrained examiner that the successes and failures should be scattered over quite an extensive range of years. why, it may be asked, should not a child who has -year intelligence answer correctly all the tests up to and including group x, and fail on all the tests beyond? there are two reasons why such is almost never the case. in the first place, the intelligence of an individual is ordinarily not even. there are many different kinds of intelligence, and in some of these the subject is better endowed than in others. a second reason lies in the fact that no test can be purely and simply a test of native intelligence. given a certain degree of intelligence, accidents of experience and training bring it about that this intelligence will work more successfully with some kinds of material than with others. for both of these reasons there results a scattering of successes and failures over three or four years. the subject fails first in one or two tests of a group, then in two or three tests of the following group, the number of failures increasing until there are no successes at all. success "tapers off" from  per cent to . once in a great while a child fails on several of the tests of a given year and succeeds with a majority of those in the next higher year. this is only an extreme instance of uneven intelligence or of specialized experience, and does not necessarily reflect upon the reliability of the tests for children in general. the method of calculation given above strikes a kind of average and gives the general level of intelligence, which is essentially the thing we want to know. supplementary considerations. it would be a mistake to suppose that any set of mental tests could be devised which would give us complete information about a child's native intelligence. there are no tests which are absolutely pure tests of intelligence. all are influenced to a greater or less degree also by training and by social environment. for this reason, all the ascertainable facts bearing on such influences should be added to the record of the mental examination, and should be given due weight in reaching a final conclusion as to the level of intelligence. the following supplementary information should be gathered, when possible:-- . social status (very superior, superior, average, inferior, or very inferior). . the teacher's estimate of the child's intelligence (very superior, superior, average, inferior, or very inferior). . school opportunities, including years of attendance, regularity, retardation or acceleration, etc. . quality of school work (very superior, superior, average, inferior, or very inferior). . physical handicaps, if any (adenoids, diseased tonsils, partial deafness, imperfect vision, malnutrition, etc.). in addition, the examiner will need to take account of the general attitude of the child during the examination. this is provided for in the record blanks under the heading "comments." the comments should describe as fully as possible the conduct and attitude of the child during the examination, with emphasis upon such disturbing factors as fear, timidity, unwillingness to answer, overconfidence, carelessness, lack of attention, etc. sometimes, also, it is desirable to verify the child's age and to make record of the verification. once more let it be urged that no degree of mechanical perfection of the tests can ever take the place of good judgment and psychological insight. intelligence is too complicated to be weighed, like a bag of grain, by any one who can read figures. alternative tests. the tests designated as "alternative tests" are not intended for regular use. inasmuch as they have been standardized and belong in the year group where they are placed, they may be used as substitute tests on certain occasions. sometimes one of the regular tests is spoiled in giving it, or the requisite material for it may not be at hand. sometimes there may be reason to suspect that the subject has become acquainted with some of the tests. in such cases it is a great convenience to have a few substitutes available. it is necessary, however, to warn against a possible misuse of alternative tests. _it is not permissible to count success in an alternative test as offsetting failure in a regular test._ this would give the subject too much leeway of failure. there are very exceptional cases, however, when it is legitimate to break this rule; namely, when one of the regular tests would be obviously unfair to the subject being tested. in year x, for example, one of the three alternative tests should be substituted for the reading test (x,  ) in case we are testing a subject who has not had the equivalent of at least two years of school work. in year viii, it would be permissible to substitute the alternative test of naming six coins, instead of the vocabulary test, in the case of a subject who came from a home where english was not spoken. in vii, it would perhaps not be unfair to substitute the alternative test, in place of the test of copying a diamond, in the case of a subject who, because of timidity or embarrassment, refused to attempt the diamond. but it would be going entirely too far to substitute an alternative test in the place of every regular test which the subject responded to by silence. in the large majority of cases persistent silence deserves to be scored failure. certain tests have been made alternatives because of their inferior value, some because the presence of other tests of similar nature in the same year rendered them less necessary. finding mental age. as there are six tests in each age group from iii to x, each test in this part of the scale counts  months toward mental age. there are eight tests in group xii, which, because of the omission of the -year group, have a combined value of  months, or  months each. similarly, each of the six tests in xiv has a value of  months (  ÷   =  ). the tests of the "average adult" group are given a value of  months each, and those of the "superior adult" group a value of  months each. these values are in a sense arbitrary, but they are justified in the fact that they are such as to cause ordinary adults to test at the "average adult" level. the calculation of mental age is therefore simplicity itself. the rule is: ( ) credit the subject with all the tests below the point where the examination begins (remembering that the examination goes back until a year group has been found in which all the tests are passed); and ( ) add to this basal credit  months for each test passed successfully up to and including year x,  months for each test passed in xii,  months for each test passed in xiv,  months for each success in "average adult," and  months for each success in "superior adult." for example, let us suppose that a child passes all the tests in vi, five of the six tests in vii, three in viii, two in ix, and one in x. the total credit earned is as follows:-- _years__months_ credit presupposed, years i to v credit earned in vi,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in vii,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in viii,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in ix,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in x,  test passed,  months ---- ---- total credit taking a subject who tests higher, let us suppose the following tests are passed: all in x, six of the eight in xii, two of the six in xiv, and one of the six in "average adult." the total credit is as follows:-- _years__months_ credit presupposed, years i to ix credit earned in x,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in xii,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in xiv,  tests passed,  months each credit earned in "average adult,"  success,  months ---- ---- total credit one other point: if one or more tests of a year group have been omitted, as sometimes happens either from oversight or lack of time, the question arises how the tests which were given in such a year group should be evaluated. suppose, for example, a subject has been given only four of the six tests in a given year, and that he passes two, or half of those given. in such a case the probability would be that had all six tests been given, three would have been passed; that is, one half of all. it is evident, therefore, that when a test has been omitted, a proportionately larger value should be assigned to each of those given. if all six tests are given in any year group below xii, each has a value of  months. if only four are given, each has a value of  months (  ÷   =  ). if five tests only are given, each has a value of .  months (  ÷   =  . ). if in year group xii only six of the eight tests are given, each has a value of  months (  ÷   =  ). if in the "average adult" group only five of the six tests are given, each has a value of  months instead of the usual  months. in this connection it will need to be remembered that the six "average adult" tests have a combined value of  months (  tests,  months each); also that the combined value of the six "superior adult" tests is  months (  ×   =  ). accordingly, if only five of the six "superior adult" tests are given, the value of each is  ÷   =  .  months. for example, let us suppose that a subject has been tested as follows: all the six tests in x were given and all were passed; only six of the eight in xii were given and five were passed; five of the six in xiv were given and three were passed; five of the six in "average adult" were given and one was passed; five were given in "superior adult" and no credit earned. the result would be as follows:-- _years__months_ credit presupposed, years i to ix credit earned in x,  given,  successes credit earned in xii,  given,  passed. unit value of each test given is  ÷   =  . total value of the  tests passed is  ×  or credit earned in xiv,  tests given,  passed. unit value of each of the given is  ÷   =  . . value of the passed is  ×  . , or + credit earned in "average adult,"  tests given,  passed. unit value of the  tests given is  ÷   =  . value of the  success credit earned in "superior adult" ---- ---- total credit + the calculation of mental age is really simpler than our verbal illustrations make it appear. after the operation has been performed twenty or thirty times, it can be done in less than a half-minute without danger of error. the use of the intelligence quotient. as elsewhere explained, the mental age alone does not tell us what we want to know about a child's intelligence status. the significance of a given number of years of retardation or acceleration depends upon the age of the child. a -year-old child who is retarded one year is ordinarily feeble-minded; a -year-old retarded one year is only a little below normal. the child who at  years of age is retarded one year will probably be retarded two years at the age of , three years at the age of , and four years at the age of . what we want to know, therefore, is the ratio existing between mental age and real age. this is the intelligence quotient, or i q. to find it we simply divide mental age (expressed in years and months) by real age (also expressed in years and months). the process is easier if we express each age in terms of months alone before dividing. the division can, of course, be performed almost instantaneously and with much less danger of error by the use of a slide rule or a division table. one who has to calculate many intelligence quotients should by all means use some kind of mechanical help. how to find the i q of adult subjects. native intelligence, in so far as it can be measured by tests now available, appears to improve but little after the age of  or   years. it follows that in calculating the i q of an adult subject, it will be necessary to disregard the years he has lived beyond the point where intelligence attains its final development. although the location of this point is not exactly known, it will be sufficiently accurate for our purpose to assume its location at  years. accordingly, any person over  years of age, however old, is for purposes of calculating i q considered to be just  years old. if a youth of and a man of  years both have a mental age of  years, the i q in each case is  ÷  , or . . the significance of various values of the i q is set forth elsewhere.[ ] here it need only be repeated that  i q means exactly average intelligence; that nearly all who are below  or   i q are feeble-minded; and that the child of  i q is about as much above the average as the high-grade feeble-minded individual is below the average. for ordinary purposes all who fall between  and   i q may be considered as average in intelligence. [ ] see chapter vi. material for use in testing. it is strongly recommended that in testing by the stanford revision the regular stanford record booklets be used. these are so arranged as to make testing accurate, rapid, and convenient. they contain square, diamond, round field, vocabulary list, fables, sentences, digits, and selections for memory tests, the reading selection barred for scoring, the dissected sentences, arithmetical problems, etc. one is required for each child tested.[ ] [ ] houghton mifflin company will supply all the printed material needed in the tests, including the lines for the forms for vi,  , the four pictures for "enumeration," "description," and "interpretation," the pictures for v,  and vi,  , the colors, designs for x,  , the code for average adult , and score cards for square, diamond, designs, and ball-and-field. this is all the material required for the use of the stanford revision, except the five weights for ix,  , and v,  , and the healy-fernald construction puzzle for x. these may be purchased of c. h. stoelting & co., carroll avenue, chicago. it is not necessary, however, to have the weights and the construction puzzle, as the presence of one or more alternative tests in each year makes it possible to substitute other tests instead of those requiring these materials. this saves considerable expense. apart from these, which may either be made at home (see pages , ) or dispensed with, the only necessary equipment for using the stanford revision is a copy of this book with the accompanying set of printed matter, and the record booklets. the record booklets are supplied only in packages of . chapter ix instructions for year iii iii,  . pointing to parts of the body procedure. after getting the child's attention, say: "_show me your nose._" "_put your finger on your nose._" same with eyes, mouth, and hair. tact is often necessary to overcome timidity. if two or three repetitions of the instruction fail to bring a response, point to the child's chin or ear and say: "_is this your nose?_" "_no?_" "_then where is your nose?_" sometimes, after one has tried two or three parts of the test without eliciting any response, the child may suddenly release his inhibitions and answer all the questions promptly. in case of persistent refusal to respond it is best not to harass the child for an answer, but to leave the test for a while and return to it later. this is a rule which applies generally throughout the scale. in the case of one exceptionally timid little girl, it was impossible to get any response by the usual procedure, but immediately when a doll was shown the child pointed willingly to its nose, eyes, mouth, and hair. the device was successful because it withdrew the child's attention from herself and centered it upon something objective. scoring. _three responses out of four_ must be correct. instead of pointing, the child sometimes responds by winking the eyes, opening the mouth, etc., which is counted as satisfactory. remarks. binet's purpose in this test is to ascertain whether the subject is capable of comprehending simple language. the ability to comprehend and use language is indeed one of the most reliable indications of the grade of mental development. the appreciation of gestures comes first, then the comprehension of language heard, next the ability to repeat words and sentences mechanically, and finally the ability to use language as a means of communication. the present test, however, is not more strictly a test of language comprehension than the others of the -year group, and in any case it could not be said to mark the _beginning_ of the power to comprehend spoken language. that is fairly well advanced by the age of  years. the test closely resembles iii,  (naming familiar objects), and iii,  (enumeration of objects in a picture), except that it brings in a personal element and gives some clue to the development of the sense of self. all the data agree in locating the test at year iii. iii,  . naming familiar objects procedure. use a key, a penny, a closed knife, a watch, and an ordinary lead pencil. the key should be the usual large-sized doorkey, not one of the yale type. the penny should not be too new, for the freshly made, untarnished penny resembles very little the penny usually seen. any ordinary pocket knife may be used, and it is to be shown unopened. the formula is, "_what is this?_" or, "_tell me what this is._" scoring. there must be at least _three correct responses out of five_. a response is not correct unless the object is named. it is not sufficient for the child merely to show that he knows its use. a child, for example, may take the pencil and begin to mark with it, or go to the door and insert the key in the lock, but this is not sufficient. at the same time we must not be too arbitrary about requiring a particular name. "cent" or "pennies" for "penny" is satisfactory, but "money" is not. the watch is sometimes called "a clock" or "a tick-tock," and we shall perhaps not be too liberal if we score these responses _plus_. "pen" for "pencil," however, is unsatisfactory. substitute names for "key" and "knife" are rarely given. mispronunciations due to baby-talk are of course ignored. remarks. the purpose of this test is to find out whether the child has made the association between familiar objects and their names. the mental processes necessary to enable the child to pass this test are very elementary, and yet, as far as they go, they are fundamental. learning the names of objects frequently seen is a form of mental activity in which the normally endowed child of  to   years finds great satisfaction. any marked retardation in making such associations is a grave indication of the lack of that spontaneity which is so necessary for the development of the higher grades of intelligence. it would be entirely beside the point, therefore, to question the validity of the test on the ground that a given child may not have been _taught_ the names of the objects used. practically all children  years old, however poor their environment, have made the acquaintance of at least three of the five objects, and if intelligence is normal they have learned their names as a result of spontaneous inquiry. always use the list of objects here given, because it has been standardized. any improvised selection would be sure to contain some objects either less or more familiar than those in the standardized list. note also that three correct responses out of five are sufficient. if we required five correct answers out of six (like kuhlmann), or three out of three (like binet, goddard, and huey), the test would probably belong at the -year level. binet states that this test is materially harder than that of naming objects in a picture, since in the latter the child selects from a number of objects in the picture those he knows best, while in the former test he must name the objects we have arbitrarily chosen. this difference does not hold, however, if we require only three correct responses out of five for passing the test of naming objects, instead of binet's three out of three. all else being equal, it is of course easier to recognize and name a real object shown than it is to recognize and name it from a picture. iii,  . enumeration of objects in pictures procedure. use the three pictures designated as "dutch home," "river scene," and "post-office." say, "_now i am going to show you a pretty picture._" then, holding the first one before the child, close enough to permit distinct vision, say: "_tell me what you see in this picture._" if there is no response, as sometimes happens, due to embarrassment or timidity, repeat the request in this form: "_look at the picture and tell me everything you can see in it._" if there is still no response, say: "_show me the ..._" (naming some object in the picture). only one question of this type, however, is permissible. if the child answers correctly, say: "_that is fine; now tell me everything you see in the picture._" from this point the responses nearly always follow without further coaxing. indeed, if _rapport_ has been properly cultivated before the test begins, the first question will ordinarily be sufficient. if the child names one or two things in a picture and then stops, urge him on by saying "_and what else_" proceed with pictures _b_ and _c_ in the same manner. scoring. the test is passed if the child enumerates as many as _three_ objects in _one_ picture _spontaneously_; that is, without intervening questions or urging. anything better than enumeration (as description or interpretation) is also acceptable, but description is rarely encountered before  years and interpretation rarely before  or  .[ ] [ ] see instructions for vii,  , and xii,  . remarks. the purpose of the test in this year is to find out whether the sight of a familiar object in a picture provokes recognition and calls up the appropriate name.[ ] the average child of  or   years is in what binet calls "the identification stage"; that is, familiar objects in a picture will be identified but not described, their relations to one another will not be grasped. [ ] for a discussion of the significance of the different types of response, enumeration, description, and interpretation, see vii,  , and xii,  . in giving the test, always present the pictures in the same order, first dutch home, then river scene, then post-office. the order of presentation will no doubt seem to the uninitiated too trivial a matter to insist upon, but a little experience teaches one that an apparently insignificant change in the procedure may exert a considerable influence upon the response. some pictures tend more strongly than others to provoke a particular type of response. some lend themselves especially to enumeration, others to description, others to interpretation. the pictures used in the stanford revision have been selected from a number which have been tried because they are more uniform in this respect than most others in use. however, they are not without their differences, picture _b_, for example, tending more than the others to provoke description. there seems to be no disagreement as to the proper location of this test. iii,  . giving sex procedure. if the subject is a boy, the formula is: "_are you a little boy or a little girl?_" if a girl, "_are you a little girl or a little boy?_" this variation in the formula is necessary because of the tendency in young children to repeat mechanically the last word of anything that is said to them. if there is no response, say: "_are you a little girl?_" (if a boy); or, "_are you a little boy?_" (if a girl). if the answer to the last question is "no" (or a shake of the head), we then say: "_well, what are you? are you a little boy or a little girl?_" (or _vice versa_). scoring. the response is satisfactory if it indicates that the child has really made the discrimination, but we must be cautious about accepting any other response than the direct answer, "a little girl," or, "a little boy." "yes" and "no" in response to the second question must be carefully checked up. remarks. binet and goddard say that -year-olds cannot pass this test and that -year-olds almost never fail. we can accept the last part of this statement, but not the first part. nearly all of our -year-old subjects succeed with it. the test probably has nothing to do with sex consciousness, as such. success in it would seem to depend on the ability to discriminate between familiar class names which are in a certain degree related. iii,  . giving the family name procedure. the child is asked, "_what is your name?_" if the answer, as often happens, includes only the first name (walter, for example), say: "_yes, but what is your other name? walter what?_" if the child is silent, or if he only repeats the first name, say: "_is your name walter ... ?_" (giving a fictitious name, as jones, smith, etc.). this question nearly always brings the correct answer if it is known. scoring. simply + or -. no attention is paid to faults of pronunciation. remarks. there is unanimous agreement that this test belongs in the -year group. although the child has not had as much opportunity to learn the family name as his first name, he is almost certain to have heard it more or less, and if his intelligence is normal the interest in self will ordinarily cause it to be remembered. the critic of the intelligence scale need not be unduly exercised over the fact that there may be an occasional child of  years who has never heard his family name. we have all read of such children, but they are so extremely rare that the chances of a given -year-old being unjustly penalized for this reason are practically negligible. in the second place, contingencies of this nature are throughout the scale consistently allowed for in the percentage of passes required for locating a test. since (in the year groups below xiv) the individual tests are located at the age level where they are passed by  to   per cent of unselected children of that age, it follows that the child of average ability _is expected_ to fail on about one third of the tests of his age group. the plan of the scale is such as to warrant this amount of leeway. but even granting the possibility that one subject out of a hundred or so may be unjustly penalized for lack of opportunity to acquire the knowledge which the test calls for, the injustice done does not greatly alter the result. a single test affects mental age only to the extent of two months, and the chances of two such injustices occurring with the same child are very slight. herein lies the advantage of a multiplicity of tests. no test considered by itself is very dependable, but two dozen tests, properly arranged, are almost infinitely reliable. iii,  . repeating six to seven syllables procedure. begin by saying: "_can you say 'mamma'? now, say 'nice kitty.'_" then ask the child to say, "_i have a little dog._" speak the sentence distinctly and with expression, but in a natural voice and not too slowly. if there is no response, the first sentence may be repeated two or three times. then give the other two sentences: "_the dog runs after the cat_," and, "_in summer the sun is hot._" a great deal of tact is sometimes necessary to enlist the child's coöperation in this test. if he cannot be persuaded to try, the alternative test of three digits may be substituted. scoring. the test is passed if at least _one sentence is repeated without error after a single reading_. "without error" is to be taken literally; there must be no omission, insertion, or transposition of words. ignore indistinctness of articulation and defects of pronunciation as long as they do not mutilate the sentence beyond easy recognition. remarks. the test does not presuppose that the child should have the ability to make and use sentences like these for purposes of communication, or even that he should know the meaning of all the words they contain. its purpose is to bring out the ability of the child to repeat a six-syllable series of more or less familiar language sounds. as every one knows, the normal child of  or   years is constantly imitating the speech of those around him and finds this a great source of delight. long practice in the semi-mechanical repetition of language sounds is necessary for the learning of speech coördinations and is therefore an indispensable preliminary to the purposeful use of language. high-grade idiots and the lowest grade of imbeciles never acquire much facility in the repetition of language heard. the test gets at one of the simplest forms of mental integration. binet says that children of  years _never_ repeat sentences of ten syllables. this is not strictly true, for six out of nineteen -year-olds succeeded in doing so. all the data agree, however, that the _average_ child of  years repeats only six to seven syllables correctly. iii. alternative test: repeating three digits procedure. use the following digits: - - , - - , - - . begin with two digits, as follows: "_listen; say - _." "_now, say - - _." "_now, say - - _," etc. pronounce the digits in a distinct voice and with perfectly uniform emphasis at a rate just a little faster than one per second. two per second, as recommended by binet, is too rapid. young subjects, because of their natural timidity in the presence of strangers, sometimes refuse to respond to this test. with subjects under  or   years of age it is sometimes necessary in such cases to re-read the first series of digits several times in order to secure a response. the response thus secured, however, is not counted in scoring, the purpose of the re-reading being merely to break the child's silence. the second and third series may be read but once. with the digits tests above year iv the re-reading of a series is never permissible. scoring. passed if the child repeats correctly, _after a single reading, one series out of the three_ series given. not only must the correct digits be given, but the order also must be correct. remarks. others, on the basis of rather scanty data, have usually located this test at the -year level. our results show that with the procedure described above it is fully as easy as the test of repeating sentences of  to  syllables.[ ] [ ] see p.   _ff._ for further discussion of the digits test. chapter x instructions for year iv iv,  . comparison of lines procedure. present the appropriate accompanying card with the lines in horizontal position. point to the lines and say: "_see these lines. look closely and tell me which one is longer. put your finger on the longest one._" we use the superlative as well as the comparative form of _long_ because it is often more familiar to young subjects. if the child does not respond, say: "_show me which line is the biggest._" then withdraw the card, turn it about a few times, and present it again with the position of the two lines reversed, saying: "_now show me the longest._" turn the card again and make a third presentation. scoring. all three comparisons must be made correctly; or if only two responses out of three are correct, all three pairs are again shown, just as before, and if there is no error this time, the test is passed. the standard, therefore, is _three correct responses out of three, or five out of six_. sometimes the child points, but at no particular part of the card. in such cases it may be difficult to decide whether he has failed to comprehend and to make the discrimination or has only been careless in pointing. it is then necessary to repeat the experiment until the evidence is clear. remarks. as noted by binet, success in this test depends on the comprehension of the verbal directions rather than on actual discrimination of length. the child who would unerringly choose the larger of two pieces of candy might fail on the comparison of lines. however, since the child must correctly compare the lines three times in succession, or at least in five out of six trials, _willingness to attend_ also plays a part. the attention of the low-grade imbecile, or even of the normal child of  years, is not very obedient to the suggestions of the experimenter. it may be gained momentarily, but it is not easily held to the same task for more than a few seconds. hence some children who perfectly comprehend this task fail to make a succession of correct comparisons because they are unable or unwilling to bring to bear even the small amount of attention which is necessary. this does not in the least condone the failure, for it is exactly in such voluntary control of mental processes that we find one of the most characteristic differences between bright and dull, or mature and immature subjects. there has been little disagreement as to the proper location of this test. iv,  . discrimination of forms procedure. use the forms supplied with this book. first, place the circle of the duplicate set at "x", and say: "_show me one like this_," at the same time passing the finger around the circumference of the circle. if the child does not respond, say: "_do you see all of these things?_" (running the finger over the various forms); "_and do you see this one?_" (pointing again to the circle); "_now, find me another one just like this._" use the square next, then the triangle, and the others in any order. correct the child's first error by saying: "_no, find one just like this_" (again passing the finger around the outline of the form at "x"). make no comment on errors after the first one, proceeding at once with the next card, but each time the choice is correct encourage the child with a hearty "that's good," or something similar. scoring. the test is passed if _seven out of ten_ choices, are correct, the first corrected error being counted. remarks. in the test of discriminating forms, unlike the test of comparing lines, lack of success is less often due to inability to understand the task than to failure to discriminate. the test may be regarded as a variation of the form-board test. it displays the subject's ability to compare and contrast successive visual perceptions of form. the accurate perception of even a fairly simple form requires the integration of a number of sensory elements into one whole. the forms used in this test have meaning. they are far from nonsense figures even for the (normal) child of  years, who has, of course, never heard about "triangles," "squares," "rectangles," etc. the meaning present at this level of intelligence is probably a compound of such factors as appreciation of symmetry and direction, and discrimination of quantity and number. another element in success, especially in the latter part of the experiment, is the ability to make an _attentive_ comparison between the form shown and the others. the child may be satisfied to point to the first form his eye happens to fall upon. far from being a legitimate excuse for failure, such an exhibition of inattention and of weakness of the critical faculty is symptomatic of a mental level below  years. in addition to counting the number of errors made, it is interesting to note with what forms they occur. to match the circle with the ellipse or the octagon, for example, is a less serious error than to match it with the square or triangle. this test was devised and standardized by dr. fred kuhlmann. it is inserted here without essential alteration, except that the size recommended for the forms is slightly reduced and minor changes have been made in the wording of the directions. our own results are favorable to the test and to the location assigned it by its author. iv,  . counting four pennies procedure. place four pennies in a horizontal row before the child. say: "_see these pennies. count them and tell me how many there are. count them with your finger, this way_" (pointing to the first one on the child's left)--"_one_"--"_now, go ahead._" if the child simply gives the number (whether right or wrong) without pointing, say: "_no; count them with your finger, this way_," starting him off as before. have him count them aloud. scoring. the test is passed only if the counting tallies with the pointing. it is not sufficient merely to state the correct number without pointing. remarks. contrary to what one might think, this is not to any great extent a test of "schooling." practically all children of this age have had opportunity to learn to count as far as four, and with normal children the spontaneous interest in number is such that very few -year-olds, even from inferior social environment, fail to pass the test. while success requires more than the ability to repeat the number names by rote, it does not presuppose any power of calculation or a mastery of the number concepts from one to four. many children who will readily say, mechanically, "one, two, three, four," when started off, are not able to pass the test. on the other hand, it is not expected that the child who passes will also necessarily understand that four is made up of two two's, or four one's, or three plus one, etc. binet, goddard, and kuhlmann place this test in the -year group, but three separate series of tests made for the stanford revision, as well as nearly all the statistics available from other sources, show that it belongs at  years. iv,  . copying a square procedure. place before the child a cardboard on which is drawn in heavy black lines a square about ¼ inches on a side.[ ] give the child a pencil and say: "_you see that_ (pointing to the square). _i want you to make one just like it. make it right here_ (showing where it is to be drawn). _go ahead. i know you can do it nicely._" [ ] no material is needed if the regular stanford record blanks are used, as these all contain the square and diamond. avoid such an expression as, "_i want you to draw a figure like that._" the child may not know the meaning of either _draw_ or _figure_. also, in pointing to the model, take care not to run the finger around the four sides. children sometimes have a deep-seated aversion to drawing on request and a bit of tactful urging may be necessary. experience and tact will enable the experimenter in all but the rarest cases to come out victorious in these little battles with balky wills. give three trials, saying each time: "_make it exactly like this_," pointing to model. make sure that the child is in an easy position and that the paper used is held so it cannot slip. scoring. the test is passed if at least _one drawing out of the three_ is as good as those marked + on the score card. young subjects usually reduce figures in drawing from copy, but size is wholly disregarded in scoring. it is of more importance that the right angles be fairly well preserved than that the lines should be straight or the corners entirely closed. the scoring of this test should be rather liberal. remarks. after the three copies have been made say: "_which one do you like best?_" in this way we get an idea of the subject's power of auto-criticism, a trait in which the mentally retarded are nearly always behind normal children of their own age. normal children, when young, reveal the same weakness to a certain extent. it is especially significant when the subject shows complete satisfaction with a very poor performance. observe whether the child makes each part with careful effort, looking at the model from time to time, or whether the strokes are made in a haphazard way with only an initial glance at the original. the latter procedure is quite common with young or retarded subjects. curiously enough, the first trial is more successful than either of the others, due perhaps to a waning of effort and attention. note that pencil is used instead of pen and that only one success is necessary. binet gives only one trial and requires pen. goddard allows pencil, but permits only one trial. kuhlmann requires pen and passes the child only when two trials out of three are successful. but these authors locate the test at  years. our results show that nearly three fourths of -year-olds succeed with pencil in one out of three trials if the scoring is liberal. it makes a great deal of difference whether pen or pencil is used, and whether two successes are required or only one. no better illustration could be given of the fact that without thoroughgoing standardization of procedure and scoring the best mental test may be misleading as to the degree of intelligence it indicates. copying a square is one of three drawing tests used in the binet scale, the others being the diamond (year vii), and the designs to be copied from memory (year x). these tests do not to any great extent test what is usually known as "drawing ability." only the square and the diamond tests are strictly comparable with one another, the other having a psychologically different purpose. in none of them does success seem to depend very much on the amount of previous instruction in drawing. to copy a figure like a square or a diamond requires first of all an appreciation of spacial relationships. the figure must be perceived as a whole, not simply as a group of meaningless lines. in the second place, success depends upon the ability to use the visual impression in guiding a rather complex set of motor coördinations. the latter is perhaps the main difficulty, and is one which is not fully overcome, at least for complicated movements, until well toward adult life. it is interesting to compare the square and the diamond as to relative difficulty. they have the same number of lines and in each case the opposite sides are parallel; but whereas -year intelligence is equal to the task of copying a square, the diamond ordinarily requires -year intelligence. probably no one could have foreseen that a change in the angles would add so much to the difficulty of the figure. it would be worth while to devise and standardize still more complicated figures. iv,  . comprehension, first degree procedure. after getting the child's attention, say: "_what must you do when you are sleepy?_" if necessary the question may be repeated a number of times, using a persuasive and encouraging tone of voice. no other form of question may be substituted. about twenty seconds may be allowed for an answer, though as a rule subjects of  or   years usually answer quite promptly or not at all. proceed in the same way with the other two questions: "_what ought you to do when you are cold?_" "_what ought you to do when you are hungry?_" scoring. there must be _two correct responses out of three_. no one form of answer is required. it is sufficient if the question is comprehended and given a reasonably sensible answer. the following are samples of correct responses:-- (a) "go to bed." "go to sleep." "have my mother get me ready for bed." "lie still, not talk, and i'll soon be asleep." (b) "put on a coat" (or "cloak," "furs," "wrap up," etc.). "build a fire." "run and i'll soon get warm." "get close to the stove." "go into the house," or, "go to bed," may possibly deserve the score _plus_, though they are somewhat doubtful and are certainly inferior to the responses just given. (c) "eat something." "drink some milk." "buy a lunch." "have my mamma spread some bread and butter," etc. with the comprehension questions in this year it is nearly always easy to decide whether the response is acceptable, failure being indicated usually either by silence or by an absurd or irrelevant answer. one -year-old boy who had less than -year intelligence answered all three questions by putting his finger on his eye and saying: "i'd do that." "have to cry" is a rather common incorrect response. remarks. the purpose of these questions is to ascertain whether the child can comprehend the situations suggested and give a reasonably pertinent reply. the first requirement, of course, is to understand the language; the second is to tell how the situation suggested should be met. the question may be raised whether a given child might not fail to answer the questions correctly and yet have the intelligence to do the appropriate thing if the real situation were present. this is at least conceivable, but since it would not be practicable to make the subject actually cold, sleepy, or hungry in order to observe his behavior, we must content ourselves with suggesting a situation to be imagined. it probably requires more intelligence to tell what one ought to do in a situation which has to be imagined than to do the right thing when the real situation is encountered. the comprehension questions of this year had not been standardized until the stanford investigation of - . questions _a_ and _b_ were suggested by binet in , while _c_ is new. they make an excellent test of -year intelligence. iv,  . repeating four digits procedure. say: "_now, listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through, i want you to say them exactly like i do. listen closely and get them just right-- - - - ._" same with - - - and - - - . the examiner should consume nearly four seconds in pronouncing each series, and should practice in advance until this speed can be closely approximated. if the child refuses to respond, the first series may be repeated as often as may be necessary to prove an attempt, but _success with a series which has been re-read may not be counted_. the second and third series may be pronounced but once. scoring. passed if the child repeats correctly, _after a single reading, one series out of the three_ series given. the order must be correct. remarks. the test of repeating four digits was not included by binet in the scale and seems not to have been used by any of the binet workers. it is passed by about three fourths of our -year-olds. iv. alternative test: repeating twelve to thirteen syllables the three sentences are:-- (a) "_the boy's name is john. he is a very good boy._" (b) "_when the train passes you will hear the whistle blow._" (c) "_we are going to have a good time in the country._" procedure. get the child's attention and say: "_listen, say this: 'where is kitty?'_" after the child responds, add: "_now say this ..._," reading the first sentence in a natural voice, distinctly and with expression. if the child is too timid to respond, the first sentence may be re-read, but in this case the response is not counted. _re-reading is permissible only with the first sentence._ scoring. the test is passed if at least _one sentence is repeated without error after a single reading_. as in the alternative test of year iii, we ignore ordinary indistinctness and defects of pronunciation due to imperfect language development, but the sentence must be repeated without addition, omission, or transposition of words. remarks. sentences of twelve syllables had not been standardized previous to the stanford revision, but binet locates memory for ten syllables at year v, and others have followed his example. our own data show that even -year-olds are usually able to repeat twelve syllables with the procedure here set forth. chapter xi instructions for year v v,  . comparison of weights materials. it is necessary to have two weights, identical in shape, size, and appearance, weighing respectively  and   grams.[ ] if manufactured weights are not at hand, it is easy to make satisfactory substitutes by taking stiff cardboard pill-boxes, about ¼ inches in diameter, and filling them with cotton and shot to the desired weight. the shot must be embedded in the center of the cotton so as to prevent rattling. after the box has been loaded to the exact weight, the lid should be glued on firmly. if one does not have access to laboratory scales, it is always possible to secure the help of a druggist in the rather delicate task of weighing the boxes accurately. a set of pill-box weights will last through hundreds of tests, if handled carefully, but they will not stand rough usage. the manufactured blocks are more durable, and so more satisfactory in the long run. if the weights are not at hand, the alternative test may be substituted. [ ] the weights required for this test, and also for ix,  , may be purchased of c. h. stoelting & co.,  carroll avenue, chicago, illinois. procedure. place the - and -gram weights on the table before the child some two or three inches apart. say: "_you see these blocks. they look just alike, but one of them is heavy and one is light. try them and tell me which one is heavier._" if the child does not respond, repeat the instructions, saying this time, "_tell me which one is the heaviest._" (many american children have heard only the superlative form of the adjective used in the comparison of two objects.) sometimes the child merely points to one of the boxes or picks up one at random and hands it to the examiner, thinking he is asked to _guess_ which is heaviest. we then say: "_no, that is not the way. you must take the boxes in your hands and try them, like this_" (illustrating by lifting with one hand, first one box and then the other, a few inches from the table). most children of  years are then able to make the comparison correctly. very young subjects, however, or older ones who are retarded, sometimes adopt the rather questionable method of lifting both weights in the same hand at once. this is always an unfavorable sign, especially if one of the blocks is placed in the hand on top of the other block. after the first trial, the weights are shuffled and again presented for comparison as before, _this time with the positions reversed_. the third trial follows with the blocks in the same position as in the first trial. some children have a tendency to stereotyped behavior, which in this test shows itself by choosing always the block on a certain side. hence the necessity of alternating the positions.[ ] reserve commendation until all three trials have been given. [ ] for discussion of "stereotypy" see p.  . scoring. the test is passed if _two of the three_ comparisons are correct. if there is reason to suspect that the successful responses were due to lucky guesses, the test should be entirely repeated. remarks. this test is decidedly more difficult than that of comparing lines (iv,  ). it is doubtful, however, if we can regard the difference as one due primarily to the relative difficulty of visual discrimination and muscular discrimination. in fact, the test with weights hardly taxes sensory discrimination at all when used with children of -year intelligence. success depends, in the first place, on the ability to understand the instructions; and in the second place, on the power to hold the instructions in mind long enough to guide the process of making the comparison. the test presupposes, in elementary form, a power which is operative in all the higher independent processes of thought, the power to neglect the manifold distractions of irrelevant sensations and ideas and to drive direct toward a goal. here the goal is furnished by the instruction, "try them and see which is heavier." this must be held firmly enough in mind to control the steps necessary for making the comparison. ideas of piling the blocks on top of one another, throwing them, etc., must be inhibited. sometimes the low-grade imbecile starts off in a very promising way, then apparently forgets the instructions (loses sight of the goal), and begins to play with the boxes in a random way. his mental processes are not consecutive, stable, or controlled. he is blown about at the mercy of every gust of momentary interest. there is very general agreement in the assignment of this test to year v. v,  . naming colors materials. use saturated red, yellow, blue, and green papers, about  ×   inch in size, pasted one half inch apart on white or gray cardboard. for sake of uniformity it is best to match the colors manufactured especially for this test.[ ] [ ] printed cards showing these colors are included in the set of material furnished by the publishers of this book. procedure. point to the colors in the order, red, yellow, blue, green. bring the finger close to the color designated, in order that there may be no mistake as to which one is meant, and say: "_what is the name of that color?_" do not say: "_what color is that?_" or, "_what kind of a color is that?_" such a formula might bring the answer, "the first color"; or, "a pretty color." still less would it do to say: "_show me the red_," "_show me the yellow_," etc. this would make it an entirely different test, one that would probably be passed a year earlier than the binet form of the experiment. nor is it permissible, after a color has been miscalled, to return to it and again ask its name. scoring. the test is passed only if _all_ the colors are named correctly and without marked uncertainty. however, prefixing the adjective "dark," or "light," before the name of a color is overlooked. remarks. naming colors is not a test of color discrimination, for that capacity is well developed years below the level at which this test is used. all -year-olds who are not color blind discriminate among the four primary colors here used as readily as adults do. as stated by binet, it is a test of the "verbalization of color perception." it tells us whether the child has associated the names of the four primary colors with his perceptual imagery of those colors. the _ability_ to make simple associations between a sense impression and a name is certainly present in normal children some time before the above color associations are actually made. many objects of experience are correctly named two or three years earlier, and it may seem at first a little strange that color names are learned so late. but it must be remembered that the child does not have numerous opportunities to observe and hear the names of several colors at once, nor does the designation of colors by their names ordinarily have much practical value for the young child. when he finally learns their names, it is more because of his spontaneous interest in the world of sense. lack of such spontaneous interest is always an unfavorable sign, and it is not surprising, therefore, that imbecile intelligence has ordinarily never taken the trouble to associate colors with their names. girls are somewhat superior to boys in this test, due probably to a greater natural interest in colors. binet originally placed this test in year viii, changing it to year vii in the scale. goddard places it in year vii, while kuhlmann omits it altogether. with a single exception, all the actual statistics with normal children justify the location of the test in year v. bobertag's figures are the exception, opposed to which are rowe, winch, dumville, dougherty, brigham, and all three of the stanford investigations. the test is probably more subject to the influence of home environment than most of the other tests of the scale, and if the social status of the child is low, failure would not be especially significant until after the age of  years. on the whole it is an excellent test. v,  . Æsthetic comparison use the three pairs of faces supplied with the printed forms. it goes without saying that improvised drawings may not be substituted for binet's until they have first been standardized. procedure. show the pairs in order from top to bottom. say: "_which of these two pictures is the prettiest?_" use both the comparative and the superlative forms of the adjective. do not use the question, "which face is the uglier (ugliest)?" unless there is some difficulty in getting the child to respond. it is not permitted, in case of an incorrect response, to give that part of the test again and to allow the child a chance to correct his answer; or, in case this is done, we must consider only the original response in scoring. scoring. the test is passed only if all _three_ comparisons are made correctly. any marked uncertainty is failure. sometimes the child laughingly designates the ugly picture as the prettier, yet shows by his amused expression that he is probably conscious of its peculiarity or absurdity. in such cases "pretty" seems to be given the meaning of "funny" or "amusing." nevertheless, we score this response as failure, since it betokens a rather infantile tolerance of ugliness. remarks. from the psychological point of view this is a most interesting test. one might suppose that æsthetic judgment would be relatively independent of intelligence. certainly no one could have known in advance of experience that intellectual retardation would reveal itself in weakness of the æsthetic sense about as unmistakably as in memory, practical judgment, or the comprehension of language. but such is the case. the development of the æsthetic sense parallels general mental growth rather closely. the imbecile of -year intelligence, even though he may have lived forty years, has no more chance of passing this test than any other test in year v. it would be profitable to devise and standardize a set of pictures of the same general type which would measure a less primitive stage of æsthetic development. the present test was located by binet in year vi and has been retained in that year in other revisions; but three separate stanford investigations, as well as the statistics of winch, dumville, brigham, rowe, and dougherty, warrant its location in year v. v,  . giving definitions in terms of use procedure. use the words: _chair_, _horse_, _fork_, _doll_, _pencil_, and _table_. say: "_you have seen a chair. you know what a chair is. tell me, what is a chair?_" and so on with the other words, always in the order in which they are named above. occasionally there is difficulty in getting a response, which is sometimes due merely to the child's unwillingness to express his thoughts in sentences. the earlier tests require only words and phrases. in other cases silence is due to the rather indefinite form of the question. the child could answer, but is not quite sure what is expected of him. whatever the cause, a little tactful urging is nearly always sufficient to bring a response. in this test we have not found the difficulty of overcoming silence nearly as great as others have stated it to be. in consecutive tests of - and -year-old children we encountered unbreakable silence with  words out of the total (  ×  ). this is less than  per cent. but tactful encouragement is sometimes necessary, and it is best to take the precaution of not giving the test until _rapport_ has been well established. the urging should take the following form: "_i'm sure you know what a ... is. you have seen a .... now, tell me, what is a ... ?_" that is, we merely repeat the question with a word of encouragement and in a coaxing tone of voice. it would not at all do to introduce other questions, like, "_what does a ... look like?_" or, "_what is a ... for?_" "_what do people do with a ... ?_" sometimes, instead of attempting a definition (of _doll_, for example), the child begins to talk in a more or less irrelevant way, as "i have a great big doll. auntie gave it to me for christmas," etc. in such cases we repeat the question and say, "_yes, but tell me; what is a doll?_" this is usually sufficient to bring the little chatter-box back to the task. unless it is absolutely necessary to give the child lavish encouragement, it is best to withhold approval or disapproval until the test has been finished. if the first response is a poor one and we pronounce it "fine" or "very good," we tempt the child to persist in his low-grade type of definition. by withholding comment until the last word has been defined, we give greater play to spontaneity and initiative. scoring. as a rule, children of  and   years define an object in terms of use, stating what it does, what it is for, what people do with it, etc. definitions by description, by telling what substance it is made of, and by giving the class to which it belongs are grouped together as "definitions superior to use." it is not before  years that two thirds of the children spontaneously give a large proportion of definitions in terms superior to use. the test is passed in year v if _four words out of the six_ are defined in terms of use (or better than use). the following are examples of satisfactory responses:-- _chair_: "to sit on." "you sit on it." "it is made of wood and has legs and back," etc. _horse_: "to drive." "to ride." "what people drive." "to pull the wagon." "it is big and has four legs," etc. _fork_: "to eat with." "to stick meat with." "it is hard and has three sharp things," etc. _doll_: "to play with." "what you dress and put to bed." "to rock," etc. _pencil_: "to write with." "to draw." "they write with it." "it is sharp and makes a black mark." _table_: "to eat on." "what you put the dinner on." "where you write." "it is made of wood and has legs." examples of failure are such responses as the following: "a chair is a chair"; "there is a chair"; or simply, "there" (pointing to a chair). we record such responses without pressing for a further definition. about the only other type of failure is silence. remarks. it is not the purpose of this test to find out whether the child knows the meaning of the words he is asked to define. words have purposely been chosen which are perfectly familiar to all normal children of  years. but with young children there is a difference between knowing a word and giving a definition of it. besides, we desire to find out how the child apperceives the word, or rather the object for which it stands; whether the thing is thought of in terms of use, appearance (shape, size, color, etc.), material composing it, or class relationships. this test, because it throws such interesting light on the maturity of the child's apperceptive processes, is one of the most valuable of all. it is possible to differentiate at least a half-dozen degrees of excellence in definitions, according to the intellectual maturity of the subject. a volume, indeed, could be written on the development of word definitions and the growth of meanings; but we will postpone further discussion until viii,  . our concern at present is to know that children of  years should at least be able to define four of these six words in terms of use. binet placed the test in year vi, but our own figures and those of nearly all the other investigations indicate that it is better located in year v. v,  . the game of patience material. prepare two rectangular cards, each  ×   inches, and divide one of them into two triangles by cutting it along one of its diagonals. procedure. place the uncut card on the table with one of its longer sides to the child. by the side of this card, a little nearer the child and a few inches apart, lay the two halves of the divided rectangle with their hypothenuses turned from each other as follows: [illustration] then say to the child: "_i want you to take these two pieces_ (touching the two triangles) _and put them together so they will look exactly like this_" (pointing to the uncut card). if the child hesitates, we repeat the instructions with a little urging. say nothing about hurrying, as this is likely to cause confusion. give three trials, of one minute each. if only one trial is given, success is too often a result of chance moves; but luck is not likely to bring two successes in three trials. if the first trial is a failure, move the cut halves back to their original position and say: "_no; put them together so they will look like this_" (pointing to the uncut card). make no other comment of approval or disapproval. disregard in silence the inquiring looks of the child who tries to read his success or failure in your face. if one of the pieces is turned over, the task becomes impossible, and it is then necessary to turn the piece back to its original position and begin over, not counting this trial. have the under side of the pieces marked so as to avoid the risk of presenting one of them to the child wrong side up. scoring. there must be _two successes in three trials_. about the only difficulty in scoring is that of deciding what constitutes a trial. we count it a trial when the child brings the pieces together and (after few or many changes) leaves them in some position. whether he succeeds after many moves, or leaves the pieces with approval in some absurd position, or gives up and says he cannot do it, his effort counts as one trial. a single trial may involve a number of unsuccessful changes of position in the two cards, but these changes may not consume altogether more than one minute. remarks. as aptly described by binet, the operation has the following elements: "( ) to keep in mind the end to be attained, that is to say, the figure to be formed. it is necessary to comprehend this end and not to lose sight of it. ( ) to try different combinations under the influence of this directing idea, which guides the efforts of the child even though he be unconscious of the fact. ( ) to judge the formed combination, compare it with the model, and decide whether it is the correct one." it may be classed, therefore, as one of the many forms of the "combination method." elements must be combined into some kind of whole under the guidance of a directing idea. in this respect it has something in common with the form-board test, the ebbinghaus test, and the test with dissected sentences (xii,  ). binet designates it a "test of patience," because success in it depends upon a certain willingness to persist in a line of action under the control of an idea. not all failures in this test are equally significant. a bright child of  years sometimes fails, but usually not without many trial combinations which he rejects one after another as unsatisfactory. a dull child of the same age often stops after he has brought the pieces into any sort of juxtaposition, however absurd, and may be quite satisfied with his foolish effort. his mind is not fruitful and he lacks the power of auto-criticism. it would be well worth while to work out a new and somewhat more difficult "test of patience," but with special care to avoid the puzzling features of the usual games of anagrams. the one given us by binet is rather easy for year v, though plainly somewhat too difficult for year iv. v,  . three commissions procedure. after getting up from the chair and moving with the child to the center of the room, say: "_now, i want you to do something for me. here's a key. i want you to put it on that chair over there; then i want you to shut (or open) that door, and then bring me the box which you see over there_ (pointing in turn to the objects designated). _do you understand? be sure to get it right. first, put the key on the chair, then shut_ (open) _the door, then bring me the box_ (again pointing). _go ahead._" stress the words _first_ and _then_ so as to emphasize the order in which the commissions are to be executed. give the commissions always in the above order. do not repeat the instructions again or give any further aid whatever, even by the direction of the gaze. if the child stops or hesitates it is never permissible to say: "_what next?_" have the self-control to leave the child alone with his task. scoring. _all three commissions must be executed and in the proper order._ failure may result, therefore, either from leaving out one or more of the commands or from changing the order. the former is more often the case. remarks. success depends first on the ability to comprehend the commands, and secondly, on the ability to hold them in mind. it is therefore a test of memory, though of a somewhat different kind from that involved in repeating digits or sentences. it is an excellent test, for it throws light on a kind of intelligence which is demanded in all occupations and in everyday life. a more difficult test of the same type ought to be worked out for a higher age level. binet originally located this test in year vi, but in changed it to year vii. this is unfortunate, for the three stanford investigations, as well as the statistics of all other investigators, show conclusively that it is easy enough for year v. v. alternative test: giving age procedure. the formula is simply, "_how old are you?_" the child of this age is, of course, not expected to know the date of his birthday, but merely how many years old he is. scoring. about the only danger in scoring is in the failure to verify the child's response. some children give an incorrect answer with perfect assurance, and it is therefore always necessary to verify. remarks. inability to give the age may or may not be significant. if the child has arrived at the age of  or   years and has had anything like a normal social environment, failure in the test is an extremely unfavorable sign. but if the child is an orphan or has grown up in neglect, ignorance of age has little significance for intelligence. about all we can say is that if a child gives his age correctly, it is because he has had sufficient interest and intelligence to remember verbal statements which have been made concerning him in his presence. he may even pass the test without attaching any definite meaning to the word "year." on the other hand, if he has lived seven or eight years in a normal environment, it is safe to assume that he has heard his age given many times, and failure to remember it would then indicate either a weak memory or a grave inferiority of spontaneous interests, or both. normal children have a natural interest in the things they hear said about themselves, while the middle-grade imbecile of even  years may fail to remember his age, however often he may have heard it stated. binet placed the test in year vi of the series, but omitted it altogether in . kuhlmann and goddard also omit it, perhaps wisely. nevertheless, it is always interesting to give as a supplementary test. children from good homes acquire the knowledge about a year earlier than those from less favorable surroundings. unselected children of california ordinarily pass the test at  years. chapter xii instructions for year vi vi,  . distinguishing right and left procedure. say to the child: "_show me your right hand._" after this is responded to, say: "_show me your left ear._" then: "_show me your right eye._" stress the words _left_ and _ear_ rather strongly and equally; also _right_ and _eye_. if there is one error, repeat the test, this time with left hand, right ear, and left eye. carefully avoid giving any help by look of approval or disapproval, by glancing at the part of the body indicated, or by supplementary questions. scoring. the test is passed if all three questions are answered correctly, or if, in case of one error, the three additional questions are all answered correctly. the standard, therefore, _is three out of three, or five out of six_. the chief danger of variation among different examiners in scoring comes from double responses. for example, the child may point first to one ear and then to the other. in all cases of double response, the rule is to count the second response and disregard the first. this holds whether the first response was wrong and the second right, or _vice versa_. remarks. it is interesting to follow the child's acquisitions of language distinctions relating to spacial orientation. other distinctions of this type are those between up and down, above and below, near and far, before and behind, etc. as bobertag has pointed out, the child first masters such distinctions as up and down, above and below, before and behind, etc., and arrives at a knowledge of right and left rather tardily. how may we explain the late distinction of right and left as compared with up and down? at least four theories may be advanced: ( ) something depends on the frequency with which children have occasion to make the respective distinctions. ( ) it may be explained on the supposition that kinæsthetic sensations are more prominently involved in distinctions of up and down than in distinctions of right and left. it is certainly true that, in distinguishing the two sides of a thing, less bodily movement is ordinarily required than in distinctions of its upper and lower aspects. the former demands only a shift of the eyes, the latter often requires an upward or downward movement of the head. ( ) it may be due to the fact that the appearance of an object is more affected by differences in vertical orientation than by those of horizontal orientation. we see an object now from one side, now from the other, and the two aspects easily blend, while the two aspects corresponding to above and below are not viewed in such rapid succession and so remain much more distinct from one another in the child's mind. or, ( ), the difference may be mainly a matter of language. the child undoubtedly hears the words _up_ and _down_ much oftener than _right_ and _left_, and thus learns their meaning earlier. horizontal distinctions are commonly made in such terms as _this side_ and _that side_, or merely by pointing, while in the case of vertical distinctions the words _up_ and _down_ are used constantly. this last explanation is a very plausible one, but it is very probable that other factors are also involved. the distinction between right and left has a certain inherent and more or less mysterious difficulty. to convince one's self of this it is only necessary to try a little experiment on the first fifty persons one chances to meet. the experiment is as follows. say: "i am going to ask you a question and i want you to answer it as quickly as you can." then ask: "which is your right hand?" about forty persons out of fifty will answer correctly without a second's hesitation, several will require two or three seconds to respond, while a few, possibly four or five per cent, will grow confused and perhaps be unable to respond for five or ten seconds. some very intelligent adults cannot possibly tell which is the right or left hand without first searching for a scar or some other distinguishing mark which is known to be on a particular hand. others resort to incipient movements of writing, and since, of course, every one knows which hand he writes with, the writing movements automatically initiated give the desired clue. one bright little girl of  years responded by trying to wink first one eye and then the other. asked why she did this, she said she knew she could wink her left eye, but not her right! one who is resourceful enough to adopt such an ingenious method is surely not less intelligent than the one who is able to respond by a direct instead of an intermediate association. it seems that normal people never encounter a corresponding difficulty in distinguishing up and down. the writer has questioned several hundred without finding a single instance, whereas a great many have to employ some intermediate association in order to distinguish right and left. it is the "p's and q's" that children must be told to mind; not the "p's and b's." the former is a horizontal, the latter a vertical distinction. considering the difficulty which normal adults sometimes have in distinguishing right and left, is it fair to use this test as a measure of intelligence? we may answer in the affirmative. it is fair because normal adults, notwithstanding momentary uncertainty, are invariably able to make the distinction, if not by direct association, then by an intermediate one. we overlook the momentary confusion and regard only the correctness of the response. subjects who are below middle-grade imbecile, however long they have lived, seldom pass the test. this test found a place in year vi of binet's scale, but was shifted to year vii in the revision. the stanford statistics, and all other available data, with the exception of bobertag's, justify its retention in year vi. it is possible that the children of different nations do not have equal opportunity and stimulus for learning the distinction between right and left, but the data show that as far as american and english children are concerned we have a right to expect this knowledge in children of  years. vi,  . finding omissions in pictures procedure. show the pictures to the child one at a time in the order in which they are lettered, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_. when the first picture is shown (that with the eye lacking), say: "_there is something wrong with this face. it is not all there. part of it is left out. look carefully and tell me what part of the face is not there._" often the child gives an irrelevant answer; as, "the feet are gone," "the stomach is not there," etc. these statements are true, but they do not satisfy the requirements of the test, so we say: "_no; i am talking about the face. look again and tell me what is left out of the face._" if the correct response does not follow, we point to the place where the eye should be and say: "_see, the eye is gone._" when picture _b_ is shown we say merely: "_what is left out of this face?_" likewise with picture _c_. for picture _d_ we say: "_what is left out of this picture?_" no help of any kind is given unless (if necessary) with the first picture. with the others we confine ourselves to the single question, and the answer should be given promptly, say within twenty to twenty-five seconds. scoring. passed if the omission is correctly pointed out in _three out of four_ of the pictures. certain minor errors we may overlook, such as "eyes" instead of "eye" for the first picture; "nose and one ear" instead of merely "nose" for the third; "hands" instead of "arms" for the fourth, etc. errors like the following, however, count as failure: "the other eye," or "the other ear" for the first or third; "the ears" for the fourth, etc. remarks. the test is one of the two or three dozen forms of the so-called "completion test," all of which have it in common that from the given parts of a whole the missing parts are to be found. the whole to be completed may be a word, a sentence, a story, a picture, a group of pictures, an object, or in fact almost anything. sometimes all the parts of the whole are given and only the arrangement or order is to be found, as in the test with dissected sentences. further discussion of the completion test will be found in connection with test  , year xii. for the present we will only observe that notwithstanding a certain similarity among the tests of this type, they do not all call into play the same mental processes. the factor most involved may be verbal language coherence, visual perception of form, the association of abstract ideas, etc. to pass binet's test with mutilated pictures requires, ( ) that the parts of the picture be perceived as constituting a whole; and ( ) that the idea of a human face or form be so easily and so clearly reproducible that it may act, even before it comes fully into consciousness, as a model or pattern, for the criticism of the picture shown. the younger the child, the less adequate, in this sense, is his perceptual familiarity with common objects. in standardizing a series of "absurd pictures," the writer has found that normal children of  years often see nothing wrong in a picture which shows a cat with two legs or a hen with four legs. such children would, of course, never mistake a cat for a hen. their trouble lies in the inability to call up in clear form a "free idea" of a cat or a hen for comparison with the perceptual presentation offered by the picture. middle-grade imbeciles of adult age have much the same difficulty as normal children of  years in recognizing mutilations or absurdities in pictures of familiar objects. binet first placed this test in year vii, changing it to year viii in the revision. in other revisions it has been retained in year vii, although all the available statistics except bobertag's warrant its location in year vi. vi,  . counting thirteen pennies procedure. the procedure is the same as in the test of counting four pennies (year iv, test  ). if the first response contains only a minor error, such as the omission of a number in counting, failure to tally with the finger, etc., a second trial is given. scoring. the test is passed if there is _one success in two trials_. success requires that the counting should tally with the pointing. it is not sufficient merely to state the number of pennies without pointing, for unless the child points and counts aloud we cannot be sure that his correct answer may not be the joint result of two errors in opposite directions and equal; for example, if one penny were skipped and another were counted twice the total result would still be correct, but the performance would not satisfy the requirements. remarks. does success in this test depend upon intelligence or upon schooling? the answer is, intelligence mainly. there are possibly a few normal -year-old children who could not pass the test for lack of instruction, but children of this age usually have enough spontaneous interest in numbers to acquire facility in counting as far as without formal teaching. certainly, inability to do so by the age of  years is a suspicious sign unless the child's environment has been extraordinarily unfavorable. on the other hand, feeble-minded adults of the -year level usually have to have a great deal of instruction before they acquire the ability to count , and many of them are hardly able to learn it at all. so much does our learning depend on original endowment. binet originally placed this test in year vii, but moved it to year vi in . all the statistics, without exception, show that this change was justified. bobertag says that nearly all -year-olds who are not feeble-minded can pass it, a statement with which we can fully agree. vi,  . comprehension, second degree procedure. the questions used in this year are:-- (a) "_what's the thing to do if it is raining when you start to school?_" (b) "_what's the thing to do if you find that your house is on fire?_" (c) "_what's the thing to do if you are going some place and miss your train (car)?_" note that the wording of the first part of the questions is slightly different from that in year iv, test  . if there is no response, or if the child looks puzzled, the question may be repeated once or twice. the form of the question must not under any circumstances be altered. question _b_, for example, would be materially changed if we should say: "_suppose you were to come home from school and find that your house was burning up. what would you do?_" the expression "burning up" would probably be much less likely to suggest calling a fireman than would the words "on fire." scoring. _two out of three_ must be answered correctly. the harder the comprehension questions are, the greater the variety of answers and the greater the difficulty of scoring. because of the difficulty many examiners find in scoring this test, we will list the most common satisfactory, unsatisfactory, and doubtful responses to each question. (a) _if it is raining when you start to school_ _satisfactory._ "take umbrella," "bring a parasol," "put on rubbers," "wear an overcoat," etc. this type of response occurred  times out of  successes. "have my father bring me" also counts _plus_. _unsatisfactory._ "go home," "stay at home," "stay in the house," "have the rainbow," "stay in school," etc. "stay at home" is the most common failure and might at first seem to the examiner to be a satisfactory response. as a matter of fact, this answer rests on a slight misunderstanding of the question, the import of which is that one is to go to school and it is raining. _doubtful._ "run" as an answer is a little more troublesome. it may reasonably be scored _plus_ if it can be ascertained that the child is accustomed to meet the situation in this way. it is a common response with children in those regions of the southwest where rains are so infrequent that umbrellas are rarely used. "bring my lunch" may be considered a satisfactory response in case the child is in the habit of so doing on rainy days. (b) _if you find that your house is on fire_ _satisfactory._ "ring the fire alarm," "call the firemen," "call for help," "put water on it," etc. _unsatisfactory._ the most common failure, accounting for nearly half of all, is to suggest finding other shelter; _e.g._, "go to the hotel," "get another house," "stay with your friends," "build a new house," etc. others are: "tell them you are sorry it burned down," "be careful and not let it burn again," "have it insured," "cry," "call the policeman," etc. _doubtful._ instead of suggesting measures to put out the fire, a good many children suggest mere escape or the saving of household articles. responses of this type are: "jump out of the windows," "save yourself," "get out as fast as you can," "save the baby," "get my dolls and jewelry and hurry and get out." these answers are about one seventh as frequent as the perfectly satisfactory ones, and the rule for scoring them is a matter of some importance. under certain circumstances the logical thing to do would be to save one's self or valuables without wasting time trying to call help. there may be no help in reach, or a fire which the child imagines may be too far along for help to be effective. in order to avoid the possibility of doing a subject an injustice, it may be desirable to score such answers _plus_. we must not be too arbitrary. (c) _if you miss your train_ _satisfactory._ the answer we expect is, "wait for another," "take the next car," or something to that effect. this type of answer includes about  per cent of the responses which do not belong obviously in the unsatisfactory group. "take a jitney" is a modern variation of this response which must be counted as satisfactory. _unsatisfactory._ these are endless. one continues to meet new examples of absurdity, however many children one has tested. the possibilities are literally inexhaustible, but the following are among the most common: "wait for it to come back," "have to walk," "be mad," "don't swear," "run and try to catch it," "try to jump on," "don't go to that place," "go to the next station," etc. _doubtful._ the main doubtful response is, "go home again," "come back next day and catch another," etc. in small or isolated towns having only one or two trains per day, this is the logical thing to do, and in such cases the score is _plus_. fortunately, only about one answer in ten gives rise to any difference of opinion among even partly trained examiners. remarks. the three comprehension questions of this group were all suggested by binet in . only one of them, however, "what would you do if you were going some place and missed your train?" was incorporated in the or series, and this was used in year x with seven others much harder. the other two remained unstandardized previous to the stanford investigation.[ ] [ ] for general discussion of the comprehension questions as a test, see p.  . vi,  . naming four coins procedure. show a nickel, a penny, a quarter, and a dime, asking each time: "_what is that?_" if the child misunderstands and answers, "money," or "a piece of money," we say: "_yes, but what do you call that piece of money?_" show the coins always in the order given above. scoring. the test is passed if _three of the four_ questions are correctly answered. any correct designation of a coin is satisfactory, including provincialisms like "two bits" for the -cent piece, etc. if the child changes his response for a coin, we count the second answer and ignore the first. no supplementary questions are permissible. remarks. some of the critics of the binet scale regard this test as of little value, because, they say, the ability to identify pieces of money depends entirely on instruction or other accidents of environment. the figures show, however, that it is not greatly influenced by differences of social environment, although children from poor homes do slightly better with it than those from homes of wealth and culture. the fact seems to be that practically all children by the age of  years have had opportunity to learn the names of the smaller coins, and if they have failed to learn them it betokens a lack of that spontaneity of interest in things which we have mentioned so often as a fundamental presupposition of intelligence. it is by no means a test of mere mechanical memory. this test was given a place in year vii of binet's scale, the coins used being the -sou, -sous, -sous, and -franc pieces. it was omitted from the binet revision and also from that of goddard. kuhlmann retains it in year vii. others, however, have required all four coins to be correctly named, and when this standard is used the test is difficult enough for year vii. germany has six coins up to and including the -mark piece, all of which could be named by  per cent of bobertag's -year-olds. with the coins and the standard of scoring used in the stanford revision the test belongs well in year vi. vi,  . repeating sixteen to eighteen syllables the sentences are:-- (a) "_we are having a fine time. we found a little mouse in the trap._" (b) "_walter had a fine time on his vacation. he went fishing every day._" (c) "_we will go out for a long walk. please give me my pretty straw hat._" procedure. the instructions should be given as follows: "_now, listen. i am going to say something and after i am through i want you to say it over just like i do. understand? listen carefully and be sure to say exactly what i say._" then read the first sentence rather slowly, in a distinct voice, and with expression. if the response is not too bad, praise the child's efforts. then proceed with the second and third sentences, prefacing each with an exhortation to "say exactly what i say." in this year and in the memory-for-sentences test of later years it is not permissible to re-read even the first sentence. the only reason for allowing a repetition of one of the sentences in the earlier test of this kind was to overcome the child's timidity. with children of  years or upward we seldom encounter the timidity which sometimes makes it so hard to secure responses in some of the tests of the earlier years. scoring. the test is passed _if at least one sentence out of three is repeated without error, or if two are repeated with not more than one error each_. a single omission, insertion, or transposition counts as an error. faults of pronunciation are of course overlooked. it is not sufficient that the thought be reproduced intact; the exact language must be repeated. the responses should be recorded _verbatim_. this is easily done if record blanks used for scoring have the sentences printed in full. remarks. in this test and in later tests of memory for sentences, it is interesting to ask after each response: "_did you get it right?_" as in the tests with digits, it is an unfavorable sign when the child is perfectly satisfied with a very poor response. it is evident that tests of this type give opportunity for different degrees of failure. to repeat only a half or a third of each sentence is much more serious than to make but one error in each sentence (one word omitted, inserted, or misplaced). it would be possible to use the same sentences at three or four different age levels, by setting the appropriate standard for success at each age. if the standard is one sentence out of three repeated with no more than two errors, the test belongs in year v. if we require two absolutely correct responses out of three, the test belongs at about year vii. the shifting standard is rendered unnecessary, however, by the use of other tests of the same kind, easier ones in the lower years and more difficult ones in the upper. sentences of sixteen syllables found a place in binet's scale and were correctly located in year vi, but later revisions, including that of binet, have omitted the test. vi. alternative test: forenoon and afternoon procedure. if it is morning, ask: "_is it morning or afternoon?_" if it is afternoon, put the question in the reverse form, "_is it afternoon or morning?_" this precaution is necessary because of the tendency of some children to choose always the latter of two alternatives. do not cross-question the child or give any suggestion that might afford a clue as to the correct answer. scoring. the test is passed if the correct response is given with apparent assurance. if the child says he is not sure but _thinks_ it forenoon (or afternoon, as the case may be), we score the response a failure even if the answer happens to be correct. however, this type of response is not often encountered. remarks. it is interesting to follow the child's development with regard to orientation in time. this development proceeds much more slowly than we are wont to assume. certain distinctions with regard to space, as up and down, come much earlier. as binet remarks, schools sometimes try to teach the events of national history to children whose time orientation is so rudimentary that they do not even know morning from afternoon! the test has two rather serious faults: ( ) it gives too much play to chance, for since only two alternatives are offered, guesses alone would give about fifty per cent of correct responses. ( ) we cannot be sure that the verbal distinction between forenoon and afternoon always corresponds the two divisions of the day. it is possible that the temporal discrimination precedes the formation of the correct verbal association. this test was included in the year vi group of the scale, but was omitted from the revision. nearly all the data except bobertag's show that it is rather easy for year vi, though too difficult for year v. bobertag's figures would place the test in year vii. possibly the corresponding german words are not as easy to learn as our _morning_ and _afternoon_. chapter xiii instructions for year vii vii,  . giving the number of fingers procedure. "_how many fingers have you on one hand?_" "_how many on the other hand?_" "_how many on both hands together?_" if the child begins to count in response to any of the questions, say: "_no, don't count. tell me without counting._" then repeat the question. scoring. passed _if all three questions are answered correctly and promptly_ without the necessity of counting. some subjects do not understand the question to include the thumbs. we disregard this if the number of fingers exclusive of thumbs is given correctly. remarks. like the two tests of counting pennies, this one, also, throws light on the child's spontaneous interest in numbers. however, the mental processes it calls into play are a little less simple than those required for mere counting. if the child is able to give the number of fingers, it is ordinarily because he has previously counted them and has remembered the result. the memory would hardly be retained but for a certain interest in numbers as such. middle-grade imbeciles of even adult age seldom remember how many fingers they have, however often they may have been told. they are not able to form accurate concepts of other than the simplest number relationships, and numbers have little interest or meaning for them. binet gave this test a place in year vii of the series, but omitted it in the revision. goddard omits it, while kuhlmann retains it in year vii, where, according to our own figures, it unmistakably belongs. bobertag finds it rather easy for year vii, though too difficult for year vi. our data prove that this test fulfills the requirements of a good test. it shows a rapid but even rise from year v to year viii in the per cent passing, the agreement among the different testers is extraordinarily close, and it is relatively little influenced by training and social environment. for these reasons, and because it is so easy to give and score with uniformity, it well deserves a place in the scale. vii,  . description of pictures procedure. use the same pictures as in iii,  , presenting them always in the following order: dutch home, river scene, post-office. the formula for the test in this year is somewhat different from that of year iii. say: "_what is this picture about? what is this a picture of?_" use the double question, and follow the formula exactly. it would ruin the test to say: "_tell me everything you see in this picture_," for this form of question tends to provoke the enumeration response even with intelligent children of this age. when there is no response, the question may be repeated as often as is necessary to break the silence. scoring. the test is passed if _two of the three_ pictures are described or interpreted. interpretation, however, is seldom encountered at this age. often the response consists of a mixture of enumeration and description. the rule is that the reaction to a picture should not be scored _plus_ unless it is made up chiefly of description (or interpretation). study of the following samples of satisfactory responses will give a fairly definite idea of the requirements for satisfactory description:-- _picture (a): satisfactory responses_ "the little girl is crying. the mother is looking at her and there is a little kitten on the floor." "the mother is watching the baby, and the cat is looking at a hole in the floor, and there is a lamp and a table so i guess it's a dining room." "the little girl has wooden shoes. her mother is sitting in a chair and has a funny cap on her head. the cat is sitting on the floor and there is a basket by the mother and a table with something on it." "it's about holland. the little dutch girl is crying and the mother is sitting down." "a little dutch girl and her mother and that's a kitten, and the little girl has her hand up as if she was doing something to her forehead. she has shoes that curve up in front." "dutch lady, and the little baby doesn't want to come to her mother and the cat is looking for some mice." "the mother is sitting down and the little one has her hands up over her eyes. there's a pail by the mother and a chair with some clothes on it and a table with dishes. and here's a lamp and here's some curtains." _picture (b): satisfactory responses_ "some people in a boat. the water is high and if they don't look out the boat will tip over." "some indians and a lady and man. they are in a boat on the river and the boat is about to upset, and there are some dead trees going to fall." "there's a lot of water coming up to drown the people. there are two people in the boat and the boat is sinking." "there's some people sailing in a canoe and the woman is leaning over on the man because she is afraid." "there's an indian and some white people in the boat. i suppose they are out for a ride in a canoe." "picture about some man and lady in a canoe and going down to the sea." "they are taking a boat ride on the ocean and the water is up so high that one of them is scared. here are some trees and two of them are going to fall down. here's a little place or bridge you can stand on. the man is touching this one's head and this one has his hand on the cover." "the water is splashing all over. there's trees on this bank and there's a rock and some trees falling down. the people have a blanket over them." _picture (c): satisfactory responses_ "a man selling eggs and two men reading the paper together and two men watching." "a few men reading a newspaper and one has a basket of eggs and this one has been fishing." "there's a man with a basket of eggs and another is reading the paper and a woman is hanging out clothes. there's a house near." "there's a man trying to read the paper and the others want to read it too. here's a lady walking up to the barn. there are houses over there and one man has a basket." "there's a big brick house and five men by it and a man with a basket of eggs and a post-office sign and a lady going home." "they are all looking at the paper. he is looking over the other man's shoulder and this one is looking at the back of the paper. there's a woman cleaning up her back yard and some coops for hens." "a man reading a paper, a man with eggs, a woman and a tree and another house. that man has an apron on. this is the post-office." unsatisfactory responses are those made up entirely or mainly of enumeration. a phrase or two of description intermingled with a larger amount of enumeration counts _minus_. sometimes the description is satisfactory as far as it goes, but is exceedingly brief. in such cases a little tactful urging ("_go ahead_," etc.) will extend the response sufficiently to reveal its true character. remarks. description is better than enumeration because it involves putting the elements of a picture together in a simple way or noting their qualities. this requires a higher type of mental association (combinative power) than mere enumeration. an unusually complete description indicates relative wealth of mental content and facility of association. binet placed this test in year vii, and it seems to have been retained in this location in all revisions except bobertag's. however, the statistics of various workers show much disagreement. lack of agreement is easily accounted for by the fact that different investigators have used different series of pictures and doubtless also different standards for success. the pictures used by binet have little action or detail and are therefore rather difficult for description. on the other hand, the jingleman-jack pictures used by kuhlmann represent such familiar situations and have so much action that even - or -year intelligence seldom fails with them. the pictures we employ belong without question in year vii. no better proof than the above could be found to show how ability of a given kind does not make its appearance suddenly. there is no one time in the life of even a single child when the power to describe pictures suddenly develops. on the contrary, pictures of a certain type will ordinarily provoke description, rather than enumeration, as early as  or   years; others not before  or   years, or even later. vii,  . repeating five digits procedure. use: - - - - ; - - - - ; - - - - . tell the child to listen and to say after you just what you say. then read the first series of digits at a slightly faster rate than one per second, in a distinct voice, and with perfectly uniform emphasis. _avoid rhythm._ in previous tests with digits, it was permissible to re-read the first series if the child refused to respond. in this year, and in the digits tests of later years, this is not permissible. warning is not given as to the number of digits to be repeated. before reading each series, get the child's attention. do not stare at the child during the response, as this is disconcerting. look aside or at the record sheet. scoring. passed if the child repeats correctly, after a single reading, _one series out of the three_ series given. the order must be correct. remarks. psychologically the repetition of digits differs from the repetition of sentences mainly in the fact that digits have less meaning (fewer associations) than the words of a sentence. it is because they are not as well knit together in meaning that three digits tax the memory as much as six syllables making up a sentence. testing auditory memory for digits is one of the oldest of intelligence tests. it is easy to give and lends itself well to exact quantitative standardization. its value has been questioned, however, on two grounds: ( ) that it is not a test of pure memory, but depends largely on attention; and ( ) that the results are too much influenced by the child's type of imagery. as to the first objection, it is true that more than one mental function is brought into play by the test. the same may be said of every other test in the binet scale and for that matter of any test that could be devised. it is impossible to isolate any function for separate testing. in fact, the functions called memory, attention, perception, judgment, etc., never operate in isolation. there are no separate and special "faculties" corresponding to such terms, which are merely convenient names for characterizing mental processes of various types. in any test it is "general ability" which is operative, perhaps now _chiefly_ in remembering, at another time _chiefly_ in sensory discrimination, again in reasoning, etc. the second objection, that the test is largely invalidated by the existence of imagery types, is not borne out by the facts. experiments have shown that pure imagery types are exceedingly rare, and that children, especially, are characterized by "mixed" imagery. there are probably few subjects so lacking in auditory imagery as to be placed at a serious disadvantage in this test. lengthening a series by the addition of a single digit adds greatly to the difficulty. while four digits can usually be repeated by children of  years, five digits belong in year vii and six in year x. it is always interesting to note the type of errors made. the most common error is to omit one or more of the digits, usually in the first part of the series. if the child's ability is decidedly below the test he may give only the last two or three out of the five or six heard. substitutions are also quite frequent, and if so many substitutions are made as to give a series quite unlike that which the child has heard, it is an unfavorable sign, indicating weakness of the critical sense which is so often found with low-level intelligence. in case of extreme weakness of the power of auto-criticism, the child in response to the series - - - - -, may say - - - - - , or perhaps merely a couple of digits like - , and still express complete satisfaction with his absurd response. after each series, therefore, the examiner should say, "_was it right?_"[ ] very young subjects, however, have a tendency to answer "yes" to any question of this type, and it is therefore best not to call for criticism of a performance below the age of  or   years. [ ] "_was it wrong?_" is not an equivalent question and should not be used. digit series of a given length are not always of equal difficulty, and for this reason it is never wise to use series improvised at the moment of the experiment. we must avoid especially series of regularly ascending or descending value, the repetition at regular intervals of a particular digit, and all other peculiarities of arrangement which would favor the grouping of the digits for easier retention. it remains to mention two or three further cautions in regard to procedure. it is best to begin with a series about one digit below the child's expected ability. if the child has a probable intelligence of about  or   years, we should begin with four digits; in case of probable -year intelligence we begin with five digits, etc. on the other hand, we should avoid beginning too far down, because then the result is too much complicated by the effects of practice and fatigue. it is not necessary, and often it is not expedient, to give the digits tests of all the different years in succession; that is, without other tests intervening. while this may be permissible with older children, in young children the power of sustained attention is so weak that no single kind of test should occupy more than two or three minutes. children below  or   years should ordinarily be given the tests in the order in which they are listed in the record booklet. in his revision of the scale binet unfortunately shifted this test from year vii to year viii. goddard follows his example, but kuhlmann retains it in year vii. the data from more than a dozen leading investigations in america, england, and germany agree in showing that the test should remain in year vii. vii,  . tying a bow-knot procedure. prepare a shoestring tied in a bow-knot around a stick. the knot should be an ordinary "double bow," with wings not over three or four inches long. make this ready in advance of the experiment and show the child only the completed knot. place the model before the subject with the wings pointing to the right and left, and say: "_you know what kind of knot this is, don't you? it is a bow-knot. i want you to take this other piece of string and tie the same kind of knot around my finger._" at the same time give the child a piece of shoestring, of the same length as that which is tied around the stick, and hold out a finger pointed toward the child and in convenient position for the operation. it is better to have the subject tie the string around the examiner's finger than around a pencil or other object because the latter often falls out of the string and is otherwise awkward to handle. some children who assert that they do not know how to tie a bow-knot are sometimes nevertheless successful when urged to try. it is always necessary, therefore, to secure an actual trial. scoring. the test is passed if a double bow-knot (both ends folded in) is made _in not more than a minute_. a single bow-knot (only one end folded in) counts half credit, because children are often accustomed to use the single bow altogether. the usual plain common knot, which precedes the bow-knot proper, must not be omitted if the response is to count as satisfactory, for without this preliminary plain knot a bow-knot will not hold and is of no value. to be satisfactory the knot should also be drawn up reasonably close, not left gaping. remarks. this test, which had not before been standardized, was suggested to the writer by the late dr. huey, who in a conversation once remarked upon the frequent inability of feeble-minded adults to perform the little motor tasks which are universally learned by normal persons in childhood. the test was therefore incorporated in the stanford trial series of - and tried with non-selected children within two months of the th, th, th, or th birthday. it was expected that the test would probably be found to belong at about the -year level, but it proved to be easy enough for year vii, where  per cent of the children passed it. only  per cent of the -year-olds succeeded, but after that age the per cent passing increased rapidly to  per cent at  years. this little experiment, simple as it is, seems to fulfill reasonably well the requirements of a good test. the main objection which might be brought against it is that it is much subject to the influence of training. if this were true in any marked degree, the mentally retarded children of -year intelligence should be expected to succeed better with it than mentally advanced children of the same mental level, since the former would have had at least two or three years more in which to learn the task. a comparison of the two groups, however, shows no great difference. the factor of age, apart from mental age, affects the results so little that it is evident we have here a real test of intelligence. it would, of course, be easy to imagine a child of  years who had not had reasonable opportunity to make the acquaintance of bow-knots or to learn to tie them. but such children are seldom encountered in the ages above  or  . of -year-olds who were asked whether they had ever seen a bow-knot ("a knot like that") only two replied in the negative. it cannot be denied, however, that specific instruction and special stimulus to practice do play a certain part. this is suggested by the fact that girls excel the boys somewhat at each age, doubtless because bow-knots play a larger rôle in feminine apparel. social status affects the results in only a moderate degree, though it might be supposed that poor ragamuffins, on the one hand, and children of the very rich, on the other, would both make a poor showing in this test; the former because of their scanty apparel, the latter because they sometimes have servants to dress them. the following are probably the chief factors determining success with this test: ( ) interest in common objective things; ( ) ability to form permanent associative connections between successive motor coördinations (memory for a series of acts); and ( ) skill in the acquisition of voluntary motor control. the last factor is probably much less important than the other two. motor awkwardness often prolongs the time from the usual ten or fifteen seconds to thirty or forty seconds, but it is rarely a cause of a failure. the important thing is to be able to reproduce the appropriate succession of acts, acts which nearly all children of  years, under the joint stimulus of example and spontaneous interest, have before performed or tried to perform. vii,  . giving differences from memory procedure. say: "_what is the difference between a fly and a butterfly?_" if the child does not seem to understand, say: "_you know flies, do you not? you have seen flies? and you know the butterflies! now, tell me the difference between a fly and a butterfly._" proceed in the same way with _stone and egg_, and _wood and glass_. a little coaxing is sometimes necessary to secure a response, but supplementary questions and suggestions of every kind are to be avoided. for example, it would not be permissible for the examiner to say: "_which is larger, a fly or a butterfly?_" this would give the child his cue and he would immediately answer, "a butterfly." the child must be left to find a difference by himself. sometimes a difference is given, but without any indication as to its direction, as, for example, "one is bigger than the other" (for fly and butterfly). it is then permissible to ask: "_which is bigger?_" scoring. passed if a real difference is given in _two out of three comparisons_. it is not necessary, however, that an _essential_ difference be given; the difference may be trivial, only it must be a real one. the following are samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses:-- _fly and butterfly_ _satisfactory._ "butterfly is larger." "butterfly has bigger wings." "fly is black and a butterfly is not." "butterfly is yellow (or white, etc.) and fly is black." "fly bites you and butterfly don't." "butterfly has powder on its wings, fly does not." "fly flies straighter." "butterfly is outdoors and a fly is in the house." "flies are more dangerous to our health." "flies haven't anything to sip honey with." "butterfly doesn't live as long as a fly." "butterfly comes from a caterpillar." sometimes a double contrast is meant, but not fully expressed; as, "a fly is small and a butterfly is pretty." here the thought is probably correct, only the language is awkward. of  correct responses, were in terms of size, or size plus color or form; were in terms of both form and color; in terms of color alone; and the rest scattered among such responses as those mentioned above. _unsatisfactory._ these are mostly misstatements of facts; as: "fly is bigger." "fly has legs and butterfly hasn't." "butterfly has no feet and fly has." "butterfly makes butter." "fly is a fly and a butterfly is not." failures due to misstatement of fact are of endless variety. if an indefinite response is given, like "the fly is different," or "they don't look alike," we ask, "_how is it different?_" or, "_why don't they look alike?_" it is satisfactory if the child then gives a correct answer. _stone and egg_ _satisfactory._ "stone is harder." "egg is softer." "egg breaks easier." "egg breaks and stone doesn't." "stone is heavier." "egg is white and stone is not." "egg has a shell and stone does not." "eggs have a white and a yellow in them." "you put eggs in a pudding." "an egg is rounder than a stone." we may also accept statements which are only qualifiedly true; as, "you can break an egg, but not a stone." likewise double but incomplete comparisons are satisfactory; as, "an egg you fry and a stone you throw," "a stone is tough and an egg you eat," etc. a little over three fourths of the comparisons made by children of , , and  years are in terms of hardness. the other responses are widely scattered. _unsatisfactory._ "a stone is bigger (or smaller) than an egg." "a stone is square and an egg is round." "an egg is yellow and a stone is white." "stones are red (or black, etc.) and eggs are white." "an egg is to eat and a stone is to plant." "an egg is round and a stone is sometimes round." it will be noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. the error they contain renders them unacceptable. most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. _wood and glass_ _satisfactory._ "glass breaks easier than wood." "glass breaks and wood does not." "wood is stronger than glass." "glass you can see through and wood you can't." "glass cuts you and wood doesn't." "you get splinters from wood and you don't from glass." "glass melts and wood doesn't." "wood burns and glass doesn't." "wood has bark and glass hasn't." "wood grows and glass doesn't." "glass is heavier than wood." "glass glistens in the sun and wood does not." an incomplete double comparison is also counted satisfactory; as, "wood you can burn and glass you can see through." _unsatisfactory._ "wood is black and glass is white." (color differences are always unsatisfactory in this comparison unless transparency is also mentioned.) "glass is square and wood is round." "glass is bigger than wood" (or _vice versa_). "wood is oblong and glass is square." "glass is thin and wood is thick." "wood is made out of trees and glass out of windows." "there is no glass in wood." the two most frequent types of failures are misstatements regarding color and thickness. the other failures are widely scattered. remarks. the test is one which all the critics agree in commending, largely because it is so little influenced by ordinary school experience. its excellence lies mainly, however, in the fact that it throws light upon the character of the child's higher thought processes, for thinking means essentially the association of ideas on the basis of differences or similarities. nearly all thought processes, from the most complex to the very simplest, involve to a greater or less degree one or the other of these two types of association. they are involved in the simple judgments made by children, in the appreciation of puns, in mechanical inventions, in the creation of poetry, in the scientific classification of natural phenomena, and in the origination of the hypotheses of science or philosophy. the ability to note differences precedes somewhat the ability to note resemblances, though the contrary has sometimes been asserted by logician-psychologists. the difficulty of the test is greatly increased by the fact that the objects to be compared are not present to the senses, which means that the free ideas must be called up for comparison and contrast. failure may result either from weakness in the power of ideational representation of objects, or from the inadequacy of the associations themselves, or from both. probably both factors are usually involved. intellectual development is especially evident in increased ability to note _essential_ differences and likenesses, as contrasted with those which are trivial, superficial, and accidental. to distinguish an egg from a stone on the basis of one being organic, the other inorganic matter requires far higher intelligence than to distinguish them on the basis of shape, color, fragibility, etc. it is not till well toward the adult stage that the ability to give very essential likenesses and differences becomes prominent, and when we get a comparison of this type from a child of  or   years it is a very favorable sign. it would be well worth while to standardize a new test of this kind for use in the upper years and especially adapted to display the ability to give essential likenesses and differences. at year vii we must accept as satisfactory any real difference. one point remains. in the tests of giving differences and similarities, it is well to make note of any tendency to _stereotypy_, by which is meant the mechanical reappearance of the same idea, or element, in successive responses. for example, the child begins by comparing fly and butterfly on the basis of size; as, "a butterfly is bigger than a fly." so far, this is quite satisfactory; but the child with a tendency to stereotypy finds himself unable to get away from the dominating idea of size and continues to make it the basis of the other comparisons: "a stone is larger than an egg," "wood is larger than glass," etc. in case of stereotypy in all three responses, we should have to score the total response failure even though the idea employed happened to fit all three parts of the question. as a rule it is encountered only with very young children or with older children who are mentally retarded. it is therefore an unfavorable sign. although this test has been universally used in year viii, all the available statistics, with the exception of bobertag's and bloch's, indicate that it is decidedly too easy for that year. binet himself says that nearly all -year-olds pass it. goddard finds  per cent passing at year viii, and dougherty  per cent at year vi. with the standard of scoring given in the present revision, and with the substitution of _stone and egg_ instead of the more difficult _paper and cloth_, the test is unquestionably easy enough for year vii. vii,  . copying a diamond procedure. on a white cardboard draw in heavy black lines a diamond with the longer diagonal three inches and the shorter diagonal an inch and a half. the specially prepared record booklet contains the diamond as well as many other conveniences. place the model before the child with the longer diagonal pointing directly toward him, and giving him _pen and ink_ and paper, say: "_i want you to draw one exactly like this._" give three trials, saying each time: "_make it exactly like this one._" in repeating the above formula, merely point to the model; do not pass the fingers around its edge. unlike the test of copying a square in year iv, there is seldom any difficulty in getting the child to try this one. by the age of the child has grown much less timid and has become more accustomed to the use of writing materials. note whether the child draws each part carefully, looking at the model from time to time, or whether the strokes are made in a more or less haphazard manner with only an initial glance at the original. after each trial, say to the child: "_is it good?_" and after the three copies have been made say: "_which one is the best?_" retarded children are sometimes entirely satisfied with the most nondescript drawings imaginable, but they are more likely correctly to pick out the best of three than to render a correct judgment about the worth of each drawing separately. scoring. the test is passed if _two of the three_ drawings are at least as good as those marked satisfactory on the score card. the diamond should be drawn approximately in the correct position, and the diagonals must not be reversed. disregard departures from the model with respect to size. remarks. the test is a good one. age and training, apart from intelligence, affect it only moderately. there are few adult imbeciles of -year intelligence who are able to pass it, while but few subjects who have reached the -year level fail on it.[ ] [ ] for further discussion of drawing tests, see v,  , and x,  . this test was located in year vii of the scale, but was shifted to year vi in binet's revision. the change was without justification, for binet expressly states, both in and , that only half of the -year-olds succeed with it. the large majority of investigations have given too low a proportion of successes at  years to warrant its location at that age, particularly if pen is required instead of pencil. location at year vi would be warranted only on the condition that the use of pencil be permitted and only one success required in three trials. vii, alternative test  : naming the days of the week procedure. say: "_you know the days of the week, do you not? name the days of the week for me._" sometimes the child begins by naming various annual holidays, as christmas, fourth of july, etc. perhaps he has not comprehended the task; at any rate, we give him one more trial by stopping him and saying: "_no; that is not what i mean. i want you to name the days of the week._" no supplementary questions are permissible, and we must be careful not to show approval or disapproval in our looks as the child is giving his response. if the days have been named in correct order, we check up the response to see whether the real order of days is known or whether the names have only been repeated mechanically. this is done by asking the following questions: "_what day comes before tuesday?_" "_what day comes before thursday?_" "_what day comes before friday?_" scoring. the test is passed if, within _fifteen seconds_, the days of the week are _all named in correct order_, and if the child succeeds in at least _two of the three check questions_. we disregard the point of beginning. remarks. the test has been criticized as too dependent on rote memory. bobertag says a child may pass it without having any adequate conception of "week," "yesterday," "day before yesterday," etc. this criticism holds if the test is given according to the older procedure, but does not apply with the procedure above recommended. the "checking-up" questions enable us at once to distinguish responses that are given by rote from those which rest upon actual knowledge. the test has been shown to be much more influenced by age, apart from intelligence, than most other tests of the scale. notwithstanding this fault, it seems desirable to keep the test, at least as an alternative, because it forms one of a group which may be designated as tests of time orientation. the others of this group are: "_distinguishing forenoon and afternoon_" (vi), "_giving the date_" and "_naming the months_" (ix). it would be well if we had even more of this type, for interest in the passing of time and in the names of time divisions is closely correlated with intelligence. one reason for the inferiority of the dull and feeble-minded in tests of this type is that their mental associations are weaker and less numerous. the greater poverty of their associations brings it about that their remembered experiences are less definitely located in time with reference to other events. the test was located in year ix of the scale, but was omitted from the revision. kuhlmann also omits it, while goddard places it in year viii. the statistics from every american investigation, however, warrant its location in year vii. it may be located in year viii only on the condition that the child be required to name the days backwards, and that within a rather low time limit. vii, alternative test  : repeating three digits reversed procedure. the digits used are: - - ; - - ; - - . the test should be given after, but not immediately after, the tests of repeating digits forwards. say to the child: "_listen carefully. i am going to read some numbers again, but this time i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say - - , you would say - - . do you understand?_" when it is evident that the child has grasped the instructions, say: "_ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards._" then read the series at the same rate and in the same manner as in the other digits tests. it is not permissible to re-read any of the series. if the first series is repeated forwards instead of backwards series exhort the child to listen carefully and to be sure to repeat the numbers backwards. scoring. the test is passed if _one series out of three_ is repeated backwards without error. remarks. the test of repeating digits backwards was suggested by bobertag in , but appears not to have been used or standardized previous to the stanford investigation. it is very much harder to repeat a series of digits backwards in the direct order at year vii, and six at year x. reversing the order places three digits in year vii, four in year x, five in year xii, and six in "average adult." even intelligent adults sometimes have difficulty in repeating six digits backwards, once in three trials. as a test of intelligence this test is better than that of repeating digits in the direct order. it is less mechanical and makes a much heavier demand on attention. the digits must be so firmly fixated in memory that they can be held there long enough to be told off, one by one, backwards. feeble-minded children find this test especially difficult, perhaps mainly because of its element of novelty. school children are often asked to write numbers dictated by the teacher, and even the very dull acquire a certain proficiency in doing so; but the test of repeating digits backwards requires a certain facility in adjusting to a new task, exactly the sort of thing in which the feeble-minded are so markedly deficient. as a rule the response consumes much more time than in the other digits test. this is particularly true when the series to be repeated backwards contains four or more digits. the chance of success is greatly increased if the subject first thinks the series through two or three times in the direct order before attempting the reverse order. the subject who responds immediately is likely to begin correctly, but to give the first part of the original series in the direct order. for example, - - - is given - - - . sometimes the child gives one or two numbers and then stops, having completely lost the rest of the series in the stress of adjusting to the novel and relatively difficult task of beginning with the final digit. in such cases the feeble-minded are prone to fill in with any numbers they may happen to think of. a good method for the subject is to break the series up into groups and to give each group separately. thus, - - - is given - (pause) - . as a rule only the more intelligent subjects adopt this method. one -year-old girl attending high school was able to repeat eight digits backwards by the aid of this device. it would be well worth while to investigate the relation of this test to imagery type. such a study would have to make use of adult subjects trained in introspection. it would seem that success might be favored by the ability to translate the auditory impression into visual imagery, so that the remembered numbers could be read off as from a book; but this may or may not be the case. at any rate, success seems to depend largely upon the ability to manipulate mental imagery. the degree of certainty as to the correctness of the response is usually much less than in repeating digits forwards. chapter xiv instructions for year viii viii,  . the ball-and-field test (score  , inferior plan) procedure. draw a circle about two and one half inches in diameter, leaving a small gap in the side next the child. say: "_let us suppose that your baseball has been lost in this round field. you have no idea what part of the field it is in. you don't know what direction it came from, how it got there, or with what force it came. all you know is that the ball is lost somewhere in the field. now, take this pencil and mark out a path to show me how you would hunt for the ball so as to be sure not to miss it. begin at the gate and show me what path you would take._"[ ] [ ] the stanford record booklet contains the circle ready for use. give the instructions always as worded above. avoid using an expression like, "_show me how you would walk around in the field_"; the word _around_ might suggest a circular path. sometimes the child merely points or tells how he would go. it is then necessary to say: "_no; you must mark out your path with the pencil so i can see it plainly._" other children trace a path only a little way and stop, saying: "here it is." we then say: "_but suppose you have not found it yet. which direction would you go next?_" in this way the child must be kept tracing a path until it is evident whether any plan governs his procedure. scoring. the performances secured with this test are conveniently classified into four groups, representing progressively higher types. the first two types represent failures; the third is satisfactory at year viii, the fourth at year xii. they may be described as follows:-- _type a_ (failure). the child fails to comprehend the instructions and either does nothing at all or else, perhaps, takes the pencil and makes a few random strokes which could not be said to constitute a search. _type b_ (also failure). the child comprehends the instructions and carries out a search, but without any definite plan. absence of plan is evidenced by the crossing and re-crossing of paths, or by "breaks." a break means that the pencil is lifted up and set down in another part of the field. sometimes only two or three fragments of paths are drawn, but more usually the field is pretty well filled up with random meanderings which cross each other again and again. other illustrations of type _b_ are: a single straight or curved line going direct to the ball, short haphazard dashes or curves, bare suggestion of a fan or spiral. _type c_ (satisfactory at year viii). a successful performance at year viii is characterized by the presence of a plan, but one ill-adapted to the purpose. that some forethought is exercised is evidenced, ( ) by fewer crossings, ( ) by a tendency either to make the lines more or less parallel or else to give them some kind of symmetry, and ( ) by fewer breaks. the possibilities of type _c_ are almost unlimited, and one is continually meeting new forms. we have distinguished more than twenty of these, the most common of which may be described as follows:-- . very rough or zigzag circles or similarly imperfect spirals. . segments of curves joined in a more or less symmetrical fashion. . lines going back and forth across the field, joined at the ends and not intended to be parallel. . the "wheel plan," showing lines radiating from near the center of the field toward the circumference. . the "fan plan," showing a number of lines radiating (usually) from the gate and spreading out over the field. . "fan ellipses" or "fan spirals" radiating from the gate like the lines just described. . the "leaf plan," "rib plan," or "tree plan," with lines branching off from a trunk line like ribs, veins of a leaf, or branches of a tree. . parallel lines which cross at right angles and mark off the field like a checkerboard. . paths making one or more fairly symmetrical geometrical figures, like a square, a diamond, a star, a hexagon, etc. . a combination of two or more of the above plans. _type d_ (satisfactory at year xii). performances of this type meet perfectly, or almost perfectly, the logical requirements of the problem. the paths are almost or quite parallel, and there are no intersections or breaks. the possibilities of type _d_ are fewer and embrace chiefly the following:-- . a spiral, perfect or almost perfect, and beginning either at the gate or at the center of the field. . concentric circles. . transverse lines, parallel or almost so, and joined at the ends. up to about  years most children failed entirely to comprehend the task. by the age of  years the task is usually understood, but the search is conducted without plan. type _c_ is not attained by two thirds before the mental level of  years, and score  ordinarily not until  or   years. grading presents some difficulties because of occasional border-line performances which have a value almost midway between the types _b_ and _c_ or between _c_ and _d_. frequent reference to the scoring card will enable the examiner, after a little experience, to score nearly all the doubtful performances satisfactorily. remarks. the ball-and-field problem may be called a test of practical judgment. unlike a majority of the other tests, it gives the subject a chance to show how well he can meet the demands of a real, rather than an imagined, situation. tests like this, involving practical adjustments, are valuable in rounding out the scale, which, as left by binet, placed rather excessive emphasis on abstract reasoning and the comprehension of language. the test requires little time and always arouses the child's interest. our analysis of the responses of nearly  subjects shows that improvement with increasing mental age is steady and fairly rapid. occasionally, however, one meets a high-grade performance with children of  or   years, and a low-grade performance with adults of average intelligence. like all the other tests of the scale, it is unreliable when used alone. viii,  . counting backwards from  to  procedure. say to the child: "_you can count backwards, can you not? i want you to count backwards for me from  to  . go ahead._" in the great majority of cases this is sufficient; the child comprehends the task and begins. if he does not comprehend, and is silent, or starts in, perhaps, to count forwards from or , say: "_no; i want you to count backwards from  to  , like this: - - , and clear on down to . now, go ahead._" insist upon the child trying it even though he asserts he cannot do it. in many such cases an effort is crowned with success. say nothing about hurrying, as this confuses some subjects. prompting is not permissible. scoring. the test is passed if the child counts from  to  _in not over forty seconds and with not more than a single error_ (one omission or one transposition). errors which the child spontaneously corrects are not counted as errors. remarks. the statistics on this test agree remarkably well. it is plainly too easy for year ix, and no one has found it easy enough for year vii. the main lack of uniformity has been in the adherence to a time limit. binet required that the task be completed in twenty seconds, and goddard and most others adhere rather strictly to this rule. kuhlmann, however, allows thirty seconds if there is no error and twenty seconds if one error is committed. we agree with bobertag that owing to the nature of this test we should not be pedantic about the time. while a majority of children who are able to count backwards do the task in twenty seconds, there are some intelligent but deliberate subjects who require as much as thirty-five or forty seconds. if the counting is done with assurance and without stumbling, there is no reason why we should not allow even forty seconds. beyond this, however, our generosity should not go, because of the chance it would give for the use of special devices such as counting forwards each time to the next number wanted. it may be said that counting backwards is a test of schooling, and to a certain extent this is true. it is reasonable to suppose that special training would enable the child to pass the test a little earlier than he would otherwise be able to do, though it is doubtful whether many children below  years of age have had enough of such training to influence the performance very materially. on the other hand, when the child has reached an intelligence level of or at most  years, he is ordinarily able to count from  to  whether he has ever tried it before or not. what psychological factors are involved in this test? it presupposes, in the first place, the ability to count from  to  . but this alone does not guarantee success in counting backwards. something more is required than a mere rote memory for the number names in their order from up to . the quantitative relationships of the numbers must also be apprehended if the task is to be performed smoothly without a great deal of special training. in addition to being reasonably secure in his knowledge of the number relationships involved, the child must be able to give sustained attention until the task is completed. his mental processes must be dominated by the guiding idea, "count backwards." associations which do not harmonize with this aim, or which fail to further it, must be inhibited. even momentary relaxation of attention means a loss of directive force in the guiding idea and the dominance of better known associations which may be suggested by the task, but are out of harmony with it. thus, if a child momentarily loses sight of the end after counting backwards successfully from  to  , he is likely to be overpowered by the law of habit and begin counting forwards, - - - , etc. we may regard the test, therefore, as a test of attention, or prolonged thought control. the ability to exercise unbroken vigilance for a period of twenty or thirty seconds is rarely found below the level of - or -year intelligence. viii,  . comprehension, third degree the questions for this year are:-- (a) "_what's the thing for you to do when you have broken something which belongs to some one else?_" (b) "_what's the thing for you to do when you notice on your way to school that you are in danger of being tardy?_" (c) "_what's the thing for you to do if a playmate hits you without meaning to do it?_" the procedure is the same as in previous comprehension questions.[ ] each question may be repeated once or twice, but its form must not be changed. no explanations are permissible. [ ] see iv,  , and vi,  . scoring:-- _question a (if you have broken something)_ _satisfactory responses_ are those suggesting either restitution or apology, or both. confession is not satisfactory unless accompanied by apology. the following are satisfactory: "buy a new one." "pay for it." "give them something instead of it." "have my father mend it." "apologize." "tell them i'm sorry, that i did not mean to break it," etc. of  correct answers, suggested restitution, while suggested apology, or apology and restitution. _unsatisfactory._ "tell them i did it." "go tell my mother." "feel sorry." "be ashamed." "pick it up," etc. mere confession accounts for over  per cent of all failures. _question b (in danger of being tardy)_ _satisfactory._ the expected response is, "hurry," "walk faster," or something to that effect. one bright city boy said he would take a car. of the answers not obviously incorrect, nearly  per cent suggest hurrying. the rule ordinarily recommended is to grade all other responses _minus_. but this rule is too sweeping to be followed blindly. one who would use intelligence tests must learn to discriminate. "i would go back home and not go to school that day" is a good answer in those cases (fortunately rare) in which children are forbidden by the teacher to enter the schoolroom if tardy. "go back home and get mother to write an excuse" would be good policy if by so doing the child might escape the danger of incurring an extreme penalty. when teachers inflict absurd penalties for unexcused tardiness, it is the part of wisdom for children to incur no risks! when such a response is given, it is well to inquire into the school's method of dealing with tardiness and to score the response accordingly. _unsatisfactory._ "go to the principal." "tell the teacher i couldn't help it." "have to get an excuse." "go to school anyway." "get punished." "not do it again." "not play hooky." "start earlier next time," etc. lack of success results oftenest from failure to get the exact shade of meaning conveyed by the question. it is implied, of course, that something is to be done at once to avoid tardiness; but the subject of dull comprehension may suggest a suitable thing to do in case tardiness has been incurred. hence the response, "i would go to the principal and explain." answers of this type are always unsatisfactory. _question c (playmate hits you)_ _satisfactory responses_ are only those which suggest either excusing or overlooking the act. these ideas are variously expressed as follows: "i would excuse him" (about half of all the correct answers). "i would say 'yes' if he asked my pardon." "i would say it was all right." "i would take it for a joke." "i would just be nice to him." "i would go right on playing." "i would take it kind-hearted." "i would not fight or run and tell on him." "i would not blame him for it." "ask him to be more careful," etc. _unsatisfactory responses_ are all those not of the above two types; as: "i would hit them back." "i would not hit them back, but i would get even some other way." "tell them not to do it again." "tell them to 'cut it out.'" "tell him it's a wrong thing to do." "make him excuse himself." "make him say he's sorry." "would not play with him." "tell my mamma." "i would ask him why he did it." "he'd say 'excuse me' and i'd say 'thank you.'" "he should excuse me." "he is supposed to say 'excuse me.'" remarks. all three comprehension questions of this year were used by binet, goddard, huey, and others in year x; two of them in the "easy series" and one in the "hard series." the stanford data show that they belong at the -year level on the standard of scoring above set forth. the three differ little among themselves in difficulty, but all of them are decidedly easier than the other five used by binet. it would be absurd to go on using the comprehension questions as binet bunched them, eight together, ranging in difficulty from one which is easy enough for -year intelligence ("what's the thing to do if you miss your train?") to one which is hard for the -year level ("why is a bad act done when one is angry more excusable than the same act done when one is not angry?"). viii,  . giving similarities; two things procedure. say to the child: "_i am going to name two things which are alike in some way, and i want you to tell me how they are alike. wood and coal: in what way are they alike?_" proceed in the same manner with:-- _an apple and a peach._ _iron and silver._ _a ship and an automobile._ after the first pair the formula may be abbreviated to "_in what way are ... and ... alike?_" it is often necessary to insist a little if the child is silent or says he does not know, but in doing this we must avoid supplementary questions and suggestions. in giving the first pair, for example, it would not be permissible to ask such additional questions as, "_what do you use wood for? what do you use coal for? and now, how are wood and coal alike?_" this is really putting the answer in the child's mouth. it is only permissible to repeat the original question in a persuasive tone of voice, and perhaps to add: "_i'm sure you can tell me how ... and ... are alike_," or something to that effect. a very common mistake which the child makes is to give differences instead of similarities. this tendency is particularly strong if test  , year vii (giving differences), has been given earlier in the sitting, but it happens often enough in other cases also to suggest that finding differences is, to a much greater extent than finding similarities, the child's preferred method of making a comparison. when a difference is given, instead of a similarity, we say: "_no, i want you to tell me how they are alike. in what way are ... and ... alike?_" unless the child is of rather low intelligence level this is sufficient, but the mentally retarded sometimes continue to give differences persistently in spite of repeated admonitions, or if they cease to do so for one or two comparisons, they are likely to repeat the mistake in the latter part of the test. scoring. the test is passed if a likeness is given in _two out of four_ comparisons. we accept as satisfactory any real likeness, whether fundamental or superficial, though, of course, the more essential the resemblance, the better indication it is of intelligence. the following are samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory answers:--[ ] [ ] for aid in classifying the responses in this and certain other tests the writer is indebted to miss grace lyman. (a) _wood and coal_ _satisfactory._ "both burn." "both keep you warm." "both are used for fuel." "both are vegetable matter." "both come from the ground." "can use them both for running engines." "both hard." "both heavy." "both cost money." of correct answers, , or  per cent, referred in one way or another to combustibility. _unsatisfactory._ most frequent is the persistent giving of a difference instead of a similarity. this accounts for a little over half of all the failures. about half of the remainder are cases of inability to give any response. incorrect statements with regard to color are rather common. sample failures of this type are: "both are black," or "both the same color." other failures are: "both are dirty on the outside;" "you can't break them;" "coal burns better;" "wood is lighter than coal," etc. (b) _an apple and a peach_ _satisfactory._ "both are round." "both the same shape." "they are about the same color." "both nearly always have some red on them." "both good to eat." "can make pies of both of them." "both can be cooked." "both mellow when they are ripe." "both have a stem" (or seeds, skin, etc.). "both come from trees." "can be dried in the same way." "both are fruits." "both green (in color) when they are not ripe." of correct answers,  per cent mention color;  per cent, form;  per cent, edibility;  per cent, having stem, seed, or skin; and  per cent, that both grow on trees. _unsatisfactory._ "both taste the same." "both have a lot of seeds." "both have a fuzzy skin." "an apple is bigger than a peach." "one is red and one is white," etc. again, over  per cent of the failures are due to giving differences and about  per cent to silence. (c) _iron and silver_ _satisfactory._ "both are metals" (or mineral). "both come out of the ground." "both cost money." "both are heavy." "both are hard." "both can be melted." "both can be bent." "both used for utensils." "you manufacture things out of both of them." "both can be polished." these are named most frequently in the following order: ( ) hardness, ( ) origin from the ground, ( ) heaviness, ( ) use in making things. _unsatisfactory._ "both thin" (or thick). "sometimes they are the same shape." "both the same color." "a little silver and lots of iron weigh the same." "both made by the same company." "they rust the same." "you can't eat them" (!)[ ] [ ] one is here reminded of the puzzling conundrum, "why is a brick like an elephant?" the answer being, "because neither can climb a tree!" a response of this type states a fact, but because of its bizarre nature should hardly be counted satisfactory. of  failures, were due to giving differences and to silence or unwillingness to hazard a reply. (d) _a ship and an automobile_ _satisfactory._ "both means of travel." "both go." "you ride in them." "both take you fast." "they both use fuel." "both run by machinery." "both have a steering gear." "both have engines in them." "both have wood in them." "both can be wrecked." "both break if they hit a rock." about  per cent of the answers are in terms of running or travel,  per cent in terms of machinery or structure, the rest scattered. _unsatisfactory._ "both black" (or some other color). "both very big." "they are made alike." "both run on wheels." "ship is for the water and automobile for the land." "ship goes on water and an automobile sometimes goes in water." "an auto can go faster." "ship is run by coal and automobile by gasoline." of  failures, were due to giving differences and to failure to reply. remarks. the test of finding similarities was first used by binet in . our results show that it is fully as satisfactory as the test of giving differences. the test reveals in a most interesting way one of the fundamental weaknesses of the feeble mind. young normal children, say of  or   years, often fail to pass, but it is the feeble-minded who give the greatest number of absurd answers and who also find greatest difficulty in resisting the tendency to give differences.[ ] [ ] for further discussion of the processes involved, see vii,  . viii,  . giving definitions superior to use procedure. the words for this year are _balloon_, _tiger_, _football_, and _soldier_. ask simply: "_what is a balloon?_" etc. if it appears that any of the words are not familiar to the child, substitution may be made from the following: _automobile_, _battle-ship_, _potato_, _store_. make no comments on the responses until all the words have been given. in case of silence or hesitation in answering, the question may be repeated with a little encouragement; but supplementary questions are never in order. ordinarily there is no difficulty in securing a response to the definition test of this year. the trouble comes in scoring the response. scoring. the test is passed if two of the four words are defined in terms superior to use. "superior to use" includes chiefly: (a) definitions which describe the object or tell something of its nature (form, size, color, appearance, etc.); (b) definitions which give the substance or the materials or parts composing it; and (c) those which tell what class the object belongs to or what relation it bears to other classes of objects. it is possible to distinguish different grades of definitions in each of the above classes. a definition by description (type _a_) may be brief and partial, mentioning only one or two qualities or characteristics, or it may be relatively rich and complete. likewise with definitions of type _b_. classificatory definitions (type _c_) are of particularly uneven value, the lowest order being those which subsume the object to be defined under a remote class and give few if any characteristics to distinguish it from other members of the same class; as, for example, "a football is a thing you can have fun with," or, "a soldier is a person." the best classificatory definitions are those which subsume the object under the next higher class and give the more essential traits (perhaps a number of them) which distinguish the object from others of the class named; as, for example, "a tiger is a large animal like a cat; it lives in the jungle and eats men and other animals," or, "a soldier is a man who goes to war." these shades of distinction give interesting and valuable clues to the maturity and richness of the apperceptive processes, but for purposes of scoring it is necessary merely to decide whether the definition is given in terms superior to use. the following are samples of satisfactory definitions, those for each word being arranged roughly in the order of their value from excellent to barely passing:-- (a) _balloon_ _satisfactory._ "a balloon is a means of traveling through the air." "it is a kind of airship, made of cloth and filled with air so it can go up." "it is big and made of cloth. it has gas in it and carries people up in a basket that's fastened on to the bottom." "it is a thing you hold by a string and it goes up." "it is like a big bag with air in it." "it is a big thing that goes up." _unsatisfactory._ "to go up in the air." "what you go up in." "when you go up." "they go up in it." "it's full of gas." "to carry you up." "a balloon is a balloon," etc. "it is big." "they go up," etc. (b) _tiger_ _satisfactory._ "it is a wild animal of the cat family." "it is an animal that's a cousin to the lion." "it is an animal that lives in the jungle." "it is a wild animal." "it looks like a big cat." "it lives in the woods and eats flesh." "something that eats people." _unsatisfactory._ "to eat you up." "to kill people." "to travel in the circus." "what eats people." "it is a tiger," etc. "you run from it," etc. (c) _football_ _satisfactory._ "it is a leather bag filled with air and made for kicking." "it is a ball you kick." "it is a thing you play with." "it is made of leather and is stuffed with air." "it is a thing you kick." "it is brown and filled with air." "it is a thing shaped like a watermelon." _unsatisfactory._ "to kick." "to play with." "what they play with." "boys play with it." "it's filled with air." "it is a football." "it is a basket ball." "it is round." "you kick it." (d) _soldier_ _satisfactory._ "a man who goes to war." "a brave man." "a man that walks up and down and carries a gun." "it is a man who minds his captain and stands still and walks straight." "it is a man who goes to war and shoots." "it is a man who stands straight and marches." _unsatisfactory._ "to shoot." "to go to war." "it is a soldier." "a soldier that marches." "he fights." "he shoots." "what fights," etc. "when you march and shoot." silence accounts for only a small proportion of the failures with children of , , and  years. remarks. the "use definitions" sometimes given at this age are usually of slightly better quality than those given in year v. younger children more often use the infinitive form, "to play with" (doll), "to drive" (horse), "to eat on" (table), etc. use definitions of this year more often begin with "they," or "what"; as, "they go up in it" (balloon), "they kick it" (football), etc. why, it may be asked, is the use definition regarded as inferior to the descriptive or the classificatory definition? is not the use to which an object may be put the most essential thing about it, for the child at least? is it not more important to know that a fork is to eat with than to be able to name the material it is made of? is not the use primary and does it not determine most of the physical characteristics of the object? the above questions may sound reasonable, but they are based on poor psychology. we must rest our case upon the facts. the first lesson which the student of child psychology must learn is that it is unsafe to set up criteria of intelligence, of maturity, or of any other mental trait on the basis of theoretical considerations. experiment teaches that normal children of  or   years, also older feeble-minded persons of the -year intelligence level, define objects in terms of use; also that normal children of  or   years and older feeble-minded persons of this mental level have for the most part developed beyond the stage of use definitions into the descriptive or classificatory stage. an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory. the test has usually been located in year ix, with the requirement of three successes out of five trials and with somewhat more rigid scoring of the individual definitions. when only two successes are required in four trials, and when scored leniently, the test belongs at the -year level. viii,  . vocabulary; twenty definitions,  words procedure. use the list of words given in the record booklet. say to the child: "_i want to find out how many words you know. listen; and when i say a word you tell me what it means._" if the child can read, give him a printed copy of the word list and let him look at each word as you pronounce it. the words are arranged approximately (though not exactly) in the order of their difficulty, and it is best to begin with the easier words and proceed to the harder. with children under  or   years, begin with the first. apparently normal children of  years may safely be credited with the first ten words without being asked to define them. apparently normal children of may begin with word  , and -year-olds with word  . except with subjects of almost adult intelligence there is no need to give the last ten or fifteen words, as these are almost never correctly defined by school children. a safe rule to follow is to continue until eight or ten successive words have been missed and to score the remainder _minus_ without giving them. the formula is as follows: "what is an _orange_?" "what is a _bonfire_?" "_roar_; what does _roar_ mean?" "_gown_; what is a _gown_?" "what does _tap_ mean?" "what does _scorch_ mean?" "what is a _puddle_?" etc. some children at first show a little hesitation about answering, thinking that a strictly formal definition is expected. in such cases a little encouragement is necessary; as: "_you know what a bonfire is. you have seen a bonfire. now, what is a bonfire?_" if the child still hesitates, say: "_just tell me in your own words; say it any way you please. all i want is to find out whether you know what a bonfire is._" do not torture the child, however, by undue insistence. if he persists in his refusal to define a word which he would ordinarily be expected to know, it is better to pass on to the next one and to return to the troublesome word later. above all, avoid helping the child by illustrating the use of a word in a sentence. adhere strictly to the formula given above. if the definition as given does not make it clear whether the child has the correct idea, say: "_explain_," or, "_i don't understand; explain what you mean._" encourage the child frequently by saying: "that's fine. you are doing beautifully. you know lots of words," etc. never tell the child his definition is not correct, and never ask for a different definition. avoid saying anything which would suggest a model form of definition, as the type of definition which the child spontaneously chooses throws interesting light on the degree of maturity of the apperceptive processes. record all definitions _verbatim_ if possible, or at least those which are exceptionally good, poor, or doubtful. scoring. credit a response in full if it gives one correct meaning for the word, regardless of whether that meaning is the most common one, and regardless of whether it is the original or a derived meaning. occasionally half credit may be given, but this should be avoided as far as possible. to find the entire vocabulary, multiply the number of words known by . (this list is made up of  words selected by rule from a dictionary containing ,  words.) thus, the child who defines  words correctly has a vocabulary of  ×   =   words;  correct definitions would mean a vocabulary of  words, etc. the following are the standards for different years, as determined by the vocabulary reached by  to   per cent of the subjects of the various mental levels:--  years  words vocabulary ,  years  words vocabulary ,  years  words vocabulary ,  years  words vocabulary , average adult  words vocabulary , superior adult  words vocabulary , although the form of the definition is significant, it is not taken into consideration in scoring. the test is intended to explore the range of ideas rather than the evolution of thought forms. when it is evident that the child has one fairly correct meaning for a word, he is given full credit for it, however poorly the definition may have been stated. while there is naturally some difficulty now and then in deciding whether a given definition is correct, this happens much less frequently than one would expect. in order to get a definite idea of the extent of error due to the individual differences among examiners, we have had the definitions of  subjects graded independently by different persons. the result showed an average difference below in the number of definitions scored _plus_. since these subjects attempted on an average about  words, the average number of doubtful definitions per subject was below  per cent of the number attempted. an idea of the degree of leniency to be exercised may be had from the following examples of definitions, which are mostly of low grade, but acceptable unless otherwise indicated:-- . _orange._ "an orange is to eat." "it is yellow and grows on a tree." (both full credit.) . _bonfire._ "you burn it outdoors." "you burn some leaves or things." "it's a big fire." (all full credit.) . _roar._ "a lion roars." "you holler loud." (full credit.) . _gown._ "to sleep in." "it's a nightie." "it's a nice gown that ladies wear." (all full credit.) . _puddle._ "you splash in it." "it's just a puddle of water." (both full credit.) . _straw._ "it grows in the field." "it means wheat-straw." "the horses eat it." (all full credit.) . _rule._ "the teacher makes rules." "it means you can't do something." "you make marks with it," i.e., a ruler, often called a _rule_ by school children. (all full credit.) . _afloat._ "to float on the water." "a ship floats." (both full credit.) . _eyelash._ if the child says, "it's over the eye," tell him to point to it, as often the word is confused with _eyebrow_. . _copper._ "it's a penny." "it means some copper wire." (both full credit.) . _health._ "it means good health or bad health." "it means strong." (both full credit.) . _guitar._ "you play on it." (full credit.) . _mellow._ if the child says, "it means a mellow apple," ask what kind of apple that would be. for full credit the answer must be "soft," "mushy," etc. . _pork._ if the answer is "meat," ask what animal it comes from. half credit if wrong animal is named. . _plumbing._ "you fix pipes." (full credit.) . _southern._ if the answer is "southern states," or "southern california," say: "_yes; but what does 'southern' mean?_" do not credit unless explanation is forthcoming. . _noticeable._ "you notice a thing." (full credit.) . _civil._ "civil war." (failure unless explained.) "it means to be nice." (full credit.) . _treasury._ give half credit for definitions like "valuables," "lots of money," etc.; i.e., if the word is confused with _treasure._ . _ramble._ "to go about fast." (half credit.) . _nerve._ half credit if the slang use is defined, "you've got nerve," etc. . _majesty._ "what you say to a king." (full credit.) . _sportive._ "to like sports." (half credit.) "playful" or "happy." (full credit.) . _hysterics._ "you laugh and cry at the same time." "a kind of sickness." "a kind of fit." (all full credit.) . _repose._ "you pose again." (failure.) . _coinage._ "a place where they make money." (half credit.) . _dilapidated._ "something that's very old." (half credit.) . _conscientious._ "you're careful how you do your work." (full credit.) . _artless._ "no art." (failure unless correctly explained.) . _priceless._ "it has no price." (failure.) . _promontory._ "something prominent." (failure unless child can explain what it refers to.) . _milksop._ "you sop up milk." (failure.) . _harpy._ "a kind of bird." (full credit.) . _exaltation._ "you feel good." (full credit.) . _retroactive._ "acting backward." (full credit.) . _theosophy._ "a religion." (full credit.) it is seen from the above examples that a very liberal standard has been used. leniency in judging definitions is necessary because the child's power of expression lags farther behind his understanding than is true of adults, and also because for the young subject the word has a relatively less unitary existence. remarks. our vocabulary test was derived by selecting the last word of every sixth column in a dictionary containing approximately ,  words, presumably the , most common words in the language. the test is based on the assumption that  words selected according to some arbitrary rule will be a large enough sampling to afford a fairly reliable index of a subject's entire vocabulary. rather extensive experimentation with this list and others chosen in a similar manner has proved that the assumption is justified. tests of the same  individuals with five different vocabulary tests of this type showed that the average difference between two tests of the same person was less than  per cent. this means that any one of the five tests used is reliable enough for all practical purposes. it is of no special importance that a given child's vocabulary is rather than ; the significance lies in the fact that it is approximately and not , , , or some other widely different number. it may seem to the reader almost incredible that so small a sampling of words would give a reliable index of an individual's vocabulary. that it does so is due to the operation of the ordinary laws of chance. it is analogous to predicting the results of an election when only a small proportion of the ballots have been counted. it is known that a ballot box contains  votes, and if when only have been counted it is found that they are divided between two candidates in the proportion of  and  , it is safe to predict that a complete count will give the two candidates approximately and respectively.[ ] in about , , votes were cast for governor in california, and when only ,  votes had been counted, or a hundredth of all, it was announced and conceded that governor johnson had been reëlected by the , plurality. the completed count gave him , plurality. the error was less than  per cent of the total vote. [ ] supposing the ballots to have been shuffled. the vocabulary test has a far higher value than any other single test of the scale. used with children of english-speaking parents (with children whose home language is not english it is of course unreliable), it probably has a higher value than any three other tests in the scale. our statistics show that in a large majority of cases the vocabulary test alone will give us an intelligence quotient within  per cent of that secured by the entire scale. out of hundreds of english-speaking children we have not found one testing significantly above age who had a significantly low vocabulary; and correspondingly, those who test much below age never have a high vocabulary. occasionally, however, a subject tests somewhat higher or lower in vocabulary than the mental age would lead us to expect. this is often the case with dull children in cultured homes and with very intelligent children whose home environment has not stimulated language development. but even in these cases we are not seriously misled, for the dull child of fortunate home surroundings shows his dullness in the quality of his definitions if not in their quantity; while the bright child of illiterate parents shows his intelligence in the aptness and accuracy of his definitions. we have not worked out a satisfactory method of scoring the quality of definitions in our vocabulary test, but these differences will be readily observed by the trained examiner. definitions in terms of use and definitions which are slightly inaccurate or hazy are quite characteristic of the lower mental ages. children of the lower mental age have also a tendency to venture wild guesses at words they do not know. this is especially characteristic of retarded subjects and is another example of their weakness of auto-criticism. one feeble-minded boy of  years, with a mental age of  years, glibly and confidently gave definitions for every one of the hundred words. about of the definitions were pure nonsense. this vocabulary test was arranged and partially standardized by mr. h. g. childs and the writer in . many experiments since then have proved its value as a test of intelligence. viii, alternative test  : naming six coins procedure is exactly as in vi,  (naming four coins). the dollar should be shown before the half-dollar. scoring. _all six coins must be correctly named._ if a response is changed the rule is to count the second answer and ignore the first. remarks. binet used nine pieces and required knowledge of all at year x ( ), but at year ix in the revision. most other workers have used the same method, with the test located in either year ix or year x. viii, alternative test  : writing from dictation procedure. give the child pen, ink, and paper, place him in a comfortable position for writing, and say: "_i want you to write something for me as nicely as you can. write these words: 'see the little boy.' be sure to write it all: 'see the little boy.'_" do not dictate the words separately, but give the sentence as a whole. further repetition of the sentence is not permissible, as ability to remember what has been dictated is a part of the test. copy, of course, must not be shown. scoring. passed if the sentence is written legibly enough to be easily recognized, and if no word has been omitted. ordinary mistakes of spelling are disregarded. the rule is that the mistake in spelling must not mutilate the word beyond easy recognition. the performance may be graded by the use of thorndike's handwriting scale. the handwriting of -year-old children who have been in school not less than one year or more than two usually falls between quality  and quality  on this scale, but we shall, perhaps, not be too liberal if we consider a performance satisfactory which does not grade below quality  , provided it is not seriously mutilated by errors, omissions, etc.[ ] [ ] see scoring card for samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory performances. remarks. this test found a place in year viii of binet's scale, but has been omitted from all the other revisions, including binet's own. bobertag did not even regard the test as worthy of a trial. the universal criticism has been that it is a test of schooling rather than of intelligence. that the performance depends, in a certain sense, upon special instruction is self-evident. without such instruction no child of  years, however intelligent, would be able to pass the test. nature does not give us a conventionalized language, either written or spoken. it must be acquired. it is also true that a high-grade feeble-minded child, say  years of age and of -year intelligence, is sometimes (though not always) able to pass the test after two years of school instruction. it is exceedingly improbable, however, that a feeble-minded subject with less than -year intelligence will ever be able to pass this test, however long he remains in school. the conclusions to be drawn from these facts are as follows: ( ) inability to pass the test should not be counted against the child unless it is known that he has had at least a full year of the usual school instruction. ( ) ability to pass the test after only two years of school instruction is almost certain proof that the child has reached a mental level of at least  years. ( ) failure to pass the test must be regarded as a grave symptom in the case of the child or more years of age who is known to have attended school as much as two years. ( ) for mental levels higher than  years the test has hardly any diagnostic value, since feeble-minded persons of - or -year intelligence can usually be taught to write quite legibly. if the limitations above set forth are kept in mind, the test is by no means without value, and is always worth giving as a supplementary test. learning to write simple sentences from dictation is no mean accomplishment. it demands, in the first place, a fairly complete mastery of rather difficult muscular coördinations. moreover, these coördinations must be firmly associated with the corresponding letters and words, for if the writing coördinations are not fairly automatic, so much attention will be required to carry them out that the child will not be able to remember what he has been told to write. the necessity of remembering the passage acts as a distraction, and writing from dictation is therefore a more difficult task than writing from copy. chapter xv instructions for year ix ix,  . giving the date procedure. ask the following questions in order:-- (a) "_what day of the week is it to-day?_" (b) "_what month is it?_" (c) "_what day of the month is it?_" (d) "_what year is it?_" if the child misunderstands and gives the day of the month for the day of the week, or _vice versa_, we merely repeat the question with suitable emphasis, but give no other help. scoring. an error of three days in either direction is allowed for _c_, but _a_, _b_, and _d_ must all be given correctly. if the child makes an error and spontaneously corrects it, the change is allowed, but corrections must not be called for or suggested. remarks. binet originally located this test in year ix, but unfortunately moved it to year viii in the revision. kuhlmann, goddard, and huey all retain it in year ix, where, according to our own data, it unquestionably belongs. with the exception of binet's results, the statistics for the test are in remarkably close agreement for children in france, germany, england, and eastern and western united states. it seems that practically all children in civilized countries have ample opportunity to learn the divisions of the year, month, and week, and to become oriented with respect to these divisions. special instruction is doubtless capable of hastening time orientation to a certain degree, but not greatly. binet tells of a french _école maternelle_ attended by children  to   years of age, where instruction was given daily in regard to the date, and yet not a single one of the children was able to pass this test. this is a beautiful illustration of the futility of precocious teaching. in spite of well-meant instruction, it is not until the age of  or   years that children have enough comprehension of time periods, and sufficient interest in them, to keep very close track of the date. failure to pass the test at the age of  or   years is a decidedly unfavorable sign, unless the error is very slight. the fact that normal adults are occasionally unable to give the day of the month is no argument against the validity of the test, since the system of tests is so constructed as to allow for accidental failures on any particular test. as a matter of fact, very nearly  per cent of normal -year-old children pass this test. the unavoidable fault of the test is its lack of uniformity in difficulty at different dates. it is easier for school children to give the day of the week on monday or friday than on tuesday, wednesday, or thursday. mistakes in giving the day of the month are less likely to occur at the beginning or end of the month than at any other time, while mistakes in naming the month are most likely to occur then. it is interesting to compare the four parts of this test in regard to difficulty. binet and bobertag both state that ability to name the year comes last, but they give no figures. our own data show that the four parts of the test are of almost exactly the same difficulty and that this is true at all ages. ix,  . arranging five weights use the five weights, , , , , and  grams. be sure that the weights are identical in appearance. the weights may be made as described under v,  , or they may be purchased of c. h. stoelting & co., chicago, illinois. if no weights are at hand one of the alternative tests may be substituted. procedure. place the five boxes on the table in an irregular group before the child and say: "_see the boxes. they all look alike, don't they? but they are not alike. some of them are heavy, some are not quite so heavy, and some are still lighter. no two weigh the same. now, i want you to find the heaviest one and place it here. then find the one that is just a little lighter and put it here. then put the next lighter one here, and the next lighter one here, and the lightest of all at this end_ (pointing each time at the appropriate spot). _do you understand?_" whatever the child answers, in order to make sure that he does understand, we repeat the instructions thus: "_remember now, that no two weights are the same. find the heaviest one and put it here, the next heaviest here, and lighter, lighter, until you have the very lightest here. ready; go ahead._" it is best to follow very closely the formula here given, otherwise there is danger of stating the directions so abstractly that the subject could not comprehend them. a formula like "_i want you to arrange the blocks in a gradually decreasing series according to weight_" would be greek to most children of  years. if the subject still seems at a loss to know what to do, the instructions may be again repeated. but no further help of any kind may be given. do not tell the subject to take the blocks one at a time in the hand and try them, and do not illustrate by hefting the blocks yourself. it is a part of the test to let the subject find his own method. give three trials, shuffling the boxes after each. do not repeat the instructions before the second and third trials unless the subject has used an absurd procedure in the previous trial. scoring. the test is passed if the blocks are arranged in the correct order _twice out of three trials_. always record the order of arrangement and note the number and extent of displacement. obviously an arrangement like - - - - is very much more serious than one like - - - - , but we require that two trials be absolutely without error. scoring is facilitated if the blocks are marked on the bottom so that they may be easily identified. it is then necessary to exercise some care to see that the subject does not examine the bottom of the blocks for a clue as to the correct order. remarks. binet originally located this test in year ix, but in his revision changed it to year viii. other revisions have retained it in year ix. the correct location depends upon the weights used and upon the procedure and scoring. kuhlmann uses weights of , , , , , and  grams, and this probably makes the test easier. bobertag tried two sets of boxes, one set being of larger dimensions than the other. the larger gave decidedly the more errors. if we require only one success in three trials the test could be located a year or two lower in the scale, while three successes as a standard would require that it be moved upward possibly as much as two years. much depends also on whether the child is left to find his own method, and on this there has been much difference of procedure. kuhlmann, bobertag, and wallin illustrate the correct method of making the comparison by first hefting and arranging the weights while the subject looks on. we prefer to keep the test in its original form, and with the procedure and scoring we have used it is well located in year ix. wallin carries his assistance still further by saying, after the first block has been placed, "now, find the heaviest of the four," and after the second has been placed, "now, find the heaviest of the three," etc. finally, when the arrangement has been made, he tells the subject to try them again to make sure the order is correct, allowing the subject to make whatever changes he thinks necessary. this procedure robs the test of its most valuable features. the experiment was not devised primarily as a test of sensory discrimination, for it has long been recognized that individuals who have developed as far as the - or -year level of intelligence are ordinarily but little below normal in sensory capacity. psychologically, the test resembles that of comparing weights in v,  . success depends, in the first place, upon the correct comprehension of the task and the setting of a goal to be attained; secondly, upon the choice of a suitable method for realizing the goal; and finally, upon the ability to keep the end clearly in consciousness until all the steps necessary for its attainment have been gone through. elementary as are the processes involved, they represent the prototype of all purposeful behavior. the statesman, the lawyer, the teacher, the physician, the carpenter, all in their own way and with their own materials, are continually engaged in setting goals, choosing means, and inhibiting the multitudinous appeals of irrelevant and distracting ideas. in this experiment the subject may fail in any one of the three requirements of the test or in all of them. ( ) he may not comprehend the instructions and so be unable to set the goal. ( ) though understanding what is expected of him, he may adopt an absurd method of carrying out the task. or ( ) he may lose sight of the end and begin to play with the blocks, stacking them on top of one another, building trains, tossing them about, etc. sometimes the guiding idea is not completely lost, but is weakened or rendered only partially operative. in such a case the subject may compare some of the blocks carefully, place others without trying them at all, but continue in his half-rational, half-irrational procedure until all the blocks have been arranged. it is essential, therefore, to supplement the mere record of success or failure by jotting down a brief but accurate description of the performance. note any hesitation or inability to grasp the instructions. note especially any absurd procedure, such as placing all the blocks without hefting any of them, comparing only some of them, holding them up and shaking them, hefting two at once in the same hand, etc. the ideal method, of course, is to try all the blocks carefully before placing any of them, then to make a tentative arrangement, and finally, to correct this tentative arrangement by means of individual comparisons. a slight departure from this method does not always bring failure, but it renders success less probable. as a rule it is only the very intelligent children of  years who think to test out their first arrangement by making a final and additional trial of each block in turn. contrary to what might be supposed, success is slightly favored by hefting the blocks successively with one hand rather than by taking one in each hand for simultaneous comparison, but as the child cannot be expected to know this, we must regard the two methods as equally logical. the test of arranging weights has met universal praise. its special advantage is that it tests the subject's intelligence in the manipulation of _things_ rather than his capacity for dealing with _abstractions_. it tests his ability to do something rather than his ability to express himself in language. it throws light upon certain factors of motor adaptation and practical judgment which play a great part in the everyday life of the average human being. it depends as little upon school, perhaps, as any other test of the scale, and it is readily usable with children of all nations without danger of being materially altered in translation moreover, it is always an interesting test for the child. bobertag goes so far as to say that any - or -year child who passes this test cannot possibly be feeble-minded. this may be true; but the converse is hardly the case; that is, the failure of older children is by no means certain proof of mental retardation. the same observation, however, applies equally well to many other of the binet tests, some of which correlate more closely with true mental age than this one. a rather considerable fraction of normal -year-olds fail on it, and it is in fact somewhat less dependable than certain other tests if we wish to differentiate between -year and -year intelligence. but it is a test we could ill afford to eliminate.[ ] [ ] compare with v,  . ix,  . making change procedure. ask the following questions in the order here given:-- (a) "_if i were to buy  cents worth of candy and should give the storekeeper  cents, how much money would i get back?_" (b) "_if i bought  cents worth and gave the storekeeper  cents, how much would i get back?_" (c) "_if i bought  cents worth and gave the storekeeper  cents, how much would i get back?_" coins are not used, and the subject is not allowed the help of pencil and paper. if the subject forgets the statement of the problem, it is permissible to repeat it once, but only once. the response should be made in ten or fifteen seconds for each problem. scoring, the test is passed if _two out of three_ problems are answered correctly in the allotted time. in case two answers are given to a problem, we follow the usual rule of counting the second and ignoring the first. remarks. problems of this nature, when thoroughly standardized, are extremely valuable as tests of intelligence. the difficulty of the test, as we have used it, does not lie in the subtraction of from , from , etc. such subtractions, when given as problems in subtraction, are readily solved by practically all normal -year-olds who have attended school as much as two years. the problems of the test have a twofold difficulty: ( ) the statement of the problem must be comprehended and held in mind until the solution has been arrived at; ( ) the problem is so stated that the subject must himself select the fundamental operation which applies. the latter difficulty is somewhat the greater of the two, addition sometimes being employed instead of subtraction. it is just such difficulties as this that prove so perplexing to the feeble-minded. high-grade defectives, although they require more than the usual amount of drill and are likely to make occasional errors, are nevertheless capable of learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fairly well. their main trouble comes in deciding which of these operations a given problem calls for. they can master routine, but as regards initiative, judgment, and power to reason they are little educable. the psychology and pedagogy of mental deficiency is epitomized in this statement. there has been little disagreement as to the proper location of the test of making change, but various procedures have been employed. coins have generally been employed, in which case the subject is actually allowed to make the change. most other revisions have also given only a single problem, usually  cents out of  cents, or out of , or out of . it is evident that these are not all of equal difficulty. there is general agreement, however, that normal children of  years should be able to make simple change. ix,  . repeating four digits reversed the series are - - - ; - - - ; - - - . procedure and scoring. exactly as in vii, alternate test  .[ ] [ ] see discussion, p.   _ff._ ix,  . using three words in a sentence procedure the words used are:-- (a) _boy_, _ball_, _river_. (b) _work_, _money_, _men_. (c) _desert_, _rivers_, _lakes_. say: "_you know what a sentence is, of course. a sentence is made up of some words which say something. now, i am going to give you three words, and you must make up a sentence that has all three words in it. the three words are 'boy,' 'ball,' 'river.' go ahead and make up a sentence that has all three words in it._" the others are given in the same way. note that the subject is not shown the three words written down, and that the reply is to be given orally. if the subject does not understand what is wanted, the instruction may be repeated, but it is not permissible to illustrate what a sentence is by giving one. there must be no preliminary practice. a curious misunderstanding which is sometimes encountered comes from assuming that the sentence must be constructed entirely of the three words given. if it appears that the subject is stumbling over this difficulty, we explain: "_the three words must be put with some other words so that all of them together will make a sentence._" nothing is said about hurrying, but if a sentence is not given within one minute the rule is to count that part of the test a failure and to proceed to the next trio of words. give only one trial for each part of the test. do not specially caution the child to avoid giving more than one sentence, as this is implied in the formula used and should be understood. scoring. the test is passed if _two of the three_ sentences are satisfactory. in order to be satisfactory a sentence must fulfill the following requirements: ( ) it must either be a simple sentence, or, if compound, must not contain more than two distinct ideas; and ( ) it must not express an absurdity. slight changes in one or more of the key words are disregarded, as _river_ for _rivers_, etc. the scoring is difficult enough to justify rather extensive illustration. (a) _boy, ball, river_ _satisfactory._ an analysis of satisfactory responses gave the following classification:-- ( ) simple sentence containing a simple subject and a simple predicate; as: "the boy threw his ball into the river." "the boy lost his ball in the river." "the boy's ball fell into the river." "the boy swam into the river after his ball," etc. this group contains  per cent of the correct responses. ( ) a sentence with a simple subject and a compound predicate; as: "a boy went to the river and took his ball with him." about  per cent of all were of this type. ( ) a complex sentence containing a relative clause (  per cent only); as: "the boy ran after his ball which was rolling toward the river." ( ) a compound sentence containing two independent clauses (about  per cent); as: "the boy had a ball and he lost it in the river." _unsatisfactory._ the failures fall into four chief groups:-- ( ) sentences with three clauses (or else three separate sentences). ( ) sentences containing an absurdity. ( ) sentences which omit one of the key words. ( ) silence, due ordinarily to inability to comprehend the task. group  includes  per cent of the failures; group  , about  per cent; and group and about  per cent each. samples of group  are: "there was a boy, and he bought a ball, and it fell into the river." "i saw a boy, and he had a ball, and he was playing by the river." illustration of an absurd sentence, "the boy was swimming in the river and he was playing ball." (b) _work, money, men_ _satisfactory_:-- ( ) sentence with a simple subject and simple predicate (including  per cent of satisfactory responses); as: "men work for their money." "men get money for their work," etc. ( ) a complex sentence with a relative clause (  per cent of correct answers); as: "men who work earn much money." "it is easy for men to earn money if they are willing to work," etc. ( ) a compound sentence with two independent, coördinate clauses (  per cent); as: "men work and they earn money." "some men have money and they do not work." _unsatisfactory_:-- ( ) three clauses; as: "i know a man and he has money, and he works at the store." ( ) sentences which are absurd or meaningless; as: "men work with their money." ( ) omission of one of the words. ( ) inability to respond. (c) _desert, rivers, lakes_ _satisfactory_:-- ( ) sentences with a simple subject and a simple predicate (including  per cent of correct answers); as: "there are no rivers or lakes in the desert." "the desert has one river and one lake," etc. ( ) a complex sentence with a relative clause (only  per cent); as: "in the desert there was a river which flowed into a lake." ( ) a compound sentence with two independent, coördinate clauses (  per cent); as: "we went to the desert, and it had no rivers or lakes." ( ) a compound, complex sentence (  per cent of all); as: "there was a desert, and near by there was a river that emptied into a lake." _unsatisfactory_:-- ( ) sentences with three clauses (  per cent of all failures); as: "a desert is dry, rivers are long, lakes are rough." ( ) sentences containing an absurdity (  per cent of the failures): as: "a desert is dry, rivers are long, lakes are filled with swimming boys." "the lake went through the desert and the river." "there was a desert and rivers and lakes in the forest." "the desert is full of rivers and lakes." ( ) omission of one of the words (  per cent of the failures). ( ) inability to respond (  per cent). remarks. the test of constructing a sentence containing given words was first used by masselon and is known as "the masselon experiment." meumann, who used it in a rather extended experiment,[ ] finds it a good test of intelligence and a reliable index as to the richness, definiteness, and maturity of the associative processes. as meumann shows, it is instructive to study the qualitative differences between the responses of bright and dull children, apart from questions of sentence structure. these differences are especially discernible in (a) the logical qualities of the associations, and (b) the definiteness of statement. as regards (a), bright children are much more likely to use the given words as keystones in the construction of a sentence which would be logically suggested by them. for example, _donkey_, _blows_, suggest some such sentence as, "the donkey receives blows because he is lazy." in like manner we have found that the words _work_, _money_, _men_ usually suggest to the more intelligent children a sentence like "men work for their money" (or "because they need money," etc.), while the dull child is more likely to give some such sentence as "the men have work and they don't have much money." that is, the sentence of the dull child, even though correct in structure and free enough from outright absurdity to satisfy the standard of scoring which we have set forth, is likely to express ideas which are more or less nondescript, ideas not logically suggested by the set of words given. [ ] "ueber eine neue methode der intelligenzprüfung und über den wert der kombinationsmethoden," in _zeitschrift für pädagogische psychologie und experimentelle pädagogik_ ( ), pp.  - . the experiment is one of the many forms of the "completion test," or "the combination method." as we have already noted, the power to combine more or less separate and isolated elements into a logical whole is one of the most essential features of intelligence. the ability to do so in a given case depends, in the first place, upon the number and logical quality of the associations which have previously been made with each of the given elements separately, and in the second place, upon the readiness with which these ideational stores yield up the particular associations necessary for weaving the given words into some kind of unity. the child must pass from what is given to what is not given but merely suggested. this requires a certain amount of invention. scattered fragments must be conceived as the skeleton of a thought, and this skeleton, or partial skeleton, must be assembled and made whole. the task is analogous to that which confronts the palæontologist, who is able to reconstruct, with a high degree of certainty, the entire skeleton of an extinct animal from the evidence furnished by three or four fragments of bones. it is no wonder, therefore, that subjects whose ideational stores are scanty, and whose associations are based upon accidental rather than logical connections, find the test one of peculiar difficulty. invention thrives in a different soil. binet located this test in year x. goddard and kuhlmann assign it the same location, though their actual statistics agree closely with our own. our procedure makes the test somewhat easier than that of binet, who gave only one trial and used the somewhat more difficult words _paris_, _river_, _fortune_. others have generally followed the binet procedure, merely substituting for paris the name of a city better known to the subject. binet's requirement of a written response also makes the test harder. perhaps the greatest obstacle to uniformity in the use of the test comes from the difficulty of scoring, particularly in deciding whether the sentence contains enough absurdity to disqualify it, and whether it expresses three separate ideas or only two. it is hoped that the rather large variety of sample responses which we have given will reduce these difficulties to a minimum. an additional word is necessary in regard to what constitutes an absurdity in (b). a sentence like "there are some rivers and lakes in the desert" is not an absurdity in certain parts of western united states. in professor ordahl's tests at reno, nevada, many children whose intelligence was altogether above suspicion gave this reply. the statement is, indeed, perfectly true for the semi-arid region in the vicinity of reno known as "the desert." on the other hand, such sentences as "the desert is full of rivers and lakes," or "there are forty rivers and lakes in the desert," can hardly be considered satisfactory. similar difficulties are presented by (c), though not so frequently. "men who work do not have money" expresses, unfortunately, more truth than nonsense. ix,  . finding rhymes procedure. say to the child: "_you know what a rhyme is, of course. a rhyme is a word that sounds like another word. two words rhyme if they end in the same sound. understand?_" whether the child says he understands or not, we proceed to illustrate what a rhyme is, as follows: "_take the two words 'hat' and 'cat.' they sound alike and so they make a rhyme. 'hat,' 'rat,' 'cat,' 'bat' all rhyme with one another._" that is, we first explain what a rhyme is and then we give an illustration. a large majority of american children who have reached the age of  years understand perfectly what a rhyme is, without any illustration. a few, however, think they understand, but do not; and in order to insure that all are given equal advantage it is necessary never to omit the illustration. after the illustration say: "_now, i am going to give you a word and you will have one minute to find as many words as you can that rhyme with it. the word is 'day.' name all the words you can think of that rhyme with 'day.'_" if the child fails with the first word, before giving the second we repeat the explanation and give sample rhymes for _day_; otherwise we proceed without further explanation to _mill_ and _spring_, saying, "_now, you have another minute to name all the words you can think of that rhyme with 'mill,'_" etc. apart from the mention of "one minute" say nothing to suggest hurrying, as this tends to throw some children into mental confusion. scoring. passed if in _two out of the three_ parts of the experiment the child finds _three words_ which rhyme with the word given, the time limit for each series being _one minute_. note that in each case there must be three words in addition to the word given. these must be real words, not meaningless syllables or made-up words. however, we should be liberal enough to accept such words as _ding_ (from "ding-dong ") for _spring_, _jill_ (see "jack and jill") for _mill_, _fay_ (girl's name) for _day_, etc. remarks. at first thought it would seem that the demands made by this test upon intelligence could not be very great. sound associations between words may be contrasted unfavorably with associations like those of cause and effect, part to whole, whole to part, opposites, etc. but when we pass from _a-priori_ considerations to an examination of the actual data, we find that the giving of rhymes is closely correlated with general intelligence. the -year-olds who test at or above  years nearly always do well in finding rhymes, while -year-olds who test as low as  years seldom pass. when a test thus shows high correlation with the scale as a whole, we must either accept the test as valid or reject the scale altogether. while the feeble-minded do not do as well in this test as normal children of corresponding mental age, the percentage successes for them rises rapidly between mental age  and mental age   or  . closer psychological analysis of the processes involved will show why this is true. to find rhymes for a given word means that one must hunt out verbal associations under the direction of a guiding idea. every word has innumerable associations and many of these tend, in greater or less degree, to be aroused when the stimulus word is given. in order to succeed with the test, however, it is necessary to inhibit all associations which are not relevant to the desired end. the directing idea must be held so firmly in mind that it will really direct the thought associations. besides acting to inhibit the irrelevant, it must create a sort of magnetic stress (to borrow a figure from physics) which will give dominance to those associative tendencies pointing in the right direction. even the feeble-minded child of imbecile grade has in his vocabulary a great many words which rhyme with _day_, _mill_, and _spring_. he fails on the test because his verbal associations cannot be subjugated to the influence of a directing idea. the end to be attained does not dominate consciousness sufficiently to create more than a faint stress. instead of a single magnetic pole there is a conflict of forces. the result is either chaos or partial success. _mill_ may suggest _hill_, and then perhaps the directing idea becomes suddenly inoperative and the child gives _mountain_, _valley_, or some other irrelevant association. the lack of associations, however, is a more frequent cause of failure than inability to inhibit the irrelevant. if any one supposes that finding rhymes does not draw upon the higher mental powers, let him try the experiment upon himself in various stages of mental efficiency, say at  a.m., when mentally refreshed by a good night of sleep and again when fatigued and sleepy. poets questioned by galton on this point all testified to the greater difficulty of finding rhymes when mentally fatigued. in this and in many other respects the mental activities of the fatigued or sleepy individual approach the type of mentation which is normal to the feeble-minded. it is important to note that adults make a less favorable showing in this test than normal children of corresponding mental age, mr. knollin's "hoboes" of -year intelligence doing hardly as well as school children of -year intelligence. those who are habitually employed in school exercises probably acquire an adeptness in verbal associations which is later gradually lost in the preoccupations of real life. there has been more disagreement as to the proper location of this test than of any other test of the binet scale. binet placed it in year xii of the scale, but shifted it to year xv in . kuhlmann retains it in year xii, while goddard drops it down to year xi. however, when we examine the actual statistics for normal children we do not find very marked disagreement, and such disagreement as is present can be largely accounted for by variations in procedure and by differing conclusions drawn from identical data. in the first place, binet gave but one trial. this, of course, makes the test much harder than when three trials are given and only two successes are required. to make one trial equal in difficulty to three trials we should perhaps need to demand only two rhymes, instead of three, in the one trial. in the second place, the word used by binet (_obeissance_) is much harder than one-syllable words like _day_, _mill_, and _spring_. finally, the wide shift of the test from year xii to year xv was not justified by the statistics of binet himself, and the figures of kuhlmann and goddard are really in exceptionally close agreement with our own, notwithstanding the fact that goddard required three successes instead of two. in four series of tests, considered together, we have found  per cent passing at year ix,  per cent at year x,  per cent at year xi, and  per cent at year xii. ix, alternative test  : naming the months procedure. simply ask the subject to "_name all the months of the year_." do not start him off by naming one month; give no look of approval or disapproval as the months are being named, and make no suggestions or comments of any kind. when the months have been named, we "check up" the performance by asking: "_what month comes before april?_" "_what month comes before july?_" "_what month comes before november?_" scoring. passed if the months are named in about _fifteen or twenty seconds with no more than one error_ of omission, repetition, or displacement, and if _two out of the three check questions_ are answered correctly. disregard place of beginning. remarks. some are inclined to consider this test of little value, because of its supposed dependence on accidental training. with this opinion we cannot fully agree. the arguments already given in favor of the retention of naming the days of the week (year vii), apply equally well in the present case. it has been shown, however, that age, apart from intelligence, does have some effect on the ability to name the months. defective adults of -year intelligence do about as well with it as normal children of -year intelligence. the test appears in year x of binet's scale and in year ix of the revision. goddard places it correctly in year ix, while kuhlmann and bobertag have omitted it. ix, alternative test  : counting the value of stamps procedure. place before the subject a cardboard on which are pasted three -cent and three -cent stamps arranged as follows: . be sure to lay the card so that the stamps will be right side up for the child. say: "_you know, of course, how much a stamp like this costs_ (pointing to a -cent stamp). _and you know how much one like this costs_ (pointing to a -cent stamp). _now, how much money would it take to buy all these stamps?_" do not tell the individual values of the stamps if these are not known, for it is a part of the test to ascertain whether the child's spontaneous curiosity has led him to find out and remember their values. if the individual values are known, but the first answer is wrong, a second trial may be given. in such cases, however, it is necessary to be on guard against guessing. if the child merely names an incorrect sum without saying anything to indicate how he arrived at his answer, it is well to tell him to figure it up aloud. "_tell me how you got it._" scoring. passed if the correct value is given in not over fifteen seconds. remarks. the value of this test may be questioned on two grounds: ( ) that it has an ambiguous significance, since failure to pass it may result either from incorrect addition or from lack of knowledge of the individual values of the stamps; ( ) that familiarity with stamps and their values is so much a matter of accident and special instruction that the test is not fair. both criticisms are in a measure valid. the first, however, applies equally well to a great many useful intelligence tests. in fact, it is only a minority in which success depends on but one factor. the other criticism has less weight than would at first appear. while it is, of course, not impossible for an intelligent child to arrive at the age of  years without having had reasonable opportunity to learn the cost of the common postage stamps, the fact is that a large majority have had the opportunity and that most of those of normal intelligence have taken advantage of it. it is necessary once more to emphasize the fact that in its method of locating a test the binet system makes ample allowance for "accidental" failures. like the tests of naming coins, repeating the names of the days of the week or the months of the year, giving the date, tying a bow-knot, distinguishing right and left, naming the colors, etc., this one also throws light on the child's spontaneous interest in common objects. it is mainly the children of deficient intellectual curiosity who do not take the trouble to learn these things at somewhere near the expected age. the test was located in year viii of the binet scale. however, binet used coins, three single and three double sous. since we do not have either a half-cent or a -cent coin, it has been necessary to substitute postage stamps. this changes the nature of the test and makes it much harder. it becomes less a test of ability to do a simple sum, and more a test of knowledge as to the value of the stamps used. that the test is easy enough for year viii when it can be given in the original form is indicated by all the french, german, and english statistics available, but four separate series of stanford tests agree in finding it too hard for year viii when stamps are substituted and the test is carried out according to the procedure described above. chapter xvi instructions for year x x,  . vocabulary (thirty definitions,  words) procedure and scoring as in viii,  . at year x, thirty words should be correctly defined. x,  . detecting absurdities procedure. say to the child: "_i am going to read a sentence which has something foolish in it, some nonsense. i want you to listen carefully and tell me what is foolish about it._" then read the sentences, rather slowly and in a matter-of-fact voice, saying after each: "_what is foolish about that?_" the sentences used are the following:-- (a) "_a man said: 'i know a road from my house to the city which is downhill all the way to the city and downhill all the way back home.'_" (b) "_an engineer said that the more cars he had on his train the faster he could go._" (c) "_yesterday the police found the body of a girl cut into eighteen pieces. they believe that she killed herself._" (d) "_there was a railroad accident yesterday, but it was not very serious. only forty-eight people were killed._" (e) "_a bicycle rider, being thrown from his bicycle in an accident, struck his head against a stone and was instantly killed. they picked him up and carried him to the hospital, and they do not think he will get well again._" each should ordinarily be answered within thirty seconds. if the child is silent, the sentence should be repeated; but no other questions or suggestions of any kind are permissible. such questions as "_could the road be downhill both ways?_" or, "_do you think the girl could have killed herself?_" would, of course, put the answer in the child's mouth. it is even best to avoid laughing as the sentence is read. owing to the child's limited power of expression it is not always easy to judge from the answer given whether the absurdity has really been detected or not. in such cases ask him to explain himself, using some such formula as: "_i am not sure i know what you mean. explain what you mean. tell me what is foolish in the sentence i read._" this usually brings a reply the correctness or incorrectness of which is more apparent, while at the same time the formula is so general that it affords no hint as to the correct answer. additional questions must be used with extreme caution. scoring. passed if the absurdity is detected in _four out of the five_ statements. the following are samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory answers:-- (a) _the road downhill_ _satisfactory._ "if it was downhill to the city it would be uphill coming back." "it can't be downhill both directions." "that could not be." "that is foolish. (explain.) because it must be uphill one way or the other." "that would be a funny road. (explain.) no road can be like that. it can't be downhill both ways." _unsatisfactory._ "perhaps he took a little different road coming back." "i guess it is a very crooked road." "coming back he goes around the hill." "the man lives down in a valley." "the road was made that way so it would be easy." "just a road. i don't see anything foolish." "he should say, 'a road which goes.'" (b) _what the engineer said_ _satisfactory._ "if he has more cars he will go slower." "it is the other way. if he wants to go faster he mustn't have so many cars." "the man didn't mean what he said, or else it was a slip of the tongue." "that's the way it would be if he was going downhill." "foolish, because the cars don't help pull the train." "he ought to say _slower_, not _faster_." _unsatisfactory._ "a long train is nicer." "the engine pulls harder if the train has lots of cars." "that's all right. i suppose he likes a big train." "nothing foolish; when i went to the city i saw a train that had lots of cars and it was going awfully fast." "he should have said, 'the faster i can _run_.'" (c) _the girl who was thought to have killed herself_ _satisfactory._ "she could not have cut herself into eighteen pieces." "she would have been dead before that." "she might have cut two or three pieces off, but she couldn't do the rest." (laughing) "well, she may have killed herself; but if she did it's a sure thing that some one else came along after and chopped her up." "that policeman must have been a fool. (explain.) to think that she could chop herself into eighteen pieces." _unsatisfactory._ "_think_ that she killed herself; they _know_ she did." "they can't be sure. some one may have killed her." "it was a foolish girl to kill herself." "how can they tell who killed her?" "no girl would kill herself unless she was crazy." "it ought to read: 'they think that she committed suicide.'" (d) _the railroad accident_ _satisfactory._ "that was very serious." "i should like to know what you would call a serious accident!" "you could say it was not serious if two or three people were killed, but forty-eight,--that is serious." _unsatisfactory._ "it was a foolish mistake that made the accident." "they couldn't help it. it was an accident." "it might have been worse." "nothing foolish; it's just sad." (e) _the bicycle rider_ _satisfactory._ "how could he get well after he was already killed?" "why, he's already dead." "no use to take a dead man to the hospital." "they ought to have taken him to a grave-yard!" _unsatisfactory._ "foolish to fall off of a bicycle. he should have known how to ride." "they ought to have carried him home. (why?) so his folks could get a doctor." "he should have been more careful." "maybe they can cure him if he isn't hurt very bad." "there's nothing foolish in that." remarks. the detection of absurdities is one of the most ingenious and serviceable tests of the entire scale. it is little influenced by schooling, and it comes nearer than any other to being a test of that species of mother-wit which we call common sense. like the "comprehension questions," it may be called a test of judgment, using this term in the colloquial and not in the logical sense. the stupid person, whether depicted in literature, proverb, or the ephemeral joke column, is always (and justly, it would seem) characterized by a huge tolerance for absurd contradictions and by a blunt sensitivity for the fine points of a joke. intellectual discrimination and judgment are inferior. the ideas do not cross-light each other, but remain relatively isolated. hence, the most absurd contradictions are swallowed, so to speak, without arousing the protest of the critical faculty. the latter, indeed, is only a name for the tendency of intellectually irreconcilable elements to clash. if there is no clash, if the elements remain apart, it goes without saying that there will be no power of criticism. the critical faculty begins its development in the early years and strengthens _pari passu_ with the growing wealth of inter-associations among ideas; but in the average child it is not until the age of about  years that it becomes equal to tasks like those presented in this test. eight-year intelligence hardly ever scores more than two or three correct answers out of five. by , the critical ability has so far developed that the test is nearly always passed. it is an invaluable test for the higher grades of mental deficiency. as a test of the critical powers binet first used "trap questions"; as, for example, "is snow red or black?" the results were disappointing, for it was found that owing to timidity, deference, and suggestibility normal children often failed on such questions. deference is more marked in normal than in feeble-minded children, and it is because of the influence of this trait that it is necessary always to forewarn the subject that the sentence to be given contains nonsense. binet located the test in year xi of the scale, but changed it to year x in . goddard and kuhlmann retain it in year xi. the large majority of the statistics, including those of goddard and kuhlmann, warrant the location of the test in year x. not all have used the same absurdities, and these have not been worded uniformly. most have required three successes out of five, but bobertag and kuhlmann require three out of four; bobertag's procedure is also different in that he does not forewarn the child that an absurdity is to follow. the present form of the test is the result of three successive refinements. it will be noted that we have made two substitutions in binet's list of absurdities. those omitted from the original scale are: "_i have three brothers--paul, ernest, and myself_," and, "_if i were going to commit suicide i would not choose friday, because friday is an unlucky day and would bring me misfortune._" the last has a puzzling feature which makes it much too hard for year x, and the other is objectionable with children who are accustomed to hear a foreign language in which the form of expression used in the absurdity is idiomatically correct. the two we have substituted for these objectionable absurdities are, "the road downhill" and "what the engineer said." the five we have used, though of nearly equal difficulty, are here listed in the order from easiest to hardest. our series as a whole is slightly easier than binet's. x,  . drawing designs from memory procedure. use the designs shown on the accompanying printed form. if copies are used they must be exact in size and shape. before showing the card say: "_this card has two drawings on it. i am going to show them to you for ten seconds, then i will take the card away and let you draw from memory what you have seen. examine both drawings carefully and remember that you have only ten seconds._" provide pencil and paper and then show the card for ten seconds, holding it at right angles to the child's line of vision and with the designs in the position given in the plate. have the child draw the designs immediately after they are removed from sight. scoring. the test is passed if _one of the designs is reproduced correctly and the other about half correctly_. "correctly" means that the _essential plan_ of the design has been grasped and reproduced. ordinary irregularities due to lack of motor skill or to hasty execution are disregarded. "half correctly" means that some essential part of the design has been omitted or misplaced, or that parts have been added. the sample reproductions shown on the scoring card will serve as a guide. it will be noted that an inverted design, or one whose right and left sides have been transposed, is counted only half correct, however perfect it many be in other respects; also that design _b_ is counted only half correct if the inner rectangle is not located off center. remarks. binet states that the main factors involved in success are "attention, visual memory, and a little analysis." the power of rapid analysis would seem to be the most important, for if the designs are analyzed they may be reproduced from a verbal memory of the analysis. without some analysis it would hardly be possible to remember the designs at all, as one of them contains thirteen lines and the other twelve. the memory span for unrelated objects is far too limited to permit us to grasp and retain that number of unrelated impressions. success is possible only by grouping the lines according to their relationships, so that several of them are given a unitary value and remembered as one. in this manner, the design to the right, which is composed of twelve lines, may be reduced to four elements: ( ) the outer rectangle; ( ) the inner rectangle; ( ) the off-center position of the inner rectangle; and ( ) the joining of the angles. of course the child does not ordinarily make an analysis as explicit as this; but analysis of some kind, even though it be unconscious, is necessary to success. ability to pass the test indicates the presence, in a certain definite amount, of the tendency for the contents of consciousness to fuse into a meaningful whole. failure indicates that the elements have maintained their unitary character or have fused inadequately. it is seen, therefore, that the test has a close kinship with the test of memory for sentences. the latter, also, permits the fusion or grouping of impressions according to meaning, with the result that five or six times as many meaningful syllables as nonsense syllables or digits can be retained. binet had many more failures on design _a_ than on design _b_. this was probably due to the fact that he showed the designs with our _b_ to the left. a majority of subjects, probably because of the influence of reading habits, examine first the figure to the left, and because of the short time allowed for the inspection are unable to devote much time to the design at the right. we have placed the design of greater intrinsic difficulty at the left, with the result that the failures are almost equally divided between the two. binet used this test in his unstandardized series of , omitted it in , but included it in the revision, locating it in year x. except for goddard, who recommends year xi, there is rather general agreement that the test belongs at year x. our own data show that it may be placed either at year x or year xi, according as the grading is rigid or lenient. x,  . reading for eight memories material. we use binet's selection, slightly adapted, as follows:-- _new york, september th. a fire last night burned three houses near the center of the city. it took some time to put it out. the loss was fifty thousand dollars, and seventeen families lost their homes. in saving a girl, who was asleep in a bed, a fireman was burned on the hands._ the copy of the selection used by the subject should be printed in heavy type and should not contain the bars dividing it into memories. the stanford record booklet contains the selection in two forms, one suitable for use in scoring, the other in heavy type to be read by the subject. procedure. hand the selection to the subject, who should be seated comfortably in a good light, and say: "_i want you to read this for me as nicely as you can._" the subject must read aloud. pronounce all the words which the subject is unable to make out, not allowing more than five seconds' hesitation in such a case. record all errors made in reading the selection, and the exact time. by "error" is meant the omission, substitution, transposition, or mispronunciation of one word. the subject is not warned in advance that he will be asked to report what he has read, but as soon as he has finished reading, put the selection out of sight and say: "_very well done. now, i want you to tell me what you read. begin at the first and tell everything you can remember._" after the subject has repeated everything he can recall and has stopped, say: "_and what else? can you remember any more of it?_" give no other aid of any kind. it is of course not permissible, when the child stops, to prompt him with such questions as, "_and what next? where were the houses burned? what happened to the fireman?_" etc. the report must be spontaneous. now and then, though not often, a subject hesitates or even refuses to try, saying he is unable to do it. perhaps he has misunderstood the request and thinks he is expected to repeat the selection word for word, as in the tests of memory for sentences. we urge a little and repeat: "_tell me in your own words all you can remember of it._" others misunderstand in a different way, and thinking they are expected to tell merely what the story is about, they say: "it was about some houses that burned." in such cases we repeat the instructions with special emphasis on the words _all you can remember_. scoring. the test is passed _if the selection is read in thirty-five seconds with not more than two errors, and if the report contains at least eight "memories."_ by underscoring the memories correctly reproduced, and by interlineations to show serious departures from the text, the record can be made complete with a minimum of trouble. the main difficulty in scoring is to decide whether a memory has been reproduced correctly enough to be counted. absolutely literal reproduction is not expected. the rule is to count all memories whose thought is reproduced with only minor changes in the wording. "it took quite a while" instead of "it took some time" is satisfactory; likewise, "got burnt" for "was burned"; "who was sleeping" for "who was asleep"; "are homeless" for "lost their homes"; "in the middle" for "near the center"; "a big fire" for "a fire," etc. memories as badly mutilated as the following, however, are not counted: "a lot of buildings" for "three houses;" "a man" for "a fireman"; "who was sick" for "who was asleep"; etc. occasionally we may give half credit, as in the case of "was seventeen thousand dollars" for "was fifty thousand dollars"; "and fifteen families" for "and seventeen families," etc. remarks. are we warranted in using at all as a measure of intelligence a test which depends as much on instruction as this one does? many are inclined to answer this question in the negative. the test has been omitted from the revisions of goddard, kuhlmann, and binet himself. as regards binet's earlier test of reading for two memories, in year viii, there could hardly be any difference of opinion. the ability to read at that age depends so much on the accident of environment that the test is meaningless unless we know all about the conditions which have surrounded the child. the use of the test in year x, however, is a very different matter. there are comparatively few children of that age who will fail to pass it for lack of the requisite school instruction. children of  years who have attended school with reasonable regularity for three years are practically always able to read the selection in thirty-five seconds and without over two mistakes unless they are retarded almost to the border-line of mental deficiency. of our -year-olds who failed to meet the test, only a fourth did so because of inability to meet the reading requirements as regards time or mistakes. the remaining failures were caused by inadequate report, and most of these subjects were of the distinctly retarded group. we may conclude, therefore, that given anything approaching normal educational advantages, the test is really a measure of intelligence. used with due caution, it is perhaps as valuable as any other test in the scale. it is only necessary, in case of failure, to ascertain the facts regarding the child's educational opportunities. even this precaution is superfluous in case the subject tests as low as  years by the remainder of the scale. a safe rule is to omit the test from the calculation of mental age if the subject has not attended school the equivalent of two or three years. it has been contended by some that tests in which success depends upon language mastery cannot be real tests of intelligence. by such critics language tests have been set over against intelligence tests as contrasting opposites. it is easy to show, however, that this view is superficial and psychologically unsound. every one who has an acquaintance with the facts of mental growth knows that language mastery of some degree is the _sine qua non_ of conceptual thinking. language growth, in fact, mirrors the entire mental development. there are few more reliable indications of a subject's stage of intellectual maturity than his mastery of language. the rate of reading, for example, is a measure of the rate of association. letters become associated together in certain combinations making words, words into word groups and sentences. recognition is for the most part an associative process. rapid and accurate association will mean ready recognition of the printed form. since language units (whether letters, words, or word groups) have more or less preferred associations according to their habitual arrangement into larger units, it comes about that in the normal mind under normal conditions these preferred sequences arouse the apperceptive complex necessary to make a running recognition rapid and easy. it is reasonable to suppose that in the subnormal mind the habitual common associations are less firmly fixed, thus diminishing the effectiveness of the ever-changing apperceptive expectancy. reading is, therefore, largely dependent on what james calls the "fringe of consciousness" and the "consciousness of meaning." in reading connected matter, every unit is big with a mass of tendencies. the smaller and more isolated the unit, the greater is the number of possibilities. every added unit acts as a modifier limiting the number of tendencies, until we have finally, in case of a large mental unit, a fairly manageable whole. when the most logical and suitable of these associations arise easily from subconsciousness to consciousness, recognition is made easy, and their doing so will depend on whether the habitual relations of the elements have left permanent traces in the mind. the reading of the subnormal subject bears a close analogy to the reading of nonsense matter by the normal person. it has been ascertained by experiment that such reading requires about twice as much time as the reading of connected matter. this is true for the reason that out of thousands of associations possible with each word, no particular association is favored. the apperceptive expectancy, practically _nil_ in the reading of nonsense material, must be decidedly deficient in all poor reading. furthermore, in the case of the ordinary reader there is a feeling of rightness or wrongness about the thought sequences. that less intelligent subjects have this sense of fitness to a much less degree is evidenced by their passing over words so mutilated in pronunciation as to deprive them of all meaning. the transposition of letters and words, and the failure to observe marks of punctuation, point to the same thing. in other words, all the reading of the stupid subject is with material which to him is more or less nonsensical.[ ] [ ] see "genius and stupidity," by lewis m. terman, in _pedagogical seminary_, september, , p.   _ff._ a little observation will convince one that mentally retarded subjects, even when they possess a reasonable degree of fluency in recognizing printed words, do not sense shades of meaning. their reading is by small units. words and phrases do not fuse into one mental content, but remain relatively unconnected. the expression is monotonous and the voice has more of the unnatural "schoolroom" pitch. they read more slowly, more often misplace the emphasis, and miscall more words. in short, one who has psychological insight and is acquainted with reading standards can easily detect the symptoms of intellectual inferiority by hearing a dull subject read a brief selection. the giving of memories is also significant. feeble-minded adults who have been well schooled are sometimes able to read the words of the text fairly fluently, but are usually unable to give more than a scanty report of what has been read. the scope of attention has been exhausted in the mere recognition and pronouncing of words. in general, the greater the mechanical difficulties which a subject encounters, the less adequate is his report of memories. the test has, however, one real fault. school children have a certain advantage in it over older persons _of the same mental age_ whose school experience is less recent. adult subjects tend to give their report in less literal form. it is necessary, therefore, to give credit for the reproduction of the ideas of the passage rather than for strictly literal "memories." the selection we have used is, with minor changes, the same as binet's. his selection was divided into nineteen memories. the one here given has twenty-one memories. binet used the test both in year viii and year ix, requiring two memories at year viii and six memories at year ix. when we require eight memories, as we have done, the test becomes difficult enough for non-selected school children of  years. location in year x seems preferable, because it insures that the child will almost certainly have had the schooling requisite for learning to read a selection of this difficulty, even if he has started to school at a later age than is customary. naturally, placing the test higher in the scale makes it more a test of report and less a test of ability to recognize and pronounce printed words. x,  . comprehension, fourth degree the questions for this year are:-- (a) "_what ought you to say when some one asks your opinion about a person you don't know very well?_" (b) "_what ought you to do before undertaking (beginning) something very important?_" (c) "_why should we judge a person more by his actions than by his words?_" the procedure is the same as for the previous comprehension tests. each question may be repeated, but its form must not be changed. it is not permissible to make any explanation whatever as to the meaning of the question, except to substitute _beginning_ for _undertaking_ when (b) seems not to be comprehended. scoring. _two out of the three_ questions must be answered satisfactorily. study of the following classified responses should make scoring fairly easy in most cases:-- (a) _when some one asks your opinion_ _satisfactory._ "i would say i don't know him very well" (  per cent of the correct answers). "tell him what i know and no more" (  per cent of correct answers). "i would say that i'd rather not express any opinion about him" (  per cent of the correct answers). "tell him to ask some one else." "i would not express any opinion." _unsatisfactory._ unsatisfactory responses are due either to failure to grasp the import of the question, or to inability to suggest the appropriate action demanded by the situation. the latter form of failure is the more common; e.g.: "i'd say they are nice." "say you like them." "say what i think." "say it's none of their business." "tell them i mind my own business." "say i would get acquainted with them." "say that i don't talk about people." "say i didn't know how he looked." "tell them you ought not to say such things; you might get into trouble." "i wouldn't say anything." "i would try to answer." "say i did not know his name," etc. the following are samples of failure due to mistaking the import of the question: "i'd say, 'how do you do?'" "say,'i'm glad to meet you.'" (b) _before undertaking something important_ _satisfactory responses_ fall into the following classes:-- ( ) brief statement of preliminary consideration; as: "think about it." "look it over." "plan it all out." "make your plans." "stop and think," etc. ( ) special emphasis on preliminary preparation and correct procedure; as: "find out the best way to do it." "find out what it is." "get everything ready." "do every little thing that would help you." "get all the details you can." "take your time and figure it out," etc. ( ) asking help; as: "ask some one to help you who knows all about it." "pray, if you are a christian." "ask advice," etc. ( ) preliminary testing of ability, self-analysis, etc.; as: "try something easier first." "practice and make sure i could do it." "learn how to do it," etc. ( ) consider the wisdom or propriety of doing it: "think whether it would be best to do it." "see whether it would be possible." about  per cent of the correct responses belong either to group ( ) or ( ), about  per cent to group ( ), and most of the remainder to group ( ). _unsatisfactory responses_ are of the following types:-- ( ) due to mistaking the import of the question; e.g.: "ask for it." "ought to say please." "ask whose it is." replies of this kind can be nearly all eliminated by repeating the question, using _beginning_ instead of _undertaking_. ( ) replies more or less absurd or irrelevant; as: "promise to do your best." "wash your face and hands." "get a lot of insurance." "dress up and take a walk." "tell your name." "know whether it's correct." "begin at the beginning." "say you will do it." "see if it's a fake." "go to school a long time." "pass an examination." "do what is right." "add up and see how much it will cost." "say i would do it." "just start doing it." "go away." "consult a doctor." "see if you have time," etc. (c) _why we should judge a person more by his actions than by his words_ _satisfactory responses_ fall into the following classes:-- ( ) words and deeds both mentioned and contrasted in reliability; as: "actions speak louder than words" (this in  per cent of successes). "you can tell more by his actions than by his words." "he might talk nice and do bad things." "sometimes people say things and don't do them." "it's not what you say but what you do that counts." "talk is cheap; when he does a thing you can believe it." "people don't do everything they say." "a man might steal but talk like a nice man." over  per cent of all correct responses belong to group ( ). ( ) acts stressed without mention of words; as: "you can tell by his actions whether he is good or not." "if he _acts_ nice he _is_ nice." "actions show for themselves." group ( ) contains about  per cent of the correct responses. ( ) emphasis on unreliability of words; as: "you can't tell by his words, he might lie or boast." "because you can't always believe what people say." (group ( ) contains  per cent of the correct responses.) ( ) responses which state that a man's deeds are sometimes better than his words; as: "he might talk ugly and still not do bad things." "some really kind-hearted people scold and swear." "a man's words may be worse than his deeds," etc. group ( ) contains over  per cent of the correct responses. _unsatisfactory responses_ are usually due to inability to comprehend the meaning of the question. if there is a complete lack of comprehension the result is either silence or a totally irrelevant response. if there is partial comprehension of the question the response may be partially relevant, but fail to make the expected distinction. the following are sample failures: "you could tell by his words that he was educated." "it shows he is polite if he acts nice." "sometimes people aren't polite." "actions show who he might be." "acts may be foolish." "words ain't right." "a man might be dumb." "a fellow don't know what he says." "some people can talk, but don't have control of themselves." "you can tell by his acts whether he goes with bad people." "if he doesn't act right you know he won't talk right." "actions show if he has manners." "might get embarrassed and not talk good." "he may not know how to express his thoughts." "he might be a rich man but a poor talker." "he might say the wrong thing and afterwards be sorry for it," etc. (the last four are nearer correct than the others, but they fall just short of expressing the essential contrast.) remarks. for discussion of the comprehension questions as a test of intelligence, see page  . binet used eight questions, three "easy" and five "difficult," and required that five out of eight be answered correctly in year x. the eight were as follows:-- ( ) what to do when you have missed your train. ( ) when you have been struck by a playmate, etc. ( ) when you have broken something, etc. ( ) when about to be late for school. ( ) when about to undertake something important. ( ) why excuse a bad act committed in anger more readily than a bad act committed without anger. ( ) what to do if some one asks your opinion, etc. ( ) why can you judge a person better by his actions, etc. as we have shown, questions , , , and are much too easy for year x. question  is hard enough for year xii. we have omitted it because it was not needed and is not entirely satisfactory. x,  . naming sixty words procedure. say: "_now, i want to see how many different words you can name in three minutes. when i say ready, you must begin and name the words as fast as you can, and i will count them. do you understand? be sure to do your very best, and remember that just any words will do, like 'clouds,' 'dog,' 'chair,' 'happy'--ready; go ahead!_" the instructions may be repeated if the subject does not understand what is wanted. as a rule the task is comprehended instantly and entered into with great zest. do not stare at the child, and do not say anything as the test proceeds unless there is a pause of fifteen seconds. in this event say: "_go ahead, as fast as you can. any words will do._" repeat this urging after every pause of fifteen seconds. some subjects, usually rather intelligent ones, hit upon the device of counting or putting words together in sentences. we then break in with: "_counting_ (or _sentences_, as the case may be) _not allowed. you must name separate words. go ahead._" record the individual words if possible, and mark the end of each half-minute. if the words are named so rapidly that they cannot be taken down, it is easy to keep the count by making a pencil stroke for each word. if the latter method is employed, repeated words may be indicated by making a cross instead of a single stroke. always make record of repetitions. scoring. the test is passed if _sixty_ words, exclusive of repetitions, are named in three minutes. it is not allowable to accept twenty words in one minute or forty words in two minutes as an equivalent of the expected score. only real words are counted. remarks. scoring, as we have seen, takes account only of the number of words. it is instructive, however, to note the kind of words given. some subjects, more often those of the - or -year intelligence level, give mainly isolated, detached words. as well stated by binet, "little children exhaust an idea in naming it. they say, for example, _hat_, and then pass on to another word without noticing that hats differ in color, in form, have various parts, different uses and accessories, and that in enumerating all these they could find a large number of words." others quickly take advantage of such relationships and name many parts of an object before leaving it, or name a number of other objects belonging to the same class. _hat_, for example, suggests _cap_, _hood_, _coat_, _shirt_, _shoes_, _stockings_, etc. _pencil_ suggests _book_, _slate_, _paper_, _desk_, _ink_, _map_, _school-yard_, _teacher_, etc. responses of this type may be made up of ten or a dozen plainly distinct word groups. another type of response consists in naming only objects present, or words which present objects immediately suggest. it is unfortunate that this occurs, since rooms in which testing is done vary so much with respect to furnishings. the subject who chooses this method is obviously handicapped if the room is relatively bare. one way to avoid this influence is to have all subjects name the words with eyes closed, but the distraction thus caused is sometimes rather disturbing. it is perhaps best for the present to adhere to the original procedure, and to follow the rule of making tests in a room containing few furnishings in addition to the necessary table and chairs. a fourth type of response is that including a large proportion of unusual or abstract words. this is the best of all, and is hardly ever found except with subjects who are above the -year intelligence level. it goes without saying that a response need not belong entirely to any one of the above types. most responses, in fact, are characterized by a mixture of two or three of the types, one of them perhaps being dominant. though not without its shortcomings, the test is interesting and valuable. success in it does not, as one might suppose, depend solely upon the size of the vocabulary. even -year-olds ordinarily know the meaning of more than  words, and by  years the vocabulary usually exceeds words, or eighty times as many as the child is expected to name in three minutes. the main factors in success are two, ( ) richness and variety of previously made associations with common words; and ( ) the readiness of these associations to reinstate themselves. the young or the retarded subject fishes in the ocean of his vocabulary with a single hook, so to speak. he brings up each time only one word. the subject endowed with superior intelligence employs a net (the idea of a class, for example) and brings up a half-dozen words or more. the latter accomplishes a greater amount and with less effort; but it requires intelligence and will power to avoid wasting time with detached words. one is again and again astonished at the poverty of associations which this test discloses with retarded subjects. for twenty or thirty seconds such children may be unable to think of a single word. it would be interesting if at such periods we could get a glimpse into the subject's consciousness. there must be some kind of mental content, but it seems too vague to be crystallized in words. the ready association of thoughts with definite words connotes a relatively high degree of intellectual advancement. language forms are the short-hand of thought; without facile command of language, thinking is vague, clumsy, and ineffective. conversely, vague mental content entails language shortage. occasionally a child of - or -year intelligence will make a poor showing in this test. when this happens it is usually due either to excessive embarrassment or to a strange persistence in running down all the words of a given class before launching out upon a new series. occasionally, too, an intelligent subject wastes time in thinking up a beautiful list of big or unusual words. as stated by bobertag, success is favored by a certain amount of "intellectual nonchalance," a willingness to ignore sense and a readiness to break away from a train of associations as soon as the "point of diminishing returns" has been reached. this doubtless explains why adults sometimes make such a surprisingly poor showing in the test. they have less "intellectual nonchalance" than children, are less willing to subordinate such considerations as completeness and logical connection to the demands of speed. knollin's unemployed men of - to -year intelligence succeeded no better than school children of the -year level. we do not believe, however, that this fault is serious enough to warrant the elimination of the test. the fact is that in a large majority of cases the score which it yields agrees fairly closely with the result of the scale as a whole. subjects more than a year or two below the mental age of  years seldom succeed. those more than a year or two above the -year level seldom fail. there is another reason why the test should be retained, it often has significance beyond that which appears in the mere number of words given. the naming of unusual and abstract words is an instance of this. an unusually large number of repetitions has symptomatic significance in the other direction. it indicates a tendency to mental stereotypy, so frequently encountered in testing the feeble-minded. the proportion of repetitions made by normal children of the - or -year intelligence level rarely exceeds  or   per cent of the total number of words named; those of older retarded children of the same level occasionally reach  or   per cent. it is conceivable, of course, that a more satisfactory test of this general nature could be devised; such, for example, as having the subject name all the words he can of a given class (four-footed animals, things to eat, articles of household furniture, trees, birds, etc.). the main objection to this form of the test is that the performance would in all probability be more influenced by environment and formal instruction than is the case with the test of naming sixty words. one other matter remains to be mentioned; namely, the relative number of words named in the half-minute periods. as would be expected, the rate of naming words decreases as the test proceeds. in the case of the -year-olds, we find the average number of words for the six successive half-minutes to be as follows:-- , ½, ½, , ½, . some subjects maintain an almost constant rate throughout the test, others rapidly exhaust themselves, while a very few make a bad beginning and improve as they go. as a rule it is only the very intelligent who improve after the first half-minute. on the other hand, mentally retarded subjects and very young normals exhaust themselves so quickly that only a few words are named in the last minute. binet first located this test in year xi, but shifted it to year xii in . goddard and kuhlmann retain it in year xi, though goddard's statistics suggest year x as the proper location, and kuhlmann's even suggest year ix. kuhlmann, however, accepts fifty words as satisfactory in case the response contains a considerable proportion of abstract or unusual words. all the american statistics except rowe's agree in showing that the test is easy enough for year x. x, alternative test  : repeating six digits the digit series used are - - - - - ; and - - - - - . the procedure and scoring are the same as in vii,  , except that only two trials are given, one of which must be correct. the test is somewhat too easy for year  when three trials are given. the test of repeating six digits did not appear in the binet scale and seems not to have been standardized until inserted in the stanford series. x, alternative test  : repeating twenty to twenty-two syllables the sentences for this year are:-- (a) "_the apple tree makes a cool, pleasant shade on the ground where the children are playing._" (b) "_it is nearly half-past one o'clock; the house is very quiet and the cat has gone to sleep._" (c) "_in summer the days are very warm and fine; in winter it snows and i am cold._" procedure and scoring exactly as in vi,  . remarks. it is interesting to note that five years of mental growth are required to pass from the ability to repeat sixteen or eighteen syllables (year vi) to the ability to repeat twenty or twenty-two syllables. similarly in memory for digits. five digits are almost as easy at year vii as six at year x. two explanations are available: ( ) the increased difficulty may be accounted for by a relatively slow growth of memory power after the age of  or   years; or ( ) the increase in difficulty may be real, expressing an inner law as to the behavior of the memory span in dealing with material of increasing length. both factors are probably involved. this is another of the stanford additions to the scale. average children of  years ordinarily pass it, but older, retarded children of -year mental age make a poorer showing. in the case of mentally retarded adults, especially, the verbal memory is less exact than that of school children of the same mental age. x, alternative test  : construction puzzle a (healy and fernald) material. use the form-board pictured on page  . this may be purchased of c. h. stoelting & co., chicago, illinois. a home-made one will do as well if care is taken to get the dimensions exact. quarter-inch wood should be used. the inside of the frame should be  ×   inches, and the dimensions of the blocks should be as follows: + /  ×  ;  ×  ½;  ×  ¾;  ×  ½; ¼ ×  . procedure. place the frame on the table before the subject, the short side nearest him. the blocks are placed in an irregular position on the side of the frame away from the subject. take care that the board with the blocks in place is not exposed to view in advance of the experiment. say: "_i want you to put these blocks in this frame so that all the space will be filled up. if you do it rightly they will all fit in and there will be no space left over. go ahead._" do not tell the subject to see how quickly he can do it. say nothing that would even suggest hurrying, for this tends to call forth the trial-and-error procedure even with intelligent subjects. [illustration] scoring. the test is passed if the child succeeds in fitting the blocks into place _three times in a total time of five minutes for the three trials_. the method of procedure is fully as important as the time, but is not so easily scored in quantitative terms. nevertheless, the examiner should always take observations on the method employed, noting especially any tendency to make and to repeat moves which lead to obvious impossibilities; i.e., moves which leave a space obviously unfitted to any of the remaining pieces. some subjects repeat an absurd move many times over; others make an absurd move, but promptly correct it; others, and these are usually the bright ones, look far enough ahead to avoid error altogether. remarks. this test was devised by professor freeman, was adapted slightly by healy and fernald, and was first standardized by dr. kuhlmann. miss gertrude hall has also standardized it, but on a different procedure from that described above.[ ] [ ] _eugenics and social welfare bulletin_, no.  , the state board of charities, albany, new york. the test has a lower correlation with intelligence than most of the other tests of the scale. many bright children of -year intelligence adopt the trial-and-error method and have little success, while retarded older children of only -year intelligence sometimes succeed. age, apart from intelligence, seems to play an important part in determining the nature of the performance. a favorable feature of the test, however, is the fact that it makes no demand on language ability and that it brings into play an aspect of intelligence which is relatively neglected by the remainder of the scale. for this reason it is at least worth keeping as an alternative test. chapter xvii instructions for year xii xii,  . vocabulary (forty definitions,  words) procedure and scoring as in previous vocabulary tests.[ ] in this case forty words must be defined. [ ] see viii,  . xii,  . defining abstract words procedure. the words to be defined are _pity_, _revenge_, _charity_, _envy_, and _justice_. the formula is, "_what is pity? what do we mean by pity?_" and so on with the other words. if the meaning of the response is not clear, ask the subject to explain what he means. if the definition is in terms of the word itself, as "pity means to pity someone," "revenge is to take revenge," etc., it is then necessary to say: "_yes, but what does it mean to pity some one?_" or, "_what does it mean to take revenge?_" etc. only supplementary questions of this kind are permissible. scoring. the test is passed if _three of the five_ words are satisfactorily defined. the definition need not be strictly logical nor the language elegant. it is sufficient if the definition shows that the meaning of the word is known. definitions which define by means of an illustration are acceptable. the following are samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses:-- (a) _pity_ _satisfactory._ "to be sorry for some one." "to feel compassion." "to have sympathy for a person." "to feel bad for some one." "it means you help a person out and don't like to have him suffer." "to have a feeling for people when they are treated wrong." "if anybody gets hurt real bad you pity them." "it's when you feel sorry for a tramp and give him something to eat." "if some one is in trouble and you know how it feels to be in that condition, you pity him." "you see something that's wrong and have your feeling aroused." of correct responses, , or  per cent, defined _pity_ as "to feel sorry for some one," or words to that effect. less than  per cent defined by means of illustration. _unsatisfactory._ "to think of the poor." "to be good to others." "to help." "it means sorrow." "mercy." "to cheer people up." "it means 'what a pity!'" "to be ashamed." "to be sick or poor." "it's when you break something." apart from inability to reply, which accounts for nearly one fourth of the failures, there is no predominant type of unsatisfactory response. (b) _revenge_ _satisfactory._ "to get even with some one." "to get back on him." "to do something to the one who has done something to you." "to hurt them back." "to pay it back," or "do something back." "to do something mean in return." "to square up with a person." "when somebody slaps you, you slap back." "you kill a person if he does something to you." the expression "to get even" was found in  per cent of correct answers; "to pay it back," or "to do something back," in  per cent; "to get back on him," in  per cent. about  per cent were illustrations. _unsatisfactory._ "to be mad." "you try to hurt them." "to fight." "you hate a person." "to kill them." "it means hateful." "to try again." "to think evil of some one." "to hate some one who has done you wrong." "to let a person off." "to go away from something." inability to reply accounts for a little over  per cent of the failures. (c) _charity_ _satisfactory._ "to give to the poor." "to help those who are needy." "it is charity if you are poor and somebody helps you." "to give to somebody without pay." of correct replies,  per cent were worded substantially like the first or second given above. _unsatisfactory._ "a person who helps the poor." "a place where poor people get food and things." "it is a good life." "to be happy." "to be poor." "charity is being treated good." "it is to be charitable." "charity is selling something that is not worth much." "it means to be good" or "to be kind." when the last named response is given, we should say: "_explain what you mean._" if this brings an amplification of the response to "it means to do things for the poor," or the equivalent, the score is _plus_. "charity means love" is also _minus_ if the statement cannot be further explained and is merely rote memory of the passage in the th chapter of st corinthians. simply "to help" or "to give" is unsatisfactory. half of the failures are due to inability to reply. (d) _envy_ _satisfactory._ "you envy some one who has something you want." "it's the way you feel when you see some one with something nicer than you have." "it's when a poor girl sees a rich girl with nice dresses and things." "you hate some one because they've got something you want." "jealousy" (satisfactory if subject can explain what _jealousy_ means; otherwise it is _minus_). "it's when you see a person better off than you are." nearly three fourths of the correct responses say in substance, "you envy a person who has something you want." most of the others are concrete illustrations. _unsatisfactory._ "to hate some one," or simply "to hate." "you don't like 'em." "bad feeling toward any one." "to be a great man or woman." "not to be nice to people." "what we do to our enemies." inability to respond accounts for  per cent of the failures. (e) _justice_ _satisfactory._ "to give people what they deserve." "it means that everybody is treated the same way, whether he is rich or poor." "it's what you get when you go to court." "if one does something and gets punished, that's justice." "to do the square thing." "to give everybody his dues." "let every one have what's coming to him." "to do the right thing by any one." "if two people do the same thing and they let one go without punishing, that is not justice." approximately  per cent of correct responses referred to treating everybody the same way;  per cent to "doing the square thing",  per cent were concrete illustrations; and  per cent were definitions of what justice is not. _unsatisfactory._ "it means to have peace." "it is where they have court." "it's the courthouse." "to be honest." "where one is just" (_minus_, unless further explained). "to do right" (_minus_, unless in explaining _right_ the subject gives a definition of _justice_). it is very necessary, in case of such answers as "justice is to do right," "to be just," etc., that the subject be urged to explain further what he means. "to do right" includes nearly  per cent of all answers, and is given by the very brightest children. most of these are able, when urged, to complete the definition in a satisfactory manner. remarks. the reader may be surprised that the ability to define common abstract words should develop so late. most children who have had anything like ordinary home or school environment have doubtless heard all of these words countless times before the age of  years. nevertheless, the statistics from the test show unmistakably that before this age such words have but limited and vague meaning. other vocabulary studies confirm this fact so completely that we may say there is hardly any trait in which - to -year intelligence more uniformly excels that of the - or -year level. this is readily understandable when we consider the nature of abstract meanings and the intellectual processes by which we arrive at them. unlike such words as _tree_, _house_, etc., the ideas they contain are not the immediate result of perceptual processes, in which even childish intelligence is adept, but are a refined and secondary product of relationships between other ideas. they require the logical processes of comparison, abstraction, and generalization. one cannot see justice, for example, but one is often confronted with situations in which justice or injustice is an element; and given a certain degree of abstraction and generalization, out of such situations the idea of justice will gradually be evolved. the formation and use of abstract ideas, of one kind or another, represent, _par excellence_, the "higher thought processes." it is not without significance that delinquents who test near the border-line of mental deficiency show such inferior ability in arriving at correct generalizations regarding matters of social and moral relationships. we cannot expect a mind of defective generalizing ability to form very definite or correct notions about justice, law, fairness, ownership rights, etc.; and if the ideas themselves are not fairly clear, the rules of conduct based upon them cannot make a very powerful appeal.[ ] [ ] see also p.   _ff._ binet used the words _charity_, _justice_, and _kindness_, and required two successes. in the revision he shifted the test from year xi to year xii, where it more nearly belongs. goddard also places it in year xii and uses binet's words, translating _bonté_, however, as _goodness_ instead of _kindness_. kuhlmann retains the test in year xi and adds _bravery_ and _revenge_, requiring three correct definitions out of five. bobertag uses _pity_, _envy_, and _justice_, requires two correct definitions, and finds the test just hard enough for year xii. after using the words _goodness_ and _kindness_ in two series of tests, we have discarded them as objectionable in that they give rise to so many doubtful definitions. even intelligent children often say: "goodness means to do something good," "kindness means to be kind to some one," etc. these definitions in a circle occur less than half as often with _pity_, _revenge_, and _envy_, which are also superior to _charity_ and _justice_ in this respect. the relative difficulty of our five words is indicated by the order in which we have listed them in the test (i.e., beginning with the easiest and ending with the hardest). on the standard of three correct definitions, these words fit very accurately in year xii. xii,  . the ball-and-field test (superior plan) procedure, as in year viii, test  . scoring. score  (or superior plan) is required for passing in year xii.[ ] [ ] see scoring card. xii,  . dissected sentences the following disarranged sentences are used:-- for the started an we country early at hour to asked paper my teacher correct i my a defends dog good his bravely master these should be printed in type like that used above. the stanford record booklet contains the sentences in convenient form. it is not permissible to substitute written words or printed script, as that would make the test harder. all the words should be printed in caps in order that no clue shall be given as to the first word in a sentence. for a similar reason the period is omitted. procedure. say: "_here is a sentence that has the words all mixed up so that they don't make any sense. if the words were changed around in the right order they would make a good sentence. look carefully and see if you can tell me how the sentence ought to read._" give the sentences in the order in which they are listed in the record booklet. do not tell the subject to see how quickly he can do it, because with this test any suggestion of hurrying is likely to produce a kind of mental paralysis. if the subject has no success with the first sentence in one minute, read it off correctly for him, somewhat slowly, and pointing to each word as it is spoken. then proceed to the second and third, allowing one minute for each. give no further help. it is not permissible, in case an incorrect response is given, to ask the subject to try again, or to say: "_are you sure that is right?_" "_are you sure you have not left out any words?_" etc. instead, maintain absolute silence. however, the subject is permitted to make as many changes in his response as he sees fit, provided he makes them spontaneously and within the allotted time. record the entire response. once in a great while the subject misunderstands the task and thinks the only requirement is to use all the words given, and that it is permitted to add as many other words as he likes. it is then necessary to repeat the instructions and to allow a new trial. scoring. _two sentences out of three must be correctly given within the minute allotted to each._ it is understood, of course, that if the first sentence has to be read for the subject, both the other responses must be given correctly. a sentence is not counted correct if a single word is omitted, altered, or inserted, or if the order given fails to make perfect sense. certain responses are not absolutely incorrect, but are objectionable as regards sentence structure, or else fail to give the exact meaning intended. these are given half credit. full credit on one, and half credit on each of the other two, is satisfactory. the following are samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses:-- (a) _satisfactory._ "we started for the country at an early hour." "at an early hour we started for the country." "we started at an early hour for the country." _unsatisfactory._ "we started early at an hour for the country." "early at an hour we started for the country." "we started early for the country." _half credit._ "for the country at an early hour we started." "for the country we started at an early hour." (b) _satisfactory._ "i asked my teacher to correct my paper." _unsatisfactory._ "my teacher asked to correct my paper." "to correct my paper i asked my teacher." _half credit._ "my teacher i asked to correct my paper." (c) _satisfactory._ "a good dog defends his master bravely." "a good dog bravely defends his master." _unsatisfactory._ "a dog defends his master bravely." "a bravely dog defends his master." "a good dog defends his bravely master." "a good brave dog defends his master." _half credit._ "a dog defends his good master bravely." "a dog bravely defends his good master." "a good master bravely defends his dog." remarks. this is an excellent test. it involves no knowledge which may not be presupposed at the age in which it is given, and success therefore depends very little on experience. the worst that can be urged against it is that it may possibly be influenced to a certain extent by the amount of reading the subject has done. but this has not been demonstrated. at any rate, the test satisfies the most important requirement of a test of intelligence; namely, the percentage of successes increases rapidly and steadily from the lower to the higher levels of mental age. this experiment can be regarded as a variation of the completion test. binet tells us, in fact, that it was directly suggested by the experiment of ebbinghaus. as will readily be observed, however, it differs to a certain extent from the ebbinghaus completion test. ebbinghaus omits parts of a sentence and requires the subject to supply the omissions. in this test we give all the parts and require the formation of a sentence by rearrangement. the two experiments are psychologically similar in that they require the subject to relate given fragments into a meaningful whole. success depends upon the ability of intelligence to utilize hints, or clues, and this in turn depends on the logical integrity of the associative processes. all but the highest grade of the feeble-minded fail with this test. this test is found in year xi of binet's series and in year xii of his revision. goddard and kuhlmann retain it in the original location. that it is better placed in year xii is indicated by all the available statistics with normal children, except those of goddard. with this exception, the results of various investigators for year xii are in remarkably close agreement, as the following figures will show:-- _per cent passing at year xii_ binet kuhlmann bobertag dougherty strong léviste and morlé stanford series ( ) stanford series ( ) stanford series ( ) princeton data this agreement is noteworthy considering that no two experiments seem to have used exactly the same arrangement of words, and that some have presented the words of a sentence in a single line, others in two or three lines. a single line would appear to be somewhat easier. xii,  . interpretation of fables (score  ) the following fables are used:-- (a) _hercules and the wagoner_ _a man was driving along a country road, when the wheels suddenly sank in a deep rut. the man did nothing but look at the wagon and call loudly to hercules to come and help him. hercules came up, looked at the man, and said: "put your shoulder to the wheel, my man, and whip up your oxen." then he went away and left the driver._ (b) _the milkmaid and her plans_ _a milkmaid was carrying her pail of milk on her head, and was thinking to herself thus: "the money for this milk will buy  hens; the hens will lay at least  eggs; the eggs will produce at least  chicks; and with the money which the chicks will bring i can buy a new dress to wear instead of the ragged one i have on." at this moment she looked down at herself, trying to think how she would look in her new dress; but as she did so the pail of milk slipped from her head and dashed upon the ground. thus all her imaginary schemes perished in a moment._ (c) _the fox and the crow_ _a crow, having stolen a bit of meat, perched in a tree and held it in her beak. a fox, seeing her, wished to secure the meat, and spoke to the crow thus: "how handsome you are! and i have heard that the beauty of your voice is equal to that of your form and feathers. will you not sing for me, so that i may judge whether this is true?" the crow was so pleased that she opened her mouth to sing and dropped the meat, which the fox immediately ate._ (d) _the farmer and the stork_ _a farmer set some traps to catch cranes which had been eating his seed. with them he caught a stork. the stork, which had not really been stealing, begged the farmer to spare his life, saying that he was a bird of excellent character, that he was not at all like the cranes, and that the farmer should have pity on him. but the farmer said: "i have caught you with these robbers, and you will have to die with them."_ (e) _the miller, his son, and the donkey_ _a miller and his son were driving their donkey to a neighboring town to sell him. they had not gone far when a child saw them and cried out: "what fools those fellows are to be trudging along on foot when one of them might be riding." the old man, hearing this, made his son get on the donkey, while he himself walked. soon, they came upon some men. "look," said one of them, "see that lazy boy riding while his old father has to walk." on hearing this, the miller made his son get off, and he climbed on the donkey himself. farther on they met a company of women, who shouted out: "why, you lazy old fellow, to ride along so comfortably while your poor boy there can hardly keep pace by the side of you!" and so the good-natured miller took his boy up behind him and both of them rode. as they came to the town a citizen said to them, "why, you cruel fellows! you two are better able to carry the poor little donkey than he is to carry you." "very well," said the miller, "we will try." so both of them jumped to the ground, got some ropes, tied the donkey's legs to a pole and tried to carry him. but as they crossed the bridge the donkey became frightened, kicked loose and fell into the stream._ procedure. present the fables in the order in which they are given above. the method is to say to the subject: "_you know what a fable is? you have heard fables?_" whatever the answer, proceed to explain a fable as follows: "_a fable, you know, is a little story, and is meant to teach us a lesson. now, i am going to read a fable to you. listen carefully, and when i am through i will ask you to tell me what lesson the fable teaches us. ready; listen._" after reading the fable, say: "_what lesson does that teach us?_" record the response _verbatim_ and proceed with the next as follows: "_here is another. listen again and tell me what lesson this fable teaches us_," etc. as far as possible, avoid comment or commendation until all the fables have been given. if the first answer is of an inferior type and we express too much satisfaction with it, we thereby encourage the subject to continue in his error. on the other hand, never express dissatisfaction with a response, however absurd or _malapropos_ it may be. many subjects are anxious to know how well they are doing and continually ask, "did i get that one right?" it is sufficient to say, "you are getting along nicely," or something to that effect. offer no comments, suggestions, or questions which might put the subject on the right track. this much self-control is necessary if we would make the conditions of the test uniform for all subjects. the only occasion when a supplementary question is permissible is in case of a response whose meaning is not clear. even then we must be cautious and restrict ourselves to some such question as, "_what do you mean?_" or, "_explain; i don't quite understand what you mean_." the scoring of fables is somewhat difficult at best, and this additional question is often sufficient to place the response very definitely in the right or wrong column. scoring. give score  , i.e.,  points, for a correct answer, and for an answer which deserves half credit. the test is passed in year xii _if  points are earned_; that is, if two responses are correct or if one is correct and two deserve half credit. score  means that the fable has been correctly interpreted and that the lesson it teaches has been stated in general terms. there are two types of response which may be given half credit. they include ( ) the interpretations which are stated in general terms and are fairly plausible, but are not exactly correct; and ( ) those which are perfectly correct as to substance, but are not generalized. we overlook ordinary faults of expression and regard merely the essential meaning of the response. the only way to explain the method is by giving copious illustrations. if the following sample responses are carefully studied, a reasonable degree of expertness in scoring fables may be acquired with only a limited amount of actual practice. the sampling may appear to the reader needlessly prolix, but experience has taught us that in giving directions for the scoring of tests error always lies on the side of taking too much for granted. (a) _hercules and the wagoner_ _full credit; score  ._ "god helps those who help themselves." "do not depend on others." "help yourself before calling for help." "it teaches that we should rely upon ourselves." the following are not quite so good, but are nevertheless considered satisfactory. "we should always try, even if it looks hard and we think we can't do it." "when in trouble try to get out of it yourself." "we've got to do things without help." "not to be lazy." _half credit; score  ._ this is most often given for the response which contains the correct idea, but states it in terms of the concrete situation, e.g.: "the man ought to have tried himself first." "hercules wanted to teach the man to help himself." "the driver was too much inclined to depend on others." "the man was too lazy. he should not have called for help until he had tried to get out by himself." "to get out and try instead of watching." _unsatisfactory; score  ._ failures are mainly of five varieties: ( ) generalized interpretations which entirely miss the point; ( ) crude interpretations which not only miss the point, but are also stated in terms of the concrete situation; ( ) irrelevant or incoherent remarks; ( ) efforts to repeat the story; and ( ) inability to respond. sample failures of type ( ), entirely incorrect generalizations: "teaches us to look where we are going." "not to ask for anything when there is no one to help." "to help those who are in trouble." "teaches us to be polite." "how to help others." "not to be cruel to horses." "always to do what people tell you" (or "obey orders," etc.). "not to be foolish" (or stupid, etc.). "if you would have a thing well done, do it yourself." failures of type ( ), crude interpretations stated in concrete terms: "how to get out of the mud." "not to get stuck in the mud." "to carry a stick along to pry yourself out if you get into a mud-hole." "to help any one who is stuck in the mud." "taught hercules to help the horses along and not whip them too hard." "not to be mean like hercules." failures of type ( ), irrelevant responses: "it was foolish not to thank him." "he should have helped the driver." "hercules was mean." "if any one helps himself the horses will try." "the driver should have done what hercules told him." "he wanted the man to help the oxen." type ( ): efforts to repeat the story. type ( ): inability to respond. (b) _the maid and the eggs_ _full credit; score  ._ "teaches us not to build air-castles." "don't count your chickens before they are hatched." "not to plan too far ahead." slightly inferior, but still acceptable: "never make too many plans." "don't count on the second thing till you have done the first." _half credit; score  ._ "it teaches us not to have our minds on the future when we carry milk on the head." "she was building air-castles and so lost her milk." "she was planning too far ahead." the responses just given are examples of fairly correct interpretations in non-generalized terms. the following are examples of generalized interpretations which fall below the accuracy required for full credit: "never make plans." "not to be too proud." "to keep our mind on what we are doing." "don't cross a bridge till you come to it." "don't count your _eggs_ before they are hatched." "not to be wanting things; learn to wait." "not to imagine; go ahead and do it." _unsatisfactory; score  ._ type ( ), entirely incorrect generalization: "that money does not buy everything." "not to be greedy." "not to be selfish." "not to waste things." "not to take risks like that." "not to think about clothes." "count your chickens before they are hatched." type ( ), very crude interpretations stated in concrete terms: "not to carry milk on the head." "teaches her to watch and not throw down her head." "to carry her head straight." "not to spill milk." "to keep your chickens and you will make more money." type ( ), irrelevant responses: "she wanted the money." "teaches us to read and write" ( -year-old of -year intelligence). "about a girl who was selling some milk." type ( ), effort to repeat the story. type ( ), inability to respond. (c) _the fox and the crow_ _full credit; score  ._ "teaches us not to listen to flattery." "don't let yourself be flattered." "it is not safe to believe people who flatter us." "we had better look out for people who brag on us." _half credit; score  ._ correct idea in concrete terms: "the crow was so proud of herself that she lost all she had." "the crow listened to flattery and got left." "not to be proud and let people think you can sing when you can't." "if anybody brags on you don't sing or do what he tells you." pertinent but somewhat inferior generalizations: "not to be too proud." "pride goes before a fall." "to be on our guard against people who are our enemies." "not to do everything people tell you." "don't trust every slick fellow you meet." _unsatisfactory; score  ._ type ( ), incorrect generalization: "not to go with people you don't know." "not to be selfish." "to share your food." "look before you leap." "not to listen to evil." "not to steal." "teaches honesty." "not to covet." "think for yourself." "teaches wisdom." "never listen to advice." "never let any one get ahead of you." "to figure out what they are going to do." "never try to do two things at once." "how to get what you want." type ( ), very crude interpretation stated in terms of the concrete situation: "not to sing before you eat." "not to hold a thing in your mouth; eat it." "to eat a thing before you think of your beauty." "to swallow it before you sing." "to be on your watch when you have food in your mouth." type ( ), irrelevant responses: "the fox was greedy." "the fox was slicker than what the crow was." "the crow ought not to have opened her mouth." "the crow should just have shaken her head." "it served the crow right for stealing the meat." "the fox wanted the meat and just told the crow that to get it." "foolishness." "guess that's where the old fox got his name--'old foxy'--don't teach us anything." type ( ), efforts to repeat the story. type ( ), inability to respond. (d) _the farmer and the stork_ _full credit; score  ._ "you are judged by the company you keep." "teaches us to keep out of bad company." "birds of a feather flock together." "if you go with bad people you are counted like them." "we should choose our friends carefully." "don't go with bad people." "teaches us to avoid the appearance of evil." _half credit; score  ._ "the stork should not have been with the cranes." "teaches him not to go with robbers." "don't go with people who are not of your nation." "not to follow others." _unsatisfactory; score  ._ type ( ), incorrect generalization: "not to steal." "not to tell lies." "not to give excuses." "a poor excuse is better than none." "not to trust what people say." "not to listen to excuses." "not to harm animals that do no harm." "to have pity on others." "not to be cruel." "to be kind to birds." "not to blame people for what they don't do." "teaches that those who do good often suffer for those who do evil." "to tend to your own business." "not to meddle with other people's things." "not to trespass on people's property." "not to think you are so nice." "to keep out of mischief." type ( ), very crude interpretations in concrete terms: "taught the stork to look where it stepped and not walk into a trap." "taught the stork to keep out of the man's field." "not to take the seeds." type ( ), irrelevant responses: "the farmer was right; storks do eat grain." "served the stork right, he was stealing too." "he should try to help the stork out of the field." type ( ), efforts to repeat the story. type ( ), inability to reply. (e) _the miller, his son, and the donkey_ _full credit; score  ._ "when you try to please everybody you please nobody." "don't listen to everybody; you can't please them all." "don't take every one's advice." "don't try to do what everybody tells you." "use your own judgment." "have a mind of your own." "make up your mind and stick to it." "don't be wishy-washy." "have confidence in your own opinions." _half credit; score  ._ interpretations which are generalized but somewhat inferior: "never take any one's advice" (too sweeping a conclusion). "don't take foolish advice." "take your own advice." "it teaches us that people don't always agree." correct idea but not generalized: "they were fools to listen to everybody." "they should have walked or rode just as they thought best, without listening to other people." _unsatisfactory; score  ._ type ( ), incorrect generalization: "to do right." "to do what people tell you." "to be kind to old people." "to be polite." "to serve others." "not to be cruel to animals." "to have sympathy for beasts of burden." "to be good-natured." "not to load things on animals that are small." "that it is always better to leave things as they are." "that men were not made for beasts of burden." type ( ), very crude interpretations stated in concrete terms: "not to try to carry the donkey." "that walking is better than riding." "the people should have been more polite to the old man." "that the father should be allowed to ride." type ( ), irrelevant responses: "the men were too heavy for the donkey." "they ought to have stayed on and they would not have fallen into the stream." "it teaches about a man and he lost his donkey." type ( ), efforts to repeat the story. type ( ), inability to respond. remarks. the fable test, or the "test of generalization," as it may aptly be named, was used by the writer in a study of the intellectual processes of bright and dull boys in ,[ ] and was further standardized by the writer and mr. childs in .[ ] it has proved its worth in a number of investigations. it has been necessary, however, to simplify the rather elaborate method of scoring which was proposed in , not because of any logical fault of the method, but because of the difficulty in teaching examiners to use the system correctly. the method explained above is somewhat coarser, but it has the advantage of being much easier to learn. [ ] "genius and stupidity," in _pedagogical seminary_, vol. xiii, pp.  - . [ ] "a tentative revision and extension of the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence," _journal of educational psychology_ ( ). the generalization test presents for interpretation situations which are closely paralleled in the everyday social experience of human beings. it tests the subject's ability to understand motives underlying acts or attitudes. it gives a clue to the status of the social consciousness. this is highly important in the diagnosis of the upper range of mental defectiveness. the criterion of the subnormal's fitness for life outside an institution is his ability to understand social relations and to adjust himself to them. failure of a subnormal to meet this criterion may lead him to break common conventions, and to appear disrespectful, sulky, stubborn, or in some other way queer and exceptional. he is likely to be misunderstood, because he so easily misunderstands others. the skein of human motives is too complex for his limited intelligence to untangle. ethnological studies have shown in an interesting way the social origin of the moral judgment. the rectitude of the moral life, therefore, depends on the accuracy of the social judgment. it would be interesting to know what proportion of offenders have transgressed moral codes because of continued failure to grasp the essential lessons presented by human situations. for the intelligent child even the common incidents of life carry an endless succession of lessons in right conduct. on the average school playground not an hour passes without some happening which is fraught with a moral hint to those who have intelligence enough to generalize the situation. a boy plays unfairly and is barred from the game. one bullies his weaker companion and arouses the anger and scorn of all his fellows. another vents his braggadocio and feels at once the withering scorn of those who listen. laziness, selfishness, meanness, dishonesty, ingratitude, inconstancy, inordinate pride, and the countless other faults all have their social penalties. the child of normal intelligence sees the point, draws the appropriate lesson and (provided emotions and will are also normal) applies it more or less effectively as a guide to his own conduct. to the feeble-minded child, all but lacking in the power of abstraction and generalization, the situation conveys no such lesson. it is but a muddle of concrete events without general significance; or even if its meaning is vaguely apprehended, the powers of inhibition are insufficient to guarantee that right action will follow. it is for this reason that the generalization test is so valuable in the mental examinations of delinquents. it presents a moral situation, imagined, to be sure, but none the less real to the individual of normal comprehension. it tells us quickly whether the subject tested is able to see beyond the incidents of the given situation and to grasp their wider relations--whether he is able to generalize the concrete. the following responses made by feeble-minded delinquents from  to   years of age demonstrate sufficiently their inability to comprehend the moral situation:-- _hercules and the wagoner._ "teaches you to look where you are going." "not to help any one who is stuck in the mud." "not to whip oxen." "teaches that hercules was mean." "teaches us to carry a stick along to pry the wheels out." _the fox and the crow._ "not to sing when eating." "to keep away from strangers." "to swallow it before you sing." "not to be stingy." "not to listen to evil." "the fox was wiser than the crow." "not to be selfish with food." "not to do two things at once." "to hang on to what you've got." _the farmer and the stork._ "teaches the stork to look where he steps." "not to be cruel like the farmer." "not to tell lies." "not to butt into other people's things." "to be kind to birds." "teaches us how to get rid of troublesome people." "never go with anything else." the following are the responses of an -year-old delinquent (intelligence level  years) to the five fables:-- _maid and eggs._ "she was thinking about getting the dress and spilled the milk. teaches selfishness." _hercules and the wagoner._ "he wanted to help the oxen out." _fox and crow._ "guess that's where the fox got his name--'old foxy.' don't teach us anything." _farmer and stork._ "try and help the stork out of the field." _miller, son, and donkey._ "they was all big fools and mean to the donkey." one does not require very profound psychological insight to see that a person of this degree of comprehension is not promising material for moral education. his weakness in the ability to generalize a moral situation is not due to lack of instruction, but is inherent in the nature of his mental processes, all of which have the infantile quality of average - or -year intelligence. well-instructed normal children of  years ordinarily succeed no better. the ability to draw the correct lesson from a social situation is little developed below the mental level of  or   years. the test is also valuable because it throws light on the subject's ability to appreciate the finer shades of meaning. the mentally retarded often show marked inferiority in this respect. they sense, perhaps, in a general way the trend of the story, but they fail to comprehend much that to us seems clearly expressed. they do not get what is left for the reader to infer, because they are insensible to the thought fringes. it is these which give meaning to the fable. the dull subject may be able to image the objects and activities described, but taken in the rough such imagery gets him nowhere. finally, the test is almost free from the danger of coaching. the subject who has been given a number of fables along with twenty-five or thirty other tests can as a rule give only hazy and inaccurate testimony as to what he has been put through. moreover, we have found that, even if a subject has previously heard a fable, that fact does not materially increase his chances of giving a correct interpretation. if the situation depicted in the fable is beyond the subject's power of comprehension even explicit instruction has little effect upon the quality of the response. incidentally, this observation raises the question whether the use of proverbs, mottoes, fables, poetry, etc., in the moral instruction of children may not often be futile because the material is not fitted to the child's power of comprehension. much of the school's instruction in history and literature has a moral purpose, but there is reason to suspect that in this field schools often make precocious attempts in "generalizing" exercises. xii,  . repeating five digits reversed the series are - - - - ; - - - - ; - - - - . procedure and scoring. exactly as in years vii and ix.[ ] [ ] see discussion, p.   _ff._ xii,  . interpretation of pictures procedure. use the same pictures as in iii,  , and vii,  , and the additional picture _d_. present in the same order. the formula to begin with is identical with that in vii,  : "_tell me what this picture is about. what is this a picture of?_" this formula is chosen because it does not suggest specifically either description or interpretation, and is therefore adapted to show the child's spontaneous or natural mode of apperception. however, in case, this formula fails to bring spontaneous interpretation for three of the four pictures, we then return to those pictures on which the subject has failed and give a second trial with the formula: "_explain this picture_." a good many subjects who failed to interpret the pictures spontaneously do so without difficulty when the more specific formula is used. if the response is so brief as to be difficult to classify, the subject should be urged to amplify by some such injunction as "_go ahead_," or "_explain what you mean_." one more caution. it is necessary to refrain from voicing a single word of commendation or approval until all the pictures have been responded to. a moment's thought will reveal the absolute necessity of adhering to this rule. often a subject will begin by giving an inferior type of response (description, say) to the first picture, but with the second picture adjusts better to the task and responds satisfactorily. if in such a case the first (unsatisfactory) response were greeted with an approving "that's fine, you are doing splendidly," the likelihood of any improvement taking place as the test proceeds would be greatly lessened. scoring. _three pictures out of four_ must be satisfactorily interpreted. "satisfactorily" means that the interpretation given should be reasonably plausible; not necessarily the exact one the artist had in mind, yet not absurd. the following classified responses will serve as a fairly secure guide for scoring:-- (a) _dutch home_ _satisfactory._ "child has spilled something and is getting a scolding." "the baby has hurt herself and the mother is comforting her." "the baby is crying because she is hungry and the mother has nothing to give her." "the little girl has been naughty and is about to be punished." "the baby is crying because she does not like her dinner." "there's bread on the table and the mother won't let the little girl have it and so she is crying." "the baby is begging for something and is crying because her mamma won't give it to her." "it's a poor family. the father is dead and they don't have enough to eat." _unsatisfactory._ "the baby is crying and the mother is looking at her" (description). "it's in holland, and there's a little girl crying, and a mamma, and there's a dish on the table" (mainly description). "the mother is teaching the child to walk" (absurd interpretation). (b) _river scene_ _satisfactory._ "man and lady eloping to get married and an indian to row for them." "i think it represents a honeymoon trip." "in frontier days and a man and his wife have been captured by the indians." "it's a perilous journey and they have engaged the indian to row for them." _unsatisfactory._ "they are shooting the rapids." "an indian rowing a man and his wife down the river" (mainly description). "a storm at sea" (absurd interpretation). "indians have rescued a couple from a shipwreck." "they have been up the river and are riding down the rapids." the following responses are somewhat doubtful, but should probably be scored _minus_: "people going out hunting and have indian for a guide." "the man has rescued the woman from the indians." "it's a camping trip." (c) _post-office_ _satisfactory._ "it's a lot of old farmers. they have come to the post-office to get the paper, which only comes once a week, and they are all happy." "there's something funny in the paper about one of the men and they are all laughing about it." "they are reading about the price of eggs, and they look very happy so i guess the price has gone up." "it's a bunch of country politicians reading the election news." _unsatisfactory._ "a man has just come out of the post-office and is reading to his friends." "it's a little country town and they are looking at the paper." "a man is reading the paper and the others are looking on and laughing." "some men are reading a paper and laughing, and the other man has brought some eggs to market, and it's in a little country town." (all the above are mainly description.) responses like the following are somewhat better, but hardly satisfactory: "they are reading something funny in the paper." "they are reading the ads." "they are laughing about something in the newspaper," etc. (d) _colonial home_ _satisfactory._ "they are lovers and have quarreled." "the man has to go away for a long time, maybe to war, and she is afraid he won't return." "he has proposed and she has rejected him, and she is crying because she hated to disappoint him." "the woman is crying because her husband is angry and leaving her." "the man is a messenger and has brought the woman bad news." _unsatisfactory._ "the husband is leaving and the dog is looking at the lady." "it's a picture to show how people dressed in colonial times." "the lady is crying and the man is trying to comfort her." "the man is going away. the woman is angry because he is going. the dog has a ball in its mouth and looks happy, and the man looks sad." such responses as the following are doubtful, but rather _minus_ than _plus_: "a picture of george washington's home." "they have lost their money and they are sad" (gratuitous interpretation). "the man has struck the woman." doubt sometimes arises as to the proper scoring of imaginative or gratuitous interpretations. the following are samples of such: (a) "the little girl is crying because she wants a new dress and the mother is telling her she can have one when christmas comes if she will be good." (b) "the man and woman have gone up the river to visit some friends and an indian guide is bringing them home." (c) "some old rubes are reading about a circus that's going to come." (d) "napoleon leaving his wife." sometimes these imaginative responses are given by very bright subjects, under the impression that they are asked to "make up" a story based on the picture. we may score them _plus_, provided they are not too much out of harmony with the situation and actions represented in the picture. interpretations so gratuitous as to have little or no bearing upon the scene depicted should be scored _minus_. remarks. the test of picture interpretation has been variously located from  to   years. it cannot be too strongly emphasized that everything depends on the nature of the pictures used, the form in which the question is put, and the standard for scoring. the jingleman-jack pictures used by kuhlmann are as easy to interpret at  years as the stanford pictures at . spontaneous interpretation ("what is this a picture of?" or "what do you see in this picture?") comes no more readily at  years than provoked interpretation ("explain this picture") at . the standard of scoring is no less important. if with the stanford pictures we require three satisfactory responses out of four, the test belongs at the -year level, but the standard of two correct out of four can be met a year or two earlier. even after we have agreed upon a given series of pictures, the formula for giving the test, and upon the requisite number of passes, there remains still the question as to the proper degree of liberality in deciding what constitutes interpretation. there is no single point in mental development where the "ability to interpret pictures" sweeps in with a rush. like the development of most other abilities, it comes by slow degrees, beginning even as early as  years. the question is, therefore, to decide whether a given response contains as much and as good interpretation as we have a right to expect at the age level where the test has been placed. it is imperative for any one who would use the scale correctly to acquaint himself thoroughly with the procedure and standards described above. xii,  . giving similarities, three things procedure. the procedure is the same as in viii,  , but with the following words:-- (a) _snake_, _cow_, _sparrow_. (b) _book_, _teacher_, _newspaper_. (c) _wool_, _cotton_, _leather_. (d) _knife-blade_, _penny_, _piece of wire_. (e) _rose_, _potato_, _tree_. as before, a little tactful urging is occasionally necessary in order to secure a response. scoring. _three satisfactory responses out of five_ are necessary for success. any real similarity is acceptable, whether fundamental or superficial, although the giving of fundamental likenesses is especially symptomatic of good intelligence. failures may be classified under four heads: ( ) leaving one of the words out of consideration; ( ) giving a difference instead of a similarity; ( ) giving a similarity that is not real or that is too bizarre or far-fetched; and ( ) inability to respond. types ( ), ( ), and ( ) are almost equally numerous, while type ( ) is not often encountered at this level of intelligence. this test provokes doubtful responses somewhat oftener than the earlier test of giving similarities. those giving greatest difficulty are the indefinite statements like "all are useful," "all are made of the same material," etc. fortunately, in most of these cases an additional question is sufficient to determine whether the subject has in mind a real similarity. questions suitable for this purpose are: "explain what you mean," "in what respect are they all useful?" "what material do you mean?" etc. of course it is only permissible to make use of supplementary questions of this kind when they are necessary in order to clarify a response which has already been made. while the amateur examiner is likely to have more or less trouble in deciding upon scores, this difficulty rapidly disappears with experience. the following samples of satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses will serve as a fairly adequate guide in dealing with doubtful cases:-- (a) _snake_, _cow_, _sparrow_ _satisfactory._ "all are animals" (or creatures, etc.). "all live on the land." "all have blood" (or flesh, bones, eyes, skin, etc.). "all move about." "all breathe air." "all are useful" (_plus_ only if subject can give a use which they have in common). "all have a little intelligence" (or sense, instinct, etc.). _unsatisfactory._ "all have legs." "all are dangerous." "all feed on grain" (or grass, etc.). "all are much afraid of man." "all frighten you." "all are warm-blooded." "all get about the same way." "all walk on the ground." "all can bite." "all holler." "all drink water." "a snake crawls, a cow walks, and a sparrow flies" (or some other difference). "they are not alike." (b) _book_, _teacher_, _newspaper_ _satisfactory._ "all teach." "you learn from all." "all give you information." "all help you get an education." "all are your good friends" (_plus_ if subject can explain how). "all are useful" (_plus_ if subject can explain how). _unsatisfactory._ "all tell you the news." "a teacher writes, and a book and newspaper have writing." "they are not alike." "all read." "all use the alphabet." (c) _wool_, _cotton_, _leather_ _satisfactory._ "all used for clothing." "we wear them all." "all grow" (_plus_ if subject can explain). "all have to be sent to the factory to be made into things." "all are useful" (_plus_ if subject can give a use which all have in common). "all are valuable" (_plus_ if explained). _unsatisfactory._ "all come from plants." "all grow on animals." "all came off the top of something." "all are things." "they are pretty." "all spell alike." "all are furry" (or soft, hard, etc.). (d) _knife-blade_, _penny_, _piece of wire_ _satisfactory_. "all are made from minerals" (or metals). "all come from mines." "all are hard material." _unsatisfactory._ "all are made of steel" (or copper, iron, etc.). "all are made of the same metal." "all cut." "all bend easily." "all are used in building a house." "all are worthless." "all are useful in fixing things." "all have an end." "they are small." "all weigh the same." "can get them all at a hardware store." "you can buy things with all of them." "you buy them with money." "one is sharp, one is round, and one is long" (or some other difference). such answers as "all are found in a boy's pocket," or "boys like them," are not altogether bad, but hardly deserve to be called satisfactory. "all are useful" is _minus_ unless the subject can give a use which they have in common, which in this case he is not likely to do. bizarre uses are also _minus_; as, "all are good for a watch fob," "can use all for paper weights," etc. (e) _rose_, _potato_, _tree_ _satisfactory._ "all are plants." "all grow from the ground." "all have leaves" (or roots, etc.). "all have to be planted." "all are parts of nature." "all have colors." _unsatisfactory._ "all are pretty." "all bear fruit." "all have pretty flowers." "all grow on bushes." "all are valuable" (or useful). "they grow close to a house." "all are ornamental." "all are shrubbery." remarks. the words of each series lend themselves readily to classification into a next higher class. this is the best type of response, but with most of the series it accounts for less than two thirds of the successes among subjects of -year intelligence. the proportion is less than one third for subjects of -year intelligence and nearly three fourths at the -year level. it would be possible and very desirable to devise and standardize an additional test of this kind, but requiring the giving of an essential resemblance or classificatory similarity. for discussion of the psychological factors involved in the similarities test, see vii,  . chapter xviii instructions for year xiv. xiv,  . vocabulary (fifty definitions,  words) procedure and scoring, as in viii, x, and xii. at year xiv fifty words must be correctly defined. xiv,  . induction test: finding a rule procedure. provide six sheets of thin blank paper, say ½ ×   inches. take the first sheet, and telling the subject to watch what you do, fold it once, and in the middle of the folded edge tear out or cut out a small notch; then ask the subject to tell you _how many holes there will be in the paper when it is unfolded_. the correct answer, _one_, is nearly always given without hesitation. but whatever the answer, unfold the paper and hold it up broadside for the subject's inspection. next, take another sheet, fold it once as before and say: "_now, when we folded it this way and tore out a piece, you remember it made one hole in the paper. this time we will give the paper another fold and see how many holes we shall have._" then proceed to fold the paper again, this time in the other direction, and tear out a piece from the folded side and ask how many holes there will be when the paper is unfolded. after recording the answer, unfold the paper, hold it up before the subject so as to let him see the result. the answer is often incorrect and the unfolded sheet is greeted with an exclamation of surprise. the governing principle is seldom made out at this stage of the experiment. but regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of the first and second answers, proceed with the third sheet. fold it once and say: "_when we folded it this way there was one hole._" then fold it again and say: "_and when we folded it this way there were two holes._" at this point fold the paper a third time and say: "_now, i am folding it again. how many holes will it have this time when i unfold it?_" record the answer and again unfold the paper while the subject looks on. continue in the same manner with sheets four, five, and six, adding one fold each time. in folding each sheet recapitulate the results with the previous sheets, saying (with the sixth, for example): "_when we folded it this way there was one hole, when we folded it again there were two, when we folded it again there were four, when we folded it again there were eight, when we folded it again there were sixteen; now, tell me how many holes there will be if we fold it once more._" in the recapitulation avoid the expression "_when we folded it once, twice, three times_," etc., as this often leads the subject to double the numeral heard instead of doubling the number of holes in the previously folded sheet. after the answer is given, do not fail to unfold the paper and let the subject view the result. scoring. the test is passed _if the rule is grasped by the time the sixth sheet is reached_; that is, the subject may pass after five incorrect responses, provided the sixth is correct and the governing rule can then be given. it is not permissible to ask for the rule until all six parts of the experiment have been given. nothing must be said which could even suggest the operation of a rule. often, however, the subject grasps the principle after two or three steps and gives it spontaneously. in this case it is unnecessary to proceed with the remaining steps. remarks. this test was first used by the writer in a comparative study of the intellectual processes of bright and dull boys in , but it was not standardized until . rather extensive data indicate that it is a genuine test of intelligence. of -year-old school children testing between  and   i q,  per cent passed this test; of -year-olds testing below  i q,  per cent passed; of those testing above ,  per cent passed. that is, the test agrees well with the results obtained by the scale as a whole. of "average adults" only  per cent fail; and of "superior adults," fewer than  per cent. as a rule, the higher the grade of intelligence, the fewer the steps necessary for grasping the rule. of the superior adults, only  per cent fail to get the rule as early as the end of the fourth step. the test is little affected by schooling, and apart from differences in intelligence it is little influenced by age. other advantages of the test are the keen interest it always arouses and its independence of language ability. it has been used successfully with immigrant subjects who had been in this country but a few months. we have named the experiment an "induction test." it might be supposed that the solution would ordinarily be arrived at by deduction, or by an _a-priori_ logical analysis of the principle involved. this, however, is rarely the case. not one average adult out of ten reasons out the situation in this purely logical manner. it is ordinarily only after one or more mistakes have been made and have been exposed by the examiner holding up the unfolded paper to view that the correct principle is grasped. in the absence of deductive reasoning the subject must note that each unfolded sheet contains twice as many holes as the previous one, and must infer that folding the paper again will again double the number. the ability tested is the ability to generalize from particulars where the common element of the particulars can be discerned only by the selective action of attention, in this case attention to the fact that each number is the double of its predecessor. xiv,  . giving differences between a president and a king procedure. say: "_there are three main differences between a president and a king; what are they?_" if the subject stops after one difference is given, we urge him on, if possible, until three are given. scoring. the three differences relate to power, tenure, and manner of accession. only these differences are considered correct, and the successful response must include at least two of the three. we disregard crudities of expression and note merely whether the subject has the essential idea. as regards power, for example, any of the following responses are satisfactory: "the king is absolute and the president is not." "the king rules by himself, but the president rules with the help of the people." "kings can have things their own way more than presidents can," etc. it may be objected that the reverse of this is sometimes true, that the king of to-day often has less power than the average president. sometimes subjects mention this fact, and when they do we credit them with this part of the test. as a matter of fact, however, this answer is seldom given. sometimes the subject does not stop until he has given a half-dozen or more differences, and in such cases the first three differences may be trivial and some of the later ones essential. the question then arises whether we should disregard the errors and pass the subject on his later correct responses. the rule in such cases is to ask the subject to pick out the "three main differences." sometimes accession and tenure are given in the form of a single contrast, as: "the president is elected, but the king inherits his throne and rules for life." this answer entitles the subject to credit for both accession and tenure, the contrast as regards tenure being plainly implied. unsatisfactory contrasts are of many kinds and are often amusing. some of the most common are the following:-- "a king wears a crown." "a king has jewels." "a king sits on a throne." ("a king sets on a thorn" as one feeble-minded boy put it!) "a king lives in a palace." "a king has courtiers." "a king is very dignified." "a king dresses up more." "a president has less pomp and ceremony." "a president is more ready to receive the people." "a king sits on a chair all the time and a president does not." "no differences; it's just names." "a president does not give titles." "a king has a larger salary." "a king has royal blood." "a king is in more danger." "they have a different title." "a king is more cruel." "kings have people beheaded." "a king rules in a monarchy and a president in a republic." "a king rules in a foreign country." "a president is elected and a king fights for his office." "a president appoints governors and a king does not." "a president lets the lawyers make the laws." "everybody works for a king." it is surprising to see how often trivial differences like the above are given. about thirty "average adults" out of a hundred, including high-school students, give at least one unsatisfactory contrast. the test has been criticized as depending too much on schooling. the criticism is to a certain extent valid when the test is used with young subjects, say of  or   years. it is not valid, however, if the use of the test is confined to older subjects. with the latter, it is not a test of knowledge, but of the discriminative capacity to deal with knowledge already in the possession of the subject. it would be difficult to find an adult, not actually feeble-minded, who is ignorant of the facts called for: that the king inherits his throne, while the president is elected; that the tenure of the king is for life, and that of the president for a term of years; that kings ordinarily have, or are supposed to have, more power. even the relatively stupid adult knows this; but he also knows that kings are different from presidents in having crowns, thrones, palaces, robes, courtiers, larger pay, etc., and he makes no discrimination as regards the relative importance of these differences. the test is psychologically related to that of giving differences in year vii and to the two tests of finding similarities; but it differs from these in requiring a comparison based on fundamental rather than accidental distinctions. the idea is good and should be worked out in additional tests of the same type. the test first appeared in the binet revised scale of . kuhlmann omits it, and besides our own there are few statistics bearing on it. our results show that if two essential differences are required, the test belongs where we have placed it, but that if only one essential difference is required, the test is easy enough for year xii. xiv,  . problem questions procedure. say to the subject: "_listen, and see if you can understand what i read._" then read the following three problems, rather slowly and with expression, pausing after each long enough for the subject to find an answer:-- (a) "_a man who was walking in the woods near a city stopped suddenly, very much frightened, and then ran to the nearest policeman, saying that he had just seen hanging from the limb of a tree a ... a what?_" (b) "_my neighbor has been having queer visitors. first a doctor came to his house, then a lawyer, then a minister (preacher or priest). what do you think happened there?_" (c) "_an indian who had come to town for the first time in his life saw a white man riding along the street. as the white man rode by, the indian said--'the white man is lazy; he walks sitting down.' what was the white man riding on that caused the indian to say, 'he walks sitting down'?_" do not ask questions calculated to draw out the correct response, but wait in silence for the subject's spontaneous answer. it is permissible, however, to re-read the passage if the subject requests it. scoring. _two responses out of three must be satisfactory._ the following explanations and examples will make clear the requirements of the test:-- (a) _what the man saw hanging_ _satisfactory._ the only correct answer for the first is "a man who had hung himself" (or who had committed suicide, been hanged, etc.). we may also pass the following answer: "dead branches that looked like a man hanging." a good many subjects answer simply, "a man." this answer cannot be scored because of the impossibility of knowing what is in the subject's mind, and in such cases it is always necessary to say: "_explain what you mean._" the answer to this interrogation always enables us to score the response. _unsatisfactory._ there is an endless variety of failures: "a snake," "a monkey," "a robber," or "a tramp" being the most common. others include such answers as "a bear," "a tiger," "a wild cat," "a cat," "a bird," "an eagle," "a bird's nest," "a hornet's nest," "a leaf," "a swing," "a boy in a swing," "a basket of flowers," "an egg," "a ghost," "a white sheet," "clothes," "a purse," etc. (b) _my neighbor_ _satisfactory._ the expected answer is "a death," "some one has died," etc. we must always check up this response, however, by asking what the lawyer came for, and this must also be answered correctly. while it is expected that the subject will understand that the doctor came to attend a sick person, the lawyer to make his will, and the minister to preach the funeral, there are a few other ingenious interpretations which pass as satisfactory. for example, "a man got hurt in an accident; the doctor came to make him well, the lawyer to see about damages, and then he died and the preacher came for the funeral." or, "a man died, the lawyer came to help the widow settle the estate and the preacher came for the funeral." we can hardly expect the -year-old child to know that it is not the custom to settle an estate until after the funeral. the following excellent response was given by an enlightened young eugenist: "a marriage; the doctor came to examine them and see if they were fit to marry, the lawyer to arrange the marriage settlement, and the minister to marry them." the following logical responses occurred once each: "a murder. the doctor came to examine the body, the lawyer to get evidence, and the preacher to preach the funeral." "an unmarried girl has given birth to a child. the lawyer was employed to get the man to marry her and then the preacher came to perform the wedding ceremony." perhaps some will consider this interpretation too far-fetched to pass. but it is perfectly logical and, unfortunately, represents an occurrence which is not so very rare. if an incorrect answer is first given and then corrected, the correction is accepted. _unsatisfactory._ the failures again are quite varied, but are most frequently due to failure to understand the lawyer's mission. of tabulated failures, are accounted for in this way, while only are due to inability to state the part played by the minister. the most common incorrect responses are: "a baby born" (accounting for out of failures); "a divorce" (very common with the children tested by dr. ordahl, at reno, nevada!); "a marriage"; "a divorce and a remarriage"; "a dinner"; "an entertainment"; "some friends came to chat," etc. in  failures out of , marriage was incorrectly connected with a will, a divorce, the death of a child, etc. the following are not bad, but hardly deserve to pass: "sickness and trouble; the lawyer and minister came to help him out of trouble." or, "somebody was sick; the lawyer wanted his money and the minister came to see how he was." a few present a still more logical interpretation, but so far-fetched that it is doubtful whether they should count as passes; for example: "a man and his wife had a fight. one got hurt and had to have the doctor, then they had a lawyer to get them divorced, then the minister came to marry one of them." again, "some one is dying and is getting married and making his will before he dies." (c) _what the man was riding on_ the only correct response is "bicycle." the most common error is _horse_ (or _donkey_), accounting for out of tabulated failures. vehicles, like _wagon_, _buggy_, _automobile_, or _street car_, were mentioned in out of failures. bizarre replies are: "a cripple in a wheel chair"; "a person riding on some one's back," etc. remarks. the experiment is a form of the completion test. elements of a situation are given, out of which the entire situation is to be constructed. this phase of intelligence has already been discussed.[ ] [ ] see ix,  , and xii,  . while it is generally admitted that the underlying idea of this test is good, some have criticized binet's selection of problems. meumann thinks the lawyer element of the second is so unfamiliar to children as to render that part of the test unfair. several "armchair" critics have mentioned the danger of nervous shock from the first problem. bobertag throws out the test entirely and substitutes a completion test modeled after that of ebbinghaus. our own results are altogether favorable to the test. if it is used in year xiv, meumann's objection hardly holds, for american children of that age do ordinarily know something about making wills. as for the danger of shock from the first problem, we have never once found the slightest evidence of this much-feared result. the subject always understands that the situation depicted is hypothetical, and so answers either in a matter-of-fact manner or with a laugh. the bicycle problem is our own invention. binet used the other two and required both to be answered correctly. the test was located in year xii of the scale, and in year xv of the revision. goddard and kuhlmann retain it in the original location. the stanford results of , , , and agree in showing the test too difficult for year xii, even when only two out of three correct responses are required. if the original form of the experiment is used, it is exceedingly difficult for year xv. as here given it fits well at year xiv. xiv,  . arithmetical reasoning procedure. the following problems, printed in clear type, are shown one at a time to the subject, who reads each problem aloud and (with the printed problem still before him) finds the answer without the use of pencil or paper. (a) _if a man's salary is $ a week and he spends $ a week, how long will it take him to save $ ?_ (b) _if  pencils cost  cents, how many pencils can you buy for  cents?_ (c) _at  cents a yard, how much will  feet of cloth cost?_ only one minute is allowed for each problem, but nothing is said about hurrying. while one problem is being solved, the others should be hidden from view. it is not permissible, if the subject gives an incorrect answer, to ask him to solve the problem again. the following exception, however, is made to this rule: if the answer given to the third problem indicates that the word _yard_ has been read as _feet_, the subject is asked to read the problem through again carefully (aloud) and to tell how he solved it. no further help of any kind may be given. scoring. _two of the three_ problems must be solved correctly within the minute allotted to each. no credit is allowed for correct method if the answer is wrong. remarks. we have selected these problems from the list used by bonser in his _study of the reasoning ability of children in the fourth, fifth, and sixth school grades_.[ ] [ ] columbia university contributions to education, no.  , . our tests of "at age" children between  and   years reveal the surprising fact that the test as here used and scored is not passed by much over half of the children of any age in the grades below the high-school age. of the high-school pupils  per cent failed to pass,  per cent of ordinarily successful business men (!), and  per cent of knollin's unemployed men testing up to the "average adult" level. to find average intelligence cutting such a sorry figure raises the question whether the ancient definition of man as "the rational animal" is justified by the facts. the truth is, _average_ intelligence does not do a great deal of abstract, logical reasoning, and the little it does is done usually under the whip of necessity. at first thought these problems will doubtless appear to the reader to be mere tests of schooling. it is true, of course, that in solving them the subject makes use of knowledge which is ordinarily obtained in school; but this knowledge (that is, knowledge of reading and of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) is possessed by practically all adults who are not feeble-minded, and by many who are. success, therefore, depends upon the ability to apply this knowledge readily and accurately to the problems given--precisely the kind of ability in which a deficiency cannot be made good by school training. we can teach even morons how to read problems and how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide with a fair degree of accuracy; the trouble comes when they try to decide which of these processes the problem calls for. this may require intelligence of high or low order, according to the difficulty of the problem. as for the present test, we have shown that almost totally unschooled men of "average adult" intelligence pass this test as frequently as high-school seniors of the same mental level. xiv,  . reversing hands of clock procedure. say to the subject: "_suppose it is six twenty-two o'clock, that is, twenty-two minutes after six; can you see in your mind where the large hand would be, and where the small hand would be?_" subjects of - to -year intelligence practically always answer this in the affirmative. then continue: "_now, suppose the two hands of the clock were to trade places, so that the large hand takes the place where the small hand was, and the small hand takes the place where the large hand was. what time would it then be?_" repeat the test with the hands at . (  minutes after ), and again with the hands at . (  minutes before ). the subject is not allowed to look at a clock or watch, or to aid himself by drawing, but must work out the problem mentally. as a rule the answer is given within a few seconds or not at all. if an answer is not forthcoming within two minutes the score is failure. scoring. the test is passed if _two of the three_ problems are solved within the following range of accuracy: the first solution is considered correct if the answer falls between . and . , inclusive; the second if the answer falls between . and . , and the third if the answer falls between . and . . remarks. it appears that success in the test chiefly depends upon voluntary control over constructive visual imagery. weakness of visual imagery may account for the failure of a considerable percentage of adults to pass the test. visual imagery, however, is not absolutely necessary to success. one -year-old prodigy, who had -year intelligence, arrived in forty seconds at a strictly mathematical solution for the second problem, as follows: "if it is . , and the hands trade places, then the little hand has gone about one fourth of the distance from  o'clock to  o'clock. one fourth of  minutes is  minutes, and so the time would be  minutes after  o'clock." such a solution is certainly possible by the use of verbal imagery of any type. the test shows a high correlation with mental age, but more than most others it is subject to the influence of cribbing. for this reason, other positions of the clock hands should be tried out for the purpose of finding substitute experiments of equal difficulty. until such experiments have been made, it will be necessary to confine the experiment to the three positions here presented. schooling seems to have no influence whatever on the percentage of passes. this test was first used by binet in , but was not included in either the or series. goddard and kuhlmann both include the test in their revisions, placing it in year xv. they give only two problems (our _a_ and _c_) and require that both be answered correctly. neither goddard nor kuhlmann, however, indicates the degree of error permitted. something depends upon original position of the hands. binet used . and . . for some reason the . arrangement is much more difficult than either . or . , yielding almost twice as many failures as either of the other positions. xiv, alternative tests: repeating seven digits this time, as in year x, only two series are given, one of which must be repeated without error. the two series are: - - - - - - and - - - - - - . note that in none of the tests of repeating digits is it permissible to warn the subject of the number to be given. remarks. binet originally placed this test in year xii, giving three trials, but later moved it to year xv. goddard and kuhlmann retain it in year xii. our data show that when three trials are given the test is too easy for year xiv, but that it fits this age when only two trials are allowed; that after the age of  or   years memory for relatively meaningless material, like digits or nonsense syllables, improves but little; and that above this level it does not correlate very closely with intelligence. chapter xix instructions for "average adult" average adult, : vocabulary (sixty-five definitions, ,  words) procedure and scoring, as in previous vocabulary tests.[ ] at the average adult level sixty-five words should be correctly defined. [ ] see viii,  . average adult, : interpretation of fables (score  ) procedure. as in year xii, test  . use the same fables. scoring. the method of scoring is the same as for xii, but the total score must be  points to satisfy the requirements at this level. remarks. for discussion of test, see xii,  . average adult, : differences between abstract terms procedure. say: _what is the difference between_:-- (a) _laziness and idleness?_ (b) _evolution and revolution?_ (c) _poverty and misery?_ (d) _character and reputation?_ scoring. _three correct contrasting definitions out of four_ are necessary for a pass. it is not sufficient merely to give a correct meaning for each word of a pair; the subject must point out a difference between the two words so as to make a real contrast. for example, if the subject defines _evolution_ as a "growth" or "gradual change," and _revolution_ as the turning of a wheel on its axis, the experimenter should say: "_yes, but i want you to tell me the difference between evolution and revolution._" if the contrast is not then forthcoming the response is marked _minus_. the following are sample definitions which may be considered acceptable:-- (a) _laziness and idleness._ "it is laziness if you won't work, and idleness if you are willing to work but haven't any job." "lots of men are idle who are not lazy and would like to work if they had something to do." "laziness means you don't want to work; idleness means you are not doing anything just now." "idle people may be lazy, or they may just happen to be out of a job." "it is laziness when you don't like to work, and idleness when you are not working." "an idle person might be willing to work; a lazy man won't work." "laziness comes from within; idleness may be forced upon one." "laziness is aversion to activity; idleness is simply the state of inactivity." "laziness is idleness from choice or preference; idleness means doing nothing." the essential contrast, accordingly, is that _laziness refers to unwillingness to work; idleness to the mere fact of inactivity_. this contrast must be expressed, however clumsily. (b) _evolution and revolution._ "evolution is a gradual change; revolution is a sudden change." "evolution is natural development; revolution is sudden upheaval." "evolution means an unfolding or development; revolution means a complete upsetting of everything." "evolution is the gradual development of a country or government; revolution is a quick change of government." "evolution takes place by natural force; a revolution is caused by an outside force." "evolution is growth; revolution is a quick change from existing conditions." "evolution is a natural change; revolution is a violent change." "evolution is growth step by step; revolution is more sudden and radical in its action." "evolution is a change brought about by peaceful development, while revolution is brought about by an uprising." the essential distinction, accordingly, is that _evolution means a gradual, natural, or slow change, while revolution means a sudden, forced, or violent change_. non-contrasting definitions, even when the individual terms are defined correctly, are not satisfactory. (c) _poverty and misery._ "poverty is when you are poor; misery means suffering." "only the poor are in poverty, but everybody can be miserable." "poverty is the lowest stage of poorness; misery means pain." "the poor are not always miserable, and the rich are miserable sometimes." "poverty means to be in want; misery comes from any kind of suffering or anguish." "the poor are in poverty; the sick are in misery." "poverty is the condition of being very poor financially; misery is a feeling which any class of people can have." "one who is poor is in poverty; one who is wretched or doesn't enjoy life is in misery." "poverty comes from lack of money; misery, from lack of happiness or comfort." "misery means distress. it can come from poverty or many other things." (d) _character and reputation._ "character is what you are; reputation is what people say about you." "you have character if you are honest; but you might be honest and still have a bad reputation among people who misjudge you." "character is your real self; reputation is the opinion people have about you." "your character depends upon yourself; reputation depends on what others think of you." "character means your real morals; reputation is the way you are known in the world." "a man has a good character if he would not do evil; but a man may have a good reputation and still have a bad character." a little practice and a good deal of discrimination are necessary for the correct grading of responses to this test. subjects are often so clumsy in expression that their responses are anything but clear. it is then necessary to ask them to explain what they mean. further questioning, however, is not permissible. for uniformity in scoring it is necessary to bear in mind that the definitions given must, in order to be satisfactory, express the essential distinction between the two words. remarks. what we have said regarding the psychological significance of test  , year xii, applies equally well here. the test on the whole is a valuable one. our statistics show that it is not, as some critics have thought, mainly a test of schooling. the main criticism to be made is that it imposes a somewhat difficult task upon the power of language expression. for this reason it is necessary in scoring to disregard clumsiness of expression and to look only to the essential correctness or incorrectness of the thought. this test first appeared in year xiii of binet's scale. the terms used were "happiness and honor"; "evolution and revolution"; "event and advent"; "poverty and misery"; "pride and pretension." in the revision, "happiness and honor" and "pride and pretension" were dropped, and the other three pairs were moved up to the adult group, two out of three successes being required for a pass. kuhlmann places it in year xv, using "happiness and honor" instead of our "character and reputation," and requires three successes out of five. average adult, : problem of the enclosed boxes procedure. show the subject a cardboard box about one inch on a side. say: "_you see this box; it has two smaller boxes inside of it, and each one of the smaller boxes contains a little tiny box. how many boxes are there altogether, counting the big one?_" to be sure that the subject understands repeat the statement of the problem: "_first the large box, then two smaller ones, and each of the smaller ones contains a little tiny box._" record the response, and, showing another box, say: "_this box has two smaller boxes inside, and each of the smaller boxes contains two tiny boxes. how many altogether? remember, first the large box, then two smaller ones, and each smaller one contains two tiny boxes._" the third problem, which is given in the same way, states that there are _three_ smaller boxes, each of which contains _three_ tiny boxes. in the fourth problem there are _four_ smaller boxes, each containing _four_ tiny boxes. the problem must be given orally, and the solution must be found without the aid of pencil or paper. only one half-minute is allowed for each problem. note that each problem is stated twice. a correction is permitted, provided it is offered spontaneously and does not seem to be the result of guessing. guessing can be checked up by asking the subject to explain the solution. scoring. _three of the four_ problems must be solved correctly within the half-minute allotted to each. remarks. success depends, in the first place, upon ability to comprehend the statement of the problem and to hold its conditions in mind. subjects much below the -year level of intelligence are often unable to do this. granting that the problem has been comprehended, success seems to depend chiefly upon the facility with which the constructive imagination manipulates concrete visual imagery. in this respect it resembles the problem of reversing the hands of a clock. with some subjects, however, verbal imagery alone is operative. tactual imagery would, of course, serve the purpose as well. this is as good a place as any to emphasize the fact that the introspective study of mental imagery has little to contribute to the measurement of intelligence. intelligence tests are concerned with the total result of a thought process, rather than with the imagery supports of that process. thought may be carried on almost equally well by various kinds of imagery. as galton showed, a person can be taught to carry on arithmetical processes by the use of smell imagery. the kind of imagery employed is the product of slight, innate preferences complicated by the more or less accidental effects of habit. we may say that imagery is to thinking what scaffolding is to architecture. the important thing is the completed building rather than the nature of the scaffolding employed in erecting it. no one thinks of blaming the ill construction of a building upon the kind of scaffolding used, for if the architect and builder are competent satisfactory scaffolding will be found. just as little are deficiencies or peculiarities of imagery the real cause of low-order intelligence. we cannot increase intelligence by formal drill in the use of supposedly important kinds of mental imagery, any more than we can transform a plain carpenter into a michael angelo by instructing him in the use of scaffolding materials such as were employed in the construction of st. peter's cathedral. this test is of our own invention and has been brought to its present form only after a good deal of preliminary experimentation. it correlates fairly well with mental age as determined by the scale as a whole. it was passed by  per cent of high-school pupils and by  per cent of unschooled business men. success in it is thus seen not to depend upon schooling. average adult, : repeating six digits reversed the series used are: - - - - - ; - - - - - ; and - - - - - . procedure and scoring, as in year vii, alternative  . remarks. the test is passed by approximately half of "average adults" and by three fourths of "superior adults." it shows no effect of schooling, the uneducated business men even surpassing our high-school students. for the higher levels of intelligence, especially, the test is superior to that of repeating digits in the direct order. it is less mechanical and makes heavier demands upon higher intelligence. average adult, : using a code procedure. show the subject the code given on the accompanying form. say: "_see these diagrams here. look and you will see that they contain all the letters of the alphabet. now, examine the arrangement of the letters. they go_ (pointing) _a b c, d e f, g h i, j k l, m n o, p q r, s t u v, w x y z. you see the letters in the first two diagrams are arranged in the up-and-down order_ (pointing again), _and the letters in the other two diagrams run in just the opposite way from the hands of a clock_ (pointing). _look again and you will see that the second diagram is drawn just like the first, except that each letter has a dot with it, and that the last diagram is like the third except that here, also, each letter has a dot. now, all of this represents a code; that is, a secret language. it is a real code, one that was used in the civil war for sending secret messages. this is the way it works: we draw the lines which hold a letter, but leave out the letter. here, for example, is the way we would write 'spy?'_" then write the word _spy_, pointing out carefully where each letter comes from, and emphasizing the fact that the dot must be used in addition to the lines in writing any letter in the second or the fourth diagram. illustrate also with _war_. then add: "_i am going to have you write something for me; remember now, how the letters go, first_ (pointing, as before) _a b c, d e f, g h i, then j k l, m n o, p q r, then s t u v, then w x y z. and don't forget the dots for the letters in this diagram and this one_" (pointing). at this point, take away the diagrams and tell the subject to write the words _come quickly_. say nothing about hurrying. the subject is given a pencil, but is allowed to draw only the symbols for the words _come quickly_. he is not permitted to reproduce the entire code and then to copy the code letters from his reproduction. scoring. the test is passed if the words are written in _six minutes and without more than two errors_. omission of a dot counts as only a half error. remarks. it is not easy to analyze the mental functions which contribute to success in the code test. contrary to what might be supposed, success does not necessarily depend upon getting and retaining a visual picture of the diagrams. kinæsthetic imagery will answer the purpose just as well, or the original visual impression may even be translated at once into auditory-verbal imagery and remembered as such. the significance of the test must be expressed in other terms than the kind of imagery it may happen to bring into play. healy and fernald describe the task of writing a code sentence without copy as one which requires "close attention and steadiness of purpose." they also emphasize the fact that the attention must be directed inward, since there is no object of interest before the senses and since no special stimulus to attention is offered by the experimenter. observations we have made on subjects during the test confirm this view as to the factors involved. that inability to remember the code as a whole is not a common cause of failure is shown by the fact that subjects above -year intelligence who have failed on the test are nearly always able to reproduce the diagrams and insert the letters in their proper places. to give the code form of a given letter without copy, however, makes a much heavier demand on attention. nearly all subjects find it necessary to trace the code form, in imagination, from the beginning up to each letter whose code form is sought. subjects of superior intelligence, however, sometimes hit upon the device of remembering the position of the individual key letters e.g. (the first letter of each figure) from which, as a base, any desired letter form may be quickly sought out. the test correlates well with mental age, but for some reason not apparent it is passed by a larger percentage of high-school pupils than unschooled adults of the same mental level. the code test was first described by healy and fernald in their "tests for practical mental classification."[ ] the authors gave no data, however, which would indicate the mental level to which the test belongs. dr. goddard incorporated it in year xv of his revision of the binet scale, but also fails to give statistics. the location given the test in the stanford revision is based on tests of nearly  individuals ranging from a mental level of  years to that of "superior adult." it appears that the test is considerably more difficult than most had thought it to be. [ ] _psychological review monographs_ ( ), vol. xiii, no.  , p.  . average adult, alternative test  : repeating twenty-eight syllables the sentences for this test are:-- (a) _walter likes very much to go on visits to his grandmother, because she always tells him many funny stories._ (b) _yesterday i saw a pretty little dog in the street. it had curly brown hair, short legs, and a long tail._ procedure. exactly as in vi,  . emphasize that the sentence must be repeated without a single change of any sort. get attention before giving each sentence. scoring. passed _if one sentence is repeated without a single error_. in vi and x we scored the response as satisfactory if one sentence was repeated without error, or if two were repeated with not more than one error each. remarks. the test of repeating sentences is not as satisfactory in the higher intelligence levels as in the lower. it is too mechanical to tax very heavily the higher thought processes. it does, however, have a certain correlation with intelligence. contrary to what one would have expected, uneducated adults of "average adult" intelligence surpassed our high-school students of the same mental level. binet located this test in year xii of the series, but shifted it to year xv in . the american versions of the binet scale have usually retained it in year xii, though goddard admits that the sentences are somewhat too difficult for that year. kuhlmann puts the test in year xii, but reduces the sentences to twenty-four syllables and permits one re-reading. we give only two trials and our sentences are considerably more difficult. with the procedure and scoring we have used, the test is rather easy for the "average adult" group, but a little too hard for year xiv. average adult, alternative test  : comprehension of physical relations (a) _problem regarding the path of a cannon ball_ procedure. draw on a piece of paper a horizontal line six or eight inches long. above it, an inch or two, draw a short horizontal line about an inch long and parallel to the first. tell the subject that the long line represents the perfectly level ground of a field, and that the short line represents a cannon. explain that the cannon is "_pointed horizontally (on a level) and is fired across this perfectly level field_." after it is clear that these conditions of the problem are comprehended, we add: "_now, suppose that this cannon is fired off and that the ball comes to the ground at this point here_ (pointing to the farther end of the line which represents the field). _take this pencil and draw a line which will show what path the cannon ball will take from the time it leaves the mouth of the cannon till it strikes the ground._" scoring. there are four types of response: ( ) a straight diagonal line is drawn from the cannon's mouth to the point where the ball strikes. ( ) a straight line is drawn from the cannon's mouth running horizontally until almost directly over the goal, at which point the line drops almost or quite vertically. ( ) the path from the cannon's mouth first rises considerably from the horizontal, at an angle perhaps of between ten to forty-five degrees, and finally describes a gradual curve downward to the goal. ( ) the line begins almost on a level and drops more rapidly toward the end of its course. only the last is satisfactory. of course, nothing like a mathematically accurate solution of the problem is expected. it is sufficient if the response belongs to the fourth type above instead of being absurd, as the other types described are. any one who has ever thrown stones should have the data for such an approximate solution. not a day of schooling is necessary. (b) _problem as to the weight of a fish in water_ procedure. say to the subject: "_you know, of course, that water holds up a fish that is placed in it. well, here is a problem. suppose we have a bucket which is partly full of water. we place the bucket on the scales and find that with the water in it it weighs exactly  pounds. then we put a -pound fish into the bucket of water. now, what will the whole thing weigh?_" scoring. many subjects even as low as - or -year intelligence will answer promptly, "why,  pounds and  pounds makes  pounds, of course." but this is not sufficient. we proceed to ask, with serious demeanor: "_how can this be correct, since the water itself holds up the fish?_" the young subject who has answered so glibly now laughs sheepishly and apologizes for his error, saying that he answered without thinking, etc. this response is scored failure without further questioning. other subjects, mostly above the -year level, adhere to the answer "  pounds," however strongly we urge the argument about the water holding up the fish. in response to our question, "_how can that be the case?_" it is sufficient if the subject replies that "the weight is there just the same; the scales have to hold up the bucket and the bucket has to hold up the water," or words to that effect. only some such response as this is satisfactory. if the subject keeps changing his answer or says that he _thinks_ the weight would be  pounds, but is not certain, the score is failure. (c) _difficulty of hitting a distant mark_ procedure. say to the subject: "_you know, do you not, what it means when they say a gun 'carries  yards'? it means that the bullet goes that far before it drops to amount to anything._" all boys and most girls more than a dozen years old understand this readily. if the subject does not understand, we explain again what it means for a gun "to carry" a given distance. when this part is clear, we proceed as follows: "_now, suppose a man is shooting at a mark about the size of a quart can. his rifle carries perfectly more than  yards. with such a gun is it any harder to hit the mark at  yards than it is at  yards?_" after the response is given, we ask the subject to explain. scoring. simply to say that it would be easier at  yards is not sufficient, nor can we pass the response which merely states that it is "easier to aim" at  yards. the correct principle must be given, one which shows the subject has appreciated the fact that a small deviation from the "bull's-eye" at  yards, due to incorrect aim, becomes a larger deviation at  yards. however, the subject is not required to know that the deviation at  yards is exactly twice as great as at  yards. a certain amount of questioning is often necessary before we can decide whether the subject has the correct principle in mind. scoring the entire test. _two of the three problems_ must be solved in such a way as to satisfy the requirements above set forth. remarks. these problems were devised by the writer. they yield interesting results, when properly given, but are not without their faults. sometimes a very superior subject fails, while occasionally an inferior subject unexpectedly succeeds. on the whole, however the test correlates fairly well with mental age. at the -year level less than  per cent pass; of "average adults," from  to   per cent are successful. few "superior adults" fail. the test as here given is little influenced by the formal instruction given in the grades or the high school. in fact,  per cent of our uneducated business men, as contrasted with  per cent of high-school juniors and seniors, passed the test. success probably depends in the main upon previous interest in physical relationships and upon the ability to understand phenomena of this kind which the subject has had opportunity to observe. it would be interesting to standardize a longer series of problems designed to test a subject's comprehension of common physical relationships. in the first few months of life a normal child learns that objects unsupported fall to the ground. later he learns that fire burns; that birds fly in the air; that fish do not sink in the water; that water does not run uphill; that it is easy to lift a leg or arm as one lies prone in the water; that mud is thrown from a rotating wheel (and always in the same direction); that a stone which is flying through the air swiftly is more dangerous than one which is moving slowly; that it is more dangerous to be run over by a train than by a buggy; that it is hard to run against a strong wind; that cyclones blow down trees and houses; that a rapidly moving train creates a stronger wind than a slower train; that a feather falls through the air with less speed than a stone; that a falling object gains momentum; that a heavy moving object is harder to stop than a light object moving at the same rate; that freezing water bursts pipes; that sounds sometimes give echoes; that rainbows cannot be approached; that a lamp seems dim by daylight; that by day the stars are not visible and the moon only barely visible; that the headlights of an approaching automobile or train are blinding; that if the room in which we are reading is badly lighted we must hold the book nearer to the eyes; that running makes the heart beat faster and increases the rate of breathing; that if we are cold we can get warm by running; that whirling rapidly makes us dizzy; that heat or exercise will cause perspiration, etc. although the causes of some of these phenomena are not understood even by intelligent adults without some instruction, the facts themselves are learned by the normal individual from his own experience. the higher the mental level and the greater the curiosity, the more observant one is about such matters and the more one learns. many items of knowledge such as we have mentioned could and should be standardized for various mental levels. in devising tests of this kind we should, of course, have to look out for the influences of formal instruction. chapter xx instructions for "superior adult" superior adult, : vocabulary (seventy-five definitions, ,  words) procedure and scoring, as in previous vocabulary tests. at the "superior adult" level seventy-five words should be known. the test is passed by only one third of those at the "average adult" level, but by about  per cent of "superior adults." ability to pass the test is relatively independent of the number of years the subject has attended school, our business men showing even a higher percentage of passes than high-school pupils. superior adult, : binet's paper-cutting test procedure. take a piece of paper about six inches square and say: "_watch carefully what i do. see, i fold the paper this way_ (folding it once over in the middle), _then i fold it this way_ (folding it again in the middle, but at right angles to the first fold). _now, i will cut out a notch right here_" (indicating). at this point take scissors and cut out a small notch from the middle of the side which presents but one edge. throw the fragment which has been cut out into the waste-basket or under the table. leave the folded paper exposed to view, but pressed flat against the table. then give the subject a pencil and a second sheet of paper like the one already used and say: "_take this piece of paper and make a drawing to show how the other sheet of paper would look if it were unfolded. draw lines to show the creases in the paper and show what results from the cutting._" the subject is not permitted to fold the second sheet, but must solve the problem by the imagination unaided. note that we do not say, "_draw the holes_," as this would inform the subject that more than one hole is expected. scoring. the test is passed _if the creases in the paper are properly represented, if the holes are drawn in the correct number, and if they are located correctly_, that is, both on the same crease and each about halfway between the center of the paper and the side. the shape of the holes is disregarded. failure may be due to error as regards the creases or the number and location of the holes, or it may involve any combination of the above errors. remarks. success seems to depend upon constructive visual imagination. the subject must first be able to construct in imagination the creases which result from the folding, and secondly, to picture the effects of the cutting as regards number of holes and their location. it appears that a solution is seldom arrived at, even in the case of college students, by logical mathematical thinking. our unschooled subjects even succeeded somewhat better than high-school and college students of the same mental level. binet placed this test in year xiii of the scale, but shifted it to the adult group in the revision. goddard retains it in the adult group, while kuhlmann places it in year xv. there have also been certain variations in the procedure employed. as given in the stanford revision the test is passed by hardly any subjects below the -year level, but by about one third of "average adults" and by the large majority of "superior adults." superior adult, : repeating eight digits procedure and scoring, the same as in previous tests with digits reversed. the series used are: - - - - - - - ; - - - - - - - ; and - - - - - - - . guard against rhythm and grouping in reading the digits and do not give warning as to the number to be given. the test is passed by about one third of "average adults" and by over two thirds of "superior adults." the test shows no marked difference between educated and uneducated subjects of the same mental level. superior adult, : repeating thought of passage procedure. say: "_i am going to read a little selection of about six or eight lines. when i am through i will ask you to repeat as much of it as you can. it doesn't make any difference whether you remember the exact words or not, but you must listen carefully so that you can tell me everything it says._" then read the following selections, pausing after each for the subject's report, which should be recorded _verbatim_:-- (a) "_tests such as we are now making are of value both for the advancement of science and for the information of the person who is tested. it is important for science to learn how people differ and on what factors these differences depend. if we can separate the influence of heredity from the influence of environment, we may be able to apply our knowledge so as to guide human development. we may thus in some cases correct defects and develop abilities which we might otherwise neglect._" (b) "_many opinions have been given on the value of life. some call it good, others call it bad. it would be nearer correct to say that it is mediocre; for on the one hand, our happiness is never as great as we should like, and on the other hand, our misfortunes are never as great as our enemies would wish for us. it is this mediocrity of life which prevents it from being radically unjust._" sometimes the subject hesitates to begin, thinking, in spite of our wording of the instructions, that a perfect reproduction is expected. others fall into the opposite misunderstanding and think that they are prohibited from using the words of the text and must give the thought entirely in their own language. in cases of hesitation we should urge the subject a little and remind him that he is to express the thought of the selection in whatever way he prefers; that the main thing is to tell what the selection says. scoring. the test is passed if the subject is able to repeat in reasonably consecutive order the main thoughts of at least one of the selections. neither elegance of expression nor _verbatim_ repetition is expected. we merely want to know whether the leading thoughts in the selection have been grasped and remembered. all grades of accuracy are found, both in the comprehension of the selection and in the recall, and it is not always easy to draw the line between satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses. the following sample performances will serve as a guide:-- _selection (a)_ _satisfactory._ "the tests which we are making are given for the advancement of science and for the information of the person tested. by scientific means we will be able to separate characteristics derived from heredity and environment and to treat each class separately. by doing so we can more accurately correct defects." "tests like these are for two purposes. first to develop a science, and second to apply it to the person to help him. the tests are to find out how you differ from another and to measure the difference between your heredity and environment." "these tests are given to see if we can separate heredity and environment and to see if we can find out how one person differs from another. we can then correct these differences and teach people more effectively." "the tests that we are now making are valuable along both scientific and personal lines. by using them it can be found out where a person is weak and where he is strong. we can then strengthen his weak points and remedy some things that would otherwise be neglected. they are of great benefit to science and to the person concerned." "tests such as we are now making are of great importance because they aim to show in what respects we differ from others and why, and if they do this they will be able to guide us into the right channel and bring success instead of failure." _unsatisfactory._ "tests such as we are now making are of value both for the advancement of science and for the information of the person interested. it is necessary to know this." "such tests as we are now making show about the human mind and show in what channels we are fitted. it is the testing of each individual between his effects of inheritancy and environment." "it is very interesting for us to study science for two reasons; first, to test our mental ability, and second for the further development of science." "tests such as we are now making help in two ways; it helps the scientists and it gives information to the people." "tests are being given to pupils to-day to better them and to aid science for generations to come. if each person knows exactly his own beliefs and ideas and faults he can find out exactly what kind of work he is fitted for by heredity. the tests show that environment doesn't count, for if you are all right you will get along anyway." (note invention.) _selection (b)_ _satisfactory._ "there are different opinions about life. some call it good and some bad. it would be more correct to say that it is middling, because we are never as happy as we would like to be and we are never as sad as our enemies want us to be." "one hears many judgments about life. some say it is good, while others say it is bad. but it is really neither of the extremes. life is mediocre. we do not have as much good as we desire, nor do we have as much misfortune as others want us to have. nevertheless, we have enough good to keep life from being unjust." "some people have different views of life from others. some say it is bad, others say it is good. it is better to class life as mediocre, as it is never as good as we wish it, and on the other hand, it might be worse." "some people think differently of life. some think it good, some bad, others mediocre, which is nearest correct. it brings unhappiness to us, but not as much as our enemies want us to have." _unsatisfactory._ "some say life is good, some say it is mediocre. even though some say it is mediocre they say it is right." "there are two sides of life. some say it is good while others say it is bad. to some, life is happy and they get all they can out of life. for others life is not happy and therefore they fail to get all there is in life." "one hears many different judgments of life. some call it good, some call it bad. it brings unhappiness and it does not have enough pleasure. it should be better distributed." "there are different opinions of the value of life. some say it is good and some say it is bad. some say it is mediocrity. some think it brings happiness while others do not." "nowadays there is much said about the value of life. some say it is good, while others say it is bad. a person should not have an ill feeling toward the value of life, and he should not be unjust to any one. honesty is the best policy. people who are unjust are more likely to be injured by their enemies." (note invention.) remarks. contrary to what the subject is led to expect, the test is less a test of memory than of ability to comprehend the drift of an abstract passage. a subject who fully grasps the meaning of the selection as it is read is not likely to fail because of poor memory. mere verbal memory improves but little after the age of  or   years, as is shown by the fact that our adults do little better than eighth-grade children in repeating sentences of twenty-eight syllables. on the other hand, adult intelligence is vastly superior in the comprehension and retention of a logically presented group of abstract ideas. there is nothing in which stupid persons cut a poorer figure than in grappling with the abstract. their thinking clings tenaciously to the concrete; their concepts are vague or inaccurate; the interrelations among their concepts are scanty in the extreme; and such poor mental stores as they have are little available for ready use. a few critics have objected to the use of tests demanding abstract thinking, on the ground that abstract thought is a very special aspect of intelligence and that facility in it depends almost entirely on occupational habits and the accidents of education. some have even gone so far as to say that we are not justified, on the basis of any number of such tests, in pronouncing a subject backward or defective. it is supposed that a subject who has no capacity in the use of abstract ideas may nevertheless have excellent intelligence "along other lines." in such cases, it is said, we should not penalize the subject for his failures in handling abstractions, but substitute, instead, tests requiring motor coördination and the manipulation of things, tests in which the supposedly dull child often succeeds fairly well. from the psychological point of view, such a proposal is naïvely unpsychological. it is in the very essence of the higher thought processes to be conceptual and abstract. what the above proposal amounts to is, that if the subject is not capable of the more complex and strictly human type of thinking, we should ignore this fact and estimate his intelligence entirely on the ability he displays to carry on mental operations of a more simple and primitive kind. this would be like asking the physician to ignore the diseased parts of his patient's body and to base his diagnosis on an examination of the organs which are sound! the present test throws light in an interesting way on the integrity of the critical faculty. some subjects are unwilling to extend the report in the least beyond what they know to be approximately correct, while others with defective powers of auto-criticism manufacture a report which draws heavily on the imagination, perhaps continuing in garrulous fashion as long as they can think of anything having the remotest connection with any thought in the selection. we have included, for each selection, one illustration of this type in the sample failures given above. the worst fault of the test is its susceptibility to the influence of schooling. our uneducated adults of even "superior adult" intelligence often fail, while about two thirds of high-school pupils succeed. the unschooled adults have a marked tendency either to give a summary which is inadequate because of its extreme brevity, or else to give a criticism of the thought which the passage contains. this test first appeared in binet's revision, in the adult group. binet used only selection (b), and in a slightly more difficult form than we have given above. goddard gives the test like binet and retains it in the adult group. kuhlmann locates it in year xv, using only selection (a). on the basis of over  tests of adults we find the test too difficult for the "average adult" level, even on the basis of only one success in two trials and when scored on the rather liberal standard above set forth. superior adult, : repeating seven digits reversed procedure and scoring, the same as in previous tests of this kind. the series are: - - - - - - ; - - - - - - ; and - - - - - - . we have collected fewer data on this test than on any of the others, as it was added later to the test series. as far as we have used it we have found few "average adults" who pass, while about half the "superior adults" do so. superior adult, : ingenuity test procedure. problem _a_ is stated as follows:-- _a mother sent her boy to the river and told him to bring back exactly  pints of water. she gave him a -pint vessel and a -pint vessel. show me how the boy can measure out exactly  pints of water, using nothing but these two vessels and not guessing at the amount. you should begin by filling the -pint vessel first. remember, you have a -pint vessel and a -pint vessel and you must bring back exactly  pints._ the problem is given orally, but may be repeated if necessary. the subject is not allowed pencil or paper and is requested to give his solution orally as he works it out. it is then possible to make a complete record of the method employed. the subject is likely to resort to some such method as to "fill the -pint vessel two thirds full," or, "i would mark the inside of the -pint vessel so as to show where  pints come to," etc. we inform the subject that such a method is not allowable; that this would be guessing, since he could not be sure when the -pint vessel was two thirds full (or whether he had marked off his -pint vessel accurately). tell him he must _measure_ out the water without any guesswork. explain also, that it is a fair problem, not a "catch." say nothing about pouring from one vessel to another, but if the subject asks whether this is permissible the answer is "yes." the time limit for each problem is  minutes. if the subject fails on the first problem, we explain the solution in full and then proceed to the next. the second problem is like the first, except that a -pint vessel and a -pint vessel are given, to get  pints, the subject being told to begin by filling the -pint vessel. in the third problem and are given, to get , the instruction being to "begin by filling the -pint vessel." note that in each problem we instruct the subject how to begin. this is necessary in order to secure uniformity of conditions. it is possible to solve all of the problems by beginning with either of the two vessels, but the solution is made very much more difficult if we begin in the direction opposite from that recommended. give no further aid. it is necessary to refrain from comment of every kind. scoring. _two of the three_ problems must be solved correctly within the  minutes allotted to each. remarks. we have called this a test of ingenuity. the subject who is given the problem finds himself involved in a difficulty from which he must extricate himself. means must be found to overcome an obstacle. this requires practical judgement and a certain amount of inventive ingenuity. various possibilities must be explored and either accepted for trial or rejected. if the amount of invention called for seems to the reader inconsiderable, let it be remembered that the important inventions of history have not as a rule had a minerva birth, but instead have developed by successive stages, each involving but a small step in advance. it is unnecessary to emphasize at length the function of invention in the higher thought processes. in one form or another it is present in all intellectual activity; in the creation and use of language, in art, in social adjustments, in religion, and in philosophy, as truly as in the domains of science and practical affairs. certainly this is true if we accept mason's broad definition of invention as including "every change in human activity made designedly and systematically."[ ] from the psychological point of view, perhaps, mason is justified in looking upon the great inventor as "an epitome of the genius of the world." to develop a krag-joergensen from a bow and arrow, a "velvet-tipped" lucifer match from the primitive fire-stick, or a modern piano from the first crude, stringed, musical instrument has involved much the same intellectual processes as have been operative in transforming fetishism and magic into religion and philosophy, or scattered fragments of knowledge into science. [ ] otis t. mason: _the origins of inventions_. (london, .) psychologically, invention depends upon the constructive imagination; that is, upon the ability to abstract from what is immediately present to the senses and to picture new situations with their possibilities and consequences. images are united in order to form new combinations. as we have several times emphasized, the decisive intellectual differences among human beings are not greatly dependent upon mere sense discrimination or native retentiveness. far more important than the raw mass of sense data is the correct shooting together of the sense elements in memory and imagination. this is but another name for invention. it is the synthetic, or apperceptive, activity of the mind that gives the "seven-league boots" to genius. it is, however, a kind of ability which is possessed by all minds to a greater or less degree. any test has its value which gives a clue, as this test does, to the subject's ability in this direction. the test was devised by the writer and used in in a study of the intellectual processes of bright and dull boys, but it was not at that time standardized. it has been found to belong at a much higher mental level than was at first supposed. only an insignificant number pass the test below the mental age of  years, and about two thirds of "average adults" fail. of our "superior adults" somewhat more than  per cent succeed. formal education influences the test little or not at all, the unschooled business men making a somewhat better showing than the high-school students. selected references the following classified lists include only the most important references under each topic. so many investigations have been made with the binet-simon tests in the last few years, and so many articles have been written in evaluation of the method, that a complete bibliography of the subject would require thirty or forty pages. those who desire to make a more thorough study of the literature are referred to the admirable annotated bibliography compiled by samuel c. kohs, and published by warwick & york, baltimore. kohs's bibliography contains  references, and is complete to january  , . binet-simon tests of normal children . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "le développement de l'intelligence chez les enfants"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . exposition of the original scale with results. . binet, a. "nouvelles recherches sur la mesure du niveau intellectuel chez les enfants d'école"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . presents the revision. . bobertag, o. "ueber intelligenzprüfungen (nach der methode von binet und simon)"; in _zeitschrift für angewande psychologie_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - ; and ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . analysis of  cases and criticism of method and results. . dougherty, m. l. "report on the binet-simon tests given to four hundred and eighty-three children in the public schools of kansas city, kansas"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . goddard, h. h. "the binet-simon measuring scale for intelligence, revised"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . hoffman, a. "vergleichende intelligenzprüfungen an vorschülern und volksschülern"; in _zeitschrift für angewande psychologie_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . one hundred and fifty-six subjects. ages seven, nine, and ten. . johnston, katherine l. "binet's method for the measurement of intelligence; some results"; in _journal of experimental pedagogy_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . results of  tests of school children. . kuhlmann, f. "some results of examining public-school children with a revision of the binet-simon tests of intelligence by untrained teachers"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - , and - . . phillips, byron a. "the binet tests applied to colored children"; in _psychological clinic_ ( ), pp.  - . a comparison of colored and white children. . rogers, agnes l., _and_ mcintyre, j. l. "the measurement of intelligence in children by the binet-simon scale"; in _british journal of psychology_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . rowe, e. c. "five hundred forty-seven white and two hundred sixty-eight indian children tested by the binet-simon tests"; in _pedagogical seminary_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . strong, alice c. "three hundred fifty white and colored children measured by the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence"; in _pedagogical seminary_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . terman, l. m., _and_ childs, h. g. "a tentative revision and extension of the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - , - , - , and - . results of  tests of california school-children. . terman, lyman, ordahl, galbreath, _and_ talbert. _the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence._ ( .) detailed analysis of the results secured by testing unselected school-children within two months of a birthday. . weintrob, j. _and_ r. "the influence of environment on mental ability as shown by the binet tests"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - . . winch, w. h. "binet's mental tests: what they are, and what we can do with them"; in _child study_ (london), , , , and . an extended series of articles setting forth results of tests with normal children, and giving valuable criticisms and suggestions. binet-simon tests of the feeble-minded . chotzen, f. "die intelligenzprüfungsmethode von binet-simon bei schwachsinnigen kindern"; in _zeitschrift für angewande psychologie_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . a critical study of the results of  tests. . goddard, h. h. "four hundred feeble-minded children classified by the binet method"; in _pedagogical seminary_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - ; also in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . offers important evidence of the value of the binet-simon method. . kuhlmann, f. "the binet and simon tests of intelligence in grading feeble-minded children"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . analysis of results from  cases. binet-simon tests of delinquents . bluemel, c. s. "binet tests on two hundred juvenile delinquents"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), pp.  - . . goddard, h. h. _the criminal imbecile._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. an analysis of the mentality of three murderers of moron or borderline intelligence. . goddard, h. h. "the responsibility of children in the juvenile court"; in _journal of criminal law and criminology_ (september, ). analysis of  tests of juvenile delinquents. . healy, william. _the individual delinquent._ little, brown & co. ( .)  pages. a textbook on delinquents. gives results of many binet-simon tests. . spaulding, edith r. "the results of mental and physical examination of four hundred women offenders"; in _journal of criminal law and criminology_ ( ), pp.  - . . sullivan, w. c. "la mesure du développement intellectuel chez les jeunes délinquantes"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . williams, j. harold. _a study of delinquent boys._ bulletin no.  , research laboratory of the buckel foundation. ( .)  pages. the stanford revision used. report of over  cases to follow. binet-simon tests of superior children . jeronutti, a. "ricerche psicologiche sperimentali sugli alunni molto intelligenti"; in _lab. di psicol. sperim. della reg. univ. roma_. ( ) out of fifteen hundred school and kindergarten children, ages five to twelve, fourteen were selected by the teachers as the brightest. the binet test showed them to be from one to three years in advance of their chronological ages. . terman, l. m. "the mental hygiene of exceptional children"; in _pedagogical seminary_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . data on  children testing above  i. q. instructions for giving the binet-simon tests . binet, a., _and_ simon, th. _a method of measuring the development of intelligence in young children._ chicago medical book company. ( .)  pages. authorized translation of binet's final instructions for giving the tests. . goddard, h. h. "a measuring scale of intelligence"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . condensed translation of binet's _measuring scale of intelligence_. . goddard, h. h. "the binet-simon measuring scale for intelligence, revised"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . goddard, h. h. "standard method for giving the binet test"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . kuhlmann, f. "a revision of the binet-simon system for measuring the intelligence of children"; monograph supplement of _journal of psycho-asthenics_ (september, ),  pages. . wallin, j. e. w. "a practical guide for the administration of the binet-simon scale for measuring intelligence"; in _the psychological clinic_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . criticisms and evaluations of the binet-simon method . berry, c. s. "a comparison of the binet tests of and "; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . bobertag, o. "ueber intelligenzprüfungen (nach der methode von binet und simon)"; in _zeitschrift für angewande psychologie_. (a, ), vol.  , pp.  - ; (b, ), vol.  , pp.  - . accepts the method and gives valuable suggestions for improvement. . brigham, carl c. "an experimental critique of the binet-simon scale"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - . finds the scale % efficient. . goddard, h. h. "the reliability of the binet-simon measuring scale of intelligence"; in _proceedings of the fourth international congress of school hygiene_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . application of the theory of probability to the results proves the extremely small liability of error. . kohs, samuel c. "the practicability of the binet scale and the question of the borderline case"; in _training school bulletin_ ( ), pp.  - . analysis of cases showing the reliability of the scale. . kuhlmann, f. "binet and simon's system for measuring the intelligence of children"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . finds the method of the greatest value. . kuhlmann, f. "a reply to dr. l. p. ayres's criticism of the binet and simon system for measuring the intelligence of children"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . many of the ayres criticisms are shown to be unfounded. . meumann, e. _vorlesungen zur einführung in die experimentelle pädagogik_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . summary of the literature on binet tests up to . accepts the method but gives suggestions for improvement. this summary and other writings of meumann on the psychology of endowment are reviewed by lewis m. terman in a series of four articles in the _journal of psycho-asthenics_ for . . otis, a. s. "some logical and mathematical aspects of the measurement of intelligence by the binet-simon method"; in _the psychological review_ (april and june, ). considers the binet-simon method imperfect from the mathematical point of view. . schmitt, clara. _standardization of tests for defective children._ psychological monographs ( ), no.  ,  pages. contains (pp.  - ) a discussion of the "fallacies and inadequacies of the binet-simon series." most of the criticisms here given are either superficial or unfair, some of them apparently being due to a lack of acquaintance with binet's writings. . stern, w. _the psychological methods of measuring intelligence._ translated by g. m. whipple. ( .)  pages. a splendid critical discussion of the binet-simon method. should be read by every one who would use the scale. . terman, l. m. "suggestions for revising, extending, and supplementing the binet intelligence tests"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . terman, l. m. "psychological principles underlying the binet-simon scale and some practical considerations for its correct use"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . terman, l. m. "a report of the buffalo conference on the binet-simon tests of intelligence"; in _pedagogical seminary_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . abstracts of papers presented at the above conference. . terman, lyman, ordahl, galbreath, _and_ talbert. _the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon scale for measuring intelligence._ ( .) contains a chapter on the validity of the individual tests and on considerations relating to the formation of an intelligence scale. . terman _and_ knollin. "the detection of borderline deficiency by the binet-simon method"; in _journal of psycho-asthenics_ (june, ). a comparison of the accuracy of the stanford and other revisions with borderline cases. . trèves _and_ saffiotti. "l'échelle métrique de l'intelligence modifiée selon la méthode trèves-saffiotti"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), pp.  - . criticize the age-grade method of measuring intelligence and propose a substitute. . wallin, j. e. w. _experimental studies of mental defectives. a critique of the binet-simon tests._ warwick & york. ( .) criticism based on the use of the scale with epileptics. . yerkes _and_ bridges. _a point scale for measuring mental ability._ warwick & york. authors think the point scale preferable to the binet-simon method. books on mental deficiency . binet, a., _and_ simon, th. _mentally defective children._ translated from the french by w. b. drummond. longmans, green & co. ( .)  pages. discusses the psychology, pedagogy, and medical examination of defectives. . goddard, h. h. _feeble-mindedness; its causes and consequences._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. the most important single volume on the subject. extensive data on the causes of feeble-mindedness and excellent clinical pictures of all grades of mental defects. . goddard, h. h. _the kallikak family._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. an epoch-making study of the hereditary transmission of mental deficiency in a degenerate family. . holmes, arthur. _the conservation of the child._ j. b. lippincott company. ( .)  pages. methods of examination and treatment of defective children. . holmes, arthur. _the backward child._ bobbs-merrill company. ( .) a popular treatment of the handling of backward children. . huey, e. b. _backward and feeble-minded children._ warwick & york. ( .)  pages. devoted mainly to clinical accounts of borderline cases. . lapage, c. p. _feeble-mindedness in children of school age._ the university press, manchester, england. ( .)  pages. . sherlock, e. b. _the feeble-minded; a guide to study and practice._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. . tredgold, a. f. _mental deficiency (amentia)._ baillière, tindall, and cox. london, england. ( d ed. .)  pages. the best medical treatment of the subject. studies of the progress of children through the grades . ayres, leonard p. _laggards in our schools._ the russell sage foundation. ( .)  pages. interesting and instructive discussion of school retardation and its causes. . blan, louis b. _a special study of the incidence of retardation._ teachers college, columbia university, contributions to education, no.  . ( .)  pages. review of the literature and a statistical study of the progress of  children. . keyes, c. h. _progress through the grades of city schools._ teachers college, columbia university, contributions to education, no.  . ( .)  pages. important study of the progress of several thousand children. . strayer, george d. _age and grade census of schools and colleges._ bulletin no.  , u.s. bureau of education. ( .)  pages. statistics of the age-grade status of the children in  cities. . see also the _reports_ of leading school surveys, such as those of new york, salt lake city, butte, springfield (mass.), denver, cleveland, etc. references on the special class for exceptional children . huey, e. b. "the education of defectives and the training of teachers for special classes"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - . . goddard, h. h. _school training of defective children._ world book company. ( .)  pages. based on his survey of the treatment of backward children in the schools of new york city. . holmes, w. h. _school organization and the individual child._ the davis press, worcester, massachusetts. ( .)  pages. a comprehensive account of the efforts which have been made to adjust the school to the capacities of individual children. . maennel, b. _auxiliary education._ translated from the german by emma sylvester. doubleday, page & co. ( .)  pages. . van sickle, j. h., witmer, l., _and_ ayres, l. p. _provision for exceptional children in public schools._ bulletin no.  , u.s. bureau of education. ( .)  pages. . shaer, i. "special classes for bright children in an english elementary school"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - . . stern, w. "the supernormal child"; in _journal of educational psychology_ ( ), pp.  - and - . a strong plea for special classes for superior children. . vaney, v. _les classes pour enfants arrières._ bulletin de la société libre pour l'étude psychologique de l'enfant ( ), pp.  - . report of the french national commission appointed to investigate methods of treatment and training. . witmer, l. _the special class for backward children._ the psychological clinic press, philadelphia. ( .)  pages. an account of the special class conducted in connection with the university of pennsylvania summer school. list of binet's most important contributions to the measurement of intelligence . binet, a. _l'Étude experimentale de l'intelligence._ paris: schleicher frères. ( .) . binet, a. "a propos de la mesure de l'intelligence"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a. _les enfants anormaux; guide pour l'admission des enfants anormaux dans les classes de perfectionnement._ paris: colin ( .) . binet, a. _comment les instituteurs jugent-ils l'intelligence d'un ecolier?_ bulletin de la société libre pour l'étude psychologique de l'enfant ( ), no.  , pp.  - . . binet, a. "nouvelles recherches sur la mesure du niveau intellectuel chez les enfants d'école"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "sur la nécessité d'établir un diagnostique scientifique des états inférieurs de l'intelligence"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostique du niveau intellectuel des anormaux"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "application des méthodes nouvelles au diagnostique du niveau intellectuel chez des enfants normaux et anormaux d'hospice et d'école primaire"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "le développement de l'intelligence chez les enfants"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "langage et pensée"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "l'intelligence des imbeciles"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. "nouvelle théorie psychologique et clinique de la démence"; in _année psychologique_ ( ), vol.  , pp.  - . . binet, a., _et_ simon, th. _la mesure du développement de l'intelligence chez les jeunes enfants._ bulletin de la société libre pour l'étude psychologique de l'enfant ( ), no.  , pp.  - . suggestions for a teacher's private library on exceptional children ayres, l. p. _laggards in our schools._ the russell sage foundation. ( .)  pages. treats the amount and causes of school retardation. binet, a., _and_ simon, th. _mentally defective children._ translated from the french by w. b. drummond. longmans, green & co. ( .)  pages. discusses the psychology, pedagogy and medical examination of defectives. binet, a., _and_ simon, th. _a method of measuring the development of intelligence in young children._ chicago medical book company. ( .)  pages. authorized translation of binet's final instructions for giving the tests. goddard, h. h. _feeble-mindedness; its causes and consequences._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. the most important single volume on the subject. goddard, h. h. _the kallikak family._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. a study of the hereditary transmission of mental deficiency in one family. goddard, h. h. _school training of defective children._ world book company. ( .)  pages. admirable treatment of the entire subject. goddard, h. h. _the criminal imbecile._ the macmillan company. ( .)  pages. an analysis of three murderers of borderline intelligence. holmes, arthur. _the conservation of the child._ j. b. lippincott company. ( .)  pages. methods of examination and treatment of defective children. holmes, arthur. _the backward child._ the bobbs-merrill co. ( .) a popular treatment of the subject. holmes, w. h. _school organization and the individual child._ the davis press, worcester, massachusetts. ( )  pages. a comprehensive account of methods of adjusting school work to the capacity of the individual child. huey, e. b. _backward and feeble-minded children._ warwick & york. ( .)  pages. clinical studies of borderline cases. kelynack, t. n. (_editor_). _defective children._ john bale, sons, and daniellson, london. ( .)  pages. written by many authors and devoted to all kinds of physical and mental defects. kuhlmann, f. "a revision of the binet-simon system for measuring the intelligence of children." monograph supplement of _journal of psycho-asthenics_. ( .)  pages. contains instructions for use of the kuhlmann revision. stern, w. _the psychological method of measuring intelligence._ translated from the german by g. m. whipple. warwick & york. ( .)  pages. terman, lyman, ordahl, galbreath, _and_ talbert. _the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon scale for measuring intelligence._ ( .) extended analysis of  tests. data on the relation of intelligence to school success, social status, etc. terman, lewis m. _the hygiene of the school child._ houghton mifflin company. ( .)  pages. devoted to the physical defects of school children. tredgold, a. f. _mental deficiency (amentia)._ baillière, tindall & cox, london. ( .)  pages. the best medical treatment of the subject. whipple, g. m. _manual of mental and physical tests._ warwick & york. vol. i ( ),  pages; vol. ii ( ),  pages. the best treatment of mental tests other than those of the binet system. witmer, l. _the special class for backward children._ the psychological clinic press, philadelphia. ( .)  pages. problems encountered in connection with the special class. magazines _the training school bulletin._ published monthly by the training school, vineland, new jersey. edited by h. h. goddard and e. r. johnstone. _the psychological clinic._ published monthly by the psychological clinic press, philadelphia. edited by lightner witmer. _the journal of delinquency._ published bi-monthly by the whittier state school, whittier, california. edited by williams, goddard, terman, and others. _the journal of psycho-asthenics._ published quarterly at faribault, minnesota. organ of the american association for the study of the feeble-minded. edited by a. c. rogers and f. kuhlmann. _the journal of educational psychology._ published by warwick & york, baltimore. edited by j. carleton bell. index abstract thought, tests of, . absurdities,  _ff._ adolescence, and variability in intelligence, . adult intelligence, . adults, how to find i q of adults, . Æsthetic comparison,  _ff._ age, test of giving age,  _ff._ age standards, . alternative tests, . amateur testing,  _ff._ apperception, . arithmetical reasoning,  _ff._ association processes, . attention, during the test, . attitude of the subject, . auto-criticism, , , . average intelligence,  _ff._ ball and field test,  _ff._, . berry, c. s., . binet, on how teachers judge intelligence,  _ff._; binet's conception of intelligence,  _ff._, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . binet-simon method, nature and derivation of the scale,  _ff._,  _ff._; limitations of,  _ff._ bloch, . bluemel, c. s., . bobertag, otto, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . borderline intelligence, ,  _ff._ bow-knot, test of tying,  _ff._ brigham, , . change, test of making change,  _ff._ childs, h. g., , . coaching,  _ff._ code test,  _ff._ color naming,  _ff._ combination method, . _see also_ completion test. commissions,  _ff._ comparison of lines,  _ff._ completion test, , , . comprehension questions,  _ff._,  _ff._,  _ff._,  _ff._ conditions favorable to testing,  _ff._ counting, four pennies, ; thirteen pennies, ; counting backwards, . crime, relation to feeble-mindedness,  _ff._; cost of, . cuneo, irene, . davenport, c. b., . definitions, in terms of use, ; superior to use, ; of abstract words,  _ff._, and  _ff._ _see also_ vocabulary tests. "degenerate" families,  _ff._ delinquency, relation to feeble-mindedness,  _ff._ diamond, test of copying diamond, . differences, test of finding, ,  _ff._ digits. _see_ memory for digits. discrimination of forms,  _ff._ dissected sentences,  _ff._ distribution of intelligence,  _ff._,  _ff._ dougherty, , , . drawing, , , . dull normals,  _ff._ dumville, , . ebbinghaus, , . emotion, . enclosed boxes,  _ff._ endowment, ,  _ff._ environment, influence on test,  _ff._ eugenics,  _ff._ examination, duration of,  _ff._ examiner, qualifications of,  _ff._ fables, interpretation of,  _ff._ fatigue, influence of, on test,  _ff._ feeble-minded, proportion of school-children feeble-minded, . feeble-mindedness, value of tests for,  _ff._; psychological analysis, ; definition, ; examples,  _ff._ fernald, g. g., . fernald, grace, , , , . fingers, test of giving number of,  _ff._ freeman, frank n., . functions, tested by binet scale,  _ff._ galbreath, neva, . galton, . general intelligence,  _ff._ generalization, tests of, . genius. _see_ superior intelligence. goddard, h. h., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . grading, value of intelligence tests in, . hall, gertrude, . healy-fernald, , , , . heredity, use of tests in the study of, . hill folk, . hollingworth, leta s., . huey, e. b., , , . imagery, , , , . induction test,  _ff._ ingenuity test, . intelligence, analysis of, _see_ remarks under instructions for each test; superior,  _ff._,  _ff._, teachers' estimates of, , , , , ; general,  _ff._; definitions of,  _ff._ intelligence quotient, , , ,  _ff._; validity of, ; classification and significance,  _ff._,  _ff._ jukes family, . kallikak family, . knollin, h. e., , , , . kohs, s. c.,  _ff._ kuhlmann, f., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . language comprehension, , . limitations of the binet scale,  _ff._ lombroso, . lyman, grace, . mason, otis, . masselon, . material used in the tests, . memory, for sentences,  _ff._, , , ; for passages, ; for designs, ; for digits, , , , , , , , , , , . mental age,  _ff._; effect of stanford revision on, ; how to calculate,  _ff._ mental deficiency. _see_ feeble-mindedness. meumann, ernst, , , , . moral development, dependence of, on intelligence,  _ff._ nam family, . name, test of giving name,  _ff._ naming coins,  _ff._, . naming familiar objects,  _ff._ normals, dull,  _ff._ ordahl, dr. george, . ordahl, louise ellison, . paper-cutting test, . physical defects, effects of, on intelligence, . physical relations, comprehension of,  _ff._ physicians, as binet testers, . pictures, enumeration of objects in, ; description of,  _ff._; interpretation of, ; finding omissions in, . pointing to parts of body,  _ff._ practical judgment, . president and king, giving differences between, . problem questions,  _ff._ procedure, necessity of uniformity in,  _ff._,  _ff._ promotions, on basis of intelligence tests,  _ff._ race differences, . range of testing, . rapport,  _ff._ reading, test of reading for memories, . record booklet, . recording responses,  _ff._ reliability of the scale,  _ff._,  _ff._ repeated tests,  _ff._ retardation, cost of, ,  _ff._; training of retarded children,  _ff._,  _ff._,  _ff._ reversing hands of clock,  _ff._ rhymes, test of finding, . right and left,  _ff._ rowe, e. p., , , . rowland, eleanor, . scattering of successes,  _ff._ school success and intelligence,  _ff._ scoring, . _see also_ instructions for scoring each test. seclusion during test, . sex, test of giving,  _ff._ sex differences in intelligence,  _ff._ similarities, test of finding,  _ff._,  _ff._ sixty words,  _ff._ social class and intelligence,  _ff._,  _ff._ spearman, c., definition of intelligence, . special classes, . square, test of copying,  _ff._ stamps, test of counting value of, . standardization, value of, . stanford revision of the binet scale,  _ff._ stereotypy, . stern, w., , , . stigmata, . structural psychology, . superior intelligence, tests of superior children,  _ff._,  _ff._ supplementary information, . teachers' estimates of intelligence, , , , , . terman, lewis m., , , . three words, test of using, in a sentence,  _ff._ time orientation, forenoon and afternoon,  _ff._; days of the week,  _ff._; giving date,  _ff._; naming months,  _ff._ unemployment, relation of, to intelligence, . validity of the tests,  _ff._ vocabulary tests, , , , , , . vocational guidance, use of intelligence tests in, , . volition, . waddle, charles, . wallin, . weights, comparison of, ,  _ff._ williams, dr. j. harold, , . winch, w. h., , . writing from dictation,  _ff._ yerkes, r. m., . construction work for rural and elementary schools by virginia mcgaw teacher in the elementary school of baltimore a. flanagan company chicago copyright by a. flanagan company preface in offering this volume to the public the author has but one wish--namely, that it may supply a want in time of need and help some one over a difficult place. most of the subject-matter in parts one, two, three, and four was written for and has been previously published in the _atlantic educational journal_, with a view to assisting the rural teacher. the present volume comprises a revision of the articles published, together with a short account of one season's work in a school garden, and has the same object--that of aiding the rural teacher by means of a few simple suggestions. the work is divided into five parts--"cord construction," "paper construction," "wood construction," "basketry," and "the school garden." no subject is dealt with at length. the aim has been to give simple models that may be made without elaborate preparation or special material. believing that a child is most likely to appreciate his tools when he realizes their value or knows their history, a brief introduction to each part is given, and wherever possible, the place of the occupation in race history is dealt with, and an account of the culture and habitat of the material is given. as clear a statement as is possible is made of how the model is constructed, and in most cases both a working drawing and a picture are given. virginia mcgaw. baltimore, maryland, april, . acknowledgments to the _atlantic educational journal_ for the privilege of revising and relinquishing the articles on cord, paper, wood, and basketry. to mr. george m. gaither, supervisor of manual training in the public schools of baltimore, for five of the woodwork patterns. to president richard w. silvester, of the maryland agricultural college, for the inspiration to write the _garden bulletin_, his consent to its republication, and his hearty coöperation in its revision. contents cord construction introductory remarks knots overhand knot square knot "granny" knot chains loop chain overhand knot chain solomon's knot chain combined knots and chains knotted bag miniature hammock--knotted miniature portière--knotted weaving miniature hammock--woven paper construction introductory remarks a model lesson windmill or pin-wheel square tray no. i square tray no. ii square box with cover square or rectangular box pencil box with sliding cover seed box with sections picture frame no. i, diagonal folds picture frame no. ii portfolio barn--house--furniture hexagonal tray lamp shade star notebook bound book japanese book scrap-book wood construction introductory remarks puzzle plant label pencil sharpener match scratch kite-string winder thermometer back pocket pin-cushion picture frame japanese box grandfather's chair basketry introductory remarks reed construction napkin ring no. i napkin ring no. ii mat hamper basket basket tray basket with handle raffia construction plaited rope plaited mat purse plaited basket hat of plaited rope napkin ring indian basket grass basket or tray basket of splints and raffia combined reed and raffia umbrella miniature chair no. i miniature chair no. ii rules for caning chairs the school garden introductory remarks a city school garden part i cord construction cord construction introductory remarks to a child one of the most attractive of possessions is a piece of cord. he has so many uses for it that it becomes part of the prized contents of his pocket. since this commodity affords so much pleasure to the untrained child, how greatly may the pleasure be enhanced if he is taught how to make the number of beautiful things that may be wrought from cord or twine! having this knowledge, he will unconsciously employ many otherwise weary moments in fashioning some coveted article. among the things he can make are chains, reins, bags, nets, miniature hammocks, portières, and rugs for the dollhouse. he must be guided step by step from the simplest to the more intricate. he must be taught that only when a thing is well done has it any use or value, therefore the best effort is necessary to the success of his work. if he ties a knot, it must be properly tied or it will not hold. if he makes a bag or a hammock, the meshes must be uniform and the color blendings pleasing or it will lack beauty, and even he, himself, will not care for it. should he make a chain or reins, they ought to be attractive-looking as well as useful; hence the aim should be for artistic combination and perfect execution. the success the child will meet with will depend greatly upon the attitude of the teacher toward the work and the amount of spirit she may be able to infuse into it. knots _aim_--to teach the names of different knots, how they are tied, and the utilitarian value of each. begin by teaching how to tie a knot, and that all knots are not alike nor tied in the same way. there are three kinds of knots--the overhand knot, the square knot and the "granny" knot. each of these has its use, its place, and a utilitarian value. overhand knot _material_--one -inch piece of heavy twine. hold one end of the twine firmly in the left hand and throw the other end over with the right hand to form a loop; then pass the end in the right hand under the loop; and draw it through tightly, making a firm knot. [illustration: overhand knot] a long piece of twine in which are tied either single knots at regular intervals, or groups of three or five knots with spaces between, will make a chain which will delight any small child. square knot _aim_--to teach how to tie a knot that will not slip. _material_--one -inch piece of heavy twine. take an end of the twine between the thumb and the forefinger of each hand. holding in the left hand end no. , pass it to the right over end no. ; then pass it under no. ; finally, pass it out and over, making the first tie. now, holding end no. firmly in the right hand and end no. in the left, pass no. to the left over no. , then under, out and over; draw the two ties together, and you will have a firm, square knot. [illustration: square knot] "granny" knot _aim_--to teach the name of the knot one usually ties and how to tie it. _material_--one -inch piece of heavy twine. take an end of the twine between the thumb and the forefinger of each hand and hold firmly. pass end no. to the right over end no. , under and out. next pass end no. to the right over end no. , under and out. we now have the knot known as the "granny," which we ordinarily tie. chains loop chain _material_--one piece, yards long, of macramé cord, no. , one color. (see page .) about five inches from one end of the cord make a short loop. using this loop as a starting-point, work up the length of the cord to within about eighteen inches of the other end, by repeatedly drawing a new loop through the one previously made as one does in crocheting. the child can easily manipulate the cord with his tiny fingers. aim to have the loops of uniform size. finish with a loop five inches long, leaving an end of the same length. now, placing together the two ends of the chain, we have a loop and two single ends of cord. take these single cords together and buttonhole them over the loop for about three inches, then twist. tie the single ends with a square knot, and fringe them out; leave the loop. [illustration: loop chain showing how stitch is made and appearance of finished chain.] instead of being fringed, the ends may have a large bead attached to each, and a whistle may be strung on the loop. this would both make the chain attractive to the child and demonstrate a use for it. overhand knot chain _material_--macramé cord, no. : one piece yards long, white; one piece yards long, red. [illustration: overhand knot chain] fasten the two pieces together in the middle. pin them to a board or slip them over a hook where the cord will be held firmly. using the overhand knot, tie each color alternately, until all except about four inches of cord is used up. taking four ends as one, tie a slip-knot close up to the point where you stopped forming the chain. next, fringe out the four ends close up to the knot. the result is a circular cord with stripes running diagonally around it, very pleasing to the eye of a child. the lengths here given make a fob-chain about five inches long. solomon's knot chain _material_--four pieces of macramé cord, no. , - / yards long, of one color. (see page .) double in the middle and leave two loops, each two inches long. take two strands as the center and foundation and attach them to a hook or a board where they will be held firmly. loop the two remaining threads alternately over the two central ones, first the one on the right, then the one on the left. for instance: take a single cord on the left, form a loop to the left of the double cords, draw the end over the two foundation pieces and hold firmly. then take a single cord on the right, pass it over the piece of cord which forms the loop, then under where the three pieces cross and up through the loop; draw it tight. then work with a single cord on the right in the same way and continue, alternating the two single cords, until there is left about four inches. clip the middle cords so that the four ends may be of equal length. finish by tying them in a square knot and fringing the ends. this forms a flat chain one-quarter of an inch wide and one-eighth of an inch thick, which may be made any length desired. [illustration: solomon's knot chain showing how stitch is made.] [illustration: knotted bag] combined knots and chains knotted bag _material_--macramé cord, no. , one or two colors; twelve pieces yard long or six pieces yard long, of each of the two colors. double each piece of cord in the middle and tie it in a loop over a pencil or some other object that will make the loops of equal size. slip the loops from the pencil and string them to a cord, alternating the colors. join the ends of the cord so as to form a hoop. you now have twelve loops on this hoop and one row of knots. form a second row of knots by tying cords of different colors together. the meshes should be uniform and of the size of the loops. continue knotting one row below the other until about three inches of cord remain. now stretch the bag out straight and double and tie together the four cords, which operation will form the bottom and close the bag. fringe the ends and trim them off evenly. make a loop chain, and run it through the top loops, having removed the working cord. small brass rings may be used at the top instead of loops, and the drawing string may be run through them. a larger bag may be made by the addition of more and longer pieces of twine. [illustration: miniature hammock--knotted] miniature hammock--knotted _material_--twelve pieces of seine cord, no. , each yards long. two iron rings, inch in diameter. string the pieces of cord through a ring, taking care that the ends are of the same length. about three inches from the ring, knot each piece of cord. this will make twelve knots and form the first row. for the second row, knot alternate pieces of cord. continue until there are twelve rows of knots. be careful to make the meshes the same size. leave about three inches unknotted and attach these ends to the second ring. make a twisted cord (of four thicknesses of macramé) of some contrasting color and run through the meshes of each side, taking it twice through each mesh and attaching it to rings at the ends of the hammock. the meshes should be about an inch square. make the cords a little shorter than the sides of the hammock, in order to give it the proper spring. take an extra piece of cord the color of the hammock and wrap it around the cords close up to the rings, winding it evenly and firmly for about an inch from the ring; fasten it securely. miniature portière--knotted _material_--twelve -inch lengths of macramé cord, no. . double each piece in the middle and, using the overhand knot, tie it over a stout lead pencil or a very narrow ruler. see that each knot is pressed close to the foundation holder, that the loops may be of equal size. these loops and knots form the first row. do not remove them from the holder. separate the cords and knot together each two adjacent ones, alternating at every other row. continue knotting until about three inches of cord remain to form the fringe at the bottom. before tying the last row of knots, slip a colored glass bead over each set of cords, then make the knot so as to hold the bead in place. these beads are an ornament, apart from giving weight to the portière to make it hang well. trim the fringe evenly, slip the portière from the foundation holder, and it is ready to hang. use beads the color of the cord, or of some effective contrasting shade. if a child is expert enough, a bead may be placed at every knot, adding decidedly to the attractiveness of the little portière. (see page .) weaving miniature hammock--woven _material_--tag-board loom × inches. cord of one, two or three colors. two brass rings, / inch in diameter. [illustration: miniature portiere--(for description see page .)] to make a loom, take a piece of tag-board × inches in size. measure off one inch from the back edge and draw a line parallel to the back edge. measure off one inch from the front edge and draw a line parallel to the front edge. measure off one inch from the right edge and draw a line parallel to the right edge. measure off one inch from the left edge and draw a line parallel to the left edge. you have now a × -inch rectangle marked off, leaving a one-inch space around the edge of the tag-board. start at a point where a vertical and a horizontal line intersect and mark off the six-inch ends into spaces one-fourth inch apart. next with a large needle pierce the board at each point of intersection. this will make twenty-five eyelets at each end. on the reverse side of the board draw diagonals to determine the center. tie together the two brass rings and fasten them firmly to the center of the reverse side. [illustration: blanket for doll's bed showing how it is started.] to string the loom requires about fifteen yards of cord. divide the cord into two lengths. thread a length into a needle and tie one end of it to one of the brass rings. next carry the cord from the ring through the thirteenth perforation, then across the face of the loom to the thirteenth perforation at the opposite end, through again to the reverse side and pass through the opposite ring from which it started. repeat this operation by carrying the cord in a reverse direction each time until one-half the loom is strung. then with the other length of cord start, by attaching it to the same ring to which the first piece was tied, and work in the opposite direction until the second half is strung. should it be necessary to add to the cord, arrange that the knot be on an end near a ring. a knot in the warp hampers the weaving. [illustration: a rug made of narrow strips of cotton cloth.] have the warp threads and the predominant woof thread of the same color. to begin weaving, cut a quantity of ten-inch lengths. take one of these lengths, start in the center of the loom, and weave in and out among the warp threads, allowing it to extend two inches beyond on each side. have a perfectly smooth, narrow, thin ruler and weave it in across the warp threads. as each horizontal or woof thread is added, shove it close to the preceding one with the ruler, which acts as a pusher. weave first on one side of the center and then on the other, until the entire × -inch space is covered. if a border is to be put in, gauge equal spaces from the center and work in the border of a different shade or color. the borders must be placed equally distant from the center and the same distance from each end. take the overhanging cords and knot each alternate two together along the line of the outer warp thread. this will hold the woof threads in place, as well as finish the edges of the hammock. comb these ends out and trim them, to get the fringe even. at each end where the weaving stops, take a needle threaded with a length of cord and run in and out along the warp threads, first to the right and then to the left of the final woof thread. this makes a secure finish and holds the woof threads in position. next unfasten the rings and remove the hammock from the loom by tearing the tag-board along the lines of perforations. finally, where the cords pass through the ring, hold them close to the ring and wrap them with a piece of cord for the distance of an inch, then fasten off by forcing the needle up through the wrapped space toward the ring; draw the end through and clip close to the ring. the hammock is now finished. the question may arise: why begin weaving in the center of the loom? the answer is: because small children, and even older ones, sometimes, are not able to keep their warp threads parallel and as they approach the middle, where these threads give more, they naturally draw them in. this tendency is remedied to a great extent by beginning in the middle and weaving toward the ends, where the warp is confined in the board and keeps its place with no effort on the part of the child. part ii paper construction paper construction introductory remarks whatever may have been the true origin of the art of paper-making, it is now lost in obscurity. it is almost certain that the earliest form of paper was the papyrus of the egyptians and that they were the first to use it as a writing material. they manufactured it from the stem of the papyrus plant, from which the name _paper_ comes. it is also known that the chinese were versed in this art before the christian era, and that they made paper from the bark of various trees, the soft part of bamboo stems, and cotton. in india and china the practice of writing on dried palm and other leaves still obtains. it is probable that the employment of these fibrous substances, together with observation of the methods of paper-making wasps and other insects, led to manufacturing by pulping the materials and spreading them out. as the chinese seem to have been the pioneers in so many great inventions, so also they appear to have been the inventors of this art. from the chinese the arabians learned, in the seventh century, the craft of making paper from cotton, and they established a manufactory at samarcand in a. d. here the moors learned the art, and through them it was introduced into spain. it is thought that the moors used flax and hemp in addition to cotton in their manufacture of paper. the products of their mills are known to have been of a most superior quality, but, with the decline of the moors, paper-making passed into less skilled hands, and the quality of the paper became inferior. from spain the art spread through the other countries of europe, and as factories were established further north, where cotton was not a product nor easy to import, the necessity of substituting some other material probably led to the introduction of linen rags; but when they began to be used is uncertain. england was far behind the other countries of northern europe in introducing the industry of paper-making. [illustration: screen--six-by-nine-inch construction paper] in the united states to-day paper in all varieties is manufactured to an enormous extent, and almost exclusively from vegetable matter. the book and newspaper trades demand an untold quantity. there are three great types--writing, printing, and wrapping paper. writing paper is made from rags and wood pulp. the staple for wrapping paper is old rope, and in some cases jute. the best writing and printing papers, however, are made from rags. from these as staples, all other varieties are developed, and we have paper for every use to which man can apply it. paper folding and modeling is not an ancient occupation, but a modern device, yet to the child it has a utilitarian value not to be overlooked. his nature demands that he be employed, and change of occupation is conducive to his happiness. nothing is quite so restful to him as to do something with his hands; therefore, with his blocks he builds a house, fences it around with his splints, and strews the ground with imaginary trees and animals. he lives in this nursery play, and in it he is happy. when he enters school, should he have only books? no, his hands still demand employment. he is now led to fashion from paper what he has already made with his blocks and toys. he is occupied, he is interested, and he is cultivating concentration and industrious habits. is this worth while? begin the lessons with a talk on the manufacture and uses of paper. by a story, an association or the suggestion of a future use the child should be made to feel that he is doing something worth while. this will accentuate the interest and deepen the impression. all models given may be increased or decreased in size if the proportions are adhered to, but the dimensions stated are those commonly used. a model lesson _aim_--to construct a windmill or pin-wheel. each child should have a five-inch square, a slender stick five inches long, a pin, a ruler, a pair of scissors, and a lead pencil. the children are supposed to know that every piece of paper, laid in position, has a back edge, a front edge, a right edge, a left edge, a right-back corner, a left-back corner, a right-front corner, a left-front corner, and that, in tracing, the forefinger of the right hand is used. three questions after each direction will be sufficient. the questions aim to have a complete statement in answer, and to develop an unconsciously correct use of the verb. this may appear slow at first, but soon the replies will come quickly and the answer will be correctly given. [illustration: windmill, a] _teacher_: "children, lay your papers on your desk parallel with the front edge of the desk.--john, where are you to lay your paper?" _john_: "i am to lay my paper on my desk parallel with the front edge of my desk." _teacher_: "mary, where did you lay your paper?" _mary_: "i laid my paper on my desk parallel with the front edge of my desk." _teacher_: "willie, where has mary laid her paper?" _willie_: "mary has laid her paper on her desk, parallel with the front edge of her desk." _teacher_: "trace the back edge of your paper.--anna, what are you to do to your paper?" _anna_: "i am to trace the back edge of my paper." _teacher_: "harry, what did you do to your paper?" _harry_: "i traced the back edge of my paper." _teacher_: "jessie, what have you done to your paper?" _jessie_: "i have traced the back edge of my paper." _teacher_: "each child place the forefinger on the right-back corner of the paper.--charles, what are you to do?" _charles_: "i am to place my forefinger on the right-back corner of my paper." _teacher_: "anna, what did you do?" _anna_: "i placed my forefinger on the right-back corner of my paper." _teacher_: "laurence, what have you done?" _laurence_: "i have placed my forefinger on the right-back corner of my paper." _teacher_: "take your ruler and lay it across your paper from the left-back corner to the right-front corner.--margaret, what are you to do?" _margaret_: "i am to lay my ruler on my paper from the left-back corner to the right-front corner." _teacher_: "draw a line connecting the left-back corner of your paper with the right-front corner.--james, what did you draw?" _james_: "i drew a line connecting the left-back corner of my paper with the right-front corner." _teacher_: "alice, what have you drawn?" _alice_: "i have drawn a line connecting the left-back corner of my paper with the right-front corner." now have the children draw a line connecting the reverse diagonal corners and proceed as follows: _teacher_: "find the point where the lines cross. this is the center or middle point of your paper.--albert, what are you to find?" _albert_: "i am to find the point where the lines cross, which is the center of my paper." _teacher_: "measure one inch from this point on each of the four lines and place a dot.--sara, what did you measure?" _sara_: "i measured one inch from the center of my paper on each of the four lines and placed a dot." _teacher_: "lay your pencil and your ruler down. place your paper on your desk parallel with its front edge and lay your left hand on the right-front corner. turn the paper until this corner is directly in front of you. take your scissors and cut along the ruled line from the corner to the point one inch from the center. [illustration: windmill, b] "lay down your scissors. turn your paper from right to left until the next corner faces you. cut. move the paper from right to left again until the third corner faces you. cut. bring the fourth corner to face you. cut. there are now eight points. turn each alternate point to the center, run the pin through all of them and fasten the wheel to the stick." _final questions._ _teacher_: "what did you make?" _pupil_: "i made a pin-wheel." _teacher_: "what have you made?" _pupil_: "i have made a pin-wheel." _teacher_: "what has ellen made?" _pupil_: "ellen has made a pin-wheel." when older pupils have completed a model it is excellent practice to have them write a full description of how it is made and the materials used. windmill, or pin-wheel _material_--one piece of construction paper, × inches. stick, × / × / inches. one pin. (see pages and .) fold the square on the diagonals. cut the diagonals to within one-half inch of the center. bend alternate corners over until the point of each touches the center. fasten the four points in the center by running the pin through them and driving it into the stick. square tray no. i _material_--construction paper, × inches. (see page .) measure off one inch on four sides, and connect the points with a line parallel to the edge of the paper. score lightly each line. cut out the four corner squares. turn up the sides, fasten the corners together with raffia or cord, tying a small bow. square tray no. ii _material_--construction paper, × inches. (see page .) fold and crease into sixteen small squares. score lightly the four lines nearest the outer edge. draw one diagonal pointing toward the center of each corner square. next draw half of the diagonal extending in the opposite direction. fold the paper on the lines scored. crease the diagonals - , making the crease extend to the inside of the tray, and press until lines - and - meet. now we have a triangle on the inside of the tray. fold this over on half-diagonal, no. , and press to the side of the tray. this will fasten together firmly the corners of the tray. [illustration: square tray no. i--(for description see page .)] square box with cover _materials_--construction paper, × inches. (see page .) measure off from the outer edge two lines, one inch apart. score these lines. in each corner there are four one-inch squares. cut off , , and ; then draw the diagonal of pointing toward the center of the paper. crease and fold on these diagonals, extending the triangle inward. fold this triangle over to half its size; press to the inside of the box. edges - , - will meet to form the corners of the box, and cover flaps - will fall naturally into place. result, box four inches square, one inch deep, with folding cover. square or rectangular box [illustration: square tray no. ii--(for description see page .)] _material_--construction paper, × inches or × inches. measure off a margin one inch all around, and score. cut as indicated on page . fold over the border to half its width, as over to . bend up on line - . when the edge is folded over a little tongue is formed at each end. slip this tongue under the fold of the adjacent side, and it will fasten the sides of the box firmly together. a lid may be made exactly as the box is made. [illustration: square box with cover--(for description see page .)] a beautiful christmas box may be made of red paper, or gray decorated with holly. made of white paper, with a chicken (in yellow) painted on the lid, it is appropriate for easter. [illustration: square box--(for description see pages and .)] pencil box with sliding cover _material_--construction paper: one -inch square; one rectangle × inches. (see page .) _drawer._ lay the rectangle on the desk with the nine-inch edge parallel with the front edge of the desk. draw a line one inch from the back edge and parallel with it. draw a line one inch from the front edge and parallel with it. draw a line one inch from the right edge and parallel with it; and a line one inch from the left edge and parallel with it. score, bend and crease on these lines. cut the lines on the right and the left edges to where they intersect the lines on the back and the front edges. fold and glue. the laps are pasted on the inside and give strength to the ends of the drawer. [illustration: pencil box with sliding cover] _cover_ (seven-inch square). measure off one and one-fourth inches, and construct a line parallel to the back edge. measure one inch and draw a line parallel to this. measure off two and one-sixteenth inches (shy) and draw a third parallel line. measure one inch again and draw a fourth line parallel to the other three. score and fold on these lines. lap the space at the back edge over the space at the front edge until they form a rectangle two and one-sixteenth by seven inches in size, to correspond with the opposite one, which is the top of the cover. glue. slide in the drawer and the pencil box is completed. seed box with sections _material_--construction paper: two rectangles × inches; one rectangle × - / inches; one rectangle × - / inches. (see page .) take one × -inch rectangle for the body of the box and lay off a two-inch space all around. cut on dotted lines. score and crease, fold and glue. the laps are glued to the inside and each one turned to the right. when the partitions are put in the laps mark where the ends go, as well as brace the ends of them. take the two rectangles, × - / inches and × - / inches, and draw a line one-half inch from each of the two-inch edges. score and crease. these form the laps for pasting the partitions in. on these partitions turn all four laps to the right, to coincide with the laps on the box. dovetail the partitions by cutting a slit one inch deep in the center of each and slipping one over the other. next glue them to the inside of the box. _cover._ take the second × -inch rectangle and mark off a two-inch space (shy) all around. find middle of nine-inch edges and draw lines - , - , and - . cut out these two triangles. cut the corners on the dotted lines. score, fold, and glue. notice that in the lids the laps are not turned as in the body of the box. here, as in the drawer of the pencil-box, the laps are glued to the ends of the cover, concentrating strength there and producing symmetry in construction. picture frame no. i--diagonal folds _material_--construction paper, × inches. (see page .) fold on the diagonals. bring each corner over until it touches the center; crease. fold each corner back again until its point touches the outside edge at the middle section; crease. [illustration: seed box with sections--(for description see page .)] picture frame no. ii _material_--construction paper, - / × - / inches. (see page .) divide the length into three equal parts, making three rectangles - / × - / inches in size. in the middle rectangle, measure off and cut out a rectangle - / × inches in size. fold rectangle no. up and back of rectangle no. . holding the two firmly together, punch two holes, one-fourth inch apart, on each side, and one-fourth inch from the outer edges (see diagram). draw a piece of raffia or ribbon through these holes and tie in a bow. fold back rectangle no. for support. [illustration: picture frame no. i--(for description see page .)] [illustration: picture frame no. ii--(for description see pages and .)] portfolio _material_--heavy manila paper, - / × inches. (see page .) fold edge no. over and even with edge no. . crease and fold. on each side of a mark and cut off one-half inch. clip off the corners of the flaps on b. fold the flaps of b over on a and paste. find the middle of edges and . with a radius of one inch, describe a semicircle and cut it out. [illustration: portfolio--(for description see page .)] barn--house--furniture _material_--construction paper, × inches or × inches. (see page .) fold a square into sixteen small squares of equal size; crease. with this as a basis throw the child on his own resources, allowing him to invent a pattern and make a chair, a sofa, or any piece of furniture that he can devise from such a square. a corner may have to be cut out or a slit made, but impress upon the child that, as far as possible, the model must be gotten by folding, with very little or no cutting. by using a larger square and folding in the same way, a house or a barn may be made. add a chimney and steps from an extra piece of paper. [illustration] hexagonal tray _material_--construction paper, × inches. [illustration: hexagonal tray] draw one diameter; find the center. with a radius of three and one-half inches describe a circle. (the circumference of a circle is six times the radius). place a point of the compass at one intersection of the circumference and the diameter, and divide the circle into six equal parts. with a radius of two inches, describe an inner circle parallel to the outer one. connect opposite points of the outer circle by drawing two more diameters. this will divide the inner circle into six equal parts. connect by straight lines the adjacent points of the inner circle, as - ; score. at the intersections of the outer circle, mark off one-half inch on each side and by straight lines connect both these points with the opposite points of intersection of the inner circle, as - , - . this forms two equal triangles, one of which is to be cut out, as - - , and the other, as - - , left. having cut out the six triangles, bend up on lines scored, bring the sides together, and use triangle - - as a lap for pasting. lamp shade _material_--construction paper, × inches. japanese rice paper, × inches. [illustration: lamp shade, a] select a pretty shade of brown, green or red construction paper. measure off two inches and construct a line parallel to the ten-inch length. bisect this line. place the compass at this point of bisection and with a radius of four inches describe a semicircle, - ; extend this arc to , and draw the line - . with a radius of one inch describe an inner semicircle ( - ) parallel to the outer one. again, with a radius of one inch describe a third semicircle, parallel to the other two. set the compass at half the radius and divide each semicircle into six equal parts. connect these points of intersection by straight lines ( - ). make a stencil that will fit in one of these sections. using the stencil, draw the same figure in each section. carefully cut out the stenciled space. next lay the construction paper on the japanese rice paper and trace on it the stencil design. remove the construction paper and, with two blending colors of crayon, color the figure or design traced on the japanese paper. again, lay the construction paper on the rice paper and glue the two together. cut out the shade as marked off, bring the two edges together, and glue. [illustration: lamp shade, b] if you wish the lower edge scalloped, cut it as shown in the diagram. by folding and creasing on the lines of intersection the shade may be made hexagonal in shape. all designs for decoration are supposed to be original. star _material_--construction paper, two -inch squares. raffia. take an eight-inch square. fold the front edge over to the back edge; crease. on the left edge place a point one and one-half inches from the left-back corner. carry the right-front corner over to this point; fold and crease. turn the left triangle under; fold and crease. next, as the paper stands in your hand with the triangle facing you, fold the right edge over to the left edge; crease. where the three edges of the paper come together, begin at the highest point and cut across the paper from right to left to within two and one-half inches of the center. open out the paper and you have the star. a picture frame made of a five-pointed star is very pretty. cut two stars of the same size. from the center of one cut a star one inch smaller for a mat. lay this mat on the solid or foundation star and glue four of the points together. in the fifth point pierce two holes through both pieces, about an inch from the apex of the point. slip in the picture. take a piece of raffia or cord and tie a loop with two ends. bring these ends through the holes from the back to the front and tie them in a bow. by the loop at the back the frame is hung. [illustration: picture frame from five-pointed star] notebook _material_--construction paper, - / × inches, for cover. manila paper, four pieces × - / inches, for leaves. fold the piece of construction paper down the middle, so as to form the - / × - / -inch cover. in the same way crease the manila paper for the leaves. place the leaves within the cover; with heavy silk or fine twine sew them to the back. bring the needle through one inch from the upper edge, one inch from the lower edge, and in the middle. the long stitch is on the inside, the two short ones are on the outside, both ends of the thread are brought through the center to the inside and tied over the long stitch to hold it in place. leave the ends an inch long and fringe them. [illustration: notebook] bound book _material_--heavy construction paper, colored, × inches, for cover. four pieces white paper, - / × - / inches, for leaves. two pieces tape, / × inches. _cover._ mark off and rule two and seven-eighths inches from each edge of the five-inch length; crease. this will leave in the middle a / × -inch space, in which the back of the leaves will go. take each sheet of white paper, fold it once lengthwise, and once crosswise; this will make a "folio" four leaves thick, - / × - / inches in size. we have four of these folios to be joined together and bound to the back. take folio no. and with needle and silk sew the leaves together, running the thread one inch from the upper edge and one inch from the lower edge and in the center, seeing that the last stitch brings the thread on the outside of the back of the leaves. do not break the thread. take folio no. , hold it close to folio no. , carry the thread across and take it through the middle of the back, one inch from front or back edge, as in folio no. . [illustration: bound book] on the back edges of these folios there will be two long stitches. under these stitches pass the two pieces of tape. keep one of these tapes as near the upper and the other as near the lower edge as the stitch will allow. as a folio is added and the leaves sewed together, connect the exposed stitch of the one previously added to the one last added, at the three places where the thread holds the leaves, by a buttonhole stitch (in bookbinding known as the "kettle stitch"). when the last folio is added, place the back of the leaves to the back of the cover in the / × -inch space. stretch the tapes down on the cover and paste ( - ). take the first and the last leaf and paste them over the tapes, to the inside of the cover. the outside of the cover may have some simple decoration if such is desired. in book vii of the _text book of art education_, published by the prang educational company, is worked out a very interesting problem for the making of a scrap-book, and suggestions given for decorating the cover. the scrap or clipping books shown here were made in a similar way. the decoration and cover are left to the taste and ingenuity of the teacher or the child. japanese book _material_--construction paper, colored, - / × - / inches, for cover. manila paper, six leaves, × inches, double, with fold on outer edge. [illustration: japanese book] the paper for the cover is - / × - / inches in size. place the paper lengthwise in front of you and bring the left edge over to the right edge; crease, fold. mark off a space three-fourths of an inch from the edge of the fold, draw a line, a-l. on this line three-quarters of an inch from the upper and the lower edges, place dots, b c, and one-fourth inch from b c place dots d e. hold the leaves evenly together and press them in between the cover. with a large needle and cord sew through c, under, up, and over a, through c again, under to f, over through c, under and up through e, back to g, under and up through e, down to d, through and over h, back to d, down and up through d, then to b; down under to k, back to b, through and under and around to l, to b, to d, to e, to c. tie the two ends of the cord, which come together at c, and fringe them out. [illustration: scrap or clipping book cover of grass cloth.] scrap-book _material_--construction paper, colored: - / × - / inches, for cover. manila paper: three leaves × inches; three strips - / × inches. two paper clamps. double the × -inch leaves into six leaves × inches in size. between leaves and , and , and , place the - / × -inch guards at the back. have leaves and guards even and compact; then set them between the cover. measure from the back edge of the cover a space three-quarters of an inch wide, and draw a pencil line. placing the sharp edge of a ruler on this line, bend the back edge toward the front until it is well creased. in the center of this / -inch space, one inch from the upper edge and one inch from the lower edge of the book, pierce a hole and insert the brass clamps. [illustration: scrap or clipping book cover of linen, stenciled.] a paste mix until perfectly smooth one cup of flour with one cup of cold water. put two cups of water in a vessel and set it over the fire until it heats. (do not let it boil.) add one teaspoonful of powdered alum, then stir in the mixture of flour and cold water. continue stirring until it thickens to a good consistency. remove it from the fire and add one teaspoonful of oil of cloves or peppermint. pour it into an air-tight jar and when it is cool screw on the top. [illustration: scrap or clipping book cover of fancy paper--(for description see pages and .)] use the same cup all through. the oil of cloves or peppermint is simply a flavoring, and does not add to the quality. this quantity will nearly fill a quart jar. part iii wood construction wood construction introductory remarks as the child develops, paper construction loses its charm, and a desire for something utilitarian arises. we suggest that at this stage the much-treasured pocket knife be brought into service, for from small pieces of wood many articles may be made. the construction of these will afford the child, especially the boy, much pleasure, and will at once arouse a new interest. only the simplest articles will be given here--articles which may be fashioned from bits of wood commonly found around a house, such as old cigar boxes, small starch boxes, etc. but, should the teacher be able to obtain the proper materials, basswood a quarter or three-eighths of an inch thick, and whittling knives are the requisites. the reader will notice that the wood mentioned for each model is bass. why? because bass is the wood generally used for carving. the tree is the same as the linden and the lime. it is found in northern asia, europe, and north america, and grows to an immense height. the wood is soft, light, close-veined, pliable, tough, durable, and free from knots, and does not split easily; all of which qualities favor its suitability for carving. in whittling, it is always best to lay off the pattern on both sides of the wood. then one can work from either side without fear of spoiling the material. in cutting, work with the grain, or the wood will be apt to split. cut toward you, not from you. in grooving, use the point of the knife, and work slowly and carefully. if the knife slips the wood is ruined. insist that nothing the child does is well done unless well sandpapered, and nothing is properly sandpapered until all roughness is done away with, and the grain appears. in the making of designs, let the child first have a piece of paper the size of the wood he is to use, and have him work out a design to be applied to his wood. this design may be most crude, but with a suggestion here, and a correction there, from the teacher, it can be brought into shape. the child will be pleased, and will attack with more assurance of success each succeeding problem that he meets. for coloring, use water color paints. red, green, and yellow are most satisfactory, as their identity is retained when staining is applied. apply the stain with a brush, and with a soft cloth rub it in until it is dry. this develops or brings out the grain. when sure that the stain is well rubbed in and dry, apply butcher's wax, and polish with a soft cloth. some articles need two coats of stain, and an equal amount of polish. in all work impress upon the child the fact that what is worth doing is worth doing well, or it should not be done at all. each model given works out a problem in handling the knife and cutting the wood, and each problem leads up to the one that follows. we will begin with the simplest thing one can make--a puzzle. puzzle _problem_--to cut with the grain of the wood, and how to cut corners. (see page .) _material_--basswood: one piece × - / × / inches; one piece × - / × / inches. one yard of macramé cord. shave the × - / -inch strip of wood down with a knife until it is an inch wide, being careful to keep the edges parallel. measure off three-eighths of an inch in opposite directions on each corner and on both sides of the wood. connect these points by a pencil line. cut off each corner the space indicated by the line. be careful always to cut with the grain of the wood; cutting against it will split the board. next, three-fourths of an inch from each end, and equally distant from the sides, and in the center, bore holes. from the × - / -inch piece of wood, cut two blocks one and one-half inches square, and bore a hole in the center of each. double the string to a loop and draw this loop through the center hole of the rectangular strip. pull the loop to the edge, and draw through it the two ends of the cord. string the - / -inch blocks, one on each cord, then tie the ends of cord in the two end holes of the rectangular strip. the puzzle is finished. what is the aim, and how can it be solved? [illustration: puzzle] _solution._ mark one block. hold one in the hand and move the other along until it passes through the loop at the center. pull the cord through the middle hole until it draws with it four thicknesses of cord. now slide the block along until it passes through a double loop. next, draw this double loop back through the hole; the string will be in position, and the block is now passed along through a single loop and onto the string containing the other one. to replace the block, turn the puzzle around and repeat the process. plant label _problem_--to cut across the grain, and, by removing two equal triangles, to form a well-tapered point. _material_--one piece of basswood, × × / inches. [illustration: plant label] take the end a b and find the center, c. from a measure off two and a half inches, and place point d. from b measure off two and a half inches, and place point e. connect points cd and ce. place the same measurements on the reverse side. with the knife cut off triangles a-c-d and b-c-e. sandpaper the wood until it is smooth and the label is finished. pencil sharpener _problem_--curve-cutting. _material_--one piece of basswood, - / × - / × / inches. one piece of sandpaper, × - / inches. glue. stain. on the wood place points three and a quarter inches from each end, at a and b, and connect them by line a-b. place points g and h half an inch from c and d. start your curve at g, pass through i, and end at h. in the rectangle a-b-f-e draw a handle as indicated in the diagram. shape the other end by removing spaces g-c-i and h-d-i. sandpaper thoroughly. shape one end of the × - / -inch piece of sandpaper as curve g-i-h, and glue it to the wood. stain the wood and polish it by rubbing it with a soft cloth. [illustration: pencil sharpener] match scratch _problem_--curve and cross-grain cutting. _material_--one piece of basswood, - / × × / inches. one piece of sandpaper, - / × inches. glue. [illustration: match scratch] place a point at the center of line a-b and of line c-d. place a point on line a-c and line b-d, one and one-quarter inches from a and b. connect these points by a pencil line, and draw another line one-eighth of an inch below. score these two lines with the point of the knife, making a tiny groove. draw curves a-e and b-e, the highest point of the curve being half an inch from the edge a-e-b. draw curves g-f and h-f. remove spaces , , , and . sandpaper thoroughly the edges and sides. shape the piece of sandpaper, two and a half by three inches, to fit the space g-f-h, allowing a quarter-inch margin, and glue it on. bore a hole at . do not stain. [illustration: kite string winder] kite-string winder _problem_--cross-grain cutting. _material_--one piece of basswood, - / × - / × / inches. measure and lay off as shown in the diagram, and cut out all spaces indicated by dotted lines. sandpaper the wood until it is smooth. stain the winder or not, as is preferred. thermometer back _problem_--beveling and grooving. (see page .) _material_--one piece of basswood × × / inches. stain. for the thermometer back the measurements need be placed on but one side of the wood. mark off a quarter-inch from the edge all around and draw a line. place a second line a quarter-inch within this. using the line nearest the edge as a guide, cut off the sharp edges on the face of the strip of wood until the slant surface is reached between the line and the back edge. this makes the bevel. the inner line is a guide for spacing the design. originate a simple design, and lay it off on the board in pencil. then, using the point of the knife, with the greatest care groove out the design. place a hole near the top of the strip by means of which to hang it. notice that the design fits around the hole. sandpaper, stain, and polish the wood. the design given here is the simplest that can be made. it is suggested that until the child becomes accustomed to working with the knife, all designs for grooving had better be confined to straight lines. combine in a design a vertical, a horizontal, and an oblique line, and some beautiful patterns may be originated. pocket pin-cushion _problem_--circular cutting, grooving, stenciling, and coloring. (see page .) _material_--basswood: two pieces, × × / inches. one piece of heavy felt × × / inches. glue. water-color paints. stain. find the center of each square of wood by drawing the diagonals. with the compass at the radius of one and one-half inches, describe a circle on each piece of wood (on one side only). remove spaces a, b, c, and d with the knife, and you have a circular block. remember to cut with the grain. bevel the edges. make an original design and apply it to your wood. with the knife groove the outline of this design. there should be a space three-eighths of an inch wide between the edge of the wood and the outer edge of the design. when the design is grooved in, color it. red, green and yellow are the best colors. their identity is not lost in staining. lastly, stain and polish the face of the blocks. cut the felt the size of the blocks, cover the back of each block with glue, place the felt between the two, and keep the whole in press for several hours. the model here suggests two designs. these are given simply as illustrations. use the same design for both backs of the cushion. [illustration: thermometer back--(for description see page .)] [illustration: pin cushion] [illustration: designs for pin cushion] picture frame _material_--basswood, sweet gum, walnut or oak. one piece, × × / inches, for frame; one piece, - / × × / inches, for back; one piece, - / × × / inches, for supports; two pieces, - / × / × / inches, and one piece, - / × / × / inches for cleats. glue. half-inch brads. should basswood be used it must be stained. sweet gum, walnut, or oak may be left in its natural state, and oiled to bring out the grain and finish. [illustration: picture frame] on the × × / -inch board mark off with a pencil a center space - / × - / inches in size. with a gimlet bore holes at points a, b, c, and d. connect these holes with a pencil line as a guide for cutting. along the line make a groove which may be broadened and deepened until the board is cut through. by working around the square in this way, the center will soon be opened. trim the wood as smoothly as possible with a knife; then use sandpaper to level and finish off. bevel the edge of the opening if you wish. cut in half the - / × × / -inch piece of wood, and make two supports, as in figure . with a pencil draw the shape of these supports on the wood; in whittling work very carefully, as they are small and will easily split. as far as possible, hold the pieces so that the knife will shave with the grain of the wood. in crosscut work from the opposite side. in straight cut, keep notches at opposite ends, so that if the knife should slip and the wood split no serious damage will be done. place the cleats on the back half an inch from the opening, the longer fitting in between the two shorter ones. glue them on, then nail them. against these cleats glue the back ( ) before nailing it. next glue and nail on the two supports against the back and on a level with the lower edge (figure ). on the fourth side, where there is no cleat, is the opening through which the picture is slipped. when the frame is satisfactorily sandpapered, oil and polish it. japanese box _problem_--to construct a box having lid and bottom extend beyond sides. _stock_--basswood: two pieces, each - / × - / × / inches, for lid and bottom; two pieces, each × × / inches, for sides; two pieces, each - / × × / inches, for ends; two pieces, each - / × / × / inches, for cleats. glue. half-inch brads. stain. wax. [illustration: japanese box] on the - / × - / × / -inch pieces of wood, cut a bevel a quarter of an inch wide. place the two ends between the two sides; glue and nail. set this rectangular frame on the under side of the bottom, equally distant from each edge, and trace the shape with a pencil. remove the frame; the pencil line indicates where the nails are to be driven to secure the frame to the base. now set the frame on the upper side of the bottom; aim for the same spacing as on the under side, and mark off. carefully cover the lower edge of this frame with glue, place it on the base and press the two until the glue is dry. drive the brads through from the under side of the base an eighth of an inch within the guiding line. having beveled and sandpapered the lid, trace a design on it, and outline this design by grooving. [illustration] nail the - / × / × / -inch cleats to the under side of the lid, five-eighths or an inch from each end and half an inch from each side. these cleats fit into the box and hold the lid on. stain, wax, and polish the box. grandfather's chair _material_--basswood: three pieces × × / inches; one piece × × / inches. brads. sandpaper. glue. stain or oil. [illustration: grandfather's chair] measure and lay off as you have done in making the other small pieces of wood work. handle the knife most cautiously, as the wood is so thin that it is easily split. when all parts are cut out and well sandpapered glue them together and secure them by driving in the brads about an inch apart along the line of the seat and where the arms join the back. stain or oil as most convenient, or as taste dictates. part iv basketry basketry introductory remarks the art of basket-making is a primitive one, and so simple that it appears to have been known among the rudest people and in very early ages. when moses was found by pharaoh's daughter, he was lying in a basket which had been woven by his mother. later, when the israelites were returning to the promised land, they were commanded to offer unto the lord "the first of all the fruits of the earth" in a basket, as soon as canaan became their possession. the baskets of the rich, of these ancient israelites were made of gold and silver, and so valuable were they that when a gift was sent in one of them the basket was always returned. the ancient britons were remarkably expert in the manufacture of baskets, which were so beautifully made that they were highly prized by the romans. our own american indians were, and still are, such adepts in the art of basket-making that, for beauty and artistic effect, their baskets are excelled by none. the perfection attained in this art by the uncivilized is marvelous. adapting the materials about them to their use, they produce masterpieces which the civilized man beholds in wonder and amazement. though handed down to us through many ages, this ancient occupation has never lost its fascination. the adult and the child of to-day are as eager to learn its secrets as were those dwellers on the banks of the nile, hundreds of years ago. as a plastic art it lies between paper construction and clay modeling on one side, and wood and iron work on the other. a keen interest in the art may be awakened by arousing in the child a desire for a basket for some practical purpose. in the autumn, the collecting of seeds for next spring's planting, the gathering of nuts, the need for something in which to take the lunch to school, or, perhaps, a wish to make a pleasing gift for the coming christmas, will immediately suggest its utility. [illustration: north carolina pine] of what shall the basket be made? children enjoy those things most which they feel that they have exerted themselves to obtain; and the greater the effort involved, the greater the educational value. every child should be trained to keep his eyes open and to adapt to his use the things he sees about him. materials for baskets may be obtained in just this way. city children may take a trip to the country and gather the long grasses found in swamps and low places. perhaps in the garden at home there is a clump of yucca; when the fall comes and the bloom is gone the leaves or blades may be cut, dried and stripped, and transformed into an attractive basket or tray. again, the husks which are stripped from the corn cooked for dinner may be torn into narrow ribbons and dried for use. corn husks make a beautiful basket, for the different shades of green change, after the husks have dried, to as many shades of brown, which blend most artistically when worked up. the little children of the south may gather the long needles that fall from the southern pine, and combine them with raffia or twine to construct a basket. country children have a most adaptable and convenient commodity in the tough, flexible willows found on the banks of almost every stream. the material most commonly used and easiest to begin with, however, is reed, which is pliable, and readily handled and moulded into simple forms by even small children. it is available when other materials are not to be had, for it may be purchased with the school supplies. reed is the core or central part of the climbing calamus, a species of palm found in the jungles of borneo and adjacent south sea islands. the outside of the raw calamus is smooth and is made into commercial cane used for chairs. the shavings, made by the machine which separates the cane from the core or inner reed, are utilized for mats, polishing material, and stuffing for mattresses and furniture. thus every part of the raw material is brought into use. originally the calamus grew in a limited area and was difficult to obtain. only the natives could gather it, as the white man contracted the jungle fever as soon as he subjected himself to the climate in which it grew. but within the last fifty or seventy-five years enterprising men have begun the cultivation of the rattan palm, and have met with so much success that now there are a number of factories in the united states making the reed and rattan of commerce, while germany and belgium export to us the best reed that is used. [illustration: reed baskets] the teacher should never begin the use of any new material for construction without having made the child familiar with its history; nor should a finished article be laid aside until the pupil has given the teacher a description of how it is made, and of what it is made. if this method is carried out the child will show a greater appreciation of what he is doing, will value the finished article more highly, and will place a premium on the raw material. overlook the pupils in their work, but grant them the privilege of adjusting size and shape, and of selecting material for the requirements of the design they have in mind. by achieving what he can for himself, the pupil attains a realization of his own power, and the logic of size, shape, material, etc., is awakened. reed construction in construction, the first thing to teach a child is how to handle the material. to do this, use small quantities and attempt only simple articles. reed is the simplest thing to begin with, and the easiest of all basket-work models is the napkin ring. soak all the reed and dry it with a cloth before using. napkin ring no. i _problem_--to construct a napkin ring of reed. _material_--no. reed, feet. take one end of the reed and form a loop two inches in diameter, and wind the reed three times to form the ring. hold it in the left hand. pass the loose end over the curve and through the circle. pull it taut enough to make it lie in a natural curve. repeat this movement--over and over, round and round--allowing the strands always to follow the valley between the two former laps. when the foundation is covered, clip the end where it finishes up, press it into place in the groove, drop a little glue over the point at which it is pressed in, and bind the ring with a string to hold the end in position. when the glue has dried, remove the string. [illustration: no. i no. ii reed napkin rings] when the napkin ring has been made, the child has learned the principle involved in constructing a basket handle. napkin ring no. ii _problem_--to construct a napkin ring of no. reed. (see page .) _material_--no. reed, - / feet. in using no. reed, form the loop two inches in diameter, but have the ring of only one thickness, and proceed as in ring no. . this will make a napkin ring of different appearance because the windings are fewer and the reed thicker. mat _problem_--to construct a simple mat of reed. _material_--no. reed: eight spokes, inches long; one spoke, inches long. weavers of no. reed. [illustration: figure figure to start a reed mat or simple basket] place together, at right angles, two groups of four spokes of no. reed. to the under group add the six-inch spoke of no. reed (figure ). hold the spokes firmly in the left hand. take the no. weaver and insert it under the thumb. wind the weaver diagonally over the crossing point in both directions (figure ). then wind the weaver over and under alternate groups of spokes, three times around. hold both spokes and weaver firmly in place with the left hand. separate into single spokes now and continue weaving until your mat is four inches in diameter. fasten the end of the weaver by tucking it down beside a rib. the projecting ribs are trimmed to an even length and pointed. take any given spoke, as no. , bend it to the left in front of no. and insert it on the right side of no. . no. is now taken and carried to the left over no. and inserted to the right of no. . proceed thus until all the spokes are inserted, when the mat is finished. the scallops should form a semicircle. [illustration: reed mat] for a larger mat, take ten spokes, sixteen inches long, of no. reed, and one spoke nine inches long of the same. use no. reed for the weaver and proceed as in making the smaller mat. to add a new weaver, place the end about two spokes back of where the former weaver ended and parallel with it. hamper basket _problem_--to construct a simple reed basket. _material_--no. reed: eight spokes inches long; one spoke inches long. weavers of no. reed. begin the basket exactly as the mat was begun. weave until the bottom is three inches, or three and a half inches in diameter. then bend the spokes at right angles with the base, drawing the weaver tight so as to hold the spokes in position and keep them separated at an equal distance. continue weaving until the basket is three inches high, or until about one and a half inches of spokes is left for the border. finish the edge by turning down the spokes as in the edge of the mat, or bend them down flat with the edge of the basket. take any spoke, as no. , bring from right to left over no. , then no. over no. , and so on until the ends of all the spokes are turned to the inside of the basket. keep both basket and weaver well dampened while weaving. after the basket is finished press it into shape while still damp. when it is thoroughly dry trim off the ends of the spokes which appear too long on the inside of the basket, leaving them just long enough to be held in place by the curved spoke under which each passes. this makes a beautiful hamper basket. [illustration: hamper basket] a handle may be added to this little basket, but it is not advisable to encourage a child to add a handle until he has made his third basket or has shown in some way proficiency in what has been taught so far. _to add a handle._ take a length of reed, of the same number as the spokes, for the handle bow. for a small-sized basket take ten inches. insert one end down through the weaving beside one of the spokes. bend the bow into the shape you wish for the handle and insert the other end of the bow beside a spoke on the opposite side of the basket, being careful that the two spaces between the two ends of the handle are equal. the handle should be about as high above the border as the border is above the bottom of the basket. the width of the handle should be a little less than the width of the basket at the top. you are now ready to cover the handle. take a long weaver; push one end of it through the wale under the second row. hold the end in place and wrap the weaver about the handle bow, keeping the spaces about equal, and drawing taut enough to be graceful, until it reaches the opposite side. then draw the weaver through the wale and under the second row and up on that side; next wind about the handle bow again, back to the starting-point. push the weaver through the wale, under the second row and out again, and once more wind across the handle bow. repeat this operation from side to side until the handle bow is covered. keep each row of winder close to the preceding one and parallel to it. when the bow is covered, tuck the end of the weaver through the wale and under the second row and clip the end, leaving it just long enough to stay in place. the handle bow needs to be damp enough to be flexible, but unless the winding weaver is well soaked it will crack and make trouble. basket tray _problem_--to construct a reed basket or tray, having an even number of spokes, and using same number reed for both spokes and weaver. _material_--sixteen spokes, each inches long, of no. or no. reed. weaver of reed of same number as spokes. separate the spokes into groups of four. place set no. on and at right angles to set no. . sets and are laid diagonally across sets and . [illustration: how to begin the basket tray] hold the spokes firmly, attach the weaver and go in and out four times round, over and under the same set of spokes each time. at the end of the fourth round, pass the weaver over two sets of spokes and weave four rows. next separate the spokes into sets of two and weave one row; now each time that the weaver comes to starting-point in the circle, pass it over two sets of spokes instead of one, and then weave the next round. when you have been around seven times using double spokes, bend the spokes up for sides and weave two more rows over double spokes. then separate into single spokes and weave six rows, remembering each time to pass the weaver at the end of a new round over two spokes instead of one, so as to have them properly alternated. trim the ends of the spokes to an equal length and start the border by bending any given spoke to the right and inside the tray, holding it in place. continue with each succeeding one until all the spokes have been bent into position. these spokes being bent so closely and consecutively over each other, form a coil resembling the handle of a basket. the points of the spokes are pushed under the coil, through from the inside to the outside of the basket. keep a vessel of water at hand and wet the material constantly as you weave. when the tray is finished, press it into shape and set aside to dry. when it is well dried, clip off the projecting ends. [illustration: reed basket tray] basket with handle _problem_--to construct a basket using an uneven number of spokes, spokes and weaver the same number reed; and to add a handle. _material_--no. reed: eight stakes, each inches long; one stake inches long. weavers of no. reed. make two groups of four each of the twenty-inch stakes. place one set at right angles across the other, and beside the under set insert the eleven-inch spoke. hold the spokes firmly between the thumb and the forefinger of the left hand, and with the weaver in the right hand place the starting end under the edge of the upper set; bring it around and over set no. , under no. , over no. , under no. , and repeat this operation four times. now separate the spokes into groups of eight twos and one single, and weave four rounds. next cut seventeen eleven-inch stakes and push one in beside each stake already used. divide them into seventeen pairs. weave round and round until you have a base three and one-half inches in diameter. being sure that the weaver is damp and pliable, with fingers, or "pliers," bend up the stakes close to the weaving, at right angles with the base, and continue weaving until the basket is four inches deep. then trim the stakes, if necessary, to uniform length and bend them over to form the border. take any stake, as no. , and work from right to left. bend down no. , pass under no. and over no. . then take no. , pass under no. and over no. . continue until every pair of stakes has been turned down and worked into the border. all ends must come inside the basket; after it is dry, trim them off. you will find that in working with the wet reed your basket may seem not to have the proper shape. soak it well and you will be able to mould as you wish it. add a handle. [illustration: reed basket with handle] this basket is made almost exactly like the little hamper basket previously described, except that in this one, we use double stakes, while in that one, single stakes were used; the sides of this one are vertical, those of that one slightly curved. * * * * * in passing from the reed basket, the next step would be the raffia and then the combination of reed and raffia, which is worked out in all forms of indian basketry. the most common stitch is known as the "lazy squaw," and is made by winding the raffia round the reed one, two, or three times, as space is desired; and then the needle is taken through the row below to make the stitch. each stitch is a repetition of the one before and the mat, tray or basket grows with the effort. there are innumerable opportunities for design in indian basketry, and it is here that the work of an artist may be realized and recognized. raffia construction we may correlate and combine raffia with reed in construction. the two materials may be worked together to great advantage and interest to the child. for instance, when a napkin ring has been made of reed let the child next construct one of raffia, and then compare the finished article as to the material vised, the beauty, the flexibility, the durability, and the nativity of each. as in the case of reed, so with raffia before constructing with it, pass a piece to each child and give the life history of the plant. madagascar may be a name only to the small child, but the very vagueness of his knowledge concerning it may cause him to realize the distance of the island from us and appreciate that this simple material with which he is working has traveled thousands of miles to bring him a story and an occupation. raffia, a native of the south sea islands and of madagascar, is the inner bark of the raphia palm, pulled off, torn into narrow strips, dried in the sun, and bound into bunches, which are plaited together and stored ready for use or shipping. we receive the raffia in its natural state, but many colors may easily be had by dyeing. in _practical basket making_, by george wharton james, some valuable suggestions on dyeing are given; but the small quantity of raffia a teacher will need may be dyed with very little trouble with the "easy dyes" manufactured by the american color company. follow directions and the results will be most satisfactory. be very careful to have the dyes strong enough, as raffia absorbs an enormous amount of coloring. all raffia should be washed before dyeing; it should be well dried before being put into the dye pot, since it takes the color better when dry. if you have pupils old enough, or a class on which you can rely, nothing will delight them more than to do their own dyeing. a fourth-grade class in one of the baltimore schools has successfully dyed all the raffia, cord, cotton, and textiles used in their classroom. the child dearly loves color; the possibility of having different shades to work with will arouse an intense interest in procuring these colors. it will be unusual if the pupils do not handle with care the materials and the dye pot. in adapting a commodity to circumstances in this way, the broader knowledge of how the colors in clothing are obtained will develop and there will be created in the child a new idea of life and of man's work. the natural color of the raffia is much improved by washing; therefore, before using it loosen it and soak it in clean water so that all dust and dirt may be removed and the strips or strings straightened out; then hang it in the air until thoroughly dry. before offering any models of the combined reed and raffia, we shall give a few of raffia alone, as we did of the reed. plaited rope _problem_--to teach different ways in which the plaited rope of raffia may be applied. _material_--raffia. begin the use of raffia by teaching the child the three-strand plait, adding a new thread from time to time, until a long rope is made. next teach how to coil this rope into a mat, a purse, a basket, or a hat. in plaiting, keep the raffia damp and use strands of equal size. dampness adds gloss and smoothness to the finished article. [illustration: three-strand plait] in the construction of articles of plaited raffia an opportunity opens up to bring the child's inventive ingenuity into play. get him to think of something he might make, and to construct it roughly of paper. with his model as a guide for shape and size, he can easily reproduce it in raffia. the first pattern may be crude, but each repetition will produce a better one, and interest will lend enchantment, until both pattern and reproduction will be most creditable. plaited mat _problem_--to construct a mat of plaited raffia rope. _material_--raffia. [illustration: mat of plaited braid] the starting-point in all these designs is the little round coil, called the button. to make a mat, first plait a rope several feet long. to form the button hold the end of the rope between thumb and forefinger, and begin to roll the rope just as a watch spring is coiled. with a needle and fine thread of raffia, make the button firm; then keep on coiling around the button and, as each row is added, tack it to the preceding row by pushing the needle in and out at right angles with the braid, so that the stitch may be invisible. when finished the mat should be about four inches in diameter. the object of winding the plait sideways is to give the mat firmness and thickness. purse _problem_--to construct a purse or bag of plaited raffia rope. (see page .) _material_--raffia. to make a purse, plait enough rope to make two mats three and a half inches in diameter. to construct these mats first make the button. work this time with the braid flat. sew by holding the inner edge of the plait just under the outer edge of the preceding row. when both mats are finished, place them flat against each other, and overseam or buttonhole the edges together for about two-thirds of the circumference. plait a rope, seven inches long, for a handle. tie a knot in each end, and ravel the ends of raffia to form a tassel. attach this handle to the purse at each side, where the opening begins. girls especially delight in this little purse or bag. plaited basket _problem_--to sew braid together to form one angle. (see page .) _material_--raffia. _dimensions_--bottom three inches in diameter; sides two inches high; handle six inches long and two braids wide. using three threads of raffia, plait a rope several feet long. proceed just as with purse, and sew until you have a mat three inches in diameter. now place the braid at right angles with the base, and sew round and round to form the sides. when these are two inches high fasten the braid; and, without cutting it, carry it to the opposite side to form the handle. fasten it there and bring it back again, to make the handle two braids wide. either overseam these together to make a broad handle, or leave them separated to form a double handle. an easy way to obtain a more uniform shape in constructing this basket is to have a smooth tumbler or a tin box, and, as you work, fit the material to the form. when it is finished, dampen it and let it remain on the form until it dries. [illustration: purse or bag of plaited raffia--(for description see page .)] [illustration: basket of plaited raffia--(for description see page .)] hat of plaited rope _problem_--to sew the braid together to form two angles. _material_--raffia. [illustration: hat of plaited raffia] first plait the raffia together until you have a very long braid. take the starting end, make the button, and sew round and round, as in making the purse. when the top of the crown is as large as you wish it, turn the braid at right angles and form the sides. when, in your judgment, the crown is high enough, make a second right angle to form the brim, which may be wide or narrow as taste dictates. use a blunt needle (smith's tapestry, no. ). napkin ring _problem_--to construct a raffia napkin ring. _material_--raffia. a piece of tag-board - / or inches wide and inches long. quarter-inch ribbon or strip of paper, or raffia of a contrasting color. there is mentioned a raffia napkin ring in comparison with the one of reed. take the strip of tag-board, fasten the ends together and wrap with raffia until the board is covered. it may be ornamented with a narrow strip of ribbon, paper or colored raffia woven around the center. if ribbon or raffia is used tie the ends in a bow. if paper is used the ends must be glued. indian basket _problem_--to teach construction with twisted raffia rope. (see page .) _material_--two contrasting colors of raffia. first think of what shape and size you would like a basket; then roughly sketch a design, in order that an idea of shape, size, and proportion may be had. keep the design before you and work as closely from it as possible. take three thick strands of raffia and twist them into a rope. in starting have the threads unequal in length, as it is much neater to add one new thread at a time than two or three. keep the rope of the same thickness throughout, and as each thread is used up, insert another overlapping the old one two or three inches. around this rope, and twisted in the same way, wrap a contrasting color of raffia, aiming to have the spaces equal and using threads of the same size. having twisted and wound four or five inches start the basket by forming a button, then, holding the button firmly with the left hand, coil the rope round and round and sew it. use the sharp-pointed needle and join the coils in such a way that the threads will coincide with the twist. when the basket is finished, the opening at the top should be either greater or less in diameter than the base. make a lid exactly as the base is made, and have it just a shade wider than the opening so that it will be supported. the ring with which to lift the lid is made by wrapping raffia three or four times over the finger, and then buttonholing it over. sew the ring to the middle of the lid and attach the lid to the basket. [illustration: indian baskets] the model here given is made of white raffia twisted with red. diameter of base, inches; height, - / inches; opening at top, - / inches; diameter of lid, - / inches. [illustration: indian basket--(for description see pages and .)] grass basket or tray _problem_--to teach how to construct a basket of grass, pine needles, or corn husks. _material_--narrow-blade marsh or sweet grass. raffia for sewing. make a design in pencil, ink, or colored crayon. here the adaptability of material gathered about the home is illustrated. the tall, fine marsh grasses may be collected, spread out for three or four days where they will dry, and then utilized. you will find that almost every blade of this grass varies in color. the root end may be brown, while toward the tip the leaf shades into a light green, or white, or vice versa; this blending, when the grass is bunched, is most artistic. bunch a sufficient number of blades to make a coil a half or three-quarters of an inch in diameter. do not twist. never allow the coil to lessen in size. keep adding fresh strands by slipping the root ends of the new blades up between those already in the coil. when we begin to sew we do not wrap the grasses as we wrapped the strands of raffia, but simply use as a sewing thread raffia of a contrasting or blending color. to form the button, wrap the threads three or four times around the root ends of the bunch, fasten tightly, then coil to form the center. take the needle through the center and over the coil as many times as you think necessary to make the button firm. these stitches are the beginning of the spiral rays which radiate to the edge of the basket. take the stitches at equal distances from each other. handle the needle so as to pass from back to front, and always have the new stitch pass through the stitch of the coil just below it from right to left. when the coil has been wound around four or five times, the stitches will be seen to interlock and form a spiral. soon the spaces will become too wide; then take an extra stitch in the center of each space, thus adding another set of rays. continue adding new sets of rays as the spaces widen, until the basket is finished. [illustration: beginning of basket tray] when the base has grown to the required size, turn up for sides and continue sewing in the same way until the necessary depth is obtained. to give a finish add enough grass to make a thick coil around the edge. colored hemp may be woven in with the grass either as a lining or so inserted as to make a beautiful pattern. the value of the basket will be enhanced by the use of sweetgrass, if this material is obtainable. the model given is made of marsh grass, sewed with raffia of natural color, and the design is made in pink hemp. its base is five inches in diameter; its depth one and one-fourth inches. corn husks may be used instead of grasses, and are unexcelled for beauty and artistic effect. use the inner husk from the ear when green; though the husks will dry, the varied color will not be lost. when made up with a contrasting color of green or golden brown raffia they are most attractive. grasses may be kept a long time; but before using them soak them thoroughly, and let them dry out. this treatment will make them so pliable that they may be handled as easily as though freshly gathered. the long needles of the southern pine also are thus worked up. [illustration: basket tray] basket of splints and raffia _problem_--to teach construction, using splints and raffia. _material_--splints of ash or flat reed: eighteen splints, each / × inches; splints, each / × inches, for binding of edge. raffia of two or three colors. _dimensions_--base, × inches. depth, inches. sides, × inches. lay a set of nine splints flat on a surface. take one of the remaining nine and weave across for the first row. add a second splint, weaving in and out through alternate ones. continue until all the nine splits are woven in and the square base of the basket is formed. have splints sufficiently damp to be flexible; otherwise they may break. bend up the splints at right angles to the base for sides, thus making corners. now with the raffia weave in and out, interlace the thread at the corners, and draw it tight enough to hold the splints in place. introduce color to suit taste. [illustration: bottom of splint and raffia basket] when the sides are finished, take an eighteen-inch splint and lay it around on the inside of the basket close to the last row of raffia. hold it in place and turn the ends of the basket splints over it inward. these end splints must be trimmed evenly and left just long enough to bend over the splint running round on the inner side. take two more eighteen-inch splints; having placed one inside the edge and the other outside the edge of the basket, with a needle and a long thread of raffia whip over and over. bring the needle through each opening between the splints until you have gone around the four sides. this makes a suitable border and completes the basket. [illustration: basket of splints and raffia] the model given here has ten rows of natural color, ten rows of green, six rows of brown, ten of green and ten of natural color, which combination makes it two inches deep. combined reed and raffia _problem_--to teach how reed and raffia may be combined in construction. the models suggested here are very simple and can be made by the younger children of the lower grades. these have been held to purposely, for the child needs first to learn how both to use his fingers and to handle a needle; and afterward he must have much practice before he can take up the more difficult stitch in the indian basketry. in beginning the combined reed and raffia work, the first thing i should make is a miniature umbrella. [illustration: umbrella (for description see opposite page.)] umbrella _material_--one -inch spoke of no. reed for handle. nine -inch spokes of no. reed for ribs. raffia for weaver. have the spokes thoroughly soaked and keep them wet. also, have the raffia damp. place the four-inch spokes around the nine-inch spoke, hold them firmly, and wrap tightly with the damp weaver four or five times; then tie, but do not cut the weaver. now stand this bunch of spokes on end on a board or desk top, press the nine spokes out so as to form a circle parallel with the surface of the desk, and with the weaver work in and out among the spokes. the convex top of the umbrella will soon form. to lengthen the weaver, tie on a new piece of raffia. continue weaving until within an inch of the ends of the ribs, or until the umbrella is four or four and one-half inches across; then fasten by tying the weaver to one of the ribs. to form a ferrule, slide end no. of the handle reed down until it stands three-quarters of an inch above the outside of the umbrella. drop a little glue into the cavity to hold the reed in place. now take end no. of the handle reed and curve it to form a ring or to appear like the handle of a real umbrella. tie it with raffia to keep it in place and lay the umbrella aside to dry. when it is thoroughly dry, clip the points of the ribs to equal lengths. this little toy suggests the invention of primitive life or of an uncivilized nation of which the pupil has some previous knowledge. it is most attractive, and to have made it greatly pleases the child. miniature chair no. i _material_--no. reed: one piece inches long; one piece inches long; four pieces inches long. several lengths of raffia. take three ten-inch lengths of reed and bend them so: [illustration] fasten them together at the joints and wrap with the raffia for about two inches to form the front legs. next attach the fifteen-inch length of reed, placing the ends together to form the back legs and allowing the extra amount to extend above in a bow to form the back. you now have the framework of back, seat, and legs. at the back, where the bow extends above the line of the seat, place a five-inch piece of very wet reed to the front of the bow and at the edge of the seat; carry it around and lap it at the back and fasten to hold the back legs together and shape the seat. [illustration: chair no. i made of reed and raffia.] this chair has a woven seat of raffia. use a very long needle and carry the raffia from one side of the seat to the other in close lines until the space is covered one way. then reverse the action and work from front to back, weaving in and out among the cross threads exactly as you do in darning. be careful to keep the thread even, to prevent sagging. when the seat is woven whip the edge all around with raffia for a finish. next take the remaining ten-inch piece of reed, bend it to a four-inch square and insert it between the legs one inch below the seat. tie it to each leg and wrap the intervening space with the raffia as you go from leg to leg. this forms the brace which holds the legs in position. for the back take a very long thread of raffia in your needle, make seven cross threads and weave a spider's web, having the center fill about one-fourth the space. when the web is finished, buttonhole around the reed to fasten the spirals in position and to give a finish to the frame of the back. lastly measure and trim off the legs to equal length. the back should extend two and one-half inches above the seat, and the legs should be two and one-fourth inches long. miniature chair no. ii _material_--no. reed: six spokes, inches long; one spoke, inches long. no. reed: two -inch lengths; six -inch lengths and one -inch length. several lengths of raffia. weave two mats two inches in diameter in the following manner: lay three ten-inch spokes across three ten-inch spokes at right angles. place beside the under set the six-inch spoke. take a piece of raffia, not too thick, for a weaver, and beginning as you would begin a basket or mat with a reed weaver, weave until the mat is two inches in diameter. do not cut either spokes or weaver. have the reed well soaked, that it may be very pliable and in no danger of breaking. to construct the back, take a mat and a fifteen-inch length of reed, bend the latter to a bow and place it back of the spokes at the edge of the last row of weaving. bend each spoke consecutively over this reed and bring the end of the spoke through between the last row of weaving and the reed. this forms a loop over the no. reed. thread the weaver into a needle, and take it in and out where the no. reed, or spoke, crosses between the mat edge and the no. reed in the form of a back stitch. the first one fastened, continue in the same way until ten spokes are bent over and tied down. next take the twelve-inch length of no. reed, bend it to this shape: [illustration] then fasten the three remaining spokes to the two-inch space as you have done with the other ten. take the second fifteen-inch length of no. reed, bend around again and fasten by running a piece of raffia in and out and over through each space between the loops. lay it aside until the seat is prepared. [illustration: chair no. ii made of reed and raffia.] _seat._ the mat is ready. bend a ten-inch length of no. reed into a - / -inch square. set this around the mat, bend the spokes over it and fasten as you did those of the back. again take three ten-inch lengths of no. reed and bend so: [illustration] place these around three sides of the prepared seat and fasten them by wrapping them over and over with raffia, and the front and two sides of the chair are formed. adjust the back to the fourth side of the seat; fasten it by wrapping it closely with raffia. next bend to a form near the size of the seat a piece of no. reed. place this around the legs, to form a brace, about one inch below the seat in front and about three-fourths of an inch below in the back. let the joining point of the reed come at the back. with a piece of raffia fasten this to one leg, then wrap the raffia over and over along the brace until the next leg is reached, secure it and pass on to the third, then to the fourth, when the entire brace will be wrapped with raffia and the four legs held in place. [illustration: back of chair no. ii] where the back is attached to the seat, you will have four no. reeds coming together to form the back legs. this would make them too thick and clumsy and they would not be symmetrical with the front ones. to prevent this, clip two of the reeds between the seat and the brace on the legs. cut out the ends of the one of the back first worked in, and the ends of the one forming the back brace. there is left the outer fifteen-inch spoke you put on and the one which came around from the side of the seat. these two form the back leg on each side. wrap closely with raffia the intervening spaces between the seat and the brace so as to leave no unsightly ends. in bending the reed to fashion the legs it is impossible to have it all the same length; adjust this by letting the unevenness come out at the foot of the leg and when the chair is finished measure and cut off the legs to the same length. rules for caning chairs _first: verticals._ setting up: begin at the center hole of the front, pass the cane up through the hole from the underside and down through the corresponding hole at the back, leaving about four inches to tie off; then up through the next hole to the right, pass to the corresponding hole to the front, continue to the right and then to the left, until all the holes are filled except the corner ones. _second: horizontals._ begin at the center hole at the left, pass the cane up through the hole and over all the verticals and down through the corresponding hole on the right, filling all the holes toward the front and then toward the back until all the holes are filled except the corner ones. _third: verticals._ begin at the center hole at the back, pass the cane up through the hole at the front, then fill all the holes to the right and the left, except the corner ones. _fourth: weaving horizontally._ begin at the right-hand side, pass the cane over the upper vertical and under the lower vertical, pulling the upper one to the right and keeping the weaver to the back of the first horizontal: continue this until you have two horizontals in each hole. _fifth: diagonals running from left to right._ pass the cane up through the front left-hand corner, under the verticals and over the horizontals, working toward the upper right-hand corner; first the right, and then the left-hand side of the frame is filled in this manner. _sixth: diagonals running from right to left._ pass the cane up through the front right-hand corner and work toward the back left-hand corner, passing the cane over the vertical and under the horizontal pairs; continue in this way until the entire frame is filled with these diagonals. tie all the ends securely on the under side of the frame. _bind off._ lay a piece of cane over the holes on the upper side of the frame. take a second long piece of cane as a weaver, pass it from the under side of the frame up through a hole, over the cane, and down through the same hole to the under side again. carry it along to the next or second next hole, pass up, over cane, and down in the same way. continue this until the entire frame is bound around. part v the school garden [illustration] the school garden introductory remarks in the spring of , at the request of president r. w. silvester of the maryland agricultural college, i wrote, for publication as a _college bulletin_, my experience of one year's work in a city school garden. the introduction of school gardens as a factor in the school curriculums was then in its infancy. three years have shown great advancement along this line, though the main issue is the same to-day as it was then. this paper is a revised edition of the _m. a. c. bulletin_. that president silvester was a pioneer in the thought that "agriculture should enter into education" is shown by the following quotation from his introduction to my article of :-- "the time must come when the child of rural environment must find in the only school which ninety per cent will ever attend, a training which will give it an intelligent adjustment to its environment. with this adjustment, the future work of the child cannot reasonably expect to escape the state of drudgery. when a life's work degenerates into this condition, then contentment with it, or happiness as a result of it, becomes an idle dream. can the accuracy of this statement be questioned? if so, it would be a great privilege for the writer to receive from some teacher a letter setting forth the particulars in which he is wrong. "let all who are interested in the child from the country, and every one should be, take this as a motto in this great work before us: 'the country is entitled from its state and from its county, to that consideration which will give him every opportunity to secure an education as well suited to his conditions, as is enjoyed by his city brothers and sisters.'" a city school garden if a country boy were to hear his little city brother say, "our class has a garden and i have a share in the working of it," the country chap would "non plus" him by quickly exclaiming, "what's that! i work in my father's garden every year and know all about raising and gathering vegetables." but to the city child, who sees only cobblestones beneath his feet, whose view is contracted by rows of dingy houses, or who plays on a lot used both as a dump-pile and as a baseball ground, the privilege of working in a garden plat is a great one and the products of its soil a revelation. [illustration: weeding the beds] the aim here is to give an account of one season's work in such a garden--a garden treasured by children whose only knowledge of vegetable foods was that mother got them in the market. through the courtesy of the city park superintendent of baltimore, sections of ground in some of the parks are placed at the disposal of the board of education for school gardens, and the privilege of cultivating these gardens is granted to teachers in an adjacent building. it is of the section in riverside park that i am writing, and the accompanying illustrations are pictures of this garden, taken at various times through the season. these sections are not in prominent places, but for the most part in undesirable corners that the park gardener is willing to relinquish for the good of the cause. in riverside park the plat is adjacent to the summer playground, and the second year that i had the garden, at the end of june when school closed, a few of the children volunteered to attend to it during vacation. [illustration: girl interest] the interest of these children attracted the attention of the director of the playground and she offered to oversee the work while the playground was in session if some of her children might have the privilege of working in the garden. this proved to be an amicable arrangement, as by it the garden was kept in good condition all summer. when school opened in september i took charge again, that the children might have the full experience. in my memory lingers a most vivid picture of a cold november afternoon when we gathered what remained of the crops, cleaned off the beds, heaped the refuse in the center of the garden, and had a most glorious bonfire, though it was not election day. we watched the last spark die out, closed the gate, and with regretful steps wended our way back to the schoolroom, to await the coming of another spring. our plat measures fifty by twenty-five feet and is enclosed by a fence. the park gardener became interested in the children's effort and added to the success of the work by giving the necessary top soil, lending wheelbarrows, and offering occasional suggestions. [illustration: may i come in?] as a preparation for the outside work we made a thorough study of soil composition and seed germination early in the winter. the children brought pieces of rock, pebbles, shells, wood, and leaves as concrete illustrations and with these before us the following lessons were developed:-- i that soil is made from the wasting away of all kinds of rock. ii that soil is made by decaying wood. iii that soil is made by decaying leaves. iv that the above composites combine to form productive soil. the object of the first lesson was to teach that soil is made from rock. the pupils examined stones, pebbles, and shells. they found some rough, some smooth. through the teacher's questions--"why are some rough?" "why are some smooth?" "if those having a smooth surface now were once rough, what has become of the particles which must have broken away?"--the class was led to express opinions until the final generalization was made: soil may be formed from the breaking up of rocks and shells. each topic was treated in a similar manner, the specific qualities of the specimen being brought out, until we were able to make the summary:-- "soil is made from decayed rocks and shells; soil is made from decayed leaves; the rocks make a coarse soil called sand; the wood and leaves make finer soil called loam; the mixture of these soils makes productive soil." [illustration: whose bed looks the best?] this summary led to the next lesson, "the productive qualities of soil." the question was asked, "how can we determine the productive quality of soil?" "we can plant some seeds in each kind of soil," said a child. several pupils volunteered to bring pots of earth. ready for the experiment, we proceeded to analyze as follows the soil brought by the children:-- "take some of the soil in your hands, powder it as finely as possible.--john, what do you find in yours?" "i can feel grains of sand," said john. "do you think there is more sand or more loam?" "i think there is more loam," said another child. "why do you think there is more loam?" "because, when i rub it between my fingers there seems to be more soft material than grains," came the answer. "can any one suggest a means of proving that there is some of each kind of soil in what we have here?" various suggestions were made, but none directly to the point. [illustration: last day of school] "mary, fill that glass jar three parts full of water. we will now drop into the water some of this soil and mix it well. what do you think will happen when we stop stirring?" "the sand will settle at the bottom of the jar," was the ready reply from a bright child. "the coarse loam will settle next," was a second answer; and then came the statement that the finest loam would remain on top. we waited a few days and were rewarded by seeing the soil in distinct layers in the jar. "now we will try to discover which kind will produce the best plant. how shall we determine this?" "plant some seeds," was the immediate suggestion. one pot was filled with the original soil, and one each with the kinds of soil that we had gotten from our experiment. a seed bean was placed in each pot, and all pots subjected to the same conditions and watched by anxious eyes. [illustration: studying nature] "i see a bean pushing up," came the statement one morning and every child wished for a peep at the tiny plant. "in which soil did the plant appear?" another look was taken and answer given that the plant came from the mixed soil. the second plant to appear came from the bed of coarse loam; the one in the pot of fine loam came third; and last the one in the sand struggled to a small shoot, then died of starvation. after this the life of one plant was studied. thus slowly and cautiously the study of seed germination was made, the teacher getting all from the child possible, and aiming to have him cull his information from the plant before his eyes. now that we were familiar with the facts concerning soil composition and seed germination, we felt prepared to take up the outside work. between the first and the fifteenth of april our first visit to the garden was made. the ground was so saturated with water that it was impossible to think of working it in that condition. after taking a view of the surroundings we discovered that the plat was on low ground and that the water from the rising slopes at the back ran down and settled upon it. the question which naturally arose was, "how may this water be gotten rid of?" a short talk on drainage solved this problem. the children decided that ditches, ten feet apart, should be dug crosswise in the garden. they were dug, and, as the weather was favorable, in a week's time the soil was in condition to be worked. meanwhile interest did not flag, though it was impossible to accomplish any outside work. writing letters to an imaginary hardware dealer, stating what tools we needed and inquiring the price, became an all-absorbing exercise. next, we turned dealers ourselves and rendered itemized bills and receipts to purchasers of garden materials. in this way two forms of letter-writing were taught and the children derived both pleasure and profit from the work. in the construction period were made the labels they would need when the planting-time came. these were cut from small pieces of wood with penknives and marked ready for use. a plan by which to landscape this same plat had been drawn the year before by the supervisor of our city school gardens. this plan suggested a talk on landscape gardening and intense interest was at once aroused. the talk developed such questions as these:-- "is the plan before us a good one?" "can we improve on it?" "is there any waste space which we should utilize?" "is the plan artistic in its arrangement?" "suppose we work out some plans to see what is possible." a lesson such as this followed:-- a rectangle was drawn on the board to represent the plat. beside it was a statement of the number of beds to be laid off and the width of the paths between. in the arrangement of these beds and paths there must be artistic effect. [illustration: a flower from the country] each child then drew a rectangle on paper and made an original plan for landscaping. those showing most thought were placed before the class and their good points commended. the children decided that not one met every requirement. the supervisor's plan was again shown, discussed, and adopted. this plan called for twenty rectangular beds × feet in area, four shorter rectangular beds with a triangular section marked off from the end of each toward the center of the garden; and a circular bed, four feet in diameter, in the middle of the plat. it also allowed for one three-foot path running through the center the entire length of the garden, and a one-foot path separating the beds. there was to be a - / -foot path around the middle circle. in a further study of this plan the following arithmetic problems were developed:-- "what is the area of a garden plat fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide?" "what would be the cost of this plat at one dollar and twenty-five cents a square foot?" "how many feet of fence will be required to enclose this plat?" "if the posts are set five feet apart, how many posts will be required?" "there are two rows of cross beams, and each beam is ten feet long; how many will be needed for the fence?" "how much will it cost to fence this garden at twelve cents a foot?" "what is the area of a garden bed three feet by eleven feet? the perimeter?" "what is the circumference of a circular flower bed four feet in diameter?" by this time the ground was in condition to be worked. which should we do first, spade it up, or lay it off? we decided that we would first dig up the entire plat and level it. now, in spacing off, should we begin at the center or from opposite ends? the advantages of each method were strongly advocated, and finally, the children themselves concluded that it would be easier to measure for the center and space off from that point. stakes and cord had been brought. children stood at the sides and ends of the garden. the middle points of the sides were determined and connected with a cord, and likewise the two ends. the intersection of the cords was the center of the plat and here a stake was driven. attaching a cord to this stake two feet along the cord was measured and a small stick tied there. using the cord as a radius, a circle was made and the middle bed staked off. next the three-foot path to opposite ends was marked off, then the center one-foot path to opposite sides. this much accomplished, spacing the rest of the plat was easy. two small boys, with lines and stakes, marked off the remaining portion and when the ends were reached the measurements were found to be accurate. the paths between the beds were next made and the ground prepared for planting. [illustration: a suggestion for recess hour] after spading, leveling, and thoroughly pulverizing the native soil, we added a top layer of foreign soil as a fertilizer. the latter came from a compost heap of street sweepings which had been standing two years and was supposed to be nutritious. as it turned out, however, this soil contained little nutriment and was productive of more fine weeds than fine vegetables, and it required much labor to fight these enemies. now came the seed-planting, which was intensely interesting to the children. rows twelve inches apart were marked off across the beds and the seeds planted according to the relative height of the plants which they would produce, those that would grow tallest being placed next to the fence, and the rest graduating to the center; thus:-- fence corn pole beans peas string beans lettuce radishes lettuce parsley flowers first came corn, three grains to a hill, the hills twelve inches apart. then pole beans, three beans to a hill and these hills separated twelve inches. next we planted two peas in a hill and made the hills six inches apart. the string beans were planted just as the peas had been. then came a row of lettuce, next radishes, a second row of lettuce, and last parsley. the end of the bed was left for flowers. on arbor day, in the classroom, we had sown tomato and lettuce seeds in boxes, that we might have the plants ready for transplanting when our outside soil was in condition. the lettuce plants turned out satisfactorily, but, for some unaccountable reason, the tomatoes were a failure. to replace the latter, we took a corner bed in the garden, divided it into three sections and planted tomato, onion, and cabbage seeds. in five weeks the tomato and cabbage plants were large enough to transplant, and, as the radishes and lettuce matured and were used, tomato and cabbage plants were put in the vacant places. two pumpkin seeds were planted in each bed, but if they both came up, after the plants had reached a good size, the weaker one of the two was weeded out (as the bed was too small to support both) and the stronger one left to bear fruit. why had we planted onion seed? one of the boys had brought an onion and asked if he might plant it in his bed, and if it would produce other onions. i explained to him and then allowed him to plant the seeds in the supply bed at the same time that he planted the onion in his own bed. the onion planted produced seed, while the seeds sown yielded the small sets for the next year's planting. thus by the act of one child the fact was clearly demonstrated to the class that fruit produces seed, and seed produces fruit. the supervisor had given us a wren-box, made by a child in a more advanced class as manual work. the children were delighted with the gift; they built a framework around a stout pole in the center bed and set the wren-box on the pole. they then suggested that a vine should cover this framework. consequently, japanese morning glories were chosen as the vine and the remaining space in the bed was filled with marigolds, nasturtiums and coleus. [illustration: a garden in the yard of a city school] the seeds being planted, the work in the garden was at a standstill until the plants appeared, then systematic visits began. the class was divided into three groups and two children were assigned to a plat. we worked in the garden on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays for half an hour each day. thus, each group had its day once a week regularly. finding that it was impossible to direct satisfactorily more than twelve children at a time, i devised the above plan, which worked admirably. to go to and come from the garden took a half-hour, and with half an hour's work there the child was away from the classroom one hour a week. this allowed ample time to keep the beds in order, for two children were apportioned to a bed, and these two went on separate days, so that each plat was worked twice a week. [illustration: garden beds around three sides of the playground] the first crop of peas and of beans were gathered as vegetables. when the plants ceased to bear a second planting was made and the yield from this was left to mature as seedlings. when ripe, the seeds were gathered and carefully put away in the sectional seed-boxes which the children had constructed for the purpose. [illustration: another section of the same garden] the children took care of the garden during vacation, gathered the vegetables as they ripened, and with pardonable pride carried them home to their parents. the parents, in turn, were gratified and as much interested as the children. several of the boys had individual appliances made by their fathers for use in the garden. often on monday mornings would come the account of the sunday walk with mother and father, the visit to the garden and how much the parents admired it. one instance occurred which proved the value of this garden work and showed how devoid of a knowledge of vegetable growth many city children are. i noticed a boy digging around the root of his tomato vine as though he were searching for something. i asked what he was doing. "i want to see if there are any small tomatoes there," he replied. as the fruit of the radish had come from under the ground he expected to find the tomato there, too. the value of educating the child through his self-activity was proved in several instances, one of which i will mention. a large boy of the fourth grade, though a poor student, was placed on the list of garden children and proved to be the most industrious and active child of the group. why? his father was a baker; the boy worked in the bakery until eleven every night; slept until four, then arose and delivered goods until eight, and was in the classroom at nine. is there any wonder that this child lacked energy as a student? when he was removed from the confinement of the classroom the pure outside air acted as a tonic, his interest was awakened and his work well done. this same child, whenever relieved of home duties out of school hours, spent the time in the garden instead of devoting it to play. he hauled a quantity of shells with which to pave the paths, and brought all the sod we needed to form a firm edge around the center bed. can there be any doubt that this boy was benefited? there is a social side to this industrial outside work which is superior to that of the classroom. first: the teacher has but a small number of children under her care at one time; consequently, she is enabled to learn more of each individual nature. secondly: the child is under no apparent restraint, so expresses himself freely and shows his natural self. thirdly: the boys and girls mingle with one another with the same freedom that they have on their own playground. in the two months spent in the garden not a single child took undue advantage of the privileges allowed, and the opportunity afforded the teacher for the study of child-nature was of great value. some one might ask, "while garden work is being done, does not the work of the classroom suffer?" no, it does not. when classes are taught in sections, this outside work may be fitted in as a sectional part and the routine be kept intact. in summarizing, the lessons developed from garden work were these: science (soil physics and seed germination); geography; arithmetic; spelling; english; drawing, and construction. the greatest benefit to the teacher was the chance to study the child under natural conditions. the greatest benefit to the child was his awakening to a knowledge of things by personal contact. i sincerely believe that the after-life of each one of these children will be the richer for this experience of outdoor study. [illustration: gathering the vegetables] in some of the school yards the pavement near the fence has been removed, and the space divided into small beds for gardening. many of these gardens make a fine showing and you will find here three pictures of such a yard, illustrating what may be done within the limits of the playground of a city school. when you consider that between six and eight hundred children play in this yard at the same recess time every day, you can appreciate what it means to yield a portion of the limited space to vegetables and flowers; and, since these plants are never molested, how much the children are pleased to have their playground so decorated. nearly all the garden products may be correlated with the classroom work. the kindergarten children use peas in construction. the peas raised in the garden may be applied here. the first-grade children use lentils in construction. why not as well use pumpkin seed and grains of corn--the product of the garden? every class enjoys having a jack-o'-lantern at hallowe'en, so here again the pumpkin from the garden comes into play. in the construction of miniature wagons and wheelbarrows of paper, peas may be soaked and used as axles for the wheels. both peas and beans may be soaked and given to the small children to string for chains, thus teaching number and spacing. every layer of husk (beneath the outside one) from the ear of corn may be dried and made into a basket by the more advanced pupil. if a city teacher, with opportunities so limited and numberless disadvantages, can accomplish even a little in this line for the children in her charge, how much more should the teacher of the rural school accomplish when she has space at her command, children in the environment of country life, and seemingly all things that tend to work together to produce good results! so much interest is shown in this phase of industrial work all over the country that i doubt that there is anywhere a teacher who does not wish to add the study of it to the curriculum, unless she is already working along these lines. feeling sure of the sympathy aroused in every teacher's heart, i have included among the illustrations of this article three scenes from rural school life. (see pages , , and .) in connection with these pictures let me say a few more words to the rural teacher. you may think yourself much poorer than your city co-worker, but the fact is that you are the one of affluence, she is the struggler. you have all about you the materials that a city teacher can secure only at second hand. all the riches of nature are at your command--the birds that nest at your door, the fishes that swim in the brook, the grasses that grow by the roadside, the trees of the forest, and the flowers that spring up everywhere; the ground space for your garden; the intelligent child of country environment who does not need to work the garden to learn how vegetables grow, but who does need to work it for the education, the aim and object of school gardens. if you are not interested in such work, try doing it once because you should. next year there will be no should; love will lead you on. i have the same feeling in my heart about the school garden that the poet who wrote "the little fir trees" must have had about them. each stanza winds up with and so, little evergreens, grow! grow, grow! grow, little evergreens, grow! i would say: and so, grow, school gardens, grow! grow, grow! grow, school gardens, grow! the three pictures, "studying nature," "a flower from the country" and "a suggestion for recess hour," came to me from a country school. they speak so vividly for themselves that i feel that each one carries with it its own message and appeals so strongly in behalf of the deepest love of nature in even the youngest child as to point to the possibilities of what might be when this love is fed and made to grow with the physical nature of the child. * * * * * transcriber's notes corrected minor punctuation typos. moved some of the illustrations to avoid breaking up paragraphs of text. page references pertain to the original book but link to the correct image/topic in the html version. page : changed portiere to portière for consistency. ( miniature portiere--knotted) page : changed sand-papered to sandpapered for consistency: (and nothing is properly sand-papered until all roughness) page : changed the page reference from to : (with the grain of the wood, and how to cut corners. (see page .)) page : changed exend to extend: (to construct a box having lid and bottom exend beyond sides.) page : original text might be missing "child" after country: ('the country is entitled from its state and from its county,) page : changed attenion to attention: (the interest of these children attracted the attenion of the) edition stanford achievement test by truman l. kelley, giles m. ruch, and lewis m. terman advanced examination: form a for grades - =========================================================================== name ................................ grade .......... boy or girl ........ age ... when is your next birthday? ....... how old will you be then?...... name of school ................................... date ................... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | score | subject | age | |----------------------------------|-------- scores | equivalents | | : reading: paragraph meaning | | | (subject | |----------------------------------|-------| | ages) | | . reading: sentence meaning | | | | |----------------------------------|-------| | | | . reading: word meaning | | | | |----------------------------------+-------|---------|-------------------| | total reading score | | |----------------------------------+-------|---------|-------------------| | . arithmetic: computation | | | | |----------------------------------|-------|---------| | | . arithmetic: reasoning | | | | |----------------------------------+-------|---------| | | total arithmetic score | | | |----------------------------------+-------|---------|-------------------| | . nature study and science | | | | |----------------------------------|-------|---------|-------------------| | . history and literature | | | | |----------------------------------|-------|---------|-------------------| | . language usage | | | | |----------------------------------|-------|---------|-------------------| | . dictation exercise | | | | |----------------------------------+-------+---------|-------------------| | composite score (sum of subject scores ÷ ) | | |----------------------------------+-------+---------| | | educational age | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- note. this page may be torn off and filed as a record. published by world book company, yonkers-on-hudson, new york, and prairie avenue, chicago copyright by world book company. copyright in great britain. _all rights reserved._ sat: adv. a- printed in u. s. a. history language reading arithmetic science literature usage spelling -- -- -- -- -- -- | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -| -| -| -| -| -| | | | | | | | | | | | | -- -- -- -- -- -- history language reading arithmetic science literature usage spelling adv. exam.: form a test . reading: paragraph meaning sample: dick and tom were playing ball in the field. dick was throwing the ball and ............. was trying to catch it. write just one word on each dotted line. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- fanny has a little red hen. every day the hen goes to her nest and lays an egg for fanny to eat. then she makes a funny noise to tell fanny to come and get the.............. a kitten can climb a tree, but a dog cannot. this is very lucky for nellie's kitten. every time joe's big dog comes along the kitten climbs a tree and the............. cannot follow. anna had never seen a squirrel in her life, although she had always wanted to very much. one day when she was playing under a tree she heard a funny little noise over her head. she looked up, and what do you think she saw? up there in the............. was the very thing she had always wanted to see, a.............. john and joe played one day till they were very hungry; so john went into the house and asked his mother for something to.............. when he came out again he had a big apple for himself and another for .............. one day when jane was sweeping she found a dime on the floor under the bed. they could not find out whose dime it was, so jane's mother gave it to her. now, every time jane............. the floor she looks carefully under the bed for another.............. helen and kate pulled their sled through the deep snow to the top of the hill and soon were coasting swiftly down again. they did this over and over. the............. was so deep that they found it hard work to drag the............. to the top. once a black raven wanted to have white feathers like a swan. the raven saw that the swan lived in the water, and thought it was the water that made the swan's feathers so white. so the............. decided to wash his feathers every day to see if it would not make them.............. birds' eggs are almost as different from each other as are the birds themselves. the robin lays four or five blue eggs. the dove lays two white eggs. the sparrow lays six or eight speckled eggs. if we should find a nest with four blue eggs in it, we could be pretty sure that it was the nest of a............. rather than of a............. or dove. once there lived on a mountain near a village an immense giant whose cruelty kept the people of the village in great terror. however, there was one person in the village who was not afraid of the giant. this was a young soldier who carried a magic sword that a fairy had given him. once when the............. came down from the............. the soldier attacked him with his magic............. and killed him. once a hen was so foolish as to go to a fox and ask him to look after her chicks while she went to the barnyard to find some worms for her chicks. the fox was of course quite willing. the hen was gone a long time. when she finally returned, she found that the fox had eaten all her chicks. since then no............. has employed a as a nurse. turn the page and go right on. adv. exam.: form a test , continued when the bear appeared near the hut, walter was alone. his father had driven to the village, that morning, several miles away. fortunately he had left his gun hanging on the wall loaded and ready for service. walter was excited, but he did not hesitate. quickly seizing the .......................... he............. the.............. in a certain village a ton of coal costs just as much as a cord of wood, but it produces twice as much heat. therefore the poor families in this village should be advised to burn............. rather than .............. "come on" called joe, "let's go for a swim down by jones' point, where the river is deep." "no," said pete, "let's swim down by duggan's. where the water is warmer." "it isn't because the water is warm that you want to go to............., but because you can't swim," said .............. richard and miss cabot quickly found their way alone to the house of mr. smith on craven street. miss cabot left richard in the carriage, walked quickly to the door, and sending up her card by the servant, requested to see mr. smith. the............. soon returned and begged her to come in. as soon as she had done so. miss cabot introduced herself to mr.............. and begged him to come out and talk with ............., who was waiting outside in the carriage. joe made up a game which he called "jac-alack." one person called jack must climb a tree and hang by his arms from a low bough. the others stand behind him and say in unison, "alas, alack, he fell on his back," and while they are saying it, one of them hits jack with a bean bag. if jack can see or guess who did it, he may drop down, and the guilty person takes his place. otherwise he has to............. there for another turn and sing out, "alas, alack, another whack." it is quite a game and jack must have strong.............. it is well established that the bee, which is commonly supposed to be so industrious, really works only two or three hours a day. the man who works eight or ten hours a day is therefore far more............. than the.............. boys and girls know my name. and mothers and fathers, too. big folks love me. you do, too. the first letters in the first four sentences of this paragraph spell my name; so write it here.............. energy is a measure of the fullness of life and is indispensable for genius. no energy at all is death. idiots are feeble and listless. nearly all the leaders of mankind have been noted for their remarkable .............. deciduous trees lose their leaves in winter, while evergreens, as their name implies, do not. therefore, in forests composed of............. trees the ground is less shaded in winter than is the case in forests whose trees are.............. some historians believe that the spread of anti-slavery feeling among the people of the north previous to the civil war was due less to the moral issue involved than to the fact that they recognized the system of............. as a menace to the industrial system of free labor. go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued if i were writing about the rich, i should be inclined to divide them, according to their attitude toward life, into workers and parasites. the motto of the worker is, "i owe the world a life," and the motto of the.................. is, "the.................. owes me a living." caution, when not present in excess, is a desirable trait. often it saves one from disappointment or failure. occasionally, however, one finds a person so extremely.................. that his will is paralyzed and he is totally unable to set about any new undertaking. too much.................. is indeed often.................. than too little. a whale is not a fish, even though it does live in water. a fish has no lungs, is cold-blooded, and absorbs oxygen from the water through its gills; but a whale is warm-blooded and has a genuine set of lungs. in consequence, in bodily structure the is.................. like a shark, which is a true fish, than it is like a horse. the brook on our farm has many whims. it ripples over bright and shiny rocks, and falls into a placid little pool so clear that i can see the pebbles on the bottom and can see myself down there, too. as i look straight down, it is hard to tell whether what i see is my nose or a .................., but as i move a little, that which i sec stands still, so i know it is not..................................... farther on the brook forgets the placid pool and tumbles over roots and rocks. it does, indeed, have many................... to pant for recognition, to yearn to impress one's personality upon one's fellow-men, is the essence of ambition. the ambitious person may think that he merely thirsts to "do something" or "be somebody" but really what he craves is to figure potently in the minds of others, to be greatly loved, admired, or feared. to reap a success which no one .................. does not satisfy the yearnings of the .................. individual. washington was a very silent man. of no man in the world's history do we have so few sayings of a personal kind. as for talking about himself, that was something in which he almost never indulged. yet it would be a great error to interpret his.................. as an indication that he was in any sense cold or unfeeling. as a rule, it is more economical to remember things by associating them clearly and vigorously than by going through many repetitions of them. thus, a clear understanding of the causes for the democratic victory in the national election in will be.................. effective in remembering the fact than a dozen.................. of the statement "woodrow wilson was elected in ." fundamentally, education depends upon the capacity of a person to profit by past experiences. past situations modify present and future adjustments. education in its broadest sense means acquiring experiences that serve to.................. existing inherited or acquired tendencies of behavior. "naïve" and "unsophisticated" are frequently confused. the former suggests a type of behavior which is artless, spontaneous, and free from the restraints of custom. the latter implies fully as great lack of knowledge of social usage, and, in addition, conduct which is primitive and perchance inelegant. thus, the.................. youth was the first to enter the car, and his.................. little sister warmly kissed him in the presence of the king. we may also say that a country boy is.................. with respect to city life and customs. _test . number right.......... x = score.........._ adv. exam.: form a test . reading: sentence meaning samples: can dogs bark? [yes] no does a cat have six legs? yes [no] read each question and draw a line under the right answer. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- is milk white? yes no do we sleep in beds? yes no is the day as dark as night? yes no is green a color? yes no is smoke always yellow? yes no do men and women dress just alike? yes no do ships sail on the sea? yes no are all chimneys made of brass? yes no are rocks hard? yes no is everybody as huge as a giant? yes no do pupils always have excellent memories? yes no are brooms used to sweep bedrooms? yes no are machines ever useful? yes no are sugar and salt sold in stores? yes no are geese generally clad in bonnets? yes no do lambs roar? yes no does crime always bring happiness? yes no does justice sometimes seem cruel? yes no could one cradle hold eighty infants? yes no is a beetle very different from a mole? yes no does the friendship of a cheerful person make us unhappy? yes no is a dime less than a nickel? yes no is the guilty thief always located? yes no is it ever important to hurry? yes no might a prisoner feel sorrow at the ruin he has caused? yes no are all antique benches made of bamboo? yes no are battleships dedicated to warfare? yes no can we discern things clearly in a dense fog? yes no might a person suffer confusion during an examination? yes no are marmalade and gruel made of milkweed? yes no could delicious chocolate be served at a festival? yes no do all university professors give instruction in science? yes no does it take courage to perform a very dangerous task? yes no should one always be censured for playing a flute by the fireplace? yes no are homely people always loathed and disliked? yes no is it deemed delightful to suffer a bloody defeat? yes no would a man be fortunate if he could flee from a famine? yes no may careful observation be of considerable help in decreasing mistakes? yes no does speaking with brevity necessarily mean that one is peevish? yes no are chimes ever played in a cathedral? yes no go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued do repealed interruptions sometimes exasperate us? yes no should thieves be encouraged by giving them magnificent rewards? yes no are locusts and gnats generally believed to enjoy immortality? yes no might an accidental outbreak cause anxiety? yes no may shortages often be prevented by foresight? yes no is an annual appeal made once a week? yes no may occasional opposition awaken us to greater endeavor? yes no is every earl destined to become a genius or a conqueror? yes no might a person show unfeigned enjoyment of a symphony? yes no are we irresistibly led to confide in every near-by idler? yes no do any considerable percentage of motorists use headlights? yes no does an auctioneer boost prices with earnestness? yes no is it advisable to use dynamite as a lubricant? yes no is a person in a frenzy likely to make wild gestures? yes no should the captain of a yacht consider the weather forecast? yes no would it take a considerable income to provide a sumptuous wardrobe? yes no is it disgraceful to teach a defenseless person decimals? yes no is the idea of burial usually attractive? yes no may allies make exertion to enter into a federation? yes no should enthusiastic homage make a man indignant? yes no could the imperious actions of a lordly person become notorious? yes no is all adventurous activity to be deplored? yes no should a person be advised to sacrifice a good opportunity? yes no is a harmonious alliance sometimes expedient? yes no could an eloquent lawmaker do anything heinous? yes no is boric acid a chemical made of graphite? yes no are all festivities characterized by extravagance? yes no may imposition upon others become habitual? yes no is a scarecrow a kind of inoffensive imitation? yes no does bliss always befall desperate people? yes no could congressional action cause the people to be dissatisfied? yes no may seeing a person drunk decrease one's admiration for him? yes no could an inexperienced person be jovial and fascinating? yes no is one often assaulted by a boon companion? yes no ought accursed liars to be suppressed? yes no might an involuntary impulse impel one to be malicious? yes no is one necessarily inhospitable who dislikes an obnoxious guest? yes no does extreme audacity sometimes make us stand aghast? yes no is humanity subject to joyous emotions? yes no might a hysterical person given to rashness be intolerable? yes no _number right .........._ _number wrong .........._ _test . score (subtract).........._ adv. exam.: form a test . reading: word meaning samples: bread is something to catch drink eat throw wear a robin is a bird cat dog girl horse in each sentence draw a line under the word that makes the sentence true. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- march is the name of a day food month week year a fat person is always bad blue cold heavy little a thing that is perfect is always close early hard little right a farmer often raises bears corn gold paper pictures cotton is cool dark heavy soft sweet a husband is sometimes a father flower mother sister town a path is a place to eat dress die live walk a maiden is a bird boy girt king plant a lion is blue fine hot strong sweet islands are land ships soldiers time water the ocean is fire land paper water wood rice is a battle beast bell cloud grain. a dove is a bird boat fish horse sheep. to be silent is to be heard loud quick still wild olives are to burn drink eat ride wear to crush is to break escape guard hold plant rapid means long much quick small soft a moment means color form money time place to stitch is to reward sew starve suggest tempt a question is something we answer build eat grow kill harbors are for churches cows gardens horses ships to polish is to bribe brighten smite thrive traverse to pronounce is to sail show speak stand watch a physician is a child doctor master noise valley a customer is a person who buys draws fishes hunts sells to wander is to improve locate roam situate wail to be sober is to be funny grave happy noisy wild an orphan is one who has no clothing education hair parents teeth to be active is to be hospitable humorous ignoble indolent sprightly to be wretched is to be proud silent swift unhappy valuable independence means blame custom freedom mercy virtue agriculture refers to authority appearance defense farming mystery to inquire is to appear ask rest sleep watch a tavern is a companion funeral parcel park hotel to be saucy is to be affectionate agreeable devoted dignified rude an argument is a discussion gully gymnasium penance perjury jealous means affectionate appeased benevolent envious sympathetic meek means gaudy gentle mean strength tight gorgeous means frisky gigantic hereditary magnificent malicious a barge is a kind of animal boat castle fruit vegetable go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued situation refers to noise number place pleasure time to plan is to banish bestow design betray defeat behavior refers to position conduct progress revenge temper a vagabond is a kite lantern nightingale tramp scholar ambition means aspiration frivolity lettering remorse slothfulness a sluggard is ambitious considerate divine earnest lazy victorious means baffled frustrated triumphant unstable vagrant to mingle is to mislead blend sanction screech scurry to heed is to escape fancy hurry notice prove dignified means lonely monstrous prominent spiritual stately an opponent is a delicacy antagonist detective diplomat hostess to prophesy is to assess bemoan cancel disclaim foretell imperial affairs concern cities garments kingdoms machines patterns to massacre is to investigate lament manifest misunderstand slaughter to be prompt is to be formal frightful hospitable punctual purified listless means indifferent loathsome malicious merciless presumptuous to lament is to flatter humor injure lend mourn a prologue is a kind of introduction knell prohibition sermon tempest lifeless means inanimate indefinite infamous undecided untidy an impression is a century compass copy globe pasture crafty means accurate proficient slavish submissive wily liberality means promotion robbery reproof scandal generosity jubilant means abrupt abject confused triumphant doleful a bulwark is a hospital hotel protection punishment purchase a legacy is an inheritance inscription levy receptacle regulation maintenance means contention continuance corruption cowardice resource to meditate is to escort gossip ponder transgress withhold covetous means avaricious bountiful gaudy gray-headed harassed minimum means the largest least most newest oldest to chastise is to promise publish punish purchase trifle a sequel is something that excels follows interrupts precedes yields ceaseless means boisterous diminished discontented ended incessant emphatic means forcible frantic incurable pernicious reluctant to subvert means to overturn shorten sling sojourn spurn to be infamous is to be doubtful polished shameful sorrowful valuable to be languid is to be courteous domestic doubtful spiritless jolly an associate is an adversary ally antagonist emigrant ensign to be vigilant means to be aloof betrothed betwixt lawless watchful decisive means conclusive dazzled genuine profane prudent a scullion is a grasshopper gymnasium haycock hedgehog servant usury has to do with chivalry fiction homage loans manufactures perspective has to do with drawing expenses mining religion warfare an insurrection is a fugitive rebellion publication punishment hermit a reprobate is one who is very cowardly ugly wealthy wicked youthful candid means illegitimate impeccable imperious incisive ingenuous _test . score .........._ adv. exam.: form a test . arithmetic: computation get the answers to these examples as quickly as you can without making mistakes. look carefully at each example to see what you are to do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- begin here. ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) add add add + = + = --- --- ---- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) add subtract subtract add × = ---- --- --- ---- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) subtract subtract subtract subtract multiply ---- ---- ---- ----- ---- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) multiply divide divide add ÷ = ______ ______ ------ ) ) ----------- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) add multiply multiply ______ / / . / - = ------- ------- ------ go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) subtract _______ / of = / - / = . / . / - × = -------- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) multiply multiply / ÷ / = . / . ---- ÷ --- = -------- -------- ( ) ( ) . + . + + . = . - / = ( ) ( ) / + / + / + / + / = . + / + . + / = ( ) ( ) / × / × / = / + . + / + . = ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) subtract add _______ ( )^ = yd. ft. in. yr. mo. \/ yd. ft. in. yr. mo. ------------------ yr. mo. ------------- ( ) ( ) ( ) express as a decimal multiply to three places . + / = gals. qts. pt. ---- = -------------------- _test . number right.......... x = score.........._ adv. exam.: form a test . arithmetic: reasoning find all the answers as quickly as you can. write the answers on the dotted lines. use the blank sheets of paper to figure on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- begin here. how many are eggs and eggs? answer ........ mary is years old. how old will she be in years? answer ........ a hen had chicks and of them died. how many were left? answer ........ milk costs cents a pint and the milkman is going to raise the price cents. what will it then cost? answer ........ if you buy a pencil for cents and pay for it with a dime, how much change should you get? answer ........ how many dimes are there in a dollar? answer ........ how many eggs are there in nests if each nest has eggs? answer ........ how many cents will oranges cost at cents each? answer ........ david earned $ . in june, $ . in july, and $ . in august. how much did he earn in all? answer ........ frank bought two-cent postage stamps and one-cent stamps. how much did he pay for all? answer ........ five girls buy a present costing cents. how many cents does each pay? answer ........ if a train goes miles in three hours, how far does it go in one hour? answer ........ john has saved $ . . how many dollars more does he need to buy a pony which costs $ . ? answer ........ a man pays the street-car fare for himself and two friends. if the fare is ¢, how much change should he receive from a half dollar? answer ........ a train which was due at p.m. was / hours late. when did it arrive? answer ........ what is the cost of oranges at for cents? answer ........ edward has $ . in the bank and takes out quarters, a dime, and a cent. how much does he have left in the bank? answer ........ what is the cost of a / -pound roast at cents a pound? answer ........ a boy saved cents a day for two weeks, and cents a day for the next four weeks. how much money does he then have? answer ........ a gallon is equal to cubic inches. how many gallons are there in a tank × × inches? answer ........ the tax rate in an eastern city has varied as follows: , ¢ on each $ ; , ¢ on each $ ; , ¢ on each $ ; , ¢ on each $ ; , ¢ on each $ ; , ¢ on each $ . the highest rate was how many times as great as the lowest? answer ........ go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued henry was marked in geography the first month, the second, and the third month. what was his average grade? answer ........ if the butcher's scales read one ounce too much on each weighing, how much is a customer overcharged on a pound of steak at ¢ a pound? answer ........ at $ . a bushel for potatoes and $ . a car for freight, how much will a -bushel carload of potatoes cost? answer ........ tom has just weeds' vacation and wishes to spend it in a city which it takes two days to reach by train. how many days can he spend in the city? answer ........ if a fence rail is feet long, how many rails will it take to reach a mile? answer ........ sound travels about ft. a second. if you see the flash of a cannon and seconds later the sound reaches you, how far away is the cannon? answer ........ a man had $ , from which he received per cent income each year. in addition he earned $ in business. what was his total income for the year? answer ........ frank and george buy marbles for cents. frank pays cents and george cents. how many marbles should george receive? answer ........ if a watch gains seconds in hours, what fraction of a minute will it gain between noon and p.m.? answer ........ the heights of boys in a class are feet inches, feet inches, feet inches, and feet inches. what is the average height? answer ........ an article which formerly sold at cents was raised to cents. what per cent was the price advanced? answer ........ a broker charges $ commission on every sale plus per cent on all over $ . what would be his commission on a $ sale? answer ........ if per cent of potatoes is water, how many pounds of solid material are there in a ton of potatoes? answer ........ a man invested $ in each of different bonds. the first paid per cent dividend and the second per cent, but on the third he lost $ on each hundred dollars invested. what was his net yearly gain on the three investments? answer ........ if the circumference of a circle is . feet, what is its diameter? answer ........ the regular price of a certain piece of linen is $ per yard. a remnant / yards long is offered at $ . . what per cent reduction is made? answer ........ a man six feet tall casts a shadow feet long at a.m. a telephone pole casts a shadow feet long at the same time. how high is the pole? answer ........ it costs cents to send a -pound parcel post package from new orleans to dallas. what will it cost to send an -pound package if the cost is cents more on the first pound than on additional pounds? answer ........ if the hour hand of a clock is inches long and the minute hand is inches long, how far apart are the tips of the two hands at a.m.? answer ........ _test . number right.......... x = score.........._ adv. exam.: form a test . nature study and science samples: the number of cents in a dollar is [ ] our rain comes from the [clouds] moon stars draw a line under the word that makes the sentence true. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- _begin here._ thanksgiving comes in july january november the earth is shaped most like a baseball football pear a sweet-smelling flower is the daisy poppy rose the month before july is may june august the axle is a part of an ax typewriter wagon alfalfa is a kind of corn fruit hay bacon comes from the cow hog sheep an animal that builds dams is the alligator beaver turtle raisins are dried currants gooseberries grapes london is in england scotland wales the dahlia is a kind of animal flower fruit the tractor is used in farming mining racing tarts are a kind of drink pastry vegetable planes are used chiefly by barbers blacksmiths carpenters rubber is obtained from animals oil trees the antelope is a kind of deer rabbit wolf the number of quarts in a gallon is a telescope makes things look larger prettier smaller chop suey is a dish of the chinese indians mexicans a flower that grows from a bulb is the lily marigold poppy the compass is used chiefly by sailors surgeons tailors serge is a kind of cloth drink wood the article costing the least is coat gloves overcoat the anvil is used by blacksmiths carpenters printers a food requiring many eggs is "angel food" bread marmalade rye is most like beans corn wheat the cotton gin was invented by arkwright watt whitney beets are useful for making catsup sugar jellies the earth moves completely around the sun in about days days days the most gold is produced in alaska new york tennessee the lungs take from the air carbon dioxide nitrogen oxygen the tadpole is the young of the fish frog lizard most of our anthracite coal comes from alabama colorado pennsylvania molasses is obtained from grapes honey sugar cane a great clothing-manufacturing state is massachusetts oregon texas a food rich in fats is butter eggs tapioca an important meat-packing city is chicago new orleans seattle lard comes from butter cattle hogs a food containing considerable oil is rice potatoes walnuts linen is made from cotton flax hemp the united states exports coffee cotton tea a tree that will grow from cuttings is the oak pine willow organdie is a kind of cloth marmalade musical instrument the common house fly often lays its eggs in leaves manure water the greatest sugar-exporting country is brazil cuba mexico go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued the leghorn is a kind of cow owl goat the panther is most like the cat dog wolf electric lights were invented by edison marconi volts the most wool is produced in australia france holland calcutta is a city in china egypt india tapioca is chiefly fat starch sugar the largest state in the union is california new york texas the freezing point on the centigrade thermometer ° ° ° the tooth's enamel is broken down by acids carbon dioxide starches air and gasoline are mixed in the accelerator carburetor gear-case a crop which enriches the soil is clover potatoes tobacco distance above sea level is known as altitude latitude longitude the house fly spreads bubonic plague typhoid yellow fever a very important product of minneapolis is automobiles flour meat a food that has much the same food substance as rice is beans peas potatoes a gross equals milk testers were devised by babcock bell edison the coarsest of these threads is no. the differential is a part of an auto bicycle typewriter the largest planet is jupiter neptune saturn a plant that can be grafted is the apple tree lily potato the normal temperature of the human body is about ° ° ° alcohol is made from gasoline grains oils an avalanche causes destruction by burning sliding spouting most automobiles are manufactured in michigan new york iowa the nile is in africa asia europe a country that imports nearly half its food is england france germany bronchitis resembles most dyspepsia headaches sore throat a common ingredient of matches is calcium iodine phosphorus a body that shines by reflected light is the moon north star sun monsoons are a kind of plain plateau storm the days are longest in march july october the largest amount of corn is shipped from denver omaha pittsburgh tokyo is a city of china india japan a place for storing weapons is called an abattoir arsenal cafeteria a plant that thrives best in dry places is the lichen lily mushroom the dictaphone is a kind of multigraph phonograph typewriter the wyandotte is a kind of fowl sheep watermelon linotypes are used in printing surveying weaving an eight-sided figure is called an octagon scholium trapezium "pi" is equal to . croquettes are a kind of food ornament weapon a botanist is one who studies animals minerals plants the technical name for hard coal is anthracite bituminous lignite air brakes are used on automobiles balloons trains deltas tend to grow larger smaller wetter the angora is a kind of chicken goat sheep one of the lightest-known metals is aluminum tin zinc the most expensive of these rugs is axminster brussels oriental fondant is a kind of candy meat salad _number right .........._ _number wrong .......... ÷ = .........._ _test . score (subtract) .........._ adv. exam.: form a test . history and literature draw a line under the word that makes the sentence true. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- an elf is a kind of animal brownie dragon "the glass slipper" reminds us of ali baba cinderella goldilocks the first president of the united states was adams jefferson washington the shepherd boy who became king was david saul solomon columbus made his first voyage to america in the highest officer of a city is the alderman chief of police mayor apollo was the god of rivers the sun wind a battle of the revolution was bull run bunker hill tippecanoe the god of mischief was asgard loki mimir mount olympus is located in greece italy washington hiawatha was written by bryant longfellow whittier the declaration of independence was signed in a name made famous by longfellow is matthew arnold admiral dewey paul revere kings are supposed to rule for years years life "the children's hour" was written by longfellow riley stevenson the quakers came from england france holland ulysses captured troy by hiding in a forest load of hay wooden horse the country which helped america in the revolution was england france germany goliath was slain by david joseph samson thor lost his armor chariot hammer "uncle tom's cabin" was written by alger sewell stowe louisiana was purchased by jefferson madison polk peter pan is the name of a boy dog fairy the slaves were freed by jefferson lincoln washington the first white man to see the pacific was balboa cabot vespucci the united states was allied in the great war with bulgaria france turkey "treasure island" tells about long john micawber uncas madame curie is noted for the discovery of platinum radium pyrite "the star-spangled banner" was written by alcott burns key the earliest of these inventions was railroad stagecoach steamboat foreigners can obtain the right to vote by habeas corpus naturalization purchase "the legend of sleepy hollow" tells about ichabod crane hiawatha pinocchio robert e. lee surrendered to grant sheridan sherman new york was settled by the dutch english french minnehaha means falling leaves laughing waters whispering pines the most important qualification for a voter is generosity intelligence wealth the king who let the cakes burn was alfred arthur william inability to pay debts is called bankruptcy embezzlement vagrancy the messenger of the gods was called mercury perseus vulcan virginia was settled by the english french spanish "oliver twist" was written by dickens scott thackeray roger williams was a colonizer judge merchant valley forge relates to the civil war revolution war of sherlock holmes was a detective sailor thief a man who betrayed his country was arnold cornwall lee go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued the number of united states senators from each state is "the man without a country" was written by cooper hawthorne hale a general in the civil war was lincoln sherman washington the name "old ironsides" refers to a man mountain ship a president who was assassinated was garfield roosevelt taylor the british prime minister in was lloyd george balfour asquith the red cross was founded by clara barton jenny lind rockefeller legal authority over a dead man's estate is given to an administrator judge jury barbara frietchie sympathized with the english south union grover cleveland was a general an inventor a president the crime which brings the greatest punishment is larceny manslaughter murder the chief cause of the mexican war was disputed territory immigration slavery the stork reminds us of holland italy scotland cornwallis surrendered at appomattox bunker hill yorktown "treasure island" was written by alger defoe stevenson the "spoils system" refers to farming political offices tariff jesus was betrayed by herod judas pilate louisiana was purchased from the french indians spanish the son of abraham was isaac moses solomon lewis and clark explored the great lakes the mississippi valley the northwest the number of men in the light brigade was the war of was fought against england mexico spain among the allies of germany was belgium bulgaria roumania one of robin hood's men was ivanhoe lancelot little john each state has the power to coin money declare war establish schools a great scotch poet was burns chaucer milton the general who surrendered at yorktown was burgoyne cornwallis lafayette a gnome is a kind of dwarf giant priest "treasure island" tells about black dog fagin miss hazy the vessel which overcame the merrimac was the monitor old ironsides wasp a man known for his strength was abel david samson one who lives in the poorhouse is legally a bankrupt delinquent pauper "a tale of two cities" tells of the american revolution civil war french revolution ivanhoe is a character from dickens scott wordsworth circa changed the men of odysseus into horses stones swine in there was a great revolution in germany russia turkey a writer of mystery tales was dickens poe scott "styx" was the name of a giant god river a city is most likely to own its electric lights gas plant water system the author of "innocents abroad" is hawthorne stevenson mark twain the american revolution was chiefly a dispute over boundary lines slavery taxation "the last of the mohicans" was hiawatha mowgli uncas wallace irwin is an actor baseball player writer coleridge wrote "ancient mariner" "hiawatha" "thanatopsis" the chautauqua is a kind of entertainment museum music a word that means exactly the opposite of joy is sad sorrow sorry marco polo was a famous philosopher traveler warrior "the charge of the light brigade" was written by burns longfellow tennyson the mohammedan bible is the bagavad-gita koran zend-avesta the singular of "are" is is was were _number right .........._ _number wrong .......... ÷ = .........._ _test . score (subtract) .........._ adv. exam.: form a test . language usage -------------------------------------------------------------------------- [sidenote: samples is apples good. [are] [told] he me. telled] calculate i to go soon. expect gave last year uncle me a pair of skates. give broke. his leg was broken. gone they have to town. went any he isn't better than you. no bathe always your hands before eating. wash heap i have a of work to do. great deal delicious we had a time at the party. delightful hurt the earthquake four buildings. damaged sat i had there for an hour. set yourself and your guests are invited. you saw i him do it. seen game. i think dominoes is an interesting sport. mad at my father is very me. angry with till we had only started joe came. when are the news bad today. is going? where are you going to? as they fight demons. like to quickly run home. i told him to to run home quickly. doesn't he know anything. don't had ought i think you to go. ought chose. i asked him which one he choosed. transpired this battle in . occurred he does not go to school on mondays. he goes erroneous. the idea that the moon is made of cheese is ridiculous. they it is who should be blamed. them crimes he went to prison for his sins. no good. that fellow is worthless. remember i seeing him there. remember of burst he a blood vessel. busted go right on to next page. adv. exam.: form a test , continued perfect. he acted the part perfectly. snap. he worked with much vigor. sat he the vase on the table. set plenty rain has been this season. plentiful admitted the prisoner finally he was guilty. declared ridden i have often a horse. rode of he went in search his sheep. his risen i have often early. rose applauded. the honest person is to be commended. disinterested he is in history. uninterested an appointment he has with the president. a date occupied we charged and their trenches. possessed abolished slavery was in . destroyed indignant. his attack on my character made me peevish. qualified one is not to vote at the age of . fit rang i have often this bell. rung much my work is different this year. very caught nearly he down and went to sleep. nearly caught laid he down and went to sleep. lay i. all went but me. is when one gives charity to the poor. means giving plain and evident it is now why he left. evident shall are you sure he succeed? will when one sets arson means fire to property. setting endure i can hardly him. stand was each man and woman present. were cherish why a vain hope? pursue was i wish john here. were confuse he has no fear; nothing can him. daunt he? is that him? _number right .........._ _number wrong .........._ _test . score (subtract) .........._ adv. exam.: form a test . dictation exercise --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... ........................................................................... _test . full score for easier sentences not dictated .........._ _number right in sentences dictated .........._ _sum .......... × = score .........._ rural life and the rural school by joseph kennedy dean of the school of education in the university of north dakota american book company new york cincinnati chicago rural life and the rural school w. p. . preface this volume is addressed to the men and women who have at heart the interests of rural life and the rural school. i have tried to avoid deeply speculative theories on the one hand, and distressingly practical details on the other; and have addressed myself chiefly to the intelligent individual everywhere--to the farmer and his wife, to the teachers of rural schools, to the public spirited school boards, individually and collectively, and to the leaders of rural communities and of social centers generally. i have tried to avoid the two extremes which guizot says are always to be shunned, viz.: that of the "visionary theorist" and that of the "libertine practician." the former is analogous to a blank cartridge, and the latter to the mire of a swamp or the entangled underbrush of a thicket. the legs of one's theories (as lincoln said of those of a man) should be long enough to reach the earth; and yet they must be free to move upon the solid ground of fact and experience. details must always be left to the _person_ who is to do the work, whether it be that of the teacher, of the farmer, or of the school officer. i am aware that there is a veritable flood of books on this and kindred topics, now coming from the presses of the country. my sole reasons for the publication of the present volume are the desire to deliver the message which has come to fruition in my mind, and the hope that it may reach and interest some who have not been benefited by a better and more systematic treatise on this subject. by way of credential and justification, i would say that the message of the book has in large measure grown out of my own life and thought; for i was born and brought up in the country, there i received my elementary education, and there i remained till man grown. practically every kind of work known on the farm was familiar to me, and i have also taught and supervised rural schools. these experiences are regarded as of the highest value, and i revert in memory to them with a satisfaction and affection which words cannot express. if there should seem to be a note of despair in some of the earlier chapters as to the desired outcome of the problems of rural life and the rural school, it is not intended that such impression shall be complete and final. an attempt is made simply to place the problem and the facts in their true light before the reader. there has been much "palavering" on this subject, as there has been much enforced screaming of the eagle in many of our fourth of july "orations." i feel that the first requisite is to conceive the problems clearly and in all seriousness. if these problems are to be solved, true conceptions of _values_ must be established in the social mind. many present conceptions, like those of the _personality_ of the teacher, _standards_ for teaching, _supervision_, school _equipment_, _salary_, etc., must first be _dis_-established, and then higher and better ones substituted. there will have to be a genuine and intelligent "tackling" of the problems, and not, as has been the case too often, a mere playing with them. there will have to be some real statesmanship introduced into the present _laissez-faire_ spirit, attitude, and methods of american rural life and rural education. the nation in this respect needs a trumpet call to action. there is need of a chorus, loud and long, and if the small voice of the present discussion shall add only a little--however little--to this volume of sound, there will be so much of gain. this is my aim and my hope. joseph kennedy the university of north dakota contents page chapter i. rural life a generation ago; chores and work; value of work; extremes; yearly routine; disliked in comparison; other hard jobs; harvesting; threshing; welcome events; winter work; what the old days lacked; the result; the backward rural school; women's condition unrelieved; the rural problem must be met; facilities. chapter ii. the urban trend cityward; attractive forces; conveniences in cities; urbanized literature; city schools; city churches; city work preferred; retired farmers; educational centers; face the problem; educational value not realized; wrong standard in the social mind; rural organization; playing with the problem. chapter iii. the real and the ideal school the building; no system of ventilation; the surroundings; the interior; small, dead school; that picture and this; architecture of building; get expert opinion; other surroundings; number of pupils; it will not teach alone; the teacher; a good rural school; the problem. chapter iv. some lines of progress progress; in reaping machines; the dropper; the hand rake; the self rake; the harvester; the wire binder; the twine binder; threshing machine; the first machine; improvements; the steam engine; improvements in ocean travel; from hand-spinning to factory; the cost; progress in higher education; progress in normal schools; progress in agricultural colleges; progress in the high schools; how is the rural school? chapter v. a backward and neglected field rural schools the same everywhere; rural schools no better than formerly; some improvements; strong personalities in the older schools; more men needed; low standard now; the survival of the unfittest; short terms; poor supervision; no decided movement; elementary teaching not a profession; the problem difficult, but before us; other educational interests should help; higher standards necessary; courses for teachers; the problem of compensation; consolidation as a factor; better supervision necessary; a model rural school; the teacher should lead; a good boarding place. chapter vi. consolidation of rural schools the process; when not necessary; the district system; the township system; consolidation difficult in district system; easier in township system; consolidation a special problem for each district; disagreements on transportation; each community must decide for itself; the distance to be transported; responsible driver; cost of consolidation; more life in the consolidated school; some grading desirable; better teachers; better buildings and inspection; longer terms; regularity, punctuality, and attendance; better supervision; the school as a social center; better roads; consolidation coming everywhere; the married teacher and permanence. chapter vii. the teacher the greatest factor; what education is; what the real teacher is; a hypnotist; untying knots; too much kindness; the button illustration; the chariot race; physically sound; character; well educated; professional preparation; experience; choosing a teacher; a "scoop"; what makes the difference; a question of teachers. chapter viii. the three inseparables the "mode"; the "mode" in labor; the "mode" in educational institutions; no "profession"; weak personalities; low standard; the norm of wages too low; the inseparables; raise the standard first; more men; coöperation needed; the supply; make it fashionable; the retirement system; city and country salaries--effects; the solution demands more; a good school board; board and teacher; the ideal. chapter ix. the rural school curriculum imitation; the country imitates the city; textbooks; an interpreting core; rural teachers from the city; a course for rural teachers; all not to remain in the country; mere textbook teaching; a rich environment; who will teach these things?; the scientific spirit needed; a course of study; red tape; length of term; individual work; "waking up the mind"; the overflow of instruction; affiliation; the "liking point"; the teacher, the chief factor. chapter x. the social center the teacher, the leader; some community activities; the literary society; debates; the school program; spelling schools; lectures; dramatic performances; a musical program; slides and moving pictures; supervised dancing; sports and games; school exhibits; a public forum; courtesy and candor; automobile parties; full life or a full purse; organization; the inseparables. chapter xi. rural school supervision important; supervision standardizes; supervision can be overdone; needed in rural schools; no supervision in some states; nominal supervision; some supervision; an impossible task; the problem not tackled; city supervision; the purpose of supervision; what is needed; the term; assistants; the schools examined; keep down red tape; help the social centers; conclusion. chapter xii. leadership and coÖperation the real leader; teaching _vs._ telling; enlisting the coöperation of pupils; placing responsibility; how people remain children; on the farm; renters; the owner; the teacher as a leader; self-activity and self-government; taking laws upon one's self; an educational column; all along the educational line. chapter xiii. the farmer and his home farming in the past; old conceit and prejudice; leveling down; premises indicative; conveniences by labor-saving devices; eggs in several baskets; the best is the cheapest; good work; good seed and trees; a good caretaker; family coöperation; an ideal life. chapter xiv. the rural renaissance darkest before the dawn; the awakening; the agricultural colleges; conventions; other awakening agencies; the farmer in politics; the national commission; mixed farming; now before the country; educational extension; library extension work; some froth; thought and attitude. chapter xv. a good place after all not pessimistic; fewer hours of labor than formerly; the mental factor growing; the bright side of old-time country life; the larger environment; games; inventiveness in rural life; activity rather than passivity; child labor; the finest life on earth. rural life and the rural school chapter i rural life it is only within the past decade that rural life and the rural school have been recognized as genuine problems for the consideration of the american people. not many years ago, a president of the united states, acting upon his own initiative, appointed a rural school commission to investigate country life and to suggest a solution for some of its problems. that commission itself and its report were both the effect and the cause of an awakening of the public mind upon this most important problem. within the past few years the cry "back to the country" has been heard on every hand, and means are now constantly being proposed for reversing the urban trend, or at least for minimizing it. =a generation ago.=--rural life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. in those days--and no doubt they are so even yet in many places--the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the country to the city? =chores and work.=--the country youth, a mere boy in his teens, was, and still is, compelled to rise early in the morning--often at four o'clock--and to go through the round of chores and of work for a long day of twelve to fifteen hours. first, after rising, he had his team to care for, the stables were to be cleaned, cows to be milked, and hogs and calves to be fed. after the chores were done the boy or the young man had to work all day at manual labor, usually close to the soil; he was allowed about one hour's rest at dinner time; in the evening after a day's hard labor, he had to perform the same round of chores as in the morning so that there was but a short time for play and recreation, if he had any surplus energy left. he usually retired early, for he was fatigued and needed sleep and rest in order to be refreshed for the following day, when he very likely would be required to repeat the same dull round. =value of work.=--of course work is a good thing. a moderate and reasonable amount of labor is usually the salvation of any individual. no nation or race has come up from savagery to civilization without the stimulating influence of labor. it is likewise true that no individual can advance from the savagery of childhood to the civilization of adult life except through work of some kind. work in a reasonable amount is a blessing and not a curse. it is probably due to this fact that so many men in our history have become distinguished in professional life, in the forum, on the bench, and in the national congress; in childhood and youth they were inured to habits of work. this kept them from temptation, and endowed them with habits of industry, of concentration, and of purpose. the old adage that "satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," found little application in the rural life of a quarter of a century ago. =extremes.=--even with all its unrecognized advantages, the fact remains that farm life has been quite generally uninteresting to the average human being. there are individuals who become so accustomed to hard work that the habit really grows to be pleasant. this, no doubt, often happens. habit accustoms the individual to accommodate himself to existing conditions, no matter how severe they may be. a very old man who was shocking wheat under the hot sun of a harvest day was once told that it must be hard work for him. he replied, "yes, but i like it when the bundles are my own." so the few who are interested and accustomed by habit to this kind of life may enjoy it, but to the great majority of people the conditions would be decidedly unattractive. =yearly routine.=--the yearly routine on the farm used to be about as follows: in early spring, before seeding time had come, all the seed wheat had to be put through the fanning mill. the seed was sown by hand. a man carried a heavy load of grain upon his back and walked from one end of the field to the other, sowing it broadcast as he went. after the wheat had been sown, plowing for the corn and potatoes was begun and continued. these were all planted by hand, and when they came above ground they were hoed by hand and cultivated repeatedly by walking and holding the plow. =disliked in comparison.=--all of this work implies, of course, that the person doing it was close to the soil; in fact, he was _in_ the soil. he wore, necessarily, old clothes somewhat begrimed by dirt and dust. his shoes or boots were heavy and his step became habitually long and slow. manual labor too frequently carries with it a neglect of cleanliness. the laborer on the farm necessarily has about him the odor of horses, of cows, and of barns. such conditions are not bad, but they are nevertheless objectionable, when compared with the neatness and cleanliness of the clerk in the bank or behind the counter. we do not write these words in any spirit of disparagement, but merely from the point of view at which many young people in the country view them. we are trying to face the truth in order to understand the problem to be solved. it is essential to look at the situation squarely and to view it steadily and honestly. hiding our heads in the sand will not clarify our vision. =other hard jobs.=--the next step in the yearly round was haymaking. frequently, the grass was cut with scythes. in any event the work of raking, curing, and stacking the hay, or the hauling it and pitching it into the barns was heavy work. there was no hayfork operated by machinery in those days. when not haying, the youth was usually put to summer-fallowing or to breaking new ground, to fencing or splitting rails,--all heavy work. no wonder that he always welcomed a rainy day! =harvesting.=--then came the wheat-harvest time. within the memory of the author some of the grain was cut with cradles; later, simple reaping machines of various kinds were used; but with them went the binding, shocking, and stacking, all performed by hand and all arduous pieces of work. these operations were interspersed with plowing and threshing. then came corn cutting, potato digging, and corn husking. =threshing.=--in those days most of the work around a threshing machine was also done by hand. there was no self-feeding apparatus and no band-cutting device; there was no straw-blower and no measuring and weighing attachments. it usually required about a dozen "hands" to do all the work. these men worked strenuously and usually in dusty places. the only redeeming feature of the business was the opportunity given for social intercourse which accompanied the work. men, being social by instinct, always work more willingly and more strenuously when others are with them. =welcome events.=--it is quite natural, as we have said, that under such conditions as these the youth longed for a rainy day. a trip to the city was always a delightful break in the monotony of his life, and a short respite from severe toil. sunday was usually the only social occasion in rural life. it was always welcome, and the boys, even though tired physically from work during the week, usually played ball, or went swimming, or engaged in other sports on sunday afternoons. living in isolation all the week and engaged in hard labor, they instinctively craved companionship and society. =winter work.=--when the fall work was done, winter came with its own occupations. there were usually about four months of school in the rural district, but even during this season there was much manual labor to be done. trees were to be cut down and wood was to be chopped, sawed, and split for the coming summer. land frequently had to be cleared to make new fields; the breaking of colts and of steers constituted part of the sport as well as of the labor of that season of the year. =what the old days lacked.=--there was little or no machinery as a factor in the rural life of days gone by. in these modern times, of course, many things have made country life more attractive than formerly. twenty-five years ago there was no rural delivery, no motor cycle, no automobile; even horses and buggies were somewhat of a luxury, for in the remote country districts the ox team or "shanks' mares" formed the usual mode of travel. =the result.=--it is little wonder that under such circumstances discontent arose and that people who by nature are sociable longed to go where life was, in their opinion, more agreeable. even with all the later conveniences and improvements, the trend cityward still continues and may continue indefinitely in the future. the american people may as well face the facts as they are. it is difficult if not impossible to make the country as attractive to young people as is the city; and consequently to reverse or even stop the urban trend will be most difficult. indeed, some of the things which make rural life pleasant, like the automobile, favor this trend, which probably will continue until economic pressure puts on the brakes. even now, with all our improvements, the social factors in rural life are comparatively small. here is one of our greatest problems: how to increase the fullness of social life in rural communities so as to make country life and living everywhere more attractive. =the backward rural school.=--although the material conditions and facilities for work have improved by reason of various inventions in recent years, the rural school of former days was frequently as good as, if not better in some respects than, the school of to-day. formerly there were many able men engaged in teaching who could earn as much in the schoolroom as they could earn elsewhere. there were consequently in the rural schools many strong personalities, both men and women. since that time new opportunities and callings have developed so rapidly that some of the most capable people have been enticed into other and more profitable callings, and the schools are left in a weakened condition by reason of their absence. =women's condition unrelieved.=--with all our improvements and conveniences, the work of women in country communities has been relieved but little. farm life has always been and still is a hard one for women. it has been, in many instances, a veritable state of slavery; for women in the country have always been compelled to do not only their own proper work, but the work of two or three persons. the working hours for women are even longer than those for men; for breakfast must be prepared for the workmen, and household work must be done after the evening meal is eaten. it is little to be wondered at that women as a rule wish to leave the drudgery of rural life. under the improved conditions of the present day, with all kinds of machinery, the work of women is lightened least.[ ] [footnote : there is an illuminating article, entitled "the farmer and his wife," by martha bensley bruère in _good housekeeping magazine_, for june, , p. .] =the rural problem must be met.=--i have given a short description of rural life in order to have a setting for the rural school. the school is, without doubt, the center of the rural life problem, and we are face to face with it for a solution of some kind. the problems of both have been too long neglected. now forced upon our attention, they should receive the thoughtful consideration of all persons interested in the welfare of society. they are difficult of solution, probably the most difficult of all those which our generation has to face. they involve the reduction of the repellent forces in rural life and the increase of such forces and agencies as will be attractive, especially to the young. the great problem is, how can the trend cityward be checked or reversed? what attractions are possible and feasible in the rural communities? in each there should be some recognized center to provide these various attractions. there should be lectures and debates, plays of a serious character, musical entertainments, and social functions; even the moving picture might be made of great educational value. there is no reason why the people in the country are not entitled to all the satisfying mental food which the people of the city enjoy. these things can be secured, too, if the people will only awake to a realization of their value, and will show their willingness to pay for them. something cannot be secured for nothing. in the last resort the solution of most problems, as well as the accomplishment of most aims, involves the expenditure of money. wherever the people of rural communities have come to value the finer educational, cultural, civilizing, and intangible things more than they value money, the problem is already being solved. it is certainly a question of values--in aims and means. =facilities.=--many inventions might be utilized on the farm to better advantage than they are at present. but people live somewhat isolated lives in rural communities and there is not the active comparison or competition that one finds in the city; improvements of all kinds are therefore slower of realization. values are not forced home by every-day discussion and comparison. people continue to do as they have been accustomed to do, and there are men who own large farms and have large bank accounts who continue to live without the modern improvements, and hence with but few comforts in life. a greater interest in the best things pertaining to country life needs to be awakened, and to this end rural communities should be better organized, socially, economically, and educationally. chapter ii the urban trend in the preceding chapter we discussed those forces at work in rural life which tend to drive people from the farm to the city. it was shown that, on the whole, up to the present at least, farm life has not been as pleasant as it should or could be made. some aspects of it are uncomfortable, if not painful. hard manual labor, long hours of toil, and partial isolation from one's fellows usually and generally characterize it. of course, there are many who by nature or habit, or who by their ingenuity and thrift, have made it serve them, and who therefore have come to love the life of the country; but we are speaking with reference to the average men and women who have not mastered the forces at hand, which can be turned to their service only by thought and thrift. =cityward.=--the trend toward the cities is unmistakable. so alarming has it become that it has aroused the american people to a realization that something must be done to reverse it or at least to minimize it. at the close of the revolutionary war only three per cent of the total population of our country lived in what could be termed cities. in only about five per cent of the whole population was urban; while in forty-six per cent of our people lived in cities. this means that, relatively, our forces producing raw materials are not keeping pace with the growth and demands of consumption. in some of the older atlantic states, as one rides through the country, vast areas of uncultivated land meet the view. the people have gone to the city. large cities absorb smaller ones, and the small towns absorb the inhabitants of the rural districts. every city and town is making strenuous efforts to build itself up, if need be at the expense of the smaller towns and the rural communities. to "boom" its own city is assumed to be a large and legitimate part of the business of every commercial club. this must mean, of course, that smaller cities and towns and the rural communities suffer accordingly in business, in population, and in life. =attractive forces.=--the attractive forces of the city are quite as numerous and powerful as the repellent forces of the country. the city is attractive from many points of view. it sets the pace, the standard, the ideals; even the styles of clothing and dress originate there. it is where all sorts of people are seen and met with in large numbers; its varied scenes are always magnetic. both old and young are attracted by activities of all kinds; the "white way" in every city is a constant bid for numbers. in the city there is always more liveliness if not more life than in the country. activity is apparent everywhere. everything _seems_ better to the young person from the country; there is more to see and more to hear; the show windows and the display of lighting are a constant lure; there is an endless variety of experiences. life seems great because it is cosmopolitan and not provincial or local. in any event, it _draws_ the youth of the country. things, they say, are _doing_, and they long to be a part of it all. there is no doubt that the mind and heart are motivated in this way. =conveniences in cities.=--in the city there are more conveniences than in the country. there are sidewalks and paved streets instead of muddy roads; there are private telephones, and the telegraph is at hand in time of need; there are street cars which afford comfortable and rapid transportation. there are libraries, museums, and art galleries; there are free lectures and entertainments of various kinds; and the churches are larger and more attractive than those in the country. as in the case of teachers, the cities secure their pick of preachers. doctors are at hand in time of need, and all the professions are centered there. is it any wonder that people, when they have an opportunity, migrate to the city? there is a social instinct moving the human heart. all people are gregarious. adults as well as children like to be where others are, and so where some people congregate others tend to do likewise. country life as at present organized does not afford the best opportunity for the satisfaction of this social instinct. the great variety of social attractions constitutes the lure of the city--it is the powerful social magnet. =urbanized literature.=--most books, magazines, and papers are published in cities, hence most of them have the flavor of city life about them. they are made and written by people who know the city, and the city doings are usually the subject matter of the literary output of the day. children acquire from these, even in their primary school days, a longing for the city. the idea of seeing and possibly of living in the city becomes "set," and it tends sooner or later to realize itself in act and in life. =city schools.=--the city, as a rule, maintains excellent schools; and the most modern and serviceable buildings for school purposes are found there. urban people seem willing to tax themselves to a greater extent; and so in the cities will be found comparatively better buildings, better teachers, more and better supervision, more fullness of life in the schools. usually in the cities the leading and most enterprising men and women are elected to the school board, and the people, as we have said, acquiesce in such taxation as the board deems necessary. cities endeavor to secure the choice of the output of normal schools, regardless of the demands of rural districts. every city has a superintendent, and every building a principal; while, in the country, one county superintendent has to supervise a hundred or more schools, situated too, as they are, long distances apart. =city churches.=--something similar may be said with respect to the churches. in every city there are several, and people can usually go to the church of their choice. in many parts of the country the church is decadent, and in some places it is becoming extinct. even the automobile contributes its influence against the country church as a rural institution, and in favor of the city; for people who are sufficiently well-to-do often like to take an automobile ride to the city on sunday. =city work preferred.=--workingmen and servant girls also prefer the city. they dislike the long irregular hours of the country; they prefer to work where the hours are regular, where they do not come into such close touch with the soil, and where they do not have to battle with the elements. in the city they work under shelter and in accordance with definite regulations. hence it is that the problem of securing workingmen and servant girls in the country is every day becoming more and more perplexing. =retired farmers.=--farmers themselves, when they have become reasonably well-to-do, frequently retire to the city, either to enjoy life the rest of their days or to educate their children. individuals are not to be blamed. the lack of equivalent attractions and conveniences in the country is responsible. =educational centers.=--as yet, it is seldom that good high schools are found in the country. to secure a high school education country people frequently have to avail themselves of the city schools. many colleges and universities are located in the cities and, consequently, much of the educational trend is in that direction. =face the problem.=--the rural problem is a difficult one and we may as well face the situation honestly and earnestly. there has been too much mere oratory on problems of rural life. we have often, ostrich-like, kept our heads under the sand and have not seen or admitted the real conditions, which must be changed if rural life is to become attractive. say what we will, people will go where their needs are best satisfied and where the attractions are greatest. people cannot be _driven_--they must be attracted and won. if "god made the country and man made the town," god's people must be neglecting to give god's country "such a face and such a mien as to be loved needs only to be seen." where the element of nature is largest there should be a more truly and deeply attractive life than where the element of art predominates, however alluring that may be. how can country life and the country itself be made to attract? =educational value not realized.=--people generally have never been able to estimate education fairly. the value of lands, horses, and money can easily be measured, for these are tangible things; but education is very difficult of appraisal, for it is intangible. yet it is true that intangible things are frequently of greater worth than are tangible things. there are men who pay more to a jockey to train their horses than they are willing to pay to a teacher to train their children. this is because the services of the jockey are more easily reckoned. the effects or results of the horse training are measured by the proceeds in dollars and cents on the racetrack, and so are easily realized; while the growth in education, refinement, and culture on the part of the child is difficult indeed to measure or estimate. and yet how much more valuable it is! the jockey gives the one, the teacher the other. =wrong standard in the social mind.=--in some rural communities the idea exists that a teacher is worth about fifty dollars a month--perhaps not so much. this idea has been encouraged until it has been too generally accepted; and in many places the notion prevails that if a teacher is receiving more than that amount, she is being overpaid, and the school board is accused of extravagance. the rural school problem will never be solved until the standard of compensation is readjusted. there are many persons in the cities, who, for the performance of socially unimportant things, are receiving larger salaries than are usually paid to university professors and college presidents. thus, the relative values of services are misjudged and the recompense of labor is not properly graded and proportioned. unless there is, quite generally, a saner perspective in the social mind and until values are reëstimated, the solution of the rural school problem and indeed of many problems of rural life is well-nigh hopeless. before a solution is effected sufficient inducement must be held out to more strong persons to come into the rural life and into the rural schools. these persons would and could be leaders of strength among the people. =rural organization.=--until recently there has been little or no organization of rural life. communities have been chaotic, socially, economically, and educationally. real leaders have been wanting--men and women of strong and winning personality. the rural teacher, if he were a man of power and initiative, often proved to be a real savior and redeemer of social life in his community. but leaders of this type cannot now be secured without a reasonable incentive. such men will seldom sacrifice themselves for the organization and uplift of a community except for proper compensation. if teachers--or at least the strong ones--were paid two or three times as much as they are to-day, and if the standards were raised accordingly, so as to secure really strong personalities as teachers, country life might be organized in different directions and made so much more attractive than at present, that the urban trend would be arrested or greatly minimized. =playing with the problem.=--the possibilities of the organization of rural life and rural schools have not yet been realized; as a people we have really played with this problem. it has taken care of itself; it has been allowed to drift. rural life at present is a kind of easy social adjustment on the basis of the minimum of expense and of exertion toward a solution. we have not realized the value of genuine social, economic, and educational organization with all the activities in these lines which the terms imply. we have not grappled with the problem in an earnest, scientific way; we have never thought out systematically what is needed, and then decided to employ the necessary means to bring about the desired end. it may be that the problem will remain unsolved for generations to come; but if country life and country schools are to be made as attractive and pleasant as city life and city schools, the people will have to face the problem without flinching and use the only means which will bring about the desired result. the problem could be easily solved if the people realized the true value of rural life and of _good_ rural schools. where there is a will there is a way; but where there is no will there is no possible way. country life can be made fully as pleasant as city life, and the rural schools can be made fully as good as the city schools. of course some things will be lacking in the country which are found in the city; but, conversely, many things and probably better things will be found in the country than could be found in the city. chapter iii the real and the ideal school this chapter will have reference to the one-room rural school as it has existed in the past and as it still exists in many places; it will also discuss the rural school as it ought to be. it is assumed that, although consolidation is spreading rapidly, the one-room rural school as an institution will continue to exist for an indefinite time. under favorable conditions it probably should continue to exist; for, as we shall see, it has many excellent features which are real advantages. =the building.=--the old-fashioned country schoolhouse was in many respects a pitiable object. the "little red schoolhouse" in story and song has been the object of much praise. as an ideal creation it may be deserving of admiration, but this cannot be asserted of it as a reality. the common type was an ordinary box-shaped building without architecture, without a plan, and, as a rule, without care or repair. frequently it stood for years without being repainted, and in the midst of chaotic and ill-cared-for surroundings. the contract for building it was usually awarded to some carpenter who was also given _carte blanche_ to do as he pleased in regard to its construction, the only provision being that he keep within the amount of money allowed--probably eight hundred or a thousand dollars. the usual result was the plainest kind of building, without conveniences of any kind. if a blackboard were provided in the specifications (which were often oral rather than written), it was perhaps placed in such a position as to be useless. in the course of my experience as county superintendent of schools, i once visited a rural school in which the blackboard began at the height of a man's head and extended to the ceiling, the carpenter probably thinking that its one purpose was to display permanently the teacher's program. =no system of ventilation.=--no system of ventilation was provided in former days, and in some schoolhouses such is the condition to-day. nevertheless, within the past fifteen years, there has been a gratifying improvement in this direction. it used to be necessary to secure fresh air, if at all, by opening windows. in some sections, where the climate is mild, this is the best method of ventilation; but certainly, in northern latitudes where the winters are long and cold, some system of forced or automatic ventilation should be provided. it may not be amiss to assert that it would be an excellent plan to decide first upon a good system of ventilation and then to build the schoolhouse around it. without involving great expense there are simple systems of ventilation and heating combined which are very efficient for such houses. in former times, and in some places even yet, the usual method of heating was by an unjacketed stove which made the pupils who sat nearest it uncomfortably warm, while those in the farther corners were shivering with cold. with new systems of ventilation there is an insulating jacket which equalizes the temperature of the room by heating the fresh air and distributing it evenly. it is strange how slowly people change their habits and even their opinions. many are ignorant of the fact that in an unventilated schoolroom each child is breathing over and over again an atmosphere vitiated by the air exhaled from the lungs of every child in the room. the fact that twenty to forty pupils are often housed in poorly-ventilated schools accounts for much sickness and disease among country children. whatever it is that makes air "fresh," and healthful, that factor is not found under the conditions described. changes in the temperature and movement of the air are, no doubt, important in securing a healthful physiological reaction, but air contaminated and befouled by bodies and lungs has stupefying effects which cannot be ignored. frequent change of air is essential. =the surroundings.=--the typical country schoolhouse, as it existed in the past, and as it frequently exists to-day, has not sufficient land to form a good yard and a playground appropriate for its needs. the farmer who sold or donated the small tract of land often plows almost to the very foundation walls. there are usually no trees near by to afford shelter or to give the place a homelike and attractive appearance. some trees may have been planted, but owing to neglect they have all died out, and nothing remains but a few dead and unsightly trunks. there is usually no fence around the school yard, and the outbuildings are frequently a disgrace, if not a positive menace to the children's morals. if a choice had to be made it would be better to allow children to grow up in their native liberty and wildness without a school "education" than to have them subjected to mental and moral degradation by the vicious suggestions received in some of these places. weak teachers have a false modesty in regard to such conditions and school boards are often thoughtless or negligent. =the interior.=--within the building there is frequently no adequate equipment in the way of apparatus, supplementary reading, or reference books of any kind. there are no decorations on the walls except such as are put there by mischievous children. the whole situation both inside and out brings upon one a feeling of desolation. men and women who live in reasonably comfortable homes near by allow the school home of their precious children to remain for years unattractive and uninspiring in every particular. again this is the result of ignorance, thoughtlessness, or negligence--a negligence that comes alarmingly close to guilt. =small, dead school.=--in many a lone rural schoolhouse may be found ten to twenty small children; and behind the desk a teacher holding only a second or third grade elementary or county certificate. the whole institution is rather tame and weak, if not dead; it is anything but stimulating (and if education means anything it means stimulation). it is this kind of situation which has led in recent years to a discussion of the rural school as one of the problems most urgently demanding the attention of society. =that picture and this.=--let us now consider, after looking upon that picture, what the situation ought to be. in the first place, there should be a large school ground, or yard--not less than two acres. the schoolhouse should be properly located in this tract. the ground as a whole should be platted by a landscape architect, or at least by a person of experience and taste. trees of various kinds should be planted in appropriate places, and groups of shrubbery should help to form an attractive setting. the school grounds should have a serviceable fence and gate and there should be a playground and a school garden. =architecture of building.=--no school building should be erected that has not first been planned or passed upon by an architect; this is now required by law in some states. a building with handsome appearance and with appropriate appointments is but a trifle, if any, more costly than one that has none. art of all kinds is a valuable factor in the education of children and of people generally; and a building, beautiful in construction, is no exception to the rule. every person is educated by what impresses him. it is only within the last few years that much attention has been given to the necessity of special architecture in schoolhouses. men of intelligence sometimes draw up their own plans for a building and then, having become enamored of them, proceed to construct a residence or a schoolhouse along those lines. if they had shown their plans to an architect of experience he would probably have pointed out numerous defects which would have been admitted as soon as observed. neither the individual nor the district school boards can afford, in justice to themselves and the community they represent, to ignore the wide and varied knowledge of the expert. =get expert opinion.=--expert opinion should govern in the matter of heating and ventilating, in the kind of seating, in the arrangement of blackboards, in the decorations, and in all such technical and professional matters. every rural school should have a carefully selected library, suited to its needs, including a sufficient number of reference books. the pupils should have textbooks without delay so that no time may be wasted in getting started after the opening of school. the walls should be adorned with a few appropriate and beautiful pictures. =other surroundings.=--on this school ground there should be a shop of some kind. the resourceful teacher would find a hundred uses for some such center of work. the closets should be so placed and so devised as to be easily supervised. this would prevent them from being moral plague spots, as is too often the case, as we have already said. there should be stables for sheltering horses, if the school is, as it should be, a social center for the community. there should be a flagpole in front of the schoolhouse, from the top of which the stars and stripes should be often unfurled to the breeze. =number of pupils.=--in this architecturally attractive building, amid beautiful surroundings both inside and out, there should be, in order to have a good rural school, not less than eighteen or twenty pupils. where there are fewer the school should be consolidated with a neighboring school. twenty pupils would give an assurance of educational and social life, instead of the dead monotony which often prevails in the smaller rural school. there should be, during the year, at least eight, and preferably nine, months of school work. =it will not teach alone.=--but with all of these conditions the school may still be far from effective. all the material equipment--the total environment of the pupils, both inside and outside the building--may be excellent, and still we may fail to find there a good school. garfield said of his old teacher that mark hopkins on one end of a log and a pupil on the other made the best kind of college. this indicates an essential factor other than the physical equipment. i remember being once in a store when a man who had bought a saw a few days previously returned it in a wrathful mood. he was angry through and through and declared that the saw was utterly worthless. he had brought it back to reclaim his money. the merchant had a rich vein of humor in his nature and he listened smilingly to the outburst of angry language. then he merely took the saw, opened his till and handed the man his money, quietly asking, with a twinkle in his eyes for those standing around, "wouldn't it saw alone?" now, we may have a fine school ground, or site, with a variety of beautiful trees and clumps of shrubbery; we may have a playground and a school garden; we may have it all splendidly fenced; the schoolhouse may have an artistic appearance and may be kept in excellent repair; it may be well furnished inside with blackboards, seats, library, reference books, good textbooks, and all else that is needed; it may be beautifully decorated; it may have twenty or even more pupils, and yet we may not have a good school. it will not "saw alone"; the one indispensable factor may still be lacking. =the teacher.=--"as is the teacher, so is the school." mark hopkins on the end of a log made a good college, compared with the situation where the building is good and the teacher poor. the teacher is like the mainspring in a watch. without a good teacher there can be no good school. live teacher, live school; dead teacher, dead school. the teacher and the school must be the center of life, of thought, and of conversation, in a good way, in the neighborhood. the teacher is the soul of the school; the other things constitute its body. what shall it profit a community to have a great building and lack a good teacher? if we were obliged to choose between a good teacher and poor material conditions and environment on the one hand, and excellent material conditions and environment and a poor teacher on the other, we should certainly not hesitate in our choice. =a good rural school.=--now, if we suppose a really good teacher under the good conditions described above, we shall have a _good_ rural school. there is usually better individual work done in such a school than is possible in a large system of graded schools in a city. in such a school there is more single-mindedness on the part of pupils and teacher. these pupils bring to such a school unspoiled minds, minds not weakened by the attractions and distractions, both day and night, of city life. in such a school the essentials of a good education are, as a rule, more often emphasized than in the city. there is probably a truer perspective of values. things of the first magnitude are distinguished from things of the second, fifth, or tenth magnitude. this inability to distinguish magnitudes is one of the banes of common school education everywhere--so many things are appraised at the same value. =the problem.=--we have tried in this discussion to put before the reader a fairly accurate picture, on the one hand, of the undesirable conditions which have too often prevailed, and, on the other, of a rural school which would be an excellent place in which to receive one's elementary education. the reader is asked to "look here, upon this picture, and on this." the transition from the one to the other is one of the great problems of rural life and of the rural school. consolidation of schools, which we shall discuss more at length in a later chapter, will help to solve the problem of the rural school, and we give it our hearty indorsement. it is the best plan we know of where the conditions are favorable; but it is probable that the one-room rural school will remain with us for a long time to come. indeed there are some good reasons why it should remain. where the good rural school exists, whether non-consolidated or consolidated, it should be the center and the soul of rural life in that community--social, economical, and educational. chapter iv some lines of progress =progress.=--the period covering the last sixty or seventy-five years has seen greater progress in all material lines than any other equal period of the world's history. indeed, it is doubtful if a similar period of invention and progress will ever recur. it has been one of industrial revolution in all lines of activity. =in reaping machines.=--let us for a few moments trace this development and progress in some specific fields. within the memory of many men now living the hand sickle was in common use in the cutting of grain. in the fifties and sixties the cradle was the usual implement for harvesting wheat, oats, and similar grains. one man did the cradling and another the gathering and the binding into sheaves. then came rapid development of the reaping machine. =the "dropper."=--the most important step was probably the invention of the sickle-bar, a slender steel bar having v-shaped sections attached, to cut the grass and grain; this was pushed and pulled between what are called guards, by means of a rod called the "pitman rod," attached to a small revolving wheel run by the gearing of the machine. this was a wonderful invention and its principle has been extensively applied. the first reaping machine using the sickle and guard device was known as the "dropper." a reel, worked by machinery, revolved at a short distance above the sickle, beating the wheat backward upon a small platform of slats. this platform could be raised and lowered by the foot, by means of a treadle. when there was sufficient grain on this slat-platform it was lowered and the wheat was left lying in short rows on the ground, behind the machine. the bundles had to be bound by hand and removed before the machine could make the next round. this machine, though simple, was the forerunner of other important inventions. =the hand rake.=--the next type of machine was the one in which the platform of slats was replaced by a stationary platform having a smooth board floor. a man sat at the side of the machine, near the rear, and raked the bundles off sidewise with a hand rake. a boy drove the team and the man raked off the grain in sufficient quantities to make bundles. these were thrown by the rake a sufficient distance from the standing grain to allow the machine to proceed round and round the field, even if these bundles of grain, so raked off, were not yet bound into sheaves. =the self rake.=--the next advance consisted in what is known as the "self rake." this machine had a series of slats or wings which did both the work of the reel in the earlier machine and also that of the man who raked the wheat off the later machine. this saved the labor of one man. =the harvester.=--the next improvement in the evolution of the reaping machine--if indeed an improvement it could be called--was what is known as the "harvester." in this there was a canvas elevator upon which the grain was thrown by the reel, and which brought the grain up to the platform on which two men stood for the purpose of binding it. each man took his share, binding alternate bundles and throwing them, when bound, down on the ground. such work was certainly one of the repellent factors in driving men and boys from the country to the city. =the wire binder.=--another step in advance was the invention of the wire binder. everything was now done by machinery: the cutting, the elevating, the binding, and even the carrying of the sheaves into piles or windrows. there was an attachment upon the machine by which the bundles were carried along and deposited in bunches to make the "shocking" easier. =the twine binder.=--but the wire was found to be an obstruction both in threshing and in the use of straw for fodder; and, as necessity is the mother of invention, the so-called twine "knotter" soon came into existence and with it the full-fledged twine binder with all its varied improvements as we have it to-day. =threshing machine.=--the development of the perfected threshing machine was very similar. fifty years ago, the flail was an implement of common use upon the barn floor. then came the invention called the "cylinder"; this was systematically studded with "teeth" and these, in the rapid revolutions of the cylinder, passed between corresponding teeth systematically set in what is known as "concaves." this tooth arrangement in revolving cylinder and in concave was as epochal in the line of progress in threshing machines as the sickle, with its "sections" passing or being drawn through guards, was in reaping machines. =the first machine.=--the earliest of these threshing machines containing a cylinder was run by a treadmill on which a horse was used. it was literally a "one-horse" affair. of course the first type of cylinder was small and simple, and the work as a rule was poorly done. the chaff and the straw came out together and men had to attend to each by hand. the wheat was poorly cleaned and had to be run through a fanning-mill several times. =improvements.=--then came some improvements and enlargements in the cylinder, and also the application of horse power by means of what was known as "tumbling rods" and a gearing attached to the cylinder. all this at first was on rather a small scale, only two, three, or four horses being used. but improvements and enlargements came step by step, until the ten and twelve horse power machine was achieved, resulting in the large separator that would thresh out several hundred bushels of wheat in a day. the separator had also attached to it what was called the "straw carrier," which conveyed both the straw and the chaff to quite a distance from the machine. but even then most of the work around the machine was done by hand. the straw pile required the attention of three or four men; or if the straw were "bucked," as they said, it required a man with a horse or team hitched to a long pole. in this latter case the straw was spread in various parts of the field and finally burned. =the steam engine.=--then came the portable steam engine for threshing purposes. at first, however, this had to be drawn from place to place by teams. the power was applied to the separator by a long belt. following this, came the devices for cutting the bands, the self-feeder, and finally the straw blower, as it is called, consisting of a long tube through which the straw is blown by the powerful separator fanning-mill. this blower can be moved in different directions, and consequently it saves the labor of as many men as were formerly required to handle the straw and chaff. about the same time, also, the device for weighing and measuring the grain was perfected. the "traction" engine has now replaced the one which had to be drawn by teams, and this not only propels itself but also draws the separator and other loads after it from place to place. in all this progress the machinery has constantly become more and more perfect and the cylinder and capacity of the machine greater and greater. not many years ago, six hundred bushels in a day was considered a big record in the threshing of wheat. now the large machines separate, or thresh out, between three and four thousand bushels in one day. such has been the development in reaping machines from the sickle to the self-binder, and in threshing machines from the flail to the modern marvel just described. =improvement in ocean travel.=--a similar story may be told in regard to ocean traffic and ocean travel. our ancestors came from foreign lands on sailing ships that required from three weeks to several months to cross the atlantic. i am acquainted with a german immigrant who, many years ago, left a seaport town of germany on january st and landed at castle garden in new york city on the th of july. the inconvenience of travel under such circumstances was equal to the slowness of the journey. in those days leaving home in the old country meant never again seeing one's relatives and friends. if such conditions are compared with those of to-day we can readily realize the vast progress that has been made. to-day the great ocean liners cross the atlantic in a little more than five days. these magnificent "ocean greyhounds" are fitted out with all modern conveniences and improvements, so that one is as comfortable in them and as safe as he is in one of the best hotels of the large cities. =from hand-spinning to factory.=--weaving in former times was done entirely by hand. fifty years ago private weavers were found in almost every community. wool was raised, carded, spun, and woven, and the garments were all made, practically, within the household. all that is now past. in the great manufacturing establishments one man at a lever does the work of or people. this great industrial advancement has taken place within the memory of people now living. and similar progress has been made in almost every other line of human endeavor. =the cost.=--very few people realize what it has cost the human race to pass from one condition to the other in these various lines. hundreds and thousands of men have worked and died in the struggle and in the process of bringing about improvements. every calamity due to inadequate machines or to poor methods has had its influence toward causing further advancements in inventions for the benefit of mankind. =progress in higher education.=--let us now turn our attention to the progress that has been made in the field of academic education. it is true that many of the great universities were established centuries ago. these were at first endowed church institutions or theological seminaries; but the great state universities of this country are creations of the progressive period under consideration. general taxation for higher education is comparatively a modern practice. the university of michigan was one of the first state universities established. since then nearly every commonwealth, whether it has come into the union since that time or whether it is one of the older states, has established a university. there has been a great development of higher education by the states. no institutions of the country have grown more rapidly within the last thirty or forty years than the state universities. they have established departments of every kind. besides the college of liberal arts there are in most of them colleges or schools of law, medicine, engineering in its several lines, education, pharmacy, dentistry, commerce, industrial arts, and fine arts. the state university is abroad in the land; it has, as a rule, an extension department by which it impresses itself upon the people of the state, outside its walls. the principle of higher education by taxation of all the people is no longer questioned; it is no longer an experiment. the state university is relied upon to furnish the country with the leaders of the future--and leaders will always be in demand, for they are always sorely needed. =progress in normal schools.=--while the state universities have been enjoying this marvelous development, nearly every state has been establishing normal schools for the professional preparation of teachers. the normal school as an institution is also modern. as an institution established and supported by state taxation it is, as a rule, more recent than the universities. forty years ago many good people regarded the normal school idea as visionary and its realization as a doubtful experiment. indeed in one western state, as late as the eighties, its legislature debated the abolition of its normal schools on the ground that they were not fulfilling or accomplishing any useful mission. to-day, however, no such charge of inefficiency can be made. the normal schools, like the universities, have proved their right to exist. they have been weighed in the balance and have not been found wanting. it is now generally recognized that those who would teach should make some preparation for that high calling; and so the normal schools in every state have demonstrated their "right of domicile" in the educational system. it is now generally recognized that teaching, both as a science and as an art, is highly complicated, and that, if it is to be a profession, there must be special preparation for it. consequently the normal schools of the country have had a wonderful and rapid development from the experimental stage to that in which they have well-nigh realized their ideals. school boards everywhere look to the normal schools for their supply of elementary teachers. =progress in agricultural colleges.=--similar statements may be made concerning the agricultural colleges of the country. they are modern creations in the united states; and with the aid of both the state and the national government they have come to be vast institutions, devoting themselves to the teaching and the spreading of scientific farming among the people. here there is a vast work to be done. on account of the trend of population toward the cities, and on account of the vast tracts of country land lying idle, scientific agriculture should be brought in to aid in production and thus to keep down the cost of living. the agricultural colleges of the country have a large part to play in the solution of the problems of rural life. =progress in the high schools.=--a similar development characterizes the high schools of the country. education has extended downward from above. universities everywhere have come into existence before the establishment of secondary schools. not only are the universities, the normal schools, and the agricultural colleges of recent origin, but the high schools also are modern institutions, at least in their present systematized form. the high schools of the cities constitute to-day one of the most efficient forms of school organization. at the present time the better high schools of the cities are veritable colleges--in fact their curricula are as extensive as were those of the colleges of sixty years ago. vast numbers attend them; their faculties are composed of college graduates or better; they have, as a rule, various departments, such as manual training, domestic science, agriculture, commercial subjects, normal courses, etc. in addition to the traditional curricula, the high schools, like the universities, normal schools, and agricultural colleges, have kept pace, in large measure, with the material progress described in the first part of this chapter. =how is the rural school?=--we have described the progress that has been made in various fields of the industrial world and also in several kinds of educational institutions. at this point the question may, with propriety, be asked whether the rural schools have generally kept pace in their progress with the other and higher institutions which we have mentioned. we believe that they have not. the rural schools have too often been the last to attract public interest and to receive the attention which their importance deserves. [illustration: a neglected school in unattractive surroundings] [illustration: a lonely road to school. no conveyances provided] [illustration: a better type of building with some attempt at improvements] [caption for the above illustrations: the one-room school] chapter v a backward and neglected field =rural schools the same everywhere.=--the one-room country school of to-day is much the same the whole country over. such schools are no better in michigan, wisconsin, or minnesota than they are in the dakotas, montana, or idaho. they are no better in ohio or new york than they are in minnesota or wisconsin, and no better in the new england states than in new york and ohio. there is a wonderful similarity in these schools in all the states. nevertheless, it may be maintained with some plausibility that the rural schools of the west are superior to those farther east. the east is conservative and slow to change. the west has fewer traditions to break. many strong personalities of initiative and push have come out of the east and taken up their abode in the west. young men continue to follow horace greeley's advice. sometimes these young men file upon lands and teach the neighboring school; and while this may not be the highest professional aim and attitude, it remains true nevertheless that such teachers are often earnest, strong, and educated persons. not long ago i had occasion to visit a teacher's institute in a northwestern state, in which there were enrolled teachers. some of these were college graduates and many of them were normal school graduates from various states. one had only to conduct a round table in order to experience a very spirited reaction. colonel homer b. sprague, who was once president of the university of north dakota, used to say that it always wrenched him to kick at nothing. there would be no danger, in such a body of teachers as i have referred to, of wrenching oneself. i have had occasion many times every year to meet these western teachers in local associations, in teachers' institutes, and in state conventions; and from my observations and experience i can truthfully state that they are fully as responsive and as progressive as the teachers in other parts of the country. =rural schools no better than formerly.=--notwithstanding all this, it is probably true that the rural schools of to-day are, on the whole, but little better than those of twenty years ago. about that time i served four years as county superintendent of schools in a western state. as i recall the condition of the schools of that day i feel sure that there has been but little real progress. indeed, for reasons which will be stated later on, it can be safely asserted that in some parts of the country there has been a deterioration. about thirty years ago i had the experience of teaching rural schools for several terms. being acquainted with my coworkers, i met them frequently in teachers' gatherings and in conventions of various kinds. if my memory is to be trusted i can again affirm that the teachers of those days do not compare unfavorably with the rural school teachers of the present time. and if the teacher is the measure of the school, the same may be said of the schools. nor is this all. about forty years ago i was attending a rural school myself. i received all of my elementary education in such schools and i am convinced that many of my teachers were stronger personalities than the teachers of to-day. =some improvement.=--it is not intended here to assert or to convey the impression that there has been no progress in any direction in the rural schools. it is the personnel of the country school--the strength and power of initiative in the teachers of that day--that is here referred to. although there has been some progress in many lines it has not been in the direction of stronger teachers. the textbooks in use to-day in various branches are decidedly superior to those used in former days, although some of these older books were by no means without their points of strength and excellence. indeed, i sometimes think that textbooks are often rendered less efficient by being refined upon in a variety of ways to conform to the popular pedagogical ideas of the day. it is no doubt true also that there has been, in the last thirty or forty years, much discussion along the lines of psychology and pedagogy and the methods of teaching the various branches. the professional spirit has been in the air, and there has been much writing and much talking on the science and art of teaching. but it must be confessed that, while this is desirable and in fact indispensable, much of it may be little more than a mere whitewash; much of it is simply parrot-like imitation; much of it is only "words, words, words." far be it from me to underestimate the value of this professional and pedagogical phase of the teacher's equipment. nevertheless, when all is said and duly considered, it is personality that is the greatest factor in the teacher. a good, sound knowledge of the subjects to be taught comes next; and last, though probably not least, should come the professional preparation and training. without the first two requisites, however, this last is worth little. it is a lamentable fact that, in almost every section of our country, there are persons engaged in teaching rural schools, who are not only deficient in personal power but whose academic education is not such as to afford an adequate foundation for professional training. =strong personalities in the older schools.=--as an example of strong personalities i remember one teacher who in middle life was recognized as a leader in his community; another one, after serving an apprenticeship in the country schools, became a prominent and successful physician; a third became a leading architect; a fourth, a lawyer; a fifth went west and became county judge in the state of his adoption; a sixth entered west point military academy and rose rapidly in the united states army. these instances are given to show that many of the old-time country teachers were men of force and initiative. they became to their pupils ideals of manhood worthy to be patterned after. these all taught in one neighborhood, but similar strong characters were no doubt engaged in the schools of surrounding neighborhoods. what rural school of to-day in any state can boast of the uplifting presence of so many men teaching in one decade? a. v. storm, of the minnesota agricultural college, says: "but we lack one thing nowadays that these old schools possessed. twenty or thirty years ago the country schools were taught for the most part by men. such men as shaw and dolliver, and a great many other leading men of to-day, were at one time country school teachers. they exercised a great influence upon the pupils. they were the angels who put the coals of fire upon the lips of the young men, giving them the ambition that made for future greatness. the country schools now are not so good as they were twenty years ago. the chief reason is that their teachers are not so capable." =more men needed.=--to secure the best results, there should be fully as many men as women teaching in the rural schools. one hundred years ago both city and country schools were taught by men alone. now the rural schools and most of the city schools are taught by women alone. there is probably as much reason against all teachers being women as there is against all teachers being men. =low standard now.=--thirty or forty years ago about half of the teachers were men and half women, both sexes representing the strong and the weak. very many of the schools of to-day are under the charge of young girls from eighteen to twenty years of age who have had little more than a common elementary education. some have just finished the eighth grade and have had a smattering of pedagogy or what is sometimes called "the theory and practice of teaching." this they could have secured in a six weeks' summer school, while reviewing the so-called "common branches." these teachers are holders merely of a second grade elementary, or county, certificate, which requires very little education. almost any person who has taken the required course in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, and hygiene of the elementary school can pass the usual examination and obtain a certificate to teach. in some states the matter is made still easier by the issuing of third grade county certificates, and even, in some cases, by the giving of special permits. indeed, the standards are usually so low that the supply of teachers is far beyond the demand. =the survival of the unfittest.=--such is the standard which prevails extensively throughout the country in respect to the qualifications of rural school teachers. as inferior goods sometimes drive out the better in the markets, so poor teachers holding the lowest grade of certificate will sometimes drive out the better, for they are ready to teach for "less than anybody else." the men and women of strength and initiative are constantly tempted to go out of the calling into other lines of work where progress is more pronounced and where salaries or wages are higher; and so the doors of the teachers' calling swing outward. the good teachers will desert us, or refuse to come, and the rural schools will be left with what might be called the survival of the unfittest. =short terms.=--add to the foregoing considerations the short terms of service which prevail in rural schools and we have indeed a pitiable condition. the average yearly duration of such schools in most states is about seven months--sometimes less. this leaves about five months of vacation, or of time between terms, when much that has been learned is forgotten. under such conditions how is it possible to give the children of these communities an education which is at all comparable to that afforded by the city? =poor supervision.=--then, again, there is often little supervision of country schools. when a county superintendent has under his inspection from fifty to two hundred schools, it is utterly impossible for him to give to each the desired number of visits or to supervise and superintend the work of those schools in a manner that can be called adequate in any true sense. sometimes he can visit each school only once a year, or twice at most, and, even then, there may be two different teachers in the same school during the year; so that he sees each of his teachers at work probably only once. what can a supervising officer do for a school or for a teacher under such circumstances? practically nothing. the county superintendent is usually elected to office by the people and frequently on a partisan ticket. this method of choosing naturally tends to make him give more attention to politics than he otherwise would think of giving. so the supervision or superintendency of country schools is too often slighted or neglected--and who is to blame? of course there are many exceptional cases, but the exceptions only prove the rule. =no decided movement.=--the whole movement of the rural school, whether it has been backward or forward, has been too frequently without definite or pronounced direction. it has moved along the line of least resistance, sometimes this way, sometimes that, in some places forward, in other places backward. time, circumstances, and chance determine the work. school problems have been settled by convenience and circumstances. the whole situation has been one of _laissez faire_. it is only within the past few years that people have become awakened to the situation. they are beginning to be impressed with the progress that is being made in all other lines, not only outside of the schools but also in the fields of higher and secondary education. the rural school interests have at last begun to ask, "where do we come in?" =elementary teaching not a profession.=--there has been as yet no real profession of teaching in the rural or elementary field. in about one third of the schools there is a new teacher every year; so that every three years the teaching force in any given county is practically renewed. a _profession_ cannot be acquired in a day, or even in twelve months. the work to be done is regarded as an important public work, and the public is concerned in its own protection. hence in every true profession there is a somewhat lengthy period of preparation and a standard of acquirements which must be attained. in other words, a true profession is a closed calling which it is impossible for everyone to join, and which only those can enter who have passed through a severe preparation and have successfully met the required standard. school teaching in the country is too frequently not a profession. it can be entered too easily; the required period of preparation is so short and the standard is placed so low that young and poorly prepared persons enter too easily. =the problem difficult, but before us.=--what shall be done? the problem is before the american people in every state of the union. the people themselves have become aroused to the situation, and this itself is encouraging. much has been done in some states, but much will be left undone for the attention of coming generations. the masses of the people can be aroused only with difficulty. the education of an individual is a slow process. the education of a family, of a community, or of a state is slower still. the education of a nation or of a race is so slow that its progress is difficult of measurement. indeed, the movement of the race as a whole is so imperceptible that it leaves room for debate as to whether humanity is going forward or backward. =other educational interests should help.=--the higher institutions, including the state universities, the agricultural colleges, the normal schools, and the high schools, should all join hands in helping to remedy conditions. society has already, in large measure, solved the problems in the higher educational fields; those institutions have been advanced to such an extent that they have almost realized their ideals. the rural population has helped them to attain to these high standards. as one good turn deserves another, rural communities now look to these interests for aid in the struggle to overcome the difficulties which confront them. =higher standards necessary.=--but before the rural schools can ever hope to make the desired progress, higher standards must be set by society, and the teachers in those schools must attain to them. the united states, as a nation, is far behind foreign countries in setting such a standard. in denmark and elsewhere a country school teacher must be a normal school graduate. a few national laws in the way of standardization both in higher and lower education would produce excellent results. the old fear of encroachment upon state's rights by the national government has too long prevented national legislation of a most beneficial kind in the educational field. =courses for teachers.=--in every normal school in the united states there should be an elementary course of study extending at least three years above the eighth grade, and the completion of this course should be required as a minimum preparation for teaching in any school in the country. this is certainly not asking too much. pupils who complete the eighth grade at fourteen or fifteen years, and then go to a normal school, would complete this elementary course at the age of seventeen or eighteen; and no person who has not reached this age should assume the responsibility for the care and instruction of children in any school. =the problem of compensation.=--were such a standard adopted as a minimum, salaries would immediately rise. (we do not often call them "salaries" but _wages_, and probably with some discrimination.) if it is said that teachers of such qualifications cannot be secured, the answer is that in a short time things would so adjust themselves that the demand would bring the supply. salaries in the country must be higher before we can hope to secure any considerable number of teachers as well equipped and with as strong personalities as those found in the cities. it may be necessary for us to pay more than is paid in the city; for if a teacher has two offers at $ a month, one from a city and one from the country, she will, without doubt, accept the city offer every time. true, she will have to pay more for room and board in the city; nevertheless she will prefer to be where there are the most opportunities and conveniences, with probably a better prospect for promotion. and who can blame her? it is probable that, in many instances, country districts will have to pay five or ten dollars a month more than the city if they wish to secure equally strong teachers. a country district can really afford to pay more than the city in order to get a good, strong teacher; for taxation in the country is usually lighter than it is in the city. in the city there is taxation for lighting, for paving, for sidewalks, for police protection, and for various other conveniences and necessities. the country is free from most of such levies, and it could, therefore, afford to pay a little more school tax in order to secure its share of the best teachers. =consolidation as a factor.=--in the solution of the school problem consolidation will do much. this is being tried in almost every state of the union and is working in the direction of progress with great satisfaction. we shall treat of this more at length in a later chapter. =better supervision necessary.=--not only must we have better teachers in the country, but we must have more and better supervision. there is no valid reason why country superintendents should be elected on a political platform. it is the custom everywhere to choose city superintendents from among the best men or women anywhere in the field, inside or outside of the state. such should also be the practice in choosing county superintendents. then, too, a county should be divided into districts and more assistance given the county superintendent in the supervision of schools. in other words, supervision should be persistent, consistent, and systematic; visits should be more frequent. in the city a superintendent or principal has all his schools and teachers either in one building or in several buildings at no great distance apart. in the latter case he can go from one to another in a few minutes, staying at each as long as he thinks necessary. little time is lost in travel. the opposite condition is one of the difficulties of rural supervision, and it must be overcome in some satisfactory way. =a model rural school.=--it would be a good plan for the state to establish in each county one model rural school. such schools might be maintained wholly or in part by the state, and they would become models for all the neighboring districts. children are always imitative, and people are only children of a larger growth. most people learn to do things better by imitation; and so these model state schools would serve as patterns to be studied and copied by others. =the teacher should lead.=--the school should be the mainspring of educational and social life in the community; hence, only such teachers should be employed as are real originators of activity in rural schools and in rural life. the teacher should be a "live wire" and should be "doing things" all the time. he should be the leader of his community and his people. =a good boarding place.=--a serious difficulty connected with teaching in the country is that of securing a good boarding place and temporary home. this may not be a troublesome problem in the older and well-established communities, but in the newer states and sparsely settled sections the condition is almost forbidding. half the enjoyment of life consists in having a comfortable home and a good room to oneself. this is absolutely necessary in order to do one's work well, especially the work of the teacher. some of the experiences which teachers have been obliged to go through are almost incredible. almost every teacher of a country school could give vivid and pathetic illustrations and examples of the discomforts, the annoyances, and the trials to which a boarder in a strange family is subjected. the question of a boarding place should be in the mind and plan of every school board when they employ a teacher for their district. it is they who should solve this problem for the teacher by having a good available home provided in advance. chapter vi consolidation of rural schools much has been said and written in regard to what is generally known as the "consolidation of schools." men and women interested in the cause of popular education have come to feel that the rural schools throughout the country are making little or no progress, and public attention has therefore been turned to consolidation as one of the possible means of improvement. =the process.=--as the name implies, the process is simply the bringing together and the fusing of two or more schools into one. if two or more communities, each having a small school of a few children, conclude that their schools are becoming ineffective and that it would be advantageous to unite, each may sell its own schoolhouse, and a new one may be built large enough for all and more centrally located with regard to the whole territory. they thus "consolidate" the schools of the several districts and establish a single large one. in many portions of the country the rural schools have, from various causes, grown smaller and smaller, until they have ceased to be places of interest, of activity, and of life. now, a school, if it means anything, means a place where minds are stimulated and awakened as well as where knowledge is communicated. there can be but little stimulation in a school of only a few children. the pupils feel it and so does the teacher. life, activity, mental aspiration are always found where large numbers of persons congregate. for these reasons the idea of consolidating the small schools into important centers, or units, is forcing itself upon the people of the country. where the schools are small and the roads are good, everything favors the bringing of the children to a larger and more stimulating social and educational center. =when not necessary.=--it might happen, as it frequently does, that a school is already sufficiently large, active, and enthusiastic to make it inadvisable to give up its identity and become merged in the larger consolidated school. if there are twenty or thirty children and an efficient teacher we have the essential factors of a good school. furthermore, it is rather difficult to transport, for several miles, a larger number than this. =the district system.=--there are two different kinds of country school organization. in some states, what is known as the district system is the prevailing one. this means that a school district, more or less irregular in shape and containing probably six to ten square miles, is organized into a corporation for school purposes. the schoolhouse is situated somewhere near the center of this district and is usually a small, boxlike affair, often located in a desolate place without trees or other attractive environment. this school may be under the administration of a trustee or of a school board having the management of the school in every respect. this board determines the length of term; it hires and dismisses teachers, procures supplies and performs all the functions authorized by law. it is a case where one school board has the entire management of one small school. [illustration: a frame building and adequate conveyances] [illustration: a substantial and well-planned building] [caption for the above illustrations: two types of consolidated schools] =the township system.=--the other form of organization is what is known as the township system. here the several schools in one township are all under the administration of one school board. there is not a school board for each schoolhouse, as in the district system, but one school board has charge of all the schools of the township. under certain conditions it has in its power the locating of schoolhouses within this general district. the board hires the teachers for all the schools within its jurisdiction, and in general manages all the schools in the same manner as the board in the district system manages its one school. =consolidation difficult in district system.=--the process of consolidation is always difficult where the district system prevails. both custom and sentiment cause the people to hesitate or refuse to abandon their established form of organization. if a community has been incorporated for any purpose and has done business for some years, it is always difficult to induce the people to make a change. they feel as if they were abdicating government and responsibility. they hesitate to merge themselves in a larger organization, and hence they advance many objections to the consolidation of their schools. all this is but natural. the several communities have been living apart educationally and have been in a measure strangers. they have never had any occasion to meet in conference, to exchange thought, and to do business together; hence they fear and hesitate to take a leap in the dark, as they conceive it, and to embark upon a course which they think they may afterwards regret. consolidation frequently fails because of false apprehensions due to a lack of social organization. =easier in township system.=--it is quite otherwise where the township system exists. here there are no separate corporations or organizations controlling the various schools. the school board administers the affairs of all the schools in the township. hence there is no sentiment in regard to the separate and distinct individuality of each school and its patronage. there are no sub-districts or distinctly organized communities; a whole township or two townships constitute one large district and the schools are located at the most convenient points to serve the children of the whole township. the people in such districts have been accustomed to act together educationally as well as politically, and to exchange thought on all such situations. hence consolidation, or the union of the several schools, is a comparatively easy matter. =consolidation a special problem for each district.=--it will, of course, be seen at once that, in a school township where there are several small and somewhat lifeless schools with only a few children in each, it would be desirable for several reasons to bring together all the children into one large and animated center. this process is a specific local problem. whether or not such consolidation is advisable depends upon many conditions, among which are, ( ) the size of the former schools, ( ) the unanimity of sentiment in the community, ( ) the location of roads and of residences, ( ) the distance the pupils are to be transported, and other local and special considerations. the people of each district should get together and discuss these problems from various points of view and decide for themselves whether or not they shall adopt the plan and also the extent to which it shall be carried. much will depend upon the size of the schools and everything upon the unanimity of sentiment in the community. if there is a large minority against consolidation the wisdom of forcing it by a small majority is to be questioned. it would be better to let the idea "work" a while longer. =disagreements on transportation.=--the problem of transporting pupils is always a puzzling one. many details are involved in its solution and it is upon details that communities usually disagree. most enterprises are wrecked by disagreements over small matters. even among friends it is the small details in mannerisms or conduct that become with time so irritating that friendship is often strained. details are usually small, but their obtrusive, perpetual presence is likely to disturb one's nerves. this is true in deliberative bodies of all kinds. important measures are often delayed or killed because their advocates and opponents cannot "give and take" upon small points. almost every great measure passing successfully through legislative bodies and, in fact, the settlement of many social problems embody a compromise on details. many good people forget that, while there should be unanimity in essentials, there should be liberty in non-essentials, and charity in all things. many people lack the power of perspective in the discussion and solution of problems; for them all facts are of the same magnitude. large things which they do not wish are minimized and small things are magnified. a copper cent may be held so near the eye that it will obscure the sun. probably there has been no difficulty greater in the process of consolidation than the problems involved in the details concerning the transportation of pupils. =each community must decide for itself.=--the particular mode of transportation must be determined by the conditions existing in each community. in some places the consolidated school district provides one or more busses, or, as they are sometimes called, "vans"; and these go to the homes of the children each morning in time to arrive at the schoolhouse before nine o'clock. of course, in this case the pupils living farthest from the school must rise and be ready earliest; they are on the road for the greatest length of time. but this is one of the minor discomforts which must be borne by those families and their children. all cannot live near the school. sometimes a different plan of transportation is found to give better satisfaction. the parents may prefer to bring their own children to school or to make definite arrangements with nearby neighbors who bring theirs. there is no one way which is the only way, and, in fact, several methods may be used in the same district. =the distance to be transported.=--if pupils must be transported over five or six miles, consolidation becomes a doubtful experiment. of course, the vehicles used should be comfortable and every care should be taken of the children; but six miles over country roads and in all kinds of weather means, probably, an hour and a quarter on the road both morning and evening. it could, of course, be said in reply that six miles in a comfortable wagon and an hour and a quarter on the road are not nearly so bad as a mile and a quarter on foot at certain seasons of the year. =responsible driver.=--another point upon which all parents should insist is that the transportation of their children should be performed by reliable and responsible drivers. this is important and most necessary. under such conditions there would be no danger of children being drenched with rain in summer and exposed to cold in winter, for the vehicles would be so constructed as to offer protection against both. there would also be no danger of the large boys bullying and browbeating the smaller children on the way, as is often done when they walk to school over long and lonely roads; for all would be under the care of a trustworthy driver until they were landed at the door of the schoolhouse or the home. =cost of consolidation.=--the cost of consolidation is always an important consideration. under the district system one district may be wealthy and another poor, the former having scarcely any taxation and the latter a high rate of taxation. it is usual that, in such cases, the districts having a small rate of taxation are unwilling to consolidate with others. this is one of the difficulties. consolidation will bring about uniformity of taxation in the whole territory affected. this is an advantage in itself. if the old schoolhouses are in good condition there will be somewhat of a loss in selling them and in building a large new central building. this is another situation which always complicates the problem. if the old buildings are worthless and if they must be replaced in any event by new buildings, then the time is opportune for considering consolidation. even after the reorganization is effected, and the new central building located, the cost of education, all things considered, is not increased. it is undoubtedly true that a larger amount of money may be needed to maintain the consolidated school than to maintain all the various small schools which have previously existed. but other factors must be taken into account. the total amount of dollars and cents in the one situation as compared with the total amount in the other does not tell the whole story. for it has been found that, everywhere in the country, there is a larger and better attendance of pupils in the consolidated school, that more pupils go to school, that they attend more regularly, and that the school terms are longer. therefore the proper test of expense is the cost of a day's schooling for each pupil, or the cost "per pupil per day." measured by this standard education in the consolidated school is no more expensive than in the unconsolidated schools; indeed it is usually less expensive. it is a good thing for society to give a day's education to one child; then education pays as it goes, and the more days' education it can offer, the better. =more life in the consolidated school.=--no one can deny that in this larger school there can be more life and activity of all kinds, and a much finer school spirit than was possible in the smaller schools. education means stimulation and where a great many children are brought together and properly organized and graded there is a more stimulating atmosphere and environment. =some grading desirable.=--in these consolidated schools a reasonable amount of grading can be secured. it may be true that in some of the large cities an extreme degree of grading defeats education and the true aim of organization, but certainly in consolidated rural schools no such degree of refinement need be reached or feared. grading can remain here in the golden mean and will be beneficial to pupils and teachers alike. the pupils thus graded will have more time for recitation and instruction, and teachers will have more time to do efficient work. in the one-room rural school one teacher usually has eight grades and often more, and sometimes she is required to conduct thirty or forty different recitations in a day. under such conditions the lack of time prevents the attainment of good results. =better teachers.=--it is also true that, where a school is larger and attains to more of a system, better teachers are sought and secured by the authorities. as we have already said, the cities are able to bid higher for the best trained teachers, so the country districts suffer in the economic competition. but the consolidated school being organized, equipped, and graded, and representing, as it does, a large community or district, the tendency will be to secure as good teachers as possible. this is helped along by the comparison and competition of teachers working side by side within the walls of the same building. in such schools, too, there is usually a principal, and he exercises the function of selection and rejection in the choice of teachers. all this conduces to the securing of good teachers in the consolidated center. =better buildings and inspection.=--similar improvements are attained in the building as a whole, in the individual rooms, and in the interior equipment. such buildings are usually planned by competent architects and are more adequate in all their appointments. all things are subject to inspection, both by the community and the authorities. it is natural that such inspection and criticism will be satisfied only with the best; and so the surroundings of pupils become much more favorable to their mental, moral, and physical well-being than was possible in the isolated one-room school building. =longer terms.=--the same discussion, agitation, inspection, and supervision will inevitably lead to longer terms of school. whereas the one-room schools usually average six and a half months of school per year, the consolidated schools average over eight months. this is in itself a most important gain. =regularity, punctuality, and attendance.=--the larger spirit and life of the consolidated school induce greater punctuality and regularity of attendance. when pupils are transported to school they are always on time, and when they are members of a class where there is considerable competition they attend school with great regularity. there are many grown-up pupils in the district who would not go to the small schools, but who will go to a larger school where they find their equals; and so the school attendance is greatly increased. we have, then, the advantages of greater punctuality, greater regularity, and more pupils in attendance. the school spirit is abroad in the consolidated school district; people are thinking and talking school. it becomes the customary and fashionable thing to send children to school. =better supervision.=--there is also much better supervision in the consolidated school; for, in addition to the supervision given by the county superintendent or his assistants, there is also the supervision of the principal, or head teacher. this is in itself no small factor in the making of a good school. good supervision always makes strongly for efficiency. =the school as a social center.=--other effects than those above mentioned will necessarily follow. the consolidated school can and should become a social center. there should be an assembly room for lectures, debates, literary and musical entertainments, and meetings of all kinds. the lecture hall should be provided with a stage, and good moving-picture exhibitions might be given occasionally. there, also, the citizens may gather to hear public questions discussed. it could thus become a civic and social center as well as an educational center. all problems affecting the welfare of the community might be presented here; the people could assemble to listen to the discussion of political and other social and public questions, which are the subjects of thought and of conversation in the neighborhood. this is real social and educational life. =better roads.=--not only does consolidation tend to all the above results but it does many other things incidentally. it leads to the making of better roads; for where a community has to travel frequently it will provide good roads. this is one of the crying needs of the day throughout the country. =consolidation coming everywhere.=--consolidation is now under way in almost every state of the union and wherever tried it has almost invariably succeeded. in but very few places have rural communities abandoned the educational, social, and civic center, and gone back to their former state of isolation and deadly routine. =the married teacher and permanence.=--in order to make the consolidated school a success, the policy will have to be adopted in america of building, at or near the school, a residence for the teacher, and of selecting as teacher a married man, who will make his home there among the people whose children he is to teach. such a teacher should be a real community leader in every way, and his tenure of service should be permanent. grave and specific reasons only should effect his removal. with single men and women it is impossible to secure the permanence of tenure that is desirable and necessary to the educational and social welfare of a school and a community. this has been demonstrated over and over again, and foreign countries are far ahead of us in this respect. such a real leader and teacher will, it is true, command a high salary; but a good home, permanence of position, a small tract of land for garden and field purposes, and the coming policy everywhere of an "insurance and retirement fund" would offer great inducements to strong men to take up their abode and cast their lot in such educational and community centers. chapter vii the teacher =the greatest factor.=--now, although we may have a beautiful school campus, an adequate and artistic building, a library, laboratories and workshops with all necessary physical or material appointments complete, we may yet have a poor school; these things, however desirable, will not teach alone. the teacher is the mainspring, the soul of the school; the "plant," as it may be called, is only the body. a great person is one with a great soul, not necessarily with a great body. hence it is that a great teacher with poor buildings and inferior equipments is incomparably better than great buildings and equipments without a competent teacher. =what education is.=--education is essentially and largely the stimulation and transformation of one mind or personality by another. it is the impression of one great mind or soul upon another, giving it a manner of spirit, a bent, an attitude, as well as a thirst for knowledge. this is too often lost sight of in the complexity of things. many people are inclined to think that educational equipment and machinery alone will educate. there is nothing further from the truth. mark hopkins would be a great teacher without equipment; buildings, grounds, apparatus, and laboratories will not really educate without a great personality behind the desk. there is probably nothing more inspiring, more suggesting, more stimulating, or more transforming than intimate contact with great minds. thought like water seeks its level, and for children to come into living and loving communication with a great teacher is a real uplift and an education in itself. as a saw will not saw without some extraneous power to give it motion, neither will the gun do execution without the man behind it. the locomotive is not greater than the man at the throttle, and the ship without the man at the helm flounders aimlessly upon the sea. just so, a great personality must be behind the teacher's desk or there cannot be in any sense a real school. =what the real teacher is.=--the true teacher is an inspirer; that is, he breathes into his pupils his spirit, his love of learning, his method of study, his ideals. he is a real leader in every way. children--and we are all children to a certain extent--are great imitators, and so the pupils tend to become like the teacher. the true teacher stimulates to activity by example. where you find such a teacher, things are constantly "doing"; people are thinking and talking school all the time; education is in the atmosphere. the real teacher is, to use a popular phrase, a "live wire." something new is undertaken every day. he is a man of initiative and push, and withal he is a man of sincerity and tact. while he is retrospective and circumspective he is also prospective--he is a man of the far-look-ahead type. =a hypnotist.=--the teacher is in the true sense a suggester of good things. he is an educational hypnotist. the longer i continue to teach the more am i impressed with the fact that suggestion is the great art of the teacher. hence the true teacher is the leader and not the driver. =untying knots.=--a man once said that the best lesson he ever learned in school was the lesson of "untying knots." he meant, of course, that every problem that was thrown to the school by the teacher was "tackled" in the right spirit by the pupils. they investigated it and analyzed it; they peered into it and through it to find all the strands of relationship existing in it. it would be easier, of course, for the teacher under these circumstances merely to cut the knot and have it all done with, but this would be poor teaching. this would be _telling_, not teaching. this would lead to passivity and not to activity on the part of the pupils. and it may be said here that constant and too much _telling_ is probably the greatest and most widespread mistake in teaching. teachers are constantly cutting the knots for children who should be left to untie them for themselves. to untie a knot is to see through and through a subject, to see all around it, to see the various relations of its parts and, consequently, to understand it. this is solving a problem; it is _dissolving_ it; that is, the problem becomes a part of the pupil's own mind, and, having made it a part of himself, he understands it and never forgets it. this is the difference between not being able to remember and not being able to forget. in the former case the so-called knowledge is not a part of oneself; it is not vital. the roots do not penetrate beneath the surface of our minds; they are, as it were, merely stuck on; the mental sap does not circulate. in the latter case the knowledge is real; it is alive and growing; there is a vital connection between it and ourselves. it would be as difficult to tear it from us as it would to have our hearts torn out and still live. =too much kindness.=--an illustration of the same point appears in the following incident. a boy who owned a pet squirrel thought it a kindness to the squirrel to crack all the nuts for it. the consequence was that the squirrel's incisors, above and below, grew so long that they overlapped and the animal could not eat anything. too many teachers are so kind to their pupils that they crack all the educational nuts for them, with the consequence that the children become passive and die mentally for want of activity. the true teacher will allow his pupils to wrestle with their problems without interruption until they arrive at a conclusion. if some pupil "goes into the ditch" and flounders he should usually be allowed to get out by his own efforts as best he can. here is the place where the teacher "should be cruel only to be kind." =the button illustration.=--another illustration may help to bring to us one of the characteristics of the really good teacher. when children, we have all, no doubt, amused ourselves by putting a string through two holes of a button and, after twirling it around between our thumbs, drawing it steadily in measured fashion so as to make the button spin and hum. if the string is drawn properly this will be successful; otherwise it will become a perfect snarl. this common experience has often seemed to me to typify two different kinds of school. in one, where there is a great teacher "drawing" the school properly, you will hear, incidentally, the hum of industry, for all are active. a school which may be thus characterized is always better than the one characterized by silence and inaction. a little noise--in fact a considerable noise--is not inconsistent with a good school, and it frequently happens that what we call "the silence of death" is due to fear, which is always paralyzing. =the chariot race.=--still another illustration may help to make clear what is meant by a good school and a good teacher. lew wallace, in his account of the chariot race, makes ben hur and his rival approach the goal with their horses neck and neck. he says that ben hur, in getting the best out of his steeds, _sent his will out along the reins_. a really spirited horse responds to the throb of his driver's hand upon the rein. a good driver gets the best out of his horse; he and his horse are in accord and the horse takes as much pride in the performance as the driver does. this is analogously true of a good school. the schoolroom is not a complete democracy--in fact, it is not a democracy at all in the lower grades; it is or should be a benevolent autocracy. the teacher within the schoolroom is the law-making body, the interpreter of the laws, and the executor of the laws. the good teacher does all this justly and kindly, and so elicits the admiration, the respect, and the active support of the governed. he sends his will out along the reins. some schools--those with great teachers in charge--are in this condition; they are coming in under full speed toward the goal, guided by a master whose will stimulates the pupils to the greatest voluntary activity. other schools, we are sorry to say, illustrate the conditions where the reins are over the dashboard and the school is running away, pell-mell! =physically sound.=--what are some of the characteristic attributes or traits which a masterful and inspiring teacher should possess? in the first place he should be physically sound. it may seem like a lack of charity to say, and yet it is true, that any serious physical defect should militate against, if not bar, one from the schoolroom. any serious blemish or noticeable defect becomes to pupils an ever-present suggestive picture, and to some extent must work against, rather than for, education. other things being equal, those who are personally attractive and have the most agreeable manners should be chosen. since children are extremely plastic and impressionable, and so susceptible to the influence of ideas and ideals, beauty and perfection should, whenever possible, be the attributes of the person who is to guide and fashion them. =character.=--a teacher should be morally sound; he should "ring true." one can give only what one has. a liar cannot teach veracity; a dishonest person can not teach honesty; the impure cannot teach purity. one may deceive for a time, but in the long run the echo of what we are, and hence what we can give, will be returned. it is often thought that children are better judges of moral defects and of shams than are grown people; but, while this is not true, it is nevertheless a fact that many children, in a short time, divine or sense the true moral nature of the teacher. children appreciate justice and will endure and even welcome severity if they know that justice is coupled with it. they are not averse to being governed with a firm hand. if pupils are allowed to do just as they please they may go home at the close of the first day, saying that they had a "lovely time" and liked their teacher, but in a very few days they will tire of it and begin to complain. =well educated.=--we need not, of course, contend at any length that a teacher should be well educated, in the academic sense of the word. in order to teach well, one must understand his subject thoroughly. it is quite generally held that a teacher should be at least four years in advance, academically, of the pupils whom he is to teach. whether this is true or not in particular cases, the fact remains that the teacher should be full of his subject, should be at home in it, and should be able to illustrate it in its various phases; he should be free to stand before his class without textbook in hand and to give instruction from a full and accurate mind. there is probably nothing that so destroys the confidence of pupils as the lamentable spectacle of seeing the teacher compelled at every turn to refer to the book for verification of the answers given. it is a sign of pitiable weakness. if a distinction is to be made between knowledge and wisdom a true teacher should be possessed of the latter to a considerable extent. he should also have prudence, or practical wisdom. wisdom and prudence imply that fine perspective which gives a person balance and tact in all situations. it should be noted that there is a policy, or diplomacy, in a good sense, which does not in any way conflict with principle; and the true teacher should have the knowledge, the wisdom, and the tact to do and to say the right thing at the right time and to leave unsaid and undone many, many things. =professional preparation.=--in addition to a thorough knowledge of subject matter every teacher should have had some professional preparation for his work. teaching, like government, is one of the most complicated of arts, and to engage in it without any previous study of its problems, its principles, and its methods seems like foolhardiness. there are scores, if not hundreds, of topics and problems which should be thought out and talked over before the teacher engages in actual work in the schoolroom. when the solutions of these problems have become a part of his own mind, they will come to his rescue as occasion demands; and, although much must be learned by experience, a sound knowledge of the fundamental principles of education and teaching will always throw much light upon practical procedure. it is true that theory without practice is often visionary, but it is equally true that practice without any previous knowledge, or theory, is very often blind. =experience.=--in addition to the foregoing qualifications the teacher, in order to be really masterful, must have had some--indeed considerable--actual experience. it is this that gives confidence and firmness to all our procedure. the young lawyer when he appears at the bar, to plead his first case, finds his knees knocking together; but after a few months or years of practice he acquires ease, confidence, and mastery in his work. the same is true of the physician and the teacher. some successful experience always counts for much. school boards, however, often over-estimate _mere_ experience. poor experience may be worse than none; and some good superintendents are willing, and often prefer, to select promising candidates without experience, and then train or build them up into the kind of teachers they wish them to become. =choosing a teacher.=--if i were a member of a school board in a country district where there is either a good one-room school or a consolidated school, i should go about securing a good teacher somewhat as follows: i should keep, so to speak, my "weather eye" open for a teacher who had become known to some extent in all the surrounding country; one who had made a name and a reputation for himself. i should inquire, in regard to this teacher, of the county superintendent and of his supervising officers. i should make this my business; and then, if i should become convinced that such a person was the one needed in our school, and if i had the authority to act, i should employ such a person regardless of wages or salary. if after a term or two this teacher should make a satisfactory record, i would then promote him, unsolicited, and endeavor to keep him as long as he would stay. =a "scoop."=--sometimes there is considerable rivalry among the newspapers of a city. the editors or local reporters watch for what they call a "scoop." this is a piece of news that will be very much sought by the public and which remains unknown to the people or, in fact, to the other papers until it appears in the one that has discovered it. this is analogous to what i should try to do in securing a teacher: i should try to get a veritable educational "scoop" on all the other districts of the surrounding country. the only way to secure such persons is for some individual or for the school board to make this a specific business. in the country districts this might be done by one of the leading directors; in a consolidated school, by the principal or superintendent. if it is true that "as the teacher so is the school," it is likewise true that as is the principal or superintendent so are the teachers. =what makes the difference.=--it will be found that a small difference in salary will frequently make all the difference between a worthless and an excellent teacher. it is often the ten or fifteen dollars a month additional which secures the prize teacher; and so i should make the difference in salary a secondary consideration; for, after all, the difference amounts to very little in the taxation on the whole community. =a question of teachers.=--the question of teachers is the real problem in education, from the primary school to the great universities. it is the poor teaching of poor teachers everywhere that sets at naught the processes of education; and when the american people, and especially the rural people, realize that this is the heart and center of their problem, and when they realize also that the difference, financially, between a poor teacher and a good one is so small, they will rise to the occasion and proceed to a correct solution of their problem. chapter viii the three inseparables in the preceding chapter we discussed the type of person that should be in evidence everywhere in the teaching profession. such a type is absolutely necessary to the attainment of genuine success. in rural schools this type is by no means too common, and in the whole field of elementary and higher education it is much more rare than it should be. because of the frequent appearance of the opposite type in colleges and in other schools, the teacher and the professor have been often caricatured to their discredit. there is usually some truth underlying a caricature; a cartoon would lack point if it did not possess a substratum of fact. =the "mode."=--now, there is often in the public mind this poorer type of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once established, it is changed only with difficulty. the commonplace individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the average. the "mode" in any class of objects or of individuals is the one that occurs oftenest, the one most frequently met with. and so this inactive, nondescript sort of person is often thought of as the typical teacher. he has no very high standing either financially or socially, and so has no great influence on the individuals around him or on the community in general. this conception has become so well established in the public mind, and is so frequently met with, that all teachers are regarded as being of the same type. the better teachers, the strong personalities, are brought into this same class and must suffer the consequences. =the "mode" in labor.=--this same process of classifying individuals may be seen in other spheres also. in some sections of the country it is the method of estimating the worth of laboring men; all in the same class are considered equal; all of a class are reduced to the same level and paid the same wages. one man can do and often does the work of two or three men, and does it better; yet he must labor for the same common wage. =the "mode" in educational institutions.=--the same is to a great extent true of the popular estimate of educational institutions. in the public mind an institution is merely an "institution." one is thought of as doing practically the same work as another; so when institutions come before legislatures for financial recognition in the way of appropriations, one institution is considered as deserving as another. the great public is not keen in its discriminations, whether it be a case of educational institutions, of laboring men, or of teachers. =no "profession."=--the fact is that, in the lower ranks of the teachers' calling, there is really no _profession_. the personality of many who engage in the work is too ordinary to professionalize any calling. =weak personalities.=--this condition of affairs has grown partly out of the fact that we have not, in the different states and in the country at large, a sufficiently high standard. the examinations are not sufficiently extensive and intensive to separate the sheep from the goats. the unqualified thus rush in and drive out the qualified, for the efficient cannot compete with the inefficient. the calling is in no sense a "closed" profession, and consequently in the lower ranks it is scarcely a profession at all. =low standard.=--there is also established in the public mind a certain standard, or test, for common school teaching. this standard has been current so long that it has become quite stable, and it seems almost impossible to change it. as in the case of some individuals when they become possessed of an idea, it is almost impossible to dispossess the social mind of this low standard. =the norm of wages too low.=--in regard to the wages of teachers it may be said that there is fixed in the social mind also, a certain _norm_. as in the case of personality and of standard qualifications, a certain amount of wages has long been regarded as representing the sum which a teacher ought to receive. for rural schools this is probably about fifty dollars a month; in fact, in most states the average wage paid to rural school teachers is below that amount. but let us say that fifty dollars is the amount that has become established in the popular mind as a reasonable salary. here, as in the other cases, it is very difficult to change ideas established by long custom. for many years people have been accustomed to think of teachers receiving certain salaries, and they refuse to consider any higher sums as appropriate. this, of course, is an egregious blunder. the rural schools can never be lifted above their present plane of efficiency until these three conceptions, ( ) that of personality, ( ) that of standard, and, ( ) that of wages, are revised in the public mind. there will have to be a great revolution in the thought of the people in regard to these inseparable things. =the inseparables.=--the fact is that, ( ) strong personalities, ( ) a high standard of qualifications, ( ) and a respectable salary go hand in hand. they rise and fall together; they are reactive, one upon the other. the strong personality implies the ability to meet a high standard and demands reasonable compensation. the same is true of the high standard--it selects the strong personality and this in turn cannot be secured except at a good salary. it may be maintained that if school boards really face the question in earnest, and are willing to offer good salaries, strong personalities who are able to meet that high standard can always be secured. professor hugo münsterberg says: "our present civilization shows that in every country really decisive achievement is found only in those fields which draw the strongest minds, and that they are drawn only where the greatest premiums are tempting them."[ ] [footnote : psychology and social sanity, p. .] =raise the standard first.=--the best way, then, to attack the problem is, first, to raise the standard. this will eliminate inferior teachers and retain or attract those of superior qualifications. it is to be regretted that we have not, in the united states, a more uniform standard for teaching in the common schools. each state has its own laws, its own standard. it would not, we think, be asking too much to provide that no person should teach in any grade of school, rural or elementary, in the united states, unless such person has had a course for teachers equivalent to at least three years of work in the high school or normal school, with pedagogical preparation and training. in fact, a national law making such a uniform standard among the teachers in the common schools of the country would be an advantage. but this is probably more than we can expect in the near future. as it is, there should be a conference of the educational authorities in each state to agree upon a standard for teaching, with a view to uniform state legislation. =more men.=--one of the great needs of the calling is more men. there was a time when all teachers were men; now nearly all teachers are women. there is as much reason for one condition as for the other. without going into an analysis of the situation or the causes which make it desirable that there should be more men in the teaching profession, it is, we think, generally granted that the conditions would be better, educationally, socially, and every other way, if the number of men and women in the work were about evenly divided. =coöperation needed.=--educational movements and influences have spread downward and outward from above. the great universities of the world were established before the secondary and elementary school systems came into existence. thought settles down from leaders who are in high places. we have shown in a former chapter that the state universities, the agricultural colleges, the normal schools, and the high schools have had a wonderful development within the last generation, while the rural school has too often lagged perceptibly behind. the country districts have helped to support in every way the development of the higher schools; now an excellent opportunity presents itself for all the higher and secondary educational influences to unite in helping to advance the interests and increase the efficiency of the rural schools. =the supply.=--the question is sometimes asked whether the right kind of teachers can be secured, if higher salaries are offered. there can be no doubt at all on this point. where the demand exists and where there is sufficient inducement offered, the supply is always forthcoming. men are always at hand to engage in the most menial and even the most dangerous occupations if a sufficient reward, financial or otherwise, is offered. for high wages men are induced to work in factories where mercury must be handled and where it is well known that life is shortened many years as a consequence. men are secured to work long hours in the presence of red-hot blast furnaces and in the lowest depths of the holds of ships. can it be possible that with a reasonable salary the strongest kind of men would not be attracted to a calling that has as many points of interest and as many attractions as teaching? =make it fashionable.=--a great deal depends upon making any work or any calling fashionable. all that is needed is for the tide to turn in that direction. it is difficult to say how much salary will stop the outward tide and cause it to set in the other direction; but one thing is certain, we shall never completely solve the rural school problem until the tide turns. =the retirement system.=--strong personalities will, then, help to make teaching attractive and fashionable, as well as effectual. there is a movement now becoming quite extensive which will also add to the attractiveness of the teacher's calling. a system or plan of insurance and retirement is now being installed in many states for the benefit of teachers who become incapacitated or who have taught a certain period of time. this plan gives a feeling of contentment, and also a feeling of security against the stress and needs of old age, which will do much to hold strong people in the profession. the fear of being left penniless in later life and dependent upon others or upon the state, induces, without doubt, a great many persons to leave a calling so poorly paid, in order that they may, in more generous vocations, lay something by for "a rainy day." the truth of this is borne in upon us more strongly when we remember that teaching is different from law, medicine, or other professions. in these vocations a man's service usually becomes more and more in demand as he advances in years, on account of the reputation and experience he has gained; while in teaching, when a person arrives at the middle line of life or after, school boards begin to say and to think, that he is getting too old for the schoolroom, and so they seek for younger talent. the consequence is that the good and faithful public servant who has given the best years of his life to the education of the young is left stranded in old age without an occupation and without money. the insurance and retirement fund plan is a movement in the right direction and will do something to help turn the tide of strong personalities toward the teachers' calling. =city and country salaries--effects.=--the average salary for rural school teachers in one state i find to be $ a month. in that same state the average salary of teachers in the city and town schools is $ a month. now, under such conditions, it is very difficult to secure a good corps of teachers for the rural schools. if the ratio were reversed and the rural schools paid $ a month, while the cities and towns paid only $ , there would be more chance of each securing teachers of equal ability. even then, teachers would prefer to go to the city at the lower salary on account of the additional attractions and conveniences and the additional facilities and opportunities of every kind for self-improvement. in the state referred to, the average salary of all teachers in the common schools was $ a month. it is utterly impossible to realize a "profession" on such a financial basis as this. forty-five or fifty dollars a month for rural teachers is altogether too low. this must be raised fifty, if not one hundred per cent, in order that a beginning may be made in the solution of the rural school problem. where $ a month seems to be the going wage, if school boards would offer $ and then see to it that the persons whom they hire are efficient, an attempt at the solution of the problem in that district or neighborhood would be made. is it possible that any good, strong, educated, and cultured person can be secured for less than $ a month? if in such a district there were eight months of school this would mean only x $ , or $ more than had been paid previously. for ten sections of land this would mean about $ a section, or $ a quarter section, in addition to what they had been paying with unsatisfactory results. this sum often represents the difference between a poor school and a good school. with a fifty-dollar teacher, constructive work was likely lacking. there was little activity in the neighborhood; the pupils or the people had not been fully waked up. there had not been enough thinking and talking of education and of schools, enough reading, or talking about books, about education, about things of the higher life. under the seventy-five-dollar teacher, wisely chosen, all this is changed. =the solution demands more.=--instead of $ , a community should pay to a wide-awake person, who takes hold of a situation in a neighborhood and keeps things moving, at least $ a month. with nine months' school this would mean $ ; and it is strange, indeed, if a person in the prime of life who has spent many years in the preparation of his work, and who has initiative and push, is not worth $ a month for nine months in the year. to such a person the people of that neighborhood intrust their dearest and priceless possessions--their own children. if we remember that, as the twig is bent the tree is inclined, there need be no hesitation about the value of efficient teaching during the plastic period of childhood. in fact, it may easily be maintained that the salary should be even higher than this. but, if this be so, how far are we at present from even a beginning of the solution of our rural school problem! =a good school board.=--a good school board is one whose members are alive to their duties and wide-awake to the problems of education. they are men or women who have an intelligent grasp of the situation and who will earnestly attempt to solve the educational problems of school and of life in their community. =board and teacher.=--if a poor teacher and a good school board are brought together the chances are that they will soon part company. a good school board will not retain a poor teacher longer than it is compelled to do so. a poor school board and a good teacher will also part company, for the good teacher will not stay; he will leave and find relief as soon as possible. under a poor school board and a poor teacher nothing will be done; the children, instead of being educated, will be de-educated. quarrels and dissensions will be created in the neighborhood and a miserable condition, educationally and socially, will prevail. if a good school board and a good teacher join hands, the problem is solved, or at least is in a fair way to being solved. this last condition will mean an interested school, a united neighborhood, a live, wide-awake, and happy community. =the ideal.=--it is as impossible to describe a successful solution of the problems of any particular school as it is to paint the lily, the rose, or the rainbow. all are equally indescribable and intangible, but nevertheless the more real, potent, and inspiring on that account. such a situation means the presence of a strong life, a strong mind, and a strong hand exemplifying ideals every day. this is education, this is growth, this is real life. chapter ix the rural school curriculum =imitation.=--there are two processes by which all progress is attained, namely, imitation and invention. imitation is found everywhere, in all spheres of thought and of action. children are great imitators, and adults are only children grown up. imitation, of course, is a necessary thing. without it no use could be made of past experience. when it conserves and propagates the good it is to be commended; but the worthless and the bad are often imitated also. as imitation is necessary for the preservation of past experience, so invention is equally essential in blazing new paths of thought and of action. it is probably true that all persons are more prone to imitation than to invention. =the country imitates the city.=--the rural schools have always imitated the city schools, as rural life attempts to imitate city life. many of the books used in rural schools have been written largely with city conditions in mind and by authors who have been city bred or city won. these books have about them the atmosphere and the flavor of the city. their selections as a rule contain references and allusions without number to city life, and give a cityward bent; their connotation and attitude tend to direct the mind toward the city. as a consequence even school textbooks have been potent aids in the urban trend. =textbooks.=--it is not urged that the subject matter of textbooks be made altogether rural in its applications and references. the books should not be completely _ruralized_; nor should there be two sets of books, one for the country and one for the city. but there should be a more even balance between the city aspect and the rural aspect of textbooks, whether used in the country or in the city. if some of the texts now used were rewritten with the purpose of attaining that balance, they would greatly assist the curriculum in both country and city schools. there is no reason why city children should not have their minds touched by the life, the thought, and the activities of the country; and it is granted that country children should be made conscious and cognizant of the life, the thought, and the activities of the city. there is no more reason why textbooks should carry the urban message, than that they should be dominantly ruralizing. =an interpreting core.=--the experiences of country children are of all kinds; rural life, thought, and aspirations constitute the very development of their consciousness and minds. in all their practical experiences rural life and thought form the anchorage of their later academic instruction. this early experience constitutes what the herbartians term their "apperception mass"; and children, as well as grown-ups, can interpret new matter only in terms of the old. the experiences of the child, which constitute his world of thought, of discourse, and of action, are the only means by which he grasps and interprets new thought and experience. consequently, the texts which rural children use should make a strong appeal to their apperception mass--to their old stock and store of knowledge. it is the textbooks that bring to the old knowledge new mental material which the teacher and the textbook together attempt to communicate to the children. without an interpreting center--a stock and store of old knowledge which constitute the very mental life of the child--it is impossible for him to assimilate the new. the old experiences are, in fact, the mental digestive apparatus of the child. without this center, or core, the new instead of being assimilated is, so to speak, merely stuck on. this is the case with much of the subject matter in city-made texts. it does not _grow_, but soon withers and falls away. it is, then, essential that the textbooks used in rural schools should have the rural bent and application, the rural flavor, the rural beck and welcome. =rural teachers from the city.=--a great many teachers of country schools come from the city. a number of these are young girls having, without blame on their part, the tone and temper, the attitude, spirit, and training which the city gives. their minds have been _urbanized_; all their thoughts are city thoughts. the textbooks which they have used have been city textbooks; their teachers have for the most part been those in or from the city. it can scarcely be expected that such teachers can do for the rural districts all that ought to be done. very naturally they inspire some of the children with the idea of ultimately going to the city. this suggestion and this inspiration are given unconsciously, but in the years of childhood they take deep root and sooner or later work themselves out in an additional impetus to the urban trend. =a course for rural teachers.=--what is needed is a course of instruction for rural teachers, in every state of the union. in some states the agricultural colleges have inaugurated a movement to this end. in such colleges, agricultural high schools, and institutions of a similar kind in every state, a three-year course for teachers above the eighth year, specially designed to prepare them for rural school teaching, should be established. such a school would furnish the proper atmosphere and the proper courses of instruction to suffuse the minds of these prospective teachers with appreciation and love of country life and rural school work. =all not to remain in the country.=--it is not contended here that all who are born and brought up in the country ought to remain there for life. many writers and speakers preach the gospel of "the country for country children," but this cannot be sound. each one, as the years go by, should "find" himself and his own proper place. there are many children brought up in the country who find their place best in the heart of the great city; and there are many brought up in the cities who ultimately find themselves and their place in the country and in its work. while all this is true it may still be maintained that the proper mental food for country children is the life and the activities of the country; and if this life and these activities are made pleasant and attractive a larger percentage of country children will remain in the country for the benefit of both country and city. =mere textbook teaching.=--many teachers in the country, as well as in the city, follow literally the textbooks provided for them. textbooks, being common and general, must leave the application of the thought largely to the teacher. to follow them is probably the easiest kind of teaching, for the mind then moves along the line of least resistance. accordingly the tendency is merely to teach textbooks, without libraries, laboratories, and other facilities for the application of the thought of the text. application and illustration are always difficult. it frequently happens that children go through their textbooks under the guidance of their more or less mechanical teachers, without making any application of their knowledge. their learning seems to be stored away in pigeonholes and never used again. that in one pigeonhole does not mix with that in another. their thoughts and their education in different fields are in no sense united. pupils are surprised if they are asked or expected to use their knowledge in any practical manner. a man who had a tank, seven feet in diameter and eight feet high, about half full of gasoline, asked his daughter, who was completing the eighth grade, to figure out for him how many gallons it contained. she had just been over "weights and measures" and "denominate numbers" of all kinds. after much figuring she returned the answer that there were in it about seven and one half gallons, without ever suspecting the ridiculousness of the result. =a rich environment.=--the country is so rich in material of all kinds for scientific observation, that some education should be given to the rural child in this field. agriculture and its various activities surround the child; nature teems with life, both animal and vegetable; the country furnishes long stretches of meadow and woodland for observation and study. yet in most places the children are blind to the beauties and wonders around them. nature study in such an environment should be a fascinating subject, and agriculture is full of possibilities for the application of the thought in the textbooks. =who will teach these things?=--but who will teach these new sciences or open the eyes of the child to the beauties around him? not everyone can do it. it will require a master. teaching "at" these things in a dull, perfunctory way will do no good. it would be better to leave them untaught. we have, everywhere, too much "attempting" to teach and not enough teaching, too much seeming and not enough being, too much appearance and not enough reality. an example will illustrate the author's meaning. some years ago an experienced institute conductor in a western state found himself the sole instructor when the teachers of the county convened. he sought among the teachers for someone who could and would give him assistance. one man of middle age, who had taught for many years, volunteered to take the subject of arithmetic and to give four lessons of forty minutes each in it during the week. this was good news to the conductor; he congratulated himself on having found some efficient help. his assistant, however, after talking on arithmetic for ten minutes of his first period, reached the limit of his capacity, either of thought or of expression, and had to stop. he could not say another word on that subject during the week! now if this is true of an experienced middle-aged teacher of a subject so universally taught as arithmetic, how much more true must it be of an instructor in a subject like agriculture. it should not be expected that a young girl, eighteen or twenty years of age, who has probably been brought up in the city and who has had the subject of agriculture only one period a day for a year, can give any adequate instruction in that branch. she would be the butt for ridicule among the practical boys and girls in the country who would probably know more about such things than she. she would, therefore, lose the respect and confidence of pupils and parents, and it would really be better for her and for all concerned not to attempt the teaching of that subject at all. what is worth doing at all is worth doing well. a little instruction well given and well applied is worth any amount of "stuff" poorly done and unapplied. =the scientific spirit needed.=--there is great need of teachers who are thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit. in the country especially there is need of teachers who will rouse the boys and girls to the investigation of problems from the facts at hand and all around them. this should be done inductively and in an investigative spirit. our whole system of education seems somewhat vitiated by the deductive attitude and method of teaching--the assuming of theories handed down by the past, without investigation or verification. this is the kind of teaching which has paralyzed china for untold generations. the easiest thing to do is to accept something which somebody else has formulated and then, without further ado, to be content with it. the truly scientific mind, the investigative mind, is one that starts with facts or phenomena and, after observing a sufficient number of them, formulates a conclusion and tests it. this will result in real thinking--which is the same as "thinging." it is putting _things_ into causal relation and constructing from them, unity out of diversity. to induce this habit of thought, to inspire this spirit of investigation and observation in children is the essence of teaching. to teach is to cause others to _think_, and the man or woman who does this is a successful teacher. =a course of study.=--there should be in every rural school a simple and suggestive course of study. this should not be as large as a textbook. the purpose of it is not to indicate at great length and in detail either the matter or the manner of teaching any specific subject. it should be merely an outline of the metes and bounds in the processes and the progress of pupils through the grades. the course of study should be a means, not an end; it should be a servant and not a master. it should not entail upon the school or upon the teacher a vast complicated machinery or an endless routine of red tape. if it does this it defeats its true aim. here again the country schools have attempted to imitate the city schools. in all cities grading is much more systematized, and is pushed to a greater extent than it is or should be in the country. owing to the necessities of the situation and also to the convenience of the plan in the cities, the grades, with their appropriate books, amount of work, and plan of procedure, are much more definite than is possible or desirable in the country. to grade the country schools as definitely and as systematically as is done in the city would be to do them an irreparable injury. the country would make a great mistake to imitate the city school systems in its courses of study. =red tape.=--it sometimes happens that county and state superintendents, in performing the duties of their office, think it necessary to impose upon the country schools a variety of tests, examinations, reports, and what-not, which accomplish but little and may result in positive injury. to pile up complications and intricacies having no practical educational value is utterly useless. it indicates the lack of a true conception of the school situation. such haphazard methods will not teach alone any more than a saw will saw alone. behind it all must be the simple, great teacher, and for him all these things, beyond a reasonable extent, are hindrances to progress. =length of term.=--in very many country districts the terms are frequently only six months in the year. this should be extended to eight at least. even in this case, it gives the rural school a shorter term than the city school, which usually has nine or ten months each year. but it is very probable that the simplicity of rural school life and rural school teaching will enable pupils to do as much in eight months as is done in the city in nine. =individual work.=--individual work should be the rule in many subjects. there is no need, on account of numbers, of a lock-step. in the cities, where the teacher has probably an average of to children, all the pupils are held together and in line. in such cases the great danger is to those above the average. there is the danger of forming what might be called the "slow habit." the bright pupils are retarded in their work, for they are capable of much more than they do. in such cases the retardation is not on account of the inability of the pupil but on account of the system. the bright ones are held back in line with the slow. this need not be the case in rural schools. here, in every subject which lends itself to the plan, each pupil should be allowed to go as far and as fast as he can, provided that he appreciates the thought, solves the problems, and understands the work as he goes. i once knew a large rural school in which there were enrolled about sixty pupils, taking the subjects of all the grades, from the first to the eighth and even some high school subjects. in such classes as arithmetic the pupils were, so to speak, "turned loose" and all entered upon a race for the goal. each one did as much as he could, his attainments being subjected to the test of examination. the plan worked excellently; no one was retarded, and all were intensely busy. ="waking up the mind."=--the main thing in any school is not the amount of knowledge which pupils get from textbooks or from the teacher, but the extent to which the mind appropriates that knowledge and is "waked up" by it. mr. page in his excellent classic, _the theory and practice of teaching_, has a chapter called "waking up the mind" and some excellent illustrations as to how it may be done. the main thing is not the amount of mere knowledge or information held in memory for future delivery, but the spirit and attitude of it all. the extent to which children's minds are made awake and sensitive, and the extent to which they are inspired to pursue with zest and spirit any new problem are the best criterions of success in teaching. the spirit and method of attack is all-important; quantity is secondary. if children have each other, so to speak, "by the ears," over some problem from one day to the next, it indicates that the school and the teacher are awake, that they are up and doing, and that education, which is a process of leavening, is taking place. =the overflow of instruction.=--on account of the individual work which is possible in the country schools, what is sometimes called the "overflow of instruction" is an important factor in the stimulation and the education of all the children in the room. in the city school, where all are on a dead level, doing the same work, there is not much information or inspiration descending from above, for there is no class above. but in the rural school, children hear either consciously or unconsciously much that is going on around them. they hear the larger boys and girls recite and discuss many interesting things. these discussions wake up minds by sowing the seeds which afterwards come to flower and fruit in those who listen--in those who, in fact, cannot help hearing. i remember an incident which occurred during my experience as a pupil in a country school. a certain county superintendent, who used to visit the school periodically, was in the habit, on these occasions, of reading to the school for probably half an hour. just what he read i do not even remember, but i recall vividly his quiet manner and attitude, his beautiful and simple expression, and the whole tone and temper of the man as he gathered the thought and expressed it so beautifully and so artistically. this type of thing has great influence. it is often the intangible thing that tells and that is valuable. in every case, that which is most artistically done is probably that which leaves its impression. =affiliation.=--in some states, notably in minnesota, an excellent plan is in vogue by which the schools surrounding a town or a city are affiliated with the city schools in such a manner as to receive the benefit of the instruction of certain special teachers from the city. these teachers--of manual training, domestic science, agriculture, etc.--are sent out from the city to these rural schools two or three times a week, and in return the country children beyond a certain grade are sent to the high school in the city. this is a process of affiliation which is stimulating and economical, and can be encouraged with good results. [illustration: a christmas gathering at the new school] [illustration: a school garden in the larger center] =the "liking point."=--in the teaching of all subjects the important thing is that the pupil reach what may be termed the "liking point." until a pupil has reached that point in any subject of study his work is mere drudgery--it is work which is probably disliked. the great problem for the teacher is to bring the child as soon as possible to this liking point, and then to keep him there. it is probable that every pupil can be brought to the liking point of every subject by a good teacher. where there is difficulty in doing this, something has gone wrong somewhere, either on the part of the pupil, his former teachers, his parents, or his companions. when a pupil has reached the liking point it means that he has a keen relish, an appetite for the subject, and in this condition he will actively pursue it. =the teacher the chief factor.=--the foregoing observations imply again that the teacher, after all, is the great factor in the success of the school. he is the "man behind the gun"; he is the engineer at the throttle; he is the master at the helm; he is the guide, for he has been over the road; he is the organizer, the center of things; he is the mainspring; he is the soul of the school, and is greater than books or courses of study. he is the living fire at which all the children must light their torches. again we ask, how can this kind of person be found? without him true education, in its best sense, cannot be secured; with him the paltry consideration of salary should not enter. without such teachers there can be no solution of the rural school problems, nor, indeed, of the rural life problems. with him and those of his class, there is great hope. chapter x the social center during the past few years we have heard much of what is called the "social center," or the "community center," in rural districts. this idea has grown with the spread of the consolidation of schools, and means, as the name implies, a unifying, coördinating, organizing agency of some kind in the midst of the community, to bring about a harmony and solidity of all the interests there represented. it implies of course a leader; for what is left to be done by people in general is likely to be done poorly. there is no doubt that this idea should be encouraged and promoted. people living in the country are of necessity forced to a life of isolation. their very work and position necessitate this, and consequently it is all the more necessary that they should frequently come together in order to know each other and to act together for the benefit of all. "in union there is strength," but these people have always been under a great disadvantage in every way, because they have not organized for the purpose of united and effective coöperation. =the teacher, the leader.=--there is no more appropriate person to bring about this organization, this unification, this increased solidarity, than the public school teacher of the community; but it will require the head and the hand of a real master to lead a community--to organize it, to unite it, and to keep it united. it requires a person of rare strength and tact, a person who has a clear head and a large heart, and who is "up and doing" all the time. a good second to such a person would be the minister of the neighborhood, provided he has breadth of view and a kindly and tolerant spirit. much of the success of rural life in foreign countries, notably in denmark, is due to the combined efforts of the schoolmaster and the minister of the community church. =some community activities.=--let us suggest briefly some of the activities that are conducive to the fuller life of such a social center. it is true that these activities are more possible in the consolidated districts than in the communities where consolidation has not been effected; but many of them could be provided even in the small schools. =the literary society.=--there should be in every school district a literary society of some kind. this of course must not be overworked, for other kinds of activities also should be organized in order to give the change which interest demands. in this literary society the interest and assistance of the adults of the neighborhood and the district, who are willing and able to coöperate, should be enlisted. there are in every community a few men and women who will gladly assist in a work of this kind if their interest can be properly aroused. there is scarcely any better stimulus to the general interest of a neighborhood, and especially of the children in the school, than seeing and hearing some of the grown-up men and women who are their neighbors participate in such literary work. =debates.=--an important phase of the literary work of such a society should be an occasional debate. this might be participated in sometimes by adults who are not going to school, and sometimes by the bigger and more advanced pupils. topics that are timely and of interest to the whole community should be discussed. there is probably no better way of teaching a tolerant spirit and respect for the honest opinions of others than the habit of "give and take" in debate. in such debates judges could sometimes be appointed and at other times the relative merits of the case and of the debaters might well be left to the people of the neighborhood without any formal decision having been rendered. this latter plan is the one used in practical life in regard to addresses and debates on the political platform. the discussions and differences of opinion following such debates constitute no small part of life and thought manifested later in the community. =the school program.=--a program or exhibition by the school should be given occasionally. this would differ from the work of the literary society in that it would be confined to the pupils of the school. such a program should be a sample of what the pupils are doing and can do. it should be a mental exhibition of the school activities. there is scarcely anything that attracts the people and the parents of the neighborhood more than the literary performances of their children, younger and older. such performances, as in other cases, may be overdone; they may be put forward too frequently; they may also be too lengthy. but the teacher with a true perspective will see to it that all such extremes are avoided, for he realizes that there are other activities which must be developed and presented in order to secure a change of interest. these school programs occupy the mind and thought of the community for some time. the performance of the different parts and the efforts of the various children--both their successes and their failures--become the subjects of thought and of talk in the neighborhood. it acts like a kind of ferment in the social mind; it keeps the school and the community talking and thinking of school and of education. =spelling schools.=--for a change, even an old-fashioned spelling school is not to be scorned. years ago this was quite the custom. an entire school would, on a challenge, go as a sleigh-ride party to the challenging school. there the spelling contest would take place. one of the teachers, either the host or the guest, would pronounce the words, and the visiting school would return, either victorious or vanquished. a performance of this kind enlists the attention and the interest of people and schools in the necessity of good spelling; it affords a delightful social recreation, stirs up thought and wakes up mind in both communities, by an interesting and courteous contest. such results are not to be undervalued. =lectures.=--if the school is a consolidated one, or even a large district school, a good lecture course may be given to advantage. here, again, care must be taken that the lectures, even if few, shall be choice. nothing will kill a course of lectures sooner than to have the people deceived a few times by poor ones. it would be better to have three good lectures during the year than six that would be disappointing. these lecture courses may be secured in almost every state through the extension department of the various state institutions. recently the states of wisconsin, minnesota, and north dakota have entered into an arrangement whereby they will furnish any rural or urban community of these states with good lecturers at a very small consideration. excellent lectures can be secured in this way on a great variety of subjects, including those most interesting to rural communities and most helpful in all phases of farm life. these might be secured in the winter season when there is ample time and leisure for all to attend. =dramatic performances.=--in the social centers where the conveniences admit, simple dramatic performances might be worked up or secured from the outside. it is a fact that life in some country communities is not sufficiently cheered through the agency of the imagination. the tendency is for farmers and farmers' families to live a rather humdrum existence involving a good deal of toil. on the secluded farms during the long winter months, there is not much social intercourse. it has been asserted that the isolation and solitariness in sparsely settled districts are causes of the high percentage of insanity in rural and frontier communities. it is good for the mental and physical health of both old and young to be lifted, once in a while, out of the world of reality into that of the imagination. all children and young people like to play, to act, to make believe. this is a part of their life, and it is conducive to their mental and social welfare to express themselves in simple plays or to see life in its various phases presented dramatically by others. =a musical program.=--if the teacher is a leader he will either be able, himself, to arrange a musical entertainment, or he will secure some one who can and will do so. all, it is contended, can learn to sing if they begin early enough; and there is probably no better mode of self-expression and no better way of waking up people emotionally and socially than to engage them in singing. the importance of singing, to secure good and right emotional attitudes toward life and mankind, is indicated in the saying, "let me make the songs of a nation and i care not who makes her laws." the importance of singing is recognized to a much greater extent in foreign countries, notably in germany, than in america. in germany all sing; in america, it is to be regretted, but few sing. there should be a real renaissance in music throughout the country. as an aid in the teaching of music and of song, that marvelous invention, the "talking machine," should be made use of. it would be an excellent thing if a phonograph could be put in every school. children would become acquainted with the best music; they would grow to like it, as the weeks, months, and years roll on. this machine is a wonderful help in developing an appreciation of good music. =slides and moving pictures.=--in the consolidated schools, where there is a suitable hall, a moving-picture entertainment of the right kind is to be commended. the screens and the lantern enable us, in our imaginations, to live in all countries and climes. the eye is the royal road to the mind, and most people are eye-minded; and the moving picture is a wonderful agency to convey to the mind, through the eye, accurate pictures of the world around us, natural and social. the community center--the school center--should avail itself of all such inventions. =supervised dancing.=--even the supervised dance, where the sentiment of the community will allow, is not to be condemned. it is much better to have young people attend dances that are supervised than to attend public dances that are not supervised; and young people, as a rule, will attend one or the other. the practical question or condition is one of supervision or no supervision, for the dance is here. the dance properly supervised, and conducted in a courteous, formal way, beginning and closing at the right time, can probably be turned to good and made an occasion for social and individual culture. the niceties and amenities of life can there be inculcated. there is no good reason why the dance activities should be turned over to the devil. there was a time and there were places where violin playing was turned over to him and banished from the churches. dancing is too old, too general, too instinctive, and too important, not to be recognized as a means to social culture. here again the sane teacher can be an efficient supervisor. he can take care that the young people do not become entirely dance-minded. =sports and games.=--the various sports should not be forgotten. skating, curling, and hockey, basketball, and volley ball, are all fine winter sports; in summer, teams should be organized in baseball, tennis, and all the proper athletic sports and games. play should be supervised to a certain extent; over-supervision will kill it. sometimes plays that are not supervised at all degenerate and become worse than none. all of these physical activities and sports should be found and fostered in the rural center. they are healthful, both physically and mentally, and should be participated in by both girls and boys. it is probably true that our schools and our education have stood, to too great an extent, for mere intellectual acquisition and training. in sparta of old, education was probably nine tenths physical and one tenth mental. in these modern days education seems to be about ninety-nine parts mental. a sound body is the foundation of a sound mind, and time is not lost in devoting much attention to the play and games of children and young people. there is no danger in the schools of our day of going to an extreme in the direction of physical education; the danger is in not going far enough. i am not sure that it would not be better if the children in every school were kept in the open air half the time learning and participating in various games and sports, instead of, as now, poring over books and memorizing a lot of stuff that will never function on land or sea. =school exhibits.=--in the social centers a school exhibit could be occasionally given with great profit. if domestic science is taught, an occasion should be made to invite the people of the neighborhood to sample the products, for the test of the pudding is in the eating. this would make a delightful social occasion for the men and women of the community to meet each other, and the after-effects in the way of favorable comment and thought would be good. if manual training is an activity of the school, as it ought to be, a good exhibit of the product of this department could be given. if agriculture is taught and there is a school garden, as there should be, an exhibit once a year would produce most desirable effects in the community along agricultural lines. =a public forum.=--aside from provisions for school activities in this social center there should be a hall where public questions can be discussed. all political parties should be given equal opportunities to present their claims before the people of the community. this would tend toward instruction, enlightenment, and toleration. the interesting questions of the day, in political and social life, should be discussed by exponents chosen by the social center committee. in america we have learned the lesson of listening quietly to speakers in a public meeting, whether we agree with them or not. in some countries, when a man rises to expound his political theories, he is hissed down or driven from the stage by force. this is not the american way. in america each man has his hour, and all listen attentively and respectfully to him. the next evening his opponent may have his hour, his inning, and the audience is as respectful to him. this is as it should be; this is the true spirit of toleration which should prevail everywhere and which can be cultivated to great advantage in these rural, social centers. it makes, too, for the fullness of life in rural communities. it makes country life more pleasant and serves in some degree to counteract the strong but regrettable urban trend. =courtesy and candor.=--there are two extremes in debates and in public discussions which should be equally avoided: the first is that brutal frankness which forgets to be courteous; and the second is that extreme of hypocritical courtesy which forgets to be candid. what is needed everywhere is the candor which is also courteous and the courtesy which is likewise candid. in impulsive youth and in lack of education and culture, brutal candor without courtesy sometimes manifests itself; while courtesy without candor is too often exhibited by shrewd politicians and diplomatic intriguers. =automobile parties.=--a delightful and profitable occasion could be made by the men of the rural community who are the owners of automobiles, by taking all the children of the community and of the schools, once in a while, for an automobile ride to near or distant parts of the county. such an occasion would never be forgotten by them. it would be enjoyable to those who give as well as to those who receive, and would have great educational as well as social value. it would bind together both young and old of the community. occasions like these would also conduce to the good-roads movement so commendable and important throughout the country. the automobile and the consolidation of rural schools, resulting in social centers, are large factors in the good-roads movement. =full life or a full purse.=--the community which has been centralized socially and educationally may often bring upon itself additional expense to provide the necessary hall, playgrounds, and other conveniences required to realize and to make all of these activities most effective. but this is a local problem which must be tackled and solved by each community for itself. the community where the right spirit prevails will realize that they must make some sacrifices. if a thing is worth while, the proper means must be provided. one cannot have the benefit without paying the cost. it is a question as to which a community will choose: a monotonous, isolated life _with_ the accumulation of some money, or an active, enthusiastic, educational, and social life _without_ so many dollars. it is really a choice between money with little life on the one hand, and a little less money with more fullness of life on the other. life, after all, is the only thing worth while, and in progressive communities its enrichment will be chosen at any cost. here again it is the duty of the teacher to bring about the right spirit and attitude and the right decision in regard to all these important questions. =organization.=--a community which is socially and educationally organized will need a central post office and town hall, a community store, a grain elevator, a church, and possibly other community agencies. all of these things tend to solidify and bring together the people at a common center. this suggests organization of some kind in the community. the old grange was good in its ideal; the purpose was to unite and bring people together for mutual help. there should probably be a young men's society of some kind, and an organization of the girls and women of the community. it is true that the matter may be overdone and we may have such a thing as activity merely for the sake of activity. it was carlyle who said that some people are noted for "fussy littleness and an infinite deal of nothing." the golden mean should apply here as elsewhere. =the inseparables.=--to bring all of these things about requires talent and ingenuity on the part of the leader or leaders; and we come again to the inseparables mentioned in a former chapter. it will require a great personality to organize. the word "great" implies a high standard; and strong personalities, such as are capable of managing a social center, cannot possibly be secured without an adequate inducement in the way of salary. proper compensation cannot mean sixty, seventy-five, or one hundred dollars a month. it must mean also permanence of position. again we come face to face with the problem of the teacher in our solution of the problem of rural life and the rural school. in conclusion it must be said that nothing is too good for the country which is not too good for the city. the rural community must determine to have all these good things at any cost, if it wishes to work out its own salvation. chapter xi rural school supervision =important.=--supervision is fully as important as teaching. the supervisor must be, to even a higher degree than the teacher, a strong personality, and this too implies a high standard and an attractive salary. the supervisor or superintendent must be somewhat of an expert in the methods of teaching all the common school subjects. not only must he understand school discipline and organization in its details, but he must possess the ability to "turn in" and exemplify his qualifications at any time. it will be seen everywhere that the supervisor or superintendent is the expensive person; for, having the elements of leadership, he is in demand in educational positions as well as in outside callings. consequently it is only by a good financial inducement, as a rule, that a competent supervisor can be retained in the profession. =supervision standardizes.=--without the superintendent or supervisor, no common standard can be attained or maintained. it is he who keeps the force up to the line; without him each teacher is a law unto himself and there will be as many standards as there are teachers. human nature is innately slothful and negligent, and needs the spirit of supervision to keep it toned up to the necessary pitch. supervision over a large force of workers of any kind is absolutely necessary to secure efficiency, and to keep service up to a high standard. =supervision can be overdone.=--the necessity for supervision is clearly felt in the city systems. there they have a general superintendent, principals of buildings, and supervisors in various special lines. a system of schools in the city without supervision would simply go to pieces. it would soon cease to be a system, and would become chaotic. it may be, it is true, that in some cities there is too much supervision; it may become acute and pass the line of true efficiency. indeed, in some cities the red tape may become so complicated and systematized that it becomes an end, and schools and pupils seem to exist for supervisors and systems instead of _vice versa_. it is probably true that the constant presence of a supervisor who is adversely critical may do injury to the efficiency of a good teacher. no one can teach as well under disapprobation as he can where he feels that his hands are free; and so in some places supervision may act as a wet blanket. it may suppress spontaneity, initiative, and real life in the school. but this is only an abuse of a good thing, and probably does not occur frequently. in any event, the exception would only prove the rule. supervision is as necessary in a system of schools as it is in a railroad or in large industries. [illustration: a basket ball team for the girls] [illustration: a brass band for the young men] [caption for the above illustrations: activities of the consolidated school] =needed in rural schools.=--the country partakes of the same isolation in regard to its schools as it does in regard to life in general. this isolation is accentuated where there is little or no supervision. without it, the necessary stimulus seldom or never touches the life of the teacher or the school. there is little uplift; the school runs along in its ordinary, humdrum fashion, and never measures itself with other schools, and is seldom measured by a supervisor. a poor teacher may be in the chair one term and a good teacher another. the terms are short and the service somewhat disconnected. the whole situation gives the impression to people, pupils, and teacher that education is not of very great value. =no supervision in some states.=--in some states there is but little supervision. there may be, it is true, a district board, but these are laymen, much better acquainted with the principles of farming than with those of teaching. they have no standards for judging a school and seldom visit one. the selection known as the "deestrict skule" illustrates fairly well the ability of the old-time school board to pass judgment upon the professional merits of the teacher. =nominal supervision.=--in other states there is a county superintendent on part time who has a kind of general but attenuated supervision over all the schools of a county. he is usually engaged in some other line of work--in business, in medicine, in law, in preaching--and can give only a small portion of his time to the work of superintendence. indeed, this means only an occasional visit to the school, probably once every one or two years, and such simple and necessary reports as are demanded by the state superintendent or state board of education. such supervision, however honestly performed, accomplishes but little. the superintendent may visit the teacher to-day, but when he returns a year hence, he is likely to find another teacher in charge. under such circumstances, what can he do? he has seen the teacher at work for half an hour or an hour; he offers a suggestion, or makes some complimentary remark, and goes his way. no one realizes better than he how little he has been able to accomplish. and yet, under existing circumstances he has done all that could be expected. =some supervision.=--there are, elsewhere, county superintendents who devote their whole time to the work, but who are chosen for short terms and in a political campaign. very frequently these men are elected for political reasons quite as much as for educational fitness. if a superintendent so elected is politically minded--and i regret to say that sometimes this is the case--he will probably devote much time, energy, and thought to paving the way for reëlection. expecting to be a candidate for a second term, he will use his best efforts to impress the public mind in his favor. this sometimes results in greater attention to the duties of his office and the consequent betterment of the schools; but, too often, it works in the opposite direction. being elected for only two years, he has not the time to carry out any educational policy no matter how excellent his plans may be. of course many persons chosen in this way make excellent and efficient officers, but the plan is bad. the good superintendent frequently loses out soonest. =an impossible task.=--superintendents sometimes have under their jurisdiction from one hundred to two hundred, or even more, schools separated by long distances. the law usually prescribes that the county superintendent shall visit each school at least once a year. this means that practically he will do no more; indeed it is often impossible to do more. it means that his visits must of necessity be a mere perfunctory call of an hour or two's duration with no opportunity to see the same teacher again at work to determine whether or not she is making progress, and whether she is carrying out his instructions. such so-called supervision, or superintendence, is not supervision at all--how can it be? the superintendent is only a clerical officer who does the work required by law, and makes incidentally an annual social visit to the schools. =the problem not tackled.=--such a situation is another evidence that the states which tolerate the foregoing conditions have not, in any real and earnest manner, attempted to solve the problem of rural school supervision. they have merely let things drift along as they would, not fully realizing the problem or else trusting to time to come to their aid. micawber-like, they are waiting for "something to turn up." but such problems will not solve themselves. =city supervision.=--compare the supervision described above with that which is usually found in cities. there we usually find a general superintendent and assistant superintendents; there are high school principals and a principal at the head of every grade building; there is also a supervisor of manual training, of domestic science, of music, of drawing, and possibly of other subjects. when we consider, too, that the teachers in the city are all close at hand and that the supervisor or superintendent may drop into any room at any time with scarcely a minute's notice, we see the difference between city supervision and country supervision. add to this the fact that cities attract the strong teachers--the professionally trained teachers, the output of the professional schools--and we can see again how effective supervision becomes in the city as compared with that in the country. in the country we find only one superintendent for a county often as large as some of the older states, and the possibility of visiting each school only about once a year. here also are the teachers who are not professionalized, as a rule, and who, therefore, need supervision most. =the purpose of supervision.=--the main purpose of supervision is to bring teachers up to a required standard of excellence in their work and to keep them there. it is always the easiest plan to dismiss a teacher who is found deficient, but this is cutting the knot rather than untying it. efficient and intelligent supervision proceeds along the line of building such a teacher up, of making her strong where she is weak, of giving her initiative where she lacks it, of inculcating good methods where she is pursuing poor ones, of inducing her to come out of her shell where she is backward and diffident. in other words, the great work of the supervisor is to elicit from teachers their most active and hearty response in all positive directions. it should be understood by teachers--and they should know that the superintendent or supervisor indorses the idea--that it is always better to go ahead and blunder than to stand still for fear of blundering; and so, in the presence of a good supervisor, the teacher is not afraid to let herself out. in the conference, later, between herself and her supervisor, mistakes may be pointed out; but, better than this, the best traits of the teacher should be brought to her mind and the weak ones but lightly referred to. =what is needed.=--what is needed in the rural situation is a county superintendent chosen because of his professional fitness by a county board whose members have been elected at large. this board should be elected on a nonpartisan ticket and so far as possible on a basis of qualification and of good judgment in educational matters. it should hold office for a period of years, some members retiring from the board annually so that there shall not be, at any time, an entirely new board. this would insure continuity. another plan for a county board would be to have the presidents of the district boards act as a county board of education. such a board should be authorized--and indeed this tradition should be established--to select a county superintendent from applicants from outside as well as inside the county. they should be empowered to go anywhere in the country for a superintendent with a reputation in the teaching profession. this is the present plan in cities, and it should be true also in the selection of a county superintendent. =the term.=--the term of office of the county superintendent should be at the discretion of the county board. it should be not less than three or four years--of sufficient length to enable a man to carry out a line of policy in educational administration. the status of the county superintendency should be similar to that of the city superintendency. =assistants.=--the county board should be empowered to provide assistants for the county superintendent. there should be one such assistant for about thirty or thirty-five schools. it is almost impossible for a supervisor to do efficient and effective work if he has more than this number of schools, located, as they are, some distance apart. provision for such assistants, who should, like the superintendent himself, be experts, is based upon the assumption that supervision is worth while, and in fact necessary in any system if success is to be attained. if the supervision of thirty-five schools is an important piece of work it should be well done, and a person well qualified for that work should be selected. he should be a person of sympathetic attitude, of high qualifications, and of experience in the field of elementary education. the assistants should be carefully selected by the board on the recommendation of the county superintendent. poor supervision is little better than none. =the schools examined.=--the county superintendent and his assistants should give, periodically, oral and written examinations in each school, thus testing the work of both the teacher and the pupils. these examinations should not conform in any perfunctory or red-tape manner to a literally construed course of study. the course of study is a means and not an end, and should be, at all points and times, elastic and adaptable. to make pupils fit the course of study instead of making the course of study fit the pupils is the old method of the procrustean bed--if the person is not long enough for it he is stretched; if too long, a piece is cut off. any examination or tests which would wake up mind and stimulate education in the neighborhood may be resorted to; but it should be remembered that examinations are likewise a means and not an end. some years ago when i was a county superintendent i tried the plan of giving such tests in any subject to classes that had completed a definite portion of that subject and arrived at a good stopping place. if, for example, the teacher announced that his class had acquired a thorough knowledge of the multiplication table, i gave a searching test upon that subject and issued a simple little certificate to the effect that the pupil had completed it. these little certificates acted like stakes put down along the way, to give incentive, direction, and definiteness to the educative processes, and to stimulate a reasonable class spirit or individual rivalry. i meet these pupils occasionally now--they are to-day grown men and women--and they retain in their possession these little colored certificates which they still highly prize. one portion of my county was populated almost entirely by scandinavians, and here a list of fifty to a hundred words was selected which scandinavian children always find it difficult to pronounce. at the first trial many or most of the children mispronounced a large percentage of them. i then announced that, the next time i visited the school, i would test the pupils again on these words and others like them, and issue "certificates of correct pronunciation" to all who were entitled to them. i found, on the next visit, that nearly all the children could secure these certificates. these tests created a great impetus in the direction of correct pronunciation and language. some teachers, from mistaken kindness, had been accustomed to refrain from correcting the children on such words, but as superintendent i found that both the parents and the children wished drill in pronunciation and were gratified at their success. this is only a sample. i would advocate the giving of tests, or examinations, on any subject in the school likely to lead to good results and to stimulate the minds of the pupils in the right direction. the county superintendent and his assistants might agree to lay the accent or the emphasis on different subjects, or lines of work, in different years. =keep down red tape.=--in all the work of supervision, the formal part--the accounting and reporting part--should be kept simple; the tendency in administrative offices is too often in the direction of complexity and red tape. wherever there is form merely for the sake of form, it is well worth while to sound a note of warning against it. =help the social centers.=--the county superintendent and his assistants can be of inestimable value in all the work of the social centers. they should advise with school boards in regard to consolidation and other problems agitating the community. they should lend a helping hand to programs that are being carried out in any part of the county. they should give lectures themselves at such social centers and, if asked, should help the local communities and local committees in every way within their power. =conclusion.=--the problem, then, of superintendence is, we conclude, one of the large and important problems awaiting solution in rural life and in rural schools. it is the binding force that will help to unify all the educational activities of the county. it is one of the chief stimulating and uplifting influences in rural education. as in the case of most other school problems, the constant surprise is that the people have not awakened sooner to the realization of its importance and to an honest and earnest attempt at its solution. chapter xii leadership and coÖperation =the real leader.=--real leadership is a scarce and choice article; true leaders are few and far between. the best kind of leader is not one who attempts to be at the head of every movement and to do everything himself, but rather he who makes the greatest number of people active in his cause. it frequently happens that the more a leader does himself, the less his followers are inclined to do. the more active he is, the more passive they are likely to become. as teaching is causing others to know and react educationally, so genuine leadership is causing others to become active in the direction of the leader's purpose, or aim. some who pose as leaders seek to be conspicuous in every movement, merely to attract attention to themselves. they bid for direct and immediate recognition instead of being content with the more remote, indirect, but truer and more substantial reward of recognition through their followers who are active in their leader's cause. the poor leader does not think that there is glory enough for all, and so he monopolizes all he can of it, leaving the remainder to those who probably do the greater part of the work and deserve as much credit as he. the spectacular football player who ignores the team and team work, in order to attract attention by his individual plays, is not the best leader or the best player. the real leader will frequently be content to see things somewhat poorly done or not so well done, in order that his followers may pass through the experience of doing them. it is only by having such experiences that followers are enabled, in turn, to become leaders. =teaching vs. telling.=--as has been shown in an earlier chapter, the lack of leadership is frequently exhibited in the classroom when the teacher, instead of inducing self-activity and self-expression on the part of the pupils, proceeds to recite the whole lesson himself. he asks leading questions and then, at the slightest hesitation on the part of a pupil, he suggests the answer; he asks another leading question from another point of view; he puts words into the mouth of the pupil who is trying in a pitiable way to recite; and ends by covering the topic all over with words, words, words of his own. this is poor leadership on the part of the teacher and gives no opportunity for real coöperation on the part of the pupils. the teacher takes all the glory of reciting, and leaves the pupil without an opportunity or the reward of self-expression. =enlisting the coöperation of pupils.=--all children--and in fact all people--if approached or stimulated in the proper way--like to _do_ things, to perform services for others. a pupil always considers it a compliment to be asked by his teacher to do something for him, if the relations between the teacher and pupil are normal and cordial. this must, of course, be the case if any truly educative response is to be elicited. socrates once said that a person cannot learn from one whom he does not love. the relation between pupil and teacher should be one of mutual love and respect, if the educational process is to obtain. if this relation does not exist, the first duty of the teacher is to bring it about. sometimes this is difficult. i once heard a teacher say that it took him about three weeks to establish this relation between himself and one of his pupils. he finally invited the pupil out hunting with him one saturday, and after that they were the best of friends. the pupil became one of the leaders in his school and his coöperation was secured from that time forward. in this instance the teacher showed marked leadership as well as practical knowledge of psychology and pedagogy. francis murphy, the great temperance orator, understood both leadership and coöperation, for he always, as he said, made it a point to approach a man from the "south side." a pupil, if approached in the right way, will do anything in his power for his teacher. there may be times when wood or fuel must be provided, when the room must be swept and cleaned, when little repairs become necessary, or an errand must be performed. in such situations, if the teacher is a real leader and if his school and he are _en rapport_, volunteers will vie with each other for the privilege of carrying out the teacher's wishes. this would indicate genuine leadership and coöperation. =placing responsibility.=--whether in school or some other station in life, there is scarcely anything that so awakens and develops the best that is in either man or child as the placing of responsibility. every person is educated and made greater according to the measure of responsibility that is given to him and that he is able to live up to. while it is true that too great a measure of responsibility might be given, this is no reasonable excuse for withholding it altogether for fear the burden would be too great. there is a wide middle ground between no responsibility and too much of it, and it is in this field that leadership and coöperation can be displayed to much advantage. the greater danger lies in not giving sufficient responsibility to children and youths. it is well known that, in parts of our country, where men who have been proved to be, or are strongly suspected of being crooked, have been placed upon the bench to mete out justice, they have usually risen to the occasion and to their better ideals, and have not betrayed the trust reposed in them, or the responsibility placed upon them. there is probably no finer body of men in america than our railroad engineers; and while it may be true that they are _picked_ in a measure, it is also true that their responsible positions and work bring out their best manhood. as they sit or stand at the throttle, with hand upon the lever and eyes on the lookout for danger, and as they feel the heart-throbs of their engine drawing its precious freight of a thousand souls through the darkness and the storm, they cannot help realizing that this is real life invested with great responsibilities; and with this thought ever before them, they become men who can be trusted anywhere. there is little doubt that abraham lincoln's mettle was tempered to the finest quality in the fires of the great struggle from to , when every hour of his waking days was fraught with the greatest responsibility. =how people remain children.=--if children and young people are not given responsibilities they are likely to remain children. the old adage, "don't send a boy to mill," is thoroughly vicious if applied beyond a narrow and youthful range. in some neighborhoods the fathers even when of an advanced age retain entire control of the farm and of all activities, and the younger generation are called the "boys," and, what is worse, are considered such till forty years of age or older--in fact as long as the fathers live and are active. a "boy" is called "johnnie," "jimmie," or "tommie," and is never chosen to do jury duty or to occupy any position connected in the local public mind with a man's work. the father in such cases is not a good leader, for he has given no responsibility to, and receives no genuine coöperation from, his sons, who are really man grown, but who are regarded, even by themselves, from habit and suggestion, as children. if these middle-aged men should move to another part of the country they would be compelled to stand upon their own feet, and would be regarded as men among men. they would be called _mr._ jones, _mr._ smith, and _mr._ brown, instead of diminutive and pet names; and, what is better, they would regard themselves as men. this would be a wholesome and stimulating suggestion. hence horace greeley's advice to young men, to "go west," would prove beneficial in more ways than one. this state of affairs is illustrated on a large scale by the chinese life and civilization. from time immemorial the chinese have been taught to regard themselves as children, and the emperor as the common father of all. the head of the family is the head as long as he lives and all his descendants are mere sons and daughters. when he dies he is the object of worship. this custom has tended to influence in a large measure the thought and life of china and to keep the chinese, for untold generations, a childlike and respectful people. whatever may come to pass under the new regime, recently established in their country, they have been, since the dawn of history, a passive people, the majority of whom have not been honored with any great measure of responsibility. =on the farm.=--such lessons from history, written large, are as applicable in rural life as elsewhere. coöperation and profit-sharing are probably the key to the solution of the labor problem. many industrial leaders in various lines, notably mr. henry ford in his automobile factories in detroit, have come to the conclusion that coöperation, or some kind of profit-sharing by the rank and file of the workers, is of mutual benefit to employer and laborer. the interest of workers must be enlisted for their own good as well as for the good of society at large. it induces the right attitude toward work on the part of the worker, and the right attitude of employer and employee toward each other. this leads to the solidarity of society and the integrity of the social bond. it tends to establish harmony and to bring contentment to both parties. =renters.=--the renter of a farm must have sufficient interest in it and in all its activities to improve it in every respect, rather than to allow it to deteriorate by getting out of it everything possible, and then leaving it, like a squeezed orange, to repeat the operation elsewhere. a farm, in order to yield its best and to increase in production and value, must be managed with care, foresight, and scientific understanding. there must be, among other things, a careful rotation of crops and the rearing of good breeds of animals of various kinds. but these things cannot be intrusted to the mere renter or the hired man who is nothing more. these are not sufficiently interested. the man who successfully manages a farm must be interested in it and in its various phases, whether he be a renter or a worker. he must be careful, watchful, industrious, intelligent, and a lover of domestic animals; otherwise the farm will go backward and the stock will not thrive and be productive of profits. the man who drives a farm to a successful issue must be a leader, and, if he is not the owner, he must coöperate with the owner in order that there may be interest, which is the great essential. =the owner.=--if the farm is operated by the owner himself and his family, there is still greater need of leadership on the part of the father and of coöperation on the part of all. money and profits are not the only motives or the only results and rewards that come to a family in rural life. as the children grow up to adult life, both boys and girls, for their own education and development in leadership and in coöperation, should be given some share in the business, some interest which they can call their own, and whose success and increase will depend on their attention, care, and industry. that father is a wise leader who can enlist the active coöperation of all his family for the good of each and of all. such leadership and coöperation are the best forms and means of education, and lead inevitably to good citizenship. how often do we see a grasping, churlish father whose leadership is maintained by fear and force and whose family fade away, one by one, as they come to adolescence. there is no cementing force in such a household, and the centrifugal forces which take the place of true leadership and cordial coöperation soon do their work. =the teacher as a leader.=--we have already spoken of the teacher as the natural leader of the activities of a social center, or of a community. in such situations the teacher should be a real leader, not one who wishes or attempts to be the direct and actual leader in every activity, but one "who gets things done" through the secondary leadership of a score or more of men, boys, and girls. the leader in a consolidated district, or social center, who should attempt to bring all the glory upon himself by immediate leadership would be like the teacher who insists on doing all the reciting for his pupils. that would be a false and short-lived leadership. hence the teacher who is a true leader will keep himself somewhat in the background while, at the same time, he is the hidden mainspring, the power behind the throne. "it is the highest art to conceal art." fitch, in his lectures on teaching, says that the teacher and the leader should "keep the machinery in the background." the teacher should start things going by suggestion and keep them going by his presence, his attitude, and his silent participation. too much participation and direction are fatal to the active coöperation and secondary leadership of others. hence the teacher will bring about, in his own good time and way, the organization of a baseball team under the direction of a captain chosen by the boys. the choice, it is true, may probably be inspired by the teacher. the same would take place in regard to every game, sport, or activity, mental, social, or physical, in the community. the danger always is that the initial leader may become too dominant. it is hard on flesh and blood to resist the temptation to be lionized. but it is incomparably better to have partial or almost total failures under self-government than to be governed by a benevolent and beneficent autocrat. and so it is much better that boys and girls work out their own salvation under leaders of their own choice, than to be told to organize, and to do thus and so. it requires a rare power of self-control in a real leader to be compelled to witness only partial success and crude performance under secondary leaders groping toward success, and still be silent and patient. but this is the true process of education--self-activity and self-government. =self-activity and self-government.=--in order to develop initiative, which is the same thing, practically, as leadership, opportunity must be given for free self-activity. children and adults alike, if they are to grow, must be induced to _do_. it is always better to go ahead and blunder than to stand still for fear of blundering. many kind mothers fondly wish--and frequently attempt to enforce their wish--that children should learn how to swim without going into the water. children see the folly of this and, in order not to disturb the calm and peace of the household, slip away to a neighboring creek or swimming-hole, for which they ever after retain the most cherished memories. in later years when all danger is over these grown-up children smilingly and jokingly reveal the mysteries of the trick! children cannot learn to climb trees without climbing trees, or to ride calves and colts without the real animals. some chances must be taken by parents and guardians, and more chances are usually taken by children than their guardians ever hear of. accidents will happen, it is true, but in the wise provision of mother nature the world moves on through these persistent and instinctive self-activities. self-activity is manifested on a larger scale in society and among nations and peoples. civilization is brought about through self-activity and coöperation. it were better for the filipinos to civilize themselves as much as possible than that we impose civilization upon them. it is better that mexico bring peace into her own household, than that we take the leadership and enforce order among her people. when the irish captain said to his soldiers, "if you don't obey willingly i'll make you obey willingly," he fused into one the military and the truly civic and educational conceptions. an individual or a nation must energize from within outward in order to truly express itself and thus develop in the best sense. hence in any community the development of self-expression, self-activity, and coöperation under true leadership is conducive to the highest type of individuality and of citizenship. =taking laws upon one's self.=--it is under proper leadership and coöperation that children and young people are induced to take laws upon themselves. it is always a joy to a parent or a teacher when a pupil expresses himself with some emotion to the effect that such and such a deed is an "outrage," or "fine" as the case may be. it is an indication that he has adopted a life principle which he means to live by, and that it has been made his own to such an extent that he expresses and commits himself upon it with such feeling. moralization consists in just this process--the taking upon one's self of a bundle of good life principles. under the right kind of leadership and coöperation this moralizing process grows most satisfactorily. children then take upon themselves laws and become self-governing and law-abiding. =an educational column.=--one of the best means of creating an atmosphere and spirit of education and culture in a community is to conduct an "educational column" in the local newspaper. the teacher as a real leader in the community could furnish the matter for such a column once every two weeks or once a month, and, before long, if he is the leader we speak of, the people will begin to look eagerly for this column; they will turn to it first on receiving their paper. here items of interest on almost any subject might be discussed. the column need not be limited narrowly to technically educational topics. the author of such a column could thus create and build up in a community the right kind of traditions and a good spirit, tone, and temper generally. his influence would be potent outside the schoolroom and he would have in his power the shaping and the guiding of the social, or community mind. it is wonderful what can be done in this way by a prudent, intelligent, and interesting writer. the community soon will wish, after the column has been read through, that he had written more. this would be an encouraging sign. =all along the educational line.=--the kind of leadership and coöperation indicated in this chapter should be exemplified through the entire common-school system. it should obtain between the state superintendent and the county superintendents; between the county superintendents and their deputies, or assistants on the one hand and the principals of schools on the other; between principals and teachers; and between teachers and pupils. it should exist between all of these officials and the people variously organized for social and educational betterment. then there would be a "long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together" for the solution of the problems of rural life and the rural school. chapter xiii the farmer and his home =farming in the past.=--in the past, successful farming was easier than it is at present or is destined to be in the future. in the prairie regions of the great central west, the virgin and fertile soil, the large acreage of easy cultivation, and the good prices made success inevitable. indeed, these conditions were thrust upon the fortunate farmer. but those days are passed. increased population is reducing the acreage and cultivation, while it is eliminating the surplus fertility; competition and social and economic pressure are reducing the margin of profits. thrift, good management, and brains are becoming increasingly important factors in successful farming. =old conceit and prejudice.=--twenty years ago, when the agricultural colleges were taking shape and attempting to impress their usefulness upon the farmer, the latter was inclined to assume a derisive attitude, and to refer to their graduates as "silk-stocking farmers"--or, as one farmer put it, "theatrical" sort of fellows, meaning _theoretical_! in the farming of the future, however, the agricultural college and its influence are bound to play a large part. there is plenty of room on a good farm of one hundred and sixty acres for the best thinking and the most careful planning. foresight and ingenuity of the rarest kinds are demanded there. we wish to enumerate, and discuss in brief, some of the important points of vantage to be watched and carefully guarded, if farm life, which means rural life, is to be pleasant and profitable. if rural life is to retain its attractions and its people, it must be both of these. let us, in this chapter, investigate some things which, although apart from the school and education in any technical sense, are truly educative, in the best sense. =leveling down.=--one thing that sometimes impresses the close observer who is visiting in the country and in farm homes is that there exists in some rural localities a kind of "leveling down" process. people become accommodated to their rather quiet and unexciting surroundings. their houses and barns, in the way of repairs and improvements, are allowed gradually to succumb to the tooth of time and the beating of the elements. this process is so slow and insidious that those who live in the midst of it scarcely notice the decay that is taking place. hence it continues to grow worse until the farm premises assume an unattractive and dilapidated appearance. weeds grow up around the buildings and along the roads, so slowly, that they remain unnoticed and hence uncut--when half an hour's work would suffice to destroy them all, to the benefit of the farm and the improvement of its appearance. in the country it is very easy, as we have said, to "level down." people live in comparative isolation; imitation, comparison, and competition enter but little into their thoughts and occupations. in the city it is otherwise. people live in close proximity to each other, and one enterprising person can start a neighborhood movement for the improvement of lawns and houses. there is more conference, more criticism and comparison, more imitation. in the city there is a kind of compulsion to "level up." when one moves from a large active center to a smaller one, the life tendency is to accommodate one's self to his environment; while if one moves from a small, quiet place to a larger and more active center, the life tendency is to level up. it is, of course, fortunate for us that we are able to accommodate ourselves to our environment and to derive a growing contentment from the process. the prisoner may become so content in his cell that he will shed tears when he is compelled to leave it for the outer world where he must readjust himself. the college man, over whom there came a feeling of desolation on settling down in a small country village with one store, comes eventually to find contentment, sitting on the counter or on a drygoods box, swapping stories with others like himself who have leveled down to a very circumscribed life and living. leveling down may be accomplished without effort or thought, but eternal vigilance is the price of leveling up. =premises indicative.=--a farmer is known by the premises he keeps, just as a person is known by the company he keeps. if a man is thrifty it will find expression in the orderliness of his place. if he is intelligent and inventive it will show in the appointments and adaptations everywhere apparent, inside and outside the buildings. if the man and his family have a fine sense of beauty and propriety, an artistic or æsthetic sense, there will be evidences of cleanliness and simple beauty everywhere--in the architecture, in the painting, in the pictures, and the carpets, in the kinds and positions of the trees and shrubbery, and in the general neatness and cleanliness of the premises. it is not so necessary that people possess much, but it is important that they make much of what they do possess. the exquisite touch on all things is analogous to the flavor of our food--it is as important for appetite and for nourishment as the food itself. =conveniences by labor-saving devices.=--if there are ingenuity and the power of ordinary invention in common things, system and devices for saving labor will be evident everywhere. the motor will be pressed into service in various ways. there will be a place for everything, and everything will be in its place. head work and invention, rather than mere imitation, characterize the activities of the master. =eggs in several baskets.=--the day is past when success may be attained by raising wheat alone. this was, of course, in days gone by, the easiest and cheapest crop to produce. it was also the crop that brought the largest returns in the shortest time. wheat raising was merely a summer's job, with a prospective winter's outing in some city center. it was and is still the lazy farmer's trick. it was an effort similar to that of attempting the invention of a perpetual motion machine; it was an attempt, if not to get something for nothing, at least to get something at the lowest cost, regardless of the future. but nature cannot be cheated, and the modern farmer has learned or is learning rapidly, that he must rotate and diversify his crops if he would succeed in the long run. consequently he has begun rotation. he also replenishes his soil with nitrogen-producing legumes, along with corn planting and with summer fallowing. he engages in the raising of chickens, hogs, cattle, and horses. this diversification saves him from total loss in case of a bad year in one line. the farmer does not carry all his eggs in one basket. a bad year with one kind of crops may be a good year with some other. diversification also makes farming an all-year occupation, every part of which is bringing a good return, instead of being a job with an income for the summer and an outlay for the winter. live stock, sheep, hogs, and cattle grow nights, sundays, and winters as well as at other times, and so the profits are accumulating all the year round. =the best is the cheapest.=--the modern farmer also realizes that it takes no more, nor indeed as much, to feed and house the best kinds of animals than it does to keep the scrub varieties. in all of this there is a large field for study and investigation. but one must be interested in his animals and understand them. they should know his voice and he should know their needs and their habits. as in every other kind of work there must be a reasonable interest; otherwise it cannot be an occupation which will make life happy and successful. =good work.=--the good farmer has the _feel_ and the habit of good work. the really successful man in any calling or profession is he who does his work conscientiously and as well as he can. the sloven becomes the bungler, and the bungler is on the high road to failure. it is always a pleasant thing to see a man do his work well and artistically. it is the habit, the policy, the attitude of thus doing that tell in the long run. a farmer may by chance get a good crop by seeding on unplowed stubble land, but he must feel that he is engaged in the business of trying to cheat himself, like the boy playing solitaire--he does not let his right hand know what his left hand is doing. the good farmer is an artist in his work, while the poor farmer is a veritable bungler--blaming his tools and nature herself for his failures. =good seed and trees.=--the successful farmer knows from study and experience that only healthy seed and healthy animals will produce good grain and strong animals after their kind. he does not try tricks on nature. he selects the best kinds of trees and shrubbery and when these are planted he takes care of them. he realizes that what is worth sowing and planting is worth taking care of. =a good caretaker.=--the successful and intelligent farmer keeps all his buildings, sheds, and fences in good repair and well painted. he is not penny-wise and pound-foolish. he knows the value of paint from an economic and financial point of view as well as from an artistic and æsthetic one. knowing these things, and from an ingrained feeling and habit, he sees to it that all his machinery and tools are under good cover, and are not exposed to the gnawing tooth of the elements. this habit and attitude of the man are typical and make for success as well as for contentment. as it is not the saving of a particular dollar that makes a man thrifty or wealthy, but the _habit_ of saving dollars; so it is not the taking care of this or that piece of machinery, or that particular building, but the habit of doing such things that leads him to success. =family coöperation.=--such a man will also enlist the interest and the active coöperation of his sons and daughters by giving them property or interests which they can call their own; he will make them, in a measure, co-partners with him on the farm. there could be no better way of developing in them their best latent talents. it would result in mutual profit and, what is better, in mutual love and happiness. one of the greatest factors in a true education is to be interested, self-active, and busy toward a definite and worthy end. under such circumstances both the parents and the children might be benefited by taking short courses in the nearest agricultural college; and a plan of giving each his turn could be worked out to the interest and profit of all the family. such a family would become local leaders in various enterprises. =an ideal life.=--it would seem that such an intelligent and successful farmer and his family could lead an ideal life. every life worth while must have work, disappointments, and reverses. but work--reasonable work--is a blessing and not a curse. work is an educator, a civilizer, a sanctifier. a family like that described might in the course of a few years possess most of the modern conveniences. the telephone, the daily mail, the automobile, and other inventions are at hand, in the country as well as in the city. the best literature of to-day and of all time is available. music and art are easily within reach. with these advantages any rural family may have a happy home. this is more than most people in the cities can have. more and more of our people should turn in the future to this quiet but happy and ideal country life. chapter xiv the rural renaissance =darkest before the dawn.=--prior to the present widespread discussion, which it is hoped will lead to a rural renaissance, the condition and the prospects of country life and the country school looked dark and discouraging. country life seemed to be passing into the shadow and the storm. it seemed as if the country was being not only deserted but forgotten. the urban trend, as we have seen, moved on apace. farms were being deserted or, if cultivated at all, were passing more and more into the hands of renters. the owners were farming by proxy. this meant decreased production and impoverished soil. it meant one-crop, or small-grain farming; it meant a class of renters or tenants with only temporary homes, and hence with only a partial interest. the inevitable result would be an impoverished rural life and poor rural schools. without a realization of the seriousness of the situation and the trend on the part of the people at large, all these conditions prevailed to a greater or less extent. the people seemed unaware of the fact that rural life was not keeping pace with the progress of the world around. in new england whole districts were practically deserted, and her abandoned farms told the tale. in virginia and in most of the older states similar conditions existed. the people migrated either to the cities or to the newer and cheaper agricultural regions of the west. =the awakening.=--but the time came when the newer lands were not so available and when social and economic pressure forced the whole problem of rural life upon the attention of the nation. difficulty in adjustment to surroundings always constitutes a problem, and a problem always arouses thought. when our adjustment is easy and successful it is effected largely through habit; but when it is obstructed or thwarted, thought and reason must come to the rescue. investigation, comparison, and reflection are then drafted for a solution. this is what happened a few years ago. the whole situation, it is true, had been in mind previously, but only in a half conscious or subconscious way. it was being felt or sensed, more or less clearly, that there was something wrong, that there was a great unsupplied need, in rural life; but the thought had no definite shape. the restiveness, the restlessness, was there but no distinct and articulate voices gave utterance to any definite policy or determination. there was no clearly formulated consensus of thought as to what ought to be done. prior to this time the thought of the people had not been focused on country life at all. the attention of the rural districts was not on themselves; they were not really self-conscious of their condition or that there was any important problem before them. but not many years ago, owing to various movements, which were both causes and effects, the whole country began to be aroused to the importance of the subjects which i have been discussing. the committee of twelve on rural schools appointed by the national educational association had reported the phases of the rural life problem in ; but many declarations and reports of that kind are necessary to stir the whole country. hence no decisive movement, even in rural education, became noticeable for several years. but this report did much good; it not only formulated educational thought and policy in regard to the subject but it also awakened thought and discussion outside of the teaching profession. =the agricultural colleges.=--the agricultural colleges and experimental stations in the several states had also been active for some years and had formulated a body of knowledge in regard to agricultural principles and methods. they had distributed this information widely among the farmers of the country. the latter, at first, looked askance at these colleges and their propaganda, and often refused to accept their suggestions and advice on the ground that it was "mere theory," and that farmers could not be taught practical agriculture by mere "book men" and "theorizers." the practical man often despises theory, not realizing that practice without theory is usually blind. but the growing science of agriculture was working like a leaven for the improvement of farm life in all its phases, and to-day the agricultural colleges and experiment stations are the well-springs of information for practical farmers everywhere. bulletins of information are published and distributed regularly, and farmers are being brought into closer and closer touch with these institutions. =conventions.=--during this awakening period, conventions of various kinds are held, which give the farmers an opportunity to hear and to participate in discussions pertaining to the problems with which they are wrestling. they come together in district, county, or state conventions, and the result has been that a class consciousness, an _esprit de corps_, is being developed. farmers hear and see bigger and better things; their world is enlarged and their minds are stimulated; they are induced to think in larger units. thought, like water, seeks its level, and in conventions of this kind the individual "levels up." he goes home inspired to do better and greater things, and spreads the new gospel among his neighbors. at the conventions he hears a variety of topics discussed, including good roads, house plans, sanitation, schools, and others too numerous to mention. =other awakening agencies.=--the agricultural paper, which practically every farmer takes and which every farmer should take, brings to the farm home each week the most modern findings on all phases of country life. the rural free delivery and the parcel post bring the daily mail to the farmer's door. the rural telephone is becoming general, and also the automobile and other rapid and convenient modes of communication and transportation. all these things have helped to develop a clearer consciousness of country life, its problems and its needs. =the farmer in politics.=--add to all the foregoing considerations the fact that, in every state legislature and in congress, the number of rural representatives is constantly increasing, and we see clearly that the country districts are awakening to a realization not only of their needs but of their rights. all of these conditions have helped to turn the eyes of the whole people, in state and nation, to long neglected problems. =the national commission.=--so the various agencies and factors enumerated above and others besides, all working more or less consciously and all conspiring together, finally resulted in the appointment of a national commission on rural life, the results and findings of which were made the subject of a special message from the president to congress in . the report of the commission was issued from the government printing office in washington as document number , and should be read by every farmer in the country. this commission was the resultant of many forces exerted around family firesides, in the schoolroom, in the press, on the platform, in conventions, in legislatures, and in the halls of congress. for the first time in this country, the conditions and possibilities of rural life were made the subjects of investigation and report to a national body. thus the commission became thenceforth a potent cause of the attention and impetus since given to the problems we are discussing. =mixed farming.=--in recent years, too, what may be called "scientific farming" has become a decided "movement" and is now very extensively practiced. this includes diversified farming, rotation of crops, stock raising, the breeding of improved stock, better plowing, and a host of matters connected with the farmer's occupation. thus farming is becoming neither a job nor an avocation, but a genuine vocation, or profession. it requires for its success all the brains, all the ingenuity, all the attention and push that an intelligent man can give it; and, withal, it promises all the variety, the interest, the happiness, and the success that any profession can offer. =now before the country.=--the movement in behalf of a richer rural life and of better rural schools is now before the country. it is the subject of discussion everywhere. it is in the limelight; the literature on the subject is voluminous; books without number, on all phases of the subject, are coming from the press. educational papers and magazines, and even the lay press, are devoting unstinted space to discussions on country life and the rural school. the country has the whole question "on the run," with a fair prospect of an early capture. on pages - we give a bibliography of a small portion of the literature on these questions which has come out recently. =educational extension.=--within the last few years the movement known as "extension work," connected with the educational institutions, has had a rapid growth. the state universities, agricultural colleges, and normal schools in almost every state are doing their utmost to carry instruction and education in a variety of forms to communities beyond their walls. they are vying with each other in their extension departments, in extra-mural service of every possible kind. in many places institutions are even furnishing musical performances and other forms of entertainment at cost, in competition with the private bureaus, thus saving communities the profits of the bureau and the expense of the middlemen. the university of wisconsin has been in recent years the leader in this extension work. minnesota, and most of the central and western states are active in the campaign of carrying education and culture to outlying communities. wisconsin, minnesota, and north dakota have recently pooled their forces for some exchange of service in extension work. =library extension work.=--in wisconsin, the state library is under the direction of the university extension department, and collections of books, which may be retained for a definite length of time, may be secured by any town or community in the state. in this way a library may do excellent service. =some froth.=--no doubt some froth will be produced by the stirring of the waters which are moving in some places with whirlpool rapidity. there is considerable sound and fury, no doubt, in the discussions and in the things attempted in these uplifting movements. there is a considerable amount of smoke in proportion to the fire beneath. but, even with the froth, the noise, and the smoke, there is some latent power, some energy, beneath and behind it all. the main thing is that the power, the energy, the thought, the enthusiasm of the nation have been started on the right way. we can discount and overlook the vagaries and foibles which will undoubtedly play around the outskirts of the movement. every new movement shows similar phenomena. much will be said, written, and done which is mere surface display. but while these may do little good, they will do no harm and are indicative of the inner and vital determination of the people to confront the difficulties. =thought and attitude.=--our thought and our attitude make any kind of work or any kind of position desirable and worthy, or the reverse. many vicious leaders poison the minds of workers and make them dissatisfied with their work and their employers by suggesting a wrong spirit and attitude. we do not advocate passive submission to wrongs; nor on the other hand do we think that the interests of the laborer are to be subserved by infusing into his mind jealousy and envy and discontent with his lot. a young man goes through the practice and games of football, enduring exertion and pain which he would not allow any other person to force upon him; at the same time, he has a song in his heart. on a camping trip a person will submit to rigors and privations which he would think intolerable at home. whatever is socially fashionable is done with pleasure; the mind is the great factor. if one is interested in his work, it is pleasant--indeed more enjoyable than play; but if there is no interest it is all drudgery and pain. the attitude, the motive, the will make all the difference in the world. in the rural renaissance, farm life may become more and more fashionable. this is by no means impossible. country life has no such rigors as the football field or the outing in the wilds. when as a people we have passed from the sensuous and erotic wave on the crest of which we seem at present to be carried along, we can with profit, intellectually, morally, socially, and physically, "go forth under the open sky and list to nature's teachings." everything except the present glare of excitement beckons back to the land, back to the country. whether as a people we shall effectively check the urban trend, will, in the not distant future, test the self-control, the foresight, the wisdom, and the character of the manhood and womanhood of this nation. chapter xv a good place after all =not pessimistic.=--some of the early chapters of this book may have left the impression that a restoration, or rejuvenation, of country life, such as will reverse the urban trend and make rural life the more attractive by comparison, is difficult if not impossible. it is difficult we grant; but we do not wish to leave the impression that such is improbable, much less impossible. we were simply facing the truth on the dark, or negative, side, and were attempting to give reasons for conditions and facts which have been everywhere apparent. if there are two sides to a question both should be presented as they really are. it is always as useless and as wrong to minimize as it is to exaggerate, and we were simply accounting for facts. we did not mean that there is no hope. the first essential in the solution of any problem or in the improvement of any condition is to get the condition clearly and accurately in mind--to _conceive_ it exactly as it is. there is no doubt that the city, with its material splendor and its social life, has attractions; but if we turn to rural life, we shall find, if we go below the surface of human nature, the strongest appeals to our deeper and more abiding interests. the surface of things and the present moment are near to us, and powerful in the way of motivation. these, however, are the aspects of human environment which appeal most strongly to the child, to the savage, and to the uneducated person. if we are optimists, believing that the race is progressing, and that our own people and country are progressing as rapidly as or more rapidly than any other, we must believe that motives which appeal to our deeper, saner, and more disciplined nature will win out in the long run. let us see, then, what some of the appeals to this saner stratum of human nature, in behalf of rural life, are. =fewer hours of labor than formerly.=--the hours of labor have been reduced everywhere. in the olden time labor was done by slaves or serfs, and neither their bodies nor their time was their own. they labored when, where, and as long as their masters dictated. even a generation ago there was little said, and there was no uniformity, as to how long a working-man should labor. in busy seasons or on important pieces of work, he labored as long as the light of day permitted. it was from sun to sun, and often long after the sun had disappeared from the western horizon. sixteen hours was no uncommon day for him. under such conditions there was no room for mental, social, or spiritual advancement. later, the hours were reduced to a maximum of fourteen. this proved to be so satisfactory that laws were passed providing for a further decrease in hours. this standardizing of the day of labor, while not general in the country, had its effect. the twelve-hour day, while still long, was a decided betterment over the sixteen-hour day. there was beginning to be a little possible margin for social, mental, and recreational activity. but the twelve-hour day must inevitably get the better of the human system and of the spirit of man. it is too long and too steady a grind, and habit and long hours soon tell their story. they inevitably lead to the condition of the "man with the hoe." as improvements in machinery were perfected and inventions of all kinds multiplied and spread both in the factory and on the farm, the ten-hour day was ushered in. it was inevitable in this age of inventions and improvements. capital had these inventions and improvements in its possession and a laboring man could now do twice as much with the same labor as formerly. but society as a whole could not assent to the theory and the practice that the capitalist, the owner of the machines, should reap all the advantages; and so, while the hours were still further reduced, the wages were increased, thus more nearly equalizing the benefits accruing to employer and employed. with the aid of inventions the worker, on the average, can do more in the short day of eight or ten hours than he did formerly in the sixteen-hour day. it is not contended, however, that every laborer actually does this. this phase of the question is a large factor in the labor problem. but from the point of view of the average man and of society, labor with the aid of machinery can produce probably twice as much as it produced formerly without that aid. this fact has had great influence upon industrial life everywhere, and makes for increased opportunities and growth. =the mental factor growing.=--the trend alluded to above implies that the mental factor is growing larger and larger in occupations of all kinds. success is becoming more and more dependent on knowledge, ingenuity, prudence, and foresight. especially is this true on the farm. there is scarcely any calling that demands or can make use of such varied talents. all fields of knowledge may be drawn upon and utilized, from the weather signals to the most recent findings and conclusions of science and philosophy. as the hours of labor both in the factory and on the farm are shortened still more--as is possible--the hours of study, of play, and of social converse will be lengthened. indeed this is one of the by-problems of civilization and progress--to see that leisure hours are profitably spent for the welfare of the individual. in any event, the prospect of reasonable hours and of social and cultural opportunities in rural life is growing from day to day. the intelligent man with modern machinery and ordinary capital, if he has made some scientific study of agriculture, need have no fear of not living a successful and happy life on the farm. a knowledge of his calling in all its aspects, with the aid of modern machinery, and with sobriety, thrift, and industry, will bring a kind of life to both adults and children that the crowded factory and tenements and the tinsel show of the city cannot give. but one must be willing to forego the social and physical display of the surface of things and to choose the better and more substantial part. if we are a people that can do this there is hope for an early and satisfactory solution of the problems of rural life. =the bright side of old-time country life.=--even in the country life of twenty-five to fifty years ago, there was a bright and happy side. it was not all dark, and, in its influence for training the youth to a strong manhood, we shall probably not look upon its like again. if strength and welfare rather than pleasure are the chief end of life, many of the experiences which were undoubtedly hardships were blessings in disguise. every boy had his chores and every girl her household duties to perform. the cows had to be brought home in the evening from the prairie or the woods; they had to be milked and cared for; calves and hogs had to be fed; horses had to be cared for both evening and morning; barns, stables, and sheds had to be looked after. all the animals of the farm, including the domestic fowls, such as chickens, ducks, and turkeys, became our friends and each was individually known. though all the duties of farm life had to be done honestly and well, nevertheless the farmer's boy found time to go fishing and hunting, skating, coasting, and trapping. he learned the ways and the habits of beasts, birds, and fish. he observed the squirrels garnering their winter supply in the fall. he watched the shrewd pocket gopher as it came up and deposited the contents of its cheek pockets upon the pile of fresh dirt beside his hole. he learned how to trap the muskrat, and woe to the raccoon that was discovered stealing the corn, for it was tracked and treed even at midnight. the boy's eyes occasionally caught sight of a red fox or of a deer; and the call of the dove, the drum of the pheasant, the welcome "whip-poor-will" and the "to-whit, to-whit, to-who" of the owl were familiar sounds. he ranged the prairie and the woods; he climbed trees for nuts and for distant views, and knew every hill, valley, and stream for miles and miles around. even his daily and regular work was of a large and varied kind. it was not like the making of one tenth of a pin, which has a strong tendency to reduce the worker to one tenth of a man. on the farm one usually begins and finishes a piece of work whether it be a hay-rack or a barn; he sees it through--the whole of it receives expression in him. it is _his_ piece of work and it faces him as he has to face it. the tendency is for both to be "honest." if there were so much brightness and variety in days gone by, when all work was done by hand, how much better the situation can be now and in the future, when inventions and machines have come to the rescue of the laborer, and when the hours of toil have been so materially shortened! =the larger environment.=--there is no doubt that a large and varied environment is conducive to the growth of a strong and active personality. if one has to adjust himself at every turn to something new, it will lead to self-activity and initiative, to ingenuity and aggressiveness. if tadpoles are reared in jars of different sizes, the growth and size of each will vary with the size of the vessel, the smallest jar growing the smallest tadpole, and the largest jar the largest tadpole. it is fighting against the laws of fate to attempt to rear strong personalities in a "flat" or even in a fifty-foot lot. they need the range of the prairies, the hills, and the woods. shakespeare was born and brought up in one of the richest and most stimulating environments, natural and social, in the world; and this, no doubt, had much to do with his matchless ability to express himself on all phases of nature and of mind. large and varied influences, while they do not compel, at least _tend_ to produce, large minds; for they leave with us infinite impressions and induce correspondingly varied reactions and experiences. under such conditions a child is reacting continually and thus becoming active and efficient. he is challenged at every turn, and if stumbling blocks become stepping stones, the process is the very best kind of education. =games.=--there are excellent opportunities in the country for all kinds of games, for there ample room and many incentives to activity present themselves. in the city, children are often content with seeing experts and professionals give performances or "stunts," while they, themselves, remain passive. in the country there are not so many attractions and distractions--so many dazzling and overwhelmingly "superior" things--that children may not be easily induced to "get into the game" themselves. i fear that in recent years owing to imitation of the city and its life, play and games in the country have become somewhat obsolete. there needs to be a renaissance in this field. we have been offered everywhere in recent years so much of what might be called the "finished product" that the children are content merely to sit around as spectators and watch others give the performances. as in the case of the rural school the play instincts of country children must be awakened again in behalf of rural life in general. there are scores of games and sports, from marbles to football, which should receive attention. in recent years the social mind, in all sports, seems to be directed to the _result_, the winning or losing, instead of to the game, as a game, and the fun of it all. true sportsmanship should be revived and cultivated. there is no reason why there should not be found in every neighborhood, and especially at every school center, all kinds of plays and games, each in its own time and place and having its own patronage--marbles, tops, swings, horseshoes, "i spy," anti-over, pull-away, prisoner's base, tennis, croquet, volley ball, basketball, skating, coasting, skiing, baseball, and football. horizontal bars, turning pole, and other apparatus should be provided in every playground. in the social centers, if the boys can be organized as boy scouts, and the girls as camp-fire girls, good results will ensue. many more plays and games will suggest themselves, and those for girls should be encouraged as well as those for boys. all the aspects of rural life can thus be made most enjoyable. it is often well to introduce and cultivate one game at a time, letting it run its course, something like a fever, and then, at the psychological moment, introduce and try out another. to introduce too many at one time would not afford an opportunity for children to experience the rise and fall of a wave of enthusiasm on any one, and this is quite important. usually some direction should be given to play, but this direction should not be suppressive, and should be given by a leader who understands and sympathizes with child nature. =inventiveness in rural life.=--in the city, where everything is manufactured or sold ready-made, a person simply goes to the store and buys whatever he needs. in the country this cannot be done, and one is driven by sheer necessity to devise ways and means of supplying his needs, himself. he simply has to invent or devise a remedy. necessity is the mother of invention. it is really better for boys and girls in the country if their parents are compelled to be frugal and economical. if children get anything and everything they wish, merely for the asking, they are undone; they become weak for lack of self-exertion, self-expression, and invention; they become dissatisfied if everything is not coming their way from others. they become selfish and careless. having tasted of the best, merely for the asking, they become dissatisfied with everything except the best. this is the dominant tendency in the city and wherever parents are foolish enough to satisfy the child's every whim. if the parents carry the child in this manner, the child, in later years, will have weak legs and the parents will have weak backs. moreover, love and respect move in the direction of activity, and if everything comes the child's way there will be little love, except "cupboard love," going the other way. it is unfortunate for children to experience the best too early in life; there is then no room for growth and development. it was professor james who said that the best doll he ever saw was a home-made rag doll; it left sufficient room for the play of the imagination. with the perfect, factory-made doll there is nothing more for the imagination to do; it is complete, but it is not the little girl who has completed it. in the country, men and women, boys and girls are induced to begin and complete all kinds of things. many things have to be made outright and most things have to be repaired on the farm. challenges of this kind to inventiveness and activity are outstanding all the time. sleds, both large and small, wheelbarrows and hay racks, sheds, granaries, and barns are both made and repaired. but in all there is no mad rush. it is not as it is in the factory or in the sawmill. one is not reduced to the instantaneous reactions of an automaton; he has time to breathe and to think. one can act like a free man rather than like a machine. there is room for thought and for invention. =activity rather than passivity.=--in this infinite variety of stimulation and response, the youth is induced to become active rather than passive. while he is not pushed unduly, he is reasonably active during all his waking hours, and the habit of activity, of doing, is ingrained. this is closely related to character and morality, to thrift and success. such a person is more likely to be a creditor than a debtor to society. in this respect the country and the farm have been the salvation of many a youth. in the city many children have no regular employment; they have no chores to do and no regular occupation. evenings and vacations find them on the streets. then satan always finds mischief for idle hands to do. these children become passive except under the impulses of instinct or of mischievous ideas; they have no regular and systematic work to do; everything is done for them. during their early years habits of idleness, of passive receptivity, of mischief, and possibly of crime, are ingrained. and though this kind of life may be more _pleasurable_, in a low sense, than the active life of the country, there can be no doubt as to which is the more wholesome and strengthening. =child labor.=--a good child-labor law is absolutely essential to the welfare of the children for whom it has been enacted; nevertheless, there has been a great omission in not providing that idle children shall do some work. even in large cities there are probably more children who do not work enough than there are who are made to work too hard. in our zeal we sometimes forbid children to work, when some work would be the very best thing for them. it is true that on the farm as well as in the factory ignorant and mercenary parents make dollars out of the sweat of their children, when these should be going to school or engaged in physical and mental recreation and development. it is unfortunate that society is not able to see to it, that, as in plato's republic, every child and every person engage in the work or study for which he is best fitted, and to the extent that is best for him. then the hundreds of thousands of children who are idling would be engaged in some kind of occupation, and those who are working too hard would be given lighter tasks; and all would have the privilege of an appropriate education. =the finest life on earth.=--in view of such circumstances and opportunities, life in the country should be, and _could be made_, the best and most complete life possible to a human being. country life is the best cradle of the race. to have a good home and rear a family in the heart of a great city is well-nigh impossible for the average laboring man. the struggle for existence is too fierce and the opportunity, in childhood and youth, for self-expression and initiative is too meager. the environment is too vast, complex, and overwhelming, with nothing worth while for the child to do. "individuals may stand, but generations will slip" on such an inclined plane of life. from this point of view it can be truly said, we think, that "god made the country while man made the town." the real, vital possibilities of country life are without number. the surface attractions of the city are most alluring. a focusing of the public mind upon the problem, its _pros_ and _cons_, will, it is to be hoped, turn the scales without delay in favor of country life and its substantial benefits. bibliography the following bibliography is submitted as affording information and suggestive helps to those who are interested in the problems herein discussed. although the books and references have been selected with care, it is not to be inferred that the list includes any considerable portion of the vast and still increasing output of literature in this field of investigation. but it will prove to be a fairly comprehensive list from which the reader may select such articles or books as make a favorable appeal to him. the works referred to are all of recent date, and express the current trend of thought upon the problems discussed in this little volume. books american academy of political and social science. philadelphia, . vol. xl, no. , "country life": butterfield, "rural sociology as a college discipline"; cance, "immigrant rural communities"; carver, "changes in country population"; coulter, "agricultural laborers"; davenport, "scientific farming"; dixon, "rural home"; eyerly, "coöperative movements among farmers"; foght, "the country school"; gillette, "conditions and needs of country life"; gray, "southern agriculture"; hartman, "village problems"; hamilton, "agricultural fairs"; henderson, "rural police"; hibbard, "farm tendency"; kates, "rural conferences"; lewis, "tramp problem"; marquis, "the press"; mumford, "education for agriculture"; parker, "good roads"; pearson, "chautauquas"; roberts and israel, "y.m.c.a."; scudder, "rural recreation"; true, "the department of agriculture"; van norman, "conveniences"; watrous, "civic art"; washington, b. t., "the rural negro community"; wilson, "social life"; wells, "rural church". bailey, l. h.: _the country life movement in the u. s._ ( ) pp. macmillan co., new york. _cyclopedia of american agriculture._ vols. $ . . macmillan co., new york. _the state and the farmer._ ( ) pp. macmillan co., new york. _the training of farmers._ ( ) pp. century co., new york. betts, george h.: _new ideals in rural schools._ ( ) pp. houghton mifflin co., boston. brown, h. a.: _readjustment of a rural high school to the needs of a community._ ( ) bureau of education, bulletin no. . buell, jennie: _one woman's work for farm women._ c. whitcomb & barrows, boston. burnham, ernest: _two types of rural schools._ ( ) pp. teachers college, columbia, new york. butterfield, k. l.: _chapters in rural progress._ $ . . univ. of chicago press. _the country church and the rural problem._ ( ) pp. univ. of chicago press. carney, mabel: _country life and the country school._ ( ) pp. row, peterson & co., chicago. conference on rural education--_proceedings._ ( ) pp. wright & potter, boston. coulter, john lee: _coöperation among farmers._ ( ) c. sturgis & walton co., new york. cubberly, e. p.: _the improvement of the rural school._ ( ) pp. houghton mifflin co., boston. _rural life and education._ houghton mifflin co., boston. curtis, henry s.: _play and recreation for the open country._ ( ) pp. ginn & co., boston. davenport, mrs. e.: _possibilities of the country home._ (bulletin.) university of illinois, urbana. dodd, helen c.: _the healthful farm house; by a farmer's wife._ ( ) pp. whitcomb & barrows, new york. eggleston, j. d., and bruère, r. w.: _the work of the rural school._ ( ) pp. harpers. fiske, g. w.: _the challenge of the country._ ( ) pp. association press, new york. foght, h. w.: _the american rural school._ ( ) pp. macmillan co., new york. f. t.: _the country school of to-morrow._ ( ) pp. general education board, new york. gillette, j. m.: _constructive rural sociology._ ( ) pp. sturgis & walton, new york. haggard, h. r.: _rural denmark and its lessons._ ( ) $ . . longmans, green & co., new york. hutchinson, f. k.: _our country life._ ( ) pp. a. c. mcclurg & co., chicago. kern, o. j.: _among country schools._ ( ) pp. ginn & co., boston. macdonald, n. c.: _the consolidation of rural schools in north dakota._ ( ) pp. state board of education, bismarck, n. d. mckeever, wm. a.: _farm boys and girls._ ( ) pp. macmillan co., new york. monahan, a. c.: _the status of rural education in the u. s._ bureau of education, washington, d. c. page, l. w.: _roads, paths, and bridges._ ( ) $ . . sturgis & walton co., new york. pennsylvania rural progress association: _proceedings, rural life conference._ ( ) pp. julius smith, secretary, pennsdale, pa. plunkett, sir horace c.: _rural problem in the u. s._ ( ) pp. report of national commission on rural life. doc. no. . government printing office, washington, d. c. schmidt, c. c.: _consolidation of schools._ university of north dakota. seerley, h. h.: _the country school._ ( ) pp. scribner's sons, new york. _rural school education._ ( ) pp. university of texas. wray, angelina: _jean mitchell's school._ $ . . public school pub. co., bloomington, ind. articles in reports and periodicals allman, l. j.: _teachers for rural schools._ report, n. e. a. ( ) pp. and . bailey, l. h.: _why boys leave the farm._ century, : - (july, ). barnes, f. r.: _present defects in the rural schools._ report n. d. e. a. ( ) pp. - . bruère, martha bensley: _the farmer and his wife._ good housekeeping mag., june, , p. , new york. conference for education in the south; _proceedings, ._ foster, webb, and parkes, nashville, tenn. consolidation: drop a postal card to superintendents of public instruction for latest printed matter. cotton, f. a.: _country life and the country school._ school and home education, : - (nov., ). coulter, j. c.: _coöperative farming._ world's work, : - (nov., ). _county supervision._ report n.e.a. , p. . cubberly, e. p.: _politics and the country school problem._ educ. review, : - (jan., ). gillette, j. m.: _the drift to the city._ am. journal of sociology, : - (mar., ). hibbard, b. h.: _tenancy in the north central states._ quar. journal of economics, : - (aug., ). hill, j. j.: _what we must do to be fed._ world's work, : - (nov., ). mcclure, d. e.: _education of country children for the farm._ education, : - (oct., ). miller, e. e.: _factors in the re-making of country life._ forum, : - (sept., ). _passing of the man with the hoe._ world's work, : - (aug., ). _rural life and rural education._ report n. e. a. , pp. - . supervision: index of n. e. a. reports for county. report of , pp. - . wells, george f.: _is an organized country life movement possible?_ survey, : - (jan. , ). index activity and passivity, affiliation, agricultural colleges, , apperception mass, assistant county superintendent, attendance in consolidated school, automobile parties, "back to the country," best, the--the cheapest, boarding place, boy scouts, bright side of rural life, camp-fire girls, character, child labor, china, , chores, cities, population of, ; churches of, ; conveniences in, , ; schools of, commission, rural, , committee of twelve, community activities, consolidation, , , , , ; cost, ; difficulties, ; effects of, , , , ; process, ; when not needed, conventions, coöperation, , , , county superintendence, course of study, curriculum in rural schools, - dancing, debates, district system, diversification in farming, , dramatic performances, driver, education, ; of teachers, ; value of, educational centers, ; column in press, environment, , examination of schools, exhibits, school, experience, teaching, extension work, farmer, the, and his home, ; and his politics, forum, a rural, games, , grading, harvesting machinery, - high schools, progress in, higher education, progress in, hopkins, mark, , , hours of labor, ideal life, imitation, , , individual work, inseparables, the three, , , interpreting core, inventiveness in rural life, - kindness, too much, knots, untying, labor, hours of, labor-saving devices, laws, self-imposed, leadership, , , , lectures, leveling process, , library extension, literary society, literature, urbanized, machinery, caring for, married teachers, men needed in teaching, , mental factor, mixed farming, "mode," the, , model rural school, moving pictures, münsterberg, prof. h., murphy, francis, music, normal schools, ocean travel, organization, , "overflow of instruction," physical soundness, , plant, the educational, , , problem, rural, , , , , profession, , profit-sharing, progress, lines of, - punctuality, reaping machines, , renaissance, rural, responsibility, retired farmers, retirement fund, roads, better, routine, rural commission, , rural schools, ; backward, , , ; buildings, ; course of study for, ; good, , ; interior, ; no progress in, ; organization, ; ventilation of, rural teachers, ; courses for, , salaries, , , school board, scientific farming, ; spirit, self-activity, , , social center, , , ; cost of, , ; as business center, spelling school, sports, standards, , , ; to be raised, steam engine, storm, a. v., supervision, , , , , ; city, ; county, , ; importance of, ; nominal, ; overdone, ; purpose of, surroundings, effect of, on children, , teacher, , , , , , ; chief factor, ; leader, , , ; courses for, , , terms, school, , textbook teaching, township system, , transportation of pupils, , urban trend, urbanized literature, value of education, ventilation, wages, , waste land, winter work, women's condition, work, value of, , , , ; city, ; farm, yearly routine, college teaching studies in methods of teaching in the college edited by paul klapper, ph.d. associate professor of education the college of the city of new york with an introduction by nicholas murray butler, ll.d. president of columbia university yonkers-on-hudson, new york world book company world book company the house of applied knowledge established, , by caspar w. hodgson yonkers-on-hudson, new york , prairie avenue, chicago a treasure of wisdom is stored in the colleges of the land. the teachers are the custodians of knowledge that makes life free and progressive. this book aims to make the college teacher effective in handing down this heritage of knowledge, rich and vital, that will develop in youth the power of right thinking and the courage of right living. thus _college teaching_ carries out the ideal of service as expressed in the motto of the world book company, "books that apply the world's knowledge to the world's needs". copyright, , by world book company copyright in great britain _all rights reserved_ preface the student of general problems of education or of elementary education finds an extensive literature of varying worth. in the last decade our secondary schools have undergone radical reorganization and have assumed new functions. a rich literature on every phase of the high school is rapidly developing to keep pace with the needs and the progress of secondary education. the literature on college education in general and college pedagogy in particular is surprisingly undeveloped. this dearth is not caused by the absence of problem, for indeed there is room for much improvement in the organization, the administration, and the pedagogy of the college. investigators of these problems have been considerably discouraged by the facts they have gathered. this volume is conceived in the hope of stimulating an interest in the quality of college teaching and initiating a scientific study of college pedagogy. the field is almost virgin, and the need for constructive programs is acute. we therefore ask for our effort the indulgence that is usually accorded a pioneer. in this age of specialization of study it is evident that no college teacher, however wide his experience and extensive his education, can speak with authority on the teaching of all the subjects in the college curriculum, or even of all the major ones. for this reason this volume is the product of a coöperating authorship. the editor devotes himself to the study of general methods of teaching that apply to almost all subjects and to most teaching situations. in addition, he coördinates the work of the other contributors. he realizes that there exists among college professors an active hostility to the study of pedagogy. the professors feel that one who knows his subject can teach it. the contributors have been purposely selected in order to dispel this hostility. they are, one and all, men of undisputed scholarship who have realized the need of a mode of presentation that will make their knowledge alive. books of multiple authorship often possess too wide a diversity of viewpoints. the reader comes away with no underlying thought and no controlling principles. to overcome this defect, so common in books of this type, a tentative outline was formulated, setting forth a desirable mode of treating, in the confines of one chapter, the teaching of any subject in the college curriculum. this outline was submitted to all contributors for critical analysis and constructive criticism. the original plan was later modified in accordance with the suggestions of the contributors. this final outline, which follows, was then sent to the contributors with the full understanding that each writer was free to make such modifications as his specialty demanded and his judgment dictated. this outline is followed in most of the chapters and gives the book that unifying element necessary in any book and vital in a work of so large a coöperating authorship. the editor begs to acknowledge his indebtedness to the many contributors who have given generously of their time and their labor with no hope of compensation beyond the ultimate appreciation of those college teachers who are eager to learn from the experience of others so that they may the better serve their students. tentative outline for the teaching of ---- in the college i. aim of subject _x_ in the college curriculum: is it taught for disciplinary values? what are they? is it taught for cultural reasons? is it taught to give necessary information? is it taught to prepare for professional studies? is the aim single or eclectic? do the aims vary for different groups of students? does this apply to all the courses in your specialty? how does the aim govern the methods of teaching? ii. place of the subject in the college curriculum: in what year or years should it be taught? what part of the college course--in terms of time or credits--should be allotted to it? what is the practice in other colleges? what course or courses in this subject should be part of the general curriculum or be prescribed for students in art, in science, in modern languages, or in the preprofessional or professional groups? iii. organization of the subject in the college course: desired sequence of courses in this subject. what is the basis of this sequence? gradation of successive difficulties or logical sequence of facts? should these courses be elective or prescribed? all prescribed? for all groups of students? in what years should the elective work be offered? iv. discussion of methods of teaching this subject: place and relative worth of lecture method, laboratory work, recitations, research, case method, field work, assignment from a single text or reference reading, etc. discussion of such problems as the following: shall the first course in chemistry be a general and extensive course summing up the scope of chemistry, its function in organic and inorganic nature, with no laboratory work other than the experimentation by the instructor? should students in the social sciences study the subject deductively from a book or should the book be postponed and the instructor present a series of problems from the social life of the student so that the analysis of these may lead the student to formulate many of the generalizations that are given early in a textbook course? should college mathematics be presented as a series of subjects, e.g., algebra (advanced), solid geometry, trigonometry, analytical geometry, calculus, etc.? would it be better to present the subject as a single and unified whole in two or three semesters? should a student study his mathematics as it is developed in his book,--viz., as an intellectual product of a matured mind familiar with the subject,--or should the subject grow gradually in a more or less unorganized form from a series of mechanical, engineering, building, nautical, surveying, and structural problems that can be found in the life and environment of the student? v. moot questions in the teaching of this subject. vi. how judge whether the subject has been of worth to the student? how test whether the aims of this subject have been realized? how test how much the student has carried away? what means, methods, and indices exist aside from the traditional examination? vii. bibliography on the pedagogy of this subject as far as it applies to college teaching. the aim of the bibliography should be to give worth-while contributions that present elaborations of what is here presented or points of view and modes of procedure that differ from those here set forth. paul klapper _the college of the city of new york_ contents page introduction xiii by nicholas murray butler, ph.d., ll.d. president of columbia university. author of _the meaning of education_, _true and false democracy_, etc. editor of _educational review_ part one--the introductory studies chapter i history and present tendencies of the american college by stephen pierce duggan, ph.d. professor of education, the college of the city of new york. author of _a student's history of education_ ii professional training for college teaching by sidney e. mezes, ph.d., ll.d. president of the college of the city of new york. formerly president of university of texas. author of _ethics, descriptive and explanatory_ iii general principles of college teaching by paul klapper, ph.d. associate professor of education, the college of the city of new york. author of _principles of educational practice_, _the teaching of english_, etc. part two--the sciences iv the teaching of biology by t. w. galloway, ph.d., litt.d. professor of zoölogy, beloit college. author of _textbook of zoölogy_, _biology of sex for parents and teachers_, _use of motives in moral education_, etc. v the teaching of chemistry by louis kahlenberg, ph.d. director of the course in chemistry and professor of chemistry, university of wisconsin. author of _outlines of chemistry_, _laboratory exercises in chemistry_, _chemistry analysis_, _chemistry and its relation to daily life_, etc. vi the teaching of physics by harvey b. lemon, ph.d. assistant professor of physics, university of chicago vii the teaching of geology by t. c. chamberlin, ph.d., ll.d., sc.d. professor and head of department of geology and director of walker museum, university of chicago. author of _geology of wisconsin_, _the origin of the earth_. editor of _the journal of geology_ viii the teaching of mathematics by g. a. miller, ph.d. professor of mathematics, university of illinois. author of _determinants_, _mathematical monographs_ (co-author), _theory and applications of groups of finite order_ (co-author), _historical introduction to the mathematical literature_, etc. co-editor of _american year book_ and _encyclopédie des sciences mathématiques_ ix physical education in the college by thomas a. storey, m.d., ph.d. professor of hygiene, the college of the city of new york. state inspector of physical training, new york. secretary-general, fourth international congress of school hygiene, buffalo, . executive-secretary, united states interdepartmental social hygiene board. author of various contributions to standard works on physiology, hygiene, and physical training part three--the social sciences x the teaching of economics by frank a. fetter, ph.d., ll.d. professor of political economy, princeton university. author of _economic principles and modern economic problems_ xi the teaching of sociology by arthur j. todd, ph.d. professor of sociology and director of the training course for social and civic work, university of minnesota. author of _the primitive family as an educational factor_, _theories of social progress_ xii the teaching of history a. american history by henry w. elson, a.m., litt.d. president of thiel college. formerly professor of history, ohio university. author of _history of the united states_, _the story of the old world_ (with cornelia e. macmullan), etc. b. modern european history by edward krehbiel, ph.d. professor of modern european history, leland stanford university. author of _the interdict_, _nationalism_, _war and society_ xiii the teaching of political science by charles grove haines, ph.d. professor of government, university of texas. author of _conflict over judicial powers in the united states prior to _, _the american doctrine of judicial supremacy_, _the teaching of government_ (report of committee on instruction, political science association) xiv the teaching of philosophy by frank thilly, ph.d., ll.d. professor of philosophy, dean of the college of arts and sciences, cornell university. author of _introduction to ethics_, _history of philosophy_ xv the teaching of ethics by henry neumann, ph.d. leader of the brooklyn society for ethical culture. formerly of the department of education, the college of the city of new york, author of _moral values in secondary education_ xvi the teaching of psychology by robert s. woodworth, ph.d. professor of psychology, columbia university. author of _dynamic psychology_, _le mouvement_, _care of the body_, _elements of physiological psychology_ (with george trumbull ladd) xvii the teaching of education a. teaching the history of education by herman h. horne, ph.d. (harvard). professor of the history of education and the history of philosophy, new york university. author of _the philosophy of education_, _the psychological principles of education_, _free will and human responsibility_, etc. b. teaching educational theory by frederick e. bolton, ph.d. dean of the college of education, university of washington. author of _principles of education_, _the secondary school system of germany_ part four--the languages and literatures xviii the teaching of english literature by caleb t. winchester, l.h.d. professor of english literature, wesleyan university. author of _some principles of literary criticism_, _a group of english essayists_, _william wordsworth: how to know him_, etc. xix the teaching of english composition by henry seidel canby, ph.d. adviser in literary composition, yale university. author of _the short story in english_, _college sons and college fathers_, etc. xx the teaching of the classics by william k. prentice, ph.d. professor of greek, princeton university, author of _greek and latin inscriptions in syria_ xxi the teaching of the romance languages by william a. nitze, ph.d. professor and head of department of romance languages, university of chicago. author of _the grail romance_, _glastonbury and the holy grail_, _handbook of french phonetics_, etc. contributor to _new international encyclopedia_ xxii the teaching of german by e. prokosch, ph.d. late professor of germanic languages, university of texas. author of _teaching of german in secondary schools_, _phonetic lessons in german_, _sounds and history of the german language_, etc. part five--the arts xxiii the teaching of music by edward dickinison, litt.d. professor of history and criticism of music, oberlin college. author of _music in the history of the western church_, _the study of the history of music_, _the education of a music lover_, _music and the higher education_ xxiv the teaching of art by holmes smith, a.m. professor of drawing and the history of art, washington university. author of various articles in magazines on art topics part six--vocational subjects xxv the teaching of engineering subjects by ira o. baker, c.e., d. eng'g. professor of civil engineering, university of illinois. author of _treatise on masonry construction_, _treatise on roads and pavements_ xxvi the teaching of mechanical drawing by james d. phillips, b.s. assistant dean and professor of drawing, college of engineering, university of wisconsin, author of _elements of descriptive geometry_ (with a. v. millar), _mechanical drawing for secondary schools_ (with f. o. crawshaw), _mechanical drawing for colleges and universities_ (with h. d. orth) and herbert d. orth, b.s. assistant professor of mechanical drawing and descriptive geometry, university of wisconsin. author of _mechanical drawing for colleges and universities_ (with j. d. phillips) xxvii the teaching of journalism by talcott williams, a.m. ll.d., litt.d. director, school of journalism, columbia university xxviii business education by frederick b. robinson, ph.d. professor of economics and dean of the school of business and civic administration, college of the city of new york index introduction it is characteristic of the american people to have profound faith in the power of education. since colonial days the american college has played a large part in american life and has trained an overwhelming proportion of the leaders of american opinion. there was a time when the american college was a relatively simple institution of a uniform type, but that time has passed. the term "college" is now used in a variety of significations, a number of which are very new and very modern indeed. some of these uses of the term are quite indefensible, as when one speaks of a college of engineering, or of law, or of medicine, or of journalism, or of architecture. such use of the word merely confuses and makes impossible clear thinking as to educational institutions and educational aims. the term "college" can be properly used only of an institution which offers training in the liberal arts and sciences to youth who have completed a standard secondary school course of study. the purpose of college teaching is to lay the foundation for intelligent and effective specialization later on, to open the mind to new interpretations and new understandings both of man and of nature, and to give instruction in those standards of judgment and appreciation, the possession and application of which are the marks of the truly educated and cultivated man. the size of a college is a matter of small importance, except that under modern conditions a large college and one in immediate contact with the life of a university is almost certain to command larger intellectual resources than is an institution of a different type. the important thing about a college is its spirit, its clearness of aim, its steadiness of purpose, and the opportunity which it affords for direct personal contact between teacher and student. given these, the question of size is unimportant. there was a time when it was felt, probably correctly, that a satisfactory college training could be had by requiring all students to follow a single prescribed course of study. at that time, college students were drawn almost exclusively from families and homes of a single type or kind. their purposes in after-life were similar, and their range of intellectual sympathy, while intense, was rather narrow. the last fifty years have changed all this. college students are now drawn from families and homes of every conceivable type and kind. their purposes in after-life are very different, while new subjects of study have been multiplied many fold. the old and useful tradition of latin, greek, and mathematics, together with a little history and literature, as the chief elements in a college course of study, had to give way when first the natural sciences, and then the social sciences, claimed attention and when even these older subjects of study were themselves subdivided into many parts. these changes forced a change in the old-fashioned program of college study, and led to the various substitutes for it that now exist. whether a college prefers the elective system of study, or the group system, or some other method of combining instruction that is regarded as fundamental with other instruction that is regarded as less so, the fact is that all these are simply different kinds of attempt to meet a new condition which is the natural result of intellectual and economic changes. just now the college is in a state of transition. it is not at all clear precisely what its status will be a generation hence, or how far present tendencies may continue to increase, or how far they may be counteracted by a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. therefore this is a time to describe rather than to dogmatize, and it is description which is the characteristic mark of the important series of papers which constitute the several chapters in the present volume. a careful reading of these papers is commended not only to the great army of college teachers and college students, but to that still greater army of those who, whether as alumni or as parents or as citizens, are deeply concerned with the preservation of the influence and character of the american college for its effect upon our national standards of thought and action. american colleges are of two distinct types, and it may be that the future has in store a different position for each type. the true distinction between colleges is according as they are separate or are incorporated in a university system, and not at all as to whether they are large or small. a separate college, such as amherst or beloit or grinnell or pomona, has its own peculiar problems of support and administration. the university college, on the other hand, such as columbia or harvard or chicago or the college of any state university, has quite different problems of support and of administration. it is not unlikely that the distinction between these two types of college will become more sharply marked as years go by, and that eventually they will appear to be two distinct institutions rather than two types of one and the same institution. meanwhile, we have to deal with the college as it is, in all its varied forms, but characteristically american whatever its form. the american college has little or no resemblance to the english public school or to the french lycée or to the german gymnasium. it is something more than any one of these, and at the same time something less. it differs from them all very much as the conditions of american life differ from those of english or of french or of german life. the college may or may not involve residence, but when it does involve residence, it is at its best. it is then that the largest amount of carefully ordered and stimulating influence can be brought to bear upon the daily life of growing and expanding youth, and it is then and only then, that youth can get the inestimable benefits which follow from daily and hourly contact with others of like age, like tastes, like habits, and like purposes. indeed, it has often been said that the college gives more through its opportunities which attach to residence, than through its opportunities which attach to instruction. almost every conceivable problem that can arise in college life and college work, is discussed in the following pages. it is now coming to be understood that the health of the college student is as much a matter of concern as his instruction, and that a college is not doing its full duty by those who seek its doors, when it merely provides libraries, laboratories, and skillful teachers. it must also provide for such conditions of residence, of food, of exercise, and of frequent medical examination and inspection, as shall protect and preserve the health of those who come to take advantage of its instruction. there is one other point which should not be overlooked, and that is the literally immense influence exerted in america by that solidarity of college sentiment and college opinion which is kept alive by organizations of former college students scattered throughout the land. this, again, is a peculiarly american development, and it serves to unite the college and public sentiment much more closely than any formal tie could possibly do. indeed, it illustrates how completely the american people claim the college as their own. the man or woman who has once been a college student never ceases to be a member of that particular college or to labor to extend its influence and to increase its usefulness. every reader of this volume should approach it in a spirit of sympathetic understanding of american higher education, and of the college as the oldest instrument of that higher education and still one of the chief elements in it. nicholas murray butler _columbia university_ part one the introductory studies chapter i history and present tendencies of the american college _stephen p. duggan_ ii professional training for college teaching _sidney e. mezes_ iii general principles of college teaching _paul klapper_ i history and present tendencies of the american college . the colonial period =the predominance of the religious motive= the american colonies were founded chiefly by englishmen who came to america for a variety of reasons. some of these were economic and political, but the most important of their reasons was the desire to practice their religious convictions with greater freedom than was permitted at home. apart from the state religion, however, all the colonists were animated by a love for english institutions which they transplanted to the new world, and among these institutions were the grammar school and the college. wherever the reformation had been chiefly a religious rather than a political and ecclesiastical movement, the interest in education and the effect upon it were direct and immediate. this was true where calvinism prevailed, as in the netherlands, scotland, and among the puritans in england. hence it is natural to find that the first effective movements in america toward the establishment of educational institutions, both elementary and higher, should have taken place in new england. a large proportion of university graduates were included among the settlers of the massachusetts bay colony. they were chiefly graduates of cambridge, which had always been religiously more tolerant than oxford, and especially of emmanuel college, which was the stronghold of puritanism at cambridge. it was natural that these men, leaders in the affairs of the colony, should want to establish a new cambridge university, but it is astonishing that they were able to do so as early as , only six years after the founding of this colony. two years later the college was named after john harvard, a clergyman and a graduate of emmanuel, who upon his death bequeathed half his estate and all his fine library of three hundred volumes to the college. the religious motive predominated in the founding of harvard, for though the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." harvard remained the sole instrument in the colonies for that purpose for more than half a century. in the college of william and mary was founded in virginia, with the most generous endowment of any pre-revolutionary college, generous because of the help received from the mother country. it was the child of the church of england, and its president and its professors had to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles. subscription to a religious creed was also demanded of the president and tutors of the third american college, founded in . this collegiate institute, as it was called, moved from place to place for more than a decade, but finally it settled permanently in new haven in . it afterward received the name of yale college in honor of elihu yale, who had given it generous assistance. as a result of the founding of these three institutions, the new england and the southern colonies had their need for ministers fairly well supplied, but this was not yet true of the middle colonies. however, the presbyterians had become particularly strong in the middle colonies, and their religious zeal resulted in the establishment of the college of new jersey, now princeton university, in . a few years later benjamin franklin advanced for the college a new _raison d'être_. in he published a pamphlet entitled "proposals relating to the education of youth in pennsylvania," in which he advocated the establishment of an academy whose purpose was not the training of ministers but the secular one of developing the practical virtue necessary in the opening up of a new country. the academy was opened in , and the charter, granted in , designated the institution as "the college, academy, and charitable school of philadelphia." though the extremely modern organization and curriculum suggested by franklin were not realized, the institution, which was afterward called "the university of pennsylvania," offered the most liberal curriculum of any college in the colonies up to the revolution. the human motive was uppermost also in the establishment of king's college in . the colonial assembly desired its establishment to enhance the welfare and reputation of the colony, and the only connection between the college and the church of england lay in the requirement that the president should be a communicant of that church and that the morning and evening service of the college should be performed out of the liturgy of that church. but the religious motive again comes to the fore in the establishment of brown university at providence, rhode island, in , primarily to train ministers for the baptist churches; of queens, afterwards named rutgers, in , to provide ministers for the dutch reformed churches; and of dartmouth, in , from which it was hoped at first that the evangelization of the indians would proceed. =character of the colonial college= these colonial colleges in their histories bear a great resemblance to one another. they were almost all born in poverty and led a desperate financial existence for many years. in some cases survival was possible only as the result of the untiring self-sacrifice of some great personality like eleazar wheelock, the first president of dartmouth; in all cases, of the devotion of teachers and officers. their beginnings were all small; in some cases the president was the only member of the instructing staff and taught all the subjects of the curriculum. the students were few in number, the equipment was simple, the buildings usually consisting of a house for the president, in which he often heard recitations, a dormitory for the students, and a college hall. libraries, laboratories, and recreational facilities were usually conspicuous by their absence. in fact, as the curriculum consisted almost exclusively of philosophy, greek, latin, rhetoric, and a little mathematics, there was no great need of much equipment. the classics were taught by the intensive grammatical method; in philosophy there was a great deal of dialectical disputation; rhetoric was studied as an aid to oratory; mathematics included only arithmetic and geometry. the aim of instruction was, not to give a wide acquaintance with many fields of knowledge for cultural and appreciative purposes, but rather to develop power through intensive exercise upon a restricted curriculum. but the value of the materials utilized to produce power which would function in oratory, debate, and diplomacy is splendidly illustrated in the decades before the revolution. the contest between the colonies and the mother country was essentially a rational contest in which questions of constitutional law and, indeed, of the fundamental principles of civil and political existence were debated. splendidly did the leaders of public opinion in the colonies, almost every one of whom was a graduate of a colonial college, defend the cause of the colonists in pamphlet and debate. and when debate was followed by war, twenty-five per cent of the twenty-five hundred graduates of the colonial colleges were found in the military service of their country. at the close of the struggle for independence, it was again upon the shoulders of the men who had gained vision and character in the colonial colleges that the burden fell of organizing the mutually suspicious and antagonistic colonies into one nation. space will not permit even of the enumeration of the great leaders who graduated from all the colonial colleges, but an idea of the service rendered by those institutions to the new nation may be obtained by mentioning the names of a few statesmen who received their instruction in one of the least of them, william and mary. in its classrooms were taught thomas jefferson, benjamin harrison, edmund randolph, james monroe, and john marshall. . the national era =french influence= french influence upon american political and intellectual life had become quite pronounced as the result of the contact between the leaders of the two peoples during and after the revolution. that influence was reflected in the colleges. instruction in the french language was offered in several of the colleges before the close of the eighteenth century, and a chair of french was established at columbia as early as and at william and mary in . the secularizing influence of the french united also with the democratizing influence of the revolution in diminishing the influence of the church upon the colleges and emphasizing the influence of the state and especially the relations between college and people. of the fourteen colleges founded between and , the majority were established upon a non-sectarian basis. these included institutions of a private nature like washington and lee, bowdoin, and union, as well as institutions closely related to the state governments like the universities of north carolina and of vermont. there can hardly be any doubt that the french system of centralized administration in civil affairs influenced the establishment of the university of the state of new york. the university of the state of new york is not a local institution, but a body of nine regents elected by the legislature to control the administration of education throughout the state of new york. though organized by alexander hamilton, it was in all probability much influenced by john jay, who returned from france in . but the most potent factor in the spread of french influence in the early history of our country was thomas jefferson. while jefferson was american minister to france, he studied the french system of education and embodied ideas taken from it in the organization of the university of virginia. this occupied much of his attention during the last two decades of his life. the university was to be entirely non-sectarian and had for its purpose ( ) to form statesmen, legislators, and judges for the commonwealth; ( ) to expand the principles and structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of states, and a sound spirit of legislation; ( ) to harmonize and promote the interests of all forms of industry, chiefly by well-informed views of political economy; ( ) to develop the reasoning faculties of youth and to broaden their minds and develop their character; ( ) to enlighten them with knowledge, especially of the physical sciences which will advance the material welfare of the people. these progressive views of what the college should aim to do were associated with equally advanced views of college administration, such as the elective system and the importation of professors from abroad. the remarkable vision, constructive imagination, courage, and faith of jefferson in his break with what was traditional and authoritative in education has been justified by the fine career of the university which he founded. =the state universities system= all the colleges that were established before the revolution, and most of those between the revolution and the year , had received direct assistance from the colonial or state government either in grants of land, money, the proceeds of lotteries, or special taxes. most of them, however, were dependent upon private foundations and controlled by denominational bodies. the secularizing influence from france, the growing interest in civic and political affairs, and the democratic spirit resulting from the revolution combined to develop a distrust of the colleges as they were organized and a desire to bring them under the control of the state. this was apparent in , when the legislature of pennsylvania withdrew the charter of the college of philadelphia and created a new corporation to be known as "the trustees of the university of the state of pennsylvania"; it was shown in when columbia college was granted a new charter by the state legislature, under which the board of trustees were all drawn from the board of regents of the state; it was made most evident in when the legislature of new hampshire transformed dartmouth college into a university without the consent of the board of trustees and empowered the governor and council to appoint a board of overseers. in the celebrated dartmouth college case, , the old board of trustees, when defeated before the supreme court of new hampshire in their suit for the recovery of property which had been seized, carried the case to the supreme court of the united states and engaged daniel webster as their counsel. the court declared the act of the new hampshire legislature in violation of the provision of the constitution of the united states which reads that "no state shall pass any ... law impairing the obligation of contracts." the decision drew a sharp distinction between public and private corporations, and a necessary inference was that most of the existing institutions for higher education were in the latter class. the result was to strengthen the rising demand for publicly controlled institutions. the southern and western states across the alleghanies that were on the point of framing state constitutions made provision for state universities under state control. the intention to provide higher education freely for the people had already received its greatest impetus in an act of congress passed shortly after the passage of the ordinance of , providing for the organization of the northwest territory. by that act two entire townships of public land were reserved to the states to be erected out of the territory, the proceeds of the sale of which were to be devoted to the establishment of a state university. these universities followed swiftly upon the establishment of new states, and the democratic ideal that prevailed is shown in the determination that the state university was to be the crown of the public educational system of the state. this is well illustrated in the provision of the constitution of indiana, adopted in the very year of the dartmouth college decision, , which reads, "it shall be the duty of the general assembly, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide by law for a general system of education, ascending in regular gradation from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all." circumstances did permit in the following year, and the provisions of the bill materialized. the national policy of granting public lands for educational purposes to new states was continued, and one or two townships were devoted in each case to the establishment of a state university. national assistance to higher education was given on an immense scale in , when the morrill act was passed providing for the grant of , acres of land for each representative and senator, to be devoted to the support in each state of a higher institution of learning, in which technical and agricultural branches should be taught. within twenty years every state in the union had taken advantage of this splendid endowment, either to found a new state university which would comply with the requirements as regards courses of instruction or to establish an agricultural college as an independent institution, or in connection with some already existing institution. not only do some of the finest state universities like those of california, illinois, and minnesota owe their origins to the morrill act, but others owe to it their real beginnings as institutions of collegiate grade. up to the passage of the morrill act a dozen state universities struggled to maintain themselves with meager revenues and few students. they were trying to do broad academic work, but by no means reached the standards of the strong colleges in the eastern part of the country. the establishment of state-supported and state-controlled universities in the commonwealths organized after the close of the eighteenth century by no means put an end to the establishment of colleges upon religious foundations. denominational zeal was very strong in the decades preceding the civil war, and the church was the center of community life in the newly settled regions. the need to provide an intelligent ministry and also a higher civilization led to the establishment of many small sectarian colleges in the new states. despite the fact that practically all of them would today be considered only of secondary grade, they accomplished a splendid work and provided ideals and standards of intellectual life in a new country whose population was engaged chiefly in supplying the physical needs of life. the response made in the civil war by the institutions of higher education throughout the united states, whether privately or publicly supported, was a magnificent return for the sacrifices endured in their establishment and maintenance. everywhere throughout the north the colleges were depleted of instructors and students who had entered the ranks, and in the south nearly all the colleges were compelled to close their doors. upon the shoulders of their graduates fell the burden of directing civil and military affairs in state and nation. . the modern era were a visitor to harvard or columbia in to revisit it today, the changes he would observe would be startling. the elective system, graduate studies, professional and technical schools, an allied woman's college, and a summer session are a few of the most noticeable activities incorporated since . it would be impossible to set any date for the beginning of this transformation, so gradual and subtle has it been, but the accession of dr. charles w. eliot to the presidency of harvard college in and the establishment of johns hopkins university in are definite landmarks. this chapter is a history of the american college, and space will not permit of a detailed description of these activities but simply of a narration of the way they developed and of the forces which brought them into being. =the curriculum and the elective system= it has already been mentioned that the curriculum of the average american college at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed but little from the curriculum followed in the middle of the seventeenth. the reason is simple. the curriculum is based upon the biological principle of adaptation to environment, and the environment of the average american of differed but slightly from his ancestor of a century and a half previous. the growth of the curriculum follows, slowly it is often true, upon the growth of knowledge. the growth of knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was slow and insignificant compared to its marvelous growth in the nineteenth century, particularly in the last half of it. the great discoveries in science, first in chemistry, then in physics and biology, resulted in their gradually displacing much of the logic and philosophy which had maintained the prime place in the old curriculum. the interest aroused in the french language and literature by our revolution; in the spanish by the south american wars of independence; and in the german by the distinguished scholars who studied in the german universities during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, caused a demand that those languages as well as english have a place in the curriculum. this could be secured only by making them partly alternatives to the classical languages. the industrial revolution, based as it was upon the application of science to industry, not only gave an impetus to the establishment of technical schools, but by revolutionizing the production and distribution of wealth pushed into the curriculum the science that deals with wealth, political economy. the growth of cities that followed in the wake of the industrial revolution, the conflicts between the interests of classes,--viz., landowners, capitalists, and laborers,--the rapid decay of feudalism and the spread of political democracy following the french revolution, the expansion of commerce to all corners of the globe and the resulting development of colonialism, all these human interests gave a new meaning to the study of history and politics which caused them to secure a place of great prominence in the curriculum during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. it is perfectly obvious that as the time at the student's disposal remained the same, if he were to pursue even a part of the new subject matter that was gradually admitted into the curriculum, the course of study could no longer remain wholly prescribed and he would have to be granted some freedom of choice. the growth in number of students also produced changes in administration favorable to the introduction of the elective system. in the early history of the american college one instructor taught a single class in all subjects, and it was not until that the transfer was made at harvard from the teaching of classes by one instructor to the teaching of each subject by one instructor. with increase in numbers the students were unable to receive in each year instruction by every member of the teaching staff. in spite of the quite obvious advantages of the elective system, it was obstinately resisted by the defenders of the classics and also of orthodox religion and at first made but slow progress. thomas jefferson gave it the first great impetus when he made it an essential element in the organization of the university of virginia in . francis wayland, president of brown university and one of the few college presidents of his day who were educators in the modern sense, made a splendid exposition and defense of it in in his "report to the corporation of brown university on changes in the system of collegiate education." but the elective system waited upon the elevation of charles w. eliot to the presidency of harvard in for its general realization; in the senior year at harvard became wholly elective; in , the junior year; in , the sophomore year; and in the single absolute requirement that remained in the entire college course was english a. the action of harvard was rapidly imitated to a more or less thorough extent throughout the country. probably no two colleges administer the elective system in the same way. there has been a considerable revulsion of opinion against unrestricted election of individual subjects. in many colleges the subjects of the curriculum were arranged into groups which must be elected _in toto_. this resulted in the multiplication of bachelor's degrees, each indicating the special course--arts, science, philosophy, or literature--which had been followed. at the present time the tendency is to prescribe the subjects considered essential to a liberal education chiefly in the first two years and to permit election among groups of related courses in the last two. this has maintained the unity that formerly prevailed and introduced greater breadth into the curriculum. it has also brought the new bachelor's degrees into disfavor, and today the majority of the best colleges give only the a.b. degree for the regular academic course. valuable modifications in the elective system are constantly being adopted. one such is the preceptorial system at princeton and elsewhere, under which the preceptors personally supervise the reading and study of a small group of students and can therefore advise them from personal knowledge of their capacity. another is the system of honor courses adopted at columbia and elsewhere, whereby a distinction is made between mere "passmen" and students desirous of attaining high rank in courses that are carefully organized in sequence. =german influence and graduate study= the introduction of new subjects into the curriculum of the college and the adoption by it of the elective system owe much to german influence upon american education. though this influence was partly exerted by the study of the german language and literature, it resulted chiefly from the residence of american students at german universities. the first american to be granted the degree of doctor of philosophy from a german university was edward everett, who received it at göttingen in . he was followed by george ticknor, george bancroft, henry w. longfellow, john lothrop motley, frederick henry hedge, william dwight whitney, theodore dwight woolsey, and a host of scholars who shed luster upon american education and scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century. most of these men became associated with american colleges in some capacity and had a profound influence upon their ideals, organization, and methods of teaching. they came back devoted advocates of wide and deep scholarship, of independent research, and of the need of such scholastic tools as libraries and laboratories. but especially did they give an impetus to the movement in favor of freedom of choice (_lernfreiheit_) in studies. only by the adoption of such a principle could the pronounced tastes or needs of individual students be satisfied. some slight effort had been made in the first four decades of the nineteenth century by a few of the colleges to conform to the desire of students for further study in some chosen field, but the results were negligible. in yale established a "department of philosophy and the arts for scientific and graduate study leading to the degree of bachelor of philosophy." the first degree of doctor of philosophy was bestowed in , but a distinct graduate school was not organized until . harvard announced in the same year the establishment of a graduate department to which only holders of the bachelor's degree would be admitted and in which the degrees of doctor of philosophy and doctor of science would be conferred. the graduate department was not made a separate school, however, until . the greatest impetus to the establishment of graduate schools in the american universities was made by the establishment of johns hopkins university in . upon its foundation the chief aim was announced to be the development of instruction in the methods of scientific research. the influence of this institution upon the development of higher education in the united states has been incalculably great. johns hopkins was not a transplanted german university. the unique place of the college in american education was shown by the fact that graduate schools have followed the lead of johns hopkins in building upon the college. even clark university at worcester, founded in upon a purely graduate basis, established an undergraduate college in . one of the most gratifying features of higher education in the united states during the past quarter century has been the extension of graduate schools to the strong state universities. research work in them usually began in the school of agriculture, where the intensive study of the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology, had such splendid results in improved farming and dairying that legislatures were gradually persuaded to extend the support for research to purely liberal studies. with the growth and development of graduate schools in this country, the practice of going to europe for advanced specialized study has abated considerably. it will probably so continue in the future, particularly with regard to germany. on the other hand, should the new ideal of international good will become a living reality, education through a wide system of exchange professors and students may be expected to make its contribution. =technical and professional study= while the graduate school was built upon the college, the technical school grew up by the side of it or upon an independent foundation. the first technical school was established at troy, new york, in , and was called rensselaer polytechnic institute, after its founder, stephen van rensselaer. for a score of years no other development of consequence was made, but in the foundations were made of what have since become the lawrence scientific school at harvard and the sheffield scientific school at yale. the passage of the morrill act in had a quickening effect on education in engineering and agriculture. in the decade from to some twenty-two technical institutions were founded, most of them by the aid of the land grants. the most important of them is the massachusetts institute of technology, where instruction was first given in and which has exerted by far the greatest influence upon the development of scientific and technical education. the best technical schools require a high school diploma for admission and have a four-year course of study, but the only technical school on a graduate basis is the school of mines at columbia university. professional education in theology, law, and medicine in the united states was conducted chiefly upon the apprenticeship system down into the nineteenth century. though chairs of divinity existed in the colonial colleges in the eighteenth century, systematic preparation for the ministry was not generally attempted and the prospective minister usually came under the special care of a prominent clergyman who prepared him for the profession. in harvard established a separate faculty of divinity, and three years later yale founded a theological department. since then about fifty colleges and universities have established theological faculties and about independent theological schools have been founded as the result of denominational zeal. a majority of all these institutions require at least a high school diploma for admission; half of them require a college degree. nearly all offer a three-year course of study and confer the degree of bachelor of divinity. previous to the civil war the great majority of legal practitioners obtained their preparation in a law office. though the university of pennsylvania attempted to establish a law school in , and columbia in , both attempts were abortive, and it remained for harvard to establish the first permanent law school in . even this was but a feeble affair until justice joseph story became associated with it in . up to but three terms of study were required for a degree; until students were admitted without examination, and special students were admitted without examination as late as . since then the advance in standards has been very rapid, and in harvard placed its law school upon a graduate basis. though but few others have emulated harvard in this respect, the improvement in legal education during the past two decades has been marked. of the law schools today, the great majority are connected with colleges and universities, demand a high school diploma for admission, maintain a three-year course of study, and confer the degree of ll.b. twenty-four per cent of the twenty thousand students are college graduates. in some of the best schools the inductive method of study--i.e., the "case method"--has superseded the lecture, and in practically all the moot court is a prominent feature. entrance into the medical profession in colonial times was obtained by apprenticeship in the office of a practicing physician. the first permanent medical school was the medical college of philadelphia, which was established in and which became an integral part of the university of pennsylvania in . columbia, harvard, and dartmouth also founded schools before the close of the eighteenth century, and these were slowly followed by other colleges in the early decades of the nineteenth century. during almost the entire nineteenth century medical education in the united states was kept on a low plane by the existence of large numbers of proprietary medical "colleges" organized for profit, requiring only the most meager entrance qualifications, giving poor instruction, and having very inadequate equipment in the way of laboratories and clinics. in fact, medical education did not obtain a high standard until the establishment of the johns hopkins medical school in . since then the efforts of the medical schools connected with the strong universities and of the rockefeller foundation to raise the minimum standard of medical education have resulted in the elimination of the weakest medical schools. the total number fell from in to in . not all of these demand a high school diploma for admission, though the tendency is to stiffen entrance requirements, but all have a four-year course of study. in most institutions experience in laboratory, clinic, and hospital has superseded the old lecture system as the method of instruction. closely associated with the progress in medicine and to a great extent similar in history has been the progress in dentistry and pharmacy. there are now fifty schools of dentistry, with nearly students, and seventy-two schools of pharmacy, with nearly students. one of the most gratifying advances in professional education has been that of the teacher. practically all the state universities and many of the universities and colleges upon private foundations have established either departments or schools of education which require at least the same entrance qualifications as does the college proper and in many cases confine the work to the junior and senior years. teachers college of columbia university is on a graduate basis. though many of the training and normal schools throughout the country do not require a high school diploma for admission, the tendency is wholly in that direction. in no field of professional education has the application of scientific principles to actual practice made such progress as in that of the teacher. =college education for women--the independent college= few movements in the history of american education had more important results than the academy movement which prevailed during the period between the revolution and the civil war. possibly the principle upon which the new nation was established, i.e., the privilege of every individual to make the most of himself, influenced the founders of the academies to make provision for the education of girls beyond the mere rudiments. certainly this aspect of the movement had a far-reaching influence. some of the earliest of the academies admitted girls as well as boys from the beginning, and some soon became exclusively female. when it became evident from the work of the academies that sex differences were not of as great importance as had been supposed, it was not a long step to higher education. some of the academies added a year or two to the curriculum and took on the more dignified name of "seminary." in this transition period the influence of a few great personalities was profound, and even a brief sketch of the history of women's education cannot omit to mention the splendid work of emma willard and mary lyon. mrs. willard was an exponent of the belief that freedom of development for the individual was the greatest desideratum for humanity. she not only diffused this idea in her addresses and writings but tried to utilize it in the establishment in of the troy female seminary, which was the forerunner of many others throughout the country. mary lyon was rather the representative of the religious influence in education, the embodiment of the belief that to do one's duty is the great purpose in life. in she founded mount holyoke seminary, which had an influence of inestimable value in sending well-equipped women throughout the country a teachers. the importance of this service was particularly evident during the period of the civil war. although a number of excellent institutions for women bearing the name of college were founded before the civil war, the first one of really highest rank was vassar college, which opened its doors to students in . smith and wellesley were founded in , and bryn mawr in . these four colleges are in every respect the equal of the best colleges for men. they are the most important of a dozen independent colleges for women, almost all of which are situated in the east. to establish the independent college was the chief method adopted in the older parts of the country to solve the problem of women's higher education, rather than to reorganize colleges for men where conditions were already established. =the development of coeducation= the independent college is not the method that has prevailed in the west. when the inspiration to higher education for women arrived west of the alleghanies, conditions, especially lack of resources, practically necessitated coeducation. oberlin, founded in , was the first fully coeducational institution of college grade in the world. in three women received from it the bachelor's degree, the first to get it. oberlin's success had a pronounced influence on the state universities, which, it was argued, should be open and free to all citizens, since they were supported by public taxation. almost all the state universities and the great majority of the colleges and universities on private foundations are today coeducational. the results predicted by pessimists, viz., that the physical health of women would suffer, that their intellectual capacity would depreciate scholarship, and that the interests of the family would be menaced, have not eventuated. =the affiliated college for women= the spread of coeducation in the state universities of the west and the south and its presence in the newer private universities like cornell and chicago had an influence upon the older universities of the east. this influence has resulted in a third method of solving the problem of women's education; viz., the establishment of the affiliated college. several universities have established women's colleges, sometimes under the same and sometimes under a different board of trustees, to provide the collegiate education for women which is given to men by the undergraduate departments. barnard college, affiliated with columbia university, radcliffe college, affiliated with harvard university, woman's college, affiliated with brown university, the college for women, affiliated with the western reserve university, and the h. sophie newcomb memorial college for women, affiliated with tulane university, have all been founded within the past forty years. =graduate and professional studies for women= all the universities for men except princeton and johns hopkins and all the fully coeducational institutions admit women upon the same terms as men to graduate work. graduate work is also undertaken with excellent results in some of the independent women's colleges, as at bryn mawr. professional education for women has been coeducational from the beginning, with the exception of medicine. the prejudice against coeducation in that profession was so strong that five women's medical schools were organized, but they provide instruction for little more than a quarter of the women medical students. the increase in the number of women in professional schools has not by any means kept pace with the increase in the colleges. it appears that, with the exception of teaching, woman is not to be a very important sector in the learned professions in the near future. =undergraduate life--fraternities= nothing differentiates more clearly the american college from european institutions of higher education than the kind of non-scholastic activities undertaken by the students. from the very beginning the college became a place of residence as well as of study for students from a distance, and the dormitory was an essential element in its life. with increase in numbers, especially after the revolution, when all distinctions of birth or family were abolished, students naturally divided into groups. the first fraternity, phi beta kappa, was founded in at william and mary, with a patriotic and literary purpose, and membership in it has practically ever since been confined to graduates who have attained high scholastic standing. when one speaks of college fraternities, however, he does not refer to phi b k, but to one of the intercollegiate social organizations which have chapters in several colleges organized somewhat upon the plan of a club and whose members live in a chapter house. the first such fraternity was founded at yale in , but it was limited to the senior class. the three fraternities established at union in - form the foundation of the present system. the fraternities spread rapidly and are today very numerous. there are about thirty of national importance, having about a thousand chapters and a quarter of a million members. the fraternity system is bitterly attacked as being undemocratic, expensive, emphasizing social rather than scholastic attainments, and, generally speaking, a divisive rather than a unifying factor in college life. hence some colleges have abolished it. fraternities have been defended, however, as promoting close fellowship and even helping to develop character. so strongly are they entrenched, not only in undergraduate but also in alumni affection, that they probably form a permanent element in college life. =religious life= the early american college was primarily a place to prepare for the ministry, and personal piety was a matter of official enforcement. for a number of reasons religious zeal declined in the eighteenth century. after the revolution, under the influence of the new political theories and of french skepticism the percentage of students professing to be active christians fell very low. in the early nineteenth century the interest of students in religion increased, and religious organizations in a number of colleges were founded. practically all of these later gave way to the young men's christian association, which has now over , members organized in almost all the colleges of the country save the roman catholic. the religious interests of roman catholic students are in many colleges served by the newman clubs and similar organizations, and of jewish students by the menorah society. the religion of college students has become less a matter of form and speech and more a matter of service--social service of many kinds at home and missionary service abroad. =physical education= the educational reformers of europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries placed great emphasis upon a more complete physical training. this interest was felt in the united states, and simple gymnastic apparatus was set up at harvard and yale in . the movement spread very slowly, however, due probably to ignorance of its real physiological import. since the civil war the development of the gymnastic system has been rapid, and now practically every first-class college has its gymnasium, attendance upon which is compulsory, and some have their stadium and natatorium. of independent origin but hastened by the spread of the gymnasium is the vast athletic interest of undergraduates. its earliest form, conducted on a considerable scale, was rowing. the first rowing club was formed at yale in , and the first intercollegiate race was rowed on lake winnepesaukee in , harvard defeating yale. rowing is now a form of athletics at every college where facilities permit. the first baseball nine was formed at princeton in , and the game spread rapidly to all the other colleges. football in a desultory and unorganized way made its appearance early in the nineteenth century. as early as an annual game was played at yale between the freshmen and the sophomores, but the establishment of a regular football association dates from , also at yale. in the following year an intercollegiate organization was formed, and since then football has increased in popularity at the colleges to such an extent that just as baseball has become the great national game, so has football become the great american collegiate game. track athletics is the most recent form of athletic sports to be introduced into the college, and most colleges now have their field days. in addition to these four major forms of college sports, tennis, lacrosse, basketball, and swimming also have a prominent place. the four major sports are usually under the control of special athletic associations, which spend large sums of money and have a great influence with the students. in fact, so great has become the interest of college students in athletics that much fear has been expressed about its influence upon scholastic work, and voices are not lacking demanding its curtailment.[ ] military training is a phase of physical education which, though it had earlier found a place in the land-grant institutions, came to the fore as a part of the colleges' contribution to winning the world war. students' army training corps were established at many of the higher institutions of the country, and the academic studies were made to correlate with the military work as a nucleus. at the present time, however, the colleges are putting their work back on a pre-war basis, and it seems most unlikely that military training will survive as a corporate part of their work. =student literary activities--college journalism= journalism, though its actual performance is limited to a small number of students, has had an honored place as an undergraduate activity for almost a hundred years. it served first as a means of developing literary ability among the students, afterwards as a vehicle for college news, and now there has been added to these purposes the uniting of alumni and undergraduates. hence we find among college journals dailies, monthlies, and quarterlies, some of them humorous and some with a serious literary purpose. journalism is not the only method of expressing undergraduate thought. there has been a great revival of intracollegiate and of intercollegiate debating in recent years. literary societies for debating the great issues preceding the revolution was the first development of undergraduate life, and every college before and after the revolution had strong societies. as undergraduate interests increased in number, and especially as the fraternity system began to spread, debating societies assumed a relatively less important place, but in the past two decades great interest has been revived in them. the glee club, or choral society, along with the college orchestra, minister to the specialized interests of some students, and the dramatic association to those of others. one significant result of such activities has been to establish a nexus between the college and community life. =student self-government= one other feature of undergraduate life cannot be overlooked; viz., student self-government. the college student today is two or three years older than was his predecessor of fifty or sixty years ago. moreover, with the great increase in the number of students has come a parallel increase in complexity of administration and in the duties of the college professor. finally, a sounder psychology has taught the wisdom of placing in the hands of the students the control of many activities which they can supervise better than the faculty. as a result of these and of other influences, in many colleges today all extra-scholastic activities are either supervised by the student council, the members of which are elected by the students, or by a joint body of student and faculty members. the effect in almost every instance has been the diminution of friction between the faculty and students and the development of better relations between them. in some colleges the honor system is found, under which even proctoring at examinations does not exist, as all disciplinary matters, including the decision in serious offenses like cheating, rest with the student council. student self-government is only one evidence of the democratization that has taken place in the administration of the college during the past two decades. even more noticeable than student self-government is the tendency recently manifested to transfer more of the control of the government of the college from the board of trustees to the faculty. =new opportunities in higher education= with the extension of commerce and the attempt to bring it under efficient organization in the nineteenth century, the demand has been made upon the colleges to train experts in this field. germany was the first to engage in it, and just before the war probably led the world. france and england have remained relatively indifferent. in america, the so-called "business college" proved entirely too narrow in scope, and beginning with the wharton school of finance and commerce of the university of pennsylvania ( ), the higher institutions have begun to train for this important field. some of the colleges of commerce, like those of dartmouth and harvard, demand extensive liberal preparation; others, like wharton and the schools connected with the state universities, coördinate their liberal and vocational work; a few, like that of new york university, give almost exclusive attention to the practical element. two other movements might be mentioned as illustrating the attempt to extend the opportunity for higher education to an ever increasing number of people. one is the development of extension courses and the other the offering of evening work to those who cannot attend the regular sessions. these are both steps in the direction of equality of opportunity which is the ultimate aim of education in a democratic country. =the future of the college in american education--relation to secondary schools= the college preceded the high school in time, and when the high school began its career in the middle of the nineteenth century it was made tributary to the college in all essentials. by deciding requirements for admission, the college practically prescribed the curriculum of the high school; by conducting examinations itself it practically determined methods of teaching in the high school. but a remarkable change in these respects has taken place in the past two decades. the high school, which is almost omnipresent in our country, has attained independence and today organizes its curricula without much reference to the college. if there be any domination in college entrance requirements today, it is rather the high school that dominates. over a large part of the country, especially in states maintaining state universities, there are now no examinations for entrance to college. the college accepts all graduates of _accredited_ high schools--i.e., high schools that the state university decides maintain proper secondary standards. this growth in strength and independence has been accompanied by a lengthening of the high school course from two years in the middle of the last century to four years at the present time. =the junior college= with the introduction of the principle of promotion by subject instead of by class, the strong high schools have been enabled to undertake to teach subjects in their last years which were formerly taught in the first years of the college. they have done this so well that the practice has grown up in some parts of the country, especially on the pacific coast, of extending the course of the high school to six years and of completing in them the work of the first two years of college. this enables more young men and women throughout the state to receive collegiate education, and as the best-equipped teachers in the high schools are usually in the last years and the worst-equipped teachers in the college are usually in the first years, the system makes for better education. moreover, it relieves the state universities of the crowds of students in the first two years and permits overworked professors to concentrate upon the advanced work of the last two years and upon research work in the graduate schools. a system which offers so many advantages and is so popular both in the high school and the university bids fair to spread. =the abbreviated and condensed college course= while the movement making for the elimination of the college from below has been taking place in the west, another movement having the same effect has been taking place in the east, only the pressure has been from above. the tendency is spreading for the professional schools of the strong universities to demand a college degree for admission. if the full four years of the college are demanded in addition to the four years of the secondary school and the eight years of the elementary school, the great majority of students will begin their professional education at twenty-two and their professional careers at twenty-six, and they will hardly be self-supporting before thirty. this seems an unreasonably long period of preparation compared to that required in other progressive countries. the german student, for example, begins his professional studies immediately upon graduation from the gymnasium at eighteen. hence the demand has arisen for a shortening of the college course. this demand has been met in several ways. in some colleges the courses have been arranged in such a way that the bright and industrious student may complete the work required for graduation in three years. in others, as at harvard, the student may elect in his senior year the studies of the first year of the professional school. another tendency in the same direction is to permit students in the junior and even in the sophomore years to elect subjects of a vocational nature. this has been bitterly contested by those who hold that the minimum essentials of liberal culture should be acquired before vocational specialization begins. columbia _permits_ a student to complete his college and professional studies in six years, and at the end of that time he receives both the bachelor's and the professional degrees. it is to be noted, however, that these solutions of the problem and, in fact, most other solutions that have been suggested, apply only to a college connected with a university; they could not be administered in the independent college. but a movement has developed in the middle west which may result in another solution; i.e., the junior college. it can be best understood by reference to the policy of the university of chicago. that institution divides its undergraduate course into two parts: a junior college of two years, the completion of whose course brings with it the title of associate in arts, and a senior college of two years, the completion of whose course is rewarded with the regular bachelor's degree. there have become affiliated with the university of chicago a considerable number of colleges throughout the mississippi valley which have frankly become junior colleges and confine their work to the freshman and sophomore years. and this has become true of other universities. it would seem inevitable that the bachelor's degree will finally be granted at the end of the junior college and some other degree, perhaps the master's, which has an anomalous place in american education in any case, at the end of the senior college. this has, in fact, been suggested by president butler. the university of chicago has also struck out in another new direction. provided a certain amount of work is done in residence at the university, the remainder may be completed _in absentia_, i.e., through correspondence courses. the junior college movement has had the excellent result of inducing many weak colleges to confine their work to what they really can afford to do. many parts of our country have a surplus of colleges, chiefly denominational. ohio alone has more than fifty. the cost of maintaining dormitories, laboratories, libraries, apparatus, and other equipment and paying respectable salaries cannot be met by the tuition fees in any college. the college must either have a large income-producing endowment, which few have, or must receive gifts sufficient to meet expenses. gifts to colleges and universities form one of the finest evidences of interest in higher education in the united states, and reach really colossal proportions. in the past fifty years, during which this form of generosity has prevailed, over million dollars have been given, and in gifts from private sources amounted to more than million dollars. most of this money is given to the non-sectarian institutions and not to the small denominational colleges scattered over the country. as they are in addition unable to compete with the state universities, they are for every reason justified in becoming junior colleges. but this does not apply to the old independent colleges, such as amherst, williams, dartmouth, etc., which have loyal and wealthy alumni associations. they have the support necessary to retain the four-year course and seem determined to do so. just what the outcome of the whole question of shortening the college course may be is not now evident. that concessions in time must be made to the demand for an earlier beginning of professional education seems certain. that the saving should be made in the college course is not so certain. a sounder pedagogy seems to indicate that one year, if not two, can be saved in the period from the sixth to the eighteenth year. it is probable that the arbitrary division of american education into elementary, secondary, collegiate, and university, each with a stated number of years, will give way to a real unification of the educational process. most americans would regret to see the college, the unique product of american education, which has had such an honorable part in the development of our civilization, disappear in the unifying process. stephen pierce duggan _college of the city of new york_ bibliography the bibliography on the american college is almost inexhaustible. the list here given is confined to the best books that have appeared since . angell, j. b. _selected addresses._ new york, . association of american universities. proceedings of the annual conference. butler, n. m. _education in the united states._ new york, . cattell, j. m. _university control._ new york, . crawford, w. h. (editor). _the american college._ new york, . (papers by faunce, shorey, haskins, rhees, thwing, finley, few, slocum, meiklejohn, claxton.) cyclopedia of education, article on "american college." new york, . dexter, e. g. _history of education in the united states._ new york, . draper, a. s. _american education._ boston, . flexner, a. _the american college: a criticism._ general education board, new york, . foster, w. t. _administration of the college curriculum._ boston, . harper, w. r. _the trend in higher education._ chicago, . kingsley, c. d. _college entrance requirements._ united states bureau of education, . maclean, g. e. _present standards of higher education in the united states._ united states bureau of education, . national association of state universities in the united states of america. annual transactions and proceedings. risk, r. k. _america at college._ london, . snow, l. f. _college curriculum in the united states._ new york, . thwing, c. f. _history of higher education in the united states._ new york, . ---- _the american college; what it is and what it may become._ new york, . ---- _college administration._ new york, . west, a. f. _short papers on american liberal education._ new york, . footnotes: [ ] w. t. foster in n.e.a. reports, . ii professional training for college teaching =introduction= were this chapter to be a discussion of schemes of training, now in operation, that had been devised to prepare teachers for colleges, it could not be written, for there are no such schemes. many elementary and secondary teachers have undergone training for their life work, as investigators have, by a different regimen, of course, for theirs. but if college and university teachers do their work well, it is because they are born with competence for their calling, or were self-taught, or happened to grow into competence accidentally, as a by-product of training for other and partly alien ends, or learned to teach by teaching. there are able college men, presidents and others, who view this situation with equanimity, if not with satisfaction. teachers are born, not made, it is said. can pedagogy furnish better teachers than specialized scholarly training? it is asked. if we train definitely for teaching, we shall diminish scholarship, cramp and warp native teaching faculty, and mechanize our class procedure, it is objected. had the subject of training for college teaching been discussed, no doubt other objections would have been advanced. but it has not been discussed, as will be seen from the very scant bibliography at the end of the chapter. no plan of training for college teaching is in operation, and no discussion of such a plan can be found. each of a half-dozen men has argued his individual views, and elicited no reply. this state of facts notwithstanding, the subject is well worth discussing, and one may even venture to prophesy that in a decade, or at latest two, the subject will have a respectable literature, and enough training plans will be in operation to permit fruitful comparisons. when specific training is first urged for specialized work, there always is opposition. the outgoing generation remembers the opposition to specialized training for law, medicine, and engineering, to say nothing of farming, school teaching and business. but in spite of obstructive and retarding objections, specialized types of training for specialized types of work have grown in number and favor, and today we are being shown convincingly that nations which have declined to set up the fundamental types of special training find themselves able to make effective only a fraction of their resources. the majority of the personnel in every higher calling has about average native aptitude for it, and it is just the average man who can be improved in competence for any work by training directed to that end rather than to another. this is, of course, true of college teaching. =how the college teacher has been and is trained= in early days in this country the great majority of college teachers were clergymen, trained in most cases abroad. later bookish graduates came to be the chief source of supply, their appointment in their own colleges, and infrequently in others, following close upon their graduation. well into the third quarter of last century college faculties were selected almost exclusively from these two types, representatives of the former decreasing and of the latter increasing in relative number. neither type was specifically trained for teaching in colleges or elsewhere. with the founding and developing of johns hopkins university a new era in higher education opened in this country. the paucity of exact scholarship came to be known, and the country's need of scholarship to be appreciated. in colleges grown from english seedlings we sought to implant grafts from german universities. independent colleges and colleges within universities, while still called upon by american traditions and needs to prepare their students for enlightened living by means of a broadening and liberating training, came to be manned preponderatingly by narrowly specialized investigators, withdrawn from everyday life, with concentrated interests focused upon subjects or parts of subjects, rather than upon students. little thought was, or is yet, given to the preparation of college teachers for their duties as teachers, and that little rested, and still in large measure rests, satisfied with the assumption that by some unexplained and it may be inexplicable transfer of competence a man closeted and intensively trained to search for truth in books and laboratories emerges after three or more years well equipped for divining and developing the mental processes and interests of freshmen. once fairly examined, this assumption lacks plausibility. "we consider the ph.d. a scholar's degree and not a teacher's degree," says the dean of one of our leading graduate schools, and yet preparation for this scholar's degree has been and is practically the only formal preparation open to college teachers in this country. =equipment needed by college teachers= it goes without saying that scholarship is one of the basal needs of college teachers, a scholarship that keeps alive, and is human and contagious. but it should be remembered that there are several kinds of scholarship, and it is pertinent to ask what kind college teachers need. should they, for instance, model themselves on the broad shrewdness and alluring scholarly mellowness of james russell lowell or on the untiring encyclopedic exactitude and minuteness of von helmholz? or is there an even better ideal or ideals _for them_? i would suggest that the teacher's knowledge of his subject should, essentially, be of a kind that would keep him in intellectual sympathy with the undeveloped minds of his students, and this means chiefly two things. the more points of contact of his knowledge with the past experience and future plans of his students the teacher has at his command, the better teacher he will be; for he can use them, not as resting places, but as points of departure for the development of phases of his subject outside the students' experience. and secondly, the teacher should see his subject entire, with its parts, as rich in number and detail as possible, each in its proper place within the whole. for the students' knowledge of the subject is vague and general; he is trying to place it, and many other new things, in some kind of a coherent setting; in fact, he is in college largely for the very purpose of working out some sort of rudimentary scheme of things. the duty of the college teacher is to help him in this quite as much as to teach him a particular subject. and, besides, each particular subject can be best taught if advantage is taken of every opportunity to attach it to the only knowledge of it the student has, vague and general though it be. highly specialized and dehumanized knowledge is not as useful for the college teacher as broad and vital knowledge, which is, of course, much harder to acquire. even in the case of "disciplinary" subjects, there is no gain in concealing the human bearings. the teacher should be trained to seize opportunities in the classroom and out to help the student, through his subject and his maturer life experience, to see the bearing of what he is learning on the life about him and on the life he is to lead. this is the college teacher's richest opportunity and the opportunity that tries him most shrewdly. if he is to rise to it, his entire equipment, native and acquired, must come into play. what else does the teacher need? so that he may select the best and continue to improve them, he needs a knowledge of the different methods and aims in the teaching of his subject, and, so far as possible, of the results attained by each. too much of college teaching is a blind groping, chartless and without compass. instead of expecting each inexperienced teacher to start afresh, he should set out armed with the epitomized and digested teaching experience of those that have gone before him. finally, the teacher needs a sympathetic and expert understanding of the thinking and feeling of college students. this should be his controlling interest. the teacher, his interest in his subject, and in all else except the student, should be instrumental, not final. every available strand of continuity between studenthood and teacherhood should thereafter be preserved. this need suggests a capital weakness of the training for the doctorate in philosophy as a preparation for teaching. as it proceeds it shifts the interest from undergraduate student to scholarly specialty, and steadily snaps the ties that bound the budding investigator to his college days. it also explains the greatness of some college teachers and personalities before the eighties. their degrees in arts were their licenses to teach. they suffered no drastic loss of touch with undergraduate thought and life. in the early years of their teaching this sympathetic and kindly understanding was fresh and strong, and they used it in their classroom and wove it into the tissue of their tutorial activities. a discerning observer of college faculties can even today discover in them men and women who entered them by the same door as these great ones of old, irregularly as we would say now,--without the hallmark, and whose good teaching is a surprise to their doctored colleagues. in one institution i know of, the best five teachers some years ago were all of this type. the training of college teachers might well, it therefore seems, include an apprenticeship, beginning with, or in exceptional cases before, graduation from college. =the college legislator and administrator= but the duties and opportunities of the college teacher do not stop at the door leading from his classroom. in addition to dealing directly with students, individually and in groups, and even, if possible, with their families, as he grows in service he becomes, as faculty member and committeeman, a college legislator and administrator. in exercising these important functions he needs the equipment that would aid him to take the central point of view, a background of scholarly knowledge of what education in general and college education in particular are in their methods and in their social functions and purposes. there is too much departmental logrolling, as well as too much beating of the air in faculty meetings, and too many excursions into the blue in faculty legislation and administration arrangements. the educational views of faculty members greatly need to be steadied, ordered, and appreciably broadened and deepened by a developed and trained habit of thinking educationally under the safeguards of scientific method and on the basis of an adequate supply of facts. that pedagogy has made but the smallest beginning of gathering and ordering such facts and developing a scientific method in this field is not a valid objection. these tasks are no more difficult than others that have been compared, as _they_ will be, the sooner for being imposed. it is significant that coincident with sharp and widespread criticism of the american college (justified in part by what college teachers have been made into by their training), appear demands on the part of faculties for more power. in this connection it may be remembered that autocracy is the simplest and easiest form of government, and that history shows that it can at least be made to work with less brains and training than are required for the working of democracy. as american colleges and universities have grown in complexity and responsibility, their faculties have lost power because they did not acquire the larger competence that was the indispensable condition of even reasonably successful democratic control. it is highly desirable that the power of faculties should increase to the point of preponderance. but the added power they will probably acquire will not be retained unless faculty members learn their business much better than they now know it in most institutions. thomas jefferson, when asked which would come to dominate, the states or the federal government, replied that in the long run each of the opposed pair would prevail in the functions in which it proved the more competent. =a tentative scheme of training for college teachers= to outline a scheme of such importance without any experience to examine as a basis is a very bold undertaking, and one that can hope for but partial success. what i shall propose, however, is similar to the proposals of pitkin ( ), horne ( ), and wolfe ( ), my only predecessors in this rash enterprise. the general spirit and purpose of our proposals are the same. but we disagree more or less in details--which is fortunate, as it may encourage discussion of the subject, which is the thing most needed. indeed, a lively sense of this need has led me to venture some unpopular assertions. it may also be admitted that the desiderata for teachers mentioned above are not likely to be all insured by any system of training. the proposal submitted for discussion is that a three-year graduate course be established, its spirit and purpose being to train young men to become _college_ teachers. this course should lead to a doctorate; e.g., to the degree of doctor of philosophy, or of doctor of philosophy in teaching, or of docendi doctor. what degree is selected is, in the long run, relatively unimportant, provided the course is soundly conducive to its end. the course might well be divided into three parts, having the approximate relative value in time and effort of two fifths, two fifths, and one fifth. these parts should proceed simultaneously throughout the three years, the first being an apprenticeship--under supervision, of course--in the functions of the college teacher, the second a broad course of study and investigation of the subject to be taught, and the third a course of pedagogical study and investigation. let me suggest a minimum of detail within these outlines. the apprentice teacher would, naturally, do the least classroom teaching during his first year, and the most during his last. he would also each year "advise" a group of freshman in studies and in life, or coöperate with students in the conduct of athletics, dramatics, publication work, or other "activities." on all this apprentice work he would report, and in all he would be guided and supervised appropriately by the department whose subject he was teaching, by the department of education, and by other departments concerned. this and other parts of the training would attract others in addition to narrowly bookish graduates, something much to be desired (other parts would eliminate those not bookish enough), and would tend to keep alive in all apprentices an interest in students, especially in student character, and to prevent them from thinking of students as disembodied minds. the course of study and investigation in the subject to be taught should be based on adequate undergraduate work in the same and allied fields, and should be something like the honor course in oxford or cambridge (or our _old_ m.a. course) in its conduct and purpose; it should hark back to our collegiate origin in england. the work should be in charge of a don, a widely and wisely read and a very human guide, philosopher, and friend. stated class meetings and precise count of hours of attendance should receive little emphasis. but wide reading of the subject, in a spirit that breeds contagion, running off into a study, in books, laboratories, and meetings, of the human and practical bearings of the subject, should be required, and enough conference with the don should be had to enable him to judge and criticize the student's plan and amount of work, to test his mettle in handling the subject, and to aid him to grasp it as a whole and in its chief subdivisions, and to get glimpses of its bearings on and place in human life. this part of the training should lead up to and culminate in a thesis dealing with some major phase of the subject comprehendingly in its setting and connections. naturally this program could be carried out most successfully with the social subjects, which lend themselves easily to culture, like history or philosophy, and less completely with the exact subjects, which are better fitted for precise discipline, like mathematics. but if treated, as far as possible, after the manner indicated, even the latter could be made better instruments for the training of college teachers than they are now in narrow specialization for the ph.d. degree. among returning rhodes scholars some excellent material for dons could be found. the fifth of the course directed to pedagogy should include a very brief study of the methods of teaching the chosen subject, with glimpses into teaching methods in general; and courses in the history and philosophy of education, with emphasis on, but by no means exclusive dealing with, the educational and social functions of the college. it might include an intensive investigation of some relatively simple college problem in preparation for future faculty membership. all this should, of course, be intimately articulated with the student's apprenticeship work. such a course of pedagogical study should furnish a basis for better teaching methods and for helpful self-criticism therein; should encourage the formation of a habit of thinking and working out educational problems scientifically with eyes open to the purpose of the college as a whole; and should discourage departmental selfishness in legislation and administration. =incidental advantage= the college would, under this plan, have some of its teaching done at minimum cost by student teachers, who should receive only the graduate scholarship or fellowship now customary for ph. d. candidates. care would be necessary to prevent the assignment to them of mere routine hackwork without training value. it is safe to say that, though slightly less mature, their services, being supervised, would be more valuable than those rendered during their first few years of teaching by most better-paid winners of the doctorate of philosophy, who, if they do so at all, grope their way to usefulness as teachers, with little aid from others more experienced. with good teaching prepared for, required, and adequately rewarded (a point to be developed later), somewhat longer schedules could properly be assigned and further economy effected. schedules would, of course, have to be kept short enough to allow ample time for reading, for some writing, and for faculty and committee work in later years. but time would not be required by _college_ teachers for specialized research, and the freedom from such tasks resulting for them would be a blessed relief to many who are now compelled to assume a virtue they have not, and to conceal the love of teaching they have. and when we bear in mind the heavy mass of uninspired and unimportant hackwork that is now dumped on the scholarly world, we shall welcome the prospect of a lightened burden for ourselves. the need of students, especially of freshmen, for advisers is widely recognized. they come into a new freedom exercised in a new environment. this makes for bewilderment that involves loss of precious time and opportunities, and presents perils which involve possible injuries to many and certain injuries to some. efforts, many and various, to constitute a body of advisers chosen from among faculty members have met with but little success. with few exceptions the task is not congenial to those who now man our faculties, and for that and other reasons they are ill fitted for it. but a greater measure of success has been attained, even under present conditions, when the coöperation of volunteers from among seniors and graduate students has been had. this suggests that the problem might come nearer solution when some dependence came to be placed upon the services of apprentices. such service would be a part of their regular work having a bearing on their future career, and would therefore be supervised and rest on sustained interest and the consciousness that it was counting. finally, young student teachers would, under proper encouragement and arrangement, help materially to bridge the gulf, that is broader than is wholesome, between a faculty of mature men and young students. the mixing of these different generations, so far as possible, is much to be desired, difficult as it is to accomplish. =consequent change of plan in appointments and promotions= this is not the place to discuss the details of appointment and promotion plans, interesting and important as they are. but it is evident that the scheme of training outlined, if adopted, would call for changes in present practices. the appointing authorities of colleges looking for young teachers could ascertain their strong and weak points as they developed during their apprenticeship in classrooms and in other educational activities, as well as the quality and trend of their scholarship. they would not rest satisfied with ascertaining the minute corner of the field of philosophy, history, or physics in which a man recommended had done research. records could be kept throwing much-needed light on the teaching ability, scholarship, and personality of candidates for appointment. in selecting _college_ teachers, appointing authorities would value this evidence and would come to prefer teaching power to investigating ability. moreover, the record keeping, and, no doubt, some of the supervision begun during the apprentice years would continue during the early instructorial years. this would render it possible to evaluate and to value effectiveness in teaching in making promotions. ambitious teachers would no longer be practically forced, as their only resort, to neglect their students and give their best energies to publication in order to make a name and get a call, in the interest of promotion. the expert teacher would have a chance and a dignity equal to that of the skilled investigator. the individual could follow, and not be penalized for so doing, his own bent and the line of his highest capacity. =training of investigators= the training now given in graduate schools here and elsewhere for the doctorate in philosophy will, of course, continue, and increase rather than diminish. investigators will be preferred in research, in universities, and in some colleges and college departments. they will be increasingly prized in the government service and in important branches of industry. the recent terrible experiences burn into our minds the imperative need strong nations have of exact knowledge and of skill that has a scientific edge. and the specific training for these great tasks will be stronger when it is based on a college course in which highly effective and whole-hearted teaching is valued and rewarded. sidney e. mezes _college of the city of new york_ bibliography anonymous. confessions of one behind the times. _atlantic_, vol. , pages - , march, . canby, h. s. the professor. _harpers_, april, . carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. bulletin no. , may, , pages - . flexner, abraham. adjusting the college to american life. _science_, vol. , pages - . handschin, c. h. inbreeding in the instructional corps of american colleges and universities. _science_, vol. , pages - . november, . holliday, carl. our "doctored" colleges. _school and society_, vol. , pages - . november , . horne, herman h. the study of education by prospective college instructors. _school review_, vol. , march, , pages - . pitkin, w. b. training college teachers. _popular science_, vol. , pages - . june, . report of the committee on standards of american universities. _science_, vol. , page . november , . robinson, mabel l. need of supervision in college teaching. _school and society_, vol. , pages - , october , . sanderson, e. d. definiteness of appointment and tenure. _science_, vol. , pages - , june, . stewart, charles a. appointment and promotion of college instructors. _educational review_, vol. , , pages - . wilczynski, e. j. appointments in college and universities. _science_, february , ; vol. , pages ff. wolfe, a. b. the graduate school, faculty responsibility, and the training of university teachers. _school and society_, september , . iii general principles of college teaching =status of teaching in the colleges= the investigator of educational practices and methods of teaching is impressed with an unmistakable educational anti-climax, for the conviction grows on him that elementary school teaching is on a relatively high plane, that secondary school teaching is not as effective, and that collegiate teaching, with rare exceptions, is ineffective and in urgent need of reform. a superficial survey of educational literature of the last ten years shows that while the problem of the high school is now receiving earnest attention, elementary education continues to absorb the earnest efforts of an army of vitally interested investigators. the field of college pedagogics is still virgin soil, and no significant or extensive program for improved methods of teaching has yet been advanced. three earnest and intelligent students representing three colleges of undisputed standing were asked informally about their instructors for the current semester. nothing was said to make these students aware that their judgment would hold any significance beyond the friendly conversation. the summary of opinions is offered, not because the investigation is complete and affords a basis for scientific conclusion, but because it reflects typical college teaching in three recognized institutions of more than average standing. student no. i | student no. ii | student no. iii | | _teacher a_: a popular | _teacher a_: a good | _teacher a_: a very and interesting | teacher of mathematics.| popular teacher of teacher. talks | he assigns a new lesson| english. if the final enthusiastically, but | for home study. the | examination is given talks all the time. | next day he asks | by another teacher, i lessons assigned are | questions on the | may not have enough not heard. students | lesson. the answers are| specific facts to seldom recite. written | written out on the | pass. we began chaucer quizzes on themes of | blackboards. after | last week. he spent a assigned reading are | fifteen minutes all | good part of each rated by an assistant. | students take their | session reading to us. the work comes back | seats and the work on | all of us were with an a, a c, or a d,| the blackboard is taken| surprised to find how but we do not know why | up for explanation. he | much more the text the rating was given. | explains every | meant than after our frequently two students| difficulty very | own reading. in the who worked together are| clearly. we rarely | last session we went marked b and d | cover the lesson. some | to our book on respectively for the | topics go unexplained | literature and tried same work. sometimes a | because during the next| to justify the a student who "cribbed"| hour the blackboard | characterization which his outline from | problems are based on | the author gives of another who actually | the lesson. if i | chaucer. the class "worked it up" receives| understood the second | agreed with all in the a higher mark than was | half of each lesson as | book except in one given for the original.| clearly as the first, | characterization. in | i would feel hopeful | the composition work we | of a good grade in the | took up the structure | final examination. | of short narratives. | | the assignment was to | | find narratives in | | current periodicals, | | in the writings of | | standard authors, in | | newspapers, and then | | attempt to find whether | | the structure we | | studied was followed. | | in each case we had to | | justify any departure | | from the standard. | | there was little time | | for the footnotes in | | chaucer. i hope we are | | not asked for these on | | the final examination. | | | | _teacher b_: rather an | _teacher b_: a dry | _teacher b_: a very interesting teacher; | course in art history | conscientious teacher assigns lessons from a | and appreciation. we | of chemistry. he gives book. at the beginning | take up the history of | us a ten-minute written of the hour he asks | architecture, painting,| quiz each hour on the questions on the text | and sculpture. the | work in the book or on but is soon carried | names of the best | the matter discussed in away and rambles along | artists are mentioned, | the last lecture. the for the period, | and their many works | rest of the hour is touching on every | confuse us. we memorize| spent in explanation of subject. we never | praxiteles, phidias, | difficult points and in complete a chapter or | myron, the ancient | the application of what topic. the succeeding | cairns, the parts of an| we learned of industry hour we take the next | egyptian temple. | and physiology. it is chapter, which meets | pictures are shown on | surprising to see the the same fate. written | the screen. i elected | interest the class tests determine the | this course in the hope| shows in the chemical students' rank. the | that it would teach me | explanations of things grade for the written | something about | we never noticed test is announced, but | pictures, how to judge | before. the papers are not | them and give me | returned and one never | standards of beauty, | knows why the papers | etc., but it has been | were rated c or d. | history and not | | appreciation so far. | | we do not see any | | beauty in the pictures | | of old madonnas. even | | the religious ones | | among us say this. | | | | | _teacher c_: | _teacher c_: a good, | _teacher c_: a scholarly a conscientious teacher| clear, effective | instructor in history. in physics. he assigns | lecturer in chemistry. | he assigns thirty to a definite lesson for | every lesson we learn a| forty pages in english each recitation of the | definite principle and | history, and then he term. at the beginning | its application. the | lectures to us about of the hour students go| laboratory work of each| the topics discussed by to the board to write | is related to the | the author. he points out answers to | lecture and throws | out errors in dates and questions on the | interesting side lights| places. occasionally he lesson. the hour is | on it. we have quiz | calls on a student. at spent listening to the | sections once a week. | the end of each month recitation of each | here the work is oral | he gives a written test. student and the | and written. | we remember little of explanation of | | what we learned and difficult points. we | | must "bone away" at never cover more than | | about to pages. one half of the lesson:| | his english is sometimes only one | | delightful and we enjoy third. the next hour | | listening at times, the questions are on | | but i seem to retain the new lesson, not on | | so little. "yes, half the incompleted portion| | the term is up. we are of the former lesson. | | beginning the reign of my knowledge of physics| | henry vii." is punctuated by areas | | of ignorance. these | | alternate with topics | | that i think i | | understand clearly. | | | | | | _teacher d_: a quiet, | _teacher d_: a very | _teacher d_: a very modest man. sits back | strict teacher of | enthusiastic lecturer comfortably in his seat| english literature. he | in economics. he and asks questions on | assigns text for study,| explains the important assigned texts. the | and we must be prepared| principles in questions review the | for detailed questions | economics. we follow text, and he explains | on each of the great | in a printed syllabus, in further detail the | writers. he is very | so that it is facts in the book. the | strict and detailed. we| unnecessary to take conscientious and | had to know all the | notes. he talks well capable student finds | fifteen qualities of | and makes things clear. him superfluous; the | macaulay's style. "no, | we are given assignments indifferent student | we did not read | in s----'s "elements of remains unmoved by his | macaulay this term: we | economics," on which we phlegmatic | study from a history of| are questioned by presentation; the poor | english literature that| another teacher. "is student finds him a | tells us all about the | the work in the quiz help; the shirk who | master writers." | section related directly listens and takes notes| | to the lectures? is saved studying at | | sometimes. no, we do home. | | not take current | | economic problems. these | | are given in a later | | elective course." | | | | _teacher e_: a good | _teacher e_: a quiet, | _teacher e_: an teacher of latin. he | dignified gentleman who| instructor in explains the work, | teaches us psychology. | psychology. his hours hears the lessons, | a chapter is assigned | are weary and dreary. gives drills, calls on | in the book, and the | a chapter is assigned almost everybody every | hour is spent hearing | in x's "elements of hour. the written work | students recite on the | psychology." he asks a is returned properly | text. he sticks closely| question or two and corrected and rated. | to the book. he | then repeats what the | explains clearly when | author tells us, even | the book is not clear | using the illustrations | or not specific enough.| and diagrams found in | the hours drag, for the| the text. sometimes a | book is good and those | student reads a paper | who studied the lessons| which he prepared. "no, | weary at what seems to | we do not get very much | us needless repetition.| out of these papers | | read by students. but | | then we get just as | | little from the | | instructor. no, we | | never apply the | | psychology to our own | | thinking nor to | | teaching nor to the | | behavior of children | | or adults." | | | | _teacher f_: one | _teacher f_: a learned | _teacher f_: a cannot pass judgment on| latin scholar who is | forbidding but very this teacher of | very enthusiastic about| strict latin teacher. mechanical drawing. he | his specialty. the | his questions are fast gives out a problem, | students exhibit | and numerous and the works a type on the | cheerful tolerance. he | hesitating student is board, and then | assigns a given number | lost. he assigns at distributes the plates.| of lines per day. these| least twenty-five per we draw. he helps us | we prepare at home. in | cent more per lesson when we ask for aid, | class we give a | than any other otherwise he walks | translation in english | instructor. the hour is about the room. i | that has distorted | spent in translating, suppose one cannot show| phrases and clauses | parsing, and quizzing teaching ability in | lest we be accused of | on historical and such a subject. | dishonesty in | mythological allusions. | preparation. the rest | every "pony" user is | of the time is spent on| soon caught, because | questions of syntax, | he is asked so many | references, footnotes, | questions on each | and the identification | sentence. there is a | of the of the real and | distinct relief when | mythological characters| the hour is over because | in the text. the | he is constantly at you. | teacher is animated and| "will i take the next | effective. | course in latin? not | | unless i must. this is | | prescribed work. it | | can't end too soon for | | me, nor for the others | | in the class." the student of scientific and statistical measurements in education may object to attaching any importance to these informal characterizations of college teachers by undergraduates. college teachers interested in the pedagogical aspects of their subject, and college administrators who spend time observing class instruction will concede that these young men were not at all unfortunate in their teachers. the significance of these characterizations is not that college teachers vary in teaching efficiency, but rather that inefficient college teaching is general, and that the causes of this inefficiency are such as respond readily to simple remedial measures very well known to elementary and high school teachers. =causes of ineffective college teaching= it may be well to note the chief causes of ineffective college teaching before directing attention to a remedial program: (a) many college teachers hold to be true the time-honored fallacy that the only equipment for successful teaching is a thorough knowledge of the subject. they do not stop to square their belief with actual facts. they overlook the examples of their colleagues possessed of undisputed scholarship who are failures in the classroom. they fail to realize that there are psychological and pedagogical aspects of the teaching art which demand careful organization, skilful gradation and a happy selection of illustrations intimately related to the lives of the students. (_b_) closely related to this first cause of ineffective teaching is a lack of sympathetic understanding of the student's viewpoint. the scholarly teacher, deep in the intricacies and speculations of his specialty, is often impatient with the groping of the beginner. he may not realize that the student before him, apparently indifferent to the most vital aspects of his subject, has potentialities for development in it. his interest in his researches and his vision of the far-reaching human relations of his subject may blind him to the difficulties that beset the path of the beginner. (_c_) the inferiority of college teaching in many institutions can often be traced to the absence of constructive supervision. the supervising officer in elementary and secondary schools makes systematic visits to the classrooms of young or ineffective teachers, observes their work, offers remedial suggestions, and tries to infuse a professional interest in the technique of teaching. in the college such supervision would usually stir deep resentment. the college teacher is, in matters of teaching, a law unto himself. he sees little of the actual teaching of his colleagues; they see as little of his. his contact with the head of his department, and his departmental and faculty meetings, are usually limited to discussions of college policy and of the sequence and content of courses. methods of teaching are rarely, if ever, brought up for discussion. the results are inevitable. weaknesses in teaching are perpetuated, while the devices and practices of an effective teacher remain unknown to his colleagues. (_d_) a fourth factor which accounts for much of the inefficiency in college pedagogics is made the thesis of dr. mezes' chapter on "the training of the college teacher." the college teacher, unlike teachers in other grades of an educational system, is expected to teach without a knowledge of educational aims and ideals, and without a knowledge of the psychological principles which should guide him in his work. the prospective college teacher, having given evidence of scholarship alone, has intrusted to him, the noisy, expressive, and rapidly developing, youth. we set up no standards aside from character and scholarship. we do not demand evidence of teaching ability, a knowledge of applied psychology and of accepted teaching practices, skill in presentation, power of organizing material in graded sequence, or ability to frame a series of questions designed to stimulate and sustain the self-activity of the pupils. the born college teacher remains the successful teacher. the poor college teacher finds no agent which tends to raise his teaching to a higher level. the temperamentally unfit are not weeded out. but teaching is an art, and like all arts it requires conscientious professional preparation, the mastery of underlying scientific principles, and practice under supervision scrupulous in its attention to technique. we have here outlined a few of the causes which keep college teaching on a low plane. the remedial measures are in each case too obvious to mention. it remains for college authorities to formulate a well-conceived and adjustable program of means and methods of ridding college teaching of those forces which keep it in a discouraging state. it is our purpose in the remainder of this chapter not to evolve a system of pedagogics, but rather to touch on the most vital principles in teaching which must be borne in mind if college teaching is to be rendered pedagogically comparable to elementary and secondary teaching. we shall confine ourselves to teaching practices which are applicable to all subjects in the college curriculum. principles in college teaching =a clearly conceived aim must control all teaching= one of the very first elements in good teaching is the clear recognition of a well-defined aim that gives purpose and direction to all that is attempted in a lesson or in a period. the chief cause of poor teaching is aimless teaching, in which the sole object seems to be to fill the allotted time with talking about the facts of a given subject. we sit patiently through a recitation in english literature. act i, scene of _hamlet_ had been assigned for home study and is now the text for the hour. questions are asked on the dramatic structure of this scene, on versification, on the meaning of words and expressions now obsolete, on peculiarities of syntax, and finally a question or two on a character portrayal. the bell brings these questions to an abrupt end. ask teacher and students the aim of all these questions. to the former, they are means of testing the students' knowledge of a variety of facts of language and literature; to the latter they mean little, and serve only to repress a living interest and appreciation of living literary text. how much more effective the hour in english literature would have been if the entire act had been assigned with a view to giving the students an insight into the dramatic structure of each scene in this act and of the act as a whole. all the questions would then bear on dramatic movement, on the dramatist's technique, on his way of arousing interest in his story, on devices for giving the cause and the development of the action. in the opening scene we read: _elsinore. a platform before the castle._ _francisco at his post. enter to him bernardo._ ber. who's there? fran. nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself. ber. long live the king! fran. bernardo? ber. he. fran. you come most carefully upon your hour. ber. 'tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, francisco. fran. for this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold. and i am sick at heart. ber. have you had a quiet guard? here we see the guard on duty challenged by his relief, a most unusual procedure. why does this experienced guard so far forget the customary forms as to challenge the guard on duty? what possible reason can there be for this? how would you read the second line? what words must be emphasized to show the surprise of the challenged guard? if the entire hour were given to the whole of act i and all the questions sought to reveal to the students shakespeare's power of dramatic structure, a definite and lasting impression would be carried away. act i should be assigned again, but with a different aim. the teacher now seeks to make clear to the student the dramatist's method of character portrayal. a third hour may be spent on certain portions of this act in which attention is given to significant facts of language, choice of words, or poetic form. when a guiding aim controls, all questions, suggestions, explanations, and illustrations tend to create in the mind of the pupil a rich and unified impression. where no distinct aim gives direction to the work, the student is confused by a variety of facts--isolated facts--that are displaced by another group of disjointed bits of information. aimless teaching leads to mental wandering on the part of the student; teaching governed by a definite aim leads to mental development and to the acquisition of new viewpoints and new power. =the educational aim vs. the instructional aim= we must distinguish clearly between the general or educational aim and the specific or instructional aim. the former sums up the hope of an entire course or an entire subject. in the teaching of literature we hope to develop a vital interest in reading, a discriminating taste, an enlivened imagination and a quickened perception which enable the student to visualize the situations and to acquire the thought on the printed page. the instructional aim, however, is much more specific; it posits a task that can be accomplished in a very limited time; it seeks to give an insight into shakespeare's mastery of words, or into his power of character portrayal, or into his methods of enhancing dramatic interest. each of these two types of aims has its unmistakable influence on methods of teaching. =the variety of aims that may govern teaching= what aim should we select to guide us in formulating principles of collegiate teaching? the question is almost basic, for the selection of a proper aim gives color and direction to all our teaching. in brief, the aim may be one of the following: (_a_) _the informational aim._ a given course in chemistry or physics may be designed to sum up for the student the vital facts necessary for an intelligent comprehension of common phenomena. with such an aim, it is obvious that only so much laboratory work will be assigned as will give the student a general knowledge of the tools and methods of laboratory work; that the major portion of the work will be divided into occasional lectures, regular book assignments, and extensive applications of knowledge gained to surrounding chemical and physical phenomena. a language course may seek to give pupils a stock of words designed to develop power to read the language in a very short time. obviously, grammatical work and translations into the mother tongue will now be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. there is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. the significant thing is, not so much to discover its relative importance, but, having adopted it, to devise methods which clearly tend to bring the students to an effective realization of it. (_b_) _the disciplinary aim._ on the other hand, the controlling aim in any subject may be to develop the power to reason about natural phenomena, the power to observe, and the power to discriminate between vital and inconsequential details. if this be the aim, the assignment of subject matter must be reduced, the phenomena studied must be submitted in the forms of problems, first-hand observations must be made, and students must be led to see the errors in their observations and their reasoning. the course which is extensive in subject matter and which relies on the lecture method sacrifices mental discipline for information. from the teaching point of view, the result of the time-honored quarrel between the disciplinists and the utilitarians is not so important as the adoption of a definite aim, and the formulation of consistent methods of teaching in order to attain that aim. ineffective teaching is not caused by the selection of the one aim or of the other, but by systems of instruction devoid of any aim at all. (_c_) _the appreciative or æsthetic aim._ it is obvious that a subject may be taught for the power it develops for æsthetic appreciation of the arts of life. we have here a legitimate aim of coördinate importance with the two preceding ones; and if we adopt it, the vital thing in teaching is to allow this appreciative aim to mold all instructional effort. it is obvious that a college course in æsthetics must be inspirational, must seek to develop a real appreciation of the beauty of line, of color and of sound. such a course must, therefore, encourage contact with the products of art, rather than promote the study of texts on the history of any of the arts. so, too, courses in music or in literature which do not send the student away with an intense desire to hear, to see, to feel the masterpieces of music or literature must be judged dismal failures. the formalization of an art course given to the general student, kills the live material and leaves the student himself cold. (_d_) _the aim to teach technique._ an effective college course may select for its aim the development of the technique of a given subject. it is obvious that a science course governed by this aim will emphasize the laboratory method at the expense of information; that a course in the social sciences will seek to cover less ground but will develop in the student the power to find facts and use them to formulate an intelligent conclusion; that a course in biology will minimize names, classifications and structures, but will emphasize field and laboratory work and the modes of utilizing the data thus discovered. we must repeat the statement made before, that no one can set himself up as the final arbiter of the claims of these contending aims. they are all vitally necessary for a thorough understanding of life's problems. the significant conclusion for teaching is that one or more of these aims must be consciously chosen and that content and method must be determined by them absolutely. teaching for the sake of teaching consumes time and makes drafts on energy, but it leaves the student no richer in power and with no truer understanding. =should the aim be modified for varying groups of students?= it is obvious that no general law can be formulated for the adjustment of aims to the needs of students. teachers have usually found it necessary to change the aim, the content, and the method of a course according to the needs of different classes of students. in one of our colleges science students are required to take two years of latin. the course offered these young men gives the ordinary drill in grammar, translation, and analysis of cæsar, cicero, and vergil, as well as practice in prose composition in which nondescript and disjointed english sentences, grammatically correct, are turned into incorrect latin. this description, without any changes whatever, applies also to the course given in the introductory years in latin to students specializing in the arts. even a superficial analysis reveals a different set of needs in the two classes of students which can be served only by a corresponding difference in content and mode of teaching. a student who takes french or german because he wants enough mastery of these languages to enable him to read in foreign journals about the progress of his specialty must be given a course which appeals to the eye and minimizes the grammatical and conversational phases of these languages. there are courses that are foundational and that must therefore be governed by an eclectic aim. in the first course in college physics it is obvious that we must teach the necessary facts of the subject as well as its method. these aspects of the work must be emphasized with equal force for all students; no differentiation need be made for future medical or engineering students or for prospective teachers of the subject in secondary schools. generally speaking, initial courses in a department are governed by an eclectic aim, but in the advanced courses there must be constant adjustment to the needs of various groups. an eclectic aim can be as effective an instrument in enhancing the quality of teaching as a single, clear-cut aim, provided there is a clear recognition of the relative importance of the ends set up, and provided a definite plan is evolved to attain them. the aim or aims of a subject or a lesson, once formulated, must always be kept before the students as well as before the teacher. every pupil must know the ends to be attained in the course he is taking, and as work progresses he must experience a growing realization that the class is moving toward these ends. the subject matter of the course, the method of instruction, the assigned task, now glow with interest which springs from work clearly motivated. the average student plods through his semester from a sense of duty or obedience rather than from a conviction of the worth of both subject matter and method. =value of clearly defined aims= not only must the general aim be indicated to the student, but he must also be made acquainted with the specific aim. where students have been acquainted with the specific task that must be accomplished in a given period, concentration and coöperation with the instructor are easier; the students can, at stages in the lesson, anticipate succeeding steps; their answers have greater relevancy, their thought is more sequential and flows more readily along the path planned by the instructor. a specific aim for each lesson makes for economy, for it is a standard of relevancy for both student and teacher. the student whose answer or observation is irrelevant is asked to recall the aim of the lesson and to judge the pertinence of his contribution. the instructor given to wandering far afield finds that a clearly fixed aim is an aid in keeping him in the prescribed path. too many college hours, especially in the social sciences, find the instructor beginning with his subject but ending anywhere in the field of human knowledge. these wanderings are entertaining enough, but they dissipate the energies of the students and produce a mental flabbiness already too well developed in the average college student. =motivation in college teaching= a second factor which contributes much toward the effectiveness of college teaching is the principle of motivation. so long as most of the college course is prescribed, course by course, students will be found pursuing certain studies without an intelligent understanding of their social or mental worth. ask the student "doing" prescribed logic to explain the value of the course. in friendly or intimate discussion with him, elicit his conception of the utilitarian or disciplinary worth of the prescribed latin or mathematics in the arts course. he sees no relation between the problems of life and the daily lessons in many of these subjects. he submits to the teacher's attempts to graft this knowledge upon his intellectual stock merely because he has learned that the easiest course is to bend to authority. instruction in too many college subjects is based, not on intelligent and voluntary attention, but on the discipline maintained by the institution or by the instructor. it is obvious that such instruction is stultifying to the teacher and can never develop in the student a liberal and cultured outlook upon life. the principle of motivation in teaching seeks to justify to the student the experience that is presented as part of his college course. it is obvious that this motivation need not always be explained in terms of utilitarian values. a student of college age can be made to realize the mental, the cultural, or the inspirational values that justify the prescription of certain courses. the college instructor who tries to motivate courses in the appreciation of music or painting finds no great difficulty in leading his students to an enthusiastic conviction of their inspirational value. it is well worth taking the student into our confidence in these matters of aim and value. we must become more tolerant of the thoughtful student who makes honest inquiry as to the value of any of the presented courses. we must learn to regard such questions as signs of growing seriousness and increasing maturity and not as signs of impertinence. we constantly ask ourselves questions about the round of our daily task; we seek to know thoroughly their uses, their values, their meaning in our lives. clear conception of use or value in teaching is as vital as it is in life--for what is teaching if not the process of repeating life's experiences? in the principle of motivation lies the most successful solution of the problem of interest in teaching. we have too long persisted in the "sugarcoating" conception of interest. we have regarded it as a process of "making agreeable." interest has therefore been looked upon as a fictitious element introduced into teaching merely to inveigle the mind of the student into a consideration of what we are offering it. our modern psychology teaches a truer conception of interest: a feeling accompanying self-expression. interest has been defined as a feeling of worth in experience. where this feeling of worth is aroused, the individual expresses his activity to attain the end that he perceives. every act, every effort, to attain this end is accompanied by a distinctive feeling known as interest. when a class is quiet and gives itself to the teacher, it is obedient and polite, but not necessarily interested. the class that looks tolerantly at the stereopticon views that the instructor presents, or listens to the reading of the professor of english, is amused but not necessarily interested. but when the students ask questions about the pictures or ask the professor of english for further references, then have we evidence of real interest. interest is, therefore, an active attitude toward life's experience. rational motivation is almost a guarantee of this active attitude of interest. intelligent motivation in teaching has far-reaching values for both student and teacher. it stirs interest and guarantees attention and thus tends to keep aroused the activity of the students. it establishes an end toward which all effort of teacher and student must bend. it enables the student to follow a line of thought more intelligently, and occasionally to anticipate conclusions. for the teacher it serves as a standard, in terms of which he reorganizes his subject matter, judges the value of each topic, and omits socially useless matter which has too long been retained in the course in the fond hope that it will in some way develop the mind. =beginning at the point of contact= the instructor who strives to motivate the subject matter he teaches usually begins with that phase of the subject which is most intimately related to the student's life and environment. every subject worth teaching crosses the student's life at some point. the contacts between pupil and subject afford the most natural and the most effective starting points in the teaching of any subject. the subject matter in a college course is too frequently so organized that it presents points of discrepancy between itself and the student. to the college student life is not classified and systematized to a nicety. experiences occur in more or less accidental but natural sequence. scientific classification is the product of a mature mind possessing mastery of a given portion of the field of knowledge. to thrust the student, who is just finding his way in a new course, into a thoroughly scientific classification of a subject, is to present in the introduction what should come in the conclusion. many a student taking his introductory course in psychology begins with a definition of the subject, its relation to all social and physical sciences, and its classification. all these are aspects of the subject which the mind conversant with it sees clearly and understands thoroughly, but which the inexperienced student accepts merely because the facts are printed in his textbook. the youthful mind is concerned with the present and with the immediate environment. too many of our college courses, in the initial stages, transport the student into the realm of theory or into the distant past. the student cannot orientate himself in this new environment and is soon lost on the highways and byways of classification; to him the subject becomes a study of words rather than of vital ideas. why must the introductory course in philosophy begin with the ancient philosophers, and give the major part of the term to the study of dead philosophers and their theories long since refuted and discarded, while vital modern philosophic thought is crowded into the last few sessions of the semester? =illustrations of maxim. begin at the point of contact= the pedagogical significance of beginning at the point of contact can best be understood and appreciated by illustrations of actual teaching conditions. most initial courses in economics begin by positing that economics is the science of the consumption, distribution, and production of wealth. the student is told that in earlier systems of economics production was studied as the initial economic process, but that the more modern view makes consumption the starting process. all this the student takes on faith. he does not really see its bearings and its implications; he is as unconcerned with the new formulation as he is with the old; he feels at once far removed from economics. the succeeding lessons study economic laws with little reference to the economic life that the student lives. in a later chapter he learns a definition of wages, the forces that determine wage, and the mode of computing the share of the total produce that must go to wages. here we have a course that does not begin at the point of contact, that presents the very discrepancies between itself and the student that were noted before. how can we overcome them? by proceeding psychologically. the instructor refers to two or three important wage disputes in current industrial life; these conflicts are analyzed; the contending demands are studied, and the forces controlling the adoption of a new wage scale are noted. after this study of actual economic conditions the students are led to formulate their own definition of wages, and to discover the forces that determine wage. their conclusions are of course tentative. the textbook or textbooks are consulted in order to verify the formulations and the conclusions of the class. thus the course is developed entirely through a series of contacts with economic life. the final topic in the course is the formulation of a definition of economics. now the class sums up all that it has seen and learned of economics during the year. the cold and empty definition now glows with meaning. such a course awakens an intelligent interest in economic life; it develops a mode of thought in social sciences and a sense of self-reliance; it teaches the student that all conclusions are tentative and constantly subject to verification; it fosters a critical attitude toward printed text. the college graduate who studied college mathematics, advanced algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry, and calculus, looks back with satisfaction at work completed. each of these subjects seemed to have little or no relation to the other; each was kept in a water-tight compartment. he remembers few, if any, of the formulæ, equations, and symbols. he recalls vividly his admiration of the author's ingenious method of deriving equations. every succeeding theorem, formula, or equation was another puzzle in a subject which seemed to be composed of a series of difficult, unrelated, and unapplied mathematical proofs. the course ended, the mass of data was soon obliterated from the mind's active possessions. what is the meaning of it all? what is its relation to life? there is no doubt that much of this mathematics has its application to life's needs, and that these successive subjects of mathematics are thoroughly interdependent. but nothing in the mode of instruction leads the student to see either the application or the interrelation of all this higher mathematics. would it not be better to give a single course called mathematics rather than these successive subjects? would it not be more enlightening if each new mathematical principle were taught through a situation in building, engineering, or mechanics so that the student would at all times see the intimate relation between mathematical law and physical forces? would not the disciplinary values of mathematics be intensified for the student by teaching it in a way that presents a quantitative interpretation of the daily phenomena in his experience? teachers of philosophy and psychology too often fall into a formalism that robs their subject of all its vitalizing influences. many a student enters his course in logic with high hopes. at last he is to learn the laws of thought which will render him keen in detection of fallacies and potent in the presentation of argument. how bitter is his disappointment when he finds his course dissipated in definitions and classifications. his logic gives itself to the discussion of such patent fallacies as, "a good teacher knows his subject; williams knows his subject, therefore he is a good teacher." day after day he proves the error in every form of stupidity or the truth of what is axiomatic. he tires of "gold is a metal" and "socrates is mortal." few courses in logic have the courage to break away from the traditional formalism and to begin each new principle or fundamental concept of logic by analyzing editorials, arguments, contentions in newspapers, magazines, campaign literature, or the actual textbooks. few students complete their course in logic with a keener insight into thought and with a maturer or more aggressive mental attitude. =beginning at the point of contact relates the subject to the life of the student= it was pointed out in a previous illustration that the college student "taking philosophy" is seldom made to feel that the subject he studies is related to the problems that arise in his own life. too frequently introductory courses in philosophy are historical and extensive in scope, striving to develop mastery of facts rather than to give new viewpoints. the student learns names of philosophers, and attempts to memorize the philosophic system developed by each thinker. such a course imposes a heavy burden on retentive power, for no little effort is required to remember the distinctive philosophical systems advocated by the respective writers. to the students these philosophers represent a group of peculiar people differing one from the other in their degrees of "queerness." one system is as far removed as another from the life that the student experiences; no system helps him to find himself. an introductory course in philosophy should begin with the problems of philosophy; it should have its origin in the reflective and speculative problems of the student himself. as the course progresses, the student should feel a growing sense of power, an increasing ability to formulate more clearly, to himself at least, the questions of religion and ethics that arise in the life of a normal thinking person. so, too, courses in ethics and psychology lose the vital touch unless they begin in the life of the student and apply their lessons to his social and intellectual environment. it must be pointed out, however, that the social sciences lend themselves more readily to this intimate treatment than do languages, or the physical sciences, but at all points possible in the study of a subject, the experience of the student must be introduced as a means of giving the subject real meaning. in teaching composition and rhetoric illustrations of the canons of good form need not be restricted to the past. current magazines and newspapers are not devoid of effective illustrations. when the older literary forms are used exclusively as models of language, the student ends his course with the erroneous notion that contemporary writing is cheap and sensational and devoid of artistic craftsmanship. courses in physics and chemistry frequently devote themselves to a development of principles rather than to the applications of the studies to every sphere of life. introductory college courses in zoölogy spend the year in the minutiæ of the lowest animal forms and rarely reach any animal higher in the scale than the crayfish. we still find students in botany learning the various margins of leaves, the system of venation, the scientific classifications, but at the end of the course, unable to recognize ordinary leaves and just as blind to nature as they were before. zoölogy and botany do not always--as they should--give a new view of life, a new attitude towards living phenomena, a new contact with nature. careful inquiry among college students will reveal an amazing ignorance of common chemical and physical phenomena after full-year courses in chemistry and physics. we find a student giving two semesters to work in each of these subjects. he spends most of his time learning the chemical elements, their characteristics and the modes of testing for them. the major portion of the time is spent in the laboratory, where he must discover for himself the elementary practices of the subject and test the validity of well-established truths. at the end of his second semester he has not developed sufficient laboratory technique for significant work in chemistry; he is ignorant of the chemical explanation of the most common phenomena in life. =pedagogical vs. logical organization= there is much to be said for the position taken by the "older teachers," who may not possess the scholarship of the "younger investigators" but who argue for a general course in which laboratory work shall be reduced, technique minimized, and attention focused on giving an extensive view of chemical forces. the simple chemical facts in digestion, metabolism, industry, war, medicine, etc., would be presented in such a way as to make life a more intelligent process and to give an insight into the method of science. in the courses that follow the introductory one, there would be a marked change in aim; the student would be taught the laboratory technique and would be given a more intensive study of the important aspects of chemistry. similar changes in the introductory courses in physics are urged by these same teachers. beginning at the point of contact may frequently interfere with the logical arrangement of the course of study; it may wrench many a topic out of its accustomed place in the textbook; it will demand that the applications, which come last in most logically arranged courses, be given first and that definitions and principles which come first be given last. this logical arrangement, it was pointed out, is usually the expression of the matured mind that is thoroughly conversant with every aspect of a subject; it may mean little, however, to the beginner--so little that he does not even slightly appreciate its significance. the loss in logical sequence entailed by beginning at the point of contact is often more than compensated for by the advantages which are derived from a psychological presentation. =proper organization as a factor in effective teaching= a well-organized lesson possesses teaching merits which may counteract almost all the usual weaknesses found in poor teaching. good organization determines clearness of comprehension, ease of retention, and ability of recall; it makes for economy of time and mental energy; it simplifies the processes of mental assimilation; it teaches the student, indirectly but effectively, to think sequentially. we have all suffered too keenly, as auditors and readers, the inconveniences of poor organization, not to realize the worth of proper organization of knowledge in teaching. organization of knowledge has become a pedagogical slogan, but its increase in popularity has not been accompanied by increased clearness of comprehension of its meaning. what, then, is meant by proper organization? it must ever be borne in mind that proper organization is a relative condition, the limits of which are determined by the capacities of the students and the nature of the subject matter. what is effective organization of facts in elementary history may be very ineffective organization for students of high school or college grade. making due allowance for relative conditions, good organization may be said to consist of five essential characteristics. _logical sequence_ is the first of these. it is apparent that the more rational the sequence of facts, the more effective is the organization of knowledge. data organized on a basis of cause and effect, similarity, contrast or any other logical relationship will help to secure the teaching advantages we have mentioned. a search for this simple principle in most textbooks on american or english history or literature reveals its complete absence. a detailed mass of historical information grouped into administrations or reigns is merely a mechanical organization in which time, the accidental element, and not the development of social movements, the logic of human history, is the determining factor. in too many courses in literature the student learns names of writers, biographical data, and literary characteristics of the masters, but fails to see the development of the movement of which the writer was a part. events of history placed in their social movements, writers in literature placed in the school in which they belong, give the student the logical ties which bind the knowledge to him. so, too, one often analyzes the sequence of chapters in an advanced algebra or a trigonometry and fails to discover the governing rationale. it must be remembered, however, that the nature of the subject will often reduce the logical element in its organization. instances in language teaching may be cited as illustrations of teaching situations where a mechanical organization is often the only one possible because of the arbitrary character of the subject matter. =meaning of organization of subject matter= _relativity_ of importance is the second factor of good organization. a cursory study of a well-organized chapter or merely passing attention to a well-organized lecture reveals at once a distinct difference in the emphasis on the various parts or elements of the subject. the proportional allotment of time or space, the number of illustrations, the number of questions asked on a given point, the force of language--these are all means of bringing out the relative importance of constituent topics or principles. in retrospect, a well-organized lesson presents an appearance similar to a contour map; each part stands out in distinctive color according to its significance. it is frequently argued by teachers that students of college age should be required to distinguish the relativity of importance of the parts of a lesson or the topics in a subject; that the instructor who points out the changing importance of each succeeding part of a lesson is enervating the student by doing for him what he ought to do for himself. this is true in part, but it must be realized that the instructor who through questions and directed discussions leads students to formulate for themselves the relative importance of data is not only carrying out the suggestion made in the preceding paragraph but is also developing in his students a power they too frequently lack. those who have studied the notes that students take in their classes have seen how frequently facts are torn from their moorings; how wrong principles are derived from illustrations; how a catch-phrase becomes a basic principle; how simple truths and axioms are distorted in the frenzy of note taking. through questions if possible, through emphasis on illustrations and explanations, where no other means is available, students must be made to see that all facts of a subject are not of the same hue, that some are faint of tint, others in shadow, and still others in high colors. without this relativity of importance, facts are grouped; with it, they are intelligently organized. _an underlying tendency_ can be discerned in well-organized knowledge. not only are facts arranged in logical sequence and emphasized according to importance, but there is in addition a central principle or an underlying purpose giving unifying force to them all. we can illustrate the need of this third characteristic of good organization by referring to a college course in american history which gives much time to the period from to . the events of these forty-five years are not taught in administrations but are summed up in six national tendencies; viz., the questions of state sovereignty, slavery, territorial acquisition, tariff, industrial and transportational progress, and foreign policy. each of these movements is treated as intensively as time permits. at the end of the study of the entire period, the student is left with these six topics but without a unifying principle; to him, these are six unrelated currents of events. in each of these problems the north and the south displayed distinctive attitudes, acted from distinctive motives, expressed distinctive needs and preferences, but these were never brought out either through well-formulated questions or through explanation. as a result, the class never realize fully that those years, - , marked the period of growing sectional differences, misunderstandings, and animosities. had this underlying tendency been brought out clearly at various points in the course, the students would have carried away a permanent impression of what is most vital in this period of american development. _gradation_ of subject matter is another characteristic of good organization. careful gradation is not so vital in subjects of social content as it is in mathematics, foreign languages, and exact sciences. the most important single factor in removing difficulties that beset a student is gradation. teaching problems often arise because the instructor or the textbook presents more than one difficulty at a time. teachers who lack intellectual sympathy or who are so lost in the advanced stages of their specialty that they can no longer image the successive steps of difficulty, one by one, that present themselves to a mind inexperienced in their respective fields, are frequently guilty of this pedagogical error. malgradation of subject matter is the direct cause of serious loss of time and energy and of needless discouragement not only to students but to instructors as well. _ability of the student to summarize_ easily is a test of good organization. at the end of a loosely organized chapter or lesson the student experiences no little difficulty in setting forth the underlying principles and their supporting data. it does not help much to have the textbook or the instructor state the summary either at the end of the lesson in question or at the beginning of the succeeding one. the summary of a lesson, given by the class, is a test of the effectiveness of instruction. summaries given by teachers or textbooks have little or no pedagogical justification. only in cases where the summary introduces a new point of view or unifying principles, or when it sets forth basic principles in particularly forceful language--only then is the statement by teacher or textbook justifiable. =thoroughness= teachers are advised to be thorough in their instruction. they in turn urge their students to strive for thoroughness in study. we praise or impugn the scholarship of our colleagues because it possesses or lacks thoroughness. here we have a quality of knowledge universally extolled. but what is meant by thoroughness? how can teachers or students know that they are attaining that degree of comprehension known as thoroughness? we are told that thoroughness is a relative condition, always changing with accompanying circumstances. even an unattainable ideal can be defined,--why not thoroughness? we must, therefore, attempt to determine the meaning of thoroughness as used in teaching and study. =negative interpretation of thoroughness= it may be helpful to formulate the common or lay interpretation of thoroughness. the term "thoroughness" is erroneously used in a quantitative sense to describe scholastic attainment. we are told of a colleague's thoroughness in history; he knows all names, dates, places, facts in the development of mankind; his knowledge of his specialty is encyclopedic; "there is no need of looking things up when he is around." a professor of english literature boasted of the thoroughness with which he teaches _hamlet_: "every word of value and every change in the form of versification are marked; every allusion is taken up, every peculiar grammatical construction is brought to the attention of the class." here we have illustrations of an erroneous conception of thoroughness which gives it an extensive meaning and regards it as the accumulation of a mass of data. =positive interpretation of thoroughness= yet the master of chronological detail in history may have no historical imagination, no historical perspective, no historical judgment. he may possess the facts, but a period in history still remains for him a stretch of time limited by two dates, rather than a succession of years in which all mankind seems to be moving in the same direction, possessed of the same viewpoints, the same hopes and aspirations. the professor of english literature does not see that in teaching _hamlet_ he forsook his specialty, literature, for philology and mythology; that he turned his back on art and took up language structure. thoroughness is not completeness, because the possession of the details of a subject does not necessarily bring with it a true comprehension of it. add all the details, and the sum total is nothing more than the group of details. thoroughness is a degree of comprehension resulting from the acquisition of new points of view. the teacher of history who sees underlying forces in the facts of the past, who understands that true inwardness of any movement which shows him its relation to all phases of life, but who nevertheless may not have ready command of all the specific details, is more thorough in his scholarship. he has the things that count; the facts that are forgotten can easily be found. the class that studies the dramatic structure of _hamlet_, that sees shakespeare's power of character portrayal, that takes up only such grammatical and language points as give clearer comprehension or lead to greater appreciation of diction, is thorough although it does not possess all the facts. it is thorough because what is significant and dynamic in _hamlet_ is made focal. the postgraduate student assiduously searching for data for his doctorate thesis is often guided by the erroneous conception of thoroughness; he wants facts that have never seen the light. the more he gets of these, the nearer he approaches his goal. he avoids conclusions; he is counseled by his professors against giving too much of his book to the expression of his views. analyze the chapters of a doctorate thesis and note the number of pages given to facts and those to conclusions and interpretations. the proportion is astonishing. the student's power to find facts is clearly shown; his power to use facts is not revealed by his thesis. the richer the thesis is in detail, in references, in allusions to dusty tomes and original sources, the more thorough is it frequently considered by the faculty. we have failed to realize that this excessive zeal in gathering and collating a large number of not commonly known facts may make the thesis more cumbersome, more complete, but not necessarily more thorough. however, the plea for a new standard in judging doctorate theses is meeting with gratifying encouragement. what, then, are the teaching practices that make for greater thoroughness, that increase the qualitative and intensive character of knowledge? we shall discuss some of these in the succeeding paragraphs. =how can thoroughness be produced?= the _acquisition of new points of view_ makes for increased thoroughness of comprehension. the class that understands the causes of the american revolution from the american point of view knows of the navigation laws, the quartering of soldiers in american homes, the stamp act, the boston massacre,--the usual provocations that strained patience to the breaking point. the college teacher of american history who spends time on the riots in new york in which a greater number of colonists was killed than in boston, who teaches in detail the various acts forbidding the manufacture of hats and of iron ware, or the protests against english practices in the colonies made by british merchants, etc., is adding more facts, but he may only be intensifying the erroneous conclusion that the students have formed in earlier and less complete courses. the topic, "causes of the american revolution," grows in thoroughness, not through the addition of these facts but through the presentation of new interpretations of the practices of the english. when we explain that the english believed in virtual and not actual representation, the students see a new meaning in "taxation without representation." when the students learn that the english government decided on a new economic and industrial policy which planned to have the mother country specialize in manufacture and transportation and the colonies in production of raw materials, the students see reason, though not necessarily justice, in the acts prohibiting americans from various forms of manufacture and transportational activities. these new facts modify in the minds of students the point of view so often given in elementary courses, that the war for independence was caused by sheer british meanness and injustice, by her policy of reckless repression. it is not always possible to give new points of view to all knowledge in all subjects. there are cases in which there is only one point of view or where students may not be ready for a new interpretation because of their limited mastery of a new field of knowledge. under these conditions an added point of view is a source of confusion rather than an aid to clearer comprehension. some subjects, like the social sciences, naturally allow for richer interpretations. others, like the languages and the physical sciences, present only very limited opportunities; in the biological sciences the possibilities, though not as rich as in the social sciences, are numerous and productive of good results. _comparison_ is a second means of producing thoroughness of comprehension. good teaching abounds in comparisons which are introduced at the end of every important topic rather than reserved for examination questions. comparisons used liberally at every logical pause in the development of a subject always give an added viewpoint, review early subject matter incidentally, stir thought, and make for better organization. how much more clearly are the causes of the war of understood after they are compared with those that brought on the revolutionary war! how much more definite are the causes of the american revolution when compared with those that brought on the french revolution! a writer, a school, or a movement in english literature may be understood when studied by itself; but how is comprehension deepened when each is compared with another writer or school or movement! comparison of perception and conception or appreciation and association in psychology, makes each activity stand out clearer in the mind of the student. compare the laws of rent, wage, profit, and interest in economics, and not only each is better understood but the basic laws of distribution are readily derived by the student. similarly, comparisons in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the entire range of collegiate subjects give increased comprehension, useful though incidental reviews, and greater unification of knowledge, as well as added points of view. _correlation_ as a means of producing thoroughness is closely allied to comparison. correlation relates kindred topics of different subjects, while comparison points out relations in the same subject. the instructor who correlates the history of education with the political and economic history that the student learned in another course is unifying related experience, reducing the field of knowledge, introducing logical organization, and adding new interpretations to facts already acquired. similarly, teaching must be enriched by correlating physics and mathematics, chemistry and physics, literature and music, history of literature and general history, until instruction has taken advantage of every vital relation among subjects. with the growth of specialized subjects there is an unfortunate tendency toward isolation until the untrained mind looks upon the curriculum as a series of unrelated experiences, each rivaling the other in its claim to importance. the advantage of correlation will remain lost in college teaching as long as each instructor regards himself as a specialized investigator concerned with teaching his subject rather than his students. how many college teachers know what subjects their students have already taken, or knowing the names of these subjects, have a general knowledge of their content? the college professor of the preceding generation was a cultured gentleman whose general scholarship transcended the limits of his specialty. he understood and knew the curriculum as a whole. because of changes in every phase of our civilization, his successor has a deeper but a narrower knowledge. he knows little of the work of his students outside of his own subject. he does not relate and correlate the ever growing field of knowledge; he merely adds--by the introduction of his own mass of facts--to the isolation which characterizes the parts of college curricula. this tendency must be counteracted, not by interfering with the scholastic interests of any instructor, but by occasional conferences of instructors of allied subjects in order to agree on common meeting grounds, on points of correlation, on useful repetitions, and on the elimination of needless duplications. such pedagogical conferences are rare because college teachers are not alive to the need of reform in methods of college teaching. thoroughness results from _increase in the number of applications_ of knowledge. the introduction of the functional view into teaching brings with it a realization of the vital needs of increased ways of applying the experience we present to students. as the laws of physics, mathematics, biology, composition, economics, etc., are applied to a number of specific instances, the generalization grows in meaning and in force. specific cases vary, and, varying, give new color and new meaning to the laws that are applied to explain them. how much a law in chemistry means after it is applied to specific instances in industry, human and animal physiology, plant life, or engineering! the equation learned in descriptive geometry may be understood, but it never means so much as when it is applied to specific problems in engineering. applications give added insight into knowledge and therefore make for greater thoroughness of comprehension. =teaching as a process of arousing self-activity= locke's blank paper theory, enunciated centuries ago, has been repeatedly and triumphantly refuted even by tyros in psychology, but in educational practices it continues to hold sway. college teaching too frequently proceeds on the assumption that the mind is an aching void anxiously awaiting the generous contributions of knowledge to be made by the teacher. college examinations usually test for multiplicity of facts acquired, rather than for power developed. college teaching usually does not perceive that the mind is a reacting machine containing a vast amount of pent-up potential energy which is ready to react upon any presentation; that development takes place only as this self-activity expresses itself; that education is evolutionary rather than involutionary. teaching is, therefore, a process of arousing, sustaining, and directing the self-activity of pupils. the more persistently and successfully this activity is aroused, the more systematically it is directed to intelligent ends, the more skillful is the teaching. teachers do not impart knowledge, for that is impossible; they _occasion_ knowledge. only as the teacher succeeds through questions, directions, diagrams, and all known devices, in arousing the self-activity of the student, is he producing the conditions under which knowledge is acquired by the pupil. =evaluation of common methods of teaching= the methods commonly used in college teaching are as follows: . lecture method, with or without quiz sections. . development method, with or without textbook. . combination of lecture and development method. . reference readings and the presentation of papers by students. . laboratory work by students, together with lectures and quiz sections. teachers have long debated the relative merits of these methods or combinations of them. they fail to realize that each method is correct, depending upon the aim to be accomplished and the governing circumstances. no method has a monopoly of pedagogical wisdom; no method, used exclusively, is free from inherent weakness. a teaching method must be judged by its ability to arouse and sustain self-activity and to attain the aim set for a specific lesson. with this standard for judging a method of teaching, we must stop to sum up the relative worth of common methods of college teaching. =lecture method evaluated= the _lecture method_ has been the target for much criticism for many centuries. socrates inveighed against its use by the sophists, and educators since have repeated the attack. the reasons are legion: (_a_) the lecture method tends to discourage the pupil's activity. the student feels no responsibility during the lecture; he listens leisurely, and makes notes of the instructor's contribution. the student's judgment is not called into play; he learns to take knowledge on the authority of the instructor. the sense of comfort and security experienced in a lecture hour is fatal even to aggressive and assertive minds. sooner or later the students succumb to the inertia developed by the lecture system. (_b_) a second limitation of an exclusive lecture method is its inability to make permanent impressions. many a student, entering the lecture hall, has completely forgotten even the theme of the last lecture. knowledge is retained only when it is obtained by the expression of self-activity. to offset this weakness notes must be taken, but these prove to be the bane of the lecture method. some students, in their efforts to record a point just concluded, lose not only the thought of what they are trying to write but also the new thought which the instructor is now explaining; they drop both ideas from their notes and wait for the next step in the development of the lecture. this accounts for the many gaps in the notes kept by students. some instructors, dismayed by the amount of knowledge lost by students, resort to dictation devices. others, realizing the pedagogical weakness of such teaching, distribute mimeographed outlines of carefully prepared summaries of the lectures. now the student is relieved of the tedium of note taking, but the temptation to let his mind wander afield is intensified. an outline, scanty of detail, but so devised as to keep the organization and sequence of subject matter clear in the minds of students, is, of course, helpful. but detailed outlines distributed among the students discourage even attentive listening. (_c_) in teaching by lectures only there is no contact between student and teacher. the student does not recite; he does not reveal his type of mind, his mode of study, his grasp of subject matter. he is merely a passive recipient. to this third weakness of the lecture method we may add a fourth: (_d_) it tends to emphasize quantity rather than method. the student is confronted with a great mass of facts, but he does not acquire a mode of thought nor does he see the method by which a given subject is developed. (_e_) the lecture method, therefore, inculcates in students an attitude of mental subservience which is fatal for the development of courageous and vigorous thought. and finally (_f_) it must be urged that in lecture teaching the instructor is not testing the accuracy of the students' conceptions nor is he able to judge the efficacy of his own methods. but, on the other hand, it must be admitted that with an effective lecturer, possessed of commanding personality, the lecture gives a point of view of a subject and an enthusiasm for it which other devices fail to achieve. the lecture method makes for economy of time and enables one to present his subject to his class with a succinctness absent from many textbooks. where much must be taught in a limited time, where a comprehensive view of an extensive field must be given, when certain types of responses or mental attitudes are desired, the lecture serves well. =final worth of lecture method= experience teaches that an exclusive lecture system is not conducive to efficient work; that lectures to regular classes ought to be punctuated by questions whenever interest lags; that the occasional and even the unannounced lecture is more effective; that supplementary devices for checking up assignments and regular collateral study are of vital importance. where regular lectures are followed by detailed analyses in quiz sections the best results are obtained when the lecturer himself is the questioner. where quiz sections are turned over to assistants, wise procedure requires that quiz leaders attend the lectures and decide, in conference with the lecturer, the specific aims which must be achieved in the quiz work and the assigned readings which must be given to students in preparation for each quiz hour. unless this is done, the student is frequently confused by the divergent points of view presented by lecturer, quiz master, and textbook. _the development method_ has much to commend it. it stimulates activity by its repeated questions. few or no notes are taken. there is constant contact with the student. at every point the mental content of the pupils is revealed. the teacher sees the result of his teaching by the intelligence of successive responses. the pupil is being trained in systematic thought and in concentration. but it must be remembered that the development method is often costly in time because answers may be wrong or irrelevant. it may encourage wandering; a student's reply reveals ignorance of a basic principle, and the aim of the lesson is often forgotten in the eagerness to patch up this misconception. then, too, in subject matter that is arbitrary, as in descriptive and narrative history, no development is possible. in such cases the questions are designed to test the student's knowledge of the text, and the lesson becomes a quiz rather than a development. it is plain, therefore, that a judicious combination of the lecture and development methods will give better results than the exclusive use of either one. the analysis of the pedagogical advantages of each leads to the conclusion that the development method should predominate and that the lecture method should be used sparingly and always with some of the checking devices described. =place of reference reading in college teaching= =evaluation of development--socratic or heuristic method= a common method employed in advanced courses in college subjects emphasizes _reference study and research_. the entire course is reduced to a series of problems, each of which deals with a vital aspect of the subject. each student is made responsible for a topic. the initial hours are devoted to an examination of the common sources of information in this specific subject, the modes of using these, the standards to be attained in writing a paper on one of the topics, and similar matters. the remainder of the term is given over to seminar work: each student reads his paper and holds himself in readiness to answer all questions his classmates may ask on his topic. the aims of such a course are obviously to develop a knowledge of sources and an ability to use intelligently the unorganized data found by the student. the results of these pseudo-seminar courses are far from what was anticipated. a thorough investigation of such a course will soon convince the teacher that the seminar method, whatever its merits in university training, must be refined and diluted before it is applied to college teaching. let us see why. successful reference reading requires a knowledge of the field studied, maturity of mind, discriminating judgment in the selection of material, and ability in organization. the university student is not only maturer and more serious but has a basis of broader knowledge than most undergraduates. without this equipment of mental powers and knowledge, the student cannot judge the merits of contending views nor harmonize seeming discrepancies. a student who has no ample foundation of economics cannot study the subject by reference reading on the problems of economics. to learn the meaning of value he would read the psychological explanations of the austrian schools and the materialistic conceptions of the classical writers. he would then find himself in a state of confusion, owing to what seemed to him to be a superfluity of explanations of value. when one understands one point of view, an added viewpoint is a source of greater clarity and a means of deeper understanding. but when one is entirely ignorant of fundamental concepts, two points of view presented simultaneously become two sources of confusion. in the university only the student of tried worth is permitted to take a seminar course. in the upper classes in college, mediocre students are often welcomed into a seminar course in order to help float an unpromising elective. =limitations of seminar method in undergraduate teaching= the college seminar is usually unsuccessful because few students have ability to hold the attention of their classmates for a period of thirty minutes or more. language limitations, lack of a knowledge of subject matter, inability to illustrate effectively, and the skeptical attitude of fellow students all militate against successful teaching by a member of the class. students presenting papers often select unimportant details or give too many details. the rest of the class listen languidly, take occasional notes, and ask a few perfunctory questions to help bring the session to a close. a successful hour is rare. the student who prepared the topic of the day undoubtedly is benefited, but those who listen acquire little knowledge and less power. the course ends without a comprehensive view of the entire subject, without that knowledge which comes from the teacher's leadership and instruction. this type of reference reading and research has value when used as an occasional ten or fifteen minute exercise to supplement certain aspects of class work. but as a steady diet in a college course, the seminar usually leaves much to be desired. the _laboratory method_ is growing in favor today in college teaching. it is employed in the social sciences, in sociology, in economics, in psychology, in education, as well as in the physical and the biological sciences. where it is followed the aim is clearly twofold; viz., to teach the method by which the specific subject is growing and to develop in the students mental power and a scientific attitude towards knowledge. =value of laboratory method= let us illustrate these two aims of the laboratory method. a laboratory course in chemistry or biology or sociology may be designed to teach the student the use of apparatus and equipment necessary for work in a respective field; the method of attacking a problem; a standard for distinguishing significant from immaterial data; methods of gathering facts; the modes of keeping scientific records,--in a word, the essence of the experience of successive generations of investigators and contributors. but no successful laboratory results can be obtained without a proper mental attitude. the student must learn how to prevent his mental prepossessions or his desires from coloring his observations; to allow for controls and variables; to give most exacting care to every detail that may influence his result; to regard every conclusion as a tentative hypothesis subject to verification or modification in the light of further test. unless the student acquires a knowledge of the method of science and has achieved these necessary modes of thought, his laboratory course has failed to make its most significant contribution. in courses where the aim is to teach socially necessary information or to give a comprehensive view of the scope of a specific subject, it is obvious that the laboratory method will lead far afield. it is for this reason that introductory courses given in recitations, with demonstrations by instructors, and occasional lecture and laboratory hours, are more liberalizing in their influence upon the beginners than courses that are primarily laboratory in character. =cautions in the use of the laboratory method= most laboratory courses would enhance their usefulness by observing a few primary pedagogical maxims. the first of these counsels that we establish most clearly the distinctive aim of the course. the instructor must be sure that he has no quantitative aim to attain but is occupied rather with the problems of teaching the method of his specialty. second, an earnest effort must be made to acquaint the students with the general aim of the entire course as well as with the specific aim of each laboratory exercise. the students must be made to realize that they are not discovering new principles but that by rediscovering old knowledge or testing the validity of well-established truths they are developing not only the technique of investigational work, but also a set of useful mental habits. much in laboratory work seems needless to the student who does not perceive the goal which every task strives to attain. a third requisite for successful laboratory work requires so careful a gradation that every type of problem peculiar to a subject is made to arise in the succession of exercises. it is wise at times to set a trap for students so that they may learn through the consequences of error. for this reason students may be permitted to leap to a conclusion, to generalize from insufficient data, to neglect controls, to overlook disturbing factors, etc. an improperly planned and poorly graded laboratory course repeats exercises that involve the same problems and omits situations that give training in attacking and solving new problems. effective laboratory courses afford opportunity to students to repeat those exercises in which they failed badly. if each exercise in the course is designed to make a specific contribution to the development of the student, it is obvious that merely marking the student zero for a badly executed experiment is not meeting the situation. he must in addition be given the opportunity to repeat the experiment in order to derive the necessary variety of experiences from his laboratory training. and, finally, the character of the test that concludes a laboratory course must be considered. the test must be governed by the same underlying aims that determine the entire course. it must seek to reveal, not the mastery of facts, but growth in power. it must measure what the student can do rather than what he knows. a properly organized test serves to reinforce in the minds of students the aims of the entire course. =the college teacher not the university professor= an analysis of effective teaching is necessarily incomplete that does not give due consideration to the only human factor in the teaching process--the teacher. we have too long repeated the old adages: "he who knows can teach"; "a teacher is born, not made"; "experience is the teacher of teachers." these dicta are all tried and true, but they have the failings common to platitudes. it often happens that those who know but lack in imagination and sympathy are by that very knowing rendered unfit to teach. "knowing" so well, they cannot see the difficulties that beset the learner's path, and they have little patience with the student's slow and measured steps in the very beginnings of their specialty. it is true that some are born teachers, but our educational institutions could not be maintained if classes were turned over only to those to whom nature had given lavishly of pedagogical power. experience teaches even teachers, but the price paid must be computed in terms of the welfare of the student. teaching is one of the arts in which the artist works only with living material; yet college authorities still make no demand of professional training and apprenticeship as prerequisites for admission to the fraternity of teaching artists. ineffective college teaching will not improve until professional teaching standards are set up by respected institutions. the college teacher must be possessed of ample scholarship of a general nature. he must have expertness in his specialty, to give him a knowledge of his field, its problems and its methods. he must be a constant student, so that his scholarship in his specialty will win recognition and respect. but part of his preparation must be given over to professional training for teaching. without this, the prospective teacher may not know until it is too late that his deficiencies of personality unfit him for teaching. with it, he shortens his term of novitiate and acquires his experience under expert guidance. the plan of college-teacher training, given by dr. mezes in chapter ii, so complete in scope, so thoroughly sound and progressive in character, is here suggested as a type of professional preparation now sorely needed. =testing the results of instruction= the usual test of teacher and student is still the traditional examination, with its many questions and sub-questions. we still measure the results of instruction by fathoming the fund of information our students carry away. but these traditional examinations test for what is temporary and accidental. facts known today are forgotten tomorrow. the professor himself often comes to class armed with notes, but he persists in setting up, as a test of the growth of his students, their retentivity of the facts he gave from these very notes. in the final analysis, these examinations are not tests. the writer does not urge the abolition of examinations, but argues rather for a reorganized examination that embodies new standards. a real examination must test for what is permanent and vital; it must measure the degree to which students approximate the aims that were set up to govern the entire course; it must gauge the mental habits, the growth in power, rather than facts. part of an examination in mathematics should test students' ability to attack new problems, to plan a line of work, to think mathematically, to avoid typical fallacies of thought. for this part of the test, books may be opened and references consulted. in literature we may question on text not discussed in class to ascertain the students' power of appreciation or of literary criticism. so, too, in examinations in social sciences, physical sciences, foreign languages, and biological sciences, the examination must consist, in great measure, of questions which test the acquisition of the habits of thought, of work, of laboratory procedure--in a word, the permanent contribution of any study. this part of an examination should be differentiated from the more mechanical and memory questions which seek to reveal the student's mastery of those facts of a subject which may be regarded as socially necessary. reduce the socially necessary data of any subject to an absolute minimum and frame questions on it demanding no such slovenly standard--sixty per cent--as now prevails in college examinations. if the facts called for on an examination are really the most vital in the subject, the passing grade should be very high. if the questions seek to elicit insignificant or minor information, any passing mark is too high. it is obvious, therefore, that a student should receive two marks in most subjects,--one that rates power and another that rates mere acquisition of facts. the passing grade in the one would necessarily be lower than in the other. an examination is justified only when it is so devised that it reveals not only the students' stock of socially useful knowledge but also their growth in mental power. paul klapper _college of the city of new york_ part two the sciences chapter iv the teaching of biology _t. w. galloway_ v the teaching of chemistry _louis kahlenberg_ vi the teaching of physics _harvey b. lemon_ vii the teaching of geology _t. c. chamberlin_ viii the teaching of mathematics _g. a. miller_ ix physical education in the college _thomas a. storey_ iv the teaching of biology biology and education =biology the science basal to all knowing= the life sciences, broadly conceived, are basal to all departments of knowledge; and the study of biology illumines every field of human interest. to the believer in evolution the human body, brain, senses, intellect, sensations, impulses, habits, ideas, knowledges, ideals, standards, attractions, sympathies, combinations, organizations, institutions, and all other powers and possessions of every kind and degree are merely crowning phenomena of life itself. the languages, history, science, economic systems, philosophies, and literatures of mankind are only special manifestations and expressions of life and a part, therefore, of the studies by which we as living beings are trying to appraise and appreciate the meaning of life and of the universe of which life is the most significant product. life is not merely the most notable product of our universe; it is the most persuasive key for solving the riddle of the universe, and is the only universe product which aspires to interpret the processes by which it has reached its own present level. all knowledge, then, is _biological_ in the very vital sense that the living organism is the only _knowing_ thing. the knowing process is a life process. even when knowledge pertains to non-living objects, therefore, it is one-half biological; our most worth-while knowledge--that of ourselves and other organisms--is wholly so. because all our knowledge is colored by the life process, of which the knowing process is derivative, the study of life underlies every science and its applications, every art and its practice, every philosophy and its interpretations. biology must be taught in sympathy with the whole joint enterprise of living and of learning. =adaptation without losing adaptability the goal of life and of education= the most outstanding phenomenon of life is the _adaptation_ of living things to the real and significant conditions of their existence. furthermore, as these conditions are not static, particularly in the case of humans, organisms must not merely be adapted, but must continue thereafter to be _adaptable_. now learning is only a special case under living, and education a special case under life. its purposes are the purposes of life. it is an artificial and rapid recapitulation for the individual, in method and results, of past life itself. the purpose of education is "adaptation,--with the retention of adaptability." it is to bring the individual into attunement, through his own responses and growth, with all the real factors, external and internal, in his life,--material, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual,--and at the same time leave him plastic. adaptation comes through the habit-forming experiences of stimulus and response. the very process of adaptation, therefore, tends toward fixity and to destroy adaptability. it is thus the task of education, as it is of life, to replace the native, inexperienced and physiological plasticity of youth with some product of experience which shall be able to revise habits in the interest of new situations. the adaptability of the experienced person must be psychical and acquired. it must be in the realm of appreciation, attitude, choice, self-direction--a realm superior to habit. in this human task of securing adaptation and retaining adaptiveness the life sciences have high rank. in addition to furnishing the very conception itself that we have been trying to phrase, they give illustrations of all the historic occasions, kinds, and modes of adaptation; in lacking the exactness of the mathematical and physical sciences they furnish precisely the degree of uncertainty and openness of opportunity and of mental state which the act of living itself demands. in other words the science of life is, if properly presented, the most normal possible introduction to the very practical art of living. because of the parallel meaning of education and life in securing progressive adaptation to the essential influential forces of the universe, an appreciative study of biology introduces directly to the purposes and methods of human education. chief aims of biology as a college subject =why study biology in college?= while students differ in the details of their purposes in life, all must learn to make the broad adjustments to the physical conditions of life; to the problems of food and nutrition; to other organisms, helpful and hurtful; to the internal impulses, tendencies, and appetites; to the various necessary human contacts and relations; to the great body of knowledge important to life, which human beings have got together; to the prevailing philosophical interpretations of the universe and of life; and to the pragmatic organizations, conventions, and controls which human society has instituted. in addition to these, some students of biology are going into various careers, each demanding special adjustments which biology may aid notably. such are medicine and its related specialties, professional agricultural courses, and biological research of all kinds. an extended examination of college catalogs shows some consciousness of these facts on the part of teachers of biology. the following needs are formally recognized in the prospectuses: ( ) the disciplinary and cultural needs of the general student; ( ) the needs of those preparing for medicine or other professional courses; and ( ) the needs of the people proposing to specialize in botany and zoölogy. these aims are usually mentioned in the order given here; but an examination of the character of the courses often reveals the fact that the actual organization of the department is determined by an exact reversal of this order,--that most of the attention is given, even in the beginning courses, to the task of preparing students to take advanced work in the subject. the theory of the departments is usually better than their practice. in what follows these are the underlying assumptions,--which seem without need of argument: ( ) the general human needs should have the first place in organizing the courses in biology; ( ) the introductory courses should not be constructed primarily as the first round in the ladder of biological or professional specialization, but for the general purposes of human life; ( ) the preparation needed by teachers of biology for secondary schools is more nearly like that needful for the general student than that suited to the specialist in the subject; and ( ) the later courses may more and more be concerned with the special ends of professional and vocational preparation. general aims of biology in education what are the general adaptive contributions of biology to human nature? what are the results in the individual which biology should aim to bring to every student? there are four classes of personal possessions, important in human adaptation, to which biology ministers in a conspicuous way: information and knowledge; ability and skills; habits; and attitudes, appreciations, and ideals. these four universal aims of education are doubtless closely related and actually inseparable, but it is worth while to consider them apart for the sake of clearness. a. types of biological knowledge useful in the adaptation of human beings to the most important conditions of their life =( ) study of biology furnishes knowledge of adaptive value= ( ) some knowledge of the processes by which individual plants and animals grow and differentiate, through nutrition and activity; of the process of development common to all organisms; and the bearing of these facts on human life, health, and conduct. ( ) an outline knowledge of reproduction in plants and animals; the origin, nature, meaning, and results of sex; the contribution of sex to human life, to social organization and ideals, and its importance in determining behavior and controls. ( ) a good knowledge of the external forces most important in influencing life; of the nature of the influence; of the various ways in which organisms respond and become adjusted individually and racially to these conditions. a sense of the necessity of adaptation; of the working of the laws of cause and effect among living things, as everywhere else; of the fact that nature's laws cannot be safely ignored by man any more than by the lower organisms; of the relation between animal behavior and human behavior. ( ) equally a true conception of the known facts about the internal tendencies in organisms including man, which we call hereditary. the principles underlying plant, animal, and human breeding. any progress in behavior, in legislation, or in public opinion in the field of eugenics, negative or positive, must come from the spread of such knowledge. ( ) a knowledge of the numerous ways in which plants and animals contribute to or interfere with human welfare. this includes use for food, clothing, and labor saving; their destruction of other plants or animals useful or hurtful to us; their work in producing, spreading, or aiding in the cure of disease; their æsthetic service and inspiration; the aid they give us in learning of our own nature through the experiments we conduct upon them; and many miscellaneous services. ( ) a conception of the evolutionary series of plants and animals, and of man's place in the series; a reassurance that man's high place as an intellectual and emotional being is in no way put in peril by his being a part of the series. some clear knowledge of the general manner of the development of the plant and animal kingdoms to their present complexity should be gained. the student should have some acquaintance with the great generalizations that have meant so much to the science and to all human thinking, should understand how they were reached and the main classes of facts on which they are based. ( ) the general student should be required to have such knowledge of structure and classification as is needed to give foundation and body to the evolutionary conceptions of plants and animals, and to the various processes and powers mentioned above--and only so much. ( ) some knowledge of the development of the science itself; of its relation to the other sciences; of the men who have most contributed to it, and their contributions; of the manner of making these discoveries, and of the bearing of the more important of these discoveries upon human learning, progress, and well-being. ( ) something of the parallelism between animal psychology, behavior, habits, instincts, and learning, and those of man,--in both the individual and the social realm. ( ) an elementary understanding of plant and animal and human distribution over the earth, and of the factors that have brought it about. b. forms of skill which work in biology should bring to every student =( ) biological study gives desirable skills= skill or ability may be developed in respect to the following activities: seeking and securing information, recording it, interpreting its significance, reaching general conclusions about it, modifying one's conduct under the guidance of these conclusions, and, finally, of appraising the soundness of this conduct in the light of the results of it. all of these are of basic importance in the human task of making conscious adjustments in actual life; and the ability to get facts and to use them is more valuable than to possess the knowledge of facts. other sciences develop some of these forms of skill better than biology does; nevertheless, we shall find that biology furnishes a remarkably balanced opportunity to develop skills of the various kinds. it presents a great range and variety of opportunity to develop accuracy and skill in raising questions; in observation and the use of precise descriptive terms in recording results of observation; in experimentation; in comparison and classification. it is peculiarly rich in opportunities to gain skill in discriminating between important and unimportant data,--one of the most vital of all the steps in the process of sound reasoning. in practice, a datum may at first sight seem trivial, when in reality it is very significant. _skill_ in estimating values comes only with _experience_ in estimating values, and in applying these estimates in practice, and in observing and correcting the results of practice. finally, skill in adjusting behavior to knowledge is one of the most necessary abilities and most difficult to attain. the study of animal behavior experimentally is at the foundation of much that we know of human psychology and the grounds of human behavior. even in an elementary class it is quite possible so to study animal responses and the results of response as to give guidance and facility to the individual in interpreting the efficiency of his own responses, and in adding to his own controls. as has been said, practice of some kind is necessary to determine whether our estimate of values is good. even vicarious experience has educative value. c. habits which may be strengthened by the work in biology =( ) biology may supply adaptive habits= habits are of course the normal outcome of repeated action. indeed, skills are in a sense habits from another point of view. skill, however, looks rather toward the output; habit, toward the mode of functioning by the person by whom the result is attained. we may then develop habits in respect to all the processes and activities mentioned above under the term "skills." the teacher of biology should have definitely in purpose the securing for the student of habits of inquiry, of diligence, of concentration, of accuracy of observation, of seeking and weighing evidence, of detecting the essentials in a mass of facts, of refusing to rest satisfied until a conclusion, the most tenable in the light of all known data, is reached, and of reëxamining conclusions whenever new evidence is offered. of course it is impossible to use biology to get habits of right reasoning in students unless we _really allow them to reason_. if we insist that their work is merely to observe, record, and hold in memory,--as so many of us do in laboratory work,--they may form habits of doing these things, but not necessarily any more than this. indeed, they may definitely form the habit of doing _only_ these things, _failing to use the results in forming for themselves any of the larger conclusions about organisms_. _seeing_ and _knowing_--without the ability and habit of _thinking_--is not an uncommon or surprising result of our conventional laboratory work. there is only one way to get the habit of right "following through" in reasoning; this is, _always to do the thing_. when data are observed or are furnished it is a pedagogical sin on the part of the teacher to allow the student to stop at that point; and equally so to deduce the conclusion for the student, or to allow the writer of the textbook to do so, or at any time to induce the student to accept from another a conclusion which he himself might reach from the data. we have depended too much on our science as a mere observational science,--when as a matter of fact its chief glory is really its opportunity and its incentives to coherent thinking and careful testing of conclusions. it is inexact enough, if we are entirely honest, to force us to hold our conclusions with an open mind ready to admit new evidence. it is entirely the fault of the teacher if the pupil gets a dogmatic, too-sure habit of mind as the result of his biological studies. and yet, as has been said, it is exact enough to enable us to reach just the same sort of approximations to truth which are possible in our own lives. the study of biology presents a superb opportunity to prepare for living by forming the habits of mind and of life that facilitate right choices in the presence of highly debatable situations. in this it much surpasses the more "exact" sciences. we may conclude, then, by positing the belief that the most important mental habit which human beings can form is that of using and applying consciously the scientific method as outlined above, not merely to biology alone, but to all the issues of personal life as well. d. appreciations, attitudes, and ideals as aided by biology =( ) attitudes of life perfected by study of the life sciences= this group of objectives is a bit less tangible, as some think, than those that have been mentioned; but in my own opinion they are as important and as educable for the good of the youth by means of biology as are knowledge, skill, and habit. in a sense these states of mind arise as by-products of the getting of information, skills, and habits; in turn they heighten their value. we have spoken above of the need of skill and habit in making use of the various steps in the scientific method in reaching conclusions in life. these are essential, but skill and habit alone are not enough to meet the necessities in actual life. in the first place the habit of using the scientific method in the scientific laboratory does not in itself give assurance that the person will apply this method in getting at the truth in problems in his own personal life; and yet this is the essential object of all this scientific training. in order to get the individual to carry over this method,--especially where feelings and prejudices are involved,--we must inculcate in him the scientific ideal and the scientific attitude until they become general in their influence. to do this he ought to be induced as a regular part of his early courses in biology to practice the scientific method upon certain practical daily decisions exactly with the same rigor that is used in the biological laboratory. the custom of using this method in animal study should be transformed into an _attitude of dependence upon it_ as the only sound method of solving one's life choices. only by carrying the method consciously into our life's problems, _as a part of the exercise in the course in biology_, can we break up the disposition to regard the method as good merely in the biological laboratory. we must generate, by practice and precept, the _ideal_ of making universal our dependence upon our best instrument of determining truth. a personal habit in the laboratory must become a general ideal for life, if we hope to substitute the scientific method for prejudice in human living. there is no department of learning so well capable of doing this thing as biology. in the second place, the scientific method standing alone, because of its very excellence as a method, is liable to produce a kind of over-sure dogmatism about conclusions, unless it be accompanied by the scientific attitude or spirit of open-mindedness. the scientific spirit does not necessarily flow from the scientific method at all, unless the teacher is careful in his use of it in teaching. we make a mistake if, in our just enthusiasm to impress the scientific method upon the student, we fail to teach that it can give, at best, only an approximation to truth. the scientific attitude which holds even our best-supported conclusions subject to revision by new evidence is the normal corrective of the possible dogmatism that comes from over-confidence in the scientific method as our best means of discovering truth. the student at the end of the first year of biology ought to have more appreciation and enjoyment of plants and animals and their life than at the beginning,--and increased appreciation of his own relation to other animals; some attitude of dependence upon the scientific method of procedure not merely in biology but in his own life; a desire, however modest, for investigating things for himself; and an ideal of open-minded, enthusiastic willingness to subject his own conclusions to renewed testing at all times. all these gains should be reinforced by later courses. special aims of biology in education =( ) biology a valuable tool for certain technical pursuits= so far as i can see, the preparation of students for medicine, for biological research, or for any advanced application of biology calls only for the following,--in addition to the further intensification of the emphasis suggested above: (_a_) an increased recognition of the subject matter in organizing the course. in the early courses the subject ought to be subordinated to the personal elements. if one is to relate himself to the science in a professional way, the logic of the science comes to be the dominant objective. (_b_) growing out of the above there comes to be a change of emphasis on the scientific method. the method itself is identical, but the attitude toward it is different. in the early courses it was guided by the _teaching_ purpose. we insist upon the method in order that the student may appreciate how the subject has grown, may realize how all truth must be reached, and may come habitually to apply the method to his life problems. in the later courses it becomes the method of research into the unknown. the student comes more and more to use it as a tool, in whose use he himself is subordinated to his devotion to a field of investigation. (_c_) a greater emphasis upon such special forms of biological knowledge as will be necessary as tools in the succeeding steps, and the selection of subject matter with this specifically in view. this is chiefly a matter of information, making the next steps intellectually possible. (_d_) more specific forms of skill, adapted to the work contemplated. technic becomes an object in such courses. morphology, histology, technic, exact experimentation, repetition, drill, extended comparative studies, classifition, and the like become more essential than in the elementary courses. thoroughness and mastery are desiderata for the sake both of subject matter and character; and in very much greater degree than in the general course. organization of the course in biology =biology courses not to be standardized rigidly= the writer does not feel that standardized programs in biology in colleges are either possible or desirable. what is set down here under this heading is merely intended as carrying out the principles outlined above, and not as the only way to provide a suitable program. the writer assumes that the undergraduates are handled by men of catholic interests; and that the undergraduate courses are not distributed and manipulated primarily as feeders for specialized departments of research in a graduate school. this latter attitude is, in my opinion, fatal to creditable undergraduate instruction for the general student or for the future high school teachers of the subject. =but they should follow a general principle:= there are three groups or cycles of courses which may properly be developed by the college or by the undergraduate department of the university. _first group_ =( ) the _first_ group of courses should introduce to life rather than to later biological courses= this group contains introductory courses for all students, but organized particularly with the idea of bringing the rich material of biology to the service of young people with the aim of making them effective in life, and not as a first course for making them botanists or zoölogists. course--_biology ._ general biology this course should introduce the student to the college method of work in the life sciences; should give him the general knowledge and points of view outlined above as the chief aims of biology; should synthesize what the student already knows about plants and animals under the general conception of life. ideally the botanical and zoölogical portions should be fused and be given by one teacher, rather than presented as one semester of botany and one of zoölogy. this, however, is frequently impracticable. in any event the total result should really be biology, and not a patchwork of botany and zoölogy. hence there should be a free crossing of the barriers in use of materials at all times. a year of biology is recommended because each pupil ought to have some work in both fields, and we cannot expect him to take a year in each. course--_biology ._ history of biology this course, dealing with the relation of the development of biology to human interests and problems, may be given separately, or as a part of course ,--which should otherwise be prerequisite to it. this may be one of the most humanizing of all the possible courses in biology. _second group_ =( ) a _second_ group should be technical and introductory to professional uses= this group furnishes a series of courses providing a thorough introduction to the principles and methods of botany and zoölogy. they provide discipline, drill, comparison, mastery of technic as well as increased appreciation of biology and of the scientific method. they should prepare for advanced work in biology, and for technical applications of it to medicine, agriculture, stock breeding, forestry, etc. course--botany : general and comparative botany, and the evolution of plants. course--botany : physiology and ecology of plants. course--botany : plant cytology, histology, and embryology. course--zoölogy : general and comparative zoölogy. course--zoölogy : animal, including human, physiology. course--zoölogy : microtechnic, histology, histogenesis, embryogeny. course--zoölogy : animal ecology. this outline for botany and zoölogy follows in the main the most common arrangement found in the schools of the country. in the personal judgment of the writer all undergraduate courses should combine aspects of morphology, physiology, ecology, etc., rather than be confined strictly to one particular phase; even histology and embryology can be better taught when their physiological aspects are emphasized. there is no fundamental reason, however, why there may not be great latitude of treatment in this group. an alluring feature of biological teaching is that a teacher who has a vital objective can begin anywhere in our wonderful subject and get logically to any point he wishes. these courses may be further subdivided, where facilities allow. _third group_ =( ) a _third_ group of special, but cultural, courses= this group contains certain of the more elementary applications of biology to human welfare. while having practical value in somewhat specialized vocations, the courses in this group are not proposed as professional or technical. they are definitely cultural. every college might well give one or more of them, in accordance with local conditions. they ought to be eligible without the courses of the second group. the order is not significant. biology : economic entomology; biology : bird course; biology : tree course; biology : bacteriology and fermentation; biology : biology of sex; heredity and eugenics; biology : biology and education; biology : evolution and theoretical problems. place of biology in the college curriculum =the first course ought to be given in such a way that it might fittingly be required of all freshmen= the introductory course (biology ) can be given in such a way that it ought to be required of all students during the freshman or sophomore year, preferably the freshman. in addition to the life value suggested above, and its introductory value in later biology courses, such a course would aid the student in psychology, sociology, geology, ethics, philosophy, education, domestic economy, and physical culture. effort should be made to correlate the biological work with these departments of instruction. the course as now given in most of our colleges and universities does not possess enough merit to become a required study. perhaps all we have a right at present to ask is that biology shall be one of a group of sciences from which all students must elect at least one. it is preposterous, in an age of science, that any college should not require at least a year of science. biology should be prerequisite for botany and zoölogy , and for the special biology courses in group three. botany and zoölogy should be made prerequisite for the higher courses in their respective fields; but aside from this almost any sequence would be allowable. a major in biology should provide at least for biology and , botany , zoölogy , botany and , or zoölogy, and . chemistry is desirable as a preparation for the second group of courses. methods of teaching as conditioned by the aims outlined above =acceptance of biology retarded by poor pedagogy= since the laboratory method came into use among biologists, there has been a disposition, growing out of its very excellences, to make a fetich of it, to refuse to recognize the necessity of other methods, to be intolerant of any science courses not employing the laboratory, and to affect a lofty disdain of any pedagogical discussion of the question whatsoever. the tone in which all this is done suggests a boast; but to the discriminating it amounts to a confession! the result of it has been to retard the development of biology to its rightful place as one of the most foundational and catholic of all educational fields. the great variety of aim and of matter not merely allow, but make imperative, the use of all possible methods; and there is no method found fruitful in education which does not lend itself to use in biology. the lecture method, the textbook, the recitation, the quiz and the inverted quiz, the method of assigned readings and reports, the method of conference and seminar, the laboratory method, and the field method are all applicable and needed in every course, even the most elementary. =prostitution of the laboratory= our method has thus crystallized about the laboratory as the one essential thing; but worse, we have used the very shortcomings of the laboratory as an excuse for extending its sway. the laboratory method is the method of research in biology. it is our only way to discover unknown facts. is it, therefore, the best way to rediscover facts? this does not necessarily follow, though we have assumed it. self-discovered facts are no better nor more true than communicated facts, and it takes more time to get them. the laboratory is the slowest possible way of getting facts. we have tried to correct this quantitative difficulty by extending the laboratory time, by speeding up, by confining ourselves to static types of facts like those of structure, and by using detailed laboratory guides for matter and method, all of which tends to make the laboratory exercise one of routine and the mere observation and recording of facts or a verification of the statements in manuals. the correction of these well-known limitations of the laboratory must come, in my opinion, by a frank recognition of, and breaking away from, certain of our misapprehensions about the function of the laboratory. some of these are: =real purpose and possibility of laboratory work= . that the chief facts of a science should be rediscovered by the student in the laboratory. this is not true. life is too short. the great mass of the student's facts must come from the instructor and from books. the laboratory has as its function in respect to facts, some very vital things: as, making clear certain classes of facts which the student cannot visualize without concrete demonstration; giving vividness to facts in general; gaining of enough facts at first hand to enable him to hold in solution the great mass of facts which he must take second hand; to give him skill and accuracy in observation and in recording discoveries; to give appreciation of the way in which all the second-hand facts have been reached; to give taste and enthusiasm for asking questions and confidence and persistence in finding answers for them. anything more than this is waste of time. these results are not gained by mere quantity of work, but only through constant and intelligent guidance of the student's attitude in the process of dealing with facts. . a feeling that the laboratory or scientific method consists primarily of observation of facts and their record. in reality these are three great steps instead of one in this method, which the student of biology should master: ( ) the getting of facts, one device for doing which is observation; ( ) the appraisal and discrimination of these facts to find which are important; and ( ) the drawing of the conclusions which these facts seem to warrant. there are two practical corollaries of this truth. one is that the laboratory should be so administered that the pupil shall appreciate the full scope of the scientific method, its tremendous historic value to the race, and the necessity of using _all_ the steps of it faithfully in all future progress as well as in the sound solution of our individual problems and the guidance of conduct. the second is that we may make errors in our scientific conclusions and in life conclusions, through failure to discriminate among our facts, quite as fatally as through lack of facts. indeed, my personal conviction is that more failures are due to lack of discrimination than to lack of observation. the power to weigh evidence is at least as important as the power to collect it. . a disposition to deny the student the right to reach conclusions in the laboratory,--or, as we flamboyantly say, to "generalize." now in reality the only earthly value of _facts_ is to get _truth_,--that is, conclusions or generalizations. to deny this privilege is taxation without representation in respect to personality. the purpose of the laboratory is to enable students to think, to think accurately and with purpose, to reach their own conclusions. the getting of facts by observation is only a minor detail. in reality, the data the student can get from books are much more reliable than his own observations are likely to be. our laboratory training should add gradually to the accuracy of his observations, but particularly it should enable him to use his own and other persons' facts conjointly, and with proper discrimination, in reaching conclusions. to do other than this tends to abort the reasoning attitude and power, and teaches the pupil to stand passive in the presence of facts and to divorce facts and conclusions. the fear is, of course, that the students will get wrong conclusions and acquire the habit of jumping prematurely to generalizations. but this situation, while critical, is the very glory of the method. what we want to do is to ask them continually,--wherever possible,--_where_ _their facts seem to lead them_. their conclusions are liable to be quite wrong, to be sure. but our province as teachers is to see that the facts ignorance of which made this conclusion wrong are brought to their attention,--and it is not absolutely material whether they discover these facts themselves or some one else does. what we want to compass is practice in reaching conclusions, and the recognition of the necessity of getting and discriminating facts in doing so, together with a realization that there are probably many other facts which we have not discovered that would modify our conclusions. this keeps the mind open. in other words, the student may thus be brought to realize the meaning of the "working hypothesis" and the method of approximation to truth. it makes no difference if one "jumps to a conclusion," if he jumps in the light of all his known facts and holds his conclusion _tentatively_. it is much better to reach wrong conclusions through inadequate facts than to have the mind come to a standstill in the presence of facts. instead of being a threat, reaching a wrong conclusion gives us the opportunity to train students in holding their conclusions open-mindedly and subject to revision through new facts. reaching wrong or partial conclusions and correcting them may be made even more educative than reaching right ones at the outset. this would not be true if the conclusion were being sought for the sake of the science. but it is being sought solely for the sake of the student. the distinction is important. the inability to make it is one of the reasons why research men so often fail as teachers. all through life the student will be forced to draw conclusions from two types of facts,--both of which will be incomplete: those he himself has observed and those which came to him from other observers. while he must always feel free to try out any and all facts for himself, it is quite as important in practice that he be able to weigh other persons' facts discriminatingly. we teach in the laboratory that the pupil should not take his facts second hand, though we rather insist that he do so with his conclusions. in reality it is often much better to take our facts second hand; the stultifying thing is to take our conclusions so. =a normal complete mental reaction for every laboratory exercise= . the dependence upon outlines and manuals. this is one of the most deadening devices that we have instituted to economize gray matter and increase the quantity of laboratory records at the expense of real initiative and thinking. it is easy for the reader to analyze for himself the mental reaction, or lack of it, of the student in following the usual detailed laboratory outline. _every laboratory exercise should be an educative situation calling for a complete mental reaction from the pupil._ in the first place, no exercise should be used which is not really vital and educative. this assured, the full mental reaction of the student should be about as follows: ( ) the cursory survey of the situation. ( ) the raising by the student of such questions as seem to him interesting or worthy of solution. (here, of course, the teacher can by skillful questioning lead the class to raise all necessary problems, and increase the student's willingness to attack them.) ( ) the determination through class conference of the order and method of attacking the problems, and the reasons therefor. ( ) the accumulation and record of discovered facts (sharply eliminating all inferences). ( ) the arrangement (classification) and appraisal (discrimination) of the discovered facts. ( ) conclusions or inferences from the facts. (these should be very sharply and critically examined by teacher and class, to see to what extent they are really valid and supported by the facts.) ( ) retesting of conclusions by new facts submitted by class, by teacher, or from books, with an effort to diminish prejudice as a factor in conclusions, and to increase the willingness to approach our own conclusions with an open mind. when laboratory outlines are used at all they should consist merely of directions, and suggestions, and stimulating questions which will start the pupils on the main quest,--the raising and solving of their own problems. some moot problems[ ] =ascending or descending order?= . shall we begin with the simple, little-known, lower forms and follow the ascending order, which is analogous at least to the evolutionary order? or shall we begin with the more complex but better-known forms and go downward? it seems to the writer that the former method has the advantage in actual interest; in its suggestiveness of evolution, which is the most important single impression the student will get from his course; and in the mental satisfactions that come to pupil and teacher alike from the sense of progress. however, our material is so rich, so interesting, and so plastic that it makes little difference where we begin if only we have a clear idea of what we want to accomplish. =morphology versus other interests= . what proportion of time should be given to morphology in relation to other interests? for several reasons morphology has been overemphasized. it lends itself to the older conception of the laboratory as a place to observe and record facts. it offers little temptation to reach conclusions. it calls for little use of gray matter. this makes it an easy laboratory enterprise. it is what the grade teachers call "busy" work, and can be multiplied indefinitely. it can be made to smack of exactness and thoroughness. furthermore, morphology _is_ in reality a basal consideration. it is a legitimate part of an introductory course,--but never for its own sake nor to prepare for higher courses. but morphology is, however, only the starting point for the higher mental processes by which different forms of organisms are compared, for the correlating of structure with activity, for appreciation of adaptations of structure both to function and to environmental influence. it thus serves as a foundation upon which to build conclusions about really vital matters. experience teaches that sensitiveness, behavior, and other activities and powers and processes interest young people more than structure. the student's views are essentially sound at this point. the introductory course should, therefore, be a cycle in which the student passes quite freely back and forth between form, powers, activities, conditions of life, and the conclusions as to the meanings of these. it is important only that he shall know with which consideration he is from time to time engaged. =few types or many?= . shall a few forms be studied thoroughly, or many forms be studied more superficially? there is something of value in each of these practices. it is possible to over-emphasize the idea of thoroughness in the introductory courses. thoroughness is purely a relative condition anyway, since we cannot really master any type. it seems poor pedagogy, in an elementary class particularly, to emphasize small and difficult forms or organs because they demand more painstaking and skill on the part of the student. my own practice in the elementary course is to have a very few specially favorable forms studied with a good deal of care, and a much larger number studied partially, emphasizing those points which they illustrate very effectively. =distribution of time= . what proportion of time should be given to the various methods of work? manifestly the answer to this question depends upon the local equipment and upon the character of the course itself. the suggestion here relates primarily to the general or introductory courses. it seems to me that a sound division of time would be: two or three hours per week of class exercises (lectures, recitations, reports, quiz, etc.) demanding not less than four hours of preparation in text and library work; and four to six hours a week of "practical" work with organisms, about two hours of which should take the form of studies in the field wherever this is possible. =weakness of the research man as a teacher for the beginning course= . is the "research" man the best teacher for the introductory courses? in spite of a good deal of prejudgment on the part of college and university administrators and of the research biologists themselves. i am convinced he is not. while there are notable exceptions, my own observation is that the investigator, whether the head professor or the "teaching fellow," usually does not have the mental attitude that makes a successful teacher, at least of elementary classes,--and for these reasons: he begrudges the time spent in teaching elementary classes, presents the subject as primarily preparatory to upper courses, subordinates the human elements to the scientific elements, and actually exploits the class in the interest of research. the real teacher's question about an entering class is this: "how can i best use the materials of our science to make real men and women out of these people?" the question of the professional investigator is likely to be: "how many of these people are fit to become investigators, and how can i most surely find them and interest them in the science?" this is a perfectly fine and legitimate question; but it is not an appropriate one until the first one has been answered. it has been assumed that the answers to the two questions are identical. this is one of the most vicious assumptions in higher education today, in my opinion. furthermore, the investigator with his interests centering at the margins of the unknown cannot use the scientific method as a teacher, whose interest must center in the pupil. the points of view are not merely not identical; they are incompatible. =necessity of differentiation and recognition of the two functions= experience indicates the wisdom of having all beginning courses in biology in colleges and universities given by teachers and not by investigators, mature or immature. all people who propose to teach biology in the high schools should have their early courses given from this human point of view, that they may be the better able to come back to it after their graduate work, in their efforts to organize courses for pupils the greater part of whom will never have any but a life interest in the subject. the problem of presenting the advanced and special courses is relatively an easy one. the investigator is the best possible teacher for advanced students in his own special field if he is endowed with any common sense at all. tests of effectiveness of teaching as yet we are notably lacking in regard to the measurement of progress as the result of our teaching. our usual tests--examination, recitation, quiz, reports, laboratory notebooks--evaluate in a measure work done, knowledge or general grasp acquired, and accuracy developed. we need, however, measurements of skill, of habits, and of the still more intangible attitudes and appreciations. these may be gained in part by furnishing really educative situations and observing the time and character of the student's reaction. every true teacher is in reality an experimental psychologist, and must apply directly the methods of the psychologist. =more vital _tests_ of results of teaching must be found= the laboratory and field furnish opportunity for this sort of testing. the student may be confronted with an unfamiliar organism or situation and be given a limited time in which to obtain and record his results. he may be asked to state and enumerate the problems that are suggested by the situation; outline a method of solving them; discover as large a body of facts as possible; arrange them in an order that seems to him logical, with his reasons; and to make whatever inferences seem to him sound in the light of facts,--supporting his conclusions at every point. the ability to make such a total mental reaction promptly and comprehendingly is the best test of any teaching whatsoever. the important thing is that we shall not ourselves lose sight of the essential parts of it in our enthusiasm for one portion of it. in judging attitude and appreciation i think it is possible for discriminating teachers to obtain the testimony of the pupil himself in appraisal of his own progress and attitude. this needs to be done indirectly, to be sure. the student's self-judgment may not be accurate; but it is not at all impossible to secure a disposition in students to measure and estimate their own progress in these various things with some accuracy and fairness of mind. besides its incidental value as a test, i know of no realm of biological observation, discrimination, and conclusion more likely to prove profitable to the student than this effort to estimate, without prejudice, his own growth. the literature of the subject =scarcity of authoritative pedagogical literature in biology= for various reasons very little attention has been given to the pedagogy of college biology by those in the best position to throw light upon this vital problem. more information as to the attitude of teachers of the subject is to be derived from college and university catalogs than elsewhere,--howbeit of a somewhat stereotyped and standardized kind. much more has been written relative to the teaching of biology in the secondary schools. in my opinion the most effective teaching of biology in america today is being done in the best high schools by teachers who have been forced to acquire a pedagogical background that would enable them to reconstruct completely their presentation of the subject. most of these people obtained very little help in this task from their college courses in biology. for these reasons every college teacher will greatly profit by studying what has been written for the secondary teachers. _school science and mathematics_ (chicago) is the best source for current views in this field. its files will show no little of the best thought and investigation that have been devoted to the principles underlying instruction in biology. lloyd and bigelow, in _the teaching of biology_ (longmans, green & co.), have treated the problems of secondary biology at length. ganong's _teaching botanist_ (the macmillan company) has high value. the authors of textbooks of biology, botany, and zoölogy issued during the last ten years have ventured to develop, in their prefaces, appendices, and elsewhere, their pedagogical points of view. the writer has personal knowledge that teaching suggestions are still resented by some college teachers of zoölogy. illustrations of the tendency to incorporate pedagogical material in textbooks on biological subjects can be found in dodge, c. w. _practical biology._ harper and brothers, . gager, c. s. _fundamentals of botany._ p. blakiston's son & co., . galloway, t. w. _textbook of zoölogy._ p. blakiston's son & co., . kingsley, j. s. _textbook of vertebrate zoölogy._ h. holt & co. petrunkevitch, a. _morphology of invertebrate types._ the macmillan company, . t. w. galloway _beloit college_ bibliography cramer, f. logical method in biology. _popular science monthly_, vol. , page . . farlow, w. g. biological teaching in colleges. _popular science monthly_, vol. , page . . harvey, n. a. pedagogical content of zoölogy. _proceedings national education association_, ; page . hodge, c. f. dynamic biology. _pedagogical seminar_, vols. - . huxley, j. h. educational value of natural history science. essay ii, _science and education_. . rusk, r. r. _introduction to experimental education._ longmans, green & co., . saunders, s. j. value of research in education. _school science and mathematics_, vol. ii, march, . smallwood, w. m. biology as a culture study. _journal of pedagogy_, vol. , page . welton, j. _psychology of education_ (chapter on "character"). the macmillan company, . footnotes: [ ] these problems relate particularly to the introductory courses. v the teaching of chemistry =preparation of entering students a determining factor= some of the students entering classes in chemistry in college have already had an elementary course in the subject in the high school or academy, while others have not. again, some study chemistry in college merely for the sake of general information and culture, while many others pursue the subject because the vocation they are planning to make their life's work requires a more or less extensive knowledge of chemistry. thus, all students in the natural sciences and their applications--as we have them in medicine, engineering, agriculture, and home economics--as well as those who are training to become professional chemists, either in the arts and industries or in teaching, must devote a considerable amount of time and energy to the study of chemistry. the teacher of college chemistry consequently must take into consideration the preparation with which the student enters his classes and also the end which is to be attained by the pursuit of the subject in the case of the various groups of students mentioned. in the larger high schools courses in chemistry are now quite generally offered, but this is not yet true of the smaller schools. in some colleges those who have had high school chemistry are at once placed into advanced work without taking the usual basal course in general chemistry which is so arranged that students can enter it who have had no previous knowledge of the subject. in other words, in some cases the college builds directly upon the high school course in chemistry. as a rule, however, this does not prove very successful, for the high school course in chemistry is not primarily designed as a course upon which advanced college chemistry can be founded. this is as it should be, for after all, while the high school prepares students for college, its chief purpose is to act as a finishing school for those larger numbers of students who never go to college. the high school course in chemistry is consequently properly designed to give certain important chemical facts and point out their more immediate applications in the ordinary walks of life, as far as this can properly be done in the allotted time with a student of high school age and maturity. the result is consequently that while such work can very well be accepted toward satisfying college entrance requirements, it is only rarely sufficient as a basis for advanced college courses in the subject. as a rule it is best to ask all students to take the basal course in general chemistry offered in college, arranging somewhat more advanced experiments in the laboratory wherever necessary for those who have had chemistry in preparatory schools. this has become the writer's practice after careful trial of other expedients. the scheme has on the whole worked out fairly well, for it is sufficiently elastic to meet the needs of the individual students, who naturally come with preparation that is quite varied. almost invariably students who, on account of their course in high school chemistry, are excused from the general basal course in college chemistry have been handicapped forever afterward in their advanced work in the subject. =organization of first-year course--general chemistry= the first year's work in college chemistry consists of general chemistry. it is basal for all work that is to follow, and yet at the same time it is a finished course, giving a well-rounded survey of the subject to all who do not care to pursue it further. this basal course is commonly given in the freshman year, though sometimes it is deferred to the sophomore year. its content is now fairly uniform in different colleges, the first semester being commonly devoted to general fundamental considerations and the chemistry of the non-metals, while the metals receive attention in the second semester, the elements of qualitative analysis being in some cases taught in connection with the chemistry of the metals. the work is almost universally conducted by means of lectures, laboratory work, and recitations. the lectures have the purpose to unfold the subject, give general orientation as to the most important fundamental topics and points of view, and furnish impetus, guidance, and inspiration for laboratory study and reading. to this end the lectures should be illustrated by means of carefully chosen and well-prepared experiments. these serve not only to illustrate typical chemical processes, and fundamental laws, but they also stimulate interest and teach the student many valuable points of manipulation, for it is well-nigh impossible to watch an expert manipulator without absorbing valuable hints on the building up, arranging, and handling of apparatus. in the lectures the material should be presented slowly, carefully, and clearly, so that it may readily be followed by the student. facts should always be placed in the foreground, and they should be made the basis of the generalization we call laws, and then the latter naturally lead to theoretical conceptions. it is a great mistake to begin with the atomic theory practically the first day and try to bolster up that theory with facts later on as concrete cases of chemical action are studied. on the other hand, it is also quite unwise to defer the introduction of theoretical conceptions too long, for the atomic theory is a great aid in making rapid progress in the study of chemistry. at least two or three weeks are well spent in studying fundamental chemical reactions as facts quite independent of any theories whatsoever, in order that the student may thoroughly appreciate the nature of chemical change and become familiar with enough characteristic and typical cases of chemical action so that the general laws of chemical combination by weight and by volume may be logically deduced and the atomic and molecular theories presented as based upon those laws. up to this stage the reactions should be written out in words and all formulation should be avoided, so that the student will not get the idea that "chemistry is the science of signs and symbols," or that "chemistry is a hypothetical science," but that he will feel that chemistry deals with certain very definite, characteristic, and fundamental changes of matter in which new substances are formed, and that these processes always go on in accordance with fixed and invariable laws, though they are influenced by conditions of temperature, pressure, light, electricity, and the presence of other substances in larger or smaller amounts. the theory and formulation when properly introduced should be an aid to the student, leading him to see that the expression of chemical facts is simplified thereby. thus he will never make the error of regarding the symbol as the fundamental thing, but he will from the very outset look upon it simply as a useful form of shorthand expression, as it were, which is also a great aid in chemical thinking. facts and theories should ever be kept distinct and separate in the student's mind, if he is to make real progress in the science. a thoroughgoing, logical presentation of the subject, leading the student slowly and with a sense of perfect comprehension into the deeper and more difficult phases, should constitute one of the prime features of the work of the first year. interest should constantly be stimulated by references to the historical development of the subject, to the practical applications in the arts and industries, to sanitation and the treatment of disease, to the providing of proper food, clothing, fuel, and shelter, to the problems of transportation and communication, to the chemical changes that are constantly going on in the atmosphere, the waters, and the crust of the earth as well as in all living beings. nevertheless, all the time the _science_ should be taught as the backbone of the entire course. the allusions to history and the manifold applications to daily life are indeed very important, but they must never obscure the science itself, for only thus can a thorough comprehension of chemistry be imparted and the benefits of the mental drill and culture be vouchsafed to the student. =methods of teaching--the lecture method= for the freshman and sophomore, two lectures per week are sufficient for this type of instruction. in these exercises the student should give his undivided attention to what is presented by the lecturer. the taking of notes is to be discouraged rather than encouraged, for it results in dividing the attention between what is presented and the mechanical work of writing. to take the place of the usual lecture notes, students of this grade had better be provided with a suitable text, definite chapters in which are assigned for reading in connection with each lecture. the text thus serves for purposes of review, and also as a means for inculcating additional details which cannot to advantage be presented in a lecture, but are best studied at home by perusing a book, the contents of which have been illuminated by the experimental demonstrations, the explanations on the blackboard, the charts, lantern slides, and above all the living development and presentation of the subject by the lecturer. the lectures should in no case be conducted primarily as an exercise in dictation and note taking. if the lectures do not give general orientation, illumination, and inspiration for further study in laboratory and library, they are an absolute failure and had better be omitted entirely. on the other hand, when properly conducted the lectures are the very life of the course. =the laboratory work= the laboratory work should be well correlated with the lectures, especially during the first year. the experiments to be performed by the student should be carefully chosen and should not be a mere repetition of the lecture demonstrations. the laboratory experiments should be both qualitative and quantitative in character. they should on the one hand illustrate the peculiar properties of the substances studied and the typical concomitant changes of chemical action, but on the other hand a sufficient number of quantitative exercises in the laboratory should be introduced to bring home to the student the laws of combining weights and volumes, thus giving him the idea that chemistry is exact and that quantitative relations always obtain when chemical action takes place. at the same time the quantitative exercises lay the basis for the proper comprehension of the laws of combining weights and volumes and the atomic and molecular theories. at least three periods of two consecutive hours each should be spent in the laboratory per week, and the laboratory exercises should be made so interesting and instructive that the student will feel inclined to work in the laboratory at odd times in addition if his program of other studies permits. the laboratory should at all times be, as its name implies, a place where work is done. order and neatness should always prevail. apparatus should be kept neat and clean, and in no case should slovenly habits of setting up apparatus be tolerated. the early introduction of a certain amount of quantitative experimentation in the course makes for habits of order and neatness in experimentation and guards against bringing up "sloppy" chemists. =the student's laboratory record= the laboratory notebook should be a neat and accurate record of the work in the laboratory. to this end the entries in the notebook should be made in the laboratory at the time when the experiment is actually being performed. the writing of data on loose scratch paper and then finally writing up the notebook later at home from such sheets is not to be recommended, for while thus the final appearance of the notebook may be improved, it is no longer a first-hand record such as every scientist makes, but rather a transcribed one. the student, in making up such a transcription, is only too apt to draw upon his inner consciousness to make the book appear better; indeed, when he has neglected to transcribe his notes for several days, he is bound to produce anything but a true and accurate record, to say nothing about being put to the temptation to "fake" results which he has either not at all obtained in the laboratory, or has recorded so imperfectly on the scratch paper that he can no longer interpret his record properly. the only true way is to have the notes made directly in the permanently bound notebook at the time when the experiment is actually in progress. the student ought not to take the laboratory notebook home at all without the instructor's knowledge and permission. each experiment should be entered in the notebook in a brief, businesslike manner. long-winded, superfluous discussions should be avoided. as a rule, drawings of apparatus in the notes are unnecessary, it being sufficient to indicate that the apparatus was set up according to figure so-and-so in the laboratory manual or according to the directions given on page so-and-so. the student should be made to feel that the laboratory is the place where careful, purposeful experimentation is to be done, that this is the main object of the laboratory work, and that the notebook is merely a reliable record of what has been accomplished. to this end the data in the notebook should be complete, yet brief and to the point, so that what has been done can be looked up again and that the instructor may know that the experiment has been performed properly, that its purpose was understood by the student, and that he has made correct observations and drawn logical conclusions therefrom. while in each case the notes should indicate the purpose of the experiment, what has actually been done and observed, and the final conclusions, it is on the whole best not to have a general cut-and-dried formula according to which each and every experiment is to be recorded. it is better to encourage a certain degree of individuality in this matter on the part of each student. notebooks should be corrected by the teacher every week, and the student should be asked to correct all errors which the teacher has indicated. a businesslike atmosphere should prevail in the laboratory at all times, and this should be reflected in the notebooks. anything that savors of the pedantic is to be strictly avoided. small blackboards should be conveniently placed in the laboratory so that the instructor may use them in explaining any points that may arise. usually the same question arises with several members of the class, and a few moments of explanation before the blackboard enable the instructor to clear up the points raised. this not only saves the instructor's time, but it also stimulates interest in the laboratory when explanations are thus given to small groups just when the question is hot. it is, of course, assumed that the necessary amount of apparatus, chemicals, and other supplies is available, and that the laboratory desks, proper ventilation of the rooms, and safeguards in the case of all experiments fraught with danger have received the necessary painstaking attention on the part of the instructor, who must never for a moment relax in looking after these matters, which it is not the purpose to discuss here. at all times the student should work intelligently and be fully aware of any dangers that are inherent in what he is doing. it need hardly be said that a beginner should not be set at experiments that are specially dangerous. having been given proper directions, the student should be taught to go ahead with confidence, for working in constant trepidation that an accident may occur often creates a nervous state that brings about the accident. too much emphasis cannot be laid upon proper, definite laboratory instructions, especially as to kinds and amounts of materials to be used. such directions as "take a _little_ phosphorus," for example, should be strictly avoided, for the direction as to amount is absolutely indefinite and may in the case where phosphorus or any other dangerous substance is used lead to dire accidents. the student should be given proper and very definite directions, and then he should be taught to follow these absolutely and not use more of the materials than is specified, as the beginner is so apt to do, thus often wasting his time and the reagents as well. economy and the correct use of all laboratory supplies should be inculcated indirectly all the time. a fixed set of printed rules for the laboratory is generally neither necessary nor desirable when students are properly directed to work intelligently as they go, and good directions are given in the laboratory manual. thus a spirit of doing intelligently what is right and proper, guarding against accidents, economizing in time and materials of all kinds will soon become dominant in the laboratory and will greatly add to the efficiency of the workers. minor accidents are almost bound to occur at times in spite of all precautions, and the instructor should be ready to cope with these promptly by means of a properly supplied first-aid kit. =recitations and quizzes= for students of the first year quizzes or recitations should be held at least twice a week. in these exercises the ground covered in the lectures and laboratory work should be carefully and systematically reviewed. the quiz classes should not be too large. twenty-five students is the upper limit for a quiz section. the laboratory sections too should not be larger than this, and it is highly desirable that the same instructor conduct both the recitation and the immediate laboratory supervision of the student. lecture classes can, of course, be very much larger in number. in most colleges the attendance upon classes in chemistry is so large that it is not possible for the professor to deliver the lectures and also personally conduct all of the laboratory work and recitations. it is consequently necessary to divide the class up into small sections for laboratory and quiz purposes. it is highly desirable that the student become well acquainted with his individual instructor in laboratory and quiz work, and therefore it would be unfortunate to have one instructor in the laboratory and still another instructor in the quiz. it might be argued that it is a good thing to have the student become acquainted with a number of instructors, but in the writer's experience such practice results to the disadvantage of the student, and is consequently not to be recommended. in the recitations the student is to be encouraged to do the talking. he is to be given an opportunity to ask questions as well as to answer the queries put by the teacher. short written exercises of about ten minutes' duration can be given to advantage in each of these recitations. in this way the entire class writes upon a well-chosen question or solves a numerical chemical problem and thus a great deal of time is saved. the quiz room should be well provided with blackboards which may be used to great advantage in the writing of equations and the solution of chemical problems just as in a class in mathematics. the textbook, from which readings are assigned to the student in connection with the lectures, should contain questions which recapitulate the contents of each chapter. when such questions are not contained in the book, they ought to be provided by the teacher on printed or mimeographed sheets. when properly conducted, the recitation aids greatly in clarifying, arranging and fixing the important points of the course in the mind of the student. young instructors are apt to make the mistake of doing too much talking in the quiz, instead of encouraging the student to express his views. in these days, when foreign languages and mathematics are more or less on the wane in colleges, the proper study of chemistry, particularly in the well-conducted quiz, will go far toward supplying the mental drill which the older subjects have always afforded. =summary of first-year course= if the work of the first year has been properly conducted, it will have given the student a general view of the whole field of chemistry, together with a sufficient amount of detail so securely anchored in careful laboratory work and practical experience as to form a basis for either more advanced work in chemical lines or in the pursuance of the vocations already mentioned in which a knowledge of chemistry is basal. it is hardly necessary to add that if well taught, the student will at the end of such a course have a desire for more chemistry. =organization of second-year course= the work of the second year of chemistry in college generally consists of quantitative analysis, though the more intensive study of the compounds of carbon, known as organic chemistry, is also frequently taken up at this time, and there is much to be said in favor of such practice. =content of the course in quantitative analysis= in the quantitative analysis, habits of neatness and accuracy must be insisted upon. it is well to give the general orientation and directions by means of lectures. one or two such exercises per week will suffice. there should also be recitations. when two lectures per week are given, it will suffice to review the work with the student in connection with such lectures, provided the class is not too large for quiz purposes. intelligent work should characterize a course in quantitative analysis. to this end the student should be taught how to take proper representative samples of the material to be analyzed. he should then be taught how to weigh or measure out that sample with proper care. the manipulations of the analytical process should be carried out so that each step is properly understood and its relations to the general laws of chemistry are constantly before the mind. in carrying out the process, the various sources of error must be thoroughly appreciated and guarded against. the final weighing or measuring of the form in which the ingredient sought is estimated should again be carried out with care, and in the calculation of the percentage content due regard should be had for the limits of error of experimentation throughout the entire analytical process. the student feels that a large number of the exercises in quantitative analysis are virtually cases of making chemical preparations of the highest possible purity, thus connecting his previous chemical experience with his quantitative work. the course in quantitative analysis should cover the determination of the more important basic and acid radicals, and should consist of both gravimetric and volumetric exercises. the choice of the exercises is of great importance. it may vary, and should vary considerably in different cases. thus a student in agriculture is naturally interested in the methods of estimating lime, phosphorus, nitrogen, potash, silica, sulphur, etc., whereas a student in engineering would be more interested in work with the heavy metals and the ingredients which the commercial samples of such metals are apt to contain. thus, analytical work on solder, bearing metal, iron and steel, cement, etc., should be introduced as soon as the student in engineering is ready for it. it is quite possible to inculcate the principles of quantitative analysis by selecting exercises in which the individual student is interested, though, to be sure, certain fundamental things would naturally have to be taken by all students, whatever be the line for which they are training. a few exercises in gas analysis and also water analysis should be given in every good course in quantitative analysis that occupies an entire year. careful attention should be given to the notebook in the quantitative work, and the student should also be made to feel that in modern quantitative analysis not only balances and burettes are to serve as the measuring instruments, but that the polariscope and the refractometer also are very important, and that at times still other physical instruments like the spectroscope, the electrometer, and the viscometer may prove very useful indeed. the quantitative analysis offers a splendid opportunity for bringing home to the student what he has learned in the work of the first year, showing him one phase of the application of that knowledge and making him feel, as it were, the quantitative side of science. this latter view can be imparted only to a limited degree in the first year's work, but the quantitative course offers an unusual opportunity for giving the student an application of the fundamental quantitative laws which govern all chemical processes. it is not possible to analyze very many substances during any college course in quantitative analysis. the wise teacher will choose the substances to be analyzed so as to keep up the interest of the student and yet at the same time give him examples of all the fundamental cases that are commonly met in the practice of analytical work. a careful, painstaking, intelligent worker should be the result of the course in quantitative analysis. toward the end of the course, too, a certain amount of speed should be insisted upon. the student should be taught to carry on several processes at the same time, but care should be taken not to overdo this. =the course in organic chemistry= in the course in organic chemistry, lectures, laboratory work, and recitations, arranged very much as to time as in the first year, will be found advantageous. if the intensive work in organic chemistry is postponed to the third year in college, there are certain advantages. for example, the student is more mature and has had drill and experience in the somewhat simpler processes commonly taught in general and analytical chemistry. on the other hand, the postponing of organic chemistry to the third year has the disadvantage that the student goes through his basal training in quantitative analysis without the help of that larger horizon which can come to him only through the study of the methods of organic chemistry. the general work of the first year, to be sure, if well done compensates in part for what is lost by postponing organic chemistry till the third year, but it can never entirely remove the loss to the student. teachers will differ as to whether the time-honored division of organic chemistry into the aliphatic and aromatic series should be maintained pedagogically, but they will doubtless all agree that the methods of working out the structure of the chemical compound are peculiarly characteristic of the study of the compounds of carbon, and these methods must consequently constitute an important point to be inculcated in organic chemistry. the derivation of the various types of organic compounds from the fundamental hydrocarbons as well as from one another, and the characteristic reactions of each of these fundamental forms which lead to their identification and also often serve as a means of their purification, should naturally be taught in a thoroughgoing manner. the numerous practical applications which the teacher of organic chemistry has at his command will always serve to make this subject one of the deepest interest, if not the most fascinating portion of the entire subject of chemistry. no student should leave the course in organic chemistry without feeling the beautiful unity and logical relationship which obtains in the case of the compounds of carbon, the experimental study of which has cast so much light upon the chemical processes in living plants and animals, processes upon which life itself depends. the analysis of organic compounds is probably best taught in connection with the course in organic chemistry. it is here that the student is introduced to the use of the combustion furnace and the method of working out the empirical formulæ of the compounds which he has carefully prepared and purified. the laboratory practice in organic chemistry generally requires the use of larger pieces of apparatus. some of the experiments also are connected with peculiar dangers of their own. these facts require that the student should not approach the course without sufficient preliminary training. furthermore, the teacher needs to exercise special care in supervising the laboratory work so as to guard the student against serious accidents. the historical development of organic chemistry is especially interesting, and allusions to the history of the important discoveries and developments of ideas in organic chemistry should be used to stimulate interest and so enhance the value of the work of the student. the practical side of organic chemistry should never be lost sight of for a moment, and under no condition should the course be allowed to deteriorate into one of mere picturing of structural formulæ on the blackboard. all chemical formulas are merely compact forms of expression of what we know about chemical compounds. there are, no doubt, many facts about chemical compounds which their accepted formulas do not express at all, and the wise teacher should lead the student to see this. there is peculiar danger in the course in organic chemistry that the pupil become a mere formula worshiper, and this must carefully be guarded against. the applications of organic chemistry to the arts and industries, but especially to biochemistry, will no doubt interest many members of the class of a course in organic chemistry if the subject is properly taught. this will be particularly the case if the teacher always holds before the mind of the pupil the actual realities in the laboratory and in nature, using formulation merely as the expression of our knowledge and not as an end in itself. =place of physical chemistry in the college curriculum= physical chemistry, commonly regarded as the youngest and by its adherents the most important and all-pervading branch of chemistry, is presented very early in the college course by some teachers, and postponed to the junior and even the senior year by others. just as a certain amount of organic chemistry should be taught in the first year, so a few of the most fundamental principles of physical chemistry must also find a place in the basal work of the beginner. however, in the first year's work in chemistry so many phases of the subject must needs be presented in order to give a good general view, that many details in either organic, analytical, or physical chemistry must necessarily be omitted. what is to be taught in that important basal year must, therefore, be selected with extreme care. moreover, so far as physical chemistry is concerned, it is in a way chemical philosophy or general chemistry in the broadest sense of the word, and consequently requires for its successful pursuit not only a basal course, but also proper knowledge of analytical and organic chemistry, as well as a grounding in physics, crystallography, and mathematics. at the same time a certain amount of biological study is highly desirable. a good course in physical chemistry postulates lectures, laboratory work, and recitations. in general, these should be arranged much like those in the basal course and the course in organic chemistry. if anything, more time should be put upon the lectures and recitations; certainly more time should be devoted to exercises of this kind than in the course in quantitative analysis, which is best taught in the laboratory. at the same time it would be a mistake to teach physical chemistry without laboratory practice. indeed, laboratory practice is the very life of physical chemistry, and the more of such work we can have, the better. however, since physical chemistry, as already stated, delves into the philosophical field, discussions in the lecture hall and classroom become of peculiar importance. =courses in applied chemistry= many colleges now give additional courses in chemical technology. these would naturally come after the student has had a sufficient foundation in general chemistry, chemical analysis, and organic and physical chemistry. as a rule such applied courses ought not to be given until the junior or senior year. it is a great mistake to introduce such courses earlier, for the student cannot do the work in an intelligent manner. =enthusiastic teaching a vital factor= in all the courses in chemistry, interest and enthusiasm are of vital importance. these can be instilled only by the teacher himself, and no amount of laying out courses on paper and giving directions, however valuable they may be, can possibly take the place of an able, devoted, enthusiastic teacher. chemistry deals with things, and hence is always best taught in the laboratory. the classroom and the library should create interest and enthusiasm for further laboratory work, and in turn the laboratory work should yield results that will finally manifest themselves in the form of good written reports. =the teacher must continue his researches= original work should always be carried on by the college teacher. if he fails in this, his teaching will soon be dead. there will always be some bright students who can help him in his research work. these should be led on and developed along lines of original thought. from this source there will always spring live workers in the arts and industries as well as in academic lines. lack of facilities and time is often pleaded by the college teacher as an excuse for not doing original work. there is no doubt that such facilities are often very meager. nevertheless, the enthusiastic teacher is bound to find the time and also the means for doing some original work. a great deal cannot be expected of him as a rule because of his pedagogical duties, but a certain amount of productive work is absolutely essential to any live college teacher. =future of chemistry in the college curriculum= the importance of chemistry in daily life and in the industries has been increasing and is bound to continue to increase. for this reason the subject is destined to take a more important place in the college curriculum. if well taught, college chemistry will not only widen the horizon of the student, but it will also afford him both manual training and mental drill and culture of the highest order. louis kahlenberg _university of wisconsin_ vi the teaching of physics the need of giving to physics a prominent place in the college curriculum of the twentieth century is quite universally admitted. if, as an eminent medical authority maintains, no man can be said to be educated who has not the knowledge of trigonometry, how much more true is this statement with reference to physics? the five human senses are not more varied in scope than are the five great domains of this science. in the study of heat, sound, and light we may strive merely to understand the nature of the external stimuli that come to us through touch, hearing and sight; but in mechanics, where we examine critically the simplest ideas of motion and inertia, we acquire the method of analysis which when applied to the mysteries of molecular physics and electricity carries us along avenues that lead to the most profound secrets of nature. utilitarian aspects dwindle in our perspective as we face the problem of the structure, origin, and evolution of matter--as we question the independence of space and time. modern physics possesses philosophic stature of heroic size. =utilitarian value of the study of physics= but with regard to everyday occurrences a study of physics is necessary. it is trite to mention the development in recent years of those mechanical and electrical arts that have made modern civilization. the submarine, vitalized by storage battery and diesel engine, the torpedo with its gyroscopic pilot and pneumatic motors, the wireless transmission of speech over seas and continents--these things no longer excite wonder nor claim attention as we scan the morning paper; yet how many understand their mechanism or appreciate the spirit which has given them to the world? =disciplinary value of the study= if culture means the subjective transformation of information into a philosophy of life, can culture be complete unless it has included in its reflections the marvelously simple yet intricate interrelations of natural phenomena? the value of this intricate simplicity as a mental discipline is equaled perhaps only in the finely drawn distinctions of philosophy and in the painstaking statements of limitations and the rapid generalizations of pure mathematics; and let us not forget the value of discipline, outgrown and unheeded though it be in the acquisitive life of the present age. =relation of physics to philosophy and the exact sciences= the professional student, continually increasing in numbers in our colleges, either of science or in certain branches of law, finds a broad familiarity with the latest points of view of the physicist not only helpful but often indispensable. chemistry can find with difficulty any artificial basis for a boundary of its domain from that of physics. certainly no real one exists. the biologist is heard asking about the latest idea in atomic evolution and the electrical theories of matter, hoping to find in these illuminating points of view, he tells us, some analogy to his almost hopelessly complex problems of life and heredity. even those medical men whose interest is entirely commercial appreciate the convenience of the x-ray and the importance of correctly interpreting the pathological effects of the rays of radio-activity and ultra-violet light. one finds a great geologist in collaboration with his distinguished colleague in physics, and from the latter comes a contribution on the rigidity of the earth. astronomy answers nowadays to the name of astrophysics, and progressive observatories recognize in the laboratory a tool as essential as the telescope. in a word, the professional student of science not only finds that the subject matter of physics has many fundamental points of contact with his own chosen field, but also recognizes that the less complex nature of its material allows the method of study to stand out in bolder relief. training in the method and a passion for the method are vital to a successful and an ardent career. =should the teaching of college physics change its aim for different classes of students?= in the teaching of physics, then, the aim might at first sight appear to be quite varied, differing with different classes of students. a careful analysis of the situation, however, will show, we think, that this conclusion can with difficulty be justified: that it is necessary to conduct college instruction in a fashion dictated almost not at all by the subsequent aims of the students concerned. in the more elementary work, certainly, adherence to this idea is of great importance. the character, design, and purpose of an edifice do not appear in the foundations except that they are massive if the structure is to be great. not infrequently this seems an unnecessary hardship to a professional student anxious to get into the work of his chosen field. if such is the case, let him question perhaps whether any study of physics should be attempted, as this query may have different answers for different individuals. but if he is to study it at all, there is but one place where the analysis of physical phenomena can begin, and that is with fundamentals--space, time, motion, and inertia. how can one who is ignorant of the existence and characteristics of rotational inertia understand a galvanometer? how can waves be discussed unless in terms of period, amplitude, frequency, and the like, that find definition in simple harmonic motion? how does one visualize the mechanism of a gas, unless by means of such ideas as momentum interchange, energy conservation, and forces of attraction? let us emphasize here, lest we be misunderstood, that we are considering collegiate courses. we do not doubt that descriptive physics may be given after one fashion to farmers, quite differently to engineers, and from still a third point of view to medical students. unfortunately some collegiate courses never get beyond the high school method. our aim is not to discuss descriptive courses, but those that approach the subject with the spirit of critical analysis, for these alone do we deem worthy of a place in the college curriculum. =the course in college physics differentiated from the high school course= the problem of the descriptive course is the problem of the high school. because of failure there, too often we see at many a university courses in subfreshman physics. these are made necessary where entrance requirements do not demand this subject and where subsequent interest along related lines develops among the students a tardy necessity of getting it. from the point of view of the collegiate course it often appears as if the subfreshman course could be raised to academic rank. this is because familiarity with the material must precede an analysis of it. credit for high school physics on the records of the entrance examiner, unless this credit is based on entrance examination, is often found to stand for very little. consequently the almost continual demand for the high school work under the direct supervision of a collegiate faculty. the number of students who should go into this course instead of the college course is increasing at the present time in the immediate locality of the writer. as contributory testimony here, witness the number of colleges that do not take cognizance at all of high school preparation and admit to the same college classes those who have never had preparatory physics with those who have had it. we are told the difference between the two groups is insignificant. perhaps it is. if so, this fact reflects as much on the college as on the high school. if we are looking for a solution of our problem in this direction, let us be undeceived; we are looking backwards, not forward. =need of adequate high school preparation in physics= no one will affirm that to a class of whose numbers some have never had high school physics a course that is really analytical can be given. wherever a rigorous analytic course is given those who have been well trained in descriptive physics do well in it in general. let us not beg the question by giving such physics in a college that does not require high school preparation. the college curriculum is full enough as it is without duplication of high school work, and any college physics course that is a first course is essentially a high school course. let us rather put the responsibility squarely where it lies. the high school will respond if the urgency is made clear. witness some of them in our cities already attempting the junior college idea, an idea that has not been unsuccessful in some of our private schools. if it is made clear that a thoroughgoing course in descriptive physics is a paramount necessity in college work and that no effort will be spared on the part of the university to insure this quality, the men will be found and the proper courses given. =preparatory work in mathematics essential for success in college physics= we favor a comprehensive examination plan in all cases where the quality of the high school work is either unknown or open to question. familiarity, likewise, with the most elementary uses of mathematics should be insured. it would be highly desirable that a course of collegiate grade in trigonometry should immediately precede the physics. this is not because the details of trigonometry are all needed in physics. in fact, a few who have never had trigonometry make a conspicuous success in physics. these, however, are ones who have a natural facility in analysis. to keep them out because of failure to have had a prerequisite course in trigonometry often works an unnecessary hardship. we would argue, therefore, for a formal prerequisite on this subject, reserving for certain students exemption, which should be determined in all cases, if not by the instructor himself, at least by his coöperation with some advisory administrative officer. =need of testing each student's preparation= nor is it sufficient with regard to the mathematical preparation or the knowledge of high school physics in either case to go exclusively by the official credit record of the student. it is our firm conviction from several years' experience where widely different aims in the student body are represented that above and beyond all formal records attention to the individual case is of prime importance. the opening week of the course should be so conducted that those who are obviously unequipped can be located and directed elsewhere into the proper work. how this may best be accomplished can be determined only by the circumstances in the individual school, we imagine. daily tests covering the simplest descriptive information that should be retained from high school physics and requiring the intelligent use of arithmetic, elementary algebra, and geometry will reveal amazing incapacity in these things. tuttle, in his little book entitled _an introduction to laboratory physics_ (jefferson laboratory of physics, philadelphia, ), gives on pages - an excellent list of questions of this sort. any one with teaching experience in the subject whatever can make up an equally good one suited for his special needs and temperament. it should not be assumed that all who fail in such tests should be dropped. some undoubtedly should be sent back to high school work or its equivalent; others may need double the required work in mathematics to overcome their unreadiness in its use. personal contacts will show that some are drifting into a scientific course who have no aptitude for it and who will be doomed to disappointment should they continue. in a word, then, we are convinced that the more carefully one plans the work of the first week or so the more smoothly does the work of the rest of the year follow. the number of failures may be reduced to a few per cent without in any way relaxing the standard of the course. =methods of teaching college physics= with regard to the organization of the college courses in physics there seems to us to be at least one method that leads to a considerable degree of success. this is not the lecture method of instruction; neither is it a wholly unmitigated laboratory method. =lecture method vs. laboratory method= to kindle inspiration and enthusiasm nothing can equal the contact in lectures with others, preferably leaders in their profession, but at least men who possess one of these qualities. such contacts need not be frequent; indeed, they should not be. the speaker is apt to make more effort, the student to be more responsive, if such occasions are relatively rare. even thus, although real information is imparted at such a time, it is seldom acquired. however, perspective is furnished, interest stimulated, and the occasion enjoyed. =limitations of exclusive use of each method= for the real acquisition of scientific information, the great method is the working out of a laboratory exercise and pertinent problems, with informal guidance in the atmosphere of active study and discussion engendered among a small group,--the laboratory method. taken alone, it is apt to become mechanical and uninteresting and the outlook to be obscured by details. lectures, especially demonstration lectures, are needed to vitalize and inspire. moreover, many of the most vivid illustrations of physical principles that occur on every hand to focus the popular attention are never met with in the college course because they are unsuited for inexperienced hands or not readily amenable to quantitative experimentation. the more informally such demonstrations can be conducted, the more enthusiastically they are received. =aims of the laboratory method= with regard to laboratory work, accuracy in moderate degree is important, but too great insistence upon it is apt to overshadow the higher aim; namely, that of the analysis of the phenomena themselves. a determination of the pressure coefficient of a gas to half a per cent, accompanied by a clear visualization of the mechanism by which a gas exerts a pressure and a usable identification of temperature with kinetic agitation, would seem preferable to an experimental error of a tenth per cent which may be exacted which is unaccompanied by these inspiring and rather modern points of view. especially in electricity is a familiarity with the essentials of the modern theories important. here supplementary lectures are of great necessity, for no textbook keeps pace with progress in this tremendously important field. problem solving with class discussion is absolutely essential, and should occupy at least one third of the entire time. in no other way can one be convinced that the student is doing anything more than committing to memory, or blindly following directions with no reaction of his own. =value of the supplementary lecture= the incorporation recently of this idea into the courses at the university of chicago has been very successful. five sections which are under different instructors are combined one day a week at an hour when there are no other university engagements, for a lecture demonstration. this is given by a senior member of the staff whenever possible. the other meetings during the week are conducted by the individual instructors and consist of two two-hour laboratory periods and two class periods that usually run into somewhat over one hour each. these sections are limited to twenty-five, and a smaller number than this would be desirable. the responsibility for the course rests naturally upon the individual instructors of these small sections. these men also share in the demonstration work, since each is usually an enthusiast in some particular field and will make a great effort in his own specialty to give a successful popular presentation of the important ideas involved. the enthusiasm which this plan has engendered is very great. attendance is crowded and there is always a row of visitors, teachers of the vicinity, advanced students in other fields of work, or undergraduates brought in by members of the class. these latter especially are encouraged, as this does much to offset current ideas that physics is a subject of unmitigated severity. the particular topics put into these demonstrations will be discussed in paragraphs below, which take up in more detail the organization of the special subdivisions of the material in a general physics course. =mechanics a stumbling block--how to meet the difficulty= mechanics is a stumbling block at the outset. as we have indicated above, it must form the beginning of any course that is analytic in aim. there is no question of sidestepping the difficulty: it must be surmounted. a judicious weeding during the first week is the initial part of the plan. interest may be aroused at once in the demonstration lectures by mechanical tricks that show apparent violations of newton's laws. these group around the type of experiment which shows a modification of the natural uniform rectilinear motion of any object by some hidden force, most often a concealed magnetic field. the instinctive adherence of every one to newton's dynamic definition, that acceleration defies the ratio of force to inertia, is made obvious by the amusement with which a trick in apparent defiance of this principle is greeted. informality of discussion in such experiments, questions on the part of the instructor that are more than rhetorical, and volunteer answers and comment from the class increase the vividness of the impressions. a mechanical adaptation of the "monkey on the string" problem, using little electric hoists or clockworks, introduces interesting discussion of the third law in conjunction with the second. a toy cannon and target mounted on easily rolling carriages bring in the similar ideas where impulses rather than forces alone can be measured. there follow, then, the laboratory experiments of the atwood machine and the force table, where quantitative results are demanded. it is desirable to have these experiments at least worked by the class in unison. whatever may be the exigencies of numbers and apparatus equipment that prevent it later, these introductions should be given to and discussed by all together. in the nature of things, fortunately, this is possible. a single atwood machine will give traces for all in a short time under the guidance of the instructor. the force table experiment is nine-tenths calculation, and verifications may be made for a large number in a short time. searching problems and discussion are instigated at once, and the notion of rotational equilibrium and force moments brought in. because of the very great difficulty seeming to attach to force resolutions, demonstration experiments and problems using a bridge structure, such as the harvard experimental truss, will amply repay the time invested. another experiment here, which makes analysis of the practice of weighing, is possible, although there will be divergence almost at once due to the personality of the instructor and the equipment by which he finds himself limited. the early introduction of moments is important, however, because it seems as if a great amount of unnecessary confusion on this topic is continually cropping out later. at this point, if limitations of apparatus present a difficulty, a group of more or less independent experiments may be started. ideas of energy may be illustrated in the determination of the efficiency and the horse power of simple machines, such as water motors, pulleys, and even small gas or steam engines. in discussion of power one should not forget that in practical problems one meets power as force times velocity rather more frequently than as rate of doing work, and this aspect should be emphasized in the experiments. conservation of energy is brought out in these same experiments with reference to the efficiencies involved. in sharp contrast here the principle of conservation of momentum may be brought in by ballistic pendulum experiments involving elastic and inelastic impacts. most students are unfamiliar with the application of these ideas to the determination of projectile velocities, and this forms an interesting lecture demonstration. elasticity likewise is a topic that may be introduced with more or less emphasis according to the predilection of the instructor. the moduli of young and of simple rigidity lend themselves readily to quantitative laboratory experiments. any amount of interesting material may be culled here from recent investigations of michelson, bridgman, and others with regard to elastic limits, departures from the simple relations, variations with pressure, etc., for a lantern or demonstration talk in these connections. by this time the student should have found himself sufficiently prepared to take up problems of rotational motion. the application of newton's laws to pure rotations and combinations of rotation and translation, such as rolling motions, are very many. we would emphasize here the dynamic definition of moment of inertia, i = fh/_a_ rather than the one so frequently given importance for computational purposes, s_mr_^{ }. quantitative experiments are furnished by the rotational counterpart of the atwood machine. lecture demonstrations for several talks abound: stability of spin about the axis of greatest inertia, kelvin's famous experiments with eggs and tops containing liquids, which suggest the gyroscopic ideas, and finally a discussion of gyroscopes and their multitudinous applications. the book of crabtree, _spinning tops and the gyroscope_, and the several papers by gray in the _proceedings of the physical society of london_, summarize a wealth of material. if one wishes to interject a parenthetical discussion of the bernouilli principle, and the simplest laws of pressure distributions on plane surfaces moving through a resisting medium, a group of striking demonstrations is possible involving this notion, and by simple combination of it with the precession of a rotating body the boomerang may be brought in and its action for the major part given explanation. rotational motion leads naturally to a discussion of centripetal force, and this in turn is simple harmonic motion. this latter finds most important applications in the pendulum experiments, and no end of material is here to be found in any of the textbooks. the greatest refinement of experimentation for elementary purposes will be the determination of "g" by the method of coincidences between a simple pendulum and the standard clock. elementary analysis without use of calculus reaches its culmination in a discussion of forced vibrations similar to that used by magie in his general text. many will not care to go as far as this. others will go farther and discuss kater's pendulum and the small corrections needed for precision, for here does precision find bold expression. it is not our purpose to give a synopsis of the entire general physics course. we have made an especially detailed study of mechanics, because this topic is the one of greatest difficulty by far in the pedagogy. it is too formally given in the average text, and seems to have suffered most of all from lack of imagination on the part of instructors. =suggested content for the study of phenomena of heat and molecular physics= in the field of heat and molecular physics in general there is much better textbook material. experiments here may legitimately be called precise, for the gas laws, temperature coefficients, and densities of gases and saturated vapor pressures will readily yield in comparatively inexperienced hands an accuracy of about one in a thousand. in the demonstrations emphasis should be given to the visualization of the kinetic theory points of view. such models as the northrup visible molecule apparatus are very helpful. however, in absence of funds for such elaboration, slides from imaginative drawings showing to scale conditions in solids, liquids, and vapors with average free paths indicated and the history of single molecules depicted will be found ideal in getting the visualization home to the student. where we have a theory so completely established as the mechanical theory of heat it seems quite fair to have recourse to the eye of the senses to aid the eye of the mind. brownian movements have already yielded up their dances to the motion picture camera. need the "movies" be the only ones to profit by the animated cartoon? nor should the classical material be forgotten. boys' experiments in soap bubbles have been the inspiration of generations of students of capillarity. and if the physicist will consult with the physiological chemist he will find a mass of material of which he never dreamed where these phenomena of surface tension enter in a most direct fashion to leading questions in the life sciences. =the teacher of scholarship and understanding is the teacher who uses sound methods= enough has been said to indicate what we consider the methods of successful teaching of college physics. it is quite obvious, we think, that physics constitutes no exception to the rule that the teacher must first of all know and understand his subject. right here lies probably nine tenths of the fault with our pedagogy. no amount of study of method will yield such returns as the study of the subject itself. the honest student, and every teacher should belong to this class or he has no claim to the name, is well aware that most of his deficiency in explaining a topic is in direct ratio to his own lack of comprehension of it. in physics, as in every other walk of life, we suffer from lack of thoroughness, from a kind of superficiality that is characteristically human but especially american. we have yet to know of any one who really ranks as a scholar in his subject from whom students do not derive inspiration and enthusiasm. such a one usually pays little attention to the methods of others, for the divine fire of knowledge itself does not need much of tinder to kindle the torches of others. our greatest plea is for our teachers to be men of understanding, for then they will be found to be men of method. =the method of analysis dominant in physics= the sequence in which heat, electricity, sound, and light follow mechanics seems quite immaterial. several equally logical plans may be organized. preference is usually accorded one or the other on the basis of local conditions of equipment, and needs little reference to pedagogy. if one gives to mechanics its proper importance, the difficulty in giving instruction in the other topics seems very much less. the momentum acquired seems to serve for the balance of the year. always must analysis be insisted upon, if our college course is going to differ from that of the high school. if we are to let students be content to read current from an ammeter with a calibrated scale and not have the interest to inquire and the ambition to insist upon the knowledge of how that calibration was originally made, we have no right to claim any collegiate rank for our courses. but if we define electrical current in terms of mechanical force which exhibits a balanced couple on a system in rotational equilibrium, there can be no dodging of the issue, for in no other way than by the study of the mechanics of the situation can the content and the limitations of our definition be understood. any college work, so called, that does less than analyze thus is nothing more than a review and amplification of the material that should be within the range of the high school student and in that place presented to him. the first college course reveals a different method, the method of analysis. science at the present time is so far developed that in no branch is progress made by mere description and classification. the method of analysis is dominant in the biological and the earth sciences as well as in the physics and chemistry of today. =teaching of advanced courses in physics= on the more advanced college courses which follow the general physics course little comment is needed. problems and questions here also exist, but they have a strongly local color and are out of place in a general discussion. the student body is no longer composed of the rank and file, half of whom are driven, by some requirement or other, into work in which they have but a passing interest at best. it is no longer a problem of seeing how much can be made to adhere in spite of indifference, of how firm a foundation can be prepared for needs as yet unrecognized in the subject of the effort. a very limited number, comparatively, enter further work of senior college courses, and these have either enthusiasm or ability and often both. of course, a cold neglect or bored indifference in the attitude of the teacher will be resented. it will kill enthusiasm and send ability seeking inspiration elsewhere. but any one who is fond of his subject, and of moderate ability and industry, should have no difficulty in developing senior college work. if our instructor in the general course must be a scholar to be successful, the man in more advanced work must be one _a fortiori_. if he is not, few who come in contact with him have so little discernment as to fail to recognize the fact. =organization of advanced courses= organization of senior college work may be in many ways. one method where an institution follows the quarter system is the plan of having eight or ten different and rather unrelated twelve-week major courses which may be taken in almost any order. half of these are lecture courses, the other half exclusively laboratory courses. there should be a correspondence of material to some extent between the two. lectures on the kinetic theory of gases should have a parallel course in which the classical experiments of the senior heat laboratory are performed,--such experiments, for example, as vapor density, resistance and thermocouple pyrometry, bomb calorimetry viscosity, molecular conductivity, freezing and boiling points, recalescence, etc. a course of advanced electrical measurements should have a parallel lecture course in which the theoretical aspects of electromagnetism, the classical theories, and the equations that represent transitory and equilibrium conditions in complex circuits are discussed. in optics, likewise, there is ample material of great importance: physical, geometrical optics, spectroscopy, photography, x-ray crystallography, etc. the advanced student in these fields finds more elasticity and opportunity for cultivating a special interest in having a large number of limited interest courses from which to choose than in having such material presented in a completely organized course covering one or two years of complete work. instructors who are specialists have opportunity of working up courses in their own fields which they do more efficiently under this plan. research begins at innumerable places along the way, and the senior college courses so organized are the feeders of all graduate work. =dangers of formalizing methods of instruction= in all of the above discussion it should be clearly remembered that no single plan or no one particular method has the final word or ever will have. as long as a science is growing and unfinished, points of view will continually be shifting. we are largely orthodox in our teaching. if brought up on the laboratory method of instruction it may seem the best one for us, but others may prefer another way which they have inherited. let us appeal, then, for a constructive orthodoxy. let us be as teachers of a subject to which we are devoted, truly and sincerely open-minded, quick to recognize and sincere in our efforts to adopt what is better wherever we meet it: waiting not to meet it, either, but going out to seek it. from the humblest college to the greatest university we shall find it here and there. not alone in schools but in the legion of human activities about us on every hand are people who are doing things more efficiently, more thoroughly, and more skillfully than we do things. if we would be of the number that lead, we must be among the first to recognize these facts and profit by them. first, let our work be organized with respect to that of others--the high schools; not discounting their labor but having them truly build for us. second, let us be open-minded enough to see that all methods of instruction have their advantages and make such combinations of the best elements in each as best suit our purpose. above all things, let us know our subject. here is a task before which we quail in this generation of vast vistas. but there is no alternative for us. no amount of method will remove the curse of the superficially informed. let us devote ourselves to smaller fields if we must, but let us not tolerate ignorance among those who bear the burden of passing on, with its flame ever more consuming, the torch of knowledge. harvey b. lemon _university of chicago_ vii the teaching of geology =values of the study of geology diverse= so wide is the scope of the science of the earth, so varied is its subject matter, and so diverse are the mental activities called forth in its pursuit, that its function in collegiate training cannot be summed up in an introductory phrase or two. geology is so composite that it is better fitted to serve a related group of educational purposes than a single one alone. besides this, these possible services have not yet become so familiar that they can be brought vividly to mind by an apt word or phrase; they need elaboration and exposition to be valued at what they are really worth. geology is yet a young science and still growing, and as in the case of a growing boy, to know what it was a few years ago is not to know what it is today. its disciplines take on a realistic phase in the main, but yet in some aspects appeal powerfully to the imagination. its subject matter forms a constitutional history of our planet and its inhabitants, but yet largely wears a descriptive or a dynamic garb. =geology a study of the process of evolution= though basally historical, a large part of the literature of geology is concerned with the description of rocks, structural features, geologic terrains, surface configurations and their modes of formation and means of identification. a notable part of the text prepared for college students relates primarily to phenomena and processes, leaving the history of the earth to follow later in a seemingly secondary way. this has its defense in a desire first to make clear the modes of the geologic processes, to the end that the parts played by these processes in the complexities of actions that make up the historical stages may be better realized. this has the effect, however, of giving the impression that geology is primarily a study of rocks and rock-forming processes, and this impression is confirmed by the great mass of descriptive literature that has sprung almost necessarily from the task of delineating such a multitude of formations before trying to interpret their modes of origin or to assign them their places in the history of the earth. the descriptive details are the indispensable data of a sound history, and they have in addition specific values independent of their service as historical data. but into the multiplicity and complexity of the details of structure and of process, the average college student can wisely enter to a limited extent only, except as they form types, or appear in the local fields which he studies, where they serve as concrete examples of world-forming processes. =disciplinary worth of study of geology= the study of these structures, formations, configurations, and processes yields each its own special phase of discipline and its own measure of information. the work takes on various chemical, mechanical, and biological aspects. as a means of discipline it calls for keenness and diligence in observation, circumspection in inference, a judicial balancing of factors in interpretation. an active use of the scientific imagination is called forth in following formations to inaccessible depths or beneath areas where they are concealed from view. while thus the study of structures, formations and configurations constitutes the most obtrusive phase of geologic study and has given trend to pedagogical opinion respecting its place in a college course, such study is not, in the opinion of the writer, the foremost function of the subject in a college curriculum that is designed to be really broad, basal, and free, in contradistinction to one that is tied to a specific vocational purpose. =this study concerned primarily with the typical college course, not with vocational courses= while we recognize, with full sympathy, that the subject matter of geology enters vitally into certain vocational and prevocational courses, and, in such relations, calls for special selections of material and an appropriate handling, if it is to fulfill these purposes effectively, this seems to us aside from the purpose of this discussion, which centers on typical college training--training which is liberal in the cosmic sense, not merely from the homocentric point of view. =knowledge of geology contributes to a truly liberal education= to subserve these broader purposes, geology is to be studied comprehensively as the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. the earth in itself is to be regarded as an organism and as the foster-parent of a great series of organisms that sprang into being and pursued their careers in the contact zones between its rigid body and its fluidal envelopes. these contact zones are, in a special sense, the province of geography in both its physical and its biotic aspects. the evolution of the biotic and the psychic worlds in these horizons is an essential part of the history of the whole, for each factor has reacted powerfully on the others. an appreciative grasp of these great evolutions, and of their relations to one another, is essential to a really broad view of the world of which we are a part; it is scarcely less than an essential factor in a modern liberal education. =geology embraces all the great evolutions= let us agree, then, at the outset, that a true study of the career of the earth is not adequately compassed by a mere tracing of its inorganic history or an elucidation of its physical structure and mineral content, but that it embraces as well all the great evolutions fostered within the earth's mantles in the course of its career. greatest among these fostered evolutions, from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. it does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop a multitude of sub-sciences, for that is true of every comprehensive unit. nor is it inconsistent with this larger view of the scope of geology that it is, itself, often given a much narrower definition, as already implied. in its broader sense, geology is an enveloping science, surveying, in a broad historical way, many subjects that call for intensive study under more special sciences, just as human history sweeps comprehensively over a broad field cultivated more intensively by special humanistic sciences. in a comprehensive study of the earth as an organism, it is essential that there be embraced a sufficient consideration of all the vital factors that entered into its history to give these their due place and their true value among the agencies that contributed to its evolution. a true biography of the earth can no more be regarded as complete without the biotic and psychic elements that sprang forth from it, or were fostered within its mantles, than can the biography of a human being be complete with a mere sketch of his physical frame and bodily growth. the physical and biological evolutions are well recognized as essential parts of earth history. although the mental evolutions have emerged gradually with the biological evolutions, and have run more or less nearly parallel with them--have, indeed, been a working part of them--they have been less fully and frankly recognized as elements of geological history. they have been rather scantily treated in the literature of the subject; but they are, none the less, a vital part of the great history. they have found some recognition, though much too meager, in the more comprehensive and philosophical treatises on earth-science. it may be safely prophesied that the later and higher evolutions that grace our planet will be more adequately emphasized as the science grows into its full maturity and comes into its true place among the sciences. it is important to emphasize this here, since it is preëminently the function of a liberal college course to give precedence to the comprehensive and the essential, both in its selection of its subject matter and in its treatment of what it selects. it is the function of a liberal course of study to bring that which is broad and basal and vital into relief, and to set it over against that which is limited, special, and technical, however valuable the latter may be in vocational training and in economic application. =physical and dynamic boundaries of geology--implications for teaching= in view of these considerations--and frankly recognizing the inadequacies of current treatment--let us note, before we go further, what are the physical and dynamic boundaries of the geologic field, that we may the better see how that field merges into the domains of other sciences. this will the better prepare us to realize the nature of the disciplines for which earth-science forms a suitable basis, as well as the types of intellectual furniture it yields to the mind. obviously these disciplines and this substance of thought should determine the place of the science in the curriculum of any course that assumes the task of giving a broad and liberal education. earth-science is the domestic chapter of celestial science. our planet is but a modest unit among the great celestial assemblage of worlds; but, modest as it is, it is that unit about which we have by far the fullest and most reliable knowledge. the earth not only furnishes the physical baseline of celestial observation, but supplies all the appliances by which inquiry penetrates the depths of the heavens. not alone earth-science, as such, but several of the intensive sciences brought into being through the intellectual evolutions that have attended the later history of the earth, have been prerequisites to the development of the broad science of the outer heavens. the science of the lower heavens is a factor of earth-science in the definition we are just about to give. at the same time, the whole earth, including the lower heavens, is enveloped by the more comprehensive domain of celestial science. if we seek the most logical limit that may be assigned the realm of earth-science, as distinguished from that of celestial science, of which it is the home unit, it may be found at that borderline _within which_ any passive body obeys the call of the earth, as against the call of the outer worlds, and _without which_ such a passive body obeys the call of the outer worlds, the call of the sun in particular. this limit is the _dynamic dividing line_ between the kingdom of the earth and the kingdom of the outer heavens. this boundary, according to moulton, incloses a spheroid whose minimum radius is about , miles, and whose maximum radius is about , miles. we may, then, conveniently say that the earth's sphere of control stretches out a million kilometers from its center and that this defines its true realm. at the same time, this defines the logical limit of the earth's ultra-atmosphere and appears to mark a zone of exchange between the ultra-atmosphere of the earth and the ultra-atmosphere of the sun. it thus appears to imply the place and the mode of an exchange of vital elements upon which probably hangs the wonderful maintenance of the earth's atmosphere for many millions of years and the equally wonderful regulation of the essential qualities of the atmosphere so that these have always remained within the narrow range subservient to terrestrial life. it is needless to add that this regulation also conditions the present intellectual status of the thinking factor among the inhabitants of the earth out of which--may i be pardoned for saying?--has grown the present educational discussion. if this last shall seem to squint toward special pleading, let it be considered that, as we see things, it is precisely those views that take hold of the issues upon which our very being and all its activities depend, that serve best to train youth to broad views and penetrating thought. such thinking seems to me to form the very essence of a really liberal education. not only is this definition of the sphere of geology comprehensive, but it has the special merit of being _dynamic_, rather than material. such a dynamic definition comports with the view that earth-study should center on the forces and energies that actuated its evolution, since these are the most vital feature of the evolution itself. it is important to form adequate concepts of the energies that have maintained the past ongoings of the earth not only, but that still maintain its present activities and predetermine its future. it is the study of the forces and the processes of past and of present evolutions that constitute the soul of the science, rather than the apparently fixed and passive aspects of the earth's formations and configurations which are but the products of the processes that have gone before. even the apparent passiveness of the geologic products is illusive, for they are in reality expressions of continued internal activities of an intense, though occult, order. these escape notice largely because they are balanced against one another in a system of equilibrium which pervades them and gives them the appearance of fixity. to serve their proper functions as sources of higher education, the concepts of the constitution of the earth should penetrate even to these refined aspects of physical organization and should bring the whole into harmony with the most advanced views of the real nature of physical organisms. this removes from the whole terrestrial organism every similitude of inertness and gives it a fundamental refinement, activity, and potency of the highest order. to form a true and consistent concept, the enveloping earth-science must be assumed to embrace, potentially at least, the essentials of all that was evolved within it and from it, with, of course, due recognition of what was added from without. _the history of the earth should therefore be taught in college courses as a succession of complex dynamic events, great in the past and great in future potentialities._ the formations and configurations left by the successive phases of action are to be studied primarily as the vestiges of the processes that gave them birth, and hence as their historic credentials. they are to be looked upon less as the vital things in themselves, than as the _record_ of the events of the time and as the forerunners of the subsequent events that may be potential in them. and so, primarily, the geologic records are to be scrutinized to find _the deeper meanings which they embody_, whether such meanings lie in the physical, the biological, or the psychological world. =geology the means of developing scientific imagination of time and space= turning to specific phases of the subject, it may first be noted that geology is singularly suited to develop clear visions of vast stretches of time; it opens broad visions of the panorama of world events, a panorama still passing before us. while the celestial order of things no doubt involves greater lapses of time, these are not so easily realized, for they are not so well filled in with a succession of records of the passing stages that make up the whole. but even the lapses of geologic time are greater than immature minds can readily grasp; however, their _powers of realization_ are greatly strengthened by studying so protracted a record, built up stage upon stage. the very slowness with which the geologic record was made, as well as the evidences of slowness in each part of the record, help to draw out an appreciation of the immensity of the whole. the round period covered by the more legible range of the geologic record rises to the order of a hundred million years, perhaps to several hundred million years. the large view of history which this implies has already come to form the ample background on which are projected the concepts of the broader class of thinkers; such largeness of view will quite surely be held to be an indispensable prerequisite to the still broader thinking of the future for which the better order of students are now preparing. while this is preëminently true of the concept of time, the concept of space is fairly well cultivated by geologic study, though far less effectively than is done by astronomical study. astronomy and geology work happily together in contributing to largeness of thought. the study of the origin and early history of the earth brings the student into touch with the most far-reaching problems that have thus far called forth the intellectual efforts of man. if rightly handled, these great themes may be made to teach the true method of inquiry into past natural events whose vastness puts them quite beyond the resources of the laboratory. this method finds its key in a search for the history of such vast and remote events by a scrutiny of the vestiges these events have left as their own automatic record. this method stands in sharp contradistinction to simple speculation without such search for talismanic vestiges, a discredited method which is too often supposed to be the only way of dealing with such themes. to be really competent in the field of larger and deeper thinking, every courageous mind should be able to cross the threshold of any of the profound problems of the universe with safe and circumspect steps, however certain it may be that only a slight measure of penetration of the problem may be attainable. a well-ordered mind will remain at once complacent and wholesome when brought to the limit of its effort by the limit of evidence. the problem of the origin of celestial worlds, of which the genesis of the earth is the theme of largest human interest, is admirably suited to give college students at once a modest sense of their limitations and a wholesome attitude toward problems of the vaster type. without having acquired the power to make prudent and duly controlled excursions into the vaster fields of thought, the mind can scarcely be said to have been liberalized. =geology a means of training in thinking in scientific experiences= from the very outset, the tracing of the earth history forces a comprehensive study of the co-workings of the three dominant states of matter massively embodied in the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere, the great terrestrial triumvirate. the strata of the earth are the joint products of these three elements and constitute their lithographic record. these three coöperating and contending elements not only bring into view the three typical phases of physical action, but they present this action in such titanic aspects as to force the young mind to think along large lines, with the great advantage that these actions are controlled by determinate laws, while the causes and the results are both tangible and impressive. while there is a large class of tangible and determinate problems of this kind, embracing shiftings of matter on the earth's surface, distortions of strata, and changes of bodily form, there are also problems of a more hidden nature such as internal mutations. these give rise to mathematical, physical, and chemical inquiries while at the same time they call into play the use of the scientific imagination and are thus rich in the possibilities of training. thus in varied ways geological work joins hands with chemical, physical, mechanical, and mathematical work. when life first appears in the record, there is occasion to raise the profound question of its origin, and with this arises a closely related question as to the nature of the conditions that invited life, which leads on to the further question, what fostered the development of life throughout its long history? while the obscurity of the earliest record leaves the question of origin indeterminate for the present, duly guarded thought upon the subject should foster a wholesome spirit toward inquiry in this vital line as well as a hospitable attitude toward whatever solution may finally await us. in all such studies the student should be invited to look to _the vestiges left automatically by the process itself_ for the answer, and he should learn to accept the teachings of evidence precisely as it presents itself. so also when a problem is, for the present, indeterminate, it is peculiarly wholesome for the inquirer to learn to rest the case where the light of evidence fails, and to be complacent in such suspension of judgment and to wait further light patiently in serene confidence that the vestiges left by the actuating agencies in their constructive processes are the surest index of the ultimate truth and are likely to be sooner or later detected and read truly. =relation of geology to botany, zoölogy, psychology, and sociology= in the successive records of past life impressed on strata piled one upon another until they form the great paleontologic register, there is an ample and a solid basis for the study of the historic evolution of life. with this also go evidences of the conditions that attended this life progress and that gave trend to it. this record of the relations of life to the environing physical conditions forms one of the most stimulating fields of study that can engage the student who seeks light on the great problems of biological progress. here geology joins hands with botany and zoölogy in a mutual helpfulness that is scarcely less than indispensable to each. following, or perhaps immediately attending, the introduction of physiological life, there appeared signs of sentient life. the preservation of certain of the sense organs, taken together with the collateral evidences of sense action, as early as cambrian times, furnish the groundwork for a historical study of the progress of sentient life, eventuating in the higher forms of mental life. here the problems of geology run hand in hand with the problems of psychology. the limitations of the evidence bearing on psychological phenomena, while regrettable, are not without some compensation in that they center the attention on the simpler aspects of the protracted deployment of the psychological functions. in addition to the clear evidences of psychic action, in at least its elementary forms, there appeared early in the stratigraphic records intimations of some of the relationships that sentient beings then bore to one another; and this relationship gives occasion to study the primitive aspects of sociological phenomena. if nothing more is learned than the important lesson that sociology is not a thing of today, not an untried realm inviting all kinds of ill-digested projects, but on the contrary is a field of vast and instructive history, the gain will not be inconsiderable. there are intimations of the early existence and effective activity of those affections that precede and that cluster about the parental relationship, the nucleus of the most vital of all the sociological relationships. in contrast to the affections, there are distinct evidences of antagonistic relations, of pursuit and capture, of attack and defense; there were tools of warfare and devices for protection. in time, a wide-ranging series of experiments, so to speak, were tried to secure advantage, to avoid suffering, to escape death, and to preserve the species. there were even suggestions of the cruder forms of government. the many stages in the evolution of the various devices, as well as the stages of their abandonment, that followed one another in the course of the ages recorded the results of a multitude of efforts at sociological adjustment. they raise the question whether a common set of guiding principles does not underlie all such relationships, earlier and later, whatever their rank in our scale of valuation. and so this great field of inquiry--too narrowly regarded as merely humanistic--comes into view early in the history of the earth. the geological and the sociological sciences find in it common working ground. if the geologic and the humanistic sciences are given each their widest interpretation and their freest application, the advantage cannot be other than mutual. it is perhaps not too much to say that studies in the physiological, the psychological, the sociological, and the allied fields necessarily lack completeness if they do not bring into their purview the data of their common historical record traced as far back as it is found to contain intimations of their actual extension. it is customary to speak of the geologic ages as though they were wholly past; they are, indeed, chiefly past as the record now stands, but time runs on and earth history continues; the processes of the past are still active, and they are likely to work on far into the future. and so geologic study links itself fundamentally into all such present terrestrial interests as take hold of the distant future. the forecast of the earth's endurance, attended by conditions congenial to life and to the mental and moral activities, hinges on a sound insight into the great actuating forces inherent in the earth, together with those likely to come into play from the celestial environment. all human interests, in so far as they are dependent on a protracted future, center in the prognosis of the earth based on its present and its past. the latest phases of geologic doctrine prophesy a long future habitability of the earth. they thus give meaning and emphasis to the deeper purposes sought in all the higher endeavors, not the least of which is education, particularly those phases of education that lead to effects which may be handed down from age to age. =standard for selecting subject matter for the general college course: select fundamentals or that which bears on fundamentals= out of all this vast physical, biological, and psychological history, the things to be selected for substance of thought and for service in mental training in a college course are, first of all, those that are either fundamental in themselves, or that have vital bearings on what is fundamental. these are chiefly the great dynamic factors, the agencies that gave trend to the master events, the forces that actuated the basal processes by which the vast results were attained. the material formations and the surficial configurations that resulted are to be duly considered, to be sure, for they form the basis of interpretation and they are, besides, the repositories of economic values of indispensable worth; but, as already urged, in a course of intellectual training, these are to be regarded rather as the relics of the great agencies and the proofs of their actions, than as the most vital subjects of study, which are the agencies themselves. as already remarked, the geologic formations are to be treated rather as the credentials of the potencies that reside in the earth organism, than as the vital things themselves. the vestiges of creation and the footprints of historical progress embody the soul of the subject; they constitute the chief source of inspiration to those who aspire to think in large, deep ways of really great things. it is of little value, from the viewpoint of liberal culture, to know that there is a certain succession of sandstones, shales, and limestones; that professional convention has given them certain names, more or less infelicitous in derivation and in phonic quality; but it is of vital consequence to learn how and why these relics of former processes came to be left as they were left, and thus came to be witnesses to the history of the far past. it was a wise thing, no doubt, that the fathers of geology strongly insisted that there should be a rigorous and rather literal adhesion to the terrestrial record in all earth studies, because in those times of transition from the loose, more or less fantastic thought that marked the adolescent stage of the human race, it was imperative that students should stick close to the immediate evidence of what had transpired, and should withhold themselves from much enlargement of view based on the less tangible evidences; but at the present stage, when the general nature of the earth's history has been firmly established, it would be an error on the part of those who seek for the most liberalizing and broadening values of the science, to treat the record merely as a material register of immediate import only, to the neglect of the less tangible but more vital teachings immanent in its great forces and processes. the seeker of liberal culture should direct his attention to the great events, and, above all, to the larger and deeper meanings implied by these events. and so--may i be pardoned for reëmphasizing?--the teacher of geology whose essential purpose is liberal training, leading to broad and firm knowledge and to sound processes of thought, will critically observe the distinction between geology taught appropriately from the collegiate point of view, and geology taught specifically from the professional and technical points of view. in these latter, specific details in specific lines are important, and may even be essential, but it is the function of the college teacher of geology _to select_ from the great mass of material of the science such factors as are basal, vital, and talismanic. he will give these emphasis, while he neglects the multitude of details that lack significance as working elements or as landmarks of progress, whatever their value in other relations. this selection is equally important, whether applied to the great physical processes that have shaped the earth into its present configuration, or to the great chemical and mineralogical processes that have determined its texture and its structure, or to the great biological and psychological processes that have given trend to the development of its inhabitants. even if the undergraduate course in geology is pursued less for the purpose of liberal culture than as a means of preparing for a professional career as an economic geologist, no essential departure from an effort to master first the basal features and the broader aspects of the science, especially the dynamic aspects, is to be advised. the shortest road to _declared success_ in professional and economic geology lies through the early mastery of its fundamentals. no doubt immediate and apparent success may often be sooner reached by a narrower and shallower study of such special phases of the subject as happen just now to be most obviously related to the existing state of the industries; but industrial demands are constantly changing--indeed, at present, rather rapidly--and new aspects follow one another in close succession. these new aspects almost inevitably spring from the more basal factors as these rise into function with the progress of experience or the stress of new demands. those who have sought only the immediate and the superficial, at the expense of the basal, and especially those who have neglected to acquire _the power and the disposition to search out the fundamentals_, are quite sure to be left among the unfortunates who trail behind; they are little likely to be found among those who lead at the times when leadership counts. in the judgment of those master minds that lead in affairs and that take large and penetrating views, the lines along which the most vital contributions to economic interests are being made connect closely with basal studies of the actuating agencies that condition great enterprises. in the judgment of the writer, it is a false view to suppose that any short, superficial study of so vast a subject as the constitution and history of the earth can result in economic competency. in so far as time for study is limited, it should be concentrated on the great underlying factors that constitute the essentials of the science. it is here assumed that men who care to take a college course at all are seeking for a large success and are ambitious for a high personal career. if they look ultimately to professional work in economic lines, they may safely be advised that the straight road to declared success lies in a search for the vital forces, the critical agencies, and the profound principles that make for great results, not along the by-paths whose winding, superficial courses are turned hither and thither by adventitious conditions whose very nature invites distrust rather than confidence. =evaluations of methods of teaching= turning to some of the more formal phases of treatment, three types of work are presented: ( ) the use of nature's laboratory, the world itself, ( ) the use of the college collections and laboratories, and ( ) the use of the literature of the subject. ( ) fortunately, there is no place on the face of the earth where there is not some natural material for geologic study, for even in the most artificialized locations geological processes are active. in crowded cities these processes may be easily overlooked, but yet they are susceptible of effective use. within easy access from almost every college site there are serviceable fields of study, and these, in any live course, will be assiduously cultivated. they may be relatively modest in their phenomena; they may seem to lack that impressiveness which has played so large a part in the popular notion of the content of geology, but they may nevertheless serve as most excellent training grounds for young geologists. if students are so situated as to be brought at the beginning of study under the influence of very impressive displays of geologic phenomena--precipitous mountains, rugged cliffs, deep cañons, and the like--there is danger that their mental habits may become diffusive rather than close and keen; the emotions may be called forth in wonder rather than turned into zest in the search for evidence. if students are to be trained to diligence in inquiry and to the highest virility in inference and interpretation, it is perhaps fortunate for them if they are located where only modest records of geological processes are presented for study. in such regions they are more likely to be led to scrutinize the field keenly, sharply, and diligently for data on which to build their interpretations. the scientific use of their imaginations is all the better trained if, in their endeavor to build up a consistent concept of the whole structure that underlies their field, they are forced to project their inferences from a few out-crops far beneath the cover of the adjacent mantle that shuts off direct vision. few teachers have, therefore, any real occasion to long for richer fields than those accessible to them, if they have the tact to render these fertile in stimulus and suggestion. ( ) laboratory work upon the material collected in the field work, as well as laboratory work upon the college collections, are essential adjuncts. ample provisions for this supplementary work, however modest the appointments, are important and can usually be secured by ingenuity and diligence in spite of financial limitations. both field and laboratory work should be well correlated with one another and with the systematic work on the text that guides the study, so that each shall whet the edge of the other and all together accomplish what neither could alone. ( ) the text selected should be such as lends itself, in some notable degree at least, to the general purposes set forth above. it should be supplemented, so far as may be, by judicious assignments for reading and for special study. lectures may be made a valuable aid to the discussions of the classroom, but with college classes they can rarely be made an advantageous substitute for the discussions. lecturing, so far as used, is best woven informally into the classroom discussions. supplementary lecturettes may be advised if they are of such an informal sort that they may almost unconsciously take their start from any vital point encountered in the course of discussion, may run on as far as the occasion invites, and may then give way again to the discussion with the utmost informality. such little participations in the work of the classroom, on the part of the teacher, are likely to be cordially welcomed. at the same time, if well done, they will set an excellent example in the presentative art as also in an apt organization of thought. =organization of courses= if the stated course in earth-science is limited to the junior and senior year by the existing requirements of the curriculum of the institution or by the rulings of its officers--as is not uncommonly the case at present--it is relatively immaterial whether the sections of the course are marshaled under the single name "geology" or whether they are given separate titles as sub-sciences, provided the special subjects are arranged in logical sequence and in consecutive order. if, on the other hand, the teacher's choice of time and relations is freer, the more accessible phases of earth study, now well organized under the name of "physiography," form an excellent course for either freshmen or sophomores. it opens their minds to a world of interesting activities about them which have probably been largely overlooked in previous years. it gives them substance of thought that will be of much service in the pursuit of other sciences. it has been found that it is not without rather notable service to young students as the basis of efforts in the art of literary presentation, a felicity to which teachers of this important art frequently give emphatic testimony. the secret seems to lie in the fact that physiography gives varied and vivid material susceptible of literary presentation, while the fixed qualities of the subject matter control the choice of terms and the mode of expression. if geography and physiography are given in the earlier years, the course in historical geology, as well as the study of the more difficult phases of geological processes, of the principles of dynamic geology, together with mineralogy, petrology, and paleontology, may best fall into the later years, even if some interval separates them from the geography and physiography. one hundred and twenty classroom hours, or their equivalent in laboratory and field work, are perhaps to be regarded as the irreducible minimum in a well-balanced undergraduate course, while twice that time or more is required to give a notably strong college course in earth-science. a consideration of the sequences among the geological sub-subjects, as also among the subjects that are held to be preliminary to the earth-sciences, is important, but it would lead us too far into details which depend more or less on local conditions. in the experience of american teachers it appears to have been found advisable to put geological processes and typical phenomena to the front and to take up geological history afterwards. the earlier method of taking up the history first, beginning with recent stages and working backward down the ages,--once in vogue abroad,--has been abandoned in this country. it was the order in which the science was developed and it had the advantage of starting with the living present and with the most accessible formations, but this latter advantage is secured by studying the living processes, as such, first, and turning to the history later. this permits the study of the history in its natural order, which seems better to call forth the relations of cause and effect and to give emphasis to the influence of inherited conditions. respecting antecedents to the study, the more knowledge of physics, chemistry, zoölogy, and botany, the better, but it is easy to over-stress the necessity for such preparation, however logical it may seem, for in reality all the natural sciences are so interwoven that, in strict logic, a complete knowledge of all the others should be had before any one is begun, a _reductio ad absurdum_. the sciences have been developed more or less contemporaneously and progressively, each helping on the others. they may be pursued much in the same way, or by alternations in which each prior study favors the sequent one. they may even be taken in a seemingly illogical order without serious disadvantage, for the alternative advantages and other considerations may outweigh the force of the logical order, which is at best only partially logical. it is of prime importance to stimulate in students a habit of observing natural phenomena at an early age. it may be wise for a student to take up physiography, or its equivalent, early in the college course, irrespective of an ideal preparation in the related sciences. it is unfortunate to defer such study to a stage when the student's natural aptitude for observation and inference has become dulled by neglect or by confinement to subjects devoid of naturalistic stimulus. to permit students to take up earth-science in the freshman and sophomore years, even without the ideal preparation, is therefore probably wiser than to defer the study beyond the age of responsiveness to the touch of the natural environment. the geographic and geologic environment conditioned the mental evolution of the race. it left an inherited impress on the perceptive and emotional nature, only to be awakened most felicitously, it would seem, at about the age at which the naturalistic phases of the youth's mentality were originally called into their most intense exercise. t. c. chamberlin _the university of chicago_ viii the teaching of mathematics =recent changes and some of their sources= in recent years the teaching of mathematics has undergone remarkable changes in many countries, both as regards method and as regards content. with respect to college mathematics these changes have been evidenced by a growing emphasis on applications and on the historic setting of the various questions. to understand one direct source of these changes it is only necessary to recall the fact that in about there began a steady stream of american mathematical students to europe, especially to germany. most of these students entered the faculties of our colleges and universities on their return to america it is therefore of great importance to inquire what mathematical situation served to inspire these students. the german mathematical developments of the greater part of the nineteenth century exhibited a growing tendency to disregard applications. it was not until about that a strong movement was inaugurated to lay more stress on applied mathematics in germany.[ ] our early american students therefore brought with them from germany a decided tendency toward investigations in mathematical fields remote from direct contact with applications to other scientific subjects, such as physics and astronomy, which had so largely dominated mathematical investigations in earlier years. this picture would, however, be very incomplete without exhibiting another factor of a similar type working in our own midst. j. j. sylvester was selected as the first professor of mathematics at johns hopkins university, which opened its doors in and began at once to wield a powerful influence in starting young men in higher research. sylvester's own investigations related mainly to the formal and abstract side of mathematics. moreover, "he was a poor teacher with an imperfect knowledge of mathematical literature. he possessed, however, an extraordinary personality; and had in remarkable degree the gift of imparting enthusiasm, a quality of no small value in pioneer days such as these were with us."[ ] =influence of researches in mathematics on methods of teaching= mathematical research was practically introduced into the american colleges during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the wave of enthusiasm which attended this introduction was unfortunately not sufficiently tempered by emphasis on good teaching and breadth of knowledge, especially as regards applications. in fact, the leading mathematician in america during the early part of this period was glaringly weak along these lines. by means of his bountiful enthusiasm he was able to do a large amount of good for the selected band of gifted students who attended his lectures, but some of these were not so fortunate in securing the type of students who are helped more by the direct enthusiasm of their teacher than by the indirect enthusiasm resulting from good teaching. the need of good mathematical teaching in our colleges and universities began to become more pronounced at about the time that the wave of research enthusiasm set in, as a result of the growing emphasis on technical education which exhibited itself most emphatically in the development of the schools of engineering. while the student who is specially interested in mathematics may be willing to get along with a teacher whose enthusiasm for the new and general leads him to neglect to emphasize essential details in the presentation, the average engineering student insists on clearness in presentation and usability of the results. as the latter student does not expect to become a mathematical specialist, he is naturally much more interested in good teaching than in the mathematical reputation of his teacher, even if his reputation is not an entirely insignificant factor for him. during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the present century the mathematical departments of our colleges and universities faced an unusually serious situation as a result of the conditions just noted. the new wave of research enthusiasm was still in its youthful vigor and in its youthful mood of inconsiderateness as regards some of the most important factors. on the other hand, many of the departments of engineering had become strong and were therefore able to secure the type of teaching suited to their needs. in a number of institutions this led to the breaking up of the mathematical department into two or more separate departments aiming to meet special needs. in view of the fact that the mathematical needs of these various classes of students have so much in common, leading mathematicians viewed with much concern this tendency to disrupt many of the stronger departments. hence the question of good teaching forced itself rapidly to the front. it was commonly recognized that the students of pure mathematics profit by a study of various applications of the theories under consideration, and that the students who expect to work along special technical lines gain by getting broad and comprehensive views of the fundamental mathematical questions involved. moreover, it was also recognized that the investigational work of the instructors would gain by the broader scholarship secured through greater emphasis on applications and the historic setting of the various problems under consideration. to these fundamental elements relating to the improvement of college teaching there should perhaps be added one arising from the recognition of the fact that the number of men possessing excellent mathematical research ability was much smaller than the number of positions in the mathematical departments of our colleges and universities. the publication of inferior research results is of questionable value. on the other hand, many who could have done excellent work as teachers by devoting most of their energies to this work became partial failures both as teachers and as investigators through their ambition to excel in the latter direction. =range of subjects and preparation of students= it should be emphasized that the college and university teachers of mathematics have to deal with a wide range of subjects and conditions, especially where graduate work is carried on. advanced graduate students have needs which differ widely from those of the freshmen who aim to become engineers. this wide range of conditions calls for unusual adaptability on the part of the college and university teacher. this range is much wider than that which confronts the teachers in the high school, and the lack of sufficient adaptability on the part of some of the college teachers is probably responsible for the common impression that some of the poorest mathematical teaching is done in the colleges. it is doubtless equally true that some of the very best mathematical teaching is to be found in these institutions. in some of the colleges there has been a tendency to diminish the individual range of mathematical teaching by explicitly separating the undergraduate work and the more advanced work. for instance, in johns hopkins university, l. s. hulburt was appointed "professor of collegiate mathematics" in , with the understanding that he should devote himself to the interests of the undergraduates. in many of the larger universities the younger members of the department usually teach only undergraduate courses, while some of the older members devote either all or most of their time to the advanced work; but there is no uniformity in this direction, and the present conditions are often unsatisfactory. the undergraduate courses in mathematics in the american colleges and universities differ considerably. the normal beginning courses now presuppose a year of geometry and a year and a half of algebra in addition to the elementary courses in arithmetic, but much higher requirements are sometimes imposed, especially for engineering courses. in recent years several of the largest universities have reduced the minimum admission requirement in algebra to one year's work, but students entering with this minimum preparation are sometimes not allowed to proceed with the regular mathematical classes in the university. =variety of college courses in mathematics= freshmen courses in mathematics differ widely, but the most common subjects are advanced algebra, plane trigonometry, and solid geometry. the most common subjects of a somewhat more advanced type are plane analytic geometry, differential and integral calculus, and spherical trigonometry. beyond these courses there is much less uniformity, especially in those institutions which aim to complete a well-rounded undergraduate mathematical course rather than to prepare for graduate work. among the most common subjects beyond those already named are differential equations, theory of equations, solid analytic geometry, and mechanics. a very important element affecting the mathematical courses in recent years is the rapid improvement in the training of our teachers in the secondary schools. this has led to the rapid introduction of courses which aim to lead up to broad views in regard to the fundamental subjects. in particular, courses relating to the historical development of concepts involved therein are receiving more and more attention. indirect historical sources have become much more plentiful in recent years through the publication of various translations of ancient works and through the publication of extensive historical notes in the _encyclopédie des sciences mathématiques_ and in other less extensive works of reference. the problem presented by those who are preparing to teach mathematics may at first appear to differ widely from that presented by those who expect to become engineers. the latter are mostly interested in obtaining from their mathematical courses a powerful equipment for doing things, while the former take more interest in those developments which illumine and clarify the elements of their subject. hence the prospective teacher and the prospective engineer might appear to have conflicting mathematical interests. as a matter of fact, these interests are not conflicting. the prospective teacher is greatly benefited by the emphasis on the serviceableness of mathematics, and the prospective engineer finds that the generality and clarity of view sought by the prospective teacher is equally helpful to him in dealing with new applications. hence these two classes of students can well afford to pursue many of the early mathematical courses together, while the finishing courses should usually be different. the rapidly growing interest in statistical methods and in insurance, pensions, and investments has naturally directed special attention to the underlying mathematical theories, especially to the theory of probability. some institutions have organized special mathematical courses relating to these subjects and have thus extended still further the range of undergraduate subjects covered by the mathematical departments. the rapidly growing emphasis on college education specially adapted to the needs of the prospective business man has recently led to a greater emphasis on some of these subjects in several institutions. the range of mathematical subjects suited for graduate students is unlimited, but it is commonly assumed to be desirable that the graduate student should pursue at least one general course in each one of broader subjects such as the theory of numbers, higher algebra, theory of functions, and projective geometry, before he begins to specialize along a particular line. it is usually taken for granted that the undergraduate courses in mathematics should not presuppose a knowledge of any language besides english, but graduate work in this subject cannot be successfully pursued in many cases without a reading knowledge of the three other great mathematical languages; viz., french, german, and italian. hence the study of graduate mathematics necessarily presupposes some linguistic training in addition to an acquaintance with the elements of fundamental mathematical subjects. historical studies make especially large linguistic demands in case these studies are not largely restricted to predigested material. this is particularly true as regards the older historical material. in the study of contemporary mathematical history the linguistic prerequisites are about the same as those relating to the study of other modern mathematical subjects. with the rapid spread of mathematical research activity during recent years there has come a growing need of more extensive linguistic attainments on the part of those mathematicians who strive to keep in touch with progress along various lines. for instance, a thriving spanish national mathematical society was organized in at madrid, spain, and in march, , a new mathematical journal entitled _revista de matematicas_ was started at buenos aires, argentine republic. hence a knowledge of spanish is becoming more useful to the mathematical student. similar activities have recently been inaugurated in other countries. =history of college mathematics= until about the beginning of the nineteenth century the courses in college mathematics did not usually presuppose a mathematical foundation carefully prepared for a superstructure. according to m. gebhardt, the function of teaching elementary mathematics in germany was assumed by the gymnasiums during the years from to .[ ] before this time the german universities usually gave instruction in the most elementary mathematical subjects. in our own country, yale university instituted a mathematical entrance requirement under the title of arithmetic as early as , but at harvard university no mathematics was required for admission before . on the other hand, _l'ecole polytechnique_ of paris, which occupies a prominent place in the history of college mathematics, had very high admission requirements in mathematics from the start. according to a law enacted in , the candidates for admission were required to pass an examination in arithmetic; in algebra, including the solution of equations of the first four degrees and the theory of series; and in geometry, including trigonometry, the applications of algebra to geometry, and conic sections.[ ] it should be noted that these requirements are more extensive than the usual present mathematical requirements of our leading universities and technical schools, but _l'ecole polytechnique_ laid special emphasis on mathematics and physics and became the world's prototype of strong technical institutions. the influence of _l'ecole polytechnique_ was greatly augmented by the publication of a regular periodical entitled _journal de l'ecole polytechnique_, which was started in and is still being published. a number of the courses of lectures delivered at _l'ecole polytechnique_ and at _l'ecole normale_ appeared in the early volumes of this journal. the fact that some of these courses were given by such eminent mathematicians as j. l. lagrange, g. monge, and p. s. laplace is sufficient guarantee of their great value and of their good influence on the later textbooks along similar lines. in particular, it may be noted that g. monge gave the first course in descriptive geometry at _l'ecole normale_ in , and he was also for a number of years one of the most influential teachers at _l'ecole polytechnique_. a most fundamental element in the history of college mathematics is the broadening of the scope of the college work. as long as college students were composed almost entirely of prospective preachers, lawyers, and physicians, there was comparatively little interest taken in mathematics. it is true that the mental disciplinary value of mathematics was emphasized by many, but this supposed value did not put any real life into mathematical work. the dead abstract reasonings of euclid's _elements_, or even the number speculations of the ancient pythagoreans, were enough to satisfy most of those who were looking to mathematics as a subject suitable for mental gymnastics. on the other hand, when the colleges began to train men for other lines of work, when the applications of steam led to big enterprises, like the building of railroads and large ocean steamers, mathematics became a living subject whose great direct usefulness in practical affairs began to be commonly recognized. moreover, it became apparent that there was great need of mathematical growth, since mathematics was no longer to be used merely as mental indian clubs or dumb-bells, where a limited assortment would answer all practical needs, but as an implement of mental penetration into the infinitude of barriers which have checked progress along various lines and seem to require an infinite variety of methods of penetration. the american colleges were naturally somewhat slower than some of those of europe in adapting themselves to the changed conditions, but the rapidity of the changes in our country may be inferred from the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century harvard placed in comparatively short succession three mathematical subjects on its list of entrance requirements; viz., arithmetic in , algebra in , and geometry in . although harvard had not established any mathematical admission requirements for more than a century and a half after its opening, she initiated three such requirements within half a century. it is interesting to note that for at least ninety years from the opening of harvard, arithmetic was taught during the senior year as one of the finishing subjects of a college education.[ ] the passage of some of the subjects of elementary mathematics from the colleges to the secondary schools raised two very fundamental questions. the first of these concerned mostly the secondary schools, since it involved an adaptation to the needs of younger students of the more or less crystallized textbook material which came to them from the colleges. the second of these questions affected the colleges only, since it involved the selection of proper material to base upon the foundations laid by the secondary schools. it is natural that the influence of the colleges should have been somewhat harmful with respect to the secondary schools, since the interests of the former seemed to be best met by restricting most of the energies of the secondary teachers of mathematics to the thorough drilling of their students in dexterous formal manipulations of algebraic symbols and the demonstration of fundamental abstract theorems of geometry. =relation of mathematics in secondary schools and college= students who come to college with a solid and broad foundation but without any knowledge of the superstructure can readily be inspired and enthused by the erection of a beautiful superstructure on a foundation laid mostly underground, with little direct evidence of its value or importance. the injustice and shortsightedness of the tendency to restrict the secondary schools to such foundation work would not have been so apparent if the majority of the secondary school students would have entered college. as a matter of fact it tended to bring secondary mathematics into disrepute and thus to threaten college mathematics at its very foundation. it is only in recent years that strong efforts have been made to correct this very serious mathematical situation. much progress has been made toward the saner view of letting secondary mathematics build its little structure into the air with some view to harmony and proportion, and of requiring college mathematics to build _on_ as well as _upon_ the work done by the secondary schools. the fruitful and vivifying notions of function, derivative, and group are slowly making their way into secondary mathematics, and the graphic methods have introduced some of the charms of analytic geometry into the same field. this transformation is naturally affecting college mathematics most profoundly. the tedious work of building foundations in college mathematics is becoming more imperative. the use of the rock drill is forcing itself more and more on the college teacher accustomed to use only hammer and saw. as we are just entering upon this situation, it is too early to prophesy anything in regard to its permanency, but it seems likely that the secondary teachers will no more assume a yoke which some of the college teachers would so gladly have them bear and which they bore a long time with a view to serving the interests of the latter teachers. as many of the textbooks used by secondary teachers are written by college men, and as the success of these teachers is often gauged by the success of their students who happen to go to college, it is easily seen that there is a serious temptation on the part of the secondary teacher to look at his work through the eyes of the college teacher. the recent organizations which bring together the college and the secondary teachers have already exerted a very wholesome influence and have tended to exhibit the fact that the success of the college teacher of mathematics is very intimately connected with that of the teachers of secondary mathematics. while it is difficult to determine the most important single event in the history of college teaching in america, there are few events in this history which seem to deserve such a distinction more than the organization of the mathematical association of america which was effected in december, . this association aims especially to promote the interests of mathematics in the collegiate field and it publishes a journal entitled _the american mathematical monthly_, containing many expository articles of special interest to teachers. it also holds regular meetings and has organized various sections so as to enable its members to attend meetings without incurring the expense of long trips. its first four presidents were e. r. hedrick, florian cajori, e. v. huntington, and h. e. slaught. an event which has perhaps affected the very vitals of mathematical teaching in america still more is the founding of the american mathematical society in , called the new york mathematical society until . through its _bulletin_ and _transactions_, as well as through its meetings and colloquia lectures, this society has stood for inspiration and deep mathematical interest without which college teaching will degenerate into an art. during the first thirty years of its history it has had as presidents the following: j. h. van amringe, emory mcclintock, g. w. hill, simon newcomb, r. s. woodward, e. h. moore, t. s. fiske, w. f. osgood, h. s. white, maxime böcher, h. b. fine, e. b. van vleck, e. w. brown, l. e. dickson, and frank morley. =aims of college mathematics: methods of teaching= the aims of college mathematics can perhaps be most clearly understood by recalling the fact that mathematics constitutes a kind of intellectual shorthand and that many of the newer developments in a large number of the sciences tend toward pure mathematics. in particular, "there is a constant tendency for mathematical physics to be absorbed in pure mathematics."[ ] as sciences grow, they tend to require more and more the strong methods of intellectual penetration provided by pure mathematics. the principal modern aim of college mathematics is not the training of the mind, but the providing of information which is absolutely necessary to those who seek to work most efficiently along various scientific lines. mathematical knowledge rather than mathematical discipline is the main modern objective in the college courses in mathematics. as this knowledge must be in a usable form, its acquisition is naturally attended by mental discipline, but the knowledge is absolutely needed and would have to be acquired even if the process of acquisition were not attended by a development of intellectual power. the fact that practically all of the college mathematics of the eighteenth century has been gradually taken over by the secondary schools of today might lead some to question the wisdom of replacing this earlier mathematics by more advanced subjects. in particular, the question might arise whether the college mathematics of today is not superfluous. this question has been partially answered by the preceding general observations. the rapid scientific advances of the past century have increased the mathematical needs very rapidly. the advances in college mathematics which have been made possible by the improvements of the secondary schools have scarcely kept up with the growth of these needs, so that the current mathematical needs cannot be as fully provided for by the modern college as the recognized mathematical needs of the eighteenth century were provided for by the colleges of those days. there appears to be no upper limit to the amount of useful mathematics, and hence the aim of the college must be to supply the mathematical needs of the students to the greatest possible extent under the circumstances. in order to supply these needs in the most economical manner, it seems necessary that some of them should be supplied before they are fully appreciated on the part of the student. the first steps in many scientific subjects do not call for mathematical considerations and the student frequently does not go beyond these first steps in his college days, but he needs to go much further later in life. college mathematics should prepare for life rather than for college days only, and hence arises the desirability of deeper mathematical penetration than appears directly necessary for college work. =advanced work in college mathematics= another reason for more advanced mathematics than seems to be directly needed by the student is that the more advanced subjects in mathematics are a kind of applied mathematics relative to the more elementary ones, and the former subjects serve to throw much light on the latter. in other words, the student who desires to understand an elementary subject completely should study more advanced subjects which are connected therewith, since such a study is usually more effective than the repeated review of the elementary subject. in particular, many students secure a better understanding of algebra during their course in calculus than during the course in algebra itself, and a course in differential equations will throw new light on the course in calculus. hence college mathematics usually aims to cover a rather wide range of subjects in a comparatively short time. since mathematics is largely the language of advanced science, especially of astronomy, physics, and engineering, one of the prominent aims of college mathematics should be to keep in close touch with the other sciences. that is, the idea of rendering direct and efficient services to other departments should animate the mathematical department more deeply than any other department of the university. the tendency toward disintegration to which we referred above has forcefully directed attention to the great need of emphasizing this aspect of our subject, since such disintegration is naturally accompanied by a weakening of mathematical vigor. it may be noted that such a disintegration would mean a reverting to primitive conditions, since some of the older works treated mathematics merely as a chapter of astronomy. this was done, for instance, in some of the ancient treatises of the hindus. =mathematics and technical education= the great increase in college students during recent years and the growing emphasis on college activities outside of the work connected with the classroom, especially on those relating to college athletics, would doubtless have left college mathematics in a woefully neglected state if there had not been a rapidly growing interest in technical education, especially in engineering subjects, at the same time. naval engineering was one of the first scientific subjects to exert a strong influence on popularizing mathematics. in particular, the teaching of mathematics in the russian schools supported by the government began with the founding of the government school for mathematics and navigation at moscow in . it is interesting to note that the earlier russian schools established by the clergy after the adoption of christianity in that country did not provide for the teaching of any arithmetic whatever, notwithstanding the usefulness of arithmetic for the computing of various dates in the church calendar, for land surveying, and for the ordinary business transactions.[ ] the direct aims in the teaching of college mathematics have naturally been somewhat affected by the needs of the engineering students, who constitute in many of our leading institutions a large majority in the mathematical classes. these students are usually expected to receive more drill in actual numerical work than is demanded by those who seek mainly a deeper penetration into the various mathematical theories. the most successful methods of teaching the former students have much in common with those usually employed in the high schools and are known as the recitation and problem-solving methods. they involve the correction and direct supervision of a large number of graded exercises worked out by the students on the blackboard or on paper, and aim to overcome the peculiar difficulties of the individual students. the lecture method, on the other hand, aims to exhibit the main facts in a clear light and to leave to the student the task of supplying further illustrative examples and of reconsidering the various steps. the purely lecture method does not seem to be well adapted to american conditions, and it is frequently combined with what is commonly known as the "quiz." the quiz seems to be an american institution, although it has much in common with a species of the french "conference." it is intended to review the content of a set of lectures by means of discussions in which the students and the teacher participate, and it is most commonly employed in connection with the courses of an advanced undergraduate or of a beginning graduate grade. a prominent aim in graduate courses is to lead the student as rapidly as possible to the boundary of knowledge along the particular line considered therein. while some of the developments in such courses are apt to be somewhat special or to be too general to have much meaning, their novelty frequently adds a sufficiently strong element of interest to more than compensate losses in other directions. moreover, the student who aims to do research work will thus be enabled to consider various fields as regards their attractiveness for prolonged investigations of his own. =preparation of the college teacher of mathematics.= the fact that the college teacher has need of much more mathematical knowledge than he can possibly secure during the period of his preparation, especially if he expects to take an active part in research and in directing graduate work, has usually led to the assumption that the future teacher of college mathematics should devote all his energies to securing a deep mathematical insight and a wide range of mathematical knowledge.[ ] on the other hand, students prepared in accord with this assumption have frequently found it very difficult to adapt themselves to the needs of large freshman classes of engineering students entering upon the duties for which they were supposed to have been prepared. the breadth of view and the sweep of abstraction needed for effective graduate work have little in common with accuracy in numerical work and emphasis on details which are so essential to the young engineering students. the difficulty of the situation is increased by the fact that the young instructor is often led to believe that his advancement and the appreciation of his services are directly proportional to his achievements in investigations of a high order. this belief naturally leads many to begrudge the time and thought which their teaching duties should normally receive. the young college teacher of mathematics is thus confronted with a much more complex situation than that which confronts the mathematics teachers in secondary school work. here the success in the classroom is the one great goal, and the mathematical knowledge required is comparatively very modest. possibly the situation of the college teacher could be materially improved if it were understood that his first promotion would be mainly dependent upon his success as a teacher, but that later promotions involved the element of productive scholarship in an increasing ratio. the schools of education which have in recent years been established in most of our leading universities have thus far had only a slight influence on the preparation of the college teachers, but it seems likely that this influence will increase as the needs of professional training become better known. it is probably true that the ratio of courses on methods to courses on knowledge of the subject will always be largest for the elementary teacher, in view of the great difference between the mental maturity of the student and the teacher, somewhat less for the secondary teacher and least for the college teacher; but this least should not be zero, as is so frequently the case at present, since there usually is even here a considerable difference between the mathematical maturity of the student and that of the teacher. it may be argued that the future college teacher will probably profit more by noting the methods employed by his instructors than he would by the theoretic discussions relating to methods. this is doubtless true, but it does not prove that the latter discussions are without value. on the other hand, these discussions will often serve to fix more attention on the former methods and will lead the student to note more accurately their import and probable adaptability to the needs of the younger students. among the useful features for the training of the future mathematics teachers are the mathematical clubs which are connected with most of the active mathematical departments. in many cases, at least, two such clubs are maintained, the one being devoted largely to the presentation of research work while the other aims to provide opportunities for the presentation of papers of special interest to the students. the latter papers are often presented by graduate students or by advanced undergraduates, and they offer a splendid opportunity for such students to acquire effective and clear methods of presentation. the same desirable end is often promoted by reports given by students in seminars or in advanced courses. prominent factors in the training of the future college teachers are the teaching scholarships or fellowships and the assistantships. many of the larger universities provide a number of positions of this type. it sometimes happens that the teaching duties connected with these positions are so heavy as to leave too little energy for vigorous graduate work. on the other hand, these positions have made it possible for many to continue their graduate studies longer than they could otherwise have done and at the same time to acquire sound habits of teaching while in close contact with men of proved ability along this line. it should be emphasized that the ideal college teacher of mathematics is not the one who acquires a respectable fund of mathematical knowledge which he passes along to his students, but the one imbued with an abiding interest in learning more and more about his subject as long as life lasts. this interest naturally soon forces him to conduct researches where progress usually is slow and uncertain. research work should be animated by the desire for more knowledge and not by the desire for publication. in fact, only those new results should be published which are likely to be helpful to others in starting at a more favorable point in their efforts to secure intellectual mastery over certain important problems. half a century ago it was commonly assumed that graduation from a good college implied enough training to enter upon the duties of a college teacher, but this view has been practically abandoned, at least as regards the college teacher of mathematics. the normal preparation is now commonly placed three years later, and the ph.d. degree is usually regarded to be evidence of this normal preparation. this degree is supposed by many to imply that its possessor has reached a stage where he can do independent research work and direct students who seek similar degrees. in view of the fact that in america as well as in germany the student often receives much direct assistance while working on his ph.d. thesis, this supposition is frequently not in accord with the facts.[ ] the emphasis on the ph.d. degree for college teachers has in many cases led to an improvement in ideals, but in some other cases it has had the opposite effect. too many possessors of this degree have been able to count on it as accepted evidence of scientific attainments, while they allowed themselves to become absorbed in non-scientific matters, especially in administrative details. professors of mathematics in our colleges have been called on to shoulder an unusual amount of the administrative work, and many men of fine ability and scholarship have thus been hindered from entering actively into research work. conditions have, however, improved rapidly in recent years, and it is becoming better known that the productive college teacher needs all his energies for scientific work; and in no field is this more emphatically true than in mathematics. some departmental administrative duties will doubtless always devolve upon the mathematics teachers. by a careful division of these duties they need not interfere seriously with the main work of the various teachers. =the mathematical textbook= the american teachers of mathematics follow the textbook more closely than is customary in germany, for instance. among college teachers there is a wide difference of view in regard to the suitable use of the textbook. while some use it simply for the purpose of providing illustrative examples and do not expect the student to begin any subject by a study of the presentation found in the textbook, there are others who expect the normal student to secure all the needed assistance from the textbook and who employ the class periods mainly for the purpose of teaching the students how to use the textbook most effectively. the practice of most teachers falls between these two extremes, and, as a rule, the textbook is followed less and less closely as the student advances in his work. in fact, in many advanced courses no particular textbook is followed. in such courses the principal results and the exercises are often dictated by the teacher or furnished by means of mimeographed notes. the close adherence to the textbook is apt to cultivate the habit on the part of the student of trying to understand what the author meant instead of confining his attention to trying to understand the subject. in view of the fact that the american secondary mathematics teachers usually follow textbooks so slavishly, the college teacher of mathematics who believes in emphasizing the subject rather than the textbook often meets with considerable difficulty with the beginning classes. on the other hand, it is clear that as the student advances he should be encouraged to seek information from all available sources instead of from one particular book only. the rapid improvement in our library facilities makes this attitude especially desirable. an advantage of the textbook is that it is limited in all directions, while the subject itself is of indefinite extent. in the textbook the subject has been pressed into a linear sequence, while its natural form usually exhibits various dimensions. the textbook presents those phases about which there is usually no doubt, while the subject itself exhibits limitations of knowledge in many directions. from these few characteristics it is evident that the study of textbooks is apt to cultivate a different attitude and a different point of view from those cultivated by the unhampered study of subjects. the latter are, however, the ones which correspond to the actual world and which therefore should receive more and more emphasis as the mental vision of the student can be enlarged. the number of different available college mathematical textbooks on the subjects usually studied by the large classes of engineering students has increased rapidly in recent years. on the other hand, the number of suitable textbooks for the more advanced classes is often very limited. in fact, it is often found desirable to use textbooks written in some foreign language, especially in french, german, or italian, for such courses. this procedure has the advantage that it helps to cultivate a better reading knowledge of these languages, which is in itself a very worthy end for the advanced student of mathematics. this procedure has, however, become less necessary in recent years in view of the publication of various excellent advanced works in the english language. the greatest mathematical treasure is constituted by the periodic literatures, and the larger colleges and universities aim to have complete sets of the leading mathematical periodicals available for their students. this literature has been made more accessible by the publication of various catalogues, such as the _subject index_, volume i, published by the royal society of london in , and the volumes "a" of the annual publications entitled _international catalogue of scientific literature_. all students who have access to large libraries should learn how to utilize this great store of mathematical lore whenever mathematical questions present themselves to them in their scientific work. this is especially true as regards those who specialize along mathematical lines. in some of the colleges and universities general informational courses along mathematical lines have been organized under different names, such as history of mathematics, synoptic course, fundamental concepts, cultural course, etc. several books have recently been prepared with a view to meeting the needs of textbooks for such courses. college teachers of mathematics usually find it difficult to interest their students sufficiently in the current periodic literature, and one of the greatest problems of the college teacher is to instill such a broad interest in mathematics that the student will seek mathematical knowledge in all available sources instead of confining himself to the study of a few textbooks or the work of a particular school. g. a. miller _university of illinois_ references for articles on the teaching of mathematics which appeared during the nineteenth century, consult _pedagogy_ in the _royal society index_, vol. i, pure mathematics, . for literature appearing during the first twelve years of the present century the reader may consult the _bibliography of the teaching of mathematics_, - , by d. e. smith and charles goldziher, published by the united states bureau of education, bulletin, , no. . more recent literature may be found by consulting annual indexes, such as the _international catalogue of scientific literature_, a, mathematics, under , and _revue semestrielle des publications mathématiques_, under v . the volumes of the international review entitled _l'enseignement mathématique_, founded in , contain a large number of articles relating to college teaching. this subject will be treated in the closing volumes of the large french and german mathematical encyclopedias in course of publication. footnotes: [ ] p. zühlke. _zeitschrift für mathematischen und naturwissenschuftlichen unterricht_, vol. ( ), page . [ ] committee no. xii, american report of the international commission on the teaching of mathematics, , page . [ ] _internationale mathematische unterrichtskomission_, vol. , no. ( ), page . [ ] _journal de l'ecole polytechnique_, vol. ( ), part , page lx. [ ] f. cajori, _teaching and history of mathematics in the united states_, , page . [ ] a. e. h. love, _proceedings of the london mathematical society_, vol. ( ), page . [ ] v. v. bobynin, _l'enseignement mathématique_, vol. ( ), page . [ ] the training of teachers of mathematics, , by r. c. archibald. bulletin no. , , united states bureau of education. [ ] cf. m. bôcher, _science_, vol. ( ), page . ix physical education in the college =lessons for physical education from the world war= the events of the four years between the summer of and the winter of have brought us to a full realization of the real significance of physical education in the training of youth. america and her allies have had very dramatic reasons for regretting their careless indifference to the welfare of childhood and youth in former years. only yesterday, we were told that the great war would be won by the country that could furnish the last man or fight for the last quarter of an hour. america and her allies looked with a new and fearful concern upon the army of young men who were found physically unfit for military service. with the danger of war past, there is no lack of evidence that we and our allies will make practical application of this particular lesson. it will be fortunate indeed if the enlightened people of the earth are really permanently awake to the importance of the physical education of their citizens-in-the-making. governmental agencies have already started the movement to guarantee to the coming generation more extensive and more scientific physical education. public and private institutions are joining forces so that the advantages of this extended program of physical education will be enjoyed by the young men and young women in industry and commerce as well as by those in schools and colleges. it is to be hoped that the american college will do its full share and neglect no reasonable measure whereby the college graduate may be developed into the vigorous and healthy human being that the mentally trained ought to be. it must be admitted that our findings by the military draft boards, as well as other evidences secured through physical examinations, are not such as to make the american college proud of the quality or the extent of physical education which it has given in the past. we must express our keen disappointment at the prevalence of under-development, remediable defects, and unachieved physical and functional possibilities in our college graduates. =aims of physical education= physical training is concerned with the achievement and the conservation of human health. it has to do with conditioning the human being for the exigencies of life in peace or in war. its standards are not set by a degree of health which merely enables the individual to keep out of bed, eat three meals a day, and run no abnormal temperature. physical training is concerned with developing vigorous, enduring health that is based upon the perfect function, coördination, and integration of every organ of the human body; health that is not found wanting at the military draft; health that meets all its community obligations; health that is not affected by diseases of decay; and health that resists infection and postpones preventable death. =formulations of aims and scope of physical education in official documents--by regents of the state of new york= official statements and information from reliable sources indicate that physical education and hygiene and physical training are regarded by authorities as covering about the same general field. the general plan and syllabus for physical training adopted by the regents of the university of the state of new york in interprets physical training as covering "( ) individual health examinations and personal health instruction (medical inspection); ( ) instruction concerning the care of the body and the important facts of hygiene (recitations in hygiene); ( ) physical examinations as a health habit, including gymnastics, elementary marching, and organized, supervised play, recreation, and athletics." =by national committee on physical education= in march of a national committee on physical education, formed of representatives from twenty or more national organizations, adopted the following resolutions: i. that a comprehensive, thoroughgoing program of health education and physical education is absolutely needed for all boys and girls of elementary and secondary school age, both rural and urban, in every state in the union. ii. that legislation, similar in purpose and scope to the provisions and requirements in the laws recently enacted in california, new york state, and new jersey, is desirable in every state, to provide authorization and support for state-wide programs in the health and physical education field. iii. that the united states bureau of education should be empowered by law, and provided with sufficient appropriations, to exert adequate influence and supervision in relation to a nationwide program of instruction in health and physical education. iv. that it seems most desirable that congress should give recognition to this vital and neglected phase of education, with a bill and appropriation similar in purpose and scope to the smith-hughes law, to give sanction, leadership, and support to a national program of health and physical education; and to encourage, standardize, and, in part, finance the practical program of constructive work that should be undertaken in every state. v. that federal recognition, supervision, and support are urgently needed, as the effective means, under the constitution, to secure that universal training of boys and girls in health and physical fitness which are equally essential to efficiency of all citizens both in peace and in war. =by five national organizations= in december, , five national organizations, assembled in regular annual meeting, adopted resolutions which read in part as follows: first: that this society shall make every reasonable effort to influence the congress of the united states and the legislatures of our various states to enact laws providing for the effective physical education of all children of all ages in our elementary and secondary schools, public, institutional and private, a physical education that will bring these children instruction in hygiene, regular periodic health examinations and a training in the practice of health habits with a full educational emphasis upon play, games, recreation, athletics and physical exercise, and shall further make every possible reasonable effort to influence communities and municipalities to enact laws and pass ordinances providing for community and industrial physical training and recreative activities for all classes and ages of society. second: that this association shall make persistent effort to influence state boards of education, or their equivalent bodies, in all the states of the united states, to make it their effective rule that on or after june, , or some other reasonable date, no applicant may receive a license to teach any subject in any school who does not first present convincing evidence of having covered in creditable manner a satisfactory course in physical education in a reputable training school for teachers. third: and that this association hereby directs and authorizes its president to appoint a committee of three to take such steps as may be necessary to put the above resolutions into active and effective operation, and to coöperate in every practical and substantial way with the national committee on physical education, the division of physical education of the playground and recreation association of america, and any other useful agency that may be in the field for the purpose of securing the proper and sufficient physical education of the boys and girls of to-day, so that they may to-morrow constitute a nation of men and women of normal physical growth, normal physical development and normal functional resource, practicing wise habits of health conservation and possessed of greater consequent vitality, larger endurance, longer lives and more complete happiness--the most precious assets of a nation. =by the united states interdepartmental social hygiene board= in january, , the united states interdepartmental social hygiene board suggested the following organization of a department of hygiene for the purpose of establishing such a department in at least one normal school, college, or university training school for teachers in each state of the union. suggested organization of a department of hygiene i. _division of informational hygiene._ (stressing in each of its several divisions with due proportion and with appropriate emphasis, the venereal diseases, their causes, carriers, injuries, and prevention): (_a_) the principles of hygiene. required of all students at least twice a week for at least four terms. ( ) general hygiene. (the agents that injure health, the carriers of disease, the contributory causes of poor health, the defenses of health, and the sources of health.) ( ) individual hygiene. (informational hygiene, the care of the body and its organs, correction, and repair, preventive hygiene, constructive hygiene.) ( ) group hygiene. (hygiene of the home and the family, school hygiene, occupational hygiene, community hygiene.) ( ) intergroup hygiene. (interfamily, intercommunity, interstate, and international hygiene.) (_b_) principles of physical training. (gymnastics, exercise, athletics, recreation, and play.) required of all students. to be given at least twice a week for two terms in the junior or senior years. (_c_) health examinations-- ( ) medical examination required each half year of every student. (making reasonable provisions for a private, personal, confidential relationship between the examiner and the student.) ( ) sanitary surveys and hygienic inspections applied regularly to all divisions of the institution, their curriculums, buildings, dormitories, equipment, personal service, and surroundings. ii. _division of applied hygiene._ (_a_) health conference and consultations. ( ) every student advised under "c" above (health examinations) must report to his health examiner within a reasonable time, as directed, with evidence that he has followed the advice given, or with a satisfactory explanation for not having done so. ( ) must provide student with opportunities for safe, confidential consultations with competent medical advisors concerning the intimate problems of sex life as well as those of hygiene in general. (_b_) physical training. ( ) gymnastic exercises, recreation, games, athletics, and competitive sports. required of all students six hours a week every term. ( ) reconstructional and special training and exercise for students not qualified organically for the regular activities covered in " " above. it is assumed that every teacher-in-training physically able to go to school is entitled to and should take some form of physical exercise. iii. _division of research._ (_a_) investigations, tests, evaluating measurements, records, and reports required each term covering progress made under each division and subdivision of the department, for the purpose of discovering and developing more effective educational methods in hygiene. (_b_) provide facilities for the sifting, selection, and investigation of problems in hygiene that may be submitted to or proposed by the department of hygiene. (_c_) arrange for frequent lectures on public hygiene and public health from competent members of municipal, state, and national departments of health, and from other appropriate sources. iv. _personnel requisite for such a department._--men and women should be chosen for service in the several divisions of the department, who have a sane, well-balanced, and experienced appreciation of the importance of the whole field of hygiene as well as of the place and relations of the venereal diseases. ( ) one director or head of department. must have satisfactory scientific training and special experience, fitting him for supervision, leadership, teaching, research, and administrative responsibility. ( ) one medical examiner for men and one medical examiner for women. there should be one examiner for each students. must be selected with special care because of the presence of extraordinary opportunities to exercise a powerful intimate influence upon the mental, moral, and physical health of the students with whom such examiners come in contact. ( ) one special teacher of physical training (a "physical director") for each group of students. there must be a man for the men and a woman for the women students. the physical training instructors employed in this department should be in charge of and should cover satisfactorily all the directing, training, and coaching carried on in the department and in the institution in its relation to athletics and competitive sports. the men and women who are placed in charge of individual students and groups of students engaged in the various activities of physical training (gymnastics, athletics, recreation and play) should be selected with special reference to their wholesome influence on young men and young women. ( ) one coördinator (this function may be covered by one of the personnel covered by " ," " " or " " above). will serve to influence every teacher in every department on the entire staff of the institution to meet his obligations, in relation to the individual hygiene of the students in his classes and to the sanitation of the class rooms in which he meets his students. the coördinator should bring information to all teachers and assist them to meet more satisfactorily their opportunities to help students in their individual problems in social hygiene. ( ) special lectures on the principles and progress of public hygiene and public health. a close coördination should be secured between this department and community agencies like the department of health that are concerned with public hygiene. ( ) sufficient clerical, stenographic and filing service to meet the needs of the department. in february, , the field service of the national committee on physical education issued a tentative outline for a state law for physical education, suggested for use in planning future legislation. the purposes of physical education as stated in the preamble of this law read as follows: . in order that the children of the state of .... shall receive a quality and an amount of physical education that will bring to them the health, growth and a normal organic development that is essential to their fullest present and future education, happiness and usefulness; and in order that the future citizenship of the state of .... may receive regularly from the growing and developing youth of the commonwealth a rapidly increasing number of more vigorous, better educated, healthier, happier, more prosperous and longer lived men and women, we, the people of the state of .... represented in the senate and assembly do enact as follows: =by legislative committee of national committee on physical education= in february, , the legislative committee of the national committee on physical education prepared a bill for federal legislation for the purpose of assisting the states in establishing physical education in their schools. this proposed federal law stated the purpose and aim of physical education as follows: the purpose and aim of physical education in the meaning of this act shall be: more fully and thoroughly to prepare the boys and girls of the nation for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship through the development of bodily vigor and endurance, muscular strength and skill, bodily and mental poise, and such desirable moral and social qualities as courage, self-control, self-subordination and obedience to authority, coöperation under leadership, and disciplined initiative. the processes and agencies for securing these ends shall be understood to include: comprehensive courses of physical training activities, periodical physical examination; correction of postural and other remediable defects; health supervision of schools and school children; practical instruction in the care of the body and in the principles of health; hygienic school life, sanitary school buildings, playgrounds, and athletic fields and the equipment thereof; and such other means as may be conducive to these purposes. an analysis of these several authoritative and more or less official documents indicates very clearly a unanimity as to scope and aims of physical education, for they all seek to promote and conserve, in the broadest sense of the term, the health of the nation. =poor type of physical education in secondary schools intensifies problem in the college= the problem of physical education in the college is intensified by the fact that freshmen come to their chosen institutions with a variety of experience in physical training, but unfortunately this experience is, too often, either inadequate or ineffective. the natural physical training of the earlier age periods produces whatever neuro-muscular development, whatever neuro-muscular coördination, whatever neuro-muscular control, and whatever other organic growth, development, or functional perfection is achieved by the young human concerned. a program of physical training wisely planned with reference to infancy, childhood, and early youth would include types of exercises, play, games, and sports, that would perfect the neuro-muscular and other functions far more completely than is commonly accomplished through the natural unsupervised and undirected physical training of those early age periods either in city or in rural communities. the force of modern habits of life has led to the destruction of those natural habits of work, play, and recreation that gave a proportion of our forebears a fairly complete natural program of physical exercise during the plastic or formative periods of life. as a result, many students reach college nowadays with stunted growths and with poorly developed, poorly trained, or poorly controlled neuro-muscular equipment. some of these matriculates are physically weak. they lack alertness; their response is slow. others are awkward and muscularly inefficient, though their physical growth is objectively--height and weight--normal or even above normal. the college department faces these problems through special provisions made for the purpose of supplying a belated neuro-muscular training to such cases. it often happens that successful training along these lines is possible only through individual instruction of a most elementary sort, taking the student through simple exercises that ought to have been a part of his experience in early childhood. =individual needs of students augment problem of department of physical education= for the same reasons that are stated above, the college department of physical training finds it necessary to concern itself with individual students who need special attention directed to specified organs or groups of organs whose training or care could have been accomplished ordinarily far better at an earlier period. these students present problems of posture, lung capacity, and regional weakness. =supervision of athletics and recreation adds further to its problem= the college department of physical training finds also a significant opportunity and an urgent duty in the fact that various types of physical exercise are intimately associated with social, ethical, and moral consequences. no other human activity gives the same opportunity for the development of a social spirit and personal ethical standards as do play, games, and sports of children and adolescents. unsupervised, these activities degenerate and bring unmoral practices and an anti-social spirit in their wake. because of these opportunities and obligations, college departments of physical training are including within their programs and jurisdictions more and more supervision of college athletics, and assume an ever increasing rôle in the direction of recreational activities of college students. it remains true, however, that these influences of supervised play and athletics should operate long before the individual reaches college age. the intense interest of college students in athletic competitions, united with the opportunity which athletics offer for social and character training, has decided a number of colleges to turn athletic training over to the department of physical training. this preparation for the supreme physical and physiological test must be built upon a foundation of safe and sound health. there is no more fitting place in the collegiate organization for these athletic and recreational activities. =organization of department of physical education= the college departments that cover this field in whole or in part are known by various names. we have departments of physical training; of physical education; of physical culture; of hygiene; of physiology and physical education; of hygiene and physical education; of physical training and athletics, and so on. an analysis of these college departments shows that they all concern themselves with much the same important objects, although they differ in their lines of greater emphasis. we find, too, that in some colleges the department includes activities that form separate, though related departments in other institutions. the activities of such departments fall into three large divisions, each one of which has its logical subdivisions. one of these large divisions may be called the division of health examination. it has to do with the health examination of the individual student and with the health advice that is based on and consequent to such examination. the second division has to do with health instruction covering the subject matter of physical training. the third division covers directed experiences in right living and the formation of health habits, and includes the special activities noted above. we often refer to the first division noted above as the division of medical inspection, physical examination, or health examination; to the second as hygiene, physiology, biology, or bacteriology; and to the third as gymnastics, physical exercise, organized play, recreation, athletics, or narrowly as physical training. the prime purpose of collegiate physical training, then, is to furnish the student such information and such habit-forming experiences as will lead him to formulate and practice an intelligent policy of personal health control and an intelligent policy of community health control. the collateral and special objects of physical training vary with the individual student under the influence of his previous training and his present and future life plans. the collegiate department of physical training is primarily concerned, therefore, with the acquisition and conservation of human health--mental, moral, and physical health. because of his physical training, the college man should live longer; he should meet his environments obligations more successfully; he should be better able to protect himself from, and better able to avoid, injury; he should lose less time on account of injury, poor health, and sickness; he should get well more rapidly when he is sick; he should be better able to recover his health and strength after injury or illness; and he should therefore give to society a fuller, happier, and more useful life. such a department is concerned secondarily with (_a_) those special defects of earlier physical training that bring to college, students in need of neuro-muscular training and organic development, (_b_) with social, ethical, and character training, and (_c_) with the conditioning and special training of students for athletic competition or for other extraordinary physical and physiological demands. in the light of the above statements, the objects of physical training may be summarized as follows: i. the fundamental and ever present object of physical training is the acquisition and conservation of vigorous, enduring health, the summated effect of perfect functions in each and every organ of the human body. ii. the special objects of physical training vary in their needs for emphasis at different age periods and under the changing stresses of life. among the more important of these special objects are: ( ) general, normal growth. an object in the early age periods. ( ) neuro-muscular development, coördination, and control. accomplished best in early age periods. ( ) special organic (anatomical and functional) development. optimum period in childhood and youth. ( ) social, ethical, and moral training. character building. objects more easily secured in childhood and youth. ( ) preparation for some supreme physical and physiological test; e.g., athletic competition, police or fire service, military service. most desirable training period in late youth and early maturity. must depend, however, on the effects of earlier physical training. ( ) the formation of health habits. best accomplished in early life but commonly an important function of the college department of physical training. ( ) the conservation of health. always an object, but more particularly so in the middle and later life. the medical examination in the american college of today, the student's first contact with the department of physical training is very likely to be in the examining room. in the college of the city of new york[ ] it has become the established custom to require a satisfactory health examination before admitting the applicant to registration as a student in the college. entering classes are enrolled in this institution at the beginning of each term, and in each list of applicants there are always a few to whom admission is denied because of unsatisfactory health conditions. in each case in which admission is denied because of unsatisfactory health, the individual is given careful advice relative to his present and probable future condition, and every effort is made to help the applicant plan his life so that he may be able at a later time to enter the college. of course, it occasionally happens that applicants are found with serious and incurable health defects which make it very improbable that they will ever be in condition to attempt a college education. =scope of health examination= the health examination of the student should cover those facts in his family and personal health history that are likely to have a bearing upon his present or future health, and the examination should include a very careful investigation of the important organs of his body. this examination calls for expert medical and dental service. =how to conduct health examination= the most useful examiner is he who is at the same time a teacher. nowhere else is a better or even an equally good opportunity given to drive home impressively, and sometimes dramatically, important lessons in individual hygiene. through a pair of experimental lenses placed by his examiner before his hitherto undiscovered visual brain cells, the young student who has had poor vision and has never known it, may obtain, for the first time, a glimpse of the beauty in his surroundings. the dental examiner who finds bad teeth and explains bad teeth to the student whose health is being, or may be, destroyed by such teeth, has before him all the elements necessary for very effective health instruction. the health examination should be a personal and private affair. it is often best not to have even a recorder present. the student should understand that whatever passes between him and his examiner is entirely confidential. all advice given a student at these examinations should be followed up if it is the kind of advice that can be followed up. if the advice involves the attention of a dentist or treatment by a physician, time should be allowed for making arrangements and for securing the treatment necessary. after that time has elapsed the student should be called upon to report with information from his parent or guardian, or from his family health adviser, indicating what has been done or will be done for the betterment of the conditions for which the advice was originally given. in the hands of a tactful examiner--one who is a teacher as well as an examiner--the student and parent, particularly the parent, will coöperate effectively in this plan for the development of health habits of the student. less than three tenths of one per cent of the parents of city college students refuse to secure special health attention for their boys when we do so advise. these examinations should be repeated at reasonable intervals throughout the entire college course. we have found in the college of the city of new york that a repetition every term is none too frequent. visual defects, dental defects, evidences of heart trouble and signs of pulmonary tuberculosis, and other defects, not infrequently arise in cases of individuals who have been seen several times before without showing any evidence of poor health. it is hoped that these repeated examinations may lead to the continuation of such habits of bodily care in postgraduate years. a careful and concise record must be made covering the main facts of each examination and of each conference with the student subsequent to his examination. these memoranda enable the examiner at each later examination to talk to the student with a knowledge of what has been found and what has been said and what has been done on preceding examinations, and on preceding follow-up conferences. as a result, the examiner-teacher is in position to be very much more useful not only because of significant facts before him concerning the student with whom he is talking, but also because of the greater confidence which the student will necessarily have in an examiner who is obviously interested in him and who possesses such an accurate record of his health history. these examinations should apply to every student in a college or a university, regardless of the division to which he belongs. the need for health instruction or for the establishment of health habits, in order that one may be physically trained for the exigencies of life, is not peculiar to any student age period or to any academic or technicological group, or to a college for men or a college for women. one of the dangers present in these college examinations is the tendency of the examiner to become more interested in the number of students examined and the number of diagnoses made than in the good influence he may have upon the health future of the student. every "case" should be treated by the health examiner as if it were the first and only case on hand for the day. the student certainly classifies the examiner as the first and only one he has had that day. the examiner should plan to make every contact he has with a student a help to the student. health instruction a second large division of physical training deals with health instruction. as has been pointed out above, the division of health examination produces a very important and very useful opportunity for individual health instruction. =content of hygiene instruction= hygiene, however, is presented commonly to groups of students in class organization rather than individually. anatomy, physiology, psychology, bacteriology, pathology, general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene are sciences, or combinations of sciences, from which physical training draws its facts. these sciences and those phases of economics and sociology that have to do with the economic and social influences of health and disease, of physical efficiency and physical degeneracy, supply physical training with its general subject matter. health instruction, then, as a part of physical training, draws its content from these sources. a logical plan of class instruction would, therefore, include the elements of anatomy, physiology, psychology, bacteriology (and general parasitology), pathology, economics, and sociology, as a basis for a more complete presentation of the facts of general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene. =method of health instruction= the most satisfactory presentation of these subjects involves the grouping of students into small classes, the employment of laboratory methods, the use of reference libraries, and the assignment of problems for investigation and study, with a general group discussion of these problems. unfortunately, college classes are large and the number of teachers employed in the department of physical training, or in those departments from which physical training draws its science and its philosophy, is small, so that it is impractical to plan to give this instruction to small groups of students covering this range of subject matter. as a result, the lecture method with its obvious defects and shortcomings is the common medium for the health instruction of college students organized into classes. the more intimate and detailed instruction in these subjects is secured in special courses and in professional schools. in the college of the city of new york, we expect that students who come to us from high schools and preparatory schools have had the elements of anatomy and physiology either in courses on those subjects or in courses in biology.[ ] our health instruction, therefore, has been developed along the lines of lectures on general hygiene, individual hygiene, group hygiene, and intergroup hygiene running through the four terms of the freshman and sophomore years. these lectures are given in periods of from ten to fifteen minutes each, preceding class work in various forms of physical exercise. they are often called "floor talks." the shortness of the presentation favors vigor of address; necessitates a concise organization of material and a clarity and brevity of statement; and is more likely to command student attention and concentration. it has, however, its obvious defects. in these lectures persistent effort is made to influence the daily habits of the student. the lecture content is selected with reference to the practical problems of the daily life of the individual and of the community of which he is a part. it is obvious that the amount of time devoted to the presentation of the subject matter is utterly inadequate. short written tests are given once each month, and a longer written test is given at the end of each term. these examinations stimulate the student to organize his information and make it more completely his own property. the classes are too large[ ] and the instructional force relatively too small to permit the assignment of references, presentation of reports, and the conduct of investigations. further instruction in physiology and bacteriology is secured in this institution through elective courses open to students in their junior and senior years. these elective courses, however, are not planned primarily for the health education of the student, but rather for his partial preparation as a teacher of physical training, a student of medicine, a scientific specialist, or for public health work. health-forming activities of the department of physical education the third division of activities contains the health-habit-forming influences covered by the department of physical training. these influences are formed partly in connection with the follow-up activities associated with the health examinations and advice noted above; partly through impressions made by way of individual and class instruction concerning the laws of health (also noted above); and partly through systematic class work, group work, and individual work in gymnastics, organized recreation, games, play, and athletics. the student who has been given a health examination each term throughout his college career will be very likely to continue the practice as a habit after graduation. this habit will follow more surely if the examiner has been a real health teacher and not a perfunctory recorder of observations made upon the student. a lack of sympathy and tact may easily prejudice the student against the examination. the student who has been led regularly to care for defects of one sort or another; whose contact with his examiner-teacher in conferences following up the advice that has been given at the time of examination has been accompanied by the right sort of explanation and mutual understanding, will be more likely to continue to exercise that sort of care for the welfare of his body after he is no longer under the influence of the college. the student who has seen the application of class health talks to his everyday problems is likely to be influenced to the practice of consequent health habits, particularly if those short lectures serve to correlate his various habit-forming experiences while in college. and finally, the student who is brought into contact with regular systematic exercise may, if the exercise is attractive and interesting, achieve a health habit that will be carried out into his postgraduate life. the existence of the department of physical training would be amply justified if its influence upon the health and vigor of the student were limited to the period of his stay in college. the full success of this department, however, like that of all other college departments, must be measured by its influence upon the life of the student after he has left college. the formation of lasting health habits is, therefore, the most important object of this department. =place of physical exercise in program for physical education= regular appropriate physical exercise is one of our most important health habits. it is perhaps safe to say that for the average individual it is the most important health habit. this is true because of its intimate and impressive influence upon all the fundamental organic functions of the body. physical exercise in the american college is provided either as organized class work in the gymnasium, or by means of voluntary recreational opportunities, or through athletics. =class work in physical exercise= class work may include: marching, mass drills with or without light apparatus, work on heavy apparatus, games, dancing, swimming, and track and field work. this class work may be indoors or outdoors, depending on the season or climate. =additional facilities for physical exercise= voluntary recreational opportunities are offered through free mass drills open to all students who may desire to take them regularly or irregularly; through open periods for apparatus work; and through facilities and space for games, swimming, mass athletics, and so on. =recreational activities and athletics= competitive athletics are typical of the american college. theoretically, athletics are open to all students. practically, in many of our colleges athletics are made available only to the student with leisure time and exceptional physique. consistent effort is being made today by college authorities to provide opportunities for intramural (interclass, intergroup, and mass) athletics for the whole student body; at the same time preserving the desirable features of the more specialized intercollegiate competitions. =inculcating habits of physical exercise= physical exercise in these various forms has its immediate and valuable influence upon the health condition of the individual student, if taken in sufficient quantity. it has its lasting and very much more important influence in those cases in which physical exercise becomes a habit. it has, therefore, become the increasing concern of the college teacher of physical training to develop activities in physical exercise that the student may use after graduation. teachers of physical training have become more and more impressed with the importance of interesting exercise, not only because interesting exercise is more likely to become habitual exercise, but also because exercise that is accompanied by the play spirit, by happiness and joy, is physiologically and therefore healthfully of very much more value to the individual. the relationship between cheerfulness and good health has become very firmly established through the scientific researches of the modern physiologist. we know that health habits which are associated with cheerfulness and happiness are bound to be more effective. =opportunities for character building= the teacher of physical training finds opportunity for incidental and yet very important instruction leading to the formation of fine qualities of character and fine standards of personal conduct. these opportunities arise constantly in the various general types of physical exercise found in the curriculum of the department of physical training. they are especially present in those activities in which competition occurs, as in play, games, and athletics. these activities do not in themselves produce excellent qualities of character or high standards of conduct, but the teacher--whether he be called a coach or a trainer or a professor of hygiene--who sets a good example and who insists that every game played, and every contest, whether it be in a handball court between college chums or on the football field between college teams, shall be clean and fair, is using in the right way one of the opportunities present in the entire college life of the student, for the formation of fine character. special exercises for special groups in any given group of college students one will find a number of individuals in need of special or modified physical exercise. these students may be grouped commonly under the following heads: ( ) undeveloped, ( ) bad posture, ( ) awkward, ( ) originally weak, ( ) deformed. some of these students suffer from defects that are remediable, some of these defects are due to poor physical training in earlier years. some are the results of disease. all of them call for modified exercise and recreation. the fact that a student may fall into one of these groups in no way justifies the assumption that he is therefore no longer subject to the laws of health or to the need for rational health habits. as a matter of fact, such cases generally call for greater care and attention in the formulation and operation of a rational policy of right living. every student physically able to go to college is physically able to exercise. no student in attendance on recitations anywhere can offer a rational plea for exemption from exercise, the individual whose physical condition contraindicates all forms of exercise needs careful medical advice and probably needs hospital or sanitarium treatment. college departments of physical training are planning for cases in need of special or modified exercise, through the organization of special classes and through individual attention. in the college of the city of new york we attempt to group the weak students in a given class, into squads of four such students with a squad leader, a student. the awkward students are grouped in the same manner. the exercise of the cripple and the student with serious organic weakness is individualized. these special individualized cases are under the direct supervision of a physician on the staff. organization of the students for prescribed work in the college courses in this college, organized, directed physical exercise as outlined above is covered in the division of physical training, the division of recreation, and the division of athletics, all of which are subdivisions of the department of hygiene. the enrollment in the required classes in the division of physical training varies from thirty in the smaller classes to over two hundred in the larger. the total enrollment has been approximately eleven hundred each term for several years. these courses are required of all students during the first four collegiate terms. each of these four courses requires three hours a week, distributed over two or into three periods, and credits the student with one half point toward graduation. this time allowance is, however, inadequate. the class organization in the division of the department of hygiene is based on a unit composed of five students. each of these units or squads contains one student who is designated as the "leader" of that unit. persistent effort is made to assign students of like physical development and needs to the same squads. in this manner a single class of a hundred young men will have a graduation on the basis of proficiency which makes it possible for the teacher to come very near to the rational application of exercise for the individual student. these units or squads are organized into divisions, each division being made up of four squads. each division is under the supervision and instruction of a member of the departmental staff. in any given class, then, there is a regular instructor for each group of twenty students, and a student leader for each group of four students. the aim in this organization is to establish a relationship between the instructor and his twenty students that will secure for him an intimate knowledge of each young man, relating to his physical training needs, general and special. =a class period in physical exercise= a typical class period is made up of a short health talk, minutes; a mass drill, minutes; apparatus period, two changes, minutes; and a play period, minutes. if the health talk is not given the play period is lengthened. the mass drills referred to above are made up of drill in marching and in gymnastics with and without hand apparatus. these drills are graded within the term and from term to term so that a desirable variety is secured. they are devised for disciplinary, postural, developmental, and health purposes. during the progress of the drill the instructors present inspect the posture and work of the students in their divisions. the apparatus periods referred to include work on the conventional pieces of gymnastic apparatus, with the addition of chest weights, an indoor track, and a swimming pool. the squad organization for this work gives opportunity for the development of student leadership which is often of extraordinary educational value to the individual boy. these periods, because of this squad organization, may be utilized for such _special exercise_ emphasis as may be decided upon for any given group of students. it is here that _special conditioning_ may be given those young men who are planning for military training or who need selected exercise for neuro-muscular development. the play period in the regular class program is devoted largely to looser games that contain a predominating element of big muscle activities. competition is a fairly constant factor. here, again, our squad unit permits us to assign selected groups of students to special types of games. it is feasible, in this organization, to satisfy a need for the training that is furnished by highly organized games, fighting games, and by games and out-of-door events that develop special groups of muscles and special coördinations. a well-organized collegiate department of physical training could coöperate very effectively with a collegiate department of military training. the squad organization in apparatus periods and in play periods offers the best possible avenue for a successful emphasis of several of the very important phases of military physical training. =recreational facilities in addition to prescribed work= the division of recreation in the department of hygiene in the college of the city of new york, takes charge of all recreational and athletic space and all recreational and intramural athletic activities in those periods of the day in which regular class work does not take precedence. students of all classes are admitted freely throughout their four collegiate years to these activities, and a studied effort is made to increase their attractiveness as well as to secure from them their full social and character-training values. such values depend to a very large degree upon the experienced supervision and direction given these activities. it does not follow that the creation of play opportunity is bound to produce good citizenship. the quality of the product depends upon the quality of the man or men in charge of the enterprise. the most important mission of the recreational division is its purpose to furnish the student lasting habits of play and recreation based upon the physical development he has secured in his earlier experiences in physical training. after all, one's physical training should begin at birth and continue throughout life. the division of athletic instruction is concerned with all plans for intercollegiate athletics, including organization, financing, training, coaching, and scheduling. all these activities are under the direction of members of the staff of the department of hygiene. there is no one employed in this relationship who is not a member of the staff. constant attempts are made, in every reasonable way, to accomplish the athletic ideals that have been set up by the national collegiate athletic association. clean play, honorable methods, and sportsmanly standards dominate the theory and practice of this athletic instruction and supervision. the scope and content of physical training which i have attempted to present in these pages is brought out more clearly by the following announcement of the department of hygiene of the college of the city of new york: hygiene ( - ) the department of hygiene is made up of the divisions of physical training, physiology, bacteriology, health examination, recreational instruction, and athletics. through these divisions the department attempts to train young men for the exigencies of life through the establishment of enduring habits of health examination and repair, health information and individual and community protection against the agents that injure health and cause disease, and through the establishment of wise habits of daily life. this organization gives opportunity for the development of neglected organic and neuromuscular growth, coördination and control; for the social, ethical, and moral training (character building influences) inherent in wisely supervised athletic and recreational experiences; and for the special conditioning that accompanies training for severe physical and physiological competition and other tests. finally, preparation may be secured for life work along certain lines of research, certain medical sciences, various phases of public health, physical training and social work. in addition, this department is concerned with all those influences within the college which affect the health of the student. every reasonable effort is made to keep the institution safe and attractive to the clean, healthy individual. division of physical training . _course one._ (_a_) lectures. "some of the common causes of disease." (_b_) physical exercise. i. graded mass drills. (_a_) elementary drills are used in order to develop obedience, alertness, and ready response to command, accurate execution, good posture and carriage and facility of control. (_b_) more advanced drills are given in which movements are made in response to commands. strength, endurance, and coördination are brought into play. ii. apparatus work. continuation of graded exercises for squads of five students each. iii. selected, graded, recreative indoor and outdoor games and play. iv. swimming. each student is required to learn to swim with more than one variety of stroke. prescribed. freshman, first term; three hours a week; counts / . . _course two._ (_a_) lectures. "the carriers of disease." (_b_) physical exercise. i. graded mass drills. two-count movements. these drills are continuations of, but more advanced than those given in the preceding term. ii. apparatus work. continuation of graded exercises for squads of five. iii. selected, graded, recreative indoor and outdoor games and play. iv. swimming. each student is required to develop endurance in swimming. prerequisite: hygiene . prescribed. freshman, second term; three hours a week; counts / . . _course three._ (_a_) lectures. "the contributory causes and carriers of disease." (_b_) physical exercise. i. graded mass drills. four-count movements. more advanced work. ii. apparatus work. continuation of graded exercises for squads of five. iii. selected, graded, recreative indoor and outdoor games and play. iv. swimming. diving, rescue and resuscitation of the drowning. prerequisite: hygiene . prescribed. sophomore, first term; three hours a week; counts / . . _course four._ (_a_) lectures. "defenses against poor health and disease." (_b_) physical exercise. i. advanced graded mass drills. eight-count movements. ii. advanced graded apparatus work. for squads of five. iii. selected, graded, recreative indoor and outdoor games and play. iv. swimming. advanced continuation of requirements outlined for courses and . prerequisite: hygiene . prescribed. sophomore, second term; three hours a week; counts / . _modified course._ in each of the above required courses provision is made for those students whose organic condition may permanently disqualify them for the regular scheduled work. this special work is under the immediate direction of a medical member of the staff. . _intermediate physical training._ this course is planned to supply the student with such organic development and efficiency as will enable him to demonstrate successfully as a teacher various type exercises for classes in elementary and intermediate indoor and outdoor gymnastics, aquatics, games, play and athletics. prerequisite: hygiene . three hours a week; counts / . . _advanced physical training._ this course is a continuation of course , and is designed for the physical equipment of teachers of more advanced physical work. prerequisite: hygiene . three hours a week; counts / . . _class management._ this course supplies the practical instruction and experience needed for the training of special teachers in the management of elementary and intermediate classes in various forms of physical exercise. prerequisite: hygiene and . fall term, three hours a week; counts . . _class management._ this course is a continuation of course . it is planned to give a training in the management of more advanced classes. prerequisite: hygiene . spring term, three hours a week; counts . . _control of emergencies and first aid to the injured._ this course supplies instruction concerning the management and protective care of common emergencies. the instruction is practical and rational. it covers such emergencies as: sprains, fractures, dislocations, wounds, bruises, sudden pain, fainting, epileptic attacks, unconsciousness, drowning, electric shock, and so on. prerequisite: hygiene . fall term, two hours a week; counts . . _theory and practice of individual instruction in hygiene and in departmental sanitation._ students taking this subject will be given practical first hand experience of special use to teachers; (a) in connection with health examination, inspection, conference, consultation, and follow up service carried on in the departmental examining room; and (b) in connection with the sanitary supervision carried on by the department. prerequisites or co-requisites: hygiene , and . spring term, six hours a week in two periods of three hours each; counts . division of physiology . _elements of physiology._ this subject deals with the general concepts of the science of physiology, the chemical and physical conditions which underlie and determine the action of the individual organs, and the integrative relationship of the parts of the body. one lecture, one recitation and two laboratory hours a week; counts . . _special physiology._ a study of the fundamental facts of physiology and methods of investigation. the aim is to give a complete study of certain topics: the phenomena of contraction, conduction, sense perception and the various mechanisms of general metabolism. laboratory work is arranged to show the methods of physiologic experimentation and to emphasize the necessity of using care and accuracy in their application. spring term, two lectures and three laboratory hours a week; counts . . _physiology of nutrition._ the aim of this subject is to study broadly the metabolism of the human body. in the development of this plan the following topics will be considered: the food requirements of man, the nutritive history of the physiologic ingredients, the principles of dietetics and their application to daily living. fall term, two lectures and three laboratory hours a week; counts . division of bacteriology . _general bacteriology._ lectures, recitations and laboratory work introducing the student to the technique of bacteriology and to the more important facts about the structure and function of bacteria. special applications of bacteriology to agriculture and the industries are discussed, and brief references are made to the activities of allied microbes, the yeasts and molds. the general relations of bacteria to disease and the principles of immunity and its control are included. one lecture, one recitation and four laboratory hours a week; counts . . _bacteriology of foods._ this includes the bacteriologic examination of water, sewage, air, milk, the various food products together with the methods used in the standardization of disinfectants, a detailed study of yeast and bacterial fermentation and their application to the industries. numerous trips to industrial plants will be made. prerequisite: hygiene . fall term, one lecture and six laboratory hours a week; counts . . _bacteriology of pathogenic micro-organisms._ this subject is devoted to the laboratory methods of biology as applied in the state and municipal boards of health. practice will be given in the methods used for the diagnosis of diphtheria, tuberculosis, malaria, rabies, and other diseases caused by micro-organisms, together with a detailed study of the groups to which they belong. prerequisite: hygiene . spring term, one lecture and six laboratory hours a week; counts . . _potable and industrial water._ very few industries are independent of a water supply. no one is independent of the source of his drinking water. water varies in its usefulness for definite purposes. this subject differentiates between various waters, takes them up from industrial and hygienic standpoints, considers softening, filtering, purifying and water analysis. work is divided into three groups. a. industrial water ) } given in the chemistry department. b. potable water ) c. water bacteriology ) } given in the department of hygiene. (microscopy of water) ) municipal students may elect any or all of the three groups. prerequisite: chemistry and hygiene . chemistry is desirable. spring term, seven hours a week; counts . . _municipal sanitation._ lectures, discussions and visits to public works of special importance. the principles which underlie a pure water supply and the means by which the wastes of the city, its sewage and garbage may be successfully disposed of, and the problems of pure milk and pure food supplies, the housing question with its special phase of ventilation and plumbing, and the methods by which a municipal board of health is organized to fight tuberculosis and other specific diseases will be studied. fall term, two lectures and one field trip a week; counts . . _municipal sanitary inspection._ _professor b---- and bureau of foods and drugs, new york city department of health._ the seminar work of this subject is done in the college and the field work in company with and under the direct supervision of an inspector of the department of health of the city. the subject is limited to six students each semester, and is intended for those planning to go into this branch of the city's service. the qualifications will be based upon individuality, personality playing an important part. prerequisite: hygiene and and chemistry . spring term, two seminar hours, one recitation and one inspection tour a week; counts . . _research._ seniors who have completed satisfactorily a sufficient amount of work in the department may be assigned some topic to serve as a basis for a thesis which will be submitted as credit for the work at its completion. the student will receive the advice of the instructor in the subject in which the research falls, but as much independent work as possible will be insisted upon. the purpose is to introduce the student into research methods, and also to foster independence. division of health examination i. _individual instruction in hygiene._ this instruction is of a personal confidential character, and is given in the form of advice based upon medical history supplied by the individual, and upon medical and hygienic examinations and inspections of the individual. (_a_) medical and hygienic history and examination. in this relationship with the student the department attempts to secure such information concerning environmental and habit influences in the life of the student as may be used as a basis for supplying him with helpful advice concerning the organization of his policy of personal health control. the medical examinations are utilized for the purpose of finding remediable physical defects whose proper treatment may be added to the physiological efficiency and therefore to the health possibilities of the student. prescribed: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior and special students. once each term. no credits. (_b_) hygiene inspections. these inspections are applied in the mutual interest of personal, departmental and institutional hygiene. prescribed: freshman and sophomore. (_c_) conferences. all students who have been given personal hygienic or medical advice are required to report in conference by appointment in order that the advice may be followed up. all individuals found with communicable diseases are debarred from all classes until it is shown in conference that they are receiving proper medical treatment, and that they may return to class attendance with safety to their comrades. all individuals found with remediable physical or hygienic defects are required to report in conference with evidence that the abnormal condition has been brought to the serious attention of the parent, guardian or family medical or hygienic adviser. students failing to report as directed may be denied admission to all classes. ii. _medical and sanitary supervision._ (_a_) sanitary supervision. an "advisory committee on hygiene and sanitation" with the professor of hygiene as chairman, has been appointed by the president. this committee has been instructed to "inquire from time to time into all our institutional influences which are likely to affect the health of the student and instructor, and to make such reports with recommendations to the president as may seem wise and expedient." (_b_) a medical examination is required of all applicants for admission to the college. approval of the medical examiner must be secured before registration is permitted. (_c_) medical consultation. open to all students. (optional.) (_d_) medical examination of athletes. required of all students before admission to athletic training and repeated at intervals during the training season. (_e_) treatment. emergency treatment is the only treatment attempted by the department. such treatment will be applied only for the purpose of protecting the individual until he can secure the services he selects for that purpose. (_f_) conferences. (see "c" under i.) (_g_) laboratory: the department laboratories are equipped for bacteriological and other analyses. the water in the swimming pool is examined daily. the laboratory service is utilized to identify disease carriers, and in every other reasonable way to assist in the protection of student health. division of recreational instruction liberal provision is made by the college for voluntary recreational activities indoors and outdoors during six days of the week and throughout vacation periods. emphasis is laid on recreation as a health habit and a means of social training. division of athletics ( ) _athletic supervision._ three organizations are concerned: (_a_) the faculty athletic committee, which has to do with all athletic activities that involve academic relationships. (_b_) the athletic council, a committee of the department of hygiene, charged with the supervision of all business activities connected with student athletic enterprises. (_c_) the athletic association of the student body. ( ) _athletic instruction._ the department utilizes various intramural and extramural athletic activities for the purpose of securing a further influence on the promotion of health habits, the development of physical power, and the establishment and maintenance of high standards of sportsmanly conduct on part of the individual and the group. at present the schedule includes the following sports: baseball, basket ball, track and field, swimming and water polo, tennis, soccer foot ball, and hand ball. thomas andrew storey, m.d. _college of the city of new york_ [it was hoped that it would be possible to include with professor storey's chapter a number of forms and photographs calculated to serve as aids in the organization and conduct of a college department of hygiene. as professor storey's work is very distinctive, other institutions which are striving to organize effective departments of physical education would have found his experiences as graphically depicted in these photographs and summed up in these charts extremely helpful. unfortunately it has proved impossible to print them here on account of limitations of space, but all who are interested in securing further information can obtain these valuable guides in the introductory stages of the inauguration of a department of hygiene by applying to the college of the city of new york. editor.] footnotes: [ ] the construction of this chapter on the teaching of physical training is based very largely upon the experiences and organization of the department of hygiene in the college of the city of new york. [ ] this precollegiate instruction is, unfortunately, uniformly poor in so far as it relates to health. [ ] the present enrollment in these classes, february, , is approximately . part three the social sciences chapter x the teaching of economics _frank a. fetter_ xi the teaching of sociology _a. j. todd_ xii the teaching of history a. american history _h. w. elson_ b. modern european history _edward krehbiel_ xiii the teaching of political science _charles grove haines_ xiv the teaching of philosophy _frank thilly_ xv the teaching of ethics _henry neumann_ xvi the teaching of psychology _robert s. woodworth_ xvii the teaching of education a. teaching the history of education _herman h. horne_ b. teaching educational theory _frederick e. bolton_ x the teaching of economics =conception and aims of economics= even though economics be so defined as to exclude a large part of the field of the social sciences, its scope is still very broad. economics is less homogeneous in its content, is far less clearly defined, than is any one of the natural sciences. a very general definition of economics is: the study of men engaged in making a living. more fully expressed, economics is a study of men exercising their own powers and making use of their environment for the purposes of existence, of welfare, and of enjoyment. within such a broad definition of economics is found room for various narrower conceptions. to mention only the more important of these we may distinguish individual economics, domestic economics, business economics, governmental economics (public finance), and political (or national) economics. any one of these subjects may be approached and treated primarily either with regard to its more immediate financial, material, acquisitive aspects, or to its more far-reaching social, psychical, and welfare aspects. these various ideas appear and reappear most confusingly in economic literature. the aims that different students and teachers have in the pursuit of economics are as varied as are the conceptions of its nature. the teaching aims are, indeed, largely determined by those conceptions. moreover, the teaching aims are modified by still other conditions, such as the environment of the college and its constituency, and such as the temperament, business experience, and scholarly training of the teacher. we may distinguish broadly three aims: the vocational, the civic, and the cultural. _the vocational aim_ is the most elementary and most usual. xenophon's treatise on domestic "economy" was the nucleus from which have grown all the systematic formulations of economic principles. vocational economics is the economics of the craftsman and of the shop. every practical craft and art has its economic aspect, which concerns the right and best use of labor and valuable materials to attain a certain artistic, mechanical, or other technical end in its particular field. economics is not mere technology, which has to do with the mastery of materials and forces to attain any material end. vocational economics, however, modifies and determines technical practice, which, in the last analysis, is subject to the economic rule. the economic engineer should construct not the best bridge that is possible, mechanically considered, but the best possible or advisable for the purpose and with the means at hand. the economic agriculturist should not produce the largest crop possible, but the crop that gives the largest additional value. the rapidly growing recognition of the importance, in all technical training, of cultivating the ability to take the economic view has led to the development of household economics in connection with the teaching of cooking, sewing, decorating, etc.; of the economics of farm management to supplement the older technical courses in natural science, crops, and animal husbandry; of the economics of factory management in connection with mechanical engineering; of the economics of railway location in connection with certain phases of civil engineering; and many more such special groupings and formulations of economic principles with reference to particular vocations and industries. the ancient and the medieval crafts and mysteries undoubtedly had embodied in their maxims, proverbs, traditional methods, and teachings, many economic principles suitable to their comparatively simple and unchanging conditions. the rapid changes that have occurred, especially in the last half century, in the natural sciences and in the practical arts have rendered useless much of this wisdom of the fathers. recently there has been a belated and sudden awakening to the need of studying, consciously and systematically, the economic aspects of the new dynamic forces and industrial conditions. hence the almost dramatic appearance of vocational, or technical, economics under such names as "scientific management" and the "economics of engineering." viewed in this perspective such a development appears to be commendable and valuable in its main purpose. unfortunately, some, if not all, of the adherents of this new cult of "economy" and "efficiency" fail to appreciate how very restricted and special it is, compared with the whole broad economic field. _the civic aim_ in teaching economics is to fit the student to perform the duties of a citizen. we need not attempt to prove here that a large proportion of public questions are economic in nature, and that in a democracy a wise decision on these questions ultimately depends on an intelligent public opinion and not merely on the knowledge possessed by a small group of specialists. the civic conception of economics, seen from one point of view, shows little in common with the vocational conception. yet from another point of view it may be looked upon as the vocational conception "writ large" and is the art of training men to be citizens in a republic. good citizenship involves an attitude of interest, a capacity to form judgments on public economic issues, and, if need be, to perform efficiently public functions of a legislative, executive or judicial nature. the state-supported colleges usually now recognize very directly their obligation to provide economic training with the civic aim, and, in some cases, even to require it as a part of the work for a college degree. often also is found the thought that it is the duty of the student while obtaining an education at public expense, to take a minimum of economics with the civic aim even if he regards it as in no way to his individual advantage or if it has in his case no direct vocational bearings. in the privately endowed institutions this policy may be less clearly formulated, but it is hardly less actively practiced. indeed, the privately endowed institutions have been recognizing more and more fully their fiduciary and public nature. their public character is involved in their charters, in their endowments, in their exemption from taxation, and in their essential educational functions. the proudest pages in their history are those recording their services to the state.[ ] =evaluations of aims of teaching economics in college= _the cultural aim_ in economics is to enable the student to comprehend the industrial world about him. it aims to liberate the mind from ignorance and prejudice, giving him insight into, and appreciation of, the industrial world in which he lives. in this aspect it is a liberal study. economics produces in some measure this cultural result, even when it is studied primarily with the vocational or with the civic aim. but in vocational economics the choice of materials and the mode of treatment are deliberately restricted by the immediate utilitarian purposes; and in economic teaching with a civic purpose there is the continual temptation to arouse the sympathies for an immediate social program and to take a view limited by the contemporary popular interest in specific proposals for reform. economics at its highest level is the search for truth. it has its place in any system of higher education as has pure natural science, apart from any immediate or so far as we may know, any possible, utilitarian application. it is a disinterested philosophy of the industrial world. though it may not demonstrably be a _means_ to other useful things, it is itself a worthy _end_. it helps to enrich the community with the immaterial goods of the spirit, and it yields the psychic income of dignity and joy in the individual and national life. and as a final appeal to any doubting philistine it may be said that just as the cult of pure science is necessary to the continual and most effective progress in the practical arts, so the study of economics on the philosophical plane surely is necessary to the highest and most lasting results in the application of economics to the arts and to civic life. the differences in aims set forth in this paragraph result in much of the futile discussion in recent years regarding methods of teaching. enthusiastic innovators have debated at cross purposes about teaching methods as if they were to be measured by some absolute standard of pedagogic values, not recognizing that the chief differences of views as to teaching methods were rooted in the differing aims. this truth will reappear at many points in the following discussion. "what will you have," quoth the gods, "pay the price and take it." =place of economics in the college curriculum= the place assigned to economics in the college curriculum in respect to the year in which the student is admitted to its study is very different in various colleges. in the last investigation of the subject it appeared that the first economics course might be taken first in the freshman year in per cent of cases, in the sophomore year in per cent of cases, in the junior year in per cent of cases, in the senior year in per cent of cases.[ ] among those institutions giving an economic course in the freshman year are some small and some large institutions (some of the latter being stanford, new york university, pennsylvania, bryn mawr, and the state universities of california, iowa, nebraska, north dakota, colorado, utah). frequently the elementary course given to freshmen is in matter and method historical and descriptive, rather than theoretical, and is planned to precede a more rigid course in the principles.[ ] the plan of beginning economics in the sophomore year is the mode among the state universities and larger colleges, including nearly all of the larger institutions that do not begin the subject in the freshman year. this group includes yale, hopkins, chicago, northwestern, mount holyoke, wellesley, vassar, and (after ) princeton. the group of institutions beginning economics in the junior year is the largest, but consists mostly of small colleges having some advanced economics courses, but no more than can be given in the senior year. it contains, besides, a few colleges of arts which maintain a more strictly prescribed curriculum for underclassmen (freshmen and sophomores), such as dartmouth, columbia, smith, and simmons. it should be observed also that in a great many institutions, where economics may be taken by some students in the first two years, it is in fact scheduled as late as junior or senior year in the prescribed courses of students in special departments such as agriculture, engineering, and law. this statement applies doubtless to many thousands of technical students.[ ] in view of these divergencies in practice we must hesitate to declare that the subject should be begun at precisely this or that point in the college course. these differences, to be sure, are in many cases the result of accidental factors in the college curriculum, and often have been determined by illogical departmental rivalries within the faculty rather than by wise and disinterested educators studying the merits of the case. but in large part these differences are the expression of different purposes and practical needs in planning a college curriculum, and are neither quite indefensible nor necessarily contradictory in pedagogic theory. in the small college with a nearly uniform curriculum and with limited means, a general course is perhaps best planned for the senior year, or in the junior year if there is an opportunity given to the student to do some more advanced work the year following. at the other extreme are some larger institutions in which the pressure of new subjects within the arts curriculum has shattered the fixed curriculum into fragments. this has made possible specialization along any one of a number of lines. where this idea is carried out to the full, every general group of subjects eventually must make good its claim to a place in the freshman year for its fundamental course. but inasmuch as, in most institutions, the freshman year is still withheld from this free elective plan by the requirement of a small group of general subjects, economics is first open to students in the sophomore year. the license of the elective system is of course much moderated by the requirement to elect a department, usually at the beginning either of the sophomore or of the junior year, and within each department both a more or less definite sequence of courses and a group of collateral requirements are usually enforced. where resources are very limited it is probably best to give the economics course in the last two years, but where several more specialized courses in economics are given, it should be introduced as early as the sophomore year. if a freshman course in the subject is given it should be historical, descriptive, or methodical (e.g., statistical methods, graphics, etc.) rather than theoretical. the experience (or lack of experience) and knowledge of the industrial world, past and present, possessed by the average american college student is such that courses of that kind meet a great need.[ ] =time to be given to economics in a college curriculum= teachers of economics today are doubtless attempting the impossible in compressing the present "general course" into three hours for two semesters. no other department of a university attempts to treat in such a brief time so broad a subject, including both principles and applications. such a course was quite long enough in the days when all economic instruction was given by gray-haired theologians, philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists, dogmatically expounding the _pons asinorum_ of economics, and quizzing from a dusty textbook of foreign authorship. but now the growing and vigorous tribe of specialized economic teachers is bursting with information and illustrations. moreover, the range of economic topics and of economic interests has expanded wonderfully. the resulting overcrowded condition of the general course is possibly the main cause of the difficulties increasingly felt by teachers in handling that course satisfactorily. as a part of a general college curriculum "general economics" cannot be satisfactorily treated in less than three hours a week for two years. the additional time should not be spent in narrow specialization but rather in getting a broader understanding of the subject through economic history and geography, through observation and description of actual conditions, through a greater use of problems and examples, and through more detailed, less superficial study of the fundamental principles. as a part of sixteen years of the whole educational scheme from primary grade to college diploma such a course would claim but - / per cent of the student's whole time, while the subjects of english, mathematics, and foreign linguistics each gets about per cent, in the case even of students who do not specialize in one of these branches. of the replies[ ] from nearly three hundred colleges to the question whether economics was required for graduation, about per cent were in the affirmative. unfortunately the question was ambiguous, and the replies apparently were understood to mean generally that it was required in one or more curricula, not of all graduates (though in some cases the question was probably taken in the other sense). it is noteworthy that more frequently economics is required in the smaller colleges having but one curriculum, that of liberal studies. in the larger institutions economics is usually not required of students in the humanities, although of late it has increasingly been made a part of the technical college curricula, especially in engineering and agriculture.[ ] so we are in a fair way to arrive at the situation where no student except in those "liberal" arts courses can get a college diploma without studying economics; only in a modern course in the humanities may the study of human society be left out. the economists have not been active in urging their subject as a requirement. the call for increasing requirements in economics has come from the public and from the alumni. the steady increase in the number of students electing economic courses without corresponding additions to the teaching forces has made the overworked professors of the subject thankful when nothing more was done to increase by faculty requirements the burden of their class work. it is charged and it is admitted in some institutions that the standards of marking are purposely made more severe in the economics courses than in courses in most other subjects. the purpose avowed is "to cut out the dead timber," so that only the better students will be eligible for enrollment in the advanced economics courses. an unfortunate result is to discourage some excellent students, ambitious for high marks or honors, from electing courses in economics because thereby their average grades would be reduced. in many cases, for this reason, good students take the subject optionally (without credit), though doing full work in it. =organization of the subject in the college curriculum= we have already, in discussing the place of economics, necessarily touched upon the organization of the courses. in most colleges this organization is very simple. the whole economic curriculum consists of the "general" course, or at most of that plus one or more somewhat specialized courses given the next year. the most usual year of advanced work consists of one semester each of money and banking and of public finance. a not unusual plan, well suited to the situation in a small college where economics takes the full time of one teacher, is to give the general course in the sophomore year, and to offer a two-year cycle of advanced work, the two courses being given in alternate years, the class consisting of juniors and seniors. in this plan the additional courses may be in transportation, in labor problems, in trusts and corporations, and frequently of late, in accounting. ordinarily the "general" course itself involves a logical sequence, the first term dealing with fundamental concepts and theories, and the second term covering in a rapid survey a pretty wide range of special problems. the majority of the students take only the general course. those who go on to more advanced courses retrace the next year some of the ground of the second semester's work, but this is probably for few of them a loss of time. indeed, in such a subject as economics this opportunity to let first teachings "sink in," and strange concepts become familiar, is for most students of great value. yet the plan was adopted and is followed as a compromise, using one course as a ready-made fit for the differing needs of two groups of students. we have seen above (page ) that preceding the general, or systematic, course, there is in a number of colleges a simpler one. in some cases[ ] the experiment has been undertaken of studying first for a time certain broad institutional features of our existing society, such as property, the wage system, competition, and the amount and distribution of wealth. the need of such a course is said to be especially great in the women's colleges. if so, it is truly urgent, for most young men come to college with very meager experience in economic lines. few, if any, teachers would deny that such an introductory course preceding the principles is distinctly of advantage.[ ] some would favor it even at the price of shortening materially the more general course. but most teachers would agree that together the introductory course and the general course should take two full years (three hours a week, twelve college credit hours, as usually reckoned), an amount of time which cannot be given by the "floater" electing economics. and to accommodate both those who have had the introductory course and those who have not, the general course would have to be given in two divisions and in two ways. again we come to the thought, suggested above, that probably we are attempting too much in too brief a time in the general course today. a longer time for the study would permit of a sequence that would be more logically defensible. it would begin with historical and descriptive studies, both because they are fundamentally necessary and because, being of more concrete nature, they may be given in a form easier for the beginner to get. in this period a good deal of the terminology can be gradually familiarized. then should come the more elementary analytical studies and fundamental principles, followed by a discussion of a number of practical problems. in conclusion should come a more systematic survey of general principles, of which most students now get but a superficial idea. the work in the specialized elective courses would then be built upon much firmer foundation than is the case at present. =methods of teaching= the main methods that have been developed and tested in the teaching of undergraduate classes in economics may be designated as the lecture method, the textbook method, the problem method. any one of these may be used well-nigh exclusively, or, as is more usual, two or more may be combined in varying proportions; e.g., lectures with "supplementary" (or "collateral") readings, with or without an occasional meeting in a quiz section. along with these main methods often are used such supplementary methods as topical reports requiring individual library work; laboratory exercises, as in statistics, accounting, etc.; individual field work to study some industrial problem; and visits, as a class, and with guidance, to factories and industrial enterprises. the choice of these particular methods of teaching is, however, largely conditioned by the teacher's antecedent choice between the deductive or the inductive forms of presentation. this is an old controversy ever recurring. but it should be observed that the question here is not whether induction or deduction is a greater aid in arriving at new truth, but it is whether the inductive or the deductive process is the better for the imparting of instruction to beginners. in teaching mathematics, the most deductive of the sciences, use may be made of such inductive aids as object lessons, physical models, and practical problems; and _per contra_, in the natural sciences, where induction is the chief instrument of research, elementary instruction is largely given in a deductive manner by the statement of general propositions, the workings of which are then exemplified. the decision of the question which is the better of these two pedagogic methods in a particular case, depends (_a_) partly on the average maturity and experience of the class; (_b_) partly on the mental quality of the students; and (_c_) partly on the interest and qualifications of the teacher. (_a_) the choice of the best method of teaching is of course dependent on the same factors that have been shown above to affect the nature and sequence of the courses. the simpler method leading to more limited results is more suitable for the less mature classes; but the scientific stage in the treatment of any subject is not reached until general principles are discussed. if one is content with a vocational result in economic teaching, stopping short of the theoretical, philosophic outlook, more can be accomplished in a short time by the concrete method. but such teaching would seem to belong in a trade school rather than in a college of higher studies, and in any case should be given by a vocational teacher rather than by a specialist in social, or political, economy. =various methods evaluated= (_b_) every college class presents a gradation of minds capable (whether from nature or training) of attaining different states of comprehension. of students in the lower half of the classes in american colleges, it may be said broadly that they never can or will develop the capacity of thinking abstractly and that the concrete method of teaching would give better results in their cases. therefore the teacher attempts to compromise, to adopt a method that fits the "mode," the middle third of the class, wasting much of the time of the brighter (or of the more earnest) students, and letting those in the lowest third trail along as best they can. this difficulty may be met with some success where there are several sections of a class by grouping the men in accordance with their previous scholarship records. this grouping is beneficial alike to those lower and to those higher than the average in scholarship. (_c_) quite as important in this connection as this subjective quality of the students, is the characteristic quality of the teacher. a particular teacher will succeed better or worse with any particular method according as it fits his aim and is in accord with his endowment and training. if he is himself of the "hard-headed" unimaginative or unphilosophic type, he will of course deem effort wasted that goes beyond concrete facts. he will give little place to the larger aspects and principles of "political" economy, but will deal exhaustively with the details of commercial economy. if the teacher is civic-minded and sympathetic, he will be impelled to trace economic forces, in their actions and interactions, far beyond the particular enterprise, to show how the welfare of others is affected. to do this rightly, knowledge of the conditions must be combined with a deeper theoretical insight; but the civic aim operates selectively to limit the choice of materials and analysis to those contemporary issues that appeal at the time to the textbook writer, to the teacher, or to the public. still different is the case of the teacher who finds his greatest joy in the theoretical aspects of economics, possesses a clean-cut economic philosophy (even though it may not be ultimate truth), and has faith in economics as a disciplinary subject. such a teacher will (other things being equal) have, relatively, his greatest success with the students of greatest ability; he will get better results in teaching the "principles" than in teaching historical and descriptive facts. none will deny that this type of education has an important place. even in the more descriptive courses appeal should be made to the higher intellectual qualities of the class, leaving a lasting disciplinary result rather than a memory stored with merely ephemeral and mostly insignificant information. the teacher with colorless personality and without interest in, and knowledge of, the world of reality, will fail, whatever be the purpose of his teaching. the higher the teacher's aim, the farther may he fall below its attainment. a college teacher whose message is delivered on the mental level of grammar school children should, of course, score a pretty high percentage of success in giving a passing mark to sophomores, juniors, and seniors in american colleges. but is this really a success, or is it rather not evidence of a failure in the whole school curriculum, and of woful waste in our system of so-called "higher" education? are colleges for the training of merely mediocre minds? =aim and attitude more fundamental than method of instruction= these questions of aim and of attitude are more fundamental than is the question of the particular device of instruction to be used, as lecture, textbook, etc. yet the latter question is not without its importance. in general it appears that practice has moved and still moves in a cycle. in the american college world as a whole each particular college repeats some or all of the typical phases with the growth of its economic department. ( ) first is the textbook, with recitations in small classes. ( ) next, the lecture gradually takes a larger place as the classes grow, until, supplemented by required readings, it becomes the main tool of instruction, this being the cheapest and easiest way to take care of the rapidly growing enrollment. ( ) then, when this proves unsatisfactory, the lectures are perhaps cut down to two a week, and the class is divided into quiz sections for one meeting a week under assistants or instructors, the lecture still being the main center of the scheme of teaching. ( ) this still being unsatisfactory (partly because it lacks oversight of the students' daily work, and partly because the lecture is unsuited to the development of general principles that require careful and repeated study for their mastery), a textbook is made the basis of section meetings, held usually twice a week, and the lectures are reduced to one a week, given to the combined class, and so changed in character as to be merely supplementary to the class work. the lectures are given either in close connection week by week with the class work or bearing only a general relation with the term's work as a whole. this may be deemed the prevailing mode today in institutions where the introductory course has a large enrollment.[ ] ( ) another change completes the cycle; the lecture is dropped and the class is divided, each section, consisting of twenty to thirty students, meeting with the same teacher regularly for class work. this change was made after mature consideration in "the college" in columbia university; is in operation in chicago university, where the meetings are held five times a week; and has been adopted more recently still in new york university. there have been for years evidences of the growing desire to abolish the lecture from the introductory course and also to limit its use in some of the special undergraduate courses. the preceptorial plan adopted in by princeton university is the most notable instance of the latter change.[ ] even in graduate teaching in economics there has been a growing opinion and practice favorable to the "working" course or "seminar" course to displace lecture courses.[ ] thus the lecture seems likely to play a less prominent role, especially in the introductory courses, but it is not likely to be displaced entirely in the scheme of instruction. =selection of a textbook= numerous american textbooks on political economy (thirty, it is said) have been published in the last quarter of a century, a fact which has now and then been deplored by the pessimistic critic.[ ] few share this opinion, however. the textbooks have, to be sure, often served, not to unfold a consistent system of thought, but to reveal the lack of one. but they have afforded to the teachers and students, in a period of developing conceptions on the subjects, a wide choice of treatment of the principles much more exactly worked out and carefully expressed than is possible through the medium of lectures as recorded in the students' hastily written notes. questions, exercises, and test problems are widely used as supplementary material for classroom discussion.[ ] separately printed collections of such material date back at least to w. g. sumner's _problems in political economy_ ( ), which in turn acknowledged indebtedness to other personal sources and to milnes' collection of two thousand questions and problems from english examination papers. with somewhat varying aims, further commented upon below, and in varying degrees, all teachers of economics now make use of such questions in their teaching of both general and special courses. unquestionably there are, in the use of the problem method, possibilities for good which few teachers have fully realized.[ ] the selection and arrangement of materials for supplementary readings is guided by various motives, more or less intermingling. it may be chiefly to parallel a systematic text by extracts taken largely from the older "classics" of the subject (as in c. j. bullock's _selected readings in economics_, ); or to provide additional concrete material bearing mostly upon present economic problems (as in the author's _source book in economics_, ); or to supplement a set of exercises and problems (as in f. m. taylor's _some readings in economics_, ); or to constitute of itself an almost independent textbook of extracts, carefully edited with original introductions to chapters (as marshall, wright, and field's _materials for the study of elementary economics_, , and w. h. hamilton's _readings in current economic problems_, ). whatever be the particular tool of instruction, whether lecture, textbook with classroom discussion, problem study, or collateral readings, its use may be very different according as the teacher seeks to develop the subject positively or negatively, to present a single definite and (if he can) coherent body of doctrines, or a variety of opinions that have been held, among which the student is encouraged to choose. evidently the conditions determining choice in the case of advanced courses are different from those in the introductory course. for the beginner time is required in order that economic principles may sink in, and so he is bewildered if at first he is introduced to a number of theories by different authors. materials that supplement the general course of principles should therefore be limited to subject matter that is descriptive, concrete, and illustrative. the beginner, somewhat dazed with the variety of new facts, ideas, terminology, and problems in the field into which he has entered, needs guidance to think clearly step by step about them.[ ] not until the pupil has learned to see and apprehend the simpler economic phenomena near him can he be expected to survey the broader fields and to form independent judgments concerning complex situations. he must creep before he can run. in fact, teachers are often self-deceived when they imagine that they are leaving students to judge for themselves among various opinions or to find their way inductively to their own conclusions. the recitation, in truth, becomes the simple game of "hot and cold." the teacher has in mind what he considers the right answer; the groping student tries to guess it; and as he ventures this or that inexpert or lucky opinion he is either gently chided or encouraged. at length some bright pupil wins the game by agreeing with the teacher's theretofore skilfully concealed opinion. this is called teaching by the inductive method. undoubtedly it is more desirable to develop in the student the ability to think independently about economic questions than it is to drill him into an acceptance of ready-made opinions on contemporary practical issues. the more fundamental economic theory--the more because its bearing on pecuniary and class interests is not close or obvious--is an admirable organ for the development of the student's power of reasoning. but to give the student this training it is not necessary to keep him in the dark as to what he is to learn. the socratic method is still unexcelled in the discussion of a text and of lectures in which propositions are clearly laid down and explained. the theorem in geometry is first stated, and then the student is conducted step by step through the reasoning leading to that conclusion. should not the student of economics have presented to him in a similar way the idea or principle, and then be required to follow the reasoning upon which it is based? then, through questions and problems,--the more the better, if time permits of their thorough discussion and solution,--the student may be exercised in the interpretation of the principles, and by illustrations drawn from history and contemporary conditions may be shown the various applications of the principle to practical problems. to get and hold the student's _interest_, to fascinate him with the subject, is equal in importance to the method, for without interest good results are impossible.[ ] =tests or teaching results= it must be confessed that no exact objective measure of the efficiency of teaching methods in economics has been found. at best we have certain imperfect indices, among which are the formal examination, the student's own opinion at the close of the course, and the student's revised opinion after leaving college. the primary purpose of the traditional examination is not to test the relative merits of the different methods of teaching, but to test the relative merits of the various students in a class, whatever be the method of teaching. every teacher knows that high or low average marks in an entire class are evidences rather of the standard that he is setting than it is of the merits of his teaching methods,--though in some cases he is able to compare the results obtained after using two different methods of exposition for the same subject. but, as was indicated above, such a difference may result from his own temperament and may point only to the method that he can best use, not to the best absolutely considered. moreover, the teacher may make the average marks high or low merely by varying the form and content of the examination papers or the strictness of his markings. each ideal and method of teaching has its corresponding type of examination. descriptive and concrete courses lend themselves naturally to memory tests; theoretical courses lend themselves to problems and reasoning. a high type of question is one whose proper answer necessitates knowledge of the facts acquired in the course together with an interpretation of the principles and their application to new problems. memory tests serve to mark off "the sheep from the goats" as regards attention and faithful work; reasoning tests serve to give a motive for disciplinary study and to measure its results. it may perhaps seem easier to test the results of the student's work in memory subjects; but even as to that we know that there are various types of memory and how much less significant are marks obtained by "the cramming process" than are equally good marks obtained as a result of regular attention to daily tasks. the students' revised and matured judgment of the value of their various college studies generally differ, often greatly, from their judgments while taking or just after completing the courses. yet even years afterward can man judge rightly in his own case just what has been the relative usefulness to him of the different elements of his complex college training, or of the different methods employed?[ ] but the evidence that comes from the most successful alumni to the college teacher in economics is increasingly to the effect that the college work they have come to value most is that which "teaches the student to think." our judgments in this matter are influenced by the larger educational philosophy that we hold. each will have his standard of spiritual values. =moot questions in economics affecting the teaching of the subject= the moot questions in the teaching of the subject have, perhaps, been sufficiently indicated, but we may here add a word as to the bearings which certain moot questions in the theory of the subject may have on the methods of teaching. the fundamental theory of economics has, since the days of adam smith, been undergoing a process of continuous transition, but the broader concepts never have been more in dispute than in the last quarter century in america. the possibility of such diversity of opinion in the fundamentals among the leading exponents of the subject argues strongly that economics is still a philosophy--a general attitude of mind and system of opinion--rather than a positive science. at best it is a "becoming science" which never can cease entirely to have a speculative, or philosophic character. this is not the place to go into details of matters in controversy. suffice it to say that in rivalry to the older school--which is variously designated ricardian, orthodox, english, or classical--newer ideas have been developed, dating from the work of the austrian economists, of jevons, and of j. b. clark in the last decades of the nineteenth century. the older school had sought the explanation of value and the theory of distribution in objective factors,--partly in the chemical qualities of the soil, partly in labor, partly in the costs (or outlays) of the employing class. the psychological factor in value had been almost eliminated from this older treatment of value and price, or at best was imperfectly recognized under the name of "utility." the newer school made the psychological element primary in the positive treatment of economic principles, and launched a negative criticism against the older terms and ideas that effectively exposed their unsoundness considered separately and their inconsistency as a system of economic thought. both the negative criticisms and the proposed amendments taken one by one gained wide acceptance among economists. but when it came to embodying them in a general theory of economics, many economists have balked.[ ] most of the american texts in economics and much of our teaching show disastrous effects of this confusion and irresolution. the newer concepts, guardedly admitted to have some validity, appear again and again in the troubled discussions of recent textbook writers, which usually end with a rejection, "on the whole," of the logical implications of these newer concepts. many teachers thus have lost their grip on any coördinating theory of distribution. they no longer have any general economic philosophy. the old ricardian cock-sureness had its pedagogic merits. without faith, teaching perishes. the complaints of growing difficulty in the teaching of the introductory course seem to have come particularly from teachers that are in this unhappy state of mind. they declare that it is impossible longer to interest students successfully in a general theoretical course, and they are experimenting with all kinds of substitutes--de-nicotinized tobacco and kaffee hag--from which poisonous theory has been extracted. at the same time, economics "with a punch in it," economics "with a back bone," is being taught by strong young teachers of the new faith more successfully, perhaps, than economics has ever been taught in the past. this greater question of the teacher's conception of economics dominates all the minor questions of method. economics cannot be taught as an integrated course in principles by teachers without theoretical training and conceptions; in such hands its treatment is best limited to the descriptive phases of concrete special problems,--valuable, indeed, as a background and basis, but never rising to the plane upon which alone economics is fully worth the student's while as a college subject. frank albert fetter _princeton university_ bibliography the literature on the teaching of economics in the secondary schools, its need and its proper scope and method, is somewhat extensive. another goodly group of articles discusses the teaching of economic history and of other social sciences related to economics, either in high schools or colleges. a somewhat smaller group pertains to graduate instruction in the universities. the following brief list of titles, arranged chronologically, is most pertinent to our present purpose: "the relation of the teaching of economic history to the teaching of political economy" (pages - ), and "methods of teaching economics" (pages - ), _a. e. a. economic studies_, vol. , . proceedings of a conference on the teaching of elementary economics, _journal of political economy_, vol. , december, . taylor, f. m. "methods of teaching elementary economics," _journal of political economy_. vol. , december, , page . wolfe, a. b. "aim and content of a college course in elementary economics," _journal of political economy_, vol. , december, , page . symposium by carver, clark, seager, seligman, nearing, _et al._, _journal of political economy_, vol. , . report of the committee on the teaching of economics, _journal of political economy_, vol. , , pages - . robinson, l. n. "the seminar in the colleges," _journal of political economy_, vol. , , page . wolfe, a. b. "the aim and content of the undergraduate economics curriculum," _journal of political economy_, vol. , , page . persons, charles e. "teaching the introductory course in economics," _quarterly journal of economics_, november, . footnotes: [ ] see article by charles e. persons, on teaching the introductory course in economics, in _quarterly journal of economics_ vol. xxxi, november, , for a strong presentation of this civic ideal in economic study. [ ] compiled by the writer from data in the report of the committee appointed by the conference on the teaching of elementary economics, ; _journal of political economy_, november, , vol. , pages - . [ ] see page of the committee report cited above. [ ] evidently it is not possible to draw from these data any definite conclusions as to the proportion of students beginning economics in each of the four years respectively. but probably three-fourths of all, possibly four-fifths, take the general course either in the sophomore or the junior year. most of the institutions giving economics only in the senior year are small, with a very restricted curriculum, often limited to one general course. but it is a widely observed fact that many students in large institutions postpone the election of the subject till their senior year. [ ] of this see further below, page . [ ] article cited, _journal of political economy_, vol. , page . [ ] the society for the promotion of engineering education has had a standing committee on economics, since . the first committee was composed of three engineers (all of them consulting and in practice and two of them also teachers) and the present writer. [ ] in amherst, as described in _journal of political economy_ by professor w. h. hamilton, on "the amherst program in economics"; and in chicago university beginning in . see also, by the same writer, a paper on "the institutional approach to economic theory", in the _american economic review_, supplement, page , march, . [ ] at the meeting of the american economic association in , at which was discussed "the relation of the teaching of economic history to the teaching of political economy," the opinion was expressed by one teacher that economic history should follow the general course. but all the others agreed that such a course should begin the sequence, and this seems to be the almost invariable practice. see _economic studies_, volume iii. pages - , publications of the american economic association, . [ ] this plan has at various times been followed at stanford, cornell, harvard, and princeton, to cite only a few of the numerous examples. [ ] in this plan the sections are small (three to seven students) and the preceptor is expected to give much time to the personal supervision of the student's reading, reports, and general scholarship. the preceptorial work is rated at more than half of the entire work of the term. the one great difficulty of the preceptorial system is its cost. [ ] a strong plea is made for the "retirement of the lectures" by c. e. persons, in the _quarterly journal of economics_, vol. xxxi, "teaching the introductory course in economics," november, , pages - . [ ] professor j. h. hollander, _american economic review_, vol. vi, no. , supplement (march, ), page . see dissenting opinions in the discussion that followed. [ ] professor c. e. persons (art. cited page , november, ) gives the titles of ten separate books or pamphlets of this kind; since which date have appeared the author's "manual of references and exercises," parts i and ii, to accompany _economic principles_, , and _modern economic problems_, , respectively. [ ] among those most elaborately developing this method has been professor f. m. taylor of the university of michigan. see his paper on the subject and discussion in the _journal of political economy_, vol. vii, pages - (december, ). marshall, wright, and field published the _outline of economics_, developed as a series of problems in , which they used for a time as the main tool of instruction in the introductory course in chicago university. [ ] a thoughtful discussion of some phases of this problem is given by persons, art. cited, pages ff., favoring the more positive treatment with less distracting multiplicity of detail. [ ] to a former student of mine and now a successful teacher, dean j. r. turner of new york university, i am indebted for the suggestion of the following practical rules, a few among many possible, which should be helpful to younger teachers: (_a_) keep the student expecting a surprise, afraid to relax attention for fear of missing something. (_b_) by socratic method lead him into error, then have him (under cross fire and criticism of class) reason his way out. (_c_) make fallacious argument, then call for criticism giving distinction to him who renders best judgment. (_d_) set tasks and have members of class compete in intellectual contests. (_e_) make sure that each principle learned is seen in its relationship to practical affairs. (_f_) enliven each dry principle with an anecdote or illustration to elucidate it, for principles devoid of interesting features cannot secure attention and so will not be remembered. (_g_) accompany the discussion with charts and board work to visualize facts and questions to stimulate thought. (_h_) ask questions and so handle the class discussions that a few will not do all the talking, that foreign subject matter is not introduced, that a consistent and logical development of thought is strictly adhered to. (_i_) the last few minutes of the period might well be devoted to the assignment for the next meeting. the best manner of assignment must depend upon the nature of task, the advancement of the student, the purpose in view. [ ] an interesting study made by the department of education of harvard university of the teaching methods and results in the department of economics was referred to in president lowell's report. according to the answers of the alumni their work in economics is now valued mainly for its civic and disciplinary results (these do not seem to have been further distinguished). in the introductory course reading was ranked first, class work next, and lectures least, in value. in the advanced courses the lecture was ranked higher and class work lower, but that may be because the lecture plays a more important role there than in the lower classes. answers regarding such matters are at most significant as indicating the relative importance of the various methods as they have actually been employed in the particular institution, and have little validity in reference to the work and methods of other teachers working under other conditions, and with students having different life aims. [ ] the typical attitude of many economists is expressed about as follows: it is one thing to give assent to refinements when they are used in the discussion of some single point of theory, and it is quite another thing to accept them when one sees how, in their combined effect, they would carry us away from "the old familiar moorings." such a view, it need not be urged, reflects an unscientific state of mind. the real cause of the rejection of the ideas probably is the shrinking of over-busy men, in middle life, and absorbed in teaching and in special problems, from the intellectual task of restudying the fundamentals and revising many of their earlier formed opinions--to say nothing of rewriting many of their old lectures and manuscripts. xi the teaching of sociology =growth of sociology as a college subject= the teaching of sociology as a definite college subject in the united states began at yale nearly forty-five years ago. since it has been introduced into nearly american colleges, universities, normal schools, and seminaries. a study of this teaching in revealed over courses offered to over undergraduates and graduate students. it is safe to assume a steady growth during the last six years. hence the problem of teaching is of no little concern to sociologists. the american sociological society early recognized this fact and in appointed a committee of ten to report on certain aspects of the problem. but that all teachers of sociology have not grasped the bearing of pedagogy upon their work is clear from complaints still heard from students that sociology is vague, indefinite, abstract, dull, or scattered. not long ago some bright members of a class were overheard declaring that their professor must have been struck by a gust of wind which scattered his notes every day before getting to his desk. =the pedagogy of sociology the pedagogy of all college subjects= sociology is simply a way of looking at the same world of reality which every other science looks at in its own way. it cannot therefore depart far from the pedagogical principles tried out in teaching other subjects. it must utilize the psychology of attention, interest, drill, the problem method, procedure from the student's known to the new, etc. the universal pitfalls have been charted for all teachers by the educational psychologists. in addition, sociology may offer a few on its own account, partly because it is new, partly because a general agreement as to the content of fundamentals in sociology courses is just beginning to make itself felt, partly because there is so far no really good textbook available as a guide to the beginner. =methods of teaching sociology determined by a complex of vital factors= specific methods of teaching vary according to individual temperament, the "set" of the teacher's mind; according to his bias of class, birth, or training; according to whether he has been formed or deformed by some strong personality whose disciple he has become; according to whether he is a radical or a conservative; according to whether he is the dreamy, idealistic type or whether he hankers after concrete facts; according to whether sociology is a primary interest or only an incidental, more or less unwelcome. hence part of the difficulty, though by no means all, comes from the fact that sociology is frequently expounded by men who have received no specific training themselves in the subject, or who have had the subject thrust upon them as a side issue. in this connection it is interesting to note that in sociology was "given" in only cases by sociology departments, in by combinations of economics, history, and politics, in by philosophy and psychology, in by economics and applied christianity or theology, in by practical theology! =guiding principles in the teaching of sociology--the teacher as keen analyst, not revivalist= whatever the path which led into the sociological field or whatever the bias of temperament, experience justifies several preliminary hints for successful teaching. first, avoid the voice, the yearning manner, and the gesture of the preacher. sociology needs the cool-headed analyst rather than the social revivalist. let the sentimentalist and the muck-raker stay with their lecture circuits and the newspapers. the student wants enthusiasm and inspiration rather than sentimentality. =avoiding the formal lecture= second, renounce the lecture, particularly with young students. there is no surer method of blighting the interest of students, of murdering their minds, and of ossifying the instructor than to persist in the pernicious habit of the formal lecture. some men plead large classes in excuse. if they were honest with themselves they would usually find that they like large classes as a subtle sort of compliment to themselves. given the opportunity to break up a class of two hundred into small discussion groups they would frequently refuse, on the score that they would lose a fine opportunity to influence a large group. dodge it as you will, the lecture is and will continue to be an unsatisfactory, even vicious, way of attempting to teach social science. no reputable university tries to teach economics or politics nowadays in huge lecture sections. only an abnormal conceit or abysmal poverty will prevent sociology departments from doing likewise. remember that education is always an exchange, never a free gift. =adjusting instruction to the capacities of your students= third, do not be afraid to utilize commonplace facts and illustrations. a successful professor of sociology writes me that he can remember that what are mere commonplaces now were revelations to him at twenty-one. two of the greatest teachers of the nineteenth century, faraday and huxley, attributed their success to the simple maxim, take nothing for granted. it is safe to assume that most students come from homes where business and petty neighborhood doings are the chief concern, and where a broad, well-informed outlook on life is rare. since so many of my colleagues insist that young ph.d.'s tend constantly to "shoot over the heads" of their students, the best way of avoiding this particular pitfall seems to lie along the road of simple, elementary, concrete fact. the discussion method in the classroom will soon put the instructor right if he has gone to the other extreme of depreciating his students through kindergarten methods. likewise he can guard against being oracular and pedantic by letting out his superior stores of information through free discussion in the socratic fashion. nothing is more important to good teaching than the knack of apt illustration. while to a certain extent it can be taught, just as the art of telling a humorous story or making a presentation speech can be communicated by teachers of oral english, yet in the long run it is rather a matter of spontaneous upwellings from a well-stored mind. for example, suppose a class is studying the factors of variation and selection in social evolution: the instructor shows how nature loves averages, not only by statistics and experiments with the standard curve of distribution, but also, if he is a really illuminated teacher, by reference, say, to the legend of david and goliath, the fairy tale of _little one-eye, little two-eye, little three-eye_, and lincoln's famous aphorism to the effect that the lord must love the common people because he made so many of them. sad experience advises that it is unsafe for an instructor any longer to assume that college sophomores are familiar with the old testament, classic myths, or greek and roman history. hence he must beware of using any recondite allusions or illustrations which themselves need so much explanation that their bearing on the immediate problem in hand is obscured. an illustration, like a funny story, loses its pungency if it requires a scholium. =pedagogical suggestions summarized= fourth, adhere to what a friend calls the to basis-- parts fact and part theory. fifth, eschew the professor's chair. the blackboard is the teacher's "next friend." recent time-motion studies lead us to believe that no man can use a blackboard efficiently unless he stands! the most celebrated teaching in history was peripatetic. sixth, postpone the reconciling of discrepant social theorizings to the tougher-hided seniors or graduate students, and stick to the presentation of "accessible realities." finally, an occasional friendly meeting with students, say once or twice a semester at an informal supper, will create an atmosphere of coöperative learning, will break down the traditional barriers of hostility between master and pupil, and may incidentally bring to the surface many useful hints for the framing of discussion problems. =the course of study--(a) determined by the maturity of the students= to a certain extent teaching methods are determined by the age of the students. in , of all the institutions reporting, stated that sociology instruction began in the junior year; admitted sophomores, freshmen, seniors. but the unmistakable drift is in the direction of introducing sociology earlier in the college curriculum, and even into secondary and elementary schools. hence the cautions voiced above tend to become all the more imperative. moreover, while in the past it has been possible to exact history, economics, political science, philosophy, psychology, or education as prerequisite to beginning work in sociology, in view of the downward trend of sociology courses it becomes increasingly more difficult to take things for granted in the student's preparation. until the dream of offering a semester or year of general social science to all freshmen as the introduction to work in the specialized branches of social science comes true, the sociologist must communicate to his elementary classes a sense of the relations between his view of social phenomena and the aspects of the same phenomena which the historian, the economist, the political scientist, and the psychologist handle. =(b) determined by its aims= both the content and methods of sociological instruction are determined also in part by what its purpose is conceived to be. a study of the beginnings of teaching this subject in the united states shows that it was prompted primarily by practical ends. for example, the american social science association proposal ( ), in so far as it covered the field of sociology, included only courses on punishment and reformation of criminals, public and private charities, and prevention of vice. president white of cornell in recommended a course of practical instruction "calculated to fit young men to discuss intelligently such important social questions as the best methods of dealing practically with pauperism, intemperance, crime of various degrees and among persons of different ages, insanity, idiocy, and the like." columbia university early announced that a university situated in such a city, full of problems at a time when "industrial and social progress is bringing the modern community face to face with social questions of the greatest magnitude, the solution of which will demand the best scientific study and the most honest practical endeavor," must provide facilities for bringing university study into connection with practical work. in definite practical courses shared honors of first place with the elementary or general course in college announcements. the situation was practically the same ten years later. still more recently professor blackmar, one of the veterans in sociology teaching, worked out rather an elaborate program of what he called a "reasonable department of sociology for colleges and universities." in spite of the fact that theoretical, biological, anthropological, and psychological aspects of the subject were emphasized, his conclusion was that "the whole aim is to ground sociology in general utility and social service. it is a preparation for social efficiency." =(c) determined by the social character of the community= the principle of adaptation to environment comes into play also in the choice of teaching methods. an urban department can send its students directly into the field for first-hand observation of industry, housing, sanitation, congestion, playgrounds, immigration, etc., and may encourage "supervised field work" as fulfilling course requirements. but the country or small town department far removed from large cities must emphasize rural social study, or get its urban data second hand through print, charts, photographs, or lantern slides. a semester excursion to the city or to some state charitable institution adds such a touch of vividness to the routine class work. but "slumming parties" are to be ruthlessly tabooed, particularly when featured in the newspapers. social science is not called upon to make experimental guinea pigs of the poor simply because of their poverty and inability to protect themselves. =the introductory course the vital point of contact between student and the department= for many reasons the most serious problems of teaching sociology center about the elementary or introductory course. advanced undergraduate and graduate courses usually stand or fall by the inherent appeal of their content as organized by the peculiar genius of the instructor. if the student has been able to weather the storms of his "introduction," he will usually have gained enough momentum to carry him along even against the adverse winds of bad pedagogy in the upper academic zones. since the whole purpose of sociology is the very practical one of giving the student mental tools with which to think straight on societal problems (what comte called the "social point of view"), and since usually only a comparatively small number find it possible to specialize in advanced courses, the introductory course assumes what at first sight might seem a disproportionate importance. only one or two teachers of sociology, so far as i know, discount the value of an elementary course. the rest are persuaded of its fundamental importance, and many, therefore, consider it a breach of trust to turn over this course to green, untried instructors. partly as a recruiting device for their advanced courses, partly from this sense of duty, they undertake instruction of beginners. but it is often impossible for the veteran to carry this elementary work: he must commit it to younger men. for that reason the remainder of this chapter will be given over to a discussion of teaching methods for such an elementary course, with younger teachers in mind. =teaching suggestions for the introductory course= first, two or three general hints. it is unwise, to say the least, to attempt to cover the social universe in one course. better a few simple concepts, abundantly illustrated, organized clearly and systematically. perhaps it is dangerous to suggest a few recurrent catch phrases to serve as guiding threads throughout the course, but that was the secret of the old ballad and the folk tale. homer and the makers of fairy tales combined art and pedagogy in their use of descriptive epithets. such a phrase as ward's "struggle for existence is struggle for structure" might furnish the framework of a whole course. "like-mindedness," "interest-groups," "belief-groups," and "folk-ways" are also convenient refrains. nobody but a thoroughgoing pedant will drag his students through two weeks' lectures and a hundred pages of text at the beginning of the course in the effort to define sociology and chart all its affinities and relations with every other science. twenty minutes at the first class meeting should suffice to develop an understanding of what the scientific attitude is and a tentative definition of sociology. the whole course is its real definition. at the end of the term the very best way of indicating the relation of sociology to other sciences is through suggestions about following up the leads obtained in the course by work in biology, economics, psychology, and other fields. this correlation of the student's program gives him an intimate sense of the unity in diversity of the whole range of science. if the student is to avoid several weeks of floundering, he should be led directly to observe societal relations in the making. this can perhaps be accomplished best through assigning a series of four problems at the first class meetings. problem i: to show how each student spins a web of social relationship. let him take a sheet of paper, place a circle representing himself in the middle of it, then add dots and connecting lines for every individual or institution he forms a contact with during the next two or three days. he will get a figure looking something like this: [illustration] problem ii: to show how neighborhoods are socially bound up. let the student take a section, say two or three blocks square, in a district he knows well, and map it,--showing all the contacts. again he will get a web somewhat like this: [illustration] these diagrams are adapted from students' reports. if they seem absurdly simple, it is well to remember that experience reveals the student's amazing lack of ability to vizualize social relationships without some such device. these diagrams, however, should serve merely as the point of departure. add to them charts showing the sources of milk and other food supplies of a large city, and a sense of the interdependence and reciprocity of city and country will develop. take a mercator's projection map of the world and draw the trade routes and immigration streams to indicate international solidarities. such diagrams as the famous health tract "a day in the life of a fly" or the story of typhoid mary are helpful in establishing how closely a community is bound together. problem iii: to show the variety and kinds of social activities, i.e., activities that bring two or more people into contact. have the student note down even the homeliest sorts of such activities, the butcher, the postman, the messenger boy; insist that he go out and look instead of guessing or reading; require him to group these activities under headings which he may work out for himself. he will usually arrive at three or four, such as getting a living, recreation, political. it may be wise to ask him to grade these activities as helpful, harmful, strengthening, or weakening, in order to accustom him to the idea that sociology must treat of good, bad, and indifferent objects. problem iv: to determine what the preponderant social interests and activities are as judged by the amount of time men devote to them. let the student try a "time budget" for a fortnight. for this purpose giddings suggests a large sheet of paper ruled for a wide left-hand margin and narrow columns: the first columns for hours of the day, the th for the word "daily," and the last seven for the seven days of the week. in the margin the student writes the names of every activity of whatever description during the waking hours. this will furnish excellent training in exact habits of observation and recording, and inductive generalization. when the summary is made at the end of the fortnight, the student will have worked for himself the habitual "planes of interest" along which social activities lie. at this point he ought to have convinced himself that the subject matter of sociology is concrete reality, not moonshine. moreover, he should be able to lay down certain fundamental marks of a social group, such as a common impulse to get together, common sentiments, ideas, and beliefs, reciprocal service. from the discovery of habitual planes of interest (self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, self-assertion, self-subordination, etc.) it is a simple step to show diagrammatically how each interest impels an activity, which tends to precipitate itself into a social habit or institution. --------------------------------------------------------------------- inner urge or interest | motor expression in | resultant group habit (instinct or | activity | or institution disposition) | | -----------------------+----------------------+---------------------- hunger; will-to-live | the food-quest | economic technique self-maintenance | | property, invention, | | material arts of life -----------------------+----------------------+---------------------- sex : | procreation and | the family, ancestor self-perpetuation | parenthood | worship, courts of | | domestic relations, | | patriarchal government, | | etc. --------------------------------------------------------------------- =to make sociology real make it egocentric= the way is now clear for the two next steps, the concepts of causation and development. here again why not follow the egocentric plan of starting with what the student knows? ask him to write a brief but careful autobiography answering the questions--how have i come to be what i am? what influences personal or otherwise have played upon me?[ ] the student is almost certain to lay hold of the principle of determining or controlling forces, and of evolution or change; he may even be able to analyze rather clearly the different types of control which have coöperated in his development. from this start it is easy to develop the genetic concept of social life. the individual grows from simple to complex. why not the race? here introduce a comparison between the social group known to the student, a retarded group (such as macclintock's or vincent's study of the kentucky mountaineers[ ]) or a frontier community, and a contemporary primitive tribe (say, the hupa or seri indians, negritos, bontoc igorot, bangala, kafirs, yakuts, eskimo, or andaman islanders). require a detailed comparison arranged in parallel columns on such points as size, variety of occupation, food supply, security of life, institutions, family life, language, religion, superstitions, and opportunities for culture. these two points of departure--the student's interest in his own personality and the community influences that have molded it, and the comparative study of a primitive group--should harmonize the two chief rival views of teaching sociologists; namely, those who urge the approach to sociology through anthropology and those who find the best avenue through the concrete knowledge of the _socius_. moreover, it lays a foundation for a discussion of the antiquity of man, his kinship with other living things, and his evolution; that is, the biological presupposition of human society. here let me testify to the great help which osborn's photographs[ ] of reconstructions of the pithecanthropos, piltdown, neanderthal, and crô-magnon types have rendered in clearing away prejudices and in vivifying the remote past. religious apprehensions in particular may be allayed also by referring students to articles on race, man, evolution, anthropology, etc., in such compilations as the _catholic encyclopedia_ and hastings' _encyclopedia of religion and ethics_. the opening chapters in marett's little book on _anthropology_ are so sanely and admirably written that they also clear away many prejudices and fears. with such a concrete body of facts contrasting primitive with modern civilized social life the student will naturally inquire, how did these changes come about? at this point should come normally the answer in terms of what practically all sociologists agree upon; namely, the three great sets of determining forces or phenomena, the three "controls": ( ) the physical environment (climate, topography, natural resources, etc.); ( ) man's own nature (psycho-physical factors, the factors in biological evolution, the role of instinct, race, and possibly the concrete problems of immigration and eugenics); ( ) social heredity (folk-ways, customs, institutions, the arts of life, the methods of getting a living, significance of tools, distribution of wealth, standards of living, etc.) a blackboard diagram will show how these various factors converge upon any given individual.[ ] the amplification of these three points will ordinarily make up the body of an introductory course so far as class work goes. ethnography should furnish rich illustrative material. but to make class discussions really productive the student's knowledge of his own community must be drawn upon. and the best way of getting this correlation is through community surveys. the student should be required as parallel laboratory work to prepare a series of chapters on his ward or part of his ward or village, covering the three sets of determining factors. the instructor may furnish an outline of the topics to be investigated, or he may pass around copies of such brief survey outlines as aronovici's _knowing one's own community_ or miss byington's _what social workers should know about their own communities_; he may also refer them to any one of the rapidly growing number of good urban and rural surveys as models. but he should not give too much information as to where materials for student reports may be obtained. the disciplinary value of having to hunt out facts and uncover sources is second only to the value of accurate observation and effective presentation. if the aim of a sociology course is social efficiency, experience shows no better way of getting a vivid, sober, first-hand knowledge of community conditions. and there is likewise no surer way of compelling students to substitute facts for vapid wordiness and snap judgments. toward the end of the course many of us have found it profitable to introduce a brief discussion of what may be called the highest term of the series; namely, the evolution of two or three typical institutions, say law and government, education, religion, and the family. these topics will serve to clinch the earlier discussions and to crystallize a few ideas on social control and perhaps even social progress. normally such a course will close with a fuller definition of the meaning of sociology, its content, its value in the study of other sciences, and, if time permits, a brief historical sketch of the development of sociology as a separate science. =the use of a text for study= i have no certified advice to offer on the question of textbooks. but the almost universal cry of sociology teachers is that so far no really satisfactory text has been produced. some men still use spencer, some write their own books, some try to adapt to their particular needs such texts as are issued from time to time, some use none at all but depend upon a more or less well-correlated syllabus or set of readings. there is undoubtedly a profitable demand for a good elementary source book comparable to thomas's _source book on social origins_ or marshall, wright, and field's _materials for the study of elementary economics_. nearly any text will need freshening up by collateral reading from such periodicals as _the survey or the new republic_. in order to secure effective and correlated outside reading, many teachers have found it helpful to require the students to devote the first five or ten minutes of a class meeting once a week or even daily to a written summary of their readings and of class discussions. such a device keeps readings fresh and enables the teacher to emphasize the points of contact between readings and class work. =the social museum= every university should develop some sort of a social museum, to cover primitive types of men, the evolution of tools, arts of life, manners and customs, and contemporary social conditions. these can be displayed in the form of plaster casts, ethnographic specimens, photographs, lantern slides, models of housing, statistical charts, printed monographs, etc. the massing of a series of these illustrations sometimes produces a profound effect. for example, the corridor leading to the sociology rooms at the university of minnesota has been lined with large photographs of tenement conditions, child labor, immigrant types, etc. the student's interest and curiosity have been heightened immensely. once a semester, during the discussion of the economic factor in social life, we stage what is facetiously called "a display of society's dirty linen." the classroom is decorated with a set of charts showing the distribution of wealth, wages, cost of living, growth of labor unions and other organizations of economic protest. the mass effect is a cumulative challenge. =field work: values and limitations= finally, a word about "field work" as a teaching device. field work usually means some sort of social service practice work under direction of a charitable agency, juvenile court, settlement, or playground. but beginning students are usually more of a liability than an asset to such agencies; they lack the time to supervise students' work, and field work without strict supervision is a farcical waste of time. if such agencies will accept a few students who have the learner's attitude rather than an inflated persuasion of their social messiahship, field work can become a very valuable adjunct to class work. in default of such opportunities the very best field work is an open-eyed study of one's own community, in the attempt to find out what actually is rather than to reform a hypothetical evil.[ ] arthur j. todd _university of minnesota_ footnotes: [ ] in order to secure frank statements, both these autobiographies and the time budgets may be handed in anonymously. [ ] _american journal of sociology_, : - ; : - , - . [ ] in his _men of the old stone age_. [ ] see such a diagram in todd, _theories of social progress_, page . [ ] while accepting full responsibility for the opinions herein set forth, i wish to express my appreciation of assistance rendered by a large group of colleagues in the american sociological society. xii the teaching of history a. the teaching of american history =function of the teacher of history= history as a science attempts to explain the development of civilization. the investigator of the sources of history must do his part in a truly scientific spirit. he must examine with the utmost scrutiny the many sources on which the history of the past has its foundation. he reveals facts, and through them the truth is established. but history is more than a science. it is an art. the investigator is not necessarily a historian, any more than a lumberman is an architect. the historian must use all available material, whether the result of his own researches or that of others. he must weigh all facts and deduct from them the truth. he must analyze, synthesize, organize, and generalize. he must absorb the spirit of the people of whom he writes and color the narrative as little as possible with his own prejudices. but the historian must be more than a narrator; he must be an interpreter. as an interpreter he should never lose sight of the fact that all his deductions should be along scientific lines. even then he will not escape errors. in pure science error is inadmissible. in history minor errors of fact are unavoidable, but their presence need not seriously affect the general conclusions. in spite of many misstatements of fact, a historical work may be substantially correct in the main things--in presenting and interpreting with true perspective the life and spirit of the people of whom it treats. the historian must be more than a chronicler and an interpreter. he must be master of a lucid, virile, attractive literary style. the power of expression, indeed, must be one of his chief accomplishments. the old notion, it is true, that history is merely a branch of literature is quite as erroneous as the later theory that history is a pure science and must be dissociated from all literary form. =the teacher of history as the teacher of the evolution of civilization= the pioneer investigator who patiently delves into sources and brings to light new material deserves high praise, but far rarer is the gift of the man who sees history in its true perspective, who can construct the right relationships and can then reproduce the past in compelling literary form. a historian without literary charm is like an architect who cares only for the utility and nothing for the grace and beauty of his building. =the chronological point of view= the history teacher who slavishly follows old chronological methods has not kept pace with modern progress; but the teacher who has discarded the chronological method has ventured without a compass on an unknown sea. chronology, the sequence of events, is as necessary in history as distance and direction in geography. =the economic point of view= a modern school of history teachers would make economics the sole background of history, would explain all historic events from the economic standpoint--to which school this writer does not belong. economics has played a great part in the course of human events, but it is only one of many causes that explain history. for example, the trojan war (if there was a trojan war), the conquests of alexander, the mohammedan invasions, were due chiefly to other causes. =the culture viewpoint= nor would we agree with the school of modern educators who would eliminate the culture studies from the curriculum, retaining only those which make for present-day utilitarianism. a general education imparts power and enlarges life, and such an education should precede all technical and specialized training. if a young man with the solid foundation of a liberal education fail in this or that walk of life, the fault must be sought elsewhere than in his education. the late e. h. harriman made a wise observation when he said that though a high school graduate may excel the college graduate in the same employment for the first year, the latter would at length overtake and pass him and henceforth remain in the lead. =aims of history in the college curriculum= the uses of the study of history are many, the most important of which perhaps is that it aids us in penetrating the present. our understanding of every phase of modern life is no doubt strengthened by a knowledge of the past. it is trite but true to say that the study of history is a study of human nature, that a knowledge of the origin and growth of the institutions we enjoy makes for a good citizenship, that the study of history is a cultural study and that it ranks with other studies as a means of mental discipline. finally, the reading of history by one who has learned to love it is an abiding source of entertainment and mental recreation. it is one of the two branches of knowledge (the other being literature) which no intelligent person, whatever his occupation, can afford to lay aside after quitting school. =what can the study of american history give the college student?= the most important historical study is always that of one's own country. in our american colleges, therefore, the study of american history must take precedence over that of any other, though an exception may be made in case a student is preparing to teach the history of some other country or period. it must not be forgotten, however, by the student of american history that a study of the european background is an essential part of it. from its very newness the history of the united states may seem less fascinating than that of the older countries, and, indeed, it is true that the glamour of romance that gathers around the stories of royal dynasties, orders of nobility, and ancient castles is wanting in american history. but there is much to compensate for this. the coming of the early settlers, often because of oppression in their native land, their long struggle with the forest and with the wild men and wild beasts of the forest, the gradual conquest of the soil, the founding of cities, the transplanting of european institutions and their development under new environment--the successful revolt against political oppression and the fearless grappling with the problem of self-government when nearly all governments in the world were monarchical--these and many other phases of american history furnish a most fascinating story as a mere story. =to the college student american history must be presented as evidence of the success of democracy= but to the student of politics and history the most unique and interesting thing, perhaps, in american history lies in the fact that the united states is the first great country in the world's history in which the federal system has been successful--if we assume that our experimental period has passed. perhaps the greatest of all governmental problems is just this: how to strike the right balance between these opposing tendencies--liberty and union, democracy and nationality--so that the people may enjoy the benefits of both. the united states has, no doubt, come nearer than any other country to solving this problem, and the fact greatly enhances the interest in our history. this is a question of political science rather than of history, it is true, but the history of any country and its government are inseparably bound together. =utilitarian value= in the regular college curriculum there should be, in my opinion, two courses in american history. =organization of courses and methods of teaching= _course i_--about hours for one academic year ( semester-hours) in the freshman or sophomore year, covering the whole story of the united states. about one third of the year's work should cover the colonial and revolutionary periods. of the remaining two thirds of the year i should devote about half to the period since the civil war. this course should be required of all students taking the a.b. degree and in all other liberal arts courses; an exception may be made in the case of those taking certain specialized scientific courses--for these students, the history required in the high school may be deemed sufficient. in this course a textbook is necessary, and if the class is large it is desirable that the text be uniform. the text should be written by a true historian with broad and comprehensive views, by one who knows how to appraise historic values, and, if possible, by one who commands an attractive literary style. if the textbook is written by dr. dry-as-dust, however learned he may be, the whole burden of keeping the class interested rests with the teacher; and, moreover, many of the students will never become lovers of the subject to such a degree as to make it a lifelong study. the exclusive lecture system is intolerable, and the same is true of the quiz. a teacher will do his best work if untrammeled by rules. he should conduct a class in his own way and according to his own temperament. it is doubtful if the teacher who carefully plans and maps out the work he intends to present to the class is the most successful teacher. a teacher who is free, spontaneous, without a fixed method, ready in passing from the lecture to the quiz and vice versa at any moment, quick in asking unexpected questions, will usually have little trouble in keeping a class alert. above all, a teacher of college history must explain the meaning of things with far greater fullness than is possible in a condensed textbook, and it is a most excellent practice to ask opinions of members of the class on almost all debatable questions that may arise. the reason for this is obvious. the usual method of the writer, in as far as he has a method, is to spend the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the class hour in hearing reports from two or three students on special topics that have been assigned them a week or two before, topics that require library reference work and that could not possibly be developed from the textbook. these topics are not on the subject of the day's lesson, but of some preceding lesson. after commenting on these reports and often asking for opinions and comments of the class, we plunge into the day's lesson. the use of a current periodical in class should be encouraged. it brings the learner into direct contact with life and often illuminates the past. current events as presented in the daily papers should often be the subject of comment, but the daily newspaper is not suitable for class use. even the weekly is, for several reasons, less desirable than the monthly. it must not be forgotten that the basal, fundamental work of the class is, not to keep posted on current affairs, but to study the elements under the guidance of a textbook and an inspiring teacher to interpret it. the weekly is less accurate than the monthly and less literary in form, and, moreover, it comes too often. it is apt to take too much time from the study of the fundamentals. the use of the periodical in the history class has probably come to stay and it should stay, but it should be only incidental and supplementary. _course ii_ should be given in the junior or senior year. it should be elective, should cover at least two year-hours, and should be wholly devoted to the national period of american history. only those having taken course i should be eligible to this class. every student who expects to read law, to enter journalism or politics, or to teach history or political science should take this course. the class will be smaller than in course i. uniform textbooks need not be required, or the class may be conducted without a text. most of the work must be done from the library. it is assumed that the members of this class have a good knowledge of the narrative, and it is needless to follow it closely again. a better plan is to choose an important phase of the history here and there and study intensively. much use should be made of original sources such as presidents' messages, _congressional record_, speeches and writings of the times, but the class must not ignore the fact that a vast amount of good material may be had from the historians. it must also be remembered that original research is for the graduate student and the specialist rather than for the undergraduate. =testing the results of instruction= in conclusion, i shall explain a method of examination that i have frequently employed with apparently excellent results. two or three weeks before the time of the examination i give the class a series of topics, perhaps fifty or more, carefully chosen from the entire subject that has been studied during the semester. instead of having the usual review of the text, we talk over these subjects in class during the remainder of the semester. the examination is oral, not written. the time for examination is divided into three, four, or five minute periods, according to the number in the class. when a student's name is called, he comes forward and draws from a box one of the topics and dilates on it before the class during his allotted time. if he fails on the first topic he may have another draw, but his grade will be reduced. a second failure would mean a "flunk," unless the class marks are very high. there are three or four real advantages in this form of examination: ( ) it saves the teacher hours of labor in reading examination papers; ( ) the teacher, in selecting the topics, omits the unimportant and chooses only the salient, leading subjects such as every student should master and remember; ( ) the student, knowing that no new questions will be sprung for the examination, will be almost sure to be prepared on every question. failures under this system have been much less frequent than under the old system of written examinations; ( ) it practically eliminates all chance of cheating in examination. henry w. elson _thiel college_ b. modern european history =history to be taught as an evolutionary process= teaching european history in colleges is, in many ways, not different from teaching any other history. in each instance it is to be remembered that history includes all activities of man and not merely his political life, that facts and data are not intrinsically valuable but are merely a means to an end, that the end of history is to inform us where man came from, what experiences he passed through, and _chiefly_, what were the fundamental forces behind his experiences. the emphasis should be put on the stimuli--economic, political, religious, or social--that lead man to act, instead of narrating his action. in a word, not _what_ happened or _when_ it happened, but _why_ it happened, is of importance in college history. stressing the stimuli in history will almost inevitably lead to treating history as a continuous or evolutionary process, which of itself greatly increases the interest of the subject. =because history is an evolution it must explain the present= it is highly desirable that in teaching modern history very much more time be given to recent history than has generally been the case. frederick william i showed that he accepted this when he instructed the tutors of frederick (later the great) to teach the history of the last fifty years to the exactest pitch. so important is this that, even when teaching early periods, constant contrasts or comparisons with present conditions should be made, and the descent of ideas and institutions to modern times should be sketched, as it shows the student that remote events or institutions have a relationship to current life. =disciplinary values of history= certain special aims of history have been advocated. it is held to be of disciplinary value, especially in strengthening the memory. though this is true, it is hardly a good reason for studying history, as the memory can be perfected on almost anything, on the dictionary, poetry, formulæ, family records, gossip, or cans on grocery shelves, some of which may indeed be of more practical value than dates. in college, at least, history should aim to explain social tendencies and processes in a rational way rather than to develop the memory. the latter method tends to make the student passive and narrow, the former requires cerebration and develops breadth and depth of vision. understanding history, rather than memorizing it, has cultural value. to be sure, understanding presupposes information; but where there is a desire to understand, the process of seeking and acquiring the information is natural and tends to care for itself. history is not a prerequisite to professional careers in the way mathematics is to engineering; still, special periods, chiefly the modern, are highly useful to lawyers, journalists, publicists, statesmen, and others, each of whom selects what he finds most useful to his purposes. =organization of courses in history--what to teach in the beginning course= the point of view in history teaching is more material than the machinery or methods employed. these must and should vary with persons and conditions. ordinarily, however, it seems preferable to offer some part of european history as the first-year college course, because students have usually had considerable american history in high school, and the change adds new interest. whether this course be general, medieval, or modern european history is of little importance, though, of course, medieval should precede modern history. in any case, the course should offer the student a good deal more than he may have had in high school, if for no other reason than to justify the profound respect with which he ordinarily comes to college. it should come often enough a week to grip the student, especially the history major. =gradation of courses determined by content= gradation of courses in history on the basis of subject matter is largely arbitrary, and turns upon the method of presentation. general courses naturally precede period courses. a sound principle is to select courses adapted to the stages of the student's development. on this principle it has already been suggested that the first college course should be, not american but european history. english, ancient, medieval, or modern history immediately suggest themselves, with strong arguments in favor of the first if but one freshman course is offered, as it forms a natural projection of american history into the past. beyond this, what subject matter is offered in the several years is largely a matter of local convenience, as the college student understands the general history of all nations or periods about equally well. it is now clear, however, that the student should know more modern and contemporary european history than he has been getting, and the sound training of an american of the future should include thorough training in modern european history. =gradation of courses may be determined by method of teaching= gradation based on the method of presentation is more nearly possible. graduate courses presuppose training in the auxiliary sciences, in the necessary languages, in research methods, in the special field of research, as well as a knowledge of general history. this establishes a sort of sequence of the methods to be employed, irrespective of subject matter. =method of teaching introductory courses--lecture method= the lecture method is convenient for the elementary courses, especially if, as is so often the case, these have a large number of students. it cannot, however, be gainsaid that convenience or, worse still, economy is a weak argument in favor of the lecture course, especially for the first-year student. to him the lecture method is unknown, and he flounders about a good deal if he is left to work out his own salvation; and then, too, just when he needs personal direction and particularly when, as a youth away from home for the first time, he needs some definite and unescapable task that shall teach discipline and duty as well as give information, the lecture system gives him the maximum of liberty with the minimum of aid or direction. these considerations strongly advocate small classes for freshmen, frequent recitations, discussions, tests, papers and maps, library problems--in short, a laboratory system. every student should always have at least one course in which he is held to rigid and exact performance. these courses should be required, no matter what the special field or period of history, and should form a sequence leading to a degree and providing training for a technical and professional career. in addition to these courses, designed to assure personal work and supervision, enough other, presumably lecture, courses should be required to secure a general knowledge of history. beyond that there are always enough electives to satisfy any personal wish or whim of the student. =topical method in european history= there is much to be said, especially in modern history, for the topical treatment of institutions. in a very specialized course a single institution may be treated; but even in a general course, treating the several human institutions as evolutionary organisms seems preferable and is more interesting than a chronological narrative, which grows more inane the more general the course. courses which come to modern times can trace existing institutions and their immediate antecedents, thus giving an advantage that many instructors neglect from the mere tradition that history does not come down to living man. no primitive superstition needs to be dispelled more than this, if history is to maintain its hold in the modern college. indeed, whenever possible--which is always with modern history--a course should start from the present by dwelling on the existing conditions the historical antecedents of which are to be traced. if this is done, the student forthwith secures a vital interest and feels that he is trying to understand his own rather than past times. after this preliminary the past can be traced chronologically or topically as preferred, the textbook serving as a quarry for data, the teacher seeing to it that the change or progress toward the present condition is perceived and understood, and furnishing corroborative and analogous materials from the history of other nations and periods. =assigned reading= it is the general practice of college courses in history to require outside reading. though this rests on the sound ground that the student ought to get a large background and learn to know books and writers, it is very doubtful whether this aim is, in fact, achieved. the student often has too much work to permit of much outside reading, and often the library is too limited to give him a good choice, or to permit him to keep a desirable book until he has finished reading it. unguided reading is almost certainly a failure; reading guided only by putting a selected list of books before the student is not sure to be a success. the instructor ought from time to time to tell his class something about the books he suggests, and about their authors and their careers, viewpoints and merits, as a reader always profits by knowing these things. as the reading of snatches from collateral books is hardly profitable, so the perusal of longer histories is often impossible, and generally confines the student for a long time to the minutiæ of one period while the class is going forward. in view of these difficulties there is much to be said in favor of putting a large textbook into the hands of a class, and requiring a thorough reading and understanding of it, and correspondingly reducing outside readings. if collateral reading is demanded, it is a good plan to require students to read a biography or a work on some special institution falling within the scope of the course,--some selected historical novel even,--for in that way the student reads, as he will in later life, something he selects instead of a required number of pages, a specific thing is covered, an author's acquaintance is made, and therefore a significant test can be conducted. furthermore, as some students will buy special volumes of this kind, the pressure on the library is reduced. direct access to reference shelves is always recommended. one of our universities has a system of renting preferred books to students. =tests on outside reading= tests on outside reading are always difficult, but they must be employed if the reading is not to become a farce. by having weekly reading reports on uniform cards, one can often arrange groups of students who have read the same thing and can therefore be tested by a single question. by extending this over several weeks the majority of students, even in a large class, can be tested with relatively few questions. some instructors require students to hand in their reading notes, others check up the books the students use in the library, still others have consultation periods in which they inquire into the student's reading. quiz sections, if there are any, offer a good opportunity to test collateral reading. =miscellaneous aids in teaching history= map making, coördinated with the recitations and so designed as to require more than mere tracing, is desirable in introductory courses. the imaginative historical theme written by the student is employed--and successfully, it is declared--in one college. a syllabus is highly useful in the hands of students in lecture courses. it can be mimeographed at comparatively slight expense for each lecture, thus permitting changes in successive years--a distinct advantage over the printed syllabus. =the problem of suitable examination= how to give a fair and telling examination is the college teacher's perennial problem. the less he teaches and insists on facts and details, the greater his quandary. a majority of students incline to parrot what they have heard, to the dismay of the teacher who wants them to make the subject their own. hence tests calling the memory only into play do not satisfy the true teacher or the thoughtful student. at the least there should be some questions requiring constructive or synthetic thinking by the student. above all, the instructor of introductory work should form a first-hand personal opinion of the student by requiring him to come to the office for consultation. nothing can take the place of the personal touch. quiz masters are better than no touch; but they are a poor substitute for the small class and direct contact, even if the instructor is not one of the masters of the profession. =the worth of topical or institutional treatment= the topical or institutional treatment of history has been mentioned above as being particularly applicable to modern history. if carefully worked out beforehand it can be made to embrace virtually everything--certainly everything significant--that is contained either in the text or in a chronological narrative. to be sure, a topical treatment of this kind places more emphasis on the common experiences of mankind than does national history, and, as some nations or peoples precede others in a given development, history becomes continuous instead of fragmentary. perhaps, too, the way certain matters are introduced into "continuous" history may appear forced, unless it be remembered that this impression is created merely by its dissimilarity from the usual interpretation, which is just as arbitrary and forced until one gets accustomed to it. =classification in topical treatment= it will be serviceable in arranging a topical treatment of any period of history, which shall show a sense of historical continuity and keep in mind the fundamental stimuli and causes of human action, to note that virtually all human interests can be classified under one of the following six heads: physical, economic, social, religious, political, and intellectual (or cultural). though these are never wholly isolated and are always interactive, one or the other may be specially significant in a given era, and thus we speak of a religious age, an age of rationalism, or the period of the industrial revolution. suggested topical outline of modern european history to apply this more specifically to modern european history, there follows an outline of topics. it is general to about , and more detailed for the period since that time (iv below), the endeavor being to show how a topical treatment of the development of democracy can be made to include practically everything of significance. there are certain cautions necessary here: that the outline is suggestive only, that it does not pretend or aim to be complete, that specific data often found in the sub-heads are to serve as illustrations and not as a complete statement of sub-topics; and that it is in fact merely a skeleton which can be extended and amplified indefinitely by insertions. i. background of the modern period. _a._ economic and social conditions at the close of the middle age. _b._ political nature of feudalism. the governments of the th century. _c._ the medieval church. ii. the development of religious liberty. _a._ the reformation. _b._ varieties of protestant sects, from state churches to individualistic sects. _c._ the religious wars, and toleration. iii. absolute monarchy. _a._ dynastic states. _b._ dynastic wars and the balance of power. iv. the development of democracy. _a._ the dynastic feudal state (_ancien régime_). . description of the _ancien régime_. . proponents of the _ancien régime_. dynasties (divine right monarchs). feudal landlords. higher clergy and state churches. the army command (younger sons of the nobility). the schools (education for privileged classes only). _b._ the revolutionary elements. . the dissatisfied feudal serf. . the intellectuals, rationalists, political theorists. the "social compact." ... popular sovereignty. . religious dissenters. . industrial elements. _a._ the industrial revolution. resulting in exportation, markets, and _laissez-faire_ doctrines. _b._ the bourgeoisie (employers) ... the third estate. _c._ the proletariat ... unorganized labor elements. _c._ the revolutionary period, - . . triumph of bourgeoisie over feudal aristocracy in france, - . limited monarchy. mirabeau. . increasing influence and rise to control of france of the parisian proletariat. the republic ... the terror ... robespierre. . radiation of revolutionary ideas to other nations. . wars between revolutionary france and monarchical europe. the rise of napoleon. _d._ the decline of the revolutionary elements, - . . france converted from a republic to an empire by napoleon. . the napoleonic wars. _a._ reveal napoleon's dynastic ambition. _b._ lead europe to combine against him and to blame democratic ideas for the sorrows of the time. _c._ result in the defeat of napoleon and the triumph of anti-democratic or reactionary elements. _e._ the fruits of the principle of popular sovereignty during the th century (chronologically england and france lead the other countries in most of these developments).[ ] . constitutions, embodying ever-increasing popular rights and powers. . extension of suffrage. political parties and party politics. . the spirit of nationality. independence of greece and belgium. unification of italy and germany. national revivals in poland, bulgaria, servia, rumania, bohemia, finland, ireland, and elsewhere. pan-germanism, pan-slavism, imperial federation. . class consciousness and strife. feudal aristocratic class--leans toward absolute monarchy. bourgeoisie (employing capitalists)--leans toward limited monarchies or republics. labor--leans toward socialism. (the other elements in the society are slow in developing a group consciousness.) . abolition of feudal forms and tenures. fight on great landlords. encouragement of independent farmers. emancipation and protection of peasants: france, ; prussia, ; austria, ; russia, . . social, socialistic, and humanitarian legislation. factory acts, minimum wage laws, industrial insurance, old age insurance, labor exchanges, child labor laws, prison reform acts, revision of penal codes, abolition of slavery and slave trade, government control or ownership of railways, telephones, telegraph, and mails. . opposition to state or national churches. disestablishment agitations ... separation of church and state. . demand for free public schools to replace church or other private schools. state lay schools in england ... suppression of teaching orders in france ... kulturkampf in germany ... expulsion of jesuits ... tendency toward compulsory non-sectarian education. . imperialism. industrial societies depend on imports, exports, and markets as means of keeping labor employed and people prosperous. this means export of capital, hence, plans for colonies, closed doors, preferential markets, and demands for the protection of citizens abroad and political stability in backward areas. partition of africa, asia, and near east. . militarism. expansion and colonial acquisition by one country exclude another, thus unsettling the balance of power. therefore rival nations depend on force and go in for military and naval programs. _f._ the conflict between reactionary and bourgeois interests, - . . reactionary elements in control--opposed to democracy and revolutionary doctrines. _a._ restore europe as nearly as possible on old lines at vienna, . ignore liberal tendencies and national sentiments. _b._ seek to maintain _status quo_. metternich ... holy alliance. carlsbad decrees ... congresses of troppau, laibach, verona ... intervention in naples, piedmont, and spain. proposal to restore latin america to monarchy. opposed by great britain in compliance with bourgeois interests. monroe doctrine. _c._ failed to prevent: greek revolution and independence (national movement). separation of belgium from the netherlands (national). revival of liberal demands in various quarters, producing the revolution of in france and elsewhere. . the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, - . _a._ industrialism on the continent. _b._ the bourgeois (capitalist employer) secures political power to advance his interests. revolution of . reform bill of . legislation against labor organizations and for tariffs favoring trade. _c._ the development of organized labor and socialism. legislation hostile to labor. chartism. labor in france, germany, and belgium. spread of socialist doctrines. _d._ the revolution of . socialist republican state in france, . the winning of constitutions in prussia, austria, and elsewhere--breach in the walls of reaction. _g._ the broadening base of democracy, - . . the organization of labor. . the spread of socialistic views and of class consciousness. karl marx. . the resistance of the old aristocratic class and the bourgeoisie, who gradually fuse to form the conservative element in all nations. napoleon iii restores the empire in france. in austria and prussia, bismarck and francis joseph ii retrieve losses of . disraeli and conservatives in england. . the progress toward universal suffrage after , strengthening political position of lower classes. vindication of democratic government through triumph of the north in the united states gave impetus to democracy abroad. electoral reform bills in great britain, , , . franco-prussian war and the third french republic. universal suffrage. unification of germany and universal suffrage. russian revolution, . woman suffrage. . popular sovereignty and its consequences. _a._ triumph of republicans and radicals in france over monarchists and clericals. _b._ liberal ministries in united kingdom. lloyd george budget ... parliament act. social legislation. _c._ growth of social democratic party in germany. bismarck and state socialism. _d._ in recent times the many divergent political parties fall rather instinctively into three groups which have opposing views and policies on almost every question, and which may be called: conservatives (tories, aristocrats, monarchists, junkers, clericals, capitalists, imperialists, militarists); peasants and farmers, being conservative, are usually politically allied to this group. liberals (progressives, democrats, labor parties, socialists, social democrats, dissenters, anti-imperialists, anti-militarists). radicals, bolsheviki or revolutionists seeking change of the economic and social order. . effects of the war _a._ extensive nationalization and socialization of industry and human rights in all belligerent countries. _b._ develops into a "war for democracy," and for moral as opposed to materialistic aims. _c._ culminates in an attempt to secure a righteous and lasting peace through the instrumentality of a league of nations. edward krehbiel _leland stanford junior university_ bibliography texts andrews, c. m. _historical development of modern europe._ two vols. g. p. putnam's sons, . hayes, carlton j. h. _a political and social history of modern europe._ two vols. the macmillan company, . robinson, j. h., and beard, c. a. _the development of modern europe._ two vols. ginn and co., , . schevill, ferdinand. a_ political history of modern europe._ charles scribner's sons, . period histories bourne, henry eldredge. _the revolutionary period in europe._ the century company, . _cambridge modern history._ thirteen vols. and maps. i. the renaissance; ii. the reformation; iii. the wars of religion; iv. the thirty years' war; v. the age of louis xiv; vi. the eighteenth century; vii. the united states; viii. the french revolution; ix. napoleon; x. the restoration; xi. the growth of nationalities; xii. the latest age; xiii. genealogical tables and lists and general index; also on atlas, in another volume. cambridge, the university press, - . hazen, charles downer. _europe since ._ henry holt & co., . lindsay, t. m. _a history of the reformation._ two vols. charles scribner's sons, - . lowell, e. j. _the eve of the french revolution._ schapiro, jacob salwyn. _modern and contemporary european history._ houghton mifflin company, . wakeman, h. o. _the ascendancy of france._ the macmillan company, . source books anderson, frank maloy. _the constitutions and other select documents illustrative of the history of france, - ._ h. w. wilson company, minneapolis, . fling, fred morrow. _source problems of the french revolution._ harper and brothers, . robinson, j. h. _readings in european history._ two vols. ginn and co., . ---- _readings in european history._ abridged edition. ginn and co., . robinson, j. h., and beard, c. a. _readings in modern european history._ two vols. ginn and co., . ---- _readings in modern european history._ abridged edition. ginn and co., . atlases _cambridge modern history._ volume of maps. cambridge, the university press, . dow, earle w. _atlas of european history._ henry holt & co., . droyse, gustav. _allgemeiner historischer kandatlas._ velhagen und klasing, leipzig, . gardiner, samuel rawson. _a school atlas of english history._ longmans, green & co., . poole, reginal lane. _historical atlas of modern europe from the decline of the roman empire._ h. frowde, - . putzger, friedrich wilhelm. _historischer schul-atlas zur alten, mittleren, und neunen geschichte._ velhagen und klasing, leipzig, . shepherd, william robert. _historical atlas._ henry holt & co., . bibliographical adams, charles kendall. _a manual of historical literature._ harper and brothers, . andrews, gambrill, and tall. _a bibliography of history for schools and libraries._ longmans, green & co., . pedagogical committee of seven. american historical association. _the study of history in the schools._ the macmillan company, . committee of five. american historical association. _the study of_ _history in the secondary schools._ the macmillan company, . dunn, arthur william. _the social studies in secondary education._ department of the interior, bureau of education, bulletin no. , . johnson, h. _the teaching of history in elementary and secondary schools._ . robinson, james harvey. _the new history; essays illustrating the modern history outlook._ the macmillan company, . historical fiction baker, e. a. _history in fiction._ two vols. e. p. dutton & co., . nield, jonathan. _a guide to the best historical novels and tales._ g. p. putnam's sons. periodicals _the american historical review._ published by the american historical association, washington, d. c. _the history teacher's magazine._ mckinley publishing company, philadelphia, pennsylvania. footnotes: [ ] this summary of the consequences of the doctrines of democracy is allowed to break into the topical development of the outline, as it gives a sort of general introduction to tendencies since . it will not escape the teacher that he could treat history since by taking up in order the topics given under this heading. xiii the teaching of political science =scope of political science= certain phases of what is known as political science form to no small degree the content of courses in other branches of study. the engineering schools in their effort to set forth the regulation of public utilities with respect to engineering problems have begun to offer courses which deal extensively with politics and government. in political and constitutional history, considerable attention is given to the organization and administration of the various divisions of government. to a greater degree, however, the allied departments of economics and sociology have begun, in the development of their respective fields, to analyze matters which are primarily of a political nature. especially in what is designated as applied economics and applied sociology there is to be found material a large part of which relates directly to the regulation and administration of governmental affairs. thus in portions of the courses designated as labor problems, money and banking, public finance, trust problems, public utility regulation, problems in social welfare, and immigration, primary consideration is frequently given to government activities and to the influences and conditions surrounding government control. while these courses, then, deal in part with subject matter which belongs primarily to the science of politics and while any comprehensive survey of instruction in political science would include an account of the phases of the subject presented in other departments, for the present purpose it has been advisable to limit the consideration of the teaching of political science to the subjects usually offered under that designation.[ ] some attention, however, will be given later to the relation of political science to allied subjects. a difference of opinion exists as to the meaning of political science, some institutions using the term in a broad sense to embody courses offered in history, economics, politics, public law, and sociology, and others giving the word a very narrow meaning to include a few specialized courses in constitutional and administrative law. there is, nevertheless, a strong tendency to have the term "political science" comprise all of the subjects which deal primarily with the organization and the administration of public affairs. =courses usually offered in political science= through an exhaustive survey made by the committee on instruction of the american political science association, covering instruction in political science in colleges and universities, the subjects which are usually offered may be indicated in two groups: leading courses for colleges and universities[ ] (given in order of number of instruction hours, with highest ranked first.) _a._ major courses. . american government--including national, state, and local. . general political science--mainly political theory, with some comparative government. . comparative government--devoted chiefly to a study of england, france, germany, and the united states. . international law. . commercial law. . municipal government. . constitutional law. _b._ minor courses. . jurisprudence, or elements of law. . political theories. . diplomacy. . state government. . political parties. . government of england. . legislative methods of procedure. . roman law. . regulation of social and industrial affairs. while the purposes and objects of instruction in this rather extensive group of subjects vary considerably, it seems desirable to analyze the chief objects in accordance with which political science courses are presented to students of collegiate grade. =aims of instruction in government= the aims of instruction in government are ( ) to train for citizenship; ( ) to prepare for professions such as law, teaching, business, and journalism; ( ) to train experts and prepare specialists for government positions; ( ) to provide facilities and lead students into research material and research methods. each of these aims affects to a certain extent a different class of students and renders the problem as to methods of instruction correspondingly difficult. = . training for citizenship= in a certain sense all instruction may be looked upon as giving training for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and undoubtedly a great deal of instruction in other subjects aids in the process of citizenship training. nevertheless, a heavy responsibility rests upon departments of political science to lead students into the extensive literature on government as well as to instruct them with respect to the organizations and methods by which the political and social affairs are being conducted. in short, one of the primary aims of government instruction and one which is kept foremost in the arrangement of courses is elementary training for the average student in the principles, the practices, and the technique of governmental affairs. for such citizenship training, which is usually given in large elementary classes, a special method of instruction and system of procedure are pursued. it is necessary to provide subject matter which is informational in character, as the lack of knowledge of the governments of home and foreign countries is ordinarily appalling, and which will open up by way of discussion and comparison many of the leading problems of modern politics. more necessary and indispensable is a method of study which will aid in pursuing inquiries along the many and varied lines which will devolve upon the citizen performing his multifarious duties and discharging his many responsibilities. as many of the students will take but a single course, the opening up to them of the vast field of government literature is one of the aims to be constantly kept in mind. moreover, while all of the above are essential matters in the elementary courses, the most important consideration of all is that the teaching of politics and government will have utterly failed unless there are created a desire and an interest which will lead into many lines of investigation beyond those offered in a single introductory course. the development of this interest and appreciation is the all-important object. = . preparation for the professions= many who enter the introductory courses in government select the subject with the idea of continuing their preparation for professional life in their chosen fields. among the professions which particularly seek instruction in government are chiefly law, teaching, business, and journalism. for these groups of students, many of whom continue the study of the subject for several years, often going on into the advanced courses in graduate departments, it is recognized that beginning work which is too general and discursive may be less useful than a specialized course which may be rounded out by a series of correlated courses. consequently, there is a question whether the professional student, interested in the study of government, should begin his work under the same conditions and with the same methods as the student who does not expect to continue the subject. the number of those who are preparing for the professions is often so large as to require separate consideration and to affect seriously the determination of the method and content of the introductory course. this difficulty is obviated where professional courses are provided, giving instruction in government and citizenship, as is now the practice in certain law schools, in some departments of journalism, and in a few engineering schools. for each of the major professions in which government instruction is particularly sought a different type of course is desired. for the law student comparative public law, jurisprudence, and specialized government courses in various fields are usually demanded. for the journalist, general subjects dealing with specific countries and with the political practices of all governments are regarded of special benefit. for the teaching profession the study of some one line and specialization in a particular field seem to be a necessity. which is the better, such specialized government courses for professional students, or a general course for all introductory students, is still an undetermined problem. the fact that most of the conditions and problems of citizenship are similar for all these groups and that there is great difficulty in providing separate instruction for each group renders it necessary to provide an elementary course which is adapted to the needs and which will serve the purpose of the citizen seeking a general introduction in one course and the professional student who seeks entrance to advanced courses. = . training for public service and preparation of specialists for government positions= colleges and universities have recently begun to give special instruction for the training of those who desire to enter the government service. a few institutions are offering courses and a considerable number are beginning to adapt instruction which will be of service not only to those who anticipate entrance into some form of public work, but also to those who are engaged in performing public service in some department of government. as a matter of fact, the training of specialists must in large measure be cared for by professional and technical schools, such as the provision for directors of public health by medical schools, the training of sanitary engineers by the engineering schools, the training of accountants, statisticians, and financial experts by the schools of commerce and finance. nevertheless, departments offering instruction in general political subjects are expected to give some consideration to and to make special arrangements for advanced courses in the way of preparing those who seek to enter the various divisions of the government service, such as the consular and diplomatic affairs, charitable and social work, and the administrative regulation of public utilities, industrial affairs, and the public welfare. through the introduction of specialized courses in municipal, state, and national administration it is possible to prepare more adequately for various branches of public administration. = . special courses in research and research methods= although research methods and graduate courses of instruction in political science developed rather slowly, a substantial beginning has been made by the universities in the offering of advanced courses in which a specialized study is made of some of the problems of government and the methods of administration. through these courses valuable contributions have been made to the historical and comparative phases of the subject and to some extent to the analytical study of government in operation. the primary aim has been to provide an avenue and an opportunity for those who look forward to teaching or to entering the field of special research work in politics and governmental affairs. the results of the research work have been rendered available to government officials and departments through bureaus of research and other agencies devised to aid in improving the public service. only a few universities separate the graduate from the undergraduate students, and as a result the instruction cannot be of strictly graduate character and quality. much of the present research is done with small groups of students in a seminar where personal direction is given to investigations and where the methods of research are developed under direct supervision. =value of the subject= any determination of the value of a subject in the school curriculum is necessarily based upon the opinions of individuals whose judgment will vary in large measure according to their respective training, influences, and predilections. the value of the subject which is usually placed first is its usefulness in imparting information. much instruction in government is descriptive and informational in character and is offered primarily to increase the stock of knowledge and to give information with respect to the present and the future interests of the citizen. while this descriptive material has served a useful purpose, it is doubtful whether, as in the formal civics of the public schools, the method of imparting information has not been used so extensively as to have a detrimental effect. too much attention has been given to the memorization of facts and the temporary accumulation of information more or less useful, and correspondingly too little to thinking on the great political and social issues of the day. when governments are engaging in endless activities which affect the welfare of society in its social and æsthetic, as well as political aspects, government instruction becomes increasingly necessary and valuable as a cultural study. the recent development in european political affairs has impressed upon the citizens of this country as never before the results of a profound ignorance with respect to conditions in foreign countries. while the knowledge of the affairs of the great nations of the world has hitherto appeared advisable, it has now come to be regarded as a necessity. from the standpoint of culture a knowledge of the institutions of one's own country and of other countries is one of the cardinal elements of education and provisions for such instruction ought to be placed among the few primary topics in the preparation of all educational programs. if culture involves an understanding of the social and political conditions of the past and present as well as some appreciation of the problems which confront the individual in his activities of life, then the study of both history and government must be given a foremost rank among the subjects now classified as cultural. with respect to formal discipline government instruction has been rated lower than that of the more exact subjects, the languages and mathematics. while it is true that from the standpoint of formal discipline and exact methods government instruction has not measured up to that of some other subjects, it must be remembered that the standardization of instruction, and the methods pursued in other subjects, have developed through a long process of years to the present effectiveness in mental discipline. as the study of government becomes more specialized, the material in the field worked into more concrete form for purposes of instruction, the methods better developed with the formulation of standard plans and principles, the disciplinary value of the subject will be increased. the development now in process is bringing about changes which will greatly enhance not only the usefulness but in a large measure the disciplinary value of the subject. =place in college curriculum= instruction in government is usually offered only to students who have acquired sophomore standing. a few institutions now give a course in government in the freshman year, and the practice seems to be meeting with success. sentiment is growing in favor of this plan. the argument presented for this change is that a large percentage of the freshman class does not continue college work, and consequently many students have no opportunity to become acquainted with the special problems of politics and government. to meet the need of those who spend but one year in college, it is claimed that an introduction should be given to the study of government problems. while there are strong reasons in support of this change, the prevailing sentiment for the present favors the requirement of a year's work in college as a prerequisite. the advocates of this arrangement contend that in view of the fact that most of the high schools are now giving a half of a year or a year to civic instruction on somewhat the same plan as would be necessary in a first-year college course, it seems better from the standpoint of the student as well as of the department to defer the introductory course until better methods of study and greater maturity of mind are acquired. sophomore standing is the only prerequisite for the elementary course except in a few institutions where the selection of a course in history in the freshman year is required. a few colleges are offering to freshmen an introductory course in the social sciences, comprising mainly some elementary material from economics, sociology, and political science. while there are some advantages in the effort to give a general introduction to the social sciences, no practicable content or method for such a course has yet been prepared. moreover, it seems likely now that such a general introduction will be attempted either in the junior or in the senior high school. for advanced work in the senior high school and for the introductory college course reason and practice both favor a separation of these subjects, with close correlation and constant consideration of the interrelations. =the introductory course= it is customary to introduce students to the study of government through a general course in american government, dealing briefly with national, state, and local institutions. other subjects, such as comparative government,--including a consideration of some representative foreign countries along with american government,--an introductory course in political science, and international law, are sometimes used as basic courses to introduce students to subsequent work. the general practice in the introductory course seems to be approaching a standard in which either american government is made the basis of study, with comparisons from european practices and methods, or european governments are studied, with attention by way of comparison to the american system of government. the committee of seven of the american political science association offered the following suggestions relative to the introductory course, which it seems well to quote in full. the committee recommended that: american government be taken as the basis for the introductory course because it is convinced that there is an imperative need for a more thorough study of american institutions, because the opportunity for this study is not now offered in any but a few of the best secondary schools, and because it is exceedingly important that the attention of an undergraduate be directed early in his course to a vital personal interest in his own government, national, state, and local. instruction in political science is rarely given until the second or third year of the college work, and thus unless american government is selected for the first course only a small percentage of students receive encouragement and direction in the study of political affairs with which they will constantly be expected to deal in their ordinary relations as citizens. but the committee believes that this study of american government can be distinctly vitalized by the introduction of such comparisons with european practices and forms as will supply the student with a broader basis of philosophical conclusions as to constitutional development and administrative practices. the committee is of the opinion that despite the very marked increase of courses in american government within the past few years, one of the immediate needs is the further extension and enlargement of these courses. in only a few institutions is enough time given to the subject to permit anything more than the most cursory survey of the various features of the government, and almost invariably state and local government suffer in the cutting process which is necessary. about seventy institutions only give courses in which state and local government are the basis of special study. in order that state and local government shall be given more consideration, and in order that judicial procedure and administrative methods shall receive more than passing notice, it is absolutely necessary that the time allotted to american government be increased. nothing short of a full year of at least three hours a week gives the necessary time and opportunity do anything like full justice to the national, state, and local units.[ ] because of the fact that only a small percentage of the student body elects this course under present conditions, and because the majority of those who do elect it never have an opportunity to continue the study of government, it is thought that the selection of american government for the beginning subject has the tendency to foster provincialism. when but one course is taken this one, it is contended, should deal with foreign governments, to supply a broader basis for the comparison of political institutions. as the study of government is introduced in the grades and thorough and effective instruction is offered in the high school, it will become increasingly practicable to introduce the comparative method in introductory courses. =sequence of courses= one of the difficulties in the instruction in political science which has received less consideration than it deserves is that of the sequence of courses. in the determination of sequence it is customary to have an introductory course, such as american government, european government, or political theory, and to make this subject a prerequisite for all advanced courses. as the introductory course requires sophomore standing, it renders entrance into advanced courses open only to students of junior rank or above. after passing the first course, there are open for election a number of subjects, mainly along specialized lines. this condition is to be found, particularly, in the large universities, where a group of instructors offer specialized work, with either little or no advice to students as to the proper arrangement or sequence of courses. the ordinary classification is into three groups: ( ) an elementary course, prerequisite for advanced instruction; ( ) courses for graduate and undergraduate students, seldom arranged on a basis of sequence or logical order;--the lack of sequence is due in part to the fact that after taking elementary work the student in government frequently wishes to specialize in the field of federal government, or of state government, or of international law, or possibly of political theory; ( ) courses for graduate students, which are intended primarily for investigation and research. students who specialize in government are generally advised by the head of the department or the professor under whom their work is directed, as to the proper arrangement and correlation of courses. it is, however, questionable whether some plan of sequence more definitely outlined than that now to be found in most catalogs ought not to be prepared in advance for the consideration of those who look forward to specializing in political science. such an arrangement of sequence has been prepared by the department of political science of the university of chicago, which divides its work into ( ) elementary, ( ) intermediate, ( ) advanced--the advanced courses being subdivided into (_a_) theory, (_b_) constitutional relations, (_c_) public administration, and (_d_) law. suggestions are offered as to the principal and secondary sequences for various groups of students. the sequence of courses could be better arranged provided a freshman course were offered. a freshman course in american government could be given, with some attention by way of comparison to european methods and practices, and followed by an intermediate course dealing with some select foreign governments, again using the comparative method and viewpoint. two courses of this character would offer a greater opportunity to give the instruction now desired from the standpoint of the average student and citizen, and would serve as a better basis for advanced instruction than the single course now customarily offered either in american or comparative government. after taking the elementary courses the student could then be allowed to select from a group of subjects in one of the various lines, according to the special field in which he is interested. in short, the arrangement of the sequence of courses will necessarily be unsatisfactory as long as the elementary course is offered only to those of at least sophomore rank, a practice which unfortunately necessitates in many cases the beginning of the work in the junior or senior year. it will be necessary to introduce the subject earlier in the curriculum, in order to arrange such a sequence as would seem desirable from the standpoint of thorough and effective instruction. =methods of instruction= methods of instruction[ ] vary according to the size of the institution and the number in the classes. in the preliminary courses the system of informal lectures is combined with recitations, discussions, reports, and quizzes. the students in the advanced courses are obliged to carry on independent work under the supervision of the instructor. for seniors and graduate students the seminar has been found most satisfactory in developing a keen interest in the problems of politics. unfortunately, where the classes are small and the time is limited, it is customary to rely largely on textbooks and recitations, with a moderate amount of special readings and occasional class reports. but, on the other hand, courses in government have been improved recently by the appearance of good textbooks. american and european governments are now presented in texts which have proved satisfactory and which have aided in the development of standard courses for these elementary subjects. then, too, interest has been aroused and better results obtained through the use of texts and manuals dealing with the actual work and the problems of government. the neglected fields of state government and administrative practices are just beginning to receive attention. one method of government instruction, and a very valuable one, is to encourage the examination of evidence and to consider different viewpoints on public questions, with the purpose of forming judgments based on the facts. for this purpose extensive reading and frequent reports are necessary to check up the work completed. it is possible to keep in constant touch with the amount of work and the methods of study or investigation by means of discussions in small sections for one or two hours each week and by the use of the problem sheet. in the courses offered in departments of government in such subjects as constitutional law, international law, commercial law, and to some extent in courses in jurisprudence and government regulation of public utilities and social welfare, the case method has been adopted quite extensively. this method has been sufficiently tried and its effectiveness has been demonstrated in the teaching of law, so that nothing need be said in its defense. the introduction of the case method in political science and public law has undoubtedly improved the teaching of certain phases of these subjects. that the use of cases and extracts may be carried to an extreme which is detrimental is becoming apparent, for opinions and data change so rapidly that any collection of cases and materials is out of date before it issues from the press. moreover, the use of such collections encourages the reliance on secondary sources and secondary material, a tendency which ought to be discouraged. every encouragement and advantage should be given to have students and investigators in government deal with original rather than secondary sources. there is, in addition to the use of textbooks, lectures, extensive reference reading, case books, and the writing of papers, a tendency to introduce the problem method of instruction and to encourage field work, observation, and, so far as practicable, a first-hand study of government functions and activities. another line in which the study of government is undergoing considerable modification is the emphasis placed on administration and administrative practices. while special attention heretofore has been given either to the history of politics and political institutions or to political theories and principles, the tendency is now to give import to political practices and the methods pursued in carrying on government divisions and departments. the introduction of courses in the principles of administration, with the consideration of problems in connection with public administration in national, state, and local affairs, is tending to modify the content as well as the methods of the teaching of government. new methods and a new content are changing the emphasis from the formal, theoretical, and historical study of government and turning attention to the practical phases and to the technique of administration. as a result of this change and through the work which is being undertaken by bureaus of reference and research, instruction is brought much closer to public officers and greater service is rendered in a practical way to government administration. =some unsolved problems= among the difficulties and unsolved problems in the teaching of political science are, first, the beginning course; second, the relation of courses in government to economics, sociology, history, and law; third, the extent to which field investigation and the problem method can be used to advantage in offering instruction and the development of new standards and of new tests which are applicable to these methods; fourth, the introduction of the scientific method. = . the introductory course= while the elementary course in government is now usually american government and is, as a rule, offered to sophomores, both the content and the present position of the course in the curriculum are matters on which there is considerable difference of opinion. where the subject matter now offered to beginning students is comprised of comparative material selected from a number of modern governments, it is contended that this arrangement is preferable to confining attention to american institutions with which there is at least general but often vague familiarity. if provision is made in the high school, by which the majority of those who enter the university have had a good course in american government, there seems to be a strong presumption that the beginners' course should be devoted to comparative government. it is quite probable that the introductory course will cease to be confined to a distinct and separate study of either foreign governments or of american government and that the most satisfactory course will be the development of one in which main emphasis is given to one or the other of these fields and in which constant and frequent comparisons will be made for purposes of emphasis, discussion, and the consideration of government issues and problems. in some cases it is undoubtedly true that emphasis should be given to foreign governments, and as the high schools improve their instruction in our local institutions, national and state, it will become increasingly necessary in colleges to turn attention to the study of foreign governments in the beginners' course. there appears to be a desire to introduce government into the freshman year, and it is likely that provision will be made to begin the study of the subject in the first college year, thereby rendering it possible for those who enter college to profit by a year's work and to give an earlier start to those who wish to specialize. another difficulty in connection with the introductory course which is still not clearly determined is the time and attention which may be given to lectures, to discussions, to the writing of papers or theses, to the investigation and report on problems, and the extent to which use may be made of some of the practical devices such as field investigation. there is a general belief that in the elementary course only a slight use may be made of practical methods, but that it is necessary to begin these methods in the elementary years and to render instruction practical and concrete to a larger extent than is now done, by means of problems and the discussion of matters of direct interest to all citizens. no doubt as the problem method and field study are more definitely systematized and the ways of supervision and checking up the work developed, these devices will be used much more extensively. the preparation of problem sheets and of guides to the selection of concrete material gives promise of a more general and effective use of the problem method. = . relation of instruction in government to other subjects= the proper relationship and correlation of instruction in government with that of other subjects has not yet been determined satisfactorily. the matter of correlation is slowly being worked out along certain lines; for example, the relationship between courses in history and in government is coming to be much better defined. such subjects as constitutional history and the development of modern governments are being treated almost entirely in departments of history, and less attention is being given to the historical development of institutions in departments of political science. as long as it is impossible to make certain history courses prerequisites before beginning the study of government, it becomes necessary to give some attention in political science to the historical development of political institutions. by correlation and by proper arrangement of courses, however, the necessity of introducing government courses with historical introductions ought to be considerably reduced. the relation between work in government and in economics and sociology is a more difficult problem and one which has not as yet been satisfactorily adjusted. some of the courses given in departments of economics and sociology deal to a considerable extent with the regulation of public affairs. in these courses, including public finance, the regulation of public utilities, the regulation of trusts, labor organizations, and the administration and regulation of social and industrial affairs, a more definite correlation between political science and so-called applied economics and applied sociology must be made. while it is undoubtedly necessary for the economist and the sociologist to deal with government regulation of economic and social affairs, and while it is very desirable that these departments should emphasize the practical and applied phases of their subjects, it is nevertheless true that courses which are, to a large extent, comprised of government instruction should be given under the direction of the department of political science, or, at least, in an arrangement of definite coöperation therewith. there is no reason why in such a subject as the regulation of public utilities a portion of the course might not be given in the department of economics and a portion in the department of government. or it may be better, perhaps, for a course to be arranged in the regulation of public utilities, continuing throughout the year, in which the professors of economics, government, commerce, finance, and engineering participate in the presentation of various phases of the same subject. at all events, the present separation into different departments of the subject matter of government regulation of such affairs as public utilities, taxation, and social welfare regulation is, to say the least, not producing the best results. the relation of government courses to instruction in law is likewise a partially unsolved problem. a few years ago, when the curricula of law schools dealt with matters of law and procedure in which only the practitioner was interested, it became necessary to introduce the study of public law in departments of government and political science. thus we find courses in international law, constitutional law, roman law, and elements of law and jurisprudence being offered in large part in departments of political science. the recent changes in law school curricula, however, by which many of these subjects are now offered in the law school and in some cases are offered to qualified undergraduate students, render the situation somewhat more difficult to adjust. there is a tendency to introduce these courses into the law school for law students and to offer a similar course in the department of government for undergraduates and graduates. the problem has been further complicated by the provision in some of the leading law schools of a fourth year, in which the dominant courses relate to public and international law, legal history and foreign law, jurisprudence and legislative problems.[ ] as these courses become entirely legal in nature and content and require a background of three years of law, it becomes practically impossible for any but law students to be admitted to them. with the prospect of a permanent arrangement for a fourth year of law devoted primarily to subjects formerly given in departments of political science, it seems to be necessary to provide instruction in constitutional law and international law, at least, for those advanced students in political science who seek this instruction but who do not expect to take the private law instruction required to admit them to a fourth-year law class. the preferable arrangement may prove to be one in which a thorough course is offered which will be open to qualified seniors and graduate students and to law students, thus avoiding the duplication which is now characteristic of instruction in law and the public law phases of government. in this matter, as in the relation of economics and sociology, the most appropriate and effective adjustment for coöperation remains to be formulated. = . problem method of instruction= as the criticism of eminent specialists in government and politics has impressed upon instructors the idea that too large a portion of the teaching of the subject is theoretical, treating of what ought to be rather than of what actually occurs, dealing with facts only on a limited scale and with superficial attention to actual conditions, there has developed the necessity of revising the methods of instruction. this revision is being made largely in the introduction of field investigation, observation of government activities, and the problem and research methods. the prevailing practice of the teaching of politics, which involves lectures, recitations, and the reading and writing of theses, with a considerable amount of supplementary work, is being revised by means of a research and reference division, by the constant use of field investigation and by the study of governmental problems. the difficulty with all these devices lies in the indefinite and vague way in which so much of this work must be done. for the present, in only a few instances, such as the new york bureau of municipal research, has the technique for field investigation and the research method been effectively developed. one of the chief lines for the improvement of the teaching of government is in the standardization and systematization of the problem method and its more extensive use in the elementary and advanced government instruction. = . introduction of the scientific method= in the past and to a great extent at the present time that part of the study of government which has to do with political theory and with a descriptive and historical account of government has comprised the greater portion of what is usually designated as political science. the nature of these studies is such as to render inapplicable the use of the scientific method. if the study of government is to be developed as a science in the true sense, then the above subjects must be supplemented by exhaustive inductive studies and research in the actual operation of government. such methods are now being employed in the examination of government records and the comparison of administrative practices. and there is being developed also a science of government based on the practices and the technique of public administration. this science now finds its exemplification in some of the exceptional work of the graduate schools. unfortunately, the connection between these schools and the government departments has not been such as to secure the best results. moreover, departments of political science are not now doing their part to place the results of scientific investigations at the disposal of government officials. the introduction of courses in extension departments and evening classes has in part met this deficiency. but much remains to be done to render through the department of political science effective service in the practical operation of government. with the introduction of the problem method and field investigation in the elementary instruction, so far as seems feasible, with the development of standard methods and the technique of research for advanced instruction, the teaching of government will be rendered not only more valuable to the citizen, but colleges and universities may render aid to government officials and citizens interested in social and political affairs. a significant development as an aid for research and for rendering more effective public service has come in the establishment of bureaus of government research. the method of investigation and research which has been applied to the problems of government by private organizations has been found applicable to the handling of research material in the universities. through a bureau of this character recent publications and ephemeral material may be collected for the use of advanced students, digests may be prepared on topics of special interest to legislators and administrators, and publications of particular interest to the citizens may be issued. such a bureau serves as a government laboratory for the university and can be placed at the service of public officials and others who desire to use a reference department in securing reliable data on governmental affairs. thus it is coming to be realized that research in government may be encouraged and the resources of higher institutions may be so organized as to render a distinct and much appreciated public service. charles grove haines _university of texas_ bibliography allix, e. h. nÉzard, and meunier, a. _instruction civique._ paris, f. juven, ; pages . american political science association. report of the committee on instruction in political science in colleges and universities. _proceedings_, ; pages - . ---- report of committee of seven on instruction in colleges and universities. _political science review_, vol. ix, pages - . ---- the teaching of government. report to the american political science association by the committee on instruction. the macmillan company, ; pages - . baldwin, simeon e. _the relations of education to citizenship._ yale university press, ; pages . beach, w. g. the college and citizenship. _proceedings of the washington educational association._ school journal publishing co., ; pages - . beard, c. a. _the study and teaching of politics._ columbia university press, june, ; vol. xii, pages - . ---- _politics_, columbia university press, ; pages . ---- _training for efficient public service._ annals of the american academy of political and social science, march, . boitel, j., and foiguet, r. _notions elementaires d'instruction civique de droit usuel et d'économie politique._ paris, delagrave, ; pages . bourgueil, e. _instruction civique._ paris: f. nathan, ; pages . bryce, james. _the hindrances to good citizenship._ yale university press, ; pages . drown, thomas m. instruction in municipal government in american educational institutions. _national municipal league: proceedings_, boston, ; pages - . fairlie, john a. instruction in municipal government. _national municipal league: proceedings_, detroit, ; pages - . freund, ernst. correlation of work for higher degrees in graduate school and law school. _illinois law review_, vol. xi, page . hall, g. stanley. civic education. _educational problems_, new york, , vol. ii, pages - . hill, david j. _a plan for a school of the political sciences._ , pages . hinman, george w. the new duty of american colleges. d congress, st session. senate document no. , . lowell, a. lawrence. administrative experts in municipal governments. _national municipal review_, vol. iv, pages - . ---- the physiology of politics, _american political science review_, february, . ---- _public opinion and popular government_, chapters - . morey, william c. _american education and american citizenship._ rochester, n. y., pages . munro, w. b. the present status of instruction in municipal government in the universities and colleges of the united states. _national municipal league: proceedings._ pittsburgh, , pages - . ---- instruction in municipal government in the universities and colleges of the united states. _national municipal review_, vol. ii, pages - , and vol. v, pages - . national municipal league. report of the committee on instruction in municipal government. _proceedings_, rochester, ; pages - . report of the committee on organized coöperation between the massachusetts institute of technology and the commonwealth of massachusetts. _bulletin of the alumni association_, , no. . report of the committee on training for public service. columbia university. charles a. beard, chairman. _bulletin_, march , . robinson, frederick b. the municipal courses. _city college (n. y.) quarterly_, vol. xii, page . rowe, j. s. university and collegiate research in municipal government. _national municipal league: proceedings._ chicago, , pages - . schaper, w. a. what do students know about american government before taking college courses in political science? _journal of pedagogy_, june, . vol. xviii, pages - . society for the promotion of training for the public service. e. a. fitzpatrick, director. madison, wisconsin. _the public servant._ issued monthly. ---- universities and public service. _proceedings of the first national conference._ madison, , pages . training for public service. new york bureau of municipal research, annual reports. white, a. d. the provision for higher instruction bearing directly upon public affairs. _house executive document no. _, part , th congress, d session. ---- education in political science. baltimore, pages . ---- european schools of history and politics. _johns hopkins university studies_, series , vol. xii. wilson, woodrow. _the study of politics. an old master and other essays._ charles scribner's sons, , pages - . wolfe, a. b. shall we have an introductory course in social sciences? _journal of political economy_, vol. xxii, pages - . young, james t. university instruction in municipal government. _national municipal league: proceedings._ rochester, ; pages - . footnotes: [ ] the courses usually given in departments of political science are: . american government, (_a_) national, (_b_) state and local, (_c_) municipal. . general political science. . comparative government. . english government. . international law. . diplomacy. . jurisprudence or elements of law. . world politics. . commercial law. . roman law. . administrative law. . political theories (history of political thought). . party government. . colonial government. . legislative methods and legislative procedure. . current political problems. . municipal corporations. . law of officers and taxation. . seminar. . additional courses, such as the government of foreign countries, the regulation of public utilities, and the political and legal status of women. cf. _the teaching of government_, page . published by the macmillan company, . with the permission of the publishers some extracts from the report of the committee on instruction have been used. the report should be consulted for the presentation of data and for a further consideration of some questions of instruction which cannot be taken up fully within the compass of this chapter. [ ] cf. _the teaching of government_, page . [ ] _the teaching of government_, pages - . [ ] the discussion of methods follows in part the report of the committee on instruction, pages - . [ ] see especially article by ernst freund on "correlation of work for higher degrees in graduate school and law school," vol. xi, _illinois law review_, page . xiv the teaching of philosophy the study of philosophy covers such a wide range of subjects that it is difficult to generalize in attempting to answer the basal questions which call for consideration in a book like this. in the great european universities it includes psychology, logic, ethics, æsthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and sometimes even the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of the state. although special courses may not be offered in every one of these fields in our american colleges, their philosophical territory is sufficiently extensive and the separate provinces sufficiently unlike to baffle any one seeking to describe the educational aims and methods of the domain as a whole. in order, therefore, to do full justice to our task it would be necessary to treat each one of the various philosophical branches separately and to expand the space assigned to us into a fair-sized volume. since this is not to be thought of, we shall have to confine ourselves to a consideration of the traits common to all the subjects, without forgetting, however, such differences as may call for different educational treatment. =the unified college course in philosophy= the difficulty of which we have spoken becomes less formidable when the teacher of the traditional philosophical subjects regards them not as so many independent and disconnected fields of study, but as parts of a larger whole held together by some central idea. the great systematic thinkers, from plato down to herbert spencer, have aimed at "completely unified knowledge" and have sought to bring order and coherence into what may seem to the casual onlooker as a disunited array of phenomena. philosophical teaching will be the more fruitful, the more it is inspired by the thought of unity of aim, and the more consciously the teachers of the different disciplines keep this idea in mind. that is the reason why philosophical instruction given in a small college and by one man is, in some respects, often more satisfactory than in the large university with its numberless specialists, in which the beginning student frequently does not see the forest for the trees. it is not essential that the teacher present a thoroughly worked-out and definitive system of thought, but it is important that he constantly keep in mind the interrelatedness of the various parts of his subject and the notion of unity which binds them together,--at least as an ideal. and perhaps this notion of the unity of knowledge ought to be made one of the chief aims of philosophical instruction in the college. the ideal of philosophy in the sense of metaphysics is to see things whole, to understand the interrelations not only of the branches taught in the department of philosophy but of all the diverse subjects studied throughout the university. the student obtains glimpses of various pictures presented by different departments and different men, and from different points of view. each teacher offers him fragments of knowledge, the meaning of which, as parts of an all-inclusive system, the pupil does not comprehend. indeed, it frequently happens that the different pieces do not fit into one another; and he is mystified and bewildered by the seemingly disparate array of facts and theories crowding his brain which he cannot correlate and generally does not even suspect of being capable of correlation. to be sure, every teacher ought to be philosophical, if not a philosopher, and indicate the place of his specialty in the universe of knowledge; but that is an ideal which has not yet been realized. in the meanwhile, the study of philosophy ought to make plain that knowledge is not a mere heap of broken fragments, that the inorganic, organic, and mental realms are not detached and independent principalities but kingdoms in a larger empire, and that the world in which we live is not a chaos but a cosmos. an introductory course in philosophy, the type of course given in many german universities under the title "einleitung in die philosophie" and attended by students from all sections of the university, will help the young student to find his bearings in the multifarious thought-world unfolded before him and will, at the same time, put him in the way of developing some sort of world-view later on. philosophical instruction that succeeds in the task outlined above will have accomplished much. nevertheless, it cannot attain its goal unless the student is introduced to the study of the human-mental world which constitutes a large portion of the field assigned to the philosophical department: the study of psychology, logic, ethics, and the history of philosophy. these branches deal with things in which the human race has been interested from its early civilized beginnings and with which the young persons entering college have had little or no opportunity of becoming acquainted. and they deal with a world which no man can ignore who seeks to understand himself and his relation to the natural and social environment in which his lot is cast. a knowledge of the processes of mind (psychology), of the laws of thought (logic), of the principles of conduct (ethics), and of the development of man's interpretation of reality (history of philosophy) will supplement the knowledge acquired by the study of physical nature, preventing a one-sided and narrow world-view, and will serve as a preparation for intelligent reflection upon the meaning of reality (philosophy in the sense of metaphysics). =controlling aims in the teaching of philosophy= all these subjects, therefore, have as one of their aims the training of the powers of thought (judgment and reasoning); and philosophical teaching should never lose sight of this. thinking is a difficult business,--an art which is practiced, to be sure, in every field of study, but one for which the philosophical branches provide unusual opportunity and material. it has become a habit with many of recent years to decry the study of logic as an antiquated discipline, but it still remains, if properly taught, an excellent means of cultivating clear thinking; there is no reason why a consciousness of correct ways of thinking and of the methods employed in reaching reliable judgments should not prove useful to every one. we should say, therefore, that the study of philosophy has a high cultural value: it encourages the student to reflect upon himself and his human and natural surroundings (society and nature) and to come to grips with reality; it frees him from the incubus of transmitted opinions and borrowed beliefs, and makes him earn his spiritual possessions in the sweat of his face,--mindful of goethe's warning that "he alone deserves freedom and life who is compelled to battle for them day by day";--it helps him to see things in their right relations, to acquire the proper intellectual and volitional attitude toward his world through an understanding of its meaning and an appreciation of its values; in short, it strengthens him in his struggle to win his soul, to become a person. this is its ideal; and in seeking to realize it, philosophy coöperates with the other studies in the task of developing human beings, in preparing men for complete living, and is therefore practical in a noble sense of the term. it has a high disciplinary value in that it trains the powers of analysis and judgment, at least in the fields in which it operates. and the habit acquired there of examining judgments, hypotheses, and beliefs critically and impartially, of testing them in the light of experience and of reason, cannot fail to prove helpful wherever clear thinking is a requisite. the teacher should keep all these aims in view in organizing his material and applying his methods. he should not forget that philosophy is above all things a reflection upon life; he should endeavor to train his pupils in the art of interpreting human experience, of grasping its meaning. his chief concern should be to make _thinkers_ of them, not to fasten upon them a final philosophic creed,--not to give them a philosophy, but to teach them how to philosophize. if he succeeds in arousing in them a keen intellectual interest and a love of truth, and in developing in them the will and the power to think a problem through to the bitter end, he will have done more for them than would have been possible by furnishing them with ready-made formulas. there is nothing so hopelessly dead as a young man without the spirit of intellectual adventure, with his mind made up, with the master's ideas so deeply driven into his head that his intellectual career is finished. the germans call such a person _vernagelt_, a term that fitly describes the case. what should be aimed at is the cultivation of the mind so that it will broaden with enlarging experience, that it will be hospitable to new ideas and yet not be overwhelmed by them, that it will preserve inviolate its intellectual integrity and keep fresh the spirit of inquiry. such a mind may be safely left to work out its own salvation in the quest for a _weltanschauung_. "young, all lay in dispute; i shall know, being old." in emphasizing the need of such central aims in instruction we do not wish to be understood as not appreciating the utilitarian value of the philosophical branches and their importance as a preparation for professional activity. like all knowledge, these subjects have their worth not merely as means of developing human personality but also as means of equipping the student with such knowledge of facts, methods, and theories as will prove useful to him in his other studies and in the daily affairs of life. the teacher, the physician, the lawyer, the clergyman, the artist, the engineer, the business man, will be benefited by an understanding of the workings of the human mind, of the laws of human thinking, and of the principles of human conduct. it is not absolutely necessary, however, in our opinion, that separate classes specially designed for the different professions be formed in the colleges; after all, it is the same human mind that operates in all the fields of human activity, and a knowledge of mental life in general will serve the purposes of every vocation. doubtless, courses in psychology, logic, and ethics, for example, might be offered having in view the particular needs of prospective members of the various callings, but such courses would, in order to meet the situation, presuppose an acquaintance with the respective professional fields in question which only students well along in their professional studies could be expected to possess. courses of this character might profitably be given for the benefit of professional students who have already taken the introductory subjects necessary to their proper understanding. =introduction of philosophy in the college course= it is not easy to determine the most favorable period in a student's college career at which philosophical subjects should be taught. the more mature the student is, the more successful the instruction is apt to be; but this may be said of many other studies. there is no reason why an intelligent freshman may not begin the study of psychology and logic and perhaps of some other introductory philosophical branches; but as a rule better results may be obtained by admitting only such persons to these classes as have familiarized themselves with university methods. =problems of philosophy and the development of thought to be emphasized, rather than the historical sequence= we should recommend that every student in the college devote at least three hours a week for four terms to the study of psychology, logic, ethics, and the history of philosophy. in case not all these fundamental courses can be taken, the student will most likely derive the greatest benefit by giving a year to the study of the history of philosophy, or one term to the introduction to philosophy, where he has only that much time at his disposal. it seems easier, however, to arouse a philosophical interest in the average student through a study of the basal philosophical questions from the standpoint of contemporaneous thinking than through the study of the history of philosophy. he is generally lacking in the historic sense, and is apt to be wearied and even confused by the endless procession of systems. this is particularly the case when the teacher fails to emphasize sufficiently the progressive nature of philosophical thinking in its history, when he regards this as a mere succession of ideas rather than as a more or less logical unfolding of problems and solutions--as a continuous effort on the part of the universal mind, so to speak, to understand itself and the world. a course in the introduction to philosophy acquainting the student with the aims of philosophy and its relation to other fields of study, and placing before him an account of the most important problems of metaphysics and epistemology as well as of the solutions which have been offered by the great thinkers, together with such criticisms and suggestions as may stimulate his thought, will awaken in him a proper appreciation of a deeper study of the great systems and lead him to seek light from the history of philosophy. =methods of instruction= the place and relative worth of the various methods of instruction in the province of philosophy will, of course, depend, among other things, upon the character of the particular subject taught and the size and quality of the class. in nearly all the introductory philosophical branches in which the classes are large the lecture method will prove a valuable auxiliary. in no case, however, should this method be employed exclusively; and in formal logic, it should be used rather sparingly. ample opportunity should always be given in smaller groups for raising questions and discussing important issues with a view to clearing up obscure points, overcoming difficulties, developing the student's powers of thought, and enabling him to exercise his powers of expression. it is also essential that the student be trained in the difficult art of reading philosophical works. it is wise as a rule to refer him to a good textbook, which should be carefully studied, to passages or chapters in other standard manuals, and in historical study to the writings of the great masters. and frequent opportunity to express himself in the written word must be afforded him; to this end written reports giving the thought of an author in the student's own language, occasional critical essays, and written examinations appealing not only to his memory but to his intelligence should be required during the term. such exercises keep the student's interest alive, increase his stock of knowledge, develop maturity and independence of thought, and create a sense of growing intellectual power. the written tests encourage members of the class to review the work gone over and to discuss with one another important phases of it; in the effort to organize their knowledge they obtain a much better grasp of the subject than would have been possible without such an intensive re-appraisal of the material. =logic to be related to the intellectual life of the student= in the course on formal logic a large part of the time should be spent in examining and criticizing examples of the processes of thought studied (definitions, arguments, methods employed in reaching knowledge) and in applying the principles of correct thinking in written discourses. it is a pity that we have no comprehensive work containing the illustrative material needed for the purpose. as it is, the teacher will do well to select his examples from scientific works, speeches, and the textbooks used in other classes. as every one knows, nothing is so likely to deaden the interest and to make the study of logic seem trivial as the use of the puerile examples found in many of the older treatises. with the proper material this subject can be made one of the most interesting and profitable courses in the curriculum,--in spite of what its modern detractors may say. =students to be familiarized with sources and original writings of the leading philosophers= in the history of philosophy the lectures and textbook should be supplemented by the reading of the writings of the great philosophers. wherever it is possible, the learner should be sent to the sources themselves. it will do him good to finger the books and to find the references; and by and by he may be tempted to read beyond the required assignment--a thing greatly to be encouraged, and out of the question so long as he limits himself to some one's selections from the writings of the philosophers. in the advanced courses the research method may be introduced; special problems may be assigned to the student who has acquired a knowledge of the fundamentals, to be worked out under the guidance of the instructor. =lecture method should arouse dynamic interest and a desire to master the problems of philosophy= in the lecture intended for beginners the teacher should seek to arouse in his hearers an interest in the subject and the desire to plunge more deeply into it. he should not bewilder the student with too many details and digressions but present the broad outlines of the field, placing before him the essentials and leaving him to fill in the minutiæ by a study of the books of reference. each lecture ought to constitute an organic whole, as it were, in which the different parts are held together by a central idea; and its connection with the subject matter of the preceding lectures should be kept before the hearer's mind. all this requires careful and conscientious preparation on the part of the teacher, who must understand the intellectual quality of his class and avoid "shooting over their heads" as well as going to the other extreme of aiming below the level of their mental capacities. lecturing that is more than mere entertainment is an art which young instructors sometimes look upon as an easy acquisition and which older heads, after long years of experience, often despair of ever mastering. the lecture aims to do what books seldom accomplish--to infuse life and spirit into the subject; and this ideal a living personality may hope to realize where a dead book fails. =how to secure active participation by students through lecture method= in order, however, that the philosophical lecture may not fail of its purpose, the hearer must be more than a mere listener; he must bring with him an alert mind that grasps meanings and can follow thought-sequences. and he cannot keep his attention fixed upon the discourse and understand the relations of its parts unless other senses coöperate with the sense of hearing and unless the motor centers are called into play also. he should carefully cultivate the art of taking notes, an accomplishment in which the average student is sadly lacking and to acquire which he needs the assistance of the instructor, which he seldom receives. an examination of the student's notebook frequently reveals such a woeful lack of discrimination on the writer's part that one is led to doubt the wisdom of following this method at all; wholly unimportant things are set down in faithful detail and essential ones wholly ignored. the hour spent in the lecture room, however, can and should be made a fruitful means of instruction, one that will awaken processes of thought and leave its mark. but in order to get the best result, the student should be urged to study his notes and the books to which he has been referred while the matters discussed in the lecture are still fresh in his mind; he will be able to clear up points he did not fully grasp, see connections that have escaped him, understand the force of arguments which he missed; and he will assume a more independent and critical attitude toward what he has heard than was possible on the spur of the moment, when he was driven on and could not stop and reflect. at home, in the quiet of his study, he can organize the material, see the parts of the discourse in their relations to each other, and re-create the whole as it lived and moved in the mind of the teacher. in doing this work he is called on to exercise his thinking and takes an important step forward. it is for this reason that i am somewhat skeptical of the value of the syllabus prepared by the teacher for the use of classes in philosophy,--it does for the student what he should do for himself. whatever value the syllabus may have in other fields of study, its use in the philosophical branches ought to be discouraged. the great weakness of the lecture method lies in its tendency to relieve the hearer of the necessity of doing his own thinking, to leave him passive, to feed him with predigested food; and this defect is augmented by providing him with "helps" which rob him of the benefit and pleasure of putting the pieces of the puzzle-picture together himself. however, even at its best, the lecture method, unless supplemented in the ways already indicated, runs the danger of making the student an intellectual sponge, a mere absorber of knowledge, or a kind of receptacle for professors to shoot ideas into. as was said before, the student must cultivate the art of reading books and of expressing his thoughts by means of the spoken and written word. at the early stages and in some fields of philosophical study, however, the reading of many books may confuse the beginner and leave his mind in a state of bewilderment. it is indispensable that he acquire the working concepts and the terminology of the subject, and to this end it is generally wise to limit his reading until he has gained sufficient skill in handling his tools, as it were. in the elementary courses many members of the class will be unable to do more than follow the lectures and study the textbook; the more gifted ones, however, should be encouraged to extend the range of their reading under the guidance of the instructor. =organization of undergraduate courses in philosophy= an answer to the question concerning the desired sequence of courses in philosophy will depend upon many considerations,--upon one's conception of philosophy and of the various subjects generally embraced under it, upon one's notion of the aims of philosophical instruction, upon one's estimate of the difficulties encountered by the student in the study of the different branches of it, and so on. there is wide divergence of opinion among thinkers on all these points. philosophy is variously conceived as metaphysics, as theory of knowledge, as the science of mind (_geisteswissenschaft_), as the science of values (_werttheorie_), or as all of these together. logic is conceived by some thinkers as dependent upon psychology, by others as the presupposition of _all_ the sciences, including psychology. ethics is regarded both as a branch of psychology, or as dependent upon psychology, and as an independent study having nothing whatever to do with psychology. psychology itself is treated both as a natural science, its connection with philosophy being explained as a historical survival, and as the fundamental study upon which all the other subjects of the philosophical department must rest. where there is such a lack of agreement, it will not be easy to map out a sequential course of study that will satisfy everybody. even when philosophy is defined in the old historic sense as an attempt to reach a theory of the world and of life, men may differ as to the exact order in which the basal studies should be pursued. by many the history of philosophy is considered the best introduction to the entire field, while others would place it at the end of the series of fundamentals (psychology, logic, ethics), holding that a student who has studied these will be best equipped for a study that includes the history of their development. as a matter of fact, given students of mature mind and the necessary general preparation, either order may be justified. the average underclassman is, however, too immature to plunge at once into the study of the history of philosophy, and the present writer would recommend that it be preceded by courses in general psychology, logic and ethics. the average sophomore will have little difficulty in following courses in psychology and logic; and it is immaterial which of these he takes up first. the course in the theory of ethics should come in the junior or senior year and after the student has gained some knowledge of psychology (preferably from a book like stout's _manual of psychology_). and it would be an advantage if the course in ethics could be preceded by a study of the development of moral ideas, of the kind, let us say, presented in hobhouse's _morals in evolution_. for reasons already stated, the entire course in philosophy should be inaugurated by the introduction to philosophy. advanced courses in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge should come at the end and follow the history of philosophy. the ideal sequence would, therefore, be in the view of the present writer: introduction to philosophy, psychology or logic, the development of moral ideas, theory of ethics, history of philosophy, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge. it must be admitted, however, that a rigorous insistence upon this scheme in the american college, in which freedom of election is the rule, would impair the usefulness of the department of philosophy. few students will be willing to take all these subjects, and there is no reason why an intelligent junior or senior should not be admitted to a course in ethics or the history of philosophy without having first studied the other branches. a person possessing sufficient maturity of mind to pursue these studies will be greatly benefited by them even when he comes to them without previous preparation; and it would be a pity to deprive him of the opportunity to become acquainted with a field in which some of the ablest thinkers have exercised their powers. at all events, he should not leave college without having had a course in the history of philosophy, which will open up a new world to him and may perhaps stimulate him to read the best books in the other branches later on. it would not be possible, of course, to prescribe all the fundamental philosophical courses, even if it were desirable,--few faculties would go so far,--but it would be wise to require every candidate for the bachelor's degree to give at least six hours of his time (three hours a term, on the two-term basis) to one or two of the elementary courses, preferably in the sophomore year. ethics and the history of philosophy could then be chosen as electives and be followed by the more advanced and specialized courses. =moot questions: controversy between philosopher and psychologist= we have already touched upon some of the debatable questions in the sphere of philosophical education. the dispute concerning the place of psychology in the scheme of philosophical instruction has its cause in differences of view concerning the aims, nature, and methods of that subject. philosophers ask for an introductory course in psychology which shall serve as a propaedeutic to the philosophical studies, while teachers of education wish to have it treated in a way to throw light upon educational methods and theory. "some biologists treat mental phenomena as mere correlates of physiological processes.... others, including a number of psychologists also, regard psychological phenomena as fully explicable in terms of behavior, and as constituting therefore a phase of biological science." the committee of the american psychological association on the academic status of psychology recommends "that the association adopt the principle that the undergraduate psychological curriculum in every college or university, great or small, should be planned from the standpoint of psychology and in accordance with psychological ideals, rather than to fit the needs and meet the demands of some other branch of learning."[ ] this declaration of principle might lead to peace between the philosophers and the psychologists if there were agreement concerning the "psychological ideals" in accordance with which the subject is to be studied. the desideratum of the philosophers is a psychology which will give the student an understanding of the various phases of mental life; but they do not believe that this can be reached by an exclusive use of the natural-scientific method. the objection of some psychologists, that the philosophers wish to inject metaphysics into the study of mental processes, is met by the rejoinder that the natural-scientific psychology is itself based upon an unconscious metaphysics, and a false one at that. what the philosophers desire is psychological courses which will do full justice to the facts of the mental life and not falsify them to meet the demands of a scientific theory or method--courses of the kind given in european universities by men whose reputation as psychologists is beyond suspicion. =divergent views as to nature of introductory course in philosophy= we have likewise alluded, in this chapter, to the controversy over the need and nature of an introductory course in philosophy. of those who favor such a philosophical propaedeutic some recommend the history of philosophy, others an introduction to philosophy of the type described in the preceding pages. some teachers regard as the ideal course a study of the evolving attitudes of the individual toward the world, after the manner of hegel's phenomenology of the spirit; some the philosophy of history; some _kulturgeschichte_, that is, the study of "the evolution of science, morality, art, religion, and political life,--in short, the history of institutions"; some the study of the great literatures; and some would seek the approach to the subject through the religious interest.[ ] it is plain that the history of philosophy will receive help from all these sources; and a wise teacher will make frequent use of them. nor can the course in the introduction to philosophy afford to ignore them; it will do well to lay particular stress upon the philosophical attitudes, the embryonic philosophies which are to be found in the great literatures, in the great religions, in science, and in the common sense of mankind. wherever the human mind is at work, there philosophical conceptions,--world-views, crude or developed,--play their part; and they form the background of the lives of peoples as well as of individuals. in the systems of the great thinkers they are formulated and made more or less consistent; but everywhere they are the result of the mind's yearning to understand the meaning of life in its manifold expressions. when the student comes to see that philosophy is simply an attempt to do what mankind has always been doing and will always continue to do, in a rough way, that it is "only an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently,"--to continue the process of thinking to the bitter end,--his attitude toward it will be one of intelligent interest and respect. but not one of these subjects taken by itself will serve the purpose of an introductory course. =the "case method" in the teaching of philosophy= another moot question is concerned with the use of the "case method," employed in law instruction, in ethics. the case method seeks to know what the moral law is by studying the moral judgments of society; or, more definitely, to quote the words of professor coxe,[ ] one of its champions: "to discover, if possible, a law running through the judgments _which society has made through its duly appointed officials_." "historical cases, properly attested, alone give us the means of objective judgment." there can be no doubt that this method will prove serviceable, if judiciously applied; but its exclusive use either as a method of study or as a method of instruction,--even in an introductory course in ethics,--is not to be recommended.[ ] the student will not gain an adequate conception of morality from a study of the varying and often contradictory "historical cases," much less from a study of the judgments which society has made "through its duly appointed officials." the legal "case" literature of our country does indeed furnish valuable and interesting material for ethical study, but it would require a riper mind than that of a beginner to discover and to evaluate the moral principles which lie embodied in it. =testing the results of instruction= the problem of testing the effectiveness of one's teaching presents few difficulties in classes which are small and in which individual instruction is possible. wherever teacher and student come in close personal contact and opportunity is afforded for full and frequent discussions as well as for written exercises, it is a comparatively easy matter to judge the mental caliber of the members of the class and to determine the extent of their progress. in the case of the large classes, however, which crowd into the lecture halls of the modern university, the task is not so simple. here every effort should be made to divide such concourses of students into numerous sections, small enough to enable the instructor to become acquainted with those under his charge and to watch their development. the professor who gives the lectures should take one or more of these sections himself in order that he may understand the minds to which he is addressing himself, and govern himself accordingly. the tests should consist of discussions, essays, and written and oral examinations; by means of these it is not impossible to determine whether the aims of the subject have been realized in the instruction or not. but the tasks set should be of such a character as to test the student's power of thought, his ability to understand what he has read and heard with all its implications, his ability to assume a critical attitude toward what he has assimilated, and his ability to try his intellectual wings in independent flights. a person who devotes himself faithfully to his work during the entire term, who puts his mind upon it, takes an active part in the discussions, and is encouraged to express himself frequently by means of the written word, will surely give some indication of the progress he has made, even in a written examination--it being a fair assumption that one who knows will somehow succeed in revealing his knowledge. care must be taken, of course, that the test is not a mere appeal to the memory; it is only when the examination makes demands upon the student's intelligence that it can be considered a fair measure of the value of philosophical instruction. it must not be forgotten, however, that the examination may reveal not only the weakness of the learner but the weakness of the teacher. it is possible for a student, even in philosophy, to make a fine showing in a written examination by repeating the words of the master which he does not understand, without having derived any real benefit from the course. the teacher may set an examination which will hide the deficiencies of the instruction, and the temptation to do this in large classes which he knows have not been properly taught is great. frank thilly _cornell university_ bibliography coxe, g. c. the case method in the study and teaching of ethics. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. x, , page . davies, a. e. education and philosophy, _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. vi, , page . hinman, e. l. the aims of an introductory course in philosophy. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. vii, , page . hÖfler, a. _zur propädeutik-frage._ hÖfler, a. zur reform der philosophischen propädeutik. _zeitschrift für die Österreichischen gymnasien_, vol. l, , page . hudson, j. w. hegel's conception of an introduction to philosophy. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. vi, , page . ---- an introduction to philosophy through the philosophy of history. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods._ vol. vii, , page . ---- the aims and methods of introduction courses: a questionnaire. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. ix, , page . lehmann, r. _der deutsche unterricht_, pages - . leuchtenberger, g. _die philosophische propädeutik auf den höheren schulen._ overstreet, h. a. professor coxe's "case method" in ethics. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. x, , page . paulsen, f. _german universities and university studies._ english translation by frank thilly and w. w. elwang, book iii and book iv. ---- _ueber vergangenheit und zukunft der philosophie im gelehrten unterricht, central-organ für die interessen des realschulwesens_, vol. xiv, , page . ---- _geschichte des gelehrten unterrichts_, conclusion. report of the committee on the academic status of psychology, published by the american psychological association, december, . tufts, j. h. garman as a teacher. _journal of philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods_, vol. iv, , page . weissenfels, o. die philosophie auf dem gymnasium. _zeitschrift für das gymnasialwesen_, vol. liii, , page . wendt, g. _didaktik und methodik des deutschen unterrichts, handbuch der erziehungs- und unterrichtslehre für höhere schulen._ footnotes: [ ] the sentences quoted are taken from the report of this committee, which was published in december, . [ ] see the articles of j. w. hudson and others in the bibliography. [ ] see bibliography. [ ] see professor overstreet's discussion mentioned in the bibliography. xv the teaching of ethics =interest in the study of ethics determined by the aim of instruction= nowhere does academic tediousness work a more dire mischief than in the teaching of ethics. it is bad to have students forever shun the best books because of poor instruction in literature; the damage is worse when it is the subject of moral obligation which they associate with only the duller hours of their college life. not that the aim of a course in ethics is to afford a number of entertaining periods. the object rather is to help our students realize that here is a subject which seeks to interpret for them the most important problems of their own lives present and to come. where this end is kept in view, the question of interesting them is settled. a sincere interpretation of life always takes the interest when once it is grasped that this is what is really being interpreted. =viewpoint in the past= the procedure in the past (and still quite common) was to introduce the subject by way of its history. a book like sidgwick's _history of ethics_ was studied, with supplements in the shape of the students' own reading of the classics, or lectures, with quotations, by the teacher. that this method was frequently of much service is undeniable. teachers there are with rare gifts of inspiration who can put freshness into any course which ordinary teachers leave hopelessly arid. but this should not blind us to the fact that certain modes of procedure are in general more likely to be fruitful than others. =the business of right living the aim of ethics teaching= these methods depend upon the aim; and the aim, we venture to hold, should be eminently practical. the content of ethics is not primarily a matter of whether kant's judgments are sounder than mill's or spencer's. its subject is human life and the business of right living: how should people--real people, that is, not textbook illustrations--live with one another? this is the essential concern of our subject matter, and in it our student is intimately and practically involved. charged with the fact, he may deny the impeachment. he refuses to worry over the merits of hedonism versus rigorism, the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, or the claim of ethics to be called a science. ethics, that is, as an intellectual discipline through the survey of historic disputations is indeed remote from the concerns that touch his life. but all the time there is no subject of greater interest when approached from the side of its bearing on practical problems. consider the earnestness with which the student will discuss with his friends such questions as these: what sense is there in a labor strike? is a conscientious objector justified in refusing military service? why should any one oppose easy divorce laws? may a lawyer defend a rogue whom he knows to be guilty? can one change the nature with which he was born? is violence justified in the name of social reform? if what is right in one age or place is wrong in another, is it fair to object when moral laws are broken? if a practice like prostitution is common, what makes it wrong? these do not sound like the questions likely to receive a welcome hearing in the classroom; but it is precisely upon the interest in such topics as these that the course in ethics should build; for its subject is right living, a matter in which the student may indeed be assumed to feel a genuine concern. if the questions that he wants answered are not all as broad in their significance as the foregoing, there are others of a more immediate personal kind which arise in his life as a student, as a friend, as a son and brother, problems in which standards of fair play and "decency" are involved, and upon which it may be taken for granted that he has done some thinking, howsoever crude. these interests are invaluable. out of them the finer product is to be created in the shape of better standards, higher ideals, and habits of moral thoughtfulness, leading in turn to still better standards and still worthier conduct. the course in ethics should be practical in the sense that both its starting point and its final object are found in the student's management of his life. =illustrations of the problems of right living= consider, for example, how his interest in problems of friendship may be used as the point of departure for an extremely important survey over general questions of right relationship. just because friendship is so vital a concern of adolescent years, he can be led to read what aristotle, kant, emerson, have to say upon this subject and be introduced as well to that larger life of ideal relationships from which these writers regard the dealings of friends. the topic of right attitudes toward a friend broadens out readily into such considerations as treating persons aright for their own sake or regarding them as ends _per se_, a dead abstraction when approached as it is by kant, but a living reality when the students get aristotle's point about magnanimous treatment of friends. they can then proceed by way of contrast to note, for example, how this magnanimity was limited to friends in the upper levels of athenian society, and went hand in hand with approval of slave labor and other exploitations which a modern conscience forbids. to give sharper edge to the conception of man as deserving right treatment for his own sake, the class might go on to examine other notable violations of personality in past and present; e.g., slavery (read for instance sparr's _history of the african slave trade_) or the more recent cruelties toward the natives in the rubber regions of the congo and the amazon. reference may also be made (without undue emphasis) to the white-slave traffic of today and the fact be noted that a right sense of chivalry will keep a man from partnership in the degradation which creates both the demand for white slavery and ultimately its supply. we mention this to show how a common practical interest can be employed to introduce the students to so fundamental an ethical conception as the idea of inviolable human worth. it may, no doubt, be highly unconventional for them to begin with a discussion of friendship and after a few periods find themselves absorbed in these other questions; but if care is exercised to sum up and to emphasize the big conceptions underlying the topic, we may be sure that their grasp of the subject will be no less firm than under the older method. their acquaintance with a study requiring hard, abstract thinking will surely not be hurt, to say the least, by an introduction which is concrete and practical. or take another matter of real concern to the student at this period of his life. he is certain to be giving some thought to the matter of his future vocation; and here again is a topic which, properly handled, broadens out into the most far-reaching inquiries. it is to be regretted that as yet the vocational-guidance movement has been occupied in the main with external features--comparing jobs, making objective tests of efficiency, and so on. the central ethical conceptions are usually slighted. that one's vocation is a prime influence in the shaping of personality in oneself, in one's fellow workers, in the public served (or disserved) by one's work, in the world of nations in so far as war and peace are connected with commerce and other interchange of vocational products--all this is matter for the teacher who wishes the ethics course to work over into better living.[ ] nor again, as will be noted later in the chapter, need the claims of the subject as a scholarly discipline suffer from such treatment. questions of the nature of moral standards, of the distinction between expedient and right, etc., can be taken up more profitably when, instead of dealing with the academic questions forming the stock in trade of most textbooks, the course examines a few vocations, let us say, business, teaching, art, law, medicine,--in the light of such standards as these: a history of the calling; e.g., what has it contributed to the elevation of mankind, to the development of the arts and sciences, and to specific kinds of human betterment? what is the best service it can accomplish today? what traits does it require in those who pursue it? what traits is it likely to encourage in them for better and for worse? report on great leaders in the calling, with special reference to what their work made of them. what are the darker sides of the picture? what efforts are being made today to raise the moral code in this vocation? sum up the ideal rewards. we do not mean, of course, that the only problems are those which center around the demands of today for a more just economic and social order. on the contrary, we believe that the movement for social justice is greatly in need of precisely that appreciation of the claims of moral personality which it is the main business of ethical study to promote. but we shall never get our students to profit from their work in social ethics, or in ethical theory, or in any branch of the subject whatever, unless we keep fresh and close the contact with their own experiences and ambitions. indeed, we venture to assert that unless this connection is kept unbroken, the subject is not ethics at all but an abstraction which ought to take some other name. ethics deals with human volitions; but the latter term is meaningless to the student save as he interprets it by his own experiences in the preference of better ways to lower. he knows the difficulties that arise in his own group-associations,--his home or his class or his club, for example,--the conflicts of ambitions, the readiness to shirk one's share of common responsibility, the discordant prides and appetites of one sort and another which lead to overt injustices. all these should be used to throw light upon the living moral problems of group-life in the vocations, in the civic world, in the international order. temperamentally, to be sure, the teacher may be inclined to handle his subject in what he prefers to regard as academic detachment. but where the subject is ethics and not dead print, complete aloofness is out of the question. there would be no textbooks in ethics if the men whose convictions are there recorded had not grappled earnestly with problems of vital moment to their day and generation. the crucial questions raised by a changing athenian democracy were no matters of air-born speculation to socrates and plato and aristotle. nor is it an accident that the philosopher who so sought to vindicate the worth of man as an end _per se_ should have sent from his apparently isolated study in königsberg his glad acclaim of the french revolution. the abounding interest of the english utilitarians in the economics, the politics, the social reform, of the nineteenth century needs no comment. there are texts for study today because the men who wrote them were keenly concerned about a nobler mode of life for mankind. to invite the student to share their reflections without expecting worthier conduct is to ignore the essential purpose by which those reflections were prompted. =governing aim in ethics teaching= hence our first recommendation--that the _content of the ethics courses be determined by the principal aim of so interpreting the experiences and interests of the student as to stimulate worthier behavior through a better understanding of the general problem of right human relationships_. our second recommendation as to aims is suggested by certain extremes in the practice of today. reference to problems of immediate concern does not mean that ultimate considerations are to be shelved. indeed, it must rather be stressed that such discussions miss their best object, _if they fail to lead to searching reflection upon ultimate standards_. the temptation to forego such inquiry today is strong. in their desire to be practical and up-to-date, many teachers are altogether too ready to rest the case for moral obligation upon a kind of easy-going hedonism, the fallacy of provisionalism, as professor felix adler calls it. tangible "goods" like happiness or "social values" are held up as standards, as if these values were ends in themselves and the problem of an ultimate human worth were irrelevant. it may very well be a modest attitude to say that we can no longer busy ourselves with the nature of ultimate ends and that we can best employ our energies in trying to define the various goods which contribute now and here to human betterment. let the effort be made, by all means. but when the last of empirical goods have been examined and appraised (assuming for the moment that we can indeed appraise without possessing ultimate norms) the cardinal question still waits for answer: to what are all these goods instrumental? what kind of life is best? what is it that permits man, with all his faults, his sordid appetites, his meannesses and gross dishonors, to hold his head erect as one yet worthy of the tribute implied in the fact that we have duties toward him? an answer satisfying to all may never be reached; but to evade these questions is to abdicate the teacher's function. many young people are led by the biologic teachings of the day to regard man as the utterly helpless product of his environment. or they are so impressed with the obvious and immediate needs of whole masses for better food, better homes, greater opportunities for culture, that they do not stop to ask whether these goods are worth while in themselves, or if not, what is the deeper purpose to which they should minister. a conception of personality is needed, sufficiently exalted to permit the various immediate utilities to find their due place as tributes to the ideal excellence latent in man; and on the other hand there is need for a view of the spiritual life free from the misuse to which that term is put by the various cults evoked by reaction against modern mechanism. painstaking inquiry into the grounds upon which the assurance of human dignity can justify itself, has never been more urgently required.[ ] =ideals and tendencies in ethics teaching= let us beware of surrendering to the common but often pernicious demand of our swift-moving america that in order to receive consideration a new idea should prove itself capable of yielding immediate dividends. there seems to be a certain hesitancy today among some in our educated classes about speaking of "ideals." ideals connote a long look ahead. they imply a sense that there is something perfect even though the steps toward embodying or approximating it will be many and arduous, perhaps discouragingly hard. they betoken the likelihood of appearing before men as the victims of ultimately unworkable dreams. in refreshing contrast is the seeming practicability of encouraging present tendencies. your tendency is no far-off projection of mere thought; it is something solid and "real," here and now, respected at the bank, in the newspaper office, and other meeting places of those whose heads are hard. tendencies turn elections; ideals carry no such palpable witness of their power. "hence let us study tendencies." this characterization is perhaps extreme, but the danger to which it refers is all too frequent. a strike, for instance, sets most of us to discussing ways by which this particular disturbance can be ended quickly. it is only the few who are willing to hold in mind both terms of the problem, namely the procedure for tomorrow morning and the positive ideal toward which all our vocational life should set its face even if the distant tomorrow is still so far ahead. so of our conceptions of political life. a given election may indeed involve an immediate moral issue; but even the issue of next month can be faced properly only when it is related to an ideal of public life which may have to wait long years for appreciation by the majority. nothing is more necessary in a democracy than a leadership trained in the long forward look, trained in distinguishing morally right and morally wrong from expedient, and best from merely better, trained in the courage to champion a distant ideal in the face of clamor to accept some inferior but belligerently present substitute. in short, the student should be offered every encouragement to thinking out the ultimate obligations of his own life and of his various groups and to reaching the conviction that there is such a reality as a permanent human worth, a fundamentally right way for men and women to seek, a rightness whose authority is undiminished by the blunders of the human mind in trying to define it. an ever more earnest attempt to find that way, and to find it by practice illumined by all the knowledge that can be brought to bear, should be the leading object. not a series of definitions and quotations, nor yet a little information about the social movements of our time, but a truer understanding of life as the result of interpreting it in terms of the obligation to create right human adjustments--such an aim saves college ethics alike from dryness and from superficial attempts to sprinkle interest over a subject of inherent and intense practical importance. it is not essential that an introductory course in ethics should enter into the philosophy of religion. this may be left to other agencies, like the church, or to later courses, with every confidence that the outcome will be sound if mind and soul and will (to use the old formula) are first enlisted in behalf of noble conduct. whatever thinking the student may do along these lines will be the better if its nurture is drawn first from moral thinking and moral practice.[ ] =course in ethics prescribed, and early in college course= from the foregoing it follows that the ethics course should be taken by all the students. the earlier it can be given the better, inasmuch as its demands upon their conduct apply to all the years of their life, and because the whole career at college is more likely to benefit from beginning early such reflections as this study particularly invites. =sequence determined by development of the student= the sequence of courses will perhaps be best determined by remembering the need of following the natural growth of the student. experiences come first and then the interpretations. hence the insistence upon the practical content of the introductory courses. theory and history should follow, not precede. nobody is interested in the history or the theory of a thing unless he is interested in the thing itself. furthermore, we must bear in mind the needs of those students who are not likely to care enough for the more theoretical aspects to continue the subject. if the introductory course is to be all that they take, obviously the more practical we can make it the better. =in teaching ethics follow the maxim from the concrete to the abstract= as to method, a variety of profitable ways abounds if only the contact with life is kept close and the principles studied are tested by their outcome in the life which the student knows best. in general, the best procedure is to work back from concrete instances to the principles underlying the problem, formulate the principles and test them in other fields. our illustrative strike, for instance, can be used to throw light upon the actual and the ideal principles involved in human relationship in some such manner as the following: =method of procedure illustrated= what do the employers want? what do they mean by liberty? what were the circumstances under which mill formulated his principle of "liberty within the limits of non-infringement?" what have been the consequences in america of reliance upon this formula? why does it break down in practice? compare it with the theory of the balance of power in international relations. what is likely to be the effect of the possession of power upon the possessor himself? restate the ideal of liberty in terms of duty, not of privilege. what are the obstacles to the fulfillment of such an ideal in industry? in homes? what are the personal obstacles to clear understanding of the meaning of right? what do the workers want? examine each of their demands--shorter hours, more pay, recognition of the union, etc. what should the granting of these demands contribute to their lives? give instances to show whether "better off" means better persons or not. compare the working man's use of the word "liberty" with that of the employer. why do workers often become oppressors when they themselves become employers? what is the difference between demanding a redress of your grievance and making a moral demand? what makes the cry of fraternity as uttered by the workers repugnant to those who otherwise would accept fraternity as an ideal? how would you formulate the ideal for the vocational life of the factory worker? apply it to other vocations--journalism, law, teaching. sum up the ideal rewards of work. make tentative definitions of liberty, rights, duty, justice. * * * * * each of the questions mentioned above--and many more will occur in the course of the discussion--furnishes occasion for extended considerations that call upon the student for scholarly gathering of facts, for close thinking, and--not least--for reflection upon his own experiences and volitions. other problems will suggest themselves. it is obvious how the interest of the student in prison reform, for example, can be employed in like manner as a motive to searching reflection upon questions of moral responsibility. the principle that punishment should be a means of awaking in the offender the consciousness of a self which can and should hold itself to account despite the magnitude of its temptations is of special usefulness, in the years when a broadening altruism (and we might add, a tendency to self-pity) is likely to lead to loose notions of personal obligation. =place of the textbook in ethics teaching= the use of a textbook is a minor matter. to prevent the courses from running off into mere talk--and even ethics classes are not averse to "spontaneous" recitation on their own part or to monologues by the teacher--a textbook may be required, with, let us say, monthly reports or examinations. so much depends, however, upon the enthusiasm of the instructor that here particularly recommendations can be only of the most general kind. some of the most effective work in this subject is being done by teachers who forget the textbook for weeks at a time in order to push home a valuable inquiry suggested by an unforeseen problem raised in the course of the discussion. others use no textbooks at all. some outline the year's work in a series of cases or problems with questions to be answered in writing after consulting selected passages in the classics or in current literature or in both.[ ] this method has the advantage of laying out the whole year's work beforehand and of guaranteeing that the student comes to the classroom with something more than a facility in unpremeditated utterance. it is generally found to be of greater interest because it follows the lines of his own ordinary thinking--first the problem and then the attempt to find the principles that will help to solve it. =moral concepts deepened by participation in social or philanthropic endeavors= more important than any of these details of technique is the need of helping the student to clarify his thinking by engaging in some practical moral endeavor. the broadening and deepening of the altruistic interests is a familiar feature of adolescent life. the instructor in ethics, in the very interest of his own subject, is the one who should take the lead in encouraging these expressions, not only because of the general obligation of the college to make the most of aptitudes which, neglected in youth, may never again be so vigorous, but also because of the truth in aristotle's dictum that insight is shaped by conduct. hence the work in ethics should be linked up wherever possible with student self-government and other participation in the management of the college, and with philanthropics like work in settlements or in social reform groups or cosmopolitan societies. for the students of finer grain it is eminently worth the trouble to form clubs to intensify the spirit of the members by activities more pointedly directed to the refining of human relationships. they might engage in activities in which the task of elevating the personality is specially marked, that is, in problems which have to do with mutual interpretation--e.g., black folk and white, foreign and native stocks in america, delinquents and the community, immigrant parents and unsympathetic children. they might organize clubs for one or more of these purposes, for discussing intimately the problems of personal life, for public meetings on the ethics of the vocations and on the more distinctly ethical phases of political and international progress. such organizations can be made to do vastly more good for their members then the average debating society, with its usual premium on mere forensic skill, or the fraternity, with its encouragement of snobbishness. the wholesome thing about the spirit of fraternity should be set to work upon some such creative activities as we have mentioned. not only does the comradeship strengthen faith in right doing, but these practical endeavors offer a notable help to the deepening, extending, and clarifying of that interest in moral progress without which there can be none of the intelligent leadership for which our democracy looks to its colleges. =peculiar difficulty of applying usual test to courses in ethics= to test how far the subject has been of value to the student is unusually difficult. his interest in the discussions is by no means an unfailing index. there are those who may be both eager and skilled in the intellectual combat incidental to the course but whose lives remain untouched for the better. the worthier outcome is hard to trace. it is quite possible for the teacher to take credit for the instilling of an ideal whose generation was due to some agency wholly unknown, perhaps even to the student himself. on the other hand, the best results may take years for overt appearance. in the nature of the case, their more intimate expressions can never be recorded. moreover, students vary in the force of character which they bring with them to the study. a lad whose home training has been deficient may take more time than the best teacher can give in order to reach the degree of excellence to which others among his classmates ascend more quickly. or a lad whom the course has moved with a desire to take up some philanthropic endeavor may hesitate to pursue it through lack of the necessary gift or failure in self-confidence. the forces which enter into the making of character are so complex, including as they do not only acquisitions of new moral standards, but temperamental qualities, early training, potent example, physical stamina, dozens of accidental circumstances, that it is unfair to use the tests applicable, let us say, to a course in engineering. hence we must be beware of testing the value of the work by immediate results. something may be gathered by having the students write confidentially what they think the course has done for them and where it could be improved. this they can do both at the end of the course and years later when time has brought perspective. but tests are of minor importance. the ethical shortcomings of our time, the constant need of our students for ever finer standards, convey challenge enough. even though the obvious results fall short of our hopes, we can make the most of our resources with every assurance that they are amply needed. are young men more likely to be the better for setting time aside to obtain with the help of an earnest student of life a clearer insight into the principles of the best living? if they are the courses are justified, even though some who take them can show little immediate profit. henry neumann, ph.d. _ethical culture school, new york_ footnotes: [ ] see adler: _the present world-crisis and its meaning_, chapter on "an ethical program of social reform": also _an ethical philosophy of life_, chapters , , , , . [ ] from this point of view the ethical justification for the war on the slum becomes: (_a_) to make possible for the slum-dweller the better performance of his various duties as parent, worker, citizen; (_b_) to drive home to all concerned the meaning of interdependence; (_c_) to clarify for all of us the ideals to which better living conditions should minister. there is every need today to further the conviction that the highest service we can perform for another is not to make him happier, but to help him make himself a better person through the better performance of his duties. [ ] note the emphasis placed by modern philosophy upon ethical value as the point of approach to the problem of godhead. [ ] professor sharp of wisconsin has found this method so serviceable that he has interested many teachers in his state and elsewhere in using it with high school students for purposes of moral instruction. see "a course in moral instruction for high schools," by f. c. sharp; _bulletin, university of wisconsin_. xvi the teaching of psychology =place of psychology in the curriculum= historically, as an offshoot, and rather a recent offshoot, from philosophy, psychology has been under the care of the department of philosophy in colleges and universities, foreign as well as american, and has been taught by professors concerned in part with the courses in philosophy. though this state of affairs still obtains to a considerable extent, the tendency is undoubtedly towards allowing psychology an independent position in the organization and curriculum of the college. in recent appointments, indeed, the affiliation of psychology with education has frequently been emphasized instead of its affiliation with philosophy, for the professional applications of psychology lie more in the field of education than elsewhere. as a required study, our science is more likely to find a place in the college for teachers than in the college of arts. but, on the other hand, the applications to medicine, business, and industry are increasing so rapidly in importance as to make it logical to maintain an independent position for the science. only in an independent position can the psychologist be free to cultivate the central body of his subject, the "pure" as distinguished from the applied science; and, with the multiplication of practical applications, it is more than ever important to center psychological teaching in the person of some one who is simply and distinctively a psychologist. =the introductory course to be general, not vocationally applied psychology= for a similar reason, psychologists are wont to insist that the introductory course in their subject, no matter for what class of students, with general or with professional aims, should be definitely a course in _psychology_ as distinguished from educational or medical or business psychology. illustrative material may very well be chosen with an eye to the special interests of a class of students, but the general principles should be the same for all classes, and should not be too superficially treated in the rush for practical applications. some years ago, a committee of the american psychological association was appointed to make a survey of the teaching of psychology in universities, colleges, and normal schools, and the report of this committee ( ), still the most important contribution to the pedagogy of the subject, emphasizes the concurrent view of psychologists to the effect just stated, that the study of psychology should begin with a course in the central body of doctrine. the psychological point of view must be acquired before intelligent application can be made, whether to practical pursuits or to other branches of study such as philosophy and the social sciences, to which psychology stands in the relation of an ancillary science. during the war, the applications of psychology in the testing and selection of men and training them for specified military and naval work, in rating officers, in morale and intelligence work, and in several other lines, became so important that it was decided to give psychology a place as an "allied subject" in the curriculum of the students' army training corps; and the report of the committee of psychologists that prepared the outline of a course for this purpose deserves attention as a contribution to the pedagogy of the subject. they proposed a course on "human action," to be free from questions of a speculative or theoretical nature and concentrated on matters relevant to military practice and the military uses of psychology. the aim was to enlist the student's practical concern at the very outset, and to give him the psychological point of view as applied to his problems as a member of the army and a prospective officer. in method, the course was to depend little on lectures, or even on extensive readings, and much on the student's own solution of practical psychological problems. evidently the psychologists who prepared this plan were driven by the emergency to abandon "academic" prepossessions in favor of a course in pure psychology as the necessary prerequisite to any study of applications; and it is quite possible that courses in psychology for different groups of students could be prepared that should follow this general plan and be intensely practical from the start. it would still remain true that the thorough psychologist should be the one to plan and conduct such courses. =the psychological point of view must be emphasized in the introductory course= the psychological point of view means attentiveness to certain matters that are neglected in the usual objective attitude toward things. it is identified by many with introspection, but there is at present considerable dissent from this doctrine, the dissenters holding that an objective type of observation of human behavior is distinctively psychological and probably more significant and fruitful than the introspective attitude. however this may be, both introspection and behavior study require attention to matters that are commonly disregarded. every one is of course interested in what people do, or at least in the outcome of their activities; but psychology is interested in the activities themselves, in how the outcome is reached rather than in the outcome itself. ordinarily, we are interested in the fact that an inventor has solved a problem, but regard it as rather irrelevant if he proceeds to tell us the mental process by which he reached the solution. we are interested in the fact that a child has learned to speak, but devote little thought to the question as to how he has learned. it is to bring such psychological questions to light and arouse intelligent interest in them, with some knowledge of the answers that have been found, that the psychologist is chiefly concerned when initiating beginners into his science. this primary aim is accomplished in the case of those students who testify, as some do, that the course in psychology has "opened their eyes" and made them see life in a different light than hitherto. =values of the study of psychology--cultural rather than disciplinary= whether this primary value of psychology is to be counted among the disciplinary or among the cultural values may be a matter of doubt. psychologists themselves have seldom made special claims in behalf of their science as a means of formal discipline, many of them, in fact, taking a very negative position with regard to the whole conception of such discipline. what psychology can give of general value is a point of view, and a habit of attentiveness to the mental factor. the need of some systematic attention to these matters often comes to light in the queer efforts at a psychology made by intelligent but uninstructed persons in the presence of practical problems involving the mental factor. =the practical value= besides this "cultural" value, and besides the special uses of psychology as a preparation for teaching and certain other professions, there is a very real and practical value to be expected from an understanding of the mental mechanism. since every one works with this mechanism, every one can make practical use of the science of it. most persons get on passably well, perhaps, without any expert knowledge of the machinery which they are running; yet the machine is not entirely "fool proof," by any means, but sometimes comes to grief from what is in essence a lack of psychological wisdom either in the person himself or in his close companions. mental hygiene, in short, depends on psychology. the college student, looking forward to a life of mental activity, is specially in a position to utilize information regarding the most economical working of the mental machine; and, as a matter of experience, some students are considerably helped in their methods of mental work by what they learn in the psychology class. among the results of recent investigation are many bearing on economy and efficiency of mental work. this value of psychology, it will be seen, is practical without being professional--except in so far as all educated men can be said to adopt the profession of mental engineer. much more emphasis than has been customary might well be laid on this side of the subject in elementary courses. =content of the introductory course in psychology= the content of the first course in psychology is just now undergoing a certain amount of revision. traditionally the aim has been, not so much, as in most other subjects, to initiate the student into a range of facts lying outside his previous experience, as to bring definitely to his attention facts lying within the experience of all, and to cause him to classify these so as to refer any given mental process to the class or classes where it belongs. this calls for definition, the making of distinctions, the analysis of complex facts, the use of a technical vocabulary, and in general for much more precision of statement than the student has been used to employ in speaking of such matters. some laws of mental action, verifiable within ordinary experience, are also brought to light in such a course, and some account of the neural mechanisms of mental life is usually included; but its chief accomplishment is in leading the student to attend to mental processes and gain a point of view that may remain his future possession. with the great expansion of psychological knowledge in recent decades, due to research by experimental and other empirical methods, it has become possible to give a course more informational in character and going quite beyond the range of the student's previous experience; and this new material is finding its way into elementary texts and courses. many of the results of research are not at all beyond the comprehension of the beginner; indeed, they are often more tangible than the distinctions and analyses that give the stamp to the traditional course. these empirical results also have the advantage, in many cases, of throwing light on the practical problems of mental health and efficiency; and some inclusion of such material is desirable if only to fit the needs of the considerable number of students who cannot become interested in a course of the traditional sort. practice in this matter is at present quite variable, some teachers basing the introductory course as far as possible on the results of experiment, and others adhering closely to the older plan. =methods of teaching psychology--practical exercises= there is certainly some advantage in keeping the first course untechnical. the student can then be set to observing for himself, instead of depending on books. many of the facts of psychology are so accessible, at least in a rough form, as to make the subject a good one for appealing to the spirit of independence in the student. some teachers are, in fact, accustomed to introduce each part of the subject by exercises, introspective or other, designed to bring the salient facts home to the student in a direct way, before he has become inoculated with the doctrine of the authorities. "the essential point is that the student be led to observe his own experience, to record his observation accurately--in a word, to psychologize; and to make the observation before, not after, discovering from book or from lecture what answers are expected to these questions. individual experiments should so far as possible be performed in like manner before the class discussion of typical results. in all cases the results of these introspections should be recorded in writing; representative records should be read and commented on in class; and the discussion based on them should form the starting point for textbook study and for lecture." the plan thus highly recommended by professor calkins[ ] she found not to be widely used at the time of her inquiry; a commoner practice was the assignment of reading for the student's first introduction to a given topic. this alternative plan is a line of less resistance; and it is also true that exercises in original observation by beginners in psychology are likely to be instructive mostly as evidence of the ineptness of the beginner in psychological observation. moreover, when the content of the course is informational and based on the results of research, preliminary exercises by the student are of rather limited value, though they still could serve a useful purpose in bringing forcibly to his attention the problems to be studied. the use of "exercises," somewhat analogous to the examples of algebra or the "originals" of geometry, is quite widespread in introductory courses in psychology, and several much-used textbooks offer sets of exercises with each chapter. several types are in vogue: ( ) some call for introspections, as, for example, "think of your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning--do you see it clearly as a scene before your mind's eye?" ( ) some call for a review and generalization of facts presumably already known, as "find instances of the dependence of character upon habit;" ( ) many consist of simple experiments demanding no special apparatus and serving to give a direct acquaintance with matters treated in the text, such as after-images or fluctuations of attention; and ( ) many call for the application of the principles announced in the text to special cases, the object being to "give the student some very definite thing to do" (thorndike), in doing which he will secure a firm hold of the principles involved. in general, teachers of psychology aim to "keep the student doing things, instead of merely listening, reading, or seeing them done" (seashore, , page ). in a few colleges, laboratory work of a simple character forms part of the introductory course, and in one or two the laboratory part is developed to a degree comparable with what is common in chemistry or biology. as a rule, however, considerations of time and equipment have prevented the introduction of real laboratory work into the first course in psychology. =classroom methods--the lecture= of classroom methods, perhaps all that are employed in other subjects find application also in psychology, some teachers preferring one and some another. the lecture method is employed with great success by some of the leaders, who devote much attention to the preparation of discourse and demonstrations. one professor (anonymous) is quoted[ ] as follows: "i must here interject my ideas on the lecture system. the lecture has a twofold advantage over the recitation. ( ) it is economical, since one man handles a large number of students; the method of recitation is extravagant. this fact alone will mean the retention of the lecture system, wherever it can possibly be employed with success. ( ) it is educationally the better method, for the average student and the average teacher. for the reconstruction of a lecture from notes means an essay in original work, in original thinking; while the recitation lapses all too readily into textbook rote and verbal repetition. "it is, nevertheless, true that sophomore students are on the whole inadequate to a lecture course. they cannot take notes; they cannot tear the heart out of a lecture. (they are also, i may add, inadequate to the reading of textbooks or general literature, in much the same way.) hence one has to supplement the lecture by syllabi, by lists of questions (indexes, so to speak, to the lectures), and by personal interviews.... "the sum and substance of my recommendations is that you provide a competently trained instructor, and let him teach psychology as he best can. what the student needs is the effect of an individuality, a personality; and the lecture system provides admirably for such effect." =the recitation= though the lecture system is used with great success by a number of professors, the general practice inclines more to the plan of oral recitations on assigned readings in one or more texts, and large classes are often handled in several divisions in order to make the recitation method successful. not infrequently a combination of lectures by the professor and recitations conducted by his assistants is the plan adopted, the lecturer to add impressiveness to the course, and the recitations to hold the student up to his work. written exercises, such as those already mentioned, are often combined with the oral recitation; and in some cases themes are to be written by the students. probably the seminar method, in which the subject is chiefly presented in themes prepared by the students, is never attempted in the introductory course. =class discussion= on the other hand, a number of successful teachers reject both the lecture and the recitation methods, and rely for the most part upon class discussions, with outside readings in the textbooks, and frequent written recitations as a check on the student's work. a champion of the discussion method writes as follows:[ ] "a teacher has not the right to spend any considerable part of the time of a class in finding out by oral questions ... whether or not the student has done the work assigned to him. the good student does not need the questions and is bored by the stumbling replies which he hears; and even the poor student does not get what he needs, which is either instruction _a deux_, or else a corrected written recitation.... not in this futile way should the instructor squander the short hours spent with his students. the purpose of these hours is twofold: first, to give to the students such necessary information as they cannot gain, or cannot so expediently gain, in some other way; second, and most important, to incite them to 'psychologize' for themselves. the first of these purposes is best gained by the lecture, the second by guided discussion. 'guided discussion' does not mean a reversal of the recitation process--an hour in which students ask questions in any order, and of any degree of relevancy and seriousness, which the instructor answers. on the contrary, the instructor initiates and leads the discussion; he chooses its subject, maps out its field, pulls it back when it threatens to transgress its bonds, and, from time to time, summarizes its results. this he does, however, with the least possible show of his hand. he puts his question and leaves it to the student interested to answer him; he restates the bungling answer and the confused question; he leaves one student to answer the difficulties of another.... the advantage of the discussion over the lecture is, thus, that it fosters in the student the active attitude of the thinker in place of the passive attitude of the listener.... obviously it is simplest to teach large classes by lecturing to them. yet a spirited and relevant discussion may be conducted in a class of a hundred or so. of course no more than eight or twelve, or, at most, twenty of these will take even a small part on a given day; perhaps a half or two thirds will never take part; and some will remain uninterested. but there will be many intelligent listeners as well as active participants; and these gain more, i believe, by the give and take of a good discussion than by constant lectures however effective." =class experiments= brief mention should be made of a form of class exercise peculiar to psychology, the "class experiment." this is in some respects like a demonstration, but differs from that in calling for a more active participation on the part of the student. any psychological experiment is performed _on_ a human (or animal) subject, and many experiments can be performed on a group of subjects together, each of them being called on to perform a certain task or to make a certain observation. each of the class having made his individual record, the instructor may gather them together into an average or summary statement, and the individual variations as well as the general tendency may thus be brought to light. very satisfactory and even scientific experiments can thus be performed, with genuine results instructive to the class. =checking the work of the students= of methods of holding the student to his work, mention has already been made of the much-used written recitation. the usual plan is to have frequent, very brief written examinations. sometimes the practice is to correct and return all the papers; sometimes to place them all on file and correct samples chosen at random for determining the student's "term mark." a plan that has some psychological merit is to follow the examination immediately by a statement of the correct answers, with brief discussion of difficulties that may arise, and to ask each student to estimate the value of his own paper in the standard marking system. the papers are then collected and examined, and returned with the instructor's estimate. since an examination is, in effect, a form of psychological test, it is natural that psychologists should have attempted to introduce some of the technique of psychological testing into the work of examining students, in the interest of economy of the student's time as well as that of the examiner. the teacher prepares blanks which the student can quickly fill out if he knows the subject, not otherwise. to discover how far the student has attained a psychological point of view, written work or examination questions often demand some independence in the application to new cases of what has been learned. far-reaching tests of the later value to the student of a course in psychology have not as yet been attempted. =place of psychology in the college course= no attempt has yet been made to obtain the consensus of opinion among psychologists as to whether the introductory course should be required of all arts students, and probably opinions would differ, without anything definitive to be said on either side. in quite a number of colleges psychology forms part of a required general course in philosophy. where a separation has occurred between philosophy and psychology, the latter is seldom absolutely required. as a general rule, however, the introductory course, even if not required, is taken by a large share of the arts students. the traditional position for the course in psychology is late in the college curriculum, originally in the senior but more recently in the junior year. in many of the larger colleges it is now open to sophomores or even to freshmen. one motive for pushing the introductory course back into the earlier years is naturally to provide for more advanced courses in the subject; and another is the desire to make psychology prerequisite for courses in philosophy, education, or sociology. still another motive tending in the same direction is the desire to make the practical benefits of psychological study available for the student in the further conduct of his work as a student in whatever field. if considerable attention is devoted in the introductory course to questions of mental hygiene and efficiency, the advantage of bringing these matters early to the attention of the student outweighs the objection which is often raised by teachers of psychology, as of other subjects, to admitting the younger students, on the ground of immaturity. the teachers who get the younger students may have to put up with immaturity in order that the benefit of their teaching may be carried over by the students into later parts of the curriculum. =length of the introductory course= when the introductory course in psychology forms part of a course in philosophy, it is usually restricted to one semester, with three hours of class work per week. when psychology is an independent subject in the curriculum, a two-semester course is usually provided, since it is the feeling of psychologists that this amount of time is needed in order to make the student really at home in the subject, and to realize for him the values that are looked for from psychology. often there is a break between the two semesters of such a course, the second being devoted to advanced or social or applied psychology. sometimes, on the other hand, the two-semester course is treated as a unit, the various topics being distributed over the year; this latter procedure is probably the one that finds most favor with psychologists. still, good results can be obtained with the semester course supplemented by other courses. =content of advanced courses in psychology= the most frequent advanced course is one in experimental psychology. this is taken by only a small fraction of those who have taken the introductory course, partly because the laboratory work attached to the experimental course demands considerable time from the student, partly because students are not encouraged to go into the laboratory unless they have a pretty serious interest in the subject. for a student who has it in him to become somewhat of an "insider" in psychology, no course is the equal of the laboratory course, supplemented by judicious readings in the original sources or in advanced treatises. next in frequency to the experimental course stands that in applied psychology, since the recent applications of psychology to business, industry, vocational guidance, law, and medicine appeal to a considerable number of college students. other courses which appear not infrequently in college curricula are those in social, abnormal, and animal psychology. no precise order is necessary in the taking of these courses, and it is not customary to make any beyond the introductory course prerequisite for the others. robert s. woodworth _columbia university_ bibliography many of the textbooks contain, in their prefaces, important suggestions toward the teaching of the subject. there are also frequent articles in the psychological journals on apparatus for demonstrations and class or laboratory experiments. . report of the committee of the american psychological association on the teaching of psychology. _psychological monographs_, no. , . . american psychological association, report of the committee on the academic status of psychology, : "the academic status of psychology in the normal schools." . same committee, : "a survey of psychological investigations with reference to differentiations between psychological experiments and mental tests." concerned with the availability of mental tests as material for the experimental course. . courses in psychology for the students' army training corps. _psychological bulletin_, , , - . see also the outlines of parts of the course in the same journal, pages - , - ; and a note on the success of the courses by edgar s. brightman, in the _bulletin_ for , pages - . footnotes: [ ] in report, pages - . [ ] by sanford, , page . [ ] calkins, , pages - . xvii the teaching of education a. teaching the history of education in college =kinds of educational values= there are three main kinds of educational value; viz., practical, cultural, and disciplinary. these three types of educational value probably originated in the order in which they are here mentioned. in early educational periods, all values are practical, or utilitarian. with the growth of social classes, some values become cultural; viz., those pursued by the upper classes. the disciplinary values are recognized when studies cease to have the practical and cultural values. =meaning of educational values= by the "educational value" of a subject we mean, of course, the service which the pursuit of that subject renders. any one subject will naturally have all three values, but no two subjects will have the same values mixed in the same proportion. the practical value of a subject depends on the use in life to which it can be put, especially its use in making a living. the cultural value of a subject depends largely on the enjoyment it contributes to life. while culture does not make a living, it makes it worth while that a living should be made. the disciplinary value of a subject depends on the amount of mental training that subject affords. such mental training is available in further pursuit of the same, or a similar, subject. it is the fashion of educational thinking in our day to put greatest stress on the practical values, less on the cultural, and least on the disciplinary. there is no denying the reality of each type of value. =value of the history of education= now, what is the value of the history of education? there are no experimental studies as yet, nor scientific measurements, upon which to base an answer. the poor best we can do is to express an opinion. this opinion is based on the views of others and on the writer's experience in teaching the history of education ten years in a liberal college (dartmouth) and ten years in a professional graduate school (new york university). on this basis i should say that the aim of the history of education, at least as recorded in existing texts, is first cultural, then practical, and last disciplinary. texts yet to be written for the use of teachers in training may shift the places of the cultural and the practical. this new type of text will give the history, not of educational epochs in chronological succession, but of modern educational problems in their origin and development.[ ] =its cultural value= as cultural, the history of education is the record of the efforts of society to project its own ideals into the future through shaping the young and plastic generation. there comes into this purview the successive social organizations, their ideals, and the methods utilized in embodying these ideals in young lives. interpretations of the nature of social progress, the contribution of education to such progress, and the goal of human progress, naturally arise for discussion, and the history of education well taught as the effort of man to improve himself is both informing and inspiring. this is the cultural value of the history of education. the sense of the meaning and value of human life is enhanced. as president faunce says,[ ] "a college of arts and sciences which has no place for the study of student life past and present, no serious consideration of the great schools which have largely created civilization, is a curiously one-sided and illiberal institution." =its practical value= as practical, the history of education, even when taught from the customary general texts, throws some light on such everyday school matters as educational organization, the best methods of teaching, the right principles of education for women, how to manage classes, and the art of administering education. history cannot give the final answer to such questions, but it makes a contribution to the final answer in reporting the results of racial experience and in assisting students to understand present problems in the light of their past. the history of education has a practical value, but it is not alone the source of guidance. =its disciplinary value= as disciplinary, the history of education shows the value of all historical study. the appeal is mainly to the memory and the judgment. the teaching is inadequate, if the appeal is only to the memory. the judgment must also be requisitioned in comparing, estimating, generalizing, and applying. memory is indispensable in retaining the knowledge of the historical facts, and judgment is utilized in seeing the meaning of these facts. with all studies in general, history shares in training perceptive, associative, and effortful activities. training in history is commonly supposed also to make one conservative, in contrast with training in science, which is supposed to make one progressive. but this result is not necessary, being dependent upon one's attitude toward the past. if past events are viewed as a lapse from an ideal, the study of history makes one conservative and skeptical about progress. if, on the other hand, the past is viewed as progress toward an ideal, the study of history makes one progressive, and expectant of the best that is yet to be. but, even so, familiarity with the past breeds criticism of quick expedients whereby humanity is at last to arrive. on the whole, the disciplinary value of the history of education is attained as an incident of its cultural and practical values. we are no longer trying to discipline the mind by memorizing lists of names and dates, though they be such euphonious names as those of the native american indian tribes, but we are striving to understand man's past and present efforts at conscious self-improvement. =the various aims of students= college students will elect a course in the history of education with many different motives. they may like the teacher, they may like history in any form, they may like the hours at which the class is scheduled, some person who had the course recommended it, or they have an idea they may teach for a while after graduating. a few know they are going into teaching as a vocation in life, and appreciate in a measure the increasing exactitudes of professional training. thus, from the student standpoint, the aims are eclectic. the results with them will be that as human beings they have a wider view of life; as citizens, perhaps as members of school boards, they are more intelligent in school matters; and as teachers they make a start in their progressive equipment. the general course in the history of education is pursued by a group of students with varying but undifferentiated motives. =a student's reaction= once i asked a group of college students to write a frank reaction on a sixty-hour course they had just completed in the general history of education. one wrote as follows: "the history of education makes me feel that a number of what we call innovations today are a renaissance of something as 'old as the hills.' we hear a lot about pupil self-government, and we find it back in the seventeenth century. the trade school also is not a modern tendency. "i also feel that maybe we are not giving our boys and girls a liberal education; maybe we are too utilitarian (i was very much inclined that way myself before i took this course). "that when we wish to try something new, let's go back and see if it has not been tried before, study the circumstances, the mistakes made, the results attained, and see whether we can't profit by the experience given us by the past. "i was also very much surprised to learn the close connection that there is between civilization and education. "i feel that we are laying too much stress on the thinking side of training rather than on the volitional side: not doing in the sense of utility alone, but as a means of expression." it is easy to see the parts of the course that particularly gripped him. another wrote as follows: =another reaction= "the history of education makes me feel as follows about teaching: ( ) it shows the knowledge of method to be obtained from the experiences of others. ( ) it makes me feel the importance of the teacher. ( ) it shows a great field and encourages us to try to improve our own methods. ( ) it shows us the great responsibility of the profession in connection with the nation, for the school teacher to a marked degree determines the destiny of a nation. ( ) it shows the importance of free-thinking. (illustration omitted.) ( ) it shows us the great importance of individuality along the line of teaching, for, as soon as we begin to adopt the methods of others exactly without examining them carefully, progress stops, and we are like the teachers of the middle ages. ( ) it shows that every teacher should have a heartfelt interest in his pupil. ( ) it makes us feel that discipline is unnecessary, if we utilize the right methods. ( ) it tells us and makes us feel above everything else that a good education is worth as much as riches and that, since we are all brothers, we ought to try to teach everybody." an analysis of these two answers would show a combination of the cultural and practical values and, by implication at least, since they were able to say these things, a disciplinary value. =history of education should be an elective course= should the history of education be a required or an elective course in the college curriculum? in a school of education offering a bachelor's degree, it might well be required, for both cultural and professional reasons, but in the usual department of education in a college it will be offered as an elective course. its cultural and disciplinary values are not such as to make its pursuit a requisite for a liberal education, and its practical value for prospective teachers, as it has been commonly taught, is not such as to warrant its prescription. besides, the prospective teacher is animated by the vocational motive and will elect the history of education anyway, unless there are more practical courses to be had. students in all the college courses should have the privilege of electing the history of education in view of their future citizenship. =a forty-five-hour course= a three-hour-per-week elective course for a half year, about forty-five classroom hours, will meet the needs of the average undergraduate in this subject. this amount of time is adequate for a bird's eye view of the general field, affording a unit of accomplishment in itself preparing the way for more specialized study later, though it is only about half the time requisite for presenting the details of the subject. =first term senior year= in my judgment the study of the history of education would best fall between principles and methods. the study of the principles of education should come first, as it is closely related to preceding work in the natural and mental sciences, especially biology, physiology, sociology, and psychology; it also gives a point of view from which to continue the study of education, some standard of judgment. the study of educational methods, such as general method in teaching, special method for different subjects, the technique of instruction, class management, organization and administration of schools, should come last in the course, because it will be soonest used. these practical matters should be fresh in the mind of any young college graduate beginning to teach. the history of education is a good transition in study from the theory of the first principles to the practice of school matters, affording a panorama of facts to be judged by principles and racial experiments in educational practice. this means that the choice time for the course in the history of education is the first semester of the senior year in college. there is something to be said for making this course the introductory one in the study of education, connecting with preceding courses in history and being objective in character. there is also something to be said for giving only a practical course dealing with the history of educational problems to college undergraduates and reserving the general history of education as a complex social study for the graduate school. there is no unanimity of opinion or practice concerning the history of education.[ ] =texts and contents= what should be the content of the one-semester general course? three modern available texts are monroe, _a brief course in the history of education_ (the macmillan company); graves, _a student's history of education_ (the macmillan company); and duggan, _a student's textbook in the history of education_ (d. appleton & co.). of these monroe's book is the first ( ), and it has greatly influenced every later text in the field. there is a general agreement in these three texts as to the content of such a course; viz., a general survey of education in the successive periods of history, including primitive, oriental, greek, roman, early christian and medieval, renaissance, reformation, realism, locke and the disciplinary tendency, rousseau, the psychologists, and the scientific, sociological, and eclectic tendencies. all are written from the standpoint of the conflict between the interests of society and the individual. the pages of the three books number respectively , , and . graves pays most attention to the development of american education. duggan omits the treatment of primitive and oriental education (except jewish), "which did not contribute _directly_ to western culture and education." all are illustrated. all have good summaries, which graves and duggan, following s. c. parker, who derived the suggestion from herbart, place at the beginning of the chapter. all have bibliographical references, and duggan adds lists of questions also. perhaps in order of ease for students the books would be duggan, graves, and monroe, though teachers would not all agree in this. users of monroe have a valuable aid in his epoch-making _textbook in the history of education_ (the macmillan company), pages, , and users of graves likewise have his three volumes as supplementary material (the macmillan company). the same general ground is covered by p. j. mccormick, _history of education_ (the catholic educational press), , pages, with especial attention given to the middle ages and the religious organizations of the seventeenth century. this work contains references and summaries also. duggan is right in omitting the treatment of primitive and oriental education on the principle of strict historical continuity, but for purposes of comparison the chapters on primitive and oriental education in the other texts serve a useful purpose. =educational classics= a more intensive elective course in the history of education intended especially for those expecting to teach might well be offered in a college with sufficient instructors. these courses might be in educational classics, the history of modern elementary education, or the history of the high school. texts are now available in these fields. monroe's _source book for the history of education_ (the macmillan company), , is a most useful book in studying the ancient educational classics, in which, however, the anacharsis of lucian does not appear, though it can be found in the report of the united states commissioner of education, - , vol. i, pages - . the renaissance classics may be studied in the works of woodward and laurie. the realists may be studied in the various editions of comenius, locke, spencer, and huxley. likewise the modern naturalistic movement may be followed in the writings of rousseau, pestalozzi, herbart, and froebel. these four courses are available in educational classics: the ancient, the renaissance or humanistic, the realistic and the naturalistic. =history of elementary and high schools= _the history of modern elementary education_ (ginn and co.) by s. c. parker and _the high school_ (the macmillan company) by f. w. smith may be profitably used as texts in the courses on these topics. parker's has but little on the organization of the elementary school, is weak on the philosophical side of the theorists treated, has nothing on montessori, draws no lessons from history, is very brief on the present tendencies, and is somewhat heavy, prosaic, and unimaginative in style; but it is painstaking, covers all the main points well and has uncovered some valuable new material, and on the whole is the best history in english on its problem. dr. smith's book is really a history of education written around the origin and tendencies of the high school as central. it is a scholarly work, based on access to original latin and other sources, though diffuse. =american education= an elective course in the history of american education is highly desirable. chancellor e. e. brown's scholarly book on _the making of our middle schools_, or e. g. dexter's encyclopedic book on _history of education in the united states_, may profitably serve as texts. this course should show the european influences on american schools, the development of the american system, and the rôle of education in a democratic society. there is great opportunity for research in this field. =history of educational problems= there is room for yet another course for college undergraduates expecting to teach,--a history of educational problems. the idea is to trace the intimate history of a dozen or more of the present most urgent educational questions, with a view to understanding them better and solving them more wisely, thus enabling the study of the history of education to function more in the practice of teachers. such a text has not yet been written. the point of view is expressed by professor joseph k. hart as follows: "the large problem of education is the making of new educational history. the real reason for studying the history of education is that one may learn how to become a maker of history. for this purpose, history must awaken the mind of the student to the problems, forces, and conditions of the present; and its outlook must be toward the future."[ ] =methods of teaching= what should be the method of teaching the history of education in college? one of the texts will be used as a basis for assignments and study. not less than two hours of preparation on each assignment will be expected. the general account in the text will be supplemented by the reading of source and parallel material, concerning which very definite directions will have to be given by the teacher. each student will keep a notebook as one of the requirements of the course, which is examined by the instructor at the end. a profitable way to make a notebook is for each student to select a different modern problem and trace its origin and growth as he goes through the general history of education and its source material. in this way each student becomes a crude historian of a problem. the examination will test judgment and reason as well as memory. in the classroom the instructor will at times question the class, will at times be questioned by the class, will lecture on supplementary material, will use some half-dozen stereopticon lectures in close conjunction with the text, will have debates between chosen students, seeking variety in method without loss of unity in result. some questions for debate might be, the superiority of the athenian to the modern school product, the necessity of latin and greek for a liberal education, religious instruction in the public schools, formal discipline, whether the aim of education is cultural or vocational, whether private philanthropy is a benefit to public education, etc. it is very important in teaching so remote a subject as the history of education that the teacher have imagination, be constantly pointing modern parallels, communicate the sense that the past has made a difference in the present, and be himself kindled and quickened by man's aspirations for self-improvement. unless our subject first inspires us, it cannot inspire our pupils. whoever teaches the history of education because he has to instead of because he wants to must expect thin results. =testing results= in addition to the formal indication of the results of the course in the examination paper, teachers can test their results by asking for frank unsigned statements as to what the course has meant to each student, by securing suggestions from the class for the future conduct of the course, by noting whether education as a means of social evolution has been appreciated, by observing whether the attitude of individual students toward education as a life-work or as a human enterprise deserving adequate support from all intelligent citizens has developed. as future citizens, has the motive to improve schools been awakened? particularly do more men want to teach, despite small pay and slight male companionship? the history of education does not really grip the class until its members want to rise up and do something by educational means to help set the world right. the limits of this paper exclude the treatment of the subject in the professional training of teachers in normal schools, high schools, and graduate schools, as well as in extension courses for teachers or in their private reading. herman h. horne _new york university_ bibliography buisson, f. _dictionnaire de la pédagogie_, histoire de l'education. burnham, w. h. education as a university subject. _educational review_, vol. , pages - . burnham and suzzalo, _the history of education as a professional subject_, teachers college, new york, . cook, h. m. _history of the history of education as a professional study in the united states._ unpublished thesis. hinsdale, b. a. the study of education in american colleges and universities, _educational review_, vol. , pages - . horne, h. h. a new method in the history of education. _the school review monographs_, no. , chicago, ; pages - . discussion of same in _school review_, may, . kiehle, d. l. the history of education: what it stands for. _school review_, vol. , pages - . monroe, p., and others. history of education; in monroe's _cyclopedia of education_, vol. , new york, . monroe, p. opportunity and need for research work in the history of education. _pedagogical seminary_, vol. , pages - . moore, e. c. the history of education. _school review_, vol. xi, pages - . norton, a. o. scope and aims of the history of education. _educational review_, vol. . payne, w. h. practical value of the history of education. _proceedings national education association_, , pages - . rein, w. encyclopädisches handbuch der pädagogik. _historische pädagogik._ robbins, c. l. history of education in state normal schools. _pedagogical seminary_, vol. , no. , pages - . ross, d. _education as a university subject: its history, present position, and prospects._ glasgow, . sutton, w. l., and bolton, f. e. the relation of the department of education to other departments in colleges and universities. _journal of pedagogy_, vol. , nos. - . williams, s. g. value of the history of education to teachers. _proceedings national education association_, , pages - . wilson, g. m. titles of college courses in education. _educational monographs_, no. , , pages - . b. teaching educational theory in college and university departments of education =introductory= courses in education in a college or university department may be roughly classified into (_a_) the theoretical phases of education, (_b_) the historical phases, and (_c_) the applied phases. under the historical phases may properly be included courses in the general history of education as well as those in the history of education in special countries. the applied courses may include general and special method, organization, administration, observation, and practice. educational theory is discussed below. a couple of decades ago the terms "philosophy of education," "science of education," and "general pedagogy," or just "pedagogy," were most generally employed. at that time most of the work in education was given in the departments of philosophy or psychology. gradually departments of education came to have an independent status. among the earliest were those at michigan, under dr. joseph payne, and the one at iowa, under dr. stephen fellows. previous to the vigorous development of departments of education, the departments of psychology and philosophy gave no special attention to the educational bearings of psychology. but as soon as departments of education began to introduce courses in educational psychology and child study, the occupants of the departments of psychology rubbed their eyes, became aware of unutilized opportunities, and then began to assert claims. =place of educational theory in the curriculum= ordinarily the courses in educational theory are given in the junior year of college. in a few places, elementary or introductory courses are open to freshmen. there is a distinct advantage in giving courses to freshmen, if they can be made sufficiently concrete and grow out of their previous experiences. the college of education in the university of washington, for example, is so organized that the student shall begin to think of the profession of teaching immediately upon entering the university. while the main work in education courses does not come until the junior and senior years, the student receives guidance and counsel from the outset in selecting his courses and is helped to get in touch with the professional atmosphere that should surround a teacher's college. the foundation work in zoölogy and psychology is given as far as possible with the teaching profession in mind. it is planned to give some work of a general nature in education during the first two years, that will serve as vocational guidance and will assist the student to arrange his work most advantageously and to accomplish it most economically. by the more prolonged individual acquaintance between students and faculty of the college of education, it is hoped that the students will receive greater professional help and the faculty will be better able to judge of the teaching abilities of the students. the work in education and allied courses has been so extended that adequate professional preparation may be secured. the courses in zoölogy, psychology, and sociology are all directly contributory to a knowledge of, and to an interpretation of, the courses in education. the great majority of undergraduate students taking education are preparing to teach, and more and more they plan to teach in the high schools. however, not a few students of medicine, law, engineering, and other technical subjects take courses in education as a means of general information. it would be exceedingly desirable if all citizens would take general courses in education, and would come to understand the meaning of educational processes and past and present practices in educational procedure. if all parents and members of school boards could have a few modern courses in educational theory and organization, the work of school teachers would be very much simplified. so far as is known, no college or university makes education an absolute requirement such as is made with respect to foreign languages, science, mathematics, or philosophy. in a large majority of states, some work in education is required for teacher's certification. the number of states making such requirements is rapidly increasing. before long it will be impossible for persons to engage in teaching without either attending a normal school or taking professional courses in education in college. =the scope of college courses in educational theory= the theory of education as considered in this chapter will include all those courses which have for their purpose the consideration of the fundamental meaning of education and the underlying laws or principles governing the education process. educational theory is given in different institutions under a great variety of titles. the following are the most frequently offered: principles of education, philosophy of education, theory of education, educational psychology, genetic psychology, experimental education, child study, adolescence, moral education, educational sociology, social aspects of education. educational theory may be divided into courses which are elementary in character, and those which are advanced. the purpose of the former is to present to beginning students the fundamentals of reasonably well-tested principles and laws, and to indicate to them something of the various phases of education. the purpose of advanced courses, especially in experimental education, is to reach out into new fields and by study and experiment to test and develop new theories. the experimental phases of education seek to blaze new trails and to discover new methods of reaching more economically and efficiently the goals which education seeks. both of these phases should be given in a college course in the theory of education. enough of the experimental work should be given in the elementary course to enable students to distinguish between mere opinion and well-established theory, to understand how the theories have been derived, to know how to subject them to crucial tests, and to give them some knowledge of methods of experimentation. education as a science is constantly confronted by the questions, "what are the ends and aims of education?" and "what are the means of accomplishing these ends?" these mean that there must be a study of the ends of education as necessitated by the demands of society and the needs of the individual himself. in determining the ends of education, adult society, of which the individual is to be a part, must be surveyed, as must also the social group of which the child is now an integral part. in addition to these the laws of growth and development must be studied, to understand what will contribute effectively to the child's normal unfoldment. the interpretation of the ends and means of education will determine the field of the theory of education. this interpretation has been so splendidly stated by dewey that i venture to quote him at length. he says (_my pedagogic creed_): "i believe that this educational process has two sides--one psychological and one sociological: and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. the child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. it may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative processes will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. if it chances to coincide with the child's activity, it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature. "i believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. the child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. we must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. we must be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. in the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of the future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct. "i believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. we are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal--that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us an idea of the use to which these powers are put. on the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status. "i believe each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. in order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know, save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. but, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all of his powers. with the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities, that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. it is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests; say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms. "in sum, i believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual, and that society is an organic union of individuals. if we eliminate the social factor from the child, we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. it must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. these powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. they must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service." therefore, the fundamental course in educational theory must include ( ) the biological principles of education, ( ) the psychological principles of education, and ( ) the social principles of education. this does not mean that the sequence must be as enumerated here. in some places that is the sequence followed, in some other places the social principles are studied first. as a matter of fact, all three phases must be studied together to a considerable extent. probably a purely logical arrangement would place the social phases first, but it is almost futile to attempt to present them effectively until something of the biological and psychological laws are first established. again, the student in beginning the formal study of education is already in possession of a vast body of facts concerning society and the relation of education to it, so that reference can be advantageously made in connection with the study of biological and psychological laws of education. then the social principles and applications can be more thoroughly and scientifically considered in the light of the other phases. in administering a college course in the theory of education the great desideratum is to try to formulate a body of knowledge which will give the undergraduate students an idea of the meaning of education and its problems and processes. in so far as possible it is desirable to present material which in a certain sense will be practical. inasmuch as the majority of undergraduates who study education in a college department intend to go into the practical work of teaching, it is important to fortify them, as well as possible in the brief time which they devote to the subject, concerning the best means of securing definite results in education. the majority are not so much interested in the abstract science or the philosophy of education as they are in its practical problems. all courses in education should seek to deal with fundamental principles and not dole out dogmatic statements of practical means and devices, but at the same time no principles should be considered with which the student cannot see some relation to the educative processes. they are not primarily concerned with the place of education among the sciences or with ontological and teleological meanings of education or of its laws. =academic recognition of the introductory course= the course in elementary educational theory should be on a par with a course in principles of physics, one in principles of biology, principles of psychology, principles of political science, etc. a course in the principles of any of these subjects attempts to set forth the main problems with which the science deals. elementary courses attempt to select those principles which have frequent application in everyday life. the course in the principles of physics deals with the elementary notions of matter, motion, and force, and everyday illustrations and problems are sought. it would seem that in a similar manner the college course in the foundations of education should seek elementary principles which will enable the student to accomplish the purpose of education; namely, to produce modifications in individuals and in society in harmony with the ideals and ends of education. education is a process of adjusting individuals to their environment, natural and accidental, and the environment which is created through ideals held by society and by individuals themselves. all education has to do with the development of the individual in accordance with his potentialities and the ideals of education which are set up. it is a practical science, an applied science, in the same way that engineering is an applied science. engineering does not deal with ultimate theories of matter, force, and motion, except as they are important in considering practical ends to be secured through the application of forces. an elementary course in educational theory should seek to include the foundations rather than to encompass all knowledge about education. it is rather an introduction than an encyclopedia. although a complete and logical treatise on the theory of education might include a consideration of the course of study and the methods of instruction, the making of a course of study, the problem of the arrangement of the course of study, the various studies as instruments of experience, the organization and administration of education, etc., it is questionable from a practical point of view whether they should be given consideration in the undergraduate course. mere passing notice would at any rate seem sufficient. each topic of the scope of the foregoing is sufficient to form a course in itself, and the introductory course should do no more than define their relation to the general problem. in the principles of psychology the fields of abnormal psychology, comparative psychology, child psychology, adolescent psychology, etc., are defined and drawn upon for illustration, yet no separate chapters are devoted to them. in departments of political economy there are usually elemental courses designed as an introduction to the leading principles of economic science, but there are special courses in currency and banking, public finance, taxation, transportation, distribution of wealth, etc. similarly in the college course in the theory of education, the work should be concentrated upon fundamentals designed to introduce the student to the many special problems. for example, the course of study and the organization and administration of education should be regarded as accessory rather than as fundamental. the laws underlying processes of development and modification are what should occupy the attention of the student in this elemental survey. a study of the special means and agencies of education and forms of social organization should be given in other courses by special names. secondary education, the kindergarten, administration and supervision, methods in special subjects, etc., each deserve attention as a distinct and separate course. as shown by two surveys made by the writer, one in and the last in , the theory of education is most frequently given under the terms "principles of education," "educational psychology," "social phases of education," "educational sociology," and "child study." therefore, a brief special discussion of each of these fields may be desirable. =principles of education= under various names courses in principles of education are given in most departments of education. the term "principles of education" does not appear in all, being replaced by "principles of teaching," "philosophy of education," "fundamentals of teaching," "introduction to education," "science of education," "principles of method," "theory of education," etc. in some institutions the terms "educational psychology" and "child study" stand for essentially the same thing as the foregoing. in most institutions it is recognized that the teacher must understand (_a_) the meaning and aim of education, (_b_) the nature of the child considered biologically, psychologically, socially, and morally, (_c_) the foundations of society and the industries, (_d_) how to adapt and utilize educational means so as to develop the potentialities of the child's nature and cause him to achieve the aims of education. =biological principles= in this section there should be an attempt first to enlarge the notion of education, aiming to have it regarded as practically coincident with life and experience. of course there is the ideal side to which individuals will strive, but the student should be impressed with the fact that every experience leaves its ineffaceable effect upon all organisms. in order to convey this idea we may begin with a discussion of the effects of experience upon simple animal and plant life and the general modifications produced in the adjustment of such life to surroundings. some familiar, non-technical facts in the evolution of plant and animal life may be considered in their relation to the question of adaptation and adjustment. due notice should be taken of the facts of adjustment as manifested in such illustrations as the change of the eyes of cave animals, gradual modifications of plant and animal life, the change of animals from sea life to land life, some of the retrogressions, etc. a general study of the gradual evolution of sense organs and the nervous system should be made, because these illustrate in an excellent way the gradual modifications produced by experience in the race. after this general survey, the subject of innate tendencies may be considered through the discussion of such chapters as drummond's "the ascent of the body," "the scaffolding left in the body," "the arrest of the body," "the dawn of mind," "the evolution of language," etc. these discussions naturally lead to a consideration of the lengthening period of human infancy, and the importance of infancy in education. this in turn leads to a brief consideration of the periods of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, largely from a biological point of view. these should be followed by a discussion of such topics as instinct, heredity, from fundamental to accessory, the brain as an organ of mind, some of the facts of psycho-physical correlation, and the reciprocal influence of mind and body upon each other. before leaving this general field, thorough and designedly practical discussions of the importance of physical development and culture for education in general and for mental development, fatigue, habit, physical and mental hygiene, and play should be considered. =educational psychology= the next section should include what some authors term educational psychology, and others call the psychological aspects of education. in this section the first topic naturally considered is that of memory. it grows out of the biological discussion of instinct, heredity, etc. included in the subject of memory is that of association. following this come imagination, imitation, training of the senses, apperception, formal discipline, feeling, volition, motor training, induction, etc. periods of mental development and the specific topics of childhood and adolescence should receive definite consideration, though more exhaustive treatment should be reserved for a distinct course in child study. the genetic point of view should be emphasized throughout. while the number of students registered for educational psychology is not large, the numbers that are in reality pursuing this branch are increasing. fortunately, the "psychology for teachers" and "applied psychology" of a score of years ago are giving way to a kind of educational psychology that is much more vital. men like judd and thorndike are formulating a psychology of the different branches of study and of the teaching processes involved that will enable the teacher to see the connection between the psychological laws and the processes to be learned. this sort of work has been made possible by the work of hall and his followers in studying the child and the adolescent from the standpoint of growth periods and the types of activity suited to each period. educational psychology is therefore represented richly in principles of education, genetic psychology, mental development, child study, and adolescence, as well as in the courses labeled "educational psychology." =social aspects of education= twelve years ago courses on social phases of education were probably not offered anywhere, as they are not listed in my tabulation at that time. today they appear in some form or other in almost every department of education. in columbia the work is given as "educational sociology." the departments of sociology also emphasize various phases of educational problems. courses on vocational education, industrial education, and vocational guidance all emphasize the same idea. the introduction of these courses means that the merely disciplinary aim of education is fast giving way to that of adjustment and utility. educational means are ( ) to enable the child to live happily and to develop normally, and ( ) to furnish a kind of training which will enable him to serve society to the utmost advantage. in the courses on educational sociology, there should be an attempt to help the student feel that the highest aim of education is not individualistic, but social. the purpose is to fit the individual for coöperation, developing agencies of life that shall be mutually advantageous, for democratic society seeks the highest welfare of all its members through the coöperation and contribution of each of its members. it teaches us not only the rights and privileges of society but also its duties and obligations. the best individual development also comes only through the social interaction of minds, and consequently various phases of social psychology must receive consideration. various forms of coöperative effort which enlist the interest of children at various stages of development should be studied. inasmuch as educators should link school and home, typical illustrations of the manifold means of relating the school and society should be studied, so that the teacher will not be without knowledge of their possibilities. =the child the center= throughout the country there is evidence that the curricula in education departments have for their central object a scientific knowledge of the child, and the better adaptation of educational means to the development of the potentialities possessed by the child. this idea is evidenced by the fact that the foundation courses are psychology, principles of education, child study, educational psychology. the fact that the history of education is still so largely given as a relatively beginning course shows that the new idea has not gained complete acceptance. many specialized courses in child study are offered, among them being such courses as the "psychology of childhood," "childhood and adolescence," "psychopathic, retarded, and mentally deficient children," "genetic psychology," "the anthropological study of children," "the physical nature of the child." at the university of pittsburgh a school of childhood has been established which will combine in theory and practice the best ideals in the kindergarten, the modern primary school, and the montessori system. clark university has had for some years its children's institute, which attempts to assemble the best literature on childhood and the best materials of instruction in childhood. many of the courses in educational tests and measurements center around the study of the child. =methods of teaching the subject= naturally, methods of teaching the subject vary exceedingly in the different institutions. each instructor to a large extent follows his own individual inclinations. probably the great majority pursue the lecture method to a considerable extent. the lectures are generally accompanied by readings either from some textbook or from collateral readings. the writer has personally pursued the combination method. for years before his own book on _principles of education_ was completed the subject was presented in lecture form, and accompanied by library readings. even now, with a textbook at hand, each new topic is outlined in an informal development lecture. definite assignments are made from the text, and from collateral readings, which include additional texts, periodical literature, and selected chapters from various educational books. after students have had an opportunity to read copiously and to think out special problems, an attempt is made to discuss the entire topic orally. that is possible and very fruitful in classes of the right size,--not over thirty. in large classes numbering from sixty to one hundred or more, the oral discussion is not profitable unless the instructor is very skilled in conducting the discussion. the questions should never be for the purpose of merely securing answers perfectly obvious to all in the class. the questions should seek to unfold new phases of the subject. difficult points should be considered, new contributions should be made by the students and the instructor, and all should feel that it is really an enlargement, a broadening, and a deepening of ideas gained through the lectures and the assigned readings. very frequently individual students should be assigned special topics for report. a good deal of care must be exercised in this connection, for unless the material is a real contribution and is presented effectively, the rest of the students become wearied. if possible, the instructor should know exactly what points are to be brought out, and the approximate amount of time to be occupied. throughout, an attempt is made to make the work as concrete as possible, and to show its relation to matters pertaining to the schoolroom, the home, and the everyday conduct of the students themselves. each topic is treated with considerable thoroughness and detail. no endeavor is made to secure an absolutely systematic and ultra-logical system. the charge of being logically unsystematic and incomplete would not be resented. there is no desire for a system. as in the elementary stages of any subject, the first requisite is a body of fundamental facts. there is time enough later to evolve an all-inclusive and all-exclusive system. i am not aware that even the "doctors" have yet fully settled this question. the psychological order is the one sought. what is intelligible, full of living interest, and of largest probable importance in the life and work of the student teacher are the criteria applied in the selection of materials. the student verdict is given much weight in deciding. a rather successful plan of providing an adequate number of duplicates of books much used has been developed by the writer at the state university of iowa and at the university of washington. in all courses in which no single suitable text is found the students are asked to contribute a small sum, from twenty-five to fifty cents, for the purpose of purchasing duplicates. these books are placed on the reserve shelf, and this makes it possible for large classes to be accommodated with a relatively small number of books. ordinarily there should be one book for every four or five students, if all are expected to read the same assignment. if options are allowed, the proportion of books may be reduced. the books become the property of the institution, and a fine library of duplicate sets rapidly accumulates. in about five years about fifteen hundred volumes have been secured in this way at the university of washington. valuable pamphlet material and reprints of important articles also are collected and kept in filing boxes. frederick e. bolton _university of washington_ bibliography . articles on teaching of educational theory bolton, frederick e. the relation of the department of education to other departments in colleges and universities. _journal of pedagogy_, vol. xix, nos. , , december, , march, . ---- curricula in university departments of education. _school and society_, december , , pages - . judd, charles h. the department of education in american universities. _school review_, vol. , november, . hollister, horace a. courses in education best adapted to the needs of high school teachers and high school principals. _school and home education_, april, . . books on the general, biological, and psychological phases of education bagley, william c. _the educative process._ the macmillan company, . pages. ---- _educational values._ the macmillan company, . pages. bolton, frederick e. _principles of education._ charles scribner's sons, . pages. butler, nicholas murray. _the meaning of education, and other essays._ the macmillan company, . pages. revised edition. cubberley, ellwood p. _changing conceptions of education._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. davenport, eugene. _education for efficiency._ d. c. heath & company, . pages. dewey, john. _democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education._ macmillan, . pages. freeman, frank n. _experimental education._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. ---- _psychology of the common branches._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. ---- _how children learn._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. gordon, kate. _educational psychology._ henry holt & co., . pages. groszmann, m. p. e. _some fundamental verities in education._ richard badger, . pages. guyer, michael. _being well-born._ bobbs-merrill company, . pages. hall, g. s. _educational problems._ d. appleton & co., . volumes, pages and pages. heck, w. h. _mental discipline and educational values._ john lane & co., . pages. henderson, charles h. _education and the larger life._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. ---- _what is it to be educated?_ houghton mifflin company, . pages. henderson, ernest n. _a textbook on the principles of education._ the macmillan company, . pages. horne, herman h. _the philosophy of education._ the macmillan company, . pages. ---- _the psychological principles of education._ the macmillan company, . pages. klapper, paul. _principles of educational practice._ d. appleton & co., . pages. moore, ernest c. _what is education?_ ginn and co., . pages. o'shea, m. vincent. _dynamic factors in education._ the macmillan company, . pages. ---- _education as adjustment._ longmans, green & co., . pages. ---- _linguistic development and education._ the macmillan company, . pages. pyle, william h. _the science of human nature._ silver, burdett & co., . pages. ---- _the outlines of educational psychology._ warwick & york, . pages. ruediger, william c. _principles of education._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. spencer, herbert. _education, intellectual, moral, and physical._ d. appleton & co., . pages. thorndike, edward l. _principles of teaching._ a. g. seiler, . pages. ---- _education: a first book._ the macmillan company, . pages. ---- _individuality._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. ---- _educational psychology._ teachers college, . vol. . the original nature of man. pages. . books on the social phases of education betts, george h. _social principles of education._ charles scribner's sons, . pages. cabot, ella l. _volunteer help to the schools._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. dewey, john. _the school and society._ university of chicago press, . pages. ---- _the schools of tomorrow._ e. p. dutton & co., . pages. ---- _democracy and education._ the macmillan company, . pages. dewey, john, and small, albion w. _my educational creed._ e. l. kellogg & co., . pages. dutton, samuel t. _social phases of education in the school and the home._ the macmillan company, . pages. gillette, john m. _constructive rural sociology._ sturgis & walton, . pages. king, irving. _education for social efficiency._ d. appleton & co., . pages. ---- _social aspects of education. a book of sources and original discussions, with annotated bibliographies._ the macmillan company, . mcdougall, william. _an introduction to social psychology._ john w. luce, . pages. o'shea, m. vincent. _social development and education._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. scott, colin a. _social education._ ginn and co., . pages. smith, walter r. _an introduction to educational sociology._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. . books on childhood and adolescence drummond, william b. _an introduction to child study._ longmans, green & co., . pages. gesell, beatrice c. and arnold. _the normal child and primary education._ ginn and co., . pages. groszmann, m. p. e. _the career of the child._ richard badger, . pages. hall, g. stanley. _youth, its education, regimen, and hygiene._ d. appleton & co., . pages. ---- _aspects of child life and education._ ginn and co., . pages. ---- _adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education._ d. appleton & co., . vols., and pages. king, irving. _the high school age._ robbs-merrill company, . pages. kirkpatrick, edwin a. _fundamentals of child study._ the macmillan company, . pages. ---- _genetic psychology: an introduction to an objective and genetic view of intelligence._ the macmillan company, . pages. oppenheim, nathan. _the development of the child._ the macmillan company, . pages. sully, james. _studies of childhood._ d. appleton & co., . pages. swift, edgar j. _youth and the race._ charles scribner's sons, . pages. tanner, amy e. _the child: his thinking, feeling, and doing._ . pages. terman, lewis m. _the hygiene of the school child._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. tracy, frederick, and stimpel, james. _the psychology of childhood._ d. c. heath & co., . pages. tyler, john mason. _growth and education._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. waddle, charles w. _introduction to child psychology._ houghton mifflin company, . pages. footnotes: [ ] "a new method in the history of education," _school review monographs_, no. . h. h. horne. [ ] quoted in _school and society_, vol. , page , from president faunce's annual report. recent articles on the cultural value of courses in education are: j. m. mecklin, "the problem of the training of the secondary teacher," _school and society_, vol. , pages - . h. e. townsend, "the cultural value of courses in education," _school and society_, vol. , pages - . [ ] cf. thomas m. balliet, "normal school curricula," _school and society_, vol. iv, page . [ ] "can a college department of education become scientific?" _the scientific monthly_, vol. , no. , page . part four the languages and literatures chapter xviii the teaching of english literature _caleb t. winchester_ xix the teaching of english composition _henry seidel canby_ xx the teaching of the classics _william k. prentice_ xxi the teaching of the romance languages _william a. nitze_ xxii the teaching of german _e. prokosch_ xviii the teaching of english literature =scope of study of english literature in college= it should be understood at the outset that this paper is concerned with the study of literature, not in the university or graduate school, but in the college, by the undergraduate candidate for the bachelor's degree; and, furthermore, that the object of study is not the history, biography, bibliography, or criticism of literature, but the literature itself. perhaps also the term "literature" may need definition. as commonly--and correctly--used, the word "literature" denotes all writing which has sufficient emotional interest, whether primary or incidental, to give it permanence. as thus defined, literature would include, for example, history and much philosophical writing, and would exclude only writing of purely scientific or technical character. but in the following pages the word will be used in a narrower sense, as indicating those books that are read for their own sake, not solely or primarily for their intellectual content. this definition is elastic enough to comprise not only poetry, drama, and fiction, but the essay, oratory, and much political and satirical prose. it should be further understood that for the purpose of this paper, english literature may be considered to begin about the middle of the fourteenth century. earlier and anglo-saxon writings are by no means without great literary value, and it may at once be granted that no college teacher of english literature is thoroughly equipped for his work who is ignorant of them; but they can be read appreciatively only after considerable study of the language, the method and motives of which are linguistic rather than literary. =aims governing the teaching of english literature= perhaps it may be asked just here whether english literature, as thus defined, need be studied in college at all. until quite recently that question seems generally to have been answered in the negative. fifty years ago, few if any of our american colleges gave any study to texts of english classics. there were, indeed, in most colleges professors of rhetoric and _belles-lettres_, whose lectures upon the history and criticism of our literature were often of great value as an inspiration to literary study; but it was only in the decade from to that in most of our colleges the literature itself, with hesitating caution, began to be read and studied in the classroom. =can literary appreciation be developed?= nor was this hesitation without some reasons, at least plausible. the chief object of college training, it was said, is to discipline and strengthen the intellect, to give the student that grasp and power of thought which he may apply to all the work of later life. the college should not be expected to pay much attention to the cultivation of the imagination and the emotions. these faculties, to which literature makes appeal, are not, it was said, under the control of the will, and you cannot cultivate or strengthen them by sheer resolve or strenuous exertion. the first condition of any real appreciation of literature, so ran the argument, is spontaneous enjoyment of it; and you cannot command a right feeling for literature or for anything else. but a normal development of the imagination and the emotions does usually accompany the vigorous development of the intellect, so that the advancing student will be found to turn spontaneously to art and literature. and his appreciation of all the highest and deepest meanings in literature will be quickened because he brings to his reading a mind trained to accurate and vigorous thinking. moreover, all substantial advantages from the study of modern vernacular literature can be better obtained from the greek and latin classics. they afford the same richness of thought and charm of form as our modern writing; but they demand for their appreciation that careful attention and study which modern literature too often discourages. the survivors of a former generation sometimes ask us today, with a touch of sarcasm, "do you think the average new england college student of fifty to seventy-five years ago, when the emersons and longfellows and lowells were young men, the days of the old _north american review_ and the new _atlantic monthly_, had any less appreciation and enjoyment of whatever is good in literature, or any less power to produce it, than the young fellows who are coming out of college today after more than a quarter century of literary instruction?" and they occasionally suggest that, at all events, it is difficult to find any evidences of the result of such instruction in the quality of the literature produced or demanded today. =conflict of utilitarian and cultural standards= on the other hand, the study of english literature often fares little better with the advocates of the modern practical tendency in education. they have but scanty allowance for a study assumed to be of so little use in the actual work of life. an acquaintance with well-known english books, especially if they be modern books, is, they admit, a desirable accomplishment if it can be gained without too much cost, but not to be allowed the place of more valuable knowledge. a typical modern father, writing not long ago to a modern educator, after giving with equal positiveness the subjects that his boy must have and must not have included in his course of study, added by way of concession, "the boy might, if he has time, take english literature." =cultural and utilitarian standards harmonized= now in answer to this second class of objectors, it may be frankly admitted that the study of english literature is primarily, if not entirely, cultural. a boy may not make a better engineer or practical chemist for having studied in college the plays of shakespeare or the prose of ruskin. and to the older objectors, who urge that literary study can ever give that severe intellectual discipline afforded by the older, narrower college course, we reply that it is not merely the intellectual powers that need culture and discipline. the ideal college training will surely not neglect the imagination and emotions, the faculties which so largely determine the conduct of life. and at no period in the educational process is the need of wide moral training so urgent as in those years when the young man is forming independent judgments and his tastes are taking their final set. the study of english literature finds its warrant for a place in the college curriculum principally because, better than any other subject, it is fitted to cultivate both the emotional and the intellectual sides of our nature. for in all genuine literature those two elements, the intellectual and the emotional, are united; you cannot get either one fully without getting the other. in some forms of literature, as in poetry, the emotional appeal is the main purpose of the writing; but even here no really profound or sublime emotion is possible without a solid basis of thought. =appreciation the ultimate aim in the teaching of literature= this, then, let us understand, is the primary object of all college teaching in this department. it affords the student opportunity and incitement to read, during his four years, a considerable number of our best classics, representative of different periods and different forms of literature, and to read them with such intelligence and appreciation as to receive from them that discipline of thought and feeling which literature better than anything else is fitted to impart. if the student would or could do this reading by himself, without formal requirement or assistance, there might be little need of undergraduate teaching of literature; but every one who knows much of american college conditions knows that the average undergraduate has neither time, inclination, nor ability for such voluntary reading. =appreciative study of literary masterpieces involves vigorous mental exercise= just here lies a difficulty peculiar to the college teacher in this department. all studies that appeal primarily to the intellect and call only for careful attention and vigorous thinking can be prescribed, and mastery of them rigidly enforced. indeed, the ambitious student is often stimulated to more vigorous effort by the very difficulty of his subject. but the appreciative reading of any work of literature cannot thus be prescribed. of course the instructor may do much to help the student to such appreciation--that, indeed, is his chief duty; but he will not try to expound or enjoin emotional effects. recognizing these limitations upon his work, he often finds it difficult to avoid one or the other of two dangers that beset all efforts to teach a vernacular literature; the student must not think his reading an idle pastime, nor, on the other hand, must he think it a repellent task. in the first case, he is likely never to read anything well; in the second case, the things best worth reading he will probably never read at all. of the two dangers, the first is the more serious. the student ought early to learn that no really good reading is "light reading." and it may be remarked that this lesson was never more needed than today. there was never a time when people of all classes read more and thought less. we have what might almost be called a plague of reading, and an astonishing amount of what is called "reading matter" rolling out of our presses every year; while, significantly, we are producing very few books of permanent literary value. if the college study of literature is to encourage this indolent receptive temper, and relax the intellectual fiber of the student, then we might better drop it from the curriculum. the student must somehow learn that the book that is worth while will tax his thought, his imagination, his sympathies. he cannot be content merely to leave the door of his mind lazily open to it. every teacher knows the difficulty in any attempt to inspire or direct such a pupil. and the simpler the subject assigned him, the greater the difficulty. give him, for example, a group of the best lyrics in the language, in which the thought is simple and the sentiment homely or familiar. he will glance over them in half an hour, and then wonder what more you want of him. and you may not find it so easy to tell him. for he does not perceive nice shades of feeling, he has little sense of poetic form, he has not read the poems aloud to get the charm of their melody, and he will not let them linger in his mind long enough to feel that the simplest sentiments are often the most profound and moving. he simply tries to conjecture what sort of questions he is likely to meet on examination. doubtless from this type of pupil better results can be obtained by the reading of prose not too familiar, that suggests more questions for reflection and discussion. =suggestions for teaching of english literature--emotional appreciation to have an intellectual basis= it is perhaps impossible to lay down a detailed method for the teaching of english literature. much depends upon the nature of the literature read, the temperament of the teacher, the aptitude of the pupil. every teacher will, in great measure, discover his own methods. at all events, no attempts will be made here to give more than a few suggestions. in the first place, the teacher will remember that every work of literature--except purely "imagist" poetry, which it is hardly worth while to teach--is based upon some thought or truth; in most varieties of prose literature this forms the main purpose of the writing. the first object of the student's reading, therefore, must be to understand thoroughly the intellectual element in what he reads; and here the instructor can often be of direct assistance. and after such careful reading, the higher emotional values of what he has read will often disclose themselves spontaneously, so that the reader will need little further help. =abundant oral reading by teacher an aid to appreciation= just here it is worth while to note the great value of reading aloud, both by the teacher as a means of instruction, and by the pupil as a test of appreciation. all good writing gains vastly when read thus. mentally, at all events, we must image its sound if we are to get its full value. as to poetry, that goes without saying; for the essential, defining element in poetry is music. you may have truth, beauty, imagination, emotion, but without music you have not yet got poetry. but it is hardly less true that prose should be read aloud. "the best test of good writing," said hazlitt--and no man in his generation wrote better prose than he--"is, does it read well aloud." the sympathetic oral reading of a passage from any prose master, a reading that naturally indicates points of emphasis, shades of thought, nuances of feeling, is often better than any formal explanation, for it reproduces the living voice of the writer. the wise teacher will avoid the mannerisms of the professed elocutionist or dramatic reader, but he will not neglect the value of truthful oral interpretation for many passages of beautiful, or subtle, or powerful writing. and the student will often give a better proof of intelligent appreciation by reading aloud, "with good accent and discretion," than by any more elaborate form of examination. =knowledge of author's life and art and of ideals of the times necessary for comprehension and appreciation= some varieties of literature can best be approached indirectly, through a study of the life of the author, or of the age in which he lived. as any great work of pure literature must come out of the author's deepest life, it is evident that any knowledge of that life gained from other sources may be an important aid in the appreciation of his work. it is true that in the case of a writer of supreme and almost impartial dramatic genius, such knowledge may be of comparatively little value; though few of us will admit that it is merely an idle curiosity that would be gratified by a fuller knowledge even of the man william shakespeare. but all the more subjective forms of literature, such as the lyric and the essay, can hardly be studied intelligently without some biographical introduction. still more obvious is the need in many instances of some accurate knowledge of the period in which a given work is produced. for all such writing as grows directly out of political or social conditions, as oratory, or political satire, or various forms of the essay, this is clearly necessary. it would be folly to attempt to read the speeches of edmund burke or the political writings of swift without historical introduction and comment. but the historical setting is hardly less important in many other forms of literature. for the whole cast of an author's mind, the habitual tone of his feeling on most important matters, is often largely decided by his environment. it is only a very inadequate appreciation, for example, of the work not only of carlyle and ruskin but of tennyson, browning, and matthew arnold, that is possible without some correct knowledge of the varying attitude of these men toward important movements in english thought, social, economic, religious, between and . it must always be an important part of the duty of the college teacher of literature to provide such biographical and historical information. =knowledge of an author's style to be result of appreciative study of his works and not gathered from texts on literary criticism= all careful study of literature must involve some attention to manner or style--not so much, however, for its own sake, as a means for the fuller appreciation of what is read. in strictness, style has only one virtue, clearness; only one vice, obscurity. a perfect style is a transparent medium through which we plainly see the thought and feeling of the writer. such a style may, indeed, often have striking peculiarities, but these are really the marks of the writer's personality, which his style reveals without exaggerating. all rhetorical study ought, therefore, to accompany or follow, not to precede, the careful reading for appreciation. no good book ought ever to be considered a mere _corpus vile_ for rhetorical praxis. =careful attention to critical analysis= of much greater value is that distinctively critical analysis which endeavors to discover the different elements, intellectual, imaginative, emotional, that enter into any work of literature, and to determine their relative amount and importance. such analysis may well form the subject of classroom discussion, and advanced students should often be required to put the conclusions they have drawn from such discussion into the form of a finished critical essay. all exercises of this kind presuppose, of course, that the work criticized has been read with interest and intelligence; but no form of literary study is more stimulating or tends more directly to the formation of original and accurate critical judgments. it affords the best test of real literary appreciation. =content of college course in literature= obviously it is impossible with this method of study to cover the entire field of english literature in the four college years. it is wiser to read a few great books well than to read many smaller ones hurriedly. it becomes, therefore, an important question on what principle these books should be selected and grouped in courses. in the opinion of the present writer, it is well to begin with a brief outline sketch of the history of the literature given either in a textbook or by lectures, and illustrated by a few representative works, read carefully but without much detailed or intensive study. such an introductory course may have little cultural value; but it furnishes that knowledge of the chronological succession of english writers, and the varieties of literature dominant in each period, that is necessary for further intelligent study. this knowledge should, indeed, be given in the preparatory schools, but unfortunately it usually is not. when given in college, the course should, if possible, be assigned to the freshman year. in the later years, the works selected for study will best be grouped either by period or by subject. both plans have their advantages, but in most instances the first will be found the better. the study of a group of contemporary writers always gains in interest as we see how they all, with striking individual differences in temper and subject, yet reflect the social and moral life of their age. sometimes the two plans may be united; a particular form of literature may be studied as the best representative of a period, as the political pamphlet for the age of queen anne or the extended essay for the first quarter of the nineteenth century. and in some rare instances a single writer is at once the highest representative of the age in which he lived and the supreme master of the form in which he wrote--as shakespeare for the drama and milton for the epic. =gradation of courses and adaptation of methods to growing capacities of students= these courses should all--in the judgment of the present writer--be elective, but should be arranged in some natural sequence, those assigned to a lower year being preparatory to those of a higher. this sequence need not always be historical; the simpler course may well precede those which for any reason are more difficult. methods of instruction will also naturally change, becoming less narrowly didactic with the advancement of the student. in the senior year the teacher will usually prefer to meet his classes in small sections, on the seminar plan, for informal discussion and the criticism of papers written by his pupils on questions suggested by their reading. of such questions, students who for four years have been reading the masterpieces of english literature will surely find no lack. the number of courses that can be offered in the department will depend in some cases upon the relative size of the faculty and the student body. for in no other subject is it more important, especially in the later years, that the classes or sections should be small enough to allow some intimate personal touch between professor and student. it may be safely said that no college department of english literature is well officered or equipped that does not furnish at least four or five year-long courses of instruction. and certainly no student can maintain for four years such an acquaintance with the best specimens of a great literature without gaining something of that broad intelligence, heightened imagination, and just appreciation of whatever is best in nature and in human life, which combine in what we call culture. =undergraduate vs. graduate teaching of english literature= throughout this paper it has been assumed that what has been termed appreciation--that is, the ability to understand and enjoy the best things in literature--is the one central purpose to which all efforts must be subservient, in the teaching of english literature. but it should be remembered, as stated at the outset, that this paper has to do with the college undergraduate only, the candidate for the bachelor's degree. in the university, and to some extent in the graduate courses of the college leading to the master's degree, the subjects and methods of teaching may well be very different. studies in comparative literature, studies of literary origins, the investigation of perplexed or controverted questions in the life or work of an author, the study and elucidation of the work of an unknown or little-known writer--all these and many other similar matters may very properly be the subjects of specialized graduate study. but they will rarely be found of most profit to undergraduate classes. caleb t. winchester _wesleyan university_ xix the teaching of english composition[ ] =language an index of mental development= "deeds, not words," is a platitude--a flat statement which reduces the facts of the case to an average, and calls that truth. it is absurd to imply, as does this old truism, that we may never judge a man by his words. words are often the most convenient indices of education, of cultivation, and of intellectual power. and what is more, a man's speech, a man's writing, when properly interpreted, may sometimes measure the potentialities of the mind more thoroughly, more accurately, than the deeds which environment, opportunity, or luck permit. it is hard enough to take the intellectual measure even of the makers of history by their acts, so rapidly does the apparent value of their accomplishments vary with changing conceptions of what is and what is not worth doing. it is infinitely more difficult to judge in advance of youths just going out into the world by what they do. their words, which reveal what they are thinking and how they are thinking, give almost the only vision of their minds; and "by their words ye shall know them" becomes not a perversion, but an adaptation of the old text. would you judge of a boy just graduated entirely by the acts he had performed in college? if you did, you would make some profound and illuminating mistakes. this explains, i think, why parents, and teachers, and college presidents, and even undergraduates, are exercised over the study of writing english--which is, after all, just the study of the proper putting together of words. they may believe, all of them, that their concern is merely for the results of the power to write well--the ability to compose a good letter, to speak forcibly on occasion, to offer the amount of literacy required for most "jobs." but i wonder if the quite surprising keenness of their interest is not due to another cause. i wonder if they do not feel--perhaps unconsciously--that words indicate the man, that the power to write well shows intellect, and measures, if not its profundity, at least the stage of its development. we fasten on the defects of the letters written by undergraduates, on their faltering speeches, on their confused examination papers, as something significant, ominous, worthy even of comment in the press. and we are, i believe, perfectly right. speech and writing, if you get them in fair samples, indicate the extent and the value of a college education far better than a degree. =disappointing results from teaching of composition= it is this conviction which, pressing upon the schools and colleges, has caused such a flood of courses and textbooks, such an expenditure of time, energy, and money in the teaching of composition, so many ardent hopes of accomplishment, so much bitter disappointment at relative failure. i do not know how many are directly or indirectly teaching the writing of english in america--perhaps some tens of thousands; the imagination falters at the thought of how many are trying to learn it. thus the parent, conscious of this enormous endeavor and the convictions which inspire it, is somewhat appalled to hear the critics without the colleges maintaining that we are not teaching good writing, and the critics within protesting that good writing cannot be taught. =fixing responsibility for alleged failure of composition teaching= it is with the teachers, the administrators, the theorists on education, but most of all the teachers, that the responsibility for the alleged failure of this great project--to endow the college graduate with adequate powers of expression--must be sought. but these guardians of expression are divided into many groups, of which four are chief. there is first the great party of the know-nothings, who plan and teach with no opinion whatsoever as to the ends of their teaching. under the conditions of human nature and current financial rewards for the work, this party is inevitably large; but it counts for nothing except inertia. there is next the respectable and efficient cohort of the do-nothings, who believe that good writing and speaking are natural emanations from culture, as health from exercise or clouds from the sea. they would cultivate the mind of the undergraduate, and let expression take care of itself. they do not believe in teaching english composition. next are the formalists, who hold up a dictionary in one hand, the rules of rhetoric in the other, and say, "learn these, and good writing and good speaking shall be added unto you." the formalists have weakened in late years. there have been desertions to the do-nothings, for the work of grinding rules into unwilling minds is hard, and it is far easier to adopt a policy of _laissez-faire_. but there have been far more desertions into a party which i shall call, for want of a better name, the optimists. the optimists believe that in teaching to write and speak the american college is accepting its most significant if not its greatest duty. they believe that we must understand what causes good writing, in order to teach it; and that for the average undergraduate writing must be taught. =divergent views on teaching of composition= the best way to approach this grand battleground of educational policies is by the very practical fashion of pretending (if pretense is necessary) that you have a son (or a daughter) ready for college. what does he need, what must he have in a writing way, in a speaking way, when he has passed through all the education you see fit to give him? what should he possess of such ability in order to satisfy the world and himself? facts, ideas and imagination, to put it roughly, make up the substance of expression. facts he must be able to present clearly and faithfully; ideas he must be able to present clearly and comprehensively; his imagination he will need to express when his nature demands it. and for all these needs he must be able to use knowingly the words which study and experience will feed to him. he must be able to combine these words effectively in order to express the thoughts of which he is capable. and these thoughts he must work out along lines of logical, reasonable developments, so that what he says or writes will have an end and attain it. in addition, if he is imaginative--and who is not?--he should know the color and fire of words, the power of rhythm and harmony over the emotions, the qualities of speech whose secret will enable him to mold language to his personality and perhaps achieve a style. this he should know; the other powers he must have, or stop short of his full efficiency. alas, we all know that the undergraduate, in the mass, fails often to attain even to the power of logical, accurate statement, whether of facts or ideas. it is true that most of the charges against him are to a greater or less degree irrelevant. weighty indictments of his powers of expression are based upon bad spelling: a sign, it is true, of slovenliness, an indication of a lack of thoroughness which goes deeper than the misplacing of letters, but not in itself a proof of inability to express. great writers have often misspelled; and the letters which some of our capable business men write when the stenographer fails to come back after lunch are by no means impeccable. other accusations refer to a childish vagueness of expression--due to the fact that the american undergraduate is often a child intellectually rather than to any defects in composition _per se_. but it is a waste of time to deny that he writes, if not badly, at least not so clearly, so correctly, so intelligently, as we expect. the question is, why? it would be a comfort to place the blame upon the schools; and indeed they must take some blame, not only because they deserve it, but also to enlighten those critics of the college who never consider the kind of grain which comes into our hoppers. the readers of college entrance papers could tell a mournful story of how the candidates for our freshman classes write. here, for an instance, is a paragraph intended to prove that the writer had a command of simple english, correct in sentence structure, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. the subject is "the value of organized athletics in schools"--not an abstruse one, or too academic: if fellows are out in the open and take athletics say at a certain time every-day; these fellows are in good health and allert in their lessons, while those who take no exercise are logy and soft. organized athletics in a school bring the former, while if a school has no athletics every-thing goes more or less slipshod, and the fellows are more liable to get into trouble, because they are nervious from having nothing to do. this is a little below the average of the papers rejected for entrance to college. it is not a fair sample of what the schools can do, but it is a very fair sample of what they often do not do. it was not written by a foreigner, nor, i judge, by a son of illiterate parents, since it came from an expensive eastern preparatory school. the reader, marking with some heat a failure for the essay from which this paragraph is extracted, would not complain of the writer's paucity of ideas. his ideas are not below the average of his age. he would keep his wrath for the broken, distorted sentences, the silly spelling, the lack (which would appear in the whole composition) of even a rudimentary construction to carry the thought. spelling, the fundamentals of punctuation, and the compacting of a sentence must be taught in the schools, for it is too late to cure diseases of these members in college. they can be abated; but again and again they will break out. it is the school's business to teach them; and the weary reader sees in this unhappy specimen but a dark and definite manifestation of a widespread slovenliness in secondary education, a lack of thoroughness which appears not only in the failures, but also, though in less measure, among the better writers, whose work is too good in other respects not to be reluctantly passed. again, it would be easy to place much of the blame for the slipshod writings of the undergraduate upon the standards set by his elders outside the colleges. editors can tell of the endless editing which contributions, even from writers supposed to be professional, will sometimes require. and when such a sentence as the following slips through, and begins an article in a well-known, highly respectable magazine, we can only say, "if gold rust, what will iron do?" yes the rot--and with a very big r--in sport: for that, thanks to an overdone and too belauded a professionalism by a large section of the pandering press, is what it has got to. again, any business man could produce from his files a collection of letters full of phrasing so vague and inconsequential that only his business instincts and knowledge of the situation enable him to interpret it. any lawyer could give numberless instances where an inability to write clear and simple english has caused litigation without end. indeed, the bar is largely supported by errors in english composition! and as for conversation conducted--i will not say with pedantical correctness, for that is not an ideal, but with accuracy and transparency of thought--listen to the talk about you! however, it is the business of the colleges to improve all that; and though it is not easy to develop in youth virtues which are more admired than practiced by maturity, let us assume that they should succeed in turning out writers of satisfactory ability, even with these handicaps, and look deeper for the cause of their relative failure. =democratizing education and immigration the cause of poor quality of expression= the chief cause of the prevalent inadequacy of expression among our undergraduates is patent, and its effects are by no means limited to america, as complaints from france and from england prove. the mob--the many-headed, the many-mouthed, figured in the past by poets as dumb, or, at best, an incoherent thing of brutish noises signifying speech--is acquiring education and learning how to express it. hundreds of thousands whose ancestors never read, and seldom talked except of the simpler needs of life, are doing the talking and the writing which their large share in the transaction of the world's business demands. indeed, democracy requires not only that the illiterate shall learn to read and write in the narrower sense of the words, but also that the relatively literate must seek with their growing intellectuality a more perfect power of expression. and it is precisely from the classes only relatively literate--those for whom in the past there has been no opportunity, and no need, to become highly educated--that the bulk of our college students today are coming, the bulk of the students in the endowed institutions of the east as well as in the newer state universities of the west. the typical undergraduate is no longer the son of a lawyer or a clergyman, with an intellectual background behind him. there is plenty of grumbling among college faculties, and in certain newspapers, over this state of affairs. in reality, of course, it is the opportunity of the american colleges. let the motives be what they may, the simple fact that so many american parents wish to give their children more education than they themselves were blessed with is a condition so favorable for those who believe that in the long run only intelligence can keep our civilization on the path of real progress, that one expects to hear congratulations instead of wails from the college campuses. nevertheless, we pay for our opportunity, and we must expect to pay. the thousands of intellectual immigrants, ill-supplied with means of progress, indefinite of aim, unaware of their opportunities, who land every september at the college gates, constitute a weighty burden, a terrible responsibility. and the burden rests upon no one with more crushing weight than upon the unfortunate teacher of composition. that these entering immigrants cannot write well is a symptom of their mental rawness. it is to be expected. but thanks to the methods of slipshod, ambitious america, the schools have passed them on still shaky in the first steps of accurate writing--spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and the use of words. thanks to the failure of america to demand thoroughness in anything but athletics and business, they are blind to the need of thoroughness in expression. and thanks to the inescapable difficulty of accurate writing, they resist the attempt to make them thorough, with the youthful mind's instinctive rebellion against work. nevertheless, whatever the cost, they must learn if they are to become educated in any practical and efficient sense; the immigrants especially must learn, since they come from environments where accurate expression has not been practiced--often has not been needed--and go to a future where it will be required of them. not even the do-nothing school denies the necessity that the undergraduate should learn to write well. but how? =solutions proposed by four types of instructors= the know-nothing school proposes no ultimate solution and knows none, unless faithfully teaching what they are told to teach, and accepting the sweat and burden of the day, with few of its rewards, be not in its blind way a better solution than to dodge the responsibility altogether. the formalists labor over precept and principle--disciplining, commanding, threatening--feeling more grief over one letter lost, or one comma mishandled, than joy over the most spirited of incorrect effusions. they turn out sulky youths who nevertheless have learned something. the do-nothings propose a solution which is engaging, logical--and insufficient. they are the philosophers and the æsthetes among teachers, who see, what the formalists miss, that he who thinks well will in the long run write as he should. their special horror is of the compulsory theme, extracted from unwilling and idealess minds. their remedy for all ills of speech and pen is: teach, not writing and speaking, but thinking; give, not rules and principles, but materials for thought. and above all, do not force college students to study composition. the do-nothing school has almost enough truth on its side to be right. it has more truth, in fact, than its principles permit it to make use of. the umpire in this contest--who is the parent with a son ready for college--should note, however, two pervading fallacies in this _laissez-faire_ theory of writing english. the first belongs to the party of the right among the do-nothings--the older teachers who come from the generation which sent only picked men to college; the second, to the party of the left--the younger men who are distressed by the toil, the waste, the stupidity which accompany so much work in composition. the older men attack the attempt to teach the making of literature. their hatred of the cheap, the banal, and the false in literature that has been machine-made by men who have learned to express finely what is not worth expressing at all, leads them to distrust the teaching of english composition. they condemn, however, a method of teaching that long since withered under their scorn. the aim of the college course in composition today is not the making of literature, but writing; not the production of imaginative masterpieces, but the orderly arrangement of thought in words. through no foresight of our own, but thanks to the pressure of our immigrants upon us, we have ceased teaching "eloquence" and "rhetoric," and have taken upon ourselves the humbler task of helping the thinking mind to find words and a form of expression as quickly and as easily as possible. the old teacher of rhetoric aspired to make burkes, popes, or de quinceys. we are content if our students become the masters rather than the servants of their prose. the party of the left presents a more frontal attack upon the teaching of the writing of english. show the undergraduate how to think, they say; fill his mind with knowledge, and his pen will find the way. ah, but there is the fallacy! why not help him to find the way--as in latin, or surveying, or english literature? the way in composition can be taught, as in these other subjects. writing, like skating, or sailing a boat, has its special methods, its special technique, even as it has its special medium, words, and the larger unities of expression. the laws which govern it are simple. they are always in intimate connection with the thought behind, and worthless without it; but they can be taught. ask any effective teacher of composition to show you what he has done time and again for the freshman whose sprawling thought he has helped to form into coherent and unified expression. and do not be deceived by analogies drawn from our colleges of the mid-nineteenth century, where composition was not taught, and men wrote well; or from the english universities, where the same conditions are said (with dissenting voices) to exist. in the first place, they had no immigrant problem in the mid-century, nor have they in oxford and cambridge. in the second, the rigorous translation back and forward between the classics and the mother tongue, now obsolete in america, but still a requisite for an english university training, provides a drill in accuracy of language whose efficiency is not to be despised. the student must express his intellectual gains even as he absorbs them, or the crystallization of knowledge into personal thought will be checked at the beginning. the boy must be able to say what he knows, or write what he knows, or he does not know it. and it is as important to help him express as to help him absorb. the teachers in other departments must aid in this task or we fail; but where the whole duty of making expression keep pace with thought and with life is given to them, they will be forced either to overload, or to neglect all but the little arcs that bound their subjects. and since they are specialists in other fields, and so may neglect that technique of writing which in itself is a special study, their task, when they accept it, is hard, and their labor, when it is forced upon them, too often ineffective. composition must be taught where college education proceeds--that is the truth of the matter; and if not taught directly, then indirectly, with pain and with waste. the school of the optimists approaches this question of writing english with self-criticism and with a full realization of the difficulties, and of the tentative nature of the methods now in use, but with confidence as to the possibility of ultimate success. in order to be an optimist in composition you must have some stirrings of democracy in your veins. you must be interested in the need of the average man to shape his writing into a useful tool that will serve his purposes, whether in the ministry or the soap business. this is the utilitarian end of writing english. and you must be interested in developing his powers of self-expression, even when convinced that no great soul is longing for utterance, but only a commonplace human mind--like your own--that will be eased by powers of writing and of speech. it is here that composition is of service to the imagination, and incidentally to culture; and i should speak more largely of this service if there were space in this chapter to bring forward all the aspects of college composition. it is the personal end of writing english. if the average man turns out to be a superman with mighty purposes ahead, or if he has a great soul seeking utterance, he will have far less need of your assistance; but you can aid him, nevertheless, and your aid will count as never before, and will be your greatest personal reward, though no greater service to the community than the countless hours spent upon the minds of the multitude. in order to be an optimist it is still more important to understand that writing english well depends first upon intellectual grasp, and second upon technical skill, and always upon both. as for the first, your boy, if you are the parent of an undergraduate, is undergoing a curious experience in college. against his head a dozen teachers are discharging round after round of information. sometimes they miss; sometimes the shots glance off; sometimes the charge sinks in. and his brain is undergoing less obvious assaults. he is like the core of soft iron in an electro-magnet upon which invisible influences are constantly beating. his teachers are harassing his mind with methods of thinking: the historical method; the experimental method of science; the interpretative method of literature. unfortunately, the charges of information too often lodge higgledy-piggledy, like bird-shot in a signboard; and the waves of influence make an impression which is too often incoherent and confused. if the historians really taught the youth to think historically from the beginning, and the scientists really taught him to think scientifically from the beginning, and he could apply his new methods of thought to the expression of his own emotions, experiences, life, then the teacher of composition might confine himself to the second of his duties, and teach only that technique which makes writing to uncoil itself as easily and as vividly as a necklace of matched and harmonious stones. in the university of utopia we shall leave the organization of thought to the other departments, and have plenty left to do; but we are not yet in utopia. at present, the teacher of composition stands like a sentry at the gates of knowledge, challenging all who come out speaking random words and thoughts; asking, "have you thought it out?" "have you thought it out clearly?" "can you put your conclusions into adequate words?" and if the answers are unsatisfactory, he must proceed to teach that orderly, logical development of thought from cause to effect which underlies all provinces of knowledge, and reaches well into the unmapped territories of the imagination. but even in utopia composition must remain the testing ground of education, though we shall hope for more satisfactory answers to our challenges. and even in utopia, where the undergraduate perfects his thinking while acquiring his facts, it will be the duty of the teacher of writing to help him to apply his intellectual powers to his experiences, his emotions, his imagination, in short, to self-expression. and there will still remain the technique of writing. =how to teach college students the art of self-expression?= theoretically, when the undergraduate has assembled his thoughts he is ready and competent to write them, but practically he is neither entirely ready nor usually entirely competent. it is one thing to assemble an automobile; it is another thing to run it. the technique of writing is not nearly as interesting as the subject and the thought of writing; just as the method of riding a horse is not nearly as interesting as the ride itself. and yet when you consider it as a means to an end, as a subtle, elastic, and infinitely useful craft, the method of writing is not uninteresting even to those who have to learn and not to teach it. the technique of composition has to do with words. we are most of us inapt with words; even when ideas begin to come plentifully they too often remain vague, shapeless, ineffective, for want of words to name them. and words can be taught--not merely the words themselves, but their power, their suggestiveness, their rightness or wrongness for the meaning sought. the technique of writing has to do with sentences. good thinking makes good sentences, but the sentence must be flexible if it is to ease the thought. we can learn its elasticity, we can practice the flow of clauses, until the wooden declaration which leaves half unexpressed gives place to a fluent and accurate transcript of the mind, form fitting substance as the vase the water within it. this technique has to do with paragraphs. the critic knows how few even among our professional writers master their paragraphs. it is not a dead, fixed form that is to be sought. it is rather a flexible development, which grows beneath the reader's eye until the thought is opened with vigor and with truth. it is interesting to search in the paragraph of an ineffective editorial, an article, or theme, for the sentence that embodies the thought; to find it dropped like a turkey's egg where the first opportunity offers, or hidden by the rank growth of comment and reflection about it. such research is illuminating for those who do not believe in the teaching of composition; and if it begins at home, so much the better. and finally, the technique of writing has to do with the whole, whether sonnet, or business letter, or report to a board of directors. how to lead one thought into another; how to exclude the irrelevant; how to weigh upon that which is important; how to hold together the whole structure so that the subject, all the subject, and nothing but the subject shall be laid before the reader; this requires good thinking, but good thinking without technical skill is like a strong arm in tennis without facility in the strokes. the program i have outlined is simpler in theory than in practice. in practice, it is easier to discover the disorder than the thought which it confuses; in practice, technical skill must be forced upon undergraduates unaccustomed to thoroughness, in a country that in no department of life, except perhaps business, has hitherto been compelled to value technique. even the optimist grows pessimistic sometimes in teaching composition. and yet in the teaching of english the results are perhaps more evident than elsewhere in the whole range of college work. it is wonderful to see what can be accomplished by an enthusiast in the sport of transmuting brains into words. when the teacher seeks for his material in the active interests of the student--whether athletics or engineering or literature or catching trout--when he stirs up the finer interests, drawing off, as it were, the cream into words, the results are convincing. writing is one of the most fascinating, most engaging of pursuits for the man with a craving to grasp the reality about him and name it in words. and even for the undergraduate, whose imagination is just developing, and whose brain protests against logical thought, it can be made as interesting as it is useful. the teaching of english composition in this country is a vast industry in which thousands of workmen are employed and in which a million or so of young minds are invested. i do not wish to take it too seriously. there are many accomplishments more important for the welfare of the race. and yet, if it be true that maturity of intellect is never attained without that clearness and accuracy of thinking which can be made to show itself in good writing, then the failure of the undergraduate to write well is serious, and the struggle to make him write better worthy of the attention of those who have children to be educated. i do not think that success in this struggle will come through the policy of _laissez-faire_. all undergraduates profit by organized help in their writing; many require it. i do not think that success will come by a pedantical insistence upon correctness in form without regard to the sense. squeezing unwilling words from indifferent minds may be discipline; it certainly is not teaching. i think that success will come only to the teacher who is a middleman between thought and expression, valuing both. when we succeed in making the bulk of the undergraduates really think; when we can inspire them with a modicum of that passion for truth in words which is the moving force of the good writer; when the schools help us and the outside world demands and supports efficiency in diction; then we shall carry through the program of the optimists. henry seidel canby _yale university_ footnotes: [ ] reprinted in revised form from _college sons and college fathers_, harper and brothers. xx the teaching of the classics =significance of recent criticisms of the teaching of the classics= methods of teaching are determined to a large extent by appreciation of the objects to be attained. if teachers make clear to themselves just what they wish to accomplish, they will more easily develop the means. the storm of objection now rising against the study of the classics indicates clearly that there is a general dissatisfaction with the result of this study. there is a striking unanimity on this subject among persons of widely different talent and experience, of whom some are still students, while others are looking back upon their training in school and college after years of mature life. their adverse criticism is all the more significant because often expressed with obvious regret. some, who have had unusual opportunities for observation, state their opinion in no uncertain language. for example, mr. abraham flexner, in his pamphlet "a modern school," on page says: "neither latin nor greek would be contained in the curriculum of the modern school--not, of course, because their literatures are less wonderful than they are reputed to be, but because their present position in the curriculum rests upon tradition and assumption. a positive case can be made out for neither." the president of columbia university, in his annual report for - , page , speaking of the "teachers of the ancient classics," says: "they have heretofore been all too successful in concealing from their pupils the real significance and importance of greek and latin studies." such criticisms, however, do not prove that the study of the classics cannot accomplish all that its advocates claim for it, but only that it is not now accomplishing satisfactory results. undoubtedly there are various causes for a depreciation of classical studies at the present time. other subjects, such as mathematics, are suffering from a similar disparagement. in recent years interest has centered more and more in studies designed to develop powers of observation, give knowledge of certain facts, or provide equipment for some particular vocation, to the neglect of those which discipline the mind or impart a general culture. it is certainly important, therefore, to consider the relative values of these various studies. to do so it is desirable to examine the aims of classical teaching and the methods by which these aims may be realized; for it is at least possible that the widespread dissatisfaction with this teaching is due not so much to the subject itself as to defects and insufficiency in the methods employed. =the present aims of classical teaching= not all teachers of the classics agree in all respects as to the aims of their teaching. certain aims, however, are common to all the classical departments in american colleges. these are: . to train students, through the acquisition and use of the ancient languages, in memory, accuracy, analysis and logic, clearness and fluency of expression, and style. . to enable certain students to read with profit and enjoyment the masterpieces of greek and latin literature. . to impart to certain students a knowledge, as complete as possible, of the classical civilization as a whole. to a complete knowledge of this civilization belongs all that the ancients possessed or did, all that they thought or wrote, whether or not any particular part of it had an influence upon later times or is, in itself, interesting or valuable now. all parts alike are phenomena of the life of these ancient peoples and so of the life of the human race. . to impart a knowledge and understanding of the thoughts and ideas, the forms of expression, the institutions, and the experiences of the ancients, in so far as these are either actually valuable in themselves to the modern world or have influenced the development of modern civilization. besides these aims which are common to all, there are certain others less generally pursued by classical teachers in this country. among these are: . to make students familiar with "the greek (and latin) in english," i.e. with the etymology and history of words in our own language which had their origin in or through greek or latin.[ ] . to trace the influences of the classic literature upon modern literature and thought.[ ] . to train those who expect to teach the classics in pedagogical methods, and to familiarize them with modern pedagogical appliances.[ ] . to teach the language of the new testament and of the church fathers.[ ] the classical departments of some colleges also give courses in modern greek[ ]: such courses, however, belong properly to the field of modern languages. now it is by no means certain that all of these aims properly concern all classes of students. on the contrary, every one would doubtless agree that those described under nos. and do not concern the average student of the classics. it is also a debatable question whether it should be the aim of classical teaching to give all classical students some knowledge of the classic civilization as a whole; whether, for example, aristophanes and plautus, however important these authors may be for a complete understanding of the ancient life and literature, are worth while for all classical students alike. it is far more important, however, to determine whether, in that which seems to many persons the chief business of a classical department, all who study the masterpieces of the ancient literatures should be taught to study them in the original language. =teaching from the originals only= no one doubts that classical departments should provide courses on the ancient literature in the original, or that the æsthetic qualities of a literature can be _fully_ appreciated only in the original language. some people, however, maintain that every literary production is primarily a work of art, and consequently that its æsthetic qualities are its most essential qualities: that to teach the classical literature through the medium of translations would be aiming at an imperfect appreciation of its most essential qualities, and would also divert students from the study of its original form. yet in most colleges courses on painting and sculpture are given through the medium of photographs, casts and copies, and no one questions the value and effectiveness of such courses, or doubts that they tend to increase the desire of the students to know the originals themselves. similarly courses on greek literature in translations are given at many american colleges, for example at bucknell, california, colorado, harvard,[ ] idaho, illinois, kansas, lafayette, leland stanford, michigan, missouri, new york university, north dakota, pennsylvania, syracuse, tennessee, vermont, washington university, wesleyan, and wisconsin: courses in latin literature in translations at california, colorado, kansas, leland stanford, pennsylvania, tennessee, and washington university. besides these there are courses at some colleges on greek or roman life and thought,[ ] or life and letters,[ ] or civilization,[ ] most of which do not involve the use of the ancient languages on the part of the students. for example, at brown courses which require no knowledge of the ancient languages are given in both greek and roman "civilization as illustrated by the literature, history and monuments of art."[ ] harvard also offers courses entitled "a survey of greek civilization" and "a survey of roman civilization, illustrated from the monuments and literature," in which a knowledge of the ancient languages is not required. in deciding the question here at issue it is essential to distinguish between the different kinds of literature. the value of certain literary productions undoubtedly consists chiefly in the æsthetic qualities of their form; that is, the excellence and influence of these productions depends upon the particular language actually used by the author. such works of literature lose very much in translation, and it may be asserted with some reason that they lose their most essential qualities. it may well be doubted, therefore, whether any one can derive great pleasure or benefit from the study of the poems of sappho or the odes of horace, for example, unless these are studied in the original. the value of other literary productions, on the other hand, lies partly in their form and partly in their content, or in their content alone. it is quite a different question, therefore, whether one may derive a satisfactory pleasure and benefit from a translation of the _agamemnon_ of Æschylus or thucydides' _history of the peloponnesian war_, of lucretius or tacitus, to say nothing of such books as aristotle's _constitution of athens_. =teaching only from classical texts= there is another and still more important question connected with the theory of classical teaching, namely whether all classical courses should be based upon or begin with the study of some classical text. some are of the opinion that it is the business of classical teachers to teach the greek and latin languages, and the literatures in these languages, and that anything which cannot be taught best through the study of some portion of the classical literature in the original should be taught by some other department of the college. consequently in some institutions courses on ancient literature in english translations are given by the english department,[ ] courses on greek and roman history, archaeology, and philosophy by the departments of history, archaeology, and philosophy, respectively, courses on the methods and equipment of teaching the classics by the department of pedagogy. others, less extreme in their views, hold (_a_) that any study of the greek or roman civilization apart from the original ancient literature would be vague, discoursive, and unprofitable, and in particular that a discussion of a literature or of literary forms without an immediate, personal acquaintance with this literature or these literary forms in the original would not be useful, and (_b_) that such courses would have little permanent value for the students because it would not be possible to compel the students to make much effort for themselves. quite the opposite opinion on this most important question is held by those who believe (_a_) that the study of the classics should not be confined to those who are now able, or may in the future be expected, to read the ancient literature in the original, (_b_) that there are some things even about the ancient literature and civilization which can be taught more effectively without the loss of time and the division of attention involved in reading the ancient authors in the original, and (_c_) that in courses such as those dealing with ancient history ancient books on these subjects, either in the original or in translations, cannot properly be used as textbooks for the reason that, quite apart from their errors and misconceptions, these books do not contain, except incidentally, those phases of the ancient life which are the most interesting and valuable to the modern world. such persons consider that the attempt to convey an appreciation of the ancient literature through those limited portions of it which can be read by the students in the original is necessarily ineffective. they hold that to appreciate any literature one must study it as literature,--i.e., as english literature should be studied by english students, french literature by french students,--and that literary study of this sort properly begins where translation and exegesis leave off. and finally, they maintain that the effort to give students a lively knowledge of ancient life or ancient history through the ancient texts is precisely like the effort to illustrate ancient life by ancient works of art; e.g., to give a student an idea of an ancient soldier by showing him an ancient picture of a soldier. such illustrations convey instead the impression that ancient life was both unattractive and unreal, that the study of it is childish and unpractical.[ ] =courses in the ancient languages= many classical courses are designed primarily to teach the classical languages themselves, or to give mental training through the study and use of these languages. until recently most american colleges required for admission an elementary knowledge of these languages involving commonly at least three years of preparatory training in greek and from three to five years of preparatory latin. now, however, many colleges provide courses for beginners in greek, some also for beginners in latin. for example, courses for beginners in greek are given at bryn mawr, university of california, chicago, colorado, columbia, university of north dakota, dartmouth, harvard, idaho, illinois, johns hopkins, kansas, lafayette, leland stanford, michigan, new york university, northwestern, university of pennsylvania, university of tennessee, vanderbilt, vermont, washington university, wesleyan, williams, wisconsin, yale, and elsewhere. courses for beginners in latin are given, for example, at the universities of idaho, pennsylvania, and wisconsin. ordinarily these courses resemble in general plan and method the corresponding courses in secondary schools; but inasmuch as the students are more mature, the progress is much more rapid. =the "natural method"= in some institutions the attempt is made in teaching ancient greek and latin to employ methods used by the teachers of modern languages. some classical teachers have even adopted to some extent the so-called "natural" or "direct" method of language teaching[ ]: commonly such attempts have not been very successful, and where some degree of success has been attained the success seems due to the personality and enthusiasm of the individual teacher. others have contented themselves with devoting a part of certain courses to exercises designed to show the students that the classical languages were at one time in daily use among living people and were the media of ordinary conversation[ ]. students in such courses commonly memorize certain colloquial phrases and take part in simple conversations in which these phrases can be used. such methods, skillfully employed, undoubtedly relieve the tedium of the familiar drill in grammar and "prose composition," and may help materially in imparting both a knowledge of the ancient languages and a facility in reading the ancient authors. an interesting experiment is now being tried at the university of california in a course in greek for beginners, given by professor james t. allen. the description of the course in the university catalogue is as follows: "an introduction to the greek language based upon graded selections from the works of menander, euclid, aristophanes, plato, herodotus, and the new testament. the method of presentation emphasizes the living phrase, and has as its chief object the acquiring of reading power. mastery of essential forms; memorizing of quotations; practice in reading at sight." this course has had considerable success. more than three hundred students have been enrolled thus far in a period of six or seven years, and some of these have testified that it was one of the most valuable courses they have had in any subject. one of the chief advantages has been that the students, while learning forms and vocabulary, are reading some real greek, and that of first-rate quality.[ ] =use of modern literature in ancient greek or latin= various attempts have been made, especially in recent years, to provide for classical students modern stories in ancient latin, in the belief that modern students will acquire a practical knowledge of the language more readily from such textbooks than from any parts of the ancient literature.[ ] the story of robinson crusoe was translated into latin by g. f. goffeaux, and this version has been edited and republished by dr. arcadius avellanus, philadelphia, ( pages). an abridgement of the original edition was edited by p. a. barnett, under the title _the story of robinson crusoe in latin, adapted from defoe by goffeaux_, longmans, green and co., . among original compositions in ancient latin for students may be mentioned ( ) ritchie's _fabulae faciles_, a first latin reader, edited by john copeland kirtland, jr., of phillips exeter academy, longmans, green & co., ( pages). ( ) _the fables of orbilius_ by a. d. godley, london, edward arnold, two small pamphlets, illustrated, containing short and witty stories for beginners. ( ) _ora maritima_, a latin story for beginners, by e. a. sonnenschein, seventh edition, , london, kegan, paul and co.; new york, the macmillan company ( pages). this is the account of the experiences of some boys during a summer in kent. ( ) _pro patria_, a latin story for beginners by professor e. a. sonnenschein, london, swan, sonnenschein and co.; new york, the macmillan company, ( pages). ( ) _rex aurei rivi, auctore johanne ruskin, latine interpretatus est arcadius avellanus, neo-eboraci_, (published by e. p. prentice). ( ) f. g. moore: _porta latina_, fables of la fontaine in a latin version, ginn and co., . a series of translations of modern fiction is now being produced under the title of the mount hope classics, published by mr. e. p. prentice, wall street, new york city. the translator is dr. arcadius avellanus. the first of these appeared in under the title _pericla navarci magonis_, this being a translation of _the adventures of captain mago_, or _with a phoenician expedition, b. c. _, by léon cahun, scribner's, . the second volume, _mons spes et fabulae aliae_, a collection of short stories, was published in . the third, _mysterium arcae boule_, published in , is the well-known mystery of the boule cabinet by mr. burton egbert stevenson. the fourth, _fabulae divales_, published in , is a collection of fairy stories for young readers to which is added a version of ovid's _amor et psyche_. over these books a lively controversy has arisen between dr. avellanus and mr. charles h. forbes, of phillips academy, andover.[ ] undoubtedly the translator's style and vocabulary are far from being strictly in accord with the present canons of classical latin. he employs a multitude of words and idioms unfamiliar to those whose reading has been confined to the masterpieces of the ancient literature which are most commonly studied. on the other hand, the ancient language is made in these books a medium of modern thought. the stories presented hold the attention, the vividness of the narrative captivates the reader and carries him through the obscurities of diction and of style to a wholly unexpected realization that latin is a real language after all. it is a serious question whether students can ever acquire a mastery of a language, or even a sufficient knowledge of it really to appreciate its literature, unless they learn to use this language to express their own thoughts. but it is evident that it is impossible adequately to express modern ideas in the language of cæsar and cicero. those who would exclude the latin of comparatively recent authors such as erasmus from the canon of the latin which may be taught, as well as those who confine their teaching to the translation and parsing of certain texts, are raising the question whether the latin language should be taught at all in modern times. naturally less effort has been made to provide for students modern literature in ancient greek. at least one such book, however, is available, _the greek war of independence, - , told in classical greek for the use of beginners_ (with notes and exercises) by c. d. chambers: published by swan, sonnenschein and co. =courses in "prose composition"= in nearly all american colleges courses in greek and latin composition are given, either as a means of mental training or in order to give a more complete mastery of these languages and a greater facility in reading the literature. in some places, for example at the university of california, a series of courses is given in both greek and latin composition culminating in original compositions, translations of selections from modern literature, and conversation in the ancient languages. courses in latin conversation[ ] are given in other places also, and courses in the pronunciation of ancient greek and latin.[ ] all such courses belong to the general field of the study of the classical languages as distinguished from the study of the literature, history, or any other phase of the classical civilization. this branch of language study, of course, includes such purely linguistic courses as those in comparative philology, comparative grammar, the morphology of the ancient languages, syntax, dialects, etc. =courses in literature= the bulk of classical teaching in american colleges is devoted to the literature. the great majority of all college courses in latin and greek have the same general characteristics.[ ] a certain limited portion of text is assigned for preparation. this text is then translated by the students in class, and the translation corrected. grammatical and exegetical questions and the content of the passage are discussed. most of the time at each meeting of the class is consumed in such exercises. generally lectures or informal talks are given by the instructor upon the life and personality of each author whose work is read, upon the life and thought of his times, upon the literary activity as a whole, and upon the value of those selections from his works which are the subject of the course. sometimes the students are required to read more of the original literature than can be translated in class. generally some collateral reading in english is assigned. often the instructor reads to the class, usually from the original, other portions of the ancient literature. the number and extent of such courses in the different institutions vary according to the strength of the faculty, the plan of the curriculum, and the number and demands of the students in each. in the main, however, the list of selections from the ancient literature presented in such courses in all the colleges is much the same. many of these courses deal with one particular author and his works, such as sophocles, plato, plautus, or horace. others deal with some particular kind of literature, such as greek tragedy or oratory, latin comedy, etc., or with a group of authors of different types combined for the sake of variety.[ ] =methods commonly pursued= the methods as well as the aims of such courses are well exemplified in the following passages contained in the _circular of information_ for - of the university of chicago, page : "ability to read greek with accuracy and ease, and intelligent enjoyment of the masterpieces of greek literature are the indispensable prerequisites of all higher greek scholarship. all other interests that may attach to the study are subordinate to these, and their pursuit is positively harmful if it prematurely distracts the student's attention from his main purpose." it is not immediately apparent what distinction is made here, if there is any, between the "prerequisites" and the "main purpose" of classical scholarship. what the chief aim of classical teaching is according to this view, however, is made clear by the two paragraphs which follow, as well as by the descriptions of the individual courses offered by the chicago faculty. "in the work of the junior colleges the department will keep this principle steadily in view, and will endeavor to teach a practical knowledge of greek vocabulary and idiom, and to impart literary and historic culture by means of rapid viva voce translation and interpretation of the simpler masterpieces of the literature.... in the senior colleges the chief stress will be laid on reading and exegesis, but the range of authors presented to the student's choice will be enlarged." =value of such courses= the advantage of such courses is that they make the students who take them familiar with at least some limited portions of the best of the ancient literature in its original form, and most people are agreed that this is the only way in which students can be taught to appreciate that part of this literature, the value of which lies chiefly or wholly in its form. but people are not agreed upon two most serious questions which arise in this connection. the first is whether all students are capable of appreciating at all literature of this sort, especially when it is conveyed in an ancient and difficult language. the other question is how much of the classical literature really depends for its values chiefly upon its form. to say that the psalms and the gospels have no value or little value for the world apart from the original form and language in which they were written would, of course, be absurd. is it any less absurd to say that the study of the homeric poems, the attic tragedies, the works of thucydides and plato would have little value for students unless this literature were studied in the original language? these questions cannot properly be ignored any longer by teachers of the classics. =defects of these courses= the defects of such courses are manifest to most persons. students who pursue these courses through most of the years of secondary school and college fail to acquire either such a knowledge of the greek and latin languages as would enable them to read with pleasure and profit a greek or latin book, or such a knowledge of the greek and roman literature and civilization as would enable them to appreciate the value of classical studies. many of them graduate from college without even knowing that there is anything really worthy of their attention in the classical literatures. the fact stares the teachers of the classics grimly in the face that they are not accomplishing the aims which they profess. one explanation of this fact suggests itself. in the classical courses commonly given in american colleges the attention paid to the content of the literature, to the author and his times--the lectures and readings by the instructor, the discussion of archaeological, historical, literary, and philosophical matters introduced into the course,--distract attention from the study of the language itself, and check this study before a real mastery of the language has been secured. on the other hand, the time and still more the attention devoted in these courses to the mere process of translation detracts from the appreciation of the literature and obstructs the study of the life and thought. in attempting to accomplish both purposes in these courses the teachers fail to accomplish either, and the result is chiefly a certain mental training, the practical value of which depends largely upon the mental capacity and skill of each individual teacher, and is not readily appreciated. =courses not requiring knowledge of the ancient languages= to obviate some of these defects, and also to provide courses on greek and roman culture for those unfamiliar with the ancient languages, courses which require no use of these languages are now given at various colleges on classical literature or civilization.[ ] a course on the "greek epic" at the university of california is described as follows: "a study chiefly of the iliad and the odyssey; their form, origin, and content; homeric and pre-homeric aegean civilizations; relative merits of modern translations; influence of the homeric poems on the later greek, roman, and modern literature. lectures (partly illustrated), assigned readings, discussions, and reports." the course at harvard entitled "survey of greek civilization" is "a lecture course, with written tests on a large body of private reading (mostly in english). no knowledge of greek is required beyond the terms which must necessarily be learned to understand the subject." "the prescribed reading includes translations of greek authors as well as modern books on greek life and thought." the lecturer frequently reads and comments upon selections from the ancient literature. at brown university a course is given on greek civilization, including the following topics: i topography of greece, ii prehistoric greece, iii the language, iv early greece (the makers of homer, expansion of greece, tyrannies, the new poetry, etc.), v the transition century, - b. c. ((_a_) government and political life, (_b_) literature, (_c_) art), vi the classical epoch, - b. c. ((_a_) political and military history, (_b_) literature, (_c_) the fine arts), vii the hellenistic and græco-roman periods, ((_a_) history, (_b_) literature, (_c_) philosophy, (_d_) learning and science, (_e_) art), viii the sequel of greek history (the byzantine empire, the italian renaissance, mediæval and modern greece). this is described as "wholly a lecture course, with frequent written tests, examination of the notebooks, and a final examination on the whole. definite selections of the most conspicuous authors are required in english translations." the lecturer also reads selections from homer, the greek drama, pindar, etc. similar courses on roman civilization are given at both brown and harvard. there is also a course of fifteen lectures on "greek civilization" at vermont; "the culture history of rome, lectures with supplementary reading in english," at washington university; "greek civilization, lectures and collateral reading on the political institutions, the art, religion, and scientific thought of ancient greece in relation to modern civilization," at wesleyan; "the role of the greeks in civilization" at wisconsin.[ ] =defects of the lecture system= whatever success such courses may have, they are open to one criticism. most, if not all of them, appear to be primarily lecture courses, with more or less collateral reading controlled by tests and examinations. the experience of many, however, justifies to some extent the belief that college students derive little benefit from collateral reading controlled only in this way, because such reading is commonly most superficial. little mental training, therefore, is involved in courses such as those just described, and the ideas which the students acquire in them are chiefly those given to them by others. and it may reasonably be doubted whether the value to the students of ideas received in this way is comparable to the value of those which they are led to discover for themselves. so far, then, as such courses fail to accomplish the purposes for which they were designed, their failure may be due wholly to this cause. =the study of literature apart from its original language= it is entirely possible to conceive of courses in which no use of the ancient languages would be required, but in which the students would acquire by their own efforts a knowledge of the classical literature and civilization far more extensive and more satisfying than in courses largely devoted to translating from greek and latin. such courses would not merely substitute english translations for the originals, and treat these translations as the originals are treated in courses of the traditional type; the ancient literature would be studied in the same way as english literature is studied. for example, in a course of this kind on greek literature, in dealing with the odyssey the students would discuss in class, or present written reports upon, the composition of the poem as a whole, and the relation to the main plot of different episodes such as the quest of telemachus, his visit to pylos and lacedæmon, the scene in calypso's cave, the building of the raft, the arrival of odysseus among the phæacians, his account of his own adventures, his return to ithaca, the slaying of the wooers, etc.; also the characters of the poem, their individual experiences and behavior in various circumstances, and the ideas which they express, comparing these characters and ideas with those of modern times. in dealing with the drama, the students would study the composition of each play, present its plot in narrative form, and criticize it from the dramatic as well as from the literary standpoint; they would discuss the characters and situations, and the ideas embodied in each.[ ] in dealing with thucydides they would discuss the plan of his book and the artistic elements in its composition; also the critical standards of the author, his methods, his objectivity, and his personal bias. they would study the debates in which the arguments on both sides of great issues are presented, expressing their own opinions on the questions involved. they would study the great descriptions, such as the account of the siege of platæa, the plague at athens, the last fight in the harbor of syracuse, making a summary in their own language of the most essential or effective details. lastly they would discuss such figures as pericles, nicias and alcibiades, archidamus, brasidas and hermocrates, their characters, principles, and motives. in dealing with plato they would study the character of socrates and those ideas contained in the platonic dialogues which can be most readily comprehended by college students. =classical studies not confined to the ancient authors= the study of "the classics" is not properly confined to the greek and latin literatures: it includes the military, political, social, and economic history of the ancient greeks and romans, their institutions, their religion, morals, philosophy, science, art, and private life. the geography and topography of ancient lands, anthropology and ethnology, archaeology and epigraphy contribute to its material. it is not necessary that all these subjects be taught by members of a classical department. in particular it is the common practice in this country to relegate the study of ancient philosophy to the department of philosophy, whereas in england and on the continent such distinctions between departments are not recognized. but certainly these branches of the study of the classical civilization should be taught best by those most familiar with the classical civilization in all its phases, and most thoroughly trained in the interpretation and criticism of its literature. it is also obvious that the teaching of the classical literature would be emasculated if it were separated from these other subjects mentioned. only, such subjects as history should not be taught from the literary point of view. history should be an account of what actually took place, derived from every available source and not from a synthesis of a literary tradition. in this respect the teachers of the classics have from the earliest times made the most serious mistakes. to some extent the same charges may be brought against the methods and traditions of the teachers of modern history. the teaching of greek and roman history, however, is affected in a peculiar degree by the traditions of classical scholarship. the historical courses given by most classical teachers are based upon the translation and discussion of the works of certain ancient authors, whose accounts are not only false and misleading in many respects, but characteristically omit those factors in the ancient life which are the most significant and interesting to the modern world. such courses begin by implanting false impressions which no amount of explanation can eradicate. the ancient world, therefore, is made to appear to modern students unreal and unworthy of serious attention: it is not strange that they are dissatisfied with such teaching, and that it seems to many practically worthless. a true picture of the life and experience of the ancient greeks and romans would appear both interesting and profitable to a normal college student. =summary of objects to be sought in the teaching of the classics= the aims of the teaching of the classics in american colleges should be to give, in addition to a training of the mind: . an appreciation of the best of the classical literature. for this is, in many respects, the best literature which we have at all, even when without any allowances it is compared with the best of modern literatures. much of it is universal in character. it is also the foundation of the modern literatures. by learning to appreciate it, students would learn to judge and appreciate all literature. . a familiarity with the characters and narratives of the ancient literature. the knowledge of these characters, their behavior under various vicissitudes of fortune, and their experiences, would of itself be a valuable possession and equipment for life. . a knowledge of the ideas of the ancient greeks and romans, revealed and developed in their literature, and tested in the realities of their life. many of these ideas are of the utmost value today, and are in danger of being overlooked and forgotten in this materialistic age of ours, unless they are constantly recalled to our minds by such studies. . a knowledge of the actual experiences of the ancients, as individuals and as nations, their experiments in democracy and other forms of government, in imperialism, arbitration, and the like, their solutions of the moral, social, and economic problems which were as prominent in their world as in ours. to realize these aims old methods should be revised and improved, new methods developed. for there can hardly be a study more valuable and practical than this. william k. prentice _princeton university_ footnotes: [ ] for example, at the university of kansas. [ ] leland stanford, michigan, princeton. [ ] california, north dakota, harvard, idaho, illinois, kansas, leland stanford, michigan, oberlin, otterbein, pennsylvania, vermont, wisconsin, yale, etc. some of these courses are offered only to graduate students, and some are given by the departments of pedagogics. [ ] in new testament or patristic greek at austin, bucknell, california, cornell, harvard, illinois, lafayette, michigan, millsaps, trinity, wesleyan. in patristic latin, bucknell and elsewhere. [ ] brown, cornell, leland stanford. [_n. b._ these lists are by no means complete.] [ ] history of greek tragedy. lectures with reading and study of the plays of Æschylus, sophocles, and euripides. requires no knowledge of the greek language. [ ] e.g., columbia, lafayette. [ ] california, washington university. [ ] colorado, idaho, syracuse, vermont, washington university, wesleyan, wisconsin. [ ] it should be noted that at brown the titles of the classical departments are "the department of greek literature and history" and "the department of roman literature and history." [ ] at cornell and oberlin, for example. [ ] see especially clarence p. bill. "the business of a college greek department," _classical journal_, ix ( - ), pp. - . [ ] see the article by mr. theodosius s. tyng in _classical weekly_, viii ( ), nos. and . also m. j. russell: "the direct method of teaching latin," in the _classical journal_, xii ( ), pages - , and other articles on this subject in the _classical journal_ and the _classical weekly_ in recent years. [ ] for example, "latin conversation," at columbia; "oral latin," at leland stanford; "sight reading and latin speaking," at new york university. [ ] see professor allen's article, "the first year of greek," in the _classical journal_, x ( ), pages - . [ ] as early as the seventeenth century books were produced which may be regarded as the forerunners of this sort of modern composition in the ancient language. one of these was published in under the title: "iocorum atque seriorum tum novorum tum selectorum atque memorabilium libri duo, recensente othone melandro." another is the "terentius christianus seu comoediae sacrae--terentiano stylo a corn. schonaeo goudono conscriptae, editio nova amstelodami ": this includes dramas such as naaman (princeps syrus), tobaeus (senex), saulus, iuditha, susanna, ananias, etc. still another is the "poesis dramatica nicolai amancini s. j.," in two parts, published in and . a century later there appeared a story which, judging from its title, was designed primarily for students: "joachimi henrici campe robinson secundus tironum causa latine vertit philippus julius lieberkühn," zullich, . [ ] see the _classical journal_, xi ( ), pages - ; _classical weekly_, ix ( - ), pages - ; x ( ), pages f.; _classical weekly_, x ( ), pages f. [ ] see note , page . [ ] columbia. [ ] this is true of the courses in secondary schools and graduate courses in universities also; but in the secondary and graduate schools the proportion of translation courses to the others is smaller. [ ] for example, at harvard one course includes plato, lysias, lyric poetry, and euripides, with lectures on the history of greek literature; another livy, terence, horace and other latin poets. [ ] see above, page f. [ ] for a fuller list of institutions where classical courses not requiring a knowledge of the ancient languages are given see above, page . [ ] "die höchste aufgabe bei der lektüre des griechischen dramas sei das stück leben, das uns der dichter vor augen führt, in seinem vollen inhalt miterleben zu lassen." c. wunderer, in _blätter für das gymnasial-schulwesen_, vol. lii ( ), . xxi the teaching of the romance languages =the college course must emphasize power, not facts= it is well at times to emphasize old truths, mainly because they are old and are consecrated by experience. one of these, frequently combated nowadays, is that any college course--worthy of the name--has other than utilitarian ends. i therefore declare my belief that the student does not go to college primarily to acquire facts. these he can learn from books or from private instruction. _me judice_--he goes to college primarily to learn _how to interpret_ facts, and to arrive through this experience at their practical as well as their theoretic value: as respects himself, as respects others, and in an ever widening circle as regards humanity in general. the first object, thus, of a college course is to humanize the individual, to emancipate him intellectually and emotionally from his prejudices and conventions by giving him a wider horizon, a sounder judgment, a firmer and yet a more tolerant point of view. "our proclivity to details," said emerson, "cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry." the college seizes upon the liberating instinct of youth and utilizes it for all it is worth. we summarize by saying that the college prepares not merely for "life" but for "living"; so that the society whom the individual serves will be served by him loyally, intelligently, and broad-mindedly, with an increasing understanding of its aims and purposes. =the college can attain its aim only when the student brings necessary facts from secondary schools= this, let us assume, is the somewhat lofty ideal. what about its concrete realization? especially when the subject is a language, which, considering that it consists of parts of speech, inflections, phonetics, etc., is a very practical matter and apparently far removed from the ideal in question. every language teacher is familiar with this stock objection. how often has he not been told that his business is not to teach french culture or spanish life, but french and spanish? and as everybody knows, french and spanish are not learned in a day, nor, indeed, if we judge by the average graduate of our colleges, in four years of classroom work. it is not my purpose to combat the contention that college french or spanish or italian could be taught better, and that from a utilitarian point of view the subject is capable of a great deal of improvement. as professor grandgent has trenchantly said "i do not believe there is or ever was a language more difficult to acquire than french; most of us can name worthy persons who have been assiduously struggling with it from childhood to mature age, and who do not know it now: yet it is treated as something any one can pick up offhand.... french staggers under the fearful burden of apparent easiness." i do not think these words overstate the case. all the more reason, then, to bear in mind that the burden of this accomplishment should not fall on the college course alone, or, i should even say, on the college course at all. for the fact is that a thorough knowledge of the romance tongues cannot be acquired in any college course, and to attack the problem from that angle alone is to attempt the impossible. it is on the school, and not on the college, that the obligation of the practical language problem rests. if our students are to become proficient in french--in the sense that they can not only read it but write and speak it with passable success--the language must be begun early, in the grade school (when memory and apperception are still fresh), and then carried forward systematically over a period of from six to seven years. but this will require on the part of our schools: ( ) a longer time allotment to the subject than it now generally has, ( ) a closer articulation between the grade-school, high-school, and college courses, and ( ) the appointment of better and higher-paid teachers of the subject. an encouraging move is being made in many parts of the country to carry out this plan, though of course we are still a long way from its realization; and when it is realized we shall not yet have reached the millennium. but at least we shall have given the practical teaching of the subject a chance, comparable to the opportunity it has in europe; and the complaint against the french and spanish teacher--if there still be a chronic complaint--will have other grounds than the one we so commonly hear at present. =limitations of elementary and intermediate courses as college courses= in the meantime, let us remember that the college has other, and more pressing, things to do than to attempt to supply the shortcomings of the school. it is certainly essential that the college should continue and develop the practical work of the school in various ways, such as advanced exercises and lectures in the foreign idiom, special conversation classes, and the like--if only for the simple reason that a language that is not used soon falls into desuetude and is forgotten. but assuredly the so-called elementary, intermediate, and advanced courses in french and spanish (as given in college) do not fall under that head. they exist in the college by _tolerance_ rather than by sound pedagogical theory, and the effort now being made to force all such courses back into the school by reducing the college "credits" they give is worthy of undivided support. not only are they out of place in the college program, but the burden of numerous and often large "sections" in these courses has seriously impeded the college in its proper language work. the college in its true function is the clarifier of ideas, the correlator of facts, the molder of personalities; and the student of modern languages should enter college prepared to study his subject from the college point of view. much of the apparent "silliness" of the french class which our more virile undergraduates object to would be obviated if a larger percentage of them could at once enter upon the more advanced phases of the subject. it is, then, to their interest, to the interest of the subject, and to the advantage of the college concerned, that this reform be brought about. =aim of the teaching of romance languages in the college= in any case, the function of a college subject can be stated, as president meiklejohn has stated it, in terms of two principles. he says: "the first is shared by both liberal and technical teaching. the second applies to liberal education alone. the principles are these: ( ) that activity guided by ideas is on the whole more successful than the same activity without the control of ideas, and ( ) that in the activities common to all men the guidance of ideas is quite as essential as in the case of those which different groups of men carry on in differentiation from one another." as applied to the romance languages, this means that while the college must of course give "technical" instruction in language, the emphasis of that instruction should be upon the "ideas" which the language expresses, in itself and in its literature. it is not enough that the college student should gain fluency in french or spanish, he must also and primarily be made conscious of the processes of language, its logical and æsthetic values, the civilization it expresses, and the thoughts it has to convey. while it may be said that all thorough language instruction accomplishes this incidentally, the college makes this _the_ aim of its teaching. the college should furnish an objective appraisal of the fundamental elements of the foreign idiom, not merely a subjective (and often superficial) mastery of details. for the old statement remains true that--when properly studied--"proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual";[ ] and what shall we say when "literature" is added to this list? =status of romance languages in representative colleges--early status= from these preliminary observations let us now turn to the present status of romance languages in some of our representative colleges.[ ] one gratifying fact may be noted at once. whereas a quarter of a century ago greek and latin were still considered the _sine qua non_ of a liberal education, today french and german, and to a lesser extent spanish and italian, have their legitimate share in this distinction. indeed, to judge merely by the number of students, they would seem to have replaced latin and greek. to be sure, several colleges, as for instance amherst and chicago, alarmed by this swing of the pendulum, have reserved the b.a. degree for the traditional classical discipline. but in the first case the entire curriculum includes "two years of greek or latin," and in the second the b.a. students comprise but a very small percentage of the college body; and while in both cases latin and greek are required subjects, romance is admitted as an elective, in which--to mention only amherst--six consecutive semester courses, covering the main phases of modern french literature, can be chosen. as noted, the recognition of modern languages as cultural subjects is relatively recent. as late as a commission, appointed by the modern language association, found that "few colleges have a modern language requirement for admission to the course in arts; ... of the fifty reported, three require french, two offer an election between french and german, and two require both french and german." and of these same colleges, "eighteen require no foreign language, twenty-nine require either french or german, and eighteen require both french and german, for graduation in the arts." obviously, few (at most seven) of the colleges examined admitted students prepared to take advanced courses in french; and only eighteen, or per cent, allowed students to begin french in the freshman year, over one half of the entire number postponing the beginners' french until the sophomore, junior, or even senior year. it is clear, therefore, that as late as , and in spite of such illustrious examples as that set by harvard in the appointment of ticknor to the smith professorship in , the romance languages could hardly be classed as a recognized college subject. at best, they were taught on the principles that "it is never too late to learn," and although this teaching failed from the "practical" point of view, it yet had little or no opportunity to concern itself with the cultural aspects of the subject. no wonder the commission reported[ ] that in the circumstances "a mastery of language, as well as a comprehensive study of the literature, is impossible." with the part played by our greek and latin colleagues in keeping the modern languages out of the curriculum we need not deal in detail here. it is enough, in order to explain their attitude, to observe that previous to the teaching of modern languages was generally poor: it was intrusted for the most part to foreigners, who, being usually ignorant of the finer shades of english and woefully ignorant of american students, could not have been expected to succeed, or to native americans, who for various and often excellent reasons lacked the proper training, and therefore succeeded--when in rare cases they did succeed--in spite of their qualifications rather than because of them. add to all this the conviction natural to every classicist, that latin and greek are the keys to all western civilization and that without them romance literatures (not to say "languages") are incomprehensible, and the situation up to the 's is amply clear. =contemporary status of romance languages in college curricula= today, then, conditions are changed, and for better or worse the romance tongues are on a par with other collegiate subjects. a glance at the latest statistics is instructive. in , out of colleges and universities in the united states, taught french; (the universities) offered more than four years' instruction, offered four years, three years, two years, and only one year. the present status can easily be divined: the interest in spanish has certainly not waned, while the interest in french has grown by leaps and bounds. some curtailment there has been, owing to the adoption of the "group system" of studies on the part of most of the colleges, and as the colleges are relieved of more and more of the elementary work there doubtless will be more. but, in any case, it is safe to say that french, spanish, and italian are now firmly installed as liberal studies in the curricula of most of our colleges. now, how do they fulfill this function? what changes will be necessary in order that they may fulfill it better? what particular advantages have they to offer as a college subject? a brief consideration of each of these points follows. in general, our colleges require fifteen units of entrance credit and about twenty collegiate units for the college degree.[ ] of the entrance units, a maximum of four in french and two in spanish is allowed; and of the college units, an average of five, or about one fourth of the entire college work,[ ] must be taken consecutively in _one_ department of study or in not more than _two_ departments. this last group of approximately five units thus constitutes, so to speak, the backbone of the student's work. it is his so-called "principal sequence" (chicago) or his "two majors" (amherst) or his "major subject" (wisconsin and colorado); and while in the case of amherst it cannot be begun "until after the freshman year," in general it must be begun by the junior year. considerable variety prevails, of course, in carrying out this idea; for example, johns hopkins requires "at least two courses in the major and at least two in some cognate subject." harvard states that "every student shall take at least six of his courses in some one department, or in one of the recognized fields of distinction." princeton demands of "every junior and senior ... at least two -hour courses in some one department." but almost all representative colleges now recognize four general groups of study: philosophy (including history), language, science, and mathematics; and the student's work must be so arranged that while it is fairly evenly distributed over three of the groups it is at the same time definitely concentrated in one of them. =normal prescription in a romance language= in answer to our first question, it follows that the student entering with the maximum of french should be able, before graduation, to get enough advanced courses to give him an intelligent grasp of the literature as well as the language. in our better-equipped colleges this is undoubtedly the case. harvard, for instance, would admit him to a course (french ) in french prose and poetry, which includes some "composition," to be followed by ( ) a general view of french literature, ( ) french literature in the eighteenth century, ( ) french literature in the seventeenth century, ( ) comedy of manners in france, ( ) literary criticism in france; and in some of these courses the linguistic aspects would be considered in the form of "themes," "reports," etc., while the student could choose ( ) advanced french composition for that special purpose. other colleges (e.g., johns hopkins, chicago, stanford) offer the same or similar opportunities. so that, although titles of courses are often deceptive, the general plan of offering ( ) an introductory course in which both the language and the literature are treated, ( ) a survey-course in literature, leading to ( ) various courses in literature after , and supported by ( ) at least one specific course in language, now constitutes the normal collegiate "major" in french; and, on the whole, it would be difficult in the present circumstances to devise a better plan. =changes in current practice that will enhance effectiveness of teaching of romance languages--danger of minimizing the language phase= it is obvious that the success of any plan depends on the thoroughness with which it is carried out, and this in turn depends on the qualifications and energy of those who have the matter in hand. that contingency does not concern us here. but what is worth noting is that the fourth point mentioned above,--the specific language part of the "major"--might be strengthened, especially since some excellent institutions omit this consideration entirely. the danger of falling between two stools is never greater, it seems, than in treating both language and literature. an instructor who is bent on elucidating the range of anatole france's thought naturally has little time to deal adequately with his rich vocabulary, his deft use of tense, the subtle structure of his phrase--and yet who can be said really to "know" such an author if he be ignorant of either side of his work? "thought expands but lames," said goethe--unless it is constantly controlled by fact. in order to give the undergraduate that control, it is essential that he should be placed in the position everywhere to verify his author's thought. how difficult it is to bring even the best of our undergraduates to this point i need not discuss. but at least once in the process of his work he might be held to a stricter account than elsewhere. and if we ask ourselves by what method this can best be accomplished, i believe the answer is by some _special_ course in which the language of several representative writers is treated as such.[ ] the point could be elaborated, particularly in view of the present-day tendency to dwell unduly on so-called _realia_, french daily life, and the like--all legitimate enough in their proper time and place. but enough has been said to show that excellent as the present plan is, it could without detriment enlarge the place given to linguistics. in this bewildered age of ours we are forever hearing the cry of "literature," more "literature": not only our students but our teachers--and the connection is obvious--find language study dull and uninspiring, oblivious to the fact that the fault is theirs and not the subject's. yet, as we observed above, french is "hard," and its grammatical structure, apparently so simple, is in truth very complicated. manifestly, to understand a foreign literature we must understand the language in which it is written. how few of our students really do! moreover, language and literature are ultimately only parts of one indivisible entity: philology--though the fact often escapes us. "the most effective work," said gildersleeve,[ ] "is done by those who see all in the one as well as one in the all." and strange as it appears to the laity, a linguistic fact may convey a universal lesson. i hesitate to generalize, but i believe most of our colleges need to emphasize the language side of the french "major" more. =relative positions of french, spanish, and italian in a college course= as for italian and spanish, few of the colleges as yet grant these subjects the importance given to french. for one reason, entrance credit in italian is extremely rare, and neither there nor in spanish, in which it is now rather common, owing to the teaching of spanish in the high schools, does it exceed two units. some work of an elementary nature must therefore be done in the college; indeed, at amherst neither language can be begun until the sophomore year--though fortunately this is an isolated case. further, even when the college is prepared to teach these subjects adequately, it is still a debatable question whether they are entitled to precisely the same consideration as their more venerable sister. it is unnecessary to point out that such great names as dante, petrarch, boccaccio, alfieri, leopardi, carducci, cervantes, calderón, lope de vega, benavente, _e tutti quanti_, are abundant evidence of the value of italian and spanish culture. they unquestionably are. where the emphasis is cultural, it would certainly be unwise to neglect italian, since the renaissance is italian and underlies modern european culture in general. on the other hand, spanish is, so to speak, at our very doors because of our island possessions: it is the _one_ foreign language which calls for no argument to make the undergraduate willing to learn to speak, and spanish literature, especially in the drama, has the same romantic freedom as english literature and is thus readily accessible to the american type of mind. pedagogically, thus, the question is far from simple. but while it is impossible to lay down any fixed precept, it seems worth while to remember: that the french genius is preëminently the vehicle of definite and clear ideas, that in a very real sense france has been and is the intellectual clearinghouse of the world, and that potentially, at least, her civilization is of the greatest value to our intellectually dull and undiscriminating youth. from french, better than from italian and spanish, he can learn the discipline of accurate expression, of clear articulation, and the enlightenment that springs from contact with "general ideas." moreover, we must not forget that the undergraduate's time is limited and that under the "group system" some discrimination must necessarily be made. granted, then, that, all things considered, the first place will doubtless be left to french, the question remains whether the attention given to spanish and italian is at least adequate. and do the colleges extract from them the values they should? as a general proposition, we may take it for granted that the college should offer at least _four_ units in each of these subjects. for spanish, certainly, the tendency will be to make the proportion larger. but two units devoted to learning the language and two devoted to the literature may be regarded as essential, and are as a matter of fact the common practice. several illustrations will make this clear. _johns hopkins_ offers: in italian, . grammar, short stories, etc., . grammar, written exercises, selections from classic authors, lectures on italian literature; in spanish, . grammar, oral and written exercises, reading from alarcón, valdés, etc., . contemporary novel and drama, oral practice, grammar and composition, . the classic drama and cervantes, oral practice, etc., history of spanish literature. _illinois_: in italian, a- b elementary course, a- b italian literature, nineteenth century; in spanish, a- b elementary course, a- b modern spanish, a- b introduction to spanish literature, a- b business correspondence and conversation, a- b business practice in spanish, a- b the spanish drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a- b the spanish drama of the nineteenth century. _harvard_: in italian, . italian grammar, reading and composition, . general view of italian literature, . modern italian literature, . italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, . the works of dante; in spanish, . spanish grammar, reading and composition, . spanish composition, . spanish composition and conversation (advanced course), . general view of spanish literature, . spanish prose and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, . spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[ ] since spanish and italian fall into the department of romance languages, in order to make up his "major" the student is at present compelled to combine them with french. on the whole, this arrangement appears to me wise. to be sure, the deans of our colleges of commerce and administration will say that, granting the greater cultural value of french, the business interests of the country will force us nevertheless to give spanish the same place in the curriculum as french. and the more radical educators will affirm with mr. flexner:[ ] "languages have no value in themselves; they exist solely for the purpose of communicating ideas and abbreviating our thought and action processes. if studied, they are valuable only in so far as they are practically mastered--not otherwise." i have taken a stand against this matter-of-fact conception of education throughout this chapter. i may now return to the charge by adding that the banality of our college students' thinking stares us in the face; if we wish to quicken it, to refine it, we should have them study other media of expression _qua_ expression besides their own (that is what europe did in the renaissance, and the example of the renaissance is still pertinent); that if mr. flexner's reasoning were valid the french might without detriment convey their "ideas" in volapük or ido (i suggest that mr. flexner subject anatole france to this test); and that instead of being valueless in themselves, on the contrary, languages are the repositories of the ages: "we infer," said emerson, "the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument in which each forcible individual in the course of many hundred years has contributed a stone." in other words, however great the claim of spanish as "a practical subject" may be and whatever concessions our schools and colleges may make to this fact, i still believe that spanish should be subordinated as a college subject to the study of french. in principle we may admit the spanish "major," as in fact we do at present with the italian "major"; but some knowledge of french on the part of the student should be presupposed, or if not, it should be a required part of the spanish sequence. this may seem extreme, but in reality few students would wish to proceed far in spanish without some french, and, practically, the knowledge of one romance tongue is always a great aid in the study of another. =training teachers of romance languages= thus we see that, with the addition here and there of an extra course (where the college is not up to the standard as we have outlined it), and an added stress on the advanced linguistics, the present curriculum in romance apparently provides an excellent working basis. if properly carried out--and the success of all teaching depends of course ultimately on the teacher--it ought to fulfill all legitimate needs, so far as the strictly collegiate aims are concerned. a word is now in order as to its fitness for those students who are planning to take romance as a profession. normally these students would coincide with those who are taking up "special honors" in romance languages; and for the latter group most of our colleges now make special provision--in the form of "independent work done outside the regular courses in the major subject and at least one other department during the junior and senior year (wisconsin)," or as amherst states it, "special work involving collateral reading or investigation under special conditions." in general, this gives the candidate certain professional options among the courses listed (in cases where the college is part of the university) as "primarily for graduates." in this way the student is able to add to his "major" such subjects as old french (chicago), introduction to romance philology (columbia), practical phonetics (chicago), a teachers' course (wisconsin), etc. personally i am of the opinion that the day has passed when any of our graduates who has not at least a master's degree in romance should be recommended to a teaching position. but evidently any such hard and fast rule is bound to be unfair, especially since a large percentage of our students is compelled to earn a living immediately upon graduation. thus here again--as in the elementary courses as now given in the colleges--we are confronted with a makeshift which only time and continued effort can correct. in the meantime the value of such professional courses depends to a very marked degree upon the success with which they can be carried out where they are counted toward a higher degree (m.a. or ph.d.) the difficulty is not so great, since their introductory nature is self-evident; but where they conclude, so to speak, the student's formal training the difficulty of making them "fit in" is often sadly apparent. at any rate, in this borderland between cultural and professional studies, where the college is merging with the university or professional school, the necessity for the able teacher is a paramount issue. if the transition is to be successful, the obligation rests upon the teacher so to develop his subject that the specializing will not drown out the general interest but will inform it with those values which only the specialist can impart. =final contributions of romance languages to the american college student= and now as to our final consideration: what particular advantages have the romance tongues to offer as a college subject? an obvious advantage is: an understanding of foreign peoples. the romance languages are modern. they are spoken today over a large part of the habitable globe. we stand in direct relations with those who speak them and write them. above all, a large share of the world's best thought is being expressed in them. the point requires no arguing, that translations cannot take the place of originals: _traduttore traditore_, says an excellent italian proverb. if we are really to know what other nations think,--whether we accept or reject their thought makes little or no difference here,--we can do so only by knowing their language. and the better we know it, the greater our insight will be. to speak at least _one_ foreign language is not only a parlor accomplishment: it is for whoever is to be a citizen-of-the-world a necessity. there is a turkish proverb that he who knows two languages, his own and another, has two souls. certainly there is no better way to approach a nation's soul than through its language. but, in the second place, the romance tongues have certain artistic qualities which english in a great measure lacks. the student who has intelligently mastered one of them has a better sense of form, of delicate shades of expression, and--if the language be french--of clarity of phrase: what pater termed _netteté d'expression_. he learns to respect language (as few americans now do), to study its possibilities in a way which a mere knowledge of english might never have suggested, and to appreciate its moral as well as its social power: for french forces him to curb his thought, to weigh his contention, to be simple and clear in the most abstruse matters. in a famous essay on the universality of french, rivarol said: "une traduction française est toujours une _explication_." and lastly, in themselves and in the civilizations they stand for, the romance tongues are the bridge between ourselves and antiquity. since the decline in the study of greek and latin, this is a factor to be seriously considered. it is the fashion today to berate the past, to speak of the dead hand of tradition, and to flatter ourselves with the delusion of self-sufficiency. to be sure, the aim of education is never to pile up information but to "fit your mind for any sort of exertion, to make it keen and flexible." but the best way to encompass this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not the same value. there are the ideas of taine, of rousseau, of voltaire, of descartes, of montaigne, of ficino, of petrarch, of dante, of cicero, of aristotle, of plato; and in a moment i have run the gamut of all the centuries of our western civilization. who will tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? evidently, we cannot know them all. but we can at least make the attempt to know the best. and incidentally let it be said that he who professes the romance tongues can no more dispense with the classics than the classics can today afford to dispense with romance: french, italian, and spanish are the latin--and one might add the greek--of today. but to return to our theme: to deny our interest in the past is to throw away our heritage, to sell our mess of pottage to the lowest bidder. if the romance languages have one function in our american colleges, it is this: to keep alive the old humanistic lesson: _nihil humani a me alienum puto_; to the end that the modern college graduate may continue to say with montaigne: "all moral philosophy is applied as well to a private life as to one of the greatest employment. every man carries the entire form of the human condition. authors have thitherto communicated themselves to the people by some particular and foreign mark; i ... by my _universal_ being, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer." the college course in the romance languages should prepare for a profession, but it must first help to prepare thinking men and women. william a. nitze _university of chicago_ footnotes: [ ] the quotation is from emerson, _nominalist and realist_. [ ] i make no attempt in this article, written before , to treat actual teaching conditions: the premises are too uncertain. [ ] the above statistics are from c. h. handschin, _the teaching of modern languages in the united states_, washington, , pages ff. [ ] i cite the following figures: (_a_) entrance: harvard - / , amherst , wisconsin , columbia - / , colorado , illinois , chicago ; (_b_) collegiate degree: harvard - / "courses," amherst "courses," wisconsin "credits," columbia "points," colorado "hours of scholastic work," chicago "trimester majors." it is certainly desirable that our colleges adopt some uniform system for the notation of their courses. johns hopkins, at least, is specific in explaining the relationship of its " points" to its "courses"; see page of the _university register_, . [ ] at chicago exactly / or "at least coherent and progressive majors" must be taken in "one department or in a group of departments." but chicago also requires a secondary sequence of at least majors; columbia requires three years of "sequential study--in each of two departments." illinois, "a major subject ( hours)" and "an allied minor subject ( hours)." [ ] an excellent manner of procedure is that outlined by professor terracher in his interesting article in the _compte rendu du congrès de langue et de littérature française_, new york (fédération de l'alliance française), . [ ] from _johns hopkins university circular_, no. . [ ] it will be noted that throughout the amount offered in spanish exceeds that in italian. this is to be expected in view of the boom in spanish studies. moreover, most colleges now allow two units of entrance credit in spanish, and and above, under harvard, are half courses. columbia is, i believe, the only college accepting units of entrance credit in italian; but i have not examined the catalogues of all our colleges. [ ] publications of the general education board, , , page . xxii the teaching of german =our aim= the mechanical achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have obliterated geographical distances. the contact between nations, intermittent in former ages, has become a continuous one. it is no longer possible to ignore great cultural forces in foreign nations even temporarily--we may repudiate or appreciate them, as we see fit, but we should do so in a spirit of fairness and understanding, and not in ignorance. this, however, is not possible unless those who are to become leaders of the people are intimately familiar with those treasure chests of the nations that contain the true gems of racial spirit more abundantly than even art or literature, history, law or religion, stored up in the course of hundreds and thousands of years--the nations' languages. it is the clear duty of the college to instill, through the right way of teaching foreign languages, a cosmopolitan spirit of this character into the growing minds of our young men and women, after the secondary school has given them the first rudiments of knowledge and cultural training. according to one's point of view, there is as much to be said in favor of the classical as the modern languages. without doubt, their growing neglect in our institutions of learning is deeply to be regretted; however, its causes do not concern us here directly. the study of modern languages is, relatively speaking, so manifestly in the ascendency, that a return to the emphasis that was formerly laid upon latin and greek is hardly imaginable. the choice between several modern languages must very largely be determined by personal preferences and purposes. so much, however, can safely be said, that an intelligent reading knowledge of german and french is the least that should be expected of a college graduate. for, while in theory the humanistic importance of modern language study is the same for all languages, it rises, in practice, proportionately with the cultural level of the foreign nation--german and french obviously taking the lead in this regard. =place of german in the college curriculum= i am optimistic enough to assume it to be generally granted that the study of a foreign language ought to be started early in life--say, at the age of twelve. while hardly challenged in theory, this desirable condition is far from being carried out in practice. probably the time will never come when colleges will be able to dispense with elementary courses in modern foreign languages--not only for those who enter without any linguistic preparation, but also, and perhaps preëminently, for students who are taking up a second foreign language in addition to the one (or two) started in the preparatory school. thus, the starting point of the modern language course in college is easily fixed: it must begin at the very rudiments of the language. nor is it difficult to state, in general terms, the purpose of the most advanced work of the undergraduate curriculum: it must consist in adequate linguistic skill, literary knowledge and feeling, and cultural understanding to such an extent that the college graduate who has specialized in german may safely be intrusted with the teaching of german in secondary schools. at least, this holds good for the majority of institutions; a small number of colleges devote their whole effort to cultural training, and some of the larger institutions, particularly in the east, find it possible to postpone most of the professional preparation to a period of graduate work. but on the whole the average well-equipped college includes the training of teachers as one end of its foreign-language work. ordinarily, such mastery of the subject as would prepare for teaching cannot be gained within the four years' college course. rather, it might be said to require the average equivalent of something like six college years, with the understanding that not much more than one fourth of the student's time be devoted to german. this implies that only under uncommonly favorable conditions should students be encouraged to specialize in a foreign language that they begin on entering college. =organization of the german course= thus, the peculiar conditions of modern language instruction bring it about that a discussion of its organization in college must deal with a six years' course: elementary instruction must be offered to those entering without any knowledge of german; courses of a sufficiently advanced character must be provided for those who enter with three or four years of high-school german; and there must be advanced work for students who intend to make the study and teaching of german their life's work. in this six years' college course three divisions are clearly distinguishable: an elementary division devoted to such linguistic training as will enable a student to read with fair ease texts of moderate difficulty; an intermediate group during which literary and cultural appreciation should be developed, and an advanced group intended for the professional preparation of prospective teachers of german. these three divisions may be approximately equal, so that each of them covers about two years, with four or five hours a week. for graduation, all students should be required to present the equivalent of the first period for two languages (either classical or modern), one or both of which might with advantage be absolved in high school. the second division should be required of all students for at least one foreign language. colleges of high standing may find it possible to exceed these requirements; no college should remain below them. the first or elementary division should, at least for one foreign language, be finished before the student is admitted to the college. all that can reasonably be expected from this part of the work is a study of the elements of grammar, the development of a good pronunciation, a fair working vocabulary, and some ability to read, speak, understand, and write german. the second group should include, in the main, reading courses to introduce the student to what is best in german literature, but no general theoretical study of the history of literature need be contemplated. besides, it must offer such work in speaking and writing as will develop and establish more firmly the results gained in the first two years, and an appropriate study of german history and institutions. each of the three aims might be given about one third of the time available, but they may overlap to some extent. thus, writing and speaking can be connected with each of them, and historical readings and reports may furnish a part of language practice. the third group, intended for the training of teachers, must contain a course in the method of modern language teaching (connected with observation and practice), an advanced grammar course, and courses in the phonetics and historical development of the german language. these courses are indispensable for teachers, but will also be of advantage to students not intending to teach. =the elementary group= the first group is frankly of high school character. it is best to admit this fully and freely, and to teach these courses accordingly. through greater intensity of study (more home work and longer class periods), the work of three or even four high school years may be concentrated into two college years, but the method cannot differ essentially. the way of learning a new language is the same, in principle, for a child of twelve years and a man of fifty years; in the latter case, there is merely the difficulty to be overcome that older persons are less easily inclined to submit to that drill which is necessary for the establishment of those new habits that constitute _sprachgefühl_. it is a fallacy that the maturer mind of the college student requires a more synthetic-deductive study of the language than that of the high school student. it is sad but true that many college teachers are more reactionary in questions of method than the better class of high school teachers. the claim that elementary work in college requires a method different from that used in the high school is one symptom of this, and another symptom of the same tendency is the motto of so many college teachers that there is no "best method," and that a good teacher will secure good results with any method. at the bottom of such phrases there is usually not much more than indifference and unwillingness to look for information on the real character of the method at which they are generally aimed: the _direct method_. the regrettable superficiality appearing in the frequent confusion of the "direct" with the "natural" method is characteristic of this. i am, of course, willing to admit that what nowadays is termed the "direct method" is not the best way possible, but that it may and will be improved upon. however, it is not one of many methods that, according to circumstances, might be equally good, but it represents the application of the present results of psychological and linguistic research to the teaching of languages and distinctly deserves the preference over older ways. the first demand of the direct method is the development not only of a fair but of a perfect pronunciation--not so much as the independent aim, but as an indispensable condition for the development of _sprachgefühl_. it is immeasurably easier to obtain good pronunciation from the start than to improve bad pronunciation by later efforts. in the teaching of pronunciation a slight difference in the treatment of children of twelve years and of college students might be granted: young children are generally able to learn the sounds of a foreign language by imitation; students of college age can hardly ever do this well, and careful phonetic instruction is absolutely necessary with them. whoever wishes to keep aloof from phonetic _terms_ may do so; but not to know or not to apply phonetic _principles_ is bad teaching pure and simple. the use of phonetic _transcription_, however, is a moot question. its advantages are obvious enough: it insures a clear consciousness of correct pronunciation; it takes up the difficulties one by one: first pronunciation, then spelling; it safeguards greater care in matters of pronunciation in general. the objections are chiefly two: economy of time, and the fear of confusion between the two ways of spelling. the writer admits that until a few years ago he was skeptical as to the value of phonetic transcription in the teaching of german. but the nearly general recognition of its value by the foremost educators of european countries and the good results achieved with it by teachers of french in this country caused him to give it a trial, under conditions that afforded not more than an average chance of success. the result was greatly beyond his expectations. neither he nor, as far as he knows, any of his colleagues would contemplate abandoning phonetic script again. without wishing to be dogmatic, i believe that this at least can be asserted with safety: on purely theoretical grounds, no teacher has a right to condemn phonetic transcription; those who doubt its value should try it before they judge. in the writer's opinion it is best not to use any historical spelling at all during the first six or eight weeks of college german. if the confusing features of traditional orthography are eliminated during this period, it will be found that there results not a loss, but an actual _gain in time_ from the use of phonetic script. nor does the transition to common spelling cause any confusion. the less ado made about it, the better. it is a fact of experience, that students who have been trained in the use of phonetic script turn out to be better spellers than those who have not--simply because this training has made them more careful and has given them a clearer conception of the discrepancy between sound and letter. that elementary grammar should be taught inductively is true to an extent, but often overstated. it is true for the more abstract principles, such as the formation of the compound tenses, the formation and the use of the passive voice, and so on. but attempts at inductive teaching of concrete elements of mechanical memory, such as the gender and plural of nouns, or the principal parts of strong verbs, are a misunderstanding of the principles of induction. it goes without saying that thorough drill is much more valuable than the most explicit explanation. it holds good for college as well as for high schools that there is but very little to "explain" about the grammar of any language. unnecessary explanations rather increase than remove difficulties. =the use of english= the use of english is another debated question. as far as the teaching of grammar is concerned, it is unessential. if inductive drill takes the place of explanations and abstract rules, the question is very largely eliminated from practical consideration. in those very rare cases when theoretical discussions might seem desirable, it does not make much difference whether a few minutes a week are devoted to english or not. the question assumes greater importance when the development of the vocabulary is considered. in this, there are three fairly well-defined elements to be distinguished. the first vocabulary, say, of the first two or three months should be developed by concrete associations with objects and actions in the classroom; the use of the vernacular has no justification whatever during that time--not on account of any objection to an occasional english word or phrase, but simply because there is no need of it, and every minute devoted to german is a clear gain. after this, the vocabulary should be further developed through the thorough practice of connected texts. if they are well constructed, the context will explain a considerable portion of the words occurring; those that are not made clear through the context form the third division of the vocabulary and can without hesitation be explained by english equivalents. in general, the principle will go rather far that the use of an occasional english _word_ is entirely harmless, but that english _sentences_ should as much as possible be avoided in elementary work. connected translation, both from and into english, must absolutely be excluded from the first year's work, for the chief purpose of this year is not only the study of grammar and the development of an elementary vocabulary, but, even more than that, the cultivation of the right _attitude_ toward language study. reading should be our chief aim, and speaking a means to that end, but the student must be trained, from the very beginning, to understand what he is reading rather through an intelligent grasp of the contents than by fingering the dictionary. in this way he will become accustomed to associating the german sentences _directly_ with the thought expressed in them, instead of _indirectly_ through the medium of his native tongue. a great deal of misunderstanding is frequently involved in the emphasis laid upon speaking. there can hardly be a more absurd misinterpretation of the principles of the direct method than for college teachers to try to "converse" with the students in german--to have with them german chats about the weather, the games, the political situation. this procedure is splendidly fit to develop in the students a habit of guessing at random at what they hear and read--a slovenly contentedness with an approximate understanding. both teacher and students should speak and hear german practically all the time. but this should be distinctly in the service of reading and grammar work, containing almost exclusively words and forms that the student must _know_, not guess at. at the end of the first year a college student ought to have mastered the elements of grammar and possess good pronunciation and an active vocabulary of about six hundred or eight hundred words. if the second year is devoted to further drill on grammatical elements and to careful reading, its result ought to be the ability to read authors of average difficulty at a fair speed. during the first year all reading material should be practiced so intensively that an average of a little more than a page a week is not exceeded materially; but toward the end of the second year a limit of six or eight pages an hour may well be reached. by this time, translation into good english begins to be a valuable factor in the achievement of conscious accuracy; but it must under no circumstances be resorted to until the students have clearly obtained the habitual attitude of direct association between thought and sentence. it is little short of a misfortune that there exists no adequate german-german dictionary (such as la rousse's french dictionary). it would not be very difficult to write such a book, but until we possess it the irritating use of german-english dictionaries and vocabularies will be a necessary evil. the hardest problem of the second year--and this is progressively true of more advanced work--is the uneven preparation of the students. in large colleges it will often be feasible to have as many sections as possible at the same hour, distributing the students in accordance with their preparation. where this is not possible, special help for poorly prepared students is generally indispensable. =the literature group= the literature group is as distinctly of college character as the elementary group is admittedly high school work. it is here, in fact, that the best ideals of the american college find the fullest opportunity. this is true both for the teacher and for the student. in the elementary group, pedagogical skill and a fair mastery of the language are the chief prerequisites of a successful teacher. in the second group, other qualities are of greater importance. while a certain degree of pedagogical skill is just as necessary here as there, it is now no longer a question of the systematic development of habits, but of the ability to create sympathetic understanding, idealism, depth of knowledge, and literary taste--in short, to strive for humanistic education in the fullest sense of the word. this is true not only for colleges with a professedly humanistic tendency; the broadening and deepening influence of foreign language study is nowhere needed more urgently than in technical and other professional colleges. speaking and writing must no longer stand in the center of instruction in the courses of the second group, but their importance should not be underrated, as is done so frequently (it is a fact that students often know less german at the end of the third year in college than at the end of the second year). at least during the first year of this group, a practice course in advanced grammar, connected with composition, is absolutely necessary. the grammatical work should consist in review and observation, supported by the study of a larger reference grammar (e.g., chapters from curme's grammar, to introduce the students to the consistent use of this marvelous work). in composition, free reproduction should still be the main thing, but independent themes and translation from english into german--which would be distinctly harmful in elementary work--are now valuable exercises in the study of german style. it would be wholly wrong, however, to make linguistic drill the alpha and omega of this part of the college course. the preparatory years should have laid a sound basis, which during the college work proper should not be allowed to disintegrate, but the fact should not be lost sight of that the cultural aim must be stressed most in the second group. to reach this aim, a familiarity with the best works of german literature is the foremost means. german literature affords a scant choice of good and easy reading for the elementary stage: storm, ebner-eschenbach, seidel, and wildenbruch are justly favorites, but absurdities like baumbach's _schwiegersohn_ are, unfortunately, still found in the curriculum of many colleges. in contrast with the small number of good elementary texts, there exists an abundance of excellent material for the second group. aside from the classical poets, the novelists keller, meyer, fontane, raabe; the dramatists hebbel, grillparzer, kleist, hauptmann; poems collected in the _balladenbuch_ or the _ernte_ present an inexhaustible wealth, without our having to resort to the literary rubbish of benedix or moser or the sneering pretentiousness of heine's _harzreise_. the details of organization will vary greatly for this group, according to special conditions. but in general it may be said that during the first year of this period about two hours a week should be devoted to the continuation of systematic language practice as outlined above, and three hours to the reading of german authors for literary purposes. nor should this consist in "reading" alone. reading as such should no longer present any difficulty, if the work of the elementary group has been done well. special courses should be devoted to the study of the modern german novel, the drama, and the lyrics, and to individual authors like those mentioned. in these detached literature courses the principal endeavor must be to help the students to understand and feel, not so much the linguistic side of the texts read, as the soul of the author, and through him the soul of the german nation. reading must become more and more independent, the major part of the time in class being devoted to the cultural and æsthetic interpretation of what has been read at home. it is evident that in this, the most important part of the german college work, all depends upon the personality of the instructor: literary and human understanding cannot be instilled into the student's mind by one who does not possess them himself, together with a love for teaching and the power to create enthusiasm. all other requirements must be subordinate to this--even the instructor's mastery of the language. no doubt, in theory it would be most desirable that german be the exclusive language of instruction throughout; but in literary courses practical considerations will so often speak against this, that no sweeping answer to this question seems possible. for the chief aim must not be overshadowed by any other. if poor preparation on the part of the students or a deficient command of the language on the part of the instructor makes it doubtful whether the cultural aim can be attained, if german is the language of instruction, english should be used unhesitatingly. this implies that for this part of the work an instructor with a strong personality and an artistic understanding, although lacking in speaking knowledge, is far preferable to one who speaks german fluently but cannot introduce his students to the greatness of german literature and the spirit of the german people. on the other hand, written reports in literary courses should always be required to be in german; it is also a good plan to devote a few minutes of each period to prepared oral reports, in german, on the part of the individual students. where systematic practice in the colloquial use of the language is desirable for special reasons, a conversation course may be established in addition to the main work, but literary courses are not the place for starting conversational practice with classes that have been neglected in this respect during their preparatory work. the second year of the literary group should offer a choice between two directions of further literary development: about three hours of each week should be devoted either to a course on the general history of german literature, or to the intensive study of one of the greatest factors in german literature--such as goethe's _faust_. in large institutions both courses can probably be given side by side, the students taking their choice according to their preference, but in most colleges an alternation of two courses of this kind will be preferable. the method of instruction is determined by the students' preparation and the teacher's personality, in literature courses more than anything else. obviously, lectures (in german, where circumstances permit), extensive, systematic reading, written reports, and class discussion are the dominating features of such courses. some knowledge of german history and institutions is an indispensable adjunct of any serious work in german literature. probably in all colleges such instruction will be incumbent upon the german departments, and it is rarely possible to combine it with the course on the general history of german literature. therefore, a special course in german history and institutions should be offered during the second year of the literature group. =the professional group= the work of this group may overlap that of the second group to a considerable extent, in the sense that courses in both groups may be taken at the same time. the professional preparation of a teacher of german should include: a thorough knowledge of the structure of the german language, an appreciative familiarity with german literature, and a fair amount of specialized pedagogical training. the study of literature cannot be different for prospective teachers from that for all other types of college students, and, therefore, belongs to the second group. but their knowledge of language structure, though not necessarily of a specialistic philological character, must include a more detailed knowledge of german grammar, a familiarity with technical german phonetics, and at least an elementary insight into the historical development of the language. in addition to suitable courses in these three subjects, a pedagogical course, dealing with the methods of modern language teaching, and connected with observation and practice teaching, must be provided for. where the previous training has been neglected, a course in german conversation may be added; but, generally speaking, this should no longer be necessary with students in their fifth or sixth year of german instruction. wherever this need exists, the system of instruction is at fault. =conclusion= incomplete though this brief outline must necessarily be, the writer has attempted to touch upon the most important phases of the students' development of linguistic, cultural, and, where demanded, professional command of german. little has so far been said concerning the college teacher. the strong emphasis placed upon the direct method in this article should not be misinterpreted as meaning that a fluent command of the spoken language is a _conditio sine qua non_. nothing could be farther from the truth. first of all, the necessity of the exclusive use of the direct method exists obviously only in the elementary group. in this group, however, "conversation" in the generally accepted sense of the word should not be attempted--it will do more harm than good. the constant practice in speaking and hearing should be so rigidly subservient to the interpretation and practice of the texts being read and to grammatical drill, that only a minimum of "speaking knowledge" on the part of the teacher is unavoidably necessary; his pronunciation, of course, must be perfect. however desirable it may be that a teacher should know intimately well the language he is teaching in college, there are other requirements even higher than this; they are, in the first group, energy, thoroughness, and pedagogical skill, coupled with an intelligent understanding of the basic principles of the direct method; in the second group, literary appreciation and a sympathetic understanding of german thought, history, and civilization; and, for the third group, elementary philological training, theoretical as well as practical acquaintance with the needs of the classroom, and a long and varied experience in teaching. rarely will all three qualifications be combined in one person, nor are such fortunate combinations necessary in most colleges. a wise distribution of courses among the members of the department can in most cases be effected in such a way that each teacher's talents are utilized in their proper places. e. prokosch part five the arts chapter xxiii the teaching of music _edward dickinson_ xxiv the teaching of art _holmes smith_ xxiii the teaching of music =music a comparatively recent addition to the college curriculum= there is perhaps no more direct way of throwing a sort of flashlight upon the musical activity in the colleges of america than the statement that a volume of this kind, if prepared a dozen years ago, would either have contained no chapter upon music, or, if music were given a place at all, the argument would have been occupied with hopes rather than achievements. not that it would be literally true to say that music was wholly a negligible quantity in the homes of higher education until the twentieth century, but the seat assigned to it in the few institutions where it was found was an obscure and lowly one, and the influence radiating therefrom reached so small a fragment of the academic community that no one who was not engaged in a careful, sympathizing search could have been aware of its existence. it was less than twenty years ago that a prominent musical journal printed the very moderate statement that "the youth who is graduated at yale, harvard, johns hopkins, brown, dartmouth, bowdoin, amherst, cornell, or columbia has not even a smattering of music beyond the music of the college glee and mandolin club; and of course to cultivate that is the easiest road to musical perdition." one who looks at those institutions now, and attempts to measure the power and reach of their departments of music, will not deny the right to the satisfaction which their directors--men of national influence--must feel, and would almost expect them to echo the words of ancient simeon. the contrast is indeed extraordinary, and, i believe, unparalleled. the work of these men, and of others who could be named with them, has not been merely development, but might even be called creation. any one who attempts to keep track of the growth of musical education in our colleges, universities, and also in the secondary schools of the present day, will find that the bare statistics of this increase, to say nothing of a study of the problems involved, will engage much more than his hours of leisure. music, which not long ago held tolerance only as an outside interest, confined to the sphere of influence of the glee club and the chapel choir, is now, in hundreds of educational institutions, accorded the privileges due to those arts and sciences whose function in historic civilization, and potency in scholarly discipline and liberal culture, give them domicile by obvious and inalienable right. =history of the subject of music in the american college curriculum= the first university professorships in music were founded at harvard in , and at the university of pennsylvania at about the same time. vassar college established musical courses in , oberlin in . harvard took the lead in granting credit for certain courses in music toward the degree of a.b. in .[ ] progress thereafter for many years was slow; but in investigation showed that "approximately one half the colleges in the country recognize the value of instruction in music sufficiently to grant credit in this subject."[ ] since this date college after college and university after university have fallen into line, only a few resisting the current that sets toward the universal acceptance of music as a legitimate and necessary element in higher education. the problem with the musical educators of the country is no longer how to crowd their subject into the college preserve, but how to organize its forces there, how to develop its methods on a basis of scholarly efficiency, how to harmonize its courses with the ideals of the old established departments, and now, last of all, how to bring the universities and colleges into coöperation with the rapid extension of musical practice, education, and taste which has, in recent days, become a conspicuous factor in our national progress. =changing social ideals responsible for the new attitude toward the study of music in colleges= an investigation into the causes of this great change would be fully as interesting as a critical examination of its results. the limits of this chapter require that consideration be given to the present and future of this movement rather than to its past; but it is especially instructive, i think, to those who are called upon to deal practically with it, to observe that the welcome now accorded to music in our higher institutions of learning is due to changes in both the college and its environment. in view of the constitution and relationships of our higher schools (unlike those of the universities of europe), any alteration in the ideals, the practical activities, and the living conditions of the people of the democracy will sooner or later affect those institutions whose aim is fundamentally to equip young men and women for social leadership. it is unnecessary to remind the readers of such a book as this of the marked enlargement of the interests of the intelligent people of america in recent years, or of the prominent place which æsthetic considerations hold among these interests. the ancient thinker, to whom nothing of human concern was alien, would find the type he represented enormously increased in these latter days. the passion for the release of all the latent energies and the acquisition of every material good, which characterizes the american people to a degree hitherto unknown in the world since the outburst of the renaissance, issues, as in the renaissance, in an enormous multiplication of the machinery by which the enjoyment of life and its outward embellishment are promoted. but more than this and far better--the eager pursuit of the means for enhancing physical and mental gratification has coincided with a growing desire for the general welfare;--hence the æsthetic movement of recent years, and the zeal for social betterment which excludes no section or class or occupation, tend to unite, and at the same time to work inward and develop a type of character which seeks joy not only in beauty but also in the desire to give beauty a home in the low as well as in the high places. whatever may be one's view of the final value of the recent american productions in literature and the fine arts, the social, democratic tendency in them is unmistakable. the company of enthusiastic men and women who are preaching the gospel of beauty as a common human birthright is neither small nor feeble. the fine arts are emerging from the studios, professional schools, and coteries; they are no longer conceived as the special prerogative of privileged classes; not even is the creation of masterpieces as objects of national pride the pervading motive;--but they are seen to be potential factors in national education, ministering to the happiness and mental and moral health of the community at large. it was impossible that the most enlightened directors of our colleges, universities, and public schools should not perceive the nature and possibilities of this movement, hasten to ally themselves with it, and in many cases assume a leadership in it to which their position and advantages entitled them. =the educative function of music= the commanding claims which the arts of design, music, and the drama are asserting for an organized share in the higher education is also, i think, a consequence of the change that has come about in recent years in the constitution of the curriculum, the methods of instruction, the personnel of the student body, the multiplication of their sanctioned activities, and especially in the attitude of the undergraduates toward the traditional idea of scholarship. the old college was a place where strict, inherited conceptions of scholarship and mental discipline were piously maintained. the curriculum rested for its main support upon a basis of the classics and mathematics, which imparted a classic and mathematical rigidity to the whole structure. the professor was an oracle, backed by oracular textbooks; the student's activity was restricted by a traditional association of learning with self-restraint and outward severity of life. the revolutionary change came with the marvelous development of the natural sciences, compelling radical readjustments of thought both within and without the college, the quickening of the social life about the campus, and the sharp division of interest, together with a multiplication of courses which made the elective system inevitable. the consequence was, as president wilson states it, that a "disintegration was brought about which destroyed the old college with its fixed disciplines and ordered life, and gave us our present problem of reorganization and recovery. it centered in the break-up of the old curriculum and the introduction of the principle that the student was to select his own studies from a great variety of courses. but the change could not, in the nature of things, stop with the plan of study. it held in its heart a tremendous implication;--the implication of full manhood on the part of the pupil, and all the untrammeled choice of manhood. the pupil who was mature and well-informed enough to study what he chose, was also by necessary implication mature enough to be left free to _do_ what he pleased, to choose his own associations and ways of life outside the curriculum without restraint or suggestion; and the varied, absorbing life of our day sprang up as the natural offspring of the free election of studies."[ ] =the development of emotions as well as the intellect a vital concern of the college curriculum= into an academic life so constituted, art, music, and the drama must perforce make their way by virtue of their appeal to those instincts, always latent, which were now set in action. those agencies by which the emotional life has always been expressed and stimulated found a welcome prepared for them in the hearts of college youths, stirred with new zests and a more lively self-consciousness. but for a time they met resistance in the supremacy of the exact sciences, erroneously set in opposition to the forces which move the emotions and the imagination, and the stern grip, still jealously maintained, of the old conception of "mental discipline" and the communication of information as the prime purpose of college teaching. the relaxation came with the recognition of æsthetic pursuits as "outside interests," and organization and endowment soon followed. but a college art museum logically involves lectures upon art, a theater an authoritative regulation of the things offered therein, a concert hall and concert courses instruction in the history and appreciation of music. and so, with surprising celerity, the colleges began to readjust their schemes to admit those agencies that act upon the emotion as well as the understanding, and the problem how to bring æsthetic culture into a working union with the traditional aims and the larger social opportunities of the college faced the college educator, and disturbed his repose with its peremptory insistence upon a practical solution. =problems in teaching of music in the college= although the question of purpose, method, and adaptation presents general difficulties of similar character in respect to the college administration of all the fine arts, music is undoubtedly the most embarrassing item in the list. in this department of our colleges there is no common conviction as to methods, no standardized system; but rather a bewildering disagreement in regard to the subjects to be taught, the extent and nature of their recognition, the character of the response to be expected of the student mind, and the kind of gauge by which that response shall be measured by teachers, deans, and registrars. in the matter of literature and the arts of design, where there is likewise an implicit intention of enriching æsthetic appreciation, an agreement is more easily reached, by reason of their closer relationship to outer life, to action, and the more familiar processes of thought. few would maintain that the purpose of college courses in english literature is to train professional novelists and poets; the college leaves to the special art schools and to private studios the development of painters, sculptors, and architects. what remains to the college is reasonably clear. but in music, on the contrary, the function of the college is by no means so evident as to induce anything like general agreement. should the musical courses be exclusively cultural, or should they be so shaped as to provide training for professional work in composition or performance? should they be "practical" (that is, playing and singing), or simply theoretical (harmony, counterpoint, etc.), or entirely confined to musical history and appreciation? should credits leading to the a.b. degree be given for musical work, and if so, ought they to include performance, or only theory and composition? should musical degrees be granted, and if so, for what measure of knowledge or proficiency? one or two western colleges give credit for work done under the direction of private teachers in no way connected with the institution:--is this procedure to be commended, and if so, under what safeguards? should a college maintain a musical "conservatory" working under a separate administrative and financial system, many or all of whose teachers are not college graduates; or should its musical department be necessarily an organic part of the college of arts and sciences, exactly like the department of latin or chemistry? if the former, as is the case with many western institutions, to what extent should the work in the music school be supervised by the college president and general faculty; under what limitations may candidates for the a.b. degree be allowed to take accredited work in the music school? what should be the relation of the college to the university in respect to the musical courses? is it possible to establish a systematic progress from step to step similar to that which exists in many of the old established lines? what should be the relation between the college and the secondary schools? should the effort be to establish a continuity of study and promotion, such as that which exists in such subjects as latin and mathematics? should the college give entrance credits for musical work? if so, should it be on examination or certificate, for practical or theoretical work, or both? should the courses in the history and appreciation of music be thrown open to all students, or only to those who have some preliminary technical knowledge? these are some of the questions that face a college governing board when music is under discussion--questions that are dealt with on widely divergent principles by colleges of equal rank. some institutions in the west permit to music a freedom and variety in respect to grades, subjects, and methods which they allow to no other subject. the university of kansas undertakes musical extension work throughout the state. brown university restricts its musical instruction to lecture courses on the history and appreciation of music. between these extremes there is every diversity of opinion and procedure that can be conceived. the problem, as i have said, is twofold, and so long as disagreement exists as to the object of collegiate musical work, there can be no uniformity in administration. in a university the problem is or should be somewhat more simple, just as there is a more general accord concerning the precise object of university training. in place of the confusion of views in regard to ideals and systems and methods which exist in the present-day college, we find in the university a calmness of conviction touching essentials that results from the comparative simplicity of its functions and aims. a conspicuous tendency in our universities is toward specialization; their spirit and methods are largely derived from the professional and graduate schools which give them their tone and prestige. they look toward research and the advancement of learning as their particular _raison d'être_, and also toward the practical application of knowledge to actual life and the disciplining of special faculties for definite vocational ends.[ ] since our universities, unlike those of europe, consist of a union of graduate and undergraduate departments, any single problem, like that of music, is simplified by the opportunity afforded by the direct passage from undergraduate to graduate work, and the greater encouragement to specialization in the earlier courses. a graduate school which admits music will naturally do so on a vocational basis, and the question is not of the aim to be sought, but the much easier one of the means of its attainment, since there is no more of a puzzle in teaching an embryo composer or music teacher than there is in teaching an incipient physician or engineer. it seems to me that the opportunity before the university has been stated in a very clear and suggestive manner by professor albert a. stanley of the university of michigan: "if in the future the line of demarcation between the college and the university shall cease to be as sinuous and shadowy as at present, the university will offer well-defined courses in research, in creative work, possibly in interpretation--by which i do not mean criticism, but rather that which is criticized. [professor stanley evidently refers to musical performance.] the college courses will then be so broadened that the preparatory work will of necessity be relegated to the secondary schools. this will impose on the colleges and universities still another duty--the fitting of competent teachers. logically music will then be placed on the list of entrance studies, and the circle will be complete. the fitting of teachers who can satisfy the conditions of such work as will then be demanded will be by no means the least function of the higher institutions. there will be more and more demand for the broadly trained teacher, and there will be an even greater demand for the specialist. by this i mean the specialist who has been developed in a normal manner, and who appreciates the greater relations of knowledge and life."[ ] =problems in teaching of music in secondary schools are intelligently attacked= there is no question that the future of music in the colleges will greatly depend upon the developments in the secondary schools. if the time ever comes when the administrators of our public school system accept and act upon the assertion of dr. claxton, united states commissioner of education, that "after the beginnings of reading, writing, and mathematics music has greater practical value than any other subject taught in the schools," the college will find its determination of musical courses an easier matter than it is now. students will in that event come prepared to take advantage of the more advanced instruction offered by the college, as they do at present in the standard subjects, and the musical pathway through the college, and then through the university, will be direct and unimpeded. although such a prospect may seem to many only a roseate dream, it is a safer prophecy than it would have appeared a half-dozen years ago. the number of grammar and high schools is rapidly increasing in which the pupils are given solid instruction in chorus singing, ensemble playing, musical theory, and the history and appreciation of music; and in many places pupils are also permitted to carry on private study in vocal and instrumental music at the hands of approved teachers, and school credit given therefor. so apparent is the need of this latter privilege, and so full of fine possibilities, that the question of licensing private teachers with a view to an official recognition of the fittest has begun to receive the attention of state associations and legislatures. it is impossible that the colleges should remain indifferent to these tendencies in the preparatory schools, for their duty and their advantage are found in coöperating with them. the opportunity has been most clearly seen by those colleges which have established departments for the training of supervisors of public school music. such service comes eminently within the rôle of the college, for a disciplined understanding, a liberal culture, an acquaintance with subjects once unrecognized as related to music teaching, are coming to be demanded in the music supervisor. the day of the old country-school singing master transferred to the public school is past; the day of the trained supervisor, who measures up to the intellectual stature of his colleagues, is at hand. so clearly is this perceived that college courses in public school music, which at first occupied one year at the most, are being extended to two years and three years, and in at least one or two instances occupying four years. and the benefit is not confined to the schoolroom, for an educated man, conscious of his peculiar powers, will see and use opportunities afforded him not merely as a salaried preceptor but also as a citizen. =vital function of music in college curriculum is emotional and æsthetic= to revert to the difficulties which the college faces in adjusting musical courses to the general scheme of academic instruction: it is clear that these difficulties lie partly in the very nature of musical art. for music is not only an art but a science. it is the product of constructive ingenuity as well as of "inspiration"; its technique is of exquisite refinement and appalling difficulty; it appeals to the intellect as well as to the emotion. and yet the intellectual element is but tributary, and if the consciousness willfully shuts its gates against the tide of rapture rushing to flood the sense and the emotion, then in reality music is not, for its spirit is dead. what shall be done with an agency so fierce and absorbing as this? can it be tamed and fettered by the old conceptions of mental discipline and scholastic routine? only by falsifying its nature and denying its essential appeal. some colleges attempt so to evade the difficulty, and lend favor, so far at least as credit is concerned, only to the theoretical studies in which the training is as severe, and almost as unimaginative, as it is in mathematics. but to many this appears too much like a reversion to the viewpoint of the mediæval convent schools which classed music in the _quadrivium_ along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. neither the creative power nor the æsthetic receptivity is considered in such courses as these, and the spirit of music revolts against this confinement and gives its pedantic jailers no peace. =the practical course as disciplinary as the theoretical= shall practical courses in playing and singing be accepted? now the objection arises that any proficiency with which a student--at least a talented one--would be satisfied, entails hours each day of purely technical practice, involving little of the kind of mental activity that is presupposed in the tradition of college training. those institutions that have no practical courses are logical, at all events, and seem to follow the line of least resistance. but the opposition against the purely theoretical side of musical culture will not down, and the "practical" element makes steady headway as the truth shines more dearly upon the administrative mind that musical performance is not a matter of mechanical technique alone, but of scholarship, imaginative insight, keen emotional reaction, and interpretation which involves a sympathetic understanding of the creative mind. the objection to practical exercise dwindles as the conception of its nature and goal enlarges. =lack of college-trained teachers adds to difficulty of recognizing music as a college subject= another hindrance presents itself--not so inherent in the nature of the case as those just mentioned--and that is the lack of teachers of music whose educational equipment corresponds in all particulars to the standard which the colleges have always maintained as a condition of election to their corps of instructors. that one who is not a college graduate should be appointed to a professorship or instructorship in a college or university might seem to a college man of the old school very near an absurdity. yet as matters now stand it would be impossible to fill the collegiate musical departments with holders of the a.b. degree. the large and increasing number of college graduates who are entering the musical profession, especially with a view to finding a home in higher educational institutions, is an encouraging phase of present tendencies, and seems to hold out an assurance that this aspect of the college dilemma will eventually disappear.[ ] it is possible, however, that the colleges may be willing to agree to a compromise, making a distinction between the teachers of the history and criticism of music and those engaged in the departments of musical theory and performance. certainly no man should be given a college position who is not in sympathy with the largest purposes of the institution and able to contribute to their realization; but it must be remembered that broad intelligence and elevated character are to be found outside the ranks of college alumni, and are not guaranteed by a college diploma. =teaching of the history and appreciation of music= amid the jangle of conflicting opinions in regard to courses and methods and credits and degrees, etc., etc., one subject enjoys the distinction of unanimous consent, and that is the history and appreciation of music. this department may stand alone, as it does at brown university, or it may supplement theoretical and practical courses; but there seems to be a universal conviction that if the colleges accept music in any guise, they must use it as a means of enlarging comprehension and taste on the part of their young people, and of bringing them to sympathetic acceptance of its finest manifestations. it seems incredible that a college should employ literature and the fine arts except with the fixed intention of bringing them to bear upon the mind of youth according to the purpose of those who made them what they are in the spiritual development of humanity. even from the most rigid theoretical and technical drill the cultural aim must not be excluded if the college would be true to itself; how much more urgent is the duty of providing courses in which the larger vision of art, with the resultant spiritual quickening, is the prime intention! president nicholas murray butler, in his address of welcome to the music teachers' national association at their meeting in new york in , struck a note that must find response in the minds of all who are called upon to deal officially with this question, when he recognized as a department of music worthy of the college dignity "one which is not to deal merely with the technique of musical expression or musical processes, but one which is to interpret the underlying principles of musical art and the various sciences on which it rests, and to set out and to illustrate to men and women who are seeking education what those principles signify, how they may be brought helpfully and inspiringly into intellectual life, and what part they should play in the public consciousness of a cultivated and civilized nation." =emphasis on appreciation rather than technique= the first step in understanding the part which the principles of music should play in the consciousness of a civilized nation is to learn the part they have played in history. a survey of this history shows that all the phenomena of musical development, even those apparently transient and superficial, testify to a necessity of human nature, an unappeasable thirst for self-expression. in view of the relationship of musical art to the individual and the collective need, it is plain that musical history and musical appreciation must be taught together as a supplementary phase of one great theme. and, furthermore, this phase is one that is not only necessary in a complete scheme of musical culture, but is also one that is conveyed in a language which all can understand. it is significant of the broad democratic outlook of our american institutions of learning, in contrast to the universities of europe, that the needs of the unprepared students are considered as well as the benefit of those who have had musical preparation, and the mysteries of musical art are submitted to all who desire initiation. too much emphasis cannot be laid upon this wise and generous attitude toward the fine arts which is maturing in our american colleges; by which they demonstrate their belief in the power of adaptation of all manifestations of beauty to the condition of every one of intelligence, however slight the experience or limited the talent. there are, unquestionably, certain puzzling difficulties in imparting an understanding of musical structure and principles to those who have not even a preliminary smattering of the musical speech, but the experiment has gone far enough to prove that music, with all its abstruseness, complexity, and remoteness from the world of ordinary experience, has still a message so direct, so penetrating, so human and humanizing, that no one can be wholly indifferent to its eloquence when it comes through the ministry of a qualified interpreter. =the properly trained college teacher of music= a qualified interpreter!--yes, there's the rub. only a few years ago men competent to teach the history and philosophy of music in a manner which a college or university could consistently tolerate, were almost non-existent, and even today many colleges are out of sheer necessity giving over this department to men of very scanty qualifications. few men have faith enough to prepare for work that is not yet in sight. then with the sudden breaking out of musical history and appreciation courses all over the country, the demand appeared instantly far in excess of the supply. the few men who had prepared themselves for scholarly critical work were, as a rule, in the employ of daily newspapers, and the colleges were compelled to delegate the historical and interpretative lectures to those whose training had been almost wholly in other lines of musical interest. no reputable college would think for a moment of offering chairs of political science, or general history, or english literature to men with so meager an equipment. there is no doubt that the disfavor with which the musical courses are still regarded by professors of the old school is largely due to the feeling that their musical colleagues as a rule have undergone an education so narrow and special that it keeps them apart from the full life of the institution. that this is the tendency of an education that is exclusively special, no one can deny. it is equally undeniable that such an education is quite inadequate in the case of one who assumes to teach the history and appreciation of music. this subject, by reason of the multifarious relations between music and individual and social life, demands not only a complete technical knowledge, but also a familiarity with languages, general history, literature, and art not less than that required by any other subject that could be mentioned. the suggestion by a french critic that a lecturer on art must be an artist, a historian, a philosopher, and a poet, applies with equal relevance to a lecturer on music. it is only fair to the musical profession to say that its members are as eager to meet these requirements as the colleges are to make them. if music still holds an inferior place in many colleges, both in fact and in esteem, the fault lies in no small measure in the ignorance on the part of trustees, presidents, and faculties of the nature of music, its demands, its social values, and its mission in the development of civilization. with the enlightenment of the powers that control the college machinery, encouragement will be given to men of liberal culture and scholarly habit to prepare themselves directly for college work. the hundreds of college graduates now in the musical profession will be followed by other hundreds still more amply equipped as critics and expounders. the natural place for the majority of them, i maintain, is not in the private studio or newspaper office, but in the college and university classroom. there is no reason in the nature of things why our colleges and universities should not also be the centers of a concentrated and intensive activity, directed upon research and philosophic generalization in the things of music as in other fields of inquiry. for this they must provide libraries, endowments, and fellowships. such works as mr. elson's _history of american music_, mr. krehbiel's _afro-american folksongs_, and mr. kelly's _chopin as a composer_ should properly emanate from the organized institutions of learning which are able to give leisure and facility to men of scholarly ambition. the french musical historian, jules combarieu, enumerates as the domains constantly open to musical scholarship: acoustics, physiology, mathematics, psychology, æsthetics, history, philology, palæography, and sociology.[ ] every one of these topics has already an indispensable place in the college and university system--it is for trained scholarship to draw from them the contributions that will relate music explicitly to the active life of the intellect. but not for the intellect only. here the colleges are still in danger of error, due to their long-confirmed emphasis upon concepts, demonstrations, scientific methods, and "positive" results, to the neglect of the imagination, the emotions, the intuitions, and the things spiritually discerned. "the sovereign of the arts," says edmund clarence stedman, "is the imagination, by whose aid man makes every leap forward; and emotion is its twin, through which come all fine experiences, and all great deeds are achieved. youth demands its share in every study that can engender a power or a delight. universities must enhance the use, the joy, the worth of existence. they are institutions both human and humane."[ ] =the test of effective teaching of music in the college: does it enrich the life of the student through the inculcation of an æsthetic interest?= institutions which exclude the agencies which act directly to enhance "the joy and the worth of existence" are universities only in name. equally imperfect are they if, while nominally accepting these agencies, they recognize only those elements in them which are susceptible to scientific analysis, whose effects upon the student can be tested by examinations and be marked and graded--elements which are only means, and not final ends. the college forever needs the humanizing, socializing power of music, the drama, the arts of design, and it must use them not as confined to the classroom or to any single section of the institution, but as the effluence of spiritual life, permeating and invigorating the whole. in the mental life of the college there have always ruled investigation, comparison, analysis, and the temper fostered is that of reflection and didacticism. into this world of deliberation, routine, mechanical calculation, there has come the warm breath of music, art, and poetry, stirring a new fire of rapture amid the embers of speculation. the instincts of youth spring to inhale it; youth feels affiliation with it, for art and poesy, like nature, are ever self-renewing and never grow old. it works to unify the life of the college whose tendency is to divide into sealed compartments of special intellectual interests. it introduces a life that all may share, because men divide when led by their intellects, they unite when led by their emotions. among the fine arts music is perhaps supreme in its power to refine the sense of beauty, to soften the heart at the touch of high thought and tender sentiment, to bring the individual soul into sympathy with the over-soul of humanity. it is this that gives music its supreme claim to an honored place in the halls of learning, as it is its crowning glory. the whole argument, then, is reduced to this: that with all the scientific aspects of the art with respect to material, structure, psychological action, historical origins and developments and relations, of which the college, as an institution of exact learning, may take cognizance, music must be accepted and taught just because it is beautiful and promotes the joy of life, and the development of the higher sense of beauty and the spiritual quickening that issues therefrom must be the final reason for its use. at the same time it must be so cultivated and taught that it will unite its forces for a common end with all those factors which, within the college and without the college, are now working with an energy never known before in american history for a social life animated by a zeal for ideal rather than material ends, and inspired by nobler visions of the true meaning of national progress. among the worthy functions of our colleges there is none more needful than that of inspiring ardent young crusaders who shall go forth to contend against the hosts of mediocrity, ugliness, and vulgarity. one encouragement to this warfare is in the fact that these hosts, although legion, are dull as well as gross, and may easily be bewildered and put to rout by the organized assaults of the children of light. so may it be said of our institutions of culture, as matthew arnold said of oxford, that they "keep ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side." edward dickinson _oberlin college_ footnotes: [ ] arthur l. manchester: "music education in the united states; schools and departments of music." united states bureau of education bulletin, , no. . [ ] papers and proceedings of the music teachers' national association, ; report by leonard b. mcwhood. [ ] _the spirit of learning_, woodrow wilson: in _representative phi beta kappa orations_, edited by northup, lane and schwab. boston, houghton mifflin company, . [ ] i wish to safeguard this statement by saying that i have in mind not the more conservative universities of the east, but the state institutions of the middle and western commonwealths. in speaking of universities as compared with colleges i am also considering the graduate and professional departments. it is difficult to make general assertions, on such a subject that do not meet with exceptions. [ ] papers and proceedings of the music teachers' national association, . [ ] there is an interesting statistical article on the college graduate in the musical profession by w. j. baltzell in the _musical quarterly_, october, . [ ] _music; its laws and evolution_: introduction. translation in appleton's international scientific series. [ ] _the nature and elements of poetry_, page . xxiv the teaching of art =art instruction defined= in this chapter an attempt is made to set forth the aims, content, and methods of art instruction in the college. in this discussion the word "college" will be regarded in the usual sense of the college of liberal arts, and art instruction as one of the courses which lead to the degree of bachelor of arts. there is no term that is used more freely and with less precision than the word "art." in some usages it is given a very broad and comprehensive meaning, in others a very narrow and exclusive one. the term is sometimes applied to a human activity, at other times to the products of but a small part of that activity--for example, paintings and statuary. in this chapter the term will be used in accordance with the definition evolved by tolstoi, who says: "art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are affected by these feelings, and also experience them."[ ] the external signs by which the feelings are handed on are movements, as in dancing and pantomime; lines, masses, colors, as in architecture, painting and sculpture; sounds, as in music; or forms expressed in words, as in poetry and other forms of literature. the external signs with which art instruction in the college deals are lines, masses, and colors. this discussion, therefore, treats of instruction in the formative or visual arts, which include architecture, painting, sculpture, decoration, and the various crafts, in so far as they come within the meaning of the definition given above. =instruction in art should be an integral part of a liberal education= concerning the nature of art and the purpose of art instruction in the college, there is so much misunderstanding that it will be well to make an attempt at clarification. art is too commonly regarded as a luxury--a superfluity that may serve to occupy the leisure of the well-to-do--a kind of embroidery upon the edge of life that may be affixed or discarded at will. whereas, art is a factor that is fundamental in human life and development, a factor that has entered into the being of the race from the dawn of reason. its products, which antedate written history by thousands of years, form the most reliable source of information we possess of the habits and thoughts of prehistoric man. it has been the medium of expression of many of the choicest products of human thought throughout the ages. these products have been embodied in forms other than that of writing. its functions are limited neither to the citizen, the community, nor the country; they extend beyond national bounds to the world at large. art belongs to the brotherhood of man. it is no respecter of nationalities. it is obvious that in a general college course, a study of the religious, social, and political factors in civilization that does not include art among these factors is incomplete. the question under discussion concerns the teaching of art to the candidate for the bachelor of arts degree, and this question will be solely kept in view. since, however, graduates in science, engineering, law, medicine, etc., are not exempt from the needs of artistic culture, they too should have at least an effective minimum of art instruction. =art a social activity= art is recognized as a social activity. it enters largely into such practical and utilitarian problems of the community as town planning and other forms of civic improvement. as workers in such activities, college graduates are frequently called to serve on boards of directors and committees which have such work in charge. to most of such persons, education in art comes as a post-collegiate activity. surely the interests of the community would be promoted if the men and women into whose hands these interests are committed had had some formal instruction in art during their college years. if by practical education we mean training which prepares the individual for living, then the study of an activity that so pervades human life should be included in the curriculum of even a so-called practical college course. art education has a more important function than to promote the love of the beautiful, to purify and elevate public taste, to awaken intellectual and spiritual desires, to create a permanent means of investing leisure. important as all these purposes are, they are merely a part of a larger one--that of revealing to the student the relationship of art to living. =flexibility of art expression determines flexibility of art instruction= art expression has the quality of utmost flexibility. this flexibility appears also in art instruction, and it is for this reason that in no two institutions of higher learning is the problem of art instruction attacked in the same way. there is, consequently, a great diversity in the types of art courses, even in the college. the flexibility of art instruction is both advantageous and embarrassing. it is an advantage in that it can be adapted to almost any requirement. it can be applied to the occupations of the kindergarten, or it can be made an intensive study suitable for the graduate school. but this very breadth is also a source of weakness in that it tends to divert the attention from that precision of purpose which all formal instruction should have, however elementary or advanced. it is apt to be too scattering in its aims. it is not easy to determine exact values either in the subject studied or in the accomplishment of the student. estimates in art are, and should be, largely a matter of personal taste and opinion. they are not infrequently colored by prejudice, especially where the judgment of producing artists is invoked. this, again, is as it should be. an artist who assumes toward all works of art a catholic attitude, weakens that intensity of view and of purpose which animates his enthusiasm. it can easily be understood that to a larger extent than in other subjects the nature and scope of art instruction depends upon the personality of the instructor. =values of art instruction= the flexibility to which we have adverted adapts art instruction to diverse educational aims. in that it can be made to conduce to accurate observation of artistic manifestations, and to logical deduction therefrom, it may be given a disciplinary purpose. in its highest development, to which only the specially gifted can attain, the ability to observe accurately and to deduce logically demands the most exacting training of the eye, of the visual memory, and of the judgment. as an example of the exercise of this sort of discipline we may cite professor waldstein's recognition of a marble fragment in the form of a head in the louvre as belonging to a metope of the parthenon. when, after professor waldstein's suggestion of the probable connection, a plaster cast of the head was taken to the british museum and placed upon the headless figure of one of the metopes, the surfaces of fracture were found to correspond.[ ] the most useful application of this ability lies in the correct attribution of works of art to their proper schools and authorship. signor morelli in his method of identification used a system that is almost mechanical, yet the evidence supplied by concurrence or discrepancy of form in the delineation of anatomical details was supplemented by a highly cultivated sense for style, for craftsmanship, and for color as well as by an extensive historical knowledge. in that art instruction cultivates taste and the appreciation of works of art, it has a cultural purpose. by many persons it is assumed that this is its sole value. in that it serves to illuminate the study of the progress of civilization, it has an informative purpose. in that it enables the technical student to correlate his work with that of past and present workers, it aids in the preparation for professional studies. =difference between technical and lay courses in art one of emphasis= art has been defined as "the harmonic expression of the emotions."[ ] accepting this definition as a modified condensation of tolstoi's definition, it is clear that in a work of art two separate personalities are involved--that which makes the expression, and the other to whom the expression is addressed; thus, there are artists on the one hand, and the public on the other. since we shall have to speak of two distinct classes of students,--namely, those who are in training as future artists (as architects, painters, sculptors, designers, etc.), and those who are taking courses in the understanding or appreciation of art,--it will be convenient in this discussion to refer to the former as art students and to the latter as lay students. formal art instruction has been offered by colleges to both these groups. it is evident that for the training of the art student emphasis must be placed upon the technique of creative work, whereas for the lay student emphasis must be placed upon the study of the theory and the history of art. it would seem, however, that these two methods are not mutually exclusive; nor should they be, for the art student would surely gain by a study of the principles of art and its history, while the lay student would profit by a certain amount of practice directed by an observance of the principles. mr. duncan phillips, in an article entitled "what instruction in art should the college a.b. course offer to the future writer on art?" proposes a hypothetical course in which "the ultimate intention would be to awaken the æsthetic sensibilities of the youthful mind, to encourage the emergence of the artists and art critics, and the establishment of a residue of well-instructed appreciators."[ ] this proposal assumes the desirability of the completion of a general course designed for college students, before beginning the special courses designed for those individuals whose aptitudes seem to fit them for successful careers as artists on the one hand, or as successful writers on art, or art instructors on the other. in this place the question of professional training will not be discussed. the courses under consideration are designed to serve the group of lay students from which specialists may, from time to time, emerge. it is of the utmost importance that provision for the further training of such specialists should be made in the college, in the postgraduate school, or in an allied professional school of art. in view of the great diversity in the treatment of the subject in different colleges, it will be impossible to present a series of courses that might, under other conditions, be representative of a general practice throughout the country. on the other hand, the attempt to make an epitome of the various methods in use at the more important colleges would result in the presentation of a succession of unrelated statements drawn from catalogues which would be hardly less exasperating to the reader than it would be for him to follow, successively, the outlines as presented in the catalogues themselves. various summaries of these outlines have been made, and to these the reader is referred.[ ] =a general course of study--must be adjusted to local conditions= an attempt is here made to set forth a programme which is offered as a suggestion, upon which actual courses may be based, with such modifications as are demanded by local conditions, the number and personal training of the teaching staff, and the physical equipment available. the task before the college art instructor is to cultivate the lay student's understanding and appreciation of the works of art and to develop an ardent enthusiasm for his subject, tempered by good taste. this understanding will be based upon a workable body of principles which the student can use in making his artistic estimates and choices. such a body of principles will constitute his theory of art. =two methods of presenting art instruction to lay students= art instruction for lay students may be presented in two ways: . by the study of theory supplemented by the experimental application of theory to practice, as by drawing, design, etc. . by the study of theory supplemented by an application of theory to the analysis and estimation of works of art as they are presented in a systematic study of the history of art. consider now the relation of practice and history to theory: first as to practice: art instructors are divided into three camps on the question of giving to the lay student instruction in practice: ( ) those who believe that not only is practice unnecessary in the study of theory, but actually harmful; ( ) those who believe that practice will aid in a study of the theory of art; ( ) those who believe that practice is indispensable and who would, therefore, require that all students supplement their study of the theory of art by practice. as may be surmised, by far the largest number of advocates is found in the middle division. one form of practice is representation. in this form the student begins by drawing in freehand very simple objects either in outline or mass, and proceeds through more advanced exercises in drawing from still life, to drawing and painting of landscape and the human figure. with the addition of supplementary studies, such as anatomy, perspective, modeling, composition, craft work, theory, history, etc., this would be, broadly speaking, the method followed in schools of art, where courses, occupying from two to four or five years, are given, intended primarily for those who expect to make some sort of creative art their vocation. it is this kind of work which opponents to practice for the lay student have in mind. they claim that only by long and severe training can he produce such works as will give satisfaction to him or to others who examine his handiwork. they contend that the understanding of works of art is not dependent upon ability to produce a poor example. they offer many amusing analogies as arguments against practice courses for lay students. they maintain that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, rather than in the making; that to enjoy music one need not practice five-finger exercises; that other creatures than domestic fowls are capable of judging of the quality of eggs; that to appreciate the beauty of a tapestry it is not necessary to examine the reverse side. it will perhaps be sufficient, for the present, to point out that in so far as such alleged analogies can be submitted for arguments, they are equally applicable to laboratory courses in any subject which is studied with a non-professional or non-vocational purpose. it is true, however, that such a course as that outlined above demands a large amount of time, compared with the results attained; and while successful courses in representation are offered in certain colleges, the great mass of college students, who cannot hope to acquire a high degree of skill, would hesitate to devote a large part of their training to technical work, even if college faculties were willing to grant considerable proportions of credit for it toward the bachelor of arts degree. =relative value of freehand drawing and design= it will be understood by the reader that the value of elementary freehand drawing as a means of discipline or as an aid to the technical student is not under discussion. the value of drawing as a fundamental language for such purposes is universally admitted. the questions are these: can some form of practice in art be used to aid in the understanding of the principles of art? is representative drawing the only form of practice available for the lay student who undertakes the study of art? fortunately, the advocates of practice can offer an alternative; namely design. mr. arthur dow distinguishes between the drawing method (representation) and the design method by calling the former _analytical_ and the latter _synthetical_. in an article on "archaism in art teaching"[ ] he says: "i wish to show that the traditional 'drawing method' of teaching art is too weak to meet the new art criticism and new demands, or to connect with vocational and industrial education in an effective way; but that the 'design method' is broad and strong enough to do all of these things." "the drawing method," he continues, "is analytic, dealing with the small, the details, the _application_ of art; the design method is synthetic, dealing with wholes, unities, principles of art." mr. dow carries his exposition into the application of the design method to vocational work, but it can be used with equal effect in supplementing the lay student's study of art. but the questions immediately arise: is not a preparation as long and arduous required to make a designer as to make a painter or a sculptor? and is not the half-baked designer in as sorry a plight as the half-baked artist of any kind? the answer to both is simple: the lay student is not in any degree a painter or a sculptor or a designer, neither is he in training for any of these professions. the advantage of the design method is, that with no skill whatsoever in drawing, the beginner in the study of art can apply to his own efforts the same principles of design which have from time immemorial entered into the creation of great works of art. the college freshman planning a surface design with the aid of "squared" paper is applying the same principles that guided the hand of michelangelo as it swept across the ceiling of the sistine chapel. such principles as symmetry, balance, rhythm, emphasis, harmony in form, mass, value, and color can be inculcated by solving the simplest as well as the most complicated problems. a graded series of exercises can be undertaken by the student that will, with a comparatively small amount of manual skill carry him a considerable distance in the understanding of the principles of design upon which all creative art rests. another advantage is that, in the process, considerable skill in freehand drawing also can be acquired. but this advantage is merely incidental. the greatest value lies in the fact that the design method offers to the student an excellent means of self-expression. the student, through no fault of his, is too prone to absorb and too little inclined to yield of the fruits of his knowledge. herein lies a partial remedy for the tendency of college students to make receptacles of their minds into which knowledge is poured through the ear by listening to lectures, or through the eye by reading. herein is a means of overcoming mental inertia, for, certainly, the solution of a problem in design calls for thought--the amount of mental exertion being commensurate with the difficulty of the problem. in this, the design method is superior to the representation method, though it would be an error to assume that freehand drawing is chiefly a manual operation. such an error is entertained by those only who never have learned to draw. another considerable value lies in the fact that even if the lay student of design should in later life never set hand to paper,--as he probably will not, any more than he who has taken courses in drawing and painting will ever attempt to paint a picture,--yet he has come into practical contact with the leading principles of art, and has gained a knowledge that can be applied not merely to the discriminating understanding of the artistic qualities of the exhibits in art museums or in private galleries, but to the art of every day. it can be applied to the estimating of the artistic value of a poster, a book cover, or a title page; to the choosing of wall paper; to the arranging of the furniture in a room; to the laying out of a garden; to intelligent coöperation in the designing of a house or in replanning, on paper at least, the street system of a city; or to the selecting of a design for a public memorial. it is not to be assumed that in thus exercising a cultivated taste he would always make conscious application of the principles of design in making his estimates. these would have so entered into his habit of thought that he would unconsciously make what mr. dow calls "fine choices." the educational value of the design method is almost universally recognized in the art departments of our public schools and in our art schools, and it is probable that when its aims and methods are better understood by our college faculties, its disciplinary, cultural, and informative value will be more widely recognized in the college of liberal arts, and that it will take equal rank with theme and report writing as a means of cultivating a taste for literature, with the practice of harmony and counterpoint as a means of appreciating music, and with laboratory work in acquiring knowledge of a science. =art history as a means of inculcating principles of art= next, consider art history as a means of inculcating the principles of art. it is evident that the emotions or feelings of the artist and the methods he employs to express them may be studied in such masterpieces as the _hermes_ of praxiteles and the _lincoln_ of st. gaudens. in either he may observe the application of the principles of balance, mass, repose, harmony, and the analysis of character. in either he may study the technique which involves the material of the statues, the tools employed, and the manner of working. there is, however, great advantage in considering such examples in their place in the evolution of art, and their significance in their relation to the social and political development of the human race--in other words, in studying systematically the history and development of art. instruction in history of art is not without its pitfalls. it is too apt to lapse into a mere listing of names and dates of artists and their work, with the introduction of interesting biographical details and some discussion limited to the subjects treated in selected examples. it is often too much concerned with _who_, _when_, and _where_ and not sufficiently with _why_ and _how_. a person may possess a large fund of the facts of art history and yet have but little understanding or appreciation of the aims and underlying principles of art production. it should never be forgotten that for the college student the history of art is merely a convenient scheme or system upon which to base discussions of the principles of art as involved in the works themselves, an outline for the study of the artistic affiliations of any artist with the great company of his antecedents, his contemporaries, and his successors. the instructor should never regard practice or history as ends in themselves, but as means to the development of the understanding. =years in which art courses should be offered= in some colleges only the more advanced students are permitted to take art courses. it does not seem wise thus to limit the years in which courses may be taken. an elementary course should be offered in the freshman year, while other courses of increasing difficulty should be offered in each of the succeeding years. the greatest variety is seen in the colleges throughout the country in the amount of art taught, and the amount of credit given toward the a.b. degree. when the subject is elected as a "minor," it should be one-tenth to one-eighth of all the work undertaken by a candidate for the bachelor's degree; while a "major" elective usually should cover from one-fifth to one-fourth of all the work of a candidate for the same degree. some zealous advocates maintain that a certain amount of art training should be required for graduation. valuable as art training would be to every graduate, it does not seem wise to make art a required subject in the curriculum. to compel men and women to study art against their will would destroy much of the charm of the subject both for the teacher and the student. unless the subject is pursued with enthusiasm by both, it loses its value. =organization and content of courses in art= the courses suggested are as follows: _course i_ (_freshman year_). introduction to the study of art. a study of the various forms of artistic expression, together with the principles which govern those forms. the study would be carried on ( ) by means of lectures, ( ) by discussions led by the instructor and carried on by members of the class, ( ) by laboratory or studio practice in the application of the principles of art expression to graded problems in design, ( ) by collateral reading, ( ) by the occasional writing of themes and reports, ( ) by excursions to art collections (public and private), artists' studios, and craft shops. some of the topics for lectures and discussion would be: primitive art and the factors which control its rise and development; principles of harmony; design in the various arts; an outline study of historic ornament; composition in architecture, painting, and sculpture; concept in art, with a study of examples drawn from the master works of all ages; processes in the artistic crafts; application of the principles of design to room decoration. the studio or laboratory work would include: application of the principles of design; spacing of lines and spots; borders and all-over designs achieved by repetition of various units; studies in symmetry and balance; color study, including hue, value, intensity; exercises in color harmony; problems in form and proportions, decoration of given geometrical areas; applications to practical uses; studies in form and color from still life; use of charcoal, brush, pastel, water color; simple exercises in pictorial composition; problems in simplification necessitated by technique; application of principles of design to room decoration. (this course would be prerequisite for all subsequent courses in practice.) _course ii_ (_sophomore year_). a general course in the history of art. a consideration of the development of the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting from prehistoric periods to recent times. in this course emphasis would be laid upon the periods of higher attainments in artistic expression, and the discussions would be directed toward the qualities of great masterpieces rather than toward those of the multitude of lesser works. the work would be carried on ( ) by means of lectures; ( ) by discussions led by the instructor and carried on by members of the class; ( ) by collateral reading; ( ) by study of original works of art, photographs, and other forms of reproduction; ( ) by the writing of themes and reports; ( ) by visits to art galleries and artists' studios. (this course would be prerequisite for subsequent courses in history, etc.) following these two general courses there should be two groups of courses: _group a, practice courses_; _group b, history courses_. candidates for the a.b. degree who expect to take postgraduate work in creative art or in the teaching of creative art would elect chiefly from group a. lay students who are candidates for the a.b. degree and who expect to make writing or criticism in art, or teaching of art to lay students, or art museum work their vocation, would elect chiefly from group b; as would, also, those composing the greater number, who study art as one means of acquiring general culture. in the following lists of courses the grade of each course is indicated by a roman numeral placed after the title of the course, the indications being as follows: i. elementary (primarily for freshmen and sophomores). ii. intermediate (primarily for sophomores and juniors). iii. advanced (primarily for juniors and seniors). iv. graduate (primarily for seniors and graduates). beyond these indications no attempt is here made to prescribe the subdivisions of the courses, nor the number of hours per week, nor the number of weeks per year in each course. group a: practice courses a _freehand drawing._ (i) drawing in charcoal and pencil from simple objects, plaster casts, still life, etc. elements of perspective with elementary problems. a _freehand drawing_ (_continued_). (ii) drawing in charcoal, pencil, pen and ink, brush (monochrome in water color) from plaster casts, still life and the costumed figure. out-of-door sketching. a _color_ (water color or oil color). (ii) drawing in color from still life and the costumed figure. out-of-door sketching. a _modeling._ (iii) modeling in clay from casts of antique sculpture and of architectural ornament as an aid to the study of form and proportion. a _advanced design._ (iii) theory and practice. (continuation of course i. introduction to the study of art.) a , a , ... etc. _advanced courses in drawing, painting, modeling, and applied design_ (iv) selected from the following: studies in various media from life. composition. illustration. portrait work. practical work in pottery, bookbinding, enameling, metal work, interior decoration, wood carving, engraving, etching. these courses would be supplemented by lectures on the theory and principles of art. topics of such lectures would be: theory of design, composition, technique of the various arts, artistic anatomy, perspective, shades and shadows, etc. group b: history courses b _ history of ancient art._ (ii) b _history of roman and medieval art._ (ii) b _history of renaissance art in italy._ (iii) b _history of modern art._ (iii) history of art in western europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. b , b , ... etc. _history of special periods; consideration of special forms of art, and of great masters in art_ (iv) selected from the following: art of primitive greece, greek sculpture, greek vases, early christian and byzantine architecture, history of mosaic; medieval illumination; sienese painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; florentine painting; domestic architecture of various countries; leonardo da vinci and his works; art of the netherlands; history of mural painting; history and principles of engraving; prints and their makers; chinese and japanese art; colonial architecture in america; painting and sculpture in america, etc., etc. =teaching equipment for college courses in art= no attempt will here be made to comment upon the general furnishing and equipment of lecture rooms, laboratories, and studios. nevertheless, some reference to the special teaching equipment is necessary for the further consideration of the methods of teaching. illustrations are of the greatest importance in the study of art. the best illustrations are original works of art. for manifest reasons these are not usually available in the classroom, and the teacher is dependent upon facsimiles and other reproductions. these take the form of copies, replicas, casts, models, photographs, stereopticon slides, prints in black and white and in color, including the ubiquitous picture postal card. the collections of public art museums and of private galleries are of great value for illustrative purposes; but of still greater value to the student is the departmental museum, with which, unfortunately, but few colleges are equipped. some colleges have been saddled by well-meaning donors with collections of various kinds of works of art which are but ill related to the instruction given in the department of art. the collections of the college museum need not be large but they should be selected especially with their instructional purpose in view. the problems of expense debars most colleges from establishing museums of art; but with a modest annual appropriation a working collection can be gradually gathered together. a collection which is the result of gradual growth and of careful consideration will usually be of greater instructional value than one which is acquired at one time. an institution which owns a few original works of painting, sculpture, and the crafts of representative masters is indeed fortunate, but even institutions whose expenditures for this purpose are slight may possess at least a few original lithographs, engravings, etchings, etc., in its collection of prints. fortunately, there are means whereby some of the unobtainable originals of the great public museums and private collections of the world may be represented in the college museums by adequate reproductions. the methods of casting in plaster of paris, in bronze and other materials; of producing squeezes in papier maché; and of reproducing by the galvano-plastic process, are used for making facsimiles of statues, vases, terra cottas, carved ivories, inscriptions and other forms of incised work, gems, coins, etc., at a cost which, when compared with that of originals, is trivial.[ ] paintings, drawings, engravings, etc., are often admirably reproduced by various photographic and printing processes in color or black and white. generally speaking, the most valuable adjunct of the college art museum or of the college art library is the collection of photographs properly classified and filed for ready reference by the instructor or student. a specially designed museum building would present opportunities for service that would extend beyond the walls of the art department, but if such a building is not available, a single well-lighted room furnished with suitable cabinets and wall cases, and with ample wall space for the display of paintings, prints, charts, etc., would be of great service. a departmental library of carefully chosen books on the theory, history, and the practice of the various arts, together with current and bound numbers of the best art periodicals of america and of foreign countries, is indispensable. =methods of teaching= methods will naturally depend somewhat upon the size of the class. in large classes--of, say, more than forty--the lecture method, supplemented by section meetings and conferences, would usually be followed. in the following discussion it is assumed that the classes will not exceed forty. under the head of methods of teaching are here included: work in class and work outside of class. the work in class consists of lectures; discussions by the members of the class; laboratory or studio work; excursions. there is no worse method than that of exclusive lecturing by the instructor. if the methods employed do not induce the student to do his own thinking, they have but little value. much of the instructor's time will be occupied in devising methods by which the students themselves will contribute to their own and their fellows' advancement. discussions led by the instructor and carried on by the members of the class should be frequent. from time to time a separate division of a general topic should be assigned to each member of the class, who will prepare himself to present his part of the topic before the class either by reading a paper or otherwise. discussions by the members of the class, concluded by the instructor, should generally follow this presentation. topics for investigation, study, and discussion should be so selected as to require the students to make application of their study to their daily life and environment. in this way their critical interest in the design of public and private buildings, of monuments, and of the innumerable art productions which they see about them would be stimulated. for the purpose of illustrating lectures and aiding in discussions, prints and photographs may be shown either directly or through the medium of the reflectoscope. or, they may be transferred to lantern slides and shown by means of the stereopticon. to a limited extent the lumière color process has been used in preparing slides. the methods of laboratory and studio work have already been briefly treated under the head of courses of instruction, and hardly need to be further amplified here. it has already been stated that original works of art are the best illustrations, and that these are but rarely available within the walls of the college. instructors in institutions which are situated within or near to large centers of population can usually supply this deficiency by arranging visits to museums and other places where works of art are preserved and exhibited; and to artists' studios and to workshops where works of art are produced. instructors in institutions which are not so situated may supply the deficiency, in some measure, by arranging for temporary exhibitions in the museum or other rooms of the department. rotary exhibitions of paintings, prints, craftwork, sculpture, designs, examples of students' work, etc., may be arranged whereby groups of institutions within convenient distances from each other may share the benefits offered by such exhibitions, as well as the expense of assemblage, transportation, and insurance. in arranging for such temporary exhibitions it is essential that only works of the highest quality, of their kind, should be selected. selections can best be made personally by the instructor or by capable and trustworthy agents who are thoroughly informed as to the purpose of the exhibition and as to the needs of the institutions forming the circuits. such rotary exhibitions possess a wider usefulness than that of serving as illustrative material for the college department of art: they serve also as an artistic stimulus to the members of the college at large, and to the community in which the college is situated.[ ] the work of students outside of class has already been mentioned. it consists of collateral reading, the study of prints and photographs, and the preparation of written themes and reports. notwithstanding the lavish production of books relating to art, there are but very few that are suitable for use as college textbooks. the instructor will usually assign collateral reading from various authors. =testing results of art instruction= in attempting to measure the success or failure of the work, the teacher must ask himself, what do our college graduates who have taken art courses possess that is lacking in those who have not taken such courses? the immediate test of the results of the work is in the attitude of mind of the students. do they think differently about works of art from what they did before entering the courses? is there a change in their habit of thought? have they done no more than accept the lessons they have been taught, or have they so absorbed them and made them their own that they are capable of self-expression in making their estimates of works of art? these questions may be answered by the result of the written examination and by the oral quiz. it must be confessed that the chief purpose of art instruction in the college is to supply a lack in our national and private life. citizens of the older communities of europe pass their lives among the accumulated art treasures of past ages. the mere daily contact with such forms of beauty engenders a taste for them. partly through our puritan origin, partly through our preoccupation with the development of the material resources of our country, we, as a people, have failed to cultivate some of the imponderable things of the spirit. so far as we have had to do with its creation, our environment in town and village is generally lacking in artistic charm. the study by lay students of the art of the past has one chief object; namely, to train them to understand the works of the masters in order that they may discriminate between what is beautiful and what is meretricious in the art of the present day; to learn the lessons of art from the monoliths of egypt, the tawny marbles of ancient greece, the balanced thrusts of the gothic cathedral, the gracious and reverent harmonies of the primitives, the delicate handicrafts of the orient, the splendors of the renaissance, the vibrant colors of the latest phase of impressionism, and to apply these lessons in the search for hidden elements of beauty in nature and art in their own country and in their own lives and surroundings. believing, as he does, in the value of artistic culture, it becomes the duty of the college art instructor to teach with enthusiasm unmarred by prejudice; to cultivate in the minds of his students a catholic receptivity to all that is sincere in artistic expression; to open up avenues of thought in the minds of those whose lives would otherwise be barren of artistic sympathy; to cull the best from the experience of the past, and, by its help, to impart to his hearers some of his own enthusiasm; for their lives cannot fail to touch at some point the borderlands of the magic realm of art. holmes smith _washington university_ bibliography ankeney, j. s., lake, e. j., and woodward, w. final report of the committee on the condition of art work in colleges and universities. _western drawing and manual training association._ oak park, illinois. . ankeney, j. s. the place and scope of art education in the university. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . beaux, celia. what instruction in art should the college a. b. course offer to the future artists? _the american magazine of art._ washington. d. c., october, . blayney, t. l. the history of art in the college curriculum. _proceedings of the american federation of arts._ washington, d. c., . brooks, alfred the study of art in universities. _education._ boston, february, . churchill, a. v. art in the college course. _the smith alumnæ quarterly._ new york, february, . clopath, h. the scope and organization of art instruction in the a. b. course. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ oak park, illinois, . cross, h. r. the college degree in fine arts. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ oak park, illinois, . dow, a. w. anarchism in art teaching. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ cincinnati, . dow, a. w. _theory and practice of teaching art._ teachers college, columbia university. d edition. new york, . dow, a. w. modernism in art. _the american magazine of art._ new york, january, . frederick, f. f. the study of fine art in american colleges and universities: its relation to the study in public schools. _addresses and proceedings of the national education association._ detroit, . heller, o. art as a liberal study. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ oak park. illinois, . jastrow, j. the place of the study of art in a college course. _western drawing and manual training association._ oak park, illinois, . kelley, c. f. art in american universities. _nation_, : . new york, july , . kelley, c. f. art education. _report of the commissioner of education._ (department of interior, bureau of education). washington, d. c., . leonard, william j. the place of art in the american college. _education_, ; - . boston, june, . low, w. h. the proposed department of art in columbia university. _scribner's magazine._ new york, december, . mann, f. m. coöperation among art workers in universities. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . marshall, h. r. the relation of the university to the teaching of art. _architectural record._ new york, april, . monroe, paul (editor). art in education, etc. _cyclopedia of education._ the macmillan company, new york, . norton, c. e. the educational value of the history of art. _educational review_, new york, april, . phillips, duncan. what instruction in art should the college a.b. course offer to the future writer on art? _the american magazine of art._ new york, march, . pickard, j. message of art for the collegian. _the american magazine of art._ washington, d. c., february, . robinson, d. m. reproductions of classical art. _art and archaelogy._ washington, d. c., april, . sargent, w. instruction in art in the united states. _biennial survey of education in the united states - _ (department of the interior, bureau of education). washington, d. c. seelye, l. c. the place of art in the smith college curriculum. _educational review._ new york, january, . smith, e. b. _the history of art in the colleges and universities of the united states._ princeton university press. princeton, . smith, holmes. art as an integral part of university work. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . smith, holmes. the future of the university round table. _western drawing and manual training association._ oak park, illinois, . smith, holmes, lake, e. j., and marquand, a. the college art association of america. report of committee appointed to investigate the condition of art instruction in the colleges and universities of the united states. _school and society._ garrison, new york, august , . stanley, h. m. our education and the progress of art. _education._ boston, october, . swift, f. h. what art does for life. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ springfield, illinois, . sylvester, f. o. esthetic and practical values in art courses. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . waldstein, c. _the study of art in universities._ harper & brothers. new york, . walker, c. h. art in education. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . woodward, w. art education in the colleges. art education in the public schools of the united states. _american art annual._ new york, . wuerpel, e. h. the relation of the art school to the university. _western drawing and manual training association, th annual report._ st. louis, . zantzinger, c. c. report of committee on education. _proceedings of the th annual convention of the american institute of architects._ washington, d. c., december, . note. for numerous discussions of problems of college art teaching, the bulletins of the college art association of america may be consulted. footnotes: [ ] tolstoi, l. n., _what is art?_ thomas y. crowell company, . chapter v, page . [ ] waldstein: _essays on the art of pheidias_, cambridge university press. , pages et seq. [ ] _new princeton review_, ii, . [ ] _the american magazine of art_, vol. , no. , page . [ ] woodward, w. "art education in the colleges," _art education in the public schools of the united states_, edited by j. p. haney; american art annual, new york, . ankeney, j. s., woodward, w., lake, e. j., "final report of the committee on the condition of art instruction in colleges and universities." _seventeenth annual report of the western drawing and manual training association._ minneapolis, . kelley, c. f., "art education." _report of the commissioner of education_, vol. i, chap. xv. washington, d. c., . smith, e. b., _the study of the history of art in the colleges and universities of the united states._ university press, princeton, . [ ] _nineteenth annual report, western drawing and manual training association_, cincinnati, , page . [ ] robinson, d. m., "reproductions of classical art," _art and archaeology_, vol. v, no. , pages - . [ ] rotary art exhibitions for educational purposes are arranged by the american federation of arts, , new york avenue, washington, d. c. part six vocational subjects chapter xxv the teaching of engineering subjects _ira o. baker_ xxvi the teaching of mechanical drawing _j. d. phillips and h. d. orth_ xxvii the teaching of journalism _talcott williams_ xxviii business education _frederick b. robinson_ xxv the teaching of engineering subjects each of the preceding chapters of this volume treats of a subject which is substantially a unit in method and content; but the subjects assigned to this chapter include a variety of topics which are quite diverse in scope and character. for example, such subjects as german and physics represent the work of single collegiate departments; while engineering subjects represent substantially the entire work of an engineering college, of which there are many in this country, each having a thousand or more students. it is necessary, then, to inquire as to the scope of this chapter. i. scope of this chapter =contents of engineering curricula= the contents of the representative four-year engineering curriculum of the leading institutions may be classified about as in the table on page . in addition to the subjects listed, most institutions require freshmen to take gymnasium practice and lectures on hygiene, and many colleges require freshmen, and some also sophomores, to take military drill and tactics. formerly many institutions required all engineering freshmen to take elementary shop work; but at present in most institutions this practice has been discontinued, owing to the establishment of manual-training high schools and to the development of other engineering subjects. the order of the subjects varies somewhat in the different institutions. for example, instead of as in the table on page , rhetoric may be given in the sophomore year and language in the first. again, in some institutions a little technical work is given in the freshman year. further, the total number of semester-hours varies somewhat among the different institutions. however, the table is believed to be fairly representative. contents of engineering curricula the unit is a semester-hour; i.e., five class-periods a week for half a year. --------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------- | collegiate year | general subject +-----+-----+-----+-----+ total | i | ii | iii | iv | --------------------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------- mechanical drawing and descriptive | | | | | geometry | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | rhetoric | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | modern language | ... | | ... | ... | | | | | | pure mathematics | | | ... | ... | | | | | | science--physical and social | | | | | | | | | | theoretical and applied mechanics | ... | | | ... | | | | | | technical engineering | ... | | | | | ----| ----| ----| ----| ---- total | | | | | --------------------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-------- =the different engineering curricula= below is a list of the principal four-year curricula offered by the engineering colleges of this country. the list contains forty different engineering curricula. no one institution offers all of these, but some of the larger and better equipped offer fifteen or sixteen different curricula for which a degree is given. . _architecture_ (which is usually classified as an engineering subject): general architecture; architectural design; architectural construction. . _ceramics engineering:_ general ceramics and ceramics engineering; ceramics; ceramics engineering. . _chemical engineering_: general chemical engineering; metallurgical engineering; gas engineering; pulp and paper engineering; electro-chemical engineering. . _civil engineering_: general civil engineering; railway civil engineering; municipal engineering; structural engineering; topographic or geodetic engineering; hydraulic engineering; irrigation engineering; highway engineering. . _electrical engineering_: general electrical engineering; telephone engineering; electrical design; power-plant design; electrical railway engineering. . _marine engineering:_ general marine engineering; naval architecture; marine engineering. . _mechanical engineering:_ general mechanical engineering; steam engineering; railway mechanical engineering; hydro-mechanical engineering; machine design and construction; heating, ventilating, and refrigerating; industrial engineering; automobile engineering; aëronautical engineering. . _mining engineering:_ general mining engineering; metallurgical engineering; coal mining; ore mining. the first engineering curriculum established was civil engineering, which was so called to distinguish it from military engineering. at first the course contained only a little technical work, but in course of time specialized work was increased; and later courses were established in mining and mechanical engineering, and more recently followed specialized courses in architecture, electrical engineering, marine engineering, chemical engineering, and ceramic engineering--about in the order named. the order of the various special courses in the several groups above is roughly that of their establishment. =number of engineering subjects= in the preceding list are eight groups of curricula, each of which contains about semester-hours peculiar to itself; and, considering only a single curriculum in each of the eight groups, there are semester-hours of specialized work. in addition there are in the list thirty-two subdivisions, each of which differs from the parent by at least semester-hours. hence the total number of engineering subjects offered is at least semester-hours. it is safe to assume that for administrative reasons, each semester-hours on the average represents a distinct title or topic, and that therefore the engineering colleges of the country offer instruction in different engineering subjects. however, the diversity is not so great as the preceding statement seems to imply, since for convenience in program making and in bookkeeping many subjects are listed under two or more heads. for example, a subject which runs through two semesters will for administrative reasons appear under two different heads in the above computations. again, the lecture or textbook work in a subject will usually appear under one head and the laboratory work under a separate title. finally, some subjects which differ but little in character may for convenience be listed under two different titles. if the subjects that are subdivided for the above reasons were listed under a single head, the number of topics would be reduced something like to per cent. therefore, the topics of engineering instruction which differ materially in character number about . this, then, is the field assigned to this chapter. obviously it is impossible to consider the several subjects separately. ii. differentiation in engineering curricula for a considerable number of years there has been much discussion by both college teachers and practicing engineers concerning differentiation in engineering curricula; and the usual conclusion is that undue differentiation is detrimental. but nevertheless specialization has gone on comparatively rapidly and extensively--as shown in the previous article. since the degree of differentiation determines in a large measure ( ) the spirit with which a student does his work, ( ) the method of teaching that should be employed, and ( ) the results obtained, it will be wise briefly to consider the merits of specialization. the arguments against specialization have been more widely and more earnestly presented than those in favor of specialization. the usual arguments pro and con may be summarized as follows: . it is frequently claimed that the undergraduate is incapable of wisely choosing a specialty, and that hence specialization should come after a four-year course,--i.e., in the graduate school or by self-instruction after graduation. but the parents and friends of a student usually help him in deciding upon a profession or on a special line of study, and therefore it is not likely that a very serious mistake will be made. of necessity a decision must be made whether or not to seek a college education; and a decision must also be made between the great fields of knowledge,--liberal arts, agriculture, engineering, etc. if the student decides to take any branch of engineering, he usually has his whole freshman year in which to make a further specialization. at the end of the sophomore year the specialization has not gone very far; and therefore if the student finds he has made a mistake, it is not difficult to change. . "the undergraduate seldom knows the field of his future employment, and hence does not have the data necessary for an intelligent decision." the young man will never have all of the data for such a decision until he has actually worked in that field for a time, and there is no reason why he should not make a decision and try some particular line of preparation. . some opponents of specialization claim that the more general the engineering training, the easier to obtain employment after graduation; but this is not in harmony with the facts. the opposite is more nearly true. for example, who ever heard of a practicing engineer preferring a liberal arts student to a civil engineering student as a rodman? . specialized courses require that the college should have larger equipment and a more versatile staff. the larger institutions can prepare for specialized sections nearly as easily and cheaply as for duplicate sections; and institutions having only a few students or meager financial support should not offer highly specialized courses. . the opponents of specialization claim that to be a successful specialist one should have a broad training, and that therefore the broader the curriculum the better. it is true that to be a successful specialist requires a considerable breadth of knowledge, but that does not prove that the student should be required to get all of his general knowledge before he gives attention to matters peculiar to his specialty. no engineer can be reasonably successful in any field with only the knowledge obtained in college, whether that be general or special. . it is claimed that specialization should be postponed to a fifth year. it seems to have been settled by experience that four years is about the right length of the college course for the average engineering student, and that in that time he should test his fitness and liking for his future work by studying some of the subjects relating to his proposed specialized field. . the chief reason in favor of specialization is that the field of knowledge is so vast that it is absolutely necessary for every college student--engineering or otherwise--to specialize; and in engineering this specialization is vitally important, since fundamental principles can be taught most effectively in connection with their application to specialized problems. in no other way is it possible to invest theoretical principles with definite meaning to the student, and by this process it is possible to transform abstract theory into glowing realities which under a competent teacher arouse the student's interest and even his enthusiasm. . specialization in engineering curricula is a natural outgrowth of the evolution of engineering knowledge, and is in harmony with sound principles of teaching. for example, all engineering students should have a certain amount of mechanical drawing; but the best results will be obtained if the civil engineer, after a study of the elementary principles, continues his practice in drawing by making maps, while the mechanical engineer continues his by making details of machinery. both will do their work with more zest and much more efficiency than if both were compelled to make drawings which meant nothing to them except practice in the art of drawing. similar illustration can be found throughout any well-arranged engineering curriculum. a vitally essential element in any educational diet is that the subject shall not pall upon the appetite of the student. he should go to every intellectual meal with a hearty gusto. the specialized course appeals more strongly to the ambition of the student than a general course. the engineering student selects a specialized course because he has an ambition to become an architect, a chemical engineer, a civil engineer, or perhaps a bridge engineer, a highway engineer, a mechanical engineer, or perhaps a heating engineer or an automobile engineer; and having an opportunity to study subjects in which he is specially interested, he works with zest and usually accomplishes much more than a student who is pursuing a course of study only remotely, if at all, related to the field of his proposed activities after leaving college. further, the more specialized the course, the greater the energy with which the student will work. many of those who have discussed specialization seem to assume that the only, or at least the chief, purpose of an engineering education is to give technical information, and that specialization is synonymous with superficiality. from this point of view the aim of a college education is to give a student information useful in his future work, and the inevitable result is that the student has neither the intellectual power nor the technical knowledge to enable him to render efficient service in any position in which he will work whole-heartedly. the weakness and superficiality of such a student, it is usually said, is due to excessive specialization, while in reality it is primarily due to wrong methods of teaching. within reasonable limits specialization has little or nothing to do with the result; and under certain conditions, as previously stated, specialization helps rather than hinders intellectual development. if a subject has real educational value and is so taught as to train a student to see, to analyze, to discriminate, to describe, the more the specialization the better; but if a subject is taught chiefly to give unrelated information about details of practice, the more the specialization the less the educational value. . experience has conclusively shown that an engineering student is very likely to slight a general subject in favor of a simultaneous technical or specialized subject. this fact, together with the necessity of a fixed sequence in technical engineering subjects, makes it practically impossible to secure any reasonable work in most general subjects when a student is at the same time carrying one or more technical studies. for these reasons it is necessary to make the later years of the curriculum nearly wholly technical, which makes specialization possible, if it does not invite it. iii. aim of engineering education =disciplinary values of engineering subjects= the three elements of engineering education, as indeed of all education, should be development, training, and information. the first is the attainment of intellectual power, the capacity for abstract conception and reasoning. the second includes the formation of correct habits of thought and methods of work; the cultivation of the ability to observe closely, to reason correctly, to write and speak clearly; and the training of the hand to execute. the third includes the acquisition of the thoughts and experiences of others, and of the truths of nature. the development of the mental faculties is by far the most important, since it alone confers that "power which masters all it touches, which can adapt old forms to new uses, or create new and better means of reaching old ends." without this power the engineer cannot hope to practice his profession with any chance of success. the formation of correct habits of thinking and working, habits of observing, of classifying, of investigating, of discriminating, of proving instead of guessing, of weighing evidence, of patient perseverance, and of doing thoroughly honest work, is a method of using that power efficiently. the accumulation of facts is the least important. the power to acquire information and the knowledge of how to use it is of far greater value than any number of the most useful facts. the value of an education does not consist in the number of facts acquired, but in the ability to discover facts by personal observation and investigation and in the power to use these facts in deducing new conclusions and establishing fundamental principles. there is no comparison between the value of a ton of horseshoe nails and the ability to make a single nail. =utilitarian aim of the engineering subjects: information and training= the engineering student usually desires to reverse the above order and assumes that the acquisition of information, especially that directly useful in his proposed profession, is the most valuable element of an education; and unfortunately some instructors seem to make the same mistake. the truth is that methods of construction, details of practice, mechanical appliances, prices of materials and labor, change so rapidly that it is useless to teach many such matters. however important such items are to the practicing engineer, they are of little or no use to the student; for later, when he does have need of them, methods, machines, and prices have changed so much that the information he acquired in college will probably be worse than useless. technical details are learned of necessity in practice, and more easily then than in college; whereas in practice fundamental principles are learned with difficulty, if at all. a man ignorant of principles does not usually realize his own ignorance and limitations, or rather he is unaware of the existence of unknown principles. the engineering college should teach the principles upon which sound engineering practice is based, but should not attempt to teach the details of practice any further than is necessary to give zest and reality to the instruction and to give an intelligent understanding of the uses to be made of fundamental principles. as evidence that technical information is not essential for success in an engineering profession, attention is called to the fact that a considerable number of men who took a course in one of the major divisions of engineering have practiced in another branch with reasonable success. the only collegiate training one of the most distinguished american engineers of the last generation had was a general literary course followed by a law course. further, a considerable number have successfully practiced engineering, after only a general college education, and this in recent years when engineering curricula have become widely differentiated. examples in other lines of business could be cited to show that a knowledge of technical details is not the most important element in a preparation for a profession or for business. the all-important thing is that the engineering student shall acquire the power to observe closely, to reason correctly, to state clearly, that he shall be able to extract information from books certainly and rapidly, and that he shall cultivate his judgment, initiative, and self-reliance. a student may have any amount of technical information, but if he seriously lacks any of the qualities just enumerated, he cannot attain to any considerable professional success. however, if he has these qualities to a fair degree, he can speedily acquire sufficient technical details to enable him to succeed fairly well. the chief aim of the engineering college should be to develop the intellectual power that will enable the student not only to acquire quickly the details of practice, but will also enable him ultimately to establish precedents and determine the practice of his times. incidentally the engineering college should seek to expand the horizon and widen the sympathy of its students. in college classes there will be those who are either unable or unwilling to attain the highest educational ideals, and who will become only the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the engineering profession; but a setting before them of the highest ideals and even an ineffective training in methods of work will prepare them the better to fill mediocre positions. the nearly universal engineering college course requires four years. the field properly belonging to even a specialized curriculum is so wide and the importance of a proper preparation of the engineers of the future is so great as appropriately to require more than four years of time; but the consensus of opinion is that for various reasons only four years are available for undergraduate work--the only kind here under consideration. hence it is of vital importance that the highest ideals shall be set before the engineering students and that the methods of instruction employed shall be the best attainable. iv. methods of teaching instruction in technical engineering subjects is given by lectures, recitations from textbooks, assigned reading, laboratory work, surveying, field-practice, problems in design, memoirs, and examinations. each of these will be briefly considered. =lecture system= the term "lecture system" will be used to designate that method of instruction in which knowledge is presented by the instructor without immediate questioning of, or discussion by, the student. in the early history of engineering education, when instruction in technical engineering subjects was beginning to be differentiated from other branches of education, the lecture was the only means of acquainting the student with either the principles or details of engineering practice, since textbooks were then few and unsatisfactory. but at present, when there are so many fields of technical knowledge in which there are excellent books, the lecture system is indefensible as a means either of communicating knowledge or of developing intellectual strength. it is a waste of the student's time to present orally that which can be found in print. at best the lecturer can present only about one third as much as a student could read in the same time; and, besides, the student can understand what he reads better than what he hears, since he can go more slowly over that which he does not understand. the lecturer moves along approximately uniformly, while some students fail to understand one part, and others would like to pause over some other portion. a poor textbook is usually better than a good lecturer. it is a fundamental principle of pedagogy that there can be no development without the activity of the learner's mind; and hence with the lecture system it is customary to require the student to take notes, and subsequently submit himself to a quiz or present his lecture notes carefully written up. if the student is required to take notes, either for future study or to be submitted, his whole time and attention are engrossed in writing; and at the close of the lecture, if it has covered any considerable ground, the student has only a vague idea of what has been said. further, the notes are probably so incomplete as to afford inadequate material for future study. if the subject matter is really new and not found in print, the lecture should be reproduced for the student's use. it is more economical and more effective for the student to pay his share of the cost of printing, than to spend his time in making imperfect notes and perhaps ultimately writing them out more fully. the lecture system is less suitable for giving instruction in engineering subjects than in general subjects, such for example as history, sociology, and economics, since technical engineering subjects usually include principles and more or less numerical data that must be stated briefly and clearly. if a student has had an opportunity to study a subject from either a textbook or a printed copy of the lecture notes, then comments by the teacher explaining some difficult point, or describing some later development, or showing some other application or consequence of the principle, may be both instructive and inspiring; but the main work of teaching engineering subjects should be from carefully prepared textbooks. however, an occasional formal lecture by an instructor or a practicing engineer upon some subject already studied from a textbook can be a means of valuable instruction and real inspiration, provided the lecture is well prepared and properly presented. in the preceding discussion the term "lecture" has been employed as meaning a formal presentation of information; but there is another form of lecture, a demonstration lecture, which consists of an explanation and discussion by the instructor of an experiment conducted before the class. the prime purpose of the experiment and the demonstration lecture is to explain and fix in mind general principles. this form of lecture is an excellent method of giving information; and if the student is questioned as to the facts disclosed and is required to discuss the principles established, it is an effective means of training the student to observe, to analyze, and to describe. =recitation system= this system of instruction consists in assigning a lesson upon which the student subsequently recites. in subjects involving mathematical work, the recitation may consist of the presentation of the solution of examples or problems; but in engineering subjects the recitation usually consists either of answers to questions or of the discussion of a topic. the question may be either a "fact" question or a "thought" question. if the main purpose is to give information, the "fact" question is used, the object being to determine whether the student has acquired a particular item of information. not infrequently, even in college teaching, the question can be answered by a single word or a short sentence; and usually such a question, even if it does not itself suggest the answer, requires a minimum of mental effort on the part of the student. this method determines only whether the student has acquired a number of unrelated facts, and does not insure that he has any knowledge of their relation to each other or to other facts he may know, nor does it test his ability to use these facts in deducing conclusions or establishing principles. apparently this method of conducting a recitation, or quiz as it is often called, is far too common in teaching engineering subjects. it is the result chiefly of the mistaken belief that the purpose of technical teaching is to give information. the "thought" question is one which requires the student to reflect upon the facts stated in the book and to draw his own conclusions. this method is intermediate between the "fact" question and the topical discussion; it is not so suitable to college students as to younger ones, and is not so easily applied in engineering subjects as in more general subjects such as history, economics, or social science. it will not be considered further. the topical recitation consists in calling upon the student to state what he knows upon a given topic. this method not only tests the student's knowledge of facts, but also trains him in arranging his facts in logical order and in presenting them in clear, correct, and forceful language. ( ) one advantage of this method of conducting the recitation is that it stimulates the student to acquire a proper method of attacking the assigned lesson. many college students know little or nothing concerning the art of studying. apparently, they simply read the lesson over without attempting to weigh the relative importance of the several statements and without attempting to skeletonize or summarize the text. the ability to acquire quickly and easily the essential statements of a printed page is an accomplishment which will be valuable in any walk of life. in other words, this method of conducting a recitation forces the student to adopt the better method of study. ( ) a second advantage of the topical recitation is that it trains the student in expressing his ideas. it is generally conceded that the engineering-college graduate is deficient in his ability to use good english, which is evidence that either the topical recitation is not usually employed, or good english is not insisted upon, or perhaps both. ( ) a third advantage of the topical recitation is that it trains the student in judgment and discrimination--two elements essential in the practical work of all engineers. apparently many college teachers think it more creditable to deliver lectures than to conduct recitations. the formal lecture is an inefficient means of either conveying information or developing intellectual power, and hence no one should take pride in it. the textbook and quiz method of conducting a recitation is more effective than the lecture system, but is by no means an ideal method of either imparting information or giving intellectual training. neither of these methods is worthy of a conscientious teacher. the textbook and topical recitation affords an excellent opportunity to teach the student to analyze, to observe, to discriminate, to train him in the use of clear and correct language, and in the presentation of his thoughts in logical order--an object worthy of any teacher and an opportunity to employ the highest ability of any person. in the conduct of such a recitation in engineering subjects, there is abundant opportunity to supplement the textbook by calling attention to new discoveries and other applications, and to introduce interesting historic references. it is often instructive to discuss differences in construction which depend upon differences in physical conditions or in preferences of the constructor, and such discussions afford excellent opportunities to train the student in discovering the causes of the differences and in weighing evidence, all of which helps to develop his powers of observation and analysis and above all to cultivate his judgment. if a teacher is truly interested in his work, such a recitation gives opportunity for an interchange of thoughts between the student and teacher that may be made of great value to the former and of real interest to the latter. the conduct of such a recitation should be much more inspiring to the teacher than the repetition of a formal lecture which at best can have only little instructional value. =suggestions for increasing effectiveness of the recitation= the recitation is such an important method of instruction that it is believed a few suggestions as to its conduct may be permissible, although a discussion of methods of teaching does not properly belong in this chapter. ( ) the students should not be called upon in any regular order. ( ) if at all possible, each student should be called upon during each recitation. ( ) the question or topic should be stated, and then after a brief pause a particular student should be called upon to recite. ( ) the question or topic should not be repeated. ( ) the student should not be helped. ( ) the question should be so definite as to admit of only one answer. ( ) "fact" questions and topical discussions should be interspersed. ( ) irrelevant discussion should be eliminated. ( ) the thoughtful attention of the entire class and an opportunity for all to participate may be secured by interrupting a topical discussion and asking another to continue it. ( ) clear, correct and concise answers should be insisted upon. ( ) in topical discussions the facts should be stated in a logical order. ( ) commend any exceptionally good answer. =assigned reading= a student is sometimes required to read an assigned chapter in a book or some particular article in a technical journal as a supplement to a lecture or a textbook. sometimes the whole class has the same assignment, and sometimes different students have different assignments. each student should be quizzed on his reading, or should be required to give a summary of it. the method of instruction by assigned reading is most appropriate when the lecture presentation or textbook is comparatively brief. this method is only sparingly permissible with an adequate textbook. =laboratory work= the chief purpose of laboratory work is to illustrate the principles of the textbook and thereby fix them in the student's mind. the manipulation of the apparatus and the making of the observations is valuable training for the hand and the eye, and the computation of the results familiarizes the student with the limitations of mathematical processes. the interpretation of the meaning of the results cultivates the student's judgment and power of discrimination, and the writing up of the report should give valuable experience in orderly and concise statement. sometimes the student is not required to interpret the meaning or to discuss the accuracy of his results, and sometimes he is provided with a tabular form in which he inserts his observed data without consideration of any other reason for securing the particular information. he should not be provided with a sample report nor with a tabular form, but should be required to plan his own method of presentation, determine for himself what matter shall be in tabular form and what in narrative form, and plan his own illustrations. of course, he should be required to keep neat, accurate, and reasonably full notes of the laboratory work, and should be held to a high standard of clearness, conciseness, and correctness in his final report. providing the student with tabular forms and sample reports may lessen the teacher's labors and improve the appearance of the report, but such practice greatly decreases the educational value to the student. =surveying field-practice.= in its aims surveying field-practice is substantially the same as engineering laboratory work, and all the preceding remarks concerning laboratory work apply equally well also to surveying practice. ordinarily the latter has a higher educational value than the former in that the method of attack, at least in minor details, is left to the student's initiative, and also in that the difficulties or obstacles encountered require the student to exercise his own resourcefulness. the cultivation of initiative and self-reliance is of the highest engineering as well as educational value. further, in the better institutions the instructor in surveying usually knows the result the student should obtain, and consequently the latter has a greater stimulus to secure accuracy than occurs in most laboratory work. finally, the students, at least the civil engineering ones, always feel that surveying is highly practical, and hence are unusually enthusiastic in their work. =design.= when properly taught an exercise in design has the highest educational value; and, besides, the student is usually easily interested, since he is likely to regard such work as highly practical and therefore to give it his best efforts. instruction in design should accomplish two purposes; viz., ( ) familiarize the student with the application of principles, and ( ) train him in initiative. different subjects necessarily have these elements in different degrees, and any particular subject may be so taught as specially to emphasize one or the other of these objects. sometimes a problem in design is little more than the following of an outline or example in the textbook and substituting values in formulas. the design of an ordinary short-span steel truss bridge, as ordinarily taught, is an example of this method of instruction. another example is the design of a residence for which no predetermined limiting conditions are laid down and which does not differ materially from those found in the surrounding community or illustrated in the textbook or the architectural magazine. such work illustrates and enforces theory, gives the student some knowledge of the materials and processes of construction, and also trains him in drafting; but it does not give him much intellectual exercise nor develop his mental fiber, although it may prepare him to take a place as a routine worker in his profession. such instruction emphasizes utilitarian training but neglects intellectual development, mental vigor, and breadth of view. the exercise in design which has the highest educational value is one in which the student must discover for himself the conditions to be fulfilled, the method of treatment to be employed, the materials to be used, and the details to be adopted. an example of this form of problem is the design of a bridge for a particular river crossing, without any limitations as to materials of construction, type of structure, time of construction, etc., except such as are inherent in the problem and which the student must determine for himself. a better example is the architectural design of a building to be erected in a given locality to serve some particular purpose, with no limitations except perhaps cost or architectural style. experience of several teachers with a considerable number of students during each of several years conclusively shows that students who have had only comparatively little of the design work mentioned in the preceding paragraph greatly exceed other students having the same preparation except this form of design work, in mental vigor, breadth of view, intellectual power, and initiative. this difference in capacity is certainly observable in subsequent college work, and is apparently quite effective after graduation. =examinations= the term "examination" will be used as including the comparatively brief and informal quizzes held at intervals during the progress of the work and also the longer and more formal examinations held at the end of the work. usually the examination is regarded as a test to determine the accuracy and extent of the student's information, which form may be called a question-and-answer examination or quiz. a more desirable form of examination is one which requires the student to survey his information on a particular topic, and to summarize the same or to state his own conclusions concerning either the relative importance of the different items or his interpretation of the meaning or application of the facts. such an examination could be called a "topical examination." the remarks in the earlier part of this chapter concerning the relative merits of the question-and-answer and the topical recitation apply also with equal force to these two forms of examinations. however, the topical examination can be made of greater educational value than the topical recitation, since the student is likely to be required to survey a wider field and organize a larger mass of information, and also since the examination is usually written and hence affords a better opportunity to secure accuracy and finish. it is much easier for the instructor to prepare and grade the papers for the question-and-answer examination than for the topical examination, and perhaps this is one reason why the former is nearly universally employed. of course, the topical examination should not be used except in connection with the topical recitation. some executives of public school systems require that at least a third, and others at least a half, of all formal examinations shall be topical; and as the examination papers and the grades thereon are subject to the inspection of the executive, this requirement indirectly insures that the teacher shall not neglect the topical recitation. apparently a somewhat similar requirement would be beneficial in college work. =memoir= the term "memoir" is here employed to designate either a comparatively brief report upon some topic assigned in connection with the daily recitation or the graduating thesis. the former is substantially a form of laboratory work in which the library is the workroom and books the apparatus. this method of instruction has several merits. it makes the student familiar with books and periodicals and with the method of extracting information from them. it stimulates his interest in a wider knowledge than that obtained only from the textbook or the instructor's lectures. it is valuable as an exercise in english composition, particularly if the student is held to an orderly form of presentation and to good english, and is not permitted simply to make extracts. the value to be obtained from such literary report depends, of course, upon the time devoted to it, and also upon whether the instructor tells the student of the articles to be read or requires him to find the sources of information for himself. =thesis= the thesis may be a description of some original design, or a critical review of some engineering construction, or an account of an experimental investigation. the thesis differs from other subjects in the college curriculum in that in the latter the student is expected simply to follow the directions of the instructor, to study specified lessons and recite thereon, to solve the problems assigned, and to read the articles recommended; while the preparation of the thesis is intended to develop the student's ability to do independent work. there is comparatively little in the ordinary college curriculum to stimulate the student's power of initiative, but in his thesis work he is required to take the lead in devising ways and means. the power of self-direction, the ability to invent methods of attack, the capacity to foresee the probable results of experiments, and the ability to interpret correctly the results of experiments is of vital importance in the future of any engineering student. within certain limits the thesis is a test of the present attainments of the student and also a prophecy of his future success. therefore, the preparation of a thesis is of the very highest educational possibility. unfortunately many students are too poorly prepared, or too lacking in ambition, or too deficient in self-reliance and initiative to make it feasible for them to undertake the independent work required in a thesis. such students should take instead work under direction. further, it is unfortunate that, for administrative reasons, the requirement of a thesis for graduation is made less frequently now than formerly. the increase in number of students has made it practically impossible to require a thesis of all graduates, because of the difficulty of providing adequate facilities and of supervising the work. again, it is difficult to administer a requirement that only part of the seniors shall prepare a thesis. consequently the result is that at present only a very few undergraduate engineering students prepare theses. =graduate work= all of the preceding discussion applies only to undergraduate work. only comparatively few engineering students take graduate work. a few institutions have enough such students to justify, for administrative reasons, the organization of classes in graduate work, but usually such classes are conducted upon principles quite different from those employed for undergraduates. no textbooks in the ordinary sense are used. often the student is assigned an experimental or other investigation, and is expected to work almost independently of the teacher, the chief function of the latter being to criticize the methods proposed and to review the results obtained. such work under the guidance of a competent teacher is a most valuable means for mental development, training, and inspiration. ira o. baker _university of illinois_ bibliography below is a list of the principal articles relating to engineering education, arranged approximately in chronological order. . the annual _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, from to date, contain many valuable articles on various phases of engineering education. each volume consists of to vo pages. the society has no permanent address. all business is conducted by the secretary, whose address at present is university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pennsylvania. the more important papers of the above _proceedings_ which are closely related to the subject of this chapter are included in the list below. many of the articles relate to the teaching of a particular branch of engineering, and hence are not mentioned in the following list. . "methods of teaching engineering: by textbook, by lecturing, by design, by laboratory, by memoir." professor c. f. allen, massachusetts institute of technology. an excellent presentation, and discussion by others. _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, vol. vii, pages - . . "two kinds of education for engineers." dean j. b. johnson, university of wisconsin. an address to the students of the college of engineering of the university of wisconsin, . pamphlet published by the author; vo pages. reprinted in _addresses of engineering students_, edited by waddell and harrington, pages - . . "potency of engineering schools and their imperfections." professor d. c. jackson, university of wisconsin. an address presented at the quarto-centennial celebration of the university of colorado, . _proceedings_ of that celebration, pages - . . "technical and pedagogic value of examinations." professor henry h. norris, cornell university. a discussion of the general subject, containing examples of questions in a topical examination in an electrical engineering subject. discussed at length by several others. _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education._ vol. xv, pages - . . "limitations of efficiency in engineering education." professor george f. swain, harvard university. an address at the opening of the general engineering building of union university, . a discussion of various limitations and defects in engineering education. pamphlet published by union university; small vo pages. reprinted in _addresses of engineering students_, edited by waddell and harrington, pages - . . "the good engineering teacher: his personality and training." professor william t. magruder, ohio state university. an inspiring and instructive presidential address. _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, vol. xxi, pages - . . "hydraulic engineering education." d. w. mead, university of wisconsin. an interesting discussion of the elements an engineer should acquire in his education. the article is instructive, and is broader than its title; but it contains nothing directly on methods of teaching engineering subjects. _bulletin of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, vol. iv, no. , , pages - . . "some considerations regarding engineering education in america." professor g. f. swain, harvard university. a paper presented at the international engineering congress in in san francisco, california. a brief presentation of the early history of engineering education in america, and an inquiry as to the effectiveness of present methods. _transactions of international engineering congress_, miscellany, san francisco, , pages - ; discussion, pages - . . "technical education for the professions of applied science," president ira n. hollis, worcester polytechnic institute. a discussion of the methods and scope of engineering education, and of the contents of a few representative engineering curricula. _transactions international engineering congress_, san francisco, , miscellany, pages - . . "what is best in engineering education." professor h. h. higbie, president tau beta pi association. an elaborate inquiry among graduate members of that association as to the value and relative importance of the different subjects pursued in college, of the time given to each, and of the methods employed in presenting them. pamphlet published by the association, vo pages. . "some details in engineering education." professor henry s. jacoby, cornell university. a president's address, containing many interesting and instructive suggestions concerning various details of teaching engineering subjects and the relations between students and instructor. _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, vol. xxiii, pages. . "report of progress in the study of engineering education." professor c. r. mann. several of the national engineering societies requested the carnegie foundation to conduct a thorough investigation of engineering education, and the foundation committed the investigation to professor c. r. mann. first report of progress, _proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, vol. xxiii, pages - ; second report, bulletin, same, november, , pages - ; final report: a study of engineering education by charles riborg mann, _bulletin number , carnegie foundation for advancement of teaching_, . . "relation of mathematical training to the engineering profession." h. d. gaylord, secretary of the association of teachers of mathematics in new england, and professor paul h. hanus, harvard university. an elaborate inquiry as to the opinion of practicing engineers concerning the importance of mathematics in the work of the engineer. _bulletin of the society for the promotion of engineering education_, october, , pages - . . "does present-day engineering college education produce accuracy and thoroughness?" professor d. w. mead, university of wisconsin, and professor g. f. swain, harvard university. an animated discussion as to the effectiveness of a collegiate engineering education. _engineering record_, vol. (may , ), pages - . . "teach engineering students fundamental principles." professor d. s. jacobus, stevens institute. address of the retiring president of the american society of mechanical engineers. a clear and forceful discussion of general methods of studying and teaching, and of the choice of subjects to be taught. _engineering record_, december , , pages - . . a considerable number of thoughtful articles on the general subject of technical education appeared in the columns of _mining and scientific press_ (san francisco, california) during the year . in the main these articles discuss general engineering education, and give a little attention to mining engineering education. . since the preceding was written there has appeared a little book, the reading of which would be of great value to all engineering students, entitled _how to study_, by george fillmore swain, ll.d., professor of civil engineering in harvard university and in the massachusetts institute of technology. mcgraw-hill book company, new york city, . x - / inches, paper, pages, cents. xxvi the teaching of mechanical drawing =mechanical drawing a mode of expression= drawing is a mode of expression and is therefore a form of language. as applied in the engineering field drawing is mechanical in character and is used principally for the purpose of conveying information relative to the construction of machines and structures. it seems logical that the methods employed and the standards adopted in the teaching of engineering drawing should be based on an analysis of conditions found in the engineering world. in the best engineering practice the technical standards of drawing are high, so high in fact that they may be used as an ideal toward which to work in the classroom. examples of good draftsmanship selected from practice may well serve to furnish standards for classroom work, both in technique and methods of representation. =mechanical drawing disciplinary as well as practical in value= engineering drawing demands intellectual power quite as much as it does skill of hand. the draftsman in conceiving and planning his design visualizes his problem, makes calculations for it, and graphically represents the results upon the drafting board. the development of the details of his design makes it necessary that he be a trained observer of forms. since new designs frequently involve modifications of old forms, in his efforts to recall old forms and create new ones, he develops visual memory. if the requirements of a successful draftsman or designer be taken as typical, it is evident that the young engineer must develop, in addition to a technical knowledge of the subject, and a certain degree of skill of hand, a habit of quick and accurate observation and the ability to perceive and retain mental images of forms. modern methods of instruction recognize both the motor and mental factors involved in the production of engineering drawings. it is the aim of the drawing courses in engineering colleges to familiarize the student with the standards of technique and methods of representation found in the best commercial practice; likewise to develop in him the powers to visualize and reason, which are possessed by the commercial draftsman and designers. =organization and content of courses in mechanical drawing= the drawing courses of engineering curricula may be divided into two groups: ( ) _general courses_, in which the principles and methods of representation are taught, together with such practice in drawing as will develop a satisfactory technique. ( ) _technical courses_, the aim of which is to assist the student to acquire technical knowledge or training, drawing being used primarily for the purpose of developing or testing a student's knowledge of the subject matter. the general courses usually include an elementary course and a course in descriptive geometry. these courses deal with the fundamental principles and methods which have universal application in the advanced and technical courses. while the courses of the two groups may overlap, the general courses precede the courses of the technical group. there is no general agreement as to the order in which the subjects belonging to the general group should be given. each of the following orders is in use: . a course in descriptive geometry followed by an elementary technical course. . an elementary course and a course in descriptive geometry given simultaneously. . an elementary course followed by a course in descriptive geometry. the _first plan_ is followed by a number of institutions which conclude, because of the general practice of offering courses in drawing in the secondary schools, that pupils entering college have a knowledge of the fundamentals ordinarily included in an elementary course. in other institutions it is held that the principles of projection can be taught to students of college age in a course of descriptive geometry without preliminary drill. where the _second plan_ is used, the courses are so correlated that the instruction in the use of instruments given in an elementary course is applied in solving problems in descriptive geometry, while the principles of projection taught in descriptive geometry are applied in the making of working drawings. this plan is followed by several of the larger engineering colleges. under the _third plan_ the principles of projection are taught through their applications in the form of working drawings. in this way the principles may be taught in more elementary form than is possible in any adequate treatment of descriptive geometry. the illustration of the principles in a concrete way makes it possible for those who find visualizing difficult, to develop that power before abstract principles of projection are taken up in the descriptive geometry. the skill of hand developed in the elementary course makes it possible to give entire attention to a study of the principles in the course in descriptive geometry. while excellent results are being obtained under each of the three plans, this plan is the one most generally adopted. the order of courses in the technical drawing groups is determined by other considerations than those relating to drawing, such as prerequisites in mathematics, strength of materials, etc. =the elementary courses= the elementary courses have undergone a number of important changes during recent years. in those of the present day more attention than formerly is given to the making of complete working drawings. in the earlier courses the elements were taught in the form of exercises. in the latter part of the courses the elements were combined in working drawings. in the modern courses, however, there is a very marked tendency to eliminate the exercise and make the applications of elements in the form of working drawings throughout the course. in the early type of course the theory of projection was taught by using the synthetic method; i.e., by placing the emphasis first upon the projection of points, then lines, surfaces, and finally geometrical solids. in the modern type of course, however, this order is reversed and the analytic method is used; i.e., solids in the form of simple machine or structural parts are first represented, then the principles of projection involved in the representation of their surfaces, edges, and finally their corners are studied. in this type of course the student works from the concrete to the abstract rather than from the abstract to the concrete. =fundamentals of the elementary course= _geometrical constructions_, which were formerly given as exercises and which served as a means of giving excellent practice in the use of instruments, are now incorporated in working drawings and emphasized in making views of objects. it is believed that in the applied form these constructions offer the same opportunity for the training in accuracy in the use of instruments that was had in the abstract exercises, to which is added interest naturally secured by making applications of elements in working drawings. _conventions_ are also taught in an applied form and are introduced as the skill for executing them and the theory involved in their construction are developed in the progress of the course. the type of _freehand lettering_ most generally taught is that used in practice; i.e., the single-stroke gothic. the best commercial drafting-room practice suggests the use of the vertical capitals for titles and subtitles, and the inclined, lower case letters and numerals for notes and dimensions. the plan generally found to produce satisfactory results is to divide the letters and numerals of the alphabet into groups containing four or five letters and numerals on the basis of form and to concentrate the attention of the student on these, one group at a time. the simple forms are considered first, and enough practice is given to enable the student to proportion the letters and numerals and make the strokes in the proper order. it is more natural to make inclined letters than vertical ones, and they are therefore easier to execute. if both vertical and inclined letters are taught, the instruction on the vertical should be given first, as it is more difficult to make vertical strokes after becoming accustomed to the inclined strokes. _freehand perspective sketching_ affords the most natural method of representing objects in outline. it is of particular value in interpreting orthographic drawing. the student who first draws a perspective sketch of an object becomes so familiar with every detail of it that he cannot fail to have a clearer mental image of its form when he attempts to draw its orthographic views. it gives a valuable training in coördinating the hand and eye in drawing freehand lines and estimating proportions. it also serves as an intermediate step between observing an object and drawing it orthographically. _freehand orthographic sketching_ is now quite commonly incorporated in modern courses in mechanical drawing. such sketches serve as a preliminary step in the preparation of the mechanical drawing. they correspond to the sketches made by the engineer or draftsman for drafting-room or shop use. the experience of many instructors seems to indicate that the early introduction of freehand perspective and orthographic sketching in a course of mechanical drawing serves as a means of developing that skill in freehand execution which is so necessary in rendering the freehand features of a mechanical drawing. when this type of skill is acquired before the mechanical work is started, the mechanical and freehand technique may be simultaneously developed. the organization of an elementary course composed largely of a progressive series of working drawings necessitates the giving of considerable attention to the selection of problems involving the use of the above-named fundamentals to make the course increasingly difficult for the student. the drawing of views involves geometrical constructions and conventions, while the dimensions, notes, and title invoke the making of arrowheads, letters, and numerals. in such an elementary course the student receives not only the training in the fundamentals, but also in their application in working drawings which furnish complete and accurate information in the desired form. =descriptive geometry= the modern methods of teaching descriptive geometry apply the theory of the subject to applications in problems taken from engineering practice. the introduction of practical applications adds interest to the subject and makes the theory more easily understood. the number of applications should be as great as possible without interfering with the development of the theory. such a treatment of descriptive geometry, following a thorough course in elementary drawing, should make it possible to deal with abstract principles of projection with a few well-chosen applications. descriptive geometry aids materially in developing the power of visualization which is so essential to the training of the engineer. the graphical applications of the subject in the solution of engineering problems may be used as a means of testing the student's ability to visualize. there is now very little discussion relative to the advantages and disadvantages of the first and third angle projection. since the third angle is generally used in the elementary course as well as in engineering practice, it seems logical that it should be emphasized in descriptive geometry. recent textbooks on this subject confirm the tendency toward the use of the third angle. the use of the third angle presents new difficulties, such as that of locating the positions of magnitudes in space in relation to their projections. magnitudes must be located behind or below the drawing surface. to obviate such difficulties, some instructors demonstrate principles by first angle constructions. others invert surfaces which in the first angle have their bases in the horizontal plane. this undesirable device may be overcome by using a second horizontal plane in the third angle. such means of demonstration may be avoided altogether by considering the space relations of magnitude to one another instead of relating them to the planes of projection. this method centers the attention of the student on the relation of magnitudes represented and develops visualization. it has been found to give excellent results in both elementary drawing and descriptive geometry. to bring the teaching of descriptive geometry into closer harmony with its application in practice, auxiliary views are frequently used instead of the method of rotations. briefly, then, it appears that the modern course in descriptive geometry should contain enough applications to hold the interest of the student and to test his power of visualization; that the third angle should be emphasized, and some use should be made of auxiliary views. above all, the development of visualizing ability should be considered one of the chief aims of the course. =methods of instruction in general courses= in teaching drawing and descriptive geometry, lectures, demonstrations, and individual instruction each have a place. principles can best be presented in the form of lectures. the manual part of the work can be presented most effectively by means of demonstrations. the instructor should illustrate the proper use of instruments and materials by actually going through the process himself, calling attention to important points and explaining each step as he proceeds. individual instruction given at the student's desk is a vital factor in teaching drawing, as it offers the best means of clearing up erroneous impressions and ministering to the needs of the individual student. frequent recitations and quizzes serve the purpose of keeping the instructor informed as to the effectiveness of his instruction and as a means by which the student can measure his own progress and grasp upon the subject. =methods of instruction in technical drawing courses= those drawing courses which have for their primary object the teaching of technical subject matter make use of the drawings as an instrument to record facts and to test the student's knowledge of principles and methods. in the technical courses it should be possible to assume a knowledge of the material given in the general courses. some effort is usually necessary, however, to maintain the standards already established. the effort thus expended should result in improving technique and increased speed. =the four-year drawing course= in an institution where drawing courses are given throughout the four years, much can be done by organization and coöperation to make the time spent by the student productive of the best results. more time than can usually be secured for the general courses is necessary to develop skill that will be comparable with that found in practice. the conditions in technical drawing courses approximate those in practice. they apply methods taught in the general courses. the limited time, frequently less than clock hours, devoted to the general courses makes it desirable that advantage be taken in the technical courses for further development of technique and skill. in a number of institutions all work in drawing is so organized as to form a single drawing unit. this plan calls for coöperation on the part of all drawing teachers in the institution. the results obtained by this method seem amply to justify the effort put forth. =conclusion= the final test in any course or group of drawing courses may be measured by the student's ability to solve problems met with in engineering practice. measured upon this basis, the newer types of courses discussed herein, those founded upon the analytic method and developed largely as a progressive series of working drawings, seem to be meeting with better results than did those of the older type in which the synthetic method predominated and in which abstract problems were principally used. while the college man is not fitting himself to become a draftsman, it is quite true that many start their engineering careers in the drafting office. those who think well and are proficient in expressing their thoughts through the medium of drawing are most apt to attract attention which places them in line for higher positions. those who do not enter the engineering field through the drafting office will find the cultural and disciplinary training and the habits of precision and neatness instilled by a good course in drawing of great value. j. d. phillips and h. d. orth _university of wisconsin_ xxvii the teaching of journalism the education of the journalist or newspaper man has been brought into being by the evolution of the newspaper during the last half century. addison's _spectator_ two centuries ago counted almost wholly on the original and individual expression of opinion. it had nothing beyond a few advertisements. the news sheet of the day was as wholly personal, a billboard of news and advertisements with contributed opinion in signed articles. a century ago, nearly half the space in a daily went to such communications. in the four-page and the eight-page newspaper of sixty to eighty years ago, taking all forms of opinions,--leaders contributed, political correspondence from capitals, state and federal, and criticism,--about one fourth of the space went to utterance editorial in character. the news filled as much more, running to a larger or smaller share as advertisements varied. the news was little edited. the telegraph down to was taken, not as it came, but more nearly so than today. in an eight-page new york paper between and , a news editor with one assistant and a city editor with one assistant easily handled city, telegraph, and other copy. none of it had the intensive treatment of today. it was not until that telegraph and news began to be sharply edited, the new york sun and the springfield _republican_ leading. between and , the daily paper doubled in size, and the sunday paper quadrupled and quintupled. the relative share taken by editorial and critical matter remained about the same in amount, grew more varied in character, but dropped from per cent of the total space in a four-page newspaper to to per cent in the dailies with sixteen to twenty pages, and the news required from three to five times as many persons to handle it. the circulation of individual papers in our large cities doubled and quadrupled, and the weekly expenditure of a new york paper rose from $ , a week to thrice that. these rough, general statements, varying with different newspapers as well as issue by issue in the same newspaper, represent a still greater change in the character of the subjects covered. when the newspaper was issued in communities, of a simple organization, in production, transportation, and distribution, the newspaper had some advertising, some news, and personal expression of opinion--political-partisan for the most part, critical in small part. this opinion was chiefly, though even then not wholly, expressed by a single personality, sometimes dominant, able, unselfish, and in nature a social prophet, but in most instances weak, time-serving, and self-seeking, and partisan, with one eye on advertising, official preferred, and the other on profits, public office, and other contingent personal results. in the complex society today, classified, stratified, organized, and differentiated, the newspaper is a complex representation of this life. the railroad is a far more important social agency than the stagecoach. it carries more people; it offers the community more; but the individual passenger counted for more in the eye of the traveling public in the stagecoach than today in the railroad train; but nobody would pretend to say that the railroad president was less important than the head of a stage line, mr. a. j. cassatt, president of the pennsylvania railroad and builder of its terminal, than john e. reeside, the head of the express stage line from new york to philadelphia, who beat all previous records in speed and stages. the newspaper-complex, representing all society, still expressing the opinion of society, not merely on politics but on all the range of life, creating, developing, and modifying this opinion, publishes news which has been standardized by coöperative news-gathering associations, local, national, and international. in the daily of today "politics" is but a part and a decreasing part, and a world of new topics has come into pages which require technical skill, the well-equipped mind, a wide information, and knowledge of the condition of the newspaper. the early reporter who once gathered the city news and turned it in to be put into type and made up by the foreman,--often also, owner and publisher,--in a sheet as big as a pocket-handkerchief, is as far removed from the men who share in the big modern daily, as far as is the modern railroad man from the rough, tough individual proprietor and driver of the stagecoach, though the driver of the latter was often a most original character, and a well-known figure on the highway as railroad men are not. =evolution of the profession of journalism= as this change in the american newspaper came between and , the public demand came for the vocational training of the journalist and experiments in obtaining it began. when charles a. dana bought the new york _sun_ in , he made up his staff, managing editor, news editor, city editor, albany correspondent and political man, from among the printers he had known on the new york _tribune_. in ten years these were succeeded by college graduates, and the _sun_ became a paper whose writing staff, as a whole, had college training, nearly all men from the colleges. college men were in american journalism from its early beginnings; but, speaking in a broad sense, the american newspaper drew most of its staff in the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century from among men who had the rough but effective training of the composing room, with the common school as a beginning. when the high school developed from on, it began to furnish a large number of journalists, particularly in philadelphia, where the central high school manned many papers. by , college men began to appear in a steadily growing proportion, so far as the general writing staff was concerned. if one counted the men at the top, they were in a small proportion. in journalism, as in all arts of expression, a special and supreme gift will probably always make up for lack of special training. between and , the american newspaper as it is today was fairly launched, and joseph pulitzer, the ablest man in dealing with the journalism of and for the many, was the first conspicuous figure in the newspaper world to see that the time had come for the professional training of the journalist, the term he preferred to "newspaper men." neither the calling nor the public were ready when he made his first proposal, and with singular nobility of soul and sad disappointment of heart he determined to pledge his great gift of $ , , , paying $ , , of it to columbia university before his death and providing that the school of journalism, to which he furnished building and endowment, should be operated within a year after his death. this came october , , and the school opened the following year. =journalism today requires general and technical training= the discussion of the education of the journalist has been in progress for twoscore years. in whitelaw reid published his address on the "school of journalism" and urged systematic training, for which in the bitter personal newspaper of the day he was ridiculed as "the young professor of journalism." in , mr. charles e. fitch, but just gone after long newspaper service, delivered a course of lectures on the training of the journalist, at cornell university. two years later mr. brainerd smith, before and after of the new york _sun_, then professor of elocution in the same university, began training in the work of the newspaper in his class in composition, sending out his class on assignments and outlining possible occurrences which the class wrote out. this experiment was abruptly closed by mr. henry w. sage, chairman of the cornell board of trustees, because the newspapers of minneapolis inclined to treat the university as important, chiefly because it taught "journalism." mr. fred newton scott, professor of rhetoric in the university of michigan in , began, with less newspaper notice, training in newspaper english, continuing to the present time his happy success in teaching style to his students. in , mr. walter williams, for twenty-four years editor, first of the boonville _advertiser_, and then of the columbia, missouri, _herald_, became dean of the first school of journalism opened in the same year by the university of missouri. this example was followed under the direction of willard g. bleyer in the university of wisconsin. by , nearly a score of colleges, universities, and technical schools were giving courses in journalism. by , the directory of teachers of journalism compiled by mr. carl f. getz, of the university of ohio, showed universities and colleges which gave courses in journalism, state universities, state colleges and schools of journalism, and colleges, endowed, denominational, or municipal. the teachers who offered courses in journalism numbered . of these, were in trade, industrial, and agricultural schools, their courses dealing with aspects of writing demanded in the fields to which the institution devoted its work. the number of students in all these institutions numbered about . this gave about students a year, who had completed their studies and gone out with a degree recording college or technical work in which training in journalism played its part. with about , men and women who were "journalists" in the country at this time, there are probably--the estimate is little better than a guess--about posts becoming vacant each year, in all branches of periodical work, monthly, weekly, and daily. the various training in journalism now offered stands ready to furnish a little less than half this demand. i judge it actually supplies yearly somewhat less than a fourth of the new men and women entering the calling, say about in all. as in all professional schools, a number never enter the practice of the calling for which they are presumably prepared and still larger numbers leave it after a short trial. in addition, training for the work of the journalist opens the door to much publicity work, to some teaching, and to a wide range of business posts where writing is needed. no account also has been made here of the wide range of miscellaneous courses in advertising provided by universities, colleges and schools of journalism by advertising clubs, by private schools, and by teachers, local, lecturing and peripatetic. it will take at least ten years more before those who have systematic teaching in journalism will be numerous enough to color the life of the office of the magazine or newspaper, and a generation before they are in the majority. =development of courses and schools of journalism= but numbers are not the only gauge of the influence of professional study on the calling itself. the mere presence, the work, the activities, and the influence of professional schools raise the standards of a calling. those in its work begin to see their daily task from the standpoint which training implies. since the overwhelming majority of newspaper men believe in their calling, love it, rejoice in it, regret its defects, and honor its achievements, they begin consciously to try to show how good a newspaper can be made with nothing but the tuition of the office. inaccuracy, carelessness, bad taste, and dubious ethics present themselves at a different angle when judged in the light of a calling for which colleges and universities furnish training. a corporate spirit and a corporate standard are felt more strongly, and men who have learned all they know in a newspaper office have a just, noble, and often successful determination to advance these standards and endeavor to equal in advance anything the school can accomplish. this affects both those who have had college training and those who come to their work as newspaper men with only the education of the public schools, high or elementary. more than letters have been received by the school of journalism in columbia university, since it was opened, asking advice as to the reading and study which could aid a man or woman unable to leave the newspaper office to study to improve their work. college graduates, in particular on newspapers, begin systematic study on their own account, aware of an approaching competition. definite standards in newspaper writing and in diction begin to be recognized and practiced in the office, and slips in either meet a more severe criticism. newspaper associations of all orders play their part in this spontaneous training. advertising clubs and their great annual gatherings have censored the periodic publicity of the advertising column as no other agency whatever could possibly have done. how far this educating influence has transformed this share of the american periodical in all its fields only those can realize who have studied past advertisements. every state has its editorial association. these draw together more men from the weeklies and the dailies in cities under , of population than from cities of more than , . these associations thirty years ago were little more than social. they have come to be educational agencies of the first importance. they create and assert new norms of conduct and composition. the papers read are normally didactic. all men try to be what they assert they are. from the american newspaper publishers' association, bringing together nearly of our leading newspapers to meetings of the weeklies of a county, a region in a state, a whole state, sections like new england or the southern states of particular classes of periodicals, these various organizations are rapidly instituting a machinery, and breathing a spirit whose work is a valid factor in the education of the newspaper man. not the least influence which the schools of journalism exert on the active work of the calling is through these associations, particularly in the states west of the mississippi where, at the present stage of journalism in this region, state universities can through schools of journalism bring newspapers together at a "newspaper week." =journalism raised to dignity of a profession by schools of journalism= the rapid growth in students registered in "journalism" courses did not gauge the demand for professional teaching in the craft of the newspaper or the magazine. a large share of the "journalism" taught consisted simply in teaching newspaper english. the college course has been nowhere so vehemently and vigorously attacked as in the training it gave in writing english. few were satisfied with it, least of all those who taught it. at least one college professor, whose method and textbooks were launched thirty years ago, has recanted all his early work in teaching composition and pronounced it valueless or worse. the college graduate, after courses in english composition (at least one in the freshman year and often two or three more), in many instances found himself unable to write a business letter, describe a plan projected in business affairs, compose advertisements, or narrate a current event. this was not invariably the case, but it occurred often enough to be noted. books, pamphlets, and papers multiplied on this lack of training for practical writing in college composition courses. the world of education discovered, what the newspapers had found by experience, that the style of expression successful in literature did not bring results in man's daily task of reaching his fellow man on the homely and direct issues of daily life. in literature, genius is seeking to express itself. in the newspaper and in business, the writer is trying--and only trying--to express and interpret his subject so as to reach the other and contemporary man. if he does this, he wins. if not, he fails. genius can, should be, careless of the immediate audience, and wait for the final and ultimate response. no newspaper article and no advertisement can. for them, style is only a means. in letters, form is final. the verdict of posterity and not of the yearly subscriber or daily purchaser is decisive. =journalistic writing demands a distinctive style and calls for immediate response= in the high school and college, from on, there came courses in english which turned to the newspaper for methods and means of expression, and were called "courses in journalism." they were really courses in the english of the newspaper, besprinkled with lectures on the diction of the newspaper and the use of words--futile efforts, through lists of words that must not be used, to give a sound rule of the selection of language by the writer, and, above all, attempts to secure simple, direct, incisive narrative and discussion. these are all useful in their place and work. they prepare a man for some of the first steps of the newspaper office, particularly in the swift, mechanical routine and technique of "copy," indispensable where what is copy now is on the street for sale within an hour. where an instructor has himself the gift of style and the capacity to impart it, where he is himself a man who sells his stuff and knows what stuff will sell, where he has taste and inspiring, effective teaching power, a course in newspaper english may carry a man far in acquiring command of his powers of expression to their profitable use. these "courses in journalism" sometimes run for only a single semester. many run for the normal span of three hours a week through a year. sometimes there are two in succession, the second assuming the task of teaching work which a newspaper beginner usually reaches in from three to five years: the special article, the supplement, study of a subject, the "feature" story, criticism, and the editorial. when these courses are based on assignments which lead a man to go out and get the facts on which he writes, they furnish a certain share of training in the art of reporting. where this is done in a college town and a college community, however, the work is a far remove from that where the reporter must dive and wrestle in the seething tide of a great city, to return with news wrested from its native bed. =courses in "newspaper english"= newspaper english has its great and widest value to the man who wishes to learn how he can affect the other man. a course in it is certain, if the instruction is effective, to leave a student better able to express himself in the normal needs of life. this work is taken by many students as part of the effective training of college life, with no expectation of entering active newspaper work. the demand for publicity work in all business fields, and its value to the social worker, the teacher, and the clergyman, lead others to this specialized training. in at least one of our state universities, half those who take the courses in journalism do not look to the newspaper in the future. the curriculum is often so arranged that in a four-year college course it will be practicable to combine these courses in newspaper english with the parts of work offered, required for, or preparatory to the three learned professions, social service, business, and the applied sciences. such an arrangement of studies frankly recognizes the value in general education and after life of training in the direct expression the newspaper uses. in no long time every college will have at least one such course in its english department. but this course in direct writing stands alone, without any systematic training in journalism; it should not be called a course in journalism any more than a course in political science dealing with law, or a course in physiology or hygiene, can be called courses in law or medicine, because they cover material used in schools of law or schools of medicine. it is an advantage for any educated man to learn to write clearly, simply, to the point; to put the purpose, object, and force of an article at the beginning, and to be as much like daniel defoe and franklin, and as little like walter pater or samuel johnson, as possible; it is well for him to have a general view of the newspaper and its needs; it is a mistake to leave him with the impression that he has the training journalism demands. he is no better off at this point than any college graduate who has picked up for himself, by nature or through practice and imitation, the direct newspaper method. =functions of a school of journalism: to select as well as to train= president eliot, when the organization of a school of journalism came before him, cast his august and misleading influence for the view that a college education was enough training for newspaper work. many still believe this. in more than one city-room today college men are challenging the right of the graduates of a school of journalism to look on themselves as better fitted for the newspaper office than those who are graduates of a good college. if the training of the school has done no more than graft some copy-writing and some copy-editing on the usual curriculum, they are right. if the coming journalist has got his training in classes, half of whose number had no professional interest in the course offered, the claim for the college course may be found to be well based. men teach each other in the classroom. a common professional purpose creates common professional ideals and common professional aims as no training can, given without this, though it deal with identically the same subjects. the training of the journalist will at this point go through the same course as the training of other callings. the palpable thing about law, the objective fact it presents first to the layman, is procedure and form. this began legal education. a man entered a law office. he ran errands and served papers which taught him how suits were opened. a bright new york office boy in a law firm will know how many days can pass before some steps must be taken or be too late, better than the graduate of a law school. the law students in an office once endlessly copied forms and learned that phase of law. for generations men "eat their dinners" at the inns of court and learned no more. the law itself they learned through practice, at the expense of their clients. anatomy was the obvious thing about medicine when vesalius, of the strong head and weak heart, cleaned away the superstitions of part of the medical art and discovered a new world at twenty-eight. the medical training of even seventy years ago, twenty years after cellular pathology had dawned, held wearisome hours of dissection now known to be a waste. it is the functions of the body and its organs which we now know to be the more important, and not the bones, muscles, nerves, and organs considered as mere mechanism. the classroom is the patent thing about instruction. the normal schools lavished time on the tricks of teaching until flocks of instructors in the high schools and colleges could not inaccurately be divided into those who could teach and knew nothing and those who knew something and could not teach. our colleges early thought they could weave in hebrew and theology, and send out clergymen, and later tried to give the doctor a foundation on which eighteen subsequent months could graft all he needed of medicine. reporting is the obvious aspect of journalism which the ignorant layman sees. many hold the erroneous view that the end of a school of journalism is to train reporters. reporting is not journalism. it is the open door to the newspaper office, partly because there are very few reporters of many years' service. some of them are, but able men before long usually work out of a city-room, or gain charge of some field of city news, doing thus what is in fact reporting, but combined with editorial, critical, and correspondent work. such is the wall street man, the local politics man, the city hall man, or the police headquarters man, who gathers facts and counts acquaintance as one of his professional assets. but these men are doing, in their work, far more than reporting as it presents itself to those who see in the task only an assignment. such men know the actual working of the financial mechanism, not as economists see it, but as bagehot knew it. they understand the actual working of municipal machinery besides having a minute knowledge of character, decision, practice, and precedent in administration. in our real politics, big and little, they and the washington and albany correspondents are the only men who know both sides, are trusted with the secrets of both parties, and read closed pages of the book of the chronicles of the republic. as for the police headquarters man, he too alone knows both police and crime, and no investigation surprises him by its revelations. if a man, for a season, has had the work of one of these posts, he comes to feel that he writes for an ignorant world, and if he have the precious gift of youth, looks on himself as favored of mortals early, seeing the events of which others hear, daily close to the center of affairs, knowing men as they are and storing confidence against the day of revelation. men like these are the very heart's core of a newspaper. their posts train them. so do the key posts of a newspaper, its guiding and directing editors and those who do the thinking for thinking men by the hundred thousand in editorial, criticism, and article. it is for this order of work on a newspaper that a school of journalism trains. it is to these posts that, if its men are properly trained, its graduates rapidly ascend, after a brief apprenticeship in the city-room and a round in the routine work of a paper. dull men, however educated, will never pass these grades, and not passing they will drop out. a school should sift such out; but so far, in all our professional training, it is only the best medical schools which are inflexible in dealing with mediocrity. most teachers know better, but let the shifty and dull pass by. the newspaper itself has to be inexorable, and no well-organized office helps twice the man who is dull once; but he and his kind come often enough to mar the record. journalism, like other professions, has its body of special tasks and training, but, as in other callings, clear comprehension of this body of needs will develop in instruction slowly. the case system in law and the laboratory method in medicine came after some generations or centuries of professional work and are only a generation old. any one who has sought to know the development of these two methods sees that much in our schools of journalism is where law and medical schools were sixty years ago. we are still floundering and have not yet solved the problem of giving background, concision, accuracy, and interest to the report, of really editing copy and not merely condensing and heading it, of recognizing and developing the editorial and critical mind, and most of all, of shutting out early the shallow, the wrong-headed, the self-seeking, and the unballasted student. =the average college student lacks expressional power: reasons= the very best law and medical schools get the better of this, and only the best. they are greatly aided by a state examination which tests and tries all their work, braces their teaching, stimulates their men, and directs their studies. this will inevitably come in journalism, though most practicing newspaper men do not believe this. neither did doctors before expect this. as the newspaper comes closer and closer into daily life, inflicts wounds without healing and does damage for which no remedy exists, the public will require of the writer on a daily at least as much proof of competency as it does of a plumber. this competency sharply divides between training in the technical work of the newspaper and in those studies that knowledge which newspaper work requires. capacity to write with accuracy, with effect, with interest, and with style is the first and most difficult task among the technical requirements of the public journal. as has already been said, a gift for expression is needed, but even this cannot be exercised or developed unless a man has acquired diction and come in contact with style, for all the arts rest on the imitation of accepted models. many students in all schools of journalism come from immigrant families and are both inconceivably ignorant of english and inconceivably satisfied with their acquirement of english, as we all are with a strange tongue we have learned to speak. even in families with two or more generations of american life, the vocabulary is limited, construction careless, and the daily contact with any literature, now that family prayers and bible reading are gone; almost nil. of the spoken english of teachers in our public schools, considered as the basis of training for the writer, it is not seemly to speak. everybody knows college teachers who have never shaken off the slovenly phrases and careless syntax of their homes. the thesis on which advanced degrees are conferred is a fair and just measure of the capacity to write conferred by eleven years of education above the "grammar grades." the old drill in accurate and exact rendering of greek and latin was once the best training for the writer; but slovenly sight reading has reduced its value, and a large part of its true effect was because the youth who studied the classics fifty years ago came in a far larger share than today from families whose elders had themselves had their expression and vocabulary trained and developed by liberal studies. the capacity for good writing apparent at oxford and cambridge rests in no small measure on the classical family horizon in teacher and taught. =kind of training in composition to be given students of journalism= those who turn to journalism naturally care for writing, but in an art to "care" is little and most have never had the personal environment, the training, or the personal command of english to enable them to do more than write a stiff prose with a narrow vocabulary and no sense of style. even those who have some such capacity are hampered by the family heritage already outlined. college writing is in the same condition; but the average college man is not expecting to earn his living by his typewriter. in order to receive a minimum capacity in writing enough to pass, every year of study for journalism must have a writing course and the technical work must run to constant writing. from start to finish there must be patient, individual correction. the use of the typewriter must be made obligatory. rigid discipline must deal with errors in spelling, grammar, the choice of words and phrases. previous college training in composition must in general be revised and made over to secure directness and simplicity. at the end, the utmost that can be gained for nineteen out of twenty is some facility, a little sense of style and diction, and copy that will be above the average of the newspaper and not much above that. examine the writing in the newspapers issued by some schools and the work in schools that do not, and a distressingly large portion is either dull or "smart," the last, worst fault of the two. =effective training in reporting must be given in large urban centers= reporting is the first use to which writing is put and through which the writer is trained. for this, abundant material is indispensable, as much as clinical material for a medical school. as the medical schools gravitate to cities, and the rural institutions flicker out one by one, so in the end the effectively trained reporter will gravitate to a large city. towns of under , population furnish a very tame sort of reporting, and those who get this training in them find reporting is under new conditions in a great metropolis. in such a place the peril is that routine news will take too much of the precious time for training the reporter and the demands of academic hours will interfere with sharing in the best of big stories. =aims in teaching the art of reporting= routine is the curse of the newspaper, and it is at its worst in reporting. in its face the four hard things to get are the combination of the vivid, the accurate, and the informed and the condensed story. equipped newspapers of high standards like the new york _world_ require recourse to reference books, the "morgue," and the files in every story where details can be added to the day's digging in that particular news vein. condensation comes next. the young cub reporter generally shuns both. he hates to look up his subject. he spreads himself like a sitting hen over one egg. both must be required for efficient training. compression it is difficult to enforce in a school where paper bills are small or do not exist and the space pressure of the large daily is absent. a number of dailies of large circulation are cultivating very close handling of news and space for feature and woman stuff with very great profit, and the schools give too little attention to this new phase of the newspaper. in all papers, the old tendency to print anything that came by wire is gone and mere "news" has not the place it once had. in particular, local news was cut down one half in a majority of dailies in cities of , and over from august, , to the close of the war. the small daily in places of less than , and weeklies did not do this, which is one reason why great tracts of the united states were not ready for war when it came. woe to the land whose watchmen sleep! =the teaching of copy-editing= copy-editing is the next task in the training of the coming newspaper man. on the small daily and weekly, there is little of this, but it is practiced on the metropolitan daily. there ten to twelve men are needed, doing nothing else but editing copy. in the office, two or three years are needed to bring a man to this work. no school can teach this unless its men give at least a full day to editing a flood of copy that will fill a to page newspaper. where the work of the students runs day by day on the copy of one of the lesser dailies, editing for that purpose is secured, but not the intensive training needed to handle the copy-desk requirements of newspapers in a city of , , population or more in its urban ring. success in this field is proved when men go direct from the classroom to such a desk. this carries with it tuition in heads for all needs, make-up, and the close editing of special articles, features, and night associated press copy. =a liberal curriculum must be part of training for journalism= newspaper training will always deal also with subjects and needs a course containing a larger proportion of the studies usually taught in college or offered in its curriculum. medicine requires the same chemistry, organic and inorganic, the same physics, and the same elementary biology as our college courses cover; these sciences are more or less like a mother hubbard, no very close fit and concealing more than is revealed. johns hopkins has been able at this point to apply tests, personal and particular, gauging both teacher and taught, more searching than are elsewhere required. the fruits abundantly justify this course, and in time some school of journalism will apply like tests to history,--ancient, medieval, and modern,--political economy, political science, and the modern languages, which are the basis of its work. the practical difficulty is that it is far easier to test the three sciences just mentioned than history, politics, and economics. no one will seriously assert that these are as rigorously taught as chemistry, physics, and biology. the personal equation of the teacher counts for more, it is both easier and more tempting to inject social theories, not yet tested by current facts, than in science. sciolism is less easily detected in courses which deal with the humanitarian held than in science, but it is not less perilous and it is not less possible to apply the same experimental tests as in the scientific laboratory. he is blind, however, who does not see that much advance in the current teaching at any time of history, politics, and economics has had its experimental tests as complete and as convincing as in any laboratory, which certain teachers wholly refuse to accept--sometimes because they are behind the times, sometimes because they are before the times; sometimes they are in no time whatever but the fool time of vain imaginings that somewhere, somewhen, and somehow there is a place where human desires are stronger than the inevitable laws which guide and guard the physics, the chemistry, and the biology of social bodies. =social sciences must be related to life= a notable difference exists between the views of law taught and discussed in a law school and in a school of political science. the medical lectures preserve a sobriety in discussing sundry biological problems not always present in advanced courses of biology. both lecturers, in both instances, are scientific men, both are faithful to the truths of science, but as a distinguished economist, who in his early years had been accused of being an advanced socialist, said, after he had won a comfortable fortune by judicious investments in business, banking, and realty, to a friend of earlier and far-distant years: "my principles remain exactly the same, but, i admit, my point of view has changed." there is not one biology of the medical school, another of the biological laboratory. neither does the body of law differ in a law school or in a school of political science. the principles remain exactly the same. of necessity, however, the point of view has changed and treatment has changed with it. so has responsibility. the subject offers some difficulties. the analogy is not at all points exact. medicine and law have a definite body of doctrine. schools of biology and political science have not, but granting all this, it still remains true that exactly as the law student and the medical student must have what is defined, established, and unmistakable in the world of law and of life, so the student looking to journalism needs and must have what is defined, established, and unmistakable in economics and political science. here, again, no one will pretend that the usual college course in either of these branches is taught with the same determination to keep within the same metes and bounds of recorded, tested, and ascertained facts as is true of courses in physics, chemistry, and biology. the boundary marked is less distinct. the periodic law by which the atomic values of elements are established is more definite than the periodic law under which wealth is distributed through society, though in the end some mendelléeff will record the periodic law of social elements in their composition and action. research is needed and must be free. theory and speculation are as necessary to secure an experiment and observation. the principle is clear, however, that the student who is to make professional use of a topic needs to have a definite and established instruction, not required in one to whom topic is incidental. the medical student or law student who has a new view of economic results or a new theory of the cause and purpose of our judicial and constitutional system as organized to protect the few against the many will work this off in the school of life, and is unaffected in his professional work. the journalist within his first year's work must apply his college economics and political science, and a wrong starting point may have serious consequences to his own career in the end, perhaps to society. fortunately the work of the journalist so brings him in contact with things as they are, that the body of newspaper writers, taken as a whole, represents the stability of society. the convictions and principles created by their daily work tend this way. the labor union has few illusions to the reporter, and it was the editorial writers of the land who carried the gold standard in , when many a publisher was hazy and scary. the causes of crime grow pretty clear to a police reporter, and a few assignments in which a newspaper man sees a riot convinces him of the value of public order, rigidly enforced. none the less, the reporter should start right on these sciences, basic in his calling; in the end, as the medical school has steadied the college teaching of chemistry and biology, so the school of journalism, the school of business, and the school of railroad practice _et al_ will steady economics and political science. but the duty of the college and university remains clear, to be as watchful that the sciences of social action and reaction shall be taught with the same adherence to the established and the same responsibility to their professional use as the sciences of physical, chemical, and biological action and reaction. =especially adapted content in social sciences to meet professional needs= the college studies needed as preparation for journalism call for a special proficiency and content as much as for a professional viewpoint. the journalist makes precisely the same use of his fundamental studies as does the medical student of his. if a future lawyer neglects his chemistry and biology, it is of little moment. he can get up what he needs of a case. a medical student who neglects these studies will find that the best schools bar him. in time the school of journalism will refuse the college passing mark for admission. the newspaper man almost from the start has to use his economics, his political science, and his history. elementary economics is in great measure given to theory, though a change has begun. for the journalist, this course needs to be brought in close contact with the actual economic working of society. the theory may be useful to the man who expects in the end to teach economics. it is of next to no value to the writer on public affairs. of what possible use is it to him to learn the various theoretic explanations of boehm-bawerk's cost and value? the newspaper man needs to see these things and be taught them as bagehot wrote on them and walker and sumner taught them. =general science course of inestimable worth to the journalist= in columbia, this change is already recognized as necessary. so in political science, the actual working of the body politic needs to be taught, and this is too often neglected for explanatory theories and a special interpretation. a single elementary course in chemistry, physics, or biology presupposes two or three more courses which fill out the special opening sketch. newspaper works requires a general account of science, derided by the scientist who is himself satisfied in his own education with a similar sketch in history. these general science courses are being smuggled in as "history of science," or "scientific nomenclature." much can be done in a year with such a three-hour course, if the teaching be in exceptional hands; but adequate treatment requires two years of three hours, one on organic and one on inorganic science. the latter should give a view of anthropology and the former dwell on the application of science in modern industry. =in history attention must be focalized on modern movements= college history courses end thirty to fifty years ago. the journalist needs to know closely the last thirty years, at home and abroad. weeks given to colonial charters in american history are as much waste as to set a law student to a special study of the year books of edward i and ii. college students have to put up with a good deal of this kind of waste. if twelve hours can be assigned to history, three should be on the classical period, three introductory to the modern world, three to european history since , and three hours for american history; at least two of these three hours should go to american history since garfield. =recent progress in all subjects must be summed up for the student of journalism= the writing course should be used to supplement this by articles on both these fields so that a student will learn the sources of history for the last thirty years, its treaties, its elections, its movements, its statutes, its reference works. he will need all this knowledge as soon as he has to write as a correspondent, a feature writer, or an editor, on the important topics of the day. statistics need to supplement economics and advanced courses, two, if possible, should give knowledge and method in the approach to new problems in currency, banking, trusts, and unions. at least one general course in philosophy is needed, and freud is as important for him here as aristotle. the contact of the newspaper man with book reviewing, book advertising, and the selection of fiction and news in supplements and magazines calls for the "survey course in english literature" and a knowledge of the current movement in letters for thirty years back. in science, in politics, in history, in economics, in philosophy, and in letters, it is indispensable that the young newspaper man should be introduced by lecture, and still more by reading, to the speaking figures of his own day on affairs, political life, letters, the theatre, and art. =the journalist must ever be a student of human affairs= these things are indispensable. the man who knows them can learn to write and edit, but the man who can only write and edit and does not know them will speedily run dry in the newspaper, weekly and monthly. news is today standardized. each president, each decade, each great war, the associated press and city press associations cover more completely the current news. presentation, comment, handling special articles, grow each year more important and more in demand. the price of supplement and magazine articles has trebled in the last twenty years. the newspaper grows more and more to be a platform, particularly the sunday newspaper and popular magazine. if a man is to be a figure in the day's conflict and on its wider issues, he needs the special training just outlined, and when this outline is begun, he will find the toil of the years in these fields has but begun. about the safe harbors of journalism where men come and go, dealing with the affairs of and ending the ready market of the day, are the reefs strewn with the wrecks of ready and often "brilliant" writers whose few brief years left them empty and adrift, telling all they meet that no man can long earn a fair income and hold his own through the years in journalism. a school can ameliorate all this by one course which requires much reading of the bible and shakespeare, by furnishing in the school library abundant access to the best current prose and verse of the day which will directly appeal to the young reader, since each decade has its new gods in letters, and by selecting teachers for the professional courses who have shown that they can write at least well enough to be paid by newspapers and magazines for their work. the teacher in writing whose work is not salable is not as likely to teach students how to write so that their work can sell as one who has earned his living by selling his stuff. talcott williams _school of journalism, columbia university_ xxviii business education =evolution of business education= business education of collegiate grade is a very recent development. the world's first commercial college was established at antwerp in , while the forerunner of american institutions of this sort, the wharton school, was founded in . others followed in the nineties, but the general establishment of schools of commerce as parts of colleges and universities, as well as the inclusion of business subjects in the curricula of liberal colleges, took place after . this sudden flowering at the top was preceded by a long evolution quite typical of the development of education in all the branches of learning to which institutions devote time because of their cultural or professional worth. some practical end and not the desire for abstract knowledge prompted early instruction and stimulated business education as well as education in general through various stages of progress. of course all education is a process whereby technical operations and abstract truth developed by many generations are systematized, compressed, and imparted to individuals in a relatively short time. the first stage in the evolution in a given field may be called the _apprentice stage_. just as physicians, lawyers, and in fact practitioners in all the professions and crafts trained their assistants in their establishments for the purpose of making them proficient in their daily work, so did merchants at this stage give apprentice training in commercial branches to their employees. traditional ways of carrying out certain transactions, convenient rules of thumb, and habits of neatness and reliability were passed on in a given establishment. as industry grew and guilds were formed, the training tended to become more standardized and merchants joined in establishing guild schools for their employees. many such schools were conducted in the various crafts, and their modern counterparts are the well-known vocational or trade schools. this _vocational training_ stage was developed by business men for persons not employed as productive craftsmen but rather as workers in business offices which administered production and directly attended to selling and exchange, and for others looking forward to such employment. at this stage there grew up also private schools, usually conducted by teachers especially proficient in particular lines of service. thus inventors of shorthand systems, devisers of systems of penmanship, and authors of methods of bookkeeping and accounting set up schools in these specialties. here we have training outside the business house itself to prepare for participation in business, and the enterprises flourish because there is a demand for the people they train. at this stage rules of thumb are supplanted by systems based on principles, and the way is paved for the _technical school stage_. the training here is practical, but it is broad and based on scientific knowledge. this stage is not reached in all fields of endeavor, for some stop at the first or the second, while on the other hand the existence of a higher stage of education does not preclude the continuation at the same time of agencies carrying on instruction after the mode of the lower stages. with the rise of the factory system and the extension of capitalistic production and industrial integration in the form of "big business," there came a demand in the business world for men widely informed and thoroughly trained. not only did men to meet this demand have to have good foundations of general education, but they needed technical preparation in the specialized field of business itself. business science is not only applied science, but it is secondary or derived from a number of the fundamental sciences. it draws its principles from the physical sciences of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology; it utilizes the engineering applications of these sciences; it derives valuable information from physiology and psychology, and it makes use of the modern languages. borrowing from all the pure sciences and their applied counterparts, it formulates its own regulations so that it may manage the work of the world _economically_, so that it may bring about the production of goods necessary to meet humanity's many, varied, and recurrent wants, and make these commodities available in advantageous times and places with individual title to them established according to existing standards of personal justice and social expediency. the final stage, the _cultural stage_, is reached when the educator determines that the field in question is so much a part of the general civilization or intellectual wealth of the world that it ought to receive some consideration, not only by specialists in the field but also by the student pursuing a well-planned course of a general or non-technical character designed to enable him to appreciate and play some rôle in the world in which he lives. it is because new branches of human endeavor constantly blossom forth into this stage, while more ancient branches wither and no longer bear fruit of contemporary significance, that the very humanities themselves change as well as realities. business as a field of human thought and activity has reached this stage, and educators reckon with it in laying out courses of general elementary, secondary, and collegiate study. no one would contend that educators should in any way cease to offer general or cultural courses, but they should insist that these general courses embrace all of humanity's wealth, including that which modern society contributed, and that they should with each addition reshape their general offerings so that appropriate proportions will be preserved. =definition of business education= before the development of modern highly organized production, business training would have been synonymous with commercial training; that is, training to prepare men to play their parts in the _exchange_ of goods. this would embrace correspondence with customers, the keeping of records of stock, the cost of stock, making out bills, and attending to all financial operations which were associated with marketing and exchange. successful training would imply, of course, the broad foundational grasp of arithmetic, reading, and writing of the mother tongue and of such foreign languages as the nature of the market might require, a grasp of various money values, banking procedure, and other information concerning financial affairs, the means of transportation, freight charges, etc. manual skill had to be developed in penmanship, in the technique of bookkeeping, general office organization, and filing. with the invention of mechanical and labor-saving office devices, facility in operating them was required to supplement skill in penmanship. of course, with the development of the market the complexity of office management increased. in modern times the business man concerns himself not only with the duties of the merchant and exchanger, but also with the organization of industry and economical procedure. the modern business man, entrepreneur or manager, and all those assisting him in the discharge of his duties, perform functions in two directions: first, in the direction of the market in the establishment of price, in the selling of his goods, and in attending to all matters which flow therefrom, and secondly toward the production plant itself; while he employs technicians who know how to perform operations skillfully according to the laws of science, nevertheless he must know how to buy labor and how to organize labor and materials and put them in coördinate working relationship most economically. we can therefore define business _education as education which directly prepares people to discharge the business function: namely, the economical organization of men and materials in production and the most advantageous distribution and exchange of the commodities or service for consumption_. in the modern world it is hard sometimes to draw the line between the field of technology in production and the field of business management in production, but in general the two functions are fairly distinct. the technician is interested in operations of production, while the business manager is interested in their economical organization and in their government with relation to market conditions. the very engineers themselves must be selected, engineered, and paid by the business man. the business manager is interested in keeping the total price of his commodities above his total entrepreneur's cost. the technician is interested in inventing and operating the machinery of production, if and when the business man determines what operations will be profitable. =aims and curricula of business education= the aims of business education are, first and foremost, professional; second, civic; and third, cultural. at no time can the three be separated, but it is possible to devise a curriculum which stresses one or two of the aims. it is also possible to treat a subject so as to emphasize technical and practical skill or to promote philosophical reflection. the professional aim prompted the establishment of the first schools or colleges of commerce, and it is kept to the fore not only in institutions giving courses of study which lead to distinctive degrees in commerce, but also in places which give specialized instruction in particular fields. we shall consider curricula of the following types: _type i._ curriculum designed to give the student training to meet a definite professional requirement established by law. _type ii._ curriculum designed to make a student proficient in a particular narrow field. _type iii._ curriculum leading to a baccalaureate degree in commerce or business, vertical type. _type iv._ curriculum leading to a baccalaureate degree in commerce or business, horizontal type. type i. technical course, designed to prepare students to meet the state requirements for certified public accountants _entrance requirements_ for students matriculating for the whole course as candidates for a diploma of graduate in accountancy--high school graduation, college entrance or a state regents' c.p.a. qualifying certificate. non-matriculated students--mature persons wishing to pursue certain subjects without academic credit. _prescribed_ accounting, theory, practice and problems terms, hours a week-- hours this course covers general accounting for the single proprietor, partnerships and corporations, embracing financing, manufacturing, and selling operations, with agencies and branches, the formation of mergers, syndicates, holding companies, etc.; dissolutions and reorganizations. cost accounting term, hours a week-- hours auditing term, hours a week-- hours public utilities accounting term, hours a week-- hours judicial (fiduciary) accounting term, hours a week-- hours advanced accounting, theory, and problems term, hours a week-- hours commercial law terms, hours a week hours covering general principles of law, contracts, and all forms of special contracts of interest to the business man, especially those related to personal property, risk insurance, credit and real property, and forms of business associations. economics economic principles term, hours a week-- hours economic development of the united states term, hours a week-- hours money and banking term, hours a week-- hours english--written, business english terms, hours a week-- hours oral english--public speaking terms, hour a week-- hours _additional electives_--one course of at least hours in government and enough other elective subjects in technical commercial work or political science to accrue at least a total of hours. the available additional electives in accounting are advanced courses in different special fields such as advanced cost accounting, municipal accounting--general and departmental, systems for particular industries or forms of business, public utilities rate making and regulation, etc. in government the available electives include such subjects as american government and citizenship, american constitutional law, international law, political theory, comparative government, state legislation and administration, municipal administration, etc. in political science, courses in economics and business, such as economic problems, business organization and management, public finance, foreign trade, foreign exchange, insurance, advertising, salesmanship, etc., are available, while general and special courses may be taken in sociology and statistics. courses of study of this sort in a specialized field are offered in colleges usually at night for students who are in active business during the day. with more or less extensive additions in scientific, literary, and linguistic fields they become the curricula leading to baccalaureate degrees as represented by type iii, to follow. large private institutes or schools conducted for profit and also correspondence institutions offer similar courses. other groups of studies in particular fields are: in banking, in transportation or traffic, in sales management, including advertising and salesmanship, and in foreign trade. a group in foreign trade will typify this sort of course of study, which differs from the one in accountancy just given because the make-up will be determined wholly by each institution quite independent of legally established professional standards. type ii. to prepare students for work in a special field, foreign trade principles of economics term, hours a week-- hours economic resources of the u. s. term, hours a week-- hours commercial geography term, hours a week-- hours money and banking term, hours a week-- hours foreign exchange term, hours a week-- hours foreign credit term, hours a week-- hours international law term, hours a week-- hours tariff history of the u. s. term, hours a week-- hours u. s. and foreign customs administrations term, hours a week-- hours export technique term, hours a week-- hours practical steamship operation term, hours a week-- hours marketing and salesmanship general course term, hours a week-- hours special courses as desired on south american markets, mediterranean markets, russian markets, northwest empire markets, etc. foreign languages: practical courses in conversation and correspondence in french, spanish, portuguese, german, russian, etc., according to market in which trade is specialized, at least terms, hours a week-- hours total (in years, with weekly schedule of or hrs.) hours a special course of this sort usually leads to a certificate but not a diploma or degree. obviously the technical aim is very prominent, though civic and cultural benefits of no mean character will of necessity be derived. new groups will be found as new fields of business become important and develop definite, recognizable requirements of a scientific sort. naturally each such specialty goes through the usual evolution and contributes its philosophical distillation or essence to the cultural college course. when we come to the construction of a curriculum leading to a bachelor's degree in business, economics, or commerce, we have the problems of the engineering schools. just how far will specialization be carried, in what sequence will the foundational subjects and the specialties be taken up, and to what extent will other more general subjects not directly contributing to a technical end be admitted? in most institutions of good standards the degree is regarded as representing not only technical proficiency in business but also some acquaintance with science, politics, and letters in general. the question (already an old one in schools of engineering) arises then concerning the best way to arrange the special or distinctively business subjects in relation to the more general. although there are a number of variations, two outstanding types are recognizable. we may devise labels for them: the _vertical_ curriculum, which offers both general and special courses side by side right up through the college course, and the _horizontal_, which requires a completion of the whole or nearly all of the general group during the first two years of college before the special subjects are pursued in the last two. type iii. vertical type of undergraduate curriculum, leading to the degree of b. s. in economics _entrance_: college entrance requirements. _requirement for graduation_: units, of which must be in general business and in liberal subjects, with in specialized fields of business activity, to be taken after the freshman year. a unit here represents successful work for one hour a week for two semesters. therefore the total is equivalent to of the usual collegiate units. _freshman required work_ english composition hours a week-- terms english, history of the language hour a week-- terms english literature hour a week-- terms chemistry--general ) or } hours a week-- terms business law ) physical education hours a week-- terms government--federal and state hours a week-- terms principles of economics hours a week-- terms economic resources hours a week-- terms accounting--general course hours a week-- terms _sophomore required work_ english literature and composition hours a week-- terms physical education hours a week-- terms general history hours a week-- terms _required before end of junior year_ additional political science hours a week-- terms physical education hour a week-- terms _required before graduation_ additional history hours a week-- terms physical education hour a week-- terms a modern language beyond the first year in college hours a week-- terms total required units units elect after the freshman year courses aggregating additional units in fields of i. business law courses, units available ii. commerce and transportation courses, units available iii. economics courses, units available iv. finance and accounting courses, units available v. geography and industry courses, units available vi. insurance courses, units available vii. political science courses, units available viii. sociology courses, units available total required for the degree, units there is a school which grants a degree in commerce for the equivalent of of these units or of the usual college credits, if the student has business experience, and for the equivalent of of these units or of the usual college credits if he has not. the course is essentially like type i and includes no broad liberal requirements in literature, foreign language, and history and on the other hand is not so strictly prescribed as type i. a strictly technical degree may be desirable for such a short course, provided the prescription is severe and includes languages. generally it seems best to reserve degrees for full college courses of four years or more which include a reasonable general requirement in languages and science. this leads us to type iv, or the curriculum which requires the first regular two years of the college course prescribed for one of the liberal degrees and permits business specialization in the last two undergraduate years or these with an additional postgraduate year. one institution requires the first three years as a foundation for a two-year course in business, and one conducts a postgraduate school of business administration leading to the degree of ph.d. in business economics. no doubt postgraduate work will be continued mainly in the research direction, but undergraduate day and continuation courses will be devoted mainly to preparation for business. it is not necessary to illustrate type iv, because the first two years consist simply of the freshman and sophomore work of any sort of liberal college course, classical, scientific, or modern language, while the succeeding years are made up of special work in economics and business of more or less concentrated character. the advantage of the type is obviously administrative. the whole vexing problem of insuring fairly wide cultivation along with opportunities for specialization is conveniently settled by giving general training, most of it remote from business work, for two years, after which the student is considered cultivated enough to withstand the blighting effect of specialization. but there are serious pedagogical objections to this arrangement which make the vertical plan seem preferable. a student coming from one of our constantly improving high schools of commerce is checked for two years and given time to forget all the bookkeeping and other commercial work which he has learned and on which advanced commercial instruction may be built, while he pursues an academic course. it would be far better to continue the modern languages, the mathematics, and natural sciences, along with business courses. furthermore there is much to be done by educators in arranging such parallel sequences of subjects so that advantage may be taken of vocational interest to stimulate broad and deep study of related fundamentals. considerable improvement could be made over type iii, but that type seems better than the one we have styled "horizontal." in all these courses of study we quite properly find both the philosophical and analytical courses, those which are historical and descriptive and those of detailed practical technique; we find economic theory, industrial history, business management, and practical accounting; we find theory of money and banking, history of banking in the united states, and practical banking; we find theory of international exchange, tariff history, and the technique of customs administration. concerning methods of teaching particular subjects we shall speak later. seldom do we find curricula drawn up with the purely civic end in view, though many schools and associations throughout the country are agitating the question of organized training of men for public service. strictly speaking, this kind of training is both professional and civic because it is designed to make men proficient in carrying on the business of the state. in new york city the municipal college conducts courses of this sort for persons in the city service, while private bureaus of municipal research conduct their own courses. so far in america no courses are yet accepted officially for entrance into public service or as the only qualification for advancement in the service. nevertheless, progress is being made in this direction. the curricula offered include courses in government and especially municipal government, public finance and taxation, the practical organization and administration of various departments such as police, charities, public works, the establishment and maintenance of special systems of municipal accounts. but the great civic benefit comes from general courses in business, for the business man who has a real grasp of his work and sees it in the light of general social welfare becomes a good citizen. business education gives some sense of the interdependence of industry, personal ethics, and government. the broadly trained business man realizes that he is in a sense a servant of the community, that his property is wrapped up with the welfare of his fellow men, and that what he has is a trust which society grants to him to be conducted after the manner of a good steward. such training reveals to him the _raison d'être_ of labor legislation, factory laws, the various qualifications of the property right, the necessity for taxation, and the importance of good government to all the citizens of the state both as coöperative agents in production and as consumers. continued and improved business education will elevate the mind of the merchant and the manager so that its horizon is no longer the profit balance but the welfare of all society. the cultural aim of business courses is consciously kept in mind by the makers of curricula for colleges of liberal arts and sciences which permit a rather free choice of electives in the department of economics and business or of political science, according to the departmental organization of the institution. here, of course, we find economics, which bears to practical business much the relation which philosophy bears to active life in general. we find also courses in money and banking, usually offered from the historical and descriptive rather than the technical point of view. recently, however, colleges have included in this field of election practical courses in accountancy and commercial law. the tendency is in the direction of including more and more of the practical and technical courses, although the historical and philosophical courses are retained. nevertheless the cultural value is undiminished, unless one were to maintain that nothing which is exact can be cultural. =methods of teaching= the field of business is so wide and embraces so many subjects that the methods of teaching giving the best results will be varied and used in different combinations with different subjects. those subjects which are practical and largely habit forming, such as stenography, typewriting, bookkeeping, and the manipulation of mechanical and labor-saving office devices, are of course taught by some method of training which will insure quick reaction. in these courses the object is to cultivate habits of manual dexterity and habits of orderliness and neatness. here we find that exposition is reduced to a minimum, lectures are few, recitations do not exist to any great extent, but that practice, st, to secure proper form, and d, to secure speed, is the controlling aim of the method. the teachers show their ingenuity in devising exercises which will give accuracy of form and then develop speed without sacrifice of accuracy. in colleges these courses are reduced to a minimum because they are usually cared for in lower schools, but for students who come directly to the commercial college without them, preparatory courses of this sort are often conducted. among the technical subjects the one which calls for the most practice is, of course, accountancy, first for the single proprietor, next for the partnership, and finally for the corporation. various methods of presenting accountancy have been suggested. very few teachers employ extensive recitation work in this field. it is found most desirable to have periods of at least two hours' duration, so that the teacher can give such exposition and lecture work at the beginning of the period as he may see fit, and the class may then take up practice. in some schools it is customary to have one course in theory, another course in practical accounting, and another course in problems of accounting. however, the tendency seems to be in the direction of making these three aspects of the work mutually helpful, and the course is offered as a course in accounting, theory, practice, and problems. the theory is set forth in a lecture, practice is given with typical situations in mind, and then related problems are taken up for solution. many excellent texts are now appearing and can be used in the customary manner. assignments in these books tend to make unnecessary many long or formal lectures, but there still remains the need for classroom talks and quizzes. as the course progresses, the problems become more and more difficult and complicated, and the final problem work is exceedingly difficult and calls for a considerable power of analysis, clarity of statement, and care in arrangement on the part of the student. a complete course of this sort usually covers two and a half or three years. at the end of the first year of general accountancy, special subjects may be pursued parallel with the general course. the order in which these specialties are introduced is usually cost accounting, auditing systems, judicial or fiduciary accounting, and then other special branches such as brokers' accounts, public utilities accounting, foreign exchange accounting, etc. general accounting is very important both as an instrument for the business man to use and as a training to insure the grasp of general business organization. it is the opinion of the writer that whether a business man expects to become an accountant or not, he should have a thorough and technical grasp of this subject. in these specialties it is necessary to depend upon lectures rather than textbooks, not only because textbooks here are few and other works are not well adapted to teaching use, but also because the subject matter must be kept up to date and in keeping with changing practice. the lecturers should be practical experts in each particular field as well as acceptable teachers. closely related to accountancy is commercial law. commercial law should, of course, be understood by every business man, not because he expects to become a practitioner of law but because he wishes to avoid unnecessary disputes and to shape his course wisely from a legal standpoint in dealing with his employees, his business associates, and his customers. there are various methods of teaching commercial law. the one which has been in vogue thus far has been the textbook method, in which the principles of law of interest to the business man are set forth. lessons are assigned in the book, and recitations are held. the lecture method also is advocated. in some universities which have both law schools and schools of commerce, the commercial students receive lectures in the school of law in such subjects as contracts, agencies, insurance, etc. it seems to the writer that neither of these practices is desirable but that the proper way to teach commercial law to the commercial students is the case method, in which the principles of law of interest to the business man are developed from an examination of actual cases of business litigation. we may very likely look forward to the publication of case books which can be used either alone or in conjunction with textbooks on legal principles. lectures on law to commercial students should be reduced to a minimum, and then they should confine themselves to very broad principles which need no lengthy exposition or to fields in which the students may be expected to have a general grasp but no very detailed knowledge. but such subjects as contracts, agency, bankruptcy, sales, insurance, negotiable instruments, and forms of business association should be taught thoroughly to the student in the classroom through the case method, in which each case is fully discussed by the class and from which discussion legal principles are evolved. it is interesting to note that the states which stand highest in the matter of certified public accountancy licenses are requiring very thorough preparation in law. to meet such requirements a course in law covering at least three semesters, three hours a week, with a case method is certainly necessary. the modern languages taught in schools of commerce should be by the direct method, and always with the vocational end clearly before the student. actual business transactions, such as selling to a foreign customer in the foreign language, correspondence, newspapers, catalogues and other documents of business, should be the supplementary reading and exercise material of the class. facility in conversation and writing should be developed as rapidly as possible, and the grasp of the methodical rules should follow. it would probably be presumptuous to take a strong position here on the question of teaching modern languages, but experience with commercial students has clearly indicated that greatest progress can be made if the language is taught by a conversation or direct method from the very start, and if paradigms and rules of syntax are evolved after some vocabulary has been developed and some facility in speech has been acquired. we may say here, incidentally, that it seems wise to teach the spoken language for a while before taking up the problem of the written language, especially where the foreign language assigns different phonetic values to the printed symbols from those assigned in english. while the various technical subjects offer different problems because of differences in their character, we may say in general that the aim of the school should always be to keep in touch with the actual practice in the business world; to have the lecturer use material which is up to the minute, and, where possible, to give the students the advantage of field work or at least to take them on tours of inspection in the different houses engaged in this or that line of business. the curriculum of any good commercial college or university department of business includes courses in economics, commercial geography, industrial history, business management, and similar subjects. no doubt other chapters of this book discuss methods of teaching these subjects. but it may not be out of place here to indicate that the best approach to the study of economics is through practical business courses in accountancy, commercial law, and practical management. economics is the philosophy of business, and it cannot be understood by one who is unfamiliar with the facts of business. certainly it cannot be related to real business life by the academic student. it would seem, therefore, best to reserve the course in economic theory for the senior year of a business course and precede it with courses in accounting, law, industrial history, and management. then, when it is taught, it should be presented through practical problems from which the general principles may, by induction, be derived. =relations with the business world= it is important that commercial education should not grow academic and remote from the real world of affairs. therefore schools of business should keep in close contact with merchants' associations, chambers of commerce, and such other bodies of business men as may be in the neighborhood of the school. committees from such associations should have either a voice in the conduct of the school, or at least have very strong advisory representation on committees. in france, germany, and in fact most european countries, colleges of commerce were directly established by chambers of commerce and associations of merchants, and the work is to a large extent conducted under their direction. whether the college of commerce in america be a private institution or one supported by the public, it should form some sympathetic contact with the leading business organizations. of course certain business associations have their own technical schools of training. the american bankers' association conducts its own courses, drawing upon various universities for lecturers in some subjects and drawing upon experts in business for other kinds of technical work. so also various corporations have their corporation schools which seek to develop business executives by progressive courses of training for those in the lower ranks. nevertheless, the collegiate institutions offering organized courses in commerce will do well to keep in touch with business men. another way in which such schools and colleges can keep abreast of the times is to employ lecturers who do not make teaching their main business of life but who are expert in certain particular fields. indeed, it is almost impossible to teach certain of the very advanced and specialized courses without employing men of this sort. they are attracted to teaching not by the pay but by the honor of being connected with an institution of learning, and by sincere desire to contribute something to the development of the work in which they are interested. these men, of course, can be scheduled only for a relatively few hours a week, and sometimes they can be had only for evening lectures, but in any event they are very much worth while. obviously the director of studies in the college should give these men all possible assistance of a pedagogical sort, so that their advantages as experts in business will not be offset by deficiencies as teachers. =evening work in commercial courses= this brings us to another consideration which is very important. it seems to the writer that the ideal training for a student who has reached the stage of entrance to college and who wishes to go into business is as follows: he should enroll in the college course which is preparatory for business training and pursue his modern languages, mathematics, english, and the social sciences, and also take up such accounting and technical work as he can have the first two years of his course. then he should enter the world of business itself, be in a business house during the day, and continue his studies at night. it seems very desirable that this parallel progress, in organized theory and instruction, on the one hand, and in actual business with its difficulties which arise almost haphazard, should be carried on. the relationship is very helpful. of course a substitute for this is the coöperative plan, in which the student spends a part of his time in college and a part of the time in a business house. another alternative in institutions which have the three-term year is to put two terms in at college and one term in at business. the calendar arrangement of any institution will suggest variations of this suggested arrangement, the purpose of which will be to insure progressive development in business practice and also in collegiate instruction. =recent developments= it is to be noticed that in the last few years business has become more and more intense. the developments are in two directions. the first direction is saving and efficiency through organization. this tends to keep down cost. the other direction is in the stimulation of the market and in perfecting advertising and selling methods. naturally there have been developments in the recording, accounting, and clerical ends of the business, but scientific management in production on the one hand, and scientific selling on the other, are the two great developments. in both, engineering plays a prominent part and dictates a close correlation of the business and the engineering curricula of a college or university seeking to give most effective training either to the student of business or the student of engineering. on the selling side we are having the further developments which come with the growth of foreign trade. in order to meet the demand for men competent to organize production wisely and from a business viewpoint, more courses will be given in what we may call production management or commercial engineering. furthermore, the sales engineer must be trained. the curriculum of the course of collegiate grade should be made up somewhat as follows: a two years' prescribed course in the general sciences and in general principles of business, followed by a two or three year curriculum in technical business management, on the one hand, including especially accounting, cost accounting, wage systems, employment management, and some branch of engineering on the other hand. the engineering course should be general but thorough. it should not go up into specialized fields of design, but it should include all the fundamental courses of engineering--of mechanical, electrical, and civil engineering. a combination course in engineering and business management is needed also to prepare men for places in banks as investment managers. the banks must advance funds to industrial concerns, and such loans cannot be made wisely save upon the advice of one who is thoroughly acquainted with plant management, equipment, and mechanical operations as well as costs of production and market possibilities. in addition, such a man must be well acquainted with systems of accounting and methods of preparing financial statements. in the field of salesmanship, engineering training is growing in importance. in short, the highly organized state of modern production and the tremendous part played by engineering in modern industry indicate the need for a close coördination of business and engineering education. in conclusion we may say that business education is now at the stage where it has its own technology, is in close touch with other fields of technology, and is making its contribution to the general fund of modern culture. texts and scientific treatises in the field of business are increasing, the pedagogy of the various included subjects is receiving satisfactory attention, and schools of collegiate and university grade are keeping abreast of the demands of the business world for adequate general and specific training in business. frederick b. robinson _college of the city of new york_ bibliography cooley, e. g. _vocational education in europe._ commercial club of chicago, chicago, illinois, . chapters on vocational education in general, commercial schools, and the conclusion. farrington, f. e. _commercial education in germany._ the macmillan company, . herrick, c. a. _meaning and practice of commercial education_, and other works in the macmillan commercial series, . there is an excellent bibliography on the whole subject of commercial education as an appendix to herrick's commercial education. hooper, frederick, and graham, james. _commercial education at home and abroad._ the macmillan company, . there are numerous contributions on particular aspects and general methods and special methods in commercial subjects. the best printed bibliography of these is in the back of herrick's book. a typical work on methods is klein and kahn's _methods in commercial education_. index accountancy. _see_ business education adapting course of study, - , , , , adler, felix, , Æsthetic aim, in teaching, , ; in music, aims, in teaching, - ; modified for different students, ; in organization of knowledge, ; in teaching biology, - ; in teaching mathematics, ; in physical education, - ; in teaching economics, - ; in teaching american history, ; in teaching political science, - ; in teaching philosophy, ; in teaching ethics, - ; in teaching psychology, ; in teaching english literature, - , - ; in teaching classics, ; in teaching romance languages, - ; in teaching music, - , ; of art instruction, ; in teaching engineering subjects, - ; in teaching mechanical drawing, - ; in business education, . _see_ civic, disciplinary, utilitarian allen, j. t., angell, j. b., application of knowledge, art, - art instruction, athletics. _see_ physical education author's life, in literary study, biological basis of education, - , , biology, - brown, e. e., brown university, business education, - butler, n. m., , calkins, mary w., canby, h. s., case method, in political science, ; in philosophy, ; in ethics, ; in psychology, - ; in commercial law, - cattell, j. m., chemistry, - chronological viewpoint in history, citizenship, training for, civic aim in economics, classics, - ; in colonial colleges, - ; status in college teaching, ; through the vernacular, ; through ancient authors, coeducation, - college teaching, why ineffective, - collegiate institute, colonial period, columbia university, , commercial education. _see_ business education commercial law, - committee on standards of american universities, comparisons in teaching, composition and journalism, composition teaching, status of, . _see_ english correlation, , , - , , - , course of study, , - , - ; in biology, - ; logical and psychological, ; in chemistry, ; in physics, - , - ; in geology, - , ; in hygiene and physical training, ; in economics, ; in sociology, - ; determined by community, ; in american history, - ; in european history, - ; in political science, - ; in philosophy, - ; in education, ; in english literature, ; in classics, ; in romance languages, - ; in german, - ; in engineering, - ; in mechanical drawing, - ; in business education, - cultural aim, , , , - dartmouth college case and college development, - democracy, descriptive geometry, design in engineering, development method, , - _see_ recitation dewey, j., - dexter, e. g., , differentiated courses, - direct method, disciplinary aim, - ; in physics, - ; in geology, - ; in history, ; in psychology, ; in education, ; in literature, - ; in romance languages, ; in music, - draper, a. s., duggan, s. p., economic viewpoint in history, economics, , - education as college subject, - educational and instructional aim, - elective system, - elementary language courses as college courses, eliot, charles w., emotional reaction in literature, engineering subjects, - english, teaching of, , - , - . _see_ composition, literature equipment for art instruction, ethics, - evening session for business education, examination, . _see_ tests experimental work in psychology, . _see_ laboratory method expressional limitations of college students, field work, , , finance, teaching of. _see_ business education flexner, a., , foster, w. t., functional aspect in teaching, geology, - german, - german influence on american college, gradation of subject matter, , graduate schools, - graves, habits, , . _see_ aims, disciplinary aim handschin, c. h., harper, w. r., hart, harvard, health instruction, . _see_ physical education heuristic method. _see_ development method, recitation high school preparation, in physical education, ; in music, , history, of american college, ; of college mathematics, ; of sociology, ; of music as college subject, ; of teaching of journalism, - ; of business education in the college, - holliday, c., horne, h. h., , illustrations, immigration and status of english teaching, . informal aim in teaching, informal examination, introductory course, in ethics, ; in political science, , ; in philosophy, , ; in psychology, ; in mechanical drawing, - jefferson and founding of american college, johns hopkins university, journalism as college subject, , - junior college, - king's college, kingsley, c. d., laboratory method, , ; in chemistry, , ; in biology, ; in physics, ; in geology, ; in psychology, ; in engineering, language as index of mentality, law, ; commercial, - lecture method, ; in chemistry, - ; in physics, , ; in mathematics, ; in economics, , - ; in sociology, ; in history, , ; in philosophy, - ; in psychology, - ; in classics, - ; in engineering, - ; in commercial education, - length of periods in accountancy, literary analysis, literary appreciation, . _see_ aims, cultural, Æsthetic literary style, literature and the classics, - , . _see_ english logical association, - maclean, g. e., mathematics, , - mechanical drawing, - medicine, mental development and acquisition of language, methods of teaching conditioned by aims, . _see_ aims mezes, s. f., modern languages, when introduced, ; in business education, modern literature and the classics, monroe, p., morrill act, motivation in teaching, - municipal research, . _see_ laboratory method, sociology, political science music in secondary schools, natural method in classics, , - newspaper english, - non-sectarianism in american colleges, notebook of students, oberlin and coeducation, oral composition in german, oral reading and english literature, ordinance of , organization of subject matter, - outlines in biology, parker, s. c., pennsylvania university, philosophy, , - , , , - physical education, , - physics, - pitkin, w. b., - place in curriculum, of political science, ; of ethics, ; of psychology, , ; of history of education, ; of educational theory, ; of german, ; of art education, point of contact in teaching, - political science, - preparatory training, in chemistry, ; in physics, ; in mathematics, , - ; in physical education, ; in german, ; for journalism, problem method, in economics, , - ; in sociology, - professional preparation, for women, ; through political science, prose composition and the classics, psychology, , - , public service, training for, quiz, how to conduct, recitation, , , - , - reduction of college course, reference reading, , , , relating course to students, , ; in chemistry, ; in sociology, ; in philosophy, ; in ethics, - , - ; in psychology, ; in music, ; in business education, . _see_ adapting course of study relative importance in organization of knowledge, religious character of american college, - , reporting, teaching art of, research, . _see_ reference reading, problem method, seminar research scholars as teachers, - , , , robinson, m. l., romance languages, - scholarship as preparation for teaching, science, teaching of, - ; place of, in journalism course, scientific methods, in political science, ; in psychology, scope of course in educational theory, self-activity, self-government, seminar, senior college, - sequence of courses in political science, skill to be developed in biology, smith, f. w., snow, l. f., social museum, the, social sciences, place in journalism course, sociology, - socratic method. _see_ recitation, development method stanley, a. a., student army training corps, summaries in teaching, teacher, as scholar, . _see_ research, teacher training teacher training, , , - , - , , - technical subjects in college curriculum, , - , , - technique, as aim in teaching, testing results of instruction, ; in economics, ; in history, , ; in psychology, ; in music, ; in art, - ; in engineering subjects, - textbook, in geology, ; in mathematics, ; in economics, , - ; in sociology, ; in history, ; in ethics, theology, in separate school, thoroughness, - , thwing, c. f., time to be given to subjects, , . _see_ place in curriculum topical method in history, types of instruction, - undergraduate and graduate teaching, unified courses, , utilitarian aim, ; of physics, ; of geology, ; of political science, ; of psychology, ; of history of education, values, . _see_ aims vernacular, in teaching 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selected after a thorough sifting of every type of children's literature. the different forms of poetry and narrative, and descriptions, sketches, essays, and letters are represented. every piece is a complete unit or is at least easily detached from its original setting, like an uncle remus or an arabian-nights story. the selections are arranged as nearly as may be in the order of increasing difficulty. the versions given are the definitive and authoritative ones. the space devoted to each type of writing has been justly apportioned. a bibliography, index to authors, titles, and first lines of poems and helpful notes are included. it is attractive in appearance. though primarily designed for use in normal-school, college and library classes, it will interest teachers and parents generally, and it should be put into the hands of children. _xiii + pages. price, $ . _ world book company yonkers-on-hudson, new york prairie avenue, chicago books on government for high schools and colleges government handbooks edited by _david p. barrows and thomas h. reed_ government and politics of switzerland by _robert c. brooks_ a description of the organization and functioning of this government, with a discussion of historical origin and development and with particular emphasis on the modern political life of the country. 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($ . .) world book company yonkers-on-hudson, new york prairie avenue, chicago transcriber's notes: passages in italics indicated by underscore _italics_. sidenotes indicated by =sidenote=. the note between footnotes and refers to footnotes - . the original text's usage of the greek letter sigma in a formula has been trancribed in this text as "s". misprints corrected: missing "by" added (table of contents) "asisstant" corrected to "assistant" (table of contents) "is is" corrected to "is" (page ) missing "to" added to sidenote (page ) "scupltors" corrected to "sculptors" (page ) "coöperaton" corrected to "coöperation" (page ) missing hyphens added as necessary additional spacing after some of the quotations is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. the curse of education =publisher's announcement= a notable book drifting crown vo., cloth, s. d. third edition 'an able and suggestive book.'--_the spectator._ 'it is a sane, healthy indication of the weak spots in the country's armour, and a practical attempt to indicate remedies.'--_the sunday special._ 'the author's contempt for the time-serving politician, who in this country has, unfortunately, come to count for so much in all governments--tory or liberal--will be shared by the thinking portion of his fellow countrymen.'--_the financial news._ 'by such suggestions the author of "drifting" does good service to the country.'--_the outlook._ london: grant richards , henrietta street, w.c. the curse of education by harold e. gorst london grant richards prefatory note in calling this little book 'the curse of education,' i trust that i shall not be misunderstood to disparage culture. the term 'education' is used, for want of a better word, to express the conventional mode of teaching and bringing up children, and of educating youth in this and other civilized countries. it is with education systems, with the universal method of cramming the mind with facts, and particularly with the manufacture of uniformity and mediocrity by subjecting every individual to a common process, regardless of his natural bent, that i have chiefly to find fault. at a moment when the country is agitated with questions of educational reform, i thought it might be useful to draw attention to what i believe to be a fact, namely, that the foundations of all existing education systems are absolutely false in principle; and that teaching itself, as opposed to natural development and self-culture, is the greatest obstacle to human progress that social evolution has ever had to encounter. harold e. gorst. london, _april, ._ contents chapter page i. flourishing mediocrity ii. square pegs in round holes iii. the destruction of genius iv. human factories v. the greatest misery of the greatest number vi. the output of prigs vii. boy degeneration viii. the struggle of the educated ix. woman's empire over man x. youth and crime xi. mental breakdown xii. evidence of history xiii. the apotheosis of cram xiv. the great fallacy xv. real education xvi. the open door to intelligence the curse of education chapter i flourishing mediocrity humanity is rapidly becoming less the outcome of a natural process of development, and more and more the product of an organized educational plan. the average educated man possesses no real individuality. he is simply a manufactured article bearing the stamp of the maker. year by year this fact is becoming more emphasized. during the past century almost every civilized country applied itself feverishly to the invention of a national plan of education, with the result that the majority of mankind are compelled to swallow a uniform prescription of knowledge made up for them by the state. now there is a great outcry that england is being left behind in this educational race. other nations have got more exact systems. where the british child is only stuffed with six pounds of facts, the german and french schools contrive to cram seven pounds into their pupils. consequently, germany and france are getting ahead of us, and unless we wish to be beaten in the international race, it is asserted that we must bring our own educational system up to the continental standard. before going more deeply into this vital question, it is just as well to consider what these education systems have really done for mankind. there is a proverb, as excellent as it is ancient, which says that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. no doubt learned theoretical treatises upon the scope and aim of educational methods are capital things in their way, but they tell us nothing of the effects of this systematic teaching and cramming upon the world at large. if we wish to ascertain them, we must turn to life itself, and judge by results. to begin with, the dearth of great men is so remarkable that it scarcely needs comment. people are constantly expressing the fear that the age of intellectual giants has passed away altogether. this is particularly obvious in political life. since the days of gladstone and disraeli, parliamentary debate has sunk to the most hopeless level of mediocrity. the traditions of men such as pitt, fox, palmerston, peel, and others, sound at the present day almost like ancient mythology. yet the supposed benefits of education are not only now free to all, but have been compulsorily conferred upon most nations. nevertheless, even prussian pedagogues have never succeeded in producing another bismarck; and france has ground away at her educational mill for generations with the result that the supply of napoleons has distinctly diminished. look at the methods by which our public service is recruited. who are the men to whom the administration of all important departments of government is entrusted, and how are they selected? they are simply individuals who have succeeded in obtaining most marks in public competitive examinations--that is to say, men whose brains have been more effectually stuffed with facts and mechanical knowledge than were the brains of their unsuccessful competitors. there is no question, when a candidate presents himself for a post in the diplomatic service or in one of the government offices, whether he possesses tact, or administrative ability, or knowledge of the world. all that is demanded of him is that his mind should be crammed with so many pounds avoirdupois of latin, greek, mathematics, history, geography, etc., acquired in such a way that he will forget, within a couple of years, every fact that has been pestled into him. for every vacancy in the various departments of the administration there are dozens, or even scores, of applicants; and the candidate selected for the post is the one whose mind has been most successfully subjected to this process of over-cramming, and consequently most effectually ruined for all the practical purposes of life. now, to whatever cause it may be ascribed, there can be no doubt that the general level throughout the various branches of the public service is one of mediocrity. we are not surrounded, faithful and devoted as our public servants are universally admitted to be, by administrative geniuses. facts point altogether the other way. great national catastrophes, like the blunders and miscalculations that have characterized the conduct of the war in south africa, have always resulted in making the most uncomfortable revelations concerning the inefficiency of more than one important department of government. the war office has long since become a public scandal, and if the truth were known about the inner domesticity of more than one great administrative office, the susceptibilities of the nation would be still further shocked and outraged. fortunately, however--or it may be unfortunately--government linen is usually washed at home; and it is only in times of great emergency that the truth leaks out, to the general consternation. when this does happen there is a great outcry about the inefficiency of this or that branch of the public service. the government in power wait to see if the agitation dies a natural death; and if it is successfully kept up, a sort of pretence at reform takes place. there is a re-shuffle. fresh names are given to old abuses; incompetent officials exchange posts; and a new building is erected at the public expense. then all goes on as heretofore. nobody seems to think of making an inquiry into the constitution of the public service itself. but until this is done no real reform of any permanent value can possibly be effected. it is not the nomenclature of appointments, the subdivision of departmental work, and such matters of detail, that stand in need of the reformer. the titles and duties of the several officials are of secondary importance. it is not in them that the evils of bad administration are to be located. the fault lies with the officials themselves, who are the victims of the stupid system which has placed them in the position they occupy. the education they have received has, in the first case, unfitted them for the performance of any but mechanical and routine work; and the strain of a competitive examination, involving the most unintellectual and brain-paralyzing process of cram, has probably destroyed the faculty of initiative, which should be, but is not, a distinguishing characteristic of the administrative official. herein lies the secret of all opposition to progress. it is the permanent official who needs reforming. he is the embodiment of routine and conservatism, because he is the embodiment of mediocrity. progress means ideas, and mediocrity does not deal in them. it has been furnished, instead, by a systematic course of instruction, with a sufficient equipment of the ideas of other people to last its lifetime. whilst we fill our public service with specially prepared mediocrity, the administrative departments will remain reactionary. and as long as education is synonymous with cramming on an organized plan, it will continue to produce mediocrity. the army affords at the present moment an admirable object-lesson in this connection. the results of cramming young men as a preparation for a profession which demands, more than any other, individual initiative and independence, have become painfully apparent upon the field of battle. one of our foremost generals has come home from the campaign declaring the necessity of both officers and men being trained to think and act for themselves. that is one, perhaps the chief, of the great lessons which this war has taught us. but here, again, no useful reform can be achieved by alterations in the drill-book, through lectures by experienced generals, or by the issue of army orders. it is our entire system of education which is again at fault. boys are stuffed with facts before they go to sandhurst, and when they get there they are crammed in special subjects. the whole object of the process is to enable candidates to pass examinations, and not to produce good officers. the effect here is the same as elsewhere. a quantity of useless and some useful knowledge is drilled into the pupil in such a manner that the mind retains nothing that has been put into it. and, to make matters worse, all this is done at the expense of retarding the proper development of faculties which would be of incalculable value to the soldier. most of the blunders of the war are, in fact, attributable to want of common sense, and common sense consists in the capacity of an individual to think for himself and to exercise his judgment. educational methods which, in the majority of cases, appear to destroy this faculty altogether are clearly pernicious. common sense is the most valuable gift with which man can be endowed. it is the very essence of genius, for it consists in the application of intelligence to every detail, and the highest order of intellect can accomplish no more than that. yet it is the rarest of all attributes, for the very reason that it is deliberately destroyed by conventional methods of bringing up children and instructing youth. therefore, before we can hope to obtain a supply of self-reliant officers and men, we must see some radical change in the very principles upon which modern methods of education are founded. wherever we go we find this curse of mediocrity. in the professions, at the bar, in the pulpit, amongst physicians, it is apparent everywhere. there are clever men, of course; but the very fact that their names spring at once prominently to mind is in itself a proof that ability is exceptional. some people, of course, accepting the world as they find it, may think it very unreasonable to expect able men to be plentiful in all walks of life. that is, to my mind, the chief pathos of the situation. it has come to be accepted that the world must be filled with a great majority of very commonplace people, even amongst the educated classes. no doubt it is filled at the present moment with a very vast preponderance of conventional minds manufactured to meet the supposed requirements of our complicated civilization. but i deny that this need be the case. on the contrary, we are surrounded on all sides by ability, by great possibilities of individual development, even by genius. and our education systems are busily engaged in the work of destroying this precious material, substituting facts for ideas, forcing the mind away from its natural bent, and manufacturing a machine instead of a man. chapter ii square pegs in round holes perhaps the worst evil from which the world suffers in an educational sense is the misplaced individual. nothing is more tragic, and yet nothing is more common, than to see men occupying positions for which they are unfitted by nature and therefore by inclination; whilst it is obvious that, had the circumstances of their early training been different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction. this miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individual misery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go far beyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most baneful influence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and upon the development of the human race. one of the advantages of the division of labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that it offers a fair field for personal adaptation. people select the particular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this way everybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most useful work of which he is capable. it is a fine theory. perhaps in olden times, before the introduction of education systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades and industries. a man had then at least some opportunity of developing a natural bent. he was not taken by the state almost from infancy, crammed with useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment within his reach. the object was not to educate him above his station and then make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the civil service. a bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for which he may have shown some predisposition. of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents or from some other cause. there are many such examples to be met with in the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different callings from those into which they were forced in their youth. sir william herschel, who discovered uranus, and who first conceived the generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up by his father to be a musician. in spite of his predilection for astronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until he was promoted from being a performer in the pump room at bath to the position of astronomer royal. faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remained in this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. it was quite by accident that somebody more intelligent than michael faraday's pastors and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered by sir humphry davy. this led happily to the young bookbinder making the acquaintance of the lecturer, and eventually obtaining a position as assistant in the royal institution. linnæus, the great naturalist, had a very narrow escape from missing his proper vocation. he was sent to a grammar-school, but exhibited no taste for books; therefore his father decided to apprentice him to a shoemaker. fortunately, however, a discriminating physician had observed the boy's love of natural history, and took him into his own house to teach him botany and physiology. instances of the kind might be multiplied. milton himself began life as a schoolmaster, and the father of turner, one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived, did his best to turn his brilliant son into a barber. the point, however, is obvious enough without the need of further illustration. a few examples have been adduced of great geniuses who have contrived, by the accident of circumstances or through sheer force of character, to escape from an environment which was forced upon them against their natural inclination. but it is not everybody who is gifted with such commanding talent and so much obstinacy and perseverance as to be able to overcome the artificial obstacles placed in the way of his individual tendencies; and now we have, what happily did not exist in the day of herschel, faraday, turner, linnæus and others--a compulsory education system to strangle originality and natural development at the earliest possible stage. most people would probably find it far easier to quote instances offhand of friends who had missed their proper vocation in life than of those who were placed exactly in the position best suited to their taste and capacity. the failures in life are so obviously in excess of those who may be said to have succeeded that specific illustrations of the fact are hardly necessary. one has only to exert ordinary powers of observation to perceive that the world is not at all well ordered in this respect. it has already been pointed out that the public service and the professions are almost entirely filled with what must be called mediocrity; and one of the most potent causes of this unhappy state of affairs is the exquisite infallibility with which a blind system is constantly forcing square pegs into round holes. every profession and calling teems with examples. there are men, intended by nature to be artists and musicians, leading a wretched and unnatural existence in many a merchant's office because their best faculties were undeveloped during the early years of schooling. mathematicians, philosophers, even poets, are tied to trade or to some equally unsuitable occupation. scores of so-called literary men ought to be calculating percentages or selling dry goods; and no doubt there are shop-assistants and stock-jobbers who might, if led into the path of culture, have become creditable authors and journalists. this is neither joke nor satire. it is sober earnest, as many observant readers will readily testify. the loss is not only to the individual, it is to society at large, and to the whole world. no one will deny the fact; but to how many will it occur that such anomalies cannot be the outcome of natural development and progress, but that they must be directly or indirectly attributable to some artificial cause? it is the great difficulty against which all human advancement has to contend, that people can rarely be brought to question principles which have become a part and parcel of their everyday existence. there are plenty of individuals who are ready to tinker with existing institutions, and who erroneously dignify that process by the name of reform. but nothing is more despairing than the effort to convince conventionally brought up people that some cherished convention, with which the world has put up for an indefinite period, is founded upon fallacy, and ought to be cast out root and branch. even in the united states, where far greater efforts are made to encourage individuality in the schools and colleges than is the case with the countries of the old world, people are not much better distributed amongst the various professions and occupations than they are here. i have made inquiries amongst americans of wide experience and observation, and have learnt that nothing is more common in the states than to find individuals brought up to exercise functions for which they are wholly unfitted by natural capacity and inclination. an instance was given me, by an american friend, of a boy who spent all his leisure in constructing clever little mechanical contrivances, in running miniature locomotives, and in setting up electric appliances of one kind and another. one day the youth's father came to him and said: 'i don't know what to make of b----. could you find him a place in a wholesale merchant's office?' when it was pointed out to the parent that his son showed unmistakable mechanical genius, he obstinately insisted on getting the boy a situation for which he was quite unsuited, and which was highly distasteful to him. i quote this instance to show that the parent is often as bad an educator as the school itself. in this case the school would have taken as little notice of the boy's natural bent as his father. it would, in all probability, never have discovered it at all. but it has become so much an accepted axiom that children are to be manufactured into anything that happens to suit the taste or convenience of their guardians, that it probably never occurred to the parent in question that he was committing a cruel and foolish act in forcing his son out of the path into which the boy's natural instinct was guiding him. the youth who might have pursued a happy and prosperous career as a mechanical engineer is now a disappointed man, struggling on, with little hope of success, in an occupation which does not interest him, and for which he does not possess the slightest adaptability. every nation is equally at fault in this respect. in germany, for instance, the child is quite as much a pawn at the disposal of its parent and the school system as it is elsewhere. i spent a number of years in the country, and enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with many german families. nothing has left upon my mind a deeper impression than the tragedy i witnessed of a boy being gradually and systematically weaned from the pursuit to which he was passionately devoted, and forced into a career utterly unsympathetic and distasteful to his peculiar temperament. the boy was simply, from head to foot, a musician. he spent every moment he could steal from his school studies in playing through the difficult scores of wagner's music dramas. his taste, his musical memory, the enormous natural ability which enabled him to surmount all technical difficulties with ease, were apparent to everybody who knew him. yet his parents determined from the first that he should study law, and enter the legal profession. i have never seen anything more painful than the deliberate discouragement, during a period extending over several years, of the boy's natural bent, and the application of absolute compulsion to force him, against every natural instinct, to prepare himself for a profession repugnant to his inclinations, and for which he was not in the smallest degree adapted. out of this promising musical material the _stadt gymnasium_ manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. he was stuffed with the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customary examination, and was despatched, much against his will, to the universities of jena and zürich. when i last saw him he was a plodding lawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner, with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. the _gymnasium_, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done their work very effectually. they had succeeded in reducing him to the level of a machine, and in all probability germany lost an excellent musician who might have given pleasure to thousands of others, besides enjoying an honourable career of useful and congenial work. we have seen that between the stupidity of the parent and the inflexibility of the school system children have little chance of developing their natural propensities. the results surround us everywhere, and there is no getting away from them. all that the school professes to do is to stuff the pupil with a certain quantity of facts according to a fixed curriculum. it does not pretend to exercise any other function. there is no effort to differentiate between individuals, or to discover the natural bent of each particular child. instruction consists in cramming and prescribing by a more or less pernicious method--according to the lights of the particular school authorities in some cases, and in others according to a hard and fast code enforced by the state--a certain quantity of facts into all pupils without distinction. parents, on the other hand, think they have fulfilled their duty simply by sending their children to school. the only thing considered necessary to equip a child for the battle of life is to get him an education, and nobody bothers his head about the principles or the effects of the process. the parent leaves everything to the school, regardless of the fact that schools do not pretend to concern themselves about the natural tendencies of their pupils. he is satisfied if his son is receiving the same education as his neighbour's, and is quite contented to leave the question of his future career to be an after-consideration. the result upon the world in general of this double neglect on the part of parents and school systems is disastrous in the extreme. in the first place, it makes the life of the misplaced individual a burden to himself and to those by whom he is surrounded. natural tendencies cannot be wholly suppressed, even by education systems; and the victim's existence is not rendered more bearable by the reflection that, but for circumstances which he is rarely able to analyze, he might have succeeded in some other and more agreeable occupation had he only received the necessary encouragement in his youth. secondly, there is the fact that the progress of civilization is enormously retarded by its being rarely in the hands of the most fit. the most fit are not, and cannot be, produced under prevailing conditions. the whole machinery of education is directed towards the production of a dead level of mediocrity. in many cases--such as, for example, in prussia--this is done by design, and not by accident. instruction is imparted in such a manner that no regard is paid to individual propensities. all are subjected, more or less, to the same process. they are fitted for nothing in particular, and no trouble is taken to ascertain the direction in which an individual mind should be developed. the consequence is that, from one end of the civilized world to the other, resounds the cry, 'what shall we do with our boys?' and, lastly, it scarcely requires pointing out that the enormous sums of money spent by governments, by municipalities, and by private persons upon education, in order to produce this lamentable state of affairs, is so much waste and extravagance. not only does it bring in no practical return, but it works out in a precisely opposite direction. schools and colleges that only serve to produce anomalous and unnatural social conditions, that stifle genius and talent, and that cause widespread misery among the unsuitably educated, must be reckoned as a national loss. people deplore the heavy sums spent on armaments and on the maintenance of enormous fleets and armies; but it may be doubted if this expenditure is as costly in the end as that which goes to support a systematic manufacture of the unfit, and to assist in the distribution of individuals to stations in the social scheme for which they are wholly unsuited. chapter iii the destruction of genius most people labour under the delusion that genius only makes its appearance twice or thrice during a generation. it is certainly the fact that a napoleon, a shakespeare, or a beethoven, is only born once in a century; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded as unnatural phenomena. but genius of a less high order is far more common than is generally supposed. people are simply blind to it. although it surrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. and nearly everybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversity that is as unconscious as it is criminal. those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental development of an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinary processes of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of its mind. if children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at an astonishing rate. give an imaginative child of five or six some simple object, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round it a web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame. naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to the very motes that float in a sunbeam; they will spin an odyssey out of the most trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. every commonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious and fantastic attributes. when left to observe facts for themselves, they will develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of cramming and caning would ever succeed in driving into them. there are probably few parents who have not been startled, at some period or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an original reflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental development. did it ever occur to them that some intellectual process must have been going on in the child's mind to produce such powers of observation or thought? there is a fallacious notion, founded upon pure want of observation, that human beings are unable to form ideas or to think for themselves until they have been put through an elaborate course of mental gymnastics. a great deal of the process misnamed education is directed towards this end, with the result that in nine cases out of ten the brain is simply paralyzed and rendered incapable of performing its proper functions. the fact is, that people, whether young or old, cannot be forced to think. it is a habit that must come of its own accord, and that can only be stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. observant and reflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire development and upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will have noticed that there is a natural tendency on the part of a child, if not interfered with, to think and to expand its faculty of imagination. this tendency is not shared to an equal extent by all children; there are, of course, dissimilarities caused by varying degrees of intelligence. but it is there, in however rudimentary and undeveloped a stage; and the more backward it appears to be, the more care should be taken not to destroy it or to check its natural growth. now, the whole machinery of education is brought to bear, from the moment the child is of an age to receive any instruction, to strangle the development of the thinking and imaginative faculties. that process will be described presently. what i wish to point out first is that, long before the school or the governess commences this operation, the parents of the child, or those to whom they have delegated the duty of taking charge of it during the tenderest and most momentous years of its existence, are generally engaged in doing everything they can to bring about the same pernicious result. of course the evil is committed in sheer ignorance. but it has been bred for so many generations that individual judgment and common sense must every day be becoming more rare. therefore the evil spreads, and people blame the introduction of railways and other mechanical improvements for the diminishing supply of artistic and creative genius, whilst they are in reality themselves busily employed in stifling its development. there are two ways in which this unhappy result is brought about. in the first place, there is the invariable custom of giving young children toys which, far from stimulating the imagination, only serve to impress upon their minds the commonplace facts of everyday life. it is really, only in a different form, a part of the process by which, later on, the education system drives out ideas and crams in facts. to take a concrete instance, a doll is the plaything usually given to little girls. at first sight nothing can appear more charming or instructive than the gift to a little girl, who will one day be a wife and a mother, of the miniature representation of a baby. there will be a bath provided, in which she may learn to wash it. everything will be complete--soap, sponge, loofah, puff-box, and powder. the present will be accompanied by a _layette_, so that the child may learn to dress her infant and to change its clothes. hair-brushes will teach her to keep the doll's hair neat; and probably a dozen other toilet requisites, of which the masculine mind has no notion or is expected to affect ignorance, will be found ready at hand to inculcate the lesson of nursery routine. in this ingenious way the materialistic side of life is deliberately forced upon the attention of the child. everything is providently supplied that would be calculated to occupy her attention with commonplace facts instead of with fancies. the child is not encouraged to make a living creature of this inanimate dummy, to tell it stories, or to exercise her imagination in some other way. she is provided with a round of prosaic and extremely material duties, and her mind is carefully kept within these bounds by details of soap and feeding-bottles, which do not offer scope for any flight of imagination. it would be far better to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a little girl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. she would, if left to herself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn to exercise her dormant powers of imagination and originality. with the same lack of forethought boys are surrounded from earliest infancy with objects designed to keep their minds within the narrow limits of fact. their playthings are ships, fire-engines, miniature railways, water-pumps, and such-like. the imagination is allowed as little play as possible. interest is carefully concentrated upon the mechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments, wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go to make up a mechanical contrivance. great care is taken in constructing toy models to reproduce at least the chief points of the original, in order to give them a supposititious educational value. the parents then fondly imagine that, in stocking the nursery with these abominations, they are largely assisting in the development of the boy's mind. to people who do not understand children it is difficult to convey any adequate idea of the fatal result produced upon the dawning intellect by this introduction of materialism into the nursery. the imaginative will at once say that the contention is too far fetched. certainly the pernicious effects of such toys as have been described are not easily discernible; therein lies the insidiousness of this retarding process. but to those who have watched, as i have done, the natural development of an intelligent child's powers of reflection and imagination--unchecked by dolls or toy locomotives--there will be neither absurdity nor exaggeration in what i have written. toys in themselves are harmless and unobjectionable things, though every observant person who has had much to do with young children will readily concede how superfluous they are as a means of amusement. the average child will treasure up a button or a shell long after it has destroyed, or maybe forgotten the existence of, the most elaborate and expensive toy. that is a commonplace of the nursery. but it does not seem to convey either meaning or moral to the majority of parents. the second way in which the thinking and imaginative faculties are impeded in their development is by the discouragement of, or by the injudicious answers given to, the questions asked by children. at a certain age the latter become inquisitive about everything in the universe. they ply their elders with perpetual questioning; and it must be acknowledged that many of their interrogations are highly inconvenient and unanswerable. it is very difficult for the average person to reply offhand to elementary questions such as, why does the sun shine? what makes the wind blow? how does a seed grow into a tree? and so forth. few people have the patience to answer the numerous inquiries of an intelligent child; and sooner than expose their ignorance, parents will generally quench this thirst for knowledge at the outset by a flat prohibition. the selfish desire for peace prompts them to refuse the solicited information altogether, or, worse still, to return answers calculated to kill imaginative ideas or to impress the child's mind with a bare and prosaic materialism. they do not stop to think of the immense harm that may be done to the child by throwing cold water upon its first attempts at research. children, it must be remembered, do not possess the perseverance and determination which often come to the rescue of original genius at a later period. however active their minds may be, they are also timid, and shrink back quickly under the influence of unsympathetic treatment. the fact should be patent to everybody that children strive constantly to use the brains with which nature has endowed them. being naturally imaginative and original, these faculties only need ordinary encouragement to develop and flourish. yet the entire method of bringing up children, from the cradle to the school bench, is directed towards stifling all originality and substituting for it a stock of commonplace ideas and conventional knowledge. the process is begun at home. it takes its root in conventionality, the curse of all individuality and progress. parents, brought up to be the slaves of custom, carry on the imbecile traditions that have been handed down to them from former generations, without stopping to consider whether they are rational or foolish. it is good enough for the majority of people that the imbecile things they do were done by their forefathers before them; and no tradition is more rigidly followed than that which prescribes the manner of bringing up children. it would have been thought that those who had themselves suffered from the effects of bad methods would be careful not to repeat the mistakes with their own children. but that is the worst aspect of the evil. its chief operation consists in hedging round the intelligence with conventionalities to such an extent as to exclude vigorous and independent thought. the most intelligent people often find the utmost difficulty in attempting to shake off the prejudices inculcated during the early years of life. many, before accomplishing this end, have had to pass through a long period of suffering and adversity. but the average mind is generally a hopeless case. there must be strong inward impulses, or the necessary measure of initiative and courage will not be forthcoming. everybody who chooses to think for himself knows that it is an operation which does not usually entail pleasant consequences. so much for the part played by the parent. the school system stands on a different plane altogether, and must be considered by itself. for parents there is, as has been pointed out, a certain amount of excuse. for the school system there is none. chapter iv human factories distinction must be made, of course, in discussing the effects of teaching methods upon children, between the various kinds of schools, and between public instruction and private tuition. it would not be fair to lump them all together, for the evils they produce are by no means distributed by them in equal proportion. one must differentiate. fundamentally, all education is proceeding on a false principle. in this respect it is necessary to blame education systems, institutions, school teachers, tutors, governesses, and parents alike; for all are engaged in keeping up an educational delusion that is working great harm to the world in general. but when we come to consider the amount of evil produced by each of these factors, it will be seen at once that there is a good deal to choose between them. the private tutor, under present methods of teaching, is in a far better position to encourage the individual development of a child than is the schoolmaster who has the care of a class. children can contend, to a certain extent, against the tyranny of the tutor; they can force their own wishes upon his attention should they possess the necessary strength of character. but the strongest must succumb to the school system. here there is no latitude to particular pupils, no concession made to idiosyncrasies of mind or character. the system must not be relaxed, and in consequence everybody has to be subjected to precisely the same course of study. children begin to receive instruction at a very early age. the usual plan is to take a child the moment it is able to string enough words together to form ideas, and to subject it to a methodical process of teaching. the custom of beginning what is called a child's education at a tender age is verified by the fact that the state now compels, or rather pretends to compel, parents to send their children to school at the age of five, whilst large numbers of the children of the poor are voluntarily sent to school at three years of age, or even younger. it will be observed, therefore, that the state, as far as the masses of the people are concerned, takes the child in hand at the most impressionable period of its existence. the instruction of infants is not a very difficult task, if all that is aimed at is to teach them certain elementary subjects. at five years of age children will generally learn with avidity. their minds are just sufficiently formed to be receptive, and as all knowledge is a blank to them they are ready to learn anything, within the limits of their comprehension, that the teacher may choose to put before them. this would place upon the latter a very heavy responsibility if the matter were left entirely to his discretion. but this is by no means the case; the course of instruction is fixed beforehand by the school managers. it may differ slightly in schools of varying types; but in the main it is identical in all the essentials. to what extent this variation may occur is, however, entirely beside the point. what should be noted in this connection is that each school, and for the matter of that every private teacher, has a fixed plan of instruction which is more or less rigidly enforced. in the case of the school, as has already been stated, no attention whatever is paid to individual requirements. all are subjected to exactly the same process, for better or for worse. the child, therefore, as soon as it begins to attend school is compelled to learn certain things. the stock subjects are reading, writing, and arithmetic. they are necessary accomplishments in all stations of life, and education without them would be practically impossible. i do not disparage them in the least. but there is a good deal to be said about the method of teaching them, and the grave error of making them the principal objective of elementary teaching. in this connection it is both interesting and instructive to note a significant alteration in the day school code issued by the board of education. until quite recently reading, writing, and arithmetic were classed under the code as 'obligatory subjects' in infant schools. article of the code now reads: 'the course of instruction in infant schools and classes should, as a rule, include--suitable instruction, writing, and numbers,' etc. compare this with the same passage contained in former codes. 'the subjects of instruction,' it runs, 'for which grants may be made are the following: (a) obligatory subjects--reading, writing, arithmetic; hereinafter called "the elementary subjects,"' etc. this amendment is a recognition of the fact that nothing can be more detrimental to education than hard-and-fast rules. it is a protest against the general assumption that the curricula of schools must be of a more or less uniform pattern, and puts an end to the absurdity of the central authority prescribing subjects to be taught in all elementary schools, regardless of varying circumstances or the possibility of improved methods of teaching. formerly the pernicious custom existed of examining the pupils, at the annual visit of the inspector, in stereotyped subjects. matthew arnold, reporting to the education department in , observed: 'the mode of teaching in the primary schools has certainly fallen off in intelligence, spirit, and inventiveness during the four or five years which have elapsed since my last report. it could not well be otherwise. in a country where everyone is prone to rely too much on mechanical processes, and too little on intelligence, a change in the education department's regulations, which, by making two-thirds of the government grant depend upon a mechanical examination, inevitably gives a mechanical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to the inspection, is, and must be, trying to the intellectual life of the school. in the inspection the mechanical examination of individual scholars in reading a short passage, writing a short passage, and working two or three sums, cannot but take the lion's share of room and importance, inasmuch as two-thirds of the government grant depend upon it.... in the game of mechanical contrivances the teachers will in the end beat us; and as it is now found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the revised code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering without their really knowing how to read, write, and cipher, so it will with practice no doubt be found possible to get the three-fourths of the one-fifth of the children over six through the examination in grammar, geography, and history without their really knowing any one of these three matters.' throughout the whole of his career as an inspector of elementary schools arnold had to reiterate this complaint again and again. he saw the incentive to cramming provided by the mode of distributing the grants, and he perceived the uselessness of the type of instruction engendered by it. to-day all this has been changed. there is no such thing now as a compulsory annual examination in the three elementary subjects. it has been finally abolished by the central authority. the duty of the inspectors is no longer to examine the children, but to investigate the methods of teaching, the qualifications of the teachers, and so forth. they are, it is true, empowered to examine children when they think it advisable to do so; but they are directed to use this power sparingly, and in exceptional cases. the department at whitehall does not, unfortunately, exist for the purpose of abolishing education systems. it has been called into existence for the sole purpose of distributing grants of public money in aid of elementary education and for the support of training-colleges for teachers. the exercise of this function has necessitated the framing of a code of regulations to be observed by schools wishing to qualify themselves for the grant. this code is revised each year, and has undergone some remarkable changes of late. there is a distinct tendency to make it as elastic as possible, with the obvious aim of encouraging variety in the schools and in the methods of teaching. for an example of this tendency one need only compare the present conditions attaching to the payment of the principal grant to infant schools with those that were in force a few years ago. the higher grant was formerly given if the scholars were taught under a certificated teacher, or under a teacher not less than eighteen years of age, approved by the inspector, and in a room properly constructed and furnished for the instruction of infants. there was also a proviso that the infants should be taught 'suitably to their age.' the new code contains the following regulation: 'a principal grant of s. or s. is made to infant schools and classes. the board shall decide which, if either, of these grants shall be paid after considering the report and recommendation of the inspector upon each of the following four points: (a) the suitability of the instruction to the circumstances of the children and the neighbourhood; (b) the thoroughness and intelligence with which the instruction is given; (c) the sufficiency and suitability of the staff; (d) the discipline and organization.' working in this spirit, the board of education is able to mitigate some of the evils of a state system. but it cannot attack them at the roots without initiating a complete revolution. out and out reforms of this kind are only politically practicable when they are demanded by the irresistible voice of a strong public opinion. the public are misled as to the true issues by the intrigues of political parties. the conflict is narrowed down by party politicians, who have particular interests to serve, to a mere squabble about school boards, voluntary schools, local authorities, and religious instruction. the consequence is that these side issues have come to be regarded as the great education question of the day. it is not easy to stir up any deep feeling about the comparative merits of the two classes of elementary schools. most people do not care a jot whether their children go to one or the other. it is not the masses who agitate about denominational or secular teaching, but those limited classes who have some direct interest in matters affecting religion. but who would not cast aside their lethargy, if they were made to understand that the question to be decided is not whether this or that type of school should be supported, but whether the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? that behind all these petty controversies lie great issues, affecting the fundamental principles of education, which must be pushed to the front unless the degeneration of the race--an inevitable result of the present educational method--is to be continued indefinitely? let people consider for a moment what is effected by the present system. the child, as we have seen, is taken by the state at an early age and subjected, for the most part, to a careful drilling in the three elementary subjects. there is no harm in knowing how to read and write; it is a very necessary accomplishment. a little arithmetic is also indispensable to the fulfilment of many of the commonest duties of everyday life. but, apart from the iniquity of cramming or forcing the brain in a particular direction, it must be recollected that by imposing certain subjects upon the undeveloped mind of a child, others are necessarily excluded. the process therefore, when rigidly carried out, has very serious and far-reaching effects. it prevents the development of the mind in any direction but that which is being enforced. the harm done to the individual child by this means is incalculable. on the very threshold of the development of its faculties according to natural instincts this development is violently arrested by an artificial operation. nor does the evil end here. this interference with nature is carried on throughout the whole school career of the child, and the tradition flourishes in a modified form in the colleges and universities. it is, in fact, the vital principle of modern education. these schools in which the children of the people are taught are nothing more than factories for turning out a uniformly-patterned article. they do not succeed in their object of conferring what is called an education upon their pupils, but they contrive to drive out all original ideas without implanting any useful knowledge in their place. the general result of this wholesale manufacture of dummies will be dealt with directly. the intention here is merely to point out that the practical working of the machinery of state education is to check the natural development of the mind, and to unfit those whom it has victimized, not only for one, but for all occupations that demand manual dexterity or practical intelligence. chapter v the greatest misery of the greatest number it is now time to consider the effect of this system of compulsory education upon the masses of the people. in the first two chapters an attempt was made to sketch some of the anomalies brought about by the educational methods of our public schools and universities, and by the pernicious system of public competitive examinations. we will now turn our attention exclusively to the masses, and endeavour to see what national instruction does for them. the common people labour under the delusion that children who have passed the standards of an elementary school are educated. they have been fitted, according to the popular belief, for a superior station in life. the first ambition of parents is, therefore, for their child to obtain a post suitable to its supposed scholarship. of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in intelligence. but these facts are only discovered by the victims themselves after years of bitter experience. totally unfitted for any station in life, many of them leave school full of self-confidence in the belief that their superior education will secure them a good opening. despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. the result is, of course, an over-supply of candidates for employment of this kind. in consequence, the girls have to fall back upon domestic service; while the boys swell the ranks of unskilled labourers and unemployed loafers, or, worse still, betake themselves to a life of dishonesty. nowhere are the evil effects of this education system more strikingly illustrated than in the country districts. the children of agricultural labourers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of no earthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturally fitted. instead of being prepared for country pursuits, they are given an inferior type of all-round education which is equally useless everywhere. when they leave school they can read, write, add, subtract, divide, and multiply--after a fashion; they can mispronounce a few french words, without being able to construct a single grammatical sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history and geography, all of which will be totally obliterated from their memories within a space of twelve months. shorthand is not a very promising preparation for the plough; and french and mathematics are equally valueless accomplishments for the carting of manure. dairymaids need neither history nor geography; they can even do without grammar. consequently these unhappy school-children have been rendered useless for all the practical purposes of the life they ought to lead. the result is inevitable. there is a constant, never-ceasing exodus from the country into the towns. the rural school victims are incited to look for employment in an altogether different sphere from that for which nature originally intended them. philosophers and politicians crack their heads over this mysterious problem of town immigration; but it is really a very simple affair. we are pretending to educate the rural population by conferring upon them the blessings of french and shorthand. the natural consequence of our excellent foresight in spreading this type of culture throughout the land is that there is a scarcely remarkable dearth of rural labour. farm hands are not quite as plentiful as they used to be, and there is some difficulty in getting damsels to churn butter. but, on the other hand, we are driving this mob of cultured yokels into the towns to crowd out local labour, to starve, and to fill the gaols and workhouses. london has at the present moment mainly to thank this process of 'education' for the overcrowding problem which is becoming every day more dangerous and pressing. it is useless to talk of pulling down slums and building up model blocks, or of inventing fresh means of communication to convey artisans to suburban dwellings, whilst the real cause of the evil is left untouched. young men and women will continue to pour in from the country districts as long as a smattering of geography and arithmetic flatters them into the delusion that they are educated, and that knowledge of the useless kind that has been drummed into them is the high-road to fortune. it is, however, of little use to urge overcrowding as a ground for reforming educational methods. few people are stirred by what to them is a purely abstract question. they see nothing to indicate its existence, and they know nothing of its evils. they seldom walk down the dreary avenues of bricks and mortar which contain the houses of the working classes; and if they do, they scarcely realize the fact that inside the humble, dingy little dwellings whole families are crowded into single rooms, share each other's beds, and are even thankful to find sleeping accommodation upon the floor. but everybody appreciates and understands the servant question. that touches the comfort of the individual too nearly to be ignored. the rapid extinction of good servants, the insolence and inefficiency of the average domestic--these are facts of everyday life that will come home to the suffering upper and middle classes. it is not because they are educated that domestic servants have deteriorated, however, but on account of the profound state of ignorance in which their elementary schooling has left them, leading them to the misapprehension that, from the standpoint of culture, they are as good as anybody and certainly above their menial position. servants have as little need of french verbs and hieroglyphics as the ploughboy or the dairymaid. there are many useful things that might be learnt by a person who wished to be trained for domestic service; but it is rare enough to find a cook that, amongst other items of a liberal education, has been given cooking lessons. in this respect education is like food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. we do not wish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to a private secretary. then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farm labourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax? it may be highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class read aloud passages from shakespeare and milton without dropping more than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half a dozen multi-syllabic words. but, unfortunately, there is no demand for parlourmaids who can quote 'hamlet' amid the intervals of waiting at table, or for page-boys capable of spouting 'paradise lost' for the intellectual improvement of the servants' hall. perhaps these instances show as well as anything the grotesque absurdity of collecting a number of children together, and attempting to teach them things that they are not fitted to do, whilst no effort is made to cultivate in each individual the faculties that are really capable of development. it is not in the least surprising that occupations involving manual labour are for the most part filled with dissatisfied and incompetent grumblers, who have been obligingly provided by a state system of education. but if any further illustration be needed of the superficiality and harmfulness of the education forced upon the masses, we have it glaringly enough in the cheap literature of to-day. this stupendous mass of bosh could not have been produced unless there were a demand for it. some people are never tired of abusing the millionaires who have made their fortunes by providing the illiterate nonsense that forms the intellectual food of the vast majority of the public. it is wholly unjustifiable and illogical to blame them. they are not founders of new schools of thought in the field of literature; they are men of business, and do not pretend to be anything worse. as such, it is their vocation to find out what the public want, and to supply it to them. they have no interest in making the million take their literature after it has been passed through a mincer. they chop up news and hash grammar at half price because the patrons of cheap papers and periodicals like their literature served up in that fashion. it is not the millionaire trader who is to blame for this state of affairs--he merely profits by its existence. the real culprit is the education system, which is the universal provider of the peculiar type of culture that interests itself in the number of beef sandwiches that would be required to encircle the earth, or the rate at which the population of the world would have to increase within a given time to enable its inhabitants, by mounting upon each other's heads, to reach the moon. the enormous demand for this class of literature is the most pregnant evidence of the miserable effects of misapplied education and defective instruction that could well be brought forward. but it is by no means confined to the uncultured masses who have been driven through the standards of an elementary school. thousands who have been put through the paces of what is called 'higher education' may be seen in railway-carriages, at health resorts, or in the public libraries, deeply immersed in cheap-jack reading-matter that no self-respecting person of moderate intelligence would care even to be capable of specifying. this painful sight, which cannot have escaped the notice of the least observant, must surely lead the reflective man or woman to doubt the value of educational methods that have led to no better result. it is monstrous to think of years spent in grinding out syntax rules, mathematics, latin, french, geography, science, history, composition, and a dozen other branches of knowledge, in order to develop a taste for sensational rags, middle-class magazines, and inferior fiction. if the process were coupled with no worse consequences than this, nobody of the least pretension to culture would wish to see it continued another day. but we have seen that the mischief goes far beyond mere superficiality and bad taste. it carries its pernicious influence into every social problem by which modern statesmen are perplexed and harassed. from the housing question to the dearth of servants we feel its baneful effects. and as if it were not enough to have unfitted the masses of the people for the occupations best suited to the great bulk of them, to have instilled into the minds of working-men's children, by means of illiterate shakespeare recitations and burlesque efforts to grasp geography, a contempt for the skilled labour of the artisan--this education process has brought about a general deterioration in the manners of the lower classes that has long been a subject of general complaint. nobody wishes to see the common people in a constant attitude of servility towards the classes above them. to thinking people nothing is more painful than to observe such signs of a want of proper self-respect and independence on the part of freeborn men and women of whatever standing in the social scale. but it is a significant fact that educating the masses, in the sense in which that term seems to be generally employed, has had the effect of eradicating from them all respect for education. the educated man of real attainments is not looked up to in the smallest degree by the average individual of the lower orders. it would be useless to quote, in support of a statement made in the presence of unexceptional members of the working classes, the opinion of any recognised authority. for the matter of that, there are many persons of a higher rank who are supposed to have enjoyed the benefits of a more liberal type of education than that afforded by the elementary school, who are equally unimpressed by the value of expert knowledge. whether it is that state-educated youths think that their accomplishments have made them the equals of everybody else, or whether the inanity of the system to which they have been subjected has given them a contempt for learning, it would be difficult to determine. probably both misconceptions are evenly distributed amongst the victims of the process. but the fact that this should be the case at all speaks eloquently for the crass ignorance which results from the confounding, on the part of so-called educationists, of mere fact-cramming and subject-compulsion with the proper development of the human faculties. chapter vi the output of prigs having considered the evils produced by sham education, such as is compulsorily given to the masses of the people, we can proceed to examine into the average results effected by more genuine and efficient systems of cramming and instruction. it is not in the least degree necessary, for this purpose, to go into minute comparisons of the various types of secondary schools and colleges that have been established in this country. in the actual method of teaching there is little to choose between them. all have practically a common aim, namely, the preparation of boys and young men for examinations. of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or otherwise. but that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. the boys are crammed just the same. whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. there is no middle course except the private tutor; and he, owing to the defects of his own early training and to the terrific conservatism peculiar to his profession, probably knows no better process than the familiar routine of cram and idea-suppression. the whole of school life is a scramble for marks. the school managers and masters are interested in getting the boys stuffed with facts, dates, figures, and inflections, because the prestige of the school--and consequently its commercial success--is mainly dependent upon the creditable placing of pupils in public examinations. therefore the boys are encouraged, or rather compelled, to occupy themselves with what will best conduce to secure this object, regardless of their own wishes or obvious inclinations. a boy might enter a grammar-school, or one of the great public schools, teeming to his finger-tips with an inborn thirst for scientific knowledge; he might spend all his spare moments making crude experiments with an air-pump, or gazing at planets through a cheap astronomical telescope; he might fail dismally to grasp the rudiments of the latin grammar, and be incapable of conjugating an irregular verb; but his nose would be kept down to the grindstone of the school curriculum all the same, and not the smallest attention paid to his obvious bent of mind. he had been placed there, the authorities would say, to receive a general education, and a general education he should have. if during the process all the scientific enthusiasm is ground out of him, that is not the business of the schoolmaster. the boy, for the ordinary purposes of instruction, is an empty bottle into which a certain prescription is to be poured. the prescription has been made up beforehand, and cannot be altered. the school undertakes to administer a draught, but it refuses to bother about diagnosing each case. there is only one method of treatment, and every patient who enters the establishment has to be submitted to it. there have been, of course, enlightened pedagogues. the names of arnold and thring will always stand out prominently in the history of english school life, and it will be a bad day indeed for the youth in our public schools when their traditional influence shall have been entirely obliterated. they grafted upon the established methods of teaching a liberal and broad-minded effort to bring out what was best in each pupil by other influences. 'it is no wisdom,' dr. arnold declared, 'to make boys prodigies of information; but it is our wisdom and our duty to cultivate their faculties each in its season, first the memory and imagination, and then the judgment; to furnish them with the means, and to excite the desire of improving themselves, and to wait with confidence god's blessing on the result.' edward thring wrote the following remarks in his diary: 'education is not bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden truths and new creative genius. if the cursed rule-mongering and technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might be done. three parts of teaching and learning in england is the hiding common sense and disguising ignorance under phrases.' no stranger anomaly can be conceived than that presented by the constant effort of these two eminent headmasters to undo the evils of a universal system of education. it is not often that people strive to set their house in order after this fashion, and all honour is due to them for the courageous endeavour. the mistake they made was in tinkering with a system inherently bad and useless, instead of taking the bold step of abolishing it altogether and beginning afresh on new and sound principles. the energies of schoolmasters of the type of thring and arnold are, in fact, concentrated mainly upon a constant struggle to prevent the ordinary process of school instruction from producing prigs. stupid boys are generally rendered more stupid by teaching, for reasons that will be analyzed later on. but boys whose brains are amenable to academic training are liable, unless the environment of the school is peculiarly unfavourable to the development of the species, to become priggish. it is the purely academic training that produces the prig. football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. the important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. in a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or artifice. the same law of nature applies to the working of the brain. stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind, and the result must necessarily be as artificial as the process. the mind becomes incapable of thinking individually and naturally; it becomes pedantic and circumscribed, powerless to give simple expression to simple thoughts; and the prig is made. it requires a great deal of kicking and hustling on the part of the victim's schoolfellows to arrest this process, and the cure is generally only effected outwardly. priggishness cannot be eradicated from the system in a moment, even by the most heroic measures. its excision involves a slow mental process, the converse of that which served to call it into existence. the prig has to divest himself of the false mental outlook imposed upon him by his education, and to begin all over again. it is a hard lesson which can only be learnt in the school of life, generally after humiliating experience and bitter suffering. many never succeed in learning it. there must be some material to work upon, and probably their individuality, weak at the commencement and therefore doubly in need of tender treatment and fostering care, has been hopelessly crushed out of existence by the conventional training of school and university. under present conditions prigs can and do grow up everywhere. in some educational institutions--notably in great public schools like eton and harrow--they are more discouraged than in others; but the cramming system has reached such proportions that all schools and colleges are affected in a greater or less degree. they infect our public life, as we have seen; largely recruit our public service; and are in evidence in the pulpit, at the schoolmaster's desk, on public platforms, in the lecture-room of the university, and wherever the services of educated men are employed. the ideals of men like arnold and thring cannot be carried out as long as the examination system puts a premium upon cramming. 'i call that the best theme,' said dr. arnold, alluding to original composition, 'which shows that the boy has read and thought for himself; that the next best, which shows that he has read several books, and digested what he has read; and that the worst, which shows that he has followed but one book, and followed that without reflection.' there is no time nowadays for a boy to read and think for himself. besides the examinations inside his own school for which he has to be prepared, there are scholarships, university examinations, competitive examinations for the civil service, and a host of other possibilities of the kind, all of which necessitate the acquisition of an enormous number of useless facts in every branch of learning. too much attention is concentrated on the admirable physical product of the athletic side of our public school and university life. this advantage of the english system of education has been dwelt upon to such an extent, that people are apt to overlook the fact that, side by side with these fine specimens of healthy and for the most part unintellectual manhood, we are manufacturing a purely academic article of the least inspired and most retrogressive description. if somebody, wishing to make you acquainted with a friend, says to you: 'i want you to meet so-and-so; he was at eton and trinity hall, and came out tenth in the mathematical tripos,' you know exactly the kind of man to whom you are going to be introduced. he will have a very proper contempt for made-up ties, and will refuse to fasten the bottom button of his waistcoat. you know beforehand the precise point of view that he will take upon every conceivable topic, and the channels in which his conversation is certain to flow. his entire mental horizon will be bounded by academic conventionalities in such a cast-iron fashion that it would, you are well aware, waste your time to attempt to extend its boundaries by the fraction of an inch. if you say anything yourself out of the beaten track, you know that you will be looked down upon as a fool or a faddist. the eton stamp will be upon his dress and manners; the cambridge brand seared into every crevice of his mind. there will be an individuality about him, but it will be an individuality shared in common with hundreds of young men of the same educational antecedents. that is the fault of the system. it takes away, or fails to evoke, the distinguishing traits of each individual, and substitutes a kind of manufactured personality according to the particular institution, or type of institution, in which the educational metamorphosis has taken place. 'a mob of boys,' said the man who raised uppingham from complete obscurity to the front rank of public schools, 'cannot be educated.' it is, nevertheless, the process that is going on all over the civilized world. reform does not lie alone in making instruction itself more effective. as long as the principle is retained of forcing certain facts and certain subjects into the mind of every boy, the country will continue to breed conventionality, to produce a uniform type of useless mediocrity, and to make prigs. this is, unfortunately, exactly what the average educationist aims at. there is no disguise about the belief that conventional ideas, and the manufacture of what is called average ability, are the sheet-anchor of the state. and this type of fossilized conservatism seems to grow in proportion to the number of schools and colleges in the country. lower-middle-class young men, of no intellectual predisposition at all, are being turned out on all sides crammed with the narrowest type of educational tradition. prigs are produced wholesale; the worst and most odious branch of the family being the semi-illiterate prig--the man who gets drummed out of decent regimental messes, the man who wants to go on the stage and declaim shakespeare through his nose, the man who vulgarizes the public service by dropping his h's in the great government departments, and others too numerous to be specified. everything is vulgar that pretends to be what it is not. priggishness is an artificial mental condition that is far more common than people generally suspect. we are most of us prigs, if we only knew it. the man who is unable to get rid of conventions and to think for himself is a prig. england is peopled with them. we meet them at every turn; we see them driving the country to the dogs by sheer inability to grasp its needs;--and we send our sons to the schools and universities to be manufactured after the same pattern. chapter vii boy degeneration if some boys thrive, according to ordinary school standards, on the cramming system, what becomes of those to whose nature the process is entirely antagonistic? the question is best answered by a glance at the schools themselves. take one of the great public schools, and it will be found that much the same conditions are prevalent in every class or form. there is a small percentage of boys at the top of each class who are considered the most intelligent, and by whom most of the questions asked by the master are answered. the remaining majority are divided into two sections, one of which consists of what are termed boys of average ability, whilst the other contains the lazy element, the refractory boys, and the dullards. in the last chapter we chiefly discussed those individuals who may be taken as representing the average of the best results achieved by higher schools and universities. these form, however, only a fraction of the scholars who pass through such institutions. it still remains for us to discover the rôle which is played by the other four-fifths in school-life. according to scholastic methods of classification, the bulk of this residue are boys of medium intelligence who plod on without specially distinguishing themselves, and contrive, by dint of industry and application, to blunder through the ordinary course of study without coming to grief. it would be difficult to conjure up a more melancholy picture than that presented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by being performed against the grain. they suffer more under the system than the dull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, either because some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, or because the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receiving instruction imparted on the cramming principle. but the average mediocrity amongst schoolboys are often inferior in ability both to those who rank above and below them in school attainment. they neither profit by the teaching process, nor do they possess those qualities that would enable them to resist its consequences. thus they fall between two stools, being carried out of their natural sphere, and at the same time failing to attain such a measure of artificial success as would afford them compensation for the injury. success in life is not an easy thing to generalize about. it is, however, important to note as far as possible the results brought about by school education. the boy who is trained to pass examinations has a respectable chance of getting into some branch of the public service; and, as we have seen, it is from amongst his ranks that the permanent officials of the various departments of government are recruited. a great number of those who distinguish themselves academically also pass into the teaching profession; though a considerable percentage of graduates, for reasons that will be discussed in due course, drift into the ranks of the unemployed. the average schoolboy, who does his work mechanically and without enthusiasm, probably furnishes the greatest number of examples of the misplaced individual. his application to his studies is not natural; it is enforced by what is called school discipline. that is to say, the authorities devise every conceivable form of punishment to make a constant grind at obligatory subjects less disagreeable than the consequences of idleness. these are the simple arts by means of which unwilling boys are driven, like cattle, along the highway of what is termed, by an inaccurate application of the english language, knowledge. anybody who has been coerced, and _poena_ed, and flogged through the curriculum of a public school will acknowledge that the performance is not an exhilarating one for the victim. it is preposterous to dignify this nigger-driving by the term 'education.' one might as well talk of the chinese eagerly embracing christianity, when, as a matter of fact, the missionaries have been forced upon them, like their foreign trade, at the point of the bayonet. the wonder is that anybody survives the process and retains his sanity. that many nervous temperaments and highly-gifted minds do not survive it is a point of so much importance that it will be dealt with later on in a separate chapter. what needs emphasizing here is that to make boys do certain things under compulsion is not developing their faculties, but is absolutely preventing their development; and secondly, that this infamous but universal proceeding is responsible for a positive degeneration amongst those whom it is supposed to educate and improve. dr. arnold held that a low standard of schoolboy morality was inevitable. 'with regard to reforms at rugby,' he wrote to a friend, 'give me credit, i must beg of you, for a most sincere desire to make it a place of christian education. at the same time, my object will be, if possible, to form christian men, for christian boys i can scarcely hope to make; i mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and i suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what i consider the boyhood of the human race.' in a letter to another friend he spoke still more strongly on the subject. 'since i began this letter,' he wrote, 'i have had some of the troubles of school-keeping; and one of those specimens of the evil of boy nature which makes me always unwilling to undergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his son to a public school. there has been a system of persecution carried on by the bad against the good, and then, when complaint was made to me, there came fresh persecution on that very account, and divers instances of boys joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and moral, when, if left to themselves, they would rather have shunned it. and the exceedingly small number of boys who can be relied on for active and steady good on these occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable of ordinary life (carlyle's "shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take part with the evil, makes me strongly feel exemplified what the scriptures say about the strait gate and the wide one--a view of human nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, i imagine, to find it hard to realize. but here, in the nakedness of boy nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in a whole city.' this sweeping statement has been quoted because it comes with double force from an undisputed authority such as the late dr. arnold. everybody who has had experience of school-life knows that the average boy spends a great deal of his time in cheating the masters, lying to the authorities, and playing every sort and kind of mischievous or disreputable prank that comes into his head. but it is better to have this fact testified to by a man who has been in a position to observe large numbers of boys over a very extended period. the accusation of exaggeration or hasty generalization cannot then be well sustained. where, however, i venture to differ with dr. arnold is in the assumption that this low standard of morality must be ascribed to boy nature alone. undoubtedly this is the case in part. but there is a far more potent cause than natural instinct. it is to be found in the system of education which not only fails to develop and encourage the boy's individual tastes or faculties, but actually forces upon him occupations that are, for the most part, absolutely foreign to his nature. this is the real key to the vagaries of boyhood, and without such an explanation one must hold, with the great headmaster of rugby, that boy nature is inherently bad. boys, like other rational beings, must have their interests and amusements. if the legitimate and normal ones are prohibited, solace will be sought in those which are illegitimate and abnormal. by failing to encourage the faculties that nature intended a particular boy to develop, a vacuum is created. this vacuum must be filled up, and it is no earthly use trying to fill it up, against the grain, with mathematical problems or the irregular inflections of latin verbs. the average boy is as little capable of taking an absorbing interest in these exhilarating features of the school curriculum as would be the average hottentot. every healthy boy stores up energy. it should be the first object of the schoolmaster--if such a being ought to have any existence at all--to see that this energy is not allowed to waste. natural forces of this kind do not, it must be recollected, evaporate. there they are, and the laws of nature have decreed that they shall be constantly expended and renewed. if this or that boy's store of energy is not turned into one channel, it will expend itself through another. if the schoolmaster were to take the trouble to find out the particular bent of a pupil, and were then to proceed to foster and educate it, all the energy of the boy would be used in this useful and congenial work. but this can never be the case until the present methods of instruction have been revolutionized. the discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an altogether false and pernicious discipline. the only liberty which is vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. no doubt it is an excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which they make use of their leisure hours. there would be a great uproar amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. it would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets; or, to use an eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising oarsman and might row in the school eight at henley, and turn him into the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.' but the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to mental discipline. in the class-room there is practically no latitude given to the boy at all. in many schools, it is true, there is the choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents', not the boy's. the latter is always treated, in reference to his school-work, as a machine. there is simply the offer of a classical strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into one or the other according to the fancy of a third person. strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. it has been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the worst possible treatment for the brain. whilst our lunatics, however, are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of madmen. the school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a mental strait-waistcoat. it has a more immoral and degenerating effect upon the mind because it is applied directly. if physical restraint acts perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm must be caused by direct mental restraint. yet nobody, from arnold and thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped this simple fact. schoolmasters are like mothers. they imagine that because a boy happens to have survived their system of teaching the latter must necessarily be the one perfect method--just as the fond mother, whose infant has been enabled by means of a phenomenal digestion to outlive a particular food, believes that it is the only food upon which babies can possibly be brought up. when we come to survey impartially the effects of this system of education upon boys in general, it must surely be brought home to us that something is radically wrong somewhere. if a few manage to survive the treatment and remain the ten righteous individuals, what is to be said of the degeneration of the majority? it is surely absurd, with the anomalies and defects of the whole method of educating youth staring one in the face, to ascribe it to mere boy nature. the truth is that in boyhood the natural tendencies incline to push their way boisterously to the front. they are constantly trying to find an egress. but the parent and the pedagogue, in their blindness, can only see in this law of nature a wicked and perverse propensity that must be restrained at all hazards by a speedy application of the educational strait-waistcoat. chapter viii the struggle of the educated so far we have chiefly discussed the effect produced upon the individual by a compulsory course of study. it has been seen that he suffers in a number of ways, through being subjected, from his earliest childhood, to a more or less inflexible method of training. all of these, however, have been directly attributable to his education. we may now consider, before pursuing the subject any further, certain disabilities that may be traced to the same cause, but which are brought about indirectly. it is bad enough, as most of us will have perceived, to compel a boy to learn certain things whether they are congenial to him or not. but it is preposterous that the same stock of knowledge should be forced upon all alike. this is, however, exactly what is being done in every educational establishment throughout the empire, with the most disastrous consequences to the victims of the system. let us turn once more to the map of life for an illustration. the average educated man begins to learn his alphabet at the age of four or five. during the following years he receives the necessary grounding to prepare him for the lower forms of a public school. at eleven, or thereabouts, he commences his school career. throughout the whole of this period he is put through a course of study identical in every respect with that pursued by his schoolfellows. every boy in the school is crammed with the same facts, and in the same way. the sixth-form boy is exactly like the rest of his class, exactly like the sixth-form boy of ten years ago, and probably exactly like the sixth-form boy of ten years hence. not only does he possess precisely the same knowledge as his companions, hold the same opinions, and enjoy the same mental horizon, but he has acquired uniform tastes and habits. in other words, the school has stamped upon him a common individuality shared by all its pupils. after he has left school the same process is carried on at the university. here he is crammed again with the same facts, the same rules, and the same ideas, borrowed from the same people, that are being dinned into scores of other young men who are working for their degree. having gone conscientiously through this routine, he takes his degree with the rest. this aim being accomplished, his educational career is over. he has graduated; that is to say, he has obtained a certificate to the effect that he has acquired a certain regulation stock of knowledge. what happens next? the unhappy graduate suddenly makes the discovery that his university qualification is not the ready passport to employment that he had fondly imagined it to be. unless he has a reasonable chance of a curacy and chooses to enter the church, or can scrape together a few pupils to coach, or has the means to go on reading for the bar or cramming for the public examinations, his prospects of immediate starvation are excessively favourable. it was remarked some years ago by a writer who had spent a great deal of time in investigating life at common lodging-houses in the poorer districts of the metropolis, that a startling number of university men seemed to drift into them. yet these are the men who are supposed to have qualified themselves most highly for the holding of good positions. in some way, therefore, it is clear that this academic training has disadvantages which serve to handicap its victims severely in practical life. it cannot be mere accident that those who, according to all educational tradition, are classed as the most fit for responsible employment necessitating good mental ability, actually labour under obvious disabilities in this connection. nobody can urge that there is not enough work of a nature demanding high attainments to go round. literature itself offers an enormous field for the exhibition of special talent; and there are many other walks in life where mental superiority is sadly needed, and which should therefore provide ample work and remuneration for those who show capability and resource. but in spite of all these openings some of our scholars are driven to eke out a miserable pauper's existence in the common lodging-house, or even in extreme cases to solicit parish relief. the explanation of this strange anomaly lies simply in the fact that the educational mill not only manufactures dummies, but makes them all exactly alike. in the higher types of schools and colleges there is generally a choice of three patterns--the classical dummy, the modern language dummy, and the scientific dummy. but each pattern is very like the other, for all the practical purposes of this life; that is to say, they are all equally useless and equally unfitted for the task of moving forward with the times. the result of fitting out everybody with a common stock of knowledge is to institute a disastrous form of intellectual competition. thousands of young men are being equipped annually by our schools and universities for the performance of precisely the same functions. intelligence brought wholesale to the market in this stereotyped form is in much the same unhappy condition as unskilled labour. there is a supply far in excess of the demand, and consequently employment cannot be found for all. perhaps the profession of literature and journalism affords the aptest illustration of the utter folly and uselessness of producing these machine-made scholars, all filled chock-full with the same ideas, facts, figures, and dates. here, as in reality everywhere else, there is need of originality, intellectual independence, insight, judgment, and imagination. journalism wants ideas; facts are amply provided by the news agency and the reporter. the gates of literature are opened wide for striking and vigorous thought, trenchant criticism, and imaginative flights of fancy. what has the average academically-trained man to offer? he has an assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from plato and socrates, from ovid and virgil and horace; he can echo voltaire, goethe, kant, shakespeare, dante; he can dish up aristotle, pythagoras, bacon, galileo, newton, lavoisier, davy, faraday and darwin. he can borrow illustrations from classical mythology; he knows the dynasties of ancient egypt; and he is able to furnish, without reference to history, the exact date upon which king john signed magna charta, and the precise number of battles fought in the wars of the roses. such are the literary accomplishments of numberless university graduates, and it is small wonder that they often lead to the workhouse. the demand for the dressed-up ideas of the poets, philosophers, and scientists of a former generation is not great. those who like their literature at second hand prefer snippets from the newgate calendar to the wise saws of bacon; and they would rather have their blood stirred by quotations from 'the charge of the light brigade,' or 'pay, pay, pay,' than read a paraphrase of the combined wisdom of all the philosophers of the nineteenth century. the same argument holds good in relation to other professions and occupations. the university graduate has no practical accomplishments. he may be an ornamental, but he is certainly not _ipso facto_ a useful, member of society. the only thing for which he is pre-eminently fitted is to assist others, by means of extension lectures and cramming, to be his companions in misfortune. but this can hardly be designated a beneficial sphere of activity, and he is handicapped in all he undertakes by the fact that thousands of others possess the same educational equipment as himself. why should every educated man be like the other? there is absolutely no reason for it. the similarity is purely artificial. nature never intended all men to be cast in the same mould, and it is only the perversity of man himself that has brought the human race down to such a level. the stupidity of giving every scholar the same mental outfit is so self-evident as scarcely to need further comment. even following the modern plan of stuffing minds instead of developing them, one would have thought that common sense would dictate the necessity of manufacturing as much variety as possible. the whole trend of evolution is to differentiate; and if natural laws were not completely disregarded by education systems, the absurdity of filling the world with two or three human species instead of a hundred thousand would never have been perpetrated. as long as this arbitrary interference with nature is continued, educated men will not cease to be a drug in the market. its immediate effect is not to endow the individual with special qualities, but to handicap him heavily for the real business of life. competition amongst the 'well-educated' is not the result of over-population or of a too liberal supply of competent men. it is caused by uniformity of attainment; and until this is generally realized, one of the most pressing social problems cannot hope to find a solution. chapter ix woman's empire over man men have always been reluctant to acknowledge the truth about woman's real position in the world. they keep up a beautiful kind of masculine myth about the mastery of the sterner sex and their mental superiority, and they talk of woman in a patronizing way as man's helpmate. there is no doubt--it is a physiological fact--that man possesses more brain-power or capacity than woman. but woman has, on the other hand, an enormous advantage in the use to which she has put her mental machinery from time immemorial. the truth is that women think out things for themselves a great deal more than does the average man. as, however, they concentrate their attention for the most part on what are called the minor interests of life, whilst men are occupied with bigger and more important things, it has come to be accepted that the mind of woman is inferior to the mind of man. in one sense this is true. potentially, woman's mind has not the capacity of man's. one has only to look for female shakespeares, newtons, bismarcks, raphaels, and beethovens, to verify the fact beyond dispute. but we are dealing here with existing circumstances, not with potentialities. therefore i have no hesitation in saying that, as a general rule, women use what brain power they have to much better advantage than men; which amounts to a confession that woman, apart from intellectual specialization, is, on the average, man's mental superior. this is a sweeping statement to make, but it is made only in the interests of truth, and it admits of a great deal of plausible explanation. man's mental training, as has been fully pointed out, consists almost entirely in pouring facts into a vacuum created by the careful elimination of original thought. until recently, women have not been subjected to this agreeable process. for a very long time they were not educated at all, and when governesses first came into fashion in better class families, the idea was rather to endow girls with a few graceful accomplishments than to cram them with dates and other kinds of mechanical knowledge. this tradition is still kept up to a certain degree in the higher social circles; but there have also sprung up a large number of girls' colleges, in which all the bad points of masculine education are carefully copied. these colleges are frequented by girls of the upper and middle classes, chiefly the latter, and no doubt they are gradually working a revolution in feminine character. but heredity--especially when it is, within a generation or so, the heredity of long ages--is a very potent factor in the formation of both mind and body, and offers a steady resistance to innovation. the full effects, therefore, of this educational revolution in respect to womankind are not yet apparent. the net result of this is that the majority of women are still addicted to thought. facts have not yet entirely taken the place of ideas in their minds, except in extreme cases which may be called exceptional, although it must be confessed that they are becoming every day less rare. they think, no doubt, for the most part about the commonplace incidents of their daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. but anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. it is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the sovereigns from william the conqueror, or to construe horace's odes without taking in a syllable of their sense. women have thus formed a habit of reflection about trifles, which the more gifted amongst them extend to weightier topics. and it is in this way that they are able to gain an ascendancy over man that is the more potent because it is unobtrusive. the average woman sees things the subtleties of which escape man altogether, and she perceives them because her mind has been trained, by natural development, to observation. the average man, on the other hand, is the most unobservant creature under the sun. he rarely understands even what is going on under his nose. it is all very well to say that his superior mind is wrapt up in percentages, or absorbed in grand schemes for the regeneration of mankind. the plain truth is that he does not possess the faculty of applying his intelligence to everything within his range of observation. evolution intended him to possess it; but education systems, which harbour very little respect for the laws of nature, have found ready means to curb the propensity or to destroy it altogether. it is small matter for surprise, therefore, that woman should have succeeded in subjecting man to an empire as autocratic as it is, to all outward appearances, unsuspected. some people maintain that this empire is gained solely by physical attraction; but this contention is disproved easily enough. all women do not possess the charm of beauty; yet there is scarcely a woman of any nationality, or belonging to any station in life, who does not exercise a more or less powerful influence over her menkind. husbands are guided by their wives, even in matters of business or affecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready to acknowledge. staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, i made the acquaintance of a hard-headed lancashire merchant who had amassed a comfortable independence. in an outburst of confidence he told me one day that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct of his business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged that he had never had to regret asking her advice. the moral of this story is the more significant when it is recollected that in such a case the wife has not had the same opportunities as her husband of forming a correct judgment. the latter has the business details at his finger-ends; he is acquainted with the person or persons with whom the dealings are taking place; and he has his experience to fall back upon. but somehow or other the wife seems to grasp all the points, and to see more clearly into the motives of the person concerned. 'why,' she will exclaim to her husband, 'can't you see that so-and-so is trying to bamboozle you?' and, the scales falling from the deluded husband's eyes, he suddenly makes the discovery that his wife thinks where his own powers of reflection are contented to remain dormant. the fact is, that the habit of thinking cannot be acquired through exercise in mental gymnastics. philosophers, mathematicians, and men of science are notoriously up in the clouds, and incapable often to a remarkable degree of managing the affairs of everyday life with common sense. yet these are the individuals who have been subjected to the highest form of what is called mental training. if fact-cramming and mental gymnastics are the best developers of the human mind, these men ought to be perfect models of intelligence. but will any candid-minded person call it the highest form of intellectual development to have a clear conception of the precession of the equinoxes, or to manufacture metaphysical conundrums, whilst remaining utterly incapable of applying common sense to human affairs that demand at least an equal amount of attention? it is clear that this type of mental training does not teach people to think at all, but has the contrary effect of restricting the intelligence to an altitude very far beyond the ordinary requirements of our social existence. man may have a very broad horizon; but the broader it becomes, the further he seems to be transported from the capacity to exercise the normal functions of the brain. to designate this the proper development of the mind would be manifestly absurd; yet many people seem contented to regard it as such, and accept the anomaly without giving its obvious contradictoriness a second thought. of course it is not argued that woman's mental training is, or has been, all that can be desired. it is, in her case, more the neglect to apply severe educational methods, than anything else, that has permitted the negative development of her thinking faculties; and this tends to demonstrate all the more conclusively that the real use of the brain is practically destroyed by conventional modes of instruction. women, left to their own devices for countless generations, have acquired a faculty that all the education systems in the world have failed to pound into the mind of man. it is their superiority in this respect that has given them far-reaching empire over the opposite sex. that this should be generally appreciated is of the utmost importance, because the modern metamorphosis of woman, if rightly understood, is the best conceivable object-lesson in the evils brought about by the educational methods of the present day. it is not that the academically-trained woman threatens to push man out of his place in the world, but that she is herself in danger of losing the very weapon that has given her so large a share of power and influence. a great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the spectacled girton girl competing with men in knowledge, at the expense of forfeiting their admiration and thereby losing her vantage-ground. spectacles do not enter into the matter at all. as has already been pointed out, physical attraction has nothing, or very little, to do with feminine wire-pulling. women derive their real powers from a gift of trained observation, and from the subtlety conferred upon them by the capacity to apply their intelligence to the numerous small matters which go to make up the sum of human life. their minds will no longer develop these powers when they are systematically subjected to a process of education which has invariably failed to evoke them in the opposite sex. and with the loss of them, woman is bound also to lose the empire which she has hitherto exercised over masculine nature. from this point of view alone, the education of women on the modern system is much to be deplored. there is no doubt that women in general have always exercised their predominant influence for the good of mankind. striking exceptions might easily be adduced from history; but, on the whole, it must be acknowledged that woman has seldom abused her power. therefore, anything that is calculated to undermine or destroy this favourable influence on human affairs cannot be regarded as otherwise than pernicious. the more the idea spreads that girls must be given the same educational equipment as boys, the more rapid will be the degeneration of woman. it is a well-known fact in the medical profession that weakly boys are often unable to withstand the strain of school cramming; therefore girls, with their more delicate organization, will suffer proportionately in a greater degree. physical training, of course, obviates a great deal of this evil. but the same thing is bound to happen in the case of girls as has already been experienced where boys are concerned; that is to say, the most promising intellects will be sacrificed, partly through the ambition of the school authorities, whose principal anxiety is to see their pupils distinguish themselves in examinations, and partly owing to the fact that exceptional ability so often implies a nervous temperament and delicate physique. women, it must be acknowledged, by no means use their faculties of thinking and observation to the best advantage. the conclusions at which they arrive are often far too definite, and have been formed in too great haste. so rapid is this operation of thought that it often becomes a mere intuition. yet the remarkable accuracy of a woman's intuitions is evidence that there underlies them some intellectual process resting on a more solid basis than conjecture or guesswork. it is the crude and untutored stage of development of the thinking faculty in woman that causes it to work intuitively, instead of by the slower and sounder processes of logic. to neglect a faculty is by no means synonymous with developing it. hence woman's powers of thought and observation are embryonic rather than matured. the work they perform is not a tithe of what would be accomplished by them under the auspices of judicious encouragement and skilled training. the faculty has neither been destroyed by over-cramming nor fostered by enlightened treatment. it has simply been allowed to lie more or less dormant, according to the natural environment of the individual. if man, with his superior brain capacity, were encouraged to cultivate the habits of observation at present restricted to woman, and to apply his intelligence to everything, instead of to a few selected objects, the ratio of the world's progress would be enormously increased. who first started the notion that man is being manufactured into a superior article, and that woman cannot do better than submit herself with all haste to the same process, i do not know. at any rate, it is a disastrous doctrine, and the sooner the fallacy of it is perceived the more chance there will be of saving future generations of women from the blunder that is handicapping the masculine sex at the present moment. it would be a grand thing if educationists could be persuaded to open their eyes to the fact that women, having been providentially saved from school instruction for past generations, have been enabled to preserve mental faculties that no amount of cramming and corporal punishment has ever succeeded in awakening in man. they would then cease from their ignorant attempt to deprive woman of her intellectual gift, and possibly even do something towards securing man a little mental room for the installation of his own thinking faculty. chapter x youth and crime we now come to the consideration of an aspect of the educational problem that involves questions of great difficulty and importance. the discussion has hitherto been limited to the lesser evils attributable to the forcing upon the masses of the people a useless and unsuitable kind of education. but there are far graver possibilities than the mere unfitting of large numbers of individuals for the occupations their natural propensities intended them to pursue. people are, as has been pointed out, driven by the stupidity of the teaching system into all kinds of uncongenial employment. the suffering and waste caused by this constant production of the unfit are incalculable. it is scarcely to be wondered at that some persons have formed the ingenious theory that this world is hell itself, and that we are now actually undergoing our punishment in purgatory. certainly there is some ground for the supposition in the fact that the lives of so many of us seem to have been ordered in direct opposition to our individual tastes and wishes. this is bad enough. the question we have to face now is whether we have not to thank education systems for something a great deal worse. mere unhappiness is not necessarily soul-destroying. but there is only too good reason to suppose that the evil effects of the mock education provided by the state do not stop at making its victims unhappy, but even go so far as to plunge a certain proportion of them into actual crime. at the outset it must be acknowledged that the allegation is very difficult to prove. no satisfactory evidence on the point is derivable from published statistics. it is quite possible to determine by means of the latter how many young persons between the ages of twelve and twenty-one have been convicted of indictable offences during the year. but everybody who is acquainted with criminology, or who is conversant with the compilation of statistical information, must be well aware of the futility of depending upon the apparently clear testimony of official figures. it would be extremely useful to find out whether juvenile offenders have increased or decreased since the institution of compulsory education. statistics relating to this subject are procurable, but it is impossible to place any reliance upon them. in the first place, there is nothing to show the cause of any such increase or decrease in the offences committed by young persons. it may be due to a variety of circumstances, none of which can be accurately determined. for instance, it is a well-known fact that youthful offenders have of late years been treated by magistrates with ever-increasing leniency. consequently, fewer convictions take place now, in regard to this class of offence, than was the case some years ago. the number of the convictions is, therefore, no guide at all as to the increasing or diminishing proportion of youthful criminals. then there is the increased vigilance of the police, which leads to the more frequent detection of crime; whilst, as a set-off against this, there is the fact that education teaches the criminal, by assisting him to the reading of police-court reports and sensational storyettes, to be more wary. besides these, there is the important consideration that by far the larger number of young persons guilty of offences of various kinds are not prosecuted at all. this is due to two causes: firstly, to the fact that in the majority of cases they are not found out; and secondly, that many people are reluctant to bring youthful offenders within the meshes of the criminal law, as a conviction, whether or not it be followed by punishment, generally spells ruin to the person who has been found guilty. there may be, and there probably are, many other and even more substantial reasons for discrediting statistics that are commonplaces to experts in crime. but those that have been cited, and which are at once suggested by common sense, fully suffice to show the impossibility of arriving at satisfactory conclusions on the basis of statistical tables published by the authorities. the blue-book containing the latest judicial returns attempts to deal with this question of the increase or decrease of juvenile crime; figures being only available, however, from the year . 'to answer this question,' it is stated, 'it is necessary to ascertain the proportion which youthful offenders bear to the total number of convicted persons. this is given in the following table, where it will be seen that the proportion of offenders under the age of twenty-one remains almost constant: 'proportion of youthful offenders convicted of indictable offences to total number of persons convicted. +---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ | age. | . | . | . | . | . | . | +---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ | |per cent.|per cent.|per cent.|per cent.|per cent.|per cent.| | under | . | . | . | . | . | . | | and under | . | . | . | . | . | . | | and under | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | | | | | | +---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ |total under | . | . | . | . | . | . | +---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+ 'the general result is that the number of youthful offenders has diminished with the general diminution of crime, but that they still bear almost the same ratio as before to the total of criminals.' all this is, as has been pointed out, absolutely misleading. the number of persons convicted has nothing whatever to do with the increase or decrease of crime; and the proportion of youthful offenders to the total number of persons convicted is only calculated, in view of the great amount of clemency shown to young people both by magistrates and by the public, to give one a wholly false impression as to the prevalence of juvenile crime. it would be easy to take the criminal statistics of foreign countries, and to prove from them that the education of the masses there has brought about an overwhelming increase in the proportion of crimes and offences committed by young persons under the age of twenty-one. in germany, austria, france, russia, italy, holland, and the united states juvenile crime has, according to statistical information, largely increased during the last quarter of a century. but, without making an exhaustive inquiry into the alterations that may have taken place in the law, the relative activity of the police, and a dozen other contingencies, it would not be honest to attempt to draw definite conclusions from these figures. one has, after all, in these matters to fall back upon logic and common sense. there is the solid fact that youthful criminals abound in spite of education systems, and although there is a considerable leakage in respect to school-attendance, it does not follow that juvenile offenders are drawn from this truant class to a disproportionate extent. it must be remembered, on the contrary, that a great amount of non-attendance at school is due to the employment of children--especially in rural districts, where the members of school boards are often the very people who extract most profit from child labour. a prison chaplain of great experience, the rev. j. w. horsley, wrote, in his interesting work on 'prisons and prisoners': 'while covetousness is a factor of crime, the tools education places in the hands make crimes of greed more possible, and possible at an earlier age than in past generations. this week i got the church of england waifs and strays society to take under its care a child of ten, who had written, filled up, and cashed, a postal order that it might buy more lollipops. increased knowledge, especially when not adequately accompanied by moral and religious education, will create new tastes, desires, and ambitions, that make for evil as well as for good. let instruction abound, let education in its fullest sense more abound, but let us be aware of the increased power for evil as well as for good that they produce, and at any rate let us not imagine that education and crime cannot co-exist. crime is varied, not abolished, not even most effectually decreased, by the sharpening of wits.' speaking of intemperance in relation to crime, he states that: 'brain-workers provide the most hopeless cases of dipsomania. increased brain-power--more brain-work; more brain-exhaustion--more nervous desire for a stimulant, more rapid succumbing to the alcoholic habit--these are the stages that can be noted everywhere among those who have had more "schooling" than their fathers. australia consumes more alcohol per head than any nation. in australia primary education is more universal than in england, and yet there criminals have increased out of all proportion to the population. of much crime, of many forms of crime, it is irrefragably true that crime is condensed alcohol, and it is certainly not true that the absolutely or comparatively illiterate alone comprise those who swell these categories.' i have taken pains to ascertain the opinions of several of the chaplains attached to the great convict prisons, and they are practically unanimous in condemning the present system of education. 'it is liable,' writes one of these experienced clergymen, 'to foster conceit, discontent, a disinclination to submit to discipline and authority, and a dangerous phase of ambition, which are fruitful sources of that kind of crime which is in these days most prevalent.... this superficial education causes, i think, self-deceit as well as self-conceit, and makes young people imagine that because, in addition to what they have learnt, they can present a good outward appearance, they are qualified to fill any kind of appointment with success. 'i think, also,' he goes on to say, 'that it leads them in their desire to rise in the social scale to attempt by dishonest means to live at a higher rate than is justifiable, to gamble and speculate, in order to keep up a false position. i have come across those who have fallen where this has confessedly been the case, and who have lamented that such wrong ideas had been put into their heads. young people now look upon many honourable and useful employments as beneath them, and there is a general rush for those which seem to offer a better social position.' the conventional belief in the efficacy of cramming boys with moral platitudes and all kinds of commonplace facts and theoretical knowledge is so ingrained that there is a natural reluctance to ascribe any evil effects to the process of education. i am contented, however, to let the facts speak for themselves. it cannot well be disputed that unsuitable education, or sham education, or whatever one may like to call it, is the direct cause of widespread dissatisfaction amongst the very classes from which the majority of criminals are recruited. whilst vast numbers of people are constantly being unfitted for the commonest occupations of life, there must result an overcrowding of the callings which are considered suitable to the dignity of those who have eaten the unripe fruit of the elementary tree of knowledge. it is self-evident that the unsuitably educated have much greater incentive to wrong-doing than the merely illiterate, and it is also a corroborative fact that by far the greater proportion of criminals have been taught at least to read and write. given two boys, one of whom had acquired a smattering of facts at school and had learnt the catechism very perfectly by rote, whilst the other had merely been encouraged to apply a little common sense to manual labour, who would have any hesitation in pointing out the former as the more likely to fall into evil ways? therein lies the supreme foolishness of modern methods of instruction. all the moral aphorisms in the world will not help a boy to be honest if he is at the same time unfitted for his station in life. people do not need moral instruction; they acquire all their morality in the school of life. it is impossible to teach boys and girls theoretically to be virtuous. all that can be done is to turn them into first-class hypocrites, ready to quote texts and to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles, whilst they are busy breaking the ten commandments every day of the week. a surprising amount of virtue would come into the world of its own accord if a little more pains were taken to preserve for each individual the environment to which he is adapted by nature. this life has become such a mockery that people talk of heaven as a state in which every person will be free to do the things he likes best--as if that blissful condition were utterly unattainable here. whilst such anomalies exist as those which curse the existence of the majority upon this earth, criminals will continue to be produced. and if we concede that these anomalies are directly or indirectly brought about by false and irrational methods of educating the youth of the country, we must also allow that education helps to manufacture criminals and to encourage crime. chapter xi mental breakdown it was frankly stated in the last chapter that there is no concrete evidence of a reliable nature as to the immoral effects of our education system. the inquirer has to depend rather upon the logic of philosophical speculation than upon the testimony of our available statistics, common sense being generally a far more truthful witness than figures that can be manipulated to mean almost anything. but when we come to inquire into the physical evils that are produced by cramming and injudiciously-applied instruction, it must be acknowledged that the evidence as to their existence rests upon a much more solid foundation. clever brain specialists, who have made a lifelong study of mental diseases and the causes of mental breakdown, are in a position to state very definitely, from actual experience, whether or not the cramming system of modern education is productive of physical ill on a large scale. we all of us know, probably, of some isolated instances here and there where the severe strain of cramming for a competitive examination has resulted in loss of health and physical breakdown. some are even aware of cases in which the unhappy victim of overwork has lost his reason altogether, and has been compelled to be placed under restraint. but it is only the physician who has made a special study of mental diseases that is in a position to form wide and accurate generalizations on the subject. in approaching this question, therefore, i have realized the importance of obtaining the opinions of experts who are alone qualified to express a well-balanced judgment upon a matter demanding knowledge and opportunities of observation of a very special nature. accordingly, i have consulted some of the greatest brain specialists in this country, and the brief remarks that i am enabled to make on the subject of educational cramming and mental breakdown are chiefly based upon the valuable hints for which i am indebted to them. to take the case of healthy children first, it is satisfactory to learn upon high authority that they do not suffer much physical harm from the effects of overwork. what happens in their case is that the vigorous and healthy brain offers a sound resistance to the stuffing process, and speedily forgets what has been forced into it. from an educational point of view this is, of course, very disastrous; but as far as health considerations are concerned it affords a certain amount of consolation. this is to say, one must bear in mind, that modern methods of education are only salutary as long as they fail altogether to affect the intelligence. the moment they prove themselves to be efficacious they become an immediate source of danger. it follows from this fact that stupid children are as well protected against the evil effects of the education system as the healthy children. in fact, to a large extent the stupid children are the healthy ones by reason of their stupidity. it is, however, a great mistake to suppose that a stupid child necessarily implies one that is in any sense deficient mentally. the dull schoolboy often proves in after life to be the brilliant man. all that his dulness need be taken to signify is that his mind is not receptive to the subjects which are being forced upon it. linnæus was very stupid at latin until an enlightened physician, who was aware of his passion for botanical study, suggested his reading plinius; and although he may not have imbibed very accurate information about natural history from that philosopher, he succeeded in making immediate progress in the latin language. there should be, under a rational system of education, no such thing as a stupid child. what is, after all, stupidity or dulness in a schoolboy? it simply means that the boy's faculties are undeveloped, and that no amount of fact-cramming has succeeded in developing them. the whole mischief lies, of course, in the fact that the school is not trying to develop the boy's own faculties at all, but merely to force him to adapt himself to its own curriculum and conventionality. the danger to the brain of the healthy or stupid child is not over-development but under-development. it is not they who suffer in the worst sense from the evil effects of over-education, but the gifted children, as they are called, or those whose quick, nervous intellects are most susceptible to the process of receiving any kind of instruction. it is the nervous boy or girl who generally makes the most promising pupil. a natural inclination to study leads children of this type to prefer the schoolroom to the playground. the boy who works hard to get to the top of his class, or to pass an examination, or to obtain a scholarship, is the one least given to games, and, in consequence, the weakest physically. these are the very children whom the teacher is most tempted to encourage to do more work than is good for them. the process of their mental development is so rapid that it needs no stimulation from outside. but that is not, unfortunately, the concern of the school authorities. the anxiety to produce scholars who will distinguish themselves in public examinations, and thereby advertise the school, invariably leads the schoolmaster to cram and stuff the brains of the brightest and most forward boys. there is special danger in over-working boys or girls of this type, because the brain is not strong enough to withstand the pressure. the result is never good, and in extreme cases it is as bad as it could possibly be. it follows, in fact, as a matter of course, that the finest and most sensitive intellects are the first to succumb to the pernicious effects of over-cramming the brain. there is a strain that can only be endured by second-rate minds, and it is not, therefore, the intellectually fittest who are encouraged to survive under the present system. what has been stated above refers rather to the higher class of schools and colleges, which prepare boys for examinations and academic distinctions of various kinds, than to the elementary schools to which the children of the poor are commandeered. in the latter establishments a special barbarity takes place which has been so widely discussed in parliament and in the newspapers that i will do no more here than allude to it in passing. i refer to the forcing of instruction upon under-fed school-children. apart from the gross inhumanity of the proceeding, there is the indisputable fact that the compulsory teaching of children whose bodies have not been properly nourished tends to weaken the intellect. if these children were subjected to a process of cramming such as is usual in the higher schools, their minds would undoubtedly break down altogether. as it is, the comparatively mild method of the elementary school does not effect anything worse in such cases than the prevention of the development of the mind, which is one degree better than complete breakdown or insanity. 'the school board system of cramming with smatterings,' wrote one of the greatest mental specialists in the world in reply to my inquiries, 'instead of teaching their victims to think--even if only by teaching one subject well--is perhaps responsible for some positive mental breakdown; but probably the main harm of it is that it stifles and strangles proper mental development.' 'undeveloped mentality,' he says in conclusion, 'is perhaps the principal fault of our educational system (so-called).' another distinguished physician writes to me from a lunatic asylum: 'we have had a few cases who have broken down, the results of working for scholarships; also we have had one or two cases of ladies who have broken down working for higher examinations. dr. ---- and myself both feel certain that there is a good deal to be said against the increased pressure put upon young adolescents at schools. from my own experience i know that boys who were considered especially clever, and were high up in forms in the public school i was at, have most of them now dropped back, and are very mediocre. on the other hand, many who matured slowly have continued to advance. this is only an observation, and has many exceptions; but it is an observation that, as time passes, is more fully confirmed.' it is not necessary to add anything to these valuable expressions of opinion, proceeding from eminent men of wide experience, who are far more capable judges than the layman who has no scientific knowledge and a necessarily limited range of observation. facts speak very eloquently for themselves. if brain specialists are continually coming across cases of mental breakdown resulting from cramming or over-education, it is quite clear that a system which is productive of such evils must be altogether defective in principle and wanting in common sense. chapter xii evidence of history after an exhaustive inquiry into the multifarious evils which must be laid at the door of education, it is refreshing to turn to history for illustrious examples of men who not only did not owe their greatness to academic training, but who actually owed it to what would nowadays be designated a neglected education. the chronicles of the past teem with instances of youths who have developed into brilliant men, in spite of the fact that they had either had no schooling at all, or had been considered the dunces of their class. it would, in fact, be far more difficult to supply illustrations of great men who have succeeded on account of their academic distinction, than to give examples of those who failed to distinguish themselves at school, but who nevertheless became famous afterwards as men of unusual talent. when napoleon bonaparte, at the age of fifteen, left the military college of brienne, where he had been a pupil for five years and a half, the inspector of military schools gave him the following certificate: 'm. de buonaparte (napoleon), born august , ; height feet inches lines; is in the fourth class; has a good constitution, excellent health, character obedient, upright, grateful, conduct very regular; has always been distinguished by his application to mathematics. he knows history and geography very passably. he is not well up in ornamental studies or in latin, in which he is only in the fourth class. he will be an excellent sailor. he deserves to be passed on to the military school of paris.' this was an optimistic description of the youthful napoleon's accomplishments, for he was, as a matter of fact, so backward in latin that his removal to paris was opposed by the sub-principal of the college. according to the testimony of his schoolfellow and biographer, m. de bourrienne, he exhibited backwardness in every branch of education except mathematics, for which he showed a distinct natural bent. the only professor at brienne who took any notice of napoleon was the mathematical master. the others thought him stupid because he had no taste for the study of languages, literature, and the various subjects that formed the curriculum of the establishment; and as there seemed no chance of his becoming a scholar, they took no interest in him. 'his superior intelligence was, however, sufficiently perceptible,' writes m. de bourrienne, 'even through the reserve under which it was veiled. if the monks to whom the superintendence of the establishment was confided had understood the organization of his mind, if they had engaged more able mathematical professors, or if we had had any incitement to the study of chemistry, natural philosophy, astronomy, etc., i am convinced that bonaparte would have pursued these sciences with all the genius and spirit of investigation which he displayed in a career more brilliant, it is true, but less useful to mankind. unfortunately, the monks did not perceive this, and were too poor to pay for good masters.... the often-repeated assertion of bonaparte having received a _careful education_ at brienne is therefore untrue.' napoleon's military bent showed itself whilst he was at the college of brienne. heavy snow fell during one winter, and prevented him from taking the solitary walks that were his chief recreation. he therefore fell back upon the expedient of getting his school companions to dig trenches and build snow fortifications. 'this being done,' he said, 'we may divide ourselves into sections, form a siege, and i will undertake to direct the attacks.' in this way he organized a sham war that was carried on with great success for a fortnight. this brief sketch of napoleon bonaparte's schooldays has been given in order to show that the development of his genius owed nothing to academic training. without being actually a dunce, he was backward in all the subjects except the one in which he took a vivid interest; and, doubtless, had he cared as little for mathematics as for latin, he would have left brienne with a reputation for profound stupidity. the school career of his great opponent, wellington, was even less distinguished. tradition has handed down to posterity no further details regarding his eton days beyond the record of a fight with sydney smith's elder brother 'bobus.' alluding to him as a dull boy, mr. smiles states, in a footnote, in his book on 'self-help': 'a writer in the _edinburgh review_ (july, ) observes that "the duke's talents seem never to have developed themselves until some active and practical field for their display was placed immediately before him. he was long described by his spartan mother, who thought him a dunce, as only 'food for powder.' he gained no sort of distinction, either at eton or at the french military college of angiers." it is not improbable that a competitive examination, at this day, might have excluded him from the army.' lord clive was a perfectly hopeless youth from the schoolmaster's point of view. he loathed work, and was always up to some prank or other. in the vain hope of inducing him to learn something, he was sent to four schools in succession; but, with a single exception, every master under whom he was placed declared him to be an incorrigible idler. the exception was dr. eaton of lostock, who predicted a great career for clive, provided an opportunity were afforded him for the exercise of his talents. at market drayton he amused himself by organizing a band of idle scamps, who went about threatening to smash the windows of tradespeople unless they paid a fine of apples or pence; and on one occasion he alarmed the inhabitants of the town by climbing a church steeple and seating himself upon a stone spout near the top. a man of the same stamp who received the scantiest education was george washington. he is described as having been given a common-school education, with a little mathematical training, but no instruction whatever in ancient or modern languages. christopher columbus, another adventurous spirit, owed very little to his schooling. 'he soon evinced a strong passion for geographical knowledge,' writes washington irving in his interesting life of the explorer, 'and an irresistible inclination for the sea.... his father, seeing the bent of his mind, endeavoured to give him an education suitable for maritime life. he sent him, therefore, to the university of pavia, where he was instructed in geometry, geography, astronomy and navigation.... he remained but a short time at pavia, barely sufficient to give him the rudiments of the necessary sciences; the thorough acquaintance with them which he displayed in after-life must have been the result of diligent self-schooling, and of casual hours of study amidst the cares and vicissitudes of a rugged and wandering life.' no better instance of the advantage of natural development and self-culture could be afforded than by the career of dr. livingstone. working in a cotton factory as a boy of ten, he studied scientific works and books of travel, besides the classics, not only at night, but during the hours of labour. 'looking back now at that life of toil,' he wrote afterwards, 'i cannot but feel thankful that it formed such a material part of my early education; and, were it possible, i should like to begin life over again in the same lowly style, and to pass through the same hardy training.' dr. adam clarke, the celebrated divine, scholar, and philanthropist, was a regular dunce in his early youth. it was only with difficulty, and an undue proportion of whacking, that the elements of the alphabet were driven into his head by an impatient teacher--a mode of instruction that probably caused him to remark, in after life, that 'many children, not naturally dull, have become so under the influence of the schoolmaster.' it is related of dr. clarke that when he reached the middle of 'as in præsenti,' in lilly's latin grammar, he came to a dead stop and could get no further. his fellow-pupils, however, jeered him to such an extent that he determined to go on and conquer the difficulty. and this resolution seems to have helped him considerably, as, instead of the grammar being forced into him, he began to study and think for himself. nevertheless, he always found great difficulty in learning anything at school, but was passionately devoted to reading imaginative books and stories of adventure, such as 'jack the giant-killer,' 'arabian nights,' 'the pilgrim's progress,' 'sir francis drake,' and a host of similar works. to these, in fact, and not to his painfully acquired school education, he was wont to attribute the formation of his literary taste. disraeli's education was by no means thorough. there is no record of his having distinguished himself academically in the slightest degree. it is related of him, on the contrary, that he was such a duffer at classics as to be incapable of grasping the rule that 'ut' should be followed by the subjunctive mood. the following account of disraeli's schooldays, given by one of his school-fellows, is quoted by sir william fraser: 'i cannot say that benjamin disraeli at this period of his life exhibited any unusual zeal for classical studies; and i doubt whether his attainments in this direction, when he left the school for mr. cogan's at walthamstow, reached higher than the usual grind in livy and cæsar. but i well remember that he was the compiler and editor of a school newspaper, which made its appearance on saturdays, when the gingerbread-seller was also to be seen, and that the right of perusal was estimated at the cost of a sheet of gingerbread, the money value of which was in those days the third of a penny.' turning to literary men, we find an imposing array of dunces. i have not had time to examine into the school experiences of more than a limited number of great names. if the reader is anxious to pursue the investigation further, he will doubtless find that there is scarcely a famous man of letters who made his mark at school or university. the first person to teach oliver goldsmith his letters was a woman, who afterwards became village schoolmistress, named elizabeth delap. she did not form a very flattering opinion of her young pupil. 'never was so dull a boy,' she was wont to declare; 'he seemed impenetrably stupid.' from this kind but undiscriminating teacher oliver gravitated to the village school, where he learnt nothing. thence he was sent to elphin; and of this period of his school life dr. strean says: 'he was considered by his contemporaries and school-fellows, with whom i have often conversed on the subject, as a stupid heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom every one made fun of.' goldsmith has himself, in his 'inquiry into the present state of polite learning,' recorded some very striking impressions as to the value of academic success. 'a lad whose passions are not strong enough in youth,' he writes, 'to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclination, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance, probably obtains every advantage and honour his college can bestow. i forget whether the simile has been used before, but i would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquillity of dispassionate prudence to liquors that never ferment, and consequently continue always muddy. passions may raise a commotion in the youthful breast, but they disturb only to refine it. however this be, mean talents are often rewarded in colleges with an easy subsistence.' another 'impenetrable dunce,' according to the opinion of his tutor, an eminent dublin scholar, was richard sheridan. he was afterwards sent to harrow, where he earned for himself a great reputation for idleness. dr. parr, one of the under-masters, wrote to sheridan's biographer the following expression of opinion: 'there was little in his boyhood worth communication. he was inferior to many of his schoolfellows in the ordinary business of a school, and i do not remember any one instance in which he distinguished himself by latin or english composition, in prose or verse.... he was at the uppermost part of the fifth form, but he never reached the sixth, and, if i mistake not, he had no opportunity of attending the most difficult and the most honourable of school business, when the greek plays were taught--and it was the custom at harrow to teach these at least every year. he went through his lessons in horace and virgil and homer well enough for a time. but, in the absence of the upper master, dr. sumner, it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon calling up dick sheridan, i found him not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his greek grammar.... i ought to have told you that richard, when a boy, was a great reader of english poetry; but his exercises afforded no proof of his proficiency.' the latter statement speaks volumes for a method of teaching which failed to evoke, even in such a master of english literature as sheridan eventually proved himself to be, a proper development of his greatest talent. no doubt the exercises in which so little proficiency was shown were compulsorily executed against the grain, being of such a pedantic character that no sane schoolboy could possibly be found to evince the smallest interest in them. dean swift and sir walter scott were both dull boys. the former says of himself that he was 'stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency.' scott, in his autobiographical sketch, does not make himself out to have been the dunce that he really was supposed to be at school. if not bright at his lessons, however, he was certainly clever in other ways and capable of thinking for himself. an excellent illustration of this is contained in the story that though scott, as a boy, used invariably to go to sleep in church in the course of the sermon, yet, when questioned about the latter afterwards, he was generally able to sketch out most of the points dwelt upon by the preacher--the explanation being, of course, that, given the text, he was able to follow the probable train of thought inspired by its wording. summing up scott's attainments, a biographer gives expression to the opinion that he was 'self-educated in every branch of knowledge he ever turned to account in the works of his genius.' neither burns nor carlyle was a scholar. the former received a grounding in grammar, reading, and writing. he acquired a little french, but learnt no latin at all. whatever he knew he owed to the fact that he exercised his own taste for knowledge by choosing his own books and devouring only what appealed to his mind. carlyle, like many another famous man of letters, had little latin and less greek. 'in the classical field,' he wrote, 'i am truly as nothing.' for mathematics he showed a certain amount of inclination, but even in that field did not succeed in carrying off any prizes. his own opinion of a conventional education is very tersely rendered by his exclamation: 'academia! high school instructors of youth! oh, ye unspeakable!' the poet wordsworth was educated at the grammar school at hawkshead. he always declared that the great merit of the school was the liberty allowed to the scholars. no attempt was made to cram or to produce model pupils. within limits they appear, in fact, to have been allowed to read precisely what they pleased. in this way wordsworth received in every sense of the term a liberal education; and when he went to cambridge, 'he enjoyed even more thoroughly than at hawkshead whatever advantages might be derived from the neglect of his teachers.' the poet had a great contempt for academical training, and refused to go through the usual cambridge course. he finally graduated as b.a. without honours, afterwards recording his indifference to academic distinction in the well-known lines: of college labours, of the lecturer's room, all studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, with loyal students faithful to their books, half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants, and honest dunces--of important days, examinations, when the man was weighed as in a balance! of excessive hopes, tremblings withal and commendable fears, small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad-- let others that know more speak as they know. such glory was but little sought by me, and little won. more forcibly expressed was rousseau's derision of ordinary educational methods. writing in his 'confessions' about the school days of his cousin and himself, he says: 'we were sent together to bossey, to board with the protestant minister lambercier, in order to learn, together with latin, all the sorry trash which is included under the name of education.... m. lambercier was a very intelligent person who, without neglecting our education, never imposed excessive tasks upon us. the fact that, in spite of my dislike to restraint, i have never recalled my hours of study with any feeling of disgust, and also that, even if i did not learn much from him, i learnt without difficulty what i did learn, and never forgot it, is sufficient proof that his system of instruction was a good one.' as far as the history of science is concerned, there is a long array of self-cultured men to whom most of the discoveries that have been made are due. in no other occupation is the faculty of thinking originally and independently more essential than in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and it is significant that amongst famous scientists more instances are to be found of men who owe nothing to school instruction or academic training than in almost any other walk of life. in this connection mention has already been made of the famous botanist linnæus. the whole of his school life was one unremitting protest against the usual educational methods of endeavouring to force the mind away from its natural bent. linnæus detested metaphysics, latin, greek, and every subject except physics and mathematics, in which he usually outstripped his fellow-pupils. but his nose was kept to the grindstone until the authorities informed his father that he was not fit for a learned education, and recommended his being given some manual employment. thus were twelve precious years of the life of one of the most gifted men of science, save for what he accomplished out of school hours, wasted to no purpose. it is not to be wondered at that he spoke of one of his masters as 'a passionate and morose man, better calculated for extinguishing a youth's talents than for improving them.' one of the greatest anatomists that ever lived, john hunter, who numbered dr. jenner amongst his pupils, was scarcely educated at all for the first twenty years of his life. mr. smiles states that 'it was with difficulty that he acquired the arts of reading and writing.' originally a carpenter, he became assistant to his brother, who was established in london as a surgeon. he acquired all his knowledge of anatomy in the dissecting-room, and owed everything he had learnt to his own hard work and habit of thinking things out for himself. 'the brilliant sir humphry davy,' says mr. smiles, 'was no cleverer than other boys. his teacher, dr. cardew, once said of him, "while he was with me i could not discern the faculties by which he was so much distinguished." indeed, davy himself in after life considered it fortunate that he had been left to "enjoy so much idleness" at school.' newton was always at the bottom of his class, until he suddenly took it into his head to give a boy, whom he had already thrashed in another sense, an intellectual beating. 'it is very probable,' writes sir david brewster in his biography, 'that newton's idleness arose from the occupation of his mind with subjects in which he felt a deeper interest.' nobody could have penned a more incisive indictment against the imbecility of an education system that forces all boys, irrespective of their wishes or talents, into a fixed groove. it was newton who, in answer to an inquiry as to how the principle of gravity was discovered, replied: 'by always thinking of it.' when watt, as a boy, was engaged in investigating the condensation of steam, his aunt, who was sitting with him at the tea-table, exclaimed: 'james, i never saw such an idle boy! take a book or employ yourself usefully. for the last half hour you have not spoken a word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, and counting the drops of water.' in this sympathetic way children are usually encouraged to think by their elders. watt's faculties were developed entirely at home. he was sent to a public elementary school in scotland; but, fortunately for science, he was so delicate that he was nearly always absent through indisposition. a visitor, who found the boy drawing lines and circles on the hearth with a piece of coloured chalk, once remonstrated with mr. james watt, senior, for allowing his son to waste his time at home. watt had the good fortune, however, to possess an intelligent father, who encouraged the boy as far as it lay in his power. left to his own devices, watt not only contrived to make himself the foremost engineer of his time, but he also developed his talents in many other directions. sir walter scott says of him that 'his talents and fancy overflowed on every subject.' and m. arago, the french scientist, in his memoir of watt, expresses the view that the latter, in spite of his excellent memory, 'might, nevertheless, not have peculiarly distinguished himself among the youthful prodigies of ordinary schools. he could never have learned his lessons like a parrot, for he experienced a necessity of carefully elaborating the intellectual elements presented to his attention, and nature had peculiarly endowed him with the faculty of meditation.' this is only a roundabout way of saying that the conventional process of cramming would have destroyed the fine intellectual faculties possessed by watt. but if in his case, why not in that of another? that is the strange thing about the light shed upon educational problems by cases like that of watt, newton, and other men of commanding genius. people only perceive in it a half-truth. they think that it is only in these exceptional instances that the mind is incapable of being developed by ordinary rough-and-ready methods. upon what grounds is such an absurd deduction founded? it is true that individuals differ widely as to the capabilities of their mental machinery; but it does not follow that the intellectual fibre of one person is more delicate than that of another. the difference is not mental, but physical. it is because a boy is healthy, and not because his intellectual fibre is coarse, that he is better able to withstand the strain of an educational training than a weaker and more nervous boy. until the discovery is made that all minds are sensitive, when they have been actually reached, people will go on ignorantly destroying the finer faculties under the impression that genius or talent is a very rare thing, and can always shift for itself. yet, as i have attempted to show, the evidence of history points conclusively to the fact that the contrary is the case. is it really supposed that the great names that have been handed down to posterity represent all the genius to which the world has given birth? the idea is preposterous. for every man of genius or talent who has been permitted to survive, education systems have killed a hundred. if it had not been for dr. rothmann, there would probably have been no linnæus to revolutionize the system of botanical classification. had tyrannical parents and schoolmasters compelled watt and newton to give up mechanics and scientific study for a thorough cramming in latin grammar and greek roots, we might to-day be without a steam-engine or a theory of the law of gravitation. even the genius of napoleon and wellington might easily have been crushed under the auspices of a modern competitive examination. would stupid oliver goldsmith have written his immortal 'vicar of wakefield' and 'she stoops to conquer,' or would idle sheridan have penned the exquisite comedies that have not to this day been approached by any subsequent writer, if their idleness and stupidity had been submitted to the test of an enforced academic training for classical or mathematical honours? surely the evidence of history points to only one conclusion--namely, that all the genius in the world cannot survive the hopeless imbecility of educational methods, except by successfully dodging them through stupidity and idleness, whilst the faculties develop themselves at stolen intervals. chapter xiii the apotheosis of cram we have reached a point at which it is advisable to take a broad survey of the direction in which education systems are hurrying the world. have these educational methods a definite objective, or is their sole purpose the production of scholars manufactured _en bloc_? these are important questions that need careful answering. upon the face of it, there is no doubt that in this country, at least, educational establishments have, up to the present, aimed only at turning out scholars of certain intellectual types. the result of this process has been shown in the preceding pages to be sufficiently disastrous in its effects upon its victims. there are, in fact, few social evils which cannot be traced, directly or indirectly, to its agency. but as yet there has been no dominant motive-power, working invisibly towards a definite end, behind the educational machinery of the country. a general feeling has been fomented of late, however, that all education, from the lowest step to the highest, ought to be co-ordinated and organized into a single piece of state-directed machinery. the danger of this can only be appreciated by an examination of the effects already produced by such a system in other countries. germany offers in this connection the best possible example. the interference of the state in educational matters has there been brought to perfection. absolute control is exercised by the government in everything appertaining to the instruction of youth all over germany. the emperor has become so autocratic in the exercise of this control in the kingdom of prussia, that he talks openly about manufacturing this or that kind of educational article exactly in the manner in which a manufacturer would discuss putting some commodity upon the market. there is not the slightest attempt on the part of the prussian government to disguise the political uses to which their supreme authority in educational matters is put. one of the first acts of the emperor william ii., on succeeding to the throne, was to issue the most plain-spoken instructions to the government of prussia in reference to state interference with the schools for political purposes. 'for a long time,' it was declared in the royal decree,[a] 'i have been occupied with the thought how to make the school useful for the purpose of counteracting the spread of socialistic and communistic ideas.... the history of modern times down to the present day must be introduced more than hitherto into the curriculum, and the pupils must be shown that the executive power of the state alone can protect for each individual his family, his freedom, and his rights.' [a] for information on this and many other points connected with the subject of education in prussia, i am indebted to mr. michael e. sadler's special report to the board of education on 'problems in prussian secondary education for boys.' later on follows the recommendation that, 'by striking references to actual facts, it should be made clear even to young people that a well-ordered constitution under secure monarchical rule is the indispensable condition for the protection and welfare of each individual, both as a citizen and as a worker; that, on the other hand, the doctrines of social democracy are, in point of fact, infeasible; and that, if they were put into practice, the liberty of each individual would be subjected to intolerable restraint, even within the very circle of the home. the ideas of the socialists are sufficiently defined through their own writings for it to be possible to depict them in a way which will shock the feelings and the practical good-sense even of the young.' the danger of this direct state control is obvious. it renders all liberty of thought absolutely impossible. politics, religion, social views--all are systematically worked into the curriculum for the object of stifling independent ideas, criticisms, and whatever else may be of value to the interests of the community at large, although possibly highly inconvenient to the established order. to cram the youth of the nation after this fashion with all the facts and fancies that may happen to suit the weaknesses of the national constitution, is exactly the way in which to bring about the decay of both government and country. merely from a political standpoint, therefore, nothing could be more disastrous to the state than to make use of its power of educational control in order to stifle opposition and independent criticism. it is equally clear that, wherever the government possesses this power, it will use it as far as is practicable for the purpose of self-preservation. almost for a century the prussian authorities have been getting the control of their national schools more and more into their own hands. they have now succeeded in bringing the application of the theory of state interference to the high-water mark of practicability. from the rudiments of the alphabet to the history of economics, everything in the prussian curriculum may be suspected of serving some political purpose. the schoolboy is regarded by the authorities as a mere pawn, to be moved on the national board in strict accordance with the political necessities of the hour. for some years past, the attention of prussia and of the whole german empire has been concentrated upon the commercial rivalry of the different nations of the world. the chief, if not the sole, educational aim has been to produce a percentage-calculating machine on a wholesale plan, equipped with certain devices for the successful carrying on of trade. the german authorities became impregnated with the belief that commercial supremacy could best be attained by organizing the whole nation into a uniform body of workers trained to co-operation. everything of late years has been subordinated to this design. the commercial success of the scheme has been notorious. german manufacturers have been gaining ground in all parts of the world. the consular reports at the foreign office are filled with pessimistic warnings about the decline of british trade at various points where it was once supreme, and with significant statistics that show the rapid advance of german commercial enterprise. but it does not follow, because germany seems to have shot ahead of us by leaps and bounds of late years, that she has adopted sound means to accomplish this end. on the contrary, if the expedients by which this commercial supremacy has been attained are an exaggeration of the worst evils of education systems, then germany has started upon a downward path which must eventually lead her to the brink of ruin. and this is precisely the case. cramming has been brought throughout germany to the level of a fine art. it is done, i must confess--for i was myself subjected to the process for some years--more completely and effectively than in this country. that is to say, the pupil is not crammed in such an idiotic fashion that he forgets all that has been stuffed into him immediately he has left school. the drilling, however wrong it may be in principle, is thorough enough, in all conscience. it may be, as it is elsewhere, the pestle and mortar system. but at least the pestle is applied consistently, and each ingredient is perfectly mixed before the next component is introduced. if, therefore, the object of education be to produce an article of a certain type or consistency, then the prussian school stands far in advance of our own cramming institutions. it may well be taken in that case as a model for us to copy. people should, however, ask themselves these questions: is it international commercial rivalry that produces the necessity of a state system of education to equip the nation for the struggle? or is it the state system of education, with its organized attempt to manufacture a race of traders, which has artificially created the state of commercial warfare into which we are rapidly drifting? the answer seems to me to be plain enough. the individuality of individuals is rapidly disappearing throughout that part of the world which has chosen to subject itself to uniform education systems. one englishman is much like another, in the same way that russians, or germans, or frenchmen resemble each other. in other words, the only individuality which education is leaving us is that of nationality; and the reason of this is because the manners, the customs, and the school systems of various countries still differ to a certain extent. instead, therefore, of the individual competing against the individual, we are rapidly approaching the point where the whole strength and resources of each nation will be employed to co-operate against the rest of the world. and this is no mere natural outcome of evolution. germany, with her extraordinary cuteness and foresight, invented the game for her own benefit a generation or two ago. she has spent the best part of half a century equipping herself, hand over fist, for this kind of commercial contest. but what is she sacrificing in order to obtain this triumph of the trader? there cannot be a question that she is deliberately and systematically throwing away the most precious of all human possessions--the character of the individual. at the berlin conference on secondary education, held in , dr. virchow observed: 'i regret that i cannot bear my testimony to our having made progress in forming the character of pupils in our schools. when i look back over the forty years during which i have been professor and examiner--a period during which i have been brought in contact not only with physicians and scientific investigators, but also with many other types of men--i cannot say that i have the impression that we have made material advances in training up men with strength of character. on the contrary, i fear that we are on a downward path. the number of "characters" becomes smaller. and this is connected with the shrinkage in private and individual work done during a lad's school life. for it is only by means of independent work that the pupil learns to hold his own against external difficulties, and to find in his own strength, in his own nature, in his own being, the means of resisting such difficulties and of prevailing over them.' the inevitable result of this sacrifice of individuality must be the intellectual decay of the nation, or at least its degeneration into a state of hopeless mediocrity. unless, therefore, germany can persuade other countries to adopt similar tactics, and to meet her on the plane where she has already obtained the start of a generation, she must come hopelessly to grief in the future. unfortunately, there seems every indication that the statesmen who lead rival nations are only too ready to follow germany's blind lead. in this country it is only the blessed ignorance of the people which is holding back those who are anxious to commit the folly that has put pounds, shillings, and pence into german pockets, at the cost of taking originality and character out of german heads. this educational suicide, it must also be remembered, can only be committed without serious social disturbance in a despotically-governed country like the german empire. in england, with our system of party government, a complete measure of state control in educational matters would create a political pandemonium that would be little short of appalling. the party struggles of the future would, if this prussian system were transplanted here, centre round educational control. the schools would no longer be regarded as establishments for the instruction of youth; they would be looked upon simply as the nursery of the future voter. a conservative government would cram everything into the curriculum calculated to stifle inconveniently progressive ideas, whilst a radical government would try to banish from the schools all established beliefs and conventions. between these opposing stools the manufactured scholar would fall lamentably to the ground. he would be neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. there would be a perpetual chopping and changing in the methods of his education, from which he would not even derive the benefit, so gratefully acknowledged by wordsworth, of being neglected by his teachers. to talk of beating germany at her own game is, therefore, the height of absurdity. nothing could result from such an endeavour but ruin to the country. under our party system it is obvious that it could not be done with the remotest chance of success. and even if it were possible to obtain steady uniform state interference, working always towards a specific end, german methods would only be adopted at the expense of increasing the pressure of cramming _en bloc_, and thereby multiplying the evils which have been but faintly depicted in the foregoing pages. chapter xiv the great fallacy that the world is badly ordered for humanity is a self-evident truth of which the observant scarcely need reminding. it is equally obvious, from the exquisite order and symmetry of animal and vegetable life, that providence is not to blame for the colossal mess into which civilization has managed to lead the majority of mankind. man is himself responsible for the present state of human affairs; and although great things have been undeniably accomplished during the progress of the nations, the magnificent achievements of exceptional individuals pale beside the stupendous blundering of the many. it must surely be clear to everybody that there has been some evil influence at work to arrest the fair promise and development of the human race. the splendid march of intellectual progress from the dark ages to the brilliant dawn of the nineteenth century, with its glittering array of master minds and its titanic roll of genius, has been suddenly brought to a dead halt. here and there, during the past generation, great figures have struggled up on to the world's stage and grappled with the ebb-tide. but the majestic stream of mediocrity has swept away their dykes, and obliterated their landmarks with its increasing volume. the remarkable fact can hardly have escaped attention that the more humanity attempts to equip itself for the serious business of life, by forcing itself into an educational strait-waistcoat, the more rapid becomes the disappearance of character and genius, and even of ordinary talent. everybody is getting ground down to a level. it is scarcely possible to point to a single civilized man and say: 'there is somebody in whom every faculty has been developed and natural talent perfected to its utmost capability.' the most that can be said of the individual is: 'there goes a cambridge man or a grammar-school man, and when you have knocked all the nonsense out of him you'll find he's not a bad fellow at bottom.' we are not what we have made ourselves, but what we have chosen to allow others to make us. whatever may once have been the nursery of the human race, it is now to a great extent the school. some part--it generally is the best part--of education takes place outside the class-room; but it must be remembered that the atmosphere of home is generally impregnated with the conventional traditions of the school and of the university. the evil influence that is so obviously undermining social and national life must, therefore, first be sought in the principles upon which education systems have been founded. nothing is more astonishing than to reflect upon the unintelligent grounds on which people base their adherence to the principles of modern education. they are unable, in the first place, to get over the fact that their forefathers were brought up in the same fashion before them. it is a sheer impossibility for most people to question anything that has been going on for any length of time unchecked. the undisputed possession of a custom for so many years converts it into the legal property of the nation, whence it derives a sacred character, and nobody dreams of meddling with it. any abuses it may bring in its train are then conveniently ascribed to the perversity of providence. the cherished convention is never questioned. that is the remarkable thing about it. people can be brought to understand, by means of a flourish of dazzling prospectuses and newspaper advertisements, that a bicycle is an improvement on a bone-shaker, or that pneumatic tyres are more comfortable on rough roads than iron-rimmed wheels. but that appears to be the set limit of their comprehension. they are capable of being made to grasp, after nearly exhausting the resources of a wealthy syndicate, something that obviously affects their material comfort. but progress in ideas, or anything in the shape of moral revolution, has to undergo a thousand-fold more tortuous process before it can be made to filter through a convention. the academic product is, it must be remembered, a bundle of conventions. if the article has been properly manufactured, and bears the hall-mark of the maker and the stamp of the country of its origin, there is nothing else there for the truth to filter into. it simply drops through and vapourizes without disturbing anything. conventionality is therefore an insuperable obstacle, as far as the majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the established principles of education are absolutely false. these principles will never be questioned. it is good enough for the average man that his fellow-creatures have been contented with them since time immemorial, and that they are diligently practised in the schools and colleges whose names have been household words for generations past. next to this antiquated conservatism of the least intelligent and most dispiriting type, comes the false shame that the majority of people exhibit when caught displaying ignorance of any of the facts which cramming systems have pronounced to be indispensable to a general education. probably more real culture is nipped in the bud by the ridiculous assumption that everybody must be a walking encyclopædia, than by all the philistine conventions and stupidities put together. in the course of a recent conversation with an exceptionally brilliant woman of my acquaintance, it transpired that she believed winchester and cambridge to be in the same county. this lack of geographical knowledge did not appear, however, to have impaired her intellectual faculties. there are many persons who can accurately locate any town in england, and yet are vastly inferior in mental capacity to the lady who thought that cambridge was in hampshire. why should an individual know more than it is useful and convenient for him to know? for the student of foreign politics it is essential to be aware of the geographical difference between tokio and peking; but of what earthly use would this knowledge be to a man who devoted the whole of his life to inquiring into the domestic routine of the extinct dodo, or to the improvement of agriculture by the application of scientific manures? life is short, and it is only possible within the limits of the brief span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. it is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. some consolation, at least, might surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest geniuses whom the world has produced were profoundly ignorant as to ninety per cent. of the things which are considered to be indispensable knowledge at the present day. nobody can hope to read all the books that are popularly supposed to have been digested by the well-educated man. it would be impossible to get through a tithe of them. yet how many people there are who will sooner tell a deliberate lie, than acknowledge having omitted to read some classic that happens to be mentioned in the course of conversation! and this is simply due to the infatuated belief that culture consists in stuffing one's self with the ideas of other people. a man whose brain was teeming with his own thoughts and creations, but who had neglected to stock it with the hundred thousand conventional facts culled from the hundred best books selected for him by other people, would be looked upon as an uneducated boor by cultured pedants of the conventional type. it will be seen, therefore, that this false shame, inspired by an unwholesome terror of public ridicule, plays a very important part in tying people to the apron-strings of education, and warping their judgment. but there is also a third factor which must be taken seriously into account. this is the widespread credulousness not only as to the efficacy, but as to the indispensability, of the ordinary methods of instruction as mental training. people have actually come to believe that no one can think without being taught to do so by means of all kinds of mathematical and classical gymnastics. whence comes this monstrous notion i do not pretend to be capable of explaining--i merely note its universal existence. probably no doctrine is more deeply ingrained in the mind of the average person. there does not seem to be any logic or sense in it; but somebody with a huge sense of humour must have once started the craze--much in the way that a practical joker will stare intently at nothing in a london street until he has collected a large and inquisitive crowd, and will then steal quietly away, leaving everybody looking vacuously at the same spot. in the whole history of education there is no greater absurdity than the notion that a boy can be taught to think by training his mind backwards and forwards in the conjugation of irregular verbs and the vagaries of latin or greek inflections. exercises of this ingeniously ridiculous kind only serve to empty the brain of ideas, and to make room for the reception of facts crammed in on the wholesale system. it is an accepted fact, however, that the brain, in order to pursue its normal functions, must first be subjected to a course of training in abstract subjects as far removed as possible from all human interest; that common sense, in other words, is a product of greek roots and algebraical formulæ--not of the natural application of the thinking faculties to the ordinary circumstances of everyday life. the hopeless imbecility of this tenet of faith is only equalled by the depth to which it has taken root in the popular mind. the wonderful thing is that the total failure of the plan has not long ago convinced everybody of its uselessness. but that is at once the mischief and the charm of the convention: no amount of practical demonstration will prejudice anybody against it. in this way the great fallacy of education has been allowed to grow up and to spread its false and obnoxious principles like a network over the whole civilized world. with all the baneful effects produced by these fallacious dogmas staring them in the face, people do not seem to have been capable of tumbling to the fact that the origin of the social evils which surround them lies in the very calf of gold that they and their forefathers have set up and worshipped. even the reformers of education appear to have deceived themselves. many of them--arnold and thring conspicuous amongst their number--have tried to abolish this abuse or to remedy that defect; but not one has gone to the root of the evil, and has boldly stated that the whole system of education is based upon totally erroneous principles--designed, not to encourage progress and generate ideas, but to stifle development, and to place an insurmountable obstacle in the path of the evolution of humanity. the world has acquiesced in the deceit, and so the great fallacy has grown up unchecked, and, like a rolling stone, gathered moss from generation to generation, until its hideous proportions seem to have embraced the universe, and to have shut out every particle of light from the vision of unhappy, convention-haunted mankind. chapter xv real education there is no such thing in existence as a system of genuine education. a large number of institutions exist, as we have seen, for the purpose of manufacturing and cramming, after an approved plan, the youth of the upper and middle classes, and there is a well-organized system of sham education spread throughout the country under the title of 'public elementary schools.' that is the sum of modern educational effort. the word 'education,' when used in the sense that is commonly applied to it, could not be satisfactorily and adequately defined in less than a post octavo pamphlet. it signifies an enormous number of things, from pot-hooks to trigonometry. it means history, geography, physics, chemistry, natural history, mineralogy, latin, greek, french, arithmetic, algebra, euclid, and goodness knows how many more things, jammed in at so much a pound. it means taking a child, shaking everything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner with facts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which it cannot have any use. it means risking the mental shipwreck of the clever child, and making the stupid more dense. and it means popping the individual into a mould, and dishing him up as a dummy. what it does not mean, is developing the faculties of each individual. there is, in fact, a wide difference between what education is and what it should be. if every school and college throughout the country were closed to-morrow, it would probably effect some negative good within an appreciable measure of time, and it would certainly abolish much positive harm that is being unceasingly produced by the present methods of instruction. if no effort be made to develop the faculties of each individual, then it is better to leave them alone to develop on their own account. but nothing can be more pernicious than to take the youth of the nation wholesale, and to destroy most of the good that is latent in them, in order to manufacture them into something which nature never intended them to be. this is not education, but fabrication. it is destruction, not development. real education would consist in assisting every individual to develop the faculties with which nature had endowed him, and to train to their highest capacity any special talents that might reveal themselves during the process. above all things, real education would encourage the utilization of the brain for purposes of thought and reflection, instead of trying to make it a warehouse for storing van-loads of useless knowledge. it is absurd to assume that this simple educational aim is beyond the reach of humanity. that its introduction into the practical affairs of life would cause a stupendous revolution cannot be denied. but it does not follow, on that account, that it should be conveniently consigned, like many another pressing reform, to the pigeon-hole of the impossible. the main thing that is required to carry out the true principle of education is more individual common sense and less state interference. the mischievous enactment that children should commence any process of instruction at the tender age of five should be at once struck off the statute-book. no doubt something would have to be done to remove young children of the poorest class, in large towns at least, from the influence of sordid homes for a certain period of the day. it does not follow, however, that they should be subjected to the routine of an elementary school and crammed with superficial and unsuitable knowledge. children want room to think; their minds have to grow up as well as their bodies. mental nourishment is quite as necessary as physical nourishment; but it is nonsensical to apply them both in the same fashion. the mind has to be fed in a totally different manner to the body. the former is a delicate operation, that requires far more care and common sense than is necessary for the boiling of milk or the preparation of an infant food. the child's mind is not a blank, upon which anything may be written at will; it is scored invisibly with heredity and individual tendencies. the function of the parent is to see that nothing is done to destroy this delicate fabric, and to watch carefully for revelations of natural bent and character, in order to encourage and develop them. anything in the shape of actual teaching or instruction ought to be rigorously avoided. facts should be regarded as poisons, to be used sparingly and with discrimination. every time that a fact is imparted an idea is driven out. that should be carefully borne in mind. the operation of the simplest fact upon the intelligence is highly complex. it is not only a thing to imprint upon the memory, but it is also a means of diverting thought into the channels of the commonplace. every fact closes up an avenue of the imagination. to take an illustration, let us suppose someone to impart to a little child the information that it is a physiological impossibility for angels to have wings as well as arms. this prosaic piece of intelligence would, in one moment, annihilate most of the romance of childhood. it would be a blow from which the imagination might never recover. the child would, by a rapid process of thought, lose all faith in fairyland, and in the thousand and one fancies of the youthful brain that are the mainspring of the development of the imagination. why is it that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred lose this faculty in the earliest period of their childhood? it is simply because their bringing-up has consisted in a persistent inoculation with the material facts of life, and a correspondingly persistent elimination of all imaginative ideas. 'don't let the children believe such rubbish!' is a constant ejaculation of the mechanical-minded person who does not permit himself to suffer any illusions, and who has long since 'done with romance and all that kind of twaddle.' at any cost the imagination of the child should be encouraged and developed. it is the richest vein in the whole mental machinery of man, the faculty within which genius most frequently lurks, and where it can be most easily and permanently destroyed. grown-up people should remember that an indiscreet answer to a childish question, or a snub administered to an inquiring mind, is often sufficient to check thought. it should be mainly the care of the parent to encourage the imagination in young children, recollecting that up to a certain age its development depends upon all the absurdities and fantastic notions of childhood which the average adult is so fond of repressing. by the exercise of prudence and some show of sympathy, it would then be possible to bring a child up to the age of seven or eight without damaging its mind or destroying its faculties. from that point onwards the child's education ought to depend upon the individual himself. there should be no such thing as instruction, in the sense which implies the cramming of the brain with information, or such mental gymnastics as conjugating irregular verbs and hunting for the least common multiple. the position of teacher and pupil would have to be practically reversed. the pupil would lead, and the teacher follow. in fact, the latter should become an adviser rather than instructor, the child selecting those studies, or those arts or crafts, which are to be made the principal objective of its education, whilst to the mentor would fall the rôle of encouraging and assisting the course of study or practice at a morally safe distance. boys and girls would then not learn, but investigate. the process of learning should be got rid of altogether, being a clumsy, dronish way of acquiring knowledge, and one that tends to keep the brain in a perpetual state of dependence. ignorance, one ought to remember, is a valuable incentive to investigation. young people should be left as much as possible to find things out for themselves. education should resemble a person groping forward in the dark; and only so much light ought to be let in upon the process as seems desirable in each individual case. in that way, at least, the pupil would learn to think for himself; and even if little more were accomplished than this, it would be of ten thousand times greater value to the individual, and to the community at large, than the acquisition of a large stock of facts at the price of losing all power of reflection and initiative. let me give an illustration of what i will call the opposing methods of education. we will suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only available book for the instruction of a class of boys was that excellent but abstruse work known as 'bradshaw's railway guide.' the modern schoolmaster would draw up an exhaustive and complicated scheme. so much time would be devoted to parsing every sentence through the book. the figures would be added up, and subtracted, and divided. he would concoct neat little mathematical problems: if the . express from paddington travelled to swindon at fifty miles an hour and broke down half-way, at what o'clock would the . parliamentary train overtake it? and so forth. but--most valuable exercise of all--long tables of trains would be learnt off by heart, with the names of stopping places and the prices of the first-class tickets. a genuine educationist would set to work in a much simpler fashion. he would tell the boys to look out a good train from birmingham to newcastle. each boy would be free to tackle the problem in his own fashion, and the task--if successfully accomplished--would do much towards developing the thinking faculties. in any system of real education it would be impossible for the schoolmaster to dictate the subjects to which the pupil should give his attention, and it would be equally impossible for the parent to say 'i intend my son to enter such-and-such a profession.' nobody can settle beforehand what talents the child is to develop. that is a private matter in which no third person has any right to interfere between the child itself and nature. modern education consists entirely of interference. there is, in the first place, the interference of the parent, who insists upon an artistic boy becoming a banker, puts an incipient tradesman into the army, or tries to make a scholar out of a mechanic. then there comes the interference of the schoolmaster, who has his favourite recipe of latin verses, quadratic equations, and what not, to stuff into every head he can get hold of for a few terms. lastly appears the government, which declares that nobody shall enter the army, or navy, or civil service, without devoting his best years to being crammed in such a scandalous fashion, that it is a toss-up whether he breaks down altogether under the ordeal, or simply forgets, a few months after the consummation of the process, all that has been pitchforked into his brain. when a baby is brought into the world the parents spend the first year of its life in wondering and speculating about its future. will it be a great author, or a bishop, or a lord chancellor? if its mouth twitches when anyone slams a door, or it gurgles happily when a note is struck on the piano, they declare it has genius for music; and if it amuses itself later on by crude efforts to draw distorted figures with distorted faces and distorted arms and legs, they jump to the conclusion that they have produced an infant correggio. why does all this anxiety about the child's individuality disappear the moment its intelligence begins to dawn? one must suppose, at any rate, that it does, because the parent immediately sets about getting all the originality knocked out of his offspring, and does not grudge the payment of heavy fees to secure this object. the dreams about the lord chancellorship, or the gold medal at the musical academy, vanish as if by magic. there is no more talk about bishoprics or artistic fame. the parents settle down to the conventional task of having the child fitted for something it has no desire to be; and the notion that the particular faculties they observed--or thought they observed--during its early infancy should or could be developed never appears to enter their heads for a moment. some children develop later than others; but with proper care and encouragement it would be possible not to lead, but to follow, each child to its own bent. the child must show the way--that is the essence of real education, and it involves a complete upheaval of the principles upon which systems of instruction are at present founded. there is only one way in which people are now able to obtain a genuine education, and it goes by the name--applied with more or less contempt--of self-culture. the process consists simply in the individual choosing his own subjects and studying them as best he can. no doubt the method could be immensely extended and improved, for the self-cultured man has no mentor to guide him when he is in perplexity, and would profit by experienced advice. but even were this not the case, it would be far better to abolish schools and universities and to let everybody shift for himself, than to insist upon subjecting the youth of the nation to a system that ingeniously manufactures failures for every walk in life, and accomplishes practically nothing else. chapter xvi the open door to intelligence it has been the chief aim in these pages, not to elaborate a scheme of education on new principles, but to point out the utter folly of persisting with a system that has worked a vast amount of evil, and cannot be proved to have achieved any real good. our great men have not been the product of a school curriculum, or of an academic training. in no single instance, as far as can be ascertained, has nobility of character, or the possession of genius, or soundness of judgment, or even beauty of diction in literature, been attributable to the grind in grammatical rules, the fact-cramming, and the mental gymnastics which go to make up what is called 'a liberal education.' in science, where the highest intellectual qualities are brought into play, most of the great discoverers have owed their entire scientific knowledge to self-taught methods of investigation. and it is the same thing in every field of research where the thinking faculties must reach the supreme limit of development--namely, that nothing is traceable to academic learning, and that everything is owing to the mental initiative which is produced solely by self-inculcated habits of reflection. to give education systems the credit, or even a share in the credit, of all the splendid achievements in politics, science, art, and literature is sheer intellectual laziness. it is the curse of the age that few people will trouble to question the existing order of things, and that nobody--except those who make the manufacture of opinions their profession--can be found to express an independent opinion on any subject under the sun. that is one reason why newspapers exist in their present form. the leading article is primarily the invention of the stupid, conventional, well-educated man whose profound knowledge of dates and irregular verbs has, unfortunately, had the effect of preventing him from forming his own judgment on public affairs. the press, which must have been originally established, like the famous _peking gazette_, for the dissemination of news, has long ago discovered that people prefer to obtain their opinions ready-made. the wise argument we hear being urged in a railway-carriage or at a dinner-table is merely an intellectual reach-me-down purchased at a book-stall for the modest price of one penny. if there were only one newspaper, and consequently only one leading article on a particular topic, political discussion would die a natural death. the political opinion to which the majestic alderman or the classically-trained savant gives such profound utterance is the opinion, not of himself, but of some poor devil who knows nothing of the blessings of a university education, but who writes in a garret, or in a dingy office off fleet street, to earn his bread and cheese. its value or political insight need not be disparaged on that account. i would trust it a thousand times rather than i would trust the opinion--if such a thing should have any existence--of the average educated man whose brains have been jellified at school or college. the point is not the value of the humble scribe's opinion, however, but the fact that a man, of what would be called inferior educational attainments, has to be engaged to do mental work that cannot be performed by the brains of people who have enjoyed all the advantages that a first-rate education is supposed to confer. the vote of the working-man is scarcely more unintelligently applied at election times than the vote of the educated man. on the contrary, the former may be said to think independently, or at least to use an independent instinct, whilst the latter is contented to believe in the iniquity of one party or the virtue of another, according to the opinion of the man in the garret. the working man wants beer, and he knows it. the china question, the war in south africa, the housing of the working classes, the great education controversy--everything is beer to him. it is the government who cheapen beer, or who regulate the percentage of arsenic to be used in brewing, that command his support--not ministers who promise to maintain british supremacy in the far east, or who put forward an attractive programme of domestic legislation. the natural consequence of this wholesale production of dummy members of society is that the strings of government are really pulled by the intelligent few. whatever the external constitution of great britain may be, the real power does not lie with parliament or with the executive, but is invariably wielded by one or more men of commanding ability. nominally, the administration is in the hands of the social aristocracy, that is to say, of a few peer families and their innumerable relations. whichever of the two great parties in the state may happen to be in power, the government is invariably exploited by members of the peer class, who practically divide the spoils of office amongst themselves and their immediate entourage. although, however, the english nobility manage to usurp all the offices of state, and to secure all the plums for themselves, it is not they who really govern the country. no doubt the landed aristocracy are politically the most fit to govern. they have no commercial or industrial interests that may bring corrupt and undesirable influences into public life. but they are unfitted for the position they ought to occupy by a system of education that manufactures mediocrity, and stifles the very qualities of imaginativeness and initiative which are indispensable to sound statesmanship. what is the inevitable result? the self-made man, with all his splendid intellectual faculties developed, with his independence of judgment, and his acquired habit of thinking for himself instead of leaning on precedent and borrowed wisdom, rides the dummy government class with whip and spur. he lays on the lash here and digs in the rowels there, goading on his steed in any direction that chances to suit his purpose. he naturally places personal ambition in front of national expediency, because his political career is necessarily a constant fight against odds. either he must rise superior to the peer combination, as disraeli succeeded in doing after a struggle unparalleled in the annals of political history, or he will be crushed by it. but the necessities of his position render the self-made man a particularly undesirable element in the administration of public affairs. during the course of his successful upward struggle he has, in nine cases out of ten, entangled himself in commercial or industrial interests from which it is difficult or impossible for him to dissociate himself. by this means, and through the necessarily adventurous character of his political career, he can scarcely avoid becoming, however undeserved the imputation may be, an object of suspicion. and when once distrust of this kind has been allowed to permeate through our public life, the degeneration of parliamentary government must follow. disraeli spent the greater part of his political life in manoeuvring for the premiership. when his object had been successfully attained, all his great qualities were turned to the advantage of the state. but up to that point he was compelled, in order to survive in his colossal struggle against the aristocratic element in politics, to play for his own hand. that must always be the case with the self-made man. his first objective must be his own self-preservation, and if he wishes to gain power he is bound to exploit the political situation, regardless of the best interests of the country, because every man's hand is against him until the summit of his ambition has been reached. schools and colleges in which the mind is crammed instead of being developed cannot produce statesmen. they can manufacture in unlimited quantities the type of well-intentioned, honourable mediocrity with which our public service is stocked. but as long as this process is continued, the real power in the administration of the affairs of the empire will remain virtually in the hands of a few able individuals of the wrong calibre. there will be a dummy prime minister, and a dummy cabinet; but the wires will be worked by the self-made man who must place himself first and his country second, with consequences usually disastrous to the national welfare. there is no intended disparagement of the self-made man. he is, and always has been, the best intellectual product of the age. the greatest statesmen, philosophers, scientists, writers, and other men of genius have been self-made or self-cultured. but it does not follow because great statesmen have been self-made men, that it is for the good of the country that its rulers should be drawn from that class. as has already been pointed out, the self-made man usually creates far more mischief in the course of his upward political struggle, than is compensated for afterwards when he has secured his position and can turn his talents to the account of his country, instead of for the purpose of securing his own personal advancement. there is, it must be remembered, a national emergency for which we have to prepare. our extended imperial obligations, and the sharp commercial competition which has caused some of the great powers to sacrifice individuality wholesale in order to mobilize an army of traders, make it imperative that measures should be taken to preserve the anglo-saxon race. the thing to avoid at this moment is imitation of tactics that will send every nation adopting them backward in evolution. to secure a temporary commercial triumph at the enormous sacrifice of the natural development of the individual, would be a fatal and short-sighted policy that could only end in national ruin. we have not yet reached the worst depths of the education fallacy, but we are complacently drifting in that direction. state interference in educational matters may be an excellent thing when the whole energies of the central authorities happen to be exerted in mitigation of the evils of the national system. but it must be borne in mind that political parties and the heads of departments are constantly changing in this country. the reformer of to-day may to-morrow be superseded by a retrogressive-minded mediocrity; and there would be no guarantee that the beneficial influence of the one would not be annihilated afterwards by the pernicious intermeddling of the other. instead of casting about for means of securing a state monopoly of the ruinous type of education supplied by our schools and colleges, it would be more conducive to the salvation of the country if the whole energies of the nation were directed towards revolutionizing the system of instruction itself. if schoolmasters can accomplish nothing better than the manufacture of set types of humanity, the progress of mankind would be promoted more rapidly without their assistance. what is, after all, the main object of education? it is to assist everybody to develop his faculties and talents, so that he may be fitted for the position in life which nature intended him to occupy. nobody can assert for an instant that the conventional methods of instructing youth either achieve, or even appear to aim at achieving, this end. the school does not pretend to discover or to encourage individual talents. it offers to pound so much latin grammar, mathematics, history, geography, etc., into each pupil, and to turn him out at the end of the process with exactly the same mental equipment as that acquired by the rest of his school-fellows. the principal aim of this book has been to draw attention to the incongruities and evils brought about by this sham and worthless system of education. that the world contains many illustrious examples of culture and genius is no proof that the slightest benefit has been derived by anybody from parsing ovid or cramming facts and dates. 'the best part of every man's education,' said sir walter scott, 'is that which he gives to himself'; and it might be added, with literal truth, that it is the only part which is of the slightest service in developing the mind with which he has been naturally endowed. all that i have presumed to advocate is that the door should be left open to intelligence. the education systems of the present day are particularly felicitous in keeping it firmly closed. it is only by dodging the schoolmaster and the coach that youthful talent stands a chance of being brought to maturity. the greatest achievements are not the work of senior wranglers and balliol scholars: they have been accomplished by class-room dunces, like clive and wellington; by school idlers, such as napoleon, disraeli, swift, and newton; or by self-taught men like stephenson, john hunter, livingstone, and herschel. it cannot be doubted that the institution of a rational method of developing the mind of the individual would sweep away all these anomalies. there are thousands of men in responsible positions who would willingly exchange their entire stock of classical or mathematical knowledge for a modicum of common sense and judgment. if everybody were encouraged to think for himself, the empire would have no lack of good servants to carry on the traditions of the past; and the dummy unit of administration would give place to a self-reliant man, capable of moving with the times, and of serving the public interest according to its wants, instead of clinging merely to routine and precedent. nearly all the misery suffered by humanity has been produced by artificial means. providence did not intend this world to be a place of purgatory for the majority of mankind. we are what we have made ourselves, and not what evolution intended us to be. it is in our power to mitigate much of the evil we have ignorantly manufactured for our own discomfiture, if we only attack it at the roots. and the greatest curse humanity has laid upon itself is that arbitrary interference with the natural development of the mind which is misnamed 'education.' the end billing and sons, ltd., printers, guildford practical education: by maria edgeworth, author of letters for literary ladies, and the parent's assistant, &c. &c. and, by richard lovell edgeworth, f. r. s. and m. r. i. a. in two volumes ... vol. ii. second american edition. published by j. francis lippitt, providence, (r. i.) and t. b. wait & sons, boston. t. b. wait and sons, printers. . contents. chapter page xiii. _on grammar and classical literature_ xiv. _on geography and chronology_ xv. _on arithmetic_ xvi. _geometry_ xvii. _on mechanics_ xviii. _chemistry_ xix. _on public and private education_ xx. _on female accomplishments, &c._ xxi. _memory and invention_ xxii. _taste and imagination_ xxiii. _wit and judgment_ xxiv. _prudence and economy_ xxv. _summary_ appendix. _notes, containing conversations and anecdotes of children_ practical education. chapter xiii. on grammar, and classical literature. as long as gentlemen feel a deficiency in their own education, when they have not a competent knowledge of the learned languages, so long must a parent be anxious, that his son should not be exposed to the mortification of appearing inferiour to others of his own rank. it is in vain to urge, that language is only the key to science; that the names of things are not the things themselves; that many of the words in our own language convey scarcely any, or at best but imperfect, ideas; that the true genius, pronunciation, melody, and idiom of greek, are unknown to the best scholars, and that it cannot reasonably be doubted, that if homer or xenophon were to hear their works read by a professor of greek, they would mistake them for the sounds of an unknown language. all this is true; but it is not the ambition of a gentleman to read greek like an ancient grecian, but to understand it as well as the generality of his contemporaries; to know whence the terms of most sciences are derived, and to be able, in some degree, to trace the progress of mankind in knowledge and refinement, by examining the extent and combination of their different vocabularies. in some professions, greek is necessary; in all, a certain proficiency of latin is indispensable; how, therefore, to acquire this proficiency in the one, and a sufficient knowledge of the other, with the least labour, the least waste of time, and the least danger to the understanding, is the material question. some school-masters would add, that we must expedite the business as much as possible: of this we may be permitted to doubt. _festina lente_ is one of the most judicious maxims in education, and those who have sufficient strength of mind to adhere to it, will find themselves at the goal, when their competitors, after all their bustle, are panting for breath, or lashing their restive steeds. we see some untutored children start forward in learning with rapidity: they seem to acquire knowledge at the very time it is wanted, as if by intuition; whilst others, with whom infinite pains have been taken, continue in dull ignorance; or, having accumulated a mass of learning, are utterly at a loss how to display, or how to use their treasures. what is the reason of this phenomenon? and to which class of children would a parent wish his son to belong? in a certain number of years, after having spent eight hours a day in "durance vile," by the influence of bodily fear, or by the infliction of bodily punishment, a regiment of boys may be drilled by an indefatigable usher into what are called scholars; but, perhaps, in the whole regiment not one shall ever distinguish himself, or ever emerge from the ranks. can it be necessary to spend so many years, so many of the best years of life, in toil and misery? we shall calculate the waste of time which arises from the study of ill written, absurd grammar, and exercise-books; from the habits of idleness contracted by school-boys, and from the custom of allowing holydays to young students; and we shall compare the result of this calculation with the time really necessary for the attainment of the same quantity of classical knowledge by rational methods. we do not enter into this comparison with any invidious intention, but simply to quiet the apprehensions of parents; to show them the possibility of their children's attaining a certain portion of learning within a given number of years, without the sacrifice of health, happiness, or the general powers of the understanding. at all events, may we not begin by imploring the assistance of some able and friendly hand to reform the present generation of grammars and school-books? for instance, is it indispensably necessary that a boy of seven years old should learn by rote, that "relative sentences are independent, _i. e._ no word in a relative sentence is governed either of verb, or adjective, that stands in another sentence, or depends upon any appurtenances of the relative; and that the english word 'that' is always a relative when it may be turned into _which_ in good sense, which must be tried by reading over the english sentence _warily_, and judging how the sentence will bear it, but when it cannot be altered, salvo sensu, it is a conjunction?" cannot we, for pity's sake, to assist the learner's memory, and to improve his intellect, substitute some sentences a little more connected, and perhaps a little more useful, than the following? "i have been a soldier--you have babbled--has the crow ever looked white?--ye have exercised--flowers have withered--we were in a passion--ye lay down--peas were parched--the lions did roar a while ago." in a book of latin exercises,[ ] the preface to which informs us, that "it is intended to contain such precepts of morality and religion, as ought most industriously to be inculcated into the heads of all learners, contrived so as that children may, as it were, insensibly suck in such principles as will be of use to them afterwards in the manly conduct and ordering of their lives," we might expect somewhat more of pure morality and sense, with rather more elegance of style, than appear in the following sentences: "i struck my sister with a stick, and was forced to flee into the woods; but when i had tarried there awhile, i returned to my parents, and submitted myself to their mercy, and they forgave me my offence." "when my dear mother, unknown to my father, shall send me money, i will pay my creditors their debts, and provide a supper for all my friends in my chamber, without my brother's consent, and will make presents to all my relations." so the measure of maternal tenderness is the sum of money, which the dear mother, unknown to her husband, shall send to her son; the measure of the son's generosity is the supper he is to give to all his friends in his chamber, exclusive of his poor brother, of whose offence we are ignorant. his munificence is to be displayed in making presents to all his relations, but in the mean time he might possibly forget to pay his debts, for "justice is a slow-paced virtue, and cannot keep pace with generosity." a reasonable notion of punishment, and a disinterested love of truth, is well introduced by the following picture. "my master's countenance was greatly changed when he found his beloved son guilty of a lie. sometimes he was pale with anger; sometimes he was red with rage; and in the mean time, he, poor boy, was trembling, (for what?) for fear of punishment." could the ideas of punishment and vengeance be more effectually joined, than in this portrait of the master red with rage? after truth has been thus happily recommended, comes honesty. "many were fellow-soldiers with valiant jason when he stole the golden fleece: many were companions with him, but he bore away the glory of the enterprise." valour, theft, and glory, are here happily combined. it will avail us nothing to observe, that the golden fleece has an allegorical meaning, unless we can explain satisfactorily the nature of an allegorical theft; though to our classical taste this valiant jason may appear a glorious hero, yet to the simple judgment of children, he will appear a robber. it is fastidious, however, to object to jason in the exercise-book, when we consider what children are to hear, and to hear with admiration, as they advance in their study of poetry and mythology. lessons of worldly wisdom, are not forgotten in our manual, which professes to teach "_the manly conduct and ordering of life_" to the rising generation. "those men," we are told, "who have the most money, obtain the greatest honour amongst men." but then again, "a poor man is as happy without riches, _if_ he can enjoy contentedness of mind, as the richest earl that coveteth greater honour." it may be useful to put young men upon their guard against hypocrites and knaves; but is it necessary to tell school-boys, that "it concerneth me, and all men, to look to ourselves, for the world is so full of knaves and hypocrites, that he is hard to be found who may be trusted?" that "they who behave themselves the most warily of all men, and live more watchfully than others, may happen to do something, which (if it be divulged) may very much damnify their reputation?" a knowledge of the world may be early requisite; but is it not going too far, to assure young people, that "the nations of the world are at this time come to that pass of wickedness, that the earth is like hell, and many men have degenerated into devils?" a greater variety of ridiculous passages from this tenth edition of garretson's exercise-book, might be selected for the reader's entertainment; but the following specimens will be sufficient to satisfy him, that by this original writer, natural history is as well taught as morality: man. "man is a creature of an upright body; he walketh upright when he is on a journey; and when night approaches, he lieth flat, and sleepeth." horses. "a journey an hundred and fifty miles long, tireth an horse that hath not had a moderate feed of corn." air, earth, fire, and water. "the air is nearer the earth than the fire; but the water is placed nearest to the earth, because these two elements compose but one body." it is an easy task, it will be observed, to ridicule absurdity. it is easy to pull down what has been ill built; but if we leave the ruins for others to stumble over, we do little good to society. parents may reasonably say, if you take away from our children the books they have, give them better. they are not yet to be had, but if a demand for them be once excited, they will soon appear. parents are now convinced, that the first books which children read, make a lasting impression upon them; but they do not seem to consider spelling-books, and grammars, and exercise-books, as books, but only as tools for different purposes: these tools are often very mischievous; if we could improve them, we should get our work much better done. the barbarous translations, which are put as models for imitation into the hands of school-boys, teach them bad habits of speaking and writing, which are sometimes incurable. for instance, in the fourteenth edition of clarke's cornelius nepos, which the preface informs us was written by a man full of indignation for the common practices of grammar-schools, by a man who laments that youth should spend their time "in tossing over the leaves of a dictionary, and hammering out such a language as the latin," we might expect some better translation than the following, to form the young student's style: "no body ever heard any other entertainment for the ears at _his_ (atticus's) meals than a reader, which we truly think very pleasant. nor was there ever a supper at his house without some reading, that their guests might be entertained in their minds as well as their stomachs; _for_ he invited those whose manners were not different from his own." "he (atticus) likewise had a touch at poetry, that he might not be unacquainted with this pleasure, we suppose. _for_ he has related in verses the lives of those who excelled the roman people in honour, and the greatness of their exploits. _so_ that he has described under each of their images, their actions and offices in no more than four or five verses, _which_ is scarcely to be believed _that_ such great things could be so briefly delivered." those who, in reading these quotations, have perhaps exclaimed, "why must we go through this farrago of nonsense?" should reflect, that they have now wasted but a few minutes of their time upon what children are doomed to study for hours and years. if a few pages disgust, what must be the effect of volumes in the same style! and what sort of writing can we expect from pupils who are condemned to such reading? the analogy of ancient and modern languages, differs so materially, that a literal translation of any ancient author, can scarcely be tolerated. yet, in general, young scholars are under a necessity of _rendering_ their latin lessons into english word for word, faithful to the taste of their dictionaries, or the notes in their translations. this is not likely to improve the freedom of their english style; or, what is of much more consequence, is it likely to preserve in the pupil's mind a taste for literature? it is not the time that is spent in pouring over lexicons, it is not the multiplicity of rules learnt by rote, nor yet is it the quantity of latin words crammed into the memory, which can give the habit of attention or the power of voluntary exertion: without these, you will never have time enough to teach; with them, there will always be time enough to learn.--one half hour's vigorous application, is worth a whole day's constrained and yawning study. if we compare what from experience we know can be done by a child of ordinary capacity in a given time, with what he actually does in school-hours, we shall be convinced of the enormous waste of time incident to the common methods of instruction. tutors are sensible of this; but they throw the blame upon their pupils--"you might have learned your lesson in half the time, if you had chosen it." the children also are sensible of this; but they are not able or willing to prevent the repetition of the reproach. but exertion does not always depend upon the will of the boy; it depends upon his previous habits, and upon the strength of the immediate motive which acts upon him. some children of quick abilities, who have too much time allotted for their classical studies, are so fully sensible themselves of the pernicious effect this has upon their activity of mind, that they frequently defer _getting their lessons_ to the last moment, that they may be forced by a sufficient motive to exert themselves. in _classes_ at public schools, the quick and the slow, the active and indolent, the stumbling and sure-footed, are all yoked together, and are forced to keep pace with one another: stupidity may sometimes be dragged along by the vigour of genius; but genius is more frequently chained down by the weight of stupidity. we are well aware of the difficulties with which the public preceptor has to contend; he is often compelled by his situation to follow ancient usage, and to continue many customs which he wishes to see reformed. any reformation in the manner of instruction in these public seminaries, must be gradual, and will necessarily follow the conviction that parents may feel of its utility. perhaps nothing can be immediately done, more practicably useful, than to simplify grammar, and to lighten as much as possible the load that is laid upon the memory. without a multiplicity of masters, it would be impossible to suit instruction to the different capacities, and previous acquirements, of a variety of pupils; but in a private education, undoubtedly the task may be rendered much easier to the scholar and to the teacher; much jargon may be omitted; and what appears from want of explanation to be jargon, may be rendered intelligible by proper skill and attention. during the first lessons in grammar, and in latin, the pupil need not be disgusted with literature, and we may apply all the principles which we find on other occasions successful in the management of the attention.[ ] instead of keeping the attention feebly obedient for an idle length of time, we should fix if decidedly by some sufficient motive for as short a period as may be requisite to complete the work that we would have done. as we apprehend, that even where children are to be sent to school, it will be a great advantage to them to have some general notions of grammar, to lead them through the labyrinth of common school books, we think that we shall do the public preceptor an acceptable service, if we point out the means by which parents may, without much labour to themselves, render the first principles of grammar intelligible and familiar to their children. we may observe, that children pay the strictest attention to the analogies of the language that they speak. where verbs are defective or irregular, they supply the parts that are wanting with wonderful facility, according to the common form of other verbs. they make all verbs regular. i go_ed_, i read_ed_, i writ_ed_, &c. by a proper application of this faculty, much time may be saved in teaching children grammar, much perplexity, and much of that ineffectual labour which stupifies and dispirits the understanding. by gentle degrees, a child may be taught the relations of words to each other in common conversation, before he is presented with the first sample of grammatical eloquence in lilly's accidence. "there be eight parts of speech." a phrase which in some parts of this kingdom would perhaps be understood, but which to the generality of boys who go to school, conveys no meaning, and is got by heart without reflection, and without advantage. a child can, however, be made to understand these formidable parts of speech, if they are properly introduced to his acquaintance: he can comprehend, that some of the words which he hears express _that something is done_; he will readily perceive, that if something is done, somebody, or something must do it: he will distinguish with much facility the word in any common sentence which expresses an action, and that which denotes the agent. let the reader try the experiment immediately upon any child of six or seven years old who has _not_ learned grammar, and he may easily ascertain the fact. a few months ago, mr. ---- gave his little daughter h----, a child of five years old, her first lesson in english grammar; but no alarming book of grammar was produced upon the occasion, nor did the father put on an unpropitious gravity of countenance. he explained to the smiling child the nature of a verb, a pronoun, and a substantive. then he spoke a short familiar sentence, and asked h----, to try if she could find out which word in it was a verb, which a pronoun, and which a substantive. the little girl found them all out most successfully, and formed no painful associations with her first grammatical lesson. but though our pupil may easily understand, he will easily forget our first explanations; but provided he understands them at the moment, we should pardon his forgetfulness, and we should patiently repeat the same exercise several days successively; a few minutes at each lesson will be sufficient, and the simplest sentences, such as children speak themselves, will be the best examples. mr. ----, after having talked four or five times, for a few minutes at a time, with his son s----, when s---- was between five and six years old, about grammar, asked him if he knew what a pronoun meant? the boy answered, "a word that is said instead of a substantive." as these words might have been merely remembered by rote, the father questioned his pupil further, and asked him to name any pronoun that he recollected. s----immediately said, "_i_ a pronoun." "name another," said his father. the boy answered after some pause, as if he doubted whether it was or was not a pronoun, _a_. now it would have been very imprudent to have made a sudden exclamation at the child's mistake. the father, without showing any surprise, gently answered, "no, my dear, _a_ does not stand in the place of any substantive. we say _a man_, but the word _a_ does not mean a _man_, when it is said by itself--does it?" _s----._ no. _father._ then try if you can find out a word that does. _s----._ he, and _sir_. _sir_ does stand, in conversation, in the place of a man, or gentleman; therefore the boy, even by this mistake, showed that he had formed, from the definition that had been given to him, a general idea of the nature of a pronoun, and at all events he exercised his understanding upon the affair, which is the principal point we ought to have in view. an interjection is a part of speech familiar to children. mr. horne tooke is bitter in his contempt for it, and will scarcely admit it into civilized company. "the brutish inarticulate interjection, which has nothing to do with speech, and is only the miserable refuge of the speechless, has been permitted to usurp a place amongst words, &c."--"the neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the barking of a dog, the purring of a cat; sneezing, coughing, groaning, shrieking, and every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, have almost as good a title to be called parts of speech, as interjections have." mr. horne tooke would have been pleased with the sagacity of a child of five years old (s----) who called _laughing_ an interjection. mr. ---- gave s----a slight pinch, in order to produce "an involuntary convulsion with oral sound." and when the interjection oh! was uttered by the boy, he was told by his father, that the word was an interjection; and, that "any word or noise, that expresses a sudden feeling of the mind, may be called an interjection." s----immediately said, "is laughing an interjection, then?" we hope that the candid reader will not imagine, that we produce these _sayings_ of children of four or five years old, without some sense of the danger of ridicule; but we wish to give some idea of the sort of simple answers which children are likely to make in their first grammatical lessons. if too much is expected from them, the disappointment, which must be quickly felt, and will be quickly shown by the preceptor, will discourage the pupil. we must repeat, that the first steps should be frequently retraced: a child should be _for some weeks_ accustomed to distinguish an active verb, and its agent, or nominative case, from every other word in a sentence, before we attempt to advance. the objects of actions are the next class of words that should be selected. the fanciful, or at least what appears to the moderns fanciful, arrangement of the cases amongst grammarians, may be dispensed with for the present. the idea, that the nominative is a direct, upright _case_, and that the genitive declines with the smallest obliquity from it; the dative, accusative, and ablative, falling further and further from the perpendicularity of speech, is a species of metaphysics not very edifying to a child. into what absurdity men of abilities may be led by the desire of explaining what they do not sufficiently understand, is fully exemplified in other sciences as well as grammar. the discoveries made by the author of epea pteroenta, show the difference between a vain attempt to substitute analogy and rhetoric in the place of demonstration and common sense. when a child has been patiently taught in conversation to analyze what he says, he will take great pleasure in the exercise of his new talent; he will soon discover, that the cause of the action does not always come before the verb in a sentence, that sometimes it follows the verb. "john beats thomas," and "thomas is beaten by john," he will perceive mean the same thing; he may, with very little difficulty, be taught the difference between a verb active and a verb passive; that one brings first before the mind the person or thing which performs the action, and the other represents in the first place the person or thing upon whom the action is performed. a child of moderate capacity, after he has been familiarized to this general idea of a verb active and passive, and after he has been taught the names of the cases, will probably, without much difficulty, discover that the nominative case to a passive verb becomes the accusative case to a verb active. "school-masters are plagued by boys." a child sees plainly, that school-masters are the persons upon whom the action of plaguing is performed, and he will convert the sentence readily into "boys plague school-masters." we need not, however, be in any hurry to teach our pupil the names of the cases; technical grammar may be easily learned, after a general idea of rational grammar has been obtained. for instance, _the verb_ means only _the word_, or the principal word in a sentence; a child can easily learn this after he has learnt what is meant by a sentence; but it would be extremely difficult to make him comprehend it before he could distinguish a verb from a noun, and before he had any idea of the structure of a common sentence. from easy, we should proceed to more complicated, sentences. the grammatical construction of the following lines, for example, may not be immediately apparent to a child: "what modes of sight between each vast extreme, the mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam; of smell the headlong lioness between, and hound sagacious on the tainted green." "_of smell._" a girl of ten years old (c----) was asked if she could tell what substantive the word "_of_" relates to; she readily answered, "_modes_." c----had learned a general idea of grammar in conversation, in the manner which we have described. it is asserted from experience, that this method of instructing children in grammar by conversation, is not only practicable, but perfectly easy, and that the minds of children are adapted to this species of knowledge. during life, we learn with eagerness whatever is congenial with our present pursuits, and the acquisition of language is one of the most earnest occupations of childhood. after distinct and ready knowledge of the verb and nominative case has been acquired, the pupil should be taught to distinguish the object of an action, or, in other words, the objective or accusative case. he should be exercised in this, as in the former lessons, repeatedly, until it becomes perfectly familiar; and he should be encouraged to converse about these lessons, and to make his own observations concerning grammar, without fear of the preceptor's peremptory frown, or positive reference to "_his rules_." a child of five years old, was asked what the word "_here!_" meant; he answered, "it means to give a thing." "when i call a person, as, john! john! it seems to me," said a boy of nine years old (s----) "it seems to me, that the vocative case is both the verb and its accusative case." a boy who had ever been checked by his tutor for making his own observations upon the mysterious subject of grammar, would never have dared to have thought, or to have uttered a new thought, so freely.--forcing children to learn any art or science by rote, without permitting the exercise of the understanding, must materially injure their powers both of reasoning and of invention. we acknowledge that wilkins and tooke have shown masters how to teach grammar a little better than it was formerly taught. fortunately for the rising generation, all the words under the denomination of adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions, which were absolute nonsense to us, may be easily explained to them, and the commencement of instruction need no longer lay the foundation of implicit acquiescence in nonsense. we refer to mr. horne tooke's "epea pteroenta," forbearing to dilate upon the principles of his work, lest we should appear in the invidious light of authors who rob the works of others to adorn their own. we cannot help expressing a wish, that mr. horne tooke would have the philanthropic patience to write an elementary work in a _simple style_, unfolding his grammatical discoveries to the rising generation. when children have thus by gentle degrees, and by short and clear conversations, been initiated in general grammar, and familiarized to its technical terms, the first page of tremendous lilly will lose much of its horror. it has been taken for granted, that at the age of which we have been speaking, a child can read english tolerably well, and that he has been used to employ a dictionary. he may now proceed to translate from some easy books a few short sentences: the first word will probably be an adverb or conjunction; either of them may readily be found in the latin dictionary, and the young scholar will exult in having translated one word of latin; but the next word, a substantive or verb, perhaps will elude his search. now the grammar may be produced, and something of the various terminations of a noun may be explained. if _musam_ be searched for in the dictionary, it cannot be found, but _musa_ catches the eye, and, with the assistance of the grammar, it may be shown, that the meaning of words may be discovered by the united helps of the dictionary and grammar. after some days patient continuation of this exercise, the use of the grammar, and of its uncouth collection of words and syllables, will be apparent to the pupil: he will perceive that the grammar is a sort of appendix to the dictionary. the grammatical formulæ may then, by gentle degrees, be committed to memory, and when once got by heart, should be assiduously preserved in the recollection. after the preparation which we have recommended, the singular number of a declension will be learnt in a few minutes by a child of ordinary capacity, and after two or three days repetition, the plural number may be added. the whole of the first declension should be well fixed in the memory before a second is attempted. during this process, a few words at every lesson may be translated from latin to english, and such nouns as are of the first declension, may be compared with _musa_, and may be declined according to the same form. tedious as this method may appear, it will in the end be found expeditious. omitting some of the theoretic or didactic part of the grammar, which should only be read, and which may be explained with care and patience, the whole of the declensions, pronouns, conjugations, the list of prepositions and conjunctions, interjections, some adverbs, the concords, and common rules of syntax, may be comprised with sufficient repetitions in about two or three hundred lessons of ten minutes each; that is to say, ten minutes application of the scholar in the presence of the teacher. a young boy should never be set to learn a lesson by heart when alone. forty hours! is this tedious? if you are afraid of losing time, begin a few months earlier; but begin when you will, forty hours is surely no great waste of time: the whole, or even half of this short time, is not spent in the labour of getting jargon by rote; each day some slight advance is made in the knowledge of words, and in the knowledge of their combinations. what we insist upon is, that _nothing should be done to disgust the pupil_: steady perseverance, with uniform gentleness, will induce habit, and nothing should ever interrupt the regular return of the daily lesson. if absence, business, illness, or any other cause, prevent the attendance of the teacher, a substitute must be appointed; the idea of relaxation on sunday, or a holyday, should never be permitted. in most public seminaries above one third, in some nearly one half, of the year is permitted to idleness: it is the comparison between severe labour and dissipation, that renders learning hateful. johnson is made to say by one of his female biographers,[ ] that no child loves the person who teaches him latin; yet the author of this chapter would not take all the doctor's fame, and all the lady's wit and riches, in exchange for the hourly, unfeigned, unremitting friendship, which he enjoys with a son who had no other master than his father. so far from being laborious or troublesome, he has found it an agreeable employment to instruct his children in grammar and the learned languages. in the midst of a variety of other occupations, half an hour every morning for many years, during the time of dressing, has been allotted to the instruction of boys of different ages in languages, and no other time has been spent in this employment. were it asserted that these boys made _a reasonable progress_, the expression would convey no distinct meaning to the reader; we shall, therefore, mention an experiment tried this morning, november th, , to ascertain the progress of one of these pupils. without previous study, he translated twenty lines of the story of ceyx and alcyone, from ovid, consulting the dictionary only twice: he was then desired to translate the passage which he had read into english verse; and in two or three hours he produced the following version. much of the time was spent in copying the lines fairly, as this opportunity was taken of exciting his attention to writing and spelling, to associate the habit of application with the pleasure of voluntary exertion. the _curious_ may, if they think it worth their while, see the various _readings_ and corrections of the translation (v. chapter on conversation, and anecdotes of children) which were carefully preserved, not as "_curiosities of literature_," but for the sake of truth, and with a desire to show, that the pupil had the patience to correct. a _genius_ may hit off a few tolerable lines; but if a child is willing and able to criticise and correct what he writes, he shows that he selects his expressions from choice, and not from chance or imitation; and he gives to a judicious tutor the certain promise of future improvement. "far in a vale there lies a cave forlorn, which phoebus never enters eve or morn, the misty clouds inhale the pitchy ground, and twilight lingers all the vale around. no watchful cocks aurora's beams invite; no dogs nor geese, the guardians of the night: no flocks nor herds disturb the silent plains; within the sacred walls mute quiet reigns, and murmuring lethe soothing sleep invites; in dreams again the flying past delights: from milky flowers that near the cavern grow, night scatters the collected sleep below." s----, the boy who made this translation, was just ten years old; he had made but three previous attempts in versification; his reading in poetry had been some of gay's fables, parts of the minstrel, three odes of gray, the elegy in a country church-yard, the tears of old may-day, and parts of the second volume of dr. darwin's botannic garden; dryden's translations of the fable of ceyx and alcyone he had never seen; the book had always been locked up. phædrus and ovid's metamorphoses were the whole of his latin erudition. these circumstances are mentioned thus minutely, to afford the inquisitive teacher materials for an accurate estimate of the progress made by our method of instruction. perhaps most boys of s----'s age, in our great public seminaries, would, upon a similar trial, be found superior. competition in the art of translation is not our object; our object is to show, that half an hour a day, steadily appropriated to grammar and latin, would be sufficient to secure a boy of this age, from any danger of ignorance in classical learning; and that the ease and shortness of his labour will prevent that disgust, which is too often induced by forced and incessant application. we may add, that some attention to the _manner_ in which the pupils repeat their latin lessons, has been found advantageous: as they were never put in bodily fear, by the impatience of a pedagogue, they had leisure and inclination to read and recite, without awkward gestures and discordant tones. the whining tones and convulsive gestures often contracted by boys during the agony of repeating their long lessons, are not likely to be advantageous to the rising generation of orators. practice, and the strong motive of emulation, may, in a public seminary, conquer these bad habits. after the pupil has learned to speak ill, he _may_ be taught to speak well; but the chances are against him: and why should we have the trouble of breaking bad habits? it is much easier to prevent them. in private education, as the preceptor has less chance of curing his pupil of the habit of speaking ill, he should be peculiarly attentive to give the child constant habits of speaking and reading well. it is astonishing, that parents, who are extremely intent upon the education of their children, should overlook some of the essential means of success. a young man with his head full of latin and law, will make but a poor figure at the bar, or in parliament, if he cannot enunciate distinctly, and if he cannot speak good english extempore, or produce his learning and arguments with grace and propriety. it is in vain to expect that a boy should speak well in public, who cannot, in common conversation, utter three connected sentences without a false concord or a provincial idiom; he may be taught with much care and cost to speak _tripod_ sentences;[ ] but bring the young orator to the test, bring him to actual business, rouse any of his passions, throw him off his guard, and then listen to his language; he will forget instantly his reading master, and all his rules of pronunciation and rhetoric, and he will speak the language to which he has been most accustomed. no master will then be near him to regulate the pitch and tones of his voice. we cannot believe that even caius gracchus could, when he was warmed by passion, have listened to licinius's pitch-pipe.[ ] example, and constant attention to their manner of speaking in common conversation, we apprehend to be the most certain methods of preparing young men for public speakers. much of the time that is spent in teaching boys to walk upon stilts, might be more advantageously employed in teaching them to walk well without them. it is all very well whilst the pupil is under the protection of his preceptor. the actor on the stage is admired whilst he is elevated by the cothurnus; but young men are not to exhibit their oratorical talents always with the advantages of stage effect and decorations. we should imagine, that much of the diffidence felt by young men of abilities, when they first rise to speak in public, may be attributed to their immediate perception of the difference between scholastic exhibitions and the real business of life; they feel that they have learned to speak two languages, which must not, on any account, be mixed together; the one, the vulgar language of common conversation; the other, the refined language of oratorical composition: the first they are most inclined to use when they are agitated; and they are agitated when they rise to speak before numbers: consequently there is an immediate struggle between custom and institution. now, a young man, who in common conversation in his own family has never been accustomed to hear or to speak vulgar or ungrammatical language, cannot possibly apprehend that he shall suddenly utter ridiculous expressions; he knows, that, if he speaks at all, he shall at least speak good english; and he is not afraid, that, if he is pursued, he shall be obliged to throw away his cumbrous stilts. the practice of speaking in public, we are sensible, is a great advantage; but the habit of speaking accurately in private, is of still greater consequence: this habit depends upon the early and persevering care of the parent and the preceptor. there is no reason why children should not be made at the same time good scholars and good speakers; nor is there any reason why boys, whilst they learn to write latin, should be suffered to forget how to write english. it would be a great advantage to the young classical scholar, if his latin and english literature were mixed; the taste for ancient authors and for modern literature, ought to be cultivated at the same time; and the beauties of composition, characteristic of different languages, should be familiarized to the student. classical knowledge and taste afford such continual and innocent sources of amusement, that we should be extremely sorry that any of our pupils should not enjoy them in their fullest extent; but we do not include a talent for latin composition amongst the _necessary_ accomplishments of a gentleman. there are situations in life, where facility and elegance in writing latin may be useful, but such situations are not common; when a young man is intended for them, he may be trained with more particular assiduity to this art; perhaps for this purpose the true busbyean method is the best. the great latin and greek scholars of the age, have no reason to be displeased by the assertion, that classical proficiency equal to their own, is not a _necessary_ accomplishment in a gentleman; if their learning become more rare, it may thence become more valuable. we see no reason why there should not be latinists as well as special pleaders. we have not laid down any course of classical study; those who consider the order in which certain authors are read, as of material consequence in the education of scholars, may consult milton, mrs. macaulay, "milne's well-bred scholar," &c. where they will find precise directions. we have _lately_ seen a collection of exercises for boys,[ ] which in some measure supplies the defect of mr. garretson's curious performance. we wish most earnestly that dictionaries were improved. the author of "stemmata latinitatis," has conferred an essential service on the public; but still there is wanting a dictionary for schools, in which elegant and proper english might be substituted for the barbarous translations now in use. such a dictionary could not be compiled, we should think, without an attention to the course of books that are most commonly used in schools. the first meanings given in the dictionary, should suit the first authors that a boy reads; this may probably be a remote or metaphoric meaning: then the radical word should be mentioned, and it would not cost a master any great trouble to trace the genealogy of words to the parent stock. cordery is a collection of such mean sentences, and uninstructive dialogue, as to be totally unfit for boys. commenius's "visible world displayed," is far superior, and might, with proper alterations and better prints, become a valuable _english_ school-book. both these books were intended for countries where the latin language was commonly spoken, and consequently they are filled with the terms necessary for domestic life and conversation: for this very reason they are not good introductions to the classics. selections from bailey's phædrus, will be proper for young beginners, upon account of the glossary. we prefer this mode of assisting them with glossaries to the use of translations, because they do not induce indolent habits, and yet they prevent the pupil from having unnecessary labour. translations always give the pupil more trouble in the end, than they save in the beginning. the glossary to bailey's phædrus, which we have just mentioned, wants much to be modernized, and the language requires to be improved. mr. valpy's "select sentences," would be much more useful if they had a glossary annexed. as they are, they will, however, be useful after phædrus. ovid's metamorphoses, with all its monstrous faults, appears to be the best introduction to the latin classics, and to heathen mythology. norris's ovid may be safely put into the hands of children, as it is a selection of the least exceptionable fables. to accustom boys to read poetry and prose nearly at the same period, is advantageous. cornelius nepos, a _crabbed_ book, but useful from its brevity, and from its being a proper introduction to grecian and roman history, may be read nearly at the same time with ovid's metamorphoses. after ovid, the pupil may begin virgil, postponing some of the eclogues, and all the georgics. we recommend that some english books should be put into the hands of boys whilst they are going through phædrus, ovid, and cornelius nepos, which may suit with the ideas they acquire from these latin authors. plutarch's lives, for instance, will be useful and interesting. when we mention plutarch's lives, we cannot help recollecting how many great people have acknowledged the effect of this book in their early education. charles the twelfth, rousseau, madame roland, gibbon, we immediately remember, and we are sure we have noticed many others. an abridgment of plutarch, by mrs. helme, which we have looked into, appears (the preface excepted) to be well written; and we see another abridgment of plutarch advertised, which we hope may prove serviceable: good prints to a plutarch for children, would be very desirable. as an english introduction to mythology, we recommend the first volume of lord chesterfield's letters, as a most elegant view of heathen mythology. but if there be any danger that the first volume should introduce the remainder of lord chesterfield's work to the inexperienced reader, we should certainly forbear the experiment: it would be far better for a young man never to be acquainted with a single heathen deity, than to purchase lord chesterfield's classical knowledge at the hazard of contamination from his detestable system of morals. without his lordship's assistance, mrs. monsigny's mythology can _properly_ initiate the young pupil of either sex into the mysteries of ancient fables. the notes to potter's Ã�schylus, are also well suited to our purpose. in dr. darwin's "botanic garden," there are some beautiful poetic allusions to ancient gems and ancient fables, which must fix themselves in the memory or in the imagination of the pupil. the sooner they are read, the better; we have felt the advantage of putting them into the hands of a boy of nine or ten years old. the ear should be formed to english as well as to latin poetry. classical poetry, without the knowledge of mythology, is unintelligible: if children study the one, they must learn the other. divested of the charms of poetry, and considered without classical prepossession, mythology presents a system of crimes and absurdities, which no allegorical, metaphysical, or literal interpreters of modern times, can perfectly reconcile to common sense, or common morality; but our poets have naturalized ancient fables, so that mythology is become essential even to modern literature. the associations of taste, though arbitrary, are not easily changed in a nation whose literature has attained to a certain pitch of refinement, and whose critical judgments must consequently have been for some generations traditional. there are subjects of popular allusion, which poets and orators regard as common property; to dispossess them of these, seems impracticable, after time has sanctioned the prescriptive right. but new knowledge, and the cultivation of new sciences, present objects of poetic allusion which, skilfully managed by men of inventive genius, will oppose to the habitual reverence for antiquity, the charms of novelty united to the voice of philosophy.[ ] in education we must, however, consider the actual state of manners in that world in which our pupils are to live, as well as our wishes or our hopes of its gradual improvement.[ ] with a little care, preceptors may manage so as to teach mythology without in the least injuring their pupils. children may be familiarized to the strange manners and strange personages of ancient fable, and may consider them as a set of beings who are not to be judged by any rules of morality, and who have nothing in common with ourselves. the caricatura of some of the passions, perhaps, will not shock children who are not used to their natural appearance; they will pass over the stories of love and jealousy, merely because they do not understand them. we should rather leave them completely unintelligible, than attempt, like mr. riley, in his mythological pocket dictionary for youth, to elucidate the whole at once, by assuring children that saturn was adam, that atlas is moses, and his brother hesperus, aaron; that vertumnus and pomona were boaz and ruth; that mars _corresponds_ with joshua; that apollo _accords_ with david, since they both played upon the harp; that mercury can be no other than our archangel michael, since they both have wings on their arms and feet; that, in short, to complete the concordance, momus is a striking likeness of satan. the ancients, mr. riley allows, have so much disfigured these personages, that it is hard to know many of the portraits again at first sight; however, he is persuaded that "the young student will find a peculiar gratification in tracing the likeness," and he has kindly furnished us with a catalogue to explain the exhibition, and to guide us through his new pantheon. as books of reference, the convenient size, and compressed information, of _pocket_ mythological dictionaries, will recommend them to general use; but we object to the miserable prints with which they are sometimes disgraced. the first impression made upon the imagination[ ] of children, is of the utmost consequence to their future taste. the beautiful engravings[ ] in spence's polymetis, will introduce the heathen deities in their most graceful and picturesque forms to the fancy. the language of spence, though classical, is not entirely free from pedantic affectation, and his dialogues are, perhaps, too stiff and long winded for our young pupils. but a parent or preceptor can easily select the useful explanations; and in turning over the prints, they can easily associate some general notion of the history and attributes of the gods and goddesses with their forms: the little eager spectators will, as they crowd round the book, acquire imperceptibly all the necessary knowledge of mythology, imbibe the first pleasing ideas of taste, and store their imagination with classic imagery. the same precautions that are necessary to educate the eye, are also necessary to form the ear and understanding of taste. the first mythological descriptions which our pupils read, should be the best in their kind. compare the following account of europa in a pocket dictionary, with her figure in a poetical gem--"europa, the daughter of agenor, king of the phoenicians, and sister of cadmus. this princess was so beautiful, that, they say, one of the companions of juno had robbed her of a pot of paint to bestow on this lady, which rendered her so handsome. she was beloved of jupiter, who assumed the shape of a bull to run away with her, swam over the sea with her on his back, and carried her into that part of the world now called europe, from her name." so far the dictionary; now for the poet. "now lows a milk-white bull on afric's strand, and crops with dancing head the daisy'd land; with rosy wreathes europa's hand adorns his fringed forehead and his pearly horns; light on his back the sportive damsel bounds, and, pleas'd, he moves along the flowery grounds; bears with slow step his beauteous prize aloof, dips in the lucid flood his ivory hoof; then wets his velvet knees, and wading laves his silky sides, amid the dimpling waves. while her fond train with beckoning hands deplore, strain their blue eyes, and shriek along the shore: beneath her robe she draws her snowy feet, and, half reclining on her ermine seat, round his rais'd neck her radiant arms she throws, and rests her fair cheek on his curled brows; her yellow tresses wave on wanton gales, and high in air her azure mantle sails."[ ] footnotes: [ ] garretson's exercises, the tenth edition. [ ] v. chapter on attention. [ ] mrs. piozzi. [ ] v. blair. [ ] v. plutarch. [ ] valpy's exercises. [ ] v. darwin's poetry. [ ] since the above was written, we have seen a letter from dr. aikin to his son on the _morality_ and _poetic merit_ of the fable of circe, which convinces us that the observations that we have hazarded are not premature. [ ] chapter on imagination. [ ] we speak of these engravings as _beautiful_, for the times in which they were done; modern artists have arrived at higher perfection. [ ] darwin. v. botanic garden. chapter xiv. on geography and chronology. the usual manner of teaching geography and chronology, may, perhaps, be necessary in public seminaries, where a number of boys are to learn the same thing at the same time; but what is learned in this manner, is not permanent; something besides merely committing names and dates to the memory, is requisite to make a useful impression upon the memory. for the truth of this observation, an appeal is made to the reader. let him recollect, whether the geography and chronology which he learned whilst a boy, are what he now remembers--whether he has not obtained his present knowledge from other sources than the tasks of early years. when business, or conversation, calls upon us to furnish facts accurate as to place and time, we retrace our former heterogeneous acquirements, and select those circumstances which are connected with our present pursuit, and thus we form, as it were, a nucleus round which other facts insensibly arrange themselves. perhaps no two men in the world, who are well versed in these studies, connect their knowledge in the same manner. relation to some particular country, some favourite history, some distinguished person, forms the connection which guides our recollection, and which arranges our increasing nomenclature. by attending to what passes in our own minds, we may learn an effectual method of teaching without pain, and without any extraordinary burden to the memory, all that is useful of these sciences. the details of history should be marked by a few chronological æras, and by a few general ideas of geography. when these have been once completely associated in the mind, there is little danger of their being ever disunited: the sight of any country will recall its history, and even from representations in a map, or on the globe, when the mind is wakened by any recent event, a long train of concomitant ideas will recur. the use of technical helps to the memory, has been condemned by many, and certainly, when they are employed as artifices to supply the place of real knowledge, they are contemptible; but when they are used as indexes to facts that have been really collected in the mind; when they serve to arrange the materials of knowledge in appropriate classes, and to give a sure and rapid clue to recollection, they are of real advantage to the understanding. indeed, they are now so common, that pretenders cannot build the slightest reputation upon their foundation. were an orator to attempt a display of long chronological accuracy, he might be wofully confounded by his opponent's applying at the first pause, [ ]els_luk_ he would have said! ample materials are furnished in gray's memoria technica, from which a short and useful selection may be made, according to the purposes which are in view. for children, the little ballad of the chapter of kings, will not be found beneath the notice of mothers who attend to education. if the technical terminations of gray are inserted, they will never be forgotten, or may be easily recalled.[ ] we scarcely ever forget a ballad if the tune is popular. for pupils at a more advanced age, it will be found advantageous to employ technical helps of a more scientific construction. priestley's chart of biography may, from time to time, be hung in their view. smaller charts, upon the same plan, might be provided with a few names as land-marks; these may be filled up by the pupil with such names as he selects from history; they may be bound in octavo, like maps, by the middle, so as to unfold both ways--thirty-nine inches by nine will be a convenient size. prints, maps, and medals, which are part of the constant furniture of a room, are seldom attended to by young people; but when circumstances excite an interest upon any particular subject, then is the moment to produce the symbols which record and communicate knowledge. mrs. radcliffe, in her judicious and picturesque tour through germany, tells us, that in passing through the apartments of a palace which the archduchess maria christiana, the sister of the late unfortunate queen of france, had left a few hours before, she saw spread upon a table a map of all the countries then included in the seat of the war. the positions of the several corps of the allied armies were marked upon this chart with small pieces of various coloured wax. can it be doubted, that the strong interest which this princess must have taken in the subject, would for ever impress upon her memory the geography of this part of the world? how many people are there who have become geographers since the beginning of the present war. even the common newspapers disseminate this species of knowledge, and those who scarcely knew the situation of brest harbour a few years ago, have consulted the map with that eagerness which approaching danger excites; they consequently will tenaciously remember all the geographical knowledge they have thus acquired. the art of creating an interest in the study of geography, depends upon the dexterity with which passing circumstances are seized by a preceptor in conversation. what are maps or medals, statues or pictures, but technical helps to memory? if a mother possess good prints, or casts of ancient gems, let them be shown to any persons of taste and knowledge who visit her; their attention leads that of our pupils; imitation and sympathy are the parents of taste, and taste reads in the monuments of art whatever history has recorded. in the adele and theodore of madame de silleri, a number of adventitious helps are described for teaching history and chronology. there can be no doubt that these are useful; and although such an apparatus cannot be procured by private families, fortunately the print-shops of every provincial town, and of the capital in particular, furnish even to the passenger a continual succession of instruction. might not prints, assorted for the purposes which we have mentioned, be _lent_ at circulating libraries? to assist our pupils in geography, we prefer a globe to common maps. might not a cheap, portable, and convenient globe, be made of oiled silk, to be inflated by a common pair of bellows? mathematical exactness is not requisite for our purpose, and though we could not pretend to the precision of our best globes, yet a balloon of this sort would compensate by its size and convenience for its inaccuracy. it might be hung by a line from its north pole, to a hook screwed into the horizontal architrave of a door or window; and another string from its south pole might be fastened at a proper angle to the floor, to give the requisite elevation to the axis of the globe. an idea of the different projections of the sphere, may be easily acquired from this globe in its flaccid state, and any part of it might be consulted as a map, if it were laid upon a convex board of a convenient size. impressions from the plates which are used for common globes, might be taken to try this idea without any great trouble or expense; but we wish to employ a much larger scale, and to have them five or six feet diameter. the inside of a globe of this sort might be easily illuminated, and this would add much to the novelty and beauty of its appearance. in the country, with the assistance of a common carpenter and plasterer, a large globe of lath and plaster may be made for the instruction and entertainment of a numerous family of children. upon this they should leisurely delineate from time to time, by their given latitudes and longitudes, such places as they become acquainted with in reading or conversation. the capital city, for instance, of the different countries of europe, the rivers, and the neighbouring towns, until at last the outline might be added: for the sake of convenience, the lines, &c. may be first delineated upon a piece of paper, from which they may be accurately transferred to their proper places on the globe, by the intervention of black-leaded paper, or by pricking the lines through the paper, and pouncing powdered blue through the holes upon the surface of the globe. we enter into this detail because we are convinced, that every addition to the active manual employment of children, is of consequence, not only to their improvement, but to their happiness. another invention has occurred to us for teaching geography and history together. priestley's chart of history, though constructed with great ingenuity, does not invite the attention of young people: there is an intricacy in the detail which is not obvious at first. to remedy what appears to us a difficulty, we propose that eight and twenty, or perhaps thirty, octavo maps of the globe should be engraved; upon these should be traced, in succession, the different situations of the different countries of the world, as to power and extent, during each respective century: different colours might denote the principal divisions of the world in each of these maps; the same colour always denoting the same country, with the addition of one strong colour; red, for instance, to distinguish that country which had at each period the principal dominion. on the upper and lower margin in these maps, the names of illustrious persons might be engraven in the manner of the biographical chart; and the reigning opinions of each century should also be inserted. thus history, chronology, and geography, would appear at once to the eye in their proper order, and regular succession, divided into centuries and periods, which easily occur to recollection. we forbear to expatiate upon this subject, as it has not been actually submitted to experiment; carefully avoiding in the whole of this work to recommend any mode of instruction which we have not actually put in practice. for this reason, we have not spoken of the abbé gaultier's method of teaching geography, as we have only been able to obtain accounts of it from the public papers, and from reviews; we are, however, disposed to think favourably beforehand, of any mode which unites amusement with instruction. we cannot forbear recommending, in the strongest manner, a few pages of rollin in his "thoughts upon education,"[ ] which we think contain an excellent specimen of the manner in which a well informed preceptor might lead his pupils a geographical, historical, botanical, and physiological tour upon the artificial globe. we conclude this chapter of hints, by repeating what we have before asserted, that though technical assistance may be of ready use to those who are really acquainted with that knowledge to which it refers, it never can supply the place of accurate information. the causes of the rise and fall of empires, the progress of human knowledge, and the great discoveries of superior minds, are the real links which connect the chain of political knowledge. footnotes: [ ] v. gray's memoria technica, and the critic. [ ] instead of william the conqueror long did reign, and william his son by an arrow was slain. read, william the con_sau_ long did reign, and ruf_koi_ his son by an arrow was slain. and so on from gray's memoria technica to the end of the chapter. [ ] page . chapter xv. on arithmetic. the man who is ignorant that two and two make four, is stigmatized with the character of hopeless stupidity; except, as swift has remarked, in the arithmetic of the customs, where two and two do not always make the same sum. we must not judge of the understanding of a child by this test, for many children of quick abilities do not immediately assent to this proposition when it is first laid before them. "two and two make four," says the tutor. "well, child, why do you stare so?" the child stares because the word _make_ is in this sentence used in a sense which is quite new to him; he knows what it is to make a bow, and to make a noise, but how this active verb is applicable in the present case, where there is no agent to perform the action, he cannot clearly comprehend. "two and two _are_ four," is more intelligible; but even this assertion, the child, for want of a distinct notion of the sense in which the word _are_ is used, does not understand. "two and two _are called_ four," is, perhaps, the most accurate phrase a tutor can use; but even these words will convey no meaning until they have been associated with the pupil's perceptions. when he has once perceived the combination of the numbers with real objects, it will then be easy to teach him that the words _are called_, _are_, and _make_, in the foregoing proposition, are synonymous terms. we have chosen the first simple instance we could recollect, to show how difficult the words we generally use in teaching arithmetic, must be to our young pupils. it would be an unprofitable task to enumerate all the puzzling technical terms which, in their earliest lessons, children are obliged to hear, without being able to understand. it is not from want of capacity that so many children are deficient in arithmetical skill; and it is absurd to say, "such a child has no genius for arithmetic. such a child cannot be made to comprehend any thing about numbers." these assertions prove nothing, but that the persons who make them, are ignorant of the art of teaching. a child's seeming stupidity in learning arithmetic, may, perhaps, be a proof of intelligence and good sense. it is easy to make a boy, who does not reason, repeat by rote any technical rules which a common writing-master, with magisterial solemnity, may lay down for him; but a child who reasons, will not be thus easily managed; he stops, frowns, hesitates, questions his master, is wretched and refractory, until he can discover why he is to proceed in such and such a manner; he is not content with seeing his preceptor make figures and lines upon a slate, and perform wondrous operations with the self-complacent dexterity of a conjurer. a sensible boy is not satisfied with merely seeing the total of a given sum, or the answer to a given question, _come out right_; he insists upon knowing why it is right. he is not content to be led to the treasures of science blindfold; he would tear the bandage from his eyes, that he might know the way to them again. that many children, who have been thought to be slow in learning arithmetic, have, after their escape from the hands of pedagogues, become remarkable for their quickness, is a fact sufficiently proved by experience. we shall only mention one instance, which we happened to meet with whilst we were writing this chapter. john ludwig, a saxon peasant, was dismissed from school when he was a child, after four years ineffectual struggle to learn the common rules of arithmetic. he had been, during this time, beaten and scolded in vain. he spent several subsequent years in common country labour, but at length some accidental circumstances excited his ambition, and he became expert in all the common rules, and mastered the rule of three and fractions, by the help of an old school book, in the course of one year. he afterwards taught himself geometry, and raised himself, by the force of his abilities and perseverance, from obscurity to fame. we should like to see the book which helped mr. ludwig to conquer his difficulties. introductions to arithmetic are, often, calculated rather for adepts in science, than for the ignorant. we do not pretend to have discovered any shorter method than what is common, of teaching these sciences; but, in conformity with the principles which are laid down in the former part of this work, we have endeavoured to teach their rudiments without disgusting our pupils, and without habituating them to be contented with merely technical operations. in arithmetic, as in every other branch of education, the principal object should be, to preserve the understanding from implicit belief; to invigorate its powers; to associate pleasure with literature, and to induce the laudable ambition of progressive improvement. as soon as a child can read, he should be accustomed to count, and to have the names of numbers early connected in his mind with the combinations which they represent. for this purpose, he should be taught to add first by things, and afterwards by signs or figures. he should be taught to form combinations of things by adding them together one after another. at the same time that he acquires the names that have been given to these combinations, he should be taught the figures or symbols that represent them. for example, when it is familiar to the child, that one almond, and one almond, are called two almonds; that one almond, and two almonds, are called three almonds, and so on, he should be taught to distinguish the figures that represent these assemblages; that means one and two, &c. each operation of arithmetic should proceed in this manner, from individuals to the abstract notation of signs. one of the earliest operations of the reasoning faculty, is abstraction; that is to say, the power of classing a number of individuals under one name. young children call strangers either men or women; even the most ignorant savages[ ] have a propensity to generalize. we may err either by accustoming our pupils too much to the consideration of tangible substances when we teach them arithmetic, or by turning their attention too much to signs. the art of forming a sound and active understanding, consists in the due mixture of facts and reflection. dr. reid has, in his "essay on the intellectual powers of man," page , pointed out, with great ingenuity, the admirable economy of nature in limiting the powers of reasoning during the first years of infancy. this is the season for cultivating the senses, and whoever, at this early age, endeavours to force the tender shoots of reason, will repent his rashness. in the chapter "on toys," we have recommended the use of plain, regular solids, cubes, globes, &c. made of wood, as playthings for children, instead of uncouth figures of men, women and animals. for teaching arithmetic, half inch cubes, which can be easily grasped by infant fingers, may be employed with great advantage; they can be easily arranged in various combinations; the eye can easily take in a sufficient number of them at once, and the mind is insensibly led to consider the assemblages in which they may be grouped, not only as they relate to number, but as they relate to quantity or shape; besides, the terms which are borrowed from some of these shapes, as squares, cubes, &c. will become familiar. as these children advance in arithmetic to square or cube, a number will be more intelligible to them than to a person who has been taught these words merely as the formula of certain rules. in arithmetic, the first lessons should be short and simple; two cubes placed _above_ each other, will soon be called two; if placed in any other situations near each other, they will still be called two; but it is advantageous to accustom our little pupils to place the cubes with which they are taught in succession, either by placing them upon one another, or laying in columns upon a table, beginning to count from the cube next to them, as we cast up in addition. for this purpose, a board about six inches long, and five broad, divided into columns perpendicularly by slips of wood three eighths of an inch wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, will be found useful; and if a few cubes of colours _different from those already mentioned_, with numbers on their six sides, are procured, they may be of great service. our cubes should be placed, from time to time, in a different order, or promiscuously; but when any arithmetical operations are to be performed with them, it is best to preserve the established arrangement. one cube and one other, are called two. two what? two cubes. one glass, and one glass, are called two glasses. one raisin, and one raisin, are called two raisins, &c. one cube, and one glass, are called what? _two things_ or two. by a process of this sort, the meaning of the abstract term _two_ may be taught. a child will perceive the word _two_, means the same as the words _one and one_; and when we say one and one are called two, unless he is prejudiced by something else that is said to him, he will understand nothing more than that there are two names for the same thing. "one, and one, and one, are called three," is the same as saying "that three is the name for one, and one, and one." "two and one are three," is also the same as saying "that three is the name of _two and one_." three is also the name of one and two; the word three has, therefore, three meanings; it means one, and one, and one; _also_, two and one; also, one and two. he will see that any two of the cubes may be put together, as it were, in one parcel, and that this parcel may be called _two_; and he will also see that this parcel, when joined to another single cube, will _make_ three, and that the sum will be the same, whether the single cube, or the two cubes, be named first. in a similar manner, the combinations which form _four_, may be considered. one, and one, and one, and one, are four. one and three are four. two and two are four. three and one are four. all these assertions mean the same thing, and the term _four_ is equally applicable to each of them; when, therefore, we say that two and two are four, the child may be easily led to perceive, and indeed to _see_, that it means the same thing as saying one _two_, and one _two_, which is the same thing as saying two _two's_, or saying the word _two_ two times. our pupil should be suffered to rest here, and we should not, at present, attempt to lead him further towards that compendious method of addition which we call multiplication; but the foundation is laid by giving him this view of the relation between two and two in forming four. there is an enumeration in the note[ ] of the different combinations which compose the rest of the arabic notation, which consists only of nine characters. before we proceed to the number ten, or to the new series of numeration which succeeds to it, we should make our pupils perfectly masters of the combinations which we have mentioned, both in the direct order in which they are arranged, and in various modes of succession; by these means, not only the addition, but the subtraction, of numbers as far as nine, will be perfectly familiar to them. it has been observed before, that counting by realities, and by signs, should be taught at the same time, so that the ear, the eye, and the mind, should keep pace with one another; and that technical habits should be acquired without injury to the understanding. if a child begins between four and five years of age, he may be allowed half a year for this essential, preliminary step in arithmetic; four or five minutes application every day, will be sufficient to teach him not only the relations of the first decade in numeration, but also how to write figures with accuracy and expedition. the next step, is, by far the most difficult in the science of arithmetic; in treatises upon the subject, it is concisely passed over under the title of numeration; but it requires no small degree of care to make it intelligible to children, and we therefore recommend, that, besides direct instruction upon the subject, the child should be led, by degrees, to understand the nature of classification in general. botany and natural history, though they are not pursued as sciences, are, notwithstanding, the daily occupation and amusement of children, and they supply constant examples of classification. in conversation, these may be familiarly pointed out; a grove, a flock, &c. are constantly before the eyes of our pupil, and he comprehends as well as we do what is meant by two groves, two flocks, &c. the trees that form the grove are each of them individuals; but let their numbers be what they may when they are considered as a grove, the grove is but one, and may be thought of and spoken of distinctly, without any relation to the number of single trees which it contains. from these, and similar observations, a child may be led to consider _ten_ as the name for a _whole_, an _integer_; a _one_, which may be represented by the figure ( ): this same figure may also stand for a hundred, or a thousand, as he will readily perceive hereafter. indeed, the term one hundred will become familiar to him in conversation long before he comprehends that the word _ten_ is used as an aggregate term, like a dozen, or a thousand. we do not use the word ten as the french do _une dizaine_; ten does not, therefore, present the idea of an integer till we learn arithmetic. this is a defect in our language, which has arisen from the use of duodecimal numeration; the analogies existing between the names of other numbers in progression, is broken by the terms eleven and twelve. _thirteen_, _fourteen_, &c. are so obviously compounded of three and ten, and four and ten, as to strike the ears of children immediately, and when they advance as far as twenty, they readily perceive that a new series of units begins, and proceeds to thirty, and that thirty, forty, &c. mean three tens, four tens, &c. in pointing out these analogies to children, they become interested and attentive, they show that species of pleasure which arises from the perception of _aptitude_, or of truth. it can scarcely be denied that such a pleasure exists independently of every view of utility and fame; and when we can once excite this feeling in the minds of our young pupils at any period of their education, we may be certain of success. as soon as distinct notions have been acquired of the manner in which a collection of ten units becomes a new unit of a higher order, our pupil may be led to observe the utility of this invention by various examples, before he applies it to the rules of arithmetic. let him count as far as ten with black pebbles,[ ] for instance; let him lay aside a white pebble to represent the collection of ten; he may count another series of ten black pebbles, and lay aside another white one; and so on, till he has collected ten white pebbles: as _each_ of the ten white pebbles represents ten black pebbles, he will have counted one hundred; and the ten white pebbles may now be represented by a single red one, which will stand for one hundred. this large number, which it takes up so much time to count, and which could not be comprehended at one view, is represented by a single sign. here the difference of colour forms the distinction: difference in shape, or size, would answer the same purpose, as in the roman notation x for ten, l for fifty, c for one hundred, &c. all this is fully within the comprehension of a child of six years old, and will lead him to the value of written figures by the _place_ which they hold when compared with one another. indeed he may be led to invent this arrangement, a circumstance which would encourage him in every part of his education. when once he clearly comprehends that the third place, counting from the right, contains only figures which represent hundreds, &c. he will have conquered one of the greatest difficulties of arithmetic. if a paper ruled with several perpendicular lines, a quarter of an inch asunder, be shown to him, he will see that the spaces or columns between these lines would distinguish the value of figures written in them, without the use of the sign ( ) and he will see that ( ) or zero, serves only to mark the place or situation of the neighbouring figures. an idea of decimal arithmetic, but without detail, may now be given to him, as it will not appear extraordinary to _him_ that a unit should represent ten by having its place, or column changed; and nothing more is necessary in decimal arithmetic, than to consider that figure which represented, at one time, an integer, or whole, as representing at another time the number of _tenth parts_ into which that whole may have been broken. our pupil may next be taught what is called numeration, which he cannot fail to understand, and in which he should be frequently exercised. common addition will be easily understood by a child who distinctly perceives that the perpendicular columns, or places in which figures are written, may distinguish their value under various different denominations, as gallons, furlongs, shillings, &c. we should not tease children with long sums in avoirdupois weight, or load their frail memories with tables of long-measure, and dry-measure, and ale-measure in the country, and ale-measure in london; only let them cast up a few sums in different denominations, with the tables before them, and let the practice of addition be preserved in their minds by short sums every day, and when they are between six and seven years old, they will be sufficiently masters of the first and most useful rule of arithmetic. to children who have been trained in this manner, subtraction will be quite easy; care, however, should be taken to give them a clear notion of the mystery of _borrowing_ and _paying_, which is inculcated in teaching subtraction. from subtract "six from four i can't, but six from ten, and four remains; four and four _is_ eight." and then, "one that i borrowed and four are five, five from nine, and four remains." this is the formula; but is it ever explained--or can it be? certainly not without some alteration. a child sees that six cannot be subtracted (taken) from four: more especially a child who is familiarly acquainted with the component parts of the names six and four: he sees that the sum is less than the sum , and he knows that the lesser sum may be subtracted from the greater; but he does not perceive the means of separating them figure by figure. tell him, that though six cannot be deducted from four, yet it can from fourteen, and that if one of the tens which are contained in the ( ) ninety in the uppermost row of the second column, be supposed to be taken away, or borrowed, from the ninety, and added to the four, the nine will be reduced to (eighty), and the four will become fourteen. _our_ pupil will comprehend this most readily; he will see that , which could not be subtracted from , may be subtracted from fourteen, and he will remember that the in the next column is to be considered as only ( ). to avoid confusion, he may draw a stroke across the ( ) and write over[ ] it [ over ( )] and proceed to the remainder of the operation. this method for beginners is certainly very distinct, and may for some time, be employed with advantage; and after its rationale has become familiar, we may explain the common method which depends upon this consideration. "if one number is to be deducted from another, the remainder will be the same, whether we add any given number to the smaller number, or take away the same given number from the larger." for instance: let the larger number be and the smaller if you deduct from the larger it will be from this subtract the smaller -- the remainder will be -- or if you add to the smaller number, it will be -- subtract this from the larger number -- the remainder will be now in the common method of subtraction, the _one_ which is borrowed is taken from the uppermost figure in the adjoining column, and instead of altering that figure to _one_ less, we add one to the lowest figure, which, as we have just shown, will have the same effect. the terms, however, that are commonly used in performing this operation, are improper. to say "one that i borrowed, and four" (meaning the lowest figure in the adjoining column) implies the idea that what was borrowed is now to be repaid to that lowest figure, which is not the fact. as to multiplication, we have little to say. our pupil should be furnished, in the first instance, with a table containing the addition of the different units, which form the different products of the multiplication table: these he should, from time to time, add up as an exercise in addition; and it should be frequently pointed out to him, that adding these figures so many times over, is the same as multiplying them by the number of times that they are added; as three times means added three times. here one of the figures represents a quantity, the other does not represent a quantity, it denotes nothing but the times, or frequency of repetition. young people, as they advance, are apt to confound these signs, and to imagine, for instance, in the rule of three, &c. that the sums which they multiply together, mean quantities; that yards of linen may be multiplied by three and six-pence, &c.--an idea from which the misstatements in sums that are intricate, frequently arise. we have heard that the multiplication table has been set, like the chapter of kings, to a cheerful tune. this is a species of technical memory which we have long practised, and which can do no harm to the understanding; it prevents the mind from no beneficial exertion, and may save much irksome labour. it is certainly to be wished, that our pupil should be expert in the multiplication table; if the cubes which we have formerly mentioned, be employed for this purpose, the notion of _squaring_ figures will be introduced at the same time that the multiplication table is committed to memory. in division, what is called the italian method of arranging the divisor and quotient, appears to be preferable to the common one, as it places them in such a manner as to be easily multiplied by each other, and as it agrees with algebraic notation. the usual method is this: divisor ) ( italian method: dividend | | ---- | the rule of three is commonly taught in a manner merely technical: that it may be learned in this manner, so as to answer the common purposes of life, there can be no doubt; and nothing is further from our design, than to depreciate any mode of instruction which has been sanctioned by experience: but our purpose is to point out methods of conveying instruction that shall improve the reasoning faculty, and habituate our pupil to think upon every subject. we wish, therefore, to point out the course which the mind would follow to solve problems relative to proportion without the rule, and to turn our pupil's attention to the circumstances in which the rule assists us. the calculation of the price of any commodity, or the measure of any quantity, where the first term is one, may be always stated as a sum in the rule of three; but as this statement retards, instead of expediting the operation, it is never practised. if one yard costs a shilling, how much will three yards cost? the mind immediately perceives, that the price added three times together, or multiplied by three, gives the answer. if a certain number of apples are to be equally distributed amongst a certain number of boys, if the share of one is one apple, the share of ten or twenty is plainly equal to ten or twenty. but if we state that the share of three boys is twelve apples, and ask what number will be sufficient for nine boys, the answer is not obvious; it requires consideration. ask our pupil what made it so easy to answer the last question, he will readily say, "because i knew what was the share of one." then you could answer this new question if you knew the share of one boy? yes. cannot you find out what the share of one boy is when the share of three boys is twelve? four. what number of apples then will be enough, at the same rate, for nine boys? nine times four, that is thirty-six. in this process he does nothing more than divide the second number by the first, and multiply the quotient by the third; divided by is , which multiplied by is . and this is, in truth, the foundation of the rule; for though the golden rule facilitates calculation, and contributes admirably to our convenience, it is not absolutely necessary to the solution of questions relating to proportion. again, "if the share of three boys is five apples, how many will be sufficient for nine?" our pupil will attempt to proceed as in the former question, and will begin by endeavouring to find out the share of one of the three boys; but this is not quite so easy; he will see that each is to have one apple, and part of another; but it will cost him some pains to determine exactly how much. when at length he finds that one and two-thirds is the share of one boy, before he can answer the question, he must multiply one and two-thirds by nine, which is an operation _in fractions_, a rule of which he at present knows nothing. but if he begins by multiplying the second, instead of dividing it previously by the first number, he will avoid the embarrassment occasioned by fractional parts, and will easily solve the question. : : : multiply by -- it makes which product , divided by , gives . here our pupil perceives, that if a given number, , for instance, is to be divided by one number, and multiplied by another, _it will come to the same thing_, whether he begins by dividing the given number, or by multiplying it. divided by is , which multiplied by is ; and multiplied by is , which divided by is . we recommend it to preceptors not to fatigue the memories of their young pupils with sums which are difficult only from the number of figures which they require, but rather to give examples _in practice_, where aliquot parts are to be considered, and where their ingenuity may be employed without exhausting their patience. a variety of arithmetical questions occur in common conversation, and from common incidents; these should be made a subject of inquiry, and our pupils, amongst others, should try their skill: in short, whatever can be taught in conversation, is clear gain in instruction. we should observe, that every explanation upon these subjects should be recurred to from time to time, perhaps every two or three months; as there are no circumstances in the business of every day, which recall abstract speculations to the minds of children; and the pupil who understands them to-day, may, without any deficiency of memory, forget them entirely in a few weeks. indeed, the perception of the chain of reasoning, which connects demonstration, is what makes it truly advantageous in education. whoever has occasion, in the business of life, to make use of the rule of three, may learn it effectually in a month as well as in ten years; but the habit of reasoning cannot be acquired late in life without _unusual_ labour, and uncommon fortitude. footnotes: [ ] v. a strange instance quoted by mr. stewart, "on the human mind," page . [ ] note. two is the - name for = - - = = - - - - = = = = - - - - - - = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = - - - - - - - - - - - - - - = = = = = = = = = = = = = = [ ] the word calculate is derived from the latin calculus, a pebble. [ ] this method is recommended in the cours de math, par camus, p. . chapter xvi. geometry. there is certainly no royal road to geometry, but the way may be rendered easy and pleasant by timely preparations for the journey. without any previous knowledge of the country, or of its peculiar language, how can we expect that our young traveller should advance with facility or pleasure? we are anxious that our pupil should acquire a taste for accurate reasoning, and we resort to geometry, as the most perfect, and the purest series of ratiocination which has been invented. let us, then, sedulously avoid whatever may disgust him; let his first steps be easy, and successful; let them be frequently repeated until he can trace them without a guide. we have recommended in the chapter upon toys, that children should, from their earliest years, be accustomed to the shape of what are commonly called regular solids; they should also be accustomed to the figures in mathematical diagrams. to these should be added their respective names, and the whole language of the science should be rendered as familiar as possible. mr. donne, an ingenious mathematician of bristol, has published a prospectus of an essay on mechanical geometry: he has executed, and employed with success, models in wood and metal for demonstrating propositions in geometry in a _palpable_ manner. we have endeavoured, in vain, to procure a set of these models for our own pupils, but we have no doubt of their entire utility. what has been acquired in childhood, should not be suffered to escape the memory. dionysius[ ] had mathematical diagrams described upon the floors of his apartments, and thus recalled their demonstrations to his memory. the slightest addition that can be conceived, if it be continued daily, will imperceptibly, not only preserve what has been already acquired, but will, in a few years, amount to as large a stock of mathematical knowledge as we could wish. it is not our object to make mathematicians, but to make it easy to our pupil to become a mathematician, if his interest, or his ambition, make it desirable; and, above all, to habituate him to clear reasoning, and close attention. and we may here remark, that an early acquaintance with the accuracy of mathematical demonstration, does not, within our experience, contract the powers of the imagination. on the contrary, we think that a young lady of twelve years old, who is now no more, and who had an uncommon propensity to mathematical reasoning, had an imagination remarkably vivid and inventive.[ ] we have accustomed our pupils to form in their minds the conception of figures generated from points and lines, and surfaces supposed to move in different directions, and with different velocities. it may be thought, that this would be a difficult occupation for young minds; but, upon trial, it will be found not only easy to them, but entertaining. in their subsequent studies, it will be of material advantage; it will facilitate their progress not only in pure mathematics, but in mechanics and astronomy, and in every operation of the mind which requires exact reflection. to demand steady thought from a person who has not been trained to it, is one of the most unprofitable and dangerous requisitions that can be made in education. "full in the midst of euclid dip at once, and petrify a genius to a dunce." in the usual commencement of mathematical studies, the learner is required to admit that a point, of which he sees the prototype, a dot before him, has neither length, breadth, nor thickness. this, surely, is a degree of faith not absolutely necessary for the neophyte in science. it is an absurdity which has, with much success, been attacked in "observations on the nature of demonstrative evidence," by doctor beddoes. we agree with the doctor as to the impropriety of calling a visible dot, a point without dimensions. but, notwithstanding the high respect which the author commands by a steady pursuit of truth on all subjects of human knowledge, we cannot avoid protesting against part of the doctrine which he has endeavoured to inculcate. that the names point, radius, &c. are derived from sensible objects, need not be disputed; but surely the word centre can be understood by the human mind without the presence of any visible or tangible substance. where two lines meet, their junction cannot have dimensions; where two radii of a circle meet, they constitute the centre, and the name centre may be used for ever without any relation to a tangible or visible point. the word boundary, in like manner, means the extreme limit we call a line; but to assert that it has thickness, would, from the very terms which are used to describe it, be a direct contradiction. bishop berkely, mr. walton, philathetes cantabrigiensis, and mr. benjamin robins, published several pamphlets upon this subject about half a century ago. no man had a more penetrating mind than berkely; but we apprehend that mr. robins closed the dispute against him. this is not meant as an appeal to authority, but to apprize such of our readers as wish to consider the argument, where they may meet an accurate investigation of the subject. it is sufficient for our purpose, to warn preceptors not to insist upon their pupils' acquiescence in the dogma, that a point, represented by a dot, is without dimensions; and at the same time to profess, that we understand distinctly what is meant by mathematicians when they speak of length without breadth, and of a superfices without depth; expressions which, to our minds, convey a meaning as distinct as the name of any visible or tangible substance in nature, whose varieties from shade, distance, colour, smoothness, heat, &c. are infinite, and not to be comprehended in any definition. in fact, this is a dispute merely about words, and as the extension of the art of printing puts it in the power of every man to propose and to defend his opinions at length, and at leisure, the best friends may support different sides of a question with mutual regard, and the most violent enemies with civility and decorum. can we believe that tycho brahe lost half his nose in a dispute with a danish nobleman about a mathematical demonstration? footnotes: [ ] plutarch.--life of dion. [ ] v. rivuletta, a little story written _entirely_ by her in . chapter xvii. on mechanics. parents are anxious that children should be conversant with mechanics, and with what are called the mechanic powers. certainly no species of knowledge is better suited to the taste and capacity of youth, and yet it seldom forms a part of early instruction. every body talks of the lever, the wedge, and the pulley, but most people perceive, that the notions which they have of their respective uses, are unsatisfactory, and indistinct; and many endeavour, at a late period of life, to acquire a scientific and exact knowledge of the effects that are produced by implements which are in every body's hands, or that are absolutely necessary in the daily occupations of mankind. an itinerant lecturer seldom fails of having a numerous and attentive auditory; and if he does not communicate much of that knowledge which he endeavours to explain, it is not to be attributed either to his want of skill, or to the insufficiency of his apparatus, but to the novelty of the terms which he is obliged to use. ignorance of the language in which any science is taught, is an insuperable bar to its being suddenly acquired; besides a precise knowledge of the meaning of terms, we must have an instantaneous idea excited in our minds whenever they are repeated; and, as this can be acquired only by practice, it is impossible that philosophical lectures can be of much service to those who are not familiarly acquainted with the technical language in which they are delivered; and yet there is scarcely any subject of human inquiry more obvious to the understanding, than the laws of mechanics. only a small portion of geometry is necessary to the learner, if he even wishes to become master of the more difficult problems which are usually contained in a course of lectures, and most of what is practically useful, may be acquired by any person who is expert in common arithmetic. but we cannot proceed a single step without deviating from common language; if the theory of the balance, or the lever, is to be explained, we immediately speak of _space_ and _time_. to persons not versed in literature, it is probable that these terms appear more simple and unintelligible than they do to a man who has read locke, and other metaphysical writers. the term _space_ to the bulk of mankind, conveys the idea of an interval; they consider the word _time_ as representing a definite number of years, days, or minutes; but the metaphysician, when he hears the words _space_ and _time_, immediately takes the alarm, and recurs to the abstract notions which are associated with these terms; he perceives difficulties unknown to the unlearned, and feels a confusion of ideas which distracts his attention. the lecturer proceeds with confidence, never supposing that his audience can be puzzled by such common terms. he means by _space_, the distance from the place whence a body begins to fall, to the place where its motion ceases; and by time, he means the number of seconds, or of any determinate divisions of _civil_ time which elapse from the commencement of any motion to its end; or, in other words, the duration of any given motion. after this has been frequently repeated, any intelligent person perceives the sense in which they are used by the tenour of the discourse; but in the interim, the greatest part of what he has heard, cannot have been understood, and the premises upon which every subsequent demonstration is founded, are unknown to him. if this be true, when it is affirmed of two terms only, what must be the situation of those to whom eight or ten unknown technical terms occur at the commencement of a lecture? a complete knowledge, such a knowledge as is not only full, but familiar, of all the common terms made use of in theoretic and practical mechanics, is, therefore, absolutely necessary before any person can attend public lectures in natural philosophy with advantage. what has been said of public lectures, may, with equal propriety, be applied to private instruction; and it is probable, that inattention to this circumstance is the reason why so few people have distinct notions of natural philosophy. learning by rote, or even reading repeatedly, definitions of the technical terms of any science, must undoubtedly facilitate its acquirement; but conversation, with the habit of explaining the meaning of words, and the structure of common domestic implements, to children, is the sure and effectual method of preparing the mind for the acquirement of science. the ancients, in learning this species of knowledge, had an advantage of which we are deprived: many of their terms of science were the common names of familiar objects. how few do we meet who have a distinct notion of the words radius, angle, or valve. a roman peasant knew what a radius or a valve meant, in their original signification, as well as a modern professor; he knew that a valve was a door, and a radius a spoke of a wheel; but an english child finds it as difficult to remember the meaning of the word angle, as the word parabola. an angle is usually confounded, by those who are ignorant of geometry and mechanics, with the word triangle, and the long reasoning of many a laborious instructer has been confounded by this popular mistake. when a glass pump is shown to an admiring spectator, he is desired to watch the motion of the valves: he looks "above, about, and underneath;" but, ignorant of the word _valve_, he looks in vain. had he been desired to look at the motion of the little doors that opened and shut, as the handle of the pump was moved up and down, he would have followed the lecturer with ease, and would have understood all his subsequent reasoning. if a child attempts to push any thing heavier than himself, his feet slide away from it, and the object can be moved only at intervals, and by sudden starts; but if he be desired to prop his feet against the wall, he finds it easy to push what before eluded his little strength. here the use of a fulcrum, or fixed point, by means of which bodies may be moved, is distinctly understood. if two boys lay a board across a narrow block of wood, or stone, and balance each other at the opposite ends of it, they acquire another idea of a centre of motion. if a poker is rested against a bar of a grate, and employed to lift up the coals, the same notion of a centre is recalled to their minds. if a boy, sitting upon a plank, a sofa, or form, be lifted up by another boy's applying his strength at one end of the seat, whilst the other end of the seat rests on the ground, it will be readily perceived by them, that the point of rest, or centre of motion, or fulcrum, is the ground, and that the fulcrum is not, as in the first instance, between the force that lifts, and the thing that is lifted; the fulcrum is at one end, the force which is exerted acts at the other end, and the weight is in the middle. in trying, these simple experiments, the terms _fulcrum_, _centre of motion_, &c. should be constantly employed, and in a very short time they would be as familiar to a boy of eight years old as to any philosopher. if for some years the same words frequently recur to him in the same sense, is it to be supposed that a lecture upon the balance and the lever would be as unintelligible to him as to persons of good abilities, who at a more advanced age hear these terms from the mouth of a lecturer? a boy in such circumstances would appear as if he had a genius for mechanics, when, perhaps, he might have less taste for the science, and less capacity, than the generality of the audience. trifling as it may at first appear, it will not be found a trifling advantage, in the progress of education, to attend to this circumstance. a distinct knowledge of a few terms, assists a learner in his first attempts; finding these successful, he advances with confidence, and acquires new ideas without difficulty or disgust. rousseau, with his usual eloquence, has inculcated the necessity of annexing ideas to words; he declaims against the splendid ignorance of men who speak by rote, and who are rich in words amidst the most deplorable poverty of ideas. to store the memory of his pupil with images of things, he is willing to neglect, and leave to hazard, his acquirement of language. it requires no elaborate argument to prove that a boy, whose mind was stored with accurate images of external objects, of experimental knowledge, and who had acquired habitual dexterity, but who was unacquainted with the usual signs by which ideas are expressed, would be incapable of accurate reasoning, or would, at best, reason only upon particulars. without general terms, he could not abstract; he could not, until his vocabulary was enlarged, and familiar to him, reason upon general topics, or draw conclusions from general principles: in short, he would be in the situation of those who, in the solution of difficult and complicated questions relative to quantity, are obliged to employ tedious and perplexed calculations, instead of the clear and comprehensive methods that unfold themselves by the use of signs in algebra. it is not necessary, in teaching children the technical language of any art or science, that we should pursue the same order that is requisite in teaching the science itself. order is required in reasoning, because all reasoning is employed in deducing propositions from one another in a regular series; but where terms are employed merely as names, this order may be dispensed with. it is, however, of great consequence to seize the proper time for introducing a new term; a moment when attention is awake, and when accident has produced some particular interest in the object. in every family, opportunities of this sort occur without any preparation, and such opportunities are far preferable to a formal lecture and a splendid apparatus for the first lessons in natural philosophy and chemistry. if the pump belonging to the house is out of order, and the pump-maker is set to work, an excellent opportunity presents itself for variety of instruction. the centre pin of the handle is taken out, and a long rod is drawn up by degrees, at the end of which a round piece of wood is seen partly covered with leather. your pupil immediately asks the name of it, and the pump-maker prevents your answer, by informing little master that it is called a sucker. you show it to the child, he handles it, feels whether the leather is hard or soft, and at length discovers that there is a hole through it which is covered with a little flap or door. this, he learns from the workmen, is called a clack. the child should now be permitted to plunge _the piston_ (by which name it should _now_ be called) into a tub of water; in drawing it backwards and forwards, he will perceive that the clack, which should now be called the valve, opens and shuts as the piston is drawn backwards and forwards. it will be better not to inform the child how this mechanism is employed in the pump. if the names sucker and piston, clack and valve, are fixed in his memory, it will be sufficient for his first lesson. at another opportunity, he should be present when the fixed or lower valve of the pump is drawn up; he will examine it, and find that it is similar to the valve of the piston; if he sees it put down into the pump, and sees the piston put into its place, and set to work, the names that he has learned will be fixed more deeply in his mind, and he will have some general notion of the whole apparatus. from time to time these names should be recalled to his memory on suitable occasions, but he should not be asked to repeat them by rote. what has been said, is not intended as a lesson for a child in mechanics, but as a sketch of a method of teaching which has been employed with success. whatever repairs are carried on in a house, children should be permitted to see: whilst every body about them seems interested, they become attentive from sympathy; and whenever action accompanies instruction, it is sure to make an impression. if a lock is out of order, when it is taken off, show it to your pupil; point out some of its principal parts, and name them; then put it into the hands of a child, and let him manage it as he pleases. locks are full of oil, and black with dust and iron; but if children have been taught habits of neatness, they may be clock-makers and white-smiths, without spoiling their clothes, or the furniture of a house. upon every occasion of this sort, technical terms should be made familiar; they are of great use in the every-day business of life, and are peculiarly serviceable in giving orders to workmen, who, when they are spoken to in a language that they are used to, comprehend what is said to them, and work with alacrity. an early use of a rule and pencil, and easy access to prints of machines, of architecture, and of the implements of trades, are of obvious use in this part of education. the machines published by the society of arts in london; the prints in desaguliers, emerson, le spectacle de la nature, machines approuvées par l'académie, chambers's dictionary, berthoud sur l'horlogerie, dictionaire des arts et des métiers, may, in succession, be put into the hands of children. the most simple should be first selected, and the pupils should be accustomed to attend minutely to one print before another is given to them. a proper person should carefully point out and explain to them the first prints that they examine; they may afterwards be left to themselves. to understand prints of machines, a previous knowledge of what is meant by an elevation, a profile, a section, a perspective view, and a (vue d'oiseau) bird's eye view, is necessary. to obtain distinct ideas of sections, a few models of common furniture, as chests of drawers, bellows, grates, &c. may be provided, and may be cut asunder in different directions. children easily comprehend this part of drawing, and its uses, which may be pointed out in books of architecture; its application to the common business of life, is so various and immediate, as to fix it for ever in the memory; besides, the habit of abstraction, which is acquired by drawing the sections of complicated architecture or machinery, is highly advantageous to the mind. the parts which we wish to express, are concealed, and are suggested partly by the elevation or profile of the figure, and partly by the connection between the end proposed in the construction of the building, machine, &c. and the means which are adapted to effect it. a knowledge of perspective, is to be acquired by an operation of the mind directly opposite to what is necessary in delineating the sections of bodies; the mind must here be intent only upon the objects that are delineated upon the retina, exactly what we see; it must forget or suspend the knowledge which it has acquired from experience, and must see with the eye of childhood, no further than the surface. every person, who is accustomed to drawing in perspective, sees external nature, when he pleases, merely as a picture: this habit contributes much to form a taste for the fine arts; it may, however, be carried to excess. there are improvers who prefer the most dreary ruin to an elegant and convenient mansion, and who prefer a blasted stump to the glorious foliage of the oak. perspective is not, however, recommended merely as a means of improving the taste, but as it is useful in facilitating the knowledge of mechanics. when once children are familiarly acquainted with perspective, and with the representations of machines by elevations, sections, &c. prints will supply them with an extensive variety of information; and when they see real machines, their structure and uses will be easily comprehended. the noise, the seeming confusion, and the size of several machines, make it difficult to comprehend and combine their various parts, without much time, and repeated examination; the reduced size of prints lays the whole at once before the eye, and tends to facilitate not only comprehension, but contrivance. whoever can delineate progressively as he invents, saves much labour, much time, and the hazard of confusion. various contrivances have been employed to facilitate drawing in perspective, as may be seen in "cabinet de servier, memoires of the french academy, philosophical transactions, and lately in the repertory of arts." the following is simple, cheap, and _portable_. plate . fig. . a b c, three mahogany boards, two, four, and six inches long, and of the same breadth respectively, so as to double in the manner represented. plate . fig. . the part a is screwed, or _clamped_ to a table of a convenient height, and a sheet of paper, one edge of which is put under the piece a, will be held fast to the table. the index p is to be set (at pleasure) with it sharp point to any part of an object which the eye sees through e, the eye-piece. the machine is now to be doubled as in fig. , taking care that the index be not disturbed; the point, which was before perpendicular, will then approach the paper horizontally, and the place to which it points on the paper, must be marked with a pencil. the machine must be again unfolded, and another point of the object is to be ascertained in the same manner as before; the space between these points may be then connected with a line; fresh points should then be taken, marked with a pencil, and connected with a line; and so on successively, until the whole object is delineated. besides the common terms of art, the technical terms of science should, by degrees, be rendered familiar to our pupils. amongst these the words space and time occur, as we have observed, the soonest, and are of the greatest importance. without exact definitions, or abstract reasonings, a general notion of the use of these terms may be inculcated by employing them frequently in conversation, and by applying them to things and circumstances which occur without preparation, and about which children are interested, or occupied. "there is a great space left between the words in that printing." the child understands, that _space_ in this sentence means white paper between black letters. "you should leave a greater space between the flowers which you are planting"--he knows that you mean more _ground_. "there is a great space between that boat and the ship"--space of water. "i hope the hawk will not be able to catch that pigeon, there is a great space between them"--space of air. "the men who are pulling that sack of corn into the granary, have raised it through half the space between the door and the ground." a child cannot be at any loss for the meaning of the word space in these or any other practical examples which may occur; but he should also be used to the word space as a technical expression, and then he will not be confused or stopped by a new term when employed in mechanics. the word _time_ may be used in the same manner upon numberless occasions to express the duration of any movement which is performed by the force of men, or horses, wind, water, or any mechanical power. "did the horses in the mill we saw yesterday, go as fast as the horses which are drawing the chaise?" "no, not as fast as the horses go at present on level ground; but they went as fast as the chaise-horses do when they go up hill, or as fast as horses draw a waggon." "how many times do the sails of that wind-mill go round in a minute? let us count; i will look at my watch; do you count how often the sails go round; wait until that broken arm is uppermost, and when you say _now_, i will begin to count the _time_; when a minute has past, i will tell you." after a few trials, this experiment will become easy to a child of eight or nine years old; he may sometimes attend to the watch, and at other times count the turns of the sails; he may easily be made to apply this to a horse-mill, or to a water-mill, a corn-fan, or any machine that has a rotatory motion; he will be entertained with his new employment; he will compare the _velocities_ of different machines; the meaning of this word will be easily added to his vocabulary. "does that part of the arms of the wind-mill which is near the _axle-tree_, or _centre_, i mean that part which has no cloth or sail upon it, go as fast as the ends of the arms that are the farthest from the centre?" "no, not near so fast." "but that part goes as often round in a minute as the rest of the sail." "yes, but it does not go as fast." "how so?" "it does not go so _far_ round." "no, it does not. the _extremities_ of the _sails go through more space in the same time_ than the part near the centre." by conversations like these, the technical meaning of the word _velocity_ may be made quite familiar to a child much younger than what has been mentioned; he may not only comprehend that velocity means time and space considered together, but if he is sufficiently advanced in arithmetic, he may be readily taught how to express and compare in numbers _velocities_ composed of certain portions of time and space. he will not inquire about the abstract meaning of the word _space_; he has seen space measured on paper, on timber, on the water, in the air, and he perceives distinctly that it is a term equally applicable to all distances that can exist between objects of any sort, or that he can see, feel, or imagine. momentum, a less common word, the meaning of which is not quite so easy to convey to a child, may, by degrees, be explained to him: at every instant he feels the effect of momentum in his own motions, and in the motions of every thing that strikes against him; his feelings and experience require only proper terms to become the subject of his conversation. when he begins to inquire, it is the proper time to instruct him. for instance, a boy of ten years old, who had acquired the meaning of some other terms in science, this morning asked the meaning of the word momentum; he was desired to explain what he thought it meant. he answered, "force." "what do you mean by force?" "effort." "of what?" "of gravity." "do you mean that force by which a body is drawn down to the earth?" "no." "would a feather, if it were moving with the greatest conceivable swiftness or velocity, throw down a castle?" "no."[ ] "would a mountain torn up by the roots, as fabled in milton, if it moved with the least conceivable velocity, throw down a castle?" "yes, i think it would." the difference between an uniform, and an uniformly accelerated motion, the measure of the velocity of falling bodies, the composition of motions communicated to the same body in different directions at the same time, and the cause of the curvilinear track of projectiles, seem, at first, intricate subjects, and above the capacity of boys of ten or twelve years old; but by short and well-timed lessons, they may be explained without confounding or fatiguing their attention. we tried another experiment whilst this chapter was writing, to determine whether we had asserted too much upon this subject. after a conversation between two boys upon the descent of bodies towards the earth, and upon the measure of the increasing velocity with which they fall, they were desired, with a view to ascertain whether they understood what was said, to invent a machine which should show the difference between an uniform and an accelerated velocity, and in particular to show, by occular demonstration, "that if one body moves in a given time through a given space, with an uniform motion, and if another body moves through the same space in the same time with an uniformly accelerated motion, the uniform motion of the one will be equal to half the accelerated motion of the other." the eldest boy, h----, thirteen years old, invented and executed the following machine for this purpose: plate i, fig. . _b_ is a bracket inches by , consisting of a back and two sides of hard wood: two inches from the back two slits are made in the sides of the bracket half an inch deep, and an eighth of an inch wide, to receive the two wire pivots of a roller; which roller is composed of a cylinder, three inches long and half an inch diameter; and a cone three inches long and one inch diameter in its largest part or base. the cylinder and cone are not separate, but are turned out of one piece; a string is fastened to the cone at its base _a_, with a bullet or any other small weight at the other end of it; and another string and weight are fastened to the cylinder at _c_; the pivot _p_ of wire is bent into the form of a handle; if the handle is turned either way, the strings will be respectively wound up upon the cone and cylinder; their lengths should now be adjusted, so that when the string on the cone is wound up as far as the cone will permit, the two weights may be at an equal distance from the bottom of the bracket, which bottom we suppose to be parallel with the pivots; the bracket should now be fastened against a wall, at such a height as to let the weights lightly touch the floor when the strings are unwound: silk or _bobbin_ is a proper kind of string for this purpose, as it is woven or plaited, and therefore is not liable to twist. when the strings are wound up to their greatest heights, if the handle be suddenly let go, both the weights will begin to fall at the same moment; but the weight , will descend at first but slowly, and will pass through but small space compared with the weight . as they descend further, no. still continues to get before no. ; but after some time, no. begins to overtake no. , and at last they come to the ground together. if this machine is required to show exactly the space that a falling body would describe in given times, the cone and cylinder must have grooves cut spirally upon their circumference, to direct the string with precision. to describe these spiral lines, became a new subject of inquiry. the young mechanics were again eager to exert their powers of invention; the eldest invented a machine upon the same principle as that which is used by the best workmen for cutting clock fusees; and it is described in berthoud. the youngest invented the engine delineated, plate , fig. . the roller or cone (or both together) which it is required to cut spirally, must be furnished with a handle, and a toothed wheel _w_, which turns a smaller wheel or pinion _w_. this pinion carries with it a screw _s_, which draws forward the puppet _p_, in which the graver of chisel _g_ slides _without shake_. this graver has a point or edge shaped properly to form the spiral groove, with a shoulder to regulate the depth of the groove. the iron rod _r_, which is firmly fastened in the puppet, slides through mortices at _mm_, and guides the puppet in a straight line. [illustration: plate .] the rest of the machine is intelligible from the drawing. a simple method of showing the nature of compound forces was thought of at the same time. an ivory ball was placed at the corner of a board sixteen inches broad, and two feet long; two other similar balls were let fall down inclined troughs against the first ball in different directions, but at the same time. one fell in a direction parallel to the length of the board; the other ball fell back in a direction parallel to its breadth. by raising the troughs, such a force was communicated to each of the falling balls, as was sufficient to drive the ball that was at rest to that side or end of the board which was opposite, or at right angles, to the line of its motion. when both balls were let fall together, they drove the ball that was at rest diagonally, so as to reach the opposite corner. if the same board were placed as an inclined plane, at an angle of five or six degrees, a ball placed at one of its uppermost corners, would fall with an accelerated motion in a direct line; but if another ball were made (by descending through an inclined trough) to strike the first ball at right angles to the line of its former descent, at the moment when it began to descend, it would not, as in the former experiment, move diagonally, but would describe a curve. the reason why it describes a curve, and why that curve is not circular, was easily understood. children who are thus induced to invent machines or apparatus for explaining and demonstrating the laws of mechanism, not only fix indelibly those laws in their own minds, but enlarge their powers of invention, and preserve a certain originality of thought, which leads to new discoveries. we therefore strongly recommend it to teachers, to use as few precepts as possible in the rudiments of science, and to encourage their pupils to use their own understandings as they advance. in mechanism, a general view of the powers and uses of engines is all that need be taught; where more is necessary, such a foundation, with the assistance of good books, and the examination of good machinery, will perfect the knowledge of theory and facilitate practice. at first we should not encumber our pupils with accurate demonstration. the application of mathematics to mechanics is undoubtedly of the highest use, and has opened a source of ingenious and important inquiry. archimedes, the greatest name amongst mechanic philosophers, scorned the mere practical application of his sublime discoveries, and at the moment when the most stupendous effects were producing by his engines, he was so deeply absorbed in abstract speculation as to be insensible to the fear of death. we do not mean, therefore, to undervalue either the application of strict demonstration to problems in mechanics, or the exhibition of the most accurate machinery in philosophical lectures; but we wish to point out a method of giving a general notion of the mechanical organs to our pupils, which shall be immediately obvious to their comprehension, and which may serve as a sure foundation for future improvement. we are told by a vulgar proverb, that though we believe what we see, we have yet a higher belief in what we _feel_. this adage is particularly applicable to mechanics. when a person perceives the effect of his own bodily exertions with different engines, and when he can compare in a rough manner their relative advantages, he is not disposed to reject their assistance, or expect more than is reasonable from their application. the young theorist in mechanics thinks he can produce a perpetual motion! when he has been accustomed to refer to the plain dictates of common sense and experience, on this, as well as on every other subject, he will not easily be led astray by visionary theories. [illustration: plate .] to bring the sense of feeling to our assistance in teaching the uses of the mechanic powers, the following apparatus was constructed, to which we have given the name panorganon. it is composed of two principal parts: a frame to contain the moving machinery; and a _capstan_ or _windlass_, which is erected on a _sill_ or plank, that is sunk a few inches into the ground: the frame is by this means, and by six braces or props, rendered steady. the cross rail, or _transom_, is strengthened by braces and a king-post to make it lighter and cheaper. the _capstan_ consists of an upright shaft, upon which are fixed two _drums_; about which a rope may be wound up, and two levers or arms by which it may be turned round. there is also a screw of iron coiled round the lower part of the shaft, to show the properties of the screw as a mechanic power. the rope which goes round the _drum_ passes over one of the pulleys near to the top of the frame, and under another pulley near the bottom of the frame. as two _drums_ of different sizes are employed, it is necessary to have an upright roller to conduct the rope in a proper direction to the pulleys, when either of the _drums_ is used. near the frame, and in the direction in which the rope runs, is laid a platform or road of deal boards, one board in breadth, and twenty or thirty feet long, upon which a small sledge loaded with different weights may be drawn. plate . fig. . f. f. the frame. b. b. braces to keep the frame steady. a. a. a. angular braces to strengthen the transom; and also a _king-post_. s. a round, taper shaft, strengthened above and below the mortises with iron hoops. l l. two arms, or levers, by which the shaft, &c. are to be moved round. d d. the drum, which has two rims of different circumferences. r. the roller to conduct the rope. p. the pulley, round which the rope passes to the larger drum. p . another pulley to answer to the smaller drum. p . a pulley through which the rope passes when experiments are tried with levers, &c. p . another pulley through which the rope passes when the sledge is used. ro. the road of deal boards for the sledge to move on. sl. the sledge, with pieces of hard wood attached to it, to guide it on the road. _uses of the panorganon._ as this machine is to be moved by the force of men or children, and as their force varies not only with the strength and weight of each individual, but also according to the different manner in which that strength or weight is applied; it is, in the first place, requisite to establish one determinate mode of applying human force to the machine; and also a method of determining the relative force of each individual whose strength is applied to it. _to estimate the force with which a person can draw horizontally by a rope over his shoulder._ experiment i. hang a common long scale-beam (without scales or chains) from the top or _transom_ of the frame, so as that one end of it may come within an inch of one side or post of the machine. tie a rope to the hook of the scale-beam, where the chains of the scale are usually hung, and pass it through the pulley p , which is about four feet from the ground; let the person pull this rope from towards , turning his back to the machine, and pulling the rope over his shoulder--pl. . fig. . as the pulley may be either too high or too low to permit the rope to be horizontal, the person who pulls it should be placed ten or fifteen feet from the machine, which will lessen the angular direction of the cord, and the inaccuracy of the experiment. hang weights to the other end of the scale-beam, until the person who pulls can but just walk forward, pulling fairly without propping his feet against any thing. this weight will estimate the force with which he can draw horizontally by a rope over his shoulder.[ ] let a child who tries this, walk on the board with dry shoes; let him afterwards chalk his shoes, and afterwards try it with his shoes soaped: he will find that he can pull with different degrees of force in these different circumstances; but when he tries the following experiments, let his shoes be always dry, that his force may be always the same. _to show the power of the three different sorts of levers._ experiment ii. instead of putting the cord that comes from the scale-beam, as in the last experiment, over the shoulder of the boy, hook it to the end of the lever l, fig. . plate . this lever is passed through a socket--plate . fig. .--in which it can be shifted from one of its ends towards the other, and can be fastened at any place by the screw of the socket. this socket has two gudgeons, upon which it, and the lever which it contains, can turn. this socket and its gudgeons can be lifted out of the holes in which it plays, between the rail r r, plate . fig. . and may be put into other holes at r r, fig. . loop another rope to the other end of this lever, and let the boy pull as before. perhaps it should be pointed out, that the boy must walk in a direction contrary to that in which he walked before, viz. from towards . the height to which the weight ascends, and the distance to which the boy advances, should be carefully marked and measured; and it will be found, that he can raise the weight to the same height, advancing through the same space as in the former experiment. in this case, as both ends of the lever moved through equal spaces, the lever only changed the direction of the motion, and added no mechanical power to the direct strength of the boy. experiment iii. shift the lever to its extremity in the _socket_; the middle of the lever will be now opposite to the pulley, pl. . fig. .--hook to it the rope that goes through the pulley p , and fasten to the other end of the lever the rope by which the boy is to pull. this will be _a lever of the second kind_, as it is called in books of mechanics; in using which, _the resistance is placed between the centre of motion or fulcrum, and the moving power_. he will now raise double the weight that he did in experiment ii, and he will advance through double the space. experiment iv. shift the lever, and the socket which forms the axis (without shifting the lever from the place in which it was in the socket in the last experiment) to the holes that are prepared for it at r r, plate . fig. . the free end of the lever e will now be opposite to the rope, and to the pulley (over which the rope comes from the scale-beam.) hook this rope to it, and hook the rope by which the boy pulls, to the middle of the lever. the effect will now be different from what it was in the two last experiments; the boy will advance only half as far, and will raise only half as much weight as before. this is called _a lever of the third sort_. the first and second kinds of levers are used in quarrying; and the operations of many tools may be referred to them. the third kind of lever is employed but seldom, but its properties may be observed with advantage whilst a long ladder is raised, as the man who raises it, is obliged to exert an increasing force until the ladder is nearly perpendicular. when this lever is used, it is obvious, from what has been said, that the power must always pass through less space than the thing which is to be moved; it can never, therefore, be of service in gaining power. but the object of some machines, is to increase velocity, instead of obtaining power, as in a sledge-hammer moved by mill-work. (v. the plates in emerson's mechanics, no. .) the experiments upon levers may be varied at pleasure, increasing or diminishing the mechanical advantage, so as to balance the power and the resistance, to accustom the learners to calculate the relation between the power and the effect in different circumstances; always pointing out, that whatever excess there is in the power,[ ] or in the resistance, is always compensated by the difference of space through which the inferiour passes. the experiments which we have mentioned, are sufficiently satisfactory to a pupil, as to the immediate relation between the power and the resistance; but the different spaces through which the power and the resistance move when one exceeds the other, cannot be obvious, without they pass through much larger spaces than levers will permit. experiment v. place the sledge on the farthest end of the wooden road--plate . fig. .--fasten a rope to the sledge, and conduct it through the lowest pulley p , and through the pulley p , so as that the boy may be enabled to draw it by the rope passed over his shoulder. the sledge must now be loaded, until the boy can but just advance with short steps steadily upon the wooden road; this must be done with care, as there will be but just room for him beside the rope. he will meet the sledge exactly on the middle of the road, from which he must step aside to pass the sledge. let the time of this experiment be noted. it is obvious that the boy and the sledge move with equal velocity; there is, therefore, no mechanical advantage obtained by the pulleys. the weight that he can draw will be about half a hundred, if he weigh about nine stone; but the exact force with which the boy draws, is to be known by experiment i. _the wheel and axle._ this organ is usually called in mechanics, _the axis in peritrochio_. a _hard_ name, which might well be spared, as the word windlass or capstan would convey a more distinct idea to our pupils. experiment vi. to the largest drum, plate . fig. . fasten a cord, and pass it through the pulley p downwards, and through the pulley p to the sledge placed at the end of the wooden road, which is farthest from the machine. let the boy, by a rope fastened to the extremity of one of the arms of the capstan, and passed over his shoulder, draw the capstan round; he will wind the rope round the drum, and draw the sledge upon its road. to make the sledge advance twenty-four feet upon its road, the boy must have walked circularly feet, which is six times as far, and he will be able to draw about three hundred weight, which is six times as much as in the last experiment. it may now be pointed out, that the difference of space, passed through by the power in this experiment, is exactly equal to the difference of weight, which the boy could draw without the capstan. experiment vii. let the rope be now attached to the smaller drum; the boy will draw nearly twice as much weight upon the sledge as before, and will go through double the space. experiment viii. where there are a number of boys, let five or six of them, whose power of drawing (estimated as in experiment i) amounts to six times as much as the force of the boy at the capstan, pull at the end of the rope which _was_ fastened to the sledge; they will balance the force of the boy at the capstan: either they, or he, by a sudden pull, may advance, but if they pull fairly, there will be no advantage on either part. in this experiment, the rope should pass through the pulley p , and should be coiled round the larger drum. and it must be also observed, that in all experiments upon the motion of bodies, in which there is much friction, as where a sledge is employed, the results are never so uniform as in other circumstances. _the pulley._ upon the pulley we shall say little, as it is in every body's hands, and experiments may be tried upon it without any particular apparatus. it should, however, be distinctly inculcated, that the power is not increased by a fixed pulley. for this purpose, a wheel without a rim, or, to speak with more propriety, a number of spokes fixed in a nave, should be employed. (plate . fig. .) pieces like the heads of crutches should be fixed at the ends of these spokes, to receive a piece of girth-web, which is used instead of a cord, because a cord would be unsteady; and a strap of iron with a hook to it should play upon the centre, by which it may at times be suspended, and from which at other times a weight may be hung. experiment ix. let the skeleton of a pulley be hung by the iron strap from the transom of the frame; fasten a piece of web to one of the radii, and another to the end of the opposite radius. if two boys of equal weight pull these pieces of girth-web, they will balance each other; or two equal weights hung to these webs, will be in equilibrio. if a piece of girth-web be put round the uppermost radius, two equal weights hung at the ends of it will remain immoveable; but if either of them be pulled, or if a small additional weight be added to either of them, it will descend, and the web will apply itself successively to the ascending radii, and will detach itself from those that are descending. if this movement be carefully considered, it will be perceived, that the web, in unfolding itself, acts in the same manner upon the radii as two ropes would if they were hung to the extremities of the opposite radii in succession. the two radii which are opposite, may be considered as a lever of the first sort, where the centre is in the middle of the lever; as each end moves through an equal space, there is no mechanical advantage. but if this skeleton-pulley be employed as a common _block_ or _tackle_, its motions and properties will be entirely different. experiment x. plate . fig. . nail a piece of girth-web to a post, at the distance of three or four feet from the ground; fasten the other end of it to one of the radii. fasten another piece of web to the opposite radius, and let a boy hold the skeleton-pulley suspended by the web; hook weights to the strap that hangs from the centre. the end of the radius to which the fixed girth-web is fastened, will remain immoveable; but, if the boy pulls the web which he holds in his hand upwards, he will be able to lift nearly double the weight, which he can raise from the ground by a simple rope, without the machine, and he will perceive that his hand moves through twice as great a space as the weight ascends: he has, therefore, the mechanical advantage which he would have by a lever of the second sort, as in experiment iii. let a piece of web be put round the under radii, let one end of it be nailed to the post, and the other be held by the boy, and it will represent the application of a rope to a moveable pulley; if its motion be carefully considered, it will appear that the radii, as they successively apply themselves to the web, represent a series of levers of the second kind. a pulley is nothing more than an infinite number of such levers; the cord at one end of the diameter serving as a fulcrum for the _organ_ during its progress. if this _skeleton-pulley_ be used horizontally, instead of perpendicularly, the circumstances which have been mentioned, will appear more obvious. upon the wooden road lay down a piece of girth-web; nail one end of it to the road; place the pulley upon the web at the other end of the board, and, bringing the web over the radii, let the boy, taking hold of it, draw the loaded sledge fastened to the hook at the centre of the pulley: he will draw nearly twice as much in this manner as he could without the pulley.[ ] here the web lying on the road, shows more distinctly, that it is quiescent where the lowest radius touches it; and if the radii, as they tread upon it, are observed, their points will appear at rest, whilst the centre of the pulley will go as fast as the sledge, and the top of each radius successively (and the boy's hand which unfolds the web) will move twice as fast as the centre of the pulley and the sledge. if a person, holding a stick in his hand, observes the relative motions of the top, and the middle, and the bottom of the stick, whilst he inclines it, he will see that the bottom of the stick has no motion on the ground, and that the middle has only half the motion of the top. this property of the pulley has been dwelt upon, because it elucidates the motion of a wheel rolling upon the ground; and it explains a common paradox, which appears at first inexplicable. "the bottom of a rolling wheel never moves _upon_ the road." this is asserted only of a wheel moving over hard ground, which, in fact, may be considered rather as laying down its circumference upon the road, than as moving upon it. _the inclined plane and the wedge._ the _inclined plane_ is to be next considered. when a heavy body is to be raised, it is often convenient to lay a sloping artificial road of planks, up which it may be pushed or drawn. this mechanical power, however, is but of little service without the assistance of wheels or rollers; we shall, therefore, speak of it as it is applied in another manner, under the name of _the wedge_, which is, in fact, a moving inclined plane; but if it is required to explain the properties of the inclined plane by the panorganon, the wooden road may be raised and set to any inclination that is required, and the sledge may be drawn upon it as in the former experiments. let one end of a lever, n. plate . fig. . with a wheel at one end of it, be hinged to the post of the frame, by means of a gudgeon driven or screwed into the post. to prevent this lever from deviating sideways, let a slip of wood be connected with it by a nail, which shall be fast in the lever, but which moves freely in a hole in the rail. the other end of this slip must be fastened to a stake driven into the ground at three or four feet from the lever, at one side of it, and towards the end in which the wheel is fixed (plate . fig . which is a _vue d'oiseau_) in the same manner as the treadle of a common lathe is managed, and as the treadle of a loom is sometimes guided.[ ] experiment xi. under the wheel of this lever place an inclined plane or half-wedge (plate . fig. .) on the wooden road, with rollers under it, to prevent friction;[ ] fasten a rope to the foremost end of the wedge, and pass it through the pulleys (p . and p .) as in the fifth experiment. let a boy draw the sledge by this rope over his shoulder, and he will find, that as it advances it will raise the weight upwards; the wedge is five feet long, and elevated one foot. now, if the perpendicular ascent of the weight, and the space through which he advances, be compared, he will find, that the space through which he has passed will be five times as great as that through which the weight has ascended; and that _this_ wedge has enabled him to raise five times as much as he could raise without it, if his strength were applied, as in experiment i, without any mechanical advantage. by making this wedge in two parts hinged together, with a graduated piece to keep them asunder, the wedge may be adjusted to any given obliquity; and it will be always found, that the mechanical advantage of the wedge may be ascertained by comparing its perpendicular elevation with its base. if the base of the wedge is , , , , or any other number of times greater than its height, it will enable the boy to raise respectively , , , or times more weight than he could do in experiment i, by which his power is estimated. _the screw._ _the screw_ is an inclined plane wound round a cylinder; the height of all its revolutions round the cylinder taken together, compared with the space through which the power that turns it passes, is the measure of its _mechanical advantage_.[ ] let the lever, used in the last experiment, be turned in such a manner as to reach from its gudgeon to the shaft of the panorganon, guided by an attendant lever as before. (plate . fig. .) let the wheel rest upon the lowest _helix_ or thread of the screw: as the arms of the shaft are turned round, the wheel will ascend, and carry up the weight which is fastened to the lever.[ ] as the situation of the screw prevents the weight from being suspended exactly from the centre of the screw, proper allowance must be made for this in estimating the force of the screw, or determining the mechanical advantage gained by the lever: this can be done by measuring the perpendicular ascent of the weight, which in all cases is better, and more expeditious, than measuring the parts of a machine, and estimating its force by calculation; because the different diameters of ropes, and other small circumstances, are frequently mistaken in estimates. the space passed through by the moving power, and by that which it moves, are infallible data for estimating the powers of engines. two material subjects of experiments, yet remain for the panorganon; friction, and wheels of carriages: but we have already extended this article far beyond its just proportion to similar chapters in this work. we repeat, that it is not intended in this, or in any other part of our design, to write treatises upon science; but merely to point out methods for initiating young people in the rudiments of knowledge, and of giving them a clear and distinct view of those principles upon which they are founded. no preceptor, who has had experience, will cavil at the superficial knowledge of a boy of twelve or thirteen upon these subjects; he will perceive, that the general view, which we wish to give our pupils of the useful arts and sciences, must certainly tend to form a taste for literature and investigation. the _sciolist_ has learned only to _talk_--we wish to teach our pupils to _think_, upon the various objects of human speculation. the panorganon may be employed in trying the resistance of air and water; the force of different muscles; and in a great variety of amusing and useful experiments. in academies, and private families, it may be erected in the place allotted for amusement, where it will furnish entertainment for many a vacant hour. when it has lost its novelty, the shaft may from time to time be taken down, and a swing may be suspended in its place. it may be constructed at the expense of five or six pounds: that which stands before our window, was made for less than three guineas, as we had many of the materials beside us for other purposes. footnotes: [ ] when this question was sometime afterwards repeated to s----, he observed, that the feather would throw down the castle, if its swiftness were so great as to make up for its want of weight. [ ] were it thought necessary to make these experiments perfectly accurate, a segment of a pulley, the radius of which is half the length of the scale-beam, should be attached to the end of the beam; upon which the cord may apply itself, and the pulley (p ) should be raised or lowered, to bring the rope horizontally from the man's shoulder when in the attitude of drawing. [ ] the word _power_ is here used in a popular sense, to denote the strength or efficacy that is employed to produce an effect by means of any engine. [ ] in all these experiments with the skeleton-pulley, somebody must keep it in its proper direction; as from its structure, which is contrived for illustration, not for practical use, it cannot retain its proper situation without assistance. [ ] in a loom this secondary lever is called _a lamb_, by mistake, for _lam_; from _lamina_, a slip of wood. [ ] there should be three rollers used; one of them must be placed before the sledge, under which it will easily find its place, if the bottom of the sledge near the foremost end is a little sloped upwards. to retain this foremost roller in its place until the sledge meets it, it should be stuck lightly on the road with two small bits of wax or pitch. [ ] _mechanical advantage_ is not a proper term, but our language is deficient in proper technical terms. the word _power_ is used so indiscriminately, that it is scarcely possible to convey our meaning, without employing it more strictly. [ ] in this experiment, the boy should pull as near as possible to the shaft, within a foot of it, for instance, else he will have such mechanical advantage as cannot be counterbalanced by any weight which the machine would be strong enough to bear. chapter xviii. chemistry. in the first attempts to teach chemistry to children, objects should be selected, the principal properties of which may be easily discriminated by the senses of touch, taste or smell; and such terms should be employed as do not require accurate definition. when a child has been caught in a shower of snow, he goes to the fire to warm and dry himself. after he has been before the fire for some time, instead of becoming dry, he finds that he is wetter than he was before: water drops from his hat and clothes, and the snow with which he was covered disappears. if you ask him what has become of the snow, and why he has become wetter, he cannot tell you. give him a tea-cup of snow, desire him to place it before the fire, he perceives that the snow melts, that it becomes water. if he puts his finger into the water, he finds that it is warmer than snow; he then perceives that the fire which warmed him, warmed likewise the snow, which then became water; or, in other words, he discovers, that the heat which came from the fire goes into the snow and melts it: he thus acquires the idea of the dissolution of snow by heat. if the cup containing the water, or melted snow, be taken from the fire, and put out of the window on a frosty day, he perceives, that in time the water grows colder; that a thin, brittle skin spreads over it; which grows thicker by degrees, till at length all the water becomes ice; and if the cup be again put before the fire, the ice returns to water. thus he discovers, that by diminishing the heat of water, it becomes ice; by adding heat to ice, it becomes water. a child watches the drops of melted sealing-wax as they fall upon paper. when he sees you stir the wax about, and perceives, that what was formerly hard, now becomes soft and very hot, he will apply his former knowledge of the effects of heat upon ice and snow, and he will tell you that the heat of the candle melts the wax. by these means, the principle of the solution of bodies by heat, will be imprinted upon his memory; and you may now enlarge his ideas of solution. when a lump of sugar is put into a dish of hot tea, a child sees that it becomes less and less, till at last it disappears. what has become of the sugar? your pupil will say that it is melted by the heat of the tea: but if it be put into cold tea, or cold water, he will find that it dissolves, though more slowly. you should then show him some fine sand, some clay, and chalk, thrown into water; and he will perceive the difference between mechanical mixture and diffusion, or chemical mixture. chemical mixture, as that of sugar in water, depends upon the attraction that subsists between the parts of the solid and fluid which are combined. mechanical mixture is only the suspension of the parts of a solid in a fluid. when fine sand, chalk, or clay, are put into water, the water continues for some time turbid or muddy; but by degrees the sand, &c. falls to the bottom, and the water becomes clear. in the chemical mixture of sugar and water, there is no muddiness, the fluid is clear and transparent, even whilst it is stirred, and when it is at rest, there is no sediment, the sugar is joined with the water; a new, fluid substance, is formed out of the two simple bodies sugar and water, and though the parts which compose the mixture are not discernible to the eye, yet they are perceptible by the taste. after he has observed the mixture, the child should be asked, whether he knows any method by which he can separate the sugar from the water. in the boiling of a kettle of water, he has seen the steam which issues from the mouth of the vessel; he knows that the steam is formed by the heat from the fire, which joining with the water drives its parts further asunder, and makes it take another form, that of vapour or steam. he may apply this knowledge to the separation of the sugar and water; he may turn the water into steam, and the sugar will be left in the vessel in a solid form. if, instead of evaporating the water, the boy had added a greater quantity of sugar to the mixture, he would have seen, that after a certain time, the water would have dissolved no more of the sugar; the superfluous sugar would fall to the bottom of the vessel as the sand had done: the pupil should then be told that the liquid is _saturated_ with the solid. by these simple experiments, a child may acquire a general knowledge of solution, evaporation, and saturation, without the formality of a lecture, or the apparatus of a chemist. in all your attempts to instruct him in chemistry, the greatest care should be taken that he should completely understand one experiment, before you proceed to another. the common metaphorical expression, that the mind should have time to digest the food which it receives, is founded upon fact and observation. our pupil should see the solution of a variety of substances in fluids, as salt in water; marble, chalk, or alkalies, in acids; and camphire in spirits of wine: this last experiment he may try by himself, as it is not dangerous. certainly many experiments are dangerous, and therefore unfit for children; but others may be selected, which they may safely try without any assistance; and the dangerous experiments may, when they are necessary, be shown to them by some careful person. their first experiments should be such as they can readily execute, and of which the result may probably be successful: this success will please and interest the pupils, and will encourage them to perseverance. a child may have some spirit of wine and some camphire given to him; the camphire will dissolve in the spirit of wine, till the spirit is saturated; but then he will be at a loss how to separate them again. to separate them, he must pour into the mixture a considerable quantity of water; he will immediately see the liquor, which was transparent, become muddy and white: this is owing to the separation of the camphire from the spirit; the camphire falls to the bottom of the vessel in the form of a curd. if the child had weighed the camphire, both before and after its solution, he would have found the result nearly the same. he should be informed, that this _chemical operation_ (for technical terms should now be used) is called _precipitation_: the substance that is separated from the mixture by the introduction of another body, is cast down, or precipitated from the mixture. in this instance, the spirit of wine attracted the camphire, and therefore dissolved it. when the water was poured in, the spirit of wine attracted the water more strongly than it did the camphire; the camphire being let loose, fell to the bottom of the vessel. the pupil has now been shown two methods, by which a solid may be separated from a fluid in which it has been dissolved. a still should now be produced, and the pupil should be instructed in the nature of distillation. by experiments he will learn the difference between the _volatility_ of different bodies; or, in other words, he will learn that some are made fluid, or are turned into vapour, by a greater or less degree of heat than others. the degrees of heat should be shown to him by the thermometer, and the use of the thermometer, and its nature, should be explained. as the pupil already knows that most bodies expand by heat, he will readily understand, that an increase of heat extends the mercury in the bulb of the thermometer, which, having no other space for its expansion, rises in the small glass tube; and that the degree of heat to which it is exposed, is marked by the figures on the scale of the instrument. the business of distillation, is to separate the more volatile from the less volatile of two bodies. the whole mixture is put into a vessel, under which there is fire: the most volatile liquor begins first to turn into vapour, and rises into a higher vessel, which, being kept cold by water or snow, condenses the evaporated fluid; after it has been condensed, it drops into another vessel. in the experiment that the child has just tried, after having separated the camphire from the spirit of wine by precipitation, he may separate the spirit from the water by distillation. when the substance that rises, or that is separated from other bodies by heat, is a solid, or when what is collected after the operation, is solid, the process is not called distillation, but sublimation. our pupil may next be made acquainted with the general qualities of acids and alkalies. for instructing him in this part of chemistry, definition should as much as possible be avoided; example, and occular demonstration, should be pursued. who would begin to explain by words the difference between an acid and an alkali, when these can be shown by experiments upon the substances themselves? the first great difference which is perceptible between an acid and an alkali, is their taste. let a child have a distinct perception of the difference of their tastes; let him be able to distinguish them when his eyes are shut; let him taste the strongest of each so as not to hurt him, and when he has once acquired distinct notions of the pungent taste of an alkali, and of the sour taste of an acid, he will never forget the difference. he must afterwards see the effects of an acid and alkali on the blue colour of vegetables at _separate times_, and not on the same day; by these means he will more easily remember the experiments, and he will not confound their different results. the blue colour of vegetables is turned red by acids, and green by alkalies. let your pupil take a radish, and scrape off the blue part into water; it should be left for some time, until the water becomes of a blue colour: let him pour some of this liquor into two glasses; add vinegar or lemon juice to one of them, and the liquor will become red; dissolve some alkali in water, and pour this into the other glass, and the dissolved radish will become green. if into the red mixture alkali be poured, the colour will change into green; and if into the liquor which was made green, acid be poured, the colour will change to red: thus alternately you may pour acid or alkali, and produce a red or green colour successively. paper stained with the blue colour of vegetables, is called _test_ paper; this is changed by the least powerful of the acids or alkalies, and will, therefore, be peculiarly useful in the first experiments of our young pupils. a child should for safety use the weakest acids in his first trials, but he should be shown that the effects are similar, whatever acids we employ; only the colour will be darker when we make use of the strong, than when we use the weak acids. by degrees the pupil should be accustomed to employ the strong acids; such as the vitriolic, the nitric, and the muriatic, which three are called fossil acids, to distinguish them from the vegetable, or weaker acids. we may be permitted to advise the young chemist to acquire the habit of wiping the neck of the vessel out of which he pours any strong acid, as the drops of the liquor will not then burn his hand when he takes hold of the bottle; nor will they injure the table upon which he is at work. this custom, trivial as it may seem, is of advantage, as it gives an appearance of order, and of ease, and steadiness, which are all necessary in trying chemical experiments. the little pupil may be told, that the custom which we have just mentioned, is the constant practice of the great chemist, dr. black. we should take care how we first use the term _salt_ in speaking to children, lest they should acquire indistinct ideas: he should be told, that the kind of salt which he eats is not the only salt in the world; he may be put in mind of the kind of salts which he has, perhaps, smelt in smelling-bottles; and he should be further told, that there are a number of earthy, alkaline, and metallic salts, with which he will in time become acquainted. when an acid is put upon an alkali, or upon limestone, chalk, or marle, a bubbling may be observed, and a noise is heard; a child should be told, that this is called _effervescence_. after some time the effervescence ceases, and the limestone, &c. is dissolved in the acid. this effervescence, the child should be informed, arises from the escape of a considerable quantity of a particular sort of air, called fixed air, or carbonic acid gas. in the solution of the lime in the acid, the lime and acid have an attraction for one another; but as the present mixture has no attraction for the gas, it escapes, and in rising, forms the bubbling or effervescence. this may be proved to a child, by showing him, that if an acid is poured upon caustic lime (lime which has had this gas taken from it by fire) there will be no effervescence. there are various other chemical experiments with which children may amuse themselves; they may be employed in analyzing marle, or clays; they may be provided with materials for making ink or soap. it should be pointed out to them, that the common domestic and culinary operations of making butter and cheese, baking, brewing, &c. are all chemical processes. we hope the reader will not imagine, that we have in this slight sketch pretended to point out the _best_ experiments which can be devised for children; we have only offered a few of the simplest which occurred to us, that parents may not, at the conclusion of this chapter, exclaim, "what is to be done? how are we to _begin_? what experiments are suited to children? if we knew, our children should try them." it is of little consequence what particular experiment is selected for the first; we only wish to show, that the minds of children may be turned to this subject; and that, by accustoming them to observation, we give them not only the power of learning what has been already discovered, but of adding, as they grow older, something to the general stock of human knowledge. chapter xix. on public and private education. the anxious parent, after what has been said concerning tasks and classical literature, will inquire whether the whole plan of education recommended in the following pages, is intended to relate to public or to private education. it is intended to relate to both. it is not usual to send children to school before they are eight or nine years old: our first object is to show how education may be conducted to that age in such a manner, that children may be well prepared for the acquisition of all the knowledge usually taught at schools, and may be perfectly free from many of the faults that pupils sometimes have acquired before they are sent to any public seminary. it is obvious, that public preceptors would be saved much useless labour and anxiety, were parents to take some pains in the previous instruction of their children; and more especially, if they were to prevent them from learning a taste for total idleness, or habits of obstinacy and of falsehood, which can scarcely be conquered by the utmost care and vigilance. we can assure parents, from experience, that if they pursue steadily a proper plan with regard to the understanding and the moral habits, they will not have much trouble with the education of their children after the age we have mentioned, as long as they continue to instruct them at home; and if they send them to public schools, their superiority in intellect and in conduct will quickly appear. though we have been principally attentive to all the circumstances which can be essential to the management of young people during the first nine or ten years of their lives, we have by no means confined our observations to this period alone; but we have endeavoured to lay before parents a general view of the human mind (as far as it relates to our subject) of proper methods of teaching, and of the objects of rational instruction--so that they may extend the principles which we have laid down, through all the succeeding periods of education, and may apply them as it may best suit their peculiar situations, or their peculiar wishes. we are fully conscious, that we have executed but very imperfectly even our own design; that experimental education is yet but in its infancy, and that boundless space for improvement remains; but we flatter ourselves, that attentive parents and preceptors will consider with candour the practical assistance which is offered to them, especially as we have endeavoured to express our opinions without dogmatical presumption, and without the illiberal exclusion of any existing institutions or prevailing systems. people who, even with the best intentions, attack with violence any of these, and who do not consider what is practicable, as well as what ought to be done, are not likely to persuade, or to convince mankind to increase the general sum of happiness, or their own portion of felicity. those who really desire to be of service to society, should point out decidedly, but with temperate indulgence for the feelings and opinions of others, whatever appears to them absurd or reprehensible in any prevailing customs: having done this, they will rest in the persuasion that what is most reasonable, will ultimately prevail. mankind, at least the prudent and rational part of mankind, have an aversion to pull down, till they have a moral certainty that they can build up a better edifice than that which has been destroyed. would you, says an eminent writer, convince me, that the house i live in is a bad one, and would you persuade me to quit it; build a better in my neighbourhood; i shall be very ready to go into it, and shall return you my very sincere thanks. till another house be ready, a wise man will stay in his old one, however inconvenient its arrangement, however seducing the plans of the enthusiastic projector. we do not set up for projectors, or reformers: we wish to keep steadily in view the actual state of things, as well as our own hopes of progressive improvement; and to seize and combine all that can be immediately serviceable: all that can assist, without precipitating improvements. every well informed parent, and every liberal school-master, must be sensible, that there are many circumstances in the management of public education which might be condemned with reason; that too much time is sacrificed to the study of the learned languages; that too little attention is paid to the general improvement of the understanding and formation of the moral character; that a school-master cannot pay attention to the temper or habits of each of his numerous scholars; and that parents, during that portion of the year which their children spend with them, are not sufficiently solicitous to co-operate with the views of the school-master; so that the public is counteracted by the private education. these, and many other things, we have heard objected to schools; but what are we to put in the place of schools? how are vast numbers who are occupied themselves in public or professional pursuits, how are men in business or in trade, artists or manufacturers, to educate their families, when they have not time to attend to them; when they may not think themselves perfectly prepared to undertake the classical instruction and entire education of several boys; and when, perhaps, they may not be in circumstances to engage the assistance of such a preceptor as they could approve? it is obvious, that if in such situations parents were to attempt to educate their children at home, they would harass themselves, and probably spoil their pupils irrecoverably. it would, therefore, be in every respect impolitic and cruel to disgust those with public schools, who have no other resource for the education of their families. there is another reason which has perhaps operated upon many in the middle ranks of life unperceived, and which determines them in favour of public education. persons of narrow fortune, or persons who have acquired wealth in business, are often desirous of breeding up their sons to the liberal professions: and they are conscious that the company, the language, and the style of life, which their children would be accustomed to at home, are beneath what would be suited to their future professions. public schools efface this rusticity, and correct the faults of provincial dialect: in this point of view they are highly advantageous. we strongly recommend it to such parents to send their children to large public schools, to rugby, eton, or westminster; not to any small school; much less to one in their own neighbourhood. small schools are apt to be filled with persons of nearly the same stations, and out of the same neighbourhood: from this circumstance, they contribute to perpetuate uncouth antiquated idioms, and many of those obscure prejudices which cloud the intellect in the future business of life. whilst we admit the necessity which compels the largest portion of society to prefer public seminaries of education, it is incumbent upon us to caution parents from expecting that the moral character, the understandings, or the tempers of their children, should be improved at large schools; there the learned languages, we acknowledge, are successfully taught. many satisfy themselves with the assertion, that public education is the least troublesome, that a boy once sent to school is settled for several years of life, and will require only short returns of parental care twice a year at the holydays. it is hardly to be supposed, that those who think in this manner, should have paid any anxious, or at least any judicious attention to the education of their children, previously to sending them to school. it is not likely that they should be very solicitous about the commencement of an education which they never meant to finish: they would think, that what could be done during the first few years of life, is of little consequence; that children from four to seven years old are too young to be taught; and that a school would speedily supply all deficiencies, and correct all those faults which begin at that age to be troublesome at home. thus to a public school, as to a general infirmary for mental disease, all desperate subjects are sent, as the last resource. they take with them the contagion of their vices, which quickly runs through the whole tribe of their companions, especially amongst those who happen to be nearly of their own age, whose sympathy peculiarly exposes them to the danger of infection. we are often told, that as young people have the strongest sympathy with each other, they will learn most effectually from each other's example. they do learn quickly from example, and this is one of the dangers of a public school: a danger which is not necessary, but incidental; a danger against which no school-master can possibly guard, but which parents can, by the previous education of the pupils, prevent. boys are led, driven, or carried to school; and in a school-room they first meet with those who are to be their fellow prisoners. they do not come with fresh unprejudiced minds to commence their course of social education; they bring with them all the ideas and habits which they have already learned at their respective homes. it is highly unreasonable to expect, that all these habits should be reformed by a public preceptor. if he had patience, how could he have time for such an undertaking? those who have never attempted to break a pupil of any one bad habit, have no idea of the degree of patience requisite to success. we once heard an officer of dragoons assert, that he would rather break twenty horses of their bad habits, than one man of his. the proportionate difficulty of teaching boys, may be easily calculated. it is sometimes asserted, that the novelty of a school life, the change of situation, alters the habits, and forms in boys a new character. habits of eight or nine years standing, cannot be instantaneously, perhaps can never be radically, destroyed; they will mix themselves imperceptibly with the new ideas which are planted in their minds, and though these may strike the eye by the rapidity of their growth, the others, which have taken a strong root, will not easily be dispossessed of the soil. in this new character, as it is called, there will, to a discerning eye, appear a strong mixture of the old disposition. the boy, who at home lived with his father's servants, and was never taught to have any species of literature, will not acquire a taste for it at school, merely by being compelled to learn his lessons; the boy, who at home was suffered to be the little tyrant of a family, will, it is true, be forced to submit to superior strength or superior numbers at school;[ ] but does it improve the temper to practise alternately the habits of a tyrant and a slave? the lesson which experience usually teaches to the temper of a school-boy, is, that strength, and power, and cunning, will inevitably govern in society: as to reason, it is out of the question, it would be hissed or laughed out of the company. with respect to social virtues, they are commonly amongst school-boys so much mixed with party spirit, that they mislead even the best dispositions. a boy at home, whose pleasures are all immediately connected with the idea of self, will not feel a sudden enlargement of mind from entering a public school. he will, probably, preserve his selfish character in his new society; or, even suppose he catches that of his companions, the progress is not great in moral education from selfishness to spirit of party: the one is a despicable, the other a dangerous, principle of action. it has been observed, that what we are when we are twenty, depends on what we were when we were ten years old. what a young man is at college, depends upon what he was at school; and what he is at school, depends upon what he was before he went to school. in his father's house, the first important lessons, those which decide his future abilities and character, must be learned. we have repeated this idea, and placed it in different points of view, in hopes that it will catch and fix the attention. suppose that parents educated their children well for the first eight or nine years of their lives, and then sent them all to public seminaries, what a difference this must immediately make in public education: the boys would be disposed to improve themselves with all the ardour which the most sanguine preceptor would desire; their tutors would find that there was nothing to be _unlearned_; no habits of idleness to conquer; no perverse stupidity would provoke them; no capricious contempt of application would appear in pupils of the quickest abilities. the moral education could then be made a part of the preceptor's care, with some hopes of success; the pupils would all have learned the first necessary moral principles and habits; they would, consequently, be all fit companions for each other; in each other's society they would continue to be governed by the same ideas of right and wrong by which they had been governed all their lives; they would not have any new character to learn; they would improve, by mixing with numbers, in the social virtues, without learning party spirit; and though they would love their companions, they would not, therefore, combine together to treat their instructers as pedagogues and tyrants. this may be thought an utopian idea of a school; indeed it is very improbable, that out of the numbers of parents who send their children to large schools, many should suddenly be much moved, by any thing that we can say, to persuade them to take serious trouble in their previous instruction. but much may be effected by gradual attempts. ten well educated boys, sent to a public seminary at nine or ten years old, would, probably, far surpass their competitors in every respect; they would inspire others with so much emulation, would do their parents and preceptors so much credit, that numbers would eagerly inquire into the causes of their superiority; and these boys would, perhaps, do more good by their example, than by their actual acquirements. we do not mean to promise, that a boy judiciously educated, shall appear at ten years old a prodigy of learning; far from it: we should not even estimate his capacity, or the chain of his future progress, by the quantity of knowledge stored in his memory, by the number of latin lines he had got by rote, by his expertness in repeating the rules of his grammar, by his pointing out a number of places readily in a map, or even by his knowing the latitude and longitude of all the capital cities in europe; these are all useful articles of knowledge: but they are not the test of a good education. we should rather, if we were to examine a boy of ten years old, for the credit of his parents, produce proofs of his being able to reason accurately, of his quickness in invention, of his habits of industry and application, of his having learned to generalize his ideas, and to apply his observations and his principles: if we found that he had learned all, or any of these things, we should be in little pain about grammar, or geography, or even latin; we should be tolerably certain that he would not long remain deficient in any of these; we should know that he would overtake and surpass a competitor who had only been technically taught, as certainly as that the giant would overtake the panting dwarf, who might have many miles the start of him in the race. we do not mean to say, that a boy should not be taught the principles of grammar, and some knowledge of geography, at the same time that his understanding is cultivated in the most enlarged manner: these objects are not incompatible, and we particularly recommend it to _parents who intend to send their children to school_, early to give them confidence in themselves, by securing the rudiments of literary education; otherwise their pupils, with a real superiority of understanding, may feel depressed, and may, perhaps, be despised, when they mix at a public school with numbers who will estimate their abilities merely by their proficiency in particular studies. mr. frend,[ ] in recommending the study of arithmetic for young people, has very sensibly remarked, that boys bred up in public schools, are apt to compare themselves with each other merely as classical scholars; and, when they afterwards go into the world excellent greek and latin scholars, are much astonished to perceive, that many of the companions whom they had under-valued at school, get before them when they come to actual business, and to active life. many, in the pursuit of their classical studies, have neglected all other knowledge, especially that of arithmetic, that useful, essential branch of knowledge, without which neither the abstract sciences nor practical arts can be taught. the precision which the habit of applying the common rules of arithmetic, gives to the understanding, is highly advantageous, particularly to young people of vivacity, or, as others would say, of genius. the influence which the habit of estimating has upon that part of the moral character called prudence, is of material consequence. we shall further explain upon this subject when we speak of the means of teaching arithmetic and reasoning to children; we only mention the general ideas here, to induce intelligent parents to attend early to these particulars. if they mean to send their children to public classical schools, it must be peculiarly advantageous to teach them early the rudiments of arithmetic, and to give them the habit of applying their knowledge in the common business of life. we forbear to enumerate other useful things, which might easily be taught to young people before they leave home, because we do not wish to terrify with the apprehension, that a perplexing variety of things are to be taught. one thing well taught, is better than a hundred taught imperfectly. the effect of the pains which are taken in the first nine or ten years of a child's life, may not be apparent immediately to the view, but it will gradually become visible. to careless observers, two boys of nine years old, who have been very differently educated, may appear nearly alike in abilities, in temper, and in the promise of future character. send them both to a large public school, let them be placed in the same new situation, and exposed to the same trials, the difference will then appear: the difference in a few years will be such as to strike every eye, and people will wonder what can have produced in so short a time such an amazing change. in the hindoo art of dyeing, the same liquors communicate different colours to particular spots, according to the several bases previously applied: to the ignorant eye, no difference is discernible in the ground, nor can the design be distinctly traced till the air, and light, and open exposure, bring out the bright and permanent colours to the wondering eye of the spectator. besides bestowing some attention upon early education, parents, who send their children to school, may much assist the public preceptor by judicious conduct towards children during that portion of the year which is usually spent at home.[ ] mistaken parental fondness, delights to make the period of time which children spend at home, as striking a contrast as possible with that which they pass at school. the holydays are made a jubilee, or rather resemble the saturnalia. even if parents do not wish to represent a school-master as a tyrant, they are by no means displeased to observe, that he is not the friend or favourite of their children. they put themselves in mean competition with him for their affection, instead of co-operating with him in all his views for their advantage. how is it possible, that any master can long retain the wish or the hope of succeeding in any plan of education, if he perceives that his pupils are but partially under his government; if his influence over their minds be counteracted from time to time by the superior influence of their parents? an influence which he must not wish to destroy. to him is left the power to punish, it is true; but parents reserve to themselves the privilege to reward. the ancients did not suppose, that even jupiter could govern the world without the command of pain and pleasure. upon the vases near his throne, depended his influence over mankind. and what are these holyday delights? and in what consists parental rewards? in dissipation and idleness. with these are consequently associated the idea of happiness and the name of pleasure; the name is often sufficient, without the reality. during the vacation, children have a glimpse of what is called _the world_; and then are sent back to their prison with heads full of visions of liberty, and with a second-sight of the blessed lives which they are to lead when they have left school for ever. what man of sense, who has studied the human mind, who knows that the success of any plan of education must depend upon the concurrence of every person, and every circumstance, for years together, to the same point, would undertake any thing more than the partial instruction of pupils, whose leading associations and habits must be perpetually broken? when the work of school is undone during the holydays, what hand could have the patience perpetually to repair the web? during the vacations spent at home, children may be made extremely happy in the society and in the affections of their friends, but they need not be taught, that idleness is pleasure: on the contrary, occupation should, by all possible methods, be rendered agreeable to them; their school acquisitions, their knowledge and taste, should be drawn out in conversation, and they should be made to feel the value of what they have been taught; by these means, there would be some connection, some unity of design, preserved in their education. their school-masters and tutors should never become the theme of insipid ridicule; nor should parents ever put their influence in competition with that of a preceptor: on the contrary, his pupils should uniformly perceive, that from his authority there is no appeal, except to the superior power of reason, which should be the avowed arbiter to which all should be submitted. some of the dangerous effects of that mixed society at schools, of which we have complained, may be counteracted by the judicious conduct of parents during the time which children spend at home. a better view of society, more enlarged ideas of friendship and of justice, may be given to young people, and the vile principle of party spirit may be treated with just contempt and ridicule. some standard, some rules may be taught to them, by which they may judge of character independently of prejudice, or childish prepossession. "i do not like you, doctor fell; the reason why, i cannot tell: but this i know full well, i do not like you, doctor fell"-- is an exact specimen of the usual mode of reasoning, of the usual method in which an ill educated school-boy expresses his opinion and feelings about all persons, and all things. "the reason why," should always be inquired whenever children express preference or aversion. to connect the idea of childhood with that of inferiority and contempt, is unjust and impolitic; it should not be made a reproach to young people to be young, nor should it be pointed out to them, that when they are some years older, they will be more respected; the degree of respect which they really command, whether in youth or age, will depend upon their own conduct, their knowledge, and their powers of being useful and agreeable to others. if they are convinced of this, children will not at eight years old long to be fifteen, or at fifteen to be one and twenty; proper subordination would be preserved, and the scale of happiness would not have a forced and false connection with that of age. if parents did not first excite foolish wishes in the minds of their children, and then imprudently promise that these wishes shall be gratified at certain periods of their existence, children would not be impatient to pass over the years of childhood; those years which idle boys wish to pass over as quickly as possible, men without occupation regret as the happiest of their existence. to a child, who has been promised that he shall put on manly apparel on his next birthday, the pace of time is slow and heavy until that happy era arrive. fix the day when a boy shall leave school, and he wishes instantly to mount the chariot, and lash the horses of the sun. nor when he enters the world, will his restless spirit be satisfied; the first step gained, he looks anxiously forward to the height of manly elevation, "and the brisk minor pants for twenty-one" these juvenile anticipations diminish the real happiness of life; those who are in continual expectation, never enjoy the present; the habit of expectation is dangerous to the mind, it suspends all industry, all voluntary exertion. young men, who early acquire this habit, find existence insipid to them without the immediate stimuli of hope and fear: no matter what the object is, they must have something to sigh for; a curricle, a cockade, or an opera-dancer. much may be done by education to prevent this boyish restlessness. parents should refrain from those imprudent promises, and slight inuendoes, which the youthful imagination always misunderstands and exaggerates.--never let the moment in which a young man quits a seminary of education, be represented as a moment in which all instruction, labour, and restraints, cease. the idea, that he must restrain and instruct himself, that he must complete his own education, should be excited in a young man's mind; nor should he be suffered to imagine that his education is finished, because he has attained to some given age. when a common school-boy bids adieu to that school which he has been taught to consider as a prison, he exults in his escape from books and masters, and from all the moral and intellectual discipline, to which he imagines that it is the peculiar disgrace and misery of childhood to be condemned. he is impatient to be thought a man, but his ideas of the manly character are erroneous, consequently his ambition will only mislead him. from his companions whilst at school, from his father's acquaintance, and his father's servants, with whom he has been suffered to consort during the vacations, he has collected imperfect notions of life, fashion, and society. these do not mix well in his mind with the examples and precepts of greek and roman virtue: a temporary enthusiasm may have been kindled in his soul by the eloquence of antiquity; but, for want of sympathy, this enthusiasm necessarily dies away. his heroes are not the heroes of the present times; the maxims of his sages are not easily introduced into the conversation of the day. at the tea-table he now seldom hears even the name of plato; and he often blushes for not knowing a line from a popular english poet, whilst he could repeat a cento from horace, virgil, and homer; or an antistrophe from Ã�schylus or euripides. he feels ashamed to produce the knowledge he has acquired, because he has not learned sufficient address to produce it without pedantry. on his entrance into the world, there remains in his mind no grateful, no affectionate, no respectful remembrance of those under whose care he has passed so many years of his life. he has escaped from the restraints imposed by his school-master, and the connection is dissolved for ever. but when a son separates from his father, if he has been well educated, he wishes to continue his own education: the course of his ideas is not suddenly broken; what he has been, joins immediately with what he is to be; his knowledge applies to real life, it is such as he can use in all companies; there is no sudden metamorphosis in any of the objects of his ambition; the boy and man are the same individual. pleasure will not influence him merely by her name, or by the contrast of her appearance with the rigid discipline of scholastic learning; he will feel the difference between pleasure and happiness, and his early taste for domestic life will remain or return upon his mind. his old precepts and new motives are not at war with each other; his experience will confirm his education, and external circumstances will call forth his latent virtues. when he looks back, he can trace the gradual growth of his knowledge; when he looks forward, it is with the delightful hope of progressive improvement. a desire in some degree to repay the care, to deserve the esteem, to fulfil the animating prophecies, or to justify the fond hopes of the parent who has watched over his education, is one of the strongest motives to an ingenuous young man; it is an incentive to exertion in every honourable pursuit. a son who has been judiciously and kindly educated, will feel the value of his father's friendship. the perception, that no man can be more entirely interested in every thing that concerns him, the idea, that no one more than his father can share in his glory or in his disgrace, will press upon his heart, will rest upon his understanding. upon these ideas, upon this common family interest, the real strength of the connection between a father and his son depends. no public preceptor can have the same advantages; his connection with his pupil is not necessarily formed to last. after having spoken with freedom, but we hope with moderation, of public schools, we may, perhaps, be asked our opinion of universities. are universities the most splendid repositories of learning? we are not afraid to declare an opinion in the negative. smith, in his wealth of nations, has stated some objections to them, we think, with unanswerable force of reasoning. we do not, however, wish to destroy what we do not entirely approve. far be that insanity from our minds which would, like orlando, tear up the academic groves; the madness of innovation is as destructive as the bigotry of ancient establishments. the learning and the views of the rising century must have different objects from those of the wisdom and benevolence of alfred, balsham, or wolsey; and, without depreciating or destroying the magnificence or establishments of universities, may not their institutions be improved? may not their splendid halls echo with other sounds than the exploded metaphysics of the schools? and may not other learning be as much rewarded and esteemed as pure _latinity_? we must here distinctly point out, that young men designed for the army or the navy, should not be educated in private families. the domestic habits, the learned leisure of private education, are unsuited to them; it would be absurd to waste many years in teaching them the elegancies of classic literature, which can probably be of no essential use to them; it would be cruel to give them a nice and refined choice of right and wrong, when it will be their professional duty to act under the command of others; when implicit, prompt, unquestioning obedience must be their first military virtue. military academies, where the sciences practically essential to the professions are taught, must be the best situations for all young sailors and soldiers; strict institution is the best education for them. we do not here inquire how far these professions are necessary in society; it is obvious, that in the present state of european cultivation, soldiers and sailors are indispensable to every nation. we hope, however, that a taste for peace may, at some future period in the history of the world, succeed to the passion for military glory; and in the mean time, we may safely recommend it to parents, never to trust a young man designed for a soldier, to the care of a philosopher, even if it were possible to find one who would undertake the charge. we hope that we have shown ourselves the friends of the public preceptor, that we have pointed out the practicable means of improving public institutions by parental care and parental co-operation. but, until such a meliorating plan shall actually have been carried into effect, we cannot hesitate to assert, that even when the abilities of the parent are inferiour to those of the public preceptor, the means of ensuring success preponderate in favour of private education. a father, who has time, talents, and temper, to educate his family, is certainly the best possible preceptor; and his reward will be the highest degree of domestic felicity. if, from his situation, he is obliged to forego this reward, he may select some man of literature, sense, and integrity, to whom he can confide his children. opulent families should not think any reward too munificent for such a private preceptor. even in an economic point of view, it is prudent to calculate how many thousands lavished on the turf, or lost at the gaming table, might have been saved to the heirs of noble and wealthy families by a judicious education. footnotes: [ ] v. barne's essay on public and private education. manchester society. [ ] v. mr. frend's principles of algebra. [ ] v. williams's lectures on education. chapter xx. on female accomplishments, masters, and governesses. some years ago, an opera dancer at lyon's, whose charms were upon the wane, applied to an english gentleman for a recommendation to some of his friends in england, as a governess for young ladies. "do you doubt," said the lady (observing that the gentleman was somewhat confounded by the easy assurance of her request) "do you doubt my capability? do i not speak good parisian french? have i any provincial accent? i will undertake to teach the language grammatically. and for music and dancing, without vanity, may i not pretend to teach them to any young person?" the lady's excellence in all these particulars was unquestionable. she was beyond dispute a highly accomplished woman. pressed by her forcible interrogatories, the gentleman was compelled to hint, that an english mother of a family might be inconveniently inquisitive about the private history of a person who was to educate her daughters. "oh," said the lady, "i can change my name; and, at my age, nobody will make further inquiries." before we can determine how far this lady's pretensions were ill founded, and before we can exactly decide what qualifications are most desirable in a governess, we must form some estimate of the positive and relative value of what are called accomplishments. we are not going to attack any of them with cynical asperity, or with the ambition to establish any new dogmatical tenets in the place of old received opinions. it can, however, do no harm to discuss this important subject with proper reverence and humility. without alarming those mothers, who declare themselves above all things anxious for the rapid progress of their daughters in every fashionable accomplishment, it may be innocently asked, what price such mothers are willing to pay for these _advantages_. any price within the limits of our fortune! they will probably exclaim. there are other standards by which we can measure the value of objects, as well as by money. "fond mother, would you, if it were in your power, accept of an opera dancer for your daughter's governess, upon condition that you should live to see that daughter dance the best minuet at a birth-night ball?" "not for the world," replies the mother. "do you think i would hazard my daughter's innocence and reputation, for the sake of seeing her dance a good minuet? shocking! absurd! what can you mean by such an outrageous question?" "to fix your attention. where the mind has not precisely ascertained its wishes, it is sometimes useful to consider extremes; by determining what price you will _not_ pay, we shall at length ascertain the value which you set upon the object. reputation and innocence, you say, you will not, upon any account, hazard. but would you consent that your daughter should, by universal acclamation, be proclaimed the most accomplished woman in europe, upon the simple condition, that she should pass her days in a nunnery?" "i should have no right to make such a condition; domestic happiness i ought certainly to prefer to public admiration for my daughter. her accomplishments would be of little use to her, if she were to be shut up from the world: who is to be the judge of them in a nunnery?" "i will say no more about the nunnery. but would not you, as a good mother, consent to have your daughter turned into an automaton for eight hours in every day for fifteen years, for the promise of hearing her, at the end of that time, pronounced the first private performer at the most fashionable and most crowded concert in london?" "eight hours a day for fifteen years, are too much. no one need practise so much to become the first performer in england." "that is another question. you have not told me whether you would sacrifice so much of your daughter's existence for such an object, supposing that you could obtain it at no other price." "for _one_ concert?" says the hesitating mother; "i think it would be too high a price. yet i would give any thing to have my daughter play better than any one in england. what a distinction! she would be immediately taken notice of in all companies! she might get into the first circles in london! she would want neither beauty nor fortune to recommend her! she would be a match for any man, who has any taste for music! and music is universally admired, even by those who have the misfortune to have no taste for it. besides, it is such an elegant accomplishment in itself! such a constant source of innocent amusement! putting every thing else out of the question, i should wish my daughter to have every possible accomplishment, because accomplishments are such charming _resources_ for young women; they keep them out of harm's way; they make a vast deal of their idle time pass so pleasantly to themselves and others! this is my _chief_ reason for liking them." here are so many reasons brought together at once, along with the chief reason, that they are altogether unanswerable; we must separate, class, and consider them one at a time. accomplishments, it seems, are valuable, as being the objects of universal admiration. some accomplishments have another species of value, as they are tickets of admission to fashionable company. accomplishments have another, and a higher species of value, as they are supposed to increase a young lady's chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery. accomplishments have also a value as resources against ennui, as they afford continual amusement and innocent occupation. this is ostensibly their chief praise; it deserves to be considered with respect. false and odious must be that philosophy which would destroy any one of the innocent pleasures of our existence. no reward was thought too high for the invention of a new pleasure; no punishment would be thought too severe for those who would destroy an old one. women are peculiarly restrained in their situation, and in their employments, by the customs of society: to diminish the number of these employments, therefore, would be cruel; they should rather be encouraged, by all means, to cultivate those tastes which can attach them to their home, and which can preserve them from the miseries of dissipation. every sedentary occupation must be valuable to those who are to lead sedentary lives; and every art, however trifling in itself, which tends to enliven and embellish domestic life, must be advantageous, not only to the female sex, but to society in general. as far as accomplishments can contribute to all or any of these excellent purposes, they must be just objects of attention in early education. a number of experiments have already been tried; let us examine the result. out of the prodigious number of young women who learn music and drawing, for instance, how many are there, who, after they become mistresses of their own time, and after they have the choice of their own amusements, continue to practise these accomplishments for the pure pleasure of occupation? as soon as a young lady is married, does she not frequently discover, that "she really has not _leisure_ to cultivate talents which take up so much time?" does she not complain of the labour of practising four or five hours a day to keep up her musical character? what motive has she for perseverance? she is, perhaps, already tired of playing to all her acquaintance. she may really take pleasure in hearing good music; but her own performance will not then please her ear so much as that of many others. she will prefer the more indolent pleasure of hearing the best music that can be heard for money at public concerts. she will then of course leave off playing, but continue very fond of music. how often is the labour of years thus lost for ever! those who have excelled in drawing, do not appear to abandon the occupation so suddenly; it does not demand such an inordinate quantity of time to keep up the talent; the exertion of the imitative powers with apparent success, is agreeable; the employment is progressive, and, therefore, the mind is carried on to complete what has been begun. independently of all applause, which may be expected for the performance, there is a pleasure in going on with the work. but setting aside enthusiasm and habit, the probability that any sensible person will continue to pursue a given employment, must depend, in a great measure, upon their own conviction of its utility, or of its being agreeable to those whom they wish to please. the pleasure which a lady's friends receive from her drawings, arises chiefly from the perception of their comparative excellence. comparative excellence is all to which gentlewomen artists usually pretend, all to which they expect to attain; positive excellence is scarcely attained by one in a hundred. compared with the performances of other young ladies of their acquaintance, the drawings of miss x or y may be justly considered as charming! admirable! and astonishing! but there are few drawings by young ladies which can be compared with those of a professed artist. the wishes of obliging friends are satisfied with a few drawings in handsome frames, to be hung up for the young lady's credit; and when it is allowed amongst their acquaintance, that she draws in a _superior_ style, the purpose of this part of her education is satisfactorily answered. we do not here speak of those few individuals who really _excel_ in drawing, who have learnt something more than the common routine which is usually learnt from a drawing master, who have acquired an agreeable, talent, not for the mere purpose of exhibiting themselves, but for the sake of the occupation it affords, and the pleasure it may give to their _friends_. we have the pleasure of knowing some who exactly answer to this description, and who must feel themselves distinct and honourable exceptions to these general observations. from whatever cause it arises, we may observe, that after young women are settled in life, their taste for drawing and music gradually declines. for this fact, we can appeal only to the recollection of individuals. we may hence form some estimate of the real value which ought to be put upon what are called accomplishments, _considered as occupations_. hence we may also conclude, that parents do not form their judgments from the facts which they see every day in real life; or else may we not infer, that they deceive themselves as to their own motives; and that, amongst the reasons which make them so anxious about the accomplishments of their daughters, there are some secret motives more powerful than those which are usually openly acknowledged? it is admitted in the cabinet council of mothers, that some share of the value of accomplishments depends upon the demand for them in the fashionable world. "a young lady," they say, "is nobody, and nothing, without accomplishments; they are as necessary to her as a fortune: they are indeed considered as part of her fortune, and sometimes are even found to supply the place of it. next to beauty, they are the best tickets of admission into society which she can produce; and every body knows, that on the company she keeps, depends the chance of a young woman's settling advantageously in the world." to judge of what will please and attach men of superior sense and characters--we are not quite certain that these are the men who are to be considered first, when we speak of a young lady's settling _advantageously_ in the world; but we will take this for granted--to judge of what will please and attach men of superior sense and characters, we must observe their actual conduct in life, and listen to their speculative opinions. superficial accomplishments do not appear to be the objects of their preference. in enumerating the perfections of his wife, or in retracing the progress of his love, does a man of sense dwell upon his mistress's skill in drawing, or dancing, or music? no. these, he tells you, are extremely agreeable talents, but they could have never attached him; they are subordinate parts in her character; he is angry that you can rank them amongst her perfections; he knows that a thousand women possess these accomplishments, who have never touched his heart. he does not, perhaps, deny, that in chloe, altogether, they have power to please, but he does not think them essential to her power. the opinion of women, who have seen a good deal of the world, is worth attending to upon this subject; especially if we can obtain it when their passions are wholly uninterested in their decision. whatever may be the judgment of individuals concerning the character and politics of the celebrated madame roland, her opinion as a woman of abilities, and a woman who had seen a variety of life, will be thought deserving of attention. her book was written at a time when she was in daily expectation of death, when she could have no motive to conceal her real sentiments upon any subject. she gives an account of her employments in prison, and, amongst others, mentions music and drawing. "i then employed myself in drawing till dinner time. i had so long been out of the habit of using a pencil, that i could not expect to be very dexterous; but we commonly retain the power of repeating with pleasure, or at least of attempting with ease, whatever we have successfully practised in our youth. therefore the study of the fine arts, considered as a part of female education, should be attended to, much less with a view to the acquisition of superior talents, than with a desire to give women a taste for industry, the habit of application, and a greater variety of employments; for these assist us to escape from _ennui_, the most cruel disease of civilized society; by these we are preserved from the dangers of vice, and even from those seductions which are far more likely to lead us astray. "i would not make my daughter a _performer_.[ ] i remember, that my mother was afraid that i should become a great musician, or that i should have devoted myself entirely to painting: she wished that i should, above all other things, love the duties of my sex: that i should be a good economist, a good mistress, as well as a good mother of a family. i wish my eudora to be able to accompany her voice agreeably on the harp. i wish that she may play agreeably on the piano-forte; that she may know enough of drawing, to feel pleasure from the sight and from the examination of the finest pictures of the great painters; that she may be able to draw a flower that happens to please her; and that she may unite in her dress elegance and simplicity. i should wish that her talents might be such, that they should neither excite the admiration of others, nor inspire her with vanity; i should wish that she should please by the general effect of her whole character, without ever striking any body with astonishment at first sight; and that she should attach by her good qualities, rather than shine by her accomplishments." women cannot foresee what may be the tastes of the individuals with whom they are to pass their lives. their own tastes should not, therefore, be early decided; they should, if possible, be so educated that they may attain any talent in perfection which they may desire, or which their circumstances may render necessary. if, for instance, a woman were to marry a man who was fond of music, or who admired painting, she should be able to cultivate these talents for his amusement and her own. if he be a man of sense and feeling, he will be more pleased with the motive than with the thing that is actually done. but if it be urged, that all women cannot expect to marry men of sense and feeling; and if we are told, that nevertheless they must look to "an advantageous establishment," we must conclude, that men of rank and fortune are meant by that comprehensive phrase. another set of arguments must be used to those who speculate on their daughters accomplishments in this line. they have, perhaps, seen some instances of what they call success; they have seen some young women of their acquaintance, whose accomplishments have attracted men of fortune superior to their own; consequently, maternal tenderness is awakened, and many mothers are sanguine in their expectations of the effect of their daughters education. but they forget that every body now makes the same reflections, that parents are, and have been for some years, speculating in the same line; consequently, the market is likely to be overstocked, and, of course, the value of the commodities must fall. every young lady (and every young woman is now a young lady) has some pretensions to accomplishments. she draws a little; or she plays a little, or she speaks french a little. even the blue-board boarding schools, ridiculed by miss allscript in the heiress, profess to perfect young ladies in some or all of these necessary parts of education. stop at any good inn on the london roads, and you will probably find that the landlady's daughter can show you some of her own framed drawings, can play a tune upon her spinnet, or support a dialogue in french of a reasonable length, in the customary questions and answers. now it is the practice in high life to undervalue, and avoid as much as possible, every thing which descends to the inferiour classes of society. the dress of to-day is unfashionable to-morrow, because every body wears it. the dress is not preferred because it is pretty or useful, but because it is the distinction of well bred people. in the same manner accomplishments have lost much of that value which they acquired from opinion, since they have become common. they are now so common, that they cannot be considered as the distinguishing characteristics of even a gentlewoman's education. the higher classes in life, and those individuals who aim at distinction, now establish another species of monopoly, and secure to themselves a certain set of expensive masters in music, drawing, dancing, &c. and they endeavour to believe, and to make others believe, that no one can be well educated without having served an apprenticeship of so many lessons under some of these privileged masters. but it is in vain that they intrench themselves, they are pursued by the intrusive vulgar. in a wealthy, mercantile nation, there is nothing which can be bought for money, which will long continue to be an envied distinction. the hope of attaining to that degree of eminence in the fine arts which really deserves celebrity, becomes every day more difficult to private practitioners, because the number of competitors daily increases; and it is the interest of masters to forward their pupils by every possible means. both genius and perseverance must now be united to obtain the prize of distinction; and how seldom are they found, or kept together, in the common course of education! considering all these circumstances, is not there some reason to apprehend, that in a few years the taste for several fashionable appendages of female education, may change, and that those will consequently be treated with neglect, who have no other claim to public regard, than their proficiency in what may, perhaps, then be thought vulgar or obsolete accomplishments? our great grandmothers distinguished themselves by truly substantial tent-work chairs and carpets, by needle-work pictures of solomon and the queen of sheba. these were admirable in their day, but their day is over; and these useful, ingenious, and laborious specimens of female talents, are consigned to the garret, or they are produced but as curiosities, to excite wonder at the strange patience and miserable destiny of former generations: the taste for tapestry and embroidery is thus past; the long labours of the loom have ceased. cloth-work, crape-work, chenille-work, ribbon-work, wafer-work, with a long train of etceteras, have all passed away in our own memory; yet these conferred much evanescent fame, and a proportional quantity of vain emulation. a taste for drawing, or music, cannot be classed with any of these trifling performances; but there are many faded drawings of the present generations, which cannot stand in competition with the glowing and faithful colours of the silk and worsted of former times; and many of the hours spent at a _stammering_ harpsichord, might, surely, with full as much domestic advantage, have been devoted to the embellishment of chairs and carpets. we hope that no one will so perversely misunderstand us, as to infer from these remarks, that we desire to see the revival of old tapestry work; or that we condemn the elegant accomplishments of music and drawing. we condemn only the abuse of these accomplishments; we only wish that they should be considered as domestic occupations, not as matters of competition, or of exhibition, nor yet as the means of attracting temporary admiration. we are not afraid that any, who are really conscious of having acquired accomplishments with these prudent and honourable views, should misapprehend what has been said. mediocrity may, perhaps, attempt to misrepresent our remarks, and may endeavour to make it appear that we have attacked, and that we would discourage, every effort of female taste and ingenuity in the fine arts; we cannot, therefore, be too explicit in disclaiming such illiberal views. we have not yet spoken of dancing, though it is one of the most admired of female accomplishments. this evidently is an amusement, not an occupation; it is an agreeable exercise, useful to the health, and advantageous, as it confers a certain degree of habitual ease and grace. mr. locke seems to think, that it gives young people confidence in themselves when they come into company, and that it is, therefore, expedient to teach children early to dance: but there are so many other methods of inspiring young people with this confidence in themselves, that it appears unnecessary to lay much stress upon this argument. if children live in good company, and see constantly people with agreeable manners, they will acquire manners which the dancing master does not always teach; and they will easily vary their forms of politeness with the fashion of the day. nobody comes into a room regularly as their dancing master taught them to make their entrance; we should think a strict adherence to his lessons ridiculous and awkward in well bred company; therefore much must be left to the discretion and taste of the pupil, after the dancing master has made his last bow. ease of manners is not always attained by those who have been strictly disciplined by a vestris, because the lessons are not always practised in precisely the same circumstances in which they were learnt: this confuses and confounds the pupils, and they rather lose than gain confidence in themselves, from perceiving that they cannot immediately apply what they have been taught. but we need not expatiate upon this subject, because there are few parents of good sense, in any rank of life, who will not perceive that their daughter's manners cannot be formed or polished by a dancing-master. we are not to consider dancing in a grave and moral light; it is an amusement much more agreeable to young people, and much better suited to them in every respect, than cards, or silent assemblies of formal visiters. it promotes cheerfulness, and prevents, in some measure, the habits of gossiping conversation, and the love of scandal. so far we most willingly agree with its most vivacious advocates, in its common eulogium. but this is not, we fear, saying enough. we see, or fancy that we see, the sober matron lay down her carefully assorted cards upon the card-table, and with dictatorial solemnity she pronounces, "that dancing is something more than an amusement; that girls must learn to dance, because they must appear well in public; because the young ladies who dance the best, are usually most _taken notice_ of in public; most admired by the other sex; most likely, in short, not only to-have their choice of the best partner in a ball room, but sometimes of the best partner for life." with submission to maternal authority, these arguments do not seem to be justified of late years. girls, who dance remarkably well, are, it is true, admired in a ball room, and followed, perhaps, by those idle, thoughtless young men, who frequent public places merely for want of something else to do. this race of beings are not particularly calculated to make good husbands in any sense of the word; nor are they usually disposed to think of marriage in any other light than as the last desperate expedient to repair their injured fortunes. they set their wits against the sex in general, and consider themselves as in danger of being jockeyed into the matrimonial state. some few, perhaps, who have not brought their imagination sufficiently under the command of the calculating faculty, are _caught_ by beauty and accomplishments, and marry against the common rules of interest. these men are considered with pity, or with ridicule, by their companions, as dupes who have suffered themselves to be taken in: others are warned by their fate; and the future probability of similar _errours_, of course, must be diminished. the fashionable apathy, whether real or affected, with which young men lounge in public places, with scarcely the appearance of attention to the fair exhibitors before them, sufficiently marks the temper of the times; and if the female sex have lost any thing of the respect and esteem which ought to be paid to them in society, they can scarcely expect to regain their proper influence by concessions to the false and vitiated taste of those who combine to treat them with neglect bordering upon insolence. if the system of female education, if the system of female manners, conspire to show in the fair sex a degrading anxiety to attract worthless admiration, wealthy or titled homage, is it surprising that every young man, who has any pretensions to birth, fortune, or fashion, should consider himself as the arbiter of their fate, and the despotic judge of their merit? women, who understand their real interests, perceive the causes of the contempt with which the sex is treated by fashionable coxcombs, and they feel some indignation at the meanness with which this contempt, tacitly or openly expressed, is endured. women, who feel none of this indignation, and who, either from their education, or their circumstances, are only solicitous to obtain present amusement, or what they think the permanent advantages of a fortunate alliance, will yet find themselves mistaken by persisting in their thoughtless career; they will not gain even the objects to which they aspire. how many accomplished belles run the usual round of dissipation in all public places of exhibition, tire the public eye, and, after a season or two, fade and are forgotten! how many accomplished belles are there, who, having gained the object of their own, or of their mother's ambition, find themselves doomed to misery for life! those unequal marriages, which are sometimes called _excellent matches_, seldom produce much happiness. and where happiness is not, what _is_ all the rest? if all, or any of these reflections, should strike the heart, and convince the understanding, of an anxious, but reasonable mother, she will, probably, immediately determine upon her own conduct in the education of her daughters: she will resolve to avoid the common errours of the frivolous or the interested; she will not be influenced by the importunity of every idle acquaintance, who may talk to her of the necessity of her daughter's being taken notice of in public, of the chances of an _advantageous_ establishment, of the good fortune of miss y----, or lady angelina x----, in meeting with a coxcomb or a spendthrift for a husband; nor will she be moved with maternal emulation when she is further told, that these young ladies owed their _success_ entirely to the superiority of their accomplishments: she will consider, for one moment, what is meant by the word success; she will, perhaps, not be of opinion that "'tis best repenting in a coach and six;" she will, perhaps, reflect, that even the "soft sounds" of titled grandeur lose their power to please, and "salute the ear" almost unobserved. the happiness, the permanent happiness of her child, will be the first, the last object of the good and the enlightened mother: to this all her views and all her efforts will tend; and to this she will make every fashionable, every elegant accomplishment subservient. as to the means of acquiring these accomplishments, it would be absurd, and presumptuous, to present here any vague precepts, or tedious details, upon the mode of learning drawing, dancing, and music. these can be best learned from the masters who profess to teach them, as far as the technical part is necessary. but success will not ultimately depend upon any technical instructions that a master can give: he may direct the efforts of industry so as to save much useless labour; he may prevent his pupils from acquiring bad practical habits; he may assist, but he cannot inspire, the spirit of perseverance. a master, who is not expected, or indeed allowed, to interfere in the general education of his pupils, can only diligently attend to them whilst he is giving his lessons; he has not any power, except that pernicious motive, competition, to excite them to excel; his instructions cannot be peculiarly adapted to their tempers or their understandings, because with these he is unacquainted. now a sensible mother has it in her power to supply all these deficiencies; even if she does not herself excel in any of the accomplishments which her daughters are learning, her knowledge of their minds, her taste, her judgment, her affection, her superintending intelligence, will be of inestimable value to her children. if she has any skill in any accomplishment, she will, for the first years of her daughters' lives, be undoubtedly the best person to instruct them. by skill, we do not mean superior talents, or proficiency in music or drawing; without these, she may be able to teach all that is necessary in the early part of education. one of the best motives which a woman can have to cultivate her talents after she marries, is the hope and belief, that she may be essentially serviceable in the instruction of her family. and that she may be essentially serviceable, let no false humility lead her to doubt. she need not be anxious for the rapid progress of her little pupils; she need not be terrified if she see their equals in age surpass them under what she thinks more able tuition; she may securely satisfy herself, that if she but inspires her children with a desire to excel, with the habits of attention and industry, they will certainly succeed, sooner or later, in whatever it is desirable that they should learn. the exact age at which the music, dancing, or drawing master, should begin their instructions, need not be fixed. if a mother should not be so situated as to be able to procure the best masters for her daughters whilst they are yet children, she need not be in despair; a rapid progress is made in a short time by well educated young people; those who have not acquired any bad habits, are easily taught: it should, therefore, seem prudent, if the best masters cannot be procured at any given period of education, to wait patiently, than to hazard their first impressions, and the first habits which might be given by any inferiour technical instruction. it is said, that the celebrated musician timotheus, whose excellence in his art alexander the conqueror of the world was forced to acknowledge, when pupils flocked to him from all parts of the world, had the prudence to demand double _entrance money_ from every scholar who had had any other music master. besides the advantage of being entirely free from other bad habits, children who are not taught by inferiour masters, will not contract habits of listless application. under the eye of an indolent person, children seldom give their entire attention to what they are about. they become mere machines, and, without using their own understanding in the least, have recourse to the convenient master upon every occasion. the utmost that children in such circumstances can learn, is all the technical part of the art which the master can teach. when the master is at last dismissed, and her education completed, the pupil is left both fatigued and helpless. "few have been taught to any purpose, who have not been their own teachers," says sir joshua reynolds. this reflection upon the art of teaching, may, perhaps, be too general; but those persons who look back upon their education, will, in many respects, allow it to be just. they will perceive that they have been too much taught, that they have learned every thing which they know as an art, and nothing as a science. few people have sufficient courage to re-commence their own education, and for this reason few people get beyond a certain point of mediocrity. it is easy to them to practise the lessons which they have learned, if they practise them in intellectual darkness; but if you let in upon them one ray of philosophic light, you dazzle and confound them, so that they cannot even perform their customary feats. a young man,[ ] who had been blind from his birth, had learned to draw a cross, a circle, and a square, with great accuracy; when he was twenty, his eyes were couched, and when he could see perfectly well, he was desired to draw his circle and square. his new sense of seeing, so far from assisting him in this operation, was extremely troublesome to him; though he took more pains than usual, he performed very ill: confounded by the new difficulty, he concluded that sight was useless in all operations to be performed by the hand, and he thought his eyes would be of no use to him in future. how many people find their reason as useless and troublesome to them as this young man found his eye-sight! whilst we are learning any mechanical operation, or whilst we are acquiring any technical art, the mind is commonly passive. in the first attempts, perhaps, we reason or invent ways of abridging our own labour, and the awkwardness of the unpractised hand is assisted by ingenuity and reflection; but as we improve in manual dexterity, attention and ingenuity are no longer exerted; we go on habitually without thought.--thought would probably interrupt the operation, and break the chain of associated actions.[ ] an artificer stops his hand the moment you ask him to explain what he is about: he can work and talk of indifferent objects; but if he reflects upon the manner in which he performs certain slight of hand parts of his business, it is ten to one but he cannot go on with them. a man, who writes a free running hand, goes on without thinking of the manner in which he writes; fix his attention upon the manner in which he holds his pen, or forms his letters, and he probably will not write quite so fast, or so well, as usual. when a girl first attempts to dress herself at a glass, the glass perplexes, instead of assisting her, because she thinks and reasons about every motion; but when by habit she has learned how to move her hands in obedience to the _flugel_-image,[ ] which performs its exercise in the mirror, no further thought is employed. make the child observe that she moves her left hand forward when the image in the glass moves in a contrary manner, turn the child's attention to any of her own motions, and she will make mistakes as she did before her habits were formed. many occupations, which are generally supposed to depend upon the understanding, and which do probably depend in the first instance upon the _understanding_, become by practice purely mechanical. this is the case in many of the imitative arts. a person unused to drawing, exerts a great deal of attention in copying any new object; but custom soon supplies the place of thought. by custom,[ ] as a great artist assures us, he will become able to draw the human figure tolerably correctly, with as little effort of the mind, as to trace with a pen the letters of the alphabet. we must further observe, that the habit of pursuing any occupation, which requires no mental exertion, induces an indolence or incapacity of intellect. mere artists are commonly as stupid as mere artificers, and these are little more than machines. the length of time which is required to obtain practical skill and dexterity in certain accomplishments, is one reason why there are so few people who obtain any thing more than mechanical excellence. they become the slaves of custom, and they become proud of their slavery. at first they might have considered custom as a tyrant; but when they have obeyed her for a certain time, they do her voluntary homage ever after, as to a sovereign by divine right. to prevent this species of intellectual degradation, we must in education be careful to rank mere mechanical talents below the exercise of the mental powers. thus the ambition of young people will be directed to high objects, and all inferiour qualifications may be attained without contracting the understanding. praise children for patience, for perseverance, for industry; encourage them to reason and to invent upon all subjects, and you may direct their attention afterwards as you think proper. but if you applaud children merely for drawing a flower neatly, or copying a landscape, without exciting their ambition to any thing higher, you will never create superior talents, or a superior character. the proficiency that is made in any particular accomplishment, at any given age, should not be considered so much, even by those who highly value accomplishments, as the power, the energy, that is excited in the pupil's mind, from which future progress is ensured. the writing and drawing automaton performs its advertised wonders to the satisfaction of the spectators; but the machine is not "_instinct with spirit_;" you cannot expect from its pencil the sketch of a raphael, or from its pen the thoughts of a shakespeare. it is easy to guide the hand, but who can transfuse a soul into the image? it is not an uncommon thing to hear young people, who have been long under the tuition of masters, complain of their own want of genius. they are sensible that they have not made any great progress in any of the accomplishments which they have endeavoured to learn; they see others, who have not, perhaps, had what they call such _opportunities_ and _advantages_ in their education, suddenly surpass them; this they attribute to natural genius, and they say to themselves in despair, "certainly i have no taste for drawing; i have no genius for music; i have learned so many years, i have had so many lessons from the best masters, and yet here is such and such a one, who has had no master, who has taught herself, and, perhaps, did not begin till late in life, has got before me, because she has a natural genius for these things. she must have a natural taste for them, because she can sit whole hours at these things for her own pleasure. now i never would take a pencil in my hand from my own choice; and i am glad, at all events, that the time for lessons and masters is over. my education is finished, for i am of age." the disgust and despair, which are thus induced by an injudicious education, absolutely defeat its own trivial purposes. so that, whatever may be the views of parents, whether they consider ornamental accomplishments as essential to their daughter's _success_ in the world, or whether they value them rather as secondary objects, subordinate to her happiness; whether they wish their daughter actually to excel in any particular accomplishment, or to have the power of excelling in any to which circumstances may direct her, it is in all cases advisable to cultivate the general power of the pupil's understanding, instead of confining her to technical practices and precepts, under the eye of any master who does not possess that which is the _soul_ of every art. we do not mean any illiberal attack upon masters; but in writing upon education, it is necessary to examine the utility of different modes of instruction, without fear of offending _any class_ of men. we acknowledge, that it is seldom found, that those who can communicate their knowledge the best, _possess the most_, especially if this knowledge be that of an artist or a linguist. before any person is properly qualified _to teach_, he must have the power of recollecting exactly how _he learned_; he must go back step by step to the point at which he began, and he must be able to conduct his pupil through the same path without impatience or precipitation. he must not only have acquired a knowledge of the process by which his own ideas and habits were formed, but he must have extensive experience of the varieties of the human mind. he must not suppose, that the operations of intellect are carried on precisely in the same manner in all minds; he must not imagine, that there is but one method of teaching, which will suit all persons alike. the analogies which strike his own mind, the arrangement of ideas, which to him appears the most perspicuous, to his pupil may appear remote and confused. he must not attribute this to his pupil's inattention, stupidity, or obstinacy; but he must attribute it to the true causes; the different association of ideas in different minds, the different habits of thinking, which arise from their various tempers and previous education. he must be acquainted with the habits of all tempers: the slow, the quick, the inventive, the investigating; and he must adapt his instructions accordingly. there is something more requisite: a master must not only know what he professes to teach of his own peculiar art or science, but he ought to know all its bearings and dependencies. he must be acquainted not only with the local topography of his own district, but he must have the whole map of human knowledge before him; and whilst he dwells most upon his own province, he must yet be free from local prejudices, and must consider himself as a citizen of the world. children who study geography in small separate maps, understand, perhaps, the view of each country tolerably well; but we see them quite puzzled when they are to connect these maps in their idea of the world. they do not know the relative size or situation of england or france; they cannot find london or paris when they look for the first time upon the globe, and every country seems to be turned upside down in their imagination. young people who learn particular arts and sciences from masters who have confined their view to the boundaries of each, without having given an enlarged idea of the whole, are much in the same situation with these unfortunate geographers. the persisting to teach things separately, which ought to be taught as a whole, must prevent the progress of mental cultivation.[ ] the division and subdivision of different parts of education, which are monopolised as trades by the masters who profess to teach them, must tend to increase and perpetuate errour. these intellectual _casts_ are pernicious. it is said, that the persians had masters to teach their children each separate virtue: one master to teach justice, another fortitude, another temperance, and so on. how these masters could preserve the boundaries of their several moral territories, it is not easy to imagine, especially if they all insisted upon independent sovereignty. there must have been some danger, surely, of their disputing with one another concerning the importance of their respective professions, like the poor bourgeois gentilhomme's dancing-master, music-master, master of morality, and master of philosophy, who all fell to blows to settle their pretensions, forgetful of the presence of their pupil. masters, who are only expected to teach one thing, may be sincerely anxious for the improvement of their pupils in that particular, without being in the least interested for their general character or happiness. thus the drawing-master has done his part, and is satisfied if he teaches his pupil to draw well: it is no concern of his what her temper may be, any more than what sort of hand she writes, or how she dances. the dancing-master, in his turn, is wholly indifferent about the young lady's progress in drawing; all he undertakes, is to teach her to dance. we mention these circumstances to show parents, that masters, even when they do the utmost that they engage to do, cannot educate their children; they can only partially instruct them in particular arts. parents must themselves preside over the education of their children, or must entirely give them into the care of some person of an enlarged and philosophic mind, who can supply all the deficiencies of common masters, and who can take advantage of all the positive good that can be obtained from existing institutions. such a preceptor or governess must possess extensive knowledge, and that superiority of mind which sees the just proportion and value of every acquisition, which is not to be overawed by authority, or dazzled by fashion. under the eye of such persons, masters will keep precisely their proper places; they will teach all they can teach, without instilling absurd prejudices, or inspiring a spirit of vain rivalship; nor will masters be suffered to continue their lessons when they have nothing more to teach. parents who do not think that they have leisure, or feel that they have capacity, to take the entire direction of their children's education upon themselves, will trust this important office to a governess. the inquiry concerning the value of female accomplishments, has been purposely entered into before we could speak of the choice of a governess, because the estimation in which these are held, will very much determine parents in their choice. if what has been said of the probability of a decline in the public taste for what are usually called accomplishments; of their little utility to the happiness of families and individuals; of the waste of time, and waste of the higher powers of the mind in acquiring them: if what has been observed on any of these points is allowed to be just, we shall have little difficulty in pursuing the same principles further. in the choice of a governess we should not, then, consider her fashionable accomplishments as her best recommendations; these will be only secondary objects. we shall examine with more anxiety, whether she possess a sound, discriminating, and enlarged understanding: whether her mind be free from prejudice; whether she has steadiness of temper to pursue her own plans; and, above all, whether she has that species of integrity which will justify a parent in trusting a child to her care. we shall attend to her conversation, and observe her manners, with scrupulous minuteness. children are _imitative animals_, and they are peculiarly disposed to imitate the language, manners, and gestures, of those with whom they live, and to whom they look up with admiration. in female education, too much care cannot be taken to form all those habits in morals and in manners, which are distinguishing characteristics of amiable women. these habits must be acquired early, or they will never appear easy or graceful; they will necessarily be formed by those who see none but good models. we have already pointed out the absolute necessity of union amongst all those who are concerned in a child's education. a governess must either rule, or obey, decidedly. if she do not agree with the child's parents in opinion, she must either know how to convince them by argument, or she must with strict integrity conform her practice to their theories. there are few parents, who will choose to give up the entire care of their children to any governess; therefore, there will probably be some points in which a difference of opinion will arise. a sensible woman will never submit to be treated, as governesses are in some families, like the servant who was asked by his master what business he had to think: nor will a woman of sense or temper insist upon her opinions without producing her reasons. she will thus ensure the respect and the confidence of enlightened parents. it is surely the interest of parents to treat the person who educates their children, with that perfect equality and kindness, which will conciliate her affection, and which will at the same time preserve her influence and authority over her pupils. and it is with pleasure we observe, that the style of behaviour to governesses, in well bred families, is much changed within these few years. a governess is no longer treated as an upper servant, or as an intermediate being between a servant and a gentlewoman: she is now treated as the friend and companion of the family, and she must, consequently, have warm and permanent interest in its prosperity: she becomes attached to her pupils from gratitude to their parents, from sympathy, from generosity, as well as from the strict sense of duty. in fashionable life there is, however, some danger that parents should go into extremes in their behaviour towards their governesses. those who disdain the idea of assuming superiority of rank and fortune, and who desire to treat the person who educates their children as their equal, act with perfect propriety; but if they make her their companion in all their amusements, they go a step too far, and they defeat their own purposes. if a governess attends the card-table, and the assembly-room; if she is to visit, and be visited, what is to become of her pupils in her absence? they must be left to the care of servants. there are some ladies who will not accept of any invitation, in which the governess of their children is not included. this may be done from a good motive, but, surely, it is unreasonable; for the very use of a governess is to supply the mother's place in her absence. cannot this be managed better? cannot the mother and governess both amuse themselves at different times? there would then be perfect equality; the governess would be in the same society, and would be treated with the same respect, without neglecting her duty. the reward which is given to women of abilities, and of unblemished reputation, who devote themselves to the superintendence of the education of young ladies in the higher ranks of life, the daughters of our affluent nobility, ought to be considerably greater than what it is at present: it ought to be such as to excite women to cultivate their talents, and their understandings, with a view to this profession. a profession we call it, for it should be considered as such, as an honourable profession, which a gentlewoman might follow without losing any degree of the estimation in which she is held by what is called _the world_. there is no employment, at present, by which a gentlewoman can maintain herself, without losing something of that respect, something of that rank in society, which neither female fortitude nor male philosophy willingly foregoes. the liberal professions are open to men of small fortunes; by presenting one similar resource to women, we should give a strong motive for their moral and intellectual improvement. nor does it seem probable, that they should make a disgraceful or imprudent use of their increasing influence and liberty in this case, because their previous education must previously prepare them properly. the misfortune of women has usually been, to have power trusted to them before they were educated to use it prudently. to say that preceptresses in the higher ranks of life should be liberally rewarded, is but a vague expression; something specific should be mentioned, wherever general utility is the object. let us observe, that many of the first dignities of the church are bestowed, and properly bestowed, upon men who have educated the highest ranks of our nobility. those who look with an evil eye upon these promotions, do not fairly estimate the _national_ importance of education for the rich and powerful. no provision can be made for women who direct the education of the daughters of our nobility, any ways equivalent to the provision made for preceptors by those who have influence in the state. a pecuniary compensation is in the power of opulent families. three hundred a year, for twelve or fourteen years, the space of time which a preceptress must probably employ in the education of a young lady, would be a suitable compensation for her care. with this provision she would be enabled, after her pupil's education was completed, either to settle in her own family, or she would, in the decline of life, be happily independent, secure from the temptation of marrying for money. if a few munificent and enlightened individuals set the example of liberally rewarding merit in this situation, many young women will probably appear with talents and good qualities suited to the views of the most sanguine parents. with good sense, and literary tastes, a young woman might instruct herself during the first years of her pupils childhood, and might gradually prepare herself with all the necessary knowledge: according to the principles that have been suggested, there would be no necessity for her being a _mistress of arts_, a performer in music, a paintress, a linguist, or a poetess. a general knowledge of literature is indispensable; and yet further, she must have sufficient taste and judgment to direct the literary talents of her pupils. with respect to the literary education of the female sex, the arguments on both sides of the question have already been stated, with all the impartiality in our power, in another place.[ ] without obtruding a detail of the same arguments again upon the public, it will be sufficient to profess the distinct opinion, which a longer consideration of the subject has yet more fully confirmed, that it will tend to the happiness of society in general, that women should have their understandings cultivated and enlarged as much as possible; that the happiness of domestic life, the virtues and the powers of pleasing in the female sex, the yet more desirable power of attaching those worthy of their love and esteem, will be increased by the judicious cultivation of the female understanding, more than by all that modern gallantry or ancient chivalry could devise in favour of the sex. much prudence and ability are requisite to conduct properly a young woman's literary education. her imagination must not be raised above the taste for necessary occupations, or the numerous small, but not trifling, pleasures of domestic life: her mind must be enlarged, yet the delicacy of her manners must be preserved: her knowledge must be various, and her powers of reasoning unawed by authority; yet she must _habitually_ feel that nice sense of propriety, which is at once the guard and the charm of every feminine virtue. by early caution, unremitting, scrupulous caution in the choice of the books which are put into the hands of girls, a mother, or a preceptress, may fully occupy and entertain their pupils, and excite in their minds a _taste_ for propriety, as well as a taste for literature. it cannot be necessary to add more than this general idea, that a mother ought to be answerable to her daughter's husband for the books her daughter had read, as well as for the company she had kept. those observations, which apply equally to the cultivation of the understanding both of men and of women, we do not here mean to point out; we would speak only of what may be peculiar to female education. from the study of the learned languages, women, by custom, fortunately for them, are exempted: of ancient literature they may, in translations which are acknowledged to be excellent, obtain a sufficient knowledge, without paying too much time and labour for this classic pleasure. confused notions from fashionable publications, from periodical papers, and comedies, have made their way into common conversation, and thence have assumed an appearance of authority, and have been extremely disadvantageous to female education. sentiment and ridicule have conspired to represent reason, knowledge, and science, as unsuitable or dangerous to women; yet at the same time wit, and superficial acquirements in literature, have been the object of admiration in society; so that this dangerous inference has been drawn, almost without our perceiving its fallacy, that superficial knowledge is more desirable in women than accurate knowledge. this principle must lead to innumerable errours; it must produce continual contradictions in the course of education: instead of making women more reasonable, and less presuming, it will render them at once arrogant and ignorant; full of pretensions, incapable of application, and unfit to hear themselves convinced. whatever young women learn, let them be taught accurately; let them know ever so little apparently, they will know much if they have learnt that little _well_. a girl who runs through a course of natural history, hears something about chemistry, has been taught something of botany, and who knows but just enough of these to make her fancy that she is well informed, is in a miserable situation, in danger of becoming ridiculous, and insupportably tiresome to men of sense and science. but let a woman know any one thing completely, and she will have sufficient understanding to learn more, and to apply what she has been taught so as to interest men of generosity and genius in her favour. the knowledge of the general principles of any science, is very different from superficial knowledge of the science; perhaps, from not attending to this distinction, or from not understanding it, many have failed in female education. some attempt will be made to mark this distinction practically, when we come to speak of the cultivation of the memory, invention, and judgment. no intelligent preceptress will, it is hoped, find any difficulty in the application of the observations they may meet with in the chapters on imagination, sympathy and sensibility, vanity and temper. the masculine pronoun _he_, has been used for grammatical convenience, not at all because we agree with the prejudiced, and uncourteous grammarian, who asserts, "that the masculine is the more worthy gender." footnotes: [ ] une virtuose. [ ] v. storia di quattro fratelli nati ciechi e guariti coll' estrazione delle cateratte.--di francesco buzzi. [ ] v. zoonomia. [ ] this word is sometimes by mistake spelt _fugal_-man. [ ] sir joshua reynolds. [ ] condillac. [ ] v. letters for literary ladies. chapter xxi. memory and invention. before we bestow many years of time and pains upon any object, it may be prudent to afford a few minutes previously to ascertain its precise value. many persons have a vague idea of the great value of memory, and, without analyzing their opinion, they resolve to cultivate the memories of their children as much, and as soon, as possible. so far from having determined the value of this talent, we shall find that it will be difficult to give a popular definition of a good memory. some people call that a good memory which retains the greatest number of ideas for the longest time. others prefer a recollective to a retentive memory, and value not so much the number; as the selection, of facts; not so much the mass, or even the antiquity, of accumulated treasure, as the power of producing current specie for immediate use. memory is sometimes spoken of as if it were a faculty admirable in itself, without any union with the other powers of the mind. amongst those who allow that memory has no independent claim to regard, there are yet many who believe, that a superior degree of memory is essential to the successful exercise of the higher faculties, such as judgment and invention. the degree in which it is useful to those powers, has not, however, been determined. those who are governed in their opinions by precedent and authority, can produce many learned names, to prove that memory was held in the highest estimation amongst the great men of antiquity; it was cultivated with much anxiety in their public institutions, and in their private education. but there were many circumstances, which formerly contributed to make a great memory essential to a great man. in civil and military employments, amongst the ancients, it was in a high degree requisite. generals were expected to know by heart the names of the soldiers in their armies; demagogues, who hoped to please the people, were expected to know the names of all their fellow-citizens.[ ] orators, who did not speak extempore, were obliged to get their long orations by rote. those who studied science or philosophy, were obliged to cultivate their memory with incessant care, because, if they frequented the schools for instruction, they treasured up the sayings of the masters of different sects, and learned their doctrines only by oral instruction. manuscripts were frequently got by heart by those who were eager to secure the knowledge they contained, and who had not opportunities of recurring to the originals. it is not surprising, therefore, that memory, to which so much was trusted, should have been held in such high esteem. at the revival of literature in europe, before the discovery of the art of printing, it was scarcely possible to make any progress in the literature of the age, without possessing a retentive memory. a man who had read a few manuscripts, and could repeat them, was a wonder, and a treasure: he could travel from place to place, and live by his learning; he was a circulating library to a nation, and the more books he could carry in his head, the better: he was certain of an admiring audience if he could repeat what aristotle or saint jerome had written; and he had far more encouragement to engrave the words of others on his memory, than to invent or judge for himself. in the twelfth century, above six hundred scholars assembled in the forests of champagne, to hear the lectures of the learned abeillard; they made themselves huts of the boughs of trees, and in this new academic grove were satisfied to go almost without the necessaries of life. in the specimens of abeillard's composition, which are handed down to us, we may discover proofs of his having been vain of a surprising memory; it seems to have been the superior faculty of his mind: his six hundred pupils could carry away with them only so much of his learning as they could get by heart during his course of lectures; and he who had the best memory, must have been best paid for his journey.[ ] the art of printing, by multiplying copies so as to put them within the easy reference of all classes of people, has lowered the value of this species of retentive memory. it is better to refer to the book itself, than to the man who has read the book. knowledge is now ready classed for use, and it is safely stored up in the great common-place books of public libraries. a man of literature need not incumber his memory with whole passages from the authors he wants to quote; he need only mark down the page, and the words are safe. mere erudition does not in these days ensure permanent fame. the names of the abbé de longuerue, and of the florentine librarian magliabechi, excite no vivid emotions in the minds of those who have heard of them before; and there are many, perhaps not illiterate persons, who would not be ashamed to own that they had never heard of them at all. yet these men were both of them, but a few years ago, remarkable for extraordinary memory and erudition. when m. de longuerue was a child, he was such a prodigy of memory and knowledge, that lewis the fourteenth, passing through the abbé's province, stopped to see and hear him. when he grew up, paris consulted him as the oracle of learning. his erudition, says d'alembert,[ ] was not only prodigious, but actually terrible. greek and hebrew were more familiar to him than his native tongue. his memory was so well furnished with historic facts, with chronological and topographical knowledge, that upon hearing a person assert in conversation, that it would be a difficult task to write a good historical description of france,[ ] he asserted, that he could do it from memory, without consulting any books. all he asked, was, to have some maps of france laid before him: these recalled to his mind the history of each province, of all the fiefs of the crown of each city, and even of each distinguished nobleman's seat in the kingdom. he wrote his folio history in a year. it was admired as a great curiosity in manuscript; but when it came to be printed, sundry gross errours appeared: he was obliged to take out several leaves in correcting the press. the edition was very expensive, and the work, at last, would have been rather more acceptable to the public, if the author had not written it from memory. love of the wonderful must yield to esteem for the useful. the effect which all this erudition had upon the abbé de longuerue's taste, judgment, and imagination, is worth our attention. some of his opinions speak sufficiently for our purpose. he was of opinion that the english have never done any good,[ ] since they renounced the study of greek and arabic, for geometry and physics. he was of opinion, that two antiquarian books upon homer, viz. _antiquitates homericæ_ and _homeri gnomologia_, are preferable to homer himself. he would rather have them, he declared, because with these he had all that was useful in the poet, without being obliged to go through long stories, which put him to sleep. "as for that madman ariosto," said he, "i sometimes divert myself with him." one odd volume of racine was the only french book to be found in his library. his erudition died with him, and the world has not profited much by his surprising memory. the librarian magliabechi was no less famous than m. de longuerue for his memory, and he was yet more strongly affected by the mania for books. his appetite for them was so voracious, that he acquired the name of the glutton of literature.[ ] before he died, he had _swallowed_ six large rooms full of books. whether he had time to digest any of them we do not know, but we are sure that he wished it; for the only line of his own composition which he has left for the instruction of posterity, is round a medal. the medal represents him sitting with a book in his hand, and with a great number of books scattered on the floor round him. the candid inscription signifies, that to become learned it is not sufficient to read much, if we read without reflection. the names of franklin and of shakespeare are known wherever literature is cultivated, to all who have any pretensions to science or to genius; yet they were neither of them men of extraordinary erudition, nor from their works should we judge that memory was their predominant faculty. it may be said, that a superior degree of memory was essential to the exercise of their judgment and invention; that without having treasured up in his memory a variety of minute observations upon human nature, shakespeare could never have painted the passions with so bold and just a hand; that if franklin had not accurately remembered his own philosophical observations, and those of others, he never would have made those discoveries which have immortalized his name. admitting the justice of these assertions, we see that memory to great men is but a subordinate servant, a treasurer who receives, and is expected to keep faithfully whatever is committed to his care; and not only to preserve faithfully all deposits, but to produce them at the moment they are wanted. there are substances which are said to imbibe and retain the rays of light, and to emit them only in certain situations. as long as they retain the rays, no eye regards them. it has often been observed, that a recollective and retentive memory are seldom found united. if this were true, and that we had our choice of either, which should we prefer? for the purposes of ostentation, perhaps the one; for utility, the other. a person who could repeat from beginning to end the whole economy of human life, which he had learned in his childhood, might, if we had time to sit still and listen to him, obtain our admiration for his extraordinary retentive memory; but the person who, in daily occurrences, or interesting affairs, recollects at the proper time what is useful to us, obtains from our gratitude something more than vain admiration. to speak accurately, we must remark, that retentive and recollective memories are but relative terms: the recollective memory must be retentive of all that it recollects; the retentive memory cannot show itself till the moment it becomes recollective. but we value either precisely in proportion as they are useful and agreeable. just at the time when philosophers were intent upon trying experiments in electricity, dr. heberden recollected to have seen, many years before, a small electrical stone, called tourmalin,[ ] in the possession of dr. sharpe at cambridge. it was the only one known in england at that time. dr. heberden procured it; and several curious experiments were made and verified with it. in this instance, it is obvious that we admire the retentive, local memory of dr. heberden, merely because it became recollective and useful. had the tourmalin never been wanted, it would have been a matter of indifference, whether the direction for it at dr. sharpe's at cambridge, had been remembered or forgotten. there was a man[ ] who undertook, in going from temple bar to the furthest part of cheapside and back again, to enumerate at his return every sign on each side of the way in its order, and to repeat them, if it should be required, either backwards or forwards. this he exactly accomplished. as a playful trial of memory, this affords us a moments entertainment; but if we were to be serious upon the subject, we should say it was a pity that the man did not use his extraordinary memory for some better purpose. the late king of prussia, when he intended to advance trenck in the army, upon his first introduction, gave him a list of the strangest names which could be picked out, to learn by rote. trenck learned them quickly, and the king was much pleased with this instance of his memory; but frederick would certainly never have made such a trial of the abilities of voltaire. we cannot always foresee what facts may be useful, and what may be useless to us, otherwise the cultivation of the memory might be conducted by unerring rules. in the common business of life, people regulate their memories by the circumstances in which they happen to be placed. a clerk in a counting-house, by practice, learns to remember the circumstances, affairs, and names of numerous merchants, of his master's customers, the places of their abode, and, perhaps, something of their peculiar humours and manners. a fine lady remembers her visiting list, and, perhaps, the dresses and partners of every couple at a crowded ball; she finds all these particulars a useful supply for daily conversation, she therefore remembers them with care. an amateur, who is ambitious to shine in the society of literary men, collects literary anecdotes, and retails them whenever occasion permits. men of sense, who cultivate their memories for useful purposes, are not obliged to treasure up heterogeneous facts: by reducing particulars to general principles, and by connecting them with proper associations, they enjoy all the real advantages, whilst they are exempt from the labour of accumulation. mr. stewart has, with so much ability, pointed out the effects of systematic arrangement of writing, reading, and the use of technical contrivances in the cultivation of the memory, that it would be a presumptuous and unnecessary attempt to expatiate in other words upon the same subject. it may not be useless, however, to repeat a few of his observations, because, in considering what further improvement may be made, it is always essential to have fully in our view what is already known. "philosophic arrangement assists the memory, by classing under a few principles, a number of apparently dissimilar and unconnected particulars. the habit, for instance, of attending to the connection of cause and effect, presents a multitude of interesting analogies to the minds of men of science, which escape other persons; the vulgar feel no pleasure in contemplating objects that appear remote from common life; and they find it extremely difficult to remember observations and reasonings which are foreign to their customary course of associated ideas. even literary and ingenious people, when they begin to learn any art or science, usually complain that their memory is not able to retain all the terms and ideas which pour in upon them with perplexing rapidity. in time, this difficulty is conquered, not so much by the strength of the memory, as by the exercise of judgment: they learn to distinguish, and select the material terms, facts and arguments, from those that are subordinate, and they class them under general heads, to relieve the memory from all superfluous labour. "in all studies, there is some prevalent associating principle, which gradually becomes familiar to our minds, but which we do not immediately discover in our first attempts. in poetry, resemblance; in philosophy, cause and effect; in mathematics, demonstrations continually recur; and, therefore, each is expected by persons who have been used to these respective studies. "the habit of committing our knowledge to writing, assists the memory, because, in writing, we detain certain ideas long enough in our view to perceive all their relations; we use fixed and abbreviated signs for all our thoughts; with the assistance of these, we can prevent confusion in our reasonings. we can, without fatigue, by the help of words, letters, figures, or algebraic signs, go through a variety of mental processes, and solve many difficult problems, which, without such assistance, must have been too extensive for our capacities. "if our books be well chosen, and if we read with discrimination and attention, reading will improve the memory, because, as it increases our knowledge, it increases our interest in every new discovery, and in every new combination of ideas." we agree entirely with mr. stewart in his observations upon technical helps to the memory; they are hurtful to the understanding, because they break the general habits of philosophic order in the mind. there is no connection of ideas between the memorial lines, for instance, in grey's memoria technica, the history of the kings or emperors, and the dates that we wish to remember. however, it may be advantageous in education to use such contrivances, to assist our pupils in remembering those technical parts of knowledge, which are sometimes valued above their worth in society. the facts upon which the principles of any science are founded, should never be learnt by rote in a technical manner. but the names and the dates of the reigns of a number of kings and emperors, if they must be remembered by children, should be learnt in the manner which may give them the least trouble.[ ] it is commonly asserted, that our memory is to be improved by exercise: exercise may be of different kinds, and we must determine what sort is best. repetition is found to fix words, and sometimes ideas, strongly in the mind; the words of the burden of a song, which we have frequently heard, are easily and long remembered. when we want to get any thing by rote, we repeat it over and over again, till the sounds seem to follow one another habitually, and then we say we have them perfectly by rote.[ ] the regular recurrence of sounds, at stated intervals, much assists us. in poetry, the rhymes, the cadence, the alliteration, the peculiar structure of the poet's lines, aids us. all these are mechanical helps to the memory. repetition seems much more agreeable to some people than to others; but it may be doubted whether a facility and propensity to repetition be favourable to rational memory. whilst we repeat, we exclude all thought from the mind; we form a habit of saying certain sounds in a certain order; but if this habit be afterwards broken by any trifling external circumstances, we lose all our labour. we have no means of recollecting what we have learned in this manner. once gone, it is gone for ever. it depends but upon one principle of association. those who exert ingenuity as well as memory in learning by heart, may not, perhaps, associate sounds with so much expedition, but they will have the power of recollection in a greater degree. they will have more chances in their favour, besides the great power of voluntary exertion: a power which few passive repeaters ever possess. the following lines are easily learned: "haste, then, ye spirits; to your charge repair, the fluttering fan be zephyretta's care; the drops to thee, brillante, we consign, and, momentilla, let the watch be thine; do thou, crispissa, tend her favourite lock, ariel himself shall be the guard of shock." to a person who merely learned the sounds in these lines by rote, without knowing the sense of the words, all the advantage of the appropriated names and offices of the sylphs would be lost. no one, who has any sense of propriety, can call these sylphs by wrong names, or put them out of their places. momentilla and the watch, zephyretta and the fan, crispissa and the lock of hair, brillante and the diamond drops, are so intimately associated, that they necessarily recur together in the memory. the following celebrated lines on envy, some people will find easy, and others difficult, to learn by heart: "envy will merit, as its shade, pursue; but, like a shadow, proves the substance true: for envy'd wit, like sol eclips'd, makes known th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. when first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, it draws up vapour, which obscures its rays; but ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, reflect new glories, and augment the day." the flow of these lines is not particularly easy; those who trust merely to the power of reiteration in getting them by rote, will find the task difficult; those who seize the ideas, will necessarily recollect their order, and the sense will conduct them to their proper places with certainty: they cannot, for instance, make the clouds adorn the sun's rays before the sun's powerful beams have drawn up the vapours. this fixes the place of the four last lines. the simile of merit and the sun, and envy and the clouds, keeps each idea in its order; if any one escapes, it is easily missed, and easily recalled. we seldom meet with those who can give us an accurate account of their own thoughts; it is, therefore, difficult to tell the different ways in which different people manage their memory. we judge by the effects frequently, that causes are the same, which sometimes are entirely different. thus we, in common conversation, should say, that two people had an equally good memory, who could repeat with equal exactness any thing which they had heard or read. but in their methods of remembering, these persons might differ essentially; the one might have exerted much more judgment and ingenuity in the conduct of his memory than the other, and might thus have not only fatigued himself less, but might have improved his understanding, whilst the other learned merely by rote. when dr. johnson reported the parliamentary debates for the gentleman's magazine, his judgment, his habit of attending to the order in which ideas follow one another in reasoning, his previous knowledge of the characters and style of the different speakers, must considerably have assisted his memory. his taste for literary composition must have shown him instantly where any argument or allusion was misplaced. a connecting phrase, or a link in a chain of reasoning, is missed as readily by a person used to writing and argument, as a word in a line of poetry is missed by a poetic ear. if any thing has escaped the memory of persons who remember by general classification, they are not only by their art able to discover that something is missing, but they have a general direction where to find it; they know to what class of ideas it must belong; they can hunt from generals to particulars, till they are sure at last of tracing and detecting the deserter; they have certain signs by which they know the object of which they are in search, and they trust with more certainty to these characteristics, than to the mere vague recollection of having seen it before. we feel disposed to trust the memory of those who can give us some reason for what they remember. if they can prove to us that their assertion could not, consistently with other facts, be false, we admit the assertion into the rank of facts, and their judgment thus goes surety for their memory. the following advertisement (taken from the star of the st september, ) may show that experience justifies these theoretic notions: "literature. "a gentleman capable of reporting the debates in parliament, is wanted for a london newspaper. a business of no such great difficulty as is generally imagined by those unacquainted with it. a _tolerable_ good style and facility of composition, as well as a facility of writing, together with a good memory (_not an extraordinary one_) are all the necessary requisites. if a gentleman writes short hand, it is an advantage; but memory and composition are more important. "the advertiser, conceiving that many gentlemen either in london or at the universities, or in other parts of the kingdom, may think such a situation desirable, takes this public method of enabling them to obtain it. the salary, which will vary according to the talents of the reporter, will at least afford a genteel subsistence, and the business need not interrupt the pursuit of studies necessary for a more important profession. _a gentleman who has never tried parliamentary reporting, will be preferred by the advertiser, because he has observed, that those who have last attempted it, are now the best reporters._" in the common mode of education, great exactness of repetition is required from pupils. this seems to be made a matter of too much importance. there are circumstances in life, in which this talent is useful, but its utility, perhaps, we shall find, upon examination, is over-rated. in giving evidence of words, dates, and facts, in a court of justice, the utmost precision is requisite. the property, lives, and characters of individuals depend upon this precision. but we must observe, that after long detailed evidence has been given by a number of witnesses, an advocate separates the material from the immaterial circumstances, and the judge in his charge again compresses the arguments of the counsel, so that much of what has been said during the trial, might as well have been omitted. all these superfluous ideas were _remembered_ to no purpose. an evidence sometimes, if he be permitted, would tell not only all that he remembers of the circumstances about which he is examined, but also a number of other circumstances, which are casually associated with these in his memory. an able advocate rejects, by a quickness of judgment which appears like intuition, all that is irrelevant to his argument and his cause; and it is by this selection that _his_ memory, in the evidence, perhaps, of twenty different people, is able to retain all that is useful. when this heterogeneous mass of evidence is classed by his perspicuous arrangement, his audience feel no difficulty either in understanding or recollecting all which had before appeared confused. thus the exercise of the judgment saves much of the labour of memory; labour which is not merely unnecessary, but hurtful, to our understanding. in making observations upon subjects which are new to us, we must be content to use our memory unassisted at first by our reason; we must treasure up the ore and rubbish together, because we cannot immediately distinguish them from each other. but the sooner we can separate them, the better. in the beginning of all experimental sciences, a number of useless particulars are recorded, because they are not known to be useless; when, from comparing these, a few general principles are discovered, the memory is immediately relieved, the judgment and inventive faculty have power and liberty to work, and then a rapid progress and great discoveries are made. it is the misfortune of those who first cultivate new sciences, that their memory is overloaded; but if those who succeed to them, submit to the same senseless drudgery, it is not their misfortune, but their fault. let us look over the history of those who have made discoveries and inventions, we shall perceive, that it has been by rejecting useless ideas that they have first cleared their way to truth. dr. priestley's histories of vision and of electricity, are as useful when we consider them as histories of the human mind, as when we read them as histories of science. dr. priestley has published a catalogue of books,[ ] from which he gathered his materials. the pains, he tells us, that it cost him to compress and abridge the accounts which ingenious men have given of their own experiments, teach us how much our progress in real knowledge depends upon rejecting all that is superfluous. when simonides offered to teach themistocles the art of memory, themistocles answered, "rather teach me the art of forgetting; for i find that i remember much that i had better forget, and forget" (_consequently_) "some things which i wish to remember." when any discovery or invention is completed, we are frequently astonished at its obvious simplicity. the ideas necessary to the discovery, are seldom so numerous as to fatigue our memory. memory seems to have been useful to inventors only as it presented a few ideas in a certain happy connection, as it presented them faithfully and distinctly to view in the proper moment. if we wish for examples of _the conduct of_ the understanding, we need only look into dr. franklin's works. he is so free from all affectation, he lays his mind so fairly before us, that he is, perhaps, the best example we can select. those who are used to look at objects in a microscope, say, that full as much depends upon the object's being well prepared for inspection, as upon the attention of the observer, or the excellence of the glass. the first thing that strikes us, in looking over doctor franklin's works, is the variety of his observations upon different subjects. we might imagine, that a very tenacious and powerful memory was necessary to register all these; but dr. franklin informs us, that it was his constant practice to note down every hint as it occurred to him: he urges his friends to do the same; he observes, that there is scarcely a day passes without our hearing or seeing something which, if properly attended to, might lead to useful discoveries. by thus committing his ideas to writing, his mind was left at liberty _to think_. no extraordinary effort of memory was, even upon the greatest occasions, requisite. a friend wrote to him to inquire how he was led to his great discovery of the identity of lightning and electricity; and how he first came to think of drawing down lightning from the clouds. dr. franklin replies, that he could not answer better than by giving an extract from the minutes he used to keep of the experiments he made, with memorandums of such as he purposed to make, the reasons for making them, and the observations that rose upon them. by this extract, says dr. franklin, you will see that the thought was not so much _an out of the way one_, but that it might have occurred to any electrician.[ ] when the ideas are arranged in clear order, as we see them in this note, the analogy or induction to which dr. franklin was led, appears easy. why, then, had it never been made by any other person? numbers of ingenious men were at this time intent upon electricity. the ideas which were necessary to this discovery, were not numerous or complicated. we may remark, that one analogy connecting these observations together, they are more easily recollected; and their being written down for a particular purpose, on which dr. franklin's mind was intent, must have made it still easier to him to retain them. the degree of memory he was forced to employ, is thus reduced to a portion in which few people are defective. now, let us suppose, that dr. franklin, at the time he wrote his memorandum, had fully in his recollection every previous experiment that had ever been tried on electricity; and not only these, but the theories, names, ages, and private history, of all the men who had tried these experiments; of what advantage would this have been to him? he must have excluded all these impertinent ideas successively as they rose before him, and he must have selected the fifteen useful observations, which we have mentioned, from this troublesome multitude. the chance in such a selection would have been against him; the time employed in the examination and rejection of all the unnecessary recollections, would have been absolutely wasted. we must wish that it were in our power, when we make observations upon nature, or when we read the reflections of others, to arrange our thoughts so as to be ready when we want to reason or invent. when cards are dealt to us, we can sort our hand according to the known probabilities of the game, and a new arrangement is easily made when we hear what is trumps. in collecting and sorting observations, dr. franklin particularly excelled; therefore we may safely continue to take him for our example. wherever he happened to be, in a boat, in a mine, in a printer's shop, in a crowded city, or in the country, in europe or america, he displays the same activity of observation. when any thing, however trifling, struck him which he could not account for, he never rested till he had traced the effect to its cause. thus, after having made one remark, he had fresh motive to collect facts, either to confirm or refute an hypothesis; his observations tending consequently to some determinate purpose, they were arranged in the moment they were made, in the most commodious manner, both for his memory and invention; they were arranged either according to their obvious analogies, or their relation to each other as cause and effect. he had two useful methods of judging of the value of his own ideas; he either considered how they could be immediately applied to practical improvements in the arts, or how they could lead to the solution of any of the great problems in science. here we must again observe, that judgment saved the labour of memory. a person, who sets about to collect facts at random, is little better than a magpie, who picks up and lays by any odd bits of money he can light upon, without knowing their use. miscellaneous observations, which are made by those who have no philosophy, may accidentally lead to something useful; but here we admire the good fortune, and not the genius, of the individuals who make such discoveries: these are prizes drawn from the lottery of science, which ought not to seduce us from the paths of sober industry. how long may an observation, fortunately made, continue to be useless to mankind, merely because it has not been reasoned upon! the trifling observation, that a straight stick appears bent in water, was made many hundred years before the reason of that appearance was discovered! the invention of the telescope might have been made by any person who could have pursued this slight observation through all its consequences. having now defined, or rather described, what we mean by _a good memory_, we may consider how the memory should be cultivated. in children, as well as in men, the strength of that habit, or perhaps of that power of the mind which associates ideas together, varies considerably. it is probable, that this difference may depend sometimes upon organization. a child who is born with any defect in his eyes, cannot possibly have the same pleasure in objects of sight, which those enjoy who have strong eyes: ideas associated with these external objects, are, therefore, not associated with pleasure, and, consequently, they are not recollected with any sensations of pleasure. an ingenious writer[ ] supposes, that all the difference of capacity amongst men ultimately depends on their original power of feeling pleasure or pain, and their consequent different habits of attention. when there is any defect in a child's organization, we must have recourse to physics, and not to metaphysics; but even among children, who are apparently in the full possession of all their senses, we see very different degrees of vivacity: those who have most vivacity, seldom take delight in repeating their ideas; they are more pleased with novelty than prone to habit. those children who are deficient in vivacity, are much disposed to the easy indolent pleasure of repetition; it costs them less exertion to say or do the same thing over again, than to attempt any thing new; they are uniformly good subjects to habit, because novelty has no charms to seduce their attention. the education of the memory in these two classes of children, ought not to be the same. those who are disposed to repetition, should not be indulged in it, because it will increase their indolence; they should be excited by praise, by example, by sympathy, and by all the strongest motives that we can employ. their interest in every thing around them must by all means be increased: when they show eagerness about any thing, no matter what it is, we may then exercise their memory upon that subject with some hopes of success. it is of importance that they should succeed in their first trials, otherwise they will be discouraged from repeating their attempts, and they will distrust their own memory in future. the fear of not remembering, will occupy, and agitate, and weaken their minds; they should, therefore, be animated by hope. if they fail, at all events let them not be reproached; the mortification they naturally feel, is sufficient: nor should they be left to dwell upon their disappointment; they should have a fresh and easier trial given to them, that they may recover their own self-complacency as expeditiously as possible. it may be said, that there are children of such a sluggish temperament, that they feel no pleasure in success, and no mortification in perceiving their own mental deficiencies. there are few children of this description; scarcely any, perhaps, whose defects have not been increased by education. exertion has been made so painful to them, that at length they have sunk into apathy, or submitted in despair to the eternal punishment of shame. the mistaken notion, that the memory must be exercised only in books, has been often fatal to the pupils of literary people. we remember best those things which interest us most; which are useful to us in conversation; in our daily business or amusement. so do children. on these things we should exercise their memory. tell a boy who has lost his top, to remember at such a particular time to put you in mind of it, and if he does, that you will give him another, he will probably remember your requests after this, better than you will yourself. affectionate children will easily extend their recollective memories in the service of their friends and companions. "put me in mind to give your friend what he asked for, and i will give it to him if you remember it at the right time." it will be best to manage these affairs so that convenience, and not caprice, shall appear to be your motive for the requests. the time and place should be precisely fixed, and something should be chosen which is likely to recall your request at the appointed time. if you say, put me in mind of such a thing the moment the cloth is taken away after dinner; or as soon as candles are brought into the room; or when i go by such a shop in our walk this evening; here are things mentioned which will much assist the young remembrancer: the moment the cloth is taken away, or the candles come, he will recollect, from association, that something is to be done, that _he_ has something to do; and presently he will make out what that something is. a good memory for business depends upon local, well arranged associations. the man of business makes an artificial memory for himself out of the trivial occurrences of the day, and the hours as they pass recall their respective occupations. children can acquire these habits very early in their education; they are eager to give their companions an account of any thing they have seen or heard; their tutors should become their companions, and encourage them by sympathy to address these narrations to them. children who forget their lessons in chronology, and their pence tables, can relate with perfect accuracy any circumstances which have interested themselves. this shows that there is no deficiency in their capacity. every one, who has had any experience of the pleasure of talking, knows how intimately it is connected with the pleasure of being listened to. the auditors, consequently, possess supreme power over narrative childhood, without using any artifice, by simply showing attention to well arranged, and well recollected narratives, and ceasing to attend when the young orator's memory and story become confused, he will naturally be excited to arrange his ideas. the order of _time_ is the first and easiest principle of association to help the memory. this, till young people acquire the ideas of cause and effect, will be their favourite mode of arrangement. things that happen at the same time; things that are said, thoughts that have occurred, at the same time, will recur to the mind together. we may observe, that ill educated people continue through life to remember things by this single association; and, consequently, there is a heterogeneous collection of ideas in their mind, which have no rational connection with each other; crowds which have accidentally met, and are forced to live for ever together. a vulgar evidence, when he is examined about his memory of a particular fact, gives as a reason for his remembering it, a relation of a number of other circumstances, which he tells you happened at the same time; or he calls to witness any animate or inanimate objects, which he happened to see at the same time. all these things are so joined with the principal fact in his mind, that his remembering them distinctly, seems to him, and he expects will seem to others, demonstration of the truth and accuracy of his principal assertion. when a lawyer tells him he has nothing to do with these ideas, he is immediately at a stand in his narrative; he can recollect nothing, he is sure of nothing; he has no reason to give for his belief, unless he may say that it was michaelmas-day when such a thing happened, that he had a goose for dinner that day, or that he had a new wig. those who have more enlarged minds, seldom produce these strange reasons for remembering facts. indeed, no one can reason clearly, whose memory has these foolish habits; the ill matched ideas are inseparably joined, and hence they imagine there is some natural connection between them. hence arise those obstinate prejudices which no arguments can vanquish. to prevent children from arguing ill, we must, therefore, take care, in exercising their memory, to discourage them in this method of proving that they remember one thing by telling us a number of others which happened at the same time; rather let them be excited to bring their reasoning faculty into play in support of their memory. suppose, for instance, that a child had mislaid his hat, and was trying to recollect where he had put it. he first may recollect, from the association of time, that he had the hat the last time he went out; but when he wants to recollect when that time was, he had better go back, if he can, to his motive for going out; this one idea will bring a number of others in right order into his mind. he went out, suppose, to fetch his kite, which he was afraid would be wet by a shower of rain; then the boy recollects that his hat must have been wet by the same rain, and that when he came in, instead of hanging it up in its usual place, it was put before the fire to be dried. what fire, is the next question, &c. such an instance as this may appear very trivial; but children whose minds are well managed about trifles, will retain good habits when they are to think about matters of consequence. by exercising the memory in this manner about things, instead of about books and lessons, we shall not disgust and tire our pupils, nor shall we give the false notion, that all knowledge is acquired by reading. long before children read fluently for their own amusement, they like to hear others read aloud to them, because they have then the entertainment without the labour. we may exercise their memory by asking for an account of what they have heard. but let them never be required to repeat in the words of the book, or even to preserve the same arrangement; let them speak in words of their own, and arrange their ideas to their own plan; this will exercise at once their judgment, invention, and memory. "try if you can explain to me what i have just been explaining to you," a sensible tutor will frequently say to his pupils; and he will suffer them to explain in a different manner from himself; he will only require them to remember what is essential to the explanation. in such repetitions as these, the mind is active, therefore it will strengthen and improve. children are all, more or less, pleased with the perception of resemblances and of analogy. this propensity assists us much in the cultivation of the memory; but it must be managed with discretion, or it will injure the other powers of the understanding. there is, in some minds, a futile love of tracing analogies, which leads to superstition, to false reasoning, and false taste. the quick perception of resemblances is, in other minds, productive of wit, poetic genius, and scientific invention. the difference between these two classes, depends upon this--the one has more judgment, and more the habit of using it, than the other. children who are pleased by trifling coincidences, by allusions, and similitudes, should be taught with great care to reason: when once they perceive the pleasure of demonstration, they will not be contented with the inaccuracy of common analogies. a tutor is often tempted to teach pupils, who are fond of allusions, by means of them, because he finds that they remember well whatever suits their taste for resemblances. by following the real analogies between different arts and sciences, and making use of the knowledge children have on one subject to illustrate another, we may at once amuse their fancy, and cultivate their memory with advantage. ideas laid up in this manner, will recur in the same order, and will be ready for further use. when two ideas are remembered by their mutual connection, surely it is best that they should both of them be substantially useful; and not that one should attend merely to answer for the appearance of the other. as men readily remember those things which are every day useful to them in business, what relates to their amusements, or to their favourite tastes in arts, sciences, or in literature; so children find no difficulty in remembering every thing which mixes daily with their little pleasures. they value knowledge, which is _useful_ and _agreeable_ to them, as highly as we do; but they consider only the present, and we take the future into our estimate. children feel no interest in half the things that are committed, with the most solemn recommendations, to the care of their memory. it is in vain to tell them, "you must remember _such a thing_, because it will be useful to you when you grow up to be a man." the child feels like a child, and has no idea of what he may feel when he grows up to be a man. he tries to remember what he is desired, perhaps, because he wishes to please his wiser friends; but if the ideas are remote from his every day business, if nothing recall them but voluntary exertion, and if he be obliged to abstract his little soul from every thing it holds dear, before he can recollect his lessons, they will have no hold upon his memory; he will feel that recollection is too operose, and he will enjoy none of the "pleasures of memory." to induce children to exercise their memory, we must put them in situations where they may be immediately rewarded for their exertion. we must create an interest in their minds--nothing uninteresting is long remembered. in a large and literary family, it will not be difficult to invent occupations for children which may exercise all their faculties. even the conversation of such a family, will create in their minds a desire for knowledge; what they hear, will recall to their memory what they read; and if they are encouraged to take a reasonable share in conversation, they will acquire the habit of listening to every thing that others say. by permitting children to talk freely of what they read, we are more likely to improve their memory for books, than by exacting from them formal repetitions of lessons. dr. johnson, who is said to have had an uncommonly good memory, tells us, that when he was a boy, he used, after he had acquired any fresh knowledge from his books, to run and tell it to an old woman, of whom he was very fond. this exercise was so agreeable to him, that it imprinted what he read upon his memory. la gaucherie, one of the preceptors of henry iv. having found that he had to do with a young prince of an impatient mind, and active genius, little suited to sedentary studies, instead of compelling his pupil to read, taught him by means of conversation: anecdotes of heroes, and the wise sayings of ancient philosophers, were thus imprinted upon the mind of this prince. it is said, that henry iv. applied, in his subsequent life, all the knowledge he had acquired in this manner so happily, that learned men were surprised at his memory.[ ] by these observations, we by no means would insinuate, that application to books is unnecessary. we are sensible that accurate knowledge upon any subject, cannot be acquired by superficial conversation; that it can be obtained only by patient application. but we mean to point out, that an early taste for literature may be excited in children by conversation; and that their memory should be first cultivated in the manner which will give them the least pain. when there is motive for application, and when habits of industry have been gradually acquired, we may securely trust, that our pupils will complete their own education. nor should we have reason to fear, that those who have a good memory for all other things, should not be able to retain all that is worth remembering in books. children should never be praised for merely remembering exactly what they read, they should be praised for selecting with good sense what is best worth their attention, and for applying what they remember to useful purposes. we have observed how much the habit of inventing increases the wish for knowledge, and increases the interest men take in a number of ideas, which are indifferent to uncultivated and indolent people. it is the same with children. children who invent, exercise their memory with pleasure, from the immediate sense of utility and success. a piece of knowledge, which they lay by in their minds, with the hopes of making use of it in some future invention, they have more motives for remembering, than what they merely learn by rote, because they are commanded to do so by the voice of authority. (june th, .) s----, a boy of nine years old, of good abilities, was translating ovid's description of envy. when he came to the latin word _suffusa_, he pronounced it as if it had been spelled with a single _f_ and a double _s_, _sufussa_; he made the same mistake several times: at last his father, to _try_ whether it would make him remember the right pronunciation, desired him to repeat _suffusa_ forty times. the boy did so. about three hours afterwards, the boy was asked whether he recollected the word which he had repeated forty times. no, he said, he did not; but he remembered that it meant diffused. his father recalled the word to his mind, by asking him what letter it was that he had sounded as if it had been a double letter; he said _s_. and what double letter did you sound as if it had been single? _f_, said the boy. then, said his father, you have found out that it was a word in which there was a double _ff_ and a single _s_, and that it is the latin for _diffused_. oh, suffusa, said the boy. this boy, who had such difficulty in learning a single latin word, by repeating it forty times, showed in other instances, that he was by no means deficient in recollective memory. on the contrary, though he read very little, and seldom learned any thing by rote, he applied happily any thing that he read or heard in conversation. (march st, .) his father told him, that he had this morning seen a large horn at a gentleman's in the neighbourhood. it was found thirty spades depth below the surface of the earth, in a bog. with the horn was found a carpet, and wrapped up in the carpet a lump of tallow. "now," said his father, "how could that lump of tallow come there? or was it tallow, do you think? or what could it be?" h---- (a boy of , brother to s----) said, he thought it might have been buried by some robbers, after they had committed some robbery; he thought the lump was tallow. s---- said, "perhaps some dead body might have been wrapped up in the carpet and buried; and the dead body might have turned into tallow."[ ] "how came you," said his father, "to think of a dead body's turning into tallow?" "you told me," said the boy, "you read to me, i mean, an account of some dead bodies that had been buried a great many years, which had turned into tallow." "spermaceti," you mean? "yes." s---- had heard the account he alluded to above two months before this time. no one in company recollected it except himself, though several had heard it. amongst the few things which s---- had learnt by heart, was the hymn to adversity. a very slight circumstance may show, that he did not get this poem merely as a tiresome lesson, as children sometimes learn by rote what they do not understand, and which they never recollect except in the arduous moments of formal repetition. a few days after s---- had learned the hymn to adversity, he happened to hear his sister say to a lady, "i observed you pitied me for having had a whitlow on my finger, more than any body else did, because you have had one yourself." s----'s father asked him why he smiled. "because," said s----, "i was thinking of the _song_,[ ] the _hymn_ to adversity; "and from her own she learned to melt at other's wo." a recollective memory of books appears early in children who are not overwhelmed with them; if the impressions made upon their minds be distinct, they will recur with pleasure to the memory when similar ideas are presented. july . s---- heard his father read sir brook boothby's excellent epitaph upon algernon sidney; the following lines pleased the boy particularly: "approach, contemplate this immortal name, swear on this shrine to emulate his fame; to dare, like him, e'en to thy latest breath, contemning chains, and poverty, and death." s----'s father asked him why he liked these lines, and whether they put him in mind of any thing that he had heard before. s---- said, "it puts me in mind of hamilcar's making his son hannibal swear to hate the romans, and love his countrymen eternally. but i like _this_ much better. i think it was exceedingly foolish and wrong of hamilcar to make his son swear always to hate the romans." latin lessons are usually so very disagreeable to boys, that they seldom are pleased with any allusions to them; but by a good management in a tutor, even these lessons may be associated with agreeable ideas. boys should be encouraged to talk and think about what they learn in latin, as well as what they read in english; they should be allowed to judge of the characters described in ancient authors, to compare them with our present ideas of excellence, and thus to make some use of their learning. it will then be not merely engraved upon their memory in the form of lessons, it will be mingled with their notions of life and manners; it will occur to them when they converse, and when they act; they will possess the admired talent for classical allusion, as well as all the solid advantages of an unprejudiced judgment. it is not enough that gentlemen should be masters of the learned languages, they must know how to produce their knowledge without pedantry or affectation. the memory may in vain be stored with classical precedents, unless these can be brought into use in speaking or writing without the parade of dull citation, or formal introduction. "sir," said dr. johnson, to some prosing tormentor, "i would rather a man would knock me down, than to begin to talk to me of the punic wars." a public speaker, who rises in the house of commons, with pedantry prepense to quote latin or greek, is coughed or laughed down; but the beautiful unpremeditated classical allusions of burke or sheridan, sometimes conveyed in a single word, seize the imagination irresistibly. since we perceive, that memory is chiefly useful as it furnishes materials for invention, and that invention can greatly abridge the mere labour of accumulation, we must examine how the inventive faculty can be properly exercised. the vague precept of, cultivate the memory and invention of young people at the same time, will not inform parents how this is to be accomplished; we trust, therefore, that we may be permitted, contrary to the custom of didactic writers, to illustrate a general precept by a few examples; and we take these examples from real life, because we apprehend, that fictions, however ingenious, will never advance the science of education so much as simple experiments. no elaborate theory of invention shall here alarm parents. it is a mistake, to suppose that the inventive faculty can be employed only on important subjects; it can be exercised in the most trifling circumstances of domestic life. scarcely any family can be so unfortunately situated, that they may not employ the ingenuity of their children without violent exertion, or any grand apparatus. let us only make use of the circumstances which happen every hour. children are interested in every thing that is going forward. building, or planting, or conversation, or reading; they attend to every thing, and from every thing might they with a little assistance obtain instruction. let their useful curiosity be encouraged; let them make a part of the general society of the family, instead of being treated as if they had neither senses nor understanding. when any thing is to be done, let them be asked to invent the best way of doing it. when they see that their invention becomes immediately useful, they will take pleasure in exerting themselves. june th, . a lady, who had been ruling pencil lines for a considerable time, complained of its being a tiresome operation; and she wished that a quick and easy way of doing it could be invented. somebody present said they had seen pens for ruling music books, which ruled four lines at a time; and it was asked, whether a leaden rake could not be made to rule a sheet of paper at once. mr. ---- said, that he thought such a pencil would not rule well; and he called to s----, (the same boy we mentioned before) and asked him if he could invent any method of doing the business better. s---- took about a quarter of an hour to consider; and he then described a little machine for ruling a sheet of paper at a single stroke, which his father had executed for him. it succeeded well, and this success was the best reward he could have. another day mr. ---- observed, that the maid, whose business it was to empty a bucket of ashes into an ash-hole, never could be persuaded to do it, because the ashes were blown against her face by the wind; and he determined to invent a method which should make it convenient to her to do as she was desired. the maid usually threw the ashes into a heap on the sheltered side of a wall; the thing to be done was, to make her put the bucket through a hole in this wall, and empty the ashes on the other side. this problem was given to all the children and grown up persons in the family. one of the children invented the shelf, which, they said, should be like part of the vane of a winnowing machine which they had lately seen; the manner of placing this vane, another of the children suggested: both these ideas joined together, produced the contrivance which was wanted. a little model was made in wood of this bucket, which was a pretty toy. the thing itself was executed, and was found useful. june th, . mr. ---- was balancing a pair of scales very exactly, in which he was going to weigh some opium; this led to a conversation upon scales and weighing. some one said that the dealers in diamonds must have very exact scales, as the difference of a grain makes such a great difference in their value. s---- was very attentive to this conversation. m----told him, that jewellers always, if they can, buy diamonds when the air is light, and sell them when it is heavy. s---- did not understand the reason of this, till his father explained to him the general principles of hydrostatics, and showed him a few experiments with bodies of different specific gravity: these experiments were distinctly understood by every body present. the boy then observed, that it was not fair of the jewellers to buy and sell in this manner; they should not, said he, use _these_ weights. diamonds should be the weights. diamonds should be weighed against diamonds. november, . one day after dinner, the candles had been left for some time without being snuffed; and mr. ---- said he wished candles could be made which would not require snuffing. mrs. ******** thought of cutting the wick into several pieces before it was put into the candle, that so, when it burned down to the divisions, the wick might fall off. m---- thought that the wick might be tied tight round at intervals, before it was put into the candle; that when it burned down to the places where it was tied, it would snap off: but mr. ---- objected, that the candle would most likely go out when it had burned down to her knots. it was then proposed to send a stream of oxygene through the candle, instead of a wick. m---- asked if some substance might not be used for wicks which should burn into powder, and fly off or sublime. mr. ---- smiled at this, and said, "_some substance_; some _kind of air_; some _chemical mixture_! a person ignorant of chemistry always talks of, as an ignorant person in mechanics always says, "oh, you can do it somehow with _a spring_." as the company could not immediately discover any way of making candles which should not require to be snuffed, they proceeded to invent ways of putting out a candle at a certain time without hands. the younger part of the company had hopes of solving this problem, and every eye was attentively fixed upon the candle. "how would you put it out, s----?" said mr. ----. s---- said, that if a weight, a very little lighter than the extinguisher, were tied to a string, and if the string were put over a pulley, and if _the_ extinguisher were tied to the other end of the string, and the candle put exactly under the extinguisher; the extinguisher would move very, very gently down, and at last put out the candle. mr. ---- observed, that whilst it was putting out the candle, there would be a disagreeable smell, because the extinguisher would be a considerable time moving _very, very gently down_, over the candle after the candle had begun to go out. c---- (a girl of twelve years old) spoke next. "i would tie an extinguisher to one end of a thread. i would put this string through a pulley fastened to the ceiling; the other end of this string should be fastened to the middle of another thread, which should be strained between two posts set upright on each side of the candle, so as that the latter string might lean against the candle at any distance you want below the flame. when the candle burns down to this string, it will burn it in two, and the extinguisher will drop upon the candle." this is the exact description of _the weaver's alarm_, mentioned in the philosophical transactions which c---- had never seen or heard of. mr. ---- now showed us the patent extinguisher, which was much approved of by all the rival inventors. it is very useful to give children problems which have already been solved, because they can immediately compare their own imperfect ideas with successful inventions, which have actually been brought into real use. we know beforehand what ideas are necessary to complete the invention, and whether the pupil has all the necessary knowledge. though by the courtesy of poetry, a creative power is ascribed to inventive genius, yet we must be convinced that no genius can invent without materials. nothing can come of nothing. invention is nothing more than the new combination of materials. we must judge in general of the ease or difficulty of any invention, either by the number of ideas necessary to be combined, or by the dissimilarity or analogy of those ideas. in giving any problem to children, we should not only consider whether they know all that is necessary upon the subject, but also, whether that knowledge is sufficiently _familiar_ to their minds, whether circumstances are likely to recall it, and whether they have a perfectly clear idea of the thing to be done. by considering all these particulars, we may pretty nearly proportion our questions to the capacity of the pupil; and we may lead his mind on step by step from obvious to intricate inventions. july th, . l----, who had just returned from edinburgh, and had taken down in two large volumes, dr. black's lectures, used to read to us part of them, for about a quarter of an hour, every morning after breakfast. he was frequently interrupted (which interruptions he bore with heroic patience) by mr. ----'s explanations and comments. when he came to the expansive power of steam, and to the description of the different steam engines which have been invented, mr. ---- stopped to ask b----, c----, and s----, to describe the steam engine in their own words. they all described it in such a manner as to show that they clearly understood the principle of the machine. only the general principle had been explained to them. l----, after having read the description of savary's and newcomen's steam engines, was beginning to read the description of that invented by mr. watt; but mr. ---- stopped him, that he might try whether any person present could invent it. mr. e---- thus stated the difficulty: "in the old steam engine, cold water, you know, is thrown into the cylinder to condense the steam; but in condensing the steam, the cold water at the same time cools the cylinder. now the cylinder must be heated again, before it can be filled with steam; for till it is heated, it will condense the steam. there is, consequently, a great waste of heat and fuel in the great cylinder. how can you condense the steam without cooling the cylinder?" s----. "let down a cold tin tube into the cylinder when you want to condense the steam, and draw it up again as soon as the steam is condensed; or, if you could put a _cylinder_ of ice up the great tube." some of the company next asked, if an horizontal plate of cold metal, made to slide up the inside of the cylinder, would condense the steam. the edges of the plate only would touch the cylinder; the surface of the plate might condense the steam. "but," said mr. ----"how can you introduce and withdraw it?" c---- (a girl of ) then said, "i would put a cold vessel to condense the steam at the top of the cylinder." mr. ----. "so as to touch the cylinder, do you mean?" c----. "no, not so as to touch the cylinder, but at some distance from it." mr. ----. "then the cold air would rush into the cylinder whilst the steam was passing from the cylinder to your condenser." c----. "but i would cover in the cold vessel, and i would cover in the passage to it." mr. ----. "i have the pleasure of informing you, that you have invented part of the great mr. watt's improvement on the steam engine. you see how it facilitates invention, to begin by stating the difficulty clearly to the mind. this is what every practical inventor does when he invents in mechanics." l---- (smiling.) "and what _i_ always do in inventing a mathematical demonstration." to the good natured reader we need offer no apology; to the ill natured we dare attempt none, for introducing these detailed views of the first attempts of young invention. they are not exhibited as models, either to do honour to the tutor or his pupils; but simply to show, how the mind may be led from the easiest steps, to what are supposed to be difficult in education. by imagining ourselves to be in the same situation with children, we may guess what things are difficult to them; and if we can recollect the course of our own minds in acquiring knowledge, or in inventing, we may by retracing the same steps instruct others. the order that is frequently followed by authors, in the division and subdivision of their elementary treatises, is not always the best for those who are to learn. such authors are usually more intent upon proving to the learned that they understand their subject, than upon communicating their knowledge to the ignorant. parents and tutors must, therefore, supply familiar oral instruction, and those simple, but essential explanations, which books disdain, or neglect to give. and there is this advantage in all instruction given in conversation, that it can be made interesting by a thousand little circumstances, which are below the dignity of didactic writers. gradually we may proceed from simple to more complicated contrivances. the invention of experiments to determine a theory, or to ascertain the truth of an assertion, must be particularly useful to the understanding. any person, who has attended to experiments in chemistry and natural philosophy, must know, that invention can be as fully and elegantly displayed upon these subjects as upon any in the fine arts or literature. there is one great advantage in scientific invention; it is not dependent upon capricious taste for its reward. the beauty and elegance of a poem may be disputed by a thousand amateurs; there can be but one opinion about the truth of a discovery in science. independent of all ambition, there is considerable pleasure in the pursuit of experimental knowledge. children especially, before they are yet fools to fame, enjoy this substantial pleasure. nor are we to suppose that children have not capacities for such pursuits; they are peculiarly suited to their capacity. they love to see experiments tried, and to try them. they show this disposition not only wherever they are encouraged, but wherever they are permitted to show it; and if we compare their method of reasoning with the reasonings of the learned, we shall sometimes be surprised. they have no prejudices, therefore they have the complete use of all their senses; they have few ideas, but those few are distinct; they can be analyzed and compared with ease; children, therefore, judge and invent better, _in proportion to their knowledge_, than most grown up people. dr. hooke observes, that a sensible man, in solving any philosophical problem, should always lean to that side which is opposite to his favourite taste. a chemist is disposed to account for every thing by chemical means; a geometrician is inclined to solve every problem geometrically; and a mechanic accounts for all the phenomena of nature by the laws of mechanism. this undue bias upon the minds of ingenious people, has frequently rendered their talents less useful to mankind. it is the duty of those who educate ingenious children, to guard against this species of scientific insanity. there are prejudices of another description, which are fatal to inventive genius; some of these are usually found to attend ignorance, and others sometimes adhere to the learned. ignorant people, if they possess any degree of invention, are so confident in their own abilities, that they will not take the pains to inquire what others have thought or done; they disdain all general principles, and will rather scramble through some by-path of their own striking out, than condescend to be shown the best road by the most enlightened guide. for this reason, self-taught geniuses, as they are called, seldom go beyond a certain point in their own education, and the praise we bestow upon their ingenuity is always accompanied with expressions of regret: "it is a pity that such a genius had not the advantages of a good education." the learned, on the contrary, who have been bred up in reverence for established opinions, and who have felt in many instances the advantage of general principles, are apt to adhere too pertinaciously to their theories, and hence they neglect or despise new observations. how long did the maxim, that nature abhors a vacuum, content the learned! and how many discoveries were retarded by this single false principle! for a great number of years it was affirmed and believed, that all objects were seen by the intervention of visual rays, proceeding from the eye much in the same manner as we feel any object at a distance from us by the help of a stick.[ ] whilst this absurd analogy satisfied the mind, no discoveries were made in vision, none were attempted. a prepossession often misleads the industry of active genius. dr. hooke, in spite of the ridicule which he met with, was firm in his belief, that mankind would discover some method of sailing in the air. balloons have justified his prediction; but all his own industry in trying experiments upon flying was wasted, because he persisted in following a false analogy to the wings of birds. he made wings of various sorts; till he took it for granted that he _must_ learn to fly by mechanical means: had he applied to chemistry, he might have succeeded. it is curious to observe, how nearly he once touched upon the discovery, and yet, misled by his prepossessions, quitted his hold. he observed, that the air cells[ ] of fishes are filled with air, which buoys them up in the water; and he supposes that this air is lighter than _common_ air. had he pursued this idea, he might have invented balloons; but he returned with fatal perseverance to his old theory of wings. from such facts, we may learn the power and danger of prejudice in the most ingenious minds; and we shall be careful to preserve our pupils early from its blind dominion. the best preservation against the presumption to which ignorance is liable, and the best preservative against the self sufficiency to which the learned are subject, is the habit of varying our studies and occupations. those who have a general view of the whole map of human knowledge, perceive how many unexplored regions are yet to be cultivated by future industry; nor will they implicitly submit to the reports of ignorant voyagers. no imaginary pillars of hercules, will bound their enterprises. there is no presumption in believing, that much more is possible to science than ever human ingenuity has executed; therefore, young people should not be ridiculed for that sanguine temper which excites to great inventions. they should be ridiculed only when they imagine that they possess the means of doing things to which they are unequal. the fear of this deserved ridicule, will stimulate them to acquire knowledge, and will induce them to estimate cautiously their own powers before they hazard their reputation. we need not fear that this caution should repress their activity of mind; ambition will secure their perseverance, if they are taught that every acquisition is within the reach of unremitting industry. this is not an opinion to be artfully inculcated to serve a _particular_ purpose, but it is an opinion drawn from experience; an opinion which men of the highest abilities and integrity, of talents and habits the most dissimilar, have confirmed by their united testimony. helvetius maintained, that no great man ever formed a great design which he was not also capable of executing. even where great perseverance is exercised, the choice of the subjects on which the inventive powers are employed determines, in a great measure, their value: therefore, in the education of ingenious children, we should gradually turn their attention from curious trifles to important objects. boverick,[ ] who made chains "to yoke a flea," must have possessed exquisite patience; besides his chain of two hundred links, with its padlock and key, all weighing together less than the third part of a grain, this indefatigable _minute artificer_ was the maker of a landau, which opened and shut by springs: this equipage, with six horses harnessed to it, a coachman sitting on the box, with a dog between his legs, four inside and two outside passengers, besides a postilion riding one of the fore horses, was drawn with all the ease and safety imaginable by a well trained flea! the inventor and executor of this puerile machine, bestowed on it, probably, as much time as would have sufficed to produce watt's fire engine, or montgolfier's balloon. it did not, perhaps, cost the marquis of worcester more exertion to draw out his celebrated century of inventions; it did not, perhaps, cost newton more to write those queries which maclaurin said he could never read without feeling his hair stand on end with admiration. brebeuf, a french wit, wrote a hundred and fifty epigrams upon a painted lady; a brother wit, fired with emulation, wrote upon the same subject three hundred more, making in all four hundred and fifty epigrams, each with appropriate turns of their own. probably, pope and parnell did not rack their invention so much, or exercise more industry in completing "the rape of the lock," or "the rise of woman." these will live for ever; who will read the four hundred and fifty epigrams? the most effectual methods to discourage in young people the taste for frivolous ingenuity, will be, never to admire these "laborious nothings," to compare them with useful and elegant inventions, and to show that vain curiosities can be but the wonder and amusement of a moment. children who begin with trifling inventions, may be led from these to general principles; and with their knowledge, their ambition will necessarily increase. it cannot be expected that the most enlarged plan of education could early give an intimate acquaintance with all the sciences; but with their leading principles, their general history, their present state, and their immediate desiderata,[ ] young people may, and ought to be, made acquainted. their own industry will afterwards collect more precise information, and they will never waste their time in vain studies and fruitless inventions. even if the cultivation of the memory were our grand object, this plan of education will succeed. when the abbé de longuerue, whose prodigious memory we have formerly mentioned, was asked by the marquis d'argenson, how he managed to arrange and retain in his head every thing that entered it, and to recollect every thing when wanted? the abbé answered: "sir, the elements of every science must be learned whilst we are very young; the first principles of every language; the a b c, as i may say, of every kind of knowledge: this is not difficult in youth, especially as it is not necessary to penetrate far; simple notions are sufficient; when once these are acquired, every thing we read afterwards, finds its proper place." footnotes: [ ] v. plutarch. quintilian. [ ] berington's history of the lives of abeillard and heloisa, page . [ ] eloge de m. l'abbé d'alary. [ ] marquis d'argenson's essays, page . [ ] d'alembert's eloge de m. d'alary. [ ] curiosities of literature, vol. ii. page . [ ] priestley on electricity, page . [ ] fuller, author of the worthies of england. see curiosities of literature, vol. i. [ ] v. chapter on books, and on geography. [ ] dr. darwin. zoonomia. [ ] at the end of the history of vision. [ ] "nov. , . electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these particulars. . giving light. . colour of the light. . crooked direction. . swift motion. . being conducted by metals. . crack or noise in exploding. . subsisting in water or ice. . rending bodies it passes through. . destroying animals. . melting metals. . firing inflammable substances. . sulphureous smell. the electric fluid is attracted by points. we do not know whether this property is in lightning. but since they agree in all the particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this? let the experiment be made." _dr. franklin's letters, page ._ [ ] helvetius, "sur l'esprit." [ ] see preface to l'esprit des romains considéré. [ ] see the account in the monthly review. [ ] he had tried to sing it to the tune of "hope, thou nurse of young desire." [ ] priestley on vision, vol. i. page . [ ] v. hooke's posthumous works. [ ] hooke's mycrographia, p. . chapter xxii. taste and imagination. figurative language seems to have confounded the ideas of most writers upon metaphysics. imagination, memory, and reason, have been long introduced to our acquaintance as allegorical personages, and we have insensibly learned to consider them as real beings. the "viewless regions" of the soul, have been portioned out amongst these ideal sovereigns; but disputes have, nevertheless, sometimes arisen concerning the boundaries of intellectual provinces. amongst the disputed territories, those of imagination have been most frequently the seat of war; her empire has been subject to continual revolution; her dominions have been, by potent invaders, divided and subdivided. fancy,[ ] memory,[ ] ideal presence,[ ] and conception,[ ] have shared her spoils. by poets, imagination has been addressed as the great parent of genius, as the arbiter, if not the creator, of our pleasures; by philosophers, her name has been sometimes pronounced with horror; to her fatal delusions, they have ascribed all the crimes and miseries of mankind. yet, even philosophers have not always agreed in their opinions: whilst some have treated imagination with contempt, as the irreconcileable enemy of reason, by others[ ] she has been considered with more respect, as reason's inseparable friend; as the friend who collects and prepares all the arguments upon which reason decides; as the injured, misrepresented power who is often forced to supply her adversaries with eloquence, who is often called upon to preside at her own trial, and to pronounce her own condemnation. imagination is "_the power_," we are told, of "_forming images_:" the word image, however, does not, strictly speaking, express any thing more than a representation of an object of sight; but the power of imagination extends to objects of all the senses. "i hear a voice you cannot hear, which says i must not stay. i see a hand you cannot see, which beckons me away." imagination hears the voice, as well as sees the hand; by an easy license of metaphor, what was originally used to express the operation of our senses, is extended to them all. we do not precisely say, that imagination, forms _images_ of past sounds, or tastes, or smells; but we say that she forms ideas of them; and ideas, we are told, are mental images. it has been suggested by dr. darwin, that all these analogies between images and thoughts have, probably, originated in our observing the little pictures painted on the retina of the eye. it is difficult certainly, if not impossible, to speak of the invisible operations of the mind or body, without expressing ourselves in metaphor of some kind or other; and we are easily misled by allusions to sensible objects, because when we comprehend the allusion, we flatter ourselves that we understand the theory which it is designed to illustrate. whether we call ideas images in popular language, or vibrations, according to dr. hartley's system, or modes of sensation with condillac, or motions of the sensorium, in the language of dr. darwin, may seem a matter of indifference. but even the choices of names is not a matter of indifference to those who wish to argue accurately; when they are obliged to describe their feelings or thoughts by metaphoric expressions, they will prefer the simplest; those with which the fewest extraneous associations are connected. words which call up a variety of heterogeneous ideas to our minds, are unfit for the purposes of sober reasoning; our attention is distracted by them, and we cannot restrain it to the accurate comparison of simple proportions. we yield to pleasing reverie, instead of exerting painful voluntary attention. hence it is probably useful in our attempts to reason, especially upon metaphysical subjects, to change from time to time our nomenclature,[ ] and to substitute terms which have no relation to our old associations, and which do not affect the prejudices of our education. we are obliged to define with some degree of accuracy the sense of new terms, and we are thus led to compare our old notions with more severity. our superstitious reverence for mere symbols is also dissipated; symbols are apt to impose even upon those who acknowledge their vanity, and who profess to consider them merely as objects of vulgar worship. when we call a class of our ideas _images_ and pictures, a tribe of associations with painting comes into our mind, and we argue about imagination as if she were actually a paintress, who has colours at her command, and who, upon some invisible canvass in the soul, portrays the likeness of all earthly and celestial objects. when we continue to pursue the same metaphor in speaking of the moral influence of imagination, we say that her _colouring_ deceives us, that her _pictures_ are flattering and false, that she draws objects out of proportion, &c. to what do all these metaphors lead? we make no new discoveries by talking in this manner; we do not learn the cause or the cure of any of the diseases of the mind; we only persuade ourselves that we know something, when we are really ignorant. we have sedulously avoided entering into any metaphysical disquisitions; but we have examined with care the systems of theoretic writers, that we may be able to avail ourselves of such of their observations as can be reduced to practice in education. with respect to the arts, imagination may be considered practically in two points of view, as it relates to our taste, and as it relates to our talents for the arts. without being a poet, or an orator, a man may have a sufficient degree of imagination to receive pleasure from the talents of others; he may be a critical judge of the respective merits of orators, poets, and artists. this sensibility to the pleasures of the imagination, when judiciously managed, adds much to the happiness of life, and it must be peculiarly advantageous to those who are precluded by their station in society from the necessity of manual labour. mental exercise, and mental amusements, are essential to persons in the higher ranks of life, who would escape from the fever of dissipation, or from the lethargy of ennui. the mere physical advantages which wealth can procure, are reducible to the short sum of "_meat, fire, and clothes_." a nobleman of the highest birth, and with the longest line of ancestry, inherits no intuitive taste, nor can he purchase it from the artist, the painter, or the poet; the possession of the whole pinelli library could not infuse the slightest portion of literature. education can alone give the full power to enjoy the real advantages of fortune. to educate the taste and the imagination, it is not necessary to surround the heir of an opulent family with masters and connoisseurs. let him never hear the jargon of amateurs, let him learn the art "not to admire." but in his earliest childhood cultivate his senses with care, that he may be able to see and hear, to feel and understand, for himself. visible images he will rapidly collect in his memory; but these must be selected, and his first associations must not be trusted to accident. encourage him to observe with attention all the works of nature, but show him only the best imitations of art; the first objects that he contemplates with delight, will remain long associated with pleasure in his imagination; you must, therefore, be careful, that these early associations accord with the decisions of those who have determined the national standard of taste. in many instances taste is governed by arbitrary and variable laws; the fashions of dress, of decoration, of manner, change from day to day; therefore no exclusive prejudices should confine your pupil's understanding. let him know, as far as we know them, the general principles which govern mankind in their admiration of the sublime and beautiful; but at the same time give him that enlarged toleration of mind, which comprehends the possibility of a taste different from our own. show him, and you need not go further than the indian skreen, or the chinese paper in your drawing room, for the illustration, that the sublime and beautiful vary at pekin, at london, on westminster bridge, and on the banks of the ganges. let your young pupil look over a collection of gems or of ancient medals; it is necessary that his eye should be early accustomed to grecian beauty, and to all the classic forms of grace. but do not suffer him to become a bigot, though he may be an enthusiast in his admiration of the antique. short lessons upon this subject may be conveyed in a few words. if a child sees you look at the bottom of a print for the name of the artist, before you will venture to pronounce upon its merits, he will follow your example, and he will judge by the authority of others, and not by his own taste. if he hears you ask, who wrote this poem? who built this palace? is this a genuine antique? he will ask the same questions before he ventures to be pleased. if he hears you pronounce with emphasis, that such a thing comes from italy, and therefore must be in good taste, he will take the same compendious method of decision upon the first convenient occasion. he will not trouble himself to examine why utility pleases, nor will he analyze his taste, or discover why one proportion or one design pleases him better than another; he will, if by example you teach him prejudice, content himself with repeating the words, proportion, antique, picturesque, &c. without annexing any precise ideas to these words. parents, who have not turned their attention to metaphysics, may, perhaps, apprehend, that they have something very abstruse or intricate to learn, before they can instruct their pupils in the principles of taste: but these principles are simple, and two or three entertaining books, of no very alarming size, comprise all that has yet been ascertained upon this subject. vernet's théorie des sentiments agréables; hogarth's analysis of beauty; an essay of hume's on the standard of taste; burke's sublime and beautiful; lord kames's elements of criticism; sir joshua reynold's discourses; and alison on taste; contain so much instruction, mixed with so much amusement, that we cannot think that it will be a _terrible task_ to any parent to peruse them. these books are above the comprehension of children; but the principles which they contain, can be very early illustrated in conversation. it will be easy, in familiar instances, to show children that the fitness, propriety, or utility of certain forms, recommends them to our approbation: that uniformity, an appearance of order and regularity, are, in some cases, agreeable to us; contrast, in others: that one class of objects pleases us from habit, another from novelty, &c. the general principle that governs taste, in the greatest variety of instances, is the association of ideas, and this, fortunately, can be most easily illustrated. "i like such a person, because her voice puts me in mind of my mother's. i like this walk, because i was very happy the last time i was here with my sister. i think green is the prettiest of all colours; my father's room is painted green, and it is very cheerful, and i have been very happy in that room; and, besides, the grass is green in spring." such simple observations as these, come naturally from children; they take notice of the influence of association upon their taste, though, perhaps, they may not extend their observations so as to deduce the general principle according to philosophical forms. we should not lay down for them this or any other principle of taste, as a rule which they are to take for granted; but we should lead them to class their own desultory remarks, and we should excite them to attend to their own feelings, and to ascertain the truth, by experiments upon themselves. we have often observed, that children have been much entertained with comparing the accidental circumstances they have met with, and the unpremeditated expressions used in conversation, with any general maxim. in this point of view, we may render even general maxims serviceable to children, because they will excite to experiment: our pupils will detect their falsehood, or, after sufficient reflection, acknowledge their truth. perhaps it may be thought, that this mode of instruction will tend rather to improve the judgment than the taste; but every person of good taste, must have also a good judgment in matters of taste: sometimes the judgment may have been partially exercised upon a particular class of objects, and its accuracy of discrimination may be confined to this one subject; therefore we hastily decide, that, because men of taste may not always be men of universally good judgment, these two powers of the mind are unnecessary to one another. by teaching the philosophy, at the same time that we cultivate the pleasures, of taste, we shall open to our pupils a new world; we shall give them a new sense. the pleasure of every effect will be increased by the perception of its cause; the magic of the scenery will not lose its power to charm, though we are aware of the secret of the enchantment. we have hitherto spoken of the taste for what is beautiful; a taste for the sublime we should be cautious in cultivating. obscurity and terror are two of the grand sources of the sublime; analyze the feeling, examine accurately the object which creates the emotion, and you dissipate the illusion, you annihilate the pleasure. "what seemed its head, the likeness of a kingly crown had on." the indistinctness of the head and of the kingly crown, makes this a sublime image. upon the same principle, "danger, whose limbs, of giant mould, no mortal eye can fix'd behold," always must appear sublime as long as the passion of fear operates. would it not, however, be imprudent in education to permit that early propensity to superstitious terrors, and that temporary suspension of the reasoning faculties, which are often essential to our taste for the sublime? when we hear of "margaret's grimly ghost," or of the "dead still hour of night," a sort of awful tremor seizes us, partly from the effect of early associations, and partly from the solemn tone of the reader. the early associations which we perhaps have formed of terror, with the ideas of apparitions, and winding sheets, and sable shrouds, should be unknown to children. the silent solemn hour of midnight, should not to them be an hour of terror. in the following poetic description of the beldam telling dreadful stories to her infant audience, we hear only of the pleasures of the imagination; we do not recollect how dearly these pleasures must be purchased by their votaries: "* * * * * * finally by night the village matron, round the blazing hearth, suspends the infant audience with her tales, breathing astonishment! of witching rhymes, and evil spirits; of the death-bed call of him who robbed the widow, and devour'd the orphan's portion; of the unquiet souls ris'n from the grave to ease the heavy guilt of deeds in life concealed; of shapes that walk at dead of night, and clank their chains, and wave the torch of hell around the murd'rer's bed. at every solemn pause the crowd recoil, gazing each other speechless, and congeal'd with shiv'ring sighs; till, eager for th' event, around the beldam all erect they hang, each trembling heart with grateful terrors quell'd."[ ] no prudent mother will ever imitate this eloquent village matron, nor will she permit any beldam in the nursery to conjure up these sublime shapes, and to quell the hearts of her children with these grateful terrors. we were once present when a group of speechless children sat listening to the story of blue-beard, "breathing astonishment." a gentleman who saw the charm beginning to operate, resolved to counteract its dangerous influence. just at the critical moment, when the fatal key drops from the trembling hands of the imprudent wife, the gentleman interrupted the awful pause of silence that ensued, and requested permission to relate the remainder of the story. tragi-comedy does not offend the taste of young, so much as of old critics; the transition from grave to gay was happily managed. blue-beard's wife afforded much diversion, and lost all sympathy the moment she was represented as a curious, tattling, timid, ridiculous woman. the terrors of blue-beard himself subsided when he was properly introduced to the company; and the denouement of the piece was managed much to the entertainment of the audience; the catastrophe, instead of freezing their young blood, produced general laughter. ludicrous images, thus presented to the mind which has been prepared for horror, have an instantaneous effect upon the risible muscles: it seems better to use these means of counteracting the terrors of the imagination, than to reason upon the subject whilst the fit is on; reason should be used between the fits.[ ] those who study the minds of children know the nice touches which affect their imagination, and they can, by a few words, change their feelings by the power of association. ferdinand duke of tuscany was once struck with the picture of a child crying: the painter,[ ] who was at work upon the head, wished to give the duke a proof of his skill: by a few judicious strokes, he converted the crying into a laughing face. the duke, when he looked at the child again, was in astonishment: the painter, to show himself master of the human countenance, restored his first touches; and the duke, in a few moments, saw the child weeping again. a preceptor may acquire similar power over the countenance of his pupil if he has studied the oratorical art. by the art of oratory, we do not mean the art of misrepresentation, the art of deception; we mean the art of showing the truth in the strongest light; of exciting virtuous enthusiasm and generous indignation. warm, glowing eloquence, is not inconsistent with accuracy of reasoning and judgment. when we have expressed our admiration or abhorrence of any action or character, we should afterwards be ready coolly to explain to our pupils the justice of our sentiments: by this due mixture and alternation of eloquence and reasoning, we may cultivate a taste for the moral and sublime, and yet preserve the character from any tincture of extravagant enthusiasm. we cannot expect, that the torrent of passion should never sweep away the land-marks of exact morality; but after its overflowing impetuosity abates, we should take a calm survey of its effects, and we should be able to ascertain the boundaries of right and wrong with geometrical precision. there is a style of bombast morality affected by some authors, which must be hurtful to young readers. generosity and honour, courage and sentiment, are the striking qualities which seize and enchant the imagination in romance: these qualities must be joined with justice, prudence, economy, patience, and many humble virtues, to make a character really estimable; but these would spoil the effect, perhaps, of dramatic exhibitions. children may with much greater safety see hideous, than gigantic representations of the passions. richard the third excites abhorrence; but young charles de moor, in "the robbers," commands our sympathy; even the enormity of his guilt, exempts him from all ordinary modes of trial; we forget the murderer, and see something like a hero. it is curious to observe, that the legislature in germany, and in england, have found it necessary to interfere as to the representation of captain mac heath and the robbers; two characters in which the tragic and the comic muse have had powerful effects in exciting imitation. george barnwell is a hideous representation of the passions, and therefore beneficial. there are many sublime objects which do not depend upon terror, or at least upon false associations of terror, for their effect; and there are many sublime thoughts, which have no connection with violent passions or false ideas of morality. these are what we should select, if possible, to raise, without inflating, the imagination. the view of the ocean, of the setting or the rising sun, the great and bold scenes of nature, affects the mind with sublime pleasure. all the objects which suggest ideas of vast space, or power, of the infinite duration of time, of the decay of the monuments of ancient grandeur, or of the master-pieces of human art and industry, have power to raise sublime sensations: but we should consider, that they raise this pleasure only by suggesting certain ideas; those who have not the previous ideas, will not feel the pleasure. we should not, therefore, expect that children should admire objects which do not excite any ideas in their minds; we should wait till they have acquired the necessary knowledge, and we should not injudiciously familiarize them with these objects. simplicity is a source of the sublime, peculiarly suited to children; accuracy of observation and distinctness of perception, are essential to this species of the sublime. in percy's collection of ancient ballads, and in the modern poems of the ayreshire ploughman, we may see many instances of the effect of simplicity. to preserve our pupil's taste from a false love of ornament, he must avoid, either in books or in conversation, all verbose and turgid descriptions, the use of words and epithets which only fill up the measure of a line. when a child sees any new object, or feels any new sensation, we should assist him with appropriate words to express his thoughts and feelings: when the impression is fresh in his mind, the association, with the precise descriptive epithets, can be made with most certainty. as soon as a child has acquired a sufficient stock of words and ideas, he should be from time to time exercised in description; we should encourage him to give an exact account of his own feelings in his own words. those parents who have been used to elegant, will not, perhaps, be satisfied with the plain, descriptions of unpractised pupils; but they should not be fastidious; they should rather be content with an epithet too little, than with an epithet too much; and they should compare the child's description with the objects actually described, and not with the poems of thomson or gray, or milton or shakespeare. if we excite our pupils to copy from the writings of others, they never can have any originality of thought. to show parents what sort of simple descriptions they may reasonably expect from children, we venture to produce the following extempore description of a summer's evening, given by three children of different ages. july th, . mr. ---- was walking out with his family, and he asked his children to describe the evening just as it appeared to them. "there were three bards in ossian's poems," said he, "who were sent out to see what sort of a night it was; they all gave different descriptions upon their return; you have never any of you read ossian, but you can give us some description of this evening; try." b---- (a girl of .) "the clouds in the west are bright with the light of the sun which has just set; a thick mist is seen in the east, and the smoke which had been _heaped up_ in the day-time, is now spread, and mixes with the mist all round us; the noises are heard more plainly (though there are but few) than in the day-time; and those which are at a distance, sound almost as near as those which are close to us; there is a red mist round the moon." c---- (a girl of eleven years old.) "the western clouds are pink with the light of the sun which has just set. the moon shines red through the mist. the smoke and mist make it look dark at a distance; but the few objects near us appear plainer. if it was not for the light of the moon, they would not be seen; but the moon is exceedingly bright; it shines upon the house and the windows. every thing sounds busy at a distance; but what is near us is still." s---- (a boy between nine and ten years old). "the sun has set behind the hill, and the western clouds are tinged with light. the mist mixes with the smoke, which rises from the heaps of weeds which some poor man is burning to earn bread for his family. the moon through the mist peeps her head, and sometimes she _goes back_, retires into her bower of clouds. the few noises that are heard, are heard very plain--very plainly." we should observe, that the children who attempted these little descriptions, had not been habituated to the _poetic trade_; these were the only descriptions of an evening which they ever made. it would be hurtful to exercise children frequently in descriptive composition; it would give them the habit of exact observation, it is true, but something more is necessary to the higher species of poetry. words must be selected which do not represent only, but which suggest, ideas. minute veracity is essential to some sorts of description; but in a higher style of poetry, only the large features characteristic of the scene must be produced, and all that is subordinate must be suppressed. sir joshua reynolds justly observes, that painters, who aim merely at deception of the eye by exact imitation, are not likely, even in their most successful imitations, to rouse the imagination. the man who mistook the painted fly for a real fly, only brushed, or attempted to brush it, away. the exact representation of such a common object, could not raise any sublime ideas in his mind; and when he perceived the deception, the wonder which he felt at the painter's art, was a sensation no wise connected with poetic enthusiasm. as soon as young people have collected a variety of ideas, we can proceed a step in the education of their fancy. we should sometimes in conversation, sometimes in writing or in drawing, show them how a few strokes, or a few words, can suggest or combine various ideas. a single expression from cæsar, charmed a mutinous army to instant submission. unless the words "_roman citizens!_" had suggested more than meets the ear, how could they have produced this wonderful effect? the works of voltaire and sterne abound with examples of the skilful use of the language of suggestion: on this the wit of voltaire, and the humour and pathos of sterne, securely depend for their success. thus, corporal trim's eloquence on the death of his young master, owed its effect upon the whole kitchen, including "the fat scullion, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees," to the well-timed use of the mixed language of action and suggestion. "'are we not here now?' continued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability) 'and are we not' (dropping his hat upon the ground) 'gone in a moment?'" "are we not here now, and gone in a moment?" continues sterne, who, in this instance, reveals the secret of his own art. "there was nothing in the sentence; it was one of your self-evident truths we have the advantage of hearing every day; and if trim had not trusted more to his hat than his head, he had made nothing at all of it." when we point out to our pupils such examples in sterne, we hope it will not be understood, that we point them out to induce servile imitation. we apprehend, that the imitators of sterne have failed from not having discovered that the interjections and ---- dashes of this author, are not in themselves beauties, but that they affect us by suggesting ideas. to prevent any young writers from the intemperate or absurd use of interjections, we should show them mr. horne tooke's acute remarks upon this mode of embellishment. we do not, however, entirely agree with this author in his abhorrence of interjections. we do not believe that "where speech can be employed they are totally useless; and are always insufficient for the purpose of communicating our thoughts."[ ] even if we class them, as mr. tooke himself does,[ ] amongst "involuntary convulsions with oral sound," such as groaning, shrieking, &c. yet they may suggest ideas, as well as express animal feelings. sighing, according to mr. tooke, is in the class of interjections, yet the poet acknowledges the superior eloquence of sighs: "persuasive words, and _more persuasive_ sighs." "'i wish,' said uncle toby, with a deep sigh (after hearing the story of le fevre) 'i wish, trim, i was asleep.'" the sigh here adds great force to the wish, and it does not mark that uncle toby, from vehemence of passion, had returned to the brutal state of a savage who has not learnt the use of speech; but, on the contrary, it suggests to the reader, that uncle toby was a man of civilized humanity; not one whose compassion was to be excited merely as an animal feeling by the actual _sight_ of a fellow-creature in pain, but rather by the description of the sufferer's situation. in painting, as well as in writing, the language of suggestion affects the mind, and if any of our pupils should wish to excel in this art, they must early attend to this principle. the picture of agamemnon hiding his face at the sacrifice of his daughter, expresses little to the eye, but much to the imagination. the usual signs of grief and joy make but slight impression; to laugh and to weep are such common expressions of delight or anguish, that they cannot be mistaken, even by the illiterate; but the imagination must be cultivated to enlarge the sphere of sympathy, and to render a more refined language intelligible. it is said that a milanese artist painted two peasants, and two country-girls, who laughed so heartily, that _no one_ could look at them without laughing.[ ] this is an instance of sympathy unconnected with imagination. the following is an instance of sympathy excited by imagination. when porcia was to part from brutus, just before the breaking out of the civil war, "she endeavoured," says plutarch, "as well as possible, to conceal the sorrow that oppressed her; but, notwithstanding her magnanimity, a picture betrayed her distress. the subject was the parting of hector and andromache. he was represented delivering his son astyanax into her arms, and the eyes of andromache were fixed upon him. the resemblance that this picture bore to her own distress, made _porcia_ burst into tears the moment she beheld it." if porcia had never read homer, andromache would not have had this power over her imagination and her sympathy. the imagination not only heightens the power of sympathy with the emotions of all the passions which a painter would excite, but it is likewise essential to our taste for another class of pleasures. artists, who like hogarth would please by humour, wit, and ridicule, must depend upon the imagination of the spectators to supply all the intermediate ideas which they would suggest. the cobweb over the poor box, one of the happiest strokes of satire that hogarth ever invented, would probably say nothing to the inattentive eye, or the dull imagination. a young person must acquire the language, before he can understand the ideas, of superior minds. the taste for poetry must be prepared by the culture of the imagination. the united powers of music and poetry could not have triumphed over alexander, unless his imagination had assisted "the mighty master." "with downcast looks the joyless victor sat, revolving in his altered soul the various turns of chance below; and now and then a sigh he stole, and tears began to flow." the sigh and the tears were the consequences of alexander's own thoughts, which were only recalled by kindred sounds. we are well aware, that savage nations, or those that are imperfectly civilized, are subject to enthusiasm; but we are inclined to think, that the barbarous clamour with which they proclaim their delight in music and poetry, may deceive us as to the degree in which it is felt: the sensations of cultivated minds may be more exquisite, though they are felt in silence. it has been supposed, that ignorance is extremely susceptible of the pleasures of wonder: but wonder and admiration are different feelings: the admiration which a cultivated mind feels for excellence, of which it can fully judge, is surely a higher species of pleasure, than the brute wonder expressed by "a foolish face of praise." madame roland tells us, that once, at a sermon preached by a celebrated frenchman, she was struck with the earnest attention painted in the countenance of a young woman who was looking up at the preacher. at length the fair enthusiast exclaimed, "my god, how he perspires!" a different sort of admiration was felt by cæsar, when the scroll dropped from his hand whilst he listened to an oration of cicero's. there are an infinite variety of associations, by which the orator has power to rouse the imagination of a person of cultivated understanding; there are comparatively few, by which he can amuse the fancy of illiterate auditors. it is not that they have less imagination than others; they have equally the power of raising vivid images; but there are few images which can be recalled to them: the combinations of their ideas are confined to a small number, and words have no poetic or literary associations in their minds: even amongst children, this difference between the power we have over the cultivated and uncultivated mind, early appears. a laurel leaf is to the eye of an illiterate boy nothing more than a shrub with a shining, pale-green, pointed leaf: recall the idea of that shrub by the most exact description, it will affect him with no peculiar pleasure: but associate early in a boy's mind the ideas of glory, of poetry, of olympic crowns, of daphne and apollo; by some of these latent associations the orator may afterwards raise his enthusiasm. we shall not here repeat what has been said[ ] upon the choice of literature for young people, but shall once more warn parents to let their pupils read only the best authors, if they wish them to have a fine imagination, or a delicate taste. when their minds are awake and warm, show them excellence; let them hear oratory only when they can feel it; if the impression be vivid, no matter how transient the touch. ideas which have once struck the imagination, can be recalled by the magic of a word, with all their original, all their associated force. do not fatigue the eye and ear of your vivacious pupil with the monotonous sounds and confused images of vulgar poetry. do not make him repeat the finest passages of shakespeare and milton; the effect is lost by repetition; the words, the ideas are profaned. let your pupils hear eloquence from eloquent lips, and they will own its power. but let a drawling, unimpassioned reader, read a play of shakespeare's, or an oration of demosthenes, and if your pupil is not out of patience, he will never taste the charms of eloquence. if he feels a fine sentiment, or a sublime idea, pause, leave his mind full, leave his imagination elevated. five minutes afterwards, perhaps, your pupil's attention is turned to something else, and the sublime idea seems to be forgotten: but do not fear; the idea is not obliterated; it is latent in his memory; it will appear at a proper time, perhaps a month, perhaps twenty years afterwards. ideas may remain long useless, and almost forgotten in the mind, and may be called forth by some corresponding association from their torpid state. young people, who wish to make themselves orators or eloquent writers, should acquire the habit of attending first to the general impression made upon their own minds by oratory, and afterwards to the cause which produced the effect; hence they will obtain command over the minds of others, by using the knowledge they have acquired of their own. the habit of considering every new idea, or new fact, as a subject for allusion, may also be useful to the young orator. a change from time to time in the nature of his studies, will enlarge and invigorate his imagination. gibbon says, that, after the publication of his first volume of the roman history, he gave himself a short holyday. "i indulged my curiosity in some studies of a very different nature: a course of anatomy, which was demonstrated by dr. hunter, and some lessons of chemistry, which were delivered by dr. higgins. the principles of these sciences, and a taste for books of natural history, contributed to multiply my ideas and images; and the anatomist and chemist may sometimes track me in their own snow." different degrees of enthusiasm are requisite in different professions; but we are inclined to think, that the imagination might with advantage be cultivated to a much higher degree than is commonly allowed in young men intended for public advocates. we have seen several examples of the advantage of a general taste for the belles lettres in eminent lawyers;[ ] and we have lately seen an ingenious treatise called deinology, or instructions for a young barrister, which confirms our opinion upon this subject. an orator, by the judicious preparation of the minds of his audience, may increase the effect of his best arguments. a grecian painter,[ ] before he would produce a picture which he had finished, representing a martial enterprise, ordered martial music to be played, to raise the enthusiasm of the assembled spectators; when their imagination was sufficiently elevated, he uncovered the picture, and it was beheld with sympathetic transports of applause. it is usually thought, that persons of extraordinary imagination are deficient in judgment: by proper education, this evil might be prevented. we may observe that persons, who have acquired particular facility in certain exercises of the imagination, can, by voluntary exertion, either excite or suppress certain trains of ideas on which their enthusiasm depends. an actor, who storms and raves whilst he is upon the stage, appears with a mild and peaceable demeanor a moment afterwards behind the scenes. a poet, in his inspired moments, repeats his own verses in his garret with all the emphasis and fervour of enthusiasm; but when he comes down to dine with a mixed convivial company, his poetic fury subsides, a new train of ideas takes place in his imagination. as long as he has sufficient command over himself to lay aside his enthusiasm in company, he is considered as a reasonable, sensible man, and the more imagination he displays in his poems, the better. the same exercise of fancy, which we admire in one case, we ridicule in another. the enthusiasm which characterizes the man of genius, borders upon insanity. when voltaire was teaching mademoiselle clairon, the celebrated actress, to perform an impassioned part in one of his tragedies, she objected to the violence of his enthusiasm. "mais, monsieur, on me prendroit pour une possedée!"[ ] "eh, mademoiselle," replied the philosophic bard, "il faut être un possedé pour réussir en aucun art." the degree of enthusiasm, which makes the painter and poet set, what to more idle, or more busy mortals, appears an imaginary value upon their respective arts, supports the artist under the pressure of disappointment and neglect, stimulates his exertions, and renders him almost insensible to labour and fatigue. military heroes, or those who are "_insane with ambition_,"[ ] endure all the real miseries of life, and brave the terrors of death, under the invigorating influence of an extravagant imagination. cure them of their enthusiasm, and they are no longer heroes. we must, therefore, decide in education, what species of characters we would produce, before we can determine what degree, or what habits of imagination, are desirable. "je suis le dieu de la danse!"[ ] exclaimed vestris; and probably alexander the great did not feel more pride in his apotheosis. had any cynical philosopher undertaken to cure vestris of his vanity, it would not have been a charitable action. vestris might, perhaps, by force of reasoning, have been brought to acknowledge that a dancing-master was not a divinity, but this conviction would not have increased his felicity; on the contrary, he would have become wretched in proportion as he became rational. the felicity of enthusiasts depends upon their being absolutely incapable of reasoning, or of listening to reason upon certain subjects; provided they are resolute in repeating their own train of thoughts without comparing them with that of others, they may defy the malice of wisdom, and in happy ignorance may enjoy perpetual delirium. parents, who value the happiness of their children, will consider exactly what chance there is of their enjoying unmolested any partial enthusiasm; they will consider, that by early excitations, it is very easy to raise any species of ambition in the minds of their pupils. the various species of enthusiasm necessary to make a poet, a painter, an orator, or a military hero, may be inspired, without doubt, by education. how far these are connected with happiness, is another question. whatever be the object which he pursues, we must, as much as possible, ensure our pupil's success. those who have been excited to exertion by enthusiasm, if they do not obtain the reward or admiration which they had been taught to expect, sink into helpless despondency. whether their object has been great or small, if it has been their favourite object, and they fail of its attainment, their mortification and subsequent languor are unavoidable. the wisest of monarchs exclaimed, that all was vanity and vexation of spirit; he did not, perhaps, feel more weary of the world than the poor juggler felt, who, after educating his hands to the astonishing dexterity of throwing up into the air, and catching as they fell, six eggs successively, without breaking them, received from the emperor, before whom he performed, six eggs to reward the labour of his life! this poor man's ambition appears obviously absurd; and we are under no immediate apprehension, that parents should inspire their children with the enthusiasm necessary to the profession of a juggler: but, unless some precautions are taken, the objects which excite the ambition of numbers, may be placed so as to deceive the eye and imagination of children; and they may labour through life in pursuit of phantoms. if children early hear their parents express violent admiration for riches, rank, power, or fame, they catch a species of enthusiasm for these things, before they can estimate justly their value; from the countenance and manner, they draw very important conclusions. "felicity is painted on your countenance," is a polite phrase of salutation in china. the taste for looking happy, is not confined to the chinese: the rich and great,[ ] by every artifice of luxury, endeavour to impress the spectator with the idea of their superior felicity. from experience we know, that the external signs of delight are not always sincere, and that the apparatus of luxury is not necessary to happiness. children who live with persons of good sense, learn to separate the ideas of happiness and a coach and six; but young people who see their fathers, mothers, and preceptors, all smitten with sudden admiration at the sight of a fine phaeton, or a fine gentleman, are immediately infected with the same absurd enthusiasm. these parents do not suspect, that they are perverting the imagination of their children, when they call them with foolish eagerness to the windows to look at a fine equipage, a splendid cavalcade, or a military procession; they perhaps summon a boy, who is intended for a merchant, or a lawyer, to hear "the spirit stirring drum;" and they are afterwards surprised, if he says, when he is fifteen or sixteen, that, "_if his father pleases_, he had rather go into the army, than go to the bar." the mother is alarmed, perhaps, about the same time, by an unaccountable predilection in her daughter's fancy for a red coat, and totally forgets having called the child to the window to look at the smart cockades, and to hear the tune of "see the conquering hero comes." "hear you me, jessica," says shylock to his daughter, "lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum, and the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife, clamber not you up into the casements then." shylock's exhortations were vain; jessica had arrived at years of discretion, and it was too late to forbid her clambering into the casements; the precautions should have been taken sooner; the epithets vile squeaking and wry-necked fife, could not alter the lady's taste: and shylock should have known how peremptory prohibitions and exaggerated expressions of aversion operate upon the female imagination; he was imprudent in the extreme of his caution. we should let children see things as they really are, and we should not prejudice them either by our exclamations of rapture, or by our affected disgust. if they are familiarized with show, they will not be caught by it; if they see the whole of whatever is to be seen, their imagination will not paint things more delightful than they really are. for these reasons, we think that young people should not be restrained, though they may be guided in their tastes; we should supply them with all the information in which they are deficient, and leave them to form their own judgments. without making it a matter of favour, or of extraordinary consequence, parents can take their children to see public exhibitions, or to partake of any amusements which are really agreeable; they can, at the same time, avoid mixing factitious with real pleasure. if, for instance, we have an opportunity of taking a boy to a good play, or a girl to a ball, let them enjoy the full pleasure of the amusement, but do not let us excite their imagination by great preparations, or by anticipating remarks: "oh, you'll be very happy to-morrow, for you're to go to the play. you must look well to-night, for you are going to the ball. were you never at a ball? did you never see a play before? oh, _then_ you'll be delighted, i'm sure!" the children often look much more sensible, and sometimes more composed, in the midst of these foolish exclamations, than their parents. "est ce que je m'amuse, maman?" said a little girl of six years old, the first time she was taken to the playhouse. besides the influence of opinion, there are a number of other circumstances to be considered in cultivating the imagination; there are many other circumstances which must be attended to, and different precautions are necessary, to regulate properly the imagination of children of different dispositions, or temperaments. the disposition to associate ideas, varies in strength and quickness in opposite temperaments: the natural vivacity or dulness of the senses, the habit of observing external objects, the power of voluntary exertion, and the propensity to reverie, must all be considered before we can adapt a plan of education exactly to the pupil's advantage. a wise preceptor will counteract, as much as possible, all those defects to which a child may appear most liable, and will cultivate his imagination so as to prevent the errours to which he is most exposed by natural, or what we call natural, disposition. some children appear to feel sensations of pleasure or pain with more energy than others; they take more delight in feeling than in reflection; they have neither much leisure nor much inclination for the intellectual exertions of comparison or deliberation. great care should be taken to encourage children of this temper to describe and to compare their sensations. by their descriptions we shall judge what motives we ought to employ to govern them, and if we can teach them to compare their feelings, we shall induce that voluntary exertion of mind in which they are naturally defective. we cannot compare or judge of our sensations without voluntary exertion. when we deliberate, we repeat our ideas deliberately; and this is an exercise peculiarly useful to those who feel quickly. when any pleasure makes too great an impression upon these children of vivid sensations, we should repeat the pleasure frequently, till it begins to fatigue; or we should contrast it, and bring it into direct comparison with some other species of pleasure. for instance, suppose a boy had appeared highly delighted with seeing a game at cards, and that we were apprehensive he might, from this early association, acquire a taste for gaming, we might either repeat the amusement till the playing at cards began to weary the boy, or we might take him immediately after playing at cards to an interesting comedy; probably, the amusement he would receive at the playhouse, would be greater than that which he had enjoyed at the card-table; and as these two species of pleasure would immediately succeed to each other, the child could scarcely avoid comparing them. is it necessary to repeat, that all this should be done without any artifice? the child should know the meaning of our conduct, and then he will never set himself in opposition to our management. if it is not convenient, or possible, to dull the charm of novelty by repetition, or to contrast a new pleasure with some other superior amusement, there is another expedient which may be useful; we may call the power of association to our assistance: this power is sometimes a full match for the most lively sensations. for instance, suppose a boy of strong feelings had been offended by some trifle, and expressed sensations of hatred against the offender obviously too violent for the occasion; to bring the angry boy's imagination to a temperate state, we might recall some circumstance of his former affection for the offender; or the general idea, that it is amiable and noble to command our passion, and to forgive those who have injured us. at the sight of his mother, with whom he had many agreeable associations, the imagination of coriolanus raised up instantly a train of ideas connected with the love of his family, and of his country, and immediately the violence of his sensations of anger were subdued. brutus, after his friend cassius has apologized to him for his "rash humour," by saying, "that it was hereditary from his mother," promises that the next time cassius is over-earnest with "his brutus, he will think his mother chides, and leave him so;" that is to say, brutus promises to recollect an association of ideas, which shall enable him to bear with his friend's ill humour. children, who associate ideas very strongly and with rapidity,[ ] must be educated with continual attention. with children of this class, the slightest circumstances are of consequence; they may at first appear to be easily managed, because they will remember pertinaciously any reproof, any reward or punishment; and, from association, they will scrupulously avoid or follow what has, in any one instance, been joined with pain or pleasure in their imagination: but unfortunately, accidental events will influence them, as well as the rewards and punishments of their preceptors; and a variety of associations will be formed, which may secretly govern them long before their existence is suspected. we shall be surprised to find, that even where there is apparently no hope, or fear, or passion, to disturb their judgment, they cannot reason, or understand reasoning. on studying them more closely, we shall discover the cause of this seeming imbecility. a multitude of associated ideas occur to them upon whatever subject we attempt to reason, which distract their attention, and make them change the terms of every proposition with incessant variety. their pleasures are chiefly secondary reflected pleasures, and they do not judge by their actual sensations so much as by their associations. they like and dislike without being able to assign any sufficient cause for their preference or aversion. they make a choice frequently without appearing to deliberate; and if you, by persuading them to a more detailed examination of the objects, convince them, that according to the common standard of good and evil, they have made a foolish choice, they will still seem puzzled and uncertain; and, if you leave them at liberty, will persist in their original determination. by this criterion we may decide, that they are influenced by some secret false association of ideas; and, instead of arguing with them upon the obvious folly of their present choice, we should endeavour to make them trace back their ideas, and discover the association by which they are governed. in some cases this may be out of their power, because the original association may have been totally forgotten, and yet those connected with it may continue to act: but even when we cannot succeed in any particular instance in detecting the cause of the errour, we shall do the pupils material service by exciting them to observe their own minds. a tutor, who carefully remarks the circumstances in which a child expresses uncommon grief or joy, hope or fear, may obtain complete knowledge of his associations, and may accurately distinguish the proximate and remote causes of all his pupil's desires and aversions. he will then have absolute command over the child's mind, and he should upon no account trust his pupil to the direction of any other person. another tutor, though perhaps of equal ability, could not be equally secure of success; the child would probably be suspected of cunning, caprice, or obstinacy, because the causes of his tastes and judgments could not be discovered by his new preceptor. it often happens, that those who feel pleasure and pain most strongly, are likewise most disposed to form strong associations of ideas.[ ] children of this character are never stupid, but often prejudiced and passionate: they can readily assign a reason for their preference or aversion; they recollect distinctly the original sensations of pleasure or pain, on which their associations depend; they do not, like mr. transfer in zelucco, like or dislike persons and things, because they have _been used to them_, but because they have received some injury or benefit from them. such children are apt to make great mistakes in reasoning, from their registering of coincidences hastily; they do not wait to repeat their experiments, but if they have in one instance observed two things to happen at the same time, they expect that they will always recur together. if one event precedes or follows another accidentally, they believe it to be the cause or effect of its concomitant, and this belief is not to be shaken in their minds by ridicule or argument. they are, consequently, inclined both to superstition and enthusiasm, according as their hopes and fears predominate. they are likewise subject to absurd antipathies--antipathies which verge towards insanity. dr. darwin relates a strong instance of antipathy in a child from association. the child, on tasting the gristle of sturgeon, asked what gristle was? and was answered, that gristle was like the division of a man's nose. the child, disgusted at this idea, for twenty years afterwards could never be persuaded to taste sturgeon.[ ] zimmermann assures us, that he was an eye-witness of a singular antipathy, which we may be permitted to describe in his own words: "happening to be in company with some english gentlemen, all of them men of distinction, the conversation fell upon antipathies. many of the company denied their reality, and considered them as idle stories, but i assured them that they were truly a disease. mr. william matthews, son to the governor of barbadoes, was of my opinion, because he himself had an antipathy to spiders. the rest of the company laughed at him. i undertook to prove to them that this antipathy _was really an impression on his soul, resulting from the determination of a mechanical effect_. (we do not pretend to know what dr. zimmermann means by this.) lord john murray undertook to shape some black wax into the appearance of a spider, with a view to observe whether the antipathy would take place at the simple figure of the insect. he then withdrew for a moment, and came in again with the wax in his hand, which he kept shut. mr. matthews, who in other respects was a very amiable and moderate man, immediately conceiving that his friend really had a spider in his hand, clapped his hand to his sword with extreme fury, and running back towards the partition, cried out most horribly. all the muscles of his face were swelled, his eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his body was immoveable. we were all exceedingly alarmed, and immediately ran to his assistance, took his sword from him, and assured him that what he conceived to be a spider, was nothing more than a bit of wax, which he might see upon the table. "he remained some time in this spasmodic state; but at length he began to recover, and to deplore the horrible passion from which he still suffered. his pulse was very strong and quick, and his whole body was covered with a cold perspiration. after taking an anodyne draft, he resumed his usual tranquillity. "we are not to wonder at this antipathy," continues zimmermann; "the spiders at barbadoes are very large, and of an hideous figure. mr. matthews was born there, and his antipathy was therefore to be accounted for. some of the company undertook to make a little waxen spider in his presence. he saw this done with great tranquillity, but he could not be persuaded to touch it, though he was by no means a timorous man in other respects. nor would he follow my advice to endeavour to conquer this antipathy by first drawing parts of spiders of different sorts, and after a time whole spiders, till at length he might be able to look at portions of real spiders, and thus gradually accustom himself to whole ones, at first dead, and then living ones."[ ] dr. zimmermann's method of cure, appears rather more ingenious, than his way of accounting for the disease. are all the natives of barbadoes subject to convulsions at the sight of the large spiders in that island? or why does mr. william matthews' having been born there account so satisfactorily for his antipathy? the cure of these unreasonable fears of harmless animals, like all other antipathies, would, perhaps, be easily effected, if it were judiciously attempted early in life. the epithets which we use in speaking of animals, and our expressions of countenance, have great influence on the minds of children. if we, as dr. darwin advises, call the spider _the ingenious spider_, and the frog _the harmless frog_, and if we look at them with complacency, instead of aversion, children, from sympathy, will imitate our manner, and from curiosity will attend to the animals, to discover whether the commendatory epithets we bestow upon them, are just. it is comparatively of little consequence to conquer antipathies which have trifling objects. an individual can go through life very well without eating sturgeon, or touching spiders; but when we consider the influence of the same disposition to associate false ideas too strongly in more important instances, we shall perceive the necessity of correcting it by education. locke tells us of a young man, who, having been accustomed to see an old trunk in the room with him when he learned to dance, associated his dancing exertions so strongly with the sight of this trunk, that he could not succeed by any voluntary efforts in its absence. we have, in our remarks upon attention,[ ] pointed out the great inconveniences to which those are exposed who acquire associated habits of intellectual exertion; who cannot speak, or write, or think, without certain habitual aids to their memory or imagination. we must further observe, that incessant vigilance is necessary in the moral education of children disposed to form strong associations; they are liable to sudden and absurd dislikes or predilections, with respect to persons, as well as things; they are subject to caprice in their affections and temper, and liable to a variety of mental infirmities, which, in different degrees, we call passion or madness. locke tells us, that he knew a man who, after having been restored to health by a painful operation, had so strongly associated the idea and figure of the operator with the agony he had endured, that though he acknowledged the obligation, and felt gratitude towards this friend who had saved him, he never afterwards could bear to see his benefactor. there are some people who associate so readily and incorrigibly the idea of any pain or insult they have received from another, with his person and character, that they can never afterwards forget or forgive. they are hence disposed to all the intemperance of hatred and revenge; to the chronic malice of a jago, or the acute pangs of an achilles. homer, in his speech of achilles to agamemnon's mediating ambassadors, has drawn a strong and natural picture of the progress of anger. it is worth studying as a lesson in metaphysics. whenever association suggests to the mind of achilles the injury he has received, he loses his reason, and the orator works himself up from argument to declamation, and from declamation to desperate resolution, through a close linked connection of ideas and sensations. the insanities of ambition, avarice, and vanity, originate in early mistaken associations. a feather, or a crown, or an alderman's chain, or a cardinal's hat, or a purse of yellow counters, are unluckily associated in the minds of some men with the idea of happiness, and, without staying to deliberate, these unfortunate persons hunt through life the phantasms of a disordered imagination. whilst we pity, we are amused by the blindness and blunders of those whose mistakes can affect no one's felicity but their own; but any delusions which prompt their victims to actions inimical to their fellow-creatures, are the objects not unusually of pity, but of indignation, of private aversion and public punishment. we smile at the avaricious insanity of the miser, who dresses himself in the cast-off wig of a beggar, and pulls a crushed pancake from his pocket for his own and for his friend's dinner.[ ] we smile at the insane vanity of the pauper, who dressed himself in a many-coloured paper star, assumed the title of duke of baubleshire, and as such required homage from every passenger.[ ] but are we inclined to smile at the outrageous vanity of the man who styled himself the son of jupiter, and who murdered his best friend for refusing him divine honours? are we disposed to pity the slave-merchant, who, urged by the maniacal desire for gold, hears unmoved the groans of his fellow-creatures, the execrations of mankind, and that "small still voice," which haunts those who are stained with blood. the moral insanities which strike us with horror, compassion, or ridicule, however they may differ in their effects, have frequently one common origin; an early false association of ideas. persons who mistake in measuring their own feelings, or who neglect to compare their ideas, and to balance contending wishes, scarcely merit the name of _rational_ creatures. the man, who does not deliberate, is lost. we have endeavoured, though well aware of the difficulty of the subject, to point out some of the precautions that should be used in governing the imagination of young people of different dispositions. we should add, that in all cases the pupils attention to his own mind will be of more consequence, than the utmost vigilance of the most able preceptor; the sooner he is made acquainted with his own character, and the sooner he can be excited to govern himself by reason, or to attempt the cure of his own defects, the better. there is one habit of the imagination, to which we have not yet adverted, the habit of reverie. in reverie we are so intent upon a particular train of ideas, that we are unconscious of all external objects, and we exert but little voluntary power. it is true that some persons in castle-building both reason and invent, and therefore must exert some degree of volition; even in the wildest reverie, there may be traced some species of consistency, some connection amongst the ideas; but this is simply the result of the association of ideas. inventive castle-builders are rather nearer the state of insanity than of reverie; they reason well upon false principles; their airy fabrics are often both in good taste and in good proportion; nothing is wanting to them but a foundation. on the contrary, nothing can be more silly than the reveries of silly people; they are not only defective in consistency, but they want all the unities; they are not extravagant, but they are stupid; they consist usually of a listless reiteration of uninteresting ideas; the whole pleasure enjoyed by those addicted to them consists in the facility of repetition. it is a mistaken notion, that only people of ardent imaginations are disposed to reverie; the most indolent and stupid persons waste their existence in this indulgence; they do not act always in consequence of their dreams, therefore we do not detect their folly. young people of active minds, when they have not sufficient occupation, necessarily indulge in reverie; and, by degrees, this wild exercise of their invention and imagination becomes so delightful to them, that they prefer it to all sober employments. mr. williams, in his lectures upon education, gives an account of a boy singularly addicted to reverie. the desire of invisibility had seized his mind, and for several years he had indulged his fancy with imagining all the pleasures that he should command, and all the feats that he could perform, if he were in possession of gyges's ring. the reader should, however, be informed, that this castle-builder was not a youth of strict veracity; his confession upon this occasion, as upon others, might not have been sincere. we only state the story from mr. williams. to prevent children from acquiring a taste for reverie, let them have various occupations both of mind and body. let us not direct their imagination to extraordinary future pleasures, but let us suffer them to enjoy the present. anticipation is a species of reverie; and children, who have promises of future pleasures frequently made to them, live in a continual state of anticipation. to cure the habit of reverie when it has once been formed, we must take different methods with different tempers. with those who indulge in the _stupid reverie_, we should employ strong excitations, and present to the senses a rapid succession of objects, which will completely engage without fatiguing them. this mode must not be followed with children of different dispositions, else we should increase, instead of curing, the disease. the most likely method to break this habit in children of great quickness or sensibility, is to set them to some employment which is wholly new to them, and which will consequently exercise and exhaust all their faculties, so that they shall have no life left for castle-building. monotonous occupations, such as copying, drawing, or writing, playing on the harpsichord, &c. are not, _if habit has made them easy_ to the pupil, fit for our purpose. we may all perceive, that in such occupations, the powers of the mind are left unexercised. we can frequently read aloud with tolerable emphasis for a considerable time together, and at the same time think upon some subject foreign to the book we hold in our hands. the most difficult exercises of the mind, such as invention, or strict reasoning, are those alone which are sufficient to subjugate and chain down the imagination of some active spirits. to such laborious exercises they should be excited by the encouraging voice of praise and affection. imaginative children will be more disposed to invent than to reason, but they cannot perfect any invention without reasoning; there will, therefore, be a mixture of what they like and dislike in the exercise of invention, and the habit of reasoning will, perhaps, gradually become agreeable to them, if it be thus dexterously united with the pleasures of the imagination. so much has already been written by various authors upon the pleasures and the dangers of imagination, that we could scarcely hope to add any thing new to what they have produced: but we have endeavoured to arrange the observations which appeared most applicable to practical education; we have pointed out how the principles of taste may be early taught without injury to the general understanding, and how the imagination should be prepared for the higher pleasures of eloquence and poetry. we have attempted to define the boundaries between the enthusiasm of genius, and its extravagance; and to show some of the precautions which may be used, to prevent the moral defects to which persons of ardent imagination are usually subject. the degree in which the imagination should be cultivated must, we have observed, be determined by the views which parents may have for their children, by their situations in society, and by the professions for which they are destined. under the government of a sober judgment, the powers of the imagination must be advantageous in every situation; but their value to society, and to the individuals by whom they are possessed, depends ultimately upon the manner in which they are managed. a magician, under the control of a philosopher, would perform not only great, but useful, wonders. the homely proverb, which has been applied to fire, may with equal truth be applied to imagination: "it is a good servant, but a bad master." footnotes: [ ] priestley has ably given the desiderata of electricity, vision, &c. [ ] wharton's ode to fancy. [ ] gerard. [ ] lord kames. [ ] professor stewart. [ ] v. an excellent essay of mr. barnes's on imagination. manchester society, vol. i. [ ] it is to be hoped that the foreign philosophers, who, it is said, are now employed in drawing up a new metaphysical nomenclature, will avail themselves of the extensive knowledge, and original genius of the author of zoonomia. [ ] akenside. [ ] "know there are words and spells which can control, between the fits, the fever of the soul." pope. [ ] peter of cortona. [ ] v. epea pteroenta, p. . [ ] chapter on grammar. [ ] v. camper's works, p. . [ ] v. chapter on books. [ ] lord mansfield, hussey burgh, &c. [ ] theon. [ ] "but, sir, i shall be taken for one possessed!" "well, ma'am, you must be _like one possessed_, if you would succeed in any art." [ ] dr. darwin. [ ] "i am the god of dancing!" [ ] v. smith's moral theory. [ ] temperament of increased association. zoonomia. [ ] v. zoonomia. temperament of increased sensibility and association joined. [ ] zoonomia, vol. ii. [ ] monthly review of zimmermann on experience in physic. march , p. . [ ] v. chapter on attention. [ ] elwes. see his life. [ ] there is an account of this poor man's death in the star, . chapter xxiii. on wit and judgment. it has been shown, that the powers of memory, invention and imagination, ought to be rendered subservient to judgment: it has been shown, that reasoning and judgment abridge the labours of memory, and are necessary to regulate the highest flights of imagination. we shall consider the power of reasoning in another point of view, as being essential to our conduct in life. the object of reasoning is to adapt means to an end, to attain the command of effects by the discovery of the causes on which they depend. until children have acquired some knowledge of effects, they cannot inquire into causes. observation must precede reasoning; and as judgment is nothing more than the perception of the result of comparison, we should never urge our pupils to judge, until they have acquired some portion of experience. to teach children to compare objects exactly, we should place the things to be examined distinctly before them. every thing that is superfluous, should be taken away, and a sufficient motive should be given to excite the pupil's attention. we need not here repeat the advice that has formerly been given[ ] respecting the choice of proper motives to excite and fix attention; or the precautions necessary to prevent the pain of fatigue, and of unsuccessful application. if comparison be early rendered a task to children, they will dislike and avoid this exercise of the mind, and they will consequently show an inaptitude to reason: if comparing objects be made interesting and amusing to our pupils, they will soon become expert in discovering resemblances and differences; and thus they will be prepared for reasoning. rousseau has judiciously advised, that _the senses_ of children should be cultivated with the utmost care. in proportion to the distinctness of their perceptions, will be the accuracy of their memory, and, probably, also the precision of their judgment. a child, who sees imperfectly, cannot reason justly about the objects of sight, because he has not sufficient data. a child, who does not hear distinctly, cannot judge well of sounds; and, if we could suppose the sense of touch to be twice as accurate in one child as in another, we might conclude, that the judgment of these children must differ in a similar proportion. the defects in organization are not within the power of the preceptor; but we may observe, that inattention, and want of exercise, are frequently the causes of what appear to be natural defects; and, on the contrary, increased attention and cultivation sometimes produce that quickness of eye and ear, and that consequent readiness of judgment, which we are apt to attribute to natural superiority of organization or capacity. even amongst children, we may early observe a considerable difference between the quickness of their senses and of their reasoning upon subjects where they have had experience, and upon those on which they have not been exercised. the first exercises for the judgment of children should, as rousseau recommends, relate to visible and tangible substances. let them compare the size and shape of different objects; let them frequently try what they can lift; what they can reach; at what distance they can see objects; at what distance they can hear sounds: by these exercises they will learn to judge of distances and weight; and they may learn to judge of the solid contents of bodies of different shapes, by comparing the observations of their sense of feeling and of sight. the measure of hollow bodies can be easily taken by pouring liquids into them, and then comparing the quantities of the liquids that fill vessels of different shapes. this is a very simple method of exercising the judgment of children; and, if they are allowed to try these little experiments for themselves, the amusement will fix the facts in their memory, and will associate pleasure with the habits of comparison. rousseau rewards emilius with cakes when he judges rightly; success, we think, is a better reward. rousseau was himself childishly fond of cakes and cream. the step which immediately follows comparison, is deduction. the cat is larger than the kitten; then a hole through which the cat can go, must be larger than a hole through which the kitten can go. long before a child can put this reasoning into words, he is capable of forming the conclusion, and we need not be in haste to make him announce it in mode and figure. we may see by the various methods which young children employ to reach what is above them, to drag, to push, to lift different bodies, that they reason; that is to say, that they adapt means to an end, before they can explain their own designs in words. look at a child building a house of cards; he dexterously balances every card as he floors the edifice; he raises story over story, and shows us that he has some design in view, though he would be utterly incapable of describing his intentions previously in words. we have formerly[ ] endeavoured to show how the vocabulary of our pupils may be gradually enlarged, exactly in proportion to their real knowledge. a great deal depends upon our attention to this proportion; if children have not a sufficient number of words to make their thoughts intelligible, we cannot assist them to reason by our conversation, we cannot communicate to them the result of our experience; they will have a great deal of useless labour in comparing objects, because they will not be able to understand the evidence of others, as they do not understand their language; and at last, the reasonings which they carry on in their own minds will be confused for want of signs to keep them distinct. on the contrary, if their vocabulary exceed their ideas, if they are taught a variety of words to which they connect no accurate meaning, it is impossible that they should express their thoughts with precision. as this is one of the most common errours in education, we shall dwell upon it more particularly. we have pointed out the mischief which is done to the understanding of children by the nonsensical conversation of common acquaintance.[ ] "should you like to be a king? what are you to be? are you to be a bishop, or a judge? had you rather be a general, or an admiral, my little dear?" are some of the questions which every one has probably heard proposed to children of five or six years old. children who have not learned by rote the expected answers to such interrogatories, stand in amazed silence upon these occasions; or else answer at random, having no possible means of forming any judgment upon such subjects. we have often thought, in listening to the conversations of grown up people with children, that the children reasoned infinitely better than their opponents. people, who are not interested in the education of children, do not care what arguments they use, what absurdities they utter in talking to them; they usually talk to them of things which are totally above their comprehension; and they instil errour and prejudice, without the smallest degree of compunction; indeed, without in the least knowing what they are about. we earnestly repeat our advice to parents, to keep their children as much as possible from such conversation: children will never reason, if they are allowed to hear or to talk nonsense. when we say, that children should not be suffered to talk nonsense, we should observe, that unless they have been in the habit of hearing foolish conversation, they very seldom talk nonsense. they may express themselves in a manner which we do not understand, or they may make mistakes from not accurately comprehending the words of others; but in these cases, we should not reprove or silence them; we should patiently endeavour to find out their hidden meaning. if we rebuke or ridicule them, we shall intimidate them, and either lessen their confidence in themselves or in us. in the one case, we prevent them from thinking; in the other, we deter them from communicating their thoughts; and thus we preclude ourselves from the possibility of assisting them in reasoning. to show parents the nature of the mistakes which children make from their imperfect knowledge of words, we shall give a few examples from real life. s----, at five years old, when he heard some one speak of _bay_ horses, said, he supposed that the bay horses must be the best horses. upon cross-questioning him, it appeared that he was led to this conclusion by the analogy between the sound of the words _bay_ and _obey_. a few days previous to this, his father had told him that spirited horses were always the most ready to obey. these erroneous analogies between the sound of words and their sense, frequently mislead children in reasoning; we should, therefore, encourage children to explain themselves fully, that we may rectify their errours. when s---- was between four and five years old, a lady who had taken him upon her lap playfully, put her hands before his eyes, and (we believe) asked if he liked to be blinded. s---- said no; and he looked very thoughtful. after a pause, he added, "smellie says, that children like better to be blinded than to have their legs tied." (s---- had read this in smellie two or three days before.) _father._ "are you of smellie's opinion?" _s----_ hesitated. _father._ "would you rather be blinded, or have your legs tied?" _s----._ "i would rather have my legs tied not quite tight." _father._ "do you know what is meant by _blinded_?" _s----._ "having their eyes put out." _father._ "how do you mean?" _s----._ "to put something into the eye to make the blood burst out; and then the blood would come all over it, and cover it, and stick to it, and hinder them from seeing--i don't know how." it is obvious, that whilst this boy's imagination pictured to him a bloody orb when he heard the word _blinded_, he was perfectly right in his reasoning in preferring to have his legs tied; but he did not judge of the proposition meant to be laid before him; he judged of another which he had formed for himself. his father explained to him, that smellie meant blindfolded, instead of blinded; a handkerchief was then tied round the boy's head, so as to hinder him from seeing, and he was made perfectly to understand the meaning of the word _blindfolded_. in such trifles as these, it may appear of little consequence to rectify the verbal errours of children; but exactly the same species of mistake, will prevent them from reasoning accurately in matters of consequence. it will not cost us much more trouble to detect these mistakes when the causes of them are yet recent; but it will give us infinite trouble to retrace thoughts which have passed in infancy. when prejudices, or the habits of reasoning inaccurately, have been formed, we cannot easily discover or remedy the remote trifling origin of the evil. when children begin to inquire about causes, they are not able to distinguish between coincidence and causation: we formerly observed the effect which this ignorance produces upon their temper; we must now observe its effect upon their understanding. a little reflection upon our own minds, will prevent us from feeling that stupid amazement, or from expressing that insulting contempt which the natural thoughts of children sometimes excite in persons who have frequently less understanding than their pupils. what account can we give of the connection between cause and effect? how is the idea, that one thing is the cause of another, first produced in our minds? all that we know is, that amongst human events, those which precede, are, in some cases, supposed to produce what follow. when we have observed, in several instances, that one event constantly precedes another, we believe, and expect, that these events will in future recur together. before children have had experience, it is scarcely possible that they should distinguish between fortuitous circumstances and causation; accidental coincidences of time, and juxta-position, continually lead them into errour. we should not accuse children of reasoning ill; we should not imagine that they are defective in judgment, when they make mistakes from deficient experience; we should only endeavour to make them delay to decide until they have repeated their experiments; and, at all events, we should encourage them to lay open their minds to us, that we may assist them by our superior knowledge. this spring, little w---- (three years old) was looking at a man who was mowing the grass before the door. it had been raining, and when the sun shone, the vapour began to rise from the grass. "does the man mowing _make_ the smoke rise from the grass?" said the little boy. he was not laughed at for this simple question. the man's mowing immediately preceded the rising of the vapour; the child had never observed a man mowing before, and it was absolutely impossible that he could tell what effects might be produced by it; he very naturally imagined, that the event which immediately preceded the rising of the vapour, was the cause of its rise; the sun was at a distance; the scythe was near the grass. the little boy showed by the tone of his inquiry, that he was in the philosophic state of doubt; had he been ridiculed for his question; had he been told that he talked nonsense, he would not, upon another occasion, have told us his thoughts, and he certainly could not have improved in reasoning. the way to improve children in their judgment with respect to causation, is to increase their knowledge, and to lead them to try experiments by which they may discover what circumstances are essential to the production of any given effect; and what are merely accessory, unimportant concomitants of the event.[ ] a child who, for the first time, sees blue and red paints mixed together to produce purple, could not be certain that the pallet on which these colours were mixed, the spatula with which they were tempered, were not necessary circumstances. in many cases, the vessels in which things are mixed are essential; therefore, a sensible child would repeat the experiment exactly in the same manner in which he had seen it succeed. this exactness should not be suffered to become indolent imitation, or superstitious adherence to particular forms. children should be excited to add or deduct particulars in trying experiments, and to observe the effects of these changes. in "chemistry," and "mechanics," we have pointed out a variety of occupations, in which the judgment of children may be exercised upon the immediate objects of their senses. it is natural, perhaps, that we should expect our pupils to show surprise at those things which excite surprise in our minds; but we should consider that almost every thing is new to children; and, therefore, there is scarcely any gradation in their astonishment. a child of three or four years old, would be as much amused, and, probably, as much surprised, by seeing a paper kite fly, as he could by beholding the ascent of a balloon. we should not attribute this to stupidity, or want of judgment, but simply to ignorance. a few days ago, w---- (three years old) who was learning his letters, was let sow an _o_ in the garden with mustard seed. w---- was much pleased with the operation. when the green plants appeared above ground, it was expected that w---- would be much surprised at seeing the exact shape of his _o_. he was taken to look at it; but he showed no surprise, no sort of emotion. we have advised that the judgment of children should be exercised upon the objects of their senses. it is scarcely possible that they should reason upon the subjects which are sometimes proposed to them: with respect to manners and society, they have had no experience, consequently they can form no judgments. by imprudently endeavouring to turn the attention of children to conversation that is unsuited to them, people may give the _appearance_ of early intelligence, and a certain readiness of repartee and fluency of expression; but these are transient advantages. smart, witty children, amuse the circle for a few hours, and are forgotten: and we may observe, that almost all children who are praised and admired for sprightliness and wit, reason absurdly, and continue ignorant. wit and judgment depend upon different opposite habits of the mind. wit searches for remote resemblances between objects or thoughts apparently dissimilar. judgment compares the objects placed before it, in order to find out their differences, rather than their resemblances. the comparisons of judgment may be slow: those of wit must be rapid. the same power of attention in children, may produce either wit or judgment. parents must decide in which faculty, or rather, in which of these habits of the mind, they wish their pupils to excel; and they must conduct their education accordingly. those who are desirous to make their pupils witty, must sacrifice some portion of their judgment to the acquisition of the talent for wit; they must allow their children to talk frequently at random. amongst a multitude of hazarded observations, a happy hit is now and then made: for these happy hits, children who are to be made wits should be praised; and they must acquire sufficient courage to speak from a cursory view of things; therefore the mistakes they make from superficial examination must not be pointed out to them; their attention must be turned to the comic, rather than to the serious side of objects; they must study the different meanings and powers of words; they should hear witty conversation, read epigrams, and comedies; and in all company they should be exercised before numbers in smart dialogue and repartee. when we mention the methods of educating a child to be witty, we at the same time point out the dangers of this education; and it is but just to warn parents against expecting inconsistent qualities from their pupils. those who steadily prefer the solid advantages of judgment, to the transient brilliancy of wit, should not be mortified when they see their children, perhaps, deficient at nine or ten years old in the showy talents for general conversation; they must bear to see their pupils appear slow; they must bear the contrast of flippant gayety and sober simplicity; they must pursue exactly an opposite course to that which has been recommended for the education of wits; they must never praise their pupils for hazarding observations; they must cautiously point out any mistakes that are made from a precipitate survey of objects; they should not harden their pupils against that feeling of shame, which arises in the mind from the perception of having uttered an absurdity; they should never encourage their pupils to play upon words; and their admiration of wit should never be vehemently or enthusiastically expressed. we shall give a few examples to convince parents, that children, whose reasoning powers have been cultivated, are rather slow in comprehending and in admiring wit. they require to have it explained, they want to settle the exact justice and morality of the repartee, before they will admire it. (november th, .) to day at dinner the conversation happened to turn upon wit. somebody mentioned the well known reply of the hackney coachman to pope. s----, a boy of nine years old, listened attentively, but did not seem to understand it; his father endeavoured to explain it to him. "pope was a little ill made man; his favourite exclamation was, 'god mend me!' now, when he was in a passion with the hackney coachman, he cried as usual, 'god mend me!' 'mend _you_, sir?' said the coachman; 'it would be easier to make a new one.' do you understand this now, s----?" s---- looked dull upon it, and, after some minutes consideration, said, "yes, pope was ill made; the man meant it would be better to make a new one than to mend him." s---- did not yet seem to taste the wit; he took the answer literally, and understood it soberly. immediately afterwards, the officer's famous reply to pope was told to s----. about ten days after this conversation, s---- said to his sister, "i wonder, m----, that people don't oftener laugh at crooked people; like the officer who called pope a note of interrogation." _m----._ "it would be ill natured to laugh at them." _s----._ "but you all praised that man for saying _that_ about pope. you did not think him ill natured." _mr. ----._ "no, because pope had been impertinent to him." _s----._ "how?" _m----._ "don't you remember, that when the officer said that a note of interrogation would make the passage clear, pope turned round, and looking at him with great contempt, asked if he knew what a note of interrogation was?" _s----._ "yes, i remember that; but i do not think that was very impertinent, because pope might not know whether the man knew it or not." _mr. ----._ "very true: but then you see, that pope took it for granted that the officer was extremely ignorant; a boy who is just learning to read knows what a note of interrogation is." _s----_ (thoughtfully.) "yes, it _was_ rude of pope; but then the man was an officer, and therefore, it was very likely that he might be ignorant; you know you said that officers were often very ignorant." _mr. ----._ "i said _often_; but not _always_. young men, i told you, who are tired of books, and ambitious of a red coat, often go into the army to save themselves the trouble of acquiring the knowledge necessary for other professions. a man cannot be a good lawyer, or a good physician, without having acquired a great deal of knowledge; but an officer need have little knowledge to know how to stand to be shot at. but though it may be true in general, that officers are often ignorant, it is not necessary that they should be so; a man in a red coat may have as much knowledge as a man in a black, or a blue one; therefore no sensible person should decide that a man is ignorant merely because he is an officer, as pope did." _s----._ "no, to be sure. i understand now." _m----._ "but i thought, s----, you understood this before." _mr. ----._ "he is very right not to let it pass without understanding it thoroughly. you are very right, s----, not to swallow things whole; chew them well." _s----_ looked as if he was still chewing. _m----._ "what are you thinking of s----?" _s----._ "of the man's laughing at pope for being crooked." _mr. ----._ "if pope had not said any thing rude to that man, the man would have done very wrong to have laughed at him. if the officer had walked into a coffee-house, and pointing at pope, had said, 'there's a little crooked thing like a note of interrogation,' people might have been pleased with his wit in seeing that resemblance, but they would have disliked his ill nature; and those who knew mr. pope, would probably have answered, 'yes sir, but that crooked little man is one of the most witty men in england; he is the great poet, mr. pope.' but when mr. pope had insulted the officer, the case was altered. now, if the officer had simply answered, when he was asked what a note of interrogation was, 'a little crooked thing;' and if he had looked at pope from head to foot as he spoke these words, every body's attention would have been turned upon pope's figure; but then the officer would have reproached him only for his personal defects: by saying, 'a little crooked thing _that asks questions_,' the officer reproved pope for his impertinence. pope had just asked him a question, and every body perceived the double application of the answer. it was an exact description of a note of interrogation, and of mr. pope. it is this sort of partial resemblance quickly pointed out between things, which at first appear very unlike, that surprises and pleases people, and they call it wit." how difficult it is to explain wit to a child! and how much more difficult to fix its value and morality! about a month after this conversation had passed, s---- returned to the charge: his mind had not been completely settled about _wit_. (january th, .) "so, s----, you don't yet understand wit, i see," said m---- to him, when he looked very grave at something that was said to him in jest. s---- immediately asked, "what _is_ wit?" _m----_ answered (laughing) "wit is the folly of grown up people." _mr. ----._ "how can you give the boy such an answer? come to me, my dear, and i'll try if i can give you a better. there are two kinds of wit, one which depends upon words, and another which depends upon thoughts. i will give you an instance of wit depending upon words: "hear yonder beggar, how he cries, i am so lame i cannot rise! if he tells truth, he lies." "do you understand that?" _s----._ "no! if he tells truth, he lies! no, he can't both tell truth and tell a lie at the same time; that's impossible." _mr. ----._ "then there is something in the words which you don't understand: in the _common_ sense of the words, they contradict each other; but try if you can find out any uncommon sense--any word which can be understood in two senses." _s----_ muttered the words, "if he tells truth, he lies," and looked indignant, but presently said, "oh, now i understand; the beggar was lying down; he lies, means he lies down, not he tells a lie." the perception of the double meaning of the words, did not seem to please this boy; on the contrary, it seemed to provoke him; and he appeared to think that he had wasted his time upon the discovery. _mr. ----._ "now i will give you an instance of wit that depends upon the ideas, rather than on the words. a man of very bad character had told falsehoods of another, who then made these two lines; "lie on, whilst my revenge shall be, to tell the very truth of thee." _s----_ approved of this immediately, and heartily, and recollected the only epigram he knew by rote, one which he had heard in conversation two or three months before this time. it was made upon a tall, stupid man, who had challenged another to make an epigram extempore upon him. unlike to robinson shall be my song; it shall be witty, and it shan't be long. at the time s---- first heard this epigram, he had been as slow in comprehending it as possible; but after it had been thoroughly explained, it pleased him, and remained fixed in his memory. mr. ---- observed, that this epigram contained wit both in words and in ideas: and he gave s----one other example. "there were two contractors; i mean people who make a bargain with government, or with those who govern the country, to supply them with certain things at a certain price; there were two contractors, one of whom was employed to supply government with corn; the other agreed to supply government with rum. now, you know, corn may be called grain, and rum may be called spirit. both these contractors cheated in their bargain; both their names were the same; and the following epigram was made on them: "both of a name, lo! two contractors come; one cheats in corn, and t'other cheats in rum. which is the greater, if you can, explain, a rogue in spirit, or a rogue in grain?" "_spirit_," continued mr. ----, "has another sense, you know--will, intention, soul; he has the spirit of a rogue; she has the spirit of contradiction. and grain has also another meaning; the grain of this table, the grain of your coat. dyed in grain, means dyed into the substance of the material, so that the dye can't be washed out. a rogue in grain, means a man whose habit of cheating is fixed in his mind: and it is difficult to determine which is the worst, a man who has the wish, or a man who has the habit, of doing wrong. at first it seems as if you were only asked which was the worst, to cheat in selling grain, or in selling spirit; but the concealed meaning, makes the question both sense and wit." these detailed examples, we fear, may appear tiresome; but we knew not how, without them, to explain ourselves fully. we should add, for the consolation of those who admire wit, and we are amongst the number ourselves, that it is much more likely that wit should be engrafted upon judgment, than that judgment should be engrafted upon wit. the boy whom we have just mentioned, who was so slow in comprehending the nature of wit, was asked whether he could think of any answer that pope might have made to the officer who called him a note of interrogation. _s----._ "is there any note which means _answer_?" _mr. ----._ "i don't know what you mean." _s----._ "any note which means answer, as - - - - like the note of interrogation, which shows that a question is asked?" _mr. ----._ "no; but if there were, what then?" _s----._ "pope might have called the man that note." s---- could not exactly explain his idea; somebody who was present said, that if he had been in pope's place, he would have called the officer a note of admiration. s---- would have made this answer, if he had been familiarly acquainted with the _name_ of the note of admiration. his judgment taught him how to set about looking for a proper answer; but it could not lead him to the exact place for want of experience. we hope that we have, in the chapter on books, fully explained the danger of accustoming children to read what they do not understand. poetry, they cannot early comprehend; and even if they do understand it, they cannot improve their reasoning faculty by poetic studies. the analogies of poetry, and of reasoning, are very different. "the muse," says an excellent judge upon this subject, "would make but an indifferent school-mistress." we include under the head poetry, all books in which declamation and eloquence are substituted for reasoning. we should accustom our pupils to judge strictly of the reasoning which they meet with in books; no names of high authority should ever preclude an author's arguments from examination. the following passage from st. pierre's etudes de la nature, was read to two boys: h----, years old; s----, years old. "hurtful insects, present (the same) oppositions and signs of destruction; the gnat, thirsty of human blood, announces himself to our sight by the white spots with which his brown body is speckled; and by the shrill sound of his wings, which interrupts the calm of the groves, he announces himself to our ear as well as to our eye. the carnivorous wasp is streaked like the tiger, with bands of black over a yellow ground." h---- and s---- both at once exclaimed, that these spots in the gnat, and streaks in the wasp, had nothing to do with their stinging us. "the buzzing of the gnat," said s----, "would, i think, be a very agreeable sound to us, if we did not know that the gnat would sting, and that it was coming near us; and, as to the wasp, i remember stopping one day upon the stairs to look at the beautiful black and yellow body of a wasp. i did not think of danger, nor of its stinging me then, and i did not know that it was like the tiger. after i had been stung by a wasp, i did not think a wasp such a beautiful animal. i think it is very often from our knowing that animals can hurt us, that we think them ugly. we might as well say," continued s----, pointing to a crocus which was near him, "we might as well say, that a man who has a yellow face has the same disposition as that crocus, or that the crocus is in every thing like the man, because it is yellow." cicero's "curious consolation for deafness" is properly noticed by mr. hume. it was read to s---- a few days ago, to try whether he could detect the sophistry: he was not previously told what was thought of it by others. "how many languages are there," says cicero, "which you do not understand! the punic, spanish, gallic, egyptian, &c. with regard to all these, you are as if you were deaf, and yet you are indifferent about the matter. is it then so great a misfortune to be deaf to one language more?" "i don't think," said s----, "that was at all a good way to console the man, because it was putting him in mind that he was more deaf than he thought he was. he did not think of those languages, perhaps, till he was put in mind that he could not hear them." in stating any question to a child, we should avoid letting our own opinion be known, lest we lead or intimidate his mind. we should also avoid all appearance of anxiety, all impatience for the answer; our pupil's mind should be in a calm state when he is to judge: if we turn his sympathetic attention to our hopes and fears, we agitate him, and he will judge by our countenances rather than by comparing the objects or propositions which are laid before him. some people, in arguing with children, teach them to be disingenuous by the uncandid manner in which they proceed; they show a desire for victory, rather than for truth; they state the arguments only on their own side of the question, and they will not allow the force of those which are brought against them. children are thus piqued, instead of being convinced, and in their turn they become zealots in support of their own opinions; they hunt only for arguments in their own favour, and they are mortified when a good reason is brought on the opposite side of the question to that on which they happen to have enlisted. to prevent this, we should never argue, or suffer others to argue for victory with our pupils; we should not praise them for their cleverness in finding out arguments in support of their own opinion; but we should praise their candour and good sense when they perceive and acknowledge the force of their opponent's arguments. they should not be exercised as advocates, but as judges; they should be encouraged to keep their minds impartial, to sum up the reasons which they have heard, and to form their opinion from these without regard to what they may have originally asserted. we should never triumph over children for changing their opinion. "i thought you were on _my_ side of the question; or, i thought you were on the other side of the question just now!" is sometimes tauntingly said to an ingenuous child, who changes his opinion when he hears a new argument. you think it a proof of his want of judgment, that he changes his opinion in this manner; that he vibrates continually from side to side: let him vibrate, presently he will be fixed. do you think it a proof that your scales are bad, because they vibrate with every additional weight that is added to either side? idle people sometimes amuse themselves with trying the judgment of children, by telling them improbable, extravagant stories, and then ask the simple listeners whether they believe what has been told them. the readiness of belief in children will always be proportioned to their experience of the veracity of those with whom they converse; consequently children, who live with those who speak truth to them, will scarcely ever be inclined to doubt the veracity of strangers. such trials of the judgment of our pupils should never be permitted. why should the example of lying be set before the honest minds of children, who are far from silly when they show simplicity? they guide themselves by the best rules, by which even a philosopher in similar circumstances could guide himself. the things asserted are extraordinary, but the children believe them, because they have never had any experience of the falsehood of human testimony. the socratic mode of reasoning is frequently practised upon children. people arrange questions artfully, so as to bring them to whatever conclusion they please. in this mode of reasoning, much depends upon getting the first move; the child has very little chance of having it, his preceptor usually begins first with a peremptory voice, "now answer me this question!" the pupil, who knows that the interrogatories are put with a design to entrap him, is immediately alarmed, and instead of giving a direct, candid answer to the question, is always looking forward to the possible consequences of his reply; or he is considering how he may evade the snare that is laid for him. under these circumstances he is in imminent danger of learning the shuffling habits of cunning; he has little chance of learning the nature of open, manly investigation. preceptors, who imagine that it is necessary to put on very grave faces, and to use much learned apparatus in teaching the art of reasoning, are not nearly so likely to succeed as those who have the happy art of encouraging children to lay open their minds freely, and who can make every pleasing trifle an exercise for the understanding. if it be playfully pointed out to a child that he reasons ill, he smiles and corrects himself; but you run the hazard of making him positive in errour, if you reprove or ridicule him with severity. it is better to seize the subjects that accidentally arise in conversation, than formally to prepare subjects for discussion. "the king's stag hounds," (says mr. white of selborne, in his entertaining observations on quadrupeds,[ ]) "the king's stag hounds came down to alton, attended by a huntsman and six yeoman prickers with horns, to try for the stag that has haunted hartley-wood and its environs for so long a time. many hundreds of people, horse and foot, attended the dogs to see the deer unharboured; but though the huntsman drew hartley-wood, and long-coppice, and shrub-wood, and temple-hangers, and in their way back, hartley, and wardleham-hangers, yet no stag could be found. "the royal pack, _accustomed to have the deer turned out before them, never drew the coverts with any address and spirit_," &c. children, who are accustomed to have the game started and turned out before them by their preceptors, may, perhaps, like the royal pack, lose their wonted address and spirit, and may be disgracefully _at a fault_ in the public chase. preceptors should not help their pupils out in argument, they should excite them to explain and support their own observations. many ladies show in general conversation the powers of easy raillery joined to reasoning, unincumbered with pedantry. if they would employ these talents in the education of their children, they would probably be as well repaid for their exertions, as they can possibly be by the polite, but transient applause of the visiters to whom they usually devote their powers of entertaining. a little praise or blame, a smile from a mother, or a frown, a moments attention, or a look of cold neglect, have the happy, or the fatal power of repressing or of exciting the energy of a child, of directing his understanding to useful or pernicious purposes. scarcely a day passes in which children do not make some attempt to reason about the little events which interest them, and, upon these occasions, a mother, who joins in conversation with her children, may instruct them in the art of reasoning without the parade of logical disquisitions. mr. locke has done mankind an essential service, by the candid manner in which he has spoken of some of the learned forms of argumentation. a great proportion of society, he observes, are unacquainted with these forms, and have not heard the name of aristotle; yet, without the aid of syllogisms, they can reason sufficiently well for all the useful purposes of life, often much better than those who have been disciplined in the schools. it would indeed "be putting one man sadly over the head of another," to confine the reasoning faculty to the disciples of aristotle, to any sect or system, or to any forms of disputation. mr. locke has very clearly shown, that syllogisms do not assist the mind in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas; but, on the contrary, that they invert the natural order in which the thoughts should be placed, and in which they must be placed, before we can draw a just conclusion. to children who are not familiarized with scholastic terms, the sound of harsh words, and quaint language, unlike any thing that they hear in common conversation, is alone sufficient to alarm their imagination with some confused apprehension of difficulty. in this state of alarm they are seldom sufficiently masters of themselves, either to deny or to acknowledge an adept's major, minor, or conclusion. even those who are most expert in syllogistical reasoning, do not often apply it to the common affairs of life, in which reasoning is just as much wanted as it is in the abstract questions of philosophy; and many argue, and conduct themselves with great prudence and precision, who might, perhaps, be caught on the horns of a dilemma; or who would infallibly fall victims to _the crocodile_. young people should not be ignorant, however, of these boasted forms of argumentation; and it may, as they advance in the knowledge of words, be a useful exercise to resist the attacks of sophistry. no ingenious person would wish to teach a child to employ them. as defensive weapons, it is necessary, that young people should have the command of logical terms; as offensive weapons, these should never be used. they should know the evolutions, and be able to perform the exercise of a logician, according to the custom of the times, according to the usage of different nations; but they should not attach any undue importance to this technical art: they should not trust to it in the day of battle. we have seen syllogisms, crocodiles, enthymemas, sorites, &c. explained and tried upon a boy of nine or ten years old in playful conversation, so that he became accustomed to the terms without learning to be pedantic in the abuse of them; and his quickness in reasoning was increased by exercise in detecting puerile sophisms; such as that of _the cretans_--gorgias and his bargain about the winning of his first cause. in the following sorites[ ] of themistocles--"my son commands his mother; his mother commands me; i command the athenians; the athenians command greece; greece commands europe; europe commands the whole earth; therefore my son commands the whole earth"--the sophism depends upon the inaccurate use of the _commands_, which is employed in different senses in the different propositions. this errour was without difficulty detected by s---- at ten years old; and we make no doubt that any unprejudiced boy of the same age, would immediately point out the fallacy without hesitation; but we do not feel quite sure that a boy exercised in logic, who had been taught to admire and reverence the ancient figures of rhetoric, would with equal readiness detect the sophism. perhaps it may seem surprising, that the same boy, who judged so well of this sorites of themistocles, should a few months before have been easily entrapped by the following simple dilemma. _m----._ "we should avoid what gives us pain." _s----._ "yes, to be sure." _m----._ "whatever burns us, gives us pain." _s----._ "yes, that it does!" _m----._ "we should then avoid whatever burns us." to this conclusion s---- heartily assented, for he had but just recovered from the pain of a burn. _m----._ "fire burns us." _s----._ "yes, i know that." _m----._ "we should then avoid fire." _s----._ "yes." this hasty _yes_ was extorted from the boy by the mode of interrogatory; but he soon perceived his mistake. _m----._ "we should avoid fire. what when we are very cold?" _s----._ "oh, no: i meant to say, that we should avoid a certain degree of fire. we should not go _too_ near the fire. we should not go _so_ near as to burn ourselves." children who have but little experience, frequently admit assertions to be true in general, which are only true in particular instances; and this is often attributed to their want of judgment: it should be attributed to their want of experience. experience, and nothing else, can rectify these mistakes: if we attempt to correct them by words, we shall merely teach our pupils to argue about terms, not to reason. some of the questions and themes which are given to boys may afford us instances of this injudicious education. "is eloquence advantageous, or hurtful to a state?" what a vast range of ideas, what variety of experience in men and things should a person possess, who is to discuss this question! yet it is often discussed by unfortunate scholars of eleven or twelve years old. "what is the greatest good?" the answer expected by a preceptor to this question, obviously is, virtue; and, if a boy can, in decent language, write a page or two about _pleasure's_ being a transient, and virtue a permanent good, his master flatters himself that he has early taught him to reason philosophically. but what ideas does the youth annex to the words pleasure and virtue? or does he annex any? if he annex no idea to the words, he is merely talking about sounds. all reasoning ultimately refers to matters of fact: to judge whether any piece of reasoning is within the comprehension of a child, we must consider whether the facts to which it refers are within his experience. the more we increase his knowledge of facts, the more we should exercise him in reasoning upon them; but we should teach him to examine carefully before he admits any thing to be a fact, or any assertion to be true. experiment, as to substances, is the test of truth; and attention to his own feelings, as to matters of feeling. comparison of the evidence of others with the general laws of nature, which he has learned from his own observation, is another mode of obtaining an accurate knowledge of facts. m. condillac, in his art of reasoning, maintains, that the evidence of reason depends solely upon our perception of the _identity_, or, to use a less formidable word, _sameness_, of one proposition with another. "a demonstration," he says, "is only a chain of propositions, in which the same ideas, passing from one to the other, differ only because they are differently expressed; the evidence of any reasoning consists solely in its identity." m. condillac[ ] exemplifies this doctrine by translating this proposition, "the measure of every triangle is the product of its height by half its base," into self-evident, or, as he calls them, identical propositions. the whole ultimately referring to the ideas which we have obtained by our senses of a triangle; of its base, of measure, height, and number. if a child had not previously acquired any one of these ideas, it would be in vain to explain one term by another, or to translate one phrase or proposition into another; they might be identical, but they would not be self-evident propositions to the pupil; and no conclusion, except what relates merely to words, could be formed from such reasoning. the moral which we should draw from condillac's observations for practical education must be, that clear ideas should first be acquired by the exercise of the senses, and that afterwards, when we reason about things in words, we should use few and accurate terms, that we may have as little trouble as possible in changing or translating one phrase or proposition into another. children, if they are not overawed by authority, if they are encouraged in the habit of observing their own sensations, and if they are taught precision in the use of the words by which they describe them, will probably reason accurately where their own feelings are concerned. in appreciating the testimony of others, and in judging of chances and probability, we must not expect our pupils to proceed very rapidly. there is more danger that they should overrate, than that they should undervalue, the evidence of others; because, as we formerly stated, we take it for granted, that they have had little experience of falsehood. we should, to preserve them from credulity, excite them in all cases where it can be obtained, never to rest satisfied without the strongest species of evidence, that of their own senses. if a child says, "i am sure of such a thing," we should immediately examine into his reasons for believing it. "mr. a. or mr. b. told me so," is not a sufficient cause of belief, unless the child has had long experience of a. and b.'s truth and accuracy; and, at all events, the indolent habit of relying upon the assertions of others, instead of verifying them, should not be indulged. it would be waste of time to repeat those experiments, of the truth of which the uniform experience of our lives has convinced us: we run no hazard, for instance, in believing any one who simply asserts, that they have seen an apple fall from a tree; this assertion agrees with the great natural _law of gravity_, or, in other words, with the uniform experience of mankind: but if any body told us, that they had seen an apple hanging self-poised in the air, we should reasonably suspect the truth of their observation, or of their evidence. this is the first rule which we can most readily teach our pupils in judging of evidence. we are not speaking of children from four to six years old, for every thing is almost equally extraordinary to them; but, when children are about ten or eleven, they have acquired a sufficient variety of facts to form comparisons, and to judge to a certain degree of the probability of any new fact that is related. in reading and in conversation we should now exercise them in forming judgments, where we know that they have the means of comparison. "do you believe such a thing to be true? and why do you believe it? can you account for such a thing?" are questions we should often ask at this period of their education. on hearing extraordinary facts, some children will not be satisfied with vague assertions; others content themselves with saying, "it is so, i read it in a book." we should have little hopes of those who swallow every thing they read in a book; we are always pleased to see a child hesitate and doubt, and require positive proof before he believes. the taste for the marvellous, is strong in ignorant minds; the wish to account for every new appearance, characterizes the cultivated pupil. a lady told a boy of nine years old (s----) the following story, which she had just met with in "the curiosities of literature." an officer, who was confined in the bastille, used to amuse himself by playing on the flute: one day he observed, that a number of spiders came down from their webs, and hung round him as if listening to his music; a number of mice also came from their holes, and retired as soon as he stopped. the officer had a great dislike to mice; he procured a cat from the keeper of the prison, and when the mice were entranced by his music, he let the cat out amongst them. s---- was much displeased by this man's treacherous conduct towards the poor mice, and his indignation for some moments suspended his reasoning faculty; but, when s---- had sufficiently expressed his indignation against the officer in the affair of the mice, he began to question the truth of the story; and he said, that he did not think it was certain, that the mice and spiders came to listen to the music. "i do not know about the mice," said he, "but i think, perhaps, when the officer played upon the flute, he set the air in motion, and shook the cobwebs, so as to disturb the spiders." we do not, nor did the child think, that this was a satisfactory account of the matter; but we mention it as an instance of the love of investigation, which we wish to encourage. the difficulty of judging concerning the truth of evidence increases, when we take moral causes into the account. if we had any suspicion, that a man who told us that he had seen an apple fall from a tree, had himself pulled the apple down and stolen it, we should set the probability of his telling a falsehood, and his motive for doing so, against his evidence; and though according to the natural physical course of things, there would be no improbability in his story, yet there might arise improbability from his character for dishonesty; and thus we should feel ourselves in doubt concerning the fact. but if two people agreed in the same testimony, our doubt would vanish; the dishonest man's doubtful evidence would be corroborated, and we should believe, notwithstanding his general character, in the truth of his assertion in this instance. we could make the matter infinitely more complicated, but what has been said will be sufficient to suggest to preceptors the difficulty which their young and inexperienced pupils must feel, in forming judgments of facts where physical and moral probabilities are in direct opposition to each other. we wish that a writer equal to such a task would write trials for children as exercises for their judgment; beginning with the simplest, and proceeding gradually to the more complicated cases in which moral reasonings can be used. we do not mean, that it would be advisable to initiate young readers in the technical forms of law; but the general principles of justice, upon which all law is founded, might, we think, be advantageously exemplified. such trials would entertain children extremely. there is a slight attempt at this kind of composition, we mean in a little trial in evenings at home; and we have seen children read it with great avidity. cyrus's judgment about the two coats, and the ingenious story of the olive merchant's cause, rejudged by the sensible child in the arabian tales, have been found highly interesting to a young audience. we should prefer truth to fiction: if we could select any instances from real life, any trials suited to the capacity of young people, they would be preferable to any which the most ingenious writer could invent for our purpose. a gentleman who has taken his two sons, one of them ten, and the other fifteen years old, to hear trials at his county assizes, found by the account which the boys gave of what they had heard, that they had been interested, and that they were capable of understanding the business. allowance must be made at first for the bustle and noise of a public place, and for the variety of objects which distract the attention. much of the readiness of forming judgments depends upon the power of discarding and obliterating from our mind all the superfluous circumstances; it may be useful to exercise our pupils, by telling them now and then stories in the confused manner in which they are sometimes related by puzzled witnesses; let them reduce the heterogeneous circumstances to order, make a clear statement of the case for themselves, and try if they can point out the facts on which the decision principally rests. this is not merely education for a lawyer; the powers of reasoning and judgment, when we have been exercised in this manner, may be turned to any art or profession. we should, if we were to try the judgment of children, observe, whether in unusual circumstances they can apply their former principles, and compare the new objects that are placed before them without perplexity. we have sometimes found, that on subjects entirely new to them, children, who have been used to reason, can lay aside the circumstances that are not essential, and form a distinct judgment for themselves, independently of the opinion of others. last winter the entertaining life of the celebrated miser mr. elwes was read aloud in a family, in which there were a number of children. mr. elwes, once, as he was _walking_ home on a dark night, in london, ran against a chair pole and bruised both his shins. his friends sent for a surgeon. elwes was alarmed at the idea of expense, and he laid the surgeon the amount of his bill, that the leg which he took under his own protection would get well sooner than that which was put under the surgeon's care; at the same time mr. elwes promised to put nothing to the leg of which he took charge. mr. elwes favourite leg got well sooner than that which the surgeon had undertaken to cure, and mr. elwes won his wager. in a note upon this transaction his biographer says, "this wager would have been a bubble bet if it had been brought before the jockey-club, because mr. elwes, though he promised to put nothing to the leg under his own protection, took velnos' vegetable sirup during the time of its cure." c---- (a girl of twelve years old) observed when this anecdote was read, that "still the wager was a fair wager, because _the medicine_ which mr. elwes took, if it was of any use, must have been of use to both legs; therefore the surgeon and mr. elwes had equal advantage from it." c---- had never heard of the jockey-club, or of bubble bets before, and she used the word _medicine_, because she forgot the name of velnos' vegetable sirup. we have observed,[ ] that works of criticism are unfit for children, and teach them rather to remember what others say of authors, than to judge of the books themselves impartially: but, when we object to works of criticism, we do not mean to object to criticism; we think it an excellent exercise for the judgment, and we have ourselves been so well corrected, and so kindly assisted by the observations of young critics, that we cannot doubt their capacity. this book has been read to a jury of young critics, who gave their utmost attention to it for about half an hour at a sitting, and many amendments have been made from their suggestions. in the chapter on obstinacy, for instance, when we were asserting, that children sometimes forget their old bad habits, and do not consider these as a part of themselves, there was this allusion. "as the snake, when he casts his skin, leaves the slough behind him, and winds on his way in new and beautiful colours." the moment this sentence was read, it was objected to by the audience. mr. ---- objected to the word slough, as an ill sounding, disagreeable word, and which conveyed at first to the eye the idea of a wet boggy place; such as the slough of despond. at last s----, who had been pondering over the affair in silence, exclaimed, "but i think there's another fault in the allusion; do not snakes cast their skins every year? then these _new and beautiful colours_, which are the good habits, must be thrown aside and forgotten the next time; but that should not be." this criticism appeared conclusive even to the author, and the sentence was immediately expunged. when young people have acquired a command of language, we must be careful lest their fluency and their ready use of synonymous expressions should lessen the accuracy of their reasoning, mr. horne tooke has ably shown the connection between the study of language and the art of reasoning. it is not necessary to make our pupils profound grammarians, or etymologists, but attention to the origin, abbreviations, and various meanings of words, will assist them not only to speak, but to think and argue with precision. this is not a study of abstract speculation, but of practical, daily utility; half the disputes, and much of the misery of the world, originate and perpetuate themselves by the inaccurate use of words. one party uses a word in _this_ sense, the opposite party uses the same word in another sense; all their reasonings appear absurd to each other; and, instead of explaining them, they quarrel. this is not the case merely in _philosophical_ disputes between authors, but it happens continually in the busy, active scenes of life. even whilst we were writing this passage, in the newspaper of to-day, we met with an instance that is sufficiently striking. "the accusation against me," says sir sidney smith, in his excellent letter to pichegru, expostulating upon his unmerited confinement, "brought forward by _your_ justice of the peace, was, that i was the enemy of the republic. you know, general, that with military men, the word _enemy_ has merely a technical signification, without expressing the least character of hatred. you will readily admit this principle, the _result_ of which is, that i ought not to be persecuted for the injury i have been enabled to do whilst i carried arms against you." here the argument between two generals, one of whom is pleading for his liberty, if not for his life, turns upon the meaning and construction of a single word. accuracy of reasoning, and some knowledge of language, may, it appears, be of essential service in all professions. it is not only necessary to attend to the exact meaning which is avowedly affixed to any terms used in argument, but is also useful to attend to the thoughts which are often suggested to the disputants by certain words. thus, the words happiness and beauty, suggest, in conversation, very different ideas to different men; and in arguing, concerning these, they could never come to a conclusion. even persons who agree in the same definition of a word, frequently do not sufficiently attend to the ideas which the word suggests; to the association of thoughts and emotions which it excites; and, consequently, they cannot strictly abide by their own definition, nor can they discover where the errour lies. we have observed,[ ] that the imagination is powerfully affected by words that suggest long trains of ideas; our reasonings are influenced in the same manner, and the elliptical figures of speech are used in reasoning as well as in poetry. "i would do so and so, if i were alexander." "and so would i, if i were parmenio;" is a short reply, which suggests a number of ideas, and a train of reasoning. to those who cannot supply the intermediate ideas, the answer would not appear either sublime or rational. young people, when they appear to admire any compressed reasoning, should be encouraged to show that they can supply the thoughts and reasons that are not expressed. vivacious children, will be disgusted, however, if they are required to detail upon the subject;[ ] all that is necessary, is to be sure that they actually comprehend what they admire. sometimes a question that appears simple, involves the consideration of others which are difficult. whenever a preceptor cannot go to the bottom of the business, he will do wisely to say so at once to his pupil, instead of attempting a superficial or evasive reply. for instance, if a child was to hear that the dutch burn and destroy quantities of spice, the produce of their india islands, he would probably express some surprise, and perhaps some indignation. if a preceptor were to say, "the dutch have a right to do what they please with what is their own, and the spice is their own," his pupil would not yet be satisfied; he would probably say, "yes, they have a right to do what they please with what is their own; but why should they destroy what is useful?" the preceptor might answer, if he chose to make a foolish answer, "the dutch follow their own interest in burning the spice; they sell what remains at a higher price; the market would be overstocked if they did not burn some of their spice." even supposing the child to understand the terms, this would not be a satisfactory answer; nor could a satisfactory answer be given, without discussing the nature of commerce, and the _justice_ of monopolies. where one question in this manner involves another, we should postpone the discussion, if it cannot be completely made; the road may be just pointed out, and the pupil's curiosity may be excited to future inquiry. it is even better to be ignorant, than to have superficial knowledge. a philosopher, who himself excelled in accuracy of reasoning, recommends the study of mathematics, to improve the acuteness and precision of the reasoning faculty.[ ] to study any thing accurately, will have an excellent effect upon the mind; and we may afterwards direct the judgment to whatever purposes we please. it has often been remarked, as a reproach upon men of science and literature, that those who judge extremely well of books, and of abstract philosophical questions, do not show the same judgment in the active business of life: a man, undoubtedly, may be a good mathematician, a good critic, an excellent writer, and may yet not show, or rather not employ, much judgment in his conduct: his powers of reasoning cannot be deficient; the habit of employing those powers in conducting himself, he should have been taught by early education. moral reasoning, and the habit of acting in consequence of the conviction of the judgment, we call prudence; a virtue of so much consequence to all the other virtues; a virtue of so much consequence to ourselves and to our friends, that it surely merits a whole chapter to itself in practical education. footnotes: [ ] v. chapter on attention. [ ] v. tasks. [ ] chapter on acquaintance. [ ] v. stewart. [ ] a naturalist's calendar, by the late rev. gilbert white, m. a. published by dr. aikin, printed for b. and j. white, fleet street. [ ] v. deinology; where there are many entertaining examples of the figures of rhetoric. [ ] une dèmonstration est donc une suite de propositions, ou les mêmes idées passant de l'une à l'autre, ne différent que parce qu'elles sont énonceès différement; et l'évidence d'un raisonnement consiste uniquement dans l'identité. v. art de raisonner, p. . [ ] v. chapter on books. [ ] v. chapter on imagination. [ ] v. attention. [ ] locke. essay on the conduct of the human understanding. chapter xxiv. on prudence and economy. voltaire says, that the king of prussia always wrote with one kind of enthusiasm, and acted with another. it often happens, that men judge with one degree of understanding, and conduct themselves with another;[ ] hence the common-place remarks on the difference between theory and practice; hence the observation, that it is easy to be prudent for other people, but extremely difficult to be prudent for ourselves. prudence is a virtue compounded of judgment and resolution: we do not here speak of that narrow species of prudence, which is more properly called worldly wisdom; but we mean that enlarged, comprehensive wisdom, which, after taking a calm view of the objects of happiness, steadily prefers the greatest portion of felicity. this is not a selfish virtue; for, according to our definition, benevolence, as one of the greatest sources of our pleasures, must be included in the truly prudent man's estimate. two things are necessary to make any person prudent, the power to judge, and the habit of acting in consequence of his conviction. we have, in the preceding chapter, as far as we were able, suggested the best methods of cultivating the powers of reasoning in our pupils; we must consider now how these can be applied immediately to their conduct, and associated with habits of action. instead of deciding always for our young pupils, we should early accustom them to choose for themselves about every trifle which is interesting to childhood: if they choose wisely, they should enjoy the natural reward of their prudence; and if they decide rashly, they should be suffered to feel the consequence of their own errour. experience, it is said, makes even fools wise; and the sooner we can give experience, the sooner we shall teach wisdom. but we must not substitute belief upon trust for belief upon conviction. when a little boy says, "i did not eat any more custard, because mamma told me that the custard would make me sick," he is only obedient, he is not prudent; he submits to his mother's judgment, he does not use his own. when obedience is out of the question, children sometimes follow the opinions of others; of this we formerly gave an instance (v. toys) in the poor boy, who chose a gilt coach, because his mamma "_and every body said it was the prettiest_," whilst he really preferred the useful cart: we should never prejudice them either by our _wisdom_ or our folly. a sensible little boy of four years old had seen somebody _telling fortunes_ in the grounds of coffee; but when he had a cup of coffee given to him, he drank it all, saying, "coffee is better than fortune!" when their attention is not turned to divine what the spectators think and feel, children will have leisure to consult their own minds, and to compare their own feelings. as this has been already spoken of,[ ] we shall not dwell upon it; we only mention it as a necessary precaution in teaching prudence. some parents may perhaps fear, that, if they were to allow children to choose upon every trifling occasion for themselves, they would become wilful and troublesome: this certainly will be the effect, if we make them think that there is a pleasure in the exercise of free-will, independently of any good that may be obtained by judicious choice. "now, my dear, you shall have _your_ choice! you shall choose for _yourself_! you shall have your _free_ choice!" are expressions that may be pronounced in such a tone, and with such an emphasis to a child, as immediately to excite a species of triumphant ecstasy from the mere idea of having his _own_ free choice. by a different accent and emphasis we may repress the ideas of triumph, and, without intimidating the pupil, we may turn his mind to the difficulties, rather than the glory of being in a situation to decide for himself. we must not be surprised at the early imprudence of children; their mistakes, when they first are allowed to make a choice, are inevitable; all their sensations are new to them, consequently they cannot judge of what they shall like or dislike. if some of lord macartney's suite had, on his return from the late embassy to china, brought home some plant whose smell was perfectly unknown to europeans, would it have been possible for the greatest philosopher in england to have decided, if he had been asked, whether he should like the unknown perfume? children, for the first five or six years of their lives, are in the situation of this philosopher, relatively to external objects. we should never reproachfully say to a child, "you asked to smell such a thing; you asked to see such a thing; and now you have had your wish, you don't like them!" how can the child possibly judge of what he shall like or dislike, before he has tried? let him try experiments upon his own feelings; the more accurate knowledge he acquires, the sooner he will be enabled to choose _prudently_. you may expedite his progress by exciting him to compare each new sensation with those to which he is already familiarized; this will counteract that love of novelty which is often found dangerous to prudence; if the mind is employed in comparing, it cannot be dazzled by new objects. children often imagine, that what they like for the present minute, they shall continue to like for ever; they have not learnt from experiment, that the most agreeable sensations fatigue, if they are prolonged or frequently repeated; they have not learnt, that all violent stimuli are followed by weariness or ennui. the sensible preceptor will not insist upon his pupil's knowing these things by inspiration, nor will he expect that his assertions or prophecies should be implicitly believed; he will wait till the child _feels_, and at that moment he will excite his pupil to observe his own feelings. "you thought that you should never be tired of smelling that rose, or of looking at that picture; now you perceive that you _are_ tired: remember this; it may be of use to you another time." if this be said in a friendly manner, it will not pique the child to defend his past choice, but it will direct his future judgment. young people are often reproached for their imprudence in preferring a small present pleasure to a large distant advantage: this errour also arises from inexperience, not from want of judgment, or deficiency in strength of mind. when that which has been the future, has in its turn become present, children begin to have some idea of the nature of time, and they can then form some comparisons between the value of present and future pleasures. this is a very slow process; old people calculate and depend upon the distant future more than the young, not always from their increased wisdom or prudence, but merely from their increased experience, and consequent belief that the future will in time arrive. it is imprudent in old people to depend upon the future; if they were to reason upon the chance of their lives, they ought not to be secure of its arrival; yet habit in this instance, as in many others, is more powerful than reason: in all the plans of elderly people, there is seldom any errour from impatience as to the future; there often appear gross errours in their security as to its arrival. if these opposite habits could be mixed in the minds of the old and of the young, it would be for their mutual advantage. it is not possible to _infuse_ experience into the mind; our pupils must feel for themselves: but, by teaching them to observe their own feelings, we may abridge their labour; a few lessons will teach a great deal when they are properly applied. to teach children to calculate and compare their present and future pleasures, we may begin by fixing short intervals of time for our experiments; an hour, a day, a week, perhaps, are periods of time to which their imagination will easily extend; they can measure and compare their feelings within these spaces of time, and we may lead them to observe their own errours in not providing for the future. "now friday is come; last monday you thought friday would never come. if you had not cut away all your pencil last week, you would have had some left to draw with to-day. another time you will manage better." we should also lead them to compare their ideas of any given pleasure, before and after the period of its arrival. "you thought last summer that you should like making snow balls in winter, better than making hay in summer. now you have made snow-balls to-day; and you remember what you felt when you were making hay last summer; do you like the snow-ball pleasure, or the hay-making pleasure the best?" v. berquin's quatre saisons. if our pupils, when they have any choice to make, prefer a small present gratification to a great future pleasure, we should not, at the moment of their decision, reproach their imprudence, but we should _steadily make them abide by their choice_; and when the time arrives at which the greater pleasure might have been enjoyed, we should remark the circumstance, but not with a tone of reproach, for it is their affair, not ours. "you preferred having a sheet of paper the moment you wanted it last week, to the having a quire of paper this week." "oh, but," says the child, "i wanted a sheet of paper very much then, but i did not consider how soon this week would come--i wish i had chosen the quire." "then remember what you feel now, and you will be able to choose better upon another occasion." we should always refer to the pupils' own feelings, and look forward to their future advantage. the reason why so few young people attend to advice, is, that their preceptors do not bring it actually home to their feelings: it is useless to reproach for past imprudence; the child sees the errour as plainly as we do; all that can be done, is to make it a lesson for the future. to a geometrician, the words _by proposition st._ stand for a whole demonstration: if he recollects that he has once gone over the demonstration, he is satisfied of its truth; and, without verifying it again, he makes use of it in making out the demonstration of a new proposition. in moral reasoning, we proceed in the same manner; we recollect the result of our past experiments, and we refer to this moral demonstration in solving a new problem. in time, by frequent practice, this operation is performed so rapidly by the mind, that we scarcely perceive it, and yet it guides our actions. a man, in walking across the room, keeps out of the way of the tables and chairs, without perceiving that he reasons about the matter; a sober man avoids hard drinking, because he knows it to be hurtful to his health; but he does not, every time he refuses to drink, go over the whole train of reasoning which first decided his determination. a modern philosopher,[ ] calls this rapid species of reasoning "intuitive analogy;" applied to the business of life, the french call it tact. sensible people have this tact in higher perfection than others; and prudent people govern themselves by it more regularly than others. by the methods which we have recommended, we hope it may be successfully cultivated in early education. rousseau, in expressing his contempt for those who make _habit_ their only guide of action, goes, as he is apt to do in the heat of declamation, into the errour opposite to that which he ridicules. "the only habit," cries he, "that i wish my emilius to have, is the habit of having no habits." emilius would have been a strange being, had he literally accomplished his preceptor's wish. to go up stairs, would have been a most operose, and to go down stairs, a most tremendous, affair to emilius, for he was to have no habits: between every step of the stairs, new deliberations must take place, and fresh decisions of the judgment and will ensue. in his moral judgments, emilius would have had as much useless labour. habit surely is necessary, even to those who make reason the ultimate judge of their affairs. reason is not to be appealed to upon every trivial occasion, to rejudge the same cause a million of times. must a man, every time he draws a straight line, repeat to himself, "a right line is that which lieth evenly between its points?" must he rehearse the propositions of euclid, instead of availing himself of their practical use? "christian, can'st thou raise a perpendicular upon a straight line?" is the apostrophe with which the cross-legged emperor of barbary, seated on his throne of rough deal boards, accosts every _learned_ stranger who frequents his court. in the course of his reign, probably, his barbaric majesty may have reiterated the demonstration of this favourite proposition, which he learned from a french surgeon about five hundred times; but his majesty's understanding is not materially improved by these recitals; his geometrical learning is confined, we are told, to this single proposition. it would have been scarcely worth while to have singled out for combat this paradox of rousseau's, concerning habit, if it had not presented itself in the formidable form of an antithesis. a false maxim, conveyed in an antithesis, is dangerous, because it is easily remembered and repeated, and it quickly passes current in conversation. but to return to our subject, of which we have _imprudently_ lost sight. imprudence does not always arise from our neglect of our past experience, or from our forgetting to take the future into our calculations, but from false associations, or from passion. objects often appear different to one man, from what they do to the rest of the world: this man may reason well upon what the majority of reasonable people agree to call false appearances; he may follow strictly the conviction of his own understanding, and yet the world will say that he acts very imprudently. to the taste or smell of those who are in a fever, objects not only appear, but really are, to the patients different from what they appear to persons in sound health: in the same manner to the imagination, objects have really a different value in moments of enthusiasm, from what they have in our cooler hours, and we scarcely can believe that our view of objects will ever vary. it is in vain to oppose reason to false associations; we must endeavour to combat one set of associations by another, and to alter the situation, and consequently, the views,[ ] of the mistaken person. suppose, for instance, that a child had been in a coach and six upon some _pleasant_ excursion (it is an improbable thing, but we may suppose any thing:) suppose a child had enjoyed, from some accidental circumstances, an extraordinary degree of pleasure in a coach and six, he might afterwards long to be in a similar vehicle, from a mistaken notion, that it could confer happiness. here we should not oppose the force of reasoning to a false association, but we should counteract the former association. give the child an equal quantity of amusement when he is not in a coach and six, and then he will form fresh pleasurable associations with other objects which may balance his first prepossession. if you oppose reason ineffectually to passion or taste, you bring the voice and power of reason into discredit with your pupil. when you have changed his view of things, you may then reason with him, and show him the cause of his former mistake. in the excellent fable of the shield that was gold on one side and silver on the other, the two disputants never could have agreed until they changed places.--when you have, in several instances, proved by experiment, that you judge more prudently than your pupil, he will be strongly inclined to listen to your counsels, and then your experience will be of real use to him; he will argue from it with safety and satisfaction. when, after recovering from fits of passion or enthusiasm, you have, upon several occasions, convinced him that your admonitions would have prevented him from the pain of repentance, he will recollect this when he again feels the first rise of passion in his mind; and he may, in that lucid moment, avail himself of your calm reason, and thus avoid the excesses of extravagant passions. that unfortunate french monarch,[ ] who was liable to temporary fits of frenzy, learned to foresee his approaching malady, and often requested his friends to disarm him, lest he should injure any of his attendants. in a malady which precludes the use of reason, it was possible for this humane patient to foresee the probable mischief he might do to his fellow-creatures, and to take prudent measures against his own violence; and may not we expect, that those who are early accustomed to attend to their own feelings, may prepare against the extravagance of their own passions, and avail themselves of the regulating advice of their temperate friends? in the education of girls, we must teach them much more caution than is necessary to boys: their prudence must be more the result of reasoning than of experiment; they _must_ trust to the experience of others; they cannot always have recourse to what _ought to be_; they must adapt themselves to what is. they cannot rectify the material mistakes in their conduct,[ ] timidity, a certain tardiness of decision, and reluctance to act in public situations, are not considered as defects in a woman's character: her pausing prudence does not, to a man of discernment, denote imbecility; but appears to him the graceful, auspicious characteristic of female virtue. there is always more probability that women should endanger their own happiness by precipitation, than by forbearance.--promptitude of choice, is seldom expected from the female sex; they should avail themselves of the leisure that is permitted to them for reflection. "begin nothing of which you have not well considered the end," was the piece of advice for which the eastern sultan[ ] paid a purse of gold, the price set upon it by a sage. the monarch did not repent of his purchase. this maxim should be engraved upon the memory of our female pupils, by the repeated lessons of education. we should, even in trifles, avoid every circumstance which can tend to make girls venturesome; which can encourage them to trust their good fortune, instead of relying on their own prudence. marmontel's tale, entitled "_heureusement_," is a witty, but surely not a _moral_, tale. girls should be discouraged from hazarding opinions in general conversation; but amongst their friends, they should be excited to reason with accuracy and with temper.[ ] it is really a part of a woman's prudence to have command of temper; if she has it not, her wit and sense will not have their just value in domestic life. calphurnia, a roman lady, used to plead her own causes before the senate, and we are informed, that she became "so troublesome and confident, that the judges decreed that thenceforward no woman should be suffered to plead." did not this lady make an imprudent use of her talents? in the choice of friends, and on all matters of taste, young women should be excited to reason about their own feelings. "there is no reasoning about taste," is a pernicious maxim: if there were more reasoning, there would be less disputation upon this subject. if women questioned their own minds, or allowed their friends to question them, concerning the reasons of their "preferences and aversions," there would not, probably, be so many love matches, and so few love marriages. it is in vain to expect, that young women should begin to reason miraculously at the very moment that reason is wanted in the guidance of their conduct. we should also observe, that women are called upon for the exertion of their prudence at an age when young men are scarcely supposed to possess that virtue; therefore, women should be more early, and more carefully, educated for the purpose. the important decisions of woman's life, are often made before she is twenty: a man does not come upon the theatre of public life, where most of his prudence is shown, till he is much older. economy is, in women, an essential domestic virtue. some women have a foolish love of expensive baubles; a taste which a very little care, probably, in their early education, might have prevented. we are told, that when a collection of three hundred and fifty pounds was made for the celebrated cuzzona, to save her from absolute want, she immediately laid out two hundred pounds of the money in the purchase of a _shell cap_, which was then in fashion.[ ] prudent mothers, will avoid showing any admiration of pretty trinkets before their young daughters; and they will oppose the ideas of utility and durability to the mere caprice of fashion, which creates a taste for beauty, as it were, by proclamation. "such a thing is pretty, but it is of no use. such a thing is pretty, but it will soon wear out"--a mother may say; and she should prove the truth of her assertions to her pupils. economy is usually confined to the management of money, but it may be shown on many other occasions: economy may be exercised in taking care of whatever belongs to us; children should have the care of their own clothes, and if they are negligent of what is in their charge, this negligence should not be repaired by servants or friends, they should feel the real natural consequences of their own neglect, but no other punishment should be inflicted; and they should be left to make their own reflections upon their errours and misfortunes, undisturbed by the reproaches of their friends, or by the prosing moral of a governess or preceptor. we recommend, for we must descend to these trifles, that girls should be supplied with an independent stock of all the little things which are in daily use; housewives, and pocket books well stored with useful implements; and there should be no lending[ ] and borrowing amongst children. it will be but just to provide our pupils with convenient places for the preservation and arrangement of their little goods. order is necessary to economy; and we cannot more certainly create a taste for order, than by showing early its advantages in practice as well as in theory. the aversion to _old_ things, should, if possible, be prevented in children: we should not express contempt for _old_ things, but we should treat them with increased reverence, and exult in their having arrived under our protection to such a creditable age. "i have had such a hat so long, therefore it does not signify what becomes of it!" is the speech of a _promising_ little spendthrift. "i have taken care of my hat, it has lasted so long; and i hope i shall make it last longer," is the exultation of a young economist, in which his prudent friends should sympathize. "waste not, want not," is an excellent motto in an english nobleman's kitchen.[ ] the most opulent parents ought not to be ashamed to adopt it in the economic education of their children: early habits of care, and an early aversion and contempt for the selfish spirit of wasteful extravagance, may preserve the fortunes, and, what is of far more importance, the integrity and peace of mind of noble families. we have said, that economy cannot be exercised without children's having the management of money. whilst our pupils are young, if they are educated at home, they cannot have much real occasion for money; all the necessaries of life are provided for them; and if they have money to spend, it must be probably laid out on superfluities. this is a bad beginning. money should be represented to our pupils as what it really is, the conventional sign of the value of commodities: before children are acquainted with the real and comparative value of any of these commodities, it is surely imprudent to trust them with money. as to the idea that children may be charitable and generous in the disposal of money, we have expressed our sentiments fully upon this subject already.[ ] we are, however, sensible that when children are sent to any school, it is advisable to supply them with pocket-money enough to put them upon an equal footing with their companions; otherwise, we might run the hazard of inducing worse faults than extravagance--meanness, or envy. young people who are educated at home should, as much as possible, be educated to take a family interest in all the domestic expenses. parental reserve in money matters is extremely impolitic; as mr. locke judiciously observes, that a father, who wraps his affairs up in mystery, and who "views his son with jealous eyes," as a person who is to begin _to live_ when he dies, _must_ make him an enemy by treating him as such. a frank simplicity and cordial dependence upon the integrity and upon the sympathy of their children, will ensure to parents their disinterested friendship. ignorance is always more to be dreaded than knowledge. young people, who are absolutely ignorant of affairs, who have no idea of the relative expense of different modes of living, and of the various wants of a family, are apt to be extremely unreasonable in the imaginary disposal of their parent's fortune; they confine their view merely to their own expenses. "i _only_ spend such a sum," they say, "and surely that is nothing to my father's income." they consider only the absolute amount of what they spend; they cannot compare it with the number of other expenses which are necessary for the rest of the family: they do not know these, therefore they cannot perceive the proportion which it is reasonable that their expenditure should bear to the whole. mrs. d'arblay, in one of her excellent novels, has given a striking picture of the ignorance in which young women sometimes leave their father's house, and begin to manage in life for themselves, without knowing any thing of the _powers_ of money. camilla's imprudence must chiefly be ascribed to her ignorance. young women should be accustomed to keep the family accounts, and their arithmetic should not be merely a speculative science; they should learn the price of all necessaries, and of all luxuries; they should learn what luxuries are suited to their fortune and rank, what degree of expense in dress is essential to a regularly neat appearance, and what must be the increased expense and temptations of fashion in different situations; they should not be suffered to imagine that they can resist these temptations more than others, if they get into company above their rank, nor should they have any indistinct idea, that by some wonderful economical operations they can make a given sum of money go further than others can do. the steadiness of calculation will prevent all these vain notions; and young women, when they see in stubborn figures what must be the consequence of getting into situations where they must be tempted to exceed their means, will probably begin by avoiding, instead of braving, the danger. most parents think that their sons are more disposed to extravagance than their daughters; the sons are usually exposed to greater temptations. young men excite one another to expense, and to a certain carelessness of economy, which assumes the name of spirit, while it often forfeits all pretensions to justice. a prudent father will never, from any false notions of forming his son early to _good_ company, introduce him to associates whose only merit is their rank or their fortune. such companions will lead a weak young man into every species of extravagance, and then desert and ridicule him in the hour of distress. if a young man has a taste for literature, and for rational society, his economy will be secured, simply because his pleasures will not be expensive, nor will they be dependent upon the caprice of fashionable associates. the intermediate state between that of a school-boy and a man, is the dangerous period in which taste for expense is often acquired, before the means of gratifying it are obtained. boys listen with anxiety to the conversation of those who are a few years older than themselves. from this conversation they gather _information_ respecting the ways of the world, which, though often erroneous, they tenaciously believe to be accurate: it is in vain that their older friends may assure them that such and such frivolous expenses are not necessary to the well-being of a man in society; they adhere to the opinion of the younger counsel; they conclude that every thing has changed since their parents were young, that they must not govern themselves by antiquated notions, but by the scheme of economy which happens to be the fashion of the day. during this boyish state, parents should be particularly attentive to the company which their sons keep; and they should frequently in conversation with sensible, but not with morose or old fashioned people, lead to the subject of economy, and openly discuss and settle the most essential points. at the same time a father should not intimidate his son with the idea that nothing but rigid economy can win his parental favour; his parental favour should not be a mercenary object; he should rather show his son, that he is aware of the great temptations to which a young man is exposed in going first into the world: he should show him, both that he is disposed to place confidence in him, and that he yet knows the fallibility of youthful prudence. if he expect from his son unerring prudence, he expects too much, and he will, perhaps, create an apprehension of his displeasure, which may chill and repress all ingenuous confidence. in all his childish, and in all his youthful distresses, a son should be habitually inclined to turn to his father as to his most indulgent friend. "apply to me if ever you get into any difficulties, and you will always find me your _most indulgent friend_," were the words of a father to a child of twelve years old, pronounced with such encouraging benevolence, that they were never forgotten by the person to whom they were addressed. before a young man goes into the world, it will be a great advantage to him to have some share in the management of his father's affairs; by laying out money for another person, he will acquire habits of care, which will be useful to him afterwards in his own affairs. a father, who is building, or improving grounds, who is carrying on works of any sort, can easily allot some portion of the business to his son, as an exercise for his judgment and prudence. he should hear and see the estimates of workmen, and he should, as soon as he has collected the necessary facts, form estimates of his own, before he hears the calculation of others: this power of estimating will be of great advantage to gentlemen: it will circumscribe their wishes, and it will protect them against the low frauds of designing workmen. it may seem trivial, but we cannot forbear to advise young people to read the news-papers of the day regularly: they will keep up by these means with the current of affairs, and they will exercise their judgment upon interesting business, and large objects. the sooner boys acquire the sort of knowledge necessary for the conversation of sensible men, the better; they will be the less exposed to feel false shame. false shame, the constant attendant upon ignorance, often leads young men into imprudent expenses; when, upon any occasion, they do not know by any certain calculation to what any expense may amount, they are ashamed to inquire minutely. from another sort of weakness, they are ashamed to resist the example or importunity of numbers; against this weakness, the strong desire of preserving the good opinion of estimable friends, is the best preservative. the taste for the esteem of superior characters, cures the mind of fondness for vulgar applause. we have, in the very first chapter of this book, spoken of the danger of the passion for gaming, and the precautions that we have recommended in early education will, it is hoped, prevent the disorder from appearing in our pupils as they grow up. occupations for the understanding, and objects for the affections, will preclude all desire for the violent stimulus of the gaming table. it may be said, that many men of superior abilities, and of generous social tempers, become gamesters. they do so, because they have exhausted other pleasures, and they have been accustomed to strong excitements. such excitements do not become necessary to happiness, till they have been made habitual. there was an excellent essay on projects, published some years ago by an anonymous writer, which we think would make a great impression upon any young persons of good sense. we do not wish to repress the generous enterprising ardour of youth, or to confine the ideas to the narrow circle of which self must be the centre. calculation will show what can be done, and how it can be done; and thus the individual, without injury to himself, may, if he wish it, speculate extensively for the good of his fellow creatures. it is scarcely possible, that the mean passion of avarice should exist in the mind of any young person who has been tolerably well educated; but too much pains cannot be taken to preserve that domestic felicity, which arises from entire confidence and satisfaction amongst the individuals of a family with regard to property. exactness in accounts and in business relative to property, far from being unnecessary amongst friends and relations, are, we think, peculiarly agreeable, and essential to the continuance of frank intimacy. we should, whilst our pupils are young, teach them a love for exactness about property; a respect for the rights of others, rather than a tenacious anxiety about their own. when young people are of a proper age to manage money and property of their own, let them know precisely what they can annually spend; in whatever form they receive an income, let that income be certain: if presents of pocket money or of dress are from time to time made to them, this creates expectation and uncertainty in their minds. all persons who have a fluctuating revenue, are disposed to be imprudent and extravagant. it is remarkable, that the west-indian planters, whose property is a kind of lottery, are extravagantly disposed to speculation; in the hopes of a favourable season, they live from year to year in unbounded profusion. it is curious to observe, that the propensity to extravagance exists in those who enjoy the greatest affluence, and in those who have felt the greatest distress. those who have little to lose, are reckless about that little; and any uncertainty as to the tenure of property, or as to the rewards of industry, immediately operates, not only to depress activity, but to destroy prudence. "prudence," says mr. edwards, "is a term that has no place in the negro vocabulary; instead of trusting to what are called the _ground provisions_, which are safe from the hurricanes, the negroes, in the cultivation of their _own_ lands, trust more to plantain-groves, corn, and other vegetables that are liable to be destroyed by storms. when they earn a little money, they immediately gratify their palate with salted meats and other provisions, which are to them delicacies. the idea of accumulating, and of being economic in order to accumulate, is unknown to these poor slaves, who hold their lands by the most uncertain of all tenures,"[ ] we are told, that the _provision ground_, the creation of the negro's industry, and the hope of his life, is sold by public auction to pay his master's debts. is it wonderful that the term prudence should be unknown in the negro vocabulary? the very poorest class of people in london, who feel despair, and who merely live to bear the evil of the day, are, it is said, very little disposed to be prudent. in a late publication, mr. colquhoun's "treatise on the police of the metropolis," he tells us, that the "chief consumption of oysters, crabs, lobsters, pickled salmon, &c. when first in season, and when the prices are high, is by the _lowest_ classes of the people. the middle ranks, and those immediately under them, abstain generally from such indulgences until the prices are moderate."[ ] perhaps it may be thought, that the consumption of oysters, crabs, and pickled salmon, in london, or the management of the negro's _provision ground_ in jamaica, has little to do with a practical essay upon economy and prudence; but we hope, that we may be permitted to use these far fetched illustrations, to show that the same causes act upon the mind independently of climate: they are mentioned here to show, that the little _revenue_ of young people ought to be fixed and certain. when we recommend economy and prudence to our pupils, we must, at the same time, keep their hearts open to the pleasures of generosity; economy and prudence will put it in the power of the generous to give. "the worth of everything is as much money as 'twill bring," will never be the venal maxim of those who understand the nature of philosophic prudence. the worth of money is to be estimated by the number of real pleasures which it can procure: there are many which are not to be bought by gold;[ ] these will never lose their pre-eminent value with persons who have been educated both to reason and to feel. footnotes: [ ] here lies the mutton eating king; whose promise none relied on; who never _said_ a foolish thing, and never did a wise one. _epitaph on charles d._ [ ] v. taste and imagination. [ ] darwin's zoonomia. [ ] chapter on imagination. [ ] charles vi. [ ] "no penance can absolve their guilty fame, nor tears, that wash out sin, can wash out shame." [ ] v. persian tales. [ ] v. chapter on temper. [ ] mrs. piozzi's english synonymy, vol. i. p. . [ ] v. toys. [ ] lord scarsdale's. keddleston. [ ] v. chapter on sympathy and sensibility. [ ] v. edwards' history of the west indies. [ ] v. a note in page of the treatise on the police of the metropolis. chapter xxv. summary. "the general principle," that we should associate pleasure with whatever we wish that our pupils should pursue, and pain with whatever we wish that they should avoid, forms, our readers will perceive, the basis of our plan of education. this maxim, applied to the cultivation of the understanding, or of the affections, will, we apprehend, be equally successful; virtues, as well as abilities, or what is popularly called genius, we believe to be the result of education, not the gift of nature. a fond mother will tremble at the idea, that so much depends upon her own care in the early education of her children; but, even though she may be inexperienced in the art, she may be persuaded that patience and perseverance will ensure her success: even from her timidity we may prophesy favourably; for, in education, to know the danger, is often to avoid it. the first steps require rather caution and gentle kindness, than any difficult or laborious exertions: the female sex are, from their situation, their manners, and talents, peculiarly suited to the superintendence of the early years of childhood. we have, therefore, in the first chapters of the preceding work, endeavoured to adapt our remarks principally to female readers, and we shall think ourselves happy, if any anxious mother feels their practical utility. in the chapters on toys, tasks, and attention, we have attempted to show how the instruction and amusements of children may be so managed as to coincide with each other. _play_, we have observed, is only a change of occupation; and toys, to be permanently agreeable to children, must afford them continued employment. we have declared war against _tasks_, or rather against the train of melancholy, which, associated with this word, usually render it odious to the ears of the disgusted scholar. by kind patience, and well timed, distinct, and above all, by short lessons, a young child may be initiated in the mysteries of learning, and in the first principles of knowledge, without fatigue, or punishment, or tears. no matter how little be learned in a given time, provided the pupil be not disgusted; provided the wish to improve be excited, and the habits of attention be acquired. attention we consider as the faculty of the mind which is essential to the cultivation of all its other powers. it is essential to success in what are called accomplishments, or talents, as well as to our progress in the laborious arts or abstract sciences. believing so much to depend upon this faculty or habit, we have taken particular pains to explain the practical methods by which it may be improved. the general maxims, that the attention of young people should at first be exercised but for very short periods; that they should never be urged to the point of fatigue; that pleasure, especially the great pleasure of success, should be associated with the exertions of the pupil; are applicable to children of all tempers. the care which has been recommended, in the use of words, to convey uniformly distinct ideas, will, it is hoped, be found advantageous. we have, without entering into the speculative question concerning the original differences of temper and genius, offered such observations as we thought might be useful in cultivating the attention of vivacious, and indolent children; whether their idleness or indolence proceed from nature, or from mistaken modes of instruction, we have been anxious to point out means of curing their defects; and, from our successful experience with pupils apparently of opposite dispositions, we have ventured to assert with some confidence, that no parent should despair of correcting a child's defects; that no preceptor should despair of producing in his pupil the species of abilities which his education steadily tends to form. these are encouraging hopes, but not flattering promises. having just opened these bright views to parents, we have paused to warn them, that all their expectations, all their cares, will be in vain, unless they have sufficient prudence and strength of mind to follow a certain mode of conduct with respect to servants, and with respect to common acquaintance. more failures in private education have been occasioned by the interference of servants and acquaintance, than from any other cause. it is impossible, we repeat it in the strongest terms, it is impossible that parents can be successful in the education of their children at home, unless they have steadiness enough to resist all interference from visiters and acquaintance, who from thoughtless kindness, or a busy desire to administer advice, are apt to counteract the views of a preceptor; and who often, in a few minutes, undo the work of years. when our pupils have formed their habits, and have reason and experience sufficient to guide them, let them be left as free as air; let them choose their friends and acquaintance; let them see the greatest variety of characters, and hear the greatest variety of conversation and opinions: but whilst they are children, whilst they are destitute of the means to judge, their parents or preceptors must supply their deficient reason; and authority, without violence, should direct them to their happiness. they must see, that all who are concerned in their education, agree in the means of governing them; in all their commands and prohibitions, in the distribution of praise and blame, of reward and punishment, there must be unanimity. where there does not exist this unanimity in families; where parents have not sufficient firmness to prevent the interference of acquaintance, and sufficient prudence to keep children _from all private communication with servants_, we earnestly advise that the children be sent to some public seminary of education. we have taken some pains to detail the methods by which all hurtful communication between children and servants, in a well regulated family, may be avoided, and we have asserted, from the experience of above twenty years, that these methods have been found not only practicable, but easy. in the chapters on obedience, temper and truth, the general principle, that pleasure should excite to exertion and virtue, and that pain should be connected with whatever we wish our pupils to avoid, is applied to practice with a minuteness of detail which we knew not how to avoid. obedience we have considered as a relative, rather than as a positive, virtue: before children are able to conduct themselves, their obedience must be rendered habitual: obedience alters its nature as the pupil becomes more and more rational; and the only method to secure the obedience, the willing, enlightened obedience of rational beings, is to convince them by experience, that it tends to their happiness. truth depends upon example more than precept; and we have endeavoured to impress it on the minds of all who are concerned in education, that the first thing necessary to teach their pupils to love truth, is in their whole conduct to respect it themselves. we have reprobated the artifices sometimes used by preceptors towards their pupils; we have shown that all confidence is destroyed by these deceptions. may they never more be attempted! may parents unite in honest detestation of these practices! children are not fools, and they are not to be governed like fools. parents who adhere to the firm principle of truth, may be certain of the respect and confidence of their children. children who never see the example of falsehood, will grow up with a simplicity of character, with an habitual love of truth, that must surprise preceptors who have seen the propensity to deceit which early appears in children who have had the misfortune to live with servants, or with persons who have the habits of meanness and cunning. we have advised, that children, before their habits are formed, should never be exposed to temptations to deceive; that no questions should be asked them which hazard their young integrity; that as they grow older, they should gradually be trusted; and that they should be placed in situations where they may feel the advantages both of speaking truth, and of obtaining a character for integrity. the perception of the utility of this virtue to the individual, and to society, will confirm the habitual reverence in which our pupils have been taught to hold it. as young people become reasonable, the nature of their habits and of their education should be explained to them, and their virtues, from being virtues of custom, should be rendered virtues of choice and reason. it is easier to confirm good habits by the conviction of the understanding, than to induce habits in consequence of that conviction. this principle we have pursued in the chapter on rewards and punishments; we have not considered punishment as vengeance or retaliation, but as _pain inflicted with the reasonable hope of procuring some future advantage to the delinquent, or to society_. the smallest possible quantity of pain that can effect this purpose, we suppose, must, with all just and humane persons, be the measure of punishment. this notion of punishment, both for the sake of the preceptor and the pupil, should be clearly explained as early as it can be made intelligible. as to rewards, we do not wish that they should be bribes; they should stimulate, without weakening the mind. the consequences which naturally follow every species of good conduct, are the proper and best rewards that we can devise; children whose understandings are cultivated, and whose tempers are not spoiled, will be easily made happy without the petty bribes which are administered daily to ill educated, ignorant, over stimulated, and, consequently, wretched and ill humoured children. far from making childhood a state of continual penance, restraint, and misery, we wish that it should be made a state of uniform happiness; that parents and preceptors should treat their pupils with as much equality and kindness as the improving reason of children justifies. the views of children should be extended to their future advantage,[ ] and they should consider childhood as a part of their existence, not as a certain number of years which must be passed over before they can enjoy any of the pleasures of life, before they can enjoy any of the privileges of _grown up people_. preceptors should not accustom their pupils to what they call indulgence, but should give them the utmost degree of present pleasure which is consistent with their future advantage. would it not be folly and cruelty to give present pleasure at the expense of a much larger portion of future pain? when children acquire experience and reason, they rejudge the conduct of those who have educated them; and their confidence and their gratitude will be in exact proportion to the wisdom and justice with which they have been governed. it was necessary to explain at large these ideas of rewards and punishments, that we might clearly see our way in the progress of education. after having determined, that our object is to obtain for our pupils the greatest possible portion of felicity; after having observed, that no happiness can be enjoyed in society without the social virtues, without the _useful_ and the _agreeable_ qualities; our view naturally turns to the means of forming these virtues, of ensuring these essential qualities. on our sympathy with our fellow creatures depend many of our social virtues; from our ambition to excel our competitors, arise many of our most _useful_ and _agreeable_ actions. we have considered these principles of action as they depend on each other, and as they are afterwards separated. sympathy and sensibility, uninformed by reason, cannot be proper guides to action. we have endeavoured to show how sympathy may be improved into virtue. children should not see the deformed expression of the malevolent passions in the countenance of those who live with them: before the habits are formed, before sympathy has any rule to guide itself, it is necessarily determined by example. benevolence and affectionate kindness from parents to children, first inspire the pleasing emotions of love and gratitude. sympathy is not able to contend with passion or appetite: we should therefore avoid placing children in painful competition with one another. we love those from whom we receive pleasure. to make children fond of each other, we must make them the cause of pleasure to each other; we must place them in situations where no passion or appetite crosses their natural sympathy. we have spoken of the difference between transient, convivial sympathy, and that higher species of sympathy which, connected with esteem, constitutes friendship. we have exhorted parents not to exhaust imprudently the sensibility of their children; not to lavish caresses upon their infancy, and cruelly to withdraw their kindness when their children have learned to expect the daily stimulus of affection. the idea of exercising sensibility we have endeavoured to explain, and to show, that if we require premature gratitude and generosity from young people, we shall only teach them affectation and hypocrisy. we have slightly touched on the dangers of excessive female sensibility, and have suggested, that useful, active employments, and the cultivation of the reasoning faculty, render sympathy and sensibility more respectable, and not less graceful. in treating of vanity, pride, and ambition, we have been more indulgent to vanity than our _proud_ readers will approve. we hope, however, not to be misunderstood; we hope that we shall not appear to be admirers of that mean and ridiculous foible, which is anxiously concealed by all who have any desire to obtain esteem. we cannot, however, avoid thinking it is a contradiction to inspire young people with a wish to excel, and at the same time to insist upon their repressing all expressions of satisfaction if they succeed. the desire to obtain the good opinion of others, is a strong motive to exertion: this desire cannot be discriminative in children before they have any knowledge of the comparative value of different qualities, and before they can estimate the consequent value of the applause of different individuals. we have endeavoured to show how, from appealing at first to the opinions of others, children may be led to form judgments of their own actions, and to appeal to their own minds for approbation. the sense of duty and independent self-complacency may gradually be substituted in the place of weak, ignorant vanity. there is not much danger that young people, whose understandings are improved, and who mix gradually with society, should not be able to repress those offensive expressions of vanity or pride, which are disagreeable to the feelings of the "impartial spectators." we should rather let the vanity of children find its own level, than attempt any artificial adjustments; they will learn propriety of manners from observation and experience; we should have patience with their early uncivilized presumption, lest we, by premature restraints, check the energy of the mind, and induce the cold, feeble vice of hypocrisy. in their own family, among the friends whom they ought to love and esteem, let children, with simple, unreserved vivacity, express the good opinion they have of themselves. it is infinitely better that they should be allowed this necessary expansion of self-complacency in the company of their superiors, than that it should be repressed by the cold hand of authority, and afterwards be displayed in the company of inferiors and sycophants. we have endeavoured to distinguish between the proper and improper use of praise as a motive in education: we have considered it as a stimulus which, like all other excitements, is serviceable or pernicious, according to the degree in which it is used, and the circumstances in which it is applied. whilst we have thus been examining the general means of educating the heart and the understanding, we have avoided entering minutely into the technical methods of obtaining certain parts of knowledge. it was essential, in the first place, to show, how the desire of knowledge was to be excited; what acquirements are most desirable, and how they are to be most easily obtained, are the next considerations. in the chapter on books--classical literature and grammar--arithmetic and geometry--geography and astronomy--mechanics and chemistry--we have attempted to show, how a taste for literature may early be infused into the minds of children, and how the rudiments of science, and some general principles of knowledge, may be acquired, without disgusting the pupil, or fatiguing him by unceasing application. we have, in speaking of the choice of books for children, suggested the general principles, by which a selection may be safely made; and by minute, but we hope not invidious, criticism, we have illustrated our principles so as to make them practically useful. the examination of m. condillac's cours d'etude was meant to illustrate our own sentiments, more than to attack a particular system. far from intending to depreciate this author, we think most highly of his abilities; but we thought it necessary to point out some practical errours in his mode of instruction. without examples from real life, we should have wandered, as many others of far superior abilities have already wandered, in the shadowy land of theory. in our chapters on grammar, arithmetic, mechanics, chemistry, &c. all that we have attempted has been to recall to preceptors the difficulties which they once experienced, and to trace those early footsteps which time insensibly obliterates. how few possess, like faruknaz in the persian tale, the happy art of transfusing their own souls into the bosoms of others! we shall not pity the reader whom we have dragged through garretson's exercises, if we can save one trembling little pilgrim from that "slough of despond." we hope that the patient, quiet mode of teaching classical literature, which we have found to succeed in a few instances, may be found equally successful in others; we are not conscious of having exaggerated, and we sincerely wish that some intelligent, benevolent parents may verify our experiments upon their own children. the great difficulty which has been found in attempts to instruct children in science, has, we apprehend, arisen from the theoretic manner in which preceptors have proceeded. the knowledge that cannot be immediately applied to use, has no interest for children, has no hold upon their memories; they may learn the principles of mechanics, or geometry, or chemistry; but if they have no means of applying their knowledge, it is quickly forgotten, and nothing but the disgust connected with the recollection of useless labour remains in the pupil's mind. it has been our object, in treating of these subjects, to show how they may be made interesting to young people; and for this purpose we should point out to them, in the daily, active business of life, the practical use of scientific knowledge. their senses should be exercised in experiments, and these experiments should be simple, distinct, and applicable to some object in which our pupils are immediately interested. we are not solicitous about the quantity of knowledge that is obtained at any given age, but we are extremely anxious that the desire to learn should continually increase, and that whatever is taught should be taught with that perspicuity, which improves the general understanding. if the first principles of science are once clearly understood, there is no danger that the pupil should not, at any subsequent period of his life, improve his practical skill, and increase his knowledge to whatever degree he thinks proper. we have hitherto proceeded without discussing the comparative advantages of public or private education. whether children are to be educated at home, or to be sent to public seminaries, the same course of education, during the first years of their lives, should be pursued; and the preparatory care of parents is essential to the success of the public preceptor. we have admitted the necessity of public schools, and, in the present state of society, we acknowledge that many parents have it not in their power properly to superintend the private education of a family. we have earnestly advised parents not to attempt private education without first calculating the difficulties of the undertaking; we have pointed out that, by co-operating with the public instructer, parents may assist in the formation of their children's characters, without undertaking the sole management of their classical instruction. a private education, upon a calm survey of the advantages of both systems, we prefer, because more is in the power of the private than of the public instructer. one uniform course of experience may be preserved, and no examples, but those which we wish to have followed, need be seen by those children who are brought up at home. when we give our opinion in favour of private education, we hope that all we have said on servants and on acquaintance will be full in the reader's recollection. no private education, we repeat it, can succeed without perfect unanimity, consistency, and steadiness, amongst all the individuals in the family. we have recommended to parents the highest liberality as the highest prudence, in rewarding the care of enlightened preceptors. ye great and opulent parents, condescend to make your children happy: provide for yourselves the cordial of domestic affection against "that sickness of long life--old age." in what we have said of governesses, masters, and the value of female accomplishments, we have considered not only what is the fashion of to-day, but rather what is likely to be the fashion of ten or twenty years hence. mothers will look back, and observe how much the system of female education has altered within their own memory; and they will see, with "the prophetic eye of taste," what may probably be the fashion of another spring--another race.[ ] we have endeavoured to substitute the words _domestic happiness_ instead of the present terms, "success in the world--fortunate establishments," &c. this will lead, perhaps, at first, to some confusion in the minds of those who have been long used to the old terms: but the new vocabulary has its advantages; the young and unprejudiced will, perhaps, perceive them, and maternal tenderness will calculate with more precision, but not with less eagerness, the chances of happiness according to the new and old tables of interest. sectary-metaphysicians, if any of this description should ever deign to open a book that has a _practical_ title, will, we fear, be disappointed in our chapters on memory--imagination and judgment. they will not find us the partisans of any system, and they will probably close the volume with supercilious contempt. we endeavour to console ourselves by the hope, that men of sense and candour will be more indulgent, and will view with more complacency an attempt to collect from all metaphysical writers, those observations, which can be immediately of practical use in education. without any pompous pretensions, we have given a sketch of what we have been able to understand and ascertain of the history of the mind. on some subjects, the wisest of our readers will at least give us credit for knowing that we are ignorant. we do not set that high value upon memory, which some preceptors are inclined to do. from all that we have observed, we believe that few people are naturally deficient in this faculty; though in many it may have been so injudiciously cultivated as to induce the spectators to conclude, that there was some original defect in the retentive power. the recollective power is less cultivated than it ought to be, by the usual modes of education: and this is one reason why so few pupils rise above mediocrity. they lay up treasures for moths to corrupt; they acquire a quantity of knowledge, they learn a multitude of words by rote, and they cannot produce a single fact, or a single idea, in the moment when it is wanted: they collect, but they cannot combine. we have suggested the means of cultivating the inventive faculty at the same time that we store the memory; we have shown, that on the order in which ideas are presented to the mind, depends the order in which they will recur to the memory; and we have given examples from the histories of great men and little children, of the reciprocal assistance which the memory and the inventive powers afford each other. in speaking of taste, it has been our wish to avoid prejudice and affectation. we have advised that children should early be informed, that the principles of taste depend upon casual, arbitrary, variable associations. this will prevent our pupils from falling into the vulgar errour of being amazed and _scandalized_ at the tastes of other times and other nations. the beauties of nature and the productions of art, which are found to be most generally pleasing, we should associate with pleasure in the mind: but we ought not to expect that children should admire those works of imagination which suggest, instead of expressing, ideas. until children have acquired the language, until they have all the necessary trains of ideas, many of the finest strokes of genius in oratory, poetry, and painting, must to them be absolutely unintelligible. in a moral point of view, we have treated of the false associations which have early influence upon the imagination, and produce the furious passions and miserable vices. the false associations which first inspire the young and innocent mind with the love of wealth, of power, or what is falsely called pleasure, are pointed out; and some practical hints are offered to parents, which it is hoped may tend to preserve their children from these moral insanities. we do not think that persons who are much used to children, will quarrel with us for what we have said of early prodigies of wit. people, who merely talk to children for the amusement of the moment, may admire their "lively nonsense," and will probably think the simplicity of mind that we prefer, is downright stupidity. the habit of reasoning is seldom learned by children who are much taken notice of for their sprightly repartees; but we have observed that children, after they have learned to reason, as they grow up and become acquainted with the manners and customs of the world, are by no means deficient in talents for conversation, and in that species of wit which depends upon the perception of analogy between ideas, rather than a play upon words. at all events, we would rather that our pupils should be without the brilliancy of wit, than the solid and essential power of judgment. to cultivate the judgment of children, we must begin by teaching them accurately to examine and compare such external objects as are immediately obvious to their senses; when they begin to argue, we must be careful to make them explain their terms and abide by them. in books and conversation, they must avoid all bad reasoning, nor should they ever be encouraged in the quibbling habit of arguing for victory. prudence we consider as compounded of judgment and resolution. when we teach children to reflect upon and compare their own feelings, when we frequently give them their _choice_ in things that are interesting to them, we educate them to be prudent. we cannot teach this virtue until children have had some experience; as far as their experience goes, their prudence may be exercised. those who reflect upon their own feelings, and find out exactly what it is that makes them happy, are taught wisdom by a very few distinct lessons. even fools, it is said, grow wise by experience, but it is not until they grow old under her rigid discipline. economy is usually understood to mean prudence in the management of money; we have used this word in a more enlarged sense. children, we have observed, may be economic of any thing that is trusted to their charge; until they have some use for money, they need not be troubled or tempted with it: if all the necessaries and conveniences of life are provided for them, they must spend whatever is given to them as pocket money, in superfluities. this habituates them early to extravagance. we do not apprehend that young people should be entrusted with money, till they have been some time used to manage the money business of others. they may be taught to keep the accounts of a family, from which they will learn the price and value of different commodities. all this, our readers will perceive, is nothing more than the application of the different reasoning powers to different objects. we have thus slightly given a summary of the chapters in the preceding work, to recall the whole in a connected view to the mind; a few simple principles run through the different parts; all the purposes of practical education tend to one distinct object; to render our pupils good and wise, that they may enjoy the greatest possible share of happiness at present and in future. parental care and anxiety, the hours devoted to the instruction of a family, will not be thrown away; if parents have the patience to wait for their reward, that reward will far surpass their most sanguine expectations: they will find in their children agreeable companions, sincere and affectionate friends. whether they live in retirement, or in the busy world, they will feel their interest in life increase, their pleasures multiplied by sympathy with their beloved pupils; they will have a happy home. how much is comprised in that single expression! the gratitude of their pupils will continually recall to their minds the delightful reflection, that the felicity of their whole family is their work; that the virtues and talents of their children are the necessary consequences of good education. footnotes: [ ] "turn from the glittering bribe your scornful eye, nor sell for gold what gold can never buy." _johnson's london._ [ ] emilius. [ ] "another spring, another race supplies." pope's homer. notes, containing conversations and anecdotes of children. several years ago a mother,[ ] who had a large family to educate, and who had turned her attention with much solicitude to the subject of education, resolved to write notes from day to day of all the trifling things which mark the progress of the mind in childhood. she was of opinion, that the art of education should be considered as an experimental science, and that many authors of great abilities had mistaken their road by following theory instead of practice. the title of "_practical education_" was chosen by this lady, and prefixed to a little book for children, which she began, but did not live to finish. the few notes which remain of her writing, are preserved, not merely out of respect to her memory, but because it is thought that they may be useful. her plan of keeping a register of the remarks of children, has at intervals been pursued in her family; a number of these anecdotes have been interspersed in this work; a few, which did not seem immediately to suit the didactic nature of any of our chapters, remain, and with much hesitation and diffidence are offered to the public. we have selected such anecdotes as may in some measure illustrate the principles that we have endeavoured to establish; and we hope, that from these trifling, but genuine conversations of children and parents, the reader will distinctly perceive the difference, between practical and theoretic education. as some further apology for offering them to the public, we recur to a passage in dr. reid's[ ] essays, which encourages an attempt to study minutely the minds of children. "if we could obtain a distinct and full history of all that hath passed in the mind of a child from the beginning of life and sensation till it grows up to the use of reason, how its infant faculties began to work, and how they brought forth and ripened all the various notions, opinions, and sentiments, which we find in ourselves when we come to be capable of reflection, this would be a treasure of natural history which would probably give more light into the human faculties, than all the systems of philosophers about them, from the beginning of the world." the reader, we hope, will not imagine that we think we can present him with this treasure of natural history; we have only a few scattered notices, as bacon would call them, to offer; perhaps, even this slight attempt may awaken the attention of persons equal to the undertaking: if able preceptors and parents would pursue a similar plan, we might, in time, hope to obtain a full history of the infant mind. it may occur to parents, that writing notes of the remarks of children would lessen their freedom and simplicity in conversation; this would certainly be the case if care were not taken to prevent the pupils from thinking of the _note-book_.[ ] the following notes were never seen by the children who are mentioned in them, and though it was in general known in the family that such notes were taken, the particular remarks that were written down, were never known to the pupils: nor was any curiosity excited upon this subject. the attempt would have been immediately abandoned, if we had perceived that it produced any bad consequences. the simple language of childhood has been preserved without alteration in the following notes; and as we could not devise any better arrangement, we have followed the order of time, and we have constantly inserted the ages of the children, for the satisfaction of preceptors and parents, to whom alone these infantine anecdotes can be interesting: we say nothing farther as to their accuracy; if the reader does not see in the anecdotes themselves internal marks of veracity, all we could say would be of no avail. x---- (a girl of five years old) asked why a piece of paper fell quickly to the ground when rumpled up, and why so slowly when opened. y---- (a girl of three years and a half old) seeing her sister taken care of and nursed when she had chilblains, said, that she wished to have chilblains. z---- (a girl between two and three) when her mother was putting on her bonnet, and when she was going out to walk, looked at the cat, and said with a plaintive voice, "poor pussey! you have no bonnet, pussey!" x---- ( years old) asked why she was as tall as the trees when she was far from them. z---- ( years old) went to church, and when she was there said, "do those men do every thing better than we, because they talk so loud, and i think they read." it was a country church, and people sang; but the child said, "she thought they didn't sing, but roared, because they were shut up in that place, and didn't like it." l---- (a boy between and years) was standing before a grate with coals in it, which were not lighted; his mother said to him, "what is the use of coals?" _l----._ "to put in your grate." _mother._ "why are they put there?" _l----._ "to make fire." _mother._ "how do they make fire?" _l----._ "fire is brought to them." _mother._ "how is fire brought to them?" _l----._ "fire is brought to them upon a candle and put to them." l----, a little while afterwards, asked leave to light a candle, and when a bit of paper was given to him for that purpose, said, "but, mother, may i take some light out of your fire to put to it?" this boy had more exact ideas of property than prometheus had. z----, when she was between five and six, said, "water keeps things alive, and eating keeps alive children." _z----_ (same age) meddling with a fly, said, "she did not hurt it." "were you ever a fly?" said her mother. "not _that i know of_," answered the child. _z----'s_ father sent her into a room where there were some knives and forks. "if you meddle with them," said he, "you may cut yourself." _z----._ "i won't cut myself." _father._ "can you be sure of that?" _z----._ "no, but i can take care." _father._ "but if you should cut yourself, would it do you any good?" _z----._ "no--yes." _father._ "what good?" _z----._ "not to do so another time." ---- (same age.) z----'s mother said to her, "will you give me some of your fat cheeks?" _z----._ "no, i cannot, it would hurt me." _mother._ "but if it would not hurt you, would you give me some?" _z----._ "no, it would make two holes in my cheeks that would be disagreeable." a sentimental mother would, perhaps, have been displeased with the simple answers of this little girl. (vide sympathy and sensibility.) the following memorandums of mrs. h----e----'s (dated ) have been of great use to us in our chapter upon toys. "the playthings of children should be calculated to fix their attention, that they may not get a habit of doing any thing in a listless manner. "there are periods as long as two or three months at a time, in the lives of young children, when their bodies appear remarkably active and vigorous, and their minds dull and inanimate; they are at these times incapable of comprehending any new ideas, and forgetful of those they have already received. when this disposition to exert the bodily faculties, subsides, children show much restlessness and distaste for their usual plays. the intervals between meals, appear long to them; they ask a multitude of questions, and are continually looking forward to some future good; if at this time any mental employment be presented to them, they receive it with the utmost avidity, and pursue it with assiduity; their minds appear to have acquired additional powers from having remained inactive for a considerable time." (january .) z----, ( years old.) "what are bones made of? my father says it has not been found out. if i should find it out, i shall be wiser in that respect than my father." (april th.) _z----._ "what becomes of the blood when people die?" _father._ "it stays in the body." _z----._ "i thought it went out of the body; because you told me, that what we eat was turned into blood, and that blood nourished the body and kept it alive." _father._ "yes, my dear; but blood must be in motion to keep the body alive; the heart moves the blood through the arteries and veins, and the blood comes back again to the heart. we don't know how this motion is performed. what we eat, is not turned at once into blood; it is dissolved by something in the stomach, and is turned into something white like milk, which is called chyle; the chyle passes through little pipes in the body, called lacteals, and into the veins and arteries, and becomes blood. but i don't know how. i will show you the inside of the body of a dead pig: a pig's inside is something like that of a man." _z----_ (same age) when her father had given her an account of a large stone that was thrown to a considerable distance from mount vesuvius at the time of an eruption, she asked, how the air could keep a large stone from falling, when it would not support her weight. z----, (same age) when she was reading the roman history, was asked, what she thought of the conduct of the wife of asdrubal. z---- said she did not like her. she was asked why. the first reason z---- gave for not liking the lady, was, "that she spoke loud;" the next, "that she was unkind to her husband, and killed her children." we regret (though perhaps our readers may rejoice) that several years elapsed in which these little notes of the remarks of children were discontinued. in the following notes were begun by one of the same family. (march, ' .) mr. ---- saw an irish giant at bristol, and when he came home, mr. ---- gave his children a description of the giant. his height, he said, was about eight feet. _s----_ (a boy of five years old) asked whether this giant had lived much longer than other men. _father._ "no; why did you think he had lived longer than other men?" _s----._ "because he was so much taller." _father._ "well." _s----._ "and he had so much more time to grow." _father._ "people, after a certain age, do not grow any more. your sister m----, and i, and your mother, have not grown any taller since you can remember, have we?" _s----._ "no; but i have, and b----, and c----." _father._ "yes; you are children. whilst people are growing, they are children; after they have done growing they are called men and women." (april, ' .) at tea-time, to-day, somebody said that hot chocolate scalds worse than hot tea or hot water. mr. ---- asked his children if they could give any reason for this. they were silent. mr. ----. "if water be made as hot as it can be made, and if chocolate be made as hot as it can be made, the chocolate will scald you the most. can you tell me why!" _c----_ (a girl between eight and nine years old.) "because there is oil, i believe, in the chocolate; and because it is thicker, and the parts closer together, than in tea or water." _father._ "what you say is true; but you have not explained the reason yet. well, _h----_." _h----_ (a boy between nine and ten.) "because there is water in the bubbles." _father._ "water in the bubbles? i don't understand. water in what bubbles?" _h----._ "i thought i had always seen, when water boils, that there are a great many little bubbles upon the top." _father._ "well; but what has that to do with the question i asked you?" _h----._ "because the cold air that was in the bubbles, would cool the water next them, and then"--(he was quite confused, and stopped.) _b----_ (a girl of ten or eleven years old) spoke next. "i thought that chocolate was much thicker than water, and there were more parts, and those parts were closer together, and each could hold but a certain quantity of heat; and therefore chocolate could be made hotter than water." _father._ "that is a good chemical idea. you suppose that the chocolate and tea can be _saturated_ with heat. but you have none of you yet told the reason." the children were all silent. _father._ "can water ever be made hotter than boiling hot?" _b----._ "no." _father._ "why?" _b----._ "i don't know." _father._ "what happens to water when it does what we call _boil_?" _h----._ "it bubbles, and makes a sort of noise." _b----._ "it turns into steam or vapour, i believe." _father._ "all at once?" _b----._ "no: but what is at the top, first." _father._ "now you see the reason why water can't be made hotter than boiling hot: for if a certain degree of heat be applied to it, it changes into the form of vapour, and flies off. when i was a little boy, i was once near having a dreadful accident. i had not been taught the nature of water, and steam, and heat, and evaporation; and i wanted to fill a wet hollow stick with melted lead. the moment i poured the lead into the stick, the water in the wood turned into vapour suddenly, and the lead was thrown up with great violence to the ceiling: my face narrowly escaped. so you see people should know what they are about before they meddle with things.--but now as to the chocolate." no one seemed to have any thing to say about the chocolate. _father._ "water, you know, boils with a certain degree of heat. will oil, do you think, boil with the same heat?" _c----._ "i don't understand." _father._ "in the same _degree of heat_ (you must learn to accustom yourself to those words, though they seem difficult to you)--in the same heat, do you think water or oil would boil the soonest?" none of the children knew. _father._ "water would boil the soonest. more heat is necessary to make oil boil, or turn into vapour, than to make water evaporate. do you know of any thing which is used to _determine_, to _show_, and _mark_, to us the different degrees of heat?" _b----._ "yes; a thermometer." _father._ "yes: thermometer comes from two greek words, one of which signifies heat, and the other measure. meter, means measure. thermo_meter_ a measurer of heat; baro_meter_, a measurer of the weight of the air; hygro_meter_, a measurer of moisture. now, if you remember, on the thermo_meter_ you have seen these words at a certain mark, _the heat of boiling water_. the quicksilver, in a thermometer, rises to that mark when it is exposed to that degree of heat which will make the water turn into vapour. now the degree of heat which is necessary to make oil evaporate, is not marked on the thermometer; but it requires several degrees more heat to evaporate oil, than is necessary to evaporate water.--so now you know that chocolate, containing more oil than is contained in tea, it can be made hotter before it turns into vapour." children may be led to acquire a taste for chemistry by slight hints in conversation. (july d, .) _father._ "s----, can you tell me what is meant by a body's falling?" _s----_ (seven years old.) "a body's falling, means a body's dying, i believe." _father._ "by _body_, i don't mean a person, but any thing. what is meant by any thing's falling?" _s----._ "coming down from a high place." _father._ "what do you mean by a high place?" _s----._ "a place higher than places usually are; higher than the ground." _father._ "what do you mean by the ground?" _s----._ "the earth." _father._ "what shape do you think the earth is?" _s----._ "round." _father._ "why do you think it is round?" _s----._ "because i have heard a great many people say so." _father._ "the shadow.--it is so difficult to explain to you, my dear, why we think that the earth is round, that i will not attempt it _yet_." it is better, as we have often observed, to avoid all _imperfect_ explanations, which give children confused ideas. (august th, .) master ---- came to see us, and taught s---- to fish for minnows. it was explained to s----, that fishing with worms for baits, tortures the worms. no other argument was used, no sentimental exclamations made upon the occasion; and s---- fished no more, nor did he ever mention the subject again. children sometimes appear cruel, when in fact they do not know that they give pain to animals. (july th, .) s---- saw a beautiful rainbow, and he said, "i wish i could walk over that fine arch." this is one of the pleasures of ariel, and of the sylphs in the rape of the lock. s---- was not praised for a poetic wish, lest he should have learnt affectation. (september d, .) mr. ---- attempted to explain to b----, h----, s----, and c----, the nature of insurance, and the day afterwards he asked them to explain it to him. they none of them understood it, except b----, who could not, however, explain it, though she did understand it. the terms were all new to them, and they had no ships to insure. (september th.) at dinner to-day, s---- (seven years old) said to his sister c----, "what is the name of that man that my father was talking to, that sounded like idem, isdal, or izard, i believe." "izard!" said somebody at table, "that name sounds like lizard; yes, there is a family of the lizards in the guardian." _s----._ "a real family?" _mr. ----._ "no, my dear: a name given to supposed characters." _m----._ "wasn't it one of the young lizards who would prove to his mother, when she had just scalded her fingers with boiling water out of the tea-kittle, that there's no more heat in fire that heats you, than pain in the stick that beats you!" _mr. ----._ "yes; i think that character has done harm; it has thrown a ridicule upon metaphysical disquisitions." _mrs.----._ "are not those lines about the pain in the stick in the 'letter[ ] to my sisters at crux easton,' in dodsley's poems?" _mr. ----._ "yes; but they come originally from hudibras, you know." in slight conversations, such as these, which are not contrived for the purpose, the curiosity of children is awakened to literature; they see the use which people make of what they read, and they learn to talk freely about what they meet with in books. what a variety of thoughts came in a few instants from s----'s question about _idem_! (november th, .) mr. ---- read the first chapter of hugh trevor to us; which contains the history of a passionate farmer, who was in a rage with a goose because it would not eat some oats which he offered it. he tore off the wings of the animal, and twisted off its neck; he bit off the ear of a pig, because it squealed when he was ringing it; he ran at his apprentice hugh trevor with a pitch-fork, because he suspected that he had drank some milk; the pitch-fork stuck in a door. hugh trevor then told the passionate farmer, that the dog jowler had drank the milk, but that he would not tell this before, because he knew his master would have hanged the dog. _s----_ admired hugh trevor for this extremely. the farmer in his lucid intervals is extremely penitent, but his fit of rage seizes him again one morning when he sees some milk boiling over. he flies at hugh trevor, and stabs him with a clasp knife, with which he had been cutting bread and cheese; the knife is stopped by half a crown which hugh trevor had sewed in his waistcoat; _this half crown he had found on the highway a few days before_. it was doubted by miss m. s----, whether this last was a proper circumstance to be told to children, because it might lead them to be dishonest. the evening after mr. ---- had read the story, he asked s---- to repeat it to him. s---- remembered it, and told it distinctly till he came to the half crown; at this circumstance he hesitated. he said he did not know how hugh trevor "_came to keep it_," though he had found it. he wondered that hugh trevor did not ask about it. _mr. ----_ explained to him, that when a person finds any thing upon the highway, he should put it in the hand of the public crier, who should _cry it_. mr. ---- was not quite certain whether the property found on the high road, after it has been _cried_ and no owner appears, belongs to the king, or to the person who finds it. blackstone's commentaries were consulted; the passage concerning _treasuretrove_ was read to s----; it is written in such distinct language, that he understood it completely. young people may acquire much knowledge by consulting books, at the moment that any interest is excited by conversation upon particular subjects. explanations about the _law_ were detailed to s----, because he was intended for a lawyer. in conversation we may direct the attention of children to what are to be their professional studies, and we may associate entertainment and pleasure with the idea of their future profession. the story of the passionate farmer in hugh trevor was thought to be a good lesson for children of vivacious tempers, as it shows to what crimes excess of passion may transport. this man appears an object of compassion; all the children felt a mixture of pity and abhorrence when they heard the history of his disease. (november d, .) this morning at breakfast miss ---- observed, that the inside of the cream cover, which was made of black wedgwood's ware, looked brown and speckled, as if the glazing had been worn away; she asked whether this was caused by the cream. one of the company immediately exclaimed, "oh! i've heard that wedgwood's ware won't hold oil." mr. ---- observed, that it would be best to try the experiment, instead of resting content with this hearsay evidence; he asked h---- and s---- what would be the best method of trying the experiment exactly. _s----_ proposed to pour oil into a vessel of wedgwood's ware, and to measure the depth of the oil when first put in; to leave the oil in the vessel for some time, and then to measure again the depth of the oil. _h----_ said, "i would weigh the wedgwood's ware vessel; then pour oil into it, and weigh _it_ (them) again; then i would leave the oil in the vessel for some time, and afterwards i would pour out the oil, and would weigh the vessel to see if it had gained any weight; and then weigh the oil to find out whether it had lost any weight since it was put into the vessel." h----'s scheme was approved. a black wedgwood's ware salt-cellar was weighed in accurate scales; it weighed grains; grains of oil were poured into it; total weight of the salt-cellar and oil, grs. six months afterwards, the salt-cellar was produced to the children, who were astonished to see that the oil had disappeared. the lady, who had first asserted that wedgwood's ware would not hold oil, was inclined to believe that the oil had oozed through the pores of the salt-cellar; but the little spectators thought it was more probable that the oil might have been accidentally spilled; the salt-cellar weighed as before grains. the experiment was repeated, and this time it was resolved to lock up the salt-cellar, that it might not again be thrown down. (april th, .) into the same salt-cellar grains weight of oil was poured (total weight grains.) the salt-cellar was put on a saucer, and covered with a glass tumbler. (june d, .) mr. ---- weighed the salt-cellar, and found that with the oil it weighed precisely the same as before, grains; without the oil, grains, its original weight: therefore it was clear that the wedgwood's ware had neither imbibed the oil, nor let it pass through its pores. this little experiment has not been thus minutely told for philosophers, but for children; however trivial the subject, it is useful to teach children early to try experiments. even the weighing and calculating in this experiment, amused them, and gave some ideas of the exactness necessary to prove any fact. (dec. st, .) _s----_ ( years old) in reading gay's fable of "the painter who pleased every body and nobody," was delighted to hear that the painter put his pallet upon his thumb, because _s----_ had seen a little pallet of his sister _a----'s_, which she used to put on her thumb. _s----_ had been much amused by this, and he was very fond of this sister, who had been absent for some time. association makes slight circumstances agreeable to children; if we do not know these associations, we are surprised at their expressions of delight. it is useful to trace them. (vide chap. on imagination.) _s----_ seemed puzzled when he read that the painter "dipped his pencil, talked of _greece_." "why did he talk of greece?" said _s----_ with a look of astonishment. upon inquiry, it was found that _s----_ mistook the word _greece_ for _grease_! it was explained to him, that grecian statues and grecian figures are generally thought to be particularly graceful and well executed; that, therefore, painters attend to them. (dec. st, .) after dinner to-day, _s----_ was looking at a little black toothpick-case of his father's; his father asked him if he knew what it was made of. the children guessed different things; wood, horn, bone, paper, pasteboard, glue. mr. ----. "instead of examining the toothpick-case, _s----_, you hold it in your hand, and turn your eyes away from it, that you may think the better. now, when i want to find out any thing about a particular object, i keep my eye fixed upon it. observe the texture of that toothpick-case, if you want to know the materials of which it is made; look at the edges, feel it." _s----._ "may i smell it?" _mr. ----._ "oh yes. you may use all your senses." _s----_ (feeling the toothpick-case, smelling it, and looking closely at it.) "it is black, and smooth, and strong and light. what is, let me see, both strong and light, and it will bend--parchment." _mr. ----._ "that is a good guess; but you are not quite right yet. what is parchment? i think by your look that you don't know." _s----._ "is it not paper pasted together?" _mr. ----._ "no; i thought you mistook pasteboard for parchment." _s----._ "is parchment skin?" _mr. ----._ "of what?" _s----._ "animals." _mr. ----._ "what animal?" _s----._ "i don't know." _mr. ----._ "parchment is the skin of sheep." "but _s----_, don't keep the toothpick-case in your hand, push it round the table to your neighbours, that every body may look again before they guess. i think, for certain reasons of my own, that _h----_ will guess right." _h----._ "oh i know what it is now!" _h----_ had lately made a pump, the piston of which was made of leather; the leather had been wetted, and then forced through a mould of the proper size. _h----_ recollected this, as _mr. ----_ thought he would, and guessed that the case might have been made of leather, and by a similar process. _s----._ "is it made of the skin of some animal?" _mr. ----._ "yes; but what do you mean by the skin of some animal? what do you call it?" _s----_ (laughing.) "oh, leather! leather!" _h----._ "yes, it's made the same way that the piston of my pump is made, i suppose." _m----._ "could not shoes be made in the same manner in a mould?" _mr. ----._ "yes; but there would be one disadvantage; the shoes would lose their shape as soon as they were wet; and the sole and upper leather must be nearly of the same thickness." _s----._ "is the tookpick-case made out of any particular kind of leather? i wish i could make one!" _m----._ "you have a bit of green leather, will you give it to me? i'll punch it out like _h_'s piston; but i don't exactly know how the toothpick-case was made into the right shape." _mr. ----._ "it was made in the same manner in which silver pencil-cases and thimbles are made. if you take a thin piece of silver, or of any ductile material, and lay it over a concave mould, you can readily imagine that you can make the thin, ductile material take the shape of any mould into which you put it; and you may go on forcing it into moulds of different depths, till at last the plate of silver will have been shaped into a cylindrical form; a thimble, a pencil-case, a toothpick-case, or any similar figure." we have observed (v. mechanics) that children should have some general idea of mechanics before they go into the large manufactories; this can be given to them from time to time in conversation, when little circumstances occur, which _naturally_ lead to the subject. (november th, .) _s----_ said he liked the beginning of gay's fable of "the man and the flea," very much, but he could not tell what was meant by the crab's crawling beside the _coral grove_, and hearing the ocean roll _above_. "the ocean cannot roll _above_, can it mother?" _mother._ "yes, when the animal is crawling below he hears the water rolling above him." _m----._ "coral groves mean the branches of coral which look like trees; you saw some at bristol in mr. b----'s collection." the difficulty _s----_ found in understanding "coral groves," confirms what has been observed, that children should never read poetry without its being thoroughly explained to them. (vide chapter on books.) (january th, .) _s----_ ( years old) said that he had been thinking about the wind; and he believed that it was the earth's turning round that made the wind. _m----._ "then how comes it that the wind does not blow always the same way?" _s----._ "aye, that's the thing i can't make out; besides, perhaps the air would stick to the earth as it turns round, as threads stick to my spinning top, and go round with it." (january th, .) as we were talking of the king of poland's little dwarf, s---- recollected by contrast the irish giant whom he had seen at bristol. "i liked the irish giant very much, because," said s----, "though he was so large, he was not surly; and when my father asked him to take out his shoe-buckle to try whether it would cover my foot, he did not seem in a hurry to do it. i suppose he did not wish to show how little i was." children are nice observers of that kind of politeness which arises from good nature; they may hence learn what really pleases in manners, without being taught grimace. dwarfs and giants led us to gulliver's travels. s---- had never read them, but one of the company now gave him some general account of lilliput and brobdignag. he thought the account of the little people more entertaining than that of the large ones; the carriage of gulliver's hat by a team of lilliputian horses, diverted him; but, when he was told that the queen of brobdignag's dwarf stuck gulliver one day at dinner into a marrow bone, s---- looked grave, and seemed rather shocked than amused; he said, "it must have almost suffocated poor gulliver, and must have spoiled his clothes." s---- wondered of what cloth they could make him new clothes, because the cloth in brobdignag must have been too thick, and as thick as a board. he also wished to know what sort of glass was used to glaze the windows in gulliver's wooden house; "because," said he, "their common glass must have been so thick that it would not have been transparent to gulliver." he thought that gulliver must have been extremely afraid of setting his small wooden house on fire. _m----._ "why more afraid than we are? his house was as large for gulliver as our house is for us." _s----._ "yes, but what makes the fire must have been _so much_ larger! one cinder, one spark of theirs would have filled his little grate. and how did he do to read their books?" _s----_ was told that gulliver stood at the topmost line of the page, and ran along as fast as he read, till he got to the bottom of the page. it was suggested, that gulliver might have used a diminishing glass. s----immediately exclaimed, "how entertaining it must have been to him to look through their telescopes." an instance of invention arising from _contrast_. if the conversation had not here been interrupted, s---- would probably have invented a greater variety of pleasures and difficulties for gulliver; his eagerness to read gulliver's travels, was increased by this conversation. we should let children exercise their invention upon all subjects, and not tell them the whole of every thing, and all the ingenious parts of a story. sometimes they invent these, and are then interested to see how the _real_ author has managed them. thus children's love for literature may be increased, and the activity of their minds may be exercised. "le secret d'ennuyer," says an author[ ] who never tires us, "le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire." this may be applied to the art of education. (v. attention, memory, and invention.) (january th, .) s----. "i don't understand about the tides." _h----_ ( years old.) "the moon, when it comes near the earth, draws up the sea by the middle; attracts it, and as the middle rises, the water runs down from that again into the channels of rivers." _s----._ "but--hum!--the moon attracts the sea; but why does not the sun attract it by the middle as well as the moon? how can you be sure that it is the moon that does it?" _mr. ----._ "we are not sure that the moon is the cause of tides." we should never force any system upon the belief of children; but wait till they can understand all the arguments on each side of the question. (january th, .) s---- ( years old.) "father, i have thought of a reason for the wind's blowing. when there has been a hot sunshiny day, and when the ground has been wet, the sun attracts a great deal of vapour: then _that_ vapour must have room, so it must push away some air to make room for itself; besides, vapour swells with heat, so it must have a _great_, _great_ deal of room as it grows hotter, and hotter; and the moving the air to make way for it, must make wind." it is probable, that if children are not early taught by rote words which they cannot understand, they will _think_ for themselves; and, however strange their incipient theories may appear, there is hope for the improvement of children as long as their minds are active. (february th, .) s----. "how do physicians try new medicines? if they are not sure they will succeed, they may be hanged for murder, mayn't they? it is cruel to try _them_ (_them_ meant medicines) on animals; besides, all animals are not the same as men. a pig's inside is the most like that of a man. i remember my father showed us the inside of a pig once." some time afterwards, s---- inquired what was meant by the circulation of the blood. "how are we sure that it does move? you told me that it doesn't move after we die, then nobody can have seen it really moving in the veins; that beating that i feel in my pulse does not feel like any thing running backwards and forwards; it beats up and down." the lady to whom s---- addressed these questions and observations, unfortunately could not give him any information upon this subject, but she had at least the prudence, or honesty, to tell the boy that "she did not know any thing about the matter." s---- should have been shown the circulation of the blood in fishes: which he might have seen by a microscope. children's minds turn to such inquiries; surely, if they are intended for physicians, these are the moments to give them a taste for their future profession, by associating pleasure with instruction, and connecting with the eagerness of curiosity the hope of making discoveries; a hope which all vivacious young people strongly feel. (february th.) s---- objected to that fable of phædrus in which it is said, that a boy threw a stone at Ã�sop, and that Ã�sop told the boy to throw a stone at another passenger, pointing to a rich man. the boy did as Ã�sop desired, and the rich man had the boy hanged. s---- said, that he thought that Ã�sop should have been hanged, because Ã�sop was the cause of the boy's fault. how little suited _political_ fables are to children. this fable, which was meant to show, we suppose, that the _rich_ could not, like the poor, be insulted with impunity, was quite unintelligible to a boy (nine years old) of _simple_ understanding. (july th, .) amongst "_vulgar errours_," sir thomas browne might have mentioned the common notion, that if you take a hen and hold her head down to the ground, and draw a circle of chalk round her, she will be enchanted by this magical operation so that she cannot stir. we determined to try the experiment, for which dr. johnson would have laughed at us, as he laughed at browne[ ] for trying "_the hopeless experiment_" about the magnetic dials. a hen's head was held down upon a stone flag, and a chalk line was drawn before her; she did not move. the same hen was put into a circle of chalk that had been previously drawn for her reception; her head was held down according to the letter of the charm, and she did not move; line or circle apparently operated alike. it was suggested (by a----) that perhaps the hen was frightened by her head's being held down to the ground, and that the chalk line and circle had nothing to do with the business. the hen was carried out of sight of the magic line and circle, her head was held down to the ground as before; and when the person who had held her, gently withdrew his hand, she did not move. she did not for some instants recover from her terror; or, perhaps, the feeling of pressure seemed to her to remain upon her head after the hand was withdrawn. children who are accustomed to _doubt_, and to try experiments, will not be dupes to "vulgar errours." (july th, .) s---- (between and ) when he heard a lady propose to make use of a small glass tumbler to hold pomatum, made a face expressive of great disgust; he was begged to give a reason for his dislike. s---- said it appeared to him dirty and disagreeable to put pomatum into a tumbler out of which we are used to drink wine or water. we have observed, (v. chapter on taste and imagination) that children may early be led to reflect upon the cause of their tastes. (july th, .) s---- observed, that "the lachrymal sack is like aboulcasem's cup, (in the persian tales.) it is emptied and fills again of itself; though it is emptied ever so often, it continues full." the power of reasoning had been more cultivated in s---- than the taste for wit or allusion; yet it seems his mind was not defective in that quickness of seizing resemblances which _may_ lead to wit. he was not praised for the lachrymal sack, and aboulcasem's cup. (v. chapter on wit and judgment.) (august d, .) c---- ( years old) after she had heard a description of a fire engine, said, "i want to read the description of the fire engine over again, for whilst my father was describing one particular part, i recollected something that i had heard before, and _that_ took my attention quite away from what he was saying. very often when i am listening, something that is said puts me in mind of something, and then i go on thinking of _that_, and i cannot hear what is said any longer." preceptors should listen to the observations that their pupils make upon their minds; this remark of c----suggested to us some ideas that have been detailed in the "chapter on attention." (august st, .) s----, who had been translating some of ovid's metamorphoses to his father, exclaimed, "i hate those ancient gods and goddesses, they are so wicked! i wish i was perseus, and had his shield, i would fly up to heaven and turn jupiter, and apollo, and venus into stone; then they would be too heavy to stay in heaven, and they would tumble down to earth; and then they would be stone statues, and we should have much finer statues of apollo and venus than any they have now at rome." (september th, .) s---- (within a month of ten years old) read to his sister m---- part of dr. darwin's chapter upon instinct; that part in which there is an account of young birds who learn to sing from the birds who take care of them, not from their parents. s---- immediately recollected a story which he had read last winter in the annual register. extract from barrington's remarks upon singing birds. "there was a silly boy once (you know, sister, boys are silly sometimes) who used to play in a room where his mother had a nightingale in a cage, and the boy took out of the cage the nightingale's eggs, and put in some other bird's eggs (a swallow's, i think) and the nightingale hatched them, and when the swallows grew up they sang like nightingales." when s---- had done reading, he looked at the title of the book. he had often heard his father speak of zoonomia, and he knew that dr. darwin was the author of it. _s----._ "oh, ho! zoonomia! dr. darwin wrote it; it is very entertaining: my father told me that when i read zoonomia, i should know the reason why i stretch myself when i am tired. but, sister, there is one thing i read about the cuckoo that i did not quite understand. may i look at it again?" he read the following passage. "for a hen teaches this language with ease to the ducklings she has hatched from supposititious eggs, and educates as her own offspring; and the wag-tails or hedge-sparrows learn it from the young cuckoo, their foster nursling, and supply him with food long after he can fly about, whenever they hear his cuckooing, which linnæus tells us is his call of hunger." _s----_ asked what dr. darwin meant by "learns _it_." _m----._ "learns a language." _s----._ "what does foster nursling mean?" _m----._ "it here means a bird that is nursed along with another, but that has not the same parents." _s----._ "then, does it not mean that the sparrows learn from their foster sister, the cuckoo, to say cuckoo!" _m----._ "no; the sparrow don't learn to say cuckoo, but they learn to understand what he means by that cry; that he is hungry." _s----._ "well, but then i think this is a proof against what dr. darwin means about instinct." _m----._ "why? how?" _s----._ "because the young cuckoo does say cuckoo! without being taught, it does not learn from the sparrows. how comes it to say cuckoo at all, if it is not by instinct? it does not see its own father and mother." we give this conversation as a proof that our young pupils were accustomed to _think_ about every thing that they read. (nov. th, .) the following are the "_curiosities of literature_," which were promised to the reader in the chapter upon grammar and classical literature. translation from ovid. the cave of sleep, _first_ edition. "no watchful cock aurora's beams invite; no dog nor goose, the guardians of the night." _dog_ and _goose_ were objected to, and the young author changed them into dogs and geese. "no herds nor flocks, nor human voice is heard; but nigh the cave a _rustling_ spring appear'd." when this line was read to s----, he changed the epithet _rustling_ into _gliding_. "and with soft murmurs faithless sleep invites, and there the flying past again delights; and near the door the noxious poppy grows, and spreads his sleepy milk at daylight's close." s---- was now requested to translate the beginning of the sentence, and he produced these lines: "far from the sun there lies a cave forlorn, which sol's bright beams _can't_ enter eve nor morn." _can't_ was objected to. mr. ---- asked s---- what was the literal english. s---- first said _not_, and then _nor_; and he corrected his line, and made it "which sol's bright beams _nor_ visit eve nor morn." afterwards: "far in a vale there lies a cave forlorn, which phoebus never enters eve nor morn." after an interval of a few days, the lines were all read to the boy, to try whether he could farther correct them; he desired to have the two following lines left out: "no herds, nor flocks, nor human voice is heard, but nigh the cave a gliding spring appeared." and in the place of them he wrote, "no flocks nor herds disturb the silent plains: within the sacred walls mute quiet reigns." instead of the two following: "and with soft murmurs faithless sleep invites, and there the flying past again delights." s---- desired his _secretary_ to write, "but murmuring lethe soothing sleep invites, in dreams again the flying past delights." instead of "and near the doors the noxious poppy grows, and spreads his sleepy milk at daylight's close," the following lines were written. s---- did not say _doors_, because he thought the cave had no doors; yet his latin, he said, spoke of squeaking hinges. "from milky flowers that near the cavern grow, night scatters the collected sleep below." we shall not make any further apology for inserting all these corrections, because we have already sufficiently explained our motives. (v. chapter on grammar and classical literature.) (february, .) a little theatre was put up for the children, and they acted "justice poz."[ ] when the scenes were pulled down afterwards, s---- was extremely sorry to see the whole theatre vanish; he had succeeded as an actor, and he wished to have another play acted. his father did not wish that he should become ambitious of excelling in this way at ten years old, because it might have turned his attention away from things of more consequence; and, if he had been much applauded for this talent, he would, perhaps, have been over-stimulated. (v. chapter on vanity and ambition.) the way to turn this boy's mind away from its present pursuit, was to give him another object, not to blame or check him for the natural expression of his wishes. it is difficult to find objects for children who have not cultivated a taste for literature; but infinite variety can be found for those who have acquired this happy taste. soon after s---- had expressed his ardent wish to have another play performed, the trial of some poor man in the neighbourhood happened to be mentioned; and it was said, that the criminal had the choice of either going to botany bay, or being hanged. s---- asked how that could be. "i did'nt think," said he, "that a man could have two punishments. can the judge change the punishment? i thought it was fixed by the law." mr. ---- told s---- that these were sensible questions; and, as he saw that the boy's attention was fixed, he seized the opportunity to give him some general idea upon the subject. he began with telling s----the manner in which a suspected person is brought before a justice of the peace. a warrant and committal were described; then the manner of trying criminals; what is called the court, the jury, &c. the crier of the court, and the forms of a trial; the reason why the prisoner, when he is asked how he will be tried, answers, "by god and my country:" this led to an account of the old absurd fire and water ordeals, and thence the advantages of a trial by jury became more apparent by comparison. mr. ---- told s---- why it is called _empannelling_ a jury, and why the jury are called a _pannel_; the manner in which the jury give their verdict; the duty of the judge, to sum up the evidence, to explain the law to the jury. "the judge is, by the humane laws of england, always supposed to be the protector of the accused; and now, s----, we are come round to your question; the judge cannot make the punishment more severe; but when the punishment is fine or imprisonment, the quantity or duration of the punishment is left to his judgment. the king may remit the punishment entirely; he may pardon the criminal; he may, if a man be sentenced to be hanged, give him his choice, whether he will be hanged or _transported_"--(the word was explained.) "but," said s----, "since the judge cannot _change_ the punishment, why may the king? i think it is very unjust that the king should have such a power, because, if he changes the punishment for one thing, why mayn't he for another and another, and so on?" mr. ----. "i am inclined to believe, my dear s----, that it is for the good of a state, that a king should have such a power; but i am not sure. if any individual should have this power, i think it is most safely trusted to a king; because, as he has no connection with the individuals who are tried, as he does not live amongst them, he is not so liable as judges and jurymen might be to be prejudiced, to be influenced by personal revenge, friendship, or pity. when he pardons, he is supposed to pardon without any personal motives. but of all this, s----, you will judge for yourself, when you study the law. i intend to take you with me to ---- next assizes to hear a trial." s---- looked full as eager to hear a trial, as he had done, half an hour before, to act a play. we should mention, that in the little play in which he had acted, he had played the part of a justice of the peace, and a sort of trial formed the business of the play; the ideas of trials and law, therefore, joined readily with his former train of thought. much of the success of education, depends upon the preceptor's seizing these slight connections. it is scarcely possible to explain this fully in writing. (february th, .) s---- was reading in "evenings at home," the story of "a friend in need, is a friend indeed." "mr. g. cornish, having raised a moderate fortune, and being now beyond the meridian of life, he felt a _strong desire_ of returning to his native country." s----. "how much better that is, than to say he felt an _irresistible desire_, or an _insupportable desire_, as people sometimes say in books." our pupils were always permitted to stop when they were reading loud, to make whatever remarks they pleased upon whatever books they read. they did not, by this method, get through so many books as other children of their age usually do; but their taste for reading seemed to increase rapidly. (v. books.) (march th, .) h---- ( ) told us that he remembered seeing, when he was five years old, some puppets packed up by a showman in a triangular box; "and for sometime afterwards," said h----, "when i saw my father's triangular hat-box, i expected puppets to come out of it. a few days ago, i met a man with a triangular box upon his head, and i thought that there were puppets in the box." we have taken notice of this propensity in children, to believe that particular, are general causes; and we have endeavoured to show how it affects the temper, and the habits of reasoning. (v. temper, and wit and judgment.) (march th, .) mr. ---- showed little w----( years old) a watch, and asked him if he thought that it was alive. _w----._ "yes." _mr. ----._ "do you think that the fire is alive?" _w----._ "yes." _mr. ----._ (the child was standing at the tea table.) "do you think the urn is alive?" _w----._ "no." _mr. ----._ "do you think that book is alive?" _w----._ "no." _mr. ----._ "the horses?" _w----._ "yes." _mr. ----._ "do you think that the chaise is alive?" _w----._ "yes." then, after looking in mr. ----'s face, he changed his opinion, and said _no_. _w----_ did not seem to know what was meant by the word _alive_. mr. ---- called h. ( years old) and asked her whether she thought that the watch was alive. she at first said yes; but, as soon as she had time to recollect herself, she said that the watch was not alive. this question was asked, to try whether reid was right in his conjecture as to the answers a child would give to such a question. (v. reid's essays on the intellectual powers of man.) we frequently say, that flowers, &c. are dead: we should explain to children that there are two kinds of life; or rather, that the word _life_ is used to express two ideas; vegetable life, and animal life. (july, .) miss louisa ---- told us, that when a rose bud begins to wither, if you burn the end of the stalk, and plunge it red hot into water, the rose will be found revived the next day; and by a repetition of this burning, the lives of flowers may be fortunately prolonged many days. miss louisa ---- had seen many surprising recoveries performed by this operation, and several of her friends had adopted the practice with uniform success. we determined to repeat the experiment. children should never take any thing upon trust which they can verify. two roses, gathered at the same time, from the same tree, were put into separate glasses of water. the stalk of one of these roses was burnt, according to prescription; they were left a night in water, and the next day the rose that had been burnt, appeared in much better health than that which had not been burnt. the experiment was afterwards several times repeated; and should be tried by others until the fact be fully ascertained. (july, .) little w---- (three years old) was shown miss b----'s beautiful copy of the aurora surgens of guido. the car of apollo is encircled by the dancing hours, so that its shape is not seen; part of one wheel only is visible between the robes of the dancing figures. we asked little w---- why that man (pointing to the figure of apollo in his invisible car) looked so much higher up in the air than the other people? _w----._ "because he is in a carriage; he is sitting in a carriage." we pointed to the imperfect wheel, and asked if he knew what that was? he immediately answered, "yes, the wheel of the carriage." we wanted to see whether the imagination of a child of three years old, would supply the invisible parts of the _car_: and whether the wheel and horses, and man holding the reins, would suggest the idea of a phæton. (v. chapter on taste and imagination.) we shall not trespass upon the reader's patience with any more anecdotes from the nursery. we hope, that candid and intelligent parents will pardon, if they have discovered any desire in us to _exhibit_ our pupils. we may mistake our own motives, and we do not pretend to be perfectly impartial judges upon this occasion; but we have hoped, that only such conversations or anecdotes have been produced, as may be of some use in practical education. from conversation, if properly managed, children may learn with ease, expedition, and delight, a variety of knowledge; and a skilful preceptor can apply in conversation all the principles that we have laboriously endeavoured to make intelligible. footnotes: [ ] mrs. honora edgeworth, daughter of edward sneyd, esq. of litchfield. as this lady's name has been mentioned in a monody on the death of major andré, we take this opportunity of correcting a mistake that occurs in a note to that performance. "till busy rumour chas'd each pleasing dream, and quench'd the radiance of the silver beam." _monody on major andré._ the note on these lines is as follows: "the tidings of honora's marriage. upon that event mr. andré quitted his profession as a merchant, and joined our army in america." miss honora sneyd was married to mr. edgeworth in july, , and the date of major andré's first commission in the welch fusileers is march th, . [ ] this has been formerly quoted in the preface to the parent's assistant. [ ] the anecdotes mentioned in the _preceding_ pages, were read to the children with the rest of the work. [ ] soame jennings's. [ ] voltaire. [ ] v. johnson's life of browne. [ ] parent's assistant. the end. practical education: by maria edgeworth, author of letters for literary ladies, and the parent's assistant, &c. &c. and, by richard lovell edgeworth, f.r.s. and m.r.i.a. in two volumes ... vol. i. second american edition. published by j. francis lippitt, providence, (r. i.) and t. b. wait & sons, boston. t. b. wait and sons, printers. . preface. we shall not imitate the invidious example of some authors, who think it necessary to destroy the edifices of others, in order to clear the way for their own. we have no peculiar system to support, and, consequently, we have no temptation to attack the theories of others; and we have chosen the title of practical education, to point out that we rely entirely upon practice and experience. to make any progress in the art of education, it must be patiently reduced to an experimental science: we are fully sensible of the extent and difficulty of this undertaking, and we have not the arrogance to imagine, that we have made any considerable progress in a work, which the labours of many generations may, perhaps, be insufficient to complete; but we lay before the publick the result of our experiments, and in many instances the experiments themselves. in pursuing this part of our plan, we have sometimes descended from that elevation of style, which the reader might expect in a quarto volume; we have frequently been obliged to record facts concerning children which may seem trifling, and to enter into a minuteness of detail which may appear unnecessary. no anecdotes, however, have been admitted without due deliberation; nothing has been introduced to gratify the idle curiosity of others, or to indulge our own feelings of domestic partiality. in what we have written upon the rudiments of science, we have pursued an opposite plan; so far from attempting to teach them in detail, we refer our readers to the excellent treatises on the different branches of science, and on the various faculties of the human mind, which are to be found in every language. the chapters that we have introduced upon these subjects, are intended merely as specimens of the manner in which we think young children should be taught. we have found from experience, that an early knowledge of the first principles of science may be given in conversation, and may be insensibly acquired from the usual incidents of life: if this knowledge be carefully associated with the technical terms which common use may preserve in the memory, much of the difficulty of subsequent instruction may be avoided. the sketches we have hazarded upon these subjects, may to some appear too slight, and to others too abstruse and tedious. to those who have explored the vast mines of human knowledge, small specimens appear trifling and contemptible, whilst the less accustomed eye is somewhat dazzled and confused by the appearance even of a small collection: but to the most enlightened minds, new combinations may be suggested by a new arrangement of materials, and the curiosity and enthusiasm of the inexperienced may be awakened, and excited to accurate and laborious researches. with respect to what is commonly called the education of the heart, we have endeavoured to suggest the easiest means of inducing useful and agreeable habits, well regulated sympathy and benevolent affections. a witty writer says, "il est permis d'ennuyer en moralites d'ici jusqu' a constantinople." unwilling to avail ourselves of this permission, we have sedulously avoided declamation, and, wherever we have been obliged to repeat ancient maxims, and common truths, we have at least thought it becoming to present them in a new dress. on religion and politics we have been silent, because we have no ambition to gain partisans, or to make proselytes, and because we do not address ourselves exclusively to any sect or to any party. the scrutinizing eye of criticism, in looking over our table of contents, will also, probably, observe that there are no chapters on courage and chastity. to pretend to teach courage to britons, would be as ridiculous as it is unnecessary; and, except amongst those who are exposed to the contagion of foreign manners, we may boast of the superior delicacy of our fair countrywomen; a delicacy acquired from domestic example, and confirmed by publick approbation. our opinions concerning the female character and understanding, have been fully detailed in a former publication;[ ] and, unwilling to fatigue by repetition, we have touched but slightly upon these subjects in our chapters on temper, female accomplishments, prudence, and economy. we have warned our readers not to expect from us any new theory of education, but they need not apprehend that we have written without method, or that we have thrown before them a heap of desultory remarks and experiments, which lead to no general conclusions, and which tend to the establishment of no useful principles. we assure them that we have worked upon a regular plan, and where we have failed of executing our design, it has not been for want of labour or attention. convinced that it is the duty and the interest of all who write, to inquire what others have said and thought upon the subject of which they treat, we have examined attentively the works of others, that we might collect whatever knowledge they contain, and that we might neither arrogate inventions which do not belong to us, nor weary the public by repetition. some useful and ingenious essays may probably have escaped our notice; but we flatter ourselves, that our readers will not find reason to accuse us of negligence, as we have perused with diligent attention every work upon education, that has obtained the sanction of time or of public approbation, and, though we have never bound ourselves to the letter, we hope that we have been faithful to the spirit, of their authors. without incumbering ourselves with any part of their systems which has not been authorized by experience, we have steadily attempted immediately to apply to practice such of their ideas as we have thought useful; but whilst we have used the thoughts of others, we have been anxious to avoid mean plagiarism, and wherever we have borrowed, the debt has been carefully acknowledged. the first hint of the chapter on toys was received from dr. beddoes; the sketch of an introduction to chemistry for children was given to us by mr. lovell edgeworth; and the rest of the work was resumed from a design formed and begun twenty years ago. when a book appears under the name of two authors, it is natural to inquire what share belongs to each of them. all that relates to the art of teaching to read in the chapter on tasks, the chapters on grammar and classical literature, geography, chronology, arithmetic, geometry, and mechanics, were written by mr. edgeworth, and the rest of the book by miss edgeworth. she was encouraged and enabled to write upon this important subject, by having for many years before her eyes the conduct of a judicious mother in the education of a large family. the chapter on obedience, was written from mrs. edgeworth's notes, and was exemplified by her successful practice in the management of her children; the whole manuscript was submitted to her judgment, and she revised parts of it in the last stage of a fatal disease. footnotes: [ ] letters for literary ladies. contents. chapter page i. _toys_ ii. _tasks_ iii. _on attention_ iv. _servants_ v. _acquaintance_ vi. _on temper_ vii. _on obedience_ viii. _on truth_ ix. _on rewards and punishments_ x. _on sympathy and sensibility_ xi. _on vanity, pride, and ambition_ xii. _books_ practical education. chapter i. toys. "why don't you play with your playthings, my dear? i am sure that i have bought toys enough for you; why can't you divert yourself with them, instead of breaking them to pieces?" says a mother to her child, who stands idle and miserable, surrounded by disjointed dolls, maimed horses, coaches and one-horse chairs without wheels, and a nameless wreck of gilded lumber. a child in this situation is surely more to be pitied than blamed; for is it not vain to repeat, "why don't you play with your playthings," unless they be such as he can play with, which is very seldom the case; and is it not rather unjust to be angry with him for breaking them to pieces, when he can by no other device render them subservient to his amusement? he breaks them, not from the love of mischief, but from the hatred of idleness; either he wishes to see what his playthings are made of, and how they are made; or, whether he can put them together again, if the parts be once separated. all this is perfectly innocent; and it is a pity that his love of knowledge and his spirit of activity should be repressed by the undistinguishing correction of a nursery maid, or the unceasing reproof of a french governess. the more natural vivacity and ingenuity young people possess, the less are they likely to be amused with the toys which are usually put into their hands. they require to have things which exercise their senses or their imagination, their imitative, and inventive powers. the glaring colours, or the gilding of toys, may catch the eye, and please for a few minutes, but unless some use can be made of them, they will, and ought, to be soon discarded. a boy, who has the use of his limbs, and whose mind is untainted with prejudice, would, in all probability, prefer a substantial cart, in which he could carry weeds, earth and stones, up and down hill, to the finest frail coach and six that ever came out of a toy-shop: for what could he do with the coach after having admired, and sucked the paint, but drag it cautiously along the carpet of a drawing-room, watching the wheels, which will not turn, and seeming to sympathize with the just terrors of the lady and gentleman within, who are certain of being overturned every five minutes? when he is tired of this, perhaps, he may set about to unharness horses which were never meant to be unharnessed; or to currycomb their woollen manes and tails, which usually come off during the first attempt. that such toys are frail and useless, may, however, be considered as evils comparatively small: as long as the child has sense and courage to destroy the toys, there is no great harm done; but, in general, he is taught to set a value upon them totally independent of all ideas of utility, or of any regard to his own real feelings. either he is conjured to take particular care of them, because they cost a great deal of money; or else he is taught to admire them as miniatures of some of the fine things on which fine people pride themselves: if no other bad consequence were to ensue, this single circumstance of his being guided in his choice by the opinion of others is dangerous. instead of attending to his own sensations, and learning from his own experience, he acquires the habit of estimating his pleasures by the taste and judgment of those who happen to be near him. "i liked the cart best," says the boy, "but mamma and every body said that the coach was the prettiest; so i chose the coach."--shall we wonder if the same principle afterwards governs him in the choice of "the toys of age?" a little girl, presiding at her baby tea-table, is pleased with the notion that she is like her mamma; and, before she can have any idea of the real pleasures of conversation and society, she is confirmed in the persuasion, that tattling and visiting are some of the most enviable privileges of grown people; a set of beings whom she believes to be in possession of all the sweets of happiness. dolls, beside the prescriptive right of ancient usage, can boast of such an able champion in rousseau, that it requires no common share of temerity to attack them. as far as they are the means of inspiring girls with a taste for neatness in dress, and with a desire to make those things for themselves, for which women are usually dependent upon milliners, we must acknowledge their utility; but a watchful eye should be kept upon the child, to mark the first symptoms of a love of finery and fashion. it is a sensible remark of a late female writer, that whilst young people work, the mind will follow the hands, the thoughts are occupied with trifles, and the industry is stimulated by vanity. our objections to dolls are offered with great submission and due hesitation. with more confidence we may venture to attack baby-houses; an unfurnished baby-house might be a good toy, as it would employ little carpenters and seamstresses to fit it up; but a completely furnished baby-house proves as tiresome to a child, as a finished seat is to a young nobleman. after peeping, for in general only a peep can be had into each apartment, after being thoroughly satisfied that nothing is wanting, and that consequently there is nothing to be done, the young lady lays her doll upon the state bed, if the doll be not twice as large as the bed, and falls fast asleep in the midst of her felicity. before dolls, baby-houses, coaches, and cups and saucers, there comes a set of toys, which are made to imitate the actions of men and women, and the notes or noises of birds and beasts. many of these are ingenious in their construction, and happy in their effect, but that effect unfortunately is transitory. when the wooden woman has churned her hour in her empty churn; when the stiff backed man has hammered or sawed till his arms are broken, or till his employers are tired; when the gilt lamb has ba-ad, the obstinate pig squeaked, and the provoking cuckoo cried cuckoo, till no one in the house can endure the noise; what remains to be done?--wo betide the unlucky little philosopher, who should think of inquiring why the woman churned, or how the bird cried cuckoo; for it is ten to one that in prosecuting such an inquiry, just when he is upon the eve of discovery, he snaps the wire, or perforates the bellows, and there ensue "a death-like silence, and a dread repose." the grief which is felt for spoiling a new plaything might be borne, if it were not increased, as it commonly is, by the reproaches of friends; much kind eloquence, upon these occasions, is frequently displayed, to bring the sufferer to a proper sense of his folly, till in due time the contrite corners of his mouth are drawn down, his wide eyes fill with tears, and, without knowing what he means, he promises never to be so silly any more. the future safety of his worthless playthings is thus purchased at the expense of his understanding, perhaps of his integrity: for children seldom scrupulously adhere to promises, which they have made to escape from impending punishment. we have ventured to object to some fashionable toys; we are bound at least to propose others in their place; and we shall take the matter up soberly from the nursery. the first toys for infants should be merely such things as may be grasped without danger, and which might, by the difference of their sizes, invite comparison: round ivory or wooden sticks should be put into their little hands; by degrees they will learn to lift them to their mouths, and they will distinguish their sizes: square and circular bits of wood, balls, cubes, and triangles, with holes of different sizes made in them, to admit the sticks, should be their playthings. no greater apparatus is necessary for the amusement of the first months of an infant's life. to ease the pain which they feel from cutting teeth, infants generally carry to their mouths whatever they can lay their hands upon; but they soon learn to distinguish those bodies which relieve their pain, from those which gratify their palate; and, if they are left to themselves, they will always choose what is painted in preference to every thing else; nor must we attribute the look of delight with which they seize toys that are painted red, merely to the pleasure which their eye takes in the bright colour, but to the love of the sweet taste which they suck from the paint. what injury may be done to the health by the quantity of lead which is thus swallowed, we will not pretend to determine, but we refer to a medical name of high authority,[ ] whose cautions probably will not be treated with neglect. to gratify the eye with glittering objects, if this be necessary, may be done with more safety by toys of tin and polished iron: a common steel button is a more desirable plaything to a young child than many expensive toys; a few such buttons tied together, so as to prevent any danger of their being swallowed, would continue for some time a source of amusement. when a nurse wants to please or to pacify a child, she stuns its ear with a variety of noises, or dazzles its eye with glaring colours or stimulating light. the eye and the ear are thus fatigued without advantage, and the temper is hushed to a transient calm by expedients, which in time must lose their effect, and which can have no power over confirmed fretfulness. the pleasure of exercising their senses, is in itself sufficient to children without any factitious stimulus, which only exhausts their excitability, and renders them incapable of being amused by a variety of common objects, which would naturally be their entertainment. we do not here speak of the attempts made to sooth a child who is ill; "to charm the sense of pain," so far as it can be done by diverting the child's attention from his own sufferings to outward objects, is humane and reasonable, provided our compassion does not induce in the child's mind the expectation of continual attendance, and that impatience of temper which increases bodily suffering. it would be in vain to read lectures on philosophy to a nurse, or to expect stoicism from an infant; but, perhaps, where mothers pay attention themselves to their children, they will be able to prevent many of the consequences of vulgar prejudice and folly. a nurse's wish is to have as little trouble as possible with the child committed to her charge, and at the same time to flatter the mother, from whom she expects her reward. the appearance of extravagant fondness for the child, of incessant attention to its humour, and absurd submission to its caprices, she imagines to be the surest method of recommending herself to favour. she is not to be imposed upon by the faint and affected rebukes of the fond mother, who exclaims, "oh, nurse, indeed you _do_ spoil that child sadly!--oh, nurse, upon my word she governs you entirely!--nurse, you must not let her have her own way always.--never mind her crying, i beg, nurse."--nurse smiles, sees that she has gained her point, and promises what she knows it is not expected she should perform. now if, on the contrary, she perceived that the mother was neither to be flattered nor pleased by these means, one motive for spoiling the child would immediately cease: another strong one would, it is true, still remain. a nurse wishes to save herself trouble, and she frequently consults her own convenience when she humours an infant. she hushes it to sleep, that she may leave it safely; she stops it from crying, that she may not hear an irritating noise, that she may relieve herself as soon as possible from the painful weakness of compassion, or that she may avoid the danger of being interrogated by the family as to the cause of the disturbance. it is less trouble to her to yield to caprice and ill-humour than to prevent or cure it, or at least she thinks it is so. in reality it is not; for an humoured child in time plagues its attendant infinitely more than it would have done with reasonable management. if it were possible to convince nurses of this, they would sacrifice perhaps the convenience of a moment to the peace of future hours, and they would not be eager to quell one storm, at the hazard of being obliged to endure twenty more boisterous; the candle would then no more be thrust almost into the infant's eyes to make it take notice of the light through the mist of tears, the eternal bunch of keys would not dance and jingle at every peevish summons, nor would the roarings of passion be overpowered by insulting songs, or soothed by artful caresses; the child would then be caressed and amused when he looks smiling and good-humoured, and all parties would be much happier. practical education begins very early, even in the nursery. without the mountebank pretence, that miracles can be performed by the turning of a straw, or the dictatorial anathematizing tone, which calls down vengeance upon those who do not follow to an iota the injunctions of a theorist, we may simply observe, that parents would save themselves a great deal of trouble, and their children some pain, if they would pay some attention to their early education. the temper acquires habits much earlier than is usually apprehended; the first impressions which infants receive, and the first habits which they learn from their nurses, influence the temper and disposition long after the slight causes which produced them are forgotten. more care and judgment than usually fall to the share of a nurse are necessary, to cultivate the disposition which infants show, to exercise their senses, so as neither to suffer them to become indolent and torpid from want of proper objects to occupy their attention, nor yet to exhaust their senses by continual excitation. by ill-timed restraints or injudicious incitements, the nurse frequently renders the child obstinate or passionate. an infant should never be interrupted in its operations; whilst it wishes to use its hands, we should not be impatient to make it walk; or when it is pacing, with all the attention to its centre of gravity that is exerted by a rope-dancer, suddenly arrest its progress, and insist upon its pronouncing the scanty vocabulary which we have compelled it to learn. when children are busily trying experiments upon objects within their reach, we should not, by way of saving them trouble, break the course of their ideas, and totally prevent them from acquiring knowledge by their own experience. when a foolish nurse sees a child attempting to reach or lift any thing, she runs immediately, "oh, dear love, it can't do it, it can't!--i'll do it for it, so i will!"--if the child be trying the difference between pushing and pulling, rolling or sliding, the powers of the wedge or the lever, the officious nurse hastens instantly to display her own knowledge of the mechanic powers: "stay, love, stay; that is not the way to do it--i'll show it the right way--see here--look at me love."--without interrupting a child in the moment of action, proper care might previously be taken to remove out of its way those things which can really hurt it, and a just degree of attention must be paid to its first experiments upon hard and heavy, and more especially upon sharp, brittle, and burning bodies; but this degree of care should not degenerate into cowardice; it is better that a child should tumble down or burn its fingers, than that it should not learn the use of its limbs and its senses. we should for another reason take care to put all dangerous things effectually out of the child's reach, instead of saying perpetually, "take care, don't touch that!--don't do that!--let that alone!" the child, who scarcely understands the words, and not at all the reason of these prohibitions, is frightened by the tone and countenance with which they are uttered and accompanied; and he either becomes indolent or cunning; either he desists from exertion, or seizes the moment to divert himself with forbidden objects, when the watchful eye that guards them is withdrawn. it is in vain to encompass the restless prisoner with a fortification of chairs, and to throw him an old almanack to tear to pieces, or an old pincushion to explore; the enterprising adventurer soon makes his escape from this barricado, leaves his goods behind him, and presently is again in what the nurse calls mischief. mischief is with nurses frequently only another name for any species of activity which they find troublesome; the love which children are supposed to have for pulling things out of their places, is in reality the desire of seeing things in motion, or of putting things into different situations. they will like to put the furniture in a room in its proper place, and to arrange every thing in what we call order, if we can make these equally permanent sources of active amusement; but when things are once in their places, the child has nothing more to do, and the more quickly each chair arrives at its destined situation, the sooner comes the dreaded state of idleness and quiet. a nursery, or a room in which young children are to live, should never have any furniture in it which they can spoil; as few things as possible should be left within their reach which they are not to touch, and at the same time they should be provided with the means of amusing themselves, not with painted or gilt toys, but with pieces of wood of various shapes and sizes, which they may build up and pull down, and put in a variety of different forms and positions; balls, pulleys, wheels, strings, and strong little carts, proportioned to their age, and to the things which they want to carry in them, should be their playthings. prints will be entertaining to children at a very early age; it would be endless to enumerate the uses that may be made of them; they teach accuracy of sight, they engage the attention, and employ the imagination. in we saw l----, a child of two years old, point out every piece of furniture in the french prints of gil blas; in the print of the canon at dinner, he distinguished the knives, forks, spoons, bottles, and every thing upon the table: the dog lying upon the mat, and the bunch of keys hanging at jacintha's girdle; he told, with much readiness, the occupation of every figure in the print, and could supply, from his imagination, what is supposed to be hidden by the foremost parts of all the objects. a child of four years old was asked, what was meant by something that was very indistinctly represented as hanging round the arm of a figure in one of the prints of the london cries. he said it was a glove; though it had as little resemblance to a glove, as to a ribbon or a purse. when he was asked how he knew that it was a glove, he answered, "that it ought to be a glove, because the woman had one upon her other arm, and none upon that where the thing was hanging." having seen the gown of a female figure in a print hanging obliquely, the same child said, "the wind blows that woman's gown back." we mention these little circumstances from real life, to show how early prints may be an amusement to children, and how quickly things unknown, are learnt by the relations which they bear to what was known before. we should at the same time observe, that children are very apt to make strange mistakes, and hasty conclusions, when they begin to reason from analogy. a child having asked what was meant by some marks in the forehead of an old man in a print; and having been told, upon some occasion, that old people were wiser than young ones, brought a print containing several figures to his mother, and told her that _one_, which he pointed to, was wiser than all the rest; upon inquiry, it was found that he had formed this notion from seeing that one figure was wrinkled, and that the others were not. prints for children should be chosen with great care; they should represent objects which are familiar; the resemblances should be accurate, and the manners should be attended to, or at least, the general moral that is to be drawn from them. the attitude of sephora, the boxing lady in gil blas, must appear unnatural to children who have not lived with termagant heroines. perhaps, the first ideas of grace, beauty, and propriety, are considerably influenced by the first pictures and prints which please children. sir joshua reynolds tells us, that he took a child with him through a room full of pictures, and that the child stopped, with signs of aversion, whenever it came to any picture of a figure in a constrained attitude. children soon judge tolerably well of proportion in drawing, where they have been used to see the objects which are represented: but we often give them prints of objects, and of animals especially, which they have never seen, and in which no sort of proportion is observed. the common prints of animals must give children false ideas. the mouse and the elephant are nearly of the same size, and the crocodile and whale fill the same space in the page. painters, who put figures of men amongst their buildings, give the idea of the proportionate height immediately to the eye: this is, perhaps, the best scale we can adopt; in every print for children this should be attended to. some idea of the relative sizes of the animals they see represented would then be given, and the imagination would not be filled with chimeras. after having been accustomed to examine prints, and to trace their resemblance to real objects, children will probably wish to try their own powers of imitation. at this moment no toy, which we could invent for them, would give them half so much pleasure as a pencil. if we put a pencil into their hands even before they are able to do any thing with it but make random marks all over a sheet of paper, it will long continue a real amusement and occupation. no matter how rude their first attempts at imitation may be; if the attention of children be occupied, our point is gained. girls have generally one advantage at this age over boys, in the exclusive possession of the scissors: how many camels, and elephants with amazing trunks, are cut out by the industrious scissors of a busy, and therefore happy little girl, during a winter evening, which passes so heavily, and appears so immeasurably long, to the idle. modelling in clay or wax might probably be a useful amusement about this age, if the materials were so prepared, that the children could avoid being every moment troublesome to others whilst they are at work. the making of baskets, and the weaving of sash-line, might perhaps be employment for children; with proper preparations, they might at least be occupied with these things; much, perhaps, might not be produced by their labours, but it is a great deal to give early habits of industry. let us do what we will, every person who has ever had any experience upon the subject, must know that it is scarcely possible to provide sufficient and suitable occupations for young children: this is one of the first difficulties in education. those who have never tried the experiment, are astonished to find it such a difficult and laborious business as it really is, to find employments for children from three to six years old. it is perhaps better, that our pupils should be entirely idle, than that they should be half employed. "my dear, have you nothing to do?" should be spoken in sorrow rather than in anger. when they see other people employed and happy, children feel mortified and miserable to have nothing to do. count rumford's was an excellent scheme for exciting sympathetic industry amongst the children of the poor at munich; in the large hall, where the elder children were busy in spinning, there was a range of seats for the younger children, who were not yet permitted to work; these being compelled to sit idle, and to see the busy multitude, grew extremely uneasy in their own situation, and became very anxious to be employed. we need not use any compulsion or any artifice; parents in every family, we suppose, who think of educating their own children, are employed some hours in the day in reading, writing, business, or conversation; during these hours, children will naturally feel the want of occupation, and will, from sympathy, from ambition and from impatience of insupportable ennui, desire with anxious faces, "to have something to do." instead of loading them with playthings, by way of relieving their misery, we should honestly tell them, if that be the truth, "i am sorry i cannot find any thing for you to do at present. i hope you will soon be able to employ yourself. what a happy thing it will be for you to be able, by and by, to read, and write and draw; then you will never be forced to sit idle." the pains of idleness stimulate children to industry, if they are from time to time properly contrasted with the pleasures of occupation. we should associate cheerfulness, and praise, and looks of approbation, with industry; and, whenever young people invent employments for themselves, they should be assisted as much as possible, and encouraged. at that age when they are apt to grow tired in half an hour of their playthings, we had better give them playthings only for a very short time, at intervals in the day; and, instead of waiting till they are tired, we should take the things away before they are weary of them. nor should we discourage the inquisitive genius from examining into the structure of their toys, whatever they may be. the same ingenious and active dispositions, which prompt these inquiries, will secure children from all those numerous temptations to do mischief, to which the idle are exposed. ingenious children are pleased with contrivances which answer the purposes for which they are intended: and they feel sincere regret whenever these are injured or destroyed: this we mention as a further comfort and security for parents, who, in the company of young mechanics, are apt to tremble for their furniture. children who observe, and who begin to amuse themselves with _thought_, are not so actively hostile in their attacks upon inanimate objects. we were once present at the dissection of a wooden cuckoo, which was attended with extreme pleasure by a large family of children; and it was not one of the children who broke the precious toy, but it was the father who took it to pieces. nor was it the destruction of the plaything which entertained the company, but the sight of the manner in which it was constructed. many guesses were made by all the spectators about the internal structure of the cuckoo, and the astonishment of the company was universal, when the bellows were cut open, and the simple contrivance was revealed to view; probably, more was learnt from this cuckoo, than was ever learnt from any cuckoo before. so far from being indifferent to the destruction of this plaything, h---- the little girl of four years old, to whom it belonged, remembered, several months afterwards, to remind her father of his promise to repair the mischief he had done. "several toys, which are made at present, are calculated to give pleasure merely by exciting surprise, and of course give children's minds such a tone, that they are afterwards too fond of _similar useless baubles_."[ ] this species of delight is soon over, and is succeeded by a desire to triumph in the ignorance, the credulity, or the cowardice, of their companions. hence that propensity to play tricks, which is often injudiciously encouraged by the smiles of parents, who are apt to mistake it for a proof of wit and vivacity. they forget, that "gentle dulness ever loved a joke;" and that even wit and vivacity, if they become troublesome and mischievous, will be feared, and shunned. many juggling tricks and puzzles are highly ingenious; and, as far as they can exercise the invention or the patience of young people, they are useful. care, however, should be taken, to separate the ideas of deceit and of ingenuity, and to prevent children from glorying in the mere possession of a secret. toys which afford trials of dexterity and activity, such as tops, kites, hoops, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, ninepins, and cup-and-ball, are excellent; and we see that they are consequently great and lasting favourites with children; their senses, their understanding, and their passions, are all agreeably interested and exercised by these amusements. they emulate each other; but, as some will probably excel at one game, and some at another, this emulation will not degenerate into envy. there is more danger that this hateful passion should be created in the minds of young competitors at those games, where it is supposed that some _knack_ or _mystery_ is to be learned before they can be played with success. whenever children play at such games, we should point out to them how and why it is that they succeed or fail: we may show them, that, in reality, there is no _knack_ or _mystery_ in any thing, but that from certain causes certain effects will follow; that, after trying a number of experiments, the circumstances essential to success may be discovered; and that all the ease and dexterity, which we often attribute to the power of natural genius, is simply the consequence of practice and industry. this sober lesson may be taught to children without putting it into grave words or formal precepts. a gentleman once astonished a family of children by his dexterity in playing at bilboquet: he caught the ball nine or ten times successively with great rapidity upon the spike: this success appeared miraculous; and the father, who observed that it had made a great impression upon the little spectators, took that opportunity to show the use of spinning the ball, to make the hole at the bottom ascend in a proper direction. the nature of centrifugal motion, and its effect, in preserving the _parallelism_ of _motion_, if we may be allowed the expression, was explained, not at once, but at different intervals, to the young audience. only as much was explained at a time as the children could understand, without fatiguing their attention, and the abstruse subject was made familiar by the mode of illustration that was adopted. it is surprising how much children may learn from their playthings, when they are judiciously chosen, and when the habit of reflection and observation is associated with the ideas of amusement and happiness. a little boy of nine years old, who had had a hoop to play with, asked "why a hoop, or a plate, if rolled upon its edge, keeps up as long as it rolls, but falls as soon as it stops, and will not stand if you try to make it stand still upon its edge?" was not the boy's understanding as well employed whilst he was thinking of this phenomenon, which he observed whilst he was beating his hoop, as it could possibly have been by the most learned preceptor? when a pedantic schoolmaster sees a boy eagerly watching a paper kite, he observes, "what a pity it is that children cannot be made to mind their grammar as well as their kites!" and he adds, perhaps, some peevish ejaculation on the natural idleness of boys, and that pernicious love of play against which he is doomed to wage perpetual war. a man of sense will see the same thing with a different eye; in this pernicious love of play he will discern the symptoms of a love of science, and, instead of deploring the natural idleness of children, he will admire the activity which they display in the pursuit of knowledge. he will feel that it is his business to direct this activity, to furnish his pupil with materials for fresh combinations, to put him or to let him put himself, in situations where he can make useful observations, and acquire that experience which cannot be bought, and which no masters can communicate. it will not be beneath the dignity of a philosophic tutor to consider the different effects, which the most common plays of children have upon the habits of the understanding and temper. whoever has watched children putting together a dissected map, must have been amused with the trial between wit and judgment. the child, who quickly perceives resemblances, catches instantly at the first bit of the wooden map, that has a single hook or hollow that seems likely to answer his purpose; he makes, perhaps, twenty different trials before he hits upon the right; whilst the wary youth, who has been accustomed to observe differences, cautiously examines with his eye the whole outline before his hand begins to move; and, having exactly compared the two indentures, he joins them with sober confidence, more proud of never disgracing his judgment by a fruitless attempt, than ambitious of rapid success. he is slow, but sure, and wins the day. there are some plays which require presence of mind, and which demand immediate attention to what is actually going forward, in which children, capable of the greatest degree of abstract attention, are most apt to be defective. they have many ideas, but none of them ready, and their knowledge is useless, because it is recollected a moment too late. could we, in suitably dignified language, describe the game of "birds, beasts, and fishes," we should venture to prescribe it as no very painful remedy for these absent and abstracted personages. when the handkerchief or the ball is thrown, and when his bird's name is called for, the absent little philosopher is obliged to collect his scattered thoughts instantaneously, or else he exposes himself to the ridicule of naming, perhaps, a fish or a beast, or any bird but the right. to those children, who, on the contrary, are not sufficiently apt to abstract their attention, and who are what bacon calls "birdwitted," we should recommend a solitary-board. at the solitary-board they must withdraw their thoughts from all external objects, hear nothing that is said, and fix their attention solely upon the figure and the pegs before them, else they will never succeed; and, if they make one errour in their calculations, they lose all their labour. those who are precipitate, and not sufficiently attentive to the consequences of their own actions, may receive many salutary lessons at the draught or chess-board--happy, if they can learn prudence and foresight, by frequently losing the battle. we are not quite so absurd as to imagine, that any great or permanent effects can be produced by such slight causes as a game at draughts, or at a solitary-board, but the combination of a number of apparent trifles, is not to be neglected in education. we have never yet mentioned what will probably first occur to those who would invent employments for children. we have never yet mentioned a garden; we have never mentioned those great delights to children, a spade, a hoe, a rake, and a wheelbarrow. we hold all these in proper respect; but we did not sooner mention them, because, if introduced too early, they are useless. we must not expect, that a boy six or seven years old, can find, for any length of time, sufficient daily occupation in a garden: he has not strength for hard labour; he can dig soft earth; he can weed groundsel, and other weeds, which take no deep root in the earth; but after he has weeded his little garden, and sowed his seeds, there must be a suspension of his labours. frequently children, for want of something to do, when they have sowed flower-seeds in their crooked beds, dig up the hopes of the year to make a new walk, or to sink a well in their garden. we mention these things, that parents may not be disappointed, or expect more from the occupation of a garden, than it can, at a very early age, afford. a garden is an excellent resource for children, but they should have a variety of other occupations: rainy days will come, and frost and snow, and then children must be occupied within doors. we immediately think of a little set of carpenter's tools, to supply them with active amusement. boys will probably be more inclined to attempt making models, than drawings of the furniture which appears to be the most easy to imitate; they will imagine that, if they had but tools, they could make boxes, and desks, and beds, and chests of drawers, and tables and chairs innumerable. but, alas! these fond imaginations are too soon dissipated. suppose a boy of seven years old to be provided with a small set of carpenter's tools, his father thinks perhaps that he has made him completely happy; but a week afterwards the father finds dreadful marks of the file and saw upon his mahogany tables; the use of these tools is immediately interdicted until a bench shall be procured. week after week passes away, till at length the frequently reiterated speech of "papa, you bid me put you in mind about my bench." "papa" has its effect, and the bench appears. now the young carpenter thinks he is quite set up in the world, and projects carts and boxes, and reading-desks and writing-desks for himself and for his sisters, if he have any; but when he comes to the execution of his plans, what new difficulties, what new wants arise! the wood is too thick or too thin; it splits, or it cannot be cut with a knife; wire, nails, glue, and above all, the means of heating the glue, are wanting. at last some frail machine, stuck together with pegs or pins, is produced, and the workman is usually either too much ridiculed, or too much admired. the step from pegging to mortising is a very difficult step, and the want of a mortising-chisel is insuperable: one tool is called upon to do the duty of another, and the pricker comes to an untimely end in doing the hard duty of the punch; the saw wants setting; the plane will plane no longer; and the mallet must be used instead of the hammer, because the hammer makes so much noise, that the ladies of the family have voted for its being locked up. to all these various evils the child submits in despair; and finding, after many fruitless exertions, that he cannot make any of the fine things he had projected, he throws aside his tools, and is deterred by these disappointments from future industry and ingenuity. such are the consequences of putting excellent tools into the hands of children before they can possibly use them: but the tools which are useless at seven years old, will be a most valuable present at eleven or twelve, and for this age it will be prudent to reserve them. a rational toy-shop should be provided with all manner of carpenter's tools, with wood properly prepared for the young workman, and with screws, nails, glue, emery-paper, and a variety of articles which it would be tedious to enumerate; but which, if parents could readily meet within a convenient assemblage, they would willingly purchase for their children. the trouble of hunting through a number of different shops, prevents them at present from purchasing such things; besides, they may not perhaps be sufficiently good carpenters to know distinctly every thing that is necessary for a young workman. card, pasteboard, substantial but not sharp-pointed scissors, wire, gum and wax, may, in some degree, supply the want of carpenter's tools at that early age when we have observed that the saw and plane are useless. models of common furniture should be made as toys, which should take to pieces, so that all their parts, and the manner in which they are put together, might be seen distinctly; the names of the different parts should be written[ ] or stamped upon them: by these means the names will be associated with realities; children will retain them in their memory, and they will neither learn by rote technical terms, nor will they be retarded in their progress in mechanical invention by the want of language. before young people can use tools, these models will amuse and exercise their attention. from models of furniture we may go on to models of architecture; pillars of different orders, the roofs of houses, the manner of slating and tiling, &c. then we may proceed to models of simple machines, choosing at first such as can be immediately useful to children in their own amusements, such as wheelbarrows, carts, cranes, scales, steelyards, jacks, and pumps, which children ever view with eager eyes. from simple, it will be easy to proceed gradually to models of more complicated, machinery: it would be tiresome to give a list of these; models of instruments used by manufacturers and artists should be seen; many of these are extremely ingenious; spinning-wheels, looms, paper-mills, wind-mills, water-mills, might with great advantage be shown in miniature to children. the distracting noise and bustle, the multitude of objects which all claim the attention at once, prevent young people from understanding much of what they see, when they are first taken to look at large manufactories. if they had previously acquired some general idea of the whole, and some particular knowledge of the different parts, they would not stare when they get into these places; they would not "stare round, see nothing, and come home content," bewildered by the sight of cogs and wheels; and the explanations of the workmen would not be all jargon to them; they would understand some of the technical terms, which so much alarm the intellects of those who hear them for the first time. we may exercise the ingenuity and judgment of children by these models of machines, by showing them first the thing to be done, and exciting them to invent the best means of doing it; afterwards give the models as the reward for their ingenuity, and let them compare their own inventions with the contrivances actually in use amongst artificers; by these means, young people may be led to compare a variety of different contrivances; they will discern what parts of a machine are superfluous, and what inadequate, and they will class particular observations gradually under general principles. it may be thought, that this will tend to give children only mechanical invention, or we should call it, perhaps, the invention of machines; and those who do not require this particular talent, will despise it as unnecessary in what are called the liberal professions. without attempting to compare the value of different intellectual talents, we may observe, that they are all in some measure dependent upon each other. upon this subject we shall enlarge more fully when we come to consider the method of cultivating the memory and invention. chemical toys will be more difficult to manage than mechanical, because the materials, requisite to try many chemical experiments, are such as cannot safely be put into the hands of children. but a list of experiments, and of the things necessary to try them, might easily be drawn out by a chemist who would condescend to such a task; and if these materials, with proper directions, were to be found at a rational toy-shop, parents would not be afraid of burning or poisoning their children in the first chemical lessons. in some families, girls are taught the confectionary art; might not this be advantageously connected with some knowledge of chemistry, and might not they be better taught than by mrs. raffeld or mrs. glass?[ ] every culinary operation may be performed as an art, probably, as well by a cook as by a chemist; but, if the chemist did not assist the cook now and then with a little science, epicures would have great reason for lamentation. we do not, by any means, advise that girls should be instructed in confectionary arts, at the hazard of their keeping company with servants. if they learn any thing of this sort, there will be many precautions necessary to separate them from servants: we do not advise that these hazards should be run; but if girls learn confectionary, let them learn the principles of chemistry, which may assist in this art.[ ] children are very fond of attempting experiments in dying, and are very curious about vegetable dyes; but they can seldom proceed for want of the means of boiling, evaporating, distilling, and subliming. small stills, and small tea-kettles and lamps, would be extremely useful to them: these might be used in the room with the children's parents, which would prevent all danger: they should continue to be the property of the parents, and should be produced only when they are wanted. no great apparatus is necessary for showing children the first simple operations in chemistry: such as evaporation, crystalization, calcination, detonation, effervescence, and saturation. water and fire, salt and sugar, lime and vinegar, are not very difficult to be procured; and a wine-glass is to be found in every house. the difference between an acid and alkali should be early taught to children; many grown people begin to learn chemistry, without distinctly knowing what is meant by those terms. in the selection of chemical experiments for young people, it will be best to avoid such as have the appearance of jugglers tricks, as it is not our purpose to excite the amazement of children for the moment, but to give them a permanent taste for science. in a well known book, called "hooper's _rational recreations_," there are many ingenious experiments; but through the whole work there is such a want of an enlarged mind, and such a love of magic and deception appears, as must render it not only useless, but unsafe, for young people, in its present state. perhaps a selection might be made from it in which these defects might be avoided: such titles as "_the real apparition: the confederate counters: the five beatitudes_: and _the book of fate_," may be changed for others more _rational_. receipts for "_changing winter into spring_," for making "_self-raising pyramids, inchanted mirrors_, and _intelligent flies_," might be omitted, or explained to advantage. recreation the th, "to tell by the dial of a watch at what hour any person intends to rise;" recreation the th, "to produce the appearance of a phantom on a pedestal placed on the middle of a table;" and recreation the th, "to write several letters which contain no meaning, upon cards; to make them, after they have been twice shuffled, give an answer to a question that shall be proposed;" as for example, "what is love?" scarcely come under the denomination of rational recreations, nor will they much conduce to the end proposed in the introduction to hooper's work; that is to say, in his own words, "to enlarge and fortify the mind of man, that he may advance with tranquil steps through the flowery paths of investigation, till arriving at some noble eminence, he beholds, with awful astonishment, the boundless regions of science, and becomes animated to attain a still more lofty station, whilst his heart is incessantly rapt with joys of which the groveling herd have no conception." even in those chemical experiments in this book, which are really ingenious and entertaining, we should avoid giving the old absurd titles, which can only confuse the understanding, and spoil the taste of children. the tree of diana, and "philosophic wool," are of this species. it is not necessary to make every thing marvellous and magical, to fix the attention of young people; if they are properly educated, they will find more amusement in discovering, or in searching for the cause of the effects which they see, than in a blind admiration of the juggler's tricks. in the papers of the manchester society, in franklin's letters, in priestley's and percival's works, there may be found a variety of simple experiments which require no great apparatus, and which will at once amuse and instruct. all the papers of the manchester society, upon the repulsion and attraction of oil and water, are particularly suited to children, because they state a variety of simple facts; the mind is led to reason upon them, and induced to judge of the different conclusions which are drawn from them by different people. the names of dr. percival, or dr. wall, will have no weight with children; they will compare only the reasons and experiments. oil and water, a cork, a needle, a plate, and a glass tumbler, are all the things necessary for these experiments. mr. henry's experiments upon the influence that fixed air has on vegetation, and several of reaumur's experiments, mentioned in the memoirs of the french academy of sciences, are calculated to please young people much, and can be repeated without expense or difficulty. to those who acquire habits of observation, every thing that is to be seen or heard, becomes a source of amusement. natural history interests children at an early age; but their curiosity and activity is often repressed and restrained by the ignorance or indolence of their tutors. the most inquisitive genius grows tired of repeating, "pray look at this--what is it? what can the use of this be?" when the constant answer is, "oh! it's nothing worth looking at, throw it away, it will dirty the house." those who have attended to the ways of children and parents, well know that there are many little inconveniences attending their amusements, which the sublime eye of the theorist in education overlooks, which, nevertheless, are essential to practical success. "it will dirty the house," puts a stop to many of the operations of the young philosopher; nor is it reasonable that his experiments should interfere with the necessary regularity of a well ordered family. but most well ordered families allow their horses and their dogs to have houses to themselves; cannot one room be allotted to the children of the family? if they are to learn chemistry, mineralogy, botany, or mechanics; if they are to take sufficient bodily exercise without tormenting the whole family with noise, a room should be provided for them. we mention exercise and noise in particular, because we think they will, to many, appear of the most importance. to direct children in their choice of fossils, and to give them some idea of the general arrangements of mineralogy, toy-shops should be provided with specimens of ores, &c. properly labelled and arranged, in drawers, so that they may be kept in order. children should have empty shelves in their cabinets, to be filled with their own collections; they will then know how to direct their researches, and how to dispose of their treasures. if they have proper places to keep things in, they will acquire a taste for order by the best means, by feeling the use of it: to either sex, this taste will be highly advantageous. children who are active and industrious, and who have a taste for natural history, often collect, with much enthusiasm, a variety of pebbles and common stones, which they value as great curiosities, till some surly mineralogist happens to see them, and condemns them all with one supercilious "pshaw!" or else a journey is to be taken, and there is no way in making up the heterogeneous, cumbersome collection, which must, of course, be abandoned. nay, if no journey is to be taken, a visitor, perhaps, comes unexpectedly; the little naturalist's apartment must be vacated on a few minutes notice, and the labour of years falls a sacrifice, in an instant, to the housemaid's undistinguishing broom. it may seem trifling to insist so much upon such slight things, but, in fact, nothing can be done in education without attention to minute circumstances. many who have genius to sketch large plans, have seldom patience to attend to the detail which is necessary for their accomplishment. this is a useful, and therefore, no humiliating drudgery. with the little cabinets, which we have mentioned, should be sold cheap microscopes, which will unfold a world of new delights to children; and it is very probable that children will not only be entertained with looking at objects through a microscope, but they will consider the nature of the magnifying glass. they should not be rebuffed with the answer, "oh, it's only a common magnifying glass," but they should be encouraged in their laudable curiosity; they may easily be led to try slight experiments in optics, which will, at least, give the habits of observation and attention. in dr. priestley's history of vision, many experiments may be found, which are not above the comprehension of children of ten or eleven years old; we do not imagine that any science can be taught by desultory experiments, but we think that a taste for science may early be given by making it entertaining, and by exciting young people to exercise their reasoning and inventive faculties upon every object which surrounds them. we may point out that great discoveries have often been made by attention to slight circumstances. the blowing of soap bubbles, as it was first performed as a scientific experiment by the celebrated dr. hook, before the royal society, makes a conspicuous figure in dr. priestley's chapter on the reflection of light; this may be read to children, and they will be pleased when they observe that what at first appeared only a trifling amusement, has occupied the understanding, and excited the admiration, of some great philosophers. every child observes the colours which are to be seen in panes of glass windows: in priestley's history of vision, there are some experiments of hook's and lord brereton's upon these colours, which may be selected. buffon's observations upon blue and green shadows, are to be found in the same work, and they are very entertaining. in dr. franklin's letters, there are numerous experiments, which are particularly suited to young people; especially, as in every instance he speaks with that candour and openness to conviction, and with that patient desire to discover truth, which we should wish our pupils to admire and imitate. the history of the experiments which have been tried in the progress of any science, and of the manner in which observations of minute facts have led to great discoveries, will be useful to the understanding, and will gradually make the mind expert in that mental algebra, on which both reasoning and invention (which is, perhaps, only a more rapid species of reasoning) depend. in drawing out a list of experiments for children, it will, therefore, be advantageous to place them in that order which will best exhibit their relative connection; and, instead of showing young people the steps of a discovery, we should frequently pause to try if they can invent. in this, our pupils will succeed often beyond our expectations; and, whether it be in mechanics, chemistry, geometry, or in the arts, the same course of education will be found to have the same advantages. when the powers of reason have been cultivated, and the inventive faculty exercised; when general habits of voluntary exertion and patient perseverance, have been acquired, it will be easy, either for the pupil himself, or for his friends, to direct his abilities to whatever is necessary for his happiness. we do not use the phrase, _success in the world_, because, if it conveys any distinct ideas, it implies some which are, perhaps, inconsistent with real happiness. whilst our pupils occupy and amuse themselves with observation, experiment, and invention, we must take care that they have a sufficient variety of manual and bodily exercises. a turning-lathe, and a work-bench, will afford them constant active employment; and when young people can invent, they feel great pleasure in the execution of their own plans. we do not speak from vague theory; we have seen the daily pleasures of the work-bench, and the persevering eagerness with which young people work in wood, and brass, and iron, when tools are put into their hands at a proper age, and when their understanding has been previously taught the simple principles of mechanics. it is not to be expected that any exhortations we could use, could prevail upon a father, who happens to have no taste for mechanics, or for chemistry, to spend any of his time in his children's laboratory, or at their work-bench; but in his choice of a tutor, he may perhaps supply his own defects; and he will consider, that even by interesting himself in the daily occupations of his children, he will do more in the advancement of their education, than can be done by paying money to a hundred masters. we do not mean to confine young people to the laboratory or the work-bench, for exercise; the more varied exercises, the better. upon this subject we shall speak more fully hereafter: we have in general recommended all trials of address and dexterity, except games of chance, which we think should be avoided, as they tend to give a taste for gambling; a passion, which has been the ruin of so many young men of promising talents, of so many once happy families, that every parent will think it well worth his while to attend to the smallest circumstances in education, which can prevent its seizing hold of the minds of his children. in children, as in men, a taste for gaming arises from the want of better occupation, or of proper emotion to relieve them from the pains and penalties of idleness; both the vain and indolent are prone to this taste from different causes. the idea of personal merit is insensibly connected with what is called _good luck_, and before avarice absorbs every other feeling, vanity forms no inconsiderable part of the charm which fixes such numbers to the gaming-table. indolent persons are fond of games of chance, because they feel themselves roused agreeably from their habitual state of apathy, or because they perceive, that at these contests, without any mental exertion, they are equal, perhaps superior, to their competitors. happy they, who have early been inspired with a taste for science and literature! they will have a constant succession of agreeable ideas; they will find endless variety in the commonest objects which surround them; and feeling that every day of their lives they have sufficient amusement, they will require no extraordinary excitations, no holyday pleasures. they who have learnt, from their own experience, a just confidence in their own powers; they who have tasted the delights of well-earned praise, will not lightly trust to _chance_, for the increase of self-approbation; nor will those pursue, with too much eagerness, the precarious triumphs of fortune, who know, that in their usual pursuits, it is in their own power to command success proportioned to their exertions. perhaps it may be thought, that we should have deferred our eulogium upon literature till we came to speak of tasks; but if there usually appears but little connection in a child's mind, between books and toys, this must be attributed to his having had bad books and bad toys. in the hands of a judicious instructer, no means are too small to be useful; every thing is made conducive to his purposes, and instead of useless baubles, his pupils will be provided with play things which may instruct, and with occupations which may at once amuse and improve the understanding. it would be superfluous to give a greater variety of instances of the sorts of amusements which are advantageous; we fear that we have already given too many, and that we have hazarded some observations, which will be thought too pompous for a chapter upon toys. we intended to have added to this chapter an inventory of the present most fashionable articles in our toy-shops, and _a list of the new assortment_, to speak in the true style of an advertisement; but we are obliged to defer this for the present; upon a future occasion we shall submit it to the judgment of the public. a revolution, _even in toy-shops_, should not be attempted, unless there appear a moral certainty that we both may, and can, change for the better. the danger of doing too much in education, is greater even than the danger of doing too little. as the merchants in france answered to colbert, when he desired to know "how he could best assist them," children might, perhaps, reply to those who are most officious to amuse them, "leave us to ourselves." footnotes: [ ] dr. fothergill. [ ] dr. beddoes. [ ] we are indebted to dr. beddoes for this idea. [ ] we do not mean to do injustice to mrs. raffeld's professional skill. [ ] v. diderot's ingenious preface to "chymie de gout et de l'odorat." chapter ii. tasks. "why don't you get your task, instead of playing with your playthings from morning till night? you are grown too old now to do nothing but play. it is high time you should learn to read and write, for you cannot be a child all your life, child; so go and fetch your _book_, and learn your _task_." this angry apostrophe is probably addressed to a child, at the moment when he is intent upon some agreeable occupation, which is now to be stigmatized with the name of play. why that word should all at once change its meaning; why that should now be a crime, which was formerly a virtue; why he, who had so often been desired to _go and play_, should now be reviled for his obedience, the young casuist is unable to discover. he hears that he is no longer a child: this he is willing to believe; but the consequence is alarming. of the new duties incumbent upon his situation, he has but yet a confused idea. in his manly character, he is not yet thoroughly perfect: his pride would make him despise every thing that is childish, but no change has yet been wrought in the inward man, and his old tastes and new ambition, are in direct opposition. whether to learn to read, be a dreadful thing or not, is a question he cannot immediately solve; but if his reasoning faculty be suspended, there is yet a power secretly working within him, by which he will involuntarily be governed. this power is the power of association: of its laws, he is, probably, not more ignorant than his tutor; nor is he aware that whatever word or idea comes into his mind, with any species of pain, will return, whenever it is recalled to his memory, with the same feelings. the word task, the first time he hears it, is an unmeaning word, but it ceases to be indifferent to him the moment he hears it pronounced in a terrible voice. "learn your task," and "fetch your book," recur to his recollection with indistinct feelings of pain; and hence, without further consideration, he will be disposed to dislike both books and tasks; but his feelings are the last things to be considered upon this occasion; the immediate business, is to teach him to read. a new era in his life now commences. the age of learning begins, and begins in sorrow. the consequences of a bad beginning, are proverbially ominous; but no omens can avert his fate, no omens can deter his tutor from the undertaking; the appointed moment is come; the boy is four years old, and he must learn to read. some people, struck with a panic fear, lest their children should never learn to read and write, think that they cannot be in too great a hurry to teach them. spelling-books, grammars, dictionaries, rods and masters, are collected; nothing is to be heard of in the house but tasks; nothing is to be seen but tears. "no tears! no tasks! no masters! nothing upon compulsion!" say the opposite party in education. "children must be left entirely at liberty; they will learn every thing better than you can teach them; their memory must not be overloaded with trash; their reason must be left to grow." their reason will never grow, unless it be exercised, is the reply; their memory must be stored whilst they are young, because, in youth, the memory is most tenacious. if you leave them at liberty for ever, they will never learn to spell; they will never learn latin; they will never learn latin grammar; yet, they must learn latin grammar, and a number of other disagreeable things; therefore, we must give them tasks and task-masters. in all these assertions, perhaps, we shall find a mixture of truth and errour; therefore, we had better be governed by neither party, but listen to both, and examine arguments unawed by authority. and first, as to the panic fear, which, though no argument, is a most powerful motive. we see but few examples of children so extremely stupid as not to have been able to learn to read and write between the years of three and thirteen; but we see many whose temper and whose understanding have been materially injured by premature or injudicious instruction; we see many who are disgusted, perhaps irrecoverably, with literature, whilst they are fluently reading books which they cannot comprehend, or learning words by rote, to which they affix no ideas. it is scarcely worth while to speak of the vain ambition of those who long only to have it said, that their children read sooner than those of their neighbours do; for, supposing their utmost wish to be gratified, that their son could read before the age when children commonly articulate, still the triumph must be of short duration, the fame confined to a small circle of "foes and friends," and, probably, in a few years, the memory of the phenomenon would remain only with his doting grandmother. surely, it is the use which children make of their acquirements which is of consequence, not the possessing them a few years sooner or later. a man, who, during his whole life, could never write any thing that was worth reading, would find it but poor consolation for himself, his friends, or the public, to reflect, that he had been in joining-hand before he was five years old. as it is usually managed, it is a dreadful task indeed to learn, and, if possible, a more dreadful task to teach to read. with the help of counters, and coaxing, and gingerbread, or by dint of reiterated pain and terror, the names of the four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, are, perhaps, in the course of some weeks, firmly fixed in the pupil's memory. so much the worse; all these names will disturb him, if he have common sense, and at every step must stop his progress. to begin with the vowels: each of these have several different sounds, and, consequently, ought to have several names, or different signs, to distinguish them in different circumstances. in the first lesson of the spelling book, the child begins with a-b, makes ab; b-a makes ba. the inference, if any general inference can be drawn from this lesson, is, that when _a_ comes before _b_, it has one sound, and after _b_, it has another sound; but this is contradicted by and by, and it appears that _a_ after _b_, has various sounds, as in _ball_, in _bat_, in _bare_. the letter _i_ in _fire_, is _i_, as we call it in the alphabet, but in fir, it is changed; in _pin_, it is changed again; so that the child, being ordered to affix to the same sign a variety of sounds and names, and not knowing in what circumstances to obey, and in what to disregard the contradictory injunctions imposed upon him, he pronounces sounds at hazard, and adheres positively to the last ruled case, or maintains an apparently sullen, or truly philosophic and sceptical silence. must _e_ in _pen_, and _e_ in _where_, and _e_ in _verse_, and _e_ in _fear_, all be called _e_ alike? the child is patted on the head for reading _u_ as it ought to be pronounced in _future_; but if, remembering this encouragement, the pupil should venture to pronounce _u_ in _gun_, and _bun_, in the same manner, he will, inevitably, be disgraced. pain and shame, impress precepts upon the mind: the child, therefore, is intent upon remembering the new sound of _u_ in _bun_; but when he comes to _busy_, and _burial_, and _prudence_, his last precedent will lead him fatally astray, and he will again be called a _dunce_. _o_, in the exclamation _oh!_ is happily called by its alphabetical name; but in _to_, we can hardly know it again, and in _morning_ and _wonder_, it has a third and a fourth additional sound. the amphibious letter _y_, which is either a vowel or a consonant, has one sound in one character, and two sounds in the other; as a consonant, it is pronounced as in _yesterday_; in _try_, it is sounded as _i_; in _any_, and in the termination of many other words, it is sounded like _e_. must a child know all this by intuition, or must it be whipt into him? but he must know a great deal more, before he can read the most common words. what length of time should we allow him for learning, when _c_ is to be sounded like _k_, and when like _s_? and how much longer time shall we add for learning, when _s_ shall be pronounced _sh_, as in _sure_, or _z_, as in _has_; the sound of which last letter _z_, he cannot, by any conjuration, obtain from the name _zed_, the only name by which he has been taught to call it? how much time shall we allow a patient tutor for teaching a docile pupil, when _g_ is to be sounded soft, and when hard? there are many carefully worded rules in the spelling-books, specifying before what letters, and in what situations, _g_ shall vary in sound; but, unfortunately, these rules are difficult to be learned by heart, and still more difficult to understand. these laws, however positive, are not found to be of universal application, or at least, a child has not always wit or time to apply them upon the spur of the occasion. in coming to the words _ingenious gentleman, get a good grammar_, he may be puzzled by the nice distinctions he is to make in pronunciation in cases apparently similar; but he has not yet become acquainted with all the powers of this privileged letter: in company with _h_, it assumes the character of _f_, as in _tough_; another time he meets it, perhaps, in the same company, in the same place, and, as nearly as possible, in the same circumstances, as in the word _though_; but now _g_ is to become a silent letter, and is to pass incognito, and the child will commit an unpardonable errour, if he claimed the incognito as his late acquaintance _f_. still, all these are slight difficulties; a moment's reflection must convince us, that by teaching the common names of every consonant in the alphabet, we prepare a child for misery, when he begins to spell or read. a consonant, as sayeth the spelling-book, is a letter which cannot be pronounced without a vowel before or after it: for this reason, _b_, is called _be_, and _l_, _el_; but why the vowel should come first in the one case, or last in the second, we are not informed; nor are we told why the names of some letters have no resemblance whatever to their sounds, either with a vowel before or after them. suppose, that after having learned the alphabet, a child was to read the words _here is some apple-pye._ he would pronounce the letters thus: _acheare ies esoeme apepeele pewie._ with this pronunciation the child would never decipher these simple words. it will be answered, perhaps, that no child is expected to read as soon as he has learnt his alphabet: a long initiation of monosyllabic, dissyllabic, trissyllabic, and polysyllabic words is previously to be submitted to; nor, after this inauguration, are the novices capable of performing with propriety the ceremony of reading whole words and sentences. by a different method of teaching, all this waste of labour and of time, all this confusion of rules and exceptions, and all the consequent confusion in the understanding of the pupil, may be avoided. in teaching a child to read, every letter should have a precise single sound annexed to its figure; this should never vary. where two consonants are joined together, so as to have but one sound, as ph, sh, &c. the two letters should be coupled together by a distinct invariable mark. letters that are silent should be marked in such a manner as to point out to the child that they are not to be sounded. upon these simple rules our method of teaching to read has been founded. the signs or marks, by which these distinctions are to be effected, are arbitrary, and may be varied as the teacher chooses; the addition of a single point above or below the common letters is employed to distinguish the different sounds that are given to the same letter, and a mark underneath such letters as are to be omitted, is the only apparatus necessary. these marks were employed by the author in , before he had seen sheridan's, or any similar dictionary; he has found that they do not confuse children as much as figures, because when dots are used to distinguish sounds, there is only a change of place, and no change of form: but any person that chooses it, may substitute figures instead of dots. it should, however, be remembered, that children must learn to distinguish the figures before they can be useful in discriminating the words. all these sounds, and each of the characters which denote them, should be distinctly known by a child before we begin to teach him to read. and here at the first step we must entreat the teacher to have patience; to fix firmly in her mind, we say _her_ mind, because we address ourselves to mothers; that it is immaterial whether a child learns this alphabet in six weeks or in six months; at all events, let it not be inculcated with restraint, or made tiresome, lest it should retard the whole future progress of the pupil. we do not mean to recommend the custom of teaching in play, but surely a cheerful countenance is not incompatible with application. the three sounds of the letter (a) should first be taught; they may be learned by the dullest child in a week, if the letters are shown to him for a minute or two, twice a day. proper moments should be chosen when the child is not intent upon any thing else; when other children have appeared to be amused with reading; when the pupil himself appears anxious to be instructed. as soon as he is acquainted with the sounds of (_a_) and with their distinguishing marks, each of these sounds should be formed into syllables, with each of the consonants; but we should never name the consonants by their usual names; if it be required to point them out by sounds, let them resemble the real sounds or powers of the consonants; but in fact it will never be _necessary_ to name the consonants separately, till their powers, in combination with the different vowels, be distinctly acquired. it will then be time enough to teach the common names of the letters. to a person unacquainted with the principles upon which this mode of teaching is founded, it must appear strange, that a child should be able to read before he knows the names of his letters; but it has been ascertained, that the names of the letters are an incumbrance in teaching a child to read. vowels. | dipthongs. | consonants. | | sounded as in | sounded as in | & double consonants | | | | a fate | [=ea] ocean | c as in cap [.a] fat | | [c.] city [.a.] fall | [=ew] few | [=ch] child e mere | | [=ch.] machine [.e] met | [=ia] filial | g got [e.] her | | [.g] age [.e.] where | [=ie] daniel | [=ng] long i fine | | ing thing [.i] in | [=io] minion | [=le] able [i.] bird | | [=re] acre [.i.] machine| [=oi] voice | [=ph] physic o throne | | [.s] has [.o] on | [=ou] found | [=sh] she [o.] love | | [=sion] fusion [..o] move | [=ow] now | [=th] the u pure | | ti christian [ü] busy | [ua] assuage| [=tion] nation [u.] sun | | [=wh] who [..u] full | [=ui] languid| [=ough] tough [.y] by | | [:y] ably | [=oy] joy | consonants ba ca da fa ga ha ja ka la ma na pa qua ra sa ta va wa ya za (`) _this mark under a letter shews that it is not to be pronounced, as_ [.e.]ight _in which_ igh _are not sounded._ [transcriber's note: the symbols in this table are as follows: [.a] indicates dot above letter [a.] indicates dot below letter [.a.] indicates dot above letter and below letter [..o] indicates dot in center of letter [:a] indicates two dots above letter [=ea] indicates a horizontal line through letters [=ch.] indicates a horizontal line through letters and a dot below] in the quotation from mrs. barbauld, at the bottom of the alphabetical tables, there is a stroke between the letters _b_ and _r_ in _february_, and between _t_ and _h_, in _there_, to show that these letters are to be sounded together, so as to make one sound. the same is to be observed as to (_ng_) in the word _long_, and also as to the syllable _ing_, which, in the table no. , column , is directed to be taught as one sound. the mark (.) of obliteration, is put under (_y_) in the word _days_, under _e_ final in _there_, and also under one of the _l_'s and the (_w_) in _yellow_, to show that these letters are not to be pronounced. the exceptions to this scheme of articulation are very few; such as occur, are marked, with the number employed in walker's dictionary, to denote the exception, to which excellent work, the teacher will, of course, refer. parents, at the first sight of this new alphabet, will perhaps tremble lest they should be obliged to learn the whole of it before they begin to teach their children: but they may calm their apprehensions, for they need only point out the letters in succession to the child, and sound them as they are sounded in the words annexed to the letters in the table, and the child will soon, by repetition, render the marks of the respective letters familiar to the teacher. we have never found any body complain of difficulty, who has gone on from letter to letter along with the child who was taught. as soon as our pupil knows the different sounds of (_a_) combined in succession with all the consonants, we may teach him the rest of the vowels joined with all the consonants, which will be a short and easy work. our readers need not be alarmed at the apparent slowness of this method: six months, at the rate of four or five minutes each day, will render all these combinations perfectly familiar. one of mrs. barbauld's lessons for young children, carefully marked in the same manner as the alphabet, should, when they are well acquainted with the sounds of each of the vowels with each of the consonants, be put into our pupil's hands.[ ] the sound of three or four letters together, will immediately become familiar to him; and when any of the less common sounds of the vowels, such as are contained in the second table, and the terminating sounds, _tion_, _ly_, &c. occur, they should be read to the child, and should be added to what he has got by rote from time to time. when all these marks and their corresponding sounds are learnt, the primer should be abandoned, and from that time the child will be able to read slowly the most difficult words in the language. we must observe, that the mark of obliteration is of the greatest service; it is a clue to the whole labyrinth of intricate and uncouth orthography. the word though, by the obliteration of three letters, may be as easily read as _the_ or _that_. it should be observed that all people, before they can read fluently, have acquired a knowledge of the general appearance of most of the words in the language, independently of the syllables of which they are composed. seven children in the author's family were taught to read in this manner, and three in the common method; the difference of time, labour, and sorrow, between the two modes of learning, appeared so clearly, that we can speak with confidence upon the subject. we think that nine-tenths of the labour and disgust of learning to read, may be saved by this method; and that instead of frowns and tears, the usual harbingers of learning, cheerfulness and smiles may initiate willing pupils in the most difficult of all human attainments. a and h, at four and five years old, after they had learned the alphabet, without having ever combined the letters into syllables, were set to read one of mrs. barbauld's little books. after being employed two or three minutes every day, for a fortnight, in making out the words of this book, a paper with a few raisins well concealed in its folds, was given to each of them, with these words printed on the outside of it, marked according to our alphabet: "open this, and eat what you find in it." in twenty minutes, they read it distinctly without any assistance. the step from reading with these marks, to reading without them, will be found very easy. nothing more is necessary, than to give children the same books, without marks, which they can read fluently with them. spelling comes next to reading. new trials for the temper; new perils for the understanding; positive rules and arbitrary exceptions; endless examples and contradictions; till at length, out of all patience with the stupid docility of his pupil, the tutor perceives the absolute necessity of making him get by heart, with all convenient speed, every word in the language. the formidable columns in dread succession arise a host of foes; two columns a day, at least, may be conquered. months and years are devoted to the undertaking; but after going through a whole spelling-book, perhaps a whole dictionary, till we come triumphantly to spell _zeugma_, we have forgotten to spell _abbot_, and we must begin again with _abasement_. merely the learning to spell so many unconnected words, without any assistance from reason or analogy, is nothing, compared with the difficulty of learning the explanation of them by rote, and the still greater difficulty of understanding the meaning of the explanation. when a child has got by rote, "midnight, the _depth_ of night;" "metaphysics, the science which treats of immaterial beings, and of forms in general abstracted from matter;" has he acquired any distinct ideas, either of midnight or of metaphysics? if a boy had eaten rice pudding, till he fancied himself tolerably well acquainted with rice, would he find his knowledge much improved, by learning from his spelling-book, the words "rice, a foreign esculent grain?" yet we are surprised to discover, that men have so few accurate ideas, and that so many learned disputes originate in a confused or improper use of words. "all this is very true," says a candid schoolmaster; "we see the evil, but we cannot new-model the language, or write a perfect philosophical dictionary; and, in the mean time, we are bound to teach children to spell, which we do with the less reluctance, because, though we allow that it is an arduous task, we have found from experience, that it can be accomplished, and that the understandings of many of our pupils, survive all the perils to which you think them exposed during the operation." the understandings may, and do, survive the operation; but why should they be put in unnecessary danger? and why should we early disgust children with literature, by the pain and difficulty their first lessons? we are convinced, that the business of learning to spell, is made much more laborious to children than it need to be: it may be useful to give them five or six words every day to learn by heart, but more only loads their memory; and we should, at first, select words of which they know the meaning, and which occur most frequently in reading or conversation. the alphabetical list of words in a spelling-book, contains many which are not in common use, and the pupil forgets these as fast as he learns them. we have found it entertaining to children, to ask them to spell any short sentence as it has been accidentally spoken. "put this book on that table." ask a child how he would spell these words, if he were obliged to write them down, and you introduce into his mind the idea that he must learn to spell, before he can make his words and thoughts understood in writing. it is a good way to make children write down a few words of their own selection every day, and correct the spelling; and also after they have been reading, whilst the words are yet fresh in their memory, we may ask them to spell some of the words which they have just seen. by these means, and by repeating, at different times in the day, those words which are most frequently wanted, his vocabulary will be pretty well stocked without its having cost him many tears. we should observe that children learn to spell more by the eye than by the ear, and that the more they read and write, the more likely they will be to remember the combination of letters in words which they have continually before their eyes, or which they feel it necessary to represent to others. when young people begin to write, they first feel the use of spelling, and it is then that they will learn it with most ease and precision. then the greatest care should be taken to look over their writing, and to make them correct every word in which they have made a mistake; because, bad habits of spelling, once contracted, can scarcely be cured: the understanding has nothing to do with the business, and when the memory is puzzled between the rules of spelling right, and the habits of spelling wrong, it becomes a misfortune to the pupil to write even a common letter. the shame which is annexed to bad spelling, excites young people's attention, as soon as they are able to understand, that it is considered as a mark of ignorance and ill breeding. we have often observed, that children listen with anxiety to the remarks that are made upon this subject in their presence, especially when the letters or notes of _grown up people_, are criticised. some time ago, a lady, who was reading a newspaper, met with the story of an ignorant magistrate, who gave for his toast, at a public dinner, the two k's, for the king and constitution. "how very much ashamed the man must have felt, when all the people laughed at him for his mistake! they must all have seen that he did not know how to spell; and what a disgrace for a magistrate too!" said a boy who heard the anecdote. it made a serious impression upon him. a few months afterwards, he was employed by his father in an occupation which was extremely agreeable to him, but in which he continually felt the necessity of spelling correctly. he was employed to send messages by a telegraph; these messages he was obliged to write down hastily, in little journals kept for the purpose; and as these were seen by several people, when the business of the day came to be reviewed, the boy had a considerable motive for orthographical exactness. he became extremely desirous to teach himself, and consequently his success was from that moment certain. as to the rest, we refer to lady carlisle's comprehensive maxim, "spell well if you can." it is undoubtedly of consequence, to teach the rudiments of literary education early, to get over the first difficulties of reading, writing, and spelling; but much of the anxiety and bustle, and labour of teaching these things, may be advantageously spared. if more attention were turned to the general cultivation of the understanding, and if more pains were taken to make literature agreeable to children, there would be found less difficulty to excite them to mental exertion, or to induce the habits of persevering application. when we speak of rendering literature agreeable to children, and of the danger of associating pain with the sight of a book, or with the sound of the word _task_, we should at the same time avoid the errour of those who, in their first lessons, accustom their pupils to so much amusement, that they cannot help afterwards feeling disgusted with the sobriety of instruction. it has been the fashion of late to attempt teaching every thing to children in play, and ingenious people have contrived to insinuate much useful knowledge without betraying the design to instruct; but this system cannot be pursued beyond certain bounds without many inconveniences. the habit of being amused not only increases the desire for amusement, but it lessens even the relish for pleasure; so that the mind becomes passive and indolent, and a course of perpetually increasing stimulus is necessary to awaken attention. when dissipated habits are required, the pupil loses power over his own mind, and, instead of vigorous voluntary exertion, which he should be able to command, he shows that wayward imbecility, which can think successfully only by fits and starts: this paralytic state of mind has been found to be one of the greatest calamities attendant on what is called genius; and injudicious education creates or increases this disease. let us not therefore humour children in this capricious temper, especially if they have quick abilities: let us give rewards proportioned to their exertions with uniform justice, but let us not grant bounties in education, which, however they may appear to succeed in effecting partial and temporary purposes, are not calculated to ensure any consequences permanently beneficial. the truth is, that useful knowledge cannot be obtained without labour; that attention long continued is laborious, but that without this labour nothing excellent can be accomplished. excite a child to attend in earnest for a short time, his mind will be less fatigued, and his understanding more improved, than if he had exerted but half the energy twice as long: the degree of pain which he may have felt will be amply and properly compensated by his success; this will not be an arbitrary, variable reward, but one within his own power, and that can be ascertained by his own feelings. here is no deceit practised, no illusion; the same course of conduct may be regularly pursued through the whole of his education, and his confidence in his tutor will progressively increase. on the contrary, if, to entice him to enter the paths of knowledge, we strew them with flowers, how will he feel when he must force his way through thorns and briars! there is a material difference between teaching children in play, and making learning a task; in the one case we associate factitious pleasure, in the other factitious pain, with the object: both produce pernicious effects upon the temper, and retard the natural progress of the understanding. the advocates in favour of "scholastic badinage" have urged, that it excites an interest in the minds of children similar to that which makes them endure a considerable degree of labour in the pursuit of their amusements. children, it is said, work hard at play, therefore we should let them play at work. would not this produce effects the very reverse of what we desire? the whole question must at last depend upon the meaning of the word play: if by play be meant every thing that is not usually called a task, then undoubtedly much may be learned at play: if, on the contrary, we mean by the expression to describe that state of fidgeting idleness, or of boisterous activity, in which the intellectual powers are torpid, or stunned with unmeaning noise, the assertion contradicts itself. at play so defined, children can learn nothing but bodily activity; it is certainly true, that when children are interested about any thing, whether it be about what we call a trifle, or a matter of consequence, they will exert themselves in order to succeed; but from the moment the attention is fixed, no matter on what, children are no longer at idle play, they are at active work. s----, a little boy of nine years old, was standing without any book in his hand, and seemingly idle; he was amusing himself with looking at what he called a rainbow upon the floor; he begged his sister m----to look at it; then he said he wondered what could make it; how it came there. the sun shone bright through the window; the boy moved several things in the room, so as to place them sometimes between the light and the colours which he saw upon the floor, and sometimes in a corner of the room where the sun did not shine. as he moved the things, he said, "this is not it;" "nor this;" "this has'n't any thing to do with it." at last he found, that when he moved a tumbler of water out of the place where it stood, his rainbow vanished. some violets were in the tumbler; s---- thought they might be the cause of the colours which he saw upon the floor, or, as he expressed it, "perhaps these may be the thing." he took the violets out of the water; the colours remained upon the floor. he then thought that "it might be the water." he emptied the glass; the colours remained, but they were fainter. s---- immediately observed, that it was the water and glass together that made the rainbow. "but," said he, "there is no glass in the sky, yet there is a rainbow, so that i think the water alone would do, if we could but hold it together without the glass. oh i know how i can manage." he poured the water slowly out of the tumbler into a basin, which he placed where the sun shone, and he saw the colours on the floor twinkling behind the water as it fell: this delighted him much; but he asked why it would not do when the sun did not shine. the sun went behind a cloud whilst he was trying his experiments: "there was light," said he, "though there was no sunshine." he then said he thought that the different thickness of the glass was the cause of the variety of colours: afterwards he said he thought that the clearness or muddiness of the different drops of water was the cause of the different colours. a rigid preceptor, who thinks that every boy must be idle who has not a latin book constantly in his hand, would perhaps have reprimanded s---- for wasting his time _at play_, and would have summoned him from his rainbow to his _task_; but it is very obvious to any person free from prejudices, that this child was not idle whilst he was meditating upon the rainbow on the floor; his attention was fixed; he was reasoning; he was trying experiments. we may call this _play_ if we please, and we may say that descartes was at play, when he first verified antonio de dominis bishop of spalatro's treatise of the rainbow, by an experiment with a glass globe:[ ] and we may say that buffon was idle, when his pleased attention was first caught with a landscape of green shadows, when one evening at sunset he first observed that the shadows of trees, which fell upon a white wall, were green. he was first delighted with the exact representation of a green arbour, which seemed as if it had been newly painted on the wall. certainly the boy with his rainbow on the floor was as much amused as the philosopher with his coloured shadows; and, however high sounding the name of antonio de dominis, bishop of spalatro, it does not alter the business in the least; he could have exerted only his _utmost attention_ upon the theory of the rainbow, and the child did the same. we do not mean to compare the powers of reasoning, or the abilities of the child and the philosopher; we would only show that the same species of attention was exerted by both. to fix the attention of children, or, in other words, to interest them about those subjects to which we wish them to apply, must be our first object in the early cultivation of the understanding. this we shall not find a difficult undertaking if we have no false associations, no painful recollections to contend with. we can connect any species of knowledge with those occupations which are immediately agreeable to young people: for instance, if a child is building a house, we may take that opportunity to teach him how bricks are made, how the arches over doors and windows are made, the nature of the keystone and butments of an arch, the manner in which all the different parts of the roof of a house are put together, &c.; whilst he is learning all this he is eagerly and seriously attentive, and we educate his understanding in the best possible method. but if, mistaking the application of the principle, that literature should be made agreeable to children, we should entice a child to learn his letters by a promise of a gilt coach, or by telling him that he would be the cleverest boy in the world if he could but learn the letter _a_, we use false and foolish motives; we may possibly, by such means, effect the immediate purpose, but we shall assuredly have reason to repent of such imprudent deceit. if the child reasons at all, he will be content after his first lesson with being "the cleverest boy in the world," and he will not, on a future occasion, hazard his fame, having much to lose, and nothing to gain; besides, he is now master of a gilt coach, and some new and larger reward must be proffered to excite his industry. besides the disadvantage of early exhausting our stock of incitements, it is dangerous in teaching to humour pupils with a variety of objects by way of relieving their attention. the pleasure of _thinking_, and much of the profit, must frequently depend upon our preserving the greatest possible connection between our ideas. those who allow themselves to start from one object to another, acquire such dissipated habits of mind, that they cannot, without extreme difficulty and reluctance, follow any connected train of thought. you cannot teach those who will not follow the chain of your reasons; upon the connection of our ideas, useful memory and reasoning must depend. we will give you an instance: arithmetic is one of the first things that we attempt to teach children. in the following dialogue, which passed between a boy of five years old and his father, we may observe that, till the child followed his father's train of ideas, he could not be taught. _father._ _s----_, how many can you take from one? _s----._ none. _father._ none! think; can you take nothing from one? _s----._ none, except that one. _father._ except! then you can take one from one? _s----._ yes, _that one_. _father._ how many then can you take from one? _s----._ one. _father._ very true; but now, can you take two from one? _s----._ yes, if they were figures i could, with a rubber-out. (this child had frequently sums written for him with a black lead pencil, and he used to rub out his figures when they were wrong with indian rubber, which he had heard called _rubber-out_.) _father._ yes, you could; but now we will not talk of figures, we will talk of things. there may be one horse or two horses, or one man or two men. _s----._ yes, or one coat or two coats. _father._ yes, or one thing or two things, no matter what they are. now, could you take two things from one thing? _s----._ yes, if there were three things i could take away two things, and leave one. his father took up a cake from the tea-table. _father._ could i take two cakes from this one cake? _s----._ you could take two pieces. his father divided the cake into halves, and held up each half so that the child might distinctly see them. _father._ what would you call these two pieces? _s----._ two cakes. _father._ no, not two cakes. _s----._ two biscuits. _father._ holding up a whole biscuit: what is this? _s----._ a thing to eat. _father._ yes, but what would you call it? _s----._ a biscuit. his father broke it into halves, and showed one half. _father._ what would you call this? _s----._ was silent, and his sister was applied to, who answered, "half a biscuit." _father._ very well; that's all at present. the father prudently stopped here, that he might not confuse his pupil's understanding. those only who have attempted to teach children can conceive how extremely difficult it is to fix their attention, or to make them seize the connection of ideas, which it appears to us almost impossible to miss. children are well occupied in examining external objects, but they must also attend to words as well as things. one of the great difficulties in early instruction arises from the want of words: the pupil very often has acquired the necessary ideas, but they are not associated in his mind with the words which his tutor uses; these words are then to him mere sounds, which suggest no correspondent thoughts. words, as m. condillac well observes,[ ] are essential to our acquisition of knowledge; they are the medium through which one set of beings can convey the result of their experiments and observations to another; they are, in all mental processes, the algebraic signs which assist us in solving the most difficult problems. what agony does a foreigner, knowing himself to be a man of sense, appear to suffer, when, for want of language, he cannot in conversation communicate his knowledge, explain his reasons, enforce his arguments, or make his wit intelligible? in vain he has recourse to the language of action. the language of action, or, as bacon calls it, of "transitory hieroglyphic," is expressive, but inadequate. as new ideas are collected in the mind, new signs are wanted, and the progress of the understanding would be early and fatally impeded by the want of language. m. de la condamine tells us that there is a nation who have no sign to express the number three but this word, _poellartarrorincourac_. these people having begun, as condillac observes, in such an incommodious manner, it is not surprising that they have not advanced further in their knowledge of arithmetic: they have got no further than the number three; their knowledge of arithmetic stops for ever at _poellartarrorincourac_. but even this cumbersome sign is better than none. those who have the misfortune to be born deaf and dumb, continue for ever in intellectual imbecility. there is an account in the memoires de l'academie royale, p. xxii-xxiii, , of a young man born deaf and dumb,[ ] who recovered his hearing at the age of four-and-twenty, and who, after employing himself in repeating low to himself the words which he heard others pronounce, at length broke silence in company, and declared that he could talk. his conversation was but imperfect; he was examined by several able theologians, who chiefly questioned him on his ideas of god, the soul, and the morality or immorality of actions. it appeared that he had not thought upon any of these subjects; he did not distinctly know what was meant by death, and he never thought of it. he seemed to pass a merely animal life, occupied with sensible, present objects, and with the few ideas which he received by his sense of sight; nor did he seem to have gained as much knowledge as he might have done, by the comparison of these ideas; yet it is said that he did not appear naturally deficient in understanding. peter, the wild boy, who is mentioned in lord monboddo's origin of language,[ ] had all his senses in remarkable perfection. he lived at a farm house within half a mile of us in hertfordshire for some years, and we had frequent opportunities of trying experiments upon him. he could articulate imperfectly a few words, in particular, _king george_, which words he always accompanied with an imitation of the bells, which rang at the coronation of george the second; he could in a rude manner imitate two or three common tunes, but without words. though his head, as mr. wedgewood and many others had remarked, resembled that of socrates, he was an idiot: he had acquired a few automatic habits of rationality and industry, but he could never be made to work at any continued occupation: he would shut the door of the farm-yard five hundred times a day, but he would not reap or make hay. drawing water from a neighbouring river was the only domestic business which he regularly pursued. in we visited him, and tried the following experiment. he was attended to the river by a person who emptied his buckets repeatedly after peter had repeatedly filled them. a shilling was put before his face into one of the buckets when it was empty; he took no notice of it, but filled it with water and carried it homeward: his buckets were taken from him before he reached the house and emptied on the ground; the shilling, which had fallen out, was again shown to him, and put into the bucket. peter returned to the river again, filled his bucket and went home; and when the bucket was emptied by the maid at the house where he lived, he took the shilling and laid it in a place where he was accustomed to deposit the presents that were made to him by curious strangers, and whence the farmer's wife collected the price of his daily exhibition. it appeared that this savage could not be taught to reason for want of language. rousseau declaims with eloquence, and often with justice, against what he calls a knowledge of words. words without correspondent ideas, are worse than useless; they are counterfeit coin, which imposes upon the ignorant and unwary; but words, which really represent ideas, are not only of current use, but of sterling value; they not only show our present store, but they increase our wealth, by keeping it in continual circulation; both the principal and the interest increase together. the importance of signs and words, in our reasonings, has been eloquently explained, since the time of condillac, by stewart. we must use the ideas of these excellent writers, because they are just and applicable to the art of education; but whilst we use, it is with proper acknowledgments that we borrow, what we shall never be able to return. it is a nice and difficult thing in education, to proportion a child's vocabulary exactly to his knowledge, dispositions, or conformation; our management must vary; some will acquire words too quickly, others too slowly. a child who has great facility in pronouncing sounds, will, for that reason, quickly acquire a number of words, whilst those whose organs of speech are not so happily formed, will from that cause alone, be ready in forming a copious vocabulary. children who have many companions, or who live with people who converse a great deal, have more motive, both from sympathy and emulation, to acquire a variety of words, than those who live with silent people, and who have few companions of their own age. all these circumstances should be considered by parents, before they form their judgment of a child's capacity from his volubility or his taciturnity. volubility can easily be checked by simply ceasing to attend to it, and taciturnity may be vanquished by the encouragements of praise and affection: we should neither be alarmed at one disposition nor at the other, but steadily pursue the system of conduct which will be most advantageous to both. when a prattling, vivacious child, pours forth a multiplicity of words without understanding their meaning, we may sometimes beg to have an explanation of a few of them, and the child will then be obliged to think, which will prevent him from talking nonsense another time. when a thoughtful boy, who is in the habit of observing every object he sees, is at a loss for words to express his ideas, his countenance usually shows to those who can read the countenance of children, that he is not stupid; therefore, we need not urge him to talk, but assist him judiciously with words "in his utmost need:" at the same time we should observe carefully, whether he grows lazy when we assist him; if his stock of words does not increase in proportion to the assistance we give, we should then stimulate him to exertion, or else he will become habitually indolent in expressing his ideas; though he may _think_ in a language of his own, he will not be able to understand our language when we attempt to teach him: this would be a source of daily misery to both parties. when children begin to read, they seem suddenly to acquire a great variety of words: we should carefully examine whether they annex the proper meaning to these which are so rapidly collected. instead of giving them lessons and tasks to get by rote, we should cautiously watch over every new phrase and every new word which they learn from books. there are but few books so written that young children can comprehend a single sentence in them without much explanation. it is tiresome to those who hear them read to explain every word; it is not only tiresome, but difficult; besides, the progress of the pupil seems to be retarded; the grand business of reading, of getting through the book, is impeded; and the tutor, more impatient than his pupil, says, "read on, i cannot stop to explain _that_ to you now. you will understand the meaning of the sentence if you will read to the end of the page. you have not read three lines this half hour; we shall never get on at this rate." a certain dame at a country school, who had never been able to compass the word nebuchadnezzar, used to desire her pupils to "call it nazareth, and let it pass." if they be obliged to pass over words without comprehending them in books, they will probably do the same in conversation; and the difficulty of teaching such pupils, and of understanding what they say, will be equally increased. at the hazard of being tedious, we must dwell a little longer upon this subject, because much of the future capacity of children seems to depend upon the manner in which they first acquire language. if their language be confused, so will be their thoughts; and they will not be able to reason, to invent, or to write, with more precision and accuracy than they speak. the first words that children learn are the names of things; these are easily associated with the objects themselves, and there is little danger of mistake or confusion. we will not enter into the grammatical dispute concerning the right of precedency, amongst pronoun substantives and verbs; we do not know which came first into the mind of man; perhaps, in different minds, and in different circumstances, the precedency must have varied; but this seems to be of little consequence; children see actions performed, and they act themselves; when they want to express their remembrance of these actions, they make use of the sort of words which we call verbs. let these words be strictly associated with the ideas which they mean to express, and no matter whether children know any thing about the disputes of grammarians, they will understand rational grammar in due time, simply by reflecting upon their own minds. this we shall explain more fully when we speak hereafter of grammar; we just mention the subject here, to warn preceptors against puzzling their pupils too early with grammatical subtleties. if any person unused to mechanics was to read dr. desagulier's description of the manner in which a man walks, the number of a-b-c's, and the travels of the centre of gravity, it would so amaze and confound him, that he would scarcely believe he could ever again perform such a tremendous operation as that of walking. children, if they were early to hear grammarians talk of the parts of speech, and of syntax, would conclude, that to speak must be one of the most difficult arts in the world; but children, who are not usually so unfortunate as to have grammarians for their preceptors, when they first begin to speak, acquire language, without being aware of the difficulties which would appear so formidable in theory. a child points to, or touches, the table, and when the word table is repeated, at the same instant he learns the name of the thing. the facility with which a number of names are thus learned in infancy is surprising; but we must not imagine that the child, in learning these names, has acquired much knowledge; he has prepared himself to be taught, but he has not yet learnt any thing accurately. when a child sees a guinea and a shilling, and smiling says, "that's a guinea, mama! and that's a shilling!" the mother is pleased and surprised by her son's intelligence, and she gives him credit for more than he really possesses. we have associated with the words guinea and shilling a number of ideas, and when we hear the same words pronounced by a young child, we perhaps have some confused belief that he has acquired the same ideas that we have; hence we are pleased with the mere sound of words of high import from infantine lips. children who are delighted in their turn by the expression of pleasure in the countenance of others, repeat the things which they perceive have pleased; and thus their education is begun by those who first smile upon them, and listen to them when they attempt to speak. they who applaud children for knowing the names of things, induce them quickly to learn a number of names by rote; as long as they learn the names of external objects only, which they can see, and smell, and touch, all is well; the names will convey distinct ideas of certain perceptions. a child who learns the name of a taste, or of a colour, who learns that the taste of sugar is called sweet, and that the colour of a red rose is called red, has learned distinct words to express certain perceptions: and we can at any future time recall to his mind the memory of those perceptions by means of their names, and he understands us as well as the most learned philosopher. but, suppose that a boy had learned only the name of gold; that when different metals were shown to him, he could put his finger upon gold, and say, "that is gold;" yet this boy does not know all the properties of gold; he does not know in what it differs from other metals; to what uses it is applied in arts, manufactures, and commerce; the name of gold, in his mind, represents nothing more than a substance of a bright yellow colour, upon which people, he does not precisely know why, set a great value. now, it is very possible, that a child might, on the contrary, learn all the properties, and the various uses of gold, without having learned its name; his ideas of this metal would be perfectly distinct; but whenever he wished to speak of gold, he would be obliged to use a vast deal of circumlocution to make himself understood; and if he were to enumerate all the properties of the metal every time he wanted to recal the general idea, his conversation would be intolerably tedious to others, and to himself this useless repetition must be extremely laborious. he would certainly be glad to learn that single word _gold_, which would save him so much trouble; his understanding would appear suddenly to have improved, simply from his having acquired a proper sign to represent his ideas. the boy who had learnt the name, without knowing any of the properties of gold, would also appear comparatively ignorant, as soon as it is discovered that he has few ideas annexed to the word. it is, perhaps, for this reason, that some children seem suddenly to shine out with knowledge, which no one suspected they possessed; whilst others, who had appeared to be very quick and clever, come to a dead stop in their education, and appear to be blighted by some unknown cause. the children who suddenly shine out, are those who had acquired a number of ideas, and who, the moment they acquire proper words, can communicate their thoughts to others. those children who suddenly seem to lose their superiority, are those who had acquired a variety of words, but who had not annexed ideas to them. when their ignorance is detected, we not only despair of them, but they are apt to despair of themselves; they see their companions get before them, and they do not exactly perceive the cause of their sudden incapacity. where we speak of sensible, visible, tangible objects, we can easily detect and remedy a child's ignorance. it is easy to discover whether he has or has not a complete notion of such a substance as gold; we can enumerate its properties, and readily point out in what his definition is defective. the substance can be easily produced for examination; most of its properties are obvious to the senses; we have nothing to do but to show them to the child, and to associate with each property its usual name; here there can be no danger of puzzling his understanding; but when we come to the explanation of words which do not represent external objects, we shall find the affair more difficult. we can make children understand the meaning of those words which are the names of simple feelings of the mind, such as surprise, joy, grief, pity; because we can either put our pupils in situations where they actually feel these sensations, and then we may associate the name with the feelings; or we may, by the example of other people, who actually suffer pain or enjoy pleasure, point out what we mean by the words joy and grief. but how shall we explain to our young pupils, a number of words which represent neither existing substances nor simple feelings, when we can neither recur to experiment nor to sympathy for assistance? how shall we explain, for instance, the words virtue, justice, benevolence, beauty, taste, &c.? to analyze our own ideas of these, is no easy task; to explain the process to a young child, is scarcely possible. call upon any man, who has read and reflected, for a definition of virtue, the whole "theory of moral sentiments" rises, perhaps, to his view at once, in all its elegance; the paradoxical acumen of mandeville, the perspicuous reasoning of hume, the accurate metaphysics of condillac, the persuasive eloquence of stewart; all the various doctrines that have been supported concerning the foundation of morals, such as the fitness of things, the moral sense, the beauty of truth, utility, sympathy, common sense; all that has been said by ancient and modern philosophers, is recalled in transient perplexing succession to his memory. if such be the state of mind of the man who is to define, what must be the condition of the child who is to understand the definition? all that a prudent person will attempt, is to give instances of different virtues; but even these, it will be difficult properly to select for a child. general terms, whether in morals or in natural philosophy, should, we apprehend, be as much as possible avoided in early education. some people may imagine that children have improved in virtue and wisdom, when they can talk fluently of justice, and charity, and humanity; when they can read with a good emphasis any didactic compositions in verse or prose. but let any person of sober, common sense, be allowed to cross-examine these proficients, and the pretended extent of their knowledge will shrink into a narrow compass; nor will their virtues, which have never seen service, be ready for action. general terms are, as it were, but the indorsements upon the bundles of our ideas; they are useful to those who have collected a number of ideas, but utterly useless to those who have no collections ready for classification: nor should we be in a hurry to tie up the bundles, till we are sure that the collection is tolerably complete; the trouble, the difficulty, the shame of untying them late in life, is felt even by superior minds. "sir," said dr. johnson, "i don't like to have any of my opinions attacked. i have made up my faggot, and if you draw out one you weaken the whole bundle." preceptors sometimes explain general terms and abstract notions vaguely to their pupils, simply because they are ashamed to make that answer which every sensible person must frequently make to a child's inquiries, "i don't know."[ ] surely it is much better to say at once, "i cannot explain this to you," than to attempt an imperfect or sophistical reply. fortunately for us, children, if they are not forced to attend to studies for which they have no taste, will not trouble us much with moral and metaphysical questions; their attention will be fully employed upon external objects; intent upon experiments, they will not be very inquisitive about theories. let us then take care that their simple ideas be accurate, and when these are compounded, their complex notions, their principles, opinions, and tastes, will necessarily be just; their language will then be as accurate as their ideas are distinct; and hence they will be enabled to reason with precision, and to invent with facility. we may observe, that the great difficulty in reasoning is to fix steadily upon our terms; ideas can be readily compared, when the words by which we express them are defined; as in arithmetic and algebra, we can easily solve any problem, when we have precise signs for all the numbers and quantities which are to be considered. it is not from idleness, it is not from stupidity, it is not from obstinacy, that children frequently show an indisposition to listen to those who attempt to explain things to them. the exertion of attention, which is frequently required from them, is too great for the patience of childhood: the words that are used are so inaccurate in their signification, that they convey to the mind sometimes one idea and sometimes another; we might as well require of them to cast up a sum right whilst we rubbed out and changed the figures every instant, as expect that they should seize a combination of ideas presented to them in variable words. whoever expects to command the attention of an intelligent child, must be extremely careful in the use of words. if the pupil be paid for the labour of listening by the pleasure of understanding what is said, he will attend, whether it be to his playfellow, or to his tutor, to conversation, or to books. but if he has by fatal experience discovered, that, let him listen ever so intently, he cannot understand, he will spare himself the trouble of fruitless exertion; and, though he may put on a face of attention, his thoughts will wander far from his tutor and his tasks. "it is impossible to fix the attention of children," exclaims the tutor; "when this boy attends he can do any thing, but he will not attend for a single instant." alas! it is in vain to say he _will not_ attend; he _cannot_. footnotes: [ ] some of these lessons, and others by the authors, will shortly be printed, and marked according to this method. [ ] see priestley's history of vision, vol. i. p. . [ ] "art de penser." [ ] see condillac's art de penser. in the chapter "on the use of signs," this young man is mentioned. [ ] vol. ii. [ ] rousseau. chapter iii. on attention. pere bourgeois, one of the missionaries to china, attempted to preach a chinese sermon to the chinese. his own account of the business is the best we can give. "they told me _chou_ signifies a book, so that i thought whenever the word _chou_ was pronounced, a book was the subject of discourse; not at all. chou, the next time i heard it, i found signified _a tree_. now i was to recollect chou was a book, and a tree; but this amounted to nothing. chou i found also expressed _great heats_. chou is _to relate_. chou is _the aurora_. chou means _to be accustomed_. chou expresses the _loss of a wager_, &c. i should never have done were i to enumerate all its meanings******. "i recited my sermon at least fifty times to my servant before i spoke it in public; and yet i am told, though he continually corrected me, that of the ten parts of the sermon (as the chinese express themselves) they hardly understood three. fortunately the chinese are wonderfully patient." children are sometimes in the condition in which the chinese found themselves at this learned missionary's sermon, and their patience deserves to be equally commended. the difficulty of understanding the chinese chou, strikes us immediately, and we sympathise with pere bourgeois's perplexity; yet, many words, which are in common use amongst us, may perhaps be as puzzling to children. _block_ (see johnson's dictionary) signifies _a heavy piece of timber, a mass of matter_. block means _the wood on which hats are formed_. block means _the wood on which criminals are beheaded_. block is _a sea-term for pulley_. block is _an obstruction, a stop_; and, finally, block means _a blockhead_. there are in our language, ten meanings for _sweet_, ten for _open_, twenty-two for _upon_, and sixty-three for _to fall_. such are the defects of language! but, whatever they may be, we cannot hope immediately to see them reformed, because common consent, and universal custom, must combine to establish a new vocabulary. none but philosophers could invent, and none but philosophers would adopt, a philosophical language. the new philosophical language of chemistry was received at first with some reluctance, even by chemists, notwithstanding its obvious utility and elegance. butter of antimony, and liver of sulphur, flowers of zinc, oil of vitriol, and spirit of sulphur by the bell, powder of algaroth, and salt of alembroth, may yet long retain their ancient titles amongst apothecaries. there does not exist in the mineral kingdom either butter or oil, or yet flowers; these treacherous names[ ] are given to the most violent poisons, so that there is no analogy to guide the understanding or the memory: but custom has a prescriptive right to talk nonsense. the barbarous enigmatical jargon of the ancient adepts continued for above a century to be the only chemical language of men of science, notwithstanding the prodigious labour to the memory, and confusion to the understanding, which it occasioned: they have but just now left off calling one of their vessels for distilling, a death's head, and another a helmet. capricious analogy with difficulty yields to rational arrangement. if such has been the slow progress of a philosophical language amongst the learned, how can we expect to make a general, or even a partial reformation amongst the ignorant? and it may be asked, how can we in education attempt to teach in any but customary terms? there is no occasion to make any sudden or violent alteration in language; but a man who attempts to teach, will find it necessary to select his terms with care, to define them with accuracy, and to abide by them with steadiness; thus he will make a philosophical vocabulary for himself. persons who want to puzzle and to deceive, always pursue a contrary practice; they use as great a variety of unmeaning, or of ambiguous words, as they possibly can.[ ] that state juggler, oliver cromwell, excelled in this species of eloquence; his speeches are models in their kind. count cagliostro, and the countess de la motte, were not his superiors in the power of baffling the understanding. the ancient oracles, and the old books of judicial astrologers, and of alchymists, were contrived upon the same principles; in all these we are confounded by a multiplicity of words which convey a doubtful sense. children, who have not the habit of listening to words without understanding them, yawn and writhe with manifest symptoms of disgust, whenever they are compelled to hear sounds which convey no ideas to their minds. all supernumerary words should be avoided in cultivating the power of attention. the common observation, that we can attend to but one thing at a time, should never be forgotten by those who expect to succeed in the art of teaching. in teaching new terms, or new ideas, we must not produce a number at once. it is prudent to consider, that the actual progress made in our business at one sitting is not of so much consequence, as the desire left in the pupil's mind to sit again. now a child will be better pleased with himself, and with his tutor, if he acquire one distinct idea from a lesson, than if he retained a confused notion of twenty different things. some people imagine, that as children appear averse to repetition, variety will amuse them. variety, to a certain degree, certainly relieves the mind; but then the objects which are varied must not all be entirely new. novelty and variety, joined, fatigue the mind. either we remain passive at the show, or else we fatigue ourselves with ineffectual activity. a few years ago, a gentleman[ ] brought two eskimaux to london--he wished to amuse, and at the same time to astonish, them with the great magnificence of the metropolis. for this purpose, after having equipped them like english gentlemen, he took them out one morning to walk through the streets of london. they walked for several hours in silence; they expressed neither pleasure nor admiration at any thing which they saw. when their walk was ended, they appeared uncommonly melancholy and stupified. as soon as they got home, they sat down with their elbows upon their knees, and hid their faces between their hands. the only words they could be brought to utter, were, "too much smoke--too much noise--too much houses--too much men--too much every thing!" some people who attend public lectures upon natural philosophy, with the expectation of being much amused and instructed, go home with sensations similar to those of the poor eskimaux; they feel that they have had too much of every thing. the lecturer has not time to explain his terms, or to repeat them till they are distinct in the memory of his audience.[ ] to children, every mode of instruction must be hurtful which fatigues attention; therefore, a skilful preceptor will, as much as possible, avoid the manner of teaching, to which the public lecturer is in some degree compelled by his situation. a private preceptor, who undertakes the instruction of several pupils in the same family, will examine with care the different habits and tempers of his pupils; and he will have full leisure to adapt his instructions peculiarly to each. there are some general observations which apply to all understandings; these we shall first enumerate, and we may afterwards examine what distinctions should be made for pupils of different tempers or dispositions. besides distinctness and accuracy in the language which we use, besides care to produce but few ideas or terms that are new in our first lessons, we must exercise attention only during very short periods. in the beginning of every science pupils have much laborious work; we should therefore allow them time; we should repress our own impatience when they appear to be slow in comprehending reasons, or in seizing analogies. we often expect, that those whom we are teaching should know some things intuitively, because these may have been so long known to us that we forget how we learned them. we may from habit learn to pass with extraordinary velocity from one idea to another. "some often repeated processes of reasoning or invention," says mr. stewart, "may be carried on so quickly in the mind, that we may not be conscious of them ourselves." yet we easily convince ourselves that this rapid facility of thought is purely the result of practice, by observing the comparatively slow progress of our understandings in subjects to which we have not been accustomed: the progress of the mind is there so slow, that we can count every step. we are disposed to think that those must be naturally slow and stupid, who do not perceive the resemblances between objects which strike us, we say, at the first glance. but what we call the first glance is frequently the fiftieth: we have got the things completely by heart; all the parts are known to us, and we are at leisure to compare and judge. a reasonable preceptor will not expect from his pupils two efforts of attention at the same instant; he will not require them at once to learn terms by heart, and to compare the objects which those terms represent; he will repeat his terms till they are thoroughly fixed in the memory; he will repeat his reasoning till the chain of ideas is completely formed. repetition makes all operations easy; even the fatigue of thinking diminishes by habit. that we may not increase the labour of the mind unseasonably, we should watch for the moment when habit has made one lesson easy, and when we may go forward a new step. in teaching the children at the house of industry at munich to spin, count rumford wisely ordered that they should be made perfect in one motion before any other was shown to them: at first they were allowed only to move the wheel by the treadle with their feet; when, after sufficient practice, the foot became perfect in its lesson, the hands were set to work, and the children were allowed to begin to spin with coarse materials. it is said that these children made remarkable good spinners. madame de genlis applied the same principle in teaching adela to play upon the harp.[ ] in the first attempts to learn any new bodily exercise, as fencing or dancing, persons are not certain what muscles they must use, and what may be left at rest; they generally employ those of which they have the most ready command, but these may not always be the muscles which are really wanted in the new operation. the simplest thing appears difficult, till, by practice, we have associated the various slight motions which ought to be combined. we feel, that from want of use, our motions are not obedient to our will, and to supply this defect, we exert more strength and activity than is requisite. "it does not require strength; you need not use so much force; you need not take so much pains;" we frequently say to those who are making the first painful awkward attempts at some simple operation. can any thing appear more easy than knitting, when we look at the dexterous, rapid motions of an experienced practitioner? but let a gentleman take up a lady's knitting needles, and knitting appears to him, and to all the spectators, one of the most difficult and laborious operations imaginable. a lady who is learning to work with a tambour needle, puts her head down close to the tambour frame, the colour comes into her face, she strains her eyes, all her faculties are exerted, and perhaps she works at the rate of three links a minute. a week afterwards, probably, practice has made the work perfectly easy; the same lady goes rapidly on with her work; she can talk and laugh, and perhaps even think, whilst she works. she has now discovered that a number of the motions, and a great portion of that attention which she thought necessary to this mighty operation, may be advantageously spared. in a similar manner, in the exercise of our minds upon subjects that are new to us, we generally exert more attention than is necessary or serviceable, and we consequently soon fatigue ourselves without any advantage. children, to whom many subjects are new, are often fatigued by these overstrained and misplaced efforts. in these circumstances, a tutor should relieve the attention by introducing indifferent subjects of conversation; he can, by showing no anxiety himself, either in his manner or countenance, relieve his pupil from any apprehension of his displeasure, or of his contempt; he can represent that the object before them is not a matter of life and death; that if the child does not succeed in the first trials, he will not be disgraced in the opinion of any of his friends; that by perseverance he will certainly conquer the difficulty; that it is of little consequence whether he understands the thing in question to-day or to-morrow; these considerations will calm the over-anxious pupil's agitation, and, whether he succeed or not, he will not suffer such a degree of pain as to disgust him in his first attempts. besides the command which we, by this prudent management, obtain over the pupil's mind, we shall also prevent him from acquiring any of those awkward gestures and involuntary motions which are sometimes practised to relieve the pain of attention. dr. darwin observes, that when we experience any disagreeable sensations, we endeavour to procure ourselves temporary relief by motions of those muscles and limbs which are most habitually obedient to our will. this observation extends to mental as well as to bodily pain; thus persons in violent grief wring their hands and convulse their countenances; those who are subject to the petty, but acute miseries of false shame, endeavour to relieve themselves by awkward gestures and continual motions. a plough-boy, when he is brought into the presence of those whom he thinks his superiors, endeavours to relieve himself from the uneasy sensations of false shame, by twirling his hat upon his fingers, and by various uncouth gestures. men who think a great deal, sometimes acquire habitual awkward gestures, to relieve the pain of intense thought. when attention first becomes irksome to children, they mitigate the mental pain by wrinkling their brows, or they fidget and put themselves into strange attitudes. these odd motions, which at first are voluntary, after they have been frequently associated with certain states of mind, constantly recur involuntarily with those feelings or ideas with which they have been connected. for instance, a boy, who has been used to buckle and unbuckle his shoe, when he repeats his lesson by rote, cannot repeat his lesson without performing this operation; it becomes a sort of artificial memory, which is necessary to prompt his recollective faculty. when children have a _variety_ of tricks of this sort, they are of little consequence; but when they have acquired a few constant and habitual motions, whilst they think, or repeat, or listen, these should be attended to, and the habits should be broken, otherwise these young people will appear, when they grow up, awkward and ridiculous in their manners; and, what is worse, perhaps their thoughts and abilities will be too much in the power of external circumstances. addison represents, with much humour, the case of a poor man who had the habit of twirling a bit of thread round his finger; the thread was accidentally broken, and the orator stood mute. we once saw a gentleman get up to speak in a public assembly, provided with a paper of notes written in pencil: during the exordium of his speech, he thumbed his notes with incessant agitation; when he looked at the paper, he found that the words were totally obliterated; he was obliged to apologize to his audience; and, after much hesitation, sat down abashed. a father would be sorry to see his son in such a predicament. to prevent children from acquiring such awkward tricks whilst they are thinking, we should in the first place take care not to make them attend for too long a time together, then the pain of attention will not be so violent as to compel them to use these strange modes of relief. bodily exercise should immediately follow that entire state of rest, in which our pupils ought to keep themselves whilst they attend. the first symptoms of any awkward trick should be watched; they are easily prevented by early care from becoming habitual. if any such tricks have been acquired, and if the pupil cannot exert his attention in common, unless certain contortions are permitted, we should attempt the cure either by sudden slight bodily pain, or by a total suspension of all the employments with which these bad habits are associated. if a boy could not read without swinging his head like a pendulum, we should rather prohibit him from reading for some time, than suffer him to grow up with this ridiculous habit. but in conversation, whenever opportunities occur of telling him any thing in which he is particularly interested, we should refuse to gratify his curiosity, unless he keeps himself perfectly still. the excitement here would be sufficient to conquer the habit. whatever is connected with pain or pleasure commands our attention; but to make this general observation useful in education, we must examine what degrees of stimulus are necessary for different pupils, and in different circumstances. we have formerly observed,[ ] that it is not prudent early to use violent or continual stimulus, either of a painful or a pleasurable nature, to excite children to application, because we should by an intemperate use of these, weaken the mind, and because we may with a little patience obtain all we wish without these expedients. besides these reasons, there is another potent argument against using violent motives to excite attention; such motives frequently disturb and dissipate the very attention which they attempt to fix. if a child be threatened with severe punishment, or flattered with the promise of some delicious reward, in order to induce his performance of any particular task, he desires instantly to perform the task; but this desire will not ensure his success: unless he has previously acquired the habit of voluntary exertion, he will not be able to turn his mind from his ardent wishes, even to the means of accomplishing them. he will be in the situation of alnaschar in the arabian tales, who, whilst he dreamt of his future grandeur, forgot his immediate business. the greater his hope or fear, the greater the difficulty of his employing himself. to teach any new habit or art, we must not employ any alarming excitements: small, certain, regularly recurring motives, which interest, but which do not distract the mind, are evidently the best. the ancient inhabitants of minorca were said to be the best slingers in the world; when they were children, every morning what they were to eat was slightly suspended from high poles, and they were obliged to throw down their breakfasts with their slings from the places where they were suspended, before they could satisfy their hunger. the motive seems to have been here well proportioned to the effect that was required; it could not be any great misfortune to a boy to go without his breakfast; but as this motive returned every morning, it became sufficiently serious to the hungry slingers. it is impossible to explain this subject so as to be of use, without descending to minute particulars. when a mother says to her little daughter, as she places on the table before her a bunch of ripe cherries, "tell me, my dear, how many cherries are there, and i will give them to you?" the child's attention is fixed instantly; there is a sufficient motive, not a motive which excites any violent passions, but which raises just such a degree of hope as is necessary to produce attention. the little girl, if she knows from experience that her mother's promise will be kept, and that her own patience is likely to succeed, counts the cherries carefully, has her reward, and upon the next similar trial she will, from this success, be still more disposed to exert her attention. the pleasure of eating cherries, associated with the pleasure of success, will balance the pain of a few moments prolonged application, and by degrees the cherries may be withdrawn, the association of pleasure will remain. objects or thoughts, that have been associated with pleasure, retain the power of pleasing; as the needle touched by the loadstone acquires polarity, and retains it long after the loadstone is withdrawn. whenever attention is habitually raised by the power of association, we should be careful to withdraw all the excitements that were originally used, because these are now unnecessary; and, as we have formerly observed, the steady rule, with respect to stimulus, should be to give the least possible quantity that will produce the effect we want. success is a great pleasure; as soon as children become sensible to this pleasure, that is to say, when they have tasted it two or three times, they will exert their attention merely with the hope of succeeding. we have seen a little boy of three years old, frowning with attention for several minutes together, whilst he was trying to clasp and unclasp a lady's bracelet; his whole soul was intent upon the business; he neither saw nor heard any thing else that passed in the room, though several people were talking, and some happened to be looking at him. the pleasure of success, when he clasped the bracelet, was quite sufficient; he looked for no praise, though he was perhaps pleased with the sympathy that was shown in his success. sympathy is a better reward for young children in such circumstances than praise, because it does not excite vanity, and it is connected with benevolent feelings; besides, it is not so violent a stimulus as applause. instead of increasing excitements to produce attention, we may vary them, which will have just the same effect. when sympathy fails, try curiosity; when curiosity fails, try praise; when praise begins to lose its effect, try blame; and when you go back again to sympathy, you will find that, after this interval, it will have recovered all its original power. doctor darwin, who has the happy art of illustrating, from the most familiar circumstances in real life, the abstract theories of philosophy, gives us the following picturesque instance of the use of varying motives to prolong exertion. "a little boy, who was tired of walking, begged of his papa to carry him. "here," says the reverend doctor, "ride upon my gold headed cane;" and the pleased child, putting it between his legs, galloped away with delight. here the aid of another sensorial power, that of pleasurable sensation, superadded power to exhausted volition, which could otherwise only have been excited by additional pain, as by the lash of slavery."[ ] alexander the great one day saw a poor man carrying upon his shoulders a heavy load of silver for the royal camp: the man tottered under his burden, and was ready to give up the point from fatigue. "hold on, friend, the rest of the way, and carry it to your own tent, for it is yours," said alexander. there are some people, who have the power of exciting others to great mental exertions, not by the promise of specific rewards, or by the threats of any punishment, but by the ardent ambition which they inspire, by the high value which is set upon their love and esteem. when we have formed a high opinion of a friend, his approbation becomes necessary to our own self-complacency, and we think no labour too great to satisfy our attachment. our exertions are not fatiguing, because they are associated with all the pleasurable sensations of affection, self-complacency, benevolence, and liberty. these feelings, in youth, produce all the virtuous enthusiasm characteristic of great minds; even childhood is capable of it in some degree, as those parents well know, who have never enjoyed the attachment of a grateful affectionate child. those, who neglect to cultivate the affections of their pupils, will never be able to excite them to "noble ends," by "noble means." theirs will be the dominion of fear, from which reason will emancipate herself, and from which pride will yet more certainly revolt. if henry the fourth of france had been reduced, like dionysius the tyrant of syracuse, to earn his bread as a schoolmaster, what a different preceptor he would probably have made! dionysius must have been hated by his scholars as much as by his subjects, for it is said, that "he[ ] practised upon children that tyranny which he could no longer exercise over men." the ambassador, who found henry the fourth playing upon the carpet with his children, would probably have trusted his own children, if he had any, to the care of such an affectionate tutor. henry the fourth would have attached his pupils whilst he instructed them; they would have exerted themselves because they could not have been happy without his esteem. henry's courtiers, or rather his friends, for though he was a king he had friends, sometimes expressed surprise at their own disinterestedness: "this king pays us with words," said they, "and yet we are satisfied!" sully, when he was only baron de rosny, and before he had any hopes of being a duke, was once in a passion with the king his master, and half resolved to leave him: "but i don't know how it was," says the honest minister, "with all his faults, there is something about henry which i found i could not leave; and when i met him again, a few words made me forget all my causes of discontent." children are more easily attached than courtiers, and full as easily rewarded. when once this generous desire of affection and esteem is raised in the mind, their exertions seem to be universal and spontaneous: children are then no longer like machines, which require to be wound up regularly to perform certain revolutions; they are animated with a living principle, which directs all that it inspires. we have endeavoured to point out the general excitements, and the general precautions, to be used in cultivating the power of attention; it may be expected, that we should more particularly apply these to the characters of different pupils. we shall not here examine whether there be any original difference of character or intellect, because this would lead into a wide theoretical discussion; a difference in the temper and talents of children early appears, and some practical remarks may be of service to correct defects, or to improve abilities, whether we suppose them to be natural or acquired. the first differences which a preceptor observes between his pupils, when he begins to teach them, are perhaps scarcely marked so strongly as to strike the careless spectator; but in a few years these varieties are apparent to every eye. this seems to prove, that during the interval the power of education has operated strongly to increase the original propensities. the quick and slow, the timid and presumptuous, should be early instructed so as to correct as much as possible their several defects. the manner in which children are first instructed must tend either to increase or diminish their timidity, or their confidence in themselves, to encourage them to undertake great things, or to rest content with limited acquirements. young people, who have found from experience, that they cannot remember or understand one half of what is forced upon their attention, become extremely diffident of their own capacity, and they will not undertake as much even as they are able to perform. with timid tempers, we should therefore begin, by expecting but little from each effort, but whatever is attempted, should be certainly within their attainment; success will encourage the most stupid humility. it should be carefully pointed out to diffident children, that attentive patience can do as much as quickness of intellect. if they perceive that time makes all the difference between the quick and the slow, they will be induced to persevere. the transition of attention from one subject to another is difficult to some children, to others it is easy. if all be expected to do the same things in an equal period of time, the slow will absolutely give up the competition; but, on the contrary, if they are allowed time, they will accomplish their purposes. we have been confirmed in our belief of this doctrine by experiments. the same problems have been frequently given to children of different degrees of quickness, and though some succeeded much more quickly than others, all the individuals in the family have persevered till they have solved the questions; and the timid seem to have been more encouraged by this practical demonstration of the infallibility of persevering attention, than by any other methods which have been tried. when, after a number of small successful trials, they have acquired some share of confidence in themselves, when they are certain of the possibility of their performing any given operations, we may then press them a little as to velocity. when they are well acquainted with any set of ideas, we may urge them to quick transition of attention from one to another; but if we insist upon this rapidity of transition, before they are thoroughly acquainted with each idea in the assemblage, we shall only increase their timidity and hesitation; we shall confound their understandings, and depress their ambition. it is of consequence to distinguish between slow and sluggish attention. sometimes children appear stupid and heavy, when they are absolutely exhausted by too great efforts of attention: at other times, they have something like the same dulness of aspect, before they have had any thing to fatigue them, merely from their not having yet awakened themselves to business. we must be certain of our pupil's state of mind before we proceed. if he be incapacitated from fatigue, let him rest; if he be torpid, rouse him with a rattling peal of thunder; but be sure that you have not, as it has been said of jupiter,[ ] recourse to your thunder only when you are in the wrong. some preceptors scold when they cannot explain, and grow angry in proportion to the fatigue they see expressed in the countenance of their unhappy pupils. if a timid child foresees that an explanation will probably end in a phillipic, he cannot fix his attention; he is anticipating the evil of your anger, instead of listening to your demonstrations; and he says, "yes, yes, i see, i know, i understand," with trembling eagerness, whilst through the mist and confusion of his fears, he can scarcely see or hear, much less understand, any thing. if you mistake the confusion and fatigue of terror for inattention or indolence, and press your pupil to further exertions, you will confirm, instead of curing, his stupidity. you must diminish his fear before you can increase his attention. with children who are thus, from timid anxiety to please, disposed to exert their faculties too much, it is obvious that no excitation should be used, but every playful, every affectionate means should be employed to dissipate their apprehensions. it is more difficult to manage with those who have sluggish, than with those who have timid, attention. indolent children have not usually so lively a taste for pleasure as others have; they do not seem to hear or see so quickly; they are content with a little enjoyment; they have scarcely any ambition; they seem to prefer ease to all sorts of glory; they have little voluntary exertion; and the pain of attention is to them so great, that they would preferably endure the pain of shame, and of all the accumulated punishments which are commonly devised for them by the vengeance of their exasperated tutors. locke notices this listless, lazy humour in children; he classes it under the head "sauntering;" and he divides saunterers into two species; those who saunter only at their books and tasks; and those who saunter at play and every thing. the book-saunterers have only an acute, the others have a chronic disease; the one is easily cured, the other disease will cost more time and pains. if, by some unlucky management, a vivacious child acquires a dislike to literary application, he may appear at his books with all the stupid apathy of a dunce. in this state of literary dereliction, we should not force books and tasks of any sort upon him; we should rather watch him when he is eager at amusements of his own selection, observe to what his attention turns, and cultivate his attention upon that subject, whatever it may be. he may be led to think, and to acquire knowledge upon a variety of subjects, without sitting down to read; and thus he may form habits of attention and application, which will be associated with pleasure. when he returns to books, he will find that he understands a variety of things in them which before appeared incomprehensible; they will "give him back the image of his mind," and he will like them as he likes pictures. as long as a child shows energy upon any occasion, there is hope. if he "lend his little soul"[ ] to whipping a top, there is no danger of his being a dunce. when alcibiades was a child, he was one day playing at dice with other boys in the street; a loaded waggon came up just as it was his turn to throw. at first he called to the driver to stop, but the waggoner would not stop his horses; all the boys, except alcibiades, ran away, but alcibiades threw himself upon his face, directly before the horses, and stretching himself out, bid the waggoner drive on if he pleased. perhaps, at the time when he showed this energy about a game at dice, alcibiades might have been a saunterer at his book, and a foolish schoolmaster might have made him a dunce. locke advises that children, who are too much addicted to what is called play, should be surfeited with it, that they may return to business with a better appetite. but this advice supposes that play has been previously interdicted, or that it is something pernicious: we have endeavoured to show that play is nothing but a change of employment, and that the attention may be exercised advantageously upon a variety of subjects which are not called tasks.[ ] with those who show chronic listlessness, locke advises that we should use every sort of stimulus; praise, amusement, fine clothes, eating; any thing that will make them bestir themselves. he argues, that as there appears a deficiency of vigour, we have no reason to fear excess of appetite for any of these things: nay, further still, where none of these will act, he advises compulsory bodily exercise. if we cannot, he says, make sure of the invisible attention of the mind, we may at least get something done, prevent the habit of total idleness, and perhaps make the children desire to exchange labour of body for labour of mind. these expedients will, we fear, be found rather palliative than effectual; if, by forcing children to bodily exercise, that becomes disagreeable, they may prefer labour of the mind; but, in making this exchange, or bargain, they are sensible that they choose the least of two evils. the evil of application is diminished only by comparison in their estimation; they will avoid it whenever they are at liberty. the love of eating, of fine clothes, &c. if they stimulate a slothful child, must be the ultimate object of his exertions; he will consider the performance of his task merely as a painful condition on his part. still the association of pain with literature continues; it is then impossible that he should love it. there is no active principle within him, no desire for knowledge excited; his attention is forced, it ceases the moment the external force is withdrawn. he drudges to earn his cream bowl duly set, but he will stretch his lubbar length the moment his task is done. there is another class of children opposed to saunterers, whom we may denominate volatile geniuses. they show a vast deal of quickness and vivacity; they understand almost before a tutor can put his ideas into words; they observe a variety of objects, but they do not connect their observations, and the very rapidity with which they seize an explanation, prevents them from thoroughly comprehending it; they are easily disturbed by external objects when they are thinking. as they have great sensibility, their associations are strong and various; their thoughts branch off into a thousand beautiful, but useless ramifications. whilst you are attempting to instruct them upon one subject, they are inventing, perhaps, upon another; or they are following a train of ideas suggested by something you have said, but foreign to your business. they are more pleased with the discovery of resemblances, than with discrimination of difference; the one costs them more time and attention than the other: they are apt to say witty things, and to strike out sparks of invention; but they have not commonly the patience to form exact judgments, or to bring their first inventions to perfection. when they begin the race, every body expects that they should outstrip all competitors; but it is often seen that slower rivals reach the goal before them. the predictions formed of pupils of this temperament, vary much, according to the characters of their tutors. a slow man is provoked by their dissipated vivacity, and, unable to catch or fix their attention, prognosticates that they will never have sufficient application to learn any thing. this prophecy, under certain tuition, would probably be accomplished. the want of sympathy between a slow tutor and a quick child, is a great disadvantage to both; each insists upon going his own pace, and his own way, and these ways are perhaps diametrically opposite. even in forming a judgment of the child's attention, the tutor, who is not acquainted with the manner in which his pupil goes to work, is liable to frequent mistakes. children are sometimes suspected of not having listened to what has been said to them, when they cannot exactly repeat the words that they have heard; they often ask questions, and make observations, which seem quite foreign to the present business; but this is not always a proof that their minds are absent, or that their attention is dissipated. their answers often appear to be far from the point, because they suppress their intermediate ideas, and give only the result of their thoughts. this may be inconvenient to those who teach them; but this habit sufficiently proves that these children are not deficient in attention. to cure them of the fault which they have, we should not accuse them falsely of another. but it may be questioned whether this be a fault; it is absolutely necessary, in many processes of the mind, to suppress a number of intermediate ideas. life, if this were not practised, would be too short for those who think, and much too short for those who speak. when somebody asked pyrrhus which of two musicians he liked the best, he answered, "polysperchon is the best general." this would appear to be the absurd answer of an absent person, or of a fool, if we did not consider the ideas that are implied, as well as those which are expressed. march th, . to-day, at dinner, a lady observed that nicholson, williamson, jackson, &c. were names which originally meant the sons of nicholas, william, jack, &c. a boy who was present, h----, added, with a very grave face, as soon as she had finished speaking, "yes, ma'am, tydides." his mother asked him what he could mean by this absent speech? h---- calmly repeated, "ma'am, yes; because i think it is like tydides." his brother s----eagerly interposed, to supply the intermediate ideas; "yes, indeed, mother," cried he, "h---- is not absent, because _des_, in greek, means _the son of_ (the race of.) tydides is the son of tydeus, as jackson is the son of jack." in this instance, h---- was not absent, though he did not make use of a sufficient number of words to explain his ideas. august, . l----, when he returned home, after some months absence, entertained his brothers and sisters with a new play, which he had learned at edinburgh. he told them, that when he struck the table with his hand, every person present, was instantaneously to remain fixed in the attitudes in which they should be when the blow was given. the attitudes in which some of the little company were fixed, occasioned much diversion; but in speaking of this new play afterwards, they had no name for it. whilst they were thinking of a name for it, h---- exclaimed, "the gorgon!" it was immediately agreed that this was a good name for the play, and h----, upon this occasion, was perfectly intelligible, without expressing all the intermediate ideas. good judges, form an accurate estimate of the abilities of those who converse with them, by what they omit, as well as by what they say. if any one can show that he also has been in arcadia, he is sure of being well received, without producing minutes of his journey. in the same manner we should judge of children; if they arrive at certain conclusions in reasoning, we may be satisfied that they have taken all the necessary previous steps. we need not question their attention upon subjects where they give proofs of invention; they must have remembered well, or they could not invent; they must have attended well, or they could not have remembered. nothing wearies a quick child more than to be forced slowly to retrace his own thoughts, and to repeat the words of a discourse to prove that he has listened to it. a tutor, who is slow in understanding the ideas of his vivacious pupil, gives him so much trouble and pain, that he grows silent, from finding it not worth while to speak. it is for this reason, that children appear stupid and silent, with some people, and sprightly and talkative with others. those who hope to talk to children with any effect, must, as rousseau observes, be able to hear as well as to speak. m. de segrais, who was deaf, was much in the right to decline being preceptor to the duke de maine. a deaf preceptor would certainly make a child dumb. to win the attention of vivacious children, we must sometimes follow them in their zigzag course, and even press them to the end of their own train of thought. they will be content when they have obtained a full hearing; then they will have leisure to discover that what they were in such haste to utter, was not so well worth saying as they imagined; that their bright ideas often, when steadily examined by themselves, fade into absurdities. "where does this path lead to? can't we get over this stile? may i _only_ go into this wood?" exclaims an active child, when he is taken out to walk. every path appears more delightful than the straight road; but let him try the paths, they will perhaps end in disappointment, and then his imagination will be corrected. let him try his own experiments, then he will be ready to try yours; and if yours succeed better than his own, you will secure his confidence. after a child has talked on for some time, till he comes to the end of his ideas, then he will perhaps listen to what you have to say; and if he finds it better than what he has been saying himself, he will voluntarily give you his attention the next time you begin to speak. vivacious children are peculiarly susceptible of blame and praise; we have, therefore, great power over their attachment, if we manage these excitements properly. these children should not be praised for their _happy hits_, their first[ ] glances should not be extolled; but, on the contrary, they should be rewarded with universal approbation when they give proofs of patient industry, when they bring any thing to perfection. no one can bring any thing to perfection without long continued attention; and industry and perseverance presuppose attention. proofs of any of these qualities may therefore satisfy us as to the pupil's capacity and habits of attention; we need not stand by to see the attention exercised, the things produced are sufficient evidence. buffon tells us that he wrote his epoques de la nature over eighteen times before he could perfect it to his taste. the high finish of his composition is sufficient evidence to intelligent readers, that he exerted long continued attention upon the work; they do not require to have the eighteen copies produced. bacon supposes, that for every disease of the mind, specific remedies might be found in appropriate studies and exercises. thus, for "bird-witted" children he prescribes the study of mathematics, because, in mathematical studies, the attention must be fixed; the least intermission of thought breaks the whole chain of reasoning, their labour is lost, and they must begin their demonstration again. this principle is excellent; but to apply it advantageously, we should choose moments when a mathematical demonstration is interesting to children, else we have not sufficient motive to excite them to commence the demonstration; they will perceive, that they loose all their labour if their attention is interrupted; but how shall we make them begin to attend? there are a variety of subjects which are interesting to children, to which we may apply bacon's principle; for instance, a child is eager to hear a story which you are going to tell him; you may exercise his attention by your manner of telling this story; you may employ with advantage the beautiful figure of speech called _suspension_: but you must take care, that the hope which is long deferred be at last gratified. the young critics will look back when your story is finished, and will examine whether their attention has been wasted, or whether all the particulars to which it was directed were essential. though in amusing stories we recommend the figure called suspension,[ ] we do not recommend its use in explanations. our explanations should be put into as few words as possible: the closer the connection of ideas, the better. when we say, allow time to understand your explanations, we mean, allow time between each idea, do not fill up the interval with words. never, by way of gaining time, pay in sixpences; this is the last resource of a bankrupt. we formerly observed that a preceptor, in his first lessons on any new subject, must submit to the drudgery of repeating his terms and his reasoning, until these are sufficiently familiar to his pupils. he must, however, proportion the number of his repetitions to the temper and habits of his pupils, else he will weary, instead of strengthening, the attention. when a thing is clear, let him never try to make it clearer; when a thing is understood, not a word more of exemplification should be added. to mark precisely the moment when the pupil understands what is said, the moment when he is master of the necessary ideas, and, consequently, the moment when repetition should cease, is, perhaps, the most difficult thing in the art of teaching. the countenance, the eye, the voice, and manner of the pupil, mark this instant to an observing preceptor; but a preceptor, who is absorbed in his own ideas, will never think of looking in his pupil's face; he will go on with his routine of explanation, whilst his once lively, attentive pupil, exhibits opposite to him the picture of stupified fatigue. quick, intelligent children, who have frequently found that lessons are reiterated by a patient but injudicious tutor, will learn a careless mode of listening at intervals; they will say to themselves, "oh i shall hear this again!" and if any stray thought comes across their minds, they will not scruple to amuse themselves, and will afterwards ask for a repetition of the words or ideas which they missed during this excursion of fancy. when they hear the warning advertisement of "certainly for the last time this season," they will deem it time enough to attend to the performance. to cure them of this presumption in favour of our patience, and of their own superlative quickness, we should press that quickness to its utmost speed. whenever we call for their attention, let it be on subjects highly interesting or amusing, and let us give them but just sufficient time with their fullest exertion to catch our words and ideas. as these quick gentlemen are proud of their rapidity of apprehension, this method will probably secure their attention, they will dread the disgrace of not understanding what is said, and they will feel that they cannot understand unless they exert prompt, vigorous, unremitted attention. the duchess of kingston used to complain that she could never acquire any knowledge, because she never could meet with any body who could teach her anything "in two words." her grace felt the same sort of impatience which was expressed by the tyrant who expected to find a royal road to geometry. those who believe themselves endowed with genius, expect to find a royal road in every science shorter, and less laborious, than the beaten paths of industry. their expectations are usually in proportion to their ignorance; they see to the summit only of one hill, and they do not suspect the alps that will arise as they advance: but as children become less presumptuous, as they acquire more knowledge, we may bear with their juvenile impatience, whilst we take measures to enlarge continually their sphere of information. we should not, however, humour the attention of young people, by teaching them always in the mode which we know suits their temper best. vivacious pupils should, from time to time, be accustomed to an exact enumeration of particulars; and we should take opportunities to convince them, that an orderly connection of proofs, and a minute observation of apparent trifles, are requisite to produce the lively descriptions, great discoveries, and happy inventions, which pupils of this disposition are ever prone to admire with enthusiasm. they will learn not to pass over _old_ things, when they perceive that these may lead to something _new_; and they will even submit to sober attention, when they feel that this is necessary even to the rapidity of genius. in the "curiosities of literature," there has been judiciously preserved a curious instance of literary patience; the rough draught of that beautiful passage in pope's translation of the iliad which describes the parting of hector and andromache. the lines are in pope's hand-writing, and his numerous corrections appear; the lines which seem to the reader to have been struck off at a single happy stroke, are proved to have been touched and retouched with the indefatigable attention of a great writer. the fragment, with all its climax of corrections, was shown to a young vivacious poet of nine years old, as a practical lesson, to prove the necessity of patience to arrive at perfection. similar examples, from real life, should be produced to young people at proper times; the testimony of men of acknowledged abilities, of men whom they have admired for genius, will come with peculiar force in favour of application. parents, well acquainted with literature, cannot be at a loss to find opposite illustrations. the life of franklin is an excellent example of persevering industry; the variations in different editions of voltaire's dramatic poetry, and in pope's works, are worth examining. all sir joshua reynolds's eloquent academical discourses enforce the doctrine of patience; when he wants to prove to painters the value of continual energetic attention, he quotes from livy the character of philopoemen, one of the ablest generals of antiquity. so certain it is, that the same principle pervades all superior minds: whatever may be their pursuits, attention is the avowed primary cause of their success. these examples from the dead, should be well supported by examples from amongst the living. in common life, occurrences can frequently be pointed out, in which attention and application are amply rewarded with success. it will encourage those who are interested in education, to observe, that two of the most difficult exercises of the mind can, by practice, be rendered familiar, even by persons whom we do not consider as possessed of superior talents. abstraction and transition--abstraction, the power of withdrawing the attention from all external objects, and concentrating it upon some particular set of ideas, we admire as one of the most difficult exercises of the philosopher. abstraction was formerly considered as such a difficult and painful operation, that it required perfect silence and solitude; many ancient philosophers quarrelled with their senses, and shut themselves up in caves, to secure their attention from the distraction caused by external objects. but modern[ ] philosophers have discovered, that neither caves nor lamps are essential to the full and successful exercise of their mental powers. persons of ordinary abilities, tradesmen and shop-keepers, in the midst of the tumult of a public city, in the noise of rumbling carts and rattling carriages, amidst the voices of a multitude of people talking upon various subjects, amidst the provoking interruptions of continual questions and answers, and in the broad glare of a hot sun, can command and abstract their attention so far as to calculate yards, ells, and nails, to cast up long sums in addition right to a farthing, and to make out multifarious bills with quick and unerring precision. in almost all the dining houses at vienna, as a late traveller[ ] informs us "a bill of fare containing a vast collection of dishes is written out, and the prices are affixed to each article. as the people of vienna are fond of variety, the calculation at the conclusion of a repast would appear somewhat embarrassing; this, however, is done by mechanical habit with great speed; the custom is for the party who has dined to name the dishes, and the quantity of bread and wine. the keller who attends on this occasion, follows every article you name with the sum, which this adds to the calculation, and the whole is performed, to whatever amount, without ink or paper. it is curious to hear this ceremony, which is muttered with great gravity, yet performed with accuracy and despatch." we coolly observe, when we read these things, "yes, this is all habit; any body who had used himself to it might do the same things." yet the very same power of abstracting the attention, when employed upon scientific and literary subjects, would excite our astonishment; and we should, perhaps, immediately attribute it to superior original genius. we may surely educate children to this habit of abstracting the attention, which we allow depends entirely upon practice. when we are very much interested upon any subject, we attend to it exclusively, and, without any effort, we surmount all petty interposing interruptions. when we are reading an interesting book, twenty people may converse round about us, without our hearing one word that they say; when we are in a crowded playhouse, the moment we become interested in the play, the audience vanish from our sight, and in the midst of various noises, we hear only the voices of the actors. in the same manner, children, by their eager looks and their unaffected absence to all external circumstances, show when they are thoroughly interested by any story that is told with eloquence suited to their age. when we would teach them to attend in the midst of noise and interruptions, we should begin by talking to them about things which we are sure will please them; by degrees we may speak on less captivating subjects, when we perceive that their habit of beginning to listen with an expectation of pleasure is formed. whenever a child happens to be intent upon any favourite amusement, or when he is reading any very entertaining book, we may increase the busy hum around him, we may make what bustle we please, he will probably continue attentive; it is useful therefore to give him such amusements and such books when there is a noise or bustle in the room, because then he will learn to disregard all interruptions; and when this habit is formed, he may even read less amusing books in the same company without being interrupted by the usual noises. the power of abstracting our attention is universally allowed to be necessary to the successful labour of the understanding; but we may further observe, that this abstraction is characteristic in some cases of heroism as well as of genius. charles the twelfth and archimedes were very different men; yet both, in similar circumstances, gave similar proofs of their uncommon power of abstracting their attention. "what has the bomb to do with what you are writing to sweden," said the hero to his pale secretary when a bomb burst through the roof of his apartment, and he continued to dictate his letter. archimedes went on with his demonstration in the midst of a siege, and when a brutal soldier entered with a drawn sword, the philosopher only begged he might solve his problem before he was put to death. presence of mind in danger, which is usually supposed to depend upon our quick perception of all the present circumstances, frequently demands a total abstraction of our thoughts. in danger, fear is the motive which excites our exertions; but from all the ideas that fear naturally suggests, we must abstract our attention, or we shall not act with courage or prudence. in proportion to the violence of our terror, our voluntary exertion must be great to withdraw our thoughts from the present danger, and to recollect the means of escape. in some cases, where the danger has been associated with the use of certain methods of escape, we use these without deliberation, and consequently without any effort of attention; as when we see any thing catch fire, we instantly throw water upon the flames to extinguish them. but in new situations, where we have no mechanical courage, we must exert much voluntary, quick, abstract attention, to escape from danger. when lee, the poet, was confined in bedlam, a friend went to visit him; and finding that he could converse reasonably, or at least reasonably for a poet, imagined that lee was cured of his madness. the poet offered to show him bedlam. they went over this melancholy, medical prison, lee moralising philosophically enough all the time to keep his companion perfectly at ease. at length they ascended together to the top of the building; and, as they were both looking down from the perilous height, lee seized his friend by the arm, "let us immortalize ourselves!" he exclaimed; "let us take this leap. we'll jump down together this instant." "any man could jump down," said his friend, coolly; "we should not immortalize ourselves by that leap; but let us go down, and try if we can jump up again." the madman, struck with the idea of a more astonishing leap than that which he had himself proposed, yielded to this new impulse, and his friend rejoiced to see him run down stairs full of a new project for securing immortality. lee's friend, upon this occasion, showed rather absence than presence of mind: before he could have invented the happy answer that saved his life, he must have abstracted his mind from the passion of fear; he must have rapidly turned his attention upon a variety of ideas unconnected by any former associations with the exciting motive--falling from a height--fractured skulls--certain death--impossibility of reasoning or wrestling with a madman. this was the train of thoughts which we might naturally expect to arise in such a situation, but from all these the man of presence of mind turned away his attention; he must have directed his thoughts in a contrary line: first, he must have thought of the means of saving himself, of some argument likely to persuade a madman, of some argument peculiarly suited to lee's imagination, and applicable to his situation; he must at this moment have considered that alarming situation without thinking of his fears; for the interval in which all these ideas passed in his mind, must have been so short that he could not have had leisure to combat fear; if any of the ideas associated with that passion had interrupted his reasonings, he would not have invented his answer in time to have saved his life. we cannot foresee on what occasions presence of mind may be wanted, but we may, by education, give that general command of abstract attention, which is essential to its exercise in all circumstances. transition of thought, the power of turning attention quickly to different subjects or employments, is another of those mental habits, which in some cases we call genius, and which in others we perceive depends entirely upon practice. a number of trials in one newspaper, upon a variety of unconnected subjects, once struck our eye, and we saw the name of a celebrated lawyer[ ] as counsel in each cause. we could not help feeling involuntary admiration at that versatility of genius, which could pass from a fractional calculation about a london chaldron of coals, to the jamaica laws of insurance; from the bargains of a citizen, to the divorce of a fine lady; from pathos to argument; from arithmetic to wit; from cross examination to eloquence. for a moment we forgot our sober principles, and ascribed all this versatility of mind to natural genius; but upon reflection we recurred to the belief, that this dexterity of intellect was not bestowed by nature. we observe in men who have no pretensions to genius, similar versatility of mind as to their usual employments. the daily occupations of mr. elwes's huntsman were as various and incongruous, and required as quick transitions of attention, as any that can well be imagined. "at[ ] four o'clock he milked the cows; then got breakfast for mr. elwes and friends; then slipping on a green coat, he hurried into the stable, saddled the horses, got the hounds out of the kennel, and away they went into the field. after the fatigues of hunting, he _refreshed_ himself, by rubbing down two or three horses as quickly as he could; then running into the house to lay the cloth, and wait at dinner; then hurrying again into the stable to feed the horses, diversified with an interlude of the cows again to milk, the dogs to feed, and eight hunters to litter down for the night." mr. elwes used to call this huntsman an idle dog, who wanted to be paid for doing nothing! we do not mean to require any such rapid daily transitions in the exercise of attention from our pupils; but we think that much may be done to improve versatility of mind, by a judicious arrangement of their occupations. when we are tired of smelling a rose, we can smell a carnation with pleasure; and when the sense of smell is fatigued, yet we can look at the beautiful colours with delight. when we are tired of thinking upon one subject, we can attend to another; when our memory is fatigued, the exercise of the imagination entertains us; and when we are weary of reasoning, we can amuse ourselves with wit and humour. men, who have attended much to the cultivation of their mind, seem to have felt all this, and they have kept some subordinate taste as a refreshment after their labours. descartes went from the system of the world to his flower-garden; galileo used to read ariosto; and the metaphysical dr. clarke recovered himself from abstraction by jumping over chairs and tables. the learned and indefatigable chancellor d'aguesseau declared, that change of employment was the only recreation he ever knew. even montaigne, who found his recreation in playing with his cat, educated himself better than those are educated who go from intense study to complete idleness. it has been very wisely recommended by mr. locke, that young people should early be taught some mechanical employment, or some agreeable art, to which they may recur for relief when they are tired by mental application.[ ] doctor darwin supposes that "animal motions, or configurations of the organs of sense, constitute our ideas.[ ] the fatigue, he observes, that follows a continued attention of the mind to one object, is relieved by changing the subject of our thoughts, as the continued movement of one limb is relieved by moving another in its stead." dr. darwin has further suggested a tempting subject of experiment in his theory of ocular spectra, to which we refer ingenious preceptors. many useful experiments in education might be tried upon the principles which are there suggested. we dare not here trust ourselves to speculate upon this subject, because we are not at present provided with a sufficient number of facts to apply our theory to practice. if we could exactly discover how to arrange mental employments so as to induce actions in the antagonist faculties of the mind, we might relieve it from fatigue in the same manner as the eye is relieved by change of colour. by pursuing this idea, might we not hope to cultivate the general power of attention to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown? we have endeavoured to show how, by different arrangements and proper excitations, a preceptor may acquire that command over the attention of his pupils, which is absolutely essential to successful instruction; but we must recollect, that when the years commonly devoted to education are over, when young people are no longer under the care of a preceptor, they will continue to feel the advantages of a command of attention, whenever they mix in the active business of life, or whenever they apply to any profession, to literature, or science. their attention must now be entirely voluntary; they will have no tutor to excite them to exertion, no nice habitual arrangements to assist them in their daily occupations. it is of consequence, therefore, that we should substitute the power of voluntary, for the habit of associated, attention. with young children we depend upon particular associations of place, time, and manner, upon different sorts of excitement, to produce habits of employment: but as our pupils advance in their education, all these temporary excitements should be withdrawn. some large, but distant object, some pursuit which is not to be rewarded with immediate praise, but rather with permanent advantage and esteem, should be held out to the ambition of youth. all the arrangements should be left to the pupil himself, all the difficulties should be surmounted by his own industry, and the interest he takes in his own success and improvement, will now probably be a sufficient stimulus; his preceptor will now rather be his partner than his master, he should rather share the labour than attempt to direct it: this species of sympathy in study, diminishes the pain of attention, and gives an agreeable interest even in the most tiresome researches. when a young man perceives that his preceptor becomes in this manner the companion of his exertions, he loses all suspicion that he is compelled to mental labour; it is improper to say _loses_, for in a good education this suspicion need not ever be created: he discovers, we should rather say, that all the habits of attention which he has acquired, are those which are useful to men as well as to children, and he feels the advantage of his cultivated powers on every fresh occasion. he will perceive, that young men who have been ill educated, cannot, by any motive, command their vigorous attention, and he will feel the cause of his own superiority, when he comes to any trial of skill with inattentive _men of genius_. one of the arguments which bayle uses, to prove that fortune has a greater influence than prudence in the affairs of men, is founded upon the common observation, that men of the best abilities cannot frequently recollect, in urgent circumstances, what they have said or done; the things occur to them perhaps a moment after they are past. the fact seems to be, that they could not, in the proper moment, command their attention; but this we should attribute to the want of prudence in their early education. thus, bayle's argument does not, in this point of view, prove any thing in favour of fortune. those who can best command their attention, in the greatest variety of circumstances, have the most useful abilities; without this command of mind, men of genius, as they are called, are helpless beings; with it, persons of inferior capacity become valuable. addison trembled and doubted, and doubted and trembled, when he was to write a common official paper; and it is said, that he was absolutely obliged to resign his place, because he could not decide in time whether he should write a _that_ or a _which_. no business could have been transacted by such an imbecile minister. to substitute voluntary for associated attention, we may withdraw some of the usually associated circumstances, and increase the excitement; and we may afterwards accustom the pupil to act from the hope of distant pleasures. unless children can be actuated by the view of future distant advantage, they cannot be capable of long continued application. we shall endeavour to explain how the value of distant pleasures can be increased, and made to act with sufficient force upon the mind, when we hereafter speak of judgment and of imagination. it has been observed, that persons of wit and judgment have perhaps originally the same powers, and that the difference in their characters arises from their habits of attention, and the different class of objects to which they have turned their thoughts. the manner in which we are first taught to observe, and to reason, must in the first years of life decide these habits. there are two methods of teaching; one which ascends from particular facts to general principles, the other which descends from the general principles to particular facts; one which builds up, another which takes to pieces; the synthetic and the analytic method. the words analysis and synthesis are frequently misapplied, and it is difficult to write or to speak long about these methods without confounding them: in learning or in teaching, we often use them alternately. we first observe particulars; then form some general idea of classification; then descend again to new particulars, to observe whether they correspond with our principle. children acquire knowledge, and their attention alternates from particular to general ideas, exactly in the same manner. it has been remarked, that men who have begun by forming suppositions, are inclined to adapt and to compress their consequent observations to the measure of their theories; they have been negligent in collecting facts, and have not condescended to try experiments. this disposition of mind, during a long period of time, retarded improvement, and knowledge was confined to a few peremptory maxims and exclusive principles. the necessity of collecting facts, and of trying experiments, was at length perceived; and in all the sciences this mode has lately prevailed: consequently, we have now on many subjects a treasure of accumulated facts. we are, in educating children, to put them in possession of all this knowledge; and a judicious preceptor will wish to know, not only how these facts can be crammed speedily into his pupil's memory, but what order of presenting them will be most advantageous to the understanding; he will desire to cultivate his pupil's faculties, that he may acquire new facts, and make new observations after all the old facts have been arranged in his mind. by a judicious arrangement of past experiments, and by the rejection of what are useless, an able instructer can show, in a small compass, what it has cost the labour of ages to accumulate; he may teach in a few hours what the most ingenious pupil, left to his own random efforts, could not have learned in many years. it would take up as much time to go over all the steps which have been made in any science, as it originally cost the first discoverers. simply to repeat all the fruitless experiments which have been made in chemistry, for instance, would probably employ the longest life that ever was devoted to science; nor would the individual have got one step forwarder; he would die, and with him his recapitulated knowledge; neither he nor the world would be the better for it. it is our business to save children all this useless labour, and all this waste of the power of attention. a pupil, who is properly instructed, with the same quantity of attention, learns, perhaps, a hundred times as much in the same time, as he could acquire under the tuition of a learned preceptor ignorant in the art of teaching. the analytic and synthetic methods of instruction will both be found useful when judiciously employed. where the enumeration of particulars fatigues the attention, we should, in teaching any science, begin by stating the general principles, and afterwards produce only the facts essential to their illustration and proof. but wherever we have not accumulated a sufficient number of facts to be accurately certain of any general principle, we must, however tedious the task, enumerate all the facts that are known, and warn the pupil of the imperfect state of the science. all the facts must, in this case, be stored up with scrupulous accuracy; we cannot determine which are unimportant, and which may prove essentially useful: this can be decided only by future experiments. by thus stating honestly to our pupils the extent of our ignorance, as well as the extent of our knowledge; by thus directing attention to the imperfections of science, rather than to the study of theories, we shall avoid the just reproaches which have been thrown upon the dogmatic vanity of learned preceptors. "for as knowledges are now," says bacon, "there is a kind of contract of errour between the deliverer and receiver; for he that delivereth knowledge, desireth to deliver it in such a form as may be best believed, and not as may be best examined; and he that receiveth knowledge, desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry; and so rather not to doubt, than not to err; glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the disciple not to know his strength."[ ] footnotes: [ ] v. preface to berthollet's chemical nomenclature. [ ] v. condillac's "art de penser." [ ] major cartwright. see his journal, &c. [ ] v. chapter on mechanics. [ ] v. adela and theodore. [ ] chapter on tasks. [ ] zoonomia, vol. i. page . [ ] cicero. [ ] lucian. [ ] "and lends his little soul at every stroke." _virg._ [ ] v. chapter ii. on tasks. [ ] apercues. [ ] deinology. [ ] v. condillac art de penser. [ ] mr. owen. [ ] mr. erskine--the star. [ ] v. life of john elwes, esq. by t. topham. [ ] v. chapter on toys. [ ] zoonomia, vol. i. p. , . [ ] bacon, vol. i. page . chapter iv. servants. "now, master,"[ ] said a fond nurse to her favourite boy, after having given him sugared bread and butter for supper, "now, master, kiss me; wipe your mouth, dear, and go up to the drawing room to mamma; and when mistress asks you what you have had for supper, you'll say, bread and butter, for you _have had_ bread and butter, you know, master." "and sugar," said the boy; "i must say bread and butter and sugar, you know." how few children would have had the courage to have added, "and sugar!" how dangerous it is to expose them to such temptations! the boy must have immediately perceived the object of his nurse's casuistry. he must guess that she would be blamed for the addition of the sugar, else why should she wish to suppress the word? his gratitude is engaged to his nurse for running this risk to indulge him; his mother, by the force of contrast, appears a severe person, who, for no reason that he can comprehend, would deprive him of the innocent pleasure of eating sugar. as to its making him sick, he has eat it, and he is not sick; as to its spoiling his teeth, he does not care about his teeth, and he sees no immediate change in them: therefore he concludes that his mother's orders are capricious, and that his nurse loves him better because she gives him the most pleasure. his honour and affection towards his nurse, are immediately set in opposition to his duty to his mother. what a hopeful beginning in education! what a number of dangerous ideas may be given by a single word! the taste for sugared bread and butter is soon over; but servants have it in their power to excite other tastes with premature and factitious enthusiasm. the waiting-maid, a taste for dress; the footman, a taste for gaming; the coachman and groom, for horses and equipage; and the butler, for wine. the simplicity of children is not a defence to them; and though they are totally ignorant of vice, they are exposed to adopt the principles of those with whom they live, even before they can apply them to their own conduct. the young son of a lady of quality, a boy of six or seven years old, addressed, with great simplicity, the following speech to a lady who visited his mother. _boy._ miss n----, i wish you could find somebody, when you go to london, who would keep you. it's a very good thing to be kept. _lady._ what do you mean, my dear? _boy._ why it's when--you know, when a person's kept, they have every thing found for them; their friend saves them all trouble, you know. they have a _carriage_ and _diamonds_, and every thing they want. i wish somebody would keep you. _lady_, laughing. but i'm afraid nobody would. do you think any body would? _boy_, after a pause. why yes, i think sir ----, naming a gentleman whose name had, at this time, been much talked of in a public trial, would be as likely as any body. the same boy talked familiarly of phætons and gigs, and wished that he was grown up, that he might drive four horses in hand. it is obvious that these ideas were put into the boy's head by the servants with whom he associated. without supposing them to be profligate, servants, from their situation, from all that they see of the society of their superiors, and from the early prejudices of their own education, learn to admire that wealth and rank to which they are bound to pay homage. the luxuries and follies of fashionable life they mistake for happiness; they measure the respect they pay to strangers by their external appearance; they value their own masters and mistresses by the same standard; and in their attachment there is a necessary mixture of that sympathy which is sacred to prosperity. setting aside all interested motives, servants love show and prodigality in their masters; they feel that they partake the triumph, and they wish it to be as magnificent as possible. these dispositions break out naturally in the conversation of servants with one another; if children are suffered to hear them, they will quickly catch the same tastes. but if these ideas break out in their unpremeditated gossiping with one another, how much more strongly will they be expressed when servants wish to ingratiate themselves into a child's affections by flattery! their method of showing their attachment to a family, is usually to exaggerate in their expressions of admiration of its consequence and grandeur; they depreciate all whom they imagine to be competitors in any respect with their masters, and feed and foster the little jealousies which exist between neighbouring families. the children of these families are thus early set at variance; the children in the same family are often taught, by the imprudence or malice of servants, to dislike and envy each other. in houses where each child has an attendant, the attendants regularly quarrel, and, out of a show of zeal, make their young masters and mistresses parties in their animosity. three or four maids sometimes produce their little dressed pupils for a few minutes to _the company_ in the drawing room, for the express purpose of seeing which shall obtain the greatest share of admiration. this competition, which begins in their nurses' arms, is continued by daily artifices through the whole course of their nursery education. thus the emulation of children is rendered a torment to them, their ambition is directed to absurd and vile purposes, the understanding is perverted, their temper is spoiled, their simplicity of mind, and their capability of enjoying happiness, materially injured. the language and manners, the awkward and vulgar tricks which children learn in the society of servants, are immediately perceived, and disgust and shock well-bred parents. this is an evil which is striking and disgraceful; it is more likely to be remedied than those which are more secret and slow in their operation: the habits of cunning, falsehood, envy, which lurk in the temper, are not instantly visible to strangers; they do not appear the moment children are reviewed by parents; they may remain for years without notice or without cure. all these things have been said a hundred times; and, what is more, they are universally acknowledged to be true. it has passed into a common maxim with all who reflect, and even with all who speak upon the subject of education, that "it is the worst thing in the world to leave children with servants." but, notwithstanding this, each person imagines that he has found some lucky exception to the general rule. there is some favourite maid or phoenix of a footman in each family, who is supposed to be unlike all other servants, and, therefore, qualified for the education of children. but, if their qualifications were scrupulously examined, it is to be feared they would not be found competent to the trust that is reposed in them. they may, nevertheless, be excellent servants, much attached to their masters and mistresses, and sincerely desirous to obey their orders in the management of their pupils; but this is not sufficient. in education it is not enough to obey the laws; it is necessary to understand them, to understand the spirit, as well as the letter of the law. the blind application of general maxims will never succeed; and can that nice discrimination which is necessary to the just use of good principles, be expected from those who have never studied the human mind, who have little motive for the study, whose knowledge is technical, and who have never had any liberal education? give, or attempt to give, the best waiting-maid in london the general maxim, "that pain should be associated with whatever we wish to make children avoid doing; and pleasure should be associated with whatever we wish that children should love to do;" will the waiting-maid understand this, even if you exchange the word _associated_ for _joined_? how will she apply her new principle in practice? she will probably translate it into, "whip the child when it is troublesome, and give it sweetmeats when it does as it is bid." with this compendious system of tuition she is well satisfied, especially as it contains nothing which is new to her understanding, or foreign to her habits. but if we should expect her to enter into the views of a locke or a barbauld, would it not be at once unreasonable and ridiculous? what has been said of the understanding and dispositions of servants, relates only to servants as they are now educated. their vices and their ignorance arise from the same causes, the want of education. they are not a separate cast in society, doomed to ignorance, or degraded by inherent vice; they are capable, they are desirous of instruction. let them be well educated,[ ] and the difference in their conduct and understanding will repay society for the trouble of the undertaking. this education must begin as early as possible; let us not imagine that it is practicable to change the habits of servants who are already educated, and to make them suddenly fit companions in a family. they should not, in any degree, be permitted to interfere with the management of children, until their own education has been radically reformed. let servants be treated with the utmost kindness; let their situations be made as happy as possible; let the reward of their services and attachment be as liberal as possible; but reward with justice, do not sacrifice your children to pay your own debts. familiarity between servants and children, cannot permanently increase the happiness of either party. children, who have early lived with servants, as they grow up are notoriously apt to become capricious and tyrannical masters. a boy who has been used to treat a footman as his play-fellow, cannot suddenly command from him that species of deference, which is compounded of habitual respect for the person, and conventional submission to his station; the young master must, therefore, effect a change in his footman's manner of thinking and speaking by violent means; he must extort that tribute of respect which he has neglected so long, and to which, consequently, his right is disputed.[ ] he is sensible, that his superiority is merely that of situation, and he, therefore, exerts his dormant prerogatives with jealous insolence. no master is so likely to become the tyrant of his valet-de-chambre, as he who is conscious that he never _can_ appear to him a hero. no servant feels the yoke of servitude more galling, than he who has been partially emancipated, who has lost his habits of "proud subordination, and his taste for dignified submission."[ ] no mistaken motive of tenderness to domestics should operate upon the minds of parents; nor should they hesitate, for the general happiness of their families, to insist upon a total separation between those parts of it which will injure each other essentially by their union. every body readily disclaims the idea of letting children live with servants; but, besides the exceptions in favour of particular individuals, there is yet another cause of the difference between theory and practice upon this subject. time is left out of the consideration; people forget that life is made up of days and hours; and they by no means think, that letting children pass several hours every day with servants, has any thing to do with the idea of living with them. we must contract this latitude of expression. if children pass one hour in a day with servants, it will be in vain to attempt their education. madame roland, in one of her letters to de bosc, says, that her little daughter eudora had learned to swear; "and yet," continues she, "i leave her but one half hour a day with servants. admirez la disposition!" madame roland could not have been much accustomed to attend to education. whilst children are very young, there appears a necessity for their spending at least half an hour a day with servants; until they are four or five years old, they cannot dress or undress themselves, or, if they attempt it, they may learn careless habits, which in girls are particularly to be avoided. if a mother, or a governess, would make it a rule to be present when they are dressing, a maid-servant would not talk to them, and could do them but little injury. it is of consequence, that the maid-servant should herself be perfectly neat both from habit and taste. children observe exactly the manner in which every thing is done for them, and have the wish, even before they have the power, to imitate what they see; they love order, if they are accustomed to it, and if their first attempts at arrangement are not made irksome by injudicious management. what they see done every day in a particular manner, they learn to think part of the business of the day, and they are uneasy if any of the rites of cleanliness are forgotten; the transition from this uneasiness, to the desire of exerting themselves, is soon made, particularly if they are sometimes left to feel the inconveniences of being helpless. this should, and can, be done, without affectation. a maid cannot be always ready, the instant she is wanted, to attend upon them; they should not be waited upon as being masters and misses, they should be assisted as being helpless.[ ] they will not feel their vanity flattered by this attendance; the maid will not be suffered to amuse them, they will be ambitious of independence, and they will soon be proud of doing every thing for themselves. another circumstance which keeps children long in subjection to servants, is their not being able to wield a knife, fork, or spoon, with decent dexterity. such habits are taught to them by the careless maids who feed them, that they cannot for many years be produced even at the side-table without much inconvenience and constant anxiety. if this anxiety in a mother were to begin a little sooner, it need never be intense; patient care in feeding children neatly at first, will save many a bitter reprimand afterwards; their little mouths and hands need not be disgusting at their meals, and their nurses had better take care not to let them touch what is disagreeable, instead of rubbing their lips rudely with a rough napkin, by way of making them love to have their mouths clean. these minutiæ must, in spite of didactic dignity, be noticed, because they lead to things of greater consequence; they are well worth the attention of a prudent mother or governess. if children are early taught to eat with care, they will not, from false shame, desire to dine[ ] with the vulgar indulgent nursery-maid, rather than with the fastidious company at their mother's table. children should first be taught to eat with a spoon what has been neatly cut for them; afterwards they should cut a little meat for themselves towards the end of dinner, when the rage of hunger is appeased; they will then have "leisure to be good." the several operations of learning to eat with a spoon, to cut and to eat with a knife and fork, will become easy and habitual, if sufficient time be allowed. several children in a family, who were early attended to in all these little particulars, were produced at table when they were four or five years old; they suffered no constraint, nor were they ever banished to the nursery lest _company_ should detect their evil habits. their eyes and ears were at liberty during the time of dinner; and instead of being absorbed in the contemplation of their plates, and at war with themselves and their neighbours, they could listen to conversation, and were amused even whilst they were eating. without meaning to assert, with rousseau, that all children are naturally gluttons or epicures, we must observe, that eating is their first great and natural pleasure; this pleasure should, therefore, be _entirely_ at the disposal of those who have the care of their education; it should be associated with the idea of their tutors or governesses. a governess may, perhaps, disdain to use the same means to make herself beloved by a child, as those which are employed by a nursery-maid; nor is it meant that children should be governed by their love of eating. eating need not be made a reward, nor should we restrain their appetite as a punishment; praise and blame, and a variety of other excitements, must be preferred when we want to act upon their understanding. upon this subject we shall speak more fully hereafter. all that is here meant to be pointed out, is, that the mere physical pleasure of eating should not be associated in the minds of children with servants; it should not be at the disposal of servants, because they may, in some degree, balance by this pleasure the other motives which a tutor may wish to put in action. "solid pudding," as well as "empty praise," should be in the gift of the preceptor. besides the pleasures of the table, there are many others which usually are associated early with servants. after children have been pent in a close formal drawing-room, motionless and mute, they are frequently dismissed to an apartment where there is no furniture too fine to be touched with impunity, where there is ample space, where they may jump and sing, and make as much noise as can be borne by the much-enduring eardrum of the nursery-maid. children think this insensibility of ear a most valuable qualification in any person; they have no sympathy with more refined auditory nerves, and they prefer the company of those who are to them the best hearers. a medium between their taste and that of their parents should, in this instance, be struck; parents should not insist upon eternal silence, and children should not be suffered to make mere noise essential to their entertainment. children should be encouraged to talk at proper times, and should have occupations provided for them when they are required to be still; by these means it will not be a restraint to them to stay in the same room with the rest of the family for some hours in the day. at other times they should have free leave to run about either in rooms where they cannot disturb others, or out of doors; in neither case should they be with servants. children should never be sent out to walk with servants. after they have been poring over their lessons, or stiffening under the eye of their preceptors, they are frequently consigned immediately to the ready footman; they cluster round him for their hats, their gloves, their little boots and whips, and all the well known signals of pleasure. the hall door bursts open, and they sally forth under the interregnum of this beloved protector, to enjoy life and liberty; all the natural, and all the factitious ideas of the love of liberty, are connected with this distinct part of the day; the fresh air--the green fields--the busy streets--the gay shops--the variety of objects which the children see and hear--the freedom of their tongues--the joys of bodily exercise, and of mental relaxation, all conspire to make them prefer this period of the day, which they spend with the footman, to any other in the four-and-twenty hours. the footman sees, and is flattered by this; he is therefore assiduous to please, and piques himself upon being more indulgent than the hated preceptor. servants usually wish to make themselves beloved by children; can it be wondered at if they succeed, when we consider the power that is thrown into their hands? in towns, children have no gardens, no place where they can take that degree of exercise which is necessary for their health; this tempts their parents to trust them to servants, when they cannot walk with them themselves: but is there no individual in the family, neither tutor, nor governess, nor friend, nor brother, nor sister, who can undertake this daily charge? cannot parents sacrifice some of their amusements in town, or cannot they live in the country? if none of these things can be done, without hesitation they should prefer a public to a private education. in these circumstances, they cannot educate their children at home; they had much better not attempt it, but send them at once to school. in the country, arrangements may easily be made, which will preclude all those little dangers which fill a prudent parent's mind with anxiety. here children want the care of no servant to walk out with them; they can have gardens, and safe places for exercise allotted to them. in rainy weather they can have rooms apart from the rest of the family; they need not be cooped up in an ill-contrived house, where servants are perpetually in their way. attention to the arrangement of a house, is of material consequence. children's rooms should not be passage rooms for servants; they should, on the contrary, be so situated, that servants cannot easily have access to them, and cannot, on any pretence of business, get the habit of frequenting them. some fixed employment should be provided for children, which will keep them in a different part of the house at those hours when servants must necessarily be in their bed-chambers. there will be a great advantage in teaching children to arrange their own rooms, because this will prevent the necessity of servants being for any length of time in their apartments; their things will not be mislaid; their playthings will not be swept away or broken; no little temptations will arise to ask questions from servants; all necessity, and all opportunity of intercourse, will thus be cut off. children should never be sent with messages to servants, either on their own business, or on other people's; if they are permitted any times to speak to them, they will not distinguish what times are proper, and what are improper. servants have so much the habit of talking to children, and think it such a proof of good nature to be interested about them, that it will be difficult to make them submit to this total silence and separation. the certainty that they shall lose their places, if they break through the regulations of the family, will, however, be a strong motive, provided that their places are agreeable and advantageous; and parents should be absolutely strict in this particular. what is the loss of the service of a good groom, or a good butler, compared with the danger of spoiling a child? it may be feared that some _secret_ intercourse should be carried on between children and servants; but this will be lessened by the arrangements in the house, which we have mentioned; by care in a mother or governess, to know exactly where children are, and what they are doing every hour of the day; this need not be a daily anxiety, for when certain hours have once been fixed for certain occupations, habit is our friend, and we cannot have a safer. there is this great advantage in measures of precaution and prevention, that they diminish all temptation, at the same time that they strengthen the habits of obedience. other circumstances will deter servants from running any hazard themselves; they will not be so fond of children who do not live with them; they will consider them as beings moving in a different sphere. children who are at ease with their parents, and happy in their company, will not seek inferior society; this will be attributed to pride by servants, who will not like them for this reserve. so much the better. children who are encouraged to converse about every thing that interests them, will naturally tell their mothers if any one talks to them; a servant's speaking to them would be an extraordinary event to be recorded in the history of the day. the idea that it is dishonourable to tell tales, should never be put into their minds; they will never be the spies of servants, nor should they keep their secrets. thus, as there is no faith expected from the children, the servants will not trust them; they will be certain of detection, and will not transgress the laws. it may not be impertinent to conclude these minute precepts with assuring parents, that in a numerous family, where they have for above twenty years been steadily observed, success has been the uniform result. footnotes: [ ] verbatim from what has been really said to a boy. [ ] perhaps an institution for the education of attendants upon children, would be of the highest utility. mr. ---- had once an intention of educating forty children for this purpose; from amongst whom he proposed to select eight or ten as masters for future schools upon the same plan. [ ] v. the comedy of wild oats. [ ] burke. [ ] rousseau. [ ] v. sancho panza. chapter v. acquaintance. "the charming little dears!" exclaims a civil acquaintance, the moment the children are introduced. "won't you come to me, love?" at this question, perhaps, the bashful child backs towards its nurse, or its mother; but in vain. rejected at this trying crisis by its natural protectors, it is pushed forward into the middle of the circle, and all prospect of retreat being cut off, the victorious stranger seizes upon her little victim, whom she seats, without a struggle, upon her lap. to win the affections of her captive, the lady begins by a direct appeal to personal vanity: "who curls this pretty hair of yours, my dear? won't you let me look at your nice new red shoes? what shall i give you for that fine colour in your cheeks? let us see what we can find in my pocket!" amongst the pocket bribes, the lady never fails to select the most useless trinkets; the child would make a better choice; for, if there should appear a pocket-book, which may be drawn up by a ribbon from its slip case, a screen that would unfold gradually into a green star, a pocket-fan, or a tooth-pick case with a spring lock, the child would seize upon these with delight; but the moment its attention is fixed, it is interrupted by the officious exclamation of, "oh, let me do that for you, love! let me open that for you, you'll break your sweet little nails. ha! there is a looking-glass; whose pretty face is that? but we don't love people for being pretty, you know; (mamma says i must not tell you you are pretty) but we love little girls for being good, and i am sure you look as if you were never naughty. i am sure you don't know what it is to be naughty; will you give me one kiss? and will you hold out your pretty little hand for some sugar-plums? mamma shakes her head, but mamma will not be angry, though mamma can refuse you nothing, i'll answer for it. who spoils you? whose favourite are you? who do you love best in the world? and will you love me? and will you come and live with me? shall i carry you away with me in the coach to-night? oh! but i'm afraid i should eat you up, and then what would mamma say to us both?" to stop this torrent of nonsense, the child's mother, perhaps, ventures to interfere with, "my dear, i'm afraid you'll be troublesome." but this produces only vehement assertions of the contrary. "the dear little creature can never be troublesome to any body." wo be to the child who implicitly believes this assertion! frequent rebuffs from his _friends_ must be endured before this errour will be thoroughly rectified: this will not tend to make those friends more agreeable, or more beloved. that childish love, which varies from hour to hour, is scarcely worth consideration; it cannot be an object of competition to any reasonable person; but in early education nothing must be thought beneath our attention. a child does not retain much affection, it is true, for every casual visiter by whom he is flattered and caressed. the individuals are here to-day and gone to-morrow; variety prevents the impression from sinking into the mind, it may be said; but the general impression remains, though each particular stroke is not seen. young children, who are much caressed in company, are less intent than others upon pleasing those they live with, and they are also less independent in their occupations and pleasures. those who govern such pupils have not sufficient power over them, because they have not the means of giving pleasure; because their praise or blame is frequently counteracted by applause of visiters. that unbroken course of experience, which is necessary for the success of a regular plan of education, cannot be preserved. every body may have observed the effect, which the extraordinary notice of strangers produces upon children. after the day is over, and the company has left the house, there is a cold blank; a melancholy silence. the children then sink into themselves, and feel the mortifying change in their situation. they look with dislike upon everything around them; yawn with ennui, or fidget with fretfulness, till on the first check which they meet with, their secret discontent bursts forth into a storm. resistance, caprice, and peevishness, are not borne with patience by a governess, though they are submitted to with smiles by the complaisant visiter. in the same day, the same conduct produces totally different consequences. experience, it is said, makes fools wise; but such experience as this, makes wise children fools. why is this farce of civility, which disgusts all parties, continually repeated between visiters and children? visiters would willingly be excused from the trouble of flattering and spoiling them; but such is the spell of custom, that no one dares to break it, even when every one feels that it is absurd. children, who are thought to be clever, are often produced to entertain company; they fill up the time, and relieve the circle from that embarrassing silence, which proceeds from the having nothing to say. boys, who are thus brought forward at six or seven years old, and encouraged to say what are called _smart_ things, seldom, as they grow up, have really good understandings. children, who, like the fools in former times, are permitted to say every thing, now and then blurt out those simple truths which politeness conceals: this entertains people, but, in fact, it is a sort of _naivete_, which may exist without any great talent for observation, and without any powers of reasoning. every thing in our manners, in the customs of the world, is new to children, and the relations of apparently dissimilar things, strike them immediately from their novelty. children are often witty, without knowing it, or rather without intending it; but as they grow older, the same kind of wit does not please; the same objects do not appear in the same point of view; and boys, who have been the delight of a whole house at seven or eight years old, for the smart things they could say, sink into stupidity and despondency at thirteen or fourteen. "un nom trop fameaux, est un fardeau tres pesant," said a celebrated wit. plain, sober sense, does not entertain common visiters, and children whose minds are occupied, and who are not ambitious of exhibiting themselves for the entertainment of the company, will not in general please. so much the better; they will escape many dangers; not only the dangers of flattery, but also the dangers of nonsense. few people know how to converse with children; they talk to them of things that are above, or below, their understandings; if they argue with them, they do not reason fairly; they silence them with sentiment, or with authority; or else they baffle them by wit, or by unintelligible terms. they often attempt to try their capacities with quibbles and silly puzzles. children, who are expert at answering these, have rarely been well educated: the extreme simplicity of sensible children, will surprise those who have not been accustomed to it, and many will be provoked by their inaptitude to understand the common-place wit of conversation. "how many sticks go to a rook's nest?" said a gentleman to a boy of seven years old; he looked very grave, and having pondered upon the question for some minutes, answered, "i do not know what you mean by the word go." fortunately for the boy, the gentleman who asked the question, was not a captious querist; he perceived the good sense of this answer; he perceived that the boy had exactly hit upon the ambiguous word which was puzzling to the understanding, and he saw that this showed more capacity than could have been shown by the parrying of a thousand witticisms. we have seen s----, a remarkably intelligent boy of nine years old, stand with the most puzzled face imaginable, considering for a long half hour the common quibble of "there was a carpenter who made a door; he made it too large; he cut it and cut it, and he cut it _too little_; he cut it again, and it fitted." s---- showed very little satisfaction, when he at length discovered the double meaning of the words "too little;" but simply said, "i did not know you meant that the carpenter cut _too little off_ the door." "which has most legs, a horse or no horse?" "a horse has more legs than no horse," replies the unwary child. "but," continues the witty sophist, "a horse, surely, has but four legs; did you ever see a horse with five legs?" "never," says the child; "no horse has five legs." "oh, ho!" exclaims the entrapper, "i have you now! no horse has five legs, you say; then you must acknowledge that _no_ horse has more legs than _a_ horse. therefore, when i asked you which has most legs, _a horse_ or _no horse_, your answer, you see, should have been, _no horse_." the famous dilemma of "you have what you have not lost; you have not lost horns; then you have horns;" is much in the same style of reasoning. children may readily be taught to chop logic, and to parry their adversaries technically in this contest of false wit; but this will not improve their understandings, though it may, to superficial judges, give them the appearance of great quickness of intellect. we should not, _even_ in jest, talk of nonsense to children, or suffer them _even_ to hear inaccurate language. if confused answers be given to their questions, they will soon be content with a confused notion of things; they will be satisfied with bad reasoning, if they are not taught to distinguish it scrupulously from what is good, and to reject it steadily. half the expressions current in conversation, have merely a nominal value; they represent no ideas, and they pass merely by common courtesy: but the language of every person of sense has sterling value; it cheats and puzzles nobody; and even when it is addressed to children, it is made intelligible. no common acquaintance, who talks to a child merely for its own amusement, selects his expressions with any care; what becomes of the child afterwards, is no part of his concern; he does not consider the advantage of clear explanations to the understanding, nor would he be at the pains of explaining any thing thoroughly, even if he were able to do so. and how few people are able to explain distinctly, even when they most wish to make themselves understood! the following conversation passed between a learned doctor (formerly) of the sorbonne, and a boy of seven years old. _doctor._ so, sir, i see you are very advanced already in your studies. you are quite expert at latin. pray, sir, allow me to ask you; i suppose you have heard of tully's offices? _boy._ tully's offices! no, sir. _doctor._ no matter. you can, i will venture to say, solve me the following question. it is not very difficult, but it has puzzled some abler casuists, i can tell you, though, than you or i; but if you will lend me your attention for a few moments, i flatter myself i shall make myself intelligible to you. the boy began to stiffen at this exordium, but he fixed himself in an attitude of anxious attention, and the doctor, after having taken two pinches of snuff, proceeded: "in the island of rhodes, there was once, formerly, a great scarcity of provisions, a famine quite; and some merchants fitted out ten ships to relieve the rhodians; and one of the merchants got into port sooner than the others; and he took advantage of this circumstance to sell his goods at an exorbitant rate, finding himself in possession of the market. the rhodians did not know that the other ships laden with provisions were to be in the next day; and they, of course, paid this merchant whatsoever price he thought proper to demand. now the question is, in morality, whether did he act the part of an honest man in this business by the rhodians? or should he not rather have informed them of the nine ships which were expected to come with provisions to the market the ensuing day?" the boy was silent, and did not appear to comprehend the story or the question in the least. in telling his story, the doctor of the sorbonne unluckily pronounced the words _ship_ and _ships_ in such a manner, that the child all along mistook them for _sheep_ and _sheeps_; and this mistake threw every thing into confusion. besides this, a number of terms were made use of which were quite new to the boy. getting into port--being in possession of the market--selling goods at an exorbitant rate; together with the whole mystery of buying and selling, were as new to him, and appeared to him as difficult to be understood, as the most abstract metaphysics. he did not even know what was meant by the ships being expected _in_ the next day; and "_acting the part_ of an honest man," was to him an unusual mode of expression. the young casuist made no hand of this case of conscience; when at last he attempted an answer, he only exposed himself to the contempt of the learned doctor. when he was desired to repeat the story, he made a strange jumble about some people who wanted to get some _sheep_, and about one man who got in his sheep before the other nine sheep; but he did not know how or why it was wrong in him not to tell of the other sheep. nor could he imagine why the _rhodians_ could not get sheep without this man. he had never had any idea of a famine. this boy's father, unwilling that he should retire to rest with his intellects in this state of confusion, as soon as the doctor had taken leave, told the story to the child in different words, to try whether it was the words or the ideas that puzzled him. "in the Ã�gean sea, which you saw the other day in the map, there is an island, which is called the island of rhodes. in telling my story, i take the opportunity to fix a point in geography in your memory. in the Ã�gean sea there is an island which is called the island of rhodes. there was once a famine in this island, that is to say, the people had not food enough to live upon, and they were afraid that they should be starved to death. now, some merchants, who lived on the continent of greece, filled ten ships with provisions, and they sailed in these vessels for the island of rhodes. it happened that one of these ships got to the island sooner than any of the others. it was evening, and the captain of this ship knew that the others could not arrive until the morning. now the people of rhodes, being extremely hungry, were very eager to buy the provisions which this merchant had brought to sell; and they were ready to give a great deal more money for provisions than they would have done if they had not been almost starved. there was not half a sufficient quantity of food in this one ship, to supply all the people who wanted food; and therefore those who had money, and who knew that the merchant wanted as much money as he could get in exchange for his provisions, offered to give him a large price, the price which he asked for them. had these people known that nine other ships full of provisions would arrive in the morning, they would not have been ready to give so much money for food, because they would not have been so much afraid of being starved; and they would have known, that, in exchange for their money, they could have a greater quantity of food the next day. the merchant, however, did not tell them that any ships were expected to arrive, and he consequently got a great deal more of their money for his provisions, than he would have done, if he had told them the fact which he knew, and which they did not know. do you think that he did right or wrong?" the child, who now had rather more the expression of intelligence in his countenance, than he had when the same question had been put to him after the former statement of the case, immediately answered, that he "thought the merchant had done wrong, that he should have told the people that more ships were to come in the morning." several different opinions were given afterwards by other children, and grown people who were asked the same question; and what had been an unintelligible story, was rendered, by a little more skill and patience in the art of explanation, an excellent lesson, or rather exercise in reasoning. it is scarcely possible that a stranger, who sees a child only for a few hours, can guess what he knows, and what he does not know; or that he can perceive the course of his thoughts, which depends upon associations over which he has no command; therefore, when a stranger, let his learning and abilities be what they will, attempts to teach children, he usually puzzles them, and the consequences of the confusion of mind he creates, last sometimes for years: sometimes it influences their moral, sometimes their scientific reasoning. "every body but my friends," said a little girl of six years old, "tells me i am very pretty." from this contradictory evidence, what must the child have inferred? the perplexity which some young people, almost arrived at the years of discretion, have shown in their first notions of mathematics, has been a matter of astonishment to those who have attempted to teach them: this perplexity has been at length discovered to arise from their having early confounded in their minds the ideas of a triangle, and an angle. in the most common modes of expression there are often strange inaccuracies, which do not strike us, because they are familiar to us; but children, who hear them for the first time, detect their absurdity, and are frequently anxious to have such phrases explained. if they converse much with idle visiters, they will seldom be properly applauded for their precision, and their philosophic curiosity will often be repressed by unmeaning replies. children, who have the habit of applying to their parents, or to sensible preceptors, in similar difficulties, will be somewhat better received, and will gain rather more accurate information. s---- (nine years old) was in a house where a chimney was on fire; he saw a great bustle, and he heard the servants and people, as they ran backwards and forwards, all exclaim, that "the chimney was on fire." after the fire was put out, and when the bustle was over, s---- said to his father, "what do people mean when they say the _chimney is on fire_? what is it that burns?" at this question a silly acquaintance would probably have laughed in the boy's face; would have expressed astonishment as soon as his visit was over, at such an instance of strange ignorance in a boy of nine years old; or, if civility had prompted any answer, it would perhaps have been, "the chimney's being on fire, my love, means that the chimney's on fire! every body knows what's meant by 'the chimney's on fire!' there's a great deal of smoke, and sparks, and flame, coming out at the top, you know, when the chimney's on fire. and it's extremely dangerous, and would set a house on fire, or perhaps the whole neighbourhood, if it was not put out immediately. many dreadful fires, you know, happen in towns, as we hear for ever in the newspaper, by the chimney's taking fire. did you never hear of a chimney's being on fire before? you are a very happy young gentleman to have lived to your time of life, and to be still at a loss about such a thing. what burns? why, my dear sir, the chimney burns; fire burns in the chimney. to be sure fires are sad accidents; many lives are lost by them every day. i had a chimney on fire in my drawing room last year." thus would the child's curiosity have been baffled by a number of words without meaning or connection; on the contrary, when he applied to a father, who was interested in his improvement, his sensible question was listened to with approbation. he was told, that the chimney's being on fire, was an inaccurate common expression; that it was the soot in the chimney, not the chimney, that burned; that the soot was sometimes set on fire by sparks of fire, sometimes by flame, which might have been accidentally _drawn up_ the chimney. some of the soot which had been set on fire, was shown to him; the nature of burning in general, the manner in which the chimney _draws_, the meaning of that expression, and many other things connected with the subject, were explained upon this occasion to the inquisitive boy, who was thus encouraged to think and speak accurately, and to apply, in similar difficulties, to the friend who had thus taken the trouble to understand his simple question. a random answer to a child's question, does him a real injury; but can we expect, that those who have no interest in education, should have the patience to correct their whole conversation, and to adapt it precisely to the capacity of children? this would indeed be unreasonable; all we can do, is to keep our pupils out of the way of those who _can_ do them no good, and who _may_ do them a great deal of harm. we must prefer the permanent advantage of our pupils, to the transient vanity of exhibiting for the amusement of company, their early wit, or "lively nonsense." children should never be introduced for the amusement of the circle; nor yet should they be condemned to sit stock still, holding up their heads and letting their feet dangle from chairs that are too high for them, merely that they may appear what is called _well_ before visiters. whenever any conversation is going forward which they can understand, they should be kindly summoned to partake of the pleasures of society; its pains and its follies we may spare them. the manners of young people will not be injured by this arrangement; they will be at ease in company, because whenever they are introduced into it, they will make a part of it; they will be interested and happy; they will feel a proper confidence in themselves, and they will not be intent upon their courtesies, their frocks, their manner of holding their hands, or turning out their toes, the proper placing of sir, madam, or your ladyship, with all the other innumerable trifles which embarrass the imagination, and consequently the manners, of those who are taught to think that they are to sit still, and behave in company some way differently from what they behave every day in their own family. we have hitherto only spoken of acquaintance who do not attempt or desire to interfere in education, but who only caress and talk nonsense to children with the best intentions possible: with these, parents will find it comparatively easy to manage; they can contrive to employ children, or send them out to walk; by cool reserve, they can readily discourage such visiters from flattering their children; and by insisting upon becoming a party in all conversations which are addressed to their pupils, they can, in a great measure, prevent the bad effects of inaccurate or imprudent conversation; they can explain to their pupils what was left unintelligible, and they can counteract false associations, either at the moment they perceive them, or at some well-chosen opportunity. but there is a class of acquaintance with whom it will be more difficult to manage; persons who are, perhaps, on an intimate footing with the family, who are valued for their agreeable talents and estimable qualities; who are, perhaps, persons of general information and good sense, and who may yet never have considered the subject of education; or who, having partially considered it, have formed some peculiar and erroneous opinions. they will feel themselves entitled to talk upon education as well as upon any other topic; they will hazard, and they will support, opinions; they will be eager to prove the truth of their assertions, or the superiority of their favourite theories. out of pure regard for their friends, they will endeavour to bring them over to their own way of thinking in education; and they will by looks, by hints, by inuendoes, unrestrained by the presence of the children, insinuate their advice and their judgment upon every domestic occurrence. in the heat of debate, people frequently forget that children have eyes and ears, or any portion of understanding; they are not aware of the quickness of that comprehension which is excited by the motives of curiosity and self love. it is dangerous to let children be present at any arguments, in which the management of their minds is concerned, until they can perfectly understand the whole of the subject: they will, if they catch but a few words, or a few ideas, imagine, perhaps, that there is something wrong, some hardships, some injustice, practised against them by their friends; yet they will not distinctly know, nor will they, perhaps, explicitly inquire what it is. they should be sent out of the room before any such arguments are begun; or, if the conversation be abruptly begun before parents can be upon their guard, they may yet, without offending against the common forms of politeness, decline entering into any discussion until their children are withdrawn. as to any direct attempt practically to interfere with the children's education, by blame or praise, by presents, by books, or by conversation; these should, and really must, be resolutely and steadily resisted by parents: this will require some strength of mind. what can be done without it? many people, who are convinced of the danger of the interference of friends and acquaintance in the education of their children, will yet, from the fear of offending, from the dread of being thought singular, submit to the evil. these persons may be very well received, and very well liked in the world: they must content themselves with this reward; they must not expect to succeed in education, for strength of mind is absolutely necessary to those who would carry a plan of education into effect. without being tied down to any one exclusive plan, and with universal toleration for different modes of moral and intellectual instruction, it may be safely asserted, that the plan which is most steadily pursued, will probably succeed the best. people who are moved by the advice of all their friends, and who endeavour to adapt their system to every fashionable change in opinion, will inevitably repent of their weak complaisance; they will lose all power over their pupils, and will be forced to abandon the education of their families to chance. it will be found impossible to educate a child at home, unless all interference from visiters and acquaintance is precluded. but it is of yet more consequence, that the members of the family must entirely agree in their sentiments, or at least in the conduct of the children under their care. without this there is no hope. young people perceive very quickly, whether there is unanimity in their government; they make out an alphabet of looks with unerring precision, and decipher with amazing ingenuity, all that is for their interest to understand. when children are blamed or punished, they always know pretty well who pities them, who thinks that they are in the wrong, and who thinks that they are in the right; and thus the influence of public opinion is what ultimately governs. if children find that, when mamma is displeased, grandmamma comforts them, they will console themselves readily under this partial disgrace, and they will suspect others of caprice, instead of ever blaming themselves. they will feel little confidence in their own experience, or in the assertions of others; they will think that there is always some chance of escape amongst the multitude of laws and law-givers. no tutor or preceptor can be answerable, or ought _to undertake to answer for measures which he does not guide_. le sage, with an inimitable mixture of humour and good sense, in the short history of the education of the robbers who supped in that cave in which dame leonardo officiated, has given many excellent lessons in education. captain rolando's tutors could never make any thing of him, because, whenever they reprimanded him, he ran to his mother, father, and grandfather, for consolation; and from them constantly received protection in rebellion, and commiseration for the wounds which he had inflicted upon his own hands and face, purposely to excite compassion, and to obtain revenge. it is obviously impossible, that all the world, the ignorant and the well-informed, the man of genius, the man of fashion, and the man of business, the pedant and the philosopher, should agree in their opinion upon any speculative subject; upon the wide subject of education they will probably differ eternally. it will, therefore, be thought absurd to require this union of opinion amongst the individuals of a family; but, let there be ever so much difference in their private opinions, they can surely discuss any disputed point at leisure, when children are absent, or they can, in these arguments, converse in french, or in some language which their pupils do not understand. the same caution should be observed, as we just now recommended, with respect to acquaintance. it is much better, when any difficulties occur, to send the children at once into any other room, and to tell them that we do so because we have something to say that we do not wish them to hear, than to make false excuses to get rid of their company, or to begin whispering and disputing in their presence. these precautions are advisable whilst our pupils are young, before they are capable of comprehending arguments of this nature, and whilst their passions are vehemently interested on one side or the other. as young people grow up, the greater variety of opinions they hear upon all subjects, the better; they will then form the habit of judging for themselves: whilst they are very young, they have not the means of forming correct judgments upon abstract subjects, nor are these the subjects upon which their judgment can be properly exercised: upon the subject of education, they cannot be competent judges, because they cannot, till they are nearly educated, have a complete view of the means, or of the end; besides this, no _man_ is allowed to be judge in his own case. some parents allow their children a vast deal of liberty whilst they are young, and restrain them by absolute authority when their reason is, or ought to be, a sufficient guide for their conduct. the contrary practice will make parents much more beloved, and will make children both wiser and happier. let no idle visiter, no intrusive, injudicious friend, for one moment interfere to lessen the authority necessary for the purposes of education. let no weak jealousy, no unseasonable love of command, restrain young people after they are sufficiently reasonable to judge for themselves. in the choice of their friends, their acquaintance, in all the great and small affairs of life, let them have liberty in proportion as they acquire reason. fathers do not commonly interfere with their sons' amusements, nor with the choice of their acquaintance, so much as in the regulation of their pecuniary affairs: but mothers, who have had any considerable share in the education of boys, are apt to make mistakes as to the proper seasons for indulgence and control. they do not watch the moments when dangerous prejudices and tastes begin to be formed; they do not perceive how the slight conversations of acquaintance operate upon the ever-open ear of childhood; but when the age of passion approaches, and approaches, as it usually does, in storms and tempest, then all their maternal fears are suddenly roused, and their anxiety prompts them to use a thousand injudicious and ineffectual expedients. a modern princess, who had taken considerable pains in the education of her son, made both herself and him ridiculous by her anxiety upon his introduction into the world. she travelled about with him from place to place, to _make him see_ every thing worth seeing; but he was not to stir from her presence; she could not bear to have him out of sight or hearing. in all companies he was _chaperoned_ by his mother. was he invited to a ball, she must be invited also, or he could not accept of the invitation: he must go in the same coach, and return in the same coach with her. "i should like extremely to dance another dance," said he one evening to his partner, "but you see i must go; my mother is putting on her cloak." the tall young man called for some negus, and had the glass at his lips, when his mamma called out in a shrill voice, through a vista of heads, "eh! my son no drink wine! my son like milk and water!" the son was at this time at years of discretion. chapter vi. on temper. we have already, in speaking of the early care of infants, suggested that the temper should be attended to from the moment of their birth. a negligent, a careless, a passionate servant, must necessarily injure the temper of a child. the first language of an infant is intelligible only to its nurse; she can distinguish between the cry of pain and the note of ill humour, or the roar of passion. the cry of pain should be listened to with the utmost care, and every possible means should be used to relieve the child's sufferings; but when it is obvious that he cries from ill humour, a nurse should not sooth him with looks of affection, these she should reserve for the moment when the storm is over. we do not mean that infants should be suffered to cry for a length of time without being regarded; this would give them habits of ill humour: we only wish that the nurse would, as soon as possible, teach the child that what he wants can be obtained without his putting himself in a passion. great care should be taken to prevent occasions for ill humour; if a nurse neglects her charge, or if she be herself passionate, the child will suffer so much pain, and so many disappointments, that it must be in a continual state of fretfulness. an active, cheerful, good humoured, intelligent nurse, will make a child good humoured by a regular, affectionate attendance; by endeavouring to prevent all unnecessary sufferings, and by quickly comprehending its language of signs. the best humoured woman in the world, if she is stupid, is not fit to have the care of a child; the child will not be able to make her understand any thing less than vociferation. by way of amusing the infant, she will fatigue it with her caresses; without ever discovering the real cause of his wo, she will sing one universal lullaby upon all occasions to pacify her charge. it requires some ingenuity to discover the cause and cure of those long and loud fits of crying, which frequently arise from imaginary apprehensions. a little boy of two years old, used to cry violently when he awoke in the middle of the night, and saw a candle in the room. it was observed that the shadow of the person who was moving about in the room frightened him, and as soon as the cause of his crying was found out, it was easy to pacify him; his fear of shadows was effectually cured, by playfully showing him, at different times, that shadows had no power to hurt him. h----, about nine months old, when she first began to observe the hardness of bodies, let her hand fall upon a cat which had crept unperceived upon the table; she was surprised and terrified by the unexpected sensation of softness; she could not touch the cat, or any thing that felt like soft fur, without showing agitation, till she was near four years old, though every gentle means were used to conquer her antipathy; the antipathy was, however, cured at last, by her having a wooden cat covered with fur for a plaything. a boy, between four and five years old, h----, used to cry bitterly when he was left alone in a room, in which there were some old family pictures. it was found that he was much afraid of these pictures: a maid, who took care of him, had terrified him with the notion that they would come to him, or that they were looking at him, and would be angry with him if he was not _good_. to cure the child of this fear of pictures, a small sized portrait, which was not amongst the number of those that had frightened him, was produced in broad day light. a piece of cake was put upon this picture, which the boy was desired to take; he took it, touched the picture, and was shown the canvas at the back of it, which, as it happened to be torn, he could easily identify with the painting: the picture was then given to him for a plaything; he made use of it as a table, and became very fond of it as soon as he was convinced that it was not alive, and that it could do him no sort of injury. by patiently endeavouring to discover the causes of terror in children, we may probably prevent their tempers from acquiring many bad habits. it is scarcely possible for any one, who has not constantly lived with a child, and who has not known the whole rise and progress of his little character, to trace the causes of these strange apprehensions; for this reason, a parent has advantages in the education of his child, which no tutor or schoolmaster can have. a little boy was observed to show signs of fear and dislike at hearing the sound of a drum: to a stranger, such fear must have seemed unaccountable, but those who lived with the child, knew from what it arose. he had been terrified by the sight of a merry-andrew in a mask, who had played upon a drum; this was the first time that he had ever heard the sound of a drum; the sound was associated with fear, and continued to raise apprehensions in the child's mind after he had forgotten the original cause of that apprehension. we are well aware that we have laid ourselves open to ridicule, by the apparently trifling anecdotes which have just been mentioned; but if we can save one child from an hour's unnecessary misery, or one parent from an hour's anxiety, we shall bear the laugh, we hope, with good humour. young children, who have not a great number of ideas, perhaps for that reason associate those which they acquire with tenacity; they cannot reason concerning general causes; they expect that any event, which has once or twice followed another, will always follow in the same order; they do not distinguish between proximate and remote causes, between coincidences and the regular connection of cause and effect: hence children are subject to feel hopes and fears from things which to us appear matters of indifference. suppose, for instance, that a child is very eager to go out to walk, that his mother puts on her gloves and her cloak; these being the usual signals that she is going out, he instantly expects, if he has been accustomed to accompany her, that he shall have the pleasure of walking out; but if she goes out, and forgets him, he is not only disappointed at that moment, but the disappointment, or, at least, some indistinct apprehension, recurs to him when he is in a similar situation: the putting on of his mother's cloak and gloves, are then circumstances of vast importance to him, and create anxiety, perhaps tears, whilst to every other spectator they are matters of total indifference. every one, who has had any experience in the education of such children as are apt to form strong associations, must be aware, that many of those fits of crying, which appear to arise solely from ill-humour, are occasioned by association. when these are suffered to become habitual, they are extremely difficult to conquer; it is, therefore, best to conquer them as soon as possible. if a child has, by any accident, been disposed to cry at particular times in the day, without any obvious cause, we should at those hours engage his attention, occupy him, change the room he is in, or by any new circumstance break his habits. it will require some penetration to distinguish between involuntary tears, and tears of caprice; but even when children are really cross, it is not, whilst they are very young, prudent to let them wear out their ill-humour, as some people do, in total neglect. children, when they are left to weep in solitude, often continue in wo for a considerable length of time, until they quite forget the original cause of complaint, and they continue their convulsive sobs, and whining note of distress, purely from inability to stop themselves. thus habits of ill-humour are contracted; it is better, by a little well-timed excitation, to turn the course of a child's thoughts, and to make him forget his trivial miseries. "the tear forgot as soon as shed," is far better than the peevish whine, or sullen lowering brow, which proclaim the unconquered spirit of discontent. perhaps, from the anxiety which we have expressed to prevent the petty misfortunes, and unnecessary tears of children, it may be supposed that we are disposed to humour them; far from it--we know too well that a humoured child is one of the most unhappy beings in the world; a burden to himself, and to his friends; capricious, tyrannical, passionate, peevish, sullen, and selfish. an only child runs a dreadful chance of being spoiled. he is born a person of consequence; he soon discovers his innate merit; every eye is turned upon him the moment he enters the room; his looks, his dress, his appetite, are all matters of daily concern to a whole family; his wishes are divined; his wants are prevented; his witty sayings are repeated in his presence; his smiles are courted; his caresses excite jealousy, and he soon learns how to avail himself of his central situation. his father and mother make him alternately their idol, and their plaything; they do not think of educating, they only think of admiring him; they imagine that he is unlike all other children in the universe, and that his genius and his temper are independent of all cultivation. but when this little paragon of perfection has two or three brothers and sisters, the scene changes; the man of consequence dwindles into an insignificant little boy. we shall hereafter explain more fully the danger of accustoming children to a large share of our sympathy; we hope that the economy of kindness and caresses which we have recommended,[ ] will be found to increase domestic affection, and to be essentially serviceable to the temper. in a future chapter, "on vanity, pride, and ambition," some remarks will be found on the use and abuse of the stimuli of praise, emulation, and ambition. the precautions which we have already mentioned with respect to servants, and the methods that have been suggested for inducing habitual and rational obedience, will also, we hope, be considered as serviceable to the temper, as well as to the understanding. perpetual and contradictory commands and prohibitions, not only make children disobedient, but fretful, peevish, and passionate. idleness, amongst children, as amongst men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no evil more certainly than to ill temper. it is said,[ ] that the late king of spain was always so cross during passion week, when he was obliged to abstain from his favourite amusement of hunting, that none of his courtiers liked to approach his majesty. there is a great similarity between the condition of a prince flattered by his courtiers, and a child humoured by his family; and we may observe, that both the child and prince are most intolerable to their dependants and friends, when any of their daily amusements are interrupted. it is not that the amusements are in themselves delightful, but the pains and penalties of idleness are insupportable. we have endeavoured to provide a variety of occupations, as well as of amusements, for our young pupils,[ ] that they may never know the misery of the spanish monarch. when children are occupied, they are independent of other people, they are not obliged to watch for casual entertainment from those who happen to be unemployed, or who chance to be in a humour to play with them; they have some agreeable object continually in view, and they feel satisfied with themselves. they will not torment every body in the house with incessant requests. "may i have this? will you give me that? may i go out to see such a thing? when will it be dinner time? when will it be tea time? when will it be time for me to go to supper?" are the impatient questions of a child who is fretful from having nothing to do. idle children are eternal petitioners, and the refusals they meet with, perpetually irritate their temper. with respect to requests in general, we should either grant immediately what a child desires, or we should give a decided refusal. the state of suspense is not easily borne; the propriety or impropriety of the request should decide us either to grant, or to refuse it; and we should not set the example of caprice, or teach our pupils the arts of courtiers, who watch the humour of tyrants. if we happen to be busy, and a child comes with an eager request about some trifle, it is easy so far to command our temper as to answer, "i am busy, don't talk to me now," instead of driving the petitioner away with harsh looks, and a peremptory refusal, which make as great an impression as harsh words. if we are reasonable, the child will soon learn to apply to us at proper times. by the same steady, gentle conduct, we may teach him to manage his love of talking with discretion, and may prevent those ineffectual exhortations to silence, which irritate the temper of the vivacious pupil. expostulations, and angry exclamations, will not so effectually command from our pupils temperance of tongue, as their own conviction that they are more likely to gain attention from their friends, if they choose properly their seasons for conversation. to prevent, we cannot too often repeat it, is better than to punish, without humouring children; that is to say, without yielding to their caprices, or to their _will_, when they express their wishes with impatience, we may prevent many of those little inconveniences which tease and provoke the temper; any continual irritation exhausts our patience; acute pain can be endured with more fortitude. we have sometimes seen children become fretful from the constant teasing effect of some slight inconveniences in their dress; we have pitied poor little boys, who were continually exhorted to produce their handkerchiefs, and who could scarcely ever get these handkerchiefs out of the tight pockets into which they had been stuffed; into such pockets the hand can never enter, or withdraw itself, without as much difficulty as trenck had in getting rid of his handcuffs. the torture of tight shoes, of back-boards, collars, and stocks, we hope is nearly abandoned; surely all these are unnecessary trials of fortitude; they exhaust that patience which might be exercised upon things of consequence. count rumford tells us, that he observed a striking melioration in the temper of all the mendicants in the establishment at munich, when they were relieved from the constant torments of rags and vermin. some people imagine, that early sufferings, that a number of small inconveniences, habitual severity of reproof, and frequent contradiction and disappointment, inure children to pain, and consequently improve their temper. early sufferings, which are necessary and inevitable, may improve children in fortitude; but the contradictions and disappointments, which arise immediately from the will of others, have not the same effect. children, where their own interests are concerned, soon distinguish between these two classes of evils; they submit patiently when they know that it would be in vain to struggle; they murmur and rebel, if they dare, whenever they feel the hand of power press upon them capriciously. we should not invent trials of temper for our pupils; if they can bear with good humour the common course of events, we should be satisfied. "i tumbled down, and i _bored_ it very well," said a little boy of three years old, with a look of great satisfaction. if this little boy had been thrown down on purpose by his parents as a trial of temper, it probably would not have been borne so well. as to inconveniences, in general it is rather a sign of indolence, than a proof of good temper in children, to submit to them quietly; if they can be remedied by exertion, why should they be passively endured? if they cannot be remedied, undoubtedly it is then better to abstract the attention from them as much as possible, because this is the only method of lessening the pain. children should be assisted in making this distinction, by our applauding their exertions when they struggle against unnecessary evil, by our commending their patience whenever they endure inevitable pain without complaints. illness, for instance, is an inevitable evil. to prevent children from becoming peevish, when they are ill, we should give our pity and sympathy with an increased appearance of affection, whenever they bear their illness with patience. no artifice is necessary; we need not affect any increase of pity; patience and good humour in the sufferer, naturally excite the affection and esteem of the spectators. the self-complacency, which the young patient must feel from a sense of his own fortitude, and the perception that he commands the willing hearts of all who attend him, are really alleviations of his bodily sufferings; the only alleviations which, in some cases, can possibly be afforded. the attention which is thought necessary in learning languages, often becomes extremely painful to the pupils, and the temper is often hurt by ineffectual attempts to improve the understanding. we have endeavoured to explain the methods of managing[ ] the attention of children with the least possible degree of pain. yesterday a little boy of three years old, w----, was learning his alphabet from his father; after he had looked at one letter for some time with great attention, he raised his eyes, and with a look of much good humour, said to his father, "it makes me tired to stand." his father seated him upon his knee, and told him that he did wisely in telling what tired him: the child, the moment he was seated, fixed his attentive eyes again upon his letters with fresh eagerness, and succeeded. surely it was not humouring this boy to let him sit down when he was tired. if we teach a child that our assistance is to be purchased by fretful entreaties; if we show him, that we are afraid of a storm, he will make use of our apprehensions to accomplish his purposes. on the contrary, if he perceives that we can steadily resist his tears and ill humour, and especially if we show indifference upon the occasion, he will perceive that he had better dry his tears, suspend his rage, and try how far good humour will prevail. children, who in every little difficulty are assisted by others, really believe that others are in fault whenever this assistance is not immediately offered. look at a humoured child, for instance, trying to push a chair along the carpet; if a wrinkle in the carpet stops his progress, he either beats the chair, or instantly turns with an angry appealing look to his mother for assistance; and if she does not get up to help him, he will cry. another boy, who has not been humoured, will neither beat the chair, nor angrily look round for help; but he will look immediately to see what it is that stops the chair, and when he sees the wrinkle in the carpet, he will either level or surmount the obstacle: during this whole operation, he will not feel in the least inclined to cry. both these children might have had precisely the same original stock of patience; but by different management, the one would become passionate and peevish, the other both good humoured and persevering. the pleasure of success pays children, as well as men, for long toil and labour. success is the proper reward of perseverance; but if we sometimes capriciously grant, and sometimes refuse, our help, our pupils cannot learn this important truth, and they imagine that success depends upon the will of others, and not upon their own efforts. a child, educated by a fairy, who sometimes came with magic aid to perform, and who was sometimes deaf to her call, would necessarily become ill humoured. several children, who were reading "evenings at home," observed that in the story of juliet and the fairy order, "it was wrong to make the fairy come whenever juliet cried, and could not do her task, because that was the way, said the children, to make the little girl ill humoured." we have formerly observed that children, who live much with companions of their own age, are under but little habitual restraint as to their tempers; they quarrel, fight, and shake hands; they have long and loud altercations, in which the strongest voice often gets the better. it does not improve the temper to be overborne by petulance and clamour: even mild, sensible children, will learn to be positive if they converse with violent dunces. in private families, where children mix in the society of persons of different ages, who encourage them to converse without reserve, they may meet with exact justice; they may see that their respective talents and good qualities are appreciated; they may acquire the habit of arguing without disputing; and they may learn that species of mutual forbearance in trifles, as well as in matters of consequence, which tends so much to domestic happiness. dr. franklin, in one of his letters to a young female friend, after answering some questions which she had asked him, apparently referring to an argument which had passed some time before, concludes with this comprehensive compliment: "so, you see, i think you had the best of the _argument_; and, as you give it up in complaisance to the company, i think you had also the best of the _dispute_." when young people perceive that they gain credit by keeping their temper in conversation, they will not be furious for victory, because moderation, during the time of battle, can alone entitle them to the honours of a triumph. it is particularly necessary for girls to acquire command of temper in arguing, because much of the effect of their powers of reasoning, and of their wit, when they grow up, will depend upon the gentleness and good humour with which they conduct themselves. a woman, who should attempt to thunder like demosthenes, would not find her eloquence increase her domestic happiness. we by no means wish that women should yield their better judgment to their fathers or husbands; but, without using any of that debasing cunning which rousseau recommends, they may support the cause of reason with all the graces of female gentleness. a man, in a furious passion, is terrible to his enemies; but a woman in a passion, is disgusting to her friends; she loses the respect due to her sex, and she has not masculine strength and courage to enforce any other species of respect. these circumstances should be considered by writers who advise that no difference should be made in the education of the two sexes. we cannot help thinking that their happiness is of more consequence than their speculative rights, and we wish to educate women so that they may be happy in the situations in which they are most likely to be placed. so much depends upon the temper of women, that it ought to be most carefully cultivated in early life; girls should be more inured to restraint than boys, because they are likely to meet with more restraint in society. girls should learn the habit of bearing slight reproofs, without thinking them matters of great consequence; but then they should always be permitted to state their arguments, and they should perceive that justice is shown to them, and that they increase the affection and esteem of their friends by command of temper. many passionate men are extremely good natured, and make amends for their extravagances by their candour, and their eagerness to please those whom they have injured during their fits of anger. it is said, that the servants of dean swift used to throw themselves in his way whenever he was in a passion, because they knew that his generosity would recompense them for standing the full fire of his anger. a woman, who permitted herself to treat her servants with ill humour, and who believed that she could pay them for ill usage, would make a very bad mistress of a family; her husband and her children would suffer from her ill temper, without being recompensed for their misery. we should not let girls imagine that they can balance ill humour by some good quality or accomplishment; because, in fact, there are none which can supply the want of temper in the female sex. a just idea of the nature of dignity, opposed to what is commonly called _spirit_, should be given early to our female pupils. many women, who are not disposed to violence of temper, affect a certain degree of petulance, and a certain stubbornness of opinion, merely because they imagine that to be gentle, is to be mean; and that to listen to reason, is to be deficient in spirit. enlarging the understanding of young women, will prevent them from the trifling vexations which irritate those who have none but trifling objects. we have observed that concerted trials of temper are not advantageous for very young children. those trials which are sometimes prepared for pupils at a more advanced period of education, are not always more happy in their consequences. we make trifles appear important; and then we are surprised that they are thought so. lord kames tells us that he was acquainted with a gentleman, who, though otherwise a man of good understanding, did not show his good sense in the education of his daughters temper. "he had," says lord kames, "three comely daughters, between twelve and sixteen, and to inure them to bear disappointments, he would propose to make a visit which he knew would delight them. the coach was bespoke, and the young ladies, completely armed for conquest, were ready to take their seats. but, behold! their father had changed his mind. this, indeed, was a disappointment; but as it appeared to proceed from whim, or caprice, it might sour their temper, instead of improving it."[ ] but why should a visit be made a matter of such mighty consequence to girls? why should it be a disappointment to stay at home? and why should lord kames advise that disappointments should _be made to appear_ the effects of chance? this method of making things appear to be what they are not, we cannot too often reprobate; it will not have better success in the education of the temper, than in the management of the understanding; it would ruin the one or the other, or both: even when promises are made with perfect good faith to young people, the state of suspense which they create, is not serviceable to the temper, and it is extremely difficult to promise proper rewards.[ ] the celebrated serena surely established her reputation for good temper, without any very severe trials. our standard of female excellence, is evidently changed since the days of griselda; but we are inclined to think, that even in these degenerate days, public amusements would not fill the female imagination, if they were not early represented as such charming things, such great rewards to girls, by their imprudent friends. the temper depends much upon the understanding; and whenever we give our pupils, whether male or female, false ideas of pleasure, we prepare for them innumerable causes of discontent. "you ought to be above such things! you ought not to let yourself be vexed by such trifles!" are common expressions, which do not immediately change the irritated person's feelings. you must alter the habits of thinking; you must change the view of the object, before you can alter the feelings. suppose a girl has, from the conversation of all her acquaintance, learned to imagine that there is some vast pleasure in going to a masquerade; it is in vain to tell her, in the moment that she is disappointed about her masquerade dress, that "it is a trifle, and she ought to be above trifles." she cannot be above them at a moment's warning: but if she had never been inspired with a violent desire to go to a masquerade, the disappointment would really appear trifling. we may calculate the probability of any person's mortification, by observing the vehemence of their hopes; thus we are led to observe, that the imagination influences the temper. upon this subject we shall speak more fully when we treat of imagination and judgment. to measure the degree of indulgence which may be safe for any given pupils, we must attend to the effect produced by pleasure upon their imagination and temper. if a small diminution of their usual enjoyments disturbs them, they have been rendered not too happy, but too susceptible. happy people, who have resources in their own power, do not feel every slight variation in external circumstances. we may safely allow children to be as happy as they possibly can be without sacrificing the future to the present. such prosperity will not enervate their minds. we make this assertion with some confidence, because experience has in many instances confirmed our opinion. amongst a large family of children, who have never been tormented with artificial trials of temper, and who have been made as happy as it was in the power of their parents to make them, there is not one ill tempered child. we have examples every day before us of different ages from three years old to fifteen. before parents adopt either epicurean or stoical doctrines in the education of the temper, it may be prudent to calculate the probabilities of the good and evil, which their pupils are likely to meet with in life. the sybarite, whose night's rest was disturbed by a doubled rose leaf, deserves to be pitied almost as much as the young man who, when he was benighted in the snow, was reproached by his severe father for having collected a heap of snow to make himself a pillow. unless we could for ever ensure the bed of roses to our pupils, we should do very imprudently to make it early necessary to their repose: unless the pillow of snow is likely to be their lot, we need not inure them to it from their infancy. footnotes: [ ] v. chapter on sympathy and sensibility. [ ] by mr. townsend, in his travels into spain. [ ] v. chapter on toys. [ ] v. chapter on attention. [ ] lord kames, p. . [ ] v. chapter on rewards and punishments. chapter vii. on obedience. obedience has been often called the virtue of childhood. how far it is entitled to the name of virtue, we need not at present stop to examine. obedience is expected from children long before they can reason upon the justice of our commands; consequently it must be taught as a habit. by associating pleasure with those things which we first desire children to do, we should make them necessarily like to obey; on the contrary, if we begin by ordering them to do what is difficult and disagreeable to them, they must dislike obedience. the poet seems to understand this subject when he says, "or bid her wear your necklace rowed with pearl, you'll find your fanny an obedient girl."[ ] the taste for a necklace rowed with pearl, is not the _first_ taste, even in girls, that we should wish to cultivate; but the poet's _principle_ is good, notwithstanding. bid your child do things that are agreeable to him, and you may be sure of his obedience. bid a hungry boy eat apple pye; order a shivering urchin to warm himself at a good fire; desire him to go to bed when you see him yawn with fatigue, and by such seasonable commands you will soon form associations of pleasure in his mind, with the voice and tone of authority. this tone should never be threatening, or alarming; it should be gentle, but decided. whenever it becomes necessary that a child should do what he feels disagreeable, it is better to make him submit at once to necessity, than to create any doubt and struggle in his mind, by leaving him a possibility of resistance. suppose a little boy wishes to sit up later than the hour at which you think proper that he should go to bed; it is most prudent to take him to bed at the appointed time, without saying one word to him, either in the way of entreaty or command. if you entreat, you give the child an idea that he has it in his power to refuse you: if you command, and he does not instantly obey, you hazard your authority, and you teach him that he can successfully set his will in opposition to yours. the boy wishes to sit up; he sees no reason, in the moral fitness of things, why he should go to bed at one hour more than at another; all he perceives is, that such is your will. what does he gain by obeying you? nothing: he loses the pleasure of sitting up half an hour longer. how can you then expect that he should, in consequence of these reasonings, give up his obvious immediate interest, and march off to bed heroically at the word of command? let him not be put to the trial; when he has for some time been regularly taken to bed at a fixed hour, he will acquire the habit of thinking that he must go at that hour: association will make him expect it; and if his experience has been uniform, he will, without knowing why, think it necessary that he should do as he has been used to do. when the habit of obedience to customary necessity is thus formed, we may, without much risk, engraft upon it obedience to the voice of authority. for instance, when the boy hears the clock strike, the usual signal for his departure, you may, if you see that he is habitually ready to obey this signal, associate your commands with that to which he has already learned to pay attention. "go; it is time that you should go to bed now," will only seem to the child a confirmation of the sentence already pronounced by the clock: by degrees, your commands, after they have been regularly repeated, when the child feels no hope of evading them, will, even in new circumstances, have from association the power of compelling obedience. whenever we desire a child to do any thing, we should be perfectly certain, not only that it is a thing which he is capable of doing, but also, that it is something we can, in case it comes to that ultimate argument, force him to do. you cannot oblige a child to stand up, if he has a mind to sit down; or to walk, if he does not choose to exert his muscles for that purpose: but you can absolutely prevent him from touching whatever you desire him not to meddle with, by your superior strength. it is best, then, to begin with prohibitions; with such prohibitions as you can, and will, steadily persevere to enforce: if you are not exact in requiring obedience, you will never obtain it either by persuasion or authority. as it will require a considerable portion of time and unremitting attention, to enforce the punctual observance of a variety of prohibitions, it will, for your own sake, be most prudent to issue as few edicts as possible, and to be sparing in the use of the imperative mood. it will, if you calculate the trouble you must take day after day to watch your pupil, cost you less to begin by arranging every circumstance in your power, so as to prevent the necessity of trusting to laws what ought to be guarded against by precaution. do you, for instance, wish to prevent your son from breaking a beautiful china jar in your drawing room; instead of forbidding him to touch it, put it out of his reach.--would you prevent your son from talking to servants; let your house, in the first place, be so arranged, that he shall never be obliged to pass through any rooms where he is likely to meet with servants; let all his wants be gratified without their interference; let him be able to get at his hat without asking the footman to reach it for him, from its inaccessible height.[ ] the simple expedient of hanging the hat in a place where the boy can reach it, will save you the trouble of continually repeating, "don't ask william, child, to reach your hat; can't you come and ask me?" yes, the boy can come and ask you; but if you are busy, you will not like to go in quest of the hat; your reluctance will possibly appear in your countenance, and the child, who understands the language of looks better than that of words, will clearly comprehend, that you are displeased with him at the very instant that he is fulfilling the letter of the law. a lady, who was fond of having her house well arranged, discovered, to the amazement of her acquaintance, the art of making all her servants keep every thing in its place. even in the kitchen, from the most minute article to the most unwieldy, every thing was invariably to be found in its allotted station; the servants were thought miracles of obedience; but, in fact, they obeyed because it was the easiest thing they could possibly do. order was made more convenient to them than disorder, and, with their utmost ingenuity to save themselves trouble, they could not invent places for every thing more appropriate than those which had been assigned by their mistress's legislative economy. in the same manner we may secure the _orderly_ obedience of children, without exhausting their patience or our own. rousseau advises, that children should be governed solely by the necessity of circumstances; but there are _one and twenty_ excellent objections to this system; the first being, that it is impossible: of this rousseau must have been sensible in the trials which he made as a preceptor. when he had the management of a refractory child, he found himself obliged to invent and arrange a whole drama, by artificial experience, to convince his little pupil, that he had better not walk out in the streets of paris alone; and that, therefore, he should wait until his pupil could conveniently accompany him. rousseau had prepared the neighbours on each side of the street to make proper speeches as his pupil passed by their doors, which alarmed and piqued the boy effectually. at length the child was met at a proper time, by a friend who had been appointed to watch him; and thus he was brought home submissive. this scene, as rousseau observes, was admirably well performed;[ ] but what occasion could there be for so much contrivance and deceit? if his pupil had not been uncommonly deficient in penetration, he would soon have discovered his preceptor in some of his artifices; then adieu both to obedience and confidence. a false idea of the pleasures of liberty misled rousseau. children have not our abstract ideas of the pleasures of liberty; they do not, until they have suffered from ill judged restraints, feel any strong desire to exercise what we call free will; liberty is, with them, the liberty of doing certain specific things which they have found to be agreeable; liberty is not the general idea of pleasure, in doing whatever they will _to do_. rousseau desires, that _we should not let our pupil know, that in doing our will he is obedient to us_. but why? why should we not let a child know the truth? if we attempt to conceal it, we shall only get into endless absurdities and difficulties. lord kames tells us, that he was acquainted with a couple, who, in the education of their family, pursued as much as possible rousseau's plan. one evening, as the father was playing at chess with a friend, one of his children, a boy of about four years old, took a piece from the board, and ran away to play with it. the father, whose principles would not permit him to assert his right to his own chessman, began to bargain for his property with his son. "harry," said he, "let us have back the man, and there's an apple for you." the apple was soon devoured, and the child returned to the chess board, and kidnapped another chessman. what this man's ransom might be, we are not yet informed; but lord kames tells us, that the father was obliged to suspend his game at chess until his son was led away to his supper. does it seem just, that parents should become slaves to the liberties of their children? if one set of beings or another should sacrifice a portion of happiness, surely those who are the most useful, and the most capable of increasing the knowledge and the pleasures of life, have some claim to a preference; and when the power is entirely in their own hands, it is most probable that they will defend their own interests. we shall not, like many who have spoken of rousseau, steal from him after having abused him. his remarks upon the absurd and tyrannical restraints which are continually imposed upon children by the folly of nurses and servants, or by the imprudent anxiety of parents and preceptors, are excellent. whenever rousseau is in the right, his eloquence is irresistible. to determine what degree of obedience it is just to require from children, we must always consider what degree of reason they possess: whenever we can use reason, we should never use force; it is only whilst children are too young to comprehend reason,[ ] that we should expect from them implicit submission. the means which have been pointed out for teaching the habit of obedience, must not be depended upon for teaching any thing more than the mere habit. when children begin to reason, they do not act merely from habit; they will not be obedient at this age, unless their understanding is convinced that it is for their advantage to be so. wherever we can explain the reasons for any of our requests, we should attempt it; but whenever these cannot be fully explained, it is better not to give a partial explanation; it will be best to say steadily, "you cannot understand this now, you will, perhaps, understand it some time hence." whenever we tell children, that we forbid them to do such and such things for any particular reason, we must take care that the reason assigned is adequate, and that it will in all cases hold good. for instance, if we forbid a boy to eat unripe fruit, _because it will make him ill_, and if afterwards the boy eat some unripe gooseberries without feeling ill in consequence of his disobedience, he will doubt the truth of the person who prohibited unripe fruit; he will rather trust his own partial experience than any assertions. the idea of _hurting his health_, is a general idea, which he does not yet comprehend. it is more prudent to keep him out of the way of unripe gooseberries, than to hazard at once his obedience and his integrity. we need not expatiate further; the instance we have given, may be readily applied to all cases in which children have it in their power to disobey with _immediate_ impunity, and, what is still more dangerous, with the certainty of obtaining immediate pleasure. the gratification of their senses, and the desire of bodily exercise, ought never to be unnecessarily restrained. our pupils should distinctly perceive, that we wish to make them happy, and every instance, in which they discover that obedience has really made them happier, will be more in our favour, than all the lectures we could preach. from the past, they will judge of the future. children, who have for many years experienced, that their parents have exacted obedience only to such commands as proved to be ultimately wise and beneficial, will surely be disposed from habit, from gratitude, and yet more from prudence, to consult their parents in all the material actions of their lives. we may observe, that the spirit of contradiction, which sometimes breaks out in young people the moment they are able to act for themselves, arises frequently from slight causes in their early education. children, who have experienced, that submission to the will of others has constantly made them unhappy, will necessarily, by reasoning inversely, imagine, that felicity consists in following their own free will. the french poet boileau was made very unhappy by neglect and restraint during his education: when he grew up, he would never agree with those who talked to him of the pleasures of childhood.[ ] "peut on," disoit ce poëte amoureux de l'indépendence, "ne pas regarder comme un grand malheur, le chagrin continuel et particulier à cet age, de ne jamais faire sa volonté?" it was in vain, continues his biographer, to boast to him of the advantages of this happy constraint, which saves youth from so many follies. "what signifies our knowing the value of our chains when we have shaken them off, if we feel nothing but their weight whilst we wear them?" the galled poet used to reply. nor did boileau enjoy his freedom, though he thought with such horror of his slavery. he declared, that if he had it in his choice, either to be born again upon the hard conditions of again going through his childhood, or not to exist, he would rather not exist: but he was not happy during any period of his existence; he quarrelled with all the seasons of life; "all seemed to him equally disagreeable; youth, manhood, and old age, are each subject, he observed, to impetuous passions, to care, and to infirmities." hence we may conclude, that the severity of his education had not succeeded in teaching him to submit philosophically to necessity, or yet in giving him much enjoyment from that _liberty_ which he so much coveted. thus it too often happens, that an imaginary value is set upon the exercise of the free will by those who, during their childhood, have suffered under injudicious restrictions. sometimes the love of free will is so uncontrollably excited, even during childhood, that it breaks out, unfortunately both for the pupils and the preceptors, in the formidable shape of obstinacy. of all the faults to which children are subject, there is none which is more difficult to cure, or more easy to prevent, than obstinacy. as it is early observed by those who are engaged in education, it is sometimes supposed to be inherent in the temper; but, so far from being naturally obstinate, infants show those strong propensities to sympathy and imitation, which prepare them for an opposite character. the folly of the nurse, however, makes an intemperate use of these happy propensities. she perpetually torments the child to exert himself for her amusement; all his senses and all his muscles she commands. he must see, hear, talk, or be silent, move or be still, when she thinks proper; and often with the desire of amusing her charge, or of showing him off to the company, she disgusts him with voluntary exertion. before young children have completely acquired the use of their limbs, they cannot perform feats of activity or of dexterity at a moment's warning. their muscles do not instantaneously obey their will; the efforts they make are painful to themselves; the awkwardness of their attempts is painful to others; the delay of the body is often mistaken for the reluctance of the mind; and the impatient tutor pronounces the child to be obstinate, whilst all the time he may be doing his utmost to obey. instead of growing angry with the helpless child, it would be surely more wise to assist his feeble and inexperienced efforts. if we press him to make unsuccessful attempts, we shall associate pain both with voluntary exertion and with obedience. little w---- (a boy of three years old) was one day asked by his father to jump. the boy stood stock still. perhaps he did not know the meaning of the word jump. the father, instead of pressing him further, asked several other children who happened to be in the room to jump, and he jumped along with them: all this was done playfully. the little boy looked on silently for a short time, and seemed much pleased. "papa jumps!" he exclaimed. his brother l---- lifted him up two or three times; and he then tried to jump, and succeeded: from sympathy he learned the command of the muscles which were necessary to his jumping, and to his obedience. if this boy had been importuned, or forced to exert himself, he might have been thus taught obstinacy, merely from the imprudent impatience of the spectators. the reluctance to stop when a child is once in motion, is often mistaken for obstinacy: when he is running, singing, laughing, or talking, if you suddenly command him to stop, he cannot instantly obey you. if we reflect upon our own minds, we may perceive that we cannot, without considerable effort, turn our thoughts suddenly from any subject on which we have been long intent. if we have been long in a carriage, the noise of the wheels sounds in our ear, and we seem to be yet going on after the carriage has stopped. we do not pretend to found any accurate reasoning upon analogy; but we may observe, the difficulty with which our minds are stopped or put in motion, resembles the vis-inertiæ of the body. w---- (three years old) had for some minutes vociferated two or three words of a song, until the noise could be no longer patiently endured; his father called to him, and desired that he would not make so much noise. w---- paused for a moment, but then went on singing the same words. his brother said, hush! w---- paused for another second or two; but then went on with his roundelay. in his countenance there was not the slightest appearance of ill humour. one of his sisters put him upon a board which was lying on the floor, and which was a little unsteady; as he walked cautiously along this board, his attention was occupied, and he forgot his song. this inability suddenly to desist from any occupation, may easily grow into obstinacy, because the pain of checking themselves will be great in children, and this pain will be associated with the commands of those who govern them; it is better to stop them by presenting new objects to their attention, than by the stimulus of a peremptory voice. children should never be accused of obstinacy; the accusation cannot cure, but may superinduce the disease. if, unfortunately, they have been suffered to contract a disposition to this fault, it may be cured by a little patience and good temper. we have mentioned how example and sympathy may be advantageously used; praise and looks of affection, which naturally express our feeling when children do right, encourage the slightest efforts to obey; but we must carefully avoid showing any triumph in our victory over yielding stubbornness. "aye, i knew that you would do what we desired at last, you might as well have done it at first," is a common nursery-maid's speech, which is well calculated to pique the pride of a half-subdued penitent. when children are made ashamed of submission, they will become intrepid, probably unconquerable, rebels. neither rewards nor punishments will then avail; the pupil perceives, that both the wit and the strength of his master are set in competition with his: at the expense of a certain degree of pain, he has the power to resist as long as he thinks proper; and there is scarcely any degree of pain that a tutor dares to inflict, which an obstinate hero is not able to endure. with the spirit of a martyr, he sustains reproaches and torture. if, at length, the master changes his tone, and tries to soften and win the child to his purpose, his rewards are considered as bribes: if the boy really thinks that he is in the right to rebel, he must yield his sense of honour to the force of temptation when he obeys. if he has formed no such idea of honour, he perhaps considers the reward as the price of his submission; and, upon a future occasion, he will know how to raise that price by prolonging his show of resistance. where the child has formed a false idea of honour, his obstinacy is only mistaken resolution; we should address ourselves to his understanding, and endeavour to convince him of his errour. where the understanding is convinced, and the _habit_ of opposition still continues, we should carefully avoid calling his false associations into action; we should not ask him to do any thing for which he has acquired an habitual aversion; we should alter our manner of speaking to him, that neither the tones of our voice, the words, or the looks, which have been his customary signals for resistance, may recall the same feelings to his mind: placed in new circumstances, he may acquire new habits, and his old associates will in time be forgotten. sufficient time must, however, be allowed; we may judge when it is prudent to try him on any old dangerous subjects, by many symptoms: by observing the degree of alacrity with which he obeys on indifferent occasions; by observing what degree of command he has acquired over himself in general; by observing in what manner he judges of the conduct and temper of other children in similar circumstances; by observing whether the consciousness of his former self continues in full force. children often completely forget what they have been. where obstinacy arises from principle, if we may use the expression, it cannot be cured by the same means which are taken to cure that species of the disease which depends merely upon habit. the same courage and fortitude which in one case we reprobate, and try to conquer with all our might, in the other we admire and extol. this should be pointed out to children; and if they act from a love of glory, as soon as they perceive it, they will follow that course which will secure to them the prize. charles xii. whom the turks, when incensed by his disobedience to the grand seignior, called demirbash, or _head of iron_, showed early symptoms of this headstrong nature; yet in his childhood, if his preceptor[ ] named but glory, any thing could be obtained from charles. charles had a great aversion to learning latin; but when he was told that the kings of poland and denmark understood it, he began to study it in good earnest. we do not mean to infer, that emulation with the kings of poland and denmark, was the best possible motive which charles the twelfth's preceptor could have used, to make the young prince conquer his aversion to latin; but we would point out, that where the love of glory is connected with obstinate temper, the passion is more than a match for the temper. let us but enlighten this love of glory, and we produce magnanimity in the place of obstinacy. examples, in conversation and in books, of great characters, who have not been ashamed to change their opinions, and to acknowledge that they have been mistaken, will probably make a great impression upon young people; they will from these learn to admire candour, and will be taught, that it is _mean_ to persist in the wrong. examples from books must, however, be also uniformly supported by examples in real life; preceptors and parents must practise the virtues which they preach. it is said, that the amiable fenelon acquired the most permanent influence over his pupil, by the candour with which he always treated him. fenelon did not think that he could lessen his dignity by confessing himself to be in the wrong. young people who have quick abilities, and who happen to live with those who are inferiour to them either in knowledge or incapacity, are apt to become positive and self-willed; they measure all the world by the individuals with whom they have measured themselves; and, as they have been convinced that they have been in the right in many cases, they take it for granted that their judgment must be always infallible. this disease may be easily cured; it is only necessary to place the patient amongst his superiors in intellect, his own experience will work his cure: he liked to follow his will, because his judgment had taught him that he might trust more securely to the _tact_ of his own understanding, than to the decision of others. as soon as he discovers more sense in the arguments of his companions, he will listen to them, and if he finds their reason superior to his own, he will submit. a preceptor, who wishes to gain ascendency over a clever positive boy, must reason with all possible precision, and must always show that he is willing to be decided by the strongest arguments which can be produced. if he ever prophesies, he sets his judgment at stake; therefore he should not prophesy about matters of chance, but rather in affairs where he can calculate with certainty. if his prophecies are frequently accomplished, his pupil's confidence in him will rapidly increase; and if he desires that confidence to be permanent, he will not affect mystery, but he will honestly explain the circumstances by which he formed his opinions. young people who are accustomed to hear and to give reasons for their opinions, will not be violent and positive in assertions; they will not think that the truth of any assertion can be manifested by repeating over the same words a thousand times; they will not ask how many people are of this or that opinion, but rather what arguments are produced on each side. there is very little danger that any people, whether young or old, should continue to be positive, who are in the habit of exercising their reasoning faculty. it has been often observed that extremely good humoured, complaisant children, when they grow up, become ill tempered; and young men who are generally liked in society as pleasant companions, become surly, tyrannical masters in their own families, positive about mere trifles, and anxious to subjugate the _wills_ of all who are any wise dependent upon them. this character has been nicely touched by de boissy, in his comedy called "dehors trompeurs." we must observe, that whilst young people are in company, and under the immediate influence of the excitements of novelty, numbers and dissipation, it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the goodness of their temper. young men who are the most ready to yield their inclinations to the humour of their companions, are not therefore to be considered as of really compliant dispositions; the idle or indolent, who have no resources in their own minds, and no independent occupations, are victims to the yawning demon of ennui the moment they are left in solitude. they consequently dread so heartily to be left alone, that they readily give up a portion of their liberty to purchase the pleasures and mental support which society affords. when they give up their wishes, and follow the lead of the company, they in fact give up but very little; their object is amusement; and this obtained, their time is sacrificed without regret. on the contrary, those who are engaged in literary or professional pursuits, set a great value upon their time, and feel considerable reluctance to part with it without some adequate compensation; they must consequently be less complaisant companions, and by the generality of superficial observers, would be thought, perhaps, less complying in their tempers, than the idle and dissipated. but when the idle man has past the common season for dissipation, and is settled in domestic life, his spirits flag from the want of his usual excitements; and, as he has no amusements in his own family, to purchase by the polite sacrifice of his opinion or his will, he is not inclined to complaisance. the pleasures of exercising his free will, becomes important in his eyes; he has few pleasures, and of those few he is tenacious. he has been accustomed to submit to others in society; he is proud to be master at home; he has few emotions, and the emotion caused by the exertion of command, becomes agreeable and necessary to him. thus many of the same causes which make a young man a pleasant companion abroad, tend naturally to make him a tyrant at home. this perversity and positiveness of temper, ultimately arise from the want of occupation, and from deficient energy of mind. we may guard against these evils by education: when we see a playful, active child, we have little fear of his temper. "oh, he will certainly be good tempered, he is the most obedient, complying creature in the world, he'll do any thing you ask him." but let us cultivate his understanding, and give him tastes which shall occupy and interest him agreeably through life, or else this sweet, complying temper will not last till he is thirty. an ill cured obstinacy of temper, when it breaks out after young people have arrived at years of discretion, is terrible. those who attempt to conquer obstinacy in children by bodily pain, or by severe punishments of any kind, often appear to succeed, and to have entirely eradicated, when they have merely suppressed, the disease for a time. as soon as the child that is intimidated by force or fear, is relieved from restraint, he will resume his former habits; he may change the mode of showing it, but the disposition will continue the same. it will appear in various parts of the conduct, as the limbs of the giant appeared unexpectedly at different periods, and in different parts of the castle of otranto. footnotes: [ ] elegy on an old beauty. parnell. [ ] rousseau. [ ] emilius, vol. i. page . [ ] vol. i. page . [ ] histoire des membres de l'académie, par m. d'alembert. tome troisieme, p. . [ ] voltaire's hist. charles xii. page . chapter viii. on truth. it is not necessary here to pronounce a panegyric upon truth; its use and value is thoroughly understood by all the world; but we shall endeavour to give some practical advice, which may be of service in educating children, not only to the love, but to the habits, of integrity. these are not always found, as they ought to be, inseparable. rousseau's eloquence, and locke's reasoning, have sufficiently reprobated, and it is to be hoped have exploded, the system of lecturing children upon morality; of giving them precepts and general maxims which they do not understand, and which they cannot apply. we shall not produce long quotations from books which are in every body's hands.[ ] there is one particular in which rousseau especially, and most other authors who have written upon education, have given very dangerous counsel; they have counselled parents to teach truth by falsehood. the privilege of using contrivance, and ingenious deceptions, has been uniformly reserved for preceptors; and the pupils, by moral delusions, and the theatric effect of circumstances treacherously arranged, are to be duped, surprised, and cheated, into virtue. the dialogue between the gardener and emilius about the maltese melon-seed, is an instance of this method of instruction. honest robert, the gardener, in concert with the tutor, tells poor emilius a series of lies, prepares a garden, "choice maltese melon-seed," and "worthless beans," all to cheat the boy into just notions of the rights of property, and the nature of exchange and barter. part of the _artificial course of experience_ in that excellent work on education, adele and theodore, is defective upon the same principle. there should be no moral delusions; no _artificial_ course of experience; no plots laid by parents to make out the truth; no listening fathers, mothers, or governesses; no pretended confidence, or perfidious friends; in one word, no falsehood should be practised: that magic which cheats the senses, at the same time confounds the understanding. the spells of prospero, the strangenesses of the isle, perplex and confound the senses and understanding of all who are subjected to his magic, till at length, worked by force of wonders into credulity, his captives declare that they will believe any thing; "that there are men dewlapt like bulls; and what else does want credit," says the duke anthonio, "come to me, and i'll be sworn 'tis true." children, whose simplicity has been practised upon by the fabling morality of their preceptors, begin by feeling something like the implicit credulity of anthonio; but the arts of the preceptors are quickly suspected by their subjects, and the charm is for ever reversed. when once a child detects you in falsehood, you lose his confidence; his incredulity will then be as extravagant as his former belief was gratuitous. it is in vain to expect, by the most eloquent manifestoes, or by the most secret leagues offensive and defensive, to conceal your real views, sentiments, and actions, from children. their interest keeps their attention continually awake; not a word, not a look, in which they are concerned, escapes them; they see, hear, and combine, with sagacious rapidity; if falsehood be in the wind, detection hunts her to discovery. honesty is the best policy, must be the maxim in education, as well as in all the other affairs of life. we must not only be exact in speaking truth to our pupils, but to every body else; to acquaintance, to servants, to friends, to enemies. it is not here meant to enter any overstrained protest against the common phrases and forms of politeness; the current coin may not be pure; but when once its alloy has been ascertained, and its value appreciated, there is no fraud, though there may be some folly, in continuing to trade upon equal terms with our neighbours, with money of high nominal, and scarcely any real, value. no fraud is committed by a gentleman's saying he is _not at home_, because no deception is intended; the words are silly, but they mean, and are understood to mean, nothing more than that the person in question does not choose to see the visiters who knock at his door. "i am, sir, your obedient and humble servant," at the end of a letter, does not mean that the person who signs the letter is a servant, or humble, or obedient, but it simply expresses that he knows how to conclude his letter according to the usual form of civility. change this absurd phrase, and welcome; but do not let us, in the spirit of draco, make no distinction between errours and crimes. the foibles of fashion or folly, are not to be treated with the detestation due to hypocrisy and falsehood; if small faults are to incur such grievous punishments, there can, indeed, be none found sufficiently severe for great crimes; great crimes, consequently, for want of adequate punishment, will increase, and the little faults, that have met with disproportionate persecution, will become amiable and innocent in the eyes of commiserating human nature. it is not difficult to explain to young people the real meaning, or rather the nonsense, of a few complimentary phrases; their integrity will not be increased or diminished by either saying, or omitting to say, "i am much obliged to you," or "i shall be very happy to see you at dinner," &c. we do not mean to include in the harmless list of compliments, any expressions which are meant to deceive; the common custom of the country, and of the society in which we live, sufficiently regulates the style of complimentary language; and there are few so ignorant of the world as seriously to misunderstand this, or to mistake civility for friendship. there is a story told of a chinese mandarin, who paid a visit to a friend at paris, at the time when paris was the seat of politeness. his well-bred host, on the first evening of his arrival, gave him a handsome supper, lodged him in the best bed-chamber, and when he wished him a good night, amongst other civil things, said he hoped the mandarin would, during his stay at paris, consider that house as his own. early the next morning, the polite parisian was awakened by the sound of loud hammering in the mandarin's bed-chamber; on entering the room, he found the mandarin and some masons hard at work, throwing down the walls of the house. "you rascals, are you mad?" exclaimed the frenchman to the masons. "not at all, my dear friend," said the chinese man, soberly, "i set the poor fellows to work; this room is too small for my taste; you see i have lost no time in availing myself of your goodness. did not you desire me to use this house as if it were my own, during my stay at paris?" "assuredly, my dear friend, and so i hope you will," replied the french gentleman, "the only misfortune here is, that i did not understand chinese, and that i had no interpreter." they found an interpreter, or a chinese dictionary, and when the parisian phrase was properly translated, the mandarin, who was an honest man, begged his polite host's pardon for having pulled down the partition. it was rebuilt; the mandarin learned french, and the two friends continued upon the best terms with each other, during the remainder of the visit. the chesterfieldian system of endeavouring to please by dissimulation, is obviously distinguishable by any common capacity, from the usual forms of civility. there is no hope of educating young people to a love of integrity in any family, where this practice is adopted. if children observe that their parents deceive common acquaintance, by pretending to like the company, and to esteem the characters, of those whom they really think disagreeable and contemptible, how can they learn to respect truth? how can children believe in the praise of their parents, if they detect them in continual flattery towards indifferent people? it may be thought, by latitudinarians in politeness, that we are too rigid in expecting this strict adherence to truth from people who live in society; it may be said, that in practical education, no such utopian ideas of perfection should be suggested. if we thought them utopian, we certainly should not waste our time upon them; but we do not here speak theoretically of what may be done, we speak of what has been done. without the affectation of using a more sanctified language than other people; without departing from the common forms of society; without any painful, awkward efforts, we believe that parents may, in all their conversation in private and in public, set their children the uniform example of truth and integrity. we do not mean that the example of parents can alone produce this effect; a number of other circumstances must be combined. servants must have no communication with children, if you wish to teach them the habit of speaking truth. the education, and custom, and situation of servants, are at present such, that it is morally impossible to depend upon their veracity in their intercourse with children. servants think it good natured to try to excuse and conceal all the little faults of children; to give them secret indulgences, and even positively to deny facts, in order to save them from blame or punishment. even when they are not fond of the children, their example must be dangerous, because servants do not scruple to falsify for their own advantage; if they break any thing, what a multitude of equivocations! if they neglect any thing, what a variety of excuses! what evasions in actions, or in words, do they continually invent! it may be said, that as the spartans taught their children to detest drunkenness, by showing them intoxicated helots, we can make falsehood odious and contemptible to our pupils, by the daily example of its mean deformity. but if children, before they can perceive the general advantage of integrity, and before they can understand the utility of truth, see the partial immediate success of falsehood, how can they avoid believing in their own experience? if they see that servants escape blame, and screen themselves from punishment, by telling falsehoods, they not only learn that falsehood preserves from pain, but they feel obliged to those who practise it for their sakes; thus it is connected with the feelings of affection and of gratitude in their hearts, as well as with a sense of pleasure and safety. when servants have exacted promises from their _protégés_, those promises cannot be broken without treachery; thus deceit brings on deceit, and the ideas of truth and falsehood, become confused and contradictory. in the chapter upon servants, we have expatiated upon this subject, and have endeavoured to point out how all communication between children and servants may be most effectually prevented. to that chapter, without further repetition, we refer. and now that we have adjusted the preliminaries concerning parents and servants, we may proceed with confidence. when young children first begin to speak, from not having a sufficient number of words to express their ideas, or from not having annexed precise ideas to the words which they are taught to use, they frequently make mistakes, which are attributed to the desire of deceiving. we should not precipitately suspect them of falsehood; it is some time before they perfectly understand what we mean by truth. small deviations should not be marked with too much rigour; but whenever a child relates _exactly_ any thing which he has seen, heard, or felt, we should listen with attention and pleasure, and we should not show the least doubt of his veracity. rousseau is perfectly right in advising, that children should never be questioned in any circumstances upon which it can be their interest to deceive. we should, at least, treat children with the same degree of wise lenity, which the english law extends to all who have arrived at years of discretion. no criminal is bound to accuse himself. if any mischief has been committed, we should never, when we are uncertain by whom it has been done, either directly accuse, or betray injurious suspicions. we should neither say to the child, "i believe you have done this," nor, "i believe you have not done this;" we should say nothing; the mischief is done, we cannot repair it: because a glass is broken, we need not spoil a child; we may put glasses out of his reach in future. if it should, however, happen, that a child voluntarily comes to us with a history of an accident, may no love of goods or chattels, of windows, of china, or even of looking-glasses, come in competition with our love of truth? an angry word, an angry look, may intimidate the child, who has summoned all his little courage to make this confession. it is not requisite that parents should pretend to be pleased and gratified with the destruction of their furniture, but they may, it is to be hoped, without dissimulation, show that they set more value upon the integrity of their children, than upon a looking-glass, and they will "keep their temper still, though china fall." h----, one day when his father and mother were absent from home, broke a looking-glass. as soon as he heard the sound of the returning carriage, he ran and posted himself at the hall door. his father, the moment he got out of the carriage, beheld his erect figure, and pale, but intrepid countenance. "father," said the boy, "i have _broke_ the best looking-glass in your house!" his father assured him, that he would rather all the looking-glasses in his house should be broken, than that one of his children should attempt to make an excuse. h---- was most agreeably relieved from his anxiety by the kindness of his father's voice and manner, and still more so, perhaps, by perceiving that he rose in his esteem. when the glass was examined, it appeared that the boy had neglected to produce all the circumstances in his own favour. before he had begun to play at ball, he had had the precaution to turn the back of the looking-glass towards him; his ball, however, accidentally struck against the wooden back, and broke the glass. h---- did not make out this favourable state of the case for himself at first; he told it simply after the business was settled, seeming much more interested about the fate of the glass, than eager to exculpate himself. there is no great danger of teaching children to do mischief by this indulgence to their accidental misfortunes. when they break, or waste any thing, from pure carelesness, let them, even when they speak the truth about it, suffer the natural consequences of their carelesness; but at the same time praise their integrity, and let them distinctly feel the difference between the slight inconvenience to which they expose themselves by speaking the truth, and the great disgrace to which falsehood would subject them. the pleasure of being esteemed, and trusted, is early felt, and the consciousness of deserving confidence is delightful to children; but their young fortitude and courage should never be exposed to severe temptations. it is not sufficient to excite an admiration of truth by example, by eloquent praise, or by the just rewards of esteem and affection; we must take care to form the habits at the same time that we inspire the love of this virtue. many children admire truth, and feel all the shame of telling falsehoods, who yet, either from habit or from fear, continue to tell lies. we must observe, that though the taste for praise is strong in childhood, yet it is not a match for any of the bodily appetites, when they are strongly excited. those children, who are restrained as to the choice, or the quantity, of their food, usually think that eating is a matter of vast consequence, and they are strongly tempted to be dishonest to gratify their appetites. children do not understand the prudential maxims concerning health, upon which these restraints are founded; and if they can, "by any indirection," obtain things which gratify their palate, they will. on the contrary, young people who are regularly let to eat and drink as much as they please, can have no temptation from hunger and thirst, to deceive; if they partake of the usual family meals, and if there are no whimsical distinctions between wholesome and unwholesome dishes, or epicurean distinctions between rarities and plain food, the imagination and the pride of children will not be roused about eating. their pride is piqued, if they perceive that they are prohibited from touching what _grown up people_ are privileged to eat; their imagination is set to work by seeing any extraordinary difference made by judges of eating between one species of food and another. in families where a regularly good table is kept, children accustomed to the sight and taste of all kinds of food, are seldom delicate, capricious, or disposed to exceed; but in houses where entertainments are made from time to time with great bustle and anxiety, fine clothes, and company-manners, and company-faces, and all that politeness can do to give the appearance of festivity, deceive children at least, and make them imagine that there is some extraordinary joy in seeing a greater number of dishes than usual upon the table. upon these occasions, indeed, the pleasure is to them substantial; they eat more, they eat a greater variety, and of things that please them better than usual; the pleasure of eating is associated with unusual cheerfulness, and thus the imagination, and the reality, conspire to make them epicures. to these children, the temptations to deceive about sweetmeats and dainties are beyond measure great, especially as ill-bred strangers commonly show their affection for them by pressing them to eat what they are not allowed to say "_if you please_" to. rousseau thinks all children are gluttons. all children may be rendered gluttons; but few, who are properly treated with respect to food, and who have any literary tastes, can be in danger of continuing to be fond of eating. we therefore, without hesitation, recommend it to parents never to hazard the truth and honour of their pupils by prohibitions, which seldom produce any of the effects that are expected. children are sometimes injudiciously restrained with regard to exercise; they are required to promise to keep within certain boundaries when they are sent out to play; these promises are often broken with impunity, and thus the children learn habits of successful deceit. instead of circumscribing their play grounds, as they are sometimes called, by narrow inconvenient limits, we should allow them as much space as we can with convenience, and at all events exact no promises. we should absolutely make it impossible for them to go without detection into any place which we forbid. it requires some patience and activity in preceptors to take all the necessary precautions in issuing orders, but these precautions will be more useful in preserving the integrity of their pupils, than the most severe punishments that can be devised. we are not so unreasonable as to expect, with some theoretic writers on education, that tutors and parents should sacrifice the whole of their time to the convenience, amusement, and education of their pupils. this would be putting one set of beings "_sadly over the head of another_:" but if parents would, as much as possible, mix their occupations and recreations with those of their children, besides many other advantages which have been elsewhere pointed out with respect to the improvement of the understanding, they would secure them from many temptations to falsehood. they should be encouraged to talk freely of all their amusements to their parents, and to ask them for whatever they want to complete their little inventions. instead of banishing all the freedom of wit and humour, by the austerity of his presence, a preceptor, with superior talents, and all the resources of property in his favour, might easily become the _arbiter deliciarum_ of his pupils. when young people begin to taste the pleasures of praise, and to feel the strong excitations of emulation and ambition, their integrity is exposed to a new species of temptation. they are tempted, not only by the hope of obtaining "well-earned praise," but by the desire to obtain praise without the labour of earning it. in large schools, where boys assist each other in their literary exercises, and in all private families where masters are allowed to show off the accomplishments of young gentlemen and ladies, there are so many temptations to fraudulent exhibitions, that we despair of guarding against their consequences. the best possible method is to inspire children with a generous contempt for flattery, and to teach them to judge impartially of their own merits. if we are exact in the measure of approbation which we bestow, they will hence form a scale by which they can estimate the sincerity of other people. it is said[ ] that the preceptor of the duke of burgundy succeeded so well in inspiring him with disdain for unmerited praise, that when the duke was only nine years old, he one day called his tutor to account for having concealed some of his childish faults; and when this promising boy, and singular prince, was asked "why he disliked one of his courtiers," he answered, "because he flatters me." anecdotes like these will make a useful impression upon children. the life of cyrus, in the cyropædia; several passages in plutarch's lives; and the lively, interesting picture which sully draws of his noble-hearted master's love of truth, will strongly command the admiration of young people, if they read them at a proper time of life. we must, however, wait for this proper time; for if these things are read too early, they lose all their effect. without any lectures upon the beauty of truth, we may, now and then in conversation, when occurrences in real life naturally lead to the subject, express with energy our esteem for integrity. the approbation which we bestow upon those who give proofs of integrity, should be quite in a different tone, in a much higher style of praise, than any commendations for trifling accomplishments; hence children will become more ambitious to obtain a reputation for truth, than for any other less honourable and less honoured qualification. we will venture to give two or three slight instances of the unaffected truth and simplicity of mind, which we have seen in children educated upon these principles. no good-natured reader will suspect, that they are produced from ostentation: whenever the children, who are mentioned, see this in print, it is ten to one that they will not be surprised at their own good deeds. they will be a little surprised, probably, that it should have been thought worth while to record things, which are only what they see and feel every day. it is this character of every-day goodness which we wish to represent; not any fine thoughts, fine sentiments, or fine actions, which come out for holyday admiration. we wish that parents, in reading any of these little anecdotes, may never exclaim, "oh that's charming, that's surprising _for a child_!" but we wish that they may sometimes smile, and say "that's very natural; i am sure _that_ is perfectly true; my little boy, or my little girl, say and do just such things continually." march, . we were at clifton; the river avon ran close under the windows of our house in prince's place, and the children used to be much amused with looking at the vessels which came up the river. one night a ship, that was sailing by the windows, fired some of her guns; the children, who were looking out of the windows, were asked "why the light was seen when the guns were fired, before the noise was heard?" c----, who at this time was nine years old, answered, "because light comes quicker to the eye, than sound to the ear." her father was extremely pleased with this answer; but just as he was going to kiss her, the little girl said, "father, the reason of my knowing it, was, that l---- (her elder brother) just before had told it to me." there is, it is usually found, most temptation for children to deceive when they are put in competition with each other, when their ambition is excited by the same object; but if the transient glory of excelling in quickness, or abilities of any sort, be much inferiour to the permanent honour which is secured by integrity, there is, even in competition, no danger of unfair play. march, . one evening ---- called the children round the tea-table, and told them the following story, which he had just met with in "the curiosities of literature." when the queen of sheba went to visit king solomon, she one day presented herself before his throne with a wreath of real flowers in one hand, and a wreath of artificial flowers in the other hand; the artificial flowers were made so exactly to resemble nature, that at the distance at which they were held from solomon, it was scarcely possible that his eye could distinguish any difference between them and the natural flowers; nor could he, at the distance at which they were held from him, know them asunder by their smell. "which of these two wreaths," demanded the queen of sheba, "is the work of nature?" solomon reflected for some minutes; and how did he discover which was real? s---- (five years old) _replied_, "perhaps he went out of the room very _softly_, and if the woman stood near the door, as he went near her, he might _see better_." _father._ but solomon was not to move from his place. _s----._. then he might wait till the woman was tired of holding them, and then perhaps she might lay them down on the table, and then perhaps he might see better. _father._ well, c----, what do you say? _c----._ i think he might have looked at the stalks, and have seen which looked stiff like wire, and which were bent down by the weight of the natural flowers. _father._ well, h----? _h----._ (ten years old.) i think he might send for a great pair of bellows, and blow, blow, till the real leaves dropped off. _father._ but would it not have been somewhat uncivil of solomon to _blow, blow_, with his great pair of bellows, full in the queen of sheba's face? _h----._ (doubting.) yes, yes. well, then he might have sent for a telescope, or a magnifying glass, and looked through it; and then he could have seen which were the real flowers, and which were artificial. _father._ well, b----, and what do you say? _b----._ (eleven years old.) he might have waited till the queen moved the flowers, and then, if he listened, he might hear the rustling of the artificial ones. _father._ s----, have you any thing more to say? _s----_ repeated the same thing that b---- had said; his attention was dissipated by hearing the other children speak. during this pause, whilst s---- was trying to collect his thoughts, mrs. e---- whispered to somebody near her, and accidentally said the word _animals_ loud enough to be overheard. _father._ well, h----, you look as if you had something to say? _h----._ father, i heard my mother say something, and _that_ made me think of the rest. mrs. e---- shook hands with h----, and praised him for this instance of integrity. h---- then said that "he supposed solomon thought of some _animal_ which would feed upon flowers, and sent it to the two nosegays; and then the animal would stay upon the real flowers." _father._ what animal? _h----._ a fly. _father._ think again. _h----._ a bee. _father._ yes. the story says that solomon, seeing some bees hover about the window, ordered the window to be thrown open, and watched upon which wreath of flowers the bee settled. august st, . s---- (nine years old) when he was reading in ovid the fable of perseus and andromeda, said that he wondered that perseus fought with the monster; he wondered that perseus did not turn him into stone at once with his gorgon shield. we believe that s---- saw that his father was pleased with this observation. a few days afterwards somebody in the family recollected mr. e----'s having said, that when he was a boy he thought perseus a simpleton for not making use of the gorgon's head to turn the monster into stone. we were not sure whether s---- had heard mr. e---- say this or not; mr. e---- asked him whether he recollected to have heard any such thing. s---- answered, without hesitation, that he did remember it. when children have formed habits of speaking truth, and when we see that these habits are grown quite easy to them, we may venture to question them about their thoughts and feelings; this must, however, be done with great caution, but without the appearance of anxiety or suspicion. children are alarmed if they see that you are very anxious and impatient for their answer; they think that they hazard much by their reply; they hesitate, and look eagerly in your face, to discover by your countenance what they ought to think and feel, and what sort of answer you expect. all who are governed by any species of fear are disposed to equivocation. amongst the lower class of irish labourers, and _under-tenants_, a class of people who are much oppressed, you can scarcely meet with any man who will give you a direct answer to the most indifferent question; their whole ingenuity, and they have a great deal of ingenuity, is upon the _qui vive_ with you the instant you begin to speak; they either pretend not to hear, that they may gain time to think, whilst you repeat your question, or they reply to you with a fresh question, to draw out your remote meaning; for they, judging by their own habits, always think you have a remote meaning, and they never can believe that your words have no intention to ensnare. simplicity puzzles them much more than wit: for instance, if you were to ask the most direct and harmless question, as, "did it rain yesterday?" the first answer would probably be, "is it yesterday you mean?" "yes." "yesterday! no, please your honour, i was not at the bog at all yesterday. wasn't i after setting my potatoes? sure i did not know your honour wanted me at all yesterday. upon my conscience, there's not a man in the country, let alone all ireland, i'd sooner serve than your honour any day in the year, and they have belied me that went behind my back to tell your honour the contrary. if your honour sent after me, sure i never _got the word_, i'll take my affidavit, or i'd been at the bog." "my good friend, i don't know what you mean about the bog; i only ask you whether it rained yesterday." "please your honour, i couldn't get a car and horse any way, to draw home my little straw, or i'd have had the house thatched long ago." "cannot you give me a plain answer to this plain question? did it rain yesterday?" "oh sure, i wouldn't go to tell your honour a lie about the matter. sarrah much it rained yesterday after twelve o'clock, barring a few showers; but in the night there was a great fall of rain any how; and that was the reason prevented my going to dublin yesterday, for fear the mistress's band-box should get wet upon my cars. but, please your honour, if your honour's displeased about it, i'll not be waiting for a loading; i'll take my car and go to dublin to-morrow for the slates, if that be what your honour means. oh, sure i would not tell a lie for the entire price of the slates; i know very well it didn't rain to call rain yesterday. but after twelve o'clock, i don't say i noticed one way or other." in this perverse and ludicrous method of beating about the bush, the man would persist till he had fairly exhausted your patience; and all this he would do, partly from cunning, and partly from that apprehension of injustice which he has been taught to feel by hard experience. the effects of the example of their parents is early and most strikingly visible in the children of this class of people in ireland. the children, who are remarkably quick and intelligent, are universally addicted to lying. we do not here scruple or hesitate in the choice of our terms, because we are convinced that this unqualified assertion would not shock the feelings of the parties concerned. these poor children are not brought up to think falsehood a disgrace; they are praised for the ingenuity with which they escape from the cross examination of their superiors; and their capacities are admired in proportion to the _acuteness_, or, as their parents pronounce it, '_cuteness_, of their equivocating replies. sometimes (the _garçon_[ ]) the little boy of the family is despatched by his mother to the landlord's neighbouring bog or turf rick, to _bring home_, in their phraseology, in ours to _steal_, a few turf; if, upon this expedition, the little spartan be detected, he is tolerably certain of being whipped by his mother, or some of his friends, upon his return home. "ah, ye little brat! and what made ye tell the gentleman when he met ye, ye rogue, that ye were going to the rick? and what business had ye to go and belie me to his honour, ye unnatural piece of goods! i'll teach ye to make mischief through the country! so i will. have ye got no better sense and manners at this time o'day, than to behave, when one trusts ye abroad, so like an innocent?" an innocent in ireland, as formerly in england, (witness the rape of the lock) is synonymous with a fool. "and fools and innocents shall still believe." the associations of pleasure, of pride and gayety, are so strong in the minds of these well educated children, that they sometimes expect the very people who suffer by their dishonesty, should sympathise in the self-complacency they feel from roguery. a gentleman riding near his own house in ireland, saw a cow's head and fore feet appear at the _top of a ditch_, through a gap in the hedge by the road's side, at the same time he heard a voice alternately threatening and encouraging the cow; the gentleman rode up closer to the scene of action, and he saw a boy's head appear behind the cow. "my good boy," said he, "that's a fine cow." "oh, faith, that she is," replied the boy, "and i'm teaching her to get her own living, please your honour." the gentleman did not precisely understand the meaning of the expression, and had he directly asked for an explanation, would probably have died in ignorance; but the boy, proud of his cow, encouraged an exhibition of her talents: she was made to jump across the ditch several times, and this adroitness in breaking through fences, was termed "getting her own living." as soon as the cow's education is finished, she may be sent loose into the world to provide for herself; turned to graze in the poorest pasture, she will be able and willing to live upon the fat of the land. it is curious to observe how regularly the same moral causes produce the same temper and character. we talk of climate, and frequently attribute to climate the different dispositions of different nations: the climate of ireland, and that of the west indies, are not precisely similar, yet the following description, which mr. edwards, in his history of the west indies, gives of the propensity to falsehood amongst the negro slaves, might stand word for word for a character of that class of the irish people who, until very lately, actually, not metaphorically, called themselves _slaves_. "if a negro is asked even an indifferent question by his master, he seldom gives an immediate reply; but affecting not to understand what is said, compels a repetition of the question, that he may have time to consider, not what is the true answer, but what is the most politic one for him to give." mr. edwards assures us, that many of these unfortunate negroes learn cowardice and falsehood after they become slaves. when they first come from africa, many of them show "a frank and fearless temper;"[ ] but all distinction of character amongst the native africans, is soon lost under the levelling influence of slavery. oppression and terror necessarily produce meanness and deceit in all climates, and in all ages; and wherever fear is the governing motive in education, we must expect to find in children a propensity to dissimulation, if not confirmed habits of falsehood. look at the true born briton under the government of a tyrannical pedagogue, and listen to the language of _in-born_ truth; in the whining tone, in the pitiful evasions, in the stubborn falsehoods which you hear from the school-boy, can you discover any of that innate dignity of soul which is the boasted national characteristic? look again; look at the same boy in the company of those who inspire no terror; in the company of his school-fellows, of his friends, of his parents; would you know him to be the same being? his countenance is open; his attitude erect; his voice firm; his language free and fluent; his thoughts are upon his lips; he speaks truth without effort, without fear. where individuals are oppressed, or where they believe that they are oppressed, they combine against their oppressors, and oppose cunning and falsehood to power and force; they think themselves released from the compact of truth with their masters, and bind themselves in a strict league with each other; thus school-boys hold no faith with their schoolmaster, though they would think it shameful to be dishonourable amongst one another. we do not think that these maxims are the peculiar growth of schools; in private families the same feelings are to be found under the same species of culture: if preceptors or parents are unjust or tyrannical, their pupils will contrive to conceal from them their actions and their thoughts. on the contrary, in families where sincerity has been encouraged by the voice of praise and affection, a generous freedom of conversation and countenance appears, and the young people talk to each other, and to their parents, without distinction or reserve; without any distinction but such as superior esteem and respect dictate. these are feelings totally distinct from servile fear: these feelings inspire the love of truth, the ambition to acquire and to preserve character. the value of a character for truth, should be distinctly felt by children in their own family: whilst they were very young, we advised that their integrity should not be tempted; as they grow up, trust should by degrees be put in them, and we should distinctly explain to them, that our confidence is to be deserved before it can be given. our belief in any person's truth, is not a matter of affection, but of experience and necessity; we cannot doubt the assertions of any person whom we have found to speak uniformly the truth; we cannot believe any person, let us wish to do it ever so much, if we have detected him in falsehoods. before we have had experience of a person's integrity, we may hope, or take it for granted, that he is perfectly sincere and honest; but we cannot feel more than _belief upon trust_, until we have actually seen his integrity tried. we should not pretend that we have faith in our pupils before we have tried them; we may hope from their habits, from the examples they have seen, and from the advantageous manner in which truth has always been represented to them, that they will act honourably; this hope is natural and just, but confidence is another feeling of the mind. the first time we trust a child, we should not say, "i am sure you will not deceive me; i can trust you with any thing in the world." this is flattery or folly; it is paying beforehand, which is not the way to get business done; why cannot we, especially as we are teaching truth, say the thing that is--"i _hope_ you will not deceive me. if i find that you may be trusted, you know i shall be able to trust you another time: this must depend upon you, not entirely upon me." we must make ourselves certain upon these occasions, how the child conducts himself; nor is it necessary to use any artifice, or to affect, from false delicacy, any security that we do not feel; it is better openly to say, "you see, i do you the justice to examine carefully, how you have conducted yourself; i wish to be able to trust you another time." it may be said, that this method of strict inquiry reduces a trust to no trust at all, and that it betrays suspicion. if you examine evidently with the belief that a child has deceived you, certainly you betray injurious suspicion, and you educate the child very ill; but if you feel and express a strong desire to find that your pupil has conducted himself honourably, he will be glad and proud of the strictest scrutiny; he will feel that he has earned your future confidence, and this confidence, which he clearly knows how he has obtained, will be more valuable to him than all the belief upon trust which you could affect to feel. by degrees, after your pupil has taught you to depend upon him, your confidence will prevent the necessity of any examination into his conduct. this is the just and delightful reward of integrity: children know how to feel and understand it thoroughly: besides the many restraints from which our confidence will naturally relieve them, they feel the pride for being trusted; the honour of having a character for integrity: nor can it be too strongly impressed upon their minds, that this character must be preserved, as it was obtained, by their own conduct. if one link in the chain of confidence be broken, the whole is destroyed. indeed, where habits of truth are early formed, we may safely depend upon them. a young person, who has never deceived, would see, that the first step in falsehood costs too much to be hazarded. let this appear in the form of calculation, rather than of sentiment. to habit, to enthusiasm, we owe much of all our virtues--to reason more; and the more of them we owe to reason, the better. habit and enthusiasm are subject to sudden or gradual changes--but reason continues for ever the same. as the understanding unfolds, we should fortify all our pupil's habits; and virtuous enthusiasm, by the conviction of their utility, of their being essential to the happiness of society in general, and conducive immediately to the happiness of every individual. possessed of this conviction, and provided with substantial arguments in its support, young people will not be exposed to danger, either from sophistry or ridicule. ridicule certainly is not the test of truth; but it is a test which truth sometimes finds it difficult to stand. vice never "bolts her arguments" with more success, than when she assumes the air of raillery, and the tone of gayety. all vivacious young people are fond of wit; we do not mean children, for they do not understand it. those who have the best capacities, and the strictest habits of veracity, often appear to common observers absolutely stupid, from their aversion to any play upon words, and from the literal simplicity with which they believe every thing that is asserted. a remarkably intelligent little girl of four years old, but who had never in her own family been used to the common phrases which sometimes pass for humour, happened to hear a gentleman say, as he looked out of the window one rainy morning, "it rains cats and dogs to-day." the child, with a surprised, but believing look, immediately went to look out of the window to see the phenomenon. this extreme simplicity in childhood, is sometimes succeeded in youth by a strong taste for wit and humour. young people are, in the first place, proud to show that they understand them; and they are gratified by the perception of a new intellectual pleasure. at this period of their education, great attention must be paid to them, lest their admiration for wit and frolic should diminish their reverence and their love for sober truth. in many engaging characters in society, and in many entertaining books, deceit and dishonesty are associated with superior abilities, with ease and gayety of manners, and with a certain air of frank carelessness, which can scarcely fail to please. gil blas,[ ] tom jones, lovelace, count fathom, are all of this class of characters. they should not be introduced to our pupils till their habits of integrity are thoroughly formed; and till they are sufficiently skilful in analysing their own feelings, to distinguish whence their approbation and pleasure in reading of these characters arise. in books, we do not actually suffer by the tricks of rogues, or by the lies they tell. hence their truth is to us a quality of no value; but their wit, humour, and the ingenuity of their contrivances, are of great value to us, because they afford us entertainment. the most honest man in the universe may not have had half so many adventures as the greatest rogue; in a romance, the history upon oath of all the honest man's bargains and sales, law-suits and losses; nay, even a complete view of his ledger and day-book, together with the regular balancings of his accounts, would probably not afford quite so much entertainment, even to a reader of the most unblemished integrity and phlegmatic temper, as the adventures of gil blas, and jonathan wild, adorned with all the wit of le sage, and humour of fielding. when gil blas lays open his whole heart to us, and tells us all his sins, unwhipt of justice, we give him credit for making us his confidant, and we forget that this sincerity, and these liberal confessions, are not characteristic of the hero's disposition, but essential only to the novel. the novel writer could not tell us all he had to say without this dying confession, and inconsistent openness, from his accomplished villain. the reader is ready enough to forgive, having never been duped. when young people can make all these reflections for themselves, they may read gil blas with as much safety as the life of franklin, or any other the most moral performance. "tout est sain aux sains,"[ ] as madame de sevigne very judiciously observes, in one of her letters upon the choice of books for her grand-daughter. we refer for more detailed observations upon this subject to the chapter upon books. but we cannot help here reiterating our advice to preceptors, not to force the detestable characters, which are sometimes held up to admiration in ancient and modern history, upon the common sense, or, if they please, the moral feelings, of their pupils. the bad actions of _great_ characters, should not be palliated by eloquence, and fraud and villainy should never be explained away by the hero's or warrior's code; a code which confounds all just ideas of right and wrong. boys, in reading the classics, must read of a variety of crimes; but that is no reason that they should approve of them, or that their tutors should undertake to vindicate the cause of falsehood and treachery. a gentleman, who has taught his sons latin, has uniformly pursued the practice of abandoning to the just and prompt indignation of his young pupils all the ancient heroes who are deficient in moral honesty: his sons, in reading cornelius nepos, could not absolutely comprehend, that the treachery of themistocles or of alcibiades could be applauded by a wise and polished nation. xenophon has made an eloquent attempt to explain the nature of military good faith. cambyses tells his son, that, in taking advantage of an enemy, a man must be "crafty, deceitful, a dissembler, a thief, and a robber." oh jupiter! exclaims the young cyrus, what a man, my father, you say i must be! and he very sensibly asks his father, why, if it be necessary in some cases to ensnare and deceive men, he had not in his childhood been taught by his preceptors the art of doing harm to his fellow-creatures, as well as of doing them good. "and why," says cyrus, "have i always been punished whenever i have been discovered in practising deceit?" the answers of cambyses are by no means satisfactory upon this subject; nor do we think that the conversation between the old general and mr. williams,[ ] could have made the matter perfectly intelligible to the young gentleman, whose scrupulous integrity made him object to the military profession. it is certain, that many persons of strict honour and honesty in some points, on others are utterly inconsistent in their principles. thus it is said, that private integrity and public corruption frequently meet in the same character: thus some gentlemen are jockies, and they have a convenient latitude of conscience as jockies, whilst they would not for the universe cheat a man of a guinea in any way but in the sale of a horse: others in gambling, others in love, others in war, think all stratagems fair. we endeavour to think that these are all honourable men; but we hope, that we are not obliged to lay down rules for the formation of such moral prodigies in a system of practical education. we are aware, that with children[ ] who are educated at public schools, truth and integrity cannot be taught precisely in the same manner as in private families; because ushers and schoolmasters cannot pay the same hourly attention to each of their pupils, nor have they the command of all the necessary circumstances.--there are, however, some advantages attending the early commerce which numbers of children at public seminaries have with each other; they find that no society can subsist without truth; they feel the utility of this virtue, and, however they may deal with their masters, they learn to speak truth towards each other.--this partial species of honesty, or rather of honour, is not the very best of its kind, but it may easily be improved into a more rational principle of action. it is illiberal to assert, that any virtue is to be taught only by one process of education: many different methods of education may produce the same effects. men of integrity and honour have been formed both by private and public education; neither system should be exclusively supported by those who really wish well to the improvement of mankind. all the errours of each system should be impartially pointed out, and such remedies as may most easily be adopted with any hope of success, should be proposed. we think, that if parents paid sufficient attention to the habits of their children, from the age of three to seven years old, they would be properly prepared for public education; they would not then bring with them to public schools all that they have learned of vice and falsehood in the company of servants.[ ] we have purposely repeated all this, in hopes of impressing it strongly. may we suggest to the masters of these important seminaries, that greek and latin, and all the elegance of classical literature, are matters but of secondary consequence, compared with those habits of truth, which are essential to the character and happiness of their pupils? by rewarding the moral virtues more highly than the mere display of talents, a generous emulation to excel in these virtues may with certainty be excited. many preceptors and parents will readily agree, that bacon, in his "general distribution of human knowledge," was perfectly right not to omit that branch of philosophy, which his lordship terms "_the doctrine of rising in the world_." to this art, integrity at length becomes necessary; for talents, whether for business or for oratory, are now become so cheap, that they cannot alone ensure pre-eminence to their possessors.--the public opinion, which in england bestows celebrity, and necessarily leads to honour, is intimately connected with the public confidence. public confidence is not the same thing as popularity; the one may be won, the other must be earned. there is amongst all parties, who at present aim at political power, an unsatisfied demand for honest men. those who speculate in this line for their children, will do wisely to keep this fact in their remembrance during their whole education. we have delayed, from a full consciousness of the difficulty of the undertaking, to speak of the method of curing either the habits or the propensity to falsehood. physicians, for mental as well as bodily diseases, can give long histories of maladies; but are surprisingly concise when they come to treat of the method of cure. with patients of different ages, and different temperaments, to speak with due medical solemnity, we should advise different remedies. with young children, we should be most anxious to break the habits; with children at a more advanced period of their education, we should be most careful to rectify the principles. children, before they reason, act merely from habit, and without having acquired command over themselves, they have no power to break their own habits; but when young people reflect and deliberate, their principles are of much more importance than their habits, because their principles, in fact, in most cases, govern their habits. it is in consequence of their deliberations and reflections that they act; and, before we can change their way of acting, we must change their way of thinking. to break _habits_ of falsehood in young children, let us begin by removing the temptation, whatever it may be. for instance, if the child has the habit of denying that he has seen, heard, or done things which he has seen, heard, and done, we must not, upon any account, ever question him about any of these particulars, but we should forbear to give him any pleasure which he might hope to obtain by our faith in his assertions. without entering into any explanations, we should absolutely[ ] disregard what he says, and with looks of cool contempt, turn away without listening to his falsities. a total change of occupations, new objects, especially such as excite and employ the senses, will be found highly advantageous. sudden pleasure, from strong expressions of affection, or eloquent praise, whenever the child speaks truth, will operate powerfully in breaking his habits of equivocation. we do not advise parents to try sudden pain with children at this early age, neither do we advise bodily correction, or lasting _penitences_, meant to excite shame, because these depress and enfeeble the mind, and a propensity to falsehood ultimately arises from weakness and timidity. strengthen the body and mind by all means; try to give the pupils command over themselves upon occasions where they have no opportunities of deceiving: the same command of mind and courage, proceeding from the consciousness of strength and fortitude, may, when once acquired, be exerted in any manner we direct. a boy who tells a falsehood to avoid some trifling pain, or to procure some trifling gratification, would perhaps dare to speak the truth, if he were certain that he could bear the pain, or do without the gratification. without talking to him about truth or falsehood, we should begin by exercising him in the art of bearing and forbearing. the slightest trials are best for beginners, such as their fortitude can bear, for success is necessary to increase their courage. madame de genlis, in her adele and theodore, gives theodore, when he is about seven years old, a box of sugar-plums to take care of, to teach him to command his passions. theodore produces the untouched treasure to her mother, from time to time, with great self-complacency. we think this a good practical lesson. some years ago the experiment was tried, with complete success, upon a little boy between five and six years old. this boy kept raisins and almonds in a little box in his pocket, day after day, without ever thinking of touching them. his only difficulty was to remember at the appointed time, at the week's end, to produce them. the raisins were regularly counted from time to time, and were, when found to be right, sometimes given to the child, but not always. when, for several weeks, the boy had faithfully executed his trust, the time was extended for which he was to keep the raisins, and every body in the family expressed that they were now certain, before they counted the raisins, that they should find the number exact. this confidence, which was not pretended confidence, pleased the child, but the rest he considered as a matter of course. we think such little trials as these might be made with children of five or six years old, to give them early habits of exactness. the boy we have just mentioned, has grown up with a more unblemished reputation for truth, than any child with whom we were ever acquainted. this is the same boy who broke the looking-glass. when a patient, far advanced in his childhood, is yet to be cured of a propensity to deceive, the business becomes formidable. it is dangerous to set our vigilance in direct opposition to his cunning, and it is yet more dangerous to trust and give him opportunities of fresh deceit. if the pupil's temper is timid, fear has probably been his chief inducement to dissimulation. if his temper is sanguine, hope and success, and perhaps the pleasure of inventing schemes, or of outwitting his superiors, have been his motives. in one case we should prove to the patient, that he has nothing to fear from speaking the truth to us; in the other case we should demonstrate to him, that he has nothing to hope from telling us falsehoods. those who are pleased with the ingenuity of cunning, should have opportunities of showing their ingenuity in honourable employments, and the highest praise should be given to their successful abilities whenever they are thus exerted. they will compare their feelings when they are the objects of esteem, and of contempt, and they will be led permanently to pursue what most tends to their happiness. we should never deprive them of the hope of establishing a character for integrity; on the contrary, we should explain distinctly to them, that this is absolutely in their own power. examples from real life will strike the mind of a young person just entering into the world, much more than any fictitious characters, or moral stories; and strong indignation, expressed incidentally, will have more effect than any lectures prepared for the purpose. we do not mean, that any artifice should be used to make our lessons impressive; but there is no artifice in seizing opportunities, which must occur in real life, to exemplify the advantages of a good character. the opinions which young people hear expressed of actions in which they have no share, and of characters with whom they are not connected, make a great impression upon them. the horror which is shown to falsehood, the shame which overwhelms the culprit, they have then leisure to contemplate; they see the effects of the storm at a distance; they dread to be exposed to its violence, and they will prepare for their own security. when any such strong impression has been made upon the mind, we should seize that moment to connect new principles with new habits of action: we should try the pupil in some situation in which he has never been tried before, and where he consequently may feel hope of obtaining reputation, if he deserves it, by integrity. all reproaches upon his former conduct should now be forborne, and he should be allowed to feel, in full security, the pleasures and the honours of his new character. we cannot better conclude a chapter upon truth, than by honestly referring the reader to a charming piece of eloquence, with which mr. godwin concludes his essay upon deception and frankness.[ ] we are sensible how much we shall lose by the comparison: we had written this chapter before we saw his essay. footnotes: [ ] we refer to locke's thoughts concerning education, and rousseau's emilius, vol. i. [ ] v. the life of the duke of burgundy in madame de la fite's agreeable and instructive work for children, "contes, drames et entretiens, &c." [ ] pronounced gossoon. [ ] edwards's history west indies, vol. ii. [ ] see mrs. macaulay's letters on education. [ ] every thing is healthful to the healthy. [ ] see mr. williams's lectures on education, where xenophon is quoted, page , &c. vol. ii.--also, page . [ ] vide williams. [ ] v. servants and "public and private education." [ ] rousseau and williams. chapter ix. on rewards and punishments. to avoid, in education, all unnecessary severity, and all dangerous indulgence, we must form just ideas of the nature and use of rewards and punishments. let us begin with considering the nature of punishment, since it is best to get the most disagreeable part of our business done the first. several benevolent and enlightened authors[ ] have endeavoured to explain the use of penal laws, and to correct the ideas which formerly prevailed concerning public justice. punishment is no longer considered, except by the ignorant and sanguinary, as vengeance from the injured, or expiation from the guilty. we now distinctly understand, that the greatest possible happiness of the whole society must be the ultimate object of all just legislation; that the partial evil of punishment is consequently to be tolerated by the wise and humane legislator, only so far as it is proved to be necessary for the general good. when a crime has been committed, it cannot be undone by all the art, or all the power of man; by vengeance the most sanguinary, or remorse the most painful. the past is irrevocable; all that remains, is to provide for the future. it would be absurd, after an offence has already been committed, to increase the sum of misery in the world, by inflicting pain upon the offender, unless that pain were afterwards to be productive of happiness to society, either by preventing the criminal from repeating his offence, or by deterring others from similar enormities. with this double view of restraining individuals, by the recollection of past sufferings, from future crimes, and of teaching others, by public examples, to expect, and to fear, certain evils as the necessary consequences of certain actions hurtful to society, all wise laws are framed, and all just punishments are inflicted. it is only by the conviction that certain punishments are essential to the general security and happiness, that a person of humanity can, or ought, to fortify his mind against the natural feelings of compassion. these feelings are the most painful, and the most difficult to resist, when, as it sometimes unavoidably happens, public justice requires the total sacrifice of the happiness, liberty, or perhaps the life, of a fellow-creature, whose ignorance precluded him from virtue, and whose neglected or depraved education prepared him, by inevitable degrees, for vice and all its miseries. how exquisitely painful must be the feelings of a humane judge, in pronouncing sentence upon such a devoted being! but the law permits of no refined metaphysical disquisitions. it would be vain to plead the necessitarian's doctrine of an unavoidable connection between the past and the future, in all human actions; the same necessity compels the punishment that compels the crime; nor could, nor ought, the most eloquent advocate, in a court of justice, to obtain a criminal's acquittal by entering into a minute history of the errours of his education. it is the business of education to prevent crimes, and to prevent all those habitual propensities which necessarily lead to their commission. the legislator can consider only the large interests of society; the preceptor's view is fixed upon the individual interests of his pupil. fortunately both must ultimately agree. to secure for his pupil the greatest possible quantity of happiness, taking in the whole of life, must be the wish of the preceptor: this includes every thing. we immediately perceive the connection between that happiness, and obedience to all the laws on which the prosperity of society depends.--we yet further perceive, that the probability of our pupil's yielding not only an implicit, but an habitual, rational, voluntary, happy obedience, to such laws, must arise from the connection which _he_ believes, and feels, that there exists between his social duties and his social happiness. how to induce this important belief, is the question. it is obvious, that we cannot explain to the comprehension of a child of three or four years old, all the truths of morality; nor can we demonstrate to him the justice of punishments, by showing him that we give present pain to ensure future advantage. but, though we cannot demonstrate to the child that we are just, we may satisfy ourselves upon this subject, and we may conduct ourselves, during his non-age of understanding, with the scrupulous integrity of a guardian. before we can govern by reason, we can, by associating pain or pleasure with certain actions, give habits, and these habits will be either beneficial or hurtful to the pupil: we must, if they be hurtful habits, conquer them by fresh punishments, and thus we make the helpless child suffer for our negligence and mistakes. formerly in scotland there existed a law, which obliged every farrier who, through ignorance or drunkenness, pricked a horse's foot in shoeing him, to deposit the price of the horse until he was sound, to furnish the owner with another, and in case the horse could not be cured, the farrier was doomed to indemnify the injured owner. at the same rate of punishment, what indemnification should be demanded from a careless or ignorant preceptor? when a young child puts his finger too near the fire, he burns himself; the pain immediately follows the action; they are associated together in the child's memory; if he repeat the experiment often, and constantly with the same result, the association will be so strongly formed, that the child will ever afterwards expect these two things to happen together: whenever he puts his finger into fire, he will expect to feel pain; he will learn yet further, as these things regularly follow one another, to think one the cause, and the other the effect. he may not have words to express these ideas; nor can we explain how the belief that events, which have happened together, will again happen together, is by experience induced in the mind. this is a fact, which no metaphysicians pretend to dispute; but it has not yet, that we know of, been accounted for by any. it would be rash to assert, that it will not in future be explained, but at present we are totally in the dark upon the subject. it is sufficient for our purpose to observe, that this association of facts, or of ideas, affects the actions of all rational beings, and of many animals who are called irrational. would you teach a dog or a horse to obey you; do you not associate pleasure, or pain, with the things you wish that they should practise, or avoid? the impatient and ignorant give infinitely more pain than is necessary to the animals they educate. if the pain, which we would associate with any action, do not _immediately_ follow it, the child does not understand us; if several events happen nearly at the same time, it is impossible that a child can at first distinguish which are causes, and which are effects. suppose, that a mother would teach her little son, that he must not put his dirty shoes upon her clean sofa: if she frowns upon him, or speaks to him in an angry tone, at the instant that he sets his foot and shoe upon the sofa, he desists; but he has only learned, that putting a foot upon the sofa, and his mother's frown, follow each other; his mother's frown, from former associations, gives him perhaps, some pain, or the expectation of some pain, and consequently he avoids repeating the action which immediately preceded the frown. if, a short time afterwards, the little boy, forgetting the frown, accidentally gets upon the sofa _without his shoes_, no evil follows; but it is not probable, that he can, by this single experiment, discover that his shoes have made all the difference in the two cases. children are frequently so much puzzled by their confused experience of impunity and punishment, that they are quite at a loss how to conduct themselves. whenever our punishments are not made intelligible, they are cruel; they give pain, without producing any future advantage. to make punishment intelligible to children, it must be not only _immediately_, but _repeatedly_ and _uniformly_, associated with the actions which we wish them to avoid. when children begin to reason, punishment affects them in a different manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. they distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation; they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause, frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that the _will_ is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by circumstances, by passions, by persuasion, by caprice. it must be, however, by slow degrees, that they acquire any ideas of justice. they cannot know our views relative to their future happiness; their first ideas of the justice of the punishments we inflict, cannot, therefore, be accurate. they regulate these first judgments by the simple idea, that our punishments ought to be exactly the same always in the same circumstances; when they understand words, they learn to expect that our words and actions should precisely agree, that we should keep our promises, and _fulfil_ our threats. they next learn, that as they are punished for voluntary faults, they cannot justly be punished until it has been distinctly explained to them what is _wrong_ or _forbidden_, and what is _right_ or _permitted_. the words _right_ or _wrong_, and _permitted_ or _forbidden_, are synonymous at first in the apprehensions of children; and obedience and disobedience are their only ideas of virtue and vice. whatever we command to be done, or rather whatever we associate with pleasure, they imagine to be right; whatever we prohibit, provided we have uniformly associated it with pain, they believe to be wrong. this implicit submission to our authority, and these confined ideas of right and wrong, are convenient, or apparently convenient, to indolent or tyrannical governours; and they sometimes endeavour to prolong the reign of ignorance, with the hope of establishing in the mind an opinion of their own infallibility. but this is a dangerous, as well as an unjust, system. by comparison with the conduct and opinions of others, children learn to judge of their parents and preceptors; by reading and by conversation, they acquire more enlarged notions of right and wrong; and their obedience, unless it then arise from the conviction of their understandings, depends but on a very precarious foundation. the mere association of pleasure and pain, in the form of reward and punishment, with any given action, will not govern them; they will now examine whether there is any moral or physical _necessary_ connection between the action and punishment; nor will they believe the punishment they suffer to be a consequence of the action they have committed, but rather a consequence of their being obliged to submit to the will of those who are stronger or more powerful than they are themselves. unjust punishments do not effect their intended purpose, because the pain is not associated with the action which we would prohibit; but, on the contrary, it is associated with the idea of our tyranny; it consequently excites the sentiment of hatred towards us, instead of aversion to the forbidden action. when once, by reasoning, children acquire even a vague idea that those who educate them are unjust, it is in vain either to punish or reward them; if they submit, or if they rebel, their education is equally spoiled; in the one case they become cowardly, in the other, headstrong. to avoid these evils, there is but one method; we must early secure reason for our friend, else she will become our unconquerable enemy. as soon as children are able, in any instance, to understand the meaning and nature of punishment, it should, in that instance, be explained to them. just punishment is pain, inflicted with the reasonable hope of preventing greater pain in future. in a family, where there are several children educated together, or in public schools, punishments may be inflicted with justice for the sake of example, but still the reformation and future good of the sufferer is always a principal object; and of this he should be made sensible. if our practice upon all occasions correspond with our theory, and if children really perceive, that we do not punish them to gratify our own spleen or passion, we shall not become, even when we give them pain, objects of their hatred. the pain will not be associated with us, but, as it ought to be, with the fault which was the real cause of it. as much as possible we should let children feel the natural consequences of their own conduct. the natural consequence of speaking truth, is the being believed; the natural consequence of falsehood, is the loss of trust and confidence; the natural consequence of all the useful virtues, is esteem; of all the amiable virtues, love; of each of the prudential virtues, some peculiar advantage to their possessor. but plum-pudding is not the appropriate reward of truth, nor is the loss of it the natural or necessary consequence of falsehood. prudence is not to be rewarded with the affection due to humanity, nor is humanity to be recompensed with the esteem claimed by prudence. let each good and bad quality have its proper share of praise and blame, and let the consequences of each follow as constantly as possible. that young people may form a steady judgment of the danger of any vice, they must uniformly perceive, that certain painful consequences result from its practice. it is in vain that we inflict punishments, unless all the precepts and all the examples which they see, confirm them in the same belief. in the unfortunate son of peter the great, we have a striking instance of the effects of a disagreement between precept and example,[ ] which, in a less elevated situation, might have escaped our notice. it seems as if the different parts and stages of his education had been purposely contrived to counteract each other. till he was eleven years old, he was committed to the care of women, and of ignorant bigotted priests, who were continually inveighing against his father for the abolition of certain barbarous customs. then came baron huysen for his governour, a sensible man, who had just begun to make something of his pupil, when prince menzikof insisted upon having the sole management of the unfortunate alexey. prince menzikof abandoned him to the company of the lowest wretches, who encouraged him in continual ebriety, and in a taste for every thing mean and profligate. at length came euphrosyne, his finlandish mistress, who, upon his trial for rebellion, deposed to every angry expression which, in his most unguarded moments, the wretched son had uttered against the tyrannical father. amidst such scenes of contradictory experience, can we be surprised, that alexey petrovitch became feeble, ignorant, and profligate; that he rebelled against the father whom he had early been taught to fear and hate; that he listened to the pernicious counsels of the companions who had, by pretended sympathy and flattery, obtained that place in his confidence which no parental kindness had ever secured? those historians who are zealous for the glory of peter the great, have eagerly refuted, as a most atrocious calumny, the report of his having had any part in the mysterious death of his son. but how will they apologize for the czar's neglect of that son's education, from which all the misfortunes of his life arose? but all this is past for ever; the only advantage we can gain from recalling these circumstances, is a confirmation of this important principle in education; that, when precept and example counteract one another, there is no hope of success. nor can the utmost severity effect any useful purpose, whilst the daily experience of the pupil contradicts his preceptor's lessons. in fact, severity is seldom necessary in a well conducted education. the smallest possible degree of pain, which can, in any case, produce the required effect, is indisputably the just measure of the punishment which ought to be inflicted in any given case. this simple axiom will lead us to a number of truths, which immediately depend upon, or result from it. we must attend to every circumstance which can diminish the quantity of pain, without lessening the efficacy of punishment. now it has been found from experience, that there are several circumstances which operate uniformly to this purpose. we formerly observed, that the effect of punishment upon the minds of children, before they reason, depends much upon its _immediately_ succeeding the fault, and also upon its being certainly repeated whenever the same fault is committed. after children acquire the power of reasoning, from a variety of new motives, these laws, with respect to punishment, derive additional force. a trifling degree of pain will answer the purpose, if it be made inevitable; whilst the fear of an enormous proportion of uncertain punishment, will not be found sufficient to govern the imagination. the contemplation of a distant punishment, however severe, does not affect the imagination with much terror, because there is still a secret hope of escape in the mind. hence it is found from experience, that the most sanguinary penal laws have always been ineffectual to restrain from crimes.[ ] even if detection be inevitable, and consequent punishment equally inevitable, if punishment be not inflicted as soon as the criminal is convicted, it has been found that it has not, either as a preventative, or a public example, the same power upon the human mind. not only should the punishment be immediate after conviction, but detection should follow the offence as speedily as possible. without entering at large into the intricate arguments concerning identity and consciousness, we may observe, that the consciousness of having committed the offence for which he suffers, ought, at the time of suffering, to be strong in the offender's mind. though proofs of his identity may have been legally established in a court of justice; and though, as far as it relates to public justice, it matters not whether the offence for which he is punished has been committed yesterday or a year ago; yet, as to the effect which the punishment produces on the culprit's own mind, there must be a material difference. "i desire you to judge of me, not by what i was, but by what i am," said a philosopher, when he was reproached for some of his past transgressions. if the interval between an offence and its punishment be long, it is possible that, during this interval, a complete change may be made in the views and habits of the offender; such a change as shall absolutely preclude all probability of his repeating his offence. his punishment must then be purely for the sake of example to others. he suffers pain at the time, perhaps, when he is in the best social dispositions possible; and thus we punish the present good man for the faults of the former offender. we readily excuse the violence which a man in a passion may have committed, when, upon his return to his sober senses, he expresses contrition and surprise at his own excesses; he assures us, and we believe him, that he is now a perfectly different person. if we do not feel any material ill consequences from his late anger, we are willing, and even desirous, that the passionate man should not, in his sober state, be punished for his madness; all that we can desire, is to have some security against his falling into any fresh fit of anger. could his habits of temper be instantly changed, and could we have a moral certainty that his frenzy would never more do us any injury, would it not be malevolent and unjust to punish him for his old insanity? if we think and act upon these principles with respect to men, how much more indulgent should we be to children? indulgence is perhaps an improper word--but in other words, how careful should we be never to chain children to their dead faults![ ] children, during their education, must be in a continual state of progression; they are not the same to-day that they were yesterday; they have little reflection; their consciousness of the present occupies them; and it would be extremely difficult from day to day, or from hour to hour, to identify their minds. far from wishing that they should distinctly remember all their past thoughts, and that they should value themselves upon their continuing the same, we must frequently desire that they should forget their former errours, and absolutely change their manner of thinking. they should feel no interest in adhering to former bad habits or false opinions; therefore, their pride should not be roused to defend these by our making them a part of their standing character. the character of children is _to be_ formed--we should never speak of it as positively fixed. man has been defined to be a bundle of habits; till the bundle is made up, we may continually increase or diminish it. children who are zealous in defence of their own perfections, are of all others most likely to become stationary in their intellectual progress, and disingenuous in their temper. it would be in vain to repeat to them this sensible and elegant observation--"to confess that you have been in the wrong, is only saying, in other words, that you are wiser to-day than you were yesterday." this remark will rather pique, than comfort, the pride of those who are anxious to prove that they have been equally wise and immaculate in every day of their existence. it may be said, that children cannot too early be made sensible of the value of reputation, and they must be taught to connect the ideas of their past and present _selves_, otherwise they cannot perceive, for instance, why confidence should be placed in them in proportion to their past integrity; or why falsehood should lead to distrust. the force of this argument must be admitted; yet still we must consider the age and strength of mind in children in applying it to practice. truth is not instinctive in the mind, and the ideas of integrity, and of the advantages of reputation, must be very cautiously introduced, lest, by giving children too perfect a theory of morality, before they have sufficient strength of mind to adhere to it in practice, we may make them hypocrites, or else give them a fatal distrust of themselves, founded upon too early an experience of their own weakness, and too great sensibility to shame. shame, when it once becomes familiar to the mind, loses its effect; it should not, therefore, be used as a common punishment for slight faults. nor should we trust very early in education to the delicate secret influence of conscience; but we should take every precaution to prevent the necessity of having recourse to the punishment of disgrace; and we must, if we mean to preserve the power of conscience, take care that it be never disregarded with impunity. we must avoid opposing it to strong temptation; nor should we ever try the integrity of children, except in situations where we can be perfectly certain of the result of the experiment. we must neither run the risk of injuring them by unjust suspicions, nor unmerited confidence. by prudent arrangements, and by unremitted daily attention, we should absolutely prevent the possibility of deceit. by giving few commands, or prohibitions, we may avoid the danger of either secret or open disobedience. by diminishing temptations to do wrong, we act more humanely than by multiplying restraints and punishments. it has been found, that no restraints or punishments have proved adequate to ensure obedience to laws, whenever strong temptations, and many probabilities of evasion, combine in opposition to conscience or fear. the terrors of the law have been for years ineffectually directed against a race of beings called smugglers: yet smuggling is still an extensive, lucrative, and not universally discreditable, profession. let any person look into the history of the excise laws,[ ] and he will be astonished at the accumulation of penal statutes, which the active, but ineffectual, ingenuity of prohibitory legislators has devised in the course of about thirty years. open war was declared against all illegal distillers; yet the temptation to illegal distilling continually increased, in proportion to the heavy duties laid upon the fair trader. it came at length to a trial of skill between revenue officers and distillers, which could cheat, or which could detect, the fastest. the distiller had the strongest interest in the business, and he usually came off victorious. _coursing officers_, and _watching officers_ (once ten _watching officers_ were set upon one distiller) and _surveyors_ and _supervisors_, multiplied without end: the land in their fiscal maps was portioned out into _divisions_ and _districts_, and each gauger had the charge of all the distillers in his division: the watching officer went first, and the coursing officer went after him, and after him the supervisor; and they had _table-books_, and _gauging-rods_, and _dockets_, and _permits_; permits for sellers, and permits for buyers, and permits for foreign spirits, printed in red ink, and permits for british spirits, in black ink; and they went about night and day with their hydrometers, to ascertain the strength of spirits; and with their gauging-rods, to measure _wash_. but the pertinacious distiller was still flourishing; permits were forged; concealed pipes were fabricated; and the proportion between the _wash_ and _spirits_ was seldom legal. the commisioners complained, and the legislators went to work again. under a penalty of one hundred pounds, distillers were ordered to paint the words _distiller, dealer in spirits_, over their doors; and it was further enacted, that all the distillers should furnish, at their own expense, any kind of locks, and fastenings, which the revenue officers should require for locking up the doors of their own furnaces, the heads of their own stills, pumps, pipes, &c. first, suspicions fell upon the public distiller for exportation; then his utensils were locked up; afterwards the private distiller was suspected, and he was locked up: then they set him and his furnaces at liberty, and went back in a passion to the public distiller. the legislature condescended to interfere, and with a new lock and key, precisely described in an act of parliament, it was hoped all would be made secure. any person being a distiller, who should lock up his furnace or pipes with a key constructed differently from that which the act described, or any person making such illegal key for said distiller, was subject to the forfeiture of one hundred pounds. the padlock was never fixed upon the mind, and even the lock and key, prescribed by act of parliament, were found inefficacious. any common blacksmith, with a picklock in his possession, laughed at the combined skill of the two houses of parliament. this digression from the rewards and punishments of children, to the distillery laws, may, it is hoped, be pardoned, if the useful moral can be drawn from it, that, where there are great temptations to fraud, and continual opportunities of evasion, no laws, however ingenious, no punishments, however exorbitant, can avail. the history of coiners, venders, and utterers, of his majesty's coin, as lately detailed to us by respectable authority,[ ] may afford further illustration of this principle. there is no imminent danger of children's becoming either coiners or fraudulent distillers; but an ingenious preceptor will not be much puzzled in applying the remarks that have been made, to the subject of education. for the anticlimax, in descending from the legislation of men to the government of children, no apology is attempted. the fewer the laws we make for children, the better. whatever they may be, they should be distinctly expressed; the letter and spirit should both agree, and the words should bear but one signification, clear to all the parties concerned. they should never be subject to the ex post facto interpretation of an angry preceptor, or a cunning pupil; no loose general terms should permit tyranny, or encourage quibbling. there is said[ ] to be a chinese law, which decrees, that whoever does not show _proper respect_ to the sovereign, is to be punished with death. what is meant by the words _proper respect_, is not defined. two persons made a mistake in some account of an insignificant affair, in one of their court gazettes. it was declared, that _to lie_ in a court gazette, is to be wanting in _proper respect_ to the court. both the careless scribes were put to death. one of the princes of the blood inadvertently put some mark upon a memorial, which had been signed by the emperor bogdo chan. this was construed to be a want of _proper respect_ to bogdo chan the emperor, and a horrible persecution hence arose against the scrawling prince and his whole family. may no schoolmasters, ushers, or others, ever (even as far as they are able) imitate bogdo chan, and may they always define to their subjects, what they mean by _proper respect_! there is a sort of mistaken mercy sometimes shown to children, which is, in reality, the greatest cruelty. people, who are too angry to refrain from threats, are often too indolent, or too compassionate, to put their threats in execution. between their words and actions there is hence a manifest contradiction; their pupils learn from experience, either totally to disregard these threats, or else to calculate, from the various degrees of anger which appear in the threatener's countenance, what real probability there is of his being as good or as bad as his word. far from perceiving that punishment, in this case, is _pain given with the reasonable hope of making him wiser or happier_, the pupil is convinced, that his master punishes him only to gratify the passion of anger, to which he is unfortunately subject. even supposing that threateners are exact in fulfilling their threats, and that they are not passionate, but simply wish to avoid giving pain; they endeavour to excite the fears of their pupils as the means of governing them with the least possible pain. but with fear they excite all the passions and habits which are connected with that mean principle of action, and they extinguish that vigorous spirit, that independent energy of soul, which is essential to all the active and manly virtues. young people, who find that their daily pleasures depend not so much upon their own exertions as upon the humour and caprice of others, become absolute courtiers; they practise all the arts of persuasion, and all the crouching hypocrisy which can deprecate wrath, or propitiate favour. their notions of right and wrong cannot be enlarged; their recollection of the rewards and punishments of their childhood, is always connected with the ideas of tyranny and slavery; and when they break their own chains, they are impatient to impose similar bonds upon their inferiors. an argument has been used to prove, that in some cases anger is part of the _justice_ of punishment, because "mere _reproof_, without sufficient marks of _displeasure_ and _emotion_, affects a child very little, and is soon forgotten."[ ] it cannot be doubted, that the expression of indignation is a just consequence of certain faults, and the general indignation with which these are spoken of before young people, must make a strong and useful impression upon their minds. they reflect upon the actions of others; they see the effects which these produce upon the human mind; they put themselves in the situation alternately of the person who expresses indignation, and of him who suffers shame; they measure the fault and its consequences, and they resolve to conduct themselves so as to avoid that just indignation of which they dread to be the object. these are the general conclusions which children draw when they are _impartial spectators_; but where they are themselves concerned, their feelings and their reasonings are very different. if they have done any thing which they know to be wrong, they expect, and are sensible that they deserve, displeasure and indignation; but if any precise penalty is annexed to the fault, the person who is to inflict it, appears to them in the character of a judge, who is bound to repress his own feelings, and coolly to execute justice. if the judge both reproaches and punishes, he doubles the punishment. whenever indignation is expressed, no vulgar trivial penalties should accompany it; the pupil should feel that it is indignation against his fault, and not against himself; and that it is not excited in his preceptor's mind by any petty personal considerations. a child distinguishes between anger and indignation very exactly; the one commands his respect, the other raises his contempt as soon as his fears subside. dr. priestley seems to think that, "it is not possible to express displeasure with sufficient _force_, especially to a child, when a man is perfectly cool." may we not reply to this, that it is scarcely possible to express displeasure with sufficient _propriety_, especially to a child, when a man is in a passion? the propriety is, in this case, of at least as much consequence as the force of the reprimand.--the effect which the preceptor's displeasure will produce, must be, in some proportion, to the esteem which his pupil feels for him. if he cannot command his irascible passions, his pupil cannot continue to esteem him; and there is an end of all that fear of his disapprobation, which was founded upon esteem, and which can never be founded upon a stronger or a better basis. we should further consider, that the opinions of all the bystanders, especially if they be any of them of the pupil's own age, have great influence upon his mind. it is not to be expected that they should all sympathize equally with the angry preceptor; and we know, that whenever the indignation expressed against any fault, appears, in the least, to pass the bound of exact justice, the sympathy of the spectators immediately revolts in favour of the culprit; the fault is forgotten or excused, and all join in spontaneous compassion. in public schools, this happens so frequently, that the master's displeasure seldom affects the little community with any sorrow; combined together, they make each other amends for public punishments, by private pity or encouragement. in families, which are not well regulated, that is to say, in which the interests of all the individuals do not coalesce, the same evils are to be dreaded. neither indignation nor _shame_ can affect children in such schools, or such families; the laws and manners, public precept and private opinion, contradict one another. in a variety of instances in society, we may observe, that the best laws and the best principles are not sufficient to resist the combination of numbers. never attempt to affix infamy to a number of people at once, says a philosophic legislator.[ ] this advice showed that he perfectly understood the nature of the passion of shame. numbers keep one another in countenance; they form a society for themselves; and sometimes by peculiar phrases, and an appropriate language, confound the established opinions of virtue and vice, and enjoy a species of self-complacency independent of public opinion, and often in direct opposition to their former _conscience_. whenever any set of men want to get rid of the shame annexed to particular actions, they begin by changing the names and epithets which have been generally used to express them, and which they know are associated with the feelings of shame: these feelings are not awakened by the new language, and by degrees they are forgotten, or they are supposed to have been merely prejudices and habits, which _former methods of speaking_ taught people to reverence. thus the most disgraceful combinations of men, who live by violating and evading the laws of society, have all a peculiar phraseology amongst themselves, by which jocular ideas are associated with the most disreputable actions. those who live by depredation on the river thames, do not call themselves thieves, but _lumpers_ and _mudlarks_. coiners give regular mercantile names to the different branches of their trade, and to the various kinds of false money which they circulate: such as _flats_, or _figs_, or _fig-things_. unlicensed lottery wheels, are called _little goes_; and the men who are sent about to public houses to entice poor people into illegal lottery insurances, are called _morocco-men_: a set of villains, hired by these fraudulent lottery keepers, to resist the civil power during the drawing of the lottery, call themselves _bludgeon-men_; and in the language of robbers, a receiver of stolen goods is said to be _staunch_, when it is believed that he will go all lengths rather than betray the secrets of a gang of highwaymen.[ ] since words have such power in their turn over ideas, we must, in education, attend to the language of children as a means of judging of the state of their minds; and whenever we find, that in their conversation with one another, they have any slang, which turns moral ideas into ridicule, we may be certain that this must have arisen from some defect in their education. the power of shame must then be tried in some new shape, to break this false association of ideas. shame, in a new shape, affects the mind with surprising force, in the same manner as danger in a new form alarms the courage of veterans. an extraordinary instance of this, may be observed in the management of gloucester jail: a blue and yellow jacket has been found to have a most powerful effect upon men supposed to be dead to shame. the keeper of the prison told us, that the most unruly offenders could be kept in awe by the dread of a dress which exposed them to the ridicule of their companions, no new term having been yet invented to counteract the terrors of the yellow jacket. to prevent the mind from becoming insensible to shame, it must be very sparingly used; and the hope and possibility of recovering esteem, must always be kept alive. those who are excluded from hope, are necessarily excluded from virtue; the loss of reputation, we see, is almost always followed by total depravity. the cruel prejudices which are harboured against particular classes of people, usually tend to make the individuals who are the best disposed amongst these sects, despair of obtaining esteem; and, consequently, careless about deserving it. there can be nothing inherent in the knavish propensity of jews; but the prevailing opinion, that avarice, dishonesty and extortion, are the characteristics of a jew, has probably induced many of the tribe to justify the antipathy which they could not conquer. children are frequently confirmed in faults, by the imprudent and cruel custom which some parents have of settling early in life, that such a thing is natural; that such and such dispositions are not to be cured; that cunning, perhaps, is the characteristic of one child, and caprice of another. this general odium oppresses and dispirits: such children think it is in vain to struggle against nature, especially as they do not clearly understand what is meant by nature. they submit to our imputations, without knowing how to refute them. on the contrary, if we treat them with more good sense and benevolence, if we explain to them the nature of the human mind, and if we lay open to them the history of their own, they will assist us in endeavouring to cure their faults, and they will not be debilitated by indistinct, superstitious fears. at ten or eleven years old, children are capable of understanding some of the general principles of rational morality, and these they can apply to their own conduct in many instances, which, however trivial they may appear, are not beneath our notice. june , . s---- (nine years old) had lost his pencil; his father said to him, "i wish to give you another pencil, but i am afraid i should do you harm if i did; you would not take care of your things if you did not feel some inconvenience when you lose them." the boy's lips moved as if he were saying to himself, "i understand this; it is just." his father guessed that these were the thoughts that were passing in his mind, and asked whether he interpreted rightly the motion of the lips. "yes," said s----, "that was exactly what i was thinking." "then," said his father, "i will give you a bit of my own pencil this instant: all i want is to make the necessary impression upon your mind; that is all the use of punishment; you know we do not want to torment you." as young people grow up, and perceive the consequences of their own actions, and the advantages of credit and character, they become extremely solicitous to preserve the good opinion of those whom they love and esteem. they are now capable of taking the future into their view as well as the present; and at this period of their education, the hand of authority should never be hastily used; the voice of reason will never fail to make herself heard, especially if reason speak with the tone of affection. during the first years of childhood, it did not seem prudent to make any punishment lasting, because young children quickly forget their faults; and having little experience, cannot feel how their past conduct is likely to affect their future happiness: but as soon as they have more enlarged experience, the nature of their punishments should alter; if we have any reason to esteem or love them less, our contempt and displeasure should not lightly be dissipated. those who reflect, are more influenced by the idea of the duration, than of the intensity of any mental pain. in those calculations which are constantly made before we determine upon action or forbearance, some tempers estimate any evil which is likely to be but of short duration, infinitely below its real importance. young men, of sanguine and courageous dispositions, hence frequently act imprudently; the consequences of their temerity will, they think, soon be over, and they feel that they are able to support evil for a short time, however great it may be. anger, they know, is a short-lived passion, and they do not scruple running the hazard of exciting anger in the hearts of those they love the best in the world. the experience of lasting, sober disapprobation, is intolerably irksome to them; any inconvenience which continues for a length of time, wearies them excessively. after they have endured, as the consequence of any actions, this species of punishment, they will long remember their sufferings, and will carefully avoid incurring, in future, similar penalties. sudden and transient pain appears to be most effectual with persons of an opposite temperament. young people, of a torpid, indolent temperament, are much under the dominion of habit; if they happen to have contracted any disagreeable or bad habits, they have seldom sufficient energy to break them. the stimulus of sudden pain is necessary in this case. the pupil may be perfectly convinced, that such a habit ought to be broken, and may wish to break it most sincerely; but may yet be incapable of the voluntary exertion requisite to obtain success. it would be dangerous to let the habit, however insignificant, continue victorious, because the child would hence be discouraged from all future attempts to battle with himself. either we should not attempt the conquest of the habit, or we should persist till we have vanquished. the confidence, which this sense of success will give the pupil, will probably, in his own opinion, be thought well worthy the price. neither his reason nor his will was in fault; all he wanted, was strength to break the diminutive chains of habit; chains which, it seems, have power to enfeeble their captives exactly in proportion to the length of time they are worn. every body has probably found, from their own experience, how difficult it is to alter little habits in manners, pronunciation, &c. children are often teased with frequent admonitions about their habits of sitting, standing, walking, talking, eating, speaking, &c. parents are early aware of the importance of agreeable, graceful manners; every body who sees children, can judge, or think that they can judge, of their manners; and from anxiety that children should appear to advantage in company, parents solicitously watch all their gestures, and correct all their attitudes according to that image of the "_beau ideal_," which happens to be most fashionable. the most convenient and natural attitudes are not always the most approved. the constraint which children suffer from their obedience, obliges them at length to rest their tortured muscles, and to throw themselves, for relief, into attitudes the very reverse of those which they have practised with so much pain. hence they acquire opposite habits in their manners, and there is a continual struggle between these. they find it impossible to correct, instantaneously, the awkward tricks which they have acquired, and they learn _ineffectually_ to attempt a conquest over themselves; or else, which is most commonly the catastrophe, they learn to hear the exhortations and rebukes of all around them, without being stimulated to any degree of exertion.[ ] the same voices which lose their power on these trifling occasions, lose, at the same time, much of their general influence. more _power_ is wasted upon trifling defects in the manners of children, than can be imagined by any who have not particularly attended to this subject. if it be thought indispensably necessary to speak to children eternally about their manners, this irritating and disagreeable office should devolve upon somebody whose influence over the children we are not anxious to preserve undiminished. a little ingenuity in contriving the dress, writing desks, reading desks, &c. of children, who are any way defective in their shape, might spare much of the anxiety which is felt by their parents, and much of the bodily and mental pain which they alternately endure themselves. for these patients, would it not be rather more safe to consult the philosophic physician,[ ] than the dancing master who is not bound to understand either anatomy or metaphysics? every preventative which is discovered for any defect, either in manners, temper, or understanding, diminishes the necessity for punishment. punishments are _the abrupt, brutal resource of ignorance, frequently_,[ ] to cure the effects of former negligence. with children who have been reasonably and affectionately educated, scarcely any punishments are requisite. this is not an assertion hazarded without experience; the happy experience of several years, and of several children of different ages and tempers, justifies this assertion. as for corporeal punishments, they may be necessary where boys are to be _drilled_ in a given time into scholars; but the language of blows need seldom be used to reasonable creatures. the idea that it is disgraceful to be governed by force, should be kept alive in the minds of children; the dread of shame is a more powerful motive than the fear of bodily pain. to prove the truth of this, we may recollect that few people have ever been known to destroy themselves in order to escape from bodily pain; but numbers, to avoid shame, have put an end to their existence. it has been a question, whether mankind are most governed by hope or by fear, by rewards or by punishments? this question, like many others which have occasioned tedious debates, turns chiefly upon words. hope and fear are sometimes used to denote mixed, and sometimes unmixed, passions. those who speak of them as unmixed passions, cannot have accurately examined their own feelings.[ ] the probability of good, produces hope; the probability of evil, excites fear; and as this probability appears less or greater, more remote or nearer to us, the mind fluctuates between the opposite passions. when the probability increases on either side, so does the corresponding passion. since these passions seldom exist in absolute separation from one another, it appears that we cannot philosophically speak of either as an independent motive: to the question, therefore, "which governs mankind the most, hope or fear?" we cannot give an explicit answer. when we would determine upon the probability of any good or evil, we are insensibly influenced, not only by the view of the circumstances before us, but also by our previous habits; we judge not only by the general laws of human events, but also by our own individual experience. if we have been usually successful, we are inclined to hope; have we been accustomed to misfortunes, we are hence disposed to fear. "cæsar and his fortune are on board," exclaimed the confident hero to the mariners. hope excites the mind to exertion; fear represses all activity. as a preventative from vice, you may employ fear; to restrain the excesses of all the furious passions, it is useful and necessary: but would you rouse the energies of virtue, you must inspire and invigorate the soul with hope. courage, generosity, industry, perseverance, all the magic of talents, all the powers of genius, all the virtues that appear spontaneous in great minds, spring from hope. but how different is the hope of a great and of a little mind; not only are the objects of this hope different, but the passion itself is raised and supported in a different manner. a feeble person, if he presumes to hope, hopes as superstitiously as he fears; he keeps his attention sedulously fixed upon all the probabilities in his favour; he will not listen to any arguments in opposition to his wishes; he knows he is unreasonable, he persists in continuing so; he does not connect any idea of exertion with hope; his hope usually rests upon the exertions of others, or upon some fortuitous circumstances. a man of a strong mind, reasons before he hopes; he takes in, at one quick, comprehensive glance, all that is to be seen both for and against him; he is, from experience, disposed to depend much upon his own exertions, if they can turn the balance in his favour; he hopes, he acts, he succeeds. poets, in all ages, have celebrated the charms of hope; without her propitious influence, life, they tell us, would be worse than death; without her smiles, nature would smile in vain; without her promises, treacherous though they often prove, reality would have nothing to give worthy of our acceptance. we are not bound, however, to understand literally, the rhetoric of poets. hope is to them a beautiful and useful allegorical personage: sometimes leaning upon an anchor; sometimes "waving her golden hair;" always young, smiling, enchanting, furnished with a rich assortment of epithets suited to the ode, the sonnet, the madrigal, with a traditionary number of images and allusions; what more can a poet desire? men, except when they are poets, do not value hope as the first of terrestrial blessings. the action and energies which hope produces, are to many more agreeable than the passion itself; that feverish state of suspense, which prevents settled thought or vigorous exertion, far from being agreeable, is highly painful to a well regulated mind; the continued repetition of the same ideas and the same calculations, fatigues the mind, which, in reasoning, has been accustomed to arrive at some certain conclusion, or to advance, at least, a step at every effort. the exercise of the mind, in changing the views of its object, which is supposed to be a great part of the pleasure of hope, is soon over to an active imagination, which quickly runs through all the possible changes; or is this exercise, even while it lasts, so delightful to a man who has a variety of intellectual occupations, as it frequently appears to him who knows scarcely any other species of mental activity? the vacillating state of mind, peculiar to hope and fear, is by no means favourable to industry; half our time is generally consumed in speculating upon the reward, instead of earning it, whenever the value of that reward is not _precisely ascertainable_. in all occupations, where judgment or accurate observation is essential, if the reward of our labour is brought suddenly to excite our hope, there is an immediate interruption of all effectual labour; the thoughts take a new direction; the mind becomes tremulous, and nothing decisive can be done, till the emotions of hope and fear either subside or are vanquished. m. l'abbé chappe, who was sent by the king of france, at the desire of the french academy, to siberia, to observe the transit of venus, gives us a striking picture of the state of his own mind when the moment of this famous observation approached. in the description of his own feelings, this traveller may be admitted as good authority. a few hours before the observation, a black cloud appeared in the sky; the idea of returning to paris, after such a long and perilous journey, without having seen the transit of venus; the idea of the disappointment to his king, to his country, to all the philosophers in europe; threw him into a state of agitation, "which must have been felt to be conceived." at length the black cloud vanished; his hopes affected him almost as much as his fears had done; he fixed his telescope, saw the planet; his eye wandered over the immense space a thousand times in a minute; his secretary stood on one side with his pen in his hand; his assistant, with his eye fixed upon the watch, was stationed on the other side. the moment of the total immersion arrived; the agitated philosopher was seized with an universal shivering, and could scarcely command his thoughts sufficiently to secure the observation. the uncertainty of reward, and the consequent agitations of hope and fear, operate as unfavourably upon the moral as upon the intellectual character. the favour of princes is an uncertain reward. courtiers are usually despicable and wretched beings; they live upon hope; but their hope is not connected with exertion. those who court popularity, are not less despicable or less wretched; their reward is uncertain: what is more uncertain than the affection of the multitude? the proteus character of wharton, so admirably drawn by pope, is a striking picture of a man who has laboured through life with the vague _hope_ of obtaining universal applause. let us suppose a child to be educated by a variety of persons, all differing in their tastes and tempers, and in their notions of right and wrong; all having the power to reward and punish their common pupil. what must this pupil become? a mixture of incongruous characters; superstitious, enthusiastic, indolent, and perhaps profligate: superstitious, because his own contradictory experience would expose him to fear without reason; enthusiastic, because he would, from the same cause, form absurd expectations; indolent, because the _will_ of others has been the measure of his happiness, and his own exertions have never procured him any certain reward; profligate, because, probably from the confused variety of his moral lessons, he has at last concluded that right and wrong are but unmeaning words. let us change the destiny of this child, by changing his education. place him under the sole care of a person of an enlarged capacity, and a steady mind; who has formed just notions of right and wrong; and who, in the distribution of reward and punishment, of praise and blame, will be prompt, exact, invariable. his pupil will neither be credulous, rash, nor profligate; and he certainly will not be indolent; his habitual and his rational belief will, in all circumstances, agree with each other; his hope will be the prelude to exertion, and his fear will restrain him only in situations where action is dangerous. even amongst children, we must frequently have observed a prodigious difference in the quantity of hope and fear which is felt by those who have been well or ill educated. an ill educated child, is in daily, hourly, alternate agonies of hope and fear; the present never occupies or interests him, but his soul is intent upon some future gratification, which never pays him by its full possession. as soon as he awakens in the morning, he recollects some promised blessing, and, till the happy moment arrives, he is wretched in impatience: at breakfast he is to be blessed with some toy, that he is to have the moment breakfast is finished; and when he finds the toy does not delight him, he is _to be blessed_ with a sweet pudding at dinner, or with sitting up half an hour later at night than his usual bed-time. endeavour to find some occupation that shall amuse him, you will not easily succeed, for he will still anticipate what you are going to say or to do. "what will come next?" "what shall we do after this?" are, as mr. williams, in his able lectures upon education, observes, the questions incessantly asked by spoiled children. this species of idle, restless curiosity, does not lead to the acquisition of knowledge, it prevents the possibility of instruction; it is not the animation of a healthy mind, it is the debility of an over-stimulated temper. there is a very sensible letter in mrs. macaulay's book upon education, on the impropriety of filling the imagination of young people with prospects of future enjoyment: the foolish system of promising great rewards, and fine presents, she clearly shows creates habitual disorders in the minds of children. the happiness of life depends more upon a succession of small enjoyments, than upon great pleasures; and those who become incapable of tasting the moderately agreeable sensations, cannot fill up the intervals of their existence between their great delights. the happiness of childhood peculiarly depends upon their enjoyment of _little_ pleasures: of these they have a continual variety; they have perpetual occupation for their senses, in observing all the objects around them, and all their faculties may be exercised upon suitable subjects. the pleasure of this exercise is in itself sufficient: we need not say to a child, "look at the wings of this beautiful butterfly, and i will give you a piece of plum-cake; observe how the butterfly curls his proboscis, how he dives into the honeyed flowers, and i will take you in a coach to pay a visit with me, my dear. remember the pretty story you read this morning, and you shall have a new coat." without the new coat, or the visit, or the plum-cake, the child would have had sufficient amusement in the story and the sight of the butterfly's proboscis: the rewards, besides, have no natural connection with the things themselves; and they create, where they are most liked, a taste for factitious pleasures. would you encourage benevolence, generosity, or prudence, let each have its appropriate reward of affection, esteem, and confidence;[ ] but do not by ill-judged bounties attempt to force these virtues into premature display. the rewards which are given to benevolence and generosity in children, frequently encourage selfishness, and sometimes teach them cunning. lord kames tells us a story, which is precisely a case in point. two boys, the sons of the earl of elgin, were permitted by their father to associate with the poor boys in the neighbourhood of their father's house. one day, the earl's sons being called to dinner, a lad who was playing with them, said that he would wait until they returned--"there is no dinner for me at home," said the poor boy. "come with us, then," said the earl's sons. the boy refused, and when they asked him if he had any money to buy a dinner, he answered, "no." "papa," said the eldest of the young gentlemen when he got home, "what was the price of the silver buckles you gave me?" "five shillings." "let me have the money, and i'll give you the buckles." it was done accordingly, says lord kames. the earl, inquiring privately, found that the money was given to the lad _who had no dinner_. the buckles were returned, and the boy was highly commended for being kind to his companion. the commendations were just, but the buckles should not have been returned: the boy should have been suffered steadily to abide by his own bargain; he should have been let to feel the pleasure, and pay the exact price of his own generosity. if we attempt to teach children that they can be generous, without giving up some of their own pleasures for the sake of other people, we attempt to teach them what is false. if we once make them amends for any sacrifice they have made, we lead them to expect the same remuneration upon a future occasion; and then, in fact, they act with a direct view to their own interest, and govern themselves by the calculations of prudence, instead of following the dictates of benevolence. it is true, that if we speak with accuracy, we must admit, that the most benevolent and generous persons act from the hope of receiving pleasure, and their enjoyment is more exquisite than that of the most refined selfishness; in the language of m. de rochefoucault, we should therefore be forced to acknowledge, that the most benevolent is always the most selfish person. this seeming paradox is answered, by observing, that the epithet _selfish_ is given to those who prefer pleasures in which other people have no share; we change the meaning of words when we talk of its being selfish to like the pleasures of sympathy or benevolence, because these pleasures cannot be confined solely to the idea of self. when we say that a person pursues his own interest more by being generous than by being covetous, we take into the account the general sum of his agreeable feelings; we do not balance prudentially his loss or gain upon particular occasions. the generous man may himself be convinced, that the sum of his happiness is more increased by the feelings of benevolence, than it could be by the gratification of avarice; but, though his understanding may perceive the demonstration of this moral theorem, though it is the remote principle of his whole conduct, it does not occur to his memory in the form of a prudential aphorism, whenever he is going to do a generous action. it is essential to our ideas of generosity, that no such reasoning should, at that moment, pass in his mind; we know that the feelings of generosity are associated with a number of enthusiastic ideas; we can sympathize with the virtuous insanity of the man who forgets himself whilst he thinks of others; we do not so readily sympathize with the cold strength of mind of the person, who, deliberately preferring _the greatest possible share of happiness_, is benevolent by rule and measure. whether we are just or not, in refusing our sympathy to the man of reason, and in giving our spontaneous approbation to the man of enthusiasm, we shall not here examine. but the reasonable man, who has been convinced of this propensity in human nature, will take it into his calculations; he will perceive, that he loses, in losing the pleasure of sympathy, part of the sum total of his possible happiness; he will consequently wish, that he could add this item of pleasure to the credit side of his account. this, however, he cannot accomplish, because, though he can by reason correct his calculations, it is not in the power, even of the most potent reason, suddenly to break habitual associations; much less is it in the power of cool reason to conjure up warm enthusiasm. yet in this case, enthusiasm _is the thing required_. what the man of reason cannot do for himself after his associations are strongly formed, might have been easily accomplished in his early education. he might have been taught the same general principles, but with different habits. by early associating the pleasures of sympathy, and praise, and affection with all generous and benevolent actions, his parents might have joined these ideas so forcibly in his mind, that the one set of ideas should never recur without the other. whenever the words benevolence or generosity were pronounced, the feelings of habitual pleasure would recur; and he would, independently of reason, desire from association to be generous. when enthusiasm is fairly justified by reason, we have nothing to fear from her vehemence. in rewarding children for the prudential virtues, such as order, cleanliness, economy, temperance, &c. we should endeavour to make the rewards the immediate consequence of the virtues themselves; and at the same time, approbation should be shown in speaking of these useful qualities. a gradation must, however, always be observed in our praises of different virtues; those that are the most useful to society, as truth, justice and humanity, must stand the highest in the scale; those that are most agreeable, claim the next place. those good qualities, which must wait a considerable time for their reward, such as perseverance, prudence, &c. we must not expect early from young people. till they have had experience, how can they form any idea about the future? till they have been punctually rewarded for their industry, or for their prudence, they do not feel the value of prudence and perseverance. time is necessary to all these lessons, and those who leave time out in their calculations, will always be disappointed in whatever plan of education they may pursue. many, to whom the subject is familiar, will be fatigued, probably, by the detailed manner in which it has been thought necessary to explain the principles by which we should guide ourselves in the distribution of rewards and punishments to children. those who quickly seize, and apply, general ideas, cannot endure, with patience, the tedious minuteness of didactic illustration. those who are actually engaged in _practical education_, will not, on the contrary, be satisfied with general precepts; and, however plausible any theory may appear, they are well aware that its utility must depend upon a variety of small circumstances, to which writers of theories often neglect to advert. at the hazard of being thought tedious, those must be minute in explanation who desire to be generally useful. an old french writer,[ ] more remarkable for originality of thought, than for the graces of style, was once reproached _by a friend_ with the frequent repetitions which were to be found in his works. "name them to me," said the author. the critic, with obliging precision, mentioned all the ideas which had most frequently recurred in the book. "i am satisfied," replied the honest author; "you remember my ideas; i repeated them so often to prevent you from forgetting them. without my repetitions, we should never have succeeded." footnotes: [ ] v. the inquirer, p. . [ ] beccaria, voltaire, blackstone, &c. [ ] see cox's travels, vol. ii. . [ ] see beccaria, blackstone, colquhoun. [ ] mezentius. _virgil._ [ ] v. an enquiry into the principles of taxation, p. , published in . [ ] colquhoun. on the police of the metropolis. [ ] v. the grand instructions to the commissioners appointed to frame a new code of laws for the russian empire, p. , said to be drawn up by the late lord mansfield. [ ] v. dr. priestley's miscellaneous observations relating to education, sect. vii. of correction, p. . [ ] v. code of russian laws [ ] colquhoun. [ ] see the judicious locke's observations upon the subject of _manners_, section of his valuable treatise on education. [ ] see vol. ii. of zoonomia. [ ] we believe this is williams's idea. [ ] hume's dissertation on the passions. [ ] see locke, and an excellent little essay of madame de lambert's. [ ] the abbe st. pierre. see his eloge by d'alembert. chapter x. on sympathy and sensibility. the artless expressions of sympathy and sensibility in children, are peculiarly pleasing; people who, in their commerce with the world, have been disgusted and deceived by falsehood and affectation, listen with delight to the genuine language of nature. those who have any interest in the education of children, have yet a higher sense of pleasure in observing symptoms of their sensibility; they anticipate the future virtues which early sensibility seems certainly to promise; the future happiness which these virtues will diffuse. nor are they unsupported by philosophy in these sanguine hopes. no theory was ever developed with more ingenious elegance, than that which deduces all our moral sentiments from sympathy. the direct influence of sympathy upon all social beings, is sufficiently obvious, and we immediately perceive its necessary connection with compassion, friendship, and benevolence; but the subject becomes more intricate when we are to analyse our sense of propriety and justice; of merit and demerit; of gratitude and resentment; self-complacency or remorse; ambition and shame.[ ] we allow, without hesitation, that a being destitute of sympathy, could never have any of these feelings, and must, consequently, be incapable of all intercourse with society; yet we must at the same time perceive, that a being endowed with the most exquisite sympathy, must, without the assistance and education of reason, be, if not equally incapable of social intercourse, far more dangerous to the happiness of society. a person governed by sympathy alone, must be influenced by the bad as well as by the good passions of others; he must feel resentment with the angry man; hatred with the malevolent; jealousy with the jealous; and avarice with the miser: the more lively his sympathy with these painful feelings, the greater must be his misery; the more forcibly he is impelled to action by this sympathetic influence, the greater, probably, must be his imprudence and his guilt. let us even suppose a being capable of sympathy only with the best feelings of his fellow-creatures, still, without the direction of reason, he would be a nuisance in the world; his pity would stop the hand, and overturn the balance of justice; his love would be as dangerous as his pity; his gratitude would exalt his benefactor at the expense of the whole human race; his sympathy with the rich, the prosperous, the great, and the fortunate, would be so sudden, and so violent, as to leave him no time for reflection upon the consequences of tyranny, or the miseries occasioned by monopoly. no time for reflection, did we say? we forgot that we were speaking of a being destitute of the reasoning faculty! such a being, no matter what his virtuous sympathies might be, must act either like a madman or a fool. on sympathy we cannot depend, either for the correctness of a man's moral sentiments, or for the steadiness of his moral conduct. it is very common to talk of the excellence of a person's heart, of the natural goodness of his disposition; when these expressions distinctly mean any thing, they must refer to natural sympathy, or a superior degree of sensibility. experience, however, does not teach us, that sensibility and virtue have any certain connection with each other. no one can read the works of sterne, or of rousseau, without believing these men to have been endowed with extraordinary sensibility; yet, who would propose their conduct in life as a model for imitation? that quickness of sympathy with present objects of distress, which constitutes compassion, is usually thought a virtue, but it is a virtue frequently found in persons of an abandoned character. mandeville, in his essay upon charity schools, puts this in a strong light. "should any one of us," says he, "be locked up in a ground room, where, in a yard joining to it, there was a thriving good humoured child at play, of two or three years old, so near us, that through the grates of the window we could almost touch it with our hands; and if, whilst we took delight in the harmless diversion, and imperfect prattle, of the innocent babe, a nasty overgrown sow should come in upon the child, set it a screaming, and frighten it out of its wits; it is natural to think that this would make us uneasy, and that with crying out, and making all the menacing noise we could, we should endeavour to drive the sow away--but if this should happen to be an half-starved creature, that, mad with hunger, went roaming about in quest of food, and we should behold the ravenous brute, in spite of our cries, and all the threatening gestures we could think of, actually lay hold of the helpless infant, destroy, and devour it;--to see her widely open her destructive jaws, and the poor lamb beat down with greedy haste; to look on the defenceless posture of tender limbs first trampled upon, then torn asunder; to see the filthy snout digging in the yet living entrails, suck up the smoking blood, and now and then to hear the crackling of the bones, and the cruel animal grunt with savage pleasure over the horrid banquet; to hear and see all this, what torture would it give the soul beyond expression!****** not only a man of humanity, of good morals, and commiseration, but likewise an highwayman, an house-breaker, or a murderer, could feel anxieties on such an occasion." amongst those monsters, who are pointed out by the historian to the just detestation of all mankind, we meet with instances of casual sympathy and sensibility; even their vices frequently prove to us, that they never became utterly indifferent to the opinion and feelings of their fellow-creatures. the dissimulation, jealousy, suspicion, and cruelty of tiberius, originated, perhaps, more in his anxiety about the opinions which were formed of his character, than in his fears of any conspiracies against his life. the _"judge within," the habit of viewing his own conduct in the light in which it was beheld by the impartial spectator_, prompted him to new crimes; and thus his unextinguished sympathy, and his exasperated sensibility, drove him to excesses, from which a more torpid temperament might have preserved him.[ ] when, upon his presenting the sons of germanicus to the senate, tiberius beheld the tenderness with which these young men were received, he was moved to such an agony of jealousy, as instantly to beseech the senate that he might resign the empire. we cannot attribute either to policy or fear, this strong emotion, because we know that the senate was at this time absolutely at the disposal of tiberius, and the lives of the sons of germanicus depended upon his pleasure. the desire to excel, according to "smith's theory of moral sentiments," is to be resolved principally into our love of the sympathy of our fellow-creatures. we wish for their sympathy, either in our success, or in the pleasure we feel in superiority. the desire for this refined modification of sympathy, may be the motive of good and great actions; but it cannot be trusted as a moral principle. nero's love of sympathy, made him anxious to be applauded on the stage as a fiddler and a buffoon. tiberius banished one of his philosophic courtiers, and persecuted him till the unfortunate man laid violent hands upon himself, merely because he had discovered that the emperour read books in the morning to prepare himself with questions for his literary society at night. dionysius, the tyrant of syracuse, sued in the most abject manner for an olympic crown, and sent a critic to the galleys for finding fault with his verses. had not these men a sufficient degree of sensibility to praise, and more than a sufficient desire for the sympathy of their fellow-creatures? it is not from any perverse love of sophistry, that the word sensibility has been used in these instances instead of _irritability_, which seems better to characterize the temper of a dionysius, or a tiberius; but, in fact, irritability, in common language, merely denotes an excessive or ill governed degree of sensibility. the point of excess must be marked: sympathy must be regulated by education, and consequently the methods of directing sensibility to useful and amiable purposes, must be anxiously studied by all who wish either for the happiness or virtue of their pupils. long before children can understand reasoning, they can feel sympathy; during this early period of their education, example and habit, slight external circumstances, and the propensity to imitation, govern their thoughts and actions. imitation is the involuntary effect of sympathy in children; hence those who have the most sympathy, are most liable to be improved or injured by early examples. examples of the malevolent passions, should therefore be most carefully excluded from the sight of those who have yet no choice in their sympathy; expressions of kindness and affection in the countenance, the voice, the actions, of all who approach, and of all who have the care of infants, are not only immediately and evidently agreeable to the children, but ought also to be used as the best possible means of exciting benevolent sympathies in their mind. children, who habitually meet with kindness, habitually feel complacency; that species of instinctive, or rather of associated affection, which always rises in the mind from the recollection of past pleasures, is immediately excited in such children by the sight of their parents. by an easy transition of ideas, they expect the same benevolence, even from strangers, which they have experienced from their friends, and their sympathy naturally prepares them to wish for society; this wish is often improperly indulged. at the age when children begin to unfold their ideas, and to express their thoughts in words, they are such interesting and entertaining companions, that they attract a large portion of our daily attention: we listen eagerly to their simple observations; we enter into their young astonishment at every new object; we are delighted to watch all their emotions; we help them with words to express their ideas; we anxiously endeavour to understand their imperfect reasonings, and are pleased to find, or put them in the right. this season of universal smiles and courtesy, is delightful to children whilst it lasts, but it soon passes away; they soon speak without exciting any astonishment, and instead of meeting with admiration for every attempt to express an idea, they are soon repulsed for troublesome volubility; even when they talk sense, they are suffered to talk unheard, or else they are checked for unbecoming presumption. children feel this change in public opinion and manners most severely; they are not sensible of any change in themselves, except, perhaps, they are conscious of having improved both in sense and language. this unmerited loss of their late gratuitous allowance of sympathy, usually operates unfavourably upon the temper of the sufferers; they become shy and silent, and reserved, if not sullen; they withdraw from our capricious society, and they endeavour to console themselves with other pleasures. it is difficult to them to feel contented with their own little occupations and amusements, for want of the spectators and the audience which used to be at their command. children of a timid temper, or of an indolent disposition, are quite dispirited and bereft of all energy in these circumstances; others, with greater vivacity, and more voluntary exertion, endeavour to supply the loss of universal sympathy, by the invention of independent occupations; but they feel anger and indignation, when they are not rewarded with any smiles or any praise for their "virtuous toil." they naturally seek for new companions, either amongst children of their own age, or amongst complaisant servants. immediately all the business of education is at a stand; for neither these servants, nor these playfellows, are capable of becoming their instructers; nor can tutors hope to succeed, who have transferred their power over the pleasures, and consequently over the affections of their pupils. sympathy now becomes the declared enemy of all the constituted authorities. what chance is there of obedience or of happiness, under such a government? would it not be more prudent to prevent, than to complain of these evils? sympathy is our first, best friend, in education, and by judicious management, might long continue our faithful ally. instead of lavishing our smiles and our attention upon young children for a short period, just at that age when they are amusing playthings, should we not do more wisely if we reserved some portion of our kindness a few years longer? by a proper _economy_, our sympathy may last for many years, and may continually contribute to the most useful purposes. instead of accustoming our pupils early to such a degree of our attention as cannot be supported long on our parts, we should rather suffer them to feel a little ennui, at that age when they can have but few independent or useful occupations. we should employ ourselves in our usual manner, and converse, without allowing children to interrupt us with frivolous prattle; but whenever they ask sensible questions, make just observations, or show a disposition to acquire knowledge, we should assist and encourage them with praise and affection; gradually as they become capable of taking any part in conversation, they should be admitted into society, and they will learn of themselves, or we may teach them, that useful and agreeable qualities are those by which they must secure the pleasures of sympathy. esteem, being associated with sympathy, will increase its value, and this connection should be made as soon, and kept as sacred, in the mind as possible. with respect to the sympathy which children feel for each other, it must be carefully managed, or it will counteract, instead of assisting us, in education. it is natural, that those who are placed nearly in the same circumstances, should feel alike, and sympathize with one another; but children feel only for the present; they have few ideas of the future; and consequently all that they can desire, either for themselves, or for their companions, is what will _immediately_ please. education looks to the future, and frequently we must ensure future advantage, even at the expense of present pain or restraint. the companion and the tutor then, supposing each to be equally good and equally kind, must command, in a very different degree, the sympathy of the child. it may, notwithstanding, be questioned, whether those who are constant companions in their idle hours, when they are _very_ young, are likely to be either as fond of one another when they grow up, or even as happy whilst they are children, as those are who spend less time together. whenever the humours, interests, and passions of others cross our own, there is an end of sympathy, and this happens almost every hour in the day with children; it is generally supposed, that they learn to live in friendship with each other, and to bear with one another's little faults habitually; that they even reciprocally cure these faults, and learn, by experience, those principles of honour and justice on which society depends. we may be deceived in this reasoning by a false analogy. we call the society of children, _society in miniature_; the proportions of the miniature are so much altered, that it is by no means an accurate resemblance of that which exists in the _civilized_ world. amongst children of different ages, strength, and talents, there must always be tyranny, injustice, and that worst species of inequality, which arises from superior force on the one side, and abject timidity on the other. of this, the spectators of juvenile disputes and quarrels are sometimes sensible, and they hastily interfere and endeavour to part the combatants, by pronouncing certain moral sentences, such as, "good boys never quarrel; brothers must love and help one another." but these sentences seldom operate as a charm upon the angry passions; the parties concerned, hearing it asserted that they must love one another, at the very instant when they happen to feel that they cannot, are still further exasperated, and they stand at bay, sullen in hatred, or approach hypocritical in reconciliation. it is more easy to prevent occasions of dispute, than to remedy the bad consequences which petty altercations produce. young children should be kept asunder at all times, and in all situations, in which it is necessary, or probable, that their appetites and passions should be in direct competition. two hungry children, with their eager eyes fixed upon one and the same bason of bread and milk, do not sympathize with each other, though they have the same sensations; each perceives, that if the other eats the bread and milk, he cannot eat it. hunger is more powerful than sympathy; but satisfy the hunger of one of the parties, and immediately he will begin to feel for his companion, and will wish that _his_ hunger should also be satisfied. even mr. barnet, the epicure, who is so well described in moore's excellent novel,[ ] _after_ he has crammed himself to the throat, asks his wife to "try to eat a bit." intelligent preceptors will apply the instance of the bason of bread and milk, in a variety of apparently dissimilar circumstances. we may observe, that the more quickly children reason, the sooner they discover how far their interests are any ways incompatible with the interests of their companions. the more readily a boy calculates, the sooner he will perceive, that if he were to share his bason of bread and milk equally with a dozen of his companions, his own portion must be small. the accuracy of his mental division would prevent him from offering to part with that share which, perhaps, a more ignorant accountant would be ready to surrender at once, without being on that account more generous. children, who are accurate observers of the countenance, and who have a superior degree of penetration, discover very early the symptoms of displeasure, or of affection, in their friends; they also perceive quickly the dangers of rivalship from their companions. if experience convinces them, that they must lose in proportion as their companions gain, either in fame or in favour, they will necessarily dislike them as rivals; their hatred will be as vehement, as their love of praise and affection is ardent. thus children, who have the most lively sympathy, are, unless they be judiciously educated, the most in danger of feeling early the malevolent passions of jealousy and envy. it is inhuman, and in every point of view unjustifiable in us, to excite these painful feelings in children, as we too often do, by the careless or partial distribution of affection and applause. exact justice will best prevent jealousy; each individual submits to justice, because each, in turn, feels the benefit of its protection. some preceptors, with benevolent intentions, labour to preserve a perfect equality amongst their pupils, and, from the fear of exciting envy in those who are inferior, avoid uttering any encomiums upon superior talents and merit. this management seldom succeeds; the truth cannot be concealed; those who feel their own superiority, make painful reflections upon the injustice done to them by the policy of their tutors; those who are sensible of their own inferiority, are not comforted by the courtesy and humiliating forbearance with which they are treated. it is, therefore, best to speak the plain truth; to give to all their due share of affection and applause: at the same time, we should avoid blaming one child at the moment when we praise another: we should never put our pupils in contrast with one another; nor yet should we deceive them as to their respective excellences and defects. our comparison should rather be made between what the pupil _has been_, and what he _is_, than between what he _is_, and what any body else _is not_.[ ] by this style of praise we may induce children to become emulous of their former selves, instead of being envious of their competitors. without deceit or affectation, we may also take care to associate general pleasure in a family with particular commendations: thus, if one boy is remarkable for prudence, and another for generosity, we should not praise the generosity of the one at the expense of the prudence of the other, but we should give to each virtue its just measure of applause. if one girl sings, and another draws, remarkably well, we may show that we are pleased with both agreeable accomplishments, without bringing them into comparison. nor is it necessary that we should be in a desperate hurry to balance the separate degrees of praise which we distribute exactly at the same moment, because if children are sure that the reward of their industry and ingenuity is secured by our justice, they will trust to us, though that reward may be for a few hours delayed. it is only where workmen have no confidence in the integrity or punctuality of their masters, that they are impatient of any accidental delay in the payment of their wages. with the precautions which have been mentioned, we may hope to see children grow up in real friendship together. the whole sum of their pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. this happy moral truth, upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion. those who have observed the sudden, violent, and surprising effects of emulation in public schools, will regret the want of this _power_ in the intellectual education of their pupils at home. even the acquisition of talents and knowledge ought, however, to be but a secondary consideration, subordinate to the general happiness of our pupils. if we _could_ have superior knowledge, upon condition that we should have a malevolent disposition, and an irritable temper, should we, setting every other moral consideration aside, be willing to make the purchase at such a price? let any person, desirous to see a striking picture of the effects of scholastic competition upon the moral character, look at the life of that wonder of his age, the celebrated abeillard. as the taste and manners of the present times are so different from those of the age in which he lived, we see, without any species of deception, the real value of the learning in which he excelled, and we can judge both of his acquirements, and of his character, without prejudice. we see him goaded on by rivalship, and literary ambition, to astonishing exertions at one time; at another, torpid in monkish indolence: at one time, we see him intoxicated with adulation; at another, listless, desponding, abject, incapable of maintaining his own self-approbation without the suffrages of those whom he despised. if his biographer[ ] does him justice, a more selfish, irritable, contemptible, miserable being, than the learned abeillard, could scarcely exist. a philosopher,[ ] who, if we might judge of him by the benignity of his writings, was surely of a most amiable and happy temper, has yet left us a melancholy and discouraging history of the unsociable condition of men of superior knowledge and abilities. he supposes that those who have devoted much time to the cultivation of their understandings, have habitually less sympathy, or less exercise for their sympathy, than those who live less abstracted from the world; that, consequently, "all their social, and all their public affections, lose their natural warmth and vigour," whilst their selfish passions are cherished and strengthened, being kept in constant play by literary rivalship. it is to be hoped, that there are men of the most extensive learning and genius, now living, who could, from their own experience, assure us that those are obsolete observations, no longer applicable to modern human nature. at all events, we, who refer so much to education, are hopefully of opinion, that education can prevent these evils, in common with _almost_ all the other evils of life. it would be an errour, fatal to all improvement, to believe that the cultivation of the understanding, impedes the exercise of the social affections. obviously, a man, who secludes himself from the world, and whose whole life is occupied with abstract studies, cannot enjoy any pleasure from his social affections; his admiration of the dead, is so constant, that he has no time to feel any sympathy with the living. an individual, of this ruminating species, is humorously delineated in mrs. d'arblay's camilla. men, who are compelled to unrelenting labour, whether by avarice, or by literary ambition, are equally to be pitied. they are not models for imitation; they sacrifice their happiness to some strong passion or interest. without this ascetic abstinence from the domestic and social pleasures of life, surely persons may cultivate their understandings, and acquire, even by mixing with their fellow-creatures, a variety of useful knowledge. an ingenious theory[ ] supposes the exercise of any of our faculties, is always attended with pleasure, which lasts as long as that exercise can be continued without fatigue. this pleasure, arising from the due exercise of our mental powers, the author of this theory maintains to be the foundation of our most agreeable sentiments. if there be any truth in these ideas, of how many agreeable sentiments must a man of sense be capable! the pleasures of society must to him increase in an almost incalculable proportion; because, in conversation, his faculties can never want subjects on which they may be amply exercised. the dearth of conversation, which every body may have felt in certain company, is always attended with mournful countenances, and every symptom of ennui. indeed, without the pleasures of conversation, society is reduced to meetings of people, who assemble to eat and drink, to show their fine clothes, to weary and to hate one another. the sympathy of bon vivants is, it must be acknowleged, very lively and sincere towards each other; but this can last only during the hour of dinner, unless they revive, and prolong, by the powers of imagination, the memory of the feast. some foreign traveller[ ] tells us, that "every year, at naples, an officer of the police goes through the city, attended by a trumpeter, who proclaims in all the squares and cross-ways, how many thousand oxen, calves, lambs, hogs, &c. the neapolitans have had the honour of eating in the course of the year." the people all listen with extreme attention to this proclamation, and are immoderately delighted at the huge amount. a degree, and scarcely one degree, above the brute sympathy of good eaters, is that gregarious propensity which is sometimes honoured with the name of sociability. the current sympathy, or appearance of sympathy, which is to be found amongst the idle and frivolous in fashionable life, is wholly unconnected with even the idea of esteem. it is therefore pernicious to all who partake of it; it excites to no great exertions; it rewards neither useful nor amiable qualities: on the contrary, it is to be obtained by vice, rather than by virtue; by folly much more readily than by wisdom. it is the mere follower of fashion, and of dissipation, and it keeps those in humour and countenance, who ought to hear the voice of public reproach, and who might be roused by the fear of disgrace, or the feelings of shame, to exertions which should justly entitle them to the approbation and affection of honourable friends. young people, who are early in life content with this _convivial_ sympathy, may, in the common phrase, become _very good, pleasant companions_; but there is little chance that they should ever become any thing more, and there is great danger that they may be led into any degree of folly, extravagance, or vice, to which fashion and the voice of numbers invite. it sometimes happens, that men of superior abilities, have such an indiscriminate love of applause and sympathy, that they reduce themselves to the standard of all their casual companions, and vary their objects of ambition with the opinion of the silly people with whom they chance to associate. in public life, party spirit becomes the ruling principle of men of this character; in private life, they are addicted to clubs, and associations of all sorts, in which the contagion of sympathy has a power which the sober influence of reason seldom ventures to correct. the waste of talents, and the total loss of principle, to which this indiscriminate love of sympathy leads, should warn us to guard against its influence by early education. the gregarious propensity in childhood, should not be indulged without precautions: unless their companions are well educated, we can never be reasonably secure of the conduct or happiness of our pupils: from sympathy, they catch all the wishes, tastes, and ideas of those with whom they associate; and what is still worse, they acquire the dangerous habits of resting upon the support, and of wanting the stimulus of numbers. it is, surely, far more prudent to let children feel a little ennui, from the want of occupation and of company, than to purchase for them the juvenile pleasures of society at the expense of their future happiness. childhood, as a part of our existence, ought to have as great a share of happiness as it can enjoy compatibly with the advantage of the other seasons of life. by this principle, we should be guided in all which we allow, and in all which we refuse, to children; by this rule, we may avoid unnecessary severity, and pernicious indulgence. as young people gradually acquire knowledge, they will learn to _converse_, and when they have the habits of conversing rationally, they will not desire companions who can only chatter. they will prefer the company of friends, who can sympathize in their occupations, to the presence of ignorant idlers, who can fill up the void of ideas with nonsense and noise. some people have a notion that the understanding and the _heart_ are not to be educated at the same time; but the very reverse of this is, perhaps, true; neither can be brought to any perfection, unless both are cultivated together. we should not, therefore, expect premature virtues. during childhood, there occur but few opportunities of exerting the virtues which are recommended in books, such as humanity and generosity. the _humanity_ of children cannot, perhaps, properly be said to be exercised upon animals; they are frequently extremely fond of animals, but they are not always equable in their fondness; they sometimes treat their favourites with that caprice which favourites are doomed to experience; this caprice degenerates into cruelty, if it is resented by the sufferer. we must not depend merely upon the natural feelings of compassion, as preservatives against cruelty; the _instinctive_ feelings of compassion, are strong amongst uneducated people; yet these do not restrain them from acts of cruelty. they take delight, it has been often observed, in all tragical, sanguinary spectacles, because these excite emotion, and relieve them from the listless state in which their days usually pass. it is the same with all persons, in all ranks of life, whose minds are uncultivated.[ ] until young people have fixed _habits_ of benevolence, and a taste for occupation, perhaps it is not prudent to trust them with the care or protection of animals. even when they are enthusiastically fond of them, they cannot, by their utmost ingenuity, make the animal so happy in a state of captivity, as they would be in a state of liberty. they are apt to insist upon doing animals good against their will, and they are often unjust in the defence of their favourites. a boy of seven years old, once knocked down his sister, to prevent her crushing his caterpillar.[ ] children should not be taught to confine their benevolence to those animals which are thought beautiful; the fear and disgust which we express at the sight of certain unfortunate animals, whom we are pleased to call ugly and shocking, are observed by children, and these associations lead to cruelty. if we do not prejudice our pupils by foolish exclamations; if they do not, from sympathy, catch our absurd antipathies, their benevolence towards the animal world, will not be illiberally confined to favourite lap-dogs and singing-birds. from association, most people think that frogs are ugly animals. l----, a boy between five and six years old, once begged his mother to come out to look at a _beautiful_ animal which he had just found; she was rather surprised to find that this beautiful creature was a frog. if children never see others torment animals, they will not think that cruelty can be an amusement; but they may be provoked to revenge the pain which is inflicted upon them; and therefore we should take care not to put children in situations where they are liable to be hurt or terrified by animals. could we possibly expect, that gulliver should love the brobdignagian wasp that buzzed round his cake, and prevented him from eating his breakfast? could we expect that gulliver should be ever reconciled to the rat against whom he was obliged to draw his sword? many animals are, to children, what the wasp and the rat were to gulliver. put bodily fear out of the case, it required all uncle toby's benevolence to bear the buzzing of a gnat while he was eating his dinner. children, even when they have no cause to be afraid of animals, are sometimes in situations to be provoked by them; and the nice casuist will find it difficult to do strict justice upon the offended and the offenders. october , . s----, nine years old, took care of his brother h----'s hot-bed for some time, when h---- was absent from home. he was extremely anxious about his charge; he took one of his sisters to look at the hot-bed, showed her a hole where the mice came in, and expressed great hatred against the whole race. he the same day asked his mother for a bait for the mouse-trap; his mother refused to give him one, telling him that she did not wish he should learn to kill animals. how good nature sometimes leads to the opposite feeling! s----'s love for his brother's cucumbers made him _imagine_ and compass the death of the mice. children should be protected against animals, which we do not wish that they should hate; if cats scratch them, and dogs bite them, and mice devour the fruits of their industry, children must consider these animals as enemies; they cannot love them, and they may learn the habit of revenge, from being exposed to their insults and depredations. pythagoras himself would have insisted upon his exclusive right to the vegetables on which he was to subsist, especially if he had raised them by his own care and industry. buffon,[ ] notwithstanding all his benevolent philosophy, can scarcely speak with patience of his enemies the field mice; who, when he was trying experiments upon the culture of forest trees, tormented him perpetually by their insatiable love of acorns. "_i was terrified_," says he, "at the discovery of half a bushel, and often a whole bushel, of acorns in each of the holes inhabited by these little animals; they had collected these acorns for their winter provision." the philosopher gave orders immediately for the erection of a great number of traps, and snares baited with broiled nuts; in less than three weeks nearly three hundred field mice were killed _or taken prisoners_. mankind are obliged to carry on a defensive war with the animal world. "eat or be eaten," says dr. darwin, is the great law of nature. it is fortunate for us that there are butchers by profession in the world, and rat-catchers, and cats, otherwise our habits of benevolence and sympathy would be utterly destroyed. children, though they must perceive the necessity for destroying certain animals need not be themselves executioners; they should not conquer the natural repugnance to the sight of the struggles of pain, and the convulsions of death; their aversion of being the cause of pain should be preserved, both by principle and habit. those who have not been habituated to the bloody form of cruelty, can never fix their eye upon her without shuddering; even those to whom she may have, in some instances, been early familiarized, recoil from her appearance in any shape to which they have not been accustomed. at one of the magnificent shows with which pompey[ ] entertained the roman people for five days successively, the populace enjoyed the death of wild beasts; five hundred lions were killed; but, on the last day, when twenty elephants were put to death, the people, unused to the sight, and moved by the lamentable howlings of these animals, were seized with sudden compassion; they execrated pompey himself for being the author of so much cruelty. charity for the poor, is often inculcated in books for children; but how is this virtue to be actually brought into practice in childhood? without proper objects of charity are selected by the parents, children have no opportunities of discovering them; they have not sufficient knowledge of the world to distinguish truth from falsehood in the complaints of the distressed: nor have they sufficiently enlarged views to discern the best means of doing good to their fellow-creatures. they may give away money to the poor, but they do not always feel the value of what they give: they give counters: supplied with all the necessaries and luxuries of life, they have no use for money; they feel no privation; they make no sacrifice in giving money away, or at least, none worthy to be extolled as heroic. when children grow up, they learn the value of money; their generosity will then cost them rather more effort, and yet can be rewarded only with the same expressions of gratitude, with the same blessings from the beggar, or the same applause from the spectator. let us put charity out of the question, and suppose that the generosity of children is displayed in making presents to their companions, still there are difficulties. these presents are usually baubles, which at the best can encourage only a frivolous taste. but we must further consider, that even generous children are apt to expect generosity equal to their own from their companions; then come tacit or explicit comparisons of the value or elegance of their respective gifts; the difficult rules of exchange and barter are to be learned; and nice calculations of _tare and tret_ are entered into by the repentant borrowers and lenders. a sentimental, two often ends in a commercial intercourse; and those who begin with the most munificent dispositions, sometimes end with selfish discontent, low cunning, or disgusting ostentation. whoever has carefully attended to young makers of presents, and makers of bargains, will not think this account of them much exaggerated. "then what is to be done? how are the social affections to be developed? how is the sensibility of children to be tried? how is the young heart to display its most amiable feelings?" a sentimental preceptress will impatiently inquire. the amiable feelings of the heart need not be displayed; they may be sufficiently exercised without the stimulus either of our eloquence or our applause. in madame de silleri's account of the education of the children of the duke of orleans, there appears rather too much sentimental artifice and management. when the duchess of orleans was ill, the children were instructed to write "charming notes" from day to day, and from hour to hour, to inquire how she did. once when a servant was going from saint leu to paris, madame de silleri asked her pupils if they had any commissions; the little duke de chartres says yes, and gave a message about a bird-cage, but he did not recollect to write to his mother, till somebody whispered to him that he had forgotten it. madame de silleri calls this childish forgetfulness a "heinous offence;" but was not it very natural, that the boy should think of his bird cage? and what mother would wish that her children should have it put into their head, to inquire after her health in the complimentary style? another time, madame de silleri is displeased with her pupils, because they did not show sufficient sympathy and concern for her when she had a headache or sore throat. the exact number of messages which, consistently with the strict duties of friendship, they ought to have sent, are upon another occasion prescribed. "i had yesterday afternoon a violent attack of the colic, and you discovered the greatest sensibility. by the journal of m. le brun, i find it was the duke de montpensier who thought this morning of writing to inquire how i did. you left me yesterday in a very calm state, and there was no reason for anxiety; but, consistently with the strict duties of friendship, you ought to have given orders before you went to bed, for inquiries to be made at eight o'clock in the morning, to know whether i had had any return of my complaint during the night; and you should again have sent at ten, to learn from myself, the instant i awoke, the exact state of my health. such are the benevolent and tender cares which a lively and sincere friendship dictates. you must accustom yourselves to the observance of them, if you wish to be beloved." another day madame de silleri told the duke de chartres, that he had a very idiotic appearance, because, when he went to see his mother, his attention was taken up by two paroquets which happened to be in the room. all these reproaches and documents could not, we should apprehend, tend to increase the real sensibility and affection of children. gratitude is one of the most certain, but one of the latest, rewards, which preceptors and parents should expect from their pupils. those who are too impatient to wait for the gradual development of the affections, will obtain from their children, instead of warm, genuine, enlightened gratitude, nothing but the expression of cold, constrained, stupid hypocrisy. during the process of education, a child cannot perceive its ultimate end; how can he judge whether the means employed by his parents, are well adapted to effect their purposes? moments of restraint and of privation, or, perhaps, of positive pain, must be endured by children under the mildest system of education: they must, therefore, perceive, that their parents are the immediate cause of some evils to them; the remote good is beyond their view. and can we expect from an infant the systematic resignation of an optimist? belief upon trust, is very different from that which arises from experience; and no one, who understands the human heart, will expect incompatible feelings: in the mind of a child, the feeling of present pain is incompatible with gratitude. mrs. macaulay mentions a striking instance of extorted gratitude. a poor child, who had been taught to return thanks for every thing, had a bitter medicine given to her; when she had drank it, she curtesied, and said, "thank you for my good stuff." there was a mistake in the medicine, and the child died the next morning. children who are not sentimentally educated, often offend by their simplicity, and frequently disgust people of impatient feelings, by their apparent indifference to things which are expected to touch their sensibility. let us be content with nature, or rather let us never exchange simplicity for affectation. nothing hurts young people more than to be watched continually about their feelings, to have their countenances scrutinized, and the degrees of their sensibility measured by the surveying eye of the unmerciful spectator. under the constraint of such examinations, they can think of nothing, but that they are looked at, and feel nothing but shame or apprehension: they are afraid to lay their minds open, lest they should be convicted of some deficiency of feeling. on the contrary, children who are not in dread of this sentimental inquisition, speak their minds, the truth, and the whole truth, without effort or disguise: they lay open their hearts, and tell their thoughts as they arise, with simplicity that would not fear to enter even "the palace of truth."[ ] a little girl, ho----, who was not quite four years old, asked her mother to give her a plaything: one of her sisters had just before asked for the same thing. "i cannot give it to you both," said the mother. _ho----._ no, but i wish you to give it to me, and not to e----. _mother._ don't you wish your sister to have what she wants? _ho----._ mother, if i say that i _don't_ wish so, will you give it to me? perhaps this _naivete_ might have displeased some scrupulous admirers of politeness, who could not discover in it symptoms of that independent simplicity of character, for which the child who made this speech was distinguished. "do you _always_ love me?" said a mother to her son, who was about four years old. "always," said the child, "except when i am asleep." _mother._ "and why do you not love me when you are asleep?" _son._ "because i do not think of you then." this sensible answer showed, that the boy reflected accurately upon his own feelings, and a judicious parent must consequently have a sober certainty of his affection. the thoughtless caresses of children who are never accustomed to reason, are lavished alike upon strangers and friends, and their fondness of to-day may, without any reasonable cause, become aversion by to-morrow. children are often asked to tell which of their friends they love the best, but they are seldom required to assign any reason for their choice. it is not prudent to question them frequently about their own feelings; but whenever they express any decided preference, we should endeavour to _lead_, not to _drive_ them to reflect upon the reasons for their affection. they will probably at first mention some particular instance of kindness, which they have lately received from the person whom they prefer. "i like such a person because he mended my top." "i like such another because he took me out to walk with him and let me gather flowers." by degrees we may teach children to generalize their ideas, and to perceive that they like people for being either useful or agreeable. the desire to return kindness by kindness, arises very early in the mind; and the hope of conciliating the good will of the powerful beings by whom they are surrounded, is one of the first wishes that appears in the minds of intelligent and affectionate children. from this sense of mutual dependence, the first principles of social intercourse are deduced, and we may render our pupils either mean sycophants, or useful and honourable members of society, by the methods which we use to direct their first efforts to please. it should be our object to convince them, that the exchange of mutual good offices contributes to happiness; and whilst we connect the desire to assist others with the perception of the beneficial consequences that eventually arise to themselves, we may be certain that children will never become blindly selfish, or idly sentimental. we cannot help admiring the simplicity, strength of mind, and good sense, of a little girl of four years old, who, when she was put into a stage coach with a number of strangers, looked round upon them all, and, after a few minutes silence, addressed them, with the imperfect articulation of infancy, in the following words: "if you'll be good to me, i'll be good to you." whilst we were writing upon sympathy and sensibility, we met with the following apposite passage: "in , i was," says m. de st. pierre, "at dresden, at a play acted at court; it was the pere de famille. the electoress came in with one of her daughters, who might be about five or six years old. an officer of the saxon guards, who came with me to the play, whispered, 'that child will interest you as much as the play.' as soon as she was seated, she placed both her hands on the front of the box, fixed her eyes upon the stage, and continued with her mouth open, all attention to the motions of the actors. it was truly touching to see their different passions painted on her face as in a glass. there appeared in her countenance successively, anxiety, surprise, melancholy, and grief; at length the interest increasing in every scene, tears began to flow, which soon ran in abundance down her little cheeks; then came agitation, sighs, and loud sobs; at last they were obliged to carry her out of the box, lest she should choke herself with crying. my next neighbour told me, that every time that this young princess came to a pathetic play, she was obliged to leave the house before the catastrophe." "i have seen," continues m. de st. pierre, "instances of sensibility still more touching amongst the children of the common people, because the emotion was not here produced by any theatrical effect. as i was walking some years ago in the pre st. gervais, at the beginning of winter, i saw a poor woman lying on the ground, busied in weeding a bed of sorrel; near her was a little girl of six years old at the utmost, standing motionless, and all purple with cold. i addressed myself to this woman, who appeared to be ill, and i asked her what was the matter with her. sir, said she, for these three months i have suffered terribly from the rheumatism, but my illness troubles me less than this child, she never will leave me; if i say to her, thou art quite frozen, go and warm thyself in the house, she answers me, alas! mamma, if i leave you, you'll certainly fall ill again!" "another time, being at marly, i went to see, in the groves of that magnificent park, that charming group of children who are feeding with vine leaves and grapes a goat who seems to be playing with them. near this spot is an open summer house, where louis xv. on fine days, used sometimes to take refreshment. as it was showery weather, i went to take shelter for a few minutes. i found there three children, who were much more interesting than children of marble. they were two little girls, very pretty, and very busily employed in picking up all round the summer house dry sticks, which they put into a sort of wallet which was lying upon the king's table, whilst a little ill clothed thin boy was devouring a bit of bread in one corner of the room. i asked the tallest of the children, who appeared to be between eight and nine years old, what she meant to do with the wood which she was gathering together with so much eagerness. she answered, 'sir, you see that little boy, he is very unhappy. he has a mother-in-law' (why always _a mother-in-law_?) 'he has a mother-in-law, who sends him all day long to look for wood; when he does not bring any home, he is beaten; when he has got any, the swiss who stands at the entrance of the park takes it all away from him, and keeps it for himself. the boy is almost starved with hunger, and we have given him our breakfast.' after having said these words, she and her companion finished filling the little wallet, they packed it upon the boy's shoulders, and they ran before their unfortunate friend to see that he might pass in safety." we have read these three anecdotes to several children, and have found that the _active_ friends of the little wood-cutter were the most admired. it is probable, that amongst children who have been much praised for expressions of sensibility, the young lady who wept so bitterly at the play-house, would be preferred; affectionate children will like the little girl who stood purple with cold beside her sick mother; but if they have been well educated, they will probably express some surprise at her motionless attitude; they will ask why she did not try to help her mother to weed the bed of sorrel. it requires much skill and delicacy in our conduct towards children, to preserve a proper medium between the indulging and the repressing of their sensibility. we are cruel towards them when we suspect their genuine expressions of affection; nothing hurts the temper of a generous child more than this species of injustice. receive his expressions of kindness and gratitude with cold reserve, or a look that implies a doubt of his truth, and you give him so much pain, that you not only repress, but destroy his affectionate feelings. on the contrary, if you appear touched and delighted by his caresses, from the hope of pleasing, he will be naturally inclined to repeat such demonstrations of sensibility: this repetition should be gently discouraged, lest it should lead to affectation. at the same time, though we take this precaution, we should consider, that children are not early sensible that affectation is either ridiculous or disgusting; they are not conscious of doing any thing wrong by repeating what they have once perceived to be agreeable in their own, or in the manners of others. they frequently imitate, without any idea that imitation is displeasing; their object, as locke observes, is to please by affectation; they only mistake the means: we should rectify this mistake without treating it as a crime. a little girl of five years old stood beside her mother, observing the distribution of a dish of strawberries, the first strawberries of the year; and seeing a number of people busily helping, and being helped to cream and sugar, said in a low voice, not meant to attract attention, "i like to see people helping one another." had the child, at this instant, been praised for this natural expression of sympathy, the pleasure of praise would have been immediately substituted in her mind, instead of the feeling of benevolence, which was in itself sufficiently agreeable; and, perhaps, from a desire to please, she would, upon the next favourable occasion, have repeated the same sentiment; this we should immediately call affectation; but how could the child foresee, that the repetition of what we formerly liked, would be offensive? we should not first extol sympathy, and then disdain affectation; our encomiums frequently produce the faults by which we are disgusted. sensibility and sympathy, when they have proper objects, and full employment, do not look for applause; they are sufficiently happy in their own enjoyments. those who have attempted to teach children, must have observed, that sympathy is immediately connected with all the imitative arts; the nature of this connection, more especially in poetry and painting, has been pointed out with ingenuity and eloquence by those[ ] whose excellence in these arts entitle their theories to our prudent attention. we shall not attempt to repeat; we refer to their observations. sufficient occupation for sympathy, may be found by cultivating the talents of young people. without repeating here what has been said in many other places, it may be necessary to remind all who are concerned in _female_ education, that peculiar caution is necessary to manage female sensibility: to make, what is called the heart, a source of permanent pleasure, we must cultivate the reasoning powers at the same time that we repress the enthusiasm of _fine feeling_. women, from their situation and duties in society, are called upon rather for the daily exercise of quiet domestic virtues, than for those splendid acts of generosity, or those exaggerated expressions of tenderness, which are the characteristics of heroines in romance. sentimental authors, who paint with enchanting colours all the graces and all the virtues in happy union, teach us to expect that this union should be indissoluble. afterwards, from the natural influence of association, we expect in real life to meet with virtue when we see grace, and we are disappointed, almost disgusted, when we find virtue unadorned. this false association has a double effect upon the conduct of women; it prepares them to be pleased, and it excites them to endeavour to please by adventitious charms, rather than by those qualities which merit esteem. women, who have been much addicted to common novel-reading, are always acting in imitation of some jemima, or almeria, who never existed, and they perpetually mistake plain william and thomas for "_my beverly!_" they have another peculiar misfortune; they require continual great emotions to keep them in tolerable humour with themselves; they must have tears in their eyes, or they are apprehensive that their hearts are growing hard. they have accustomed themselves to such violent stimulus, that they cannot endure the languor to which they are subject in the intervals of delirium. pink appears pale to the eye that is used to scarlet; and common food is insipid to the taste which has been vitiated by the high seasonings of art. a celebrated french actress, in the wane of her charms, and who, for that reason, began to feel weary of the world, exclaimed, whilst she was recounting what she had suffered from a faithless lover, "ah! c'étoit le bon temps, j'étois bien malheureuse!"[ ] the happy age in which women can, with any grace or effect, be romantically wretched, is, even with the beautiful, but a short season of felicity. the sentimental sorrows of any female mourner, of more than thirty years standing, command but little sympathy, and less admiration; and what other consolations are suited to sentimental sorrows? women, who cultivate their reasoning powers, and who acquire tastes for science and literature, find sufficient variety in life, and do not require the _stimulus_ of dissipation, or of romance. their sympathy and sensibility are engrossed by proper objects, and connected with habits of useful exertion: they usually feel the affection which others profess, and actually enjoy the happiness which others describe. footnotes: [ ] adam smith. [ ] see smith. [ ] edward. [ ] v. rousseau and williams. [ ] berington. see his life of abeillard. [ ] dr. john gregory. comparative view of the state and faculties of man with those of the animal world. see vol. ii. of works, from page to . [ ] vernet's théorie des sentiments agréables. [ ] v. varieties of literature, vol. i. [ ] can it be true, that an english nobleman, in the th century, won a bet by procuring a man to eat a cat alive? [ ] see moore's edward for the boy and larks, an excellent story for children. [ ] mem. de l'acad. r. for the year , p. . [ ] v. middleton's life of cicero, vol. i. page . [ ] v. le palais de la verite.--madame de genlis veillées du château. [ ] sir joshua reynolds's discourses. dr. darwin's critical interludes in the botanic garden, and his chapter on sympathy and imitation in zoonomia. [ ] d'alembert. chapter xi. on vanity, pride, and ambition. we shall not weary the reader by any common-place declamations upon these moral topics. no great subtilty of distinction is requisite to mark the differences between vanity and pride, since those differences have been pointed out by every moralist, who has hoped to please mankind by an accurate delineation of the failings of human nature. whatever distinctions exist, or may be supposed to exist, between the characters in which pride or vanity predominates, it will readily be allowed, that there is one thing in which they both agree--they both receive pleasure from the approbation of others, and from their own. we are disgusted with the vain man, when he intemperately indulges in praise of himself, however justly he may be entitled to that praise, because he offends against those manners which we have been accustomed to think polite, and he claims from us a greater portion of sympathy than we can possibly afford to give him. we are not, however, pleased by the negligence with which the proud man treats us; we do not like to see that he can exist in independent happiness, satisfied with a cool internal sense of his own merits; he loses our sympathy, because he does not appear to value it. if we could give our pupils exactly the character we wish, what degrees of vanity and pride should we desire them to have, and how should we regulate these passions? should we not desire, that their ambition to excel might be sufficient to produce the greatest possible exertions, directed to the best possible objects; that their opinion of themselves should be strictly just, and should never be expressed in such a manner as to offend against propriety, or so as to forfeit the sympathy of mankind? as to the degree of pleasure which they should feel from their secret reflections upon their own meritorious conduct, we should certainly desire this to be as lasting, and as exquisite, as possible. a considerable portion of the happiness of life arises from the sense of self-approbation; we should, therefore, secure this gratification in its utmost perfection. we must observe, that, however independent the proud man imagines himself to be of the opinions of all around him, he must form his judgment of his own merits from some standard of comparison, by some laws drawn from observation of what mankind in general, or those whom he particularly esteems, think wise or amiable. he must begin then in the same manner with the vain man, whom he despises, by collecting the suffrages of others; if he selects, with perfect wisdom, the opinions which are most just, he forms his character upon excellent principles; and the more steadily he abides by his first views, the more he commands and obtains respect. but if, unfortunately, he makes a mistake at first, his obstinacy in errour is not to be easily corrected, for he is not affected by the general voice of disapprobation, nor by the partial loss of the common pleasures of sympathy. the vain man, on the contrary, is in danger, let him form his first notions of right and wrong ever so justly, of changing them when he happens to be in society with any persons who do not agree with him in their moral opinions, or who refuse him that applause which supports his own feeble self-approbation. we must, in education, endeavour to guard against these opposite dangers; we must enlighten the understanding, to give our pupils the power of forming their rules of conduct rightly, and we must give them sufficient strength of mind to abide by the principles which they have formed. when we first praise children, we must be careful to associate pleasure with those things which are really deserving of approbation. if we praise them for beauty, or for any happy expressions which entertain us, but which entertain us merely as the sprightly nonsense of childhood, we create vanity in the minds of our pupils; we give them false ideas of merit, and, if we excite them to exertions, they are not exertions directed to any valuable objects. praise is a strong stimulus to industry, if it be properly managed; but if we give it in too large and lavish quantities early in life, we shall soon find that it loses its effect, and yet that the _patient_ languishes for want of the excitation which custom has rendered almost essential to his existence. we say the _patient_, for this mental languor may be considered entirely as a disease. for its cure, see the second volume of zoonomia, under the article vanity. children, who are habituated to the daily and hourly food of praise, continually require this sustenance unless they are attended to; but we may gradually break bad habits. it is said, that some animals can supply themselves at a single draught with what will quench their thirst for many days. the human animal may, perhaps, by education, be taught similar foresight and abstinence in the management of his thirst for flattery. young people, who live with persons that seldom bestow praise, do not expect that stimulus, and they are content if they discover by certain signs, either in the countenance, manner, or tone of voice, of those whom they wish to please, that they are tolerably well satisfied. it is of little consequence by what language approbation is conveyed, whether by words, or looks, or by that silence which speaks with so much eloquence; but it is of great importance that our pupils should set a high value upon the expressions of our approbation. they will value it in proportion to their esteem and their affection for us; we include in the word _esteem_, a belief in our justice, and in our discernment. expressions of affection, associated with praise, not only increase the pleasure, but they alter the nature the of that pleasure; and if they gratify vanity, they at the same time excite some of the best feelings of the heart. the selfishness of vanity is corrected by this association; and the two pleasures of sympathy and self-complacency should never, when we can avoid it, be separated. children, who are well educated, and who have acquired an habitual desire for the approbation of their friends, may continue absolutely indifferent to the praise of strangers, or of _common_ acquaintance; nor is it probable that this indifference should suddenly be conquered, because the greatest part of the pleasure of praise in their mind, depends upon the esteem and affection which they feel for the persons by whom it is bestowed. instead of desiring that our pupils should entirely repress, in the company of their own family, the pleasure which they feel from the praise that is given to them by their friends, we should rather indulge them in this natural expansion of mind; we should rather permit their youthful vanity to display itself openly to those whom they most love and esteem, than drive them, by unreasonable severity, and a cold refusal of sympathy, into the society of less rigid observers. those who have an aversion to vanity, will not easily bear with its uncultivated intemperance of tongue; but they should consider, that much of what disgusts them, is owing to the simplicity of childhood, which must be allowed time to learn that respect for the feelings of others, which teaches us to restrain our own: but we must not be in haste to restrain, lest we teach hypocrisy, instead of strength of mind, or real humility. if we expect that children should excel, and should not know that they excel, we expect impossibilities; we expect at the same time, intelligence and stupidity. if we desire that they should be excited by praise, and that, at the same time, they should feel no pleasure in the applause which they have earned, we desire things that are incompatible. if we encourage children to be frank and sincere, and yet, at the same time, reprove them whenever they naturally express their opinions of themselves, or the pleasurable feelings of self-approbation, we shall counteract our own wishes. instead of hastily blaming children for the sincere and simple expression of their self-complacency, or of their desire for the approbation of others, we should gradually point out to them the truth--that those who refrain from that display of their own perfections which we call vanity, in fact are well repaid for the constraint which they put upon themselves, by the superior degree of respect and sympathy which they obtain; that vain people effectually counteract their own wishes, and meet with contempt, instead of admiration. by appealing constantly, when we praise, to the judgment of the pupils themselves, we shall at once teach them the habit of re-judging flattery, and substitute, by insensible degrees, patient, steady confidence in themselves, for the wavering, weak, impatience of vanity. in proportion as any one's confidence in himself increases, his anxiety for the applause of others diminishes: people are very seldom vain of any accomplishments in which they obviously excel, but they frequently continue to be vain of those which are doubtful. where mankind have not confirmed their own judgment, they are restless, and continually aim either at convincing others, or themselves, that they are in the right. hogarth, who invented a new and original manner of satirizing the follies of mankind, was not vain of this talent, but was extremely vain of his historical paintings, which were indifferent performances. men of acknowledged literary talents, are seldom fond of amateurs; but, if they are but half satisfied of their own superiority, they collect the tribute of applause with avidity, and without discrimination or delicacy. voltaire has been reproached with treating strangers rudely who went to ferney, to see and admire a philosopher as a prodigy. voltaire valued his time more than he did this vulgar admiration; his visiters, whose understanding had not gone through exactly the same process, who had not, probably, been satisfied with public applause, and who set, perhaps, a considerable value upon their own praise, could not comprehend this appearance of indifference to admiration in voltaire, especially when it was well known that he was not insensible of fame. he was, at an advanced age, exquisitely anxious about the fate of one of his tragedies; and a public coronation at the theatre at paris, had power to inebriate him at eighty-four. those who have exhausted the stimulus of wine, may yet be intoxicated by opium. the voice of numbers appears to be sometimes necessary to give delight to those who have been fatigued with the praise of individuals; but this taste for _acclamation_ is extremely dangerous. a multitude of good judges seldom meet together. by a slight difference in their manner of reasoning, two men of abilities, who set out with the same desire for fame, may acquire different habits of pride, or of vanity; the one may value the number, the other may appreciate the judgment of his admirers. there is something not only more wise, but more elevated, in this latter species of select triumph; the noise is not so great; the music is better. "if i listened to the music of praise," says an historian, who obviously was not insensible to its charms, "i was more seriously satisfied with the approbation of my _judges_. the candour of dr. robertson embraced his disciple. a letter from mr. hume overpaid the labour of ten years."[ ] surely no one can be displeased with this last generous expression of enthusiasm; we are not so well satisfied with buffon, when he ostentatiously displays the epistles of a prince and an empress.[ ] perhaps, by pointing out at proper opportunities the difference in our feelings with respect to vulgar and refined vanity, we might make a useful impression upon those who have yet their habits to form. the conversion of vanity into pride, is not so difficult a process as those, who have not analyzed both, might, from the striking difference of their appearance, imagine. by the opposite tendencies of education, opposite characters from the same original dispositions are produced. cicero, had he been early taught to despise the applause of the multitude, would have turned away like the proud philosopher, who asked his friends what absurdity he had uttered, when he heard the populace loud in acclamations of his speech; and the cynic, whose vanity was seen through the holes in his cloak, might, perhaps, by a slight difference in his education, have been rendered ambitious of the macedonian purple. in attempting to convert vanity into pride, we must begin by exercising the vain patient in forbearance of present pleasure; it is not enough to convince his understanding, that the advantages of proud humility are great; he may be perfectly sensible of this, and may yet have so little command over himself, that his loquacious vanity may get the better, from hour to hour, of his better judgment. habits are not to be instantaneously conquered by reason; if we do not keep this fact in our remembrance, we shall be frequently disappointed in education; and we shall, perhaps, end by thinking that reason can do nothing, if we begin by thinking that she can do every thing. we must not expect that a vain child should suddenly break and forget all his past associations; but we may, by a little early attention, prevent much of the trouble of curing, or converting, the disease of vanity. when children first begin to learn accomplishments, or to apply themselves to literature, those who instruct, are apt to encourage them with too large a portion of praise; _the smallest quantity of stimulus that can produce the exertion we desire, should be used_; if we use more, we waste our power, and injure our pupil. as soon as habit has made any exertion familiar, and consequently easy, we may withdraw the original excitation, and the exertion will still continue. in learning, for instance, a new language, at first, whilst the pupil is in the midst of the difficulties of regular and irregular verbs, and when, in translation, a dictionary is wanted at every moment, the occupation itself cannot be very agreeable; but we are excited by the hope that our labour will every day diminish, and that we shall at last enjoy the entertainment of reading useful and agreeable books. children, who have not learnt by experience the pleasures of literature, cannot feel this hope as strongly as we do, we, therefore, excite them by praise; but by degrees they begin to feel the pleasure of success and occupation; when these are felt, we may and ought to withdraw the unnecessary excitements of praise. if we continue, we mislead the child's mind, and, whilst we deprive him of his natural reward, we give him a factitious taste. when any moral habit is to be acquired, or when we wish that our pupil should cure himself of any fault, we must employ at first strong excitement, and reward with warmth and eloquence of approbation; when the fault is conquered, when the virtue is acquired, the extraordinary excitement should be withdrawn, and all this should not be done with an air of mystery and artifice; the child should know all that we do, and why we do it; the sooner he learns how his own mind is managed, the better--the sooner he will assist in his own education. every body must have observed, that languor of mind succeeds to the intoxication of vanity; if we can avoid the intoxication, we shall avoid the languor. common sayings often imply those sensible observations which philosophers, when they theorize only, express in other words. we frequently hear it said to a child, "praise spoils you; my praise did you harm; you can't bear praise well; you grow conceited; you become idle; you are good for nothing, because you have been too much flattered." all these expressions show, that the consequences of over-stimulating the mind by praise, have been vaguely taken notice of in education; but no general rules have been deduced from these observations. with children of different habits and temperaments, the same degree of excitement acts differently, so that it is scarcely possible to fix upon any positive quantity fit for all dispositions--the quantity must be relative; but we may, perhaps, fix upon a criterion by which, in most cases, the proportion may be ascertained. the golden rule,[ ] which an eminent physician has given to the medical world for ascertaining the necessary and useful quantity of stimulus for weak and feverish patients, may, with advantage, be applied in education. whenever praise produces the intoxication of vanity, it is hurtful; whenever the appearances of vanity diminish in consequence of praise, we may be satisfied that it does good, that it increases the pupil's confidence in himself, and his strength of mind. we repeat, that persons who have confidence in themselves, may be proud, but are never vain; that vanity cannot support herself without the concurring flattery of others; pride is satisfied with his own approbation. in the education of children who are more inclined to pride than to vanity, we must present large objects to the understanding, and large motives must be used to excite voluntary exertion. if the understanding of proud people be not early cultivated, they frequently fix upon some false ideas of honour or dignity, to which they are resolute martyrs through life. thus the high-born spaniards, if we may be allowed to reason from the imperfect history of national character. the spaniards, who associate the ideas of dignity and indolence, would rather submit to the evils of poverty, than to the imaginary disgrace of working for their bread. volney, and the baron de tott, give us some curious instances of the pride of the turks, which prevents them from being taught any useful arts by foreigners. to show how early false associations are formed and supported by pride, we need but recollect the anecdote of the child mentioned by de tott.[ ] the baron de tott bought a pretty toy for a present for a little turkish friend, but the child was too proud to seem pleased with the toy; the child's grandfather came into the room, saw, and was delighted with the toy, sat down on the carpet, and played with it until he broke it. we like the second childhood of the grandfather better than the premature old age of the grandson. the self-command which the fear of disgrace insures, can produce either great virtues, or great vices. revenge and generosity are, it is said, to be found in their highest state amongst nations and individuals characterized by pride. the early objects which are associated with the idea of honour in the mind, are of great consequence; but it is of yet more consequence to teach proud minds early to bend to the power of reason, or rather to glory in being governed by reason. they should be instructed, that the only possible means of maintaining their opinions amongst persons of sense, is to support them by unanswerable arguments. they should be taught, that, to secure respect, they must deserve it; and their self-denial, or self-command, should never obtain that tacit admiration which they most value, except where it is exerted for useful and rational purposes. the constant custom of appealing, in the last resort, to their own judgment, which distinguishes the proud from the vain, makes it peculiarly necessary that the judgment, to which so much is trusted, should be highly cultivated. a vain man may be tolerably well conducted in life by a sensible friend; a proud man ought to be able to conduct himself perfectly well, because he will not accept of any assistance. it seems that some proud people confine their benevolent virtues within a smaller sphere than others; they value only their own relations, their friends, their country, or whatever is connected with themselves. this species of pride may be corrected by the same means which are used to increase sympathy.[ ] those who, either from temperament, example, or accidental circumstances, have acquired the habit of repressing and commanding their emotions, must be carefully distinguished from the selfish and insensible. in the present times, when the affectation of sensibility is to be dreaded, we should rather encourage that species of pride which disdains to display the affections of the heart. "you romans triumph over your tears, and call it virtue! i triumph in my tears," says caractacus; his tears were respectable, but in general the roman triumph would command the most sympathy. some people attribute to pride all expressions of confidence in one's self: these may be offensive to common society, but they are sometimes powerful over the human mind, and where they are genuine, mark somewhat superior in character. much of the effect of lord chatham's eloquence, much of his transcendent influence in public, must be attributed to the confidence which he showed in his own superiority. "i trample upon impossibilities!" was an exclamation which no inferiour mind would dare to make. would the house of commons have permitted any one but lord chatham to have answered an oration by "tell me, gentle shepherd, where?" the danger of failing, the hazard that he runs of becoming ridiculous who verges upon the moral sublime, is taken into our account when we judge of the action, and we pay involuntary tribute to courage and success: but how miserable is the fate of the man who mistakes his own powers, and upon trial is unable to support his assumed superiority; mankind revenge themselves without mercy upon his ridiculous pride, eager to teach him the difference between insolence and magnanimity. young people inclined to over-rate their own talents, or to under-value the abilities of others, should frequently have instances given to them from real life, of the mortifications and disgrace to which imprudent boasters expose themselves. where they are able to demonstrate their own abilities, they run no risk in speaking with decent confidence; but where their success depends, in any degree, either upon fortune or opinion, they should never run the hazard of presumption. modesty prepossesses mankind in favour of its possessor, and has the advantage of being both graceful and safe: this was perfectly understood by the crafty ulysses, who neither raised his eyes, nor stretched his sceptered hand, "when he first rose to speak." we do not, however, recommend this artificial modesty; its trick is soon discovered, and its sameness of dissimulation presently disgusts. prudence should prevent young people from hazardous boasting; and good nature and good sense, which constitute real politeness, will restrain them from obtruding their merits to the mortification of their companions: but we do not expect from them total ignorance of their own comparative merit. the affectation of humility, when carried to the extreme, to which all affectation is liable to be carried, appears full as ridiculous as troublesome, and offensive as any of the graces of vanity, or the airs of pride. young people are cured of presumption by mixing with society, but they are not so easily cured of any species of affectation. in the chapter on female accomplishments, we have endeavoured to point out, that the enlargement of understanding in the fair sex, which must result from their increasing knowledge, will necessarily correct the feminine foibles of vanity and affectation. strong, prophetic, eloquent praise, like that which the great lord chatham bestowed on his son, would rather inspire in a generous soul noble emulation, than paltry vanity. "on this boy," said he, laying his hand upon his son's head, "descends my mantle, with a double portion of my spirit!" phillip's praise of his son alexander, when the boy rode the unmanageable horse,[ ] is another instance of the kind of praise capable of exciting ambition. as to ambition, we must decide what species of ambition we mean, before we can determine whether it ought to be encouraged or repressed; whether it should be classed amongst virtues or vices; that is to say, whether it adds to the happiness or the misery of human creatures. "the inordinate desire of fame," which often destroys the lives of millions when it is connected with ideas of military enthusiasm, is justly classed amongst the "_diseases of volition_:" for its description and cure we refer to zoonomia, vol. ii. achilles will there appear to his admirers, perhaps, in a new light. the ambition to rise in the world, usually implies a mean, sordid desire of riches, or what are called honours, to be obtained by the common arts of political intrigue, by cabal to win popular favour, or by address to conciliate the patronage of the great. the experience of those who have been governed during their lives by this passion, if passion it may be called, does not show that it can confer much happiness either in the pursuit or attainment of its objects. see bubb doddington's diary, a most useful book; a journal of the petty anxieties, and constant dependence, to which an ambitious courtier is necessarily subjected. see also mirabeau's "secret history of the court of berlin," for a picture of a man of great abilities degraded by the same species of low unprincipled competition. we may find in these books, it is to be hoped, examples which will strike young and generous minds, and which may inspire them with contempt for the objects and the means of vulgar ambition. there is a more noble ambition, by which the enthusiastic youth, perfect in the theory of all the virtues, and warm with yet unextinguished benevolence, is apt to be seized; his heart beats with the hope of immortalizing himself by noble actions; he forms extensive plans for the improvement and the happiness of his fellow creatures; he feels the want of power to carry these into effect; power becomes the object of his wishes. in the pursuit, in the attainment of this object, how are his feelings changed! m. necker, in the preface to his work on french finance,[ ] paints, with much eloquence, and with an appearance of perfect truth, the feelings of a man of virtue and genius, before and after the attainment of political power. the moment when a minister takes possession of his place, surrounded by crowds and congratulations, is well described; and the succeeding moment, when clerks with immense portfolios enter, is a striking contrast. examples from romance can never have such a powerful effect upon the mind, as those which are taken from real life; but in proportion to the just and lively representation of situations, and passions resembling reality, fictions may convey useful moral lessons. in the cyropædia there is an admirable description of the day spent by the victorious cyrus, giving audience to the unmanageable multitude, after the taking of babylon had accomplished the fullness of his ambition.[ ] it has been observed, that these examples of the insufficiency of the objects of ambition to happiness, seldom make any lasting impression upon the minds of the ambitious. this may arise from two causes; from the reasoning faculty's not having been sufficiently cultivated, or from the habits of ambition being formed before proper examples are presented to the judgment for comparison. some ambitious people, when they reason coolly, acknowledge and feel the folly of their pursuits; but still, from the force of habit, they act immediately in obedience to the motives which they condemn: others, who have never been accustomed to reason firmly, believe themselves to be in the right in the choice of their objects; and they cannot comprehend the arguments which are used by those who have not the same way of thinking as themselves. if we fairly place facts before young people, who have been habituated to reason, and who have not yet been inspired with the passion, or enslaved by the habits of vulgar ambition, it is probable, that they will not be easily effaced from the memory, and that they will influence the conduct through life. it sometimes happens to men of a sound understanding, and a philosophic turn of mind, that their ambition decreases with their experience. they begin with some ardor, perhaps, an ambitious pursuit; but by degrees they find the pleasure of the occupation sufficient without the fame, which was their original object. this is the same process which we have observed in the minds of children with respect to the pleasures of literature, and the taste for sugar-plums. happy the child who can be taught to improve himself without the stimulus of sweetmeats! happy the man who can preserve activity without the excitements of ambition! footnotes: [ ] gibbon. memoirs of his life and writings, page .--perhaps gibbon had this excellent line of mrs. barbauld's in his memory: "and pay a life of hardships with a line." [ ] see peltier's state of paris in the years and . [ ] see zoonomia, vol. i. p. . [ ] v. de tott's memoirs, p. , a note. [ ] v. sympathy. [ ] v. plutarch. [ ] necker de l'administration des finances de la france, vol. i. p. . [ ] cyropædia, vol. ii. page . chapter xii. books. the first books which are now usually put into the hands of a child, are mrs. barbauld's lessons; they are by far the best books of the kind that have ever appeared; those only who know the difficulty and the importance of such compositions in education, can sincerely rejoice, that the admirable talents of such a writer have been employed in such a work. we shall not apologize for offering a few remarks on some passages in these little books, because we are convinced that we shall not offend. lessons for children from three to four years old, should, we think, have been lessons for children from four to five years old; few read, or ought to read, before that age. "charles shall have a pretty new lesson." in this sentence the words pretty and new are associated; but they represent ideas which ought to be kept separate in the mind of a child. the love of novelty is cherished in the minds of children by the common expressions that we use to engage them to do what we desire. "you shall have a new whip, a new hat," are improper modes of expression to a child. we have seen a boy who had literally twenty new whips in one year, and we were present when his father, to comfort him when he was in pain, went out to buy him a _new_ whip, though he had two or three scattered about the room. the description, in the first part of mrs. barbauld's lessons, of the naughty boy who tormented the robin, and who was afterwards supposed to be eaten by bears, is more objectionable than any in the book: the idea of killing is in itself very complex, and, if explained, serves only to excite terror; and how can a child be made to comprehend why a cat _should_ catch mice, and not kill birds? or why should this species of honesty be expected from an animal of prey? "i want my dinner." does charles take it for granted, that what he eats is his own, and that he _must_ have his dinner? these and similar expressions are words of course; but young children should not be allowed to use them: if they are permitted to assume the tone of command, the feelings of impatience and ill temper quickly follow, and children become the little tyrants of a family. property is a word of which young people have general ideas, and they may, with very little trouble, be prevented from claiming things to which they have no right. mrs. barbauld has judiciously chosen to introduce a little boy's daily history in these books; all children are extremely interested for charles, and they are very apt to expect that every thing which happens to him, is to happen to them; and they believe, that every thing he does, is right; therefore, his biographer should, in another edition, revise any of his expressions which may mislead the future tribe of his little imitators. "maid, come and dress charles." after what we have already said with respect to servants, we need only observe, that this sentence for charles should not be read by a child; and that in which the maid is said to bring home a gun, &c. it is easy to strike a pencil line across it. all the passages which might have been advantageously omitted in these excellent little books, have been carefully obliterated before they were put into the hands of children, by a mother who knew the danger of early false associations. "little boys don't eat butter." "no body wears a hat in the house." this is a very common method of speaking, but it certainly is not proper towards children. affirmative sentences should always express real facts. charles must know that some little boys do eat butter; and that some people wear their hats in their houses. this mode of expression, "no body does that!" "every body does this!" lays the foundation for prejudice in the mind. this is the language of fashion, which, more than conscience, makes cowards of us all. "i want some wine." would it not be better to tell charles, in reply to this speech, that wine is not good for him, than to say, "wine for little boys! i never heard of such a thing!" if charles were to be ill, and it should be necessary to give him wine; or were he to see another child drink it, he would lose confidence in what was said to him. we should be very careful of our words, if we expect our pupils to have confidence in us; and if they have not, we need not attempt to educate them. "the moon shines at night, when the sun is gone to bed." when the sun is out of sight, would be more correct, though not so pleasing, perhaps, to the young reader. it is very proper to teach a child, that when the sun disappears, when the sun is below the horizon, it is the time when most animals go to rest; but we should not do this by giving so false an idea, as that the sun is gone to bed. every thing relative to the system of the universe, is above the comprehension of a child; we should, therefore, be careful to prevent his forming erroneous opinions. we should wait for a riper period of his understanding, before we attempt positive instruction upon abstract subjects. the enumeration of the months in the year, the days in the week, of metals, &c. are excellent lessons for a child who is just beginning to learn to read. the classification of animals into quadrupeds, bipeds, &c. is another useful specimen of the manner in which children should be taught to generalize their ideas. the pathetic description of the poor timid hare running from the hunters, will leave an impression upon the young and humane heart, which may, perhaps, save the life of many a hare. the poetic beauty and eloquent simplicity of many of mrs. barbauld's lessons, cultivate the imagination of children, and their taste, in the best possible manner. the description of the white swan with her long arched neck, "winning her easy way" through the waters, is beautiful; so is that of the nightingale singing upon her lone bush by moon-light. poetic descriptions of real objects, are well suited to children; apostrophe and personification they understand; but all allegoric poetry is difficult to manage for them, because they mistake the poetic attributes for reality, and they acquire false and confused ideas. with regret children close mrs. barbauld's little books, and parents become yet more sensible of their value, when they perceive that none can be found immediately to supply their place, or to continue the course of agreeable ideas which they have raised in the young pupil's imagination. "evenings at home," do not immediately join to lessons for children from three to four years old; and we know not where to find any books to fill the interval properly. the popular character of any book is easily learned, and its general merit easily ascertained; this may satisfy careless, indolent tutors, but a more minute investigation is necessary to parents who are anxious for the happiness of their family, or desirous to improve the art of education. such parents will feel it to be their duty to look over every page of a book before it is trusted to their children; it is an arduous task, but none can be too arduous for the enlightened energy of parental affection. we are acquainted with the mother of a family, who has never trusted any book to her children, without having first examined it herself with the most scrupulous attention; her care has been repaid with that success in education, which such care can alone ensure. we have several books before us marked by her pencil, and volumes which, having undergone some necessary operations by her scissors, would, in their mutilated state, shock the sensibility of a nice librarian. but shall the education of a family be sacrificed to the beauty of a page, or even to the binding of a book? few books can safely be given to children without the previous use of the pen, the pencil, and the scissors. in the books which we have before us, in their corrected state, we see sometimes a few words blotted out, sometimes half a page, sometimes many pages are cut out. in turning over the leaves of "the children's friend," we perceive, that the different ages at which different stories should be read, have been marked; and we were surprised to meet with some stories marked for six years old, and some for sixteen, in the same volume. we see that different stories have been marked with the initials of different names by this cautious mother, who considered the temper and habits of her children, as well as their ages. as far as these notes refer peculiarly to her own family, they cannot be of use to the public; but the principles which governed a judicious parent in her selection, must be capable of universal application. it may be laid down as a first principle, that we should preserve children from the knowledge of any vice, or any folly, of which the idea has never yet entered their minds, and which they are not necessarily disposed to learn by early example. children who have never lived with servants, who have never associated with ill educated companions of their own age, and who, in their own family, have heard nothing but good conversation, and seen none but good examples, will, in their language, their manners, and their whole disposition, be not only free from many of the faults common amongst children, but they will absolutely have no idea that there are such faults. the language of children who have heard no language but what is good, must be correct. on the contrary, children who hear a mixture of low and high vulgarity before their own habits are fixed, must, whenever they speak, continually blunder; they have no rule to guide their judgment in their selection from the variety of dialects which they hear; probably they may often be reproved for their mistakes, but these reproofs will be of no avail, whilst the pupils continue to be puzzled between the example of the nursery and of the drawing-room. it will cost much time and pains to correct these defects, which might have been with little difficulty prevented. it is the same with other bad habits. falsehood, caprice, dishonesty, obstinacy, revenge, and all the train of vices which are the consequences of mistaken or neglected education, which are learned by bad example, and which are not inspired by nature, need scarcely be known to children whose minds have from their infancy been happily regulated. such children should sedulously be kept from contagion. no books should be put into the hands of this happy class of children, but such as present the best models of virtue: there is no occasion to shock them with caricatures of vice. such caricatures they will even understand to be well drawn, because they are unacquainted with any thing like the originals. examples to deter them from faults to which they have no propensity, must be useless, and may be dangerous. for the same reason that a book written in bad language, should never be put into the hands of a child who speaks correctly, a book exhibiting instances of vice, should never be given to a child who thinks and acts correctly. the love of novelty and of imitation, is so strong in children, that even for the pleasure of imitating characters described in a book, or actions which strike them as singular, they often commit real faults. to this danger of catching faults by sympathy, children of the greatest simplicity are, perhaps, the most liable, because they least understand the nature and consequences of the actions which they imitate. during the age of imitation, children should not be exposed to the influence of any bad examples until their habits are formed, and until they have not only the sense to choose, but the fortitude to abide by, their own choice. it may be said, that "children must know that vice exists; that, even amongst their own companions, there are some who have bad dispositions; they cannot mix even in the society of children, without seeing examples which they ought to be prepared to avoid." these remarks are just with regard to pupils who are intended for a public school, and no great nicety in the selection of their books is necessary; but we are now speaking of children who are to be brought up in a private family. why should they be prepared to mix in the society of children who have bad habits or bad dispositions? children should not be educated for the society of children; nor should they live in that society during their education. we must not expect from them premature prudence, and all the social virtues, before we have taken any measures to produce these virtues, or this tardy prudence. in private education, there is little chance that one errour should balance another; the experience of the pupil is much confined; the examples which he sees, are not so numerous and various as to counteract each other. nothing, therefore, must be expected from the counteracting influence of opposing causes; nothing should be trusted to chance. experience must preserve one uniform tenour; and examples must be selected with circumspection. the less children associate with companions of their own age, the less they know of the world; the stronger their taste for literature; the more forcible will be the impression that will be made upon them by the pictures of life, and the characters and sentiments which they meet with in books. books for such children, ought to be _sifted_ by an academy[ ] of enlightened parents. without particular examples, the most obvious truths are not brought home to our business. we shall select a few examples from a work of high and deserved reputation, from a work which we much admire, "berquin's children's friend." we do not mean to criticise this work as a literary production; but simply to point out to parents, that, even in the best books for children, much must still be left to the judgment of the preceptor; much in the choice of stories, and particular passages suited to different pupils. in "the children's friend," there are several stories well adapted to one class of children, but entirely unfit for another. in the story called the hobgoblin, antonia, a little girl "who has been told a hundred foolish stories by her maid, particularly one about a black-faced goblin," is represented as making a lamentable outcry at the sight of a chimney-sweeper; first she runs for refuge to the kitchen, the last place to which she should run; then to the pantry; thence she jumps out of the window, "half dead with terror," and, in the elegant language of the translator, _almost splits her throat with crying out help! help!_--in a few minutes she discovers her errour, is heartily ashamed, and "ever afterwards antonia was the first to laugh at silly stories, told by silly people, of hobgoblins and the like, to frighten her." for children who have had the misfortune to have heard the hundred foolish stories of a foolish maid, this apparition of the chimney-sweeper is well managed; though, perhaps, ridicule might not effect so sudden st cure in all cases as it did in that of antonia. by children who have not acquired terrors of the black-faced goblin, and who have not the habit of frequenting the kitchen and the pantry, this story should never be read. "the little miss deceived by her maid," who takes her mamma's keys out of her drawers, and who steals sugar and tea for her maid, that she may have the pleasure of playing with a cousin whom her mother had forbidden her to see, is not an example that need be introduced into any well regulated family. the picture of amelia's misery, is drawn by the hand of a master. terror and pity, we are told by the tragic poets, purify the mind; but there are minds that do not require this species of purification. powerful antidotes are necessary to combat powerful poisons; but where no poison has been imbibed, are not antidotes more dangerous than useful? the stories called "the little gamblers; blind man's buff; and honesty the best policy," are stories which may do a great deal of good to bad children, but they should never be given to those of another description. the young gentlemen who cheat at cards, and who pocket silver fish, should have no admittance any where. it is not necessary to put _children_ upon their guard against associates whom they are not likely to meet; nor need we introduce the vulgar and mischievous school-boy, to any but school-boys. martin, who throws squibs at people in the street, who fastens rabbits' tails behind their backs, who fishes for their wigs, who sticks up pins in his friends' chairs, who carries a hideous mask in his pocket to frighten little children, and who is himself frightened into repentance by a spectre with a speaking trumpet, is a very objectionable, though an excellent dramatic character. the part of the spectre is played by the groom; this is ill contrived in a drama for children; grooms should have nothing to do with their entertainments; and cæsar, who is represented as a pleasing character, should not be supposed to make the postillion a party in his inventions. "_a good heart compensates for many indiscretions_," is a dangerous title for a play for young people; because _many_ is an indefinite term; and in settling how many, the calculations of parents and children may vary materially. this little play is so charmingly written, the character of the imprudent and generous frederick is so likely to excite imitation, that we must doubly regret his intimacy with the coachman, his running away from school, and drinking beer at an ale-house in a fair. the coachman is an excellent old man; he is turned away for having let master frederick mount his box, assume the whip, and overturn a handsome carriage. frederick, touched with gratitude and compassion, gives the old man all his pocket money, and sells a watch and some books to buy clothes for him. the motives of frederick's conduct are excellent, and, as they are misrepresented by a treacherous and hypocritical cousin, we sympathize more strongly with the hero of the piece; and all his indiscretions appear, at least, amiable defects. a nice observer[ ] of the human heart says, that we are never inclined to to cure ourselves of any defect which makes us agreeable. frederick's real virtues will not, probably, excite imitation so much as his imaginary excellences. we should take the utmost care not to associate in the mind the ideas of imprudence and of generosity; of hypocrisy and of prudence: on the contrary, it should be shown that prudence is necessary to real benevolence; that no virtue is more useful, and consequently more respectable, than justice. these homely truths will never be attended to as the counter-check moral of an interesting story; stories which require such morals, should, therefore, be avoided. it is to be hoped, that select parts of the children's friend,[ ] translated by some able hand, will be published hereafter for the use of private families. many of the stories, to which we have ventured to object, are by no means unfit for school-boys, to whom the characters which are most exceptionable cannot be new. the vulgarity of language which we have noticed, is not to be attributed to m. berquin, but to his wretched translator. l'ami des enfans, is, in french, remarkably elegantly written. the little canary bird, little george, the talkative little girl, the four seasons, and many others, are excellent both in point of style and dramatic effect; they are exactly suited to the understandings of children; and they interest without any improbable events, or unnatural characters. in fiction it is difficult to avoid giving children false ideas of virtue, and still more difficult to keep the different virtues in their due proportions. this should be attended to with care in all books for young people; nor should we sacrifice the understanding to the enthusiasm of eloquence, or the affectation of sensibility. without the habit of reasoning, the best dispositions can give us no solid security for happiness; therefore, we should early cultivate the reasoning faculty, instead of always appealing to the imagination. by sentimental persuasives, a child may be successfully governed for a time, but that time will be of short duration, and no power can continue the delusion long. in the dialogue upon this maxim, "that a competence is best," the reasoning of the father is not a match for that of the son; by using less eloquence, the father might have made out his case much better. the boy sees that many people are richer than his father, and perceiving that their riches procure a great number of conveniences and comforts for them, he asks why his father, who is as good as these opulent people, should not also be as rich. his father tells him, that he is rich, that he has a large garden, and a fine estate; the boy asks to see it, and his father takes him to the top of a high hill, and, showing him an extensive prospect, says to him, "all this is my estate." the boy cross questions his father, and finds out that it is not his estate, but that he may enjoy the pleasure of looking at it; that he can buy wood when he wants it for firing; venison, without hunting the deer himself; fish, without fishing; and butter, without possessing all the cows that graze in the valley; therefore he calls himself master of the woods, the deer, the herds, the huntsmen, and the labourers that he beholds. this is[ ] poetic philosophy, but it is not sufficiently accurate for a child; it would confound his ideas of property, and it would be immediately contradicted by his experience. the father's reasoning is perfectly good, and well adapted to his pupil's capacity, when he asks, "whether he should not require a superfluous appetite to enjoy superfluous dishes at his meals." in returning from his walk, the boy sees a mill that is out of repair, a meadow that is flooded, and a quantity of hay spoiled; he observes, that the owners of these things must be sadly vexed by such accidents, and his father congratulates himself upon their not being his property. here is a direct contradiction; for a few minutes before he had asserted that they belonged to him. property is often the cause of much anxiety to its possessor; but the question is, whether the pains, or the pleasures of possessing it, predominate; if this question could not be fully discussed, it should not be partially stated. to silence a child in argument is easy, to convince him is difficult; sophistry or wit should never be used to confound the understanding. reason has equal force from the lips of the giant and of the dwarf. these minute criticisms may appear invidious; but it is hoped that they will be considered only as illustrations of general principles; illustrations necessary to our subject. we have chosen m. berquin's work because of its universal popularity; probably all the examples which have been selected, are in the recollection of most readers, or at least it is easy to refer to them, because "the children's friend" is to be found in every house where there are any children. the principles by which we have examined berquin, may be applied to all books of the same class. sandford and merton, madame de silleri's theatre of education, and her tales of the castle, madame de la fite's tales and conversations, mrs. smith's rural walks, with a long list of other books for children, which have considerable merit, would deserve a separate analysis, if literary criticism were our object. a critic once, with indefatigable ill-nature, picked out all the faults of a beautiful poem, and presented them to apollo. the god ordered a bushel of his best parnassian wheat to be carefully winnowed, and he presented the critic with the chaff. our wish is to separate the small portion of what is useless, from the excellent nutriment contained in the books we have mentioned. with respect to sentimental stories,[ ] and books of mere entertainment, we must remark, that they should be sparingly used, especially in the education of girls. this species of reading, cultivates what is called the heart prematurely; lowers the tone of the mind, and induces indifference for those common pleasures and occupations which, however trivial in themselves, constitute by far the greatest portion of our daily happiness. stories are the novels of childhood. we know, from common experience, the effects which are produced upon the female mind by immoderate novel reading. to those who acquire this taste, every object becomes disgusting which is not in an attitude for poetic painting; a species of moral picturesque is sought for in every scene of life, and this is not always compatible with sound sense, or with simple reality. gainsborough's country girl, as it has been humorously[ ] remarked, "is a much more picturesque object, than a girl neatly dressed in a clean white frock; but for this reason, are all children to go in rags?" a tragedy heroine, weeping, swooning, dying, is a moral picturesque object; but the frantic passions, which have the best effect upon the stage, might, when exhibited in domestic life, appear to be drawn upon too large a scale to please. the difference between reality and fiction, is so great, that those who copy from any thing but nature, are continually disposed to make mistakes in their conduct, which appear ludicrous to the impartial spectator. pathos depends on such nice circumstances, that domestic, sentimental distresses, are in a perilous situation; the sympathy of their audience, is not always in the power of the fair performers. frenzy itself may be turned to farce.[ ] "enter the princess mad in white satin, and her attendant mad in white linen." besides the danger of creating a romantic taste, there is reason to believe, that the species of reading to which we object, has an effect directly opposite to what it is intended to produce. it diminishes, instead of increasing, the sensibility of the heart; a combination of romantic imagery, is requisite to act upon the associations of sentimental people, and they are virtuous only when virtue is in perfectly good taste. an eloquent philosopher[ ] observes, that in the description of scenes of distress in romance and poetry, the distress is always made _elegant_; the imagination, which has been accustomed to this delicacy in fictitious narrations, revolts from the disgusting circumstances which attend real poverty, disease and misery; the emotions of pity, and the exertions of benevolence, are consequently repressed precisely at the time when they are necessary to humanity. with respect to pity, it is a spontaneous, natural emotion, which is strongly felt by children, but they cannot properly be said to feel benevolence till they are capable of reasoning. charity must, in them, be a very doubtful virtue; they cannot be competent judges as to the general utility of what they give. persons of the most enlarged understanding, find it necessary to be extremely cautious in charitable donations, lest they should do more harm than good. children cannot see beyond the first link in the chain which holds society together; at the best, then, their charity can be but a partial virtue. but in fact, children have nothing to give; they think that they give, when they dispose of property of their parents; they suffer no privation from this sort of generosity, and they learn ostentation, instead of practising self-denial. berquin, in his excellent story of "the little needle woman," has made the children give their own work; here the pleasure of employment is immediately connected with the gratification of benevolent feelings; their pity is not merely passive, it is active and useful. in fictitious narratives, affection for parents, and for brothers and sisters, is often painted in agreeable colours, to excite the admiration and sympathy of children. caroline, the charming little girl, who gets upon a chair to wipe away the tears that trickle down her eldest sister's cheek when her mother is displeased with her,[ ] forms a natural and beautiful picture; but the desire to imitate caroline must produce affectation. all the simplicity of youth, is gone the moment children perceive that they are extolled for the expression of fine feelings, and fine sentiments. gratitude, esteem and affection, do not depend upon the table of consanguinity; they are involuntary feelings, which cannot be raised at pleasure by the voice of authority; they will not obey the dictates of interest; they secretly despise the anathemas of sentiment. esteem and affection, are the necessary consequences of a certain course of conduct, combined with certain external circumstances, which are, more or less, in the power of every individual. to arrange these circumstances prudently, and to pursue a proper course of conduct steadily, something more is necessary than the transitory impulse of sensibility, or of enthusiasm. there is a class of books which amuse the imagination of children, without acting upon their feelings. we do not allude to fairy tales, for we apprehend that these are not now much read; but we mean voyages and travels; these interest young people universally. robinson crusoe, gulliver, and the three russian sailors, who were cast away upon the coast of norway, are general favourites. no child ever read an account of a shipwreck, or even a storm, without pleasure. a desert island is a delightful place, to be equalled only by the skating land of the rein-deer, or by the valley of diamonds in the arabian tales. savages, especially if they be cannibals, are sure to be admired, and the more hair-breadth escapes the hero of the tale has survived, and the more marvellous his adventures, the more sympathy he excites.[ ] will it be thought to proceed from a spirit of contradiction, if we remark, that this species of reading should not early be chosen for boys of an enterprising temper, unless they are intended for a sea-faring life, or for the army? the taste for adventure, is absolutely incompatible with the sober perseverance necessary to success in any other liberal professions. to girls, this species of reading cannot be as dangerous as it is to boys; girls must very soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventures; and where there appears an obvious impossibility in gratifying any wish, it is not likely to become, or at least to continue, a torment to the imagination. boys, on the contrary, from the habits of their education, are prone to admire, and to imitate, every thing like enterprise and heroism. courage and fortitude, are the virtues of men, and it is natural that boys should desire, if they believe that they possess these virtues, to be placed in those great and extraordinary situations which can display them to advantage. the taste for adventure, is not repressed in boys by the impossibility of its indulgence; the world is before them, and they think that fame promises the highest prize to those who will most boldly venture in the lottery of fortune. the rational probability of success, few young people are able, fewer still are willing, to calculate; and the calculations of prudent friends, have little power over their understandings, or at least, over their imagination, the part of the understanding which is most likely to decide their conduct.--from general maxims, we cannot expect that young people should learn much prudence; each individual admits the propriety of the rule, yet believes himself to be a privileged exception. where any prize is supposed to be in the gift of fortune, every man, or every young man, takes it for granted that he is a favourite, and that it will be bestowed upon him. the profits of commerce and of agriculture, the profits of every art and profession, can be estimated with tolerable accuracy; the value of activity, application and abilities, can be respectively measured by some certain standard. modest, or even prudent people, will scruple to rate themselves in all of these qualifications superior to their neighbours; but every man will allow that, in point of good fortune, at any game of chance, he thinks himself upon a fair level with every other competitor. when a young man deliberates upon what course of life he shall follow, the patient drudgery of a trade, the laborious mental exertions requisite to prepare him for a profession, must appear to him in a formidable light, compared with the alluring prospects presented by an adventuring imagination. at this time of life, it will be too late suddenly to change the taste; it will be inconvenient, if not injurious, to restrain a young man's inclinations by force or authority; it will be imprudent, perhaps fatally imprudent, to leave them uncontroled. precautions should therefore be taken long before this period, and the earlier they are taken, the better. it is not idle refinement to assert, that the first impressions which are made upon the imagination, though they may be changed by subsequent circumstances, yet are discernible in every change, and are seldom entirely effaced from the mind, though it may be difficult to trace them through all their various appearances. a boy, who at seven years old, longs to be robinson crusoe, or sinbad the sailor, may at seventeen, retain the same taste for adventure and enterprise, though mixed so as to be less discernible, with the incipient passions of avarice and ambition; he has the same dispositions modified by a slight knowledge of real life, and guided by the manners and conversation of his friends and acquaintance. robinson crusoe and sinbad, will no longer be his favourite heroes; but he will now admire the soldier of fortune, the commercial adventurer, or the nabob, who has discovered in the east the secret of aladdin's wonderful lamp; and who has realized the treasures of aboulcasem. the history of realities, written in an entertaining manner, appears not only better suited to the purposes of education, but also more agreeable to young people than improbable fictions. we have seen the reasons why it is dangerous to pamper the taste early with mere books of entertainment; to voyages and travels, we have made some objections. natural history, is a study particularly suited to children: it cultivates their talents for observation, applies to objects within their reach, and to objects which are every day interesting to them. the histories of the bee, the ant, the caterpillar, the butterfly, the silk-worm, are the first things that please the taste of children, and these are the histories of realities. amongst books of mere entertainment, no one can be so injudicious, or so unjust, as to class the excellent "evenings at home." upon a close examination, it appears to be one of the best books for young people from seven to ten years old, that has yet appeared. we shall not pretend to enter into a minute examination of it; because, from what we have already said, parents can infer our sentiments, and we wish to avoid tedious, unnecessary detail. we shall, however, just observe, that the lessons on natural history, on metals, and on chemistry, are particularly useful, not so much from the quantity of knowledge which, they contain, as by the agreeable manner in which it is communicated: the mind is opened to extensive views, at the same time that nothing above the comprehension of children is introduced. the mixture of moral and, scientific lessons, is happily managed so as to relieve the attention; some of the moral lessons, contain sound argument, and some display just views of life. "perseverance against fortune;" "the price of victory;" "eyes and no eyes," have been generally admired as much by parents as by children. there is a little book called "leisure hours," which contains a great deal of knowledge suited to young people; but they must observe, that the style is not elegant; perhaps, in a future edition, the style may be revised. the "conversations d'emile," are elegantly written, and the character of the mother and child admirably well preserved. white of selborne's naturalist's calendar, we can recommend with entire approbation: it is written in a familiar, yet elegant style; and the journal form, gives it that air of reality which is so agreeable and interesting to the mind. mr. white will make those who have observed, observe the more, and will excite the spirit of observation in those who never before observed. smellie's natural history, is a useful, entertaining book; but it _must_ be carefully looked over, and many pages and half pages must be entirely sacrificed. and here one general caution may be necessary. it is hazarding too much, to make children promise not to read parts of any book which is put into their hands; when the book is too valuable, in the parent's estimation, to be cut or blotted, let it not be given to children when they are alone; in a parent's presence, there is no danger, and the children will acquire the habit of reading the passages that are selected without feeling curiosity about the rest. as young people grow up, they will judge of the selections that have been made for them; they will perceive why such a passage was fit for their understanding at one period, which they could not have understood at another. if they are never forced to read what is tiresome, they will anxiously desire to have passages selected for them; and they will not imagine that their parents are capricious in these selections; but they will, we speak from experience, be sincerely grateful to them for the time and trouble bestowed in procuring their literary amusements. when young people have established their character for truth and exact integrity, they should be entirely trusted with books as with every thing else. a slight pencil line at the side of a page, will then be all that is necessary to guide them to the best parts of any book. suspicion would be as injurious, as too easy a faith is imprudent: confidence confirms integrity; but the habits of truth must be formed before dangerous temptations are presented. we intended to have given a list of books, and to have named the pages in several authors, which have been found interesting to children from seven to nine or ten years old. the reviews; the annual registers; enfield's speaker; _elegant extracts_; the papers of the manchester society; the french academy of sciences; priestley's history of vision; and parts of the works of franklin, of chaptal, lavoisier and darwin, have supplied us with our best materials. some periodical papers from the world, rambler, guardian, and adventurer, have been chosen: these are books with which all libraries are furnished. but we forbear to offer any list; the passages we should have mentioned, have been found to please in one family; but we are sensible, that as circumstances vary, the choice of books for different families, ought to be different. every parent must be capable of selecting those passages in books which are most suited to the age, temper, and taste of their children. much of the success, both of literary and moral education, will depend upon our seizing the happy moments for instruction; moments when knowledge immediately applies to what children are intent upon themselves; the step which is to be taken by the understanding, should immediately follow that which has already been secured. by watching the turn of mind, and by attending to the conversation of children, we may perceive exactly what will suit them in books; and we may preserve the connection of their ideas without fatiguing their attention. a paragraph read aloud from the newspaper of the day, a passage from any book which parents happen to be reading themselves, will catch the attention of the young people in a family, and will, perhaps, excite more taste and more curiosity, than could be given by whole volumes read at times when the mind is indolent or intent upon other occupations. the custom of reading aloud for a great while together, is extremely fatiguing to children, and hurtful to their understandings; they learn to read on without the slightest attention or thought; the more fluently they read, the worse it is for them; for their preceptors, whilst words and sentences are pronounced with tolerable emphasis, never seem to suspect that the reader can be tired, or that his mind may be absent from his book. the monotonous tones which are acquired by children who read a great deal aloud, are extremely disagreeable, and the habit cannot easily be broken: we may observe, that children who have not acquired bad customs, always read as they speak, when they understand what they read; but the moment when they come to any sentence which they do not comprehend, their voice alters, and they read with hesitation, or with false emphasis: to these signals a preceptor should always attend, and the passage should be explained before the pupil is taught to read it in a musical tone, or with the proper emphasis: thus children should be taught to read by the understanding, and not merely by the ear. dialogues, dramas, and well written narratives, they always read _well_, and these should be their exercises in the art of reading: they should be allowed to put down the book as soon as they are tired; but an attentive tutor will perceive when they ought to be stopped, _before_ the utmost point of fatigue. we have heard a boy of nine years old, who had never been taught elocution by any reading master, read simple pathetic passages, and natural dialogues in "evenings at home," in a manner which would have made even sterne's critic forget his stop-watch. by reading much at a time, it is true that a great number of books are run through in a few years; but this is not at all our object; on the contrary, our greatest difficulty has been to find a sufficient number of books fit for children to read. if they early acquire a strong taste for literature, no matter how few authors they may have perused. we have often heard young people exclaim, "i'm glad i have not read such a book--i have a great pleasure to come!"--is not this better than to see a child yawn over a work, and count the number of tiresome pages, whilst he says, "i shall have got through this book by and by; and what must i read when i have done this? i believe i never shall have read all i am to read! what a number of tiresome books there are in the world! i wonder what can be the reason that i must read them all! if i were but allowed to skip the pages that i don't understand, i should be much happier, for when i come to any thing entertaining in a book, i can keep myself awake, and then i like reading as well as any body does." far from forbidding to skip the incomprehensible pages, or to close the tiresome volume, we should exhort our pupils never to read one single page that tires, or that they do not fully understand. we need not fear, that, because an excellent book is not interesting at one period of education, it should not become interesting at another; the child is always the best judge of what is suited to his present capacity. if he says, "such a book tires me," the preceptor should never answer with a forbidding, reproachful look, "i am surprised at that, it is no great proof of your taste; the book, which you say tires you, is written by one of the best authors in the english language." the boy is sorry for it, but he cannot help it; and he concludes, if he be of a timid temper, that he has no taste for literature, since the best authors in the english language tire him. it is in vain to tell him, that the book is "universally allowed to be very entertaining." "if it be not such to me, what care i how fine it be!" the more encouraging and more judicious parent would answer upon a similar occasion, "you are very right not to read what tires you, my dear; and i am glad that you have sense enough to tell me that this book does not entertain you, though it is written by one of the best authors in the english language. we do not think at all the worse of your taste and understanding; we know that the day will come when this book will probably entertain you; put it by until then, i advise you." it may be thought, that young people who read only those parts of books which are entertaining, or those which are selected for them, are in danger of learning a taste for variety, and desultory habits, which may prevent their acquiring accurate knowledge upon any subject, and which may render them incapable of that literary application, without which nothing can be well learned. we hope the candid preceptor will suspend his judgment, until we can explain our sentiments upon this subject more fully, when we examine the nature of invention and memory.[ ] the secret fear, that stimulates parents to compel their children to constant application to certain books, arises from the opinion, that much chronological and historical knowledge must at all events be acquired during a certain number of years. the knowledge of history is thought a necessary accomplishment in one sex, and an essential part of education in the other. we ought, however, to distinguish between that knowledge of history and of chronology which is really useful, and that which is acquired merely for parade. we must call that useful knowledge, which enlarges the view of human life and of human nature, which teaches by the experience of the past, what we may expect in future. to study history as it relates to these objects, the pupil must have acquired much previous knowledge; the habit of reasoning, and the power of combining distant analogies. the works of hume, of robertson, gibbon, or voltaire, can be properly understood only by well informed and highly cultivated understandings. enlarged views of policy, some knowledge of the interests of commerce, of the progress and state of civilization and literature in different countries, are necessary to whoever studies these authors with real advantage. without these, the finest sense, and the finest writing, must be utterly thrown away upon the reader. children, consequently, under the name of fashionable histories, often read what to them is absolute nonsense: they have very little motive for the study of history, and all that we can say to keep alive their interest, amounts to the common argument, "that such information will be useful to them hereafter, when they hear history mentioned in conversation." some people imagine, that the memory resembles a store-house, in which we should early lay up facts; and they assert, that, however useless these may appear at the time when they are laid up, they will afterwards be ready for service at our summons. one allusion may be fairly answered by another, since it is impossible to oppose allusion by reasoning. in accumulating facts, as in amassing riches, people often begin by believing that they value wealth only for the use they shall make of it; but it often happens, that during the course of their labours, they learn habitually to set a value upon the coin itself, and they grow avaricious of that which they are sensible has little intrinsic value. young people who have accumulated a vast number of facts, and names, and dates, perhaps intended originally to make some good use of their treasure; but they frequently forget their laudable intentions, and conclude by contenting themselves with the display of their nominal wealth. pedants and misers forget the real use of wealth and knowledge, and they accumulate without rendering what they acquire useful to themselves or to others. a number of facts are often stored in the mind, which lie there useless, because they cannot be found at the moment when they are wanted. it is not sufficient, therefore, in education, to store up knowledge; it is essential to arrange facts so that they shall be ready for use, as materials for the imagination, or the judgment, to select and combine. the power of retentive memory is exercised too much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by the common modes of education. whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories; whilst they are learning tables of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and their reasoning faculties are absolutely passive; nor are any of the facts which they learn in this manner, associated with circumstances in real life. these trains of ideas may with much pains and labour be fixed in the memory, but they must be recalled precisely in the order in which they were learnt by rote, and this is not the order in which they may be wanted: they will be conjured up in technical succession, or in troublesome multitudes.--many people are obliged to repeat the alphabet before they can recollect the relative place of any given letter; others repeat a column of the multiplication table before they can recollect the given sum of the number they want. there is a common rigmarole for telling the number of days in each month in the year; those who have learnt it by heart, usually repeat the whole of it before they can recollect the place of the month which they want; and sometimes in running over the lines, people miss the very month which they are thinking of, or repeat its name without perceiving that they have named it. in the same manner, those who have learned historical or chronological facts in a technical mode, must go through the whole train of their rigmarole associations before they can hit upon the idea which they want. lord bolingbroke mentions an acquaintance of his, who had an amazing collection of facts in his memory, but unfortunately he could never produce one of them in the proper moment; he was always obliged to go back to to some fixed landing place, from which he was accustomed to take his flight. lord bolingbroke used to be afraid of asking him a question, because when once he began, he went off like a larum, and could not be stopped; he poured out a profusion of things which had nothing to do with the point in question; and it was ten to one but he omitted the only circumstance that would have been really serviceable. many people who have tenacious memories, and who have been ill educated, find themselves in a similar condition, with much knowledge baled up, an incumbrance to themselves and to their friends. the great difference which appears in men of the same profession, and in the same circumstances, depends upon the application of their knowledge more than upon the quantity of their learning. with respect to a knowledge of history and chronologic learning, every body is now nearly upon a level; this species of information cannot be a great distinction to any one; a display of such common knowledge, is considered by literary people, and by men of genius especially, as ridiculous and offensive. one motive, therefore, for loading the minds of children with historic dates and facts, is likely, even from its having universally operated, to cease to operate in future. without making it a laborious task to young people, it is easy to give them such a knowledge of history, as will preserve them from the shame of ignorance, and put them upon a footing with men of good sense in society, though not, perhaps, with men who have studied history for the purpose of shining in conversation. for our purpose, it is not necessary early to study voluminous philosophic histories; these should be preserved for a more advanced period of their education. the first thing to be done, is to seize the moment when curiosity is excited by the accidental mention of any historic name or event. when a child hears his father talk of the roman emperors, or of the roman people, he naturally inquires who these people were; some short explanation may be given, so as to leave curiosity yet unsatisfied. the prints of the roman emperors' heads, and mrs. trimmer's prints of the remarkable events in the roman and english history, will entertain children. madame de silleri, in her adela and theodore, describes historical hangings, which she found advantageous to her pupils. in a prince's palace, or a nobleman's palace, such hangings would be suitable decorations, or in a public seminary of education it would be worth while to prepare them: private families would, perhaps, be alarmed at the idea of expense, and at the idea, that their house could not readily be furnished in proper time for the instruction of children. as we know the effect of such apprehensions of difficulty, we forbear from insisting upon historical hangings, especially as we think that children should not, by any great apparatus for teaching them history, be induced to set an exorbitant value upon this sort of knowledge, and should hence be excited to cultivate their memories without reasoning or reflecting. if any expedients are thought necessary to fix historic facts early in the mind, the entertaining display of roman emperors, and british kings and queens, may be made, as madame de silleri recommends, in a magic lantern, or by the ombres chinoises. when these are exhibited, there should be some care taken not to introduce any false ideas. parents should be present at the spectacle, and should answer each eager question with prudence. "ha! here comes queen elizabeth!" exclaims the child; "was she a good woman?" a foolish show-man would answer, "yes, master, she was the greatest queen that ever sat upon the english throne!" a sensible mother would reply, "my dear, i cannot answer that question; you will read her history yourself, you will judge by her actions, whether she was, or was not, a good woman." children are often extremely impatient to settle the precise merit and demerit of every historical personage, with whose names they become acquainted; but this impatience should not be gratified by the short method of referring to the characters given of these persons in any common historical abridgment. we should advise all such characters to be omitted in books for children; let those who read, form a judgment for themselves: this will do more service to the understanding, than can be done by learning by rote the opinion of any historian. the good and bad qualities; the decisive, yet contradictory, epithets, are so jumbled together in these characters, that no distinct notion can be left in the reader's mind; and the same words recur so frequently in the characters of different kings, that they are read over in a monotonous voice, as mere concluding sentences, which come of course, at the end of every reign. "king henry the fifth, was tall and slender, with a long neck, engaging aspect, and limbs of the most elegant turn. **********. his valour was such as no danger could startle, and no difficulty could oppose. he managed the dissentions amongst his enemies with such address as spoke him consummate in the arts of the cabinet. he was chaste, temperate, modest, and devout, scrupulously just in his administration, and severely exact in the discipline of his army, upon which he knew his glory and success in a great measure depended. in a word, it must be owned that he was without an equal in the arts of war, policy, and government. his great qualities were, however, somewhat obscured by his ambition, and his natural propensity to cruelty." is it possible that a child of seven or eight years old can acquire any distinct, or any just ideas, from the perusal of this character of henry the fifth? yet it is selected as one of the best drawn characters from a little abridgment of the history of england, which is, in general, as well done as any we have seen. even the least exceptionable historic abridgments require the corrections of a patient parent. in abridgments for children, the facts are usually interspersed with what the authors intend for moral reflections, and easy explanations of political events, which are meant to be suited to _the meanest capacities_. these reflections and explanations do much harm; they instil prejudice, and they accustom the young unsuspicious reader to swallow absurd reasoning, merely because it is often presented to him. if no history can be found entirely free from these defects, and if it be even impossible to correct any completely, without writing the whole over again, yet much may be done by those who hear children read. explanations can be given at the moment when the difficulties occur. when the young reader pauses to think, allow him to think, and suffer him to question the assertions which he meets with in books, with freedom, and that minute accuracy which is only tiresome to those who cannot reason. the simple morality of childhood is continually puzzled and shocked at the representation of the crimes and the virtues of historic heroes. history, when divested of the graces of eloquence, and of that veil which the imagination is taught to throw over antiquity, presents a disgusting, terrible list of crimes and calamities: murders, assassinations, battles, revolutions, are the memorable events of history. the love of glory atones for military barbarity; treachery and fraud are frequently dignified with the names of prudence and policy; and the historian, desirous to appear moral and sentimental, yet compelled to produce facts, makes out an inconsistent, ambiguous system of morality. a judicious and honest preceptor will not, however, imitate the false tenderness of the historian for the dead; he will rather consider what is most advantageous to the living; he will perceive, that it is of more consequence that his pupils should have distinct notions of right and wrong, than that they should have perfectly by rote all the grecian, roman, english, french, all the fifty volumes of the universal history. a preceptor will not surely attempt, by any sophistry, to justify the crimes which sometimes obtain the name of heroism; when his ingenious indignant pupil verifies the astonishing numeration of the hundreds and thousands that were put to death by a conqueror, or that fell in one battle, he will allow this astonishment and indignation to be just, and he will rejoice that it is strongly felt and expressed. besides the false characters which are sometimes drawn of individuals in history, national characters are often decidedly given in a few epithets, which prejudice the mind, and convey no real information. can a child learn any thing but national prepossession, from reading in a character of the english nation, that "boys, before they can speak, discover that they know the proper guards in boxing with their fists; a quality that, perhaps, is peculiar to the english, and is seconded by a strength of arm that few other people can exert? _this_ gives their soldiers an infinite superiority in all battles that are to be decided by the bayonet screwed upon the musket."[ ] why should children be told, that the italians are _naturally_ revengeful; the french _naturally_ vain and perfidious, excessively credulous and litigious; that the spaniards are _naturally_ jealous and haughty?[ ] the patriotism of an enlarged and generous mind cannot, surely, depend upon the early contempt inspired for foreign nations.--we do not speak of the education necessary for naval and military men--with this we have nothing to do; but surely it cannot be necessary to teach national prejudices to any other class of young men. if these prejudices are ridiculed by sensible parents, children will not be misled by partial authors; general assertions will be of little consequence to those who are taught to reason; they will not be overawed by nonsense wherever they may meet with it. the words whig and tory, occur frequently in english history, and liberty and tyranny are talked of--the influence of the crown--the rights of the people. what are children of eight or nine years old to understand by these expressions? and how can a tutor explain them, without inspiring political prejudices? we do not mean here to enter into any political discussion; we think, that children should not be taught the principles of their preceptors, whatever they may be; they should judge for themselves, and, until they are able to judge, all discussion, all explanations, should be scrupulously avoided. whilst they are children, the plainest chronicles are for them the best histories, because they express no political tenets and dogmas. when our pupils grow up, at whatever age they may be capable of understanding them, the best authors who have written on each side of the question, the best works, without any party considerations, should be put into their hands; and let them form their own opinions from facts and arguments, uninfluenced by passion, and uncontrolled by authority. as young people increase their collection of historic facts, some arrangement will be necessary to preserve these in proper order in the memory. priestley's biographical chart, is an extremely ingenious contrivance for this purpose; it should hang up in the room where children read, or rather where they live, for we hope no room will ever be dismally consecrated to their studies. whenever they hear any celebrated name mentioned, or when they meet with any in books, they will run to search for these names in the biographical chart; and those who are used to children, will perceive, that the pleasure of this search, and the joy of the discovery, will fix biography and chronology easily in their memories. mortimer's student's dictionary, and brookes's gazetteer, should, in a library or room which children usually inhabit, be always within the reach of children. if they are always consulted at the very moment they are wanted, much may be learned from them; but if there be any difficulty in getting at these dictionaries, children forget, and lose all interest in the things which they wanted to know. but if knowledge becomes immediately useful, or entertaining to them, there is no danger of their forgetting. who ever forgets shakespeare's historical plays? the arrangements contrived and executed by others, do not always fix things so firmly in our remembrance, as those which we have had some share in contriving and executing ourselves. one of our pupils has drawn out a biographical chart upon the plan of priestley's, inserting such names only as he was well acquainted with; he found, that in drawing out this chart, a great portion of general history and biography was fixed in his memory. charts, in the form of priestley's, but without the names of the heroes, &c. being inserted, would, perhaps, be useful for schools and private families. there are two french historical works, which we wish were well translated for the advantage of those who do not understand french. the chevalier meheghan's tableau de l'histoire moderne, which is sensibly divided into epochs; and condillac's view of universal history, comprised in five volumes, in his "cours d'etude pour l'instruction du prince de parme." this history carries on, along with the records of wars and revolutions, the history of the progress of the human mind, of arts, and sciences; the view of the different governments of europe, is full and concise; no prejudices are instilled; yet the manly and rational eloquence of virtue, gives life and spirit to the work. the concluding address, from the preceptor to his royal pupil, is written with all the enlightened energy of a man of truth and genius. we do not recommend condillac's history as an elementary work; for this it is by no means fit; but it is one of the best histories that a young man of fifteen or sixteen can read. it is scarcely possible to conceive, that several treatises on grammar, the art of reasoning, thinking, and writing, which are contained in m. condillac's course of study, were designed by him for elementary books, for the instruction of a child from seven to ten years old. it appears the more surprising that the abbé should have so far mistaken the capacity of childhood, because, in his judicious preface, he seems fully sensible of the danger of premature cultivation, and of the absurdity of substituting a knowledge of words for a knowledge of things. as m. condillac's is a work of high reputation, we may be allowed to make a few remarks on its practical utility, and this may, perhaps, afford us an opportunity of explaining our ideas upon the use of metaphysical, poetical, and critical works, in early education. we do not mean any invidious criticism upon condillac, but in "practical education" we wish to take our examples and illustrations from real life. the abbé's course of study, for a boy of seven years old, begins with metaphysics. in his preface he asserts, that the arts of speaking, reasoning, and writing, differ from one another only in degrees of accuracy, and in the more or less perfect connection of ideas. he observes, that attention to the manner in which we acquire, and in which we arrange our knowledge, is necessary equally to those who would learn, and to those who would teach, with success. these remarks are just; but does not he draw an erroneous conclusion from his own principles, when he infers, that the first lessons which we should teach a child, ought to be metaphysical? he has given us an abstract of those which he calls preliminary lessons, on the operations of the soul, on attention, judgment, imagination, &c.--he adds, that he thought it useless to give to the public the conversations and explanations which he had with his pupil on these subjects. both parents and children must regret the suppression of these explanatory notes; as the lessons appear at present, no child of seven years old can understand, and few preceptors can or will make them what they ought to be. in the first lesson on the different species of ideas, the abbé says, "the idea, for instance, which i have of peter, is singular, or individual; and as the idea of man is general relatively to the ideas of a nobleman and a citizen, it is particular as it relates to the idea of animal."[ ] "relatively to the ideas of a nobleman and a citizen." what a long explanation upon these words there must have been between the abbé and the prince! the whole view of society must have been opened at once, or the prince must have swallowed prejudices and metaphysics together. to make these things familiar to a child, condillac says, that we must bring a few or many examples; but where shall we find examples? where shall we find proper words to express to a child ideas of political relations mingled with metaphysical subtleties? through this whole chapter, on particular and general ideas, the abbé is secretly intent upon a dispute began or revived in the thirteenth century, and not yet finished, between the nominalists and the realists; but a child knows nothing of this. in the article "on the power of thinking," an article which he acknowledges to be a little difficult, he observes, that the great point is to make the child comprehend what is meant by attention; "for as soon as he understands that, all the rest," he assures us, "will be easy." is it then of less consequence, that the child should learn the habit of attention, than that he should learn the meaning of the word? granting, however, that the definition of this word is of consequence, that definition should be made proportionably clear. the tutor, at least, must understand it, before he can hope to explain it to his pupil. here it is: "*** when amongst many sensations which you experience at the same time, _the direction of the organs_ makes you take notice of one, so that you do not observe the others any longer, this sensation becomes what we call _attention_."[ ] this is not accurate; it is not clear whether the direction of the organs be the cause, or the effect, of attention; or whether it be only a concomitant of the sensation. attention, we know, can be exercised upon abstract ideas; for this objection m. condillac has afterwards a provisional clause, but the original definition remains defective, because the direction of the organs is not, though it be stated as such, essential: besides, we are told only, that the sensation described becomes (devient) what we call attention. what attention actually is, we are still left to discover. the matter is made yet more difficult; for when we are just fixed in the belief, that attention depends "upon our remarking one sensation, and not remarking others which we may have at the same time," we are in the next chapter given to understand, that "in comparison we may have _a double attention, or two attentions_, which are only two sensations, which make themselves be taken notice of equally, and consequently comparison consists only of sensations."[ ] the doctrine of simultaneous ideas here glides in, and we concede unawares all that is necessary to the abbé's favourite system, "that sensation becomes successively attention, memory, comparison, judgment, and reflection;[ ] and that the art of reasoning is reducible to a series of identic propositions." without, at present, attempting to examine this system, we may observe, that in education it is more necessary to preserve the mind from prejudice, than to prepare it for the adoption of any system. those who have attended to metaphysical proceedings, know, that if a few apparently trifling concessions be made in the beginning of the business, a man of ingenuity may force us, in the end, to acknowledge whatever he pleases. it is impossible that a child can foresee these consequences, nor is it probable that he should have paid such accurate attention to the operations of his own mind, as to be able to detect the fallacy, or to feel the truth, of his tutor's assertions. a metaphysical catechism may readily be taught to children; they may learn to answer almost as readily as trenck answered in his sleep to the guards who regularly called to him every night at midnight. children may answer expertly to the questions, "what is attention? what is memory? what is imagination? what is the difference between wit and judgment? how many sorts of ideas have you, and which are they?" but when they are perfect in their responses to all these questions, how much are they advanced in real knowledge? allegory has mixed with metaphysics almost as much as with poetry; personifications of memory and imagination are familiar to us; to each have been addressed odes and sonnets, so that we almost believe in their individual existence, or at least we are become jealous of the separate attributes of these ideal beings. this metaphysical mythology may be ingenious and elegant, but it is better adapted to the pleasures of poetry than to the purposes of reasoning. those who have been accustomed to respect and believe in it, will find it difficult soberly to examine any argument upon abstract subjects; their favourite prejudices will retard them when they attempt to advance in the art of reasoning. all accurate metaphysical reasoners have perceived, and deplored, the difficulties which the prepossessions of education have thrown in their way; and they have been obliged to waste their time and powers in fruitless attempts to vanquish these in their own minds, or in those of their readers. can we wish in education to perpetuate similar errors, and to transmit to another generation the same artificial imbecility? or can we avoid these evils, if with our present habits of thinking and speaking, we attempt to teach metaphysics to children of seven years old? a well educated, intelligent young man, accustomed to accurate reasoning, yet brought up without any metaphysical prejudices, would be a treasure to a metaphysician to cross examine: he would be eager to hear the unprejudiced youth's evidence, as the monarch, who had ordered a child to be shut up, without hearing one word of any human language, from infancy to manhood, was impatient to hear what would be the first word that he uttered. but though we wish extremely well to the experiments of metaphysicians, we are more intent upon the advantage which our unprejudiced pupils would themselves derive from their judicious education: probably they would, coming fresh to the subject, make some discoveries in the science of metaphysics: they would have no paces[ ] to show; perhaps they might advance a step or two on this difficult ground. when we object to the early initiation of novices into metaphysical mysteries, we only recommend it to preceptors not to teach; let pupils learn whatever they please, or whatever they can, without reading any metaphysical books, and without hearing any opinions, or learning any definitions by rote; children may reflect upon their own feelings, and they should be encouraged to make accurate observations upon their own minds. sensible children will soon, for instance, observe the effect of habit, which enables them to repeat actions with ease and facility, which they have frequently performed. the association of ideas, as it assists them to remember particular things, will soon be noticed, though not, perhaps, in scientific words. the use of the association of pain or pleasure, in the form of what we call reward and punishment, may probably be early perceived. children will be delighted with these discoveries if they are suffered to make them, and they will apply this knowledge in their own education. trifling daily events will recall their observations, and experience will confirm, or correct, their juvenile theories. but if metaphysical books, or dogmas, are forced upon children in the form of lessons, they will, as such, be learned by rote, and forgotten. to prevent parents from expecting as much as the abbé condillac does from the comprehension of pupils of six or seven years old upon abstract subjects, and to enable preceptors to form some idea of the perfect simplicity in which children, unprejudiced upon metaphysical questions, would express themselves, we give the following little dialogues, word for word, as they passed: . _father._ where do you think? _a----._ (six and a half years old.) in my mouth. _ho----._ (five years and a half old.) in my stomach. _father._ where do you feel that you are glad, or sorry? _a----._ in my stomach. _ho----._ in my eyes. _father._ what are your senses for? _ho----._ to know things. without any previous conversation, ho---- (five years and a half old) said to her mother, "i think you will be glad my right foot is sore, because you told me i did not lean enough upon my left foot." this child seemed, on many occasions, to have formed an accurate idea of the use of punishment, considering it always as pain given to cure us of some fault, or to prevent us from suffering more pain in future. april, . h----, a boy nine years and three quarters old, as he was hammering at a work-bench, paused for a short time, and then said to his sister, who was in the room with him, "sister, i observe that when i don't look at my right hand when i hammer, and only think where it ought to hit, i can hammer much better than when i look at it. i don't know what the reason of that is; unless it is because i think in my head." _m----._ i am not sure, but i believe that we do think in our heads. _h----._ then, perhaps, my head is divided into two parts, and that one thinks for one arm, and one for the other; so that when i want to strike with my right arm, i think where i want to hit the wood, and then, without looking at it, i can move my arm in the right direction; as when my father is going to write, he sometimes sketches it. _m----._ what do you mean, my dear, by sketching it? _h----._ why, when he moves his hand (flourishes) without touching the paper with the pen. and at first, when i want to do any thing, i cannot move my hand as i mean; but after being used to it, then i can do much better. i don't know why. after going on hammering for some time, he stopped again, and said, "there's another thing i wanted to tell you. sometimes i think to myself, that it is right to think of things that are sensible, and then when i want to set about thinking of things that are sensible, i _cannot_; i can only think of that over and over again." _m----._ you can only think of what? _h----._ of those words. they seem to be said to me over and over again, till i'm quite tired, "that it is right to think of things that have some sense." the childish expressions in these remarks have not been altered, because we wished to show exactly how children at this age express their thoughts. if m. condillac had been used to converse with children, he surely would not have expected, that any boy of seven years old could have understood his definition of attention, and his metaphysical preliminary lessons. after these preliminary lessons, we have a sketch of the prince of parma's subsequent studies. m. condillac says, that his royal highness (being not yet eight years old) was now "perfectly well acquainted with the system of intellectual operations. he comprehended already the production of his ideas; he saw the origin and the progress of the habits which he had contracted, and he perceived how he could substitute just ideas for the false ones which had been given to him, and good habits instead of the bad habits which he had been suffered to acquire. he had become so quickly familiar with all these things, that he retraced their connection without effort, quite playfully."[ ] this prince must have been a prodigy! after having made him reflect upon his own infancy, the abbé judged that the infancy of the world would appear to his pupil "the most curious subject, and the most easy to study." the analogy between these two infancies seems to exist chiefly in words; it is not easy to gratify a child's curiosity concerning the infancy of the world. extracts from l'origine des loix, by m. goguet, with explanatory notes, were put into the prince's hands, to inform him of what happened in the commencement of society. these were his evening studies. in the mornings he read the french poets, boileau, moliere, corneille, and racine. racine, as we are particularly informed, was, in the space of one year, read over a dozen times. wretched prince! unfortunate racine! the abbé acknowledges, that at first these authors were not understood with the same ease as the preliminary lessons had been: every word stopped the prince, and it seemed as if every line were written in an unknown language. this is not surprising, for how is it possible that a boy of seven or eight years old, who could know nothing of life and manners, could taste the wit and humour of moliere; and, incapable as he must have been of sympathy with the violent passions of tragic heroes and heroines, how could he admire the lofty dramas of racine? we are willing to suppose, that the young prince of parma was quick, and well informed for his age; but to judge of what is practicable, we must produce examples from common life, instead of prodigies. s----, a boy of nine years old, of whose abilities the reader will be able to form some judgment from anecdotes in the following pages, whose understanding was not wholy uncultivated, when he was between nine and ten years old, expressed a wish to read some of shakespeare's plays. king john was given to him. after the book had been before him for one winter's evening, he returned it to his father, declaring that he did not understand one word of the play; he could not make out what the people were about, and he did not wish to read any more of it. his brother h----, at twelve years old, had made an equally ineffectual attempt to read shakespeare; he was also equally decided and honest in expressing his dislike to it; he was much surprised at seeing his sister b----, who was a year or two older than himself, reading shakespeare with great avidity, and he frequently asked what it was in that book that could entertain her. two years afterwards, when h---- was between fourteen and fifteen, he made another trial, and he found that he understood the language of shakespeare without any difficulty. he read all the historical plays with the greatest eagerness, and particularly seized the character of falstaff. he gave a humorous description of the figure and dress which he supposed sir john should have, of his manner of sitting, speaking, and walking. probably, if h---- had been pressed to read shakespeare at the time when he did not understand it, he might never have read these plays with real pleasure during his whole life. two years increase prodigiously the vocabulary and the ideas of young people, and preceptors should consider, that what we call literary taste, cannot be formed without a variety of knowledge. the productions of our ablest writers cannot please, until we are familiarized to the ideas which they contain, or to which they allude.[ ] poetry is usually supposed to be well suited to the taste and capacity of children. in the infancy of taste and of eloquence, rhetorical language is constantly admired; the bold expression of strong feeling, and the simple description of the beauties of nature, are found to interest both cultivated and uncultivated minds. to understand descriptive poetry, no previous knowledge is required, beyond what common observation and sympathy supply; the analogies and transitions of thought, are slight and obvious; no labour of attention is demanded, no active effort of the mind is requisite to follow them. the pleasures of simple sensation are, by descriptive poetry, recalled to the imagination, and we live over again our past lives without increasing, and without desiring to increase, our stock of knowledge. if these observations be just, there must appear many reasons, why even that species of poetry which they can understand, should not be the early study of children; from time to time it may be an agreeable amusement, but it should not become a part of their daily occupations. we do not want to retrace perpetually in their memories a few musical words, or a few simple sensations; our object is to enlarge the sphere of our pupil's capacity, to strengthen the habits of attention, and to exercise all the powers of the mind. the inventive and the reasoning faculties must be injured by the repetition of vague expressions, and of exaggerated description, with which most poetry abounds. childhood is the season for observation, and those who observe accurately, will afterwards be able to describe accurately: but those, who merely read descriptions, can present us with nothing but the pictures of pictures. we have reason to believe, that children, who have not been accustomed to read a vast deal of poetry, are not, for that reason, less likely to excel in poetic language. the reader will judge from the following explanations of gray's hymn to adversity, that the boy to whom they were addressed, was not much accustomed to read even the most popular english poetry; yet this is the same child, who a few months afterwards, wrote the translation from ovid, of the cave of sleep, and who gave the extempore description of a summer's evening in tolerably good language. jan. . s---- (nine years old) learned by heart the hymn to adversity. when he came to repeat this poem, he did not repeat it well, and he had it not perfectly by heart. his father suspected that he did not understand it, and he examined him with some care. _father._ "purple tyrants!" why purple? _s----._ because purple is a colour something like red and black; and tyrants look red and black. _father._ no. kings were formerly called tyrants, and they wore purple robes: the purple of the ancients is supposed to be not the colour which we call purple, but that which we call scarlet. "when first thy sire to send on earth virtue, his darling child, design'd, to thee he gave the heavenly birth, and bade to form her infant mind." when s---- was asked who was meant in these lines by "thy sire," he frowned terribly; but after some deliberation, he discovered that "thy sire" meant jove, the father, or sire of adversity: still he was extremely puzzled with "the heavenly birth." first he thought that the heavenly birth was the birth of adversity; but upon recollection, the heavenly birth was to be trusted to adversity, therefore she could not be trusted with the care of herself. s---- at length discovered, that jove must have had two daughters, and he said he supposed that virtue must have been one of these daughters, and that she must have been sister to adversity, who was to be her nurse, and who was to form her infant mind: he now perceived that the expression, "stern, rugged nurse," referred to adversity; before this, he said, he did not know who it meant, whose "rigid lore" was alluded to in these two lines, or who bore it with patience. "stern, rugged nurse, thy rigid lore with patience many a year she bore." the following stanza s---- repeated a second time, as if he did not understand it. "scared at thy frown, terrific fly self pleasing follies, idle brood, wild laughter, noise, and thoughtless joy, and leave us leisure to be good. light they disperse, and with them go the summer friend, the flattering foe; by vain prosperity receiv'd, to her they vow their truth, and are again believ'd." _father._ why does the poet say _wild_ laughter? _s----._ it means, not reasonable. _father._ why is it said, "by vain prosperity receiv'd, to her they vow their truth, and are again believ'd?" _s----._ because the people, i suppose, when they were in prosperity before, believed them before, but i think that seems confused. "oh gently on thy suppliant's head, dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand." s---- did not seem to comprehend the first of these two lines; and upon cross examination, it appeared that he did not know the meaning of the word _suppliant_; he thought it meant "a person who supplies us." "not in thy gorgon terrors clad, nor circled by the vengeful band, as by the impious thou art seen." it may appear improbable, that a child who did not know the meaning of the word suppliant, should understand the gorgon terrors, and the vengeful band, yet it was so: s---- understood these lines distinctly; he said, "gorgon terrors, yes, like the head of gorgon." he was at this time translating from ovid's metamorphoses; and it happened that his father had explained to him the ideas of the ancients concerning the furies; besides this, several people in the family had been reading potter's Ã�schylus, and the furies had been the subject of conversation. from such accidental circumstances as these, children often appear, in the same instant almost, to be extremely quick, and extremely slow of comprehension; a preceptor who is well acquainted with all his pupil's previous knowledge, can rapidly increase his stock of ideas by turning every accidental circumstance to account: but if a tutor persists in forcing a child to a regular course of study, all his ideas must be collected, not as they are wanted in conversation or in real life, but as they are wanted to get through a lesson or a book. it is not surprising, that m. condillac found such long explanations necessary for his young pupil in reading the tragedies of racine; he says, that he was frequently obliged to translate the poetry into prose, and frequently the prince could gather only some general idea of the whole drama, without understanding the parts. we cannot help regretting, that the explanations have not been published for the advantage of future preceptors; they must have been almost as difficult as those for the preliminary lessons. as we are convinced that the art of education can be best improved by the registering of early experiments, we are very willing to expose such as have been made, without fear of fastidious criticism or ridicule. may , . a little poem, called "the tears of old may-day," published in the second volume of the world, was read to s----. last may-day the same poem had been read to him; he then liked it much, and his father wished to see what effect it would have upon this second reading. the pleasure of novelty was worn off, but s---- felt new pleasure from his having, during the last year, acquired a great number of new ideas, and especially some knowledge of ancient mythology, which enabled him to understand several allusions in the poem which had before been unintelligible to him. he had become acquainted with the muses, the graces, cynthia, philomel, astrea, who are all mentioned in this poem; he now knew something about the hesperian fruit, amalthea's horn, choral dances, libyan ammon, &c. which are alluded to in different lines of the poem: he remembered the explanation which his father had given him the preceding year, of a line which alludes to the island of atalantis: "then vanished many a sea-girt isle and grove, their forests floating on the wat'ry plain; then famed for arts, and laws deriv'd from jove, my atalantis sunk beneath the main." s----, whose imagination had been pleased with the idea of the fabulous island of atalantis, recollected what he had heard of it; but he had forgotten the explanation of another stanza of this poem, which he had heard at the same time: "to her no more augusta's wealthy pride, pours the full tribute from potosi's mine; nor fresh blown garlands village maids provide, a purer offering at her rustic shrine." s---- forgot that he had been told that london was formerly called augusta; that potosi's mines contained silver; and that pouring the tribute from potosi's mines, alludes to the custom of hanging silver tankards upon the may-poles in london on may-day; consequently the beauty of this stanza was entirely lost upon him. a few circumstances were now told to s----, which imprinted the explanation effectually in his memory: his father told him, that the publicans, or those who keep public houses in london, make it a custom to lend their silver tankards to the poor chimney-sweepers and milk-maids, who go in procession through the streets on may-day. the confidence that is put in the honesty of these poor people, pleased s----, and all these circumstances fixed the principal idea more firmly in his mind. the following lines could please him only by their sound, the first time he heard them: "ah! once to fame and bright dominion born, the earth and smiling ocean saw me rise, with time coeval, and the star of morn, the first, the fairest daughter of the skies. "then, when at heaven's prolific mandate sprung the radiant beam of new-created day, celestial harps, to airs of triumph strung, hail'd the glad dawn, and angel's call'd me may. "space in her empty regions heard the sound, and hills and dales, and rocks and valleys rung; the sun exulted in his glorious round, and shouting planets in their courses sung." the idea which the ancients had of the music of the spheres was here explained to s----, and some general notion was given to him of the _harmonic numbers_. what a number of new ideas this little poem served to introduce into the mind! these explanations being given precisely at the time when they were wanted, fixed the ideas in the memory in their proper places, and associated knowledge with the pleasures of poetry. some of the effect of a poem must, it is true, be lost by interruptions and explanations; but we must consider the general improvement of the understanding, and not merely the cultivation of poetic taste. in the instance which we have just given, the pleasure which the boy received from the poem, seemed to increase in proportion to the exactness with which it was explained. the succeeding year, on may-day , the same poem was read to him for the third time, and he appeared to like it better than he had done upon the first reading. if, instead of perusing racine twelve times in one year, the young prince of parma had read any one play or scene at different periods of his education, and had been led to observe the increase of pleasure which he felt from being able to understand what he read better each succeeding time than before, he would probably have improved more rapidly in his taste for poetry, though he might not have known racine by rote quite so early as at eight years old. we considered parents almost as much as children, when we advised that a great deal of poetry should not be read by very young pupils; the labour and difficulty of explaining it can be known only to those who have tried the experiment. the elegy in a country church-yard, is one of the most popular poems, which is usually given to children to learn by heart; it cost at least a quarter of an hour to explain to intelligent children, the youngest of whom was at the time nine years old, the first stanza of that elegy. and we have heard it asserted by a gentleman not unacquainted with literature, that perfectly to understand l'allegro and il penseroso, requires no inconsiderable portion of ancient and modern knowledge. it employed several hours on different days to read and explain comus, so as to make it intelligible to a boy of ten years, who gave his utmost attention to it. the explanations on this poem were found to be so numerous and intricate, that we thought it best not to produce them here. explanations which are given by a reader, can be given with greater rapidity and effect, than any which a writer can give to children: the expression of the countenance is advantageous, the sprightliness of conversation keeps the pupils awake, and the connection of the parts of the subject can be carried on better in speaking and reading, than it can be in written explanations. notes are almost always too formal, or too obscure; they explain what was understood more plainly before any illustration was attempted, or they leave us in the dark the moment we want to be enlightened. wherever parents or preceptors can supply the place of notes and commentators, they need not think their time ill bestowed. if they cannot undertake these troublesome explanations, they can surely reserve obscure poems for a later period of their pupil's education. children, who are taught at seven or eight years old to repeat poetry, frequently get beautiful lines by rote, and speak them fluently, without in the least understanding the meaning of the lines. the business of a poet is to please the imagination, and to move the passions: in proportion as his language is sublime or pathetic, witty or satirical, it must be unfit for children. knowledge cannot be detailed, or accurately explained, in poetry; the beauty of an allusion depends frequently upon the elliptical mode of expression, which passing imperceptibly over all the intermediate links in our associations, is apparent only when it touches the ends of the chain. those who wish to instruct, must pursue the opposite system. in doctor wilkins's essay on universal language, he proposes to introduce a note similar to the common note of admiration, to give the reader notice when any expression is used in an ironical or in a metaphoric sense. such a note would be of great advantage to children: in reading poetry, they are continually puzzled between the obvious and the metaphoric sense of the words.[ ] the desire to make children learn a vast deal of poetry by heart, fortunately for the understanding of the rising generation, does not rage with such violence as formerly. dr. johnson successfully laughed at infants lisping out, "angels and ministers of grace, defend us." his reproof was rather ill-natured, when he begged two children who were produced, to repeat some lines to him, "can't the pretty dears repeat them both together?" but this reproof has probably prevented many exhibitions of the same kind. some people learn poetry by heart for the pleasure of quoting it in conversation; but the talent for quotation, both in conversation and in writing, is now become so common, that it cannot confer immortality.[ ] every person has by rote certain passages from shakespeare and thomson, goldsmith and gray: these trite quotations fatigue the literary ear, and disgust the taste of the public. to this change in the fashion of the day, those who are influenced by fashion, will probably listen with more eagerness, than to all the reasons that have been offered. but to return to the prince of parma. after reading corneille, racine, moliere, boileau, &c. the young prince's taste was formed, as we are assured by his preceptor, and he was now fit for the study of grammar. so much is due to the benevolent intentions of a man of learning and genius, who submits to the drudgery of writing an elementary book on grammar, that even a critic must feel unwilling to examine it with severity. m. condillac, in his attempt to write a rational grammar, has produced, if not a grammar fit for children, a philosophical treatise, which a well educated young person will read with great advantage at the age of seventeen or eighteen. all that is said of the natural language of signs, of the language of action, of pantomimes, and of the institution of m. l'abbé l'epée for teaching languages to the deaf and dumb, is not only amusing and instructive to general readers, but, with slight alterations in the language, might be perfectly adapted to the capacity of children. but when the abbé condillac goes on to "your highness knows what is meant by a system," he immediately forgets his pupils age. the reader's attention is presently deeply engaged by an abstract disquisition on the relative proportion, represented by various circles of different extent, of the wants, ideas, and language of savages, shepherds, commercial and polished nations, when he is suddenly awakened to the recollection, that all this is addressed to a child of eight years old: an allusion to the prince's little chair, completely rouses us from our reverie. "as your little chair is made in the same form as mine, which is higher, so the system of ideas is fundamentally the same amongst savage and civilized nations; it differs only in degrees of extension, as after one and the same model, seats of different heights have been made."[ ] such mistakes as these, in a work intended for a child, are so obvious, that they could not have escaped the penetration of a great man, had he known as much of the practice as he did of the theory of the art of teaching. to analyze a thought, and to show the construction of language, m. condillac, in this volume on grammar, has chosen for an example a passage from an _eloge_ on peter corneille, pronounced before the french academy by racine, on the reception of thomas corneille, who succeeded to peter. it is in the french style of academical panegyric, a representation of the chaotic state in which corneille found the french theatre, and of the light and order which he diffused through the dramatic world by his creative genius. a subject less interesting, or more unintelligible to a child, could scarcely have been selected. the lecture on the anatomy of racine's thought, lasts through fifteen pages; according to all the rules of art, the dissection is ably performed, but most children will turn from the operation with disgust. the abbé condillac's treatise on the art of writing, immediately succeeds to his grammar. the examples in this volume are much better chosen; they are interesting to all readers; those especially from madame de sevigné's letters, which are drawn from familiar language and domestic life. the enumeration of the figures of speech, and the classification of the flowers of rhetoric, are judiciously suppressed; the catalogue of the different sorts of _turns_, phrases proper for maxims and principles, turns proper for sentiment, ingenious turns and quaint turns, stiff turns and easy turns, might, perhaps, have been somewhat abridged. the observations on the effect of unity in the whole design, and in all the subordinate parts of a work, though they may not be new, are ably stated; and the remark, that the utmost propriety of language, and the strongest effect of eloquence and reasoning, result from the greatest possible attention to the connection of our ideas, is impressed forcibly upon the reader throughout this work. how far works of criticism in general are suited to children, remains to be considered. such works cannot probably suit their taste, because the taste for systematic criticism cannot arise in the mind until many books have been read; until the various species of excellence suited to different sorts of composition, have been perceived, and until the mind has made some choice of its own. it is true, that works of criticism may teach children to talk well of what they read; they will be enabled to repeat what good judges have said of books. but this is not, or ought not to be, the object. after having been thus officiously assisted by a connoisseur, who points out to them the beauties of authors, will they be able afterwards to discover beauties without his assistance? or have they as much pleasure in being told what to admire, what to praise, and what to blame, as if they had been suffered to feel and to express their own feelings naturally? in reading an interesting play, or beautiful poem, how often has a man of taste and genius execrated the impertinent commentator, who interrupts him by obtruding his ostentatious notes--"the reader will observe the beauty of this thought." "this is one of the finest passages in any author, ancient or modern." "the sense of this line, which all former annotators have mistaken, is obviously restored by the addition of the vowel i." &c. deprived, by these anticipating explanations, of the use of his own common sense, the reader detests the critic, soon learns to disregard his references, and to skip over his learned truisms. similar sensations, tempered by duty or by fear, may have been sometimes experienced by a vivacious child, who, eager to go on with what he is reading, is prevented from feeling the effect of the whole, by a premature discussion of its parts. we hope that no keen hunter of paradoxes will here exult in having detected us in a contradiction: we are perfectly aware, that but a few pages ago we exhibited examples of detailed explanations of poetry for children; but these explanations were not of the criticising class; they were not designed to tell young people what to admire, but simply to assist them to understand before they admired. works of criticism are sometimes given to pupils, with the idea that they will instruct and form them in the art of writing: but few things can be more terrific or dangerous to the young writer, than the voice of relentless criticism. hope stimulates, but fear depresses the active powers of the mind; and how much have they to fear, who have continually before their eyes the mistakes and disgrace of others; of others, who with superior talents have attempted and failed! with a multitude of precepts and rules of rhetoric full in their memory, they cannot express the simplest of their thoughts; and to write a sentence composed of members, which have each of them names of many syllables, must appear a most formidable and presumptuous undertaking. on the contrary, a child who, in books and in conversation, has been used to hear and to speak correct language, and who has never been terrified with the idea, that to write, is to express his thoughts in some new and extraordinary manner, will naturally write as he speaks, and as he thinks. making certain characters upon paper, to represent to others what he wishes to say[ ] to them, will not appear to him a matter of dread and danger, but of convenience and amusement, and he will write prose without knowing it. amongst some "practical essays,"[ ] lately published, "to assist the exertions of youth in their literary pursuits," there is an essay on letter-writing, which might deter a timid child from ever undertaking such an arduous task as that of writing a letter. so much is said from blair, from cicero, from quintilian; so many things are requisite in a letter; purity, neatness, simplicity; such caution must be used to avoid "exotics transplanted from foreign languages, or raised in the hot-beds of affectation and conceit;" such attention to the mother-tongue is prescribed, that the young nerves of the letter-writer must tremble when he takes up his pen. besides, he is told that "he should be extremely reserved on the head of pleasantry," and that "as to sallies of wit, it is still more dangerous to let them fly at random; but he may repeat the smart sayings of others if he will, or relate _part_ of some droll adventure, to enliven his letter." the anxiety that parents and tutors frequently express, to have their children write letters, and good letters, often prevents the pupils from writing during the whole course of their lives. letter-writing becomes a task and an evil to children; whether they have any thing to say or not, write they must, this post or next, without fail, _a pretty letter_ to some relation or friend, who has exacted from them the awful promise of punctual correspondence. it is no wonder that school-boys and school-girls, in these circumstances, feel that necessity is _not_ the mother of invention; they are reduced to the humiliating misery of begging from some old practitioner a beginning, or an ending, and something to say to fill up the middle. locke humorously describes the misery of a school-boy who is to write a theme; and having nothing to say, goes about with the usual petition in these cases to his companions, "pray give me a little sense." would it not be better to wait until children have sense, before we exact from them themes and discourses upon literary subjects? there is no danger, that those who acquire a variety of knowledge and numerous ideas, should not be able to find words to express them; but those who are compelled to find words before they have ideas, are in a melancholy situation. to form a style, is but a vague idea; practice in composition, will certainly confer ease in writing, upon those who write when their minds are full of ideas; but the practice of sitting with a melancholy face, with pen in hand, waiting for inspiration, will not much advance the pupil in the art of writing. we should not recommend it to a preceptor to require regular themes at stated periods from his pupils; but whenever he perceives that a young man is struck with any new ideas, or new circumstances, when he is certain that his pupil has acquired a fund of knowledge, when he finds in conversation that words flow readily upon certain subjects, he may, without danger, upon these subjects, excite his pupil to try his powers of writing. these trials need not be frequently made: when a young man has once acquired confidence in himself as a writer, he will certainly use his talent whenever proper occasions present themselves. the perusal of the best authors in the english language, will give him, if he adhere to these alone, sufficient powers of expression. the best authors in the english language are so well known, that it would be useless to enumerate them. dr. johnson says, that whoever would acquire a pure english style, must give his days and nights to addison. we do not, however, feel this exclusive preference for addison's melodious periods; his page is ever elegant, but sometimes it is too diffuse.--hume, blackstone, and smith, have a proper degree of strength and energy combined with their elegance. gibbon says, that the perfect composition and well turned periods of dr. robertson, excited his hopes, that he might one day become his equal in writing; but "the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival hume, often forced him to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." from this testimony we may judge, that a simple style appears to the best judges to be more difficult to attain, and more desirable, than that highly ornamented diction to which writers of inferior taste aspire. gibbon tells us, with great candour, that his friend hume advised him to beware of the rhetorical style of french eloquence. hume observed, that the english language, and english taste, do not admit of this profusion of ornament. without meaning to enter at large into the subject, we have offered these remarks upon style for the advantage of those who are to direct the taste of young readers; what they admire when they read, they will probably imitate when they write. we objected to works of criticism for young children, but we should observe, that at a later period of education, they will be found highly advantageous. it would be absurd to mark the precise age at which blair's lectures, or condillac's art d'ecrire, ought to be read, because this should be decided by circumstances; by the progress of the pupils in literature, and by the subjects to which their attention happens to have turned. of these, preceptors, and the pupils themselves, must be the most competent judges. from the same wish to avoid all pedantic attempts to dictate, we have not given any regular course of study in this chapter. many able writers have laid down extensive plans of study, and have named the books that are essential to the acquisition of different branches of knowledge. amongst others we may refer to dr. priestley's, which is to be seen at the end of his essays on education. we are sensible that order is necessary in reading, but we cannot think that the same order will suit all minds, nor do we imagine that a young person cannot read to advantage unless he pursue a given course of study. men of sense will not be intolerant in their love of learned order. if parents would keep an accurate list of the books which their children read, of the ages at which they are read, it would be of essential service in improving the art of education. we might then mark the progress of the understanding with accuracy, and discover, with some degree of certainty, the circumstances on which the formation of the character and taste depend. swift has given us a list of the books which he read during two years of his life; we can trace the ideas that he acquired from them in his laputa, and other parts of gulliver's travels. gibbon's journal of his studies, and his account of universities, are very instructive to young students. so is the life of franklin, written by himself. madame roland has left a history of her education; and in the books she read in her early years, we see the formation of her character. plutarch's lives, she tells us, first kindled republican enthusiasm in her mind; and she regrets that, in forming her ideas of universal liberty, she had only a partial view of affairs. she corrected these enthusiastic ideas during the last moments of her life in prison. had the impression which her study of the roman history made upon her mind been known to an able preceptor, it might have been corrected in her early education. when she was led to execution, she exclaimed, as she passed the statue of liberty, "oh liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"[ ] formerly it was wisely said, "tell me what company a man keeps, and i will tell you what he is;" but since literature has spread a new influence over the world, we must add, "tell me what company a man has kept, and what books he has read, and i will tell you what he is." footnotes: [ ] v. academie della crusca. [ ] marmontel. "on ne se guérit pas d'un dêfaut qui plait." [ ] we have heard that such a translation was begun. [ ] v. hor. epist. lib. ii. [ ] v. sympathy and sensibility. [ ] v. a letter of mr. wyndham's to mr. repton, in repton, on landscape gardening. [ ] the critic. [ ] professor stewart. [ ] berquin. [ ] v. sympathy and sensibility. [ ] chapter on invention and memory. [ ] v. guthrie's geographical, historical, and commercial grammar, page . [ ] ibid, page . [ ] l'idée, par exemple, que j'ai de pierre, est singuliére ou individuelle, et comme l'idêe d'homme est générale par rapport aux idées de noble et de roturier, elle est particuliére par rapport à l'idée d'animal. leçons préliminaires, vol. i. p. . [ ] ainsi lorsque, de plusieurs sensations qui se font en même temps sur vous, la direction des organs vous en fait remarquer une, de maniére que vous ne remarquez plus les autres, cette sensation devient ce que nous appellons _attention_. leçons préliminaires, page . [ ] "la comparaison n'est donc qu'une double attention. nous venons de voir que l'attention n'est qu'une sensation qui se fait remarquer. deux attentions ne sont donc que deux sensations qui se font remarquer également; et par conséquent il n'y a dans la comparaison que des sensations." leçons préliminaires, p. . [ ] v. art de penser, p. . [ ] v. dunciad. [ ] motif des études qui ont été faites aprés leçons préliminaires, p. . lejeune prince connoissoit déja le systême des operations de son ame, il comprenoit la génération de ses idées, il voyoit l'origine et le progrès des habitudes qu'il avoit contractées, et il concevoit comment il pouvoit substituer des idées justes aux idées fausses qu'on lui avoit données, et de bonnes habitudes aux mauvaises qu'on lui avoit laissé prendre. il s'ètoit familiarié si promptement avec toutes ces choses, qu'il s'en retraçoit la suite sans effort, et comme en badinant. [ ] as this page was sent over to us for correction, we seize the opportunity of expressing our wish, that "botanical dialogues, by a lady," had come sooner to our hands; it contains much that we think peculiarly valuable. [ ] in dr. franklin's posthumous essays, there is an excellent remark with respect to typography, as connected with the art of reading. the note of interrogation should be placed at the beginning, as well as at the end of a question; it is sometimes so far distant, as to be out of the reach of an unpractised eye. [ ] young. [ ] comme votre petite chaise est faite sur le même modèle que la mienne qui est plus élevée, ainsi le système des idées est le même pour le fond chez les peuples sauvages et chez les peuples civilisés; il ne differe, qui parce qu'il est plus on moins etendu; c'est un même modele d'apres lequel on a fait des sieges de différent hauteur.--grammaire, page . [ ] rousseau. [ ] milne's well-bred scholar. [ ] "oh liberté, que de forfaits on commet en ton nom!" v. appel à l'impartielle postérité. end of vol. i. [illustration: dr. maria montessori] dr. montessori's own handbook by maria montessori author of "the montessori method" and "pedagogical anthropology" _with forty-three illustrations_ new york frederick a. stokes company publishers _copyright, , by_ frederick a. stokes company _all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages_ fasc may, to my dear friend donna maria maraini marchioness guerrieri-gonzaga who devotedly and with sacrifice has generously upheld this work of education brought to birth in our beloved country but offered to the children of humanity note by the author as a result of the widespread interest that has been taken in my method of child education, certain books have been issued, which may appear to the general reader to be authoritative expositions of the montessori system. i wish to state definitely that the present work, the english translation of which has been authorised and approved by me, is the only authentic manual of the montessori method, and that the only other authentic or authorised works of mine in the english language are "the montessori method," and "pedagogical anthropology." [signed: maria montessori] preface if a preface is a light which should serve to illumine the contents of a volume, i choose, not words, but human figures to illustrate this little book intended to enter families where children are growing up. i therefore recall here, as an eloquent symbol, helen keller and mrs. anne sullivan macy, who are, by their example, both teachers to myself--and, before the world, living documents of the miracle in education. in fact, helen keller is a marvelous example of the phenomenon common to all human beings: the possibility of the liberation of the imprisoned spirit of man by the education of the senses. here lies the basis of the method of education of which the book gives a succinct idea. if one only of the senses sufficed to make of helen keller a woman of exceptional culture and a writer, who better than she proves the potency of that method of education which builds on the senses? if helen keller attained through exquisite natural gifts to an elevated conception of the world, who better than she proves that in the inmost self of man lies the spirit ready to reveal itself? helen, clasp to your heart these little children, since they, above all others, will understand you. they are your younger brothers: when, with bandaged eyes and in silence, they touch with their little hands, profound impressions rise in their consciousness, and they exclaim with a new form of happiness: "i see with my hands." they alone, then, can fully understand the drama of the mysterious privilege your soul has known. when, in darkness and in silence, their spirit left free to expand, their intellectual energy redoubled, they become able to read and write without having learnt, almost as it were by intuition, they, only they, can understand in part the ecstasy which god granted you on the luminous path of learning. maria montessori. contents page preface vii introductory remarks a "children's house" the method didactic material for the education of the senses didactic material for the preparation of writing and arithmetic motor education sensory education language and knowledge of the world freedom writing exercises for the management of the instrument of writing exercises for the writing of alphabetical signs the reading of music arithmetic moral factors illustrations dr. maria montessori _frontispiece_ fig. facing page . cupboard with apparatus . the montessori pædometer . frames for lacing and buttoning . child buttoning on frame . cylinders decreasing in diameter only . cylinders decreasing in diameter and height . cylinders decreasing in height only . child using case of cylinders . the tower . child playing with tower . the broad stair . the long stair . board with rough and smooth surfaces . board with gummed strips of paper . wood tablets differing in weight color spools . cabinet with drawers to hold geometrical insets . set of six circles . set of six rectangles . set of six triangles . set of six polygons . set of six irregular figures . set of four blanks and two irregular figures . frame to hold geometrical insets . child touching the insets . series of cards with geometrical forms . sound boxes . musical bells . sloping boards to display set of metal insets . single sandpaper letter . groups of sandpaper letters . box of movable letters . the musical staff . didactic material for musical reading . didactic material for musical reading . didactic material for musical reading . didactic material for musical reading . didactic material for musical reading . didactic material for musical reading . dumb keyboard . diagram illustrating use of numerical rods . counting boxes . arithmetic frame dr. montessori's own handbook recent years have seen a remarkable improvement in the conditions of child life. in all civilized countries, but especially in england, statistics show a decrease in infant mortality. related to this decrease in mortality a corresponding improvement is to be seen in the physical development of children; they are physically finer and more vigorous. it has been the diffusion, the popularization of science, which has brought about such notable advantages. mothers have learned to welcome the dictates of modern hygiene and to put them into practice in bringing up their children. many new social institutions have sprung up and have been perfected with the object of assisting children and protecting them during the period of physical growth. in this way what is practically a new race is coming into being, a race more highly developed, finer and more robust; a race which will be capable of offering resistance to insidious disease. what has science done to effect this? science has suggested for us certain very simple rules by which the child has been restored as nearly as possible to conditions of a natural life, and an order and a guiding law have been given to the functions of the body. for example, it is science which suggested maternal feeding, the abolition of swaddling clothes, baths, life in the open air, exercise, simple short clothing, quiet and plenty of sleep. rules were also laid down for the measurement of food adapting it rationally to the physiological needs of the child's life. yet with all this, science made no contribution that was entirely new. mothers had always nursed their children, children had always been clothed, they had breathed and eaten before. the point is, that the same physical acts which, performed blindly and without order, led to disease and death, when ordered _rationally_ were the means of giving strength and life. * * * * * the great progress made may perhaps deceive us into thinking that everything possible has been done for children. we have only to weigh the matter carefully, however, to reflect: are our children only those healthy little bodies which to-day are growing and developing so vigorously under our eyes? is their destiny fulfilled in the production of beautiful human bodies? in that case there would be little difference between their lot and that of the animals which we raise that we may have good meat or beasts of burden. man's destiny is evidently other than this, and the care due to the child covers a field wider than that which is considered by physical hygiene. the mother who has given her child his bath and sent him in his perambulator to the park has not fulfilled the mission of the "mother of humanity." the hen which gathers her chickens together, and the cat which licks her kittens and lavishes on them such tender care, differ in no wise from the human mother in the services they render. no, the human mother if reduced to such limits devotes herself in vain, feels that a higher aspiration has been stifled within her. she is yet the mother of man. children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow the mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation, man. science evidently has not finished its progress. on the contrary, it has scarcely taken the first step in advance, for it has hitherto stopped at the welfare of the body. it must continue, however, to advance; on the same positive lines along which it has improved the health and saved the physical life of the children, it is bound in the future to benefit and to reenforce their inner life, which is the real _human life_. on the same positive lines science will proceed to direct the development of the intelligence, of character, and of those latent creative forces which lie hidden in the marvelous embryo of man's spirit. * * * * * as the child's body must draw nourishment and oxygen from its external environment, in order to accomplish a great physiological work, the _work of growth_, so also the spirit must take from its environment the nourishment which it needs to develop according to its own "laws of growth." it cannot be denied that the phenomena of development are a great work in themselves. the consolidation of the bones, the growth of the whole body, the completion of the minute construction of the brain, the formation of the teeth, all these are very real labors of the physiological organism, as is also the transformation which the organism undergoes during the period of puberty. these exertions are very different from those put forth by mankind in so-called _external work_, that is to say, in "social production," whether in the schools where man is taught, or in the world where, by the activity of his intelligence, he produces wealth and transforms his environment. it is none the less true, however, that they are both "work." in fact, the organism during these periods of greatest physiological work is least capable of performing external tasks, and sometimes the work of growth is of such extent and difficulty that the individual is overburdened, as with an excessive strain, and for this reason alone becomes exhausted or even dies. man will always be able to avoid "external work" by making use of the labor of others, but there is no possibility of shirking that inner work. together with birth and death it has been imposed by nature itself, and each man must accomplish it for himself. this difficult, inevitable labor, this is the "work of the child." when we say then that little children should _rest_, we are referring to one side only of the question of work. we mean that they should rest from that _external_ visible work to which the little child through his weakness and incapacity cannot make any contribution useful either to himself or to others. our assertion, therefore, is not absolute; the child in reality is not resting, he is performing the mysterious inner work of his autoformation. he is working to make a man, and to accomplish this it is not enough that the child's body should grow in actual size; the most intimate functions of the motor and nervous systems must also be established and the intelligence developed. the functions to be established by the child fall into two groups: ( ) the motor functions by which he is to secure his balance and learn to walk, and to coordinate his movements; ( ) the sensory functions through which, receiving sensations from his environment, he lays the foundations of his intelligence by a continual exercise of observation, comparison and judgment. in this way he gradually comes to be acquainted with his environment and to develop his intelligence. at the same time he is learning a _language_, and he is faced not only with the motor difficulties of articulation, sounds and words, but also with the difficulty of gaining an intelligent understanding of names and of the syntactical composition of the language. if we think of an emigrant who goes to a new country ignorant of its products, ignorant of its natural appearance and social order, entirely ignorant of its language, we realize that there is an immense work of adaptation which he must perform before he can associate himself with the active life of the unknown people. no one will be able to do for him that work of adaptation. he himself must observe, understand, remember, form judgments, and learn the new language by laborious exercise and long experience. what is to be said then of the child? what of this emigrant who comes into a new world, who, weak as he is and before his organism is completely developed, _must_ in a short time adapt himself to a world so complex? up to the present day the little child has not received rational aid in the accomplishment of this laborious task. as regards the psychical development of the child we find ourselves in a period parallel to that in which the physical life was left to the mercy of chance and instinct--the period in which infant mortality was a scourge. it is by scientific and rational means also that we must facilitate that inner work of psychical adaptation to be accomplished within the child, a work which is by no means the same thing as "any external work or production whatsoever." this is the aim which underlies my method of infant education, and it is for this reason that certain principles which it enunciates, together with that part which deals with the technique of their practical application, are not of a general character, but have special reference to the particular case of the child from three to seven years of age, _i.e._, to the needs of a formative period of life. my method is scientific, both in its substance and in its aim. it makes for the attainment of a more advanced stage of progress, in directions no longer only material and physiological. it is an endeavor to complete the course which hygiene has already taken, but in the treatment of the physical side alone. if to-day we possessed statistics respecting the nervous debility, defects of speech, errors of perception and of reasoning, and lack of character in normal children, it would perhaps be interesting to compare them with statistics of the same nature, but compiled from the study of children who have had a number of years of rational education. in all probability we should find a striking resemblance between such statistics and those to-day available showing the decrease in mortality and the improvement in the physical development of children. a "children's house" the "children's house" is the _environment_ which is offered to the child that he may be given the opportunity of developing his activities. this kind of school is not of a fixed type, but may vary according to the financial resources at disposal and to the opportunities afforded by the environment. it ought to be a real house; that is to say, a set of rooms with a garden of which the children are the masters. a garden which contains shelters is ideal, because the children can play or sleep under them, and can also bring their tables out to work or dine. in this way they may live almost entirely in the open air, and are protected at the same time from rain and sun. the central and principal room of the building, often also the only room at the disposal of the children, is the room for "intellectual work." to this central room can be added other smaller rooms according to the means and opportunities of the place: for example, a bathroom, a dining-room, a little parlor or common-room, a room for manual work, a gymnasium and rest-room. the special characteristic of the equipment of these houses is that it is adapted for children and not adults. they contain not only didactic material specially fitted for the intellectual development of the child, but also a complete equipment for the management of the miniature family. the furniture is light so that the children can move it about, and it is painted in some light color so that the children can wash it with soap and water. there are low tables of various sizes and shapes--square, rectangular and round, large and small. the rectangular shape is the most common as two or more children can work at it together. the seats are small wooden chairs, but there are also small wicker armchairs and sofas. [illustration: fig. .--cupboard with apparatus.] in the working-room there are two indispensable pieces of furniture. one of these is a very long cupboard with large doors. (fig. .) it is very low so that a small child can set on the top of it small objects such as mats, flowers, etc. inside this cupboard is kept the didactic material which is the common property of all the children. the other is a chest of drawers containing two or three columns of little drawers, each of which has a bright handle (or a handle of some color to contrast with the background), and a small card with a name upon it. every child has his own drawer, in which to put things belonging to him. round the walls of the room are fixed blackboards at a low level, so that the children can write or draw on them, and pleasing, artistic pictures, which are changed from time to time as circumstances direct. the pictures represent children, families, landscapes, flowers and fruit, and more often biblical and historical incidents. ornamental plants and flowering plants ought always to be placed in the room where the children are at work. another part of the working-room's equipment is seen in the pieces of carpet of various colors--red, blue, pink, green and brown. the children spread these rugs upon the floor, sit upon them and work there with the didactic material. a room of this kind is larger than the customary class-rooms, not only because the little tables and separate chairs take up more space, but also because a large part of the floor must be free for the children to spread their rugs and work upon them. in the sitting-room, or "club-room," a kind of parlor in which the children amuse themselves by conversation, games, or music, etc., the furnishings should be especially tasteful. little tables of different sizes, little armchairs and sofas should be placed here and there. many brackets of all kinds and sizes, upon which may be put statuettes, artistic vases or framed photographs, should adorn the walls; and, above all, each child should have a little flower-pot, in which he may sow the seed of some indoor plant, to tend and cultivate it as it grows. on the tables of this sitting-room should be placed large albums of colored pictures, and also games of patience, or various geometric solids, with which the children can play at pleasure, constructing figures, etc. a piano, or, better, other musical instruments, possibly harps of small dimensions, made especially for children, completes the equipment. in this "club-room" the teacher may sometimes entertain the children with stories, which will attract a circle of interested listeners. the furniture of the dining-room consists, in addition to the tables, of low cupboards accessible to all the children, who can themselves put in their place and take away the crockery, spoons, knives and forks, table-cloth and napkins. the plates are always of china, and the tumblers and water-bottles of glass. knives are always included in the table equipment. _the dressing-room._ here each child has his own little cupboard or shelf. in the middle of the room there are very simple washstands, consisting of tables, on each of which stand a small basin, soap and nail-brush. against the wall stand little sinks with water-taps. here the children may draw and pour away their water. there is no limit to the equipment of the "children's houses" because the children themselves do everything. they sweep the rooms, dust and wash the furniture, polish the brasses, lay and clear away the table, wash up, sweep and roll up the rugs, wash a few little clothes, and cook eggs. as regards their personal toilet, the children know how to dress and undress themselves. they hang their clothes on little hooks, placed very low so as to be within reach of a little child, or else they fold up such articles of clothing, as their little serving-aprons, of which they take great care, and lay them inside a cupboard kept for the household linen. * * * * * in short, where the manufacture of toys has been brought to such a point of complication and perfection that children have at their disposal entire dolls' houses, complete wardrobes for the dressing and undressing of dolls, kitchens where they can pretend to cook, toy animals as nearly lifelike as possible, this method seeks to give all this to the child in reality--making him an actor in a living scene. * * * * * [illustration: fig .--the montessori paedometer.] my pedometer forms part of the equipment of a "children's house." after various modifications i have now reduced this instrument to a very practical form. (fig. .) the purpose of the pedometer, as its name shows, is to measure the children. it consists of a wide rectangular board, forming the base, from the center of which rise two wooden posts held together at the top by a narrow flat piece of metal. to each post is connected a horizontal metal rod--the indicator--which runs up and down by means of a casing, also of metal. this metal casing is made in one piece with the indicator, to the end of which is fixed an india-rubber ball. on one side, that is to say, behind one of the two tall vertical wooden posts, there is a small seat, also of wood. the two tall wooden posts are graduated. the post to which the seat is fixed is graduated from the surface of the seat to the top, whilst the other is graduated from the wooden board at the base to the top, _i.e._ to a height of . meters. on the side containing the seat the height of the child seated is measured, on the other side the child's full stature. the practical value of this instrument lies in the possibility of measuring two children at the same time, and in the fact that the children themselves cooperate in taking the measurements. in fact, they learn to take off their shoes and to place themselves in the correct position on the pedometer. they find no difficulty in raising and lowering the metal indicators, which are held so firmly in place by means of the metal casing that they cannot deviate from their horizontal position even when used by inexpert hands. moreover they run extremely easily, so that very little strength is required to move them. the little india-rubber balls prevent the children from hurting themselves should they inadvertently knock their heads against the metal indicator. the children are very fond of the pedometer. "shall we measure ourselves?" is one of the proposals which they make most willingly and with the greatest likelihood of finding many of their companions to join them. they also take great care of the pedometer, dusting it, and polishing its metal parts. all the surfaces of the pedometer are so smooth and well polished that they invite the care that is taken of them, and by their appearance when finished fully repay the trouble taken. the pedometer represents the scientific part of the method, because it has reference to the anthropological and psychological study made of the children, each of whom has his own biographical record. this biographical record follows the history of the child's development according to the observations which it is possible to make by the application of my method. this subject is dealt with at length in my other books. a series of cinematograph pictures has been taken of the pedometer at a moment when the children are being measured. they are seen coming of their own accord, even the very smallest, to take their places at the instrument. the method the technique of my method as it follows the guidance of the natural physiological and psychical development of the child, may be divided into three parts: motor education. sensory education. language. the care and management of the environment itself afford the principal means of motor education, while sensory education and the education of language are provided for by my didactic material. the didactic material for the _education of the senses_ consists of: (_a_) three sets of solid insets. (_b_) three sets of solids in graduated sizes, comprising: ( ) pink cubes. ( ) brown prisms. ( ) rods: (_a_) colored green; (_b_) colored alternately red and blue. (_c_) various geometric solids (prism, pyramid, sphere, cylinder, cone, etc.). (_d_) rectangular tablets with rough and smooth surfaces. (_e_) a collection of various stuffs. (_f_) small wooden tablets of different weights. (_g_) two boxes, each containing sixty-four colored tablets. (_h_) a chest of drawers containing plane insets. (_i_) three series of cards on which are pasted geometrical forms in paper. (_k_) a collection of cylindrical closed boxes (sounds). (_l_) a double series of musical bells, wooden boards on which are painted the lines used in music, small wooden discs for the notes. _didactic material for the preparation for writing and arithmetic_ (_m_) two sloping desks and various iron insets. (_n_) cards on which are pasted sandpaper letters. (_o_) two alphabets of colored cardboard and of different sizes. (_p_) a series of cards on which are pasted sandpaper figures ( , , , etc.). (_q_) a series of large cards bearing the same figures in smooth paper for the enumeration of numbers above ten. (_r_) two boxes with small sticks for counting. (_s_) the volume of drawings belonging specially to the method, and colored pencils. (_t_) the frames for lacing, buttoning, etc., which are used for the education of the movements of the hand. motor education the education of the movements is very complex, as it must correspond to all the coordinated movements which the child has to establish in his physiological organism. the child, if left without guidance, is disorderly in his movements, and these disorderly movements are the _special characteristic of the little child._ in fact, he "never keeps still," and "touches everything." this is what forms the child's so-called "unruliness" and "naughtiness." the adult would deal with him by checking these movements, with the monotonous and useless repetition "keep still." as a matter of fact, in these movements the little one is seeking the very exercise which will organize and coordinate the movements useful to man. we must, therefore, desist from the useless attempt to reduce the child to a state of immobility. we should rather give "order" to his movements, leading them to those actions towards which his efforts are actually tending. this is the aim of muscular education at this age. once a direction is given to them, the child's movements are made towards a definite end, so that he himself grows quiet and contented, and becomes an active worker, a being calm and full of joy. this education of the movements is one of the principal factors in producing that outward appearance of "discipline" to be found in the "children's houses." i have already spoken at length on this subject in my other books. muscular education has reference to: the primary movements of everyday life (walking, rising, sitting, handling objects). the care of the person. management of the household. gardening. manual work. gymnastic exercises. rhythmic movements. [illustration: fig. .--frames for lacing and buttoning.] in the care of the person the first step is that of dressing and undressing. for this end there is in my didactic material a collection of frames to which are attached pieces of stuff, leather, etc. these can be buttoned, hooked, tied together--in fact, joined in all the different ways which our civilization has invented for fastening our clothing, shoes, etc. (fig. .) the teacher, sitting by the child's side, performs the necessary movements of the fingers very slowly and deliberately, separating the movements themselves into their different parts, and letting them be seen clearly and minutely. for example, one of the first actions will be the adjustment of the two pieces of stuff in such a way that the edges to be fastened together touch one another from top to bottom. then, if it is a buttoning-frame, the teacher will show the child the different stages of the action. she will take hold of the button, set it opposite the buttonhole, make it enter the buttonhole completely, and adjust it carefully in its place above. in the same way, to teach a child to tie a bow, she will separate the stage in which he ties the ribbons together from that in which he makes the bows. in the cinematograph film there is a picture which shows an entire lesson in the tying of the bows with the ribbons. these lessons are not necessary for all the children, as they learn from one another, and of their own accord come with great patience to analyze the movements, performing them separately very slowly and carefully. the child can sit in a comfortable position and hold his frame on the table. (fig. .) as he fastens and unfastens the same frame many times over with great interest, he acquires an unusual deftness of hand, and becomes possessed with the desire to fasten real clothes whenever he has the opportunity. we see the smallest children _wanting_ to dress themselves and their companions. they go in search of amusement of this kind, and defend themselves with all their might against the adult who would try to help them. [illustration: fig. .--child buttoning on frame. (photo taken at mr. hawker's school at runton.)] in the same way for the teaching of the other and larger movements, such as washing, setting the table, etc., the directress must at the beginning intervene, teaching the child with few or no words at all, but with very precise actions. she teaches all the movements: how to sit, to rise from one's seat, to take up and lay down objects, and to offer them gracefully to others. in the same way she teaches the children to set the plates one upon the other and lay them on the table without making any noise. the children learn easily and show an interest and surprising care in the performance of these actions. in classes where there are many children it is necessary to arrange for the children to take turns in the various household duties, such as housework, serving at table, and washing dishes. the children readily respect such a system of turns. there is no need to ask them to do this work, for they come spontaneously--even little ones of two and a half years old--to offer to do their share, and it is frequently most touching to watch their efforts to imitate, to remember, and, finally, to conquer their difficulty. professor jacoby, of new york, was once much moved as he watched a child, who was little more than two years old and not at all intelligent in appearance, standing perplexed, because he could not remember whether the fork should be set at the right hand or the left. he remained a long while meditating and evidently using all the powers of his mind. the other children older than he watched him with admiration, marveling, like ourselves, at the life developing under our eyes. the instructions of the teacher consist then merely in a hint, a touch--enough to give a start to the child. the rest develops of itself. the children learn from one another and throw themselves into the work with enthusiasm and delight. this atmosphere of quiet activity develops a fellow-feeling, an attitude of mutual aid, and, most wonderful of all, an intelligent interest on the part of the older children in the progress of their little companions. it is enough just to set a child in these peaceful surroundings for him to feel perfectly at home. in the cinematograph pictures the actual work in a "children's house" may be seen. the children are moving about, each one fulfilling his own task, whilst the teacher is in a corner watching. pictures were taken also of the children engaged in the care of the house, that is, in the care both of their persons and of their surroundings. they can be seen washing their faces, polishing their shoes, washing the furniture, polishing the metal indicators of the pedometer, brushing the carpets, etc. in the work of laying the table the children are seen quite by themselves, dividing the work among themselves, carrying the plates, spoons, knives and forks, etc., and, finally, sitting down at the tables where the little waitresses serve the hot soup. again, gardening and manual work are a great pleasure to our children. gardening is already well known as a feature of infant education, and it is recognized by all that plants and animals attract the children's care and attention. the ideal of the "children's houses" in this respect is to imitate the best in the present usage of those schools which owe their inspiration more or less to mrs. latter. for manual instruction we have chosen clay work, consisting of the construction of little tiles, vases and bricks. these may be made with the help of simple instruments, such as molds. the completion of the work should be the aim always kept in view, and, finally, all the little objects made by the children should be glazed and baked in the furnace. the children themselves learn to line a wall with shining white or colored tiles wrought in various designs, or, with the help of mortar and a trowel, to cover the floor with little bricks. they also dig out foundations and then use their bricks to build division walls, or entire little houses for the chickens. among the gymnastic exercises that which must be considered the most important is that of the "line." a line is described in chalk or paint upon a large space of floor. instead of one line, there may also be two concentric lines, elliptical in form. the children are taught to walk upon these lines like tight-rope walkers, placing their feet one in front of the other. to keep their balance they make efforts exactly similar to those of real tight-rope walkers, except that they have no danger with which to reckon, as the lines are only _drawn_ upon the floor. the teacher herself performs the exercise, showing clearly how she sets her feet, and the children imitate her without any necessity for her to speak. at first it is only certain children who follow her, and when she has shown them how to do it, she withdraws, leaving the phenomenon to develop of itself. the children for the most part continue to walk, adapting their feet with great care to the movement they have seen, and making efforts to keep their balance so as not to fall. gradually the other children draw near and watch and also make an attempt. very little time elapses before the whole of the two ellipses or the one line is covered with children balancing themselves, and continuing to walk round, watching their feet with an expression of deep attention on their faces. music may then be used. it should be a very simple march, the rhythm of which is not obvious at first, but which accompanies and enlivens the spontaneous efforts of the children. when they have learned in this way to master their balance the children have brought the act of walking to a remarkable standard of perfection, and have acquired, in addition to security and composure in their natural gait, an unusually graceful carriage of the body. the exercise on the line can afterwards be made more complicated in various ways. the first application is that of calling forth rhythmic exercise by the sound of a march upon the piano. when the same march is repeated during several days, the children end by feeling the rhythm and by following it with movements of their arms and feet. they also accompany the exercises on the line with songs. little by little the music is _understood_ by the children. they finish, as in miss george's school at washington, by singing over their daily work with the didactic material. the "children's house," then, resembles a hive of bees humming as they work. as to the little gymnasium, of which i speak in my book on the "method," one piece of apparatus is particularly practical. this is the "fence," from which the children hang by their arms, freeing their legs from the heavy weight of the body and strengthening the arms. this fence has also the advantage of being useful in a garden for the purpose of dividing one part from another, as, for example, the flower-beds from the garden walks, and it does not detract in any way from the appearance of the garden. sensory education [illustration: fig. .--cylinders decreasing in diameter only.] [illustration: fig. .--cylinders decreasing in diameter and height.] [illustration: fig. .--cylinders decreasing in height only.] my didactic material offers to the child the _means_ for what may be called "sensory education." in the box of material the first three objects which are likely to attract the attention of a little child from two and a half to three years old are three solid pieces of wood, in each of which is inserted a row of ten small cylinders, or sometimes discs, all furnished with a button for a handle. in the first case there is a row of cylinders of the same height, but with a diameter which decreases from thick to thin. (fig. .) in the second there are cylinders which decrease in all dimensions, and so are either larger or smaller, but always of the same shape. (fig. .) lastly, in the third case, the cylinders have the same diameter but vary in height, so that, as the size decreases, the cylinder gradually becomes a little disc in form. (fig. .) the first cylinders vary in two dimensions (the section); the second in all three dimensions; the third in one dimension (height). the order which i have given refers to the degree of _ease_ with which the child performs the exercises. the exercise consists in taking out the cylinders, mixing them and putting them back in the right place. it is performed by the child as he sits in a comfortable position at a little table. he exercises his hands in the delicate act of taking hold of the button with the tips of one or two fingers, and in the little movements of the hand and arm as he mixes the cylinders, _without letting them fall_ and _without making too much noise_ and puts them back again each in its own place. in these exercises the teacher may, in the first instance, intervene, merely taking out the cylinders, mixing them carefully on the table and then showing the child that he is to put them back, but without performing the action herself. such intervention, however, is almost always found to be unnecessary, for the children _see_ their companions at work, and thus are encouraged to imitate them. they like to do it _alone_; in fact, sometimes almost in private for fear of inopportune help. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--child using case of cylinders.] but how is the child to find the right place for each of the little cylinders which lie mixed upon the table? he first makes trials; it often happens that he places a cylinder which is too large for the empty hole over which he puts it. then, changing its place, he tries others until the cylinder goes in. again, the contrary may happen; that is to say, the cylinder may slip too easily into a hole too big for it. in that case it has taken a place which does not belong to it at all, but to a larger cylinder. in this way one cylinder at the end will be left out without a place, and it will not be possible to find one that fits. here the child cannot help seeing his mistake in concrete form. he is perplexed, his little mind is faced with a problem which interests him intensely. before, all the cylinders fitted, now there is one that will not fit. the little one stops, frowning, deep in thought. he begins to feel the little buttons and finds that some cylinders have too much room. he thinks that perhaps they are out of their right place and tries to place them correctly. he repeats the process again and again, and finally he succeeds. then it is that he breaks into a smile of triumph. the exercise arouses the intelligence of the child; he wants to repeat it right from the beginning and, having learned by experience, he makes another attempt. little children from three to three and a half years old have repeated the exercise up to _forty_ times without losing their interest in it. if the second set of cylinders and then the third are presented, the _change_ of shape strikes the child and reawakens his interest. the material which i have described serves to _educate the eye_ to distinguish _difference in dimension_, for the child ends by being able to recognize at a glance the larger or the smaller hole which exactly fits the cylinder which he holds in his hand. the educative process is based on this: that the control of the error lies in _the material itself_, and the child has concrete evidence of it. the desire of the child to attain an end which he knows, leads him to correct himself. it is not a teacher who makes him notice his mistake and shows him how to correct it, but it is a complex work of the child's own intelligence which leads to such a result. hence at this point there begins the process of auto-education. the aim is not an external one, that is to say, it is _not_ the object that the child should learn how to place the cylinders, and _that he should know how to perform an exercise_. the aim is an inner one, namely, that the child train himself to observe; that he be led to make comparisons between objects, to form judgments, to reason and to decide; and it is in the indefinite repetition of this exercise of attention and of intelligence that a real development ensues. * * * * * [illustration: fig. .--the tower.] the series of objects to follow after the cylinders consists of three sets of geometrical solid forms: ( ) ten wooden cubes colored pink. the sides of the cubes diminish from ten centimeters to one centimeter. (fig. .) with these cubes the child builds a tower, first laying on the ground (upon a carpet) the largest cube, and then placing on the top of it all the others in their order of size to the very smallest. (fig. .) as soon as he has built the tower, the child, with a blow of his hand, knocks it down, so that the cubes are scattered on the carpet, and then he builds it up again. [illustration: fig. .--child playing with tower. (photo taken at mr. hawker's school at runton.)] [illustration: fig. .--the broad stair.] [illustration: fig. .--the long stair.] ( ) ten wooden prisms, colored brown. the length of the prisms is twenty centimeters, and the square section diminishes from ten centimeters a side to the smallest, one centimeter a side. (fig. .) the child scatters the ten pieces over a light-colored carpet, and then beginning sometimes with the thickest, sometimes with the thinnest, he places them in their right order of gradation upon a table. ( ) ten rods, colored green, or alternately red and blue, all of which have the same square section of four centimeters a side, but vary by ten centimeters in length from ten centimeters to one meter. (fig. .) the child scatters the ten rods on a large carpet and mixes them at random, and, by comparing rod with rod, he arranges them according to their order of length, so that they take the form of a set of organ pipes. as usual, the teacher, by doing the exercises herself, first shows the child how the pieces of each set should be arranged, but it will often happen that the child learns, not directly from her, but by watching his companions. she will, however, always continue to watch the children, never losing sight of their efforts, and any correction of hers will be directed more towards preventing rough or disorderly use of the material than towards any _error_ which the child may make in placing the rods in their order of gradation. the reason is that the mistakes which the child makes, by placing, for example, a small cube beneath one that is larger, are caused by his own lack of education, and it is the _repetition of the exercise_ which, by refining his powers of observation, will lead him sooner or later to _correct_ _himself_. sometimes it happens that a child working with the long rods makes the most glaring mistakes. as the aim of the exercise, however, is _not_ that the rods be arranged in the right order of gradation, but that the child _should practise by himself_, there is no need to intervene. one day the child will arrange all the rods in their right order, and then, full of joy, he will call the teacher to come and admire them. the object of the exercise will thus be achieved. these three sets, the cubes, the prisms, and the rods, cause the child to move about and to handle and carry objects which are difficult for him to grasp with his little hand. again, by their use, he repeats the _training of the eye_ to the recognition of differences of size between similar objects. the exercise would seem easier, from the sensory point of view, than the other with the cylinders described above. as a matter of fact, it is more difficult, as there is _no control of the error in the material itself_. it is the child's eye alone which can furnish the control. hence the difference between the objects should strike the eye at once; for that reason larger objects are used, and the necessary visual power presupposes a previous preparation (provided for in the exercise with the solid insets). * * * * * [illustration: fig. .--board with rough and smooth surfaces.] during the same period the child can be doing other exercises. among the material is to be found a small rectangular board, the surface of which is divided into two parts--rough and smooth. (fig. .) the child knows already how to wash his hands with cold water and soap; he then dries them and dips the tips of his fingers for a few seconds in tepid water. graduated exercises for the thermic sense may also have their place here, as has been explained in my book on the "method." after this, the child is taught to pass the soft cushioned tips of his fingers _as lightly as possible_ over the two separate surfaces, that he may appreciate their difference. the delicate _movement_ backwards and forwards of the suspended hand, as it is brought into light contact with the surface, is an excellent exercise in control. the little hand, which has just been cleansed and given its tepid bath, gains much in grace and beauty, and the whole exercise is the first step in the education of the "tactile sense," which holds such an important place in my method. when initiating the child into the education of the sense of touch, the teacher must always take an active part the first time; not only must she show the child "how it is done," her interference is a little more definite still, for she takes hold of his hand and guides it to touch the surfaces with the finger-tips in the lightest possible way. she will make no explanations; her words will be rather to _encourage_ the child with his hand to perceive the different sensations. when he has perceived them, it is then that he repeats the act by himself in the delicate way which he has been taught. [illustration: fig. .--board with gummed strips of paper.] after the board with the two contrasting surfaces, the child is offered another board on which are gummed strips of paper which are rough or smooth in different degrees. (fig. .) graduated series of sandpaper cards are also given. the child perfects himself by exercises in touching these surfaces, not only refining his capacity for perceiving tactile differences which are always growing more similar, but also perfecting the movement of which he is ever gaining greater mastery. following these is a series of stuffs of every kind: velvets, satins, silks, woolens, cottons, coarse and fine linens. there are two similar pieces of each kind of stuff, and they are of bright and vivid colors. the child is now taught a new movement. where before he had to _touch_, he must now _feel_ the stuffs, which, according to the degree of fineness or coarseness from coarse cotton to fine silk, are felt with movements correspondingly decisive or delicate. the child whose hand is already practised finds the greatest pleasure in feeling the stuffs, and, almost instinctively, in order to enhance his appreciation of the tactile sensation he closes his eyes. then, to spare himself the exertion, he blindfolds himself with a clean handkerchief, and as he feels the stuffs, he arranges the similar pieces in pairs, one upon the other, then, taking off the handkerchief, he ascertains for himself whether he has made any mistake. this exercise in _touching_ and _feeling_ is peculiarly attractive to the child, and induces him to seek similar experiences in his surroundings. a little one, attracted by the pretty stuff of a visitor's dress, will be seen to go and wash his hands, then to come and touch the stuff of the garment again and again with infinite delicacy, his face meanwhile expressing his pleasure and interest. * * * * * a little later we shall see the children interest themselves in a much more difficult exercise. [illustration: fig. .--wood tablets differing in weight.] there are some little rectangular tablets which form part of the material. (fig. .) the tablets, though of identical size, are made of wood of varying qualities, so that they differ in weight and, through the property of the wood, in color also. the child has to take a tablet and rest it delicately on the inner surfaces of his four fingers, spreading them well out. this will be another opportunity of teaching delicate movements. the hand must move up and down as though to weigh the object, but the movement must be as imperceptible as possible. these little movements should diminish as the capacity and attention for perceiving the weight of the object becomes more acute and the exercise will be perfectly performed when the child comes to perceive the weight almost without any movement of the hands. it is only by the repetition of the attempts that such a result can be obtained. once the children are initiated into it by the teacher, they blindfold their eyes and repeat by themselves these exercises of the _baric sense_. for example, they lay the heavier wooden tablets on the right and the lighter on the left. when the child takes off the handkerchief, he can see by the color of the pieces of wood if he has made a mistake. * * * * * a long time before this difficult exercise, and during the period when the child is working with the three sorts of geometrical solids and with the rough and smooth tablets, he can be exercising himself with a material which is very attractive to him. this is the set of tablets covered with bright silk of shaded colors. the set consists of two separate boxes each containing sixty-four colors; that is, eight different tints, each of which has eight shades carefully graded. the first exercise for the child is that of _pairing the colors_; that is, he selects from a mixed heap of colors the two tablets which are alike, and lays them out, one beside the other. the teacher naturally does not offer the child all the one hundred and twenty-eight tablets in a heap, but chooses only a few of the brighter colors, for example, red, blue and yellow, and prepares and mixes up three or four pairs. then, taking one tablet--perhaps the red one--she indicates to the child that he is to choose its counterpart from the heap. this done, the teacher lays the pair together on the table. then she takes perhaps the blue and the child selects the tablet to form another pair. the teacher then mixes the tablets again for the child to repeat the exercise by himself, _i.e._, to select the two red tablets, the two blue, the two yellow, etc., and to place the two members of each pair next to one another. then the couples will be increased to four or five, and little children of three years old end by pairing of their own accord ten or a dozen couples of mixed tablets. [illustration: color spools] when the child has given his eye sufficient practise in recognizing the identity of the pairs of colors, he is offered the shades of one color only, and he exercises himself in the perception of the slightest differences of shade in every color. take, for example, the blue series. there are eight tablets in graduated shades. the teacher places them one beside another, beginning with the darkest, with the sole object of making the child understand "what is to be done." she then leaves him alone to the interesting attempts which he spontaneously makes. it often happens that the child makes a mistake. if he has understood the idea and makes a mistake, it is a sign that _he has not yet reached the stage_ of perceiving the differences between the graduations of one color. it is practise which perfects in the child that capacity for distinguishing the fine differences, and so we leave him alone to his attempts! there are two suggestions that we can make to help him. the first is that he should always select the darkest color from the pile. this suggestion greatly facilitates his choice by giving it a constant direction. secondly, we can lead him to observe from time to time any two colors that stand next to each other in order to compare them directly and apart from the others. in this way the child does not place a tablet without a particular and careful comparison with its neighbor. finally, the child himself will love to mix the sixty-four colors and then to arrange them in eight rows of pretty shades of color with really surprising skill. in this exercise also the child's hand is educated to perform fine and delicate movements and his mind is afforded special training in attention. he must not take hold of the tablets anyhow, he must avoid touching the colored silk, and must handle the tablets instead by the pieces of wood at the top and bottom. to arrange the tablets next to one another in a straight line at exactly the same level, so that the series looks like a beautiful shaded ribbon, is an act which demands a manual skill only obtained after considerable practise. * * * * * these exercises of the chromatic sense lead, in the case of the older children, to the development of the "color memory." a child having looked carefully at a color, is then invited to look for its companion in a mixed group of colors, without, of course, keeping the color he has observed under his eye to guide him. it is, therefore, by his memory that he recognizes the color, which he no longer compares with a reality but with an image impressed upon his mind. the children are very fond of this exercise in "color memory"; it makes a lively digression for them, as they run with the image of a color in their minds and look for its corresponding reality in their surroundings. it is a real triumph for them to identify the idea with the corresponding reality and to _hold in their hands_ the proof of the mental power they have acquired. * * * * * another interesting piece of material is a little cabinet containing six drawers placed one above another. when they are opened they display six square wooden "frames" in each. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--cabinet with drawers to hold geometrical insets.] almost all the frames have a large geometrical figure inserted in the center, each colored blue and provided with a small button for a handle. each drawer is lined with blue paper, and when the geometrical figure is removed, the bottom is seen to reproduce exactly the same form. the geometrical figures are arranged in the drawers according to analogy of form. ( ) in one drawer there are six circles decreasing in diameter. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of six circles.] ( ) in another there is a square, together with five rectangles in which the length is always equal to the side of the square while the breadth gradually decreases. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of six rectangles.] ( ) another drawer contains six triangles, which vary either according to their sides or according to their angles (the equilateral, isosceles, scalene, right angled, obtuse angled, and acute angled). (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of six triangles.] ( ) in another drawer there are six regular polygons containing from five to ten sides, _i.e._, the pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, and decagon. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of six polygons.] ( ) another drawer contains various figures: an oval, an ellipse, a rhombus, and a trapezoid. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of six irregular figures.] ( ) finally, there are four plain wooden tablets, _i.e._, without any geometrical inset, which should have no button fixed to them; also two other irregular geometrical figures. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--set of four blanks and two irregular figures.] connected with this material there is a wooden frame furnished with a kind of rack which opens like a lid, and serves, when shut, to keep firmly in place six of the insets which may be arranged on the bottom of the frame itself, entirely covering it. (fig. .) [illustration: fig. .--frame to hold geometrical insets.] this frame is used for the preparation of the _first presentation_ to the child of the plane geometrical forms. the teacher may select according to her own judgment certain forms from among the whole series at her disposal. at first it is advisable to show the child only a few figures which differ very widely from one another in form. the next step is to present a larger number of figures, and after this to present consecutively figures more and more similar in form. the first figures to be arranged in the frame will be, for example, the circle and the equilateral triangle, or the circle, the triangle and the square. the spaces which are left should be covered with the tablets of plain wood. gradually the frame is completely filled with figures; first, with very dissimilar figures, as, for example, a square, a very narrow rectangle, a triangle, a circle, an ellipse and a hexagon, or with other figures in combination. afterwards the teacher's object will be to arrange figures similar to one another in the frame, as, for example, the set of six rectangles, six triangles, six circles, varying in size, etc. this exercise resembles that of the cylinders. the insets are held by the buttons and taken from their places. they are then mixed on the table and the child is invited to put them back in their places. here also the control of the error is in the _material_, for the figure cannot be inserted perfectly except when it is put in its own place. hence a series of "experiments," of "attempts" which end in victory. the child is led to compare the various forms; to realize in a concrete way the differences between them when an inset wrongly placed will not go into the aperture. in this way he educates his eye to the _recognition of forms_. [illustration: fig. .--child touching the insets. (montessori school, runton.)] the new movement of the hand which the child must coordinate is of particular importance. he is taught to _touch the outline of the geometrical figures_ with the soft tips of the index and middle finger of the right hand, or of the left as well, if one believes in ambidexterity. (fig. .) the child is made to touch the outline, not only of the _inset_, but also of the corresponding aperture, and, only after _having touched_ them, is he to put back the inset into its place. the _recognition_ of the form is rendered much easier in this way. children who evidently do not _recognize the identities of form_ by the eye and who make absurd attempts to place the most diverse figures one within the other, _do recognize_ the forms after having touched their outlines, and arrange them very quickly in their right places. the child's hand during this exercise of touching the outlines of the geometrical figures has a concrete guide in the object. this is especially true when he touches the frames, for his two fingers have only to follow the edge of the frame, which acts as an obstacle and is a very clear guide. the teacher must always intervene at the start to teach accurately this movement, which will have such an importance in the future. she must, therefore, show the child _how to touch_, not only by performing the movement herself slowly and clearly, but also by guiding the child's hand itself during his first attempts, so that he is sure to touch all the details--angles and sides. when his hand has learned to perform these movements with precision and accuracy, he will be _really_ capable of following the outline of a geometrical figure, and through many repetitions of the exercise he will come to coordinate the movement _necessary_ for the exact delineation of its form. this exercise could be called an indirect but very real preparation for drawing. it is certainly the preparation of the hand to _trace an enclosed form_. the little hand which touches, feels, and knows how to follow a determined outline is preparing itself, without knowing it, for writing. the children make a special point of touching the outlines of the plane insets with accuracy. they themselves have invented the exercise of blindfolding their eyes so as to recognize the forms by touch only, taking out and putting back the insets without seeing them. * * * * * [illustration: fig. .--series of cards with geometrical forms.] corresponding to every form reproduced in the plane insets there are three white cards square in shape and of exactly the same size as the wooden frames of the insets. these cards are kept in three special cardboard boxes, almost cubic in form. (fig. .) on the cards are repeated, in three series, the same geometrical forms as those of the plane insets. the same measurements of the figures also are exactly reproduced. in the first series the forms are filled in, _i.e._, they are cut out in blue paper and gummed on to the card; in the second series there is only an outline about half a centimeter in width, which is cut out in the same blue paper and gummed to the card; in the third series, however, the geometrical figures are instead outlined only in black ink. by the use of this second piece of the material, the exercise of the eye is gradually brought to perfection in the recognition of "plane forms." in fact, there is no longer the concrete control of error in the material as there was in the _wooden_ insets, but the child, by his eye alone, must judge of identities of form when, instead of _fitting_ the wooden forms into their corresponding apertures, he simply _rests_ them on the cardboard figure. again, the refinement of the eye's power of discrimination increases every time the child passes from one series of cards to the next, and by the time that he has reached the third series, he can see the relation between a wooden object, which he holds in his hand, and an outline drawing; that is, he can connect the concrete reality with an _abstraction_. the _line_ now assumes in his eyes a very definite meaning; and he accustoms himself to recognize, to interpret and to judge of forms contained by a simple outline. the exercises are various; the children themselves invent them. some love to spread out a number of the figures of the geometric insets before their eyes, and then, taking a handful of the cards and mixing them like playing cards, deal them out as quickly as possible, choosing the figures corresponding to the pieces. then as a test of their choice, they place the wooden pieces upon the forms on the cards. at this exercise they often cover whole tables, putting the wooden figures above, and beneath each one in a vertical line, the three corresponding forms of the cardboard series. another game invented by the children consists in putting out and mixing all the cards of the three series on two or three adjoining tables. the child then takes a wooden geometrical form and places it, as quickly as possible, on the corresponding cards which he has recognized at a glance among all the rest. four or five children play this game together, and as soon as one of them has found, for example, the filled-in figure corresponding to the wooden piece, and has placed the piece carefully and precisely upon it, another child takes away the piece in order to place it on the same form in outline. the game is somewhat suggestive of chess. many children, without any suggestion from any one, touch with the finger the outline of the figures in the three series of cards, doing it with seriousness of purpose, interest and perseverance. we teach the children to name all the forms of the plane insets. at first i had intended to limit my teaching to the most important names, such as square, rectangle, circle. but the children wanted to know all the names, taking pleasure in learning even the most difficult, such as trapezium, and decagon. they also show great pleasure in listening to the exact pronunciation of new words and in their repetition. early childhood is, in fact, the age in which language is formed, and in which the sounds of a foreign language can be perfectly learned. when the child has had long practise with the plane insets, he begins to make "discoveries" in his environment, recognizing forms, colors, and qualities already known to him--a result which, in general, follows after all the sensory exercises. then it is that a great enthusiasm is aroused in him, and the world becomes for him a source of pleasure. a little boy, walking one day alone on the roof terrace, repeated to himself with a thoughtful expression on his face, "the sky is blue! the sky is blue!" once a cardinal, an admirer of the children of the school in via guisti, wished himself to bring them some biscuits and to enjoy the sight of a little greediness among the children. when he had finished his distribution, instead of seeing the children put the food hastily into their mouths, to his great surprise he heard them call out, "a triangle! a circle! a rectangle!" in fact, these biscuits were made in geometrical shapes. in one of the people's dwellings at milan, a mother, preparing the dinner in the kitchen, took from a packet a slice of bread and butter. her little four-year-old boy who was with her said, "rectangle." the woman going on with her work cut off a large corner of the slice of bread, and the child cried out, "triangle." she put this bit into the saucepan, and the child, looking at the piece that was left, called out more loudly than before, "and now it is a trapezium." the father, a working man, who was present, was much impressed with the incident. he went straight to look for the teacher and asked for an explanation. much moved, he said, "if i had been educated in that way i should not be now just an ordinary workman." it was he who later on arranged for a demonstration to induce all the workmen of the dwellings to take an interest in the school. they ended by presenting the teacher with a parchment they had painted themselves, and on it, between the pictures of little children, they had introduced every kind of geometrical form. as regards the touching of objects for the realization of their form, there is an infinite field of discovery open to the child in his environment. children have been seen to stand opposite a beautiful pillar or a statue and, after having admired it, to close their eyes in a state of beatitude and pass their hands many times over the forms. one of our teachers met one day in a church two little brothers from the school in via guisti. they were standing looking at the small columns supporting the altar. little by little the elder boy edged nearer the columns and began to touch them, then, as if he desired his little brother to share his pleasure, he drew him nearer and, taking his hand very gently, made him pass it round the smooth and beautiful shape of the column. but a sacristan came up at that moment and sent away "those tiresome children who were touching everything." the great pleasure which the children derive from the recognition of _objects_ by touching their form corresponds in itself to a sensory exercise. many psychologists have spoken of the _stereognostic_ sense, that is, the capacity of recognizing forms by the movement of the muscles of the hand as it follows the outlines of solid objects. this sense does not consist only of the sense of touch, because the tactile sensation is only that by which we perceive the differences in quality of surfaces, rough or smooth. perception of form comes from the combination of two sensations, tactile and muscular, muscular sensations being sensations of movement. what we call in the blind the _tactile_ sense is in reality more often the stereognostic sense. that is, they perceive by means of their hands the _form of bodies_. it is the special muscular sensibility of the child from three to six years of age who is forming his own muscular activity which stimulates him to use the stereognostic sense. when the child spontaneously blindfolds his eyes in order to recognize various objects, such as the plane and solid insets, he is exercising this sense. there are many exercises which he can do to enable him to recognize with closed eyes objects of well defined shapes, as, for example, the little bricks and cubes of froebel, marbles, coins, beans, peas, etc. from a selection of different objects mixed together he can pick out those that are alike, and arrange them in separate heaps. in the didactic material there are also geometrical solids--pale blue in color--a sphere, a prism, a pyramid, a cone, a cylinder. the most attractive way of teaching a child to recognize these forms is for him to touch them with closed eyes and guess their names, the latter learned in a way which i will describe later. after an exercise of this kind the child when his eyes are open observes the forms with a much more lively interest. another way of interesting him in the solid geometrical forms is to make them _move_. the sphere rolls in every direction; the cylinder rolls in one direction only; the cone rolls round itself; the prism and the pyramid, however, stand still, but the prism falls over more easily than the pyramid. * * * * * [illustration: fig. .--sound boxes.] little more remains of the didactic material for the education of the senses. there is, however, a series of six cardboard cylinders, either closed entirely or with wooden covers. (fig. .) when these cases are shaken they produce sounds varying in intensity from loud to almost imperceptible sounds, according to the nature of the objects inside the cylinder. there is a double act of these, and the exercise consists, first, in the recognition of sounds of equal intensity, arranging the cylinders in pairs. the next exercise consists in the comparison of one sound with another; that is, the child arranges the six cylinders in a series according to the loudness of sound which they produce. the exercise is analogous to that with the color spools, which also are paired and then arranged in gradation. in this case also the child performs the exercise seated comfortably at a table. after a preliminary explanation from the teacher he repeats the exercise by himself, his eyes being blindfolded that he may better concentrate his attention. we may conclude with a general rule for the direction of the education of the senses. the order of procedure should be: ( ) recognition of _identities_ (the pairing of similar objects and the insertion of solid forms into places which fit them). ( ) recognition of _contrasts_ (the presentation of the extremes of a series of objects). ( ) discrimination between objects very _similar_ to one another. to concentrate the attention of the child upon the sensory stimulus which is acting upon him at a particular moment, it is well, as far as possible, to _isolate_ the sense; for instance, to obtain silence in the room for all the exercises and to blindfold the eyes for those particular exercises which do not relate to the education of the sense of sight. the cinematograph pictures give a general idea of all the sense exercises which the children can do with the material, and any one who has been initiated into the theory on which these are based will be able gradually to recognize them as they are seen practically carried out. it is very advisable for those who wish to guide the children in these sensory exercises to begin themselves by working with the didactic material. the experience will give them some idea of what the children must feel, of the difficulties which they must overcome, etc., and, up to a certain point, it will give them some conception of the interest which these exercises can arouse in them. whoever makes such experiments himself will be most struck by the fact that, when blindfolded, he finds that all the sensations of touch and hearing really appear more acute and more easily recognized. on account of this alone no small interest will be aroused in the experimenter. * * * * * for the beginning of the education of the musical sense, we use in rome a material which does not form part of the didactic apparatus as it is sold at present. it consists of a double series of bells forming an octave with tones and semitones. these metal bells, which stand upon a wooden rectangular base, are all alike in appearance, but, when struck with a little wooden hammer, give out sounds corresponding to the notes doh, re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, doh, doh [sharp], re [sharp], fah [sharp], soh [sharp], lah [sharp]. [illustration: musical scale (chromatic)] [illustration: fig. .--musical bells.] one series of bells is arranged in chromatic order upon a long board, upon which are painted rectangular spaces which are black and white and of the same size as the bases which support the bells. as on a pianoforte keyboard, the white spaces correspond to the tones, and the black to the semitones. (fig. .) at first the only bells to be arranged upon the board are those which correspond to the tones; these are set upon the white spaces in the order of the musical notes, doh, re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, doh. to perform the first exercise the child strikes with a small hammer the first note of the series already arranged (doh). then among a second series of corresponding bells which, arranged without the semitones, are mixed together upon the table, he tries, by striking the bells one after the other, to find the sound which is the same as the first one he has struck (doh). when he has succeeded in finding the corresponding sound, he puts the bell thus chosen opposite the first one (doh) upon the board. then he strikes the second bell, _re_, once or twice; then from among the mixed group of bells he makes experiments until he recognizes _re_, which he places opposite the second bell of the series already arranged. he continues in the same way right to the end, looking for the identity of the sounds and performing an exercise of _pairing_ similar to that already done in the case of the sound-boxes, the colors, etc. later, he learns in order the sounds of the musical scale, striking in rapid succession the bells arranged in order, and also accompanying his action with his voice--doh, re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, doh. when he is able to recognize and _remember_ the series of sounds, the child takes the eight bells and, after mixing them up, he tries by striking them with the hammer, to find _doh_, then _re_, etc. every time that he takes a new note, he strikes from the beginning all the bells already recognized and arranged in order--doh, _re_, doh, re, _mi_; doh, re, mi, _fah_; doh, re, mi, fah, _soh_, etc. in this way he succeeds in arranging all the bells in the order of the scale, guided only by his ear, and having succeeded, he strikes all the notes one after the other up and down the scale. this exercise fascinates children from five years old upwards. if the objects which have been described constitute the didactic material for the beginnings of a methodical education of the auditory sense, i have no desire to limit to them an educational process which is so important and already so complex in its practise, whether in the long established methods of treatment for the deaf, or in modern physiological musical education. in fact, i also use resonant metal tubes, small bars of wood which emit musical notes, and strings (little harps), upon which the children seek to recognize the tones they have already learned with the exercise of the bells. the pianoforte may also be used for the same purpose. in this way the difference in _timbre_ comes to be perceived together with the differences in tone. at the same time various exercises, already mentioned, such as the marches played on the piano for rhythmic exercises, and the simple songs sung by the children themselves, offer extensive means for the development of the musical sense. * * * * * to quicken the child's attention in special relation to sounds there is a most important exercise which, contrary to all attempts made up to this time in the practise of education, consists not in producing but in eliminating, as far as possible, all sounds from the environment. my "lesson of silence" has been very widely applied, even in schools where the rest of my method has not found its way, for the sake of its practical effect upon the discipline of the children. the children are taught "not to move"; to inhibit all those motor impulses which may arise from any cause whatsoever, and in order to induce in them real "immobility," it is necessary to initiate them in the _control_ of all their movements. the teacher, then, does not limit herself to saying, "sit still," but she gives them the example herself, showing them how to sit absolutely still; that is, with feet still, body still, arms still, head still. the respiratory movements should also be performed in such a way as to produce no sound. the children must be taught how to succeed in this exercise. the fundamental condition is that of finding a comfortable position, _i.e._, a position of equilibrium. as they are seated for this exercise, they must therefore make themselves comfortable either in their little chairs or on the ground. when immobility is obtained, the room is half-darkened, or else the children close their eyes, or cover them with their hands. it is quite plain to see that the children take a great interest in the "silence"; they seem to give themselves up to a kind of spell: they might be said to be wrapped in meditation. little by little, as each child, watching himself, becomes more and more still, the silence deepens till it becomes absolute and can be felt, just as the twilight gradually deepens whilst the sun is setting. then it is that slight sounds, unnoticed before, are heard; the ticking of the clock, the chirp of a sparrow in the garden, the flight of a butterfly. the world becomes full of imperceptible sounds which invade that deep silence without disturbing it, just as the stars shine out in the dark sky without banishing the darkness of the night. it is almost the discovery of a new world where there is rest. it is, as it were, the twilight of the world of loud noises and of the uproar that oppresses the spirit. at such a time the spirit is set free and opens out like the corolla of the convolvulus. and leaving metaphor for the reality of facts, can we not all recall feelings that have possessed us at sunset, when all the vivid impressions of the day, the brightness and clamor, are silenced? it is not that we miss the day, but that our spirit expands. it becomes more sensitive to the inner play of emotions, strong and persistent, or changeful and serene. "it was that hour when mariners feel longing, and hearts grow tender." (dante, trans. longfellow.) the lesson of silence ends with a general calling of the children's names. the teacher, or one of the children, takes her place behind the class or in an adjoining room, and "calls" the motionless children, one by one, by name; the call is made in a whisper, that is, without vocal sound. this demands a close attention on the part of the child, if he is to hear his name. when his name is called he must rise and find his way to the voice which called him; his movements must be light and vigilant, and so controlled _as to make no noise_. when the children have become acquainted with _silence_, their hearing is in a manner refined for the perception of sounds. those sounds which are too loud become gradually displeasing to the ear of one who has known the pleasure of silence, and has discovered the world of delicate sounds. from this point the children gradually go on to perfect themselves; they walk lightly, take care not to knock against the furniture, move their chairs without noise, and place things upon the table with great care. the result of this is seen in the grace of carriage and of movement, which is especially delightful on account of the way in which it has been brought about. it is not a grace taught externally for the sake of beauty or regard for the world, but one which is born of the pleasure felt by the spirit in immobility and silence. the soul of the child wishes to free itself from the irksomeness of sounds that are too loud, from obstacles to its peace during work. these children, with the grace of pages to a noble lord, are serving their spirits. this exercise develops very definitely the social spirit. no other lesson, no other "situation," could do the same. a profound silence can be obtained even when more than fifty children are crowded together in a small space, provided that _all_ the children know how to keep still and want to do it; but one disturber is enough to take away the charm. here is demonstration of the cooperation of all the members of a community to achieve a common end. the children gradually show increased power of _inhibition_; many of them, rather than disturb the silence, refrain from brushing a fly off the nose, or suppress a cough or sneeze. the same exhibition of collective action is seen in the care with which the children move to avoid making a noise during their work. the lightness with which they run on tiptoe, the grace with which they shut a cupboard, or lay an object on the table, these are qualities that must be _acquired by all_, if the environment is to become tranquil and free from disturbance. one rebel is sufficient to mar this achievement; one noisy child, walking on his heels or banging the door, can disturb the peaceful atmosphere of the small community. language and knowledge of the world the special importance of the sense of hearing comes from the fact that it is the sense organ connected with speech. therefore, to train the child's attention to follow sounds and noises which are produced in the environment, to recognize them and to discriminate between them, is to prepare his attention to follow more accurately the sounds of articulate language. the teacher must be careful to pronounce clearly and completely the sounds of the word when she speaks to a child, even though she may be speaking in a low voice, almost as if telling him a secret. the children's songs are also a good means for obtaining exact pronunciation. the teacher, when she teaches them, pronounces slowly, separating the component sounds of the word pronounced. but a special opportunity for training in clear and exact speech occurs when the lessons are given in the nomenclature relating to the sensory exercises. in every exercise, when the child has _recognized_ the differences between the qualities of the objects, the teacher fixes the idea of this quality with a word. thus, when the child has many times built and rebuilt the tower of the pink cubes, at an opportune moment the teacher draws near him, and taking the two extreme cubes, the largest and the smallest, and showing them to him, says, "this is large"; "this is small." the two words only, _large_ and _small_, are pronounced several times in succession with strong emphasis and with a very clear pronunciation, "this is _large_, large, large"; after which there is a moment's pause. then the teacher, to see if the child has understood, verifies with the following tests: "give me the large one. give me the _small_ one." again, "the large one." "now the small one." "give me the large one." then there is another pause. finally, the teacher, pointing to the objects in turn asks, "what is this?" the child, if he has learned, replies rightly, "large," "small." the teacher then urges the child to repeat the words always more clearly and as accurately as possible. "what is it?" "large." "what?" "large." "tell me nicely, what is it?" "large." _large_ and _small_ objects are those which differ only in size and not in form; that is, all three dimensions change more or less proportionally. we should say that a house is "large" and a hut is "small." when two pictures represent the same objects in different dimensions one can be said to be an enlargement of the other. when, however, only the dimensions referring to the section of the object change, while the length remains the same, the objects are respectively "thick" and "thin." we should say of two posts of equal height, but different cross-section, that one is "thick" and the other is "thin." the teacher, therefore, gives a lesson on the brown prisms similar to that with the cubes in the three "periods" which i have described: _period . naming._ "this is thick. this is thin." _period . recognition._ "give me the _thick_. give me the _thin_." _period . the pronunciation of the word._ "what is this?" there is a way of helping the child to recognize differences in dimension and to place the objects in correct gradation. after the lesson which i have described, the teacher scatters the brown prisms, for instance, on a carpet, says to the child, "give me the thickest of all," and lays the object on a table. then, again, she invites the child to look for _the thickest_ piece among those scattered on the floor, and every time the piece chosen is laid in its order on the table next to the piece previously chosen. in this way the child accustoms himself always to look either for the _thickest_ or the _thinnest_ among the rest, and so has a guide to help him to lay the pieces in gradation. when there is one dimension only which varies, as in the case of the rods, the objects are said to be "long" and "short," the varying dimension being length. when the varying dimension is height, the objects are said to be "tall" and "short"; when the breadth varies, they are "broad" and "narrow." of these three varieties we offer the child as a fundamental lesson only that in which the _length_ varies, and we teach the differences by means of the usual "three periods," and by asking him to select from the pile at one time always the "longest," at another always the "shortest." the child in this way acquires great accuracy in the use of words. one day the teacher had ruled the blackboard with very fine lines. a child said, "what small lines!" "they are not small," corrected another; "they are _thin_." when the names to be taught are those of colors or of forms, so that it is not necessary to emphasize contrast between extremes, the teacher can give more than two names at the same time, as, for instance, "this is red." "this is blue." "this is yellow." or, again, "this is a square." "this is a triangle." "this is a circle." in the case of a _gradation_, however, the teacher will select (if she is teaching the colors) the two extremes "dark" and "light," then making choice always of the "darkest" and the "lightest." many of the lessons here described can be seen in the cinematograph pictures; lessons on touching the plane insets and the surfaces, in walking on the line, in color memory, in the nomenclature relating to the cubes and the long rods, in the composition of words, reading, writing, etc. by means of these lessons the child comes to know many words very thoroughly--large, small; thick, thin; long, short; dark, light; rough, smooth; heavy, light; hot, cold; and the names of many colors and geometrical forms. such words do not relate to any particular _object_, but to a psychic acquisition on the part of the child. in fact, the name is given _after a long exercise_, in which the child, concentrating his attention on different qualities of objects, has made comparisons, reasoned, and formed judgments, until he has acquired a power of discrimination which he did not possess before. in a word, he has _refined his senses_; his observation of things has been thorough and fundamental; he has _changed himself_. he finds himself, therefore, facing the world with _psychic_ qualities refined and quickened. his powers of observation and of recognition have greatly increased. further, the mental images which he has succeeded in establishing are not a confused medley; they are all classified--forms are distinct from dimensions, and dimensions are classed according to the qualities which result from the combinations of varying dimensions. all these are quite distinct from _gradations_. colors are divided according to tint and to richness of tone, silence is distinct from non-silence, noises from sounds, and everything has its own exact and appropriate name. the child then has not only developed in himself special qualities of observation and of judgment, but the objects which he observes may be said to go into their place, according to the order established in his mind, and they are placed under their appropriate name in an exact classification. does not the student of the experimental sciences prepare himself in the same way to observe the outside world? he may find himself like the uneducated man in the midst of the most diverse natural objects, but he differs from the uneducated man in that he has _special qualities_ for observation. if he is a worker with the microscope, his eyes are trained to see in the range of the microscope certain minute details which the ordinary man cannot distinguish. if he is an astronomer, he will look through the same telescope as the curious visitor or _dilettante_, but he will see much more clearly. the same plants surround the botanist and the ordinary wayfarer, but the botanist sees in every plant those qualities which are classified in his mind, and assigns to each plant its own place in the natural orders, giving it its exact name. it is this capacity for recognizing a plant in a complex order of classification which distinguishes the botanist from the ordinary gardener, and it is _exact_ and scientific language which characterizes the trained observer. now, the scientist who has developed special qualities of observation and who "possesses" an order in which to classify external objects will be the man to make scientific _discoveries_. it will never be he who, without preparation and order, wanders dreaming among plants or beneath the starlit sky. in fact, our little ones have the impression of continually "making discoveries" in the world about them; and in this they find the greatest joy. they take from the world a knowledge which is ordered and inspires them with enthusiasm. into their minds there enters "the creation" instead of "the chaos"; and it seems that their souls find therein a divine exultation. freedom the success of these results is closely connected with the delicate intervention of the one who guides the children in their development. it is necessary for the teacher to _guide_ the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may be always ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience. a lesson in the ordinary use of the word cools the child's enthusiasm for the knowledge of things, just as it would cool the enthusiasm of adults. to keep alive that enthusiasm is the secret of real guidance, and it will not prove a difficult task, provided that the attitude towards the child's acts be that of respect, calm and waiting, and provided that he be left free in his movements and in his experiences. then we shall notice that the child has a personality which he is seeking to expand; he has initiative, he chooses his own work, persists in it, changes it according to his inner needs; he does not shirk effort, he rather goes in search of it, and with great joy overcomes obstacles within his capacity. he is sociable to the extent of wanting to share with every one his successes, his discoveries, and his little triumphs. there is therefore no need of intervention. "wait while observing." that is the motto for the educator. let us wait, and be always ready to share in both the joys and the difficulties which the child experiences. he himself invites our sympathy, and we should respond fully and gladly. let us have endless patience with his slow progress, and show enthusiasm and gladness at his successes. if we could say: "we are respectful and courteous in our dealings with children, we treat them as we should like to be treated ourselves," we should certainly have mastered a great educational principle and undoubtedly be setting an _example of good education_. what we all desire for ourselves, namely, not to be disturbed in our work, not to find hindrances to our efforts, to have good friends ready to help us in times of need, to see them rejoice with us, to be on terms of equality with them, to be able to confide and trust in them--this is what we need for happy companionship. in the same way children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their "innocence" and of the greater possibilities of their future. what we desire they desire also. as a rule, however, we do not respect our children. we try to force them to follow us without regard to their special needs. we are overbearing with them, and above all, rude; and then we expect them to be submissive and well-behaved, knowing all the time how strong is their instinct of imitation and how touching their faith in and admiration of us. they will imitate us in any case. let us treat them, therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them. and by kindness is not meant caresses. should we not call anyone who embraced us at the first time of meeting rude, vulgar and ill-bred? kindness consists in interpreting the wishes of others, in conforming one's self to them, and sacrificing, if need be, one's own desire. this is the kindness which we must show towards children. to find the interpretation of children's desires we must study them scientifically, for their desires are often unconscious. they are the inner cry of life, which wishes to unfold according to mysterious laws. we know very little of the way in which it unfolds. certainly the child is growing into a man by force of a divine action similar to that by which from nothing he became a child. our intervention in this marvelous process is _indirect_; we are here to offer to this life, which came into the world by itself, the _means_ necessary for its development, and having done that we must await this development with respect. let us leave the life _free_ to develop within the limits of the good, and let us observe this inner life developing. this is the whole of our mission. perhaps as we watch we shall be reminded of the words of him who was absolutely good, "suffer the little children to come unto me." that is to say, "do not hinder them from coming, since, if they are left free and unhampered, they will come." writing the child who has completed all the exercises above described, and is thus _prepared_ for an advance towards unexpected conquests, is about four years old. he is not an unknown quantity, as are children who have been left to gain varied and casual experiences by themselves, and who therefore differ in type and intellectual standard, not only according to their "natures," but especially according to the chances and opportunities they have found for their spontaneous inner formation. education has _determined an environment_ for the children. individual differences to be found in them can, therefore, be put down almost exclusively to each one's individual "nature." owing to their environment which offers _means_ adapted and measured to meet the needs of their psychical development, our children have acquired a fundamental type which is common to all. they have _coordinated_ their movements in various kinds of manual work about the house, and so have acquired a characteristic independence of action, and initiative in the adaptation of their actions to their environment. out of all this emerges a _personality_, for the children have become little men, who are self-reliant. the special attention necessary to handle small fragile objects without breaking them, and to move heavy articles without making a noise, has endowed the movements of the whole body with a lightness and grace which are characteristic of our children. it is a deep feeling of responsibility which has brought them to such a pitch of perfection. for instance, when they carry three or four tumblers at a time, or a tureen of hot soup, they know that they are responsible not only for the objects, but also for the success of the meal which at that moment they are directing. in the same way each child feels the responsibility of the "silence," of the prevention of harsh sounds, and he knows how to cooperate for the general good in keeping the environment, not only orderly, but quiet and calm. indeed, our children have taken the road which leads them to mastery of themselves. but their formation is due to a deeper psychological work still, arising from the education of the senses. in addition to ordering their environment and ordering themselves in their outward personalities, they have also ordered the inner world of their minds. the didactic material, in fact, does not offer to the child the "content" of the mind, but the _order_ for that "content." it causes him to distinguish identities from differences, extreme differences from fine gradations, and to classify, under conceptions of quality and of quantity, the most varying sensations appertaining to surfaces, colors, dimensions, forms and sounds. the mind has formed itself by a special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying. the mental attitude acquired by such an exercise leads the child to make ordered observations in his environment, observations which prove as interesting to him as discoveries, and so stimulate him to multiply them indefinitely and to form in his mind a rich "content" of clear ideas. language now comes to _fix_ by means of _exact words_ the ideas which the mind has acquired. these words are few in number and have reference, not to separate objects, but rather to the _order of the ideas_ which have been formed in the mind. in this way the children are able to "find themselves," alike in the world of natural things and in the world of objects and of words which surround them, for they have an inner guide which leads them to become _active and intelligent explorers_ instead of wandering wayfarers in an unknown land. these are the children who, in a short space of time, sometimes in a few days, learn to write and to perform the first operations of arithmetic. it is not a fact that children in general can do it, as many have believed. it is not a case of giving my material for writing to unprepared children and of awaiting the "miracle." the fact is that the minds and hands of our children are already _prepared_ for writing, and ideas of quantity, of identity, of differences, and of gradation, which form the bases of all calculation, have been maturing for a long time in them. one might say that all their previous education is a preparation for the first stages of essential culture--_writing_, _reading_, _and number_, and that knowledge comes as an easy, spontaneous, and logical consequence of the preparation--that it is in fact its natural _conclusion_. we have already seen that the purpose of the _word_ is to fix ideas and to facilitate the elementary comprehension of _things_. in the same way writing and arithmetic now fix the complex inner acquisitions of the mind, which proceeds henceforward continually to enrich itself by fresh observations. * * * * * our children have long been preparing the hand for writing. throughout all the sensory exercises the hand, whilst cooperating with the mind in its attainments and in its work of formation, was preparing its own future. when the hand learned to hold itself lightly suspended over a horizontal surface in order to touch rough and smooth, when it took the cylinders of the solid insets and placed them in their apertures, when with two fingers it touched the outlines of the geometrical forms, it was coordinating movements, and the child is now ready--almost impatient to use them in the fascinating "synthesis" of writing. the _direct_ preparation for writing also consists in exercises of the movements of the hand. there are two series of exercises, very different from one another. i have analyzed the movements which are connected with writing, and i prepare them separately one from the other. when we write, we perform a movement for the _management_ of the instrument of writing, a movement which generally acquires an individual character, so that a person's handwriting can be recognized, and, in certain medical cases, changes in the nervous system can be traced by the corresponding alterations in the handwriting. in fact, it is from the handwriting that specialists in that subject would interpret the _moral character_ of individuals. writing has, besides this, a general character, which has reference to the form of the alphabetical signs. when a man writes he combines these two parts, but they actually exist as the _component parts of a single product_ and can be prepared apart. _exercises for the management of the instrument of writing_ (the individual part) in the didactic material there are two sloping wooden boards, on each of which stand five square metal frames, colored pink. in each of these is inserted a blue geometrical figure similar to the geometrical insets and provided with a small button for a handle. with this material we use a box of ten colored pencils and a little book of designs which i have prepared after five years' experience of observing the children. i have chosen and graduated the designs according to the use which the children made of them. the two sloping boards are set side by side, and on them are placed ten complete "insets," that is to say, the frames with the geometrical figures. (fig. .) the child is given a sheet of white paper and the box of ten colored pencils. he will then choose one of the ten metal insets, which are arranged in an attractive line at a certain distance from him. the child is taught the following process: [illustration: fig. .--sloping boards to display set of metal insets.] he lays the frame of the iron inset on the sheet of paper, and, holding it down firmly with one hand, he follows with a colored pencil the interior outline which describes a geometrical figure. then he lifts the square frame, and finds drawn upon the paper an enclosed geometrical form, a triangle, a circle, a hexagon, etc. the child has not actually performed a new exercise, because he had already performed all these movements when he _touched_ the wooden plane insets. the only new feature of the exercise is that he follows the outlines no longer directly with his finger, but through the medium of a pencil. that is, he _draws, he leaves a trace_ of his movement. the child finds this exercise easy and most interesting, and, as soon as he has succeeded in making the first outline, he places above it the piece of blue metal corresponding to it. this is an exercise exactly similar to that which he performed when he placed the wooden geometrical figures upon the cards of the third series, where the figures are only contained by a simple line. this time, however, when the action of placing the form upon the outline is performed, the child takes _another colored pencil_ and draws the outline of the blue metal figure. when he raises it, if the drawing is well done, he finds upon the paper a geometrical figure contained by two outlines in colors, and, if the colors have been well chosen, the result is very attractive, and the child, who has already had a considerable education of the chromatic sense is keenly interested in it. these may seem unnecessary details, but, as a matter of fact, they are all-important. for instance, if, instead of arranging the ten metal insets in a row, the teacher distributes them among the children without thus exhibiting them, the child's exercises are much limited. when, on the other hand, the insets are exhibited before his eyes, he feels the desire to draw them _all_ one after the other, and the number of exercises is increased. the two _colored outlines_ rouse the desire of the child to see another combination of colors and then to repeat the experience. the variety of the objects and the colors are therefore an _inducement_ to work and hence to final success. here the actual preparatory movement for writing begins. when the child has drawn the figure in double outline, he takes hold of a pencil "like a pen for writing," and draws marks up and down until he has completely filled the figure. in this way a definite filled-in figure remains on the paper, similar to the figures on the cards of the first series. this figure can be in any of the ten colors. at first the children fill in the figures very clumsily without regard for the outlines, making very heavy lines and not keeping them parallel. little by little, however, the drawings improve, in that they keep within the outlines, and the lines increase in number, grow finer, and are parallel to one another. when the child has begun these exercises, he is seized with a desire to continue them, and he never tires of drawing the outlines of the figures and then filling them in. each child suddenly becomes the possessor of a considerable number of drawings, and he treasures them up in his own little drawer. in this way he _organizes_ the movement of writing, which brings him _to the management of the pen_. this movement in ordinary methods is represented by the wearisome pothook connected with the first laborious and tedious attempts at writing. the organization of this movement, which began from the guidance of a piece of metal, is as yet rough and imperfect, and the child now passes on to the _filling in of the prepared designs_ in the little album. the leaves are taken from the book one by one in the order of progression in which they are arranged, and the child fills in the prepared designs with colored pencils in the same way as before. here the choice of the colors is another intelligent occupation which encourages the child to multiply the tasks. he chooses the colors by himself and with much taste. the delicacy of the shades which he chooses and the harmony with which he arranges them in these designs show us that the common belief, that children love _bright and glaring_ colors, has been the result of observation of _children without education_, who have been abandoned to the rough and harsh experiences of an environment unfitted for them. the education of the chromatic sense becomes at this point of a child's development the _lever_ which enables him to become possessed of a firm, bold and beautiful handwriting. the drawings lend themselves to _limiting_, in very many ways, _the length of the strokes with which they are filled in_. the child will have to fill in geometrical figures, both large and small, of a pavement design, or flowers and leaves, or the various details of an animal or of a landscape. in this way the hand accustoms itself, not only to perform the general action, but also to confine the movement within all kinds of limits. hence the child is preparing himself to write in a handwriting _either_ large or small. indeed, later on he will write as well between the wide lines on a blackboard as between the narrow, closely ruled lines of an exercise book, generally used by much older children. the number of exercises which the child performs with the drawings is practically unlimited. he will often take another colored pencil and draw over again the outlines of the figure already filled in with color. a help to the _continuation_ of the exercise is to be found in the further education of the chromatic sense, which the child acquires by painting the same designs in water-colors. later he mixes colors for himself until he can imitate the colors of nature, or create the delicate tints which his own imagination desires. it is not possible, however, to speak of all this in detail within the limits of this small work. _exercises for the writing of alphabetical signs_ [illustration: fig. .--single sandpaper letter.] [illustration: fig. .--groups of sandpaper letters.] in the didactic material there are series of boxes which contain the alphabetical signs. at this point we take those cards which are covered with very smooth paper, to which is gummed a letter of the alphabet cut out in sandpaper. (fig. .) there are also large cards on which are gummed several letters, grouped together according to analogy of form. (fig. .) the children "have to _touch_ over the alphabetical signs as though they were writing." they touch them with the tips of the index and middle fingers in the same way as when they touched the wooden insets, and with the hand raised as when they lightly touched the rough and smooth surfaces. the teacher herself touches the letters to show the child how the movement should be performed, and the child, if he has had much practise in touching the wooden insets, _imitates_ her with _ease_ and pleasure. without the previous practise, however, the child's hand does not follow the letter with accuracy, and it is most interesting to make close observations of the children in order to understand the importance of a _remote motor preparation_ for writing, and also to realize the _immense_ strain which we impose upon the children when we set them to write directly without a previous motor education of the hand. the child finds great pleasure in touching the sandpaper letters. it is an exercise by which he applies to a new attainment the power he has already acquired through exercising the sense of touch. whilst the child touches a letter, the teacher pronounces its sound, and she uses for the lesson the usual three periods. thus, for example, presenting the two vowels _i_, _o_, she will have the child touch them slowly and accurately, and repeat their relative sounds one after the other as the child touches them, "i, i, i! o, o, o!" then she will say to the child: "give me i!" "give me o!" finally, she will ask the question: "what is this?" to which the child replies, "i, o." she proceeds in the same way through all the other letters, giving, in the case of the consonants, not the name, but only the sound. the child then touches the letters by himself over and over again, either on the separate cards or on the large cards on which several letters are gummed, and in this way he establishes the movements necessary for tracing the alphabetical signs. at the same time he retains the _visual_ image of the letter. this process forms the first preparation, not only for writing, but also for reading, because it is evident that when the child _touches_ the letters he performs the movement corresponding to the writing of them, and, at the same time, when he recognizes them by sight he is reading the alphabet. the child has thus prepared, in effect, all the necessary movements for writing; therefore he _can write_. this important conquest is the result of a long period of inner formation of which the child is not clearly aware. but a day will come--very soon--when he _will write_, and that will be a day of great surprise for him--the wonderful harvest of an unknown sowing. * * * * * [illustration: fig. .--box of movable letters.] the alphabet of movable letters cut out in pink and blue cardboard, and kept in a special box with compartments, serves "for the composition of words." (fig. .) in a phonetic language, like italian, it is enough to pronounce clearly the different component sounds of a word (as, for example, m-a-n-o), so that the child whose ear is _already educated_ may recognize one by one the component sounds. then he looks in the movable alphabet for the _signs_ corresponding to each separate sound, and lays them one beside the other, thus composing the word (for instance, mano). gradually he will become able to do the same thing with words of which he thinks himself; he succeeds in breaking them up into their component sounds, and in translating them into a row of signs. when the child has composed the words in this way, he knows how to read them. in this method, therefore, all the processes leading to writing include reading as well. if the language is not phonetic, the teacher can compose separate words with the movable alphabet, and then pronounce them, letting the child repeat by himself the exercise of arranging and rereading them. in the material there are two movable alphabets. one of them consists of larger letters, and is divided into two boxes, each of which contains the vowels. this is used for the first exercises, in which the child needs very large objects in order to recognize the letters. when he is acquainted with one half of the consonants he can begin to compose words, even though he is dealing with one part only of the alphabet. the other movable alphabet has smaller letters and is contained in a single box. it is given to children who have made their first attempts at composition with words, and already know the complete alphabet. it is after these exercises with the movable alphabet that the child _is able to write entire words_. this phenomenon generally occurs unexpectedly, and then a child who has never yet traced a stroke or a letter on paper _writes several words in succession_. from that moment he continues to write, always gradually perfecting himself. this spontaneous writing takes on the characteristics of a _natural_ phenomenon, and the child who has begun to write the "first word" will continue to write in the same way as he spoke after pronouncing the first word, and as he walked after having taken the first step. the same course of inner formation through which the phenomenon of writing appeared is the course of his future progress, of his growth to perfection. the child prepared in this way has entered upon a course of development through which he will pass as surely as the growth of the body and the development of the natural functions have passed through their course of development when life has once been established. for the interesting and very complex phenomena relating to the development of writing and then of reading, see my larger works. the reading of music [illustration: fig. .--the musical staff.[a]] ----- [a] the single staff is used in the conservatoire of milan and utilized in the perlasca method. ----- when the child knows how to read, he can make a first application of this knowledge to the reading of the names of musical notes. in connection with the material for sensory education, consisting of the series of bells, we use a didactic material, which serves as an introduction to musical reading. for this purpose we have, in the first place, a wooden board, not very long, and painted pale green. on this board the staff is cut out in black, and in every line and space are cut round holes, inside each of which is written the name of the note in its reference to the treble clef. there is also a series of little white discs which can be fitted into the holes. on one side of each disc is written the name of the note (doh, re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, doh). the child, guided by the name written on the discs, puts them, with the name uppermost, in their right places on the board and then reads the names of the notes. this exercise he can do by himself, and he learns the position of each note on the staff. another exercise which the child can do at the same time is to place the disc bearing the name of the note on the rectangular base of the corresponding bell, whose sound he has already learned to recognize by ear in the sensorial exercise described above. [illustration: fig. .--dumb keyboard.] following this exercise there is another staff made on a board of green wood, which is longer than the other and has neither indentures nor signs. a considerable number of discs, on one side of which are written the names of the notes, is at the disposal of the child. he takes up a disc at random, reads its name and places it on the staff, with the name underneath, so that the white face of the disc shows on the top. by the repetition of this exercise the child is enabled to arrange many discs on the same line or in the same space. when he has finished, he turns them all over so that the names are outside, and so finds out if he has made mistakes. after learning the treble clef the child passes on to learn the bass with great ease. to the staff described above can be added another similar to it, arranged as is shown in the figure. (fig. .) the child beginning with doh, lays the discs on the board in ascending order in their right position until the octave is reached: doh, re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, doh. then he descends the scale in the same way, returning to _doh_, but continuing to place the discs always to the right: soh, fah, mi, re, doh. in this way he forms an angle. at this point he descends again to the lower staff, ti, lah, soh, fah, mi, re, doh, then he ascends again on the other side: re, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti, and by forming with his two lines of discs another angle in the bass, he has completed a rhombus, "the rhombus of the notes." after the discs have been arranged in this way, the upper staff is separated from the lower. in the lower the notes are arranged according to the bass clef. in this way the first elements of musical reading are presented to the child, reading which corresponds to _sounds_ with which the child's ear is already acquainted. for a first practical application of this knowledge we have used in our schools a miniature pianoforte keyboard, which reproduces the essentials of this instrument, although in a simplified form, and so that they are visible. two octaves only are reproduced, and the keys, which are small, are proportioned to the hand of a little child of four or five years, as the keys of the common piano are proportioned to those of the adult. all the mechanism of the key is visible. (fig. .) on striking a key one sees the hammer rise, on which is written the name of the note. the hammers are black and white, like the notes. with this instrument it is very easy for the child to practise alone, finding the notes on the keyboard corresponding to some bar of written music, and following the movements of the fingers made in playing the piano. the keyboard in itself is mute, but a series of resonant tubes, resembling a set of organ-pipes, can be applied to the upper surface, so that the hammers striking these produce musical notes corresponding to the keys struck. the child can then pursue his exercises with the control of the musical sounds. didactic material for musical reading. [illustration: fig. . on the wooden board, round spaces are cut out corresponding to the notes. inside each of the spaces there is a figure. on one side of each of the discs is written a number and on the other the name of the note. they are fitted by the child into the corresponding places.] [illustration: fig. . the child next arranged the discs in the notes cut out on the staff, but there are no longer numbers written to help him find the places. instead, he must try to remember the place of the note on the staff. if he is not sure he consults the numbered board (fig. ).] [illustration: fig. . the child arranged on the staff the semitones in the spaces which remain where the discs are far apart: do-re, re-mi, fah-soh, soh-la, la-ti. the discs for the semitones have the sharp on one side and the flat on the other, e.g., re[sharp]-mi[flat] are written on the opposite sides of the same disc.] [illustration: fig. . the children take a large number of discs and arrange them on the staff, leaving uppermost the side which is blank, i.e., the side on which the name of the note is not written. then they verify their work by turning the discs over and reading the name.] [illustration: fig. . the double staff is formed by putting the two staves together. the children arrange the notes in the form of a rhombus.] [illustration: fig. . the two boards are then separated and the notes remain arranged according to the treble and bass clefs. the corresponding key signatures are then placed upon the two different staves.] arithmetic the children possess all the instinctive knowledge necessary as a preparation for clear ideas on numeration. the idea of quantity was inherent in all the material for the education of the senses: longer, shorter, darker, lighter. the conception of identity and of difference formed part of the actual technique of the education of the senses, which began with the recognition of identical objects, and continued with the arrangement in gradation of similar objects. i will make a special illustration of the first exercise with the solid insets, which can be done even by a child of two and a half. when he makes a mistake by putting a cylinder in a hole too large for it, and so leaves _one_ cylinder without a place, he instinctively absorbs the idea of the absence of _one_ from a continuous series. the child's mind is not prepared for number "by certain preliminary ideas," given in haste by the teacher, but has been prepared for it by a process of formation, by a slow building up of itself. to enter directly upon the teaching of arithmetic, we must turn to the same didactic material used for the education of the senses. let us look at the three sets of material which are presented after the exercises with the solid insets, _i.e._, the material for teaching _size_ (the pink cubes), _thickness_ (the brown prisms), and _length_ (the green rods). there is a definite relation between the ten pieces of each series. in the material for length the shortest piece is a _unit of measurement_ for all the rest; the second piece is double the first, the third is three times the first, etc., and, whilst the scale of length increases by ten centimeters for each piece, the other dimensions remain constant (_i.e._, the rods all have the same section). the pieces then stand in the same relation to one another as the natural series of the numbers , , , , , , , , , . in the second series, namely, that which shows _thickness_, whilst the length remains constant, the square section of the prisms varies. the result is that the sides of the square sections vary according to the series of natural numbers, _i.e._, in the first prism, the square of the section has sides of one centimeter, in the second of two centimeters, in the third of three centimeters, etc., and so on until the tenth, in which the square of the section has sides of ten centimeters. the prisms therefore are in the same proportion to one another as the numbers of the series of squares ( , , , etc.), for it would take four prisms of the first size to make the second, nine to make the third, etc. the pieces which make up the series for teaching thickness are therefore in the following proportion: : : : : : : : : : . in the case of the pink cubes the edge increases according to the numerical series, _i.e._, the first cube has an edge of one centimeter, the second of two centimeters, the third of three centimeters, and so on, to the tenth cube, which has an edge of ten centimeters. hence the relation in volume between them is that of the cubes of the series of numbers from one to ten, _i.e._, : : : : : : : : : . in fact, to make up the volume of the second pink cube, eight of the first little cubes would be required; to make up the volume of the third, twenty-seven would be required, and so on. [illustration: ===== =====----- =====-----===== a =====-----=====----- b =====-----=====-----===== =====-----=====-----=====----- =====-----=====-----=====-----===== =====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- =====-----=====-----=====-----=====-----===== =====-----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- fig. .--diagram illustrating use of numerical rods.] the children have an intuitive knowledge of this difference, for they realize that the exercise with the pink cubes is the _easiest_ of all three and that with the rods the most difficult. when we begin the direct teaching of number, we choose the long rods, modifying them, however, by dividing them into ten spaces, each ten centimeters in length, colored alternately red and blue. for example, the rod which is four times as long as the first is clearly seen to be composed of four equal lengths, red and blue; and similarly with all the rest. when the rods have been placed in order of gradation, we teach the child the numbers: one, two, three, etc., by touching the rods in succession, from the first up to ten. then, to help him to gain a clear idea of number, we proceed to the recognition of separate rods by means of the customary lesson in three periods. we lay the three first rods in front of the child, and pointing to them or taking them in the hand in turn, in order to show them to him we say: "this is _one_." "this is _two_." "this is _three_." we point out with the finger the divisions in each rod, counting them so as to make sure, "one, two: this is _two_." "one, two, three: this is _three_." then we say to the child: "give me _two_." "give me _one_." "give me _three_." finally, pointing to a rod, we say, "what is this?" the child answers, "three," and we count together: "one, two, three." in the same way we teach all the other rods in their order, adding always one or two more according to the responsiveness of the child. the importance of this didactic material is that it gives a clear idea of _number_. for when a number is named it exists as an object, a unity in itself. when we say that a man possesses a million, we mean that he has a _fortune_ which is worth so many units of measure of values, and these units all belong to one person. so, if we add to ( + ), we add a _number to a number_, and these numbers for a _definite_ reason represent in themselves groups of homogeneous units. again, when the child shows us the , he is handling a rod which is inflexible--an object complete in itself, yet composed of _nine equal parts_ which can be counted. and when he comes to add to , he will place next to one another, two rods, two objects, one of which has eight equal lengths and the other two. when, on the other hand, in ordinary schools, to make the calculation easier, they present the child with different objects to count, such as beans, marbles, etc., and when, to take the case i have quoted ( + ), he takes a group of eight marbles and adds two more marbles to it, the natural impression in his mind is not that he has added to , but that he has added + + + + + + + to + . the result is not so clear, and the child is required to make the effort of holding in his mind the idea of a group of eight objects as _one united whole_, corresponding to a single number, . this effort often puts the child back, and delays his understanding of number by months or even years. the addition and subtraction of numbers under ten are made very much simpler by the use of the didactic material for teaching lengths. let the child be presented with the attractive problem of arranging the pieces in such a way as to have a set of rods, all as long as the longest. he first arranges the rods in their right order (the long stair); he then takes the last rod ( ) and lays it next to the . similarly, he takes the last rod but one ( ) and lays it next to the , and so on up to the . this very simple game represents the addition of numbers within the ten: + , + , + , + . then, when he puts the rods back in their places, he must first take away the and put it back under the , and then take away in their turn the , the , the . by this action he has put the rods back again in their right gradation, but he has also performed a series of arithmetical subtractions, - , - , - , - . the teaching of the actual figures marks an advance from the rods to the process of counting with separate units. when the figures are known, they will serve the very purpose in the abstract which the rods serve in the concrete; that is, they will stand for the _uniting into one whole_ of a certain number of separate units. the _synthetic_ function of language and the wide field of work which it opens out for the intelligence is _demonstrated_, we might say, by the function of the _figure_, which now can be substituted for the concrete rods. the use of the actual rods only would limit arithmetic to the small operations within the ten or numbers a little higher, and, in the construction of the mind, these operations would advance very little farther than the limits of the first simple and elementary education of the senses. the figure, which is a word, a graphic sign, will permit of that unlimited progress which the mathematical mind of man has been able to make in the course of its evolution. in the material there is a box containing smooth cards, on which are gummed the figures from one to nine, cut out in sandpaper. these are analogous to the cards on which are gummed the sandpaper letters of the alphabet. the method of teaching is always the same. the child is _made to touch_ the figures in the direction in which they are written, and to name them at the same time. in this case he does more than when he learned the letters; he is shown how to place each figure upon the corresponding rod. when all the figures have been learned in this way, one of the first exercises will be to place the number cards upon the rods arranged in gradation. so arranged, they form a succession of steps on which it is a pleasure to place the cards, and the children remain for a long time repeating this intelligent game. after this exercise comes what we may call the "emancipation" of the child. he carried his own figures with him, and now _using them_ he will know how to group units together. [illustration: fig. .--counting boxes.] for this purpose we have in the didactic material a series of wooden pegs, but in addition to these we give the children all sorts of small objects--sticks, tiny cubes, counters, etc. the exercise will consist in placing opposite a figure the number of objects that it indicates. the child for this purpose can use the box which is included in the material. (fig. .) this box is divided into compartments, above each of which is printed a figure and the child places in the compartment the corresponding number of pegs. another exercise is to lay all the figures on the table and place below them the corresponding number of cubes, counters, etc. this is only the first step, and it would be impossible here to speak of the succeeding lessons in zero, in tens and in other arithmetical processes--for the development of which my larger works must be consulted. the didactic material itself, however, can give some idea. in the box containing the pegs there is one compartment over which the is printed. inside this compartment "nothing must be put," and then we begin with _one_. zero is nothing, but it is placed next to one to enable us to count when we pass beyond --thus, . [illustration: fig. .--arithmetic frame.] if, instead of the piece , we were to take pieces as long as the rod , we could count , , , , , , , , . in the didactic material there are frames containing cards on which are printed such numbers from to . these numbers are fixed into a frame in such a way that the figures to can be slipped in covering the zero. if the zero of is covered by the result is , if with it becomes , and so on, until the last . then we pass to the twenties (the second ten), and so on, from ten to ten. (fig. .) for the beginning of this exercise with the cards marking the tens we can use the rods. as we begin with the first ten ( ) in the frame, we take the rod . we then place the small rod next to rod , and at the same time slip in the number , covering the zero of the . then we take rod and figure away from the frame, and put in their place rod next to rod , and figure over the zero in the frame, and so on, up to . to advance farther we should need to use two rods of to make . the children show much enthusiasm when learning these exercises, which demand from them two sets of activities, and give them in their work clearness of idea. * * * * * in writing and arithmetic we have gathered the fruits of a laborious education which consisted in coordinating the movements and gaining a first knowledge of the world. this culture comes as a natural consequence of man's first efforts to put himself into intelligent communication with the world. all those early acquisitions which have brought order into the child's mind, would be wasted were they not firmly established by means of written language and of figures. thus established, however, these experiences open up an unlimited field for future education. what we have done, therefore, is to introduce the child to a higher level--the level of culture--and he will now be able to pass on to a _school_, but not the school we know to-day, where, irrationally, we try to give culture to minds not yet prepared or _educated to receive it_. to preserve the health of their minds, which have been _exercised_ and not _fatigued_ by the order of the work, our children must have a new kind of school for the acquisition of culture. my experiments in the continuation of this method for older children are already far advanced. moral factors a brief description such as this, of the _means_ which are used in the "children's house," may perhaps give the reader the impression of a logical and convincing system of education. but the importance of my method does not lie in the organization itself, but _in the effects which it produces on the child_. it is the _child_ who proves the value of this method by his spontaneous manifestations, which seem to reveal the laws of man's inner development.[b] psychology will perhaps find in the "children's houses" a laboratory which will bring more truths to light than thus hitherto recognized; for the essential factor in psychological research, especially in the field of psychogenesis, the origin and development of the mind, must be the establishment of normal conditions for the free development of thought. ----- [b] see the chapters on discipline in my larger works. ----- as is well known, we leave the children _free_ in their work, and in all actions which are not of a disturbing kind. that is, we _eliminate_ disorder, which is "bad," but allow to that which is orderly and "good" the most complete liberty of manifestation. the results obtained are surprising, for the children have shown a love of work which no one suspected to be in them, and a calm and an orderliness in their movements which, surpassing the limits of correctness have entered into those of "grace." the spontaneous discipline, and the obedience which is seen in the whole class, constitute the most striking result of our method. the ancient philosophical discussion as to whether man is born good or evil is often brought forward in connection with my method, and many who have supported it have done so on the ground that it provides a demonstration of man's natural goodness. very many others, on the contrary, have opposed it, considering that to leave children free is a dangerous mistake, since they have in them innate tendencies to evil. i should like to put the question upon a more positive plane. in the words "good" and "evil" we include the most varying ideas, and we confuse them especially _in our practical dealings with little children_. the tendencies which we stigmatize as _evil_ in little children of three to six years of age are often merely those which cause _annoyance_ to us adults when, not understanding their needs, we try to prevent their _every movement_, their every _attempt to gain experience for themselves in the world_ (by touching everything, etc.). the child, however, through this _natural tendency_, is led to _coordinate his movements_ and to collect impressions, especially sensations of touch, so that when prevented he _rebels_, and this rebellion forms almost the whole of his "naughtiness." what wonder is it that the evil disappears when, if we give the right _means_ for development and leave full liberty to use them, rebellion has no more reason for existence? further, by the substitution of a series of outbursts of _joy_ for the old series of outbursts of _rage_, the moral physiognomy of the child comes to assume a calm and gentleness which make him appear a different being. it is we who provoked the children to the violent manifestations of a real _struggle for existence_. in order to exist _according to the needs of their psychic development_ they were often obliged to snatch from us the things which seemed necessary to them for the purpose. they had to move contrary to our laws, or sometimes to struggle with other children to wrest from them the objects of their desire. on the other hand, if we give children the _means of existence_, the struggle for it disappears, and a vigorous expansion of life takes its place. this question involves a hygienic principle connected with the nervous system during the difficult period when the brain is still rapidly growing, and should be of great interest to specialists in children's diseases and nervous derangements. the inner life of man and the beginnings of his intellect are controlled by special laws and vital necessities which cannot be forgotten if we are aiming at health for mankind. for this reason, an educational method, which cultivates and protects the inner activities of the child, is not a question which concerns merely the school or the teachers; it is a universal question which concerns the family, and is of vital interest to mothers. to go more deeply into a question is often the only means of answering it rightly. if, for instance, we were to see men fighting over a piece of bread, we might say: "how bad men are!" if, on the other hand, we entered a well-warmed eating-house, and saw them quietly finding a place and choosing their meal without any envy of one another, we might say: "how good men are!" evidently, the question of absolute good and evil, intuitive ideas of which guide us in our superficial judgment, goes beyond such limitations as these. we can, for instance, provide excellent eating-houses for an entire people without directly affecting the question of their morals. one might say, indeed, that to judge by appearances, a well-fed people are _better, quieter, and commit less crime_ than a nation that is ill-nourished; but whoever draws from that the conclusion that to make men good it is _enough_ to feed them, will be making an obvious mistake. it cannot be denied, however, that _nourishment_ will be an essential factor in obtaining goodness, in the sense that it will _eliminate_ all the _evil acts, and the bitterness_ caused by lack of bread. now, in our case, we are dealing with a far deeper need--the nourishment of man's inner life, and of his higher functions. the bread that we are dealing with is the bread of the spirit, and we are entering into the difficult subject of the satisfaction of man's psychic needs. we have already obtained a most interesting result, in that we have found it possible to present _new means_ of enabling children to reach a higher level of calm and goodness, and we have been able to establish these means by experience. the whole foundation of our results rests upon these means which we have discovered, and which may be divided under two heads--the _organization of work_, and liberty. it is the perfect organization of work, permitting the possibility of self-development and giving outlet for the energies, which procures for each child the beneficial and calming _satisfaction_. and it is under such conditions of work that liberty leads to a perfecting of the activities, and to the attainment of a fine discipline which is in itself the result of that new quality of _calmness_ that has been developed in the child. freedom without organization of work would be useless. the child left _free_ without means of work would go to waste, just as a new-born baby, if _left free_ without nourishment, would die of starvation. _the organization of the work_, therefore, is the corner-stone of this new structure of goodness; but even that organization would be in vain without the _liberty_ to make use of it, and without freedom for the expansion of all those energies which spring from the satisfaction of the child's highest activities. has not a similar phenomenon occurred also in the history of man? the history of civilization is a history of successful attempts to organize work and to obtain liberty. on the whole, man's goodness has also increased, as is shown by his progress from barbarism to civilization, and it may be said that crime, the various forms of wickedness, cruelty and violence have been gradually decreasing during this passage of time. the _criminality_ of our times, as a matter of fact, has been compared to a form of _barbarism_ surviving in the midst of civilized peoples. it is, therefore, through the better organization of work that society will probably attain to a further purification, and in the meanwhile it seems unconsciously to be seeking the overthrow of the last barriers between itself and liberty. if this is what we learn from society, how great should be the results among little children from three to six years of age if the organization of their work is complete, and their freedom absolute? it is for this reason that to us they seem so good, like heralds of hope and of redemption. if men, walking as yet so painfully and imperfectly along the road of work and of freedom, have become better, why should we fear that the same road will prove disastrous to the children? yet, on the other hand, i would not say that the goodness of our little ones in their freedom will solve the problem of the absolute goodness or wickedness of man. we can only say that we have made a contribution to the cause of goodness by removing obstacles which were the cause of violence and of rebellion. let us "render, therefore, unto cæsar the things that are cæsar's, and unto god the things that are god's." the end transcriber's note: illustrations have been moved closer to their relevant paragraphs. the page numbers in the list of illustrations do not reflect the new placement of the illustrations, but are as in the original. the list of "didactic material for the _education of the senses_" on pages - is missing item (j) as in the original. author's archaic and variable spelling is preserved. author's punctuation style is preserved. passages in italics indicated by _underscores_. passages in bold indicated by =equal signs=. typographical problems have been changed and are listed below. transcriber's changes: page vii: was 'marvellous' [in fact, helen keller is a =marvelous= example of the phenomenon common to all human beings] page : was 'anvles' [which vary either according to their sides or according to their =angles= (the equilateral, isosceles, scalene, right angled, obtuse angled, and acute)] page : added commas [recognized and arranged in order--doh, _re_, =doh,= re, _mi_; doh, =re,= mi, _fah_; doh, =re,= mi, fah, _soh_, etc. in this way he succeeds in arranging all the] fig. caption: was 'si' [the spaces which remain where the discs are far apart: do-re, re-mi, fah-soh, soh-la, la-=ti=. the discs for the semitones] transcriber's note: italicized words are enclosed by underscores (_italic_). bold-faced words are enclosed by equal signs (=bold=). the vitalized school by francis b. pearson superintendent of public instruction of ohio author of "the evolution of the teacher" "the high school problem" "reveries of a schoolmaster" new york the macmillan company copyright, , by the macmillan company. published february, . reprinted january, . preface the thoughtful observer must have noted in the recent past many indications of an awakened interest both in the concept of education and in school procedure on the part of school officials, teachers, and the public. educators have been developing pedagogical principles that strike their roots deep into the philosophy of life, and now their pronouncements are invading the consciousness of people of all ranks and causing them to realize more and more that the school process is an integral part of the life process and not something detached from life. the following pages constitute an attempt to interpret some of the school processes in terms of life processes, and to suggest ways in which these processes may be made identical. it is hoped that teachers who may read these pages may find running through them a strand of optimism that will give them increased faith in their own powers, a larger hope for the future of the school, and an access of zeal to press valiantly forward in their efforts to excel themselves. f. b. p. columbus, ohio, january, . table of contents chapter i. teaching school ii. the teacher iii. the child iv. the child of the future v. the teacher-politician vi. sublime chaos vii. democracy viii. patriotism ix. work and life x. words and their content xi. complete living xii. the time element xiii. the artist teacher xiv. the teacher as an ideal xv. the socialized recitation xvi. agriculture xvii. the school and the community xviii. poetry and life xix. a sense of humor xx. the element of human interest xxi. behavior xxii. bond and fear xxiii. examinations xxiv. world-building xxv. a typical vitalized school the vitalized school chapter i teaching school =life and living compared.=--there is a wide difference between school-teaching and teaching school. the question "is she a school-teacher?" means one thing; but the question "can she teach school?" means quite another. school-teaching may be living; but teaching school is life. and any one who has a definition of life can readily find a definition for teaching school. much of the criticism of the work of the schools emanates from sources that have a restricted concept of life. the artisan who defines life in terms of his own trade is impatient with much that the school is trying to do. he would have the scope of the school narrowed to his concept of life. if art and literature are beyond the limits of his concept, he can see no warrant for their presence in the school. the work of the schools cannot be standardized until life itself is standardized, and that is neither possible nor desirable. the glory of life is that it does not have fixity, that it is ever crescent. =teaching defined.=--teaching school may be defined, therefore, as the process of interpreting life by the laboratory method. the teacher's work is to open the gates of life for the pupils. but, before these gates can be opened, the teacher must know what and where they are. this view of the teacher's work is neither fanciful nor fantastic; quite the contrary. life is the common heritage of people young and old, and the school should be so organized and administered as to teach people how to use this heritage to the best advantage both for themselves and for others. if a child should be absent from school altogether, or if he should be incarcerated in prison from his sixth to his eighteenth year, he would still have life. but, if he is in school during those twelve years, he is supposed to have life that is of better quality and more abundant. life is not measured by years, but by its own intensity and scope. it has often been said that some people have more life in threescore and ten years than methuselah had in his more than nine hundred years. =life measured by intensity.=--this statement is not demonstrable, of course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have more of life in a given time than others in the same time. in this sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives. these reactions may be increased by training. two persons, in passing a shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many as the other, according to their ability to react. the man who was locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. he had really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of life during that hour. =illustrations.=--in the case of dreams, we are told that years may be condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of reactions. the rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves manifest on the face of the dreamer. beads of perspiration and facial contortions betoken intensity of feeling. in such an experience life is intense. if a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a case, it would make a high record of speed. life sometimes touches bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. but the distance between these extremes varies greatly in different persons. the life of one may have but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand. the life of job is an apt illustration. no one has been able to sound the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the heights of his exaltation. we may not readily compute the octaves in such a life as his. =the complexity of life.=--it is not easy to think life, much less define it. the elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the mind. it looks out at one from so many corners that it seems argus-eyed. at one moment we see it on the stock exchange where men struggle and strive in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home, where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition but, rather, a sublime monopoly. again, it manifests itself in the clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or constructing a canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where the microscope is revealing the form of the snow crystal. one man is watching the movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his telescope, while another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of people. another man is leading an army into battle, while some doctor macclure is breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his mission of mercy. =manifestations of life.=--these manifestations of life men call trade, commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy. and men write these words in books, and other men write other books trying to explain their meaning. then, still others divide and subdivide, and science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and astronomy. here mathematics and science seem to merge. and, in time, history and geography come together, and sometimes strive for precedence. thus, books accumulate into libraries and so add another to the many elements of life. then magazines are written to explain the books and their authors. the motive behind the book is analyzed in an effort to discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. in these revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes the roaring of the lion. in them we see the moonbeams that play among the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the blossoms that filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries destruction; the rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that destroys. =life in literature.=--back of these sights and sounds we discover men--cicero, demosthenes, homer, isaiah, shakespeare, milton, dante. we trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. and in literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life. literature is what it is because these men were what they were. they saw and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. they stood upon the heights and saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature. this panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they could not but portray. and so literature and life are identical and not coördinates, as some would have us think. =life as subject matter in teaching.=--in teaching school, therefore, the subject matter with which we have to do is life--nothing more and nothing less. we may call it history, or mathematics, or literature, or psychology,--but it still remains true that life is the real objective of all our activities. and, as has been already said, we are teaching life by the laboratory method. we are striving to interpret the thing in which we are immersed. we feel, and think, and aspire, and love, and enjoy. all these are life; and from this life we are striving to extract strength that our feeling may be deeper, our thinking higher, our aspirations wider and more lofty, our love purer and nobler, and our own enjoyment greater. by absorbing the life that is all about us we strive to have more abundant and abounding life. =the teacher's province.=--such is the province of one who essays the task of teaching school. school is life, as we have been told; but, at the same time, it is a place and an occasion for teaching life. if we could detach history from life, it would cease to be history. if literature is not life, it is not literature; and so with the sciences. these branches are but variants or branches of life, and all emanate from a common center. whether we scan the heavens, penetrate the depths of the sea, pore over the pages of books, or look into the minds and hearts of men, we are striving after an interpretation of life. questions and exercises . distinguish between a "school teacher" and a "man or woman who teaches school." . discuss the importance of the following agencies of the school in securing for children "life of a better quality and more abundant": play; revitalized curricula; vitalized teachers; medical inspection; social centers; moral instruction. . discuss both from the standpoint of present practice and ideal educational principles: "more abundant life rather than knowledge is the chief end of instruction." . what changes are necessary in school curricula and in the methods of school organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the chief purpose of our schools, "more abundant _life_," may be realized? . justify the apparent length of the school day to teachers and pupils, as a means of determining the quality of the work of the school. . some teachers maintain that school is a preparation for life, while the author maintains that "school is _life_." is this difference in the concept of the school a vital one? . how may this difference of concept affect the work of the teacher? the attitude of the pupil? . what definition of education will best harmonize with the ideals of this chapter? chapter ii the teacher =teachers contrasted.=--the vitalized school is an expression of the vitalized teacher. in the hands of the teacher of another sort, the vitalized school is impossible. unless she can see in the multiplication table the power that throws the bridge across the river, that builds pyramids, that constructs railways, that sends ships across the ocean, that tunnels mountains and navigates the air, this table becomes a stupid thing, a dead thing, and an incubus upon the spirits of her pupils. to such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are little less than an impertinence. the vitalized teacher is different. to her the multiplication table pulsates with life. it stretches forth its beneficent hand to give employment to a million workers, and food to a million homes. it pervades every mart of trade; it loads trains and ships with the commerce of nations; and it helps to amplify and ennoble civilization. =vitalized mathematics.=--in this table she sees a prophecy of great achievements in engineering, architecture, transportation, and the myriad applications of science. in brief, mathematics to her is vibrant with life both in its present uses and in its possibilities. she knows that it is a part of the texture of the daily life of every home as well as of national life. she knows that it pertains to individual, community, and national well-being. knowing this, she feels that it is quite worth while for herself and her pupils, both for the present and for the future. she feels that, if she would know life, she must know mathematics, because it is a part of life; that, if she would teach life to her pupils, she must teach them mathematics as an integral part of life; and that she must teach it in such a way that it will be as much a part of themselves as their bodily organs. she wants them to know the mathematics as they know that the rain is falling or that the sun is shining, because the rain, the sunshine, and the mathematics are all elements of life. her great aim is to have her pupils experience the study just as they experience other phases of life. =the teacher's attitude.=--such a teacher with such a conception of life and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery. each day is an exhilarating experience of life. her pupils are a part of life to her. she enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. they are her confederates in the fine game of life. the bigness and exuberance of her abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her presence they absorb life. their studies, under the influence of her magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the food they eat. no two days are alike in her school, for life to-day is larger than it was yesterday and so presents a new aspect. her spirit carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these truths thus become inherent. =college influences.=--she teaches life, albeit through the medium of subjects and books, because she knows life. her college work did not consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in accumulating experiences of life. many of these experiences were acquired vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. her generous nature was able to withstand the most assiduous efforts of some of her teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books, with the wet blanket of erudition. she was able to relive the thoughts and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their experiences her own. she could reconstitute the emotional life of her authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. her books were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages. =reading and life.=--she can teach reading because she can read. reading to her is an experience in life. the words on the printed page are not meaningless hieroglyphics. they are the electric wires which connect the soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is continually passing. when she reads dickens, tiny tim is never a mere boy with a crutch, but he is tiny tim, and, as such, neither men nor angels can supplant him on the printed page. she knows the touch of him and the voice of him. she laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays with him; she lives with him. in her teaching she causes tiny tim to stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. this she can do because he is a part of her life. she has no occasion either to pose or to rhapsodize. sincerity is its own explanation and justification. =power of understanding.=--when she reads "little boy blue" she can hear the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know the universality of death and sorrow. but she finds faith and hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the mother's grief. thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. in every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. in short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. she can feel as well as think and so can emotionalize the printed page. nature has endowed her with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that the author produces. thus she understands, and that is the prime desideratum in reading. and because she understands, she can interpret, and cause her pupils to understand. thus they receive another endowment of life. =books as exponents of life.=--she has time for reading as she has time for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. to her they are all coördinate elements of life. she eats, and sleeps, and reads because she is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads. she taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. she does not smite the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth. she descends into hades with dante, and ascends sinai with moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. she sits enrapt as shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by victor hugo's picture of the human soul. her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book, and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the spirits of her pupils. there is, therefore, no drag or listlessness in her class in reading, because, during this exercise, life is as buoyant and spontaneous as it is upon the playground. =the meaning of history.=--in her teaching of history she invests all the characters with life, because to her they are alive. and because they are alive to her they are alive to her pupils. they are instinct with power, action, life. she rehabilitates the scenes in which they moved, and, therefore, they must be alive in order to perform their parts. they are all flesh and blood people with all the attributes of people. they are all actuated by motives and move along their appointed ways obedient to the laws of cause and effect. they are not named in the book to be learned and recited, but to be known. she causes her pupils to know them as they would come to know people in her home. nor do they ever mistake one for the other or confuse their actions. they know them too well for that. these characters are made to stand wide apart, so that, being thus seen, they will ever after be known. history is not a directory of names, but groups of people going about their tasks. they hunger, and thirst, and love, and hate, and struggle with their environment as their descendants are doing to-day. =language and vitality.=--when she is teaching a language, it is never less than a living language. in latin the syntax is learned as a means, never an end. the big things in the study loom too large for that. the pupils become so eager to see what cæsar will do next that they cannot afford the time to stare long at a mere ablative absolute. they are following the parade, and are not to be turned aside from their large purpose by minor matters. they are made to see and hear cicero; and rome becomes a reality, with its forum, its senate, and its mamertine. when dido sears the soul of the faithless Æneas with her words of scorn, the girls applaud and the boys tremble. when troy burns, there is a real fire, and achates is as real as the man friday. when the shipwrecked trojans regale themselves with venison, it is no make-believe dinner, but a real one. where such a teacher is, there can be no dead language, no dry bones of history, and no stagnation in the stream of life. questions and exercises . what suggestions are offered for the vitalization of mathematics? history? reading? language? . in what ways is vitalization of subject matter related to its socialization? . how may motivation in teaching the multiplication table be assisted by vitalization? . what is to be included in the term "read" in the sentence "she can teach reading because she can read"? . add to the author's list of children in literature whom the vitalized teacher may introduce as companions to her pupils. . why is extended reading essential to success in teaching? . what works of dante have you read? of victor hugo? of shakespeare? how will the reading of such authors improve the teaching ability of elementary teachers? . what are the distinguishing characteristics of the vitalized teacher? chapter iii the child =the child as the center in school procedure.=--the child is the center of school procedure in all its many ramifications. for the child the building is erected, the equipment is provided, the course of study is arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. the child is major, and all else is subsidiary. in the general scheme even the teacher takes secondary place. teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the focus of all plans and purposes. the teacher is secured for the child, and not the child for the teacher. taxpayers, boards of education, parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its prime objective. colleges of education and normal schools, in large numbers, are working at the educational problem in an effort to develop more effective methods of training the teachers of the child. a host of authors and publishers are giving to the interest of the child the products of their skill. in every commonwealth may be found a large number of men and women whose time and energies are devoted to the work of the schools for the child. =all children should have school privileges.=--all these facts are freely admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have truant officers, and child labor laws. we admit the facts, but, in our practices, strive to circumvent their application. if the school is good for one child, it is good for all children. indeed, the school is maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of and profit by its presence. if there were no schools, our civilization would surely decline. if school attendance should cease at the end of the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. it rests, therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization, or a college civilization. =parental attitude.=--schools are administered on the assumption that every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the child will make for a better quality of civilization. the state regards the child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be an asset in his manhood. in this hope time and money are devoted to his training. but, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use them for their own comfort or profit. they seem to think that their children are indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that their obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of food, shelter, and clothing. they seem not to realize that "life is more than fruit or grain," and deny to their children the elements of life. =the rights of the child.=--all this is a sort of preface to the statement that the child comes into the world endowed with certain inherent rights that may not be abrogated. he has a right to life in its best and fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure of life, or to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a life. he goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one who denies him this boon is doing violence to his right to have life. he does not go to school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one of the elements of life; and experience has demonstrated that arithmetic may be learned in the school more advantageously than elsewhere. he goes to school to have agreeable and profitable life. each day is an integer of life and must be made to abound in life if it is to be accounted a success. =child life.=--again, the child has a right to the quality of life that is consistent with and congenial to his age. a seven-year-old should be a seven-year-old, in his thinking, in his activities, in his amusements, and in his feeling. we should never ask or want him to "put away childish things" at this age, for these childish things are a proof of his normality and good health. his buoyant life and good health may prove disastrous to the furniture in his home, but far better marred furniture than marred childhood. if, at this age, he should become as quiet and sedate as his father, his parents and teacher would have cause for alarm. it is the high privilege of the parent and the teacher to direct his activities, but not to abridge or interdict them. if the teacher would reduce him to inaction and silence, she may well reflect that if he were an imbecile he would be quiet. he will not pass this way again; and if he is ever to have the sort of life that is in harmony with his age, he must have it now. =childhood curtailed.=--he has a right, also, to the full measure of childhood. this period is relatively short, and any curtailment does violence to his physiological and psychological nature. all the years of his childhood are necessary for a proper balancing of his physical and mental powers, that they may do their appointed work in after years. entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties and responsibilities of adult life. one such mother went to the high school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, upon being asked why the daughter was leaving school, replied, "oh, she's keeping company now." that daughter will never be the hardy plant in civilization that she ought to be, because she was reared in a hothouse atmosphere. that mother had no right to cripple the life of her child by thwarting nature's decrees. =detrimental effects.=--the pity of it all is that the child is at the mercy of the parent, or of the teacher, as the case may be. we become so eager to have "old heads on young shoulders" that we begrudge the child the years that are necessary for the shoulders to attain that maturity of strength that is needful for supporting the "old heads." then ensues a lack of balance, and, were all children thus denied their right to the full period of youth, we should have a distorted civilization. dickens inveighs against this curtailment of youth prodigiously, and the marvel is that we have failed to learn the lesson from his pages. we need not have recourse to victor hugo to know the life of little cosette, for we can see her prototype by merely looking about us. =the child's right to the best.=--as the child has a right to life in its fullness, so he has a right to all the agencies that can promote this type of life. if he meets with an accident he has a right to the best surgical skill that can be secured, and this right we readily concede; and equally he has a right to the best teacher that money will secure. if he has a teacher that is less than the best, the time thus lost can never be restored to him. a lady who had an unskillful teacher in her first year in the high school now avers that he maimed her for life in that particular study. life is such a delicate affair that it demands expert handling. if we hope to have the child attain his right to be an intelligent coöperating agent in promoting life in society, then no price is too great to pay for the expert teaching which will nurture the sort of life in him that will make him effective. =the child's native tendencies.=--then, again, the child has a right to the exercise of the native tendencies with which he is endowed. in fact, these tendencies should be the working capital of the teacher, the starting points in her teaching. there was a time when the teacher punished the child who was caught drawing pictures on his slate. happily that sort of barbarity disappeared, in the main, along with the slate. the vitalized teacher rejoices in the pictures that the child draws and turns this tendency to good account. through this inclination to draw she finds the real child and so, as the psychologists direct, she begins where the child is and sets about attaching to this native tendency the work in nature study, geography, or history. when she discovers a constructive tendency in the child, she at once uses this in shifting from analytic to synthetic exercises in the school order. if he enjoys making things, he will be glad of an opportunity to make devices, or problems, or maps. =the play instinct.=--she makes large use, also, of the play instinct that is one of his native tendencies. this instinct is constantly reaching out for objects of play. the teacher is quick to note the child's quest for objects and deftly substitutes some phase of school work for marbles, balls, or dolls, and his playing proceeds apace without abatement of zest. the vitalized teacher knows how to attach the arithmetic to this play instinct and make it a fascinating game. during the games of arithmetic, geography, history, or spelling, life is at high tide in her school and the work is thorough in consequence. work is relieved of the onus of drudgery whenever it appears in the guise of a game, and the teacher who has skill in attaching school studies to the play instinct of the child will make her school effective as well as a delight to herself and her pupils. in such a plan there is neither place nor occasion for coercion. =self-expression.=--another right of the child is the right to express himself. the desire for self-expression is fundamental in the human mind, as the study of archæology abundantly proves. since this is true, every school should be a school of expression if the nature of the child is to have full recognition. without expression there is no impression, and without impression there is no education that has real value. the more and better expression in the school, therefore, the more and better the education in that school. in the vitalized school we shall find freedom of expression, and the absence of unreasoning repression. the child expresses himself by means of his hands, his feet, his face, his entire body, and his organs of speech, and his expression through either of these means gives the teacher a knowledge of what to do. these expressions may not be what the teacher would wish, but the expression necessarily precedes intelligent teaching. =imagination.=--these expressions may reveal a vivid imagination, but they are no less valuable as indices of the child's nature on that account. it is the very refinement of cruelty to try to interdict or stifle the child's imagination. but for the imagination of people in the past we should not have the rich treasures of mythology that so delight us all. every child with imagination is constructing a mythology of his own, and from the gossamer threads of fancy is weaving a pattern of life that no parent or teacher should ever wish to forbid or destroy. day by day, he sees visions and dreams dreams, and so builds for himself a world in which he finds delight and profit. in this world he is king, and only profane hands would dare attempt to dethrone him. =the child's experiences.=--his experiences, whether in the real world, or in this world of fancy, are his capital in the bank of life; and he has every right to invest this capital so as to achieve further increments of life. in this enterprise, the teacher is his counselor and guide, and, in order that she may exercise this function sympathetically and rationally, she must know the nature and extent of his capital. if he knows a bird, he may invest this knowledge so as to gain a knowledge of many birds, and so, in time, compass the entire realm of ornithology. if he knows a flower, from this known he may be so directed that he may become a master in the unknown field of botany. if he knows coal, this experience may be made the open sesame to the realms of geology. in short, all his experiences may be capitalized under the direction of a skillful teacher, and made to produce large dividends as an investment in life. =relation to school work.=--thus the school becomes, for the child, a place of and for real life, and not a place detached from life. there he lives effectively, and joyously, because the teacher knows how to utilize his experiences and native dispositions for the enlargement of his life. he has no inclination to become a deserter or a tenant, for life is agreeable there, and the school is made his chief interest. his work is not doled out to him in the form of tasks, but is graciously presented as a privilege, and as such he esteems it. there he learns to live among people of differing tastes and interests without abdicating his own individuality. there he learns that life is work and that work is the very quintessence of life. questions and exercises . how should dividends on school investments be estimated? . what are the inherent rights of childhood? . what use may be made of play in the education of children? . explain why adults are often unwilling to coöperate through lack of opportunity to play in childhood. . illustrate from your own knowledge and experience how the exercise of native tendencies may be the means of education. . what modes of self-expression should be used by pupils of elementary schools? of high schools? . what may the vitalized teacher do to assist in the development of self-expression? what should she refrain from doing? . suggest methods whereby the teacher may discover the content of the child's world. . how may the child's experience, imagination, and expression be interrelated? . why is the twentieth century called the "age of the child"? chapter iv the child of the future =rights of the coming generations.=--any school procedure that limits its interests and activities to the present generation takes a too restricted view of the real scope of education. the children of the next generation, and the next, are entitled to consideration if education is to do its perfect work and have complete and convincing justification. the child of the future has a right to grandfathers and grandmothers of sound body and sound mind, and the schools and homes of the present are charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that this right is vouchsafed to him. in actual practice our plans seem not to previse grandfathers and grandmothers, and stop short even of fathers and mothers. the child of the next generation has a right to a father and a mother of untainted blood, and neither the home nor the school can ignore this right. =transmitted weaknesses.=--if these rights are not scrupulously respected by the present generation, the child of the future may come into the world under a handicap that all the educational agencies combined can neither remove nor materially mitigate. if he is crippled in mind or in body because of excesses on the part of his progenitors, the schools and hospitals may help him through life in a sorry sort of fashion, but his condition is evermore a reminder to him of how much he has missed in comparison with the child of sound body and mind. if such a child does not imprecate even the memory of the ancestors whose vitiated blood courses through his stricken body, it will be because his mind is too weak to reason from effect to cause or because his affliction has taught him large charity. he will feel that he has been shamefully cheated in the great game of life, with no hope of restitution. by reason of this, his gaze is turned backward instead of forward, and this is a reversal of the rightful attitude of child life. instead of looking forward with hope and happiness, he droops through a somber life and constantly broods upon what might have been. =attitude of ancestors.=--whether he realizes it or not, he reduces the average of humanity and is a burden upon society both in a negative and in a positive sense. in him society loses a worker and gains a dependent. every taxpayer of the community must contribute to the support which he is unable to provide for himself. he watches other children romp and play and laugh; but he neither romps, nor plays, nor laughs. he is inert. some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. he asks for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give him a living death; he asks for a heaven of delight, and they give him a hell of despair. he has a right to freedom, but, in place of that, he is forced into slavery of body and soul to pay the debts of his grandfather. nor can he pay these debts in full, but must, perforce, pass them on to his own children. sad to relate, the father and grandfather look upon such a child and charge providence with unjust dealing in burdening them with such an imperfect scion to uphold the family name. they seem blind to the patent truth before them; they seem unable to interpret the law of cause and effect; they charge the almighty and the child with their own defections; they acquit themselves of any responsibility for what is before their eyes. =hospitals cited.=--our hospitals for abnormal and subnormal children, and our eleemosynary institutions, in general, are a sad commentary upon our civilization and something of a reflection upon the school as an exponent of and a teacher of life. if the wards of these institutions, barring the victims of accidents, are the best we can do in the way of coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the school has any special warrant for exultation. these defectives did not just happen. the law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. on the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. with lavish hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial consideration to the ounce of prevention. the title of education will be cloudy until such time as these institutions have become a thing of the past. both pulpit and press extol the efforts of society to build, equip, and maintain these institutions, and that is well; but, with all that, we are merely trying to make the best of a bad situation. education will not fully come into its own until it takes into the scope of its interests the child of the future as well as the child of the present; not until it comes to regard the children of the present as future ancestors as well as future citizens. =the child as a future ancestor.=--if the children of the future are to prove a blessing to society and not a burden, then the children of the present need to become fully conscious of their responsibilities as agencies in bringing to pass this desirable condition. if the teacher or parent can, somehow, cause the boy of to-day to visualize his own grandson, in the years to come, pointing the finger of scorn at him and calling down maledictions upon him because of a taint in the family blood, that picture will persist in his consciousness, and will prove a deterrent factor in his life. the desire for immortality is innate in every human breast, we are taught, but certainly no boy will wish to achieve that sort of immortality. he will not consider with complacency the possibility of his becoming a pariah in the estimation of his descendants, and will go far in an effort to avert such a misfortune. there is no man but will shudder when he contemplates the possibility of having perpetuated upon his gravestone or in the memory of his grandchild the word "unclean." =the heart of the problem.=--here we arrive at the very heart of the problem that confronts the home and the school. we may close our eyes, or look another way, but the problem remains. we may not be able to solve it, but we cannot evade it. each day it calls loudly to every parent and every teacher for a solution. the health and happiness of the coming generations depend upon the right education of the present one, and this responsibility the home and the school can neither shirk nor shift. we take great unction to ourselves for the excellence of the horses, pigs, and cattle that we have on exhibition at the fairs, but are silent as to our failures in the form of children, that drag out a half-life in our hospitals. in one state it costs more to care for the defectives and unfortunates than to provide schooling facilities for all the normal children, but this fact is not written into party platforms nor proclaimed from the stump. in the face of such a fact society seems to proceed upon the agreeable assumption that the less said the better. =misconceptions.=--we temporize with the fundamental situation by the use of such soporifics as the expressions "necessary evil" and the like, but that leaves us exactly at the starting point. many well-meaning people use these expressions with great frequency and freedom and seem to think that in so doing they have given a proof of virtue and public spirit. it were worthy only of an iconoclast to deprecate or disparage the legislative attempts to foster clean living. all such efforts are worthy of commendation; but in sadness it must be confessed that, laudable as these efforts are, they have not produced results that are wholly satisfactory. defectives are still granted licenses to perpetuate their kind; children still enervate their bodies and minds by the use of narcotics; and society daintily lifts its skirts as it hurries past the evil, pretending not to see. legislation is an attempt to express public sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede legislation if it is to become effective. efforts have been made through the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking. hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our problem, until public sentiment has been educated. =the responsibility of the school.=--this education must come, in large part, through the schools, but even these will fail until they come into a full realization of the fact that their field of effort is life in the large. time was when the teacher thought she was employed to teach geography, grammar, and arithmetic. then she enlarged this to include boys and girls. and now she needs to make another addition and realize that her function is to teach boys and girls the subject of life, using the branches of study as a means to this end. in a report on the work of the schools at gary, indiana, the statement is made that the first purpose of these schools seems to be to produce efficient workers for the mills. this seems to savor of the doctrine of educational foreordination, and would make millwork and life synonymous. life is larger than any mill. we may be justified in educating one horse for the plow and another for the race track, but this justification rests upon the fact that horses are assets and not liabilities. =clean living.=--clean living in this generation will, undeniably, project itself into the next, and we have only to see to it that all the activities of the school function in clean living in the child of to-day, and we shall surely be safeguarding the interests of the child of the future. but clean living means more than mere externals. the daily bath, pure food, fresh air, and sanitary conditions are essential but not sufficient in themselves. clean thinking, right motives, and a high respect for the rights and interests of the future must enter into the scheme of life. there must be no devious ways, no back alleys, in the scheme, but only the broad highway of life, open always to the sunlight and to the gaze of all mankind. all this must become thoroughly enmeshed in the social consciousness and in the daily practice of every individual, before the school can lay claim to success in the art of teaching efficient living. questions and exercises . investigate the following agencies as means for providing future generations with ancestors of untainted blood: legislation; moral education; physical education; sex hygiene and eugenics; penal institutions; medical science. . enumerate some of the physical and mental handicaps of the child who is not well born. . what powerful appeal for clean living may be made to the adolescent youth? . as a concrete example of children being punished for the sins of their fathers even unto the third and fourth generation, read the history of the juke family. . to what extent does the school share the responsibility for the improvement of the physical and moral quality of the children of the future? . what kind of teaching is needed to meet this responsibility? . reliable authorities have estimated that per cent or , , of the school children of america are suffering from removable physical defects; that per cent of the school children of the country have defective teeth; and that on the average the health of children who are not in attendance at school is better than that of those who are in school. in the light of these facts discuss the failure or success of our schools in providing fit material for efficient citizenship. chapter v the teacher-politician =the politician defined.=--the politician has been defined as one who makes a careful study of the wants of his community and is diligent in his efforts to supply these wants. this definition has, at the very least, the merit of mitigating, if not removing, the stigma that attaches to politicians in the popular thought. conceding the correctness of this definition, it must be evident that society is the beneficiary of the work of the politician, and would be the gainer if the number of politicians were multiplied. the motive of self-interest lies back of all human activities, and education is constantly striving to stimulate and accentuate this motive. even in altruism we may find an admixture of self-interest. the merchant who arranges his goods artistically may hope by this means to win more patronage, but, aside from this, he wins a feeling of gratification. his self-interest may look either toward a greater volume of business or to a better class of patrons, or both. while he is enlarging the scope of his business, he may be elevating the taste of his customers. in either case his self-interest is commendable. a successful merchant is better for the community than an unsuccessful one. =self-interest.=--the physician is actuated by the motive of self-interest, also. his years of training are but a preparation for the competition that is certain to fall to his lot. he is gratified at the increase of his popularity as a successful practitioner. but he prescribes modes of living as well as remedies, and so tries to forestall and prevent disease, while he is exercising his curative skill. he tries not only to restore health, but also to promote good health in the community by his recommendations of pure food, pure water, fresh air, and exercise. his motives are altruistic even while he is consulting self-interest. none but the censorious will criticize the minister for accepting a larger parish even with a larger salary attached. the larger parish will afford him a wider field for usefulness, and the larger salary will enable him to execute more of his laudable plans. =the methods of the politician.=--hence it will be seen that, in the right sense, merchants, physicians, and ministers are all politicians in that they seek to expand the sphere of their activities. like the politician they study the wants of the people in order to win a starting point for leadership. true, there are quacks, charlatans, hypocrites, and demagogues, but none of these, nor all combined, avail to disprove the validity of the principle. it has often been said that the churches would do well to study and use the art of advertising that is so well understood by the saloons. this is another way of saying that the methods of the politician will avail in promoting right activities as well as wrong ones. the politician, whether he is a business man or a professional man, proceeds from the known to the related unknown, and thus shows himself a conscious or unconscious student of psychology. he studies that which is in order to promote that which should be. =leadership.=--the politician aspires to leadership, and that is praiseworthy, provided his cause is a worthy one. if the cause is unworthy, the cloven foot will soon appear and repudiation will ensue, which will mark him unsuccessful as a politician. he may be actuated by the motive of self-interest, in common with all others, but this interest may focus in the amelioration of conditions as they are or in the advancement of his friends. the satisfaction of leadership is the sole reward of many a politician, with the added pleasure of seeing his friends profit by this leadership. a statesman is a politician grown large--large in respect to motives, to plans and purposes, and to methods. the fundamental principle, however, remains constant. =the politician worthy of imitation.=--the successful politician must know people and their wants. he must know conditions in order to direct the course of his activities. otherwise, he will find himself moving at random, and this may prove disastrous to his purposes. much misdirected effort has been expended in disparaging the politician and his methods. if the man and his methods were better understood, they would often be found worthy of close imitation in the home, in the school, in the church, in the professions, and in business. =education and substitution.=--education, in the large, is the process of making substitutions. evermore, in school work, we are striving to substitute something better for something not so good. in brief, we are striving to substitute needs for wants. but before we can do this we must determine, by careful study and close observation, what the wants are. ability to substitute needs for wants betokens a high type of leadership. the boy wants to read henty, but needs to read dickens or shakespeare. how shall the teacher proceed in order to make the substitution? certainly it cannot be done by any mere fiat or ukase. those who are incredulous as to the wisdom of establishing colleges of education and normal schools to generate and promote methods of teaching have here a concrete and pertinent question: can a college of education or normal school give to an embryo teacher any method by which she may effectively substitute shakespeare for henty? =methods contrasted.=--some teachers have attempted to make this substitution by means of ridicule and sarcasm and then called the boy stupid because he continued to read his henty. others have indulged in rhapsodies on shakespeare, hoping to inoculate the boy with the shakespearean virus, and then called the boy stolid because he failed to share their apparent rapture. the politician would have pursued neither of these plans. his inherent or acquired psychology would have admonished him to begin where the boy is. he would have gone to henty to find the boy. having found him, he would have sat down beside him and entered into his interest in the book. in time he would have found something in the book to remind him of a passage in shakespeare. this passage he would have read in his best style and then resumed the reading of henty. thus, by degrees, he would have effected the substitution, permitting the boy to think that this had been done on his own initiative. =the principle illustrated.=--the vitalized teacher observes, profits by, and initiates into her work the method of the politician and so makes her school work vital. beginning with what the boy wants, she lures him along, by easy stages, until she has brought him within the circle of her own wants, which are, in reality, the needs of the boy. the boy walks along in paces, let us say, of eighteen inches. the teacher moderates her gait to harmonize with his, but gradually lengthens her paces to two feet. at first, she kept step with him; now he is keeping step with her and finds the enterprise an exhilarating adventure. she is teaching the boy to walk in strides two feet in length, and begins with his native tendency to step eighteen inches. thus she begins where the boy is, by acquainting herself with his wants, attaches her teaching to his native tendencies, and then proceeds from the known to the related unknown. libraries abound in books that explain lucidly this simple elementary principle of teaching, but many teachers still seem to find it difficult of application. =substitution illustrated.=--this method of substitution becomes the rule of the school through the skill of the vitalized teacher. the lily of the valley is substituted for the sunflower, in the children's esteem, and there is generated a taste for the exquisite. the copy of the masterpiece of art supplants the bizarre chromo; correct forms of speech take the place of incorrect forms; the elegant usurps the place of the inelegant; and the inartistic gives place to the artistic. the circle of their wants is extended until it includes their needs, and these, in turn, are transformed into wants. thus all the pupils ascend to a higher level of appreciation of the things that make for a more comfortable and agreeable civilization. they work under the spell of leadership, for real leadership always inspires confidence. =society and the school.=--at its best, society is but an enlarged copy of the vitalized school. or, to put it in another way, the vitalized school is society in miniature. as the school is engaged in the work of making substitutions, so, in fact, is society. legislative bodies are striving to substitute wise laws for the laws that have fallen behind the needs of the times, that the interests of society may be fully conserved. the church is substituting better methods of work in all its activities for the methods that have become antiquated or ineffective. this it does in the hope that its influence may be broadened and deepened. ministers and officials are constantly pondering the question of substitutions. the farmer is substituting better methods of tilling the soil for the methods that were in vogue in a former time before science had invaded the realms of agriculture, to the end that he may increase the yield of his fields, make larger contributions to commerce, increase his profits, and so be better able to gratify some of the higher desires of his nature. =the automobile factory.=--each successive model in an automobile factory is a concrete illustration of the process of making substitutions, and each substituted part bears witness to a close scrutiny of past experiences as well as of the wants of prospective purchasers. the self-starter was a want at first; but now it is a need, and, therefore, a necessity. if the school would but make as careful study of the boy's experiences and his wants as the manufacturer does in the case of automobiles, and then would attach the substitutions to these experiences and wants, the boy would very soon find himself in happy possession of a self-starter which would prove to be the very crown of school work. the automobile manufacturer is both a psychologist and a politician. =results of substitutions.=--as a result of substitutions we have better roads, better houses, better laws, cleaner streets, better fences, better machinery, more sanitary conditions, and a higher type of conduct. we step to a higher level upon the experiences of the past and make substitutions as we move upward. the progress of civilization is measured by the character of these substitutions and the rapidity with which they are made. the people on the isle of marken make but few substitutions, and these only at long intervals, and so they are looked upon as curiosities among humans. in all our missionary enterprises we are endeavoring to persuade the peoples among whom we are working to make substitutions. instead of their own, we would have them accept our books, our styles of clothing, our plans of government, our modes of living, our means of transportation, and, in short, our standards of life. but, first of all, we must learn their standards of life; otherwise we cannot proceed intelligently or effectively in the line of substitutions. we must know their language before we can teach them ours, and we must translate our books into their language before we can hope to substitute our books for theirs. all the substitutions we hope to make presuppose a knowledge of their wants. hence the methods of the missionary bear a close analogy to the methods of the politician. =the idealist.=--this is equally true of the vitalized teacher. she is a practical idealist. in the words of the poet, her reach is beyond her grasp, and this proclaims her an idealist. in her capacity as a politician she makes a close study of the wants of her constituents, both pupils and parents, and so learns how best to articulate school work with the interests of the community. she does not hold aloof from her pupils or their homes, but studies them at close range, as do the missionary and the politician. she lives among them and so learns their language and their modes of thinking and living. only so can she come into sympathetic relations with them and be of greatest service to them in promoting right substitutions. she finds one boy surcharged with the instinct of pugnacity. this tendency manifests itself both in school and at home. her own conclusions are ratified by the parents. he wants to fight. his whole nature cries aloud for battle. in such a case, neither repression nor suppression will avail. so she attaches a phase of school work to this native disposition and gives his pugnacious instinct a fair field. =an example.=--enlisting him as her champion in a tournament, she pits against him a doughty antagonist in the form of a problem in arithmetic. in tones of encouragement she gives the signal and the fight is on. the boy pummels that problem as he would belabor a schoolmate on the playground. his whole being is focused upon the adventure. and when he has won his meed of praise, he feels himself a real champion. the teacher merely substituted mind for hands in the contest and so fell in with his notion that fighting is quite right if only the cause is a worthy one. he is quick to see the distinction and so makes the substitution with alacrity and with no loss of self-respect. ever after he disdains the vulgar brawl and does not lose the fighting instinct. thus the vitalized teacher by knowing how to make substitutions wins for society a valiant champion. if we multiply this example, we shall readily see how such a teacher-politician deserves the distinction of being termed a practical idealist. questions and exercises . distinguish the following terms: demagogue; politician; statesman; and practical idealist. . subject to what limitations should a successful teacher be a politician? . enumerate the qualities of a successful politician that teachers should possess. . how does the author define education? criticize this definition. . what resemblances has the process of education to the evolution of machinery? to the evolution of biological species? . describe methods by which the tactful teacher may secure helpful substitutions in the child's life. . in what respects does society resemble a vitalized school? . illustrate how teachers may utilize for the education of the child seemingly harmful instincts. chapter vi sublime chaos =acquisitiveness.=--in fancy, at least, we may attain a position over and far above the city of london and from this vantage-place, with the aid of strong glasses, watch a panorama that is both entrancing and bewildering. the scene bewilders not alone by its scope, but still more by its complexity. the scene is a shifting one, too, never the same in two successive minutes. here is trafalgar square, with its noble monument and the guardian lions, reminding us of nelson in what is accounted one of the most heroic naval engagements recorded in history. as we look, we reconstitute the scene, far away, in which he was conspicuous, and reread in our books his stirring appeal to his men. thence we glance up regent street and see it thronged with equipages that betoken wealth and luxury. richly dressed people in great numbers are moving to and fro and giving color to the picture. a shabby garb cannot be made to fit into this picture. when it appears, there is discord in the general harmony. all this motion must have motives behind it somewhere; but we can only conjecture the motives. we have only surface indications to guide us in our quest for these. but we are reasonably certain that these people are animated by the instinct of acquisition. they seem to want to get things, and so come where things are to be had. =desires for things intangible.=--there are miles of vehicles of many kinds wending their tortuous, sinuous ways in and out along streets that radiate hither and thither. they stay their progress for a moment and people emerge at robinson's, at selfridge's, at liberty's. each of these is the mecca of a thousand desires, and faces beam with pleasure when they reappear. some desire has evidently been gratified. others alight at the national gallery and enter its doors. when they come forth it is obvious that something happened to them inside that building. the lines of care on their faces are not so evident, and their step is more elastic and buoyant. their desires did not have tangible things as their objectives as in the case of the people who entered the shops for merchandise, but their faces shine with a new light and, therefore, their quest must have been successful. as we look, we realize that desires for intangible things may be as acute as for tangible ones, and that the gratification of these desires produces equal satisfaction. =westminster abbey.=--not far away other throngs are invading westminster abbey. in those historic and hallowed precincts they are communing with the past, the present, and the future. all about them is the sacred dust of those who once wrought effectively in affairs of state and in the realm of letters. history and literature have their shrine there, and these people are worshipers at that shrine. all about them are reminders of the past, while the worshipers before the cross direct their thoughts to the future. earth and heaven both send forth an invitation for supreme interest in their thoughts and feelings. history and literature call to them to emulate the achievements whose monuments they see about them, while the cross admonishes them that these achievements are but temporal. here they experience a fulfillment of their desires. their knowledge is broadened, and their faith is lifted up. the past thrills them; the future inspires them; and thus the present is far more worth while. =house of parliament.=--across the way is parliament, and this conjures up a long train of events of vast import. the currents that flow out from this power-house have encircled the globe. here conquests have been planned that electrified nations. here have been generated vast armies and navies as messengers of desire. here have been voted vast treasures in execution of the desires of men for territorial extension and national aggrandizement. these halls have resounded with the eloquence of men who were striving to inoculate other men with the virus of their desires; and the whole world has stood on tiptoe awaiting the issue of this eloquence. momentous scenes have been enacted here, all emanating from the desires of men, and these scenes have touched the lives of untold millions of people. =commerce.=--we see the thames near by, teeming with ships from the uttermost corners of the earth, and we think of commerce. we use the word glibly, but no mind is able to comprehend its full import. we know that these ships ply the seas, bearing food and clothing to the peoples who live far away, but when we attempt to estimate the magnitude of commerce, the mind confesses to itself that the problem is too great. we may multiply the number of ships by their tonnage, but we get, in consequence, an array of figures so great that they cease to have any meaning for the finite mind. the best and most that they can do for us is to make us newly aware that the people who dwell in the jungles of africa, who roam the pampas of south america, who climb the alps, the rockies, the andes, and the himalayas, all have desires that these ships are striving to gratify. =social intercourse.=--going up the river to hampton court we see people out for a holiday. there are house-boats with elaborate and artistic fittings and furnishings, and other craft of every sort that luxury can suggest. one could imagine that none but fairies could stage such a scene. the blending of colors, the easy dalliance, the rippling laughter, the graceful feasting, and the eddying wavelets all conspire to produce a scene that serves to emphasize the beauty of the shores. underneath this enchanting scene of variegated beauty we discover the fundamental fact that man is a gregarious animal, that he not only craves association with his kind but that playing with them brings him into more harmonious communion with them. in their play they meet upon the plane of a common purpose and are thus unified in spirit. hence, all this beauty and gayety is serving a beneficent purpose in the way of gratifying the inherent desire of mankind for social intercourse. =the travel instinct.=--at charing cross the commerce drama is reënacted, only here with trains instead of boats, and, mainly, people instead of merchandise. here we see hurry and bustle, and hear the shriek of the engine and the warning blast of the guard. trains are going out, trains are coming in. when the people step out upon the platforms, they seem to know exactly whither they are bound. there are porters all about to help them achieve their desires, and cabs stand ready at the curb to do their bidding. here is human commerce, and the trains are the answer to the call of the human family to see their own and other lands. these trains are swifter and more agreeable for nomads than the camel of the desert or the conestoga wagon of the prairie. the nomadic instinct pulls and pushes people away from their own door-yards; hence railways, trains, engines, air brakes, telegraph lines, wireless apparatuses, and all the many other devices that the mind of man has designed at the behest of this desire to roam about. =monuments.=--further down the thames we see greenwich, which regulates the clocks for the whole world, and furnishes the sea captain the talisman by which he may know where he is. over against st. paul's is the bank of england, which for long years ruled the finances of the world. yonder is the museum, the conservator of the ages. there is the rosetta stone, which is the gateway of history; there the elgin marbles, which proclaim the glory of the greece that was; there the palimpsests which recall an age when men had time to think; and there the books of all time by means of which we can rethink the big thoughts of men long since gone from sight. there are things that men now call curiosities that mark the course of minds in their struggles toward the light; and there are the sentiments of lofty souls that will live in the hearts of men long after these giant stones have crumbled. =desire for pastoral beauty.=--beyond the city, in the alluring country places, we see a landscape that delights the senses, ornate with hedges, flowers, vine-clad cottages, highways of surpassing smoothness, fertile fields, and thrifty flocks and herds. there are carts and wagons on the roads bearing the products of field and garden to the marts of trade. men, women, and children zealously ply the hoe, the plow, or the shovel, abetting nature in her efforts to feed the hungry. in this pastoral scene there is dignity, serenity, and latent power. its beauty answers back to the æsthetic nature of mankind, and nothing that is artificial can ever supplant it in the way of gratifying man's desire for the beautiful. =economic articulation.=--through all the diversified phases of this panorama there runs a fundamental principle of unity. there are no collisions. in the economy of civilization the farmer is coördinate with the artist, the artisan, and the tradesman. but, if all men were farmers, the economic balance would be disturbed. the railroad engineer is major because he is indispensable. so, also, is the farmer, the legislator, the artist, and the student. there is a degree of interdependence that makes for economic harmony. the articulation of all the parts gives us an economic whole. =aspirations.=--this panorama is a picture of life; and the school is life. hence the panorama and the school are identical; only the school is larger than the panorama, even though the picture is reduced in size to fit the frame of the school. the pupils in the school have dreams and aspirations that reach far beyond the limits of the picture of our fancy. and all these aspirations are a part of life and so are indigenous in the vitalized school. and woe betide the teacher who would abridge or repress these dreams and aspirations. they are the very warp and woof of life, and the teacher who would eliminate them would suppress life itself. that teacher is in sorry business who would fit her pupils out with mental or spiritual strait-jackets, or mold them to some conventional pattern, even though it be her own. these pupils are the prototypes of the people in our panorama, and are, therefore, animated by like inclinations and desires. =desire is fundamental.=--here is a boy who is hungry; he desires food. but so does the man who is passing along the street. the man is focusing all his mental powers upon the problem of how he shall procure food. the man's problem is the boy's problem and each has a right to a solution of his problem. the school's business is to help the boy solve his problem and not to try to quench his desire for food or try to persuade him that no such desire exists. this desire is one of the native dispositions to which the work of the school is to attach itself. desires are fundamental in the scheme of education, the very tentacles that will lay hold upon the school activities and render them effective. the teacher's large task is to strengthen and nourish incipient desires and to cause the pupil to hunger and thirst after the means of gratifying them. =innate tendencies.=--each pupil has a right to his inherent individuality. the school should not only begin where the boy is, but should begin its work upon what he is. only so can it direct him toward what he ought to be. if the boy would alight at the national gallery in order to regale himself with the masterpieces of art, why, pray, should the teacher try to curtail this desire and force him into westminster abbey? if she will accompany him into the gallery and prove herself his friend and guide among the treasures of art, she will, doubtless, experience the joy of hearing him ask her to be his companion through the abbey later on. the abbey is quite right in its way and the boy must visit it soon or late, but to this particular boy the gallery comes first and he should be led to the abbey by way of the gallery. in school work the parties are all personally conducted, but the rule is that a party is composed of but one person. =illustration.=--the girl is not to be condemned because she desires to visit the selfridge shop rather than the museum. the teacher may rhapsodize upon the museum to the limit of her strength, but the girl is thinking of the beautiful fabrics to be seen at the shop, and, especially, of the delicious american ice cream that can be had nowhere else in london. it is rather a poor teacher who cannot lead the girl to the british museum by way of selfridge's. if the teacher finds the task difficult, she would do well to traverse the route a few times in advance. the ice cream will help rather than hinder when they stand, at length, before the rosetta stone or read the original letter to mrs. bixby. the store and the museum are both in the picture, and the teacher must determine which should come first in the itinerary of this girl. the native dispositions and desires will point out the way to the teacher. the old-time schoolmaster was fond of setting as a copy in the old-fashioned copy book "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy"; but, later, when he caught jack playing he gave him a flogging, thus proving himself both inconsistent and deficient in a knowledge of psychology and fair play. if we are going to greenwich we shall save time by taking the longer journey by way of hampton court. as we disport ourselves amid the beauties and gayeties of the court we can prolong our pleasures by anticipating greenwich, and so make our play the anteroom of our work. =variety in excellence.=--in the vitalized school we shall find each pupil eager in his quest of food for the hunger he feels, and the teacher rejoicing in the development of his individuality. she would not have all her pupils attain the same level even of excellence. they are different, and she would have them so. nor would she have her school exemplify the kind of order that is to be found in a gallery of statues. her school is a place of life, eager, yearning, pulsating life, and not a place of dead and deadening silence. her pupils have diversified tastes and desires and, in consequence, diversified activities, but work is the golden cord that binds them in a healthy and healthful unity. this is sublime chaos, a busy, happy throng, all working at full strength at tasks that are worth while, and all animated by hopes and aspirations that reach out to the very limits of space. questions and exercises . what may the school do to give helpful direction and needed modifications to the instinct of acquisition? . the ultimate ends of education are more efficient production and more intelligent consumption. how and by what means may the school bring about a more intelligent choice of tangible and intangible things? . what hint may the teacher of geography receive from the brief description of london's points of interest? . compare a vitalized school with the panorama of london. . to what extent must individual differences be recognized by the teacher in the recitation? in discipline? . suggest means whereby pupils may be induced to spend their evenings with dickens, eliot, macaulay, or irving in preference to the "movies." chapter vii democracy =a conflict.=--there was a fight on a railway train--a terrific fight. the conductor and two other americans were battling against ten or more foreigners. these foreigners had come aboard the train at a mining town en route to the city for a holiday. the train had hardly got under way, after the stop, when the fight was on. the battle raged back and forth from one car to the other across the platform amid the shouts and cursing of men and the screams of women. bloody faces attested the intensity of the conflict. one foreigner was knocked from the train, but no account was taken of him. the train sped on and the fight continued. nor did its violence abate until the train reached the next station, where the conductor summoned reënforcements and invoked the majesty of the law in the form of an officer. the affray, from first to last, was most depressing and gave to the unwilling witness a feeling that civilization is something of a misnomer and that men are inherently ferocious. =misconceptions.=--more mature reflection, however, served to modify this judgment, and the application of some philosophy resolved the distressing combat into a relatively simple proposition. the conductor and his assistants were fighting for their conception of order, and their opponents were fighting for their conception of manhood. reduced to its primal elements, the fight was the result of a dual misconception. the conductor was battling to vindicate his conception of order; the foreigners were battling to vindicate their conception of the rights of men in a democracy. neither party to the contest understood the other, and each one felt himself to be on the defensive. neither one would have confessed himself the aggressor, and yet each one was invading the supposed rights of the other. judicial consideration could readily have averted the whole distressing affair. =foreign concept of democracy.=--the foreigners had come to our country with roseate dreams of democracy. to their conception, this is the land where every man is the equal of every other man; where equal rights and privileges are vouchsafed to all men without regard to nationality, position, or possessions; where there is no faintest hint of the caste system; and where there are no possible lines of demarcation. their disillusionment on that train was swift and severe, and the observer could not but wonder what was their conception of a democracy as they walked about the streets of the city or gave attention to their bruised faces. their dreams of freedom and equal rights must have seemed a mockery. they must have felt that they had been lured into a trap by some agency of cruelty and injustice. after such an experience they must have been unspeakably homesick for their native land. ="melting pot."=--their primary trouble arose from the fact that they had not yet achieved democracy, but had only a hazy theoretical conception of its true meaning. nor did the conductor give them any assistance. on the contrary he pushed them farther away into the realm of theory, and rendered them less susceptible to the influence of the feeling for democracy. before these foreigners can become thoroughly assimilated they must know this feeling by experience; and until this experience is theirs they cannot live comfortably or harmoniously in our democracy. to do this effectively is one of the large tasks that confront the american school and society as a whole. if we fail here, the glory of democracy will be dimmed. all americans share equally in the responsibility of this task. the school, of course, must assume its full share of this responsibility if it would fully deserve the name of melting pot. =learning democracy.=--meeting this responsibility worthily is not the simple thing that many seem to conceive it to be. if it were, then any discussion appertaining to the teaching of democracy would be superfluous. this subject of democracy is, in fact, the most difficult subject with which the school has to do, and by far the most important. its supreme importance is due to the fact that all the pupils expect to live in a democracy, and, unless they learn democracy, life cannot attain to its maximum of agreeableness for them nor can they make the largest possible contributions to the well-being of society. it has been said that the seventeenth century saw versailles; the eighteenth century saw the earth; and the nineteenth century saw humanity. then the very pertinent question is asked, "which century will see life?" we who love our country and our form of government fondly hope that we may be the first to see life, and, if this privilege falls to our lot, we must come to see life through the medium of democracy. =the vitalized school a democracy.=--life seems to be an abstract something to many people, but it must become concrete before they can really see it as it is. democracy is a means, therefore, of transforming abstract life into concrete life, and so we are to come into a fuller comprehension of life through the gateway of democracy. the vitalized school is a laboratory of life and, at the same time, it is the most nearly perfect exemplification of democracy. the nearer its approach to perfection in exemplifying the spirit and workings of a democracy, the larger service it renders society. if the outflow from the school into society is a high quality of democracy, the general tone of society will be improved. if society deteriorates, the school may not be wholly at fault, but it evidently is unable to supply to society reënforcement in such quantity and of such quality as will keep the level up to normal. =responsibility of the individual.=--in society each individual raises or lowers the level of democracy according to what he is and does. the idler fails to make any contributions to the well-being of society and thus lowers the average of citizenship. the trifler and dawdler lower the level of democracy by reason of their inefficiency. they may exercise their right to vote but fail to exercise their right to act the part of efficient citizens. if all citizens emulated their example, democracy would become inane and devitalized. tramps, burglars, feeble-minded persons, and inebriates lower the level of democracy because of their failure to render their full measure of service, and because, in varying degrees, they prey upon the resources of society and thus add to its burdens. self-reliance, self-support, self-respect, as well as voting, are among the rights that all able-bodied citizens must exercise before democracy can come into its rightful heritage. =the function of the school.=--all this and much more the schools must teach effectively so that it shall be thoroughly enmeshed in the social consciousness or their output will reveal a lack of those qualities that make for the larger good of democratic society. democracy must be grooved into habits of thought and action or the graduates of the schools will fall short of achieving the highest plane of living in the community. they will not be in harmony with their environment, and friction will ensue, which will reduce, in some degree, the level of democracy. hence, the large task of the school is to inculcate the habit of democracy with all that the term implies. twelve years are none too long for this important work, even under the most favorable conditions and under the direction of the most skillful teaching. indeed, civic economy will be greatly enhanced if, in the twelve years, the schools accomplish this one big purpose. =manifestations of democratic spirit.=--we may not be able to resolve democracy into its constituent elements, but the spirit that is attuned to democracy is keenly alive to its manifestations. the spirit so attuned is quick to detect any slightest discord in the democratic harmony. this is especially true in the school democracy. a discordant note affects the entire situation and militates against effective procedure. in the school democracy we look for a series and system of compromises,--for a yielding of minor matters that major ones may be achieved. we look for concessions that will make for the comfort and progress of the entire body, and we experience disappointment if we fail to discover some pleasure in connection with these concessions. we expect to see good will banishing selfishness and every semblance of monopoly. we expect to find every pupil glad to share the time and strength of the teacher with his fellows even to the point of generosity, and to find joy in so doing. we expect to find each pupil eager to deposit all his attainments and capabilities as assets of the school and to find his chief joy in the success of all that the school represents. =obstacles in the path.=--but it is far easier to depict democracy than to teach it. in fact, the teacher is certain to encounter obstacles, and many of these have their source in american homes. indeed, some of the most fertile sources of discord in the school may be traced to a misconception of democracy on the part of the home. one of these misconceptions is a species of anarchy, which appropriates to itself the gentler name of democracy. but, none the less, it is anarchy. it disdains all law and authority, treads under foot the precepts of the home and the school, flouts the counsels of parents and teachers, and is self-willed, obstinate, and defiant. democracy obeys the law; anarchy scorns it. democracy respects the rights of others, anarchy overrides them. democracy exalts good will; anarchy exalts selfishness. democracy respects the golden rule; anarchy respects nothing, not even itself. =anarchy.=--when this spirit of anarchy gains access to the school, it is not easily eradicated for the reason that the home is loath to recognize it as anarchy, and resents any such implication on the part of the school. the father may be quite unable to exercise any control over the boy, but he is reluctant to admit the fact to the teacher. such a boy is an anarchist and no sophistry can gloss the fact. what he needs is a liberal application of monarchy to fit him for democracy. he should read the old testament as a preparation for an appreciative perusal of the new testament. if the home cannot generate in him due respect for constituted authority, then the school must do so, or he will prove a menace to society and become a destructive rather than a constructive agency. here we have a tense situation. anarchy is running riot in the home; the home is arrayed against the attempts of the school to correct the disorder; and democracy is standing expectant to see what will be done. =snobbery.=--scarcely less inimical to democracy than anarchy is snobbery. the former is violent, while the latter is insidious. both poison the source of the stream of democracy. if the home instills into the minds of children the notion of inherent superiority, they will carry this into the school and it will produce a discord. a farmer and a tenant had sons of the same age. these lads played together, never thinking of superiority or inferiority. now the son of the tenant is president of one of the great universities, and the son of the proprietor is a janitor in one of the buildings of that university. democracy presents to view many anomalies, and the school age is quite too early for anything approaching the caste system or snobbery. the time may come when the rich man's son will consider it an honor to drive the car for his impecunious classmate. =restatement.=--it needs to be repeated, therefore, that democracy is the most difficult subject which the school is called upon to teach, not only because it is difficult in itself, but also because of the attitude of many homes that profess democracy but do not practice it. to the influence of such homes one may trace the exodus of many children from the schools. the parents want things done in their way or not at all, and so withdraw their children to vindicate their own autocracy. they are willing to profit by democracy but are unwilling to help foster its growth. they not only lower the level of democracy but even compel their children to lower it still more. the teacher may yearn for the children and the children for the teacher, but the home is inexorable and sacrifices the children to a misconception of democracy. =coöperation.=--democracy does not mean fellowship, but it does mean coöperation. it means that people in all walks of life are animated by the common purpose to make all their activities contribute to the general good of society. it means that the railroad president may shake hands with the brakeman and talk with him, man to man, encouraging him to aspire to promotion on merit. it means that this brakeman may become president of the road with no scorn for the stages through which he passed in attaining this position. it means that he may understand and sympathize with the men in his employ without fraternizing with them. it means that every boy may aspire to a place higher than his father has attained with no loss of affection for him. it does not mean either sycophancy or truculence, but freedom to every individual to make the most of himself and so help others to make the most of themselves. =the democratic teacher.=--democracy is learned not from books but from the democratic spirit that obtains in the school. if the teacher is surcharged with democracy, her radiating spirit sends out currents into the life of each pupil, and the spirit of democracy thus generated in them fuses them into homogeneity. thus they become democratic by living in the atmosphere of democracy, as the boy grew into the likeness of the great stone face. questions and exercises . how may elementary teachers inculcate the principles of true democracy? . by what means may public schools assist in the transformation of illiterate foreigners into "intelligent american citizens"? . what are some of the weaknesses of democracy which the public school may remedy? the press? public officials? the people? . are such affairs as are described in the beginning of the chapter peculiar to democracies? why or why not? . how may school discipline recognize democratic principles, thereby laying the foundation of respect for law and order by our future citizens? . what qualities of citizens are inconsistent with a high level of democracy? . discuss the extent to which the management of the classroom should be democratic. . how may the monarchical government of a school fit pupils for a democracy? how may it unfit them? . in what ways may the following institutions raise the level of democracy: centralized schools? vocational schools? junior high schools? moonlight schools? evening schools? chapter viii patriotism =patriotism as a working principle.=--the vitalized school generates and fosters patriotism, not merely as a sentiment, but more particularly as a working principle. patriotism has in it a modicum of sentiment, to be sure, as do religion, education, the home, and civilization; but sentiment alone does not constitute real or true patriotism. the man who shouts for the flag but pursues a course of conduct that brings discredit upon the name of his country, belies the sentiment that his shouting would seem to express. the truly patriotic man feels that he owes to his country and his race his whole self,--his mind, his time, and his best efforts,--and the payment of this obligation spells life to him. thus he inevitably interprets patriotism in terms of industry, economy, thrift, and the full conservation of time and energy, that he may render a good account of his stewardship to his country. =spelling as patriotism.=--with this broad conception in mind the teacher elevates patriotism to the rank of a motive and proceeds to organize all the school activities in consonance with this conception. actuated by this high motive the pupils, in time, come to look upon correct spelling not only as a comfort and a convenience, but also as a form of patriotism in that it is an exponent of intelligent observation and as such wins respect and commendation from people at home and people abroad. or, to put the case negatively, if we were all deficient in the matter of spelling, the people of other lands would hold us up to ridicule because of this defect; but if we are expert in the art of spelling, they have greater respect for us and for our schools. hence, such a simple matter as spelling tends to invest the flag of our country with better and fuller significance. thus spelling becomes woven into the life processes, not as a mere task of the school, but as a privilege vouchsafed to every one who yearns to see his country win distinction. =patriotism a determining motive.=--in like manner the teacher runs the entire gamut of school studies and shows how each one may become a manifestation of patriotism. if she has her pupils exchange letters with pupils in the schools of other countries, they see, at once, that their spelling, their writing, and their composition will all be carefully assessed in the formation of an estimate of ourselves and our schools. it is evident, therefore, that the pupils will give forth their best efforts in all these lines that the country they represent may appear to the best advantage. in such an exercise the motive of patriotism will far outweigh in importance the motive of grades. besides, the letters are written to real people about real life, and, hence, life and patriotism become synonymous in their thinking, and all their school work becomes more vital because of their patriotism. =history.=--in the study of history, the pupils readily discover that the men and women who have given distinction to their respective countries have done so, in the main, by reason of their attainments in science, in letters, and in statesmanship. they are led to think of goethals in the field of applied mathematics; of burbank in the realm of botany; of edison in physics; of scott and burns in literature; of max müller in philology; of schliemann in archæology; of washington and lincoln in the realm of statesmanship; and of florence nightingale and clara barton in philanthropy. they discover that france deemed it an honor to have erasmus as her guest so long as he found it agreeable to live in that country, and that many countries vied with one another in claiming homer as their own. phillips brooks was a patriot, not alone because of his profession of love for his country, but because of what he did that added luster to the name of his country. =efficiency.=--the study of physiology and hygiene affords a wide field for the contemplation and practice of patriotic endeavor. the care of the body is a patriotic exercise in that it promotes health and vigor, and these underlie efficiency. anything short of efficiency is unpatriotic because it amounts to a subtraction from the possible best that may be done to advance the interests of society. the shiftless man is not a patriot, nor yet the man who enervates his body by practices that render him less than efficient. the intemperate man may shout lustily at sight of the flag, but his noise only proclaims his lack of real patriotism. an honest day's work would redound far more to the glory of his country than his noisy protestations. seeing that behind every deliberate action there lies a motive, the higher the motive the more noble will be the action. if, then, we can achieve temperance through the motive of patriotism, society will be the beneficiary, not only of temperance itself, but also of many concomitant benefits. =temperance.=--temperance may be induced, of course, through the motives of economy, good health, and the like, but the motive of patriotism includes all these and, therefore, stands at the summit. waste, in whatever form, is evermore unpatriotic. conservation is patriotism, whether of natural resources, human life, human energy, or time. the intemperate man wastes his substance, his energies, his opportunities, his self-respect, and his moral fiber. very often, too, he becomes a charge upon society and abrogates the right of his family to live comfortably and agreeably. hence, he must be accounted unpatriotic. if all men in our country were such as he, our land would be derided by the other nations of the world. he brings his country into disrepute instead of glorifying it because he does less than his full share in contributing to its well-being. he renders himself less than a typical american and brings reproach upon his country instead of honor. =sanitation.=--one of the chief variants of the general subject of physiology and hygiene is sanitation, and this, even yet, affords a field for aggressive and constructive patriotism. grime and crime go hand in hand; but, as a people, we have been somewhat slow in our recognition of this patent truth. patriotism as well as charity should begin at home, and the man who professes a love for his country should make that part of his country which he calls his home so sanitary and so attractive that it will attest the sincerity of his profession. if he loves his country sincerely, he must love his back yard, and what he really loves he will care for. it does him no credit to have the flag floating above a home that proclaims his shiftlessness. his feeling for sanitation, attractiveness, and right conditions as touching his own home surroundings will expand until it includes his neighborhood, his county, his state, and his entire country. =a typical patriot.=--a typical patriot is the busy, intelligent, frugal, cultured housewife whose home is her kingdom and who uses her powers to make that kingdom glorious. she regrets neither the time nor the effort that is required to make her home clean, artistic, and comfortable. she places upon it the stamp of her character, industry, and good taste. she supplies it with things that delight the senses and point the way to culture. to such a home the crude and the bizarre are a profanation. she administers her home as a sacred trust in the interests of her family and never for exhibition purposes. her home is an expression of herself, and her children will carry into life the standards that she inculcates through the agency of the home. life is better for the family and for the community because her home is what it is, and, in consequence, her patriotism is far-reaching in its influence. if all homes were such as this, our country would be exploited as representing the highest plane of civilization the world has yet attained. the vitalized teacher is constantly striving to have this standard of home and home life become the standard of her pupils. =mulberry bend.=--in striking contrast with this home are conditions in mulberry bend, new york, as described by a writer thoroughly conversant with conditions as they were until recently--conditions, however, now much bettered: "these alleys, running from nowhere to nowhere, alongside cellars where the light never enters and where nothing can live but beast-men and beast-women and rats; behind foul rookeries where skulk the murderer and the abandoned tramp; beside hideous plague-spots where the stench is overpowering--bottle alley, where the rag-pickers pile their bags of stinking stuff, and the whyo roost where evil-visaged beings prowl about, hunting for prey; dozens of alleys winding in and out and intersecting, so that the beast may slay his prey, and hide in the jungle, and be safe; these foul alleys--who shall picture them, or explore their depths, or describe their wretchedness and their hideousness?... upon the doorsteps weary mothers are nursing little babies who will never know the meaning of innocent childhood, but will be versed in the immoral lore of the underworld before they learn their alphabet. ragged children covered with filth play about the pushcarts and the horses in the street, while their mothers chatter in greasy doorways, or shout from upper windows into the hordes below, or clatter about creaky floors, preparing the foul mess of tainted edibles which constitutes a meal." with many other phases of this gruesome picture this author deals, and then concludes with the following: "but in the rookeries which, like their inmates, skulk and hide out of sight in the crowded street; in these ramshackle structures which line the back alleys, and there breed their human vermin amid dirt and rags--in these there is no direct sunlight throughout the long year. rookeries close to the front windows, shutting out light and air, and rookeries close to the rear windows, and rookeries close to each side, and never a breath of fresh air to ventilate one of these holes wherein men and women and children wallow in dirt, and live and fight and drink and die, and finally give way to others of their kind." so long as such conditions as these continue in our country, sanitation as a manifestation of patriotism will not have done its perfect work, and the stars and stripes of our flag will lack somewhat of their rightful luster. =patriotism in daily life.=--when the influences of hygiene and of home economics, taught as life processes and not merely as prerequisites for graduation, by teachers who regard them as forms of patriotism,--when these influences have percolated to every nook and cranny of our national life,--to the homes, the streets and alleys, the farms, the shops, the factories, and the mines, such conditions as these will disappear, and we as a nation shall then have a clearer warrant for our profession of patriotic interest in and devotion to the welfare of our country as a whole. but so long as we can look upon insanitary conditions without a shudder; so long as we permit dirt to breed disease and crime; so long as we make our streams the dumping places for débris; so long as we tolerate ugliness where beauty should obtain; and so long as our homes and our farms betray the spirit of shiftlessness,--so long shall we have occasion to blush when we look at our flag and confess our dereliction of our high privilege of patriotism. =the american restaurant.=--perhaps no single detail of the customs that obtain in our country impresses a cultivated foreigner more unfavorably than the régime in our popular restaurants. the noise, the rattle and clatter and bang, the raucous calling of orders, and the hurry and confusion give him the impression that we are content to have feeding places where we might have eating places. he regards all that he sees and hears as being less than proper decorum, less than a high standard of intelligence, less than refined cultivation, and less than agencies that contribute to the graces of life. he marvels that we have not yet attained the conception that partaking of food amounts to a gracious and delightful ceremony rather than a gastronomic orgy. his surprise is not limited to the people who administer these establishments, but extends to the people who patronize them. he marvels that the patrons do not seek out places where there is quiet, and serenity, and pleasing decorum. he returns to his own land wondering if the noisy restaurant is typical of american civilization. he may not know that the study of domestic science in our schools has not had time to attain its full fruition in the way of inculcating a lofty conception of life in the dining room. =thrift as patriotism.=--another important phase of patriotism is thrift; and here, again, we have come short of realizing our possibilities. there are far too many people who have failed to lay in store against times of emergency, far too many who care only for to-day with slight regard for to-morrow. moreover, there are far too many who, despite sound bodies, are dependents, contributing nothing to the resources of society, but constantly preying upon those resources. there are in our country not fewer than one hundred thousand tramps, and by some the number has been estimated at a half-million. if this vast army of dependents could be transferred to the ranks of producers, tilling our fields, harvesting our crops, constructing our highways of travel, redeeming our waste places, and beautifying our streams, life would be far more agreeable both for them and for the rest of our people. they would become self-supporting and so would win self-respect; they would subtract their number from the number of those who live at public expense; and they would make contributions to the general store. they would thus relieve society of the incubus of their dependence, and largely increase the number of our people who are self-supporting. =some contrasts.=--we are making some progress in the line of thrift through our school savings and postal savings, but we have not yet attained to a national conception of thrift as an element of patriotism. this is one of the large yet inspiring privileges of the vitalized school. thrift is so intimately identified with life that they naturally combine in our thinking, and we have only to reach the conception that our mode of life is the measure of our patriotism in order to realize that thrift and patriotism are in large measure identical. the industrious, frugal, thrifty man is patriotic; the unthrifty, lazy, shiftless man is unpatriotic. the one ennobles and honors his country; the other dishonors and degrades his country. =conclusion.=--if the foregoing conclusions are valid, and to every thoughtful person they must seem well-nigh axiomatic, then the school has a wide field of usefulness in the way of inculcating a loftier and broader conception of patriotism. the teacher who worthily fills her place in the vitalized school will give the boys and girls in her care such a conception of patriotism as will give direction, potency, and significance to every school activity and lift these activities out of the realm of drudgery into the realm of privilege. her pupils will be made to feel that what they are doing for themselves, their school, and their homes, they are doing for the honor and glory of their country. questions and exercises . in what ways and to what extent should patriotism affect conduct? . indicate methods in which patriotism may be used as an incentive to excel in the different branches of study. . what branches of study should have for their sole function to stimulate the growth of patriotism? discuss methods and give instances. . distinguish from patriotism each of the following counterfeits: sectionalism; partisanship; nationalism; and jingoism. should teachers try to eradicate or sublimate these sentiments? how? . what should be the attitude of the teacher of history toward commodore decatur's toast: "my country, may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, my country"? . cite recent history to prove that temperance and sanitation are necessary for the realization of national victories and the perpetuation of the common welfare. . is the "golden rule" a vital principle of patriotism? why? . how are culture and refinement related to patriotism? thrift? . make a list of songs, poems, novels, paintings, and orations that are characterized by lofty patriotic sentiments. name some that are usually regarded as patriotic but which are tainted with inferior sentiments. . discuss the adaptability of these to the different periods of youthful development and the methods whereby their appeal may be made most effective. chapter ix work and life =tom sawyer.=--tom sawyer was one of the most effective teachers that has figured in the pages of the books; and yet we still regard mark twain as merely the prince of humorists. he was that, of course, but much more; and some day we shall read his books in quest of pedagogical wisdom and shall not be disappointed. it will be recalled that tom sawyer sat on the top of a barrel and munched apples while his boy companions whitewashed the fence in his stead. tom achieved this triumph because he knew how to emancipate work from the plane of drudgery and exalt it to the plane of a privilege. indeed, it loomed so large as a privilege that the other boys were eager to barter the treasures of their pockets in exchange for this privilege. and never did a fence receive such a whitewashing! there wasn't fence enough and, therefore, the process must needs be repeated again and again. the best part of the entire episode was that everybody was happy, tom included. tom was happy in seeing his plan work, and the other boys were happy because they were doing work that tom had caused them to become eager to do. =work as a privilege.=--to make work seem a privilege is a worthy task for the school to set before itself, and if it but achieves this it will prove itself worth all it costs. at first thought, it seems a stupendous task, and so it is. but tom sawyer accomplished it in an easy, natural way, with no parade or bombast. he had habit and tradition to contend against, just as the school has, but he overbore these obstacles and won the contest. some of those boys, before that morning, may have thought it ignoble to perform menial tasks; but tom soon overcame that feeling and led them to feel that only an artist can whitewash a fence properly. some of them may have been interpreting life as having a good time, but, under the tutorage of tom, they soon came to feel that having a good time means whitewashing a fence. =the persistency of habit.=--in striving to exalt and ennoble work, the school runs counter to habits of thought that have been formed in the home, and these habits prove stubborn. the home has so long imposed work as a task that the school finds it difficult to make it seem a privilege. the father and mother have so often complained of their work, in the presence of their children, that all work comes to assume the aspect of a hardship, if not a penalty. it often happens, too, that the parents encourage their children to think that education affords immunity from work, and the children attend school with that notion firmly implanted in their minds. they seem to think that when they have achieved an education they will receive their reward in the choicest gifts that fortune has to bestow, and that their only responsibility will be to indicate their choices. =misconceptions of work.=--still further, when children enter school imbued with this conception of work, they feel that the work of the school is imposed upon them as a task from which they would fain be free. if their parents had only been as wise as tom sawyer and had set up motives before them in connection with their home activities and thus exalted all their work to the plane of privilege, the work of the school would be greatly simplified. it is no slight task to eradicate this misconception of work, but somehow it must be done before the work of the school can get on. until this is done, the work of the school will be done grudgingly instead of buoyantly, and work that is done under compulsion is never joyous work. nor will work that is done under compulsion ever be done in full measure, as the days of slavery clearly prove. =illustrations.=--life and work are synonymous, and no amount or form of sophistry can abrogate their relation. the man who does not work does not have real life, as the invalid will freely witness. the tramp on the highway manages to exist, but he does not really live, no matter what his philosophy may be. many children interpret life to mean plenty of money and nothing to do, but this conception merely proves that they are children with childish misconceptions. they see the railway magnate riding in his private car and conceive his life to be one of ease and luxury. they do not realize that the private car affords him the opportunity to do more and better work. they see the president of the bank sitting in his private office and imagine that he is idle, not realizing that his mind is busy with problems of great magnitude, problems that would appall his subordinates. they cannot know, as he sits there, that he is projecting his thoughts into far-off lands, and is watching the manifold and complex processions of commerce in their relations to the world of finance. =concrete examples.=--they see the architect in his luxurious apartments, but do not realize that his brain is directing every movement of a thousand men who are causing a colossal building to tower toward the sky. they see a grant sitting beneath a tree in apparent unconcern, but do not know that he is bearing the responsibility of the movements of a vast army. they see the pastor in his study among his books, but do not know the travail of spirit that he experiences in his yearning for his parishioners. they see the farmer sitting at ease in the shade, but do not know that he is visualizing every detail of his farm, the men at their tasks, the flocks and herds, the crops, the streams, the machinery, the fences, and the orchards and vineyards. they see the master of the ship, standing on the bridge clad in his smart uniform, and imagine that he is merely enjoying the sea breezes the same as themselves, not knowing that his thoughts are concentrated upon the safety of his hundreds of passengers and his precious cargo. =the potency of mental work.=--only by experience may children come to know that work may be mental as well as physical, and the school is charged with the responsibility of affording this experience. through experience they will come to know that mind transcends matter, and that in life the body yields obedience to the behests of the mind. they will come to know that mental work is more far-reaching than physical work, in that a single mind plans the work for a thousand hands. they will learn that mental work has redeemed the world from its primitive condition and is making life more agreeable even if more complex. they will come to see the mind busy in its work of tunneling mountains, building canals and railways, navigating oceans, and exploring the sky. they will come to realize that mental work has produced our libraries, designed our machinery, made our homes more comfortable and our fields more fertile. =work a blessing.=--as a knowledge of all these things filters into their minds, their conception of life broadens, and they see more and more clearly that life and work are fundamentally identical. they see that work directs the streams of life and gives to life point, potency, and significance. they soon see that knowledge is power only because it is the agency that generates power, and that knowledge touches life at every point. they will come to realize that work is the one great luxury in life, and that education is designed to increase the capacity for work in order that people may indulge in this luxury more abundantly. the more work one can do, the more life one has; and the better the work one can do, the higher the quality of that life. they learn that the adage "work to live and live to work" is no fiction but a reality. =work and enjoyment.=--the school, therefore, becomes to them a workshop of life, and unless it is that, it is not a worthy school. it is not a something detached from life, but, rather, an integral part of life and therefore a place and an occasion for work. the school is the burning bush of work that is to grow into the tree of life. but life ought to teem with joy in order to be at its best, and never be a drag. work, therefore, being synonymous with life, should be a joyous experience, even though it taxes the powers to the utmost. if the child comes to the work of the school as the galley-slave goes to his task, there is a lack of adjustment and balance somewhere, and a readjustment is necessary. it matters not that a boy spends two hours over a problem in arithmetic if only he enjoys himself during the time. but, if he works two hours merely to get a passing grade or to escape punishment, the time thus spent does not afford him the pleasure that rightfully belongs to him, and some better motive should be supplied. =the teacher's problem.=--the teacher's mission is not to make school work easy, but, rather, to make the hardest work alluring and agreeable. here, again, she may need to take counsel with tom sawyer. whitewashing a fence is quite as hard work as solving a problem in decimals or cube root. much depends upon the mental attitude of the boy, and this in turn depends upon the skill of the teacher and her fertility of mind in supplying motives. whitewashing a fence causes the arms to grow weary and the back to ache, but the boys recked not of that. on the contrary, they clamored for more of the same kind of work. this same spirit characterizes the work of the vitalized school. the pupils live as joyously in the schoolroom as they do outside, and the harder the work the greater their joy. when work is made a privilege by the expert teacher, school procedure becomes well-nigh automatic and there is never any occasion for nagging, hectoring, or badgering. such things are abnormal in life and no less so in the vitalized school. they are a confession on the part of the teacher that she has reached the limit of her resources. she admits that she cannot do what tom sawyer did so well, and so proclaims her inability to articulate life and work effectively. questions and exercises . read that chapter of "tom sawyer" which deals with the whitewashing episode. . what principles of teaching did tom sawyer apply? . discuss, from the pupils' viewpoint, how the study of different subjects may be made a privilege. . in accordance with tom sawyer pedagogy, discuss plans for the formation of the reading habit in pupils. how direct the pupils' choice of reading matter? . how would you demonstrate to pupils that mental work is more exhausting than manual labor? . why is work a blessing? how convince an indolent pupil of this truth? . state the chief problem of the teacher. . show that the pedagogical doctrines of this chapter are not to be classified under the head of "soft pedagogy." chapter x words and their content =initial statement.=--life and words are so closely interwoven that we have only to study words with care in order to achieve an apprehension of life. indeed, education may be defined as the process of enlarging the content of words. no two of us speak the same language even though we use the same words. the schoolboy and the savant speak of education, using the same word, but the boy has only the faintest conception of the meaning of the word as used by the savant. we must know the content of the words that are used before we can understand one another, either in speaking or in writing. for one man, a word is big with meaning; for another, the same word is so small as to be well-nigh meaningless. to the ignorant boor, the word "education" means far less than the three r's, while to the scholar the word includes languages, ancient and modern, mathematics through many volumes, sciences that analyze the dewdrop, determine the weight of the earth and the distances and movements of the planets, history from the rosetta stone to the latest presidential election, and philosophy from plato to the scholar of to-day. =the word "education."=--and yet both these men spell and pronounce the word alike. the ignorant man has only the faintest glimmering of the scholar's meaning of the word when he speaks or writes it. still the word is in common use, and people who use it are wont to think that their conception of its meaning is universal. if the boor could follow the expansion of the word as it is invested with greater and greater content, he would, in time, understand aristotle, shakespeare, gladstone, and max müller. and, understanding these men, he would come to know philosophy, literature, and language, and so would come to appreciate more fully what education really is. in contemplating the expansion of the word, one might easily visualize the ever widening circle produced by throwing a pebble into a pool; but a better conception would be the expansion of a balloon when it is being inflated. this comparison enables one to realize that education enlarges as a sphere rather than as a circle. =the scholar's concept of the sea.=--the six-year-old can give the correct spelling of the word _sea_ as readily as the sage, but the sage has spent a lifetime in putting content into the word. for him, the word epitomizes his life history. through its magic leading he retraces his journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear away two thousand feet of the appalachian mountains and spread the detritus over vast areas, making the great fertile corn and wheat belt of our country. he knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that would encircle the earth nine times, at the equator, and he interprets all this as sea. the word leads him, also, through the mazes and mysteries of meteorology, revealing to him the origin of the rain, the snow, the dew, and the frost, with all the wonders of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. =further illustration.=--he can discern the sea in every blade of grass, in every leaf, and in every flower. in the composition of his own body, he finds that ninety per cent of it is sea. he finds his heart pumping the sea through his veins and arteries as a vital part of the life process; and through the power of capillary attraction, the sea is coursing through every hair of his head. in the food upon his table, the meat, the bread, the milk, the vegetables, and the fruits, he finds the sea. not his poetry, but his science follows the raindrop from the roof to the rivulet, on to the river, then to the ocean, then into vapor and on into rain down into the earth, then up into the tree, out into the orange, until it finally reappears as a drop of juice upon the rosy lip of his little six-year-old. =the child's conception.=--whether the child ever wins the large conception of the sea that her father has depends, in part, upon the father himself, but, in a still larger degree, upon her teacher. if the teacher thinks of the sea merely as a word to be spelled, or defined, or parsed, that she may inscribe marks in a grade book or on report cards, then the child will never know the sea as her father knows it, unless this knowledge comes to her from sources outside the school. instead of becoming a living thing and the source of life, her sea will be a desert without oasis, or grass, or tree, or bird, or bubbling spring to refresh and inspire. it would seem a sad commentary upon our teaching if the child is compelled to gain a right conception of the sea outside the school and in spite of the school, rather than through and by means of the school. =the quest of teacher and child.=--the vitalized teacher knows the sea as the sage knows it, and can infuse her conception into the consciousness of the child. she feels it to be her high privilege to lead the child on in quest of the sea and to find, in this quest, pulsating life. in this alluring quest, she is putting content into the word, and thus discovering, by experience, what life is. this is education. this is the inviting vista that stretches out before the eyes of the child under the spell and leadership of such a teacher. in their quest for the meaning of the sea, these companions, the child and the teacher, will come upon the fields of grain, the orchards, the flocks and herds, the ships, the trains, and the whole intricate world of commerce. they will find commerce to be a manifestation of the sea and moreover a big factor in life. it will mean far more than mere cars to be counted or cargoes to be estimated in the form of problems for the class in arithmetic. the cargoes of grain that they see leaving the port mean food for the hungry in other lands, and the joy and vigor that only food can give. =the sea as life.=--at every turn of their ramified journey, these learners find life and, best of all, are having a rich experience in life, throughout the journey. they are immersed in life and so are absorbing life all the while. wider and wider becomes their conception of life as exemplified by the sea, and their capacity for life is ever increasing. day by day they ascend to higher levels and find their horizon receding farther and farther. for them, life enlarges until it embraces all lands, the arts, the sciences, the languages, and all history. whether they pursue the sea into the mountains; to the steppes, plateaus, or pampas; to the palace or the hovel; to the tropics or the poles,--they find it evermore representing life. =the word "automobile."=--it would seem to be quite possible to construct a twelve-year course of study based upon this sort of study of words and their content with special emphasis upon the content. since life is conterminous with the content of the words that constitute one's vocabulary, it is evident that the content of words becomes of major importance in the scheme of education. to be able to spell the word "automobile" will not carry a young man very far in his efforts to qualify as a chauffeur, important though the spelling may be. as a mere beginning, the spelling is essential, but it is not enough. still the child thinks that his education, so far as this word is concerned, is complete when he can spell it correctly, and carry home a perfect grade. no one will employ the young man as a driver until he has put content into the word, and this requires time and hard work. he must know the mechanism of the machine, in every detail, and the articulation of all its parts. he must be able to locate trouble on the instant and be able to apply the remedy. he must be sensitive to every slightest sound that indicates imperfect functioning. this, of course, carries far beyond the mere spelling of the word, but all this is essential to the safety of his passengers. =etymology.=--etymology has its place, of course, in the study of words, but it stops short of the goal. it may be well to take the watch apart in order to make an examination of its parts, but until it is reconstituted and set going, it is useless as a watch. so with a word. we may give its etymology and rhapsodize over its parts, but thus analyzed it is an inert thing and really inane so far as real service is concerned. if word study does not carry beyond the mere analysis, it is futile as a real educative process. to be really effective, the word must be instinct with life and busy in the affairs of life, and not a mere specimen in a museum. too often our work in etymology seems to be considered an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. =the word in use.=--arlo bates says that the word "highly" in the gettysburg speech is the most ornate word in the language in the setting that lincoln gave it. the merest tyro can give its etymology, but only when it was set to work by a master did it gain potency and distinction. the etymology of the word "fidelity" is reasonably easy, but this analysis is powerless to cause the child to thrill at the story of casabianca, or of ruth and naomi, or of esther, or antigone, or cordelia, or nathan hale, or the little japanese girl who deliberately bit through her tongue that she might not utter a syllable that would jeopardize the interests or safety of her father. the word analyzed is a dead thing; the word in use is a living thing. the word merely analyzed is apt to be ephemeral; the word in use is abiding and increasingly significant. as the child puts more and more content into the word, he, himself, expands at the same rate in the scope and power of his thinking. words are the materials out of which he weaves the fabric of life, and the pattern depends upon the content of his words. =illustrations from art.=--the child can spell the word "art" and can repeat the words of the book by way of a memorized definition, but he cannot define the word with even a fair degree of intelligence. he cannot know the meaning of the word until its significance becomes objectified in his life processes. this requires time, and thought, and experiences with books, with people, and with galleries. in short, he must live art before he can define the word; and his living art invests the word with content. the word will grow just as he grows in his conception of art. at first, he may denominate as art the simple little daubs of pictures that he makes with the teacher's hand guiding his brush. but, later on, as he gains a larger conception, these things will appear puerile if not silly. the time may come when he can read the thoughts of the masters as expressed in their masterpieces. then, and only then, will he be able to define the word. =michael angelo.=--at the age of fifteen, michael angelo wrought the mask of the satyr, which would not be considered a work of art if that were the only product of his chisel. what he did later was the fulfillment of the prophecy embodied in the mask. at the age of eighty, he produced the descent from the cross, which glorifies the duomo in florence. in between these productions, we find his david, his moses, the sistine ceiling, with many others scarcely less notable. he rose to a higher and higher conception of art as he lived art more and more fully, and his execution kept pace with the expansion of his conception. he gave content to the word both for himself and for the world until now we associate, in our thinking, art with his name. he himself is now, in large measure, our definition of art--and that because he lived art. =the child's conception of truth.=--in his restricted conception, the boy conceives truth to be the mere absence of peccadillos. he thinks that his denial of the charge that he was impolite to his sister, or that he went on a foraging expedition to the pantry, is the whole truth and, indeed, all there is to truth. it requires a whole lifetime to realize the full magnitude of his misconception. in the vitalized school, he finds himself busy all day long trying to find answer to the question: what is truth? in the alps, there is a place called echo glen where a thousand rocks, cliffs, and crags send back to the speaker the words he utters. so, when this boy asks what is truth? a thousand voices in the school and outside the school repeat the question to him: what is truth? abraham lincoln tried to find the answer as he figured on the bit of board with a piece of charcoal by the firelight. later on, he wrote the emancipation proclamation, and in both exercises he was seeking for the meaning of truth. =the work of the school.=--christopher columbus was doing the same thing in his quest, and thought no hardship too great if he could only come upon the answer. galileo, huxley, newton, tyndall, humboldt, darwin, edison, and burbank are only the schoolboys grown large in their search for the meaning of truth. they have enlarged the content of the word for us all, and by following their lead we may attain to their answers. every school study gives forth a partial answer, and the sum of all these answers constitutes the answer which the boy is seeking. mathematics tells part of the story, but not all of it; science tells another part, but not all of it; history tells still another part, but not all of it. hence, it may be reiterated that one of the prime functions of the vitalized school is to invest words with the largest possible content. questions and exercises . to what extent is education the process of enlarging the content of words? . as a concrete illustration of the differences in the content of words, compare various definitions of education. choose typical definitions of education to reflect the ideas of different educational periods. . suggest other methods than the use of the dictionary for the enlargement of the pupil's content of words. . how may words be vitalized in composition? . should the chief aim of language work in the grades be force, accuracy, or elegance in the use of language? . add to the author's list of words, other words the content of which may be expanded by education. . how may the vitalized teacher encourage in pupils the formation of habits of careful diction? . how remove unnatural stilted words and expressions from the oral and written expressions of pupils? chapter xi complete living =the question raised.=--that education is a preparation for complete living has been quoted by every teacher who lays any sort of claim to the standard definitions. indeed, so often and so glibly has the quotation been made that it is well-nigh axiomatic and altogether trite. but we still await any clear explanation of what is meant by complete living. on this point we are still groping, with no prophetic voice to tell us the way. by implication we have had hints, and much has been said on the negative side, but the positive side still lies fallow. when asked for an explanation, those who give the quotation resort to circumlocution and, at length, give another definition of education, apparently conscious of the mathematical dictum that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. so we continue to travel in a circle, with but feeble attempts to deviate from the course. =the vitalized school an exemplification.=--nor will this chapter attempt to resolve the difficult situation in which we are placed. it is not easy to define living, much less complete living. all that is hoped for here is to bring the matter to the attention of all teachers and to cause them to realize that the quest for a definition of complete living will be for them and for their pupils an exhilarating experience. the vitalized school will belie its name if it does not strive toward a solution of the difficulty, and any school that approximates a satisfactory definition will be proclaimed a public benefactor. in fact, the school cannot lay claim to the distinction of being vitalized if it fails to exemplify complete living, in some appreciable degree, and if it fails to groove this sort of living into a habit that will persist throughout the years. this is the big task that the school must essay if it would emancipate itself from the trammels of tradition and become a leader in the larger, better way. complete living must become the ideal of the school if it would realize the conception of education of which it is a professed exponent. =incomplete living.=--the man who walks with a crutch; the man who is afflicted with a felon; the man who lacks a hand or even a finger,--cannot experience complete living. through the power of adaptation the man with a crutch may compass more difficult situations than the man with sound legs will attempt, but he cannot realize all the possibilities of life that a sound body would vouchsafe to him. the man without hands may learn to write with his toes, but he is not employed as a teacher of penmanship. his life is a restricted one and, therefore, less than complete. we marvel at the exhibitions of skill displayed by the maimed, but we feel no envy. we may not be able to duplicate their achievements, but we feel that we have ample compensation in the normal use of our members. we know instinctively that, in the solitude of their meditations, they must experience poignant regrets that they are not as other people, and that they must pass through life under a handicap. =the sound body.=--it is evident, therefore, that soundness of body is a condition precedent to complete living. the body is the organism by means of which the mind and the spirit function in terms of life; and, if this organism is imperfect, the functioning will prove less than complete. hence, it is the province of the school to so organize all its activities that the physical powers of the pupils shall be fully conserved. the president of a large university says that during his incumbency of seventeen years they have found only one young woman of physical perfection and not a single young man, although the tests have been applied to thousands. college students, it will be readily conceded, are a selected group; and yet even in such a group not a physically perfect young man was found in tests extending over seventeen years. if a like condition should be discovered in the scoring of live stock at our fairs, there would ensue a careful investigation of causes in the hope of finding a remedy. =personal efficiency.=--we shall not achieve national efficiency until every citizen has achieved personal efficiency, and physical fitness is one of the fundamental conditions precedent to personal efficiency. here we have the blue print for the guidance of society and the school. if we are ever to achieve national efficiency, we must see to it that every man and woman, every boy and girl, has a strong, healthy body that is fully able to execute the behests of mind and spirit. this may require a stricter censorship of marriage licenses, including physical examinations; it may require more stringent laws on our statute books; it may require radical changes in our methods of physical training; and it may require the state to assume some of the functions of the home when the home reveals its inability or unwillingness to cope with the situation. heroic treatment may be necessary; but until we as a people have the courage to apply the remedies that the diagnosis shows to be necessary, we shall look in vain for improvement. =physical training.=--seeing that it is so difficult to find a man or a woman among our people who has attained physical perfection, it behooves society and the schools to take a critical inventory of their methods of physical training and their meager accomplishments as a preliminary survey looking to a change in our procedure. we seem to have delegated scientific physical training to athletics and pugilism, with but scant concern for our people as a whole. if pink-tea calisthenics as practiced mildly in our schools has failed to produce robust bodies, then it is incumbent upon us to adopt a régime of beefsteak. what the traditional school has failed to do the vitalized school must attempt to do or suffer the humiliation of striking its colors. there is no middle course; it must either win a victory or admit defeat in common with the traditional school. the standard is high, of course, but every standard of the vitalized school is and ought to be high. =cigarettes.=--if the use of cigarettes is devitalizing our boys, and this can be determined, then the manufacture and sale must be prohibited unless our legislative bodies would plead guilty to the charge of impotence. but we are told that public sentiment conditions the enactment of laws. if such be the case, then the school and its auxiliaries should feel it a duty to generate public sentiment. if cigarettes are harmful, then they should be banished, and the task is not an impossible one by any means. as to the injurious effects of cigarettes, as distinguished an authority as thomas a. edison says the following: "the injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. the substance thereby formed is called 'acrolein.' it has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. i employ no person who smokes cigarettes." we have eliminated dangerous explosives from our fourth of july celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other dangerous product. just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism, but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of their appetites and passions over the brink of destruction. it is the inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens. if paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental virtue. better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings. =military training.=--we may shrink away from military training in the schools, just as we shrink from the régime of pugilism; but we may profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to develop some method of training that will render our young people physically fit. we need some type of training that will eliminate round and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish circulation, and shallow breathing. the boys and girls need to be, first of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic, buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up. these conditions constitute the foundation for the superstructure of education. the placid, anæmic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an approximation to complete living. =examples cited.=--if one will but make a mental appraisement of the first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a few who reveal a lack of physical vigor. they droop and slouch along and seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through space by their bodies. they can neither stand nor walk as a human being ought to stand and walk, and their entire ensemble is altogether unbeautiful. we feel instinctively that, being fashioned in the image of their maker, they have sadly declined from their high estate. their bodily attitude seems a sort of apology for life, and we long to invoke the aid of some teacher of physical training to rescue them from themselves and restore them to their rightful heritage. they are weak, apparently ill-nourished, scrawny, ill-groomed; and we know, without the aid of words, that neither a vigorous mind nor a great spirit would choose that type of body as its habitation. =the body subject to the mind.=--a healthy, vigorous, symmetrical body that performs all its functions like a well-articulated, well-adjusted mechanism is the beginning, but only a beginning. next comes a mind that is so well trained that it knows what orders to give to the body and how to give them. many a strong body enters the door of a saloon because the mind is not sufficiently trained to issue wise orders. the mind was befuddled before the body became so, and the body becomes so only because the mind commands. intoxication, primarily, is a mental apostasy, and the body cannot do otherwise than obey. if the mind were intent upon securing a book at the library, the body would not have seen the door of the saloon, but would have been urgent to reach the library. there is neither fiction nor facetiousness in the adage, "an idle brain is the devil's workshop." on the contrary, the saying is crammed full of psychology for the thoughtful observer. hence, when we are training the mind we are wreaking destruction upon this workshop. =freedom a condition precedent.=--complete living is impossible outside the domain of freedom. the prisons show forth no examples of complete living. but mental thralldom is quite as inimical to complete living as thralldom of the body. the mind must know in order to move among the things of life in freedom. ignorance is slavery. the mind that is unable to read the inscription on a monument stands baffled and helpless, and no form of slavery can be more abject. the man who cannot read the bill of fare of life is in no position to revel in the good things that life offers. the man who cannot read the signboards of life gropes and flounders about in the byways and so misses the charms. if he knows the way, he has freedom; otherwise he is in thralldom. the man who cannot interpret life as it shows itself in hill, in valley, in stream and rock and tree, goes through life with bandaged eyes, and that condition affords no freedom. =street signs.=--a man who had been traveling through europe for several weeks, and had finally reached london, wrote enthusiastically of his pleasure at being able to read the street signs. all summer he had felt restricted and hampered, but when he reached a country where the street signs were intelligible, he gained his freedom. had he been as familiar with italian, german, and french as he is with english, life would have been for him far more nearly complete during that summer and therefore much more agreeable and fertile. there is no more exhilarating experience than to be able to read the street signs along the highway of life, and this ability is one of the great objectives of every vitalized school. =trained minds.=--nature reveals her inmost secrets only to the trained mind. no power can force her, no wealth can bribe her, to disclose these secrets to others. only the mind that is trained can gain admission to her treasure house to revel in its glories. john burroughs lives in a world that the ignorant man cannot know. the trained mind alone has the key that will unlock libraries, art galleries, the treasure houses of science, language, history, and art. the untrained minds must stand outside and win what comfort they can from their wealth, their social status, or whatever else they would fain substitute for the training that would admit them. all these things are parts of life, and those who cannot gain admission to these conservatories of knowledge cannot know life in its completeness. =achievements of trained minds.=--in order to know life in the large, the mind must be able to leap from the multiplication table to the stars; must become intimate with the movements of the tides, the glacier, and the planets; must translate the bubbling fountain and the eruption of vesuvius; must be able to interpret the whisper of the zephyr and the diapason of the forest; must be able to hear music in the chirp of the cricket as well as in the oratorios; must be able to delve into the recesses of the mine and scale the mountain tops; must know the heart throbs of little nell as well as of cicero and demosthenes; must be able to see the processions of history from the cradle of the race to the latest proclamation; and must sit in the councils of the poets, the statesmen, the orators, the artists, the scientists, and the historians of all time. a mind thus trained can enter into the very heart of life and know it by experience. =things of the spirit.=--but education is a spiritual process, as we have been told; and, therefore, education is without value unless it touches the spirit. indeed, it is only by the spirit that we may test the quality of education. it is spirit that sets metes and bounds and points the way to the fine things of life. a man may live in the back alley of life or on the boulevard, according to the dictates of the spirit. if his spirit cannot react to the finer things, his way will lie among the coarse and bizarre. if he cannot appreciate the glory that is revealed upon the mountain, he will gravitate to the lower levels. if his spirit is not attuned to majestic harmonies, he will drift down to association with his own kind. if he cannot thrill with pleasure at the beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the gaudy sunflower. if his spirit cannot rise to the plane of shakespeare and victor hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. the spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coarse and ugly into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the noble, and the good. and so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing their perfect work, he can, at least, look over into the promised land of complete living. =altruism.=--we are commanded to let our light shine, and this command is a noble and an inspiring one. a man who by such training as has been depicted approximates complete living is prepared to let his light shine primarily because he has light, and in the next place because his training has made him generous in spirit and altruistic; and his greatest joy comes from letting his light so shine that others may catch his spirit and move up to higher planes of living. questions and exercises . why is education not satisfactorily defined by saying that it is a preparation for complete living? who first stated this definition? . what is the relation of the school to complete living? . what further training should the school give in better living than to teach the pupils what it is? . give an idea of what is meant by incomplete living so far as the body is concerned. . show that soundness of body is necessary to realize one's best. . what are some reasons for the scarcity of physically perfect men and women? . have we been able to eliminate physical defects and develop physical merits in people to the same extent that we have in domestic animals? . what are some of the things that have been done to improve physical man? which of these have to do primarily with heredity and which with rearing or training? . why is the possession of healthy bodies a matter of national concern? . wherein does physical training seem to have failed to attain its ends? . what are the arguments, from the standpoint of the physically efficient life, for the regulation or prohibition by the government of the sale of injurious products? . what are the benefits of such a type of training as military training? . show how the lack of proper training of the mind may result in a less efficient body. . in our present civilization what conditions may give rise to mental thralldom? upon what is mental freedom conditioned? . how can the trained mind get the most out of life and contribute the most to it? . explain how the spirit is the dominant element in complete living. . why is one who is living the complete life sure to be altruistic? chapter xii the time element =the question stated.=--there are many, doubtless, who will deny, if not actually resent, the statement that some do more real teaching in ten minutes than others do in thirty minutes. but, in spite of denials, the statement can be verified by the testimony of a host of expert observers and supervisors. indeed, stenographic reports have been made of many class exercises by way of testing the truth of this statement, and these reports are a matter of record. assuming the validity of the statement, therefore, it is pertinent to inquire into the causes that underlie the disparity in the teaching ability of the ten-minute teacher and the thirty-minute teacher. the efficiency expert would be quick to seize upon this disparity in the rate of progress as the starting point in his critical examination. in a factory a like disparity would lead to unpleasant consequences. the workman who consumes thirty minutes in accomplishing a piece of work that another does in ten minutes would be admonished to accelerate his progress or else give way to a more efficient man. if we had instruments of sufficient delicacy to test the results of teaching, we should probably discover that the output of the ten-minute teacher is superior in quality to that of the thirty-minute teacher. for we must all have observed in our own experience that the clarity of our thinking depends upon its intensity. =examples.=--a young man who won distinction as a college student had a wide shelf fitted up on one side of his room at which he stood in the preparation of all his lessons. his theory was that the attitude of the body conditions the attitude of the mind. professor james gives assent to this theory and avers that an attitude of mind may be generated by placing the body in such an attitude as would naturally accompany this mental attitude. this theory proclaims that, if the body is slouching, the mind will slouch; but that, if the body is alert, the mind will be equally so. another college student always walked to and fro in his room when preparing his history lesson. a fine old lady, in a work of fiction, explained her mental acumen by the single statement, "i never slouch." every person must have observed many exemplifications of this theory in his own experience even if he has not reduced it to a working formula. =basic considerations.=--any consideration of the time element, in school work, must take into account, therefore, not only the number of minutes involved in a given piece of work, but also the intensity of effort during those minutes. two minds, of equal natural strength, may be fully employed during a given period and yet show a wide difference in the quality and quantity of the results. the one may be busy all the while but slouch through the minutes. the other may be taut and intensive, working at white heat, and the output will be more extensive and of better quality. the mind that ambles through the period shows forth results that are both meager and mediocre; but the mind whose impact is both forceful and incisive produces results that serve to magnify the work of the school. thus we have placed before us two basic considerations, one of which is the time itself, in actual minutes, and the other is the character of the reactions to external stimuli during those minutes. =two teachers compared.=--in order to consider these factors of the teaching process with some degree of definiteness it will be well to have the ten-minute teacher and the thirty-minute teacher placed in juxtaposition in our thinking. we shall thus be able to compare and contrast and so arrive at some clear judgments that may be used as a basis for generalizations. we may assume, for convenience and for concreteness, that the lesson is division of fractions. there will be substantial agreement that the principle involved in this subject can be taught in one recitation period. the reasons for some of the steps in the process may come later, but the child should be able to find his way to the correct answer in a single period. now if one teacher can achieve this result in thirty minutes and the other in ten minutes, there is a disparity in the effectiveness of the work of these teachers which is worthy of serious consideration. the ten-minute teacher proves that the thirty-minute teacher has consumed twenty minutes of somebody's time unnecessarily. if the salary of this thirty-minute teacher should be reduced to one third its present amount, she would inveigh against the reduction. =school and factory compared.=--if she were one of the operators in a factory, she would not escape with the mere penalization of a salary reduction. the owner would argue that he needed some one who could operate the machine up to its full capacity, and that, even if she should work without salary, her presence in the factory would entail a loss in that the output of her machine was so meager. if one operator can produce a shoe in ten minutes and the other requires thirty minutes for the same work, the money that is invested in the one machine pays dividends, while the other machine imposes a continuous tax upon the owner. this, of course, will be recognized as the line of argument of the efficiency expert, but it certainly is not out of place to call attention to the matter in connection with school work. the subject of efficiency is quite within the province of the school, and it would seem to be wholly within reason for the school to exemplify its own teachings. =appraisal of teaching expertness.=--the teacher who requires thirty minutes for division of fractions which the other teacher compasses in ten minutes consumes twenty minutes unnecessarily in each recitation period, or two hundred minutes in the course of the day. the efficiency expert would ask her to account for these two hundred minutes. in order to account for them satisfactorily she would be compelled to take an inventory of her acquired habits, her predilections, her attitude toward her pupils and her subjects, and any shortcomings she may have in regard to methods of teaching. she would, at first, resent the implication that the other teacher's method of teaching division of fractions is better than her own and would cite the many years during which her method has been used. when all else fails, tradition always proves a convenient refuge. we can always prove to-day by yesterday; only, by so doing, we deny the possibility of progress. =the potency of right methods.=--a teacher of latin once used twenty minutes in a violent attempt to explain the difference between the gerund construction and the gerundive construction. at the end of the time she had the pupils so completely muddled that, for months, the appearance of either of these constructions threw them into a condition of panic. to another class, later, this teacher explained these constructions clearly and convincingly in three minutes. in the meantime she had studied methods in connection with subject matter. another teacher resigned her position and explained her action by confessing that she had become so accustomed to the traditional methods of teaching a certain phase of arithmetic that it was impossible for her to learn the newer one. such a teacher must be given credit for honesty even while she illustrates tragedy. =the waste of time.=--in explaining the loss of two hundred minutes a day the teacher will inevitably come upon the subject of methods of teaching, and she may be put to it to justify her method in view of its results. the more diligently she tries to justify her method, the more certainly she proclaims her responsibility for a wrong use of the method. those twenty minutes point at her the accusing finger, and she can neither blink nor escape the facts. the other teacher led her pupils into a knowledge of the subject in ten minutes, and this one may neither abrogate nor amend the record. as an operative in the factory she holds in her hand one shoe as the result of her thirty minutes while the other holds three. conceding that results in the school are not so tangible as the results in the factory, still we have developed methods of estimating results in the school that have convincing weight with the efficiency expert. we can estimate results in school work with sufficient accuracy to enable us to assess teaching values with a goodly degree of discrimination. =possibilities.=--it would be a comparatively simple matter to compute in days and weeks the time lost during the year by the thirty-minute teacher, and then estimate the many things that the pupils could accomplish in that time. if the thirty-minute teacher could be transformed into a ten-minute teacher, the children could have three more hours each day for play, and that would be far better for them than the ordeal of sitting there in the class, the unwilling witnesses, or victims, of the time-wasting process. or they might read a book in the two hundred minutes and that would be more enjoyable, and the number of books thus read in the course of a year would aggregate quite a library. or, again, they might take some additional studies and so make great gains in mental achievements in their twelve years of school life. or they might learn to work with their hands and so achieve self-reliance, self-support, and self-respect. =conservation.=--in a word, there is no higher type of conservation than the conservation of childhood, in terms of time and interest. the two hundred minutes a day are a vital factor in the life of the child and must be regarded as highly valuable. the teacher, therefore, who subtracts this time from the child's life is assuming a responsibility not to be lightly esteemed. she takes from him his most valuable possession and one which she can never return, try as she may. worst of all, she purloins this element of time clandestinely, albeit seductively, in the guise of friendship. the child does not know that he is the victim of unfair treatment until it is too late to set up any defense. he is made to think that that is the natural and, therefore, only way of school, and that he must take things as they come if he is to prove himself a good soldier. so he musters what heroism he can and tries to smile while the teacher despoils him of the minutes he might better be employing in play, in reading, or in work. =the teacher's complacency.=--this would seem a severe indictment if it were incapable of proof, but having been proved by incontrovertible evidence its severity cannot be mitigated. we can only grieve that the facts are as they are and ardently hope for a speedy change. the chief obstacle in the way of improvement is the complacency of the teacher. habits tend to persist, and if she has contracted the habit of much speaking, she thinks her volubility should be accounted a virtue and wonders that the children do not applaud the bromidic platitudes which have been uttered in the same form and in the same tones a hundred times. she is so intoxicated with her own verbosity that she can neither listen to the sounds of her own voice nor analyze her own utterances. while her neighbor is teaching she is talking, and then with sublime nonchalance she ascribes the retardation of her pupils to their own dullness and never, in any least degree, to her own unprofitable use of their time. =the voluble teacher.=--and while she rambles on in her aimless talking the children are bored, inexpressibly bored. it is axiomatic that the learning process does not flourish in a state of boredom. under the ordeal of verbal inundation the children wriggle and squirm about in their seats and this affords her a new point of attack. she calls them ill-bred and unmannerly and wonders at the homes that can produce such children. she does not realize that if these children were grown-ups they would leave the room regardless of consequences. when they yawn, she reminds them of the utter futility of casting pearls before swine. all the while the twenty minutes are going and the pupils have not yet learned how to divide fractions. over in the next room the pupils know full well how to divide fractions and the teacher is rewarding their diligence with a cookie in the form of a story, while they wait for the bell to ring. out of the room of the thirty-minute teacher come the children glowering and resentful; out of the other room the children come buoyant and happy. =the test of teaching.=--not alone did the former teacher use the time of her pupils for her own ends, but, even more, she dulled their interest, and the damage thus inflicted cannot be estimated. many a child has deserted the school because the teacher made school life disagreeable. she was the wet blanket upon his enthusiasm and chilled him to the marrow when he failed to go forward upon her traditional track. the teacher who can generate in the minds of her pupils a spiritual ignition by her every movement and word will not be humiliated by desertions. indeed, the test of the teacher is the mental attitude of her pupils. the child who drags and drawls through the lesson convicts the teacher of a want of expertness. on the other hand, when the pupils are all wide-awake, alert, animated, eager to respond, and dynamic, we know that the teacher has brought this condition to pass and that she is a ten-minute teacher. =meaningless formalities.=--one of the influences that tends to deaden the interest of children is the ponderous formality that sometimes obtains. the teacher solemnly calls the roll, although she can see at a glance that there are no absentees. this is exceedingly irksome to wide-awake boys and girls who are avid for variety. the same monotonous calling of the roll day after day with no semblance of variation induces in them a sort of mental dyspepsia for which they seek an antidote in what the teacher denominates disorder. this so-called disorder betokens good health on their part and is a revelation of the fact that they have a keen appreciation of the fitness of things. they cannot brook monotony and it irks them to dawdle about in the anteroom of action. they are eager to do their work if only the teacher will get right at it. but they are impatient of meaningless preliminaries. they see no sense in calling the roll when everybody is present and discredit the teacher who persists in the practice. =repeating answers.=--still another characteristic of the thirty-minute teacher is her habit of repeating the answers that pupils give, with the addition of some inane comment. whether this repeating of answers is merely a bad habit or an effort on the part of the teacher to appropriate to herself the credit that should otherwise accrue to the pupils, it is not easy to say. certain it is that school inspectors inveigh against the practice mightily as militating against the effectiveness of the teaching. teachers who have been challenged on this point make a weak confession that they repeat the answers unconsciously. they thus make the fatal admission that for a part of the time of the class exercise they do not know what they are doing, and admitting so much we can readily classify them as belonging among the thirty-minute teachers. =meanderings.=--another characteristic is her tendency to wander away from the direct line and ramble about among irrelevant and inconsequential trifles. sometimes these rambles are altogether entertaining and enable her pupils to pass the time pleasantly, but they lack "terminal facilities." they lead from nowhere to nowhere in the most fascinating and fruitless meanderings. such expeditions bring back no emoluments. they leave a pleasant taste in the mouth but afford no nourishment. they use the time but exact no dividends. like sheet lightning they are beautiful but never strike anything. they are soothing sedatives that never impel to action. they lull to repose but never vitalize. =the ten-minute teacher.=--it is evident, therefore, that only the ten-minute teacher is worthy of a place in the vitalized school. she alone is able and willing to conserve, with religious zeal, the time and interest of the pupils. to her their time and interest are sacred and she deems it a sacrilege to trifle with them. she knows the market value of her own time but does not know the value of the time of the possible edison who sits in her class. she gives to every child the benefit of the doubt and respects both herself and her pupils too much to take chances by pitting herself against them and using their time for her own purposes. moreover, she never permits their interest to flag, but knows how to keep their minds tense. their reactions are never less than incisive, and, therefore, the truths of the lesson groove themselves deep in their consciousness. questions and exercises . what is meant by the time element in teaching? . how is an operation in a factory timed? for what purpose? what are some of the results that have accrued from the timing of work by efficiency experts? . how can teaching be timed approximately? is it probable that more of this will be done in the future by supervisors and investigators? would you resent the timing of your work? would you appreciate it? why? . what may be done, in the matter of bodily positions, to improve mental time-reactions of the student? of the teacher? . the literature of a typewriter manufacturer carries the precept "sit erect." what are the reasons? . what two factors must be considered in estimating mental work with a view to time considerations? . if the attainment of school results by the teacher were treated as the attainment of factory results by the operator, what would happen if a large per cent of the time spent on a process were unnecessary? . apply the factory manager's argument in detail to the teacher's efficiency. if you can, show wherein it fails to apply. . what result besides waste of time may come of a cumbersome method of teaching? . how can one acquire a clear-cut method? . a professor of physics was asked by a former student who was beginning to teach for suggestions on the teaching of physics. his only reply was "know your subject thoroughly." was this a satisfactory response? give reasons for your opinion. . if the teacher can have lessons finished with greater rapidity, what can be done with the time thus remaining? . show that the teacher must attend to the conservation of time in order to protect the child. . in what way besides the direct waste of the minutes is the expenditure of undue time unfortunate? . in what particular way do many teachers lose much of the recitation-lesson or study-lesson period? . what are the results of an undue expenditure of time in this way? . what is the relation between the waste of time in school and the exodus of children from the upper grades? . what do you think of a teacher who persists in "meaningless formalities"? . how does the repeating of answers by the teacher affect the pupils? . a teacher says she repeats answers often because pupils speak low and indistinctly. what are the proper remedies for this? . what should be the teacher's rule in regard to digressions? . why should every teacher strive to be a "ten-minute" teacher, and why should every supervisor strive to recommend no others? . what corollary can be drawn on the advisability of the employment of no teachers except those recommended by competent supervisors? chapter xiii the artist teacher =teaching as a fine art.=--teaching is an art. this fact has universal recognition. but it may be made a fine art, a fact that is not so generally recognized. the difference between the traditional school and the vitalized school lies in the fact, to a large degree, that, in the former, teaching is regarded merely as an art, while in the latter it becomes a fine art. in the former, the teacher is an artisan; in the latter the teacher is an artist. the difference is broadly significant. the artisan, in his work, follows directions, plans, specifications, and blue-prints that have been devised and designed by others; the artist imbues his work with imagination. the artisan works by the day--so much money for so many hours' work with pay day as his large objective; the artist does not disdain pay day, but he has an objective beyond this and has other sources of pleasure besides the pay envelope. the artisan thinks and talks of pay day; the artist thinks and talks of his work. the artisan drops his work when the bell rings; the artist is so engrossed in his work that he does not hear the bell. the artisan plods at his task with a grudging mien; the artist works in a fine frenzy. =characteristic qualities.=--it is not easy to find the exact words by which to differentiate the traditional teacher from the artist teacher. there is an elusive quality in the artist teacher which is not easily reduced to or described by formal words. we know that the one is an artist teacher and that the other is not. the formal examination may not be able to discover the artist teacher, but there is a sort of knowledge that transcends the findings of an examination, that makes her identity known. she is a real flesh and blood person and yet she has a distinctive quality that cannot be mistaken even though it eludes description. she exhales a certain exquisiteness that reveals itself in the delicacy and daintiness of her contact with people and the objective world. her impact upon the consciousness is no more violent than the fragrance of the rose, but, all at once, she is there and there to stay, modest, serene, and masterful. she is as gentle as the dawn but as staunch as the oak. she has knowledge and wisdom, and, better still, she has understanding; she needs no diagram. her gaze penetrates the very heart of a situation but is never less than kindly, and her eyes are never shifty. her aplomb, her pose, and her poise belong to her quite as evidently as her hands. she is genuine and altogether free from affectation. her presence stimulates without intoxicating, and she accepts the respect of people with the same naturalness and grace as would accompany her acceptance of a glass of water. both the giver and the recipient of this respect are ennobled by the giving. indeed she would far rather have the respect of people, her pupils included, than mere admiration, for she knows full well that respect is far more deeply rooted in the spirit and bears fruit that is more worth while. her nature knows not inertia, but it abounds in enterprise, endeavor, and courage that are born of a high purpose. =joy in her work.=--her teaching and her life do not occupy separate compartments but are identical in time and space; only her teaching is but one phase or manifestation of her life. she fitly exemplifies the statement that "art is the expression of man's joy in his work." she has great joy in her work and, therefore, it is done as any other artist does his work. she enjoys all life, including her work. indeed, she has contracted the habit of happiness and is so engrossed in the big elemental things of life that she can laugh at the incidental pin-pricks that others call troubles. she differentiates major from minor and never permits a minor to usurp the throne. being an integral part of her life, her work takes on all the hues of her life. for her, culture is not something added; rather it is a something that permeates her whole nature and her whole life. she does not read poetry and other forms of literature, study the great masterpieces of music and art, and seek communion with the great, either in person or through their works--she does not do these things that she may acquire culture, but does them because she has culture. =dynamic qualities.=--her character is the sum of all her habits of thinking, feeling, and action and, therefore, is herself. since she is an artist, her habits are all pitched in a high key and she is culture personified. her immaculateness of body and spirit is not a superficial acquisition but a fundamental expression of her real self. just as the electric bulb diffuses light, so she diffuses an atmosphere of culture. she gives the artistic touch to every detail of her work because she is an artist, a genuine, sincere artist in all that makes up life. she has the heart of an artist, the eyes of an artist, the touch of an artist. whether these qualities are inherent or acquired is beside the point, at present, but it may be remarked, in passing, that unless they were capable of cultivation, the world would be at a standstill. there is no place in her exuberant vitality for a jaundiced view, and hence her world does not become "stale, flat, and unprofitable." =aspiration and worship.=--every sincere, noble aspiration is a prayer; hence, she prays without ceasing in obedience to the admonition of the apostle. and, let it be said in reverence, she helps to answer her own prayers. her spirit yearns out toward higher and wider attainments every hour of the day, not morbidly but exultantly. and while she aspires she worships. the starry sky holds her in rapt attention and admiration, and the modest flower does no less. she is thankful for the rain, and revels in the beauty and abundance of the snow. the heat may enervate, but she is grateful, none the less, because of its beneficent influence upon the farmer's work. like food and sleep, her attitude of worship conserves her powers and preserves her balance. when physical weariness comes, she sends her spirit out to the star, or the sea, or the mountain, and so forgets her burden in the contemplation of majesty and beauty. in short, her spirit is attuned to all beauty and sublimity and truth, and so she is inherently an artist. =professor phelps quoted.=--in his very delightful book, "teaching in school and college," the author, professor william lyon phelps, says: "i do not know that i could make entirely clear to an outsider the pleasure i have in teaching. i had rather earn my living by teaching than in any other way. in my mind, teaching is not merely a life work, a profession, an occupation, a struggle; it is a passion. i love to teach. i love to teach as a painter loves to paint, as a musician loves to play, as a singer loves to sing, as a strong man rejoices to run a race. teaching is an art--an art so great and so difficult to master that a man or a woman can spend a long life at it, without realizing much more than his limitations and mistakes, and his distance from the ideal. but the main aim of my happy days has been to become a good teacher, just as every architect wishes to be a good architect, and every professional poet strives toward perfection. for the chief difference between the ambition of the artist and the ambition of a money-maker--both natural and honorable ambitions--is that the money-maker is after the practical reward of his toil, while the artist wants the inner satisfaction that accompanies mastery." =attitude toward work.=--to these sentiments the artist teacher subscribes whole-heartedly, if not in words, certainly by her attitude and practices. she regards her work not as a task but as a privilege, and thinking it a privilege she appreciates it as she would any other privilege. she would esteem it a privilege to attend a concert by high-class artists, or to visit an art gallery, or to witness a presentation of a great drama, or to see the jungfrau; and she feels the same exaltation as she anticipates her work as a teacher. she sings on her way to school because of the privileges that await her. she experiences a fine flow of sentiment without becoming sentimental. teaching, to her, is a serious business, but not, in the least, somber. painting is a serious business, but the artist's zeal and joy in his work give wings to the hours. laying the atlantic cable was a serious business, but the vision of success was both inspiring and inspiriting, and temporary mishaps only served to stimulate to greater effort. =the element of enthusiasm.=--to this teacher, each class exercise is an enterprise that is big with possibilities; and, in preparation for the event, she feels something of the thrill that must have animated columbus as he faced the sea. she estimates results more by the faces of her pupils than by the marks in a grade book, for the field of her endeavors is the spirit of the child, and the face of the child telegraphs to her the awakening of the spirit. like the sculptor, she is striving to bring the angel of her dream into the face of the child; and when this hope is realized, the privilege of being a teacher seems the very acme of human aspirations. the animated face and the flashing eye betoken the sort of life that her teaching aims to stimulate; and when she sees these unmistakable manifestations, she knows that her big enterprise is a success and rejoices accordingly. if, for any reason, her enthusiasm is running low, she takes herself in hand and soon generates the enthusiasm that she knows is indispensable to the success of her enterprise. =redemption of common from commonplace.=--she has the supreme gift of being able to redeem the common from the plane of the commonplace. indeed, she never permits any fact of the books to become commonplace to her pupils. they all know that columbus discovered america in , but when the recitation touches this fact she invests it with life and meaning and so makes it glow as a factor in the class exercise. the humdrum traditional teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, "columbus discovered america in ," she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, "very good." what a farce! what a travesty upon the work of the teacher! instead of being very good, it is bad, yea, inexpressibly bad. the artist teacher does it far better. by the magic of her touch she causes the imagination of her pupils to be fired and their interest to thrill with the mighty significance of the great event. they feel, vicariously, the poverty of columbus in his appeals for aid and wish they might have been there to assist. they find themselves standing beside the intrepid mariner, watching the angry waves striving to beat him back. they watch him peering into space, day after day, and feel a thousand pities for him in his suspense. and when he steps out upon the new land, they want to shout out their salvos and proclaim him a victor. =the voyage of columbus.=--they have yearned, and striven, and prayed with columbus, and so have lived all the events of his great achievements. hence, it can never be commonplace in their thinking. the teacher lifted it far away from that plane and made it loom high and large in their consciousness. a dramatic critic avers that the action of the play occurs, not upon the stage, but in the imagination of the auditors; that the players merely cause the imagination to produce the action; and that if nothing were occurring in the imagination of the people in the seats beyond what is occurring on the stage, the audience would leave the theater by way of protest. the artist teacher acts upon this very principle in every class exercise. neither the teacher nor the book can possibly depict even a moiety of all that she hopes to produce in the imagination of the pupils. she is ever striving to find the one word or sentence that will evoke a whole train of events in their minds. just here is where her superb art is shown. a whole volume could not portray all that the imagination of the pupils saw in connection with the voyage of columbus, and yet the teacher caused all these things to happen by the use of comparatively few words. this is high art; this proclaims the artist teacher. =resourcefulness.=--in her work there is a fineness and a delicacy of touch that baffles a satisfactory analysis. she has the power to call forth columbus from the past to reënact his great discovery in the imagination of her pupils--all without noise, or bombast, or gesticulation. she does what she does because she is what she is; and she needs neither copyright nor patent for protection. her work is suffused with a rare sort of enthusiasm that carries conviction by reason of its genuineness. this enthusiasm gives to her work a tone and a flavor that can neither be disguised nor counterfeited. her work is distinctive, but not sensational or pyrotechnic. least of all is it ever hackneyed. so resourceful is she in devising new plans and new ways of saying and doing things that her pupils are always animated by a wholesome expectancy. she is the dynamo, but the light and heat that she generates manifest themselves in the minds of her pupils, while she remains serene and quiet. =the thirteen colonies.=--with the poet keats she can sing: beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. animated by this sentiment, she disdains no form of truth, whether large or small, for in every form of truth she finds beauty; and her spirit reacts to it on the instant, and joy is the resultant. this is the basis for her superb enthusiasm in every detail of her work as well as the source of her joyous living. her pupils may name the thirteen original colonies without a slip, but that is not enough for her. the establishing of these colonies formed a mighty epoch in history, and she must dwell upon the events until they throb through the life currents of her pupils. names in books must mean people with all their hopes, their aspirations, their trials and hardships, their sorrows and their joys. the conditions of life, the food, the clothing, the houses, the modes of travel, and the dangers must all come into the mental picture. hence it is that she prepares for the lesson on the colonies as she would make ready for a trip with the pupils around the world, and the mere giving of names is negligible in her inspiring enterprise. =every subject invested with life.=--she finds in the circulation of the blood a subject of great import and makes ready for the lesson with enthusiastic anticipation. her step is elastic as she takes her way to school on this particular day, and her face is beaming, for to-day comes to the children this stupendous revelation. she feels as did the college professor when he was just ready to begin an experiment in his laboratory and said to his students, "gentlemen, please remove your hats; i am about to ask god a question." she approaches every truth reverently, albeit joyously, for she feels that she is the leader of the children over into the promised land. in the book already quoted, professor phelps says, "i read in a german play that the mathematician is like a man who lives in a glass room at the top of a mountain covered with eternal snow--he sees eternity and infinity all about him, but not much humanity." not so in her teaching of mathematics; for every subject and every problem transports her to the isle of patmos, and the hour is crowded with revelations. =human interest.=--and wherever she is, there is humanity. there are no dry bones in her work, for she invests every subject with human interest and causes it to pulsate in the consciousness of her pupils. if there are dry bones when she arrives, she has but to touch them with the magic of her humanity, and they become things of life. whether long division or calculus, it is to her a part of the living, palpitating truth of the world, and she causes it to live before the minds of the pupils. the so-called dead languages spring to life in her presence, and, like aaron's rod, blossom and bring forth at her touch. wherever she walks there are resurrections because life begets life. no science, no mathematics, no history, no language, can be dull or dry when touched by her art, but all become vital because she is vital. by the subtle alchemy of her artistic teaching all the subjects of her school are transmuted into the pure gold of truth and beauty. questions and exercises . what kinds of arts are there other than the fine arts? . how do the motives of the artisan differ from those of the artist? . what are some of the characteristics that gain one the distinction of being an "artist" teacher? . show that to enjoy respect is more worth while than to attract admiration. . under what conditions can one have joy in his work? can one do his best without it? . what is the result on one's work of brooding over troubles? . henry ford employs trained sociologists who see that the home relations of his employees are satisfactory. why? . is one who reads good literature to acquire culture as yet an "artist" teacher? . what constitutes character? . what is the inference concerning one's culture if his clothes and body are not clean? if his property at the school is not in order? . how can one add to his culture? is what one knows or what one does the more important part of it? has a high degree of culture been attained by a person who must ever be on his guard? . is feeling an important element of culture? illustrate. . what is the teacher's chief reward? . can a teacher lead pupils to regard work as a privilege rather than as a task, unless she has that attitude herself? . in what respects do you regard teaching as a privilege? in what respects is it drudgery to you? . can enthusiasm result if there is a lack of joy in one's work? if there is a deficiency of physical strength? if there is a poor knowledge of the subject? . what causes historical facts to seem commonplace? . what elements should be emphasized in history to make it seem alive with meaning? . what principle of the drama comes into play in teaching, when a teacher desires to invest the subject with life? . what advantages are there in having variety in one's plans? . why should one avoid the sensational in school work? what are the characteristics of sensationalism? is the fact that a class is unusually aroused a reason for decrying a method as sensational? . with what spirit should a teacher prepare to teach about the thirteen colonies? . why should a teacher have great joy in the teaching of science? . is interest in a subject as an abstract science likely to be an adequate interest? if so, is it the best sort of interest? why? . from what should interest start, and in what should it function? . summarize the ways in which the artist teacher will show herself the artist. chapter xiv the teacher as an ideal =responsibility of the exemplar.=--if the teacher could be convinced that each of her pupils is to become a replica of herself, she would more fully appreciate the responsibilities of her position. at first flush, she might feel flattered; but when she came into a full realization of the magnitude of the responsibility, she would probably seek release. if she could know that each pupil is striving to copy her in every detail of her life, her habits of speech, her bodily movements, her tone of voice, her dress, her walk, and even her manner of thinking, this knowledge would appall her, and she would shrink from the responsibility of becoming the exemplar of the child. she cannot know, however, to what extent and in what respects the pupils imitate her. nor, perhaps, could they themselves give definite information on these points, if they were put to the test. children imitate their elders both consciously and unconsciously; so, whether the teacher wills it so or not, she must assume the functions of an exemplar as well as a teacher. =absorbing standards.=--if we give full credence to tennyson's statement, "i am a part of all that i have met," then it follows that we have become what we are, in some appreciable measure, through the process of absorption. in other words, we are a composite of all our ideals. the vase of flowers, daintily arranged, on the breakfast table becomes the standard of good taste thenceforth, and all through life a vase of flowers arranged less than artistically gives one a sensation of discomfort. a traveler relates that in a hotel in brussels he saw window curtains of a delicate pattern; and, since that time, he has sought in many cities for curtains that will fill the measure of the ideal he absorbed in that hotel. beauty is not in the thing itself, but in the eye of the beholder, and the eye is but the interpreter of the ideal. one person rhapsodizes over a picture that another turns away from, because the latter has absorbed an ideal that is unknown to the former. =education by absorption.=--this subject of absorption has not received the careful attention that its importance warrants. in the social consciousness education has been so long associated with books, and formal processes, that we find it difficult to conceive of education outside of or beyond books. if, as we so confidently assert, education is a spiritual process, then whatever stimulates the spirit must be education, whether a landscape, a flower, a picture, or a person. the traveler who sits enrapt before the jungfrau for an hour or a day is becoming more highly educated, even in the absence of books and formalities. the beauty of the mountain touches his spirit, and there is a consequent reaction that fulfills all the claims of the educational processes. in short, he is lifted to a higher plane of appreciation, and that is what the books and the schools are striving to achieve. =the principle illustrated.=--in the presence of this mountain the tourist gains an ideal of grandeur which becomes his standard of estimating scenery throughout life. a boy once heard "the dead march" played by an artist, and when he was grown to manhood that was still his ideal of majestic music. a traveler asserts that no man can stand for an hour on the summit of mt. rigi and not become a better and a stronger man for the experience. a writer on art says that it is worth a trip across the ocean to see the painting of the bull by paul potter; but that, of course, depends upon the ideals of the beholder. all these illustrations conform to and are in harmony with the psychological dictum that in the educational process the spirit reacts to its environment. =the teacher as environment.=--but the environment may include people as well as inanimate objects, mountains, rivers, flowers, and pictures. and, as a part of the child's environment, the teacher takes her place in the process of education by absorption. a city superintendent avers that there is one teacher in his corps who would be worth more to his school than the salary she receives even if she did no teaching. this means that her presence in the school is a wholesome influence, and that she is the sort of environment to which the pupils react to their own advantage. it might not be a simple thing to convince some taxpayers of the truth of the superintendent's statement, but this fact only proves that they have not yet come into a realization of the fact that there can be education by absorption. =the great stone face.=--the people of florence maintain that they need not travel abroad to see the world, for the reason that the world comes to them. it is true that many thousands visit that city annually to win a definition of art. there they absorb their ideals of art and thus attain abiding standards. in like manner the child may sojourn in the school to gain an ideal of grace of manner and personal charm as exemplified by the teacher, and no one will have the temerity to assert that this phase of the child's education is less important than those that are acquired through the formal processes. the boy in the story grew into the likeness of the "great stone face" because that had become his ideal, and not because he had had formal instruction in the subject of stone faces, or had taken measurements of or computed the dimensions of the one stone face. he grew into its likeness because he thought of it, dreamed of it, absorbed it, and was absorbed by it, and reacted to it whenever it came into view. =pedagogy in literature.=--hawthorne, in this story, must have been trying to teach the lesson of unconscious education or education by absorption, but his readers have not all been quick to catch his meaning. teachers often take great unction in the reflection that they afford to the child his only means of education, and that but for them the child would never become educated at all. we are slow to admit that there are many sources of education besides the school, and that formal instruction is not the only road to the acquisition of knowledge. tennyson knew and expressed this conception in the quotation already given, but we have not acquired the habit of consulting the poets and novelists for our pedagogy. when we learn to consult these, we shall find them expressing many tenets of pedagogy that are basic. =the testimony of experience.=--but we need not go beyond our own experiences to realize that much of our education has been unconsciously gained, that we have absorbed much of it, and, possibly, what we now regard as the most vital part of it. we have but to explore our own experiences to discover some person whose standards have been effective in luring us out of ourselves and causing us to yearn toward higher levels; who has been the beacon light toward which our feet have been stumbling; who has been the pattern by which we have sought to shape our lives; and for whom we feel a sense of gratitude that cannot be quenched. the influence of that person has been a liberal education in the vital things that the books do not teach, and we shudder to think what we might have been had that influence not come into our lives. this ideal is not some mythical, far-away person, but a real man or woman who has challenged our admiration by looks, by conduct, by position, and by general bearing in society. =the one teacher.=--this preliminary part of the subject has been dwelt upon thus at length in an effort to win assent to the general proposition that unconscious education is not only possible, but an actuality. this assent being once given, the mind feels out at once for applications of the principle and, inevitably, brings the parent and the teacher into the field of view. but the parent is too near to us in time, in space, and in relation to afford the illustration that we seek, and we pass on to the teacher. in the experience of each one of us there stands out at least one teacher as clear in definition as a cameo. this teacher may not have been the most scholarly, or the most successful in popular esteem, or even the most handsome, but she had some quality that differentiates her in our thinking from all others. others may seem but a sort of blur in our memory, but not so this one. she alone is distinct, distinctive, and regnant. =her supremacy.=--the vicissitudes of life have not availed to dethrone her, nor have the losses, perplexities, and sorrows of life caused the light of her influence to grow dim. she is still an abiding presence with us, nor can we conceive of any influence that could possibly obliterate her. she may have been idealized by degrees, but when she came fully into our lives she came to stay. she came not as a transient guest, but as a lifelong friend and comrade. she crept into our lives as gently as the dawn comes over the hills, and since her arrival there has been no sunset. nor was there ever by pupil or teacher any profession or protestation, but we simply accepted each other with a frankness that would have been weakened by words. =the rôle of ideal.=--but the rôle of ideal is not an easy one. it is a comparatively simple matter to give instruction in geography, arithmetic, and history, but to know one's self to be the ideal of a child, or to conceive of the possibility of such a situation and relation, is sufficient to render the teacher deeply thoughtful. once it is borne in upon her that the child will grow into her likeness, she cannot dismiss the matter from her thinking as she can the lesson in grammar. the child may be unconscious of the matter, but the teacher is acutely conscious. when she stands before her class she sees the child growing into her image, and this reflection gives cause and occasion for a careful and critical introspection. she feels constrained to take an inventory of herself to determine whether she can stand a test that is so searching and so far-reaching. =the teacher's other self.=--as she stands thus in contemplation she sees the child grown to maturity with all her own predilections--physical, mental, spiritual--woven into the pattern of its life. in this child grown up she sees her other self and can thus estimate the qualities of body, mind, and spirit that now constitute herself, as they reveal themselves in another. she thus gains the child's point of view and so is able to see herself through the child's eyes. when she is reading a book, she is aware that the child is looking over her shoulder to note the quality of literature that engages her interest. when she is making a purchase at the shop, she finds the child standing at her elbow and duplicating her order. when she is buying a picture, she is careful to see to it that there are two copies, knowing that a second copy must be provided for the child. when she is arranging her personal adornment, she is conscious of the child peeping through the door and absorbing her with languishing eyes. =the status irrevocable.=--wherever she goes or whatever she does, she knows that the child is walking in her footsteps and reënacting her conduct. her status is irrevocably fixed in the life of the child, nor can any philosophy or sophistry absolve her from the situation. she cannot abdicate her place in favor of another, nor can she win immunity from responsibility. she is the child's ideal for weal or woe, nor can men or angels change this big fact. through all the hours of the day she hears the child saying, "whither thou goest i will go," and there is no escape. =the child's viewpoint.=--this is no flight of fancy. rather it is a reality in countless schoolrooms of the land if only the teachers were alive to the fact. but we have been so busy measuring, estimating, scoring, and surveying the child for our purposes that we have given but scant consideration to the child's point of view as regards the teacher. we have not been quick to note the significant fact that the child is estimating, measuring, scoring, and surveying the teacher for purposes of its own and in the strictest obedience to the laws of its nature. =the child's need of ideals.=--every child needs and has a right to ideals, and finds the teacher convenient both in space and in the nature of her work to act in this capacity. because of the character of her work and her peculiar relation to the child, the teacher assumes a place of leadership, and the child naturally appropriates her as the lodestar for which his nature is seeking. and so, whether the teacher leads into the morass or into the jungle, the child will follow; but if she elects to take her way up to the heights, there will be the child as faithful as her shadow. if the teacher plucks flowers by the way, then, in time, gathering flowers will become habitual to the child, nor will there be any need to admonish the child to gather flowers. the teacher plucks flowers, and that becomes the child's command. education by absorption needs neither admonition nor homilies. =the ideal a perpetual influence.=--and all this is life--actual life, fundamental life, and inevitable life. moreover, the inevitableness of this phase of life serves to accentuate its importance. the idealized teacher gives to the child his ideals of conduct, literature, art, music, home, school, and service. take this teacher out of his life and these ideals vanish. better by far eliminate the formal instruction, important as that may be made to be, than to rob the child of his ideals. they are the influences that are ever active even when formal instruction is quiescent. they are potent throughout the day and throughout the year. they induce reactions and motor activities that groove into habits, and they are the external stimuli to which the spirit responds. =the teacher's attitude.=--the vitalized school takes full cognizance of this phase and means of education and gives large scope and freedom for its exercise and development. the teacher is more concerned with who and what her pupils are to be twenty years hence than she is in getting them promoted to the next grade. she knows full well that vision clarifies sight, and she is eager to enlarge their vision in order to make their sight more keen and clear. she, therefore, adopts as her own standards of life and conduct what she wishes for her pupils when they have come to maturity. she may not proclaim herself an ideal teacher or a model teacher, but she is cognizant of the fact that she is the model and the ideal of one or more pupils in her school and bases her rule of life upon this fact. =prophetic conduct.=--in her dress she decides between ornateness and simplicity as a determining factor in the lives of her pupils both for the present and for the years to come. in this she feels that she is but doing her part in helping to determine the trend and quality of civilization. she is reading such books as she hopes to find in their libraries when they have come to administer homes of their own. she is directing her thinking into such channels as will bear the thoughts of her pupils out into the open sea of bigness and sublimity. knowing that pettiness will be inimical to society in the next generation, she is careful to banish it from her own life. =her rule of life.=--in her thinking she comes into intimate relations with the sea and all its ramified influences upon life. she invites the mountains to take her into their confidence and reveal to her the mysteries of their origin, and their influence upon the winds, the seasons, the products of the earth, and upon life itself. she communes with the great of all times that she may learn of their concepts as to the immensities which the mind can explore, as well as intricate and infinite manifestations of the human soul. she associates with the planets and rides the spaces in their company. she asks the flowers, the sunrise glow of the morning, the hues of the rainbow, and the drop of dew to explain to her what god is, and rejoices in their responses. =her growth.=--and so, through her thinking she grows big--big in her aspirations, big in her sympathies with all nature and mankind, big in her altruism, and big in her conceptions of the universe and all that it embraces. and when people come to know her they almost lose sight of the teacher in their contemplation of the woman. her pupils, by their close contact and communion, became inoculated with the germs of her bigness and so follow the lead of her thinking, her aspirations, her sympathies, and her conceptions of life. thus they grow into her likeness by absorbing her thoughts, her ideals, her standards, in short, herself. =seeing life large.=--the bigness of her spirit and her ability to see and feel life in the large superinduce dignity, poise, and serenity. she never flutters; but, calm and masterful, she moves on her majestic way with regal mien. nor is her teaching less thorough or less effective because she has a vision. on the contrary, she teaches cube root with accuracy and still is able to see and to cause her pupils to see the index finger pointing out and up toward the mathematical infinities. she can give the latitude and longitude of rome, and, while doing so, review the achievements of that historic city. she can explain the action of the geyser and still find time and inclination to take delight in its wonders. she can analyze the flower and still revel in its beauty. she can teach the details of history and find in them the footprints of great historical movements. all these things her pupils sense and so invest her with the attributes of an ideal. questions and exercises . do most teachers realize to what extent they have influence? . is it comfortable to think that one is an example? if not, why not? is it only teachers who need to feel that they are examples? is it fair to demand a higher standard of the teacher and preacher? . give from your own experience instances in which you have absorbed an ideal which has persisted. is there danger of adopting an ideal that, while it is worthy as far as it goes, is merely incidental and not worth while? (such are an accurate memory of unimportant details, certain finesse in manners and speech, punctiliousness in engagements, exhaustiveness in shopping before making purchases, perfection in penmanship and other arts at the expense of speed: suggest others.) . how can the contemplation of a rainbow educate? what education should result from a view of niagara falls? . what qualities would a teacher have to possess that her influence aside from her teaching might be of more value than the teaching itself? . that one may have influence is it enough for one to be good, or is it what one does that counts? suggest lines of action for a teacher that would increase her influence for good. . explain how a fine unconscious influence exerted by a teacher helps to keep pupils in school. . in hawthorne's story of the _great stone face_ what qualities were attained by those whom ernest expected to grow into the likeness? . why did ernest's face come to resemble that of the great stone face? . in what ways is good fiction of value to teachers? . cite something that you have gained from the unconscious influence of another. . what attainments or qualities have you yet to acquire in order to stand out as "distinctive and regnant" to a good many pupils? . a bacteriologist makes a "culture" of a drop of blood, multiplying many times the bacteria in it, to determine whether serious disease germs are prevalent. if the influence of a person could be observed in a large way, would that be conclusive as to the person's character, just as the result of the culture proves the condition of the blood? may there not be an obscure element in the teacher's character that is having a deleterious effect? or is it only the outstanding features of his conduct that affect the pupils? . why is it more important to acquire ideals than to acquire knowledge? . describe the attitude of the teacher toward the pupils in the "vitalized" school. . show how the teacher should have in view the future of the pupils. . is it a compliment to be easily recognized as a teacher? why or why not? . just what is meant by "narrowness" in a teacher? what is meant by "bigness"? what is their effect if the teacher is taken as an ideal? . can one instill high ideals in others without frequently absorbing inspiration himself? what are suitable sources? chapter xv the socialized recitation =the term defined.=--the socialized recitation, as its name implies, is a recitation in which teacher and pupils form themselves into a committee of the whole for the purpose of investigating some phase of a school study. in this committee the line of cleavage between teacher and pupils is obliterated as nearly as possible, the teacher exercising only so much of authority as will preserve the integrity of the group and forestall its disintegration. the teacher thus becomes a coördinate and coöperating member of the group, and her superior knowledge of the subject is held in abeyance to be called into requisition only in an emergency and as a last resort. it will readily be seen, however, that the teacher's knowledge of the subject must be far more comprehensive in such a procedure than in the question-and-answer type of recitation, for the very cogent reason that the discussion is both liable and likely to diverge widely from the limits of the book; and the teacher must be conversant, therefore, with all the auxiliary facts. she must be able to cite authorities in case of need, and make specific data readily accessible to all members of the group. this presupposes wide reading on her part, and a consequent familiarity with all the sources of knowledge that have a bearing upon the subject under consideration. =the pupil-teacher.=--in order to make the coöperative principle of the recitation active in practice a pupil acts as chairman of the meeting, serving in rotation, and gives direction to the discussion. he is clothed with authority, also, to restrict the discussion to time limits that there may be no semblance of monopoly and that the same rights and privileges may be accorded to each member of the class. the chairman, in short, acts both as captain and as umpire, with the teacher in the background as the court of final appeal. knowing the order of rotation, each pupil knows in advance upon what day he is to assume the functions of chairman and makes preparation accordingly, that he may acquit himself with credit in measuring up to the added responsibilities which the position imposes. in taking the chair he does not affect an air of superiority for the reason that he knows the position to have come to him by rotation and that upon his conduct of the duties depend his chances for honor; and acting for his peers he is careful not to do anything that will lead to a forfeiture of their respect and good will. =some advantages.=--it requires far more time to describe these preliminary arrangements than it does to put them into operation. indeed, after the first day, they become well-nigh automatic. because of their adaptableness the pupils look upon the new order as the established order, and, besides, the rotation in the chair affords a pleasing antidote to monotony. each day brings just enough novelty to generate a wholesome degree of anticipation. they are all stimulated by an eagerness to know just what the day will bring forth. the class exercise is relieved of much of the heavy formalism that characterizes the traditional recitation and that is so irksome to children of school age. the socialized recitation is a worthy enterprise that enlists the interest of all members of the group and unifies them upon the plane of a common purpose. in the common quest they become members in a social compact whose object is the investigation of some subject that has been found worthy the attention and thoughtful consideration of scholars and authors. =the gang element.=--the members of the group represent all strata of society, and the group is, in consequence, a working democracy. moving in the same direction under a common impulse and intent upon a laudable enterprise, race and class distinctions are considered negligible, if, indeed, they are not entirely overlooked or forgotten. the group is, in truth, a sublimated gang with the undesirable elements eliminated and the potential qualities of the gang retained. the gang spirit when impelling in right directions and toward worthy ends is to be highly commended. in the gang, each member stimulates and reënforces the other members, and their achievements in combination amply justify their coöperation. the potency of the gang spirit is well exemplified in such enterprises as "tag day" for the benefit of charity, the sale of red cross stamps, and the sale of special editions of papers. people willingly enlist in these enterprises who would not do so but for the element of coöperation. we have come to recognize and write upon the psychology of the gang, and the socialized recitation strives to utilize these psychological principles for the advancement and advantage of the enterprise in hand. =proprietary interest.=--in a coöperative enterprise such as the one under consideration each member of the group feels a sense of responsibility for the success of the enterprise as a whole, and this makes for increased effort. in the traditional recitation the pupil feels responsibility only for that part of the lesson upon which he is called to recite. in his thinking the enterprise belongs to the teacher, and therefore he feels no proprietary interest. if the lesson is a failure, he experiences no special compunction; if a success, he feels no special elation. if the trunk with which he struggles up the stairs is his own, he has the feeling of a victor when he reaches the top; but since it belongs to the teacher, he feels that he has finished a disagreeable task, takes his compensating pittance in the form of a grade, and goes on his complacent way. the boy who digs potatoes from his own garden thinks them larger and smoother than the ones he digs for wages. the latter are potatoes, while the former are his potatoes. proprietary interest sinks its roots deep into the motives that impel to action. =this interest in practice.=--the recitation in question strives to generate a proprietary interest in the enterprise on the part of every member of the class so that each one may have a share in the joy of success. such an interest gives direction and efficacy to the work of the class exercise. given such an interest, the pupil will not sit inert through the period unless stimulated by a question from the teacher, but will ask intelligent and pertinent questions to help the enterprise along. moreover, each pupil, because of his proprietary interest in the enterprise, will feel constrained to bring to class such subsidiary aids as his home affords. his interest causes him to react to clippings, pictures, magazine articles, books, and conversations that have a bearing upon the topic, and these he contributes opportunely in his zeal for the success of the recitation. his pockets become productive of a varied assortment of materials that the tentacles of his interest have seized upon in his preparation for the event, and so all members of the class become beneficiaries of his explorations and discoveries. =the potency of ownership.=--a child is interested in his own things. the little girl fondles her doll in the most tender way, even though it does not measure up to the accepted standards of excellence or elegance. but it is her doll; hence her affection. volumes have been written upon the general subject of interest, and we have been admonished to attach our teaching to the native interests of the child, but the fundamental interest of proprietorship has strangely enough been overlooked. if we want to discover and localize the child's interest, we have but to make an inventory of his possessions. his pony, his dog, or his cart will discover to us one of his interests. again, if we would generate an interest in the child, we have but to make him conscious that he is the owner of the thing for which we hope to awaken his interest. this is fundamental in this type of recitation. the teacher effaces herself as much as possible in order to develop in the pupils a feeling of proprietorship in the exercise in progress, and the pupils are quick to take the advantage thus afforded to make the work their own. =exemplified in society.=--the socialized recitation has its counterpart in many a group in society. in the blacksmith shop, at the grocery, in the barber shop, in the office, at the club, and in the field, we find groups of people in earnest, animated conversation or discussion. they are discussing politics, religion, community affairs, public improvements, tariff, war, fashions, crops, live stock, or machinery. whatever the topic, they pursue the give-and-take policy in their efforts to arrive at the truth. they contest every point and make concessions only when they are confronted by indisputable facts. some feeling, or even acrimony, may be generated in the course of the discussion, but this is always accounted a weakness and a substitute for valid argument. the recitation is rather more decorous than some of these other discussions, but, in principle, they are identical. every one has freedom to express his convictions and to adduce contributory arguments or evidence. there are no restrictions save the implied one of decorum. the utmost courtesy obtains in the recitation, even at the sacrifice of some eagerness. there may be a half-dozen members of the group on their feet and anxious to be heard, but they do not interrupt one another without due apology. =abiding resultants.=--unlike some of their elders, they are ready to acknowledge mistakes and to make concessions. they do not scruple to correct the mistakes of others, knowing that corrections will be gratefully received, but they do not accept mere statements from one another. they must have evidence. they combat statements with evidence from books or other sources that are regarded as authorities. they read extracts, or draw diagrams, or display pictures or specimens in support of their contentions. there is animation, to be sure; and, at times, the flushed face and the flashing eye betoken intense feeling. but the psychologist knows full well that these expressions intensify and make abiding the impressions. both in victory and in defeat the pupil comes to an appreciation of the truth. defeat may humiliate, but he will evermore know the rock on which his craft was wrecked. victory may elate and exalt, but he will not forget the occasion or the facts. the truths of the lesson become enmeshed in his nervous system and throughout life they will be a part of himself. =reflex influence.=--still further, this type of recitation reaches back into the home and begets a wholesome coöperation between the home and the school, and this is a desideratum of no slight import. the events of the day are recounted at the home in the evening, and the contributions of the members of the family are deposited as assets in the recitation the next day. then the family is eager to learn of the reactions of the class to their contributions. such a community of interests cannot be confined to the four walls of a home, but finds its way to other homes and to places of business; the discussions of the class become the property of society, and the influence is most salutary. indirectly, the school is affording the people of the community many profitable topics of conversation, and these readily supplant the futile and less profitable topics. it is easy to measure the intelligence of an individual or of a community by noting the topics of conversation. gossip and small talk do not thrive in a soil that has been thoroughly inoculated with history, art, music, literature, economics, and statecraft. =influence upon pupils.=--from the foregoing it will be seen that this type of recitation represents, not a _modus operandi_, but, rather, a _modus vivendi_, not a way of doing things, merely, but a manner of living. the work of the school is redeemed from the plane of a task and lifted to the plane of a privilege. the pupil's initiative is given full recognition and inspiriting freedom ensues. the teacher is not a taskmaster but a friend in need. pupils and teacher live and work together in an enterprise in which they have common interests. the emoluments attending success are shared equally and there is no place for envy in the distribution of dividends. there is fair dealing in every detail of the work, with no semblance of discrimination. there is a cash basis in every transaction. if a pupil's offerings are rejected, he sees at once that they are inferior to others and becomes a willing shareholder in the ones that are superior to his own. nothing that is spurious or counterfeit can gain currency in the enterprise, because of the critical inspection of the members of the group, all of whom are jealous for the preservation of the integrity of their organization. in this cross section of life we find young people learning, by the laboratory method, the real meaning of reciprocity; we find them winning the viewpoints of others with no abatement or abrogation of their own individuality; we find them able and willing to make concessions for the general good; we find them learning justice and discrimination in their assessment of values; we find them enlarging their horizons by ascending to higher levels of intelligence. this work is as much a part of life for them as their food or their games and they accept it on the same terms. they are becoming upright, intelligent, effective citizens by performing some of the work that engages the time and energies of such citizens. they are learning how to live by the experience of actual living. =part of an actual recitation given.=--some schools have developed this type of recitation to a very complete degree and in a very effective way. in one such school the young woman who teaches the subject of history makes the following report of a part of one of her recitations in this study: the class was called to order by the chairman for the assignment for the next day's lesson, which proceeded as follows: teacher:--to-morrow we shall have for the work of this convention the new constitution as a whole. we are ready for suggestions as to how we had best proceed. earl:--it seems to me that a good way would be to compare it with the articles of confederation. joe:--i don't quite get your idea. do you mean to take them article by article? earl:--yes. (joe and frank begin at the same time. teacher indicates joe by nod.) joe:--but there are so many things in the new that are not in the old. earl:--that is just it. let's make a list of the points in one that do not appear in the other. then by investigation and discussion see if we can tell why. teacher:--frank, you had something to say a moment ago. frank:--not on earl's plan, which i think an excellent one, but i wished to ask the class if they think it important while looking through these two documents to keep in mind the questions: "is this the way things are done to-day?" and "does this apply in our own city?" and "in case the president or congress failed in their duty, what could the people do about it?" ella:--it seems to me that frank's suggestion is a good one for it bears upon what we decided in the beginning, that we must apply the history of the past to see how it affects us to-day. violet:--i should like to know how the people received the work of this convention. you know that it was all so secret no one knew what they were doing behind their closed doors. if the people were like they are to-day there would certainly be some opposition to the new constitution. elsie:--good. mr. chairman, i move that violet report the reception and rejection of the new constitution by the people of the several states as a special topic for to-morrow. robert:--second the motion. chairman:--miss brown, have you any suggestion as to time limit? teacher:--i suggest ten minutes. (chairman puts vote and suggestion is carried.) teacher:--mr. chairman, may we have the secretary read the several points in the assignment? at the chairman's request the secretary reads and the class note as follows: study of the new constitution, emphasizing points of similarity and difference. seek reasons for same. application of constitution to our present-day life. remedy for failures if officers fail to do their duty. special topic ten minutes in length on the reception of the constitution by the people of the different states. teacher:--i think that will be enough--consult the text. in connection with the special topic some valuable material may be found in the civics section in the reference room. the other references on this subject you had given you. mr. chairman, may we have the secretary read the points brought out by yesterday's recitation? questions and exercises . what is meant by the "socialized recitation" as the term is here used? . define separately the word "socialized" as used in this connection. . what are the teacher's functions in such a recitation? . what are the teacher's functions in the traditional recitation? . compare the kinds of knowledge required of a teacher in connection with the two types of recitations. . suggest a method of proceeding in a socialized recitation and show the advantages of the method. . give some of the reasons why the socialized recitation enhances interest. . what is the essence of the "gang spirit"? . compare the character and extent of the individual's responsibility in the two types of recitations. . in what other ways is the socialized recitation likely to produce better reactions? . some one says that the convention style of recitation will not do, because a few do all of the work. from your experience or observation do you find this true? if so, is this condition peculiar to that type of recitation? suggest methods of counteracting this tendency in the socialized class. would these prove effective in a class taught in the ordinary way? . is one likely to overestimate the value of one's possessions, mental or physical? are the pupils (and perhaps the teacher) likely to overestimate what is done in the socialized recitation? what things may offset this tendency? . compare the socialized recitation with a debate. . compare it with an ordinary discussion or argument. . show just why the results of the socialized recitation are likely to be permanent. . how does socialized class work affect the home and society? . though school is a preparation for life, it, at the same time, is life. show that the socialized recitation presupposes this truth. . compare the value of the assignment of a history lesson in the manner described in the notes quoted with the value of an ordinary assignment. . describe at least one other socialized recitation. . compare socialized work as described in scott's social education (c. a. scott, ginn & co., ) with the socialized recitation here described, as to (_a_) aim, (_b_) method, (_c_) results. . "lessons require two kinds of industry, the private individual industry and the social industry or class work." is this true? if so, what sort of recitation-lesson will stimulate each kind? chapter xvi agriculture =agriculture a typical study.=--in the vitalized school the subject of agriculture is typical and may profitably be elaborated somewhat by way of illustrating the relation of a subject to school procedure. from whatever angle we approach the subject of agriculture we find it inextricably connected with human life. this fact alone gives to it the rank of first importance. its present prominence as a school study is conclusive evidence that those who are charged with the responsibility of administering the schools are becoming conscious of the need for vitalizing them. time was when arithmetic was regarded as the most practical subject in the school and, therefore, it was given precedence over all others. history, grammar, and geography were relegated to secondary rank, and agriculture was not even thought of as a school study. but as population increased and the problem of providing food began to loom large in the public consciousness, the subject of agriculture assumed an importance that rendered it worthy a place in the school curriculum. it is a high tribute to the school that whenever any subject takes hold of the public mind the school is thought of at once as the best agency for promulgating that subject. the subjects of temperance and military training aptly illustrate this statement of fact. =its rapid development.=--so soon, therefore, as the subject of agriculture became prominent in the public consciousness there ensued a speedy development of colleges and schools of agriculture for the training of teachers. this movement was prophetic of the plan and purpose to incorporate this study in the school régime. and this prophecy has been fulfilled, for the school now looks upon agriculture as a basic study. true, we are as yet only feeling our way, and that for the very good reason that the magnitude of the subject bewilders us. we have written many textbooks on the subject that were soon supplemented by better ones. the more the subject is studied, the more we appreciate its far-reaching ramifications. we find it attaching itself to many other subjects to which it seemed to have but remote relation in the earlier stages of our study. in brief, we are now on the borderland of a realization of the fact that agriculture is as broad as life and, therefore, must embrace many other studies that have a close relation to life. =relation to geology and other sciences.=--in the beginning, geology and agriculture seemed far apart, but our closer study of agriculture has revealed the fact that they are intimately related. it remained for agriculture to lay the right emphasis upon geology. the study of the composition and nature of the soil carried us at once to a study of its origin and we found ourselves at the very door of geology. when we began to inquire how the soil came to be where it is and what it is, we found ourselves yearning for new and clearer lines of demarcation in science, for we could scarcely distinguish between geology and physiography. we soon traced our alluvial plains back to their upland origin, and then we were compelled to explain their migration. this led us inevitably into the realm of meteorology, for, if we omit meteorology, the chain is broken and we lose our way in our search for the explanation we need. but having availed ourselves of the aid of meteorology, we have a story that is full of marvelous interest--the great story of the evolution of the cornfield. in this story we find many alluring details of evaporation, air movements, precipitation, erosion, and the attraction of gravitation. but in all this we are but lingering in the anteroom of agriculture. =the importance of botany.=--advancing but a single step we find ourselves in the realm of botany, which is a field so vast and so fascinating that men have devoted an entire lifetime to its wonders, and then realized that they had but made a beginning in the way of exploring its possibilities. in our own time mr. burbank has made his name known throughout the world by his work in one phase of this subject, and a score of other burbanks might be working with equal success in other branches of the subject and still not trench upon one another's domain. venturesome, indeed, would be the prophet who would attempt to predict the developments in the field of botany in the next century in the way of providing food, shelter, and clothing for the race. the possibilities stagger the imagination and the prophet stands bewildered as he faces this ever-widening field. but botany, vast as it is seen to be, is only one of the branching sciences connected with agriculture. =physics and chemistry.=--another advance brings us into the wide and fertile field of physics and chemistry, for in these subjects we find the means of interpreting much in agriculture that without their aid would elude our grasp. we have only to resolve a grain of corn into its component elements to realize the potency and scope of chemistry. then if we inquire into the sources of these elements as they have come from the soil to form this grain of corn, the indispensability of a knowledge of chemistry will become more apparent. in our explanations we shall soon come upon capillary attraction, and the person is dull, indeed, who does not stand in awe before the mystery of this subject. if we broaden our inquiry so as to compass the evolution of an ear of corn, we shall realize that we have entered upon an inquiry of vast and fascinating import. the intricate and delicate processes of growth, combining, as they do, the influences of sunshine and moisture and the conversion into food products of elements whose origin goes back to primeval times,--these processes are altogether worthy of the combined enthusiasms of scientist and poet. =physiology.=--but no mention has been made, as yet, of the science of physiology, which, alone, requires volumes. we have but to ask how wheat is converted into brain power to come upon a realization of the magnitude of the study of this science. we have only to relax the leash of fancy to see that there are no limits to the excursions that may be made in this field. if we allow fancy to roam, taking the _a posteriori_ course, we might begin with "paradise lost" and reach its sources in garden and field, in orchard, and in pasture where graze flocks and herds. but in any such fanciful meandering we should be well within the limits of physiology, and should be trying to interpret the adaptation of means to end, or, to use the language of the present, we should be making a quest to determine how the products of field, orchard, and pasture may be utilized that they may function in poetry, in oratory, in discoveries, and in inventions. in short, we should be trying to explain to ourselves how agriculture functions in life. =art as an auxiliary.=--in a recent work of fiction a chapter opens with a picture of a little girl eating a slice of bread and butter which is further surmounted by apple sauce and sugar. if the author of the book "agriculture and life" had only caught a glimpse of this picture, he might have changed the title of his book to "life and agriculture." he certainly would have given to the life element far more prominence than his book in its present form affords. his title makes a promise which the book itself does not redeem, more's the pity. if science would use art as an ally, it need not be less scientific, and its teachings would prove far more palatable. the little girl with her bread and butter would prove quite as apt as an introductory picture for a book on agriculture as for a work of fiction. it matters not that agriculture includes so many other sciences, for life is the great objective of the study of all these, and the little girl exemplifies life. =relation of sciences to life.=--the pictures are practically endless with which we might introduce the study of agriculture--a boy in the turnip field, a milkmaid beside the cow, or millet's celebrated picture "feeding the birds." and, sooner or later, pursuing our journey from such a starting point, we shall arrive at physiology, chemistry, botany, physics, meteorology, and geology, and still never be detached from the subject of life. in the school consciousness agriculture and domestic science seem far apart, but by right teaching they are made to merge in the subject of life. upon that plane we find them to be complementary and reciprocal. in the same way chemistry, botany, and physiology merge in agriculture for the reason that all these sciences as well as agriculture have to do with life. in the traditional school chemistry is taught as chemistry--as a branch of science, and the learner is encouraged to seek for knowledge. in the vitalized school the truths of chemistry are no less clearly revealed, but, in addition, their relations to life are made manifest, and the learner has a fuller appreciation of life, because of his study of chemistry. =traditional methods.=--in the traditional school domestic science is taught that the girl may learn how to cook; but in the vitalized school the girl learns how to cook that she may be able to make life more agreeable and productive both for herself and for others. in the traditional school the study of agriculture consists of the testing of soils and seeds, working out scientific theories on the subject of the rotation of crops, testing for food values the various products of the farm, judging stock, studying the best method of propagating and caring for orchards, and testing for the most economic processes for conserving and marketing crops. in the vitalized school all this is done, but this is not the ultimate goal of the study. the end is not reached until all these ramifications have touched life. =the child as the objective.=--reverting once more to the little girl of the picture, it will be conceded, upon careful consideration, that she is the center and focus of all the activities of mind and hand pertaining to agriculture. every furrow that is plowed is plowed for her; every tree that is planted is planted for her; every crop that is harvested is harvested for her; and every trainload of grain is moving toward her as its destination. but for her, farm machinery would be silent, orchards would decay, trains would cease to move, and commerce would be no more. she it is that causes the wheels to turn, the harvesters to go forth to the fields, the experiment stations to be equipped and operated, the markets to throb with activity, and the ships of commerce to ply the ocean. for her the orchard, the granary, the dairy, and the loom give of their stores, and a million willing hands till, and toil, and spin. =the story of bread.=--but the bread and butter, the apple sauce, and the sugar! they may not be omitted from the picture. the bread transports us to the fields of waving grain and conjures up in our imagination visions of harvesters with their implements, wagons groaning beneath their golden loads, riches of grain pouring forth from machines, and brings to our nostrils the tang of the harvest time. into this slice of bread the sun has poured his wealth of sunshine all the summer long, and into it the kindly clouds have distilled their treasures. in it we find the glory of the sunrise, the sparkling dewdrop, the song of the robin, the gentle mooing of the cows, the murmur of the brook, and the creaking of the mill wheel. in it we read the poetry of the morning and of the evening, the prophecy of the noontide heat, and the mighty proclamations of nature. and it tells us charming stories of health, of rosy cheeks, of laughing eyes, of happiness, of love and service. =food and life.=--the butter, the apple sauce, and the sugar each has a story of its own to tell that renders fiction weak by comparison. if our hearts were but attuned to the charm and romance of the stories they have to tell, every breakfast-table would be redolent with the fragrance of thanksgiving. if our hearts were responsive to the eloquence of these stories, then eating would become a ceremony and upon the farmer who provides our food would descend our choicest benedictions. if the scales could but fall from our eyes that we might behold the visions which our food foretells, we could look down the vista of the years and see the children grown to manhood and womanhood, happy and busy in their work of enlarging and beautifying civilization. =agriculture the source of life.=--agriculture is not the sordid thing that our dull eyes and hearts would make it appear. in it we shall find the romance of a victor hugo, the poetry of a shelley or a shakespeare, the music of a mozart, the eloquence of a demosthenes, and the painting of a raphael, when we are able to interpret its real relation to life. when the morning stars sang together they were celebrating the birth of agriculture, but man became bewildered in the mazes of commercialism and forgot the music of the stars. it is the high mission of the vitalized school to lead us back from our wanderings and to restore us to our rightful estate amid the beauties, the inspiration, the poetry, and the far-reaching prophecies of agriculture. this it can do only by revealing to us the possibilities, the glories, and the joy of life and causing us to know that agriculture is the source of life. =synthetic teaching.=--the analytic teaching of agriculture will not avail; we must have the synthetic also. too long have we stopped short with analysis. we have come within sight of the promised land but have failed to go up and possess it. we have studied the skeleton of agriculture but have failed to endow it with life. we must keep before our eyes the picture of the little girl. we must feel that the quintessence and spirit of agriculture throbs through all the arteries of life. here lies the field in which imagination can do its perfect work. here is a subject in which the vitalized school may find its highest and best justification. by no means is it the only study that fitly exemplifies life, but, in this respect, it is typical, and therefore a worthy study. on the side of analysis the teacher finds the blade of grass to be a thing of life; on the side of synthesis she finds the blade of grass to be a life-giving thing. and the synthesis is no less in accord with science than the analysis. =the element of faith.=--then again agriculture and life meet and merge on the plane of faith. the element of faith fertilizes life and causes it to bring forth in abundance. man must have faith in himself, faith in the people about him, and faith in his own plans and purposes to make his life potent and pleasurable. by faith he attaches the truths of science to his plans and thus to the processes of life; for without the faith of man these truths of science are but static. faith gives them their working qualities. there is faith in the plowing of each furrow, faith in the sowing of the seed, faith in the planting of each tree, and faith in the purchase of each machine. the farmer who builds a silo has faith that the products of the summer will bring joy and health to the winter. by faith he transmutes the mountains of toil into valleys of delight. through the eyes of faith he sees the work of his hands bringing in golden sheaves of health and gladness to his own and other homes. questions and exercises . in what ways is agriculture a typical study? . why was its importance not realized until recently? . what educational agency in your state first reflected the need of scientific instruction in agriculture? . the study of agriculture in the public school was at first ridiculed. why? what is now the general attitude toward it? . to what extent is the study of agriculture important in the city school? is there another subject as important for the city school as agriculture is for the rural school? . mention some school subjects that are closely related to agriculture. show how each is related to agriculture. . is luther burbank's work to be regarded as botanical or as agricultural? why? to which of these sciences do plant variation and improvement properly belong? . in many schools agriculture and domestic science are associated in the curriculum. what have they in common to justify this? . in the chemistry class in a certain school food products are examined for purity. how will this increase the pupils' knowledge of chemistry? . in a certain school six girls appointed for the day cook luncheon for one hundred persons, six other girls serve it, and six others figure the costs. criticize this plan. . show how some particular phase of agricultural instruction may function in agricultural practice. . what benefits accrue to a teacher from the study of a subject in its ramifications? . in what respects is agriculture a noble pursuit? compare it in this respect with law. how does agriculture lead to the exercise of faith? teaching? law? electrical engineering? chapter xvii the school and the community =an analogy.=--if we may win a concept of the analogy between the vitalized school and a filtration-plant, we shall, perhaps, gain a clearer notion of the purpose of the school and come upon a juster estimate of its processes. the purpose of the filtration-plant is to purify, clarify, and render more conducive to life the stream that passes through, and the function of the school may be stated in the same terms. the stream that enters the plant is murky and deeply impregnated with impurities; the same stream when it issues from the plant is clear, free from impurities, and, therefore, better in respect to nutritive qualities. the stream of life that flows into the school is composed of many heterogeneous elements; the stream that issues from the school is far more homogeneous, clearer, more nearly free from impurities, and, therefore, more conducive to the life and health of the community. the stream of life that flows into the school is composed of elements from all countries, languages, and conditions. in this are greeks and barbarians, jews and gentiles, saints and sinners, the washed and the unwashed, the ignorant, the high, the low, the depraved, the weak, and the strong. =life-giving properties.=--the stream that issues from the school is the very antithesis of all this. instead of all these heterogeneous elements, the stream when it comes from the school is composed wholly of americans. a hundred flags may be seen in the stream that enters the school, but the stream that flows out from the school bears only the american flag. the school has often been called the melting-pot, in which the many nationalities are fused; but it is far more than that. true, somehow and somewhere in the school process these elements have been made to coalesce, but that is not the only change that is wrought. the volume of life that issues from the school is the same as that which enters, barring the leakage, but the resultant stream is far more potent in life-giving properties because of its passage through the school. =changes wrought.=--when we see the stream entering the filtration-plant polluted with impurities and then coming forth clear and wholesome, we know that something happened to that stream in transit. similarly, when we see the stream of life entering the school as a mere aggregation of more or less discordant elements and then coming forth in a virtually unified homogeny, we know that something has happened to that stream in its progress through the school. to determine just what happens in either case is a task for experts and a task, moreover, that is well worth while. in either case we may well inquire whether the things that happen are the very best things that could possibly be made to happen; and, if not, what improvements are possible and desirable. =another misconception.=--the analogy between the plant and the school will not hold if we still retain in the parlance of school procedure the expression "getting an education." the act of getting implies material substance. education is not a substance but a process, and it is palpably impossible to get a process. so there can be no such thing as getting an education, in spite of the tenacity of the expression. even to state the fact would seem altogether trite, were we not confronted every day with the fact that teachers and parents are either unable or unwilling to substitute some right expression for this wrong one. education is not the process of getting but, rather, the process of becoming, and the difference is as wide as the difference between the true and the false. just how long it will require to eradicate this conception from the school and society no one can well conjecture. its presence in our nomenclature reveals, in a marked way, the strength of habit. many teachers will give willing assent to the fact and then use the expression again in their next sentence. certainly we shall not even apprehend the true function and procedure of the vitalized school until we have eliminated this expression. if we admit the validity of the contention as to this expression, then we may profitably resume the consideration of our analogy, for, in that case, we shall find in this analogy no ineptitude. =the validity of the analogy.=--we cause the stream of water to pass through the filtration-plant that it may become rectified; we cause the stream of life to pass through the school that it may become rectified. when the stream of water becomes rectified, bodily disease is averted; when the stream of life is rectified, mental and spiritual disease is averted. the analogy, therefore, holds good whether we consider the process itself or its effect. we have only to state the case thus to have opened up for us a wide field for profitable speculation. the diseases of mind and spirit that invade society are the causes that lie back of our police courts, our prisons, and, very often, our almshouses. hence, if the stream of life could be absolutely rectified, these undesirable institutions would disappear, and life for the entire community would be far more agreeable by reason of their absence. =function of the school.=--the school, then, is established and administered to carry on this process of rectification. by means of this process ignorance becomes intelligence, coarseness becomes culture, strife becomes peace, impurity becomes purity, disease becomes health, and darkness becomes light. the child comes into the school not to get something but to have something done to and for him that he may become something that he was not before, and, therefore, that he may the better execute his functions as a member of society. in short, he comes into the school that he may pass through the process of rectification. in this process he loses neither his name, his extraction, his identity, nor his individuality. on the contrary, all these attributes are so acted upon by the process that they become assets of the community. =language.=--in order to lead to a greater degree of clarity it may be well to be even more specific in explaining this process of rectification. language is fundamental in all the operations of society. it is indispensable to the grocer, the farmer, the lawyer, the physician, the manufacturer, the housewife, and the legislator. it is the means by which members of society communicate with one another, and without communication, in some form, there can be no social intercourse, and, therefore, no society. people are all interdependent, and language is the bond of union. they must use the same language, of course, and the words must be invested with the same meaning in order to be intelligible. =language a social study.=--just here great care must be exercised or we shall go astray in depicting the work of the school in dealing with this subject of language. the child comes into the school with language of a sort, but it needs rectification in order to render it readily available for the purposes of society. herein lies the crux of the whole matter. if this child were not to become a member of society, it would matter little what sort of language he uses or whether he uses any language. if he were to be banished to some island there to dwell alone, language would be unnecessary. hence, his study of language in the school is, primarily, for the well-being of society and not for himself. language is so essential to the life processes that, without it, society would be thrown out of balance. the needs of society are paramount, and hence language as it concerns the child relates to him chiefly if not wholly as a member of society. =grammar.=--grammar is nothing else than language reduced to a system of common terms that have been agreed upon in the interests of society. people have entered into a linguistic compact, an agreement that certain words and combinations of words shall be understood to mean certain things. the tradesman must understand the purchaser or there can be no exchange. the ticket-agent must understand the prospective traveler or the latter cannot take the journey and reach his destination. hence, grammar, with all that the term implies, is a means of facilitating the activities of society and pertains to the individual only in his relation to society. =needs of society.=--true, the individual will find life more agreeable in society if he understands the common language, just as the traveler is more comfortable in a foreign country if he understands its language. but we need emphasis upon the statement that we have grammar in the school because it is one of the needs of society. the individual may not need chemistry, but society does need it, and the school must somehow provide it because of this need. hence we place chemistry in the school as one of the ingredients of the solvent which we employ in the process of rectification. those who are susceptible to the influences of this ingredient will become inoculated with it and bear it forth into the uses of society. =caution.=--but just here we find the most delicate and difficult task of the school. here we encounter some of the fundamental principles of psychology as explained and emphasized by james, mcdougall, and strayer. here we must begin our quest for the native tendencies that condition successful teaching. we must discover what pupils are susceptible to chemistry before we can proceed with the work of inoculation. this has been the scene and source of many tragedies. we have been wont to ask whether chemistry will be good for the boy instead of making an effort to discover whether the boy will be good for chemistry--whether his native tendencies render him susceptible to chemistry. =some mistakes.=--our procedure has often come but little short of an inquisition. we have followed our own predilections and prejudices instead of being docile at the feet of nature and asking her what to do. we have applied opprobrious epithets and resorted to ostracism. we have been freely dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. we have tried to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an astronomer into a ditcher. and our complacency in the presence of the misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. we have taken counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the while rejoicing in our own infallibility. =native dispositions.=--society needs only a limited number of chemists and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry most effective in the activities of society. but we have been proceeding upon the agreeable assumption that every pupil has such native tendencies. such an assumption absolves the school, of course, from the necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of devising ways and means of making this important discovery. because we do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the assumption that it cannot or need not be made. we then proceed to apply the procrustean bed principle with the very acme of _sang froid_. here is work for the efficiency expert. when children are sitting at the table of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives when they really crave oatmeal. =the ideal of the school.=--we shall not have attained to right conditions until such time as the stream of life that issues from the school shall combine the agencies, in right proportions and relations, that will conserve the best interests of society and administer its activities with the maximum of efficiency. this is the ideal that the school must hold up before itself as the determining plan in its every movement. but this ideal presupposes no misfits in society. if there are such, then it will decline in some degree from the plane of highest efficiency. if there are some members of society who are straining at the leash which nature provided for them and are trying to do work for which they have neither inclination nor aptitude, they cannot render the best service, and society suffers in consequence. =misfits.=--the books teem with examples of people who are striving to find themselves by finding their work. but nothing has been said of society in this same strain. we have only to think of society as composed of all the people to realize that only by finding its work can society find itself. and so long as there is even one member of society who has not found himself, so long must we look upon this one exception as a discordant note in the general harmony. if one man is working at the forge who by nature is fitted for a place at the desk, then neither this man nor society is at its best. and a large measure of the responsibility for such discord and misfits in society must be laid at the door of the school because of its inability to discover native tendencies. =common interests.=--there are many interests that all children have in common when they enter the school in the morning, and these interests may well become the starting points in the day's work. the conversations at breakfast tables and the morning paper beget and stimulate many of these interests and the school does violence to the children, the community, and itself if it attempts to taboo these interests. its work is to rectify and not to suppress. when the children return to their homes in the evening they should have clearer and larger conceptions of the things that animated them in the morning. if they come into the school all aglow with interest in the great snowstorm of the night before, the teacher does well to hold the lesson in decimals in abeyance until she has led around to the subject by means of readings or stories that have to do with snowstorms. the paramount and common interest of the children in the morning is snow and, therefore, the day should hold snow in the foreground in their thinking, so that, at the close of the day, their horizon in the snow-world may be extended, and so that they may thus be able to make contributions to the home on the subject of snow. =real interests.=--in the morning the pupils had objective snow in which they rollicked and gamboled in glee. all day long they had subjective snow in which the teacher with fine technique caused them to revel; and, in the evening, their concept of snow was so much enlarged that they experienced a fresh access of delight. and that day was their snow epiphany. on that day there was no break in the stream of life at the schoolhouse door. there was no supplanting of the real interests of the morning with fictitious interests of the school, to be endured with ill grace until the real interests of the morning could be resumed in the evening. on the contrary, by some magic that only the vitalized teacher knows, every exercise of the day seemed to have snow as its center. snow seemed to be the major in the reading, in the spelling, in the geography, and in the history. on that day they became acquainted with hannibal and his struggles through the snow of the alps. on that day they learned of the avalanche, its origin, its devastating power, and, of course, its spelling. on that day they read "snow bound" and the snow poems of longfellow and lowell. thus the stream of life was clarified, rectified, and amplified as it passed through the school, and, incidentally, the teacher and the school were glorified in their thoughts. =circus day.=--but snow is merely typical. on other days other interests are paramount. on circus day the children, again, have a common interest which affords the teacher a supreme opportunity. the day has been anticipated by the teacher, and the pupils have cause to wonder how and whence she ever accumulated such a wealth of pictures of animal life. all day long they are regaled with a subjective menagerie, and when they attend the circus in the evening they astonish their parents by the extent and accuracy of their information. they know the animals by name, their habitat, their habits, their food, and their uses. in short, they seemed to have compassed a working knowledge of the animal kingdom in a single day through the skill of the teacher who knows how to make the school reënforce their life interests. =the quality of life.=--if we now extend the scope of common interests that belong in the category with the snow and the animals, we shall readily see that the analogy of the filtration-plant holds good in the entire régime of the vitalized school. but we must never lose sight of the additional fact that the quality of life that issues from the school is far better because of its passage through the school. the volume may be less, through unfortunate leakage, but the quality is so much better that its value to society is enhanced a hundred- or a thousand-fold. the people who pass through the school have learned a common language, have been imbued with a common purpose, have learned how to live and work in hearty accord, have come to revere a common flag, and have become citizens of a common country. questions and exercises . what is the general function of the school? . what is meant by the school's being the "melting-pot"? . what objection is there to the expression "getting an education"? what would be a better expression to indicate the purpose of attending school? . what diseases that invade society would be checked if in school the stream of life were rectified? . why is it desirable that pupils shall not lose their individuality in passing through school? . what is the primary purpose of each school study, for instance, language? . what is the true purpose of grammar? . what do these functions of the school and of its studies teach us regarding the adaptation of subjects and methods to the individual? . tell something of the work done in vocational guidance in boston. . tell something of the methods employed by some corporations in choosing employees naturally fitted for the work. . tell something of the psychological tests for vocations devised by professor münsterberg. (psychology and industrial efficiency, hugo münsterberg, houghton mifflin co., .) . what do you think is the practicable way of helping the pupils in your school to develop along the lines of their natural endowment? . what is the effect on society when a man does work for which he is not fitted? . show some ways in which the interests of the school as a whole may be fostered and a natural development of the class as a whole be secured. . there has been a big fire in town. show how the interest in this event may be used in the day's work. . in what ways is one who has had private instruction likely to be a poorer citizen than one who has attended school? . what conditions might cause some of those who go through school to be polluted instead of rectified? whose fault would it be? . what questions should we ask ourselves about the things that are being done in our schools? chapter xviii poetry and life =poetry defined.=--poetry has been defined as "a message from the heart of the artist to the heart of the man"; and, seeing that the heart is the center and source of life, it follows that poetry is a means of effecting a transfusion of life. the poet ponders life long and deeply and then gives forth an interpretation in artistic form that is surcharged with the very quintessence of life. the poet absorbs life from a thousand sources--the sky, the forest, the mountain, the sunrise, the ocean, the storm, the child in the mother's arms, and the man at his work, and then transmits it that the recipient may have a new influx of life. the poet's quest is life, his theme is life, and his gift to man is life. his mission is to gain a larger access of life and to give life in greater abundance. he gains the meaning of life from the snowflake and the avalanche; from the grain of sand and the fertile valley; from the raindrop and the sea; from the chirp of the cricket and the crashing of the thunder; from the firefly and the lightning's flash; and from vesuvius and sinai. to know life he listens to the baby's prattle, the mother's lullaby, and the father's prayer; he looks upon faces that show joy and sorrow, hope and despair, defeat and triumph; and he feels the pulsations of the tides, the hurricane, and the human heart. =how the poet learns life.=--he sits beside the bed of sickness and hears the feeble and broken words that tell of the past, the present, and the future; he visits the field of battle and sees the wreckage of the passions of men; he goes into the dungeon and hears the ravings and revilings of a distorted soul; he visits pastoral scenes where peace and plenty unite in a song of praise; he rides the mighty ship and knows the heartbeats of the ocean; he sits within the church and opens the doors of his soul to its holy influences; he enters the hovel whose squalor proclaims it the abode of ignorance and vice; he visits the home of happiness where industry and frugality pour forth their bounteous gifts and love sways its gentle scepter; and he sits at the feet of his mother and imbibes her gracious spirit. =transfusion of life.=--and then he writes; and as he writes his pen drips life. he knows and feels, and, therefore, he expresses, and his words are the distillations of life. his spiritual percipience has rendered his soul a veritable garden of emotions, and with his pen he transplants these in the written page. and men see and come to pluck the flowers to transplant again in their own souls that they, too, may have a garden like unto his. his _élan_ carries over into the lives of these men and they glow with the ardor of his emotions and are inspired to deeds of courage, of service, and of solace. for every flower plucked from his garden another grows in its stead more beautiful and more fragrant than its fellow, and he is reinspired as he inspires others. and thus in this transfusion of life there is an undertow that carries back into his own life and makes his spirit more fertile. =aspiration.=--when he would teach men to aspire he writes "excelsior" and so causes them to know that only he who aspires really lives. they see the groundling, the boor, the drudge, and the clown content to dwell in the valley amid the loaves and fishes of animal desires, while the man who aspires is struggling toward the heights whence he may gain an outlook upon the glories that are, know the throb and thrill of new life, and experience the swing and sweep of spiritual impulses. he makes them to know that the man who aspires recks not of cold, of storm, or of snow, if only he may reach the summit and lave his soul in the glory that crowns the marriage of earth and sky. they feel that the aspirant is but yielding obedience to the behests of his better self to scale the heights where sublimity dwells. =perseverance.=--or he writes the fourth "Æneid" to make men feel that the palm of victory comes only to those who persevere to the end; that duty does not abdicate in favor of inclination; and that the high gods will not hold guiltless the man who stops short of italy to loiter and dally in carthage even in the sunshine of a dido's smile. when italy is calling, no siren song of pleasure must avail to lure him from his course, nor must his sail be furled until the keel grates upon the italian shore. his navigating skill must guide him through the perils of scylla and charybdis and the stout heart of manhood must bear him past mount Ætna's fiery menace. his dauntless courage must brave the anger of the greedy waves and boldly ride them down. nor must his cup of joy be full until the wished-for land shall greet his eager eyes. =overweening ambition.=--or, again, the poet may yearn to teach the wrong of overweening, vaulting ambition and he writes "paradise lost" and "recessional." he pictures satan overthrown, like the giants who would climb into the throne on olympus. he pictures hell as the fitting place for satan overthrown, and in his own place he pictures the outcast and downcast satan writhing and cursing because he was balked of his unholy ambition. and, lest mortals sink from their high estate, borne down by their sins of unsanctified ambition, he prays, and prays again, "lord god of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget." and the prayer echoes and reëchoes in the soul of the man, and the world sees his lips moving in the prayer of the poet, "lest we forget, lest we forget." =native land.=--or, again, he writes bannockburn and the spirit is fired with patriotic devotion to native land. we hear the bagpipe and the drum and see the martial clans gathering in serried ranks and catch the glint of their arms and armor as they flash back the sunlight. we hear their lusty calls as they rush together to defend the hills and the homes they love. we see, again, the wallace and the bruce inciting valorous men to deeds of heroism and hear the hills reëchoing with the shock of steel upon steel. from hill to hill the pibroch leaps, and hearts and feet quicken at its sound. and mothers are pressing their bairns to their bosoms as they cheer their loved ones away to the strife. and while their eyes are weeping their hearts are saying: "wha will be a traitor knave? wha can fill a coward's grave? wha so base as be a slave? let him turn and flee!" =faith.=--and after the sounds of battle are hushed he sings "to mary in heaven" and causes the man to stand in the presence of the burning bush and to hear the command "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." and the heart of the man grows tender as the poet opens his eyes to catch a glimpse of the life of faith that the star foretells even as the star of bethlehem was prophetic. and, through the eyes of the lover, he looks over into the other life and knows that his faith is not in vain. and when faith sits enthroned, the music of the brook at his feet becomes sweeter, the stars shine more brightly, the earth becomes a place of gladness, and life is far more worth while. the poet has caused the scales to fall from his eyes and through them the light of heaven has streamed into his soul. =the teacher's influx of life.=--and the teacher imbibes the spirit of the poet and becomes vital and thus becomes attuned to all life. flowers spring up in her pathway because they are claiming kinship with the flowers that are blooming in her soul. the insect chirps forth its music, and her own spirit joins in the chorus of the forest. the brooklet laughs as it ripples its way toward the sea, and her spirit laughs in unison because the poet has poured his laughter into her soul. she stands unafraid in the presence of the storm because her feeling for majesty overmasters her apprehension of danger. the lightning's flash may rend the oak but, even so, she stands in mute admiration at this wondrous manifestation of life. her quickened spirit responds to the roll and reverberation of the thunder because she has grown to womanhood through the poet's copious draughts of life. =the book of life.=--the voices of the night enchant her and the stars take her into their counsels. the swaying tree speaks her language because both speak the language of life. she takes delight in the lexicon of the planets because it interprets to her the book of life, and in the revelations of this book she finds her chief joy. for her there are no dull moments whether she wanders by the river, through the glades, or over the hills, because she is ever turning the pages of this book. she moves among the things of life and accounts them all her friends and companions. she knows their moods and their language and with them holds intimate communion. they smile upon her because she can reciprocate their smiles. life to her is a buoyant, a joyous experience each hour of the day because the poet has poured into her spirit its fuller, deeper meanings. =the teaching.=--and because the poet has touched her spirit with the wand of his power the waters of life gush forth in sparkling abundance. and children come to the fountain of her life and drink of its waters and are thereby refreshed and invigorated. then they smile back their gratitude to her in their exuberance of joyous life. questions and exercises . what is poetry? . what is the purpose of rhyme? . may writing have the essentials of poetry and yet have no regular rhythm? what of the psalms? . why is poetry especially valuable to the teacher? . show how some poem other than those mentioned in the chapter teaches a lesson or gives an inspiration. . name, if you can, some methods of treatment that cause poetry to fail to affect the lives of the pupils as it should. . suggest uses of poetry and the treatment that will insure the right results. . is there danger that a teacher may become too appreciative or susceptible--too poetic in temperament? recall observations of those who were either too much so or too little. . is there danger that one may have too much of a good quality, or is the danger not in having too little of some other quality? . show how a wide and appreciative reading of poetry makes for a proper balance of temperament. chapter xix a sense of humor =an american story.=--there is a story to the effect that a certain mr. jones was much given to boasting of his early rising. he stoutly maintained that he was going about his work every morning at three o'clock. some of his friends were inclined to be incredulous as to his representations and entered into a kindly conspiracy to put them to the test. accordingly one of the number presented himself at the kitchen door of the jones residence one morning at half-past three and made inquiry of mrs. jones as to the whereabouts of her husband, asking if he was at home. in a very gracious manner mrs. jones replied: "no, he isn't here now. he was around here early this morning but i don't really know where he is now." this is a clean, fine, typical american story, and, by means of such a story, we can test for a sense of humor. the boy in school will laugh at this story both because it is a good one and because he is a normal boy. if he does not laugh at such a story, there is cause for anxiety as to his mental condition or attitude. if the teacher cannot or does not laugh, a disharmony is generated at once between teacher and pupil which militates against the well-being of the school. if the teacher reprimands the boy, the boy as certainly discredits the teacher and all that she represents. if she cannot enjoy such a wholesome story, he feels that her arithmetic, geography, and grammar are responsible, and these studies decline somewhat in his esteem. moreover, he feels that the teacher's reprimand was unwarranted and unjust and he fain would consort with people of his own kind. many a boy deserts school because the teacher is devoid of the saving grace of humor. her inability to see or have any fun in life makes him uncomfortable and he seeks a more agreeable environment. =humor in its manifestations.=--a sense of humor diffuses itself through all the activities of life, giving to them all a gentle quality that eliminates asperities and renders them gracious and amiable. like fireflies that bespangle the darkness of the night, humor scintillates through all life's phases and activities and causes the day to go more pleasantly and effectively on. it twinkles through the thoughts and gives to language a sparkle and a nicety that cause it to appeal to the artistic sense. it gives to discourse a piquancy that stimulates but does not irritate. it is the flavor that gives to speech its undulatory quality, and redeems it from desert sameness. it pervades the motives and gives direction as well as a pleasing fertility to all behavior. it is pervasive without becoming obtrusive. it steals into the senses as quietly as the dawn and causes life to smile. wit may flash, but humor blithely glides into the consciousness with a radiant and kindly smile upon its face. wit may sting and inflame, but humor soothes and comforts. the man who has a generous admixture of humor in his nature is an agreeable companion and a sympathetic friend to grown-up people, to children, and to animals. his spirit is genial, and people become kindly and magnanimous in his presence. =one of john b. gough's stories.=--the celebrated john b. gough was wont to tell a story that was accounted one of his many masterpieces. it was a story of a free-for-all convention where any one, according to inclination, had the privilege of freely speaking his sentiments. when the first speaker had concluded, a man in the audience called lustily for a speech from mr. henry. then another spoke, and, again, more lustily than before, the man demanded mr. henry. more and more vociferous grew the call for mr. henry after each succeeding speech until, at last, the chairman with some acrimony exclaimed: "the man who is calling for mr. henry will please be quiet. it is mr. henry who is now speaking." the man thus rebuked was somewhat crestfallen, but managed to say, as if in a half-soliloquy: "mr. henry! why, that ain't mr. henry. that's the little chap that told me to holler." at the conclusion of one of his lectures in which mr. gough told this story in his inimitable style, a man came to the platform and explained to him that he had a friend who seemed to lack a sense of humor and wondered if he might not prevail upon mr. gough to tell him this particular story in the hope that it would cause him to laugh. in a spirit of adventure mr. gough consented, and at the time appointed told the story to the old gentleman in his own best style. the old gentleman seemed to be deeply interested, but at the conclusion of the story, instead of laughing heartily as his friend had hoped, he solemnly asked, "what did he tell him to holler fur?" =the man who lacks a sense of humor.=--there was no answer to this question, or, rather, he himself was the answer. such a man is obviously outside the pale, without hope of redemption. if such a story, told by such a _raconteur_, could not touch him, he is hopeless. in his spiritual landscape there are no undulations, but it reveals itself as a monotonous dead-level without stream or verdure. he eats, and sleeps, and walks about, but he walks in a spiritual daze. to him life must seem a somber, drab affair. if he were a teacher in a traditional school, he would chill and depress, but he might be tolerated because a sense of humor is not one of the qualifications of the teacher. but, in the vitalized school, he would be intolerable. if children should go to such a teacher for spiritual refreshment, they would return thirsty. he has nothing to give them, no bubbling water of life, no geniality, no such graces of the spirit as appeal to buoyant childhood. he lacks a sense of humor, and that lack makes arid the exuberant sources of life. he may solve problems in arithmetic, but he cannot compass the solution of the problem of life. the children pity him, and no greater calamity can befall a teacher than to deserve and receive the pity of a child. he might, in a way, teach anatomy, but not physiology. he might be able to deal with the analytic. he might succeed as curator in a museum of mummies, but he will fail as a teacher of children. =story of a boy.=--a seven-year-old boy who was lying on his back on the floor asked his father the question, "how long since the world was born?" the father replied, "oh, about four thousand years." in a few moments the child said in a tone of finality, "that isn't very long." then after another interval, he asked, "what was there before the world was born?" to this the father replied, "nothing." after a lapse of two or three minutes the child gave vent to uncontrollable laughter which resounded throughout the house. when, at length, the father asked him what he was laughing at, he could scarcely control his laughter to answer. but at last he managed to reply, "i was laughing to see how funny it was when there wasn't anything." =the child's imagination.=--the philosopher could well afford to give the half of his kingdom to be able to see what that child saw. out of the gossamer threads of fancy his imagination had wrought a pattern that transcends philosophy. the picture that his imagination painted was so extraordinary that it produced a paroxysm of laughter. that picture is far beyond the ken of the philosopher and he will look for it in vain because he has grown away from the child in power of imagination and has lost the child's sense of humor. what that child saw will never be known, for the pictures of fancy are ephemeral, but certain it is that the power of imagination and a keen sense of humor are two of the attributes of childhood whose loss should give both his father and his teacher poignant regrets. =the little girl and her elders.=--the little girl upon the beach invests the tiny wavelets not only with life and intelligence, but, also, with a sense of humor as she eludes their sly advances to engulf her feet. she laughs in glee at their watery pranks as they twinkle and sparkle, now advancing, now receding, trying to take her by surprise. she chides them for their duplicity, then extols them for their prankish playfulness. she makes them her companions, and they laugh in chorus. if she knows of sprites, and gnomes, and nymphs, and fairies, she finds them all dancing in glee at her feet in the form of rippling wavelets. and while she is thus refreshing her spirit from the brimming cup of life, her matter-of-fact elders are reproaching her for getting her dress soiled. to the parent or the teacher who lacks a sense of humor and cannot enter into the little girl's conception of life, a dress is of more importance than the spirit of the child. but the teacher or the parent who has the "aptitude for vicariousness" that enables her to enter into the child's life in her fun and frolic with the playful water, and can feel the presence of the nymphs among the wavelets,--such a teacher or parent will adorn the school or the home and endear herself to the child. =lincoln's humor.=--the life of abraham lincoln affords a notable illustration of the saving power of humor. reared in conditions of hardship, his early life was essentially drab and prosaic. in temperament he was serious, with an inclination toward the morbid, but his sense of humor redeemed the situation. when clouds of gloom and discouragement lowered in his mental sky, his keen sense of humor penetrated the darkness and illumined his pathway. he was sometimes the object of derision because men could not comprehend the depth and bigness of his nature, and his humor was often accounted a weakness. but the gettysburg speech rendered further derision impossible and the wondrous alchemy of that address transmuted criticism into willing praise. =humor betokens deep feeling.=--laughter and tears issue from the same source, we are told, and the gettysburg speech revealed a depth and a quality of tenderness that men had not, before, been able to recognize or appreciate. the absence of a sense of humor betokens shallowness in that it reveals an inability to feel deeply. people who feel deeply often laugh in order to forestall tears. lincoln was a great soul and his sense of humor was one element of his greatness. his apt stories and his humorous personal experiences often carried off a situation where cold logic would have failed. whether his sense of humor was a gift or an acquisition, it certainly served the nation well and gave to us all an example that is worthy of emulation. =the teacher of english.=--many teachers could, with profit to themselves and their schools, sit at the feet of abraham lincoln, not only to learn english but also to imbibe his sense of humor. nothing is more pathetic than the efforts of a teacher who lacks a sense of humor to teach a bit of english that abounds in humor, by means of the textual notes. the notes are bad enough, in all conscience, but the teacher's lack of humor piles ossa upon pelion. the solemnity that pervades such mechanical teaching would be farcical were it not so pathetic. the teacher who cannot indulge in a hearty, honest, ringing laugh with her pupils in situations that are really humorous is certain to be laughed at by her pupils. in her work, as in lincoln's, a sense of humor will often save the day. =mark twain as philosopher.=--mark twain will ever be accounted a very prince of humorists, and so he was. but he was more than that. upon the current of his humor were carried precious cargoes of the philosophy of life. his humor is often so subtle that the superficial reader fails to appreciate its fine quality and misses the philosophy altogether. to extract the full meaning from his writing one must be able to read not only between the lines but also beneath the lines. the subtle quality of his humor defies both analysis and explanation. if it fails to tell its own story, so much the worse for the reader. to such humor as his, explanation amounts to an impertinence. people can either appreciate it or else they cannot, and there's the end of the matter. in the good time to come when the school teaches reading for the purpose of pleasure and not for examination purposes, we shall have mark twain as one of our authors; and it is to be hoped that we shall have editions devoid of notes. the notes may serve to give the name of the editor a place on the title page, but the notes cannot add to the enjoyment of the author's genial humor. mark twain reigns supreme, and the editor does well to stand uncovered in his presence and to withhold his pen. =a twain story.=--one of mark twain's stories is said to be one of the most humorous stories extant. the story relates how a soldier was rushing off the battlefield in retreat when a companion, whose leg was shattered, begged to be carried off the field. the appeal met a willing response and soon the soldier was bearing his companion away on his shoulder, his head hanging down the soldier's back. unknown to the soldier a cannon ball carried away the head of his companion. accosted by another soldier, he was asked why he was carrying a man whose head had been shot away. he stoutly denied the allegation and, at length, dropped the headless body to prove the other's hallucination. seeing that the man's head was, in truth, gone, he exclaimed, "why, the durn fool told me it was his leg." =humor defies explanation.=--the humor of this story is cumulative. we may not parse it, we may not analyze it, we may not annotate it. we can simply enjoy it. and, if we cannot enjoy it, we may pray for a spiritual awakening, for such an endowment of the sense of humor as will enable us to enjoy, that we may no longer lead lives that are spiritually blind. bill nye wrote: "the autumn leaves are falling, they are falling everywhere; they are falling through the atmosphere and likewise through the air." woe betide the teacher who tries to explain! there is no explanation--there is just the humor. if that eludes the reader, an explanation will not avail. a teacher of latin read to his pupils "the house-boat on the styx" in connection with their reading of the "Æneid." it was good fun for them all, and never was virgil more highly honored than in the assiduous study which those young people gave to his lines. they were eager to complete the study of the lesson in order to have more time for the "house-boat." the humor of the book opened wide the gates of their spirits through which the truths of the regular lesson passed blithely in. questions and exercises . what is the source of humor in a humorous story? . when should the teacher laugh with the school? when should she not do so? . how does the response of the school to a laughable incident reflect the leadership of the teacher? . what can be done to bring more or better humor into the school? . compare as companions those whom you know who exhibit a sense of humor with those who do not. . compare their influence on others. . what can be done to bring humor into essays written by the students? . distinguish between wit and humor. does wit or humor cause most of the laughter in school? . what is meant by an "aptitude for vicariousness"? . how did lincoln make use of humor? is there any humor in the gettysburg speech? why? . what is the relation of pathos to humor? . give an example from the writings of mark twain that shows him a philosopher as well as a humorist. . what books could you read to the pupils to enliven some of the subjects that you teach? chapter xx the element of human interest =yearning toward betterment.=--much has been said and written in recent times touching the matter and manner of vitalizing and humanizing the studies and work of the school. the discussions have been nation-wide in their scope and most fertile in plans and practical suggestions. no subject of greater importance or of more far-reaching import now engages the interest of educational leaders. they are quite aware that something needs to be done, but no one has announced the sovereign remedy. the critics have made much of the fact that there is something lacking or wrong in our school procedure, but they can neither diagnose the case nor suggest the remedy. they can merely criticize. we are having many surveys, but the results have been meager and inadequate. we have been working at the circumference of the circle rather than at the center. we have been striving to reform our educational training, hoping for a reflex that would be sufficient to modify the entire school régime. we have added domestic science, hoping thereby to reconstruct the school by inoculation. we have looked to agriculture and other vocational studies as the magnetic influences of our dreams. something has been accomplished, to be sure, but we are still far distant from the goal. the best that writers can do in their books or educational conferences can do in their meetings, is to report progress. =the obstacle of conservatism.=--one of the greatest obstacles we have to surmount in this whole matter of vitalizing school work is the habitual conservatism of the school people themselves. the methods of teaching that obtained in the school when we were pupils have grooved themselves into habits of thinking that smile defiance at the theories that we have more recently acquired. when we venture out from the shore we want to feel a rope in our hands. the superintendent speaks fervently to patrons or teachers on the subject of modern methods in teaching, then retires to his office and takes intimate and friendly counsel with tradition. in sailing the educational seas he must needs keep in sight the buoys of tradition. this matter of conservatism is cited merely to show that our progress, in the very nature of the case, will be slow. =schools of education.=--another obstacle in the way of progress toward the vitalized school is the attitude and teaching of many who are connected with colleges of education and normal schools. we have a right to look to them for leadership, but we find, instead, that their practices lag far in the rear of their theories. they teach according to such devitalized methods and in such an unvitalized way as to discredit the subjects they teach. it is only from such of their students as are proof against their style of teaching that we may hope for aid. one such teacher in a college of education in a course of eight weeks on the subject of school administration had his students copy figures from statistical reports for several days in succession and for four and five hours each day. the students confessed that their only objective was the gaining of credits, and had no intimation that the work they were doing was to function anywhere. =the machine teacher.=--such work is deadening and disheartening. it has in it no inspiration, no life, nothing, in short, that connects with real life. such a teacher could not maintain himself in a wide-awake high school for a half year. the boys and girls would desert him even if they had to desert the school. and yet teachers and prospective teachers must endure and not complain. those who submit supinely will attempt to repeat in their schools the sort of teaching that obtains in his classes, and their schools will suffer accordingly. his sort of teaching proclaims him either more or less than a human being in the estimation of normal people. such a teacher drones forth weary platitudes as if his utterances were oracular. the only prerequisite for a position in some schools of education seems to be a degree of a certain altitude without any reference to real teaching ability. =statistics versus children.=--such teaching palliates educational situations without affording a solution. it is so steeped in tradition that it resorts to statistics as it would consult an oracle. we look to see it establishing precedents only to find it following precedents. when we would find in it a leader we find merely a follower. to such teaching statistical numbers mean far more than living children. indeed, children are but objects that become useful as a means of proving theories. it lacks vitality, and that is sad; but, worst of all, it strives unceasingly to perpetuate itself in the schools. real teaching power receives looks askance in some of these colleges as if it bore the mark of cain in not being up to standard on the academic side. and yet these colleges are teaching the teachers of our schools. =teaching power.=--hence, the work of vitalizing the school must begin in our colleges of education and normal schools, and this beginning will be made only when we place the emphasis upon teaching power. the human qualities of the teachers must be so pronounced that they become their most distinguished characteristics. it is a sad commentary upon our educational processes if a man must point to the letters of his degree to prove that he is a teacher. his teaching should be of such a nature as to justify and glorify his degree. as the preacher receives his degree because he can preach, so the teacher should receive his degree because he can teach, even if we must create a new degree by which to designate the real teacher. =degrees and human qualities.=--there is no disparagement of the academic degree in the statement that it proves absolutely nothing touching the ability to teach. it proclaims its possessor a student but not a teacher. yet, in our practices, we proceed upon the assumption that teacher and student are synonymous. we hold examinations for teachers in our schools, but not for teachers in our colleges of education. his degree is the magic talisman that causes the doors to swing wide open for him. besides, his very presence inside seems to be prima facie evidence that he is a success, and all his students are supposed to join in the general chorus of praise. =life the great human interest.=--the books are eloquent and persistent in their admonitions that we should attach all school work to the native interests of the child. to this dictum there seems to be universal and hearty assent. but we do not seem to realize fully, as yet, that the big native interest of the child is life itself. we have not, as yet, found the way to enmesh the activities of the school in the life processes of the child so that these school activities are as much a part of his life as his food, his games, his breathing, and his sleep. we have been interpreting some of the manifestations of life as his native interests but have failed thus to interpret his life as a whole. the child is but the aggregate of all his inherent interests, and we must know these interests if we would find the child so as to attach school work to the child himself. =the child as a whole.=--here is the crux of the entire matter, here the big problem for the vitalized school. we have been taking his pulse, testing his eyes, taking his temperature, and making examinations for defects--and these things are excellent. but all these things combined do not reveal the child to us. we need to go beyond all these in order to find him. we must know what he thinks, how he feels as to people and things, what his aspirations are, what motives impel him to action, what are his intuitions, what things he does involuntarily and what through volition or compulsion. with such data clearly before us we can proceed to attach school work to his native interests. we have been striving to bend him to our preconceived notion instead of finding out who and what he is as a condition precedent to intelligent teaching. =three types of teachers.=--the three types of teachers that have been much exploited in the books are the teacher who conceives it to be her work to teach the book, the one who teaches the subject, and the one who teaches the child. the number of the first type is still very large in spite of all the books that inveigh against this conception. it were easy to find a teacher whose practice indicates that she thinks that all the arithmetic there is or ought to be is to be found in the book that lies on her desk. it seems not to occur to her that a score of books might be written that would be equal in merit to the one she is using, some of which might be far better adapted to the children in her particular school. if she were asked to teach arithmetic without the aid of a book, she would shed copious tears, if, indeed, she did not resign. =the first type.=--to such a teacher the book is the ultima thule of all her endeavors, and when the pupils can pass the examination she feels that her work is a success. if the problem in the book does not fit the child, so much the worse for the child, and she proceeds to try to make him fit the problem. it does not occur to her to construct problems that will fit the child. when she comes to the solution of the right triangle, the baseball diamond does not come to her mind. she has the boy learn a rule and try to apply it instead of having him find the distance from first base to third in a direct line. in her thinking such a proceeding would be banal because it would violate the sanctity of the book. she must adhere to the book though the heavens fall, and the boy with them. =the book supreme.=--she seems quite unable to draw upon the farm, the grocery, the store, or the playground for suitable problems. these things seem to be obscured by her supreme devotion to the book. she lacks fertility of resources, nor does she realize this lack, because her eyes are fastened upon the book rather than upon the child. were she as intent upon the child as she is upon the book, his interests would direct attention to the things toward which his inclinations yearn and toward which his aptitudes lure him. in such a case, her ingenuity and resourcefulness would roam over wide fields in quest of the objects of his native interests and she would return to him laden with material that would fit the needs of the child far better than the material of the book. =the child supreme.=--the teacher whose primary consideration is the child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her activities, never makes a fetish of the book. it has its use, to be sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. it is not a necessity, but a mere convenience. she could dispense with it entirely and not do violence to the child's interests. no book is large enough to compass all that she teaches, for she forages in every field to obtain proper and palatable food for the child. she teaches with the grain of the child and not against the grain. if the book contains what she requires in her work, she uses it and is glad to have it; but, if it does not contain what she needs, she seeks it elsewhere and does not return empty-handed. =illustrations.=--she places the truth she hopes to teach in the path of the child's inclination, and this is taken into his life processes. life does not stop at way-stations to take on supplies, but absorbs the supplies that it encounters as it moves along. this teacher does not stop the ball game to teach the right triangle, but manages to have the problem solved in connection with or as a part of the game. she does not taboo the morning paper in order to have a lesson in history, but begins with the paper as a favorable starting point toward the lesson. she does not confiscate the contents of the boy's pocket as contraband, but is glad to avail herself of all these as indices of the boy's interests, and, therefore, guides for her teaching. =attitude toward teaching materials.=--when the boy carries a toad to school, she does not shudder, but rather rejoices, because she sees in him a possible agassiz. when he displays an interest in plant life, she sees in him another burbank. when she finds him drawing pictures at his desk, she smiles approval, for she sees in him another raphael. she does not disdain the lowliest insect, reptile, or plant when she finds it within the circle of the child's interests. she is willing, nay eager, to ransack the universe if only she may come upon elements of nutrition for her pupils. from every flower that blooms she gathers honey that she may distill it into the life of the child. she does not coddle the child; she gives him nourishment. =history.=--her history is as wide as human thought and as high as human aspiration. it includes the rosetta stone and the morning paper. it travels back from the clothing of the child to the cotton gin. the stitch in the little girl's dress is the index finger that points to the page that depicts the invention of the sewing machine. every engine leads her back to watt, and she takes the children with her. every foreign message in the daily paper revives the story of field and the laying of the atlantic cable. every mention of the president's cabinet gives occasion for reviewing the cabinets of other presidents with comparisons and contrasts. at her magic touch the libraries and galleries yield forth rich treasures for her classroom. life is the textbook of her study, and the life of the child is the goal of her endeavors. =the child's native interests.=--in brief, she is teaching children and not books or subjects, and the interests of the children take emphatic precedence over her own. she enters into the life of the child and makes excursions into all life according to the dictates of his interests. the child is the big native interest to which she attaches the work of the school. the program is elastic enough to encompass every child in her school. her program is a garden in which something is growing for each child, and she cultivates every plant with sympathetic care. she considers it no hardship to learn the plant, the animal, the place, or the fact in which the child finds interest. because of the child and for the sake of the child she invests all these things with the quality of human interest. =the school and the home.=--arithmetic, language, history, and geography touch life at a thousand points, and we have but to select the points of contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a vital part of the day's work and the day's life. they are not things that are detached from the child's life. the child's errand to the shop involves arithmetic, and the vitalized teacher makes this fact a part of the working capital of the school. the dinner table abounds in geography, and the teacher is quick to turn this fact to account in the school. her fertility of resources, coupled with her vital interest in human beings and human affairs, soon establishes a reciprocal relation between the home and the school. similarly, she causes the language of the school to flow out into the home, the factory, and the office. =the skill of the teacher.=--history is not a school affair merely. it is a life affair, and through all the currents of life it may be made to flow. the languages, latin, german, french, spanish, are expressions and interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach them to the life of the pupil by the human ligaments that are ever at hand. chemistry, physics, botany, and physiology all throb with life if only the teacher can place the fingers of the pupils on their pulses. given the human teacher, the human child, and the humanized teaching, the vitalized school is inevitable. questions and exercises . what agencies have been employed with the expectation that they would improve the school? . what are the reasons why some of these have not accomplished more? . give instances in which the conservatism of teachers seems to have stood in the way of utilizing the element of human interest. . what do you think of a teacher who asserts that no important advance has been made in educational theory and practice since, say, ? . make an outline of what you think a college of education should do for the school. . what would you expect to gain from a course in school administration? . the president of at least one ohio college personally inspects and checks up the work of the professors from the standpoint of proper teaching standards, and has them visit one another's classes for friendly criticism and observation. he reports improvement in the standard of teaching. how is his plan applicable in your school? . a city high school principal states that it is not his custom to visit his teachers' classes; that he knows what is going on and that he interferes only if something is wrong. what do you think of his practice? how is the principle applicable in your school? . do the duties of a superintendent have to do only with curriculum and discipline, or have they to do also with teaching power? . what are some of the ways in which you have known superintendents successfully to increase the teaching power of the teachers? . what things do we need to know about a child in order to utilize his interests? . distinguish three types of teachers. . what are the objections to teaching the book? . what are the objections to teaching the subject? . what are some items of school work upon which some teachers spend time that they should devote to finding materials suited to the child's interests? . can one teacher utilize all of the interests of a child within a nine-month term? what is the measure of how far she should be expected to do so? chapter xxi behavior =behavior in retrospect.=--the caption of this chapter implies the behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. no sooner has the student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning. such a study affords large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine their own behavior in any mental attitude that approaches the scientific. the others seem to think that things just happen, and that their own behavior is fortuitous. they seem not to be able to reason from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what they were doing twenty years ago. =environment.=--in what measure is a man the product of his environment? to what extent is a man able to influence his environment? these questions start us on a line of inquiry that leads toward the realm of, at least, a hypothetical solution of the problem of behavior. after we have reached the conclusion, by means of concrete examples, that many men have influenced their environment, it becomes pertinent, at once, to inquire still further whence these men derived the power thus to modify their environment. we may not be able to reach final or satisfactory answers to these questions, but it will, none the less, prove a profitable exercise. we need not trench upon the theological doctrine of predestination, but we may, with impunity, speculate upon the possibility of a doctrine of educational predestination. =queries.=--was mr. george goethals predestined to become the engineer of the panama canal from the foundation of the world, or might he have become a farmer, a physician, or a poet? could julius cæsar have turned back from the rubicon and refrained from saying, "the die is cast"? could abraham lincoln have withheld his pen from the emancipation proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery? could any influence have deterred walter scott from writing "kenilworth"? was robert fulton's invention of the steamboat inevitable? could christopher columbus possibly have done otherwise than discover america? does education have anything whatever to do in determining what a man will or will not do? =antecedent causes.=--here sits a man, let us say, who is writing a musical selection. he works in a veritable frenzy, and all else seems negligible for the time. he well-nigh disdains food and sleep in the intensity of his interest. is this particular episode in his life merely happening, or does some causative influence lie back of this event somewhere in the years? did some influence of home, or school, or playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event? or, in other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the bit of paper before him? if this is an effect, what and where was the cause? in the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate antecedent causes? if a hundred musicians were writing musical compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar explanations of their behavior? =leadership.=--as a working hypothesis, it may be averred that ability to influence environment betokens leadership. with such a measuring-rod in hand we may go out into the community and determine, with some degree of accuracy, who are leaders and who are mere followers. then we should need to go further and discover degrees of leadership, whether small or large, and, also, the quality of the leadership, whether good or bad, wise or foolish, selfish or altruistic, noisy or serene, and all the many other variations. having done all this, we are still only on the threshold of our study, for we must reason back from our accumulated facts to their antecedent causes. if we score one man's leadership fifty and another's eighty, have we any possible warrant for concluding that the influences in their early life that tend to generate leadership were approximately as five to eight? =restricted concepts.=--this question is certain to encounter incredulity, just as it is certain to raise other questions. both results will be gratifying as showing an awakening of interest, which is the most and the best that the present discussion can possibly hope to accomplish. very many, perhaps most, teachers in the traditional school do their teaching with reference to the next examination. they remind their pupils daily of the on-coming examination and remind them of the dire consequences following their failure to attain the passing grade of seventy. they ask what answer the pupil would give to a certain question if it should appear in the examination. if they can somehow get their pupils to surmount that barrier of seventy at promotion time, they seem quite willing to turn their backs upon them and let the teacher in the next grade make what she can of such unprofitable baggage. =each lesson a prophecy.=--and we still call this education. it isn't education at all, but the merest hack work, and the tragedy of it is that the child is the one to suffer. the teacher goes on her complacent way happy in the consciousness that her pupils were promoted and, therefore, she will retain her place on the pay roll. it were more logical to have the same teacher continue with the pupil during his entire school life of twelve years, for, in that case, her interest in him would be continuous rather than temporary and spasmodic. but the present plan of changing teachers would be even better than that if only every teacher's work could be made to project itself not only to graduation day, but to the days of mature manhood and womanhood. if only every teacher were able to make each lesson a vital prophecy of what the pupil is to be and to do twenty years hence, then that lesson would become a condition precedent to the pupil's future behavior. =outlook.=--groping about in the twilight of possibilities we speculate in a mild and superficial way as to the extent to which heredity, environment, and education either singly or in combination are determining factors in human behavior. but when no definite answer is forthcoming we lose interest in the subject and have recourse to the traditional methods of our grandfathers. we lose sight of the fact that in our quest for the solution of this problem we are coming nearer and nearer to the answer to the perennial question, what is education? hence, neither the time nor the effort is wasted that we devote to this study. we may not understand heredity; we may find ourselves bewildered by environment; we may not apprehend what education is; but by keeping all these closely associated with behavior in our thinking we shall be the gainers. =long division ramified.=--we are admonished so to organize the activities of the school that they may function in behavior. that is an admonition of stupendous import as we discover when we attempt to compass the content of behavior. one of the activities of the school is long division. this is relatively simple, but the possible behavior in which it may function is far less simple. in the past, this same long division has functioned in the brooklyn bridge, in the hoosac tunnel, and washington monument, in the simplon pass, and in eiffel tower. it has helped us to travel up the mountain side on funicular railways, underneath rivers and cities by means of subways, under the ocean in submarines, and in the air by means of aircraft, and over the tops of cities on elevated railways. only the prophet would have the temerity to predict what further achievements the future holds in store. but all that has been done and all that will yet be done are only a part of the behavior in which this activity functions. =behavior amplified.=--human behavior runs the entire gamut, from the bestial to the sublime, with all the gradations between. it has to do with the mean thief who pilfers the petty treasures of the little child, and with the high-minded philanthropist who walks and works in obedience to the behests of altruism. it includes the frowzy slattern who offends the sight and also the high-born lady of quality whose presence exhales and, therefore, inspires to, refinement and grace. it has to do with the coarse boor who defiles with his person and his speech and the courtly, cultured gentleman who becomes the exemplar of those who come under his influence. it touches the depraved gamin of the alley and the celebrated scholar whose pen and voice shed light and comfort. it concerns itself with the dark lurking places of the prowlers of the night who prey upon innocence, virtue, and prosperity and with the cultured home whose members make and glorify civilization. =its scope.=--it swings through the mighty arc, from the anarchist plotting devastation and death up to socrates inciting his friends to good courage as he drinks the hemlock. it takes cognizance of the slave in his cabin no less than of lincoln in his act of setting the slaves free. it touches the extremes in mrs. grundy and clara barton. it concerns itself with medea scattering the limbs of her murdered brother along the way to delay her pursuers and with antigone performing the rites of burial over the body of her brother that his soul might live forever. it has to do with circe, who transformed men into pigs, and with frances willard, who sought to restore lost manhood. it includes all that pertains to lucrezia borgia and mary magdalene; nero and phillips brooks; john wilkes booth and nathan hale; becky sharp and evangeline; goneril and cordelia; and benedict arnold and george washington. =behavior in history.=--before the teacher can win a starting-point in her efforts to organize the activities of her school in such a manner that they may function in behavior, she must have a pretty clear notion as to what behavior really is. to gain this comprehensive notion she must review in her thinking the events that make up history. in the presence of each one of these events she must realize that this is the behavior in which antecedent activities functioned. then she will be free to speculate upon the character of those activities, what modifications, accretions, or abrasions they experienced in passing from the place of their origin to the event before her, and whether like activities in another place or another age would function in a similar event. she need not be discouraged if she finds no adequate answer, for she will be the better teacher because of the speculation, even lacking a definite answer. =machinery.=--she must challenge every piece of machinery that meets her gaze with the question "whence camest thou?" she knows, in a vague way, that it is the product of mind, but she needs to know more. she needs to know that the machine upon which she is looking did not merely happen, but that it has a history as fascinating as any romance if only she cause it to give forth a revelation of itself. she may find in tracing the evolution of the plow that the original was the forefinger of some cave man, in the remote past. for a certainty, she will find, lurking in some machine, in some form, the multiplication table, and this fact will form an interesting nexus between behavior in the form of the machine and the activities of the school. she will be delighted to learn that no machine was ever constructed without the aid of the multiplication table, and when she is teaching this table thereafter she does the work with keener zest, knowing that it may function in another machine. =art.=--when she looks at the "captive andromache" by leighton she is involved in a network of speculations. she wonders by what devious ways the mind of the artist had traveled in reaching this type and example of behavior. she wonders whether the artistic impulse was born in him or whether it was acquired. she sees that he knew his homer and she would be glad to know just how his reading of the "iliad" had come to function in this particular picture. she further wonders what lessons in drawing and painting the artist had had in the schools that finally culminated in this masterpiece, and whether any of his classmates ever achieved distinction as artists. she wonders, too, whether there is an embryo artist in her class and what she ought to do in the face of that possibility. again she wonders how geography, grammar, and spelling can be made to function in such a painting as rosa bonheur's "the plough oxen," and her wonder serves to invest these subjects with new meaning and power. =shakespeare.=--in the school at stratford they pointed out to her the desk at which shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to "the tempest," "king lear," and "hamlet." she pondered deeply the relation between the activities of the lad and the behavior of the man, wondering how much the school had to do with the plays that stand alone in literature, and whether he imbibed the power from associations, from books, from people, or from his ancestors. she wondered what magic ingredient had been dropped into the activities of his life that had proven the determining factor in the plays that set him apart among men. she realizes that his behavior was distinctive, and she fain would discover the talisman whose potent influence determined the bent and power of his mind. and she wonders, again, whether any pupil in her school may ever exemplify such behavior. =history.=--when she reads her history she has a keener, deeper, and wider interest than ever before, for she now realizes that every event of history is an effect, whose inciting causes lie back in the years, and is not fortuitous as she once imagined. she realizes that the historical event may have been the convergence of many lines of thinking emanating from widely divergent sources, and this conception serves to make her interest more acute. in thus reasoning from effect back to cause she gains the ability to reason from cause to effect and, therefore, her teaching of history becomes far more vital. she is studying the philosophy of history and not a mere catalogue of isolated and unrelated facts. history is a great web, and in the events she sees the pattern that minds have worked. she is more concerned now with the reactions of her pupils to this pattern than she is with mere names and dates, for these reactions give her a clew to tendencies on the part of her pupils that may lead to results of vast import. =poetry.=--in every poem she reads she finds an illustration of mental and spiritual behavior, and she fain would find the key that will discover the mental operations that conditioned the form of the poem. she would hark back to the primal impulse of each bit of imagery, and she analyzes and appraises each word and line with the zeal and skill of a connoisseur. she would estimate justly and accurately the activities that functioned in this sort of behavior. she seeks for the influences of landscapes, of sky, of birds, of sunsets, of clouds,--in short, of all nature, as well as of the manifestations of the human soul. thus the teacher gains access into the very heart of nature and life and can thus cause the poem to become a living thing to her pupils. in all literature she is ever seeking for the inciting causes; for only so can she prove an inspiring guide and counselor in pointing to them the way toward worthy achievements. =attitude of teacher.=--in conclusion, then, we may readily distinguish the vitalized teacher from the traditional teacher by her attitude toward the facts set down in the books. the traditional teacher looks upon them as mere facts to be noted, connoted, memorized, reproduced, and graded, whereas the vitalized teacher regards them as types of behavior, as ultimate effects of mental and spiritual activities. the traditional teacher knows that seven times nine are sixty-three, and that is quite enough for her purpose. if the pupil recites the fact correctly, she gives him a perfect grade and recommends him for promotion. for the vitalized teacher the bare fact is not enough. she does not disdain or neglect the mechanics of her work, but she sees beyond the present. she sees this same fact merging into the operations of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, physics, and engineering, until it finally functions in some enterprise that redounds to the well-being of humanity. =conclusion.=--to her every event of history, every fact of mathematics and science, every line of poetry, every passage of literature is pregnant with meaning, dynamic, vibrant, dramatic, and prophetic. nothing can be dull or prosaic to her electric touch. all the facts of the books, all the emotions of life, and all the beauties of nature she weaves into the fabric of her dreams for her pupils. the goal of her aspirations is far ahead, and around this goal she sees clustered those who were her pupils. in every recitation this goal looms large in her vision. she can envisage the viewpoint of her pupils, and thus strives to have them envisage hers. she yearns to have them join with her in looking down through the years when the activities of the school will be functioning in worthy behavior. questions and exercises . discuss the relative importance of environment as a factor in the behavior of plants; animals; children; men. . how may an understanding of the mutual reaction of the child and his environment assist the teacher in planning for character building in pupils? . make specific suggestions by which children may influence their environment. . discuss the vitalized teacher's contribution to the environment of the child. . after reading this chapter give your definition of "behavior." . discuss the author's idea of leadership. . define education in terms of behavior, environment, and heredity. . account for the difference in behavior of some of the characters mentioned in the chapter. . how may the vitalized teacher be distinguished from the traditional teacher in her attitude toward facts? . discuss the doctrine of educational predestination. chapter xxii bond and free =spiritual freedom.=--there is no slavery more abject than the bondage of ignorance. john bunyan was not greatly inconvenienced by being incarcerated in jail. his spirit could not be imprisoned, but the imprisonment of his body gave his mind and spirit freedom and opportunity to do work that, otherwise, might not have been done. if he had lived a mere physical life and had had no resources of the mind upon which to draw, his experience in the jail would have been most irksome. but, being equipped with mental and spiritual resources, he could smile disdain at prison bars, and proceed with his work in spiritual freedom. had he been dependent solely, or even mainly, upon food, sleep, drink, and other contributions to his physical being for his definition of life, then his whole life would have been restricted to the limits of his cell; but the more extensive and expansive resources of his life rendered the jail virtually nonexistent. =illustrations.=--it is possible, therefore, so to furnish the mind that it can enjoy freedom in spite of any bondage to which the body may be subjected. indeed, the whole process of education has as its large objective the freedom of the mind and spirit. knowledge of truth gives freedom; ignorance of truth is bondage. a man's knowledge may be measured by the extent of his freedom; his ignorance, by the extent of his bondage. in the presence of truth the man who knows stands free and unabashed, while the man who does not know stands baffled and embarrassed. in a chemical laboratory the man who knows chemistry moves about with ease and freedom, while the man who does not know chemistry stands fixed in one spot, fearing to move lest he may cause an explosion. to the man who knows astronomy the sky at night presents a marvelous panorama full of interest and inspiration, to the man who is ignorant of astronomy the same sky is merely a dome studded with dots of light. =rome.=--the man who lacks knowledge of history is utterly bewildered and ill at ease in the capitoline museum at rome. all about him are busts that represent the men who made roman history, but they have no meaning for him. nero and julius cæsar are mere names to him and, as such, bear no relation to life. cicero and caligula might exchange places and it would be all one to him. he takes a fleeting glance at the statue of the dying gaul, but it conveys no meaning to him. he has neither read nor heard of byron's poem which this statue inspired. he sees near by the celebrated marble faun, but he has not read hawthorne's romance and therefore the statue evokes no interest. in short, he is bored and uncomfortable, and importunes his companions to go elsewhere. when he looks out upon the forum he says it looks the same to him as any other stone quarry, and he roundly berates the shiftlessness of the romans in permitting the coliseum to remain when the stone could be used for building purposes, for bridges, and for paving. the tiber impresses him not at all for, as he says, he has seen much larger rivers and, certainly, many whose water is more clear. in the sistine chapel he cannot be persuaded to give more than a passing glance at the ceiling because it makes his neck ache to look up. the laocoön and apollo belvedere he will not see, giving as a reason that he is more than tired of looking at silly statuary. he feels it an imposition that he should be dragged around to such places when he cares nothing for them. his evident boredom is pathetic, and he repeatedly says that he'd far rather be visiting in the corner grocery back home, than to be spending his time in the vatican. =contrasts.=--in this, he speaks but the simple truth. in the grocery he has comfort while, in the vatican, he is in bondage. his ignorance of art, architecture, history, and literature reduces him to thralldom in any place that exemplifies these. in the grocery he has comfort because he can have a share in the small talk and gossip that obtain there. his companions speak his language and he feels himself to be one of them. were they, by any chance, to begin a discussion of history he would feel himself ostracized and would leave them to their own devices. if they would retain him as a companion they must keep within his range of interests and thinking. to go outside his small circle is to offer an affront. he cannot speak the language of history, or science, or art, and so experiences a feeling of discomfort in any presence where this language is spoken. =history.=--in this concrete illustration we find ample justification for the teaching of history in the schools. history is one of the large strands in the web of life, and to neglect this study is to deny to the pupil one of the elements of freedom. it is not easy to conceive a situation that lacks the element of history in one or another of its phases or manifestations. whether the pupil travels, or embarks upon a professional life, or associates, in any relation, with cultivated people, he will find a knowledge of history not only a convenience but a real necessity, if he is to escape the feeling of thralldom. the utilitarian value of school studies has been much exploited, and that phase is not to be neglected; but we need to go further in estimating the influence of any study. we need to inquire not only how a knowledge of the study will aid the pupil in his work, but also how it will contribute to his life. =restricted concepts.=--we lustily proclaim our country to be the land of the free, but our notion of freedom is much restricted. in the popular conception freedom has reference to the body. a man can walk the streets without molestation and can vote his sentiments at the polls, but he may not be able to take a day's ride about concord and lexington with any appreciable sense of freedom. he may walk about the congressional library and feel himself in prison. he may desert a lecture for the saloon in the interests of his own comfort. he may find the livery stable more congenial than the drawing-room. his body may experience a sort of freedom while his mind and spirit are held fast in the shackles of ignorance. a burroughs, an edison, a thoreau, might have his feet in the stocks and still have more freedom than such a man as this. he walks about amid historic scenes with his spiritual eyes blindfolded, and that condition of mind precludes freedom. =real freedom.=--we shall not attain our high privileges as a free people until freedom comes to mean more than the absence of physical restraint. our conception of freedom must reach out into the world of mind and spirit, and our educational processes must esteem it their chief function to set mental and spiritual prisoners free. we have only to read history, science, and literature to realize what sublime heights mind can attain in its explorations of the realms of truth, and, since the boys and girls of our schools are to pass this way but once, every effort possible should be made to accord to them full freedom to emulate the mental achievements of those who have gone before. they have a right to become the equals of their predecessors, and only freedom of mind and spirit can make them such. every man should be larger than his task, and only freedom of mind and spirit can make him so. the man who works in the ditch can revel among the sublime manifestations of truth if only his mind is rightly furnished. =spelling.=--the man who is deficient in spelling inevitably confines his vocabulary to narrow limits and so lacks facility of expression and nicety of diction. accordingly, he suffers by comparison with others whose vocabulary is more extensive and whose diction is, therefore, more elegant. the consciousness of his shortcomings restricts the exuberance of his life, and he fails of that sense of large freedom that a knowledge of spelling would certainly give. so that even in such an elementary study as spelling the school has an opportunity to generate in the pupils a feeling of freedom, and this feeling is quite as important in the scheme of life as the ability to spell correctly. in this statement, there is no straining for effects. on the contrary, many illustrations might be adduced to prove that it is but a plain statement of fact. a cultured lady confesses that she is thrown into a panic whenever she has occasion to use the word _tuesday_ because she is never certain of the spelling. =the switchboard.=--life may be likened to an extensive electric switchboard, and only that man or woman has complete freedom who can press the right button without hesitation or trepidation. the ignorant man stands paralyzed in the presence of this mystery and knows not how to proceed to evoke the correct response to his desires. it has been said that everything is infinitely high that we cannot see over. hence, to the man who does not know, cube root is infinitely high and, as such, is as far away from his comprehension as the fourth dimension or the precession of the equinoxes. in the presence of even such a simple truth as cube root he stands helpless and enthralled. he lives in a small circle and cannot know the joy of the man whose mind forgathers with the big truths of life. =comparisons.=--the ignorant man cannot accompany this man upon his mighty excursions, but must remain behind to make what he can of his feeble resources. the one can penetrate the mysteries of the planets and bring back their secrets; the other must confine his thinking to the weather and the crops. the one can find entertainment in the bible and shakespeare; the other seeks companionship among the cowboys and indians of the picture-films. the one sits in rapt delight through an evening of grand opera, reveling on the sunlit summits of harmony; the other can rise no higher in the scale of music than the raucous hand organ. the one finds keen delight among the masterpieces of art; the other finds his definition of art in the colored supplement. the one experiences the acme of pleasure in communing with historians, musicians, artists, scientists, and philologists; the other finds such associations the very acme of boredom. the one finds freedom among the big things of life; the other finds galling bondage. =three elements of freedom.=--there are three elements of freedom that are worthy of emphasis. these are self-reliance, self-support, and self-respect. these elements are the trinity that constitute one of the major ultimate aims of the vitalized school. the school that inculcates these qualities must prove a vital force in the life of the pupil; and the pupil who wins these qualities is well equipped for the work of real living. these qualities are the golden gateways to freedom, nor can there be a full measure of freedom if either of these qualities be lacking. moreover, these qualities are cumulative in their relations to one another. self-reliance leads to and engenders self-support, and both these underlie and condition self-respect. or, to put the case conversely, there cannot be self-respect in the absence of self-reliance and self-support. =self-reliance.=--it would not be easy to over-magnify the influence of the school that is rightly conducted in the way of inculcating the quality of self-reliance and in causing it to grow into a habit. every problem that the boy solves by his own efforts, every obstacle that he surmounts, every failure that he transforms into a success, and every advance he makes towards mastery gives him a greater degree of self-reliance, greater confidence in his powers, and greater courage to persevere. it is the high privilege of the teacher to cause a boy to believe in himself, to have confidence in his ability to win through. to this end, she adds gradually to the difficulties of his work, always keeping inside the limits of discouragement, and never fails to give recognition to successful achievements. in this way the boy gains self-reliance and so plumes himself for still loftier flights. day after day he moves upward and onward, until at length he exemplifies the sentiment of virgil, "they can because they think they can." =this quality in practice.=--the self-reliance that becomes ingrained in a boy's habits of life will not evaporate in the heat of the activities and competition of the after-school life. on the contrary, it will be reënforced and crystallized by the opportunities of business or professional life, and, in calm reliance upon his own powers, he will welcome competition as an opportunity to put himself to the test. he is no weakling, for in school he made his independent way in spite of the lions in his path, and so gained fiber and courage for the contests of daily life. and because he has industry, thrift, perseverance, and self-reliance the gates of success swing wide open and he enters into the heritage which he himself has won. =the sterling man.=--his career offers an emphatic negation to the notion that obtains here and there to the effect that education makes a boy weak and ineffective, robbing him of the quality of sterling elemental manhood, and fitting him only for the dance-hall and inane social functions. the man who is rightly trained has resources that enable him to add dignity and character to social functions in that he exhales power and bigness. people recognize in him a real man, capable, alert, and potential, and gladly pay him the silent tribute that manhood never fails to win. he can hold his own among the best, and only the best appeal to him. =self-respect.=--and, just as he wins the respect of others, so he wins the respect of himself, and so the triumvirate of virtues is complete. having achieved self-respect he disdains the cheap, the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial. he knows that there are real values in life that are worthy of his powers and best efforts, and these real values are the goal of his endeavors. moreover, he has achieved freedom, and so is not fettered by precedent, convention, or fads. he is free to establish precedents, to violate the conventions when a great principle is at stake, and to ignore fads. he can stand unabashed in the presence of the learned of the earth, and can understand the heartbeats of life, because he has had experience both of learning and of life. and being a free man his life is fuller and richer, and he knows when and how to bestow the help that will give to others a sense of freedom and make life for them a greater boon. questions and exercises . account for the production of some of our greatest religious literature in prison or in exile. give other instances than the one mentioned by the author. . give your idea of the author's concept of the terms "bondage" and "freedom." . add to the instances noted in this chapter where ignorance has produced bondage. . defend the assertion that the cost of ignorance in our country exceeds the cost of education. the total amount spent for public education in slightly exceeded $ , , . . how do the typical recitations of your school contribute to the happiness of your pupils? be specific. . how may lack of thoroughness limit freedom? illustrate. . how may education give rise to self-reliance? self-respect? . show that national and religious freedom depend upon education. chapter xxiii examinations =prelude.=--when the vitalized school has finally been achieved there will result a radical departure from the present procedure in the matter of examinations. a teacher in the act of preparing a list of examination questions of the traditional type is not an edifying spectacle. he has a text-book open before him from which he extracts nuts for his pupils to crack. it is a purely mechanical process and only a mechanician could possibly debase intelligence and manhood to such unworthy uses. were it not so pathetic it would excite laughter. but this teacher is the victim of tradition. he knows no other way. he made out examination questions in accordance with this plan fifteen years ago and the heavens didn't fall; then why, pray, change the method? besides, men and women who were thus examined when they were children in school have achieved distinction in the world's affairs, and that, of itself, proves the validity of the method, according to his way of thinking. =mental atrophy.=--it seems never to occur to him that children have large powers of resistance and that some of his pupils may have won distinction in spite of his teaching and his methods of examination and not because of them. his trouble is mental and spiritual atrophy. he thinks and feels by rule of thumb, "without variableness or shadow of turning." in the matter of new methods he is quite immune. he settled things to his complete satisfaction years ago, and what was good enough for his father, in school methods, is quite good enough for him. his self-satisfaction would approach sublimity, were it not so extremely ludicrous. he has a supercilious sneer for innovations. how he can bring himself to make concessions to modernity to the extent of riding in an automobile is one of the mysteries. =self-complacency.=--his complacency would excite profound admiration did it not betoken deadline inaction. he became becalmed on the sea of life years ago, but does not know it. when the procession of life moves past him he thinks he is the one who is in motion, and takes great unction to himself for his progressiveness--"and not a wave of trouble rolls across his peaceful breast." so he proceeds to copy another question from the text-book, solemnly writing it on a bit of paper, and later copying on the blackboard with such a show of bravery and gusto as would indicate that some great truth had been revealed to him alone. in an orotund voice he declaims to his pupils the mighty revelations that he copied from the book. his examination régime is the old offer of a mess of pottage for a birthright. =remembering and knowing.=--in our school practices we have become so inured to the question-and-answer method of the recitation that we have made the examination its counterpart. as teachers we are constantly admonishing our pupils to remember, as if that were the basic principle in the educational process. in reality we do not want them to remember--we want them to know; and the distinction is all-important. the child does not remember which is his right hand; he knows. he does not remember the face of his mother; he knows her. he does not remember which is the sun and which is the moon; he knows. he does not remember snow, and rain, and ice, and mud; he knows. =questions and answers.=--but, none the less, we proceed upon the agreeable assumption that education is the process of memorizing, and so reduce our pupils to the plane of parrots; for a parrot has a prodigious memory. hence, it comes to pass that, in the so-called preparation of their lessons, the pupils con the words of the book, again and again, and when they can repeat the words of the book we smile approval and give a perfect grade. it matters not at all that they display no intelligent understanding of the subject so long as they can repeat the statements of the book. it never seems to occur to the teacher that the pupil of the third grade might give the words of the binomial theorem without the slightest apprehension of its meaning. we grade for the repetition of words, not for intelligence. =court procedure.=--in our school practices we seem to take our cue from court procedure and make each pupil who recites feel that he is on the witness stand experiencing all its attendant discomforts, instead of being a coöperating agent in an agreeable enterprise. we suspend the sword of damocles above his head and demand from him such answers as will fill the measure of our preconceived notions. he may know more of the subject, in reality, than the teacher, but this will not avail. in fact, this may militate against him. she demands to know what the book says, with small concern for his own knowledge of the subject. we proclaim loudly that we must encourage the open mind, and then by our witness-stand ordeal forestall the possibility of open-mindedness. =rational methods.=--when we have learned wisdom enough, and humanity enough, and pedagogy enough to dispense with the quasi-inquisition type of recitation, the transition to a more rational method of examination will be well-nigh automatic. let it not be inferred that to inveigh against the question-and-answer type of recitation is to advocate any abatement of thoroughness. on the contrary, the thought is to insure greater thoroughness, and to make evident the patent truth that thoroughness and agreeableness are not incompatible. experience ought to teach us that we find it no hardship to work with supreme intensity at any task that lures us; and, in that respect, we are but grown-up children. we have only to generate a white-heat of interest in order to have our pupils work with intensity. but this sort of interest does not thrive under compulsion. =analysis and synthesis.=--the question-and-answer method evermore implies analysis. but children are inclined to synthesis, which shows at once that the analytic method runs counter to their natural bent. they like to make things, to put things together, to experiment along the lines of synthesis. hence the industrial arts appeal to them. but constructing problems satisfies their inclination to synthesis quite as well as constructing coat-hangers or culinary compounds, if only the incitement is rational. the writers of our text-books are coming to recognize this fact, and it does them credit. in time, we may hope to have books that will take into account the child's natural inclinations, and the schools will be the beneficiaries. =thinking.=--in the process of synthesis the pupil is free to draw upon the entire stock of his accumulated resources, whereas in the question-and-answer method he is circumscribed. in the question-and-answer plan he is encouraged to remember; in the other he is encouraged to think. in our theories we exalt thinking to the highest pinnacle, but in our practice we repress thinking and exalt memory. we admonish our pupils to think, sometimes with a degree of emphasis that weakens our admonition, and then bestow our laurel wreaths upon those who think little but remember much. our inconsistency in this respect would be amusing if the child's interests could be ignored. but seeing that the child pays the penalty, our inconsistency is inexcusable. =penalizing.=--the question-and-answer régime, in its full application, is not wholly unlike a punitive expedition, in that the teacher asks the question and sits with pencil poised in air ready to blacklist the unfortunate pupil whose memory fails him for the moment. the child is embarrassed, if not panic-stricken, and the teacher seems more like an avenging nemesis than a friend and helper. just when he needs help he receives epithets and a condemning zero. he sinks into himself, disgusted and outraged, and becomes wholly indifferent to the subsequent phases of the lesson. he feels that he has been trapped and betrayed, and days are required for his redemption from discouragement. =traditional method.=--in the school where this method is in vogue the examination takes on the color and character of the recitation. at the close of the term, or semester, the teacher makes out the proverbial ten questions which very often reflect her own bias, or predilections, and in these ten questions are the issues of life and death. a hundred questions might be asked upon the subjects upon which the pupils are to be tested, but these ten are the only ones offered--with no options. then the grading of the papers ensues, and, in this ordeal, the teacher thinks herself another atlas carrying the world upon her shoulders. the boy who receives sixty-seven and the one who receives twenty-seven are both banished into outer darkness without recourse. the teacher may know that the former boy is able to do the work of the next grade, but the marks she has made on the paper are sacred things, and he has fallen below the requisite seventy. hence, he is banished to the limbo of the lost, for she is the supreme arbiter of his fate. no allowance is made for nervousness, illness, or temperamental conditions, but the same measuring-rod is applied to all with no discrimination, and she has the marks on the papers to prove her infallibility. if a pupil should dare to question the correctness of her grades, he would be punished or penalized for impertinence. her grades are oracular, inviolable, and therefore not subject to review. she may have been quite able to grade the pupils justly without any such ordeal, but the school has the examination habit, and all the sacred rites must be observed. in that school there is but one way of salvation, and that way is not subject either to repeal or amendment. it is _via sacra_ and must not be profaned. time and long usage have set the seal of their approval upon it and woe betide the vandal who would dare tamper with it. =testing for intelligence.=--this emphatic, albeit true, representation of the type of examinations that still obtains in some schools has been set out thus in some detail that we may have a basis of comparison with the other type of examinations that tests for intelligence rather than for memory. for children, not unlike their elders, are glad to have people proceed upon the assumption that they are endowed with a modicum of intelligence. they will strive earnestly to meet the expectations of their parents and teachers. many wise mothers and teachers have incited children to their best efforts by giving them to know that much is expected of them. it is always far better to expect rather than to demand. coercion may be necessary at times, but coercion frowns while expectation smiles. hence, in every school exercise the teacher does well to concede to the pupils a reasonable degree of intelligence and then let her expectations be commensurate with their intelligence. =concessions.=--it is an affront to the intelligence of a child not to concede that he knows that the days are longer in the summer than in winter. we may fully expect such a degree of intelligence, and base our teaching upon this assumption. in our examinations we pay a delicate compliment to the child by giving him occasion for thinking. we may ask him why the days are longer in summer than in winter and thus give him the feeling that we respect his intelligence. our examinations may always assume observed facts. even if he has never noted the fact that his shadow is shorter in summer than in winter, if we assume such knowledge on his part and ask him why such is the case, we shall stimulate his powers of observation along with his thinking. if the teacher asks a boy when and by whom america was discovered, he resents the implication of crass ignorance; but if she asks how columbus came to discover america in , he feels that it is conceded that there are some things he knows. =illustrations.=--if we ask for the width of the zones, we are placing the emphasis upon memory; but, if we ask them to account for the width of the zones, we are assuming some knowledge and are testing for intelligent thinking. if we ask why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west we are, once again, assuming a knowledge of the facts and testing for intelligence. if we ask for the location of the suez, kiel, and welland canals, we are testing for mere memory; but, if we ask what useful purpose these canals serve, we are testing for intelligence. when we ask pupils to give the rule for division of fractions, we are testing again for mere memory; but when we ask why we invert the terms of the divisor, we are treating our pupils as rational beings. our pedagogical sins bulk large in geography when we continually ask pupils to locate places that have no interest for them. such teaching is a travesty on pedagogy and a sin against childhood. =intelligence of teacher.=--if the teacher is consulting her own ease and comfort, then she will conduct the examination as a test for memory. it requires but little work and less thinking to formulate a set of examination questions on this basis. she has only to turn the pages of the text-book and make a check-mark here and there till she has accumulated ten questions, and the trick is done. but if she is testing for intelligence, the matter is not so simple. to test for intelligence requires intelligence and a careful thinking over the whole scope of the subject under consideration. to do this effectively the teacher must keep within the range of the pupil's powers and still stimulate him to his best efforts. =major and minor.=--she must distinguish between major and minor, and this is no slight task. her own bias may tend to elevate a minor into a major rank, and this disturbs the balance. again, she must see things in their right relations and proportions, and this requires deliberate thinking. in "king lear" she may regard the fool as a negligible minor, but some pupil may have discovered that shakespeare intended this character to serve a great dramatic purpose, and the teacher suffers humiliation before her class. if she were testing for memory, she would ask the class to name ten characters of the play and like hackneyed questions, so that her own intelligence would not be put to the test. accurate scholarship and broad general intelligence may be combined in the same person and, certainly, we are striving to inculcate and foster these qualities in our pupils. =books of questions and answers.=--when the examinations for teachers shall become tests for intelligence and not for memory, we may fully expect to find the same principle filtering into our school practices. it is a sad travesty upon education that teachers, even in this enlightened age, still try to prepare for examinations by committing to memory questions and answers from some book or educational paper. but the fault lies not so much with the teachers themselves as with those who prepare the questions. the teachers have been led to believe that to be able to recall memorized facts is education. there are those, of course, who will commercialize this misconception of education by publishing books of questions and answers. of course weak teachers will purchase these books, thinking them a passport into the promised land. the reform must come at the source of the questions that constitute the examination. when examiners have grown broad enough in their conception of education to construct questions that will test for intelligence, we shall soon be rid of such an incubus upon educational progress as a book of questions and answers. the field is wide and alluring. history, literature, the sciences, and the languages are rich in material that can be used in testing for intelligence, and we need not resort to petty chit-chat in preparing for examinations. =the way of reform.=--we must take this broader view of the whole subject of examinations before we can hope to emerge from our beclouded and restricted conceptions of education. and it can be done, as we know from the fact that it is being done. here and there we find superintendents, principals, and teachers who are shuddering away from the question-and-answer method both in the recitation and in the examination. they have outgrown the swaddling-clothes and have risen to the estate of broad-minded, intelligent manhood and womanhood. they have enlarged their concept of education and have become too generous in their impulses to subject either teachers or pupils to an ordeal that is a drag upon their mental and spiritual freedom. questions and exercises . what purposes are actually achieved by examinations? . what evils necessarily accompany examinations? what evils usually accompany them? . outline a plan by which these purposes may be achieved unaccompanied by the usual evils. . is memory of facts the best test of knowledge? suggest other tests by which the value of a pupil's knowledge may be judged. . experts sometimes vary more than per cent in grading the same manuscript. the same person often varies per cent or more in grading the same manuscript at different times. an experiment with your own grading might prove interesting. . do you and your pupils in actual practice regard examinations as an end or as a means to an end? as corroborating evidence or as a final proof of competence? . how may examinations test intelligence? . suggest methods by which pupils may be led to distinguish major from minor and to see things in their right relations. . is it more desirable to have the pupils develop these powers or to memorize facts? why? . why are "question and answer" publications antagonistic to modern educational practice? why harmful to students? chapter xxiv world-building =an outline.=--education is the process of world-building. every man builds his own world and is confined, throughout life, to the world which he himself builds. he cannot build for another, nor can another build for him. neither can there be an exchange of worlds. moreover, the process of building continues to the end of life. in building their respective worlds all men have access to the same materials, and the character of each man's world, then, is conditioned by his choice and use of these materials. if one man elects to build a small world for himself, he will find, at hand, an abundant supply of petty materials that he is free to use in its construction. but, if he elects to build a large world, the big things of life are his to use. if he chooses to spend his life in an ugly world, he will find ample materials for his purpose. if, however, he prefers a beautiful world, the materials will not be lacking, and he will have the joy and inspiration that come from spending a lifetime amid things that are fraught with beauty. =exemplifications.=--this conception of education is not a figment of fancy but a reality whose verification can be attested by a thousand examples. we have only to look about us to see people who are living among things that are unbeautiful and who might be living in beautiful worlds had they elected to do so. others are spending their lives among things that are trivial and inconsequential, apparently blind to the great and significant things that lie all about them. some build their worlds with the minor materials, while others select the majors. some select the husks, while others choose the grain. some build their worlds from the materials that others disdain and seem not to realize the inferiority of their worlds as compared with others. their supreme complacency in the midst of the ugliness or pettiness of their worlds seems to accentuate the conclusion that they have not been able to see, or else have not been able to use, the other materials that are available. =flowers.=--to the man who would live in a beautiful world flowers will be a necessity. to such a man life would be robbed of some of its charm if his world should lack flowers. but unless he has subjective flowers he cannot have objective ones. he must have a sensory foundation that will react to flowers or there can be no flowers in his world. there may be flowers upon his breakfast table, but unless he has a sensory foundation that will react to them they will be nonexistent to him. he can react to the bacon, eggs, and potatoes, but not to the flowers, unless he has cultivated flowers in his spirit before coming to the table. =lily-of-the-valley civilization.=--all the flowers that grow may adorn his world if he so elects. he may be content with dandelions and sunflowers if he so wills, or he may reach forth and gather about him for his delight the entire gamut of roses from the maryland to the american beauty, the violet and its college-bred descendant the pansy, the heliotrope, the gladiolus, the carnation, the primrose, the chrysanthemum, the sweet pea, the aster, and the orchid. but, if he can reach the high plane of the lily-of-the-valley, in all its daintiness, delicacy, chastity, and fragrance, he will have achieved distinction. when society shall have attained to the lily-of-the-valley plane, life will be fine, fragrant, and beautiful. intemperance will be no more, and profanity, vulgarity, and coarseness will disappear. such things cannot thrive in a lily-of-the-valley world, but shrink away from the presence of beauty and purity. =music.=--again, the man who is building such a world will elect to have music as one of the elements. but here, again, we find that he must have a sensory foundation or there will be no music for him. moreover, the nature of this sensory foundation will determine the character of the music to be found in his world. he may be satisfied with "tipperary" or he may yearn for handel, haydn, mozart, beethoven, melba, and schumann-heink. he may not be able to rise above the plane of ragtime, or he may attain to the sublime plane of "the dead march in saul." he has access to all the music from the discordant hand organ to the oratorio and grand opera. in his introduction of a concert company, the chairman said: "ladies and gentlemen, the artists who are to favor us this evening will render nothing but high-grade selections. if any of you are inclined to be critical and to say that their music is above your heads, i beg to remind you that it will not be above the place where your heads ought to be." in substance he was saying that the nature of the music depended not so much upon the singers as upon the sensory foundation of the auditors. =music and life.=--having a sensory foundation capable of reacting to the best music, this man opens wide the portals of his world for the reception of the orchestra, the concert, the opera, and the choir, and his spirit revels in the "concord of sweet sounds." through the toil of the day he anticipates the music of the evening, and the next day he goes to his work buoyant and rejuvenated by reason of the musical refreshment. he has music in anticipation and music in retrospect, and thus his world is regaled with harmony. his world cannot be a dead level or a desert, for it is diversified by the alluring undulations of music and made fertile by the perennial fountains of inspiring harmony, and his world "shall be filled with music and the cares that infest the day shall fold their tents like the arabs, and as silently steal away." =children.=--again, this man elects to have children in his world, for he has come to know that there is no sweeter music on earth than the laughter of a child. were he sojourning five hundred miles away from the abode of children he would soon be glad to walk the entire distance that he might again hear the prattle, the laughter, or even the crying of a child. cowboys on the plains have been thrown into a frenzy of delight at the sight of a little child. full well the man knows that, if he would have children in his world, he must find these children for himself; for this task may not be delegated. if he would bring paul and florence dombey into his world, he must win them to himself by living with them throughout all the pages of the book. in order to lure pollyanna into his world to imbue it with the spirit of gladness, he must establish a community of interests with her by imbibing her spirit as revealed in the book. =characterizations.=--he may not have little joe in his world unless his spirit becomes attuned to the pathos of _bleak house_. and he both wants and needs little joe. echoing and reëchoing through his soul each day are the words of the little chap, "he wuz good to me, he wuz," and acting vicariously for the little fellow he touches the lives of other unfortunates as the hours go by and brings to them sunshine and hope and courage. and he must needs have tiny tim, also, to banish the cobwebs from his soul with his fervent "god bless us every one." the day cannot go far wrong with this simple prayer clinging in his memory. it permeates the perplexities of the day, gives resiliency to his spirit, and encourages and reënforces all the noble impulses that come into his consciousness. wherever he goes and whatever he is doing he feels that tiny tim is present to bestow his childish benediction. =lessons from childhood.=--in _laddie_ he finds a whole family of children to his liking and feels that his world is the better for their presence. to _old curiosity shop_ and _silas marner_ he goes and brings thence little nell and eppie, feeling that in their boon companionship they will make his world more attractive to himself and others by their gentle graces of kindness and helpfulness. in his quest for children of the right sort he lingers long with dickens, the apostle and benefactor of childhood, but passes by the colored supplement. for all the children in his world he would have the approval and blessing of the master. he would know, when he hears the words "except ye become as little children," that reference is made to such children as he has about him. at the feet of these children he sits and learns the lessons of sincerity, guilelessness, simplicity, and faith, and through their eyes he sees life glorified. =stars=.--nor must his world lack stars. he needs these to draw his thoughts away from sordid things out into the far spaces. he would not spend a lifetime thinking of nothing beyond the weather, the ball-score, his clothes, and his ailments. he wants to think big thoughts, and he would have stars to guide him. he knows that a man is as high, as broad, and as deep as his thoughts, and that if he would grow big in his thinking he must have big objects to engage his thoughts. he would explore the infinite spaces, commune with the planets in their courses, attain the sublime heights where the masters have wrought, and discover, if possible, the sources of power, genius, and inspiration. he would find delight in the colors of the rainbow, the glory of the morning, and the iridescence of the dewdrop. he would train his thoughts to scan the spaces behind the clouds, to transcend the snow-capped mountain, and to penetrate the depths of the sea. he would visualize creation, evolution, and the intricate processes of life. so he must have stars in his world. =books.=--in addition to all these he must have books in his world, and he is cognizant of the fact that his neighbors judge both himself and his world by the character of the books he selects. he may select _mrs. wiggs_ or _les miserables_. if he elects to have about him books of the cabbage patch variety, he condemns himself to that sort of reading for a whole lifetime. nor is any redemption possible from such standards save by his own efforts. neither men nor angels can draw him up to the plane of victor hugo if he elects to abide in the cabbage patch. if he prefers _graustark_ to _macbeth_, all people, including his dearest friends, will go on their way and leave him to his choice. if he says he cannot read shakespeare, massinger, milton, or wordsworth, he does no violence to the reputation of these writers, but merely defines and classifies himself. =authors as companions.=--having learned or sensed these distinctions, he elects to consort with burns, keats, shelley, southey, homer, dante, virgil, hawthorne, scott, maupassant, goethe, schiller, and george eliot. in such society he never has occasion to explain or apologize for his companions. he reads their books in the open and gains a feeling of elation and exaltation. when he would see life in the large, he sits before the picture of jean valjean. when he would see integrity and fidelity in spite of suffering, he sits before the portrait of job. when he would see men of heroic size, he has the characters of homer file by. if he would see the panorama of the emotions of the human soul, he selects hugo as his guide. if he would laugh, he reads _tam o'shanter_; if he would weep, he reads of the death of little nell. if he would see real heroism, he follows sidney carton to the scaffold, or esther into the presence of the king. he goes to shelley's _skylark_ to find beauty, burns's _highland mary_ to find tenderness, hawthorne's _scarlet letter_ to find tragedy, and the _book of job_ to find sublimity. through his books he comes to know quasimodo and sir galahad; becky sharp and penelope; aaron burr and enoch arden; and herodias and florence nightingale. =people.=--but his world would be incomplete without people, and here, again, he is free to choose. and, since he wants people in his world who will be constant reminders to him of qualities that he himself would cultivate, he selects ruth and jephthah's daughter to represent fidelity. when temptation assails him he finds them ready to lead him back and up to the plane of high resolves. to remind him of indomitable courage and perseverance he selects william the silent, christopher columbus, and moses. when his courage is waning and he is becoming flaccid and indolent, their very presence is a rebuke, and a survey of their achievements restores him to himself. as examples of patriotic thinking and action he invites into his world samuel adams, thomas jefferson, and alexander hamilton. they remind him that he is a product of the past and that it devolves upon him to pass on to posterity without spot or blemish the heritage that has come to him through the patriotic service and sacrifice of his progenitors. =influence of people.=--that he may never lose sight of the fact that it is cowardly and degrading to recede from high ideals he opens the doors of his world for milton, beethoven, and michael angelo. their superb achievements, considered in connection with their afflictions and hardships, are a source of inspiration to him and keep him up to his best. as a token of his appreciation of these exemplars he strives to excel himself, thus proving himself a worthy disciple. they need not chide him, for in their presence he cannot do otherwise than hold fast to his ideals and struggle upward with a courage born of inspiration. living among such goodly people, he finds his world resplendent with the virtues that prove a halo to life. with such people about him he can be neither lonely nor despondent. if the cares of life fret him for the moment, he takes counsel with them and his equilibrium is restored. in their company he finds life a joyous experience, for their very presence exhales the qualities that make life worth while. as an inevitable result of all the influences that constitute his world he finds himself yearning for meliorism as the crownpiece. drinking from the fount of inspiration that gushes forth at the behest of all these wholesome influences, he longs for betterment. good as he finds the things about him, he feels that they are not yet good enough. so he becomes the eloquent apostle of meliorism, proclaiming his gospel without abatement. the roads are not good enough, and he would have better ones. our houses are not good enough, and he would have people design and build better ones. our music is not good enough as yet, and he would encourage men and women to write better. our books are not good enough, and he would incite people to write better ones. our conduct of civic affairs is not good enough, and he would stimulate society to strive for civic betterment. our municipal government is not good enough, and he proclaims the need to make improvement. our national government is not all that it might be, and he would have all people join in a benevolent conspiracy to make it better. =influence of the school.=--thus day by day this man continues the building of a world for himself. and day by day he strives to make his world better, not only as an abiding place for himself but also as an example for others. in short, this man is a product of the vitalized school, and is weaving into the pattern of his life the teachings of the school. in exuberance of spirit and in fervent gratitude he looks back to the school that taught him to know that education is the process of world-building. and to the school he gives the credit for the large and beautiful world in which he lives. questions and exercises . show how the world that one builds depends upon one's own choosing. . do people seem to realize this truth when they do not build their world as they might? if pupils fail to realize it, what can the teacher do to help them? . suppose a pupil is interested in petty things; the school must utilize his interests. how can this be done? how can he be led to larger aims? . to what extent does the richness of our lives depend on the way we react to stimuli? . explain how each of the influences alluded to in this chapter helps the teacher. . why does the character of the books one reads most serve as an index of one's own character? . what do you think of a person who prefers new books? . what do you think of one who prefers sensational books? . why is it especially important for a teacher to be thoroughly acquainted with the great characters of history? . does acquaintance with the great in history tend to produce merely a good static character, or does it do more? chapter xxv a typical vitalized school =the school an expression of the teacher.=--the vitalized school may be a school of one room or of forty rooms; it may be in the city, in the village, in the hamlet, or in the heart of the country; it may be a kindergarten, a grade school, a high school, or a college. the size or the location of the school does not determine its vital quality. this, on the contrary, is determined by the character of its work and the spirit that obtains. in general it may be said that the vitalized teacher renders the school vital. this places upon her a large measure of responsibility, but she accepts it with equanimity, and rejoices in the opportunity to test out her powers. it needs to be oft repeated that if the teacher is static, the school will be static; but if the teacher is dynamic, the school will be dynamic. the teacher can neither delegate, abrogate, abate, nor abridge her responsibility. the school is either vitalized or it is not, according to what the teacher is and does, and what the teacher does depends upon what she is. in short, the school is an expression of the teacher, and, if the school is not vitalized, the reason is not far to seek. =a centralized school.=--for the purpose of illustration we may assume that the typical vitalized school is located in the country, and is what is known as a centralized school. the grounds comprise about ten acres, and the building contains, all told, not fewer than twenty rooms, large and small. this building was designed by a student of school problems, and is not merely a theory of the architect. each room, and each detail, articulates with every other room in harmony with a general scheme of which the child and his interests are the prime considerations. the well-being of the child takes precedence over the reputation of the architect. every nook of the building has its specific function, and this function has vital reference to the child. the location of each piece of furniture can be explained from the viewpoint of the child, and the architectural scheme is considered subsidiary. the seats conform to the child, and not the reverse. the scheme of lighting concerns itself with the child's welfare rather than with the external appearance. =integrity in construction and decoration.=--the decorations throughout the building are all chaste and artistic. nothing below this standard can win admission. no picture is admitted that does not represent art. the theory is that the school has a reflex influence upon the homes that attracts them to its standards, and experience reveals the fact that the decorations in the homes are constantly rising in artistic tone. the standards of the school become the standards of the pupils, and the pupils, in turn, modify and improve the standards of the homes. there is a degree of simplicity and dignity throughout the building that banishes from the homes the ornate and the bizarre. there is integrity in every detail of construction, and the absence of veneer gives to the pupils a definition of honesty and sincerity. there is nothing either in the building or in the work of the school that savors of the show element. the teachers of history and mathematics cannot display the products of their teaching and, therefore, there is no display of her products by the teacher of drawing. this school believes in education but not in exhibition. words of commendation may be dispensed in the classrooms, but there is no exhibit of any department in the halls. the teachers are too polite and too considerate to sanction any such display. =simplicity and sincerity.=--the library is notable for the character of the books, but not for the number. the teachers and pupils are too genuine ever to become thrasonical, and no teacher or pupil is ever heard to boast of anything pertaining to the school. they neither boast nor apologize, but leave every visitor free to make his own appraisement of their school and its belongings. the teachers are too truly cultured and the pupils are too well trained ever to exploit themselves, their school, or their work. the pictures, the statuary, the fittings, and the equipment are all of the best, and, hence, show for themselves without exploitation. to teachers and pupils it would seem a mark of ill-breeding to expatiate upon their own things. such a thing is simply not done in this school. the auditorium is a stately, commodious, and beautiful room, and everybody connected with the school accepts it as a matter of course with no boastful comment. anything approaching braggadocio would prove a discordant note in this school, and, in this respect, it represents the american ideal that is to be. =rooms are phases of life.=--the home economics room, the industrial arts room, the laboratories, the dining room, the rest rooms, and the hospital room are all supplied with suitable fittings and equipment and all represent phases of life. at luncheon each pupil is served a bowl of soup or other hot dish to supplement his own private lunch, and this food is supplied at public expense. the school authorities have the wisdom to realize that health is an asset of the community and is fundamental in effective school work. the pupils serve their schoolmates in relays, wash the dishes, and restore them to their places. the boys do not think they demean themselves by such service, but enter into it in the true spirit of democracy. a teacher is present to modify and chasten the hurry and heedlessness of childhood, and there is decorum without apparent repression. =industrial work.=--in connection with the industrial arts department there is a repair shop where all the implements that are used in caring for the school farm, gardens, orchards, and lawns are kept in repair. here the auto trucks in which the pupils are brought to the school are repaired by the drivers, assisted by the boys. in this shop the boys gain the practical knowledge that enables them to keep in repair the tools and machinery, including automobiles, at their homes. the farmers who have no sons in school avail themselves of the skill and fidelity that obtain in the shop, bringing in their tools, their harness, and their automobiles for needed repairs. the money thus earned is expended for school equipment. the products of the orchards, farm, and garden are the property of the school and are all preserved for use in the home economics department for school lunches. the man in charge of the farm is employed by the year and is a member of the teaching staff. the farm, gardens, orchard, and lawn are integral parts of the school, and perform the functions of laboratories. =school a life enterprise.=--there are all grades in the school, from the kindergarten through the high school. there is but slight disparity in the size of the classes, for the parents instinctively set apart thirteen years of the time of their children for life in the school. to these parents school and life are synonymous, and when a child enters the kindergarten he enlists in the enterprise for a term of thirteen years. the homes as well as the school are arranged on this basis, and this plan of procedure is ingrained in the social consciousness. deserting the school is no more thought of than any other form of suicide. if, by any chance, a boy should desert the school, he would be a pariah in that community and could not live among the people in any degree of comfort. he would be made to feel that he had debased himself and cast aspersion upon society. the looks that the people would bestow upon him would sting more than flagellation. he would be made to feel that he had expatriated himself, and neither himself nor his parents would be in good standing in the community. they would be made to feel that their conduct was nothing short of sacrilege. =public sentiment.=--in view of the school sentiment that obtains in the community the eighth grade is practically as populous as the first grade. attendance upon school work is a habit of thinking both with the children and with their parents, and school is taken for granted the same as eating and sleeping. if a boy should, for any cause, fail to graduate from the high school, every patron of the school would regard it as a personal calamity. they would feel that he had, somehow, been dropped off the train before he reached his destination, and the whole community would be inclined to wear badges of mourning. every parent is vitally interested in each child of the community, whether he has children in school or not, and thus school taxes are paid with pride and elation. the school is regarded as a safe investment that pays large dividends. patrons rally to the calls of the school with rare unanimity and heartiness. differences in politics and religion evaporate in their school, for the school is the high plane upon which they meet in fraternal concord. =the course of study.=--the course of study is flexible, and because of its resiliency it adapts itself easily and gracefully to the native dispositions and the aptitudes of the various pupils. if the boy has a penchant for agriculture, provision is made for him, both in the theory and in the practical applications of the subject. if he inclines to science, the laboratories accord him a gracious welcome. the studies are adapted to the boy and not the boy to the studies. no boy need discontinue school to find on the outside something that is congenial, for, within the school, he may find work that represents life in all its phases. if he yearns for horticulture, then this study is made his major and, all in good time, he is made foreman of the group who care for the gardens. if the course of study lacks the element which he craves and for which he has a natural aptitude, this branch is added to the course. the economy of life demands the conservation of childhood and youth and the school deems it the part of wisdom as well as civic and social economy to provide special instruction for this boy, as was done in the case of helen keller. this school, in theory and in practice, is firm in its opposition to wasting boys and girls. hence, ample provision is made for the child of unusual inclinations. =electives.=--the pupils do not elect a study because it is easy, but because their inclinations run in that direction. indeed, there are no easy courses, no snap courses in the school. diligent, careful, thorough work is the rule, and there can be found no semblance of approval for loafing or dawdling. the school stands for purposes that are clear in definition and for work that is intense. there are no prizes offered for excellent work, but the approbation of parents, teachers, and schoolmates, in the estimation of the pupils, far transcends any material or symbolic prizes that could be offered. in school work and in conduct the pupils all strive to win this approval. there is no coarseness nor boorishness, for that would forfeit this approval. the cigarette is under ban, for public sentiment is against it; and, after all, public sentiment is the final arbiter of conduct. hence, no boy will demean himself by flying in the face of public sentiment through indulging in any practice that this sentiment proclaims unclean or enervating. =the school the focus of community life.=--this school is the focus of the community. hither come the patrons for music, for lectures, for art, for books and magazines, for social stimulus, and, in short, for all the elements of their avocational life. indeed, in educational matters, the community is a big wholesome family and the school is the shrine about which they assemble for educational and cultural communion. it is quite a common practice for mothers to sit in the classrooms engaged in knitting or sewing while their children are busy with their lessons. for, in their conception of life, geography and sewing are coördinate elements, and so blend in perfect harmony in the school régime. at the luncheon period these mothers go to the dining room with their children in the same spirit of coöperation that gives distinction to the school and to the community. there is an interflow of interests between the school and the homes that makes for unity of purpose and practice. there is freedom in the school but not license. people move about in a natural way but with delicate consideration for the rights and sentiments of others. the atmosphere of the school interdicts rudeness. there is a quiet dignity, serenity, and intensity, with no abatement of freedom. in this school it is not good form for a boy to be less than a gentleman or for a girl to be less than a lady. =the teachers.=--the atmosphere in which the pupils live is, mainly, an exhalation from the spirit of the teachers. they live and work together in a delightful spirit of concord and coöperation. they are magnanimous and would refuse to be a part of any life that would decline from this high plane. in this corps there are no hysterics, no heroics, no strain, no stress. they are, first of all, successful human beings; and their expert teaching is an expression of their human qualities. their teaching is borne along on the tones of conversation. they know that well-modulated tones of voice contribute to the culture and well-being of the school. should a teacher ever indulge in screeching, nagging, hectoring, badgering, or sarcasm, she would find herself ostracized. such things are simply not done in this school. hence, she would soon realize that this school is no place for her and would voluntarily resign. the school is simply above and beyond her kind. =unity of purpose.=--among the teachers there are no jealousies, because each one is striving to exalt the others. they are so generous in their impulses, and have such exalted conceptions of life, that they incline to catalogue their colleagues among the very elect. the teacher in the high school and the teacher in the primary grade hold frequent conversations concerning each other's work, and no teacher ever loses interest in the pupils when they advance to the next grade. to such teachers, education is not parceled out in terms of years but is a continuous process, even as life itself. they use the text-book merely as a convenience, but never as a necessity. if all the text-books in the school should be destroyed overnight, the work would proceed as usual the next day, barring mere inconvenience. they respect themselves and others too highly ever to assume a patronizing air toward their pupils. on the contrary, they treat them as coördinates and confederates in the noble and exhilarating game of life. =the vitalized school.=--they have due regard to their personal appearance, but, once they have decided for the day, they dismiss the matter from their thinking and devote their attention to major considerations. neither in dress, in manner, nor in conversation do they ever bring into the school a discordant note. school hours are not a detached portion of life but, rather, an integral part of life, and to them life is quite as agreeable during these hours as before and after. such as they cannot do otherwise than render the school vital. and when such teachers and patrons as these join in such a benevolent conspiracy, then shall we realize not only a typical school but the vitalized school. questions and exercises . upon what does the vitalization of a school mainly depend? upon what else does it depend in part? . what suggestion is made in this chapter in regard to the planning of school buildings? . why should care be taken in choosing the decorations of a school? . why is it unwise for teacher or pupils to boast of the achievements of the school? . why has the question of school lunches gained so much prominence recently? . how should the industrial work in a school be linked with that in the community? . why are there fewer students in the higher than in the lower grades of most schools? make a careful analysis of the situation in this respect in your school. . why is it a calamity to a community for a boy to fail to graduate from the high school? . what may be done to prevent a child going outside the school to find something congenial? . what should be a student's motive in choosing a course? . how do you make your school a center for community life? how can you make it more of a center than it is? . how is the spirit of jealousy among teachers injurious to our school system? what usually makes one teacher disparage the work of another? . what is essential in vitalizing a school? index absorbing standards, . acquisitiveness, . advantages of socialized recitation, . agriculture; a typical study, ; its rapid development, ; relation to geology, ; the source of life, . altruism, . ambition, . american restaurants, . american story, . analysis and synthesis, . anarchy, . ancestor, child as a future, . ancestors, attitude of, . answers, repetition of, . antecedent causes, . art, , ; teaching as an, . aspiration, ; and worship, . aspirations, . attitude of teacher, , . attitude towards work, . authors, . automobile, ; factory, . beauty, desire for pastoral, . behavior, amplified, ; in history, ; in retrospect, ; scope of, . betterment, . body subject to the mind, . books, ; as exponents of life, ; of questions and answers, ; of life, ; supreme, . botany, importance of, . boy, story of a, . bread, . centralized school, . characterizations, . child; as a future ancestor, ; as a whole, ; as the objective, ; and teacher, quest of, ; as the center in school procedure, ; imagination of, ; supreme, ; right to express himself, ; play instinct of, ; relation of to school work, ; life, ; rights of, . child's; conception of truth, ; conception, ; need of ideals, ; viewpoint of teacher, ; experiences, ; native tendencies, ; right to the best, ; native interests, ; imagination, . childhood curtailed, . children, ; parental attitude towards, ; common interests, ; should have school privileges, ; real interests, ; _vs._ statistics, . cigarettes, . circus day, . civilization, . clean living, . college influences, . columbus, voyage of, . commerce, . common from commonplace, . comparison of life and living, . comparison of two teachers, . complacency of teacher, . complete living defined, . complexity of life, . concepts restricted, , . concessions, . conclusion, . conduct of teacher, . conflict, . conservation, . contrasted methods, . contrasts, . coöperation, . course of study, . court procedure, . curtailment of childhood, . definition; of complete living, ; of poetry, ; of politician, ; of socialized recitation, ; of teaching, . degrees and human qualities, . democracy; foreign concept of, ; the vitalized school a, . democratic spirit, manifestations of, . democratic teacher, . desire is fundamental, . desires for things intangible, . domestic science, . dynamic qualities, . economic articulation, . education, , ; and substitution, ; by absorption, ; schools of, ; unconsciously gained, . efficiency, . electives, . english, teacher of, . enthusiasm, element of, . environment, . etymology, . examinations, ; traditional method, ; testing for intelligence, ; way of reform, . expertness, appraisal of teaching, . faith, , . filtration plant and a vitalized school, . flowers, . food and life, . foreign concept of democracy, . formalities, meaningless, . freedom, , ; elements of, ; real, . function of the school, , . gang element, . generations, rights of the coming, . girl and her elders, . grammar, . great stone face, . habit, persistency of, . history, , , , ; behavior in, ; meaning of, . home and the school, . hospitals cited, . house of parliament, . human interest, . human qualities, degrees of, . humor, ; betokens deep feeling, ; defies explanation, ; lack of, ; of lincoln, . ideal; of the school, ; rôle of, . idealist, . ideals, a perpetual influence, . imagination of children, , . imitation, politician worthy of, . incomplete living, . individual, responsibility of the, . industrial work, . influence; of people, ; of the school, ; upon pupils, . influences of college, . initial statement, . innate tendencies, . intelligence of teacher, . intensity, life measured by, . interest in practice, . interest, life the great human, . joy in work of artist teacher, . language, ; a social study, ; and vitality, . leadership, , . learning democracy, . lesson a prophecy, . lessons from childhood, . life; and living compared, ; and music, ; and reading, ; as subject matter in teaching, ; books as exponents of, ; book of, ; complexity of, ; every subject invested with, ; how the poet learns, ; in literature, ; quality of, ; manifestations of, ; measured by intensity, ; sea as, ; teachers' influx of, ; the great human interest, ; transfusion of, . life and food, . lincoln's humor, . literature; life in, ; pedagogy in, . long division ramified, . machine teacher, . machinery, . major and minor, . man, . manifestations of life, . mark twain as a philosopher, . mathematics vitalized, . meanderings, . melting pot, . mental atrophy, . methods, ; contrasted, ; potency of right, ; of the politician, . michael angelo, . military training, . minor and major, . misconceptions, , . misfits, . mistakes, . monuments, . mulberry bend, . music, ; and life, . native land, . needs of society, . outlook, . ownership, potency of, . parental attitude towards children, . parliament, house of, . patriot, a typical, . patriotism; a determining motive, ; as a working principle, ; conclusions, ; in daily life, ; thrift as, . pedagogy in literature, . penalizing, . people, ; influence of, . perseverance, . personal efficiency, . physical training, . physics and chemistry, . physiology, . poetry, ; defined, . poet learns life how, . politician defined, ; methods of, ; worthy of imitation, . possibilities, . potency of right methods, . power of understanding, . problem of the teacher, . proprietary interests, . public sentiment, . pupil teacher, . question stated, . questions and answers, ; books of, . rational methods, . reading and life, . recitation, example of socialized, . reflex influence, . remembering and knowing, . repeating answers, . resourcefulness, . responsibility of the school, . restricted concepts, . resultants, . rights of the child, . rome, . rooms, . sanitation, . scholar's concept of the sea, . school; and society, ; and the home, ; an expression of the teacher, ; and factory compared, ; a life enterprise, ; function of the, ; function of, ; ideal of the, ; influence of, . schoolhouse, ; the community center, . schools; of education, ; responsibility of, ; work of the, . sciences, relation of, to life, . sea; as life, ; scholar's concept of, . self-complacency, . self-interest, . self-reliance, . self-respect, . shakespeare, . simplicity and sincerity, . snobbery, . social intercourse, . social study, language a, . socialized recitation; definition of, ; sample of, ; exemplified in society, . society; and the school, ; needs of, . sound body, . spelling, ; as patriotism, . spirit, things of the, . spiritual freedom, . stars, . statistics _vs._ children, . stories, . story of a boy, . street signs, . substitutions, results of, . switchboard, . synthesis and analysis, . synthetic teaching, . teacher, ; and child, ; as a machine, ; as environment, ; attitude towards children, ; conduct of, ; characteristic qualities of, ; intelligence of, ; growth of, ; her supremacy, ; of english, ; responsibility of, ; rule of life, ; seeing life large, ; school an expression of, ; skill of the, ; status irrevocable, ; volubility, . teachers, ; attitude, , ; complacency, ; contrasted, ; first type, ; influx of life, ; problem, ; province, ; other self, ; three types of, . teaching, ; as a fine art, ; defined, ; test of, ; life as subject matter in, ; power, . temperance, . tests of teaching, . things of the spirit, . thinking, . thirteen colonies, . three types of teachers, . thrift as patriotism, . time element, basic considerations, . time, waste of, . tom sawyer, . trained minds, ; achievements of, . transfusion of life, . travel instinct, . truth, child's conception of, . twain story, . two teachers compared, . typical patriot, . understanding, power of, . unity of purpose, . variety in excellence, . vitalized mathematics, . vitalized school, ; a democracy, ; an exemplification of complete living, ; filtration plant, . voluble teacher, . waste of time, . weaknesses transmitted, . westminster abbey, . word automobile, . word in use, . work; a blessing, ; as a privilege, ; and enjoyment, ; of the school, ; potency of mental, ; misconceptions of, . world-building, . the following pages contain advertisements of macmillan books on kindred subjects. modern pedagogy =alexander= the prussian elementary school system $ . =bagley= classroom management. its principles and technique . craftsmanship in teaching . educational values . educative process, the . school discipline . =bigelow= sex education . =brewer= the vocational guidance movement . =bricker= teaching of agriculture in the high school . =brown= american high school . =chubb= the teaching of english in elementary and secondary schools . =cloyd= modern education in europe and the orient . =cubberley= state and county educational reorganization . =cubberley and elliott= state and county school administration . =curtis= education through play (educational edition) . practical conduct of play (educational edition) . the play movement and its significance . =de garmo= interest and education . principles of secondary education vols. i, $ . ; ii, . ; iii, . =dewey= democracy and education, a philosophy of education . =dobbs= illustrative handwork . =dresslar= school hygiene . =dutton= social phases of education in the school and the home . =eaton and stevens= commercial work and training for girls . =farrington= commercial education in germany . =foght= the american rural school . rural denmark and its schools . the rural teacher and his work . =ganong= the teaching botanist . =graves= a history of education. vol. i. before the middle ages . vol. ii. a history of education during the middle ages . vol. iii. modern times . great educators of three centuries . peter ramus and the educational reformation of the th century . a students' history of education . =halleck= education of the central nervous system . =hall-quest= supervised study . =hanus= educational aims and values . modern school, a . =hart= educational resources of village and rural communities . =heatwole= a history of education in virginia . =henderson= principles of education . =herrick= meaning and practice of commercial education . =holtz= principles and methods of teaching geography . =home= philosophy of education . psychological principles of education . idealism in education . story-telling, questioning and studying . =howerth= the art of education . =huey= psychology and pedagogy of reading . =hummel and hummel= materials and methods in high school agriculture . =jessup and coffman= the supervision of arithmetic . =johnson, henry= teaching of history in elementary and secondary schools . =kahn and klein= commercial education, principles and methods in . =kennedy= fundamentals in methods . =kerschensteiner= the idea of the industrial school . =kilpatrick, v. e.= departmental teaching in elementary schools . =kilpatrick, w. b.= froebel's kindergarten principles critically examined . =kirkpatrick, e. a.= fundamentals of child study . =lee= play in education . =mckeever= training the girl . the industrial training of the boy . =macvannel= outline of a course in the philosophy of education . =miller= education for the needs of life . =monroe= principles of secondary education . text-book in the history of education . syllabus of a course of study on the history and principles of education . source book in the history of education for the greek and roman period . brief course in the history of education . cyclopedia of education, vols. . =o'shea= dynamic factors in education . =pearson= vitalized school . =perry= management of a city school . outlines of school administration . =pyle= the examination of school children . =sachs= the american secondary school . =sisson= essentials of character . =smith= all the children of all the people (teachers' edition) . =sneath and hodges= moral training in the school and home . =starch= educational measurements . experiments in educational psychology . =strayer= a brief course in the teaching process . =strayer and norsworthy= how to teach . =strayer and thorndike= educational administration quantitative studies . =taylor= handbook of vocational education . principles and methods of teaching reading . =thorndike= education: a first book . =vandewalker= kindergarten, the, in american education . =ward= the montessori method and the american school . =wayland= how to teach american history . the macmillan company boston new york atlanta chicago san francisco dallas three addresses to girls at school three addresses to girls at school by the rev. j. m. wilson, m.a. head master of clifton college and vice-president of the clifton high school for girls london percival & co. _king street, covent garden_ preface. the following addresses were printed for private circulation among those to whom they were delivered. but they fell also into other hands; and i have been frequently asked to publish them. i hesitated, on account of the personal and local allusions; but i have found it impossible to remove these allusions, and i have therefore reprinted the addresses in their original form. j.m.w. clifton college, _sept. ._ contents. page i. education _october , ._ the high school, clifton. ii. high school education for girls _december, ._ the high schools at bath and clifton. iii. religion _april , ._ st. leonard's school, st. andrews, fife. three addresses to girls at school i. education. education.[ ] now that i have given away the certificates it will be expected that i should make a few remarks on that inexhaustible subject, education. my remarks will be brief. i take this opportunity of explaining to our visitors the nature of the higher certificate examination. it is an examination instituted originally to test the efficiency of the highest forms of our public schools, and to enable boys to pass the earlier university examinations while still at school. the subjects of study are divided into four groups. in order to obtain a certificate it is necessary to pass in four subjects taken from not less than three groups. a certificate therefore ensures a sound and fairly wide education. the subjects of the groups are languages, mathematics, english history, and lastly science. one concession is made to girls which is not made to boys. they are allowed to pass in two subjects one year, and two others the next, and thus obtain their certificates piecemeal. boys have to pass in all four subjects the same year. the high school sent in seventeen candidates for the examination in two or three of the subjects--history, elementary mathematics, french, german, and latin,--and fifteen of these passed in two subjects at least: and, inasmuch as seven of them had in a previous year passed in two other subjects, they obtained their certificates. the rest carry on their two subjects, and will, we hope, obtain their certificates next summer; six of them appear to be still in the school. this is a very satisfactory result. the value of these certificates to the public is the testimony they give to the very high efficiency of the teaching. these examinations are not of the standard of the junior or senior local examinations. they are very much harder. and all who know about these matters see at a glance that a school that ventures to send in its girls for this examination only is aiming very high. the certificates for music, given by the harrow music school examiners, are also recognised by the profession as having a considerable value. but on this subject i cannot speak with the same knowledge. the value of these examinations to the mistresses is that they serve as a guide and standard for teaching. we are all of us the better for being thus kept up to the mark. their value to you is that they help to make your work definite and sound: and that, if it is slipshod, you shall at any rate know that it is slipshod. therefore, speaking for the council, and as the parent of a high school girl, and as one of the public, i may say that we set a very high value on these examinations and their results. they test and prove absolute merit. now, you may have noticed that one of the characteristics of this school is the absence of all prizes and personal competitions within the school itself; all that only brings out the relative merit of individuals. i dare say you have wondered why this should be so, and perhaps grumbled a little. "other girls," you say, "bring home prizes: our brothers bring home prizes; or at any rate have the chance of doing so--why don't we?" and not only you, but some friends of the school who would like to give prizes--for it is a great pleasure to give prizes--have sometimes wondered why miss woods says "no." i will tell you why. miss woods holds--and i believe she is quite right--that to introduce the element of competition, while it would certainly stimulate the clever and industrious to more work, would also certainly tend to obscure and weaken the real motives for work in all, which ought to outlive, but do not always outlive, the age at which prizes are won. intelligent industry, without the inducement of prizes, is a far more precious and far more durable habit than industry stimulated by incessant competition. teaching and learning are alike the better for the absence of this element, when possible. i consider this to be one of the most striking characteristics of our high school, and one of which you ought to be most proud. it is a distinction of this school. and when you speak of it, as you well may do, with some pride, you will not forget that it is due entirely to the genius and character of your head-mistress. i believe that one result will be, that you will be the more certain to continue to educate yourselves, and not to imagine that education is over when you leave school. is it necessary to say anything to you about the value of education? i think it is; because so many of the processes of education seem at the time to be drudgery, that any glimpses and reminders of the noble results attained by all this drudgery are cheering and encouraging. the reason why it is worth your while to get the best possible education you can, to continue it as long as you can, to make the very most of it by using all your intelligence and industry and vivacity, and by resolving to enjoy every detail of it, and indeed of all your school life, is that it will make you--_you yourself_--so much more of a person. more--as being more pleasant to others, more useful to others, in an ever-widening sphere of influence, but also more as attaining a higher development of your own nature. let us look at two or three ways in which, as you may easily see, education helps to do some of these things. education increases your interest in everything; in art, in history, in politics, in literature, in novels, in scenery, in character, in travel, in your relation to friends, to servants, to everybody. and it is _interest_ in these things that is the never-failing charm in a companion. who could bear to live with a thoroughly uneducated woman?--a country milkmaid, for instance, or an uneducated milliner's girl. she would bore one to death in a week. now, just so far as girls of your class approach to the type of the milkmaid or the milliner, so far they are sure to be eventually mere gossips and bores to friends, family, and acquaintance, in spite of amiabilities of all sorts. many-sided and ever-growing interests, a life and aims capable of expansion--the fruits of a trained and active mind--are the durable charms and wholesome influences in all society. these are among the results of a really liberal education. education does something to overcome the prejudices of mere ignorance. of all sorts of massive, impenetrable obstacles, the most hopeless and immovable is the prejudice of a thoroughly ignorant and narrow-minded woman of a certain social position. it forms a solid wall which bars all progress. argument, authority, proof, experience avail nought. and remember, that the prejudices of ignorance are responsible for far more evils in this world than ill-nature or even vice. ill-nature and vice are not very common, at any rate in the rank of ladies; they are discountenanced by society; but the prejudices of ignorance--i am sure you wish me to tell you the truth--these are not rare. think, moreover, for a moment how much the cultivated intelligence of a few does to render the society in which we move more enjoyable: how it converts "the random and officious sociabilities of society" into a quickening and enjoyable intercourse and stimulus: everybody can recall instances of such a happy result of education. this can only be done by educated women. how much more might be done if there were more of them! and think, too, how enormously a great increase of trained intelligence in our own class--among such as you will be in a few years--would increase the power of dealing with great social questions. all sorts of work is brought to a standstill for want of trained intelligence. it is not good will, it is not enthusiasm, it is not money that is wanted for all sorts of work; it is good sense, trained intelligence, cultivated minds. some rather difficult piece of work has to be done; and one runs over in one's mind who could be found to do it. one after another is given up. one lacks the ability--another the steadiness--another the training--another the mind awakened to see the need: and so the work is not done. "the harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few." a really liberal education, and the influence at school of cultivated and vigorous minds, is the cure for this. again, you will do little good in the world unless you have wide and strong sympathies: wide--so as to embrace many different types of character; strong--so as to outlast minor rebuffs and failures. now understanding is the first step to sympathy, and therefore education widens and strengthens our sympathies: it delivers us from ignorant prepossessions, and in this way alone it doubles our powers, and fits us for far greater varieties of life, and for the unknown demands that the future may make upon us. i spoke of the narrowness and immovability of ignorance. there is another narrowness which is not due to ignorance so much as to persistent exclusiveness in the range of ideas admitted. fight against this with all your might. the tendency of all uneducated people is to view each thing as it is by itself, each part without reference to the whole; and then increased knowledge of that part does little more than intensify the narrowness. education--liberal education--and the association with many and active types of mind, among people of your own age, as well as your teachers, is the only cure for this. try to understand other people's point of view. don't think that you and a select few have a monopoly of all truth and wisdom. "it takes all sorts to make a world," and you must understand "all sorts" if you would understand the world and help it. you are living in a great age, when changes of many kinds are in progress in our political and social and religious ideas. there never was a greater need of trained intelligence, clear heads, and earnest hearts. and the part that women play is not a subordinate one. they act directly, and still more indirectly. the best men that have ever lived have traced their high ideals to the influence of noble women as mothers or sisters or wives. no man who is engaged in the serious work of the world, in the effort to purify public opinion and direct it aright, but is helped or hindered by the women of his household. few men can stand the depressing and degrading influence of the uninterested and placid amiability of women incapable of the true public spirit, incapable of a generous or noble aim--whose whole sphere of ideas is petty and personal. it is not only that such women do nothing themselves--they slowly asphyxiate their friends, their brothers, or their husbands. these are the unawakened women; and education may deliver you from this dreadful fate, which is commoner than you think. in no respect is the influence of women more important than in religion. much might be said of the obstacles placed in the way of religious progress by the crude and dogmatic prepossessions of ignorant women, who will rush in with confident assertion where angels might fear to tread: but this is neither the time nor the place for such remarks. it is enough to remind you that in no part of your life do you more need the width and modesty and courage of thought, and the delicacy of insight given by culture, than when you are facing the grave religious questions of the day, either for yourself or others. but let me turn to a somewhat less serious subject. we earnestly desire that women should be highly educated. and yet is there not a type of educated woman which we do not wholly admire? i am not going to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers. education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. we forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness--the want of perfect sanity--in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women of genius; but in ordinary folk, no. these are the strong-minded women; ordinary folk, who make a vigorous protest against one or two of the minor mistakes of society, instead of lifting the whole: i should call these, women of imperfect sanity. it is a small matter that you should protest against some small maladjustment or folly; but it is a great matter that you should be perfectly sane and well-balanced. now education helps sanity. it shows the proportion of things. an american essayist bids us "keep our eyes on the fixed stars." education helps us to do this. it helps us to live the life we have to lead on a higher mental and spiritual level it glorifies the actual. and now, seeing these things are so, what ought to be the attitude of educated girls and women towards pleasures, the usual pleasures of society? certainly not the cynical one--"life would be tolerable if it were not for its pleasures." pleasures do make up, and ought to make up, a considerable portion of life. now i have no time for an essay on pleasures. i will only offer two remarks. one is that the pleasure open to all cultivated women, even in the pleasures that please them least, is the pleasure of giving pleasure. go to give pleasure, not to get it, and that converts anything into a pleasure. the other remark is, pitch your ordinary level of life on so quiet a note that simple things shall not fail to please. if home, and children, and games, and the daily routine of life--if the sight of october woods and the severn sea, and of human happy faces fail to please, then either in fact or in imagination you are drugging yourself with some strong drink of excitement, and spoiling the natural healthy appetite for simple pleasures. this is one of the dangers of educated women: but it is their danger because they are imperfectly educated: educated on one side, that of books; and not on the other and greater side, of wide human sympathies. society seems to burden and narrow and dull the uneducated woman, but it also hardens and dulls a certain sort of educated woman too, one who refuses her sympathies to the pleasures of life. but to the fuller nature, society brings width and fresh clearness. it gives the larger heart and the readier sympathy, and the wider the sphere the more does such a nature expand to fill it. what i am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is good, but an educated sympathy is better. i recall certain lines written by the late lord carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and commonplace:-- "you say that my love is plain, but that i can never allow, when i look at the thought for others that is written on her brow. "the eyes are not fine, i own, she has not a well-cut nose, but a smile for others' pleasure and a sigh for others' woes. "quick to perceive a want, quicker to set it right, quickest in overlooking injury, wrong, or slight. "hark to her words to the sick, look at her patient ways, every word she utters speaks to the speaker's praise. "purity, truth, and love, are they such common things? if hers were a common nature women would all have wings. "talent she may not have, beauty, nor wit, nor grace, but until she's among the angels she cannot be commonplace." there is something to remember: cultivate sympathy, gentleness, forgiveness, purity, truth, love: and then, though you may have no other gifts, "until you're among the angels, you cannot be commonplace." and here i might conclude. but i should not satisfy myself or you, if i did so without paying my tribute of genuine commendation to the high school, and of hearty respect for the head-mistress and her staff of teachers. clifton owes miss woods a great debt for the tone of high-mindedness and loyalty, for the moral and intellectual stamp that she has set on the school. she has won, as we all know, the sincere respect and attachment of her mistresses and her old pupils; and the older and wiser you grow the more you all will learn to honour and love her. and you will please her best by thorough loyalty to the highest aims of the school which she puts before you by her words and by her example. footnotes: [footnote : an address given at the high school, clifton, oct. , .] ii. high school education for girls. high school education for girls.[ ] it is a real pleasure to find myself in bath on an educational mission. i have ancestral and personal educational connections with bath of very old standing. my father was curate of st. michael's before i was born; my grandfather and uncle were in succession head-masters of the grammar school here, fine scholars both, of the old school. my first visit to bath was when i was nine years old, and on that occasion i had my first real stand-up fight with a small bath grammar school boy. i think that if the old house is still standing i could find the place where we fought, and where a master brutally interrupted us with a walking-stick. since those days, my relations with bath have been rare, but peaceful; unless, indeed, the honourable competition between clifton college and its brilliant daughter, bath college, may be regarded as a ceaseless but a friendly combat between their two head-masters whom you see so peaceably side by side. i propose, first, to say a few words about the condition of schools twenty years ago, before the present impulse towards the higher education of women gave us high schools and colleges at the universities, and other educational movements. there is a most interesting chapter in the report of the endowed schools commission of on girls' schools, and some valuable evidence collected by the assistant commissioners. it is not ancient history yet, and therein lies its great value to us. it shows us the evils from which we are only now escaping in our high schools: evils which still prevail to a formidable extent in a large section of girls' education, and from which i can scarcely imagine bath is wholly free. the report speaks of the general indifference of parents to the education of their girls in our whole upper and middle class, both absolutely and relatively to that of their boys. that indifference in part remains. there was a strong prejudice that girls could not learn the same subjects as boys, and that even if they could, such an education was useless and even injurious. that prejudice still survives, in face of facts. the right education, it was thought, for girls, was one of accomplishments and of routine work, with conversational knowledge of french. the ideal of a girl's character was that she was to be merely amiable, ready to please and be pleased; it was, as was somewhat severely said by one of the assistant commissioners, not to be good and useful when married, but to _get_ married. there was no ideal for single women. they did not realize how much of the work of the world must go undone unless there is a large class of highly educated single women. this view of girls' education is not yet extinct. corresponding to the ideal on the part of the ordinary british parent was, of course, the school itself. there was no high ideal of physical health, and but little belief that it depended on physical conditions; therefore the schools were neither large and airy, nor well provided with recreation ground; not games and play, but an operation known as "crocodiling" formed the daily and wearisome exercise of girls. that defect also is common still. there was no ideal of art, or belief in the effect of artistic surroundings, and therefore the schools were unpretending even to ugliness and meanness. the walls were not beautified with pictures, nor were the rooms furnished with taste. there was no high ideal of cultivating the intelligence, and therefore most of the lessons that were not devoted to accomplishments, such as music, flower-painting, fancy work, hand-screen making, etc., were given to memory work, and note-books, in which extracts were made from standard authors and specimen sums worked with flourishes wondrous to behold. the serious study of literature and history was almost unknown. the memory work consisted in many schools in learning mangnall's questions and brewer's guide to science--fearful books. the first was miscellaneous: what is lightning? how is sago made? what were the sicilian vespers, the properties of the atmosphere, the length of the mississippi, and the pelagian heresy? these are, i believe, actual specimens of the questions; and the answers were committed to memory. about twenty-five years ago i examined some girls in brewer's guide to science. the verbal knowledge of some of them was quite wonderful; their understanding of the subject absolutely _nil_. they could rattle off all about positive and negative electricity, and leyden jars and batteries; but the words obviously conveyed no ideas whatever, and they cheerfully talked utter nonsense in answer to questions not in the book. examinations for schools were not yet instituted; the education was unguided, and therefore largely misguided. do not let us imagine for an instant that these evils have been generally cured. the secondary education of the country is still in a deplorable condition; and it behoves us to repeat on all occasions that it is so. the schools i am describing from the report of twenty years ago exist and abound and flourish still, owing to the widespread indifference of parents to the education of their girls, to the qualifications and training of their mistresses, and the efficiency of the schools. untested, unguided, they exist and even thrive, and will do so until a sounder public opinion and the proved superiority of well-trained mistresses and well-educated girls gradually exterminates the inefficient schools. but we are, i fear, a long way still from this desirable consummation. what were the mistresses? for the most part worthy, even excellent ladies, who had no other means of livelihood, and who had no special education themselves, and no training whatever. naturally they taught what they could, and laid stress on what was called the _formation of character_, which they usually regarded as somehow alternative with intellectual attainments and stimulus, and progress in which could not be submitted to obvious tests. i suppose most of us think that there is no more valuable assistance in the formation of character than any pursuit that leads the mind away from frivolous pursuits, egotistic or morbid fancies, and fills it with memories of noble words and lives, teaches it to love our great poets and writers, and gives it sympathies with great causes. but this was not the prevailing opinion twenty years ago. the influence of good people, good homes, good example--in a word truly religious influence, as we shall all admit--is the strongest element in the formation of character; but the next strongest is assuredly that education which teaches us to admire "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report;" and this ought to be, and is, one of the results of the literary teaching given by well-educated mistresses. i have been describing the common type of what used to be called the "seminaries" and "establishments for young ladies" of twenty years ago. and it may give you the impression that there was no good education to be got in those days, and that the ladies of my generation were therefore very ill-educated. permit me to correct that impression. there were homes in which the girls learned something from father or from mother, or, perhaps, something from a not very talented governess; but in which they educated themselves with a hunger and thirst after knowledge, and an enjoyment of literature that is rare in any school. do not imagine that any school education under mistresses however skilled, or resulting in certificates however brilliant, is really as effective in the formation of strong intellectual tastes and clear judgment and ability as the self-education which was won by the mothers of some of you, by the women of my generation and those before. such education was rare, but it was possible, and it is possible still. under such a system a few are educated and the many fail altogether. the advantage of our day is that education is offered to a much larger number. but i cannot call it better than that which was won by a few in the generation of your mothers. if we would combine the exceptional merits of the old system with the high average merits of the new we must jealously preserve the element of freedom and self-education. to return to the report. the indifference of parents and the public, the inadequacy of school buildings and appliances, the low intellectual ideals of mistresses, were the evils of twenty years ago, prevailing very widely and lowering school education, and we must not expect to have got rid of them altogether. an educational atmosphere is not changed in twenty years. but our high schools are a very real step in advance. the numbers of your school show that there is a considerable and increasing fraction of residents in bath who do care for the intellectual quality of the education of their girls; and the report of the examiners is a most satisfactory guarantee that the instruction given here is thoroughly efficient along the whole line. bath must be congratulated on its high school for girls, as it must be congratulated on its college for boys. but are we therefore to rest and be thankful in the complacent belief that we have now at length attained perfection, at least in our high schools? i am called in to bless high school education, and i do bless it from my heart. i know something of it. my own daughter was at such a school; i have been vice-president of a high school for ten years. i wish there were high schools in every town in england. they have done and are doing much to lift the standard of girls' education in england. but i will again remind you that high schools are educating but a fraction of the population, and that the faults of twenty years ago still characterise our girls' education as a whole. and now, having said this, i shall not be misunderstood if i go on to speak of some of the deficiencies in our ideals of girls' education which seem to me to affect high schools as well as all other schools. one point, in which the older education with its manifold defects had a real merit, is that there was no over-teaching, no hurry to produce results, and therefore no disgust aroused with learning and literature. at any rate, the girls, or the best of them, left school or governess "with an appetite." now i consider this is a real test of teaching at school or college, in science or literature: does it leave boys and girls hungry for more, with such a love for learning that they will go on studying of themselves? if the teaching of some science is such that you never want to go to another science lecture as long as you live: your lessons on literature such that your shakespeare, your spenser, your burke, your browning will never again descend from your shelves: then, whatever else schools may have done, they have sacrificed the future to the present. it is on this account that the pressure of external examinations and its effect on the teaching of mistresses must be most carefully watched. to get immediate results is easy, but it is sometimes at the cost of later results. our aim should be not so much to teach, as to make our pupils love to learn, and have methods of learning; and every teacher should remember that our pupils can learn far more than we can teach them; and, as thring used to say, "hammering is not teaching." with a system of competitive examinations for the army and civil service, boys must sometimes sacrifice the future to the present. girls need never do so, and therefore girls' schools need not copy the faults as well as the excellences of boys' schools. i have ventured to say so much for an intellectual danger in high schools. i do not doubt that your head-mistress is aware of it, and on her guard: i speak much more to the public, to the parents, and to the council (if i may say so), as an expert, because i know that the public sometimes want to be satisfied that the education is good at every stage, and they ought to be content if it is good at the final stage. another point on which i would venture to say a word to parents is this. do not take your girls away from school too early. every schoolmaster knows that the most valuable years, those which leave the deepest marks in character and intellect, are those from sixteen to eighteen. it is equally true with girls, as schoolmistresses know equally well. it is in the later years that they get the full benefit of the higher teaching, and that much of what may have seemed the drudgery of earlier work reaps its natural and deserved reward. let your children come early, so as to be taught well from the beginning, and let them stay late. i do not myself know what your buildings may be; but a friend to whom i wrote speaks of them as inadequate and somewhat unworthy of the city. may i venture to say to a bath public that it is worth while to have first-rate buildings for educational purposes? no money is better spent. if the bath public will take this up in earnest it cannot be doubted that the girls' school company would second their efforts in such an important centre. come over and see our clifton high school, with its spacious lawns and playgrounds and pleasant rooms, and you will be discontented with a righteous discontent. and now i will point out another defect in high school education which parents and mistresses may do much to remedy. there is usually--and i am assuming without direct knowledge that it is the case here--no system by which any one girl is known through her whole school career to any one mistress; nothing corresponding to the tutor system of our public schools. it follows that a girl passes from form to form, and the relation between her and her mistress is so constantly broken that it is morally less powerful than it might be. the friendly and permanent relation of old days is converted into an official and temporary relation. it will be obvious to any one who reflects that the loss is great. the cure for it is twofold. the parents may do much by establishing a friendly relation with the form mistresses of their girls. i have known parents who had never taken the trouble to inquire even the names of their girls' mistress. if parents wish to get really the best out of a school, i would say to them (and i am speaking specially to mothers), you are delegating to the form mistress a very large share of the responsibility for the formation of your daughter's character; the least you can do is to be in the most friendly and confidential communication with her that circumstances permit. and i would say to the mistresses that, as far as is possible, you should be to the girls what form masters are in a good school to their boys--friends in school and out of school, acquainted with their tastes, companions sometimes in their games or their walks, and in all ways breaking down the merely formal relation of teacher and pupil. the ideally bad master, as i have often said to my young masters on a first appointment, is one who as soon as his boys clear out of the class-room, puts his hands in his pockets and whistles, and thanks heaven that he will see no more of the boys for so many hours. i do not know what the corresponding action on the part of a mistress may be, as i believe they have no pockets and can't whistle, but there is probably a corresponding state of mind. i venture, therefore, to suggest that in our high schools there should be a greater _rapprochement_ than is usual between parents and mistresses and girls in order to make the system more truly educational in the best sense. i am now going to turn to a wholly different subject; and i am going to talk to the girls. in the crusade against the lower type of education that prevailed twenty years ago, and still exists, who are the most important agents? it is the girls who are still in the high schools, or who are passing out of them, or who are otherwise getting the higher education in a few private schools. "ye are our epistle, known and read of all men," and read of all women too, with their still keener eyes. there is a very real danger in our high schools that the intellectual side of education may be overestimated and overpressed, not by mistresses, but by yourselves; and that the natural, human, domestic, and family elements in it may be undervalued. what are you yourselves at home, in society, with parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, schoolfellows, servants? is the better education, that you are undoubtedly getting, widening your sympathies, opening your heart and mind to all the educational influences which do not consist in books or in work? is it giving you greater delicacy of touch? is it opening new channels for influences, streaming in on you or streaming out from you? your daily life may become a higher education, and is so to the truly noble-minded and well-educated girl or woman. do not regard as interruptions, and as teasing, the calls of household, the duties to parents, visitors, children, and the rest; it is part of the education of life to fulfil all these duties well, delightfully, brilliantly, joyously, enthusiastically; these things are not interruptions to life, they are life itself. there was a pitiful magazine article written the other day by some lady complaining that social duties, the having to see her friends, her cook, her gardener, her dress-maker, etc., prevented her from reading herbert spencer, and developing her small fragment of soul. social duties, rightly done, are one of the developments of soul. let it be seen that you girls who can enjoy your literature, and your history, and your music, and your drawing with keen appreciation are not made thereby selfish or unsociable; but that you are more delightful creatures than those who have no such independent resources and joys. a girl who gets her certificate or prize and is cross or dull at home, and does not think it worth while to be kind and agreeable to a young brother or an old nurse, to every creature in her household down to the cat and the canary, is a traitor to the cause of higher education. again, it has been observed that the practical and artistic elements in school education have been, in general, more thoroughly developed of late years since they were put into a secondary place. this is as it should be. such subjects as music, drawing, cooking, housekeeping, wood-carving, nursing, needlework, when they are studied at all, are studied more professionally and thoroughly and intelligently, and less in the spirit of the amateur and dabbler. so i would say to you, both now and when you leave, show that your education in intelligence has given you wide interests and powers to master all such subjects. take them up all the more thoroughly. closely akin to this merit of thoroughness is the large spirit of unselfishness that ought to come, and certainly in many instances does come, with wider interests, a more intelligent education, and a more active imagination. women in our class have more leisure than men; they can actually do what is impossible by the conditions of life for us men to do, link class to class by knowledge and sympathy and help and kindness. they can be of immense service in this way. there is a story in the life of an american lady, mrs. lynam, that occurs to me. there was much conversation about a certain mr. robbins, who had lately died; he had been such a benefactor, such a good man, and so on. a visitor asked, "did mr. robbins found a benevolent institution?" "no," was the reply, "he _was_ a benevolent institution." women of our class may be, they ought to be, "benevolent institutions." and such women exist among us; pity is there are so few of them. they can unobtrusively be centres of happiness, and knowledge, and generous attitudes of mind. now there ought to be more of such women, and i look to our high schools with hope. they ought to make girls public-spirited and large-minded. there is another element in girls' education which is only imperfectly as yet brought out, and which you yourselves can do something to develop. i mean the better appreciation of an education which is not in books, and not in accomplishments, and not in duties, and not in social intercourse. how shall i describe it? think of the old greek education of men. there was a large element of literature and poetry and natural religion and imagination in it; and a large element of gymnastic also; but besides all this it was an education of eye and ear; it was a training that sprang from reverence for nature, as a whole, for an ideal of complete life, in body and mind and soul; and not only for complete individual life, but also for the city, the nation. it was a consummate perfection of life that was ever leading the athenian upward, by a life-long education, to strive for a certain grace and finish in every one of his faculties. and we see to what splendid results in literature and art and civic and personal beauty it led them. this element is still wanting in our higher education; it is the ideal of nobility of life and perfection. we lack it in our physical education. that is still far from perfect. if we all, parents, children, boys and girls, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, had some of the greek feeling of high admiration of physical perfection of form and grace and activity, we should not see so many boys and girls of very imperfect gracefulness, nor should we see fashions of dress so ruinous to all ideals of perfection and grace. we cannot make up for the want of this national artistic ideal of beauty of figure by artificial gymnastics, scientific posturings, and ladders and bars. they are better than nothing, they are a protest, they certainly remedy some defects and prevent others. but do not you be content with them. by self-respect and self-discipline, by healthy life, early hours, open air, natural exercise, the joyous and free use of all your powers, by dancing, playing games, by refusal to give way to unhealthy and disfiguring fashions, and, above all, by an aspiration after grace and perfection, do what you can to remedy this national defect in our ideals for girls. did you ever read kingsley's "nausicaa in london"? do you all know who nausicaa was? if not, let me advise you to borrow worsley's "odyssey" and read book vi., and read kingsley's essay too. nausicaa was a greek maiden who played at ball; and i think you are doing more to approach the old greek ideal when you play at lawn tennis and cricket and hockey, and i would add rounders and many another game, than when you are going through ordered exercises, valuable as they are, or even than when you are learning greek or copying greek statues. this leads me to say that games contribute much to remedy another deficiency in our ideal. there is a defective power of real enjoyment of life, of healthy spirits among us moderns. there is more enjoyment now than there was. i think my generation was better than the one that preceded us in this respect; we had more games, more fun, more _abandon_ in enjoyment than our fathers and mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers, had, if we may judge from letters published and unpublished. and they too often thought we were a frivolous generation, not so staid and decorous as we might be, and repressed and checked us; while we on the contrary urge on you to enjoy more fully the splendour of your youth and vitality. we desire to see you dance and sing and laugh and bubble over with the delicious inexhaustible flow of vital energy; we know that it need not interfere with the refinement of perfect manners and decorum, and we know too that there is the force which will sober down and do good work, and there is the health-giving exercise, the geniality, and the joy that will make you stronger and pleasanter, more patient and more persuasive to good in years to come. so it is with boys: men are made in our playgrounds as much as in the class-room; so, too, is it with you. i must give you a quotation from "fo'c's'le yarns," that delightfullest of volumes-- "it's likely god has got a plan to put a spirit in a man that's more than you can stow away in the heart of a child. but he'll see the day when he'll not have a bit too much for the work he's got to do. and the little turk is good for nothing but shouting and fighting and carrying on; and god delighting to make him strong and bold and free and thinking the man he's going to be-- more beef than butter, more lean than lard, hard if you like, but the world is hard. you'll see a river how it dances from rock to rock wherever it chances: in and out, and here and there a regular young divil-may-care. but, caught in the sluice, it's another case, and it steadies down, and it flushes the race very deep and strong, but still it's not too much to work the mill. the same with hosses: kick and bite and winch away--all right, all right, wait a bit and give him his ground, and he'll win his rider a thousand pound." there is a word in german which has no english equivalent; it expresses just the missing ideal i am speaking of. it is a terrible mouthful, as german words often are--lebensglückseligkeit--it is the rapture and blessedness and happiness of living. carry the idea away with you, and make it one of your personal ideals, and home ideals, and school ideals, and life ideals, this lebensglückseligkeit. "'tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, oh life, not death, for which we pant; more life, and fuller, that i want." you can carry this idea with you into society, and use it to brighten its conventional sociabilities, and stimulate them into positive enjoyability by more of intelligence and animation. we had a visit the other day from an american gentleman, mr. muybridge, who came to give a lecture at clifton college. i believe he also lectured in bath. he remarked to mrs. wilson in the lecture-room that he was glad to see some ladies present. "i like ladies at my lectures; they are so intelligent." "yes," she replied, "but i fear you are attributing to us the qualities of american ladies; we are not particularly intelligent." "you are joking!" was his reply. "no," she went on, "we are always told how much more intelligent american ladies are than english." he paused for some time, and then slowly said, "well, i'll not deny they are smarter." well, this quality that mr. muybridge describes as "smartness" is an american equivalent of lebensglückseligkeit; it is a sort of intensity of life, of vivacity, of willingness to take trouble, to interest and be interested, that is a little lacking in our english ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause of higher education. i have run to greater length than i intended, and i will conclude. it should be the aim of us all, council, parents, mistresses, and girls, to show that our ideal of education includes both the training of the intelligence and reason, and the storing the mind with treasures of beauty and instruments of power for opening new avenues into the storehouse of knowledge and delight that the world contains; and also the development of the practical ability, the benevolence and sympathy, the vivacity, the enjoyment of life, the fulness of activity, bodily and mental, that makes the lebensglückseligkeit i spoke of, and the superadding, or rather diffusing through it all, an unobtrusive but deep christian faith and reverence and charity. the archbishop of canterbury lately said in his charge that "public schools were infinitely more conducive to a strong morality than any other institution." he was thinking of boys' schools, of which he speaks with intimate knowledge; but i believe that, where girls' schools have at their head one who in the spirit of dr. arnold recognizes the responsibility for giving an unostentatious, unpartisan-like, but all-pervading and intelligent religious tone to the life, the aims, and the ideal of the school, and where the council and parents value this influence, there the influence of girls' high schools may be more conducive to strong morality and true religion in england than even that of our great public schools. for the high schools are training more and more of the most influential class among the women of england, as the public schools are training the men, and the influence of women must of necessity be of the first importance; for it is they who determine the religious training and the atmosphere of the home, and thus profoundly affect the national character. let us all alike try to keep before ourselves from day to day and from year to year these high ideals of education which can nowhere be so well attained, both by mistresses and girls, as in a high school. and in particular let me appeal to you, the inhabitants of bath, to be proud of this school, to foster it, to assist it in every way, and be assured that in so doing you are conferring a lasting benefit on your famous city. footnotes: [footnote : an address delivered at the high school, bath, and the high school, clifton, dec. .] iii. religion. religion.[ ] i am not going to preach you a sermon of quite the usual type, but intend rather to offer a few detached remarks without attempting to weave them into any unity of plan, or to connect them with any particular text from the bible. such unity as these remarks may possess will result not from design but from the nature of the subject. for i am going to speak about religion. now as i write this word i almost fancy i hear the rustle of an audience composing itself to endure what it foresees must be a dull and uninteresting address. "religion! he can't make that interesting." now, why is this? what is religion, that in the eyes of so many clever and intelligent and well-educated young people it should be thought dull? of this one point i am quite sure, that it is the fault of our misunderstanding and misrepresentation, in the past and the present, that religion seems dull. religion is, in its essence, the opening to the young mind of all the higher regions of thought and aspiration and imagination and spirituality. when you are quite young you are occupied of course with the visible things and people round you; each hour brings its amusements, its occupations and its delights, and reflection scarcely begins. but soon questions of right and wrong spring up; a world of ideas and imaginations opens before you; you are led by your teachers and your books into the presence of great thoughts, the inspirations that come from beauty in all forms, from nature, from art, from literature, and especially from poets; you come under the influence of friends--fathers, mothers, or other elders--who evidently have springs of conduct and aspirations you as yet only dimly recognize; and mixed with all these influences there is that influence on us from childhood upward of our prayers that we have been taught, our religious services, our bibles, and most of all the sacred figure, dimly seen, but never long absent from our thoughts, enveloped in a sort of sacred and mysterious halo--the figure of our lord jesus christ enshrined in our hearts, and that father in heaven of whom he spoke. all these are among the religious influences; and what is their aim and object? what is it that we should try and extract from them for ourselves? how should we use them in our turn to better those who come after us? well, i reply, they should all be regarded as the avenues by which our human nature as a whole ought to rise, and the only avenues by which it can rise, to its rightful and splendid heritage and its true development. we cannot be all that we might be without straining our efforts in this direction of aspiration towards god, towards all that is ideal, spiritual and divine. we are often inert, effortless, and then the religion i have spoken of repels us because it demands an effort; we are often selfish, and it repels us because it calls us out of self; we are often absorbed in the small and immediate aims for present enjoyment, interested in our own small circles, and religion insists that these are not enough. it is for ever calling us, as all true education calls us, as literature and history call us, to rise higher, to see more, to widen our sympathies, to enlarge our hearts, to open the doors of feeling and emotion. religion therefore may make great demands on us; it may disturb our repose; it may shake us, and say, look, look; look up, look round; it may be importunate, insistent, omnipresent, but it is not dull. there is a sham semblance of religion which you are right in regarding as dull, for it is dull. when it is unreal and insincere it is deadly dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by people who have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. when a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the various influences that elevate us, and place us in presence of the ideal and spiritual world; when the common relations of life, when art, poetry, criticism, science; when educated and refining intercourse and conversation, and all that occupies us on our intellectual sides is classed as secular, and the only helps to religion that are recognized are services and creeds and traditions of our particular church, then such religion cuts itself off from many of its springs, and from most of its fairest fields, and _is_ barren, and unprofitable, and dull. you are not likely to make this error. you are perhaps more likely to make the opposite error, by a natural reaction from this. because, when all the world of interest and beauty and human life is opening before you, you cannot believe that religion is confined to the narrow sphere of ideas in which it was once thought to consist, and is still sometimes declared to consist, you may think that you can dispense with that narrow but central sphere of ideas; and there you are wrong. i am quite sure that there is no inspiring and sustaining force, which shall make your lives worthy, comparable to the faith which christ taught the world, that we are verily the children of god, and sharers of his divine life, heirs of an eternal life in christ towards which we may press, and the appointed path to which lies in the highest duties that our daily life presents and consecrates. on this inspiring power of faith in christ i shall not speak to-day. i mean to speak on one only of the duties which form the path to the higher life, which you may overlook, and yet which is inherent in religion. the duty which i shall speak of is the necessity of entering into the life and needs and sympathies of others; of living not with an eye exclusively on yourself, but with the constant thought for others. it is the law of our being that admits of no exception. you may hope that the law of gravitation will be suspended in your case, and leap out of the window; but you will suffer for your mistake; and you will be equally mistaken and equally maim your life, if you think that somehow the law of the spiritual world would admit of exception, and that you can win happiness, goodness, and the full tide of life; become the best that you are capable of being, while remaining isolated, self-absorbed--by being centripetal, not centrifugal. it cannot be. now this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a united social life is. all girls do not know this. you do. there is distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. no casual visitor to your playing fields and hall can mistake this. and you know that this enlarges and draws something out of your nature that would never have been suspected had it not been for school life. but when school life ends, what will become of this discovery that you have made? boys, when they leave school and have developed the passionate feeling of love for their old school,--the strong _esprit de corps_, the conviction that in brotherhood and union is their strength and happiness,--contrive to find fresh united activities, and transfer to new bodies their public spirit and power of co-operation. their college, their regiment, their football club, their work with young employés, their parish, their town--something is found into which they can throw themselves. and again and again i have watched how this has become a religion, a binding and elevating and educating power in the mind of young men; and again and again, too, i have noticed how without it men lose interest, lose growth and greatness; individualism creeps on them, half their nature is stunted. for the individual life is only half the life; and even that cannot be the rich and full and glorious thing it might be, unless it is enlarged on all sides, and rests on a wide social sympathy and love. but how is it for girls when they leave school? it is distinctly harder for you to find lines of united action. society tends to individualize young ladies; its ideal for them is elegant inaction and graceful waiting, to an extent infinitely beyond what it is for young men. you do not find at your homes ready-made associations to join, or even an obvious possibility of doing anything for anybody. and so i have witnessed generous and fine school-girl natures dwarfed, cabined, confined; cheated of the activities which they had learned to desire to exercise, becoming individualistic, and therefore commonplace; not without inward fury and resistance, secret remonstrance, but concealing it all under the impassive manner which society demands. something is wrong: and your generation is finding this out, and finding out also its cure. year by year greater liberty of action is open to educated women; and educated women are themselves seeing, and others are seeing for them, that they have a part to play in the world which none others can play; if they do not play it, then work, indispensable to the good of society, and therefore to their own good, is undone. i say to _their own good_, for we all want happiness: but happiness is not won by seeking for it. make up your minds on this point, that there are certain things only to be got by not aiming directly at them. aim, for example, at being influential, and you become a prig; aim at walking and posing gracefully, and you become an affected and ludicrous object; aim even at breathing quite regularly, and you fail. so if you aim at happiness or self-culture or individualistic completeness, the world seems to combine to frustrate you. people, circumstances, opportunities, temper, everything goes wrong; and you lay the blame on everything except the one thing that is the cause of it all, the fact that you yourself are aiming at the wrong thing. but aim at making everything go well where you are; aim at using this treasure of life that god has given you for helping lame dogs over stiles, for making schools, households, games, parishes, societies, sick-rooms, girls' clubs, what not?--run more smoothly; wake every morning with the thought what can i do to-day to oil the wheels of my little world; and behold people, circumstances, opportunities, temper, even health, all get into a new adjustment, and all combine to fill your life with interests, warmth, affection, culture, and growth: you will find it true: good measure, shaken down, heaped together, and running over, shall men give into your bosoms. ah! but _what_ can one do? it is so hard to find out the right thing. yes; and no possible general rule can be given. you must fix the ideal in your mind, and be sure that in some way or other openings will arise. i will not touch life at school; you know more about that than i do, and perhaps need not that i should speak of public spirit, and generous temper, and the united life. i will only say that a girl who does not throw herself into school life with the generous wish to give pleasure and to lift the tone around her, does not get more than a fraction of the good that a school life like this can give, and does not do her duty. i speak of later years alone. and in the first instance, and always in the first place, stand the claims of home. i dare say you remember the young lady who wanted to go and learn nursing in a hospital, and was asked by the doctor why she desired this. "father is paralysed," she said, "and mother is nearly blind, and my sisters are all married, and it is so dull at home; so i thought i should like nursing." i don't want you to emulate that young person. grudge no love and care at home: no one can give such happiness to parents, brothers, sisters, as you can, and to make people happy is in itself a worthy mission; it is the next best thing to making them good. and remember also, that there are many years before you: and that though it may seem that years are spent with nothing effected except that somehow things have gone more smoothly, you yourself will have been matured, deepened, and consolidated by a life of duty, in a way in which no self-chosen path of life could have trained you. and if, as is quite possible, some of you are impatient already for the exercise of your powers in some great work, i will preach patience to you from another motive. it is this: that you are not yet capable of doing much that is useful, from want of training and general ability. i remember miss octavia hill once saying that she could get any quantity of money, and any quantity of enthusiasm, but that her difficulty was to get trained intelligence, either in men or women. so, a few days ago, miss clementina black, who is hon. secretary of the women's trade association, said to a friend of my own that she had had many voluntary lady helpers of various degrees of education and culture, and that she had found without exception that the highly educated students were the most fitted to do the work well; that they alone were capable of the patience, accuracy, and attention to detail which were one essential quality to the doing of such work, and that they alone could provide the other essentials, which can only spring from a cultivated mind--viz., wideness of view, sense of proportion, and capacity for general interest in other important questions--social, literary, and intellectual. "it is this cultivation of mind which prevents you from being crushed under the difficulty and tedium and disappointment which must attend every effort to teach principles and promote ideal aims among the mass of ignorant, apathetic, uninterested, and helpless working women, who must themselves in the last resort be the agents in bringing about a better condition of industry." you may rest assured that if you set your mind on a career of splendid usefulness for your fellows (and i hope every one of you here aims at this), then you will need all the training that the highest and most prolonged education can give you. become the most perfect creature you have it in your power to become. if oxford or cambridge are open to you, welcome the opportunity, and use the extra power they will give you. if not, then utilise the years that lie before you, in perfecting your accomplishments, in self-education; in interesting and informing yourself on social questions, in enlarging your horizon, while you cheerfully, happily, brilliantly perform _all_ your home duties. and during this period of preparation which you all must go through, remember that there are some things which you can do better in your inexperience and ignorance than any other people. how is this? tell me why it would be more comfort, and do more good sometimes to a poor sick woman to bring her a few primroses or daffodils than to give her any substantial relief. the reason is the same. the very freshness and innocence of young faces, that sympathise without having the faintest suspicion of the sin and misery of the world, is more refreshing and helpful than the stronger sympathy of one who really knows all the evil. you can be primroses and daffodils, and give glimpses into a purer world of love and gentleness and peace. and if a prolonged training is impossible to you, it is often possible for you to assist in some humble capacity some lady who is so engaged in work on a scale which you could not yourself touch. be her handmaid and fag and slave, and so gradually train yourself to become capable of independent action. but to sum up all i am saying it amounts to this--where there's a will there's a way, and i want you to have the will. did you ever think for what reason you should have had such a splendid time of it in your lives? not two girls in a thousand are getting such an education as you are, such varied studies, such vigorous public school life, such historic associations. and why? because you are better than others? i think not. it is that you play your part in the great social organism our national life; hundreds are toiling for us, digging, spinning, weaving, mining, building, navigating, that we may have leisure for the thought, the love, the wisdom that shall lighten and direct their lives. you cannot dissociate yourselves from the labouring masses, and in particular from the women and girls of england. they are your sisters; and a blight and a curse rests on you if you ignore them, and grasp at all the pleasures and sweetness and cultivation of your life with no thought or toil for them. their lives are the foundations on which ours rest. it is horrible in one class to live without this consciousness of a mutual obligation, and mutual responsibility. all that we get, we get on trust, as trustee for them. i remember that thring says somewhere, that "no beggar who creeps through the street living on alms and wasting them is baser than those who idly squander at school and afterwards the gifts received on trust." i know that our class education isolates us and separates us from the uneducated and common people as we call them, makes us perhaps regard them as uninteresting, even repellent. part of what we hope from the girls who come from great schools like this is, that they shall have a larger sympathy, a truer heart. remember all your life long a saying of abraham lincoln's, when he was president of the united states. some one remarked in his hearing that he was quite a common-looking man. "friend," he replied, gently, "the lord loves common-looking people best; that is why he has made so many of them." you can all make a _few_ friends out of the lower class; you cannot do much; but learn to know and love a few, and then you will do wider good than you suspect. but you are beginning to ask--is all this religion? you expected something else. let me remind you of the man who came to jesus christ, and asked him what he should do to obtain eternal life. and this question, i may explain, means--what shall i do that i may enter on that divine and higher life now while i live; how can i most fully develop my spiritual nature? and the answer was--love god; and love your neighbour as yourself. go outside yourself in love to all that is divine and ideal in thought and duty; go outside yourself in love to your neighbour--and your neighbour is every one with whom you have any relation; and then, and then alone, does your own nature grow to its highest and best. this is the open secret of true religion. eastertide is the teacher of ideals. its great lesson is--"if ye were raised together with christ, seek the things that are above." if by calling yourself a christian you mean that you aim at the higher, the spiritual, the divine life, then think of things that are above. [greek: ta anô phroneite], think heaven itself. and heaven lies around us in our daily life--not in the cloister, in incense-breathing aisle, in devotions that isolate us, and force a sentiment unreal, morbid, and even false, but in the generous and breathing activities of our life. religion glorifies, because it idealizes, that very life we are each called on to lead. look, therefore, round in your various lives and homes, and ask yourselves what is the ideal life for me here, in this position, as school-girl, daughter, sister, friend, mistress, or in any other capacity. education ought to enable you to frame an ideal; it ought to give you imagination, and sympathy, and intelligence, and resource; and religion ought to give you the strong motive, the endurance, the width of view, the nobleness of purpose, to make your life a light and a blessing wherever you are. footnotes: [footnote : an address given to st. leonard's school, st. andrews, on sunday, april , .] transcriber's note: for the benefit of certain readers, explanatory names have been added to some illustration tags and these have been identified with an asterisk. _bulletin number eight price thirty-five cents_ a catalogue of play equipment _compiled by_ jean lee hunt bureau _of_ educational experiments west th street, new york [illustration: wooden wheel-barrow and cabinet.]* [illustration: children at play.]* introduction what are the requisites of a child's laboratory? what essentials must we provide if we would deliberately plan an environment to promote the developmental possibilities of play? these questions are raised with ever-increasing insistence as the true nature of children's play and its educational significance come to be matters of more general knowledge and the selection of play equipment assumes a corresponding importance in the school and at home. to indicate some fundamental rules for the choice of furnishings and toys and to show a variety of materials illustrating the basis of selection has been our aim in compiling the following brief catalogue. we do not assume the list to be complete, nor has it been the intention to recommend any make or pattern as being indispensable or as having an exclusive right to the field. on the contrary, it is our chief hope that the available number and variety of such materials may be increased to meet a corresponding increase of intelligent demand on the part of parents and teachers for equipment having real dignity and play value. the materials listed were originally assembled in the exhibit of toys and school equipment shown by the bureau of educational experiments in the spring and summer of , and we wish to make acknowledgment, therefore, to the many who contributed to that exhibit and by so doing to the substance of the following pages. chief among them are teachers college, the university of pittsburgh, the ethical culture school, the play school and other experimental schools described in our bulletins, numbers , and . the cuts have been chosen for the most part from photographs of the play school, where conditions fairly approximate those obtainable in the home and thus offer suggestions easily translatable by parents into terms of their own home environment. while this equipment is especially applicable to the needs of children four, five and six years old, most of it will be found well adapted to the interests of children as old as eight years, and some of it to those of younger children as well. bureau of educational experiments. new york city, june, . [illustration: children at play.]* out-of-door furnishings out-of-door furnishings should be of a kind to encourage creative play as well as to give exercise. playground apparatus, therefore, in addition to providing for big muscle development should combine the following requisites: intrinsic value as a toy or plaything. "the play of children on it and with it must be spontaneous."[a] adaptability to different kinds of play and exercise. "it must appeal to the imagination of the child so strongly that new forms of use must be constantly found by the child himself in using it."[a] adaptability to individual or group use. it should lend itself to solitary play or to use by several players at once. additional requisites are: safety. its use should be attended by a minimum of danger. suitable design, proper proportions, sound materials and careful construction are essentials. durability. it must be made to withstand hard use and all kinds of weather. to demand a minimum of repair means also to afford a maximum of security. [footnote a: dr. e. h. arnold, "some inexpensive playground apparatus." bul. , playground association of america.] [illustration: the city yard equipped to give a maximum of exercise and creative play] [illustration: an outdoor play area.]* the outdoor laboratory in the country, ready-to-hand resources, trees for climbing, the five-barred fence, the pasture gate, the stone wall, the wood-pile, mother earth to dig in, furnish ideal equipment for the muscle development of little people and of their own nature afford the essential requisites for creative and dramatic play. to their surpassing fitness for "laboratory" purposes each new generation bears testimony. if the furnishings of a deliberately planned environment are to compare with them at all they must lend themselves to the same freedom of treatment. the apparatus shown here was made by a local carpenter, and could easily be constructed by high school pupils with the assistance of the manual training teacher. the ground has been covered with a layer of fine screened gravel, a particularly satisfactory treatment for very little children, as it is relatively clean and dries quickly after rain. it does not lend itself to the requirements of organized games, however, and so will not answer for children who have reached that stage of play development. a number of building bricks, wooden boxes of various sizes, pieces of board and such "odd lumber" with a few tools and out-of-door toys complete the yard's equipment. [illustration: the see-saw.]* the see saw board--straight grain lumber, - / " x " x '- ". two cleats - / " x " bolted to the under side of the board to act as a socket on the hip of the horse. horse--height ". length - / ". spread of feet at ground ". legs built of " x " material. hip of " x " material. brace under hip of / " material. note--all figures given are for outside measurements. apparatus except see-saw board and sliding board should be painted, especially those parts which are to be put into the ground. [illustration: the stand and slide.]* the stand and slide stand or platform-- " wide, " long, '- " high. top made of - / " tongue and groove material. uprights or legs of " x " material. cleats nailed to front legs - / " apart to form ladder are of - / " x - / " material. cross bracing of / " x - / " material. apron under top made of / " x " material nailed about - / " below to act as additional bracing and provide place of attachment for iron hooks secured to sliding board. the stand is fastened to the ground by dogs or pieces of wood buried deep enough (about ') to make it secure. slide--straight grain piece of lumber, - / " x " x '- ". two hooks at upper end of sliding board are of iron, about / " x - / ", set at a proper angle to prevent board from becoming loose. hooks are about - / " long. [illustration: the swinging rope.]* the swinging rope upright-- " x " x '- ". top piece-- " x " x '- ". upright and top piece are mortised or halved and bolted together. bracing at top ( " x " x - / " at long point of mitre cuts) is nailed to top piece and upright at an angle of about degrees. upright rests on a base measuring '- ". this is mortised together and braced with " x " material about " long, set at an angle of about degrees. unless there are facilities for bracing at the top, as shown in the cut, the upright should be made longer and buried about ' in the ground. the swinging rope ( / " dia.) passes through a hole bored in the top piece and held in place by a knot. successive knots tied " to " apart and a big knot at the bottom make swinging easier for little folks. [illustration: the trapeze.]* the trapeze two uprights-- " x " x '- ". top piece-- " x " x '- ". ends of top piece secured to uprights by being mortised or halved and bolted together. uprights rest on bases of " x " material, '- " long, connected by a small platform in the form of an h. bases and uprights are bolted to dogs or pieces of wood " x " x '- " set in the ground about '- ". adjustable bar (round) - / " dia. holes bored in each upright provide for the adjustable bar. the first hole is '- " above ground, the second '- ", the third '- ". swing bar (round), - / " dia., is " long. should hang about " below top piece. holes / " dia. bored in the top piece receive a continuous rope attached to the swing bar by being knotted after passing through holes ( / " dia.) in each end of the bar. [illustration: the ladder and support.]* the ladder and support ladder-- " x '- " sides of - / " x / " material rungs / " dia. set - / " apart at upper ends of the sides a u-shaped cut acts as a hook for attaching the ladder to the cross bar of the support. these ends are re-inforced with iron to prevent splitting. support--height '- ". spread of uprights at base '- ". uprights of - / " x - / " material are secured to a foot ( - / " x " x - / ") with braces ( - / " x - / " x ") set at an angle of about °. tops of the two uprights are halved and bolted to a cross bar - / " x - / " x " long. the uprights are secured with diagonal braces - / " x - / " x '- " fastened together where they intersect. [illustration: a pretend airship.]* a borrowed step ladder converts this gymnastic apparatus into an airship. [illustration: a borrowed ladder helps the game.]* the ladder detached from the support is an invaluable adjunct to building and other operations. [illustration: the parallel bars.]* the parallel bars the two bars are " x - / " x '- " and are set - / " to - / " apart. the ends are beveled and the tops rounded. each bar is nailed to two uprights ( " x " x '- ") set ' apart and extending " above ground. an overhang of about " is allowed at each end of the bar. [illustration: the sand box.]* the sand box the sloping cover to the sand box pictured here has been found to have many uses besides its obvious purpose of protection against stray animals and dirt. it is a fairly good substitute for the old-time cellar door, that most important dramatic property of a play era past or rapidly passing. [illustration: sand box with cover closed.]* [illustration: box village.]* box village the child is to be pitied who has not at some time revelled in a packing-box house big enough to get into and furnished by his own efforts. but a "village" of such houses offers a greatly enlarged field of play opportunity and has been the basis of miss mary rankin's experiment on the teachers college playground.[b] in addition to its more obvious possibilities for constructive and manual development, miss rankin's experiment offers social features of unusual suggestiveness, for the village provides a civic experience fairly comprehensive and free from the artificiality that is apt to characterize attempts to introduce civic content into school and play procedure. [footnote b: see "teachers college playground," bulletin no. , bureau of educational experiments.] [illustration: of interest to carpenters.] [illustration: a boom in real estate.] [illustration: boy playing pretend piano.]* indoor equipment the requisites for indoor equipment are these: a suitable floor--the natural place for a little child to play is the floor and it is therefore the sine qua non of the play laboratory. places to keep things--a maximum of convenience to facilitate habits of order. tables and chairs--for use as occasion demands, to supplement the floor, not to take the place of it. blocks and toys--for initial play material. the carpenter's bench--with tools and lumber for the manufacture of supplementary toys. a supply of art and craft materials--for the same purpose. [illustration: the indoor laboratory.] the indoor laboratory the _floor_ should receive first consideration in planning the indoor laboratory. it should be as spacious as circumstances will permit and safe, that is to say clean and protected from draughts and dampness. a well-kept hardwood floor is the best that can be provided. individual light rugs or felt mats can be used for the younger children to sit on in cold weather if any doubt exists as to the adequacy of heating facilities (see cut, p. ). battleship linoleum makes a good substitute for a hardwood finish. it comes in solid colors and can be kept immaculate. deck canvas stretched over a layer of carpet felt and painted makes a warm covering, especially well adapted to the needs of very little children, as it has some of the softness of a carpet and yet can be scrubbed and mopped. second only in importance is the supply of _lockers_, _shelves_, _boxes_ and _drawers_ for the disposal of the great number and variety of small articles that make up the "tools and appliances" of the laboratory. the cut on page shows a particularly successful arrangement for facilities of this kind. the _chairs_ shown are the mosher kindergarten chairs, which come in three sizes. the light _tables_ can be folded by the children and put away in the biggest cupboard space (p. ). _block boxes_ are an essential part of the equipment. their dimensions should be planned in relation to the unit block of the set used. those shown are - / " x - / " x " (inside measurements) for use with a set having a unit - / " x - / " x - / ". they are on castors and can be rolled to any part of the room. the low _blackboards_ are '- " in height and '- " from the floor. all the furnishings of the laboratory should lend themselves to use as dramatic properties when occasion demands, and a few may be kept for such purposes alone. the light screens in the right-hand corner of the room are properties of this kind and are put to an endless number of uses (see cut, p. ). [illustration: the balcony in a room with high ceiling.] [illustration: the balcony and a low ceiling.] the _balcony_ is a device to increase floor space that has been used successfully in the play school for several years. it is very popular with the children and contributes effectively to many play schemes. the tall block construction representing an elevator shaft shown in the picture opposite would never have reached its "singer tower proportions" without the balcony, first to suggest the project and then to aid in its execution. _drop shelves_ like those along the wall of the "gallery" (p. ) can be used for some purposes instead of tables when space is limited. materials for storekeeping play fill the shelves next the fireplace, and the big crock on the hearth contains modelling clay, the raw material of such objets d'art as may be seen decorating the mantlepiece in the cut on page . [illustration: a place for everything] [illustration: the indoor sandbox.]* the indoor sand box the indoor _sand box_ pictured here was designed by mrs. hutchinson for use in the nursery at stony ford. a box of this kind is ideal for the enclosed porch or terrace and a great resource in rainy weather. the usual kindergarten sand table cannot provide the same play opportunity that is afforded by a floor box, but it presents fewer problems to the housekeeper and is always a valuable adjunct to indoor equipment. [illustration: the carpenter bench.]* the carpenter bench the carpenter equipment must be a "sure-enough business affair," and the tools real tools--not toys. the sheldon bench shown here is a real bench in every particular except size. the tool list is as follows: manual training hammer. point cross-cut saw. point rip saw. large screw driver, wooden handle. small screw driver. nail puller. stanley smooth-plane, no. . bench hook. brace and set of twist bits. manual training rule. steel rule. tri square. utility box--with assorted nails, screws, etc. combination india oil stone. oil can. small hatchet. choice of lumber must be determined partly by the viewpoint of the adult concerned, largely by the laboratory budget, and finally by the supply locally available. excellent results have sometimes been achieved where only boxes from the grocery and left-over pieces from the carpenter shop have been provided. such rough lumber affords good experience in manipulation, and its use may help to establish habits of adapting materials as we find them to the purposes we have in hand. this is the natural attack of childhood, and it should be fostered, for children can lose it and come to feel that specially prepared materials are essential, and a consequent limitation to ingenuity and initiative can thus be established. on the other hand, some projects and certain stages of experience are best served by a supply of good regulation stock. boards of soft pine, white wood, bass wood, or cypress in thicknesses of / ", / ", / " and / " are especially well adapted for children's work, and "stock strips" / " and / " thick and " and " wide lend themselves to many purposes. [illustration: boy painting toy.]* [illustration: girl playing with dolls house.]* toys the proper basis of selection for toys is their efficiency as toys, that is: they must be suggestive of play and made for play. they should be selected in relation to each other. they should be consistent with the environment of the child who is to use them. they should be constructed simply so that they may serve as models for other toys to be constructed by the children. they should suggest something besides domestic play so that the child's interest may be led to activities outside the home life. they should be durable because they are the realities of a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship. [illustration: children re-create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand] [illustration: a house of blocks.]* floor games "there comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its ceiling going up to heaven.... it is the floor i think of chiefly, over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks...the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.... "justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. i recall an incessant variety of interests. there was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one could peep into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship.... and there was commerce; the shops and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps.... "i find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories." h. g. wells, "the new machiavelli," chapter . [illustration: the unsocial novice] nowhere else, perhaps, not even in his "floor games" and "little wars" has mr. wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found in those pages, all too brief, in "the new machiavelli" where the play laboratory at bromstead is described. one can imagine the eager boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. our laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must be above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop along with block villages and other community life in miniature. floor blocks in his reminiscences of his boyhood play mr. wells lays emphasis on his great good fortune in possessing a special set of "bricks" made to order and therefore sufficient in number for the ambitious floor games he describes. comparatively few adults can look back to the possession of similar play material, and so a majority cannot realize how it outweighs in value every other type of toy that can be provided. where the budget for equipment is limited, floor blocks can be cut by the local carpenter or, in a school, by the manual training department. the blocks in use at the play school (see cut, p. ) are of white wood, the unit block being - / " x - / " x - / ". they range in size from half units and diagonals to blocks four times the unit in length ( "). [illustration: the hill floor blocks at the gregory avenue school] at present there is but one set of blocks on the market that corresponds to the one mr. wells describes. these are the "_hill floor blocks_," manufactured and sold by a. schoenhut & co., of philadelphia. they are of hard maple and come in seven sizes, from " squares to oblongs of ", the unit block being " in length. there are pieces in a set. half and quarter sets are also obtainable. they are the invention of professor patty smith hill of teachers college, columbia university, and are used in the teachers college kindergarten and in many other schools. [illustration: useful alike to builders and cabinet makers] [illustration: advanced research in peg-lock construction] the school of childhood at the university of pittsburgh makes use of several varieties of blocks, some of commercial manufacture, others cut to order. the list given is as follows:[c] a. nest of blocks. b. large blocks made to order of hard maple in five sizes: cubes, " x ". oblongs, - / " x " x ". triangular prisms made by cutting cube diagonally into two and four parts. pillars made by cutting oblongs into two parts. plinths made by cutting oblongs into two parts. light weight " boards, '- " to '- " long. c. froebel's enlarged fifth and sixth gifts. d. stone anchor blocks. e. architectural blocks for flat forms. f. peg-lock blocks. as children become more dexterous and more ambitious in their block construction, the _peg-lock blocks_ will be found increasingly valuable. these are a type of block unknown to mr. wells, but how he would have revelled in the possession of a set! they are manufactured by the peg-lock block co. of new york. cut on a smaller scale than the other blocks described, they are equipped with holes and pegs, by which they may be securely joined. this admits of a type of construction entirely outside the possibilities of other blocks. they come in sets of varying sizes and in a great variety of shapes. the school of childhood uses them extensively, as does the play school. [footnote c: see university of pittsburgh bulletin, "report of the experimental work in the school of childhood."] [illustration: small wooden toy.]* floor toys the "do-with toys" shown in the accompanying cuts were designed by miss caroline pratt some years ago to meet the need generally felt by devotees of the play laboratory of a consistent series of toys to be used with floor blocks. for if the market of the present day can offer something more adequate in the way of blocks than was generally available in mr. wells' boyhood, the same is not true when it comes to facilities for peopling and stocking the resulting farms and communities that develop. mr. wells tells us that for his floor games he used tin soldiers and such animals as he could get--we know the kind, the lion smaller than the lamb, and barnyard fowl doubtless overtopping the commanding officer. such combinations have been known to children of all generations and play of the kind mr. wells describes goes on in spite of the inconsistency of the materials supplied. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* but when we consider fostering such play, and developing its possibilities for educational ends, the question arises whether this is the best provision that can be made, or if the traditional material could be improved, just as the traditions concerning blocks are being improved. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* a few pioneers have been experimenting in this field for some years past. no one of them is ready with final conclusions but among them opinion is unanimous that constructive play is stimulated by an initial supply of consistent play material calculated to suggest supplementary play material of a kind children can manufacture for themselves. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* blocks are of course the most important type of initial material to be provided; beyond this the generally accepted hypothesis is embodied in the "do-with" series which provides, first a doll family of proportions suited to block houses, then a set of farm animals and carts, then a set of wild animals, all designed on the same size scale, of construction simple enough to be copied at the bench, and suggesting, each set after its kind, a host of supplementary toys, limited in variety and in numbers only by the experience of the child concerned and by his ability to construct them. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* this working hypothesis for the selection of toys is as yet but little understood either by those who buy or those who sell play materials. the commercial dealer declares with truth that there is too little demand to justify placing such a series on the market. not only does he refuse to make "do-withs" but he provides no adequate substitutes. his wooden toys are merely wooden ornaments without relation to any series and without playability, immobile, reasonless, for the philosophy of the play laboratory is quite unknown to the makers of play materials, while those who buy are guided almost entirely by convention and have no better standard by which to estimate what constitutes their money's worth. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* on the other hand enthusiasts raise the question, why supply any toys? is it not better for children to make all their toys? and as miss pratt says, "getting ready for play is mistaken for play itself." [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* too much "getting ready" kills real play, and if our purpose is to foster and enrich the actual activity, we must understand the subtle value of initial play materials, of having at hand ready for the promptings of play impulse the necessary foundation stones on which a superstructure of improvisation can be reared. [illustration: transportation toys] [illustration: a trunk line] when by hook or crook the devotees of floor games have secured a population and live stock for their block communities, then, as mr. wells reminds us, comes commerce and in her wake transportation problems to tax the inventive genius of the laboratory. simple transportation toys are the next need, and suitable ones can generally, though not always, be obtained in the shops. a few well-chosen pieces for initial material will soon be supplemented by "peg-lock" or bench-made contrivances. for railroad tracks the block supply offers possibilities better adapted to the ages we are considering than any of the elaborate rail systems that are sold with the high-priced mechanical toys so fascinating to adult minds. additional curved blocks corresponding to the unit block in width and thickness are a great boon to engineers, for what is a railroad without curves! transportation toys can be perfectly satisfactory when not made strictly to scale. indeed, the exigencies of the situation generally demand that realists be satisfied with rather wide departures from the general rule. train service, however, should accommodate at least one passenger to a car. [illustration: play area.]* large and small scale toys the floor scheme pictured here is a good illustration of our principles of selection applied to toys of larger scale. the dolls, the tea set, the chairs are from the toy shop. the little table in the foreground, and the bed are bench made. the bedding is of home manufacture, the jardiniere too, is of modelling clay, gaily painted with water colors. the tea table and stove are improvised from blocks as is the bath room, through the door of which a block "tub" may be seen. the screen used as a partition at the back is one of the play school "properties" with large sheets of paper as panels. (see cut p. .) there are some important differences, however, between the content of a play scheme like this and one of the kind we have been considering (see cut page ). these result from the size and character of the initial play material, for dolls like these invite an entirely different type of treatment. one cannot build villages, or provide extensive railroad facilities for them, nor does one regard them in the impersonal way that the "do-with" family, or mr. wells' soldiers, are regarded, as incidentals in a general scheme of things. these beings hold the centre of their little stage. they call for affection and solicitude, and the kind of play into which they fit is more limited in scope, less stirring to the imagination, but more usual in the experience of children, because play material of this type is more plentifully provided than is any other and, centering attention as it does on the furnishings and utensils of the home, requires less contact with or information about, the world outside and its activities to provide the mental content for interesting play. [illustration: a "furnished apartment" at the ethical culture school] in the epochs of play development interest in these larger scale toys precedes that in more complicated schemes with smaller ones. mr. wells' stress on the desirability of a toy soldier population really reflects an adult view. for play on the toy soldier and paper doll scale develops latest of all, and because of the opportunities it affords for schemes of correspondingly greater mental content makes special appeal to the adult imagination. play material smaller than the "do-with" models and better adapted to this latest period than are either soldiers or paper dolls remains one of the unexplored possibilities for the toy trade of the future. [illustration: supplementary (a small toy train.)] [illustration: a play laundry.]* housekeeping play materials for housekeeping play are of two general kinds, according to size--those intended for the convenience of dolls, and those of larger scale for children's use. the larger kind should be strong enough and well enough made to permit of actual processes. plentiful as such materials are in the shops, it is difficult to assemble anything approaching a complete outfit on the same size scale. one may spend days in the attempt to get together one as satisfactory as that pictured here. the reason seems to be that for considerations of trade such toys are made and sold in sets of a few pieces each. if dealers would go a step further and plan their sets in series, made to scale and supplementing each other, they would better serve the requirements of play, and, it would seem, their own interests as well. storekeeping play from housekeeping play to storekeeping play is a logical step and one abounding in possibilities for leading interest beyond the horizon line of home environment. better than any toy equipment and within reach of every household budget is a "store" like the one pictured here where real cartons, boxes, tins and jars are used. [illustration: a "grocery store" at the ethical culture school] schools can often obtain new unfilled cartons from manufacturers. the fels-naphtha and national biscuit companies are especially cordial to requests of this kind, and cartons from the latter firm are good for beginners, as prices are plainly marked and involve only dime and nickel computation. the magazine "educational foundations" maintains a department which collects such equipment and furnishes it to public schools on their subscribers' list. sample packages add to interest and a small supply of actual staples in bulk, or of sand, sawdust, chaff, etc., for weighing and measuring should be provided as well as paper, string, and paper bags of assorted sizes. small scales, and inexpensive sets of standard measures, dry and liquid, can be obtained of milton bradley and other school supply houses. a toy telephone and toy money will add "content," and for older children a "price and sign marker" (milton bradley) is a valuable addition. the school of childhood (pittsburgh) list includes the following miscellaneous articles for house and store play: spoons various sized boxes stones pebbles buttons shells spools bells enlarged sticks of the kindergarten ribbon bolts filled with sand rice shot bottles, etc. craft and color materials materials of this kind are a valuable part of any play equipment. of the large assortment carried by kindergarten and school supply houses the following are best adapted to the needs of the play laboratory: _modelling materials_--modelling clay and plasticine, far from being the same, are supplementary materials, each adapted to uses for which the other is unsuited. _weaving materials_--raphia, basketry reed, colored worsteds, cotton roving, jute and macrame cord can be used for many purposes. _material for paper work_--heavy oak tag, manila, and bogus papers for cutting and construction come in sheets of different sizes. colored papers, both coated (colored on one side) and engine colored (colored on both sides) are better adapted to "laboratory purposes" when obtainable in large sheets instead of the regulation kindergarten squares. colored tissue papers, scissors and library paste are always in demand. _color materials_--crayons, water color paints, chalks (for blackboard use) are best adapted to the needs of play when supplied in a variety of colors and shades. for drawing and painting coarse paper should be furnished in quantity and in sheets of differing sizes. "_if children are let alone with paper and crayons they will quickly learn to use these toys quite as effectively as they do blocks and dolls._" [illustration: children playing with wagon.]* toys for active play and outdoor tools among the many desirable _toys for active play_ the following deserve "honorable mention": express wagon sled horse reins "coaster" or "scooter" velocipede (and other adaptations of the bicycle for beginners) football (small size association ball) indoor baseball rubber balls (various sizes) bean bags steamer quoits as in the case of the carpenter's bench it is poor economy to supply any but good _tools_ for the yard and garden. even the best garden sets for children are so far inferior to those made for adults as to render them unsatisfactory and expensive by comparison. it is therefore better to get light weight pieces in the smaller standard sizes and cut down long wooden handles for greater convenience. the one exception to be noted is the boy's shovel supplied by the peter henderson company. this is in every respect as strong and well made as the regulation sizes and a complete series to the same scale and of the same standard would meet a decided need in children's equipment where light weight is imperative and hard wear unavoidable. in addition to the garden set of shovel, rake, hoe, trowel and wheel-barrow, a small crow-bar is useful about the yard and, in winter, a light snow shovel is an advantage. jean lee hunt. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* a small permanent exhibit of the play equipment described may be seen at the bureau of educational experiments, west th street, new york, and is occasionally loaned. suggested reading for convenience it has seemed well to divide the following list into two parts--the first devoted to the discussion of theory, the other offering concrete suggestions. such a division is arbitrary, of course. no better exposition of theory can be found than is contained in some of these references dealing with actual laboratory usage and furnishings. on the other hand the two books by dr. kilpatrick, with their illuminating analysis of didactic materials, afford many concrete suggestions, at least on the negative side. part i. chamberlin, a. e. "the child: a study in the evolution of man," scribner, . chap. i, "the meaning of the helplessness of infancy." chap. ii, "the meaning of youth and play." chap. iv, "the periods of childhood." dewey, john "democracy and education," macmillan, . chap. xv, "play and work in the curriculum." "how we think," d. c. heath and co. chap. xvii, "play, work, and allied forms of activity." chap. xvi, "process and product." "interest and effort in education," houghton mifflin co., . chap. iv, "the psychology of occupations." "the school and society," university of chicago press, . chap. iv, "the psychology of occupations." chap. vii, "the development of attention." "cyclopedia of education," edited by paul monroe, macmillan co. articles on "infancy," "play." dopp, katherine e. "the place of industries in elementary education," university of chicago press, . groos, karl "the play of man," appleton, . hall, g. stanley "educational problems," appleton, . chap. i, "the pedagogy of the kindergarten." "youth: its regimen and hygiene," appleton, . chap. vi, "play, sports and games." kilpatrick, william heard "the montessori system examined," houghton mifflin, . "froebel's kindergarten principles critically examined," macmillan, . lee, joseph "play in education," macmillan, . wood, walter "children's play and its place in education," duffield, . part ii. arnold, dr. e. h. "some inexpensive playground apparatus," bulletin no. , playground association of america and playground extension committee of the russell sage foundation. deming, lucile p. and others "playthings," bulletin no. i. "the play school," bulletin no. iii. "the children's school, the teachers college playground, the gregory school," bulletin no. iv. bureau of educational experiments publications, . chambers, will grant and others "report of the experimental work in the school of childhood," university of pittsburgh bulletin, . cook, h. caldwell "the play way," stokes co., . corbin, alice m. "how to equip a playroom: the pittsburgh plan," bulletin no. , playground and recreation association of america, . dewey, john and evelyn "schools of to-morrow," dutton, . chap. v, "play." hall, g. stanley "aspects of child life," ginn, . "the story of a sand pile." hetherington, clark w. "the demonstration play school of ," university of california bulletin, . hill, patty smith and others "experimental studies in kindergarten education," teachers college publications, . johnson, george e. "education by plays and games," ginn & co., . lee, joseph "play for home," bulletin no. , playground and recreation association of america. read, mary l. "the mothercraft manual," little, brown & co., . wells, h. g. "floor games," small, maynard & co., . "the new machiavelli," duffield co., . chap. ii, "bromstead and my father." craftsmanship in teaching by william chandler bagley author of "the educative process," "classroom management," "educational values," etc. new york the macmillan company all rights reserved copyright, , by the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped. published april, . reprinted june, october, ; may, . norwood press j.s. cushing co.--berwick & smith co. norwood, mass., u.s.a. to my parents preface the following papers are published chiefly because they treat in a concrete and personal manner some of the principles which the writer has developed in two previously published books, _the educative process_ and _classroom management_, and in a forthcoming volume, _educational values_. it is hoped that the more informal discussions presented in the following pages will, in some slight measure, supplement the theoretical and systematic treatment which necessarily characterizes the other books. in this connection, it should be stated that the materials of the first paper here presented were drawn upon in writing chapter xviii of _classroom management_, and that the second paper simply states in a different form the conclusions reached in chapter i of _the educative process_. the writer is indebted to his colleague, professor l.f. anderson, for many criticisms and suggestions and to miss bernice harrison for invaluable aid in editing the papers for publication. but his heaviest debt, here as elsewhere, is to his wife, to whose encouraging sympathy and inspiration whatever may be valuable in this or in his other books must be largely attributed. urbana, illinois, march , contents chapter page i. craftsmanship in teaching ii. optimism in teaching iii. how may we promote the efficiency of the teaching force? iv. the test of efficiency in supervision v. the supervisor and the teacher vi. education and utility vii. the scientific spirit in education viii. the possibility of training children to study ix. a plea for the definite in education x. science as related to the teaching of literature xi. the new attitude toward drill xii. the ideal teacher craftsmanship in teaching ~i~ craftsmanship in teaching[ ] i "in the laboratory of life, each newcomer repeats the old experiments, and laughs and weeps for himself. we will be explorers, though all the highways have their guideposts and every bypath is mapped. helen of troy will not deter us, nor the wounds of cæsar frighten, nor the voice of the king crying 'vanity!' from his throne dismay. what wonder that the stars that once sang for joy are dumb and the constellations go down in silence."--arthur sherburne hardy: _the wind of destiny_. we tend, i think, to look upon the advice that we give to young people as something that shall disillusionize them. the cynic of forty sneers at what he terms the platitudes of commencement addresses. he knows life. he has been behind the curtains. he has looked upon the other side of the scenery,--the side that is just framework and bare canvas. he has seen the ugly machinery that shifts the stage setting--the stage setting which appears so impressive when viewed from the front. he has seen the rouge on the cheeks that seem to blush with the bloom of youth and beauty and innocence, and has caught the cold glint in the eyes that, from the distance, seem to languish with tenderness and love. why, he asks, should we create an illusion that must thus be rudely dispelled? why revamp and refurbish the old platitudes and dole them out each succeeding year? why not tell these young people the truth and let them be prepared for the fate that must come sooner or later? but the cynic forgets that there are some people who never lose their illusions,--some men and women who are always young,--and, whatever may be the type of men and women that other callings and professions desire to enroll in their service, this is the type that education needs. the great problem of the teacher is to keep himself in this class, to keep himself young, to preserve the very things that the cynic pleases to call the illusions of his youth. and so much do i desire to impress these novitiates into our calling with the necessity for preserving their ideals that i shall ask them this evening to consider with me some things which would, i fear, strike the cynic as most illusionary and impractical. the initiation ceremonies that admitted the young man to the privileges and duties of knighthood included the taking of certain vows, the making of certain pledges of devotion and fidelity to the fundamental principles for which chivalry stood. and i should like this evening to imagine that these graduates are undergoing an analogous initiation into the privileges and duties of schoolcraft, and that these vows which i shall enumerate, embody some of the ideals that govern the work of that craft. ii and the first of these vows i shall call, for want of a better term, the vow of "artistry,"--the pledge that the initiate takes to do the work that his hand finds to do in the best possible manner, without reference to the effort that it may cost or to the reward that it may or may not bring. i call this the vow of artistry because it represents the essential attitude of the artist toward his work. the cynic tells us that ideals are illusions of youth, and yet, the other day i saw expressed in a middle-aged working-man a type of idealism that is not at all uncommon in this world. he was a house painter; his task was simply the prosaic job of painting a door; and yet, from the pains which he took with that work, an observer would have concluded that it was, to the painter, the most important task in the world. and that, after all, is the true test of craft artistry: to the true craftsman the work that he is doing must be the most important thing that can be done. one of the best teachers that i know is that kind of a craftsman in education. a student was once sent to observe his work. he was giving a lesson upon the "attribute complement" to an eighth-grade grammar class. i asked the student afterward what she had got from her visit. "why," she replied, "that man taught as if the very greatest achievement in life would be to get his pupils to understand the attribute complement,--and when he had finished, they did understand it." in a narrower sense, this vow of artistry carries with it an appreciation of the value of technique. from the very fact of their normal school training, these graduates already possess a certain measure of skill, a certain mastery of the technique of their craft. this initial mastery has been gained in actual contact with the problems of school work in their practice teaching. they have learned some of the rudiments; they have met and mastered some of the rougher, cruder difficulties. the finer skill, the delicate and intangible points of technique, they must acquire, as all beginners must acquire them, through the strenuous processes of self-discipline in the actual work of the years that are to come. this is a process that takes time, energy, constant and persistent application. all that this school or any school can do for its students in this respect is to start them upon the right track in the acquisition of skill. but do not make the mistake of assuming that this is a small and unimportant matter. if this school did nothing more than this, it would still repay tenfold the cost of its establishment and maintenance. three fourths of the failures in a world that sometimes seems full of failures are due to nothing more nor less than a wrong start. in spite of the growth of professional training for teachers within the past fifty years, many of our lower schools are still filled with raw recruits, fresh from the high schools and even from the grades, who must learn every practical lesson of teaching through the medium of their own mistakes. even if this were all, the process would involve a tremendous and uncalled-for waste. but this is not all; for, out of this multitude of untrained teachers, only a small proportion ever recognize the mistakes that they make and try to correct them. to you who are beginning the work of life, the mastery of technique may seem a comparatively unimportant matter. you recognize its necessity, of course, but you think of it as something of a mechanical nature,--an integral part of the day's work, but uninviting in itself,--something to be reduced as rapidly as possible to the plane of automatism and dismissed from the mind. i believe that you will outgrow this notion. as you go on with your work, as you increase in skill, ever and ever the fascination of its technique will take a stronger and stronger hold upon you. this is the great saving principle of our workaday life. this is the factor that keeps the toiler free from the deadening effects of mechanical routine. it is the factor that keeps the farmer at his plow, the artisan at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at his palette. i once worked for a man who had accumulated a large fortune. at the age of seventy-five he divided this fortune among his children, intending to retire; but he could find pleasure and comfort only in the routine of business. in six months he was back in his office. he borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars on his past reputation and started in to have some fun. i was his only employee at the time, and i sat across the big double desk from him, writing his letters and keeping his accounts. he would sit for hours, planning for the establishment of some industry or running out the lines that would entangle some old adversary. i did not stay with him very long, but before i left, he had a half-dozen thriving industries on his hands, and when he died three years later he had accumulated another fortune of over a million dollars. that is an example of what i mean by the fascination that the technique of one's craft may come to possess. it is the joy of doing well the work that you know how to do. the finer points of technique,--those little things that seem so trivial in themselves and yet which mean everything to skill and efficiency,--what pride the competent artisan or the master artist takes in these! how he delights to revel in the jargon of his craft! how he prides himself in possessing the knowledge and the technical skill that are denied the layman! i am aware that i am somewhat unorthodox in urging this view of your work upon you. teachers have been encouraged to believe that details are not only unimportant but stultifying,--that teaching ability is a function of personality, and not a product of a technique that must be acquired through the strenuous discipline of experience. one of the most skillful teachers of my acquaintance is a woman down in the grades. i have watched her work for days at a time, striving to learn its secret. i can find nothing there that is due to genius,--unless we accept george eliot's definition of genius as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline. that teacher's success, by her own statement, is due to a mastery of technique, gained through successive years of growth checked by a rigid responsibility for results. she has found out by repeated trial how to do her work in the best way; she has discovered the attitude toward her pupils that will get the best work from them,--the clearest methods of presenting subject matter; the most effective ways in which to drill; how to use text-books and make study periods issue in something besides mischief; and, more than all else, how to do these things without losing sight of the true end of education. very frequently i have taken visiting school men to see this teacher's work. invariably after leaving her room they have turned to me with such expressions as these: "a born teacher!" "what interest!" "what a personality!" "what a voice!"--everything, in fact, except this,--which would have been the truth: "what a tribute to years of effort and struggle and self-discipline!" i have a theory which i have never exploited very seriously, but i will give it to you for what it is worth. it is this: elementary education especially needs a literary interpretation. it needs a literary artist who will portray to the public in the form of fiction the real life of the elementary school,--who will idealize the technique of teaching as kipling idealized the technique of the marine engineer, as balzac idealized the technique of the journalist, as du maurier and a hundred other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. we need some one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our work as you and i know it, not as you and i have been told by laymen that it ought to be,--a literature of the elementary school with the cant and the platitudes and the goody-goodyism left out, and in their place something of the virility, of the serious study, of the manful effort to solve difficult problems, of the real and vital achievements that are characteristic of thousands of elementary schools throughout the country to-day. at first you will be fascinated by the novelty of your work. but that soon passes away. then comes the struggle,--then comes the period, be it long or short, when you will work with your eyes upon the clock, when you will count the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes that lie between you and vacation time. then will be the need for all the strength and all the energy that you can summon to your aid. fail here, and your fate is decided once and for all. if, in your work, you never get beyond this stage, you will never become the true craftsman. you will never taste the joy that is vouchsafed the expert, the efficient craftsman. the length of this period varies with different individuals. some teachers "find themselves" quickly. they seem to settle at once into the teaching attitude. with others is a long, uphill fight. but it is safe to say that if, at the end of three years, your eyes still habitually seek the clock,--if, at the end of that time, your chief reward is the check that comes at the end of every fourth week,--then your doom is sealed. iii and the second vow that i should urge these graduates to take is the vow of fidelity to the spirit of their calling. we have heard a great deal in recent years about making education a profession. i do not like that term myself. education is not a profession in the sense that medicine and law are professions. it is rather a craft, for its duty is to produce, to mold, to fashion, to transform a certain raw material into a useful product. and, like all crafts, education must possess the craft spirit. it must have a certain code of craft ethics; it must have certain standards of craft excellence and efficiency. and in these the normal school must instruct its students, and to these it should secure their pledge of loyalty and fidelity and devotion. a true conception of this craft spirit in education is one of the most priceless possessions of the young teacher, for it will fortify him against every criticism to which his calling is subjected. it is revealing no secret to tell you that the teacher's work is not held in the highest regard by the vast majority of men and women in other walks of life. i shall not stop to inquire why this is so, but the fact cannot be doubted, and every now and again some incident of life, trifling perhaps in itself, will bring it to your notice; but most of all, perhaps you will be vexed and incensed by the very thing that is meant to put you at your ease--the patronizing attitude which your friends in other walks of life will assume toward you and toward your work. when will the good public cease to insult the teacher's calling with empty flattery? when will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools, cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings? education does not need these compliments. the teacher does not need them. if he is a master of his craft, he knows what education means,--he knows this far better than any layman can tell him. and what boots it to him, if, with all this cant and hypocrisy about the dignity and worth of his calling, he can sometimes hold his position only at the sacrifice of his self-respect? but what is the relation of the craft spirit to these facts? simply this: the true craftsman, by the very fact that he is a true craftsman, is immune to these influences. what does the true artist care for the plaudits or the sneers of the crowd? true, he seeks commendation and welcomes applause, for your real artist is usually extremely human; but he seeks this commendation from another source--from a source that metes it out less lavishly and yet with unconditioned candor. he seeks the commendation of his fellow-workmen, the applause of "those who know, and always will know, and always will understand." he plays to the pit and not to the gallery, for he knows that when the pit really approves the gallery will often echo and reëcho the applause, albeit it has not the slightest conception of what the whole thing is about. what education stands in need of to-day is just this: a stimulating and pervasive craft spirit. if a human calling would win the world's respect, it must first respect itself; and the more thoroughly it respects itself, the greater will be the measure of homage that the world accords it. in one of the educational journals a few years ago, the editors ran a series of articles under the general caption, "why i am a teacher." it reminded me of the spirited discussion that one of the sunday papers started some years since on the world-old query, "is marriage a failure?" and some of the articles were fully as sickening in their harrowing details as were some of the whining matrimonial confessions of the latter series. but the point that i wish to make is this: your true craftsman in education never stops to ask himself such questions. there are some men to whom schoolcraft is a mistress. they love it, and their devotion is no make-believe, fashioned out of sentiment, and donned for the purpose of hiding inefficiency or native indolence. they love it as some men love art, and others business, and others war. they do not stop to ask the reason why, to count the cost, or to care a fig what people think. they are properly jealous of their special knowledge, gained through years of special study; they are justly jealous of their special skill gained through years of discipline and training. they resent the interference of laymen in matters purely professional. they resent such interference as would a reputable physician, a reputable lawyer, a reputable engineer. they resent officious patronage and "fussy" meddling. they resent all these things manfully, vigorously. but your true craftsman will not whine. if the conditions under which he works do not suit him, he will fight for their betterment, but he will not whine. iv and yet this vow of fidelity and devotion to the spirit of schoolcraft would be an empty form without the two complementary vows that give it worth and meaning. these are the vow of poverty and the vow of service. it is through these that the true craft spirit must find its most vigorous expression and its only justification. the very corner stone of schoolcraft is service, and one fundamental lesson that the tyro in schoolcraft must learn, especially in this materialistic age, is that the value of service is not to be measured in dollars and cents. in this respect, teaching resembles art, music, literature, discovery, invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these branches of human activity got together and demanded of the world the real fruits of their self-sacrifice and labor,--if they demanded all the riches and comforts and amenities of life that have flowed directly or indirectly from their efforts,--there would be little left for the rest of mankind. each of these activities is represented by a craft spirit that recognizes this great truth. the artist or the scientist who has an itching palm, who prostitutes his craft for the sake of worldly gain, is quickly relegated to the oblivion that he deserves. he loses caste, and the caste of craft is more precious to your true craftsman than all the gold of the modern midas. you may think that this is all very well to talk about, but that it bears little agreement to the real conditions. let me tell you that you are mistaken. go ask röntgen why he did not keep the x-rays a secret to be exploited for his own personal gain. ask the shade of the great helmholtz why he did not patent the ophthalmoscope. go to the university of wisconsin and ask professor babcock why he gave to the world without money and without price the babcock test--an invention which is estimated to mean more than one million dollars every year to the farmers and dairymen of that state alone. ask the men on the geological survey who laid bare the great gold deposits of alaska why they did not leave a thankless and ill-paid service to acquire the wealth that lay at their feet. because commercialized ideals govern the world that we know, we think that all men's eyes are jaundiced, and that all men's vision is circumscribed by the milled rim of the almighty dollar. but we are sadly, miserably mistaken. do you think that these ideals of service from which every taint of self-seeking and commercialism have been eliminated--do you think that these are mere figments of the impractical imagination? go ask perry holden out in iowa. go ask luther burbank out in california. go to any agricultural college in this broad land and ask the scientists who are doing more than all other forces combined to increase the wealth of the people. go to the scientific departments at washington where men of genius are toiling for a pittance. ask them how much of the wealth for which they are responsible they propose to put into their own pockets. what will be their answer? they will tell you that all they ask is a living wage, a chance to work, and the just recognition of their services by those who know and appreciate and understand. but let me hasten to add that these men claim no especial merit for their altruism and unselfishness. they do not pose before the world as philanthropists. they do not strut about and preen themselves as who would say: "see what a noble man am i! see how i sacrifice myself for the welfare of society!" the attitude of cant and pose is entirely alien to the spirit of true service. their delight is in doing, in serving, in producing. but beyond this, they have the faults and frailties of their kind,--save one,--the sin of covetousness. and again, all that they ask of the world is a living wage, and the privilege to serve. and that is all that the true craftsman in education asks. the man or woman with the itching palm has no place in the schoolroom,--no place in any craft whose keynote is service. it is true that the teacher does not receive to-day, in all parts of our country, a living wage; and it is equally true that society at large is the greatest sufferer because of its penurious policy in this regard. i should applaud and support every movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to the level of those paid in other branches of professional service. society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at the public crib. i should approve all honest efforts of school men and school women toward this much-desired end. but whenever men and women enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out of the church when, during the middle ages, the church attracted men, not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards and tarnished their ideals. this is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the accumulation of property. the tremendous strides that our country has made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type of genius. creative genius must always compel our admiration and our respect. it may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope; or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. genius is pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the common clay must recognize its worth. the grave defect in our american life is not that we are hero worshipers, but rather that we worship but one type of hero; we recognize but one type of achievement; we see but one sort of genius. for two generations our youth have been led to believe that there is only one ambition that is worth while,--the ambition of property. success at any price is the ideal that has been held up before our boys and girls. and to-day we are reaping the rewards of this distorted and unjust view of life. i recently met a man who had lived for some years in the neighborhood of st. paul and minneapolis,--a section that is peopled, as you know, very largely by scandinavian immigrants and their descendants. this man told me that he had been particularly impressed by the high idealism of the norwegian people. his business brought him in contact with norwegian immigrants in what are called the lower walks of life,--with workingmen and servant girls,--and he made it a point to ask each of these young men and young women the same question. "tell me," he would say, "who are the great men of your country? who are the men toward whom the youth of your land are led to look for inspiration? who are the men whom your boys are led to imitate and emulate and admire?" and he said that he almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names of the norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: ole bull, björnson, ibsen, nansen. over and over again he asked that same question; over and over again he received the same answer: ole bull, björnson, ibsen, nansen. a great musician, a great novelist, a great dramatist, a great scientist. and i conjectured as i heard of this incident, what would be the answer if the youth of our land were asked that question: "who are the great men of _your_ country? what type of achievement have you been led to imitate and emulate and admire?" how many of our boys and girls have even heard of our great men in the world of culture,--unless, indeed, such men lived a half century ago and have got into the school readers by this time? how many of our boys and girls have ever heard of macdowell, or james, or whistler, or sargent? i have said that the teacher must take the vow of service. what does this imply except that the opportunity for service, the privilege of serving, should be the opportunity that one seeks, and that the achievements toward which one aspires should be the achievements of serving? the keynote of service lies in self-sacrifice,--in self-forgetfulness, rather,--in merging one's own life in the lives of others. the attitude of the true teacher in this respect is very similar to the attitude of the true parent. in so far as the parent feels himself responsible for the character of his children, in so far as he holds himself culpable for their shortcomings and instrumental in shaping their virtues, he loses himself in his children. what we term parental affection is, i believe, in part an outgrowth of this feeling of responsibility. the situation is precisely the same with the teacher. it is when the teacher begins to feel himself responsible for the growth and development of his pupils that he begins to find himself in the work of teaching. it is then that the effective devotion to his pupils has its birth. the affection that comes prior to this is, i think, very likely to be of the sentimental and transitory sort. in education, as in life, we play altogether too carelessly with the word "love." the test of true devotion is self-forgetfulness. until the teacher reaches that point, he is conscious of two distinct elements in his work,--himself and his pupils. when that time comes, his own _ego_ drops from view, and he lives in and for his pupils. the young teacher's tendency is always to ask himself, "do my pupils like me?" let me say that this is beside the question. it is not, from his standpoint, a matter of the pupils liking their teacher, but of the teacher liking his pupils. that, i take it, must be constantly the point of view. if you ask the other question first, you will be tempted to gain your end by means that are almost certain to prove fatal,--to bribe and pet and cajole and flatter, to resort to the dangerous expedient of playing to the gallery; but the liking that you get in this way is not worth the price that you pay for it. i should caution young teachers against the short-sighted educational theories that are in the air to-day, and that definitely recommend this attitude. they may sound sweet, but they are soft and sticky in practice. better be guided by instinct than by "half-baked" theory. i have no disposition to criticize the attempts that have been made to rationalize educational practice, but a great deal of contemporary theory starts at the wrong end. it has failed to go to the sources of actual experience for its data. i know a father and mother who have brought up ten children successfully, and i may say that you could learn more about managing boys and girls from observing their methods than from a half-dozen prominent books on educational theory that i could name. and so i repeat that the true test of the teacher's fidelity to this vow of service is the degree in which he loses himself in his pupils,--the degree in which he lives and toils and sacrifices for them just for the pure joy that it brings him. once you have tasted this joy, no carping sneer of the cynic can cause you to lose faith in your calling. material rewards sink into insignificance. you no longer work with your eyes upon the clock. the hours are all too short for the work that you would do. you are as light-hearted and as happy as a child,--for you have lost yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to lose yourself. v and the final vow that i would have these graduates take is the vow of idealism,--the pledge of fidelity and devotion to certain fundamental principles of life which it is the business of education carefully to cherish and nourish and transmit untarnished to each succeeding generation. these but formulate in another way what the vows that i have already discussed mean by implication. one is the ideal of social service, upon which education must, in the last analysis, rest its case. the second is the ideal of science,--the pledge of devotion to that persistent unwearying search after truth, of loyalty to the great principles of unbiased observation and unprejudiced experiment, of willingness to accept the truth and be governed by it, no matter how disagreeable it may be, no matter how roughly it may trample down our pet doctrines and our preconceived theories. the nineteenth century left us a glorious heritage in the great discoveries and inventions that science has established. these must not be lost to posterity; but far better lose them than lose the spirit of free inquiry, the spirit of untrammeled investigation, the noble devotion to truth for its own sake that made these discoveries and inventions possible. it is these ideals that education must perpetuate, and if education is successfully to perpetuate them, the teacher must himself be filled with a spirit of devotion to the things that they represent. science has triumphed over superstition and fraud and error. it is the teacher's duty to see to it that this triumph is permanent, that mankind does not again fall back into the black pit of ignorance and superstition. and so it is the teacher's province to hold aloft the torch, to stand against the materialistic tendencies that would reduce all human standards to the common denominator of the dollar, to insist at all times and at all places that this nation of ours was founded upon idealism, and that, whatever may be the prevailing tendencies of the time, its children shall still learn to live "among the sunlit peaks." and if the teacher is imbued with this idealism, although his work may take him very close to mother earth, he may still lift his head above the fog and look the morning sun squarely in the face. footnotes: [footnote : an address to the graduating class of the oswego, new york, state normal school, february, .] ~ii~ optimism in teaching[ ] although the month is march and not november, it is never unseasonable to count up the blessings for which it is well to be thankful. in fact, from the standpoint of education, the spring is perhaps the appropriate time to perform this very pleasant function. as if still further to emphasize the fact that education, like civilization, is an artificial thing, we have reversed the operations of mother nature: we sow our seed in the fall and cultivate our crops during the winter and reap our harvests in the spring. i may be pardoned, therefore, for making the theme of my discussion a brief review of the elements of growth and victory for which the educator of to-day may justly be grateful, with, perhaps, a few suggestions of what the next few years may reasonably be expected to bring forth. and this course is all the more necessary because, i believe, the teaching profession is unduly prone to pessimism. one might think at first glance that the contrary would be true. we are surrounded on every side by youth. youth is the material with which we constantly deal. youth is buoyant, hopeful, exuberant; and yet, with this material constantly surrounding us, we frequently find the task wearisome and apparently hopeless. the reason is not far to seek. youth is not only buoyant, it is unsophisticated, it is inexperienced, in many important particulars it is crude. some of its tastes must necessarily, in our judgment, hark back to the primitive, to the barbaric. ours is continually the task to civilize, to sophisticate, to refine this raw material. but, unfortunately for us, the effort that we put forth does not always bring results that we can see and weigh and measure. the hopefulness of our material is overshadowed not infrequently by its crudeness. we take each generation as it comes to us. we strive to lift it to the plane that civilized society has reached. we do our best and pass it on, mindful of the many inadequacies, perhaps of the many failures, in our work. we turn to the new generation that takes its place. we hope for better materials, but we find no improvement. and so you and i reflect in our occasional moments of pessimism that generic situation which inheres in the very work that we do. the constantly accelerated progress of civilization lays constantly increasing burdens upon us. in some way or another we must accomplish the task. in some way or another we must lift the child to the level of society, and, as society is reaching a continually higher and higher level, so the distance through which the child must be raised is ever increased. we would like to think that all this progress in the race would come to mean that we should be able to take the child at a higher level; but you who deal with children know from experience the principle for which the biologist weismann stands sponsor--the principle, namely, that acquired characteristics are not inherited; that whatever changes may be wrought during life in the brains and nerves and muscles of the present generation cannot be passed on to its successor save through the same laborious process of acquisition and training; that, however far the civilization of the race may progress, education, whose duty it is to conserve and transmit this civilization, must always begin with the "same old child." this, i take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's pessimism. in our work we are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,--that inertia of the primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which, for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed. this inertia has been conquered at various times in the course of recorded history,--in egypt and china and india, in chaldea and assyria, in greece and rome,--conquered only again to reassert itself and drive man back into barbarism. now we of the western world have conquered it, let us hope, for all time; for we of the western world have discovered an effective method of holding it in abeyance, and this method is universal public education. let germany close her public schools, and in two generations she will lapse back into the semi-darkness of medievalism; let her close both her public schools and her universities, and three generations will fetch her face to face with the dark ages; let her destroy her libraries and break into ruin all of her works of art, all of her existing triumphs of technical knowledge and skill, from which a few, self-tutored, might glean the wisdom that is every one's to-day, and germany will soon become the home of a savage race, as it was in the days of tacitus and cæsar. let italy close her public schools, and italy will become the same discordant jumble of petty states that it was a century ago,--again to await, this time perhaps for centuries or millenniums, another garibaldi and victor emmanuel to work her regeneration. let japan close her public schools, and japan in two generations will be a barbaric kingdom of the shoguns, shorn of every vestige of power and prestige,--the easy victim of the machinations of western diplomats. let our country cease in its work of education, and these united states must needs pass through the reverse stages of their growth until another race of savages shall roam through the unbroken forest, now and then to reach the shores of ocean and gaze through the centuries, eastward, to catch a glimpse of the new columbus. like the moving pictures of the kinetoscope when the reels are reversed, is the picture that imagination can unroll if we grant the possibility of a lapse from civilization to savagery. and so when we take the broader view, we quickly see that, in spite of our pessimism, we are doing something in the world. we are part of that machine which civilization has invented and is slowly perfecting to preserve itself. we may be a very small part, but, so long as the responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an unimportant part. society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an infinitesimal degree, but it must reckon with the institution which we represent as it reckons with no other institution that it has reared to subserve its needs. in a certain sense these statements are platitudes. we have repeated them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous significance. and it behooves us now and again to revive the old substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our function. it is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. we cannot hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true perspective that i have very briefly outlined. it would probably not be wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our function and of our worth. the popular mind must think in concrete details rather than in comprehensive principles, when the subject of thought is a specialized vocation. you and i have crude ideas, no doubt, of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the clergyman's function. not less crude are their ideas of our function. even when they patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that any man or woman would engage in, they have but a vague and shadowy perception of its real significance. i doubt not that, with the majority of those who thus pat us verbally upon the back, the words that they use are words only. they do not envy us our privileges,--unless it is our summer vacations,--nor do they encourage their sons to enter service in our craft. the popular mind--the nontechnical mind,--must work in the concrete;--it must have visible evidences of power and influence before it pays homage to a man or to an institution. throughout the german empire the traveler is brought constantly face to face with the memorials that have been erected by a grateful people to the genius of the iron chancellor. bismarck richly deserves the tribute that is paid to his memory, but a man to be honored in this way must exert a tangible and an obvious influence. and yet, in a broader sense, the preëminence of germany is due in far greater measure to two men whose names are not so frequently to be found inscribed upon towers and monuments. in the very midst of the havoc and devastation wrought by the napoleon wars,--at the very moment when the german people seemed hopelessly crushed and defeated,--an intellect more penetrating than that of bismarck grasped the logic of the situation. with the inspiration that comes with true insight, the philosopher fichte issued his famous addresses to the german people. with clear-cut argument couched in white-hot words, he drove home the great principle that lies at the basis of united germany and upon the results of which bismarck and von moltke and the first emperor erected the splendid structure that to-day commands the admiration of the world. fichte told the german people that their only hope lay in universal, public education. and the kingdom of prussia--impoverished, bankrupt, war-ridden, and war-devastated--heard the plea. a great scheme that comprehended such an education was already at hand. it had fallen almost stillborn from the only kind of a mind that could have produced it,--a mind that was suffused with an overwhelming love for humanity and incomparably rich with the practical experiences of a primary schoolmaster. it had fallen from the mind of pestalozzi, the swiss reformer, who thus stands with fichte as one of the vital factors in the development of germany's educational supremacy. the people's schools of prussia, imbued with the enthusiasm of fichte and pestalozzi,[ ] gave to germany the tremendous advantage that enabled it so easily to overcome its hereditary foe, when, two generations later, the franco-prussian war was fought; for the _volksschule_ gave to germany something that no other nation of that time possessed; namely, an educated proletariat, an intelligent common people. bismarck knew this when he laid his cunning plans for the unification of german states that was to crown the brilliant series of victories beginning at sedan and ending within the walls of paris. william of prussia knew it when, in the royal palace at versailles, he accepted the crown that made him the first emperor of united germany. von moltke knew it when, at the capitulation of paris, he was asked to whom the credit of the victory was due, and he replied, in the frank simplicity of the true soldier and the true hero, "the schoolmaster did it." and yet bismarck and von moltke and the emperor are the heroes of germany, and if fichte and pestalozzi are not forgotten, at least their memories are not cherished as are the memories of the more tangible and obvious heroes. instinct lies deeply embedded in human nature and it is instinctive to think in the concrete. and so i repeat that we cannot expect the general public to share in the respect and veneration which you and i feel for our calling, for you and i are technicians in education, and we can see the process as a comprehensive whole. but our fellow men and women have their own interests and their own departments of technical knowledge and skill; they see the schoolhouse and the pupils' desks and the books and other various material symbols of our work,--they see these things and call them education; just as we see a freight train thundering across the viaduct or a steamer swinging out in the lake and call these things commerce. in both cases, the nontechnical mind associates the word with something concrete and tangible; in both cases, the technical mind associates the same word with an abstract process, comprehending a movement of vast proportions. to compress such a movement--whether it be commerce or government or education--in a single conception requires a multitude of experiences involving actual adjustments with the materials involved; involving constant reflection upon hidden meanings, painful investigations into hidden causes, and mastery of a vast body of specialized knowledge which it takes years of study to digest and assimilate. it is not every stevedore upon the docks, nor every stoker upon the steamers, nor every brakeman upon the railroads, who comprehends what commerce really means. it is not every banker's clerk who knows the meaning of business. it is not every petty holder of public office who knows what government really means. but this, at least, is true: in proportion as the worker knows the meaning of the work that he does,--in proportion as he sees it in its largest relations to society and to life,--his work is no longer the drudgery of routine toil. it becomes instead an intelligent process directed toward a definite goal. it has acquired that touch of artistry which, so far as human testimony goes, is the only pure and uncontaminated source of human happiness. and the chief blessing for which you and i should be thankful to-day is that this larger view of our calling has been vouchsafed to us as it has been vouchsafed no former generation of teachers. education as the conventional prerogative of the rich,--as the garment which separated the higher from the lower classes of society,--this could scarcely be looked upon as a fascinating and uplifting ideal from which to derive hope and inspiration in the day's work; and yet this was the commonly accepted function of education for thousands of years, and the teachers who did the actual work of instruction could not but reflect in their attitude and bearing the servile character of the task that they performed. education to fit the child to earn a better living, to command a higher wage,--this myopic view of the function of the school could do but little to make the work of teaching anything but drudgery; and yet it is this narrow and materialistic view that has dominated our educational system to within a comparatively few years. so silently and yet so insistently have our craft ideals been transformed in the last two decades that you and i are scarcely aware that our point of view has been changed and that we are looking upon our work from a much higher point of vantage and in a light entirely new. and yet this is the change that has been wrought. that education, in its widest meaning, is the sole conservator and transmitter of civilization to successive generations found expression as far back as aristotle and plato, and has been vaguely voiced at intervals down through the centuries; but its complete establishment came only as an indirect issue of the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, and its application to the problems of practical schoolcraft and its dissemination through the rank and file of teachers awaited the dawn of the twentieth century. to-day we see expressions and indications of the new outlook upon every hand, in the greatly increased professional zeal that animates the teacher's calling; in the widespread movement among all civilized countries to raise the standards of teachers, to eliminate those candidates for service who have not subjected themselves to the discipline of special preparation; in the increased endowments and appropriations for schools and seminaries that prepare teachers; and, perhaps most strikingly at the present moment, in that concerted movement to organize into institutions of formal education, all of those branches of training which have, for years, been left to the chance operation of economic needs working through the crude and unorganized though often effective apprentice system. the contemporary fervor for industrial education is only one expression of this new view that, in the last analysis, the school must stand sponsor for the conservation and transmission of every valuable item of experience, every usable fact or principle, every tiniest perfected bit of technical skill, every significant ideal or prejudice, that the race has acquired at the cost of so much struggle and suffering and effort. i repeat that this new vantage point from which to gain a comprehensive view of our calling has been attained only as an indirect result of the scientific investigations of the nineteenth century. we are wont to study the history of education from the work and writings of a few great reformers, and it is true that much that is valuable in our present educational system can be understood and appreciated only when viewed in the perspective of such sources. aristotle and quintilian, abelard and st. thomas aquinas, sturm and philip melanchthon, comenius, pestalozzi, rousseau, herbart, and froebel still live in the schools of to-day. their genius speaks to us through the organization of subject-matter, through the art of questioning, through the developmental methods of teaching, through the use of pictures, through objective instruction, and in a thousand other forms. but this dominant ideal of education to which i have referred and which is so rapidly transforming our outlook and vitalizing our organization and inspiring us to new efforts, is not to be drawn from these sources. the new histories of education must account for this new ideal, and to do this they must turn to the masters in science who made the middle part of the nineteenth century the period of the most profound changes that the history of human thought records.[ ] with the illuminating principle of evolution came a new and generously rich conception of human growth and development. the panorama of evolution carried man back far beyond the limits of recorded human history and indicated an origin as lowly as the succeeding uplift has been sublime. the old depressing and fatalistic notion that the human race was on the downward path, and that the march of civilization must sooner or later end in a cul-de-sac (a view which found frequent expression in the french writers of the eighteenth century and which dominated the skepticism of the dark hours preceding the revolution)--this fatalistic view met its death-blow in the principle of evolution. a vista of hope entirely undreamed of stretched out before the race. if the tremendous leverage of the untold millenniums of brute and savage ancestry could be overcome, even in slight measure, by a few short centuries of intelligence and reason, what might not happen in a few more centuries of constantly increasing light? in short, the principle of evolution supplied the perspective that was necessary to an adequate evaluation of human progress. but this inspiriting outlook which was perhaps the most comprehensive result of darwin's work had indirect consequences that were vitally significant to education. it is with mental and not with physical development that education is primarily concerned, and yet mental development is now known to depend fundamentally upon physical forces. the same decade that witnessed the publication of the _origin of species_ also witnessed the birth of another great book, little known except to the specialist, and yet destined to achieve immortality. this book is the _elements of psychophysics_, the work of the german scientist fechner. the intimate relation between mental life and physical and physiological forces was here first clearly demonstrated, and the way was open for a science of psychology which should cast aside the old and threadbare raiment of mystery and speculation and metaphysic, and stand forth naked and unashamed. but all this was only preparatory to the epoch-making discoveries that have had so much to do with our present attitude toward education. the darwinian hypothesis led to violent controversy, not only between the opponents and supporters of the theory, but also among the various camps of the evolutionists themselves. among these controversies was that which concerned itself with the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the outcome of that conflict has a direct significance to present educational theory. the principle, now almost conclusively established,[ ] that the characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring, must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must look to education for its preservation and support. it has been stated by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. this simply means that nature finished her work as far as man is concerned far beyond the remotest period that human history records; that, for all that we can say to-day, there must have existed in the very distant past human beings who were just as well adapted by nature to the lives that we are leading as we are to-day adapted; that what they lacked and what we possess is simply a mass of traditions, of habits, of ideals, and prejudices which have been slowly accumulated through the ages and which are passed on from generation to generation by imitation and instruction and training and discipline; and that the child of to-day, left to his own devices and operated upon in no way by the products of civilization, would develop into a savage undistinguishable in all significant qualities from other savages. the possibilities that follow from such a conception are almost overwhelming even at first glance, and yet the theory is borne out by adequate experiments. the transformation of the japanese people through two generations of education in western civilization is a complete upsetting of the old theory that as far as race is concerned, there is anything significantly important in blood, and confirms the view that all that is racially significant depends upon the influences that surround the young of the race during the formative years. the complete assimilation of foreign ingredients into our own national stock through the instrumentality of the public school is another demonstration that the factors which form the significant characteristics in the lower animals possess but a minimum of significance to man,--that color, race, stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cranium, have very little to do with human worth or human efficiency save in extremely abnormal cases. and so we have at last a fundamental principle with which to illumine the field of our work and from which to derive not only light but inspiration. unite this with john fiske's penetrating induction that the possibilities of progress through education are correlated directly with the length of the period of growth or immaturity,--that is, that the races having the longest growth before maturity are capable of the highest degree of civilization,--and we have a pair of principles the influence of which we see reflected all about us in the great activity for education and especially in the increased sense of pride and responsibility and respect for his calling that is animating the modern teacher. and what will be the result of this new point of view? first and foremost, an increased general respect for the work. until a profession respects itself, it cannot very well ask for the world's respect, and until it can respect itself on the basis of scientific principles indubitably established, its respect for itself will be little more than the irritating self-esteem of the goody-goody order which is so often associated with our craft. with our own respect for our calling, based upon this incontrovertible principle, will come, sooner or later, increased compensation for the work and increased prestige in the community. i repeat that these things can only come after we have established a true craft spirit. if we are ashamed of our calling, if we regret openly and publicly that we are not lawyers or physicians or dentists or bricklayers or farmers or anything rather than teachers, the public will have little respect for the teacher's calling. as long as we criticize each other before laymen and make light of each other's honest efforts, the public will question our professional standing on the ground that we have no organized code of professional ethics,--a prerequisite for any profession. i started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful for,--something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement. the hopeful thing about our present status is that we have an established principle upon which to work. a writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the middle ages. the statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to education. if one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the nineteenth century. the analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its problems. education has still a long road to travel before it reaches the point of development that medicine has to-day attained. it has still to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of medicine,--the theory of opsonins,--which almost makes one believe that in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of death in the human race. education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so advanced a point of development. but there is no immediate cause for pessimism or despair. we need especially, now that the purpose of education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental science. for efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling human conduct,--we need to know just what degree of efficiency is exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our drawing and manual training, our latin and greek, our ethics and psychology. it is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our educational system to-day. and yet even here the outlook is extremely hopeful. the new movement toward industrial education is placing greater and greater emphasis upon those subjects of instruction and those types of methods whose efficiency can be tested and determined in an accurate fashion. the intimate relation between the classroom, on the one hand, and the machine shop, the experimental farm, the hospital ward and operating room, and the practice school, on the other hand, indicates a source of accurate knowledge with regard to the way in which our teachings really affect the conduct and adjustment of our pupils that cannot fail within a short time to serve as the basis for some illuminating principle of educational values. this, i believe, will be the next great step in the development of our profession. there has been no intention in what i have said to minimize the disadvantages and discouragements under which we are to-day doing our work. my only plea is for the hopeful and optimistic outlook which, i maintain, is richly justified by the progress that has already been made and by the virile character of the forces that are operating in the present situation. on the whole, i can see no reason why i should not encourage young men to enter the service of schoolcraft. i cannot say to them that they will attain to great wealth, but i can safely promise them that, if they give to the work of preparation the same attention and time that they would give to their education and training for medicine or law or engineering, their services will be in large demand and their rewards not to be sneered at. their incomes will not enable them to compete with the captains of industry, but they will permit as full an enjoyment of the comforts of life as it is good for any young man to command. but the ambitious teacher must pay the price to reap these rewards,--the price of time and energy and labor,--the price that he would have to pay for success in any other human calling. what i cannot promise him in education is the opportunity for wide popular adulation, but this, after all, is a matter of taste. some men crave it and they should go into those vocations that will give it to them. others are better satisfied with the discriminating recognition and praise of their own fellow-craftsmen. footnotes: [footnote : an address before the oswego, new york, county council of education, march , .] [footnote : it should be added that the movement toward universal education in germany owed much to the work of pre-pestalozzian reformers,--especially francke and basedow.] [footnote : while the years from to mark the period of intellectual revolution, it should not be inferred that the education of this period reflected these fundamental changes of outlook. on the contrary, these years were in general marked by educational stagnation.] [footnote : the writer here accepts the conclusions of j.a. thomson (_heredity_ new york, , ch. vii).] ~iii~ how may we promote the efficiency of the teaching force?[ ] i efficiency seems to be a word to conjure with in these days. popular speech has taken it in its present connotation from the technical vocabulary of engineering, and the term has brought with it a very refreshing sense of accuracy and practicality. it suggests blueprints and t-squares and mathematical formulæ. a faint and rather pleasant odor of lubricating oil and cotton waste seems to hover about it. the efficiency of a steam engine or a dynamo is a definitely determinable and measurable factor, and when we use the term "efficiency" in popular speech we convey through the word somewhat of this quality of certainty and exactitude. an efficient man, very obviously, is a man who "makes good," who surmounts obstacles, overcomes difficulties, and "gets results." rowan, the man who achieved immortality on account of a certain message that he carried to garcia, is the contemporary standard of human efficiency. he was given a task to do, and he did it. he did not stop to inquire whether it was interesting, or whether it was easy, or whether it would be remunerative, or whether garcia was a pleasant man to meet. he simply took the message and brought back the answer. here we have efficiency in human endeavor reduced to its lowest terms: to take a message and to bring back an answer; to do the work that is laid out for one to do without shirking or "soldiering" or whining; and to "make good," to get results. now if we are to improve the efficiency of the teacher, the first thing to do is to see that the conditions of efficiency are fulfilled as far as possible at the outset. in other words, efficiency is impossible unless one is set a certain task to accomplish. rowan was told to carry a message to garcia. he was to carry it to garcia, not to queen victoria or li hung chang or j. pierpont morgan, or any one else whom he may have felt inclined to choose as its recipient. and that is just where rowan had a decided advantage over many teachers who have every ambition to be just as efficient as he was. to expect a young teacher not only to get results, but also to determine the results that should be obtained, multiplies his chances of failure, not by two, as one might assume at first thought, but almost by infinity. let me give an example of what i mean. a young man graduated from college during the hard times of the middle nineties. it was imperative that he secure some sort of a remunerative employment, but places were very scarce and he had to seek a long time before he found anything to which he could turn his hand. the position that he finally secured was that of teacher in an ungraded school in a remote settlement. school-teaching was far from his thoughts and still farther from his ambitions, but forty dollars a month looked too good to be true, especially as he had come to the point where his allowance of food consisted of one plate of soup each day, with the small supply of crackers that went with it. he accepted the position most gratefully. he taught this school for two years. he had no supervision. he read various books on the science and art of teaching and upon a certain subject that went by the name of psychology, but he could see no connection between what these books told him and the tasks that he had to face. finally he bought a book that was advertised as indispensable to young teachers. the first words of the opening paragraph were these: "teacher, if you know it all, don't read this book." the young man threw the volume in the fire. he had no desire to profit by the teaching of an author who began his instruction with an insult. from that time until he left the school, he never opened a book on educational theory. his first year passed off with what appeared to be the most encouraging success. he talked to his pupils on science and literature and history. they were very good children, and they listened attentively. when he tired of talking, he set the pupils to writing in their copy books, while he thought of more things to talk about. he covered a great deal of ground that first year. scarcely a field of human knowledge was left untouched. his pupils were duly informed about the plants and rocks and trees, about the planets and constellations, about atoms and molecules and the laws of motion, about digestion and respiration and the wonders of the nervous system, about shakespeare and dickens and george eliot. and his pupils were very much interested in it all. their faces had that glow of interest, that look of wonderment and absorption, that you get sometimes when you tell a little four-year-old the story of the three bears. he never had any troubles of discipline, because he never asked his pupils to do anything that they did not wish to do. there were six pupils in his "chart class." they were anxious to learn to read, and three of them did learn. their mothers taught them at home. the other three were still learning at the end of the second year. he concluded that they had been "born short," but he liked them and they liked him. he did not teach his pupils spelling or writing. if they learned these things they learned them without his aid, and it is safe to say that they did not learn them in any significant measure. he did not like arithmetic, and so he just touched on it now and then for the sake of appearances. this teacher was elected for the following year at a handsome increase of salary. he took this to mean a hearty indorsement of his methods; consequently he followed the same general plan the next year. he had told his pupils about everything that he knew, so he started over again, much to their delight. he left at the close of the year, amidst general lamentation. school-teaching was a delightful occupation, but he had mastered the art, and now he wished to attack something that was really difficult. he would study law. it is no part of the story that he did not. neither is it part of the story that his successor had a very hard time getting that school straightened out; in fact, i believe it required three or four successive successors to make even an impression. now that man's work was a failure, and the saddest kind of a failure, for he did not realize that he had failed until years afterward. he failed, not because he lacked ambition and enthusiasm; he had a large measure of both these indispensable qualities. he failed, not because he lacked education and a certain measure of what the world calls culture; from the standpoint of education, he was better qualified than most teachers in schools of that type. he failed, not because he lacked social spirit and the ability to coöperate with the church and the home; he mingled with the other members of the community, lived their life and thought their thoughts and enjoyed their social diversions. the community liked him and respected him. his pupils liked him and respected him; and yet what he fears most of all to-day is that he may come suddenly face to face with one of those pupils and be forced to listen to a first-hand account of his sins of omission. this man failed simply because he did not do what the elementary teacher must do if he is to be efficient as an elementary teacher. he did not train his pupils in the habits that are essential to one who is to live the social life. he gave them a miscellaneous lot of interesting information which held their attention while it lasted, but which was never mastered in any real sense of the term, and which could have but the most superficial influence upon their future conduct. but, worst of all, he permitted bad and inadequate habits to be developed at the most critical and plastic period of life. his pupils had followed the lines of least effort, just as he had followed the lines of least effort. the result was a well-established prejudice against everything that was not superficially attractive and intrinsically interesting. now this man's teaching fell short simply because he did not know what results he ought to obtain. he had been given a message to deliver, but he did not know to whom he should deliver it. consequently he brought the answer, not from garcia, but from a host of other personages with whom he was better acquainted, whose language he could speak and understand, and from whom he was certain of a warm welcome. in other words, having no definite results for which he would be held responsible, he did the kind of teaching that he liked to do. that might, under certain conditions, have been the best kind of teaching for his pupils. but these conditions did not happen to operate at that time. the answer that he brought did not happen to be the answer that was needed. that it pleased his employers does not in the least mitigate the failure. that a teacher pleases the community in which he works is not always evidence of his success. it is dangerous to make a statement like this, for some are sure to jump to the opposite conclusion and assume that one who is unpopular in the community is the most successful. needless to say, the reasoning is fallacious. the matter of popularity is a secondary criterion, not a primary criterion of the efficiency of teaching. one may be successful and popular or successful and unpopular; unsuccessful and popular or unsuccessful and unpopular. the question of popularity is beside the question of efficiency, although it may enter into specific cases as a factor. ii and so the first step to take in getting more efficient work from young teachers, and especially from inexperienced and untrained teachers fresh from the high school or the college, is to make sure that they know what is expected of them. now this looks to be a very simple precaution that no one would be unwise enough to omit. as a matter of fact, a great many superintendents and principals are not explicit and definite about the results that they desire. very frequently all that is asked of a teacher is that he or she keep things running smoothly, keep pupils and parents good-natured. let me assert again that this ought to be done, but that it is no measure of a teacher's efficiency, simply because it can be done and often is done by means that defeat the purpose of the school. as a young principal in a city system, i learned some vital lessons in supervision from a very skillful teacher. she would come to me week after week with this statement: "tell me what you want done, and i will do it." it took me some time to realize that that was just what i was being paid to do,--telling teachers what should be accomplished and then seeing that they accomplished the task that was set. when i finally awoke to my duties, i found myself utterly at a loss to make prescriptions. i then learned that there was a certain document known as the course of study, which mapped out the general line of work and indicated the minimal requirements. i had seen this course of study, but its function had never impressed itself upon me. i had thought that it was one of those documents that officials publish as a matter of form but which no one is ever expected to read. but i soon discovered that a principal had something to do besides passing from room to room, looking wisely at the work going on, and patting little boys and girls on the head. now a definite course of study is very hard to construct,--a course that will tell explicitly what the pupils of each grade should acquire each term or half-term in the way of habits, knowledge, ideals, attitudes, and prejudices. but such a course of study is the first requisite to efficiency in teaching. the system that goes by hit or miss, letting each teacher work out his own salvation in any way that he may see fit, is just an aggregation of such schools as that which i have described. it is true that reformers have very strenuously criticized the policy of restricting teachers to a definite course of study. they have maintained that it curtails individual initiative and crushes enthusiasm. it does this in a certain measure. every prescription is in a sense a restriction. the fact that the steamship captain must head his ship for liverpool instead of wherever he may choose to go is a restriction, and the captain's individuality is doubtless crushed and his initiative limited. but this result seems to be inevitable and he generally manages to survive the blow. the course of study must be to the teacher what the sailing orders are to the captain of the ship, what the stated course is to the wheelsman and the officer on the bridge, what the time-table is to the locomotive engineer, what garcia and the message and the answer were to rowan. one may decry organization and prescription in our educational system. one may say that these things tend inevitably toward mechanism and formalism and the stultifying of initiative. but the fact remains that, whenever prescription is abandoned, efficiency in general is at an end. and so i maintain that every teacher has a right to know what he is to be held responsible for, what is expected of him, and that this information be just as definite and unequivocal as it can be made. it is under the stress of definite responsibility that growth is most rapid and certain. the more uncertain and intangible the end to be gained, the less keenly will one feel the responsibility for gaining that end. unhappily we cannot say to a teacher: "here is a message. take it to garcia. bring the answer." but we may make our work far more definite and tangible than it is now. the courses of study are becoming more and more explicit each year. vague and general prescriptions are giving place to definite and specific prescriptions. the teachers know what they are expected to do, and knowing this, they have some measure for testing the efficiency of their own efforts. iii but to make more definite requirements is, after all, only the first step in improving efficiency. it is not sufficient that one know what results are wanted; one must also know how these results may be obtained. improvement in method means improvement in efficiency, and a crying need in education to-day is a scientific investigation of methods of teaching. teachers should be made acquainted with the methods that are most economical and efficient. as a matter of fact, whatever is done in that direction at the present time must be almost entirely confined to suggestions and hints. our discussions of methods of teaching may be divided into three classes: ( ) dogmatic assertions that such and such a method is right and that all others are wrong--assertions based entirely upon _a priori_ reasoning. for example, the assertion that children must never be permitted to learn their lessons "by heart" is based upon the general principle that words are only symbols of ideas and that, if one has ideas, one can find words of his own in which to formulate them. ( ) a second class of discussions of method comprises descriptions of devices that have proved successful in certain instances and with certain teachers. ( ) of a third class of discussions there are very few representative examples. i refer to methods that have been established on the basis of experiments in which irrelevant factors have been eliminated. in fact, i know of no clearly defined report or discussion of this sort. an approach to a scientific solution of a definite problem of method is to be found in browne's monograph, _the psychology of simple arithmetical processes_. another example is represented by the experiments of miss steffens, marx lobsien, and others, regarding the best methods of memorizing, and proving beyond much doubt that the complete repetition is more economical than the partial repetition. but these conclusions have, of course, only a limited field of application to practical teaching. we stand in great need of a definite experimental investigation of the detailed problems of teaching upon which there is wide divergence of opinion. a very good illustration is the controversy between the how and the why in primary arithmetic. in this case, there is a vast amount of "opinion," but there are no clearly defined conclusions drawn from accurate tests. it would seem possible to do work of this sort concerning the details of method in the teaching of arithmetic, spelling, grammar, penmanship, and geography. iv lacking this accurate type of data regarding methods, the next recourse is to the actual teaching of those teachers who are recognized as efficient. wherever such a teacher may be found, his or her work is well worth the most careful sort of study. success, of course, may be due to other factors than the methods employed,--to personality, for example. but, in every case of recognized efficiency in teaching that i have observed, i have found that the methods employed have, in the main, been productive of good results when used by others. the experienced teacher comes, through a process of trial and error, to select, perhaps unconsciously, the methods that work best. sometimes these are not always to be identified with the methods that theoretical pedagogy had worked out from _a priori_ bases. for example, the type of lesson which i call the "deductive development" lesson[ ] is one that is not included in the older discussions of method; yet it accurately describes one of the methods employed by a very successful teacher whose work i observed. one way, then, to improve the efficiency of young teachers, in so far as improvement in methods leads to improved efficiency, is to encourage the observation of expert teaching. the plan of giving teachers visiting days often brings excellent results, especially if the teacher looks upon the privilege in the proper light. the hyper-critical spirit is fatal to growth under any condition. whenever a teacher has come to the conclusion that he or she has nothing to learn from studying the work of others, anabolism has ceased and katabolism has set in. the self-sufficiency of our craft is one of its weakest characteristics. it is the factor that more than any other discounts it in the minds of laymen. fortunately it is less frequently a professional characteristic than in former years, but it still persists in some quarters. i recently met a "pedagogue" who impressed me as the most "knowing" individual that it had ever been my privilege to become acquainted with. an enthusiastic friend of his, in dilating upon this man's virtues, used these words: "when you propose a subject of conversation in whatever field you may choose, you will find that he has mastered it to bed rock. he will go over it once and you think that he is wise. he starts at the beginning and goes over it again, and you realize that he is deep. once more he traverses the same ground, but he is so far down now that you cannot follow him, and then you are aware that he is profound." that sort of profundity is still not rare in the field of general education. the person who has all possible knowledge pigeonholed and classified is still in our midst. the pedant still does the cause of education incalculable injury. of the use to which reading circles may be put in improving the efficiency of teaching, it is necessary to say but little. such organizations, under wise leadership, may doubtless be made to serve a good purpose in promoting professional enthusiasm. the difficulty with using them to promote immediate and direct efficiency lies in the paucity of the literature that is at our disposal. most of our present-day works upon education are very general in their nature. they are not without their value, but this value is general and indirect rather than immediate and specific. a book like miss winterburn's _methods of teaching_, or chubb's _teaching of english_[ ] is especially valuable for young teachers who are looking for first-hand helps. but books like this are all too rare in our literature. on the whole, i think that the improvement of teachers in the matter of methods is the most unsatisfactory part of our problem.[ ] all that one can say is that the work of the best teachers should be observed carefully and faithfully, that the methods upon which there is little or no dispute should be given and accepted as standard, but that one should be very careful about giving young teachers an idea that there is any single form under which all teaching can be subsumed. i know of no term that is more thoroughly a misnomer in our technical vocabulary than the term "general method." i teach a subject that often goes by that name, but i always take care to explain that the name does not mean, in my class, what the words seem to signify. there are certain broad and general principles which describe very crudely and roughly and inadequately certain phases of certain processes that mind undergoes in organizing experience--perception, apperception, conception, induction, deduction, inference, generalization, and the like. but these terms have only a vague and general connotation; or, if their connotation is specific and definite, it has been made so by an artificial process of definition in which counsel is darkened by words without meaning. the only full-fledged law that i know of in the educative process is the law of habit building--( ) focalization, ( ) attentive repetition at intervals of increasing length, ( ) permitting no exception--and i am often told that this "law" is fallacious. it has differed from some other so-called laws, however, in this respect: it always works. whenever a complex habit is adduced that has not been formed through the operation of this law, i am willing to give it up. v a third general method of improving the efficiency of teaching is to build up the notion of responsibility for results. the teacher must not only take the message and deliver it to garcia, or to some other individual as definite and tangible, but he must also bring the answer. so far as i know there is no other way to insure a maximum of efficiency than to demand certain results and to hold the individual responsible for gaining these results. the present standards of the teaching craft are less rigorous than they should be in this respect. we need a craft spirit that will judge every man impartially by his work, not by secondary criteria. you remember finlayson in kipling's _bridge builders_, and the agony with which he watched the waters of the ganges tearing away at the caissons of his new bridge. a vital question of finlayson's life was to be answered by the success or failure of those caissons to resist the flood. if they should yield, it meant not only the wreck of the bridge, but the wreck of his career; for, as kipling says, "government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge as that stood or fell." president hall has said that one of the last sentiments to be developed in human nature is "the sense of responsibility, which is one of the highest and most complex psychic qualities." how to develop this sentiment of responsibility is one of the most pressing problems of education. and the problem is especially pressing in those departments of education that train for social service. to engender in the young teacher an effective prejudice against scamped work, against the making of excuses, against the seductive allurements of ease and comfort and the lines of least resistance is one of the most important duties that is laid upon the normal school, the training school, and the teachers' college. to do well the work that has been set for him to do should be the highest ambition of every worker, the ambition to which all other ambitions and desires are secondary and subordinate. pride in the mastery of the technique of one's calling is the most wholesome and helpful sort of pride that a man can indulge in. the joy of doing each day's work in the best possible manner is the keenest joy of life. but this pride and this joy do not come at the outset. like all other good things of life, they come only as the result of effort and struggle and strenuous self-discipline and dogged perseverance. the emotional coloring which gives these things their subjective worth is a matter very largely of contrast. success must stand out against a background of struggle, or the chief virtue of success--the consciousness of conquest--will be entirely missed. that sort of success means strength; for strength of mind is nothing more than the ability to "hew to the line," to follow a given course of effort to a successful conclusion, no matter how long and how tedious be the road that one must travel, no matter how disagreeable are the tasks involved, no matter how tempting are the insidious siren songs of momentary fancy. what teachers need--what all workers need--is to be inspired with those ideals and prejudices that will enable them to work steadfastly and unremittingly toward the attainment of a stated end. what inspired rowan with those ideals of efficiency that enabled him to carry his message and bring back the answer, i do not know, but if he was a soldier, i do not hesitate to hazard an opinion. our regular army stands as the clearest type of efficient service which is available for our study and emulation. the work of colonel goethals on the panama canal bids fair to be the finest fruit of the training that we give to the officers of our army. if we wish to learn the fundamental virtues of that training, it is not sufficient to study the curriculum of the military academy. technical knowledge and skill are essential to such results, but they are not the prime essentials. if you wish to know what the prime essentials are, let me refer you to a series of papers, entitled _the spirit of old west point_, which ran through a recent volume of the _atlantic monthly_ and which has since been published in book form. they constitute, to my mind, one of the most important educational documents of the present decade. the army service is efficient because it is inspired with effective ideals of service,--ideals in which every other desire and ambition is totally and completely subordinated to the ideal of duty. to those who maintain that close organization and definite prescription kill initiative and curtail efficiency, the record of west point and the army service should be a silencing argument. and yet education is more important than war; more important, even, than the building of the panama canal. we believe, and rightly, that no training is too good for our military and naval officers; that no discipline which will produce the appropriate habits and ideals and prejudices is too strenuous; that no individual sacrifice of comfort or ease is too costly. equal or even commensurable efficiency in education can come only through a like process. from the times of the ancient egyptians to the present day, one vital truth has been revealed in every forward movement; the homely truth that you cannot make bricks without straw; you cannot win success without effort; you cannot attain efficiency without undergoing the processes of discipline; and discipline means only this: doing things that you do not want to do, for the sake of reaching some end that ought to be attained. the normal schools and the training schools and the teachers' colleges must be the nurseries of craft ideals and standards. the instruction that they offer must be upon a plane that will command respect. the intolerable pedantry and the hypocritical goody-goodyism must be banished forever. the crass sentimentalism by which we attempt to cover our paucity of craft ideals must also be eliminated. those who are most strongly imbued with ideals are not those who cheapen the value of ideals by constant verbal reiteration. ideals do not often come through explicitly imparted precepts. they come through more impalpable and hidden channels,--now through stately buildings with vine-covered towers from which the past speaks in the silence of great halls and cloistered retreats; now through the unwritten and scarcely spoken traditions that are expressed in the very bearing and attitude of those to whom youth looks for inspiration and guidance; now through a dominant and powerful personality, sometimes rough and crude, sometimes warm-hearted and lovable, but always sincere. traditions and ideals are the most priceless part of a school's equipment, and the school that can give these things to its students in richest measure will have the greatest influence on the succeeding generations. footnotes: [footnote : a paper read before the normal and training teachers' conference of the new york state teachers' association, december , .] [footnote : see _educative process_, new york, , chapter xx.] [footnote : rowe's _habit formation_ (new york, ), briggs and coffman's _reading in public schools_ (chicago, ), foght's _the american rural school_, adams's _exposition and illustration in class teaching_ (new york, ), and perry's _problems of elementary education_ (new york, ) should certainly be added to this list.] [footnote : "it seems to me one of the most pressing problems in pedagogy to-day is that of method.... it is the subject in which teachers of pedagogy in colleges and universities are weakest to-day. of what practical value is all our study of educational psychology or the history of education, our child study, our experimental pedagogy, if it does not finally result in the devising of better methods of teaching, and make the teacher more skillful and effective in his work."--t.m. balliet: "undergraduate instruction in pedagogy," _pedagogical seminary_, vol. xvii, , p. .] ~iv~ the test of efficiency in supervision[ ] i i know of no way in which i can better introduce my subject than to describe very briefly the work of a superintendent who once furnished me with an example of a definite and effective method of supervision. this man was a "long range" superintendent. it was impossible for him to visit his schools very frequently, and so he did the next best thing: he had the schools brought to him. when i first saw him he was poring over a pile of papers that had just come in from one of his schools. i soon discovered that these papers were arranged in sets, each set being made up of samples taken each week from the work of the pupils in the schools under his supervision. the papers of each pupil were arranged in chronological order, and by looking through the set, he could note the growth that the pupil in question had made since the beginning of the term. upon these papers, the superintendent recorded his judgment of the amount of improvement shown both in form and in content. i was particularly impressed by the character of his criticisms. there was nothing vague or intangible about them. every annotation was clear and definite. if penmanship happened to be the point at issue, he would note that the lines were too close together; that the letters did not have sufficient individuality; that the spaces between the words were not sufficiently wide; that the indentation was inadequate; that the writing was cramped, showing that the pen had not been held properly; that the margin needed correction. if the papers were defective from the standpoint of language, the criticisms were equally clear and definite. one pupil had misspelled the same word in three successive papers. "be sure that this word appears in the next spelling list," was the comment of the superintendent. another pupil habitually used a bit of false syntax: "place this upon the list of errors to be taken up and corrected." still others were uncertain about paragraphing: "devote a language lesson to the paragraph before the next written exercise." on the covers of each bundle of class papers, he wrote directions and suggestions of a more general nature; for example: "improvement is not sufficiently marked; try for better results next time"; or: "i note that the pupils draw rather than write; look out for free movement." often, too, there were words of well-merited praise: "i like the way in which your pupils have responded to their drill. this is good. keep it up." and not infrequently suggestions were made as to content: "tell this story in greater detail next time, and have it reproduced again"; or: "the form of these papers is good, but the nature study is poor; don't sacrifice thought to form." in similar fashion, the other written work was gone over and annotated. every pupil in this system of schools had a sample of his written work examined at regular and frequent intervals by the superintendent. every teacher knew just what her chief demanded in the way of results, and did her best to gain the results demanded. i am not taking the position that the results that were demanded represented the highest ideals of what the elementary school should accomplish. good penmanship and good spelling and good language, in the light of contemporary educational thought, seem to be something like happiness--you get them in larger measure the less you think about getting them. but this possible objection aside, the superintendent in question had developed a system which kept him in very close touch with the work that was being done in widely separated schools. he told me further that, on the infrequent occasions when he could visit his classrooms, he gave most of his time and attention to the matters that could not be supervised at "long range." he found out how the pupils were improving in their reading, and especially in oral expression, in its syntax, its freedom from errors of construction, its clearness and fluency. he listed the common errors, directing his teachers to take them up in a systematic manner and eradicate them, and he did not fail to note at his next visit how much progress had been made. he noted the condition of the blackboard work, and kept a list of the improvements that he suggested. he tested for rapidity in arithmetical processes, for the papers sent to his office gave him only an index of accuracy. he noted the habits of personal cleanliness that were being developed or neglected. in fact, he had a long list of specific standards that he kept continually in mind, the progress toward which he constantly watched. and last, but by no means least, he carried with him wherever he went an atmosphere of breezy good nature and cheerfulness, for he had mastered the first principle in the art of both supervision and teaching; he had learned that the best way to promote growth in either pupils or teachers is neither to let them do as they please nor to force them to do as you please, but to get them to please to do what you please to have them do. i instance this superintendent as one type of efficiency in supervision. he was efficient, not simply because he had a system that scrutinized every least detail of his pupils' growth, but because that scrutiny really insured growth. he obtained the results that he desired, and he obtained uniformly good results from a large number of young, untrained teachers. we have all heard of the superintendent who boasted that he could tell by looking at his watch just what any pupil in any classroom was doing at just that moment. surely here system was not lacking. but the boast did not strike the vital point. it is not what the pupil is doing that is fundamentally important, but what he is gaining from his activity or inactivity; what he is gaining in the way of habits, in the way of knowledge, in the way of standards and ideals and prejudices, all of which are to govern his future conduct. the superintendent whom i have described had the qualities of balance and perspective that enabled him to see both the woods and the trees. and let me add that he taught regularly in his own central high school, and that practically all of his supervision was accomplished after school hours and on saturdays. but my chief reason for choosing his work as a type is that it represents a successful effort to supervise that part of school work which is most difficult and irksome to supervise; namely, the formation of habits. whatever one's ideals of education may be, it still remains true that habit building is the most important duty of the elementary school, and that the efficiency of habit building can be tested in no other way than by the means that he employed; namely, the careful comparison of results at successive stages of the process. ii the essence of a true habit is its purely automatic character. reaction must follow upon the stimulus instantaneously, without thought, reflection, or judgment. one has not taught spelling efficiently until spelling is automatic, until the correct form flows from the pen without the intervention of mind. the real test of the pupil's training in spelling is his ability to spell the word correctly when he is thinking, not about spelling, but about the content of the sentence that he is writing. consequently the test of efficiency in spelling is not an examination in spelling, although this may be valuable as a means to an end, but rather the infrequency with which misspelled words appear in the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. this is but the initial process. grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. so long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression is necessarily awkward and inadequate. the same rule holds in respect of the fundamental processes of arithmetic. it holds in penmanship, in articulation and enunciation, in word recognition, in moral conduct and good manners; in fact, in all of the basic work for which the elementary school must stand sponsor. and one source of danger in the newer methods of education lies in the tendency to overlook the importance of carrying habit-building processes through to a successful issue. the reaction against drill, against formal work of all sorts, is a healthful reaction in many ways. it bids fair to break up the mechanical lock step of the elementary grades, and to introduce some welcome life, and vigor, and wholesomeness. but it will sadly defeat its own purpose if it underrates the necessity of habit building as the basic activity of early education. what is needed, now that we have got away from the lock step, now that we are happily emancipated from the meaningless thralldom of mechanical repetition and the worship of drill for its own sake--what is needed now is not less drill, but better drill. and this should be the net result of the recent reforms in elementary education. in our first enthusiasm, we threw away the spelling book, poked fun at the multiplication tables, decried basal reading, and relieved ourselves of much wit and sarcasm at the expense of formal grammar. but now we are swinging back to the adequate recognition of the true purpose of drill. and in the wake of this newer conception, we are learning that its drudgery may be lightened and its efficiency heightened by the introduction of a richer content that shall provide a greater variety in the repetitions, insure an adequate motive for effort, and relieve the dead monotony that frequently rendered the older methods so futile. i look forward to the time when to be an efficient drillmaster in this newer sense of the term will be to have reached one of the pinnacles of professional skill. iii but there is another side of teaching that must be supervised. although habit is responsible for nine tenths of conduct, the remaining tenth must not be neglected. in situations where habit is not adequate to adjustment, judgment and reflection must come to the rescue, or should come to the rescue. this means that, instead of acting without thought, as in the case of habit, one analyzes the situation and tries to solve it by the application of some fact or principle that has been gained either from one's own experience or from the experience of others. this is the field in which knowledge comes to its own; and a very important task of education is to fix in the pupils' minds a number of facts and principles that will be available for application to the situations of later life. how, then, is the efficiency of instruction (as distinguished from training or habit building) to be tested? needless to say, an adequate test is impossible from the very nature of the situation. the efficiency of imparting knowledge can be tested only by the effect that this knowledge has upon later conduct; and this, it will be agreed, cannot be accurately determined until the pupil has left the school and is face to face with the problems of real life. in practice, however, we adopt a more or less effective substitute for the real test--the substitute called the examination. we all know that the ultimate purpose of instruction is not primarily to enable pupils successfully to pass examinations. and yet as long as we teach as though this were the main purpose we might as well believe it to be. now the examination may be made a very valuable test of the efficiency of instruction if its limitations are fully recognized and if it does not obscure the true purpose of instruction. and if we remember that the true purpose is to impart facts in such a manner that they may not only "stick" in the pupil's mind, but that they may also be amenable to recall and practical application, and if we set our examination questions with some reference to this requirement, then i believe that we shall find the examination a dependable test. one important point is likely to be overlooked in the consideration of examinations,--the fact, namely, that the form and content of the questions have a very powerful influence in determining the content and methods of instruction. is it not pertinent, then, to inquire whether examination questions cannot be so framed as radically to improve instruction rather than to encourage, as is often the case, methods that are pedagogically unsound? granted that it is well for the child to memorize verbatim certain unrelated facts, even to memorize some facts that have no immediate bearing upon his life, granted that this is valuable (and i think that a little of it is), is it necessary that an entire year or half-year be given over almost entirely to "cramming up" on old questions? would it not be possible so to frame examination questions that the "cramming" process would be practically valueless? what the pupil should get from geography, for instance, is not only a knowledge of geographical facts, but also, and more fundamentally, the power to see the relation of these facts to his own life; in other words, the ability to apply his knowledge to the improvement of adjustment. now this power is very closely associated with the ability to grasp fundamental principles, to see the relation of cause and effect working below the surface of diverse phenomena. geography, to be practical, must impress not only the fact, but also the principle that rationalizes or explains the fact. it must emphasize the "why" as well as the "what." for example: it is well for the pupil to know that new york is the largest city in the united states; it is better that he should know why new york has become the largest city in the united states. it is well to know that south america extends very much farther to the east than does north america, but it is better to know that this fact has had an important bearing in determining the commercial relations that exist between south america and europe. questions that have reference to these larger relations of cause and effect may be so framed that no amount of "cramming" will alone insure correct answers. they may be so framed that the pupil will be forced to do some thinking for himself, will be forced to solve an imaginary situation very much as he would solve a real situation. examination questions of this type would react beneficially upon the methods of instruction. they would tend to place a premium upon that type of instruction that develops initiative in solving problems, instead of encouraging the memoriter methods that tend to crush whatever germs of initiative the pupil may possess. this does not mean that the memoriter work should be excluded. a solid basis of fact is essential to the mastery of principles. personally i believe that the work of the intermediate grades should be planned to give the pupil this factual basis. this would leave the upper grades free for the more rational work. in any case, i believe that the efficiency of examinations may be greatly increased by giving one or two questions that must be answered by a reasoning process for every question that may be answered by verbal memory alone. iv thus far it seems clear that an absolute standard is available for testing the efficiency of training or habit building, and that a fairly accurate standard may be developed for testing the efficiency of instruction. both training and instruction, however, are subject to the modifying influence of a third factor of which too little account has hitherto been taken in educational discussions. training results in habits, and yet a certain sort of training may not only result in a certain type of habit, but it may also result in the development of something which will quite negate the habit that has been developed. in the process of developing habits of neatness, for example, one may employ methods that result in prejudicing the child against neatness as a general virtue. in this event, although the little specific habits of neatness may function in the situations in which they have been developed, the prejudice will effectually prevent their extension to other fields. in other words, the general emotional effect of training must be considered as well as the specific results of the training. the same stricture applies with equal force to instruction. instruction imparts knowledge; but if a man knows and fails to feel, his knowledge has little influence upon his conduct. this factor that controls conduct when habit fails, this factor that may even negate an otherwise efficient habit, is the great indeterminate in the work of teaching. to know that one has trained an effective habit or imparted a practical principle is one thing; to know that in doing this, one has not engendered in the pupil's mind a prejudice against the very thing taught is quite another matter. that phase of teaching which is concerned with the development of these intangible forces may be termed "inspiration"; and it is the lack of an adequate test for the efficiency of inspiration that makes the task of supervision so difficult and the results so often unsatisfactory. nevertheless, even here the outlook is not entirely hopeless. one may be tolerably certain of at least two things. in the first place, the great "emotionalized prejudices" that must come predominantly from school influences are the love of truth, the love of work, respect for law and order, and a spirit of coöperation. these factors undoubtedly have their basis in specific habits of honesty, industry, obedience, and regard for the rights and feelings of others; and these habits may be developed and tested just as thoroughly and just as accurately as habits of good spelling and correct syntax. without the solid basis of habit, ideals and prejudices will be of but little service. the one caution must be taken that the methods of training do not defeat their own purpose by engendering prejudices and ideals that negate the habits. it is here that the personality of the teacher becomes the all-important factor, and the task of the supervisor is to determine whether the influence of the personality is good or evil. most supervisors come to judge of this influence by an undefined factor that is best termed the "spirit of the classroom." the second hopeful feature of the task of supervision in respect of inspiration is that this "spirit" is an extremely contagious and pervasive thing. in other words, the principal or the superintendent may dominate every classroom under his supervision, almost without regard to the limitations of the individual teachers. typical schools in every city system bear compelling testimony to this fact. the principal _is_ the school. and if i were to sum up the essential characteristics of the ideal supervisor, i could not neglect this point. after all, the two great dangers that beset him are, first, the danger of sloth--the old adam of laziness--which will tempt him to avoid the details, to shirk the drudgery, to escape the close and wearisome scrutiny of little things; and, secondly, the sin of triviality--the inertia which holds him to details and never permits him to take the broader view and see the true ends toward which details are but the means. the proper combination of these two factors is all too rare, but it is in this combination that the ideal supervisor is to be found. footnotes: [footnote : a paper read before the fifty-second annual meeting of the new york state association of school commissioners and superintendents, november , .] ~v~ the supervisor and the teacher i it is difficult not to be depressed by the irrational radicalism of contemporary educational theory. it would seem that the workers in the higher ranges of educational activity should, of all men, preserve a balanced judgment and a sane outlook, and yet there is probably no other human calling that presents the strange phenomenon of men who are called experts throwing overboard everything that the past has sanctioned, and embarking without chart or compass upon any new venture that happens to catch popular fancy. the non-professional character of education is nowhere more painfully apparent than in the expression of this tendency. the literature of teaching that is written directly out of experience--out of actual adjustment to the teaching situation--is almost laughed out of court in some educational circles. but if one wishes to win the applause of the multitude one may do it easily enough by proclaiming some new and untried plan. at our educational gatherings you notice above everything else a straining for spectacular and bizarre effects. it is the novel that catches attention; and it sometimes seems to me that those who know the least about the educational situation in the way of direct contact often receive the largest share of attention and have the largest influence. it is in the attitude of the public and of a certain proportion of school men toward elementary teaching and the elementary teacher that this destructive criticism finds its most pronounced expression. throughout the length and breadth of the land, the efficiency of the public school and the sincerity and intelligence of those who are giving their lives to its work are being called into question. it is discouraging to think that years of service in a calling do not qualify one to speak authoritatively upon the problems of that calling, and especially upon technique. and yet it is precisely upon that point of technique that the criticisms of elementary education are most drastic. our educational system is sometimes branded as a failure, and yet this same educational system with all its weaknesses has accomplished the task of assimilating to american institutions and ideals and standards the most heterogeneous infusion of alien stocks that ever went to the making of a united people. the elementary teacher is criticized for all the sins of omission that the calendar enumerates, and yet this same elementary teacher is daily lifting millions of children to a plane of civilization and culture that no other people in history have even thought possible. i am willing to admit the deficiencies of american education, but i also maintain that the teachers of our lower schools do not deserve the opprobrium that has been heaped upon them. i believe that in education, as in business, it would be a good thing if we saw more of the doughnut and less of the hole. when i hear a prominent educator say that we must discard everything that we have produced thus far and begin anew in the realm of educational materials and methods, i confess that i am discouraged, especially when that same authority is extremely obscure as to the materials and methods that we should substitute for those that we are now employing. i heard that statement at a recent meeting of the department of superintendence, and i heard other things of like tenor,--for example, that normal schools were perpetuating types of skill in teaching that were unworthy of perpetuation, that the observation of teaching was valueless in the training of teachers because there was nothing that was being done at the present time that was worthy of imitation, that practice teaching in the training of young teachers is a farce, a delusion, and a snare. those very words were employed by one man of high position to express his opinion of contemporary practices. you cannot pick up an educational journal of the better sort, nor open a new educational book, without being brought face to face with this destructive criticism. i protest against this, not only in the name of justice, but in the name of common sense. it cannot be possible that generations of dealing with immature minds should have left no residuum of effective practice. the very principle of progress by trial and error will inevitably mean that certain practices that are possible and helpful and effective are perpetuated, and that certain other processes that are ineffective and wasteful are eliminated. to repudiate all this is the height of folly. if the history of progress shows us anything, it shows us that progress is not made by repudiating the lessons of experience. theory is the last word, not the first. theory should explain: it should take successful practice and find out what principles condition its efficiency; and if these principles are inconsistent with those heretofore held, it is the theory that should be modified to suit the facts, not the facts to suit the theory. my opponents may point to medicine as a possible example of the opposite procedure. and yet if there is anything that the history of medical science demonstrates, it is that the first cues to new discoveries were made in the field of practice. lymph therapy, which is one of the triumphs of modern medicine, was discovered empirically. it was an accident of practice, a blind procedure of trial and success that led to jenner's discovery of the virtues of vaccination. a century passed before theory adequately explained the phenomenon, and opened the way to those wider applications of the principle that have done so much to reduce the ravages of disease. the value of theory, i repeat, is to explain successful practice and to generalize experience in broad and comprehensive principles which can be easily held in mind, and from which inferences for further new and effective practices may be derived. we have a small body of sound principles in education to-day,--a body of principles that are thoroughly consistent with successful practice. but the sort of principles that are put forth as the last words of educational theory are often far from sound. personally i firmly believe that a vast amount of damage is being done to children by the application of fallacious principles which, because they emanate from high authority, obtain an artificial validity in the minds of teachers in service. i cannot understand why, when an educational experiment fails lamentably, it is not rejected as a failure. and yet you and i know a number of instances where certain educational experiments that have undeniably reversed the hypotheses of those who initiated them are excused on the ground that conditions were not favorable. that, it seems to me, should tell the whole story, for precisely what we need in educational practice is a body of doctrine that will work where conditions _are_ unfavorable. we are told that the successful application of mooted theories depends upon the proper kind of teachers. i maintain that the most effective sort of theory is the sort that brings results with such teachers as we must employ in our work. it would be a poor recommendation for a theory of medicine to say that it worked all right when people are healthy but failed to help the sick. nor is it true that good teachers can get good results by following bad theory. they often obtain the results by evading the theory, and when they live up to it, the results faithfully reflect the theory, no matter how skillful the teaching. ii statements like these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what i have said, i should do myself an injustice if i did not make certain that my position is clear. i believe in experimentation in education. i believe in experimental schools. but i should wish these schools to be interpreted as experiments and not as models, and i should wish that the failure of an experiment be accepted with good, scientific grace, and not with the unscientific attitude of making excuses. the trouble with an experimental school is that, in the eyes of the great mass of teachers, it becomes a model school, and the principles that it represents are applied _ad libitum_ by thousands of teachers who assume that they have heard the last word in educational theory. no one is more favorably disposed toward the rights of children than i am, and yet i am thoroughly convinced that soft-heartedness accompanied by soft-headedness is weakening the mental and moral fiber of hundreds of thousands of boys and girls throughout this country. no one admires more than i admire the sagacity and far-sightedness of judge lindsey, and yet when judge lindsey's methods are proposed as models for school government, i cannot lose sight, as so many people seem to lose sight, of the contingent factor; namely, that judge lindsey's leniency is based upon authority, and that if judge lindsey or anybody else attempted to be lenient when he had no power to be otherwise than lenient, his "bluff" would be called in short order. if you will give to teachers and principals the same power that you give to the police judge, you may well expect them to be lenient. the great trouble in the school is simply this: that just in the proportion that leniency is demanded, authority is taken away from the teacher. and i should perhaps say a qualifying word with regard to my attitude toward educational theory. i have every feeling of affection for the science of psychology. i have every faith in the value of psychological principles in the interpretation of educational phenomena. but i also recognize that the science of psychology is a very young science, and that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw from them anything more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final test in the crucible of practice. some day, if we work hard enough, psychology will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and physics and chemistry and, to a certain extent, biology, are predictive sciences to-day. meantime psychology is of inestimable value in giving us a point of view, in clarifying our ideas, and in rationalizing the truths that empirical practice discovers. a very few psychological principles are strongly enough established even now to form the basis of prediction. among the most important of these are the laws of habit building, some laws of memory, and the larger principles of attention. successful educational practice is and must be in accord with these indisputable tenets. but the bane of education to-day is in the pseudo-science, the "half-baked" psychology, that is lauded from the house-tops by untrained enthusiasts, turned from the presses by irresponsible publishing houses, and foisted upon the hungry teaching public through the ever-present medium of the reading circle, the teachers' institute, the summer school, and i am very sorry to admit (for i think that i represent both institutions in a way) sometimes by the normal schools and universities. most of the doctrines that are turning our practice topsy-turvy have absolutely no support from competent psychologists. the doctrine of spontaneity and its attendant _laissez-faire_ dogma of school government is thoroughly inconsistent with good psychology. the radical extreme to which some educators would push the doctrine of interest when they maintain that the child should never be asked to do anything for which he fails to find a need in his own life,--this doctrine can find no support in good psychology. the doctrine that the preadolescent child should understand thoroughly every process that he is expected to reduce to habit before that process is made automatic is utterly at variance with long-established principles which were well understood by the greeks and the hebrews twenty-five hundred years ago, and to which mother nature herself gives the lie in the instincts of imitation and repetition. it is conceivable that these radical doctrines were justified as means of reform, especially in secondary and higher education, but, even granting this, their function is fulfilled when the reform that they exploited has been accomplished. that time has come and, as palpable untruths, they should either be modified to meet the facts, or be relegated to oblivion. iii it is safe to say that formalism is no longer a characteristic feature of the typical american school. it is so long since i have heard any rote learning in a schoolroom that i am wondering if it is not almost time for some one to show that a little rote learning would not be at all a bad thing in preadolescent education. we ridicule the memoriter methods of chinese education and yet we sometimes forget that chinese education has done something that no other system of education, however well planned, has even begun to do in the same degree. it has kept the chinese empire a unit through a period of time compared with which the entire history of greece and rome is but an episode. we may ridicule the formalism of hebrew education, and yet the schools of rabbis have preserved intact the racial integrity of the jewish people during the two thousand years that have elapsed since their geographical unity was destroyed. i am not justifying the methods of chinese or hebrew education. i am quite willing to admit that, in china at any rate, the game may not have been worth the candle; but i am still far from convinced that it is not a good thing for children to reduce to verbal form a good many things that are now never learned in such a way as to make any lasting impression upon the memory; and our criticism of oriental formalism is not so much concerned with the method of learning as with the content of learning,--not so much with learning by heart as with the character of the material that was thus memorized. but, although formalism is no longer a distinctive feature of american education, formalism is the point from which education is most frequently attacked,--and this is the chief source of my dissatisfaction with the present-day critics of our elementary schools. in a great many cases, they have set up a man of straw and demolished him completely. and in demolishing him, they have incidentally knocked the props from under the feet of many a good teacher, leaving him dazed and uncertain of his bearings, stung with the conviction that what he has been doing for his pupils is entirely without value, that his life of service has been a failure, that the lessons of his own experience are not to be trusted, nor the verdicts of his own intelligence respected. go to any of the great summer schools and you will meet, among the attending teachers, hundreds of faithful, conscientious men and women who could tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the muddle in which their minds are left after some of the lectures to which they have listened. why should they fail to be depressed? the whole weight of academic authority seems to be against them. the entire machinery of educational administration is wheeling them with relentless force into paths that seem to them hopelessly intricate and bewildering. if it is true, as i think it is, that some of the proposals of modern education are an attempt to square the circle, it is certainly true that the classroom teacher is standing at the pressure points in this procedure. we hear expressed on every side a great deal of sympathy for the child as the victim of our educational system. sympathy for childhood is the most natural thing in the world. it is one of the basic human instincts, and its expressions are among the finest things in human life. but why limit our sympathy to the child, especially to-day when he is about as happy and as fortunate an individual as anybody has ever been in all history. why not let a little of it go out to the teacher of this child? why not plan a little for her comfort and welfare and encouragement? it is her skill that is assimilating the children of our alien population. it is her strength that is lifting bodily each generation to the ever-advancing race levels. her work must be the main source of the inspiration that will impel the race to further advancement. and yet when these half-million teachers who mean so much to this country gather at their institutes, when they attend the summer schools, when they take up their professional journals, what do they hear and read? criticisms of their work. denunciations of their methods. serious doubts of their intelligence. aspersions cast upon their sincerity, their patience, and their loyalty to their superiors. this, mingled with some mawkish sentimentalism that passes under the name of inspiration. only occasionally a word of downright commendation, a sign of honest and heartfelt appreciation, a note of sympathy or encouragement. carnegie gives fifteen million dollars to provide pensions for superannuated college professors; but the elementary teacher who is not fortunate enough to die in harness must look forward to the almshouse. the people tax themselves for magnificent buildings and luxurious furnishings, but not one cent do they offer for teachers' pensions. what a blot upon western civilization is this treatment of the teachers in our lower schools. these people are doing the work that even the savage races universally consider to be of the highest type. benighted china places her teachers second only to the literati themselves in the place of honor. the hindus made the teaching profession the highest caste in the social scale. the jews intrusted the education of their children to their rabbis, the most learned and the most honored of their race. it is only western civilization--it is almost only our much-lauded anglo-saxon civilization--that denies to the teacher a station in life befitting his importance as a social servant. iv but what has all this to do with school supervision? as i view it, the supervisor of schools as the overseer and director of the educational process, is just now confronted with two great problems. the first of these is to keep a clear head in the present muddled condition of educational theory. from the very fact of his position, the supervisor must be a leader, whether he will or not. it is a maxim of our profession that the principal is the school. in our city systems the supervising principal is given almost absolute authority over the school of which he has charge. in him is vested the ultimate responsibility for instruction, for discipline, for the care and condition of the material property. he may be a despot if he wishes, benevolent or otherwise. with this power goes a corresponding opportunity. his school can stand for something,--perhaps for something new and strange which will bring him into the limelight to-day, no matter what its character; perhaps for something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his own name has been forgotten. the temptation was never so strong as it is to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory. the need was never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content with the impersonal glory of the latter type. i admit that it is a somewhat thankless task to do things in a straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and i suppose that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause of the pit. but nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause of education a vast amount of harm. i know a principal who won ephemeral fame by introducing into his school a form of the japanese jiu-jitsu physical exercises. when i visited that school, i was led to believe that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the american people. whole classes of girls and boys were marched to the large basement to be put through their paces for the delectation of visitors. the newspapers took it up and heralded it as another indication that the formalism of the public school was gradually breaking down. visitors came by the hundreds, and my friend basked in the limelight of public adulation while his colleagues turned green with envy and set themselves to devising some means for turning attention in their direction. and yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of their ways, year after year, while all these currents and countercurrents are seething and eddying around them. they hold fast to that which they know is good until that which they know is better can be found. they believe in the things that they do, so the chances are greatly increased that they will do them well. they refuse to be bullied or sneered at or laughed out of court because they do not take up with every fancy that catches the popular mind. they have their own professional standards as to what constitutes competent schoolmanship,--their own standards gained from their own specialized experience. and somehow i cannot help thinking that just now that is the type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be encouraged. if i were talking to chinese teachers, i might preach another sort of gospel, but american education to-day needs less turmoil, less distraction, fewer sweeping changes. it needs to settle itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying to do. and it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as an institution manned by intelligent individuals who are perfectly competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals. iv [transcriber's note: this is a typographical error in the original, and should read "v"] but in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution. the supervisor is the captain of the teaching corps. directly under his control are the mainsprings of the school's life and activity,--the classroom teachers. it is coming to be a maxim in the city systems that the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers into strong teachers and make out of most unpromising material, an efficient, homogeneous school staff. i believe that this is coming to be considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,--not what skill the supervisor may show in testing results, or in keeping his pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully, but rather the success with which he is able to take the teaching material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency. a former commissioner of education for one of our new insular possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two classes,--( ) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and ( ) those who could make poor teachers into good teachers. of these two types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of thing,--for there is no limit to this process of training, and the superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the supervisor who can train teachers. it would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that this conception of the supervisor's function involves. i can do no more at present than indicate what seems to me the most pressing present need in this direction. i have found that sometimes the supervisors who insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the coöperation of their pupils are among the very last to secure for themselves the coöperation of their teachers. and to this important end, it seems to me that we have an important suggestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as i have attempted to describe it. as a type, the classroom teacher needs just now some adequate appreciation and recognition of the work that she is doing. if the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher's work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that commendation of good work, which can come only from a fellow-craftsman, but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd. upon the whole, i believe that the outlook in this direction is encouraging. while the teacher may miss in her institutes and in the summer school that sort of encouragement, she is, i believe, finding it in larger and larger measure in the local teachers' meetings and in her consultations with her supervisors. and when all has been said, that is the place from which she should look for inspiration. the teachers' meeting must be the nursery of professional ideals. it must be a place where the real first-hand workers in education get that sanity of outlook, that professional point of view, which shall fortify them effectively against the rising tide of unprofessional interference and dictation which, as i have tried to indicate, constitutes the most serious menace to our educational welfare. and it is in the encouragement of this craft spirit, in this lifting of the teacher's calling to the plane of craft consciousness, it is in this that the supervisor must, i believe, find the true and lasting reward for his work. it is through this factor that he can, just now, work the greatest good for the schools that he supervises and the community that he serves. the most effective way to reach his pupils is through the medium of their teachers, and he can help these pupils in no better way than to give their teachers a justifiable pride in the work that they are doing through his own recognition of its worth and its value, through his own respect for the significance of the lessons that experience teaches them, through his own suggestive help in making that experience profitable and suggestive. and just at the present moment, he can make no better start than by assuring them of the truth that emerson expresses when he defines the true scholar as the man who remains firm in his belief that a popgun is only a popgun although the ancient and honored of earth may solemnly affirm it to be the crack of doom. ~vi~ education and utility[ ] i i wish to discuss with you some phases of the problem that is perhaps foremost in the minds of the teaching public to-day: the problem, namely, of making education bear more directly and more effectively upon the work of practical, everyday life. i have no doubt that some of you feel, when this problem is suggested, very much as i felt when i first suggested to myself the possibility of discussing it with you. you have doubtless heard some phases of this problem discussed at every meeting of this association for the past ten years--if you have been a member so long as that. certain it is that we all grow weary of the reiteration of even the best of truths, but certain it is also that some problems are always before us, and until they are solved satisfactorily they will always stimulate men to devise means for their solution. i should say at the outset, however, that i shall not attempt to justify to this audience the introduction of vocational subjects into the elementary and secondary curriculums. i shall take it for granted that you have already made up your minds upon this matter. i shall not take your time in an attempt to persuade you that agriculture ought to be taught in the rural schools, or manual training and domestic science in all schools. i am personally convinced of the value of such work and i shall take it for granted that you are likewise convinced. my task to-day, then, is of another type. i wish to discuss with you some of the implications of this matter of utility in respect of the work that every elementary school is doing and always must do, no matter how much hand work or vocational material it may introduce. my problem, in other words, concerns the ordinary subject-matter of the curriculum,--reading and writing and arithmetic, geography and grammar and history,--those things which, like the poor, are always with us, but which we seem a little ashamed to talk about in public. truly, from reading the educational journals and hearing educational discussion to-day, the layman might well infer that what we term the "useful" education and the education that is now offered by the average school are as far apart as the two poles. we are all familiar with the statement that the elementary curriculum is eminently adapted to produce clerks and accountants, but very poorly adapted to furnish recruits for any other department of life. the high school is criticized on the ground that it prepares for college and consequently for the professions, but that it is totally inadequate to the needs of the average citizen. now it would be futile to deny that there is some truth in both these assertions, but i do not hesitate to affirm that both are grossly exaggerated, and that the curriculum of to-day, with all its imperfections, does not justify so sweeping a denunciation. i wish to point out some of the respects in which these charges are fallacious, and, in so doing, perhaps, to suggest some possible remedies for the defects that every one will acknowledge. ii in the first place, let me make myself perfectly clear upon what i mean by the word "useful." what, after all, is the "useful" study in our schools? what do men find to be the useful thing in their lives? the most natural answer to this question is that the useful things are those that enable us to meet effectively the conditions of life,--or, to use a phrase that is perfectly clear to us all, the things that help us in getting a living. the vast majority of men and women in this world measure all values by this standard, for most of us are, to use the expressive slang of the day, "up against" this problem, and "up against" it so hard and so constantly that we interpret everything in the greatly foreshortened perspective of immediate necessity. most of us in this room are confronting this problem of making a living. at any rate, i am confronting it, and consequently i may lay claim to some of the authority that comes from experience. and since i have made this personal reference, may i violate the canons of good taste and make still another? i was face to face with this problem of getting a living a good many years ago, when the opportunity came to me to take a college course. i could see nothing ahead after that except another struggle with this same vital issue. so i decided to take a college course which would, in all probability, help me to solve the problem. scientific agriculture was not developed in those days as it has been since that time, but a start had been made, and the various agricultural colleges were offering what seemed to be very practical courses. i had had some early experience on the farm, and i decided to become a scientific farmer. i took the course of four years and secured my degree. the course was as useful from the standpoint of practical agriculture as any that could have been devised at the time. but when i graduated, what did i find? the same old problem of getting a living still confronted me as i had expected that it would; and alas! i had got my education in a profession that demanded capital. i was a landless farmer. times were hard and work of all kinds was very scarce. the farmers of those days were inclined to scoff at scientific agriculture. i could have worked for my board and a little more, and i should have done so had i been able to find a job. but while i was looking for the place, a chance came to teach school, and i took the opportunity as a means of keeping the wolf from the door. i have been engaged in the work of teaching ever since. when i was able to buy land, i did so, and i have to-day a farm of which i am very proud. it does not pay large dividends, but i keep it up for the fun i get out of it,--and i like to think, also, that if i should lose my job as a teacher, i could go back to the farm and show the natives how to make money. this is doubtless an illusion, but it is a source of solid comfort just the same. now the point of this experience is simply this: i secured an education that seemed to me to promise the acme of utility. in one way, it has fulfilled that promise far beyond my wildest expectations, but that way was very different from the one that i had anticipated. the technical knowledge that i gained during those four strenuous years, i apply now only as a means of recreation. so far as enabling me directly to get a living, this technical knowledge does not pay one per cent on the investment of time and money. and yet i count the training that i got from its mastery as, perhaps, the most useful product of my education. now what was the secret of its utility? as i analyze my experience, i find it summed up very largely in two factors. in the first place, i studied a set of subjects for which i had at the outset very little taste. in studying agriculture, i had to master a certain amount of chemistry, physics, botany, and zoölogy, for each and every one of which i felt, at the outset, a distinct aversion and dislike. a mastery of these subjects was essential to a realization of the purpose that i had in mind. i was sure that i should never like them, and yet, as i kept at work, i gradually found myself losing that initial distaste. first one and then another opened out its vista of truth and revelation before me, and almost before i was aware of it, i was enthusiastic over science. it was a long time before i generalized that experience and drew its lesson, but the lesson, once learned, has helped me more even in the specific task of getting a living than anything else that came out of my school training. that experience taught me, not only the necessity for doing disagreeable tasks,--for attacking them hopefully and cheerfully,--but it also taught me that disagreeable tasks, if attacked in the right way, and persisted in with patience, often become attractive in themselves. over and over again in meeting the situations of real life, i have been confronted with tasks that were initially distasteful. sometimes i have surrendered before them; but sometimes, too, that lesson has come back to me, and has inspired me to struggle on, and at no time has it disappointed me by the outcome. i repeat that there is no technical knowledge that i have gained that compares for a moment with that ideal of patience and persistence. when it comes to real, downright utility, measured by this inexorable standard of getting a living, let me commend to you the ideal of persistent effort. all the knowledge that we can learn or teach will come to very little if this element is lacking. now this is very far from saying that the pursuit of really useful knowledge may not give this ideal just as effectively as the pursuit of knowledge that will never be used. my point is simply this: that beyond the immediate utility of the facts that we teach,--indeed, basic and fundamental to this utility,--is the utility of the ideals and standards that are derived from our school work. whatever we teach, these essential factors can be made to stand out in our work, and if our pupils acquire these we shall have done the basic and important thing in helping them to solve the problems of real life,--and if our pupils do not acquire these, it will make little difference how intrinsically valuable may be the content of our instruction. i feel like emphasizing this matter to-day, because there is in the air a notion that utility depends entirely upon the content of the curriculum. certainly the curriculum must be improved from this standpoint, but we are just now losing sight of the other equally important factor,--that, after all, while both are essential, it is the spirit of teaching rather than the content of teaching that is basic and fundamental. nor have i much sympathy with that extreme view of this matter which asserts that we must go out of our way to provide distasteful tasks for the pupil in order to develop this ideal of persistence. i believe that such a policy will always tend to defeat its own purpose. i know a teacher who holds this belief. he goes out of his way to make tasks difficult. he refuses to help pupils over hard places. he does not believe in careful assignments of lessons, because, he maintains, the pupil ought to learn to overcome difficulties for himself, and how can he learn unless real difficulties are presented? the great trouble with this teacher is that his policy does not work out in practice. a small minority of his pupils are strengthened by it; the majority are weakened. he is right when he says that a pupil gains strength only by overcoming difficulties, but he neglects a very important qualification of this rule, namely, that a pupil gains no strength out of obstacles that he fails to overcome. it is the conquest that comes after effort,--this is the factor that gives one strength and confidence. but when defeat follows defeat and failure follows failure, it is weakness that is being engendered--not strength. and that is the trouble with this teacher's pupils. the majority leave him with all confidence in their own ability shaken out of them and some of them never recover from the experience. and so while i insist strenuously that the most useful lesson we can teach our pupils is how to do disagreeable tasks cheerfully and willingly, please do not understand me to mean that we should go out of our way to provide disagreeable tasks. after all, i rejoice that my own children are learning how to read and write and cipher much more easily, much more quickly, and withal much more pleasantly than i learned those useful arts. the more quickly they get to the plane that their elders have reached, the more quickly they can get beyond this plane and on to the next level. to argue against improved methods in teaching on the ground that they make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous error. it is as fallacious as to argue that the introduction of machinery is a curse because it has diminished in some measure the necessity for human drudgery. but if machinery left mankind to rest upon its oars, if it discouraged further progress and further effortful achievement, it _would_ be a curse: and if the easier and quicker methods of instruction simply bring my children to my own level and then fail to stimulate them to get beyond my level, then they are a curse and not a blessing. i do not decry that educational policy of to-day which insists that school work should be made as simple and attractive as possible. i do decry that misinterpretation of this policy which looks at the matter from the other side, and asserts so vehemently that the child should never be asked or urged to do something that is not easy and attractive. it is only because there is so much in the world to be done that, for the sake of economizing time and strength, we should raise the child as quickly and as rapidly and as pleasantly as possible to the plane that the race has reached. but among all the lessons of race experience that we must teach him there is none so fundamental and important as the lesson of achievement itself,--the supreme lesson wrung from human experience,--the lesson, namely, that every advance that the world has made, every step that it has taken forward, every increment that has been added to the sum total of progress has been attained at the price of self-sacrifice and effort and struggle,--at the price of doing things that one does not want to do. and unless a man is willing to pay that price, he is bound to be the worst kind of a social parasite, for he is simply living on the experience of others, and adding to this capital nothing of his own. it is sometimes said that universal education is essential in order that the great mass of humanity may live in greater comfort and enjoy the luxuries that in the past have been vouchsafed only to the few. personally i think that this is all right so far as it goes, but it fails to reach an ultimate goal. material comfort is justified only because it enables mankind to live more effectively on the lower planes of life and give greater strength and greater energy to the solution of new problems upon the higher planes of life. the end of life can never be adequately formulated in terms of comfort and ease, nor even in terms of culture and intellectual enjoyment; the end of life is achievement, and no matter how far we go, achievement is possible only to those who are willing to pay the price. when the race stops investing its capital of experience in further achievement, when it settles down to take life easily, it will not take it very long to eat up its capital and revert to the plane of the brute. iii but i am getting away, from my text. you will remember that i said that the most useful thing that we can teach the child is to attack strenuously and resolutely any problem that confronts him whether it pleases him or not, and i wanted to be certain that you did not misinterpret me to mean that we should, for this reason, make our school tasks unnecessarily difficult and laborious. after all, while our attitude should always be one of interesting our pupils, their attitude should always be one of effortful attention,--of willingness to do the task that we think it best for them to do. you see it is a sort of a double-headed policy, and how to carry it out is a perplexing problem. of so much i am certain, however, at the outset: if the pupil takes the attitude that we are there to interest and entertain him, we shall make a sorry fiasco of the whole matter, and inasmuch as this very tendency is in the air at the present time, i feel justified in at least referring to its danger. now if this ideal of persistent effort is the most useful thing that can come out of education, what is the next most useful? again, as i analyze what i obtained from my own education, it seems to me that, next to learning that disagreeable tasks are often well worth doing, the factor that has helped me most in getting a living has been the method of solving the situations that confronted me. after all, if we simply have the ideal of resolute and aggressive and persistent attack, we may struggle indefinitely without much result. all problems of life involve certain common factors. the essential difference between the educated and the uneducated man, if we grant each an equal measure of pluck, persistence, and endurance, lies in the superior ability of the educated man to analyze his problem effectively and to proceed intelligently rather than blindly to its solution. i maintain that education should give a man this ideal of attacking any problem; furthermore i maintain that the education of the present day, in spite of the anathemas that are hurled against it, is doing this in richer measure than it has ever been done before. but there is no reason why we should not do it in still greater measure. i once knew two men who were in the business of raising fruit for commercial purposes. each had a large orchard which he operated according to conventional methods and which netted him a comfortable income. one of these men was a man of narrow education: the other a man of liberal education, although his training had not been directed in any way toward the problems of horticulture. the orchards had borne exceptionally well for several years, but one season, when the fruit looked especially promising, a period of wet, muggy weather came along just before the picking season, and one morning both these men went out into their orchards, to find the fruit very badly "specked." now the conventional thing to do in such cases was well known to both men. each had picked up a good deal of technical information about caring for fruit, and each did the same thing in meeting this situation. he got out his spraying outfit, prepared some bordeaux mixture, and set vigorously at work with his pumps. so far as persistence and enterprise went, both men stood on an equal footing. but it happened that this was an unusual and not a conventional situation. the spraying did not alleviate the condition. the corruption spread through the trees like wildfire, and seemed to thrive on copper sulphate rather than succumb to its corrosive influence. now this was where the difference in training showed itself. the orchardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sitting on his front porch bemoaning his luck. the other set diligently at work to analyze the situation. his education had not taught him anything about the characteristics of parasitic fungi, for parasitic fungi were not very well understood when he was in school. but his education had left with him a general method of procedure for just such cases, and that method he at once applied. it had taught him how to find the information that he needed, provided that such information was available. it had taught him that human experience is crystallized in books, and that, when a discovery is made in any field of science,--no matter how specialized the field and no matter how trivial the finding,--the discovery is recorded in printer's ink and placed at the disposal of those who have the intelligence to find it and apply it. and so he set out to read up on the subject,--to see what other men had learned about this peculiar kind of apple rot. he obtained all that had been written about it and began to master it. he told his friend about this material and suggested that the latter follow the same course, but the man of narrow education soon found himself utterly at sea in a maze of technical terms. the terms were new to the other too, but he took down his dictionary and worked them out. he knew how to use indices and tables of contents and various other devices that facilitate the gathering of information, and while his uneducated friend was storming over the pedantry of men who use big words, the other was making rapid progress through the material. in a short time he learned everything that had been found out about this specific disease. he learned that its spores are encased in a gelatinous sac which resisted the entrance of the chemicals. he found how the spores were reproduced, how they wintered, how they germinated in the following season; and, although he did not save much of his crop that year, he did better the next. nor were the evidences of his superiority limited to this very useful result. he found that, after all, very little was known about this disease, so he set himself to find out more about it. to do this, he started where other investigators had left off, and then he applied a principle he had learned from his education; namely, that the only valid methods of obtaining new truths are the methods of close observation and controlled experiment. now i maintain that the education which was given that man was effective in a degree that ought to make his experience an object lesson for us who teach. what he had found most useful at a very critical juncture of his business life was, primarily, not the technical knowledge that he had gained either in school or in actual experience. his superiority lay in the fact that he knew how to get hold of knowledge when he needed it, how to master it once he had obtained it, how to apply it once he had mastered it, and finally how to go about to discover facts that had been undetected by previous investigators. i care not whether he got this knowledge in the elementary school or in the high school or in the college. he might have secured it in any one of the three types of institution, but he had to learn it somewhere, and i shall go further and say that the average man has to learn it in some school and under an explicit and conscious method of instruction. iv but perhaps you would maintain that this statement of the case, while in general true, does not help us out in practice. after all, how are we to impress pupils with this ideal of persistence and with these ideals of getting and applying information, and with this ideal of investigation? i maintain that these important useful ideals may be effectively impressed almost from the very outset of school life. the teaching of every subject affords innumerable opportunities to force home their lessons. in fact, it must be a very gradual process--a process in which the concrete instances are numerous and rich and impressive. from these concrete instances, the general truth may in time emerge. certainly the chances that it will emerge are greatly multiplied if we ourselves recognize its worth and importance, and lead our pupils to see in each concrete case the operation of the general principle. after all, the chief reason why so much of our education miscarries, why so few pupils gain the strength and the power that we expect all to gain, lies in the inability of the average individual to draw a general conclusion from concrete cases--to see the general in the particular. we have insisted so strenuously upon concrete instruction that we have perhaps failed also to insist that fact without law is blind, and that observation without induction is stupidity gone to seed. let me give a concrete instance of what i mean. not long ago, i visited an eighth-grade class during a geography period. it was at the time when the discovery of the pole had just set the whole civilized world by the ears, and the teacher was doing something that many good teachers do on occasions of this sort: she was turning the vivid interest of the moment to educative purposes. the pupils had read peary's account of his trip and they were discussing its details in class. now that exercise was vastly more than an interesting information lesson, for peary's achievement became, under the skillful touch of that teacher, a type of all human achievement. i wish that i could reproduce that lesson for you--how vividly she pictured the situation that confronted the explorer,--the bitter cold, the shifting ice, the treacherous open leads, the lack of game or other sources of food supply, the long marches on scant rations, the short hours and the uncomfortable conditions of sleep; and how from these that fundamental lesson of pluck and endurance and courage came forth naturally without preaching the moral or indulging in sentimental "goody-goodyism." and then the other and equally important part of the lesson,--how pluck and courage in themselves could never have solved the problem; how knowledge was essential, and how that knowledge had been gained: some of it from the experience of early explorers,--how to avoid the dreaded scurvy, how to build a ship that could withstand the tremendous pressure of the floes; and some from the eskimos,--how to live in that barren region, and how to travel with dogs and sledges;--and some, too, from peary's own early experiences,--how he had struggled for twenty years to reach the goal, and had added this experience to that until finally the prize was his. we may differ as to the value of peary's deed, but that it stands as a type of what success in any undertaking means, no one can deny. and this was the lesson that these eighth-grade pupils were absorbing,--the world-old lesson before which all others fade into insignificance,--the lesson, namely, that achievement can be gained only by those who are willing to pay the price. and i imagine that when that class is studying the continent of africa in their geography work, they will learn something more than the names of rivers and mountains and boundaries and products,--i imagine that they will link these facts with the names and deeds of the men who gave them to the world. and when they study history, it will be vastly more than a bare recital of dates and events,--it will be alive with these great lessons of struggle and triumph,--for history, after all, is only the record of human achievement. and if those pupils do not find these same lessons coming out of their own little conquests,--if the problems of arithmetic do not furnish an opportunity to conquer the pressure ridges of partial payments or the polar night of bank discount, or if the intricacies of formal grammar do not resolve themselves into the north pole of correct expression,--i have misjudged that teacher's capacities; for the great triumph of teaching is to get our pupils to see the fundamental and the eternal in things that are seemingly trivial and transitory. we are fond of dividing school studies into the cultural and the practical, into the humanities and the sciences. believe me, there is no study worth the teaching that is not practical at basis, and there is no practical study that has not its human interest and its humanizing influence--if only we go to some pains to search them out. v i have said that the most useful thing that education can do is to imbue the pupil with the ideal of effortful achievement which will lead him to do cheerfully and effectively the disagreeable tasks that fall to his lot. i have said that the next most useful thing that it can do is to give him a general method of solving the problems that he meets. is there any other useful outcome of a general nature that we may rank in importance with these two? i believe that there is, and i can perhaps tell you what i mean by another reference to a concrete case. i know a man who lacks this third factor, although he possesses the other two in a very generous measure. he is full of ambition, persistence, and courage. he is master of the rational method of solving the problems that beset him. he does his work intelligently and effectively. and yet he has failed to make a good living. why? simply because of his standard of what constitutes a good living. measured by my standard, he is doing excellently well. measured by his own standard, he is a miserable failure. he is depressed and gloomy and out of harmony with the world, simply because he has no other standard for a good living than a financial one. he is by profession a civil engineer. his work is much more remunerative than is that of many other callings. he has it in him to attain to professional distinction in that work. but to this opportunity he is blind. in the great industrial center in which he works, he is constantly irritated by the evidences of wealth and luxury beyond what he himself enjoys. the millionaire captain of industry is his hero, and because he is not numbered among this class, he looks at the world through the bluest kind of spectacles. now, to my mind that man's education failed somewhere, and its failure lay in the fact that it did not develop in him ideals of success that would have made him immune to these irritating factors. we have often heard it said that education should rid the mind of the incubus of superstition, and one very important effect of universal education is that it does offer to all men an explanation of the phenomena that formerly weighted down the mind with fear and dread, and opened an easy ingress to the forces of superstition and fraud and error. education has accomplished this function, i think, passably well with respect to the more obvious sources of superstition. necromancy and magic, demonism and witchcraft, have long since been relegated to the limbo of exposed fraud. their conquest has been one of the most significant advances that man has made above the savage. the truths of science have at last triumphed, and, as education has diffused these truths among the masses, the triumph has become almost universal. but there are other forms of superstition besides those i have mentioned,--other instances of a false perspective, of distorted values, of inadequate standards. if belief in witchcraft or in magic is bad because it falls short of an adequate interpretation of nature,--if it is false because it is inconsistent with human experience,--then the worship of mammon that my engineer friend represents is tenfold worse than witchcraft, measured by the same standards. if there is any lesson that human history teaches with compelling force, it is surely this: every race which has yielded to the demon of individualism and the lust for gold and self-gratification has gone down the swift and certain road to national decay. every race that, through unusual material prosperity, has lost its grip on the eternal verities of self-sacrifice and self-denial has left the lesson of its downfall written large upon the pages of history. i repeat that if superstition consists in believing something that is inconsistent with rational human experience, then our present worship of the golden calf is by far the most dangerous form of superstition that has ever befuddled the human intellect. but, you ask, what can education do to alleviate a condition of this sort? how may the weak influence of the school make itself felt in an environment that has crystallized on every hand this unfortunate standard? individualism is in the air. it is the dominant spirit of the times. it is reënforced upon every side by the unmistakable evidences of national prosperity. it is easy to preach the simple life, but who will live it unless he has to? it is easy to say that man should have social and not individual standards of success and achievement, but what effect will your puerile assertion have upon the situation that confronts us? yes; it is easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. it is far easier to lie back and let things run their course than it is to strike out into midstream and make what must be for the pioneer a fatal effort to stem the current. but is the situation absolutely hopeless? if the forces of education can lift the japanese people from barbarism to enlightenment in two generations; if education can in a single century transform germany from the weakest to the strongest power on the continent of europe; if five short years of a certain type of education can change the course of destiny in china;--are we warranted in our assumption that we hold a weak weapon in this fight against mammon? i have intimated that the attitude of my engineer friend toward life is the result of twisted ideals. a good many young men are going out into life with a similar defect in their education. they gain their ideals, not from the great wellsprings of human experience as represented in history and literature, in religion and art, but from the environment around them, and consequently they become victims of this superstition from the outset. as a trainer of teachers, i hold it to be one important part of my duty to fortify my students as strongly as i can against this false standard of which my engineer friend is the victim. it is just as much a part of my duty to give my students effective and consistent standards of what a good living consists in as it is to give them the technical knowledge and skill that will enable them to make a good living. if my students who are to become teachers have standards of living and standards of success that are inconsistent with the great ideal of social service for which teaching stands, then i have fallen far short of success in my work. if they are constantly irritated by the evidences of luxury beyond their means, if this irritation sours their dispositions and checks their spontaneity, their efficiency as teachers is greatly lessened or perhaps entirely negated. and if my engineer friend places worldly emoluments upon a higher plane than professional efficiency, i dread for the safety of the bridges that he builds. his education as an engineer should have fortified him against just such a contingency. it should have left him with the ideal of craftsmanship supreme in his life. and if his technical education failed to do this, his general education ought, at least, to have given him a bias in the right direction. i believe that all forms of vocational and professional education are not so strong in this respect as they should be. again you say to me, what can education do when the spirit of the times speaks so strongly on the other side? but what is education for if it is not to preserve midst the chaos and confusion of troublous times the great truths that the race has wrung from its experience? how different might have been the fate of rome, if rome had possessed an educational system touching every child in the empire, and if, during the years that witnessed her decay and downfall, those schools could have kept steadily, persistently at work, impressing upon every member of each successive generation the virtues that made the old romans strong and virile--the virtues that enabled them to lay the foundations of an empire that crumbled in ruins once these truths were forgotten. is it not the specific task of education to represent in each generation the human experiences that have been tried and tested and found to work,--to represent these in the face of opposition if need be,--to be faithful to the trusteeship of the most priceless legacy that the past has left to the present and to the future? if this is not our function in the scheme of things, then what is our function? is it to stand with bated breath to catch the first whisper that will usher in the next change? is it to surrender all initiative and simply allow ourselves to be tossed hither and yon by the waves and cross-waves of a fickle public opinion? is it to cower in dread of a criticism that is not only unjust but often ill-advised of the real conditions under which we are doing our work? i take it that none of us is ready to answer these questions in the affirmative. deep down in our hearts we know that we have a useful work to do, and we know that we are doing it passably well. we also know our defects and shortcomings at least as well as one who has never faced our problems and tried to solve them. and it is from this latter type that most of the drastic criticism, especially of the elementary and secondary school, emanates. i confess that my gorge rises within me when i read or hear the invectives that are being hurled against teaching as a profession (and against the work of the elementary and secondary school in particular) by men who know nothing of this work at first hand. this is the greatest handicap under which the profession of teaching labors. in every other important field of human activity a man must present his credentials before he takes his seat at the council table, and even then he must sit and listen respectfully to his elders for a while before he ventures a criticism or even a suggestion. this plan may have its defects. it may keep things on too conservative a basis; but it avoids the danger into which we as a profession have fallen,--the danger of "half-baked" theories and unmatured policies. to-day the only man that can get a respectable hearing at our great national educational meetings is the man who has something new and bizarre to propose. and the more startling the proposal, the greater is the measure of adulation that he receives. the result of this is a continual straining for effect, an enormous annual crop of fads and fancies, which, though most of them are happily short-lived, keep us in a state of continual turmoil and confusion. * * * * * now, it goes without saying that there are many ways of making education hit the mark of utility in addition to those that i have mentioned. the teachers down in the lower grades who are teaching little children the arts of reading and writing and computation are doing vastly more in a practical direction than they are ever given credit for doing; for reading and writing and the manipulation of numbers are, next to oral speech itself, the prime necessities in the social and industrial world. these arts are being taught to-day better than they have ever been taught before,--and the technique of their teaching is undergoing constant refinement and improvement. the school can do and is doing other useful things. some schools are training their pupils to be well mannered and courteous and considerate of the rights of others. they are teaching children one of the most basic and fundamental laws of human life; namely, that there are some things that a gentleman cannot do and some things that society will not stand. how many a painful experience in solving this very problem of getting a living could be avoided if one had only learned this lesson passing well! what a pity it is that some schools that stand to-day for what we call educational progress are failing in just this particular--are sending out into the world an annual crop of boys and girls who must learn the great lesson of self-control and a proper respect for the rights of others in the bitter school of experience,--a school in which the rod will never be spared, but whose chastening scourge comes sometimes, alas, too late! there is no feature of school life which has not its almost infinite possibilities of utility. but after all, are not the basic and fundamental things these ideals that i have named? and should not we who teach stand for idealism in its widest sense? should we not ourselves subscribe an undying fidelity to those great ideals for which teaching must stand,--to the ideal of social service which lies at the basis of our craft, to the ideals of effort and discipline that make a nation great and its children strong, to the ideal of science that dissipates the black night of ignorance and superstition, to the ideal of culture that humanizes mankind? footnotes: [footnote : an address before the eastern illinois teachers' association, october , . published as a bulletin of the eastern illinois normal school, october, .] ~vii~ the scientific spirit in education[ ] i i know that i do not need to plead with this audience for a recognition of the scientific spirit in the solution of educational problems. the long life and the enviable record of this society of pedagogy testify in themselves to that spirit of free inquiry, to the calm and dispassionate search for the truth which lies at the basis of the scientific method. you have gathered here, fortnight after fortnight, to discuss educational problems in the light of your experience. you have reported your experience and listened to the results that others have gleaned in the course of their daily work. and experience is the corner stone of science. some of the most stimulating and clarifying discussions of educational problems that i have ever heard have been made in the sessions of this society. you have been scientific in your attitude toward education, and i may add that i first learned the lessons of the real science of education in the st. louis schools, and under the inspiration that was furnished by the men who were members of this society. what i knew of the science of education before i came to this city ten years ago, was gleaned largely from books. it was deductive, _a priori_, in its nature. what i learned here was the induction from actual experience. my very first introduction to my colleagues among the school men of this city was a lesson in the science of education. i had brought with me a letter to one of your principals. he was in the office down on locust street the first saturday that i spent in the city. i presented my letter to him, and, with that true southern hospitality which has always characterized your corps, he took me immediately under his wing and carried me out to luncheon with him. we sat for hours in a little restaurant down on sixth street,--he was my teacher and i was his pupil. and gradually, as the afternoon wore on, i realized that i had met a master craftsman in the art of education. at first i talked glibly enough of what i intended to do, and he listened sympathetically and helpfully, with a little quizzical smile in his eyes as i outlined my ambitious plans. and when i had run the gamut of my dreams, he took his turn, and, in true socratic fashion, yet without making me feel in the least that i was only a dreamer after all, he refashioned my theories. one by one the little card houses that i had built up were deftly, smoothly, gently, but completely demolished. i did not know the abc of schoolcraft--but he did not tell me that i did not. he went at the task of instruction from the positive point of view. he proved to me, by reminiscence and example, how different are actual and ideal conditions. and finally he wound up with a single question that opened a new world to me. "what," he asked, "is the dominant characteristic of the child's mind?" i thought at first that i was on safe ground--for had i not taken a course in child study, and had i not measured some hundreds of school children while working out a university thesis? so i began with my list. but, at each characteristic that i mentioned he shook his head. "no," he said, "no; that is not right." and when finally i had exhausted my list, he said to me, "the dominant characteristic of the child's mind is its _seriousness_. the child is the most _serious_ creature in the world." the answer staggered me for a moment. like ninety-nine per cent of the adult population of this globe, the seriousness of the child had never appealed to me. in spite of the theoretical basis of my training, that single, dominant element of child life had escaped me. i had gained my notion of the child from books, and, i also fear, from the sunday supplements. to me, deep down in my heart, the child was an animated joke. i was immersed in unscientific preconceptions. but the master craftsman had gained his conception of child life from intimate, empirical acquaintance with the genus boy. he had gleaned from his experience that fundamental truth: "the child is the most serious creature in the world." sometime i hope that i may make some fitting acknowledgment of the debt of gratitude that i owe to that man. the opportunities that i had to talk with him were all too few, but i did make a memorable visit to his school, and studied at first hand the great work that he was doing for the pupils of the columbia district. he died the next year, and i shall never forget the words that stood beneath his picture that night in one of the daily papers: "charles howard: architect of character." ii the essence of the scientific spirit is to view experience without prejudice, and that was the lesson that i learned from the school system of st. louis. the difference between the ideal child and the real child,--the difference between what fancy pictures a schoolroom to be and what actual first-hand acquaintance shows that it is, the difference between a preconceived notion and an actual stubborn fact of experience,--these were among the lessons that i learned in these schools. but, at the same time, there was no crass materialism accompanying this teaching. there was no loss of the broader point of view. a fact is a fact, and we cannot get around it,--and this is what scientific method has insisted upon from its inception. but always beyond the fact is its significance, its meaning. that the st. louis schools have for the last fifty years stood for the larger view; that they have never, so far as i know, exploited the new and the bizarre simply because it was new and strange,--this is due, i believe, to the insight and inspiration of the man[ ] who first fashioned the framework of this system, and breathed into it as a system the vitalizing element of idealism. personally, i have not always been in sympathy with the teachings of the hegelian philosophy,--i have not always understood them,--but no man could witness the silent, steady, unchecked growth of the st. louis schools without being firmly and indelibly impressed with dynamic value of a richly conceived and rigidly wrought system of fundamental principles. the cause of education has suffered much from the failure of educators to break loose from the shackles of the past. but it has, in some places, suffered still more from the tendency of the human mind to confuse fundamental principles with the shackles of tradition. the rage for the new and the untried, simply because it is new and untried,--this has been, and is to-day, the rock upon which real educational progress is most likely to be wrecked. this is a rock, i believe, that st. louis has so far escaped, and i have no doubt that its escape has been due, in large measure, to the careful, rigid, laborious, and yet illuminating manner in which that great captain charted out its course. iii fundamentally, there is, i believe, no discrepancy, no inconsistency, between the scientific spirit in education and what may be called the philosophical spirit. as i have suggested, there are always two dangers that must be avoided: the danger, in the first place, of thinking of the old as essentially bad; and, on the other hand, the danger of thinking of the new and strange and unknown as essentially bad; the danger of confusing a sound conservatism with a blind worship of established custom; and the danger of confusing a sound radicalism with the blind worship of the new and the bizarre. let me give you an example of what i mean. there is a rather bitter controversy at present between two factions of science teachers. one faction insists that physics and chemistry and biology should be taught in the high school from the economic point of view,--that the economic applications of these sciences to great human arts, such as engineering and agriculture, should be emphasized at every point,--that a great deal of the material now taught in these sciences is both useless and unattractive to the average high-school pupil. the other faction maintains that such a course would mean the destruction of science as an integral part of the secondary culture course,--that science to be cultural must be pure science,--must be viewed apart from its economic applications,--apart from its relations to the bread-and-butter problem. now many of the advocates of the first point of view--many of the people that would emphasize the economic side--are animated by the spirit of change and unrest which dominates our latter-day civilization. they wish to follow the popular demand. "down with scholasticism!" is their cry; "down with this blind worship of custom and tradition! let us do the thing that gives the greatest immediate benefit to our pupils. let us discard the elements in our courses that are hard and dry and barren of practical results." now these men, i believe, are basing their argument upon the fallacy of immediate expediency. the old is bad, the new is good. that is their argument. they have no sheet anchor out to windward. they are willing to drift with the gale. many of the advocates of the second point of view--many of the people who hold to the old line, pure-science teaching--are, on the other hand, animated by a spirit of irrational conservatism. "down with radicalism!" they shout; "down with the innovators! things that are hard and dry are good mental discipline. they made our fathers strong. they can make our children strong. what was good enough for the great minds of the past is good enough for us." now these men, i believe, have gone to the other extreme. they have confused custom and tradition with fundamental and eternal principles. they have thought that, just because a thing is old, it is good, just as their antagonists have thought that just because a thing is new it is good. in both cases, obviously, the scientific spirit is lacking. the most fundamental of all principles is the principle of truth. and yet these men who are teachers of science are--both classes of them--ruled themselves by dogma. and meantime the sciences are in danger of losing their place in secondary education. the rich promise that was held out a generation ago has not been fulfilled. within the last decade, the enrollment in the science courses has not increased in proportion to the total enrollment, while the enrollment in latin (which fifteen years ago was about to be cast upon the educational scrap heap) has grown by leaps and bounds. now this is a type of a great many controversies in education. we talk and theorize, but very seldom do we try to find out the actual facts in the case by any adequate tests. it was the lack of such tests that led us at the university of illinois to enter upon a series of impartial investigations to see whether we could not take some of these mooted questions out of the realm of eternal controversy, and provide some definite solutions. we chose among others this controversy between the economic scientists and the pure scientists. we took a high-school class and divided it into two sections. we tried to place in each section an equal number of bright and mediocre and dull pupils, so that the conditions would be equalized. then we chose an excellent teacher, a man who could approach the problem with an open mind, without prejudice or favor. during the present year he has been teaching these parallel sections. in one section he has emphasized economic applications; in the other he has taught the class upon the customary pure-science basis. he has kept a careful record of his work, and at stated intervals he has given both sections the same tests. we propose to carry on this investigation year after year with different classes, different teachers, and in different schools. we are not in a hurry to reach conclusions. now i said that the safeguard in all work of this sort is to keep our grip firm and fast on the eternal truths. in this work that i mention we are not trying to prove that either pure science or applied science interests our pupils the more or helps them the more in meeting immediate economic situations. we do not propose to measure the success of either method by its effect upon the bread-winning power of the pupil. what we believe that science teaching should insure, is a grip on the scientific method and an illuminating insight into the forces of nature, and we are simply attempting to see whether the economic applications will make this grip firmer or weaker, and this insight clearer or more obscure. i trust that this point is plain, for it illustrates what i have just said regarding the danger of following a popular demand. we need no experiment to prove that economic science is more useful in the narrow sense than is pure science. what we wish to determine is whether a judicious mixture of the two sorts of teaching will or will not enable us to realize this rich cultural value much more effectively than a traditional purely cultural course. now that illustrates what i think is the real and important application of the scientific spirit to the solution of educational problems. you will readily see that it does not do away necessarily with our ideals. it is not necessarily materialistic. it is not necessarily idealistic. either side may utilize it. it is a quite impersonal factor. but it does promise to take some of our educational problems out of the field of useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of conflicting views together,--for, in the case that i have just cited, if we prove that the right admixture of methods may enable us to realize both a cultural and a utilitarian value, there is no reason why the culturists and the utilitarians should not get together, cease their quarreling, take off their coats, and go to work. few people will deny that bread and butter is a rather essential thing in this life of ours; very few will deny that material prosperity in temperate amounts is good for all of us; and very few also will deny that far more fundamental than bread and butter--far more important than material prosperity--are the great fundamental and eternal truths which man has wrought out of his experience and which are most effectively crystallized in the creations of pure art, the masterpieces of pure literature, and the discoveries of pure science. certainly if we of the twentieth century can agree upon any one thing, it is this: that life without toil is a crime, and that any one who enjoys leisure and comfort and the luxuries of living without paying the price of toil is a social parasite. i believe that it is an important function of public education to impress upon each generation the highest ideals of living as well as the arts that are essential to the making of a livelihood, but i wish to protest against the doctrine that these two factors stand over against one another as the positive and negative poles of human existence. in other words, i protest against the notion, that the study of the practical everyday problems of human life is without what we are pleased to call a culture value,--that in the proper study of those problems one is not able to see the operation of fundamental and eternal principles. i shall readily agree that there is always a grave danger that the trivial and temporary objects of everyday life may be viewed and studied without reference to these fundamental principles. but this danger is certainly no greater than that the permanent and eternal truths be studied without reference to the actual, concrete, workaday world in which we live. i have seen exercises in manual training that had for their purpose the perfection of the pupil in some little art of joinery for which he would, in all probability, have not the slightest use in his later life. but even if he should find use for it, the process was not being taught in the proper way. he was being made conscious only of the little trivial thing, and no part of his instruction was directed toward the much more important, fundamental lesson,--the lesson, namely, that "a little thing may be perfect, but that perfection itself is not a little thing." i say that i have witnessed such an exercise in the very practical field of manual training. i may add that i went through several such exercises myself, and emerged with a disgust that always recurs to me when i am told that every boy will respond to the stimulus of the hammer and the jack plane. but i should hasten to add that i have also seen what we call the humanities so taught that the pupil has emerged from them with a supreme contempt for the life of labor and a feeling of disgust at the petty and trivial problems of human life which every one must face. i have seen art and literature so taught as to leave their students not with the high purpose to mold their lives in accordance with the high ideals that art and literature represent, not the firm resolution to do what they could to relieve the ugliness of the world where they found it ugly, or to do what they could to ennoble life when they found it vile; but rather with an attitude of calm superiority, as if they were in some way privileged to the delights of æsthetic enjoyment, leaving the baser born to do the world's drudgery. i have seen the principles of agriculture so taught as to leave with the student the impression that he could raise more corn than his neighbor and sell it at a higher price if he mastered the principles of nitrification; and all without one single reference to the basic principle of conservation upon which the welfare of the human race for all time to come must inevitably depend,--without a single reference to the moral iniquity of waste and sloth and ignorance. but i have also seen men who have mastered the scientific method,--the method of controlled observation, and unprejudiced induction and inference,--in the laboratories of pure science; and who have gained so overweening and hypertrophied a regard for this method that they have considered it too holy to be contaminated by application to practical problems,--who have sneered contemptuously when some adventurer has proposed, for example, to subject the teaching of science itself to the searchlight of scientific method. i trust that these examples have made my point clear, for it is certainly simple enough. if vocational education means simply that the arts and skills of industrial life are to be transmitted safely from generation to generation, a minimum of educational machinery is all that is necessary, and we do not need to worry much about it. if vocational education means simply this, it need not trouble us much; for economic conditions will sooner or later provide for an effective means of transmission, just as economic conditions will sooner or later perfect, through a blind and empirical process of elimination, the most effective methods of agriculture, as in the case of china and other overpopulated nations of the orient. but i take it that we mean by vocational education something more than this, just as we mean by cultural education something more than a veneer of language, history, pure science, and the fine arts. in the former case, the practical problems of life are to be lifted to the plane of fundamental principles; in the latter case, fundamental principles are to be brought down to the plane of present, everyday life. i can see no discrepancy here. to my mind there is no cultural subject that has not its practical outcome, and there is no practical subject that has not its humanizing influence if only we go to some pains to seek it out. i do not object to a subject of instruction that promises to put dollars into the pockets of those that study it. i do object to the mode of teaching that subject which fails to use this effective economic appeal in stimulating a glimpse of the broader vision. i do not object to the subject that appeals to the pupil's curiosity because it informs him of the wonderful deeds that men have done in the past. i do object to that mode of teaching this subject which simply arouses interest in a spectacular deed, and then fails to use this interest in the interpretation of present problems. i do not contend that in either case there must be an explicit pointing of morals and drawing of lessons. but i do contend that the teacher who is in charge of the process should always have this purpose in the forefront of his consciousness, and--now by direct comparison, now by indirection and suggestion--guide his pupils to the goal desired. i hope that through careful tests, we shall some day be able to demonstrate that there is much that is good and valuable on both sides of every controverted educational question. after all, in this complex and intricate task of teaching to which you and i are devoting our lives, there is too much at stake to permit us for a moment to be dogmatic,--to permit us for a moment to hold ourselves in any other attitude save one of openness and reception to the truth when the truth shall have been demonstrated. neither your ideas nor mine, nor those of any man or group of men, living or dead, are important enough to stand in the way of the best possible accomplishment of that great task to which we have set our hands. iv but i did not propose this morning to talk to you about science as a part of our educational curriculum, but rather about the scientific spirit and the scientific method as effective instruments for the solution of our own peculiar educational problems. i have tried to give you reasons for believing that an adoption of this policy does not necessarily commit us to materialism or to a narrowly economic point of view. i have attempted to show that the scientific method may be applied to the solution of our problems while we still retain our faith in ideals; and that, unless we do retain that faith, our investigations will be without point or meaning. this problem of vocational education to which i have just referred is one that is likely to remain unsolved until we have made a searching investigation of its factors in the light of scientific method. some people profess not to be worried by the difficulty of finding time in our elementary and secondary schools for the introduction of the newer subjects making for increased vocational efficiency. they would cut the gordian knot with one single operation by eliminating enough of the older subjects to make room for the new. i confess that this solution does not appeal to me. fundamentally the core of the elementary curriculum must, i believe, always be the arts that are essential to every one who lives the social life. in other words, the language arts and the number arts are, and always must be, the fundamentals of elementary education. i do not believe that specialized vocational education should ever be introduced at the expense of thorough training in the subjects that already hold their place in the curriculum. and yet we are confronted by the economic necessity of solving in some way this vocational problem. how are we to do it? it is here that the scientific method may perhaps come to our aid. the obvious avenue of attack upon this problem is to determine whether we cannot save time and energy, not by the drastic operation of eliminating old subjects, but rather by improving our technique of teaching, so that the waste may be reduced, and the time thus saved given to these new subjects that are so vociferously demanding admission. in cleveland, for example, the method of teaching spelling has been subjected to a rigid scientific treatment, and, as a result, spelling is being taught to-day vastly better than ever before and with a much smaller expenditure of time and energy. it has been due, very largely, to the application of a few well-known principles which the science of psychology has furnished. now that is vastly better than saying that spelling is a subject that takes too much time in our schools and consequently ought forthwith to be eliminated. in all of our school work enough time is undoubtedly wasted to provide ample opportunity for training the child thoroughly in some vocation if we wish to vocationalize him, and i do not think that this would hurt him, even if he does not follow the vocation in later life. to-day we are attempting to detect these sources of waste in technique. the problems of habit building or memorizing are already well on the way to solution. careful tests have shown the value of doing memory work in a certain definite way--learning by unit wholes rather than by fragments, for example. experiments have been conducted to determine the best length of time to give to drill processes, such as spelling, and penmanship, and the fundamental tables of arithmetic. it is already clearly demonstrated that brief periods of intense concentration are more economical than longer periods during which the monotony of repetition fags the mind to a point where it can no longer work effectively. we are also beginning to see from these tests, that a systematic method of attacking such a problem as the memorizing of the tables will do much to save time and promote efficiency. we are finding that it is extremely profitable to instruct children in the technique of learning,--to start them out in the right way by careful example, so that much of the time and energy that was formerly dissipated, may now be conserved. and there is a suggestion, also, that in the average school, the vast possibilities of the child's latent energy are only imperfectly realized. a friend of mine stumbled accidentally upon this fact by introducing a new method of grading. he divided his pupils into three groups or streams. the group that progressed the fastest was made up of those who averaged per cent and over in their work. a middle group averaged between per cent and per cent in their work, and a third, slow group was made up of those who averaged below per cent. at the end of the first month, he found that a certain proportion of his pupils, who had formerly hovered around the passing grade of , began to forge ahead. many of them easily went into the fastest stream, but they were still satisfied with the minimum standing for that group. in other words, whether we like to admit it or not, most men and women and boys and girls are content with the passing grades, both in school and in life. so common is the phenomenon that we think of the matter fatalistically. but supply a stimulus, raise the standard, and you will find some of these individuals forging up to the next level. professor james's doctrine of latent energies bids fair to furnish the solution of a vast number of perplexing educational problems. certain it is that our pupils of to-day are not overburdened with work. they are sometimes irritated by too many tasks, sometimes dulled by dead routine, sometimes exhilarated to the point of mental _ennui_ by spectacular appeals to immediate interest. but they are seldom overworked, or even worked to within a healthful degree of the fatigue point. elementary education has often been accused of transacting its business in small coin,--of dealing with and emphasizing trivialities,--and yet every time that the scientific method touches the field of education, it reveals the fundamental significance of little things. whether the third-grade pupil should memorize the multiplication tables in the form, " times equals " or simply " - 's-- " seems a matter of insignificance in contrast with the larger problems that beset us. and yet scientific investigation tells us clearly and unequivocally that any useless addition to a formula to be memorized increases the time for reducing the formula to memory, and interferes significantly with its recall and application. it may seem a matter of trivial importance whether the pupil increases the subtrahend number or decreases the minuend number when he subtracts digits that involve taking or borrowing; and yet investigation proves that to increase the subtrahend number is by far the simpler process, and eliminates both a source of waste and a source of error, which, in the aggregate, may assume a significance to mental economy that is well worth considering. in fact, if we are ever to solve the broader, bigger, more attractive problems,--like the problem of vocational education, or the problem of retardation,--we must first find a solution for some of the smaller and seemingly trivial questions of the very existence of which the lay public may be quite unaware, but which you and i know to mean an untold total of waste and inefficiency in the work that we are trying to do. and one reason why the scientific attitude toward educational problems appeals to me is simply because this attitude carries with it a respect for these seemingly trivial and commonplace problems; for just as the greatest triumph of the teaching art is to get our pupils to see in those things of life that are fleeting and transitory the operation of fundamental and eternal principles, so the glory of the scientific method lies in its power to reveal the significance of the commonplace and to teach us that no slightest detail of our daily work is necessarily devoid of inspiration; that every slightest detail of school method and school management has a meaning and a significance that it is worth our while to ponder. footnotes: [footnote : an address delivered before the st. louis society of pedagogy, april , .] [footnote : dr. w.t. harris.] ~viii~ the possibility of training children how to study[ ] i in its widest aspects, the problem of teaching pupils how to study forms a large part of the larger educational problem. it means, not only teaching them how to read books, and to make the content of books part of their own mental capital, but also, and perhaps far more significantly, teaching them how to draw lessons from their own experiences; not only how to observe and classify and draw conclusions, but also how to evaluate their experience--how to judge whether certain things that they do give adequate or inadequate results. in the narrower sense, however, the art of study may be said to consist in the ability to assimilate the experiences of others, and it is in this narrower sense that i shall discuss the problem to-day. it is not only in books that human experience is recorded, and yet it is true that the reading of books is the most economical means of gaining these experiences; consequently, we may still further narrow our problem to this: how may pupils be trained effectively to glean, through the medium of the printed page, the great lessons of race experience? the word "study" is thus used in the sense in which most teachers employ it. when we speak of a pupil's studying his lessons, we commonly mean that he is bending over a text-book, attempting to assimilate the contents of the text. just what it means to study, even in this narrow sense of the term,--just what it means, psychologically, to assimilate even the simplest thoughts of others,--i cannot tell you, and i do not know of any one who can answer this seemingly simple question satisfactorily. we all study, but what happens in our minds when we do study is a mystery. we all do some thinking, and yet the psychology of thinking is the great undiscovered and unexplored region in the field of mental science. until we know something of the psychology of thinking, we can hope for very little definite information concerning the psychology of study, for study is so intimately bound up with thinking that the two are not to be separated. but even if it is impossible at the present time to analyze the process of studying, we are pretty well agreed as to what constitutes successful study, and many rules have been formulated for helping pupils to acquire effective habits of study. these rules concern us only indirectly at the present time, for our problem is still narrower in its scope. it has to do with the possibility of so training children in the art of study, not only that they may study effectively in school, but also that they may carry over the habits and methods of study thus acquired into the tasks of later life. in other words, the topic that we are discussing is but one phase of the problem of formal discipline,--the problem of securing a transfer of training from a specific field to other fields; and my purpose is to view this topic of "study" in the light of what we know concerning the possibilities of transfer. let me take a specific example. i am not so much concerned with the problem of getting a pupil to master a history lesson quickly and effectively,--not how he may best assimilate the facts concerning the missouri compromise, for example. my task is rather to determine how we can make his mastery of the missouri compromise a lesson in the general art of study,--how that mastery may help him develop what we used to call the general power of study,--the capacity to apply an effective method of study to other problems, perhaps, very far removed from the history lesson; in other words, how that single lesson may help him in the more general task of finding any type of information when he needs it, of assimilating it once he has found it, and of applying it once he has assimilated it. in an audience of practical teachers, it is hardly necessary to emphasize the significance of doing this very thing. from one point of view, it may be asserted that the whole future of what we term general education, as distinguished from technical or vocational education, depends upon our ability to solve problems like this, and solve them satisfactorily. we can never justify universal general education beyond the merest rudiments unless we can demonstrate acceptably that the training which general education furnishes will help the individual to solve the everyday problems of his life. either we must train the pupil in a general way so that he will be able to acquire specialized skill more quickly and more effectively than will the pupil who lacks this general training; or we must give up a large part of the general-culture courses that now occupy an important part in our elementary and secondary curriculums, and replace these with technical and vocational subjects that shall have for their purpose the development of specialized efficiency. all teachers, i take it, are alive to the grave dangers of the latter policy. whether we have thought the matter through logically or not we certainly _feel_ strongly that too early specialization will work a serious injury to the cause of education, and, through education, to the larger cause of social advancement and enlightenment. we view with grave foreboding any policy that will shut the door of opportunity to any child, no matter how humble or how unpromising. and yet we also know that, unless the general education that we now offer can be distinctly shown to have a beneficial influence upon specialized efficiency, we shall be forced by economic conditions into this very policy. it is small wonder, then, that so many of our educational discussions and investigations to-day turn upon this problem; and among the various phases of the problem none is more significant than that which is covered by our topic of to-day,--how may we develop in the pupil a general power or capacity for gaining information independently of schools and teachers? if we could adequately develop this power, there is much in the way of specialized instruction that could be safely left to the individual himself. if we could teach him how to study, then we could perhaps trust him to master some of the principles of any calling that he undertakes in so far as these principles can be mastered from books. to teach the child to study effectively is to do the most useful thing that could be done to help him to adjust himself to any environment of modern civilized life into which he may be thrown. for there is one thing that the more radical advocates of a narrow vocational education commonly forget, and that is the constant change that is going on in industrial processes. when we limit our vocational teaching to a mere mastery of technique, there is no guarantee that the process which we teach to-day may not be discarded in five or ten years from to-day. even the narrower technical principles which are so extremely important to-day may be relatively insignificant by the time that the child whom we are training takes his place in the industrial world. but if we can arm the individual with the more fundamental principles which are fixed for all time; and if, in addition to this, we can teach him how to master the specialized principles which may come into the field unheralded and unexpected, and turn topsy-turvy the older methods of doing his work, then we shall have done much toward helping him in solving that perplexing problem of gaining a livelihood. ii i shall not try in this discussion of the problem of study to summarize completely the principles and precepts that have been presented so well in the four books on the subject that have appeared in the last two years. i do not know, in fact, of any book that is more useful to the teacher just at present than professor frank mcmurry's _how to study and teaching how to study_. it is a book that is both a help and a delight, for it is clear and well-organized, and written in a vivacious style and with a wealth of concrete illustration that holds the attention from beginning to end. the chief fault that i have to find with it is the fault that i have to find with almost every educational book that comes from the press to-day,--the tendency, namely, to imply that the teacher of to-day is doing very little to solve these troublesome problems. as a matter of fact, many teachers are securing excellent results from their attempts to teach pupils how to study. otherwise we should not find so many energetic young men to-day who are making an effective individual mastery of the principles of their respective trades and professions independently of schools and teachers. our attitude toward these questions, far from being that of the pessimist, should be that of the optimist. our task should be to seek out these successful teachers, and find out how they do their work. among the most important points emphasized by the recent writers upon the art of study is the necessity for some form of motivation in the work of mastering the text. we all know that if a pupil feels a distinct need for getting information out of a book, the chances are that he will get it if the book is available and if he can read. to create a problem that will involve in its solution the gaining of such information is, therefore, one of the best approaches to a mastery of the art of study. it is, however, only the beginning. it furnishes the necessary energy, but does not map out the path along which this energy is to be expended. and this is where the greater emphasis, perhaps, is needed. one of the best teachers that i ever knew taught the subject that we now call agronomy,--a branch of agricultural science that has to do with field crops. i was a mere boy when i sat under his instruction, but certain points in his method of teaching made a most distinct impression upon me. lectures we had, of course, for lecturing was the orthodox method of class instruction. but this man did something more than merely lecture. he assigned each one of his students a plat of ground on the college farm. upon this plat of ground, a definite experiment was to be conducted. one of my experiments had to do with the smut of oats. i was to try the effect of treating the seed with hot water in order to see whether it would prevent the fungus from later destroying the ripening grain. the very nature of the problem interested me intensely. i began to wonder about the life-history of this fungus,--how it looked and how it germinated and how it grew and wrought its destructive influence. it was not long before i found myself spending some of my leisure moments in the library trying to find out what was known concerning this subject. i was not so successful as i might have been, but i am confident that i learned more about parasitic fungi under the spur of that curiosity than i should have done in five times the number of hours spent in formal, meaningless study. but the point of my experience is not that a problem interest had been awakened, but rather that the white heat of that interest was not utilized so completely as it might have been utilized in fixing upon my mind some important details in the general method of running down references and acquiring information. that was the moment to strike, and one serious defect of our school organization to-day is that most teachers, like my teacher at that time, have so much to do that anything like individual attention at such moments is out of the question. next to individual attention, probably, the best way to overcome the difficulty is to give class instruction in these matters,--to set aside a definite period for teaching pupils the technique of using books. if one could arouse a sufficiently general problem interest, this sort of instruction could be made most effective. but even if the problem interest is not general, i think that it is well to assume that it exists in some pupils, at least, and to give them the benefit of class instruction in the art of study,--even if some of the seed should fall upon barren soil. this aspect of teaching pupils how to study is particularly important in the upper grades and the high school, where pupils have sufficiently mastered the technique of reading to be intrusted with individual problems, and where some reference books are commonly available. chief among these always is the dictionary, and to get pupils to use this ponderous volume effectively is one of the important steps in teaching them how to study. here, too, it is easy to be pedantic. as i shall insist strenuously a little later, the chief factor in insuring a transfer of training from one subject to another is to leave in the pupil's mind a distinct consciousness that the method that he has been trained to follow is worth while,--that it gets results. the dictionary habit is likely to begin and end within the schoolroom unless steps are taken to insure the operation of this factor. it is easy to overwork the dictionary and to use it fruitlessly, in so great a measure, in fact, that the pupil will never want to see a dictionary again. aside from the use of the dictionary, is the use of the helps that modern books provide for finding the information that may be desired,--indices, tables of contents, marginal and cross-references, and the like. these, again, are most significant in the work of the upper grades and the high school, and here again if we wish the skill that is developed in their use to be transferred, we must take pains to see that the pupil really appreciates their value,--that he realizes their time-saving and energy-saving functions. i do not know that there is any better way to do this than to let him flounder around without them for a little so that his sense of their value may be enhanced by contrast. iii another important step emphasized by the recent writers is the need for training children to pick out the significant features in the text or portion of the text that they are reading. this, of course, is work that is to be undertaken from the very moment that they begin to use books. how to do it effectively is a puzzling problem and one that will amply repay study and experimentation by the individual teacher. much studying of lessons by teachers and pupils together will help, provided that the exercise is spirited and vital, and is not looked upon by the pupils as an easy way of getting out of recitation work. mcmurry strongly recommends the marking of books to indicate the topic sentences and the other salient features. personally, i am sure from my own experience that the assignment is all-important here, and that study questions and problems which can be answered or solved by reference to the text will help matters very much; but care must, of course, be taken that the continued use of such questions does not preclude the pupil's own mastery of the art of study. to eliminate this danger, it is well that the pupils be requested frequently to make out their own lists of questions, and, as speedily as possible, both the questions made by the pupil and those made by the teacher, should be replaced by topical outlines. by taking care that the questions are logically arranged,--that is, that a general question refer to the topic of the paragraph, and other subordinate questions to the subordinate details of the paragraph,--the transition from the questions to the topical outline may be readily made. simultaneously with this will go the transition in recitation from the question-and-answer type to the topical type; and when you have trained a class into the habit of topical recitation,--when each pupil can talk right through a topic (not around it or underneath it or above it) without the use of "pumping" questions by the teacher,--you have gone a long way toward developing the art of study. the transfer of this training, however, is quite another matter. there are pupils who can work up excellent topical recitations from their school text-books but who are utterly at sea in getting a grasp on a subject treated in other books. here again the problem lies in getting the pupil to see the method apart from its content, and to show him that it really brings results that are worth while. if, in our training in the topical method, we are too formal and didactic, the art of study will begin and end right there. it is here that the factor of motivation is of supreme importance. when real problems are raised which require for their solution intelligent reading, the general worth of the method of study can be clearly shown. i do not go so far as to say that the pupil should never be required to study unless he has a real problem that he wishes to solve. in fact, i think that we still have a large place for the formal, systematic mastery of texts by every pupil in our schools. i do contend, however, that the frequent introduction of real problems will give us an opportunity to show the pupil that the method that he has utilized in his more formal school work is adequate and essential to do the thing that appeals to him as worth while. only in this way, i believe, can we insure that transfer of training which is the important factor from our present standpoint. and i ought also to say, parenthetically, that we should not interpret too narrowly this word "motivation." let us remember that what may appeal to the adult as an effective motive does not always appeal to the child as such. economic motives are the most effective, probably, in our own adult lives, and probably very effective with high-school pupils, but economic motives are not always strong in young children, nor should we wish them to be. it is not always true that the child will approach a school task sympathetically when he knows that the task is an essential preparation for the life that is going on about him. he may work harder at a task in order to get ahead of his fellow-pupils than he would if the motive were to fit him to enter a shop or a factory. motive is largely a matter of instinct with the child, and he may, indeed, be perfectly satisfied with a school task just as it stands. for example, we all know that children enjoy the right kind of drill. repetition, especially rhythmic repetition, is instinctive,--it satisfies an inborn need. where such a condition exists, it is an obvious waste of time to search about for more indirect motives. the economical thing to do is to turn the ready energy of the child into the channel that is already open to it, so long as this procedure fits in with the results that we must secure. i feel like emphasizing this fact, inasmuch as the terms "problem interest" and "motivation" seem most commonly to be associated in the minds of teachers with what we adults term "real" or economic situations. to learn a lesson well may often be a sufficient motive,--may often constitute a "real" situation to the child,--and if it does, it will serve very effectively our purposes in this other task,--namely, getting the pupil to see the worth of the method that we ask him to employ. iv there are one or two points of a general nature in connection with the art of study that should be emphasized. in the first place, the upper-grade and high-school pupils are, i believe, mature enough to appreciate in some degree what knowledge really means. one of the fallacies of which i was possessed on completing my work in the lower schools was the belief that there are some men who know everything. i naturally concluded that the superintendent of schools was one of these men; the family physician was another; the leading man in my town was a third; and any one who ever wrote a book was put, _ex officio_ so to speak, into this class without further inquiry. one of the most astounding revelations of my later education was to learn that, after all, the amount of real knowledge in this world, voluminous though it seems, is after all pitiably small. of opinion and speculation we have a surplus, but of real, downright, hard fact, our capital is still most insignificant. and i wonder if something could not be done in the high school to teach pupils the difference between fact and opinion, and something also of the slow, laborious process through which real facts are accumulated. how many mistakes of life are due to the lack of the judicial attitude right here. what mistakes we all make when we try to evaluate writings outside of our own special field of knowledge or activity. nothing depresses me to-day quite so much as the readiness with which laymen mistake opinion for fact in the field of psychology and education,--and i suppose that my own hasty acceptance of statements in other fields would have a similar effect upon the specialists of those fields. can general education help us out at all in this matter? i have only one or two suggestions to make, and even these may not be worth a great deal. in the recent polar controversy, the sympathies of the general public were, i think, at the outset with cook. this was perhaps, natural, and yet the trained mind ought to have withheld judgment for one reason if for no other,--and that one reason was peary's long arctic service, his unquestioned mastery of the technique of polar travel, his general reputation for honesty and caution in advancing opinions. by all the lessons that history teaches, peary's word should have had precedence over cook's, for peary was a specialist, while cook was only an amateur. and yet the general public discounted entirely those lessons, and trusted rather the novice, with what results it is now unnecessary to review,--and in nine cases out of ten, the results will be the same. could we not, as part of our work in training pupils to study, also teach them to give some sort of an evaluation to the authorities that they consult? could we not teach them that, in nine cases out of ten, at least, the man who has the message most worth listening to is the man who has worked the hardest and the longest in his field, and who enjoys the best reputation among his fellow-workers? sometimes, i admit, the rule does not work, and especially with men whose reputations as authorities have outlived their period of productivity, but even this mistake could be guarded against. certainly high-school pupils ought distinctly to understand that the authors of their text-books are not always the most learned men or the greatest authorities in the fields that they treat. the use of biographical dictionaries, of the books that are appearing in various fields giving brief biographies and often some authoritative estimate of the workers in these fields, is important in this connection. mcmurry recommends that pupils be encouraged to take a critical attitude toward the principles they are set to master,--to judge, as he says, the soundness and worth of the statements that they learn. this is certainly good advice, and wherever the pupil can intelligently deal with real sources, it is well frequently to have him check up the statements of secondary sources. but, after all, this is the age of the specialist, and to trust one's untrained judgment in a field remote from one's knowledge and experience is likely to lead to unfortunate results. we have all sorts of illustrations from the ignorant man who will not trust the physician or the health official in matters of sanitation; because he lacks the proper perspective, he jumps to the conclusion that the specialist is a fraud. would it not be well to supplement mcmurry's suggestion by the one that i have just made,--that is, that we train pupils how to evaluate authorities as well as facts,--how to protect themselves from the quack and the faker who live like parasites upon the ignorance of laymen, both in medicine, in education, and in arctic exploration? and i believe that there is a place, also, in the high school, especially in connection with the work in science and history, for giving pupils some idea of how knowledge is really gained. i should not teach science exclusively by the laboratory method, nor history exclusively by the source method, but i should certainly take frequent opportunity to let pupils work through some simple problems from the beginnings, struggling with the conditions somewhat as the discoverers themselves struggled; following up "blind leads" and toilsomely returning for a fresh start; meeting with discouragement; and finally feeling, perhaps, some of the joy that comes with success after struggle; and all in order that they may know better and appreciate more fully the cost and the worth of that intellectual heritage which the master-minds of the world have bequeathed to the present and the future. and along with this, as they master the principles of science, let them learn also the human side of science,--the story of newton, withholding his great discovery for years until he could be absolutely certain that it was a law; until he could get the very commonplace but obstreperous moon into harmony with his law of falling bodies;--the story of darwin, with his twenty-odd years of the most patient and persistent kind of toil; delving into the most unpromising materials, reading the driest books, always on the lookout for the facts that would point the way to the explanation of species;--the story of morse and his bitter struggle against poverty, and sickness, and innumerable disappointments up to the time when, in advancing years, success crowned his efforts. all this may seem very remote from the prosaic task of teaching pupils how to study; and yet it will lend its influence toward the attainment of that end. for, after all, we must lead our pupils to see that some books, in spite of their formidable difficulties and their apparent abstractions, are still close to life, and that the truth which lies in books, and which we wish them to assimilate, has been wrought out of human experience, and not brought down miraculously from some remote storehouse of wisdom that is accessible only to the elect. we poke a good deal of fun at book learning nowadays, and there is a pedantic type of book learning that certainly deserves all the ridicule that can be heaped upon it. but it is not wise to carry satire and ridicule too far in any direction, and especially when it may mean creating in young minds a distrust of the force that, more than any other single factor, has operated to raise man above the savage. v to teach the child the art of study means, then, that we take every possible occasion to impress upon his mind the value of study as a means of solving real and vital problems, and that, with this as an incentive, we gradually and persistently and systematically lead him to grasp the method of study as a method,--that is, slowly and gradually to abstract the method from the particular cases to which he applies it and to emotionalize it,--to make it an ideal. only in this way, so far as we may know, can the art be so generalized as to find ready application in his later life. to this end, it is essential that the steps be taken repeatedly,--not begun to-day and never thought of again until next year,--but daily, even hourly, insuring a little growth. this means, too, not only that the teacher must possess a high degree of patience,--that first principle of pedagogic skill,--but also that he have a comprehensive grasp of the problem, and the ability to separate the woods from the trees, so that, to him at least, the chief aim will never be lost to view. but, even at its best, the task is a severe one, and we need, here as elsewhere in education, carefully controlled tests and experiments, that will enable us to get at the facts. above all, let me protest against the incidental theory of teaching pupils how to study. to adopt the incidental policy in any field of education,--whether in arithmetic, or spelling, or reading; whether in developing the power of reasoning or the memory, or the art of study,--is to throw wide open the doors that lead to the lines of least resistance, to lax methods, to easy honors, to weakened mental fiber, and to scamped work. just as the pernicious doctrine of the subconscious is the first and last refuge of the psycho-faker, so incidental learning is the first and last refuge of soft pedagogy. and i mean by incidental learning, going at a teaching task in an indolent, unreflective, hit-or-miss fashion in the hope that somehow or other from this process will emerge the very definite results that we desire. footnotes: [footnote : a paper read before the superintendents' section of the illinois state teachers' association, december , .] ~ix~ a plea for the definite in education[ ] i one way to be definite in education is to formulate as clearly as we can the aims that we hope to realize in every stage of our work. the task of teaching is so complex that, unless we strive earnestly and persistently to reduce it to the simplest possible terms, we are bound to work blindly and ineffectively. it is only one phase of this topic that i wish to discuss with you this morning. my plea for the definite in education will be limited not only to the field of educational aims and values, but to a small corner of that field. your morning's program has dealt with the problem of teaching history in the elementary school. i should like, if you are willing, to confine my remarks to this topic, and to attack the specific question, what is the history that we teach in the grades to do for the pupil? i wish to make this limitation, not only because what i have to say will be related to the other topics on the program, but also because this very subject of history is one which the lack of a definite standard of educational value has been keenly felt. i should admit at the outset that my interest in history is purely educational. i have had no special training in historical research. as you may perhaps infer from my discussion, my acquaintance with historical facts is very far from comprehensive. i speak as a layman in history,--and i do it openly and, perhaps, a little defiantly, for i believe that the last person to pass adequate judgment upon the general educational value of a given department of knowledge is a man who has made the department a life study. i have little faith in what the mathematician has to say regarding the educational value of mathematics _for the average elementary pupil_, because he is a special pleader and his conclusions cannot escape the coloring of his prejudice. i once knew an enthusiastic brain specialist who maintained that, in every grade of the elementary school, instruction should be required in the anatomy of the human brain. that man was an expert in his own line. he knew more about the structure of the brain than any other living man. but knowing more about brain morphology also implied that he knew less about many other things, and among the things that he knew little about were the needs and capacities of children in the elementary school. he was a special pleader; he had been dealing with his special subject so long that it had assumed a disproportionate value in his eyes. brain morphology had given him fame, honor, and worldly emoluments. naturally he would have an exaggerated notion of its value. it is the same with any other specialist. as specialists in education, you and i are likely to overemphasize the importance of the common school in the scheme of creation. personally i am convinced that the work of elementary education is the most profoundly significant work in the world; and yet i can realize that i should be no fit person to make comparisons if the welfare of a number of other professions and callings were at stake. i should let an unbiased judge make the final determination. ii the first question for which we should seek an answer in connection with the value of any school subject is this: how does it influence conduct? let me insist at the outset that we cannot be definite by saying simply that we teach history in order to impart instruction. if there is one thing upon which we are all agreed to-day it is this: that it is what our pupils do that counts, not what they know. the knowledge that they may possess has value only in so far as it may directly or indirectly be turned over into action. let us not be mistaken upon this point. knowledge is of the utmost importance, but it is important only as a means to an end--and the end is conduct. if my pupils act in no way more efficiently after they have received my instruction than they would have acted had they never come under my influence, then my work as a teacher is a failure. if their conduct is less efficient, then my work is not only a failure,--it is a catastrophe. the knowledge that i impart may be absolutely true; the interest that i arouse may be intense; the affection that my pupils have for me may be genuine; but all these are but means to an end, and if the end is not attained, the means have been futile. we have faith that the materials which we pour in at the hopper of sense impression will come out sooner or later at the spout of reaction, transformed by some mysterious process into efficient conduct. while the machinery of the process, like the mills of the gods, certainly grinds slowly, it is some consolation to believe that, at any rate, it _does_ grind; and we are perhaps fain to believe that the exceeding fineness of the grist is responsible for our failure to detect at the spout all of the elements that we have been so careful to pour in at the hopper. what i should like to do is to examine this grinding process rather carefully,--to gain, if possible, some definite notion of the kind of grist we should like to produce, and then to see how the machinery may be made to produce this grist, and in what proportions we must mix the material that we pour into the hopper in order to gain the desired result. i have said that we must ask of every subject that we teach, how does it influence conduct? now when we ask this question concerning history a variety of answers are at once proposed. one group of people will assert that the facts of history have value because they can be directly applied to the needs of contemporary life. history, they will tell us, records the experiences of the race, and if we are to act intelligently we must act upon the basis of this experience. history informs us of the mistakes that former generations have made in adjusting themselves to the world. if we know history, we can avoid these mistakes. this type of reasoning may be said to ascribe a utilitarian value to the study of history. it assumes that historical knowledge is directly and immediately applicable to vital problems of the present day. now the difficulty with this value, as with many others that seem to have the sanction of reason, is that it does not possess the sanction of practical test. while knowledge doubtless affects in some way the present policy of our own government, it would be very hard to prove that the influence is in any way a direct influence. it is extremely doubtful whether the knowledge that the voters have of the history of their country will be recalled and applied at the ballot box next november. i do not say that the study of history that has been going on in the common schools for a generation will be entirely without effect upon the coming election. i simply maintain that this influence will be indirect,--but i believe that it will be none the less profound. one's vote at the next election will be determined largely by immediate and present conditions. but the way in which one interprets these conditions cannot help being profoundly influenced by one's historical study or lack of such study. if it is clear, then, that the study of history cannot be justified upon a purely utilitarian basis, we may pass to the consideration of other values that have been proposed. the specialist in history, whose right to legislate upon this matter i have just called into question, will probably emphasize the disciplinary value of this study. specialists are commonly enthusiastic over the disciplinary value of their special subjects. their own minds have been so well developed by the pursuit of their special branches that they are impelled to recommend the same discipline for all minds. again, we must not blame the specialist in history, for you and i think the same about our own special type of activity. from the disciplinary point of view, the study of history is supposed to give one the mastery of a special method of reasoning. historical method involves, above all else, the careful sifting of evidence, the minutest scrutiny of sources in order to judge whether or not the records are authentic, and the utmost care in coming to conclusions. now it will be generally agreed that these are desirable types of skill to possess whether one is an historian or a lawyer or a teacher or a man of business. and yet, as in all types of discipline, the difficulty lies, not so much in acquiring the specific skill, as in transferring the skill thus acquired to other fields of activity. skill of any sort is made up of a multitude of little specific habits, and it is a current theory that habit functions effectively only in the specific situation in which it has been built up, or in situations closely similar. but whether this is true or not it is obvious that the teaching of elementary history provides very few opportunities for this type of training. a third view of the way in which historical knowledge is thought to work into action may be discussed under the head of the cultural value. history, like literature, is commonly assumed to give to the individual who studies it, a certain amount of that commodity which the world calls culture. precisely what culture consists in, no one, apparently, is ready to tell us, but we all admit that it is real, if not tangible and definable, nor can we deny that the individual who possesses culture conducts himself, as a rule, differently from the individual who does not possess it. in other words, culture is a practical thing, for the only things that are practical are the things that modify or control human action. it is doubtless true that the study of history does add to this intangible something that we call "culture," but the difficulty with this value lies in the fact that, even after we have accepted it as valid, we are in no way better off regarding our methods. like many other theories, its truth is not to be denied, but its truth gives us no inkling of a solution of our problem. what we need is an educational value of history, the recognition of which will enable us to formulate a method for realizing the value. iii the unsatisfactory character of these three values that have been proposed for history--the utilitarian, the disciplinary, and the cultural--is typical of the values that have been proposed for other subjects. unless the aim of teaching any given subject can be stated in definite terms, the teacher must work very largely in the dark; his efforts must be largely of the "hit-or-miss" order. the desired value may be realized under these conditions, but, if it is realized, it is manifestly through accident, not through intelligent design. it is needless to point out the waste that such a blundering and haphazard adjustment entails. we all know how much of our teaching fails to hit the mark, even when we are clear concerning the result that we desire; we can only conjecture how much of the remainder fails of effect because we are hazy and obscure concerning its purpose. let us return to our original basic principle and see what light it may throw upon our problem. we have said that the efficiency of teaching must always be measured by the degree in which the pupil's conduct is modified. taking conduct as our base, then, let us reason back and see what factors control conduct, and, if possible, how these "controls" may be influenced by the processes of education working through the lesson in history. i shall start with a very simple and apparently trivial example. when i was living in the far west, i came to know something of the chinese, who are largely engaged, as you know, in domestic service in that part of the country. most of the chinese servants that i met corresponded very closely with what we read concerning chinese character. we have all heard of the chinese servant's unswerving adherence to a routine that he has once established. they say in the west that when a housewife gives her chinese servant an object lesson in the preparation of a certain dish, she must always be very careful to make her demonstration perfect the first time. if, inadvertently, she adds one egg too many, she will find that, in spite of her protestations, the superfluous egg will always go into that preparation forever afterward. from what i know of the typical oriental, i am sure that this warning is not overdrawn. now here is a bit of conduct, a bit of adjustment, that characterizes the chinese cook. not only that, but, in a general way, it is peculiar to all chinese, and hence may be called a national trait. we might call it a vigorous national prejudice in favor of precedent. but whatever we call it, it is a very dominant force in chinese life. it is the trait that, perhaps more than any other, distinguishes chinese conduct from european or american conduct. now one might think this trait to be instinctive,--to be bred in the bone rather than acquired,--but this i am convinced is not altogether true. at least one chinese whom i knew did not possess it at all. he was born on a western ranch and his parents died soon after his birth. he was brought up with the children of the ranch owner, and is now a prosperous rancher himself. he lacks every characteristic that we commonly associate with the chinese, save only the physical features. his hair is straight, his skin is saffron, his eyes are slightly aslant,--but that is all. as far as his conduct goes,--and that is the essential thing,--he is an american. in other words, his traits, his tendencies to action, are american and not chinese. his life represents the triumph of environment over heredity. when you visit england you find yourselves among a people who speak the same language that you speak,--or, perhaps it would be better to say, somewhat the same; at least you can understand each other. in a great many respects, the englishman and the american are similar in their traits, but in a great many other respects they differ radically. you cannot, from your knowledge of american traits, judge what an englishman's conduct will be upon every occasion. if you happened on piccadilly of a rainy morning, for example, you would see the english clerks and storekeepers and professional men riding to their work on the omnibuses that thread their way slowly through the crowded thoroughfare. no matter how rainy the morning, these men would be seated on the tops of the omnibuses, although the interior seats might be quite unoccupied. no matter how rainy the morning, many of these men would be faultlessly attired in top hats and frock coats, and there they would sit through the drizzling rain, protecting themselves most inadequately with their opened umbrellas. now there is a bit of conduct that you cannot find duplicated in any american city. it is a national habit,--or, perhaps, it would be better to say, it is an expression of a national trait,--and that national trait is a prejudice in favor of convention. it is the thing to do, and the typical englishman does it, just as, when he is sent as civil governor to some lonely outpost in india, with no companions except scantily clad native servants, he always dresses conscientiously for dinner and sits down to his solitary meal clad in the conventional swallow-tail coat of civilization. now the way in which a chinese cook prepares a custard, or the way in which an english merchant rides in an omnibus, may be trivial and unimportant matters in themselves, and yet, like the straw that shows which way the wind blows, they are indicative of vast and profound currents. the conservatism of the chinese empire is only a larger and more comprehensive expression of the same trait or prejudice that leads the cook to copy literally his model. the present educational situation in england is only another expression of that same prejudice in favor of the established order, which finds expression in the merchant on the piccadilly omnibus. whenever you pass from one country to another you will find this difference in tendencies to action. in germany, for example, you will find something that amounts almost to a national fervor for economy and frugality. you will find it expressing itself in the care with which the german housewife does her marketing. you will find it expressing itself in the intensive methods of agriculture, through which scarcely a square inch of arable land is permitted to lie fallow,--through which, for example, even the shade trees by the roadside furnish fruit as well as shade, and are annually rented for their fruit value to industrious members of the community,--and it is said in one section of germany that the only people known to steal fruit from these trees along the lonely country roads are american tourists, who, you will see, also have their peculiar standards of conduct. you will find this same fervor for frugality and economy expressing itself most extensively in that splendid forest policy by means of which the german states have conserved their magnificent timber resources. but, whatever its expression, it is the same trait,--a trait born of generations of struggle with an unyielding soil, and yet a trait which, combined with the german fervor for science and education, has made possible the marvelous progress that germany has made within the last half century. what do we mean by national traits? simply this: prejudices or tendencies toward certain typical forms of conduct, common to a given people. it is this community of conduct that constitutes a nation. a country whose people have different standards of action must be a divided country, as our own american history sufficiently demonstrates. unless upon the vital questions of human adjustment, men are able to agree, they cannot live together in peace. if we are a distinctive and unique nation,--if we hold a distinctive and unique place among the nations of the globe,--it is because you and i and the other inhabitants of our country have developed distinctive and unique ideals and prejudices and standards, all of which unite to produce a community of conduct. and once granting that our national characteristics are worth while, that they constitute a distinct advance over the characteristics of the other nations of the earth, it becomes the manifest duty of the school to do its share in perpetuating these ideals and prejudices and standards. once let these atrophy through disuse, once let them fail of transmission because of the decay of the home, or the decay of the school, or the decay of the social institutions that typify and express them, and our country must go the way of greece and rome, and, although our blood may thereafter continue pure and unmixed, and our physical characteristics may be passed on from generation to generation unchanged in form, our nation will be only a memory, and its history ancient history. some of the greeks of to-day are the lineal descendants of the athenians and spartans, but the ancient greek standards of conduct, the greek ideals, died twenty centuries ago, to be resurrected, it is true, by the renaissance, and to enjoy the glorious privilege of a new and wider sphere of life,--but among an alien people, and under a northern sun. and so the true aim of the study of history in the elementary school is not the realization of its utilitarian, its cultural, or its disciplinary value. it is not a mere assimilation of facts concerning historical events, nor the memorizing of dates, nor the picturing of battles, nor the learning of lists of presidents,--although each of these factors has its place in fulfilling the function of historical study. the true function of national history in our elementary schools is to establish in the pupils' minds those ideals and standards of action which differentiate the american people from the rest of the world, and especially to fortify these ideals and standards by a description of the events and conditions through which they developed. it is not the facts of history that are to be applied to the problems of life; it is rather the emotional attitude, the point of view, that comes not from memorizing, but from appreciating, the facts. a mere fact has never yet had a profound influence over human conduct. a principle that is accepted by the head and not by the heart has never yet stained a battle field nor turned the tide of a popular election. men act, not as they think, but as they feel, and it is not the idea, but the ideal, that is important in history. iv but what are the specific ideals and standards for which our nation stands and which distinguish, in a very broad but yet explicit manner, our conduct from the conduct of other peoples? if we were to ask this question of an older country, we could more easily obtain an answer, for in the older countries the national ideals have, in many cases, reached an advanced point of self-consciousness. the educational machinery of the german empire, for example, turns upon this problem of impressing the national ideals. it is one aim of the official courses of study, for instance, that history shall be so taught that the pupils will gain an overweening reverence for the reigning house of hohenzollern. nor is that newer ideal of national unity which had its seed sown in the franco-prussian war in any danger of neglect by the watchful eye of the government. not only must the teacher impress it upon every occasion, but every attempt is also made to bring it daily fresh to the minds of the people through great monuments and memorials. scarcely a hamlet is so small that it does not possess its bismarck _denkmal_, often situated upon some commanding hill, telling to each generation, in the sublime poetry of form, the greatness of the man who made german unity a reality instead of a dream. but in our country, we do not thus consciously formulate and express our national ideals. we recognize them rather with averted face as the adolescent boy recognizes any virtue that he may possess, as if half-ashamed of his weakness. we have monuments to our heroes, it is true, but they are often inaccessible, and as often they fail to convey in any adequate manner, the greatness of the lessons which the lives of these heroes represent. where germany has a hundred or more impressive memorials to the genius of bismarck, we have but one adequate memorial to the genius of washington, while for lincoln, who represents the typical american standards of life and conduct more faithfully than any other one character in our history, we have no memorial that is at all adequate,--and we should have a thousand. some day our people will awake to the possibilities that inhere in these palpable expressions of the impalpable things for which our country stands. we shall come to recognize the vast educative importance of perpetuating, in every possible way, the deep truths that have been established at the cost of so much blood and treasure. to embody our national ideals in the personages of the great figures of history who did so much to establish them is the most elementary method of insuring their conservation and transmission. we are beginning to appreciate the value of this method in our introductory courses of history in the intermediate and lower grammar grades. the historical study outlined for these grades in most of our state and city school programs includes mainly biographical materials. as long as the purpose of this study is kept steadily in view by the teacher, its value may be very richly realized. the danger lies in an obscure conception of the purpose. we are always too prone to teach history didactically, and to teach biographical history didactically is to miss the mark entirely. the aim here is not primarily instruction, but inspiration; not merely learning, but also appreciation. to tell the story of lincoln's life in such a way that its true value will be realized requires first upon the part of the teacher a sincere appreciation of the great lesson of lincoln's life. lincoln typifies the most significant and representative of american ideals. his career stands for and illustrates the greatest of our national principles,--the principle of equality,--not the equality of birth, not the equality of social station, but the equality of opportunity. that a child of the lowliest birth, reared under conditions apparently the most unfavorable for rich development, limited by the sternest poverty, by lack of formal education, by lack of family pride and traditions, by lack of an environment of culture, by the hard necessity of earning his own livelihood almost from earliest childhood,--that such a man should attain to the highest station in the land and the proudest eminence in its history, and should have acquired from the apparently unfavorable environment of his early life the very qualities that made him so efficient in that station and so permanent in that eminence,--this is a miracle that only america could produce. it is this conception that the teacher must have, and this he must, in some measure, impress upon his pupils. v in the teaching of history in the elementary school, the biographical treatment is followed in the later grammar grades by a systematic study of the main events of american history. here the method is different, but the purpose is the same. this purpose is, i take it, to show how our ideals and standards have developed, through what struggles and conflicts they have become firmly established; and the aim must be to have our pupils relive, as vividly as possible, the pain and the struggles and the striving and the triumph, to the end that they may appreciate, however feebly, the heritage that is theirs. here again it is not the facts as such that are important, but the emotional appreciation of the facts, and to this end, the coloring must be rich, the pictures vivid, the contrasts sharply drawn. the successful teacher of history has the gift of making real the past. his pupils struggle with columbus against a frightened, ignorant, mutinous crew; they toil with the pilgrim fathers to conquer the wilderness; they follow the bloody trail of the deerfield victims through the forest to canada; they too resist the encroachments of the mother country upon their rights as english citizens; they suffer through the long winter at valley forge and join with washington in his midnight vigils; they rejoice at yorktown; they dream with jefferson and plead with webster; their hearts are fired with the news of sumter; they clinch their teeth at bull run; they gather hope at donelson, but they shudder at shiloh; they struggle through the wilderness with grant; tired but triumphant, they march home from appomattox; and through it all, in virtue of the limitless capacities of vicarious experience, they have shared the agonies of lincoln. professor mace, in his essay on _method in history_, tells us that there are two distinct phases to every historical event. these are the event itself and the human feeling that brought it forth. it has seemed to me that there are three phases,--the event itself, the feeling that brought it forth, and the feeling to which it gave birth; for no event is historically important unless it has transformed in some way the ideals and standards of the people,--unless it has shifted, in some way, their point of view, and made them act differently from the way in which they would have acted had the event never occurred. one leading purpose in the teaching of history is to show how ideals have been transformed, how we have come to have standards different from those that were once held. many of our national ideals have their roots deep down in english history. not long ago i heard a seventh-grade class discussing the magna charta. it was a class in american history, and yet the events that the pupils had been studying occurred three centuries before the discovery of america. they had become familiar with the long list of abuses that led to the granting of the charter. they could tell very glibly what this great document did for the english people. they traced in detail the subsequent events that led to the establishment of the house of commons. all this was american history just as truly as if the events described had occurred on american soil. they were gaining an appreciation of one of the most fundamental of our national ideals,--the ideal of popular government. and not only that, but they were studying popular government in its simplest form, uncomplicated by the innumerable details and the elaborate organizations which characterize popular government to-day. and when these pupils come to the time when this ideal of self-government was transplanted to american soil, they will be ready to trace with intelligence the changes that it took on. they will appreciate the marked influence which geographical conditions exert in shaping national standards of action. how richly american history reveals and illustrates this influence we are only just now beginning to appreciate. the french and the english colonists developed different types of national character partly because they were placed under different geographical conditions. the st. lawrence and the great lakes gave the french an easy means of access into the vast interior of the continent, and provided innumerable temptations to exploitation rather than a few incentives to development. where the french influence was dispersed over a wide territory, the english influence was concentrated. as a consequence, the english energy went to the development of resources that were none too abundant, and to the establishment of permanent institutions that would conserve these resources. the barrier of the appalachians hemmed them in,--three hundred miles of alternate ridge and valley kept them from the west until they were numerically able to settle rather than to exploit this country. not a little credit for the ultimate english domination of the continent must be given to these geographical conditions. but geography does not tell the whole story. the french colonists differed from the english colonists from the outset in standards of conduct. they had brought with them the principle of paternalism, and, in time of trouble, they looked to france for support. the english colonists brought with them the principle of self-reliance and, in time of trouble, they looked only to themselves. and so the old english ideals had a new birth and a broader field of application on american soil. there is nothing finer in our country's history than the attitude of the new england colonists during the intercolonial wars. their northern frontier covering two hundred miles of unprotected territory was constantly open to the incursions of the french from canada and their indian allies, to appease whom the french organized their raids. and yet, so deeply implanted was this ideal of self-reliance that new england scarcely thought of asking aid of the mother country and would have protested to the last against the permanent establishment of a military garrison within her limits. for a period extending over fifty years, new england protected her own borders. she felt the terrors of savage warfare in its most sanguinary forms. and yet, uncomplaining, she taxed herself to repel the invaders. the people loved their own independence too much to part with it, even for the sake of peace, prosperity, and security. at a later date, unknown to the mother country, they raised and equipped from their own young men and at their own expense, the punitive expedition that, in the face of seemingly certain defeat, captured the french fortress at louisburg, and gave to english military annals one of its most brilliant victories. to get the pupil to live through these struggles, to feel the impetus of idealism upon conduct, to appreciate what that almost forgotten half-century of conflict meant to the development of our national character, would be to realize the greatest value that colonial history can have for its students. it lays bare the source of that strength which made new england preëminent in the revolution, and which has placed the mint mark of new england idealism upon the coin of american character. could a pupil who has lived vicariously through such experiences as these easily forsake principle for policy? a newspaper cartoon published a year or so ago, gives some notion of the danger that we are now facing of losing that idealism upon which our country was founded. the cartoon represents the signing of the declaration of independence. the worthies are standing about the table dressed in the knee breeches and flowing coats of the day, with wigs conventionally powdered and that stately bearing which characterizes the typical historical painting. john hancock is seated at the table prepared to make his name immortal. a figure, however, has just appeared in the doorway. it is the cartoonist's conventional conception of the modern captain of industry. his silk hat is on the back of his head as if he had just come from his office as fast as his forty-horse-power automobile could carry him. his portly form shows evidences of intense excitement. he is holding his hand aloft to stay the proceedings, while from his lips comes the stage whisper: "gentlemen, stop! you will hurt business!" what would those old new england fathers think, could they know that such a conception may be taken as representing a well-recognized tendency of the present day? and remember, too, that those old heroes had something of a passion for trade themselves. but when we seek for the source of our most important national ideal,--the ideal that we have called equality of opportunity,--we must look to another part of the country. the typical americanism that is represented by lincoln owes its origin, i believe, very largely to geographical factors. it could have been developed only under certain conditions and these conditions the middle west alone provided. the settling of the middle west in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries was part and parcel of a rigid logic of events. as miss semple so clearly points out in her work on the geographic conditions of american history, the atlantic seaboard sloped toward the sea and its people held their faces eastward. they were never cut off from easy communication with the old world, and consequently they were never quite freed from the old world prejudices and standards. but the movement across the mountains gave rise to a new condition. the faces of the people were turned westward, and cut off from easy communication with the old world, they developed a new set of ideals and standards under the stress of new conditions. chief among these conditions was the immensity and richness of the territory that they were settling. the vastness of their outlook and the wealth of their resources confirmed and extended the ideals of self-reliance that they had brought with them from the seaboard. but on the seaboard, the old world notion of social classes, the prestige of family and station, still held sway. the development of the middle west would have been impossible under so severe a handicap. with resources so great, every stimulus must be given to individual achievement. nothing must be permitted to stand in its way. the man who could do things, the man who could most effectively turn the forces of nature to serve the needs of society, was the man who was selected for preferment, no matter what his birth, no matter what the station of his family. we might, in a similar fashion, review the various other ideals, which have grown out of our history, but, as i have said, my purpose is not historical but educational, and the illustrations that i have given may suffice to make my contention clear. i have attempted to show that the chief purpose of the study of history in the elementary school is to establish and fortify in the pupils' minds the significant ideals and standards of conduct which those who have gone before us have gleaned from their experience. i have maintained that, to this end, it is not only the facts of history that are important, but the appreciation of these facts. i have maintained that these prejudices and ideals have a profound influence upon conduct, and that, consequently, history is to be looked upon as a most practical branch of study. * * * * * the best way in this world to be definite is to know our goal and then strive to attain it. in the lack of definite standards based upon the lessons of the past, our dominant national ideals shift with every shifting wind of public sentiment and popular demand. are we satisfied with the individualistic and self-centered idealism that has come with our material prosperity and which to-day shames the memory of the men who founded our republic? are we negligent of the serious menace that confronts any people when it loses its hold upon those goods of life that are far more precious than commercial prestige and individual aggrandizement? are we losing our hold upon the sterner virtues which our fathers possessed,--upon the things of the spirit that are permanent and enduring? a study of history cannot determine entirely the dominant ideals of those who pursue it. but the study of history if guided in the proper spirit and dominated by the proper aim may help. for no one who gets into the spirit of our national history,--no one who traces the origin and growth of these ideals and institutions that i have named,--can escape the conviction that the elemental virtues of courage, self-reliance, hardihood, unselfishness, self-denial, and service lie at the basis of every forward step that this country has made, and that the most precious part of our heritage is not the material comforts with which we are surrounded, but the sturdy virtues which made these comforts possible. footnotes: [footnote : an address delivered march , , before the central illinois teachers' association.] ~x~ science as related to the teaching of literature[ ] the scientific method is the method of unprejudiced observation and induction. its function in the scheme of life is to furnish man with facts and principles,--statements which mirror with accuracy and precision the conditions that may exist in any situation of any sort which man may have to face. in other words, the facts of science are important and worthy because they help us to solve the problems of life more satisfactorily. they are instrumental in their function. they are means to an end. and whenever we have a problem to solve, whenever we face a situation that demands some form of adjustment, the more accurate the information that we possess concerning this situation, the better we shall be able to solve it. now when i propose that we try to find out some facts about the teaching of english, and that we apply the scientific method in the discovery of these facts, i am immediately confronted with an objection. my opponent will maintain that the subject of english in our school curriculum is not one of the sciences. taking english to mean particularly english literature rather than rhetoric or composition or grammar, it is clear that we do not teach literature as we teach the sciences. its function differs from that of science in the curriculum. if there is a science of literature, that is not what we are teaching in the secondary schools, and that is not what most of us believe should be taught in the secondary schools. we think that the study of literature should transmit to each generation the great ideals that are crystallized in literary masterpieces. and we think that, in seeing to it that our pupils are inspired with these ideals, we should also teach literature in such a way that our pupils will be left with a desire to read good literature as a source of recreation and inspiration after they have finished the courses that we offer. when i speak of "inspiration," "appreciation," the development of "taste," and the like, i am using terms that have little direct relation to the scientific method; for, as i have said, science deals with facts, and the harder and more stubborn and more unyielding the facts become, the better they represent true science. what right have i, then, to speak of the scientific study of the teaching of english, when science and literature seem to belong to two quite separate rubrics of mental life? i refer to this point of view, not because its inconsistencies are not fully apparent to you even upon the surface, but because it is a point of view that has hitherto interfered very materially with our educational progress. it has sometimes been assumed that, because we wish to study education scientifically, we wish to read out of it everything that cannot be reduced to a scientific formula,--that, somehow or other, we intend still further to intellectualize the processes of education and to neglect the tremendous importance of those factors that are not primarily intellectual in their nature, but which belong rather to the field of emotion and feeling. i wish, therefore, to say at the outset that, while i firmly believe the hope of education to lie in the application of the scientific method to the solution of its problems, i still hold that neither facts nor principles nor any other products of the scientific method are the most important "goods" of life. the greatest "goods" in life are, and always must remain, i believe, its ideals, its visions, its insights, and its sympathies,--must always remain those qualities with which the teaching of literature is primarily concerned, and in the engendering of which in the hearts and souls of his pupils, the teacher of literature finds the greatest opportunity that is vouchsafed to any teacher. the facts and principles that science has given us have been of such service to humanity that we are prone to forget that they have been of service because they have helped us more effectively to realize our ideals and attain our ends; and we are prone to forget also that, without the ideals and the ends and the visions, the facts and principles would be quite without function. i have sometimes been taken to account for separating these two factors in this way. but unless we do distinguish sharply between them, our educational thinking is bound to be hopelessly obscure. you have all heard the story of the great chemist who was at work in his laboratory when word was brought him that his wife was dead. as the first wave of anguish swept over him, he bowed his head upon his hands and wept out his grief; but suddenly he lifted up his head, and held before him his hands wet with tears. "tears!" he cried; "what are they? i have analyzed them: a little chloride of sodium, some alkaline salts, a little mucin, and some water. that is all." and he went back to his work. the story is an old one, and very likely apocryphal, but it is not without its lesson to us in the present connection. unless we distinguish between these two factors that i have named, we are likely either to take this man's attitude or something approaching it, or to go to the other extreme, renounce the accuracy and precision of the scientific method, and give ourselves up to the cult of emotionalism. now, while we do not wish to read out of the teaching of literature the factors of appreciation and inspiration, we do wish to find out how these important functions of our teaching may be best fulfilled. and it is here that facts and principles gained by the scientific method not only can but must furnish the ultimate solution. we have a problem. that problem, it is true, is concerned with something that is not scientific, and to attempt to make it scientific is to kill the very life that it is our problem to cherish. but in solving that problem, we must take certain steps; we must arrange our materials in certain ways; we must adjust hard and stubborn facts to the attainment of our end. what are these facts? what is their relation to our problem? what laws govern their operation? these are subordinate but very essential parts of our larger problem, and it is through the scientific investigation of these subordinate problems that our larger problem is to be solved. let me give you an illustration of what i mean. we may assume that every boy who goes out of the high school should appreciate the meaning and worth of self-sacrifice as this is revealed (not expounded) in dickens's delineation of the character of sidney carton. there is our problem,--but what a host of subordinate problems at once confront us! where shall we introduce _the tale of two cities_? will it be in the second year, or the third, or the fourth? will it be best preceded by the course in general history which will give the pupil a time perspective upon the crimson background of the french revolution against which dickens projected his master character? or shall we put _the tale of two cities_ first for the sake of the heightened interest which the art of the novelist may lend to the facts of the historian? again, how may the story be best presented? what part shall the pupils read in class? what part shall they read at home? what part, if any, shall we read to them? what questions are necessary to insure appreciation? how many of the allusions need be run down in order to give the maximal effect of the masterpiece? how may the necessarily discontinuous discussions of the class--one period each day for several days--be so counteracted as to insure the cumulative emotional effect which the appreciation of all art presupposes? should the story be sketched through first, and then read in some detail, or will one reading suffice? these are problems, i repeat, that stand to the chief problem as means stand to end. now some of these questions must be solved by every teacher for himself, but that does not prevent each teacher from solving them scientifically. others, it is clear, might be solved once and for all by the right kind of an investigation,--might result in permanent and universal laws which any one could apply. there are, of course, several ways in which answers for these questions may be secured. one way is that of _a priori_ reasoning,--the deductive procedure. this method may be thoroughly scientific, depending of course upon the validity of our general principles as applied to the specific problem. ordinarily this validity can be determined only by trial; consequently these _a priori_ inferences should be looked upon as hypotheses to be tested by trial under standard conditions. for example, i might argue that _the tale of two cities_ should be placed in the third year because the emotional ferment of adolescence is then most favorable for the engendering of the ideal. but in the first place, this assumed principle would itself be subject to grave question and it would also have to be determined whether there is so little variation among the pupils in respect of physiological age as to permit the application to all of a generalization that might conceivably apply only to the average child. in other words, all of our generalizations applying to average pupils must be applied with a knowledge of the extent and range of variation from the average. some people say that there is no such thing as an average child, but, for all practical purposes, the average child is a very real reality,--he is, in fact, more numerous than any other single class; but this does not mean that there may be not enough variations from the average to make unwise the application of our principle. i refer to this hypothetical case to show the extreme difficulty of reaching anything more than hypotheses by _a priori_ reasoning. we have a certain number of fairly well established general principles in secondary education. perhaps those most frequently employed are our generalizations regarding adolescence and its influences upon the mental and especially the emotional life of high-school pupils. stanley hall's work in this field is wonderfully stimulating and suggestive, and yet we should not forget that most of his generalizations are, after all, only plausible hypotheses to be acted upon as tentative guides for practice and to be tested carefully under controlled conditions, rather than to be accepted as immutable and unchangeable laws. we sometimes assume that all high-school pupils are adolescents, when the likelihood is that an appreciable proportion of pupils in the first two years have not yet reached this important node of their development. i say this not to minimize in any way the importance that attaches to adolescent characteristics, but rather to suggest that you who are daily dealing with these pupils can in the aggregate add immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have concerning this period. a tremendous waste is constantly going on in that most precious of all our possible resources,--namely, human experience. how many problems that are well solved have to be solved again and again because the experience has not been crystallized in a well-tested fact or principle; how many experiences that might be well worth the effort that they cost are quite worthless because, in undergoing them, we have neglected some one or another of the rules that govern inexorably the validity of our inferences and conclusions. that is all that the scientific method means in the last analysis: it is a system of principles that enable us to make our experience worth while in meeting later situations. we all have the opportunity of contributing to the sum total of human knowledge, if only we know the rules of the game. i said that one way of solving these subordinate problems that arise in the realization of our chief aims in teaching is the _a priori_ method of applying general principles to the problems. another method is to imitate the way in which we have seen some one else handle the situation. now this may be the most effective way possible. in fact, if a sufficient number of generations of teachers keep on blindly plunging in and floundering about in solving their problems, the most effective methods will ultimately be evolved through what we call the process of trial and error. the teaching of the very oldest subjects in the curriculum is almost always the best and most effective teaching, for the very reason that the blundering process has at last resulted in an effective procedure. but the scientific method of solving problems has its very function in preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. english literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one or two generations? i should like to emphasize one further point. no one has greater respect than i have for what we term experience in teaching. but let me say that a great deal of what we may term "crude" experience--that is, experience that has not been refined by the application of scientific method--is most untrustworthy,--unless, indeed, it has been garnered and winnowed and sifted through the ages. let me give you an example of some accepted dictums of educational experience that controlled investigations have shown to be untrustworthy. it is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. it has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. the meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent. again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. in every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice. some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency. in this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,--for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. these investigations, i may add, were made by university professors, and i am giving them here in a university classroom and as a university representative. and of course i shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the only essential. very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. some very recent investigations made by mr. brown at the charleston normal school show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes. other similar cases could be cited, but i have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways--first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompass in a millennium. the teaching of english merits treatment by this method. i recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. you may not get immediate results. you may not get valuable results. but in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. i always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,--the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,--it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,--and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life. footnotes: [footnote : a paper read before the english section of the university of illinois high school conference, november , .] ~xi~ the new attitude toward drill[ ] wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an overdrawn analogy to our activity in attempting to construct educational theories; and yet there is a resemblance. we push out hopefully--and often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to learning. we struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to clear the road before us. and all too often we come back to our starting point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the straight line that we had anticipated. but i am not a pessimist, and i like to believe that, although our course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an homologous point on a higher plane. we have at least climbed a little, even if we have not traveled in a straight line. now in a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our present attitude toward the problem of drill or training in the process of education. drill means the repetition of a process until it has become mechanical or automatic. it means the kind of discipline that the recruit undergoes in the army,--the making of a series of complicated movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with accurately and precisely, at the word of command. it means the sort of discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their operation,--so that we do not have to think about which one comes next. thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable details and may use its precious energy for a more important purpose. in every adult life, a large number of these mechanized responses are absolutely essential to efficiency. modern civilized life is so highly organized that it demands a multitude of reactions and adjustments which primitive life did not demand. it goes without saying that there are innumerable little details of our daily work that must be reduced to the plane of unvarying habit. these details vary with the trade or profession of the individual; hence general education cannot hope to supply the individual with all of the automatic responses that he will need. but, in addition to these specialized responses, there is a large mass of responses that are common to every member of the social group. we must all be able to communicate with one another, both through the medium of speech, and through the medium of written and printed symbols. we live in a society that is founded upon the principle of the division of labor. we must exchange the products of our labor for the necessities of life that we do not ourselves produce, and hence arises the necessity for the short cuts to counting and measurement which we call arithmetic. and finally we must all live together in something at least approaching harmony; hence the thousand and one little responses that mean courtesy and good manners must be made thoroughly automatic. now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the necessity of building up these automatic responses,--of fixing these essential habits in all individuals. this recognition has often been short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be essential. drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular. it invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition tends to become monotonous. we must hold attention to the drill process, and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum. consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work has been due to its emphasis of drill. the formalism of the older schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional literature, and even in the pages of fiction. the disastrous results that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that it represents have been eloquently portrayed. along with the tendency toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal, lifeless, repetitive work. this "reform movement," as i shall call it, represents our first plunge into the wilderness. we would get away from the entanglements of drill and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. a new sun of hope dawned upon the educational world. you are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this movement. you have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts and formulæ and reactions that every one needs. you have heard and perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the child wish to do the right thing all the time. let me describe to you a school of this type that i once visited. i learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. he was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the problems of modern education. he told the audience that, in the schools of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious had been entirely dispensed with. he said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity. i listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture unfolded, i became more and more convinced that this city had at last solved the problem. i took the earliest opportunity to visit its schools. when i reached the city i went to the superintendent's office. i asked to be directed to the best school. "our schools are all 'best,'" the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride, and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. i made bold to apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that i wished to see the largest school. i was directed to take a certain car and, in due time, found myself at the school. i inferred that recess was in progress when i reached the building, and that the recess was being celebrated within doors. after some time spent in dodging about the corridors, i at last located the principal. i introduced myself and asked if i could visit his school after recess was over. "we have no recesses here," he replied (i could just catch his voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for some of the classes." he led the way to the office, and i spent a few moments in getting the "lay of the land." i asked him, first, whether he agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me that he believed in them implicitly. did he follow them out consistently in the operation of his school? yes, he followed them out to the letter. we then went to several classrooms, where i saw children realizing themselves, i thought, very effectively. there were three groups at work in each room. one recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats, a third did construction work at the tables. i inquired about the mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but i was told that mechanics had been eliminated from this school. mechanical organization of the classroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of self-realization. how, then, did these three groups exchange places, for i felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to remain in the same employment during the entire session. "oh," the principal replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's all." i saw that a change was coming directly, so i waited to watch it. the group had been working with what i should call a great deal of noise and confusion. all at once this increased tenfold. pupils jumped over seats, ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly waving her arms. the performance lasted several minutes. "there's spontaneity for you," the principal shouted above the roar of the storm. i acquiesced by a nod of the head,--my lungs, through lack of training, being unequal to the emergency. we passed to another room. the same group system was in evidence. i noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. i asked concerning the nature of the construction work. "we use it," the principal told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. you see arithmetic is dead and dry. you must give pupils an incentive to master it. we make the privileges of the construction table the incentive." "what do they make at this table?" i asked. "whatever their fancy dictates," he replied. i was a little curious, however, to know how it all come out. i saw one child start to work on a basket, work at it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time, go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of self-realization. i called the principal's attention to this phenomenon. "how do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" i asked. "for those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it is finished." "but," i objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine of spontaneity?" his answer was lost in the din of a change of groups, and i did not follow the investigation further. noon dismissal was due when i went into the corridor. lines are forbidden in that school. at the stroke of the bell, the classroom doors burst open and bedlam was let loose. i had anticipated what was coming, and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. i saw more spontaneity in two minutes than i had ever seen before in my life. some boys tore through the corridors at breakneck speed and down the stairways, three steps at a time. others sauntered along, realizing various propensities by pushing and shoving each other, snatching caps out of others' hands, slapping each other over the head with books, and various other expressions of exuberant spirits. one group stopped in front of my alcove, and showed commendable curiosity about the visitor in their midst. after exhausting his static possibilities, they tempted him to dynamic reaction by making faces; but this proving to be of no avail, they went on their way,--in the hope, doubtless, of realizing themselves elsewhere. i left that school with a fairly firm conviction that i had seen the most advanced notions of educational theory worked out to a logical conclusion. there was nothing halfway about it. there was no apology offered for anything that happened. it was all fair and square and open and aboveboard. to be sure, the pupils were, to my prejudiced mind, in a condition approaching anarchy, but i could not deny the spontaneity, nor could i deny self-activity, nor could i deny self-realization. these principles were evidently operating without let or hindrance. before leaving the school, i took occasion to inquire concerning the effect of such a system upon the teachers. i led up to it by asking the principal if there were any nervous or anæmic children in his school. "not one," he replied enthusiastically; "our system eliminates them." "but how about the teachers?" i ventured to remark, having in mind the image of a distracted young woman whom i had seen attempting to reduce forty little ruffians to some semblance of law and order through moral suasion. if i judged conditions correctly, that woman was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. my guide became confidential when i made this inquiry. "to tell the truth," he whispered, "the system is mighty hard on the women." a few years ago i had the privilege of visiting a high school which was operated upon this same principle. i visited in that school some classes that were taught by men and women, whom i should number among the most expert teachers that i have ever seen. the instruction that these men and women were giving was as clear and lucid as one could desire. and yet, in spite of that excellent instruction, pupils read newspapers, prepared other lessons, or read books during the recitations, and did all this openly and unreproved. they responded to their instructors with shameless insolence. young ladies of sixteen and seventeen coming from cultured homes were permitted in this school to pull each other's hair, pinch the arms of schoolmates who were reciting, and behave themselves in general as if they were savages. the pupils lolled in their seats, passed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the classroom while the instructor was still talking. if the lessons had been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct, but the instruction was very far from tedious. it was bright, lively, animated, beautifully clear, and admirably illustrated. it is simply the theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity of the pupils. and i may add that the school draws its enrollment very largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school, and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. and yet soon afterward, i visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts of a large city. i saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to their instructors, and to visitors. the instruction was much below that given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors. the two schools that i first described represent one type of the attempt that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness. i have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the adventurers back to their starting point. i cannot say so much for these schools. the movement that they represent is still floundering about in the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the morass, with little hope of ever emerging. may i tax your patience with one more concrete illustration: this time, of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on that new and higher plane of which i have spoken? this school is in a small massachusetts town, and is the model department of the state normal school located at that place. the first point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was passing through the corridor as i entered the building. instead of slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return to his room, he was walking briskly as if eager to get back to his work. instead of staring at the stranger within his gates with the impudent curiosity so often noticed in children of this age, he greeted me pleasantly and wished to know if i were looking for the principal. when i told him that i was, he informed me that the principal was on the upper floor, but that he would go for him at once. he did, and returned a moment later saying that the head of the school would be down directly, and asked me to wait in the office, into which he ushered me with all the courtesy of a private secretary. then he excused himself and went directly to his room. now that might have been an exceptional case, but i found out later that is was not. wherever i went in that school, the pupils were polite and courteous and respectful. that was part of their education. it should be part of every child's education. but many schools are too busy teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and others are too busy preserving discipline, and others are too busy coquetting for the good will of their pupils and trying to amuse them--too busy to give heed to a set of habits that are of paramount importance in the life of civilized society. this school took up the matter of training in good manners as an essential part of its duty, and it accomplished this task quickly and effectively. it did it by utilizing the opportunities presented in the usual course of school work. it took a little time and a little attention, for good manners cannot be acquired incidentally any more than the multiplication tables can be acquired incidentally; but it utilized the everyday opportunities of the schoolroom, and did not make morals and manners the subject of instruction for a half-hour on friday afternoons to be completely forgotten during the rest of the week. when the principal took me through the school, i noted everywhere a happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. they spoke pleasantly to one another. i heard no nagging or scolding. i saw no one sulking or pouting or in bad temper. and yet there was every evidence of respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. there was none of that happy-go-lucky comradeship which i have sometimes seen in other modern schools, and which leads the pupil to understand that his teacher is there to gain his interest, not to command his respectful attention. pupils were too busy with their work to talk much with one another. they were sitting up in their seats as a matter of habit, and it did not seem to hurt them seriously to do so. and everywhere they were working like beavers at one task or another, or attending with all their eyes and ears to a recitation. now it seemed to me that this school was operated with a minimum of waste or loss. every item of energy that the pupils possessed was being given to some educative activity. nothing was lost by conflict between pupil and teacher. nothing was lost by bursts of anger or by fits of depression. these sources of waste had been eliminated so far as i could determine. the pupils could read well and write well and cipher accurately. they even took a keen delight in the drills. and i found that this phase of their work was enlightened by the modern content that had been introduced. in their handwork and manual training they could see that arithmetic was useful,--that it had something to do with the great big buzzing life of the outer world. they learned that spelling was useful in writing,--that it was not something that began and ended within the covers of the spelling book, but that it had a real and vital relation to other things that they found to be important. they had their dramatic exercises in which they and their fellows, and, on occasions, their parents, took a keen delight, and they were glad to afford them pleasure and to receive congratulations at the close. and yet they found that, in order to do these things well, they must read and study and drill on speaking. they liked to have their drawings inspected and praised at the school exhibitions, but they soon found that good drawing and painting and designing were strictly conditioned by a mastery of technique, and they wished to master technique in order to win these rewards. now what was the secret of the efficiency of this school? not merely the fact that it had introduced certain types of content such as drawing, manual training, domestic science, dramatization, story work,--but also that it had not lost sight of the fundamental purpose of elementary education, but had so organized all of its studies that each played into the hands of the others, and that everything that was done had some definite and tangible relation to everything else. the manual training exercises and the mechanical drawing were exercises in arithmetic, but, let me remind you, there were other lessons, and formal lessons, in arithmetic as well. but the one exercise enlightened and made more meaningful the other. in the same way the story and dramatization were intimately related to the reading and the language, but there were formal lessons in reading and formal lessons in language. the geography illustrated nature study and employed language and arithmetic and drawing in its exercises. and so the whole structure was organized and coherent and unified, and what was taught in one class was utilized in another. there was no needless duplication, no needless or meaningless repetition. but repetition there was, over and over again, but always it was effective in still more firmly fixing the habits. one would be an ingrate, indeed, if one failed to recognize the great good that an extreme reform movement may do. some very precious increments of progress have resulted even from the most extreme and ridiculous reactions against the drill and formalism of the older schools. let me briefly summarize these really substantial gains as i conceive them. in the first place, we have come to recognize distinctly the importance of enlisting in the service of habit building the native instincts of the child. up to a certain point nature provides for the fixing of useful responses, and we should be unwise not to make use of these tendencies. in the spontaneous activities of play, certain fundamental reactions are continually repeated until they reach the plane of absolute mechanism. in imitating the actions of others, adjustments are learned and made into habits without effort; in fact, the process of imitation, so far as it is instinctive, is a source of pure delight to the young child. finally, closely related to these two instincts, is the native tendency to repetition,--nature's primary provision for drill. you have often heard little children repeat their new words over and over again. frequently they have no conception of the meanings of these words. nature seems to be untroubled by a question that has bothered teachers; namely, should a child ever be asked to drill on something the purpose of which he does not understand? nature sees to it that certain essential responses become automatic long before the child is conscious of their meaning. just because nature does this is, of course, no reason why we should imitate her. but the fact is an interesting commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered. i repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn adaptive instincts,--play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition. it has erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. left to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. i know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were placed in the right environment,--an environment of books. this may be possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case of certain children whom i know very well and whom i like to think of as perfectly normal. these children learned to talk by imitation and instinctive repetition. but nature has not yet gone so far as to provide the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn to read. reading is a much more complicated and highly organized process. and so it is with a vast number of the activities that our pupils must master. another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression, that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained in their acquisition. as a result, we have passed all of our grain through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life activities required different types of grist. to-day we are seeing the need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be developed in _all_ children. we are recognizing that there are many phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an automatic basis. when i was in the elementary school i memorized barnes's _history of the united states_ and harper's _geography_ from cover to cover. i have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery; but i have often thought that i might have memorized something rather more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just as effectively in another way. in the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to analyze this complex process of habit building,--to find out the factors that operate in learning. we have now a goodly body of principles that may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." we know that in habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started in the right way. a recent writer states that two thirds of the difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of this principle. inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. how important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. one writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day. the wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well under way. we are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in drill processes by inadequate methods. technique is being improved and the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that are demanding admission to the schools. again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of motivating our drill work,--of not only reading into it purpose and meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in him the _desire_ to form the habits,--to undergo the discipline that is essential for mastery. here again the reform movement has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated. all this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while may be acquired without effort. i think that educators are generally agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,--for it subverts a basic principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any other force can alter or reverse. to teach the child that the things in life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie. human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not been made at the price of struggle and effort,--at the price of doing things that men did not want to do. every great truth has had to struggle upward from defeat. every man who has really found himself in the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success. and whenever we attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial. let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation in the psychology of learning. the habit that was being learned in this experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter. the writer describes the process in the following words: "in the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much interested in the work. their whole mind seemed to be spontaneously held by the writing. they were always anxious to take up the work anew each day. their general attitude and the resultant sensations constituted a pleasant feeling tone, which had a helpful reactionary effect upon the work. continued practice, however, brought a change. in place of the spontaneous, rapt attention of the beginning stages, attention tended, at certain definite stages of advancement, to wander away from the work. a general feeling of monotony, which at times assumed the form of utter disgust, took the place of the former pleasant sensations and feelings. the writing became a disagreeable task. the unpleasant feelings now present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the work. as an expert skill was approached, however, the learners' attitude and mood changed again. they again took a keen interest in the work. their whole feeling tone once more became favorable, and the movements delightful and pleasant. the expert typist ... so thoroughly enjoyed the writing that it was as pleasant as the spontaneous play activities of a child. but in the course of developing this permanent interest in the work, there were many periods in nearly every test, many days, as well as stages in the practice as a whole, when the work was much disliked, periods when the learning assumed the rôle of a very monotonous task. our records showed that at such times as these no progress was made. rapid progress in learning typewriting was made only when the learners were feeling good and had an attitude of interest toward the work."[ ] who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that comes at these successive levels of the long process of acquiring skill in a complicated art? how desperately we struggle on--striving to put every item of energy that we can command into our work, and yet feeling how hopeless it all seems. how tempting then is the hammock on the porch, the fascinating novel that we have placed on our bedside table, the happy company of friends that are talking and laughing in the next room; or how we long for the green fields and the open road; how seductive is that siren call of change and diversion,--that evil spirit of procrastination! how feeble, too, are the efforts that we make under these conditions! we are not making progress in our art, we are only marking time. and yet the psychologists tell us that this marking time is an essential in the mastery of any complicated art. somewhere, deep down in the nervous system, subtle processes are at work, and when finally interest dawns,--when finally hope returns to us, and life again becomes worth while,--these heartbreaking struggles reap their reward. the psychologists call them "plateaus of growth," but some one has said that "sloughs of despond" would be a far better designation. the progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through these sloughs of despond,--to set his face resolutely to the task and persevere. it would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that success or achievement or even passing ability can be gained in any other manner. and this is the danger in the sugar-coating process. but motivation does not mean sugar-coating. it means the development of purpose, of ambition, of incentive. it means the development of the willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be realized, in order that the goal may be attained. it means the creating of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral fiber,--for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,--it is in this consciousness of conquest that mental strength and moral strength have their source. the victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the victory that stands out sharp and clear against the background of effort and struggle. it is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely essential to the consciousness of power,--it is for this reason that the "sloughs of despond" still have their function in our new attitude toward drill. but do not mistake me: i have no sympathy with that educational "stand-pattism" that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do so. i have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path. but if i build highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where struggle is absolutely necessary. you remember in george eliot's _daniel deronda_ the story of gwendolen harleth. gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place. in early womanhood, she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. in casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight training. she sought out her old german music teacher, klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to financial account. klesmer's reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology of skill: "any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. whenever an artist has been able to say, 'i came, i saw, i conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. your muscles, your whole frame, must go like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair. this is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have been formed." and i can formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in education no better than by paraphrasing klesmer's epigram. to increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those illustrations which will inspire them to effort; to lead them to see that peary conquering the pole, or wilbur wright perfecting the aëroplane, or morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and discouragement to give the world the electric telegraph,--to show them that these men went through experiences differing only in degree and not in kind from those which characterize every achievement, no matter how small, so long as it is dominated by a unitary purpose; to make the inevitable sloughs of despond no less morasses, perhaps, but to make their conquest add a permanent increment to growth and development: this is the task of our drill work as i view it. as the prophecy of isaiah has it: "precept must be upon precept; precept upon precept; line upon line; line upon line; here a little and there a little." and if we can succeed in giving our pupils this vision,--if we can reveal the deeper meaning of struggle and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shining out through the little details of the day's work,--we are ourselves achieving something that is richly worth while; for the highest triumph of the teacher's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and seemingly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental and eternal principles. footnotes: [footnote : an address before the kansas state teachers' association, topeka, october , .] [footnote : w.f. book, _journal of educational psychology_, vol. i, , p. .] ~xii~ the ideal teacher[ ] i wish to discuss with you briefly a very commonplace and oft-repeated theme,--a theme that has been handled and handled until its once-glorious raiment is now quite threadbare; a theme so full of pitfalls and dangers for one who would attempt its discussion that i have hesitated long before making a choice. i know of no other theme that lends itself so readily to a superficial treatment--of no theme upon which one could find so easily at hand all of the proverbs and platitudes and maxims that one might desire. and so i cannot be expected to say anything upon this topic that has not been said before in a far better manner. but, after all, very few of our thoughts--even of those that we consider to be the most original and worth while--are really new to the world. most of our thoughts have been thought before. they are like dolls that are passed on from age to age to be dressed up and decorated to suit the taste or the fashion or the fancy of each succeeding generation. but even a new dress may add a touch of newness to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new setting may, for a moment, rejuvenate an old truth. the topic that i wish to treat is this, "the ideal teacher." and i may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. this is the essential feature of any ideal. the ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics. we take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth. he would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their defects and all their inadequacies. he would have the manners of a chesterfield, the courage of a winkelried, the imagination of a dante, the eloquence of a cicero, the wit of a voltaire, the intuitions of a shakespeare, the magnetism of a napoleon, the patriotism of a washington, the loyalty of a bismarck, the humanity of a lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in richest measure. and so it is with the ideal teacher: he would combine, in the right proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of. the ideal teacher is and always must be a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, a child of the brain. and perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of business. the relentless law of compensation, which rules that unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human society. that a man should be superlatively good in one single line of effort is the demand of modern life. it is a platitude to say that this is the age of the specialist. but specialism, while it always means a gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual. darwin, at the age of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea. twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and diverse interests. he had enjoyed music, he had found delight in the masterpieces of imaginative literature, he had felt a keen interest in the drama, in poetry, in the fine arts. but at forty darwin quite by accident discovered that these things had not attracted him for years,--that every increment of his time and energy was concentrated in a constantly increasing measure upon the unraveling of that great problem to which he had set himself. and he lamented bitterly the loss of these other interests; he wondered why he had been so thoughtless as to let them slip from his grasp. it was the same old story of human progress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race. for darwin's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not limited himself to one line of effort, and given himself up to that work to the exclusion of everything else, the world might still be waiting for the _origin of species_, and the revolution in human thought and human life which followed in the wake of that great book. carlyle defined genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. george eliot characterized it as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline. but to make the definition complete, we need the formulation of goethe, who identified genius with the power of concentration: "who would be great must limit his ambitions; in concentration is shown the master." and so the great men of history, from the very fact of their genius, are apt not to correspond with what our ideal of greatness demands. indeed, our ideal is often more nearly realized in men who fall far short of genius. when i studied chemistry, the instructor burned a bit of diamond to prove to us that the diamond was, after all, only carbon in an "allotropic" form. there seems to be a similar allotropy working in human nature. some men seem to have all the constituents of genius, but they never reach very far above the plane of the commonplace. they are like the diamond,--except that they are more like the charcoal. i wish to describe to you a teacher who was not a genius, and yet who possessed certain qualities that i should abstract and appropriate if i were to construct in my imagination an ideal teacher. i first met this man five years ago out in the mountain country. i can recall the occasion with the most vivid distinctness. it was a sparkling morning, in middle may. the valley was just beginning to green a little under the influence of the lengthening days, but on the surrounding mountains the snow line still hung low. i had just settled down to my morning's work when word was brought that a visitor wished to see me, and a moment later he was shown into the office. he was tall and straight, with square shoulders and a deep chest. his hair was gray, and a rather long white beard added to the effect of age, but detracted not an iota from the evidences of strength and vigor. he had the look of a westerner,--of a man who had lived much of his life in the open. there was a ruggedness about him, a sturdy strength that told of many a day's toil along the trail, and many a night's sleep under the stars. in a few words he stated the purpose of his visit. he simply wished to do what half a hundred others in the course of the year had entered that office for the purpose of doing. he wished to enroll as a student in the college and to prepare himself for a teacher. this was not ordinarily a startling request, but hitherto it had been made only by those who were just starting out on the highroad of life. here was a man advanced in years. he told me that he was sixty-five, and sixty-five in that country meant old age; for the region had but recently been settled, and most of the people were either young or middle-aged. the only old men in the country were the few surviving pioneers,--men who had come in away back in the early days of the mining fever, long before the advent of the railroad. they had trekked across the plains from omaha, and up through the mountainous passes of the oregon trail; or, a little later, they had come by steamboat from st. louis up the twelve-hundred-mile stretch of the missouri until their progress had been stopped by the great falls in the very foothills of the rockies. what heroes were these graybeards of the mountains! what possibilities in knowing them, of listening to the recounting of tales of the early days,--of running fights with the indians on the plains, of ambushments by desperadoes in the mountain passes, of the lurid life of the early mining camps, and the desperate deeds of the vigilantes! and here, before me, was a man of that type. you could read the main facts of his history in the very lines of his face. and this man--one of that small band whom the whole country united to honor--this man wanted to become a student,--to sit among adolescent boys and girls, listening to the lectures and discussions of instructors who were babes in arms when he was a man of middle life. but there was no doubt of his determination. with the eagerness of a boy, he outlined his plan to me; and in doing this, he told me the story of his life,--just the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man to do things half-heartedly, or to drop a project until he had carried it through either to a successful issue, or to indisputable defeat. and what a life that man had lived! he had been a youth of promise, keen of intelligence and quick of wit. he had spent two years at a college in the middle west back in the early sixties. he had left his course uncompleted to enter the army, and he had followed the fortunes of war through the latter part of the great rebellion. at the close of the war he went west. he farmed in kansas until the drought and the grasshoppers urged him on. he joined the first surveying party that picked out the line of the transcontinental railroad that was to follow the southern route along the old santa fé trail. he carried the chain and worked the transit across the rockies, across the desert, across the sierras, until, with his companions, he had-- "led the iron stallions down to drink through the cañons to the waters of the west." and when this task was accomplished, he followed the lure of the gold through the california placers; eastward again over the mountains to the booming nevada camp, where the comstock lode was already turning out the wealth that was to build a half-dozen colossal fortunes. he "prospected" through this country, with varying success, living the life of the camps,--rich in its experiences, vivid in its coloring, calling forth every item of energy and courage and hardihood that a man could command. then word came by that mysterious wireless and keyless telegraphy of the mountains and the desert,--word that back to the eastward, ore deposits of untold wealth had been discovered. so eastward once more, with the stampede of the miners, he turned his face. he was successful at the outset in this new region. he quickly accumulated a fortune; he lost it and amassed another; lost that and still gained a third. five successive fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them. but during this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community. he married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled. but when his last fortune was swept away, the old _wanderlust_ again claimed its own. houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp. but it mattered little. he had only himself to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set his face westward. along the ridges of the high rockies, through wyoming and montana, he wandered, ever on the lookout for the glint of gold in the white quartz. little by little he moved westward, picking up a sufficient living, until he found himself one winter shut in by the snows in a remote valley on the upper waters of the gallatin river. he stopped one night at a lonely ranch house. in the course of the evening his host told him of a catastrophe that had befallen the widely scattered inhabitants of that remote valley. the teacher of the district school had fallen sick, and there was little likelihood of their getting another until spring. that is a true catastrophe to the ranchers of the high valleys cut off from every line of communication with the outer world. for the opportunities of education are highly valued in that part of the west. they are reckoned with bread and horses and cattle and sheep, as among the necessities of life. the children were crying for school, and their parents could not satisfy that peculiar kind of hunger. but here was the relief. this wanderer who had arrived in their midst was a man of parts. he was lettered; he was educated. would he do them the favor of teaching their children until the snow had melted away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the cañons? now school-keeping was farthest from this man's thoughts. but the needs of little children were very near to his heart. he accepted the offer, and entered the log schoolhouse as the district schoolmaster, while a handful of pupils, numbering all the children of the community who could ride a broncho, came five, ten, and even fifteen miles daily, through the winter's snows and storms and cruel cold, to pick up the crumbs of learning that had lain so long untouched. what happened in that lonely little school, far off on the gallatin bench, i never rightly discovered. but when spring opened up, the master sold his cayuse and his pick and his rifle and the other implements of his trade. with the earnings of the winter he made his way to the school that the state had established for the training of teachers; and i count it as one of the privileges of my life that i was the first official of that school to listen to his story and to welcome him to the vocation that he had chosen to follow. and yet, when i looked at his face, drawn into lines of strength by years of battle with the elements; when i looked at the clear, blue eyes, that told of a far cleaner life than is lived by one in a thousand of those that hold the frontiers of civilization; when i caught an expression about the mouth that told of an innate humanity far beyond the power of worldly losses or misfortunes to crush and subdue, i could not keep from my lips the words that gave substance to my thought; and the thought was this: that it were far better if we who were supposed to be competent to the task of education should sit reverently at the feet of this man, than that we should presume to instruct him. for knowledge may come from books, and even youth may possess it, but wisdom comes only from experience, and this man had that wisdom in far greater measure than we of books and laboratories and classrooms could ever hope to have it. he had lived years while we were living days. i thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in amassing facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive stage of american history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain of the atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the appalachians, had finally penetrated into the mississippi valley, and, subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali deserts, and the sierras, to california and the pacific coast; how these frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after wave of strength and virility to keep alive the sturdy ideals of toil and effort and independence,--ideals that would counteract the mellowing and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind. turner's theory that most of what is typical and unique in american institutions and ideals owes its existence to the backset of the frontier life found a living exemplar in the man who stood before me on that may morning. but he would not be discouraged from his purpose. he had made up his mind to complete the course that the school offered; to take up the thread of his education at the point where he had dropped it more than forty years before. he had made up his mind, and it was easy to see that he was not a man to be deterred from a set purpose. i shall not hide the fact that some of us were skeptical of the outcome. that a man of sixty-five should have a thirst for learning was not remarkable. but that a man whose life had been spent in scenes of excitement, who had been associated with deeds and events that stir the blood when we read of them to-day, a man who had lived almost every moment of his life in the open,--that such a man could settle down to the uneventful life of a student and a teacher, could shut himself up within the four walls of a classroom, could find anything to inspire and hold him in the dull presentation of facts or the dry elucidation of theories,--this seemed to be a miracle not to be expected in this realistic age. but, miracle or not, the thing actually happened. he remained nearly four years in the school, earning his living by work that he did in the intervals of study, and doing it so well that, when he graduated, he had not only his education and the diploma which stood for it, but also a bank account. he lived in a little cabin by himself, for he wished to be where he would not disturb others when he sang or whistled over his work in the small hours of the night. but his meals he took at the college dormitory, where he presided at a table of young women students. never was a man more popular with the ladies than this weather-beaten patriarch with the girls of his table. no matter how gloomy the day might be, one could always find sunshine from that quarter. no matter how grievous the troubles of work, there was always a bit of cheerful optimism from a man who had tasted almost every joy and sorrow that life had to offer. if one were in a blue funk of dejection because of failure in a class, he would lend the sympathy that came from his own rich experience in failures,--not only past but present, for some things that come easy at sixteen come hard at sixty-five, and this man who would accept no favors had to fight his way through "flunks" and "goose-eggs" like the younger members of the class. and even with it all so complete an embodiment of hope and courage and wholesome light-heartedness would be hard to find. he was an optimist because he had learned long since that anything but optimism is a crime; and learning this in early life, optimism had become a deeply seated and ineradicable prejudice in his mind. he could not have been gloomy if he had tried. and so this man fought his way through science and mathematics and philosophy, slowly but surely, just as he had fought inch by inch and link by link, across the arizona desert years before. it was a much harder fight, for all the force of lifelong habit, than which there is none other so powerful, was against him from the start. and now came the human temptation to be off on the old trail, to saddle his horse and get a pick and a pan and make off across the western range to the golden land that always lies just under the sunset. how often that turbulent _wanderlust_ seized him, i can only conjecture. but i know the spirit of the wanderer was always strong within him. he could say, with kipling's _tramp royal_: "it's like a book, i think, this bloomin' world, which you can read and care for just so long, but presently you feel that you will die unless you get the page you're reading done, an' turn another--likely not so good; but what you're after is to turn them all." and i knew that he fought that temptation over and over again; for that little experience out on the gallatin bench had only partially turned his life from the channels of wandering, although it had bereft him of the old desire to seek for gold. often he outlined to me a well-formulated plan; perhaps he had to tell some one, lest the fever should take too strong a hold upon him, and force his surrender. his plan was this: he would teach a term here and there, gradually working his way westward, always toward the remote corners of the earth into which his roving instinct seemed unerringly to lead him. alaska, hawaii, and the philippines seemed easy enough to access; surely, he thought, teachers must be needed in all those regions. and when he should have turned these pages, he might have mastered his vocation in a degree sufficient to warrant his attempting an alien soil. then he would sail away into the south seas, with new zealand and australia as a base. and gradually moving westward through english-speaking settlements and colonies he would finally complete the circuit of the globe. and the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fitting climax to my tale, were i telling it for the sake of its romance; but my purpose demands a different conclusion. my hero is now principal of schools in a little city of the mountains,--a city so tiny that its name would be unknown to most of you. and i have heard vague rumors that he is rising rapidly in his profession and that the community he serves will not listen to anything but a permanent tenure of his office. all of which seems to indicate to me that he has abandoned, for the while at least, his intention to turn quite all the pages of the world's great book, and is content to live true to the ideal that was born in the log schoolhouse--the conviction that the true life is the life of service, and that the love of wandering and the lure of gold are only siren calls that lead one always toward, but never to, the promised land of dreams that seems to lie just over the western range where the pink sunset stands sharp against the purple shadows. the ending of my story is prosaic, but everything in this world is prosaic, unless you view it either in the perspective of time or space, or in the contrasts that bring out the high lights and deepen the shadows. but if i have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, i may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than i have yet attempted. it is a simple matter to construct in imagination an ideal teacher. mix with immortal youth and abounding health, a maximal degree of knowledge and a maximal degree of experience, add perfect tact, the spirit of true service, the most perfect patience, and the most steadfast persistence; place in the crucible of some good normal school; stir in twenty weeks of standard psychology, ten weeks of general method, and varying amounts of patent compounds known as special methods, all warranted pure and without drugs or poison; sweeten with a little music, toughen with fifteen weeks of logic, bring to a slow boil in the practice school, and, while still sizzling, turn loose on a cold world. the formula is simple and complete, but like many another good recipe, a competent cook might find it hard to follow when she is short of butter and must shamefully skimp on the eggs. now the man whose history i have recounted represents the most priceless qualities of this formula. in the first place he possessed that quality the key to which the philosophers of all ages have sought in vain,--he had solved the problem of eternal youth. at the age of sixty-five his enthusiasm was the enthusiasm of an adolescent. his energy was the energy of an adolescent. despite his gray hair and white beard, his mind was perennially young. and that is the only type of mind that ought to be concerned with the work of education. i sometimes think that one of the advantages of a practice school lies in the fact that the teachers who have direct charge of the pupils--whatever may be their limitations--have at least the virtue of youth, the virtue of being young. if they could only learn from my hero the art of keeping young, of keeping the mind fresh and vigorous and open to whatever is good and true, no matter how novel a form it may take, they might, like him, preserve their youth indefinitely. and i think that his life gives us one clew to the secret,--to keep as close as we can to nature, for nature is always young; to sing and to whistle when we would rather weep; to cheer and comfort when we would rather crush and dishearten; often to dare something just for the sake of daring, for to be young is to dare; and always to wonder, for that is the prime symptom of youth, and when a man ceases to wonder, age and decrepitude are waiting for him around the next corner. it is the privilege of the teaching craft to represent more adequately than any other calling the conditions for remaining young. there is time for living out-of-doors, which some of us, alas! do not do. and youth, with its high hope and lofty ambition, with its resolute daring and its naive wonder, surrounds us on every side. and yet how rapidly some of us age! how quickly life seems to lose its zest! how completely are we blind to the opportunities that are on every hand! and closely related to this virtue of being always young, in fact growing out of it, the ideal teacher will have, as my hero had, the gift of gladness,--that joy of living which takes life for granted and proposes to make the most of every moment of consciousness that it brings. and finally, to balance these qualities, to keep them in leash, the ideal teacher should possess that spirit of service, that conviction that the life of service is the only life worth while--that conviction for which my hero struggled so long and against such tremendous odds. the spirit of service must always be the cornerstone of the teaching craft. to know that any life which does not provide the opportunities for service is not worth the living, and that any life, however humble, that does provide these opportunities is rich beyond the reach of earthly rewards,--this is the first lesson that the tyro in schoolcraft must learn, be he sixteen or sixty-five. and just as youth and hope and the gift of gladness are the eternal verities on one side of the picture, so the spirit of service, the spirit of sacrifice, is the eternal verity that forms their true complement; without whose compensation, hope were but idle dreaming, and laughter a hollow mockery. and self-denial, which is the keynote of service, is the great sobering, justifying, eternal factor that symbolizes humanity more perfectly than anything else. in the introduction to _romola_, george eliot pictures a spirit of the past who returns to earth four hundred years after his death, and looks down upon his native city of florence. and i can conclude with no better words than those in which george eliot voices her advice to that shade: "go not down, good spirit: for the changes are great and the speech of the florentines would sound as a riddle in your ears. or, if you go, mingle with no politicians on the marmi, or elsewhere; ask no questions about trade in calimara; confuse yourself with no inquiries into scholarship, official or monastic. only look at the sunlight and shadows on the grand walls that were built solidly and have endured in their grandeur; look at the faces of the little children, making another sunlight amid the shadows of age; look, if you will, into the churches and hear the same chants, see the same images as of old--the images of willing anguish for a great end, of beneficent love and ascending glory, see upturned living faces, and lips moving to the old prayers for help. these things have not changed. the sunlight and the shadows bring their old beauty and waken the old heart-strains at morning, noon, and even-tide; the little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty; and men still yearn for the reign of peace and righteousness--still own that life to be the best which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice." footnotes: [footnote : an address to the graduating class of the oswego, new york, state normal school, february, .] riverside educational monographs edited by henry suzzallo president of the university of washington seattle, washington the recitation by george herbert betts, ph. d. professor of psychology cornell college, iowa houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago san francisco the riverside press cambridge copyright, , by george herbert betts copyright, , by houghton mifflin company contents editor's introduction i. the purposes of the recitation ii. the method of the recitation iii. the art of questioning iv. conditions necessary to a good recitation v. the assignment of the lesson outline editor's introduction teachers are not always clear as to what they mean when they speak of the recitation. many different meanings are associated with the term. some of these are suggestive but quite vague; and others, although more definite, are but partial truths that hinder as much as they help. it is not surprising that a confused usage of the term is current among teachers. from one point of view, the recitation is a recitation-period, a segment of the daily time schedule. in this sense it is an administrative unit, valuable in apportioning to each school subject its part of the time devoted to the curriculum. thus, we speak of five recitations in arithmetic, three in music, or two in drawing, having in mind merely the number of times the class meets for instruction in a particular school study. a recitation here means no more than a class-period, a more or less arbitrary device for controlling the teacher's and pupils' distribution of energy among the various subjects taught. from another point of view, the recitation is a form of educative activity rather than a mere time allotment. in this sense the recitation is a process of instruction, a mode of teaching, wherein pupils and teacher, facing a common situation, proceed toward a more or less conscious end. it is a distinct movement in classroom experience, so organized that a definite beginning, progression, and end are clearly distinguishable. thus we speak of the method of the recitation, the five formal steps of the recitation, or the various types of recitation. such a usage makes "recitation" synonymous with "lesson." indeed, when we pass from general pedagogical discussion to a detailed treatment of special methods of teaching, we usually abandon the term "recitation" and use the word "lesson." although there is always some notion of a time-period in the curriculum in our idea of a lesson, yet the term "lesson" is more intimately connected with the thought of a teaching exercise in which ideas are developed and fixed in memory. it is through the lesson or recitation that pupils and teachers influence one another's thought and action; and when this condition exists, there is always educative activity. these two ways of thinking of the recitation, one primarily administrative and the other primarily educative, need to be somewhat sharply differentiated in our thinking. however closely related they are in actual schoolroom work, however greatly they influence each other in practice, they require a theoretic separation. only by this method can we avoid some of the error and confusion current in teaching theory and practice. a single instance will suffice to show the value of the distinction. no one of us would deliberately assume that the teaching process required for the instruction of a child would just cover the twenty, thirty, or forty minutes allotted to the class-period, day after day and year after year, regardless of the subject presented or the child taught. yet this is precisely the sort of assumption that is implied throughout a considerable portion of our current discussion of the teaching process. we talk about a "developmental-lesson" or a "review-recitation" in, say, geography, as though it began and ended with the recitation-period of the day. the daily lesson-plans we demand of apprentice-teachers in training-schools are largely built upon this basis. of course the fact that one must begin a theme at a given moment and close at a similar arbitrary point affects the teacher's procedure somewhat. he will always have to attack the problem anew at ten o'clock and pull together the loose ends of discussion at ten-thirty, if these happen to be the limits of time assigned him. but who will be bold enough to assert that the psychological movement for the development and solution of the particular problem at hand will always be exactly thirty minutes long? it is possible, and quite probable, that the typical movements in instruction--development, drill, examination, practice, and review--may occur within a single class-period, following fast upon the heels of each other as the situation may demand. it is equally probable that in many cases any one of them may reach across several class-periods. we need a more flexible way of thinking of the recitation and of the teaching activities involved in class-periods and of other administrative factors which condition the effectiveness of teaching. such a clear, flexible treatment of the recitation is offered in this volume. we feel that it will be particularly welcome to the practical teacher since so many previous treatments of this subject have been formal or obscure. combining the training of a psychologist with the experience of a class teacher, professor betts has given us a lucid, helpful, and common-sense treatment of the recitation without falling into scientific technicality or pedagogical formalism. i the purposes of the recitation the teacher has two great functions in the school; one is that of organizing and managing, the other, that of teaching. in the first capacity he forms the school into its proper divisions or classes, arranges the programme of daily recitations and other exercises, provides for calling and dismissing classes, passing into and out of the room, etc., and controls the conduct of the pupils; that is, keeps order. the organization and management of the school is of the highest importance, and fundamental to everything else that goes on in the school. a large proportion of the teachers who are looked upon as unsuccessful fail at this point. probably at least two out of three who lose their positions are dropped from inability to organize and manage a school. while this is true, however, the organizing and managing of the school is wholly secondary; it exists only that the _teaching_ may go on. teaching is, after all, the primary thing. lacking good teaching, no amount of good management or organization can redeem the school. . _the teacher and the recitation_ teaching goes on chiefly in what we call the _recitation_. this is the teacher's point of contact with his pupils; here he meets them face to face and mind to mind; here he succeeds or fails in his function of teaching. failure in teaching is harder to measure than failure in organization and management. it quickly becomes noised abroad if the children are not well classified, or if the teacher cannot keep order. if the machinery of the school does not run smoothly, its creaking soon attracts public attention, and the skill of the teacher is at once called into question. but the teacher may be doing indifferent work in the recitation, and the class hardly be aware of it and the patrons know nothing about it. there is no definite measure for the amount of inspiration a teacher is giving daily to his pupils, and no foot-rule with which to test the worth of his instruction in the recitation. and it is this very fact that makes it so necessary that the teacher should study the principles of teaching as applied to the recitation. the difficulty of accurately measuring failure in actual teaching tends to make us all careless at this point. yet this is the very point above all others that is vital to the pupil. inspiring teaching may compensate in large degree for poor management, but nothing can make up to a pupil for dull and unskillful teaching. if the recitations are for him a failure, nothing else can make the school a success so far as he is concerned. _the ultimate measure of a teacher, therefore, is the measure taken before his class, while he is conducting a recitation._ . _the necessity of having a clear aim_ any discussion of the recitation should begin with its aims or purposes; for upon aim or purpose everything else depends. for example, if you ask me the best method of conducting a recitation, i shall have to inquire before answering, whether your purpose in this recitation is to discover what the pupils have prepared of the work assigned them; or to introduce the class to a new subject, such as percentage in arithmetic; or to drill them, as upon the multiplication table. each of these purposes would demand a different method in the recitation. again, if your purpose is to show off a class before visitors, you will need to use a very different method from what you will employ if your aim is to encourage the class in self-expression and independence in thinking. there are three great purposes to be accomplished through the recitation: _testing_, _teaching_, and _drilling_. these three aims may all be accomplished at times in the same recitation, may even alternate with each other in successive questions, but they are nevertheless wholly distinct from each other, and require different methods for their accomplishment. the skillful teacher will have one or the other of these three aims before him either consciously or unconsciously at each moment of the recitation, and will know when he changes from one to the other and for what reason. let us proceed to consider each of these aims somewhat more in detail. . _testing as an aim in the recitation_ testing deals with ground already covered, with matter already learned, or with powers already developed. it concerns itself with the old, instead of progressing into the new. it seeks to find out what the child knows or what he can do of that which he has already been over in his work. of course every new lesson or task attempted is in some measure a test of all that has preceded it, but testing needs to be much more definite and specific than this. the testing discussed here must not be confused with what we sometimes call "tests," but which really are examinations, given at more or less infrequent intervals. testing may and should be carried on in the regular daily recitations by questions and answers either oral or written, bearing on matter previously assigned; by discussions of topics of the lesson assigned; or by requiring new work involving the knowledge or power gained in the past work which is being tested. the following are some of the principal things which we should test in the recitation:-- _a. the preparation of the lesson assigned._--the preparation of every lesson assigned should be tested in some definite way. this is of the utmost importance, especially in all elementary grades. we are all so constituted mentally that we have a tendency to grow careless in assigned tasks if their performance is not strictly required of us. no matter how careful may be the assignment of the lesson, and no matter how much the teacher may urge upon the class at the time of the assignment that they prepare the lesson well, the pupils must be held responsible for this preparation day by day, without fail, if we are to insure their mastery of it. nor is it enough to inquire, "how many understand this lesson?" or "how many got all the examples?" it is the teacher's business to test thoroughly for himself the pupil's mastery of the lesson or the knowledge or power required for the examples, in some definite and concrete way. it will not suffice to take the pupil's judgment of his own preparation and mastery, for many will allow a hazy or doubtful point to go by unexplained rather than confess before teacher and class their lack of study or inability to grasp the topic. further, pupils seldom have the standards of mastery which enable them to judge what constitutes an adequate grasp of the subject. _b. the pupil's knowledge and his methods of study._--entirely aside from the question of the preparation of the lesson assigned, the teacher must constantly test the pupil's knowledge in order that he may know how and what next to teach him; for no maxim of teaching is better established than that we should proceed from the known to the related unknown. and this is only another way of saying that we should build all new knowledge upon the foundation of knowledge already mastered. to illustrate: pupils must have a thorough mastery and ready knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division before we can proceed to teach them measurements or fractions. and without doubt much time is wasted in attempting to teach these subjects without a ready command of the fundamental operations. further, pupils must know well both common and decimal fractions before they can proceed to percentage. they must know and be able to recognize readily the different "parts of speech" before they can analyze sentences in grammar. but not less important than what the pupil knows is _how_ he knows the thing; that is, what are his methods of study and learning. the pupil in a history class may be able to recite whole pages of the text almost verbatim, but when questioned as to the meaning of the events and facts show very little knowledge about them. a student confessed to her teacher that she had committed all her geometry lessons to memory instead of reasoning them out. she could in this way satisfy a careless teacher who did not take the trouble to inquire how the pupil had prepared her lessons, but she knew little or no geometry. the mind has what may be called three different levels. the first is the _sensory_ level, represented by the phrase "in at one ear and out of the other." every one has experienced reading a page when the mind would wander and only the eyes follow the lines on down to the bottom of the page, nothing remaining as to the meaning of the text. it is easy to glance a lesson over just before reciting, and have it stick in the memory only long enough to serve the purposes of the recitation. things learned in this way are not permanently serviceable and really constitute no part of an education. the second level of the mind may be called the _memory_ level. matter which enters the mind only to this depth may be retained for a considerable time but is little understood and hence of small value. all rules and definitions committed without knowing their meaning or seeing their application, and all lessons learned merely to recite without a reasonable grasp of their meaning, sink only as deep as the memory level. the third and deepest level is that of the _understanding_. matter which permeates down through the sensory and memory levels, getting thoroughly into the understanding level, is not only remembered but is understood and applied, and therefore becomes of real service in our education. of course it is clear that the ideal in teaching should be to lead our pupils so to learn that most of what enters their memory shall also be mastered by their understanding. therefore, in the recitation we should test not alone to see what the pupil knows, but also to see _how he knows it_; not only to find out whether he can recite, but also what are his methods of learning. we should discover not alone whether the facts learned have entered the memory, but whether they have sunk down into the understanding, so that they can be used in the acquisition of further education. _c. the pupil's points of failure and the cause thereof._--every teacher has been surprised many times to discover weak places in the pupil's work when everything had seemingly been thoroughly learned. with the best teaching these weak places will occasionally occur. it is not less essential to know these points of failure than to know the foundations of knowledge which the pupil has already mastered. for these weak spots must be remedied as we go along if the later work is to be successful. very frequently classes are unable to proceed satisfactorily because of lack of thoroughness in the foundation work which precedes. to know where a pupil is failing is the first requisite if we are to help him remedy his weakness. but not only must the teacher know where the pupil is failing, but also the cause of his failure. only when we know this can we intelligently apply the remedy for the failure. a physician friend of mine tells me that almost any quack can prescribe successfully for sickness if he has an expert at hand to diagnose the case and tell him what is the matter. this is the hardest part of a physician's work and requires the most skill. so it is with the teacher's work as well. if we are sure that a certain boy is failing in his recitations because he is lazy, it is not so difficult to devise a remedy to fit the case. if we know that another is failing because the work is too advanced for his preparation, we select a different remedy. but in every case we must first know the cause of failure if we hope to prescribe a remedy certain to produce a cure. some teachers prescribe for poorly learned lessons much after the patent medicine method. a recent advertisement of one particular nostrum promises the cure of any one of thirty-seven different diseases. surely with such a remedy as this at hand there will be no need to diagnose a case of sickness to find out what is the trouble. all we need to do is to take the regulation dose. and all patients will be treated just alike whatever their ailment. this is the quack doctor's method as it is the quack teacher's. if the teacher is unskillful or lazy the remedy for poor recitations usually is, "take the same lesson for to-morrow." there is even no attempt to discover the cause of failure and no thought put on the question of how best to remedy the failure and prevent its recurrence. . _teaching as an aim in the recitation_ while testing deals with the old,--reviewing and fixing more firmly that which we have already learned,--teaching, by using the old, leads on to the new. to _educate_ means to _lead out_--to lead the child out from what he already has attained and mastered to new attainments and new mastery. this is accomplished through teaching. it is not enough, therefore, to employ the recitation as a time for testing the class; the recitation is also the teacher's opportunity to teach. teaching as distinguished from testing becomes, therefore, one of the great aims of the recitation. teaching should accomplish the following objects in the recitation:-- _a. give the child an opportunity for self-expression._--"we learn to do by doing," providing the doing is really ours. if the doing holds our interest and thought nothing will serve to clear up faulty thinking and partly mastered knowledge like attempting to express it. one really never fully knows a thing until he can so express it that others are caused to know it also. further, every person needs to cultivate the power of expression for its own sake. expression consists not only of language, but the work of the hand in the various arts and handicrafts, bodily poise and carriage, facial expression, gesture, laughter, and any other means which the mind has of making itself known to others. these various forms of expression are the only way we have of causing others to know what we think or feel. and the world cares very little how much we may know or how deeply we may feel if we have not the power to express our thoughts and emotions. the child should have, therefore, the fullest possible opportunity in the recitation for as many of these different kinds of expression as are suitable to the work of the recitation. not only must the teacher be careful not to monopolize the time of the class himself, but he must even lead the children out, encouraging them to express in their own words or through their drawings and pictures, or through maps they make or through the things they construct with their hands, or in any other way possible, their own knowledge and thought. the timid child who shrinks from reciting or going to the blackboard to draw or write needs encouragement and teaching especially. the constant danger with all teachers is that of calling upon the unusually quick and bright pupil who is ready to recite, thus giving him more than his share of training in expression and robbing thereby the more timid ones who need the practice. _b. give help on difficult points._--a complaint frequently heard in some schools, and no doubt in some degree merited in all, is, "teacher will not help," or, "teacher does not explain." no matter how excellent the work being done by the class or how skillful the teaching, there will always be hard points in the lessons which need analysis or explanation. this should usually be done when the lesson is assigned. a teacher who knows both the subject-matter and the class thoroughly can estimate almost precisely where the class will have trouble with the lesson, or what important points will need especial emphasis. and in the explanation and elaboration of these points is one of the best opportunities for good teaching. the good teacher will help just enough, but not too much; just enough so that the class will know how to go to work with the least loss of time and the greatest amount of energy; not enough so that the lesson is already mastered for the class before they begin their study. but it is necessary to help the class on the hard points not only in assigning the lesson, but also in the recitation. the alert teacher will in almost every recitation discover some points which the class have failed to understand or master fully. it is the overlooking of such half-mastered points as these that leaves weak places in the pupil's knowledge and brings trouble to him later on. these weak points left unstrengthened in the recitation are the lazy teacher's greatest reproach; the occasion of the unskillful teacher's greatest bungling; and the inexperienced teacher's greatest "danger points." _c. bring in new points supplementing the text._--while the lesson of the textbook should be followed in the main, and most of the time devoted thereto, yet nearly every lesson gives the wide-awake teacher opportunity to supplement the text with interesting material drawn from other sources. this rightly done lends life and interest to the recitation, broadens the child's knowledge, and increases his respect for the teacher. in this way many lessons in history, geography, literature--in fact, in nearly all the studies,--can have their application shown, and hence be made more real to the pupils. _d. inspire the pupils to better efforts and higher ideals._--the recitation is the teacher's mental "point of contact" with his pupils. he meets them socially in a friendly way at intermissions and on the playground. his moral character and personality are a model to the children at all times. but it is chiefly in the recitation that the _mental_ stimulus is given. the teacher who is lifeless and uninspiring in the teaching of the recitation cannot but fail to inspire his school to a strong mental growth, whatever else he may accomplish. most pupils have powers far in excess of those they are using. they only need to be inspired, to be wakened up mentally by a teacher whose mind is alive and growing. they need to be made hungry for education, and this can be accomplished only by a teacher who is himself full of enthusiasm. inspiration is caught, not taught. _e. lead pupils into good habits of study._--it is probably not too much to say that one third or one half of the pupil's time is lost in school because of not knowing how to study. over and over pupils say to the teacher, "i didn't know how to get this." many times children labor hard over a lesson without mastering it, simply because they do not know how to pick out and classify its principal points. they work on what is to them a mere jumble, because they lack the power of analysis or have never been taught its use. very early in school life the pupil should be taught to look for and make a list of the principal points in the lesson. if the lesson starts with a roman numeral i, the child should be taught to look for ii and iii, and to see how they are related to i. an arabic usually means that , and perhaps and are to follow; the letter _a_ at the head of a paragraph should start the pupil to looking for _b_, _c_, etc. and if the text does not contain such numbering or lettering, the pupil should be led to search for the main divisions and topics of the lesson for himself. of course these principles will not apply to spelling lessons, mere lists of sentences to be analyzed or problems to be solved, but they do apply to almost every other type of lesson. the best time to teach the child to make the kind of analysis suggested is when we are assigning the lesson. we can then go over the text with the class, helping them to select the chief points of the lesson until they themselves have learned this method of study. . _drill as an aim in the recitation_ there is a great difference between merely knowing a thing and knowing it so well that we can use it easily and with skill. perhaps all of us know the alphabet backwards; yet if the order of the dictionary were reversed so that it would run from z to a, we would for a time lack the skill we now have in quickly finding any desired words in the dictionary. certain fundamentals in our education need to be so well learned that they are practically automatic, and can hence be skillfully performed without thought or attention. we must know our spelling in this way, so that we do not have to stop and think how to spell each word. in the same manner we must know the mechanics of reading, that is, the recognition and pronunciation of words, the meaning of punctuation marks, etc.; and similarly multiplication and the other fundamental operations in arithmetic. pupils should come to know these things so well that they are as automatic as speech, or as walking, eating, or any other of the many acts which "do themselves." if this degree of skill is not reached, it means halting and inefficient work in all these lines farther on. many are the children who are crippled in their work in history, geography, and other studies because they cannot read well enough to understand the text. many are struggling along in the more advanced parts of the arithmetic, unable to master it because they are deficient in the fundamentals, because they lack skill. and many are wasting time trying to analyze sentences when they cannot recognize the different parts of speech. skill is efficiency in doing. it is always a growth, and never comes to us ready-made. to be sure, some pupils can develop skill much faster than others, but the point is, that _skill has to be developed_. skill is the result of repetition, or practice, that is, of _drill_. the following principles should guide in the use of drill in the recitation: _a. drill should be employed wherever a high degree of skill is required._--this applies to what have been called the "tools of knowledge," or those things which are necessary in order to secure all other knowledge. such are the "three r's," reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic, to which we may add spelling. without a good foundation in these, all other knowledge will be up-hill work, if not wholly impossible. _b. drill must be upon correct models, and with alert interest and attention._--mere repetition is not enough to secure skill. what teacher has not been driven to her wits' ends to prevent the successive lines in the copy book from growing steadily worse as they increase in number from the copy on down the page! surely drill with such a result would be long in arriving at skill. such practice is not only wholly wasted, but actually results in establishing false models and careless habits in the pupil's mind. each line must be written with correct models in mind, and with the effort to make it better than any preceding one, if skill is to be the outcome. much of the value of drill is often lost through lack of interest and attention. the child lazily sing-songing the multiplication table may learn to say it as he would a verse of poetry, and yet not know the separate combinations when he needs them in problems. what he needs is drill upon the different combinations hit-and-miss, and in simple problems, rapidly and many times over, with sufficient variety and spice, so that his interest and attention are always alert. a certain boy persisted in saying "have went" instead of "have gone." finally his teacher said, "johnny, you may stay to-night after school and write 'have gone' on the blackboard one hundred times. then you will not miss it again." johnny stayed after school and wrote "have gone" one hundred times as the teacher had directed. when he had completed his task the teacher had gone to another part of the building. before leaving for home johnny politely left this note on the teacher's desk: "dear teacher: i have went home." plenty of drill, but it was not accompanied by interest and attention, and hence left no effect. _c. drill must not stop short of a reasonable degree of efficiency, or skill._--most teachers would rather _test_ or _teach_ than _drill_. others do not see the necessity of drill. hence it happens that a large proportion of our pupils are not given practice or drill enough to arrive at even a fair degree of skill. set ten pupils of the intermediate grades to adding up four columns of figures averaging a footing of to the column, and you will probably have at least five different answers. and so with many of the fundamentals in other branches as well. _we too often stop practice just short of efficiency, and thereby waste both time and effort._ _d. drill must be governed by definite aims._--probably drilling requires more planning and care on the part of the teacher than any other work of the recitation. drill applied indiscriminately wastes time and kills interest. to study a spelling lesson over fifteen times as some teachers require is folly. every spelling list will contain some words which the pupil already knows. he should put little or no drill on these, but only on the troublesome ones. in learning and using the principal parts of verbs it is always the few that cause the difficulty. "he _done_ it"; "has the bell _rang_?" "_set_ down." these and a few other forms are the ones which give the trouble; they should receive the drill. likewise in arithmetic, there are certain combinations in the tables, and certain operations in fractions, measurements, etc., which always make trouble. they are the "danger points," and upon these the practice should be put. the teacher must aim, therefore, to select the difficult and the important points and drill upon these until they are mastered, being careful not to stop at the "half-way house," but steadily to go on until skill is obtained. he must be resourceful in methods and devices which will relieve the monotony of repetition; he must be persistent and patient, insisting on the attainment of skill, but realizing that it takes time to develop it; he must possess a good pedagogical conscience which will be satisfied with nothing short of success in his aims. . _a desirable balance among the three aims_ the aims to be accomplished through the recitation are, then, _testing_, _teaching_, and _drilling_. these three aims may, as said before, all be carried on in the same recitation, or they may come in different recitations, as the needs of the subject require. not infrequently they may alternate with each other within a few moments. in every case, however, the teacher should have clearly in mind which one of the three processes he is employing and why. not that the teacher must always stop to reason the matter out before he employs one or the other, but that he should become so familiar with the nature and use of each that he almost unconsciously passes from one to the other as the need for it arises. not many teachers are equally skilled in the use of testing, teaching, and drilling. some have a tendency to put most of the recitation time on testing whether the class have prepared the assignment, and devote but little time to teaching or drilling. others love to teach, but do not like to test or drill. it is highly desirable that every teacher, young or old in experience, should examine himself on this question and, if he finds himself lacking in any one of the three, carefully set to work to remedy the defect. the ideal for us all to reach is equal skill in each of the three processes of the recitation, testing, teaching, and drilling. ii the method of the recitation . _method varies with aim_ in the last chapter we discussed the aims or purposes of the recitation. we now come to see how these aims affect the methods we employ. for it is evident at the outset that the method we choose must depend on the aim sought in the recitation. if we seek to-day to make the recitation chiefly a test of how well the lesson has been prepared, or how much of yesterday's work has been retained, we will select a method suited for _testing_. if we aim to introduce the class to the subject of percentage for the first time, the method must be adapted to _teaching_. if we wish to make the recitation a drill in the diacritical markings or the multiplication table, the method must be still a different one. in other words, _the method must be planned to accomplish certain definite ends if the teaching is to be purposeful and effective._ . _fundamental principles of method_ there are certain fundamental principles of method which underlie all teaching, and which, therefore, are to be sought in every recitation, no matter what the special method used may chance to be. the first of these principles may be stated as follows:-- _a. interest is the first requisite for attention and all mental activity._--a recitation without interest is a dead recitation. because it possesses no life it cannot lead to growth. nothing can take the place of interest. fear may drive to work for a time, but it does not result in development. only interest can bring all the powers and capacities of the child into play. hence the teacher's first and greatest problem in the recitation is the problem of interest. to secure interest he must use every resource at his command. this does not mean that he is to bid for the children's interest with sensational methods and cheap devices. this is not the way to secure true interest. it means, rather, that he is to offer to the class subject-matter suited to their age and experience, and presented in a way adapted to their capacity and understanding; that he is to have all conditions surrounding the recitation as favorable as possible; and that he is himself to be constantly a source of interest and enthusiasm. if these conditions are all met the problem of interest will present few difficulties. _b. the natural mode of learning is to proceed from the known to the related unknown._--this is a statement of what is known as the principle of _apperception_ or the learning of the new by connecting it with the old already in the mind. to make use of this principle it is necessary to freshen up what the pupil knows on a topic by asking him questions or otherwise causing him to think anew the facts previously learned that are related to what he is about to learn. for example, when beginning the subject of percentage, the subject of decimals should be reviewed, since percentage is but an application of decimals and can most easily be learned and understood as such. likewise in beginning the study of the civil war, the question of slavery and that of the doctrine of states' rights should be reviewed, since these are fundamental to an understanding of the causes of the war. in similar manner we might apply the illustration to every branch of study, indeed there is hardly a single recitation which should not start with a brief review or a few questions to freshen up in the minds of the pupils the points related to the coming lesson. not only will this insure that the lessons themselves shall be better understood, but the entire subject will in this way come to possess a unity instead of consisting of a series of more or less disconnected lessons in the mind of the child. . _the use of special forms of method_ having stated these two general principles of method, we will now consider some of the special forms of method to be employed in the recitation. in discussing these methods and comparing them it is not to be forgotten that attention and interest are dependent in large measure on change and variety. the same method used day after day in the recitation palls upon a class and invites listlessness and inattention. a teacher should never employ cheap or sensational devices in a recitation just to have something new, but neither should he work a good method to death by too constant use. . _the question-and-answer method_ the question-and-answer method is so familiar to every one that it requires no formal definition. it is employed in all grades from the primary to the university, and it is adapted alike to testing, teaching, and drilling. this method admits of wide modification to suit it to specific uses. the questions asked may require but a short and simple answer, such as can be given by a primary pupil. they may also require a long and complex answer which will test the powers of the most advanced student. the questions may be detailed and searching, covering every point of the lesson, as when we are testing preparation. they may deal only with certain related truths, as when we "develop" a new subject intentionally by questions and answers. or they may select only the most important points upon which the class needs drill. _a. when and where to employ the question-and-answer method._--the question-and-answer method is particularly adapted to the lower grades, in which the children have not yet developed the ability to recite independently on long topics. this method allows the teacher to encourage and draw out the child by what is really a conversation between the two, the teacher asking simple questions and the child responding to them. in more advanced grades the questions may be so arranged as to require longer and more complex answers, and thus lead up to the topical method of reciting. the question-and-answer method is also suitable to employ at the beginning of a recitation to recall to the minds of the class previous lessons to which the lesson of the day is related. there is hardly one recitation in a hundred that does not require an introduction of this kind. the only true method in teaching is to build the new knowledge on the related old knowledge which is already in the mind. this is what is meant in pedagogy by "proceeding from the known to the related unknown." and the known must always be fresh and immediately present to the mind. hence the necessity for the introductory review. this method is also serviceable in reviewing former lessons. by the use of well-selected questions a large number of important points already passed over can be brought before the class in a short time. on the whole, it is probable that we do not review frequently enough in our recitation work. we review a subject when we have finished the text upon it, or before examination time, but this is not enough. careful psychological tests have shown that the mind forgets within the first three days a large proportion of what it will finally fail to retain. further, there is great economy in catching up a fading fact before it gets wholly away from us. this would suggest the constant use of the question-and-answer method to fix more firmly the important points in ground we have already passed over. one of the most important uses of this method is found in _inductive teaching_. the famous "socratic method" was simply the question-and-answer method applied by socrates to teaching new truths. this noted teacher would, by a series of skillful questions calculated to call forth what the pupil already knew, lead him on to new knowledge without actually telling the youth anything himself. and this is the very height of good teaching--the goal toward which we all should strive. it is a safe maxim never to tell a child what one can lead him by questioning to see for himself. to illustrate: suppose an elementary arithmetic class already know thoroughly how to find the area of a rectangle by multiplying its base by its altitude, and that we are now ready to teach them how to find the area of a triangle. let us see whether we can lead them to "develop" the rule instead of learning it out of the text; that is, we will proceed inductively. first draw a rectangle by on the board. q. what do we call this figure? a. a rectangle. q. how shall we find its area? a. multiply its base by its altitude ; the area is . q. now i draw a line diagonally across the rectangle; how many figures are there? a. two. (teacher here gives new word "triangle" and explains it.) q. how do the base and altitude of the triangles compare with the base and altitude of the rectangle? a. they are the same. q. how do the two triangles compare in area? a. they are equal; each is half of the rectangle. q. then, if each is half of the rectangle, what must be the area of one of the triangles? a. the area of each triangle is , for the area of the rectangle is , and the area of each triangle is half that of the rectangle. q. then, how may we find the area of a triangle? a. multiply the base by the altitude and take one half the product. of course the teacher may have to supplement questions like the above by others to assist the child in arriving at the desired answer, but the method is the same in any case. the inductive method is the child's natural way of learning, and should be applied to nearly all school branches. too many teachers have children learn rules and definitions which mean little or nothing to them. this is not only discouraging to the child and a serious waste of time, but it develops bad habits of study by making the pupil think he is learning something when he is not. only when the fact or process learned is _understood_ is it true knowledge. the inductive method begins with what the child already knows and, step by step, leads him to understand the new truths. it comes last to the rule or definition after the meaning is clearly seen. _b. dangers of the question-and-answer method._--no matter how good a method may be, there are always some dangers connected with its use, some points at which a teacher needs to be on guard to see that the method is not misused or over-used. the question-and-answer method is no exception to this rule. one of the greatest dangers in the use of this method is that pupils will come to depend on the questions as a crutch to help them along mentally when they should be able to proceed by themselves. not infrequently do pupils say to the teacher when called upon for a topical discussion, "if you will ask me questions upon the topic i can answer them, but i cannot recite upon the topic." it is very much easier to answer a series of questions upon a subject than to discuss it independently. this method is well adapted to younger children; and this very reason makes it a danger when over-used with more advanced pupils. we need to learn to think a subject through and talk about topics without the help of a teacher to stand by and ask questions; we need to become independent in our thinking; we need practice in organizing and expressing our thoughts for ourselves. the second danger we note in the question-and-answer method is that it does not give as much opportunity for training in self-expression as the topical method. in teaching by the question-and-answer method, the teacher occupies nearly or quite as much time with the questions as the class do with the answers. this does not give opportunity for practice enough in reciting on the part of the pupil, if the question-and-answer method is employed exclusively. the only way for a child to learn to recite well is by reciting; the only way to learn to express one's self is by having opportunity for expression. . _the topical method_ the topical method is too familiar to require definition. in this method the teacher suggests a topic of the lesson or asks a question which requires the pupil to go on in his own way and tell what he can about the point under discussion. there is really no hard and fast line between the topical method and the question-and-answer method. the fundamental difference between the two is this: in the question-and-answer method, the question is definitely upon some fact or point, and requires a specific answer bearing on the fact or point of the question; in the topical method, the question or topic suggested requires the pupil to decide upon what facts or points need discussion, and then to plan his own discussion. _a. where the topical method is most serviceable._--as has already been explained, the topical method requires more independence of thought than the question-and-answer method, and will therefore find its greatest use in the higher grades. we are not to think, however, that the topical method is not to be used until some certain grade has been reached, and that then the child will suddenly find himself able to use it. the ability to think independently and speak one's thoughts freely is a growth, and is not attained suddenly at a given age. even little children, telling their language stories, are using the topical method, and should be encouraged in its use. as the grades advance, however, the use of this method should increase, and the length and difficulty of the topics should grow, so that recitation by topics can be efficiently carried on in the higher intermediate and grammar grades. probably the easiest forms of the topical recitation are found in history or reading lessons, where _narration_ abounds. narration deals with a succession of events, and is always found one of the easiest forms of discourse. in proof of this, one has but to note the fluency and ease with which a child will narrate the events of a game, a trip, or an accident, whereas if you call upon him for logical explanations or even for description, as for example, "just what kind of looking team was it that ran away?" much more difficulty will be experienced in telling about it. another great field for topical recitations is found in all lines where _description_ is required. this applies to all nature study and science, to geography, to certain phases of literature and history. to describe even a commonplace object accurately and well is an art more rare than most of us would think. suppose you ask the first person you meet to describe fully the house in which he lives or the sunset which he has just seen. if he seriously tries to comply with your request, you will probably be surprised both by the difficulty he has in his attempt, and the little that he really can say upon these familiar subjects. the interesting story teller is a rarity, which is only another way of saying that the ability to narrate and describe needs cultivation. there is no better opportunity possible than that of the topical recitation. the topical method can manifestly be used to supplement the question-and-answer method in testing the pupils on the preparation of the lesson, or in reviewing former lessons. it can also be well used in teaching new subject-matter which does not particularly require the developmental, or "socratic," method. illustrations of such material are to be found in much of the work in history and in literature; also in the descriptive parts of geography, nature study, and science. when the topical method is being employed it will nearly always need to be supplemented by questions and answers. very rarely will a pupil recite upon any important topic with such accuracy and completeness that nothing more needs to be said concerning it. hence, after the pupil has completed his topical discussion, the teacher can round out the subject, impress the more important points, or correct wrong impressions, by a few questions to be answered either by the pupil who has had the discussion or by the remainder of the class. the topical method gives the teacher the best opportunity to teach the pupils how to study. it is safe to say that most pupils consider that they "have their lesson" when they understand it, or think they can remember it. but if the child is to be taught expression, as well as given knowledge, it is evident that this is not enough. not only should a pupil be sure that he understands his lesson and can remember it, but also he should think how best to express it in the recitation. the teacher can help the class in this when assigning the topics by showing the pupils how to pick out the main points of the topics, and arrange them in order for discussion. this is, of course, really training in analysis--a power that all pupils need to cultivate. _b. the question of standards in topical recitations._--the success of the topical method will depend much on the teacher's standards of thoroughness applied to its use. children, particularly of the lower grades, have not yet developed much grasp of mind, and consequently are not able to judge when they have sufficiently covered a topic given them for recitation. they are likely to think that if they stand up and say _something_ about the topic, this is sufficient. it is at this point that the teacher needs to exercise great care. the child must not be discouraged by harsh criticism, but neither must an incomplete recitation be accepted as a complete one. the teacher must judge carefully how full a discussion should be expected from a child of the given age, taking into account the treatment of the topic in the pupil's textbook. then by questions, further discussion by other pupils, kindly criticisms, and helpful suggestions, the standard should be placed as high as the class can attain. nor is it to be forgotten that the standard is to be a constantly advancing one. . _the lecture, or supplemental method_ the lecture method is rather too formal a name for the method in which the teacher talks to the class instead of asking them to recite. he may either take the entire period in a lecture, or talk, or he may only supplement now and then the answers or topical recitations of the pupils. this method is almost exclusively used in many universities and colleges, but is not suited for extensive use in more elementary schools. _a. how the lecture method is to be used._--while the lecture method should be employed sparingly in the elementary school, yet it is most valuable to supplement other methods. first, in introducing a class to a new subject or section of work, it is frequently desirable that the teacher should take a part or the whole of a recitation period to explain the nature of the work or to interest the pupils in it. for example: in taking up the discovery of america, the teacher can create interest by telling the class of the wonderful events going on in europe during the fifteenth century, of the life of columbus as a boy, of the ships then in use, comparing them with our present steamships, etc. similarly for almost every new section taken up in any study. the lecture method is also useful in supplementing the recitations of the pupils. the teacher's knowledge must be much broader than the textbook; and a little explanation added, an incident told, or an application of the lesson made will often do much to broaden the pupil's knowledge of the subject, and will at the same time lend interest to the recitation, besides increasing respect for the teacher's education. there is nothing more deadening to the recitation than a mechanical plodding through the questions and answers of a textbook without any explanation or amplification, and often without much comprehension on the part of the class. the teacher who has nothing of his own to add is incapable of _teaching_ in the true sense of the word. at best he can only _test_ as to the preparation from the textbook. _b. dangers from the lecture method._--while we justly condemn the teacher who has nothing of his own to add to the recitation, we must not forget that there is a danger on the other side. ask any assemblage of teachers how many think that, in general, their own teachers used to talk too much in the recitation, thereby monopolizing the time, and two thirds will blame their former teachers for over-using the lecture method. most people, when they are sure of an audience, like to talk, and probably teachers are no exception to the rule. the teacher who is full of information and enthusiasm for the recitation is led by this very fact into temptation. some point in the lesson suggests an interesting story or illustration, or some additional bit of information, and the teacher starts to tell it to the class. he becomes himself so interested in it that the lesson is forgotten and the class period ended long before the story is completed. this may do occasionally; but, once it becomes a habit, it is fatal to good teaching. the recitation as prepared by the class should be the chief interest of the class period. the teacher must learn to supplement without monopolizing. . _the written recitation_ the written recitation can hardly be called a method, since it can be itself applied to any or all of the methods of reciting. like all other methods, the written recitation has its strong points of excellence and also its dangers. _a. the use of the written recitation._--the written recitation is especially useful in cases where all of the class should recite upon all of the lesson. it is easy to see that by having each of a class of ten answer ten questions, a far larger amount of answering is done in the aggregate than if only one could answer at a time, as in oral recitation. there are certain kinds of knowledge that are seldom used except in writing. for example, we are never called upon to spell or to use letter forms, business forms, punctuation marks, etc., except in writing. it is safe to say that matter of such kinds should usually be taught by having it written. the written recitation also leads to accuracy and precision of thought and expression. we all formulate more carefully what we write than what we speak. the written recitation also gives an opportunity for training in verbal expression. every person needs to be able to express himself easily and forcibly in writing. but this requires much practice, and there is no better practice than in formulating in writing the thoughts of the daily lessons. _b. dangers in the use of the written method._--valuable as the written method is, there are certain cautions to be observed in its use. this method does not ordinarily possess the interest and spontaneity of the oral recitation. there is no opportunity for the teacher to supplement with points brought in. misconceptions are not cleared up in the minds of the pupils, at least during that recitation period, unless the written papers are read at once. usually time does not permit this. many children do not like to write, and hence find the lesson tiresome, especially if continued for a whole class period. the amount of writing required of children may be too great. few pupils can write long at a time without eye-strain, muscle cramp, and bad bodily positions. where this is the case, over-fatigue results if the amount of written work required is large. it is not unusual to find schools in which children are required to spend almost half of their school hours in some form of written work. this is a serious mistake both educationally and from the standpoint of health. there is also still another side of the matter to consider. one of the great advantages of written work is that the pupil may have his errors shown him, so that he may reflect upon them and correct them. but not infrequently, where the amount of written work is too large, the errors are not carefully corrected by the teacher, and not corrected at all by the pupil. this is why many pupils will keep on making the same error time after time on their papers. the correction has not sufficiently impressed them. all written work, with perhaps rare exceptions, should be carefully gone over by the teacher, and all serious or oft-repeated errors corrected by the pupils who make them. not infrequently may children be seen to glance over a paper upon which the teacher has put precious time and some red ink in making corrections, and then crumple the paper and throw it into the waste basket. sometimes this is done in sheer carelessness, and sometimes in petulance because of the many corrections. this is all a loss of time and opportunity. the teacher should have tact enough to show the pupils that corrections are made on their papers for their benefit, and not as a punishment. and then the pupils should take the trouble to correct the errors, that they may not occur again. better a thousand times correct carefully an old paper than write a new one containing the same errors. iii the art of questioning . _the importance of good questioning_ skill in the art of questioning lies at the basis of all good teaching. when we were children it looked so easy for the teacher to sit and ask the questions which we were expected to answer. when we become teachers we find that it is much harder to ask the questions than to answer them. for to question well, one must not only know the subject thoroughly, but must also constantly interpret the mind of the pupil to discover what question next to ask, and whether he is mastering what we are teaching him. good questioning stimulates thought, leads to inquiry, and results in understanding and mastery. poor questioning leaves the mental powers unawakened, cripples thought, and results in inefficiency and lack of mastery. . _need of fundamental principles_ good questioning is dependent upon the teacher's having a firm command of a few essential principles which apply to all questioning used in teaching. the teacher's constant self-criticism in the light of these will greatly improve his control of discussion in the class room. . _the principle of freedom from textbooks_ the questions of the recitation must of course deal with the matter of the textbook and be directly suggested by it. yet there are two dangers to be avoided in this connection: ( ) questions should not follow the language of the text, and ( ) the teacher should not be dependent on the textbook to suggest the question itself or to determine the correctness of the answer. the teacher who has not the lesson well prepared, or who is mentally lazy, has a constant temptation to ask questions in the words of the book. this is much easier than to know the subject and the textbook both well enough to formulate original, appropriate questions. an illustration of what is meant is found in the following account of a recitation conducted from "montgomery's american history," the lesson being on the landing of the pilgrims (pp. , ):-- q. on a morning late in november, what did the pilgrims do? a. they sighted cape cod. q. two days later, where did the mayflower come to anchor? a. in provincetown harbor. q. while the mayflower remained at anchor, what did captain standish and a boatload of men do? a. they went out to explore. q. on the shore of plymouth harbor what is there lying? a. a granite bowlder. it is seen that each of these questions follows the words of the text, and that the answer but completes the sentence of which the question is a part. questions of this kind only suggest to the memory the statement of the text, and do not cause the pupil to use his own thought in realizing the actual event. hence they arouse little interest and leave little impression. they train the verbal memory, but leave imagination, thought, and understanding untouched. how much better such questions as these:-- when did the pilgrims first sight land? what land did they see? what was its appearance? have you ever seen a stretch of shore like this one? why did not the pilgrims land at this point? where did they finally anchor? what measures did they take to see whether this was a suitable place to land? why is the name "plymouth rock" so famous in american history? these questions cover just the same ground as the ones above, but they suggest living pictures and actual events rather than the language of the textbook. the unprepared or lazy teacher is also in danger of relying on the textbook for his questions even when he does not formulate them in the language of the printed page. not infrequently teachers conduct the whole of a recitation with the text open before them, hardly taking their eyes from the book, and seeming to have no inspiration or questions not immediately gleaned from the page before them. in extreme cases of unpreparedness they may even have to test the correctness of the answers given by the class by reference to the text. of course this is all the highest degree of inefficiency. it should not be called teaching at all, for no one can teach another that which he does not himself possess as a part of his own mental equipment. nothing can be more deadening to a class than to see a teacher, whom they look upon as their intellectual leader, floundering in such a vain attempt to teach something that he does not himself know. the eyes and the mind of the teacher must both be free in the recitation--the eyes to look interest and encouragement into the eyes of the class, the mind to marshal the points of the lesson and watch the effects of their presentation on the minds of the pupils. a recitation at its best consists of an animated and interesting conversation between teacher and class. and no conversation can be live and interesting when one of its participants has mind and eyes riveted to a book; for conversation involves an interchange of expression, of spirit, and of personality as well as of words. it is not meant that a teacher must never have a textbook open before him during a recitation. often it is not only desirable, but necessary that he should do so; but only for suggestion and reference, and never to supply questions and test answers. it is certainly much better to have the textbook before one than to teach the lesson after a disconnected and haphazard fashion from lack of familiarity with its points. an excellent substitute for the text, however, is an outline, or plan of the lesson embodying the main points, illustrations, and applications to be made. such an outline will save the teacher from wandering too far afield in the discussions, will insure unity in the lesson, and make certain that important points shall not be overlooked. a desirable rule for the teacher to set for himself would be so to prepare for the recitation by mastery of the subject, and by lesson plan or outline, _that he does not need to have the textbook open before him when the pupils do not also have their books open_. the teacher who will heroically meet this standard will soon find growing in himself a feeling of mastery of his subjects and of joy in his teaching. . _the principle of unity or continuity in questions_ questions should be so planned that they develop or bring out the unity of the lesson. it is possible for questions to be so haphazard and disconnected that the pupil receives the impression of a series of unrelated facts, rather than a unified and related subject. in good questioning, one question naturally grows out of another, so that the series develops step by step the truth contained in the lesson, and brings it to the mind of the child as a complete whole. this means that the teacher must know the whole subject so thoroughly that the right questions come to him easily and naturally, and in the right order to bring out the successive steps of the lesson in their logical relations. the difference between a related series of questions and an unrelated is shown in two lists which follow. both deal with the same subject-matter, a physiology lesson on respiration. the questions of the first list are not themselves faulty, but there is no continuity among them; one does not grow out of another so as to "develop" the subject in the minds of the class. what change takes place in the air while in the lungs? what change takes place in the blood while in the lungs? how many cubic inches of air will the lungs contain? how much of this cannot be expelled by breathing out? how many times do we naturally breathe in a minute? what are some of the effects of breathing impure air? how is the oxygen carried by the blood? what is animal heat? what is the temperature of the body? these questions were all answered fairly well by the class, but the answers contained only so many bits of isolated information, and the pupils did not understand the subject after they had recited upon it. another teacher asked the following questions: why must the body have air to breathe? of what use is oxygen in the body? where does this oxidization, or burning up of worn-out cells, take place? but how is the oxygen carried to every part of the body and brought into contact with the tissues? where do the corpuscles of the blood get their loads of oxygen? what gas do they give up in exchange for the oxygen? where do they get the carbon dioxide? how does air entering the lungs differ from air leaving them? what corresponding change takes place in the blood while it is in the lungs? explain how the change is effected in each case. suppose we breathe air that contains too little oxygen, what will be the effect on the corpuscles? what will be the effect on oxidization in the tissues? and what is the effect of poor oxidization on physical vitality? on mental vitality? the class that answered these questions not only had the information belonging to each separate question, but also understood the lesson as a whole, because each question grew out of the ones that preceded it, thus making the recitation a unified whole. . _the principle of clearness_ questions must be made clear, so that their meaning may be understood. this is not always an easy task, and the teacher frequently misses being wholly clear. this is evidenced by the fact that often when a pupil fails to answer a question asked in one way, he can answer it easily when the wording is changed. this means that the difficulty for the pupil existed in the question, and not in the answer. clearness in questioning involves three factors: ( ) freedom from ambiguity or obscurity of wording; ( ) adaptation to the age and understanding of the pupil; ( ) reasonable brevity. _a. freedom from ambiguity or obscurity of wording._--this is fundamentally a matter of the use of good english. it requires such a choice and arrangement of words and clauses that there can be no doubt as to the meaning to be conveyed. assuming a fair command of the language and care in its use, the basis of clearness at this point is thorough mastery of the subject-matter of the questions, so that the teacher himself understands clearly just what he means to ask. the following illustrations show some questions that are faulty from the standpoint of obscurity of meaning:-- what caused lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation in ? (not clear whether question means why did he issue the emancipation proclamation at all, or why did he issue it in instead of at some other time.) what are the effects of attention to a moving object? (not clear whether question means effects on the person attending or the effect which the moving of an object has in making itself seen.) who chased whom down what valley? why has a cat fur and a duck feathers? _b. adaptation to the age and understanding of the child._--questions that are perfectly clear to an adult may be hazy or incomprehensible to a child because he does not understand the terms used in the question, or because it deals with matters beyond his grasp. the teacher must keep within the vocabulary of the child in formulating his questions. where it is necessary or desirable to introduce new words into questions, care must be taken that the child knows fully the meaning of the new terms. a teacher asked a class in elementary physiology, "what measures would you take to resuscitate a person asphyxiated with carbon dioxide?" the class all looked blank. no one seemed to know what to do. it chanced that the superintendent was visiting the school, and he said to the teacher, "let me try." then he asked the class, "what would you do for a person who had been smothered by breathing coal gas?" the class brightened up, and every hand was raised indicating readiness to answer the question. another teacher bewildered his class by asking, "which phenomena of the fratricidal strife in the american republic were most determinative of the ultimate fate of the nation?" no one knew. had he asked his question in plain terms, no doubt the class could have answered it. in an elementary history class, a teacher propounded this question: "what american institutions have been founded on the principle of social democracy?" not only the terms of the question, but the thought also is beyond the comprehension of children. such questions are not only useless as a means of testing, teaching, or drilling, but serve to confuse and discourage the child, and cause him to lose interest in school. _c. brevity._--no matter how well a question is worded, or how well it is adapted to the age and capacity of the pupil, it may fail in clearness because it is too long and disjointed, or because it deals with too many points. far better break a complicated question up into several simple ones, concerning whose meaning there can be no doubt. a teacher who had not yet mastered the art of questioning asked his physiology class a question somewhat like this: "do you consider it advisable, taking into account the fact that none of the vital processes go on as vigorously during sleep as during the waking hours (you remember that the breathing and the pulse are less rapid and the temperature of the body also lower), to eat just before retiring at night, especially if one is very tired and exhausted--a condition which still further lowers the vitality and hence decreases the powers of digestion and assimilation, and would your answer be different if it is understood that the food taken is to be light and easily digested?" it is needless to say that the class found themselves lost in the maze of conditions and parenthetical expressions and did not attempt an answer. the question contains material for a dozen different questions, and probably the class could have answered them all had they been properly asked. . _the principle of definiteness_ questions should be definite, so that they can have but one meaning. it is possible to ask a question so that its general meaning is clear enough, but so that its _precise_ meaning is in doubt. such questions leave the pupil puzzled, and usually lead to indirectness or guessing in the answer. failure to make questions definite, so that they can have but one meaning is responsible for much of the difference of opinion on disputed questions. many a stock question upon which amateur debating societies have exercised their talents would admit of no debate at all, if once the question were made definite. for the ground for debate lies in the difference in interpretation of the question and not in the facts themselves. for example: if a cannon ball were to be fired off by some mechanical device a million miles from where there was any ear to hear, would there be any sound? the lack of definiteness here which permits difference of opinion lies in the word "sound." if we add after the word "sound" the phrase, "in the sense of a conscious auditory sensation," the answer would obviously be, no, since there can be no auditory sensation without an ear to hear it. if, on the other hand, instead of the above phrase we add, "in the sense of wave-vibrations in the air," the answer will obviously be, yes, since the wave-vibrations in the air do not depend on the presence of an ear to be affected by them. likewise, in the question, if a man starts to walk around a squirrel which is clinging to the limb of a tree, and if, as the man circles the tree, the squirrel also circles the tree so that he constantly faces the man, when the man has gone completely around the tree, has he gone around the squirrel? here the indefiniteness lies in the meaning of to "go around." with this indefiniteness remedied, there is no longer any possibility of difference of opinion. indefiniteness may come from the use of certain words that from their very nature are indefinite in meaning. such are the verbs _be_, _do_, _have_, _become_, _happen_, and the prepositions _of_ and _about_. examples of indefiniteness growing out of such colorless words are found in the following questions, which are types of many asked in our schools daily:-- what does water _do_ when heated? (expands, evaporates, boils.) what _happens_ when it lightnings? (thunder, discharge of electricity, flash.) what must immigrants coming into this country _have_? (money, freedom from disease, character.) what did arnold _become_? (a traitor, a british general, an outcast, a repentant man.) what _is_ the cow? (a mammal, a quadruped, a producer of milk, butter, and beef; an herbivorous animal.) what _about_ the monroe doctrine? (a dozen different things.) what _of_ the animals in the temperate zone? questions may be so general as to be indefinite. the teacher asks, "where is chicago?" the class may answer, "in illinois on lake michigan; in north america; in cook county." the teacher should know just what answer he desires, and then ask, "in what state; on what continent; on what lake; or in what county?" other illustrations of vagueness coming from the use of words of too general a meaning are found in such questions as, what _kind_ of man was george washington? _when_ does a person need food? _how_ does tobacco grow? _what_ do birds like? all indefinite questions deserve and usually receive an indefinite answer, and hence lead to and encourage guessing. if the answers to such questions as the above are not indefinite, they must be purely memoriter, merely reproducing the words of the text without comprehension of any real meaning. indefinite questioning usually comes from a lack of clear thinking on the part of the questioner. the teacher himself does not know precisely what he means to ask, and hence cannot be definite. it is safe to say that the teacher's questions covering a subject will never be any more clear or definite than the subject itself is in his mind. indeed it is hard for one to be wholly definite in questioning even when he is a perfect master of his subject. certainly, then, eternal vigilance will be the price of clearness and definiteness on the part of the young teacher who is as yet striving for mastery of what he is teaching. . _secondary principles of good questioning_ besides the foregoing fundamental principles underlying the art of questioning, there are a few secondary principles, some of which are of hardly less importance:-- . questions should be asked naturally, and in a conversational tone, and not explosively _demanded_ of pupils. . usually the question should be addressed to the entire class and, after all have had a moment to think, some one then designated to answer. the reason for this is obvious. if the one who is to answer is designated before the question is asked, the incentive to the rest of the class to think the answer is greatly lessened. . no regular order should be followed in calling on pupils. if such an order is established, the lazy and uninterested ones have a tendency to remain inactive until called upon. by the hit-and-miss method of calling no one knows at what moment he may be the next one, hence there is a strong incentive to attend to the lesson. it is also desirable to call on a pupil occasionally the second time very soon after he has previously been called upon. this prevents him from thinking that as soon as he has recited once he can then safely relax his attention. . inattentive or mischievous pupils should be the mark for frequent questions. if it comes to be known that any inattention is sure to bring questions to the pupil at fault, the battle for attention is half won. there is a strong tendency on the part of the teacher to ask for the answer to a question from those whose eyes show that they are attentive and ready with an answer. while this readiness and attention should be rewarded by giving an opportunity to answer, it must not lead the teacher to neglect those who may need the question more than the more ready ones. the questions should be impartially distributed among the bright and the dull pupils. . it is highly important that questions shall be asked so that they demand thought in answering, and usually so that the answer must be given in a full statement. seldom should a question be asked in such form that a simple yes or no will answer it. this does not require sufficient thought on the part of the pupil, it permits guess-work, and fails to cultivate ability in expression. answers that may be given in a word or two, or by yes or no, may be accepted in rapid drill or review work, and also in the inductive questioning used in developing a new subject, but should be used very sparingly in other places in the recitation. . the "pumping" question should not be used. in this type of question, the teacher formulates the answer and leaves only the key word for the pupil to supply. the teacher sometimes goes so far as to suggest the necessary word by pronouncing the first syllable or two of it. a dialogue like the following was heard in one school:-- q. "columbus was an ----?" a. "explorer." q. "no, he was an it----?" a. "oh, an italian." such an attempt at teaching would be amusing, were it not so serious for the child. . _the treatment of answers_ the teacher's treatment of the answers given is of hardly less importance than the formulation of the questions themselves. it is to be remembered that the recitation is an interchange of thought and expression between teacher and class. to this end, the response must be mutual. not alone when the question is being asked is the teacher to be animated and interested, but likewise while the answer is being given. it is neither good pedagogy nor good manners for a teacher to sit unresponsive and inattentive when a pupil is reciting. not that the teacher needs always to comment on an answer, or say that it is correct; it is rather a matter of manner, of attention and interest to the answer. we find it embarrassing either in a recitation or out of it to talk to a person who seems not to be listening. right at this point, however, there lurks an insidious danger. it comes easily and naturally to one to give some sign of assent or disapproval as to the correctness of the answer while it is being spoken. the slightest inclination of the head, the dropping of the eyelids, or a certain expression of the face, comes to be read by the pupil as a signboard to guide him in his statements. this is, of course, all wrong. the teacher should give absolutely no sign while the answer is going on. thus to help the child leads him to depend on the teacher instead of relying on his own knowledge. it leads to guessing, and so skillful does this sometimes become that a bright but unprepared pupil is able to steer through a recitation guided by the unsuspecting teacher. answers should not be repeated by the teacher. this is a very common fault, and a habit that is usually acquired before the teacher is aware of it. the tendency to repeat answers probably arises at first from a mental unreadiness on the part of the teacher. he has not his next question quite ready, and so bridges over the interval by saying over the answer just given by the pupil. it is a method of gaining time, but really finally results in great loss of time in the recitation. by actual count, many teachers have been found to repeat as many as % of the answers given in the recitation. besides the great waste of time, the repetition of answers is a source of distraction and annoyance to pupils. no one enjoys having his words said over after him constantly. of course answers may sometimes need to be repeated to emphasize some important point. but when repetition has become a habit, no emphasis is gained by the repetition. finally, answers should be required in good english, clear and definite, like the questions. pupils who say, "an improper fraction is 'where' the numerator is greater than the denominator"; "a compound sentence is 'when' it has two or more independent clauses," should be led to restate their answers in clear and correct language. iv conditions necessary to a good recitation we have now discussed the aim of the recitation, its methods, and the principles governing the art of questioning. but no matter how well defined the aim for the recitation, no matter how excellent its method, no matter how skilled the teacher may be in the art of questioning, these things alone cannot make a good recitation. certain other fundamental conditions must obtain if the recitation is to be a success. let us now discuss the more important of these conditions. . _freedom from distractions_ distractions of any nature result in a double waste. first, a waste of power through preventing concentration and continuity of thought. try as hard as one may, he cannot secure the best results from his mental effort, if his stream of thought is being broken in upon. the loss by this process is comparable to that involved in running a train of cars, stopping it every ten rods instead of every ten or every one hundred miles. but this form of waste is not all. there is also a serious waste of interest and enthusiasm resulting from interrupted recitations. every teacher has at times felt the sudden drop in attention and interest on the part of the class after some interruption which took the minds of the class off the subject. try as hard as the teacher may, it is impossible to go back to the same level of efficiency after such a break. the following show some of the chief sources of distractions:-- _a. distractions by the teacher._--strange as it may seem, many teachers are to be criticised on this point. any striking feature or peculiarity of manner, dress, or carriage which attracts the attention of the class is a distraction. a loud or ill-modulated voice, tones too low or indistinct to be heard well, the habit of walking up and down the aisles or back and forth before the class, assuming awkward positions standing or sitting before the class--these are all personal factors which the teacher needs to keep constantly under surveillance. the teacher may also distract the class by answering questions asked by the pupils at their seats, or by rebuking misdemeanors seen among those not in the recitation. most of such interruptions are wholly unnecessary, and could be avoided by a little foresight and management. the lesson should be so clearly assigned that the pupils can have no excuse to ask later about the assignment, and then there should be a penalty for forgetting it. the drinks of water should be had and the errands attended to between classes. the pencils should be supplied and sharpened before the session begins. the mischievous culprits should be taught that it is a serious offense to interrupt a recitation. the teacher who permits these distractions by the school has not yet learned the secret of good management, and could hardly advertise his inefficiency in this regard any more effectively than by permitting such interruptions to continue. it is also possible for the teacher to distract the person reciting by interrupting when there is a slight pause to think of the next point, or a hesitation before pronouncing a word. teachers sometimes even interrupt a pupil who is reciting and themselves offer explanations, make remarks, or continue the discussion, leaving the child standing and not knowing whether he is excused or not. of course this is bad manners on the part of the teacher, and it is even worse pedagogy. it is not encouraging to the pupil to feel that he may be interrupted at any moment, and few can think clearly or recite well when expecting such interruptions. the pupil should not expect to be allowed to think out a lesson or a point when he is reciting, which he should have thought out before coming to class. on the other hand, the teacher must remember that the child's mind is working on what to him is new and difficult matter, and hence cannot move as rapidly as the teacher's. _b. distractions by the class._--inattention, restlessness, and mischief are great sources of distraction from the class themselves. all these things have a tendency to be contagious, and in any case always break in upon the train of thought of the recitation. because of this the teacher _must_ win the inattentive and restless, and _must_ check the restless, if he would save his recitation. not infrequently, in the more elementary classes, a certain kind of distraction is fostered and encouraged by the teacher with the aim of securing the attention of the whole class to the one who is reciting. this form of distraction consists in having the whole class watch the one who is reciting, and, if they observe an error in the recitation, at once raise their hands, when the one reciting must stop. this is a mistake from almost every standpoint, and has very little to redeem it. it may result in closer attention on the part of the class; but the motive which prompts the attention is bad. it leads to elation and rejoicing over the mistakes and failures of another, and it centres attention on the mistakes rather than on the facts to be brought out. attention should be trained so that it will not have to depend on this kind of motive, and the memory should be trained to note and hold a correction until the one reciting has finished. further, it is a most serious distraction to the one who is reciting to be expecting that a forest of hands may at any moment be wildly waving about his ears, gleefully announcing that he has made an error. condemnation of this method of securing attention can hardly be too severe. _c. distractions by the school._--in any busy school there is bound to be more or less of hum and confusion. in many schools, however, there is much more than is warranted. it is true that children get tired of sitting still for an entire session, and that they find relief in going for a drink, or going to the dictionary, or on some other errand about the room. in some schools, one or more pupils may be found walking about the room at almost any time of the day, and not infrequently several are on errands at the same time. this, as previously noted, is usually a fault in management on the part of the teacher. the larger part of these interruptions can just as well be saved by a little foresight and firmness. some teachers even leave the class which they are hearing to answer questions or give help to pupils in the school who have not been trained to wait for their requests until the class is dismissed. usually, only a very small percentage of these questions should have been asked at all, or would have been with the proper management of the school. and all the necessary questions and requests should almost without exception be held for the interval between recitations. the school should be taught that nothing short of the direst necessity will warrant asking a question or making a request during a recitation. likewise in the case of misdemeanors. the class which is reciting should not be interrupted for minor misdemeanors which occur during the recitation. this does not mean that the misdemeanor is to go by unnoticed. on the contrary, the settlement for it may be all the more severe for having to wait until the class is dismissed. _d. physical distractions._--distractions from the physical environment may be of several kinds. not infrequently, especially in the older schoolhouses, the seats are so placed with reference to windows that the light strikes the eyes of the pupils, instead of the pages of the books; or it may be that a stray sunbeam strikes athwart the class and dazzles the eyes. it need hardly be suggested that no such distraction as this should go unremedied. in the rural schools the recitation seats are often near the stove, where the temperature becomes unbearably hot when the stove must be generously fired to heat the remainder of the room. not infrequently the ventilation is bad, and the room is filled with foul air, from which the major part of the oxygen has been exhausted. no matter how good the intentions of the class or how zealous the teacher, such conditions will kill the recitation. whatever may be the cause of physical discomfort or unrest should be remedied. one's body should be so comfortable and healthy that it does not attract attention to itself, except when needing food or other care, and it is the duty of the school to do all possible to bring this condition about. . _interest and enthusiasm_ interest is the foundation of all mental activity. its very nature is to lead to thought and action. grown ardent, interest becomes enthusiasm, "without which," says emerson, "nothing great was ever accomplished." on the other hand, the absence of interest leaves the pupil lifeless and inert mentally, his work a bore and achievement impossible. interest is, therefore, a first consideration in the recitation. interest is contagious. no one ever saw an interested and enthusiastic teacher with a dull and lifeless class. nor can interest and enthusiasm on the part of a class continue in the presence of a mechanical and lifeless teacher. the teacher is the model, and he sets the standard and pace for his class. unconsciously the pupils come, under the influence of the teacher's personality, to reflect his type of mind and attitude toward the work of the school. the teacher's interest and vivacity in the recitation depend on many factors, some of which are largely under his own control. _a. the teacher's command of the subject-matter of the recitation._--a teacher whose grasp of the lesson is doubtful, who does not feel sure that he is a master of all its points, who fears that questions may be asked that he cannot answer or points raised that he cannot explain, can hardly possess an attitude of true interest toward the recitation. his mind is too full of worry and strain and embarrassment. he lacks the sense of ease and freedom which comes from a feeling of mastery. command of the subject-matter of the recitation depends, _first_ on the teacher's general mastery of the branch, and, _second_, on being freshly prepared upon it. it behooves every young teacher, therefore, to strive for mastery as he teaches. but no matter how good the preliminary preparation, this cannot take the place of the fresh daily review, which gives the mind a new readiness and grasp on the subject. let the teachers who feel that their recitations are slow and dull, seek the cause first of all in their own lack of preparation in one of the two lines mentioned. _b. the teacher's attitude toward his work._--if the teacher looks upon teaching as a mechanical process; if he looks on the recitation as "hearing the class recite"; if he realizes nothing of the opportunities and responsibilities connected with teaching children, then he can command little interest and no enthusiasm. if, on the other hand, teaching is to the teacher a joy; if he loves to watch the minds of children unfold; if he rejoices in his opportunities and responsibilities as a teacher, then he is sure to develop an interest which will soon intensify with enthusiasm. _c. the teacher's health._--all have experienced the mental depression and lack of interest in things which comes from over-fatigue. the most interesting occupation palls on us when we are fagged, or when our vitality is low from derangement of health. a case of indigestion may sweep us out of our usual cheery mood into a mood of discouragement and pessimism. frayed nerves and an ill-nourished or exhausted brain are fatal to enthusiasm. teaching is found to be a very trying occupation on the general health, and particularly on the nervous system. many girls break down or develop a chronic nervous trouble in a few years in the schoolroom. the combined work and worry prove too much for their strength; and not infrequently, also, the teacher who boards and carries a cold luncheon to school fails to secure the right kind of food. this is especially true in the rural schools. farmers have enough to eat, but often the food suitable for men engaged in heavy manual labor is wholly unsuited for one who works with the brain and does not have a large amount of out-door exercise. nor do teachers always secure enough pure air. the air of schoolrooms is usually vitiated to such a degree that one on coming in from the out-door air can detect a foul odor. but the air of a room ceases to be fit to breathe long before an odor can be detected from its impurities. these are some of the chief factors which are proving so fatal to the health of many of our teachers, and to interest and enthusiasm on the part of the teacher in his work. both for the sake of his health and his work, every teacher should seek to control these three factors as far as possible. strain and worry and wear of nerves can be greatly lessened by careful planning of work, by good organization and careful management, and by exercise of the will to prohibit worry over matters large or small when worry will not help solve them. the teacher can in some degree determine what food he will eat, even if it means a change of boarding-place. and surely every teacher can control the supply of fresh air for the schoolroom and his bedroom, and this is perhaps the most important of all. _d. experience._--the young teacher, without experience, may from sheer embarrassment and lack of mastery fail to show the enthusiasm which he feels, for embarrassment of any kind and enthusiasm do not thrive well together. but if the teacher is really fundamentally interested in his teaching, the enthusiasm will soon come. and better a thousand times the young teacher who is earnestly fighting for freedom and mastery in the recitation, than the old teacher who has grown wearied of the routine and has made out of the recitation a machine process. . _well-mastered lessons_ probably the worst of all drawbacks to good recitations is poorly prepared lessons. one of the greatest criticisms to which our educational system is open is that teachers try to teach and pupils try to recite lessons which are badly or indifferently prepared by both. there is nothing more stupefying to the mind, or more fatal to interest in school work than the halting, stumbling, ineffective recitations heard in many schools. teachers who try to teach lessons with which they are not thoroughly familiar are but blind leaders of the blind, and both they and their pupils are sure to fall into the ditch. _a. preparation by the teacher._--the teacher is the key to the situation. if he himself lacks in preparation, he can neither lead nor compel his pupils to the preparation of their lessons. he sets the standard. a stream does not rise higher than its source. the teacher's preparation has two different aspects: ( ) the general fundamental knowledge of the subject as a whole obtained by previous study; and ( ) the daily preparation by study, thought, or reading for the recitation. in general it is safe to say that teachers enter upon their vocation without sufficient education. our certificate requirements are low, and many enter upon teaching with little or no more schooling than that obtained in the schools where they begin teaching. of course this is radically wrong, but it is the fault of our school system and not of the teacher. it behooves teachers entering upon their work with this scanty preparation to recognize their limitations, however, and to do their best to remedy them. low grade of certificate, low standings in any branches, or the teacher's own consciousness of lack of mastery should be sufficient to send the sincere and earnest teacher to school again, even if this must be to summer schools instead of longer sessions. this sacrifice will not only pay abundantly in higher salary, but also in greater teaching power and in the sense of greater mastery and personal growth. but no amount of preparation in a branch will relieve a teacher of the necessity of daily preparation for the recitation. dr. arnold expressed this thought when he said: "i prefer that my pupils shall drink from a running stream, rather than from a stagnant pool." in order that one may develop a line of thought easily it must be _fresh_ in his mind; it is not enough that he has once known it well. one of the master teachers of our country, a university professor who is recognized as a great authority in his chosen subject, latin, recently said to a group of latin teachers: "i have taught cicero for twenty years, until i know it by heart. but yet, every day, one hour before the time for my cicero class, i go to my study and spend an hour with cicero, just to get into the spirit of it. i would not dare to meet my class without this." it is true that the teacher with twenty classes a day cannot spend an hour on the preparation of each lesson. but most of the lessons will not require so much--sometimes the preparation will be the making of an outline or plan, sometimes reading the lesson over to freshen the mind upon it, sometimes only thinking the lesson through, for its plan and topics. it may at times, however, mean hard and serious study to master the difficult points and their presentation. but whatever it means, the conscientious and growing teacher will go to the lesson prepared to teach it in such a way as to inspire to high standards and mastery on the part of the pupils. _b. preparation by the class._--but in addition to the well-prepared teacher, there must also be a well-prepared class. the teacher cannot make bricks without straw. every failure to recite when called upon is a dead weight upon the progress of the recitation; and each failure makes it easier for the next one to fail with impunity, or at least without disgrace. it therefore behooves the teacher who would have inspiring recitations to lead the pupils to a high standard of preparation. the pupil's preparation of the lesson should include two distinct lines: ( ) mastery of the facts, thought, or meaning of the lesson; and ( ) thought or plans how best to express the lesson in the recitation. most pupils think they "have their lesson" when they have memorized it or come to understand it. they must also be made to see that an important part of their preparation lies in _the ability to tell well what they have learned_. . _high standards in the recitation_ there is no more potent force than public opinion to compel to high achievement or restrain from unworthy acts. a school in which the standards of preparation and recitation are low presents a difficult problem for the teacher in the recitation. in some schools pupils who are diffident about reciting, or who do not care to take the trouble, shake their heads in refusal almost before they hear the question in full. others sit in stolid silence when called upon, and make no response of any kind. in still other cases the class smile or giggle when several have been called upon and have failed to recite, thus taking the failure as a joke. of course such a lack of standards proclaims the previous teaching to have been weak and bungling. it shows the effects of a teacher without standards or skill. but the immediate question is how to remedy such an evil situation when one finds it existing in a school. it is probable that low standards come as often from work that is too difficult or too great in amount as from any other source. if the child fails to understand the lesson, or has not had time to master it, he cannot recite, however much he may desire to. all that is left for him is to decline when called upon. he may be chagrined at first over his failure; but if failure follows failure, he soon ceases to care when unable to recite. the remedy suggests itself at once; assign lessons that are within the child's ability, and also within the time available for their preparation. then _insist that the work be done and the recitation be made_. if the failure comes from laziness, lack of study, indulgence in mischief, or any such cause, the remedy will be a different one. but a remedy must be devised and applied. no school can run successfully without good standards well maintained for the recitation. the teacher who feels that the standards of the school are too low in this particular should never be satisfied until the cause for such a condition is discovered, and worthy standards instituted. this will be one of the hardest tests upon the teacher's ingenuity and skill. the public opinion of the school must be brought to take the recitation seriously. it must not be a cause for levity when several pupils fail. failure must come to be looked forward to with apprehension, and looked back upon with humiliation. and all this must be done without scolding and bickering. it must be done with great patience and good nature, but it must be done. the teacher must himself have a high standard of excellence, and must persistently impress this upon his class. here again the ideals of the teacher are contagious. . _a spirit of coöperation_ much depends on the spirit with which class and teacher enter upon the recitation. if the spirit of coöperation is lacking; if the relations between teacher and pupils are strained or not cordial; if the class look upon the recitation as a kind of game in which the teacher tries to corner and catch the class, and the class try to avoid being cornered and caught, then the recitation is certain to be a failure. under skillful teaching the pupils should come to look forward to the recitation with pleasure and anticipation. it should be a time when teacher and class work together in whole-hearted, enthusiastic effort, with the common aim of bringing the class to master more fully the matter of the lesson. there should be no feeling that the teacher has one aim and the class another aim, or that their interests are in any way antagonistic; no feeling that the teacher's highest ambition is to catch pupils in errors, and the pupil's highest achievement to avoid being caught. there should be no attempt at bluffing, or covering up errors or points not understood. probably the greatest factor in establishing and maintaining a spirit of coöperation between teacher and class is a deep-seated and sympathetic desire on the part of the teacher to be helpful. if his attitude is that of a friend and co-worker, and his criticisms and corrections are all made in the spirit of helping to a better understanding rather than in the spirit of fault-finding, this will go far toward establishing a spirit of coöperation in the class. this does not mean that the teacher shall be weak, and let mistakes or failures go by unnoticed. weak teachers are never liked or respected. it only means that the teacher, in making corrections or calling attention to failures, shall manifest the spirit of a helper and not of a faultfinder. it means that no matter how many times a teacher may have to correct or even punish a pupil, his attitude toward the pupil will still be cordial and friendly. there are many persons who cannot correct a fault without having some enmity arise toward the one corrected. but what the teacher needs is to be able to correct, rebuke or punish, and at the same time keep the heart warm toward the wrongdoer. this will not only secure better results from the corrections, but will also foster the spirit of helpfulness and coöperation between teacher and school. finally, the class should be brought to see that the school is _their_ school, and not the teacher's school or the board's school. they should realize that failure or low achievement is their loss, and not the teacher's loss. they should feel that their interests and those of the teacher, the board, and the taxpayers who support the school are all _common interests_, and that only as the pupils do their part will the interests of all be conserved. v the assignment of the lesson . _the importance of proper assignment_ upon the proper assignment of the lesson depends much of the success of the recitation, and also much of the pupils' progress in learning how to study. the assignment of the lesson thus becomes one of the most important duties of the recitation period. too many times this is left until the very close of the class hour, when there is no time left for proper assignment, and the teacher can only say, "take the next four pages," or "work out the next twenty problems." . _good assignment and teaching the art of study_ we forget that children do not understand how to go to work at the lesson as we know how. the result is that they come back to the next recitation listless and uninterested, with the lesson not prepared. or, it may happen that the less timid ones, when they come to study the lesson, call upon the teacher to show them how to go to work. the teacher has then to take time needed for other things to show different individuals what should have been presented to the entire class when the lesson was assigned. such a method is comparable with giving a set of tools into the hands of novices who do not know how to use them, and then, without any instruction in the use of the tools, expecting them to turn out good work, without loss of time. little children are unfamiliar with books,--with the paragraphs, outlines, divisions, and subdivisions of a subject. they hardly know how to "gather thought" from a printed page, and yet we expect them to "get their lesson" without being shown how to go at it. much time is lost in this way, and many children are discouraged in their work and caused to dislike going to school. the germans far excel us in this feature of their school work. no class of german children are ever sent to their seats with the simple direction to take so many pages in advance. teacher and class together go over the next lesson, the teacher calling the attention of the class to the points of the lesson, asking them to hunt out subdivisions, etc., and instructing them how to prepare the lesson. and the class, having this necessary help, are able to prepare their lesson better and recite it better than the american children of the same age. . _the teacher's preparation for assignment_ there are three chief reasons why teachers do not give more attention to the assignment of the lesson: ( ) lack of time, ( ) failure themselves to prepare the lesson in advance so as to be able to assign it, and ( ) lack of understanding of proper methods of study. lack of time is not an adequate excuse for failure properly to assign the lesson. if there is but fifteen minutes for the recitation, all the more reason why this time should be used to the best advantage for the pupils. if one third of this time should be taken for the assignment of the next lesson (and this is usually not too large a proportion in elementary classes), then this much time should be taken. and, besides, if the lesson is well assigned, so that it is better understood and prepared by the class, more can be accomplished in ten minutes of actual reciting than in fifteen under the old method. it may sometimes be advisable to assign the advance lesson at the beginning of the recitation, but usually it is better to wait until the close; for then the connection between the present lesson and the next can better be brought out. failure to look ahead in the textbook and become familiar with the next lesson renders it impossible properly to make the assignment. the teacher must know the scope of the lesson, its chief points, and the main difficulties it will present to the class. how often teachers are obliged to say to an unprepared class: "i did not realize how hard that lesson was, or i would not have assigned so much"; or, "that lesson was longer than i intended." all of which is a confession that the teacher was unprepared to make the assignment properly. it is true that the teacher is very busy and has many lessons to prepare; but, on the other hand, the teacher who keeps a day ahead of the class in his preparation will find that it abundantly pays in the greater mastery of his subject and the time saved in reviewing it preparatory to the recitation. this is not time lost, it is time saved. the young teacher's lack of knowledge of the principles underlying the art of study is a more serious matter, and a difficulty harder to overcome. every teacher should make a special study of the psychology of attention and interest. he should also come to know how the mind naturally approaches any new subject, first securing a _synthetic_ or bird's-eye view of it as a whole; how next it _analyzes_ it into its elements; and how finally it thinks them together, or _synthesizes_ them, into a new and better-understood whole. . _how to assign a lesson_ there may, of course, be some lessons that can properly be assigned in a moment by telling the class how much to take in advance. this is true of lessons that are only a continuation of matter with which the class are already somewhat familiar, which they know how to study, and which contains no special difficulties. for example, spelling lessons presenting no new difficulties or especially hard words; arithmetic lessons containing practice problems intended for drill, but no new topics for study; grammar lessons consisting of applications of principles or rules already mastered. but all lessons that are built upon a logical outline, or contain new or difficult principles, or involve especial difficulties of any kind should be assigned carefully and with sufficient detail to make sure that the class know how to go to work in preparing the lesson without loss of time and interest. it is necessary, however, to observe a caution in this connection. there is some danger of assigning lessons in such a way as to render too much help, and thus relieve the pupil of the necessity of mastering it for himself. it is difficult to say whether the mistake of helping too much in the assignment, or not helping enough is the more serious. the teacher must know his class and his textbook, and then use the best judgment he has in making just such suggestions as will result in the best effort and mastery by the pupils without robbing them of the necessity for work. . _principles governing the assignment_ the following are the chief points to be observed in assigning the lesson:-- . go over the lesson with the class in such a way as to give them a _bird's-eye view_ of the whole, a general idea of what the entire lesson is about, or what it is meant to teach. sometimes this can best be done with the books open in the hands of the pupils, the teacher calling attention to the topics treated. occasionally the teacher may himself state the aim or scope of the lesson without the use of the text. getting this synthetic view of the lesson enables the pupil to begin study with better intelligence, and also helps him better to understand the relation of the separate parts to the lesson as a whole. in this bird's-eye view of the lesson its relation to the lesson just recited, or other previous lessons, should be brought out so as to unite the separate lessons into a continuous view of the subject. . suggestions should be given as to the analysis of the lesson into its different topics. if the text uses a system of numerals in designating the points, the pupils should form the habit of using these in studying the lesson. for example, finding i, they should look for ii, iii, etc., thus getting the main heads. under these main topic numerals will often be found a series of paragraphs numbered , , , etc., indicating the different topics under each head. the system may even extend to sub-topics lettered _a_, _b_, _c_, etc. the pupil should early learn to look for and make use of these helps in the analysis of the lesson. and even when the author does not introduce any such system of numbering he still follows some outline more or less logically arranged. no better training in analysis, and no better method of mastering a lesson can be found than for the pupil himself to make a written outline of the lesson, using such a system of numbering the topics and sub-topics as that suggested above. . children should be taught to make a final summary, or synthesis, of the lesson after they have analyzed it into its separate points. of course a large proportion of the details learned and recited in any lesson will finally be forgotten. but this does not mean that such details were unnecessary. it rather means that their part was to help in bringing out the few main facts or points and making them clear. for most lessons can be reduced to a few chief points. these are the ones to be remembered and used in further learning. it is these important points which the pupil should summarize and fix in his memory and understanding as the final act in preparing the lesson. not to do this is to fail to reap the best results from the work put upon the lesson, for these more important points are lost almost as readily as the less important details unless they are emphasized in some such way as has been suggested. it is of course not meant that this summary of points should be worked out by the teacher when the lesson is being assigned. that is for the pupils to do as a result of their analysis of the lesson. but the teacher should specifically call attention to the necessity for such a summary until the habit is so fixed that the pupils follow this method of study without further direction. the pupil's summary of the lesson should be tested in the recitation just as much as his analysis of the facts of the lesson. this is done by few teachers. . particularly difficult points, or points of importance as a basis for later work, should be especially emphasized in the assignment of the lesson. this will go far toward saving the fatal weakness on fundamental points which is shown in later work by so many pupils. not having been over the ground before and therefore not realizing the importance or difficulty of the critical points in a subject, the pupils must of necessity be largely dependent on the teacher for such suggestions. . pupils need to be taught to look up and come to understand the allusions and various references often used in history, reading, or other lessons. the younger pupils will often have to be shown how to do this. therefore such points should be referred to in making the assignment, and any necessary directions should be given. . not infrequently new or unusual words or phrases are encountered by pupils in preparing their lessons, and they are hampered in their study by failing to understand the new terms. the teacher, knowing his pupils, should be able to anticipate any trouble of this kind, and give such explanations or help as may be necessary when assigning the lesson. . in case written work is to constitute a part of the preparation, the directions governing what is to be done should be so clear and explicit that there is no possibility of their not being understood, and the teacher's being interrupted next day to explain to members of the class. much time can be saved for both teacher and pupils, and many distractions prevented from disturbing recitations if this simple direction is followed. . if the principles suggested above are followed in assigning lessons, there will be little excuse for a pupil's forgetting the assignment. it will therefore be a safe rule not to repeat assignments for the benefit of careless or inattentive pupils. the teacher who will refuse to be interrupted during recitation hours to tell pupils what the lesson is, but who will reassign the lesson for the pupil at recess-time, or after school, will very soon find all such troubles vanish, and will at the same time be giving his pupils valuable and necessary training in attention and memory. * * * * * outline i. the purposes of the recitation . the teacher and the recitation, . the necessity of having a clear aim, . testing as an aim in the recitation, _a._ the preparation of the lesson assigned, _b._ the pupil's knowledge and his methods of study, _c._ the pupil's points of failure and the cause thereof, . teaching as an aim in the recitation, _a._ give the child an opportunity for self-expression, _b._ give help on difficult points, _c._ bring in new points supplementing the text, _d._ inspire the pupils to better efforts and higher ideals, _e._ lead pupils into good habits of study, . drill as an aim in the recitation, _a._ drill should be employed wherever a high degree of skill is required, _b._ drill must be upon correct models, and with alert interest and attention, _c._ drill must not stop short of a reasonable degree of efficiency, or skill, _d._ drill must be governed by definite aims, . a desirable balance among the three aims, ii. the method of the recitation . method varies with aim, . fundamental principles of method, _a._ interest is the first requisite for attention and all mental activity, _b._ the natural mode of learning is to proceed from the known to the related unknown, . the use of special forms of method, . the question-and-answer method, _a._ when and where to employ the question-and-answer method, _b._ dangers of the question-and-answer method, . the topical method, _a._ where the topical method is most serviceable, _b._ the question of standards in topical recitations, . the lecture, or supplemental, method, _a._ how the lecture method is to be used, _b._ dangers from the lecture method, . the written recitation, _a._ the use of the written recitation, _b._ dangers in the use of the written method, iii. the art of questioning . the importance of good questioning, . need of fundamental principles, . the principle of freedom from textbooks, . the principle of unity or continuity in questions, . the principle of clearness, _a._ freedom from ambiguity or obscurity of wording, _b._ adaptation to the age and understanding of the child, _c._ brevity, . the principle of definiteness, . secondary principles of good questioning, . the treatment of answers, iv. conditions necessary to a good recitation . freedom from distractions, _a._ distractions by the teacher, _b._ distractions by the class, _c._ distractions by the school, _d._ physical distractions, . interest and enthusiasm, _a._ the teacher's command of the subject-matter of the recitation, _b._ the teacher's attitude toward his work, _c._ the teacher's health, _d._ experience, . well-mastered lessons, _a._ preparation by the teacher, _b._ preparation by the class, . high standards in the recitation, . a spirit of coöperation, v. the assignment of the lesson . the importance of proper assignment, . good assignment and teaching the art of study, . the teacher's preparation for assignment, . how to assign a lesson, . principles governing the assignment, * * * * * riverside educational monographs edited by henry suzzallo andress's the teaching of hygiene in the grades atwood's the theory and practice of the kindergarten bailey's art education betts's new ideals in rural schools betts's the recitation bloomfield's vocational guidance of youth cabot's volunteer help to the schools cole's industrial education in the elementary school cooley's language teaching in the grades cubberley's changing conceptions of education cubberley's the improvement of rural schools dewey's interest and effort in education dewey's moral principles in education dooley's the education of the ne'er-do-well earhart's teaching children to study eliot's education for efficiency eliot's concrete and practical in modern education emerson's education evans's the teaching of high school mathematics fairchild's the teaching of poetry in the high school fiske's the meaning of infancy freeman's the teaching of handwriting haliburton and smith's teaching poetry in the grades hartwell's the teaching of history haynes's economics in the secondary school hill's the teaching of civics horne's the teacher as artist hyde's the teacher's philosophy jenkins's reading in the primary grades judd's the evolution of a democratic school system kendall and stryker's history in the elementary grades kilpatrick's the montessori system examined leonard's english composition as a social problem lewis's democracy's high school maxwell's the observation of teaching maxwell's the selection of textbooks meredith's the educational bearings of modern psychology palmer's ethical and moral instruction in the schools palmer's self-cultivation in english palmer's the ideal teacher palmer's trades and professions perry's status of the teacher prosser's the teacher and old age russell's economy in secondary education smith's establishing industrial schools snedden's the problem of vocational education stockton's project work in education stratton's developing mental power suzzallo's the teaching of primary arithmetic suzzallo's the teaching of spelling swift's speech defects in school children terman's the teacher's health thorndike's individuality tuell's the study of nations weeks's the people's school * * * * * riverside textbooks in education _general educational theory_ averill: psychology for normal schools freeman: experimental education freeman: how children learn freeman: the psychology of the common branches perry: discipline as a school problem smith: an introduction to educational sociology thomas: training for effective study waddle: an introduction to child psychology _history of education_ cubberley: the history of education cubberley: a brief history of education cubberley: readings in the history of education cubberley: public education in the united states _administration and supervision of schools_ ayres, williams, wood: healthful schools cubberley: public school administration cubberley: rural life and education hoag and terman: health work in the schools monroe: introduction to the theory of educational measurements monroe: measuring the results of teaching monroe, devoss, kelly: educational tests and measurements nutt. the supervision of instruction rugg: statistical methods applied to education sears: classroom organization and control showalter: a handbook for rural school officers terman: the hygiene of the school child terman: the measurement of intelligence terman: the intelligence of school children _methods of teaching_ bolenius: teaching literature in the grammar grades and high school kendall, mirick: how to teach the fundamental subjects kendall, mirick: how to teach the special subjects stone: silent and oral reading trafton: the teaching of science in the elementary school woofter: teaching in rural schools _secondary education_ briggs: the junior high school inglis: principles of secondary education snedden: problems of secondary education thomas: the teaching of english in the secondary school houghton mifflin company +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | transcriber's note | | | | eight printer errors have been corrected, all of them wrong or | | missing full-stops or commas. also, in the completion tests which | | start at line , the words to be omitted, which were italicised | | in the original, have instead been surrounded by curly brackets | | to aid readability. in all other cases, italics are denoted by | | underscores and bold by equals signs. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ teacher training series edited by w. w. charters _professor of education, carnegie institute of technology_ the science of human nature _a psychology for beginners_ by william henry pyle professor of educational psychology university of missouri silver, burdett & company boston new york chicago copyright, , by silver, burdett & company. author's preface this book is written for young students in high schools and normal schools. no knowledge can be of more use to a young person than a knowledge of himself; no study can be more valuable to him than a study of himself. a study of the laws of human behavior,--that is the purpose of this book. what is human nature like? why do we act as we do? how can we make ourselves different? how can we make others different? how can we make ourselves more efficient? how can we make our lives more worth while? this book is a manual intended to help young people to obtain such knowledge of human nature as will enable them to answer these questions. i have not attempted to write a complete text on psychology. there are already many such books, and good ones too. i have selected for treatment only such topics as young students can study with interest and profit. i have tried to keep in mind all the time the practical worth of the matters discussed, and the ability and experience of the intended readers. to the teacher this book can be only a guide to you. you are to help your students study human nature. you must, to some extent, be a psychologist yourself before you can teach psychology. you must yourself be a close and scientific student of human nature. develop in the students the spirit of inquiry and investigation. teach them to look to their own minds and their neighbor's actions for verification of the statements of the text. let the students solve by observation and experiment the questions and problems raised in the text and the exercises. the exercises should prove to be the most valuable part of the book. the first two chapters are the most difficult but ought to be read before the rest of the book is studied. if you think best, merely read these two chapters with the pupils, and after the book is finished come back to them for careful study. in the references, i have given parallel readings, for the most part to titchener, pillsbury, and münsterberg. i have purposely limited the references, partly because a library will not be available to many who may use the book, and partly because the young student is likely to be confused by much reading from different sources before he has worked out some sort of system and a point of view of his own. only the most capable members of a high school class will be able to profit much from the references given. to the student you are beginning the study of human nature. you can not study human nature from a book, you must study yourself and your neighbors. this book may help you to know what to look for and to understand what you find, but it can do little more than this. it is true, this text gives you many facts learned by psychologists, but you must verify the statements, or at least see their significance to _you_, or they will be of no worth to you. however, the facts considered here, properly understood and assimilated, ought to prove of great value to you. but perhaps of greater value will be the psychological frame of mind or attitude which you should acquire. the psychological attitude is that of seeking to find and understand the _causes of human action, and the causes, consequences, and significance of the processes of the human mind_. if your first course in psychology teaches you to look for these things, gives you some skill in finding them and in using the knowledge after you have it, your study should be quite worth while. w. h. pyle. editor's preface there are at least two possible approaches to the study of psychology by teacher-training students in high schools and by beginning students in normal schools. one of these is through methods of teaching and subject matter. the other aims to give the simple, concrete facts of psychology as the science of the mind. the former presupposes a close relationship between psychology and methods of teaching and assumes that psychology is studied chiefly as an aid to teaching. the latter is less complicated. the plan contemplates the teaching of the simple fundamentals at first and applying them incidentally as the occasion demands. this latter point of view is in the main the point of view taken in the text. the author has taught the material of the text to high school students to the end that he might present the fundamental facts of psychology in simple form. w. w. c. contents page chapter i. introduction chapter ii. development of the race and of the individual chapter iii. mind and body chapter iv. inherited tendencies chapter v. feeling and attention chapter vi. habit chapter vii. memory chapter viii. thinking chapter ix. individual differences chapter x. applied psychology glossary index the science of human nature chapter i introduction =science.= before attempting to define psychology, it will be helpful to make some inquiry into the nature of science in general. science is knowledge; it is what we know. but mere knowledge is not science. for a bit of knowledge to become a part of science, its relation to other bits of knowledge must be found. in botany, for example, bits of knowledge about plants do not make a science of botany. to have a science of botany, we must not only know about leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, etc., but we must know the relations of these parts and of all the parts of a plant to one another. in other words, in science, we must not only _know_, we must not only have _knowledge_, but we must know the significance of the knowledge, must know its _meaning_. this is only another way of saying that we must have knowledge and know its relation to other knowledge. a scientist is one who has learned to organize his knowledge. the main difference between a scientist and one who is not a scientist is that the scientist sees the significance of facts, while the non-scientific man sees facts as more or less unrelated things. as one comes to hunt for causes and inquire into the significance of things, one becomes a scientist. a thing or an event always points beyond itself to something else. this something else is what goes before it or comes after it,--is its cause or its effect. this causal relationship that exists between events enables a scientist to prophesy. by carefully determining what always precedes a certain event, a certain type of happening, a scientist is able to predict the event. all that is necessary to be able to predict an event is to have a clear knowledge of its true causes. whenever, beyond any doubt, these causes are found to be present, the scientist knows the event will follow. of course, all that he really _knows_ is that such results have always followed similar causes in the past. but he has come to have faith in the uniformity and regularity of nature. the chemist does not find sulphur, or oxygen, or any other element acting one way one day under a certain set of conditions, and acting another way the next day under exactly the same conditions. nor does the physicist find the laws of mechanics holding good one day and not the next. the scientist, therefore, in his thinking brings order out of chaos in the world. if we do not know the causes and relations of things and events, the world seems a very mixed-up, chaotic place, where anything and everything is happening. but as we come to know causes and relations, the world turns out to be a very orderly and systematic place. it is a lawful world; it is not a world of chance. everything is related to everything else. now, the non-scientific mind sees things as more or less unrelated. the far-reaching causal relations are only imperfectly seen by it, while the scientific mind not only sees things, but inquires into their causes and effects or consequences. the non-scientific man, walking over the top of a mountain and noticing a stone there, is likely to see in it only a stone and think nothing of how it came to be there; but the scientific man sees quite an interesting bit of history in the stone. he reads in the stone that millions of years ago the place where the rock now lies was under the sea. many marine animals left their remains in the mud underneath the sea. the mud was afterward converted into rock. later, the shrinking and warping earth-crust lifted the rock far above the level of the sea, and it may now be found at the top of the mountain. the one bit of rock tells its story to one who inquires into its causes. the scientific man, then, sees more significance, more meaning, in things and events than does the non-scientific man. each science has its own particular field. zoölogy undertakes to answer every reasonable question about animals; botany, about plants; physics, about motion and forces; chemistry, about the composition of matter; astronomy, about the heavenly bodies, etc. the world has many aspects. each science undertakes to describe and explain some particular aspect. to understand all the aspects of the world, we must study all the sciences. =a scientific law.= by _law_ a scientist has reference to uniformities which he notices in things and events. he does not mean that necessities are imposed upon things as civil law is imposed upon man. he means only that in certain well-defined situations certain events always take place, according to all previous observations. the law of falling bodies may be cited as an example. by this law, the physicist means that in observing falling bodies in the past, he has noticed that they fall about sixteen feet in the first second and acquire in this time a velocity of thirty-two feet. he has noted that, taking into account the specific gravity of the object and the resistance of the air, this way of falling holds true of all objects at about the level of the sea. the more we carefully study the events of the world, the more strongly we come to feel that definite causes, under the same circumstances, always produce precisely the same result. the scientist has faith that events will continue to happen during all the future in the same order of cause and effect in which they have been happening during all the past. the astronomer, knowing the relations of the members of the solar system--the sun and planets--can successfully predict the occurrence of lunar and solar eclipses. in other fields, too, the scientist can predict with as much certainty as does the astronomer, provided his knowledge of the factors concerned is as complete as is the knowledge which the astronomer has of the solar system. even in the case of human beings, uncertain as their actions seem to be, we can predict their actions when our knowledge of the factors is sufficiently complete. in a great many instances we do make such predictions. for example, if we call a person by name, we expect him to turn, or make some other movement in response. our usual inability to make such predictions in the case of human beings is not because human beings are not subject to the law of cause and effect, it is not that their acts are due to chance, but that the factors involved are usually many, and it is difficult for us to find out all of them. =the science of psychology.= now, let us ask, what is the science of psychology? what kind of problems does it try to solve? what aspect of the world has it taken for its field of investigation? we have said that each science undertakes to describe some particular aspect of the world. human psychology is the science of human nature. but human nature has many aspects. to some extent, our bodies are the subject matter for physiology, anatomy, zoölogy, physics, and chemistry. our bodies may be studied in the same way that a rock or a table might be studied. but a human being presents certain problems that a rock or table does not present. if we consider the differences between a human being and a table, we shall see at once the special field of psychology. if we stick a pin into a leg of the table, we get no response. if we stick a pin into a leg of a man, we get a characteristic response. the man moves, he cries out. this shows two very great differences between a man and a table. the man is _sensitive_ and has the power of action, the power of _moving himself_. the table is not sensitive, nor can it move itself. if the pin is thrust into one's own leg, one has _pain_. human beings, then, are sensitive, conscious, acting beings. and the study of sensitivity, action, and consciousness is the field of psychology. these three characteristics are not peculiar to man. many, perhaps all, animals possess them. there is, therefore, an animal psychology as well as human psychology. a study of the human body shows us that the body-surface and many parts within the body are filled with sensitive nerve-ends. these sensitive nerve-ends are the sense organs, and on them the substances and forces of the world are constantly acting. in the sense organs, the nerve-ends are so modified or changed as to be affected by some particular kind of force or substance. vibrations of ether affect the eye. vibrations of air affect the ear. liquids and solutions affect the sense of taste. certain substances affect the sense of smell. certain organs in the skin are affected by low temperatures; others, by high temperatures; others, by mechanical pressure. similarly, each sense organ in the body is affected by a definite kind of force or substance. this affecting of a sense organ is known technically as _stimulation_, and that which affects the organ is known as the _stimulus_. two important consequences ordinarily follow the stimulation of a sense organ. one of these is movement. the purpose of stimulation is to bring about movement. to be alive is to respond to stimulation. when one ceases to respond to stimulation, he is dead. if we are to continue alive, we must constantly adjust ourselves to the forces of the world in which we live. generally speaking, we may say that every nerve has one end in a sense organ and the other in a muscle. this arrangement of the nerves and muscles shows that man is essentially a sensitive-action machine. the problems connected with sensitivity and action and the relation of each to the other constitute a large part of the field of psychology. we said just now, that a nerve begins in a sense organ and ends in a muscle. this statement represents the general scheme well enough, but leaves out an important detail. the nerve does not extend directly to a muscle, but ordinarily goes by way of the brain. the brain is merely a great group of nerve cells and fibers which have developed as a central organ where a stimulation may pass from almost any sense organ to almost any muscle. but another importance attaches to the brain. when a sense organ is stimulated and this stimulation passes on to the brain and agitates a cell or group of cells there, _we are conscious_. consciousness shifts and changes with every shift and change of the stimulation. the brain has still another important characteristic. after it has been stimulated through sense organ and nerve, a similar brain activity can be revived later, and this revival is the basis of _memory_. when the brain is agitated through the medium of a sense organ, we have _sensation_; when this agitation is revived later, we have a _memory idea_. a study of consciousness, or mind, the conditions under which it arises, and all the other problems involved, give us the other part of the field of psychology. we are not merely acting beings; we are _conscious_ acting beings. psychology must study human nature from both points of view. we must study man not only from the outside; that is, objectively, in the same way that we study a stone or a tree or a frog, but we must study him from the inside or subjectively. it is of importance to know not only how a man _acts_, but also how he _thinks and feels_. it must be clear now, that human action, human behavior, is the main field of psychology. for, even though our main interests in people were in their minds, we could learn of the minds only through the actions. but our interests in other human beings are not in their minds but in _what they do_. it is true that our interest in ourselves is in our minds, and we can know these minds directly; but we cannot know directly the mind of another person, we can only guess what it is from the person's actions. =the problems of psychology.= let us now see, in some detail, what the various problems of psychology are. if we are to understand human nature, we must know something of man's past; we must therefore treat of the origin and development of the human race. the relation of one generation to that preceding and to the one following makes necessary a study of heredity. we must find out how our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas are dependent upon a physical body and its organs. a study of human actions shows that some actions are unlearned while others are learned or acquired. the unlearned acts are known as _instincts_ and the acquired acts are known as _habits_. our psychology must, therefore, treat of instincts and habits. how man gets experience, and retains and organizes this experience must be our problem in the chapters on sensations, ideas, memory, and thinking. individual differences in human capacity make necessary a treatment of the different types and grades of intelligence, and the compilation of tests for determining these differences. we must also treat of the application of psychology to those fields where a knowledge of human nature is necessary. =applied psychology.= at the beginning of a subject it is legitimate to inquire concerning the possibility of applying the principles studied to practical uses, and it is very proper to make this inquiry concerning psychology. psychology, being the science of human nature, ought to be of use in all fields where one needs to know the causes of human action. and psychology is applicable in these fields to the extent that the psychologist is able to work out the laws and principles of human action. in education, for example, we wish to influence children, and we must go to psychology to learn about the nature of children and to find out how we can influence them. psychology is therefore the basis of the science of education. since different kinds of work demand, in some cases, different kinds of ability, the psychology of individual differences can be of service in selecting people for special kinds of work. that is to say, we must have sometime, if we do not now, a psychology of professions and vocations. psychological investigations of the reliability of human evidence make the science of service in the court room. the study of the laws of attention and interest give us the psychology of advertising. the study of suggestion and abnormal states make psychology of use in medicine. it may be said, therefore, that psychology, once abstract and unrelated to any practical interests, will become the most useful of all sciences, as it works out its problems and finds the laws of human behavior. at present, the greatest service of psychology is to education. so true is this that a department has grown up called "educational psychology," which constitutes at the present time the most important subdivision of psychology. while in this book we treat briefly of the various applications of psychology, we shall have in mind chiefly its application to education. =the science of education.= owing to the importance which psychology has in the science of education, it will be well for us to make some inquiry into the nature of education. if the growth, development, and learning of children are all controlled and determined by definite causal factors, then a systematic statement of all these factors would constitute the science of education. in order to see clearly whether there is such a science, or whether there can be, let us inquire more definitely as to the kind of problems a science of education would be expected to solve. there are four main questions which the science of education must solve: ( ) what is the aim of education? ( ) what is the nature of education? ( ) what is the nature of the child? ( ) what are the most economical methods of changing the child from what it is into what it ought to be? the first question is a sociological question, and it is not difficult to find the answer. we have but to inquire what the people wish their children to become. there is a pretty general agreement, at least in the same community, that children should be trained in a way that will make them socially efficient. parents generally wish their children to become honest, truthful, sympathetic, and industrious. it should be the aim of education to accomplish this social ideal. it should be the aim of the home and the school to subject children to such influences as will enable them to make a living when grown and to do their proper share of work for the community and state, working always for better things, and having a sympathetic attitude toward neighbors. education should also do what it can to make people able to enjoy the world and life to the fullest and highest extent. some such aim of education as this is held by all our people. the second question is also answered. psychological analysis reveals the fact that education is a process of becoming adjusted to the world. it is the process of acquiring the habits, knowledge, and ideals suited to the life we are to live. the child in being educated learns what the world is and how to act in it--how to act in all the various situations of life. the third question--concerning the nature of the child--cannot be so briefly answered. in fact, it cannot be fully answered at the present time. we must know what the child's original nature is. this means that we must know the instincts and all the other inherited capacities and tendencies. we must know the laws of building up habits and of acquiring knowledge, the laws of retention and the laws of attention. these problems constitute the subject matter of educational psychology, and at present can be only partially solved. we have, however, a very respectable body of knowledge in this field, though it is by no means complete. the answer to the fourth question is in part dependent upon the progress in answering the third. economical methods of training children must be dependent upon the nature of children. but in actual practice, we are trying to find out the best procedure of doing each single thing in school work; we are trying to find out by experimentation. the proper way to teach children to read, to spell, to write, etc., must be determined in each case by independent investigation, until our knowledge of the child becomes sufficient for us to infer from general laws of procedure what the procedure in a particular case should be. we venture to infer what ought to be done in some cases, but generally we feel insecure till we have proved our inference correct by trying out different methods and measuring the results. education will not be fully scientific till we have definite knowledge to guide us at every step. what should we teach? when should we teach it? how should we teach it? how poorly we answer these questions at the present time! how inefficient and uneconomical our schools, because we cannot fully answer them! but they are answerable. we can answer them in part now, and we know how to find out the answer in full. it is just a matter of patient and extensive investigation. we must say, then, that we have only the beginnings of a science of education. the problems which a science of education must solve are almost wholly psychological problems. they could not be solved till we had a science of psychology. experimental psychology is but a half-century old; educational psychology, less than a quarter-century old. in the field of education, the science of psychology may expect to make its most important practical contribution. let us, then, consider very briefly the problems of educational psychology. =educational psychology.= educational psychology is that division of psychology which undertakes to discover those aspects of human nature most closely related to education. these are ( ) the original nature of the child--what it is and how it can be modified; ( ) the problem of acquiring and organizing experience--habit-formation, memory, thinking, and the various factors related to these processes. there are many subordinate problems, such as the problem of individual differences and their bearing on the education of subnormal and supernormal children. educational psychology is not, then, merely the application of psychology to education. it is a distinct science in itself, and its aim is the solving of those educational problems which for their solution depend upon a knowledge of the nature of the child. =the method of psychology.= we have enumerated the various problems of psychology, now how are they solved? the method of psychology is the same as that of all other sciences; namely, the method of observation and experiment. we learn human nature by observing how human beings act in all the various circumstances of life. we learn about the human mind by observing our own mind. we learn that we _see_ under certain objective conditions, _hear_ under certain objective conditions, _taste_, _smell_, _feel cold_ and _warm_ under certain objective conditions. in the case of ourselves, we can know both our _actions_ and our _mind_. in the case of others, we can know only their _actions_, and must infer their mental states from our own in similar circumstances. with certain restrictions and precautions this inference is legitimate. we said the method of psychology is that of observation and experiment. the experiment is observation still, but observation subjected to exact methodical procedure. in a psychological experiment we set out to provide the necessary conditions, eliminating some and supplying others according to our object. the experiment has certain advantages. it enables us to isolate the phenomena to be studied, it enables us to vary the circumstances and conditions to suit our purposes, it enables us to repeat the observation as often as we like, and it enables us to measure exactly the factors of the phenomena studied. =a psychological experiment.= let us illustrate psychological method by a typical experiment. suppose we wish to measure the individual differences among the members of a class with respect to a certain ability; namely, the muscular speed of the right hand. psychological laboratories have delicate apparatus for making such a study. but let us see how we can do it, roughly at least, without any apparatus. let each member of the class take a sheet of paper and a pencil, and make as many strokes as possible in a half-minute, as shown in figure i. the instructor can keep the time with a stop watch, or less accurately with the second hand of an ordinary watch. before beginning the experiment, the instructor should have each student taking the test try it for a second or two. this is to make sure that all understand what they are to do. when the instructor is sure that all understand, he should have the students hold their pencils in readiness above the paper, and at the signal, "begin," all should start at the same time and make as many marks as possible in the half-minute. the strokes can then be counted and the individual scores recorded. the experiment should be repeated several times, say six or eight, and the average score for each individual recorded. [illustration: figure i.--strokes made in thirty seconds a test of muscular speed] whether the result in such a performance as this varies from day to day, and is accidental, or whether it is constant and fundamental, can be determined by repeating the experiment from day to day. this repetition will also show whether improvement comes from practice. if it is decided to repeat the experiment in order to study these factors, constancy and the effects of practice, some method of studying and interpreting the results must be found. elaborate methods of doing this are known to psychologists, but the beginner must use a simpler method. when the experiment is performed for the first time, the students can be ranked with reference to their abilities, the fastest one being called "first," the second highest, "second," and so on down to the slowest performer. then after the experiment has been performed the second time, the students can be again ranked. a rough comparison can then be made as follows: determine how many who were in the best half in the first experiment are among the best half in the second experiment. if most who were among the best half the first time are among the best half in the second experiment, constancy in this performance is indicated. or we might determine how many change their ranks and how much they change. suppose there are thirty in the class and only four improve their ranks and these to the extent of only two places each. this would indicate a high degree of constancy. two different performances can be compared as above described. the abilities on successive days can be determined by taking the average rank of the first day and comparing it with the average rank of the second day. if the effects of practice are to be studied, the experiments must be kept up for many days, and each student's work on the first day compared with his work on succeeding days. then a graph can be plotted to show the improvement from day to day. the average daily speed of the class can be taken and a graph made to show the improvement of the class as a whole. this might be plotted in black ink, then each individual student could put on his improvement in red ink, for comparison. a group of thirty may be considered as furnishing a fair average or norm in this kind of performance. in connection with this simple performance, making marks as fast as possible, it is evident that many problems arise. it would take several months to solve anything like all of them. it might be interesting, for example, to determine whether one's speed in writing is related to this simple speed in marking. each member of the class might submit a plan for making such a study. the foregoing simple study illustrates the procedure of psychology in all experimentation. a psychological experiment is an attempt to find out the truth in regard to some aspect of human nature. in finding out this truth, we must throw about the experiment all possible safeguards. every source of error must be discovered and eliminated. in the above experiment, for example, the work must be done at the same time of day, or else we must prove that doing it at different times of day makes no difference. nothing must be taken for granted, and nothing must be assumed. psychology, then, is like all the other sciences, in that its method of getting its facts is by observation and experiment. summary. science is systematic, related knowledge. each science has a particular field which it attempts to explore and describe. the field of psychology is the study of sensitivity, action, and consciousness, or briefly, human behavior. its main problems are development, heredity, instincts, habits, sensation, memory, thinking, and individual differences. its method is observation and experiment, the same as in all other sciences. class exercises . make out a list of things about human nature which you would like to know. paste your list in the front of this book, and as you find your questions answered in this book, or in other books which you may read, check them off. at the end of the course, note how many remain unanswered. find out whether those not answered can be answered at the present time. . does everything you do have a cause? what kind of cause? . human nature is shown in human action. human action consists in muscular contraction. what makes a muscle contract? . plan an experiment the object of which shall be to learn something about yourself. . enumerate the professions and occupations in which a knowledge of some aspect of human nature would be valuable. state in what way it would be valuable. . make a list of facts concerning a child, which a teacher ought to know. . make a complete outline of chapter i. references for class reading mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, chapters i, ii, and v. pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapter i. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapter i. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapter i. chapter ii development of the race and of the individual =racial development.= the purpose of this chapter is to make some inquiry concerning the origin of the race and of the individual. in doing this, it is necessary for us first of all to fix in our minds the idea of causality. according to the view of all modern science, everything has a cause. nothing is uncaused. one event is the result of other previous events, and is in turn the cause of other events that follow. yesterday flowed into to-day, and to-day flows into to-morrow. the world as it exists to-day is the result of the world as it existed yesterday. this is true not only of the inorganic world--the world of physics and chemistry--but it is true of living things as well. the animals and plants that exist to-day are the descendants of others that lived before. there is probably an unbroken line of descent from the first life that existed on the earth to the living forms of to-day. not only does the law of causality hold true in the case of our bodies, but of our minds as well. our minds have doubtless developed from simpler minds just as our bodies have developed from simpler bodies. that different grades and types of minds are to be found among the various classes of animals now upon the earth, no one can doubt, for the different forms certainly show different degrees of mentality. according to the evidence of those scientists who have studied the remains of animals found in the earth's crust, there is a gradual development of animal forms shown in successive epochs. in the very oldest parts of the earth's crust, the remains of animal life found are very simple. in later formations, the remains show an animal life more complex. the highest forms of animals, the mammals, are found only in the more recent formations. the remains of man are found only in the latest formations. putting these two facts together--( ) that the higher types of mind are found to-day only in the higher types of animals, and ( ) that a gradual development of animal forms is shown by the remains in the earth's crust--the conclusion is forced upon us that mind has passed through many stages of development from the appearance of life upon the earth to the present time. among the lower forms of animals to-day one sees evidence of very simple minds. in amoebas, worms, insects, and fishes, mind is very simple. in birds, it is higher. in mammals, it is higher still. among the highest mammals below man, we see manifestations of mind somewhat like our own. these grades of mentality shown in the animals of to-day represent the steps in the development of mind in the animals of the past. we cannot here go into the proof of the doctrine of development. for this proof, the reader must be referred to zoölogy. one further point, however, may be noted. if it is difficult for the reader to conceive of the development of mind on the earth similar to the development of animals in the past, let him think of the development of mind in the individual. there can certainly be no doubt of the development of mind in an individual human being. the infant, when born, shows little manifestation of mentality; but as its body grows, its mind develops, becoming more and more complex as the individual grows to maturity. =the world as dynamic.= the view of the world outlined above, and held by all scientific men of the present time, may be termed the _dynamic_ view. man formerly looked upon the world as static, a world where everything was fixed and final. each thing existed in itself and for itself, and in large measure independent of all other things. we now look upon things and events as related and dependent. each thing is dependent upon others, related to others. man not only _lives in_ such a world, but is _part of_ such a world. in this world of constant and ceaseless change, man is most sensitive and responsive. everything may affect him. to all of the constant changes about him he must adjust himself. he has been produced by this world, and to live in it he must meet its every condition and change. we must, then, look upon human nature as something coming out of the past and as being influenced every moment by the things and forces of the present. man is not an independent being, unaffected by everything that happens; on the contrary, he is affected by all influences that act upon him. among these influences may be mentioned weather, climate, food, and social forces. the condition of the various organs of a child's body determine, to some extent, the effect which these various forces have upon it. if a child's eyes are in any way defective, making vision poor, this tremendously influences his life. not only is such a child unable to see the world as it really is, but the eyestrain resulting from poor vision has serious effects on the child, producing all sorts of disorders. if a child cannot hear well or is entirely deaf, many serious consequences follow. in fact, every condition or characteristic of a child that is in any way abnormal may lead on to other conditions and characteristics, often of a serious nature. the growth of adenoids, for example, may lead to a serious impairment of the mind. poor vision may affect the whole life and character of the individual. the influence of a parent, teacher, or friend may determine the interest of a child and affect his whole life. the correct view of child life is that the child is affected, in greater or less degree, by every influence which acts upon him. =significance of development and causality.= what are the consequences of the view just set forth? what is the significance of the facts that have been enumerated? it is of great consequence to our thinking when we come to recognize fully the idea of causality. we then fully accept the fact that man's body and mind are part of a causal and orderly world. let us consider, for example, the movement of a muscle. every such movement must be caused. the physiologist has discovered what this cause is. ordinarily and normally, a muscle contracts only when stimulated by a nerve current. tiny nerve fibrils penetrate every muscle, ending in the muscle fibers. the nerve-impulse passing into the fibers of the muscles causes them to contract. the nerve stimulus itself has a cause; it ordinarily arises directly or indirectly from the stimulation of a sense organ. and the sense organs are stimulated by outside influences, as was explained previously. not only are our movements caused, but our sensations, our ideas, and our feelings follow upon or are dependent upon some definite bodily state or condition. the moment that we recognize this we see that our sensations, ideas, and feelings are subject to control. it is only because our minds are in a world of causality, and subject to its laws, that education is possible. we can bring causes to bear upon a child and change the child. it is possible to build up ideas, ideals, and habits. and ideas, ideals, and habits constitute the man. training is possible only because a child is a being that can be influenced. what any child will be when grown depends upon what kind of child it was at the beginning and upon the influences that affect it during its early life while it is growing into maturity. we need have no doubt about the outcome of any particular child if we know, with some degree of completeness, the two sets of factors that determine his life--his inheritance and the forces that affect this inheritance. we can predict the future of a child to the extent that we know and understand the forces that will be effective in his life. the notion of causality puts new meaning into our view of the _training_ of a child. the doctrine of development puts new meaning into our notion of the _nature_ of a child. we can understand man only when we view him genetically, that is, in the light of his origin. we can understand a child only in the light of what his ancestors have been. as these lines are being written, the greatest, the bloodiest war of history is in progress. men are killing men by thousands and hundreds of thousands. how can we explain such actions? observation of children shows that they are selfish, envious, and quarrelsome. they will fight and steal until they are taught not to do such things. how can we understand this? there is no way of understanding such actions until we come to see that the children and men of to-day are such as they are because of their ancestors. it has been only a few generations, relatively speaking, since our ancestors were naked savages, killing their enemies and eating their enemies' bodies. the civilized life of our ancestors covers a period of only a few hundred years. the pre-civilized life of our ancestors goes back probably thousands and thousands of years. in the relatively short period of civilization, our real, original nature has been little changed, perhaps none at all. the modern man is, at heart, the same old man of the woods. the improvements of civilization form what is called a social heritage, which must be impressed upon the original nature of each individual in order to have any effect. every child has to learn to speak, to write, to dress, to eat with knife and fork; he must learn the various social customs, and to act morally as older people dictate. the child is by nature bad, in the sense that the nature which he inherits from the past fits him better for the original kind of life which man used to live than it does for the kind of life which we are trying to live now. this view makes us see that training a child is, in a very true sense, _making him over again_. the child must be trained to subdue and control his original impulses. habits and ideals that will be suitable for life in civilized society _must be built up_. the doctrine of the bible in regard to the original nature of man being sinful, and the necessity of regeneration, is fundamentally correct. but this regeneration is not so much a sudden process as it is the result of long and patient building-up of habits and ideals. one should not despair of this view of child-life. neither should one use it as an excuse for being bad, or for neglecting the training of children. on the contrary, taking the genetic view of childhood should give us certain advantages. it makes us see more clearly the _necessity_ of training. every child must be trained, or he will remain very much a savage. in the absence of training, all children are much alike, and all alike bad from our present point of view. the chief differences in children in politeness and manners generally, in morals, in industry, etc., are due, in the main, to differences in training. it is a great help merely to know how difficult the task of training is, and that training there must be if we are to have a civilized child. we must take thought and plan for the education and training of our children. the task of education is in part one of changing human nature. this is no light task. it is one that requires, in the case of each child, some twenty years of hard, patient, persistent work. =individual development.= heredity is a corollary of evolution. individual development is intimately related to racial development. indeed, racial development would be impossible without heredity in the individual. the individual must carry on and transmit what the race hands down to him. this will be evident when we explain what heredity means. by heredity we mean the likeness between parent and offspring. this likeness is a matter of form and structure as well as likeness of action or response. animals and plants are like the parents in form and structure, and to a certain extent their responses are alike when the individuals are placed in the same situation. a robin is like the parent robins in size, shape, and color. it also hops like the parent birds, sings as they do, feeds as they do, builds a similar nest, etc. but the likeness in action is dependent upon likeness in structure. the young robin acts as does the old robin, because the nervous mechanism is the same, and therefore a similar stimulus brings about a similar response. most of the scientific work in heredity has been done in the study of the transmission of physical characteristics. the main facts of heredity are evident to everybody, but not many people realize how far-reaching is the principle of resemblance between parent and offspring. from horses we raise horses. from cows we raise cows. the children of human beings are human. not only is this true, but the offspring of horses are of the same stock as the parents. not only are the colts of the same stock as the parents, but they resemble the parents in small details. this is also true of human beings. we expect a child to be not only of the same race as the parents, but to have family resemblances to the parents--the same color of hair, the same shape of head, the same kind of nose, the same color of eyes, and to have such resemblances as moles in the same places on the skin, etc. a very little investigation reveals likenesses between parent and offspring which we may not have expected before. however, if we start out to hunt for facts of heredity, we shall perhaps be as much impressed by differences between parent and child as we shall by the resemblances. in the first place, every child has two parents, and it is often impossible to resemble both. one cannot, for example, be both short and tall; one cannot be both fair and dark; one cannot be both slender and heavy; one cannot have both brown eyes and blue. in some cases, the child resembles one parent and not the other. in other cases, the child looks somewhat like both parents but not exactly like either. if one parent is white and the other black, the child is neither as white as the one parent nor as black as the other. the parents of a child are themselves different, but there are four grandparents, and each of them different from the others. there are eight great grandparents, and all of them different. if we go back only seven generations, covering a period of perhaps only a hundred and fifty years, we have one hundred and twenty-eight ancestors. if we go back ten generations, we have over a thousand ancestors in our line of descent. each of these people was, in some measure, different from the others. our inheritance comes from all of them and from each of them. how do all of these diverse characteristics work out in the child? in the first place, it seems evident that we do not inherit our bodies as wholes, but in parts or units. we may think of the human race as a whole being made up of a great number of unit characters. no one person possesses all of them. every person is lacking in some of them. his neighbor may be lacking in quite different ones. now one parent transmits to the child a certain combination of unit characters; the other parent, a different combination. these characteristics may not all appear in the child, but all are transmitted through it to the next generation, and they are transmitted purely. by being transmitted purely, we mean that the characteristic does not seem to lose its identity and disappear in fusions or mixtures. the essential point in this doctrine of heredity is known as mendelism; it is the principle of inheritance through the pure transmission of unit characters. an illustration will probably make the mendelian principle clear. let us select our illustration from the plant world. it is found that if white and yellow corn are crossed, all the corn the first year, resulting from this crossing, will be yellow. now, if this hybrid yellow corn is planted the second year, and freely cross-fertilized, it turns out that one fourth of it will be white and three fourths yellow. but this yellow consists of three parts: one part being pure yellow which will breed true, producing nothing but yellow; the other two parts transmit white and yellow in equal ratio. that is to say, these two parts are hybrids, the result of crossing white with yellow. it is not meant that one can actually distinguish these two kinds of yellow, the pure yellow and the hybrid yellow, but the results from planting it show that one third of the yellow is pure and that the other two thirds transmit white and yellow in equal ratio. the main point to notice in all this is that when two individuals having diverse characteristics are crossed, the characteristics do not fuse and disappear ultimately, but that the two characteristics are transmitted in equal ratio, and each will appear in succeeding generations, and will appear pure, just as if it had not been crossed with something different. the first offspring resulting from the cross--known as hybrids--may show either one or the other of the diverse characteristics, or, when such a thing is possible, even a blending of the two characteristics. but whatever the actual appearance of the first generation of offspring resulting from crossing parents having diverse characteristics, their germ-cells transmit the diverse characteristics in equal proportion, as explained above. when one of the diverse characteristics appears in the first generation of offspring and the other does not appear, or is not apparent, the one that appears is said to be _dominant_, while the one not appearing is said to be _recessive_. in our example of the yellow and white corn, yellow is dominant and white recessive. and it must be remembered that the white corn that appears in the second generation will breed true just as if it had never been crossed with the yellow corn. one third of the yellow of the second generation would also breed true if it could be separated from the other two thirds. it is not here claimed that mendelism is a universal principle, that all characteristics are transmitted in this way. however, the results of the numerous experiments in heredity lead one to expect this to be the case. most of the experiments have been with lower animals and with plants, but recent experiments and statistical studies show that mendelism is an important factor in human heredity, in such characteristics as color of hair and eyes and skin, partial color blindness, defects of eye, ear, and other important organs. the studies that have been made of human heredity have been, for the most part, studies of the transmission of physical characteristics. very little has been done that bears directly upon the transmission of mental characteristics. but our knowledge of the dependence of mind upon body should prepare us to infer mental heredity from physical heredity. such studies as throw light on the question bear us out in making such an inference. the studies that have been more directly concerned with mental heredity are those dealing with the resemblances of twins, studies of heredity in royalty, studies of the inheritance of genius, and studies of the transmission of mental defects and defects of sense organs. the results of all these studies indicate the inheritance of mental characteristics in the same way that physical characteristics are transmitted. not only are human mental characteristics transmitted from parent to offspring, but they seem to be transmitted in mendelian fashion. feeble-mindedness, for example, seems to be a mendelian character and recessive. from the studies that have been made, it seems that two congenitally feeble-minded parents will have only feeble-minded children. feeble-mindedness acts in heredity as does the white corn in the example given above. if one parent only is feeble-minded, the other being normal, all of the children will be normal, just as all of the corn, in the first generation after the crossing, was yellow. but these children whose parents are the one normal and the other feeble-minded, while themselves normal, transmit feeble-mindedness in equal ratio with normality. it works out as follows: if a feeble-minded person marry a person of sound mind and sound stock, the children will all be of sound, normal mind. if these children take as husbands and wives men and women who had for parents one normal and one feeble-minded person, their children will be one fourth feeble-minded and three fourths of them normal. to summarize the various conditions: if a feeble-minded person marry a feeble-minded person, all the children will be feeble-minded. if a feeble-minded person marry a sound, normal person (pure stock), all the children will be normal. if the children, in the last case, marry others like themselves as to origin, one fourth of their offspring will be feeble-minded. if such hybrid children marry feeble-minded persons, one half of the offspring will be feeble-minded. it is rash to prophesy, but future studies of heredity may show that mendelism, or some modification of the principle, always holds true of mind as well as of body. little can be said about the transmission of particular definite mental traits, such as the various aspects of memory, association, attention, temperament, etc. before we can speak with any certainty here, we must make very careful experimental studies of these mental traits in parents and offspring. no such work has been done. all we have at the present time is the result of general observation. =improvement of the race.= eugenics is the science of improvement of the human race by breeding. while we can train children and thereby make them much better than they would be without such training, this training does not improve the stock. the improvement of the stock can be accomplished only through breeding from the best and preventing the poor stock from leaving offspring. this is a well-known principle in the breeding of domestic animals. it is doubtless just as true in the case of human beings. the hygienic and scientific rearing of children is good for the children and makes their lives better, but probably does not affect their offspring. we should not forget that all the social and educational influences die with the generation that receives them. they must be impressed by training on the next generation or that generation will receive no influence from them. the characters which we acquire in our lifetime seem not to be transmitted to our children, except through what is known as social heredity, which is merely the taking on of characteristics through imitation. our children must go through all the labor of learning to read, write, spell, add, multiply, subtract, and divide, which we went through. moral traits, manners and customs, and other habits and ideals of social importance must be acquired by each successive generation. =heredity _versus_ environment.= the question is often asked whether heredity or the influence of environment has the most to do with the final outcome of one's life. it is a rather useless question to ask, for what a human being or anything else in the world does depends upon what it is itself and what the things and forces are that act upon it. heredity sets a limitation for us, fixes the possibilities. the circumstances of life determine what we will do with our inherited abilities and characteristics. hereditary influences incline us to be tall or short, fat or lean, light or dark. the characteristics of our memory, association, imagination, our learning capacity, etc., are determined by heredity. of course, how far these various aspects develop is to some extent dependent upon the favorable or unfavorable influences of the environment. what is possible for us to do is settled by heredity; what we may actually do, what we may have the opportunity to do, is largely a matter of the circumstances of life. in certain parts of new england, the number of men who become famous in art, science, or literature is very great compared to the number in some other parts of our country. as far as we have any evidence, the native stocks are the same in the two cases, but in new england the influences turn men into the direction of science, art, and literature. everything there is favorable. in other parts of the country, the influences turn men into other spheres of activity. they become large landowners, men of business and affairs. the question may be asked whether genius makes its way to the front in spite of unfavorable circumstances. sometimes it doubtless does. but pugnacity and perseverance are not necessarily connected with intellectual genius. genius may be as likely to be timid as belligerent. therefore unfavorable circumstances may crush many a genius. the public schools ought to be on the watch for genius in any and all kinds of work. when a genius is found, proper training ought to be provided to develop this genius for the good of society as well as for the good of the individual himself. a few children show ability in drawing and painting, others in music, others in mechanical invention, some in literary construction. when it is found that this ability is undoubtedly a native gift and not a passing whim, special opportunity should be provided for its development and training. it will be better for the general welfare, as well as for individual happiness, if each does in life that for which he is by nature best fitted. for most of us, however, there is not much difference in our abilities. we can do one thing as well as we can many other things. but in a few there are undoubted special native gifts. summary. this is an orderly world, in which everything has a cause. all events are connected in a chain of causes and effects. human beings live in this world of natural law and are subject to it. human life is completely within this world of law and order and is a part of it. education is possible only because we can change human beings by having influences act upon them. individuals receive their original traits from their ancestors, probably as parts or units. mendelism is the doctrine of the pure transmission of unit characters. eugenics is the science of improving the human race by selective breeding. an individual's life is the result of the interaction of his hereditary characteristics and his environment. class exercises . try to find rock containing the remains of animals. you can get information on such matters from a textbook on geology. . read in a geology about the different geological epochs in the history of the earth. . make a comparison of the length of infancy in the lower animals and in man. what is the significance of what you find? what advantage does it give man? . what is natural selection? how does it lead to change in animals? does natural selection still operate among human beings? (see a modern textbook on zoölogy.) . by observation and from consulting a zoölogy, learn about the different classes of animal forms, from low forms to high forms. . by studying domestic animals, see what you can learn about heredity. enumerate all the points that you find bearing upon heredity. . in a similar way, make a study of heredity in your family. consider such characteristics as height, weight, shape of head, shape of nose, hair and eye color. can you find any evidence of the inheritance of mental traits? . make a complete outline of chapter ii. references for class reading davenport: _heredity in relation to eugenics_. kellicott: _the social direction of human evolution_. chapter iii mind and body =gross dependence.= the relation of mind to body has always been an interesting one to man. this is partly because of the connection of the question with that of life after death. an old idea of this relation, almost universally held till recently, was that the mind or spirit lived in the body but was more or less independent of the body. the body has been looked upon as a hindrance to the mind or spirit. science knows nothing about the existence of spirits apart from bodies. the belief that after death the mind lives on is a matter of faith and not of science. whether one believes in an existence of the mind after death of the body, depends on one's religious faith. there is no scientific evidence one way or the other. the only mind that science knows anything about is bound up very closely with body. this is not saying that there is no existence of spirit apart from body, but that at present such existence is beyond the realm of science. the dependence of mind upon body in a general way is evident to every one, upon the most general observation and thought. we know the effect on the mind of disease, of good health, of hunger, of fatigue, of overwork, of severe bodily injury, of blindness or deafness. we have, perhaps, seen some one struck upon the head by a club, or run over by an automobile, and have noted the tremendous consequences to the person's mind. in such cases it sometimes happens that, as far as we can see, there is no longer any mind in connection with that body. the most casual observation, then, shows that mind and body are in some way most intimately related. =finer dependence.= let us note this relation more in detail, and, in particular, see just which part of the body it is that is connected with the mind. first of all, we note the dependence of mind upon sense organs. we see only with our eyes. if we close the eyelids, we cannot see. if we are born blind, or if injury or disease destroys the retinas of the eyes or makes the eyes opaque so that light cannot pass through to the retinas, then we cannot see. similarly, we hear only by means of the ears. if we are born deaf, or if injury destroys some important part of the hearing mechanism, then we cannot hear. in like manner, we taste only by means of the taste organs in the mouth, and smell only with the organs of smell in the nose. in a word, our primary knowledge of the world comes only through the sense organs. we shall see presently just how this sensing or perceiving is accomplished. =dependence of mind on nerves and brain.= we have seen how in a general way the mind is dependent on the body. we have seen how in a more intimate way it is dependent on the special sense organs. but the part of the body to which the mind is most directly and intimately related is the nervous system. the sense organs themselves are merely modifications of the nerve ends together with certain mechanisms for enabling stimuli to act on the nerve ends. the eye is merely the optic nerve spread out to form the retina and modified in certain ways to make it sensitive to ether vibrations. in addition to this, there is, of course, the focusing mechanism of the eye. so for all the sense organs; they are, each of them, some sort of modification of nerve-endings which makes them sensitive to some particular force or substance. let us make the matter clear by an illustration. suppose i see a picture on the wall. my eyes are directed toward the picture. light from the picture is refracted within the eyes, forming an image on each retina. the retina is sensitive to the light. the light produces chemical changes on the retina. these changes set up an excitation in the optic nerves, which is conducted to a certain place in the brain, causing an excitation in the brain. now the important point is that when this excitation is going on in the brain, _we are conscious, we see the picture_. as far as science can determine, we do not see, nor hear, nor taste, nor smell, nor have any other sensation unless a sense organ is excited and produces the excitation in the brain. there can be no doubt about our primary, sensory experience. by primary, sensory experience is meant our immediate, direct knowledge of any aspect of the world. in this field of our conscious life, we are entirely dependent upon sense organs and nerves and brain. injuries to the eyes destroying their power to perform their ordinary work, or injuries to the optic nerve or to the visual center in the brain, make it impossible for us to see. these facts are so self-evident that it seems useless to state them. one has but to hold his hands before his eyes to convince himself that the mind sees by means of eyes, which are physical sense organs. one has but to hold his hands tight over his ears to find out that he hears by means of ears--again, physical sense organs. but simple and self-evident as the facts are, their acceptance must have tremendous consequences to our thinking, and to our view of human nature. if the mind is dependent in every feature on the body with its sense organs, this must give to this body and its sense organs an importance in our thought and scheme of things that they did not have before. this close dependence of mind upon body must give to the body a place in our scheme of education that it would not have under any other view of the mind. we wish to emphasize here that this statement of the close relation of the mind and body is not a theory which one may accept or not. it is a simple statement of fact. it is a presupposition of psychology. by "presupposition" is meant a fundamental principle which the psychologist always has in mind. it is axiomatic, and has the same place in psychology that axioms have in mathematics. all explanations of the working of the mind must be stated in terms of nerve and brain action, and stimulation of sense organs. since the sense organs are the primary and fundamental organs through which we get experience, and since the sensations are the elementary experiences out of which all mental life is built, it is necessary for us to have a clear idea of the sense organs, their structure and functions, and of the nature of sensations. =vision.= _the visual sense organs._ the details of the anatomy of the eye can be looked up in a physiological textbook. the essential principles are very simple. the eye is made on the principle of a photographer's camera. the retina corresponds to the sensitive plate of the camera. the light coming from objects toward which the eyes are directed is focused on the retina, forming there an image of the object. the light thus focused on the retina sets up a chemical change in the delicate nerve tissue; this excitation is transmitted through the optic nerve to the occipital (back) part of the brain, and sets up brain action there. then we have visual sensation; we see the object. the different colors that we see are dependent upon the vibration frequency of the ether. the higher frequencies give us the colors blue and green, and the lower frequencies give us the colors yellow and red. the intermediate frequencies give us the intermediate colors blue-green and orange. by vibration frequencies is meant the rate at which the ether vibrates, the number of vibrations a second. if the reader wishes to know something about these frequencies, such information can be found in a textbook on physics. it will be found that the vibration rates of the ether are very great. it is only within a certain range of vibration frequency that sunlight affects the retina. slower rates of vibration than that producing red do not affect the eye, and faster than that producing violet do not affect the eye. the lightness and darkness of a color are dependent upon the intensity of the vibration. red, for example, is produced by a certain vibration frequency. the more intense the vibration, the brighter the red; the less intense, the darker the red. when all the vibration frequencies affect the eyes at the same time, we see no color at all but only brightness. this is due to the fact that certain vibration frequencies neutralize each other in their effect on the retina, so far as producing color is concerned. red neutralizes green, blue neutralizes yellow, violet neutralizes yellowish green, orange neutralizes bluish green. all variations in vision as far as color and brightness are concerned are due to variations in the stimulus. changes in vibration frequency give the different colors. changes in intensity give the different brightnesses: black, gray, and white. all explanations of the many interesting phenomena of vision are to be sought in the physiological action of the eye. besides the facts of color and light and shade, already mentioned, some further interesting visual phenomena may be mentioned here. _visual contrast._ every color makes objects near it take on the antagonistic or complementary color. red makes objects near appear green, green makes them appear red. blue makes near objects appear yellow, while yellow makes them appear blue. orange induces greenish blue, and greenish blue induces orange. violet induces yellowish green, and yellowish green induces violet. these color-pairs are known as antagonistic or complementary colors. each one of a pair enhances the effect of its complementary when the two colors are brought close together. in a similar way, light and dark tints act as complementaries. light objects make dark objects near appear darker, and dark objects make light objects near seem lighter. these universal principles of contrast are of much practical significance. they must be taken account of in all arrangements of colors and tints, for example, in dress, in the arrangement of flowers and shrubs, in painting. _color-mixture._ if, on a rotating motor, disks of different colors--say red and yellow--are placed and rotated, one sees on looking at them not red or yellow but orange. this phenomenon is known as _color-mixture_. the result is due to the simultaneous stimulation of the retina by two kinds of ether vibration. if the colors used are a certain red and a certain green, they neutralize each other and produce only gray. all the pairs of complementary colors mentioned above act in the same way, producing, if mixed in the right proportion, no color, but gray. if colored disks not complementary are mixed by rotation on a motor, they produce an intermediate color. red and yellow give orange. blue and green give bluish green. yellow and green give yellowish green. red and blue give violet or purple, depending on the proportion. mixing pigments gives, in general, the same results as mixing by means of rotating the disks. the ordinary blue and yellow pigments give green when mixed, because each of the two pigments contains green. the blue and yellow neutralize each other, leaving green. _visual after-images._ the stimulation of the retina has interesting after effects. we shall mention here only the one known as _negative after-images_. if one will place on the table a sheet of white paper, and on this white paper lay a small piece of colored paper, and if he will then gaze steadily at the colored paper for a half-minute, it will be found that if the colored paper is removed one sees its complementary color. if the head is not moved, this complementary color has the same size and shape as the original colored piece of paper. the negative after-image can be projected on a background at different distances, its size depending on the distance of the background. the after-image will be found to mix with an objective color in accordance with the principles of color-mixture mentioned above. after-image phenomena have some practical consequences. if one has been looking at a certain color for some time, a half-minute or more, then looks at some other color, the after-image of the first color mixes with the second color. _adaptation._ the fact last mentioned leads us to the subject of adaptation. if the eyes are stimulated by the same kind of light for some time, the eyes become adapted to that light. if the light is yellow, at first objects seem yellow, but after a time they look as if they were illuminated with white light, losing the yellow aspect. but if one then goes out into white light, everything looks bluish. the negative after-image of the yellow being cast upon everything makes the surroundings look blue, for the after-image of yellow is blue. all the other colors act in a similar way, as do also black and white. if one has been for some time in a dark room and then goes out to a lighter place, it seems unusually light. and if one goes from the light to a dark room, it seems unusually dark. =hearing or audition.= just as the eye is an organ sensitive to certain frequencies of ether vibration, so the ear is an organ sensitive to certain air vibrations. the reader should familiarize himself with the physiology of the ear by reference to physiologies. the drum-skin, the three little bones of the middle ear, and the cochlea of the inner ear are all merely mechanical means of making possible the stimulation of the specialized endings of the auditory nerve by vibrations of air. as the different colors are due to different vibration frequencies of the ether, so different pitches of sound are due to differences in the rates of the air vibrations. the low bass notes are produced by the low vibration frequencies. the high notes are produced by the high vibration frequencies. the lowest notes that we can hear are produced by about twenty vibrations a second, and the highest by about forty thousand vibrations a second. =other sense organs.= we need not give a detailed statement of the facts concerning the other senses. in each case the sense organ is some special adaptation of the nerve-endings with appropriate apparatus in connection to enable it to be affected by some special thing or force in the environment. in the case of taste, we find in the mouth, chiefly on the back and edges of the tongue, organs sensitive to sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. in the nose we have an organ that is sensitive to the tiny particles of substances that float in the air which we breathe in through the nose. in the skin we find several kinds of sense organs that give us the sensations of cold and warmth, of pressure and pain. these are all special and definite sensations produced by different kinds of organs. the sense of warmth is produced by different organs from those which produce the sense of cold. these organs can be detected and localized on the skin. so, also, pain and touch or pressure have each its particular organ. within the body itself we have sense organs also, particularly in the joints and tendons and in the muscles. these give us the sensations which are the basis of our perception of motion, and of the position of the body and its members. in the semicircular canals of the inner ear are organs that give us the sense of dizziness, and enable us to maintain our equilibrium and to know up from down. the general nature of the sense organs and of sensation should now be apparent. the nervous system reaches out its myriad fingers to every portion of the surface of the body, and within the body as well. these nerve-endings are specially adapted to receive each its particular form of stimulation. this stimulation of our sense organs is the basis or cause of our sensations. and our sensations are the elementary stuff of all our experience. whatever thoughts we have, whatever ideas or images we have, they come originally from our sensations. they are built up out of our sensations or from these sensations as they exist in memory. =defects of sense organs.= the organs of sight and hearing are now by far the most important of our sense organs. they enable us to sense things that are at a distance. we shall therefore discuss defects of these two organs only. since sensations are the primary stuff out of which mind is made, and since sight and hearing are the most important sense organs, it is evident that our lives are very much dependent on these organs. if they cannot do their work well, then we are handicapped. and this is often the case. the making of the human eye is one of the most remarkable achievements of nature. but the making of a perfect eye is too big a task for nature. she never makes a perfect eye. there is always some defect, large or small. to take plastic material and make lenses and shutters and curtains is a great task. the curvature of the front of the eye and of the front and back of the crystalline lens is never quite perfect, but in the majority of cases it is nearly enough perfect to give us good vision. however, in about one third of school children the defect is great enough to need to be corrected by glasses. the principle of the correction of sight by means of glasses is merely this:[ ] when the focusing apparatus of the eye is not perfect, it can be made so by putting in front of the eye the proper kind of lens. there is nothing strange or mysterious about it. in some cases, the eye focuses the light before it reaches the retina. such cases are known as nearsightedness and are corrected by having placed in front of the eyes concave lenses of the proper strength. these lenses diverge the rays and make them focus on the retina. in other cases, the eye is not able to focus the rays by the time they reach the retina. in these cases, the eyes need the help of convex lenses of the proper strength to make the focus fall exactly on the retina. [ ] the teacher should explain these principles and illustrate by drawings. consult a good text in physiology. noyes' university of missouri extension bulletin on eye and ear defects will be found most useful. another defect of the eye, known as astigmatism, is due to the fact that the eye does not always have a perfectly spherical front (cornea). the curvature in one direction is different from that in others. for example, the vertical curvature may be more convex than the horizontal. such a condition produces a serious defect of vision. it can be corrected by means of cylindrical lenses of the proper strength so placed before the eye as to correct the defect in curvature. still another defect of vision is known as presbyopia or farsightedness due to old age. it has the following explanation: in early life, when we look at near objects, the crystalline lens automatically becomes thicker, more convex. this adjustment brings the rays to a focus on the retina, which is required for good vision. as we get old, the crystalline lens loses its power to change its adjustment for near objects, although the eye may see at a distance as well as ever. the old person, therefore, must wear convex glasses when looking at near objects, as in reading and sewing. another visual defect of a different nature is known as partial color blindness. the defects described above are due to misshapen eyes. partial color blindness is due to a defect of the retina which makes it unable to be affected by light waves producing red and green. a person with this defect confuses red and green. while only a small percentage of the population has this defect, it is nevertheless very important that those having it be detected. people having the defect should not be allowed to enter occupations in which the seeing of red and green is important. it was recently brought to the author's attention that a partially color-blind man was selling stamps in a post office. since two denominations of stamps are distinguished by red and green colors, this man made frequent mistakes. he was doing one of the things for which he was specially unfitted. it is easy to detect color blindness by simple tests. so great is the importance of good vision in school work and the later work of life, that every teacher should know how to make simple tests to determine visual defects. children showing any symptoms of eyestrain should be required to have their visual defects corrected by a competent oculist, and should be warned not to have the correction made by a quack. there is great popular ignorance and even prejudice concerning visual defects, and it is very important that teachers have a clear understanding of the facts. =defects of hearing.= hearing defects are only about half as frequent as those of sight. they are nearly all due to catarrhal infection of the middle ear through the eustachian tube. the careful and frequent medical examination of school children cannot, therefore, be too strongly emphasized. the deafness or partial deafness that comes from this catarrhal infection can seldom be cured; it must be prevented by the early treatment of the troubles which cause it. summary. the mind is closely related to the body. especially is it dependent upon the brain, nerves, and sense organs. the sense organs are special adaptations of the nerve-ends for receiving impressions. each sense organ receives only its particular type of impression. the main visual phenomena are those of color-mixture, after-images, adaptation, and contrast. since sensation is the basis of mental life, defects of the sense organs are serious handicaps and should be corrected if possible. visual defects are usually due to a misshapen eyeball and can be corrected by proper glasses, which should be fitted by an oculist. hearing defects usually arise from catarrhal trouble in the middle ear. class exercises . make a study of the relation of the mind to the body. enumerate the different lines of evidence which you may find indicating their close relationship. . can you find any evidence tending to show that the mind is independent of the body? . _color-mixture._ colored disks can be procured from c. h. stoelting company, chicago. if a small motor is available, the disks can be rotated on the motor and the colors mixed. mix pairs of complementary colors, also pairs of non-complementary colors, and note the result. a simple device can be made for mixing colors, as follows: on a board stand a pane of glass. on one side of the glass put a colored paper and on the other side of the glass put a different color. by looking through the glass you can see one color through transmitted light and the other color through reflected light. by inclining the glass at different angles you can get different proportions of the mixture, now more of one color, now more of the other. . _negative after-images._ cut out pieces of colored paper a half inch square. put one of these on a white background on the table. with elbows on the table, hold the head in the hands and gaze at the colored paper for about a half-minute, then blow the paper away and continue to gaze at the white background. note the color that appears. use different colors and tabulate the results. try projecting the after-images at different distances. project the after-images on different colored papers. do the after-images mix with the colors of the papers? . an interesting experiment with positive after-images can be performed as follows: shut yourself in a dark closet for fifteen or twenty minutes to remove all trace of stimulation of the retina. with the eyes covered with several folds of thick black cloth go to a window, uncover the eyes and take a momentary look at the landscape, immediately covering the eyes again. the landscape will appear as a positive after-image, with the positive colors and lights and shades. the experiment is best performed on a bright day. . _adaptation._ put on colored glasses or hold before the eyes a large piece of colored glass. note that at first everything takes on the color of the glass. what change comes over objects after the glasses have been worn for fifteen or twenty minutes? describe your experience after removing the glasses. plan and perform other experiments showing adaptation. for illustration, go from a very bright room into a dark room. go from a very dark room to a light one. describe your experience. . _contrast._ take a medium gray paper and lay it on white and various shades of gray and black paper. describe and explain what you find. . _color contrast._ darken a room by covering all the windows except one window pane. cover it with cardboard. in the cardboard cut two windows six inches long and one inch wide. over one window put colored glass or any other colored material through which some light will pass. by holding up a pencil you can cast two shadows on a piece of paper. what color are the shadows? one is a contrast color induced by the other; which one? explain the results. . make a study of the way in which women dress. what do you learn about color effects? . from the stoelting company you can obtain the holmgren worsteds for studying color blindness. . _defective vision._ procure a snellen's test chart and determine the visual acuity of the members of the class. seat the subject twenty feet from the chart, which should be placed in a good light. while testing one eye, cover the other with a piece of cardboard. above each row of letters on the chart is a number which indicates the distance at which it can be read by a normal eye. if the subject can read only the thirty-foot line, his vision is said to be / ; if only the forty-foot line, the vision is / . if the subject can read above the twenty-foot line and complains of headache from reading, farsightedness is indicated. if the subject cannot read up to the twenty-foot line, nearsightedness or astigmatism is indicated. . _hearing._ by consultation with the teacher of physics, plan an experiment to show that the pitch of tones depends on vibration frequency. such an experiment can be very simply performed by rotating a wheel having spokes. hold a light stick against the spokes so that it strikes each spoke. if the wheel is rotated so as to give twenty or thirty strokes a second, a very low tone will be heard. by rotating the wheel faster you get a higher tone. other similar experiments can be performed. . acuity of hearing can be tested by finding the distance at which the various members of the class can hear a watch-tick. the teacher can plan an experiment using whispering instead of the watch-tick. (see the author's _examination of school children_.) . by using the point of a nail, one can find the "cold spots" on the skin. warm the nail to about  degrees centigrade and you can find the "warm spots." . by touching the hairs on the back of the hand, you can stimulate the "pressure spots." . by pricking the skin with the point of a needle, you can stimulate the "pain spots." . the sense of taste is sensitive only to solutions that are sweet, sour, salt, or bitter. plan experiments to verify this point. what we call the "taste" of many things is due chiefly to odor. therefore in experiments with taste, the nostrils should be stopped up with cotton. it will be found, for example, that quinine and coffee are indistinguishable if their odors be eliminated by stopping the nose. the student should compare the taste of many substances put into the mouth with the nostrils open with the taste of the same substances with the nostrils closed. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapters vii and xii. mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, chapters iii, iv, vi, and vii. pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapters ii, iii, and iv. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapter ii. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapter i, par.  ; also chapter ii. chapter iv inherited tendencies =stimulus and response.= we have learned something about the sense organs and their functions. we have seen that it is through the sense organs that the world affects us, stimulates us. and we have said that we are stimulated in order that we may respond. we must now inquire into the nature of our responses. we are moving, active beings. but how do we move, how do we act when stimulated? why do we do one thing rather than another? why do we do one thing at one time and a different thing at another time? before we answer these questions it will be necessary for us to get a more definite and complete idea of the nature of stimulus and response. we have already used these terms, but we must now give a more definite account of them. it was said in the preceding chapter that when a muscle contracts, it must first receive a nerve-impulse. now, anything which starts this nerve-impulse is called the stimulus. the muscular movement which follows is, of course, the response. the nervous system forms the connection between the stimulus and response. the stimulus which brings about a response may be very simple. or, on the other hand, it may be very complex. if one blows upon the eyelids of a baby, the lids automatically close. the blowing is the stimulus and the closing of the lids is the response. both stimulus and response are here very simple. but sometimes the stimulus is more complex, not merely the simple excitation of one sense organ, but a complicated stimulation of an organ, or the simultaneous stimulation of several organs. in playing ball, the stimulus for the batter is the on-coming ball. the response is the stroke. this case is much more complex than the reflex closing of the eyelids. the ball may be pitched in many different ways and the response changes with these variations. in piano playing, the stimulus is the notes written in their particular places on the staff. not only must the position of the notes on the staff be taken into account, but also many other things, such as sharps and flats, and various characters which give directions as to the manner in which the music is to be played. the striking of the notes in the proper order, in the proper time, and with the proper force, is the response. in typewriting, the stimulus is the copy, or the idea of what is to be written, and the response is the striking of the keys in the proper order. speaking generally, we may say that the stimulus is the force or forces which excite the sense organs, and thereby, through the nervous system, bring about a muscular response. this is the ordinary type of action, but we have already indicated a different type. in speaking of typewriting we said the stimulus might be either the copy or ideas. one can write from copy or dictation, in which the stimulus is the written or spoken word, but one can also write as one thinks of what one wishes to write. the latter is known as _centrally initiated action_. that is to say, the stimulus comes from within, in the brain, rather than from without. let us explain this kind of stimulation a little further. suppose i am sitting in my chair reading. i finish a chapter and look at my watch. i notice that it is three o'clock, and recall that i was to meet a friend at that time. the stimulus in this case is in the brain itself; it is the nervous activity which corresponds to the idea of meeting my friend. if we disregard the distinction between mind and body, we may say that the stimulus for a response may be an idea as well as a perception, the perception arising from the immediate stimulation of a sense organ, and the idea arising from an excitation of the brain not caused by an immediate stimulation of a sense organ. =instincts and habits.= in human action it is evident that there is always a stimulus to start the nerve-impulse which causes the action. if we make inquiry concerning the connection between the stimulus and response; if we ask how it has come about that a particular stimulus causes a particular response rather than some other possible response, we find two kinds of causes. in one case the causal connection is established through heredity; in the other, the causal connection is established during a person's lifetime through training. a chicken, for example, hides under some cover the first time it hears the cry of a hawk; it scratches the first time its feet touch sand or gravel; it pecks the first time it sees an insect near by. an infant closes its eyes the first time it feels cold wind blow upon them; it cries the first time it feels pain; it clasps its fingers together the first time a touch is felt inside them. the child's nervous system is so organized that, in each of the cases named, the stimulus brings forth the particular, definite response. these acts do not have to be learned. but it is quite different in typewriting and piano playing. one _must learn_ what keys on the piano to strike in response to the various situations of the notes as written in the music. one must also learn the keys on the typewriter before he can operate a typewriter. and in the case of other habits, we find, for example, that one does not respond by saying " " for times ; nor " " for plus ; nor " " for minus ; nor " " for the square root of ; nor " " for the square of , etc., until one has learned in each case. some connections between stimulus and response we have through inheritance; all others are built up and established in one's lifetime, particularly in the first thirty years of one's life. we have spoken of bonds between stimulus and response, but have not explained just what can be meant by a _bond_. in what sense are stimulus and response bound together? a bond is a matter of greater permeability, of less resistance in one direction through the nervous system than in other directions. nerves are conductors for nerve-currents. when a nerve-current is started in a sense organ, it passes on through the path of least resistance. now, some nerves are so organized and connected through inheritance as to offer small resistance. this forms a ready-made connection between stimulus and response. muscular responses that are connected with their stimuli through inherited bonds, by inherited nerve structure, are called instincts. those that are connected by acquired bonds are called habits. sucking, crying, laughing, are instinctive acts. adding, typewriting, piano playing, are habits. the term _instinct_ may be given to the act depending upon inherited structure, an inherited bond, or it may be given to the inherited bond itself. similarly, the term _habit_ may be given to an act that we have had to learn or to the bond which we ourselves establish between response and stimulus. in this book we shall usually mean by instinct an action depending upon inherited structure and by habit an act depending upon a bond established during lifetime. a good part of our early lives is spent in building up bonds between stimuli and responses. this establishing of bonds or connections is called _learning_. =appearance of inherited tendencies.= not all of our inherited tendencies are manifested immediately after birth, nor indeed in the earliest years of childhood, but appear at different stages of the child's growth. it has already been said that a child, soon after birth, will close its eyelids when they are blown upon. the lids do not close at this time if one strikes at them, but they will do this later. the proper working of an instinct or an inherited tendency, then, depends upon the child's having reached a certain state of development. the maturing of an instinct depends upon both age and use, that is to say, upon the age of the animal and the amount of use or exercise that the instinctive activity has had. the most important factor, however, seems to be age. while our knowledge of the dependence of an instinct upon the age of the animal is not quite so definite in the case of human instincts, the matter has been worked out in the case of chickens. the experiment was as follows: chickens were taken at the time of hatching, and some allowed to peck from the first, while others were kept in a dark room and not allowed to peck. when the chickens were taken out of the dark room at the end of one, two, three, and four days, it was found that in a few hours they were pecking as well as those that had been pecking from birth. it seems probable, if we may judge from our limited knowledge, that in the human child, activities are for the most part dependent upon the age of the child, and upon the state of development of the nervous system and of the organs of the body. =significance of inherited tendencies.= although human nature is very complex, although human action nearly always has some element of habit in it, nevertheless, inborn tendencies are throughout life powerful factors in determining action. this will at once be apparent if we consider how greatly we are influenced by anger, jealousy, love, fear, and competition. now we do not have to learn to be jealous, to hate, to love, to be envious, to fight, or to fear. these are emotions common to all members of the human race, and their expression is an inborn tendency. throughout life no other influences are so powerful in determining our action as are these. so, although most of our detailed actions in life are habits which we learn or acquire, the fundamental influences which decide the course of our action are inherited tendencies. =classification of instincts.= for convenience in treatment the instincts are grouped in classes. those instincts most closely related to individual survival are called _individualistic_ instincts. those more closely related to the survival of the group are called _socialistic_. those individualistic tendencies growing out of periodic changes of the environment may be called _environmental_ instincts. those closely related to human infancy, adapting and adjusting the child to the world in which he lives, may be called _adaptive_. there is still another group of inherited tendencies connected with sex and reproduction, which are not discussed in this book. we shall give a brief discussion of the instincts falling under these various classes. it must be remembered, however, that the psychology of the instincts is indefinite and obscure. it is difficult to bring the instincts into the laboratory for accurate study. for our knowledge of the instincts we are dependent, for the most part, on general observation. we have had a few careful studies of the very earliest years of childhood. however, although from the theoretical point of view our knowledge of the instincts is incomplete, it is sufficient to be of considerable practical value. =the individualistic instincts.= man's civilized life has covered but a short period of time, only a few hundred or a few thousand years. his pre-civilized life doubtless covered a period of millions of years. the inborn tendencies in us are such as were developed in the long period of savage life. during all of man's life in the time before civilization, he was always in danger. he had many enemies, and most of these enemies had the advantage of him in strength and natural means of defense. unaided by weapons, he could hardly hold his own against any of the beasts of prey. so there were developed in man by the process of natural selection many inherited responses which we group under the head of _fear_ responses. just what the various situations are that bring forth these responses has never been carefully worked out. but any situation that suddenly puts an individual in danger of losing his life brings about characteristic reactions. the most characteristic of the responses are shown in connection with circulation and respiration. both of these processes are much interfered with. sometimes the action is accelerated, at other times it is retarded, and in some cases the respiratory and circulatory organs are almost paralyzed. also the small muscles of the skin are made to contract, producing the sensation of the hair standing on end. just what the original use of all these responses was it is difficult now to work out, but doubtless each served some useful purpose. whether any particular situations now call forth inherited fear responses in us is not definitely established. but among lower animals there are certain definite and particular situations which do call forth fear responses. on the whole, the evidence rather favors the idea of definite fear situations among children. it seems that certain situations do invariably arouse fear responses. to be alone in the dark, to be in a strange place, to hear loud and sudden noises, to see large, strange animals coming in threatening manner, seem universally to call forth fear responses in children. however, the whole situation must always be considered. a situation in which the father or mother is present is quite different from one in which they are both absent. but it is certain that these and other fears are closely related to the age and development of the child. in the earlier years of infancy, certain fears are not present that are present later. and it can be demonstrated that the fears that do arise as infancy passes on are natural and inherited and not the result of experience. few of the original causes of fear now exist. the original danger was from wild animals chiefly. seldom are we now in such danger. but of course this has been the case for only a short time. our bodies are the same sort of bodies that our ancestors had, therefore we are full of needless fears. during the early years of a child's life, wise treatment causes most of the fear tendencies to disappear because of disuse. on the other hand, unwise treatment may accentuate and perpetuate them, causing much misery and unhappiness. neither the home nor the school should play upon these ancestral fears. we should not try to get a child to be good by frightening him; nor should we often use fear of pain as an incentive to get a child to do his work. man has always been afraid, but he has also always been a fighter. he has always had to fight for his life against the lower animals, and he has also fought his fellow man. the fighting response is connected with the emotions of anger, envy, and jealousy. a man is angered by anything that interferes with his life, with his purposes, with whatever he calls his own. we become angry if some one strikes our bodies, or attacks our beliefs, or the beliefs of our dear friends, particularly of our families. the typical responses connected with anger are such as faster heart-beat, irregular breathing, congestion of the blood in the face and head, tightening of the voluntary muscles, particularly a setting of the teeth and a clinching of the fists. these responses are preparatory to actual combat. anger, envy, and jealousy, and the responses growing out of them, have always played a large part in the life of man. a great part of history is a record of the fights of nations, tribes, and individuals. if the records of wars and strifes, and the acts growing out of envy and jealousy and other similar emotions should be taken out of history, there would not be much left. much of literature and art depict those actions of man which grew out of these individualistic aspects of his nature. competition, which is an aspect of fighting, even to the present day, continues to be one of the main factors in business and in life generally. briefly, fighting responses growing out of man's selfishness are as old as man himself, and the inherited tendencies connected with them are among the strongest of our natures. in the training of children, one of the most difficult tasks is to help them to get control over the fighting instinct and other selfish tendencies. these tendencies are so deeply rooted in our natures that it is hard to get control of them. in fact, the control which we do get over them is always relative. the best we can hope to do is to get control over our fighting tendencies in ordinary circumstances. it is doubtful whether it would be good for us if the fighting spirit should disappear from the race. it puts vim and determination into the life of man. but our fighting should not be directed against our fellow man. the fighting spirit can be retained and directed against evil and other obstacles. we can learn to attack our tasks in a fighting spirit. but surely the time has come when we should cease fighting against our neighbors. =social tendencies.= over against our fighting tendencies we may set the socialistic tendencies. coöperative and sympathetic actions grow out of original nature, just as truly as do the selfish acts. but the socialistic tendencies are not, in general, as strong as are the individualistic ones. what society needs is the strengthening of the socialistic tendencies by use, and a weakening of at least some of the individualistic tendencies, by control and disuse. socialistic tendencies show themselves in gangs and clubs formed by children and adults. it is, therefore, a common practice now to speak of the "gang" instinct. human beings are pleased and content when with other human beings and not content, not satisfied, when alone. of course circumstances make a difference in the desires of men, but the general original tendency is as stated. the gang of the modern city has the following explanation: boys like to be with other boys. moreover, they like to be active; they want to be doing something. the city does not provide proper means for the desired activities, such as hunting, fishing, tramping, and boating. it does not provide experiences with animals, such as boys have on the farm. much of the boy's day is spent in school in a kind of work not at all like what he would do by choice. there is not much home life. usually there is not the proper parental control. seldom do the parents interest themselves in planning for the activities of their children. the result is that the boys come together on the streets and form a club or gang. through this organization the boy's nature expresses itself. without proper guidance from older people, this expression takes a direction not good for the future character and usefulness of the boy. the social life of children should be provided for by the school in coöperation with the home. the school or the schoolroom should constitute a social unit. the teacher with the parents should plan the social life of the children. the actual work of the school can be very much socialized. there can be much more coöperation and much more group work can be done in the school than is the case at present. and many other social activities can be organized in connection with the school and its work. excursions, pageants, shows, picnics, and all sorts of activities should be undertaken. the schoolhouse should be used by the community as the place for many of its social acts and performances. almost every night, and throughout the summer as well as in the winter, the people, young and old, should meet at the school for some sort of social work or play. the boy scouts should be brought under the control of the school to help fulfill some of its main purposes. =environmental instincts.= in this class there are at least two tendencies which seem to be part of the original nature of man; namely, the _wandering_ and the _collecting_ tendencies. _wandering._ the long life that our ancestors lived free and unrestrained in the woods has left its effect within us. one of the greatest achievements of civilization has been to overcome the inherited tendencies to roam and wander, to the extent that for the most part we live out our lives in one home, in one family, doing often but one kind of work all our lives. originally, man had much more freedom to come and go and do whatever he wished. truancies and runaways are the result of original tendencies and desires expressing themselves in spite of training, perhaps sometimes because of the lack of training. in childhood and youth these original tendencies should, to some extent, be satisfied in legitimate ways. excursions and picnics can be planned both for work and for play. if the child's desires and needs can be satisfied in legitimate ways, then he will not have to satisfy them illegitimately. the teaching itself can be done better by following, to some extent, the lead of the child's nature. much early education consists in learning the world. now, most of the world is out of doors and the child must go out to find it. the teacher should make use of the natural desires of the children to wander and explore, as a means of educating them. the school work should be of such a nature that much outdoor work will need to be done. _collecting._ it is in the nature of children to seize and, if possible, carry away whatever attracts attention. this tendency is the basis of what is called the collecting instinct. if one will take a walk with a child, one can observe the operation of the collecting tendency, particularly if the walk is in the fields and woods. the child will be observed to take leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, nuts, pebbles, and in fact everything that is loose or can be gotten loose. they are taken at first aimlessly, merely because they attract attention. the original, natural response of the child toward that which attracts attention is usually to get it, get possession of it and take it along. it is easy to see why such tendencies were developed in man. in his savage state it was highly useful for him to do this. he must always have been on the lookout for things which could be used as food or as weapons. he had to do this to live. but one need not take a child to the woods to observe this tendency. one can go to the stores. till a child is trained not to do it, he seizes and takes whatever attracts attention. just as the wandering tendencies can be used for the benefit of the child, so can the collecting tendencies. not only should the children make expeditions to learn of the world, but specimens should be collected so that they can be used to form a museum at the school which will represent the surrounding locality. geological, geographical, botanical, and zoölogical specimens should be collected. the children will learn much while making the collections, and much from the collections after they are made. "education could profit greatly by making large demands upon the collecting instinct. it seems clear that in their childhood is the time when children should be sent forth to the fields and woods, to study what they find there and to gather specimens. the children can form naturalists' clubs for the purpose of studying the natural environment. such study should embrace rocks, soils, plants, leaves, flowers, fruits, and specimens of the wood of the various trees. birds and insects can be studied and collected. the work of such a club would have a twofold value. ( ) the study and collecting acquaint the child with his natural environment, and in doing it, afford a sphere for the activity of many aspects of his nature. they take him out of doors and give an opportunity for exploring every nook and corner of the natural environment. the collecting can often be done in such a way as to appeal to the group instincts. for example, the club could hold meetings for exhibiting and studying the specimens, and sometimes the actual collecting could be done in groups. ( ) the specimens collected should be put into the school museum, and the aim of this museum should be to represent completely the local environment, the natural and physical environment, and also the industrial, civil, and social environment. the museum should be completely illustrative of the child's natural, physical, and social surroundings. the museum would therefore be educative in its making, and when it is made, it would have immense value to the community, not only to the children but to all the people. in this museum, of course, should be found the minerals, rocks, soils, insects,--particularly those of economic importance,--birds, and also specimens of the wild animals of the locality. if proper appeal is made to the natural desire of the children, this instinct would soon be made of service in producing a very valuable collection. the school museum in which these specimens are placed should also include other classes of specimens. there should be specimens showing industrial evolution, the stages of manufacture of raw material, specimens of local historical interest, pictures, documents, books. the museum should be made of such a nature that parents would go there nearly as often as the children. the school should be for the instruction of all the people of the community. it should be the experiment station, the library, the debating club, the art gallery for the whole community."[ ] [ ] pyle's _outlines of educational psychology_, pp.  - . =imitation.= one of the fundamental original traits of human nature is the tendency to imitate. imitation is not instinctive in the strict meaning of the word. seeing a certain act performed does not, apart from training and experience, serve as a stimulus to make a child perform a similar act. hearing a certain sound does not serve as a stimulus for the production of the same sound. nevertheless, there is in the human child a tendency or desire to do what it sees others doing. a few hours spent in observing children ought to convince any one of the universality and of the strength of this tendency. as our experience becomes organized, the idea of an act usually serves as the stimulus to call it forth. however, this is not because the idea of an act, of necessity, always produces the act. it is merely a matter of the stimulus and the response _becoming connected in that way_ as the result of experience. our meaning is that an act can be touched off or prompted by any stimulus. our nervous organization makes this possible. the particular stimulus that calls forth a particular response depends upon how we have been trained, how we have learned. in most cases our acts are coupled up with the ideas of the acts. we learn them that way. in early life particularly, the connection between stimulus and response is very close. when a child gets the idea of an act, he immediately performs the act, if he knows how. now, seeing another perform an act brings the act clearly into the child's consciousness, and he proceeds to perform it. but the act must be one which the child already knows how to perform, otherwise his performance of it will be faulty and incomplete. if he has never performed the particular act, seeing another perform the act sets him to trying to do it and he may soon learn it. if he successfully performs an act when he sees it done by another, the act must be one which he already knows how to perform, and for whose performance the idea has already served as a stimulus. now if imitation were instinctive in the strict sense, one could perform the act for the first time merely from seeing another do it, without any previous experience or learning. it is doubtful whether there are any such inherited connections. it is, however, true that human beings are of such a nature that, particularly in early life, they _like_ to do and _want_ to do what they see others doing. this is one of the most important aspects of human nature, as we shall see. =function and importance of imitation in life.= natural selection has developed few aspects of human nature so important for survival as the tendency to imitate, for this tendency quickly leads to a successful adjustment of the child to the world in which he lives. adult men and women are successfully adjusted to their environment. their adjustment might be better, but it is good enough to keep them alive for a time. now, if children do as they see their parents doing, they will reach a satisfactory adjustment. we may, therefore, say that the tendency to imitate serves to adjust the child to his environment. it is for this reason that imitation has been called an _adaptive instinct_. it would perhaps be better to say merely that the _tendency_ to imitate is part of the _original equipment of man_. imitation is distinctively a human trait. while it occurs in lower animals it is probably not an important factor in adjusting them to their environment. but in the human race it is one of the chief factors in adjustment to environment. imitation is one of the main factors in education. usually the quickest way to teach a child to do a thing is to show him how. through imitation we acquire our language, manners, and customs. ideals, beliefs, prejudices, attitudes, we take on through imitation. the tendency to imitate others coupled with the desire to be thought well of by others is one of the most powerful factors in producing conformity. they are the whips which keep us within the bounds of custom and conventionality. the tendency to imitate is so strong that its results are almost as certain as are those of inherited tendencies. it is almost as certain that a child will be like his parents in speech, manners, customs, superstitions, etc., as it is that he will be like them in form of body. he not only walks and talks and acts like his parents, but he thinks as they do. we, therefore, have the term _social heredity_, meaning the taking on of all sorts of social habits and ideals through imitation. the part that imitation plays in the education of a child may be learned by going to a country home and noting how the boy learns to do all the many things about the farm by imitating his father, and how the girl learns to do all the housework by imitating her mother. imitation is the basis of much of the play of children, in that their play consists in large part of doing what they see older people doing. this imitative play gives them skill and is a large factor in preparing for the work of life. =dramatization.= dramatization is an aspect of imitation, and is a means of making ideas more real than they would otherwise be. there is nothing that leads us so close to reality as action. we never completely know an act till we have done it. dramatization is a matter of carrying an idea out into action. ideas give to action its greatest fullness of meaning. dramatic representation should, therefore, have a prominent place in the schools, particularly in the lower grades. if the child is allowed to mimic the characters in the reading lesson, the meaning of the lesson becomes fuller. later on in the school course, dramatic representation of the characters in literature and history is a means of getting a better conception of these characters. in geography, the study of the manners and customs and occupations of foreign peoples can be much facilitated through dramatic representation. children naturally have the dramatic tendency; it is one aspect of the tendency to imitate. we have only to encourage it and make use of it throughout the school course. =imitation in ideals.= imitation is of importance not only in acquiring the actions of life but also in getting our ideals. habits of thinking are no less an aspect of our lives than are habits of acting. our attitudes, our prejudices, our beliefs, our moral, religious, and political ideals are in large measure copied from people about us. the family and social atmosphere in which one lives is a mold in which one's mind is formed and shaped. we cannot escape the influence of this atmosphere if we would. one takes on a belief that his father has, one clings to this belief and interprets the world in the light of it. this belief becomes a part of one's nature. it is a mental habit, a way of looking at the world. it is as much a part of one as red hair or big feet or a crooked nose. probably no other influence has so much to do with making us what we are as social beings as the influence of imitation. =play.= play is usually considered to be a part of the original equipment of man. it is essentially an expression of the ripening instincts of children, and not a specific instinct itself. it is rather a sort of make-believe activity of all the instincts. kittens and dogs may be seen in play to mimic fighting. they bite and chew each other as in real fighting, but still they are not fighting. as the structures and organs of children mature, they demand activity. this early activity is called play. it has several characteristics. the main one is that it is pleasurable. play activity is pleasurable in itself. we do not play that we may get something else which we like, as is the case with the activity which we call work. play is an end in itself. it is not a means to get something else which is intrinsically valuable. one of the chief values of play comes from its activity aspect. we are essentially motor beings. we grow and develop only through exercise. in early life we do not have to exert ourselves to get a living. play is nature's means of giving our organs the exercise which they must have to bring them to maturity. play is an expression of the universal tendency to action in early life. without play, the child would not develop, would not become a normal human being. all day long the child is ceaselessly active. the value of this activity can hardly be overestimated. it not only leads to healthy growth, but is a means through which the child learns himself and the world. everything that the child sees excites him to react to it or upon it. he gets possession of it. he bites it. he pounds it. he throws it. in this way he learns the properties of things and the characteristics of forces. through play and imitation, in a very few years the child comes to a successful adjustment in his world. play and imitation are the great avenues of activity in early life. even in later life, we seldom accomplish anything great or worth while until the thing becomes play to us, until we throw our whole being into it as we do in play, until it is an expression of ourselves as play is in our childhood. the proper use of play gives us the solution of many of the problems of early education. play has two functions in the school: ( ) motor play is necessary to growth, development, and health. the constant activity of the child is what brings about healthy growth. in the country it is not difficult for children to get plenty of the proper kind of exercise, but in the larger cities it is difficult. nevertheless, opportunity for play should be provided for every child, no matter what the trouble or expense, for without play children cannot become normal human beings. everywhere parents and teachers should plan for the play life of the children. ( ) in the primary grades play can have a large place in the actual work of the school. the early work of education is to a large extent getting the tools of knowledge and thought and work--reading, spelling, writing, correct speech, correct writing, the elementary processes of arithmetic, etc. in many ways play can be used in acquiring these tools. one aspect of play particularly should have a large place in education; namely, the manipulative tendencies of children. this is essentially play. children wish to handle and manipulate everything that attracts their attention. they wish to tear it to pieces and to put it together. this is nature's way of teaching, and by it children learn the properties and structures of things. they thereby learn what things do and what can be done with them. teachers and parents should foster these manipulative tendencies and use them for the child's good. these tendencies are an aspect of curiosity. we want to know. we are unhappy as long as a thing is before us which we do not understand, which has some mystery about it. nature has developed these tendencies in us, for without a knowledge of our surroundings we could not live. the child therefore has in his nature the basis of his education. we have but to know this nature and wisely use and manipulate it to achieve the child's education. summary. instincts are inherited tendencies to specific actions. they fall under the heads: individualistic, socialistic, environmental, adaptive, sexual or mating instincts. these inherited tendencies are to a large extent the foundation on which we build education. the educational problem is to control and guide them, suppressing some, fostering others. in everything we undertake for a child we must take into account these instincts. class exercises . make a study of the instincts of several animals, such as dogs, cats, chickens. make a list showing the stimuli and the inherited responses. . make a study of the instincts of a baby. see how many inherited responses you can observe. the simpler inherited responses are known as _reflexes_. the closing of the eyelids mentioned in the text is an example. how many such reflexes can you find in a child? . make a special study of the fears of very young children. how many definite situations can you find which excite fear responses in all children? each member of the class can make a list of his own fears. it may then be seen whether any fears are common to all members of the class and whether there are any sex differences. . similarly, make a study of anger and fighting. what situations invariably arouse the fighting response? in what definite, inherited ways is anger shown? do your studies and observations convince you that the fighting instinct and other inherited responses concerned with individual survival are among the strongest of inherited tendencies? can the fighting instinct be eliminated from the human race? is it desirable to eliminate it? . make a study of children's collections. take one of the grades and find what collections the children have made. what different objects are collected? . outline a plan for using the collecting instinct in various school studies. . with the help of the principal of the school make a study of some specific cases of truancy. what does your finding show? . make a study of play by watching children of various ages play. make a list of the games that are universal for infancy, those for childhood, and those for youth. (consult johnson's _plays and games_.) . what are the two main functions of play in education? why should we play after we are mature? . study imitation in very young children. do this by watching the spontaneous play of children under six. what evidences of imitation do you find? . outline the things we learn by imitation. what is your opinion of the place which imitation has in our education? . make a study of imitation as a factor in the lives of grown people. consider styles, fashions, manners, customs, beliefs, prejudices, religious ideas, etc. . on the whole, is imitation a good thing or a bad thing? . make a plan of the various ways in which dramatization can be profitably used in the schools. . make a study of your own ideals. what ideals do you have? where did you get them? what ideals did you get from your parents? what from books? what from teachers? what from friends? . show that throughout life inherited tendencies are the fundamental bases from which our actions proceed, on which our lives are erected. . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapters iii, viii, ix, and x. kirkpatrick: _fundamentals of child study_, chapters iv-xiii. mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, pp.  - . pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapter x. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapters iv-ix. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapter viii. chapter v feeling and attention =the feelings.= related to the instincts on one side and to habits on the other are the feelings. in chapter iii we discussed sensation, and in the preceding chapter, the instincts, but when we have described an act in terms of instinct and sensation, we have not told all the facts. for example, when a child sees a pretty red ball of yarn, he reaches out to get it, then puts it into his mouth, or unwinds it, and plays with it in various ways. it is all a matter of sensation and instinctive responses. the perception of the ball--seeing the ball--brings about the instinctive reaching out, grasping the ball, and bringing it to the mouth. but to complete our account, we must say that the child is _pleased_. we note a change in his facial expression. his eyes gleam with pleasure. his face is all smiles, showing pleasant contentment. therefore we must say that the child not only sees, not only acts, but the seeing and acting are _pleasant_. the child continues to look, he continues to act, because the looking and acting bring joy. this is typical of situations that bring pleasure. we want them continued; we act in a way to make them continue. _we go out after the pleasure-giving thing._ but let us consider a different kind of situation. a child sees on the hearth a glowing coal. it instinctively reaches out and grasps it, starts to draw the coal toward it, but instinctively drops it. this is not, however, the whole story. instead of the situation being pleasant, it is decidedly unpleasant. the child fairly howls with pain. his face, instead of being wreathed in smiles, is covered with tears. he did not hold on to the coal. he did not try to continue the situation. on the contrary, he dropped the coal, and withdrew the hand. the body contracted and shrank away from the situation. these two cases illustrate the two simple feelings, pleasantness and unpleasantness. most situations in life are either pleasant or unpleasant. situations may sometimes be neutral; that is, may arouse neither the feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness. but usually a conscious state is either pleasant or unpleasant. a situation brings us life, joy, happiness. we want it continued and act in a way to bring about its continuance. or the situation tends to take away our life, brings pain, sorrow, grief, and we want it discontinued, and act in a way to discontinue it. these two simple forms of feeling perhaps arose in the beginning in connection with the act of taking food. it is known that if a drop of acid touches an amoeba, the animal shrinks, contracts, and tries to withdraw from the death-bringing acid. on the other hand, if a particle of a substance that is suitable for food touches the animal, it takes the particle within itself. the particle is life-giving and brings pleasure. =the emotions.= pleasure and displeasure are the simple feelings. most situations in life bring about very complex feeling states known as _emotions_. the emotions are made up of pleasure or displeasure mixed or compounded with the sensations from the bodily reactions. the circulatory system, the respiratory system, and nearly all the involuntary organs of the body form a great sounding board which instantly responds in various ways to the situations of life. when the youth sees the pretty maiden and when he touches her hand, his heart pumps away at a great rate, his cheeks become flushed, his breathing is paralyzed, his voice trembles. he experiences the emotion of love. the state is complex indeed. there is pleasantness, of course, but there is in addition the feeling of all the bodily reactions. when the mother sees her dead child lying in its casket, her head falls over on her breast, her eyes fill with tears, her shoulders droop, her chest contracts, she sobs, her breathing is spasmodic. nearly every organ of the body is affected in one way or another. the state is _unpleasant_, but there is also the feeling of the manifold bodily reactions. so it is always. the biologically important situations in life bring about, through hereditary connections in the nervous system, certain typical reactions. these reactions are largely the same for the same type of situation, and they give the particular coloring to each emotion. it is evident that the emotions are closely related to the instincts. the reflexes that take place in emotions are of the same nature as the instincts. each instinctive act has its characteristic emotion. there are fear instincts and fear emotions. fear is unpleasant. in addition to its unpleasantness there is a multitude of sensations that come from the body. the hair stands on end, the heart throbs, the circulation is hastened, breathing is interrupted, the muscles are tense. this peculiar mass of sensations, blended with the unpleasantness, gives the characteristic emotion of fear. but we need not go into an analysis of the various emotions of love, hate, envy, grief, jealousy, etc. the reader can do this for himself.[ ] [ ] see james' _psychology, briefer course_, chapter xxiv. nearly every organ of the body plays its part in the emotions: the digestive organs, the liver, the kidneys, the throat and mouth, the salivary glands, the eyes and tear glands, the skin muscles, the facial muscles, etc. and every emotion is made up of pleasantness or unpleasantness and the sensations produced by some combination of bodily reactions. it is well for us to remember the part that bodily conditions and states play in the emotional life. the emotional state of a man depends upon whether he has had his dinner or is hungry, whether the liver is working normally, and upon the condition of the various secreting and excreting organs and glands. in a word, it is evident that our emotions fall within a world of cause and effect. _our feeling states are caused._ =importance in life.= our feelings and emotions are the fountains from which nearly all our volitional actions flow. feeling is the _mainspring_ of life. nearly everything we do is prompted by love, or hate, or fear, or jealousy, or rivalry, or anger, or grief. if the feelings have such close relation to action, then the schools must take them into account, for by education we seek to control action. if the feelings control action, then we must try to control the feelings. we must get the child into a right state of mind toward the school, toward his teacher, and toward his work. the child must like the school, like the teacher, and _want_ to learn. moreover, we must create the right state of mind in connection with each study, each task. the child must come to feel the need and importance of each individual task as well as of each subject. the task is then desirable, it is to be sought for and worked at, it is important for life. this is merely enlisting the child's nature in the interest of his education. for motive, we must always look to the child's nature. the two great forces which pull and drive are _pleasure_ and _pain_. nature has no other methods. formerly the school used pain as its motive almost exclusively. the child did his tasks to escape pain. for motive we now use more often the positive influences which give pleasure, which pull instead of drive. what will one not do _for_ the _loved_ one? what will one not do _to_ the _hated_ one? the child who does not love his teacher gets little good from school while under that teacher. moreover, school work is often a failure because it is so unreal, has so little relation to an actual world, and seems foreign to any real needs of the child. no one is going to work very hard unless the work is prompted by desire. our desires come from our needs. therefore, if we are to enlist the child's feelings in the service of his education, we must make the school work vital and relate it, if possible, to the actual needs of the child. it must not be forgotten, however, that we must build up permanent attitudes of respect for authority, obedience, and reverence for the important things of life. neither must it be forgotten that we can create needs in the child. if in the education of the child we follow only such needs as he has, we will make a fine savage of him but nothing else. it is the business of the school to create in the child the right kind of needs. as was pointed out in our study of the instincts, we must make the child over again into what he ought to be. but this cannot be a sudden process. one cannot arouse enthusiasm in a six-year-old child over the beauties of higher mathematics. it takes ten or fifteen years to do that, and it must be done little by little. =control of the emotions.= without training, we remain at the mercy of our baser emotions. the child must be trained to control himself. here is where habit comes in to modify primitive action. the child can be trained to inhibit or prevent the reactions that arise in hatred, envy, jealousy, anger, etc. for a fuller discussion of this point we must wait till we come to the discussion of habit and moral training. =mood and temperament.= a mood is a somewhat extended emotional state continuing for hours or days. it is due to a continuance of the factors which cause it. the state of the liver and digestive organs may throw one for days into a cross and ugly mood. when the body becomes normal, the mood changes or disappears. similarly, one may for hours or days be overjoyed, or depressed, or morose, or melancholy. parents and teachers should look well to the matter of creating and establishing continuous and permanent states of feeling that are favorable to work and development. some people are permanently optimistic, others pessimistic. some are always joyful, others as constantly see only the dark side of life. some are always serious and solemn, others always gay, even giddy. these permanent emotional attitudes constitute temperament, and are due to fundamental differences within the body that are in some cases hereditary. crossness and moroseness, for example, may be due to a dyspeptic condition and a chronically bad liver. the happy dispositions belong to bodies whose organs are functioning properly, in which assimilation is good--all the parts of the body doing their proper work. poor eyes which are under a constant strain, through the reflex effects upon various organs of the body, are likely to develop a permanently cross and irritable disposition. through the close sympathetic relation of the various organs, anything affecting one organ and interfering with its proper action is likely to affect many other organs and profoundly influence the emotional states of the body. in growing children particularly, there are many influences which affect their emotions, things of which we seldom think, such as the condition of vision and hearing, the condition of the teeth, nose, and throat, and the condition of all the important vital organs of the body. when a child's disposition is not what we think it ought to be, we should try to find out the causes. =training the emotions.= the emotions are subject to training. the child can be taught control. moreover, he can be taught to appreciate and enjoy higher things than mere animal pleasure; namely, art, literature, nature, truth. the child thereby becomes a spiritual being instead of a mere pig. the ideal of the school should be to develop men and women whose baser passions are under control, who are calm, self-controlled, and self-directed, and who get their greatest pleasure from the finer and higher things of life, such as the various forms of music, the songs of birds, the beauties and intricate workings of nature. this is a wonderful world and a wonderful life, but the child may go through the world without seeing it, and live his life without knowing what it is to live. his eyes must be opened, he must be trained to see and to feel. it is not the place here to tell how this is to be done. this is not a book on methods of teaching. we can only indicate here that the business of the school is not merely to teach people how to make a living, but to teach them how to enjoy the living. there are many avenues from which we get the higher forms of pleasure. there are really many different worlds which we may experience: the world of animals, the world of plants, the mechanical world, the chemical world, the world of literature and of art, the world of music. it is the duty of the schools to open up these worlds to the children, and make them so many possibilities of joy and happiness. the emotions and feelings, then, are not lawless and causeless, but are a part of a world of law and order. they are themselves caused and therefore subject to control and modification. =attention.= attention, too, is related to inherited tendencies on the one side and to habits on the other. if one is walking in the woods and catches a glimpse of something moving in the trees, the eyes _instinctively_ turn so that the person can get a better view of the object. if one hears a sudden sound, the head is instinctively turned so that the person can hear better. one stops, the body is held still and rigid, breathing is slow and controlled--all to favor better hearing. the various acts of attention are reflex and instinctive. but what is attention? by attention we mean _sensory clearness_. when we say we are attentive to a thing or subject, we mean that perceptions or ideas of that thing or subject are _clear_ as compared to other perceptions and ideas that are in consciousness at the same time. the contents of one's consciousness, the perceptions and ideas that constitute one's mind at any one moment are always arranged in an _attentive_ pattern, some being clear, others unclear. the pattern constantly changes and shifts. what is now clear and in the focus of consciousness, presently is unclear and may in a moment disappear from consciousness altogether, while other perceptions or ideas take its place. the first question that arises in connection with attention is, what are the causes of attention? the first group of causes are hereditary and instinctive. the child attends to loud things, bright things, moving things, etc. but as we grow older, the basis of attention becomes more and more _habit_. an illustration will make this clear. i once spent a day at a great exposition with a machinist. he was constantly attending to things mechanical, when i would not even see them. he had spent many years working with machinery, and as a result, things mechanical at once attracted him. similarly, if a man and a woman walk along a street together and look in at the shop windows, the woman sees only hats, dresses, ribbons, and other finery, while the man sees only cigars, pipes, and automobile supplies. every day we live, we are building up habits of attending to certain types of things. what repeatedly comes into our experience, easily attracts our attention to the exclusion of other things. =the function of attention.= attention is the unifying aspect of consciousness. there are always many things in consciousness, and we cannot respond to all at once. the part of consciousness that is clear and focal brings about action. the things to which we attend are the things that count. in later chapters we shall learn that in habit-formation, attention is an important factor. we must attend to the acts we are trying to make habitual. in getting knowledge, we must attend to what we are trying to learn. in committing to memory, we must attend to the ideas that we are trying to fix and make permanent. in thinking and reasoning, those ideas become associated together that are together in attention. attention is therefore the controlling aspect of consciousness. it is the basis of what we call _will_. the ideas that are clear and focal and that persist in consciousness are the ideas that control our action. when one says he has made up his mind, he has made a choice; that merely means that a certain group of ideas persist in consciousness to the exclusion of others. these are the ideas which ultimately produce action. and it is our past experience that determines what ideas will become focal and persist. =training the attention.= there are two aspects of the training of attention. ( ) we can learn to hold ourselves to a task. when we sit down to a table to study, there may be many things that tend to call us away. there lies a magazine which we might read, there is a play at the theater, there are noises outside, there is a friend calling across the street. but we must study. we have set ourselves to a task and we must hold fast to our purpose. the young child cannot do this. he must be trained to do it. the instruments used to train him are pleasure and pain, rewards and punishments that come from parents. gradually, slowly, the child gains control over himself. no one ever amounts to anything till he can hold himself to a task, to a fixed purpose. one must learn to form plans extending over weeks, months, and years, and to hold unflinchingly to them, just as one must hold himself to his study table and allow nothing to distract or to interfere. no training a child can receive is more important than this, for it gives him control over his life, it gives him control over the ideas that are to become focal and determine action. it is for this reason that we call such training a training of attention. it might perhaps better be called a training of the will. but the will is only the attentive consciousness. the idea that is clear, that holds its own in consciousness, is the idea that produces action. when we say that we _will_ to do a certain thing, all we can mean is that the _idea of this act_ is clearest and holds its focal place in consciousness to the exclusion of other ideas. it therefore goes over into action. ( ) the training just discussed may be called a general training of attention giving us a general power and control over our lives, but there is another type of training which is specific. as with the machinist mentioned above, so with all of us; we attend to the type of thing that we have formed a habit of attending to. continued experience in a certain field makes it more and more easy to attend to things in that field. one can take a certain subject and work at it day after day, year after year. by and by, the whole world takes on the aspect of this chosen subject. the entomologist sees bugs everywhere, the botanist sees only plants, the mechanic sees only machines, the preacher sees only the moral and religious aspects of action, the doctor sees only disease, the mathematician sees always the quantitative aspect of things. ideas and perceptions related to one's chosen work go at once and readily to the focus of consciousness; other things escape notice. it is for this reason that we become "crankier" every year that we live. we are attending to only one aspect of the world. while this blinds us to other aspects of the world, it brings mastery in our individual fields. we can, then, by training and practice, get a general control over attention, and by working in a certain field or kind of work, we make it easy to attend to things in that field or work. this to an extent gives us control of our lives, of our destiny. =interest.= the essential elements of interest are attention and feeling. when a person is very attentive to a subject and gets pleasure from experience in that subject, we commonly say that he is _interested_ in that subject. since the importance of attention and feeling in learning has already been shown and will be further developed in the chapters which follow in connection with the subjects of habit, memory, and thinking, little more need be said here. the key to all forms of learning is _attention_. the key to attention is _feeling_. feeling depends upon the nature of the child, inherited and acquired. in our search for the means of arousing interest, we look first to the original nature of the child, to the instincts and the emotions. we look next to the acquired nature, the habits, the ideals, the various needs that have grown up in the individual's life. educational writers have overemphasized the original nature of the child as a basis of interest and have not paid enough attention to acquired nature. we should not ask so much what a child's needs are, but what they _ought_ to be. needs can be created. the child's nature to some extent can be changed. the problem of arousing interest is therefore one of finding in the child's nature a basis for attention and pleasure. if the basis is not to be found there, then it must be built up. how this can be done, how human nature can be changed, is to some extent the main problem of psychology. every chapter in this book, it is hoped, will be found to throw some light on the problem. summary. the two elementary feeling states are pleasantness and unpleasantness. the emotions are complex mental states composed of feeling and the sensations from bodily reactions to the situations. feeling and emotion are the motive forces of life, at the bottom of all important actions. the bodily reactions of emotions are reflex and instinctive. attention is a matter of the relative clearness of the contents of consciousness. the function of attention is to unify thought and action. it is the important factor in all learning and thinking, for it is only the attentive part of consciousness that is effective. class exercises . make out a complete list of the more important emotions. . indicate the characteristic expression of each emotion in your list. . can you have an emotion without its characteristic expression? if, for example, when a situation arises which ordinarily arouses anger in you, you inhibit all the usual motor accompaniments of anger, are you really angry? . are the expressions of the same emotion the same for all people? . try to analyze some of your emotional states: anger, or fear, or grief. can you detect the sensations that come from the bodily reactions? . try to induce an emotional state by producing its characteristic reactions. . try to change an emotional state to an opposite emotion; for example, grief to joy. . try to control and change emotional states in children. . name some sensations that for you are always pleasant, others that are always unpleasant--colors, sounds, tastes, odors, temperatures. . confirm by observation the statement of the text as to the importance of emotions in all the important actions of life. . to what extent do you have control of your emotional states? what have you observed about differences in expression of deep emotions by different people? in case of death in the family, some people wail and moan and express their grief in the most extreme manner, while others do not utter a sound and show great control. why the difference? . make an introspective study of your conscious states to note the difference in clearness of the different processes that are going on in consciousness. do you find a constant shifting? . perform experiments to show the effects of attention in forming habits and acquiring knowledge. ( ) perform tests in learning, using substitution tests as described in chapter x. use several different keys. in some experiments have no distractions, in others, have various distracting noises. what differences do you find in the results? ( ) try learning nonsense syllables, some lists with distractions, others without distractions. ( ) try getting the ideas from stories read to you, as in the logical memory experiment described in chapter x. some stories should be read without distractions, others with distractions. . why are you unable to study well when under the influence of some strong emotion? . are you trained to the extent that you can concentrate on a task and hold yourself to it for a long time? . do you see that as far as will and attention and the emotions are concerned, your life and character are in large measure in your own hands? . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapters iv, v, and vi. mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, chapter xiv, also pp.  - and pp.  - . pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapters v and xi. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapter xiv. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapters iv, viii, and xi. chapter vi habit =the nature of habit.= we now turn from man's inherited nature to his acquired nature. inherited tendencies to action we have called instincts; acquired tendencies to action we shall call habits. we can best form an idea of the nature of habit by considering some concrete cases. let us take first the case of a man forming the habit of turning out the basement light. it usually happens that when a man has an electric light in the basement of his house, it is hard for him at first to think to turn out the light at night when he retires, and as a consequence the light often burns all night. this is expensive and unnecessary, so there is a strong incentive for the man to find a plan which will insure the regular turning-off of the light at bedtime. the plan usually hit upon is the following: the electric switch that controls the basement light is beside the basement stairway. the man learns to look at the switch as he comes up the stairs, after preparing the furnace fire for the night, and learns to take hold of the switch when he sees it and turn off the light. coming up the stairs means to look at the switch. seeing the switch means to turn it. each step of the performance touches off the next. the man sees that in order to make sure that the light will always be turned off, the acts must all be made automatic, and each step must touch off the next in the series. at first, the man leaves the light burning about as often as he turns it off. after practicing for a time on the scheme, the different acts become so well connected that he seldom leaves the light burning. we say that he has formed the _habit_ of turning off the light. for a second illustration, let us take the process of learning that nine times nine equals eighty-one. at first, one does not say or write "eighty-one" when one sees "nine times nine," but one can acquire the habit of doing so. it does not here concern us how the child learns what the product of nine times nine is. he may learn it by counting, by being told, or by reading it in a book. but however he first learns it, he fixes it and makes it automatic and habitual by _continuing_ to say or to write, "nine times nine equals eighty-one." the essential point is that at first the child does not know what to say when he hears or sees the expression "nine times nine," but after long practice he comes to give automatically and promptly the correct answer. for the definite problem "nine times nine" there comes the definite response "eighty-one." for a third illustration, let us take the case of a man tipping his hat when he meets a lady. a young boy does not tip his hat when he meets a lady until he has been taught to do so. after he learns this act of courtesy he does it quite automatically without thinking of it. for the definite situation, meeting a lady of his acquaintance, there comes to be established the definite response, tipping the hat. a similar habit is that of turning to the right when we meet a person. for the definite situation, meeting a person on the road or street or sidewalk, there is established the definite response, turning to the right. the response becomes automatic, immediate, certain. there is another type of habit that may properly be called an intellectual habit, such as voting a certain party ticket, say the democratic. when one is a boy, one hears his father speak favorably of the democratic party. his father says, "hurrah for bryan," so he comes to say, "hurrah for bryan." his father says, "i am a democrat," so he says he is a democrat. he takes the side that his father takes. in a similar way we take on the same religious notions that our parents have. it does not always happen this way, but this is the rule. but no matter how we come to do it, we do adopt the creed of some party or some church. we adopt a certain way of looking at public questions, and a certain way of looking at religious questions. for certain rather definite situations, we come to take definite stands. when we go to the booth to vote, we look at the top of the ballot to find the column marked "democratic," and the definite response is to check the "democrat" column. of course, some of us form a different habit and check the "republican" column, but the psychology of the act is the same. the point is that we form the democratic habit or we form the republican habit; and the longer we practice the habit, the harder it is to change it. in the presidential campaign of , roosevelt "bolted" from the republican party. it was hard for the older republicans to follow him. while one occasionally found a follower of roosevelt who was gray, one usually found the old republicans standing by the old party, the younger ones joining the progressive party. it is said that when darwin published "the origin of species," very few old men accepted the doctrine of evolution. the adherents of the new doctrine were nearly all young men. so there is such a thing as an intellectual habit. one comes to take a definite stand when facing certain definite intellectual situations. similar to the type of habits which we have called intellectual is another type which may be called "moral." when we face the situation of reporting an occurrence, we can tell the truth or we can lie. we can build up the habit of meeting such situations by telling the truth on all occasions. we can learn to follow the maxim "tell the truth at all times, at all hazards." we can come to do this automatically, certainly, and without thought of doing anything else. most moral situations are fairly definite and clear-cut, and for them we can establish definite forms of response. we can form the habit of helping a person in distress, of helping a sick neighbor, of speaking well of a neighbor; we can form habits of industry, habits of perseverance. these and other similar habits are the basis of morality. the various kinds of habits which we have enumerated are alike in certain fundamental particulars. in all of them there is a definite situation followed by a definite response. one sees the switch and turns off the light; he sees the expression "nine times nine" and says "eighty-one"; he sees a lady he knows and tips his hat; in meeting a carriage on the road, he turns to the right; when he has to vote, he votes a certain ticket; when he has to report an occurrence, he tells it as it happened. there is, in every case, a definite situation followed by a definite response. another characteristic is common to all the cases mentioned above, _i.e._ the response is acquired, it does not come at first. in every instance we might have learned to act differently. we could form the habit of always leaving the light burning; could just as easily say "nine times nine equals forty"; we could turn to the left; we could vote the republican ticket. we can form bad moral habits as well as good ones, perhaps more easily. the point is, however, that we acquire definite ways of acting for the same situations, and these definite ways of acting are called habits. =habit and nerve-path.= it has already been stated that a habit is a tendency toward a certain type of action in a certain situation. the basis of this tendency is in the nervous system. in order to understand it we must consider what the nervous system is like. nerves terminate at one end in a sense organ and at the other end ultimately in a muscle. in figure ii, a is a sense organ, b a nerve going from the sense organ to the brain c. d, e, f, g, and h are motor nerves going from the brain to the muscles. now, let us show from the diagram what organization means and what tendency means. at first when the child sees the expression "nine times nine," he does not say "eighty-one." the stimulus brings about no definite action. it is as likely to go out through e or f as through d. but suppose we can get the child to say "nine times nine equals eighty-one." we can write the expression on the blackboard and have the child look at it and say "nine times nine equals eighty-one." suppose the act of saying "eighty-one" is brought about by the nerve-current going out through nerve-chain d. by repetition, we establish a bond. a stimulus of a particular kind comes through a, goes over b to c, and out over d, making muscles at m bring about a very definite action in saying "eighty-one." [illustration: figure ii.--the organization of tendencies] from the point of view of physiology, the process of habit-formation consists in securing a particular nerve coupling, establishing a particular nerve path, so that a definite form of stimulation will bring about a definite form of response. a nerve tendency is simply the likelihood that a stimulus will take a certain course rather than any other. this likelihood is brought about by getting the stimulus to take the desired route through the nervous system to a group of muscles and to continue following this route. the more times it passes the same way, the greater is the probability that at any given time the stimulus will take the accustomed route and bring about the usual response. at first any sort of action is possible. a nerve stimulus can take any one of the many routes to the different muscles. by chance or by conscious direction, the stimulus takes a certain path, and by repetition we fix and make permanent this particular route. this constitutes a nerve tendency or habit. =plasticity.= our discussion should have made it clear that habit is acquired nature, while instinct is inherited nature. habit is acquired tendency while instinct is inherited tendency. the possibility of acquiring habits is peculiarly a human characteristic. while inanimate things have a definite nature, a definite way of reacting to forces which act upon them, they have little, if any, possibility of varying their way of acting. water might be said to have habits. if one cools water, it turns to ice. if we heat it, it turns to steam. but it _invariably_ does this. we cannot teach it any different way of acting. under the same conditions it always does the same thing. plants are very much like inanimate things. plants have definite ways of acting. a vine turns around a support. a leaf turns its upper surface to the light. but one cannot teach plants different ways of acting. the lower forms of animals are somewhat like plants and inanimate objects. but to a very slight extent they are variable and can form habits. among the higher animals, such as dogs and other domestic animals, there is a greater possibility of forming habits. in man there are the greatest possibilities of habit-formation. in man the learned acts or habits are many as compared to the unlearned acts or instincts; while among the lower animals the opposite is the case--their instincts are many as compared to their habits. we may call this possibility of forming habits _plasticity_. inanimate objects such as iron, rocks, sulphur, oxygen, etc., have no plasticity. plants have very little possibility of forming habits. lower animals have somewhat more, and higher animals still more, while man has the greatest possibility of forming habits. this great possibility of forming habits is one of the main characteristics of man. let us illustrate the contrast between man and inanimate objects by an example. if sulphur is put into a test tube and heated, it at first melts and becomes quite thin like water. if it is heated still more, it becomes thick and will not run out of the tube. it also becomes dark. sulphur _always_ does this when so treated. it cannot be taught to act differently. now the action of sulphur when heated is like the action of a man when he turns to the right upon meeting a person in the street. but the man has to acquire this habit, while the sulphur does not have to learn its way of acting. sulphur always acted in this way, while man did not perform his act at first, but had to learn it by slow repetition. everything in the world has its own peculiar nature, but man is unique in that his nature can be very much changed. to a large extent, a man is _made_, his nature is _acquired_. after we become men and women, we have hundreds and thousands of tendencies to action, definite forms of action, that we did not have when young. man's nature might be said to consist in his tendencies to action. some of these tendencies he inherits; these are his instincts. some of these he acquires; these are his habits. =what habits do for us.= we have found out what habits are like; let us now see what they do for us. what good do they accomplish for us? how are we different after forming a habit from what we were before? we can best answer these questions by a consideration of concrete cases. typewriting will serve very well the purpose of illustration. we shall give the result of an actual experiment in which ten university students took part. during their first half hour of practice, they wrote an average of  words. at the end of forty-five hours of practice, they were writing an average of  words in a half hour. this was an increase of speed of  per cent. an expert typist can write about  words in a half hour. such a speed requires much more than forty-five hours practice, and is attained by the best operators only. [illustration: figure iii.--learning curves the upper graph shows the improvement in speed of a group of students working two half hours a day. the lower curve shows the improvement of a group working ten half-hours a day.] in the foregoing experiment, the students improved in accuracy also. at the beginning of the work, they made  errors in the half hour. at the end of the practice, with much faster speed, they were making only  errors in a half hour. the actual number of errors had increased  per cent. the increase in errors was therefore exactly half as much as the increase in speed. this, of course, was a considerable increase in accuracy, for while the speed had increased to . times what it had been at the beginning, the errors had increased only . times. the subjects in this experiment paid much more attention to speed than they did to accuracy. if they had emphasized accuracy, they would have been doing almost perfect work at the end of the practice, and their speed would have been somewhat less. practice, then, not only develops speed but also develops accuracy. there are also other results. at the beginning of work with the typewriter, there is much waste of energy and much fatigue. the waste of energy comes from using unnecessary muscles, and the fatigue is partly due to this waste of energy. but even apart from this waste of energy, an habituated act is performed with less fatigue. the various muscles concerned become better able to do their work. as a result of habituation there is, then, greater speed, greater accuracy, less waste of energy, and less fatigue. if we look not at the changes in our work but at the changes in ourselves, the changes in our minds due to the formation of habits, we find still other results. at the beginning of practice with the typewriter, the learner's whole attention is occupied with the work. when one is learning to do a new trick, the attention cannot be divided. the whole mind must be devoted to the work. but after one has practiced for several weeks, one can operate the typewriter while thinking about something else. we say that the habituated act sinks to a lower level of consciousness, meaning that as a habit becomes more and more fixed, less and less attention is devoted to the acts concerned. increased skill gives us pleasure and also gives us confidence in our ability to do the thing. corresponding to this inner confidence is outer certainty. there is greater objective certainty in our performance and a corresponding inner confidence. by objective certainty, we mean that a person watching our performance, becomes more and more sure of our ability to perform, and we ourselves feel confidence in our power of achievement. now that we have shown the results of habituation let us consider additional illustrations. in piano playing, the stimuli are the notes as written in the music. we see the notes occupying certain places on the scale of the music. a note in a certain place means that we must strike a certain key. at first the response is slow, we have to hunt out each note on the keyboard. moreover, we make many mistakes; we strike the wrong keys just as we do in typewriting. we are awkward, making many unnecessary movements, and the work is tiresome and fatiguing. after long practice, the speed with which we can manipulate the keys in playing the piano is wonderful. our playing becomes accurate, perfect. we do it with ease, with no unnecessary movements. we can play the piano, after we become skilled, without paying attention to the actual movements of our hands. we can play the piano while concentrating upon the meaning of the music, or while carrying on a conversation, or while thinking about something else. as a rule, pleasure and confidence come with skill. playing a difficult piece on the piano involves a skill which is one of the most complicated that man achieves. it is possible only through habituation of the piano-playing movements. nailing shingles on a roof illustrates well the various aspects of habituation. the expert carpenter not only nails on many more shingles in a day than does the amateur, but he does it better and with more ease, and with much less fatigue. the carpenter knows exactly how much he can do in a day, and each particular movement is certain and sure. the carpenter has confidence in, and usually prides himself on, this ability, thus getting pleasure out of his work. the operations in arithmetic illustrate most of the results of habituation. practice in addition makes for speed and accuracy. in a few weeks' time we can very much increase our speed and accuracy in adding, or in the other arithmetical operations. the foregoing examples are sufficient, although they could be multiplied indefinitely. almost any habit one might name would show clearly most of the results enumerated. the most important aspects of habituation may be summed up in the one word _efficiency_. habituation gives us speed and accuracy. speed and accuracy mean skill. skill means efficiency. =how habits are formed.= it is clear from the foregoing discussion that the essential thing in a habit is the definiteness of the connection between the stimulus and the response, between the situation and the reaction to the situation. our question now is, how is this definiteness of connection established? the answer is, _through repetition_. let us work the matter out from a concrete case, such as learning to play the piano. in piano playing the stimulus comes from the music as printed on the staff. a note having a certain position on the staff indicates that a certain key is to be struck. we are told by our music teacher what keys on the piano correspond to the various notes on the staff, or we may learn these facts from the instruction book. it makes no difference how we learn them; but after we know these facts, we must have practice to give us skill. the mere knowledge will not make us piano players. in order to be skillful, we must have much practice not only in striking the keys indicated by the various note positions, but with the various combinations of notes. for example, a note on the second space indicates that the player must strike the key known as "a." but "a" may occur with any of the other notes, it may precede them or it may follow them. we must therefore have practice in striking "a" in all these situations. to have skill at the piano, we must mechanize many performances. we must be able to read the notes with accuracy and ease. we must practice so much that the instant we see a certain combination of notes on the staff, our hands immediately execute the proper strokes. not only must we learn what keys on the piano correspond to the various notes of the music, but the notes have a temporal value which we must learn. some are to be sounded for a short time, others for a longer time. we have eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, etc. moreover, the signature of the music as indicated by the sharps or flats changes the whole situation. if the music is written in "a sharp" then when "a" is indicated on the staff, we must not strike the white key known as "a," but the black key just above, known as "a sharp." briefly, in piano playing, the stimulus comes from the characters printed on the staff. the movements which these characters direct are very complicated and require months and years of practice. we must emphasize the fact that practice alone gives facility, years of practice. but after these years of practice, one can play a piece of music at sight; that is, the first stimulus sets off perfectly a very complicated response. this sort of performance is one of the highest feats of skill that man accomplishes. to get skill, then, one must practice. but mere repetition is not sufficient. for practice to be most effective, one must put his whole mind on what he is doing. if he divides his attention between the acts which he is practicing and something else, the effect of the practice in fixing and perfecting the habit is slight. it seems that when we are building up a new nerve-path which is to be the basis of a new habit, the nervous energies should not be divided; that the whole available nervous energy should be devoted to the acts which we are repeating. this is only another way of saying that when we are practicing to establish a habit, we should attend to what we are doing and to nothing else. but after the habit-connection is once firmly established, we can attend to other things while performing the habitual act. the habitual action will go on of itself. we may say, then, that in order to be able to do a thing with little or no attention, we must give much attention to it at first. another important factor in habit-formation is pleasure. the act which we are practicing must give us pleasure, either while we are doing it or as a result. pleasurable results hasten habit-formation. when we practice an act in which we have no interest, we make slow progress or none at all. now the elements of interest are attention and pleasure. if we voluntarily attend to a thing and its performance gives us pleasure, or pleasure results from it, we say we are interested in it. the secret of successful practice is interest. repeatedly in laboratory experiments it happens that a student loses interest in the performance and subsequently makes little, if any, progress. one of the biggest problems connected with habit-formation is that of maintaining interest. a factor which prevents the formation of habits is that of exceptions. if a stimulus, instead of going over to the appropriate response, produces some other action, there is an interference in the formation of the desired habit. the effect of an exception is greater than the mere neglect of practice. the _exception opens up another path_ and tends to make future action uncertain. particularly is this true in the case of moral habits. forming moral habits is usually uphill work anyway, in that we have instincts to overcome. allowing exceptions to enter, in the moral sphere, usually means a slipping back into an old way of acting, thereby weakening much the newly-made connection. in any kind of practice, when we become fatigued we make errors. if we continue to practice when fatigued, we form connections which we do not wish to make and which interfere with the desired habits. =economy of practice.= the principles which we have enumerated and illustrated are fairly general and of universal validity. there are certain other factors which we may discuss here under the head of economical procedure. to form a habit, we must practice. but how long should we practice at one time? this is an experimental problem and has been definitely solved. it has been proved by experiment that we can practice profitably for as long a time as we can maintain a high degree of attention, which is usually till we become fatigued. this time is not the same for all people. it varies with age, and in the case of the same person it varies at different times. if ordinary college students work at habit-formation at the highest point of concentration, they get the best return for a period of about a half hour. it depends somewhat on the amount of concentration required for the work and the stage of fixation of the habit, _i.e._ whether one has just begun to form the habit or whether it is pretty well fixed. for children, the period of successful practice is usually much less than a half hour--five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, depending upon the age of the child and the kind of work. the best interval between periods of practice is the day, twenty-four hours. if one practices in the morning for a half hour, one can practice again in the afternoon with nearly as much return as he would secure the next day, but not quite. in general, practice is better, gives more return, if spread out. to practice one day as long as one can work at a high point of efficiency, and then to postpone further practice till the next day, gives one the most return for the time put in. but if one is in a hurry to form a habit, one can afford to practice more each day even if the returns from the practice do diminish proportionately. this matter has been tried out on the typewriter. if one practices for ten half hours a day with half-hour rests between, one does not get so much return for his time as he would if he should spread it out at the rate of one or two half-hour practices a day. but by working ten half hours a day, one gets much more efficiency in the same number of days than if he should practice only one or two half hours a day. this point must not be misunderstood. we do not mean that one must not work at anything longer than a half hour a day. we mean that if one is forming a habit, his time counts for more in forming the habit if spread out at the rate of a half hour or an hour a day, than it does if put in at a faster rate. therefore if one is in no hurry and can afford to spread out his time, he gets the best return by so doing, and the habit is more firmly fixed than if formed hurriedly. but if one is in a hurry, and has the time to devote to it, he can afford to concentrate his practice up to five hours or possibly more in a day, provided that rest intervals are interspersed between periods of practice. there is one time in habit-formation when concentrated practice is most efficient. that is at the beginning. in a process as complicated as typewriting, so little impression is made at the beginning by a short period of practice that progress is but slight. on the first day, one should practice about four or five times to secure the best returns, a half hour each time. =what the teacher can do.= now, let us see how the teacher can be of assistance to the pupil in habit-formation. the teacher should have a clear idea of the nature of the habit to be formed and should demonstrate the habit to the pupil. suppose the habit is so simple a thing as long division. the teacher should explain each step in the process. she should go to the blackboard and actually solve a number of problems in long division, so that the pupils can see just how to do it. after this the pupils should go to the board and solve a problem themselves. the reason for this procedure is that it is most economical. if the children are left to get the method of doing long division from a book, they will not be able to do it readily and will make mistakes. a teacher can explain a process better than it can be explained in a book. by giving a full explanation and demonstration and then by requiring the children to work a few problems while she watches for mistakes, correcting them at once, the teacher secures economy of effort and time. the first step is to demonstrate the habit to the pupils; the second, to have them do the act, whatever it is, correcting their mistakes; the third, to require the pupils to practice till they have acquired skill. the teacher must make provision for practice. =what parents can do.= parents can be of very great assistance to children who are forming habits. ( ) they can coöperate with the school, which is directing the child in the systematic formation of a great system of habits. the teacher should explain these habits to the parents so that they may know what the teacher is trying to do. quite often the home and the school are working at cross purposes. the only way to prevent this is for them to work in the closest coöperation, with the fullest understanding of what is being undertaken for the child. parents and teachers should often meet together and talk over the work of training the children of the community. parents should have not merely a general understanding of the work of the school, but they should know the details undertaken. the school often assigns practice work to be done at home in reading, writing, arithmetic. parents should always know of these assignments and should help the children get the necessary practice. they can do this by reminding the child of the work, by preparing a suitable place where the work may be done, and by securing quiet for the practice. children like play and it is easy for them to forget their necessary work. parents can be of the greatest service to childhood and youth by holding the children to their responsibilities and duties. few parents take any thought of whether their children are doing all possible for their school progress. few of those who do, make definite plans and arrangements for the children to accomplish the necessary practice and study. this is the parent's duty and responsibility. moreover, parents are likely to feel that children have no rights, and think nothing of calling on them in the midst of their work to do some errand. now, children should work about the house and help their parents, but there should be a time for this and a separate time for study and practice on school work. when a child sits down for serious practice on some work, his time should be sacred and inviolable. instead of interfering with the child, the parents should do everything in their power to make this practice possible and efficient. in their relations with their children perhaps parents sin more in the matter of neglecting to plan for them than in any other way. they plan for everything else, but they let their children grow up, having taken no definite thought about helping them to form their life habits and to establish these habits by practice. when a child comes home from school, the mother should find out just what work is to be done before the next day and should plan the child's play and work in such a way as to include all necessary practice. if all parents would do this, the value to the work of the school and to the life of the child would be incalculable. ( ) just as one of the main purposes of the teacher is to help the child gain initiative, so it is one of the greatest of the parents' duties. parents must help the children to keep their purposes before them. children forget, even when they wish to remember. often, they do not want to remember. the parents' duty is to get the child to _want_ to remember, and to help him to remember, whether he wants to or not. one of the main differences between childhood and maturity is that the child lives in the present, his purposes are all immediate ones. habits always look forward, they are for future good and use. mature people have learned to look forward and to plan for the future. they must, therefore, perform this function for the children. they must look forward and see what the child should learn to do, and then see that he learns to do it. ( ) parents must help children to plan their lives in general and in detail; _i.e._ in the sense of determining the ideals and habits that will be necessary for those lives. the parents must do this with the help of the child. the child must not be a blind follower, but as the child's mind becomes mature enough, the parent must explain the matter of forming life habits, and must show the child that life is a structure that he himself is to build. life will be what he makes it, and the time for forming character is during early years. the parent must not only tell the child this but must help him to realize the truth of it, must help him continually, consistently. ( ) of course it is hardly necessary to say that the parent can help much, perhaps most, by example. the parent must not only tell the child what to do but must _show_ him how it should be done. ( ) parents can help in the ways mentioned above, but they can also help by coöperating among themselves in planning for the training of the children of the community. one parent cannot train his children independently of all the other people in the community. there must be a certain unity of ideals and aims. therefore, not only is there need for coöperation between parents and teachers but among parents themselves. although they coöperate in everything else, they seldom do in the training of their children. the people of a community should meet together occasionally to plan for this common work. =importance of habit in education and life.= a man is the sum of his habits and ideals. he has language habits; he speaks german, or french, or english. he has writing habits, spelling habits, reading habits, arithmetic habits. he has political habits, religious habits. he has various social habits, habitual attitudes which he takes toward his fellows. he has moral habits--he is honest and truthful, or he is dishonest and untruthful. he always looks on the bright side, or else on the dark side of events. all these habits and many more, he has. they are structures which he has built. one's life, then, is the sum of his tendencies, and these tendencies one establishes in early life. this view gives an importance to the work of the school which is derived from no other view. the school is not a place where we get this little bit of information, or the other. it is the place where we are molded, formed, and shaped into the beings we are to be. the school has not risen to see the real importance of its work. its aims have been low and its achievements much lower than its aims. teachers should rise to the importance of their calling. their work is that of gods. they are creators. they do not make the child. they do not give it memory or attention or imagination. but they are creators of tendencies, prejudices, religions, politics, and other habits unnumbered. so that in a very real sense, the school, with all the other educational influences, makes the man. we do not give a child the capacity to learn, but we can determine what he shall learn. we do not give him memory, but we can select what he shall remember. we do not make the child as he is at the beginning, but we can, in large measure, determine the world of influences which complete the task of _making_. in the early part of life every day and every hour of the day establishes and strengthens tendencies. every year these tendencies become stronger. every year after maturity, we resist change. by twenty-five or thirty, "character has set like plaster." the general attitude and view of the world which we have at maturity, we are to hold throughout life. very few men fundamentally change after this. it takes a tremendous influence and an unusual situation to break one up and make him an essentially different man after maturity. every year a "crank" becomes "crankier." it is well that this is so. everything in the world costs its price. rigidity is the price we pay for efficiency. in order to be efficient, we must make habitual the necessary movements. after they are habituated, they resist change. but habit makes for regularity and order. we could not live in society unless there were regularity, order, fixity. habit makes for conservatism. but conservatism is necessary for order. in a sense, habit works against progress. but permanent improvement without habit would be impossible, for permanent progress depends upon holding what we gain. it is well for society that we are conservative. we could not live in the chaos that would exist without habit. public opinion resists change. people refuse to accept a view that is different from the one they have held. we could get nowhere if we continually changed, and it is well for us that we continue to do the old way to which we have become accustomed, till a new and better one is shown beyond doubt. even then, it is probably better for an old person to continue to use the accustomed methods of a lifetime. although better methods are developed, they will not be so good for the old person as those modes of action that he is used to. the possibility of progress is through new methods which come in with each succeeding generation. when we become old we are not willing to change, but the more reasonable of us are willing that our children should be taught a better way. sometimes, of course, we find people who say that what was good enough for them is good enough for their children. most of us think better, and wish to give our children a "better bringing up than ours has been." these considerations make clear the importance of habit in life. they should also make clear a very important corollary. if habits are important in life, then it is the duty of parents and teachers to make a careful selection of the habits that are to be formed by the children. the habits that will be necessary for the child to form in order to meet the various situations of his future life, should be determined. there should be no vagueness about it. definite habits, social, moral, religious, intellectual, professional, etc., will be necessary for efficiency. we should know what these various habits are, and should then set about the work of establishing them with system and determination, just as we would the building of a house. much school work and much home training is vague, indefinite, uncertain, done without a clear understanding of the needs or of the results. we therefore waste time, years of the child's life, and the results are unsatisfactory. =drill in school subjects.= in many school subjects, the main object is to acquire skill in certain processes. as previously explained, we can become skillful in an act only by repetition of the act. therefore, in those subjects in which the main object is the acquiring of skill, there must be much repetition. this repetition is called drill. the matter of economical procedure in drill has already been considered, but there are certain problems connected with drill that must be further discussed. drill is usually the hardest part of school work. it becomes monotonous and tiresome. moreover, drill is always a means. it is the means by which we become efficient. take writing, for example. it is not an end in itself; it is the means by which we convey thoughts. reading is a means by which we are able to get the thought of another. in acquiring a foreign language, we have first to master the elementary tools that will enable us to make the thought of the foreign language our own. it seems that the hardest part of education always comes first, when we are least able to do it. it used to be that nearly all the work of the school was drill. there was little school work that was interesting in itself. in revolt against this kind of school, many modern educators have tried to plan a curriculum that would be interesting to the child. in schools that follow this idea, there is little or no drill, pure and simple. there is no work that is done for the sole purpose of acquiring skill. the work is so planned that, in pursuing it, the child will of necessity have to perform the necessary acts and will thereby gain efficiency. in arithmetic, there is no adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, only as such things must be done in the performance of something else that is interesting in itself. for example, the child plays store and must add up the sales. the child plays bean bag and must add up the score. practice gained in this indirect way is known as incidental drill. direct drill consists in making a direct approach; we wish to be efficient at adding, so we practice adding as such and not merely as incidental to something else. this plan of incidental drill is in harmony with the principle of interest previously explained. there are several things, however, that must be considered. the proper procedure would seem to be to look forward and find out in what directions the child will need to acquire skill and then to help him acquire it in the most economical way and at the proper time. nature has so made us that we like to do a new trick. when we have taught a child how to add and subtract, he likes to perform these operations because the operations themselves give pleasure. therefore much repetition can be allowed and much skill acquired by a direct approach to the practice. when interest drags, incidental drill can be fallen back upon to help out the interest. children should be taught that certain things must be done, certain skill must be acquired. they should accept some things on the authority of elders. they should be taught to apply themselves and to give their whole attention to a thing that must be done. a desire for efficiency can be developed in them. the spirit of competition can sometimes be effectively used to add interest to drill. of course, interest and attention there must be, and if it cannot be secured in one way, it must be in another. experiments have abundantly shown the value of formal drill, that is to say, drill for drill's sake. if an arithmetic class is divided, one half being given a few minutes' drill on the fundamental operations each day but otherwise doing exactly the same work as the other half of the class, the half receiving the drill acquires much more skill in the fundamental operations and, besides, is better at reasoning out problems than the half that had no drill. the explanation of the latter fact is doubtless that the pupils receiving the drill acquire such efficiency in the fundamental operations that these cause no trouble, leaving all the energies of the pupils for reasoning out the problems. it has been shown experimentally that a direct method of teaching spelling is more efficient than an indirect method. it is not to be wondered at that such turns out to be the case. for in a direct approach, the act that we are trying to habituate is brought more directly before consciousness, receiving that focal attention which is necessary for the most efficient practice in habit-formation. if one wishes to be a good ball pitcher, one begins to pitch balls, and continues pitching balls day after day, morning, noon, and night. one does not go about it indirectly. if one wishes to be a good shot with a rifle, one gets a rifle and goes to shooting. similarly, if one wishes to be a good adder, the way to do is to begin adding, not to begin doing something else. of course any method that will induce a child to realize that he ought to acquire a certain habit, is right and proper. we must do all we can to give a child a desire, an interest in the thing that he is trying to do. but there is no reason why the thing should not be faced directly. =rules for habit formation.= in the light of the various principles which we have discussed, what rules can be given to one forming habits? the evident answer is, to proceed in accordance with established principles. we may, however, bring the most important of these principles together in the form of rules which can serve as a guide and help to one forming habits. ( ) _get initiative._ by this is meant that a person forming a habit should have some sustaining reason for doing it, some end that is being sought. this principle will be of very little use to young children, only to those old enough to appreciate reasons and ends. in arithmetic, for example, a child should be shown what can be accomplished if he possesses certain skill in addition, subtraction, and multiplication. it is not always possible for a young person to see why a certain habit should be formed. for the youngest children, the practice must be in the form of play. but when a child is old enough to think, to have ideals and purposes, reasons and explanations should be worked out. ( ) _get practice._ if you are to have skill, you must practice. practice regularly, practice hard while you are doing it. throw your whole life into it, as if what you are doing is the most important thing in the world. practice under good conditions. do not think that just any kind of practice will do. try to make conditions such that they will enable you to do your best work. such conditions will not happen by chance. you must make them happen. you must make conditions favorable. you must seek opportunities to practice. you must realize that your life is in the making, that _you_ are making it, that it is to a large extent composed of habits. these habits you are building. they are built only by practice. get practice. when practicing, fulfill the psychological conditions. work under the most favorable circumstances as to length of periods, intervals, etc. ( ) _allow no exceptions._ you should fully realize the great influence of exceptions. when you start in to form a habit, allow nothing to turn you from your course. whether the habit is some fundamental moral habit or the multiplication table, be consistent, do not vacillate. nothing is so strong as consistent action, nothing so weak as doubtful, wavering, uncertain action. have the persistence of a bull dog and the regularity of planetary motion. =transfer of training.= our problem now is to find out whether forming one habit helps one to form another. in some cases it does. the results of a recent experiment performed in the laboratory of educational psychology in the university of missouri, will show what is meant. it was found that if a person practiced distributing cards into pigeon holes till great proficiency was attained, and then the numbering of the boxes or pigeon holes was changed, the person could learn the new numbering and gain proficiency in distributing the cards in the new way more quickly than was the case at first. similarly, if one learns to run a typewriter with a certain form of keyboard, one can learn to operate a different keyboard much more quickly than was the case in learning the first keyboard. it is probable that the explanation of this apparent transfer is that there are common elements in the two cases. certain bonds established in the first habit are available in the second. in the case of distributing the cards, many such common elements can be made out. one gains facility in reading the numbering of the cards. the actual movement of the hand in getting to a particular box is the same whatever the number of the box. one acquires schemes of associating and locating the boxes, schemes that will work in both cases. but suppose that one spends fifteen days in distributing cards according to one scheme of numbering, and then changes the numbering and practices for fifteen days with the new numbering, at the end of the second fifteen days one has more skill than at the close of the first fifteen days. in fact, in five days one has as much skill in the new method as was acquired in fifteen days in the first method. however, and this is an important point, the speed in the new way is not so great as the speed acquired in thirty days using one method or one scheme all the time. direct practice on the specific habit involved is always most efficient. one should probably never learn one thing _just because_ it will help him in learning something else, for that something else could be more economically learned by direct practice. learning one language probably helps in learning another. a year spent in learning german will probably help in learning french. but two years spent in learning french will give more efficiency in french than will be acquired by spending one year on german and then one year on french. if the only reason for a study is that it helps in learning something else, then this study should be left out of the curriculum. if the only reason for studying latin, for example, is that it helps in studying english, or french, or helps in grammar, or gives one a larger vocabulary in english on account of a knowledge of the latin roots, then the study of the language cannot be justified; for all of these results could be much more economically and better attained by a direct approach. of course, if latin has a justification in itself, then these by-products are not to be despised. the truth seems to be that habits are very specific things. a definite stimulus goes over to a definite response. we must decide what habits we need to have established, and then by direct and economical practice establish these habits. it is true that in pursuing some studies, we acquire habits that are of much greater applicability in the affairs of life than can be obtained from other studies. when one has acquired the various adding habits, he has kinds of skill that will be of use in almost everything that is undertaken later. so also speaking habits, writing habits, spelling habits, moral habits, etc., are of universal applicability. whenever one undertakes to do a thing that involves some habit already formed, that thing is more easily done by virtue of that habit. one could not very well learn to multiply one number by another, such as , , by , , without first learning to add. this seems to be all there is to the idea of the transfer of training. one gets an act, or an idea, or an attitude, or a point of view that is available in a new thing, thereby making the new thing easier. the methods one would acquire in the study of zoölogy would be, many of them, directly applicable in the study of botany. but, just as truly, one can acquire habits in doing one thing that will be a direct hindrance in learning another thing. knocking a baseball unfits one for knocking a tennis ball. the study of literature and philosophy probably unfits one for the study of an experimental science because the methods are so dissimilar, in some measure antagonistic. =habit and moral training.= by moral training, we mean that training which prepares one to live among his fellows. it is a training that prepares us to act in our relations with our fellow men in such a way as to bring happiness to our neighbors as well as to ourselves. specifically, it is a training in honesty, truthfulness, sympathy, and industry. there are other factors of morality but these are the most important. it is evident at once that moral training is the most important of all training. this is, at any rate, the view taken by society; for if a man falls short in his relations with his fellows, he is punished. if the extent of his falling is very great, his liberty is entirely taken away from him. in some cases, he is put to death. moral training, in addition to being the most important, is also the most difficult. what the public schools can do in this field is quite limited. the training which the child gets on the streets and at home almost overshadows it. =nature of moral training.= a good person is one who does the right social thing at the right time. the more completely and consistently one does this, the better one is. what kind of training can one receive that will give assurance of appropriate moral action? two things can be done to give a child this assurance. the child can be led to form proper ideals of action and proper habits of action. by ideal of action, we mean that the child should know what the right action is, and have a desire to do it. habits of action are acquired only through action. as has been pointed out in the preceding pages, continued action of a definite kind develops a tendency to this particular action. one's character is the sum of his tendencies to action. these tendencies can be developed only through practice, through repetition. moral training, therefore, has the same basis as all other training, that is, in habits. the same procedure that we use in teaching the child the multiplication table is the one to use in developing honesty. in the case of the tables, we have the child say "fifty-six" for "eight times seven." we have him do this till he does it instantly, automatically. honesty and truthfulness and the other moral virtues can be fixed in the same way. =home and moral training.= the home is the most important factor in moral training. this is largely because of the importance of early habits and attitudes. obedience to parents and respect for authority, which in a large measure underlie all other moral training, must be secured and developed in the early years of childhood. the child does not start to school till about six years old. at this age much of the foundation of morality is laid. unless the child learns strict obedience in the first two or three years of life, it is doubtful whether he will ever learn it aright. without the habit of implicit obedience, it is difficult to establish any other good habit. parents should understand that training in morality consists, in large measure, in building up habits, and should go about it in a systematic way. as various situations arise in the early life of a child, the parents should obtain from him the appropriate responses. when the situations recur, the right responses should be again secured. parents should continue to insist upon these responses till tendencies are formed for the right response to follow when the situation arises. after continued repetition, the response comes automatically. the good man or woman is the one who does the right thing as the situation presents itself, does it as a matter of course because it is his nature. he does not even think of doing the wrong thing. one of the main factors in child training is consistency. the parent must inflexibly require the right action in the appropriate situation. good habits will not be formed if parents insist on proper action one day but on the next day allow the child to do differently. parents must plan the habits which they wish their children to form and execute these plans systematically, exercising constant care. parents, and children as well, would profit from reading the plan used by franklin. farseeing and clear-headed, franklin saw that character is a structure which one builds, so he set about this building in a systematic way. for a certain length of time he practiced on one virtue, allowing no exceptions in this one virtue. when this aspect of his character had acquired strength, he added another virtue and then tried to keep perfect as to both.[ ] [ ] see _autobiography of benjamin franklin_. =the school and moral training.= in this, as in all other forms of training, the school is supplementary to the home. the teacher should have well in mind the habits and ideals that the home has been trying to develop and should assist in strengthening the bonds. the school can do much in developing habits of kindness and sympathy among the children. it can develop civic and social ideals and habits. just how it can best do this is a question. should moral ideals be impressed systematically and should habits be formed at the time these ideals are impressed, or should the different ideals be instilled and developed as occasion demands? this is an experimental problem, and that method should be followed which produces the best results. it is possible that one teacher may use one method best while a different teacher will have better success with another method. more important than the question of a systematic or an incidental method is the question of making the matter vital when it is taken up. nothing is more certain than that mere knowledge of right action will not insure right action. in a few hours one can teach a child, as matters of mere knowledge, what he should do in all the important situations of life; but this will not insure that he will henceforth do the right things. there are only two ways by which we can obtain any assurance that right action will come. the first way is to secure right habits of response. we must build up tendencies to action. tendencies depend upon previous action. the second way is to help the child to analyze moral situations and see what results will follow upon the different kinds of action. there can be developed in a child a desire to do that which will bring joy and happiness to others, rather than pain and sorrow. but this analysis of moral situations is not enough to insure right moral action; there must be practice in doing the right thing. the situation must go over to the right response to insure its going there the next time. the first thing in moral training is to develop habits. then, as soon as the child is old enough he can strengthen his habits by a careful analysis of the problem why one should act one way rather than another. this adds motive; and motive gives strength and assurance. summary. habits are acquired tendencies to specific actions in definite situations. they are fixed through repetition. they give us speed, accuracy, and certainty, they save energy and prevent fatigue. they are performed with less attention and become pleasurable. the main purpose of education is to form the habits--moral, intellectual, vocational, cultural--necessary for life. habits and ideals are the basis of our mature life and character. moral training is essentially like other forms of training, habit being the basis. class exercises . practice on the formation of some habit until considerable skill is acquired. draw a learning curve similar to the one on page  , showing the increase in skill. a class experiment can be performed by the use of a substitution test. take letters to represent the nine digits, then transcribe numbers into the letters as described on page  . keep a record of successive five-minute periods of practice till all have practiced an hour. this gives twelve practice periods for the construction of a learning curve. the individual experiments should be more difficult and cover a longer period. suitable experiments for individual practice are: learning to operate a typewriter, pitching marbles into a hole, writing with the left hand, and mirror writing. the latter is performed by standing a mirror vertically on the table, placing the paper in front and writing in such a way that the letters have the proper form and appearance when seen in the mirror. the subject should not look at his hand but at its reflection in the mirror. a piece of cardboard can be supported just over the hand so that only the image of the hand in the mirror can be seen. . a study of the interference of habit can be made as follows: take eight small boxes and arrange them in a row. number each box plainly. do not number them consecutively, but as follows, , , , , , , , . make eighty cards, ten of each number, and number them plainly. practice distributing the cards into the boxes. note the time required for each distribution. continue to distribute them till considerable skill is acquired. then rearrange the order of the boxes and repeat the experiment. what do the results show? . does the above experiment show any transfer of training? compare the time for each distribution in the second part of the experiment, _i.e._ after the rearrangement of the boxes, with the time for the corresponding distribution in the first part of the experiment. the question to be answered is: are the results of the second part of the experiment better than they would have been if the first part had not been performed? state your results and conclusions and compare with the statements in the text. . a study of the effects of spreading out learning periods can be made as follows: divide the class into two equal divisions. let one division practice on a substitution experiment as explained in exercise  , for five ten-minute periods of practice in immediate succession. let the other division practice for five days, ten minutes a day. what do the results indicate? the divisions should be of equal ability. if the first ten-minute practice period shows the sections to be of unequal ability, this fact should be taken into account in making the comparisons. test sheets can be prepared by the teacher, or they can be obtained from the extension division of the university of missouri. . an experiment similar to no.  can be performed by practicing adding or any other school exercise. care must be taken to control the experiment and to eliminate disturbing factors. . try the card-distributing experiment with people of different ages, young children, old people, and various ages in between. what do you learn? is it as easy for an old person to form a habit as it is for a young person? why? . if an old person has no old habits to interfere, can he form a new habit as readily as can a young person? . cite evidence from your own experience to prove that it is hard for an old person to break up old habits and form new ones which interfere with the old ones. . do you find that you are becoming "set in your ways?" . what do we mean by saying that we are "plastic in early years"? . have you planned your life work? are you establishing the habits that will be necessary in it? . is it an advantage or a disadvantage to choose one's profession or occupation early? . attention often interferes with the performance of a habitual act. why is this? . if a man removes his vest in the daytime, he is almost sure to wind his watch. on the other hand if he is up all night, he lets his watch run down. why? . do you know of people who have radically changed their views late in life? . try to teach a dog or a cat a trick. what do you learn of importance about habit-formation? . what branches taught in school involve the formation of habits that are useful throughout life? . make a list of the moral habits that should be formed in early years. . write an essay on _habit and life_. . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapters xi and xvii. pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, pp.  - ; also chapter xv. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapters x, xi, and xii. rowe: _habit formation_, chapters v-xiii. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, p.  , par.  . chapter vii memory =perceptions and ideas.= in a previous chapter, brief mention was made of the difference between perceptions and ideas. this distinction must now be enlarged upon and made clearer. perceptions arise out of our sensory life. we see things when these things are before our eyes. we hear things when these things produce air vibrations which affect our ears. we smell things when tiny particles from them come into contact with a small patch of sensitive membrane in our noses. we taste substances when these substances are in our mouths. now, this seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, etc., is _perceiving_. we perceive a thing when the thing is actually at the time affecting some one or more of our sense organs. a perception, then, results from the stimulation of a sense organ. perception is the process of perceiving, sensing, objects in the external world. ideas are our _seeming_ to see, hear, smell, taste things when these things are not present to the senses. this morning i saw, had a _perception_ of, a robin. to-night in my study, i have an _idea_ of a robin. this morning the robin was present. light reflected from it stimulated my eye. to-night, as i have an idea of the robin, it is not here; i only seem to see it. the scene which was mine this morning is now revived, reproduced. we may say, therefore, that ideas are the conscious representatives of objects which are not present to the senses. ideas are revived experiences. revived experience is memory. since it is memory that enables us to live our lives over again, brings the past up to the present, it is one of the most wonderful aspects of our natures. the importance of memory is at once apparent if we try to imagine what life would be without it. if our life were only perceptual, if it were only the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the passing moment, it would have little meaning, it would be bare and empty. but instead of our perceptions being our whole life, they are only the starting points of life. perceptions serve to arouse groups of memory images or ideas, and the groups of ideas enrich the passing moment and give meaning to the passing perceptions, which otherwise would have no meaning. suppose i am walking along the street and meet a friend. i see him, speak to him, and pass on. but after i have passed on, i have ideas. i think of seeing my friend the day before. i think of what he said and of what he was doing, of what i said and of what i was doing. perhaps for many minutes there come ideas from my past experience. these ideas were aroused by the perception of my friend. the perception was momentary, but it started a long train of memory ideas. i pass on down the street and go by a music store. within the store, a victrola is playing _jesus, lover of my soul_. the song starts another train of memory ideas. i think of the past, of my boyhood days and sunday school, my early home and many scenes of my childhood. for several minutes i am so engrossed with the memory images that i scarcely notice anything along the street. again, the momentary perception, this time of sounds, served to revive a great number of ideas, or memories, of the past. these illustrations are typical of our life. every moment we have perceptions. these perceptions arouse ideas of our past life and experience. one of these ideas evokes another, and so an endless chain of images passes along. the older we become, the richer is our ideational life. while we are children, the perceptions constitute the larger part of our mental life, but as we become older, larger and larger becomes the part played by our memory images or ideas. a child is not content to sit down and reflect, giving himself up to the flow of ideas that come up from his past experience, but a mature person can spend hours in recalling past experience. this means that the older we grow, the more we live in the past, the less we are bound down by the present, and when we are old, instead of perceptions being the main part of mental life, they but give the initial push to our thoughts which go on in an endless chain as long as we live. =the physiological basis of memory.= it will be remembered that the basis of perception is the agitation of the brain caused by the stimulation of a sense organ by an external thing or force. if there is no stimulation of a sense organ, there is no sensation, no perception. now, just as the basis of sensation and perception is brain activity, so it is also the basis of ideas. in sensation, the brain activity is set up from without. in memory, when we have ideas, the brain activity is set up from within and is a fainter revival of the activity originally caused by the stimulation of the sense organ. our ideas are just as truly conditioned or caused by brain activity as are our sensations. memory presents many problems, and psychologists have been trying for many years to solve them. we shall now see what they have discovered and what is the practical significance of the facts. =relation of memory to age and sex.= it is a common notion that memory is best when we are young, but such is not the case. numerous experiments have shown that all aspects of memory improve with age. some aspects of memory improve more than others, and they improve at different times and rates; but all aspects do improve. from the beginning of school age to about fourteen years of age the improvement of most aspects of memory is rapid. if we pronounce a number of digits to a child of six, it can reproduce but few of them, a child of eight or ten can reproduce more, a child of twelve can reproduce still more, and an adult still more. if we read a sentence to children of different ages, we find that the older children can reproduce a longer sentence. if we read a short story to children of different ages, and then require them to reproduce the story in their own words, the older children reproduce more of the story than do the young children.[ ] [ ] see age and sex graphs, pp.  , , . girls excel boys in practically all the aspects of memory. in rote memory, that is, memory for lists of unrelated words, there is not much difference; but the girls are somewhat better. however, in the ability to remember the ideas of a story, girls excel boys at every age. this superiority of girls over boys is not merely a matter of memory. a girl is superior to a boy of the same age in nearly every way. this is merely a fact of development. a girl develops faster than a boy, she reaches maturity more quickly, in mind as well as in body. although a girl is lighter than a boy at birth, on the average she gains in weight faster and is heavier at twelve than a boy of the same age. she also gains faster in height, and for a few years in early adolescence is taller than a boy of the same age. of course, boys catch up and finally become much taller and heavier than girls. similarly, a girl's mind develops faster than the mind of a boy, as shown in memory and other mental functions. =the improvement of memory by practice.= all aspects of memory can be improved by practice, some aspects much, other aspects little. the memory span for digits, or letters, or words, or for objects cannot be much improved, but memory for ideas that are related, as the ideas of a story, can be considerably improved. in extensive experiments conducted in the author's laboratory, it was found that a person who at first required an hour to memorize the ideas in a certain amount of material, could, after a few months' practice, memorize the same amount in fifteen minutes. and in the latter case the ideas would be better remembered than they were at the beginning of the experiment. not only could a given number of ideas be learned in less time, but they would be better retained when learned in the shorter time. if a person comes to us for advice as to how to improve his memory, what should we tell him? in order to answer the question, we must consider the factors of a good memory. =factors of a good memory.= ( ) the first requirement is to get a good impression in the beginning. memory is revived experience. the more vivid and intense the first experience, the more sure will be the later recall. so if we wish to remember an experience, we must experience it in the first place under the most favorable conditions. the thing must be seen clearly, it must be understood, it must be in the focus of consciousness. the best teaching is that which leads the child to get the clearest apprehension of what is taught. if we are teaching about some concrete thing, a plant, a machine, we should be sure that the child sees the essential points, should be sure that the main principles enter his consciousness. we should find out by questioning whether he really does clearly understand what we are trying to get him to understand. often we think a pupil or student has forgotten, when the fact is that he never really knew the thing which we wished to have him remember. the first requisite to memory, then, is to _know in the first place_. if we wish to remember knowledge, the knowledge must be seen in the clearest light, really _be_ knowledge, at the outset. few people ever really learn how to learn. they never see anything clearly, they never stick to a point till it is apprehended in all its relations and bearings; consequently they forget, largely because they never really knew in the fullest sense. most teaching is too abstract. the teacher uses words that have no meaning to the pupil. too much teaching deals with things indirectly. we study _about_ things instead of studying things. in geography, for example, we study about the earth, getting our information from a book. we read about land formations, river courses, erosion, etc., when instead we should study these objects and processes themselves. the first thing in memory, then, is clear apprehension, clear understanding, vivid and intense impression. ( ) the second thing necessary to memory is to repeat the experience. first we must get a clear impression, then we must repeat the experience if we would retain it. it is a mistake to believe that if we have once understood a thing, we will always thereafter remember it. we must think our experiences over again if we wish to fix them for permanent retention. we must organize our experience. to organize experience means to think it over in its helpful relations. in memory, one idea arouses another. when we have one idea, what other idea will this arouse? it depends on what connections this idea has had in our minds in the past. it depends on the associations that it has, and associations depend on our thinking the ideas over together. teachers and parents should help children to think over their experiences in helpful, practical relations. then in the future, when an idea comes to mind, it brings along with it other ideas that have these helpful, practical relations. we must not, then, merely repeat our experiences, but must repeat them in helpful connections or associations. in organizing our experience, we must systematize and classify our knowledge. one of the chief differences in men is in the way they organize their knowledge. most of us have experiences abundant enough, but we differ in the way we work over and organize these experiences. organization not only enables us to remember our experience, but brings our experience back in the right connections. the advice that should be given to a student is the following: make sure that you understand. if the matter is a lesson in a book, go through it trying to get the main facts; then go through it again, trying to see the relation of all the facts. then try to see the facts in relation to your wider experience. if it is a history lesson, think of the facts of the lesson in their relation to previous chapters. think of the details in their bearing on wider and larger movements. a teacher should always hold in mind the facts in regard to memory, and should make her teaching conform to them. she should carefully plan the presentation of a new topic so as to insure a clear initial impression. a new topic should be presented orally by the teacher, with abundant illustration and explanation. it cannot be made too concrete, it cannot be made too plain and simple. then after the teacher has introduced and made plain the new topic, the pupil reads and studies further. at the next recitation of the class, the first thing in order should be a discussion, on the part of the pupils. this will help the pupils to get the facts cleared up and will help the teacher to find out whether the pupils have the facts right. the first part of the recitation should also be a time for questions. everything should now be made clear, if there are any errors or misunderstandings on the pupil's part. of course any procedure in a recitation should depend upon the nature of the material and to some extent on the stage of advancement of the pupil; but in general such a procedure as that just outlined will be most satisfactory and economical: first clear initial presentation by the teacher; then reading and study on the part of the pupil, and third, discussions on the following day. teachers should also endeavor to show students how to study to the best advantage. pupils do not know how to study. they do not know what to look for, and do not know how to find it after they know what they are looking for. they should be shown. of course, some of them learn without help how to study. but some never learn, and it would be a great saving of time to help all of them master the arts of study and memorizing. a very important factor in connection with memory is the matter of meaning. if a person will try to memorize a list of nonsense words, he will find that it is much more difficult than to memorize words that have meaning. this is a significant fact. it means that as material approaches nonsense, it is difficult to memorize. therefore we should always try to grasp the meaning of a thing, its significance. in science, let us always ask, what is the meaning of this fact? what bearing does it have on other facts? how does it affect the meaning of other facts? =kinds of memories.= we should not speak of memory as if it were some sort of power like muscular strength. we should always speak of _memories_. memories may be classified from several different points of view: a classification may be based on the kind of material, as memory for concrete things, the actual objects of experience, on the one hand, and memory for abstract material, such as names of things, their attributes and relations, on the other. again, we can base a classification on the type of ideation to which the material appeals, as auditory memory, visual memory, motor memory. we can also base a classification on the principle of _meaning_. this principle of classification would give us at least three classes: memory for ideas as expressed in sentences, logical memory; memory for series of meaningful words not logically related in sentences, rote memory; memory for series of meaningless words, a form of rote memory. this classification is not meant to be complete, but only suggestive. with every change in the kind of material, the method of presenting the material to the subject, or the manner in which the subject deals with the material, there may be a change in the effectiveness of memory. while these different kinds or aspects of memory may have some relation to one another, they are to some extent independent. one may have a good rote memory and a poor logical memory, or a poor rote memory and a good logical memory. that is to say, one may be very poor at remembering the exact words of a book, but be good at remembering the meaning, the ideas, of the book. one may be good at organizing meaningful material but poor at remembering mere words. on the other hand, these conditions may be reversed; one may remember the words but never get the meaning. it is of course possible that much of this difference is due to habit and experience, but some of the difference is beyond doubt due to original differences in the nervous system and brain. these differences should be determined in the case of all children. it is quite a common thing to find a feeble-minded person with a good rote memory, but such a person never has a good logical memory. one can have a good rote memory without understanding, one cannot have a good logical memory without understanding. let us now ask the question, why can one remember better words that are connected by logical relations than words that have no such connection? if we read to a person a list of twenty nonsense words, the person can remember only two or three; but if a list of twenty words connected in a sentence were read to a person, in most cases, all of them would be reproduced. the reason is that the words in the latter case are not new. we already know the words. they are already a part of our experience. we have had days, perhaps years, of experience with them. all that is now new about them is perhaps a slightly new relation. moreover, the twenty words may contain but one, or at most only a few, ideas, and in this case it is the ideas that we remember. the ideas hold the words together. if the twenty words contain a great number of ideas, then we cannot remember all of them from one reading. if i say, "i have a little boy who loves his father and mother very much, and this boy wishes to go to the river to catch some fish," one can easily remember all these words after one reading. but if i say, "the stomach in all the salmonidæ is syphonal and at the pylorus are fifteen to two hundred comparatively large pyloric coeca"; although this sentence is shorter, one finds it more difficult to remember, and the main reason is that the words are not so familiar. =memory and thinking.= what is the relation of memory to thinking and the other mental functions? one often hears a teacher say that she does not wish her pupils to depend on memory, but wishes them to reason things out. such a statement shows a misunderstanding of the facts; for reasoning itself is only the recall of ideas in accordance with the laws of association. without memory, there would be no reasoning, for the very material of thought is found to be the revived experiences which we call ideas, memories. one of the first requisites of good thinking is a reliable memory. one must have facts to reason, and these facts must come to one in memory to be available for thought. if one wishes to become a great thinker in a certain field, he must gain experience in that field and organize that experience in such a way as to remember it and to recall it when it is wanted. what one does deplore is memory for the mere words with no understanding of the meaning. in geometry, for example, a student sometimes commits to memory the words of a demonstration, with no understanding of the meaning. of course, that is worse than useless. one should remember the meaning of the demonstration. if one has memorized the words only, he cannot solve an original problem in geometry. but if he has understood the meaning of the demonstration, then he recalls it, and is enabled to solve the problem. if one does not remember the various facts about the relationships in a triangle, he cannot solve a problem of the triangle until he has worked out and discovered the necessary facts. then memory would make them available for the solution of the problem. =memory and school standing.= that memory plays a large part in our life is evident; and, of course, it is an important factor in all school work. it matters not what we learn, if we do not remember it. the author has made extensive experiments to determine the relation that memory has to a child's progress in school. the method used was to give logical memory tests to all the children in a school and then rank the children in accordance with their abilities to reproduce the story used in the test. then they were ranked according to their standing in their studies. a very high correlation was found. on the whole, the pupils standing highest in the memory tests were found to stand highest in their studies. it is true, of course, that they did not stand highest merely because they had good memories, but because they were not only better in memory, but were better in most other respects too. pupils that are good in logical memory are usually good in other mental functions. a test of logical memory is one of the best to give us an idea of the school standing of pupils. not only is the retention of ideas of very great importance itself, but the acquiring of ideas, and the organizing of them in such a way as to remember them involves nearly all the mental functions. the one who remembers well ideas logically related, is the one who pays the closest attention, the one who sees the significance, the one who organizes, the one who repeats, the one who turns things over in his mind. a logical memory test is therefore, to some extent, a test of attention, association, power of organization as well as of memory; in a word, it is a test of mental power. other things being equal, a person whose power of retention is good has a great advantage over his fellows who have poor ability to remember. suppose we consider the learning of language. the pupil who can look up the meaning of a word just once and remember it has an advantage over the person who has to look up the meaning of the word several times before it is retained. so in any branch of study, the person who can acquire the facts in less time than another person, has the extra time for learning something else or for going over the same material and organizing it better. the scientist who remembers all the significant facts that he reads, and sees their bearing on his problems, has a great advantage over the person who does not remember so well. of course, there are certain dangers in having a good memory, just as there is danger in being brilliant generally. the quick learner is in danger of forming slovenly habits. a person who learns quickly is likely to form the habit of waiting till the last minute to study his lesson and then getting a superficial idea of it. the slow learner must form good habits of study to get on at all. teachers and parents should prevent the bright children from forming bad habits of study. the person who learns quickly and retains well should be taught to be thorough and to use the advantage that comes from repetition. the quick learner should not be satisfied with one attack on his lesson, but should study the lesson more than once, for even the brilliant learner cannot afford to neglect the advantages that come from repetition. a person with poor memory and only mediocre ability generally can make up very much by hard work and by work that takes advantage of all the laws of economical learning. but he can never compete successfully with the person who works as hard as he does and who has good powers of learning and retention. the author has found that in a large class of a hundred or more, there is usually a person who has good memory along with good mental ability generally, and is also a hard worker. such a person always does the best work in the class. a person with poor memory and poor mental powers generally cannot hope to compete with a person of good memory, good mental powers generally, if that person is also a good worker. =learning and remembering.= a popular fallacy is expressed in the saying "easy come, easy go." the person who is the best learner is also the best in retaining what is learned, provided all other conditions are the same. this matter was determined in the following way: a logical memory test was given to all the children in a city school system. a story was read to the pupils and then reproduced by them in writing. the papers were corrected and graded and nothing more was said about the test for one month. then at the same time in every room, the teachers said, "you remember the story i read to you some time ago and which i asked you to reproduce. well, i wish to see how much of the story you still remember." the pupils were then required to write down all the story that they could recall. it was found that, in general, the children who write the most when the story is first read to them, write the most after the lapse of a month, and the poorest ones at first are the poorest ones at the end of the month. of course, the correspondence is not perfect, but in some cases, in some grades, it is almost so. the significance of this experiment is very great. it means that the pupil who gets the most facts from a lesson will have the most facts at any later time. this is true, of course, only if other things are equal. if one pupil studies about the matter more, reflects upon it, repeats it in his mind, of course this person will remember more, other things being equal. but if neither reviews the matter, or if both do it to an equal extent, then the one who learns the most in the first place, remembers the most at a later time. i have also tested the matter out in other ways. i have experimented with a group of men and women, by reading a passage of about a page in length, repeating the reading till the subject could reproduce all the facts. it was found that the person who acquired all the facts from the fewest readings remembered more of the facts later. it must be said that there is less difference between the subjects later than at first. in the laboratory of columbia university a similar experiment was performed, but in a somewhat different way. students were required to commit to memory german vocabularies and were later tested for their retention of the words learned. it was found that those who learned the most words in a given time, also retained the largest percentage of what had been learned. it should not be surprising that this is the case. the quick learner is the one who makes the best use of all the factors of retention, the factors mentioned in the preceding paragraph--good attention, association, organization, etc. another experiment performed in the author's laboratory bears out the above conclusions. a group of students were required to commit to memory at one sitting a long list of nonsense syllables. the number of repetitions necessary to enable each student to reproduce them was noted. one day later, the students attempted to reproduce the syllables. of course they could not, and they were then required to say them over again till they could just repeat them from memory. the number of repetitions was noted. the number of repetitions was much less than on the first day. on the third day, the process was repeated. the number of repetitions was fewer still. this relearning was kept up each day till each person could repeat the syllables from memory without any study. it was found that the person who learned the syllables in the fewest repetitions the first time, relearned them in the fewest repetitions on succeeding days. all the experiments bearing on the subject point to the same conclusion; namely, that the quick learner, if other things are equal, retains at least as well as the slow learner, and usually retains better. =transfer of memory training.= we have said above that there are many kinds or aspects of memory. it has also been said that we can improve memory by practice. now, the question arises, if we improve one aspect of memory, does this improve all aspects? this is an important question; moreover, it is one to be settled by experiment and not by argument. the most extensive and thorough experiment was performed by an english psychologist, sleight. the experiment was essentially as follows: he took a large number of pupils and tested the efficiency of the various aspects of their memory. he then took half of them and trained one aspect of their memory until there was considerable improvement. the other section had no memory training meanwhile. after the training, both groups again had all aspects of their memory tested. both groups showed improvement in all aspects because the first tests gave them some practice, but the group that had been receiving the training was no better in those aspects not trained than was the group receiving no training at all. aspects of memory much like the one trained showed some improvement, but other aspects did not. the conclusion is that memory training is specific, that it affects only the kind of memory trained, and related memories. this is in harmony with what we learned about habit. when we receive training, it affects only the parts of us trained and other closely related parts. =learning by wholes.= we do not often have to commit to memory verbatim, but when we do, it is important that we should know the most economical way. experiments have clearly demonstrated that the most economical way is to read the entire selection through from beginning to end and continue to read it through in this way till the matter is learned by heart. in long selections, the saving by this method is considerable. a pupil is not likely to believe this because if he spends a few minutes learning in this manner, he finds that he cannot repeat a single line, while if he had concentrated on one line, he could have repeated at least that much. this is true; but although he cannot repeat a single line by the whole procedure, he has learned nevertheless. it would be a good thing to demonstrate this fact to a class; then the pupils would be satisfied to use the most economical procedure. the plan holds good whether the matter be prose or poetry. but experiments have been carried on only with verbatim learning. the best procedure for learning the facts so that one can give them in one's own words has not yet been experimentally determined. =cramming.= an important practical question is whether it pays to go over a great amount of material in a very short time, as students often do before examinations. from all that has been said above, one could infer the solution to this problem. learning and memorizing are to some extent a growth, and consequently involve time. there is an important law of learning and memory known as jost's law, which may be stated as follows: if we repeat or renew associations, the repetitions have most value for the old associations. therefore when we learn, we should learn and then later relearn. this will make for permanent retention. of course, if we wish to get together a great mass of facts for a temporary purpose and do not care to retain them permanently, cramming is the proper method. if we are required to pass an examination in which a knowledge of many details is expected and these details have no important permanent value, cramming is justified. when a lawyer is preparing a case to present to a court, the actual, detail evidence is of no permanent value, and cramming is justified. but if we wish to acquire and organize facts for their permanent value, cramming is not the proper procedure. the proper procedure is for a student to go over his work faithfully as the term of school proceeds, then occasionally review. at the end of the term, a rapid review of the whole term's work is valuable. after one has studied over matter and once carefully worked it out, a quick view again of the whole subject is most valuable, and assists greatly in making the acquisition permanent. but if the matter has not been worked out before, the hasty view of the material of the course, while it may enable one to pass the examination, has no permanent value. =function of the teacher in memory work.= the function of a teacher is plainly to get the pupils to learn in accordance with the laws of memory above set forth; but there are certain things that a teacher can do that may not have become evident to the reader. it has been learned in experiments in logical memory that when a story is read to a subject and the subject attempts to reproduce it, certain mistakes are made. when the story is read again, it is common for the same mistakes to be made in the recall. certain ideas were apprehended in a certain way; and, when the piece is read again, the subject pays no more attention to the ideas already acquired and reported, and they are therefore reported wrongly as they were in the first place. often the subject does not notice the errors till his attention is called to them. this suggests an important function of the teacher in connection with the memory work of the pupils. this function is to correct mistakes in the early stages of learning. a teacher should always be on the watch to find the errors of the pupils and to correct them before they are fixed by repetition. a teacher should, also, consider it her duty to test the memory capacities of the pupils and to give each the advice that the case demands. =some educational inferences.=--there are certain consequences to education that follow from the facts of memory above set forth that are of considerable significance. many things have been taught to children on the assumption that they could learn them better in childhood than later, because it was thought that memory and the learning capacity were better in childhood. but both of these assumptions are false. as children grow older their learning capacity increases and their memories become better. it has particularly been held that rote memory is better in childhood and that therefore children should begin their foreign language study early. it is true that as far as _speaking_ a foreign language is concerned, the earlier a child begins it the better. but this is not true of learning to read the language. the sounds of the foreign language that we have not learned in childhood in speaking the mother tongue are usually difficult for us to make. the organs of speech become set in the way of their early exercise. in reading the foreign language, correct pronunciation is not important. we are concerned with _getting_ the thought, and this is possible without pronouncing at all. reference to graphs on pages  and will show that rote memory steadily improves throughout childhood and youth. the author has performed numerous experiments to test this very point. he has had adults work side by side with children at building up new associations of the rote memory type and found that always the adult could learn faster than the child and retain better what was learned. the experience of language teachers in college and university does not give much comfort to those who claim that language study should be begun early. these teachers claim that the students who have had previous language study do no better than those who have had none. it seems, however, that there certainly ought to be _some_ advantage in beginning language study early and spreading the study out over the high school period. but what is gained does not offset the tremendous loss that follows from requiring _all_ high school students to study a foreign language merely to give an opportunity for early study to those who are to go on in the university with language courses. a mature university student that has a real interest in language and literature can begin his language study in the university and make rapid progress. some of the best classical scholars whom the author knows began their language study in the university. while it would have been of some advantage to them to have begun their language study earlier, there are so few who should go into this kind of work that society cannot afford to make provision for their beginning the study in the high school. the selection and arrangement of the studies in the curriculum must be based on other grounds than the laws of memory. what children make most progress in and need most to know are the concrete things of their physical and social environment. children must first learn the world--the woods and streams and birds and flowers and plants and animals, the earth, its rocks and soils and the wonderful forces at work in it. they must learn man,--what he is and what he does and how he does it; how he lives and does his work and how he governs himself. they should also learn to read and to write their mother tongue, and should learn something of that great store of literature written in the mother tongue. the few that are to be scholars in language and literature must wait till beginning professional study before taking up their foreign language; just as a person who is to be a lawyer or physician must also wait till time to enter a university before beginning special professional preparation. the child's memory for abstract conceptions is particularly weak in early years; hence studies should be so arranged as to acquaint the child with the concrete aspects of the world first, and later to acquaint him with the abstract relations of things. mathematics should come late in the child's life, for the same reason. mathematics deals with quantitative relations which the child can neither learn nor remember profitably and economically till he is more mature. the child should first learn the world in its descriptive aspects. =memory and habit.= the discussion up to this point should have made it clear to the reader that memory is much the same thing as habit. memory considered as retention depends upon the permanence of the impression on the brain; but in its associative aspects depends on connections between brain centers, as is the case with habit. the association of ideas, which is the basis of their recall, is purely a matter of habit formation. when i think of george washington, i also think of the revolution, of the government, of the presidency, of john adams, thomas jefferson, etc., because of the connections which these ideas have had in my mind many times before. there is a basis in the brain structure for these connections. there is nothing in any _idea_ that connects it with another idea. ideas become connected because of the _way in which we experience them_, and the reason one idea calls up another idea is because the brain process that is the cause of one idea brings about another brain process that is the cause of a second idea. the whole thing is merely a matter of the way the brain activities become organized. therefore the various laws of habit-formation have application to memory in so far as memory is a matter of the association of ideas, based on brain processes. one often has the experience of trying to recall a name or a fact and finds that he cannot. presently the name or fact may come, or it may not come till the next day or the next week. what is the cause of this peculiar phenomenon? the explanation is to be found in the nervous system. when one tries to recall the name and it will not come to mind, there is some temporary block or hindrance in the nerve-path that leads from one center to the other and one cannot think of the name till the obstruction is removed. we go on thinking about other things, and in the meantime the activities going on in the brain remove the obstruction; so when the matter comes up again, the nerve current shoots through, and behold, the name comes to mind. [illustration: figure iv--associative connections the diagram represents schematically the neural basis of the association of ideas.] now the only preventive of such an occurrence is to be found in the law of habit, for the block ordinarily occurs in case of paths or bonds not well established. we must _think together_ the things we wish to have associated. repetition is the key to the situation, repetition which is the significant thing in habit-formation, repetition which is the only way of coupling two things which we wish to have associated together. of course, there is no absolute coupling of two ideas. one sometimes forgets his own name. when we are tired or ill, things which were the most closely associated may not hang together. but those ideas hold together in the firmest way that have been experienced together most often in a state of attention. the diagram on page  illustrates schematically the neural connections and cross-connections which are the bases of the association of ideas, the circles _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_, and _f_ represent brain processes which give rise to ideas, and the lines represent connecting paths. note that there are both direct and indirect connections. summary. sensation and perception give us our first experience with things; memory is revived experience. it enables us to live our experience over again and is therefore one of the most important human traits. the physiological basis of memory is in the brain and nervous system. memory improves with practice and up to a certain point with the age of the person. it is better in girls than in boys. good memory depends on vivid experience in the first place and on organization and repetition afterward. the person who learns quickly usually retains well also. memory training is specific. the extension of the learning process over a long time is favorable to memory. memory ideas are the basis of thinking and reasoning. class exercises . the teacher can test the auditory memory of the members of the class for rote material by using letters. it is better to omit the vowels, using only the consonants. prepare five groups of letters with eight letters in a group. read each group of letters to the class, slowly and distinctly. after reading a group, allow time for the students to write down what they recall, then read the next group and so proceed till the five groups have been read. grade the work by finding the number of letters reproduced, taking no account of the position of the letters. . in a similar way, test visual memory, using different combinations of letters. write the letters plainly on five large squares of cardboard. hold each list before the class for as long a time as it took to read a group in experiment no.  . . test memory for words in a similar way. use simple words of one syllable, making five lists with eight words in a list. . test memory for objects by fastening common objects on a large cardboard and holding the card before the class. put eight objects on each card and prepare five cards. expose them for the same length of time as in experiment no.  . . test memory for _names_ of objects by preparing five lists of names, eight names in a list, and reading the names as in experiment no.  . . you now have data for the following study: find the average grade of each student in the different experiments. find the combined grade of each student in all the above experiments. do the members of the class hold the same rank in all the tests? how do the boys compare with the girls? how does memory for objects compare with memory for names of objects? how does auditory memory compare with visual? what other points do you learn from the experiments? . the teacher can make a study of the logical memory of the members of the class by using material as described on page  . make five separate tests, using stories that are well within the comprehension of the class and that will arouse their interest. sufficient material will be found in the author's _examination of school children_ and whipple's _manual_. however, the teacher can prepare similar material. . do the students maintain the same rank in the separate tests of experiment no.  ? rank all the students for their combined standing in all the first five tests. rank them for their combined standing in the logical memory tests. compare the two rankings. what conclusions are warranted? . you have tested, in experiment no.  , logical memory when the material was read to the students. it will now be interesting to compare the results of no.  with the results obtained by allowing the students to read the material of the test. for this purpose, select portions from the later chapters of this book. allow just time enough for the selection to be read once slowly by the students, then have it reproduced as in the other logical memory experiment. give several tests, if there is sufficient time. find the average grade of each student, and compare the results with those obtained in no.  . this will enable you to compare the relative standing of the members of the class, but will not enable you to compare the two ways of acquiring facts. for this purpose, the stories would have to be of equal difficulty. let the members of the class plan an experiment that would be adequate for this purpose. . a brief study of the improvement of memory can be made by practicing a few minutes each day for a week or two, as time permits, using material that can be easily prepared, such as lists of common words. let the members of the class plan the experiment. use the best plan. . the class can make a study of the relation of memory to school standing in one of the grades below the high school. give at least two tests for logical memory. give also the rote memory tests described on page  . get the class standing of the pupils from the teacher. make the comparison as suggested in chapter i, page  . or, the correlation can be worked out accurately by following the directions given in the _examination of school children_, page  , or in whipple's _manual_, page  . . let the members of the class make a plan for the improvement of their memory for the material studied in school. plan devices for learning the material better and for fixing it in memory. at the end of the course in psychology, have an _experience_ meeting and study the results reported. . prepare five lists of nonsense syllables, with eight in a list. give them as in experiment no.  , and compare the results with those of that experiment. what do the results indicate as to the value to memory of _meaningful_ material? what educational inferences can you make? in preparing the syllables, put a vowel between two consonants, and use no syllable that is a real word. . a study of the effects of distractions on learning and memory can be made as follows: let the teacher select two paragraphs in later chapters of this book, of equal length and difficulty. let the students read one under quiet conditions and the other while an electric bell is ringing in the room. compare the reproductions in the two cases. . from the chapter and from the results of all the memory tests, let the students enumerate the facts that have educational significance. . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapter xv. mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, pp.  - . pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapters vi and viii. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapter xiii. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapter vii. chapter viii thinking in chapter iii we learned about sensation. we found that when a sense organ is stimulated by its appropriate type of stimulus, this stimulation travels through the sensory nerves and sets up an excitation in the brain. this excitation in the brain gives us sensation. we see if the eye is stimulated. we hear if the ear is stimulated, etc. in chapter vii we learned that after the brain has had an excitation giving rise to sensation, it is capable of reviving this excitation later. this renewal or revival of a brain excitation gives us an experience resembling the original sensation, only usually fainter and less stable. this revived experience is called _image_ or _idea_. the general process of retention and revival of experience is, as we have seen, known as memory. an idea, then, is a bit of revived experience. a perception is a bit of immediate or primary experience. i am said to perceive a chair if the chair is present before me, if the light reflected from the chair is actually exciting my retinas. i have an _idea_ of the chair when i _seem_ to see it, when the chair is not before me or when my eyes are shut. these distinctions were pointed out in the preceding chapter. let us now proceed to carry our study of ideas further. =association of ideas.= the subject of the association of ideas can best be introduced by an experiment. take a paper and pencil, and think of the word "horse." write this word down, and then write down other words that come to mind. write them in the order in which they come to mind. do this for three or four minutes, and try the experiment several times, beginning with a different word each time. make a study of the lists of words. compare the different lists and the lists written by different students. in the case of the writer, the following words came to mind in the first few seconds: horse, bridle, saddle, tail, harness, buggy, whip, man, sky, stars, sun, ocean. why did these words come, and why did they come in that order? why did the idea "horse" suggest the idea "bridle"? and why did "bridle" suggest "saddle"? is there something in the nature of ideas that couples them with certain other ideas and makes them _always_ suggest the other ideas? no, there is not. ideas become coupled together in our experience, and the coupling is in accordance with our experience. things that are together in our experience become coupled together as ideas. the idea "horse" may become coupled with any other idea. the general law of the association of ideas is this: ideas are joined together in memory or revived experience as they were joined in the original or perceptive experience. but the matter is complicated by the fact that things are experienced in different connections in perceptive experience. i do not always experience "horse" together with "bridle." i sometimes see horses in a pasture eating clover. so, as far as this last experience is concerned, when i think "horse" i should also think "clover." i sometimes see a horse running when a train whistles, so "whistle" and "horse" should be coupled in my mind. a horse once kicked me on the shoulder, so "horse" and "shoulder" should be connected in my mind. and so they are. the very fact that these various experiences come back to me proves that they are connected in my mind in accordance with the original experiences. the revival of various horse experiences has come to me faster than i could write them down, and they are all bound together in my memory. if i should write them all out, it would take many hours, perhaps days. not only are these "horse ideas" bound together with one another, but they are bound more or less directly, more or less closely, to everything else in my life. i can, therefore, pass in thought from the idea "horse" to any other idea, directly or indirectly. now, in any given case, what idea will actually come first after i have the idea "horse"? this depends upon the tendencies established in the nervous system. the brain process underlying the idea "horse" has connections with many other processes and tends to excite these processes. the factors that strengthen these tendencies or connections are the frequency, recency, primacy, and vividness of experience. let us consider, in some detail, each of these factors. =primacy of experience.= a strong factor in determining association is the _first experience_. the first, the original, coupling of ideas tends to persist. the first connection is nearly always a strong one, and is also strengthened by frequent repetition in memory. our first experience with people and things persists with great strength, across the years, in spite of other associations and connections established later. just now there comes to mind my first experience with a certain famous scientist. it was many years ago. i was a student in an eastern university. this man gave a public lecture at the opening of the session. i remember many details of the occurrence with great vividness. although i studied under this man for three years, no other experience with him is more prominent than the first. first experiences give rise to such strong connections between ideas that these connections often persist and hold their own as against other connections depending upon other factors. the practical consequences of this factor in teaching are, of course, evident. both teachers and parents should take great care in the matter of the first experiences of children. if the idea-connections of first experiences are likely to persist, then these connections should be desirable ones. they should not be useless connections, nor should they, ordinarily, be connections that will have to be radically undone later. usually it is not economical to build up connections between ideas that will not serve permanently, except in cases in which the immaturity of the mind makes such a procedure necessary. =recency of experience.= the most recent connection of ideas is relatively strong, and is often the determining one. but the most recent connection must be very recent or it has no especial value. if i have seen a certain friend to-day, and his name is brought to mind now, to-day's experience with him will likely be brought to mind _first_. but if my last seeing him was some days or months ago, the idea-connection of the last meeting has no great value. of course, circumstances always alter the matter. perhaps we should say in the last instance that, other things being equal, the last experience has no special value. if the last experience was an unusual one, such as a death or a marriage, then it has a value due to its vividness and intensity and its emotional aspects. these factors not only add strength to the connections made at the time but are the cause of frequent revivals of this last experience in memory in the succeeding days. all these factors taken together often give a last experience great associative strength, even though the last experience is not recent. =frequency of experience.= the most frequent connection of ideas is probably the most important factor of all in determining future associations. the first connection is but one, and the last connection is but one, while repeated connections may be many in number. connections which recur frequently usually overcome all other connections. hence frequency is the dominant factor in association. most of the strength of first connections is due to repetitions in memory later. the first experience passes through the mind again and again as memory, and thereby becomes strengthened. the fact that repetition of connections establishes these connections is, of course, the justification of drill and review in school studies. the practical needs of life demand that certain ideas be associated so that one calls up the other. teachers and parents, knowing these desirable connections, endeavor to fix them in the minds of children by repetition. the important facts of history, literature, civics, and science we endeavor, by means of repetition, to fasten in the child's mind. =vividness and intensity of experience.= a vivid experience is one that excites and arouses us, strongly stimulating our feelings. such experiences establish strong bonds of connection. when i think of a railroad wreck, i think of one in which i participated. the experience was vivid, intense, and aroused my emotions. i hardly knew whether i was dead or alive. then, secondly, i usually think of a wreck which i witnessed in childhood. a train plunged through a bridge and eighteen cars were piled up in the ravine. the experience was vivid and produced a deep and lasting impression on me. the practical significance of this factor is, of course, great. when ideas are presented to pupils these ideas should be made clear. every conceivable device should be used to clarify and explain,--concrete demonstration, the use of objects and diagrams, pictures and drawings, and abundant oral illustration. we must be sure that the one taught understands, that the ideas become focal in consciousness and take hold of the individual. this is the main factor in what is known as "interest." an interesting thing is one that takes hold of us and possesses us so that we cannot get away from it. such experiences are vivid and have rich emotional connections or accompaniments. ideas that are experienced together at such times are strongly connected. =mental set or attitude.= another influence always operative in determining the association of ideas is mental set. by mental set we mean the mood or attitude one is in,--whether one is sad or glad, well or ill, fresh or fatigued, etc. what one has just been thinking about, what one has just been doing, are always factors that determine the direction of association. one often notices the effects of mental set in reading newspapers. if one's mind has been deeply occupied with some subject and one then starts to read a newspaper, one may actually miscall many of the words in the article he is reading; the words are made to fit in with what is in his mind. for example, if one is all wrought up over a wedding, many words beginning with "w" and having about the same length as the word "wedding," will be read as "wedding." mental set may be permanent or temporary. by permanent we mean the strong tendencies that are built up by continued thought in a certain direction. one becomes a methodist, a democrat, a conservative, a radical, a pessimist, an optimist, etc., by continuity of similar experiences and similar reactions to these experiences. germans, french, irish, italians, chinese, have characteristic sets or ways of reacting to typical situations that may be called racial. these prejudicial ways of reacting may be called racial sets or attitudes. religious, political, and social prejudices may all be called sets or attitudes. temporary sets or attitudes are leanings and prejudices that are due to temporary states of mind. the fact that one has headache, or indigestion, or is in a hurry, or is angry, or is hungry, or is emotionally excited over something will, for the time, be a factor in determining the direction of association. one of the tasks of education is to build up sets or attitudes, permanent prejudices, to be constant factors in guiding association and, consequently, action. we wish to build up permanent attitudes toward truth, honesty, industry, sympathy, zeal, persistence, etc. it is evident that attitude is merely an aspect of habit. it is an habitual way of reacting to a definite and typical situation. this habitual way is strengthened by repetition, so that set or attitude finally, after years of repetition, becomes a part of our nature. our prejudices become as strong, seemingly, as our instinctive tendencies. after a man has thought in a particular groove for years, it is about as sure that he will come to certain definite conclusions on matters in the line of his thought as that he would give typical instinctive or even reflex reactions. we know the direction association will take for a presbyterian in religious matters, for a democrat in political matters, with about as much certainty as we know what their actions will be in situations that evoke instinctive reactions. =thinking and reasoning.= thinking is the passing of ideas in the mind. this flow of ideas is in accordance with the laws of association above discussed. the order in which the ideas come is the order fixed by experience, the order as determined by the various factors above enumerated. in early life, one's mind is chiefly perceptual, it is what we see and hear and taste and smell. as one grows older his mind grows more and more ideational. with increasing age, a larger and larger percentage of our mental life is made up of ideas, of memories. the child lives in the present, in a world of perceptions. a man is not so much tied down to the present; he lives in memory and anticipation. he thinks more than does the child. a man is content to sit down in his chair and think for hours at a time, a child is not. this thinking is the passing of ideas, now one, then another and another. these ideas are the survivals or revivals of our past experience. the order of their coming depends on our past experience. as i sit here and write, there surge up out of my past, ideas of creeks and rivers and hills, horses and cows and dogs, boys and girls, men and women, work and play, school days, friends,--an endless chain of ideas. this "flow" of ideas is often started by a perception. for illustration, i see a letter on the table, a letter from my brother. i then have a visual image of my brother. i think of him as i saw him last. i think of what he said. i think of his children, of his home, of his boyhood, and our early life together. then i think of our mother and the old home, and so on and on. presently i glance at a history among my books, and immediately think of greece and athens and the acropolis, plato, aristotle, and socrates, schoolmates and teachers, and friends connected in one way or another with my college study of greek. in this description of the process of thinking, i have repeatedly used the words "think of." i might have said instead, "there came to mind ideas of athens, ideas of friends," etc. thinking, then, is a general term for our idea-life. reasoning is a form of thinking. reasoning, too, is a flow of ideas. but while reasoning is thinking, it is a special form of thinking; it is thinking to a purpose. in thinking as above described and illustrated, no immediate ends of the person are served; while in reasoning some end is always sought. in reasoning, the flow of ideas must reach some particular idea that will serve the need of the moment, the need of the problem at hand. reasoning, then, is controlled thinking, thinking centering about a problem, about a situation that one must meet. the statement that reasoning is _controlled_ thinking needs some explanation, for the reader at once is likely to want to know what does the controlling. there is not some special faculty or power that does the controlling. the control is exercised by the set into which one is thrown by the situation which confronts one. the set puts certain nerve-tracts into readiness to conduct, or in other words, makes certain groups of ideas come into mind, and makes one satisfied only if the right ideas come. as long as ideas come that do not satisfy, the flow keeps on, taking one direction and then another, in accordance with the way our ideas have become organized. an idea finally comes that satisfies. we are then said to have reached a conclusion, to have made up our mind, to have solved our problem. but the fact that we are satisfied is no sure sign that the problem is correctly solved. it means only that our past experiences, available at the time through association, say that the conclusion is right. or, in more scientific terms, that the conclusion is in harmony with our past experience, as it has been organized and made available through association. there is not within us a little being, a reasoner, that sits and watches ideas file by and passes judgment upon them. the real judge is our nervous system with its organized bonds or connections. an illustration may make the matter clearer: a boy walking along in the woods comes to a stream too wide for him to jump across. he wishes to be on the other side, so here is a situation that must be met, a problem that must be solved. a flow of ideas is started centering about the problem. the flow is entirely determined and directed by past experience and the present situation. the boy pauses, looks about, and sees on the bank a pole and several large stones. he has walked on poles and on fences, he therefore sees himself putting the pole across the stream and walking on it. this may be in actual visual imagery, or it may be in words. he may merely say, "i will put the pole across and walk on it." but, before having time to do it, he may recall walking on poles that turned. he is not then satisfied with the pole idea. the perception of stones may next become clear in his mind, and if no inhibiting or hindering idea comes up, the stone idea carries him into action. he piles the stones into the stream and walks across. as was mentioned above, the flow of ideas may take different forms. the imagery may take any form but is usually visual, auditory, motor, or verbal. further discussion of the point that reasoning is determined by past experience may be necessary. suppose the teacher ask the class a number of different questions, moral, religious, political. many different answers to the questions will be received, in some cases as many answers to the questions as there are pupils. ask whether it is ever right to steal, whether it is ever right to lie, whether it is ever right to fight, whether it is ever right to disobey a parent or teacher, whether oak is stronger than maple, whether iron expands more when heated than does copper, whether one should always feed beggars, etc. the answers received, in each case, depend on the previous experience of the pupils. the more nearly alike the experiences of the pupils, the more nearly alike will be the answers. the more divergent the experiences, the more different will be the answers. the basis of reasoning is ultimately the same sort of thing as the basis of habit. we have repeated experiences of the same kind. the ideas of these experiences become welded together in a definite way. association between certain groups of ideas becomes well fixed. later situations involving these groups of ideas set up definite trains of association. we come always to definite conclusions from the same situations provided that we are in the same mental set and the factors involved are the same. throughout early life we have definite moral and religious ideas presented to us. we come to think in definite ways about them or with them. it therefore comes about that every day we live, we are determining the way we shall in the future reason about things. we are each day getting the material for the solution of the problems that will be presented to us by future situations. and the reason that one of us will solve those problems in a different way from another is because of having somewhat different experiences, and of organizing them in a different way. =meaning and the organization of ideas.= in the preceding paragraphs we have several times spoken of the organization of ideas. let us now see just what is meant by this expression. intimately connected with the organization of ideas is _meaning_. what is the meaning of an idea? the meaning of an idea is another idea or group of ideas that are very closely associated with it. when there comes to mind an idea that has arisen out of repeated experience, there come almost immediately with it other ideas, perhaps vivid images which have been connected with the same experience. suppose the idea is of a horse. if one were asked, "what is a horse?" ideas of a horse in familiar situations would present themselves. one may see in imagination a horse being driven, ridden, etc., and he would then answer, "why, a horse is to ride," or "a horse is to drive," or "a horse is a domestic animal," etc. again, "what is a cloud? what is the sun? what is a river? what is justice? what is love?" one says, "a cloud is that from which rain falls," or "a cloud is partially condensed vapor. the sun is a round thing in the sky that shines by day. a river is water flowing along in a low place through the land. justice is giving to people what they deserve. love is that feeling one has for a person which makes him be kind to that person." the answer that one gives depends on age and experience. but it is evident that when a person is asked what a thing is or what is the meaning of a thing, he has at once ideas that have been most closely associated with the idea in question. now, since the most important aspect of a thing is what we can do with it, what use it can be to us, usually meaning centers about _use_. a chair is to sit in, bread is to eat, water is to drink, clothes are to wear, a hat is a thing to be worn on one's head, a shovel is to dig with, a car is to ride in, etc. use is not quite so evident in such cases as the following: "who was cæsar? who was homer? who is edison? what was the inquisition? what were the crusades?" however, one has, in these cases, very closely associated ideas, and these ideas do center about what we have done with these men and events in our thinking. "cæsar was a warrior. homer was a writer of epics. edison is an inventor," etc. these men and events have been presented to us in various situations as standing for various things in the history of the world. and when we think of them, we at once think of what they did, the place they fill in the world. this constitutes their meaning. it is evident that an idea may have many meanings. and the meaning that may come to us at any particular moment depends upon the situation. a chair, for example, in one situation, may come to mind as a thing to sit in; in another situation, as a thing to stand in the corner and look pretty; in another, a thing to stand on so that one may reach the top shelf in the pantry; in another, a thing to strike a burglar with; in another, a thing to knock to pieces to be used to make a fire. the meaning of a thing comes from our experience with it, and the thing usually comes to have more and more meanings as our experience with it increases. when we meet something new, it may have practically no meaning. suppose we find a new plant in the woods. it has little meaning. we may be able to say only that it is a plant, or it is a small plant. we touch it and it pricks us, and it at once has more meaning. it is a plant that pricks. we bite into it and find it bitter. it is then a plant that is bitter, etc. in such a way, objects come to have meaning. they acquire meaning according to the connections in which we experience them and they may take on different meanings for different persons because of the different experiences of these persons. the chief interest we have in objects is in what use we can make of them, how we can make them serve our purposes, how we can make them contribute to our pleasure. the organization of experience is the connecting, through the process of association, of the ideas that arise out of our experience. our ideas are organized not only in accordance with the way we experience them in the first place, but in accordance with the way we think them later in memory. of course, ideas are recalled in accordance with the way we experience them, but since they are experienced in such a multitude of connections, they are recalled later in these various connections and it is possible in recall to repeat one connection to the exclusion of others. organization can therefore be a selective process. although "horse" is experienced in a great variety of situations or connections, for our purposes we can select some one or more of these connections and by repetition in recalling it, strengthen these connections to the exclusion of others. herein lies one of the greatest possibilities in thinking and reasoning, which enables us, to an extent, to be independent of original experience. we must have had experience, of course, but the strength of bonds between ideas need not depend upon original experience, but rather upon the way in which these ideas are recalled later, and especially upon the number of times they are recalled. it is in the matter of the organization of experience that teachers and parents can be of great help to young people. children do not know what connections of ideas will be most useful in the future. people who have had more experience know better and can, by direction and suggestion, lead the young to form, and strengthen by repetition, those connections of ideas that will be most useful later. in the various school studies, a mass of ideas is presented. these ideas, isolated or with random connections, will be of little service to the pupils. they must be organized with reference to future use. this organization must come about through thinking over these ideas in helpful connections. the teacher knows best what these helpful connections are and must help the pupil to make them. suppose the topic studied in history is the battle of bunker hill. the teacher should assist the child to think the battle over in many different connections. there are various geographical, historical, and literary aspects of the battle that are of importance. these aspects should be brought to mind and related by being thought of together. thinking things together binds them together as ideas; and later when one idea comes, the others that have been joined with it in the past in thought, come also. therefore, in studying the battle of bunker hill, the pupil not only reads about it, but gets a map and studies the geography of it, works out the causes that led up to the battle, studies the consequences that followed, reads speeches and poems that have been made and written since concerning the battle, the monument, etc. similarly, all the topics studied in school should be thought over and organized with reference to meaning and with reference to future use. as a result of such procedure, all the topics become organized and crystallized, with all related ideas closely bound together in association. one of the greatest differences in people is in the organization of their ideas. of course, people differ in original experience, but they differ more in the way they organize this experience and prepare it for future needs. just as in habit-formation we should by exercise and practice acquire those kinds of skill that will serve us best in the future, so in getting knowledge we should by repetition strengthen the connections between those ideas that we shall need to have connected in the future. all education looks forward and is preparatory. as a result of training in the organization of ideas, a pupil can learn how to organize his experience, in a measure, independent of the teacher. he learns to know, himself, what ideas are significant, and what connections of ideas will be most helpful. such an outcome should be one of the ends of school training. =training in reasoning.= we have already mentioned ways in which a child can be helped in gaining power and facility in reasoning. in this paragraph we shall discuss the matter more fully. there are three aspects of training in reasoning, one with reference to original experience, one with reference to the organization of this experience as just discussed, and one with reference to certain habits of procedure in the recall and use of experience. ( ) _original experience._ before reasoning in any field, one must have experience in that field. there is no substitute for experience. after having the experience, it can be organized in various ways, but experience there must be. experience may be primary, with things themselves, or it may be secondary, received second hand through books or through spoken language. we cannot think without ideas, and ideas come only through perceptions of one kind or another. originally, all experience arises out of sensations. language makes it possible for us to profit through the perceptual experience of others. but even when we receive our experience second hand, our own primary experience must enable us to understand the meaning of what we read and hear about, else it is valueless to us. therefore, if we wish to be able to reason in the field of physics, of botany, of chemistry, of medicine, of law, or of agriculture, we must get experience in those fields. the raw material of thought comes only through experience. in such a subject as physical geography, for example, the words of the book have little meaning unless the child has had original experience in the matter discussed. he must have seen hills and valleys and rivers and lakes and rocks and weathering, and all the various processes discussed in physical geography; otherwise, the reading of the text is almost valueless. the same thing is true of all subjects. to reason in any subject we must have had original experience in it. ( ) _the organization of experience._ after experience comes its organization. this point has already been fully explained. it was pointed out that organization consists in thinking our experience over again in helpful relations. here parents and teachers can be of very great service to children. ( ) _habits of thought._ there are certain habits of procedure in reasoning, apart from the association of the ideas. one can form the habit of putting certain questions to oneself when a problem is presented, so that certain types of relations are called up. if one is a scientist, one looks for causes. if one is a lawyer, one looks up the court decisions. if one is a physician, one looks for symptoms, etc. one of the most important habits in connection with reasoning is the habit of caution. reasoning is waiting, waiting for ideas to come that will be adequate for the situation. one must form the habit of waiting a reasonable length of time for associations to run their course. if one act too soon, before his organized experience has had time to pass in review, he may act improperly. therefore one must be trained to a proper degree of caution. of course, caution may be overdone. one must act sometime, one cannot wait always. another habit is that of testing out a conclusion before it is finally put into practice. it is often possible to put a conclusion to some sort of test before it is put to the real test, just as one makes a model and tries out an invention on a small scale. one should not have full confidence in a conclusion that is the result of reasoning, till the conclusion has been put to the final test of experiment, of trial. this last statement leads us to the real function of reasoning. reason points the way to action in a new situation. after the situation is repeated for a sufficient number of times, action passes into the realm of habit. =language and thinking.= the fact that man has spoken and written language is of the greatest significance. it has already been pointed out that language is a means through which we can get experience secondhand. this proves to be a great advantage to man. but language gives us still another advantage. without language, thinking is limited to the passing of sensory images that arise in accordance with the laws of association. but man can name things and the attributes of things, and these names become associated, so that thinking comes to be, in part at least, a matter of words. thinking is talking to oneself. one cannot talk without language. the importance that attaches to language can hardly be overestimated. when the child acquires the use of language, he has acquired the use of a tool, the importance of which to thinking is greater than that of any other tool. now, one can think without language, in the sense that memory images come and go,--we have defined thinking as the flow of imagery, the passing or succession of ideas. but after we have named things, thinking, particularly reasoning, becomes largely verbal, or as we said above, _talking to oneself_. not only do we give names to concrete things but we give names to specific attributes and to relations. as we organize and analyze our experiences, there appear uniformities, principles, laws. to these we give names, such as white, black, red, weight, length, thickness, justice, truth, sin, crime, heat, cold, mortal, immortal, evolution, disintegration, love, hate, envy, jealousy, possible, impossible, probable, etc. we spoke above of meanings. to meanings we give names, so that a single word comes to stand for meanings broad and significant, the result of much experience. such words as "evolution" and "gravitation," single words though they are, represent a wide range of experiences and bring these experiences together and crystallize them into a single expression, which we use as a unit in our thought. language, therefore, makes thought easier and its accomplishment greater. after we have studied cæsar for some years, the name comes to represent the epitome, the bird's-eye view of a great man. a similar thing is true of our study of other men and movements and things. single words come to represent a multitude of experiences. then these words become associated and organized in accordance with the principles of association discussed above, so that it comes about that the older we are, the more we come to think in words, and the more these words represent. the older we are, the more abstract our thinking becomes, the more do our words come to stand for meanings and attributes and laws that have come out of the organization of our experience. it is evident that the accuracy of our thinking depends upon these words standing for the _truth_, depends upon whether we have organized our experience in accordance with facts. if our word "cæsar" does not stand for the real cæsar, then all our thinking in which cæsar enters will be incorrect. if our word "justice" does not stand for the real justice, then all our thinking in which justice enters will be incorrect. this discussion points to the tremendous importance of the organization of experience. truth is the agreement of our thought with the thing, with reality. we must therefore help the young to see the world clearly and to organize what they see in accordance with the facts and with a view to future use. then the units of this organized experience are to be tagged, labeled, by means of words, and these words or labels become the vehicles of thought, and the outcome of the thinking depends on the validity of the organization of our experience. summary. thinking is the passing of ideas in the mind; its basis is in the association of memory ideas. the basis of association is in original experience, ideas becoming bound together in memory as originally experienced. the factors of association are primacy, recency, frequency, intensity, and mental set or attitude. reasoning is thinking to a purpose. we can be trained in reasoning by being taught to get vivid experience in the first place and in organizing this experience in helpful ways, having in mind future use. class exercises . a series of experiments should be performed to make clear to the students that the basis of the association of ideas is in _experience_ and not in the nature of the ideas themselves. (a) let the students, starting with the same word, write down all the ideas that come to mind in one minute. the teacher should give the initial idea, as sky, hate, music, clock, table, or wind. the first ten ideas coming to each student might be written on the blackboard for study and comparison. are any series alike? is the tenth idea in one series the same as that in any other? (b) for a study of the various factors of association, perform the following experiment: let the teacher prepare a list of fifty words--nouns and adjectives, such as wood, murder, goodness, bad, death, water, love, angel. read the words to the class and let each student write down the first idea that comes to mind in each case. after the list is finished, let each student try to find out what the determining factor was in each case, whether primacy, frequency, recency, vividness, or mental set. when the study is completed, the student's paper should contain three columns, the first column showing the stimulus words, the second showing the response words, the third showing the determining factors. the first column should be dictated and copied after the response words have been written. (c) study the data in (a) and (b), noting the variety of ideas that come to different students for the same stimulus word. it will be seen that they come from a great variety of experiences and from all parts of one's life from childhood to the present, showing that all our experiences are bound together and that we can go from one point to any other, directly or indirectly. . perform an experiment to determine how each member of the class thinks, _i.e._ in what kind of imagery. let each plan a picnic in detail. how do they do it? do they see it or hear it or seem to act it? or does it happen in words merely? . think of the events of yesterday. how do they come to you? do your images seem to be visual, auditory, motor, or verbal? do you seem to have all kinds of imagery? is one kind predominant? . test the class for speed of free association as described on page  . repeat the experiment at least five times and rank the members of the class from the results. . similarly, test speed for controlled association as described on page  and rank the members of the class. . compare the rankings in nos.  and . . the teacher can extend the controlled association tests by preparing lists that show different kinds of logical relations with one another, from genus to species, from species to genus, from verb to object, from subject to verb, etc. do the students maintain the same rank in the various types of experiments? do the ranks in these tests correspond to the students' ranks in thinking in the school subjects? . at least two series of experiments in reasoning should be performed, one to show the nature of reasoning and the other to show the ability of the members of the class. (a) put several problems to the class, similar to the following: what happens to a wet board laid out in the sunshine? explain. suppose corn is placed in three vessels, , , and . number  is sealed up air tight and kept warm? number  is kept open and warm? number  is kept open and warm and moist. what happens in each case? explain. condensed milk does not sour as long as the can remains unopened. after the can is opened, the milk sours if allowed to become warm; it does not sour if kept frozen. why? two bars of metal are riveted together. one bar is lead, the other iron. what happens when the bars are heated to  c?  c?  c?  c? answer the following questions: is it ever right to steal? to kill a person? to lie? which are unwise and mistaken, republicans or democrats? in the above, do all come to the same conclusion? why? were any unable to come to a conclusion at all on some questions? why? do the experiments make it clear that reasoning is dependent upon experience? (b) let the teacher prepare five problems in reasoning well within the experience of the class, and find the speed and accuracy of the students in solving them. compare the results with those in the controlled association tests. test the class with various kinds of mechanical puzzles. . the students should study several people to ascertain how well those people have their experience organized. is their experience available? can they come to the point immediately, or, are they hazy, uncertain, and impractical? . it is claimed that we have two types of people, theoretical and practical. this is to some extent true. what is the explanation? . from the point of view of no.  , compare teachers and engineers. . if anything will work in theory, will it work in practice? . from what you have learned in the chapter and from the experiments, write a paper on training in reasoning. . what are the main defects of the schools with reference to training children to think? . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading colvin and bagley: _human behavior_, chapters xvi and xviii. dewey: _how we think_, parts i and iii. mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, chapters viii and xii; also pp.  - . pillsbury: _essentials of psychology_, chapters vi and ix. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_, chapter xv. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, chapters v, vi, and x. chapter ix individual differences =physical differences.= one never sees two people whose bodies are exactly alike. they differ in height or weight or color of the skin. they differ in the color of the hair or eyes, in the shape of the head, or in such details as size and shape of the ear, size and shape of the nose, chin, mouth, teeth, feet, hands, fingers, toes, nails, etc. the anatomist tells us that we differ internally just as we do externally. while the internal structure of one person has the same general plan as that of another, there being the same number of bones, muscles, organs, etc., there are always differences in detail. we are built on the same plan, _i.e._ we are made after a common type. we vary, above and below this type or central tendency. weight may be taken for illustration. if we should weigh the first thousand men we meet, we should find light men, heavy men, and men of medium weight. there would be few light men, few heavy men, but many men of medium weight. this fact is well shown in diagram by what is known as a curve of distribution or frequency surface, which is constructed as follows: draw a base line a b, and on this line mark off equal distances to represent the various weights. at the left end put the number representing the lightest men and at the right the number representing the heaviest men; the other weights come in between in order. then select a scale; we will say a millimeter in height above the base line represents one person of the weight represented on the base, and in drawing the upper part of the figure, a c b, we have but to measure up one millimeter for each person weighed, of the weight indicated below on the base. [illustration: figure v--frequency surface--weight the solid line represents men, the broken line, women.] a study of this frequency surface shows a tendency for people to be grouped about the central tendency or average. there are many people of average weight or nearly so, but few people who deviate widely from the average weight. if we measure people with reference to any other physical characteristic, or any mental characteristic, we get a similar result, we find them grouped about an average or central tendency. =mental differences.= just as we differ physically, so also we differ mentally, and in the various aspects of our behavior. the accompanying diagram (free association) shows the distribution of a large number of men and women with respect to the speed of their flow of ideas. when men and women are measured with respect to any mental function, a similar distribution is found. [illustration: figure vi--frequency surface--free association solid line, men; broken line, women. the numbers below the base represent the number of words written in the free association test, and the numbers at the left represent the number of people making the respective scores.] an interesting question is whether our mental differences have any relation or connection with one another. if one mental characteristic is of high order, are all the others of high order also? does a good memory indicate a high order of attention, of association, of imagination, of learning capacity? experiments show that mental characteristics have at least some degree of independence. but the rule is that they generally go together, a high order of ability in one mental function indicating a high order of ability in at least some others, and a low order of ability in one function indicating a low order in other functions. however, it seems that abilities that are very much specialized, such as musical ability, artistic ability, etc., may exist in high order while other mental functions may be only mediocre. it is a common thing for a musical person to be of rather poor ability otherwise. to the extent that special abilities require specialized differences in the structure of brain, nervous system, or sense organ, they can exist in some degree of independence of other functions. musical ability to some extent does require some such differences and may therefore be found either with a high or a low degree of ability in other characteristics. it is doubtless true that at maturity the unequal power of mental functions in the same person may be partly due to the fact that one function has been exercised and others neglected. a person having very strong musical tendencies is likely to have such a great interest in music that he will think other activities are not worth while, and will consequently neglect these other activities. it will therefore turn out that at maturity the great differences in mental functions in such a person are in part due to exercise of one function and neglect of others. but there can be no doubt that in many cases there are large original, inherited differences, the individual being poor in one aspect of mind and good in others. feeble-minded people are usually poor in all important aspects of mind. however, one sometimes finds a feeble-minded person having musical or artistic ability, and often such a person has a good rote memory, sometimes a good verbal memory. however, the so-called higher mental functions--logical memory, controlled association, and constructive imagination--are all poor in a feeble-minded person. each mental function may be looked upon as in some measure independent; each is found existing in people in varying degrees from zero ability up to what might be called genius ability. the frequency curves in fig. vi show this. take rote memory for example. idiots are found with practically zero ability in rote memory. at the other extreme, we find mathematical prodigies who, after watching a long freight train pass and noting the numbers of the cars, can repeat correctly the number of each car. rote memory abilities can be found representing every step between these two extremes. this principle of distribution holds true in the case of all mental functions. we find persons practically without them, and others possessing them in the highest order, but most people are grouped about the average ability. =detecting mental differences.= it has already been said that mind has many different aspects and that people differ with respect to these aspects. now let us ask how we can measure the degree of development of these aspects or functions of mind. we measure them just as we measured muscular speed as described in the first chapter. each mental function means ability to do something--to learn, to remember, to form images, to reason, etc. to measure these different capacities or functions we have but to require that the person under consideration _do_ something, as learn, remember, etc., and measure how well and how fast he does it, just as we would measure how far he can jump, how fast he can run, etc. in such measurements, the question of practice is always involved. if we measure running ability, we find that some are in practice while others are not. those in practice can run at very nearly their ultimate capacity. those who are not in practice can be trained to run much faster than they do. to get a true measure of running capacity, we should practice the persons to be measured till each runs up to the limit of his capacity, and then measure each one's speed. the same thing is true, to some extent, when we come to measure mental functions proper. however, the life that children live gives exercise to all fundamental functions of the mind, and unless some of the children tested have had experience which would tend to develop some mental functions in a special way, tests of the various aspects of learning capacity, memory, association, imagination, etc., are a fairly good measure of original, inherited tendencies. of course, it must be admitted that there are measurable differences in the influence of environment on children, and when these differences are extreme, no doubt the influence is shown in the development of the child's mind. a child reared in a home where all the influences favor its mental development, ought to show a measurable difference in such development when compared with a child reared in a home where all the influences are unfavorable. it is difficult to know to what extent this is true, for the hereditary and environmental influences are usually in harmony, the child of good hereditary stock having good environmental influences, and vice versa. when this is not the case, _i.e._ when a child of good stock is reared under poor environmental influences, or when a child of poor stock is reared under good influences, the results seem to show that the differences in environment have little effect on mental development, as far as the fundamental functions are concerned, except in the most extreme cases. each mental function is capable of some development. it can be brought up to the limit of its possibilities. but recent experiments indicate that such development is not very great in the case of the elementary, fundamental functions. training, however, has a much greater effect on complex mental activities that involve several functions. rote memory is rather simple; it cannot be much affected by training. the memory for ideas is more complex; it can be considerably affected by training. the original and fundamental functions of the mind depend upon the nature of the nervous system which is bequeathed to us by heredity. this cannot be much changed. however, training has considerable effect on the coördinations and combinations of mental functions. therefore, the more complex the mental activities which we are testing, the more likely they are to have been affected by differences in experience and training. if we should designate the logical memory capacity of one person by , and that of another by , by practice we might bring the first up to and the second to ½, but we could not equalize them. we could never make the memory of the one equal to that of the other. in an extreme case, we might find one child whose experience had been such that his logical memory was working up to the limit of its capacity, while the other had had little practice in logical memory and was therefore far below his real capacity. in such a case, a test would not show the native difference, it would show only the present difference in functioning capacity. fairly adequate tests for the most important mental functions have been worked out. a series of group tests with directions and norms follow. the members of the class can use these tests in studying the individual differences in other people. the teacher will find other tests in the author's _examination of school children_, and in whipple's _manual of mental and physical tests_. =mental tests= general directions the results of the mental tests in the school will be worse than useless unless the tests are given with the greatest care and scientific precision. every test should be most carefully explained to the children so that they will know _exactly_ what they are to do. the matter must be so presented to them that they will put forth _all possible_ effort. they must take the tests seriously. great care must be taken to see that there is no cheating. the work of each child should be his own work. in those tests in which time is an important element, the time must be _carefully kept_, with a stop watch if one is available. the papers should be distributed for the tests and turned face downward on the pupil's desk. the pupil, when all are ready to begin, should take the paper in his hand and at the signal "begin" turn it over and begin work, and when the signal "stop" is given, should quit work instantly and turn the paper over. before the work begins, the necessary information should be placed on each paper. this information should be the pupil's name, age, grade, sex, and school. this should be on every paper. when the test is over the papers should be immediately collected. logical memory =object.= the purpose of this test is to determine the pupil's facility in remembering and reproducing ideas. a pupil's standing in the test may serve as an indication of his ability to remember the subject matter of the school studies. [illustration: figure vii--logical memory "willie jones"] =method.= the procedure in this test is for the teacher to read slowly and distinctly the story to be reproduced. immediately after the reading the pupils are to write down all of the story that they can recall. they must not begin to write till _after_ the reading. ten minutes should be allowed for the reproduction. this is ample time, and each pupil should be told to use the whole time in working on his reproduction. at the end of ten minutes, collect the papers. care should be taken to see that each pupil does his own work, that there is no copying. before reading the story, the teacher should give the following instructions: i shall read to you a story entitled "willie jones and his dog" (or "a farmer's son," or "a costly temper," as the case may be). after i have read the story you are to write down all you can remember of it. you are not to use the exact words that i read unless you wish. you are to use your own words. try to recall as much as possible and write all you recall. try to get all the details, not merely the main facts. =material.= for grades three, four, and five, use "willie jones and his dog"; for grades six, seven, and eight, use "a farmer's son"; for the high school, use "a costly temper." the norms for the latter are based on eighth grade and high school pupils. * * * * * willie jones and his dog willie | jones | was a little | boy | only | five years old. | he had a dog | whose name was buster. | buster was a large | dog | with long, | black, | curly | hair. | his fore | feet | and the tip | of his tail | were white. | one day | willie's mother | sent him | to the store | which was only | a short | distance away. | buster went with him, | following behind. | as buster was turning | at the corner, | a car | struck him | and broke | one | hind | leg | and hurt | one | eye. | willie was | very | sorry | and cried | a long | time. | willie's father | came | and carried | the poor | dog | home. | the broken leg | got well | in five | weeks | but the eye | that was hurt | became blind.| a farmer's son will | was a farmer's | son | who attended school | in town. | his clothes | were poor and his boots | often smelled | of the farmyard | although he took great | care of them. | since will had not gone to school | as much | as his classmates, | he was often | at a disadvantage, | although his mind | was as good | as theirs,--| in fact, he was brighter | than most | of them. | james, | the wit | of the class, | never lost an opportunity | to ridicule | will's mistakes, | his bright | red | hair, | and his patched | clothes. | will | took the ridicule | in good part | and never | lost his temper. | one saturday | as will | was driving | his cows | to pasture, | he met james | teasing | a young | child, | a cripple. | will's | indignation | was aroused | by the sight. | he asked | the bully | to stop, | but when he would not, | will pounced | upon him | and gave him | a good | beating, | and he would not | let james go | until he promised | not to tease | the crippled | child | again. | a costly temper a man | named john | murdock | had a servant | who worried him | much by his stupidity. | one day | when this servant was more | stupid | than usual, | the angry | master | of the house | threw a book | at his head. | the servant | ducked | and the book flew | out of the window. | "now go | and pick that book up!" | ordered the master. | the servant | started | to obey, | but a passerby | had saved him | the trouble, | and had walked off | with the book. | the scientist | thereupon | began to wonder | what book | he had thrown away, | and to his horror, | discovered | that it was a quaint | and rare | little | volume | of poems, | which he had purchased | in london | for fifty | dollars. | but his troubles | were not over. | the weeks went by | and the man had almost | forgotten his loss, | when, strolling | into a secondhand | bookshop, | he saw, | to his great delight, | a copy of the book | he had lost. | he asked the price. | "well," | said the dealer, | reflectively, | "i guess we can let you have it | for forty | dollars. | it is a very | rare book, | and i am sure | that i could get seventy-five | dollars for it | by holding on a while." | the man of science | pulled out his purse | and produced the money, | delighted at the opportunity of replacing | his lost | treasure. | when he reached home, | a card | dropped out | of the leaves. | the card was his own, | and further | examination | showed that he had bought back | his own property. | "forty dollars' | worth of temper," | exclaimed the man. | "i think i shall mend my ways." | his disposition | afterward | became so | good | that | the servant became worried, | thinking the man | must be ill. | * * * * * [illustration: figure viii--logical memory--"a farmer's son"] =the results.= the material for the test is divided into units as indicated by the vertical lines. the pupil's written reproduction should be compared unit by unit with the story as printed, and given one credit for each unit adequately reproduced. the norms for the three tests are shown in the accompanying figures vii, viii, and ix. in these and all the graphs which follow, the actual ages are shown in the first horizontal column. the norms for girls appear in the second horizontal column, the norms for boys in the column at the bottom. by the _norm_ for an age is meant the average performance of all the pupils of that age examined. age ten applies to those pupils who have passed their tenth birthday and have not reached their eleventh birthday, and the other ages are to be similarly interpreted. the vertical lines in the graphs indicate birthdays and the scores written on these lines indicate ability at these exact ages. the column marked ten, for example, includes all the children that are over ten and not yet eleven. the graphs show the development from age to age. in general, it will be noticed, there is an improvement of memory with age, but in the high school, in the "costly temper" test, there is a decline. this may not indicate a real decline in ability to remember ideas, but a change in attitude. the high school pupil probably acquires a habit of remembering only significant facts. his memory is selective, while in the earlier ages, the memory may be more parrot-like, one idea being reproduced with about as much fidelity as another. this statement is made not as a _fact_, but as a _probable_ explanation. rote memory [illustration: figure ix--logical memory--"a costly temper"] =object.= the object of the rote memory tests is to determine the pupil's memory span for unrelated impressions--words that have no logical relations with one another. much school work makes demands upon this ability. therefore, the tests are of importance. =method.= there are two lists of words, _concrete_ and _abstract_, with six groups in each list. the list of concrete words should be given first, then the abstract. the procedure is to pronounce the first group, _cat_, _tree_, _coat_, and then pause for the pupils to write these three words. then pronounce the next group, _mule_, _bird_, _cart_, _glass_, and pause for the reproduction, and so on through the list. [illustration: figure x--concrete rote memory] give the following instructions: we wish to see how well you can remember words. i shall pronounce first a group of three words. _after_ i have pronounced them, you are to write them down. i shall then pronounce a group of four words, then one of five words, and so continue with a longer group each time. you must pay very close attention for i shall pronounce a group but once. you are not required to write the words in their order, but just as you recall them. =material.= the words for the test are given in the following lists: _concrete_ _abstract_ . cat, tree, coat . good, black, fast . mule, bird, cart, glass . clean, tall, round, hot . star, horse, dress, fence, man . long, wet, fierce, white, cold . fish, sun, head, door, shoe, . deep, soft, quick, dark, great, block dead . train, mill, box, desk, oil, . sad, strong, hard, bright, pup, bill fine, glad, plain . floor, car, pipe, bridge, hand, . sharp, late, sour, wide, rough, dirt, cow, crank thick, red, tight [illustration: figure xi--abstract rote memory] =results.= the papers are graded by determining the number of concrete words and the number of abstract words that are reproduced. no account is taken of whether the words are in the right position or not. a perfect score in each test would therefore be thirty-three. the norms are shown in figures x and xi. the substitution test =object.= this test determines one's ability to build up new associations. it is a test of quickness of learning. =method.= the substitution test-sheets are distributed to the pupils and turned face down on the desks. the teacher gives the following instructions: we wish to see how fast you can learn. at the top of the sheet which has been distributed to you there is a key. in nine circles are written the nine digits and for each digit there is written a letter which is to be used instead of the digit. below the key are two columns of numbers; each number contains five digits. in the five squares which follow the number you are to write the letters which correspond to the digits. work as fast as you can and fill as many of the squares as you can without making mistakes. when i say "stop," quit work instantly and turn the paper over. before beginning the test the teacher should explain on the blackboard the exact nature of the test. this can be done by using other letters instead of those used in the key. make sure that the pupils understand what they are to do. allow _eight_ minutes in grades three, four, and five, and _five_ minutes above the fifth grade. =material.= for material, use the substitution test-sheets. this and the other test material can be obtained from the university of missouri, extension division. =results.= in grading the work, count each square correctly filled in as one point, and reduce the score to speed per minute by dividing by eight in grades three, four, and five, and by five in the grades above. the norms are shown in figure xii. [illustration: figure xii--substitution test] free association =object.= this test determines the speed of the free flow of ideas. the result of the test is a criterion of the quickness of the flow of ideas when no restriction or limitation is put on this flow. =method.= the procedure in this test is to give the pupils a word, and tell them to write this word down and all the other words that come into their minds. make it clear to them that they are to write whatever word comes to mind, whether it has any relation to the word that is given them or not. start them with the word "cloud." give the following instructions: i wish to see how many words you can think of and write down in three minutes. i shall name a word, you may write it down and then all the other words that come into your minds. do not write sentences, merely the words that come into your minds. work as fast as you can. [illustration: figure xiii--free association test] =results.= score the work by counting the number of words that have been written. the norms are shown in figure xiii. opposites =object.= this is a test of controlled association. it tests one aspect of the association of ideas. all thinking is a matter of association of ideas. reasoning is controlled association. the test may therefore be taken as a measure of speed in reasoning. [illustration: figure xiv--opposites test--lists i and ii] =method.= distribute the lists of opposites to the pupils and turn them face down on the desks. use list one in grades three, four, and five, and list two in grades above. allow two minutes in grades three, four, and five and one minute in grades above. give the following instructions: on the sheets that have been distributed to you are fifty words. after each word you are to write a word that has the opposite meaning. for example, if one word were "far," you could write "near." work as fast as you can, and when i say "stop" quit work instantly and turn your paper over. =results.= the score is the number of opposites correctly written. the norms are shown in figure xiv. opposites--list no.  . good . up . before . big . thick . winter . rich . quick . ripe . out . pretty . night . sick . heavy . open . hot . late . first . long . wrong . over . wet . smooth . love . yes . strong . come . high . dark . east . hard . dead . top . sweet . wide . wise . clean . empty . front . sharp . above . girl . fast . north . sad . black . laugh . fat . old . man opposites--list no.  . strong . strange . fine . deep . wrong . plain . lazy . quickly . sharp . seldom . black . late . thin . good . sour . soft . fast . wide . many . clean . drunk . valuable . tall . tight . gloomy . hot . empty . rude . long . sick . dark . wet . friend . rough . fierce . above . pretty . great . loud . high . dead . war . foolish . cloudy . in . present . hard . yes . glad . bright the word-building test =object.= this is a test of a certain type of inventiveness, namely linguistic invention. specifically, it tests the pupil's ability to construct words using certain prescribed letters. [illustration: figure xv--word-building test] =method.= the pupils are given the letters, _a_, _e_, _o_, _m_, _n_, _r_, and told to make as many words as possible using only these letters. give the following instructions: i wish to see how many words you can make in five minutes, using only the letters which i give you. the words must be real english words. you must use only the letters which i give you and must not use the same letter more than once in the same word. you do not, of course, have to use all the letters in the same word. a word may contain one or more letters up to six. =material.= the pupils need only sheets of blank paper. =results.= the score is the number of words that do not violate the rules of the test as given in the instructions. the norms are shown in figure xv. the completion test =object.= this is, to some extent, a test of reasoning capacity. of course, it is only one particular aspect of reasoning. the pupil is given a story that has certain words omitted. he must read the story, see what it is trying to say, and determine what words, put into the blanks, will make the correct sense. the meaning of the word written in a particular blank must not only make the sentence read sensibly but must fit into the story _as a whole_. filling in the blanks in this way demands considerable thought. =method.= distribute the test-sheets and turn them face down on the desks. allow ten minutes in all the tests. give the following instructions: on the sheets which have been distributed is printed a story which has certain words omitted. you are to put in the blanks the words that are omitted. the words which you write in must give the proper meaning so that the story reads correctly. each word filled in must not only give the proper meaning to the sentence but to the story as a whole. =material.= use the completion test-sheets, "joe and the fourth of july," for grades three, four, and five; "the trout" for grades, six, seven, and eight; and "dr. goldsmith's medicine" for the high school. =results.= in scoring the papers, allow one credit for each blank correctly filled. the norms are shown in figures xvi, xvii, and xviii. it will be noticed that the boys excel in the "trout" story. this is doubtless because the story is better suited to them on the ground of their experience and interest. [illustration: figure xvi--completion test--"joe and the fourth of july"] * * * * * joe and the fourth of july joe {ran}[ ] errands for {his} mother and {took} care of the {baby} until by the fourth of july his penny {grew} to be a dime. the day before the fourth, he {went} down town all by {himself} to get his fire {works}. there were so {many} kinds he hardly knew which to {buy}. the clerk knew that it takes a {long} time to decide, for he had been a {boy} himself not very {long} ago. so he helped joe to {select} the very best kinds. "when are you going to {fire} them off?" asked the clerk. "i will fire {them} very {early} to-morrow," said the boy. so that night joe set the {alarm} clock, and the next {morning} got up {early} to fire his firecrackers. [ ] the italicized words and letters are left blank in the test sheets. the trout the trout is a fine fish. once a big trout {lived} in a pool {close} by a spring. he used to {stay} under the bank with {only} his head showing. his wide-open {eyes} shone like jewels. i tried to {catch} him. i would {creep} up to the {edge} of the pool {where} i could see his {bright} eyes looking up. i {caught} a grasshopper and {threw} it over {to} him. then there was a {splash} in the water and the grasshopper {was gone}. i {did} this {two} or three times. each time i {saw} the rush and splash and saw the bait had been {taken}. so i put the sa{me} bait on my {hook} and {threw} it over into the {water}. but {all} was silent. the fish was an {old} one and had {grown} very wise. i did this {day} after day with the same luck. the trout {knew} there was a {hook} hidden in the bait. [illustration: figure xvii--completion test--"the trout"] doctor goldsmith's medicine this {is} a story of good medicine. most medicine is {bad} to {take}, but this was so good {that} the sick man {wished} for more. {one} day a poor woman {went} to doctor goldsmith and {asked} him to {go} to see her {sick} husband. "he {is} very sick," she said, "and i {can} not {get} him to eat anything." {so} doctor goldsmith {went} to {see} him. the doctor {saw} at once that the {reason} why the man {could} not eat was {because} he was {so} poor that he had {not} been {able} to buy good food. then he {said} to the woman, "{come} to my house this evening and i will {give you} some {medicine} for your {husband}." the woman {went} in the evening and the {doctor} gave {her} a small paper box tied {up} tight. "{it} is very heavy," {she} said. "may i {see} what it looks {like}?" "{no}," said the doctor, "{wait} until you get {home}." when she {got} home, and she and {her} husband {opened} the box so that he {could} take the first {dose} of medicine,--what do you think they {saw}? the box was {filled} with silver {money}. {this} was the {good} doctor's medicine. * * * * * =importance of mental differences.= ( ) _in school work._ one of the important results that come from a knowledge of the mental differences in children is that we are able to classify them better. when a child enters school he should be allowed to proceed through the course as fast as his development warrants. some children can do an eight-year course in six years; others require ten years; still others can never do it. the great majority, of course, can do it in eight years. [illustration: figure xviii--completion test--"dr. goldsmith's medicine"] norms for adults, as obtained from university students, are: test men women substitution test . . rote memory, concrete . . rote memory, abstract . . free association . . completion, _dr. goldsmith's medicine_ . . word building . . logical memory, _costly temper_ . . [illustration: figure xix--frequency surfaces--comparing fourth grade with high school the numbers along the base represent mental age; those at the left, the number of pupils of the respective ages.] it may be thought that a child's success in school branches is a sufficient measure of his ability and that no special mental measurements are needed. this is a mistake. many factors contribute to success in school work. ability is only one of these factors, and should be specially and independently determined by suitable tests. children may fail in school branches because of being poorly started or started at the wrong time, because of poor teaching, sickness, moving from one school to another, etc. on the other hand, children of poor ability may succeed at school because of much help at home. therefore special mental tests will help in determining to what extent original mental ability is a factor in the success or failure of the different pupils. as far as possible, the children of the same grade should have about the same ability; but such is seldom the case. in a recent psychological study of a school system, the author found wide differences in ability in the same grade. the distribution of abilities found in the fourth grade and in the high school are shown in figure xix. it will be seen that in the fourth grade pupils are found with ability equal to that of some in the high school. of course to some extent such a condition is unavoidable, for a pupil must establish certain habits and acquire certain knowledge before passing from one grade to another. however, much of the wide variation in ability now found in the same grade of a school could be avoided if the teacher had accurate knowledge of the pupils' abilities. when a teacher learns that a child who is doing poorly in school really has ability, she is often able to get from that pupil the work of which he is capable. it has been demonstrated by experience that accurate measures of children's abilities are a great help in gradation and classification. a knowledge of mental differences is also an aid in the actual teaching of the children. the instance mentioned at the close of the last paragraph is an example. a knowledge of the differences among the mental functions of the same pupil is especially helpful. it has been pointed out that the different mental functions in the same pupil are sometimes unequally developed. sometimes considerable differences exist in the same pupil with respect to learning capacity, the different aspects of memory, association, imagination, and attention. when a teacher knows of these differences, she can better direct the work of the pupils. for example, if a pupil have a very poor memory, the teacher can help him by aiding him to secure the advantage that comes from close and concentrated attention, frequent repetitions, logical organization, etc. on the other hand, she can help the brilliant student by preventing him from being satisfied with hastily secured, superficial knowledge, and by encouraging him to make proper use of his unusual powers in going deeper and more extensively into the school subjects than is possible for the ordinary student. in many ways a teacher can be helpful to her pupils if she has an accurate knowledge of their mental abilities. ( ) _in life occupations._ extreme variations in ability should certainly be considered in choosing one's life work. only persons of the highest ability should go into science, law, medicine, or teaching. many occupations demand special kinds of ability, special types of reaction, of attention, imagination, etc. for example, the operation of a telephone exchange demands a person of quick and steady reaction. the work of a motorman on a street car demands a person having the broad type of attention, the type of attention that enables one to keep in mind many details at the same time. scientific work demands the type of concentrated attention. as far as it is possible, occupations demanding special types of ability should be filled by people possessing these abilities. it is best for all concerned if each person is doing what he can do best. it is true that many occupations do not call for special types of ability. and therefore, as far as ability is concerned, a person could do as well in one of these occupations as in another. the time will sometime come when we shall know the special abilities demanded by the different occupations and professions, and by suitable tests shall be able to determine what people possess the required qualifications. the schools should always be on the lookout for unusual ability. children that are far superior to others of the same age should be allowed to advance as fast as their superior ability makes possible, and should be held up to a high order of work. such superior people should be, as far as possible, in the same classes, so that they can the more easily be given the kind and amount of work that they need. the schools should find the children of unusual special ability, such as ability in drawing, painting, singing, playing musical instruments, mechanical invention, etc. some provision should be made for the proper development and training of these unusual abilities. society cannot afford to lose any spark of genius wherever found. moreover, the individual will be happier if developed and trained along the line of his special ability. =subnormal children.= a small percentage of children are of such low mentality that they cannot do the ordinary school work. as soon as such children can be picked out with certainty, they should be taken out of the regular classes and put into special classes. it is a mistake to try to get them to do the regular school work. they cannot do it, and they only waste the teacher's time and usually give her much trouble. besides, they waste their own time; for while they cannot do the ordinary school work, they can do other things, perhaps work of a manual nature. the education of such people should, therefore, be in the direction of simple manual occupations. for detecting such children, in addition to the tests given above, elaborate tests for individual examination have been devised. the most widely used is a series known as the binet-simon tests. a special group of tests is provided for the children of each age. if a child can pass the tests for his age, he is considered normal. if he can pass only the tests three years or more below his age, he is usually considered subnormal. but a child's fate should not depend solely upon any number or any kind of tests. we should always give the child a trial and see what he is able to achieve. this trial should cover as many months or years as are necessary to determine beyond doubt the child's mental status. summary. just as we differ in the various aspects of body, so also we differ in the various aspects of mind. these differences can be measured by tests. a knowledge of these differences should aid us in grading, classifying, and teaching children, as well as in the selection of occupation and professions for them. mental traits have some degree of independence; as a result a high degree of one trait may be found with low degree of some others. class exercises . many of the tests and experiments already described should have shown many of the individual differences of the members of the class. the teacher will find in the author's _examination of school children_ a series of group tests with norms which can be used for a further study of individual differences. . the tapping experiment described in the first chapter can now be repeated and the results taken as a measure of reaction time. . you should now have available the records of all the tests and experiments so far given that show individual differences. make out a table showing the rank of each student in the various tests. compute the average rank of each student for all the tests. this average rank may be taken as a measure of the intelligence of the students, as far as such can be determined by the tests used. correlate this ranking with standing in the high school classes. it will give a positive correlation, not perfect, however. why not? if your measures of intelligence were absolutely correct, you still would not get a perfect correlation with high school standing. why not? . if you had a correct measure of intelligence of mature people in your city, selected at random, would this measure give you an exact measure of their success in life? give the reason for your answer. . of all the tests and experiments previously described in this book, which gives the best indication of success in high school? . if the class in psychology is a large one, a graph should be prepared showing the distribution of abilities in the class. for this purpose, you will have to use the absolute measures instead of ranks. find the average for each test used. make these averages all the same by multiplying the low ones and dividing the high ones. then all the grades of each student can be added. this will give each test the same weight in the average. the use of a slide rule will make this transference to a new average very easy. a more accurate method for this computation is described in the author's _examination of school children_, p.  . the students should make a study of individual differences and the distribution of ability in some grade below the high school. the tests described in this chapter can be used for that purpose. . is it a good thing for high school students to find out how they compare with others in their various mental functions? if you have poor ability, is it a good thing for you to find it out? if the teacher and students think best, the results of all the various tests need not be made known except to the persons concerned. the data can be used in the various computations without the students' knowing whose measures they are. . to what extent is ability a factor in life? you find people of only ordinary ability succeeding and brilliant people failing. why is this? . none of the tests so far used measures ideals or perseverance and persistence. these are important factors in life, and there is no very adequate measure for any of them. the students might plan some experiments to test physical and mental persistence and endurance. the tapping experiment, for example, might be continued for an hour and the records kept for each minute. then from these records a graph could be plotted showing the course of efficiency for the hour. mental adding or multiplying might be kept up continuously for several hours and the results studied as above. . we have said that ideals and persistence are important factors in life. are they inherited or acquired? . do you find it to be the rule or the exception for a person standing high in one mental function to stand high in the others also? . make a complete outline of the chapter. references for class reading mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_. chapter xvi. pyle: _the examination of school children_. pyle: _the outlines of educational psychology_. chapter xvii. titchener: _a beginner's psychology_, pp.  - . chapter x applied psychology =the general field.= psychology has now reached that stage in its development where it can be of use to humanity. it can be of use in those fields which demand a knowledge of human nature. as indicated in the first chapter, these fields are education, medicine, law, business, and industry. we may add another which has been called "culture." we cannot say that psychology is able yet to be of very great service except to education, law, and medicine. it has been of less service to the field of business and industry, but in the future, its contribution here will be as great as in the other fields. while the service of psychology in the various fields is not yet great, what it will eventually be able to do is very clear. it is the purpose of this chapter to indicate briefly, the nature and possibilities of this psychological service. =education.= throughout the preceding chapters, we have emphasized the educational importance of the facts discussed. there is little left to say here except to summarize the main facts. since education is a matter of making a child over into what he ought to be, the science of education demands a knowledge of the original nature of children. this means that one must know the nature of instincts, their relations to one another, their order of development, and the possibilities of their being changed, modified, developed, suppressed. it means that one must know the nature of the child's mind in all its various functions, the development and significance of these functions,--memory, association, imagination, and attention. the science especially demands that we understand the principles of habit-formation, the laws of economical learning, and the laws of memory. this psychological knowledge must form the ground-work in the education of teachers for their profession. in addition to this general preparation of the teacher, psychology will render the schools a great service through the psycho-clinicist, who will be a psychological expert working under the superintendents of our school systems. his duty will be to supervise the work of mental testing, the work of diagnosis for feeble-mindedness and selection of the subnormal children, the teaching of such children. he will give advice in all cases which demand expert psychological knowledge. =medicine.= in the first place, there is a department of medicine which deals with nervous diseases, such as insanity, double personality, severe nervous shock, hallucination, etc. this entire aspect of medicine is wholly psychological. but psychology can be of service to the general practitioner both in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. a thorough psychological knowledge of human nature will assist a physician in diagnosis. often the best way to find out what ails a patient's body is through the patient's mind, and the doctor must know how to get the truth from the patient's mind even in those cases in which the patient is actually trying to conceal the truth. a profound practical knowledge of human nature is necessary,--a knowledge which can be obtained only by long and careful technical study as well as practice and experience. psychology can be of service in the treatment of disease. the physician must understand the peculiar mental characteristics of his patient in order to know how to deal with him. in some cases, hypnotism is a valuable aid in treatment, and in many cases, ordinary normal suggestion can be of considerable service. the state of mind of a sick person has much to do with his recovery. the physician must know this and must know how to induce the desired state of mind. indeed, a patient's trouble is often imaginary, exists in the mind only; in such cases, the treatment should be wholly mental, _i.e._ through suggestion. of course, the best physicians know these facts and make use of them in their practice, but preparation for this aspect of their work should be a regular part of their medical education. they should not be left to learn these facts from their practice as best they may, any more than they should be expected to learn their physiology and anatomy in this way. =law.= the service of psychology to law can be very great, but owing to the necessary conservatism of the courts, it will be a long time before they will make much use of psychological knowledge. perhaps the greatest service will be in determining the credibility of evidence. psychology can now give the general principles in this matter. witnesses go on the stand and swear to all sorts of things as to what they heard and saw and did, often months and even years previously. the expert clinical psychologist can tell the court the probability of such evidence being true. experiments have shown that there is a large percentage of error in such evidence. the additional value that comes from the oath has been measured. the oath increases the liability of truth only a small percentage. experiments have also shown that one's feeling of certainty is no guarantee of truth. sometimes the point we feel surest about is the one farthest from the truth. in fact, feeling sure of a thing is no guarantee of truth. in a particular case in court, the psychologist can determine the reliability of the evidence of a particular witness and enable the judge and the jury to put the proper value on such witness's testimony. for example, a witness may swear to a certain point involving the estimation of time and distance. the psychologist can measure the witness's accuracy in such estimates, often showing that what the witness claims to be able to do is an impossibility. a case may hinge on whether an interval of time was ten minutes or twelve minutes, or whether a distance was three hundred or four hundred feet. a witness may swear positively to one or both of these points. the psychologist can show the court the limitations of the witness in making such estimates. psychology can be of service in the examination of the criminal himself. through association tests and in other ways, the guilt or innocence of the prisoner can often be determined, and his intellectual status can also be determined. the prisoner may be insane, or feeble-minded, or have some other peculiar mental disorder. such matters fall within the realm of psychology. after a prisoner has been found guilty, the court should have the advice of the clinical psychologist in deciding what should be done with him. it should be added that the court and not the attorneys should make use of the psychologist. whenever a psychologist can be of service in a case in court, the judge should summon such assistance, just as he should if expert chemical, physical, physiological, or anatomical knowledge should be desired. a knowledge of human nature can be of much service to society in the prevention of crime. this will come about from a better knowledge of the psychological principles of habit-formation and moral training, through a better knowledge of how to control human nature. a large percentage of all crime, perhaps as much as forty per cent, is committed by feeble-minded people. now, if we can detect these people early, and give them the simple manual education which they are capable of receiving, we can keep them out of a life of crime. studies of criminals in reform schools show that the history of many cases is as follows: the person, being of low mentality, could not get on well at school and therefore came to dislike school, and consequently became a truant. truancy led to crime. crime sent the person to the court, and the court sent the person to the state reformatory. the great duty of the state is the prevention of crime. usually little can be done in the way of saving a mature criminal. we must save the children before they become criminals, save them by proper treatment. society owes it to every child to do the right thing for him, the right thing, whether the child is an idiot or a genius. merely from the standpoint of economy, it would be an immense saving to the state if it would prevent crime by the proper treatment of every child. =business.= the contribution of psychology in this field, so far, is in the psychology of advertising and salesmanship, both having to do chiefly with the selling of goods. students of the psychology of advertising have, by experiment, determined many principles that govern people when reading newspapers and magazines, principles having to do with size and kind of type, arrangement and form, the wording of an advertisement, etc. the object of an advertisement is to get the reader interested in the article advertised. the first thing is to get him to _read_ the advertisement. here, various principles of attention are involved. the next thing is to have the _matter_ of the advertisement of such a nature that it creates interest and remains in memory, so that when the reader buys an article of that type he buys the particular kind mentioned in the advertisement. in salesmanship, many subtle psychological principles are involved. the problem of the salesman is to get the attention of the customer, and then to make him _want_ to buy his goods. to do this with the greatest success demands a profound knowledge of human nature. other things being equal, that man can most influence people who has the widest knowledge of the nature of people, and of the factors that affect this nature. the successful salesman must understand human feelings and emotions, especially sympathy; also the laws of attention and memory, and the power of suggestion. a mastery of the important principles requires years of study, and a successful application of them requires just as many years of practice. the last paragraph leads us to a consideration of the general problem of influencing men. in all occupations and professions, one needs to know how to influence other men. we have already discussed the matter of influencing people to buy goods. people who employ labor need to know how to get laborers to do more and better work, how to make them loyal and happy. the minister needs to know how to induce the members of his congregation to do right. the statesman needs to know how to win his hearers and convince them of the justice and wisdom of his cause. whatever our calling, there is scarcely a day when we could not do better if we knew more fully how to influence people. =industry.= the service of psychology here is four-fold: ( ) finding what men are fitted for. ( ) finding what kinds of abilities are demanded by the various trades and occupations. ( ) helping the worker to understand the psychological aspects of his work. ( ) getting the best work out of the laborer. _finding what men are fitted for._ in the preceding chapter, we discussed the individual variations of men. some people are better fitted physically and mentally for certain types of work than they are for other types of work. the determination of what an individual is fitted for and what he is not fitted for is the business of psychology. in some cases, the verdict of psychology can be very specific; in others, it can be only general. much misery and unhappiness come to people from trying to do what they are not fitted by nature to do. there are many professions and occupations which people should not enter unless they possess high general ability. now, psychology is able to measure general ability. there are many other occupations and professions which people should not enter unless they possess some special ability. music, art, and mechanics may be mentioned as examples of occupations and professions demanding specific kinds of ability. in industrial work, many aspects demand very special abilities, as quick reaction, quick perception, fine discrimination, calmness and self-control, ingenuity, quick adaptation to new situations. psychology can aid in picking out the people who possess the required abilities. _the different abilities demanded._ it is the business of psychology to make a careful analysis of the specific abilities required in all the various works of life. there are hundreds of occupations and often much differentiation of work within an occupation. it is for the psychologist of the future to make this analysis and to classify the occupations with reference to the kinds of abilities demanded. of course, many of them will be found to require the same kind of ability, but just as surely, many will be found to require very special abilities. it is a great social waste to have people trying to fill such positions unless they possess the specific abilities required. it should be the work of the high school and college to explain the possibilities, and the demands in the way of ability, of the various occupations of the locality. by possibilities and demands are meant the kinds of abilities required and the rewards that can be expected, the kind of life which the different fields offer. it is the further duty of the high school and college to find out, as far as possible, the specific abilities of the students. with this knowledge before them, the students should choose their careers, and then make specific preparation for them. the schools ought to work in close coöperation with the industries, the student working for a part of the day in school and a part in the industries. this would help much in leading the student to understand the industries and in ascertaining his own abilities and interests. _the psychological aspects of one's work._ all occupations have a psychological aspect. they involve some trick of attention, of association, of memory. certain things must be looked for, certain habits must be formed, certain movements must be automatized. workmen should be helped to master these psychological problems, to find the most convenient ways of doing their work. workmen often do their work in the most uneconomical ways, having learned their methods through imitation, and never inquiring whether there is a more economical way. _securing efficiency._ securing efficiency is a matter of influencing men, a matter which we have already discussed. securing efficiency is quite a different matter from that treated in the preceding paragraph. a workman may have a complete knowledge of his work and be skilled in its performance, and still be a poor workman, because he does not have the right attitude toward his employer or toward his work. the employer must therefore meet the problem of making his men like their work and be loyal to their employer. the laborer must be happy and contented if he is to do good work. moreover, there is _no use in working_, or in living either, if one cannot be happy and contented. we have briefly indicated the possibilities of psychology in the various occupations and professions. there is a further application that has no reference to the practical needs of life, but to enjoyment. a psychological knowledge of human nature adds a new interest to all our social experience. the ability to understand the actions and feelings of men puts new meaning into the world. the ability to understand oneself, to analyze one's actions, motives, feelings, and thoughts, makes life more worth living. a knowledge of the sensations and sense organs adds much pleasure to life in addition to its having great practical value. briefly, a psychological knowledge of human nature adds much to the richness of life. it gives one the analytical attitude. experiences that to others are wholes, to the psychologist fall apart into their elements. such knowledge leads us to analyze and see clearly what otherwise we do not understand and see only darkly or not at all. literature and art, and all other creations and products of man take on a wholly new interest to the psychologist. summary. psychology is of service to education in ascertaining the nature of the child and the laws of learning; to law, in determining the reliability of evidence and in the prevention of crime; to medicine, in the work of diagnosis and treatment; to business, in advertising and salesmanship; to the industries, in finding the man for the place and the place for the man; to everybody, in giving a keener insight into, and understanding of, human nature. class exercises . visit a court room when a trial is in progress. note wherein psychology could be of service to the jury, to the judge, and to the attorneys. . to test the reliability of evidence, proceed as follows: take a large picture, preferably one in color and having many details; hold it before the class in a good light where all can see it. let them look at it for ten or fifteen seconds, the time depending on the complexity of the picture. the students should then write down what they saw in the picture, underscoring all the points to which they would be willing to make oath. then the students should answer a list of questions prepared by the teacher, on various points in the picture. some of these questions should be suggestive, such as, "what color is the dog?" supposing no dog to be in the picture. the papers giving the first written description should be graded on the number of items reported and on their accuracy. the answers to the questions should be graded on their accuracy. how do girls compare with boys in the various aspects of the report? what is the accuracy of the underlined points? . let the teacher, with the help of two or three students, perform before the class some act or series of acts, with some conversation, and then have the students who have witnessed the performance write an account of it, as in no.  . . divide the class into two groups. select one person from each to look at a picture as in no.  . these two people are then to write a complete account of the picture. this account is then read to another person in the same group, who then writes from memory his account and reads to another. this is to be continued till all have heard an account and written their own. you will then have two series of accounts of the same picture proceeding from two sources. it will be well for the two who look at the picture to be of very different types, let us say, one imaginative, the other matter-of-fact. do all the papers of one series have some characteristics that enable you to determine from which group they come? what conclusions and inferences do you draw from the experiment? . does the feeling of certainty make a thing true? see how many cases you can find in a week, of persons feeling sure a statement is true, when it is really false. . in the following way, try to find out something which a person is trying to conceal. prepare a list of words, inserting now and then words which have some reference to the vital point. read the words one by one to the person and have him speak the first word suggested by those read. note the time taken for the responses. a longer reaction time usually follows the incriminating words, and the subject is thrown into a visible confusion. . talk to successful physicians and find out what use they make of suggestion and other psychological principles. . spend several hours visiting different grades below the high school. in how many ways could the teachers improve their work by following psychological principles? . could the qualities of a good teacher--native and acquired--be measured by tests and experiments? . visit factories where men do skillful work and try to learn by observation what types of mind and body are required by the different kinds of work. . does the occupation which you have chosen for life demand any specific abilities? if so, do you possess them in a high degree? . could parents better train their children if they made use of psychological principles? . in how many ways will the facts learned in this course be of economic use to you in your life? in what ways will they make life more pleasurable? . make a complete outline of this chapter. references for class reading mÜnsterberg: _psychology, general and applied_, chapter xxvii-xxxiii. mÜnsterberg: _the psychology of industrial efficiency_. alphabetical list of references for class reading colvin, s. s., and bagley, w. c.: _human behavior_. the macmillan company, . davenport, c. b.: _heredity in relation to eugenics_. henry holt & company, . dewey, j.: _how we think_. d. c. heath & company, . kellicott, w. e.: _the social direction of human evolution_. d. appleton & company, . kirkpatrick, e. a.: _the fundamentals of child study_. the macmillan company, . mÜnsterberg, h.: _psychology, general and applied_. d. appleton & company, . mÜnsterberg, h.: _the psychology of industrial efficiency_. houghton mifflin company, . pillsbury, w. b.: _essentials of psychology_. the macmillan company, . pyle, w. h.: _outlines of educational psychology_. warwick and york, . pyle, w. h.: _the examination of school children_. the macmillan company, . rowe, s. h.: _habit-formation and the science of teaching_. longmans, green, & company, . titchener, e. b.: _a beginner's psychology_. the macmillan company, . glossary most of the terms given below are explained in the text, but it is hoped that this alphabetical list with brief definitions will prove helpful. it is a difficult task to make the definitions scientific and at the same time brief, simple, and clear. _abnormal._ having mental or physical characteristics widely different from those commonly found in ordinary people. _acquired nature._ those aspects of habit, skill, knowledge, ideas, and ideals that come from experience and are due to experience. _action._ muscular contractions usually producing motion of the body or of some part of the body. _adaptation._ adjustment to one's surroundings. _adaptive._ readily changing one's responses and acquiring such new responses as enable one to meet successfully new situations; also having tendencies or characteristics which enable one to be readily adjustable. _after-images._ images that follow immediately after stimulation of a sense organ, and resulting from this stimulation. _association._ binding together ideas through experiencing them together. _attention._ relative clearness of perceptions and ideas. _attitude._ the tendency toward a particular type of response in action or a particular idea or association in thought. _bond._ the connection established in the nervous system which makes a certain response follow a certain stimulus or a certain idea follow another idea or perception. _capacity._ the possibility of learning, achieving, etc. _color blindness._ inability to experience certain colors, usually red and green. _complementary color._ complementary colors are those which, mixed in the right proportion, produce gray. _congenital._ inborn. _connection._ the nerve-path through which a stimulus produces a response or through which one idea produces or evokes another. _conscious._ having consciousness, or accompanying consciousness or producing consciousness. _consciousness._ the mental states--perceptions, ideas, feelings--which one has at any moment. _low level of consciousness._ conscious processes not so clear as others existing at the same time. _high level of consciousness._ conscious processes that are clear as compared to others existing at the same time. _contrast._ the enhancing or strengthening of a sensation by another of opposite quality. _correlation._ the relation that exists between two functions, characteristics, or attributes that enables us, finding one, to predict the presence of the other. _development._ the appearance, or growth, or strengthening of a characteristic. _emotion._ the pleasure-pain aspect of experience plus sensations from characteristic bodily reactions. _environment._ the objects and forces about us which affect us through our senses. _environmental instincts._ instincts which have originated, at least in part, from the periodic changes in man's environment. _eugenics._ the science of race improvement through selective breeding or proper marriages or in some cases through the prevention of marriage. _experience._ what we learn of the world through sensation and perception. _fatigue._ inability to work produced by work and which only rest will cure. _feeble-minded._ having important mental traits only poorly developed or not at all. _feeling._ the pleasure-pain aspect of experience or of ideational states. _function._ the use of a thing or process, also any mental process or combination of processes considered as a unit. _genetic._ having reference to origin and development. _habits._ definite responses to definite stimuli depending upon bonds established by use after birth. _heredity._ transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring. _human nature._ the characteristics and tendencies which we have as human beings, with particular reference to mind and action. _ideals._ definite tendencies to act in definite ways. ideas of definite types of action with tendency toward the actions; ideas of definite conditions, forms, and states together with a desire to experience or possess them. _ideas._ revived perceptions. _images._ revived sensations, simpler than ideas. _imitation._ acting as we see others act. _impulse._ tendency to action. _individualistic instincts._ those instincts which more immediately serve individual survival. _individual differences._ the mental and physical differences between people. _inherited nature._ those aspects of one's nature due directly to heredity. _instincts._ definite responses produced by definite stimuli through hereditary connections in the nervous system. _intellectual habits._ definite fixed connections between ideas; definite ways of meeting typical thought situations. _intensity._ the amount or strength of a sensation or image, how far it is from nothing. _interest._ the aspect given to experience or thinking by attention and pleasure. _learning._ establishing new bonds or connections in the nervous system; acquiring habits; gaining knowledge. _memory._ the retention of experience; retained and reproduced experience. _mental set._ mental attitude or disposition. _mind._ the sum total of one's conscious states from birth to death. _nerve-path._ the route traversed by a nerve-stimulus or excitation. _original nature._ all those aspects of mind and body directly inherited. _perceive._ to be aware of a thing through sensation. _perception._ awareness of a thing through sensation or a fusion of sensations. _plasticity._ modifiability, making easy the formation of new bonds or nerve-connections. _presupposition._ a theory or hypothesis on which an argument or a system of arguments or principles is based. _primary._ first, original, elementary, perceptive experience as distinguished from ideational experience. _reaction._ the action immediately following a stimulus and produced by it. _reasoning._ thinking to a purpose; trying to meet a new situation. _reflex._ a very simple act brought about by a stimulus through an hereditary nerve-path. _response._ the act following a stimulus and produced by it. _retention._ memory; modification of the nervous system making possible the revival of experience. _science._ knowledge classified and systematized. _sensation._ primary experience; consciousness directly due to the stimulation of a sense organ. _sense._ to sense is to have sensation, to perceive. a sense is a sense organ or the ability to have sensation through a sense organ. _sense organ._ a modified nerve-end with accompanying apparatus or mechanism making possible a certain form of stimulation. _sensitive._ capable of giving rise to sensation, or transmitting a nerve-current. _sensitivity._ property of, or capacity for being sensitive. _sensory._ relating to a sense organ or to sensation. _situation._ the total environmental influences of any one moment. _socialistic instincts._ the instincts related more directly to the survival of a social group. _stimulation._ the setting up of a nerve process in a sense organ or in a nerve tract. _stimulus._ that which produces stimulation. _subnormal._ having characteristics considerably below the normal. _tendency._ probability of a nerve-current taking a certain direction due to nerve-organization. _thinking._ the passing of images and ideas. _thought._ thinking; an idea or group of ideas. _training._ establishing nerve connection or bonds. _vividness._ clearness of sensations, perceptions, images, and ideas. index abilities, specialized, ability, unusual, adaptation of vision, after-images, visual, ancestors,  f. anger, appearance of instincts, applied psychology, - ,  ff. association of ideas, astigmatism, attention,  ff.; and will, . attitude, behavior, bodily conditions, brain, brightness, sensation of, business, causality, , centrally initiated action, child, nature of, cold, sense of, collecting instinct, college, function of, color blindness, color mixture, color, sensation of, completion test, concentrated practice, consciousness, conservatism, costly temper test, cramming, criminal, the,  f. curriculum, darwin, defects of sense organs, development, individual,  ff.; racial, - ; significance of and causality, - direct method, dizziness, organs that give us sense of, dramatization, drill in school subjects, - dynamic, world as, economical practice,  ff. education, ; aim of, ; preparatory, ; science of,  ff. educational inferences, educational psychology,  ff. efficiency, , emotions,  ff. environment, environmental instincts, envy, evolution,  ff. exceptions, , excursions, experience, ; organization of, experiment,  ff. eye, the, eye defects,  ff. eyestrain, farsightedness, fatigue, fear, feeble-mindedness, feeling,  ff. fighting instincts, formal drill, iii, free association frequency surface, free association test, frequency of experience, gang instinct, genetic view of childhood, genius, habit,  ff.; and nerve path, ; how formed,  ff.; importance in life, ; intellectual, ; moral, ; of thought, ; results of, ; specific, hearing, ; defects of, heredity,  ff. heredity _vs._ environment, heritage, social, high school and fourth grade abilities compared, high school, function of, home and moral training, idea, ideas, imitation,  ff. imitation in ideals, incidental drill, individual development,  ff. individual differences,  ff. individualistic instincts, industry, influencing men, inheritance, inherited tendencies,  ff. initiative, instincts,  ff.; classification of, ; significance of, interest, intervals between practice, jealousy, joints, sense organs in, jost's law, language and thinking,  ff. language study, latin, law, service of psychology to, learning and remembering, learning by wholes, life occupations, logical memory,  ff. meaning,  ff. medicine, memories, kinds of, memory,  ff.; and age and sex, ; and habit, ; and school standing, ; and thinking, ; factors of,  ff.; good, dangers resulting from, ; kinds of, mendelian principle, mental development, mental differences, ; detection of, ; importance of,  ff. mental functions developed, mental set, mental tests,  ff. mind and body,  ff. mood, moral training,  ff. motive, muscular speed, museum, school,  ff. musical ability, nearsightedness, needs of child, nerve tendency, norms in mental tests,  ff. occupations, opposites test,  ff. organization of experience,  ff. pain sense, parents, and habit-formation of children,  ff., perception, physiological basis of memory, piano playing, , pitch, plasticity, play, pleasure and habit, pleasure, higher forms of, practice, , primary experience, psychology and culture, psychology defined, ; method of, ; problems of, race, development of,  ff.; improvement of, ranking students, reasoning, ; training in, recalling forgotten names, recency of experience, regeneration, repetition, respect for authority, resemblance, retina, the,  f. revived experience, rigidity, rote memory, rules for habit-formation, salesmanship, school, and habit, ; and moral training,  f. schoolhouse, community center,  f. science, scientific law, scientist,  ff. securing efficiency, selecting habits, sense organs, affects of stimulating, , ; knowledge through, sleight's experiment, smell, social life of children, social tendencies, stimulation, stimulus and response, study, learning how to, subnormal children, substitution test, taste, teacher, function of in memory work, ; function of in habit-formation, teaching too abstract, temperament, tendons, sense organs in, thinking,  ff., touch, transfer of training,  ff., truancies, typewriting, ,  ff. vision, ; importance of, visual contrast, vividness and intensity of experience, wandering, warmth, sense of, weight, diagram showing frequency surface of, word-building test, work and psychology, ontario teachers' manuals history authorized by the minister of education toronto the copp, clark company, limited copyright, canada, , by the minister of education for ontario contents page public and separate school course of study chapter i the aims and stages of study chapter ii general methods in the teaching of history chapter iii correlation of subjects chapter iv special topics current events local material civics the teacher of history chapter v illustrative lessons forms i and ii form ii form iii forms iii and iv form iv for teachers' reference devices bibliography appendix manual of suggestions for teachers of history public and separate school course of study details the course in literature and composition includes the telling by the teacher of suitable stories from the bible, stories of primitive peoples, of child life in other lands, of famous persons and peoples; and the oral reproduction of these stories by the pupils. in this way history, literature, and composition are combined. for method in telling stories, consult _how to tell stories to children_, by sara cone bryant, houghton, mifflin company, boston, $ . . form i bible stories: moses in the bulrushes, his childhood, the burning bush, the crossing of the red sea, the tables of stone; joseph's boyhood dreams, joseph sold into egypt, the famine, the visits of his brethren; david and goliath; samson. stories of child life: the eskimo girl, the andean girl, the arabian girl, the little syrian girl, the swiss girl, the chinese girl, the african girl, the german girl, the canadian girl; the little red child, the little white child, the little black child, the little yellow child, the little brown child. consult _the seven little sisters_, by jane andrews, ginn & co., boston, c.; _the little cousin series_, by mary hazelton wade, the page co., boston, c. each; _five little strangers_, julia augusta schwarz, american book co., new york; _each and all_, jane andrews (sequel to _the seven little sisters_), cents. special days: christmas: the birth of christ, the first christmas tree (see appendix); arbor day; constructive work suggested by st. valentine's day and thanksgiving day; stories of these days. note: advantage should be taken of every opportunity to teach obedience to authority and respect for the property and rights of others. form ii bible stories: abraham and lot, joshua, david and jonathan, david and saul, ruth and naomi, daniel, miriam and moses, abraham and isaac, boyhood of christ, the shipwreck of st. paul. stories of child life: the aryan boy, the persian boy, the greek boy, the roman boy, the saxon boy, the page boy, the english boy, the puritan boy, the canadian boy of to-day, child life in canada (_a_) in the early days, (_b_) to-day on the farm and in the city or town; occupations, games, and plays, etc. consult _ten little boys who lived on the road from long ago till now_, by jane andrews, ginn & co., c. stories of famous people: boadicea, alfred, harold, first prince of wales, sir francis drake, sir walter raleigh, columbus, cabot, cartier, champlain, madeleine de verchères, pontiac, brock, laura secord, florence nightingale. consult _the story of the british people_, thomas nelson & sons, toronto, c. (for florence nightingale, see appendix.) pioneer life: in ancient britain: see _second reader_, p. ; _ontario public school history of england_, p. . in roman britain: see _the story of the british people_, pp. - . old english life: see _third reader_, p. ; _ontario high school history of england_, pp. - . at the close of the french period in canada: see _fourth reader_, p. . in upper canada in the "thirties": see _fourth reader_, p. . our forefathers: where they lived before coming here, how they got here, hardships in travel, condition of the country at that time, how they cleared the land, their homes, their difficulties, danger from wild animals, the natives of the country, modes of travel, implements and tools, etc. consult _pen pictures of early pioneer life in upper canada_, briggs, $ . ; _ontario high school history of canada_. inventors: watt, stephenson, fulton, bell, edison, marconi. civics: elementary lessons in local government: (_a_) in cities, towns, and incorporated villages--the postmaster, (see illustrative lesson, p. ), the postman and policeman; city or town hall, post-office, mail boxes, school-houses. (_b_) for rural districts--postmaster, trustees, roads and bridges, rural mail delivery. special days: empire day, victoria day, dominion day; local occasions such as fair day, election day; review of those days taken in form i. forms iii and iv preliminary note below are the topics and sub-topics of the course in history for forms iii and iv. in dealing with the subject in both forms, the teacher should keep constantly in mind the chief aims suited to this stage of the pupil's development. (see pp. , .) the most vital of these is "to create and foster a liking for historical study." the teacher should make use of simple map drawing to illustrate the subject. this is especially necessary in dealing with the history of canada. there should be much illustration by means of maps and pictures. see educational pamphlet no. , _visual aids in the teaching of history_. the chapter numbers in the course for form iii are those of the chapters in _the story of the british people_ prescribed for the form. these chapters should be carefully read and, in form iv, the authorized text-books should be followed for the main account. _having regard to the time available for the course, only the most important details should be taken up._ form iii junior grade canadian history columbus--the discovery of america (chap. xx) john cabot and the new world (chap. xxi) jacques cartier (chap. xxiii) raleigh and gilbert (chap. xxvi) the beginnings of acadia (chap. xxvii) champlain, the father of new france (chap. xxviii) the pilgrim fathers (chap. xxix) the jesuits in canada (chap. xxxi) the settlement of french canada (chap. xxxi) la salle (chap. xxxiv) henry hudson--new york and hudson bay (chap. xxxv) frontenac (chaps. xxxiv, xxxvii) the conquest of canada--wolfe and montcalm, pontiac (chap. xli) the coming of the loyalists (chap. xlii) how canada fought for the empire (chap. xliv) william lyon mackenzie (chap. xlvi) the great north-west--selkirk, mackenzie, strathcona, riel (chap. xlvii) canada and the empire--royal visitors (chap. l) form iii senior grade british history the first britons (chap. i) the coming of the romans (chap. ii) a day in roman britain (chap. iii) the coming of the english (chap. iv) the coming of christianity (chap. v) the vikings (chap. vi) alfred the great (chap. vii) rivals for a throne (chap. viii) the coming of the normans (chap. ix) a norman castle (chap. x) a glance at scotland (chap. xi) henry the second and ireland (chap. xii) richard the lion heart (chap. xiii) king john and the great charter (chap. xiv) the first prince of wales (chap. xv) wallace and bruce (chaps. xvi, xvii) the black prince (chap. xviii) the father of the british navy (chap. xxii) the new worship (chap. xxiv) francis drake, sea-dog (chap. xxv) king charles the first (chap. xxx) the rule of cromwell (chap. xxxii) the king enjoys his own again (chap. xxxiii) the revolution and after (chap. xxxvi) the greatest soldier of his time (chap. xxxviii) bonnie prince charlie (chap. xxxix) robert clive, the daring in war (chap. xl) the terror of europe (chap. xliii) waterloo (chap. xlv) victoria the good (chaps. xlvi, xlviii, xlix) civics review of the work in form ii; election of town or township council; taxes--the money people pay to keep up schools and roads, etc.; how local taxes are levied for the support of the school; election of members of county council, of members of provincial legislature; duties of citizenship. form iv junior grade canadian history before the british conquest--an introductory account: the french settlements: extent, life of the seignior, habitant, and coureur de bois; system of trade; government at quebec--governor, bishop, intendant; territorial claims (chaps. vii, viii, ix, xi) the english settlements--hudson's bay company, english colonies in new york, new england, acadia, and newfoundland; population, life, trade, government, territorial claims (chaps. viii, x, xi) british conquest of new france--fall of quebec (chap. xi) conspiracy of pontiac (chap. xii) quebec act (chap. xii) canada and the american revolution; u.e. loyalists (chaps. xiii, xv) constitutional act--representative government (chap. xiv) social conditions, - (chap. xv) hudson's bay company (chaps. viii, xvi, xxi) north-west company (chap. xvi) exploration in north-west--hearne, mackenzie, fraser, thompson (chap. xvi) war of - (chap. xvii) family compact (chap. xvii) clergy reserves (chap. xvii) william lyon mackenzie (chap. xvii) lord durham, act of union, --responsible government (chap. xviii) social progress, - (chap. xix) settlement of the north-west--selkirk (chaps. xvi, xx) confederation of the provinces, (chap. xxii) intercolonial railway (chap. xxiv) expansion of the dominion by addition of new provinces (chap. xxii) social progress, - (chap. xxiii) canadian pacific railway (chap. xxiv) riel rebellion (chap. xxiv) disputes between canada and the united states since settled by treaty or arbitration. the hundred years of peace canada, at the opening of the twentieth century; transportation, industry, means of defence, education (chap. xxv) ontario since confederation: john sandfield macdonald, sir oliver mowat, arthur sturgis hardy, sir george w. ross, sir james p. whitney (chap. xxvi) an account of how canada is governed, simple and concrete and as far as possible related to the experience of the pupils; municipal government, provincial government, federal government (chap. xxvii) form iv senior grade british history a _a course of about two months_ the early inhabitants--the britons the coming of the romans the coming of the saxons the coming of christianity alfred the great the coming of the normans--the feudal system richard i and the crusaders john and magna charta the scottish war of independence the hundred years' war--crecy, agincourt, joan of arc. the wars of the roses (no lists of battles or details of fighting) caxton and printing separation between the english church and rome b _a course of about eight months_ brief account of the british isles, territorial, political, and religious, as an introduction to the reign of elizabeth. elizabeth and mary queen of scots; the spanish armada; drake, hawkins, gilbert, raleigh, shakespeare. the stuarts: "divine right of kings" supported by majority of gentry and landowners (cavaliers), opposed by the commercial and trading classes and yeomen (roundheads). the kings strove for absolute power, the parliament for constitutional government. james i: union of the english and scottish crowns. charles i: struggle between king and parliament; petition of right, ship money, rebellion, execution of charles. commonwealth: nominally a republic, really a dictatorship under cromwell. he gave britain a strong government at home, and made her respected abroad, and laid the foundations of britain's foreign trade and colonial empire. charles ii: the restoration: reaction in state, church, and society; king striving for absolute power; nonconformists persecuted; society profligate in its revolt against the strictness of puritanism; habeas corpus act; test act; plague and great fire. james ii: revolution of , the death-knell of "divine right"; parliament supreme; declaration of rights. william and mary: party government--whigs and tories; king to act by advice of his ministers; each parliament limited to three years; bill of rights; act of settlement. anne: marlborough; union between england and scotland, ; the jacobites, and . george ii: walpole, the great peace minister--home and colonial trade fostered and material wealth of the nation greatly increased; pitt, the great war minister; territorial expansion in canada and india--wolfe, clive; the methodist movement, wesley. george iii: the american revolution, - : loss of the american colonies; pitt; washington; acquisition of australia by great britain, ; legislative union of ireland with great britain, ; napoleonic wars; nelson, wellington, aboukir, trafalgar, and waterloo; industrial revolution--the change from an agricultural to an industrial country. william iv: reform act of , a great forward movement in democratic government; abolition of slavery, ; railways and steamships. victoria: first british settlement in new zealand, ; repeal of the corn laws, --free trade, the commercial policy of england; elementary education act, , education compulsory; parliamentary franchise extended--vote by ballot; crimean war; indian mutiny; egypt and the suez canal; boer war--orange free state and south african republic annexed; social progress. edward vii: irish land act of ; pensions for aged labourers; king edward, "the peace-maker." civics taxation--direct and indirect; how the revenue of the dominion, provinces, and municipalities, respectively, is collected. federal government--governor-general, senate, house of commons, premier, cabinet. imperial government--king, house of lords, house of commons, premier, cabinet. history chapter i the aims and stages of study aims history may be made, in several ways, an important factor in forming intelligent, patriotic citizens: (_a_) it must be remembered that society, with all its institutions, is a growth, not a sudden creation. it follows that, if we wish to understand the present and to use that knowledge as a guide to future action, we must know the story of how our present institutions and conditions have come to be what they are; we must know the ideals of our forefathers, the means they took to realize them, and to what extent they succeeded. it is only in this way that we become capable of passing judgment, as citizens, on what is proposed by political and social reformers, and thus justify and guarantee our existence as a democracy. (_b_) patriotism, which depends largely on the associations formed in childhood, is intensified by learning how our forefathers fought and laboured and suffered to obtain all that we now value most in our homes and social life. the courage with which the early settlers of upper canada faced their tremendous labours and hardships should make us appreciate our inheritance in the ontario of to-day, and determine, as they did, to leave our country better than we found it. to-morrow yet would reap to-day, as we bear blossom of the dead. (_c_) "history teaches that right and wrong are real distinctions." the study of history, especially in the sphere of biography, has a moral value, and much may be done, even in the primary classes, to inspire children to admire the heroic and the self-sacrificing, and to despise the treacherous and the self-seeking. the constant struggle to right what is wrong in the world may be emphasized in the senior classes to show that nothing is ever settled until it is settled right. (_d_) history affords specially good exercise for the judgment we use in everyday life in weighing evidence and balancing probabilities. such a question as "did champlain do right in taking the side of the hurons against the iroquois, or even in taking sides at all?" may be suggested to the older pupils for consideration. (_e_) history, when taught by a broad-minded, well-informed teacher, may do much to correct the prejudices--social, political, religious--of individuals and communities. (_f_) the imagination is exercised in the effort to recall or reconstruct the scenes of the past and in discovering relations of cause and effect. (_g_) the memory is aided and stimulated by the increase in the number of the centres of interest round which facts, both new and old, may be grouped. (_h_) a knowledge of the facts and inferences of history is invaluable for general reading and culture. to sum up: it is important that the good citizen should know his physical environment; it is just as important for him "to know his social and political environment, to have some appreciation of the nature of the state and society, some sense of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, some capacity in dealing with political and governmental questions, something of the broad and tolerant spirit which is bred by the study of past times and conditions." scope the ideal course in history would include ( ) a general view of the history of the world, giving the pupil knowledge enough to provide the proper setting for the history of his own country; ( ) a more detailed knowledge of the whole history of his own country; ( ) and a special knowledge of certain outstanding periods or tendencies in that history. in our schools, we should give most attention to the study of canadian and british history as a whole, to enough of the history of france and other countries to make clear certain parts of our own history, and to certain important periods, such as the settlement of upper canada by the united empire loyalists, etc. (see detailed course of study, p. .) we may also study our history along special lines of development--political, military, social, educational, religious, industrial, and commercial--but these phases are subjects of study rather for secondary schools and colleges. stages of study there are three stages in the study of history which, though they overlap each other, yet indicate different methods of treatment for pupils at different ages. they are the story stage, the information stage, and the reflective stage. these stages are not exclusive, nor do they coincide with the first three forms in the schools. the story stage this stage is suitable for children in the primary grades and is chiefly preparatory to the real study of history in the higher grades. the need for this stage lies in the fact that the child's "ideas are of the pictorial rather than of the abstract order"; yet his spontaneous interest in these things must be made to serve "as a stepping-stone to the acquired interests of civilized life." the definite objects at this stage are: (_a_) to create and foster a liking for historical study. it is impossible, in the public school life of a child, which is usually ended at the age of twelve to fourteen years, to accomplish all that has been indicated above concerning the aims of history teaching. the most that can be done is to lay the foundation and give the pupil a desire to continue his reading after his school days are over. serious blame rests on the teacher whose methods of teaching history, instead of attracting the child to the subject, give him a distaste for it. if history is made real and living to children, it is usually not difficult to have them like it. (for suggestions, see p. .) (_b_) to acquaint the pupils with some of the important historical persons. we wish to take advantage of the fact that "the primitive form of attention which is captured at once by objects that strike the senses is giving place in some degree to appreciative attention, which is yielded to things that connect themselves with what we already know, and which implies ability to adopt the reflective attitude towards a proposed problem."[a] now children are more interested in people than in institutions or events; and, if we can give them a knowledge of some of the striking incidents in the lives of important characters in history, we may expect them to be more interested in the study of history at a later period, because they will frequently meet with these familiar names. the emphasis at this stage is therefore on biography. [footnote a: raymont: _principles of education_] (_c_) to help the development of the "historical sense." the "historical sense" includes the notion of time, the notion of a social unit and, according to some, the notion of cause and effect. the notion of time implies the power "to represent the past as if it were present"--that is, the power to enter into the thoughts and feelings of people of the past as if we were living amongst them. this notion of time comes at different ages; to some early, to others very late. it came to professor shaler at the age of about eight or nine years, as the direct result of vivid story-telling: of all the folk who were about me, the survivors of the indian wars were the most interesting. there were several of these old clapper-clawed fellows still living, with their more or less apocryphal tales of adventures they had heard of or shared. there was current a tradition--i have seen it in print--that there had been a fight between the indians and whites where the government barracks stood, and that two wounded whites had been left upon the ground, where they were not found by the savages. one of these had both arms broken, the other was similarly disabled as to his legs. it was told that they managed to subsist by combining their limited resources. the man with sound legs drove game up within range of the other cripple's gun, and as the turkeys or rabbits fell, he kicked them within reach of his hands, and in like manner provided him with sticks for their fire. this legend, much elaborated in the telling, gave me, i believe at about my eighth year, my first sense of a historic past, and it led to much in the way of fanciful invention of like tales. (n.f. shaler: _autobiography_, chap. i.) the best means at the teacher's command to assist its coming is to tell good stories from history with all the skill he has; the stories need not be told in chronological order. the notion of time implies also in the older pupils the power to place events in chronological order. the notion of a social unit is also of slow growth and must spring from the child's conception of the social units he belongs to--the home, the school, the community. the notion of cause and effect does not belong so wholly to the study of history as the notions of time and of the social unit; it is surprising, however, how soon it makes its appearance in the child's conceptions of history, in his desire to know the "why" of things. (see barnes' _studies in historical method_.) the information stage there are several questions that children soon come to ask: "when?" and "where?" "what?" and "who?" this stage may be said to begin in earnest with the second form, and it continues through the whole course. one of the essential elements in history study is to have a knowledge of the important facts of history, without which there can be no inferences of value for present use. the all-important point in this teaching of facts is to keep the lessons interesting and not allow them to become mere lifeless memorizing of isolated happenings; for a fact is of value only when related to other facts. (see pp. , .) the reflective stage this stage naturally follows the information stage, as one must acquire facts before reflecting on them in order to draw inferences. but reflection of a simple kind may begin as soon as any facts are given that will show the relations of cause and effect. the question for the pupil here is "why?" just as in the preceding stage the questions were "when?" and "where?" "what?" and "who?" information and reflection may therefore be combined--with due regard to the pupil's capacity. practical difficulties we may speak of two difficulties. the first concerns the enormous amount of historical material that exists. it is increased still more by the intermingling of legend with history and by the partial narratives of prejudiced writers. the legendary part may be taken up in the story stage; and the evils of one-sided accounts are often balanced by the greater vigour and interest of the narrative, as in macaulay's writings. the difficulty connected with the great amount of material can be solved by the selection (already largely made by the text-books) of the more important parts, that is, those facts of history that have the greatest influence on after times--"the points of vital growth and large connection" without which subsequent history cannot be properly understood. the second difficulty has to do with deciding where to begin the teaching of history. there are two principles of teaching that will help to solve this difficulty: ( ) the child learns by relating everything new to his present fund of experiences; ( ) a child's notions grow more complex as his knowledge increases. to apply these, we must know the child's experiences and his present notions. we cannot assume that the present conditions of social life are known to the child through his experiences. our social life is also too complex to be understood by him yet; he can understand an _individual_ hero better than he can the complex idea of a _nation_. how many children would be able to begin a study of history by having, as one writer suggests, "a short series of lessons ... to make some simple and fundamental historical ideas intelligible--a state, a nation, a dynasty, a monarch, a parliament, legislation, the administration of justice, taxes, civil and foreign war!" these are ideas far beyond the comprehension of the beginner. we must be guided, not by "what happens to be near the child in time and place, but by what lies near his interests." as professor bourne says: "it may be that mediæval man, because his characteristics belong to a simple type, is closer to the experience of a child than many a later hero." with older children it is more likely to be true that the life of history lies "in its personal connections with what is here and now and still alive with us"; with historic places and relics, etc., which make their appeal first through the senses; with institutions, such as trial by jury; with anniversaries and celebrations of great events which may be used to arouse interest in the history which they suggest and recall. however, as mcmurry points out, we are in a peculiarly favourable position in canada, because we have in our own history, in the comparatively short time of years, the development of a free and prosperous country from a state of wildness and savagery. the early stages of our history present those elements of life that appeal strongly to children--namely, indians with all their ways of living and fighting, and the early settlers with their simpler problems and difficulties. the development of this simpler life to the more complex life of the present can be more readily understood by children as they follow up the changes that have taken place. (see mcmurry, _special method in history_, pp. - .) of course, at every step appeal must be made to the experiences of children, as the teacher knows them. in civics, however, the beginning must be made with conditions that exist to-day--schools, taxes, the policeman, the postmaster, etc. the beginning of the real teaching of history may then be made at the beginning of canadian history, as this will enable the child to go gradually from the simple, or individual, to the complex, and will also allow the teacher to make use of whatever historical remains may be within reach. chapter ii general methods in the teaching of history there are many methods used in the teaching of history. a brief description of the principal ones is given for reference merely, since their best features are incorporated in a combination of methods, which is strongly recommended to teachers, and is described fully in succeeding pages. . _methods based on the arrangement and selection of the matter_: chronological, topical the chronological method the matter is chosen according to the "time" order, beginning at the first of the history, and the events are taught in the order of occurrence without any marked emphasis on their importance, or without considering whether a knowledge of the event is useful or interesting to the class at this stage. such an arrangement of matter is more suitable when the formal study of history is begun. the topical method in studying a certain period of history the events are arranged under topics or heads; for example, the period of discovery in canadian history may be arranged thus--discoveries, explorations, early settlements, indian wars--and the study of each of these pursued to completion, contemporary events belonging to other topics being neglected for a time. events having the same underlying purpose, though occurring in different periods, may be arranged under one topic for review; for example, all the voyages of discovery to america may be grouped under the topic, "the road to cathay." (see p. .) in this way a comprehensive knowledge is gained. this method gives a full treatment of each topic and may be used to best advantage in connection with reviews in junior classes and occasionally as a text-book or library exercise in senior classes. . _methods based on the treatment of historical facts_: comparative, regressive, concentric the comparative method by this method a comparison is made between two events, two biographies, two reigns, etc., a very useful device when applied in connection with other methods. the regressive method in this method the pupil is expected to begin with the present and work backward; that is, to begin with institutions as they are to-day and to work back through the various steps in their progress to their present state. this method may be followed most profitably in advanced classes. in junior classes it is sufficient to refer to things as they exist to-day in order to arouse curiosity regarding the facts of history that are to be taught; for example, by the use of local material; by a visit to some place of historical interest to prepare for the story of what has occurred there in the past. (see p. .) the concentric method this method, which is much used, deals in ever widening circles with the same topic or event; for example, a simple story of champlain's life and voyages to canada is told to form ii; the same story is considered again in form iii, but this time the different voyages are noted, the results of each investigated, and the whole summarized and memorized; again, in form iv, but this time by the topical and comparative methods, where comparison is made of the purposes and achievements of the explorer with those of other explorers--jacques cartier, la salle, etc. in this third discussion a full knowledge of champlain's work is given. the excellence of this work lies in its review and repetition. the old or former knowledge is recalled and used in each succeeding discussion of the topic. the pupils grow gradually into fuller knowledge. . _methods based on class procedure_: oral, text-book the oral method this usually takes the form of an oral presentation of the story or description of the event by the teacher, while the pupils listen and afterwards reproduce what they have heard. the narration of the story is accompanied by pictures, sketches, maps, etc., illustrative of persons, places, and facts mentioned. it may also take the "development" form, in which a combination of narrative and questioning is employed. (see pp. , .) the lecture method of colleges and universities is an advanced oral method. in this the teacher narrates and describes events, propounds questions, and discusses and answers them himself, while the pupils listen and during the lecture, or afterwards, make notes of what has been heard. the text-book method by this method the teacher assigns a lesson in the book and, after the pupils have an opportunity to study it, he asks questions concerning the facts learned. the exclusive use of this method results ordinarily in dull, lifeless teaching, and with junior pupils will prevent their enjoying, or receiving much benefit from, the study of history. there are two reasons for the too general use of it--first, it is an easy method for the teacher, and secondly, it is easy for the pupils to memorize facts for the sole purpose of passing examinations. while this criticism is true when an exclusive use is made of the text-book, the same cannot be said when the text-book is used as an auxiliary to the teacher. following the oral presentation of the story, reference may be made to the book for another version or for a fuller account and, in form iv, topics may be assigned and the pupils directed to consult the text-book for the necessary information. (see pp. , .) the text-book should be one that does not show an abrupt change from the story told by the teacher. it should not be merely a short outline of the important facts in history, written separately and then pieced together in chronological order, but should be written in a readable form by one who is able to distinguish the important and necessary from the unimportant and burdensome. it should have short summaries at the ends of chapters or stories of events, so that a grasp of what has been read may be easily obtained. it should also have many pictures, illustrations, and maps, to take the place of the teacher's explanations in the earlier stage. (on the use of the text-book, see p. .) a combination of these methods general description.--as each of the above methods has its strong and its weak points, we should attempt to combine the strong points into one method, varied to keep pace with the mental development of the pupil, and thus secure the best results. the general outline of such a combination may be given as follows: the "oral story" is to be used in the junior classes, with "development" problems presented where helpful; in form iii the pupils should be introduced to the text-book (the history reader for form iii), besides being taught by the oral method; in form iv, the oral method is still to be the chief means used by the teacher, who will now, however, pay more attention to the arrangement of the matter (for example, in topical outlines), to accustom the pupils to grasp more thoroughly the relations of cause and effect in history. the topics of history will also be taken up more exhaustively than in the junior classes, and the pupils must have more practice in acquiring knowledge from the text-books. details of method forms i, ii in forms i and ii, the pupils are accustomed to the oral reproduction of stories told by the teacher. in these should be included a good many historical stories, such as those suggested in the course of study in history for these forms; they will serve the usual purposes of oral reproduction work for composition and literature, and will be, besides, a good foundation for the study of history in the higher forms. (for objects of the story stage, see p. .) the oral presentation of a story or description of an event requires a certain degree of skill on the part of a teacher--skill in story-telling, in grasping the important parts of the story or description, in knowing what details to omit as well as what to narrate, in explaining the story in a way that will make it real to the pupils, in preparing pictures and sketches to illustrate the different parts, and in questioning so that the minds of the pupils will be active as well as receptive. the care and time necessary to secure this skill will be well repaid by the interest aroused in history, by the appreciation of the thoughts thus presented, and by the lasting impressions conveyed. simple, clear language should be employed, not necessarily small words, but words whose meaning is made clear by the context or illustration. (for material for these forms, see bibliography, c, p. .) when the whole story is told, revision may be made by having the pupils reproduce it after suitable questioning, either immediately or at some future time. exercises in reproduction may also be given, for either seat work or class work, in constructive or art work; for example, after the story of the north american indians, the pupils may be asked to construct a wigwam, a canoe, a bow and arrow, or to make pictures of indians, of their houses, of their dress, etc. further exercise in composition may also be given by having the pupils write the story. to each pupil may be assigned a special part; for example, the story of moses may be divided thus: ( ) as a babe; ( ) his adoption by the princess; ( ) his life at the palace; ( ) his flight to midian; ( ) the burning bush, etc. the whole story is then reproduced by having these parts read aloud in a reading lesson. form iii the value of the oral work done in forms i and ii will be realized by the teacher when the real study of history is begun in forms iii and iv. the pupils have a liking for the stories of history and have a knowledge of some of the leading actors and of the chief events in history that calls for more complete satisfaction. there are several methods of using the history reader which is the basis of the work in form iii. perhaps the best method is to continue to make oral teaching the chief feature, and to add to that the use by the pupils, in various ways, of the history reader. for example, the teacher will tell the story of jacques cartier, following in the main the narrative as given in the history reader. it is well, however, not to follow it too closely in order that, when the pupils come to read the story in the book for themselves, they will find it an interesting combination of the familiar and the new. for that reason, it will be necessary for the teacher to have prepared the story from a somewhat different narrative in some other book at her command. in the telling of the story, problems may be asked, if thought advisable (see p. ); a few headings may be placed on the black-board for subsequent reproduction, oral or written, by the pupils; all difficulties of pronunciation, especially of proper names, should be attended to, orally and on the black-board; the places mentioned should be found on the map; pictures and sketches should be used; and in fact, every possible means taken to make the narrative more real to the class. (see p. .) when the oral teaching is finished, the pupils may have the books to read at their desks, and they often ask permission to take them home. they may sometimes be required to read aloud from the history reader for supplementary practice in oral reading. reproduction by the pupils, either immediately or in a subsequent lesson, should follow. teachers, however, are advised not to insist on too much written reproduction, as that might very easily arouse a dislike for both history and written composition. procedure as outlined above has had most gratifying results in the way of creating a liking for, and an intelligent interest in, the study of history. other methods have also had good results. the teacher may, instead of telling the story, read aloud from the reader to pave the way for the reading of the story by the pupils themselves. difficulties, either in language or in meaning, may be taken up as in a literature lesson. the pupils will at first find the reading somewhat difficult, but the interest generated by the teacher's reading or oral narrative will carry them through that stage till they acquire a love for reading history, and have enlarged their vocabulary till reading is no longer a burdensome task. a taste of the more serious study of history may be given by asking the pupils a few not very difficult questions that they can answer only by combining facts contained in several stories. for example, in the chapters selected for form iii, junior grade, the answer can be found to a question about the explorers of canada, the order of their visits, and a comparison of their work; to another question about the expansion of canada from the little part of quebec first visited to the whole of british north america. it is unnecessary, perhaps, to add that the emphasis in form iii history should be still very largely on biography, so as to influence the forming of moral ideals by concrete examples. form iv although the pupils have now had some experience in the use of the history reader, yet that is no reason why oral teaching should be discarded in form iv history, any more than in arithmetic or geography. it is scarcely a high estimate to have of history, to think that pupils of this age can grasp even the simpler lines of development in history without guidance from the teacher. hence it is necessary for the attainment of good results, that many of the lessons should be taught orally before the pupils are asked to study their books. the aim of the teaching should be not merely the acquisition of facts, but the welding of them together in a sequence of cause and effect, and the pupils at this stage can scarcely be expected to do that for themselves. in preparing for a lesson in form iv history, the teacher should analyse the incidents of the period to be studied, should see how certain causes have led to certain results, and should be sure enough of the facts to have little recourse to the text-book while teaching. it does not look like fair play to expect a class to answer questions that the teacher cannot answer without consulting the text. on the other hand, it is refreshing to see the interest aroused in a class by a teacher who thinks enough of the subject to be able to teach it without constant reference to the text-book. therefore, let the oral method be here again the chief dependence of the teacher. in such a lesson, for example, as that on the intercolonial railway (see p. ) no book is needed--only the map and the black-board. training in use of text-book however, as the pupils must learn, for their own profit in after years, how to read history without a guiding hand, they need training in the use of the text-book. the chief line on which such training may proceed is to have the pupils search out the answers to definite questions. any one who has searched for material on a certain topic will appreciate the good results that have come in the way of added knowledge and increased interest. the topics at first should be quite simple, gradually increasing in breadth. a few suggestions for such work are given below; they may be called examination questions to be answered with the help of the text-book: . name, and tell something about, four of the explorers of canada before . . name several other explorers of the new world. . which explorer did the most for canada, champlain or la salle? . in what wars did the french fight against the iroquois? with what result? . what explorers of north america were trying to find a way to china and india? (this investigation by the class may precede the lesson on the "road to cathay." see p. .) . on what did english kings base their claim to be the overlords of scotland? trace the dispute down to the union of the crowns in . . find out how the slave trade was treated by the english. . make a list of the early newspapers in canada. did they have much influence on public opinion? . compare the struggles for the control of taxation in canada and in the thirteen colonies of america. explain why these were settled differently in the two cases. with questions such as these for investigation, no pupil will be likely to secure the full facts; each may state in the next lesson what he has found, and the work of each will be supplemented by that of the others. with succeeding investigations it may be expected that the pupils will be more eager to get at all the facts in the text-book. at any rate they are learning how to gather material from books--a very valuable training, no matter how simple the topic is. when, in the ordinary course of work, lessons from the text-book are assigned, the teacher should indicate the important points, should suggest certain matters for discussion, and should note certain questions to be answered, indicating precisely where the information may be obtained. in the recitation period following, the topic should be fully discussed, the pupils giving the information they have secured from the text-book, and the teacher supplementing this from his knowledge gained through wider reading. during the discussion an outline should be made on the board, largely by the suggestions of the pupils, and kept in their note-books for reference and review. (see p. , lesson on the feudal system.) drill and review as has been already stated (p. ), the story stage is useful chiefly for the purpose of arousing interest and developing the historical sense; no drill or review is necessary other than the oral, and, in form ii, sometimes the written, reproduction of the stories. the oral reproduction can be obtained in form i by using the stories as topics in language lessons. in the information stage, where we are concerned more with the acquiring of facts, and in the reflective stage, where we wish to relate facts to each other according to cause and effect, drills and reviews are necessary. during the lesson, a summary is placed on the black-board by the teacher or pupil, as indicated above. it is used as a guide in oral reproduction and may also be copied in special note-books and used for reference when preparing for review lessons. the teacher may look over these note-books occasionally. there is great difference of opinion on the value of note-taking by pupils, but it may be said of such notes as those mentioned above that they have the advantage of being largely the pupil's own work, especially when the pupils are asked to suggest the headings; they are a record of what has been decided in the class to be important points; they are arranged in the order in which the subject has been treated in the lesson, and are in every way superior to the small note-books in history that are sometimes used as aids or helps. for the proper teaching of history, the latter are hindrances rather than helps, because they rob the pupil of the profit gained by doing the work for himself. notes obtained from books or dictated by the teacher are harmful to the right spirit of study, and create a distaste for the subject. special review lessons should be taken when a series of lessons on one topic, or on a series of connected topics, has been finished. at the close of each lesson, the facts learned are fixed more firmly in the mind by the usual drill; but there must be further organization of the several lessons by a proper review, so that history will not be a number of unconnected events, but will be seen as an orderly development. this may be accomplished: ( ) by questioning the class from a point of view different from that taken in the first lessons, ( ) by oral or written expansion of a topical outline, ( ) by illustrations with maps or drawings, ( ) by tracing the sequence of events backwards, ( ) by submitting some new situation that will recall the old knowledge in a different way. it must be remembered that it is not a mere repetition that we seek, but a _re-view_ of the facts, a new view that will prove the power of the pupils to use the knowledge they have gained. thus the lesson on the st. lawrence river (p. ) is a good review of the facts of history suggested by the places mentioned; the lesson on the road to cathay (p. ) may be considered a review of the chief explorers of north america. such a review aims at seeing new relations, at connecting new knowledge and old, at "giving freshness and vividness to knowledge that may be somewhat faded, at throwing a number of discrete facts into a bird's-eye view." the use of problems in teaching history the development, or problem, method is intended to get the pupils to do some independent thinking, instead of merely absorbing knowledge from the teacher. the plan is simply to set clearly before the pupils the conditions existing at a certain moment in the story so that they may see for themselves the difficulties that the people in the story had to overcome. the question for the class is: "what would you do in the circumstances?" let us take an example from the life of ulysses. ulysses had heard of the sirens, who sang so beautifully that any one in a passing ship who heard them was impelled to throw himself overboard, with a frantic desire to swim to their island. naturally the swimmers were all drowned in the attempt. ulysses desired to hear for himself the wonderful singing, and to experience, perhaps, its terrible effect; but he certainly did not want to run any risk of drowning. now, how did he accomplish his desire, without paying the penalty? again, in the story of madeleine de verchères, the narrative may proceed to the point where madeleine has succeeded in securing the gates. she finds herself in a weak fort with few to help her, and outside a numerous band of indians, who are kept at bay for a whole week, without even attempting their usual night attacks. how did she do it? in the case of the u.e. loyalists, the teacher may narrate the story to the point where the loyalists, after the treaty was signed, saw that they must remove to canada. the class must know where the loyalist centres in the new england states were. now, what routes would they be likely to take in going to canada? with the map before them, the class can usually tell the next part of the story themselves. even if the pupil is not able to give the correct answer to the problem submitted, he is nevertheless having an opportunity to exercise his judgment, he can see wherein his judgment differs from that of the persons concerned, his interest in their actions is increased, and the whole story will be more deeply impressed on his memory. how to make history real the chief difficulty in teaching history is to give a meaning to the language of history. much of the language is merely empty words. the magna charta and the clergy reserves mean just about as much to pupils as _x_ does in algebra, and even when they give a definition or description of these terms, it usually amounts to saying that _x_ equals _y_; the definition is just as vague as the original terms. the problem is to give the language more meaning, to ensure that the words give mental pictures and ideas; in short, to turn the abstract into concrete facts. children can make their own only such knowledge as their experience helps them to interpret. their interests are in the present, and the past appeals to them just so far as they can see in it their own activities, thoughts, and feelings. the great aim of the teacher, then, should be to help pupils to translate the facts of history into terms of their own experiences; unless that is done, they are really not learning anything. some of the ways in which this may be attempted are outlined below. . in the junior classes where the children are intensely interested in stories, the stress should be put on giving them _interesting personal details_ about the famous people in history, details that they can understand with their limited experiences of life, and that will appeal to their emotions. these stories should be told to the pupils with such vividness and animation that they will struggle with columbus against a mutinous crew, will help the early explorers to blaze their way through the dense forests, will toil with the pioneers in making homes for themselves in canada, and will suffer with the missionaries in their hardships and perils. for these pupils the oral method is the only one to use, for there is nothing that appeals to children more quickly and with more reality than what they _hear_ from the teacher. the oral method should find a large place in the teaching of history in all the forms. it may be added that the teachers who use this method will find history become a more real and interesting study to themselves. . what the pupils hear should be reinforced by giving them something to _see_. whatever pictures are obtainable (see pp. , ) should be used freely at all stages, for the visual images of children are a powerful aid to their understanding; it is for this reason that books for children are now so fully illustrated, and the same principle should be applied to the teaching of history. as soon as the children are ready for it, reference should be made to maps to illustrate historical facts. (see p. .) they should see on the map the course that columbus took across the unknown sea; champlain's explorations become real when they are traced on the map and the children have a concrete picture to carry away with them. in fact the subjects of geography, art, and constructive work, treated under the head of correlated subjects, are used in history with the aim of making it real through the eye. (see pp. , , .) . a greater difficulty presents itself when we have to deal, in the higher forms, with topics like the magna charta and the clergy reserves, and it is a difficulty that will test to the full the resourcefulness of the teacher. how can the preceding conditions and the terms of the magna charta be brought home to a class? how can children be brought to appreciate the difficulties connected with the question of clergy reserves? a few words about the latter may suggest a means. two aspects of the clergy reserves question stand out prominently, the religious and the economic. the religious aspect will be the most difficult for ontario children, for they have no immediate knowledge of what a state church is--the point on which the religious dispute turned; nor do they know enough about the government of the religious bodies to which they belong to make the matter clear to them. a full understanding must come later. the best point of approach seems to be to give the class some idea of the number of settlers belonging to the churches of england and of scotland, which claimed the right to the lands reserved, and compare with this the number of all other protestant bodies that claimed to share in them; for this difference in numbers was one of the chief causes of bitterness. an arithmetical appeal is concrete. there was also the economic aspect. the clergy reserves were one seventh of the land in each township. another seventh was withheld from free settlement as crown lands. now in some townships there were about , acres. let the class find out how many acres were thus kept from settlement. tell them that this land was not all in one block, but distributed through the township. they can now be asked to consider how this would interfere with close settlement and therefore with the establishment of schools, churches, post-offices, mills, and stores. a diagram of a township would be of great help. these two points will help them to see why an early and fair settlement of the vexed question was desired. wherever possible, present problems for them to solve by their own experiences. . the reading to the class of accounts of events written by people living at the time will give an atmosphere of reality and human interest to the events. for example, a story of early pioneer days told by a pioneer gives a personal element (see _pioneer days_, kennedy); a letter by mary queen of scots, to elizabeth (see p. ), will make both of these queens real living people, not mere names in history. (see _studies in the teaching of history_, keatinge, p. , also selections from _the sources of english history_, colby, p. .) not much of this may be possible, but more use might easily be made of such materials, especially with the early history of ontario. . the use of local history and of current events will be treated elsewhere. (see pp. , .) . when possible, let the pupils form their idea of an historical person from his actions and words just as we form our estimate of each other, instead of having them memorize mere summaries of his character before they know his actions. . genealogical and chronological tables, written on the black-board and discussed with the class, will be of service in understanding certain periods, such as the wars of the roses, and in helping to form the time-sense of pupils. (see chronological chart, p. .) . chief dependence must be placed, however, on increasing the pupil's knowledge of present-day conditions in agriculture, commerce, transportation, manufactures, in fact, in all social, economic, and political conditions, in order to enable him by comparison to realize earlier methods and ways of living. the pupil who understands best how we do things to-day can understand best the state of affairs when people had to depend on primitive methods, and can realize how they would strive to make things better. on memorizing history history is usually called a "memory" subject, and is accordingly often taught as a mere memorizing of facts, names, and dates. the following statement of the chief principles of memorizing will, it is hoped, put mere verbal repetition in its proper place. interest is the chief condition for teaching history in the public schools, in order that the pupils may acquire a liking for the subject that will tempt them to pursue their reading in after years; without that interest, the small amount of historical fact they can accumulate in their school-days will be of little real value to them when they become full-fledged citizens. in fact, through this emphasis on interest instead of verbal repetition, the pupils are likely to obtain a better knowledge of history and, at the same time, will have a chance to develop, in no slight degree, their powers of judgment. . memory depends on attention; we must observe attentively what we wish to remember. in history, attention may be secured by making the lessons interesting through the skill of the teacher in presenting the matter vividly to the pupils; also by using means to make history real instead of having it a mere mass of meaningless words. (see p. .) . facts that we wish to remember should be grouped, or studied in relation to other facts with which they are vitally connected. the facts of history should be presented to the class in their relation of cause and effect, or associated with some larger centre of interest; in other words, pupils must understand, in some degree, what they are asked to remember. (see pp. , .) . if we increase the number of connections for facts, we are more likely to remember them. it is largely for this reason that history should be taught with correlated subjects, such as geography, literature, science (inventions), etc. for example, the story of the spanish armada is remembered better if we have read _westward ho!_ and the story of the renaissance is made clearer and is therefore remembered better, if we connect with it the inventions of printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass. (see p. .) . repetition is necessary to memory. facts or groups of facts must be repeated to be remembered. this is the purpose of the drills which are necessary to good teaching, but are only a part of it. reviews are not to be considered merely as repetitions, but should be treated more as aids to better understanding. (see p. .) chapter iii correlation of subjects history and geography these subjects are very intimately related, and each should be used in teaching the other. geography, which is often called one of the "eyes of history," may be used in the teaching of this subject in two ways. in the first place, an account of an historical event lacks, to a certain degree, reality in the minds of the pupils if they do not know something of the place where it occurred. accordingly, in studying or teaching history, reference should be constantly made to the map to give a local setting to the story. the voyage of columbus, the operations of wolfe, the coming of the loyalists, are made more real if they are traced out on the map, and are therefore better understood and remembered by the pupils. for this purpose, it is better, in most cases, to use an outline map, which may be sketched on the black-board by the teacher or the pupils, because on the ordinary wall maps there are so many names and so much detail that the attention may be distracted. many of the details on the map are, moreover, more modern than the events that are to be illustrated, so that wrong impressions may be given. in the second place, it must be kept constantly in mind that many events in history have been influenced by the physical features of a country. for example: the lack of a natural boundary between france and germany has led to many disputes between these countries; the fact of great britain being an island accounts for many things in her history (see p. ); the physical features of quebec and gibraltar explain the importance of these places; and the waterways of canada account for the progress of early settlement. the climate and soil of a country affect its history; treaties are often based on physical conditions, and trade routes determined by them; a nation's commerce and wealth depend largely on the character of its natural resources. some easy problems may be given to the senior classes to be answered by reference to physical conditions: why are london, new york, chicago, montreal, and halifax, such important centres? why are certain places fitted for certain manufactures? will winnipeg become a more important city than montreal? will vancouver outstrip san francisco? what is a possible future for the western provinces of alberta and saskatchewan? what might have been the state of north america to-day, if the rocky mountains had run along the east coast, instead of along the west? on the other hand, history contributes a human interest to geography; the places of greatest interest are often those associated with great events in history--athens, mount sinai, waterloo, queenston heights. history and literature literature gives life and human interest to both history and geography. by means of literature we are able to get a better notion of the ideals and motives of a people than the mere recital of the facts of their history can give. in this connection we naturally think of homer's _iliad_ and its influence on the greeks. it was their storehouse of history, morals, religion, æsthetics, and rules for the practical guidance of life, as well as their literary masterpiece. it is often easy to interest pupils in a period of history by reading or quoting to them some ballad, poem, or prose narrative that colours the historical facts with the element of human feeling. macaulay's _horatius_ gives a deeper impression of roman patriotism than almost anything in pure history can; the various aspects of the crusades are vividly shown by w. stearns davis in _god wills it_, a story of the first crusade. in fact, if stirring events can be linked in the child's mind with stirring verse, if the struggles and progress of nations can be presented in a vigorous narrative that echoes the thoughts, feelings, and interests of the time, we make an appeal to the interest of the pupil that is almost irresistible. the objection is sometimes urged against the reading of standard historical tales and novels, that these are somewhat exaggerated in sentiment and inaccurate in facts. even if this be so, it may be said that they give in outline a fair picture of the period described, that the interest in history aroused by such tales begets a liking for history itself, and that such exaggerations and inaccuracies are soon corrected when the pupil begins to read history. the course of history has been modified by songs, ballads, and stories. the influence on the national spirit and ideals of songs such as _rule britannia_ and _the marseillaise_, of stories such as _uncle tom's cabin_, of novels such as those of dickens and of charles reade is incalculable. a few poems and prose compositions are given here as suggestions; a fuller list may be found in allen's _reader's guide to english history_, ginn & co., c. poems: _boadicea_, cowper; _recessional_, kipling; _edinburgh after flodden_, aytoun; _hands all round_, tennyson; _columbus_, joaquin miller; _waterloo_, byron; _the armada_, macaulay; _the revenge_, tennyson; _the charge of the light brigade_, tennyson. prose: "united empire loyalists," roberts' _history of canada_, chap. xv; "departure and death of nelson," southey; _montcalm and wolfe_, parkman; "the crusader and the saracen," in scott's _the talisman_; "the heroine of castle dangerous," in _stories of new france_, machar and marquis; "adam daulac," in _martyrs of new france_, herrington. history and science the connection between history and science is very close, because it was only after the invention of writing that history, the record of human progress, became possible. further, the remarkable way in which the chief stages in the development of civilization coincide with certain inventions and discoveries makes the study of history very incomplete without a knowledge of the inventions and discoveries, inasmuch as these opened a road for human development. (see p. .) to make this evident, it is enough merely to mention a few comparatively recent inventions, such as the mariner's compass, the printing-press, gunpowder, the steam-engine, the power-loom, the cotton-gin, and the telegraph. to the introduction of the mariner's compass in the fourteenth century, by which sailors were made independent of landmarks and the stars, and could therefore go more boldly into the open sea, we owe the explorations of the fifteenth century that culminated in the discovery of america, and the way to india by the cape of good hope. the introduction of gunpowder in the fourteenth century gave the lower and middle classes a weapon that made them equal in power with the nobles and brought about the downfall of the feudal system and the rise of modern democracies. the printing-press gave to the world the learning of the past and revolutionized social conditions. the invention of high explosives has made possible many of the great engineering works of to-day. the inventions that have made transportation and communication so easy and rapid have already done a great deal to bring nations to a better understanding of each other and thus to promote the peace of the world. discoveries in medicine alone have had an incalculable influence on the health and prosperity of society. in fact, the study of history and an understanding of modern social and industrial conditions are impossible without a knowledge of scientific inventions and discoveries. (see pp. , .) children naturally take an interest in what individuals have done, and it is easy to interest them in the work of men such as watt, stephenson, whitney, fulton, morse, edison, marconi, and their fellows. the biographies of famous inventors should therefore be given, both as a record of what they did and as an inspiration to like achievements. history and constructive work constructive work may be used to advantage in history and civics. it gives concrete expression to some facts of history through the construction by the pupils of objects mentioned therein. in studying indian life, the class may make in paper, wood, etc., wigwams, bows and arrows, stockades, etc.; in connection with pioneer life, they may make some of the buildings and implements used by the pioneers,--log houses, spinning-wheels, hominy blocks, red river carts, etc.; in studying campaigns, they may make models in plasticine or clay, or on the sand table, of forts, battle-fields, etc., for example--the plains of abraham, queenston heights, chateauguay, plymouth harbour; the union jack may be cut out and coloured. (see p. .) in this way the activities of the child may be made of practical use. on the industrial and social side of history, which is being more and more emphasized, it is of great value to the child to become acquainted, even though on a small scale and through the simplest implements and machines, with the construction of machinery and modes of manufacture. for a lesson on the industrial revolution in england, for example, it will give pupils a better understanding of the changes, if they know something, through their own activities, of the way of making cloth. for suggestions on constructive work, see the manual on manual training: p. : suggestions for the various seasons and days. p. : on the use of the sand table. p. : on collecting and preserving pictures. p. : on relief maps and geographical formations. history and art art assists history in two ways. first, pictures may be used to illustrate events in history and make them real. it is often difficult for children to form a definite mental image of historical scenes merely from the words of the teacher or of the text-book, because their experiences are limited and the power to combine these properly is lacking. this is recognized now in the many text-books which are freely illustrated. pictures of persons famous in history are also of value, in that they make these persons more real to the pupils. materials for class use may be collected by the teacher and pupils,--engravings, prints, cuts from newspapers and magazines of famous people, buildings, cities, monuments, events; for example, the landing of columbus, the coming of the loyalists, the fathers of confederation, the landing of the pilgrim fathers, an old-time trading post, the death of brock. a good idea is to have a class scrap-book, to be filled with suitable contributions from the class. the teacher will find a private scrap-book exceedingly useful. many fine pictures are given in _the highroads of history_, and _the story of the british people_ for form iii. it may be added that these pictures should be supplemented freely by descriptions and narratives given by the teacher. (see _visual aids in the teaching of history_.) second, the pupils may be asked to illustrate, by drawings and sketch maps, historic places, routes of armies and of explorers, the journeys of settlers, etc. history and composition history, no less than other subjects of study, needs to be expressed by the pupils, if it is to make them more efficient. some of the usual modes of expression are given above in connection with constructive work and art. the chief mode of expression, however, for history is through composition, both oral and written. in the junior forms the stories should be reproduced orally (see details of method for forms i and ii, p. ), either by pure narration or by dramatization; the pupils relate in their own language what they have learned, or are allowed to dramatize the story. in the dramatization, the pupils should be given a good deal of freedom in constructing the conversation, once they get to know what is wanted, the only restriction being that no pupil shall be allowed to take part who does not know the story thoroughly. incidents such as harold taking the oath to help william of normandy gain the crown of england, joseph being sold into egypt, the greeks using the wooden horse to capture troy, are very easily dramatized. in the senior forms the black-board outline may be used as the basis of written or oral reproduction. the subject of composition will itself be less objectionable by reason of these exercises, as the pupils are asked to reproduce the history as material valuable and interesting in itself, not merely as a means of showing their skill in expression. moreover, in the study of history, the pupil hears or reads the compositions of others, and unconsciously gains, by these examples, much in vocabulary and in power of expression. in fact, much of the culture value of history depends on the training it affords in composition, and, by intimately connecting these two subjects, a double advantage is gained--the ability to comprehend historical material, and practice in effective expression. history and chronology or the use of dates geography is one of "the eyes of history"; chronology, or the arranging of events according to their dates, is the other. this suggests that dates are to be used merely as a help in "seeing" events in history in their proper order, so that their relations to other events may be better understood. when these relations are seen, the dates lose much of their value. for example, let us consider the following dates: , , , , . the short interval between , when great britain finally assumed control of canada by treaty, and , when the quebec act was passed, helps to make clear the reason for the french citizens receiving so many concessions. they outnumbered the english so much that these concessions were deemed necessary to hold their allegiance to the crown in face of the efforts made by the discontented new england colonies to get their support in the coming revolution against great britain. the success of the act was shown in , when the invasion by the revolutionists failed. the war of the revolution was ended by treaty in , and canada received as settlers, principally in upper canada, the united empire loyalists, whose ideas of government were so different from those of the lower canadians that the separation of upper and lower canada by the constitutional act of became necessary. these dates, so close together, emphasize the rapidity with which events moved in that period, as well as the sequence of cause and effect. we think also of the dates of cartier's voyages, , , and , merely to raise the question as to why so much time elapsed between the second and third voyages. when these points are properly seen, the events are kept in place by their relation of cause and effect, and the dates lose their value. moreover, the relations thus discovered will do most toward fixing these dates in the memory. it should be understood, therefore, that dates are only a means to an end, not an end in themselves. it is important also to know the dates of certain events when we are studying the history of several countries, in order that we may consider together those events that are contemporary. there are, of course, some dates that should be remembered because of the importance of the events connected with them, for example: , , , , , , , , , . in the junior forms, because the pupils are still lacking in the "historical sense," little emphasis need be put on the giving of dates. a few of the most important may be given in form ii, but it is very questionable if they have any significance to the pupils at this early stage. chapter iv special topics current events the study of history should not end with what is contained in text-books, for the making of history never ceases. the study of current events will be found to be a very valuable element in history teaching. teachers and pupils who are interested in the events of to-day are much more likely to be interested in the events of the past. a knowledge of current events will arouse curiosity in what led up to them, will suggest a motive for studying the past, and will often supply concrete examples for both history and civics. in fact, the teaching of civics may be based almost entirely on current events. (see civics, p. et seq.) the influence of a knowledge of current events on the study of history is very plainly seen to-day in the earnest and widespread effort to discover the causes of the war that is devastating europe at the present time. history becomes real when pupils understand that what is happening now has its roots in the past and, at the same time, is history in the making. for example, the present war will certainly intensify our interest in the great movement to prevent war by means of world-wide arbitration of disputes between nations, or by any other means. the value of this phase of history teaching depends very largely on the interest taken in it by the teacher and on the work that the pupils can be induced to do for themselves. the teacher talks to the pupils about some important current event in an interesting way. then the pupils are encouraged to add to what he has said by relating what they have heard, or have read in the newspapers. after a few lessons the chief difficulty is to make a suitable selection of topics to be discussed in class. those of national importance, if within the scope of the form work, will have prominence, and the pupils will be given hints as to articles about these topics in papers, magazines, and books. it is obvious that topics likely to arouse religious, political, or other party feeling, should be avoided. for actual school-room practice the following scheme has been used successfully in form iii: current events ( minutes daily) the teacher has suggested the kinds of events that are worthy of discussion, and the pupils come to class prepared to tell what they have read in the papers about some of these. the teacher aids them to give fit expression to their information, and the pupil who has been chosen as editor writes a summary of the lesson on the black-board, and later, on a sheet of paper. ordinarily, the editors should be chosen from those who write and spell well. where the subject-matter lends itself to such treatment, these summaries may be placed in two columns--one, the _girls' news column_; the other, the _boys' news column_. the summaries on the sheets of paper may be arranged in order for a week or a month and be known as _the school review_. such a lesson includes history, and oral and written composition. the following items of news were those discussed in a form iii room at the end of the week, when some time is taken to talk over the events of the week: feb. th, rescue of the crew of the japanese cruiser asama. rescue work in the earthquake in italy. wireless message frustrates a german plot to blow up a french steamer. fire in a new york factory--rescue of the inmates. inhuman treatment of belgian women and children. british officer praises the enemy. the austrians are defeated by the montenegrins. canadians wounded in france. importance of discipline and accurate shooting for canadian troops. germany proclaims a war zone around britain. two new york boy heroes of a fire. tsar honours a girl wounded while carrying ammunition to the troops. opening of the war session of the canadian parliament. these items are sifted from a great many suggested by the pupils. in the sifting process, a very useful discussion is had as to what constitutes real "news," and what is mere "gossip"; that is, what is of value as news to the world at large, and what is of purely local, personal interest. in civics, current topics may be made very useful. items of municipal, provincial, or federal affairs furnish a concrete basis for the study of our system of government, and may also suggest moral examples. local material one of the chief uses of local history in the class-room is to make the study of general history more vivid and interesting ( ) by making more real those facts of history associated with the locality in which we live, and ( ) by providing suitable illustrations, from the pupil's own experience, of facts in general history. when a pupil has seen the place where an event of history has happened, he has an interest in that event that he could scarcely gain in any other way, and the history of that period may then be taught with more interest and profit to him. a pupil finds also in local history certain facts that he must understand in order to interpret the story of happenings, distant in time and place. some parts of ontario are much richer in material than others, but in all historic spots may be found. on the st. lawrence river, in the niagara peninsula, in the talbot settlement district, in york county, along the ottawa river, in the huron tract, there is no lack of useful material. but it is not necessary to confine such local history to the outstanding events of war or the larger happenings of civil progress. in every locality there are remains of the earlier indian inhabitants, in the form of mounds, sites of villages, relics of war and the chase (arrow-heads, stone implements, beads, etc.); relics of the early settlers, in the form of roads and old log houses; relics of pioneer life consisting of furniture, household and outdoor implements, etc., that will serve as a basis for comparison with present-day conditions, and make real to the children the lives of the earlier inhabitants and settlers of ontario. civics the teaching of civics has a threefold aim: . to instruct in the mechanism of government. (descriptive) . to instruct in the history of national institutions so as to show the line of development, and also to impress the fact that existing institutions are capable of development, are not fixed. (historical) . "to show the cost of each institution in the efforts and sacrifices of past generations and to quicken and make permanent the children's interest in public life and their sense of responsibility to their fellows." (patriotic and ethical) two points stand out clearly--to teach the machinery of government and to instil ideals of public conduct. of these the second is by far the more important and the more difficult to teach directly. the best way to attempt it is by means of biography and personal references. there are great men and women in history whose lives are worthy examples to the young: sir john eliot, pym, hampden, who stood for freedom of speech and debate; gladstone, who helped to right historic wrongs in the east; lincoln, who stood for union and the freedom of the individual; many eminent canadians, such as sir john macdonald, george brown, alexander mackenzie, egerton ryerson, sir oliver mowat, and sir james whitney; women such as florence nightingale and elizabeth fry, laura secord and sarah maxwell. besides these eminent examples, there are in every locality men and women who give unselfishly of their energy and time for the good of the community. there should also be impressed on the minds of the young a sense of their responsibility for an honest and faithful use of the ballot, a right won for them by the long and earnest effort of their forefathers; and the necessity for purity of government in our democratic form of administration. in school life, a good deal can be done to create a sense of fair play, respect for the rights of others, and of the necessity for submission to lawful authority by encouraging the pupils to conduct all their school organizations, whether in play or in work, honourably and by right methods. some of the lessons that may be taught to children during their school life are as follows: . respect for the rights of others. pupils may be brought to see that misconduct on their part affects others, not themselves only. . respect for the property of others. this may be secured best by teaching them to take good care of their own property first, for unless a child cares rightly for his own, he is not likely to take much thought for the things of others. . respect for public property. this is something that needs attention badly. it is a very common thing to find people destroying trees, flowers, etc., in public places, throwing refuse on the street, and otherwise disfiguring their surroundings. a beginning of better habits may be made by getting the pupils to aid in beautifying and decorating the school building by means of pictures, either prints or their own work, by flowers in pots, by keeping the floor and walls clean and free from marks and litter; also in making the grounds around the school more attractive by means of flowers and shrubs. arbor day may be made of great use in this respect, if the spirit of that day can be carried through the whole year. a pride in the attractiveness of the school will have its influence on the pupils in the wider life of the community. a knowledge of the machinery of government may be based on the pupils' knowledge of the organization of the school. the appointment, power, and duties of the teacher are the starting-point. the next step will be to investigate the composition of the board of school trustees. this may be done at the time of an election for school trustees. the following questions may serve as an outline of study for all the political bodies by which we are governed: . who compose the board of trustees? (in the smaller local bodies, the names of the members may be mentioned, as giving a personal interest in the matter.) . how and by whom are they elected? . for what period are they elected? . how is the board organized for the conduct of business? . what powers do they possess? . what duties have they to fulfil? . how do they raise the money needed for their work? . how is the board rendered continuous? (by electing a successor to a member who resigns; by the trustees remaining in office till their successors are elected.) other governing bodies may be taken up similarly, for example: municipal councils (township, county, village, town, or city council), provincial legislature, dominion or federal parliament, imperial parliament. a suitable time to bring up the topic of how elections are conducted would be when an election for any of the above bodies is in progress. information on this topic may be found in _canadian civics_, by jenkins; a fuller account is given in bourinot's _how canada is governed_. lessons concerning special bodies of municipal and civil servants may be taken; for example, the assessor, tax-collector, policeman, postal employees, firemen, etc. in connection with all of these, the question of taxation is constantly arising. it is suggested that something should be done to put the pupils in the right attitude toward this subject. many people have an idea that when they pay taxes they are being robbed, because they do not stop to think of what they are getting in return for their money. the chief reason for this seems to be that the taxes are usually paid once or twice a year, while the services rendered are continuous. a good way to proceed is to have the class calculate the value of the services given in return for the taxes. for example, suppose it is found that the yearly cost for each pupil in a certain section is $ . . divide this by the number of days ( ) a pupil attends school during the year, and the cost each day for each pupil is shown be only - / cents, not a very large sum for a community to pay for a child's education. other calculations may be made to show the saving to farmers by spending money in the construction of good roads to make teaming more profitable. for example: in a strip of country served by a road ten miles long, there is room for eighty farms of one hundred acres each, all the produce of which would be hauled on that road. let us suppose that this produce would amount to , loads, such as could be hauled on an ordinary country road. the average haul being five miles, two trips a day could be made. at $ . a day, the cost of haulage would be $ , . suppose this road to be converted into a good stone road at a cost of $ , a mile, a total cost of $ , . on this road, with the larger and heavier wagons that could now be used, the farmers could easily double the size of the load. this would mean that, instead of , loads being necessary, , would be sufficient. at the same rate as before, the cost of haulage would be $ , , an annual saving of $ , ; so that the whole cost of the road would be saved in eight years, to say nothing of the greater ease and comfort of travel to both man and beast. better roads would also give the farmer access to market for a greater part of the year and thus enable him to take advantage of higher prices at certain seasons. it is believed that these figures are quite within the bounds of probability. in large towns and cities the cost of public utilities may be calculated; for example, the expense of a fire-station in buildings, equipment, horses, men, etc., to show how the money raised by taxes is spent for the good of the whole community, and helps to keep down the rates for fire insurance. the kinds of taxation may also be discussed--direct and indirect; also the sources from which direct taxes are derived--customs, excise, etc.; methods of levying and collecting taxes; how taxes are spent for the various educational and charitable institutions--schools, libraries, hospitals, asylums, homes for the poor and neglected, etc.; for the protection of life and property; for the administration of justice, etc. the distribution of taxes among public institutions may be studied from the public accounts printed for the use of ratepayers. the lessons learned about the fairness of taxation may be used to illustrate certain periods of history when people struggled against unjust and arbitrary taxation; for example, wat tyler's rebellion, the civil war in england in the seventeenth century, the american and french revolutions, acts of parliament in canada from the quebec act to the act of confederation. a dominion or provincial election offers a good opportunity for a lesson on how to vote and how we came to have the right to vote; on the constitution of parliament; on the sanctity of the ballot, etc. a trial by jury in which the people of the district are interested may be used to introduce the history and purpose of the jury. the teacher of history the teacher of history must know his subject. this does not mean that every school teacher must have an expert knowledge of the whole subject, but he should know the history that is to be taught thoroughly enough to be able to teach the lesson orally without referring constantly to the text-book or to notes. this, at least, is the ideal to strive for. to accomplish this, the teacher is earnestly recommended to read at least one book in addition to the authorized text-book, which does not usually contain much more than the important facts of history. to clothe the skeleton of facts with flesh and blood so as to make history what it really is, a record of human beings who not only did things but had also thoughts and feelings like our own, it is necessary to be able to supply the personal details that make the figures of history real, living, men and women. (see the story of florence nightingale, p. .) the teacher who does this will himself come to have a more lively interest in history. the teacher must also know children. for the understanding of history, pupils are dependent on their previous knowledge of life and its interests. they must be led by timely suggestions or questions to see the connection between their own knowledge of life and the experiences of the actors in history. without this connection, the facts of history remain meaningless. to present history to the pupils in an interesting way, the oral method is the best. it is not necessary for the teacher to have a special gift for narration; any one who is really interested in the story to be told is able to tell it well enough to hold the attention of the class. in narration, mere fluency is not the chief requisite; it is more important that the pupils should feel the teacher's interest in the topic. the narration must also be confined to the facts and details that count; the teacher needs to know what to omit as well as what to narrate. if the matter has been well thought out and clearly arranged in topics with due regard to the relation of cause and effect, the telling of the story will be an easier matter, and the pupils will be trained also in a clear and logical way of treating history. the oral method should be supported by the free use of devices for making the story real. (see p. .) while it is quite true that certain important topics are to be thoroughly mastered as centres of connection for the less important facts, yet it must be insisted on that a more important aim of the teacher is to arouse and stimulate an interest in history so that the pupil's study of it may continue after the close of his school-days. no mastery of facts through memorization alone will counterbalance the lack of interest in, and liking for, the subject. chapter v illustrative lessons the following lessons are to be considered as suggestive rather than directive, as illustrating how the principles of teaching may be applied in a particular subject. definite knowledge of child-nature and of children's experiences, of the materials to be used, and of the purpose to be accomplished in teaching a subject, determines, in the main, the choice of method. this statement is especially true of history, for, unless it is steadily borne in mind, the temptation is very great to make the teaching of this subject consist in mere memorizing of events and dates. forms i and ii type lesson in the "story stage" the aim of this lesson is to give the pupils the story of "moses and the burning bush," and at the same time to arouse an interest in stories. as a preparation for the lesson, the teacher should secure pictures, or make sketches, illustrating ( ) moses tending his flocks, ( ) the burning bush, ( ) the rod turning to a serpent, ( ) moses setting out to do god's will. the pictures and sketches are used to make real the verbal story. a few questions recalling the earlier events in moses' life should be answered by the pupils, for example: moses as a baby in the bulrushes, his adoption by the princess, his life in the palace, his killing of the egyptian, the cause of his flight into midian. the teacher should then narrate in clear, simple language the story of moses in midian, dividing it into parts such as: moses at the well, his home with jethro, the appearance of the burning bush, his talk with god, his excuses, god's proof of power to help, his setting out to do god's will. in form i it may be advisable to question, during the story, to ascertain if the language and ideas are understood, but reproduction of each part as it is narrated will probably result in a loss of attention and a lack of interest in the remainder of the story. the reproduction should, therefore, be taken after the completion of the story. in form ii very short topic-phrases may be written on the black-board. these will serve as a guide to the pupils in the oral or written reproduction that follows. if illustrated story-books containing this story are in the library, pupils of form ii may be asked to read them. when practicable, an exercise in sight reading may follow this kind of lesson. the teacher may have slips containing sections of the story prepared beforehand, and may give them to the pupils for sight reading. forms i and ii the first thanksgiving materials: a set of pictures showing "the mayflower in plymouth harbour"; "the landing of the pilgrims"; "the pilgrims going to church"; "plymouth rock"; "the spinning wheel." (perry picture co. pictures) a map of the western coast of europe and the eastern coast of america drawn on the black-board. introduction: a talk on thanksgiving day as celebrated now--the returning of thanks to god for a bountiful harvest, the general good-will prevailing, the dinner. how and when did this custom originate? presentation: the teacher tells the story of the emigration of the pilgrim fathers, and shows the pictures that illustrate the different parts of the story. the voyage is traced on the map and the landing-place in america marked. this should be followed by a spirited reading of mrs. hemans' _the landing of the pilgrim fathers_, and the telling of _the first thanksgiving_. (see appendix.) a simple version of this story may be given to pupils in form i, accompanied by such construction work, in paper cutting and colouring, and in modelling, as they can do. form ii florence nightingale in the war that england and france were carrying on against russia in the crimea about fifty years ago, the english soldiers suffered terrible hardships, so terrible that more than half the army were in the hospital, and many men were dying of starvation and neglect. the people in england knew nothing of this, because they thought that everything the army needed had been sent to it. at last, they found out from the letters of dr. russell, the correspondent of the london _times_, how great were the sufferings of the soldiers, and they were so shocked at this state of things that they subscribed large sums of money, many thousands of dollars, and sent out to the army florence nightingale and thirty-four other nurses to do what they could for the neglected soldiers. after they came, the wounded and sick soldiers were so well cared for that thousands of them lived to come home who would have died if these noble women had not gone out to nurse them. do you want to know why florence nightingale was the one person out of all the people of england to be asked to go? from her earliest childhood she was always doing what she could to help those who were in trouble. the poor and suffering appealed to her more than to most people. when quite young, she went to visit the poor and sick on her father's estates, carrying to them some little dainties or flowers that they would be sure to like, and helping them to get well. all the animals around her home liked her, because they knew that she would not hurt them; even the shy squirrels would come quite close to her and pick up the nuts she dropped for them. an old gray pony, named peggy, would trot up to her when she went into the field to see it, and put its nose into her pocket for the apple or other little treat that she always had for it. a sheep dog had been hurt by a stone thrown at it by a boy, and the owner thought that its leg was broken and that he would have to kill it. but it turned out to be only a bad bruise and the dog was soon well with florence's nursing. when her rich parents took her to london, she preferred visiting the sick people in the hospitals to enjoying herself at parties or in sight-seeing. when the family travelled in europe, she visited the hospitals to see how the sick were being looked after. she went to one of the best hospitals in germany to study how to nurse the sick in the best way. when she came back to england, she did a great deal to improve the hospitals, and for many years she worked so hard that her health began to fail. it was because of what she had done in this way that she was asked to go to the crimea to take charge of the hospitals for the english soldiers. when she came there she found things in a terrible condition. the sick and wounded men were crowded in such unhealthy rooms that they had very little chance to get well. she cleaned up the buildings, gave the patients clean beds and clothes, and saw that they had good, well-cooked food to eat. she looked after their comfort, sat beside their beds when they were very ill, and wrote letters for them to their families at home. because she often walked through the rooms at night, alone, and carrying a little lamp in her hand, to see that everything was all right, she was called "the lady with the lamp." as she went about, speaking to some, nodding and smiling to others, we can imagine how much the poor soldiers thought of her. when the war was over, the people of england were so grateful to her that the government gave her a very large sum of money, $ , , but she gave it all to build a school where nurses might be trained for their work. queen victoria gave her a beautiful jewel to show what she thought of the brave work that florence nightingale did. she lived for many years, doing a great deal to show how to treat people who are ill, and how to keep people well by securing for them "pure air, pure water, cleanliness, and light." she died august , , but the good she did in saving the lives of so many soldiers will always be remembered. method it is not intended that this story should be given to the pupils just as it is here. this account is given to indicate what facts may be told to pupils as young even as those in the senior part of form i, and how the story may be simplified for their understanding. after the story is told, vividly and sympathetically, the reproduction by the class follows in the usual way. form ii the postmaster an introductory lesson in civics this is an introductory lesson in civics, in which the aim is to make the pupils familiar with the duties, qualifications, salary, and importance of the postmaster. the teacher and class, in imagination, make a visit to the post-office and describe what may be seen therein. a pupil's letter is prepared, and the teacher, by using an old envelope, shows what is done with the letter till it reaches the person to whom it is addressed, tabulating these points on the black-board: ( ) stamped; ( ) stamp cancelled; ( ) placed in the mail bag; ( ) taken to the railway station; ( ) placed on the train; ( ) received at its destination; ( ) marked to show date on which it was received; ( ) sorted; ( ) delivered. another used envelope should be shown to the pupils that they may trace, from the impressions stamped upon it, its "sending" and "receiving" offices. from a consideration of these several duties of the postmaster the pupils may be led to see that he should be an honest, careful, courteous, and prompt person. the teacher next explains how people sent letters, etc., before post-offices were instituted, and shows that the postmaster, in doing his work, is doing it as our representative, and that we should help him in the performance of his duty by plainly addressing our letters, etc. a further explanation as to the manner of appointment and payment of salary may follow. in another lesson, the secondary duties of the postmaster--the registration of letters, issuing of money orders and of postal notes, the receiving and forwarding of money to the savings bank, and the making of reports to the post-office department--may be discussed. in teaching these the objective method should be used. the teacher should obtain envelopes of registered letters and a registration blank, a blank money order, and a blank postal note, and instruct the pupils in the proper method of filling out these forms. form iii the capture of quebec the introduction to this lesson will consist of questions recalling the matter of the past lesson or lessons, and the positions of the british and the french forces in the spring of . this can be easily done by sketching on the black-board a map of north america and marking on it with coloured chalk the position of each force. the chief settlements to be mentioned in the lesson of the day should also be marked. for the matter of this see _the ontario public school history of canada_, pages - , and parkman's _montcalm and wolfe_. the teacher describes the voyage of wolfe from louisburg to quebec, mentioning the means taken to secure pilots and to overcome the difficulties of navigating the st. lawrence. when the pupils, following the voyage, have arrived at quebec, a description of the topography of the vicinity should be given, and an enlarged sketch, or better still, a plasticine model, made to show this. (see text-book, page .) the difficulty of capturing quebec may be emphasized by reference to former attempts. on this sketch or model the disposition of the french forces should be shown, and then problems may be given as to actions that might be taken by wolfe. for example: how would you attempt to destroy the fort? where may wolfe land his soldiers? what led the french to place their soldiers down as far as the montmorenci? no doubt some wrong answers will be given, but the probability is that some boy will say that he would take some guns to the high bank on the levis side and bombard the town of quebec. the teacher will then tell what was done and with what results. this should be outlined briefly on the black-board, and problem questions proposed as to the attempt of wolfe to dislodge the french at montmorenci. this second step is also told and added to the outline, after which the teacher proceeds to explain the final step, dwelling particularly on the illness of wolfe, his careful arrangement of plans, the courage shown in attempting the surprise of the hill, the speed with which his forces were drawn up on the plains, the battle with its final outcome. this is added to the outline, and the whole story is reproduced orally before the class is dismissed. as desk work, the outline is copied in note-books and the pupils are directed to read the full story in parkman's _montcalm and wolfe_, or in the history reader, pp. - . note: if plasticine be used, miniature cannon, ships, bridges, etc., may be placed in position and a realistic explanation of the battle given. this would require more time and the whole story would require several lesson spaces. references: the text-book, weaver's _canadian history for boys and girls_, and parkman's _montcalm and wolfe_. form iii the coming of the united empire loyalists . narrate briefly the story of the american revolution, to show why they had to leave the country; describe the treatment given to them by the revolutionists; how they lost their property; how they were driven from their homes and exposed to all sorts of hardships, sometimes fatal to the women and children; emphasize their constant feeling of loyalty in face of all their troubles. . there was nothing for them to do but go to some place where the british flag still flew. the pupils may be asked, with the map before them, to consider where they would be most likely to go. what were the probable routes they would follow? that would depend on where they lived in the states. what methods of travel could they use? the class will see from a consideration of these points how they did travel, what routes they followed, and where they settled down. the waterways would have to be emphasized and traced out on the map; by sea from new york and boston to nova scotia; by lake champlain and the richelieu river to quebec and eastern ontario; by the western rivers, the mohawk, the genesee, etc., to western ontario. (see _fourth reader_, p. .) . what the government did for them and how they succeeded. any account of life in canada in the early days will give the necessary information. it may be that some old settler of the neighbourhood can supply the story to one of the children. . in the senior form there may be taken up slightly the political ideals of these loyalists and how their presence led to changes in affairs in upper canada. form iii the flag in itself a flag is "only a small bit of bunting"; it becomes a powerful aid to patriotism when it receives a meaning from its history. it is the emblem of a nation, the symbol of sovereignty, and as such should have a prominent place in the education of the young. children should be taught: ( ) the history of the struggles and sacrifices of our forefathers in securing and maintaining our liberties; ( ) the significance of the flag as standing for liberty, truth, and justice; and ( ) its construction, with the special significance of each part. the last point--the construction of the union jack--should be preceded by a series of lessons on the individual "jacks." these lessons should explain the significance of the term "jack"; should give the stories of st. george, the patron saint of england, of st. andrew, the patron saint of scotland, and of st. patrick, the patron saint of ireland; and the reasons for the placing of the crosses on the jacks of the several countries. (see appendix.) these lessons may be taken as follows: that of the "jack" and "st. george" after a lesson on the crusaders; of "st. andrew" after the lesson on the battle of bannockburn; of "st. patrick" after the lesson on the conquest of ireland by strongbow. the opposite course may be followed. the construction or drawing of the flag may be taken in connection with one of the flag days; then the children will be interested in the work itself. the story of the jacks may be given afterwards in the history lessons. as desk work following each lesson, the pupils should construct the flags, using coloured paper, and these flags should be kept for use in the final lesson. the following sizes may be used in oblong flags: for st. george's--white ground-- - / in. x in., red cross / in. for st. andrew's--blue ground-- - / in. x in., white cross / in. for st. patrick's--white ground-- / in. x in., red cross / in. when the story of the union of the crowns of england and scotland in the reign of james i has been taught, the pupils should be asked to attempt the problem of uniting the two flags into one. for this purpose the flags already made can be used. the flag of england will surmount that of scotland, and in order that the flag of scotland may be seen, the white ground of the flag of england must be removed, only a narrow border of white along each arm being retained to represent the ground colour. this narrow border on each side is one third of the width of the red cross. the final lesson, the construction of the union jack of our day, should be given on empire day or a few days before. as an introduction the teacher should review the flag of each country in the union, referring also to the union jacks of james and of anne. the problem of uniting the irish jack with the other two might be given the pupils; but as they are not likely to succeed in solving it, it will be better for the teacher to place before them the union jack belonging to the school and to lead them to observe: . that it is usually oblong--twice as long as wide; (it may also be square); . that the st. andrew's cross is partially covered by the st. patrick's; . that the st. george's cross, as before, is one fifth of the width of the jack; . that along the side of the st. patrick's cross is a strip of white; . that this strip of white and the red of the st. patrick's equal the broad white of the st. andrew's; . that the broad white of the st. andrew's is partly white cross and partly white ground; . that the broad white of the st. andrew's is uppermost on the parts near the staff. when these have been noted, the pupils are ready to unite the flags which they had formerly made. the teacher directs them to cut away all of the white ground and half of each arm of the st. patrick's cross, retaining the centre. this should then be pasted upon the st. andrew's cross as in the union jack. they next cut away all of the white ground of the st. george's cross, except the border (one third of the red), and paste this above the other two. the result will be a correctly made jack, and the pupils will know the several stages in its growth. where it is not possible to conduct the series of lessons as above, the following method is suggested. the pupils are provided with white paper and red and blue crayons, and are led to make, as above, a study of the jack belonging to the school. the following directions are then given: first line in with a ruler the dimensions of the flag, say five inches wide and ten inches long. draw the diagonals in faint lines. place the cross of st. george and its border upon the flag according to the measurements mentioned, that is, the cross one inch wide and the border one third of an inch wide. the diagonals will be the centre and dividing lines of the crosses of st. andrew and st. patrick. now place the saltire crosses according to the measurements. the white arm of st. andrew's cross will be one-half inch in width, the white border of st. patrick's cross one-sixth of an inch wide, and the red cross of st. patrick one-third of an inch wide. the red cross of st. patrick is placed touching the diagonal, below in the first and third quarters, and above in the second and fourth quarters. great care must be exercised in making the drawing of the union jack. the following are the official regulations for the proportions of the union jack: . it may be either square, or twice as long as it is wide. . the proportions are: red cross of st. george / of width of flag. white border to st. george / of red of st. george. red cross of st. patrick / of red of st. george. white border to st. patrick / of red of st. george. broad white of st. andrew / of red of st. george. . broad white of st. andrew is uppermost in the two quarters next the staff; the red of st. patrick is uppermost in the other quarters. its base is the cross of st. george, red on a white ground. on the political union of england and scotland in , the cross of st. andrew, which is a white diagonal cross on a blue ground, was added, and to this union flag there was joined, in , the cross of st. patrick, a red diagonal cross on a white ground. the colours of the union jack are red, which is the emblem of courage; white, the emblem of purity; and blue, the emblem of truth; so that we cannot do anything cowardly without disgracing our flag. on memorial days the teacher, as he describes the past events that have helped to make our country strong and keep it free, may well refer to the colours of the flag as reminders of the virtues on which our empire rests. for memorial days the following, among others, are suggested: flag days opening and closing of each term jan. .--municipalities incorporated in canada, . (to be celebrated on the first school day of the new year.) feb. .--union of the canadas, . march .--first responsible ministry, . march .--founding of upper canada--constitutional act, . march .--egerton ryerson's birthday ( - ). empire day.--the school day immediately preceding may . may .--victoria day. june .--the king's birthday, . july .--dominion day: confederation of the provinces, . july .--first parliament of upper canada, . september .--battle of the plains of abraham, . october .--battle of queenston heights--death of sir isaac brock, . october .--trafalgar day, . december .--close of the war of - , by the treaty of ghent. (to be celebrated on the last school day before christmas.) other days commemorating events connected with various localities may also be chosen. for information respecting the flag, teachers are referred to barlow cumberland's _history of the union jack_ (latest edition), to the _flag charts_, by mrs. fessenden, and to _the flag of canada_, by sir joseph pope. for the stories of the patron saints of england, scotland, and ireland, see appendix. the colours of the flag what is the blue on our flag, boys? the waves of the boundless sea, where our vessels ride in their tameless pride, and the feet of the winds are free; from the sun and smiles of the coral isles to the ice of the south and north, with dauntless tread through tempests dread the guardian ships go forth. what is the white on our flag, boys? the honour of our land, which burns in our sight like a beacon light and stands while the hills shall stand; yea, dearer than fame is our land's great name, and we fight, wherever we be, for the mothers and wives that pray for the lives of the brave hearts over the sea. what is the red on our flag, boys? the blood of our heroes slain, on the burning sands in the wild waste lands and the froth of the purple main; and it cries to god from the crimsoned sod and the crest of the waves outrolled, that he send us men to fight again as our fathers fought of old. we'll stand by the dear old flag, boys, whatever be said or done, though the shots come fast, as we face the blast, and the foe be ten to one-- though our only reward be the thrust of a sword and a bullet in heart or brain. what matters one gone, if the flag float on and britain be lord of the main! --frederick george scott the union jack it's only a small piece of bunting, it's only an old coloured rag; yet thousands have died for its honour, and shed their best blood for the flag. it's charged with the cross of st. andrew, which, of old, scotland's heroes has led; it carries the cross of st. patrick, for which ireland's bravest have bled. joined with these is our old english ensign, st. george's red cross on white field; round which, from richard to roberts, britons conquer or die, but ne'er yield. it flutters triumphant o'er ocean, as free as the wind and the waves; and bondsmen from shackles unloosened, 'neath its shadows no longer are slaves. it floats o'er australia, new zealand, o'er canada, the indies, hong kong; and britons, where'er their flag's flying, claim the rights which to britons belong. we hoist it to show our devotion to our king, our country, and laws; it's the outward and visible emblem, of progress and liberty's cause. you may say it's an old bit of bunting, you may call it an old coloured rag; but freedom has made it majestic, and time has ennobled our flag. forms iii and iv suggestions for empire day the exercises on empire day may be extended to include most of the subjects on the time-table by providing interesting problems in these subjects which will, at the same time, keep the pupils' attention focused on the purpose of the day. the purpose of empire day may be stated briefly: ( ) to increase the pupils' knowledge of the various parts of the empire; ( ) to create in them fine ideals of a larger citizenship; ( ) to give a feeling of responsibility for canada's place and work in the empire, both now and in the future. exercises suggested . in literature: study one or more of the selections in the public school readers that are suitable; for example, in the iv reader, pp. , , , , , , , , , , ; in the iii reader, pp. , , , , . if these have been studied before, one or two might be read or recited by the pupils. in this manual poems are given (pp. , ) that may be used in the same way. pamphlets containing suitable matter for empire day have been sent out by the department of education on several occasions. . in history: (_a_) some information about the growth of the empire; for example, how and when canada, australia, new zealand, south africa, or any other part of the empire was added; (_b_) comparison of the size of the british empire with that of any earlier empire, such as the persian, greek, or roman; (_c_) the growth of great britain's commercial and naval supremacy, on what it is founded, what danger there is of losing it, etc.; (_d_) interpretation of the union jack, or of the canadian ensign. . in geography: (_a_) story of the "all-red" route, or of the "all-red" cable--explain the meaning of "all-red" by reference to the map; (_b_) "the sun never sets on the british flag." make this clear by having pupils notice on the map that there are red spots, showing british territory, on or not very far from every meridian line; british ships, too, are in every part of the ocean; (_c_) compare the population and area of great britain, canada, australia, the united states, germany, france, etc. . in arithmetic: the pupils may discover how many people there are to the square mile in these countries; they may be asked to work out the population canada would have if she were as densely populated as england, as the united states, as germany, etc.; how fast did the population of the united states increase in the first century after the revolution; what will the population of canada be in fifty years, if it increases as rapidly as the population of the united states in the last fifty, etc.; at the present rate of increase, when will canada catch up to great britain? when surpass her? indicate thus the possible position and power of canada in the not distant future, in order to deepen the sense of responsibility for the use made of our opportunities. (let the pupils search for as much of the material needed for these calculations as they can find in their text-books.) . in composition: subjects may be given for either oral or written composition; they may be reproductions of some of the exercises mentioned above, or may be on topics connected with them. . in drawing: pupils may draw the flag, or any map needed above. type lessons form iv introductory as described in the details of method for form iv (see p. ), the ideal method of teaching in this form is the oral method, which means not only the narration of the story, but the presentation to the pupils of problems connected with the lesson that the experiences of the class may help to solve. the full narration here of the lessons selected would be like doing over again the work of the text-book; accordingly, in the majority of the lessons, a topical analysis is all that is given. the value of a topical analysis is that it emphasizes the principal points that should be described or developed and, more important still, that it assists the pupils to _understand_ the lesson better, that is, to see more clearly the relation of cause and effect. the topical analysis will also suggest to the teacher how to prepare a lesson. there is no better evidence that a period of history is understood by the teacher than the ability to make a clear, concise analysis of it. this analysis should then be used instead of the text-book in teaching the lesson, and the use of it will, after a little practice has made the teacher more expert, contribute, to a surprising degree, to increased interest in the class. egerton ryerson one of the objects of instruction in civics is to create in the pupils ideals of citizenship that may influence their conduct in after life. the most powerful agency to use for this object is the life of some useful and patriotic citizen who gave his talents and energy to the bettering of his country. in using biography for this purpose the pupils should be given only such facts as they can comprehend, and these facts should be made as real, vivid, and interesting as possible by appropriate personal details and concrete description. the following sketch may serve as an example: dr. ryerson, in speaking of his birth and parentage, said: i was born on march th, , in the township of charlotteville, near the village of vittoria, in the then london district, now the county of norfolk. my father had been an officer in the british army during the american revolution, being a volunteer in the prince of wales' regiment of new jersey, of which place he was a native. his forefathers were from holland, and his more remote ancestors were from denmark. at the close of the american revolutionary war, he, with many others of the same class, went to new brunswick, where he married my mother, whose maiden name was stickney, a descendant of one of the early massachusetts puritan settlers. near the close of the last century, my father with his family followed an elder brother to canada, where he drew some , acres of land from the government for his services in the army, besides his pension. ryerson's mother had a very strong influence over him. she was a very religious woman with a great love for her children, and from her egerton learned lessons that never ceased to influence him. after telling how she treated him when he had done something naughty, he says that "though thoughtless and full of playful mischief, i never afterwards knowingly grieved my mother, or gave her other than respectful and kind words." the whole family had to work hard at clearing the land and farming it. before he was twenty-one years of age he "had ploughed every acre of ground for the season, cradled every stalk of wheat, rye, and oats, and mowed every spear of grass, pitched the whole first on a wagon, and then from the wagon to the haymow or stack." this was the work that gave him strength and health to do the great things that were before him. his years in the district school were few, yet he made such good use of them that when he was only fifteen years old he was asked to take the place of one of his teachers during the latter's illness. further instruction from teachers was not given him till he came of age. then he went to hamilton to study in the gore district grammar school for one year. here he studied so strenuously that he was seized with an attack of brain fever, which was followed by inflammation of the lungs. his life was despaired of, but his good constitution and his mother's nursing restored him to health. shortly afterwards he began his work as a methodist preacher. when twenty-three years old, he undertook a mission to the indians at the credit and resided among them as one of themselves, to show them better ways of living and working. this is part of his account: "between daylight and sunrise, i called out four of the indians in succession and, working with them, showed them how to clear and fence in, and plough and plant their first wheat and cornfields. in the afternoon i called out the schoolboys to go with me, and cut and pile and burn the brushwood in and around the village." in _the christian guardian_ newspaper was organized as the organ of the methodists, and the young preacher placed in the editorial chair; in he was chosen president of victoria college. in dr. ryerson was appointed chief superintendent of education for upper canada. he immediately set himself to awaken the country to a proper estimate of the importance of education, and to improve the qualifications of teachers. he urged the people to build better schools and to pay better salaries, so that well-qualified teachers could be engaged. he visited foreign countries to study their systems and methods that he might make the schools of upper canada more efficient. a provincial normal and model school was established in , better books were provided for the pupils, more and better apparatus and maps for all schools. all this was done in the face of many difficulties inevitable in a new country--popular ignorance, apathy, lack of means to build schools and support them, lack of time to attend them. the opposition of many who did not set the same value on education that he himself did had also to be faced. with unwearied zeal, steadfast courage, and unfailing patience, he met these difficulties. for over thirty years, he devoted his matured manhood and great endowments to the task of developing a public sentiment in favour of education, and of building on sure foundations a system of elementary and secondary schools that is the just pride of our province and his own best monument. in he resigned his position of chief superintendent, and was succeeded by a minister of education. he had nobly fulfilled the promise he made on accepting office in --"to provide for my native country a system of education, and facilities for intellectual improvement not second to those in any country in the world." he died in . to honour him in his death as he had served it in his life the whole country seemed assembled, in its representatives, at his funeral. members of the legislature, judges, university authorities, ecclesiastical dignitaries, thousands from the schools which he had founded, and above all, the common people, for whose cause he never failed to stand, followed to the grave the remains of the great canadian who had lived so faithfully and well for his country. note.--if the pupils have been told about the pilgrim fathers, and the u.e. loyalists, a review of those stories will add interest to this lesson; if not, it will serve as an introduction to them. for a form iv class, the following should be included in the lesson: with the close of the war of there opened a new era in the history of canada. its people had realized that their country was worth fighting for, and they had defended it successfully. a new interest in its political life was awakened, new movements inaugurated. these were along three lines--one, political with responsible government as its object; another, religious with equal rights and privileges for all churches as its aim; a third, educational with equal and efficient instruction for all without distinction of class or creed as its purpose. the first movement is known as the struggle for responsible government--the struggle for equal political rights; the second, as the secularization of the clergy reserves--the struggle for equal religious rights; the third as the university question--the struggle for non-denominational control of education. in the second and third movements dr. ryerson played a very prominent part and, because these affected the politics of his day, he took a keen interest in the first. note.--for purposes of reference, consult _the story of my life_ by dr. ryerson; _the ryerson memorial volume_ by dr. j.g. hodgins; _egerton ryerson_ by nathaniel burwash in the makers of canada; and _egerton ryerson_ by j.h. putnam. the intercolonial railway the lesson may be begun best by referring to the provisions in the british north america act for the building of the railway. (if the class knows nothing yet of this act, reference may be made to dominion day, and the act associated with it, by explaining the significance of the day. the date of confederation, , may be written on the board for reference.) in the b.n.a. act, it was provided that "the canadian government should build a railway connecting the st. lawrence with halifax, to be commenced within six months after the union." _teacher._--did you notice the two places that were to be connected by the road? _pupil._--they were halifax and the st. lawrence river. _t._--why do you think halifax was chosen as one terminus? _p._--because it is near the sea. _t._--well, quebec is not far from the sea either. _p._--it is the nearest port for ocean-going steamers. _t._--do you know what happens to the st. lawrence every winter? _p._--it freezes up. _t._--yes. it is frozen over for about four months in the winter, and ocean-going vessels cannot use the river then, so halifax was chosen as a good winter port on the atlantic. now, what place on the st. lawrence would be chosen as the other terminus? _p._--most likely either quebec or montreal. _t._--we can tell better a little later which one was actually chosen. here is a thing that i want you to think about. why should they build the railway just to the st. lawrence? were there many people living in upper canada fifty years ago? _p._--yes, as many people as there were in quebec province. _t._--really there were about , more here than in quebec. how would the people here ship their goods in the winter? how do we send our goods to europe now in winter? (several suggestions were made. finally it was stated that we could ship by water in summer, and by rail in winter.) _t._--you know that there are some rapids on the st. lawrence before we reach montreal. how do we manage about them? _p._--by using the canals. _t._--how can we ship by rail? _p._--by using the grand trunk or the canadian pacific railway. _t._--now, i shall have to tell you something about the canals and the first railway from upper canada. there were several canals already built on the st. lawrence: the lachine, welland, and others. in fact, we had spent about $ , , on canals before confederation. the grand trunk railway was running from sarnia to quebec city by , just eleven years before confederation. (have a pupil trace the line from sarnia to quebec, so that the class may see how much of upper canada was served by the grand trunk.) can you tell me now what place on the st. lawrence would be taken as the western terminus of the new railway? _p._--yes, quebec would be the one. _t._--why? _p._--because the people of upper canada had ways already for sending their goods as far as quebec city. _t._--the next point to think about is--how had canada been shipping her goods across the sea in winter before this? (several suggestions were made. "we would have to keep everything till the next summer." "we would have to use ice-boats." objections were raised to these methods to show that they were impossible. finally one pupil thought that we could send our freight through the united states.) _t._--well, why did the people not continue doing that, instead of wanting to build a railway of their own? _p._--the united states would likely make them pay for doing it. _t._--let me explain about that. in , a treaty had been made between canada and the united states, called the reciprocity treaty, by which the two countries exchanged their goods freely. this treaty was ended in , and the people of canada had to depend more on themselves. besides, there was a good deal of trouble between britain and the united states, arising out of the civil war in the latter country, which had just ended. (the pupils are told here about the "trent" and "alabama" affairs, and the fenian raids of .) the people at that time were afraid that there might be war between the two countries and, of course, that would bring canada into the trouble. do you see now why a railway was needed from quebec to halifax? _p._--because there was danger of war, and because the united states might interfere with canadian trade. _t._--there were both military and commercial reasons. we have found now why the road was to run from halifax to quebec, and why it had to be built at that time. the next thing to find out is--where it was to be built. if you were a railway contractor and had to build the road without thinking of anything but getting it done, what route would you be likely to follow? _p._--i think i should take the shortest way. _t._--where would the road go then? (have a pupil place a ruler on the map from quebec to halifax.) tell where it would run. _p._--through quebec province, the state of maine, new brunswick, and nova scotia. _t._--would the people build it along that line? don't forget the reasons for building it at all. _p._--they wouldn't go through the state of maine, because that is in the united states. _t._--what is the next way they might think of? _p._--the next shortest way so as to keep in canada. _t._--where would that be? (pupil comes up and tells from the map.) _p._--from quebec city through quebec, along the edge of maine, into new brunswick and nova scotia. _t._--would they take that way? _p._--no, because it is too near the border of the united states. _t._--why do you say "too near"? _p._--if there was war, soldiers from the united states might come over and wreck the railway. they might dynamite the bridges or tear up the rails. _t._--as a matter of fact, they did not take that way. what route could be taken to prevent any trouble of that kind? _p._--they would stay as far from the border as possible. _t._--where would that be? (pupil comes to the map to find out.) _p._--they would have to follow the st. lawrence for some distance. _t._--how far? _p._--right down to the other side of new brunswick. then down to halifax. _t._--would that be the cheapest line to build? _p._--it would cost more, because it is longer than the others. _t._--it is really miles longer than the next shortest. which of the reasons we have mentioned would make them want to keep as far from the border as they could? _p._--the military reason. _t._--which country, canada or britain, would be the most interested in the military considerations? _p._--britain, because canada depended on her for protection. _t._--is there any other reason, one connected with the cost? where would the money come from? _p._--britain would likely have to supply a good part of it. _t._--why? _p._--because there were not very many people here then. _t._--yes, we have to borrow a good deal of money for such purposes even yet. the british government was to supply the money for the railway, and would want to have something to say as to where it was to be built. the pupils could now be asked to discover from the map the chief places on the line of the railway. have them written on the board. the teacher would add some information about the length of the line ( , miles), and the total cost ($ , , ). he might also refer to the fact that the fear of war that caused that route to be followed was not realized, that the intercolonial did good service in bringing the provinces closer together, and that other railways have since been built on the two rejected routes, namely, the canadian pacific railway and the grand trunk pacific. the facts of the lesson should then be gone over again, following the black-board outline that has been made as the lesson proceeds. black-board outline . provision in the british north america act for the building of the road . reasons for building the road (_a_) military (_b_) commercial . selection of the route (_a_) routes that were possible (_b_) reasons for the final choice . facts about the road (_a_) principal places on the road (_b_) branches of the road (_c_) length and cost . value of the road to the new dominion the class may be asked afterwards to draw a map showing the route and the chief commercial centres served by the railway. industrial revolution in england, - . note.--this lesson should be preceded by an information lesson on the making of cotton goods--the material, how and where the raw material is grown, how it is harvested, the difference between spinning and weaving, the meaning of warp and woof. the aim of this lesson is to show how a remarkable series of inventions changed completely the processes of manufacturing, made england the greatest manufacturing nation in the world, and gave her a source of wealth that enabled her to carry on the costly wars against napoleon. the half century of this revolution is one of the most important in english history, on account of the results in methods of transportation, in agriculture, in social conditions, etc., and it is almost impossible to have a satisfactory knowledge of succeeding history without understanding this period. it is for this reason that it is treated at such length. this may be divided into as many lessons as the teacher wishes. the dates given are not intended to be memorized by the pupils; they are introduced simply to emphasize the order of the inventions. to emphasize further the sequence, the class may be asked at each step what invention would be needed next. the oral method--both pure narrative, and development--is supposed to be used. . _domestic system of manufacture._--before the manufacture of cotton goods was carried on in the homes of the people. a spinner would procure a supply of raw cotton from the dealer and carry it home, where, with the help of his family, he would spin it into threads or yarn and return it to the dealer. the spinning was all done by hand or foot-power on a wheel that required one person to run it, and that would make only one thread at a time. the weaving was also done at home. because of the use of kay's flying shuttle ( ), the demand of the weavers for yarn was greater than the spinners could supply, because one weaver could use the product of many spinners, and there was great need of finding some way of producing yarn more rapidly, to keep the weavers busy. . _hargreaves' spinning-jenny._--the first important invention of the period was the spinning-jenny of hargreaves ( ). this man was an ordinary spinner, and the story is told that one day, when he was returning from the dealer with a fresh supply of cotton, he came home before his wife expected him. supper was not ready, and in her haste to rise to prepare it, she overturned the wheel when it was still in motion. hargreaves, entering at that moment, noticed that the spindle, usually horizontal, was now revolving in an upright position. this gave him the idea, and a short time afterwards he invented a machine with which one person could spin several threads at once (at first eight). from it has been developed the complicated machinery for spinning used to-day. . _arkwright's spinning-frame or water-frame._ sir richard arkwright invented, in , a machine that accomplished the whole process of spinning, the worker merely feeding the machine and tying breaks in the thread. this machine was run by water-power, thus doing away with hand-power and allowing the operator to attend entirely to the spinning. . _the mule._ in , crompton invented a mule, by which threads of a finer and stronger quality could be spun, and thus made it possible to weave any grade of cloth. . _the power-loom._ the spinners were now able to keep ahead of the weavers, till cartwright invented, in , a power-loom that enabled the weavers to work faster and use all the thread that the spinners could make. . _the steam-engine._ these machines were run by hand or water-power. in , watts' steam-engine, invented several years before this, was used in the manufacture of cotton, and manufacturers were now able to use all the raw material they could get. the use of steam instead of water-power led to the building of factories in cities, where labour was plentiful and transportation facilities good. this meant large cities. . _the cotton-gin._ cotton had to be cleaned of its seeds before it could be used in the factory. this had to be done by hand, which greatly hindered the supply of raw material. a good deal of the raw cotton came from the united states, and the planters there grew no more than could be cleaned and sold. in , eli whitney, an american, invented the cotton-gin, by which the cotton could be cleaned of its seed very quickly. formerly a workman could clean by hand only five pounds of cotton a week; by the saw-gin five hundred pounds could be cleaned in an hour. (if a cotton-boll can be procured, the pupils will soon discover how difficult it is to separate the seeds from the cotton.) more cotton was then grown, because it could be sold to the factories, and england was able to get all she required to keep the factories going. it may be added here that the increase in cotton growing required more hands for its cultivation; at that time, this meant more slaves; the cotton-gin was therefore a large factor in the slave troubles in the southern states that led to the civil war. . _coal-mining and smelting._ these machines were made of iron, and coal was needed to run the engines and to smelt the iron. there was plenty of coal in england, but very little was mined until the steam pump was brought into use to keep the mines clear of water. when this was done, more men went to work in the mines to get out the greater amount of coal that was now needed. there was also plenty of iron ore in england, and before this it had been smelted by means of charcoal, which is made from wood. this slow and wasteful method was followed until roebuck invented a process of smelting by coal, and thus made possible a plentiful supply of iron for the manufacture of the machines. . _the safety lamp._ coal-mining was a dangerous occupation, because of the fire-damp that is generated in mines. the open lamps used by the miners often caused this gas to explode and many men lost their lives thereby. to remedy this, sir humphrey davy invented the safety lamp in , which gave the miners the light they needed and prevented these explosions. . _transportation._ now that there was so much manufacturing carried on, people turned their attention to ways of transporting the goods to where they were needed. the roads were generally wretched, and in many parts of the country goods had to be carried on the backs of horses, as the roads were not fit for wheels. macadam, by using broken stone to form the road-crust or surface, brought about a great improvement in road-making. (show pictures of old-time roads and of the roads to-day.) transportation by water was difficult by reasons of the obstructions in rivers. to overcome these, canals were dug. the first one was made in between some coal-mines and the town of manchester. before many more were dug, and transportation became much easier. . _agriculture._ the number of people engaged in the factories was increasing and these could not grow their own food. this made it necessary for the farmers to increase their output. farms became larger; better methods of cultivation were used; winter roots were grown, making it possible to raise better cattle; fertilizers were used in greater quantities, and the rotation of crops was introduced to prevent the exhaustion of the soil. . _social conditions._ out of the factory system grew the division of classes into capital and labour, the struggle between which is the great problem of to-day. it was then that labour unions came into existence. we see, as a result of these inventions, that england was changed from an agricultural country to a land of large manufacturing cities, and became the chief manufacturing centre of the world, able to supply money to defeat napoleon bonaparte, who is credited with the statement that it was not england's armies that defeated him, but her "spindles." note.--the teacher may refer to some of the modern social problems resulting in large part from this industrializing of the country: overcrowding in cities, bad housing and slums, urban and suburban transportation, educational problems, intemperance, decrease in physique, etc. (for the history of this period, see _a history of the british nation_, by a.d. innes, t.c. & e.c. jack, edinburgh.) the road to cathay the aim of this lesson is to show how the desire of certain european nations to find a western route to the rich countries of the east--india, cathay, and cipango (india, china, and japan)--led to the discovery and subsequent exploration of america. it can be used as a review lesson on the exploration of canada. it will also give the pupil practice in collecting information from various sources so as to show the development of history along a certain line. the subject-matter may be divided into as many lessons as the teacher thinks best, and the oral method should be used. all the dates given are not intended to be memorized; they are used to show the historical sequence; only three or four of the most important need be committed to memory by the class at their present stage. the map should be used frequently. the lesson one of the results of the crusades was to reveal to the european nations the wealth of the east. trade between the east and west grew, and venice became one of the wealthiest and most powerful of the states of europe. in , a venetian traveller named marco polo returned from cathay after an absence of twenty-five years. his stories of the wealth in silks, spices, pearls, etc., of those eastern countries intensified the desire of the west to trade with them. a great commerce soon grew up, carried on principally by the great italian cities--venice, florence, genoa, pisa, milan--and as these cities controlled the mediterranean, the only route to asia then known, they had a monopoly of the eastern trade, and kept for a time the other western nations--spain, portugal, france, and england--from sharing in it. these nations, animated by the hope of gain and by the spirit of adventure and exploration, could not long be denied their share. this spirit was stimulated by the introduction of the mariner's compass, which afforded sailors a safer guide than landmarks and stars; by the invention of gunpowder and the use of cannon, which, through lessening the strength of the mediæval castle, tended to increase the power of the middle classes; and by the invention of printing, which aided greatly in the diffusion of knowledge. the problem was to find a route by which to trade with india and china. place the map of the world before the pupils and inquire how men travel to-day from great britain to india. show that these routes were not feasible then. the route through the mediterranean to asia minor and thence overland, or through the red sea to india, was closed by the turks, who captured constantinople in . the suez canal was not opened till . the way round the cape of good hope was not discovered till . the western route across the atlantic and the pacific was unknown. not till the closing years of the fifteenth century were the attempts to solve this problem successful. the discovery of the route to india by vasco de gama in first opened the way to the east, though the still earlier discovery by columbus was to afford, in later years, a much more complete solution. christopher columbus was a native of genoa in italy. an eager student of geography, he became convinced that the earth was a sphere or globe and not a flat surface. he believed that he could reach india and cathay by sailing west, as well as by going east through the mediterranean--a route that had been closed since the capture of constantinople by the turks in . "this grand idea, together with his services in carrying it out, he offered first to his motherland of genoa. but genoa did not want a new route to the east. then he turned, but in vain, to portugal. the hopes of portugal were set upon a passage around the south of africa. to england and to france columbus held out his wondrous offer; but these countries were slow and unbelieving. it was to spain he made his most persistent appeal; and spain, to his imperishable glory, gave ear." through the self-denial and devotion of queen isabella of castile he was enabled to put his dream to the test. a special lesson should be given on the life of columbus--his efforts, perseverance, courage, failures, successes. the teacher may add at will to the facts given here. read joaquin miller's poem, "columbus," _high school reader_, pp. - . when columbus landed on the island-fringe of america in , he thought he had found what he had set out to find--the eastern country of india; and he believed it all his life. this idea survived for several generations, partly because of the great wealth of mexico and peru. when europeans were at last convinced that it was not india, they began again to seek a way to the east, and looked on the continent of america merely as an obstacle in their path. to find the road to cathay was still their chief ambition. in , john cabot, under a charter from henry vii of england, set out to find a way to the east, and landed on north america; in , his son, sebastian cabot, explored the coast from labrador to south carolina, with the same object. in , on his first voyage, cartier thought, when he arrived at gaspé and saw the great river coming from the west, that he had discovered the gateway to the east. with the same object in view, champlain, in , explored the richelieu river and lake champlain. in , he listened, only to be deceived, to the story of vignau about a way to the east up the ottawa river to a large lake and into another river that would lead to the western sea. henry hudson made four voyages in search of a way through or round the continent. on the first, second, and fourth, he tried to go round by a north-west or a north-east passage. on the third voyage, in , he sailed up the hudson river for miles, only to find his way blocked. a curious fact is that on this voyage he must, at one time, have been only about twenty leagues from champlain, when the latter was exploring lake champlain on the same errand. (show this on the map.) on his fourth voyage, in , hudson discovered the bay that now bears his name, and he must have thought, when he saw that great stretch of water to the west, that he was at last successful. he wintered there, and when the ice broke up in the spring, his men mutinied and set him, his young son, and two companions, adrift in a boat, and they were never heard of again. (see _the story of the british people_ pp. - .) the mississippi was long looked upon as a possible way to the pacific ocean. la salle explored the great lakes and the ohio, illinois, and mississippi rivers. this last he found to flow south into the gulf of mexico, instead of west into the pacific ocean. his settlement on montreal island was called _la chine_ (the french word for china), in allusion to his desire to find the way to that country. later, others were led by the same desire to explore the western part of what is now canada. vérendrye, in , travelled from lake nepigon by way of rainy lake, the winnipeg river, and the red river, to the junction of the latter with the assiniboine, where winnipeg now stands; also up the saskatchewan river to the forks. his son, in , explored the missouri river and came within sight of the rocky mountains. men of the hudson's bay company and of the north-west company--mackenzie, fraser, thompson, simpson, hearne--amid great hardships and through thrilling adventures, continued the work of exploring the waterways of the west to find an opening to the pacific. it has remained to the people of canada to conquer the passes of the rockies and selkirks, build great transcontinental railways and steamship lines, and thus afford a direct short route from europe to cathay. what men had striven for during more than four hundred years it has been our lot to accomplish. other topics of interest suggested by the lesson may be taken up afterwards; for example, the opening of the suez canal and its effect on trade--why it did not restore supremacy to the italian cities; the opening of the panama canal and its probable effect on commerce; the reasons why merchants prefer water routes to land routes, etc. topical analysis of lesson on the armada the purpose of this lesson is to show how to construct a topical outline of an important event in history. it is assumed that the teacher will use, in preparing similar lessons, a larger history of britain than the public school text-book, in order that the class may be asked, after the lesson is taught, to read in their text-books an account somewhat different in treatment from that of the teacher. the headings should show the sequence of events and should be concise. the smaller print indicates the facts that the brief headings should recall to the pupils after the lesson. the events preceding the coming of the armada are suggested here among the causes. these headings may be placed on the black-board as the lesson proceeds; they may be suggested by either teacher or pupils. the actual teaching should be by both narrative and development methods. for the teacher's use a very interesting and trustworthy book is _a history of the british nation_, by a.d. innes, t.c. & e.c. jack, edinburgh. i. causes . _political._--(_a_) ambition of philip to rule europe; chief obstacles were england, france, the netherlands. (the opposition of france was overcome by a treaty and by the marriage of philip and isabella of france after elizabeth had refused philip's offer of marriage. the netherlands were in full revolt and could not be conquered even by the cruelties of alva and the destruction of their commerce. england was the chief protestant power in europe and, as such, was the chief opponent of spain.) (_b_) the marriage trouble; elizabeth's religious policy broke off negotiations of marriage with philip. (_c_) philip received as a legacy the rights of mary queen, of scots to the english throne. . _commercial_.--interference of the english in the new world, to which spain claimed sole right. (this includes the english settlements as well as the capture of spanish treasure ships. recall stories of drake, hawkins, etc.) . _religious._--philip was the chief supporter of roman catholicism in europe, and wished to impose his religion on england. (this was the period of compulsion in religious matters.) ii. events . preparations in spain and england. (spain set about preparing a large fleet, to carry soldiers as well as sailors. the best spanish general was in command at first. his death put an incapable man in command, who was largely responsible for the defeat. the duke of parma was to co-operate from the netherlands with a large army. in england, the small battle fleet was increased by the voluntary contributions of all classes till it actually outnumbered the spanish fleet, though the vessels were very much smaller. a comparison of the fleets as they were on the eve of battle should be made.) . difference in the national spirit in the two countries. (the spanish were on an expedition of conquest; the sailors were ill-trained and many serving against their will. the english were defending their homes; they forgot their religious and political differences in their patriotism; the sailors were hardy, fearless, and most skilful in handling their ships.) . the affair at cadiz. (retarded the invasion for a year, gave england more time for preparation, and encouraged hopes of success.) . the battle in the channel. (armada attacked on the way to dover, july -aug. , ; fireships at calais, aug. ; final engagement, aug. - ; a chance for a vivid description by the teacher.) . storm completes the ruin of the armada. (facts to be given as to the losses of the armada; recall stories of wrecked spanish vessels on the coasts of scotland, etc., and recommend class to read some story, such as kingsley's _westward ho!_) iii. results . ruin of spain and of philip's ambitions. [connect with i. (_a_)] . influence on england's patriotism and maritime power. . greater religious tolerance in england. . marvellous growth of literature in england partly due to this. . effect on america. it decided for all time that spain should not rule the new world, but that the anglo-saxons should, with all their ideals of political, social, and religious liberty. (see _p.s. history of england_, secs. - .) lesson on the feudal system (as many lesson periods as may be found desirable) _aim._ to give the pupils a knowledge of the manner in which land was held, ( ) by the saxons at different periods on the continent and in england; ( ) by the french; ( ) by the normans under william the conqueror, showing the changes he made in both saxon and french systems. step i . _introduction._ by questioning, the teacher elicits from one pupil that his father owns a farm; from another, that his father rents a farm; from a third, that his father works one "on shares." from this may be derived the meaning of "freehold," "leasehold," and "on shares," as applied to ways of holding land. for town and city classes, a parallel may be made by substituting "house" for "farm." as holding property "on shares" is not so common in cities, suggest possible cases, such as a florist's business, a rink, etc. . let pupils read the sketch of the saxon or "mark" system given in the _ontario public school history of england_, pp. and ; and then draw a plan of a saxon village from the passages read. step ii (given to the class by the teacher's oral explanation) . _the saxon system:_ further study of the early land tenure of the saxons. (see _ontario high school history of england_, p. .) the following extract from oman's _england before the norman conquest_ may be of assistance: the typical free settlement of an english _maegth_ (or kindred) consisted first of the large arable fields divided up into narrow strips, of which each household possessed several, next of the almost equally prized meadow, which was hedged off into appropriated lots in summer, but thrown back into common in winter, and lastly of the undistributed waste, from which the whole community would draw its wood supply, and on which it would pasture its swine, or even turn out its cattle for rough grazing at some seasons. the normal method of agriculture was the "three-field system," with a rotation of wheat, barley, or oats, and in the third year, fallow--to allow of the exhausted soil regaining some measure of its fertility. in the last year the field was left unfenced and the cattle of the community picked up what they could from it, when they were neither on the waste, nor being fed with the hay that had been mowed from the meadow. there seem to have been exceptional cases in which the strips of the arable were not permanently allotted to different households, but were distributed, by lot or otherwise, to different holders in different years. but this was an abnormal arrangement; usually the proprietorship of the strips in each field was fixed. and the usual arrangement would be that the fully endowed ceorl's household had just so much arable in its various strips as a full team of oxen could plough. then explain the origin of the names "eorl" and "thegn" (_p.s. hist. of eng._, pp. and ); the idea of protection (_p.s. hist. of eng._, p. ), and of sharing in the produce of the land, and the payment of necessary fees to the king. emphasize the ownership of the land by the freeman. . _the courts_: the _witan_, which could displace the king for certain reasons, the _shire_ or _folk-moot_, and the _tun-moot_; their powers; the people looked to these courts for justice. . _change_ brought about by danish raids--small freeholders sought protection from the greater lords; the shifting of ownership from small landowners to "eorls." step iii _the feudal system in france:_ (read scott's _quentin durward_.) barons too powerful for the king for various reasons: . their property was large and compact. . they administered justice, issued coinage, etc. . vassals swore allegiance to their immediate superior. by means of problem-questions develop from the pupils what william would probably do to strengthen his own position. step iv _the feudal system under william:_ (note the innovations of william.) . the land belonged solely to the king; it was not the normans as a tribe, but william personally, who conquered england. . the estates of the nobles were divided, either deliberately or because the land was conquered piecemeal and parcelled out as it was conquered. (for example, odo had manors in counties.) . the vassals swore direct allegiance to the king. . the witan was displaced by the great council, the members of which were the king's vassals; therefore with him, not against him. . the king's use of shire-reeves, personal dependants, who led the military levy of the counties and collected the king's taxes. . what were the chief taxes? from them came much political trouble in later times by attempts to rectify abuses in connection with them. . the teacher may describe the ceremony of the feudal oath. the important points of each step should be written on the black-board as they are described or developed. (the decay of the feudal system in england may be the topic of another lesson.) seigniorial tenure the aim of the lesson is to give the pupils a knowledge of the method of land tenure introduced into canada by the french; to enable them to trace the effects of this system upon the progress of the people and the development of the country; and to increase their interest in the present system of tenure. method in connection with sections and the description of the feudal system would show how the land was held in france; first by the king, under him by the greater nobles, then by the lesser nobles and the gentry, then by the large farmers who sublet it in small farms or hired men to work it. every one who held land had to do something for his lord. when this description is complete, let the pupils apply it to canada, the teacher supplying the names of the corresponding classes in canada. then the pupils may be asked to consider what return each holder would make for his land; this leads to a statement of the conditions of tenure in canada. then the evils connected with this system may be presented as another problem; for example, how would the actual workers be discouraged in making improvements that they would get no credit for? in connection with section , the pupils can contrast the method of holding land that they are familiar with, that is, by complete ownership, and can imagine what changes the english settlers would want. they are then ready to hear how and when these changes were brought about, and at what cost. the method is therefore a combination of the narrative and development, or problem, methods. the lesson . introduce the lesson by a reference to the system of holding land in ontario. (see lesson on the feudal system.) develop the leading principles of freehold tenure. what act gave the people of ontario this method of holding land? we are going to learn something about the system of holding land adopted by the french when they ruled canada. (see _ontario public school history_, chapter ix, also _ontario high school history of canada_, chap. viii.) . under the french the lands of canada were held in feudal tenure, which means that the king was regarded as the owner, and that rent was paid to him, not altogether in money, but partly in military service. large portions of land were granted in this way to officers and nobles. an important and imposing ceremony was that at which the lords of manors annually did homage to the king's representative at quebec. these _seigniors_, as they were called, had great powers within their domains. this method of tenure was similar to the system of holding land in france, called the feudal system. at this point the teacher might give a short description of the feudal system. picture to the pupils the old feudal castle and its surroundings. show how ill the common people were provided for in comparison with the lords. . cardinal richelieu introduced feudalism into canada about the year . he had two objects in view: (_a_) to create a canadian aristocracy, (_b_) to establish an easy system of dividing land among settlers. this system of holding land came to be known as seigniorial tenure. the seignior received vast tracts of land from the king, became his vassal, and in turn made grants to the _censitaires_, those who held their land on the payment of an annual rental. the censitaires secured _habitants_ to cultivate the soil. . the seignior was compelled to clear his estate of forest within a certain time. in order to do this he rented it, at from half a cent to two cents an acre, and received his rent in produce. if the censitaire sold the land which was cleared, he had to pay his seignior one twelfth of the price. if the seignior parted with his estate, he had to pay the king one fifth of the selling price. the forests of canada were not very attractive to the nobles of france; hence, but few of them settled in this country. some of the prominent colonists, however, were granted patents of nobility and became seigniors. prevented by their rank from cultivating the soil, they soon became bankrupt. then they turned their attention to the fur-trade, and later many of them became explorers and the most gallant defenders of new france. . in the year , canada became a british possession, and english settlers commenced to make homes for themselves in upper canada. their number was greatly increased by the united empire loyalists who came over after the american revolution. the english disliked the french method of holding land. under seigniorial tenure, the seller of land in a seigniory was compelled to pay the seignior an amount equal to one twelfth of the purchase money. as this was chargeable not only on the value of the land, but also on the value of all buildings and improvements, which, costing the seigniors nothing, were often more valuable than the land itself, it was considered by the english settlers an intolerable handicap. (centuries before this the feudal system had been abolished in england.) . in the british parliament passed the constitutional act which gave the people of upper canada the privilege of holding lands in their own name. in lower canada, too, those who wished were allowed to avail themselves of the freehold system, but the french did not take advantage of their opportunity. in the year seigniorial tenure was abolished, the government recompensing the seigniors for the surrender of their ancient rights and privileges, and freehold tenure, as in ontario, was introduced. . reasons why the seigniorial tenure failed: (_a_) it was not adapted to conditions in canada. (_b_) it did not provide sufficient incentive to settlers to improve their lands. (_c_) it gave the habitant no chance to rise. (_d_) it tended to divide the population into three classes. (_e_) it failed to develop a civic spirit. this fact alone made progress practically impossible. each seignior was the master of his own domain. thus the people had no opportunity of working together, and under such circumstances no great national spirit could be developed. . note the effect of the conquest of canada and of the american revolution, upon seigniorial tenure. confederation of canadian provinces topical analysis _causes:_ . the idea of union an old one in canada and the maritime provinces; foreshadowed in durham's report. . immediate cause in canada was the question of representation by population; deadlock in parliament. . immediate cause in maritime provinces was the feeling between britain and the colonies and the united states over the _trent_ affair, the _alabama_ trouble, and the idea in the northern states that the british colonies favoured the cause of the south in the civil war. _steps toward confederation:_ . meeting of delegates from the maritime provinces in charlottetown in . . meeting in quebec, , of delegates from all the provinces favours confederation. . newfoundland and prince edward island reject the proposal, and delegates from upper canada (ontario), lower canada (quebec), nova scotia, and new brunswick proceed to london to secure an act of union from the imperial government. . movement in favour of union hastened by united states giving notice in of the termination of the reciprocity treaty in a year, and by the fenian raid, . . union accomplished by means of the british north america act passed by the british parliament in , and brought into force on july st, . the provinces confederated as the dominion of canada; a federal union. _outline of terms:_ see _ontario public school history of canada_, p. . provision made for admission of new provinces. _expansion of confederation:_ admission of other provinces--manitoba, ; british columbia, ; prince edward island, ; alberta and saskatchewan, ; yukon territory also represented in the dominion parliament. notes of a lesson on the influence of geographical conditions on the history of a country correlation of history and geography general the history of a nation is influenced very largely by geographical facts. its internal relations, whether friendly or hostile, are affected by these. natural barriers, such as mountains, seas, or great lakes and rivers, are often political frontiers exerting protecting or isolating influence. its industrial progress depends primarily upon its natural products--minerals, grains, woods, fish, etc., and the facilities which its structure affords for trade, both domestic and foreign. a sea-coast, with satisfactory harbours, tends to produce a sea-faring people, and therefore a trading people. the character of its people is conditioned by the zone in which the nation is situated. in the north temperate zone is the climate best suited for the growth of peoples vigorous in mind and body, and lovers of freedom. england _position:_ the forming of the straits of dover cut off a corner of europe, made great britain an island, and later a single political unit. situated between europe and america with ports opening toward each, her position gives her the opportunity for naval and commercial greatness. the narrow sea separating her from the continent is a defence in war and a means of intercourse in peace. _structure:_ two regions--one of plain, the other of hills; a line drawn from the mouth of the tees to the mouth of the severn and continued to the south coast roughly divides these regions. the part lying east of this line is, roughly speaking, level and fertile, tempting emigration from the continent, and easily explored inward. the angles, the saxons, and the jutes found their way into this plain through the rivers that flowed east and south. the pennines, the welsh peninsula, and the southwest of england from bristol are in the hilly part, which, because of its mineral wealth, has become the great industrial district. _climate:_ though england lies north of the fiftieth parallel, the moist southwest winds from the ocean temper the climate, making the winters mild and the summers cool, a climate favourable to the growth of a vigorous race. there is an abundant rainfall. _products:_ on the plains a fertile soil supported a large agricultural, and therefore self-contained, population in the earlier days, and the slopes furnished pasturage for cattle and sheep. proximity to coal is an almost indispensable condition for industries, though other considerations come in. in the hill country coal and iron, essential materials for a manufacturing nation, lie near to the deposits of limestone necessary for smelting the iron ore. the coal-fields on or near the coast are centres of shipbuilding; and the interior coal-fields the centres of the great textile industries. because of her insular position and fleets of ships the raw products from other countries can be brought to england easily and cheaply, and then shipped out as manufactured goods. consult: _a historical geography of the british empire_. hereford b. george, methuen & co., london. _the relations of geography and history_. hereford b. george, clarendon press, oxford. another form of the lesson the teacher will announce the topic for discussion, namely, how the history of great britain has been affected by her insular position. _t._--trace on the map the coast line of great britain. (pupil does so.) what do you notice about the coast line in comparison to the size of the island? _p._--it is very irregular and has a good many bays and inlets. _t._--would this have any effect on the life and occupations of the people? _p._--they would almost have to be sailors. _t._--in other words, a maritime people. do you think that is usual? look at the coast line of japan. (class sees that it is much the same as that of britain: the japanese are also a maritime race.) what is one occupation the people would follow? _p._--they would probably be fishermen. (the teacher may give some idea of the extent of the fishing. the same may be done with each new point, as it comes up.) _t._--what else would they do? _p._--they would probably engage in trade or commerce. _t._--with which countries? study the map for a moment. _p._--with those on the west of europe, and with america. _t._--yes. you must notice that great britain is situated very favourably for trade with the whole world. is there anything on the map to show this? _p._--there are a great many lines on the map that show the water routes from britain to almost every country in the world. _t._--suppose britain had trouble with any other country that might be a cause of war, would her position make any difference to her? _p._--no country could attack her except by water. _t._--how would she defend herself? _p._--she would have to depend on her ships. (a good opening for a brief outline of the growth of the navy.) _t._--where would she get her ships? _p._--she builds them herself. _t._--isn't she dependent on any other nation at all? _p._--no, she has always had the material in her own country for that. _t._--what are they built of? _p._--the old ships were wooden, and she had plenty of the best timber,--oak. _t._--what are they built of to-day? _p._--most of them are of iron. _t._--where does she get that? _p._--from her own mines. _t._--now, look at the latitude of britain. what part of our country has the same latitude? _p._--labrador. _t._--what is the climate of labrador? _p._--very cold. _t._--then the climate of britain ought to be the same? _p._--the water around it would make it not so cold. _t._--yes. the ocean currents from the south help to make the climate milder, too. there would be plenty of rain, besides. now, how would a moist, mild climate affect agriculture in england? _p._--they ought to be able to grow almost everything that we can. (similarly, many other points may be taken up and developed with the class.) st. lawrence river incidental teaching of history with geography _aim._--to show general connection between history and geography. _material required._--a black-board sketch of that part of canada adjacent to the st. lawrence and a set of pictures (or picture post-cards) showing the important historical sites along the banks of the river. _introduction._--the teacher asks a few questions to make clear the purpose of the map and to fix the location of the principal towns and cities--kingston, brockville, prescott, ogdensburg, morrisburg, cornwall, lachine, montreal, three rivers, levis, quebec, tadoussac, and gaspé. _presentation._--the lesson is assumed to be a pleasure trip by boat from port hope to the atlantic. the teacher will tell of the departure from port hope and the arrival at kingston, the first port. while there, he will ask why the place was given the name of kingston. (it was named in honour of george iii; as queenston, at the upper end of the lake, was in honour of queen charlotte.) leaving kingston the teacher will describe (showing pictures) the appearance of the fort on the point and, with the pupils, will recall its establishment by frontenac in , and its use as a check on the indians, and will note its use now as a storehouse, barracks, and training camp for soldiers. (_ontario public school history_, pp. , .) as the trip is continued down the river, they notice, in passing, the beautiful thousand islands, and the town of brockville--its name commemorating the hero of queenston heights. immediately below prescott is seen on the bank of the river an old wind-mill, the scene of the patriot invasion under von schultz, a polish adventurer. (see _ontario public school history_, p. , and picture in weaver's _canadian history for boys and girls_, p. .) across the river lies ogdensburg, the scene of a raid in . colonel macdonell, the british leader, who was drilling his small force on the ice, made a sudden attack upon the town, defeated the americans, captured a large amount of stores and ammunition, and burned four armed vessels which lay in the harbour. (see _ontario public school history_, p. .) from this point the boat passes rapidly through the narrow part of the river at iroquois (recall the indians of that name), past the flourishing town of morrisburg, until, on the north bank, appears a monument of gray granite, erected as a memorial of the battle of crysler's farm, fought in this vicinity in . (see _ontario public school history_, p. .) after passing through the long sault rapids, cornwall, noted as the seat of the first grammar school in ontario, is reached. the river now widens into a lake and does not narrow until it passes coteau, after which it passes through a chain of rapids and nears lachine, the "la chine" of la salle, and the scene of numerous indian fights and massacres. (see _ontario school geography_, p. , and _ontario public school history of canada_, p. .) ten miles to the east is montreal, the most populous city in canada, with its royal mount, and its many memories of early settlement in canada. (see _ontario school geography_, p. .) just above quebec the river, now two miles wide, passes the bold cliffs up which wolfe's men climbed to the plains of abraham, and sweeps around the citadel and lower town. on the heights may be seen the monuments erected in honour of champlain, and wolfe and montcalm. in imagination, pictures may be formed of the scenes that marked the close of french rule in canada. the river flows on past tadoussac, long the centre of the canadian fur-trade, past gaspé where cartier landed and laid claim to the surrounding country in the name of the king of france, till its banks fade from sight and its waters mingle with those of the atlantic. in teaching such lessons as this, the oral narrative and question method is used. it is a review lesson, and reproduction may follow in a written exercise. the relations between england and scotland from to the purpose of this analysis is to explain by what show of right the kings of england interfered so much in scottish affairs. the analysis also aims to show how correct and definite views on certain topics may be had only by following out those topics through history, neglecting all facts but those bearing on the topic studied. . in the tenth century, malcolm i obtained strathclyde (see map, _ontario public school history of england_, p. ) as a fief from edmund of england. his grandson, malcolm ii, was invested with lothian, before this a part of the english earldom of northumbria. these fiefs are the basis of all claims afterwards made by english kings as overlords of scotland. . malcolm iii ( - ) married margaret, sister of edgar atheling. the norman conquest drove many saxons north, and the saxon element in scotland was strengthened by this. . william the conqueror compelled malcolm's submission, . this kept alive the english claims. . henry i married matilda of scotland. many normans went to scotland in the reign of david ( - ). the feudal system was introduced and firmly established under norman influence. ecclesiastical foundation begun. friendly relations strengthened. . as the price of his liberty, william the lyon agreed, by the convention of falaise, , to hold scotland as a fief of england. . to raise money for his crusade, richard i of england renounced, in , his feudal rights over scotland for , marks, and for the first time acknowledged her independence. . the border line was fixed for the first time in . . the death of margaret, daughter of alexander iii, , left the crown a bone of contention; balliol finally secured it by favour of edward i of england, the overlord of scotland. then followed the war of independence under wallace and bruce and the battle of bannockburn, . this long and destructive war caused the scots to have a deadly hatred of the english, and drove scotland into alliance with france, the great enemy of england, and consolidated the different races in scotland. . scotland thus became involved in the many wars between england and france and attacked england whenever she and france were at war. . in , the independence of scotland was acknowledged. . friendship with france and distrust of england continued well into the reformation period, and in the main determined scotland's foreign policy. . with the change of religion in scotland at the reformation, french influence came to an end. religious sympathy overcame the political hatred of england. . the trouble in connection with mary queen of scots and her imprisonment made for peace between the two countries, as scotland did not want to have mary released for fear of further civil war. . the accession of james vi, a scottish king, to the throne of england, ended almost entirely the differences between the two countries, and led finally to the legislative union a century later ( ). analysis of sections - , ontario public school history of england the parliament had already established its sole right to levy taxation. (see green's _short history of the english people_, p. .) under charles i the struggle was mainly about the manner in which the taxes should be spent; in other words, the parliament was trying to secure control of the executive, the other important element in responsible government. charles i held very strongly the belief in the "divine right" of kings and, naturally, this belief did not harmonize with the aim of parliament. disputes were constant: . differences concerning charles' marriage. . first parliament, , would grant "tonnage and poundage" for only one year. . second parliament, , refused money unless the conduct of the spanish war by buckingham was inquired into by parliament. . third parliament, - . charles raised some money by "forced loans," but far too little, for a new war with france was begun. parliament refused to grant money till the king signed the petition of right, which embodied all the points in dispute between them. . charles did not long observe the petition of right which he had signed; laud, bishop of london, was making changes in the church ceremonies that seemed to bring back the old religion. parliament solemnly protested against both these things, then quietly adjourned. some members were arrested--sir john eliot died in the tower--others were kept in prison for eleven years. . no parliament for eleven years. charles aimed during this period to raise money without parliament, and to establish the english church in the whole country. his methods of raising money were: (_a_) by granting monopolies (£ , ). (_b_) by star chamber fines--large fines for slight offences. (_c_) by illegal duties. (_d_) by "ship-money" (trial of hampden). his methods of establishing the english church were: (_a_) religious oppression--chief agent, laud; chief sufferers, the puritans. (_b_) attempt to force the english church prayer-book on scotland led to rebellion. this rebellion forced charles to summon parliament in order to raise money. parliament refused to give money till their grievances were redressed. it was dissolved in three weeks. urgent need of troops to keep back the scottish rebels made charles summon parliament again in six months ( ). this is known as the "long parliament." . (_a_) parliament first accused laud and strafford. (_b_) the "grand remonstrance" named the illegal acts of charles. (_c_) this led to charles' final blunder--the attempt to arrest the five members. . open war, now the only way out, went on till charles was captured and beheaded, and parliament held, for a time, entire control. suggestive outlines for reviews form iv i. _the era of reform in britain_: . the methodist revival, which stirred the hearts of the people, and gave them higher ideals . social reforms: (_a_) canning, the friend of the oppressed (_b_) wilberforce and the abolition of slavery (_c_) elizabeth fry and prison reform (_d_) revision of the criminal code . political reforms: (_a_) the reform bill (_b_) the chartist agitation (_c_) the repeal of the corn laws ii. _the puritan movement_: . its beginning under elizabeth . its growth under james i . the struggle and victory under charles i . triumph and decay under the commonwealth . its dissolution under charles ii . it was the root of the resistance offered to the misrule of james ii. for teachers' reference the stages in the development of civilization correlation of history and science the purpose of these notes, which are condensed from the article on "civilization" in the _encyclopaedia britannica_ (latest edition), is to provide the teacher with some interesting material, by the use of which he may impress on the pupils the far-reaching effects of certain inventions and discoveries, which are in such common use to-day that they are very likely to be underestimated. the number of lessons must be left entirely to the discretion of the teacher. notes the close relation between the progress of civilization, as told in history, and scientific inventions and discoveries is shown by lewis h. morgan, who has indicated nine stages in the upward march of mankind from the earliest times to the present. there are three stages of savagery, three of barbarism, and three of civilization, the close of each stage being marked by an important discovery or invention. the problem method may be used, by asking what each invention or discovery would enable the people to do that they could not do before. . the savages in the first stage were developing speech, lived on raw nuts and fruits, and were restricted to places where they could have warmth and food. this stage was ended by the discovery of _fire_. . with the use of fire, their food now included fish and perhaps flesh; they could migrate to colder climates. this stage ended with the invention of the _bow and arrow_. . with the bow and arrow, the savage was safer from fierce animals; he could kill also to get food, and skins for clothing and tents; with stronger food and better protection he could and did migrate into more distant, colder countries. this stage ended with the invention of _pottery_. . hitherto man had had no cooking utensils that could withstand fire. now he could boil his food, and his diet was extended to include boiled meat and vegetables. the next stage was reached by the _domestication of animals_. . the dog, the sheep, the ox, the camel, the horse were rapidly domesticated; some of these provided man with food independent of the chase; others gave him better, swifter means of travel and transportation. distant peoples were thus brought into contact and commerce began. new ideas were gained from each other. larger communities were formed, and towns and cities began. property became individual, instead of being communal. . this stage began with the invention of _iron-smelting_. immense progress was now possible in the various arts of peace: house-building, road-making, construction of vehicles, the making of all sorts of tools. by these tools man was now able to express his æsthetic nature as never before. implements of war also became more numerous and more deadly. . the human race was now lifted from the highest stage of barbarism to the lowest stage of civilization by one of the most important inventions that man has ever made--_writing_. this made possible the recording of man's deeds and thoughts for posterity, thus securing the gains of each generation for all succeeding generations, and making history possible. . the next stage of progress is marked by a group of inventions,--_gunpowder_, _the mariner's compass_, and _paper_ and the _printing press_. the middle ages, as we call them, were now ended, and the human race found itself on a stage as wide as the world. . the next invention, which came quickly after the preceding ones, and placed mankind in the present stage of civilization, was the _steam-engine_. the revolution which this brought about is so recent as to need no details here. (see lesson on the industrial revolution, p. .) what is to be the invention that will mark the entrance of the race on a higher stage still, when tennyson's dream of a "federation of the world the parliament of man" may be realized? is it the airship, giving man the conquest of the last element still unmastered? the new learning . the aim of this lesson is to make the pupils familiar with one of the most important movements in english history, by having them study the meaning, causes, tendencies, and effects of the new learning. . as an introduction, a lesson or two should be given on the conditions prevailing in europe during the latter part of the middle ages, because a knowledge of these conditions is essential to a right understanding of many of the causes of the new learning. the new learning was a phase of a greater movement called the renaissance, which arose in italy during the fourteenth century. the renaissance marked the end of the middle ages and the beginning of modern history. it meant re-birth, a new life. people took a new interest in living. the influence of the monk and of the knight was passing, and the man of affairs, with his broader sympathies, his keener vision, his more varied interests, and his love of liberty, was coming into prominence. how to enjoy life, how to get the greatest value out of it, became the great problem. in their attempt to solve this problem people turned their attention to the ancient literature of greece and rome; for it was believed that the ancient greeks and romans had a fine appreciation of the meaning and beauty of life. they began to seek out the old literature and to study it. this new study has been called the revival of learning or the new learning. the influence of these two great literatures soon made itself felt. every province of knowledge was investigated, and people everywhere were influenced by this great intellectual awakening. . the following were the chief causes of the movement: (_a_) the crusades (_b_) the fall of constantinople, (_c_) the introduction of the mariner's compass (_d_) the invention of gunpowder (_e_) the invention of the printing press (_f_) the overthrow of the feudal system (_g_) the desire for knowledge stimulated by the universities (_h_) the failure of the schools of the middle ages to meet the demands and needs of the times . the relation of each of these causes to the new learning must be shown. in dealing with the crusade movement as a cause, it will be necessary to help the children to see the effect produced on the people of northern europe by their coming into contact with the more highly cultivated people in southern europe; and the effect produced on the people of europe by their mingling with the nations of the luxurious east--the greeks of constantinople and the brilliant mohammedan scholars of palestine. the crusades made the people dissatisfied with the conditions that had prevailed so long in europe, and this fact alone gave an impetus to the new learning. the relation of printing to the spread of the movement is evident. the introduction of printing meant the cheapening of books, their more general use, and the spread of education. this was followed by a growing independence of thought, and a desire for greater political and religious freedom. the other causes may be similarly treated. . the new learning was represented in england by a group of scholars of whom erasmus, colet, and more were the chief. the great churchmen, too, were its patrons. men of every rank were interested, and the movement affected the whole life of the people. a new interest was taken in education, in art, in religion, and in social reform. old methods of instruction were superseded by more rational ones. hundreds of new schools were established for the benefit of the middle classes. the whole tendency of the new learning was toward a higher intellectual and more moral life. . its effects: (_a_) it awakened a desire for an intellectual life and for social reform; (_b_) it made possible the reformation; (_c_) it led to the establishment of schools and libraries and to the extension of the usefulness of the universities; (_d_) it aroused the desire for liberty and the spirit of enterprise, and encouraged commercial activity; (_e_) it inspired some of the world's greatest artists in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. (_f_) it implanted the seeds of freedom of thought and fostered the spirit of scientific research; (_g_) it supplied higher ideals of life and conduct, a fact which became responsible to a large extent for the great improvement made in the condition of the people, and in the development of europe since that time. note: references to the discoveries made by copernicus, columbus, and the cabots should be made. pupils should read or hear short accounts of erasmus, more, and colet. a careful development of the causes and meaning of the movement should aid the pupils to anticipate its chief results. it is assumed, of course, that the study of this topic will occupy several lesson periods. the fight for constitutional liberty in canada, - . in the struggle for constitutional liberty in british canada, there are several distinct stages: i. to --military rule: . amherst the nominal governor; canada divided into three districts . little disturbance of french customs; the _habitants_ content . influx of "old" subjects--their character. (see _ontario public school history of canada_, p. ; _history of canada_, lucas and egerton, part ii, pp. and .) ii. to (quebec act): . period of civil government under general murray . unrest owing to demands of the "old" subjects . conditions of government: (_a_) governor and advisory council of twelve all appointed by crown (_b_) assembly permitted but not feasible; depended on will of governor (_c_) british law, both civil and criminal, prevailed (_d_) all money matters in hands of council. . at this time the french greatly outnumbered the british, and the fear of the revolution of the american colonies led to the french being favoured in the quebec act, . iii. to --quebec act to constitutional act: . both "old" and "new" subjects dissatisfied--the french with british court procedure, the british with french feudal customs. . provisions of the quebec act: (_a_) change of boundaries (see text-book.) (_b_) governor and legislative council appointed; no assembly called. (_c_) french civil law; british criminal law (_d_) no oath required, as before, hostile to the roman catholic church--beginning of religious liberty (_e_) legislative council had no control of taxation iv. to --constitutional act to act of union provisions of constitutional act: . upper and lower canada divided, because french and british could not agree on many points. . each province had a governor, a legislative council, a legislative assembly, and an executive council. the legislative council was composed of the highest officials, appointed practically for life, and responsible to no one. many of these were also members of the executive council. the legislative assembly was elected and was yet without control of the whole revenue, as the home government still collected "all duties regulating colonial navigation and commerce." . the clergy reserves were established; later to become a bone of contention. v. to --act of union to british north america act. the demands of the people for responsible government, that is, for control of the executive and of taxation, became so insistent that the act of union was passed, following lord durham's report on the rebellion of . provisions of the act of union: . legislative council appointed ( members) . legislative assembly elected ( from each province, later from each) . executive council selected from both houses . a permanent civil list of £ , was granted . the legislative assembly controlled the rest of the revenue. money bills were to originate with the government. this was really responsible government, as it was developed under elgin. vi. to the present: the british north america act was the statement of a complete victory of the people for responsible government. the executive council (cabinet) is wholly responsible to parliament, in which the members of the executive must have seats; the raising and the spending of revenue is wholly in the hands of the people's representatives. for a clear summary of the concessions won by canadians, see bourinot, _how canada is governed_, page ; see also _ontario public school history of canada_, pp. et seq. devices maps . wall maps for general study, especially of modern history. . outline or sketch maps drawn on the black-board by the teacher or the pupils for use in the study of earlier history, or explorations, etc. for these purposes the details of a wall map are not only not needed, but are rather a hindrance. . relief maps of plasticine, clay, or salt and flour, to be made by the pupils to illustrate the influence of geographical facts in history, and to make events in history more real to the pupils. pictures . many good historical pictures of persons, buildings, monuments, and events may be collected by the pupils and the teacher from magazines and newspapers, and pasted in a scrap-book. (see educational pamphlet, no. , _visual aids in the teaching of history_.) . the perry picture co., malden, mass., publishes pictures in different sizes, costing from one cent upward. many of these are useful in teaching history. similar pictures may be obtained from the cosmos picture co., new york. . good picture post-cards can be easily obtained. . lantern slides and stereopticon views may be used. (for lists of dealers and publishers of and , see also _visual aids in the teaching of history_.) museums these often contain relics of earlier times in the form of implements, utensils, weapons, dress. a visit to one will interest pupils. source books some source books for illustrating earlier conditions in ontario are: . _the talbot régime._ by charles oakes ermatinger, st. thomas. . _pioneer days._ by david kennedy, port elgin. sold by author, c. . _united empire loyalists._ by egerton ryerson. william briggs. . _canadian constitutional development._ selected speeches and dispatches, - . by egerton and grant murray. $ . . . _pen pictures of early pioneer life in upper canada._ william briggs, toronto, $ . . genealogical tables those needed to illustrate special periods may be found in the larger histories. pupils should be instructed how to interpret them. chronological chart this may be made by the class, on the black-board or on a slated cloth as the work advances. on the left hand of a vertical line are set down the dates, allowing the same space for each ten years, the close of each decade being shown in larger figures. on the right side are set down the events in their proper place. for example, in studying the career of champlain, the chart will be begun as follows: champlain = = first visit, when years old, with pontgravé. with de monts and poutrincourt he undertakes to colonize acadia; forms a settlement at port royal. founds quebec. explores richelieu river and lake champlain; forms an alliance with the hurons and algonquins against the iroquois. marriage. establishes a trading station at what is now montreal. ascends the ottawa river, expecting to find the way to china; deceived, returns to france. brings out the recollet fathers to christianize the indians; explores the country of the hurons. = = a useful chart which shows the growth of canada is to be found in taylor's _cardinal facts of canadian history_, reproduced in duncan's _the canadian people_. an illustrated chart of canadian history is published by the united editors company, of toronto. note-books and class exercises in the fourth form, pupils should copy into a notebook the black-board work--topical outlines, time chart, etc., as a basis for review and for class exercises in composition. such a topical summary, the joint work of teacher and class, is the best means of review for examination purposes, when one is held. pupils may occasionally be asked to make from the text-book, without preceding class work, a topical analysis either of a subject which is treated consecutively in the book, such as the war of - , or of a subject that requires the pupil to collect his material from various parts of the book, or even from several books. in the latter case the teacher should direct the pupil to the proper sources. bibliography a. for teachers i. _histories_: (_a_) english: . a short history of the english people. green. $ . . the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. . ontario high school history of england. c. the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. . a history of the british nation. a.d. innes. $ . . e.c. & t.c. jack, edinburgh. (_b_) canadian: . a history of canada. roberts. $ . . the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. . story of canada (story of the nations series). bourinot. $ . . g.p. putnam's, new york. . a historical geography of the british colonies, vols. canada: part i, $ . ; part ii, $ . . lucas and egerton, clarendon press, oxford. one of the best histories of canada; on a geographical basis. . ontario high school history of canada. grant. c. the t. eaton company, ltd., toronto. . a short history of the canadian people. bryce. $ . . william briggs, toronto. (_c_) civics: . canadian civics. jenkins. c. copp, clark co., ltd., toronto. . how canada is governed. bourinot. $ . . copp, clark co., ltd., toronto. (_d_) general history: . general sketch of european history. freeman. $ . . the macmillan co. of canada, ltd., toronto. . history of our own times. mccarthy. $ . . crowell and company, new york. . the nineteenth century--a history. mackenzie. $ . . t. nelson and sons, toronto. for help in preparing lessons every teacher should possess one book of each of the above classes, in addition to the ontario public school histories. ii. _on methods_: . teaching of history and civics in the elementary and secondary schools. bourne. $ . . longmans green and company, london, england. the best book on general method. . methods in history. mace. $ . . ginn and company, new york. . special method in history. mcmurry. c. the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. b. material for class work especially in correlated subjects . reader's guide to english history. allen. c. ginn and company, new york. (contains a list of historical authorities for the various periods; and lists of historical poems and fiction to illustrate these periods.) . school atlas of english history. s.r. gardiner. $ . . longmans, green and company, london, england. . atlas of canada. published by department of the interior, ottawa. (the department of the interior also publishes maps giving the latest information concerning railways, distribution of minerals, etc., which can be had by asking for them.) . atlas of ancient and classical geography. everyman's library. c. dent & co., ltd., toronto. . literary and historical atlas of europe. everyman's library. c. dent & co., ltd., toronto. . literary and historical atlas of america. everyman's library. c. dent & co., ltd., toronto. c. historical readers and supplementary books group i. . highroads of history. vols. t. nelson and sons, toronto. well illustrated; a great favourite with children. . gateways to history. vols. s. d. edward arnold, london, england. . longmans' ship historical readers. vols. s. longmans, green and company, london, england. . the little cousin series. vols. c. each. the page co., boston, mass. get list of titles and select. . peeps at many lands and cities. vols. c. each. the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. get list of titles and select. group ii. . stories from canadian history. marquis. c. copp clark company, ltd., toronto. . brief biographies. supplementing canadian history. j.o. miller. c. copp clark company, ltd., toronto. . stories of the maple land. c.a. young. c. copp clark company, ltd., toronto. . heroines of canadian history. w.s. herrington. cloth c., paper c. wm. briggs, toronto. . ryerson memorial volume. j.g. hodgins. a graphic sketch of the old log school-house and its belongings, and the life of a pioneer teacher. . stories of new france. machar and marquis. $ . . briggs, toronto. . martyrs of new france. herrington. c. briggs, toronto. group iii. . fifty famous stories retold. baldwin. c. the american book company, new york. . thirty more famous stories. baldwin. c. the american book company, new york. . book of legends. scudder. riverside literature series c. copp clark company, ltd., toronto. . legends every child should know. ed. h.w. mabie. c. doubleday, page and co., new york. group iv.--miscellaneous: . heroes every child should know. ed. h.w. mabie. c. doubleday, new york. . famous men of greece. c. the american book company, new york. . famous men of rome. the american book company, new york. . famous men of the middle ages. c. the american book company, new york. . famous men of modern times. c. the american book co., new york. . stories of great inventors. macombe. c. wm. briggs, toronto. . calendar stories. m.p. boyle. c. mcclelland, goodchild, & stewart, toronto. . ten boys who lived on the road from long ago to now. jane andrews. c. sch. ed. c. ginn and company, new york. . seven little sisters. jane andrews. c. sch. ed. c. ginn and company, new york. . the romance of canadian history. selections from parkman; edited by pelham edgar. c. the macmillan company of canada, ltd., toronto. . english life years ago. trevelyan. s. methuen and company, london. . little journeys to the homes of great reformers, great orators, great teachers, english authors, good men and great. hubbard. c each. the roycrofters, east aurora, n.y. in group i the first, and any of the others may be read. the first are very interesting and great favourites with children. in groups ii and iii one of each may be taken as they, to some extent, cover the same ground. all of those in group iv are useful, and may be added as opportunity permits. appendix the first christmas tree did you ever hear the story of the first christmas tree? this is the way it was told to me: martin luther was a good man who lived in germany long ago. one christmas eve he was walking to his home. the night was cold and frosty with many stars in the sky. he thought he had never seen stars look so bright. when he got home he tried to tell his wife and children how pretty the stars were, but they didn't seem to understand. so luther went out into his garden and cut a little evergreen tree. this he set up in the room and fastened tiny candles all over it, and when he had lighted them they shone like stars. one of luther's neighbours came in that night, and when she saw the tree she thought how one would please her children. soon she had one in her house, too. and the idea spread from one house to another until there were christmas trees all over germany. queen victoria of england was married to a german prince, and the german custom of a christmas tree for the children was followed in the royal palace. of course after the queen had a tree other people must have one, too. so the christmas tree came to england. the little french boys and girls have not had them so long. not very many years ago there was a war between france and germany. at christmas time the german soldiers were in paris. they felt sorry to be so far from their own little boys and girls on christmas eve. but they knew how to have something to remind them of home. every soldier who could got a little evergreen tree and put candles on it. the french saw them, and were so pleased that now, every year, they too have christmas trees. so many people from england, and from germany, and from france have come to our country to live, of course, we too have learned about christmas trees. and that is why you and so many other little girls and boys have such pretty trees on christmas eve. the origin of the easter bunny childish voices are asking why the rabbit is seen with the eggs and the chickens that fill the shop windows and show-cases at easter. the legend that established the hare as a symbol of the eastertide is not generally known. it is of german origin and runs as follows: many years ago, during a cruel war, the duchess of lindenburg with her two children and an old servant fled for safety to a little obscure village in the mountains. she found the people very poor, and one thing that surprised her much was that they used no eggs. she learned that they had never seen or heard of hens, and so when the old servant went to get tidings of his master and of the war he brought back with him some of these birds. the simple village folk were greatly interested in the strange fowl, and when they saw the tiny yellow chickens breaking their way out of the eggs they were full of delight. but the duchess was saddened by the thought that easter was drawing near and that she had no gifts for the little mountain children. then an idea came to her. the spring was beginning to colour the earth with leaves and flowers, and she made bright dyes out of herbs and roots and coloured the eggs. then the children were invited to visit the duchess, and she told them stories of the glad easter day, and afterwards bade each make a nest of moss among the bushes. when they had all enjoyed the little feast provided in their honour, they went back to the woods to look at their nests. lo! in each were five coloured eggs. "what a good hen it must have been to lay such beautiful eggs," said one child. "it could not have been a hen," said another. "the eggs that the hens lay are white. it must have been the rabbit that jumped out of the tree when i made my nest." and all the children agreed that it was the rabbit, and to this day the mystic bunny is supposed to bring eggs and gifts at easter to the little children of the "fatherland" who have been loving and kind during the year. the story of st. valentine once upon a time, there lived in a monastery across the sea a humble monk called valentine. every brother save himself seemed to have some special gift. now there was brother angelo, who was an artist, and painted such wonderful madonnas that it seemed as if the holy mother must step down from the frame and bless her children. brother vittorio had a wonderful voice, and on saints' days the monastery chapel would be crowded with visitors, who came from far and near just to listen to that wonderful voice as it soared up among the dim old arches. brother anselmo was a doctor, and knew the virtues of all roots, herbs, and drugs, and was kept very busy going about among the sick, followed by their tearful, grateful blessing. brother johannes was skilled in illuminating, and valentine often watched the page grow under his clever hand. how beautiful would then be the gospel story in brightly-coloured letters, with dainty flowers, bright-winged butterflies, and downy, nestling birds about the borders! brother paul was a great teacher in the monastery school, and even learned scholars came to consult him. friar john ruled the affairs of the little monastery world with wisdom and prudence. indeed, out of the whole number only valentine seemed without special talent. the poor man felt it keenly. he longed to do some great thing. "why did not the good god give me a voice like vittorio or a skilled hand like angelo?" he would often inquire of himself bitterly. one day as he sat sadly musing on these things, a voice within him said clearly and earnestly: "do the little things, valentine; there the blessing lies." "what are the little things?" asked valentine, much perplexed. but no answer came to this question. like every one else, valentine had to find his work himself. he had a little plot where he loved to work, and the other monks said that valentine's pinks, lilies, and violets were larger and brighter than any raised in the whole monastery garden. he used to gather bunches of his flowers and drop them into the chubby hands of children as they trotted to school under the gray monastery walls. many a happy village bride wore his roses on her way to the altar. scarcely a coffin was taken to the cemetery but valentine's lilies or violets filled the silent hands. he got to know the birthday of every child in the village, and was fond of hanging on the cottage door some little gift his loving hands had made. he could mend a child's broken windmill and carve quaint faces from walnut shells. he made beautiful crosses of silvery gray lichens, and pressed mosses and rosy weeds from the seashore. the same tender hands were ready to pick up a fallen baby, or carry the water bucket for some weary mother. everybody learned to love the good brother valentine. the children clung to his long, gray skirts, and the babies crept out on the streets to receive his pat on their shining hair. even the cats and dogs rubbed against him, and the little birds fluttered near him unafraid. st. valentine grew old, loving and beloved, never dreaming that he had found his great thing. when the simple monk died the whole countryside mourned, and hundreds came to look for the last time on the quiet face in the rude coffin. a great duke walked bare-headed after that coffin, and one of the most noted brothers of the church spoke the last words of blessing to the weeping people. after his death, it was remembered how sweet had been his little gifts, and the villagers said: "let us, too, give gifts to our friends on the good valentine's birthday." so ever since has the pretty custom been carried out, and on st. valentine's day we send our friends little tokens of remembrance to say we love them. the first thanksgiving it is nearly three hundred years since the first thanksgiving day. though we have even more to be grateful for, i think that there are not many of us who feel quite so thankful as the little handful of people who set apart the first thanksgiving day. there were not very many of them, just one little village in a big forest land, and by the edge of a great ocean. here, on the map, is where they lived. it is on the north-eastern shores of the united states and is called plymouth. the people i am telling you about gave it that name when they came to it, nearly two years before they had their first thanksgiving day. it was the name of the last town they had seen in england. here, on the map, is the english plymouth, and you see what a long trip they had in their little vessel, called the _mayflower_, to their new home. you still wonder why they travelled so far to make new homes for themselves. it was because they wanted to worship god in their own way that they left england. they were not afraid of the long voyage and all its hardships; for they felt sure they were doing as god wished them to do. they arrived safely, too, and built their little village by the sea--the new plymouth. one of the first buildings they put up was a little log church. the first year was very hard for everybody. the winter was colder than any they had ever known in england, and their houses were small and poorly built. they could not get any letters or news from their friends in england for many months. food was not scarce, for there was always plenty of game and fish. but it was such a change from their old way of living that many people became ill, and in the spring there were many graves. but the worst thing about the new land was the indians. these english people were afraid of them--and with good reason, too, for they were very fierce and sometimes very cruel. they tried not to let the indians know how few they were, and even planted grain about the graves in the churchyard so that the indians could not count how many had died. but one of the indian chiefs was friendly to the english and kept the other tribes from making war on them, and the second summer they had a great harvest and everything was more comfortable. it was in that autumn, just after the grain was gathered, that the minister spoke to them one sunday about having a thanksgiving day. "it seemeth right," he said, "god hath granted us peace and plenty. he has blessed us with a dwelling-place of peace. he has held back the savage red man from bringing harm to us. therefore let us appoint a day of thanksgiving." after that all the people, even the boys and girls, were busy getting ready. the men took their guns and fishing-rods and went into the forest, and brought home fowl, fish, and deer, and perhaps bear meat as well. the boys and girls gathered wild plums, and grapes, and corn, and brought in pumpkins from the gardens; and the women made pies, puddings, cakes, and bread, and baked the meat and corn. they had great piles of cakes, and rows and rows of pies, and loaves of bread and platters of meat, for they all expected company. you could not guess, i am sure, who was coming! they had sent word to the indians near to come and spend thanksgiving day with them. do you suppose they came? indeed they did. they came before breakfast and stayed until long after supper, and had a good time, and tasted everything the white women had cooked, and nodded their heads and said, "how" a great many times, to say it was good. some of the little girls and boys were half afraid of them, but they need not have been; for that day the indians felt very kindly toward the english. ask pupils to mention things for which they are thankful. letter from mary queen of scots, to queen elizabeth believe, madame (and the doctors whom you sent to me this last summer can have formed an opinion), that i am not likely long to be in a condition which can justify jealousy or distrust. and this notwithstanding, exact from me such assurances, and just and reasonable conditions as you wish. superior force is always on your side to make me keep them, even though for any reason whatever i should wish to break them. you have had from observation enough experience of my bare promises, sometimes even to my own damage, as i showed you on this subject two years ago. remember, if you please, what i then wrote you, and that in no way could you so much win over my heart to yourself as by kindness, although you have confined forever my poor body to languish between four walls; those of my rank and disposition not permitting themselves to be gained over or forced by any amount of harshness. * * * * * in conclusion, i have to request two things especially; the one that as i am about to leave this world i may have by me for my consolation some honourable churchman, in order that i may daily examine the road that i have to traverse and be instructed how to complete it according to my religion, in which i am firmly resolved to live and die. this is a last duty which cannot be denied to the most wretched and miserable person alive; it is a liberty which you give to all foreign ambassadors, just as all other catholic kings allow yours the practice of their religion. and as for myself, have i ever forced my own subjects to do anything against their religion even when i had all power and authority over them? and you cannot justly bring it to pass that i should be in this extremity deprived of such a privilege. what advantage can accrue to you from denying me this? i hope that god will forgive me if, oppressed by you in this wise, i do not cease from paying him that duty which in my heart will be permitted. but you will give a very ill example to other princes of christendom of employing towards their subjects and relatives, the same harshness which you mete out to me, a sovereign queen and your nearest relative, as i am and shall be in spite of my enemies so long as i live. index aims of study, amount of material, appendix, first christmas tree, the, first thanksgiving, the, letter of mary queen of scots, origin of the easter bunny, story of st. valentine, bibliography, black-board work in teaching history, , , , , capture of quebec, the, characteristics of a good text-book, chronological chart, chronological method, civics, , , civilization and inventions, clergy reserves, the, colours of the flag, the, combination of methods, comparative method, concentric method, confederation of the canadian provinces, constitutional liberty in canada, correlation of subjects, , , course of study, current events, dates, devices for teaching, dramatization of history, drill and review, empire day, feudal system, first christmas tree, the, first thanksgiving, the, flag, the, flag days, florence nightingale, genealogical tables, , historical sense, the, history and art, " " chronology, " " composition, , " " constructive work, , " " geography, , " " literature, " " oral reading, " " science, , how to make history real, illustrative lessons, type lesson in the story stage, first thanksgiving, the, florence nightingale, postmaster, capture of quebec, the, coming of the united empire loyalists, the, flag, the, suggestions for empire day, egerton ryerson, the intercolonial railway, the industrial revolution, the road to cathay, the armada, the feudal system, seigniorial tenure, confederation of the canadian provinces, influence of geographical conditions on history, the st. lawrence river, relations between england and scotland, analysis of secs. - in ontario p.s. history of england, outlines for reviews, the development of civilization, the new learning, the fight for constitutional liberty in canada, importance of facts in history, industrial revolution, the, influence of geography on history, , information stage, the, interest, , , , , , , intercolonial railway, the, inventions and history, , , letter of mary queen of scots, local material, maps, , , , memorizing history, methods for forms i and ii, " " form iii, " " form iv, , moral value of history, , , museums, new learning, the, newspapers, note-books, , oral method, the, , , , , , , , , origin of the easter bunny, patriotism, pictures, , , postmaster, problems in history, , , , , , , , , , , reflective stage, regressive method, relations of england and scotland, reviews, , , , , , road to cathay, ryerson, egerton, scope of study, seigniorial tenure, source books, , , spanish armada, st. lawrence river, st. valentine, stages of study, story stage, story telling, , , taxation, , , , teacher of history, text-book method, topical analysis, , , , , , , , topical method, training in the use of the text-book, united empire loyalists, union jack, , use of problems in history, , , , , , , , , , , where to begin the study of history, a practical enquiry into the philosophy of education. by james gall, inventor of the triangular alphabet for the blind; and author of the "end and essence of sabbath school teaching," &c. "_the works of the lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein._"--psal. cxi. . edinburgh: james gall & son, , niddry street. london: houlston & stoneman, , paternoster-row. glasgow; george gallie. belfast: william m'comb. mdcccxl printed by j. gall & son. , niddry street. preface. the author of the following pages is a plain man, who has endeavoured to write a plain book, for the purpose of being popularly useful. the philosophical form which his enquiries have assumed, is the result rather of accidental circumstances than of free choice. the strong desire which he felt in his earlier years to benefit the young, induced him to push forward in the paths which appeared to him most likely to lead to his object; and it was not till he had advanced far into the fields of philosophy, that he first began dimly to perceive the importance of the ground which he had unwittingly occupied. the truth is, that he had laboured many years in the sabbath schools with which he had connected himself, before he was aware that, in his combat with ignorance, he was wielding weapons that were comparatively new; and it was still longer, before he very clearly understood the principles of those exercises which he found so successful. one investigation led to another; light shone out as he proceeded; and he now submits, with full confidence in the truth of his general principles and deductions, the results of more than thirty years' experience and reflection in the great cause of education. he has only further to observe, that the term "nature," which occurs so frequently, has been adopted as a convenient and popular mode of expression. none of his readers needs to be informed, that this is but another manner of designating "the god of nature," whose laws, as established in the young mind, he has been endeavouring humbly, and perseveringly to imitate. _myrtle bank, trinity, edinburgh, th may, ._ contents part i. on the preliminary objects necessary for the establishment and improvement of education. chap. i. page on the importance of establishing the science of education on a solid foundation, chap. ii. on the cultivation of education as a science, chap. iii. on the improvement of teaching as an art, chap. iv. on the establishment of sound principles in education, part ii. on the great design of nature's teaching, and the methods she employs in carrying it on. chap. i. a comprehensive view of the several educational processes carried on by nature, chap. ii. on the method employed by nature for cultivating the powers of the mind, chap. iii. on the means by which nature enables her pupils to acquire knowledge, chap. iv. on nature's method of communicating knowledge to the young by the principle of reiteration, chap. v. on the acquisition of knowledge by the principle of individuation, chap. vi. on the acquisition of knowledge by the principle of association, or grouping, chap. vii. on the acquisition of knowledge by the principle of analysis, or classification, chap. viii. on nature's methods of teaching her pupils to make use of their knowledge, chap. ix. on nature's methods of applying knowledge by the principle of the animal, or common sense, chap. x. on nature's method of applying knowledge, by means of the moral sense, or conscience, chap. xi. on nature's method of training her pupils to communicate their knowledge, chap. xii. recapitulation of the philosophical principles developed in the previous chapters, part iii. on the methods by which the educational processes of nature may be successfully imitated. chap. i. on the exercises by which nature may be imitated in cultivating the powers of the mind, chap. ii. on the methods by which nature may be imitated in the pupil's acquisition of knowledge; with a review of the analogy between the mental and physical appetites of the young, chap. iii. how nature may be imitated in communicating knowledge to the pupil, by the reiteration of ideas, chap. iv. on the means by which nature may be imitated in exercising the principle of individuation, chap. v. on the means by which nature may be imitated in applying the principle of grouping, or association, chap. vi. on the methods by which nature may be imitated in communicating knowledge by classification, or analysis, chap. vii. on the imitation of nature in teaching the practical use of knowledge, chap. viii. on the imitation of nature in teaching the use of knowledge by means of the animal, or common sense, chap. ix. on the imitation of nature in teaching the practical use of knowledge by means of the moral sense, or conscience, chap. x. on the application of our knowledge to the common affairs of life, chap. xi. on the imitation of nature, in training her pupils fluently to communicate their knowledge, part iv. on the selection of proper truths and subjects to be taught in schools and families. chap. i. on the general principles which ought to regulate our choice of truths and subjects to be taught to the young, chap ii. on the particular branches of education required for elementary schools, chap. iii. on the easiest methods of introducing these principles, for the first time, into schools already established, notes, practical enquiry, &c. part i. on the preliminary objects necessary for the establishment and improvement of education. chap. i. _on the importance of establishing the science of education on a solid foundation._ education is at present obviously in a transition state. the public mind has of late become alive to the importance of the subject; and all persons are beginning to feel awake to the truth, that something is yet wanting to insure efficiency and permanence to the labours of the teacher. the public will not be satisfied till some decided change has taken place; and many are endeavouring to grope their way to something better. it is with an earnest desire to help forward this great movement, that the writer of the following pages has been induced to publish the result of much study, and upwards of thirty years' experience, in the hope that it may afford at least some assistance in directing the enquiries of those who are prosecuting the same object. on entering upon this investigation, it will be of use to keep in mind, that all the sciences have, at particular periods of their history, been in the same uncertain and unsettled position, as that which education at present occupies; and that each of them has in its turn, had to pass through an ordeal, similar to that which education is about to undergo. they have triumphantly succeeded; and their subsequent rapid advancement is the best proof that they are now placed on a solid and permanent foundation. it is of importance, therefore, in attempting to forward the science of education, that we should profit by the experience of those who have gone before us. they succeeded by a strict observation of facts, and a stern rejection of every species of mere supposition and opinion;--by an uncompromising hostility to prejudice and selfishness, and a fearless admission of truth wherever it was discovered. such must be the conduct of the educationist, if he expects to succeed in an equal degree. the history of astronomy as taught by astrologers, and of chemistry in the hands of the alchymist, should teach both the lovers and the fearers of change an important lesson. these pretended sciences being mere conjectures, were of use to nobody; and yet the boldness with which they were promulgated, and the confidence with which they were received, had the effect of suppressing enquiry, and shutting out the truth for several generations. similar may be the effects of errors in education, and similar the danger of too easily admitting them. the adoption of plausible theories, or of erroneous principles, must lead into innumerable difficulties; and should they be hastily patronized, and authoritatively promulgated, the improvement of this first and most important of the sciences may be retarded for a century to come. the other sciences, during the last half century, have advanced with amazing rapidity. this has been the result of a strict adherence to well established facts, and their legitimate inferences.--a docile subjection of the mind to the results of experiment, and a candid confession and abandonment of fallacies, have characterized every benefactor of the sciences;--and the science of education must be advanced by an adherence to the same principles. the educationist must be willing to abandon error, as well as to receive truth; and must resolutely shake off all conjecture and opinions not founded on fair and appropriate experiment. this course may appear tedious;--but it is the shortest and the best. by this mode of induction, all the facts which he is able to glean will assuredly be found to harmonize with nature, with reason, and with scripture; and with these for his supporters, the reformer in education has nothing to fear. his progress may be slow, but it will be sure; for every principle which he thus discovers, will enable him, not only to outrun his neighbours, but to confer a permanent and valuable boon upon posterity. that any rational and accountable being should ever have been found to oppose the progress of truth, is truly humiliating; yet every page of history, which records the developement of new principles, exhibits also the outbreakings of prejudice and selfishness. the deductions of galileo, of newton, of harvey, and innumerable others, have been opposed and denounced, each in its turn; while their promoters have been vilified as empyrics or innovators. nor has this been done by those only whose self love or worldly interests prompted them to exclude the truth, but by good and honourable men, whose prejudices were strong, and whose zeal was not guided by discretion. such persons have frequently been found to shut their eyes against the plainest truths, to wrestle with their own convictions, and positively refuse even to listen to evidence. the same thing may happen with regard to education;--and this is no pleasing prospect to the lover of peace, who sets himself forward as a reformer in this noble work.--change is inevitable. teaching is an art; and it must, like all the other arts, depend for its improvement upon the investigations of science. now, every one knows, that although the cultivation of chemistry, and other branches of natural science, has, of late years, given an extraordinary stimulus to the arts, yet the science of education, from which the art of teaching can alone derive its power, is one, beyond the threshold of which modern philosophy has scarcely entered. changes, therefore, both in the theory and practice of teaching, may be anticipated;--and that these changes will be inconvenient and annoying to many, there can be no doubt. that individuals, in these circumstances, should be inclined to deprecate and oppose these innovations and improvements, is nothing more than might be expected; but that the improvements themselves should on that account be either postponed or abandoned, would be highly injurious. an enlightened system of education is peculiarly the property of the public, on which both personal, family, and national happiness in a great measure depends. these interests therefore must not be sacrificed to the wishes or the convenience of private individuals. the prosperity and happiness of mankind are at stake; and the welfare of succeeding generations will, in no small degree, be influenced by the establishment of sound principles in education at the present time. nothing, therefore, should be allowed to mystify or cripple that science, upon which the spread and the permanence of all useful knowledge mainly rest. chap. ii. _on the cultivation of education as a science._ from numerous considerations, it must be evident, that education claims the first rank among the sciences; and, in that case, the art of teaching ought to take precedence among the arts;--not perhaps in respect of its difficulties, but most certainly in respect of its importance. the success of the teacher in his labours, will depend almost entirely on the extent and the accuracy of the investigations of the philosopher. the science must guide the art. experience shews, that where an artist in ordinary life is not directed by science,--by acknowledged principles,--he can never make any steady improvement. in like manner, when the principles of education are unknown, no advancement in the art can be expected from the teacher. every attempt at change in such circumstances must be unsatisfactory; and even when improvements are by chance accomplished, they are but partial, and must be stationary.--when, on the contrary, the teacher is directed by ascertained principles, he never can deviate far from the path of success; and even if he should, he has the means in his own power of ascertaining the cause of his failure, and of retracing his steps. he can, therefore, at his pleasure, add to or abridge, vary or transpose his exercises with his pupils, provided only that the great principles of the science be kept steadily in view, and be neither outraged, nor greatly infringed. no teacher, therefore, should profess the art, without making himself familiar with the philosophical principles upon which it is founded. in the mechanical arts, this practice is now generally followed, and with the happiest effects. the men of the present generation have profited by the painful experience of thousands in former times; who, trusting to mere conjectures, tried, failed, and ruined themselves. the mechanics of our day, instead of indulging in blind theories of their own, and hazarding their money and their time upon speculation and chance, are willing to borrow light for their guidance from those who have provided it. they slowly, but surely, follow in the path opened up to them by the discoveries of science,--and they are never disappointed. the unexampled success of the mechanical arts, would, upon the above principles, naturally lead us to conclude, that the sciences, from which they have derived all that they possess, must have been cultivated with corresponding energy. and such is the fact. since the adoption of the inductive method of philosophizing, nearly all the sciences have been advancing rapidly and steadily; and the cause of this is to be found in adhering to the rules of induction. no science has been allowed to rest its claims upon mere theory, or authority of any kind, but upon evidence derived from facts. mere opinions and suppositions have been rigidly excluded; and that alone which was acquired by accurate investigation, has been acknowledged in science as having the stamp of truth. the inductive philosophy takes nothing for granted. every conclusion must be legitimately drawn from ascertained facts, or from principles established by experiment; and the consequence has been, not only that what has been attained is permanent, and will benefit all future generations, but the amount of that attainment, in the short time that has already elapsed, is actually greater than all that had been previously gained during centuries. in this general improvement, however, the science of education has till lately formed an exception. the principles of true philosophy do not appear to have been brought to bear upon it, as they have upon the other sciences; and the consequences of this neglect have been lamentable. in every branch of natural philosophy, there are great leading principles already established. but where were there any such principles established by the philosopher for the guidance of the teacher? by what, except their own experience, and conjectures, were teachers directed in the training of the young?--thirty or forty years ago, what was called "education" in our ordinary week-day schools, was little more than a mechanical round of barren exercises. the excitement of religious persecution, which had been the means of disciplining the intellectual and moral powers of scotsmen for several previous generations, had by that time gradually subsided, and had left education to do its own work, by the use of its own resources. but these were perfectly inadequate to the task. the exercises almost universally employed in the education of the young, had neither been derived from science, nor from experience of their own inherent power; and they would, from the beginning, have been found perfectly inefficient, had they not been aided, as before noticed, by the stimulant of religious persecution.--the state of education, at the time we speak of, is still fresh on the memory of living witnesses who were its victims; and some of the absurdities which were then universal, are not even yet altogether extinct. soon after the period above stated, an important change began to take place in the art of teaching,--but still unaided and undirected by science. some of the more thinking and judicious of its professors, roused by the flagrant failures of their own practice, made several noble and exemplary efforts to place it on a better footing. had these efforts been guided by scientific research, much more good would have been done than has been accomplished, and an immense amount of misdirected labour would have been saved. but although many of the attempts at a change failed, yet some of them succeeded, and have gradually produced ameliorations and improvements in the art of teaching. still it must be observed, that philosophy has had little or no share in the merit. her labours in this important field have yet to be begun. valuable exercises have no doubt been introduced; but the principles upon which the success of these exercises depends, remain in a great measure concealed from the public generally:--and the reason of this is, that the public have been indebted for them to the _art_ of the teacher, and not to the _science_ of the philosopher. that this is not the position in which matters of so much public importance should continue, we think no one will deny. education must be cultivated as a science, before teaching can ever flourish as an art. the philosopher must first ascertain and light up the way, before the teacher can, with security, walk in it. experiment must be employed to ascertain facts, investigate causes, and trace these causes to their effects. by fair and legitimate deductions drawn from the facts thus ascertained, he will be enabled to establish certain principles, which, when acted upon by the teacher, will invariably succeed. but without this, the history of all the other arts and sciences teaches us, that success is not to be expected;--for although chance may sometimes lead the teacher to a happy device, there can be no steady progress. even those beneficial exercises upon which he may have stumbled, become of little practical value; because, when the principles upon which they are based are unknown, they can neither be followed up with certainty, nor be varied without danger. there will no doubt be a difficulty in the investigation of a science which is in itself so complicated, and which has hitherto been so little understood; but this is only an additional reason why it should be begun in a proper manner, and pursued with energy. the mode of procedure is the chief object of difficulty; but the experience and success of investigators in the other sciences, will be of great advantage in directing us in this. in the sciences of anatomy and physiology, for example, the investigations of the philosopher are designed to direct the several operations of the physician, the surgeon, and the dentist; in the same way as the investigations of the educationist are intended to direct the operations of the teacher. now the mode of procedure in those sciences for such purposes is well known, and forms an excellent example for us in the present case. the duty of the anatomist, or physiologist, is simply to examine the operations of nature in the animal economy, and the plans which she adopts for accomplishing her objects during health, and for throwing off impediments during disease. in conducting his investigations, the enquirer begins by taking a general view of the whole subject, and then separating and defining its leading parts. pulsation, respiration, digestion, and the various secretions and excretions of the body, are defined, and their general connection with each other correctly ascertained. these form his starting points; and then, taking each in its turn, he sets himself to discover the principles, or laws, which regulate its working in a healthy state;--what it is that promotes the circulation or stagnation of the blood, the bracing or relaxing of the nerves, the several processes in digestion, and the various functions of the skin and viscera. these are all first ascertained by observation and experience, and then, if necessary, established by experiment. these principles, having thus been established by science, are available for direction in the arts. the physician acts under their guidance; and his object is simply to regulate his treatment and advice in accordance with them. in other words, _he endeavours to imitate nature_, to remove the obstructions which he finds interfering with her operations, or to lend that aid which a knowledge of these principles points out as necessary. the surgeon and the dentist follow the same course, but more directly. in healing a wound, for example, the surgeon has to ascertain from science how nature in similar cases proceeds when left to herself; and all his cuttings, and lancings, and dressings, are nothing more than _attempts to imitate her_ in her healing operations. so well is this now understood, that every operation which does not at least recognise the principle is denounced--and justly denounced--as quackery; and the reason is, that uniform experience has convinced professional men, that they can only expect success when they follow with docility in the path which nature has pointed out to them. precisely similar should be the plan of operation pursued by the educationist. he should, in the first place, take a comprehensive view of the whole subject, and endeavour to map out to himself its great natural divisions;--in other words, he should endeavour to ascertain what are the things which nature teaches, that he may, by means of this great outline, form a general programme for the direction of the teacher. his next object ought to be, to ascertain the mode, and the means, adopted by nature in forwarding these several departments of her educational process; the powers of mind engrossed in each; the order in which they are brought into exercise; and the combinations which she employs in perfecting them. in ascertaining these principles which regulate the operations of nature in her educational processes, the same adherence to the rules prescribed by the inductive philosophy, which has crowned the other sciences with success, must be rigidly observed. there must be the same disregard of mere antiquity; there must be the same scrupulous sifting of evidence, and strict adherence to facts; there must be a discarding of all hypotheses, and a simple dependence upon ascertained truths alone. adherence to these rules is as necessary in cultivating the science of education, as it has been in the other sciences; and the neglect of any one of them, may introduce an element of error, which may injure the labours of a whole lifetime. we have some reason to fear, that although all this will be readily admitted in theory, it will be found somewhat difficult to adopt it in practice. the reason of this will be obvious when we reflect on the deep interest which the best and most philanthropic individuals in society take in this science. the other sciences are in some measure removed from the busy pursuits of life; they are the concern of certain persons, who are allowed to investigate and to experiment, to judge and to decide as they please, without the public in general caring much about the matter.--but education is a science of a different kind. its value is acknowledged by every one, and its interests are dear to every benevolent heart. the individual who undertakes to examine, and more especially to promulgate, any new principle upon which education rests, will have a harder task to perform, and a severer battle to fight, than the philosopher who attempts to overturn a false conclusion in chemistry, or an erroneous principle in mechanics. among the learned community, not more than one in a thousand perhaps is personally interested either in mechanics or in chemistry; and few others will enter the lists to oppose that which appears legitimate and fair. the enemies and opponents of the chemical reformer in that case may be zealous and even fierce; but they are few, and he enjoys the sympathy and the countenance of the great majority of those whose countenance is worthy of his regard. but when we calculate the number of those who take an interest in the subject of education, and those who do not, the above numbers will be reversed. nine hundred and ninety-nine among the educated public will be found who take a real interest in the progress of education, for one who cares nothing about it. this is a fearful odds where there is a likelihood of opposition;--and opposition may be expected. for there will be influences in many of the true friends of education, derived from old prejudices within, combined with the pressure of conflicting sentiments in their friends from without, which will render the task of establishing new and sound principles in this first of the sciences an irksome, and even a hazardous employment. coldness or opposition from those whom we honour and love is always painful; and yet it should be endured, rather than that the best interests both of the present and future generations should be sacrificed. the opinions of all good men deserve consideration;--but when they are merely opinions, and are not founded on reason, they are at best but specious; and when they are opposed to truth, and are contrary to experience, a zealous adherence to them becomes sinful and dangerous. such persons ought to commend, rather than blame, the reformer in education, when he declines to adopt ancient dogmas which he finds to be useless and hurtful: and at all events, if all have agreed to disregard the authority of an aristotle or a newton, when opposed to new facts and additional evidence, the educationist must not allow himself to be driven from the path of fact and experience by either friends or enemies. no authority can make darkness light;--and although he may be opposed for a time, and the public mind may be abused for a moment, it will at last correct itself, and truth will prevail. but the friends of education ought in no case to put the perseverance of those who labour for its improvement to so severe a trial. they ought in justice, as well as charity, to cultivate a forbearing and a candid spirit; and they will have many opportunities of exercising these virtues during the progress of this science. education is confessedly but in its infancy; and therefore it must grow much, and change much, before it can arrive at maturity. but if there be an increasing opposition to all advance, and if a stumbling-block be continually thrown in the way of those who labour to perfect it, the labourers may be discouraged, and the work be indefinitely postponed. let all such then guard against a blind opposition, or an attempt to explain away palpable facts, merely because they lead to principles which are new, or to conclusions which are at variance with their pre-conceived opinions. if they persevere in a blind opposition, they may find at last that they have been resisting truth, and defrauding their neighbour. truth can never be the enemy of man, although many inadvertently rank themselves among its opponents. the resistance which has invariably been offered to every important discovery hitherto, should be a beacon to warn the inconsiderate and the prejudiced against being over-hasty in rejecting discoveries in education; and the obloquy that now rests on the memory of such persons, should be a warning to them, not to plant thorns in their own pillows, or now to sow "the wind, lest they at last should reap the whirlwind." chap. iii. _on the improvement of teaching as an art._ as education on account of its importance takes precedence in the sciences, so teaching should rank first among the arts. the reasons for this arrangement are numerous; but the consideration of two will be sufficient.--the first is, that all the other arts refer chiefly to time, and the conveniences and comforts of this world; while the art of teaching not only includes all these, but involves also many of the interests of man through eternity.--and the second is, that without this art all the other arts would produce scarcely any advantage. without education of some kind, men are, and must continue to be savages,--it being the only effectual instrument of civilization. it is the chief, if not the only means for improving the condition of the human family, and for restoring man to the dignity of an intelligent and virtuous being. as "science" is the investigation and knowledge of principles, so an "art" may be defined as a system of means, in accordance with these principles, for attaining some special end. teaching is one of the arts; and it depends as entirely for its success upon a right application of the principles of the science of education, as the art of dying does upon the principles of chemistry. as an art, therefore, teaching must be subjected to all those laws which regulate the improvement of the other arts, and without which it can never be successfully carried on, far less perfected. these laws are now very generally understood; and we shall briefly advert to a few of them, which are necessary for our present purpose, and endeavour to point out their relation to the art of teaching. . one of the first rules connected with the improvement of the arts is, that the artist have _a specific object in view, for the attainment of which all his successive operations are to be combined_.--the manufacturer has his _cloth_ in prospect, before he has even purchased the wool of which it is to be composed; and it is the desire of procuring cloth of the most suitable quality, and by the easiest means, that compels him to draw liberally and constantly from the facts ascertained, and the principles developed, by the several sciences. from the science of mechanics he derives the various kinds of machinery used in the progressive stages of its production; and from the science of chemistry he obtains the processes of dying, and printing, and dressing. but he never troubles himself about the science of mechanics or of chemistry in the abstract; he thinks only of his cloth, and of these sciences as means to assist him in procuring it. he is careful of his machinery, and is constantly alive to the mode of its working, and is thus prompted to adopt such improvements as observation or experience may suggest; but it is not the machinery of itself that he either cares for, or thinks about. no; it is still the cloth that he keeps in view; and his machinery is esteemed or slighted, adopted or abandoned, exactly in proportion as it forwards his object. the processes necessary in the different departments of his establishment, are complicated and various, and to a stranger they are both curious and instructive; but it is neither the labour nor the variety that he is seeking. his is a very different object; and of this object he never loses sight; for the varied operations of stapling and carding, of spinning and weaving, are nothing more than means which he employs for accomplishing his end. he knows the uses of the whole complicated operations; and he sees at a glance, and can tell in a moment, how each in its turn contributes to the great object of all,--the production of a good and marketable cloth. now this law ought to be applied with the utmost strictness to the art of teaching. for if teaching be really an art,--that is, a successive combination of means,--it should undoubtedly be a combination of means to some specific end. nothing can be more obvious, than that a man who sits down to work, should know what he intends to do, and how he is to do it. such a line of conduct should be imperatively demanded of the teacher, both on account of the importance of his work, and of the immense value of the material upon which he is to operate. the end he has in view, whatever that end may be, ought to be correctly defined before he begins; and no exercise should upon any account be prescribed or demanded from his pupils, which does not directly, or indirectly at least, conduce to its attainment. to do otherwise is both injudicious and unjust. for if the operations of the husbandman during spring have to be selected and curtailed with the strictest attention to time and the seasons, how carefully ought the energies and the time of youth to be economized, when they have but one short spring time afforded them, during which they are to sow the seed which shall produce good or evil fruit for eternity? as to what this great end which the teacher ought steadily to contemplate should be, we shall afterwards enquire; at present we are desirous only of establishing this general law in the art of teaching, that there should be an end accurately defined, and constantly kept in view; and for the attainment of which every exercise prescribed in the school should assist. the teacher who does otherwise is travelling in the dark, and compelling labour for labour's sake;--like the manufacturer who would keep all his machinery in motion, not to make cloth, but to appear to be busy. . another law adopted in the successful prosecution of the arts is, _to use the best known means for attaining any particular end_.--this law is well known in all the other arts, and success invariably depends upon its adoption. the fields are not now tilled by the hoe, nor is cotton spun by the hand. these modes of operating have no doubt the recommendation of antiquity; but here antiquity is always at a discount, and no one doubts the propriety of its being so. the arts are advancing; and they who would impede their progress on the plea of not departing from the usages of antiquity, would be pitied or laughed at. the art of teaching, like the other arts, depends for its success on a strict adherence to this law; and the fear of departing in this case from the particular usages of our ancestors is equally unreasonable. soft ground in the valleys compelled them to travel their pack horses right over the hills, and the want of the "jenny" made them spin their yarn by the hand; but still, the same principle which guided them in the adoption of those methods, was strictly the one which we are here recommending, that of "using the best _known_ means for accomplishing the particular end." those who adopt the principle do most honour to their sagacity; while their shallow admirers, by abandoning the principle, and clinging to their necessarily imperfect mode of applying it, at once libel their good sense, and dishonour those whom they profess to revere. as society is rapidly advancing, paternal affection would undoubtedly have prompted them to advise their descendants to take the benefits of every advance;--and it would be as reasonable for us to suppose, that if they were now alive, they would advise us to travel over the hills on their old roads, or make our cloth in the old way, as to think they would be gratified by our continuing to use exercises in education, which sound philosophy and experience have shewn to be fallacious and hurtful, or that they would be displeased by the use of those which extensive experiment has now proved to be natural, easy, and efficient. these ancestral trammels have all been shaken off, wherever the acquisition of money is concerned. the mechanical processes of his forefathers have no charm for the modern manufacturer, when he can attain his object more economically by a recent improvement. neither does he go blindfold upon a mere chance,--seldom even upon a sagacious conjecture,--unless there be some good grounds for its formation. in every successive stage of his operations, he is awake to the slightest appearance of defect; and he hesitates not a moment in abandoning a lesser good for a greater, whenever he perceives it. he husbands time;--he husbands expense;--he husbands supervision and risk. every step with him is a step in advance;--every operation has a design;--every movement has a meaning;--and he makes all unite for the attainment of one common object. can we doubt that, in like manner, the most rigid economy of time and labour ought to be adopted in the art of teaching? when the end has once been distinctly defined, it ought steadily to be kept in view; and no exercise should be prescribed which does not contribute to its attainment. there should be no bustling about nothing; no busy idleness; no fighting against time; no unnecessary labour, nor useless exhaustion of the pupil's energies. the time of youth is so precious, and there is so much to be done during it, that economy here is perhaps of more importance than in any thing else. every book or exercise, therefore, which has not a palpable tendency to forward the great object designed by education, should by the teacher be at once given up. . another law which experience has established as necessary for the perfecting of any of the arts is, _a fair and honest application of the successive discoveries of science to its improvement_.--this has been the uniform practice in those arts which have of late been making such rapid progress. the artist and mechanic are never indifferent to the various improvements which are taking place around them; nor do they ever stand apart, till they are forced upon their notice by third parties, or public notoriety. there is, in the case of the manufacturer, no nervous timidity about innovation; nor does he ever attempt to deceive himself by ignorantly supposing that the change can be no improvement.--nor will he suffer himself to be deceived by others. his workmen are not allowed, to save themselves future trouble, to be careless or sinister in their trials of the improvement; for he knows, that however it may be with them, yet if his neighbour succeeds, and he fails, it may prove his ruin. such also should be the conduct of the teacher. the time has now gone by when parents were ignorant, either of what was communicated at school, or the manner in which it was taught. the improvement of their children by education, has become a primary object with all sensible parents; and they will never again be satisfied with a school or a teacher, where solid instruction, and the most useful kind of knowledge are not imparted. ameliorations in his art, therefore, is now as necessary to the teacher, as improvements in machinery are to the mechanic and the manufacturer. it will no longer do for him to say, "i can see no improvement in the change," if the parents of his pupils have been able to discover it; and the teacher who stands still in the present forward march of society, will soon find himself left alone. the practical educationist, like the mechanician, ought no doubt to be cautious in adopting changes upon chance; but wherever an improvement in his art has been sufficiently proved by fair experiment or long experience, and particularly, when the principle upon which its success depends has been fully ascertained, his rejecting the change on the plea of inconvenience, or from the fear of trouble, is not only an act of injustice to the parents of his pupils, but is a wrong which will very soon begin to re-act upon his own interests. the effect of indifference to improvement in this, as in other arts, may not be felt for a time; but as soon as _others_ have made themselves masters of the improvements which he has rejected, the successive departure of his pupils, and the melting away of his classes, will at last awaken him to a sense of his folly, when it may be too late. such has usually been the effect of remissness in the other arts; and the present state of the public mind in regard to education, indicates a similar result in similar circumstances. in connection with this part of our subject, it may here be necessary to remark, that as the experience of all teachers may not be alike in the _first working_ of a newly applied principle,--the principle itself, when fully ascertained, is not on that account to be either belied or abandoned. there are many concurring circumstances, which may make an exercise that succeeds well in the hands of one person, fail in the hands of another; but to refuse credence to the principle itself, because he cannot as yet successfully apply it, is neither prudent nor wise. there are chemical experiments so exceedingly nice, and depending on so many varying circumstances, that they frequently fail in the hands of even good operators. but the chemical principles upon which they rest remain unchanged, although individual students may have not been able successfully to apply them. if their professor has but _once_ fairly and undoubtedly succeeded in ascertaining the facts on which the principle is based, their failure for a thousand times is no proof that the ascertained principle is really a fallacy. in like manner, any important principle in education, if once satisfactorily ascertained, is a truth in the science, and will remain a truth, whoever may believe or deny it. if it has been proved to produce certain effects in certain given circumstances, it will in all future times do the same, when the circumstances are similar. the inability, therefore, of a parent or teacher, to produce equal effects by its means, may be good enough proof of his want of skill, but it is no proof of the want of inherent power in the principle itself. the rings of saturn which my neighbour's telescope has clearly brought to view, are not blotted from the heavens because my pocket glass has failed to detect them. it has been by attention to these, and similar rules, that all the secular arts have advanced to their present state; and the art of teaching must be perfected by similar means. there ought therefore to be a distinct object in view on the part of the teacher,--a specific end which he is to endeavour to arrive at in his intercourse with his pupil. for the attainment of this end, he must employ the best and the surest means that are in his power; for the same purpose, he ought honestly and fairly to apply the successive discoveries of science as they occur; and should never allow himself to abandon an exercise founded upon ascertained principles, merely because he at first finds difficulty in putting it in operation. chap. iv. _on the establishment of sound principles in education._ the application of the foregoing remarks to our present purpose, is a matter of great practical importance. it has indeed been owing chiefly to their having been hitherto overlooked, that education has been left in the backward state in which we at present find it. but if, as we have seen, education must bend to the same rigid discipline to which the other sciences have had to submit,--and if teaching can be improved only by following the laws which have determined the success of the other arts--the question naturally arises, "what is to be done now for education?"--"where are we to begin?"--"how are we to proceed?"--"in what manner are the principles of the science to be investigated, so that they shall most extensively promote the success of the art? and how is the art to be cultivated, so that it may, to the fullest extent, be benefited by the science?" to these enquiries we shall in the present chapter direct our attention. the method of investigating the operations of nature in the several sciences is very nearly alike in all. for example, in the science of chemistry, as we have formerly noticed, the first object of the philosopher would be to take a comprehensive view of his whole subject, and endeavour to separate the substances in nature according to their great leading characteristics. he would at once distinguish mineral substances as differing from vegetables;--and vegetable substances as differing from animals;--thus forming three distinct classes of objects, blending with each other, no doubt, but still sufficiently distinct to form what have been called the three kingdoms of nature. the various objects included under each of these he would again subdivide according to their several properties;--and as he went forward, he would endeavour, by careful examination and experiment, to ascertain, not only their combinations, but also the characteristic properties of their several elements. the chemist, in this method of investigating nature, almost always proceeds upwards, analytically, advancing from the general to the special, from the aggregate to its parts, endeavouring to ascertain as he proceeds the laws which regulate their composition and decomposition, for the purpose simply of endeavouring to imitate them. by this means alone he expects to perfect the science, and to benefit the arts. in the science of botany, zoology, anatomy, physiology, and almost all the others, the same plan has been adopted with invariable success. the subject, whatever it be, is looked upon as a whole, and then separated into its great divisions;--these again, are subdivided into classes; and these again, into orders, genera, species, and varieties, by which means each minute part can be examined by itself in connection with the whole; the memory and the judgment are assisted in their references and application; and order reigns through the whole subject, which otherwise would have been involved in inextricable confusion. in education, as in the other sciences, nature is our only sure teacher; and the educationist, therefore, who desires success, must proceed in the investigation in a similar way. he must first take a comprehensive view of nature's educational processes; divide them into their several kinds; and subdivide these again when necessary, that each may be viewed alone. he must then ascertain the nature and the object of these processes, and observe the means and the methods employed for accomplishing them, that he may, if possible, be enabled to _imitate_ them. in this way, and in this way alone, he is to perfect the science of education, and benefit the art of teaching. that this is the best way yet known of proceeding in investigating and improving the science of education, experience has already proved; and that it must theoretically be so, we think can admit of little doubt. the operations of nature exhibit the soundest philosophy, and the most perfect examples of art. the materials she selects are the most suitable for the purpose; the means she employs are always the most simple and efficient; and her ends are invariably gained at the least expense of material, labour, and time. in the pursuit, therefore, of any object or end similar to that in which we find nature engaged, man's truest wisdom is to distrust his own speculations, and to learn from her teaching. he should, with a child-like docility, follow her leadings and imitate her operations, both as it respects the materials he is to employ, and the mode and order in which he is to use them. were an artist to find himself at a loss for the want of an instrument to accomplish some particular purpose, or some new material upon which to operate, or some special, but as yet unknown means for attaining some new and important object,--we are warranted by facts to say, that the natural philosopher would be his best instructor. for if he can be directed to some similar operation of nature, or have pointed out to him some one or more of nature's pupils,--some animal or insect, perhaps,--whose labour or object is similar to his own, he will most probably find there, or have suggested to him by their mode of procedure, the very thing he is in search of. by studying their methods of operating, and the means employed by them for accomplishing their end, some principle or device will be exhibited, by the imitation of which his own special object will most readily and most successfully be attained. every day's experience gives us additional proof of the importance and soundness of this suggestion. for it is a remarkable fact, that there is scarcely a useful mechanical invention to which genius has laid claim,--and deservedly laid claim,--that has not its prototype somewhere in nature. the same principles, working perhaps in the same manner, have been silently in operation, thousands of years before the inventor was born; but which, from want of observation, or the neglect of its practical application to useful purposes, lay concealed and useless. this culpable neglect in practically applying the works and ways of god as he intended, has carried with it its own punishment; for thousands of the conveniences and arts, which at present smooth and adorn the paths of civilized life, have all along been placed within the reach of intelligent man. if he had but employed his intelligence, as he ought to have done, in searching them out, and had asked himself when he perceived them, "what does this teach me?" the very question would have suggested a use. this accordingly will be found to be the true way of studying nature, and one especial design for which a beneficent creator has spread out his works for our inspection. in proof, and in illustration of this fact, we may refer to the telescope, which has from the beginning had its type in the human eye;--to the formation of paper, which has been manufactured for thousands of years by the wasp;--to the levers, joints, and pulleys of the human body, of which the mechanist has as yet only made imperfect imitations;--and to the saw of an insignificant insect, (the saw-fly) which has never yet been successfully imitated by man. in prosecuting our investigations into the science of education, therefore, our business is to study nature in all the educational processes in which we find her occupied, and of which we shall find there are many;--to observe and collect facts;--to detect principles, and to discover the means employed in carrying them out, and the modes of their working;--to trace effects back to their causes, and then again to follow the effects through their various ramifications, to some ultimate end. these are the things which it is the business of the educationist to investigate, and to record for the benefit of the teacher and his art. the duty of the teacher, on the other hand, is to apply to his own purposes, and to turn to use in the prosecution of his objects, those facts discovered by the philosopher in the study of nature. he should by all means understand the principles upon which nature works, and the means which she employs for attaining her ends. he ought, as far as circumstances will allow, to arrive at his object by similar means; chusing similar materials, and endeavouring invariably to work upon the same model. by honestly following out such a mode of procedure, he must be successful; for although he can never attain to the perfection of nature, yet this is obviously the best, if not the only method by which he can ever approximate towards it. part ii. on the great design of nature's teaching, and the methods she employs in carrying it on. chap. i. _a comprehensive view of the several educational processes carried on by nature._ we have seen in the former chapters, that the most probable method of succeeding in any difficult undertaking is to learn from nature, and to endeavour to imitate her. the first great question with the educationist then should be, "does nature ever teach?" if he can find her so employed, and if he be really willing to learn, he may rest assured, that by carefully studying her operations, he will be able to detect something in the ends which she aims at, and the methods which she adopts for attaining these ends, that will lead him to the selection of similar means, and crown him ultimately with similar success. now we find that nature does teach; and in so far as rational beings are concerned, whether angelic or human, it appears to be her chief and her noblest employment. in regard to the human family, she no doubt, at a certain period, intends that the task should be taken up and carried on by parents and teachers, under her controul; but when we compare the nature and success of their operations with hers, we perceive the immense inferiority of their best endeavours, and are obliged to confess, that in many instances, instead of forwarding her work, they either mar or destroy it. for in regard to the _matter_ of their teaching, it may be observed, that they can teach their pupils nothing, except what they or their predecessors have learned of nature before;--and as to the _manner_ in which it is taught, it is generally so very imperfect, that for their success, teachers are often indebted in no small degree to the constant interference of nature, in what is ordinarily termed the "common sense" of their pupils, for rectifying many of their errors, and supplying innumerable deficiencies. of this we shall by and by have to advert more particularly. the educational operations of nature are universal; and she attaches large rewards to diligence in attending to them. she evidently intends, as we have said, that the parent and teacher should take up, and follow out her suggestions in this great work; but even when this is delayed, or altogether neglected, her part of the proceedings is not abandoned. nature is so strong within the pupil, and her educational promptings are so powerful, that even without a teacher, he is able for a time to teach himself. in man, and even among many of the more perfect specimens of the lower creation, nature has suspended the larger portion of their comforts and their security, upon attention to her lessons, and the practical application of that which she teaches. the dog which shuns the person who had previously beaten him; the infant that clings to its nurse, and refuses to leave her; the boy who refuses to cross the ditch he never tried before; the savage who traces the foot-prints of his game; the man who shrinks from a ruffian countenance; and newton, when the fall of an apple prompted him to pursue successively the lessons which that simple event suggested to him, are all examples of the teachings of nature,--specimens of the manner in which she enables her pupils to collect and retain knowledge, and stimulates them to apply it. wherever these suggestions of nature are individually neglected, there must be discomfort and danger, and wretchedness to the _person_ doing so; and wherever they are not taken up by communities, and socially taught by education of some kind or another, _society_ must necessarily remain little better than savage.--the opposite of this is equally true; for wherever they are personally attended to, the individual promotes his own safety and comfort; and when they are socially taken up and followed out by education, however imperfectly, then civilization, and national security, prosperity, and happiness, are the invariable consequences. the information which we are to derive from the academy of nature, is to be found chiefly in those instances where she is least interfered with by the operations of others. in these we shall endeavour to follow her; and, by classifying her several processes, and investigating each of them in its order, we shall assuredly be able to arrive at some first principles, to guide us in imitating the modes of her working, and which will enable us, in some measure, to share in her success. when we take a comprehensive view of the educational processes of nature, we find them arranging themselves under four great divisions, blending into each other, no doubt, like the kingdoms of nature and the colours of the rainbow, but still perfectly distinct in their great characteristics. the _first_ educational process which is observable in nature's academy, is the stimulating of her pupil to such an exercise of mind upon external objects, as tends powerfully and rapidly to expand and strengthen the powers of his mind. this operation begins with the first dawning of consciousness, and continues under different forms during the whole period of the individual's life. the _second_ educational process, which in its commencement is perhaps coeval with the first, is nature's stimulating her pupil to the acquisition of knowledge, for the purpose of retaining and using it. the _third_ consists in the disciplining of her pupil in the practical use, and proper application of the knowledge received; by which means the knowledge itself becomes better understood, better remembered, and much more at the command of the will than it was before:-- and her _fourth_ educational process consists, in training her pupil to acquire facility in communicating by language, his knowledge and experience to others. the _first_ of these four general departments in nature's educational process, _is the developement and cultivation of the powers of her pupil's mind_.--this part of nature's work begins at the first dawn of intelligence; and it continues through every other department of her educational process. for several months during infancy, sensation itself is but languid. the first indistinct perceptions of existence gradually give place to a dreamy and uncertain consciousness of personal identity.--pain is felt; light is perceived; objects begin to be defined, and distinguished; ideas are formed; and then, but not till then, reflection, imagination, and memory, are gradually brought into exercise, and cultivated. it is the extent and strength of these faculties, as we shall afterwards see, that is to measure the educational progress of the child; and therefore it is, that the first object of nature seems to be, to secure their proper developement. the child feels and thinks; and it is these first feelings and thoughts, frequently repeated, that enable it gradually to extend its mental operations. it is in this way only that the powers, of the mind in infants are expanded and strengthened, as there can be no mental culture without mental exercise. while a child is awake, therefore, nature prompts him to constant and unwearied mental exertion; by which means he becomes more and more familiar with external objects; acquires a better command over his own mind in perceiving and remembering them; and becomes more and more fitted, not only for receiving constant accessions of knowledge, but also for putting that knowledge to use. the _second_ part of nature's educational process, we have said, consists in her powerfully stimulating her pupil to _the acquisition of knowledge_.--this, which we call the second part of nature's operations, has been going on from an early period of the child's history, and it acts usually in conjunction with the first. as soon as an infant can distinguish objects, it begins to form ideas regarding them. it remembers their shape; it gradually acquires a knowledge of their qualities; and these it remembers, and, as we shall immediately see, is prompted to put to use upon proper occasions.--it is in the acquisition of this kind of knowledge that the principle of curiosity begins to be developed. the child's desire for information is increased with every new accession; and for this reason, its mental activity and restlessness, while awake, have no cessation. every glance of the eye, every motion of the hands or limbs made to gratify its curiosity, as it is called, is only an indication of its desire for information:--every sight or sound calls its attention; every portable object is seized, mouthed, and examined, for the purpose of learning its qualities. these operations at the instigation of nature are so common, that they are scarcely observed; but when we examine more minutely into their effects, they become truly wonderful. for example, were we to hear of an infant of two or three years of age, having learned in the course of a few months to distinguish each soldier in a regiment of negroes, whose features their very parents perhaps would have some difficulty in discriminating; if he could call each individual by his name; knew also the names and the uses of their several accoutrements; and, besides all this, had learned to understand and to speak their language;--we would be surprised and incredulous. and yet this would be an accumulation of knowledge, not much greater than is attained in the same space of time by many of the feeble unsophisticated pupils of nature.--infants, having no temptation to depart from her mode of discipline, become in a short period acquainted with the forms, and the uses, and even the names, of thousands of persons and objects, not only without labour, but with vast satisfaction and delight. the training of her pupils to _the practical use of their knowledge_, forms the _third_ department in nature's educational process.--this is the great end which the two previous departments were designed to accomplish. this is nature's _chief_ object;--all the others are obviously subordinate. the cultivation of the mind, and the acquisition of knowledge were necessary;--but that necessity arose from the circumstance of their being preparatory to this. nature, in fact, appears to have stamped this department of her operations almost exclusively with her own seal;--repudiating all knowledge that remains useless, and in a short time blotting it entirely from the memory of her pupils; while that portion of their acquired knowledge, on the contrary, which is useful and is put to use, becomes in proportion more familiar, and more permanent. it is also worthy of remark, that the knowledge which is most useful, is always most easily and pleasantly acquired. the superior importance of this department of education is very observable. in the previous departments of nature's educational process, the child was induced to _acquire_ new ideas;--in this he is prompted to _make use of them_. in the former he was taught to _know_;--in this he is trained to _act_. for example, if he has learned that his nurse is kind, nature now prompts him to act upon that knowledge, and he accordingly strains every nerve to get to his nurse;--if he has learned that comfits are sweet, he acts upon that knowledge, and endeavours to procure them;--and if he has once experimentally learned that the fire will burn, he will ever afterwards keep from the fire. last of all comes the _fourth_, or supplementary step in this beautiful educational process of nature. it consists in gradually training her pupil to _communicate the knowledge and experience which he has attained_.--it is probable that nature begins this part of her process before the child has acquired the use of language;--but as it is by language chiefly that man holds fellowship with man, it is not till he has learned to speak that the mental exercise on which its success depends, becomes sufficiently marked and obvious. it consists, not in the acquisition of language so much, as in the use of language after it has been gained. the pupil is for this purpose prompted by nature to think and to speak at the same moment;--mentally to prepare one sentence, while he is giving utterance to its predecessor. that this is not the result of instinct, but is altogether an acquisition made under the tuition of nature by the mental exertions of the infant himself, is obvious from the fact, that he is at first incapable of it, and never pronounces three, and very seldom two words consecutively without a pause between each. this the child continues to do after he is perfectly familiar with the meaning of many words, and after he can also pronounce each of them individually. in giving utterance to the first words which he uses, there is an evident suspension of the mind in regard to every thing else. his whole attention appears to be concentrated upon the word and its pronunciation. he cannot think of any thing else and pronounce the word at the same time; and it is not till after long practice that he can utter two, three, or more words in a sentence, without hesitation and a decided pause between them. it is only by degrees that he acquires the ability to utter a phrase, and at last a short sentence, without interruption. nature prompts the child to this exercise, which from the first attempt, to the full flow of eloquence in the extemporaneous debater, consists simply in commanding and managing one set of ideas in the mind, at the moment the person is giving utterance to others. this cannot be done by _the child_, but it is gradually acquired by _the man_; and we shall see in its proper place, that this acquisition is entirely the result of a mental exercise, such as we have here described, and to which various circumstances in childhood and youth are made directly subservient. here then we have the highway of education, marked off, and walled in by nature herself. that these four great departments in her educational process will be much better defined, and their parts better understood, when experience has given more ample opportunities for their observation, cannot be doubted; and it is not improbable, that future investigations will suggest a different arrangement of heads, and a different modification of their parts also; but still, the great outline of the whole, we think, is so distinctly marked, that, so far as they go, there can be little mistake; and by following them, we are most likely to obtain a large amount of those benefits which education is intended to secure.--to excel nature is impossible; but by endeavouring to imitate her, we may at least approach nearer to her perfections. it is not enough, however, for us to perceive the great outlines of nature's operations in education; we must endeavour to follow her into the details, and investigate the means which she employs for carrying them into practical effect. we shall therefore take up the several departments above enumerated in their order, and endeavour to trace the laws which regulate her operations in each, for the purpose of assisting the teacher in his attempts to imitate them. chap. ii. _on the method employed by nature for cultivating the powers of the mind._ the _first_ step in nature's educational process, is the cultivation of the powers of the mind; and, without entering into the recesses of metaphysics, we would here only recall to the recollection of the reader, that the mind, so far as we yet know, can be cultivated in no other way than by voluntary exercise:--not by mere sensation, or perception, nor by the involuntary flow of thought which is ever passing through the mind; but by the active mental operation called "thinking,"--the voluntary exertion of the powers of the mind upon the idea presented to it, and which we have denominated "reiteration,"[ ] as perhaps best descriptive of that thinking of the presented idea "over again," by which alone, as we shall see, the mind is cultivated, and knowledge increased. it is also here worthy of remark, that the cultivation of the powers of her pupil's mind, as a preliminary to their acquiring and applying of knowledge, appears to be a settled arrangement of nature, and one which must be rigidly followed by the teacher, wherever success is to be hoped for. analogy, in other departments of nature's operations, proves its necessity, and points out its wisdom; for she is never premature, and never stimulates her pupils to any work, till they have been properly prepared for accomplishing it. hence the consistency and importance of commencing the process of education, by expanding and cultivating the powers of the mind, preparatory to the future exertions of the pupil; and hence also the wisdom of requiring no more from the child, than the state of his mental powers at the time are capable of performing. our object, at present, is to discover the means employed by nature for accomplishing this preliminary object, that we may, by imitating her plans, obtain the greatest amount of benefit. in infancy, and during the early part of a child's life, each of the thousands of objects and actions which are presented to its observation, falls equally on the organs of sense, and each of them _might_, if the child had pleased, have become objects of perception, as well as objects of sensation. but it is evident, that till the mind occupy itself upon one or more of these objects, there can be no mental exercise, and, of course, no mental culture. on the contrary, if the mind shall single out any one object from the mass that surrounds it,--shall entertain the idea suggested by its impression on the organs of sense, and think of it--that is, review it on the mind--there is then mental exercise, and, in consequence, mental cultivation. from this obvious truth it necessarily follows, that the cultivation of the mind does not depend upon the multitude of objects presented to the observation of a child, but only on those which it really does observe,--which it looks at, and thinks upon, by an active voluntary exercise of its own powers. the child, no doubt, _might_ have smelt every odour; it _might_ have listened to every sound that entered the ear; and it _might_ have looked upon every image that entered the eye; but we know that it did not. a few of them only were thought of,--the ideas which they suggested were alone "reiterated" by the mind,--and therefore they, and they alone, tended to its cultivation. as this act of the mind lies at the root of all mental improvement, during every stage of the pupil's education, it becomes a matter of considerable importance, that its nature, and mode of operation, should be thoroughly understood. let us for this purpose suppose that a lighted candle is suddenly presented before a young infant. he looks at it; he thinks of it; his mind is employed with the flame of the candle in a manner quite different from what it is upon any thing else in the room. all the other images which enter the eye fail to make an impression upon the mind; but this object which the child looks at,--observes,--does this; and accordingly, while it is passive as to every thing else, the mind is found to be actively engaged with the candle. he not only sees it, but he looks at it. this, and similar "reiterations" of ideas by the mind, frequently repeated by the infant, gradually communicate to it a consciousness of mental power, and enable him more and more easily to wield it. every such instance of the reiteration of an idea,--of the voluntarily exercise of active thought,--strengthens the powers of the mind, so that he is soon able to look at and follow with his eyes other objects, although they are much less conspicuous than the glare of a candle. when we examine the matter a little farther in regard to infants, we perceive, that all the little arts used by the mother or the nurse, to "amuse the child," as it is called, are nothing more than means employed to excite this reiteration of ideas by the mind. a toy, for example, is presented to the infant, and his attention is fixed upon it. he is not satisfied with passively seeing the toy, as he sees all the other objects in the room, but he actively looks at it. nor is this enough; the toy is usually seized, handled, mouthed, and turned; and each movement prompts the mind to active thought,--to reiterate the idea which each of the sensations suggests. these impressions are no doubt rapid, but they are real; and each of them has been reiterated,--actively thought of,--before they could either be received, or remembered; and it is only by these impressions frequently repeated, in which the mind is vigorously and delightfully engaged, that it acquires that activity and strength which we so frequently witness in the young. at a more advanced period during childhood and youth, we find the cultivation of the mind still depending upon the same principle. it is not enough that numerous objects be presented to the senses of the pupil; or that numerous words or sounds be made to vibrate in his ears; or even that he himself be made mechanically to utter them. this may be done, and yet the mind may remain perfectly inactive with respect to them all:--nay, experience shews, that during such mechanical exercises, his mind may all the time be actively employed upon something else. there must therefore, not only be a hearing, or a reading of the words which convey an idea, but he must make the idea his own, by thinking it over again for himself. hence it is that mental vigour is not acquired in proportion to the number of pages that the pupil is compelled to read; nor to the length of the discourses which are delivered in his hearing; nor to the multiplicity of objects placed before him. it is found entirely to depend upon his diligence in thinking for himself;--in reiterating in his own mind the ideas which he hears, or reads, or which are suggested to his mind by outward objects. this is still the same act of the mind which we have described in the infant, with this very important difference, however, that a large portion of his ideas is now suggested by _words_, instead of _things_; but it is the ideas, and not the words, that the mind lays hold of, and by which its powers are cultivated. when this act therefore is successfully forced upon a child in any of his school operations, the mind will be disciplined and improved;--but wherever it is not produced, however plausible or powerful the exercise may _appear_ to be, it will on scrutiny be found to be totally worthless in education,--a mere mechanical operation, in which, there being no mental exertion, there can be no mental culture. in the adult, as well as in the young and the infant, the culture of the mind is carried on in every case by the operation of the same principle.--however various the means employed for this purpose may be, they all depend for their success upon this kind of active thought,--this reiteration of the _ideas_ suggested in the course of reading, hearing, observation, or reasoning. a man may turn a wheel, or point pins, or repeat words from infancy to old age, without his mind's being in the least perceptible degree benefited by such operations; while the mill-wright, the engineer, or the artist, whose employments require varied and active thought, cannot pursue his employment for a single day, without mental culture, and an acquisition of mental strength.--the reason is, that in mere mechanical operations there is nothing to induce this act of reiteration,--this active mental exercise of which we are speaking. in the former case, the individual is left to the train of thought in the mind, which appears to afford no mental cultivation;--whereas, in the latter, the mind is, by the acts of comparing, judging, trying, and deciding, which the nature of his occupation renders necessary, constantly excited to active thought,--that is, to the reiteration of the several ideas presented to it. these remarks may be thought by some to be exceedingly commonplace and self-evident.--it may be so. if they be admitted, we ask no more.--our purpose at present is answered, if we have detected a principle in education, by the operation of which the powers of the mind are invariably expanded and strengthened;--an effect which, so far as we yet know, in its absence never takes place. it is by means of this principle alone that nature accomplishes this important object, both in young and old; but its effects are especially observable in the young, where, her operations not being so much interfered with, we find her producing by its means the most extraordinary effects, and that even during the most imbecile period of her pupil's existence. in concluding this part of our investigation, we would very briefly remark, that the existence of this principle in connection with the cultivation of the mind, accounts in a very satisfactory manner for the beneficial results which usually accompany the study of languages, mathematics, and some other branches of education similar in their nature.--these objects of study, when once acquired, may never afterwards be used, and will consequently be lost; but in learning them the pupil was compelled to think,--to exercise his own mind on the subjects taught,--to reflect, and to reiterate the ideas communicated to him, till they had been fully mastered. the mental vigour which was at first forced upon the pupil, by these beneficial exercises, remains with him, and is exercised upon other objects, as they are presented to his observation in ordinary life.--the mind in commencing these studies gradually emancipates itself from the mechanical tendencies which an improper system of teaching had previously formed, and now gathers strength daily by this natural mode of exercising its powers. it is the effects of this kind of discipline that constitute the chief element of a cultivated mind. in this principally consists the difference between a man of "liberal education," and others who have been less highly favoured.--his superiority does not lie in his ability to read latin and greek,--for these attainments may long ago have been forgotten and lost;--but in the state of his mind, and the superior cultivation of the mental powers.--he possesses a clearness, a vigour, and a grasp of mind above others, which enable him at a glance to comprehend a statement;--to judge of its accuracy;--and, without effort, to arrange and communicate his ideas concerning it. this ability, as we have seen, can be acquired only by active mental exercise, and is not necessarily the result of extensive reading, nor is it always accompanied by extensive knowledge. it is the natural and the necessary product of mental discipline, through which the above described act of "reiteration," like a golden thread, runs from beginning to end. it is the fire of intellect, kindled at first perhaps by classical, and mathematical studies; but which now, collecting force and fuel from every circumstance of life, glows and shines, long after the materials which first excited the flame have disappeared. if then, as we formerly explained, the arts are to derive benefit from the investigations of science, we are led to the conclusion, that the wisdom of the teacher will consist in taking advantage of the principle which has been here exhibited. he should not speculate nor theorize, nor go forward inconsiderately in using exercises, the benefits of which are at least questionable; but he ought implicitly to follow nature in the path which she has thus pointed out to him. one chief object with him should be, the cultivation of the minds of his pupils; and the only method by which he can attain success in doing so has now been stated. he must invent, or procure some exercise, or series of exercises, by which the act of "reiteration" in the minds of his pupils shall be regularly and systematically carried on.--he must induce them to think for themselves, and to exercise the powers of their own minds deliberately and frequently,--in the same manner as we see nature operating in the mind of a lively and active child. when he can accomplish this, he will, and he must succeed; whereas, if he allow an exercise to be prepared where this act of the mind is absent, he may rest assured that he is deceiving both himself and the child.--the laws of nature are inflexible; and while she will undoubtedly countenance and reward these who act upon the principles which she has established, she will as certainly leave those who neglect them to eat the "fruit of their own doings."--but the pupil, more than the teacher is the sufferer. under the pure discipline of nature in the infant and the child, learning is not only their business, but their delight; and it is only when her principles are unknown, or violently outraged, that education becomes a burden, and the school-house a prison. footnotes: [ ] note a. chap. iii. _on the means by which nature enables her pupils to acquire knowledge._ the _second_ stage of the pupil's advance under the teaching of nature is that in which she prompts and assists him in the acquisition of knowledge.--the importance of this department of a child's education has uniformly been acknowledged;--so much so, indeed, that it has too frequently absorbed the whole attention of the teacher, as if the possession of knowledge were the whole of education.--that this is a mistake we shall afterwards see; because the value of knowledge must always be in proportion to the use we can make of it; but it is equally true, that as we cannot use knowledge till we have acquired it, its acquisition as a preliminary step is of the greatest importance. our intention is at present, to enquire into the means employed by nature, for enabling her pupils to acquire, to retain, and to classify their knowledge; so that, by ascertaining and imitating her methods, we may in some degree share in her success. for some time during the early years of childhood nature is the chief, or the only teacher; and the contrast between her success at that time, and the success of the parent or teacher who succeeds her, is very remarkable, and deserves consideration. when we examine this process in the case of infants, we see nature acting without interference, and therefore with undeviating success. within a few months after the child has attained some degree of consciousness, we find that nature, under every disadvantage of body and mind, has succeeded in communicating to the infant an amount of knowledge, which, when examined in detail appears very wonderful.--the child has been taught to know his relations and friends; he has acquired the ability to use his limbs, and muscles, and organs, and the knowledge how to do so in a hundred different ways. he has become familiar with the form, the colour, the texture, and the names of hundreds of articles of dress, of furniture, of food, and of amusement, not only without fatigue, but in the exercise of the purest delight, and with increasing energy. he has begun to contrast objects, and to compare them; and this capacity he evinces by an undeviating accuracy in choosing those things which please him, and in rejecting those things which he dislikes. but above all, the infant, along with all this substantial knowledge, has been taught to understand a language, and even to speak it. the fact of all this having been accomplished by a child of only two or three years of age, is so common, that the mysterious principles which it involves, are too generally overlooked. we thoughtlessly allow them to escape observation, as if they were mere matters of instinct, and were to be ranked with the spider's catching its prey, or the sparrow's building its nest. but the principles which regulate these different operations are perfectly dissimilar. in the case of the spider and the sparrow there is no teaching, and, of course, no learning. their first web, and their first nest, are as perfect as the last; but in the case of the infant, with only two or three exceptions, there is nothing that he does, and nothing that he knows, which he has not really learned,--acquired by experience under the tuition of nature, by the actual use of his own mental and physical powers. the benefits accruing to education, from successfully imitating nature in this department of her process, will be incalculable; not only in adding to the amount of knowledge communicated, but in the ease and delight which the young will experience in acquiring it. all must admit that the pleasure, as well as the rapidity, of the educational process in the young, continues only during the time that nature is their teacher;--and that her operations are generally checked, or neutralized by the mismanagement of those who supersede her work, and begin to theorize for themselves. the proof of this is to be found in the fact, that although a child is much less capable of acquiring knowledge between one and three years of age, than he is between eight and ten; yet, generally, the amount of his intellectual attainments by his school exercises, during the two latter years, bears no proportion to those of the former, when nature _alone_ was his teacher. in the one case, too, his knowledge was acquired without effort or fatigue, and in the exercise of the most delightful feelings;--in the other, quite the reverse. that we shall ever be able to equal nature in this part of her educational process, is not to be expected; but that, by following up the principles which she has developed, and imitating the methods by which she accomplishes her ends, we shall become more and more successful, there can be no doubt. the method, therefore, to be adopted by us is, to examine carefully the principles which she employs with the young, through the several stages of her process, and then, by adopting exercises which embody these principles, to proceed in a course similar to that which she has pointed out. in prosecuting this plan, then, our object must be, first, to examine generally the various means employed by nature, in the acquisition of knowledge by the young,--and then to attend more in detail to the mode by which she applies the principles involved in each. these general means appear to consist of four distinct principles, which, for want of better definitions, we shall denominate "reiteration," "individuation, or abstraction," "grouping, or association," and "classification, or analysing."[ ] the _first_ is the act of "reiteration," of which we have already spoken, as the chief instrument in cultivating the powers of the mind, and without which, we shall also find, there can be no acquisition of knowledge. the _second_ is the principle of "individuation," by which nature communicates the knowledge of single ideas, or single objects, by constraining the child to concentrate the powers of its mind upon one object, or idea, till that object or idea is familiar, or, at least, known. the _third_ is the common principle of "grouping, or association," and appears to depend, in some degree, on the imaginative powers, by which a child begins to associate objects or truths together, after they have become individually familiar; so that any one of them, when afterwards presented to the mind, enables the pupil at a glance, to command all the others which were originally associated with it. the _fourth_ is the principle of "classification, or analysing," by which the mind distributes objects or truths according to their nature,--puts every truth or idea, as it is received, into its proper place, and among objects or ideas of a similar kind. this classification of objects is not, as in the principle of grouping, regulated according to their accidental relation to each other, by which the canary and the cage in which it is confined would be classed together; but according to their nature and character, by which the canary would be classified with birds, and the cage among other articles of household furniture. all knowledge, so far as we are aware, appears to be communicated and retained for use, by means of these four principles; and we shall now proceed to examine the mode in which each of them is employed by nature for that purpose. footnotes: [ ] note a. chap. iv. _on nature's method of communicating knowledge to the young by the principle of reiteration._ we have, in a former chapter, endeavoured to describe that particular act of the mind which generally follows simple perception, and by which an idea, when presented to it, is made the subject of _active thought_, or is "_reiterated_" again to itself. we have found upon good evidence, that it is by this process, whether simple or complex, that the powers of the mind are cultivated; and we now proceed to shew, that it is by the same act, and by it alone, that any portion of knowledge is ever communicated.[ ] no truth, or idea of any kind, can make an effective entrance into the mind, or can find a permanent lodgement in the memory, so as to become "knowledge," until it has successfully undergone this process. there are two ways by which we usually acquire knowledge:--the one is by _observation_, without the use of language, and which is common to us with those who are born deaf and dumb; and the other is _through the medium of words_, either heard or read. in both cases, however, the knowledge retained consists entirely of the several _ideas_ which the objects or the words convey; and what we are now to shew, is, that these ideas thus conveyed, can neither be received by the mind, nor retained by the memory, till they have undergone this process of "reiteration." while, on the contrary, it will be seen that, whenever this process really takes place, the idea thus reiterated does become part of our knowledge, and is, according to circumstances, more or less permanently fixed upon the memory. we shall for this purpose endeavour to trace the operation of the principle, both in the case of ideas communicated by objects without language, and in those conveyed to the mind by means of words. that this act of reiteration of an idea by the mind, must take place, before objects of perception can become part of our knowledge, will, we think, be obvious, from a consideration of the following facts.--when, for example, we are in a crowded room, or in the fields, numerous sounds enter the ear,--thousands of images enter into and impress the eye, yet not one of these becomes part of our knowledge till it is _thought of_;--that is, till the idea suggested by the sensation, has not only been perceived, but reiterated by the mind. this will appear to many so plain, that any farther illustration of the fact may be deemed useless. but experience, has shewn, that the illustration of this important process in education, is not only expedient, but is really necessary; as the overlooking of this simple principle has often been the cause of great inconsistencies on the part of teachers. we shall therefore endeavour to exhibit the working of the principle in various forms, that it may be fully appreciated when we come to apply it. let us then suppose two children taken silently through a museum of curiosities, the one active and lively, the other dull and listless. it would be found on retiring, that the former would be able to give an account of many things which he saw, and that the other would remember little or nothing. in this case, all the objects in the exhibition were seen by both; and the question arises, "why does the knowledge of the one, so much exceed that of the other?" the reason is, that the mind of the one was active, while the mind of the other was in a great measure inactive. both _saw_ the objects; but only one _looked at_ them. the one actively employed his mind--fixed his eye on an object, and thought of it; that is, he reiterated the ideas it suggested to him, whether as to form, or colour, or movement, and by doing so, the ideas thus reiterated, were effectively received, and given over to the keeping of the memory. the other child saw the whole; they were perhaps objects of perception; but he allowed his sensations to die away as they were received; and his mind was left to wander, or to remain under the dreamy influence of a mere passive and evanescent train of thought. his "attention" was not arrested;--his mind was not actively engaged on any of the articles he saw; in other words, the ideas which they suggested were not "reiterated."[ ] now, that it was the want of this mental reiteration which was the cause, and the only cause, why this very usual means of acquiring knowledge failed to communicate it, may be proved we think by a very simple experiment. for if we shall suppose that the child who was obtaining no knowledge by means of the various curiosities around him, had been asked at the time a question respecting any of them,--a stuffed dog, for example,--his attention would have been arrested, and his mind would have been roused to active thought. the words, "what is that?" from his teacher, or companion, would have made him look at it, and reiterate the ideas of its form and colour, so far as to enable him to give an answer. and if he does so, it will be found afterwards, on leaving the place, that although he might have remained unconscious of the presence of all the other objects in the museum, he will remember the stuffed dog, merely because, by the question, the idea it suggested was taken up, and reiterated by the mind; while the sensations caused by all the rest, were allowed to pass away. there is another circumstance of daily occurrence, which adds to the evidence that it is this principle which we have called "reiteration," which forms the chief, if not the only avenue, by which ideas find access to the mind; and it is this:--that when at any time we bring to recollection some former circumstance of life, however remote, or when we recall any part of our former knowledge or experience, it comes up to the mind, accompanied with the perfect consciousness, that, at the time we are thinking of, this act of reiteration had taken place upon it; that we most assuredly have thought of it before. we are not more certain that it occupies our thoughts now, than we are that it did so when it occurred;--that the operation of which we are at present speaking, did actually then take place; and that it was by our doing so then, that it is remembered now. this circumstance, when duly considered, is of itself, we think, a sufficient proof, that no part of our knowledge,--not a single idea,--can be acquired, or retained on the memory by any other process, than by this act of reiteration. hence then it is plain, that all the knowledge which we receive by observation, without the use of language, is received and retained on the memory by the operation of this principle; and we will now proceed to shew, that the same process must also take place, when our ideas are received by means of _words_, whether these be spoken or read. it is of great importance for us to remember, that the only legitimate use of words is to convey ideas; and that nature rigidly refuses to acknowledge any other use to which they may be put. hence it is, that in conversation, we are quite unconscious of the words which our friend uses in communicating his ideas. nature impels us to lay hold of the ideas alone; and in proof of this we find, that we have only to attempt to concentrate our attention upon the _words_ he uses, and then we are sure to lose sight of the _ideas_ which the words were intended to convey. hence it is, that our opinion of the style, and the language, and the manner of a speaker, when the subject itself is not familiar, are formed more by indirect impressions, than by direct attention to these things while he speaks; and oftener by reflection afterwards, than by any critical observation during the time. the reason of this, we may remark once for all, is, that what the mind reiterates it remembers,--but nothing more. if during the hearing, it reiterates the ideas, it will then remember the ideas; but if it reiterates the words without the ideas, it will remember nothing but words. those therefore who sow words in the minds of the young, hoping afterwards to reap ideas, are as inconsistent as those who seek to "gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles."[ ] knowledge is received by the use of words in two ways,--either by oral speech, or by written language; but in both cases, the reception of the ideas is still governed by reiteration. we shall endeavour to examine the operation in both cases. let us suppose that a teacher announces to a class of young children, that "cain killed his brother abel,"--and then examines the state of each child's mind in regard to it. all of them heard the words, but some only perhaps are now in possession of the truth communicated. those who are so, followed the teacher in his announcement, not so much in reiterating the words, as in reiterating the idea,--the truth itself; and therefore it is, that they are now acquainted with the fact. of those who heard, but have failed to add this truth to their stock of knowledge, there may be two classes;--those who attended to what was said, but failed to interpret the words; and those whose attention was not excited at all. those who failed to interpret the words, or to extract the idea from them, reiterated the _words_ to themselves, and would perhaps be able to repeat the words again, but they do so in the same manner that a person reads or repeats words in an unknown tongue. the idea,--the truth,--is not yet perceived, and therefore cannot be remembered. the others who remember nothing, have reiterated nothing; their minds remained inactive. they also heard the words, but they failed to listen to them; in the same way as they often see objects, but do not look at them. here it is evident that every child who reiterated the idea in his own mind, is in possession of the fact communicated; and all who did not do so, even although they reiterated the words, have no addition made to their knowledge; which shews that it is only by this act of the reiteration of the ideas, that any portion of our knowledge is ever acquired. that this is a correct exhibition of the principle, and a legitimate inference from the phenomena, may be still farther proved by an experiment similar to one formerly recommended. let the teacher, in the middle of a story, ask some of the inattentive pupils a question respecting some of the persons or things he is speaking about, and force the reiteration of that part of the narrative in the child's mind by getting an answer, and it will be found at the close, that although he may remember nothing else of all that he heard, yet he will most perfectly remember that part about which he was questioned, and respecting which he returned an answer. the same thing may be ascertained by our own experience, in hearing a lecture or sermon, or even in conversation with a friend. in these cases, as long as our attention is kept up,--that is, as long as we continue to reiterate the ideas that we hear,--we may remember them; but when our minds flag, or wander; in other words, when we cease to reiterate the ideas of the speaker, the sounds enter our ear, but the matter is gone. all that has been said during that period of inattention has been lost; it never has formed, and never can form, part of our knowledge. thus we see, that in the act of hearing oral communications, the principle of reiteration of the ideas is obviously necessary for the acquiring of knowledge; and we shall now shew, that it is equally necessary in the act of reading. many persons must have witnessed children reading distinctly, and fluently perhaps, who yet were not made one whit wiser by what they read. the act of reading was correctly performed, and yet there was no accession to their knowledge. the cause of this is easily explained. the _ideas_ conveyed by the words have not been reiterated by the mind,--perhaps they were never perceived. for as long as the act of reading is difficult, the words undergo this process first, and the ideas must be gleaned afterwards. hence it is, that children, when hurried from lesson to lesson before they can read them so easily as to perceive and reiterate the ideas while reading, acquire the habit of decyphering the words alone, and the eye from practice reads mechanically, while the mind at the moment is usually wandering, or is engaged in attending to something else. nature, as we have before shewed in the act of hearing, does not intend that the mind should pay attention both to the words and the ideas at the same time; and reading being only an artificial substitute for hearing, is made subject to the same law. it is the _ideas_ that nature induces us to grapple with; and the reading of words like the hearing of language, is merely the means employed to get at them. hence the necessity of children being taught to read fluently, and with perfect ease, before they leave the school; and the neglect of this is the reason why so many after leaving school, derive so little instruction from the use of books. of these individuals, experience shews, that many, who on leaving school could not collect ideas by their mode of mechanical reading, yet persevere, and at last teach themselves by long practice to understand what they read; while there are not a few who, in similar circumstances, become discouraged, abandon the practice of reading, and soon forget the art altogether. of the correctness of these facts, every one may be convinced, by recollecting what must often have taken place with himself. when at any time the mind is exhausted while reading, we continue to read on, page after page, and when we have finished, we find, that not a single truth has made its way to the memory. now this did not arise from any difficulty in comprehending the ideas in the book, because it does not make much difference whether the subject has been simple or otherwise; neither did it arise from the want of all mental activity, for the mind was so much engaged as to read every word and every letter in the pages upon which we were occupied. but it arose entirely from the want of that principle of which we are here speaking. the words were read mechanically, and the ideas were either not thought of, or at least they were not reiterated by the mind, and therefore it is that they are lost,--and no effort can ever again recall them. the proof of the accuracy of these views will still be found in the circumstance, that if, while the person is reading, this act of the reiteration of some one or more of the ideas be in any way forced upon him, _these_ ideas thus reiterated will afterwards be remembered, although all the others are lost. here then we have arrived at a principle connected with the acquisition of knowledge, by attending to which education may be made most efficient for that purpose; but without which, education must remain a mere mechanical routine of barren exercises. no idea, no truth, we have seen, can ever form part of our knowledge, till it has undergone this particular mental process, which we have called "reiteration." if the idea, or truth, intended to be communicated, be reiterated by the mind,--thought over again,--it will then be remembered:--but if it be not reiterated by the mind, it never can. it is also worthy of remark, that the tenacity with which the memory keeps hold of any idea or truth, depends greatly upon the vigour of the mind at the time, and still more perhaps upon the frequency of its reiteration. if a child, however languid, is forced to this act of reiteration of an idea but once, it will be remembered for a longer or a shorter time; but if his mind be vigorous and lively, and more especially if he can be made _repeatedly_ to reiterate the same idea in his mind at intervals, he will on that account, retain it much more tenaciously, and will have it at the command of the will more readily. hence the vividness with which the scenes and the circumstances of youth arise upon the mind, and the tenacity with which the memory holds them. these scenes were of daily occurrence; and the small number of remarkable circumstances connected with childhood and youth having few rivals to compete with them in attracting the attention, were witnessed frequently with all the vigour and liveliness of the youthful mind, as yet unburdened with care. they were of course frequently subjected to observation, and as frequently reiterated by the mind, and have on these accounts ever since been vividly pictured by the imagination, and continue familiar to the memory. it also accounts for another circumstance of common occurrence. for when, even in early infancy, any event happened which made a deeper impression upon the mind than usual, that simple circumstance will generally outlive all its neighbours, and will take precedence in point of distinct recollection to the close of life. the reason of this is, not only the deep impression it made upon the mind at the moment, but principally because it had so strongly excited the feelings, that it was oftener thought of then and afterwards;--in other words, this act of reiteration occurred more frequently with respect to it than the others, and therefore it is now better remembered. this is a principle then of which the educationist should take advantage. for if nature invariably communicates knowledge by inducing her pupils to exercise their own minds on the subject taught, it is plain that the teacher should follow the same plan. his pupils cannot remain mentally inactive, and yet learn; neither can the mere routine of verbal exercises either cultivate the mind or increase knowledge. these are but the husks of education, which may tantalize and weaken, but which can never satisfy the cravings of the young mind for information. their mental food must be of a perfectly different kind, consisting of _ideas_, and not of _words_; and these ideas they must receive and concoct by the active use of their own powers. the teacher must no doubt select the food for his pupils, and prepare it for their reception, by breaking it down into morsels, suited to their capacities. but this is all. they must eat and digest it for themselves. the pupil must think over in his own mind, and for himself, all that he is either to know or remember. the ideas read or heard must be reiterated by himself,--thought over again,--if he is ever to profit by them. without this, no care or pains on the part of the teacher, no exertion on the part of the pupil, will be of any avail. all the knowledge that he seems to acquire in any other way is repudiated by nature; and however plausible the exercise may appear, it will ultimately be found fruitless and vain. footnotes: [ ] note b. [ ] note c. [ ] note d. chap. v. _on the acquisition of knowledge by the principle of individuation._ nature, as we have seen, has rendered it imperative that the act of reiteration should be performed upon every idea before it can have an entrance into the mind, or be retained by the memory; but as the individual cannot reiterate, or think over, all the ideas suggested to him by the innumerable objects of sensation with which he is surrounded, it next becomes a matter of importance to ascertain the means employed by nature for enabling her pupils to receive and retain the greatest number of ideas, so that they shall ever afterwards remain at the command of the will. this she accomplishes by the operation of the three other principles to which we have adverted; namely, "individuation," or "abstraction," "grouping," or "association," and "classification," or "analysis."--we shall in this chapter attend to the principle of "individuation," and endeavour to trace its nature and uses in the acquisition of knowledge by the young. the first thing in an infant that will be remarked by a close observer of nature is, that while adding to its knowledge by observation, it always confines its attention to one thing at a time, till it has examined it. before the period when this principle becomes conspicuous in an infant, the eye, and the other senses are in a great measure inactive, so far as the mind is concerned; and the first indication of the senses really ministering to the mind is the eye chusing an object, and the infant examining that object by itself, without allowing its attention to be distracted by any thing else. this operation takes place as soon as an infant is capable of observation. it fixes its eye upon an object, generally one that is new to it, and it continues to look upon it till it has collected all the information that this object can give, or which the limited capacity of the infant will enable it to receive. hence with stationary objects this information is soon acquired; but with moveable objects, or toys, or things which are capable of varying, or multiplying the ideas received by the child, the look is more intense, and the attention is sustained without fatigue for a longer time. till this information has been received, the child continues to look on; and if the object be removed, the eye still follows it with interest, and gives it up at last with reluctance. that by this concentration of its mind upon one object, the infant is adding to its knowledge, appears evident from the fact, that objects which have already communicated their stock of information, and have become familiar, are less heeded than those that are new or uncommon. every new thing excites the curiosity of the child, who is not content till that curiosity be gratified. this has been called "the love of novelty;"--but it is not the love of novelty in the very questionable sense in which many understand that term. on the contrary, it is obviously a wise provision of nature, suited to the capacity and circumstances of children, which is to be taken advantage of, for conveying such crumbs and morsels of knowledge as their limited powers are able to receive; and which should never be abused, by presenting to them an unceasing whirl of names and objects,--a process which fatigues the mind, and leaves them without any specific information. it is the same principle, and is to be considered in the same light, as that which induces the philosopher to confine himself to the investigation of one phenomenon till he understands it. the information which the child is capable of receiving from each of the impressions then made is no doubt small; but it is still information--knowledge.--this is what he is seeking; and, at this stage of his progress, it is only acquired by the concentration of the powers of the mind upon one thing at a time. the effect of this principle in the infant is worthy of remark.--while the pupil remains under the teaching of nature, there is no confusion,--no hurry,--no failure. the tasks which she prescribes for him are never oppressive, and are constantly performed with ease and with pleasure.--although there be no selection made by the parent or teacher for the child to exercise his faculties upon, yet he instinctively selects for himself, without hesitation, and without mistake. all the objects in a room or in a landscape are before him: yet he is never oppressed by their number, nor bewildered by their variety.--his mind is always at ease.--he chooses for himself; but he never selects more for his special observation at one time than he can conveniently attend to. when the objects are new, his attention is restricted to one till it be known; and then, but not till then, as we shall immediately see, he is able, and delights to employ himself in grouping it with others. in early infancy this attention to one object is protracted and slow, till he gradually acquires sufficient energy of mind by practice.--every one must have observed how slowly the eye of an infant of two or three months old moves after an object, in comparison with one of ten.--but even in the latter case, when the glance is lively and rapid, the same principle of individuation continues to operate. the information from an unknown object must still be received alone, and without distraction, although by that time the child is capable of receiving it more quickly. he is not now satisfied with viewing an object on one side, but he must view it on all sides. he endeavours by various means to acquire every one of the ideas which it is capable of communicating. his new toy is viewed with delight and wonder; and his eye by exercise can now scan in a moment its different parts.--but this is not enough; he has now learned to make use of his other senses, and he employs them also, for the purpose of becoming better acquainted with the object which he is contemplating. his toy is seized, mouthed, handled, turned, looked at on all sides, till all the information it can communicate has been received;--and then only is it cast aside for something else, which is in its turn to add to his stock of knowledge. the circumstance to which we would especially call attention at present is, the singleness of thought exercised upon the object, during the time that the child is amused by it.--he attends to nothing else, and he will look at nothing else; and were his attention forced from it for a moment, this is evidently done unwillingly; and, when allowed, it immediately returns to the object. it is also worthy of notice, that if, while he is so engaged, we attempt to teach him something else, or in other words, to induce him to divide his attention upon some other new object, the distraction of his mind is at once apparent; we perceive that it is unnatural; and we find by experience that he does not profit by either. now, from these indications it must be evident, that any interference with this principle of individuation in teaching any thing for the first time, must always be hurtful:--on the contrary, by attending to the principle, and acting upon it in the training of the young, it must be productive of the happiest effects.--while acted upon, under the guidance of nature, its efficiency and power are astonishing. it is by means of this principle, that the infant mind, with all its imbecility and want of developement, acquires and retains more real knowledge in the course of a few months, than is sometimes received at school afterwards during as many years.--few things are more cheering in prospect than the knowledge of this fact; for what may we not expect from the _man_, when his education while a _child_ shall have been improved, and approximated to that of nature! the operation of the principle of individuation, is not confined to the infant, but continues to maintain its place during all the after stages of life, whenever any thing new and uncommon is presented as an object of knowledge. every thing is new to the infant, and therefore this principle is more conspicuous during the early stages of education.--but it is still equally necessary for the child or the youth in similar circumstances; and nature compels him, as it were, still to concentrate the powers of his mind upon every new object, till he has received and become familiar with the information it is calculated to furnish.--every one must have observed the intensity with which a child examines an object which he has never seen before, and the anxiety which he evinces to know all about it.--it requires a considerable effort on his own part, and still greater on the part of others, to detach his mind from the object, till it has surrendered the full amount of information which the young enquirer is seeking. the boy with his new drum will attend to nothing else if he can help it, as long as he has any thing to learn concerning it, and the noises it is capable of producing.--and even when he has tired himself with beating it, he is not satisfied till he has explored its contents, to find out the cause which has created the sounds. the girl with her doll, in the same way, will voluntarily think of nothing else, as long as it can provide her with mental exercise; that is, as long as it can add something new to her present stock of knowledge. and it is here worthy of remark, that the apparent exception in this case, arising from the greater length of time that a doll and a few other similar toys will amuse a child, is in reality a striking confirmation, and illustration of the principle of which we are speaking.--such toys amuse longer, because it is longer before the variety of which they are capable is exhausted.--the doll is fondled, and scolded, and cradled, and dressed, and undressed in so many different ways, that the craving for new ideas continues for a long period to be amply gratified;--but the effect would be quite different, were the very same doll placed where it could only be looked at. every new movement with the toy is employed by nature, for the cultivation of the mental powers, by reiterating the ideas thus imparted, and on which the imagination delights to dwell; and also in receiving a knowledge of individual objects and ideas, which, when once known, are to form the elements of future groupings, and of an endless variety of information. it is here of importance to recollect, that almost all the information received by children, is of a sensible kind. they can form little or no idea of abstract truths. the mind and the memory must be stored with sensible objects,--first individually, and then by grouping,--before the child can arrive at a capacity for abstraction. nature's first object, therefore, is to store the memory and imagination of the young with the names and images of things, which, as we have seen, are acquired individually, and, when once known, are remembered for future use. but those things which they have not yet seen, or felt, or heard, or tasted, are totally beyond their conception, and cannot be of any service, either in grouping, or classification.--hence the great importance of allowing the young mind to act freely in acquiring new ideas by this principle of individuation; as without this, all the lessons into which such ideas shall afterward be introduced, must be in a great measure lost. even adults can form no idea of an unknown object, except by compounding it of something that they already know. and this is at least equally the case with children; who, till they can group and compare objects which they have seen, can realize no idea of any thing, however simple, that has not previously been subjected to the senses.--hence, therefore, the importance at this period of a child's education, of confining the attention chiefly to sensible objects, and of not confounding his faculties, by too early an introduction of abstract ideas. here then we have been able to detect the method by which nature selects, and enables her pupils to prepare the materials of which their future knowledge is to be compounded. these materials are the ideas of sensible objects, and their properties and uses; which must be gathered and stored one by one. by inducing them to attempt to seize even two at a time, they will most probably lose both, and their powers of collecting and storing will, by the same attempt, be injured and weakened. it is by means of this principle of individuation, that, with the most intense craving for information, and while placed among innumerable objects calculated to gratify it, the infant and the child remain perfectly collected, without the slightest appearance of distraction of mind, or confusion of ideas. with his thirst of knowledge ardent and constant, it enables him with the greatest delight to add hourly to his stores of knowledge, without difficulty, without irritation, and without fatigue. the application of these truths to the business of education, we shall attend to in its proper place; in the meantime we may remark, of how much importance it is, that all knowledge communicated to the young be simple, and that for some time it consist chiefly of sensible objects, and their qualities;--objects which they either know, or can have access to. abstract subjects are not suited for children, till they can group, and classify, and compare the sensible objects with which they are already acquainted. the aim of the teacher, therefore, ought to be, strictly to follow nature in this early stage of her operations, and to furnish food for his pupils, of the proper kind, and in proper proportions;--keeping the thinking powers constantly in healthful exercise, by giving as many ideas as the mind can reiterate without fatigue; but carefully avoiding all hurry or force, seeing that the powers of the mind are greatly weakened and injured by a multiplicity of objects, particularly when they are presented so rapidly, that the thoughts have not time to settle upon them, nor the mind to reiterate the ideas which they suggest. chap. vi. _on the application of knowledge by the principle of association, or grouping._ another principle which exhibits itself in the acquisition of knowledge by nature's pupils, is that of "grouping," or associating objects together, after they are individually known. a child, or even an infant, who is frightened, or alarmed, or who suffers any severe injury, remembers the several circumstances, and has the place, the persons, and the things connected with the event, all associated together, and grouped into one scene or picture on the memory. these objects may have been numerous; but by the operation of this principle, they have all been apprehended, and united so powerfully with each other, that no future effort of the child can either separate or obliterate any portion of them; and so comprehensive, that the recollection of any one of the circumstances instantly recalls all the others. these groupings in the mind of a child, formed chiefly by means of the imagination, are almost wholly compounded of sensible objects; and the only necessary prerequisite for their formation appears to be a knowledge of the individual elements of which they are to be composed. if an unknown object be presented to the mind in connection with the others that are known, it is generally excluded, and the things previously known retained. for example, in the case supposed above, of an accident occurring to a child, there would be thousands of objects present, and all cognisable by the senses; but not one of all these that were unknown, that is, that had not previously undergone the process of individuation, is found to form part of the remembered group. there is another circumstance connected with the operation of this principle in the young, which is of importance. almost the whole of a child's knowledge is composed of these groupings. before the developement of the reasoning powers, by which the individual is enabled to _classify_ the elements of his knowledge, there is no way of remembering these elements in connection with each other, except by this principle. if, therefore, we change the order or relative position of the elements or objects which compose the scene, or group, we draw the attention of the pupil altogether from the former, and create another which is entirely new;--in the same way as the transposition of the figures in any sum, forms another of an entirely different amount. the drawing-room, for example, is seen by the children of the family with the fire-place, the cabinet, the sofas, the tables, and other stationary ornaments, in certain relative positions, and this grouping of those objects is to them in reality all that they know of the room. any material change in shifting these objects to other places in the apartment, would, to the _parent_, whose judgment is ripened, produce feelings comparatively slight; but, to the younger branches of the family who group, but cannot as yet classify, it would appear like the complete annihilation of the former apartment. the different arrangement of a few of the articles only, would to them create another, and an entirely different room. this leads us to observe another circumstance connected with the operation of this principle, in the instruction of the young, which is the remarkable fact, that, by making the child familiar with a very few primitive elements, a parent or teacher may communicate an almost infinite variety of groupings, or stories, for cultivating the mind, and increasing the knowledge of his pupil. hence it is, that hundreds of agreeable and useful little histories have been composed for children, with no other machinery than a mamma and her child, and the occasional introduction of a doll or a dog, a cat or a canary bird. to the child, there is in these numerous groupings no appearance of sameness, nor want of variety; and although so much circumscribed in their original elements, they never fail to amuse and delight. the most important circumstance, however, connected with the working of this principle in the education of the young, appears to be the necessity of a previous familiarity with the individual objects, before the child is called upon to group them. if this has been attended to, the grouping of these into any combination will be easy and pleasant;--but if his attention be called from the group, to examine exclusively even but one of its elements, the operation is checked, the mind becomes confused, its powers are weakened, and the grouping has again to commence under serious disadvantages. to illustrate this point, let us suppose a child introduced to the bustle and sports of a common fair. here he sees thousands both of familiar and strange objects, all of which are calculated to excite his mind to increased attention; and yet the child, while greatly amused, is still perfectly at his ease. there is not the slightest indication of his being incommoded by the numerous objects about him; no confusion of ideas, no distraction of mind, no mental distress of any kind; but, on the contrary, in the midst of so much to see and to learn, the young looker-on is not only at his ease, but appears to be delighted. the reason of this is, that he is not by any external force compelled to attend to _all_ that he sees; and nature within directs him to attend to no more than he is able to group, or reiterate in his thoughts. we shall endeavour to examine this condition of the child's mind in such circumstances a little more particularly. the child in the circumstances supposed, must either be a spectator in general, or an examiner in particular; in other words, he must either employ himself with the principle of combination or grouping, or with the principle of individuation,--but he never attempts to employ himself with both at the same time. if he amuses himself as an observer in general, he is engaged in grouping objects which are already familiar to him; but while he is so engaged, he never directs his attention to any one unknown object for the purpose of examining it for the first time by itself. he passes over all the minute and unknown objects with a glance, and attends only to the grouping or associating of those which are already familiar. nature induces him, while thus employed, to pass by all these minute and unknown objects; because, if he were to do otherwise, his observation in general would instantly be recalled, and his whole attention would be monopolized by the object which he had resolved to examine, to the exclusion of every other for the time. this, however, is not what he seeks; and he employs himself entirely in the grouping of things which are already known. his mind is left at ease, and in the possession of all its powers; he looks only at those things which please him; and he passes over all the others without effort or difficulty. but if the boy shall come to something strange and new, which he is desirous of studying more closely, he immediately becomes an examiner in particular; but, at the same moment, he ceases to be an observer in general. the extended business of the fair, and the several groupings of which it is composed, are lost sight of for the moment;--the principle of individuation begins to act, and the operation of the principle of association, or grouping, is at the same moment brought to a stand. the two are incompatible, and cannot act together; and therefore nature never allows the one to interfere with the other. to shew the evil effects of overlooking this important law of nature in the education of a child, we have only to attend to the painful results which would be the consequence of acting contrary to it, even in the vigorous mind of an adult. let us for this purpose suppose a person of a powerful understanding, and a capacious mind, ushered for the first time, and for only five minutes into a crowded apartment in some eastern caravansary, or eastern bazaar, in which every thing to him was new and strange; and let us also suppose that it was imperatively demanded of him, that he should, in that short space of time, make himself acquainted with all that was going on, and be able, on his retiring, minutely to describe all that he saw. the first moment he entered, and the first strange object that caught his eye, would convince him that _the thing was impossible_. if, without such a demand, he had been introduced into such a place, and had seen various groups of strange persons differently employed, each engaged in a manner altogether new to him, and the nature of which was wholly unknown, he might look on with perfect composure, and considerable amusement, because he could attend, like the boy in the fair, either to the general mass, to isolated groups, or to individual things. he would in that case attend to no more than he was able to understand; and would placidly allow the other parts of the scene to pass without any particular attention. but the imperative injunction here supposed,--this pressure from without,--this artificial and unnatural demand upon him,--entirely alters the case. if he even attempted to make himself master of all the particulars of the scene in a circumscribed portion of time, he would find himself bewildered and confounded. the very attempt to individualize and to group so many various objects at the same moment, within such a limited period, would be enough to prostrate all the powers of his mind. he might perhaps be able to observe the persons and their costume, because varieties of persons and dresses are daily and constantly objects of observation, and are grouped without difficulty; but of their several employments, of which he was previously ignorant, he could know nothing, and on retiring, he would neither be able to remember nor to describe them. in such an experiment, it would be found, that the more anxious he was to perfect his task and to answer the demand, in the same proportion would he find himself harassed and distressed, and the powers of his mind overstretched and weakened. and if this would be the result of confounding the principles of individuation and grouping in an adult,--a person of good understanding, and of vigorous mind,--how much more hurtful must such a task be, when demanded from children or youths of ordinary capacity, during their attendance at school! few we believe will doubt the general accuracy of the above results in the cases supposed;--but some may perhaps question, whether they really do arise from the interference of these two antagonist principles during the experiment. to shew that this is the real cause of the distress felt, and the weakness and prostration of mind produced during it, we have only to institute another experiment which is exactly parallel. let us suppose the same person, and for the same limited period, ushered into the traveller's room in a well frequented hotel, and let us also suppose, that the very same demand is made imperative, that he shall observe, and again detail when he retires, all that he sees. let us also suppose, that the number of persons here is equally great, and that their employments are all equally diversified, but that each is familiar to him; and we will at once see that the difficulty of the task is really as nothing. a child could accomplish it. his eye would be able to group the whole in an instant, without effort, and without fatigue. if he saw one party at supper, another at tea, another group at cards, and others amusing themselves at draughts and backgammon; one minute instead of five, would be quite enough to make him master of the whole. on retiring, he would be able to tell the employment of every group in the room; and if any of his acquaintances had made part of the number, he would be able to tell who they were, where they were sitting, and how they were occupied. in doing all this he would find no difficulty; and yet the knowledge he has received is entirely new, and so extensive, that it would take at least ten fold more time to rehearse it, than it took to acquire it. the entire scene also would be permanently imprinted by the imagination upon the memory; and the whole, or any part of it, could be recalled, and reviewed, and rehearsed, at any future period. here then are two cases, precisely similar in their nature, and undertaken by the very same person, where the results are widely different; and we now see, that the difference arises entirely from the principle of individuation having prepared the way in the one case, while it was not allowed to operate in the other. from these circumstances taken together, we perceive, that the grouping of objects, when once they are individually familiar, is never a difficult task, but is rather one of gratification and pleasure;--and we also are taught, that the amount of knowledge thus pleasantly communicated to a child may be most extensive and valuable, while the materials necessary for the purpose, being comparatively few, may be previously rendered familiar with very little exertion. it is the confounding of these two principles in the communication of knowledge, that makes learning appear so forbidding to the young, and prevents that cultivation of the mental powers by their exercises which these would otherwise infallibly produce. by keeping each in its proper place, a child will soon acquire a thorough knowledge of the few elements necessary for the purpose; and these, when acquired, may be grouped by the teacher into thousands of forms, for extending the knowledge, and for invigorating the mind of his delighted pupil. the benevolence and wisdom of this beautiful arrangement in the educational process of nature, are truly wonderful; and in proportion as it is so, every deviation from it on our parts will be attended with disappointment and evil. if all our ideas were to be acquired and retained by the principle of individuation alone, the memory being without help or resting place, would soon become so overpowered by their number, that our knowledge would be greatly circumscribed, and its use impeded. of the benefits arising from attention to the principle we have many apt illustrations in ordinary life, among which the various groupings of the ten numeral figures into sums of any amount, and the forming of so many thousands of words by a different arrangement of the letters of the alphabet, are familiar examples. when a child knows the ten numerals, he requires no more teaching to ascertain the precise amount of any one number among all the millions which these figures can represent. the value of such an acquirement can only be appreciated by considering the labour it would cost a child to gain a knowledge of all these sums individually, and the overwhelming burden laid upon his memory if each of the millions of sums had to be remembered by a separate character. by the knowledge and various groupings of only ten such characters, the whole of this mighty burden is removed. in the art of writing, the same principle is brought into operation with complete success, by the combination, or various groupings of the twenty-six letters of the common roman alphabet in the formation of words. the value of this adaptation of the principle will be obvious, if we shall suppose, that a person who is acquainted with all the modern european languages, had been compelled to discriminate, and continue to remember, a distinct arbitrary mark or character for the many thousands of words contained in each. we may not be warranted, perhaps, to say that such a task would be impossible; but that it would be inconceivably burdensome can admit of no doubt. we have, indeed, in the writings of the chinese, although it is but one language, a living monument of the evil effects of the neglect of this principle in literature, and the unceasing inconveniences which daily arise from that empire continuing to persevere in it. there is comparatively but little combination of characters in their words, and the consequences are remarkable. in that extensive empire, the highest rewards, and the chief posts of honour and emolument, are held out to those who are most learned, whatever be their rank or their station; and yet, amidst a population immersed in poverty and wretchedness, not one person in a thousand can master even one of their books; and not one in ten thousand of those who profess to read, is able to peruse them all. the reason of this simply is, the neglect of this natural principle of grouping letters, or the signs of sounds, in their written language. with us, the elements of all the words in all the european languages are only twenty-six; and the child who has once mastered the combination of these, in any one of our books, has the whole of our literature at his command. the application of this principle to the elements of general knowledge is equally necessary, as its application to written language. the difficulty of remembering the many thousands of unconnected characters in chinese literature, is an exact emblem of what will always be the case with children in respect to their general knowledge, when this principle of association, or grouping, is neglected. adults acquire and retain a large portion of _their_ knowledge, as we shall afterwards see, by the principle of classification and analysis; but _children_ are not as yet capable of this; and they must receive their knowledge by the grouping of a few simple elements previously known, or they will not be able to receive and retain knowledge at all. the amount of this knowledge also, it should be kept in mind, is not at all in proportion to the number or the variety of the elements of which that knowledge is composed. we have formerly alluded to this, and it may be farther illustrated by a circumstance of daily occurrence. a seaman when he observes a vessel at a distance knows her class and character in an instant, whether she be a sloop or a brig, a schooner or a ship, and he forms an instantaneous idea of all her parts grouped into a whole. his memory, instead of being harassed in remembering the shape, and place, and position of each of its several parts, is relieved of the whole by the operation of this principle of association. the whole rigging, about which his mind is occupied, is composed of only _three_ elements,--ropes, and spars, and sails,--with each of which he has long ago made himself familiar. all the remaining parts of this kind of knowledge are a mere matter of grouping. by previously observing the varied arrangement of the spars, and ropes, and sails, on the several masts of the different kinds of vessels, he has already grouped them into one whole, and each is remembered by itself without effort, and without mistake. they are retained, as it were, painted by the imagination upon the memory, and may at any after period be recalled and reviewed at pleasure. hence the sight of a vessel in the distance calls up the former pictures to the mind, and enables the practised eye of the mariner to decide at once as to the kind and character of what he so imperfectly sees.--this helps also to explain the reason why children are so gratified with pictures when presented to the eye; and why they are best pleased when the figures are most simple and distinct, and particularly, when the objects grouped in the picture have previously been familiar. pictures are indeed a pretty close imitation of nature in this part of her work; and they are defective chiefly on account of their want of _motion_ and _continuity_. these last are two great and inimitable characteristics in all the groupings painted upon the memory by the imagination. from all this it is obvious, that there is an essential difference between a child's acquiring the knowledge of things individually, and acquiring a knowledge of their several associations. the two must never, if possible, be confounded with each other. when they are kept distinct in the education of a child, he has an evident pleasure in attending to either; but as soon as they are allowed to interfere, and more especially when they are systematically blended together in the same exercise, he experiences confusion, irritation, and fatigue. there is no necessity, however, for this ever being the case. all that is required is, that the few individual elements that are to be grouped or associated in a lesson, whether they be objects or ideas, shall previously be made familiar to the pupil. these, when once known, may be brought before the mind of the child in any variety of order or form, and will be received readily and pleasantly, and will be retained by the memory without confusion, and without effort. by attention to these two principles, keeping each in its proper place, and bringing each to aid and uphold the other in its proper order, it will be found, that a child may be taught more real knowledge in one week, than is often communicated in other circumstances in the course of a year. chap. vii. _on the acquisition of knowledge by the principle of analysis, or classification._ there is yet another principle brought into operation by nature to enable her pupils to receive, to retain, and to make use of their knowledge. this is the principle of classification, or analysis.[ ] the difference between this and the former principle described we think is sufficiently marked. the principle of association, or grouping, is carried on chiefly by means of the imagination, and begins to operate as soon as the mind is capable of imagining any thing; but the principle of classification, or analysis, is more intimately connected with the judgment. the consequence of this is, that it is but very partially called into action during the early stages of a child's education, and is never able to operate with vigour, till the reasoning powers of the pupil begin to develope themselves. the characteristic differences between the two principles, and their respective uses in education, may be illustrated by a circumstance of every-day occurrence. for example, a child who from infancy has been brought up in a house of several apartments, gets acquainted with each of the rooms by means of its contents. he has been in the habit of seeing the heavy pieces of furniture in each apartment in a certain place and order, and the room and its furniture, therefore, are identified together, and remain painted upon his imagination exactly as he has been in the habit of seeing them. in this case, the articles of furniture in the room are grouped, and not classified; and are remembered together, not on account of their nature and uses, but purely on account of their position, and their relative arrangement in the room. most of our readers perhaps, will remember the strange feelings produced in their minds during some period of their childhood, when in the house of their infancy, some material alteration of this kind was effected in one or more of the rooms. a change in the position of a bed, or the abstraction or introduction of a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, or other bulky piece of furniture, causes in the mind of the child an effect much deeper, and more extensive, than in the adult. the former picture of the place never having been observed or contemplated in any other aspect, is painted by the imagination, and fixed upon his memory, by long continued familiarity. but by this change it is suddenly defaced; and the new group, partaking as it will do of some of the elements of the old, produces feelings which are strange and unaccountable, and entirely different from those of his parents, who have been in the habit of contemplating the room and its furniture more by the exercise of the judgment, than of the imagination; that is, more by their uses, than by their appearance. the cause of this strangeness of feeling in a child, arises from the predominance of the principle of grouping, over that of classification. he has as yet no knowledge of any of the apartments in the house, except what he has received by grouping their contents. when, therefore, their arrangement is materially altered, the reasoning powers not being as yet able to soften down the effect, the former apartment appears to the child as if it had ceased to exist. he can scarcely believe it to be the same. he never thinks of the _uses_ of the articles in the apartment, but only of their _appearance_;--the first being an act of the judgment,--the latter of the imagination. in a similar manner he thinks of the kitchen and its furniture, not as a part of the household economy, but only in connection with the articles it contains. the dresser, the jack, and the tin covers, are never thought of in connection with their uses; but are identified with the kitchen, merely because they have always been seen there, and seen together. in like manner, the seats, the tables, and the ornaments of the drawing-room, are not connected in the child's mind because they are what are commonly called "drawing-room furniture," for that would imply a degree of reasoning of which he is as yet unacquainted; but they are remembered together, as they have always been observed in that particular place, and are now pictured on the mind, in the position in which they are usually beheld. their particular locality in the room, and their relative position with respect to each other, are of far more importance in assisting the memory of the child, than any knowledge which he has as yet acquired of their respective uses. though a child had in this way gained an exact knowledge of every apartment in a house, it is obvious that there may not have been, during the whole process, a single act of the understanding. many of the lower animals are capable of collecting all the knowledge he has received; and even infants are, to a certain extent, in the daily habit of acquiring it. but the classification of objects, according to their nature and uses, is an operation of a perfectly different kind. hence it is, that a change in the arrangement of the furniture of a room acts so slightly on the feelings of the adult, and so powerfully on the young. in the former, the reasoning powers neutralize the effect produced; to the latter, the change appears a complete revolution. this principle of classification, though peculiar to the mature mind, is not restricted to any particular class of men. it is found to be universal, wherever the reasoning powers are capable of acting. it is no doubt conspicuous in civilized societies, because there it is more cultivated; but it is not confined to them. the savage is prompted to its exercise under the tuition of nature. for example, the various articles and arts which he employs in hunting, are all regularly classified in his mind, and retained upon his memory, as perfectly distinct from those which he employs in fishing; and neither of these classes of articles are ever confounded with his implements and weapons of war. his hooks and lines, are as naturally classified in his mind with his nets and his canoe, as his club or his tomahawk is with his other weapons used in battle. it is by this means that nature aids the memory in the retention of knowledge, and keeps all the successive accumulations of the individual at the command of the will. when cultivated, as nature designs that it should be, it forms an extensive cabinet in the mind, where every department of knowledge has its appropriate place; and which, when once systematically formed, can be furnished at leisure. when a new idea is acquired, it is immediately put in its place, and associated with others of the same kind; and when any portion of the knowledge which we have accumulated is required, we know at once the particular place where it is to be found. the benefits of this principle in the above form are extensively felt and acted upon in society, even where the principle itself is neither observed nor known; for in the family, in the work shop, and in the manufactory, it is of the last importance. it is upon this principle that a clergyman, for the help of his own memory, as well as for assisting the memory of his hearers, arranges the subject of his sermons in a classified form;--his text is the root of the classification. this he divides into heads, which form the first branch in this table; and these again he sometimes sub-divides into particulars, which form a second branch depending on the first, and all proceeding from the root,--the original text. similar, but more extensive, is the plan adopted in the divisions and subdivisions of objects in the sciences, such as botany, zoology, chemistry, &c. in all of which the existence of this principle in nature's educational process is acknowledged and exemplified. in these sciences, the efficiency of the principle in facilitating the reception of knowledge, and in assisting the memory in retaining it, and in putting it to use, is universally acknowledged. but there is another form in which the same principle appears, not so obvious indeed, but it is one which is at least equally important in the education of the young. nature always brings it into operation when a teacher, while communicating any series of _connected truths_, such as a portion of history or of science, gives more of the details than the mind of his pupil can receive, or his memory retain at one time. it may be desirable that the pupil should be made thoroughly acquainted with all the minute, as well as with the general circumstances of a history or a science; but if so, it must be done, not at once, but by degrees, or steps. it is usually done by repeating the course,--"revising," as it is called,--and that perhaps more than once;--going over all the exercises again and again, till the several parts are perceived and remembered in their connection. in these "revisings," the mind forms an analytical table of the subject for itself, consisting of successive steps, formed by the successive courses. by the first course, or hearing, it is chiefly the great outlines of the subject that are perceived; and these form the first branch of a regular analytical table, which every succeeding course of reading or hearing tends to fill up. this will perhaps be best understood by an example. let us suppose that a young person sits down to read a history for the first time, and that he reads it with attention and care. when we examine the state of his mind after he has finished it, we find that, independently of what, by the principle of grouping, he has got in the form of episode, he has been able to retain only the great outlines of the history, and no more. he remembers perhaps of whose reign he has been reading, and the principal events that took place during it; but the intermediate and minor events, as connected with the history, he has not been able to remember. nothing has been imparted by this first reading, but the great landmarks of the narrative. these are destined to form the first branch of a regular analytical table, of which the reign of the particular monarch is the root. this is the frame-work of the whole history of that period, however numerous the minor circumstances may be; and a second reading will only enlarge his knowledge of the circumstances under each of the heads. in other words, it will enable him to sub-divide them into more minute details or periods, and thus form a series of second branches from each. now it is quite obvious, that when this analysis of the circumstances of that period is once formed in the mind, no new event connected with it can ever come to his knowledge without being classed with some of the others. it will be disposed of according to the relation which it bears to the parts already existing; and thus the whole texture will be regularly framed, and every event will have its proper place, and be readily available for future use. one part may be filled up and finished before another; but the regular proportions of the whole remain undisturbed. the pupil has, by the original outline and its several branches, got a date and a place for every new fact which he may afterwards glean, either in his reading or his conversation; and he has a place in which to put it, where it can easily be found. when placed there, it is safe in the keeping of the memory, and will always afterwards be at the command of the will. the connection of these circumstances, with the principle in education which we are at present endeavouring to illustrate, may not to some be very apparent. we shall therefore take another example from a circumstance similar to what occurs every day in ordinary life, and in which the principle, in the hands of nature, is abundantly conspicuous. in the example we are here to give, she forms the several steps of the classification in a number of hearers by _once_ reading a subject, very similar to what she does successively in the mind of one individual by _repeated_ readings. let us then suppose a teacher with two or three hundred pupils, including every degree of mental capacity, from the youngest child who is able to understand, up to his own classical assistant; and that he reads to them the history of joseph as given in the book of genesis. let us also suppose, that they all give him their best attention, and that they all hear the narrative for the first time. such an experiment, let it be observed, has its parallel every day, in the church, in the class room, and in the seminary; and similar effects to those we are about to describe invariably take place in each of them. when the teacher has read and concluded this lengthened exercise, it will be found, that no two individuals among his hearers have acquired the same amount of knowledge. some will have received and retained more of the circumstances, and some less, but no two, strictly speaking, will be alike. those whose minds were incapable of connecting the several parts of the narrative into a whole, will retain what they have received in disjointed groups and patches,--episodes, as it were, in the narrative,--without being able very clearly to perceive its general design. this class, upon whom the principle of association chiefly has been at work, we leave out, and confine ourselves to the state of knowledge possessed by those who are in a greater or less degree capable of classification, and of taking some cognisance of the narrative as a connected whole. among this latter class, some will have retained no more than the bare outline of the history, interspersed with groupings, as in the younger children. they will remember little more than that joseph was at first a boy in his father's house;--that he was afterwards a slave, and in prison;--and at last, a great man and a governor. here the _whole history_ is divided into three distinct heads, or eras,--the first branch of an analytical table of the whole story, from one or other of which all the other particulars, of whatever kind, must of necessity take their rise, and branch off in their natural order. an advanced class of the auditors will have retained some of the more obvious circumstances connected with _each of these three great divisions_, as well as the divisions themselves. they will not only remember that joseph was a boy in his father's house, but they will also be able to remember the more prominent subdivisions of the narrative regarding him while there; such as his father's partiality, his dreams, and his brothers' hatred. the second great division will be recollected as including the particulars of his being sold, his serving in potiphar's house, and his conduct in prison; and the third division will be remembered as containing his appearance before pharoah, his laying up corn, his conduct to his brothers, and his reception of his father and family. these subdivisions, it will at once be perceived, form the _second branch_ of a regular analytical table, each of which has sprung from, and is intimately connected with, some one or other of the three great divisions forming the first branch, of which the "history of joseph" is the comprehensive root. in like manner, a third class of the pupils, whose minds have been better cultivated, and whose memories are more retentive, will not only remember all this, but they will also remember, in connection with each of these subdivisions, many of the more specific events included in, or springing from them, and which carry forward this regular analytical table one step farther. as for example, under the subdivision entitled "joseph's conduct to his brethren," they will remember the "detention of simeon,"--"the feast in the palace,"--"the scene of the cup in the sack," and "joseph's making himself known." even these again might be subdivided into their more minute circumstances, as a fourth, or even a fifth branch, if necessary, all of which might be exactly delineated upon paper, as a regular analytical table of the history of joseph. here, then, we have an example of nature herself dividing an audience into different classes, and that by one and the same operation,--by one reading,--forming in each class part of a regular analytical table of the whole history, each class being one step in advance of the other. the first has the foundation of the whole fabric broadly and solidly laid; and it is worthy of remark, that there is not one of the ideas acquired by the most talented of the hearers, that is not strictly and regularly derived from some one or other of the three general divisions possessed by the first and the least advanced; and any one of the ideas may be regularly traced back through the several divisions to the root itself. the additional facts possessed by the second class, are nothing more than a more full developement of the circumstances remembered by the first; and those obtained by the third, are but a more extensive developement of the facts remembered by the second. this being the state of the several classes into which nature divides every audience, it is of importance to trace the means which she employs for the purpose of _advancing_ each, and of ultimately completing the analysis; or, in other words, perfecting the knowledge of the narrative, in each individual mind. this is equally beautiful, and equally simple. it is, if we may be allowed the expression, by a regular system of building. the foundation being laid, and the frame-work of the whole being erected, in the knowledge of the great general outline, confusion is ever after completely prevented. every piece of information connected with the history, which may be afterwards received, has a specific place provided for it. it must belong to some one or other of the three great divisions; and it is there inserted as a part of the general building. it is now remembered in its connection, till all the circumstances,--the whole of the information,--gradually, and perhaps distantly received, complete the narrative. to follow out this plan of nature regularly, as in a school education, the method must be exceedingly obvious; for if the first class, by once hearing the chapters read, have received merely the outline,--the frame-work of the narrative,--it must be obvious, that when this has by reflection become familiar, a second reading would enable them to fill up much of this outline, by which they would be on a par with the second. another reading would, in like manner, add to the second, and form a third; and so forth of all the others. each reading would add more and more to the knowledge of the pupil; and yet, every idea communicated would be nothing more than a fuller developement of the original outline,--the frame-work,--the skeleton of the story which he had acquired by the first reading. by successive readings, therefore, the first class will take the place of the second, the second of the third, and so on to the end. this is nature's uniform method of perfecting her pupils in any branch of _connected_ knowledge;--a method which, therefore, it should be the object of the educationist to understand, and closely to imitate. from the cases which we have in this chapter supposed as examples, there are several important practical inferences to be derived, to which we shall here very briefly advert. in the first place, we are led to infer, from all the cases brought into notice, that every kind of external force, or precipitation in education, is abhorrent to nature. in each of the cases supposed, we have a remarkable exhibition of the calm serenity of nature's operations in the education of the young. for instance, in the last case supposed, the children all listened,--they all heard the same words,--the mental food was the same to each, however diversified their abilities might be; and it was indiscriminately offered in the same form to all, although all were not equally prepared to receive and digest it. the results accordingly were, in fact, as various as the number of the persons present. and yet, notwithstanding of all this, there was no hurry, no confusion, no attempt to stretch the mind beyond its strength. each individual, according to his capacity, laid hold of as much as his mind could receive, and silently abandoned the remainder.--but if there had been any external urgency or force employed, to compel the child to accomplish more than his mind was capable of, this serenity and composure would have been destroyed; irritation, and confusion, and mental weakness, would have been the consequence; and altogether, matters would not have been made better, but worse, by the attempt. another inference, which we think may legitimately be drawn from the above examples, is this, that although nature prompts the child silently to throw off or reject that which the mind at the time cannot receive, yet it would be better for the child if no more had been pressed upon him than he was capable of receiving. the very rejection of any portion of the mental food presented for acceptance, must in some measure tend to dissipate the mind, and exhaust its strength. this we think is demonstrated by the fact, that the child had to listen for _an hour_, and yet retained on his memory no more than experience shews us could have been much more successfully communicated in _five minutes_. this leads us to another remark, almost equally important; which is, that the want of classification among the children, will not only hurt them, but tend to waste the time, and unnecessarily to exhaust the strength of the teacher. the teacher's success with any one child, is not to be estimated by the pains he takes, or the extent of his labour, but by the amount of knowledge actually retained by the child. to employ an hour's labour, therefore, to communicate that knowledge which could with much better effect be given in five minutes, is both unreasonable and improper; and every one who will for a moment think on the subject must see, that a lesson, which in that short space of time conveyed the whole of the knowledge that the pupils had been able to pick up during the hour's exercise, would leave the teacher eleven-twelfths of his time to benefit the other classes. the nurseryman follows this plan with his trees, and with evident success, both in saving time, and room, and labour. when he sows his acorns, one square yard will contain more plants than will ultimately occupy an acre. it is only as they increase in growth, that they are thinned out and transplanted; and such should be the case in communicating knowledge to children. to attempt to teach the whole history at once, is like sowing the whole acre with acorns, and thinning them out during a quarter of a century. the loss of seed in this case is the least of the evils; for the ground would be robbed of its strength, nine-tenths of it would be rendered unnecessarily useless during a large portion of the time; and much of the anxiety, and care, and labour of the nurseryman would be thrown away. ultimately he would find, that of the many thousands of oaks he had sowed, he had been able to rear no more _than the acre could carry_. by following out this principle in education, and giving the child as much as he can receive, and no more, of the whole series of truths to be communicated, his mind, at the close of the exercise, will be much more vigorous, the ideas received will be much better understood, more firmly rivetted upon the memory, and much more at the command of the will, while the quantity of knowledge really communicated, is at least equal in amount.--the only thing indeed that renders a contrary plan of procedure even tolerable to a child, is the wise provision of nature, by which she induces him to throw off, with some degree of ease, the superfluous matter; but had the reception and retention of the whole by each child been demanded by the teacher, the very attempt to do so on the part of the pupil, would not only have been irritating and burdensome, but it would have been extremely hurtful to the mind, by stretching its powers beyond its strength. footnotes: [ ] note e. chap. viii. _on nature's methods of teaching her pupils to make use of their knowledge._ we come now to another operation of nature with the young, to which she appears to attach more importance than she does to any of her previous educational processes, and to which she obviously intends that a more than ordinary attention should be paid on our parts. this is the training of her pupils to make use of their knowledge, and to apply the information they possess to guide them in the common affairs of life. this is obviously the great end which she has all along had in view; and to which the cultivation of the mind, and the acquisition of knowledge are merely preparatives. we shall first direct attention to a few of the indications of this principle as they actually appear in ordinary life; and then we shall endeavour to point out some of the laws by which she appears to regulate them. in the early periods of infancy we can plainly distinguish between certain actions which depend upon _instinct_, and which are performed by the infant perfectly and at once, without experience, and without teaching;--and others of which the infant at first appears to be incapable, but which it gradually _acquires_ by experience, or more correctly, which it _learns_ by an application of the knowledge which it is daily realizing. among the former, or instinctive class, we may rank the acts of sucking, swallowing, and crying, which are purely acts of instinct; while among the numerous class belonging to the latter, we include all those actions which are progressively improved, and which are really the result of experience, derived from the application of their acquired knowledge. as an example of these, we may instance the acts of winking with the eyelids on the approach of an object to the eye; the avoiding of a blow; the rejection of what is bitter or unpalatable; the efforts made to possess that which has been found pleasant; and the shunning of those acts for which it has been reproved or punished. all these, and thousands of similar acts, are really the result of a _direct application of previous knowledge_, and which, without the possession of that knowledge, never are, nor could be performed. mankind in infancy being, in the intention of nature, placed under the care of tender and intelligent parents are not provided with many instinctive faculties. their physical welfare is at first left altogether to the care of the nurse; but, from a very early period of consciousness, they intellectually become the pupils of nature. almost all their actions are the results of experience;--of knowledge acquired, and knowledge applied. their attainments at the beginning are no doubt few;--but, from the first, they are well marked, and go on with increasing rapidity. the acquisition of knowledge by them, and especially the application of it, are evident to the most cursory observer. for example, we see a child cling to its keeper, and refuse to go to a stranger;--we see it when hungry stretch out its arms, and cry to get to its nurse;--and when it has fallen in its efforts to walk, it will not for some time attempt it again. these, and many more which will occur to the reader, are the results of nature's teaching;--her suggestions to her pupil for the right application of its knowledge. the child has been taught from experience that it is safe and comfortable with its keeper, and it applies this knowledge by refusing to leave her. it has learned how, and by whom, its hunger is to be satisfied; and it applies this knowledge by seeking to be with its nurse. it has learned by experience, that the attempt to walk is dangerous; and it applies that knowledge by avoiding the danger. here the child is wholly as yet in the hands of nature; and it is quite evident, that her design in first enabling the pupil to acquire those portions of knowledge, was, that she might induce him to apply them for his safety and comfort. no doubt the mental powers of the child were cultivated and disciplined by the acquisition of the knowledge, and still more by its application; but this disciplining of the mind, and accumulation of knowledge, were evidently a secondary object, and not the primary one. health and cheerfulness are gained by tilling the ground; yet the ground is not tilled for the purpose of securing health and cheerfulness. it is for the produce of the harvest. so, in like manner, the cultivation of the child's mind, and the reception of the seeds of knowledge, are merely means employed for a further end,--the harvest of comfort and usefulness to be afterwards reaped. from all this we are directly led to the conclusion, that it is the intention of nature, that all the knowledge acquired should be put to use; and therefore, that nothing should be taught the young, in the first place at least, except that which is really useful; while the proper use of all that they learn should be diligently pointed out. it may appear to some, that this truth is so plain and obvious, as to require no further illustration or enforcement.--we sincerely wish that it were so. but long experience justifies us in being sceptical on the point. and as the establishment of this principle, and a thorough knowledge of its working, are perhaps of more value than any other truth in the whole range of educational science, we shall offer a few remarks on its validity and importance, before proceeding to examine the means by which nature carries it into operation. that knowledge, when once acquired, is intended by nature to be put to use, is proved negatively by the well known fact, that almost all our _mental_ acquirements, when not used, are soon lost. they gradually fade from the mind, and are at last blotted from the memory. hence the disappearance in after life of all the academical and collegiate acquirements of those youths who move in a sphere where their use is not required; and of those portions of the early attainments of even professional men, which are not necessary for their particular pursuits. by the universal operation of this principle, nature gives fair warning of the folly of useless learning; and plainly indicates, that whenever the benefits which she confers are not put to use as she designed, they will gradually, but most certainly, be withdrawn. the same fact is also proved positively:--for we find, that the proper use of any portion of our knowledge, is invariably rewarded by its becoming still more familiar. the student who puts a principle in chemistry to the test of experiment, will understand it better, remember it longer, and be able to apply it to useful purposes, much more readily than his companion who merely reflects upon it. and of two individuals, who by a lecture have been taught the duty and the delights of mercy, that one will learn it best, and remember it longest, who, immediately on hearing it, is prompted to relieve a fellow creature from distress, or to save a family from ruin. this principle of making every thing conduce to the promotion of practical good, seems to pervade all the works of god; and there is no department in nature, mineral, vegetable, or animal, that does not afford proofs of its existence. every thing that the almighty has formed is practically useful; and is arranged in such a manner as to give the clearest indications, that it was designed to be turned to some useful purpose by man. the annual and diurnal motions of the earth in its orbit; the obliquity of its axis; the inequality of its surface, and the disposition and disruption of its strata, all shew the most consummate wisdom, and are severally a call to intelligent man to turn them to use. on these, and on every other department of nature's works, there is written in legible characters, that it is the _use_ of knowledge, and not the _possession_ of it merely, that is recommended. this she teaches by every operation of her hand, both directly, and by analogy. for could we suppose that the vegetable creation were capable of receiving knowledge, we might conclude from various facts, that this principle was not confined to the animal kingdom alone, but that it regulated the operations of all organic existences. the living vegetable has at least the appearance of acting under its influence; for, as if it knew that light was necessary for its health and growth, it invariably turns towards the light;--as if it knew that certain kinds of decayed matter were better fitted for its nourishment than others, it pushes out new fibrous roots in the direction of the spot where they are to be found;--and even when isolated on a rock, or a wall, at a distance from sufficient soil and moisture, it husbands its scanty means, and sends down from its elevation an extra root to the ground, to collect additional nourishment where it is to be had. in every department of animal life, also, the principle appears to exist, and exhibits itself in the conduct of all free agents, from the insect to the elephant. the dog that has been kindly treated in a particular house, seldom fails to visit it again; and when he is violently driven from another, the same principle indisposes him to return. it is upon record, that a surgeon who had bandaged the broken leg of a dog, was afterwards visited by his patient, who brought another, requiring a similar operation. the horse, in like manner, is proverbially sagacious in the application of his knowledge. mismanagement in a groom in one instance, may create a "vice," which may lessen his value during life. this "vice," which is confirmed by practice, is nothing more than the repeated application of his knowledge. such a "vice," accordingly, is best cured by avoiding the circumstances which originally gave rise to it, till it dies from his memory. many other instances of a similar kind in the lower animals will readily occur to the reader, all of which lead directly to the conclusion, that, even in the brute creation, nature not only prompts them to collect information from what happens around them, and to act in correspondence to its indications; but that, in fact, all the knowledge they receive, or are capable of acquiring above instinct, is retained or lost, exactly in proportion as it is, or is not, put to use. in the case of rational creatures, this great design of nature is still more distinctly marked,--is intended for more important purposes,--and is carried on by a separate system of internal machinery, part of which at least is peculiar to man. this system of mental machinery consists of two kinds, one of which may, we think, with propriety get the popular name of the "animal, or common sense," and the other has already received the appropriate name of "the moral sense," or conscience. to nature's method of using these principles, for prompting and directing us in the use of our knowledge, we shall now shortly advert. chap. ix. _on nature's methods of applying knowledge by the principle of the animal, or common sense._ when an infant, by laying hold of a hot tea-pot burns its hand, it refuses to touch it again;--when a child has been frightened from a park or field, he will not willingly enter it a second time;--and when any thing is thrown in the direction of the head, we instantly stoop, or bend to one side, to evade it. these are instances of the application of knowledge, by the principle of "common sense," which do not belong to instinct; and, in many cases at least, anticipate the exercise of reason. our object at present, however, is with the principle, and not with its name. when we analyze these operations, together with their causes, we find, that there are certain portions of knowledge daily and hourly acquired by the senses, which become so interwoven with our sentiments and feelings, that they usually remain unobserved, till some special occasion calls for their application. now the principle we speak of, if it indeed be a separate principle, is employed by nature to apply this latent knowledge, and to induce her pupil instantly, and without waiting for the decisions of reason, to perform certain actions, or to pursue a certain line of conduct, which we almost instinctively feel to be useful and safe. no sane child, for example, will deliberately stand in the way of a horse or a carriage at full speed,--or walk over a precipice,--or take burning coals from the fire with his fingers; were he to do so, we would not dignify the act so far as to say that it was "unreasonable," for that would be too mild an epithet,--but we would pronounce it at once to be "contrary to common sense." in like manner, were an adult to bemire himself in crossing a ditch, instead of making use of the stepping-stones placed there for the purpose; or if he were to stand till he were drenched with a thunder-shower, instead of taking shelter for the time in the neighbouring shed, we would not say that it was "unreasonable," but that it was "contrary to common sense." in short, whenever any thing is done which universal experience shews to be hurtful _to ourselves_, (not to others) it is invariably denominated an act "contrary to common sense;" but whenever it involves hurt _to others_, it takes another character, and becomes a breach of the "moral sense." it is not our design, however, to come out of our way at present, to adapt the name to the principle in nature of which we are here speaking, and far less shall we attempt to mould the principle into a form suitable to the name. our business is with the principle itself, as it appears in ourselves and others; and we use the term "common sense," merely because at present we cannot find one more appropriate, or which would suit our purpose so well. if this name shall be found proper for it, it is well;--but if not, we leave it to others to provide a better. we have said, that nature prompts to the use of knowledge by means of two distinct principles; the one, which may be denominated the "animal," or "common sense," refers to actions of which _we ourselves_ are the subjects; and the other, known by the term of the "moral sense," or conscience, refers to actions of which _others_ are the subjects. it is the former of these that we are at present to investigate. we must all have observed the promptness with which we avoid any sudden danger, or inconvenience, before we have time to reason about the matter. as, for example, when we stumble, we instantly put forth the proper foot to prevent our fall. this cannot be said to be an act of the reasoning powers, because they have not had time to operate; and it is equally clear that it is not an act of instinct, because infants, who have only begun to walk have not the capacity of doing it. it is evidently another principle which, availing itself of the knowledge which the person has previously acquired by experience, now uses it specially for the occasion. that this application of our knowledge arises neither from instinct nor from reason, will be obvious from many circumstances of ordinary occurrence.--for example, when any object approaches the eye we instantly shut it;--when any missile is thrown at us, we instantly turn the head aside to evade it;--or when in walking something destroys our equilibrium and we stumble, we instantly bend the body in the proper direction, and to the precise point, necessary to restore our balance, and to prevent our fall.--now it is obvious, that all these contingencies are provided for by one and the same principle, whatever that principle may be; and that they are acts which do not depend upon instinct, properly so called, is proved from the circumstance, that infants, before they are taught by experience that the eye is so tender, and even adults who have but newly acquired the use of their sight, neither shut their eyes at the approach of objects, nor turn away their heads when a missile is thrown at them.--and we think it is equally clear, that it cannot be the result of reasoning, in the sense in which we generally understand that term, because the mind has no time for consideration, far less for reasoning, during the short moment that occurs between the cause and the effect. the object which we have chiefly in view at present is, to point out the great end designed by nature in all these actions, which is simply _the application of knowledge_. there is the knowledge that objects entering the eye will give pain, and that the shutting of the eye will defend it. this we have shown is not an instinctive operation, but must have been acquired by experience;--and it is this principle, into the nature of which we are now enquiring, that prompted the child in the special case to apply its knowledge by shutting the eye. in like manner, in the case of the missile thrown at the head, there is a previous knowledge of the effect which it will produce, and a knowledge also of the means by which it is to be avoided,--and it is avoided;--and in the case of losing the equilibrium, there is nothing more than the application of a latent knowledge, now suddenly brought into use on the spur of the moment, that by the movement of the foot the body will be supported. the principle, whatever it be, which instigates children and adults to do all this, is the subject of our present enquiry, and which for the present we have denominated the "animal," or "common sense." we shall therefore a little more particularly attend to its various indications. the operation of this principle in the infant has already been pointed out. when it has learned by experience that its nurse is kind, it stretches forth its little hands, and desires to be with the nurse;--when in its first attempt at walking it experiences a fall, it applies this knowledge, by refusing again for some time to walk;--and when it burns its finger at the flame of the candle, the application of that knowledge induces it ever after to avoid both fire and flame. in after life the same principle continues to operate both independently of reason, and in conjunction with it. in encountering the air of a cold night, we, without reasoning on the matter, wrap ourselves closer in our cloak. when we turn a corner, and meet a sharp frosty wind, we lower the head to protect the uncovered face. when we emerge from the house, and perceive that the dulness of the day indicates rain, we almost instinctively return for a cloak or an umbrella. and the mariner at sunset, when he sees an opening in the sky indicating a storm, immediately takes in sail, and makes all snug for the night. in all these cases we perceive a principle within us, frequently operating along with reason, but sometimes also without it, which prompts us to apply our previous knowledge for our present comfort and advantage.[ ] the constant operation of such a principle in our nature, no matter by what name it is called, leads us, as plainly as analogy and natural phenomena can do, to conclude, that it ought to be carefully studied, and assiduously cultivated in the young, during the period usually assigned for their education. when we carefully trace the operation of this principle in common life, it appears that, in fact, the greater portion of our physical comforts depends upon it. "experience" is but another name for it. we find some substances warmer, softer, harder, or more workable than others, and we apply this knowledge by substituting one for another. the savage finds the wigwam more convenient, or more easily come at, than a cave or a crevice in a rock, and he builds a wigwam;--he finds a hut more durable than a wigwam, and he substitutes a hut;--he at last finds a cottage still more convenient, and he advances in his desires and his abilities by his former experience, and he builds one.--in every advance, however, it is the application of his previous knowledge that increases his comforts, and tends to perpetuate them; and accordingly, as a proper and a general application of the "moral sense," leads directly to national _virtue_; so the proper and general application of this principle of "common sense" goes to promote every kind of personal and family _comfort_, as well as national _prosperity_. its ramifications pierce through every design and action of industry and genius. it is the exercise of this principle alone which, in the worldly sense, distinguishes the wise man from the fool; and which gives all the superiority which is possessed by a civilized, over a savage community. it is the chief guardian of our safety, and the parent of every personal and domestic comfort. it is, in short, familiarity with its exercise that imparts confidence to the philosopher, decision to the legislator, dexterity to the artificer, and perfection to the artist. in each case it is the accumulation of knowledge _put to use_, which makes the distinction between one man and another; and it is by the aggregation of such men that a nation becomes prosperous. it must never therefore be forgotten, that it is not the possession of knowledge, but the use which we make of it, that confers distinction. for no truism is more incontrovertible than this, that knowledge which we cannot or do not use, is really useless. there is no wonder then that nature should be at some pains in training her pupils to an exercise on which so much of their happiness and safety depends; and it is of corresponding importance, that we should investigate the means, and the mode by which she usually accomplishes her end. if we can successfully attain this knowledge, we may be enabled to pursue a similar course in the training of the young, and with decided advantage. when we take any one of the numerous examples of the working of this principle in the adult, and carefully analyze it, we can detect three distinct stages in the operation, before the effect is produced. the _first_ is the knowledge of some useful truth, present to the mind, and at the command of the will;--there is, _secondly_, an inference drawn from that truth, or portion of our knowledge, or the impression of an inference which was formerly drawn from it, and which, as we have seen in the infant, may remain long after the circumstance from which the lesson was derived has been forgotten;--and there is, _thirdly_, a special application of that inference or impression to our present circumstances. for example, in the case of the person leaving the house, and suddenly returning to provide himself with an umbrella, there is first the knowledge of a fact, that "the sky is lowering;" then there is an inference drawn from this fact, that "there will most probably be rain;" but the comfort--the whole benefit arising from this knowledge, and from this reasoning upon it,--depends on the third stage of the operation, which is therefore the most important of all, namely, the application of the inference, or lesson, to his present circumstances. a mere knowledge of the fact that the sky lowered, would have remained a barren and a useless truth in the mind, unless he had proceeded to draw the proper inference from it; and the inference itself, after it was drawn, would have done him no good, but must rather have added to his uneasiness, had he not proceeded to the third step of the operation, and applied the whole to the regulation of his conduct, in providing himself with an umbrella or a cloak. in like manner, in the supposed case of the mariner expecting a storm, there was first the knowledge of the fact, that the "sky was in a certain state." now of this knowledge every person on board might have been in possession as well as the master himself, without the slightest benefit accruing to themselves or the ship, unless they had been trained, or enabled to draw the proper inference or lesson from it. the mere possession of the knowledge, therefore, would have been of no advantage. but the practised eye, and the previous experience of the master, enabled him to draw the inference, that "there will be a storm." even this, however, would not have saved the ship and crew, without the third, and the most important step of all,--the application of that inference or lesson to their present condition. it was that which induced him to give the necessary orders to prepare for the storm, and thus to secure the safety both of the ship and of all on board. again, in the case of the infant burning its finger, there appears to be something like a similar process, which we can trace much better than the child itself. the child puts its finger to the flame of the candle, and it feels pain; from which it learns, for the first time, that flame burns. this is the knowledge which it has acquired. but there is also an inference drawn from that knowledge, not by reasoning, but by the operation of the principle under consideration, an inference of which it is probable the child itself at the time is unconscious, but the existence of which is sufficiently proved by its uniform conduct afterwards. by the operation of this principle in the child's mind, before he can reason, he has inferred, that if he shall again touch flame, he will again feel pain. he will very probably forget the particular circumstance in which his finger was burned, but the inference then drawn,--the impression made upon the mind, and which corresponds to an inference,--still remains, and is made the chief instrument which nature employs in this most important part of all her valuable educational processes. the child accordingly is found ever after, not only preserving the particular finger that was burned, but all its fingers and members, from a burning candle; and not from a candle only, but from fire and flame of every kind. this appears to be the natural order of that process of which we are here speaking; and before leaving it, there are two or three circumstances connected with it, that we ought not to omit noticing, more particularly, because the whole of them appear to hold out additional evidence of the little value which nature attaches to knowledge for its own sake, and of her decided approval of its acquisition, only, or at least chiefly, when it is reduced to practice. the first of these circumstances is, that nature, in all cases, teaches popularly--not philosophically; that is, she does not refuse to teach one part of a connected series of phenomena, because the whole is not yet perceived; nor does she neglect the use of the legitimate application of an ascertained truth, because the principle or law by which it acts remains as yet undiscovered. her object evidently is, the attainment of the most _useful_ part of the knowledge presented to her pupil, and the _practical use_ of that part; leaving the investigation of the other parts to the will or convenience of the person afterwards. the infant accordingly made use of its knowledge, although it knew nothing about the nature of flame; and the man and the mariner would have done as they did, although they had known nothing at all about the science of meteorology. the second remark which we would here make is, that nature, in most cases, appears to put much more value on the inferences, or lessons, drawn from the knowledge we have acquired, than she does upon the knowledge itself. for example, in the case of the infant burning its finger, the circumstance itself will soon be forgotten; but the inference, or the impression acquired by its means, will remain. and when at any subsequent period it avoids fire or flame, its mind is not so much occupied by the abstract truth that flame will burn, as by the lesson learned from that truth, that it should not meddle with it. this inference it now practically applies to its present situation. that the abstract truth,--the knowledge originally derived from the fact,--is included in the lesson, may be quite true; but what we wish at present more particularly to point out is, that _it is seldom adverted to by the infant_. the inference,--the lesson which the truth suggested,--is all that the child thought of. that alone is the fabric which nature has been employed in rearing; and the original truth has been used merely as scaffolding for the purpose. the edifice itself, accordingly, having been completed, the scaffolding is allowed to fall, as having answered its design. the same conclusion may be come to, by attending to the circumstances connected with the operation of the principle in adults.--the person who returned for his great-coat or umbrella after having drawn the inference from the appearance of the sky, thought only of the coming shower; and we could easily suppose a case, where the original indication of the sky might be totally forgotten, while the full impression that it would rain might still continue. in like manner, the mariner, in the bustle of preparation, thinks only of the dreaded storm, while the original circumstance,--the knowledge from which the inference was drawn,--is now unheeded, or entirely forgotten. the other circumstance to which we would here solicit attention, as proving the same thing, is one to which we formerly alluded. it is the remarkable fact, that knowledge, of whatever kind, when it is practised, becomes more and more familiar and useful; while that which is not acted upon, is soon blotted from the memory and lost. writing, arithmetic, and spelling, not to speak of grammar, geography, and history, when not exercised in after life, are frequently found of no avail, even at times when they are specially required.--why is this? they were once known. the knowledge was communicated at a time when the mind and memory were best fitted for receiving and retaining them. but nature in this, as in every other instance, has been true to herself; and the knowledge which is not used has been blighted, and at last removed from the memory and lost. from all these circumstances taken together, we are led to conclude, that nature never conveys knowledge without intending it to be used;--that by a principle in our constitution, which we have denominated "common sense," nature prompts even infants to employ their knowledge for their own special benefit;--that this principle continues invariably to act, till it is assisted or superseded by reason;--and that the process consists in drawing inferences, or lessons, from known facts, and in practically applying them to present circumstances. all which points the educationist directly to the conclusion, that the communication of knowledge is one of the _means_, but not the _end_, of education;--that the lessons derived from the knowledge communicated, are infinitely more valuable than the knowledge itself;--and that the great design of education is, and ought to be, to train the young to know how to use, and to put to use, not only the knowledge communicated at school, but all the knowledge which they may acquire in their future journey through life. footnotes: [ ] note f. chap. x. _on nature's method of applying knowledge by means of the moral sense, or conscience._ nature enables her pupils to apply knowledge by means of the moral sense, or conscience, as well as by the animal, or common sense. there is however this great difference in the manner in which they operate,--that whereas every infringement of the natural or physical laws which regulate the application of knowledge by what we have called the common sense, is invariably followed by its proper punishment,--the consequences of infringing the laws which regulate the moral sense, are neither so immediate, nor at the time so apparent. the child knows, that by putting his finger to the candle, burning and pain will instantly follow;--but the evil consequences of purloining sweet-meats, or telling a lie to avoid punishment, are not so obvious. does nature then put less value on moral integrity, than on worldly prudence? certainly not. but in the latter case she deals with man more as a physical and intellectual being; and in the former, as a moral, a responsible, and an immortal being. the lower animals to a great extent participate with us in the benefits arising from attention to the laws which govern physical enjoyments; but they know nothing of a moral sense, which is peculiar to intelligent and accountable creatures. from this we may safely conclude, that the application of knowledge by means of the moral sense, or conscience, is of infinitely more importance to man than the application of his knowledge by the animal, or common sense. for the purpose of arriving at accurate conclusions on this subject, in reference to education and the application of knowledge, we shall endeavour to investigate a few of the phenomena connected with the moral sense, as these are exhibited in the young and in adults; and shall, in doing so, attempt to trace the laws by which these phenomena are severally guided. . the first thing we would here remark, is, that the operations of the moral sense appear to be resolvable into two classes, which may be termed its _legislative_ and its _executive_ powers. when conscience leads us merely to judge and to decide upon the character of a feeling or an action, whether good or evil, it acts in its _legislative_ capacity; but when it reproves and punishes, or approves and rewards, for actions done, it acts in its _executive_ capacity. these two departments of the moral sense seem quite distinct in their nature and operations; and, as we shall immediately see, they not only exist separately, but they sometimes act independently of each other. . another circumstance connected with conscience is, that her _legislative_ powers do not develope themselves, nor appear to act, till the reasoning powers of the person begin to expand. then, and then only does the pupil of nature, who has not had the benefit of previous moral instruction, begin to decide on the merit or demerit of actions. infants, and children who are left without instruction, appear to have no distinct perception that certain actions are right, and others wrong. in infancy, we frequently perceive the most rebellious outbreakings of ungoverned passion, with tearing, and scratching, and beating the parent, without any indication of compunction, either at the time, or after it has taken place. even in children of more advanced years, while they remain without moral instruction, and before the reasoning powers are developed, the injuries which they occasion to each other, or which they inflict upon the old, the decrepit, or the helpless, are matters of unmingled glee and gratification, without the slightest sign of conscience interfering to prevent them, or of giving them any uneasiness after the mischief is done. instead of sorrow, such children are found invariably delighted with the recollection of their tricks; and never fail to recapitulate them to their companions afterwards, with triumph and satisfaction.--but it is not so with the adult. as soon as the reasoning powers are developed, the legislative functions of conscience begin to act, enabling and impelling the person to decide at once on actions, whether they are right or wrong, good or evil. such a person, therefore, could not strike nor abuse his parents, without knowing that he was doing wrong; nor could he tantalize or injure the aged or the helpless, without conscience putting him upon his guard, as well as reproving and punishing the crime by compunctious feelings after it was committed. from this we perceive, that the legislative powers of conscience are usually dormant in the child, and do not, when left to nature, act till the reasoning powers have exhibited themselves; from which we are led to conclude, that it is by an _early education_,--by _moral instruction_ alone,--that the young are to be guarded against crime, and prepared and furnished to good works. . this leads us to observe another remarkable circumstance, corroborative also of the above remark, which is, that although the legislative powers of conscience are but very imperfectly, if at all developed in children, yet the _executive_ powers are never absent, where moral instruction has previously been communicated.--a child of very tender years, and even an infant, may be taught, that certain actions are good and should be performed, while others are evil and must be avoided. this is matter of daily experience; and a little attention to the subject will shew, that moral instruction in the case of the young, acts the same part that the legislative powers of conscience do in the adult. but what we wish at present more particularly to remark is, that whenever such moral instruction has been communicated, nature at once sanctions it, and is ever ready to use the executive powers of the conscience for the purpose of rendering it effective. when therefore good actions have been pointed out as praiseworthy and deserving of approbation, there is a strong inducement to practise them, and a delightful feeling of satisfaction and self-approval after they have been performed. and when, on the contrary, certain other actions have been denounced as wicked, and which, if indulged in, will be punished either by their parents or by god, the child feels all the hesitation and fear to commit them, that is observable in similar cases among older persons; and, when committed he experiences the same remorse, and terror, and self-reproach, which in the adult follow the perpetration of an aggravated crime. this is a circumstance which must be obvious to every reader; and it distinctly intimates, that the god of nature intends that the legislative powers of conscience should in all cases be _anticipated_ by the parent and teacher. the moral instruction or the young is to be the rule; the neglect of it, although in some measure provided for, is to be the exception. the lesson is as plain as analogy can teach us, that, while there is written on the heart of man such an outline of the moral law as will leave him without excuse when called to judgment, yet it is not the design of the creator that, in a matter of such vast importance as the moral perfection of a rational creature, we should trust to that, and, like savages, leave our children to gather information respecting moral good and evil solely from the slowly developed and imperfect dictates of their own nature. the whole phenomena of the natural conscience shew, that although god secures the operation of the legislative powers of conscience to direct the actions of the man when they are really required, yet he intends that they should be anticipated by moral instruction given by the parent. and this is proved by the remarkable fact, that when this instruction is communicated, the executive powers of conscience immediately come into operation, and homologate this instruction, by approving of it, adopting it, and acting upon it. . this is still farther obvious from a fourth consideration, which is, that wherever moral instruction has been communicated to the young, the legislative powers of conscience are either altogether superseded, or left dormant.--every person who in youth has received a regular moral and religious education, and who retains upon his mind the knowledge then communicated, is found through life to act upon _that_ knowledge chiefly, if not entirely. he seldom thinks of the dictates of his natural conscience, and but rarely perceives them. in every decision to which he comes as to what is right or wrong, reference is generally made in his mind, either to the declarations of scripture, or to the moral instructions which he has formerly received; and upon these he invariably falls back, when any action of a doubtful character is presented for his approval or rejection. from this very remarkable circumstance, we at once ascertain what are the intentions of nature. she very plainly requires the early moral instruction of the young, by those into whose hands she has placed them; because she is here found to encourage and acknowledge this instruction at the expense of her own legislative powers, which not being now required, are allowed to lie idle. . another circumstance connected with this subject, is the well known fact, that children are found capable of moral instruction long before the time that nature usually begins to develope the legislative powers of the conscience.--a child, almost as soon as he can be made to know that he has an earthly father, may be taught that he has another father in heaven; and when he can be induced to feel that a certain line of conduct is necessary to secure the favour of the one, he may also be led to comprehend that certain dispositions and actions will please the other. now, that a child can be taught and trained to do all this with respect to his parents, is matter of daily experience. as soon as he can understand any thing, and long before he can speak, he may be enabled to distinguish between right and wrong, as well as to do that which is good, and to avoid that which is evil; and in every case of this kind, nature sanctions the moral instruction communicated, by invariably following it up with the practical operation of the executive powers of conscience, which always approve that which the child thinks is good, and reprove that which he supposes to be wrong. the triumphant gleam of satisfaction which brightens the countenance of a child, and the laughing look and pause for approval when he has done something that he knows to be right, are abundant proofs of the truth of this observation; while his cowering scowl, and fear of reproof or punishment, when he has done that which is wrong, are equal indications of the same thing. nature, therefore, that has given the capacity of distinguishing between good and evil when thus communicated, and that invariably approves of the operation, and assists in it, has most certainly intended that it should be exercised. this consideration, taken in connection with its advantages to the family, to the child, to the future man, and to society, plainly points out the value and the importance of early religious instruction and moral training. . another circumstance, in connection with the application of knowledge by means of the conscience, should not be overlooked. it is the remarkable fact, that nature has implanted in the mind of the young a principle, by which they unhesitatingly believe whatever they are told.--a child who has not been abused by frequent deceptions, is a perfect picture of docility. he never for a moment doubts either his parent or his teacher when he tells him what is right and what is wrong. if he be taught that it is a sin to eat flesh on fridays, he never questions the truth of it; and if told that he may kill spiders, but should not hurl flies, he may wonder at the difference, but he never doubts the correctness of the statement. this disposition in children is applicable to every kind of instruction offered to them;--but the superior importance of moral, to every other kind of truth, and the beneficial effects of the principle when applied to moral and religious training, shew that it is chiefly designed by nature for aiding the parent and teacher in this most important part of their labours. . another circumstance connected with this subject is, that the executive powers of conscience always act according to the belief of the person, and not according to what would have been the dictates of conscience in the exercise of her legislative functions.--this of itself is a sufficient proof of the separate and independent agency of these two principles. the legislative powers, as at first implanted in the heart of man, there is reason to believe, would, if allowed to act freely, never have been in error; and even still, they are generally a witness for the purity of truth;--but the executive powers invariably act, not according to what is really the truth, but according to what the person himself believes to be right or wrong. the child who was told that it was a sin to eat flesh on a friday, would be reproved by his conscience were he to indulge his appetite by doing so;--and the conscience of the zealous musselman, which would smite him for indulging in a sip of wine, would commend and reward him by its approval, for indulging in cruelty and injustice to the unbeliever in his faith. the executive functions of conscience then act independently of the legislative, and frequently in opposition to them. there must be a feeling of wrong, before the executive powers will reprove; and there must be a sense of merit, before they will commend;--but a mistake in either case makes no apparent difference. this is another, and a powerful argument for the early moral instruction of the young; and it shews us also, the greater value which nature puts upon the _application_ and _use_ of knowledge, than upon its possession. she not only encourages this application in all ordinary cases; but here we find her, for the purpose of maintaining the general principle, lending her assistance in the application and use of the knowledge received, even when the knowledge itself is erroneous, and the application mischievous. . another important circumstance which is worthy of especial notice, is, that conscience is much more readily acted upon by _examples_, than by _precepts_.--in communicating a knowledge of duty, this principle in nature has become proverbial; but it is not less true with respect to the executive powers, in approving or reproving that which is right or wrong. it is the prerogative of conscience to excite us to approve or condemn the conduct of others, as well as our own; and this is regulated, not by strict truth, but by our belief at the time, whether that belief be correct or the contrary. now the precept, "thou shalt not kill," would be sufficient to make the executive powers of conscience watchful, in deterring the individual from the crime, or in reproving and punishing him if he committed it. but the mere precept would have but little effect in exhibiting to him the full atrocity of the sin, in comparison with an anecdote or a story which detailed its commission. but even this would not be so powerful as the effect produced by a murder committed in a neighbouring street, and still more were it perpetrated in his own presence. the necessary inference to be drawn from this remarkable fact is, that moral truth is much more effectively taught by example than by precept; and accordingly we find, that at least four-fifths of scripture, which is altogether a moral instrument, consist of narrative, and are given specially, "that the man of god may be perfect, thoroughly furnished to every good work." . another circumstance worthy of observation is, that the executive powers of conscience appear to be exceedingly partial when exercised upon actions done by _ourselves_, in comparison of its decisions upon the same actions when they are committed by _others_.--when we ourselves perform a good action, the approval of our conscience is more lively and more extensive, than it would have been had the good action been that of another. on the contrary, it would be more ready to perform its functions, and more powerful in impressing upon our minds the demerit or wickedness of an action committed by another, than if we ourselves had committed it. the reason of this is obviously self-love, which partly overbears the natural operations of this principle. violence of passion and strong desire, when we are tempted to commit a crime, are hostile movements against the dictates of conscience; and they too frequently, by their excess, stifle and drown the still small voice which does speak out, but which, for the moment, is not heard within us.--but nothing of this kind takes place when the crime is committed by others. we are then much more impartial; and conscience is permitted to utter her voice, and to make her impressions without opposition. this impartial decision on the conduct of others, is found to be a great means of preventing us from the future commission of a similar crime; and this affords us another powerful argument in favour of early instruction and moral training. by attending early to this duty, the mind of the child is made up, and sentence has been pronounced on certain acts, before selfishness or the passions have had an opportunity of blinding the mind, or silencing the conscience. by proper moral training the pupil is fortified and prepared for combating his evil inclinations when temptations occur; but without this, he will have to encounter sudden temptations at a great disadvantage. . another circumstance connected with this subject is, that the moral sentiments and feelings above all others, are improved and strengthened by exercise; and are weakened, and often destroyed by disregard or opposition.--every instance of moral exercise or moral discipline, invigorates the executive powers of conscience, and renders the moral perceptions of the person more acute and tender. every successful struggle against a temptation, implants in the mind of a child a noble consciousness of dignity, and confers a large amount of moral strength, and a firmer determination to resist others. in this respect, the good derived from the mere knowledge of a duty and its actual performance is immense. a child who is merely told that a certain action is praiseworthy, is by no means so sensible of the fact, or of its value, as he is after he has actually performed it; and when, on the contrary, he is told that a certain action is wrong, he is no doubt prepared to avoid it; but it is not till he has been tempted to its commission, and has successfully overcome the temptation, that he is fully aware of its enormity. when he has successfully resisted the first temptation, he is much better prepared than any exhortation or warning could make him for resisting and repelling a second;--while every successive victory will give strength to the executive powers of the conscience, and will render future conflicts less hazardous, and resistance more easy. for the same reason, an amiable action frequently performed does not pall by repetition, but appears more and more amiable, till the doing of it grows into a habit; and the approval of conscience becoming every day more satisfactory, the person will be stimulated to its frequent and regular observance. but the opposite of this is equally true.--the continued habit of suppressing the voice of conscience will greatly weaken, and will at last destroy its executive powers. when a person knows that a certain action is wrong, and is tempted to commit it,--conscience will speak out, and for the first time at least it will be listened to. but if this warning be neglected, and the sin be committed, the conscience will be proportionally weakened, and the self-will of the individual will acquire additional strength. when the temptation again presents itself, it is with redoubled power, and it meets with less resistance. it will invariably be found in such cases, that the person felt much more difficulty in resisting the admonitions of conscience in the case of the first temptation, than in that of the second; and he will also feel more during the second than he will during the third. frequent resistance offered to the executive powers of conscience will at last lay them asleep. the beginning of this downward career is always the most difficult; but when once fairly begun, it grows every day more easy, till the habit of sin becomes like a second nature. . there is yet another feature in the exhibition of the moral sense in adults, which ought not to be overlooked by the educationist in his treatment of the young. we here allude to the remarkable fact, that the conscience scarcely ever refers to consequences connected merely with this world and time, but compels the man, in spite of himself, to fear, that his actions will, in some way or other, have an influence upon his happiness or his misery in another world, and through eternity.--the mere uneasiness arising from the fear of detection and punishment by men, is a perfectly different kind of feeling, and never is, and never ought to be, dignified with the name of conscience. it is the consequence of a mere animal calculation of chances;--similar to the feelings which give rise to the cautious prowling of the hungry lion, or the stealthy advances of the timorous fox. but the forebodings, as well as the gnawings of conscience, extend much farther, and strike much deeper, than these superficial and animal sensations. conscience in man, as long as it is permitted to act freely, has always a reference to god, to a future judgment, and to eternity, and is but rarely affected by worldly considerations. the valuable lesson to be drawn from this circumstance obviously is, that the parent and teacher ought, in their moral training of the young, to make use of the same principle. the anticipated approbation or displeasure of their earthly parents or teachers, or even the fear of the rod and correction, is not enough. children are capable of being restrained by much higher motives, and stimulated to duty by nobler and more generous feelings. the greatness, the holiness, the unwearied goodness, and the omnipresence of their heavenly father, present to the rational and tender affections of the young, a constantly increasing stimulus to obedience and self-controul;--while the fear of mere physical suffering will be found daily to decrease, and may perhaps in some powerful minds at last altogether disappear. the horse and the dog were intended to be trained in the one way;--but rational and intelligent minds were obviously intended to be trained in the other. of these facts, connected as they are with the application of knowledge by means of the moral sense, the educationist must make use for the perfecting of his science. they are the most valuable, and therefore they ought to form the most important branch of his investigations. all the other parts of nature's teaching were but means;--this is obviously the great end she designed by using them, and therefore it ought to be his also. in regard to the practical working of this important part of nature's educational process, we need only remark here, that the application of the pupil's knowledge connected with the moral sense, is precisely the same in form, as in that connected with the common sense. there is always here first, as in the former case, some fundamental truth, generally derived from scripture, or founded on some moral maxim, and presented in the form of a precept, a promise, a threatening, or an example;--there is next a lesson or inference drawn from this truth;--and there is, lastly, a practical application of that lesson or inference to present circumstances. for the purpose of illustrating this, let us suppose that a boy who has been trained in imitation of nature, is tempted by some ungodly acquaintances to join with them in absenting himself from public worship, and in breaking the sabbath. the moment that such a temptation is suggested to him, a feeling arises in his mind, which will take something like the following form:--"i ought not to absent myself from public worship;"--"i ought not to break the sabbath;"--"i ought not to keep bad company." here are three distinct lessons suited to the occasion, obviously derived from his previous knowledge, and which he has been trained either directly or indirectly to draw from "the only rule of duty," the bible. when, accordingly, the temptation is farther pressed upon him, and the reasons of his refusal are regularly put into form, they appear in something like the following shape and order:--"i must not absent myself from public worship; for thus it is written, 'forget not the assembling of yourselves together;' and, 'jesus, _as his custom was_, went to the synagogue on the sabbath day.'"--"i must not profane this holy day; for thus it is written, 'remember the sabbath day to keep it holy,'"--and, "i must not go with these boys; for thus it is written, 'go not in the way of the ungodly;' and 'evil communications corrupt good manners.'" whoever will investigate the subject closely, will find, that the above is a pretty correct picture of the mental process, wherever temptation is opposed and overcome by means of religious principle;--but it is also worthy of remark, that the form is still nearly the same by whomsoever a temptation is resisted, and whether they do or do not take the scriptures for their text-book and directory. the only difference in such a case is, that their lessons have been drawn from some _other_ source. for example, another boy exposed to the above temptation might successfully resist it upon the following grounds. he might say, "i must not absent myself from public worship; because i shall then lose the promised reward for taking home the text;"--"i dare not profane the sabbath; because, if i did, my father would punish me;"--"i will not go with these boys; because i would be ashamed to be seen in their company." in this latter example, we have the same lessons, and the same application, although these lessons have been derived from a more questionable, and a much more variable source. in both cases, however, it is the same operation of nature, and which we ought always to imitate therefore upon scriptural and solid grounds. these examples might be multiplied in various forms, and yet they would in every case be found substantially alike. the application of knowledge, whether by the common or the moral sense, is carried forward only in one way, in which the truth, the lesson, and the application, follow each other in natural order, whether they be perceived or not. to this process, therefore, every branch and portion of our knowledge ought to be adapted, as it is obviously the great end designed by nature in all her previous endeavours. the parent, therefore, or the teacher, who wilfully passes over, or but slightly attends to these plain indications, is really betraying his trust, and deeply injuring the future prospects of his immortal charge. the several circumstances enumerated in the previous part of this chapter, as connected with the moral sense, are capable of suggesting many important hints for the establishment of education; but there are one or two connected with the subject as a whole, to which we must very shortly allude. in the first place, from the foregoing facts we are powerfully led to the conclusion, that all kinds of physical good, such as health, strength, beauty, riches, and honours, and even the higher attainments of intellectual sagacity and knowledge, are, in the estimation of nature, not once to be compared with the very lowest of the moral acquirements. with respect to the former, man shares them, though in a higher degree, with the brute creation;--but _morals_ are altogether peculiar to higher intelligences. to man, in particular, the value of moral discipline is beyond calculation:--for, however much the present ignorance and grossness of men's minds may deceive them in weighing their respective worth, yet it would be easy to shew, that the knowledge and practice of but one additional truth in morals, are of more real value to a child, than a whole lifetime of physical enjoyment. nature has accordingly implanted in his constitution, a complete system of moral machinery, to assist the parent in this first and most important part of his duty,--that of guiding his children in the paths of religion and virtue. the executive powers of conscience are always alive and active, stimulating or restraining both young and old, wherever the action proposed partakes of the character of right or wrong. and, even where the parental duties in this respect have been neglected, nature has, in part, graciously provided a remedy. in all such cases, during the years of advancing manhood, the law is gradually and vividly written upon the heart. its dictates are generally, no doubt, dimmed and defaced by the natural depravity and recklessness of the sinner; but even then, they are sufficiently legible to leave him without excuse for his neglect of their demands. the preference which nature gives to moral acquirements, is demonstrated also by another feature in her different modes of applying knowledge by the common and the moral senses. in the attainment of physical good, nature leaves men, as she does the lower animals, in a great measure to themselves, under the guardianship of the common sense; but, in respect to actions that are morally good or evil, she deals with them in a much more solemn and dignified manner. a transgression of the laws of the natural or common sense, is, without discrimination and without mercy, visited with present and corresponding punishment; plainly indicating, that with respect to these there is to be no future reckoning;--while the trial and final judgment of moral acts are usually reserved for a future, a more solemn, and a more comprehensive investigation. another inference which legitimately arises out of the above considerations, as well as from the facts themselves, is, that religion and morals are really intended to be the chief object of attention in the education of the young. this is a circumstance so clearly and so frequently pointed out to us, in our observation of nature's educational processes, that no person, we think, of a philosophic turn of mind, can consistently refuse his assent to it. the facts are so numerous, and the legitimate inferences to be drawn from them are so plain, that pre-conceived opinions should never induce us either to blink them from fear, or deny them from prejudice. these facts and inferences too, it should be observed, present themselves to our notice in all their own native power and simplicity, invulnerable in their own strength, and, in one sense, altogether independent of revelation. they are, no doubt, efficiently supported in every page of the christian record; but, without revelation, they force themselves upon our conviction, and cannot be consistently refuted. we state this fearlessly, from a consideration of numerous facts, to a few of which, selected from among many, we shall, before concluding, very shortly advert. in the first place, it is obvious to the most cursory observer, that moral attainments and moral greatness are more honoured by nature, and are, of course, more valuable to man, than the possession of either intellectual or physical good.--nature has, to the possessor, made virtue its own reward, in that calm consciousness of dignity, self-approval, and peace, which are its natural results; while, even from the mere looker-on, she compels an approval. on the contrary, we find, that the highest intellectual or physical attainments, when coupled with vice, lead directly and invariably to corresponding depths of degradation and misery. no one, we think, can deny this as a general principle; and if it be admitted, the question is settled; for no person acting rationally would seek the _lesser_ good for his child, at the expense of the _greater_. another proof of the same fact is, that nature has provided for the physical and intellectual education of the young, by means of the animal or "common sense;" while morals are, in a great measure, left to the education of the parents. the principle of common sense, as we have seen, begins its operations and discipline in early infancy, and continues to act through life; but the culture of the moral sense,--by far the most important of the two,--is left during infancy and childhood very much to the affections of the natural guardians of the child, and to the results of their education. hence it is, that while nature amply provides for the _neglect_ of this duty, by the developement of the legislative powers of conscience towards manhood, they are comparatively feeble, and in ordinary cases are but little thought of or observed, wherever this duty has timeously been attended to. from all these circumstances we infer, that it is the intention of nature, that the establishment and culture of religion and morals should in every case form the chief objects of education,--the main business of the family and the school;--an intention which she has pointed out and guarded by valuable rewards on the one hand, and severe penalties on the other. when the duty is faithfully attended to, nature lends her powerful assistance, by the early developement of the executive powers of conscience, and the virtue of the pupil is the appropriate reward to both parties; but, when this is omitted, the growing depravity of the child becomes at once the reproof and the punishment of the parents, for this wilful violation of nature's designs. in conclusion, it may be necessary to remark, that from these latter circumstances, another and a directly opposite inference may be drawn, which we must not allow to pass without observation.--it may be said, that the very postponement of the legislative powers of conscience till the years of manhood, shews, that religion and morals are not designed to be taught till that period arrive. now, to this there are two answers.--_first_, if it were correct, it would set aside, and render useless almost all the other indications of nature on this subject. in accordance with the view taken of the circumstances as above, these indications are perfectly harmonious and effective; but, in the view of the case which this argument supposes, they are all inconsistent and useless.--but, _secondly_, if this argument proves any thing, it proves too much, and would infer the absurd proposition, that physical and intellectual qualities are superior in value to moral attainments;--a proposition that is contradicted, as we have shewn, by every operation and circumstance in nature and providence. it is in direct opposition also to all the unsophisticated feelings of human nature. no thinking person will venture to affirm, that the beauty of the courtezan, the strength of the robber, or the intelligence and sagacity of the swindler, are more to be honoured than the generous qualities of a wilberforce or a howard. and therefore it is, that from a calm and dispassionate consideration of these facts, and independently altogether of revelation, we cannot see how any impartial philosophic mind can evade the conclusion, that the chief object to be attended to in the education of the young, and to which every thing else should be strictly subservient, is _their regular and early training in religion and morals_. chap. xi. _on nature's method of training her pupils to communicate their knowledge._ there is yet a _fourth_ process in the educational system of nature, which may be termed supplementary, as it is not intended solely, nor even chiefly, for the good of the pupil himself, but for the community.--this process of nature consists in the training of her pupil to communicate, by language, not only his own wishes and wants, but also, and perhaps chiefly, the knowledge and experience which he himself has attained. the three previous processes of nature were in a great measure selfish,--referring to the pupil as an individual, and are of use although he should be alone, and isolated from all others of his species; but this is characteristically social, and to the monk and the hermit is altogether useless. that this ability to communicate our sentiments is intended by nature, not for the sole benefit of the individual, but chiefly as an instrument of doing good to others, appears obvious from various circumstances. its importance in education, and in the training of the young, would of itself, we think, be a sufficient proof of this; but it is rendered unquestionable by the invariable decision of every unbiassed mind, in judging of a person who is constantly speaking of and for himself; and of another whose sole object in conversation, is to exalt and promote the happiness of those around him. the one person, however meritorious otherwise, is pitied or laughed at;--the other is admired and applauded in spite of ourselves. the benevolence of this arrangement in the educational process of nature is worthy of especial notice, as it leads us directly to the conclusion, that learning, of whatever kind, is not intended to be a monkish and personal thing, but is really designed by nature for the benefit of the community at large. those connected with education, therefore, are here taught, that the training of the young should be so conducted, that while the attainments of the pupil shall in every instance benefit himself, they shall at the same time be of such a kind, and shall be communicated in such a way, as shall advantage the persons with whom he is to mingle, and the community of which he is to form a part. unless this lesson, taught us by nature, be attended to, her plan is obviously left incomplete. in entering upon the consideration of this part of our subject, we cannot but remark the value and the importance which nature has attached to the higher acquisitions of this anti-selfish portion of her teaching. language is perverted and abused, when it is generally and chiefly employed for the benefit of the individual himself; and the decision of every candid and well-disposed mind confirms the truth of this assertion. when, on the contrary, it is employed for the benefit of others, or for the good of the public in general, it commands attention, and compels approval. eloquence, therefore, is obviously intended by nature for the benefit of communities; and accordingly, she has so disposed matters in the constitution of men's minds, and of society, that communities shall in every instance do it homage. in proof of this, we find, in every age and nation, wherever nature is not totally debased by art or crime, that the most powerful orator, has almost always been found to be the most influential man. every other qualification in society has been made to bend to this, and even reason itself is often for the moment obscured, by means of its fascinations. learning and intellect, riches, popularity, and power, have frequently been made to quail before it; and even virtue itself has for a time been deprived of its influence, when assailed by eloquence. nay, even in more artificial communities, where nature has been constrained and moulded anew to suit the tastes and caprices of selfish men, eloquence has still maintained its reputation, and has generally guided the possessor to honour and to power. amongst the lower and unsophisticated classes of society its influence is almost universal; and in most polished communities, it is still acknowledged as a high attainment, and one of the best indications that has yet been afforded of superior mental culture. that this is not an erroneous estimate of the mental powers of a finished debater, will be evident from a slight analysis of what he has to achieve in the exercise of his art. he has, while his adversary is speaking, to receive and retain upon his mind, the whole of his argument,--separate its weak and strong points,--and call forth and arrange those views and illustrations which are calculated to overthrow and demolish it. this itself, even when performed in silence, is a prodigious effort of mental strength; but when he commences to speak, and to manage these, with other equally important operations of his own mind at the same moment, the difficulty of succeeding is greatly increased. when he begins to pour forth his refutation in an uninterrupted flow of luminous eloquence;--meeting, combating, and setting aside his opponent's statements and reasonings;--carefully marking, as he goes along, the effect produced upon his hearers, and adapting his arguments to the varying emotions and circumstances of the audience;--withholding, transposing, or abridging the materials he had previously prepared, or seizing new illustrations suggested by passing incidents;--and all this not only without hesitation, and without confusion, but with the most perfect composure and self-controul;--such a man gives evidence of an energy, a grasp, a quickness of thought, which, as an exhibition of godlike power in a creature, has scarcely a parallel in the whole range of nature's efforts. all kinds and degrees of physical glory, in comparison with this, sink into insignificance. it is but rare indeed that any country or age produces a demosthenes, a pitt, a thomson, or a brougham; and such persons have hitherto been considered as gifts of nature, rather than the legitimate production of educational exercises. but this we conceive to be a mistake. they may perhaps have been self-taught, and self-exercised, as demosthenes confessedly was; but that teaching, and especially mental and oral exercise, are necessary for the production of one of nature's chief ornaments, both analogy and experience abundantly shew.[ ] fluency in the use of words is not enough,--copiousness of thought, such as may be of use in the study, is not enough;--for nature's work, of which we are at present speaking, consists chiefly in the faculty of forming one train of thoughts in the mind, at the same time that the individual is giving expression to another. every child, accordingly, who holds conversation with his companion, is practising on a limited scale the very exercise which, if carried out by regular gradations, would ultimately lead to that excellence which we have above described. in every case of free unconstrained conversation, the operation of this principle of nature is apparent; for the idea is present to the mind some time before the tongue gives it utterance, and the person is preparing a second idea, at the moment he is communicating the first. upon this simple principle the whole art of eloquence, when analyzed, appears to depend. we shall therefore endeavour to trace its operation, and the methods which nature adopts for the purpose of perfecting it. that this ability is altogether acquired, and depends wholly upon exercise for its cultivation, is obvious in every stage of its progress, but especially towards its commencement. when nature first begins to suggest to an infant the use of language, we perceive that it cannot think and speak at the same moment. long after it has acquired the knowledge of words and names, and even the power of articulating them, it utters but one syllable, or one word at a time. its language, for a while after it has acquired a pretty extensive acquaintance with nouns and adjectives, is made up of single, or at most double words, with an observable pause between each, as if, after uttering one, it had to collect its thoughts and again prepare for a new effort, before it was able to pronounce the next. this is the child's first step, or rather the child's first attempt, in this important exercise; and it is conspicuous chiefly by the want, even in the least degree, of that power of which we have spoken. by and bye, however, the child is able to put two syllables, or two words together, without the pause;--but not three. that is a work of time, and that again has to become familiar, before four, or more words be attempted. these, however, are at last mastered; and he slowly acquires by practice the ability to utter a short sentence, composed chiefly of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, without interruption, and at last without difficulty. in the process here described, we perceive the commencement of nature's exercises in training her pupil to the acquisition of this valuable faculty. it consists chiefly, as we have said, in enabling the child by regular practice to arrive at such a command of the mental faculties, and the powers of articulation, as qualifies him to exercise both apparently at the same moment. his mind is employed in preparing one set of ideas, while the organs of speech are engaged in giving utterance to another. he thinks that which he is about to speak, at the moment he is speaking that which he previously thought; and if, as is generally admitted, the mind cannot be engaged upon two things at the same moment, there is here an instance of such a rapid and successive transition from one to another, as obviously to elude perception. the various means which nature employs in working out this great end in the young are very remarkable. we have seen that a child at first does not possess the power of uttering even a word, while his thoughts are engaged on any thing else. the powers of the mind must as it were be concentrated upon that one word, till by long practice he can at last think on one and utter another. the same difficulty of speaking and thinking on different things is observable in his amusements; and nature appears to employ the powerful auxiliary of his play to assist him in overcoming it. when a young child is engaged in any amusement which requires thought, the inability of the mind to do double duty is very evident. he cannot hear a question, nor speak a single sentence, and go on with his play at the same time. if a question be asked, he stops, looks up, hears, answers, and then perhaps collects his thoughts, and again proceeds with his game as before; but for a long time he cannot even hear, far less speak, and play at the same moment. when a child is able to do this, it is a good sign of his having acquired considerable mental powers. the excitement of play, we have said, is one chief means which nature employs for the cultivation of this faculty, and it is peculiarly worthy of attention by the educationist. every one must have observed the strong desire which children have, during their more exhilarating games, to exercise their lungs by shouting, and calling out, and giving direction, encouragement, or reproof, to their companions. in all these instances, the impetus of their play is not apparently stopt while they speak, and every time that this takes place, they are promoting their mental, as well as their physical health and well-being. the accuracy of this remark is perhaps more conspicuous, although not more real, in the less boisterous and more placid employment of the young. the lively prattle of the girl, while constructing her baby-house; her playful arrogation of authority and command over her playmates, and her serio-comic administering of commendation or reproof in the assumed character of "mistress" or "mother," are all instances of a similar kind. a little attention to the matter will convince any one, that every sentence uttered by a child while dressing a doll, or rigging a ship, or cutting a stick, is really intended and employed by nature in advancing this great object. and we cannot help remarking, that the irksome silence so frequently enjoined upon children during their play, or during any species of active employment, is not only harsh and unnecessary, but is positively hurtful. it is in direct opposition both to the design and the practice of nature. it is obstructing, or at least neglecting the cultivation and the developement of powers, which are destined to be a chief ornament of life; a source of honour and enjoyment to the pupil himself, and ultimately a great benefit to society. the cultivation of this faculty in adults, after they have emancipated themselves from the discipline of nature, is advanced or retarded by the use or neglect of similar means. accordingly we find, that in every instance where the powers of the mind are actively, (not mechanically) employed, while the individual is at the same time called on to exercise his powers of speech and hearing on something else, this faculty of extemporaneous speaking is cultivated, and rendered more easy and fluent. whereas, on the contrary, the most extensive acquaintance with words, even when combined with much knowledge, has but little influence in making a ready speaker. many of the most voluble of our species have but a very scanty vocabulary, and still less knowledge; while men of extensive and profound learning, whose habits have been formed in the study, are often defective even in common conversation, and utterly unable to undertake with success the task of public extemporaneous speaking. from this cause it is, that some of our ablest men, and our greatest scholars, are necessitated to read that which they dare not trust themselves to speak; while others, by a different practice, and perhaps with fewer real attainments, feel no difficulty in arranging their ideas, and delivering them at the same time with ease and fluency. hence it is also, that travelling, frequent intercourse with strangers, debating societies, and above all, forensic pleadings, sharpen the faculties, and give an ease and accuracy in thinking and speaking, which are but rarely acquired in the same degree in any other way. there is one particular feature in this department of nature's teaching, which is of so much importance both to the young and to adults, that it ought not to be passed over without notice. it is the important fact, that the highest attainments in this valuable accomplishment are within the reach of almost every individual pupil, by a very moderate diligence in the use of the proper means. the counterpart of this is equally true; for without culture, either regular or accidental, no portion of it can ever be acquired. this is abundantly proved both by experience and analogy. experience has shewn, that in every case, perseverance alone, often without system, has made great and powerful speakers; and the analogy between the expression of our feelings by _words_ and by _music_, shews what proper training may do in both cases. every one will admit that it is easier to give expression to our feelings by the natural organs of speech, than by the mechanical use of a musical instrument; and if by making use of the proper means, and with a moderate degree of diligence and perseverance, every man can be trained to play dexterously on the violin, or the organ, and at the same moment maintain a perfect command over the operations of his mind,--we may reasonably conclude, from analogy, that with an equal, or even a smaller degree of diligence, when the means have been equally systematized, the most humble individual may be trained to manage the operations of his mind, while he is otherwise making use of his _tongue_, as the other is of his _fingers_. but the opposite of this, as we have stated above, is equally true. for, although a man may, by diligence and perseverance, attain a high degree of perfection in the exercise of this faculty; yet, even the lowest must be procured by the use of means. the art of thinking and speaking different ideas at the same time, as we have proved, is not an instinctive, but is wholly an acquired faculty, and must be attained by exercise wherever it is possessed. we have instanced as examples the case of the girl having at first to stop while dressing her doll, and the boy while rigging his ship; but what we wish to notice here is, that the principle is not peculiar to children, whose ideas are few, and whose language is imperfect, but applies equally to adults, even of superior attainments, and well cultivated minds. we have in part proved this by the frequent defects of even learned men in conversation; but there is good reason to conclude, that even these defects would have been greater, if the few opportunities they have improved had been less numerous. in short, it appears, that the successful uttering of but two consecutive words, while the mind is otherwise engaged, must be acquired even in the adult, by education or by discipline. this important fact in education, might be demonstrated by numerous proofs, deduced from acts which are commonly understood to depend altogether on habit, and where the mind is obviously but little engaged. we shall take the case already supposed, that of the fingering of musical instruments. the rapidity with which the fingers in this exercise perform their office, would lead us to pronounce it to be purely mechanical, and to suppose that the mind was at perfect liberty to attend to any of the other functions of the body, during the performance. but this is not the case; for although by long practice, the operator has acquired the art of _thinking_ upon various other subjects while playing, he finds upon a first trial, that he is then totally unable to articulate two words in succession. here then is a case exactly parallel with that of the children who had to stop to speak during their play; proving that it does not arise from the lack of ideas, or a deficiency in words, but purely from want of discipline and practice; because many musicians by practice, and by practice alone, overcome the difficulty, and become able both to speak and to play at the same time. there is another circumstance connected with this part of our subject, which is worthy of remark. a person who is playing on an instrument, and who is desirous to speak, finds himself, without long practice, totally unable to do so; but he may, if he pleases, sing what he has to say, provided only that he modulate his voice to the tune he is playing. the reason of this appears to be two-fold; first, that the mind, by following the tune in the articulation of the words, is relieved in a great measure from doing double duty; and secondly, and chiefly, because the person has already acquired, by more or less practice, the faculty of singing and playing at the same time. from this illustration, we perceive the necessity that exists in education, of cultivating in the young, by direct means and special exercises, this important faculty of managing the thoughts and giving expression to them at the same moment. it must be acquired by a course of mental discipline, which brings all the elements of the principle into operation; the collecting and managing of ideas, the chusing and arranging of words, and the giving of them utterance, at the same time. that direct exercises of this kind are necessary for the purpose, is obvious from the illustrations here given; where we find, that although a person, while playing on an instrument, may sing his words, he is yet unable to make the slightest deviation from singing to speaking, without a long and laborious practice. here then we have been enabled to trace this supplementary process of nature in the education of her pupils, and to detect the great leading principle or law, by which it is governed. the attainment itself is the ready and fluent communication of our ideas to others; and the mode employed by nature for arriving at it, appears to be the training of her pupils to exercise their minds upon one set of ideas, while they are giving expression to another. that the mind is actually engaged in two different ways, at the same moment of time, it is not necessary for us to suppose. it is sufficient for our purpose, that the operations so rapidly succeed each other, as to appear to do so. the ability to accomplish this, we have proved to be in every case an acquired habit, and is never possessed, even in the smallest degree, without effort. it is, in fact, the invariable result of exercise and education. the most gifted of our species are frequently destitute of it; while very feeble minds have been found to possess it, when by chance or design they have employed the proper means for its attainment. what is wanted by the educationist therefore, is an exercise, or series of exercises, which will enable him to imitate nature, by causing his pupil to employ his mind in preparing one set of ideas, while he is giving expression to another. such an exercise, upon whatever subject, will always produce, in a greater or less degree, the effect which nature by this supplementary process intends to accomplish; that of giving the pupil ease and fluency in conversation, and a ready faculty of delivering his sentiments; while we have seen, by numerous illustrations, that it is at least highly improbable that it ever can be acquired in any other way. we have also demonstrated the impropriety of all unnecessary artificial restrictions upon children while at their play, and of preventing their speaking, calling out, and giving orders, encouragement, or commendation to their companions during it. these illustrations and examples have also pointed out to us the importance of encouraging the young to speak or converse with their teachers or one another, while they are actively employed at work, in their amusements, or in any other way in which the mind is but partially engaged. exercises of this kind in the domestic circle, where they could be more frequently resorted to, would be of great value in forwarding the mental capacities of the young, and might be at least equally and extensively useful, as similar exercises employed in the school. the consideration of suitable exercises for advancing these ends, by which nature may be successfully imitated in this important part of her process, belongs to another department of this treatise, to which accordingly we must refer. footnotes: [ ] note g. chap. xii. _recapitulation of the philosophical principles developed in the previous chapters._ before proceeding to the third and more practical part of this treatise, it will be of advantage here, shortly to review the progress we have made in establishing the several educational principles, exhibited in the operations of nature, as it is upon these that the following practical recommendations are to be entirely founded. in doing this, we would wish to press upon the attention of the reader the important consideration, that however much we may fail in what is to _follow_, the principles which we have _already ascertained_, must still remain as stationary landmarks in education, at which all future advances, by whomsoever made, must infallibly set out. the previous chapters, therefore, in so far as they have given a correct exposition of nature's modes of teaching, must constitute something like the model upon which all her future imitators in education will have to work. there may be a change of _order_, and a change of _names_, but the principles themselves, in so far as they have been discovered, will for ever remain unchanged and unchangeable.--it is very different, however, with what is to _follow_, in which we are to make some attempts at imitation. the principles which regulate the rapid movements of fish through water is one thing; and the attempt to imitate these principles by the ship-builder is quite another thing. the first, when correctly ascertained, remain the unalterable standard for every future naval architect; but the attempts at imitation will change and improve, as long as the minds of men are directed to the perfecting of ship-building. in like manner, the various facts in the educational processes of nature, in so far as they have been correctly ascertained in the previous part of this treatise, must form the unalterable basis for every future improvement in education. these facts, or principles, will very probably be found to form only a part of her operations;--but as they do really form _a part_, they will become a nucleus, round which all the remaining principles when discovered will necessarily congregate. we shall here therefore endeavour very shortly to recapitulate the several principles or laws employed by nature in her academy, so far as we have been able to detect them; as it must be upon these that not only we, but all our successors in the improvement of education, must hereafter proceed. we have seen in a former chapter, that the educational processes of nature divide themselves distinctly into four different kinds. _first_, the cultivation of the powers of the mind:--_second_, the acquisition of knowledge:--_third_, the uses or application of that knowledge to the daily varying circumstances of the pupil:--and _fourth_, the ability to communicate this knowledge and experience to others. the _first_ department of nature's teaching, that of cultivating the powers of her pupil's mind, we found to depend chiefly, if not entirely, upon one simple mental operation, that of "reiterating ideas;" and from numerous examples and experiments it has been shewn, that wherever this act of the mind takes place, there is, and there must be, mental culture; while, on the contrary, wherever it does not take place, there is not, so far as we can yet perceive, the slightest indication that the mind has either been exercised or benefited. the _second_ department of nature's teaching, we have seen, consists in inducing and assisting her pupils to acquire knowledge.--this object we found her accomplishing by means of four distinct principles, which she brings into operation in regular order, according to the age and mental capacity of the pupil. these we have named the principle of "perception and reiteration," which is the same as that employed in her first process;--the principle which we have named "individuation," which always precedes and prepares for the two following;--there is then the principle of "association," or "grouping," by which the imagination is cultivated, and the memory is assisted;--and there is, lastly, the principle of "classification," or "analysis," by which all knowledge when received is regularly classified according to its nature; by which means the memory is relieved, the whole is kept in due order, and remains constantly at the command of the will.--these four principles, so far as we have yet been able to investigate the processes of nature, are the chief, if not the only, means which she employs in assisting and inducing the pupil to acquire knowledge; and which of course ought to be employed in a similar way, and in the same order, by the teacher in the management of his classes. the _third_, and by far the most important series of exercises in nature's academy, we have ascertained, by extensive evidence, to be the training of her pupils to a constant practical application of their knowledge to the ordinary affairs of life.--these exercises she has separated into two distinct classes; the one connected with the physical and intellectual phenomena of our nature, and which is regulated by what we have termed the "animal, or common sense;" and the other connected with our moral nature, and regulated by our "moral sense," or conscience. in both of these departments, however, the methods which nature employs in guiding to the practical application of the pupil's knowledge are precisely the same, consisting of a regular gradation of three distinct steps, or stages. these steps we have found to follow each other in the following order. there is always first, some fundamental truth, or idea--some definite part of our knowledge of which use is to be made;--there is next an inference, or lesson, drawn from that idea, or truth;--and there is, lastly, a practical application of that lesson, or inference, to the present circumstances of the individual. this part of nature's educational process,--this application, or use of knowledge, we have ascertained and proved to be the great object which nature designs by _all her previous efforts_. this part of her work, when completed, forms in fact the great temple of education,--all the others were but the scaffolding by which it was to be reared.--this is the end; those were but means employed for attaining it. in proof of this important fact we have seen, that when this object is successfully gained, all the previous steps have been homologated and confirmed; whereas, whenever this crowning operation is awanting, all the preceding labour of the pupil becomes useless and vain, his knowledge gradually melts from the memory, and is ultimately lost. the _fourth_, or supplementary process in this educational course as conducted by nature, we found to consist in the training of her pupils to an ability to communicate with ease and fluency to others the knowledge and experience which they themselves had acquired.--this ability, as we have shewn, is not instinctive, but is in every instance the result of education. it is not always the accompaniment of great mental capacity; nor is it always at the command of those who have acquired extensive knowledge. persons highly gifted in both respects, are often greatly deficient in readiness of utterance, and freedom of speech. on careful investigation we have seen, that it is attained only by practice, and by one simple exercise of the mental powers, in which the thoughts are engaged with one set of ideas, at the same moment that the voice is giving expression to others. this faculty has been found to be eminently social and benevolent, and intended, not so much for the benefit of the individual himself as for the benefit of society. nature, accordingly, constrains mankind to do homage to eloquence when it is employed for others, or for the public;--but strongly induces them to look with pity or contempt on the person who is always speaking of or for himself. these facts accordingly have led us to the important conclusion, that learning and the possession of knowledge are not intended merely for the person himself, but for the good of society; and therefore, that education in every community ought to be conducted in such a manner, that the attainments of each individual in it, shall either directly or indirectly benefit the whole. in these several departments of our mental constitution, and in the principles or laws by which they are carried on, we have the great thoroughfare,--the highway of education,--marked out, inclosed, and levelled by nature herself. hitherto, in our examination of the several processes in which we find her engaged, we have endeavoured strictly to confine ourselves to the great general principles which she exhibits in forwarding and perfecting them. we have not touched as yet on the methods by which, in our schools, they may be successfully imitated; nor have we made any enquiry into the particular truths or subjects which ought there to be taught. these matters belong to another part of this treatise, and will be considered by themselves. and it is only necessary here to observe, that as it is the _use_ of knowledge chiefly which nature labours to attain, it is therefore _useful knowledge_ which she requires to be taught. this is a principle so prominently held forth by nature, and so repeatedly indicated and enforced, that in the school it ought never for an hour to be lost sight of. the whole business of the seminary must be practical; and the knowledge communicated must be useful, and such as can be put to use. if this rule be attended to, the knowledge communicated will be valuable and permanent;--but if it be neglected, the pretended communications will soon melt from the memory, and the previous labours of both teacher and pupil will be in a great measure lost. the existence of these several principles in education has been ascertained by long experience and slow degrees;--and the accuracy of the views which we have taken of them, has been rigorously and repeatedly tested. no pains has been spared in projecting and conducting such experiments as appeared necessary for the purpose; and it has been by experience and experiment alone that their efficiency has been established. many of these experiments were conducted in public,--some of them have for years been in circulation,--and the decisiveness of their results has never been questioned. the several principles in education which it was the object of these experiments to ascertain, are here for the first time, collected and exhibited in their natural order; and they are now presented to the friends of education with some degree of confidence. judging historically, however, from the experience of others in breaking up new ground in the sciences, there is good reason to believe, that the present treatise goes but a short way in establishing the science of education. there is yet much to be done; and others, no doubt, will follow to complete it. but if confidence is to be placed in history, it appears evident, that they must follow in the same course, if ever they are to succeed. nature is our only instructress; and however much she may have hitherto been neglected, it is only by following her leadings with a child-like docility, that improvement is ever to be expected. by so following, however, success is certain. the prospects of the science at the present moment, both as to its spread and its improvement, are exceedingly cheering. the field, which is now being opened up for the labours of the educationist, is extensive and inviting; and the anticipations of the philanthropist become the more delightful, on account of the improvements likely to ensue for carrying on the work. the errors and failings of former attempts will warn, while every new discovery will direct in the labour. the virgin soil has even yet in a great measure to be broken up; and if we shall be wise enough to employ the implements provided for us by nature herself, the present generation may yet witness a rapid and abundant ingathering of blessings for the world. this is neither a hasty nor a groundless speculation. there are already abundant proofs to warrant us in cherishing it. numerous patches of ground have again and again, under serious disadvantages, been partially cultivated; and each and all have invariably succeeded, and produced the first fruits of a ripe, a rich, and an increasing harvest. part iii. on the methods by which the educational processes of nature may be successfully imitated. chap. i. _on the exercises by which nature may be imitated in cultivating the powers of the mind._ in the educational processes of nature, her first object appears to be the cultivation of her pupil's mind; and this, therefore, ought also to be the first concern of the parent and teacher.--the wisdom of this arrangement is obvious. for as success in a great measure depends upon the vigour and extent of those powers, their early cultivation will render the succeeding exercises easy and pleasant, and will greatly abridge the anxiety and labour of both teacher and scholar. there is no doubt a great diversity in the natural capacities of children; and phrenology, as well as daily experience shews, that children who are apt in learning one thing, may be exceedingly dull and backward in acquiring others. but after making every allowance for this variety in the intellectual powers of children, it is well established by experience, and repeated experiments have confirmed the fact,[ ] that the very dullest and most obtuse of the children found in any of our schools, are really capable of rapid cultivation, and may, by the use of proper means, be very soon brought to bear their part in the usual exercises fitted for the ordinary children. a large proportion of the dulness so frequently complained of by teachers arises, not so much from any natural defect, or inherent mental weakness in the child, as from the want of that early mental exercise,--real mental culture,--of which we are here speaking. whenever this dulness in a sane scholar continues for any length of time, there is good reason to fear that it is owing to some palpable mismanagement on the part of the parent or teacher. on examination it will most likely be found, either that the pupil has had exercises prescribed to him which the powers of his mind were as yet incapable of accomplishing; or, if the exercises themselves have been suitable, there has been more prescribed than he was able to overtake. in either case the effect will be the same. the mind has been unnaturally burdened, or overstretched; confusion of ideas and mental weakness have been the consequence; and if so, the very attempt to keep up with his companions in the class only tends to aggravate the evil. hence arises the propriety of following nature in making the expansion and cultivation of the powers of the mind our first object; and our design in the present chapter is to examine into the means by which, in the exercises of the school, she may be successfully imitated in the operations which she employs for this purpose. we have in our previous investigations seen, that the cultivation of the mental powers is a work of extraordinary simplicity, depending entirely upon one act of the mind,--the reiteration of ideas. we have proved, by a variety of familiar instances, that wherever this act takes place, the mind is, and must be exercised, and so far strengthened; while, on the contrary, wherever it does not take place, there is neither mental exercise, nor any perceptible accession of mental strength. it does not depend upon the particular form of the exercise, whether it consists of reading, hearing, writing, or speaking; but simply and entirely upon the reality and the frequency of the reiteration of the included ideas during it. this makes the cultivation and strengthening of the powers of the mind a very simple and a very certain operation. for if the teacher can succeed by any means in producing frequent and successive repetitions of _this act_ of the mind in any of his pupils, nature will be true to her own law, and mental culture, and mental strength will assuredly follow;--but, on the contrary, whenever in a school exercise this act is awanting, there can be no permanent progression in the education of the pupil, and no amelioration in the state of his mind. the mechanical reading or repeating of words, for example, like the fingering of musical instruments, may be performed for months or years successively, without the powers of the mind being actively engaged in the process at all; leaving the child without mental exercise, and consequently without improvement. in following out the only legitimate plan for the accomplishment of this fundamental object, that of imitating nature, the first thing required by the teacher is an exercise, or series of exercises, by which he shall be able _at his own will_ to enforce upon his pupils this important act of the mind. if this object can be successfully attained, then the proper means for the intellectual improvement of the child are secured; but as long as it is awanting, his mental cultivation is either left to chance, or to the capricious decision of his own will;--for experience shews, that although a child may be compelled to read, or to repeat the _words_ of his exercises, they contain no power by which the teacher can ensure the reiteration of the _ideas_ they contain. the words may correctly and fluently pass from the tongue, while the mind is actively engaged upon something else, and as much beyond the reach of the teacher as ever. but if the desiderated exercise could be procured, the power of enforcing mental activity upon a prescribed subject would then remain, not in the possession of the child, but would be transferred to the teacher, at whose pleasure the mental cultivation of the pupil would proceed, whether he himself willed it or no. in the "catechetical exercise," as it has been called, and which has of late years been extensively used by our best teachers, the desideratum above described has been most happily and effectively supplied to the educationist. this valuable exercise may not perhaps be new;--but certainly its nature, and its importance in education, till of late years, has been altogether overlooked, or unknown. it differs from the former mode of catechising, (or rather of using catechisms) in this, that whereas a catechism provides an answer for the child in a set form of words,--the catechetical exercise, having first _provided him with the means_, compels him to search for, to select, and to construct an answer for himself. for example, an announcement is given by his teacher, or it is read from his book. this is the raw material upon which both the teacher and the child are to work, and within the boundaries of which the teacher especially must strictly confine himself. upon this announcement a question is founded,[ ] which obliges the child, before he can even prepare an answer, to reiterate in his own mind, not the _words_,--for that would not answer his purpose,--but the several _ideas_ contained in the sentence or truth announced. all these ideas must be perceived,--they must pass in review before the mind,--and from among them he must select the one required, arrange it in his own way, and give it to the teacher entirely as his own idea, and clothed altogether in his own words. in the common method of making use of catechisms, the words of the answer may be read, or they may be committed to memory, and may be repeated with ease and fluency; while the ideas,--the truths they contain,--may neither be perceived nor reiterated. in this there is neither mental exercise, nor mental improvement;--and, what is worse, without the catechetical exercise, the teacher has no means of knowing whether it be so or not. by means of the catechetical exercise, on the contrary, there can be no evasion,--no doubt as to the mental activity of the pupil, and his consequent mental improvement. its benefits are very extensive; and in employing it the teacher is not only sure that the ideas in the announcement have been perceived and reiterated, but that a numerous train of useful mental operations must have taken place, before his pupil could by any possibility return him an answer to his questions. we shall, before proceeding, point out a few of these. let us then suppose that a child either reads, or repeats as the answer to a question, the words, "jesus died for sinners."--at this point in the former mode of using a catechism, the exercise of the pupil stopped; and the parent or teacher understanding the meaning of the sentence, and clearly perceiving the ideas himself, usually took it for granted that the child also did so, or at least at some future time would do so. this was mere conjecture; and he had no means of ascertaining its certainty, however important. it is at this point that the catechetical exercise commences its operations. when the child has repeated the words, or when the teacher for the first time announces them, the mind of the child may be in a state very unfavourable to its improvement; but as soon as the teacher asks him a question founded upon one or more of the ideas which the announcement contains, and which he must answer without farther help, the state of his mind is instantly and materially changed. hitherto he may have been altogether passive on the subject;--nay, his mind while reading or repeating the words, may have been busily engaged on something else, or altogether occupied with his companions or his play;--but as soon as the teacher asks him "who died?" there is an instant withdrawal of the mind from every thing else, and an exclusive concentration of its powers upon the ideas in the announcement. he must think,--and he must think in a certain way, and upon the specific ideas presented to him by the teacher,--before it is possible for him to return an answer. it is on this account that this exercise is so effective an instrument in cultivating the powers of the mind;--and it is to the long series of exercises which take place in this operation, that we are now calling the attention of the reader, that he may perceive how closely this exercise follows in the line prescribed by nature, in creating occasions for the successive reiteration of different ideas suggested by one question. when, in pursuing the catechetical exercise, a question is asked from an announcement, there is first a call upon the attention, and an exercise of mind upon the _question_ asked, the words of which must be translated by the pupil into their proper ideas, which accordingly he must both perceive and understand. he has then to revert to the _ideas_ (not the words) contained in the original announcement, the words of which are perhaps still ringing in his ears; and these he must also perceive and reiterate in his mind, before he can either understand them or prepare to give an answer. at this point the child is necessarily in possession of the ideas--the truths--conveyed by the announcement; and therefore at this point one great end of the teacher has in so far been gained. but the full benefit of the exercise, in so far as it is capable of fixing these truths still more permanently on the memory, and of disciplining the mind, has not yet been exhausted. after the pupil has reiterated in his mind the ideas contained in the original sentence, or passage announced, he has again to revert to the question of the teacher, and compare it with the several ideas which the announcement contains. he has then to chuse from among them,--all of them being still held in review by the mind,--the particular idea to which his attention has been called by the question;--and last of all, and which is by no means the least as a mental exercise, he has to clothe this particular idea in words, and construct his sentence in such a way as to make it both sense and grammar. in this last effort, it is worthy of remark, children, after having been but a short while subjected to this exercise, almost invariably succeed, although they know nothing about grammar, and may perhaps never have heard of the name. but even this is not all. there has as yet been only one question asked, and the answer to this question refers to only one idea contained in the announcement. but it embraces at least three several ideas; and each of these ideas, by the catechetical exercise, is capable of originating other questions, perfectly distinct from each other, and each of which gives rise to a similar mental process, and with equally beneficial results, in exercising and strengthening the powers of the mind. it is also here of importance to take notice of the additional benefits that arise from the multiplying of questions upon one announcement. the first question proposed from the announcement, brought the mind of the child into immediate contact with all the ideas which it contained. they are now therefore familiar to him; and he is perfectly prepared for the second, and for every succeeding question formed upon it; and he fashions the answers with readiness and zest. every such answer is a kind of triumph to the child, which he gives with ease and pleasure, and yet every one of them, as an exercise of the mind, is equally beneficial as the first. when the teacher therefore asks, "what did jesus do?" and afterwards, "for whom did jesus die?" a little reflection will at once shew, that a similar mental exercise must take place at each question, in which the child has not only to reiterate the several original ideas, but must again and again compare the questions asked, with each one of them, choose out the one required, clothe it in his own language, and in this form repeat it audibly to his teacher. before leaving this enquiry into the nature and effects of the catechetical exercise, there are two circumstances connected with it as a school-engine, which deserve particular attention. the first is, that nature has made this same reiteration of ideas, for the securing of which this exercise is used, the chief means of conveying knowledge to the mind; and the second is, the undissembled delight which children exhibit while under its influence, wherever it is naturally and judiciously conducted. with respect to the former of these circumstances, it falls more particularly to be considered in another chapter, and under a following head; but with respect to the latter,--the delight felt in the exercise by the children themselves,--it deserves here a more close examination. every one who has paid any attention to the subject must have observed the life, the energy, the enjoyment, which are observable in a class of children, while they are under the influence, and subjected to the discipline of the catechetical exercise. this will perhaps be still more remarkable, if ever they have had an opportunity of contrasting this lively scene with the death-like monotony of a school where the exercise is as yet unknown. many can yet remember instances when it was first introduced into some of the sabbath schools in scotland, and the astonishment of the teachers at its instantaneous effects upon the mind and conduct of their children. the whole aspect of the school was changed; and the children, who had but a few minutes before been conspicuous only for their apathy, restlessness, or inattention, were instantly aroused to life, and energy, and delight. similar effects in some children are still witnessed; but, happily for education, the first exhibition of it to a whole school is not so common. one striking proof of the novelty and extent of its effects upon the pupils, and of the vivid contrast it produced with that to which the teachers had at that time been accustomed, is afforded by the fact, that serious objections were sometimes made to its introduction, by well-meaning individuals, on account of its breaking in, as they said, upon the proper devotional solemnity of the children;--as if the apathy of languor and weariness was identical with reverence, and mental energy and joyous feelings were incompatible with the liveliest devotion. these opinions have now happily disappeared; and the catechetical exercise is not now, on that account, so frequently opposed. christians now perceive, that by making these rough places smooth, and the crooked ways straight for the tottering feet of the lambs of the flock, they are following the best, as it is the appointed means, of "making ready a people prepared for the lord." to the teacher, especially, it must be a matter of great practical importance, to perceive clearly the cause why this exercise is so fascinating to the young, as well as so beneficial in education. the cause, when we analyze all the circumstances, is simply this, that it resembles, in all its leading characteristics, those amusements and pastimes of which children are so fond. in other words, the prosecution of the catechetical exercise with the young, produces in reality the same effects as a game would do if played with their teacher. it brings into action, and it keeps in lively operation, all those mental elements, which, in ordinary cases, constitute their play; and the effects of course are nearly similar. we shall direct the reader's attention to this curious fact for a moment. it is easy to perceive, that the pleasure and happiness experienced by a child during his play, arise altogether from the _state of his mind_, to which the physical exercises and amusements only conduce. when this mental satisfaction is examined, we find it to consist chiefly of two elements,--that of active thought, and that of self-approbation. the first,--that of active thought, or the reiteration of ideas, we have before pointed out and explained, as it is illustrated in their play, and in the pleasure they take in hearing stories, reading riddles, dressing dolls, and similar acts; and it is only here necessary to add, that their desire of congregating together for amusement has its origin in a similar cause. new ideas stimulate more powerfully to active thought; and children soon find, and insensibly draw the lesson, that the aggregate of new ideas is always enlarged by an increase of the number of persons who supply them. two children will play with the same number of toys for a longer time, without tiring, than if they were alone;--and three or four would, in the same proportion, increase the interest and prolong the season of activity. but as soon as the reiteration of the ideas suggested by their game becomes languid or difficult, their play for the time loses its charms, and the fascination is gone. that it is the cessation of active thought, which is the chief cause of their play ceasing to please, is proved from the circumstance, that if another interesting companion shall be added to their number, or if any thing shall occur to renew this operation,--the reiteration of ideas,--upon the mind, the same degree of interest, and to a corresponding extent, is immediately felt, and the play is resumed. now, the catechetical exercise is in reality the same operation in another form. the questions of the teacher excite the pupil to the same kind of active thought as that which gives relish to his play; and, while the teacher confines himself within the limits of the announcement, the mental excitement is active, but moderate, and always successful. this leads us to observe the influence which the catechetical exercise exerts in affording means for that self-approbation, or sense of merit, which constitutes another element of delight to a child during his play. all must have observed the beneficial effects of this principle in children, as an incitement to emulation and good conduct. it is not only perceptible in the love of approbation from their superiors, but in their desire to excel at all times. we see it in the pleasure felt by the child when he outstrips his fellows in the race,--when he catches his companion at "hide and seek,"--when he finds the hidden article at "seek and find,"--in winning a game, expounding a riddle, or gaining a place in his class. in all these instances there is a feeling of pure satisfaction and delight;--a feeling of self-estimation, which is at once the guardian and the reward of virtue. now, when the catechetical exercise is conducted in its purity,--that is, when the teacher keeps strictly to the announcement, without wandering where the child cannot follow him,--the answers are invariably within the limits of the child's capacity;--they are answered successfully; and every answer is a subject of triumph. he has a delightful consciousness of having overcome a difficulty, deserved approbation, and made an advance in the pathway of merit. when properly conducted, therefore, the catechetical exercise becomes to the pupils a succession of victories; and it imparts all that delight, softened and purified, which he experiences in excelling his companion, or in winning a game.--these are the reasons why the catechetical exercise is so much relished by the young, and why it has succeeded so powerfully, not only in smoothing the pathway of education, but also in shortening it. from a careful consideration of all these circumstances, we are led to conclude, that the catechetical exercise does, in a superior degree, fulfil all the stipulations required for imitating nature, in exciting to the reiteration of ideas by children, and thus disciplining and cultivating the powers of their minds. we might also have remarked, that another advantage arising from persevering in this exercise, is the arresting of the attention of the children, and successfully training them to hear and understand through life the oral communications of others;--but we hasten to consider the time and the order in which this exercise should be made use of in schools. nature intends, that the cultivation and strengthening of the powers of the mind shall in every case precede those exercises in which their strength is to be tried. in infants and young children we perceive this cultivation and invigorating of the mind going on, long before these powers are to be taxed even for their own preservation. the child is no doubt putting them to use; but in every such case it is voluntary, and not compulsory,--a matter of choice on the part of the child, and not of necessity. the infant, or even the child, is never required to take care of itself, to clothe itself, to wash itself, or even to feed itself. to require it to do so before the mind could comprehend the nature and the design of the particular duty, would be both unreasonable and cruel. this being the case, the exercises of the nursery and the school must be regulated in a similar manner, and follow the same law. the due cultivation of the mind, like the due preparation of the soil, must always precede the sowing of the seed. if this principle in nature be duly attended to, the seeds of knowledge afterwards cast into the soil thus broken up and prepared, will be readily received and nourished to perfection; but if the soil be neglected, both the seed and the labour will be lost, the anticipations of the spring and summer will end in delusion, and the folly of the whole proceeding will be shewn by a succession of noxious weeds, and at last by an unproductive harvest. the evils which must necessarily result from thus running counter to nature in this first part of her educational proceedings, may be aptly illustrated by the very common custom of beginning a child's education by teaching it to read. it would perhaps be difficult to convince many that this custom is either unnatural or improper. we shall not attempt here to _argue_ the matter, but shall merely state a fact which they cannot deny, and which will answer the purpose we think much better than an argument.--to teach the art of reading was wont to require the labour of several months, sometimes years, before the perusal of a book could be managed by the child with any degree of ease,--and even then, without any thing approaching to satisfaction or pleasure. and even yet, although the error has in some measure been perceived of late years, yet the art of reading by the young, still requires several months' attendance at school, with corresponding labour to the teacher, and great irritation and unhappiness to the child. but experience has established the fact, that, by acting on the principle of previous preparation which we are here enforcing, and by calling into operation the principle of individuation formerly explained, the whole drudgery of teaching a child to read is got over in a week,--sometimes in a day; and this with much more ease and satisfaction, than could have been done by a thousand lessons while his mind was unprepared.[ ] the accumulation of labour, and the loss of precious time by this non-observance of the dictates of nature, are in themselves serious evils; but they are not by any means so great as some others which almost invariably accompany this unnatural mode of proceeding with the young. many who have nominally been _taught to read_, are still quite unable to _understand by reading_. those who have heard chapters read by families in the country, "verse about," will at once understand what we here mean; and even in towns and cities where newspapers and low-priced books are more numerous and more tempting, it often requires long practice before the emancipated child can read these publications so readily and intelligently as they are intended to be. it is another, and an entirely different course of learning to which he subjects himself, when he labours to acquire the capacity of understanding the words that he _reads_, as readily as the words that he _hears_. where the inducements to this are sufficiently powerful, the ability is no doubt _at last_ acquired;--but where these stimulants are awanting, the difficulty of understanding by reading has by the previous habit become so great, that reading is gradually disused, and at last forgotten. many are at a loss to account for this; but it is easily explained on the above principles. to teach a child to read, before his mind is capable of understanding, or of reiterating the ideas conveyed by the words he is reading, is to train him to this habit of reading mechanically;--that is, of reading without understanding. he gradually acquires the habit of pronouncing the words which he traces with the eye, while the mind is busily engaged upon something else; in the same manner that a person acquires the habit of thinking, and even of speaking, while knitting a stocking, or sewing a seam. this habit is confirmed by constant practice; and then, the difficulty of getting off the habit is all but insurmountable. this difficulty will be best understood by the experience of those who have been during some time of their life compelled to abandon a habit after it was thoroughly confirmed;--or by those who will but try the difficulty of persevering to do something with the left hand, which has hitherto been done with the right. a very little consideration will shew, that when this habit of reading mechanically has once been established, it will require, like an improper mode of holding the pen in writing, ten-fold more labour and self-denial to _remedy_ the evil, than it would have taken at first to _prevent_ it, by learning to do the thing properly and perfectly. much therefore depends upon the early and persevering use of the catechetical exercise for cultivating a child's mind, before beginning to teach it the art of reading, or requiring it to make use of the powers of the mind on subjects which these powers are as yet incapable of comprehending. by proper _preliminary_ exercises, the powers of the mind will be gradually expanded; ideas of every different kind, both individually and in connection with each other, will become familiar; the design of language in receiving and communicating truth will by degrees be practically understood; and, by means of the catechetical exercise, it will be gradually and successfully practised. these are obviously the means by which the present crooked ways in the child's early progress in education are to be made straight, and the rough and difficult paths which he has had so long to tread, may now be made both easy and smooth.[ ] the effects of the catechetical exercise, and its uniform beneficial results, have given sufficient evidence of its being a close imitation of nature in this part of her educational process. its success indeed has been invariable, even when employed by those who remained unconscious of the great principles by which that success was to be regulated. the observations and experiments employed to ascertain in some measure the extent of its efficiency, have uniformly been satisfactory, and to a few of these we shall here very shortly advert. the first case of importance, which came under our notice, and to which we think it advisable to allude, is that of mary l. who, about the year , resided in lady yester's parish in edinburgh. this girl, when her name was taken up for the local sabbath schools in that parish, was about seven or eight years of age, and in respect to mental capacity, appeared to be little better than an idiot. she could not comprehend the most simple idea, if it related to any thing beyond the household objects which were daily forced upon her observation, and which had individually become familiar to the senses; and was unable to receive any instruction with the other children, however young. the catechetical exercise was adopted with her, as with the other scholars; and although, for a long period, she was unable to _collect knowledge_, yet the constant discipline to which the powers of the mind were thus subjected, had the happiest effect in bringing them into tone, and at last giving her the command of them. the comprehending of a simple truth when announced, became more and more distinct, and the answering of the corresponding questions, became gradually more correct and easy. at a very early period she began to relish the exercises of the school; and although these occurred only on the sundays, she continued rapidly to improve; till, in the course of a few years, she was able to join the higher classes of the children, and made a respectable appearance among her companions, at those times when they were submitted to examination.--when these schools were broken up, no stranger could have remarked any difference between mary l. and an ordinary child of the same age. a similar instance occurred more recently in the case of two sisters, (margaret and mary j.) the condition of whose minds originally was better, although not much, than that of mary l. at the respective ages of six and eight years, these sisters could scarcely receive or comprehend the simplest idea not connected with their daily ordinary affairs. for some years they had no more teaching, or regular mental exercise, than two hours weekly on the sundays, and during that period they were, in regard to mental capacity, advancing, but still nearly alike. the eldest (margaret,) was then removed to another class, the teacher of which dedicated another evening during the week for the benefit of her scholars. the consequence of this apparently slight addition to the mental exercise of this girl soon became apparent; and in the course of a short time, the powers of margaret's mind not only advanced beyond those of her sister's, but equalled at least those of children of the same age, who had not enjoyed similar opportunities of improvement. her sister mary, who continued to enjoy only the two hours on sunday, advanced proportionally in mental strength;--and before she left the district in which the school was situated, her original incapacity could scarcely have been credited by a stranger. in proof of this, it may be added, that long after she had left the parish, the writer found her by accident in the school which she attended after removing, examined her with the other children, and made some strict and searching enquiries concerning her. the report of her teacher was exceedingly satisfactory; and, without knowing the reason of these enquiries, declared, that mary j. was one of her best scholars. before leaving this notice of these two children, there is a circumstance which may perhaps be worthy of recording. in margaret's countenance there had gradually appeared, latterly, that which to a stranger gave all the ordinary indications of intellect, and rather superior intelligence; while in mary's case, at the same period, there continued to be much of that vacancy of look, and stupid stare, indicative rather of what she was, than of what she had become. that also, however, was gradually disappearing. we shall advert only to one other instance, less remarkable perhaps, and certainly not so decisive, on account of the shortness of the time during which the experiment was continued. in the opinion of the honourable and venerable examinators, however, it was considered as sufficiently decisive, and of much public importance. its application to prison discipline may ultimately be of value, where prisoners are confined but for short periods, and where the cultivation of the mind, and the growing capacity to receive and retain religious truth are objects of importance. in the experiment in , made before the lord provost, principal, professors, and clergymen of edinburgh, in the county jail, a class of criminals which had been formed three weeks before, and exercised one hour daily, were thoroughly and individually examined without intermission during nearly three hours. our present extract from the report of that experiment refers, not to the amount of knowledge acquired by these persons during these three weeks, but to the capacity which, at the end of that time, they were found to possess of acquiring every sort of knowledge. this experiment was so far imperfect, as the examinators had no means of ascertaining the true state of their minds, previous to the commencement of their exercises. but having, upon enquiry found from the governor of the prison, that there had been no selection, that all the individuals in the ward had been taken, and that at the commencement of the experiment, they formed a fair sample of the prisoners commonly under his charge,--the progress of this mental cultivation during that short period, became a special object of examination by the reverend and learned individuals who conducted it. their report of the experiment bears, that "these individuals had been taken without any regard to their abilities, and former acquirements, and formed a fair average of the usual prisoners." in endeavouring to ascertain the grasp of mind which these individuals possessed, and the readiness with which they received and retained whatever was, even for the first time, communicated to them, "it was mentioned, that a gentlemen on the previous day, in order to try the capacity of mind which they had attained, desired mr gall to catechise them upon a section, consisting of fourteen verses, which they had not seen before, and that, after just ten minutes' examination, one woman, who could not read, repeated the whole distinctly in her own words. dr brunton proposed, for a similar experiment, the parable of the 'talents,' with which none was acquainted except one woman, who was consequently not permitted to answer. with its being only read to them, and with a few minutes' catechising, they perceived its various circumstances, and were able to enumerate them in detail. this exercise demonstrated the capacity of attention, and the power of analyzing and laying hold of circumstances, which they had reached, as well as the indisputable superiority of this system, in unfolding and strengthening the mental faculties, even in adults." "the writer of the report," it is added, "was not acquainted with the extent of their acquirements when mr gall commenced his operations; but judging from the examination, and from his knowledge of the contents of the books taught, he has no hesitation in averring, that the answers which they gave, arose entirely from information communicated by them. and when he reflects that their answers, being clothed in their own words, guaranteed the fact, that it was _the ideas_ upon which they had seized, and that their knowledge participated in no degree of rote, the conviction to his mind is irresistible, that the universal application of the lesson system to prison discipline, and to adults everywhere, would be followed by effects, incalculably precious to the individuals themselves, and to the improving of society in general." numerous other instances might be adduced in proof of the efficiency of this method of attempting to imitate nature in this first part of her educational process, who will always be faithful in adhering to her own laws, and countenancing her own work. these however may suffice;--and it ought not to escape observation, that in two of the cases first alluded to, the young persons enjoyed only two hours' instruction in the week, and these not divided, but continuously given at one time. for this reason, it might have been feared, that the benefits then received would have been lost, or neutralized, by the variety of objects or amusements which must have intervened during the week between the lessons. but it was not so. and we may here remark, that if with all these disadvantages, so much good was really done in cultivating the powers of the mind by this exercise, what may we not expect by the enlightened, regular, and daily application of the same powerful principles in our ordinary schools, when the teacher shall know where the virtue of the weapon which he wields really lies, and when the nature of the material he is called to work upon is also better understood. every exercise and every operation in the school will then be made to "tell;" and every moment of the pupils' attendance will be improved. in these circumstances, we are far within the limits of the truth when we say, that more real substantial education will then be communicated in one month, than it has been usual to receive by the labours of a whole year. from what has been already ascertained, we are fully warranted in making the following remarks. . from the above facts we can readily ascertain the cause, why some exercises employed in education are so much relished by the young, and so efficient in giving strength and elasticity to the mind; while others, on the contrary are so inefficient, so irksome, and sometimes so intolerable. every exercise that tends to produce active thought,--the "reiteration of ideas,"--is natural, and therefore, not only promotes healthful mental vigour, but is also exciting and delightful; while, on the contrary, whenever the mind is fettered by the mere decyphering of words, or the repeating of sounds, without reiterating ideas, the exercise is altogether unnatural, and must of course be irritating to the child, and barren of good. . by a due consideration of the above principles, we see the reason why mental arithmetic, though it may not communicate any knowledge, is yet productive of considerable mental vigour. these exercises compel the young to a species of voluntary thought, the reiteration in the mind of the powers of numbers; and although the result of the particular calculations which are then made, may never again be of any service to the pupil, yet the consequent exercise of mind is beneficial. it should never be forgotten, however, that this exercise of mind upon _numbers_ is altogether an artificial operation, and is on this account, neither so efficient nor so pleasant as the reiteration of moral or physical truths. the same degree of mental exercise, brought into operation upon some useful fact, where the imagination as well as the understanding, can take a part, would at once be more natural, more efficient, more pleasant, and more useful. . from the nature and operation of the above principle, also, we can perceive in what the efficiency of pestalozzi's "exercises on objects," consists.--when a child is required to tell you the colour and the consistence of milk, qualities which have all along been familiar to him, it conveys to him no knowledge; but it excites to observation and active thought,--to the "reiteration of ideas;"--and for this reason it is salutary. but it is still equally true, as in the former case, that the same degree of mental exercise, brought into operation upon some useful practical truth, would be at least equally useful as a mental stimulant, and much more beneficial as an educational exercise. . from the nature of this great fundamental principle in mental cultivation, as consisting in the reiteration of ideas, and not of words, we have a key by which we can satisfactorily explain the remarkable, and hitherto unaccountable fact, that many persons who, in youth and at school, have been ranked among the dullest scholars, have afterwards become the greatest men. an active mind, in exact proportion to its vigour, will powerfully struggle against the unnatural thraldom of mere mechanical verbal exercises. the mind in a healthful state will not be satisfied with words, which are but the medium of ideas, because ideas alone are the natural food of the mind. till the powers of the mind, therefore, are sufficiently enfeebled by time and perseverance, it will struggle with its fetters, and it will be repressed only by coercion. minds naturally weak, or gradually subdued, may and do submit to this artificial bondage,--this unnatural drudgery; but the vigorous and powerful mind, under favourable circumstances, spurns the trammels, and continues to struggle on. it may be a protracted warfare,--but it must at last come to a close; and it is not till the pupil has emerged from this mental dungeon, and has had these galling fetters fairly knocked off, that the natural elasticity and strength of his mind find themselves at freedom, with sufficient room and liberty to act. the impetus then received, and the delight in the mental independence then felt, have frequently led to the brightest results. hence it is, that the reputed dunce of the school, has not unfrequently become the ornament of the senate. lastly, we would remark, that from the facts here enumerated, we derive a good test by which to try every new exercise proposed for training the young, and for cultivating the powers of the mind. if the exercise recommended compels the child to active thought,--to the voluntary exercise of his own mind upon useful ideas,--that exercise, whatever be its form, will, to that extent at least, be beneficial. and if, at the same time, it can be associated with the acquisition of knowledge, with the application of knowledge, or with the ready communication of knowledge,--all of which, as we have seen, are concomitants in nature's process,--it will, in an equal degree, be valuable and worthy of adoption. but if, on the contrary, the exercise may be performed without the necessity of voluntary thought, or the reiteration of ideas by the mind, however plausible or imposing it may appear, it is next to certain, that although such an exercise may be sufficiently burdensome to the child, and cause much labour and anxiety to the teacher, it will most assuredly be at least useless, if not injurious. footnotes: [ ] see the fifth public experiment in education, conducted before sir thomas kirkpatrick, and the clergy and teachers of dumfries, in the month of october . [ ] note k. [ ] note h. [ ] for the methods of employing this exercise and the books best adapted for it, see note i. chap. ii. _on the methods by which nature may be imitated in the pupil's acquisition of knowledge; with a review of the analogy between the mental and physical appetites of the young._ the second step in the progress of nature's pupil is the acquisition of knowledge.--this has always been considered a chief object in every system of education; and the discovery of the most efficient means by which it may be accomplished, must be a matter of great importance. in our remarks upon this subject in a previous chapter, we have shewn, that nature in her operations employs four distinct principles for accumulating knowledge, for retaining it upon the memory, and for keeping it in readiness for use at the command of the will. there are, _first_, the "reiteration of ideas" by the mind, without which there can be no knowledge; _secondly_, the principle of "individuation," by which the knowledge of objects and truths is acquired one by one; _thirdly_, the principle of "grouping," or association, in which the mind views as one object, what is really composed of many; and, _fourthly_, the principle of "analysis," or classification, in which the judgment is brought into exercise, the different portions of our knowledge are arranged and classified under different heads and branches, and the whole retained in order at the command of the will, when any portion of it is required.--our object now is to consider, what means are within the reach of the parent and the teacher, by which nature in these several processes may be successfully imitated, while they endeavour to communicate the elements of knowledge to the young. ideas being the only proper food of the mind, nature has created in the young an extraordinary appetite and desire for their possession. there is a striking analogy in this respect, between the strengthening of the body by food, and the invigorating of the mind by knowledge; and before proceeding to detail the methods by which the parent or the teacher may successfully break down and prepare the bread of knowledge for their pupils in imitation of nature, it will be of advantage here to consider more particularly some of the circumstances connected with this instructive analogy. by tracing the likeness so conspicuously held out to us in this analogy by nature herself, we shall be greatly assisted in evading the bewildering and mystifying influence of prejudice, and the reader will be much better prepared to judge of the value of those means recommended for nourishing and strengthening the mind by knowledge, when he finds them to correspond so exactly with similar principles employed by nature for the nourishing and strengthening of the body by food. we shall by this means, we hope, be able to detect some of those fallacies which have long tended to trammel the exertions, and to prevent the success of the teacher in his interesting labours. the first point of analogy to which we would advert, is the vigour and activity of the mental appetite in the young, which corresponds so strikingly with the frequent and urgent craving of their bodily appetite for food.--the desire of food for the body, and the desire of knowledge for the mind, are alike restless and insatiable in childhood; and a similar amount of satisfaction and pleasure is the consequence, whenever these desires are prudently gratified. that the desire for knowledge in the young is often weakened, and sometimes destroyed, is but too true; but this is the work of man, not of nature. it will accordingly be found on investigation, with but few exceptions, that wherever the general appetite of the child, either for mental or bodily food, becomes languid or weak, it is either the effect for disease or of some grievous abuse. another point of analogy consists, in the necessity of the personal active co-operation of the child himself in receiving and digesting his food.--there is no such thing in nature as a child being fed and nourished by proxy. his food must be received, digested, and assimilated by his own powers, and by the use of his own organs, else he will never be fed. in the same way, the food for his mind can benefit him only in so far as he himself is the active agent. he must himself receive, reiterate in his own mind, and commit to the keeping of his memory, every idea presented to him by his teacher. no one can do this for him;--he must do it himself. in a family, the parent may provide, dress, and communicate the food to the child,--but he can do no more; and similar is the case with respect to the mental food provided by the teacher. he may no doubt select the most appropriate kinds,--he may simplify it,--he may break it down into morsels;--but his pupils, if they are to learn, must learn for themselves. when a pupil, to save himself trouble, tries to evade the learning of a preliminary lesson, or when the teacher winks at the evasion by performing the exercise for him, it is as absurd as for a parent to eat the child's food, and expect at the same time that his boy is to be nourished by it. if the mental food be too strong for the child, something more simple must be provided for him; but to continue to administer knowledge which the pupil does not comprehend, and force the strong mental food of an adult upon the tender capacities of a child, is an error of the most mischievous kind. it prevents the mind from acting at all, without which there can be no improvement. the mind must wield its own weapons if ignorance is to be dislodged; and if the child is to advance at all, he must overcome the difficulties that lie in his way by the exertion of his own powers. his teacher may no doubt direct him as to the best and the easiest way of accomplishing his object; but that is all. the pupil must in every case perform the exercise for himself. this leads us to notice another point of analogy in this case, which is, the necessity of adapting the food to the age and capacities of those who are to receive it.--there is in the mental, as well as in the physical nourishment provided for our race, milk for the weak, as well as meat for the strong; and it is necessary in both cases that the kind and the quantity be carefully attended to. in the case of the strong, there is less danger; because, with regard both to the mental and bodily food, nature has so ordered matters, that the food which is best adapted for the weak, will also nourish the strong; but the food adapted for the strong is never suitable, and is often poisonous to the weak. there must therefore be, in all cases where the young are concerned, as careful a selection of the mental food, as there is of the food for the body; and the parent or teacher should, in all cases, present only such subjects, and such ideas to his pupils, as the state of their faculties, or the progress of their knowledge, enables them to understand and apply. another striking point of analogy between mental and bodily nourishment, is to be found in the effects of repletion, when too great a quantity of food is communicated at one time.--as the increase of a child's bodily strength does not depend upon the mere quantity of food forced into his stomach, but upon that portion only which is healthfully digested and assimilated; so in like manner, the amount of a child's knowledge will not correspond to the number of ideas forced upon his attention by the teacher, but to those only which have been reiterated by the mind, and committed by that process to the keeping of the memory. in both cases, the evil of repletion is two-fold; there is the waste of food and of labour, while the strength and the growth of the child, instead of being promoted, are retarded and diminished. the physical appetite gains strength, by moderate exercise; but it is palled and weakened by every instance of repletion. the desire for food is never for any length of time at rest, so long as the stomach is kept in proper tone by moderate and frequent feeding; and the quantity of food which a healthy child will in these circumstances consume, is often surprising. but whenever the stomach is gorged, then restlessness, uneasiness, and not unfrequently disease, are the consequences. the digestive powers are weakened, the tone of the stomach is relaxed, and, instead of the healthful craving for food which should occur at the proper interval, the appetite is destroyed, and food of every kind is nauseated.--exactly similar is the case with the mental appetite. the natural curiosity of children, or, in other words, their desire of information, before it is checked or overloaded by mismanagement, is almost insatiable; and the astonishing amount of knowledge which they usually acquire between the ages of one and three years, while under the guidance of nature, has been formerly alluded to. but this desire of information, and this capacity for receiving it, are by no means confined to that early period of their lives. the same appetite for knowledge would increase and acquire additional strength, were it but properly directed, or furnished with moderate and suitable means of gratification. but when a parent or teacher impatiently attempts to force it upon the child more rapidly than he can receive it,--that is, than he can reiterate it in his mind for himself,--he not only irritates and harasses the child, but his attempt neutralizes the effect of the ideas which the child would otherwise pleasantly and efficiently have received. every such attempt to do more than enough greatly weakens the powers of the pupil's mind, and discourages him from any after attempt to increase his knowledge. as a general maxim in the education of the young, it may here be observed, that as long as the understanding of a child remains clear, and he can distinctly perceive the truths which are communicated to him, he will find himself pleasantly and profitably employed, and will soon acquire a habit of distinct mental vision;--the powers of his mind will be rapidly expanded and strengthened, and he will receive and retain the knowledge communicated to him with ease and with pleasure. but when, on the contrary, he is overtasked, and more ideas are forced upon his attention than his capacity can receive, the mind becomes disturbed and confused, the mental perception becomes cloudy and indistinct, and all that is communicated in these circumstances is absolutely lost. if the parent or teacher insists on the pupil persevering in his mental meal, in the hope that things will get better, we can easily, from the present analogy, perceive the fallacy of such a hope. perseverance will only create additional perplexity; the whole powers of the child's mind will become more and more enfeebled, or totally prostrated; the labour of the teacher will be lost; and he will find his pupil now, and for some time afterwards, much less able to take a clear and distinct view of any subject than he was before. there is yet one other point of analogy between the supply of food for the body and the mind, to which we must also allude. it is to be found in the baneful, and often destructive, effects of unnatural stimulants applied to the mental appetite, which strikingly correspond in their effects to the pernicious habit of supplying stimulants to the young in their ordinary food.--stimulants will no doubt, in both cases, produce for the time additional excitement;--but they are neither natural nor necessary. in all ordinary cases, nature has made ample provision for the supposed want, of which the craving--the natural and healthy craving--of children for knowledge and for food, gives ample testimony. to counteract or to weaken this natural desire would be improper;--but artificially to _increase_ it is always dangerous. the reason is obvious; for the excitement thus caused being unnatural, it is always temporary; but its pernicious effects very soon become extensive and permanent. every physician knows, that the habitual use of stimulants in the food of the young, weakens the tone of the stomach, palls the appetite, creates a disrelish for plain and wholesome food, and frequently destroys the powers of digestion for ever after. very similar are the effects of unnatural stimulants to the mental appetite in training and teaching the young, when these stimulants are habitually, or even frequently administered. their curiosity,--their appetite for knowledge,--is naturally so vigorous, that the repetition, or the reading of any story, however commonplace or uninteresting to us, gives them the sincerest pleasure, provided only that they understand and can follow it. this is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature, of which parents and teachers should be careful to take advantage. it is because of this disposition in children, that in all ordinary cases, the simplest narrative or anecdote in ordinary life, may be successfully employed in giving them mental strength, and in communicating permanent moral instruction. but whenever unnatural and injudicious excitements are used in their instruction, and the child's imagination has been stimulated and defiled by the ideas of giants and ogres, fairies and ghosts, the whole natural tone of the mind is destroyed, plain and even interesting stories and narratives lose their proper attraction, and a diseased and insatiable appetite for the marvellous and the horrible is generally created. even to adults, and much more to children, whose minds have been thus abused, the plain paths of probability and truth have lost every charm; and the study of abstract but useful subjects becomes to them a nauseous task--an intolerable burden. the accuracy of this analogy, we think, will readily be admitted by all. and if so, it will at least help to illustrate, if it does not prove, some of the important conclusions to which we shall find ourselves led upon other, and philosophical grounds. but as the prejudices which, during several centuries, have been gradually congregating around the science of education are so many and so powerful, every legitimate means, and this among others, should be combined for the purpose of removing them. chap. iii. _how nature may be imitated in communicating knowledge to the pupil, by the reiteration of ideas._ the phenomenon in mechanics and natural philosophy, which is popularly termed "suction," may be exhibited in a thousand different ways, and yet all are the result of but one cause. when we witness the various phenomena of the air and common pump,--the barometer and the cupping glass,--the sipping of our tea, and the traversing of an insect on the mirror or the roof,--the operations appear so very dissimilar, that we are ready to attribute them to the action of a variety of agents. but it is not so;--for when we trace each of them back to its primitive cause, we find that each and all of these wonders are produced by the weight of the atmosphere, and _that alone_. in precisely the same manner, knowledge may apparently be communicated to the human mind in a thousand different ways; and yet, when we examine each, and trace it to its primitive cause, we find the phenomenon to be one--and _one alone_. the truth has been received and lodged with the memory,--made part of our knowledge--by _the reiteration of its idea_ by the mind itself;--by an exercise of active, voluntary thought upon the knowledge thus communicated. the cause and the effect invariably follow each other both in old and young; for whenever a new idea is perceived and reiterated by the pupil,--if it should be but once,--the knowledge of the child is to that extent increased; but whenever this act of the mind is awanting, there can be no additional information received;--the increase of knowledge is found to be impossible. this appears to be a law of our nature, to which we know of no exception. it is also worthy of remark here, that the retention or permanence of the ideas thus committed to the keeping of the memory depends upon two circumstances. the first is, the vigour of the mental powers, or the intensity of the impression made upon them at the time of reiteration;--and the second, and certainly the principal circumstance, is the frequency of their reiteration by the mind. in evidence of the first we see, that a fall, a fright, or a narrow escape from imminent danger, although it occurred but once, and perhaps in early infancy, will be remembered through life; and in proof of the second, we find, that the scenes and circumstances of childhood being frequently and daily reiterated by the mind, at a time when it has little else to reiterate, remain permanently on the memory. the object therefore most to be desired by the teacher, is an exercise, or a series of exercises, by which, in his attempts to communicate knowledge to his pupil, this act of reiteration may be secured, and if possible repeated at pleasure, for more permanently fixing on the memory the knowledge communicated. in a former chapter we shewed, that this act of reiteration is the instrument employed by nature for cultivating the powers of the mind as well as for communicating and impressing knowledge;--and we have also shewn that nature in that process was successfully imitated by means of the catechetical exercise. this exercise has accordingly been found as powerful and efficient in promoting this, her second object, as it is in the first. the success of the catechetical exercise in communicating knowledge clearly to the young, even when it is but imperfectly managed, has been extensive and uniform; but wherever its nature has been properly understood, and it has been scientifically conducted, the amount of knowledge communicated in a given time, and with a given amount of mental and physical labour, stands confessedly without a parallel in the previous history of education. minds the most obtuse, habits of listlessness the most inveterate, and mental imbecility, bordering on idiotcy, have been powerfully assailed and overcome; and knowledge, by means of this exercise, has forced its way, and firmly secured a place for itself, in minds which previously were little more than a blank. the causes of its success in cultivating the powers of the mind were formerly explained; but its adaptation to the communicating of knowledge is still more peculiarly striking. we shall endeavour to point out a few of these peculiarities. let us for that purpose suppose a teacher desirous of communicating to a child the important fact, that "god at first made all things of nothing to shew his greatness;" it must be done, either by the child reading or hearing the sentence. if it be read, there is at least a chance, that the words may be all decyphered, and audibly pronounced, while the ideas contained in them have not yet reached the mind. the child may have carefully examined each word as it occurred, and may have reiterated each of them on his mind as he read them, and yet there may not be the slightest addition to his knowledge. the reiteration of _words_, as we have before explained, is not that which nature requires, but the reiteration of _ideas_; and although we may, by substituting the one for the other, deceive ourselves, nature will not be deceived; for unless the ideas contained in the sentence be reiterated by the mind, there can be no additional information conveyed.--the same thing may happen, if the words, instead of being read by the child, are announced by the teacher. the pupil may in that case hear the sounds; nay, he may repeat the words, and thus reiterate _them_ in his mind after the teacher; but if he has not translated the words into their proper ideas as he proceeded, experience proves, that his knowledge remains as limited as before;--there has been no additional information. these cases are so common, and so uniform, that no farther illustration we think needs be given of them. the desideratum in both these cases is, some exercise by which the child shall be compelled to translate the words into their several ideas; and by reiterating the ideas themselves, not the words which convey them, he shall be enabled at once to commit them to the keeping of the memory, and thus make them part of his knowledge. the catechetical exercise supplies this want. for if, in either case, after the words have been read or repeated, the child is asked, "what did god make?" the translation of the words into the ideas, if previously neglected, is now forced upon him, because without this it is impossible for him to prepare the answer. the ideas must be drawn from the words, and reiterated by the mind, independently of the words, before the exercise can be completed. and not only must the particular idea which answers the question be extracted, but _the whole_ of the ideas contained in the sentence must be reiterated by the mind, before the selection can be begun, and the choice made. it is also specially worthy of remark, that even in such a case as this, where, on the sentence being read or heard, the words alone were at first perceived, yet no sooner does the mind proceed to its legitimate object, the reiteration of the ideas which the words convey, than the words themselves are instantly lost sight of, and in one sense are never again thought of. as soon as the kernel is extracted, the shell has lost its value. the pupil having once got sight of the ideas, tenaciously keeps hold of _them_, and never once thinks again of the words, which were merely the instrument employed by nature to convey them. when the question is asked, and he answers it, the process consists in his translating the words of the whole sentence into their several ideas, chusing out the idea which answers the question from all the others, and then in clothing that idea in words which are now entirely his own. in all this there is a long and intricate series of mental exercises, in every one of which the mind is actively employed, and it is in this, as before explained, that the value of this exercise, in cultivating the powers of the mind, really consists. but our present business is with the acquisition of knowledge by its means; and we have to observe, that in each of the mental operations required for the answer of a single question, the ideas contained in the original sentence have repeatedly to undergo the process of reiteration; by which they are more clearly perceived, and more permanently fixed on the memory, than they otherwise could have been. hence the value of this exercise, even in those cases where the original sentence has been at the first fully understood. this will appear obvious by tracing the mental operation of the pupil from the beginning, when he has to answer the question. there is first the understanding of the question asked at him. this must be heard and reiterated by the mind before its purport can be perceived, and all this before he can commence the proper mental operation upon the original sentence from which his answer is to be selected. he has then to review the words of the original sentence, still sounding in his ears, and to translate them into their several ideas, before he can begin to select the one required. then comes the act of selection, having to chuse out from among all the others the special idea required as his answer; and lastly, there is the clothing of that idea in words suitable for the occasion, and the audibly pronouncing of these words as the answer required. the rapidity with which the mind passes from one part of this exercise to another, may prevent these several operations from being perceived, but it is not the less true that they must have taken place. and hence arises the value of the catechetical exercise, not only in cultivating in an extraordinary degree the mental faculties of the pupil, but in powerfully forcing information upon the mind, and permanently fixing it upon the memory for after use. but even this does not exhaust the catalogue of benefits to be derived from the use of the catechetical exercise in communicating knowledge to the young. we have supposed only one question to have been asked by the teacher upon the original sentence, and yet we have seen that this one question has in fact in a great measure secured the understanding of the whole of the ideas contained in it. but instead of one question, the catechetical exercise has the power of originating many, each producing successively similar results, but with greater ease to the child, and with much more effect in rivetting the several ideas upon the memory. the first question, when properly put, gives the pupil the command of the whole proposition; but it requires considerable mental effort in the child to recall the words, and internally to translate the ideas _for the first time_. but when this has once been done, and a second question is asked from the same sentence, the ideas being now more familiar, there is less mental labour required in preparing the answer, and there being equal success, there is of course more satisfaction. the ideas become much more clear and distinct before the mind by a second review; and the effect, in fixing the whole upon the memory, is much more powerful than it could be by means of the first. when therefore the teacher confines himself to the original sentence, and does not indulge in catechetical wanderings, the questions, "when did god make all things?" "how many things did god make?" "of what did god make all things?" and, "why did god make all things?" produce extensive and powerful effects. the pupil finds himself able to master each question in succession without difficulty, and the answering of each appears to him a triumph. whoever has been in the habit of making use of this exercise in the manner explained above, must have witnessed with pleasure the life, and energy, and delight, which it invariably infuses into the scholar, giving education a perfectly different aspect from what it usually assumes in the eyes of the young, and making it even in the estimation of the pupil a formidable rival to his play. in this manner has nature set her seal upon this exercise, as a near approximation to her own process for attaining the two preparatory objects she has in view in the education of the young; that of cultivating the powers of the mind, and that of communicating to her pupils the elements of knowledge. this exercise has been reduced to a regular system, which has placed it more directly at the command of all who undertake the instruction of the young. by a little attention on the part of parents and teachers, to a few simple rules, they may catechise upon any book, and apply the exercise to any species of knowledge whatever. we shall endeavour to explain the nature and uses of these rules. for the purposes of this exercise, the school books of the pupil are supposed to consist of sentences, each of the principal _words_ in which conveys some specific idea;--these again are combined into _clauses_, which also convey an idea;--and the combination of these clauses in a _sentence_, or _paragraph_, usually forms a complete truth. for example, the sentence, "god at first [made all things] of nothing [to shew his greatness,"] contains one great truth; but the sentence which conveys it, embodies at least two _clauses_, inclosed in brackets, while the whole is made up of _words_, each of which is the sign of an idea which may readily be separated from all the others. now it is evident, that questions may be formed by the teacher relative to each of these three parts. he may ask a question, which shall require the _whole_ truth for the answer; or one which will be answered by a _clause_; or another which is answered by a _word_. in "revising," accordingly, where time is an object, the teacher confines himself to those general questions which bring out the _whole truth_ at once, as is exemplified in the larger and shorter catechisms. this is called the "connecting exercise," because it is employed in uniting sections together, which have previously been taught to the pupils separately, but which are necessary to be perceived also in connection. this, however, would be too limited an exercise for the purpose of directing the mind to the several parts of a truth for the first time; and therefore the teacher in those cases forms his questions chiefly upon the _clauses_ in the sentence, and the other words which have some material relation to them, and this is called the "general exercise." but even this is not enough, where the child is dull, or where healthful mental exercise is required; and accordingly in that case, the teacher not only questions upon the clauses in connection with the other principal words, but he takes the _words_, of which the clauses are composed, and catechises the child upon them also. this is called the "verbal exercise," which has been found of great value in the teacher's intercourse with his younger classes. upon these principles the initiatory catechisms and their keys have been formed, together with the several helps for communicating scriptural knowledge. the success of these school books, although labouring under all the disadvantages of new instruments, imperfectly formed to work out new principles, is mainly to be attributed to the close imitation of nature aimed at in all their exercises. the _rule_ for the parent or teacher in mastering these exercises is the same in all; it consists simply in forming the question in such a manner, as that the word, the clause, or the whole proposition, shall be required to make the answer. sufficient explanation and examples of all this will be found in the note.[ ] the uniform results of many experiments, have established the importance of this exercise as an instrument in communicating knowledge to the ignorant, whether young or old. we shall shortly advert to a few of the circumstances connected with these experiments, for the purpose of satisfactorily establishing this. in an experiment made in may , under the direction of the very rev. dr baird, principal of the university of edinburgh, before the lord provost, and several of the professors and clergymen of that city, nine adult criminals, "taken without regard to their abilities," and who, in the opinion of governor rose, "formed a fair average of the usual prisoners," were, in the space of three successive weeks, exercised in whole for eighteen or twenty hours. they were at the end of that time minutely examined in the chapel of the county jail, in the presence of the right honourable and reverend professors and gentlemen, who formed principal baird's committee; and their report of the experiment and its effects bears, that "the result of this important experiment was, in every point, satisfactory. not only had much religious knowledge been acquired by the pupils, and that of the most substantial, and certainly the least evanescent kind; but it appeared to have been acquired with ease, and even with satisfaction--a circumstance of material importance in every case, but especially in that of adult prisoners." "the examination evidently brought out only a specimen of their knowledge, and did by no means comprise all that had been acquired by them; but, even though it had constituted the whole amount of their information, the fact that such a treasure had been amassed in three weeks is in itself astonishing. the writer of this minute was not acquainted with the extent of their acquirements when mr gall commenced his operations; but judging from the examination, and from his knowledge of the contents of the books taught, he has no hesitation in averring, that the answers which they gave, arose entirely from information communicated by them. and when he reflects that their answers, being clothed in their own words, guaranteed the fact, that it was _the ideas_ upon which they had seized, and that their knowledge participated in no degree of rote, the conviction to his mind is irresistible, that the universal application of the lesson system to prison discipline, and to adults every where, would be followed by effects incalculably precious to the individuals themselves, and to the improving of society in general." the efficiency of this exercise in communicating knowledge, was equally conspicuous in another experiment, conducted under the eye of the principal, professors, and clergymen of aberdeen, in july . the persons on whom this experiment was made, were children taken from the lower classes of society, carefully selected on two several days, by a committee of clergymen appointed for the purpose, from the various schools in the city. these children were all carefully and individually examined in private by the committee, and were chosen from among their companions, not on account of their natural abilities, or educational acquirements, but specially and simply on account of their ignorance. the precautions taken by the rev. and learned examinators, to secure accuracy in their ultimate decision, were at once judicious and complete; and were intended to enable them to say with confidence at the close of the experiment, that the results, whatever they might be, were really the effects of the exercise and discipline to which the children during it had been subjected, and were in no respect due to the previous capacity or the attainments of the children. to secure this important preliminary object, therefore, the sub-committee of clergymen above alluded to was appointed, as soon as the experiment was determined upon, with instructions to collect a class of the most ignorant children they could find, attending the several schools, and who it was thought would be, of course, most incapacitated for receiving instruction. this sub-committee, consisting of the rev. john murray, the rev. abercromby l. gordon, and the rev. david simpson, in their previous report, say, "we, on two several days, met with the children which were collected from the various schools, and examined them individually, and apart from each other; avoiding every appearance of formality, and endeavouring to draw them into familiar conversation, that we might correctly ascertain the state of their religious knowledge on the three following points, which we considered to be the best criterion by which to judge of their understanding of the other less important points in the gospel scheme of salvation.--these points were, . our connection, as sinners, with adam; . our connection with christ as the saviour; . the means by which we become interested in the salvation of christ. on minutely examining each child on these points, one by one, and endeavouring, by varied and familiar language and cross-questioning, without confusing their ideas, to ascertain the knowledge which they possessed on these first principles, we accurately, and at the time, minuted the result, distinguishing those points which they understood, and those which they did not. from this list we afterwards selected twenty-two names, of children who appeared from the list, to be the most ignorant, by _not having any marks of approval on any one of these points_ on which they were examined;--although delicacy to the children, as well as to their parents and teachers, prevented us from stating to them, that this was the principle by which we had been regulated in our selection. from these twenty-two children, mr gall has made up his class of ten, for this experiment, which he proposes shall continue for eight days, occupying two hours each day; and having thus chosen that class of pupils which appeared to us the most ignorant, we have, in justice to mr gall and this system of teaching, stated the fact, leaving the examinators to make what allowance they may on this account think proper, in determining on the failure or success of this very important and interesting experiment." this was the state of the children's knowledge and capacity when the experiment began; and the following was found to be the state of these same children's knowledge when examined publicly in the east church, before the very rev. principal, professors, and clergymen of the city, and a large congregation of the citizens, eight days afterwards. the children were first interrogated minutely on the doctrines of the gospel, which had been previously arranged in a list under sixteen different heads, embodying all the leading doctrinal points in the confession of faith and shorter catechism, a copy of which was handed to the very rev. principal jack, who presided. the report of the experiment, prepared by their committee, goes on to say, that "after being examined generally and satisfactorily on each of these heads, the chairman, by means of a list of the names with which he was furnished, called up some of them individually, who were carefully examined, and shewed, by their answers, that they severally understood the nature of the above doctrines, and their mutual relation to each other. "they were then examined on the old testament history, from the account of the death of moses, downwards, to that of the revolt of the ten tribes in the reign of rehoboam. here they distinctly stated and described all the leading circumstances of the narrative comprised in the 'first step,' whose brief but comprehensive outline they appeared, in various instances, to have filled up at home, by reading in their bibles the corresponding chapters. they were next examined in the same way, on several sections of the new testament," with which they had also acquired an extensive practical knowledge, besides some useful information in civil history, biography, and natural philosophy, on all which they were closely and extensively examined. in another experiment, undertaken at the request, and under the sanction, of the sunday school union of london, the efficiency of this exercise, as a successful imitation of nature in communicating knowledge, was also satisfactorily ascertained. we shall at present advert only to one feature of it, as being more immediately connected with the present branch of our subject, that of communicating knowledge to the most ignorant and depraved. the report of this experiment, drawn up by the secretaries of that institution, records, that "it had been requested, that, if possible, children should be procured, somewhat resembling the heathen, (or persons in a savage state,) whose intellectual and moral attainments were bounded only by their knowledge of natural objects, and whose feelings and obligations were of course regulated principally by coercion and fear of punishment." two gentlemen of the committee, accordingly, undertook the search, and at last procured from the streets three children, a boy and two girls of the ages, so far as could be ascertained, (for they themselves could not tell,) of seven, nine, and eleven years, whom we shall designate g, h, and i. these children had no knowledge of letters; knew no more than the name of god, and that he was in the skies, but could not tell any thing about him, or what he had done. they knew not who made the sun, nor the world, nor themselves. they had no idea of a soul, or that they should live after death. one had a confused idea of the name of jesus, as connected with prayers; which, however, she did not understand, but had never heard of adam, noah, or abraham. when asked if they knew any thing of moses, one on them (viz. i,) instantly recollected the name; but when examined, it was found that she only referred to a cant term usually bestowed upon the old-clothesmen of london. they had no idea of a saviour; knew nothing of heaven or hell; had never heard of christ, and knew not whether the name belonged to a man or a woman. the boy, (h,) when strictly interrogated on this point, and asked, whether he indeed knew nothing at all of jesus christ, thinking his veracity called in question, replied with much earnestness, and in a manner that showed the rude state of his mind, "no; upon my soul, i do not!" this class, after eleven days' teaching, conducted in public, and in the presence of numbers of teachers, during one hour daily, were publicly examined in the poultry chapel, by a number of clergymen, before the committee of the sunday school union, and a numerous congregation. the report goes on to say, that the children of this class "were examined, minutely and individually, on the great leading doctrines of christianity. the enumeration and illustrations of the several doctrines were given with a simplicity, and in a language, peculiarly their own; which clearly proved the value of that part of the lesson system which enjoins the dealing with the ideas, rather than with the words; and which shewed, that they had acquired a clear knowledge of the several truths. they were also examined on some parts of the old testament history," with which, during that short period, they had been made thoroughly acquainted. these facts of themselves, and they could be enlarged to almost any extent, clearly prove the power and the value of this exercise in communicating knowledge to the young. and, as we have seen that its efficiency consists entirely in its close imitation of the process of nature in accomplishing the same object, we are the better warranted to press upon the minds of all who are interested in education and the art of teaching, the importance of keeping strictly to nature, so far as we can trace her operations; as it is by doing so alone that we are sure of success. it may no doubt be said, that there are other ways of communicating knowledge to the young, besides the catechetical exercise; and therefore the necessity of adopting it is neither so necessary nor so urgent. to this it may be answered, that there have been other plans adopted, in urgent cases, for the nourishment of the body, besides the common mode of eating and digesting food; but all such plans are unnatural, and are of course but momentary and inadequate;--this, therefore, would form no argument for depriving children of their food. but even this argument is not parallel; for, although it has been found that partial nourishment may be conveyed to the blood otherwise than by the stomach, it has not yet been ascertained that any idea can enter the mind, except by this act of "reiteration." unless, therefore, something definite can be brought forward, which will secure the performance of this act, different from the catechetical exercise, or the several modifications of it, that exercise ought to be considered as a necessary agent in every attempt of the teacher to communicate knowledge. but this admission in a philosophical question is much more than is at all necessary for our present purpose. it is in every view of the case sufficient to shew, that knowledge cannot be imparted without voluntary active thought upon the ideas communicated, or what we have termed, "reiteration;"--and if this be once admitted, and if it can be shewn that the catechetical exercise produces this result _more certainly_, and _more powerfully_, than any other mode of instruction yet known, then nothing but prejudice will lead to the neglect of this, or will give the preference to another. and it is a remarkable fact, that on investigation it will be found, that almost every useful exercise introduced into schools within the last thirty years, owes its efficiency to the presence, more or less, of the principles which we have been explaining, as embodied in the catechetical exercise.[ ] footnotes: [ ] note l. chap. iv. _on the means by which nature may be imitated in exercising the principle of individuation._ while it appears to be a law of nature, that there can be no accumulation of knowledge without the act of reiteration, yet there are other principles which she brings into operation in connection with it, by which the amount of the various branches of knowledge received is greatly increased, and the knowledge itself more easily comprehended, and more permanently retained upon the memory. the first of these principles, which we have before alluded to and described, is that of "individuation;" that principle by which an infant or child is induced to concentrate the powers of its mind upon a new object, and that to the exclusion for the time of every other, till it has become acquainted with it. in a former chapter we found, that as long as a child remains solely under the guidance of nature, it will not allow its attention to be distracted by different _unknown_ objects at the same time; but whenever it selects one for examination, it invariably for the time abandons the consideration of every other. the consequence of this is, that infants, with all their physical and mental imbecility, acquire more real knowledge under the tuition of nature in one year, than children who are double their age usually gain by the imperfect and unnatural exercises of unreformed schools in three or four. the cause of this is easily detected, and may be illustrated by the analogy of any one of the senses. the eye, for example, like the mind, must not only see the object, but it must look upon it--examine it--before the child can either become acquainted with it at the time, or remember it afterwards. but if unknown objects are made rapidly to flit past the eye of the child, so that this cannot be done before there is time to fix the attention upon any of them, the labour of the exhibitor is not only lost, but the sight of the child is impaired;--the eye itself is injured, and is less able, for some time afterwards, to look steadily upon any other object, even when that object is stationary. such is the injury and the confusion created in the mind of a child when it is hurried forward from object to object, or from truth to truth, before the mind has had leisure to lay hold of them, or to concentrate its powers upon the ideas they suggest. the labour of the teacher in that case is not only lost, and the child harassed and irritated, but the powers of the mind, instead of being brightened and strengthened, are bewildered and mystified, and must therefore be weakened in a corresponding degree. the method to be adopted therefore for the imitation of nature in the working of this principle, will consist in bringing forward, for the consideration of the child, every new letter, or word, or truth, or object, _by itself_. when presented separately and alone, there is no distraction of mind--no confusion of ideas; the child is allowed to consider it well before learning it, so that he will know something of its form or its nature, and will remember it again when it is either presented to his notice alone, or when it is grouped with others. his idea of the object or truth may be indistinct and faint at first, but it is correct so far as it goes; and the ideas which he retains concerning it, are obviously much more extensive, than if the mind at its first presentation had been disturbed or bewildered by the addition of something else. his idea of the object or the truth, after being repeatedly considered, may still be very inadequate, but it will now be distinct; and it is the want of this precision in the pupil's mind that so frequently deceives teachers, and confuses and obstructs the future advance of the scholars. when a child hears, or reads a passage, the teacher, who understands it himself, too often takes it for granted that the child as he proceeds is reiterating the ideas as well as himself, and is of course master of the subject. but this is not always the case; and wherever the child has not succeeded in doing so, all that follows in that lesson is usually to the child the cause of confusion and difficulty. he finds himself at a stand; and however far he may in these circumstances be dragged forward, he has not advanced a step, and he must at some future period,--and the sooner the better,--return again to the same point, and proceed anew under serious disadvantages. in almost every stage of a child's education, the neglect of this principle is seriously and painfully felt. it is the cause of acute mental suffering to well affected and zealous pupils; and it is the chief origin of all the heartlessness, and idleness, and apathy, which are found to pervade and regulate the conduct of those that are less active. a careful appliance of this principle of individuation, therefore, is always of importance in education; but it ought never to be forgotten, that it is more peculiarly valuable and necessary at the commencement, than at any other period of a child's progress in learning. we shall advert to a few of the methods by which it may be applied in ordinary school education, in contrast with some instances in which it is neglected. in teaching the alphabet to children, the principle of individuation is indispensable; and its neglect has been productive of serious and permanent mischief. a child of good capacity, by a proper attention to this principle, will, with pleasure and ease, learn the names and forms of the letters, with the labour of only a few hours;[ ] while, by neglecting the principle, the same child would, after years of irritation and weariness, be still found ignorant of its alphabet. the overlooking of the principle at this period has done an immense deal of injury to the cause of education. it has, at the very starting post in the race of improvement, quenched and destroyed all the real, as well as the imaginary delights of learning and knowledge. it has given the tyro such an erroneous but overwhelming impression of the difficulties and miseries which he must endure in his future advance, that the disgust then created has often so interwoven itself with his every feeling, that education has during life appeared to him the natural and necessary enemy to every kind of enjoyment. it used to be common, and the practice may still we believe be found lingering among some of the lovers of antiquity, to make a child commence at the letter a, and proceed along the alphabet without stopping till he arrived at z; and this lesson not unfrequently included both the alphabets of capitals and small letters. now the cruelty of such an exercise with a child will at once be apparent, if we shall only change its form. if a teacher were to read over to an infant twice a-day a whole page or paragraph _without stopping_ of cæsar or cicero in latin, and demand that on hearing it he shall learn it, we could at once judge of the difficulty, and the feelings of a volatile mind chained to the constant and daily repetition of such a task; and if this exercise were termed its "education," we can easily conceive the amount of affection that the child would learn to cherish towards it. now this is really no exaggerated illustration of the matter in hand, for in both cases the principle of individuation, so carefully guarded and enforced by nature, is equally outraged; and it is only where, by some means or other, a remedy for the evil accidentally occurs, that the result in the case of the alphabet, is not exactly the same as it would have been in the case of the classics above supposed. the writer once saw in a sunday school, where the children were taught twice each sabbath, a class in which some of the children had attended for upwards of two years, and were still in their alphabet; and if the same mode had been pursued, there is little doubt that they would have been in it yet. the remedy for this evil is obvious. instead of confounding the eye and the mind of the child, by rapidly parading twenty-six, or fifty-four forms, continuously and without intermission before the pupil, the letters ought to be presented to the child singly, or at most by two at a time; and these two should be rendered familiar, both in name and in form, before another character is introduced. when a few of the more conspicuous letters have become familiar, another is to be brought forward, and the child may be made to amuse himself, by picking out from a page of a book, all the letters he has learned, naming them, and if necessary describing them to a companion or a sub-monitor as they occur. or he may be set down by himself, with a waste leaf from an old book, or pamphlet, or newspaper, to prick with a pin the new letter or letters last taught him; or, as an introduction to his writing, he may be made to score them gently with ink from a fine tipped pen. in these exercises, and all others which are in their nature similar, the principle of individuation is acknowledged and acted upon; and therefore it is, that a child will, by their means, acquire an acquaintance with the letters in an exceedingly short time, and, which is of still greater importance, without irritation or trouble. these methods may sometimes be rendered yet more effective, by the teacher applying the catechetical exercise to this comparatively dry and rather forbidding part of a child's education. it proceeds upon the principle of describing each letter, and attaching its name to the description, such as "round o," "spectacle g," "top dotted i," &c. as in the "classified alphabet." the teacher has thus an opportunity of exercising the child's imagination, as well as its memory, and making a monotonous, and comparatively unintellectual exercise, one of considerable variety and amusement. in teaching the alphabet to adults, whose minds are capable of appreciating and applying the principle of analysis, the "classified alphabet" should invariably be used. by this means their memory, in endeavouring to recall the form and name of any particular letter, instead of having to search through the whole _twenty-six_, has never to think of more than the four or five which compose its class,--a circumstance which makes the alphabet much more easily acquired by the adult than by a child. but even here, the principle of individuation must not be lost sight of; each letter in the class must be separately learned, and each class must be familiar, before another is taught. the principle of individuation continues to be equally necessary in teaching children to combine the letters in the formation of words; and when it is attended to, and when the only real use of letters, as the mere symbols of sound, is understood by the pupil, a smart child may be taught to read in a few minutes. this is not a theory, but a fact,--evidenced in the experience of many, and in the presence of thousands. nor is it necessary that the words which are taught, should consist only of two or three letters; if the word be familiar to the child in speech, it becomes instantly known, when divided and taught in parts or syllables; and when once it is learned by the sounds of the letters, though these sounds merely approximate to the pronunciation of the word, it is sufficient to give a _hint_ of what the word is, and when once it is known, it will not likely be again forgotten. by this means, the child is never puzzled except by entirely new words; and by knowing the use of the letters in their sounds, he receives a key by which at least to _guess_ at them, which the sense of the subject greatly assists; so that one day, or even one hour, is sometimes, and we have no doubt will soon be generally, sufficient to overcome the hitherto forbidding and harassing drudgery of learning to read. in teaching children their first lessons, it is of great importance that the main design of reading should be clearly understood, and attended to. as writing, philosophically considered, is nothing more than an artificial substitute for speaking, so reading is nothing more than an artificial substitute for hearing, and is subject to all the laws which regulate that act. now one of the chief laws impressed by nature on the act of _hearing_ the speech of others, is the very remarkable one formerly alluded to, namely, the exclusive occupation of the mind with the _ideas_ communicated, to the entire exclusion of the _words_, which are merely the means by which the ideas are conveyed. the words are no doubt heard, but they are never thought of;--for if they were, the mind would instantly become distracted, and the ideas would be lost. this law equally applies to the act of _reading_; and every one feels, that perfection in this art is never attained, till the mind is exclusively occupied with the ideas in the book, and never in any case with the words which convey them. but in learning to read, the difficulty of decyphering the words, tends to interfere with this law, and this must be guarded against. the remedy simply is, to allow the child time to overcome this first difficulty, by repeatedly, if necessary, reading the sentence till he can read it perfectly; and then, before leaving it, to discipline the mind to the perception of the ideas it contains, now that the child can read it well. the catechetical exercise, as in the "first class book on the lesson system," will almost always accomplish the object here pointed out; and the value of the exercise it recommends will be best understood and appreciated, by observing the evils which invariably follow its neglect. for if the child be allowed to read on and on, while the difficulty of decyphering the words in the book remains, the ideas will be left behind, the attention will be fatigued, and at last exhausted. the child will continue to read without understanding; and the habit thus acquired of reading the words, without perceiving the ideas at all, will soon be established and confirmed. custom has robbed this relict of a former age of much of its repulsiveness; but it is not the less hurtful on that account. were we to run a parallel with it in any other matter, its true nature and deformity would at once appear. for example, were we to suppose ourselves listening to an imperative message from a superior, by a messenger with whose language we were but partially acquainted, we would not allow him to proceed with his communication from beginning to end, while the very first sentence he uttered, had not been understood, and the mind was unprepared for that which was to follow. we would stop him at the close of the very first sentence, and would master the meaning of that, before we would advance with him another step; and then we would make him proceed at such a pace as we could keep up with him. if he left us again behind, there would be but one remedy. he must return and repeat the sentence where he left us, till we had comprehended his master's meaning; and if he refused to do this, he could not conscientiously say to him on his return, that he had delivered his message. by following this plan, and adopting this branch of the natural principle of individuation in such a case, two benefits would arise. we would first become perfectly acquainted with the will and message of our superior; and next, we would, at the close of the exercise, be so much more familiar with the language in which it was delivered, as that it would require less effort on a future occasion, to comprehend the meaning of the same speaker. if this method had not been adopted, and the message had been given entire and without a pause, it might have been rehearsed in our hearing a hundred times, but the meaning would neither have been mastered, nor would our knowledge of the language have been in the least improved. the application of this principle of individuation in the early stages of a child's learning to read, suggests the propriety also of making some preparation for his reading every new lesson in succession. we have seen that it is chiefly the new words in a lesson that create difficulty, and prevent the operation of that important law in nature which induces the mind at once to lay hold of the ideas. to obviate this distraction of mind therefore beforehand, the new words which _are to occur_ in the lesson should be selected, and made familiar to the child previously, and by themselves;--he should be taught to read them easily by the combination of their letters, and clearly to understand their meaning, in precisely the same shade in which they are used in the lesson he is to read. when this is done, the lesson will be read with ease and with profit;--while, without this, the difficulty will be much greater, if not beyond his powers. in accordance with this plan, the "first class book," before referred to, has been constructed, and its efficiency on that account is greatly increased. the neglect of this special application of the principle has been long and painfully felt in society, and most of all where the young have been sent earliest to school. the habit of reading the words without understanding the meaning of what they read, having once been acquired, the weak powers of children are not sufficient to overcome the difficulties with which this habit has surrounded them. they feel themselves burdened and harassed with unnatural and unmeaning exercises for years, before they can acquire the art of reading the words of the simplest school book; and, what is still worse, after they have left the school, and have entered upon the busy scenes of life, they find, that they have now to teach themselves an entirely new art,--the art of _understanding by reading_. instead of all this waste of energy, and patience, and time, experience has fully proved, that by following the plain and easy dictates of nature, as above explained, all the drudgery of learning to read may be got over in a week,--it has been times without number accomplished in a single day,[ ]--and this without any harassing exertion, and generally with delight. of the truth of this, a few out of many instances may here be enumerated. in the summer of , the writer one morning found himself, by mere accident, and a perfect stranger, in a sunday school in the borough of southwark, london. he attached himself first to a class of children, some of whom he found on enquiry had been two years at the school, and were yet only learning the alphabet. in the same school, and on the same morning, a young man who only knew his letters, but had never yet attempted to put them together, was classified with the infants, whom he had willingly joined in his anxiety to learn. he had a lesson by himself. by a rigid adherence to the above principle of individuation, this young man, to his own great astonishment, was able in a few minutes to read a verse. the lesson went on, and in somewhat less than half an hour he had mastered several verses, and now knew perfectly how to make use of the letters in decyphering the several words. by that one lesson he found himself quite able to teach himself. in proof of this, as was afterwards ascertained, he read that same day on going home, without help, nineteen verses of the same chapter; and these verses, on returning to school on the same afternoon, he read correctly and without hesitation, to his usual and astonished teacher. there can be no doubt, from this circumstance, that if it had been at all necessary, he could, without further aid, and with still greater ease, have read a second nineteen verses, and perfected himself by practice in this important, and supposed difficult art of reading, by this one lesson of less than half an hour. in a later experiment, made in dumfries, in the presence and under the sanction of sir thomas kirkpatrick, and the clergymen and teachers of that town, the power of this principle was put to a severe trial, in a very unexpected and extraordinary manner. the week-day teachers of that town having heard of some of the above circumstances, and of the powers of the lesson system generally, in enabling children to read with but little trouble, were desirous of having its powers tested in that town, where the writer happened to be for a few days. he agreed; and sir thomas kirkpatrick, the sheriff of the county, with the clergymen and teachers, at his request, formed themselves into a committee for the purposes of the investigation. a sub-committee of the week-day teachers were appointed to procure a boy to be taught, which they did, and who, on being closely examined at a preliminary public meeting of the whole examinators, was found totally ignorant of words, and knew not one letter from another, with the exception, of "the round o." with this boy the writer retired, having agreed to call them again together at a public meeting, as soon as he was ready. this at the time he did not doubt would have been on the very next day;--but he was disappointed. he had not been five minutes with his pupil, till he found, to his great mortification, that he had little or no intellect to work upon. the boy was twelve years of age, and yet he was perfectly ignorant of all the days of the week, except one, the market day, on which he was in the practice of making a few pence by holding the farmers' horses. he could in no case tell what day of the week went before or followed another. he could count numbers forward mechanically till among the teens; but by no effort of mind could he tell what number came before nine, till he had again counted forward from one. the most obvious deduction from the simplest idea appeared to be quite beyond the grasp of his mind. for example, though repeatedly told that john was zebedee's son, yet, after frequent trials, he could never make out, nor comprehend who was john's father. yet this boy,--one certainly among the lowest in the grade of intellect of our species,--by a rigid application of the principle of individuation, was enabled to overcome a great part of the drudgery of learning to read, by exactly eight hours' teaching. this boy, who at the preliminary meeting on wednesday, knew only "the round o," read correctly in the court-house on the following monday, a section of the new testament, to the rev. dr duncan, minister of ruthwell, before the sheriff, clergymen, teachers, and a large assembly of the inhabitants of dumfries. to ascertain that he had in that time really _learned to read_, and that he did not repeat the words of the section by rote, he was made to read before the audience, in a chapter of the old testament, and then from a newspaper, the same words that he had read in his lesson. this he did readily, and without a mistake. footnotes: [ ] for some practical information and directions connected with the subjects in this chapter, see note m. [ ] note n. [ ] note h. chap. v. _on the means by which nature may be imitated in applying the principle of grouping, or association._ the principle of grouping, or association, as employed by nature in her educational process, is obviously intended to enable the pupil easily to receive knowledge, and to assist the memory in retaining and keeping it ever after at the command of the will. it is employed to unite many objects or truths into one aggregate mass, which is received as one,--having the component parts so linked, or associated together, that when any one part is afterwards brought before the mind, it has the power of immediately conjuring up, and holding in review, all the others. for example, when a child enters a room in which its parents and relations are severally employed, the whole scene is at a single glance comprehended and understood, and will afterwards be distinctly remembered in all its parts. the elements of the scene are no doubt all familiar, but the particular grouping of these elements are _entirely new_, and form an addition to his knowledge, as we formerly explained, as substantial, and as distinct, as the grouping of any other kind of objects or circumstances could possibly do. here then is a certain amount of knowledge acquired by the child, which could be recorded in writing, or which might be communicated by words; but which, by the operation of this principle of grouping, has been acquired with greater ease, and in much less time, than he could either have read it, or described it. it has been done in this instance by nature bringing the _ideas_ suggested by the group directly before the mind of the child, without even the intervention of words; and we see by this example, how much more laborious it would have been to communicate the very same amount of knowledge to the pupil, by making him _read_ the description of it, and how utterly preposterous and unnatural it would be to compel him, for the same purpose, to commit the words of that description to memory. the words are merely an artificial contrivance for the conveying of ideas;--and the more they can be kept out of view, it will be better for the teacher, and more natural and easy for the child. in communicating knowledge, therefore, to the young, the more directly and simply the ideas to be communicated are presented to the mind the better. they must usually be communicated by words; but these, as the mere instruments of conveyance, should be kept as much as possible out of view. to bring them at all under the notice of the child is a defect; but to make them the chief object of learning, or to make the pupil commit them to memory, is not only laborious and unnecessary, but is unnatural and hurtful. in all this we ought simply to take our lessons from nature, if we wish to succeed in conveying knowledge by the combination of simple objects. in the above example, we have seen that a single glance was sufficient to give the infant a distinct idea of the whole scene; and the reason is, that the principle of individuation had previously done its work. each of the elements of which the scene was composed, had undergone an individual and separate examination, and therefore each was familiar. this is nature's method of communicating knowledge to the young; and it is obvious, that a different arrangement of the objects or actions would have made no difference in the effects produced by the operation of the principle. whatever the circumstances might have been, the new scene, with all its variety of incidents, persons, and things, which it would take ten-fold more time to enumerate than to learn, would at once be impressed on the mind, and delivered over to the keeping of the memory, without labour, or any perceptible effort. the whole grouping forms a chain of circumstances, any one link in which, when afterwards laid hold of by the mind, brings up all the others in connection with it. the memory by this means is relieved from the burden of remembering all the individualities, and the innumerable details of the scene, by maintaining a comprehensive hold of the whole united group, as one undivided object for remembrance. from this it appears evident, that this principle is intended to succeed that of individuation, and never to precede it. objects and truths which form the elements of knowledge must be individually familiar, before they can be successfully grouped, or associated together in masses, in the way in which the several parts of the knowledge of the young are usually presented; but after these objects or truths have once become known, they may be permanently associated together in any variety of form without fatigue, and be retained on the memory for use without confusion or distraction of any kind. in our investigations into the nature and working of this principle, as detailed in a former chapter, we found several causes which gave rise to certain uniform effects, which, for the purpose of imitation or avoidance, may be classed under the following heads:--we found, . that wherever the principle of grouping acted with effect, it had always been preceded by the principle of individuation. . that wherever the principle of individuation was made to interfere, the effect intended by the principle of association was in the same degree obstructed or destroyed. . that whenever ideas or objects, whether known or unknown, were presented to a child in greater number than the mind could receive or reiterate them, it silently dropped the surplus;--but if these were _forced_ upon the mind, all the mischiefs arising from the interference of the two hostile principles immediately took place. . that children, in grouping under the tuition of nature, received and retained the impressions of objects presented to their notice, in a natural and regular order;--forming in their minds a continuous moving scene, where motion formed a part of it; and that this movement of the objects, actually was a portion of the grouping. these being the facts connected with this portion of nature's educational process, the object of the teacher should be to endeavour to imitate her in all these circumstances; carefully avoiding what she has shewn to be inoperative and hurtful, and copying as closely as possible all those that tend to forward the objects of instruction. the first thing then to be attended to by the teacher, is, that in every attempt to communicate knowledge to a child by the grouping of objects, he takes care that the principle of individuation has preceded it;--that is, that the various ideas or objects to be grouped, be individually familiar to the pupil. in communicating a story, therefore, or an anecdote, or in teaching a child to read, care must be taken that the objects or individual truths, the words, or the letters, be previously taught by themselves, before he be called upon to group them in masses, whether greater or smaller. if this be neglected, an important law of nature is violated, and the lesson to this extent will be ineffective, or worse. but if, on the contrary, this rule be attended to, the pupil, when he comes to these objects in the act of grouping, is prepared for the process; he meets with nothing that he is not familiar with; he has nothing to learn, and has only to allow the objects to take their proper places, as when he looked into the room, and grouped its contents as before supposed. all this being perfectly natural, is accomplished without effort, and with ease and pleasure.--this precaution on the part of the teacher, will at once remove many of the difficulties and embarrassments which have hitherto pressed so heavily upon the pupil in almost every stage of his advance, but more especially in the early stages of his learning to read.[ ] as an illustration of our meaning, we may notice here, that a child who knows what is meant by "sheep," and "the keeping of sheep," of "tilling the ground," and "making an offering to god," &c. is prepared to hear or to read an abridgement of the story of cain and abel. we say _an abridgement_ or _first step_, for reasons which shall afterwards be explained. without a previous knowledge of these several elements of which this story is compounded, he could neither have listened to it with pleasure, nor read it with any degree of profit; but as soon as these are individually familiar, the grouping,--the knowledge of the whole story,--is a matter of ease, and generally of delight. as the story advances, it causes a constant and regular series of groupings on the mind by the imagination, which are at once exquisitely pleasing and permanent. the child, as in a living and moving picture, imagines a man laboriously digging the ground, and another man in a distant field placidly engaged in attending to the wants and the safety of a flock of sheep. he imagines the former heaping an altar with fruits and without fire; and the latter killing a lamb, laying its parts on an altar, while a stream of fire descends from the skies and consumes it. his imagination goes on with increasing interest to picture the quarrel-scene in the field; and he in effect sees the blow given by the club of cain, that destroyed the life of his brother. all this living and moving scene will be remembered in groups; and these groups will be more or less closely linked together, and will be imagined more or less distinctly as a whole, in proportion to the mental advancement of the particular child. the next thing to be attended to in communicating knowledge to a child by grouping, is, that no strange for unknown object or idea be introduced among those which he is called upon to group; because in that case, the operation will be materially interfered with, and either marred or destroyed. the completeness of this operation in the hands of nature, depends in a great measure, as we have seen, upon the perfect composure and self-possession of the mind during the process. if there be no interruption,--no element of distraction introduced into the exercise,--all the circumstances, as they arise in the gradual developement of the story, are comprehended and grouped. the living and moving picture is permanently fixed upon the memory, so that it may be recalled and reviewed at any future time. but if, on the contrary, the placidity of the mind be interrupted,--if some strange and unknown object be introduced, whose agency is really necessary for connecting the several parts of the story,--the very attempt of the child to become individually acquainted with it, throws the whole process into confusion; and he has either to drop the contemplation of this necessary part of the machinery, or to lose the benefit of all that is detailed during the time he is engaged with it. in either case the end is not gained; and the great design aimed at by the teacher,--the communication of the knowledge connected with the narrative,--is more or less frustrated. like the landscape pictured on the placid bosom of the lake, the formation and contemplation of his own undisturbed imaginings are delightful to the child; but the introduction of an unknown object, like the dropping of a stone in the former case, produces confusion and distortion, which are always unpleasant and painful. one general reason why the introduction of unknown objects into these groupings of the child is so pernicious, may also be here adverted to. it arises from the circumstance, that no person, whether young or old, can form, even in his imagination, the idea of an entirely new thing. this is commonly illustrated by the well known fact, that it is impossible to conceive of a new sense;--but it is equally applicable to the conception of a new object. adults can no doubt conceive and picture on their imaginations, objects and scenes which they never saw;--but this mental act is not the imagining of an entirely new thing. all such scenes or things are compounded of objects, or parts of objects, which they have seen, and with which they are familiar. they can readily picture to themselves a centaur or a cerberus, a mermaid or a dragon,--creatures which have no existence, and which never did exist; but a little reflection will shew, that nothing which the mind conceives of these supposed animals is really new, but is merely a new combination of elements, or parts of other animals, already familiar. children accordingly can easily conceive the idea of a giant or a dwarf, a woman without a head, or a man with two, because the elements of which these anomalies are compounded are individually familiar to them;--but were they told of a person sitting in a howdah, or being conveyed in a palanquin, without having these objects previously explained or described to them, the mind would either be drawn from the story to find out what these meant, and thus they would lose it; or they would, on the spur of the moment, substitute in their minds something else which perhaps had no likeness to them, and which would lead them into serious error. for example, they might suppose that the one was a house, and the other a ship;--a supposition which would distort the whole narrative, and would render many of its parts inconsistent and incomprehensible. as adults then, in every similar case, are under the necessity of drawing materials from their general knowledge, for the purpose of compounding all such unknown objects, it must be much more difficult for a child to do this, not only because of his want of ability, but his want of materials. the remedy therefore in this case is, to explain and describe the objects that are to be grouped, before the pupil be called upon to do so. and when the object has not been seen by the child, and cannot be exhibited by a picture, or otherwise, the teacher must exert his ingenuity in enabling him to form an idea of the thing that is unknown, by a combination of parts of objects which are. thus a tiger may be described as resembling a large cat; a wolf, a fox, or even a lion, as resembling certain kinds of dogs; a howdah as a smaller sofa, and a palanquin, as a light crib. in all these cases, it is worthy of notice, that a mere difference of size never creates confusion;--simply because, by a natural law in optics, such differences are of constant occurrence in the experience both of children and adults. a water neut will convey a sufficiently correct idea of a crocodile; and the picture of an elephant, only one inch square, will create no difficulty, if the correct height be given. when these rules have been attended to, it will be found, that this principle in nature has been successfully imitated; and the pupil, by the previous process of individuation, will be perfectly prepared for the delightful task of grouping the objects which he now knows. when he comes to these objects in the narrative, he conceives the idea of them accurately, and he groups them without effort. there is no hesitation, and no confusion in his ideas. the painting formed upon the mind is correct; the whole picture is united into one connected scene, and is permanently imprinted on the memory for future use. another circumstance connected with this principle of grouping in children, we found to be, that when, at any time a greater number of objects were presented to the mind than it was able to reiterate and group, it silently dropt the surplus, and grouped those only which came within the reach of its powers; but if in any instance an attempt was made to _force_ the child to receive and reiterate the ideas of objects beyond a certain point, the mind got confused, and its powers weakened.--the imitation of nature in this point is also of great importance in education, particularly in teaching and exercising children in reading. to perceive this more clearly, it will be necessary to make a few remarks on the nature of the art of reading. reading is nothing more than a mechanical invention, imitative of the act of hearing; as writing is a mechanical mode of indicating sounds, and thus becomes a substitute for the art of speaking, and conveying ideas. but there is this material difference between reading and hearing, that in hearing the person giving attention is in a great measure passive, and may, or may not attend as he pleases. he may receive part of what is said, and, as prompted by nature, he may silently drop all that he cannot easily reiterate. but in the act of reading, the person has both the active and the passive operations to perform. his mind, while he reads, must be actively engaged in decyphering the words of his book, and the ideas are, or should be, by this act, forced upon the observation of the mind at the same time. as long, therefore, as the child is required to read nothing except that which he understands, and to read no more, and no faster, than his mind can without distraction receive and reiterate the ideas which he reads, the act of grouping will be performed with ease, and with evident delight, and the powers of the mind will be healthfully and extensively exercised and strengthened:--but if this simple principle of nature be violated, the exercise becomes irritating to the child, and most pernicious in its consequences. the neglect of this application of the principle is so common in education, that it usually escapes observation; but on this very account it demands from us here a more thorough investigation. we say then, that this principle is violated when a child is required to read that which it does not, and perhaps cannot understand; and also when he is required to read more, or to read faster, than he is able to reiterate the ideas in his own mind. on each of these cases we shall say a few words, for the purpose of warning and directing the teacher in applying this important principle in education. let us then suppose a child set to read a section which he does not, and which there is every probability he cannot understand, and then let us carefully mark the consequences. the child in such a case reads the words in his book, which ought to convey to his mind the ideas which the words contain. this is the sole purpose of either hearing or reading. but this is not accomplished. the words are read, and the ideas are not perceived; but the child is required to read on. he does so; and of course when the first part of the subject or sentence has been beyond his reach, the second, which most probably hangs upon it, must be much more so. in this therefore he also fails; but he is still required to read on. here is a practice begun, which at once defeats the very intention of reading, and allows the child's mind to roam upon any thing or every thing, while the eye is mechanically engaged with his book. the habit is soon formed. the child reads; but his attention is gone. he does not, and at length he cannot, understand by reading. this habit, as we formerly explained, when it is once formed, it requires great efforts on the part of the child to overcome. most people when they are actively engaged in life, do at last overcome it; while thousands, who have nominally been taught to read, never can surmount the difficulties it involves. many on this account, and for want of practising an art which they cannot profitably use, lose the art altogether. but again, let us suppose a child set to read that which he may understand, but which he is required to read more rapidly than allows him to perceive and to reiterate the ideas while reading, and let us mark what are the necessary consequences in such a case. the child is called on to read a sentence, and he does so. he understands it too. but the art of reading is not yet familiar, and he has to bend part of his attention to the decyphering of the words, as well as to the perception and reiteration of the ideas. this requires more time in a child to whom reading is not yet familiar, than to a child more advanced. but give him a little time, and the matter is accomplished the ideas have been received, and they will be reiterated, grouped, and committed to the keeping of the memory,--and then they will form part of his knowledge. but if this time be not given,--if the child, while engaged in collecting the ideas from the words of one sentence, be urged forward to the reading of another, the mental confusion formerly described instantly takes place. more ideas are forced upon the mind than it can reiterate; no group can be formed, because the elements of which it ought to be composed, have not yet been perceived; the imagination gets bewildered;--the mind is unnaturally burdened;--its faculties are overstretched;--the child is discouraged and irritated; the powers of his mind fatigued and weakened; and the whole object of the teacher is at once defeated, and rendered worse than useless.--in every case, therefore, when the child is called on to read, sufficient time should be given;--the teacher taking care that the main design of reading, that of collecting and grouping ideas, be always accomplished; and that the pupil reads no more at one time than he can thoroughly understand and retain. there is yet another circumstance connected with this process of grouping, which ought not to be overlooked. it refers to the order in which the objects to be grouped by the child are presented to his notice. a child under the guidance of nature, receives and retains its impressions of objects in a natural and simple order. when it witnesses a scene, the group of objects, or actions formed and pictured on the mind by the imagination, is exactly as they were seen, the one circumstance following the other in natural and regular order. in telling a story therefore to a child, and more especially in composing lessons for them to read, this part of nature's plan should be carefully studied and acted upon. the elements of which the several groupings are composed, or the circumstances in the narrative to be related, should be presented in the order in which the eye would catch them in nature, or the order in which they occurred, that there may be no unnecessary retrogression of the mind, no confounding of ideas, no fear of losing the links that connect and bind together the minor groupings of the story. in the history of cain and abel, for example, the child is not to be required to paint upon his imagination, a deadly struggle between two persons of whom as yet he knows nothing; and then, retiring backwards in the story, be made acquainted with the circumstances connected with their several offerings to god; and last of all, their parentage, their occupations, and their characters. the minds of the young and inexperienced would be perplexed and bewildered by such a plan of proceeding; and the irregularity would most probably be the cause of their losing the whole story. the opposite of this plan is no doubt frequently adopted in works of fiction prepared for adults, and for the sake of effect; but every one must see that it is unnecessary in simple history, and is not at all adapted for the instruction of the young. when nature's method is adopted, the child collects and groups the incidents as he proceeds, and paints, without effort, the whole living and moving scene on his imagination, as if he himself had stood by, and been an eye-witness of the original events. the ascertained benefits of these modes of imitating nature, are literally innumerable; and it is happily within the power of every parent or teacher, in a single hour, to test them for himself. we shall merely advert to one or two instances which occurred in the recorded experiments, where their effects, in combination with the other principles, were conspicuous. in the experiment upon the prisoners in the county jail of edinburgh, the acquisition of their knowledge of old testament history, instead of being a burden, was to them a source of unmingled gratification. there were painted upon their minds the leading incidents in the history of the patriarchs, not only in groups, but their judgments being ripened, they were able to perceive them in regular connection. these pictures, then so pleasantly impressed on their imaginations, are likely to remain with them through the whole of their lives. the report says, that "they were examined on their knowledge of the book of genesis," and "gave a distinct account of its prominent facts from adam down to the settlement in goshen, and shewed by their answers that these circumstances were understood by them in their proper nature and bearings." by the same means, but in less time, and to a greater extent, the same object was attained with the children in aberdeen, who, though chosen from the schools specially on account of their want of knowledge, were, by only a few hours teaching, enabled, besides many other subjects of knowledge, to receive and retain on their minds the great leading circumstances that occurred from "the death of moses downwards, to that of the revolt of the ten tribes in the reign of rehoboam." in the experiment in london also, a large portion of old testament history, with much other knowledge, was acquired in a few hours by a boy of about nine years of age, who, previously to the commencement of the experiment, knew no more of god than the name;--who had no idea of a soul, or that he should live after death;--who "had never heard of adam, noah, or abraham;"--"had no idea of a saviour; knew nothing of heaven or hell; had never heard of christ, and knew not whether the name belonged to a man or a woman." yet this boy, in an exceedingly short time, could give an account of many groupings in the old testament history. we shall only remark, in conclusion, that if, by the proper application of this principle, so much knowledge may be acquired by rude and ignorant children, not only without effort, but in the enjoyment of great satisfaction; what may not be expected in ordinary circumstances, when the pupils are regularly trained and prepared for the purpose, and when all the principles employed by nature in this great work, are made to unite their aids, and to work in harmony together for producing an enlightened and virtuous population? this may most assuredly be gained in an exceedingly short period of time, by a close and persevering imitation of nature in these educational processes. footnotes: [ ] note o. chap. vi. _on the methods by which nature may be imitated in communicating knowledge by classification, or analysis._ in a former chapter we had occasion to notice a fourth principle brought into operation by nature in the acquisition of knowledge, which is the principle of classification, or analysis; and we shall now enquire how this principle may be successfully imitated by the teacher for the furtherance of his art. there are two forms, which in a former chapter we endeavoured to trace out and explain, in which this principle of analysis appears in the educational process of nature. we shall here again very shortly advert to them, beginning with that which in education is perhaps the most important, but which hitherto has certainly been least attended to,--that of teaching connected truths by progressive steps. when we read a connected section of history for the first time, and then examine the state of our knowledge respecting it, we find that we have retained some of the ideas or truths which we read, but that we have lost more. when that portion which we have retained is carefully examined, we find that it consists chiefly of the more prominent features of the narrative, with perhaps here and there occasional groupings of isolated circumstances. we have, in fact, retained upon the memory, little more than the general outline,--the great frame-work of the history. there will be the beginning, the middle, and the end, containing perhaps few of the minor details, but what is retained is all in regular order, bound together as a continuous narrative, and, however meagre, the whole forms in the imagination of the reader, a distinct and connected whole. there is perhaps no more of the intended fabric of the history erected in the mind than the mere skeleton of the building; but this frame-work, however defective in the details, is complete both as to shape and size, and is a correct model of the finished building from top to bottom. this is the state of every advanced pupil's mind, after he has for the first time closed the reading of any portion of history or biography. if the narrative itself has been correct, this general outline,--this great frame-work of the history,--remains on his mind through life, without any material alteration. additional information afterwards will assist in filling up the empty spaces left between the more massive materials, but it will neither shake, nor shift them; and even the most minute details of individual or family incidents, connected with the general narrative, while they add additional interest, and fill up or ornament different and separate parts, will never alter the general form of the fabric, nor displace any of the main pillars upon which it is supported. this is one way of illustrating this analytical process of nature; but for the purposes of imitating it in education it is not perhaps the best. the idea of a regular analytical table of the history, formed of successive branches, by successive readings, is by far the most natural and applicable. by a first reading of a portion of history, there are certain great leading points established in the mind of the reader, which form the first branches of a regular analysis, and to some one or other of which parts or divisions every circumstance of a more minute kind connected with the history, will be found to be related. this first great division of the history attained by the first reading, if correct, will, and must, remain the same, whatever addition may afterwards be made to it. by a second reading, our knowledge of the leading points will greatly assist us in collecting and remembering many of the more minute circumstances embodied in them, or intimately connected with them; but even then, an ordinary mind, and more especially a young person, will not have made himself master of all the details. a third, and perhaps a fourth reading, will be found necessary to give him a full command of all the minuter circumstances recorded.[ ] in endeavouring to take advantage of this principle, so extensively employed by nature, it is of great importance to observe, that a certain definite effect is produced by each successive reading. a first reading establishes in the mind of the pupil a regular frame-work of the whole history, which it is the business of every successive reading to fill up and complete. there is by the first course, a separation of the whole subject into heads, forming the regular divisions of a first branch of the analysis;--the second course tends to subdivide these again into their several parts; and to form a second branch in this analytical table;--and a third course, would enable the pupil to perceive and to separate the parts of the narrative included in these several divisions, by which there would arise a third branch, all included in the second, and even in the first. we have here supposed, that the pupil has been engaged with the very same chapters in each of these several courses;--and that he read the same words in the first course that he read in those which followed. he had to read the whole, although he could retain but little. he had to labour the whole field for the sake of procuring plants, which could have been more certainly and more healthfully raised upon a square yard. his reading for hours has produced no more knowledge than is expressed by the first branch of the supposed analysis; and therefore, if the teacher would but analyse the subject for the child, whether it be a science or a history,--suppose for example, the history of joseph,--and give his younger pupils no more at first than the simple _outline_ of the story, some very important advantages would be the result. in the first place, the very difficult task of keeping the volatile mind of a child continuously fixed to the subject during the lengthened reading of the whole narrative will be unnecessary;--the irritation and uneasiness which such a lengthened exercise must produce in a child will be avoided;--time will be economised, the labour of the teacher will be spared, and the mind of the child at the close of the exercise, instead of being fagged and prostrated, will be found vigorous and lively. and yet, with all this, the positive result will be the same. the child's knowledge of the subject in this latter case, will in reality be as extensive, and much more distinct and permanent, than in the former. here is the first step gained; and to attain the second, a similar course must be pursued. nature, who formed this first branch of the analytical table on the minds of the first class of the children, formed another and more extended branch in the minds of the second class. the teacher therefore has only to take each of the branches which form the first step, and sub-divide them into their natural heads, so as to form a second,--and to teach this to his children in the same manner that he taught them the former. by this means, the first class will now possess an equal degree of knowledge with those who occupied the second;--and by a similar process, the others would advance to the third and the fourth classes according to circumstances. the plan here proposed for imitating nature by progressive steps, has been tried with undeviating success for many years. its efficiency, as embracing the principle employed by nature for the communication of knowledge, has been repeatedly subjected to the most delicate and at the same time the most searching experiments. by its means, in connection of course with the catechetical exercise by which it is wrought, very extraordinary effects have been produced even upon individuals whose minds and circumstances were greatly below the average of common children. in the experiment made upon the adult criminals in the county jail of edinburgh, the pupils acquired easily and permanently a thorough knowledge of the history contained in the book of genesis. "they gave a distinct account of its prominent facts, from adam, down to the settlement in goshen, and shewed by their answers, that these circumstances were understood by them, in their proper nature and bearings. they gave, in the next place, a connected view of the leading doctrines of revelation; when their answers evinced, most satisfactorily, that they apprehended, not merely each separate truth, but that they perceived its relation to others, and possessed a considerable knowledge of the divine system as a whole. they were also examined upon several sections of the new testament; where their answers displayed an equally clear and accurate knowledge of the subject." these persons, be it observed, belonged to a class of individuals, who are generally considered to be peculiarly hostile to the reception of information of this kind, and certainly who are least able to comprehend and retain it; and all this, besides other portions of knowledge, on which they were examined during the experiment, was communicated with ease by about twenty hours teaching. by the experiment made at aberdeen, upon children the most ignorant that the committee of clergymen could find among the several schools in the city, it was ascertained, that after only nine or ten hours teaching, they had not only received a thorough knowledge of "several sections of new testament history," but that they had acquired a knowledge of all the leading events included in the old testament history, from "the death of moses, downwards to that of the revolt of the ten tribes in the reign of rehoboam. here they distinctly stated and described all the leading circumstances of the narrative comprised in the 'first step,' whose brief but comprehensive outline they appeared, in various instances, to have filled up at home, by reading in their bibles the corresponding chapters." the efficiency of this form of analytical teaching, as exhibited in successive steps, when employed for the purpose of teaching a knowledge of civil history and biography, was also proved with equal certainty;--for these same children showed a thorough knowledge of that portion of the history of england embraced by the reign of charles i. and the commonwealth; and in biography, the life of the late john newton having been employed for the purpose, they shewed such an acquaintance with the leading facts, and the uses to be made of them, that the reverend gentlemen in this report of the experiment say, that the children had "to be restrained, as the time would not permit." in teaching the sciences, particularly the science of natural philosophy, this method of employing the principle of analysis has been found equally successful. nature indeed, by the regular division of her several works, has obviously pointed this out as the proper method of proceeding, especially with the young; and the success that has invariably accompanied the attempt, shews that the opinion is well founded. in the experiment at aberdeen, the class of children, who were specially selected from their companions on account of their ignorance only a few days before, were "interrogated, scientifically, as to the production, the nature, and the properties of several familiar objects, with the view of shewing how admirably calculated the lesson system is, for furnishing the young with a knowledge of natural science and of the arts. one of their little companions being raised before them on a bench, they described every part of his dress, from the bonnet downwards, detailing every process and stage of the manufacture. the bonnet, which was put on his head for this purpose, the coat, the silk-handkerchief, the cotton vest, were all traced respectively from the sheep, the egg of the silk-worm, and the cotton-pod. the buttons, which were of brass, were stated to be a composition of copper and zinc, which were separately and scientifically described, with the reasons assigned, (as good as could be given,) for their admixture, in the composition of brass." "a lady's parasol, and a gentleman's watch were described in the same manner. the ivory knob, the brass crampet, the bamboo, the whalebone, the silk, were no sooner adverted to, than they were scientifically described. when their attention was called to the seals of the gentleman's watch, they immediately said, 'these are of pure, and those of jeweller's gold,' and described the difference. the steel ring was traced to the iron-stone in the mine, with a description of the mode of separating the metal from its combinations. the processes requisite for the preparation of wrought-iron from the cast-iron, and of steel from the wrought-iron, with the distinguishing properties of each of these metals, were accurately described, and some practical lessons drawn from these properties; such as, that a knife ought never to be put into the fire, and that a razor should be dipped in warm water previous to its being used. various articles were collected from individuals in the meeting, and successively presented to them, all of which they described. india-rubber, cork, sponge, pocket combs, &c. a small pocket thermometer, with its tube and its mercury, its principles and use, and even the turkey-leather on the cover, were all fully described. after explaining the nature and properties of coal-gas, one of the boys stated to the meeting, that since the commencement of this experiment, he had himself attempted, and succeeded in making gas-light by means of a tobacco-pipe;--his method of doing which he also described." the other form in which the principle of analysis may, in imitation of nature, be successfully employed in communicating knowledge to the young, is not to be considered as new, although the working of the principle may not have been very clearly perceived, or systematically regulated. it is seen most simply perhaps in the division of any subject,--a sermon for example--into its great general heads; and then endeavouring to illustrate these, by sub-dividing each into its several particulars. by this means the whole subject is bound together, the judgment is healthfully exercised, and the memory is greatly assisted in making use of the information communicated. it is upon this plan that the several discourses and speeches in the acts of the apostles have been analysed, as an introduction to the teaching of the epistles to the young.[ ] upon the same principle depends the success of the "analysis of prayer," of which we shall afterwards have to speak; and it is by means of this principle, in connection with the successive steps, that the several departments of natural philosophy are proposed to be taught. the efficiency of the principle in this form, as applied to the teaching of natural philosophy to mere school boys, has been ascertained by numerous experiments, of which the one in aberdeen, already alluded to, has afforded good evidence. but the experiment conducted in newry, on account of several concurrent circumstances, is still more remarkable and appropriate, and to it therefore we propose briefly to refer. "in the year , the writer, in passing through the town of newry on his way to dublin, was waited upon by several sunday school teachers, and was requested to afford them some information as to teaching their schools, and for that purpose to hold a meeting with them and their fellow teachers, before leaving the place. to this he readily agreed; but as he intended to go to dublin by the coach, which passed through newry in the afternoon, the meeting had to take place that same day at two o'clock. at that meeting, the earl of kilmorey and a party of his friends were very unexpectedly present; and they, after the business of the meeting was over, joined with the others in requesting him to postpone his departure, and to hold a public meeting on the following tuesday, of which due intimation would be given, and many teachers in the neighbourhood, who must otherwise be greatly disappointed, would be able to attend." to this request, accordingly, he at once acceded. "in visiting the schools next day, the propriety of preparing a class or two of children for the public meeting was suggested and approved of; and the day-teacher being applied to, gave mr gall a list of six of his boys for the purpose. with these children he met on monday; and after instructing them in the doctrines of the gospel, and teaching them how to draw lessons from scripture, he began to teach them some parts of natural philosophy, and to draw lessons also from these. their aptness, and eagerness to learn, suggested the idea of selecting one of the sciences, and confining their attention principally to it, for the purpose of ascertaining how much of the really useful parts of it they could acquire and learn to use, in the short space of time which must intervene between that period and the hour of meeting. considering what would be most useful and interesting, rather than what would be most easy, he hastily fixed on the science of anatomy and physiology, and resolved to mark the time during which they were engaged with him in learning it. these lessons were altogether oral and catechetical,--as neither he nor the children at that time had any books to assist them in their labours. "the method adopted by mr gall in communicating a knowledge of this important and difficult science to these school-boys, was strictly analytical;--classifying and connecting every part of his subject, and bringing out the several branches of the analysis in natural order, so that the connection of all the parts was easily seen, and of course well remembered. an illustration of his method may induce some parents to try it themselves. "he first directed their attention to the bones, and taught them in a few words their nature and uses, as the pillars and safeguards of the body;--the shank, the joint, and the ligaments, forming the branches of this part of the analysis. he then led them to imagine these bones clothed with the fleshy parts, or muscles, of which the mass, the ligaments, and the sinews, formed the branches. he explained the nature of their contraction; and shewed them, that the muscles being fastened at one end by the ligament to a bone, its contraction pulled the sinew at the other, and thus bent the joint which lay between them.--he then taught them the nature and uses of the several viscera, which occupy the chest and belly, and their connection with each other. this prepared the way for considering the nature of the fluids of the body, particularly the blood, and its circulation from the heart and lungs by the arteries, and to them again by the veins, with the pulsation of the one, and the valves of the other. the passage of the blood through the lungs, and the uses of the air-cells and blood-vessels in that organ were described; when the boys, (having previously had a lesson on the nature of water, atmospheric air, and the gases,) readily understood the importance of bringing the oxygen into contact with the blood, for its renovation from the venous to the arterial state. the nature of the stomach and of digestion, of the intestines, lacteals, and absorbents, was next explained, more in regard to their nature than their names,--which last were most difficult to remember;--but the knowledge of the function, invariably assisted the memory in recalling the name of the organ. they were next made acquainted with the brain, the spinal cord, and the nervous system generally, as the source of motion in the muscles, and the medium of sensation in conveying intelligence from the several organs of sense to the brain, by which alone the soul, in some way unknown, receives intelligence of outward objects. this prepared the way for an account of the organs of sense, and the mechanism of their parts; and lastly, they were made acquainted with the integuments, skin, hair, and nails, with the most obvious of their peculiarities.--on all these they were assiduously and repeatedly catechised, till the truths were not only understood, but were in some degree familiar to them. in this they were greatly assisted by a consideration of their own bodies; which mr gall took care to make a kind of text-book, not only for making him better understood, but for enabling them more easily and permanently to remember what he told them. when he shewed them, by their hands, feet, and face, the ramifications of the blood-vessels and nerves,--the mechanism of the joints,--the contraction of the various muscles,--the situation and particular uses of which he himself did not even know, but which were nevertheless moved at their own will, and whenever they pleased,--the young anatomists were greatly pleased and astonished; and this added to their eagerness for farther information, and to their zeal in shewing that they understood, and were able again to communicate it. "these preparatory meetings were never protracted to any great extent, as the whole time was divided into three or four portions,--the boys being dismissed to think over the subject, (for they had nothing to read,) and to meet again at a certain hour. the watch was again produced, and the time marked; and when the whole period occupied by this science and its connections was added together, it amounted to two hours and a half exactly. one of these lessons, and the longest, was given during a stroll in the fields. "the public meeting of parents and teachers was held at newry on the th of october , when the above class, with others, were examined on the religious knowledge which had been communicated to them on the previous days, with its lessons and uses; after which the six boys were taken by themselves, and thoroughly and searchingly catechised on their knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the human body. they were examined first on the nature and uses of the bones, their shapes, substance, joints, and ligaments. then on the nature and offices of the muscles, with their blood-vessels, nerves, ligaments, sinews, and motions;--the uses of the several viscera;--the heart with its pulsations, its power, its ventricles and auricles, and their several uses;--the lungs, with their air-cells, blood-vessels, and their use in arterializing the blood;--the stomach, intestines, &c. with their peristaltic motions, lacteals, &c.;--the brain, spinal cord, and nerves, with their connections, ramifications, and uses;--the senses, with their several organs, their mechanism, and their manner of acting. on all these they were questioned, and cross-questioned, in every variety of form: and that the audience might be satisfied that this was not a mere catalogue of names, but that in fact the physiology of the several parts was really known, and would be remembered, even if the names of the organs should be forgotten, they were made repeatedly to traverse the connecting links of the analysis forward from the root, through its several branches, to the extreme limit in the ultimate effect; and, at other times backward, from the ultimate effect to the primitive organ, or part of the body from which it took its origin. for example, they could readily trace forward the movement of the arm joint, or any other joint, from the ligament of the muscle at its junction with the bone, through its contraction by the nerve at the fiat of the will, by which the sinew of the muscle, fastened at the opposite side of the joint, is pulled, and the joint bent;--or they could trace backward any of the operations of the senses,--the sight, for example, from the object seen, through the coats of the eye, to the inverted picture of it formed upon the retina, which communicated the sensation to the optic nerve, by which it was conveyed to the brain. in all which they invariably succeeded, and shewed that the whole was clearly and connectedly understood. "when this had been minutely and extensively done on the several parts of the body, some medical gentlemen who were present were requested to catechise them on any of the topics they had learnt, for the purpose of assuring themselves and the audience that the children really and familiarly understood all that they had been catechised upon. one of the medical gentlemen, for himself and the others present, then stated publicly to the meeting, that the extent of the children's knowledge of this difficult science was beyond any thing that they could have conceived. and afterwards affirmed, that he had seen students who had attended the medical classes for six months, who did not know so much of the human body as these children now did." this experiment became more remarkable from a circumstance which took place within a few days afterwards, and which tended still more strongly to prove the permanence and efficiency of this method of imitating nature; shewing, not only that truth when communicated as nature directs, is easily received, and permanently retained upon the memory, but that all such truths when thus communicated, become more and more familiar to the mind, and more decidedly under the controul, and at the command of the will. the circumstance is thus recorded in the account of the experiment[ ] from which we have already quoted. "at the close of the meeting, mr gall took farewell of his young friends, not expecting to have the pleasure of seeing them again; and (after a promised visit to ravenstile,) he proceeded on the following thursday to rostrevor, where he found a numerous audience, (publicly called together by lady lifford, the rev. mr jacobs, and others, to receive him,) already assembled. "here, in the course of teaching a class of children brought to him for the first time, and explaining the nature and capabilities of the system, reference was made to the above experiment only a few days before in their neighbourhood at newry. two gentlemen,[ ] officially and intimately connected with the kildare place society of dublin, being accidentally present, were at their own desire introduced to mr gall by a clerical friend after the close of the exercises. the circumstances of the newry experiment, which had been mentioned during the meeting, were strongly doubted, till affirmed by the clerical friend who introduced them; who, having been present and witnessed it, assured them that the circumstances connected with the event had not been exaggerated. they then stated, that it must of necessity have been a mere transient glimpse received of the science by the children; which, being easily got, would be as easily lost; and that its evanescent nature would without all question be found, by their almost immediately having forgotten the whole of what had been told them. mr gall, however, assured them, that so far from that being the case, he was convinced, from long experience, that the information communicated would be much more lasting than that received in any other way. that the impressions, so repeatedly made upon their minds by the _catechetical exercises_, would remain with them very likely through life; while the effect of the _analytical mode_, by which he had linked the whole together, would prevent any of the important branches from ever being separated from the rest. if, therefore, they remembered any of the truths, they would most probably remember all. and besides, he shewed, that the daily use, in the ordinary business of life, which they would find for the lessons from the truths taught, would revive part, and perhaps the whole, upon their memories every day. but as it was of importance that they should be satisfied, and to set the matter at rest, he agreed _to call the boys unexpectedly together_ at another public meeting in newry, where they might be present and judge for themselves; and without seeing or talking with the boys, he would examine them again publicly, and as extensively as before; when he was convinced they would shew, that the whole was as fresh on their memories as when they at first received it. in short, that they would be able to undergo the most searching ordeal, with equal, if not greater ease, than they had done formerly. "this was accordingly done. a meeting took place next day, equally respectable, and perhaps more numerous than the former, to which the boys were brought from their school, without preparation, or knowing what they were to be asked. they were then more fully and searchingly examined than at first; and there being more time, they were much longer under the exercise. it was then found, that the information formerly communicated was not only remembered, but that the several truths were much more familiar, in themselves and in their connection with each other, than they had been at the former meeting. this had evidently arisen from their own frequent meditations upon them since that time, and their application of the several lessons, either with one another, their parents, or themselves. the medical gentlemen were again present, and professed themselves equally pleased." from the number and variety of these facts, which might be indefinitely extended, it is obvious, that a new path lies open to the educationist, which, as yet, has been scarcely entered upon. the same amount of success is at the command of every teacher who will follow in the same course, and keep rigidly in the path pointed out to him by nature. footnotes: [ ] note p. [ ] note q. [ ] complete directory for sunday school teachers, vol. i. p. , and effects of the lesson system, p. . [ ] counsellor jackson, m. p. secretary to the kildare place society, and mr hamilton, brother-in-law to the duke of wellington, one of the committee. chap. vii. _on the imitation of nature in teaching the practical use of knowledge._ the third step in the educational process of nature we have found to be, the training of her pupil to the practical use of his knowledge.--all her other processes, we have seen from numerous circumstances, are merely preparatory and subservient to this; and therefore, the attempt at imitation here by the teacher is of corresponding importance. the practical application of knowledge must be the great end of all the pupil's learning; and the parent or teacher should conduct his exercises and labours in such a manner as shall be most likely to attain it. the powers of the mind are to be cultivated;--but they are to be cultivated chiefly that the pupil may be able to collect and make use of his knowledge:--and knowledge is to be pursued and stored up;--but this is to be done that it may remain at his command, and be readily put to use when it is required. to suppose any thing else, is to suppose something directly opposed to all the indications of nature, and to the plainest suggestions both of reason and experience. if in this department then, the teacher is to imitate nature with effect, there are two preliminary objects of which he ought never to lose sight. the first is, that he studiously select from the numerous subjects which may form the staple of education, those only, or at least chiefly, which are to be most useful, and which may most easily and most frequently be put to use by the pupil;--and the second is, that whatever be the truth or the subject taught, the child should, at the time of learning, be instructed in the methods and the circumstances in which it may be used. to neglect these preliminary points, is really to betray the cause of education, and, besides inflicting a lasting injury on the young, to deceive the public. in our enquiries into nature's method of applying knowledge, we found, in a former chapter, that she employs two distinct agencies in the work. the one we denominated the natural, or common sense; and the other is the conscience, or moral sense:--the one appearing to regulate our knowledge in so far as it refers to the promotion of our own personal and physical comforts; and the other, in so far as it refers to the rights and the well-being of others, and to our own moral good. the method which she employs in working out these two principles, is, as we before explained, very nearly the same; consisting of the perception of some useful truth,--the deduction of a lesson from that truth,--and the application of that lesson to corresponding circumstances. on that account, our attempts to imitate her operations as exhibited by the one, will, in form, be nearly the same as in the other. we shall here, therefore, attend to the methods by which nature may be successfully imitated under both agencies, and shall then state a few illustrations and facts which are more peculiarly applicable to each in particular. before doing this, however, we cannot help once more pressing upon the mind of all connected with education, the great importance--the necessity--of that part of the subject upon which we are now to enter. we have said, and we again repeat, that _this_ is education; and every thing else taught to a child is, or ought to be, either preliminary or supplementary;--_belonging_ to education, perhaps, but not education itself. it is _practice_, and not _theory_, that constitutes the basis of all improvement, whether in the arts, or in morals and religion; and it is to this practical application of what he learns, that every child should be trained, by whatever name the mode of doing so may be known. all our blessings are destined to come to us by the use of proper means; and this general principle applies both to temporal and spiritual matters. now "the use of means," is only another mode of expressing "the practical application of knowledge." and if so, what are we to think of the philosophy or the candour of the person, who is apparently the friend of education, but who remains indifferent or hostile to the thing itself, merely because it is presented to him under another name. he may be a zealous advocate for the spread of knowledge;--but that is not education.--knowledge is but the _means_,--the application of it is the _end_; and when therefore he stops short at the communication of knowledge, while he is indifferent to the teaching of its use, he endangers the whole of his previous labour. one single truth put to use, is of more real value to a child than a thousand are, as long as they remain unused; and of this, every friend of the young ought to be convinced. our health, our food, and our general happiness depend, not on knowledge _received_, but on knowledge _applied_; and therefore, to teach knowledge that is inapplicable or useless, or to teach useful knowledge without teaching at the same time how it may be put to use by the pupil, is neither reasonable nor just. hence the importance of our present investigation; and hence we have no hesitation in saying, that the enquiry, "how can nature be most successfully imitated in her application of knowledge?" is the most momentous question that can be put by the teacher; and a successful answer will constitute the most precious boon that can be afforded to education. to assist in this enquiry is the design of the present chapter; and we shall accordingly examine a little more in detail the circumstances that take place in the experience of the young, when they are induced to apply their knowledge under the guidance of nature, and without another teacher. for this purpose, let us suppose two children about to cross a piece of soft ground. the one goes forward, and his foot sinks in the mud. does the other follow him? no indeed. the most stupid child we could find, if within the limits of sanity, would immediately stand still, or seek a passage at another point. here then is an example of the way in which children, while entirely under the guidance of nature, make use of their knowledge, by applying the principle of which we are here speaking in cases of urgency and danger; and we shall now endeavour to analyse the process, that we may the more readily arrive at some exercise, by which it may be artificially imitated, whether the application be urgent and required at the moment or not. we have supposed one child going forward on the soft ground, while the other is slowly following him. when the foot of the first sinks, the other instantly stands still; and a spectator can perceive, better perhaps than the child himself, that something like the following mental process takes place on the occasion. the child thinks with himself, "tom's foot has sunk; if i go forward, i also will sink; i will therefore stand still, or cross at another place." this is an exact parallel to thousands of similar instances which come under the notice of parents and others every day; and is a process quite familiar to adults who have paid any attention to the operation of their own minds when similarly circumstanced. when it is analysed, we find it to consist, as shewn in a former chapter, of three distinct parts, not one of which can be left out if the effect is to be produced. there is always, at the commencement of such an operation, the knowledge of some fact; "tom's foot has sunk." there is, secondly, an inference or lesson drawn from this knowledge, "if i go forward, i also will sink." and there is, thirdly, the practical application of that lesson, or inference, to the child's present circumstances: "i will stand still, or cross at another place." it is this process, or one in every point similar, that takes place in the mind, either of the young or the old, whenever they apply the facts gleaned by observation or experience for the guidance of their conduct. now what we are at present in search of, is an exercise applicable to _reading_, as well as to observation;--to the _school_, as well as to the play ground or the parlour;--and to knowledge whose use may not be required at the instant, as well as that to which we are driven by necessity. the desideratum here desired is to be found by the teacher in the method, now very extensively known, of drawing lessons from useful truths, and then applying them to the future probable circumstances of the pupils. for example, when a child reads, or is told that jacob was punished by god for cheating his brother and telling a lie, the great object of the parent or teacher is to render these truths _practical_,--which the question, "what does that teach you?" never fails to do. the child, as soon as he knows the design of his teacher in communicating practical truths, and is asked the above question, will tell him, that he ought never to cheat his neighbour, or tell a lie. the application of these lessons, when thus established as a rule of duty founded on scripture, is as extensive as the circumstances in which they may be required are various;--and the teacher has only to suppose such a case, and to ask his pupil, if he were placed in these circumstances, what he should do. the dullest of his children will at once perceive the duty, and the source from which he derives confidence in performing it. there is no difficulty, as we have seen, in drawing and applying practical lessons in cases of urgency, where experience and the common sense of the individual prompt him to it;--and this attempt to imitate nature in less urgent cases, and especially in hearing, or in the more artificial operation of reading, has been found in experience to be completely successful. we shall endeavour to point this out by a few familiar examples. let us for this purpose suppose, that one of the boys formerly mentioned is accompanied by his teacher, instead of his companion, and is approaching the soft ground which lies between them and the house. before they arrive at the spot, his teacher tells him, that the marsh before them is so soft that even a child's foot would sink if he attempted to tread upon it. the boy might hear, and perfectly understand the truth, and yet he might not at the time think of the use to which it ought to be put. but if the teacher shall immediately add, "what does that teach you?"--his attention would instantly be called, not so much to the truth itself, as to the uses which ought to be made of it, and his answer in such a plain case would be ready, "we must not cross there, but seek a road to the house by some other way." now here the fact was verbally communicated; and although the object was in sight, and the use of the fact might in some measure have been anticipated so as to suggest the answer, yet a little consideration will shew, that a similar effect would have been produced by the question, had the parties been in the house, or had the truth been derived from reading, and not from the oral communication of the teacher. it is the want of something like this in the acquisition of truth by books, which renders that kind of knowledge in general of so little practical benefit. the truths and facts learned while attending school, are too often received as mere abstractions, without reference to their uses, or to the personal application of those uses to the circumstances of the child or his companions. events daily occur in which the pupil's knowledge might be of important service;--but the benefits to be derived from it not having been taught, and the method of applying the facts which he has acquired by reading not having been explained,--the knowledge and its uses are seldom seen together, and the practical benefit of the teaching is accordingly lost. this at once accounts for the very remarkable circumstance, that children, and not unfrequently adults also, derive far more benefit from the scanty knowledge which they have gleaned by observation and experience, than from the many thousands of highly useful facts which have again and again been pressed upon their notice by reading and study. in almost every case nature prompts us, as we have seen, to turn to our own benefit the knowledge which she has imparted; but as the mode of teaching reading, which is the _artificial_ method of acquiring information, often overlooks the use we are to make of it, we remain satisfied with the knowledge itself, and do not think of its application. to illustrate this fact in some measure, let us suppose a basket of filberts set down for the use of a company of boys, and that one of them tries to crack the shells with his front teeth. he fails. but he sees his companions put the nuts farther back in the mouth, and succeed. does he lose his share, by continuing to misapply the lever-power provided for him by nature?--no indeed. he, by a single observation, at once draws and applies the lesson;--he immediately cracks his nuts as readily as his companions, and he continues to do so all his lifetime after. but the same boy may have, that very forenoon, been reading a treatise on the power of the lever, and might read it again and again without considering himself at all interested in the matter, or thinking it probable that he ever would. his reading, without the application we are here recommending, would never have led him to perceive the slightest similarity between the fulcrum of the lever, and the insertion of his jaw; or any connection between the lesson of the school, and the employment of the parlour:--but that would. this is but one of a thousand examples that might be given, of the evils arising from the non-application of knowledge in reading, and which are applicable, not to children merely, but also to adults. the drawing and applying of lessons, the exercise which we are here recommending, has been found a valuable remedy for this defect in ordinary reading. the object of the teacher by its use, is to accomplish in the pupil by _reading_, what we have shewn nature so frequently does by _observation_;--that is, to train the child to apply for his own use, or the use of others, those truths which he acquires from his _book_, in the same way that he does those which he derives from _experience_. to illustrate this, we shall instance a few cases of every day occurrence, in which the question, "what does this teach you?" when supplemented to the fact communicated, will almost invariably answer the purpose desired, whether the truth from which the lesson is to be drawn, has been received by observation, by oral instruction, or by reading. when an observing well-disposed child sees a school-fellow praised and rewarded for being obliging and kind to the aged or the poor, there is formed in the mind of that child, more or less distinctly, a resolution to follow the example on the first opportunity. here is the fact and the lesson, with the application in prospect. this whole feeling may be faint and evanescent, but it is real; and it only wants the cultivating hand of the teacher to arrest it, and to render it permanent. accordingly, if on the child hearing the praise given to his companion for being kind and obliging to the poor, he had at the time been asked, "what does that teach you?" the lesson suggested by nature would instantly have assumed a tangible form; and in communicating the answer to the teacher, both the truth and the lesson would have been brought more distinctly before the mind, and the reply, "i should be kind and obliging to the poor," would tend to fix the duty on the memory, and would be a good preparation for putting it in practice when the next occasion should occur. again, if another thoughtful and well disposed child sees a companion severely punished for telling a lie, the question, "what does that teach me?" is in some shape or degree formed in his mind, and his resolution, however faint, is taken to avoid that sin in future. this, it is obvious, is nothing more than a practical answer to the above question, forced upon the child by the directness of the circumstances, but which would not have so readily made its appearance, or produced its effect, in cases of a less obtrusive kind, or in one of more remote application; and every person must see, that the beneficial effects desired would have been more definite, more effectual, and much more permanent, had this faint indication of nature's intention been followed up by orally asking the question at the child, and requiring him audibly to return an answer. let us once more suppose a child in the act of reading the history of cain and abel, in the manner in which it is commonly read by the young, and that the child thoroughly understands all the circumstances. he may be deeply interested in the story, while the uses to be made of it may not be very clearly perceived. but if, after reading any one of the moral circumstances, such as "cain hated his brother," or after having it announced to him by the teacher, he was asked, "what does that teach you?" the practical use of the truth would at once be forced upon his mind, and he would now very readily answer, "it teaches me that i should not hate my brother." in this case also, it is quite obvious, that without such a question having been proposed, and the answer to it given, the practical uses of the truth recorded might have been altogether overlooked; and even although they had not, still the question and its answer will always have the effect of making them stand out much more prominently before the mind, and will enable the memory to hold them more tenaciously, and bring them forth more readily for practice, than if such an operation had been neglected. hence the great importance of training the young by this exercise early to perceive the uses of every kind of knowledge, particularly scriptural knowledge; because the habit formed in youth, will continue to render every useful truth of practical benefit during life. we may remark here, that the exercise is not limited in its application to the young. for if an adult were first told, that the squalid beggar before him, though once respectable and rich, had made himself wretched by a course of idleness and dissipation, and were then asked, "what does that teach you?" he would instantly perceive the lesson, and would be stimulated to apply it. when, in like manner, the farmer is told that his neighbour has ruined himself by over-cropping his ground; or the iron master, that the use of the hot-blast has doubled the profits of his rival; a similar question would at once lead to the legitimate conclusion, and most likely to the proper conduct. in all these examples, the operation of mind which we have endeavoured to describe, is so exceedingly simple, that it is perhaps difficult to decide how much is the work of nature, and how much belongs to the exercise here recommended. this at once proves its efficiency, as an imitation of her process, in following her in the path which she has here pointed out; and it at the same time recommends itself as strictly accordant with observation and experience. the teacher then, in order to render the knowledge he communicates useful, has only to do regularly and by system, that which, under the direction of nature, every intelligent and enquiring mind in its best moments does for itself. wherever a useful truth has been communicated in the school or family, or a moral act or precept has been read or announced, the question by the parent or the teacher, "what does that teach you?" will lead the pupil to reflection, not only on its nature, but on its use; and the ability to do so, as we shall afterwards see, may be acquired by almost any individual with ease. regular training in this way, leads directly to habits of reflection and observation, which are of themselves of great value; but which, when found acting in connection with the desire and ability to turn every truth observed into a practical channel, become doubly estimable, and a public blessing. the pupil therefore ought early to be trained of himself to supplement the question, "what does this teach me?" or, "what can i learn from this?" to every circumstance or truth to which his attention is called; because the ability to answer it forms the chief, if not the only correct measure of a well educated person. in proof of this it is only necessary to remark, that as it is not the man who has accumulated the greatest amount of anatomical and surgical knowledge, but he who can make the best use of it, that is really the best surgeon; so it is not the man who has _acquired_ the largest portion of knowledge, but he who _can make the best use_ of the largest portion, that is the best scholar. hence it is, that all the exercises in a child's education should have in view the practical use of what he learns, and of what he is to continue through life to learn, as the great end to which all his learning should be subservient. the moral advantages likely to result from the general adoption of this mode of teaching useful knowledge are exceedingly cheering, and the only surprise is, that it has been so long overlooked. that the principle, though not directly applied to the purposes of education, was well known, and frequently practised by our forefathers, appears obvious from many of their valuable writings. one beautiful example of its application is familiar to thousands, though not always perceived, in the illustration given of the lord's prayer towards the close of the assembly's larger and shorter catechisms. the study of the lessons there drawn from the truths stated or implied in that prayer, will afford a better idea of the value of this mode of teaching, than perhaps any farther explanation we could give, and to these therefore we refer the reader. before closing these general observations upon the value and necessity of this method of training the young to the practical use of knowledge, there is a circumstance which should not be omitted, as it tends to double all the advantages of the exercise, both to the teacher and the pupil. it will be found in general, especially in morals, that every practical lesson that is drawn from a truth or passage, actually embodies two,--both of which are equally legitimate and connected with the subject. there is always a _negative_ lesson implied, when the _positive_ lesson is expressed; and there is in like manner a _positive_ implied, whenever it is the _negative_ that is expressed. as for example, when the child, from the history of cain and abel, draws the negative lesson that he should _not hate_ his brother; the opposite of that lesson is equally binding in the positive form, that he should _love_ his brother. and when, from the history of job, the positive lesson is drawn that we ought to be patient; the negative of that lesson becomes equally binding, and the child may, by the very same fact, be taught and enjoined not to be fretful, discontented, or impatient, during sickness or trouble. of this method of multiplying the practical uses of knowledge, we have a most appropriate example in the assembly's larger and shorter catechisms, where the illustrations given of the decalogue are conducted upon this important principle, and in a similar way. chap. viii. _on the imitation of nature in teaching the use of knowledge by means of the animal or common sense._ a large portion of what has been advanced in the foregoing chapter, has reference to the practical application of all kinds of knowledge, whether by the animal or moral sense; and we shall here offer a few additional remarks on the teaching of those branches which are more immediately connected with the former. when a person is sent to learn an art or trade, such as a carpenter, he is not sent to hear lectures, or to get merely an abstract knowledge of the several truths connected with it; but he is sent to practise the little knowledge that he is able of himself to pick up. his is a practical learning; ninety-nine parts in every hundred being employed in the practice, for one that is employed in acquiring the abstract principles of his occupation. when, on the contrary, a child is sent to school, to prepare him for this practical application of his knowledge, the former proportions are generally reversed, and ninety-nine parts of his time and labour are taken up in attaining abstract knowledge, for one that is occupied in assisting him to reduce it to practice. both modes of teaching the boy are obviously wrong. he would, when sent to it, learn his business in much less time by a previous acquaintance with its principles; and all these ought to have been furnished him as a part of his general knowledge while he attended the school. such information, indeed, ought to have formed a large portion of his education;--and it will be a matter of surprise to every one who closely considers the subject, how soon and how easily the principles, even of so complicated a trade as a carpenter, may be acquired when they are taught in the right way, and at the proper time. a few of the simplest principles in mechanics practically learned,--a knowledge of the strength and adhesion of bodies,--of the nature of edge tools,--and the importance of accuracy and caution, might have been made familiar to him while attending his studies; and if carefully and constantly reduced to practice, these would have been of the greatest service to him when called to the work-shop. the methods by which natural philosophy ought to be taught in schools, must partake of all the laws which nature employs in the several parts of her teaching. individuation, grouping, and especially analysis, must be rigidly attended to. by dividing all the subjects of general knowledge into the two grand divisions of terrestrial and celestial, and these again into their several parts, the whole field of useful knowledge would be mapped out, and connected together, so that each subject would occupy a distinct place of its own, and be readily found when it was required. the facts, or at least the most useful facts connected with each of these, would very soon be communicated; and when turned into a popular and useful form, by drawing and applying the corresponding lessons, the ease and delight of laying up these precious stores of useful knowledge by children, will not be easily conceived by those who have not witnessed it. with respect to _the ease_ with which this method of communicating knowledge can be accomplished, we may remark in general, that when a principle has been explained, and has become familiar to the child, all the phenomena arising out of it, when pointed out, are readily perceived and retained upon the memory in connection with it. for example, by a knowledge of the principle which teaches that fluids press equally on all sides, when considered in connection with the weight of the atmosphere, a child, with very little trouble, would be put into the full possession of the cause of many facts in natural philosophy, exceedingly dissimilar in their appearance, but which are all mastered with ease and intelligence by a knowledge of this law. when the principle and its mode of working have been explained, the child is provided with a key, by which he may, in the exercise of his own powers, unlock one by one all the mysterious phenomena of the air and common pump, the cupping-glass, the barometer, the old steam and fire engine, the toy sucker and pop-gun, the walking of a fly on the ceiling, the ascent of smoke in the chimney, the sipping of tea from a cup, the sucking of a wound, and the true cause of the inspiration and expiration of the air in breathing. to teach these singly, would obviously be exceedingly troublesome to the teacher, and laborious for the child; but when thus linked together, as similar effects from the same cause, they are understood at once, and each of them helps to illustrate and explain all the others. they are received without confusion, and are remembered without difficulty. all this may in general be done even with children, as we shall immediately prove, by the method recommended above, of requiring, after the illustration of the principle, the lessons which it is calculated to teach. the results of this simple method of imitating nature in one of the most valuable of her processes, have been found remarkably uniform and successful; and when it shall be regularly brought into operation in connection with the other parts of the system, it promises to be still more valuable and extensive. but even already, with all the disadvantages of time, place, and persons, the importance and efficiency of the exercise have been highly satisfactory. we shall shortly advert to a few instances of its success, which have been publicly exhibited and recorded. the criminals in the jail of edinburgh, after three weeks teaching, had acquired a considerable degree of expertness in perceiving and drawing lessons from the moral circumstances which they read from scripture. in the report of that experiment, the examinators say, "they gave a distinct account, (from the book of genesis,) of the prominent facts, from adam, down to the settlement in goshen, and shewed by their answers, that the circumstances were understood by them, in their proper nature and bearings. from each peculiar circumstance, they deduced an appropriate lesson, calculated to guide their conduct, when placed in a like, or analogous situation. it is within the truth to allege, that in this part of their examination, they submitted upwards of fifty palpable lessons, that cannot fail, we would conceive, hereafter to have a powerful influence upon their affections and deportment." in the experiments both in newry and london, the children were found quite adequate to the exercise; and in the latter instance, three children, who at their first lesson did not know they had a soul, were able to perceive and to draw lessons from almost any moral truth or fact presented to them. this they did repeatedly when publicly examined by the committee of the london sunday school union, in presence of a large body of clergymen, and a numerous congregation in the poultry chapel. but we shall at present direct attention more particularly to the children selected from the several schools in aberdeen, as given in the report by principal jack, and the professors and clergymen in that place. after mentioning, that these children, so very ignorant only eight days before, had acquired a thorough acquaintance with the leading facts in old testament history, they say, "from the various incidents in the sacred record, with which they had thus been brought so closely into contact, they drew, as they proceeded, a variety of practical lessons, evincing, that they clearly perceived, not only the nature and qualities of the actions, whether good or evil, of the persons there set before them, but the use that ought to be made of such descriptions of character, as examples or warnings, intended for application to the ordinary business of life. "they were next examined, in the same way, on several sections of the new testament, from which they had also learned to point out the practical lessons, so important and necessary for the regulation of the heart and life. the meeting, as well as this committee, were surprised at the minute and accurate acquaintance which they displayed with the multiplicity of objects presented to them,--at the great extent of the record over which they had travelled,--and at the facility with which they seemed to draw useful lessons from almost every occurrence mentioned in the passages which they had read." they were able also to apply this same principle,--the practical application of useful knowledge,--to the perusal of civil history, and also biography. the report states, that "they were examined on that portion of the history of england, embraced by the reign of charles i. and the commonwealth; and from the details of this period, they drew from the _same circumstances_, or announcements, political, domestic, and personal lessons, as these applied to a nation, to a family, and to individuals;--lessons which it ought be the leading design of history to furnish, though, both by the writers and readers of history, this committee are sorry to say, they are too generally overlooked. "they were then examined on biography,--the life of the late rev. john newton being chosen for that purpose; from whose history they also drew some very useful practical lessons, and seemed very desirous of enlarging, but had to be restrained, as the time would not permit." the practicability and the importance of teaching children to apply the same valuable principle to every branch and portion of natural philosophy were also ascertained. the same report, after stating the fact, that the children scientifically described to the meeting numerous objects presented to them from the several kingdoms of nature, goes on to say, that "here also they found no want of capacity or of materials for practical lessons. a boy, after describing copper as possessing poisonous qualities, and stating, that cooking utensils, as well as money, were made of it, was asked what practical lessons he could draw from these circumstances, replied, that no person should put halfpence in his mouth; and that people should take care to keep clean pans and kettles." the common school boys in newry also found no difficulty in the exercise, as applied to the abstruse and difficult sciences of anatomy and physiology. the account of that experiment, says, that they were "examined as to the _uses_ which they ought to make of all this information, by drawing practical lessons from the several truths. accordingly, announcements from the different branches of the science were given, from which they now very readily drew numerous and valuable practical lessons, several of which were given at this time of themselves, and which had not been previously taught them. these were drawn directly from the announcements; and all, according to their nature, calculated to be exceedingly useful for promoting the health, the comfort, and the general happiness of themselves, their friends, or their companions." but by far the most extensive and satisfactory evidence of the value and efficiency of this exercise, in the mental and moral training of the young, was afforded by the experiment undertaken at the request of the lesson system association of leith, and conducted in the assembly rooms there, in the presence of the magistrates and clergy of that town, of bishop russell, lord murray, (then lord advocate,) and a numerous meeting of the friends of education. the children were those connected with a sabbath school, who had been regularly trained by their teacher, a plain but pious workman of the town, to draw lessons every sabbath from the several subjects and passages of scripture taught them. to give all the specimens which afford evidence of the value and efficiency of this exercise in the education of children, would be to transcribe the report of the association; we shall therefore confine ourselves to a few of the circumstances only, which were taken in short-hand by a public reporter who was present. after some important and satisfactory exercises on the being and attributes of god, from which the children drew many valuable practical lessons, it is said, that the examinator "expressed his entire satisfaction with the result, and remarked, that he himself was astonished, not only at the immense store of biblical knowledge possessed by these children, but the power which they possessed over it, and the facility with which they could, on any occasion, use it in 'giving a reason for the hope that is in them.' he then proceeded to the next subject of examination which had been prescribed to him, which was, to ascertain the extent of their mental powers and literary attainments, which would be most satisfactorily shown by their ability to read the bible profitably; and for this purpose he requested that some of the clergymen present would suggest _any_ passage from the new testament on which to exercise them. the rev. dr russell (now bishop russell,) suggested the parable of the labourers hired at different hours, matt. xx. - . mr gall accordingly read it distinctly, verse by verse, catechising the children as he proceeded, and then made them relate the whole in their own words, which they did most correctly. "mr gall then selected some of the verses, and called upon them to separate the circumstances, or parts of each verse, and to state each as a separate proposition. this also they did with the greatest ease; and in some cases a variety of divisions were brought forward, thus proving the high intellectual powers which they had acquired, and the ease with which they could analyse any passage, however difficult. "it was next to be ascertained what power the children had acquired of drawing lessons from scripture; and for this purpose, mr gall, in order to husband the time of the meeting, confined the children's attention to one verse only, and proposed to submit each of the moral circumstances contained in that verse, one by one, as they themselves had divided it. the following are the lessons drawn by the children, as taken down in short-hand by the reporter. "_mr g._--the householder invited labourers at the eleventh hour;--what does that teach you?--it teaches us, that god at various seasons calls people to his church.--it teaches us, that we ought never to despair, but bear in mind the language of jesus to the repentant thief on the cross,--'to-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.'--it teaches us, that we ought not to boast of to-morrow, since we know not what a day or an hour may bring forth.--it teaches us, that time is short, and that life is the only period for preparation and hope.--it teaches us, that we ought to be prepared,--have our loins girt, and our lamps burning; for we know neither the day nor the hour wherein the son of man cometh.--it teaches us, that we ought to number our days, and apply our hearts to heavenly wisdom.--it teaches us, that we ought not to put off the day of repentance; because for every day we put it off, we shall have one more to repent _of_, and one less to repent _in_.--it teaches us, 'that life is the season god hath given to fly from hell, and rise to heaven; that day of grace fleets fast away, and none its rapid course can stay.' "mr gall here requested the children to pause for a moment, that he might express the high gratification he felt at the fluency, the readiness, and the appropriateness of the lessons which they had drawn. he was only afraid that they had inadvertently fallen upon a passage with which the children were familiar, by having had it recently under their notice; and he therefore requested mr cameron to state to the meeting whether this was really the case or not. mr cameron rose and said, that what the meeting now saw was no more than could be seen any sunday in the charlotte street school. they had not had any preparation for this meeting; and he did not remember of ever having had this passage taught in the school. he would recommend that the children be allowed a little freedom; and when they were done with that announcement, let any other be taken, for it was the same to them whatever subject might be chosen. "mr gall accordingly repeated the announcement again, and called on them to proceed with any other lessons from it which occurred to them. they accordingly commenced again, and answered as follows: it teaches us, that we ought to remember our creator in the days of our youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh in which we shall say we have no pleasure in them.--it teaches us, that we ought to prepare for death; to gird up our loins, and trim our lamps, lest it be said unto us in the great day of the lord, when he maketh up his jewels, 'depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.'--it teaches us so to conduct ourselves, that whether we live we live unto the lord, and whether we die we die unto the lord; and that whether we live therefore or die, we may be the lord's; for to that end christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be lord both of the dead and the living.[ ]--it teaches us to improve our time lest we find that the harvest is past, and the summer ended, and us not saved.--it teaches us, that we ought to study, in that whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we do all to the glory of god.--it teaches us, that we ought to endeavour to secure an interest in christ in time.--it teaches us, that delays are dangerous.--it teaches us, that the day of the lord cometh like a thief in the night, and that when sinners shall say, 'peace and safety,' sudden destruction cometh upon them.--it teaches us, that we ought to acquaint ourselves early with god; and that we ought to walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.--it teaches us, that we ought to seek the lord while he may be found, and call upon him while he is near; that the wicked ought to forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the lord, who will have mercy upon him, and to our god, who will abundantly pardon.--it teaches us to improve our time; and to bear in mind, that though patriarchs lived long, the burden of the historian's tale is always, 'and they died.'--it teaches us, that we ought not to allow pleasures and enjoyments to interfere with, or overcome, our more important duty of seeking god.--it teaches us, that we are never too young to pray, and to remember that god says, 'now;'--the devil, 'to-morrow.' "mr gall here took advantage of a short pause, and said, 'we shall now change the announcement. give me a few lessons from the fact stated in this parable, that _when the husbandman invited the labourers into the vineyard at the eleventh hour, they accepted the invitation_.--what does that teach you?'--it teaches us, that we ought to accept the invitation of jesus to come with him, 'ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money, and without price. seek ye the lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near. let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the lord, who will have mercy upon him, and to our god, for he will abundantly pardon.'--it teaches us, that we ought to show a willingness to accept the invitation of christ, since 'he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come unto him and live.'--it teaches us, that we ought to accept the invitation of christ, since we are informed in the scriptures, 'that whosoever cometh unto him he will in no ways cast out.' it teaches us, that we ought to accept of the invitation of christ; for the bible informs us, that the invitation is held forth to all; 'for whosoever will, let him take of the waters of life freely.'--'come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and i will give you rest.'--it teaches us, that we ought not to hesitate in accepting the invitation of christ; for god says he will not always strive with man. "mr gall here again expressed not only his satisfaction, but his astonishment, at the success with which mr cameron had taught the scriptures to these children. this exhibited itself in two ways; _first_, in enabling them to draw lessons from any passage of scripture; and _second_, in having so disposed of what scripture they had already been taught, that whenever a doctrine or duty was to be brought before them, scriptural declarations crowded around them 'as a light to their feet, and a lamp to their path.' he himself had no doubt that the children were no more prepared upon this passage than upon any other; but it would exhibit this fact more satisfactorily, if _another_ passage were selected, which he requested some of the gentlemen present to do. "the clergymen present accordingly requested mr gall to try the concluding portion of the second chapter of luke, which details christ's visit to jerusalem at twelve years of age. after having read and catechised the children on this passage, as he had done on the former, he proceeded at once to call for lessons. mr gall gave us the announcement that _'joseph and mary worshipped god in public_,' and asked for one or two lessons from this? it teaches us, that we ought to worship god both in public and in private.--it teaches us, that no trifles ought to hinder us from worshipping god.--one child quoted the following verse:-- 'come then, o house of jacob, come, and worship at his shrine! and walking in the light of god, with holy beauties shine.' "mr gall then said, let us change the announcement: 'joseph and mary went regularly every year to the feast of the passover?'--what does that teach you?--that teaches us, that we ought to attend the house of god regularly.--it teaches that we ought to attend church both times of the day.--it teaches us that we ought to worship god regularly; for god loveth order, and not confusion. "let us change the announcement again. 'jesus attended the passover when he was twelve years of age.' what does this teach you?--it teaches us, that parents should train up their children in the way they should go.--it teaches us, that learning young is learning fair.--it teaches us, that children should never be thought too young to be brought up in the fear of the lord.--it teaches us, that children should obey their parents.--what are we to learn from their 'fulfilling the days?'--it teaches us, that we should not leave the church until the sermon is over.--it teaches us, that we ought not to disturb others by leaving the church." remarkable as this exhibition was of the attainment of extraordinary mental power by mere children, yet it is but justice to say, that the above is merely a specimen of the elasticity and grasp of mind which these children had acquired. some idea of the extent of this may be formed when it is considered, that all these passages and, subjects were chosen for them at the moment, and by strangers. and it is worthy of remark, that if such an amount of mental power, and such an accumulation of knowledge, of the best and most practical kind, were easily and pleasantly acquired by children in the lowest ranks of life, of their own voluntary choice, under every disadvantage, and with no more than two hours teaching in the week; what may we not expect, when the principles here developed, are wielded and applied by those who thoroughly understand them, not for two hours, with an interval of six busy days, but every day of the week?--the prospect is cheering. footnotes: [ ] at this part, the report of the experiment contains the following note:--"the reader will perceive that some of the lessons diverge at times from the announcement; but it is of great importance, in an experiment of this kind, neither to omit nor amend what is wrong, but to give exactly the words that were spoken. not the least remarkable circumstance elicited by this experiment is the fact, that these children, who know nothing of the rules of grammar, have obviously, by the mental exercise induced by the system, become pretty correct practical grammarians. the variations made in many of the passages of scripture quoted by them show this." chap. ix. _on the imitation of nature in teaching the practical use of knowledge by means of the moral sense, or conscience._ in a former chapter we endeavoured to collect a few facts specially connected with the moral sense, as exhibited in the young, and the methods which nature employs, when conscience is made use of for the application of their knowledge.[ ] we shall in this chapter offer a few additional remarks on the imitation of nature in this important department; but before doing so, it will be proper to clear our way by making a few preliminary observations. no one disputes the general principle, that education is proper for man;--and if so, then education must be beneficial in all circumstances, and at every period of his life. in particular, were we to ask whether education were necessary in early childhood, and infancy, universal experience would at once answer the question, and would demonstrate, that it is much more necessary and more valuable at that season, than at any future period of the individual's life. in proof of this, we find, that enlightened restraint upon the temper, and a regulating care with regard to the conduct, are productive of the most beneficial results; while, on the contrary, when this discipline is neglected, the violence of self-will generally becomes so strong, and the checks upon the temper so weak, that the character of the child formed at this period may be such as to make him for life his own tormentor, and the pest of all with whom he is to be associated.--no one can reasonably deny this; and the conclusion is plain, that education of some kind or other is really more necessary for the infant and the child, than it is either for the youth or the man. if this general principle be once admitted, and we set it down as an axiom that the infant and the child are to learn _something_,--it naturally follows, that we are required to teach them those useful things for which nature has more especially fitted them; while we are forbidden to force branches of knowledge upon them of which they are incapable. our object then, ought to be to ascertain both the positive and the negative of this proposition; endeavouring to find out what the infant and child _are_ capable of learning, and what they _are not_. now it is an important fact, not only that infants and young children are peculiarly fitted, by the constitution of their minds and affections, for learning and practising the principles of religion and morals; but it is still more remarkable, that they are, for a long period, incapable of learning or practising any thing else. if this can be established, then nothing can be more decisive as to the intention of nature, that moral and religious training, is not only the great end in view by a course of education generally, but that it is, and ought always to be, the first object of the parent and teacher, and the only true and solid basis upon which they are to build all that is to follow. let us therefore for a moment enquire a little more particularly into this important subject. when we carefully examine the conduct of an enlightened and affectionate mother or nurse with the infant, as soon as it can distinguish right from wrong and good from evil, we find it to consist of two kinds, which are perfectly distinct from each other. the one regards the comfort and physical welfare of the child;--the other regards the regulation of its temper, its passions, and its conduct. it is of the latter only that we are here to speak. when this moral training of the judicious mother is examined, we find it uniformly and entirely to consist in an indefatigable watchfulness in preventing or checking whatever is evil in the child, and in encouraging, and teaching, and training to the practice of whatever is good. she is careful to enforce obedience and submission in every case;--to win and encourage the indications of affection; to check retaliation or revenge; to subdue the violence of passion or inordinate desire;--to keep under every manifestation of self-will;--and to soothe down and banish every appearance of fretfulness and bad temper. in short, she trains her young charge to feel and to practise all the amiable and kindly affections of our nature, encouraging and commending him in their exercise;--while, on the contrary, she prevents, discourages, reproves, and if necessary punishes, the exhibition of dispositions and conduct of an opposite kind. this, as every one who has examined the subject knows, is the sum and substance of the mother's educational efforts during this early period of her child's progress;--and what we wish to press upon the observation of the reader is, that the child at this period is literally incapable of learning any thing else which at all deserves the name of education. he may be taught to be obedient; to be submissive; to be kind and obliging; to moderate, and even to suppress his passions; to controul his wishes and his will;--to be forbearing and forgiving;--and to be gentle, peaceable, orderly, cleanly, and perhaps mannerly. is there any thing else?--is there any one element of a different kind, that ever does, or ever can enter into the course of an infant or young child's education? if there be, what is it?--let it be examined;--and we have no hesitation in saying, that if it be "education," or any thing that deserves the name, it will be found to resolve itself into some one or other of the moral qualities which we have above enumerated. if therefore children, during the earlier stages of their educational progress are to be taught at all, religion and morals _must_ be, the subjects, seeing that they are for a long period capable of learning nothing else. and it is here worthy of especial notice, that in teaching religion and morals, there is a negative as well as a positive scale;--and experience has uniformly demonstrated, that if the parent or teacher neglect to improve the child by raising him in the positive side, he will, by his own efforts, sink deeper in the negative. selfishness, as exhibited in the natural depravity of human nature, will in all such cases strengthen daily; and all the evil passions which selfishness and self-will call into exercise, will then be strengthened and confirmed perhaps for life. but while we perceive that the young are incapable of learning any thing else than what is properly termed religion and morals, we find it to be equally true, that they are peculiarly fitted and furnished by nature for making rapid and permanent progress whenever religion and morals are made the subjects of regular instruction and training. few who have considered carefully the facts stated above, will question the accuracy of this assertion in so far as _morals_ are concerned; but there are some who will doubt the capacity of infants and children to be influenced by _religion_. now this doubt arises from not observing the difference,--and the only difference,--that exists between morality and religion. a man or a child is _moral_ when he is kind and forgiving for his own sake, and to please himself or his parents;--but he is _religious_ when he does the same thing for conscience sake, and to please god. now children, by the very constitution of their minds, are well fitted for receiving all that kind of religious knowledge which acts upon the feelings, and influences the conduct; while the heart is peculiarly sensitive, and is disposed to bend under the influence of every expression of affection and tenderness exhibited by others towards them. their faith in all that they are told, as we have seen, is unhesitating and entire; and the capacity of their lively imaginations, for comprehending things mighty and sublime, which is too often abused by the ideas of giants, and ogres, and ghosts, is sanctified and refined by hearing of the greatness, and goodness, and love of the great creator of heaven and of earth. when they are informed of his affection and tenderness to them individually;--of his mercy and grace in saving them from the awful consequences of sin by the substitution of his own son for their sakes;--of his numerous benefits, and his unceasing care;--of his constant presence with them though unseen; and of his hatred of sin, and his love of holiness;--there is no mixture of doubt to neutralize the effects of these truths; and they much more willingly and unreservedly give themselves up to their influence, than those who are older. hence, the repeated declarations of our lord, that "unless we become as little children, we shall in no case enter into the kingdom of god." a simple enumeration therefore of the benefits they have received from this kind and condescending heavenly father, is well fitted to fill the heart of an unsophisticated child with affection and zeal,--and most powerfully to constrain him to avoid every thing that he is told will grieve and offend him, and to watch for opportunities to do what he now knows will honour and please him. this is religion; and it is peculiarly the religion of the young;--and that man or woman will be found most religious, who, both in spirit and in action, shall approach nearest to it in its purity and simplicity. from all these considerations we see, that nature has intended that the first part of the child's education shall consist almost exclusively of moral and religious training;--and this we think cannot be disputed by any one who considers the above facts dispassionately, or who will allow his mind to act as it ought to do under the influence of ascertained truth. we shall now therefore offer a few remarks on the manner in which this may most effectually be carried into effect; or, in other words, how nature may most successfully be imitated in the application of knowledge by means of the moral sense. . the first thing to be observed here then is, that the early efforts of the parent or teacher are to be employed for disciplining the child under the influence of the executive powers of conscience.--the child is to be trained to the perfect government of his inclinations and temper, by a watchful attention on the part of the parent to every instance of their exhibition in his daily conduct, the regulation of the desires, the softening down of the passions, the eradicating of evil propensities, the restraining and overcoming the exercise of self-will, the converting of selfishness into benevolence, and the cultivating and strengthening of self-controul within, and of sympathy, and forbearance, and kindness to all without. these are the great ends which the parent and teacher are to have in view in all their dealings with the child. they are, in short, to take care that their pupil be reduced to a state of enlightened submission, and uniform obedience; and for that purpose, they are to employ all the means and the machinery provided by nature, in the use of which she has afforded them abundant examples. in the accomplishment of these ends, _the agent_ employed has much in her power. it is a delicate, as well as an important work; and here, more than perhaps in any after period of the child's educational progress, an affectionate and enlightened agency is of the greatest importance. in that constant watchfulness and exertion, necessary to check or to controul the unceasing and often unreasonable desires of a froward child, there is naturally created in the mind of a hireling or a stranger, a feeling of irritation and dislike, which nothing but enlightened philanthropy, or high moral principle, will ever be able thoroughly to overcome;--and these qualifications are scarcely to be expected in those who are usually picked up to assist the mother during this important season. in families, nature has graciously balanced this effect, and amply provided for it, in the deep-seated and unalterable affection of the parent. the mother then is the proper agent, selected and duly qualified by nature for superintending this important work during this early period. the out-bursts and irregularities of natural depravity in the young, must be met by an unconquerable affection, exhibited in the exercise of gentleness, guided by firmness;--of kindness and forbearance, combined with a steady and an untiring perseverance. irregularity or caprice in the nurse, may be the ruin of the morals of the child. the selection of assistance here is often requisite, and yet how few comparatively of those into whose hands children and infants are placed, possess the high qualifications necessary for this important occupation?[ ] the parent who from any cause is prevented from taking charge of the superintendence of her offspring at this period, incurs a serious responsibility in the choice of her assistant; for if these qualifications be awanting, or, if they be not exercised by the nurse or the keeper, the happiness and moral welfare of the child during life are in imminent danger. . the child is not only to be trained to think and to act properly, but he must be trained to do so _under the influence of motives_. if this be neglected, we are not imitating nature in her mode of applying knowledge by means of the moral sense. we have seen, as formerly noticed, that a child under the influence of conscience, has always a painful feeling of self-reproach, or remorse, after it has done wrong; and a delightful feeling of self-approval and joy, when it has done something that is praiseworthy. these are employed by nature as powerful motives to prevent the repetition of the one, and to win the child to the frequent or regular performance of the other;--and this is their effect. in imitating her in this part of her educational process, we must in like manner follow in the spirit of this principle. there must be motives of action held out to the child; something that will tend to keep him from the commission of evil, and something that will stimulate and encourage him in doing good. both are necessary, and therefore, neither of them should be neglected. what these motives ought to be, we shall immediately shew; but at present, we are anxious to establish the fact, that motives to do good, should be invariably employed with our pupils, as well as motives to avoid evil. in ordinary life, we generally find too much of the one, and too little of the other. the fear of punishment held out to prevent mischief or evil, is common enough; but there is seldom sufficient attention paid to the providing of proper incitements to the practice of virtue. some, indeed, have gone the length of affirming that there ought to be no such incitement held out to the young; under the erroneous idea, that actions performed for an equivalent, or in the hope of a reward, cease to be virtuous. but the same reasoning would apply with almost equal force to the fear of punishment in stimulating to duty, or in deterring from wickedness; and yet they would scarcely affirm, that the child who, for fear of the consequences, refused to break the sabbath or to tell a lie, was equally guilty with the boy who did both. there are, no doubt, some motives to virtue that are higher and more noble than others, as there are differences in the degrading nature of punishment employed to deter men from vice. but both kinds may be necessary for different persons. the man who forgives his enemy because he seeks the approbation of his maker and the reward promised by him, and the man who does so, because he wishes to live in quiet, and to consult his own ease;--the boy who refrains from sin lest he should offend god, and another who does the same from the fear of the rod,--are each influenced by motives, although they are of a very different kind. but it is plain, that the motives employed may be equally efficient, and that they ought to be used according to their influence upon the individual, and his advancement in the paths of morality and religion. where the higher motive has not as yet acquired influence, the lower motive must be employed; but to refuse the employment of either would be wrong, and the sentiment which would totally exclude them, has no countenance in nature, in experience, nor in scripture. in nature, we see the directly opposite principle exhibited; and find that the remorse of conscience consequent upon crime, in preventing future transgressions, is not more powerful in those whose moral status is low, than is the feeling of delight and joy after an act of benevolence, which excites to new deeds of charity, in those whose religious attainments are greater. scripture, and the history of all those whom scripture holds out for imitation, unite in teaching the same sentiment. there are many more promises in the sacred record given to virtue, than there are threatenings against vice; and the highest altitudes of holiness are not only represented as having been attained by the influence of these promises; but the persons who have already reached them, are still urged to greater exertions, and a farther advance, by the reiteration of their number and their value. moses, we are told, "had an eye to the recompense of reward;" and our lord himself, "for the joy that was set before him," endured the cross. let us not then attempt a better method than god has sanctioned; and in our intercourse with the young, let us not only deter them from the commission of evil by the fear of disfavour or the rod, but let us also incite them to virtue, by the hope of approbation and of a future reward. . in our enquiry into the practical working of the moral sense, we found, not only that there were motives of action employed for encouraging the pupil to virtue, and for deterring him from vice; but we found also, that these motives referred chiefly to god, to a future judgment, and to eternity. in our attempts to imitate nature in this particular feature of her dealing with the moral sense, we begin more distinctly to perceive the high value of religious instruction to the young, and are led directly to the conclusion, that the motives to be employed with children for encouraging and rewarding good conduct, must be those chiefly of a spiritual kind, referring to god, and to his favour or disapprobation, rather than to the rod, or to any secular reward. the importance of imitating nature in this matter, for giving a high tone both to the sentiments and to the morals of the young, is very great. it is now generally admitted, that secular, and especially corporal punishments, are never required, except in connection with a very low and degraded state of the moral sentiments; but it is equally correct with respect to secular rewards for moral actions. they may both of them at times be necessary, but in that case they are necessary evils; and, as a class of motives, they should never be the rule, but invariably the exception.--we must not, however, be misunderstood. we are no more for abandoning _secular rewards_, than we are for giving up corporal punishments. we speak not here of their _abandonment_, but of their _enlightened regulation_;--both of them may be of service. but what we wish to point out as an important feature in moral training is, that they are, or should be, but seldom necessary; and that they ought never to be resorted to except when they really are so. the differences observable in the results arising from _secular_, and those from _moral_ motives, are very different, both as regards their power in restraining from vice, and their influence in stimulating to virtue. what, for example, would we think of the moral condition of a child, or of the virtue of his actions, if he had to be hired by a comfit, or a piece of money, to do every act of kindness which he performed; or if he refused to relieve a sister, or prevent an injury to his companion, unless similarly rewarded? this secular spirit in morals, when thus exposed in its deformity, is obnoxious to every sentiment of virtue, and shews itself to be a mere system of buying and selling. but how very different does the reward appear, and the feeling which it excites, when that reward assumes the moral character, and is found to be the desire of pleasing the parent, and much more when it seeks the approbation of the almighty? every one will see how beneficial and elevating the effects of cherishing the one must be, and how debasing comparatively is the influence of the other. that children are capable of being acted upon by these higher motives, we have already seen; and, when we aim at securing the effects which they are calculated to produce, we are closely imitating nature in one of her most important operations, and may therefore calculate upon a corresponding degree of success.[ ] . in the operations of nature by means of the moral sense, we found, that the impressions made upon the mind in reference to sin or duty, were always most efficient, and most permanent, when the sin or duty was presented to them in the form of example;--that the example increased in efficiency and interest as it was familiar or near;--and that it became still more powerful when it was actually seen or experienced.--from these circumstances we are led to conclude, that the lives and conduct of men, and especially the narrative parts of scripture, are the proper materials to be employed in the moral training of the young; and the mode of making use of them is also very plainly indicated. the closer we can bring the lesson taught to the child's own experience, or to his own circumstances, the more familiar will it become, and the deeper will be the impression it will make. an instance of infant disinterestedness or heroism, in the parlour or the play-ground, pointed out, and placed in connection with corresponding circumstances in the lives or conduct of those from whom they have previously drawn moral lessons, will render the latter much more familiar and practical, and will create more energetic desires, and stronger feelings of emulation with respect to the former. or if the conduct of the person of whom the child hears or reads, can be brought home and applied to his own case and circumstances; or if he can be made to perceive the very same dispositions or conduct exhibited in his companions; or if he can be made to see how he himself can embody in his own conduct those principles and actions which god has approved, and requires to be imitated,--the end of the teacher will be much more certainly gained, than it can be in any other way. this is moral training, conducted by the proper moral means; and to attempt to gain the same end by means which do not either more or less embody these principles, will be found to be much more difficult, and much less efficient. whoever will consider what is implied by our lord's address to the pharisees who erroneously blamed his disciples for unlawfully, as they thought, plucking the ears of corn on the sabbath, will see this method of reading and applying scripture distinctly pointed out. "have ye never read," said our lord, "what david did, and those who were with him?" this they might have done frequently; but the mere reading could never answer the purpose for which it was recorded. the moral lesson must be drawn, and it must also be applied to similar cases of mere ceremonial observance. to apply this principle, then, to the moral training of the young by means of scripture history, the method is obvious.--the events of the narrative are to be used as examples or warnings to the child in corresponding circumstances. if, for example, the teacher wishes to enforce the duty and the benefits of patience, the history of job has been provided for the purpose. when that story is taught, and the lessons drawn and applied to the ordinary contingencies of life, such as accident, disease, or distress in a companion; or to circumstances in which the child himself may hereafter be placed; he will be better prepared for his duty in such events, or, in the words of scripture, he will be "thoroughly furnished" to this good work. if they are to be taught meekness, the history of moses, or of other pious men who have been tried and disciplined as he was, will be found best adapted for the purpose. and more especially, the life of our lord, in which all the virtues concentrate, has been given "as our example, that we may follow his steps," and which ought especially to be employed in training the young "to love and to good works." the reason why example is preferable to precept in teaching children, will be obvious, when we consider the nature of the principle of grouping, as exercised by the young, and the difficulty they experience in remembering abstract or didactic subjects. when a child receives instruction by a story, the imagination is enlisted in the exercise, the grouping of the persons and circumstances assists the memory, and the moral and practical lessons which they have drawn from the narrative, are associated with it, and remain ready at the command of the will whenever they are required.--it was for this reason among others, that our lord taught so frequently by parables; and, in doing so, has not only set the parent and teacher an important example, but has, in his teaching, illustrated a principle in our nature which he himself had long before implanted for this very purpose. . in our investigations into the working of the moral sense, we found, that there was a marked difference between the decisions of conscience when judging of actions done by _ourselves_, and those which were performed by _others_. as long as the child is innocent of any particular vice, he can judge impartially of its nature and demerit; but when the temptation to commit it has really begun to darken his mind, and more particularly when he has at last fallen before it, all the selfish principles of his nature are employed to deceive his better judgment, and to drown or overbear the voice of conscience within him. from this we learn the importance of preparing the mind _beforehand_, for encountering those temptations to which the pupil will most likely be exposed; not only by teaching him to draw the proper lessons from corresponding subjects, but by making him apply these lessons to his own case and affairs. the teacher is to suppose circumstances, in which he, his parents, and companions, are most likely to be placed, and in which the lessons drawn from the narrative will be required to weaken or to prevent the influences of temptation. as, for example, it might be asked, "if you had accidentally broken a pane of glass, and your parents asked you who did it, what should you do?" there would in this case, while it was only supposed, be no temptation to stifle conscience, or to bend to the influences of selfishness or fear, and the child would accordingly answer readily, that he ought to confess his fault, and tell that he himself had done it. when again asked, "from what do you get that lesson?" he will most probably reply, "from jacob telling a lie to his parent;--from ananias and sapphira telling a lie;--from the command, 'lie not one to another,' and 'confess your faults one to another,'" &c. by this means the child is forewarned;--he is prepared and fortified against the sin, if the temptation should occur; but which would not have been the case without this or some similar exercise. . we have also seen, in our investigations into the working of the moral sense, the deplorable effects of stifling conscience, and of the child's being permitted to repeat his transgressions; while, upon the same principle, the most beneficial consequences result from the child's frequently practising self-denial, self-controul, and acts of benevolence. in the one case, sin and vice lose much of their deformity, and gain greatly in strength; while, in the other, every act of virtue makes vice appear more hideous, and excites to a more decided advance in the paths of rectitude. from these circumstances we are led to conclude, that every act of sin in the pupil ought to be carefully guarded against by the parent or teacher, and, if possible, prevented; while every exertion ought to be made to induce to the performance of good and kind actions, however humble or unimportant these actions in themselves may be. if god does "not despise the day of small things," neither should we; and one act of kindness by a child, however trifling, will most assuredly prepare the way for another. this circumstance also shews the impropriety of attempting to magnify faults, when perhaps no fault was designed; and the evil consequences, as well as the injustice, of refraining to commend a child, when commendation is due. the timorous fear, in many conscientious parents, of making children _vain_, is the common excuse for this unnatural conduct. such persons seem to confound things _vain_ with things _valuable_, though they are perfectly opposed to each other. approbation for any definite quality, excites the individual to excel in _that_ quality, whether it be worthless or otherwise. but virtuous deeds are not worthless; and by commending, as our lord repeatedly did, those who have done well, they, by that principle of our nature of which we are here speaking, are strongly excited to do better. to feed vanity, is to commend vanities; and they who prize and commend beauty, or fashion, or dress, or frivolous accomplishments, may be guilty of this folly; but not the parent or the person who commends in a child those things which are really commendable, and after which it is his greatest glory to aspire. . we have already taken notice of nature's mode of employing motives for the prevention of evil, and for the encouragement of the child in virtue, and how this is to be imitated in the education of the young; but we have left for this last section, and for separate consideration, the greatest and most powerful motive of all. this is a view of the inherent sinfulness and danger of sin, and the means appointed by god for man's redemption from it. all other motives to restrain men from sin, and to induce them to follow holiness, when compared with an enlightened view of this one, sink into insignificance. god's hatred of sin, and his holy abhorrence of it in every form, when contemplated in the abstract, may have a response from the head of him who compares it with his own detestation of meanness, and fraud, and profligacy; but when this hatred of vice in the almighty is viewed in connection with gospel truth, and is contemplated in its effects upon one to whom it was only imputed, it begins to wear a very different complexion; and, as a motive to beware of that which god is determined to punish, and which he would not pass over even in his own son, it leaves all other motives at an immeasurable distance. the same thing may be said of god's goodness and mercy in the gospel, as a motive for us to love him, and to glory in denying ourselves to serve him. the extent of the danger from which he has saved us, the amount and the permanence of the glory which he has procured for us, and the price that was paid for both, will powerfully "constrain" spiritual minds, to "live no longer to themselves, but to him who hath died for them." but the question which will be asked here is, "are children capable of all this?"--we unhesitatingly answer, from long experience, that they are. whoever doubts the fact has only to try. can a child not understand that a distinction ought to be made between the person in a family who endeavours to make all happy, and another whose constant aim is to make them all miserable?--can he not understand, that the parent who refuses to punish a wicked child, is in effect bribing others to join him in his wickedness?--can he not understand that a debt due by one, may be paid by another?--and that a simple reliance on the word of his benefactor, followed by submission to his will, may be all that is required to secure his discharge?--no one will say that a child is incapable of understanding these simple truths; and if he can comprehend _them_, he can be made to understand and appreciate the leading truths of the gospel. the teacher has only himself clearly to perceive them; and then, divesting the truths of those unnecessary technicalities which are sometimes, it is feared, used very improperly and unnecessarily, he ought to convey them to the child, either orally, or by some simple catechism suited for the purpose. wherever this is done in effect, there education will prosper; and when it shall become general among the young, it will be found to be "as life from the dead." footnotes: [ ] see pages to [ ] note x. [ ] note y. chap. x. _on the application of our knowledge to the common affairs of life._ there is another point connected with the practical use of our knowledge, which deserves a separate and careful consideration. it is the method of applying our knowledge, or rather the lessons derived from our knowledge, to the common and daily affairs of life. in this exercise both old and young are equally concerned;--but it is evident that youth is the proper time for training to its practice. to acquire this valuable art, the pupils in every seminary ought to be regularly and frequently exercised in the application of their lessons;--first, when they have been drawn from a particular subject, which has occupied their attention for the day; and afterwards generally, from any part of their previous knowledge. to illustrate what we mean by this application of our knowledge, let us suppose a person placed in difficult circumstances, and that he is desirous of knowing the path of duty, and the particular line of conduct which he should pursue. if he is to trust to himself for the information required, it is evident that he must either fall back upon his previous knowledge, and the instructions he has already received; or he must go forward upon a mere conjecture, or on chance, which is always dangerous. all knowledge is given expressly for such cases, and especially scripture knowledge; the great design of which is, "that the man of god may be thoroughly furnished to good works." but if the person has not been trained to make use of his knowledge in this way and for this purpose, he will be nearly as much at a loss as if his knowledge had never been received. hence the great importance of training the young early and constantly to draw upon their knowledge for direction and guidance in every variety of situation in which the parent or teacher can suppose them to be placed in future life. by this means they will be prepared for encountering temptation, which is often more than the half of the battle;--they will form the habit of acting by rule, instead of being carried forward by fashion, by prejudice, or by chance;--and they will soon acquire a manly confidence, in deciding and acting, both as to the matter and the manner, of performing all that they are called upon to do, in every juncture, and whether the duty be important in the ordinary sense of that term or otherwise. for this special mode of applying knowledge, we have not only the indications plainly given in nature, which we have endeavoured to illustrate, but we have also scripture precept, and scripture example. leaving the numerous instances in the old testament, we shall confine ourselves to a few given by our lord himself, and his apostles. for example, he prepared his disciples for the temptations which the love of worldly goods would throw in the way of their escape from the destruction of jerusalem, by enjoining them to "remember lot's wife." now let us observe how a teacher, in communicating the history of lot's wife for the first time, would have prepared these disciples for such a difficulty in the same way. when they had read, that while fleeing for her life, the love of her worldly goods made her sinfully look back, so that she was turned into a pillar of salt; the obvious lesson drawn from this would be, that "we ought to be on our guard against worldly mindedness;"--and the _application_ of that lesson to the coming circumstances would have been something like this. "when you are commanded to flee from jerusalem for your lives, and remember that your worldly goods are left behind, what should you do?"--"we should not turn back for them." "from what do you get that lesson?"--"from the conduct and fate of lot's wife." in a similar way, the apostle james prepared christians for humble resignation and patient endurance under coming trials, by calling to their remembrance "the patience of job." he stated the trials to which they were to be exposed, and then he directed their attention to the scripture example which was to regulate them in their endurance of them. now it is obvious that a teacher, in communicating the history of job to the young, should follow this example, and should make the same use of it that the apostle did, not only by drawing the lesson, that he "ought to be patient," but in _applying_ that lesson to temptations to which the child is likely to be exposed, as james did to the circumstances in which he knew christians were to be placed. as for example, when the child had drawn the lesson, that "we should be patient under suffering," the teacher might apply it in a great variety of ways, each of which would be a delightful exercise of mind to the child,--would impress the lesson and its source more firmly upon the memory,--and would prepare him for the circumstances in which the lesson might be required. were the teacher accordingly to ask, "if you were confined by long continued sickness;--or if you were suffering under great pain;--or if you were oppressed by the cruelty of others, and could not help yourself;--or, if you were grieved by being separated from your friends,--what would be your duty?" the answer to each would be, "we ought to be patient."--"from what do you get that lesson?"--"from the conduct of job, who was patient under his sufferings." the apostle paul follows a similar plan, in applying the practical lessons drawn from the conduct of the israelites in the wilderness, for fortifying the corinthians against temptations to which they were likely to be exposed,[ ] and tells them that this is the use to be made of old testament history. these lives are "ensamples," and are "written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come."--in like manner he forewarned the hebrews against discontent and covetousness,[ ] by drawing a _general_ lesson from a _special_ promise made to joshua; and then exhorts every christian to apply it to himself personally, by employing the language which he puts into their mouths, "the lord is my helper, and i will not fear what man can do unto me." in the same way, when our lord repeatedly says, "have ye not read?" and, "thus it is written," he gives us obvious indications of the importance of the duty of thus preparing for temptation, by the application of our lessons from scripture. they are each and all of them examples of practical lessons derived from knowledge formerly acquired, and now employed in the way of application, to connect that knowledge with corresponding circumstances as they occur in ordinary life. the lesson, it will be observed, and as we formerly explained, is always made the connecting link which unites the two; and without which there is no such thing as the bringing of knowledge and its use together, when that knowledge is required. in other words, without the lesson, knowledge is _useless_; and, without the application of the lesson, knowledge is _never used_. both therefore are necessary, and both should be rendered familiar to the young. it is only necessary here to observe, that in teaching the children to _draw_ the lessons, the teacher proceeds forwards from the knowledge communicated, and, by deducing the lesson, prepares the child for the events in life when they shall be necessary;--but in _applying_ the lessons, he proceeds backwards, from the events, through the lesson to the knowledge from which it is derived. we have a beautiful example of this in the recorded temptations of our lord. he was tempted to turn stones into bread; here was the event which required a knowledge of the corresponding duty; and he immediately applied the lesson that "we should not distrust god," and through this lesson, though not expressed, he went directly back to the source from which it was drawn, by saying, "thus it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of god." when in like manner he was tempted to throw himself from the temple, he immediately, through the lesson "that we should not unnecessarily presume on the goodness of god," went to the passage of scripture from which it was drawn;--and, in the same way, when tempted to worship satan, there was precisely the same process;--a lesson, derived from previous knowledge and applicable to the circumstances, used as a uniting link to make the duty and the scripture exactly to correspond. of doing all this which we have described above; even children are capable. this has been again and again proved by repeated experiments, and now by extensive experience in many schools. the difficulties of introducing it, even for the first time in any seminary, do not lie with the children, who in every case have shewn themselves quite adequate to the exercise; and wherever it has been followed up with corresponding energy, they have been raised much higher in the grade of intelligence and mental capacity by its means. this will be evident from the following, taken from among many examples. the criminals in edinburgh jail during the short time they were under instruction, acquired considerable facility in this valuable art. the report states, that "some of them were afterwards exercised on the application of the lessons. this part consists in supposing certain circumstances and temptations, to which they may be exposed in ordinary life, and then leaving them, by a very profitable, and usually a very pleasant operation of their own minds, in reference to these, to call up to their recollection, and to hold in review, the whole accumulated range of their previous knowledge. among the various classes of things thus brought in order before the eye of the mind, they are easily taught to discriminate all those precepts and examples which are analogous to the cases supposed, from which again they very readily select appropriate lessons to _guide them in these emergencies_; thus linking the lessons to the circumstances, which is done in the previous exercise of deducing them; and then the circumstances to the lessons; and in this manner, establishing a double tie between the understanding and the conscience. "for example, a woman from the lock-up house, being asked how she ought to conduct herself when the term of her confinement was expired? answered, that she ought not to return to her sinful courses, or wicked companions, lest a worse fate should befal her. when again interrogated where she got this lesson, she immediately referred to the case of lot, who, being once rescued from captivity by abraham, returned again to wicked sodom, where he soon lost all his property, and escaped only with his life. another being asked what she should do, when involved in a quarrel with troublesome companions? replied, that she should endeavour to be at peace, even though she should lose a little by it; and produced as her authority the conduct of abraham, who when lot's herdsmen and his could not agree, gave lot his choice of the country, in order to secure peace." the children in aberdeen also found no difficulty in perceiving the use, and in applying the lessons to their common affairs. the report of that experiment states, that "the most important part of the exercise,--that which shewed more particularly the great value of this system, and with which the meeting were especially struck,--was the appropriate application of the lessons from scripture, which they had previously drawn. they were desired to suppose themselves placed in a great variety of situations, and were asked how they ought to conduct themselves in each of these. a few examples may be given, though it is quite impossible to do justice to the subject. a boy, for instance, was asked, 'if your parents should become infirm and poor, how ought you to act towards them?' 'i ought,' replied the boy, 'to work, and help them.' and being asked, 'whence he drew that lesson?' he referred to the conduct of ruth, who supported naomi and herself, by gleaning in the fields.--a girl was asked, 'if your mother were busy, and had more to do in the family than she could easily accomplish, what ought you to do?' her answer was, 'i ought to give her assistance;' and she referred to the conduct of saul, in assisting his father to recover the asses which were lost; and to that of david, in feeding his father's sheep when his brothers were at the wars.--a little boy was asked, 'if your parents were too indulgent, and seemed to give you all your own will, what ought you to do?' 'i ought not to take it,' replied the boy very readily; and added, that it was taking his own will that caused the ruin of the prodigal son. another boy being asked, 'if you should become rich, what would be your duty to the poor?' answered, 'i ought to be good to the poor; but it would be better to give them work than to give them money; for boaz did not give ruth grain, but bade his shearers let some fall, that she might get it by her own industry.'" in the experiment in london, a child was asked, "when you live with brothers and sisters who are wicked, what should you do?" and answered, "i should not join with them in their sins." and when asked where she got that lesson, answered, "from joseph, who would not join with his brothers in their sin."--another was asked, "when you see others going heedlessly on in the commission of sin, what should you do?" and answered, "i should warn them of their danger;" and referred to noah, who warned the wicked while building the ark.--again, "when people about you are given to quarrel, what should you do?" we should endeavour to make peace; and referred to abram endeavouring to remain at peace with lot's herdsmen.--"when you have grown up to be men and women, what should you do?" "we should go to a trade, and be industrious;" and referred to cain and abel following their different employments.--"when two situations occur, one where you will get more money, but where the people are wicked and ungodly; and the other, where you will get less money, but have better company, which should you choose?" "the good company, though with less money;" and referred to lot's desire for riches taking him to live in wicked sodom, where he lost all that he had.--"when your parents get old, and are unable to support themselves, what should you do?" "we should work for them;" and referred to ruth gleaning for the support of her old mother-in-law; and another referred to joseph bringing his father to nourish him in goshen.--"when your parents or masters give you any important work or duty to perform, what should you do?" "we should pray to god for success, and for his direction and help in performing it;" and referred to abraham's servant praying at the well.--"when we find people wishing to take advantage of us and cheat us, what should we do?" "leave them;" and referred to jacob with his family leaving laban.--"were any one to tempt you to lie or commit a sin, what should you do?" "we ought not to be tempted;" and referred to abraham making sarah tell a lie in egypt.--"how should you behave to strangers?" "we should be kind to them;" and referred to lot lodging the angels.--"were a master or mistress to have the choice of two servants, one clever, but ungodly, and the other not so clever, but pious, which one should be chosen?" "the pious servant;" and referred to potiphar, whom god blessed and prospered for joseph's sake.--"when any one has injured us, what should we do?" "forgive them;" and referred to joseph forgiving and nourishing his brethren.--"when you have once escaped the snares and designs of bad company, what should you do?" "we should never go back again;" and referred to lot going back again to live in sodom from which he at last escaped only with his life. in the account given of the newry experiment, the boys were equally ready in applying for their own benefit the lessons they had drawn from their knowledge of anatomy and physiology. the account says, that "the most interesting, as well as the most edifying part of the examination, and which exhibited the great value of this method of teaching the sciences to the young, was the _application_ of these lessons to the circumstances of ordinary life. circumstances were supposed, in which they or others might be placed, and they were required to apply the lessons they had drawn for their direction, and for regulating their conduct in every such case. this they did with great sagacity, and evident delight, and in a manner which convinced the audience that the few hours during which they had been employed in making these acquisitions, instead of being irksome and laborious, as education is too often considered by the young, were obviously among the happiest and the shortest they had ever spent in almost any employment,--their play not excepted. we shall give a specimen of these, and the answers given, as nearly as can be recollected. "the case of walking in a frosty day was supposed, and they were asked what, in that case, ought to be done? the answer was, that we should take care not to fall. why? because the bones are easily broken in frosty weather.--when heated and feverish in a close room, what should be done? let in fresh air; because it is the want of oxygen in the air we breathe that causes such a feeling, but which the admission of fresh air supplies.--when troubled with listlessness, and impeded circulation, what should we do? take exercise; because the contraction of the muscles by walking, working, or otherwise, forces the blood to the heart, and through the lungs, by which health and vigour is promoted.--where should we take exercise? in the country, or in the open air; because there the air is purer than in a house or a town, where fires, smoke, frequent breathing, and other things, render the atmosphere unwholesome.--would breathing rapidly, without exercise, not nourish the blood equally well? no; because although more air be drawn into the lungs, there would be no more blood to combine with its oxygen.--what should be done, when candles in a crowded church burn dim, although they do not need snuffing? let in fresh air; because the air is then unwholesome for want of oxygen; which, carried to a great extent, would cause fainting in the people, and would extinguish the candles themselves.--when a fire is like to go out, what should be done? blow it up with bellows. why not by the mouth? because the air blown from the lungs has lost great part of its oxygen, by which alone the fire burns. why then does a fire blown with the mouth burn at all? because part of the oxygen remains, said one boy; and another added, "and because part of the surrounding air is blown in along with it." at the second meeting with these boys, occasioned by the unexpected circumstances formerly alluded to, they were summarily, and without previous notice, taken from their school to another public meeting, without knowing for what purpose they were brought, and had to undergo a still more searching examination on what they had been previously taught. here again they shewed their dexterity in making use of their lessons, by the application of them, and proved that they had been doing so to themselves in the intercourse which they had had with their relations at home. the account goes on to say, that "they were then more fully and searchingly examined than at first; and there being more time, they were much longer under the exercise. it was then found, that the information formerly communicated was not only remembered, but that the several truths were much more familiar, in themselves and in their connection with each other, than they had been at the former meeting. this had evidently arisen from their own frequent meditations upon them since that time, and their application of the several lessons, either with one another, their parents, or themselves. the medical gentlemen were again present, and professed themselves equally pleased. the lessons, _with considerable additions_, were also given, and the applications especially were greatly extended. in these last they appeared to be perfectly at home; and relevant circumstances might have been multiplied for double the time, without their having any difficulty in applying the lessons, and giving a reason for their application." but the most satisfactory of all the experiments on this point, as implying the possession of a well-cultivated mind, holding at command an extensive field of useful knowledge, was the one in leith, although from accident, or inadvertence on the part of the reporter, a large portion of it has been lost to the public. the following fragment, however, will be sufficient to shew its nature and its value. the examinator wished "to ascertain the power which the children possessed of applying the passage to their own conduct; and for this purpose, he proposed several circumstances in which they might be placed, and asked them to show how this portion of scripture directed them to act.--supposing, said he, that your father and mother were to neglect to take you to church next sunday, would that be wrong?--yes.--from what do you get that lesson? and when he was twelve years old, they went up to jerusalem after the custom of the feast.--is it right that children should go to church with their parents? yes.--why? because jesus went with his parents.--would it be right for you to go out of church during the time of the service? no.--why? joseph and mary remained till the service was over. "the next point to be ascertained was, whether the children were able, not only to perceive what passages of scripture were applicable in particular circumstances, but also to find out what circumstances in life those passages might be applied to. for this purpose, mr gall asked, 'could you tell me any circumstances which may happen, in which you may be called on to remember that joseph and mary attended public worship?'--if a friend were to take dinner or tea with us, that should not detain us from attending church.--idle amusements should not detain us from church; and nothing should keep us from it but sickness. "mr gall again expressed his unabated satisfaction at the results of the examination, in proving the intellectual acquirements of the children. but so important did the application of the lessons appear to him, that he must trespass still further upon the time of the meeting by a more severe test of the children's practical training on this particular point. it was a test which he believed to be altogether new to them; but if they should succeed, it will prove still more satisfactorily, that their knowledge of scripture has made it become, in reality, a light to their feet, and a lamp to their path. "mr gall then produced a little narrative tract, which he read aloud to the children; and after the statement of each moral circumstance detailed in it, he asked the children whether it was right or wrong. when the children answered that it was _right_, he required them to prove that it was so, by some statement in the word of god, because the bible should to them, and to every christian, be the _only_ standard of what is right and wrong; and so, in the same manner, when they said that it was _wrong_, he required them also to prove it from scripture. "as soon as the children perceived what was wanted, passages of scripture, both of precept and example, were brought forward with as much readiness and discrimination as before. the only exception, was one or two quotations from the shorter catechism in proof of their positions, which were of course rejected, as deficient of the required authority." the concluding remarks by the right honourable and reverend reporters of the experiment in edinburgh, may with propriety be here given, as it is applicable, not only to prison discipline, but to education in general. "the result of this important experiment," they say, "was, in every point, satisfactory. not only had much religious knowledge been acquired by the pupils, and that of the most substantial, and certainly the least evanescent kind; but it appeared to have been acquired with ease, and even with satisfaction--a circumstance of material importance in every case, but especially in that of adult prisoners. but the most uncommon and important feature of it was, the readiness which they, in this short period, had acquired of deducing _practical lessons_ from what they had read or heard, for the regulation of their conduct. every leading circumstance in scripture, by this peculiar feature of the system, was made to reflect its light on the various common occurrences of ordinary life, by which the pupils themselves were enabled to judge of the real nature of each particular act, and to adopt, or to shun it, as the conscience thus enlightened should dictate. the acting and re-acting, indeed, of every branch of the system, upon each other, interweaves so thoroughly the lessons of scripture with the feelings and thoughts of their minds, and associates them so closely with the common circumstances of life, that it is almost impossible that either the portions of the bible which they have thus learned, or the practical lessons thus drawn from them, should, at any future period, escape from their remembrance. the evolutions of their future life, will disclose circumstances which they are prepared to meet, by having lessons laid up in store, adapted to such occurrences; and especially, when the mental habit is formed of applying scripture in this manner, there is scarcely an event which can happen, but against its tempting influence they will be fortified by the armour of divine truth.--their compliance with temptation, should that take place, will not be done without a compunction of conscience, arising from some pointed and warning example that comes in all its urgency before their minds;--and they will, when seduced from rectitude, have a light within them, and a clue of divine truth, to guide them out of the dark and mazy labyrinth of error and crime, into the path of duty and virtue. it is god alone that can bless such instruction, and render it savingly efficacious; but surely the inference is fair, that this system furnishes us with an instrument, which, if skilfully employed, will effect all that man can do for his erring brother or sister." footnotes: [ ] cor. x. - . [ ] heb. xiii. , chap. xi. _on the imitation of nature, in training her pupils fluently to communicate their knowledge._ there is a fourth, or supplementary process in nature's educational course, the successful imitation of which promises to be of great general benefit, as soon as it shall be universally adopted in our elementary schools. it is, as it were, the door-way of intellect,--the break in the cloud, through which the sun-light of concocted knowledge is to find its way, to enlighten and cheer the general community.--we refer to that acquirement, by which persons are enabled, without distraction of mind, internally to prepare and arrange their ideas, at the moment they are verbally communicating them to others. when this process is analysed, we find, as explained in a former chapter, that it consists simply in an ability to think, and to arrange our thoughts at the time we are speaking;--to exercise the mind on one set of ideas, at the moment we are giving expression to another. simple as this at first sight may appear, we have seen that it is but very gradually arrived at;--that many persons, otherwise possessing great abilities, never can command it;--that it is altogether an acquisition depending upon the use of proper means;--but that, at the same time, any person whatever, by submitting to the appropriate discipline, may attain almost any degree of perfection in its exercise. the object required by the teacher, therefore, is a series of exercises, by means of which his pupils will be trained to think and to speak at the same moment; to have their minds busily occupied with some object or idea, while their powers of speech are engaged in giving utterance to something else. for the purpose of suggesting such an exercise, we shall again attend shortly to the exhibition of the process, as we find it under the superintendence of nature. an infant, as we formerly explained, can for a long period utter only one or two words at a time,--not because it is unacquainted with more, but because it has not yet acquired the power of thinking the second word, while it is giving utterance to the first. it has to attain, by steady practice, and by slow degrees, the ability of commanding the thoughts, while uttering two, three, or more words consecutively, without a pause. a child also, whose mind is engaged with its toys, cannot for some time, during its early mental advances, attend to a speaker; much less can it think of, and arrange an answer to a question, while it continues its play. it has to stop, and think; it then gives the information required; and after this it will perhaps resume its play, but not sooner. when a child can speak and continue its amusements, it is an evidence of considerable mental power; and as nature makes use of its play, for the purpose of increasing this ability, the teacher, and especially the parents, ought to excite and encourage every attempt at conversation while the pupil is so employed. but our object at present is to arrive at one or more regular exercises that shall embody the principle; exercises which may at all times be at the command, and under the controul of the teacher and parent, and which may form part of the daily useful arrangements of the school or the family. the following are a few, among many, which we shall briefly notice, before introducing one which promises to be still more beneficial, and more generally applicable to the economy of literary pursuits, and the arrangements of the academy. one of the exercises which assists in attaining the end here in view, we have already alluded to, as being successfully employed by nature for the purpose,--that is, the child's play. any amusement which requires thought or attention, is well calculated to answer this purpose,--and if the child can be induced and trained to speak and play at the same time, his thinking powers being occupied by the external use of his toys, the end of the teacher will in so far be gained. questions put to a child at that time, and answers given by him while he continues to exercise his mind upon his amusements, will prepare the way, and greatly assist in giving him the power of exercising it upon ideas, without the help of these external and tangible objects. the principle in both cases is the same, although in the one it is not carried out to the same extent as it is in the other. and here we cannot help remarking, how extensive and important a field the working of this principle opens up to the ingenious toy-man. if a game, or games, can be invented, where the child must have his attention occupied with one object, while he is obliged to answer questions, or to make observations, or to detail facts, or in any other way to employ his speaking powers extemporaneously, (not repeating words by rote,) the person who does so will greatly edify the young, and benefit the public. another method by which the principle may be called into exercise, is to tell a short story, or simple anecdote, and then to require the child to rehearse it again. in doing this, the mind of the child is employed in communing with the memory, while he is engaged in detailing to the teacher or monitor, the special circumstances in their order. upon the principles of individuation and grouping, too, (the two most important principles, be it observed, which nature employs with young children,) we can perceive, that it will be much easier for the child, and at least equally powerful in producing the effect, if the teacher or parent shall confine himself to one or two stories or anecdotes at a time, till, by repeated attempts, the child can in its own words, and in its own way, readily and fluently detail the whole of the circumstances to the parent or teacher, whenever required. a similar mode of accomplishing the same object, when the child is able to read, is, to require him at home to peruse a story of some length, and to rehearse what he can remember of it next day. this ought, however, in every case to be a narrative, or anecdote, consisting of groupings which the child can, on reading, picture on his mind. if this be neglected, there is danger of the child's being harassed and burdened, without any corresponding benefit being produced. it is here also worthy of remark, that dr mayo's "lessons on objects" may be employed for this purpose with considerable effect. if a list of qualities, such as colour, consistence, texture, &c. be put into the child's hand, and he be required to elucidate and rehearse those relating to one particular object, either placed before him, or, what is better, one with which he is acquainted, but which at the time he does not see, the eye and the mind will be engaged with his paper, and in recollecting the particular qualities of the object, at the same time that he is employed in communicating his recollections. another method for producing the same end, consists in the parent or teacher repeating a sentence to the child, and requiring him to remember it, and to spell the several words in their order. here the child has to remember the whole sentence, to observe the order of the several words, to chuse them one after another as he advances, and to remember and rehearse the letters of which each is composed. the mental exercise here is exceedingly useful, besides the advantages of training children to correct spelling. at the commencement of this exercise with a child, the sentence must be short, and he may be permitted to repeat each word after he has spelled it, which will help him to remember the word that follows;--but as he advances, he may be made to spell the whole without pronouncing the words; and the length of the sentence may be made to correspond with his ability. great care however should be taken by the teacher that this exercise be correctly performed. many other methods for exercising the child's mind and oral powers at the same moment, will be suggested by the ingenuity of teachers, and by experience; and wherever a teacher hits upon one which he finds efficient, and which works well with his children, it is to be hoped that he will not deprive others of its benefit. such communications in education, like mercy, are twice blessed. but the exercise which, for its simplicity and power, as well as for the extent of its application to the business and arrangements of the school, appears to answer the purpose best, and which embodies most extensively the stipulations required for the successful imitation of nature in this part of her process, is that which has been termed the "paraphrastic exercise." the exercise here alluded to has this important recommendation in its practical working, that while it can be employed with the child who can read no more than a sentence, it may be so modified and extended, as to exercise the mental and oral powers of the best and cleverest of the scholars to their full extent. it consists in making a child read a sentence or passage aloud; and, while he is doing so, in requiring him at the same moment, to be actively employed in detecting and throwing out certain specified words in the passage, and in selecting, arranging, and substituting others in their place; the child still keeping to the precise meaning of the author, and studying and practising, as far as possible, simplicity, brevity, elegance, and grammatical accuracy. it may be asked, "what child will ever be able to do this?" we answer with confidence, that every sane pupil, by using the proper means, may attain it. this is no hypothesis, but a fact, of which the experiment in leith gives good collateral proof, and of which long and uniform experience has afforded direct and ample evidence. any teacher, or parent indeed, may by a single experiment upon the very dullest of his pupils who can read, be satisfied on the point. such a child, by leaving out and paraphrasing first one word in a sentence, then two, three, or more, as he acquires ability, will derive all the advantages above described; and, by advancing in the exercise, he may have his talents taxed during the whole progress of his education to the full extent of their powers. it is in this that one great recommendation lies to this exercise,--it being adapted to every grade of intellect, from the child who can only paraphrase a single word at a time, to the student who, while glancing his eye over the passage, can give the scope of the whole in a perfectly new form, and in a language and style entirely his own. of the nature and versatility of this exercise we shall give a single example. let us for this purpose suppose that a child sees in the first answer of the first initiatory catechism the words, "god at first created all things to shew his greatness," and that the teacher wishes to exercise his mind in the way, and upon the principle of which we are here speaking, by making him paraphrase it. he begins by ascertaining that the child knows the exact meaning of one or more of the several terms used in the sentence, and can give the meaning in other words. as for example, he should be able to explain that the first word means, "the almighty;"--that the words at "first," here signifies, at "the beginning of time;"--that "created" means, "brought into existence;"--that the term "all things," as here used, indicates, "all the worlds in nature, with their inhabitants;"--that the phrase to "shew," means to "exhibit to his rational creatures;"--and that his "greatness," at the close implies, his "infinite majesty and perfections." now it must be obvious, that any one of these explanations may be made familiar to the dullest child that can read; and if _this_ can be done, the principle may immediately be brought into exercise. for example, when the child knows that the first word means "the almighty," and that "first" is another way of expressing "the beginning of time," he is required to read the whole sentence, and in doing so, to throw out these two words, and to substitute their meanings. he will then at once read the sentence thus: "[the almighty,] at [the beginning of time,] created all things to shew his greatness." the same thing may be done with any one or more of the others; and if the child at first feels any difficulty with two, the teacher has only, upon the principle of individuation, to make one of them familiar, before he be required to attend to a second; and to have two rendered easy before he goes forward to the third. each explanation can be mastered in its turn, and may then be employed in forming the paraphrase; by which means the child's mind is called to the performance of double duty,--reading from his book,--throwing out the required words,--remembering their explanations,--inserting them regularly and grammatically,--and perhaps transposing, and re-constructing the whole sentence,--at the moment that he is giving utterance to that which the mind had previously arranged. the same thing may be done with a sentence from any book, although not so systematically prepared for the purpose as the initiatory catechisms have been. the explanations of any of the words which may be pointed out, or under-scored by the teacher, can easily be mastered in the usual way by any of the children capable of reading them; and if he shall be gradually and regularly trained to do this frequently, his command of words, in expressing his _own_ ideas, and his ability to use them correctly, will very soon become extensive and fluent. the importance of this to the young is much more valuable and necessary than is generally supposed. nature evidently intends that childhood and youth should be the seed-time of language; and the exercise here recommended, when persevered in, is well calculated to produce an abundant harvest of words, suited for all kinds of oral communications.--its importance in this respect, as well as its efficiency in fulfilling all the stipulations necessary for imitating nature in the exercise of the principle which we are here illustrating, will be obvious to any reader by a very simple experiment. for this purpose the sentence which we have already employed may, for the sake of illustration, be represented in the following form.--"[god] at [first] [created] all [things] to [shew] his [greatness.]"--here each of the words, which we formerly supposed to be explained by the child, is inclosed in brackets. now if the reader will be at the pains of trying the experiment upon himself, and shall endeavour to observe the various operations of his own mind during it, he will at once perceive the correctness of the above remarks. that he may have the full benefit of this experiment, he has only to fix upon any one--but only one--of the inclosed words in the above sentence, and having ascertained its precise meaning as before given, he must _read_ the sentence aloud from the beginning, following the words with his eye in the ordinary way, till he arrives at the word he has fixed on. this he leaves out, and in its stead inserts the explanation, and then goes on to read the remainder of the sentence.--at the first trial he will perhaps be able to detect in his own mind some of the difficulties, which the less matured intellect of the young pupil has to encounter in his early attempts to succeed in the exercise; but he will also see, that it is a difficulty easily overcome when it is presented singly, and when the pupil is permitted to grapple with the paraphrasing of each word by itself. the reader will also be able to trace the operation of the young mind while engaged with the explanations, which differ entirely from the words which he is at the moment looking upon and reading. he will observe, that when the eye of the child arrives at the word fixed upon, he has to pause in his utterance for a moment, till the mind goes in search of what it requires; in the same way, and upon precisely the same principle, that an infant who has managed to speak one word, has to stop, and go in search of the next, and then to concentrate the powers of its mind upon it, before he can give it expression. but if the reader will repeat the operation to himself upon the _same word_, till he can read its explanation in the sentence without difficulty and without a pause; and then do the same with two, then with three, and so on, till he has completed the whole; he will be able to appreciate in some measure the importance of this exercise in training the young to such a command of language, as will enable them, on all known subjects, to deliver fluently, and in any variety of form, the precise shade of meaning which they wish to express. this of itself will be a great attainment by the pupil; but it is not all. the reader will also perceive what must be the necessary result of persevering in this exercise, during the time of a child's attendance at school, in training him to that calm self-possession,--that perfect command of the mind and the thoughts,--while engaged in speaking, which the frequent and gradually extended use of this exercise is so well calculated to afford. all the children of a school, without exception, may be exercised by its means, and upon the same paragraph; for while, by the paraphrasing of but one word in a clause, it is within the reach of the humblest intellect; yet, by the changes and transpositions necessary in more difficult passages, either to smooth asperities, or to avoid grammatical errors, it provides an extemporaneous exercise suited to the talents of the highest grade in any seminary. the collateral advantages also of this exercise, are both valuable and extensive. the operation of the principle which supposes double duty by the mind, enters into the nature of numerous acts in ordinary life, besides that of thinking and speaking, and which a perfect command of the thoughts in paraphrasing will tend greatly to facilitate.--for example, it will greatly assist the pupil in making observations during conversation, in attending to the weak and strong points of an argument, and in preparing his materials for a reply, while he is all the time hearing and storing up the ideas of a speaker.--it will enable him more extensively, and more deliberately to employ his mind on useful subjects while engaged with his work, even in those cases where a considerable degree of thought is required;--and it will greatly aid him in acquiring the art of "a ready writer," and will be available, both when he himself writes his own thoughts, or when he requires to dictate them to others. many persons who can express their ideas well enough by speech, find themselves greatly at a loss when they sit down to write them;--and this arises entirely from the want of that command of the mind which is necessary whenever it is called on to do double duty. the person cannot think of that which he wishes to write, and at the same moment guide the hand in writing; in the same way, and for the same reason, that a child cannot answer a question and yet continue his play. by the use of the paraphrastic exercise, however, the pupil will soon be enabled not only to concoct in his own mind what he intends to write, during the time he is writing; but the faculty may, by the same means, be cultivated to such an extent, that he may at last be able to dictate to two clerks at a time, and sometimes perhaps, (as it has been affirmed some have done) even to three. a similar collateral advantage, which will arise from the persevering use of the paraphrastic exercise, deserves a separate consideration.--it will gradually create a capacity to take written notes of a subject, either in the church, the senate, or the lecture room, during the time that the speaker is engaged in delivering it. it is in the ability to hear and concoct in the mind one set of ideas, while writing down an entirely different set, that the whole art of accurate "reporting" consists. the writing part of the process is purely mechanical; the perfection of the art consists chiefly in the command which the reporter acquires over the powers of his mind. the person while so employed has to hear and reiterate the ideas of the speaker as he proceeds; these he must remember and arrange, selecting, abridging, condensing, or abandoning, according to the extent of his manual dexterity in writing. but it is worthy of remark, that if the person be able to think,--to exercise his mind,--and to continue to write without stopping while he does so, the _amount_ of what he writes is a mere accident, and depends, not upon the state of the mind, but upon the mechanical part of the operation, which is aided by the arts of stenography and abbreviation. this mental capacity is most likely to be acquired by the regular and persevering use of the paraphrastic exercise. it will train the pupil to that command over his thoughts, which, with a little practice in this particular mode of applying it, will soon enable him, with perfect self-possession, to hear and to keep up with a speaker, while he continues without a pause, to write down as much of what has been said, as his command of the pen will allow. without this mental ability, he could not while listening write at all; but when it has been sufficiently acquired, there is no limit to his taking down all that is spoken, except what arises from the imperfection of the mechanical part of the process,--his manual dexterity. all these collateral advantages will accrue to the pupils by the use of this exercise; and this latter one will be greatly promoted in a school by a piece of history, an anecdote, or a paragraph of any kind, which none of the pupils know, being read slowly for only a few minutes, while the whole of the pupils who can write are required to take notes at the time, and to stop and give them in, as soon as the reading is finished.[ ] it is also here worthy of remark,--and it is perhaps another proof of the efficiency of the several exercises before enumerated as imitations of nature,--that they all, more or less, embody a portion of this principle of double duty performed by the mind. in each of them, when properly conducted, the pupil is compelled to speak, and to think at the same moment. not a little of their efficiency and value indeed, may be attributed to this circumstance. in the catechetical exercise, for example, it is not difficult to trace its operation. for in the attempt of the child to answer a question previously put to him, the teacher will be at no loss to perceive the mind gradually acquiring an ability to think of the original question and of the ideas contained in the subject from which he has selected his answer, at the very moment he is giving it utterance. and a knowledge of the fact should excite teachers in general, so to employ this exercise as to produce this effect.--the analytical exercise also, in its whole extent, calls into operation the working of this principle, whether employed synthetically or analytically. when children are employed with the analytical exercise proper,--as in tracing a practical lesson backwards to the subject or circumstance from which it has been drawn, and in attaching that circumstance to the story or class of truths to which it belongs; or when, as in the "analysis of prayer," a text of scripture has to be classified according to its nature, among the several parts into which prayer is divided;--in all these cases, there is this same double operation of the mind, searching and comparing one set of ideas, while the pupil is employed in giving expression to others. the exhibition of the principle will be easily traced, from what took place in the experiment in london, where the report states, that "the third class were next examined on the nature and practice of prayer. they shewed great skill in comprehending and defining the several component parts of prayer, as invocation, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, petition, &c. they first gave examples of each separately; and then, with great facility, made selections from each division in its order, which they gave consecutively; shewing, that they had acquired, with ease and aptitude, by means of this classification, a most desirable scriptural directory in the important duty of prayer. they then turned several lessons and passages of scripture into prayer; and the chairman, and several of the gentlemen present, read to them passages from various parts of the bible, which they readily classified, as taught in the 'questions on prayer,' and turned them into adoration, petition, confession, or thanksgiving; according to their nature, and as they appeared best suited for each. some of the texts were of a mixed, and even of a complicated nature; but in every case, even when they were not previously acquainted with the passages, they divided them into parts, and referred each of these to its proper class, as in the more simple and unique verses." but a similar working of the same principle takes place when the analytical exercise is employed synthetically, and when the pupil is required to go from the root, forward to the extreme branches of the analysis, as is done when he forms an extemporaneous prayer, from a previous acquaintance with its several divisions and their proper order. in this very necessary and important branch of a child's education, the "analysis of prayer" is usually employed, and has, in thousands of instances, been found exceedingly effective. during this exercise, the child has steadily to keep in view the precise form and order of the analysis, and at the same moment he has to select the matter required under each of the parts from the miscellaneous contents of his memory, to put them in order, and to give them expression. in doing this there is a variety of mental operations going on at the same moment, during all of which the pupil will soon be enabled continuously to give expression to his own ideas, with as much ease and self-possession as if he were doing nothing more than mechanically repeating words previously committed to memory. this is a valuable attainment; and yet the whole of this complicated operation of attending to the several branches of the analysis, and of selecting, forming, and giving utterance to his confessions, his thanksgivings, and his petitions, with perfect composure and self-possession, is within the reach of every christian child. it is accomplished by a persevering exercise of the principle which has been illustrated above, and which is exemplified in the paraphrastic exercise. many adults, it is believed, have been enabled, with ease and comfort, to commence family worship by its means; and numerous classes have been trained to the exercise in a few lessons. we shall here detain the reader by only a single example. the writer having been requested to meet with the sunday school teachers of greenock and its neighbourhood, about the year or , paid a visit to that place, and had the proposed meeting in a large hall of the town, where he endeavoured to explain to them, practically, a few of the principles connected with sunday school teaching, as more scientifically detailed in the present treatise. for the purposes of that meeting, three children belonging to one of the sunday schools, were for a few hours previously instructed, and prepared to exhibit the working of some of those principles which, it was hoped, would lessen the labour of the sunday school teachers, and at the same time increase their influence and their usefulness. these children, (two girls and a boy,) about the ages of ten or twelve years, were regularly instructed by means of the catechetical exercise, in the doctrines, examples, and duties of christianity; and among other subjects, they were made acquainted with the "analysis of prayer," and exercised by its means, without its being hinted to them, however, what use was intended to be made of it. the meeting was a crowded one; where, besides the sunday school teachers, and parents of the children, nearly all the clergymen of the place were present. when the more ostensible business of the meeting had been concluded, the writer consulted privately with two or three of the clergymen, and asked, whether they, knowing the general sentiments of the persons composing the meeting, would think it improper that one of the three children who had shewn themselves so intelligent, should be called on solemnly to engage in prayer with the audience before dismissing. to this they replied, that there could be no objections to such a thing, provided the children were able;--but of their ability, they very seriously doubted. on this point, however, the writer assured them there was no fear; and if that were the only objection, they would themselves immediately see that it was groundless. the boy accordingly, without his even conjecturing such a thing previously, was, before the meeting was dismissed, publicly called on to engage in prayer. he was for a moment surprised, and hesitated; but almost immediately, on the request being repeated, he shut his eyes, and commenced, with a solemn and faltering voice for one or two sentences; when, recovering from every appearance of trepidation, he proceeded with much propriety and solemnity of manner, with great latitude, and yet perfect regularity and self-possession, through all the departments of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and petition, in language entirely his own, selecting for himself, and arranging his sentences agreeably to the analysis, which was evidently his guide from the beginning to the end. this treatise will, there is little doubt, be read by some who were that evening present, and who will remember the universal feeling of surprise and delight, at the perfect propriety of expression, the serenity of mind, and the solemnity of manner, which characterised the whole of this uncommon exercise. it did appear to many as a most unaccountable thing; but when the principle is perceived, as explained above, the wonder must at once cease, and we can distinctly see, that by using the proper means, the same ability is within the reach of all who will be at the pains to make the trial. this same principle is also exercised to a very considerable extent in drawing and applying lessons from a previous announcement. a very little attention to the operations of the mind in that exercise will be sufficient to shew this. let us suppose, for example, that an announcement is made to a child, from which he is required to draw a practical lesson. this announcement must be distinctly present to his mind, while he is engaged in considering its meaning, its moral character, and its bearing on his own sentiments and conduct;--but more especially, all this, besides the original announcement, has still to be kept in view, while he is engaged in giving the lesson to the teacher in his own language as required. but in the application of the lessons, the principle is still more extensively called into operation. the child is asked, how he should act in certain given circumstances. these circumstances must accordingly be kept steadily before the mind, during the whole of the succeeding mental operation. he has to consider the lesson, or the conduct which he should pursue in these circumstances, and then, by the association of his ideas, he must call up from the whole of his accumulated knowledge, the precepts, the examples, the warnings, and even the implications, which form his authority for deciding on the conduct which he ought to pursue. these again must be kept before the mind, while he is preparing, and giving in his own language his conclusions to his teacher. all this was very obvious in the several public experiments, where the drawing of lessons, and the application of them by the pupils, were introduced.--in the case of the adult prisoners in edinburgh county jail, it was very observable; and the rolling of the eye, and the unconscious movement of the head, as if deeply engaged in some mental research when an application was required, were peculiarly pleasing and obvious to all the spectators. the reason was, that they had to keep before their mind, the circumstance, or statement involved in the question asked, while they had, at the same time, to review the several portions of their knowledge, chuse out the passage or example which was calculated to direct them in the duty; and then, still keeping these accumulated ideas present before the mind, they had to prepare and give expression to their answers. the same thing had to be done, but to a much greater extent, by the children in aberdeen, in london, and in newry. but the most satisfactory evidence of the beneficial working of this principle, in the drawing and applying of lessons, and by this means in giving even to children a command of language, and a power of extemporaneous speech which is but rarely attained even by adults, is to be found in the seventh experiment in leith. the writer feels more at liberty in descanting upon the extraordinary results of that investigation with the children, because he had no share in their previous instruction; the peculiar merits of which belonged entirely to their zealous and pious teacher. he was a plain unlettered man; and yet he has trained hundreds of children in his sunday school, whose intellectual attainments, for their age and rank in life, the writer has seldom known to be surpassed. there were exhibited by the children, from the beginning of the experiment to the end, an amount of knowledge, a degree of mental culture, a grasp of mind, and a fluency of expression, which had never before been witnessed in children of a similar class, or of the same age, by any person then present. the pupils were at the time quite unprepared for any extraordinary exhibition;--the subjects were chosen indiscriminately by the clergymen present, and were repeatedly changed;--and what is still more extraordinary, it was found, upon investigation, that the subjects were in general entirely new, or at least they had never been previously used as exercises in the school. the children, however, with all these disadvantages, were perfectly at home in each one of them. there appeared to be no exhausting of their resources; and the ease, and copiousness, and fluency of their language, were remarked by all present, as extraordinary, and by some as almost incredible. many who were present, could scarcely believe that the children spoke extemporaneously. all these phenomena were simply the effects of the principle of which we are here speaking, regularly brought into operation, in the weekly acts of drawing and applying their practical lessons. the exhibition of so much mental power possessed by mere children,--and these children collected from the very humblest and rudest classes inhabiting a sea-port town,--appeared to be a circumstance altogether new. the official persons present, and the very rev. bishop russell, who took an active part in the examination, expressed their decided satisfaction at the results of the whole experiment; and the effects of these principles, as illustrated by such children, made the present lord murray remark publicly at the close of the meeting, that it was obviously "a valuable discovery, calculated to be extensively useful to society." footnotes: [ ] note z. part iv. on the selection of proper truths and subjects to be taught in schools and families. chap. i. _on the general principles which ought to regulate our choice of truths and subjects to be taught to the young._ in all cases where our temporal interests are concerned, a proper discrimination in the selection of such exercises and studies as shall best suit our purpose, is considered as not only prudent, but necessary. the neglect of this would, indeed, by men of the world, be esteemed the height of folly. no ship-master thinks of perfecting his apprentices by lectures on agriculture; nor does the farmer train his son and successor to cultivate the land, by enforcing upon him the study of navigation. in a public school, therefore, when all classes of the community are to be taught, the truths and exercises should be selected in such a manner, that they shall, if possible, be equally useful to all; leaving the navigator and the agriculturist, the surgeon and the lawyer, to supplement their _general_ education, by the study of those special branches of learning which their several professions require. but even this is not enough:--among those subjects and exercises in which all the children in a school may be equally interested, there are many which are neither equally useful, nor equally indispensable. a thorough consideration, and a careful selection of those which are most valuable in themselves, and which are most likely to be useful during life, become both prudent and necessary. in all ordinary cases, men act upon this principle. health, food, and recreation, are all good and useful things; but even from among these we are sometimes compelled to make a choice, and the principle of our decision is always the same. when we cannot procure all, we chuse those which appear to us the most necessary, and abandon the others without regret. a man readily denies himself to sports and amusement, when he finds that he must labour for a supply of food and necessaries; and even the pleasures of the table are willingly sacrificed, for the purpose of securing or restoring the blessings of health. in like manner, those branches of education which are most important for securing the welfare of the pupils, and most for the benefit of society, ought to be selected and preferred before all others; seeing that to neglect, or wilfully to err in this matter, would be injurious to the child, and unjust to the community.--our object at present therefore is, to enquire what those general principles are which ought to regulate us in our choice of subjects and exercises for the education of youth. . the first and fundamental rule which ought to guide the educationist and the parent in the selection of subjects for the school, is to chuse those which are to promote the happiness and welfare of _the pupil himself_; without regard, in the first instance at least, to the interests or the ease of his friends, of the teacher, or of any third party whatever.--children are not the property of their parents, nor even of the community. they are strictly and unalienably the property of the almighty, whose servants and stewards the parents and the public are. the child's happiness and welfare are entirely his own;--the free gift of his maker and master, of which no man, without his full consent, has a right to deprive him. this happiness, and the full enjoyment of what he receives, both here and hereafter, have been made to depend on his allegiance and his faithfulness, not to his parents, nor even to the public, but to the great lord of both. this allegiance therefore, is his first and chief concern, with which the will and the wishes, the interests or the ease, of teachers and parents, have nothing to do. if the directions of his maker and lord are attended to, he has nothing to fear. there is in that case secured for him an inheritance that is incorruptible, and far beyond the reach or the power of any creature. it is for the enjoyment of this inheritance that he has been born;--it is with the design of attaining it, and for increasing its amount, that his time is prolonged upon earth;--it is to secure it for him, and to prepare him for it, that the parent has been appointed his guardian and guide;--and it is for the purpose of promoting and overseeing all this among its members, that a visible church, and church officers, have been established and perpetuated in the world. in so far as each individual child is concerned, the parent is the immediate agent appointed by the almighty for attending to these objects; and although, in a matter of so much importance, he is permitted to avail himself of the assistance of the teacher, he, and he only, is responsible to god for the due performance of those momentous duties which he owes to his child. when therefore the parents, for the purpose of forwarding some trifling personal advantage, or the teacher, for his own ease or caprice, are found indifferent to the kind of exercises used in the school, or to the results of what is taught in it;--doing any thing, or nothing, provided the time is allowed to pass, with at least the appearance of teaching;--they are, in such a case, betraying an important trust; they are heedlessly frustrating the wishes, and resisting the commands of their master and lord; they are sapping the foundations of society; and are thoughtlessly and basely defrauding the helpless and unconscious pupil of a most valuable patrimony.--in committing to parents the keeping and administration of this sacred deposit, reason, conscience, and scripture, all unite in declaring, that it is given them, not for the promotion of their own personal advantages, but for the child's benefit; and that, while they never can be permanently bettered by its neglect, their good, even in this world, will be best and most surely advanced by a faithful discharge of their duty to their offspring. these remarks go to establish the general principle, that the parent is not the proprietor, but merely the guardian and the administrator of the child's interests. these interests are of various kinds. and although the above remarks refer chiefly to the spiritual and eternal advantages of the young, that circumstance arises merely from their superior value and importance. the argument is equally conclusive in regard to every one of his temporal concerns. for if both the parent and the child be the special property of god, and if the parent has been appointed by him as the conservator and guardian of the child's happiness, he has no right either to lessen or to destroy it for any selfish purpose of his own. in every case--even of discipline--he is bound to follow the command and the example given him by his father and master in heaven, not to chastise his offspring for his "own pleasure," but for the "child's profit." the rule therefore which ought to regulate the parent, and of course the educationist, in making choice of the subjects and exercises for the school, is, that they shall really and permanently conduce to the _pupil's_ welfare and happiness, irrespective of the conflicting interests or wishes, either of the teacher, the parent, or the public. these will usually be in harmony; but as a general principle, the exercises are to be chosen with reference to the welfare of the _child_,--not of the _community_. . another rule which ought to be attended to in the selection of subjects and exercises for the seminary, is nearly allied to the former, but which we think, from its vast importance, should have a separate consideration. it is this, that a decided preference should be given to _every thing which advances the concerns of the soul, above those of the body;--which prefers heaven to earth,--and eternity to time_.--man is an accountable and an immortal creature;--and therefore there is no more comparison between the value of those things which refer to his happiness in eternity, and those which refer only to his enjoyments during his lifetime, than there is between a drop of water and the contents of the ocean;--nay, between a grain of sand and the whole physical universe. the truth of this observation, when viewed in the abstract, is never questioned; and yet the educational principles which it naturally suggests are too often jostled aside, and practically neglected. it plainly teaches us, that the young ought to be made aware of the comparative nothingness of temporal and sensual objects, when placed in competition with those which refer to their souls and eternity; and that the subjects which are to be taught them in the school, should tend to produce these feelings.--but this is not always the case; and even when the subjects are in themselves unobjectionable, the methods taken for teaching them frequently neutralize their effects. the national evils which have arisen from this neglect are extensive and lamentable, consisting in an almost exclusive attention among all classes to temporal matters, and to sensual gratifications. these characteristic, features in our people may all be traced, from their exhibition in general society, to the want of a thorough knowledge of those truths which tend so powerfully to deaden the influence of the things of sense and time, and to moderate our pursuit after them. it is in a particular manner at this point that the reckless cupidity, and the debased and short-sighted selfishness of the lower classes, ought to be met and removed, by the enlightened and kindly instructions of more capacious minds. society, as at present constituted, acts as if there were no futurity. time is the eternity of thousands; and therefore they think only of time. had they, as rational creatures, but a correct view,--however faint,--of their destination in eternity, their conduct and pursuits would very soon be changed, and their selected enjoyments would become, not only more rational, but much more exquisite. education is the instrument by which alone this can be effected, whether in the church or in the school; and to this point, both parents and children should be assiduously directed for their own sakes, and for the sake of the community. hitherto there has in education been too much of the mere shadow of rational knowledge, without the substance; and the consequence has been, that many parents in the lower classes have never been able to perceive their _own_ best interests, and therefore it is that their children by them have been equally neglected. nor is this only a partial evil, or confined to the lower classes.--it is, on the contrary, when we examine the matter closely, nearly universal. among ignorant and thoughtless parents, who are either unable or unwilling to look any further than the few short years of life, the training of their children to figure respectably and gracefully during it, may not perhaps excite much wonder;--but that such conduct should be followed by christian parents, who know that both they and their children have souls, and that there is such a thing as eternity before them both, is truly humbling. nor is it much for the credit of the philosophy of the present day, that while its promoters admit as an axiom the superiority of moral and religious attainments, they are found in practice to bestow their chief attention, and to lavish most of their approbation on physical investigations and on intellectual pursuits. every sound thinker must see, that by doing so, the first principles of philosophy are violated; and many well meaning persons are, by this inverted state of public opinion, insensibly drawn away from the more valuable food provided for them as responsible and immortal beings, to feed on the mere chaff and garbage of temporal and sensual enjoyments; or the more valuable, but still temporary crumbs of the intellectual table. that this practical abuse of acknowledged truths should be found among the ignorant and the depraved, might perhaps be expected; but that it should be witnessed, and yet winked at, by men of learning and study, whose comprehensive minds, although still inadequate to comprehend the full import of an eternity of advancing knowledge, can yet appreciate the comparative insignificance of seventy--nay of seventy thousand--years' investigation into the mysteries of nature, is very painful. we do not, in saying this, depreciate in the slightest degree the sublime discoveries which are daily being made of the almighty and his works;--but we say, upon the soundest principles of philosophy, that were all these discoveries multiplied ten thousand times, they could not for a moment compete with what yet remains to be communicated to the successful aspirant after the revelations of eternity. religion and morals are the only means by which success in that great competition can be gained; and therefore, to a child, a knowledge of all that man has yet discovered, or can ever know in this imperfect state of existence, is really as nothing, in comparison with the knowledge and practice of but one religious truth, or with the slightest advance in the science of morals.--a child once possessed of a living soul is born for eternity. its happiness has been made to depend, not on the possession of physical good, or of intellectual power, but entirely on its moral condition;--and the physical good it receives, and the intellectual power it attains; are nothing more than means intended by the almighty to be used for the purpose of perfecting his moral condition while he is still in this world. the whole period of his existence here, is but the moment of his birth for eternity. care and enlightened attention to his moral condition during that short period of probation, will usher him spiritually alive and fully prepared for enjoying an eternal weight of intelligence and glory;--while inattention, or misdirected activity now, may no doubt put him prematurely in possession of a few intellectual morsels of this eternal feast, but it will assuredly shut him out from its everlasting enjoyment, and will entail on him comparative ignorance, and a living death for ever. in this view of the case then,--and what christian will deny that it is the correct one,--there cannot be a more short-sighted proposition suggested in the counsels of men, than that which would sanction a system of education for an _immortal_ being, that either overlooked, or deliberately set aside, his well-being in eternity. the very idea is monstrous. it is a deliberate levelling of man to the rank of mere sentient animals; and is another form of expressing the ancient advice of the sensualist, "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." by every person of learning, then, and even by individuals of humbler attainments, in the exercise of a plain common understanding, the importance of the rule in education which we are here recommending, must at once be admitted;--that in the selection of truths and exercises for educating and training the young, a decided preference should always be given to those which have a reference to their well-being and happiness, not in time so much as in eternity. . in selecting subjects and exercises for the education of the young, those are to be preferred, by which _the largest amount of true and solid happiness is to be secured to the pupil_.--a man's happiness is his only possession. every thing else which he has, is only the means which he employs for the purpose of acquiring or retaining it. happiness accordingly, by the very constitution of our nature, is the great object of pursuit by every man.[ ] the means of happiness are no doubt frequently mistaken, and often substituted for happiness itself. but even these conflicting circumstances, when properly considered, all tend to shew, that happiness is the great object desired, and that it is universally sought after by every intelligent mind. by a wise and beneficent arrangement of the almighty, it has been so ordered, that happiness is to be found only in the exercise of the affections;--and the amount of the happiness which they confer, is found to be proportionate to the excellence of the object beloved. the love of god himself, accordingly, is the first of duties, and includes the perfection of happiness. the love of all that are like him, and in proportion as they are so, ranks next in the scale; and hence it is, that all moral excellence,--the culture of the affections and the heart,--is to be preferred to intellectual attainments, as these again are to take precedence of mere physical good. this established order for the attainment of happiness, is in society most strangely inverted. beauty, strength, honour, and riches,--mere physical qualities,--are generally preferred to the qualities of the mind;--and mental attainments, again, too often command more consideration than moral worth. this is altogether an unnatural state of things; and the consequences of its prevalence in any community, must be proportionally disastrous. how far the modes for conducting the education of the young hitherto have tended to extend or perpetuate this error, it is not for us here to say. but if they have, the sooner the evil is rectified the better. happiness, as we have said, is the single aim of man,--however he may mistake its nature, or the means by which it is to be attained. and as it is to be found, not in intellectual power, nor in the possession of physical good, but only in moral culture, it follows, that the attainment of this moral excellence should be the one chief design aimed at in the education of the young. the benevolence and wisdom of this arrangement are obvious. for had happiness been made to depend on the possession of _intellectual_ power, few comparatively could have commanded the time and means which are necessary for the purpose; and had it been attached to the possession of riches, or honour, or any other species of _physical_ good, there would have been still fewer. but it is not necessarily attached to the possession of either. men may enjoy riches and honours, beauty and health, and yet they may be unhappy. the highest mental attainments also, when disjoined from moral excellence, tend only, as in the fallen angels, to stimulate their pride, and to aggravate their misery. but happiness is exclusively and unalterably attached to the cultivation of _the affections_,--to the acquisition of moral excellence;--so that it is equally within the reach of every individual, however obscure, or however talented. few men can be intellectually great,--fewer still can be rich or powerful; but every man may, if he pleases, be good,--and therefore happy. in choosing the subjects and exercises then for the education of the young, those which tend to the production and to the cultivation of the moral affections,--love to god, and love to men,--are always to be preferred to those which have relation merely to the attainment of _intellectual_ acquirements, or the possession of mere _physical_ good. . in choosing subjects and exercises for the education of the young, reference should be had, all other things being equal, to _the prosperity and welfare of the community in general_.--we have already shewn that, under god, the happiness and welfare of every individual are his own special property, and must in all cases, therefore, be at his special disposal. no ordinary combination of circumstances will ever warrant an unjust encroachment on what is so peculiarly his own. but the happiness and welfare of an individual are almost uniformly found to be connected with the happiness and prosperity of those with whom he has to associate. the educationist, therefore, ought to have the welfare of the community in view, while he is selecting those exercises which are specially to benefit his pupil; and he will almost invariably find, that by choosing those subjects and exercises for the individual, which will tend most surely to promote the general well-being of society, he will not only not require a sacrifice of any of the personal benefits to which the child has a claim, but that he will greatly increase their amount, and add to their value. when this is the case, to overlook the good of the community in selecting exercises and subjects for the school, would be of no advantage to the pupils, and would be an act of positive injustice to the public at large. these general principles, we think, when considered singly, must approve themselves to every thinking mind; and if so, they must be still more beneficial when they are combined, and acted upon systematically in the preliminary arrangements of any seminary. the nearer, therefore, the educationist can keep to them in making his selection of subjects and exercises, the better will it be both for the pupil and for the community at large, while the benefits expected from an exercise where there is any material deviation from them, will most probably turn out to be delusive, and the exercise itself detected as the mere bequest of an antiquated prejudice, or the temporary idol of fashion. these principles being admitted to be sound in the abstract, will greatly assist us in deciding upon the relative value and appropriateness of some of the propositions which we shall immediately have to submit to the reader; and we would here only remark, for his guidance, that if, in the following recommendations, he finds an exercise correctly to accord with the above principles, while he yet hesitates as to the propriety of its adoption in the school, or feels inclined to accede to its exclusion,--he ought, in such a case, carefully to review the grounds of his decision, as these are most likely to be erroneous. he has good reason to suspect that he is labouring under prejudice, or is unduly biassed by long cherished opinions, when he refuses the legitimate application of a general law,--a law which he has previously admitted to be sound,--and which is as likely to be applicable to the case in hand, as to any other of a similar kind. footnotes: [ ] note r. chap. ii. _on the particular branches of education required for elementary schools._ in making choice of suitable subjects for the education of a community, there are two considerations which ought to regulate us in our selection. the one is, the indications of nature respecting any branch of education; and the other is, the peculiar usages of the place and persons with whom the pupil is destined to associate. as an example of the former class of subjects, we may instance reading and writing; and of the latter, book-keeping and the classics. the branches belonging to the former will be found more or less useful to all without exception; while those which rank under the second class, although requisite for some, will be found unnecessary, and generally useless, to many. from the character of the present work, our business is chiefly with the former class; and we shall therefore advert very shortly to a few of them, pointing out the intimations of nature respecting them, and giving a few hints as to the best methods by which they may be taught. and first of all, _religion and morals_ are clearly pointed out by nature as a branch of education peculiarly necessary for the young. on this we shall not here again enlarge, but shall merely refer the reader to some of our previous pages, where it has been made sufficiently clear.[ ] next in importance as a branch of education plainly indicated by nature, we ought to rank _the principles of natural philosophy_. we say next _in importance_, not _in time_; because they are evidently not to be taught to the child in this order, although it will be found in experience that these principles may be communicated by successive "steps" much sooner than is generally thought.[ ] nature begins early; and so should we. the very infant becomes practically a natural philosopher, and continues to act regularly upon the truths or principles which experience enables him to detect. he soon learns that flame burns, that clothes keep his body warm, that stumbling will cause a fall, and that the support of a chair or stool will prevent it. as he grows up he learns the danger of handling sharp knives, hot irons, and burning coals; he learns to detect some of the effects of the mechanical powers, which he frequently applies, although he cannot explain them. this we perceive exemplified in his ingenious contrivances in cutting his sticks, wrenching with forks, hammering with stones, kicking with his toes, and afterwards more powerfully with his heels; in trundling his hoop, in sailing his mimic fleets by the force of his breath, and in adapting to the requisite moving powers his wind and water mills. he even learns to know something of the composition of forces, as we perceive by his contrivances in the flying of his kite, the shooting of his marbles, and the rebounding of his ball. now, as these adaptations are never to be ranked under the class of instinctive actions, but have been in every case acquired by actual experience, it shews, that there is an outgoing of the mind in search of principles, and we think it is probable, that these principles are often, although perhaps but dimly perceived, from the various, and frequently successful contrivances of the child in difficulties, and in circumstances when he is desirous of procuring relief. this at all events shews us, that children are very early prepared, and capable of receiving instruction of this kind. the _importance_ attached by nature to this branch of learning, is not less remarkable, than is its universality. it is the great hinge upon which every temporal comfort of the individual is made to turn. what we have here termed "natural philosophy," is to the body and to time, what religion and morals are to the soul and eternity;--the well-being of both depends almost entirely upon the proper application of their several principles. it is no doubt true, that the principles are not always very clearly perceived; but it is equally true, that the application of these principles will be more easy, more frequent, and much more effective, when they are made familiar by teaching. hence the importance of this branch of education for the young. next in importance as branches of education, and prior perhaps in point of time, come the arts of _reading_ and _writing_.--speech is a valuable gift of nature, bestowed upon us for the communication of our ideas, and _writing_ is nothing more than a successful imitation of nature in doing so. the hearing of speech, in like manner, is closely copied in the art of _reading_. these two arts, therefore, as most successful imitations of nature, recommend themselves at once to the notice of the teacher as an important branch of education for the young. the one enabling him to speak with the hand, and to communicate his ideas to his friend from any distance; and the other, the art of hearing by the eye, and by which he can make the good and the wise speak to him as often and as long as he may feel inclined.[ ] of _arithmetic_, we may only remark, that the necessity of sometimes ascertaining the number of objects, of adding to their number, and at other times of subtracting from them, indicates sufficiently that this is a branch of education recommended by nature. it may only be necessary here to remark, that, from various concurring circumstances, it appears, that what is called the denary scale is that which is most conducive to general utility. as to the nature of arithmetic, and the best methods of teaching it, we must refer to the note.[ ] _music_ is one of nature's best gifts. the love of it is almost universal; and few comparatively are unable to relish and practise it. its effect in elevating and refining the sentiments in civilized society, is matter of daily observation; and its power to "soothe the savage breast," has been often verified. to neglect the cultivation of music, therefore, during childhood and youth, when it can be best done, not only without interference with other branches of study, but with decided advantage in forwarding them, is both imprudent and unjust. we say that it is _unjust_;--for while much ingenuity and large sums of money have been expended in producing musical instruments for the gratification of men, the child of the poorest beggar is in possession of an instrument in the human voice, which for sweetness, variety, expression, and above all, for its adaptation to language, has never been equalled, and stands quite unapproachable by all the contrivances of man. how cruel then in parents or teachers to allow an instrument so noble and so valuable to fall to ruin from the want of exercise! it is to deprive their pupil of a constant solace in affliction, and to dry up one of the cheapest, the readiest, and the most innocent and elevating sources both of personal and social enjoyment. of its uses, and methods of teaching in the school, we must again refer to the notes.[ ] _dancing_ is obviously the sister of music, and is perhaps equally sanctioned by nature. it is obviously capable of being consecrated and employed for high moral purposes; and its abuse therefore should form no argument against its regular cultivation. that it was so employed by the appointment of god himself, is matter of history; and that it is still capable of being preserved from abuse, cannot reasonably be denied. the stand that has so frequently been made against even the innocent enjoyment of this boon of nature, is now admitted to be a prejudice, derived originally from its flagrant and frequent abuse. these prejudices are gradually and silently melting away; and it is cheering to see the better feelings of our nature effectively advancing the art to its legitimate place in education, under the guise of gymnastics and callisthenics. that these, however, are but imperfect substitutes for what nature has intended for the young, is obvious, when we contrast them with the gambols of the kitten, the friskings of the lamb, and the unrestrained romps of healthy children newly let loose from the school. the truth is, that the accumulation of the animal spirits must be thrown off by exercise, whether the parent or teacher wills it or no; and if the children are not taught to do this _by rule_, as in dancing, they will do it without rule, and perhaps beyond the proper limit, both as to time, place, and quantity. education indeed cannot be expected to flourish to the extent desired, till the mental labours of the school can be occasionally relieved by some physical exercise, either within doors, or in the open air.[ ] the love of pictures and of _drawing_ is also a boon bestowed upon us by nature, and is a desirable acquisition for the young. the art may generally be acquired with little trouble, and often with great enjoyment. it is certainly neither so necessary, nor so valuable, as some of the branches of which we have been speaking; but as it may be easily attained, and as its future exercise will always be a source of innocent and refined enjoyment, it ought to occupy a place in every educational institution. almost every person is gratified by looking upon a good picture; and few comparatively are unable to acquire the rudiments of the art which produces them. it requires but little teaching, provided good copies be procured;--and even these will be frequently unnecessary, where the pupils are encouraged to copy from nature. the proper methods of doing this, however, must be left to the circumstances of the school, and to future experiments. with respect to the teaching of _history_, a little consideration will convince us, that it does not consist in the mere communication of historical facts. history is, or ought to be, a science; and the succession of events is nothing more than the implements employed by the master in teaching it. the _facts_ of history, like those of chemistry, agriculture, or mechanics, are taught merely as means to an end.--they are the elements from which we derive principles, which are to be practically applied by the learner; and it is _the ability to apply these_ that constitutes the learning. the facts upon which any science is based, must no doubt be known before it can be taught;--but they may be known without the science having ever been mastered: for it is not a knowledge of the facts, but the capacity to _make use_ of them, that entitles a man to the appellation of a chemist, an agriculturist, a mechanic, or a historian. viewing the study of history in this light, we at once perceive, that the teaching which it requires is not a dry detail of dates and circumstances;--but the practical uses which ought to be made of them. the only legitimate use of history is to direct us how we ought to conduct ourselves as citizens, and how rulers and governors can most safely and successfully manage the affairs of the public, in all the varying events of political change. the teacher therefore is to communicate the facts, for the purpose of turning them to use, by drawing, and teaching his pupils how to draw lessons of prudence, energy, or caution, as regards the nation;--in the same way that biography is taught for the sake of drawing lessons of a more personal kind, as regards a family or a neighbourhood. both were practically exhibited in the experiment in aberdeen; by which it was made obvious, that children, as well as adults, were capable of studying it. where the circumstances of a seminary will admit, it ought not to be neglected. the mere inconveniences which may for some time attend the introduction of such a mode of teaching history is no good reason for its neglect; and the want of practical elementary books drawn up upon this plan, in the form of successive "steps," is the chief desideratum, which we hope soon to see supplied. _geography_ is another branch of education pointed out to us by nature for the benefit of man. we speak here, however, of physical geography, and not of the historical and political departments of it. these belong more properly to history. the chief object in teaching this science, is to convey to the mind of the pupil a correct idea of this world as a sphere, on the top of which he stands, and of the relative positions of all the kingdoms and countries on its surface. this will be, and it ought to be, a work of time. the more correctly and familiarly the pupil can form the idea of this sphere as a whole, the sooner and the better will he become acquainted with its parts. acting upon the principles of reiteration and analysis, formerly described, the pupil ought to sketch, however rudely, the great outlines of the four divisions of the earth, upon a blank, or slate globe, till he can do so with some degree of correctness. the separated divisions may then be sketched on a common slate, without caring as yet for the details; and when this can be accomplished readily, the same thing may be done with the different kingdoms of which they are severally composed. the child ought never to be harassed by the minute details, till he comes to sketch the countries, or the counties. what is required _before this_, is their relative position, more than their form; and this, upon the principle of analysis, will be easiest and most permanently acquired by mastering in the first place the great outlines. children, by mere imitation, will practically acquire the art of _grammar_, long before they are capable of learning it as a science. it ought invariably to be taught by "steps;" and the child should have a perfect knowledge of the etymological part, before he is allowed to advance to syntax. the efficiency of this concluding part of grammar, depends entirely upon his familiarity with the former. it will therefore be found here, as in the practice of arithmetic, that the prize will ultimately be awarded, not to him who expends most labour and strength in running, but to him who has made the best preparation for the race. the art of _composition_, or the ability to express our thoughts in an orderly and natural form, is the last branch of education to which, as recommended by nature, we shall here allude. the perfection of this art appears to depend on three circumstances. there must be a clear understanding of the subject upon which the person is to write;--there must, in the second place, be a distinct perception of the most natural order in which it ought to be presented to the mind and imagination of others;--and the third is, an ability to manage these materials with facility, and without distraction of mind, while engaged in writing them. as to the first of these three, nothing requires to be said here, as the exercises recommended in the previous part of this treatise will almost invariably accomplish it. with respect to the second, that of presenting the ideas connected with the subject in due and proper order, it may be remarked, that the hints formerly given, as to the natural order of "grouping" objects to be presented to the imagination, will be of great use here, and to them we must refer;[ ]--and the third object here required, that of managing the thoughts at the moment of writing them, has been in effect already described and treated of, in a previous part of this treatise.[ ] it is the same kind of ability as that which is required for acquiring fluency and ease in extemporaneous speaking, and is to be gained by the use of the same means. it is here only necessary to observe, that abstract teaching and general directions are not the things most required for forwarding a child in this branch of his education. these, at an advanced stage of his learning, will no doubt be of service; but till the pupil can write with some degree of freedom, they are in a great measure useless, or worse. what is wanted most in our elementary schools, is a successful _beginning_;--suitable exercises to assist the pupil in writing his own thoughts properly, but in his own way. many methods have been devised to effect this, and with more or less success;--but we believe the most efficient, because the most natural and simple, is that which has been engrafted upon the paraphrastic exercise. in regard to its ease, it is only necessary to say, that a child who can but write a sentence, may begin to practise it;--and its efficiency may be argued from the fact, that while every step is progressive, the advanced exercises give ample scope for the abilities of the cleverest in the school.[ ] footnotes: [ ] see part ii. chap. x. p. . part iii. chap. ix. p. , and p. - . for the methods of teaching, see note s. [ ] note t. [ ] note u. [ ] note v. [ ] note w. [ ] note a a. [ ] see pages , . [ ] see pages , &c. chap iii. _on the easiest methods of introducing these principles, for the first time, into schools already established._ that the educational principles attempted to be developed in the preceding pages, shall ultimately pervade the great fields of elementary learning, admits we think of but little doubt; and yet the diminutive word "when?" in relation to this change, forms a question, which it would be extremely difficult to answer. every improvement of the kind hitherto has been gradual; and experience shews, that the admission of the most important principles in science, has been often retarded, rather than forwarded, by undue precipitation on the part of their friends. it is with this historical fact in view that the following hints are now offered, in order to render any sudden change unnecessary, and to enable teachers gradually to feel their way to greater success by _new_ methods, without making any material change for some time on the _old_. we speak advisedly when we say, that two half hours daily, if regularly and honestly employed in working out these principles in a school, will do more real good in forwarding the education of the pupils attending it, than all the rest of the day put together. this portion of time, divided between the two parts of the day, would not materially interfere with the usual routine of any seminary, which might still be proceeded with as before, till the teacher saw his way more clearly in enlarging the exercises, and extending the time. _younger classes._--with respect to the young children who are as yet incapable of understanding by reading, we would advise that they be repeatedly exercised by a monitor in sections of four or five, during not more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, by means of the "scripture groupings for children." the key to that little book will enable any monitor, or even scholar, who can read, efficiently to perform this duty. the design here is chiefly mental exercise; but with that mental exercise, the most important and valuable information may be communicated. the monitor is to announce a sentence, and then to catechise on it, taking care to avoid all "catechetical wanderings,"[ ] and confining himself strictly to the sentence announced, from which the child in that case will always be able to bring his answer. when a section has been mastered, the children may be encouraged to tell the story in their own way, the monitor taking care that the child is not reiterating the _words_, instead of the _ideas_. a few of the moral circumstances may also be presented to their minds, and the lessons drawn and applied according to their capacity. _second classes._--where the children are capable of reading, they may get a section of the "groupings," or of any of the "first steps," to read at home. on this they ought to be catechised in school, before reading it there, to see whether it has been previously read and understood or not. this preparation ought to be strictly enforced. they may then read it by sentences in turn, be catechised upon it, have the moral circumstances separated, and the lessons drawn and applied. one section should in general be _thoroughly known and mastered_, before passing to another; and all the previous sections should be frequently and extensively revised, chiefly by the application of their several lessons. _higher classes._--the whole school, with the exception perhaps of the very young classes, may be taken together, and catechised on some section of one of the steps, or on a passage of scripture previously prescribed. this they ought each to read and understand _at home_, and be prepared to paraphrase it, to separate the moral circumstances, and to draw the corresponding lessons.[ ] this will in a short time be easy for them; and to ensure the preparation, the name of each pupil ought to be kept on a separate card, and these being shuffled, the teacher, after asking the question at the whole, may take the upmost card, and require that child to answer it. all must in that case be prepared, as none can know but he may be the person who shall be called on publicly to answer. the application of the lessons will be found the most useful, and to the children the most interesting part of this exercise. in this the teacher supposes a circumstance, or situation, corresponding to the lesson drawn, in which the pupils may be placed; and he requires them to say how they ought to act in such a case. when they give their _opinion_, they must then give their _authority_; that is, they must refer to the lesson, and through the lesson, to the scripture truth from which it was drawn. _natural philosophy._--in teaching the principles of _natural philosophy_, a select class may be formed, more circumscribed as to number, and from among the more advanced scholars. to these, a section, or part of section, of the "first step to natural philosophy," is to be given to prepare at home,--to understand, and to be ready to draw and apply the lessons,--in a manner similar to that prescribed above, and as illustrated in the key to that work. _writing._--in teaching the art of _writing_, upon the preceding principles, the chief object is to train the pupils easily and readily to _write down their own thoughts_. to accomplish this, a certain portion of their time may be occupied as follows. the teacher reads a sentence, or a paragraph, or, what will perhaps be better, a short story, or anecdote, and requires the whole of them to write it down in their _books_ for after examination. these of course are to be examined and corrected, with any necessary remarks by the teacher or assistant.--in this exercise, there is no necessity for circumscribing the pupils as to time,--it being required that they write accurately, grammatically, and neatly, whether in large or small text. to all those who are first finished, some other exercise ought to be provided that they may in that manner usefully occupy the time that may remain of their hour. _arithmetic._--the introduction of the arithmetic rod, and its key, into a school, will be productive of many advantages.[ ] the line of figures upon the a side of the rod, being painted on a board in sight of the whole school, and which is never required to be altered, the teacher has only to announce a sum to be added to each of the figures; the first pupil that is done, deposits his slate on a table, stool, or form, and goes to his place; the next places his slate above his, and the others in the same way as they finish. the answer in the key will shew their accuracy, and the order in which their slates lie points out their respective merits. another very important object is gained by this exercise; for the teacher, by recording the time taken by any one of the pupils in adding a particular sum to the line, can measure by the watch the rate of his improvement every month, every week, or even every day. the parents of any child, by means of the rod and its key, can also do this at home with perfect exactness. these hints for the regulation of teachers are thrown out with great deference, as they have not been sufficiently tested by actual experiments. teachers, however, will be able, each for himself, according to the circumstances of his school, and the capacities of his children, to adopt such parts as he finds most effective; and so to modify others, that the end shall perhaps be more efficiently gained, than by strictly adhering to any one of them.--education in all its parts is yet in its infancy; and these crude hints can only be expected to help it forward to maturity. footnotes: [ ] see key to second initiatory catechism, pages xxi. & xxii. [ ] see complete directory for sunday school teachers, vol. i. p. . [ ] for these exercises the teacher or monitor will find himself greatly assisted by means of the "helps" to genesis, luke, acts, &c. where, besides the lessons, all the explanations are given in the form of a paraphrase. [ ] see note v. the end. notes note a, pages and .--it may perhaps be reasonably objected to this term of "reiteration," that it is a new term for an act of the mind which has already received another name. the author's excuse is two-fold. in the first place, he thinks, that any other term which he could have employed, might have been misunderstood, as writers are not as yet at one on the subject. but, secondly, no other term would have included so fully all that he intends to designate by the act of "reiteration." in this he may be mistaken; but as it is of little consequence by what name an object may be called, provided the thing so named be properly defined, he thought it safest to apply the term he best understood, and which, in his opinion, most correctly describes the act itself. the same thing may be said of the terms, "individuation," "grouping," and "classification," which may perhaps be nothing more than "abstraction," "combination," and "generalization." his misconception of those latter terms, and of what is included in them, may have led him to think that the mental operations which he has perceived in the young are different. if so, there can be little harm in using the terms here adopted; but if, on the contrary, they do really include more, it would have been hurtful to use a term which had been previously defined, and which did not include the whole that was intended. note b, p. .--it may be a question, but one certainly of little practical consequence, whether we ought to place the principle of "individuation," or this of "reiteration," first in order. the child, no doubt, fixes upon the individual object before he can reiterate it; but it is still this act of reiteration that first impresses the idea on the mind, and constitutes it a part of his knowledge. note c, p. .--it may be proper here to explain once for all, that it is not the intention of the author, as indeed he has not the ability, to define scientifically the mental processes which he thinks he has observed in the young. his object is simply to point them out, so that they may be successfully imitated by the teacher in the exercises of the school. note d, p. .--the fact, that children who learn to repeat words without understanding them, do sometimes acquire the meaning of them afterwards, is no valid objection to the accuracy of this statement. repeated experiments, in various forms, and with different persons, have established the important fact, that when children at any future period master the ideas contained in the words which they had previously committed to memory, it is not _because_ of that exercise, but _in spite of it_. they have attained them by another, and a perfectly different process. it is generally by reading the words from the memory,--thinking them over,--and in that way searching for, and reiterating the ideas they contain. this is much more difficult than when the person reads for the first time the same words from a book; and it has this serious disadvantage, that it has to be read from the memory _every time_ the ideas are required, which is not the case when the ideas are reiterated in the natural way by hearing, or by reading.--on this subject see the experiment made before the clergy and teachers of stirling, in july , with "blind alick" of that place, who could repeat the whole bible;--and the supplementary experiment to ascertain the same principle, made in the house of correction in belfast, before the teachers and clergymen of that town, in december . note e, p. .--perhaps it may be found, that "grouping," and "classification," are only different manifestations of the same principle. but even if it were so, it would have been necessary here to treat of them separately, on account of the very different uses made of them by nature. the present, be it observed, is not a metaphysical treatise, but a humble attempt to be popularly useful.--see note c. note f, p. .--this principle may by some be considered as "instinct," and others may affirm that it is "reason." all that we require to do here is to point out the phenomenon,--not to define it. the name is of little consequence. it is the principle itself, as perceived in its manifestations, that we have to do with, for the purpose of successfully imitating it in our dealings with the young. note g, p. .--there needs scarcely any farther proof of this than the fact, that barristers, by constant practice, are usually the most fluent extemporaneous speakers. it is also strongly corroborative of the statement in the text, that clergymen generally, and especially those who are most accustomed to the use of extemporaneous prayers and sermons, find most ease in replying to an opponent on any subject that is familiar to them. note h, p. , & .--it is a very remarkable fact, to which the attention of the writer was lately called, that mrs wesley, the mother of the rev. john wesley, founder of the wesleyan methodists, appears to have acted upon the principles here developed. in southey's life of that great man, there occurs the following note: "mrs wesley thus describes her peculiar method (of teaching her children to read,) in a letter to her son john, (the founder of the wesleyan methodists.) "none of them were taught to read till five years old, except kezzy, in whose case i was overruled; and she was more years in learning than any of the rest had been months. the way of teaching was this: the day before a child began to learn, the house was set in order, every one's work appointed them, and a charge given that none should come into the room from nine till twelve, or from two till five, which were our school hours. one day was allowed the child wherein to learn its letters, and each of them did in that time know all its letters, great and small, except molly and nancy, who were a day and a half before they knew them perfectly, for which i then thought them very dull; but the reason why i thought them so, was because the rest learned them so readily; and your brother samuel, who was the first child i ever taught, learnt the alphabet in a few hours. he was five years old the th of february; the next day he began to learn; and as soon as he knew the letters, began at the st chapter of genesis. he was taught to spell the st verse, then to read it over and over till he could read it off hand without any hesitation;--so on to the second, &c. till he took ten verses to a lesson, which he quickly did. easter fell low that year, and by whitsuntide he could read a chapter very well; for he read continually, and had such a prodigious memory, that i cannot remember ever to have told him the same word twice. what was yet stranger, any word he had learnt in his lesson, he knew wherever he saw it, either in his bible or any other book, by which means he learnt very soon to read an english author well. "the same method was observed with them all. as soon as they knew the letters, they were first put to spell and read one line, then a verse, never leaving till perfect in their lesson, were it shorter or longer. so one or other continued reading at school, time about, without any intermission; and before we left school, each child read what he had learned that morning, and ere we parted in the afternoon, what he had learned that day."--_southey's life of wesley_, note, p. . in the above simple narrative, there is a distinct reference to the principles of "reiteration," and "individuation," and hence mrs wesley's great success. note i, p. .--when the true nature of education is better understood, it will be found that a child may have advanced far on its path by oral instruction, before it be either necessary or desirable that he should be compelled to read for himself. to assist the parent and teacher in this preliminary part of their duty, the "first initiatory catechism," or the "first steps" to the old and the new testaments, with their respective keys, may be used with advantage,--they having been constructed upon the principles here recommended. but the best book _to begin with_, will be the "groupings from scripture," with its key for the use of monitors, or older children, who can by its means greatly assist the parent or teacher in the work. in making use of that little book, the sentences are to be announced in whole or in parts to the pupils one by one; and upon which they are to be thoroughly and extensively catechised. as for example, the first announcement may be given thus:--"_god made the first man_," from which the following questions may be formed--"who made the first man?" "whom did god make?" "what man did god make?" "what did god do to the first man?" the teacher or monitor ought then to add the additional fact, "that god made the first man _of clay_," and catechise again upon the whole. after this is well understood, he may complete the sentence, "god made the first man of clay, _and called him adam_." the child will then be able--not to repeat the words only, for that is not the effect of this exercise,--but to communicate the ideas in his _own words_; which, however, will generally be found to be the very same as in the book. this distinction is most important. when the whole section has been completely mastered, the lessons and their applications may also be taught;--by all of which the mental faculties will soon become vigorous and lively, and the pupil will be well prepared for all the exercises to which he may afterwards be called. note k, p. .--the art of catechising from any lesson or book, is a very simple one when the principle is understood. it consists simply in selecting the most important words contained in the announcement, and forming a question upon each of them, in such a manner, as to require that particular word from the pupil as the answer to the question raised upon it. for example, when the teacher has in four words announced the fact, that "jesus died for sinners;" he will be able to form a question from the three chief ones, "jesus,"--"died," and "sinners." these questions will be, "who died?"--"what did jesus do for sinners?" and "for whom did jesus die?" it is not necessary that the words should be taken up in their order, which may be always left to the discretion of the teacher. for the several parts of this principle, as employed upon clauses, or whole sentences or subjects, see next note l. note l, p. .--the catechetical exercise has for convenience been divided into three kinds of exercises, called the "connecting exercise," the "general exercise," and the "verbal exercise." the "connecting exercise," includes those comprehensive questions, which require the pupil to go over perhaps a whole subject, or several sentences, to complete his answer; as if in teaching the parable of the sower, the pupil were asked, "what were the several kinds of ground on which the seed was sown?" or, "what is said of the seed sown by the way side?" in answering either of these questions he would have to combine many ideas, and the truths contained in several distinct clauses. this exercise is used commonly in revising several sections at a time after they have been taught. the "general exercise," is used in all the advanced classes, sometimes in connection with the verbal exercise, and includes those questions chiefly which are formed upon clauses in the book or section taught. as, for example, when the pupil is asked, "what became of the seed sown by the way side?" or, "what did the birds of the air do?" he has to give one or more clauses, containing several ideas, as his answer. the "verbal exercise" has to do only with the words of the clauses, and the single idea which the particular word is intended to convey; as when it is said, "the birds of the air devoured it up;" the questions, "what devoured the seed?" "what birds?" "what did the birds do?" "what did the birds devour?" refer chiefly to the words, and the single ideas which they communicate. it may be here remarked, however, that although these exercises are divided in theory, they ought seldom to be altogether separated in practice. in using the verbal exercise with the younger classes, many questions will be required which properly belong to the "general;" and in using the "general exercise" with the advanced classes, neither the "connecting," nor the "verbal exercise," ought to be altogether excluded. note m, p. .--in communicating knowledge to the young by means of the catechetical exercise, care ought to be taken that the truths or ideas be communicated regularly, and not too many at a time. in making use of the "groupings," or "first steps," the contents of one section ought to be well understood, and all the circumstances to be made familiar, before the child passes to another. to do otherwise is not to forward, but to retard his advance in the attainment of knowledge. there ought also to be frequent returns upon the sections formerly mastered, so that the truths be more and more firmly fixed upon the memory. this will also be accomplished by means of the lessons from the several moral truths taught, and by their application to the circumstances of ordinary life. it is also a matter of great practical importance, in teaching any subject, that the teacher confine himself strictly to it, avoiding all kinds of "catechetical wandering," by which the minds of his pupils will be distracted and enfeebled if they _cannot_ follow him, and by which their attention will be powerfully drawn away from the lesson, if they _can_.--for example, if the subject to be taught be the "good samaritan," nothing can be plainer than that the mind of the pupil ought to be concentrated upon the subject, till it be "grouped," and fixed upon the mind and memory as one combined and moving scene, so that one circumstance in the story will conjure up all the others.--this is nature's plan.--but if the teacher, at the very commencement, when the child has read that "a certain man went down from jerusalem to jericho," shall call his attention from the story itself, to ask where jerusalem was? what was judea? who dwelt there? who was their progenitor? from what bondage were they saved? who conducted them through the wilderness? who brought them into judea? requiring the whole history of the jews, their captivity, and restoration; the effect is most pernicious, and is fatal to the great design intended by the teacher. it is destructive of that habit of concentration of mind upon a particular subject, which is always the accompaniment of genius; and which ought to be cultivated in the young with the greatest assiduity and care. but this habit of "catechetical wandering," does not stop here, for the teacher has yet another word in this first sentence which admits of a similar treatment; and instead of returning to the lesson, he takes up the word "jericho," by means of which he follows a similar course; "riding off" from the original subject, and leaving the child bewildered and confused, to commence again, to be again interrupted and distracted by other irrelevant questions. many evils result from this practice; and the cause is obvious. for if the child has been taught these irrelevant truths before, this is obviously not the time to introduce them, when he is in the very act of _learning a new subject_;--and if he has not been taught them previously, the matter becomes worse; for by this attempt to teach a variety of new things at the same time, some important principles of nature are still more violently outraged.--_after_ the subject has been taught, and the child is called on to _revise_ his several lessons, then is the time to combine them, and to point out their various connections,--but not before. note n, p. .--it will always be found advisable to teach the alphabet to children long before they begin to read; and while they are being verbally exercised on the "groupings from scripture," and other books of a similar kind. to do so at home by way of games, will be found easiest for the parent, and most pleasant for the child. by having the small letters on four dice, (six on each,) and allowing the use of only one till the six letters on its sides are familiar;--and not giving the third, till those on the two first have been mastered; and the same with the fourth,--will be found useful, provided they be only occasionally made use of. a too frequent repetition of the _game_ will destroy its effect; and therefore, as there is sufficient time, it ought only to be allowed on proper, and perhaps on _great_ occasions. other contrivances, besides those given in the text, such as making the child guess at letters, drawing letters from a bag, and naming them, &c. will readily occur to ingenious parents or teachers. it should be observed, that as this acquirement is needed but _once_ in the child's lifetime, a little pains or trouble ought not to be grudged in forwarding it. note o, p. .--in using the "first class book on the lesson system," the teacher must take care that the letters and their sounds, or powers, be perfectly familiar to the child before he begins to read. the first lesson, of course, is composed altogether of words new to the child, each of which he must be taught to _read_ by combining the powers of the letters composing it;--and he must never be allowed to pass on to the following word, till all the previous ones can be correctly and readily decyphered. before beginning to the second, or succeeding lessons, the new words occurring in it, (which are prefixed,) must be read and made familiar to him one by one, and explained if necessary. by this means he will soon be able to _pick up the ideas_ in his lesson by even a first reading, which is the great end that the teacher ought to have in view.--the capital letters need not be taught till the child comes to them in his reading.--the lessons being consecutive, none must be omitted. note p, p. .--the nature of successive "steps" will be better understood by using, than by describing them. the following, however, will give some idea of their design; keeping in mind, that the contents of the several branches must be written out in such a manner as to convey the ideas in the common way. the following is a rude sketch of what the history of joseph would be like, if the ideas under each branch of the analysis were fairly written out as first, second, and third steps. analytical table. shewing the nature of successive steps in education. the history of joseph. -------------+-----------------+------------------------------------------- substance of | substance of a | a first step.| second step. | substance of a third step. -------------+-----------------+------------------------------------------- {joseph's father {jacob loved joseph best of his family; who joseph {was partial to {brought him the evil reports of them; and was beloved {him. {got a coat of many colours. by his { father, {and he dreamed {joseph told his dream of the sheaves, and {that he was {and his brothers hated him the more. hated {to be great. {he told his dream of the sun and stars; by his { {and his father observed the saying. brothers; { {these things {his brothers would not speak peaceably to {made the family {him; and envied and hated him; and {uneasy. {his father expostulated with him. {joseph sought his brothers at dothan; {joseph was {was cast into a pit, and afterwards {cruelly used by {sold for a slave. {his brothers, {his brothers concealed the crime, and { {his father mourned him as dead. and although { he was { {joseph was carried to egypt, and long in {and was made {was a slave in potiphar's house; affliction, {a slave to {where he was industrious and faithful; {potiphar; {and was tempted by his mistress. { { {joseph was unjustly put into confinement. {who unjustly {he was useful in prison, where {cast him into {a butler and baker were confined. {prison. {joseph interpreted their dreams; but was {left in prison by the butler forgetting {him. { {pharoah was displeased with the magicians. {he was brought {the butler told him of joseph; {out to pharoah, {and joseph interpreted his dreams, { {and was advanced to authority. { { {joseph married and was made next to {and made ruler {pharoah. he collected corn for seven {over all egypt; {years; distributed it to all nations; and he rose { {sold it for the cattle and lands of egypt. at last { to great { {joseph's brothers came to egypt for food; prosperity. {during which {and he spake roughly to them. {time he behaved {he detained simeon; {with great {brought and entertained benjamin; {prudence to his {and hid his cup in benjamin's sack. {brothers; {he then made himself known to his brothers. { { {joseph brought his father and family to {and kindly {egypt. he settled, supported, and honoured {took care of the {them. he buried his father, {whole family. {and left several charges with his brothers. note q, p. .--in giving a specimen of this mode of illustrating a connected subject, we may only premise, that the method, as a branch of education, requires that all the general heads should be perceived first, before any of them is sub-divided. for example, paul's sermon at antioch, (acts xiii.) must be perceived by the pupil in its great outline, or general heads, before he be called on to separate these into their several particulars. these heads as given in the analysis, (help to acts, vol. i. p. ,) are to the following purport: "the design of paul in this discourse appears to be, i. to conciliate the jews. ii. to prove that the messiah had already come, and that jesus was that messiah. iii. to remove certain objections against jesus being the messiah. iv. to establish the claims of jesus as the messiah; and, v. to press his salvation upon their notice and acceptance." when these general divisions, or heads, are understood, either by reading the respective verses which they occupy, or by the oral illustration of the teacher, each of them may then be taken separately, and sub-divided into its parts. for example, the first head, which in the analysis is, "_first_, paul endeavours to conciliate the jews by giving a brief outline of their history, till the days of david, to whom the messiah was specially promised," ver. - . this first of the above five heads, is separable into the following particulars. " . the condition of the jews in, and their deliverance from, egypt;-- . their history in the wilderness;-- . the destruction of their enemies, and their settlement in canaan;-- . of the judges till the time of samuel;-- . the origin of the kingly authority in israel;--and . the history of their two first kings." these again may be sub-divided into their several parts, of which the last will form a good example. it appears in the analysis in the following form: vi. history of their two first kings. i. of saul, and the time of his reign, ver. . ii. of david, and his character. . saul was removed to make room for david, ver. . . david was chosen by god to be their king, ver. . . an account of david's character, and god's dealing with him. [ .] god's testimony concerning david. ( .) what david was, ver. . ( .) what david was to do, ver. . [ .] god's promise to david. ( .) a saviour was to be raised up for israel, ver. . ( .) this saviour was to be of david's seed, ver. . note r, p. .--there is not perhaps a subject in the whole range of human investigation that is so much misunderstood in practice, as a person's own happiness. whatever causes uneasiness, or distress, or anxiety of mind, destroys happiness;--which shews that it is this pleasure, or delight itself,--this exercise of the heart, that we are seeking, and not the money, or the applause, or the sensual indulgences, which sometimes procure it. the heart of man has been made for something higher and more noble than these grovelling objects of sense and time. history and experience shew, that it can never be satisfied with any finite good; and especially, the possession of all earthly enjoyments only leaves the void more conspicuous and more painful. the whole world, if it were attained, would but more powerfully illustrate its own poverty; for even alexander weeps because there are no more worlds to conquer. scripture declares, and nature, so far as we can trace her, confirms it, that man--and man alone--was _made after the image of god_,--and therefore nothing short of god himself can ever satisfy _him_. heaven itself would be inadequate to fill the soul, or to allay the cravings of such a being. the fellowship and love of the almighty, and that _alone_, by the very constitution of our nature, can fill and satisfy the boundless desires of the human heart. they who stop short of this, can never be satisfied; while they who place their happiness on him, will always be full, because he alone is infinite. the love of god, and the desire for his glory then, are the only true foundation of human happiness. and hence it is, that the perfection of enjoyment, and the whole sum of duty, meet in this one point,--the love of god. note s, p. .--the writer is aware that, in doing justice to this department of a child's education, it is impossible to avoid the charge of "enthusiasm," perhaps "illiberality," or "fanaticism." in what we have urged in the preceding pages, we have endeavoured calmly to state and illustrate simple facts,--plain indications of nature,--and to draw the obvious deductions which they suggest. we intend to follow precisely the same course here, although quite aware that we are much more liable to be misunderstood, or misrepresented. we shall at least endeavour calmly to put what we have to say upon a true philosophical basis. we all admire what is termed "roman greatness,"--that self-esteem that would not allow the possessor to degrade himself, even in his own estimation, by indulging in any thing that was mean, or disreputable, or contrary to the unchangeable rule of right. cato's probity, who chose to die rather than appear to connive at selfishness; and brutus's love of justice, who could, with a noble heroism, and without faltering, doom even his own sons to death in the midst of the entreaties of his friends for their pardon, and the concurrence of the people;--are but two out of numberless instances from ancient history. now we ask, if we admire, and approve of men being so jealous of _their_ honour, is it to be imagined that the god who made them, and who implanted those high moral sentiments in their breasts, should be less jealous of _his_?--every one will acknowledge that he is infinitely more so.--and it is in accordance with this true philosophical sentiment, that we come to the conclusion, that to teach religion,--that is, to teach the character of god, and the duty we owe him,--without what is called the "peculiar doctrines" of christianity, is to lower the character of the almighty, and to impugn his holiness, his faithfulness, his justice, and even his goodness;--things under the imputation of which even a high-minded roman would have felt himself degraded and insulted. in teaching religion and morality to the young, therefore, the pupil must know, that god is too holy to look upon sin, or to connive at it;--too just to permit the very least transgression to pass with impunity;--too faithful to allow his intimations, either in nature, or in providence, or in scripture, ever to fail, or to be called in question, without danger;--and too good to risk the happiness of his holy creatures, by allowing them to suppose it even _possible_ that they can ever indulge in sin, and yet escape misery. where a knowledge of these attributes of deity is _wanting_, his character must appear grievously defective; but wherever they are _denied_, it is most blasphemously dishonoured.--hence the importance of even a child knowing how it is that "god can be just, while he justifies the ungodly." all these perfections, with the additional revelation of his mercy and grace, are exhibited, and greatly magnified and honoured, by the christian scheme; and it is to the simplicity of this, as the foundation of the child's education, that we wish at present to direct the attention of the parent and teacher. a child may be taught to know that god hates sin, and that he must, as a just god, punish even the least transgression. there is no difficulty in understanding this simple truth. and it may be made equally clear, that man must have suffered for himself, and that for ever, if god had not sent his son jesus christ to endure in their place the punishment which the inflexible nature of his justice required. to believe that god will pardon sin _without_ such an atonement, is, as we have shewn, to sully the character of god; while to believe it, and to act upon the belief, is at once the highest honour we can pay to his perfections, and becomes the strongest possible stimulant to a grateful heart to avoid sin, and to strive to love and to obey him. this accordingly is the sum of christianity, when divested of its technicalities; and this is the foundation,--and the only proper foundation, upon which to rear either morality or religion. but it _does_ form a solid and ample foundation for that purpose. and there is perhaps no christian of any sect who will deny, that either child or adult, who simply depends for pardon and acceptance with a holy god, on the substitution of the saviour, and who, in evidence of his sincerity, strives to hate and avoid sin, and to love and obey god, is not in a safe state. in teaching these simple fundamental truths to the young, the parent or teacher will find the "shorter confession of faith," of great use. its "first step" ought to be taught first; and the second must on no account be proceeded with, till the truths in the first have become familiar. the same rule ought also to be adopted with the second, before passing to the third. the "first initiatory catechism" has also been found of great benefit to the young; and which is very easily and successfully taught by means of its key. the foundation being thus laid, the great object of the teacher then is to train the child to duty;--teaching, in a familiar way, what _conduct_ ought to be avoided, and what pursued,--what is displeasing to god, and what he delights in. this can only be done, or at least is best done, by drawing lessons from scripture. the very commandment, "thou shalt not steal," is dealt with by nature in this way; for when we examine the operation of the mind, when acting even upon the direct precept, we find that it assumes the form of a lesson, which in that case is only an echo of the command. scripture example and narrative, however, are always preferable with children; and perhaps the best method of initiating them into the ability to perceive and draw lessons generally, will be to begin and carry them forward by means of the "progressive exercises" at the end of the first initiatory catechism. very young children are able to _commence_ this important exercise; and the information and directions given in the key will enable any monitor to carry them forward. the application of the lessons ought to be the principal concern of the teacher. on this much of their utility depends, and of which the following will afford a sufficient example. in the th line of the "progressive exercises," above referred to, the announcement is simply that "rebekah was obliging,"--from which the child will readily enough draw the lesson, that "we also should be obliging." but to _apply_ this lesson, the teacher is to suppose a corresponding case, and to ask the child how it ought to behave on that occasion. for example, he may ask, "if a companion wanted a sight of your book, what should you do?" "lend it to him."--"from what do you get that lesson?" "from rebekah being obliging."--"if you saw your companion drop his ball, or his marble, without perceiving it, what should you do?" "pick it up and give it to him."--"how do you know that you ought to do that?" "from god giving rebekah as our example, who was obliging." the field which here opens up for the ingenuity of the teacher for the moral improvement of the young is almost boundless. note t, p. .--the method which both nature and experience have pointed out, as the best for giving a practical knowledge of the principles of natural philosophy to children, is to state and explain some general principle, such as, that "soft and porous bodies are bad conductors (of heat;") and then set them to think, by asking what special lessons that general truth teaches them. this leads the pupil to a train of thought, which will at all events prepare him for the proper lessons when suggested by the teacher, and which will enable him at once to perceive why his mother has to make use of a cloth when using the smoothing iron; why a metal tea-pot must have a wooden handle;--why soft clothing preserves the heat of his body, and keeps him warm;--and why the poker by the fire gets heated throughout, while a piece of wood, the same length and in the same spot, remains comparatively cool. to teach the phenomena of nature, out of their mutual relations to the general principle, would be both laborious and evanescent, because of the want of the great connecting link, afforded by the analytical method here supposed. it was by the above means that the children, in the experiment in aberdeen, and more especially those in that at newry, appeared to the examinators to be inexhaustible; they having, during a space of time unprecedentedly short, got hold of principles which enabled them, without any great stretch of memory, and by the association of ideas, to account for hundreds of familiar objects and circumstances, the nature and working of which they had never perhaps thought of before. the application of the lessons in these exercises is equally necessary, and equally beneficial. it may be _directly_ from some of the lessons drawn, such as, "why is it inconvenient to handle hot irons?" "because hard bodies readily conduct heat." or it may be varied by asking the reason of a phenomenon not formerly perceived;--such as, "why does the fire scorch the foot when it is without a stocking, and not when we have a stocking on?" "because soft bodies, such as the stocking, do not readily conduct heat." these are sufficient as specimens of the mode of conducting classes upon these principles; the "steps," and their "keys," constructed for the purpose, will assist both teacher and pupil in their proper working. note u, p. .--in teaching children to read, two things are to be specially observed.--_first_, that the child shall know that the letters in a syllable are used merely as the signs of sound, by the combination of which he is to get a _hint_ only of the sound of the whole word. this will very soon enable him to teach himself.--the _second_ is, that the child shall know that his reading is only another way of getting at truth by words _seen_, instead of words _heard_. this will make him search for the ideas, even while learning to read; and the habit being formed, he will never afterwards be satisfied without understanding all that he reads. the letters of the alphabet, with their powers, having been made familiar, the "first class book" may be put into the pupil's hand, and the first word taught him by the combination of the three letters,--"bob." shew him how the letters pronounced shortly, and rapidly one after another, _form the word_. he will then be able to _read_ this word wherever he finds it. the word "has," is to be taught in the same way, and then the word "dog." he must then be asked, "who has a dog?" and "what has bob?" till he understands that these three words convey an idea. the second and succeeding lines are to be taught the same way;--the teacher making him read the words in different parts _out of their order_, to take care that he does not repeat by rote. at every new lesson he must learn to read the words which precede it, and to read them _well_ before beginning. the great design of his reading being to collect the ideas conveyed by the words, his doing so is greatly facilitated by his learning to read the words before beginning to the lesson. it is only necessary to remark, that the homely nature of the lessons tends greatly to produce the effect here designed, and which would not perhaps be so successfully accomplished at this stage in any other way. children may be taught to _write_ almost as soon as they can read a few of their lessons. care being taken that they hold the pen properly, they will soon learn to form the letters as an amusement;--and when these are known, they will soon be able to combine them into words. when they begin to write sentences, it ought to be from their own minds, or memories, but not from copies. writing is merely an imitation of nature in her operation of conveying ideas by speech; and the nearer the imitation can be made to correspond with the original, the more perfect will it be. speech is intended solely for the communication of our ideas;--and so should writing. we teach children words and the names of things, but we never teach them to express their own thoughts, by rehearsing after us either long or short speeches of our own. neither can we so readily teach children to express their own thoughts by writing, if we attempt to do it by making them copy words which others have thought for them, and the ideas of which they themselves perhaps do not perceive. copy-lines are a great hinderance to the young; and even for teaching the correct and elegant formation of the letters they do not appear to be always necessary. note v, p. .--arithmetic, and numerical calculations of every kind, are wrought by what have been termed "the four simple rules," viz. addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. they who are expert and accurate in working _these_, have only to learn the several rules by which they are applied to all the varied purposes of life, to be perfect arithmeticians. but when the working of these four rules is analysed, we find that, with the exception of the multiplication table, the whole four are merely different applications of the rule of addition. subtraction is wrought by _adding_ a supposed sum to the figure to be subtracted;--multiplication (with the exception mentioned above,) it wrought simply by _adding_ the carryings and the aggregate of the several lines;--and division, with the same exception, is also in practice wrought by a series of _additions_. if then we shall suppose the multiplication table fully mastered, it follows, that the person who has attained greatest expertness _in addition_, will be the most expert in the working of any and every arithmetical exercise to which he may be called. but _expertness_ in arithmetical calculations, is by no means so valuable as _accuracy_;--and upon the above principle, it also follows, that the person who acquires the greatest degree of accuracy and confidence in working _addition_, must, of course, be most accurate in all his calculations. the importance of this principle will be much more prized by and bye than it can be at present;--we shall however shew here how it may be taken advantage of. upon the principle of individuation, we have seen, that a child will learn one thing much better and sooner _by itself_, than when it is mixed up with several others; and therefore we come to the conclusion, that a child, when taught the practice of addition by itself, till he is fully master of it, both as respects rapidity and accuracy, has afterwards little more to do than to get a knowledge of rules. one month's systematic exercise in _this way_, will do more in forming a desirable accountant for a desk, than a whole year's exercise otherwise. in the one case, the pupil starts to the race without preparation, and with all his natural impediments clinging to him, which he has to disentangle and throw off one by one during the fatigues and turmoil of the contest; while the other, on the contrary, delays his start till he has deliberately searched them out and cast them aside, and thus prepared himself for the course. he then starts vigorous and light, to outstrip his labouring and lumbering competitors, not only in this, but in every after trial of strength and skill of a similar kind. to follow out this plan with success, the "arithmetic rod," containing three sides, has been provided. on one side there is a single line of figures, on the second two, and on the third three. these lines of figures for a school, ought to be painted on three boards sufficiently large for all to see them distinctly. the first line is to be mastered perfectly, before the second or the third is to be taught. the way to begin with the first line, is to make the pupil mentally add a certain sum to each figure on the board, say two, or seven, or fourteen, or any other sum, beginning always with a small one. he is besides to add the carryings also to each figure, and to write down the sum as he goes on. the beginner may be exercised with the sum of two, or even one, and have the sum increased, as he acquires a knowledge of the method. these sums, as the pupils advance, may be extended to any amount. the key will shew, in every case, whether the exercise has been accurately performed; and by marking the time in any particular case, the teacher can measure exactly, every week or month, the advance of each pupil. the mental advantages of this exercise are numerous. among other things it trains to a great command of the mind; and brings into exercise an important principle formerly illustrated, (part iii. ch. xi. p. ,) by which the pupil acquires the ability to think one thing, and to do another. when the pupil is sufficiently expert at one line of figures, he should be exercised upon the b side of the rod, containing the double line. he is to practise adding each pair of the figures at a glance,--till he can run them over without difficulty, as if they were single figures. he is then to add a sum to _them_, as he did on the single line, till he can add the sum and the double figure as readily as he did one. the c side of the rod is to be treated in the same way;--first by adding all the three figures at a glance, and naming the sum of each, till he can do it as readily as if there was but one; and then he is to add any special sum to them as before. note w, p. .--children generally delight in music, and seldom weary in its exercise. it forms therefore, when judiciously managed, a most useful exercise in a school for the purposes of relaxation and variety, and for invigorating their minds after a lengthened engagement in drier studies. it thus not only becomes desirable to teach music in the seminary as a branch of education for after life, but for the purposes of present expediency. that music may be taught to the young in a manner much more simple than it has yet generally been done, is now matter of experience. the notes are only _seven_, and these are each as precise and definite in proportion to the key note as any letter in the alphabet. there is obviously no difficulty in teaching a child seven figures,--and there is in reality as little difficulty in teaching him seven notes; so that, having the key note, he will, in reading a tune, sound each in its order when presented to him, as readily and accurately as he would read so many figures. to render this exercise more simple to children, and more convenient in a school, the notes have been represented by figures, being the key note. the other notes rise in the common gradation from to , which is the key note in alt. by this means, the teacher by writing on the common black board a few figures, gives the children the tune, which a very little practice enables them to read as readily as they would the words to which they adapt it. for particulars as to time, &c. see "shorter catechism hymn book," p. and . note x, p. .--there is perhaps no department in the family economy which ought to be so cautiously filled up as the _nursery maid_; and yet we generally find, that the duties of this office are frequently handed over to any thoughtless giddy girl, whose appearance is "shewy," although she be without education, without experience, and often without principle. why there has been as yet no regular seminary for the training of young persons of good principles, for the responsible duties of the nursery, is not a little remarkable. not one of the many valuable institutions for particular classes is so much wanted, and which, if properly conducted, would be a greater blessing to families and to society generally. one of the most beautiful features in our infant schools is the circumstance, that they have tended greatly to lessen this evil, and in some measure to supply the desideratum. note y, p. .--the question of rewards and punishments in a public school is a difficult one; and although there has of late been an obvious improvement in this respect, we are afraid that the principles which ought to regulate them are not yet very clearly understood. hence the contrariety of sentiments on the subject, with little more than mere _opinions_ offered to support them. the following few crude thoughts on the subject, may perhaps lead others better qualified to consider it more extensively. we can all readily enough distinguish the difference between _physical_ efforts, _intellectual_ efforts, and _moral_ efforts; but we are very ready to confound the rewards which, we think, nature has pointed out as most appropriate to each. for physical exertions, such as the race, or the wrestling match, physical returns appear natural and appropriate enough; and therefore, money, decorations, or other physical honours, are the ordinary rewards for excelling in any of them. but to desire money as a return for intellectual excellence, appears to every well constituted mind as sordid and unseemly. the reward for the exertion of intellect must partake of intellectual dignity; and hence it is, that esteem, applause, or admiration,--the incense of the _mind_,--appears to be the natural return for such exertions. in proof of this, we may instance the sensible degradation which is felt, when the reward proffered for mental efforts, even in children, takes the form of food, or clothing, or money;--and the kind of estimation in which students hold their medals, books, and other prizes, acquired at their several seminaries. these are never valued for their intrinsic worth, but only as permanent signs of _approbation_, or _admiration_,--feelings which are purely intellectual in their character, and perfectly distinct from the grossness of physical rewards on the one hand, and the affections--the moral incense of the _heart_,--on the other. all this appears pretty evident; and it obviously leads us to the next and concluding step, which is, that the natural and proper reward for _moral_ actions, ought to partake of the moral character. it is the love and affection of those we serve, or who are called on to estimate, or to decide on the character of our actions,--that is the proper, the natural, the desirable return. a little consideration, we think, will shew us, that this, as a general principle, is really correct; and that applause, admiration, or wonder, when they are afforded without _affection_, do not satisfy the heart, that in the exercise of love, seeks love in return.--it is the friendship, the fellowship, the affections of those whom we aim at pleasing, that alone can approve itself to our minds as the appropriate returns for moral actions. note z, p. .--the following are a few specimens of the paraphrastic exercise, as employed upon different subjects:-- "but martha was [_cumbered_] [_about much serving_,] and came to [_him_,] and said, lord, [_dost thou not care_] that my sister hath left me to [_serve_] alone? [_bid_] her, therefore, that she [_help_] me." this verse is paraphrased in the help to luke by substituting the explanation of the words printed in italics, and within brackets, for the words themselves, in the following manner: "_but martha was_ [much incommoded and harassed] [to get every thing in order for the temporal accommodation of jesus and his disciples,] _and came to_ [jesus,] _and said, lord_, [art thou indifferent or careless about the circumstance] _that my sister hath left me to_ [prepare the victuals, and do all the work of the house] _alone_? [command] _her, therefore, that she_ [leave her seat at thy feet, and come to assist] _me_." "every thing [_in nature_] [_shews forth_] god's [_wisdom_,] [_power_,] and [_goodness_;] but the bible, which is the [_word of god_,] and which was [_written_] by [_holy_] men at [_different times_,] under [_his direction_,] has most [_clearly_] [_revealed_] what [_god is_,] what he has done and what [_we should do_."] this is paraphrased in the key to the second initiatory catechism thus: "_every thing_ [that has been made in the world and sky] [gives clear and constant proof of] _god's_ [chusing the best ends, and accomplishing these by the best means,] [his being able to do any thing, and every thing,] _and_ [never ceasing to care for, and to promote the happiness of all his creatures;]--_but the bible,--which is the_ [only declaration of god's mind and will to man,] _and which was_ [composed, and put, with pen and ink, upon parchment or paper,] _by_ [good and pious] _men, at_ [dates long distant from each other,] _under_ [the care of god, who told them what they were to write,]--_has most_ [distinctly and plainly,] [brought into view, and let us know,] _what_ [god's character and perfections are,] _what he has done, and what_ [is our duty, both to god and man."] "the [_word of god_,] which is contained in the [_scriptures_] of the old and new testament, is the only [_rule_] to [_direct us_] how we may glorify and enjoy him." this is paraphrased in the key to the shorter catechism in the following manner: "_the_ [revelation of god's will,] _which is contained in the_ [writings] _of the old and new testament, is the only_ [guide] _to_ [give us information] _how we may glorify and enjoy him_." note a a, p. .--nature has obviously intended that all men should be both physically and mentally employed; and that, for the proper maintenance of health, the time occupied by _physical_ exercise, ought in general to exceed that which is employed exclusively in study. the combination of both in ordinary cases, however, is still more plainly indicated. in the circumstances of the young, physical exercise is peculiarly necessary. the writer looks forward with confidence to a time, when to every seminary of eminence will be attached a sufficient plot of ground for gardening and agricultural purposes, that the physical energies of the pupils may not be allowed irregularly to run to waste, as at present; but when they shall be systematically directed to interesting, and at the same time to useful purposes. the hand-swing, although an excellent substitute, will never cope in interest, even to a child, with the moderate use of the hoe, the rake, or the spade. such a system will produce many and valuable advantages to the young. gardening, by postponing the results of labour, exciting hope, and by its daily advances, encouraging to perseverance, will tend to produce a most beneficial moral effect; and will greatly assist the teacher in establishing and strengthening some of those valuable checks upon the volatility of the young mind, which are exceedingly necessary for the proper conduct of life, but which there is usually but small opportunity of cultivating in youth. but even then, for the proper conducting of a school, there will, for _in-door exercise_, be something more required than has yet been provided, both as to kind and degree. when we examine a number of children at play, we seldom find them sitting, or even standing for any length of time, when they have space and opportunity to exercise their limbs. the hand-motions of the infant schools, therefore, although excellent so far as they go, do not go far enough; and even the marching of the children is obviously too monotonous, and not sufficiently lively, for throwing off the accumulated mass of animal spirits, which is so speedily formed in young persons while engaged at their lessons. it was to supply this defect that the writer, a number of years ago, made some experiments with a large class of children, and with complete success. the exercise was founded on the singing and marching of the infant schools, and consisted in what is known in certain seminaries, as "rights and lefts." the children were taught to meet each other in bands of equal number, and by giving the right and left hand alternately to those who came in the opposite direction, they undulated, as it were, through each others ranks, and passed on to their own music, till they met again on the other side of the room, and proceeded as before. the exercise thus afforded to the upper and lower extremities of each child, the expansion caused to the chest, and the play given to the muscles of the back and body, are exceedingly beneficial; and the whole being regulated by their own song, gives healthy, and not excessive exercise to the lungs and the whole circulation. it was also found, that this amusing employment for the young, was capable of great variety. instead of two bands meeting each other in _lines_ in opposite directions, and parting, to meet again at the other side of the room, they were formed into a circle, one-half moving in one direction, and one-half moving in the opposite, by which means the circle was never broken. it was also found, that one of these circles, containing six or eight children only, could move within the other when it contained a larger number, without those in the one interfering in the least with those of the other; and the effect became still more imposing when _between_ these, and _without_ them, two other bands of children joined hands, united in the song, and moved round in opposite directions. these details may appear trifling to some; but experience will soon convince practical men, that in education, as in nature, the most simple means often produce the most powerful and the most beneficial results. the end. +-----------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note: | | | | footnotes listed as a note followed by a letter are | | gathered together at the end of the book. | | | | inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the | | original document has been preserved. | | | | typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | page he changed to be | | page vallies changed to valleys | | page pullies changed to pulleys | | page bye changed to by | | page recal changed to recall | | page inconsistences changed to inconsistencies | | page recal changed to recall | | page he changed to be | | page oppreseive changed to oppressive | | page word "is" added | | page recals changed to recalls | | page harrassed changed to harassed | | page missle changed to missile | | page decrepid changed to decrepit | | page pronouned changed to pronounced | | page slighest changed to slightest | | page intance changed to instance | | page educa- changed to education | | page jessus changed to jesus | | page fourteeen changed to fourteen | | page pestalozzie's changed to pestalozzi's | | page unnaccountable changed to unaccountable | | page recal changed to recall | | page missing word "be" supplied | | page indispensible changed to indispensable | | page exceeedingly changed to exceedingly | | page recal changed to recall | | page comtemplation changed to contemplation | | page soffa changed to sofa | | page than changed to then | | page terrestial changed to terrestrial | | page forwarned changed to forewarned | | page aplication changed to application | | page speciment changed to specimen | | page faultering changed to faltering | | page princiciples changed to principles | | page desireable changed to desirable | | page faultering changed to faltering | | page ungodily changed to ungodly | +-----------------------------------------------------+ ontario normal school manuals science of education authorized by the minister of education toronto the ryerson press copyright, canada, , by the minister of education for ontario second printing, . third printing, . contents part i the principles of education chapter i page nature and purpose of education conditions of growth and development worth in human life factors in social efficiency chapter ii forms of reaction instinctive reaction habitual reaction conscious reaction factors in process experience relative value of experiences influence of conscious reaction chapter iii process of education conscious adjustment education as adjustment education as control of adjustment requirements of the instructor chapter iv the school curriculum purposes of curriculum dangers in use of curriculum chapter v educational institutions the school other educative agents the church the home the vocation other institutions chapter vi the purpose of the school civic views individualistic views the eclectic view chapter vii divisions of educational study control of experience the instructor's problems general method special methods school management history of education part ii methodology chapter viii general method subdivisions of method method and mind chapter ix the lesson problem nature of problem need of problem pupil's motive awakening interest knowledge of problem how to set problem examples of motivation chapter x learning as a selecting activity the selecting process law of preparation value of preparation precautions necessity of preparation examples of preparation chapter xi learning as a relating activity nature of synthesis interaction of processes knowledge unified chapter xii application of knowledge types of action nature of expression types of expression value of expression dangers of omitting expression and impression chapter xiii forms of lesson presentation the lecture method the text-book method uses of text-book abuse of text-book the developing method the objective method the illustrative method precautions modes of presentation compared chapter xiv classification of knowledge acquisition of particular knowledge through senses through imagination by deduction acquisition of general knowledge by conception by induction applied knowledge general processes of acquiring knowledge similar chapter xv modes of learning development of particular knowledge learning through senses learning through imagination learning by deduction examples for study development of general knowledge the conceptual lesson the inductive lesson the formal steps conception as learning process induction as learning process further examples the inductive-deductive lesson chapter xvi the lesson unit whole to parts parts to whole precautions chapter xvii lesson types the study lesson the recitation lesson conducting recitation lesson the drill lesson the review lesson the topical review the comparative review chapter xviii questioning qualifications of good questioner purposes of questioning socratic questioning the question the answer limitations part iii educational psychology chapter xix consciousness value of educational psychology limitations methods of psychology phases of consciousness chapter xx mind and body the nervous system the cortex reflex acts characteristics of nervous matter chapter xxi instinct human instincts curiosity imitation play play in education chapter xxii habit formation of habits value of habits improvement of habits chapter xxiii attention attention selective involuntary attention non-voluntary attention voluntary attention attention in education chapter xxiv the feeling of interest classes of feelings interest in education development of interests chapter xxv sense perception genesis of perception factors in sensation classification of sensations education of the senses chapter xxvi memory and apperception distinguished factors of memory conditions of memory types of recall localization of time classification of memories memory in education apperception conditions of apperception factors in apperception chapter xxvii imagination types of imagination passive active uses of imagination chapter xxviii thinking conception factors in concept aims of conceptual lessons the definition judgment errors in judgment reasoning deduction induction development of reasoning power chapter xxix feeling conditions of feeling tone sensuous feelings emotion conditions of emotion other types of feeling mood disposition temperament sentiments chapter xxx the will types of movement development of control volition factors in volitional act abnormal types of will chapter xxxi child study methods of child study periods of development infancy childhood adolescence individual differences appendix suggested readings the science of education part i. principles of education chapter i nature and purpose of education =value of scientific knowledge.=--in the practice of any intelligent occupation or art, in so far as the practice attains to perfection, there are manifested in the processes certain scientific principles and methods to which the work of the one practising the art conforms. in the successful practice, for example, of the art of composition, there are manifested the principles of rhetoric; in that of housebuilding, the principles of architecture; and in that of government, the principles of civil polity. in practising any such art, moreover, the worker finds that a knowledge of these scientific principles and methods will guide him in the correct practice of the art,--a knowledge of the science of rhetoric assisting in the art of composition; of the science of architecture, in the art of housebuilding; and of the science of civil polity, in the art of government. =the science of education.=--if the practice of teaching is an intelligent art, there must, in like manner, be found in its processes certain principles and methods which may be set forth in systematic form as a science of education, and applied by the educator in the art of teaching. assuming the existence of a science of education, it is further evident that the student-teacher should make himself acquainted with its leading principles, and likewise learn to apply these principles in his practice of the art of teaching. to this end, however, it becomes necessary at the outset to determine the limits of the subject-matter of the science. we shall, therefore, first consider the general nature and purpose of education so far as to decide the facts to be included in this science. conditions of growth and development =a. physical growth.=--although differing in their particular conception of the nature of education, all educators agree in setting the child as the central figure in the educative process. as an individual, the child, like other living organisms, develops through a process of inner changes which are largely conditioned by outside influences. in the case of animals and plants, physical growth, or development, is found to consist of changes caused in the main through the individual responding to external stimulation. taking one of the simplest forms of animal life, for example, the amoeba, we find that when stimulated by any foreign matter not constituting its food, say a particle of sand, such an organism at once withdraws itself from the stimulating elements. on the other hand, if it comes in contact with suitable food, the amoeba not only flows toward it, but by assimilating it, at once begins to increase in size, or grow, until it finally divides, or reproduces, itself as shown in the following figures. hence the amoeba as an organism is not only able to react appropriately toward different stimuli, but is also able to change itself, or develop, by its appropriate reactions upon such stimulations. in plant life, also, the same principle holds. as long as a grain of corn, wheat, etc., is kept in a dry place, the life principle stored up within the seed is unable to manifest itself in growth. when, on the other hand, it is appropriately stimulated by water, heat, and light, the seed awakens to life, or germinates. in other words, the seed reacts upon the external stimulations of water, heat, and light, and manifests the activity known as growth, or development. thus all physical growth, whether of the plant or the animal, is conditioned on the energizing of the inherent life principle, in response to appropriate stimulation of the environment. [illustration: a. simple amoeba. b. an amoeba developing as a result of assimilating food. c. an amoeba about to divide, or propagate.] =b. development in human life.=--in addition to its physical nature, human life has within it a spiritual law, or principle, which enables the individual to respond to suitable stimulations and by that means develop into an intelligent and moral being. when, for instance, waves of light from an external object stimulate the nervous system through the eye, man is able, through his intelligent nature, to react mentally upon these stimulations and, by interpreting them, build up within his experience conscious images of light, colour, and form. in like manner, when the nerves in the hand are stimulated by an external object, the mind is able to react upon the impressions and, by interpreting them, obtain images of touch, temperature, and weight. in the sphere of action, also, the child who is stimulated by the sight of his elder pounding with a hammer, sweeping with a broom, etc., reacts imitatively upon such stimulations, and thus acquires skill in action. so also when stimulated by means of his human surroundings, as, for example, through the kindly acts of his mother, father, etc., he reacts morally toward these stimulations and thus develops such social qualities as sympathy, love, and kindness. nor are the conditions of development different in more complex intellectual problems. if a child is given nine blocks on which are printed the nine digits, and is asked to arrange them in the form of a square so that each of the horizontal and the vertical columns will add up to fifteen, there is equally an inner growth through stimulation and response. in such a case, since the answer is unknown to the child, the problem serves as a stimulation to his mind. furthermore, it is only by reacting upon this problem with his present knowledge of the value of the various digits when combined in threes, as , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; etc., that the necessary growth of knowledge relative to the solution of the problem will take place within the mind. worth in human life but the possession of an intellectual and moral nature which responds to appropriate stimulations implies, also, that as man develops intellectually, he will find meaning in human life as realized in himself and others. thus he becomes able to recognize worth in human life and to determine the conditions which favour its highest growth, or development. =the worthy life not a natural growth.=--granting that it is thus possible to recognize that "life is not a blank," but that it should develop into something of worth, it by no means follows that the young child will adequately recognize and desire a worthy life, or be able to understand and control the conditions which make for its development. although, indeed, there is implanted in his nature a spiritual tendency, yet his early interests are almost wholly physical and his attitude impulsive and selfish. left to himself, therefore, he is likely to develop largely as a creature of appetite, controlled by blind passions and the chance impressions of the moment. until such time, therefore, as he obtains an adequate development of his intellectual and moral life, his behaviour conforms largely to the wants of his physical nature, and his actions are irrational and wasteful. under such conditions the young child, if left to himself to develop in accordance with his native tendencies through the chance impressions which may stimulate him from without, must fall short of attaining to a life of worth. for this reason education is designed to control the growth, or development, of the child, by directing his stimulations and responses in such a way that his life may develop into one of worth. =character of the worthy life.=--if, however, it is possible to add to the worth of the life of the child by controlling and modifying his natural reactions, the first problem confronting the scientific educator is to decide what constitutes a life of worth. this question belongs primarily to ethics, or the science of right living, to which the educator must turn for his solution. here it will be learned that the higher life is one made up of moral relations. in other words, the perfect man is a social man and the perfect life is a life made up of social rights and duties, wherein one is able to realize his own good in conformity with the good of others, and seek his own happiness by including within it the happiness of others. but to live a life of social worth, man must gain such control over his lower physical wants and desires that he can conform them to the needs and rights of others. he must, in other words, in adapting himself to his social environment, develop a sense of duty toward his fellows which will cause him to act in co-operation with others. he must refuse, for instance, to satisfy his own want by causing want to others, or to promote his own desires by giving pain to others. secondly, he must obtain such control over his physical surroundings, including his own body, that he is able to make these serve in promoting the common good. in the worthy life, therefore, man has so adjusted himself to his fellow men that he is able to co-operate with them, and has so adjusted himself to his physical surroundings that he is able to make this co-operation effective, and thus live a socially efficient life. factors in social efficiency =a. knowledge, a factor in social efficiency.=--the following simple examples will more fully demonstrate the factors which enter into the socially efficient life. the young child, for instance, who lives on the shore of one of our great lakes, may learn through his knowledge of colour to distinguish between the water and the sky on the horizon line. this knowledge, he finds, however, does not enter in any degree into his social life within the home. when on the same basis, however, he learns to distinguish between the ripe and the unripe berries in the garden, he finds this knowledge of service in the community, or home, life, since it enables him to distinguish the fruit his mother may desire for use in the home. one mark of social efficiency, therefore, is to possess knowledge that will enable us to serve effectively in society. =b. skill, a factor in social efficiency.=--in the sphere of action, also, the child might acquire skill in making stones skip over the surface of the lake. here, again, however, the acquired skill would serve no purpose in the community life, except perhaps occasionally to enable him to amuse himself or his fellows. when, on the other hand, he acquires skill in various home occupations, as opening and closing the gates, attending to the furnace, harnessing and driving the horse, or playing a musical instrument, he finds that this skill enables him in some measure to serve in the community life of which he is a member. a second factor in social efficiency, therefore, is the possession of such skill as will enable us to co-operate effectively within our social environment. =c. right feeling, a factor in social efficiency.=--but granting the possession of adequate knowledge and skill, a man may yet fall far short of the socially efficient life. the machinist, for instance, may know fully all that pertains to the making of an excellent engine for the intended steamboat. he may further possess the skill necessary to its actual construction. but through indifference or a desire for selfish gain, this man may build for the vessel an engine which later, through its poor construction, causes the loss of the ship and its crew. a third necessary requisite in social efficiency, therefore, is the possession of a sense of duty which compels us to use our knowledge and skill with full regard to the feelings and rights of others. thus a certain amount of socially useful knowledge, a certain measure of socially effective skill, and a certain sense of moral obligation, or right feeling, all enter as factors into the socially efficient life. formal education assuming that the educator is thus able to distinguish what constitutes a life of worth, and to recognize and in some measure control the stimulations and reactions of the child, it is evident that he should be able to devise ways and means by which the child may grow into a more worthy, that is, into a more socially efficient, life. such an attempt to control the reactions of the child as he adjusts himself to the physical and social world about him, in order to render him a more socially efficient member of the society to which he belongs, is described as formal education. chapter ii forms of reaction instinctive reaction since the educator aims to direct the development of the child by controlling his reactions upon his physical and social surroundings, we have next to consider the forms under which these reactions occur. even at birth the human organism is endowed with certain tendencies, which enable it to react effectively upon the presentation of appropriate stimuli. our instinctive movements, such as sucking, hiding, grasping, etc., being inherited tendencies to react under given conditions in a more or less effective manner for our own good, constitute one type of reactive movement. at birth, therefore, the child is endowed with powers, or tendencies, which enable him to adapt himself more or less effectively to his surroundings. because, however, the child's early needs are largely physical, many of his instincts, such as those of feeding, fighting, etc., lead only to self-preservative acts, and are, therefore, individual rather than social in character. even these individual tendencies, however, enable the child to adjust himself to his surroundings, and thus assist that physical growth without which, as will be learned later, there could be no adequate intellectual and moral development. but besides these, the child inherits many social and adaptive tendencies--love of approbation, sympathy, imitation, curiosity, etc., which enable him of himself to participate in some measure in the social life about him. =instinct and education.=--our instincts being inherited tendencies, it follows that they must cause us to react in a somewhat fixed manner upon particular external stimulation. for this reason, it might be assumed that these tendencies would build up our character independently of outside interference or direction. if such were the case, instinctive reactions would not only lie beyond the province of formal education, but might even seriously interfere with its operation, since our instinctive acts differ widely in value from the standpoint of the efficient life. it is found, however, that human instincts may not only be modified but even suppressed through education. for example, as we shall learn in the following paragraphs, instinctive action in man may be gradually supplanted by more effective habitual modes of reaction. although, therefore, the child's instinctive tendencies undoubtedly play a large part in the early informal development of his character outside the school, it is equally true that they can be brought under the direction of the educator in the work of formal education. for that reason a more thorough study of instinctive forms of reaction, and of their relation to formal education, will be made in chapter xxi. habitual reaction a second form of reaction is known as habit. on account of the plastic character of the matter constituting the nervous tissue in the human organism, any act, whether instinctive, voluntary, or accidental, if once performed, has a tendency to repeat itself under like circumstances, or to become habitual. the child, for example, when placed amid social surroundings, by merely yielding to his general tendencies of imitation, sympathy, etc., will form many valuable modes of habitual reaction connected with eating, dressing, talking, controlling the body, the use of household implements, etc. for this reason the early instinctive and impulsive acts of the child gradually develop into definite modes of action, more suited to meet the particular conditions of his surroundings. =habit and education.=--furthermore, the formation of these habitual modes of reaction being largely conditioned by outside influences, it is possible to control the process of their formation. for this reason, the educator is able to modify the child's natural reactions, and develop in their stead more valuable habits. no small part of the work of formal education, therefore, must consist in adding to the social efficiency of the child by endowing him with habits making for neatness, regularity, accuracy, obedience, etc. a detailed study of habit in its relation to education will be made in chapter xxii. conscious reaction =an example.=--the third and highest form of human reaction is known as ideal, or conscious, reaction. in this form of reaction the mind, through its present ideas, reacts upon some situation or difficulty in such a way as to adjust itself satisfactorily to the problem with which it is faced. as an example of such a conscious reaction, or adjustment, may be taken the case of a young lad who was noticed standing over a stationary iron grating through which he had dropped a small coin. a few moments later the lad was seen of his own accord to take up a rod lying near, smear the end with tar and grease from the wheel of a near by wagon, insert the rod through the grating, and thus recover his lost coin. an analysis of the mental movements involved previously to the actual recovery of the coin will illustrate in general the nature of a conscious reaction, or adjustment. =factors involved in process.=--in such an experience the consciousness of the lad is at the outset occupied with a definite problem, or felt need, demanding adjustment--the recovering of the lost coin, which need acts as a stimulus to the consciousness and gives direction and value to the resulting mental activity. acting under the demands of this problem, or need, the mind displays an intelligent initiative in the selecting of ideas--stick, adhesion, tar, etc., felt to be of value for securing the required new adjustment. the mind finally combines these selected ideas into an organized system, or a new experience, which is accepted mentally as an adequate solution of the problem. the following factors are found, therefore, to enter into such an ideal, or conscious, reaction: . _the problem._--the conscious reaction is the result of a definite problem, or difficulty, presented in consciousness and grasped by the mind as such--how to recover the coin. . _a selecting process._--to meet the solution of this problem use is made of ideas which already form a part of the lad's present experience, or knowledge, and which are felt by him to have a bearing on the presented problem. . _a relating process._--these elements of former experience are organized by the child into a mental plan which he believes adequate to solve the problem before him. . _application._--this resulting mental plan serves to guide a further physical reaction, which constitutes the actual removal of the difficulty--the recovery of the coin. =significance of conscious reactions.=--in a conscious reaction upon any situation, or problem, therefore, the mind first uses its present ideas, or experience, in weighing the difficulties of the situation, and it is only after it satisfies itself in theory that a solution has been reached that the physical response, or application of the plan, is made. hence the individual not only directs his actions by his higher intelligent nature, but is also able to react effectively upon varied and unusual situations. this, evidently, is not so largely the case with instinctive or habitual reactions. for efficient action, therefore, there must often be an adequate mental adjustment prior to the expression of the physical action. for this reason the value of consciousness consists in the guidance it affords us in meeting the demands laid upon us by our surroundings, or environment. this will become more evident, however, by a brief examination into the nature of experience itself. experience =its value.=--in the above example of conscious adjustment it was found that a new experience arises naturally from an effort to meet some need, or problem, with which the mind is at the time confronted. our ideas, therefore, naturally organize themselves into new experiences, or knowledge, to enable us to gain some desired end. it was in order to effect the recovery of the lost coin, for example, that conscious effort was put forth by the lad to create a mental plan which should solve the problem. primarily, therefore, man is a doer and his ideas, or knowledge, is meant to be practical, or to be applied in directing action. it is this fact, indeed, which gives meaning and purpose to the conscious states of man. hour by hour new problems arise demanding adjustment; the mind grasps the import of the situation, selects ways and means, organizes these into an intelligent plan, and directs their execution, thus enabling us: not without aim to go round in an eddy of purposeless dust. =its theoretic or intellectual value.=--but owing to the value which thus attaches to any experience, a new experience may be viewed as desirable apart from its immediate application to conduct. although, for instance, there is no immediate physical need that one should learn how to resuscitate a drowning person, he is nevertheless prepared to make of it a problem, because he feels that such knowledge regarding his environment may enter into the solution of future difficulties. thus the value of new experience, or knowledge, is often remote and intellectual, rather than immediate and physical, and looks to the acquisition of further experience quite as much as to the directing of present physical movement. beyond the value they may possess in relation to the removal of present physical difficulty, therefore, experiences may be said to possess a secondary value in that they may at any time enter into the construction of new experiences. =its growth: a. learning by direct experience.=--the ability to recall and use former experience in the upbuilding of an intelligent new experience is further valuable, in that it enables a person to secure much experience in an indirect rather than in a direct way, and thus avoid the direct experience when such would be undesirable. under direct experience we include the lessons which may come to us at first hand from our surroundings, as when the child by placing his hand upon a thistle learns that it has sharp prickles, or by tasting quinine learns that it is bitter. in this manner direct experience is a teacher, continually adjusting man to his environment; and it is evident that without an ability to retain our experiences and turn them to use in organizing a new experience without expressing it in action, all conscious adjustments would have to be secured through such a direct method. =b. learning indirectly.=--since man is able to retain his experiences and organize them into new experiences, he may, if desirable, enter into a new experience in an indirect, or theoretic, way, and thus avoid the harsher lessons of direct experience. the child, for example, who knows the discomfort of a pin-prick may apply this, without actual expression, in interpreting the danger lurking in the thorn. in like manner the child who has fallen from his chair realizes thereby, without giving it expression, the danger of falling from a window or balcony. it is in this indirect, or theoretic, way that children in their early years acquire, by injunction and reproof, much valuable knowledge which enables them to avoid the dangers and to shun the evils presented to them by their surroundings. by the same means, also, man is able to extend his knowledge to include the experiences of other men and even of other ages. =relative value of experiences.=--while the value of experience consists in its power to adjust man to present or future problems, and thus render his action more efficient, it is to be noted that different experiences may vary in their value. many of these, from the point of their value in meeting future problems or making adjustments, must appear trivial and even useless. others, though adapted to meet our needs, may do this in a crude and ineffective manner. as an illustration of such difference in value, compare the effectiveness and accuracy of the notation possessed by primitive men as illustrated in the following strokes: , , , , , , etc., with that of our present system of notation as suggested in: , , , , , , , etc. in like manner to experience that ice is cold is trivial in comparison with experiencing its preservative effects as seen in cold storage or its medicinal effects in certain diseases; to know that soda is white would be trivial in comparison with a knowledge of its properties in baking. =man should participate in valuable experiences.=--of the three forms of human reaction, instinctive, habitual, and conscious, or ideal, it is evident that, owing to its rational character, ideal reaction is not only the most effective, but also the only one that will enable man to adjust himself to unusual situations. for this reason, and because of the difference in value of experiences themselves, it is further evident that man should participate in those experiences which are most effective in facilitating desired adjustments or in directing right conduct. it is found, moreover, that this participation can be effected by bringing the child's experiencing during his early years directly under control. it is held by some, indeed, that the whole aim of education is to reconstruct and enrich the experiences of the child and thereby add to his social efficiency. although this conception of education leaves out of view the effects of instinctive and habitual reaction, it nevertheless covers, as we shall see later, no small part of the purpose of formal education. influence of conscious reaction =a. on instinctive action.=--before concluding our survey of the various forms of reaction, it may be noted that both instinctive and habitual action are subject to the influence of conscious reaction. as a child's early instinctive acts develop into fixed habits, his growing knowledge aids in making these habits intelligent and effective. consciousness evidently aids, for example, in developing the instinctive movements of the legs into the rhythmic habitual movements of walking, and those of the hands into the later habits of holding the spoon, knife, cup, etc. greater still would be the influence of consciousness in developing the crude instinct of self-preservation into the habitual reactions of the spearman or boxer. in general, therefore, instinctive tendencies in man are subject to intelligent training, and may thereby be moulded into effective habits of reaction. =b. on habitual action.=--further new habits may be established and old ones improved under the direction of conscious reaction. when a child first learns to represent the number four by the symbol, the problem is necessarily met at first through a conscious adjustment. in other words, the child must mentally associate into a single new experience the number idea and certain ideas of form and of muscular movement. although, however, the child is conscious of all of these factors when he first attempts to give expression to this experience, it is clear that very soon the expressive act of writing the number is carried on without any conscious direction of the process. in other words, the child soon acquires the habit of performing the act spontaneously, or without direction from the mind. inversely, any habitual mode of action, in whatever way established, may, if we possess the necessary experience, be represented in idea and be accepted or corrected accordingly. a person, for instance, who has acquired the necessary knowledge of the laws of hygiene, may represent ideally both his own and the proper manner of standing, sitting, reclining, etc., and seek to modify his present habits accordingly. the whole question of the relation of conscious to habitual reaction will, however, be considered in chapter xxii. chapter iii the process of education conscious adjustment from the example of conscious adjustment previously considered, it would appear that the full process of such an adjustment presents the following characteristics: . _the problem._--the individual conceives the existence within his environment of a difficulty which demands adjustment, or which serves as a problem calling for solution. . _a selecting process._--with this problem as a motive, there takes place within the experience of the individual a selecting of ideas felt to be of value for solving the problem which calls for adjustment. . _a relating process._--these relevant ideas are associated in consciousness and form a new experience believed to overcome the difficulty involved in the problem. this new experience is accepted, therefore, mentally, as a satisfactory plan for meeting the situation, or, in other words, it adjusts the individual to the problem in hand. . _expression._--this new experience is expressed in such form as is requisite to answer fully the need felt in the original problem. education as adjustment =example from writing.=--an examination of any ordinary educative process taken from school-room experience will show that it involves in some degree the factors mentioned above. as a very simple example, may be taken the case of a young child learning to form capital letters with short sticks. assuming that he has already copied letters involving straight lines, such as a, h, etc., the child, on meeting such a letter as c or d, finds himself face to face with a new problem. at first he may perhaps attempt to form the curves by bending the short thin sticks. hereupon, either through his own failure or through some suggestion of his teacher, he comes to see a short, straight line as part of a large curve. thereupon he forms the idea of a curve composed of a number of short, straight lines, and on this principle is able to express himself in such forms as are shown here. [illustration] [illustration] in this simple process of adjustment there are clearly involved the four stages referred to above, as follows: . _the problem._--the forming of a curved letter by means of straight sticks. . _a selecting process._--selecting of the ideas straight and curved and the fixing of attention upon them. . _a relating process._--an organization of the selected ideas into a new experience in which the curve is viewed as made up of a number of short, straight lines. . _expression._--working out the physical expression of the new experience in the actual forming of capitals involving curved lines. =example from arithmetic.=--an analysis of the process by which a child learns that there are four twos in eight, shows also the following factors: . _the problem._--to find out how many twos are contained in the vaguely known eight. . _a selecting process._--to meet this problem the pupil is led from his present knowledge of the number two, to proceed to divide eight objects into groups of two; and, from his previous knowledge of the number four, to measure the number of these groups of two. . _a relating process._--next the three ideas two, four, and eight are translated into a new experience, constituting a mental solution of the present problem. . _expression._--this new experience expresses itself in various ways in the child's dealings with the number problems connected with his environment. =example from geometry.=--taking as another example the process by which a student may learn that the exterior angle of a triangle is equal to the two interior and opposite angles, there appear also the same stages, thus: . _the problem._--the conception of a difficulty or problem in the geometrical environment which calls for solution, or adjustment--the relation of the angle _a_ to the angles _b_ and _c_ in figure . [illustration: fig. ] [illustration: fig. ] [illustration: fig. ] . _a selecting process._--with this problem as a motive there follows, as suggested by figure , the selecting of a series of ideas from the previous experiences of the pupil which seem relative to, or are considered valuable for solving the problem in hand. . _a relating process._--these relative ideas pass into the formation of a new experience, as illustrated in figure , constituting the solution of the problem. . _expression._--a further applying of this experience may be made in adjusting the pupil to other problems connected with his geometric environment; as, for example, to discover the sum of the interior angles of a triangle. education as control of adjustment the examples of adjustment taken from school-room practice, are found, however, to differ in one important respect from the previous example taken from practical life. this difference consists in the fact that in the recovery of the coin the modification of experience took place wholly without control or direction other than that furnished by the problem itself. here the problem--the recovery of the coin--presents itself to the child and is seized upon as a motive by his attention solely on account of its own value; secondly, this problem of itself directs a flow of relative images which finally bring about the necessary adjustment. in the examples taken from the school, on the other hand, the processes of adjustment are, to a greater or less extent, directed and regulated through the presence of some type of educative agent. for instance, when a student goes through the process of learning the relation of the exterior angle to the two interior and opposite angles, the control of the process appears in the fact that the problem is directly presented to the student as an essential step in a sequence of geometric problems, or adjustments. the same direction or control of the process is seen again in the fact that the student is not left wholly to himself, as in the first example, to devise a solution, but is aided and directed thereto, first, in that the ideas bearing upon the problem have previously been made known to the student through instruction, and secondly, in that the selecting and adjusting of these former ideas to the solution of the new problem is also directed through the agency of either a text-book or a teacher. a conscious adjustment, therefore, which is brought about without direction from another, implies only a process of learning on the part of the child, while a controlled adjustment implies both a process of learning on the part of the child and a process of teaching on the part of an instructor. for scientific treatment, therefore, it is possible to limit formal education, so far as it deals with conscious adjustment, to those modifications of experience which are directed or controlled through an educative agent, or, in other words, are brought about by means of instruction. requirements of the instructor formal education being an attempt to direct the development of the child by controlling his stimulations and responses through the agency of an instructor, we may now understand in general the necessary qualifications and offices of the teacher in directing the educative process. . the teacher must understand what constitutes the worthy life; that is, he must have a definite aim in directing the development of the child. . he must know what stimulations, or problems, are to be presented to the child in order to have him grow, or develop, into this life of worth. . he must know how the physical, intellectual, and moral nature of the child reacts upon these appropriate stimulations. . he must have skill in presenting the stimuli, or problems, to the child and in bringing its mind to react appropriately thereon. . he must, in the case of conscious reactions, see that the child not only acquires the new experience, but that he is also able to apply it effectively. in other words, he must see that the child acquires not only knowledge, but also skill in the use of knowledge. chapter iv the school curriculum =valuable experience: race knowledge.=--since education aims largely to increase the effectiveness of the moral conduct of the child by adding to the value of his experience, the science of education must decide the basis on which the educator is to select experiences that possess such a value in directing conduct. now a study of the progress of a nation's civilization will show that this advancement is brought about through the gradual interpretation of the resources at the nation's command, and the turning of these resources to the attainment of human ends. thus there is gradually built up a community, or race, experience, in which the materials of the physical, economic, political, moral, and religious life are organized and brought under control. by this means is constituted a body of race experience, the value of which has been tested in its direct application to the needs of the social life of the community. it is from the more typical forms of this social, or race, experience that education draws the experience, or problems, for the educative process. in other words, through education the experiences of the child are so reconstructed that he is put in possession of the more typical and more valuable forms of race experience, and thus rendered more efficient in his conduct, or action. purposes of curriculum =represents race experiences.=--so far as education aims to have the child enter into typical valuable race experiences, this can be accomplished only by placing these experiences before him as problems in such form that he may realize them through a regular process of learning. the purpose of the school curriculum is, therefore, to provide such problems as may, under the direction of the instructor, control the conscious reactions of the child, and enable him to participate in these more valuable race experiences. in this sense arithmetic becomes a means for providing the child with a series of problems which may give him the experiences which the race has found valuable in securing commercial accuracy and precision. in like manner, constructive work provides a series of problems in which the child experiences how the race has turned the materials of nature to human service. history provides problems whose solution gives the experience which enables the pupil to meet the political and social conditions of his own time. physics shows how the forces of nature have become instruments for the service of man. geography shows how the world is used as a background for social life; and grammar, what principles control the use of the race language as a medium for the communication of thought. =classifies race experience.=--without such control of the presentation of these racial experiences as is made possible through the school and the school curriculum, the child would be likely to meet them only as they came to him in the actual processes of social life. these processes are, however, so complex in modern society, that, in any attempt to secure experience directly, the child is likely to be overwhelmed by their complex and unorganized character. the message boy in the dye-works, for example, may have presented to him innumerable problems in number, language, physics, chemistry, etc., but owing to the confused, disorganized, and mingled character of the presentation, these are not likely to be seized upon by him as direct problems calling for adjustment. in the school curriculum, on the other hand, the different phases of this seemingly unorganized mass of experiences are abstracted and presented to the child in an organized manner, the different phases being classified as facts of number, reading, spelling, writing, geography, physics, chemistry, etc. thus the school curriculum classifies for the child the various phases of this race experience and provides him with a comprehensive representation of his environment. =systematizes race experience.=--the school curriculum further presents each type of experience, or each subject, in such a systematic order that the various experiences may develop out of one another in a natural way. if the child were compelled to meet his number facts altogether in actual life, the impressions would be received without system or order, now a discount experience, next a problem in fractions, at another time one in interest or mensuration. in the school curriculum, on the other hand, the child is in each subject first presented with the simple, near, and familiar, these in turn forming basic experiences for learning the complex, the remote, and the unknown. thus he is able in geography, for example, on the basis of his simple and known local experiences, to proceed to a realization of the whole world as the background for human life. =clarifies race experience.=--finally, when a child is given problems by means of the school curriculum, the experiences come to him in a pure form. that is, the trivial, accidental, and distracting elements which are necessarily bound up with these experiences when they are met in the ordinary walks of life are eliminated, and the single type is presented. for instance, the child may every day meet accidentally examples of reflection and refraction of light. but these not being separated from the mass of accompanying impressions, his mind may never seize as distinct problems the important relations in these experiences, and may thus fail to acquire the essential principles involved. in the school curriculum, on the other hand, under the head of physics, he has the essential aspects presented to him in such an unmixed, or pure, form that he finds relatively little difficulty in grasping their significance. thus the school curriculum renders possible an effective control of the experiencing of the child by presenting in a comprehensive form a classified, systematized, and pure representation of the more valuable features of the race experience. in other words, it provides suitable problems which may lead the child to participate more fully in the life about him. through the subjects of the school curriculum, therefore, the child may acquire much useful knowledge which would not otherwise be met, and much which, if met in ordinary life, could not be apprehended to an equal degree. dangers in use of curriculum while recognizing the educational value of the school curriculum, it should be noticed that certain dangers attach to its use as a means of providing problems for developing the experiences of the child. it is frequently argued against the school that the experiences gained therein too often prove of little value to the child in the affairs of practical life. the world of knowledge within the school, it is claimed, is so different from the world of action outside the school, that the pupil can find no connection between them. if, however, as claimed above, the value of experience consists in its use as a means of efficient control of conduct, it is evident that the experiences acquired through the school should find direct application in the affairs of life, or in other words, the school should influence the conduct, or behaviour, of the child both within and without the school. =a. child may not see connection with life.=--now the school curriculum, as has been seen, in representing the actual social life, so classifies and simplifies this life that only one type of experience--number, language, chemistry, geography, etc., is presented to the child at one time. it is evident, however, that when the child faces the problems of actual life, they will not appear in the simple form in which he meets them as represented in the school curriculum. thus, when he leaves the school and enters society, he frequently sees no connection between the complex social life outside the school and the simplified and systematized representation of that life, as previously met in the school studies. for example, when the boy, after leaving school, is set to fill an order in a wholesale drug store, he will in the one experience be compelled to use various phases of his chemical, arithmetical, writing, and bookkeeping knowledge, and that perhaps in the midst of a mass of other accidental impressions. in like manner, the girl in her home cooking might meet in a single experience a situation requiring mathematical, chemical, and physical knowledge for its successful adjustment, as in the substitution of soda and cream of tartar for baking-powder. this complex character of the problems of actual life may prove so bewildering that the person is unable to see any connection between the outside problem and his school experiences. thus school knowledge frequently fails to function to an adequate degree in the practical affairs of life. =how to avoid this danger.=--to meet this difficulty, school work must be related as closely as possible to the practical experiences of the child. this would cause the teacher, for example, to draw his problems in arithmetic, his subjects in composition, or his materials for nature study from the actual life about the child, while his lessons in hygiene would bear directly on the care of the school-room and the home, and the health of the pupils. moreover, that the work of the school may represent more fully the conditions of actual life, pupils should acquire facility in correlating different types of experience upon the same problem. in this way the child may use in conjunction his knowledge of arithmetic, language, geography, drawing, nature study, etc., in school gardening; and his arithmetic, language, drawing, art, etc., in conjunction with constructive occupations. =value of typical forms of expression.=--a chief cause in the past for the lack of connection between school knowledge and practical life was the comparative absence from the curriculum of any types of human activity. in other words, though the ideas controlling human activity were experienced by the child within the school, the materials and tools involved in the physical expression of such ideas were almost entirely absent. the result was that the physical habits connected with the practical use of knowledge were wanting. thus, in addition to the lack of any proper co-ordinating of different types of knowledge in suitable forms of activity, the knowledge itself became theoretic and abstract. this danger will, however, be discussed more fully at a later stage. =b. curriculum may become fossilized.=--a second danger in the use of the school curriculum consists in the fact that, as a representation of social life, it may not keep pace with the social changes taking place outside the school. this may result in the school giving its pupils forms of knowledge which at the time have little functional value, or little relation to present life about the child. an example of this was seen some years ago in the habit of having pupils spend considerable time and energy in working intricate problems in connection with british currency. this currency having no practical place in life outside the school, the child could see no connection between that part of his school work and any actual need. another marked example of this tendency will be met in the history of education in connection with the educational practice of the last two centuries in continuing the emphasis placed on the study of the ancient languages, although the functional relation of these languages to everyday life was on the decline, and scientific knowledge was beginning to play a much more important part therein. while the school curriculum may justly represent the life of past periods of civilization so far as these reflect on, and aid in the interpreting of, the present, it is evident that in so far as the child experiences the past without any reference to present needs, the connection which should exist between the school and life outside the school must tend to be destroyed. =c. may be non-progressive.=--as a corollary to the above, is the fact that the school, when not watchful of the changes going on without the school, may fail to represent in its curriculum new and important phases of the community life. at the present time, for example, it is a debatable question whether the school curriculum is, in the matter of our industrial life, keeping pace with the changes taking place in the community. it is in this connection that one of the chief dangers of the school text-book is to be found. the text is too often looked upon as a final authority upon the particular subject-matter, rather than being treated as a mode of representing what is held valuable and true in relation to present-day interests and activities. the position of authority which the text-book thus secures, may serve as a check against even necessary changes in the attitude of the school toward any particular subject. =d. may present experience in too technical form.=--lastly, the school curriculum, even when representing present life, may introduce it in a too highly technical form. so far at least as elementary education is concerned, each type of knowledge, or each subject, should find a place on the curriculum from a consideration of its influence upon the conduct and, therefore, upon the present life of the child. there is always a danger, however, that the teacher, who may be a specialist in the subject, will wish to stress its more intellectual and abstract phases, and thus force upon the child forms of knowledge which he is not able to refer to his life needs in any practical way. this tendency is illustrated in the desire of some teachers to substitute with young children a technical study of botany and zoology, in place of more concrete work in nature study. now when the child approaches these phases of his surroundings in the form of nature study, he is able to see their influence upon his own community life. when, on the other hand, these are introduced to him in too technical a form, he is not able, in his present stage of learning, to discover this connection, and the so-called knowledge remains in his experience, if it remains at all, as uninteresting, non-significant, and non-digested information. in the elementary school at least, therefore, knowledge should not be presented to the child in such a technical and abstract way that it will seem to have no contact with daily life. chapter v educational institutions the school as man, in the progress of civilization, became more fully conscious of the worth of human life and of the possibilities of its development through educational effort, the providing of special instruction for the young naturally began to be recognized as a duty. as this duty became more and more apparent, it gave rise, on the principle of the division of labour, to corporate, or institutional, effort in this direction. by this means there has been finally developed the modern school as a fully organized corporate institution devoted to educational work, and supported as an integral part of our civil or public obligations. =origin of the school.=--to trace the origin of the school, it will be necessary to look briefly at certain marked stages of the development of civilization. the earliest and simplest forms of primitive life suggest a time when the family constituted the only type of social organization. in such a mode of life, the principle of the division of labour would be absent, the father or patriarch being the family carpenter, butcher, doctor, judge, priest, and teacher. in the two latter capacities, he would give whatever theoretic or practical instruction was received by the child. as soon, however, as a tribal form of life is met, we find the tribe or race collecting a body of experience which can be retained only by entrusting it to a selected body. this experience, or knowledge, is at first mainly of a religious character, and is possessed and handed on by a body of men forming a priesthood. such priestly bodies, or colleges, may be considered the earliest special organizations devoted to the office of teaching. as civilization gradually advanced, a mass of valuable practical knowledge relative to man's environment was secured and added to the more theoretic forms. as this practical knowledge became more complex, there was felt a greater need that the child should be made acquainted with it in some systematic manner during his early years. thus developed the conception of the school as an instrument by which such educative work might be carried on more effectively. on account of the constant increase of practical knowledge and its added importance in directing the political and economic life of the people, the civil authorities began in time to assume control of secular education. thus the government of the school as an institution gradually passed to the state, the teacher taking the place of the priest as the controlling agent in the education of the young. other educative agents =the church.=--but notwithstanding the organization of the present school as a civic institution, it is to be noticed that the church still continues to act as an educative agent. in many communities, in fact, the church is still found to retain a large control of education even of a secular type. even in communities where the church no longer exercises control over the school, she still does much, though in a more indirect way, to mould the thought and character of the community life; and is still the chief educational agent concerned in the direct attempt to enrich the religious experiences of the race. =the home.=--while much of the knowledge obtained by the child within his own home necessarily comes through self, or informal, education, yet in most homes the parent still performs in many ways the function of a teacher, both by giving special instruction to the child and by directing the formation of his habits. in certain forms of experience indeed, it is claimed by the school that the instruction should be given by the parent rather than by the teacher. in questions of morals and manners, the natural tie which unites child and parent will undoubtedly enable much of the necessary instruction to be given more effectively in the home. it is often claimed, in fact, that parents now leave too much to the school and the teacher in relation to the education of the child. =the vocation.=--another agent which may directly control the experiences of the young is found in the various vocations to which they devote themselves. this phase of education was very important in the days of apprenticeship. one essential condition in the form of agreement was that the master should instruct the apprentice in the art, or craft, to which he was apprenticed. owing to the introduction of machinery and the consequent more complex division of labour, this type of formal education has been largely eliminated. it may be noted in passing that it is through these changed conditions that night classes for mechanics, which are now being provided by our technical schools, have become an important factor in our educational system. =other educational institutions.=--finally, many clubs, institutes, and societies attempt, in a more accidental way, to convey definite instruction, and therefore serve in a sense as educational institutions. prominent among such institutions is the modern public library, which affords opportunity for independent study in practically every department of knowledge. our farmers' institutes also attempt to convey definite instruction in connection with such subjects as dairying, horticulture, agriculture, etc. many women's clubs seek to provide instruction for young women, both of a practical and also of a moral and religious character. various societies of a scientific character have also done much to spread a knowledge of nature and her laws and are likewise to be classed as educational institutions. such movements as these, while taking place without the limits of the school, may not unreasonably claim a certain recognition as educational factors in the community and should receive the sympathetic co-operation of the teacher. chapter vi the purpose of the school civic views since the school of to-day is organized and supported by the state as a special corporate body designed to carry on the work of education, it becomes of public interest to know the particular purpose served through the maintenance of such a state institution. we have already seen that the school seeks to interpret the civilized life of the community, to abstract out of it certain elements, and to arrange them in systematic or scientific order as a curriculum of study, and finally to give the child control of this experience, or knowledge. we have attempted to show further that by this means education so increases the effectiveness of the conscious reactions of the child and so modifies his instincts and his habits as to add to his social efficiency. as, however, many divergent and incomplete views are held by educators and others as to the real purpose of public instruction, it will be well at this stage to consider briefly some of the most important types of these theories. =aristocratic view.=--it may be noted that the experience, or knowledge, represented in the curriculum cannot exist outside of the knowing mind. in other words, arithmetic, grammar, history, geography, etc., are not something existing apart from mind, but only as states of consciousness. text-books, for instance, do not contain knowledge but merely symbols of knowledge, which would have no significance and give no light without a mind to interpret them. some, therefore, hold that the school, in seeking to translate this social experience into the consciousness of the young, should have as its aim merely to conserve for the future the intellectual and moral achievements of the present and the past. this they say demands of the school only that it produce an intellectual priesthood, or a body of scholars, who may conserve wisdom for the light and guidance of the whole community. thus arises the aristocratic view of the purpose of education, which sees no justification in the state attempting to provide educational opportunities for all of its members, but holds rather that education is necessary only for the leaders of society. =democratic view.=--against the above view, it is claimed by others that, while public education should undoubtedly be conducted for the benefit of the state as a whole; yet, since a chain cannot be stronger than its weakest link, the efficiency of the state must be measured by that of its individual units. the state, therefore, must aim, by means of education, to add to its own efficiency by adding to that of each and all of its members. this demands, however, that every individual should be able to meet in an intelligent way such situations as he is likely to encounter in his community life. although carried on, therefore, for the good of the state, yet education should be democratic, or universal, and should fit every individual to become a useful member of society. =these views purely civic.=--it is to be noted that though the latter view provides for the education of all as a duty of the state, yet both of the above views are purely civic in their significance, and hold that education exists for the welfare of the state as a whole and not for the individual. if, therefore, the state could be benefited by having the education of any class of citizens either limited or extended in an arbitrary way, nothing in the above conception of the purpose of state education would forbid such a course. individualistic views opposed to the civic view of education, many hold, on the other hand, that education exists for the child and not for the state, and therefore, aims primarily to promote the welfare of the individual. by these educators it is argued that, since each child is created with a separate and distinct personality, it follows that he possesses a divine right to have that personality developed independently of the claims of the community to which he belongs. according to this view, therefore, the aim of education should be in each case solely to effect some good for the individual child. these educators, however, are again found to differ concerning what constitutes this individual good. =the culture aim.=--according to the practice of many educators, education is justified on the ground that it furnishes the individual a degree of personal culture. according to this view, the worth of education is found in the fact that it puts the learner in possession of a certain amount of conventional knowledge which is held to give a polish to the individual; this polish providing a distinguishing mark by which the learned class is separated from the ignorant. it is undoubtedly true that the so-called culture of the educated man should add to the grace and refinement of social life. in this sense, culture is not foreign to the conception of individual and social efficiency. a narrow cultural view, however, overlooks the fact that man's experience is significant only when it enables him to meet the needs and problems of the present, and that, as a member of a social community, he must apply himself to the actual problems to be met within his environment. to acquire knowledge, therefore, either as a mere possession or as a mark of personal superiority, is to give to experience an unnatural value. =the utilitarian aim.=--others express quite an opposite view to the above, declaring that the aim of education is to enable the individual to get on in the world. by this is meant that education should enable us to be more successful in our business, and thus live more comfortable lives. now, so far as this practical success of the individual can be achieved in harmony with the interests of society as a whole, we may grant that education should make for individual betterment. indeed it may justly be claimed that an advancement in the comfort of the individual under such conditions really implies an increase in the comfort of society as a whole; for the man who is not able to provide for his own welfare must prove, if not a menace, at least a burden to society. if, however, it is implied that the educated man is to be placed in a position to advance his own interests irrespective of, or in direct opposition to, the rights and comforts of others, then the utilitarian view of the end of education must appear one-sided. to emphasize the good of the individual irrespective of the rights of others, and to educate all of its members with such an end in view, society would tend to destroy the unity of its own corporate life. =the psychological aim.=--according to others, although education aims to benefit the child, this benefit does not come from the acquisition of any particular type of knowledge, but is due rather to a development which takes place within the individual himself as a result of experiencing. in other words, the child as an intelligent being is born with certain attributes which, though at first only potential, may be developed into actual capacities or powers. thus it is held that the real aim of education is to develop to the full such capacities as are found already within the child. moreover, it is because the child has such possibilities of development within him, and because he starts at the very outset of his existence with a divine yearning to develop these inner powers, that he reaches out to experience his surroundings. for this reason, they argue that every individual should have his own particular capacities and powers fully and harmoniously developed. thus the true aim of education is said to be to unfold the potential life of each individual and allow it to realize itself; the purpose of the school being primarily not to make of the child a useful member of society, but rather to study the nature of the child and develop whatever potentialities are found within him as an individual. because this theory places such large emphasis on the natural tendencies and capacities of the child, it is spoken of as the psychological aim of education. =limitations of the aim.=--this view evidently differs from others in that it finds the justification for education, not primarily in the needs or rights of a larger society of which the child is a member, but rather in those of the single individual. here, however, a difficulty presents itself. if the developing of the child's capacities and tendencies constitute the real purpose of public education, may not education at times conflict with the good of the state itself? now it is evident that if a child has a tendency to lie, or steal, or inflict pain on others, the development of such tendencies must result in harm to the community at large. on the other hand, it is clear that in the case of other proclivities which the child may possess, such as industry, truthfulness, self-sacrifice, etc., the development of these cannot be separated from the idea of the good of others. to apply a purely individual aim to education, therefore, seems impossible; since we can have no standard to distinguish between good and bad tendencies, unless these are measured from a social standpoint or from a consideration of the good of others, and not from the mere tendencies and capacities of the individual. moreover, to attempt the harmonious development of all the child's tendencies and powers is not justifiable, even in the case of those tendencies which might not conflict with the good of others. as already noted, division of labour has now gone so far that the individual may profitably be relieved from many forms of social activity. this implies as a corollary, however, that the individual will place greater stress upon other forms of activity. the social, or eclectic, view moreover, because, as already noted, the child is by his very nature a social being, it follows that the good of the individual can never in reality be opposed to the good of society, and that whenever the child has in his nature any tendencies which conflict with the good of others, these do not represent his true, or social, nature. for education to suppress these, therefore, is not only fitting the child for society but also advancing the development of the child so far as his higher, or true, nature is concerned. thus the true view of the purpose of the school and of education will be a social, or eclectic, one, representing the element of truth contained in both the civic and the individualistic views. in the first place, such a view may be described as a civic one, since it is only by considering the good of others, that is of the state, that we can find a standard for judging the value of the child's tendencies. moreover, it is only by using the forms of experience, or knowledge, that the community has evolved, that conditions can be provided under which the child's tendencies may realize themselves. secondly, the true view is equally an individualistic view, for while it claims that the child is by his nature a social being, it also demands a full development of the social or moral tendencies of the individual, as being best for himself as well as for society. =this view dynamic.=--in such an eclectic view of the aim of education, it is to be noted further that society may turn education to its own advancement. by providing that an individual may develop to his uttermost such good tendencies as he may possess, education not only allows the individual to make the most of his own higher nature, but also enables him to contribute something to the advancement, or elevation, of society itself. such a conception of the aim of education, therefore, does not view the present social life as some static thing to which the child must be adapted in any formal sense, but as dynamic, or as having the power to develop itself in and through a fuller development of the higher and better tendencies within its individual members. =a caution.=--while emphasizing the social, or moral, character of the aim of education, it is to be borne in mind by the educator that this implies more than a passive possession by the individual of a certain moral sentiment. man is truly moral only when his moral character is functioning in goodness, or in _right action_. this is equivalent to declaring that the moral man must be individually efficient in action, and must likewise control his action from a regard for the rights of others. there is always a danger, however, of assuming that the development of moral character consists in giving the child some passive mark, or quality, without any necessity of having it continually functioning in conduct. but this reduces morality to a mere sentiment. in such a case, the moral aim would differ little from the cultural aim mentioned above. chapter vii divisions of educational study control of experience =significance of control.=--from our previous inquiry into the nature of education, we may notice that at least two important problems present themselves for investigation in connection with the educative process. our study of the subject-matter of education, or the school curriculum, has shown that its function as an educational instrumentality is to furnish for the child experiences of greater value, this enhanced value consisting in the greater social significance of the race experiences, or knowledge, embodied within the curriculum, when compared with the more individual experiences of the average child. it has been noted further, however, that the office of education is not merely to have the child translate this race experience into his own mind, but rather to have him add to his social efficiency by gaining an adequate power of control over these experiences. it is not, for instance, merely to know the number combinations, but to be able to meet his practical needs, that the child must master the multiplication tables. control of experience, however, as we have seen from our analysis of the learning process, implies an ability to hold an aim, or problem, in view, and a further ability to select and arrange the means of gaining the desired end. in relation to the multiplication table, therefore, control of experience implies that a person is able to apprehend the present number situation as one that needs solution, and also that he can bring, or apply, his knowledge of the table to its solution. =nature of growth of control.=--the young child is evidently not able at first to exercise this power of control over his experiences. when a very young child is aroused, say by the sound proceeding from a bell, the impression may give rise to certain random movements, but none of these indicate on his part any definite experience or purpose. when, however, under the same stimulation, in place of these random movements, the child reacts mentally in a definite way, it signifies on his part the recognition of an external object. this recognition shows that the child now has, in place of the first vague image, a more or less definite idea of the external thing. before it was vague noise; now it is a bell. but a yet more valuable control is gained by the child when he gives this idea a wider meaning by organizing it as an element into more complex experiences, as when he relates it with the idea of a fire, of dinner, or of a call to school. before it was merely a bell; now it is an alarm of fire. so far, however, as the child is lacking in the control of his experiences, he remains largely a mere creature of impulse and instinct, and is occupied with present impressions only. this implies also an inability to set up problems and solve them through a regular process of adjustment, and a consequent lack of power to arrange experiences as guides to action. in the educative process, however, as previously exemplified, we find that the child is not a slave to the passing transient impressions of the present, but is able to secure a control over his experience which enables him to set up intelligent aims, devise plans for their attainment, and apply these plans in gaining the end desired. growth of control takes place, therefore, to the extent to which the child thus becomes able to keep an end in view and to select and organize means for its realization. =elements of control.=--in the growth of control manifested in the learning process, the child, as we have noticed, becomes able to judge the value, or worth, of experience. in other words, he becomes able to distinguish between the important and the trivial, and to see the relative values of various experiences when applied to practical ends. further, he gains right feeling or an emotional warmth toward that which his intelligence affirms to be worthy, or grows to appreciate the right. thirdly, he secures a power in execution that enables him to attain to that which his judgment and feeling have set up as a desirable end. in fine, the educative process implies for the child a growth of control by which he becomes able ( ) to select worthy ends; ( ) to devise plans for their attainment; and ( ) to put these plans into successful execution. the instructor's problems the end in any learning process being to set the pupils a problem which may stimulate them to gain such an efficient control of useful experience, or knowledge, we may note two important problems confronting the teacher as an instructor: . _problem of matter._--the teacher must be so conversant with the subject-matter of the curriculum and with its value in relation to actual life, that he may select therefrom the problems and materials which will enable the child to come into possession of the desirable experiences. this constitutes the question of the subject-matter of education. . _problem of method._--the teacher must further be conversant with the process by which the child gets command of experience or with the way in which the mind of the child, in reacting upon any subject-matter, selects and organizes his knowledge into new experience and puts the same into execution. in other words, the teacher must fully understand how to direct the child successfully through the four stages of the learning process. (_a_) _general method._--in a scientific study of education it is usually assumed that the student-teacher has mastered academically the various subjects of the curriculum. in the professional school, therefore, the subject-matter of education is studied largely from the standpoint of method. in his study of method the student of education seeks first to master the details of the process of education outlined in the opening chapters under the headings of problem, selecting process, relating process, and application. by this means the teacher comes to understand in greater detail how the mind of the child reacts upon the presented problems of the curriculum in gaining control over his experiences, or, in other words, how the process of learning actually takes place within the consciousness of the child. this sub-division is treated under the head of _general method_. (_b_) _special methods._--in addition to general method, the student-teacher must study each subject of the curriculum from the standpoint of its use in setting problems, or lessons, which shall enable the child to gain control of a richer experience. this sub-division is known as _special methods_, since it considers the particular problems involved in adapting the matter of each subject to the general purpose of the educative process. . _problem of management._--from what has been seen in reference to the school as an institution organized for directing the education of the child, it is apparent that in addition to the immediate and direct control of the process of learning as involved in the method of instruction, there is the more indirect control of the process through the systematic organization and management of the school as a corporate institution. these more indirect problems connected with the control of education within the school will include, not only such topics as the organization and management of the pupils, but also the legal ways and means for providing these various educational instrumentalities. these indirect elements of control constitute a third phase of the problem of education, and their study is known as _school organization and management_. . _an historic problem._--it has been noted that the corporate institution known as the school arose as the result of the principle of the division of labour, and thus took to itself duties previously performed under other less effective conditions. thus the school presents on its organic side a history with which the teacher should be more or less familiar. on its historical side, therefore, education presents a fourth phase for study. this division of the subject is known as the _history of education_. summary the facts of education, as scientifically considered by the student-teacher, thus arrange themselves under four main heads: . general method . special methods . school organization and management . history of education the third and fourth divisions of education are always studied as separate subjects under the above heads. in dealing with special methods, also, it is customary in the study of education to treat each subject of the curriculum under its own head in both a professional and an academic way. there is left, therefore, for scientific consideration, the subject of general method, to a study of which we shall now proceed. part ii.--methodology chapter viii general method =meaning of method.=--in the last chapter it was seen that, in relation to the child, education involves a gaining of control over experiences. it has been seen further, that the child gains control of new experience whenever he goes through a process of learning involving the four steps of problem, selecting activity, relating activity, and expression. finally it has been decided that the teacher in his capacity as an instructor, by presenting children with suitable problems, may in a sense direct their selecting and relating activities and thus exercise a certain control over their learning processes. to the teacher, therefore, method will mean an ability to control the learning process in such a way that the children shall, in their turn, gain an adequate control over the new experience forming the subject-matter of any learning process. thus a detailed study by student-teachers of the various steps of the learning process, with a view to gaining knowledge and skill relative to directing pupils in their learning, constitutes for such teachers a study of general method. =subdivisions of method.=--for the student-teacher, the study of general method will involve a detailed investigation of how the child is to gain control of social experiences as outlined above, and how the teacher may bring about the same through instruction. tn such an investigation, he must examine in detail the various steps of the educative process to discover: . how the knowledge, or social experience, contained in the school curriculum should be presented to the child. this will involve an adequate study of the first step of the learning process--the problem. . how the mind, or consciousness, of the child reacts during the learning process upon the presented materials in gaining control of this knowledge. this will embrace a study of the second and third steps of the process--the selecting and relating activities. . how the child is to acquire facility in using a new experience, or in applying it to direct his conduct. this involves a particular study of the fourth step of the process--the law of expression. . how the teacher may use any outside agencies, as maps, globes, specimens, experiments, etc., to assist in directing the learning process. this involves a study of various classes of educational instrumentalities. . how the principles of general method are to be adapted to the different modes by which the learner may gain new experience, or knowledge. this will involve a study of the different kinds of lessons, or a knowledge of lesson types. method implies knowledge of mind before we proceed to such a detailed study of the educative process as a process of teaching, it should be noted that the existence of a general method is possible only provided that the growth of conscious control takes place in the mind of the child in a systematic and orderly manner. all children, for instance, must be supposed to respond in the same general way in the learning process when they are confronted with the same problem. without this they could not secure from the same lesson the same experiences and the same relative measure of control over these experiences. but if our conscious acts are so uniform that the teacher may expect from all of his pupils like responses and like states of experience under similar stimulations, then a knowledge on the part of the teacher of the orderly modes in which the mind works will be essential to an adequate control of the process of learning. now a full and systematic account of mind and its activities is set forth in the science of psychology. as the science of consciousness, or experience, psychology explains the processes by which all experience is built up, or organized, in consciousness. thus psychology constitutes a basic science for educational method. it is essential, therefore, that the teacher should have some knowledge of the leading principles of this science. for this reason, frequent reference will be made, in the study of general method, to underlying principles of psychology. the more detailed examination of these principles and of their application to educational method will, however, be postponed to a later part of the text. each of the four important steps of the learning process will now be treated in order, beginning in the next chapter with the problem. chapter ix the lesson problem =problem, a motive.=--the foregoing description and examples of the educative process have shown that new knowledge necessarily results whenever the mind faces a difficulty, or need, and adjusts itself thereto. in other words, knowledge is found to possess a practical value and to arise as man faces the difficulties, or problems, with which he is confronted. the basis of conscious activity in any direction is, therefore, a feeling of _need_. if one analyses any of his conscious acts, he will find that the motive is the satisfaction of some desire which he more or less consciously feels. the workman exerts himself at his labour because he feels the need of satisfying his artistic sense or of supplying the necessities of those who are dependent upon him; the teacher prepares the lessons he has to present and puts forth effort to teach them successfully, because he feels the need of educating the pupils committed to his care; the physician observes symptoms closely and consults authorities carefully, because he feels the need of curing his patients; the lawyer masters every detail of the case he is pleading, because he feels the need of protecting the interests of his client. what is true of adults is equally true of children in school. the pupil puts forth effort in school work because he feels that this work is meeting some of his needs. =nature of problem.=--it is not to be assumed, however, that the only problem which will prompt the individual to put forth conscious effort must be a purely physical need, such as hunger, thirst, or a distinct desire for the attainment of a definite object, as to avoid danger or to secure financial gain or personal pleasure. nor is it to be understood that the learner always clearly formulates the problem in his own mind. indeed, as will be seen more fully later, one very important motive for mastering a presented problem is the instinct of curiosity. as an example of such may be noted a case which came under the observation of the writer, where the curiosity of a small child was aroused through the sight of a mud-turtle crawling along a walk. after a few moments of intense investigation, he cried to those standing by, "come and see the bug in the basket." here, evidently, the child's curiosity gave the strange appearance sufficient value to cause him to make it an object of study. impelled by this feeling, he must have selected ideas from his former experience (bug--crawling thing; basket--incasing thing), which seemed of value in interpreting the unknown presentation. finally by focusing these upon this strange object, he formed an idea, or mental picture, which gave him a reasonable control over the new vague presentation. such a motive as curiosity may not imply to the same degree as some others a personal need, nor does it mean that the child consciously says to himself that this new material or activity is satisfying a specific need, but in some vague way he knows that it appeals to him because of its attractiveness in itself or because of its relation to some other attractive object. in brief, it interests him, and thus creates a tendency on the part of an individual to give it his attention. in such situations, therefore, the learner evidently feels to a greater or less degree a necessity, or a practical need, for solving the problem before him. need of problem =knowledge gained accidentally.=--it is evident, however, that at times knowledge might be gained in the absence of any set problem upon which the learner reacts. for example, a certain person while walking along a road intent upon his own personal matters observed a boy standing near a high fence. on passing further along the street, he glanced through an opening and observed a vineyard within the inclosure. on returning along the street a few minutes later, he saw the same boy standing at a near by corner eating grapes. hereupon these three ideas at once co-ordinated themselves into a new form of knowledge, signifying stealing-of-fruit. in such a case, the experience has evidently been gained without the presence of a problem to guide the selecting and relating of the ideas entering into the new knowledge. in like manner, a child whose only motive is to fill paper with various coloured crayon may accidentally discover, while engaged on this problem, that red and yellow will combine to make orange, or that yellow and blue will combine to make green. here also the child gains valuable experience quite spontaneously, that is, without its constituting a motive, or problem, calling for adjustment. =learning without motive.=--in the light of the above, a question suggests itself in relation to the lesson problem, or motive. granting that a regular school recitation must contain some valuable problem for which the learning process is to furnish a solution, and granting that the teacher must be fully conscious both of the problem and of its mode of solution, the question might yet be asked whether a problem is to be realized by the child as a felt need at the beginning of the lesson. for example, if the teacher wishes his pupils to learn how to compose the secondary colour purple, might he have them blend in a purely arbitrary way, red and blue, and finally ask them to note the result? or again, if he wishes the pupils to learn the construction of a paper-box or fire-place, would he not be justified in directing them to make certain folds, to do certain cutting, and to join together the various sections in a certain way, and then asking them to note the result? if such a course is permissible, it would seem that, so far at least as the learner is concerned, he may gain control of valuable experience, or knowledge, without the presence of a problem, or motive, to give the learning process value and direction. =problem aids control.=--it is true that in cases like the above, the child may gain the required knowledge. the cause for this is, no doubt, that the physical activity demanded of the pupil constitutes indirectly a motive for attending sufficiently to gain the knowledge. but in many cases no such conditions might exist. it is important, therefore, to have the pupil as far as possible realize at the outset a definite motive for each lesson. the advantage consists in the fact that the motive gives a value to the ideas which enter into the new knowledge, even before they are fully incorporated into a new experience. for example, if in a lesson in geometrical drawing, the teacher, instead of having the child set out with the problem of drawing a pair of parallel lines, merely orders him to follow certain directions, and then requests him to measure the shortest distance between the lines at different points, the child is not likely to grasp the connections of the various steps involved in the construction of the whole problem. this means, however, that the learner has not secured an equal control over the new experience. =pupils feel its lack.=--a further objection to conducting a lesson in such a way that the child may find no motive for the process until the close of the lesson, is the fact that he is himself aware of its lack. in school the child soon discovers that in a lesson he selects and gives attention to various ideas solely in order to gain control over some problem which he may more or less definitely conceive in advance. for this reason, if the teacher attempts, as in the above examples, to fix the child's attention on certain facts without any conception of purpose, the pupil nevertheless usually asks himself the question: "what does the teacher intend me to do with these facts?" indeed, without at least that motive to hold such disconnected ideas in his mind, it is doubtful whether the pupil would attend to them sufficiently to organize them into a new item of knowledge. when, therefore, the teacher proposes at the outset an attractive problem to solve, he has gone a long way toward stimulating the intellectual activity of the pupil. the setting of problems, the supplying of motives, the giving of aims, the awakening of needs--this constitutes a large part of the business of the teacher. pupil's motive =pupil's problem versus teacher's.=--but it is important that the problem before the pupil at the beginning of the lesson should really be the pupil's and not the teacher's merely. the teacher should be careful not to impose the problem on the pupils in an arbitrary way, but should try to connect the lesson with an interest that is already active. the teacher's motive in teaching the lesson and the pupil's motive in attending to it are usually quite different. the teacher's problem should, of course, be identical with the real problem of the lesson. thus in a literature lesson on "hide and seek" (_ontario third reader_), the teacher's motive would be to lead the pupil to appreciate the music of the lines, the beauty of the images, and the pathos of the ideas; and in general, to increase the pupil's capacities of constructive imagination and artistic appreciation. the pupil's motive might be to find out how the poet had described a familiar game. in a nature study lesson on "the rabbit," the teacher's motive would be to lead the pupil to make certain observations and draw certain inferences and thus add something to his facility in observation and inference. the pupil's motive in the same lesson would be to discover something new about a very interesting animal. in general, the teacher's motive will be ( ) to give the pupil a certain kind of useful knowledge; ( ) to develop and strengthen certain organs; or ( ) to add something to his mechanical skill by the forming of habitual reactions. in general, the pupil's motive will be to learn some fact, to satisfy some instinct, or perform some activity that is interesting either in itself or because of its relation to some desired end. that is, the pupil's motive is the satisfaction of an interest or the promotion of a purpose. =pupil's motive may be indirect.=--it is evident from the foregoing that the pupil's motive for applying himself to any lesson may differ from the real lesson problem, or motive. for instance, in mastering the reading of a certain selection, the pupil's chief motive in applying himself to this particular task may be to please and win the approbation of the teacher. the true lesson problem, however, is to enable the learner to give expression to the thoughts and feelings of the author. when the aim, or motive, is thus somewhat disconnected from the lesson problem itself, it becomes an _indirect_ motive. while such indirect motives are undoubtedly valuable and must often be used with young children, it is evident that when the pupil's motive is more or less directly associated with the real problem of the lesson, it will form a better centre for the selecting and organizing of the ideas entering into the new experience. =relation to pupil's feeling.=--a chief essential in connection with the pupil's motive, or attitude, toward the lesson problem, is that the child should _feel_ a value in the problem. that is, his apprehension of the problem should carry with it a desire to secure a complete mastery of the problem from a sense of its intrinsic value. the difference in feeling which a pupil may have toward the worth of a problem would be noticed by comparing the attitude of a class in the study of a military biography or a pioneer adventure taken from canadian or united states sources respectively. in the case of the former, the feeling of patriotism associated with the lesson problem will give it a value for the pupils entirely absent from the other topic. the extent to which the pupil feels such a value in the lesson topic will in most cases also measure the degree of control he obtains over the new experience. awakening interest in problems as will be seen in chapter xxix, where our feeling states will be considered more fully, feeling is essentially a personal attitude of mind, and there can be little guarantee that a group of pupils will feel an equal value in the same problem. at times, in fact, even where the pupil understands fairly well the significance of a presented lesson problem, he may feel little personal interest in it. one of the most important questions of method is, therefore, how to awaken in a class the necessary interest in the lesson problem with which they are being presented. . =through physical activity.=--it is a characteristic of the young child to enjoy physical activity for the sake of the activity itself. this is true even of his earliest acts, such as stretching, smiling, etc. although these are merely impulsive movements without conscious purpose, the child soon forms ideas of different acts, and readily associates these with other ideas. thus he takes a delight in the mere functioning of muscles, hands, voice, etc., in expressive movements. as he develops, however, on account of the close association, during his early years, between thought and movement, the child is much interested in any knowledge which may be presented to him in direct association with motor activity. this fact is especially noticeable in that the efforts of a child to learn a strange object consist largely in endeavouring to discover what he can do with it. he throws, rolls, strikes, strives _to_ open it, and in various other ways makes it a means of physical expression. whenever, especially, he can discover the use of an object, as to cut with knife or scissors, to pound with a hammer, to dip with a ladle, or to sweep with a broom, this social significance of the object gives him full satisfaction, and little attention is paid to other qualities. for these reasons the teacher will find it advantageous, whenever possible, to associate a lesson problem directly with some form of physical action. in primary number work, for example, instead of presenting the child with mere numbers and symbols, the teacher may provide him with objects, in handling which he may associate the number facts with certain acts of grouping objects. it is in this way that a child should approach such problems as: how many fours are there in twelve? how many feet in a yard? how many quarts in a peck? etc. the teaching of fractions by means of scissors and cardboard; the teaching of board measure by having boards actually measured; the teaching of primary geography by means of the sand-table; the teaching of nature study by excursions to fields and woods; these are all easy because we are working in harmony with the child's natural tendency to be physically active. the more closely the lesson problem adjusts itself to these tendencies, the greater will be the pupil's activity and hence the more rapid his progress. . through constructive instinct.--the child's delight in motor expression is closely associated with his instinctive tendency to construct. when, therefore, new knowledge can be presented to the child in and through constructive exercises, he is more likely to feel its value. thus it is possible, by means of such occupations as paper folding or stick-laying, to provide interesting problems for teaching number and geometric forms. in folding the check-board, for example, the child will master necessary problems relating to the numbers, , , , and . in learning colour, it is more interesting for the child to study different colours through painting leaves, flowers, and fruits, than to learn them through mere sense impressions, or even through comparing coloured objects, as in the montessori chromatic exercises. a study of the various kindergarten games and occupations would give an abundance of examples illustrative of the possibility of presenting knowledge in direct association with various types of constructive work. =a. activity must be directly connected with problem.=--it may be noted, however, that certain dangers associate themselves with these methods. one danger consists in the fact that, if care is not taken, the physical activity may not really involve the knowledge to be conveyed, but may be only very indirectly associated with it. such a danger might occur in the use of the montessori colour tablets for teaching tints and shades. in handling those, kindergarten children show a strong inclination to build flat forms with the tablets. now unless these building exercises involve the distinguishing of the various tints and shades, the constructive activity will be likely to divert the attention of the pupil away from the colour problem which the tablets are supposed to set for the pupils. =b. not too much emphasis on manual skill.=--again, in expressive exercises intended merely to impart new knowledge, it may happen that the teacher will lay too much stress on perfect form of expression. in these exercises, however, the purpose should be rather to enable the child to realize the ideas in his expressive actions. when, for example, a child, in learning such geographical forms as island, gulf, mountain, etc., uses sand, clay, or plasticine as a medium of expression, too much striving after accuracy of form in minor details may tend to draw the pupil's attention from the broader elements of knowledge to be mastered. in other words, it is the gaining of certain ideas, or knowledge, and not technical perfection, that is being aimed at in such expressive movements. = . instinct of curiosity as motive.=--the value of the instinct of curiosity in setting a problem for the young child has been already referred to. from what was there seen, it is evident that to the extent to which the teacher awakens wonder and curiosity in his presentation of a lesson problem, the child will be ready to enter upon the further steps of the learning process. for example, by inserting two forks and a large needle into a cork, as illustrated in the accompanying figure, and then apparently balancing the whole on a small hard surface, we may awaken a deep interest in the problem of gravity. in the same manner, by calling the pupils' attention to the drops on the outside of a glass pitcher filled with water, we may have their curiosity aroused for the study of condensation. so also the presentation of a picture may arouse curiosity in places or people. [illustration] = . ownership as motive.=--the natural pleasure which children take in collection and ownership may often be associated with presented problems in a way to cause them to take a deeper interest in the knowledge to be acquired. for example, in presenting a lesson on the countries of europe, the collection of coins or stamps representative of the different countries will add greatly to the interest, compared with a mere outline study of the political divisions from a map. a more detailed examination of the instincts and tendencies of the child and their relation to the educative process will, however, be found in chapter xxi. = . acquired interest as motive.=--finally, in the case of individual pupils, a knowledge of their particular, or special, interests is often a means of awakening in them a feeling of value for various types of school work. as an example, there might be cited the experience of a teacher who had in his school a pupil whom it seemed impossible to interest in reading. thereupon the teacher made it his object to learn what were this pupil's chief interests outside the school. using these as a basis for the selecting of simple reading matter for the boy, he was soon able to create in him an interest in reading for its own sake. the result was that in a short time this pupil was rendered reasonably efficient in what had previously seemed to him an uninteresting and impossible task. = . use of knowledge as motive.=--in the preceding cases, interest in the problem is made to rest primarily upon some native instinct, or tendency. it is to be noted, however, that as the child advances in the acquisition of knowledge, or experience, there develops in him also a desire for mental activity. in other words, the normal child takes a delight in the use of any knowledge over which he possesses adequate control. it is to be noted further, that the child masters the new problem by bringing to bear upon it suitable ideas selected out of his previously acquired experiences. it is evident, therefore, that, when a lesson problem is presented to the child in such a way that he sees a connection between it and his present knowledge and feels, further, that the problem may be mastered by a use of knowledge over which he has complete mastery, he will take a deeper interest in the learning process. when, on the other hand, he has imperfect control over the old knowledge from which the interpreting ideas are selected, his interest in the problem itself will be greatly reduced. owing to this fact, the teacher may adapt his lesson problems, or motives, to the stage of development of the pupils. in the case of young children, since they have little knowledge, but possess a number of instinctive tendencies, the lesson problem should be such as may be associated with their instinctive tendencies. since, however, the expressing of these tendencies necessarily brings to the child ideas, or increases his knowledge, the pupil will in time desire to use his growing knowledge for its own sake. here the child becomes able to grasp a problem consciously, or in idea, and, so far as it appeals to his past experience, will desire to work for its solution. thus any problem which is recognized as having a vital connection with his own experience constitutes for the child a strong motive. for older pupils, therefore, the lesson problem which constitutes the strongest motive is the one that is consciously recognized and felt to have some direct connection with their present knowledge. knowledge of problem =relation to pupil's knowledge.=--since the conscious apprehension of the problem by the pupil in its relation to his present knowledge constitutes the best motive for the learning process, a question arises how this problem is to be grasped by the pupil. first, it is evident that the problem is not a state of knowledge, or a complete experience. if such were the case, there would be nothing for him to learn. it is this partial ignorance that causes a problem to exist for the learner as a felt need, or motive. on the other hand it is not a state of complete ignorance, otherwise the learner could not call up any related ideas for its solution. when, for example, the child, after learning the various physical features, the climate, and people of ontario, is presented with the problem of learning the chief industries, he is able by his former knowledge to realize the existence of these industries sufficiently to feel the need of a fuller realization. in the same way the student who has traced the events of canadian history up to the year , is able to know the constitutional act as a problem for study, that is, he is able to experience the existence of such a problem and to that extent is able to know it. his mental state is equally a state of ignorance, in that he has not realized in his own consciousness all the facts relative to the act. in the orderly study of any school subject, therefore, the mastery of the previous lesson or lessons will in turn suggest problems for further lessons. it is this further development of new problems out of present knowledge that demands an orderly sequence of topics in the different school subjects, a fact that should be fully realized by the teacher. =recognition of problem: a. prevents digressions.=--an adequate recognition of the lesson problem by the pupil in the light of his own experience is useful in preventing the introduction of irrelevant material into the lesson. young children are particularly prone (and, under certain circumstances, older students also) to drag into the lessons interesting side issues that have been suggested by some phase of the work. as a rule, it is advisable to follow closely the straight and narrow road that leads to the goal of the lesson and not to permit digressions into attractive by-paths. if a pupil attempts to introduce irrelevant matter, he should be asked what the problem of the lesson is and whether what he is speaking of will be of any value in attaining that end. the necessity of this will, however, be seen more fully in our consideration of the next division of the learning process. =b. organizes the lesson facts.=--the adequate recognition of the lesson problem is valuable in helping the pupil to organize his knowledge. if you take a friend for a walk along the streets of a strange city engaging him in interesting conversation by the way, and if, when you have reached a distant point, you tell him that he must find his way back alone, he will probably be unable to do so without assistance. but if you tell him at the outset what you are going to do, he will note carefully the streets traversed, the corners turned, the directions taken, and will likely find his way back easily. this is because he had a clearly defined problem before him. the conditions are much the same in a lesson. when the pupil starts out with no definite problem and is led along blindly to some unknown goal, he will be unable to retrace his route; that is, he will be unable to reproduce the matter over which he has been taken. but with a clearly defined problem he will be able to note the order of the steps of the lesson, their relation to one another and to the problem, and when the lesson is over he will be able to go over the same course again. the facts of the lesson will have become organized in his mind. how to set lesson problem =precautions.=--if the teacher expects his pupils to become interested in a problem by immediately recognizing a connection between it and their previous knowledge, he must avoid placing the problem before them in a form in which they cannot readily apprehend this connection. the teacher who announced at the beginning of the grammar lesson, "to-day we are going to learn about mood in verbs" started the problem in a form that was meaningless to the class. the simplest method in such a lesson would be to draw attention to examples in sentences of verbs showing this change and then say to the class, "let us discover why these verbs are changed." similarly, to propose as the problem of the history lesson "the development of parliamentary government during the stuart period" would be to use terms too difficult for the class to interpret. it would be better to say: "we are going to find out how the stuart kings were forced by parliament to give up control of certain things." instead of saying, "we shall study in this lesson the municipal government of ontario," it would be much better to proceed in some such way as the following: "a few days ago your father paid his taxes for the year. now we are going to learn by whom, and for what purposes, these taxes are spent." similarly, "let us find out all we can about the cat," would be inferior to, "of what use to the cat are his sharp claws, padded feet, and rough tongue?" on the other hand, it is evident that, in attempting to present the problem in a form in which the pupils may recognize its connection with their previous experiences, care must be taken not to tell outright the whole point of the lesson. in a lesson on the adverb, for instance, it would not do to say: "you have learned how adjectives modify, or change the meaning of, nouns. to-day we shall study words that modify verbs." a more satisfactory way of proceeding in such a lesson would be to have on the black-board two sets of sentences exactly alike except that the second would contain adverbs and the first would not. then ask: "what words are in the second group of sentences that are not in the first? let us examine the use of these words." in the same way, to state the problem of an arithmetic lesson as the discovery of "how to add fractions by changing them to equivalent fractions having the same denominator" is open to the objection of telling too much. in this case a better method would be to present a definite problem requiring the use of addition of fractions. the pupil will see that he has not the necessary arithmetical knowledge to solve the problem and will then be in the proper mental attitude for the lesson. examples of motivation a few additional examples, drawn from different school subjects, are here added to illustrate further what is meant by setting a problem as a need, or motive. =a. history.=--the members of a form iv class were about to take up the study of the influence of john wilkes upon parliamentary affairs during the reign of george iii. as most of the pupils had visited the canadian parliament buildings and had watched from the galleries the proceedings of the house of commons, the teacher took this as the point of departure for the lesson. first, he obtained from the class the facts that the members of the commons are elected by the different constituencies of the dominion and that nobody has any power to interfere with the people's right to elect whomsoever they wish to represent them. the same conditions exist to-day in england, but this has not always been the case there. there was a time when the people's choice of a representative was sometimes set aside. the teacher then inquired regarding the men who sit in the gallery just above the speaker's chair. these are the parliamentary reporters for the important daily newspapers throughout the dominion. they send telegraphic despatches regarding the debates in the house to their respective newspapers. these despatches are published the following day, and the people of the country are thus enabled to know what is going on in parliament. nobody has any right to prevent these newspapers from publishing what they wish regarding the proceedings, provided, of course, the reports are not untruthful. these conditions prevail also in england now, but have not always done so. the work of the lesson was to see how these two conditions, freedom of elections and liberty of the press, have been brought about. the pupils were thus placed in a receptive attitude to hear the story of john wilkes. =b. arithmetic.=--a form iv class had been studying decimals and knew how to read and write, add and subtract them. the teacher suggested a situation requiring the use of multiplication, and the pupils found themselves without the necessary means to meet the situation. for instance, "mary's mother sent her to buy . lb. tea which cost $. per lb. what would she have to pay for it?" or, "mr. brown has a field containing . acres. last year it yielded . bushels of wheat to the acre. wheat was worth . cents per bushel. what was the crop from the field worth?" the pupils saw that, in order to solve these questions, they must know how to multiply decimals. multiplication of decimals became the problem of the lesson, the goal to be attained. =c. grammar.=--the teacher wished to show the meaning of _case_ as an inflection of nouns and pronouns. he had written on the black-board such sentences as: i dropped my book when john pushed me. when the man passed, he had his dog with him. he asked the pupils what words in these sentences refer to the same person, and obtained the answer that _i_, _my_, and _me_ all refer to one person, and _he_, _his_, and _him_ to another. then, he proposed the problem, "let us find out why we have three different forms of a word all meaning the same person." the problem was adapted to animate the curiosity of the pupils and call into activity their capacity for perceiving relationships. =d. literature.=--the teacher was about to present the poem, "hide and seek," to a form iii class. he said, "you have all played 'hide and seek.' how do you play it? you will find on page of your _ontario third reader_ a beautiful poem describing a game of 'hide and seek' that is rather a sad one. let us see how the poet has described this game." the pupils were at once interested in what the poet had to say about what was to them a very familiar diversion, and, while the lesson was in progress, their capacity for sympathy and for artistic appreciation was appealed to. =e. geography.=--a form iii class was to study some of the more important commercial centres of canada. speaking of montreal, the teacher proposed the problem, "do you think we can find out why a city of half a million people has grown up at this particular point?" the pupils' instinct of curiosity was here appealed to and their capacity for perceiving relationships was challenged. =f. composition.=--the teacher wished to take up the writing of letters of application with a class of form iv pupils. he wrote on the black-board an advertisement copied from a recent newspaper, for example, "wanted--a boy about fifteen to assist in office; must be a good writer and accurate in figures; apply by letter to martin & kelly, central chambers, city." then he said, "some day in the near future many of you will be called upon to answer such an advertisement as this. now what should a letter of application in reply to this contain?" the class at once proceeded, with the teacher's assistance, to work out a satisfactory letter. here, a purpose for the future was the principal need promoted. =g. nature study.=--the pupils of a form ii class had been making observations regarding a pet rabbit that one of their number had brought to school. after reporting these observations, the pupils were asked, "what good do you think these long ears, large eyes, strong hind legs, split upper lip, etc., are to the rabbit?" here the problem set was related to the children's instinctive interest in a living animal, appealed to the instinct of curiosity, and challenged their capacity to draw inferences. chapter x learning as a selecting activity or process of analysis =knowledge obtained through use of ideas.=--as already noted, the presented problem of a lesson is neither a state of complete knowledge nor a state of complete ignorance. on the other hand, its function is to provide a starting-point and guide for the calling up of a number of suitable ideas which the pupil may later relate into a single experience, constituting the new knowledge. take, for example, a person without a knowledge of fractions, who approaches for the first time the problem of sharing as found in such a question as: divide $ between john and william, giving john $ as often as william gets $ . in gaining control of this situation, the pupil must select the ideas $ and $ , the knowledge that $ and $ = $ , and the further knowledge that $ contains $ three times. these various ideas will constitute data for organizing the new experience of $ for john and $ for william. in the same manner, when the student in grammar is first presented with the problem of interpreting the grammatical value of the word _driving_ in the sentence, "the boy _driving_ the horse is very noisy," he is compelled to apply to its interpretation the ideas noun, adjectival relation, and adjective, and also the ideas object, objective relation, and verb. in this way the child secures the mental elements which he may organize into the new experience, or knowledge (participle), and thus gain control of the presented word. =interpreting ideas already known.=--it is to be noticed at the outset that all ideas selected to aid in the solution of the lesson problem have their origin in certain past experiences which have a bearing on the subject in hand. when presented with a strange object (guava), a person fixes his attention upon it, and thereupon is able, through his former sensation experiences, to interpret it as an unknown thing. he then begins to select, out of his experiences of former objects, ideas that bear upon the thing before him. by focusing thereon certain ideas with which he is perfectly familiar, as rind, flesh, seed, etc., he interprets the strange thing as a kind of fruit. in the same way, when the student is first presented in school with an example of the infinitive, he brings to bear upon the vague presentation various ideas already contained within his experience through his previous study of the noun and the verb. to the extent also to which he possesses and is able to recall these necessary old ideas, will he be able to adjust himself to the new and unfamiliar presented example (infinitive). it is evident, therefore, that a new presentation can have a meaning for us only as it is related to something in our past experience. =further examples.=--the mind invariably tries to interpret new presentations in terms of old ideas. a newspaper account of a railway wreck will be intelligible to us only through the revival and reconstruction of those past experiences that are similar to the elements described in the account. the grief, disappointment, or excitement of another will be appreciated only as we have experienced similar feelings in the past. new ideas are interpreted by means of related old ideas; new feelings and acts are dependent upon and made possible by related old feelings and acts. moreover, the meaning assigned to common objects varies with different persons and even with the same person under different circumstances. a forest would be regarded by the savage as a place to hide from the attacks of his enemies; by the hunter as a place to secure game; by the woodcutter as affording firewood; by the lumberman as yielding logs for lumber; by the naturalist as offering opportunity for observing insects and animals; by the artist as a place presenting beautiful combinations of colours. this ability of the mind to retain and use its former knowledge in meeting and interpreting new experiences is known in psychology as _apperception_. a more detailed study of apperception as a mental process will be made in chapter xxvi. the selecting process =learner's mind active.=--a further principle of method to be deduced from the foregoing is, that the process of bringing ideas out of former experiences to bear upon a presented problem must take place within the mind of the learner himself. the new knowledge being an experience organized from elements selected out of former experiences, it follows that the learner will possess the new knowledge only in so far as he has himself gone through the process of selecting the necessary interpreting ideas out of his own former knowledge and finally organizing them into new knowledge. this need for the pupil to direct mental effort, or attention, upon the problem in order to bring upon it, out of his former knowledge, the ideas relative to the solution of the question before him, is one of the most important laws of method. from the standpoint of the teacher, this law demands that he so direct the process of learning that the pupil will clearly call up in consciousness the selected interpreting ideas as portions of his old knowledge, and further feel a connection between these and the new problem before him. =learner's experience analysed.=--the second stage of the learning process is found to involve also a breaking up of former experience. this appears in the fact that the various ideas which are necessary to interpret the new problem are to be selected out of larger complexes of past experience. for example, in a lesson whose problem is to account for the lack of rainfall in the sahara desert, the pupil may have a complex of experiences regarding the position of the desert. out of this mass of experience he must, however, select the one feature--its position in relation to the equator. in the same way, he may have a whole body of experience regarding the winds of africa. this body must, however, be analysed, and the attention fixed upon the north-east trade-wind. again, he may know many things about these winds, but here he selects out the single item of their coming from a land source. again, from the complex of old knowledge which he possesses regarding the land area from which the wind blows, he must analyse out its temperature, and compare it with that of the areas toward which the wind is blowing. thus it will be seen that, step by step, the special items of old knowledge to be used in the apperceptive process are selected out of larger masses of experience. for this reason this phase of the learning process is frequently designated as a process of analysis. =problem as object of analysis.=--although the second step of the learning process has been described as a selecting of elements from past experience, it might be supposed that the various elements which the mind has been said to select from its former experiences to interpret the new problem, come in a sense from the presentation itself. thus it is often said, in describing the present step in the learning process, that the presentation embodies a certain aggregate of experience, which the learner can master by analysing it into its component parts and recombining the analysed parts into a better known whole. =analysis depends upon selection.=--it is not in the above sense, however, that the term analysis is to be applied in the learning process. it is not true, for instance, when a person is presented with a strange object, say an _ornithorhynchus_, and realizes it in only a vague way, that any mere analysis of the object will discover for him the various characteristics which are to synthesize into a knowledge of the animal. this would imply that in analysis the mind merely breaks up a vaguely known whole in order to make of it a definitely known whole. but the learner could not discover the characteristics of such an object unless the mind attended to it with certain elements of its former experiences. unless, for instance, the person already knew certain characteristics of both birds and animals, he could not interpret the ornithorhynchus as a bird-beaked animal. in the case of the child and the mud-turtle, also, there could have been no analysis of the problem in the way referred to, had the child not had the ideas, bug and basket, as elements of former experience. these characteristics, therefore, which enter into a definite knowledge of the object, do not come out of the object by a mere mechanical process of analysis, but are rather read into the object by the apperceptive process. that is, the learner does not get his new experience directly out of the presented materials, but builds up his new experience out of elements of his former knowledge. in other words, the learner sees in the new object, or problem, only such characteristics as his former knowledge and interest enable him to see. thus while the learner may be said from one standpoint to analyse the new problem, this is possible only because he is able to break up, or analyse, his former experience and read certain of its elements into the new presentation. to say that the mind analyses the unknown object, or topic, in any other sense, would be to confound mental interpretation with physical analysis. =a further example.=--the following example will further show that the learner can analyse a presented problem only to the extent that he is able to put characteristics into it by this process of analysing or selecting from his past experience. consider how a young child gains his knowledge of a triangle. at first his control of certain sensations enables him to read into it two ideas, three-sidedness and three-angledness, and only these factors, therefore, organize themselves into his experience triangle. nor would any amount of mere attention enable him at this stage to discover another important quality in the thing triangle. later, however, through the growth of his geometric experience, he may be able to read another quality into a triangle, namely two-right-angledness. this new quality will then, and only then, be organized with his former knowledge into a more complete knowledge of a triangle. here again it is seen that analysis as a learning process is really reading into a new presentation something which the mind already possesses as an element of former experience, and not gaining something at first hand out of the presented problem. =problem directs selection.=--it will be well to note here also that the selecting of the interpreting ideas is usually controlled by the problem with which the mind is engaged. this is indicated from the various ways in which the same object may be interpreted as the mind is confronted with different problems. the round stone, for instance, when one wishes to crack the filbert, is viewed as a hammer; when he wishes to place his paper on the ground, it becomes a weight; when he is threatened by the strange dog, it becomes a weapon of defence. in like manner the sign _x_ suggests an unknown quantity in relation to the algebraic problem; in relation to phonics it is a double sound; in relation to numeration, the number ten. it is evident that in all these cases, what determines the meaning given to the presented object is the _need_, or _problem_, that is at the moment predominant. in the same way, any lesson problem, in so far as it is felt to be of value, forms a starting-point for calling up other ideas, and therefore starts in the learner's mind a flow of ideas which is likely to furnish the solution. moreover, the mind has the power to measure the suitability of various ideas and select or reject them as they are felt to stand related to the problem in hand. for example, when a pupil is engaged in a study of the grammatical value of the word _driving_ in the sentence, "the boy driving the horse is very noisy," it is quite possible that he may think of the horse at his own home, or the shouting of his father's hired man, or even perhaps the form of the word _driving_, if he has just been viewing it in a writing lesson. the mind is able, however, to reject these irrelevant ideas, and select only those that seem to adjust themselves to the problem in hand. the cause of this lies in the fact that the problem is at the outset at least partly understood by the learner, which fact enables him to determine whether the ideas coming forward in consciousness are related in any way to this partially known topic. thus in the example cited, the learner knows the problem sufficiently to realize that it is a question of grammatical function, and is able, therefore, to feel the value, or suitability, of any knowledge which may be applied to it, even before he is fully aware of its ultimate relation thereto. law of preparation =control of old knowledge necessary.=--but notwithstanding the direction given the apperceptive process through the aim, or problem, it is evident that if the pupil is to select from his former experiences the particular elements which bear upon the problem in hand, he must have a ready and intelligent control over such former knowledge. it is too evident, however, that pupils frequently do not possess sufficient control over the old knowledge which will bear upon a presented problem. in endeavouring, for example, to grasp the relation of the exterior angle to the two interior and opposite angles, the pupil may fail because he has not a clear knowledge of the equality of angles in connection with parallel lines. for this reason teachers will often find it necessary (before bringing old knowledge to bear upon a new problem) to review the old knowledge, or experience, to be used during the apperceptive process. thus a lesson on the participle may begin with a review of the pupils' knowledge of verbs and adjectives, a lesson on the making of the colours orange and green for painting a pumpkin with its green stem may begin with a recognition of the standard colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the writing of a capital letter with a review of certain movements. =preparation recalls interpreting ideas.=--it must be noted that this review of former knowledge always implies, either that the pupil is likely to have forgotten at least partially this former knowledge, or that without such review he is not likely to recall and apply it readily when the new problem is placed before him. for this reason the teacher is usually warned that his lesson should always begin with a review of such of the pupil's old knowledge as is to be used in mastering the new experiences. value of preparation =a. aids the understanding.=--the main advantage of this preparatory work is that it brings into clear consciousness that group of ideas and feelings best suited to give meaning to the new presentation. without it, the pupil may not understand, or only partially understand, or entirely misunderstand the lesson. ( ) he may not understand the new matter at all because he does not bring any related facts from his past experience to bear upon it. multiplication of decimals would in all probability be a merely mechanical process if the significance of decimals and the operation of multiplying fractions were not brought to bear upon it, the pupil not understanding it at all as a rational process. ( ) he may only partially understand the new matter because he does not see clearly the relation between his old ideas and the new facts, or because he does not bring to the new facts a sufficient equipment of old ideas to make them meaningful. the adverbial objective would be imperfectly understood if it were not shown that its functions are exactly parallel with those of the adverb. the pupil would have only a partial understanding of it. ( ) he may entirely misunderstand the new facts because he uses wrong old experiences to give them meaning. such was evidently the difficulty in the case of the young pupil who, after a lesson on the equator, described it as a menagerie lion running around the earth. many of the absurd answers that a pupil gives are due to his failure to use the correct old ideas to interpret the new facts. he has misunderstood because his mind was not prepared by making the proper apperceiving ideas explicit. =b. saves time.=--there is the further advantage of economy of time, when an adequate preparation of the mind has been made. when the appropriate ideas are definitely in the forefront of consciousness, they seize upon kindred impressions as soon as these are presented and give them meaning. on the other hand, when sufficient preparation has not been made, time must be taken during the presentation of the new problem to go back in search of those experiences necessary to make it meaningful. frequent interruptions and consequent waste of time will be inevitable. time will be saved by having the apperceiving ideas ready and active. =c. provides for review.=--one of the most important values of the preparatory step is the opportunity given for the review of old ideas. these have to be revived, worked over, and reconstructed, and in consequence they become the permanent possessions of the mind. the pupil's knowledge of the functions of the adverb is reviewed when he learns the adverb phrase and adverb clause, and is still further illuminated when he comes to study the adverbial objective. further, the apperceiving ideas become more interesting to the pupil, when he finds that he can use them in the conquest of new fields. he has a consciousness of power, which in itself is a source of satisfaction and pleasure. precautions regarding preparation =must not be too long.=--two precautions seem advisable in the preparatory step. the first is that too long a time should not be spent over it. there is sometimes a tendency to go back too far and drag forward ideas that are only remotely connected with the new ideas to be presented. under such conditions much irrelevant material is likely to be introduced, and often a train of associations out of harmony with the meaning and spirit of the lesson is started. this is especially dangerous in lessons in literature and history. only those experiences should be revived which are necessary to a clear apprehension of the ideas or a full appreciation of the emotions to be presented in the new lesson. =must recall vital ideas.=--the most active, vivid, and powerful ideas in the pupil's mind are those which are closely connected with his life. this suggests the second precaution, namely, the use wherever possible of the ideas associated with his surroundings, his games, his occupations. when this is done, not only will the new knowledge have a much greater interest attached to it but it will also be much more vividly apprehended. this will be referred to further in connection with the use of illustrations in teaching. necessity of preparation teachers, however, are not always agreed as to the amount of time or emphasis to be given to this preparatory step. if the teacher can assure himself that a lesson is following in easy sequence upon something with which the children are undoubtedly familiar, he may, many argue, safely omit such preparatory work. indeed it is evident that after leaving school the child will have no personal monitor to call up beforehand the ideas that he must apply in solving the problems continually presenting themselves in practical life. on the other hand, however, it is to be remembered that the young child is, at the best, feeling his way in the process of adjusting himself to new experiences. for this reason, the first work for the teacher in any lesson is to ascertain whether the pupils are in a proper attitude for the new knowledge, and, so far as is necessary, prepare their minds through the recall of such knowledge as is related to the new experiences to be presented. although, therefore, the step of preparation is not an essential part of the learning process, since it constitutes for the pupil merely a review of knowledge acquired through previous learning processes, it may be accepted as a step in the teacher's method of controlling the learning process. examples of preparation the following additional examples as to the mode and form of the step of preparation may be considered by the student-teacher: in a lesson in phonic reading in a primary class, the preparation should consist of a review of those sounds and those words which the pupil already knows that are to be used in the new lesson. in a nature study lesson on "the rabbit," in a form ii class, the preparation should include a recall of any observations the pupils may have made regarding the wild rabbit. they may have observed its timidity, its manner of running, what it feeds upon, where it makes its home, its colour during the winter and during the summer, the kind of tracks it makes in the snow, etc. all these facts will be useful in interpreting the new observations and in assisting the pupils to make new inferences. in a lesson in a form iii class on "ottawa as a commercial centre," the preparation consists of a recall of the pupil's knowledge regarding the position of the city; the adjacent rivers, the ottawa, gatineau, rideau, lièvre, madawaska; the waterfalls of the rideau and chaudière; the forests to the north and west, with their immense supplies of pine, spruce, and hemlock; and the fact that it is the dominion capital. all these facts are necessary in inferring the causes of the importance of ottawa. in a literature lesson in a form iii class on _the charge of the light brigade_, the preparation would involve a recall of some deed of personal heroism with which the pupils are familiar, such as that of john maynard, grace darling, or any similar one nearer home. recall how such a deed is admired and praised, and the memory of the doer is cherished and revered. then the teacher should tell the story of balaklava with all the dramatic intensity he is master of, in order that the pupils may be in a proper mood to approach the study of the poem. in a grammar lesson on "the adverbial objective" the preparation should consist of a review of the functions of the adverb as modifying a verb, an adjective, and sometimes another adverb. upon this knowledge alone can a rational idea of the adverbial objective be built. in an arithmetic lesson on "multiplication of decimals," in a form iv class, the preparation should involve a review of the meaning of decimals, of the interconversion of decimals and fractions (for example, . = hundredths; ten-thousandths = . , etc.); and of the multiplication of fractions. unless the pupil can do these operations, it is obviously impossible to make his knowledge of multiplication of decimals anything more than a merely mechanical process. preparation merely aids selection before closing our consideration of preparation as a stage of method, it will be well again to call attention to the fact that this is not one of the four recognized stages of the learning process, but rather a subsidiary feature of the second, or apperceptive stage. in other words, actual advance is made by the pupil toward the control of a new experience, not through a review of former experience, but by an active relating of elements selected from past experience to the interpretation of the new problem. chapter xi learning as a relating activity or process of synthesis =learning a unifying process.=--it has been seen that the learner, in gaining control of new knowledge, must organize into the new experience elements selected from former experiences. for instance, when a person gains a knowledge of a new fruit (guava), he not only brings forward in consciousness from his former knowledge the ideas--rind, flesh, seed, etc.,--to interpret the strange object, but also associates these into a single experience, a new fruit. so long also as the person referred to in an earlier chapter retained in his consciousness as distinct factors three experiences--seeing a boy at the fence, seeing the vineyard, and finally, seeing the boy eating grapes--these would not, as three such distinct experiences, constitute a knowledge of grape-stealing. on the other hand, as soon as these are combined, or associated by a relating act of thought, the different factors are organized into a new idea symbolized by the expression, _grape-stealing_. =examples from school-room procedure.=--a similar relating process is involved when the learner faces a definite school problem. when, for instance, the pupil gains a knowledge of the sign ÷, he must not only bring forward in consciousness from his former knowledge distinct ideas of a line, of two dots, and of a certain mathematical process, but must also associate these into a new idea, division-sign. so also a person may know that air takes up more moisture as it becomes warmer, that the north-east trade-winds blow over the sahara from land areas, and that the sahara is situated just north of the equator. but the mind must unify these into a single experience in order to gain a knowledge of the condition of the rainfall in that quarter. nature of synthesis =deals with former experiences.=--this mental organizing, or unifying, of the elements of past experiences to secure control of the new experience, is usually spoken of as a process of synthesis. the term synthesis, however, must be used with the same care as was noted in regard to the term analysis. synthesis does not mean that totally _new_ elements are being unified, but merely that whatever selected elements of old knowledge the mind is able to read into a presented problem, are built, or organized, into a new system; and constitute, for the time being, one's knowledge and control of that problem. this is well exemplified by noting the growth of a person's knowledge of any object or topic. thus, so long as the child is able to apperceive only the three sides and three angles of a triangle, his idea of triangle includes a synthesis of these. when later, through the building up of his geometric knowledge, he is able to apperceive that the interior angles equal two right angles, his knowledge of a triangle expands through the synthesis of this with the former knowledge. =all knowledge a synthesis.=--the fact that all knowledge is an organization from earlier experiences becomes evident by looking at the process from the other direction. the adult who has complete knowledge of an orange has it as a single experience. this experience is found, however, to represent a co-ordination of other experiences, as touch, taste, colour, etc. moreover, each of these separate characteristics is an association of simpler experiences. experiencing the touch of the orange, for instance, is itself a complex made up of certain muscular, touch, and temperature sensations. from this it is evident that the knowledge of an orange, although a unity of experience in adult life, is really a complex, or synthesis, made up of a large number of different elements. what is true of our idea of an orange is true of every other idea. whether it be the understanding of a plant, an animal, a city, a picture, a poem, an historical event, an arithmetical problem, or a scientific experiment, the process is always the same. the apperceptive process of interpreting the new by selecting and relating elements of former experience, or the process of analysis-synthesis, is universal in learning. expressed in another form, what is at first indistinct and indefinite becomes clear and defined through attention selecting, for the interpretation of the new presentation, suitable old ideas and setting up relationships among them. analysis, or selection, is incomplete without an accompanying unification, or synthesis; synthesis, or organization, is impossible without analysis, or selection. it is on account of the mind's ability to unify a number of mental factors into a single experience, that the process of unification, or synthesis, is said to imply economy within our experiences. this fact will become even more evident, however, when later we study such mental processes as sense perception and conception. interaction of processes it is to be noted, however, that the selecting and the relating of the different interpreting ideas during the learning process are not necessarily separate and distinct parts of the lesson. in other words, the mind does not first select out of its former knowledge a whole mass of disconnected elements, and then later build them up into a new organic experience. there is, rather, in almost every case, a continual interplay between the selecting and relating activity, or between analysis and synthesis, throughout the whole learning process. as soon, for instance, as a certain feature, or characteristic, is noted, this naturally relates itself to the central problem. when later, another characteristic is noted, this may relate itself at once both with the topic and with the formerly observed characteristic into a more complete knowledge of the object. thus during a lesson we find a gradual growth of knowledge similar to that illustrated in the case of the scholar's knowledge of the triangle, involving a continual interplay of analysis and synthesis, or of selecting and relating different groups of ideas relative to the topic. this would he illustrated by noting a pupil's study of the cat. the child may first note that the cat catches and eats rats and mice, and picks meat from bones. these facts will at once relate themselves into a certain measure of knowledge regarding the food of the animal. later he may note that the cat has sharp claws, padded feet, long pointed canines, and a rough tongue; these facts being also related as knowledge concerning the mouth and feet of the animal. in addition to this, however, the latter facts will further relate themselves to the former as cases of adaptation, when the child notes that the teeth and tongue are suited to tearing food and cleaning it from the bones, and that its claws and padded feet are suited to surprising and seizing its living prey. =example from study of conjunctive pronoun.=--this continuous selecting and relating throughout a process of learning is also well illustrated in the pupil's process of learning the _conjunctive pronoun_. by bringing his old knowledge to bear on such a sentence as "the men _who_ brought it returned at once"; the pupil may be asked first to apperceive the subordinate clause, _who brought it_. this will not likely be connected by the pupil at first with the problem of the value of _who_. from this, however, he passes to a consideration of the value of the clause and its relation. hereupon, these various ideas at once co-ordinate themselves into the larger idea that _who_ is conjunctive. next, he may be called upon to analyse the subordinate clause. this, at first, also may seem to the child a disconnected experience. from this, however, he passes to the idea of _who_ as subject, and thence to the fact that it signifies man. thereupon these ideas unify themselves with the word _who_ under the idea _pronoun_. thereupon a still higher synthesis combines these two co-ordinated systems into the more complex system, or idea--_conjunctive pronoun_. [illustration] this progressive interaction of analysis and synthesis is illustrated by the accompanying figure, in which the word _who_ represents the presented unknown problem; _a_, _b_, and _c_, the selecting and relating process which results in the knowledge, _conjunction_; _a'_, _b'_, and _c'_, the building up of the _pronoun_ notion; and the circle, the final organization of these two smaller systems into a single notion, _conjunctive pronoun_. the learning of any fact in history, the mastery of a poem, the study of a plant or animal, will furnish excellent examples of these subordinate stages of analysis and synthesis within a lesson. it is to be noted further that this feature of the learning process causes many lessons to fall into certain well marked sub-divisions. each of these minor co-ordinations clustering around a sub-topic of the larger problem, the whole lesson separates itself into a number of more or less distinct parts. moreover, the child's knowledge of the whole lesson will largely depend upon the extent to which he realizes these parts both as separate co-ordinations and also as related parts of the whole lesson problem. all knowledge unified nor does this relating activity of mind confine itself within the single lesson. as each lesson is organized, it will, if fully apprehended, be more or less directly related with former lessons in the same subject. in this way the student should discover a unity within the lessons of a single subject, such as arithmetic or grammar. in like manner, various groups of lessons organize themselves into larger divisions within the subject, in accordance with important relations which the pupil may read into their data. thus, in grammar, one sequence of lessons is organized into a complete knowledge of sentences; another group, into a complete knowledge of inflection; a smaller group within the latter, into a complete knowledge of tense or mood. it is thus that the mind is able to construct its mass of knowledge into organized groups known as sciences, and the various smaller divisions into topics. chapter xii application of knowledge or law of expression =practical significance of knowledge.=--in our consideration of the fourth phase of the learning process, or the law of expression, it is necessary at the outset to recall what has already been noted regarding the correlation of knowledge and action. in this connection it was learned that knowledge arises naturally as man faces a difficulty, or problem, and that it finds significance and value in so far as it enables him to meet the practical and theoretical difficulties with which he may be confronted. in other words, man is primarily a doer, and knowledge is intended to guide the conduct of the individual along certain recognized lines. this being the case, while instruction aims to control the process by which the child is to acquire valuable social experience, or knowledge, it is equally important that it should promote skill by correlating that knowledge with expression, or should strive to influence action while forming character. to apperceive, for instance, the rules of government and agreement in grammar will have a very limited value if the student is not able to give expression to these in his own conversation. it becomes imperative, therefore, that as far as possible, expression should enter as a factor in the learning process. =examples of expression.=--man's expressive acts are found, however, to differ greatly in their form. when one is hurt, he distorts his face and cries aloud; when he hears a good speech he claps his hands and shouts approval; when he reads an amusing story he laughs; when he learns of the death of a friend he sheds tears; when he is affronted his face grows red, his muscles tense, and he strikes a blow or breaks into a torrent of words; when he has seen a striking incident he tells some one about it or writes an account to a distant friend. when his feelings are stirred by a patriotic address, he springs to his feet and sings, "god save the king." the desire that his team should carry the foot-ball to the southern goal causes the spectator to lean and push in that direction. when he conceives how he may launch a successful venture, the business man at once proceeds to carry it into effect. these are all examples of _expression_. every impression, idea, or thought, tends sooner or later to work itself out in some form of motor expression. types of action =a. uncontrolled actions.=--passing to an examination of such physical, or motor, activities, we find that man's expressive acts fall into three somewhat distinct classes. a young child is found to engage in many movements which seem destitute of any conscious direction. some of these movements, such as breathing, sneezing, winking, etc., are found to be useful to the child, and imply what might be termed inherited control of conduct, though they do not give expression to any consciously organized knowledge, or experience. at other times, his bodily movements seem to be mere random, or impulsive, actions. these latter actions at times arise in a spontaneous way as a result of native bodily vigour, as, for instance, stretching, kicking, etc., as seen in a baby. at other times these uncontrolled acts have their origin in the various impressions which the child is receiving from his surroundings, or environment, as when the babe impulsively grasps the object coming in contact with his hand. although, moreover, these instinctive movements may come in time under conscious control, such actions do not in themselves imply conscious control or give expression to organized knowledge. =b. actions subject to intelligent control.=--to a second class of actions belong the orderly movements which are both produced and directed by consciousness. when, in distinction to the movements referred to above, a child pries open the lid to see what is in the box, or waves his hand to gain the attention of a companion, a conscious aim, or intention, produces the act, and conscious effort sustains it until the aim is reached. the distinction between mere impulsive and instinctive actions on the one hand, and guided effort on the other, will be considered more fully in chapter xxx. =c. habitual actions.=--thirdly, as has been noted in chapter ii, both consciously directed and uncontrolled action may, by repetition, become so fixed that it practically ceases to be directed by consciousness, or becomes habitual. our expressive actions may be classified, therefore, into three important groups as follows: . instinctive, reflex, and impulsive action . consciously controlled, or directed action . habitual action. nature of expression =implies intelligent control.=--it is evident that as a stage in the learning process, expression must deal primarily with the second class of actions, since its real purpose is to correlate the new conscious knowledge with action. expression in education, therefore, must represent largely consciously produced and consciously directed action. =conscious expression may modify a. instinctive acts.=--while this is true, however, expression, as a stage in the educative process, will also have a relation to the other types of action. as previously noted, the expression stage of the learning process may be used as a means to bring instinctive and impulsive acts under conscious control. this is indeed an important part of a child's education. for instance, it is only by forming ideas of muscular movements and striving to express them that the child can bring his muscular movements under control. it is evident, therefore, that the expressive stage of the lesson can be made to play an important part in bringing many instinctive and impulsive acts under conscious direction. by expressing himself in the games of the kindergarten, the child's social instinct will come under conscious control. by directing his muscular movements in art and constructive work, he gains the control which will in part enable him to check the impulse to strike the angry blow. these points will, however, be considered more fully in a study of the inherited tendencies in chapter xxi. =b. habits.=--further, many of our consciously directed acts are of so great value that they should be made more permanent through habituation. expression must, therefore, in many lessons be emphasized, not merely to test and render clear present conscious knowledge, but also to lead to habitual control of action, or to create skill. this would be especially true in having a child practise the formation of figures and letters. although at the outset we must have him form the letter to see that he really knows the outline, the ultimate aim is to enable him to form these practically without conscious direction. in language work, also, the child must acquire many idiomatic expressions as habitual modes of speech. types of expression since the tendency to express our impressions in a motor way is a law of our being, it follows that the school, which is constantly seeking to give the pupil intelligent impressions, or valuable knowledge, should also provide opportunity for adequate expression of the same. the forms most frequently adopted in schools are speech and writing. pupils are required to answer questions orally or in writing in almost every school subject, and in doing so they are given an opportunity for expression of a very valuable kind. in fact, it would often be much more economical to try to give pupils fewer impressions and to give them more opportunities for expression in language. but written or spoken language is not the only means of expression that the school can utilize. pupils can frequently be required to express themselves by means of manual activity. in art, they represent objects and scenes by means of brush and colour, or pencil, or crayon; in manual training, they construct objects in cardboard and wood; in domestic science, they cook and sew. the primary object of these so-called "new" subjects of the school programme is not to make the pupils artists, carpenters, or house-keepers, but partly to acquaint them with typical forms of human activity and partly to give them means of expression having an educative value. in arithmetic, the pupils express numerical facts by manipulating blocks and splints, and measure quantities, distances, surfaces, and solids. in geography, they draw maps of countries, model them in sand or clay, and make collections to illustrate manufactures at various stages of the process. in literature, they dramatize stories and illustrate scenes and situations by a sketch with pencil or brush. in nature study, they illustrate by drawings and make mounted collections of plants and insects. value of expression =a. influences conduct.=--in nature study, history, and literature, the most valuable kind of expression is that which comes through some modification of future conduct. that pupil has studied the birds and animals to little purpose who needlessly destroys their lives or causes them pain. he has studied the reign of king john to little purpose if he is not more considerate of the rights of others on the playground. he has gained little from the life of robert bruce, columbus, or la salle, if he does not manfully attack difficulties again and again until he has overcome them. he has not read _the heroine of verchères_, or _the little hero of haarlem_ aright, if he does not act promptly in a situation demanding courage. he has learned little from the story of damon and pythias if he is not true to his friends under trying circumstances, and he has not imbibed the spirit of _the christmas carol_ if he is not sympathetic and kindly toward those less fortunate than himself. from the standpoint of the moral life, therefore, right knowledge is valuable only as it expresses itself in right action. =b. aids impression.=--apart from the fact that it satisfies a demand of our being, expression is most important in that it tests the clearness of the applied knowledge. we often think that our impression is clear, only to discover its vagueness when we attempt to express it in some form. people often say that they understand a fact thoroughly, but they cannot exactly express it. such a statement is usually incorrect. if the impression were clear, the expression under ordinary circumstances would also be clear. in this connection a danger should be pointed out. pupils sometimes express themselves in language with apparent clearness, when in reality they are merely repeating words that they have memorized and that are quite meaningless to them. the alert teacher can, however, by judicious questioning, avoid being deceived in this regard. =c. adds to clearness of knowledge.=--not only does expression test the clearness of the apperceived new knowledge, but at the same time it gives the knowledge greater clearness. we learn to know by doing. a pupil realizes a story more fully when he has reproduced it for somebody else. he images a scene described in a poem more clearly when he has drawn it. he has a clearer idea of the volume of a cord when he has actually measured out a cord of wood. he has a more accurate conception of the difficulties attending the discoveries of la salle when he has drawn a map and traced the routes of his various expeditions. there is much truth in the statement that one never fully knows some things until he has taught them to somebody else. the teacher in grammar and geography will often have occasion to realize this. greater clearness of impression means, of course, greater permanence. we remember best those facts of which our impression was most vivid. dangers of omitting expression =a. knowledge not practical.=--it is apparent, then, that if the pupil is not given opportunity for expression, his ideas are vague and evanescent. further than this, his capacities for _knowing_ will be developed but his capacities for _doing_ ignored. his _intellectual_ powers will be exercised and his _volitional_ powers neglected. the pupil is thus likely to develop into a mere _theorist_; and as the tendencies of childhood are accentuated in later life, he becomes an _impractical_ man. there are many men in the world who apparently know a great deal, but who, through inability to make practical application of their knowledge, are unsuccessful in life. it is, however, seriously to be doubted whether knowledge is ever _real_ until it has been worked out in practice and conduct. to avoid the danger of becoming impractical, a pupil should have every opportunity for expression. =b. feelings weakened.=--a second serious danger of neglecting expression lies in the field of the emotions. to have generous emotions continually aroused and never to act upon them, to have one's sympathies frequently stirred and never to perform a kindly act, to experience feelings of love and never to express them in acts of service, is to cultivate a weakness of character. a classic instance of this is that of the lady who wept bitterly over the imaginary sorrows of the heroine in the play while her coachman was freezing to death outside the theatre. if worthy emotions are ever to be of the slightest moral value to us, they must be expressed in action. the pupil frequently has his emotions stirred in the lessons in literature, history, and nature study, and there are situations constantly arising in the school room, on the playground, on the street, and in the home, that afford opportunity for expression. to give a single instance, there is a story in the _ontario third reader_ by elizabeth phelps ward, called "mary elizabeth." no pupil could read that story without being stirred with a deep pity and yet profound admiration for the pathetic figure of poor little mary elizabeth. the natural expression for such emotions would be a more kindly and sympathetic attitude towards some unfortunate child in the school. relation of expression to impression =knowledge tends toward expression.=--on account of the evident connection between knowledge and action, the law of expression has formulated itself into a well-known pedagogical law of method--no impression without expression. like many other educational maxims, however, this law may be interpreted in too wide a sense. the law of expression in education claims only that valuable experiences, or valuable forms of new knowledge, should not be built up in the child's mind without adequate accompanying expression. in the first case, as already seen, many impressions come to us which are never seized upon sufficiently by our consciousness to become intelligent rules for conduct, or action. it is true, of course that, so far as such impressions stimulate us, they tend toward expression, and to that extent the maxim is true. for instance, when a child is impressed, say, by a sudden strange sound, he has a tendency to express himself by straining his attention, and when the man imagines an enemy is before him, he finds his arms and fists assuming the fighting attitude. =expression at times inhibited.=--it is to be noted that the child should early learn to form intelligent plans of action and postpone or even condemn them as forms of expression. in other words, a child should early learn to select and co-ordinate ideas into an orderly system independently of their actual expression in physical action. without this power to suppress, or inhibit, expression, the child would be unable adequately to weigh and compare alternative courses of action and suppress such as seem undesirable. such indeed is the weakness of the man who possesses an impulsive nature. although, therefore, it is true that all knowledge is intended to serve in meeting actual needs, or to function in the control of expression, it is equally true that not every organized experience should find expression in action. part at least of man's efficiency must consist in his ability to organize a new experience in an indirect way and condemn it as a rule of action. while, therefore, we emphasize the importance, under ordinary conditions, of having the child's knowledge function as directly as possible in some form of actual expression, it is equally important to recognize that in actual life many organized plans should not find expression in outer physical action. this being the case, the divorce between organized experience, or knowledge, and practical expression, which at times takes place in school work, is not necessarily unsound, since it tends to make the child proficient in separating the mental organizing of experience from its immediate expression, and must, therefore, tend to make him more capable of weighing plans before putting them into execution. this will in turn habituate the child to taking the necessary time for reflection between "the acting of a thing and the first purpose." this question will be considered more fully in chapter xxx, which treats of the development of voluntary control. it should be noted in conclusion that the law of expression as a fourth stage of the learning process differs in purpose from the use of physical action as a means of creating interest in the problem, as referred to on page . when, for instance, we set a pupil who has no knowledge of long measure to use the inch in interpreting the yard stick, expressive action is merely a means of putting the problem before the child in an interesting form on account of his liking for physical action. when, on the other hand, the child later uses the foot or yard as a unit to measure the perimeter of the school-room, he is applying his knowledge of long measure, which has been acquired previously to this expressive act. chapter xiii forms of lesson presentation the chief office of the teacher, in controlling the pupils' process of learning, being to direct their self-activity in making a selection of ideas from their former knowledge which shall stand in vital connection with the problem, and lead finally to its solution, the question arises in what form the teacher is to conduct the process in order to obtain this desired result. three different modes of directing the selecting activity of the student are recognized and more or less practised by teachers. these are usually designated the lecture method, the text-book method, and the developing method. the lecture method =example of lecture method.=--in the lecture method so-called, the teacher tells the students in direct words the facts involved in the new problem, and expects these words to enable the pupils to call up from their old knowledge the ideas which will give the teacher's words meaning, and thus lead to a solution of the problem. for example, in teaching the meaning of alluvial fans in geography, a teacher might seek to awaken the interpreting ideas by merely stating in words the characteristic of a fan. this would involve telling the pupils that an alluvial fan is a formation on the floor of a main river valley, resulting from the depositing of detritus carried down the steep side of the valley by a tributary stream and deposited in the form of a fan, when the force of the water is weakened as it enters the more level floor of the valley. to interpret this verbal description, however, the pupil must first interpret the words of the teacher as sounds, and then convert these into ideas by bringing his former knowledge to bear upon the word symbols. if we could take it for granted that the pupil will readily grasp the ideas here signified by such words as, formation, main river valley, depositing, detritus, steep side, etc., and at once feel the relation of these several ideas to the more or less unknown object--alluvial fan--this method would undoubtedly give the pupil the knowledge required. =the method difficult.=--to expect of young children a ready ability in thus interpreting words would, however, be an evident mistake. to translate such sound symbols into ideas, and immediately adjust them to the problem, demands a power of language interpretation and of reflection not usually found in school children. the purely lecture method, therefore, has very small place with young children, whatever may be its value with advanced students. pupils in the primary grades have not sufficient power of attention to listen to a long lecture on any subject, and no teacher should think of conducting a lesson by that method alone. the purpose of the lecture is merely to give information, and that is seldom the sole purpose of a lesson in elementary classes. there the more important purposes are to train pupils to acquire knowledge by thinking for themselves, and to express themselves, both of which are well-nigh impossible if the purely lecture method is followed. =does not insure selection.=--the weakness of such a method is well illustrated in the case of the young teacher who, in giving her class a conception of the equator, followed the above method, and carefully explained to the pupils that the equator is an imaginary line running around the earth equally distant from the two poles. when the teacher came later to review the work with the class, one bright lad described the equator as a menagerie lion running around the earth. here evidently the child, true to the law of apperception, had interpreted, or rather misinterpreted, the words of the teacher, by means of the only ideas in his possession which seemed to fit the uttered sounds. it is evident, therefore, that too often in this method the pupils will either thus misinterpret the meaning of the teacher's words, or else fail to interpret them at all, because they are not able to call up any definite images from what the teacher may be telling them. =when to be used.=--it may be noted, however, that there is some place for the method in teaching. for example, when young children are presented with a suitable story, they will usually have no difficulty in fitting ideas to words, and thus building up the story. it requires, in fact, the continuity found in the telling method to keep the children's attention on the story, the tone of voice and gesture of the reciter going a long way in helping the child to call up the ideas which enable him to construct the story plot. moreover, some telling must be done by the teacher in every lesson. everything cannot be discovered by the pupils themselves. even if it were possible, it would often be undesirable. some facts are relatively unimportant, and it is much better to tell these outright than to spend a long time in trying to lead pupils to discover them. the lecture method, or telling method, should be used, then, to supply pupils with information they could not find out for themselves, or which they could find out only by spending an amount of time disproportionate to the importance of the facts. the teacher must use good judgment in discriminating between those facts which the pupils may reasonably be expected to find out for themselves and those facts which had better be told. many teachers tell too much and do not throw the pupils sufficiently on their own resources. on the other hand, many teachers tell too little and waste valuable time in trying to "draw" from the pupils what they do not know, with the result that the pupils fall back upon the pernicious practice of guessing. the teacher needs to be on his guard against "the toil of dropping buckets into empty wells, and growing old in drawing nothing up." it may be added further that, in practical life, man is constantly required to interpret through spoken language. for this reason, therefore, all children should become proficient in securing knowledge through spoken language, that is, by means of the lecture, or telling, method. the text-book method =nature of text-book method.=--in the text-book method, in place of listening to the words of the teacher, the pupil is expected to read in a text-book, in connection with each lesson problem, a series of facts which will aid him in calling up, or selecting, the ideas essential to the mastery of the new knowledge. this method is similar, therefore, in a general way, to the lecture method; since it implies ability in the pupil to interpret language, and thus recall the ideas bearing upon the topic being presented. although the text-book method lacks the interpretation which may come through gesture and tone of voice, it nevertheless gives the pupil abundance of time for reflecting upon the meaning of the language without the danger of losing the succeeding context, as would be almost sure to happen in the lecture method. moreover, the language and mode of presentation of the writer of the text-book is likely to be more effective in awakening the necessary old knowledge, than would be the less perfect descriptions of the ordinary teacher. on the whole, therefore, the text-book seems more likely to meet the conditions of the laws of apperception and self-activity, than would the lecture method. =method difficult for young children.=--the words of the text-book, however, like the words of the teacher, are often open to misinterpretation, especially in the case of young pupils. this may be illustrated by the case of the student, who upon reading in her history of the mettle of the defenders of lacolle mill, interpreted it as the possession on their part of superior arms. an amusing illustration of the same tendency to misinterpret printed language, in spite of the time and opportunity for studying the text, is seen in the case of the student who, after reading the song entitled "the old oaken bucket," was called upon to illustrate in a drawing his interpretation of the scene. his picture displayed three buckets arranged in a row. on being called upon for an explanation, he stated that the first represented "the old oaken bucket"; the second, "the iron-bound bucket"; and the third, "the moss-covered bucket." another student, when called upon to express in art his conception of the well-known lines: all at once i saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils; beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze; represented on his paper a bed of daffodils blooming in front of a platform, upon which a number of female figures were actively engaged in the terpsichorean art. =pupil's mind often passive.=--as in the lecture method, also, the pupil may often go over the language of the text in a passive way without attempting actively to call up old knowledge and relate it to the problem before him. it is evident, therefore, that without further aid from a teacher, the text-book could not be depended upon to guide the pupil in selecting the necessary interpreting ideas. as with the lecture method, however, it is to be recognized that, both in the school and in after life, the student must secure much information by reading, and that he should at some time gain the power of gathering information from books. the use of the text-book in school should assist in the acquisition of this power. the teacher must, therefore, distinguish between the proper _use_ of the text-book and the _abuse_ of it. there are several ways in which the text-book may be effectively used. uses of text-book . after a lesson has been taught, the pupils may be required by way of review to read the matter covered by the lesson as stated by the text-book. this plan is particularly useful in history and geography lessons. the text-book strengthens and clarifies the impression made by the lesson. . before assigning the portion to be read in the text-book, the teacher may prepare the way by presenting or reviewing any matter upon which the interpretation of the text depends. this preparatory work should be just sufficient to put the pupils in a position to read intelligently the portion assigned, and to give them a zest for the reading. sometimes in this assignment, it is well to indicate definitely what facts are sufficiently important to be learned, and where these are discussed in the text-book. . the mastery of the text by the pupils may sometimes be aided by a series of questions for which answers are to be found by a careful reading. such questions give the pupils a definite purpose. they constitute a set of problems which are to be solved. they are likely to be interesting, because problems within the range of the pupils' capacity are a challenge to their intelligence. further, these questions will emphasize the things that are essential, and the pupils will be enabled to grasp the main points of the lesson assigned. occasionally, to avoid monotony, the pupils should be required, as a variation of this plan, to make such a series of questions themselves. in these cases, the pupil with the best list might be permitted, as a reward for his effort, to "put" his questions to the class. . in the more advanced classes, the pupils should frequently be required to make a topical outline of a section or chapter of the text-book. this demands considerable analytic power, and the pupil who can do it successfully has mastered the art of reading. the ability is acquired slowly, and the teacher must use discretion in what he exacts from the pupil in this regard. if the plan were followed persistently, there would be less time wasted in cursory reading, the results of which are fleeting. what is read in this careful way will become the real possession of the mind and, even if less material is read, more will be permanently retained. the facts thus learned from the text-book should be discussed by the teacher and pupils in a subsequent recitation period. this may be done by the question and answer method, the teacher asking questions to which the pupils give brief answers; or by the topical recitation method, the pupils reporting in connected form the facts under topics suggested by the teacher. the teacher has thus an opportunity of emphasizing the important facts, of correcting misconceptions, and of amplifying and illustrating the facts given in the text-book. further, the pupils are given an opportunity of expressing themselves, and have thus an exercise in language which is a valuable means of clarifying their impressions. abuse of text-book as instances of the abuse of the text-book, the following might be cited: . the memorization by the pupils of the words of the text-book without any understanding of the meaning. . the assignment of a certain number of pages or sections to be learned by the pupils without any preliminary preparation for the study. . the employment of the text-book by the teacher during the recitation as a means of guiding him in the questions he is to ask--a confession that he does not know what he requires the pupils to know. =limitation of text-book.=--the chief limitation of the text-book method of teaching is that the pupil makes few discoveries on his own account, and is, therefore, not trained to think for himself. the problems being largely solved for him by the writer, the knowledge is not valued as highly as it would be if it came as an original discovery. we always place a higher estimation on that knowledge which we discover for ourselves than on that which somebody else gives us. the developing method =characteristics of the method.=--the third, or developing, method of directing the selecting activity of the learner, is so called because in this method the teacher as an instructor aims to keep the child's mind actively engaged throughout each step of the learning process. he sees, in other words, that step by step the pupil brings forward whatever old knowledge is necessary to the problem, and that he relates it in a definite way to this problem. instead of telling the pupils directly, for instance, the teacher may question them upon certain known facts in such a way that they are able themselves to discover the new truth. in teaching alluvial fans, for example, the teacher would begin questioning the pupil regarding his knowledge of river valleys, tributary streams, the relation of the force of the tributary water to the steepness of the side of the river valley, the presence of detritus, etc., and thus lead the pupil to form his own conclusion as to the collecting of detritus at the entrance to the level valley and the probable shape of the deposit. so also in teaching the conjunctive pronoun from such an example as: he gave it to a boy _who_ stood near him; the teacher brings forward, one by one, the elements of old knowledge necessary to a full understanding of the new word, and tests at each step whether the pupil is himself apprehending the new presentation in terms of his former grammatical knowledge. beginning with the clause "who stood near him," the teacher may, by question and answer, assure himself that the pupil, through his former knowledge of subordinate clauses, apprehends that the clause is joined adjectively to _boy_, by the word _who_. next, he assures himself that the pupil, through his former knowledge of the conjunction, apprehends clearly the consequent _conjunctive_ force of the word _who_. finally, by means of the pupil's former knowledge of the subjective and pronoun functions, the teacher assures himself that the pupil appreciates clearly the _pronoun_ function of the word _who_. thus, step by step, throughout the learning process, the teacher makes certain that he has awakened in the mind of the learner the exact old knowledge which will unify into a clearly understood and adequately controlled new experience, as signified by the term _conjunctive pronoun_. =question and answer.=--on account of the large use of questioning as a means of directing and testing the pupils' selecting of old knowledge, or interpreting ideas, the developing method is often identified with the question and answer method. but the real mark of the developing method of teaching is the effort of an instructor to assure himself that, step by step, throughout the learning process, the pupil himself is actively apprehending the significance of the new problem by a use of his own previous experience. it is true, however, that the method of interrogation is the most universal, and perhaps the most effective, mode by which a teacher is able to assure himself that the learner's mind is really active throughout each step of the learning process. moreover, as will be seen later, the other subsidiary methods of the developing method usually involve an accompanying use of question and answer for their successful operation. it is for this reason that the question is sometimes termed the teacher's best instrument of instruction. for the same reason, also, the young teacher should early aim to secure facility in the art of questioning. an outline of the leading principles of questioning will, therefore, be given in chapter xviii. =other forms of development.=--notwithstanding the large part played by question and answer in the developing method, it must be observed that there are other important means which the teacher at times may use in the learning process in order to awaken clear interpreting ideas in the mind of the learner. in so far, moreover, as any such methods on the part of the teacher quicken the apperceptive process in the child, or cause him to apply his former knowledge in a more active and definite way to the problem in hand, they must be classified as phases of the developing method. two of these subsidiary methods will now be considered. the objective method =characteristics of the objective method.=--one important sub-section of the developing method is known as the objective method. in this method the teacher seeks, as far as possible, ( ) to present the lesson problem through the use of concrete materials, and ( ) to have the child interpret the problem by examining this concrete material. a child's interest and knowledge being largely centred in objects and their qualities and uses, many truths can best be presented to children through the medium of objective teaching. for example, in arithmetic, weights and measures should be taught by actually handling weights and measures and building up the various tables by experiment. tables of lengths, areas, and volumes may be taught by measurements of lines, surfaces, and solids. geographical facts are taught by actual contact with the neighbouring hills, streams, and ponds; and by visits to markets and manufacturing plants. in nature study, plants and animals are studied in their natural habitat or by bringing them into the class-room. =advantages of the objective method.=--the advantages of this method in such cases are readily manifest. although, for instance, the pupil who knows in a general way an inch space and the numbers , , - / , , and , might be supposed to be able to organize out of his former experiences a perfect knowledge of surface measure, yet it will be found that compared with that of the pupil who has worked out the measure concretely in the school garden, the control of the former student over this knowledge will be very weak indeed. in like manner, when a student gains from a verbal description a knowledge of a plant or an animal, not only does he find it much more difficult to apply his old knowledge in interpreting the word description than he would in interpreting a concrete example, but his knowledge of the plant or animal is likely to be imperfect. objective teaching is important, therefore, for two reasons: . it makes an appeal to the mind through the senses, the avenue through which the most vivid images come. frequently several senses are brought to bear and the impressions thereby multiplied. . on account of his interest in objects, the young child's store of old experiences is mainly of objects and of their sensuous qualities and uses. to teach the abstract and unfamiliar through these, therefore, is an application of the law of apperception, since the object makes it easier for the child's former knowledge to be related to the presented problem. =limitations of objective method.=--it must be recognized, however, that objective teaching is only a means to a higher end. the concrete is valuable very often only as a means of grasping the abstract. the progress of humanity has ever been from the sensuous and concrete to the ideal and abstract. not the objects themselves, but what the objects symbolize is the important thing. it would be a pedagogical mistake, then, to make instruction begin, continue, and end in the concrete. it is evident, moreover, that no progress could be made through object-teaching, unless the question and answer method is used in conjunction. the illustrative method =characteristics of the illustrative method.=--in many cases it is impossible or impracticable to bring the concrete object into the school-room, or to take the pupils to see it outside. in such cases, somewhat the same result may be obtained by means of some form of graphic illustration of the object, as a picture, sketch, diagram, map, model, lantern slide, etc. the graphic representation of an object may present to the eye most of the characteristics that the actual object would. for this reason pictures are being more and more used in teaching, though it is a question whether teachers make as good use of the pictures of the text-book, in geography for instance, as might be made. =illustrative method involves imagination.=--in the illustrative method, however, the pupil, instead of being able to apply directly former knowledge obtained through the senses, in interpreting the actual object, must make use of his imagination to bridge over the gulf between the actual object and the representation. when, for example, the child is called upon to form his conception of the earth with its two hemispheres through its representation on a globe, the knowledge will become adequate only as the child's imagination is able to picture in his mind the actual object out of his own experience of land, water, form, and space, in harmony with the mere suggestions offered by the model. it is evident, for the above reason, that the illustrative method often demands more from the pupil than does the more concrete objective method. for instance, the child who is able to see an actual mountain, lake, canal, etc., is far more likely to obtain an accurate idea of these, than the student who learns them by means of illustrations. the cause for this lies mainly in the failure of the child to form a perfect image of the real object through the exercise of his imagination. in fact it sometimes happens that he makes very little use of his imagination, his mental picture of the real object differing little from the model placed before him. the writer was informed of a case in which a teacher endeavoured to give some young pupils a knowledge of the earth by means of a large school globe. when later the children were questioned thereon, it was discovered that their earth corresponded in almost every particular with the large globe in the school. the successful use of the illustrative method, therefore, demands from the teacher a careful test by the question and answer method, to see that the learner has properly bridged over, through his imagination, the gulf separating the actual object from its illustration. for this reason an acquaintance with the mental process of imagination is of great value to the teacher. the leading facts connected with this process will be set forth in chapter xxvii. precautions in use of materials in the use of objective and illustrative materials the following precautions are advisable: . their use in the lesson should not be continued too long. it should be remembered that their office is illustrative, and the aim of the teacher should be to have the pupils think in the abstract as soon as possible. to make pupils constantly dependent on the concrete is to make their thinking weak. . the pupils must be mentally active while the concrete object or illustrative material is being used, and not merely gaze in a passive way upon the objects. it requires mental activity to grasp the abstract facts that the objects or illustrations typify. a tellurion will not teach the changes of the seasons; bundles of splints, notation; nor black-board examples, the law of agreement; unless these are brought under the child's mental apprehension. the sole purpose of such materials is, therefore, to start a flow of imagery or ideas which bear upon the presented problem. . the objects should not be so intrinsically interesting that they distract the attention from what they are intended to illustrate. it would be injudicious to use candies or other inherently attractive objects to illustrate number facts in primary arithmetic. the objects, not the number facts, would be of supreme interest. the teacher who used a heap of sand and some gunpowder to teach what a volcano is, found his pupils anxious for "fireworks" in subsequent geography classes. the science teacher may make his experiments so interesting that his students neglect to grasp what the experiments illustrate. the preacher who uses a large number of anecdotes to illustrate the points of his sermon, would be probably disappointed to know that the only part of his discourse remembered by the majority of his hearers was these very anecdotes. in his enthusiasm for objective teaching, the teacher may easily make the objects so attractive that the pupils fail altogether to grasp what they signify. . in the case of pictures, maps, and sketches, it is well to present those that are not too detailed. a map drawn on the black-board by the teacher is usually better for purposes of illustration than a printed wall map. the latter shows so many details that it is often difficult for the pupil to single out those required in the lesson. the black-board map, on the other hand, will emphasize just those details that are necessary. for the same reason the sketch is often better than the printed picture or photograph. any one who can sketch rapidly and accurately has at his disposal a valuable means of communicating knowledge, and every teacher should strive to cultivate this power. modes of presentation compared the relative clearness of different modes of presenting knowledge may be seen from the following: if a teacher stated to his pupils that he saw a guava yesterday, possibly no information would be conveyed to them other than that some unknown object has been referred to. merely to name any object of thought, therefore, does not guarantee any real understanding in the mind of the pupil. if the teacher describes the object as a fruit, fragrant, yellow, fleshy, and pear-shaped, the mental picture of the pupil is likely to be much more definite. if, on the other hand, a picture of the fruit is shown, it is likely that the pupil will more fully realize at least some of the features of the fruit. if the pupil is given the object and allowed to bring all his senses to bear upon it, his knowledge will become both more full and more definite. if he were allowed to express himself through drawing and modelling, his knowledge would become still more thorough, while if he grew, marketed, and manufactured the fruit into jelly, his knowledge of the fruit might be considered complete. chapter xiv classification of knowledge before passing to a consideration of the various types or classes into which school lessons may be divided, it is necessary to note a certain distinction in the way the mind thinks of objects, or two classes into which our experiences are said to divide themselves. when the mind experiences, or is conscious of, this particular chair on the platform, that tree outside the window, the size of this piece of stone, or the colour and shape of this bonnet, it is said to be occupied with a particular experience, or to be gaining particular knowledge. acquisition of particular knowledge =a. through the senses.=--these particular experiences may arise through the actual presentation of a thing to the senses. i _see_ this chair; _taste_ this sugar; _smell_ this rose; _hear_ this bell; etc. as will be seen later, the senses provide the primary conditions for revealing to the mind the presence of particular things, that is, for building up particular ideas, or, as they are frequently called, particular notions. neither does a particular experience, or notion, necessarily represent a particular concrete object. it may be an idea of some particular state of anger or joy being experienced by an individual of the beauty embodied in this particular painting, etc. =b. through the imagination.=--secondly, by an act of constructive imagination, one may image a picture of a particular object as present here and now. although never having had the actual particular experience, a person can, with the eye of the imagination, picture as now present before him any particular object or event, real or imaginary, such as king arthur's round table; the death scene of sir isaac brock or captain scott; the sinking of the _titanic_; the heroine of verchères; or the many-headed hydra. =c. by inference, or deduction.=--again, knowledge about a particular individual, or particular knowledge, may be gained in what seems a yet more indirect way. for instance, instead of standing beside socrates and seeing him drink the hemlock and die, and thus, by actual sense observation, learn that socrates is mortal; we may, by a previous series of experiences, have gained the knowledge that all men are mortal. for that reason, even while he yet lives, we may know the particular fact that socrates, being a man, is also mortal. in this process the person is supposed to start with the known general truth, "all men are mortal"; next, to call to mind the fact that socrates is a man; and finally, by a comparison of these statements or thoughts, reason out, or deduce, the inference that therefore socrates is mortal. this process is, therefore, usually illustrated in what is called the syllogistic form, thus: all men are mortal. socrates is a man. socrates is mortal. when particular knowledge about an individual thing or event is thus inferred by comparing two known statements, it is said to be secured by a process of _deduction_, or by inference. general knowledge in all of the above examples, whether experienced through the senses, built up by an act of imagination, or gained by inference, the knowledge is of a single thing, fact, organism, or unity, possessing a real or imaginary existence. in addition to possessing its own individual unity, however, a thing will stand in a more or less close relation with many other things. various individuals, therefore, enter into larger relations constituting groups, or classes, of objects. in addition, therefore, to recognizing the object as a particular experience, the mind is able, by examining certain individuals, to select and relate the common characteristics of such classes, or groups, and build up a general, or class, idea, which is representative of any member of the class. thus arise such general ideas as book, man, island, county, etc. these are known as universal, or class, notions. moreover, such rules, or definitions, as, "a noun is the name of anything"; "a fraction is a number which expresses one or more equal parts of a whole," are general truths, because they express in the form of a statement the general qualities which have been read into the ideas, noun and fraction. when the mind, from a study of particulars, thus either forms a class notion as noun, triangle, hepatica, etc., or draws a general conclusion as, "air has weight," "any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side," it is said to gain general knowledge. acquisition of general knowledge =a. conception.=--in describing the method of attaining general knowledge, it is customary to divide such knowledge into two slightly different types, or classes, and also to distinguish between the processes by which each type is attained. when the mind, through having experienced particular dogs, cows, chairs, books, etc., is able to form such a general, or class, idea as, dog, cow, chair, or book, it is said to gain a class notion, or concept; and the method by which these ideas are gained is called _conception_. =b. induction.=--when the mind, on the basis of particular experiences, arrives at some general law, or truth, as, "any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side"; "air has weight"; "man is mortal"; "honesty is the best policy"; etc., it is said to form a universal judgment, and the process by which the judgment is formed is called a process of _induction_. =examples of general and particular knowledge.=--when a pupil learns the st. lawrence river system as such, he gains a particular experience, or notion; when he learns of river basins, he obtains a general notion. in like manner, for the child to realize that here are eight blocks containing two groups of four blocks, is a particular experience; but that + = , is a general, or universal, truth. to notice this water rising in a tube as heat is being applied, is a particular experience; to know that liquids are expanded by heat is a general truth. _the air above this radiator is rising_ is a particular truth, but _heated air rises_ is a general truth. _the english people plunged into excesses in charles ii's reign after the removal of the stern puritan rule_ is particular, but a _period of license follows a period of repression_ is general. =distinction is in ideas, not things.=--it is to be noted further that the same object may be treated at one time as a particular individual, at another time as a member of a class, and at still another time as a part of a larger individual. thus the large peninsula on the east of north america may be thought of now, as the individual, nova scotia; at another time, as a member of the class, province; and at still another time, as a part of the larger particular individual, canada. =only two types of knowledge.=--it is evident from the foregoing that no matter what subject is being taught, so far as any person may aim _to develop a new experience_ in the mind of the pupil, that experience will be one or other of the two classes mentioned above. if the aim of our lesson is to have the pupils know the facts of the war of - , to study the rainfall of british columbia, to master the spelling of a particular word, or to image the pictures contained in the story _mary elizabeth_, then it aims primarily to have pupils come into possession of a particular fact, or a number of particular facts. on the other hand, if the lesson aims to teach the pupils the nature of an infinitive, the rule for extracting square root, the law of gravity, the classes of nouns, etc., then the aim of the lesson is to convey some general idea or truth. applied knowledge general before proceeding to a special consideration of such type lessons, it will be well to note that the mind always applies general knowledge in the learning process. that is, the application of old knowledge to the new presentation is possible only because this knowledge has taken on a general character, or has become a general way of thinking. the tendency for every new experience, whether particular or general, to pass into a general attitude, or to become a standard for interpreting other presentations, is always present, at least after the very early impressions of infancy. when, for instance, a child observes a strange object, dog, and perceives its four feet, this idea does not remain wholly confined to the particular object, but tends to take on a general character. this consists in the fact that the characteristic perceived is vaguely thought of as a quality distinct from the dog. this quality, _four-footedness_, therefore, is at least in some measure recognized as a quality that may occur in other objects. in other words, it takes on a general character, and will likely be applied in interpreting the next four-footed object which comes under the child's attention. so also when an adult first meets a strange fruit, guava, he observes perhaps that it is _pear-shaped, yellow-skinned, soft-pulped_, of _sweet taste_, and _aromatic flavour_. all such quality ideas as pear-shaped, yellow, soft, etc., as here applied, are general ideas of quality taken on from earlier experiences. even in interpreting the qualities of particular objects, therefore, as this rose, this machine, or this animal, we apply to its interpretation general ideas, or general forms of thought, taken on from earlier experiences. the same fact is even more evident when the mind attempts to build up the idea of a particular object by an act of imagination. one may conceive as present, a sphere, red in colour, with smooth surface, and two feet in diameter. now this particular object is defined through the qualities spherical, red, smooth, etc. but these notions of quality are all general, although here applied to building up the image of a particular thing. processes of acquiring knowledge similar if what has already been noted concerning the law of universal method is correct, and if all learning is a process of building up a new experience in accordance with the law of apperception, then all of the above modes of gaining either particular or general knowledge must ultimately conform to the laws of general method. keeping in view the fact that applied knowledge is always general in character, it will not be difficult to demonstrate that these various processes do not differ in their essential characteristics; but that any process of acquiring either particular or general knowledge conforms to the method of selection and relation, or of analysis-synthesis, as already described in our study of the learning process. to demonstrate this, however, it will be necessary to examine and illustrate the different modes of learning in the light of the principles of general method already laid down in the text. chapter xv modes of learning development of particular knowledge a. learning through the senses in many lessons in nature study, elementary science, etc., pupils are led to acquire new knowledge by having placed before them some particular object which they may examine through the senses. the knowledge thus gained through the direct observation of some individual thing, since it is primarily knowledge about a particular individual, is to be classified as particular knowledge. as an example of the process by which a pupil may gain particular knowledge through the senses, a nature lesson may be taken in which he would, by actual observation, become acquainted with one of the constellations, say the great dipper. here the learner first receives through his senses certain impressions of colour and form. next he proceeds to read into these impressions definite meanings, as stars, four, corners, bowl, three, curve, handle, etc. in such a process of acquiring knowledge about a particular thing, it is to be noted that the acquisition depends upon two important conditions: . the senses receive impressions from a particular thing. . the mind reacts upon these impressions with certain phases of its old knowledge, here represented by such words as four, corner, bowl, etc. =analysis of process.=--when the mind thus gains knowledge of a particular object through sense perception, the process is found to conform exactly to the general method already laid down; for there is involved: . _the motive._--to read meaning into the strange thing which is placed before the pupil as a problem to stimulate his senses. _ . selection, or analysis._--bringing selected elements of former knowledge to interpret the unknown impressions, the elements of his former knowledge being represented in the above example by such words as, four, bowl, curve, handle, etc. . _unification, or synthesis._--a continuous relating of these interpreting factors into the unity of a newly interpreted object, the dipper. sense perception in education =a. gives knowledge of things.=--in many lessons in biology, botany, etc., although the chief aim of the lesson is to acquire a correct class notion, yet the learning process is in large part the gaining of particular knowledge through the senses. in a nature lesson, for instance, the pupil may be presented with an insect which he has never previously met. when the pupil interprets the object as six-legged, with hard shell-like wing covers, under wings membranous, etc., he is able to gain knowledge about this particular thing: . because the thing manifests itself to him through the senses of sight and touch. . because he is able to bring to bear upon these sense impressions his old knowledge, represented by such words as six, wing, shell, hard, membranous, etc. so far, therefore, as the process ends with knowledge of the particular object presented, the learning process conforms exactly to that laid down above, for there is involved: . _the motive._--to read meaning into the new thing which is placed before the pupil as a problem to stimulate his senses. . _selection, or analysis._--bringing selected elements of former knowledge to interpret the unknown problem, the elements of his former knowledge being represented above by such words as six, leg, wing, hard, shell, membranous, etc. . _unification, or synthesis._--a continuous relating of these interpreting factors into the unity of a better known object, the insect. =b. is a basis for generalization.=--it is to be noted, however, that in any such lesson, although the pupil gains through his senses a knowledge of a particular individual only, yet he may at once accept this individual as a sign, or type, of a class of objects, and can readily apply the new knowledge in interpreting other similar things. although, for example, the pupil has experienced but one such object, he does not necessarily think of it as a mere individual--this thing--but as a representative of a possible class of objects, a beetle. in other words the new particular notion tends to pass directly into a general, or class, notion. b. learning through imagination as an example of a lesson in which the pupil secures knowledge through the use of his imagination, may be taken first the case of one called upon to image some single object of which he may have had no actual experience, as a desert, london tower, the sphinx, etc. taking the last named as an example, the learner must select certain characteristics as, woman, head, lion, body, etc., all of which are qualities which have been learned in other past experiences. moreover, the mind must organize these several qualities into the representation of a single object, the sphinx. here, evidently, the pupil follows fully the normal process of learning. . the term--the sphinx--suggests a problem, or felt need, namely, to read meaning into the vaguely realized term. . under the direction of the instructor or the text-book, the pupil selects, or analyses out of past experience, such ideas as, woman, head, body, lion, which are felt to have a value in interpreting the present problem. . a synthetic, or relating, activity of mind unifies the selected ideas into an ideally constructed object which is accepted by the learner as a particular object, although never directly known through the senses. nor is the method different in more complex imagination processes. in literary interpretation, for instance, when the reader meets such expressions as: the curfew tolls the knell of parting day, the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, the ploughman homeward plods his weary way and leaves the world to darkness and to me; the words of the author suggest a problem to the mind of the reader. this problem then calls up in the mind of the student a set of images out of earlier experience, as bell, evening, herd, ploughman, lea, etc., which the mind unifies into the representation of the particular scene depicted in the lines. it is in this way that much of our knowledge of various objects and scenes in nature, of historical events and characters, and of spiritual beings is obtained. =imagination gives basis for generalization.=--it should be noted by the student-teacher that in many lessons we aim to give the child a notion of a class of objects, though he may in actual experience never have met any representatives of the class. in geography, for instance, the child learns of deserts, volcanoes, etc., without having experienced these objects through the senses. it has been seen, however, that our general knowledge always develops from particular experience. for this reason the pupil who has never seen a volcano, in order to gain a general notion of a volcano, must first, by an act of constructive imagination, image a definite picture of a particular volcano. the importance of using in such a lesson a picture or a representation on a sand-board, lies in the fact that this furnishes the necessary stimulus to the child's imagination, which will cause him to image a particular individual as a basis for the required general, or class, notion. too often, however, the child is expected in such lessons to form the class notion directly, that is, without the intervention of a particular experience. this question will be considered more fully in chapter xxvii, which treats of the process of imagination. c. learning by inference, or deduction instead of placing himself in british columbia, and noting by actual experience that there is a large rainfall there, a person may discover the same by what is called a process of inference. for example, one may have learned from an examination of other particular instances that air takes up moisture in passing over water; that warm air absorbs large quantities of moisture; that air becomes cool as it rises; and that warm, moist air deposits its moisture as rain when it is cooled. knowing this and knowing a number of particular facts about british columbia, namely that warm winds pass over it from the pacific and must rise owing to the presence of mountains, we may infer of british columbia that it has an abundant rainfall. when we thus discover a truth in relation to any particular thing by inference, we are said to go through a process of deduction. a more particular study of this process will be made in chapter xxviii, but certain facts may here be noted in reference to the process as a mode of acquiring knowledge. an examination will show that the deductive process follows the ordinary process of learning, or of selecting certain elements of old knowledge, and organizing them into a new particular experience in order to meet a certain problem. =deduction as formal reasoning.=--it is usually stated by psychologists and logicians that in this process the person starts with the general truth and ends with the particular inference, or conclusion, for example: winds coming from the ocean are saturated with moisture. the prevailing winds in british columbia come from the pacific. therefore these winds are saturated with moisture. all winds become colder as they rise. the winds of british columbia rise as they go inland. therefore, the winds (atmosphere) in british columbia become colder as they go inland. the atmosphere gives out moisture as it becomes colder. the atmosphere in british columbia becomes colder as it goes inland. therefore, the atmosphere gives out moisture in british columbia. =steps in process.=--the various elements involved in a deductive process are often analysed into four parts in the following order: . _principles._ the general laws which are to be applied in the solution of the problem. these, in the above deductions, constitute the first sentence in each, as, the air becomes colder as it rises. air gives out its moisture as it becomes colder, etc. . _data._ this includes the particular facts already known relative to the problem. in this lesson, the data are set forth in the second sentences, as follows: the prevailing winds in british columbia come from the pacific; the wind rises as it goes inland, etc. . _inferences._ these are the conclusions arrived at as a result of noting relations between data and principles. in the above lesson, the inferences are: the atmosphere, or trade-winds, coming from the pacific rise, become colder, and give out much moisture. . _verification._ in some cases at least the learner may use other means to verify his conclusions. in the above lesson, for example, he may look it up in the geography or ask some one who has had actual experience. =deduction involves a problem.=--it is to be noted, however, that in a deductive learning process, the young child does not really begin with the general principle. on the contrary, as noted in the study of the learning process, the child always begins with a particular unsolved problem. in the case just cited, for instance, the child starts with the problem, "what is the condition of the rainfall in british columbia?" it is owing to the presence of this problem, moreover, that the mind calls up the principles and data. these, of course, are already possessed as old knowledge, and are called up because the mind feels a connection between them and the problem with which it is confronted. the principles and data are thus both involved in the selecting process, or step of analysis. what the learner really does, therefore, in a deductive lesson is to interpret a new problem by selecting as interpreting ideas the principles and data. the third division, inference, is in reality the third step of our learning process, since the inference is a new experience organized out of the selected principles and data. moreover, the verification is often found to take the form of ordinary expression. as a process of learning, therefore, deduction does not exactly follow the formal outline of the psychologists and logicians of ( ) principles, ( ) data, ( ) inference, and (_ _) verification; but rather that of the learning process, namely, ( ) problem, ( ) selecting activity, including principles and data, ( ) relating activity=inference, ( ) expression=verification. =example of deduction as learning process.=--a simple and interesting lesson, showing how the pupil actually goes through the deductive process, is found in paper cutting of forms balanced about a centre, say the letter x. . _problem._ the pupil starts with the problem of discovering a way of cutting this letter by balancing about a centre. . _selection._ principles and data. the pupil calls up as data what he knows of this letter, and as principles, the laws of balance he has learned from such letters as, a, b, etc. . _organization or inference._ the pupil infers from the principle involved in cutting the letter a, that the letter x (fig. a) may be balanced about a vertical diameter, as in fig. b. repeating the process, he infers further from the principle involved in cutting the letter b, that this result may again be balanced about a horizontal diameter, as in fig. c. [illustration] . _expression or verification._ by cutting figure d and unfolding figures e and f, he is able to verify his conclusion by noting the shape of the form as it unfolds, thus: [illustration] further examples for study the following are given as further examples of deductive processes. the materials are here arranged in the formal or logical way. the student-teacher should rearrange them as they would occur in the child's learning process. i. division of decimals . _principles_: (_a_) multiplying the dividend and divisor by the same number does not alter the quotient. (_b_) to multiply a decimal by , , , etc., move the decimal point , , , etc., places respectively to the right. . _data_: present knowledge of facts contained in such an example as . divided by . . . _inferences_: (_a_) the divisor (. ) may be converted into a whole number by multiplying it by . (_b_) if the divisor is multiplied by , the dividend must also be multiplied by if the quotient is to be unchanged. (_c_) the problem thus becomes . divided by , for which the answer is . . . _verification_: check the work to see that no mistakes have been made in the calculation. multiply the quotient by the divisor to see if the result is equal to the dividend. ii. trade-winds . _principles_: (_a_) heated air expands, becomes lighter, and is pushed upward by cooler and heavier currents of air. (_b_) air currents travelling towards a region of more rapid motion have a tendency to "lag behind," and so appear to travel in a direction opposite to that of the earth's rotation. . _data_: (_a_) the most heated portion of the earth is the tropical region. (_b_) the rapidity of the earth's motion is greatest at the equator and least at the poles. (_c_) the earth rotates on its axis from west to east. . _inferences_: (_a_) the heated air in equatorial regions will be constantly rising. (_b_) it will be pushed upward by colder and heavier currents of air from the north and south. (_c_) if the earth did not rotate, there would be constant winds towards the south, north of the equator; and towards the north, south of the equator. (_d_) these currents of air are travelling from a region of less motion to a region of greater motion, and have a tendency to lag behind the earth's motion as they approach the equator. (_e_) hence they will seem to blow in a direction contrary to the earth's rotation, namely, towards the west. (_f_) these two movements, towards the equator and towards the west, combine to give the currents of air a direction towards the south-west north of the equator, and towards the north-west south of the equator. . _verification_: read the geography text to see if our inferences are correct. the development of general knowledge =the conceptual lesson.=--as an example of a lesson involving a process of conception, or classification, may be taken one in which the pupil might gain the class notion _noun_. the pupil would first be presented with particular examples through sentences containing such words as john, mary, toronto, desk, boy, etc. thereupon the pupil is led to examine these in order, noting certain characteristics in each. examining the word _john_, for instance, he notes that it is a word; that it is used to name and also, perhaps, that it names a person, and is written with a capital letter. of the word _toronto_, he may note much the same except that it names a place; of the word _desk_, he may note especially that it is used to name a thing and is written without a capital letter. by comparing any and all the qualities thus noted, he is supposed, finally, by noting what characteristics are common to all, to form a notion of a class of words used to name. =the inductive lesson.=--to exemplify an inductive lesson, there may be noted the process of learning the rule that to multiply the numerator and denominator of any fraction by the same number does not alter the value of the fraction. _conversion of fractions to equivalent fractions with different denominators_ the teacher draws on the black-board a series of squares, each representing a square foot. these are divided by vertical lines into a number of equal parts. one or more of these parts are shaded, and pupils are asked to state what fraction of the whole square has been shaded. the same squares are then further divided into smaller equal parts by horizontal lines, and the pupils are led to discover how many of the smaller equal parts are contained in the shaded parts. [illustration: / = / / = / / = / / = / ] examine these equations one by one, treating each after some such manner as follows: how might we obtain the numerator from the numerator ? (multiply by .) the denominator from the denominator ? (multiply by .) � � � � --- = -; --- = --; --- = --; --- = --. � � � � if we multiply both the numerator and the denominator of the fraction / by , what will be the effect upon the value of the fraction? (it will be unchanged.) what have we done with the numerator and denominator in every case? how has the fraction been affected? what rule may we infer from these examples? (multiplying the numerator and denominator by the same number does not alter the value of the fraction.) the formal steps in describing the process of acquiring either a general notion or a general truth, the psychologist and logician usually divide it into four parts as follows: . the person is said to analyse a number of particular cases. in the above examples this would mean, in the conceptual lesson, noting the various characteristics of the several words, john, toronto, desk, etc.; and in the second lesson, noting the facts involved in the several cases of shading. . the mind is said to compare the characteristics of the several particular cases, noting any likenesses and unlikenesses. . the mind is said to pick out, or abstract, any quality or quantities common to all the particular cases. . finally the mind is supposed to synthesise these common characteristics into a general notion, or concept, in the conceptual process, and into a general truth if the process is inductive. thus the conceptual and inductive processes are both said to involve the same four steps of: . _analysis._--interpreting a number of individual cases. . _comparison._--noting likenesses and differences between the several individual examples. . _abstraction._--selecting the common characteristics. . _generalization._--synthesis of common characteristics into a general truth or a general notion, as the case may be. =criticism.=--here again it will be found, however, that the steps of the logician do not fully represent what takes place in the pupil's mind as he goes through the learning process in a conceptual or inductive lesson. it is to be noted first that the above outline does not signify the presence of any problem to cause the child to proceed with the analysis of the several particular cases. assuming the existence of the problem, unless this problem involves all the particular examples, the question arises whether the learner will suspend coming to any conclusion until he has analysed and compared all the particular cases before him. it is here that the actual learning process is found to vary somewhat from the outline of the psychologist and logician. as will be seen below, the child really finds his problem in the first particular case presented to him. moreover, as he analyses out the characteristics of this case, he does not really suspend fully the generalizing process until he has examined a number of other cases, but, as the teacher is fully aware, is much more likely to jump at once to a more or less correct conclusion from the one example. it is true, of course, that it is only by going on to compare this with other cases that he assures himself that this first conclusion is correct. this slight variation of the actual learning process from the formal outline will become evident if one considers how a child builds up any general notion in ordinary life. conception as a learning process =a. in ordinary life.=--suppose a young child has received a vague impression of a cow from meeting a first and only example; we find that by accepting this as a problem and by applying to it such experience as he then possesses, he is able to read some meaning into it, for instance, that it is a brown, four-footed, hairy object. this idea, once formed, does not remain a mere particular idea, but becomes a general means for interpreting other experiences. at first, indeed, the idea may serve to read meaning, not only into another cow, but also into a horse or a buffalo. in course of time, however, as this first imperfect concept of the animal is used in interpreting cows and perhaps other animals, the first crude concept may in time, by comparison, develop into a relatively true, or logical, concept, applicable to only the actual members of the class. now here, the child did not wait to generalize until such time as the several really essential characteristics were decided upon, but in each succeeding case applied his present knowledge to the particular thing presented. it was, in other words, by a series of regular selecting and relating processes, that his general notion was finally clarified. =b. in the school.=--practically the same conditions are noted in the child's study of particular examples in an inductive or conceptual lesson in the school, although the process is much more rapid on account of its being controlled by the teacher. in the lesson outlined above, the pupil finds a problem in the very first word _john_, and adjusts himself thereto in a more or less perfect way by an apperceptive process involving both a selecting and a relating of ideas. with this first more or less perfect notion as a working hypothesis, the pupil goes on to examine the next word. if he gains the true notion from the first example, he merely verifies this through the other particular examples. if his first notion is not correct, however, he is able to correct it by a further process of analysis and synthesis in connection with other examples. throughout the formal stages, therefore, the pupil is merely applying his growing general knowledge in a selective, or analytic, way to the interpreting of several particular examples, until such time as a perfect general, or class, notion is obtained and verified. it is, indeed, on account of this immediate tendency of the mind to generalize, that care must be taken to present the children with typical examples. to make them examine a sufficient number of examples is to ensure the correcting of crude notions that may be formed by any of the pupils through their generalizing perhaps from a single particular. induction as a learning process in like manner, in an inductive lesson, although the results of the process of the development of a general principle may for convenience be arranged logically under the above four heads, it is evident that the child could not wholly suspend his conclusions until a number of particular cases had been examined and compared. in the lesson on the rule for conversion of fractions to equivalent fractions with different denominators, the pupils could not possibly apperceive, or analyse, the examples as suggested under the head of selection, or analysis, without at the same time implicitly abstracting and generalizing. also in the lesson below on the predicate adjective, the pupils could not note, in all the examples, all the features given under analysis and fail at the same time to abstract and generalize. the fact is that in such lessons, if the selection, or analysis, is completed in only one example, abstraction and generalization implicitly unfold themselves at the same time and constitute a relating, or synthetic, act of the mind. the fourfold arrangement of the matter, however, may let the teacher see more fully the children's mental attitude, and thus enable him to direct them intelligently through the apperceptive process. it will undoubtedly also impress on the teacher's mind the need of having the pupils compare particular cases until a correct notion is fully organized in experience. two processes similar notwithstanding the distinction drawn by psychologists between conception as a process of gaining a general notion, and induction as a process of arriving at a general truth, it is evident from the above that the two processes have much in common. in the development of many lesson topics, in fact, the lesson may be viewed as involving both a conceptual and an inductive process. in the subject of grammar, for instance, a first lesson on the pronoun may be viewed as a conceptual lesson, since the child gains an idea of a class of words, as indicated by the new general term pronoun, this term representing the result of a conceptual process. it may equally be viewed as an inductive lesson, since the child gains from the lesson a general truth, or judgment, as expressed in his new definition--"a pronoun is a word that represents an object without naming it," the definition representing the result of an inductive process. this fact will be considered more fully, however, in chapter xxviii. further examples of inductive lessons as further illustrations of an inductive process, the following outlines of lessons might be noted. the processes are outlined according to the formal steps. the student-teacher should consider how the children are to approach each problem and to what extent they are likely to generalize as the various examples are being interpreted during the analytic stage. . the subjective predicate adjective _analysis, or selection:_ divide the following sentences into subject and predicate: the man was old. the weather turned cold. the day grew stormy. the boy became ill. the concert proved successful. what kind of man is referred to in the first sentence? what part of speech is "old"? what part of the sentence does it modify? in what part of the sentence does it stand? could it be omitted? what then is its duty with reference to the verb? what are its two duties? (it completes the verb "was" and modifies the subject "man.") lead the pupils to deal similarly with "cold," "stormy," "ill," "successful." _comparison, abstraction, and generalization, or organization:_ what two duties has each of these italicized words? each is called a "subjective predicate adjective." what is a subjective predicate adjective? (a subjective predicate adjective is an adjective that completes the verb and modifies the subject.) . condensation of vapour _analysis, or selection:_ the pupils should be asked to report observations they have made concerning some familiar occurrences like the following: ( ) breathe upon a cold glass and upon a warm glass. what do you notice in each case? where must the drops of water have come from? can you see this water ordinarily? in what form must the water have been before it formed in drops on the cold glass? ( ) what have you often noticed on the window of the kitchen on cool days? from where did these drops of water come? could you see the vapour in the air? how did the temperature of the window panes compare with the temperature of the room? ( ) when the water in a tea-kettle is boiling rapidly, what do you see between the mouth of the spout and the cloud of steam? what must have come through that clear space? is the steam then at first visible or invisible? the pupils should be further asked to report observations and make correct inferences concerning such things as: ( ) the deposit of moisture on the outside surface of a pitcher of ice-water on a warm summer day. ( ) the clouded condition of one's eye-glasses on coming from the cold outside air into a warm room. _comparison, abstraction, and generalization, or organization:_ in all these cases you have reported what there has been in the air. was this vapour visible or invisible? under what condition did it become visible? the pupils should be led to sum up their observations in some such way as the following: air often contains much water vapour. when this comes in contact with cooler bodies, it condenses into minute particles of water. in other words, the two conditions of condensation are ( ) a considerable quantity of water vapour in the air, and ( ) contact with cooler bodies. it must be borne in mind that in a conceptual or an inductive lesson care is to be taken by the teacher to see that the particulars are sufficient in number and representative in character. as already pointed out, crude notions often arise through generalizing from too few particulars or from particulars that are not typical of the whole class. induction can be most frequently employed in elementary school work in the subjects of grammar, arithmetic, and nature study. inductive-deductive lessons before we leave this division of general method, it should be noted that many lessons combine in a somewhat formal way two or more of the foregoing lesson types. in many inductive lessons the step of application really involves a process of deduction. for example, after teaching the definition of a noun by a process of induction as outlined above, we may, in the same lesson, seek to have the pupil use his new knowledge in pointing out particular nouns in a set of given sentences. here, however, the pupil is evidently called upon to discover the value of particular words by the use of the newly learned general principle. when, therefore, he discovers the grammatical value of the particular word "provender" in the sentence "provender is dear," the pupil's process of learning can be represented in the deductive form as follows: all naming words are nouns. _provender_ is a naming word. _provender_ is a noun. although in these exercises the real aim is not to have the pupil learn the value of the individual word, but to test his mastery of the general principle, such application undoubtedly corresponds with the deductive learning process previously outlined. any inductive lesson, therefore, which includes the above type of application may rightly be described as an inductive-deductive lesson. a great many lessons in grammar and arithmetic are of this type. chapter xvi the lesson unit =what constitutes a lesson problem.=--the foregoing analysis and description of the learning process has shown that the ordinary school lesson is designed to lead the pupil to build up, or organize, a new experience, or, as it is sometimes expressed, to gain control of a unit of valuable knowledge, presented as a single problem. from what has been learned concerning the relating activity of mind, however, it is evident that the teacher may face a difficulty when he is called upon to decide what extent of knowledge, or experience, is to be accepted as a knowledge unit. it was noted, for example, that many topics regularly treated in a single lesson fall into quite distinct sub-divisions, each of which represents to a certain extent a separate group of related ideas and, therefore, a single problem. on the other hand, many different lesson experiences, or topics, although taught as separate units, are seen to stand so closely related, that in the end they naturally organize themselves into a larger single unit of knowledge, representing a division, of the subject of study. from this it is evident that situations may arise, as in teaching the classes of sentences in grammar, in which the teacher must ask himself whether it will be possible to take up the whole topic with its important sub-divisions in a single lesson, or whether each sub-division should be treated in a single lesson. =how to approach associated problems.=--even when it is realized that the related matter is too large for a single lesson, it must be decided whether it will be better to bring on each sub-division as a separate topic, and later let these sub-divisions synthesise into a new unity; or whether the larger topic should be taken up first in a general way, and the sub-divisions made topics of succeeding lessons. in the study of mood in grammar, for example, shall we introduce each mood separately, and finally have the child synthesise the separate facts; or shall we begin with a lesson on mood in general, and follow this with a study of the separate moods? in like manner, in the study of winds in geography, shall we study in order land and sea breezes, trade-winds, and monsoons, and have the child synthesise these facts at the end of the series; or shall we begin with a study of winds in general, and follow this with a more detailed study of the three classes of winds? whole to parts =advantages.=--the second of these methods, which is often called the method of proceeding from whole to parts, should, whenever possible, be followed. for instance, in a study of such a lesson as _dickens in the camp_, the detailed study of the various stanzas should be preceded by an introductory lesson, bringing out the leading thought of the poem, and noting the sub-topics. when, in an introductory lesson, the pupil is able to gain control of a large topic, and see the relation to it of a given number of sub-topics, he is selecting and relating the parts of the whole topic by the normal analytic-synthetic method. moreover, in the following lessons, he is much more likely to appreciate the relation of the various sub-topics to the central topic, and the inter-relations between these various sub-topics. for this reason, in such subjects as history, literature, geography, etc., pupils are often introduced to these large divisions, or complex lesson units, and given a vague knowledge of the whole topic, the detailed study of the parts being made in subsequent lessons. =examples.=--the following outlines will further illustrate how a series of lessons (numbered i, ii, iii, etc.) may thus proceed from a first study of the larger whole to a more detailed study of a number of subordinate parts. the st. lawrence river system _i. topic.--the st. lawrence river:_ position, size, extent of system, other characteristics. importance--historical, commercial, industrial. _ii. sub-topic .--importance historically:_ open mouth to europe; open door to continent; cartier, champlain. system of lakes and rivers large and small gave lines of communication, inviting discovery and subsequent development and settlement. _iii. sub-topic .--importance commercially:_ large tracts of valuable land, timber, etc., made available. highway--need of such between east and west. difficulties to be overcome, canal, ships. competition of railways, how? classes of goods back and forth. avenue to and from the wheat land. _iv. sub-topic .--importance industrially:_ great commercial centres--where located and why? water powers, elevators, manufacturing of raw materials made available in the large areas; immigration; fishing. study of bacteria _i. topic.--bacteria:_ what they are; relations, comparisons; other plants in same class, or those of higher orders; size, shape; where found; conditions of growth; propagation; modes of distribution; etc. _ii. sub-topic .--our interest in bacteria, arising out of the injury or good they do:_ (_a_) injury: decay of fruits, trees, tissues, etc., diseases--diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis; how developed, conditions, favourable toxins. (_b_) benefits: in soil, cheese, butter, etc.; chemical action, building new compounds and breaking up other compounds. _iii. sub-topic .--our interest in controlling them; the methods based on mode and conditions of growth, etc.:_ (_a_) prevention: eliminating favourable conditions; low temperature, high temperatures, cleanliness; sewerage disposal; clean cow-stables, cellars, kitchens, etc.; antiseptics--carbolic, formalin, sugar for fruit, sealing up; quarantine, vaccination, antitoxin. (_b_) cultures,--alfalfa, cheese, butter, under control. geography of europe _i. topic.--europe:_ what interest to us; why we study it; position, latitude, near water, boundaries, size; surface features--highlands, lowlands, drainage rivers, coast-line, etc. climate--temperature (means, jan., july), wind, moisture. _ii. sub-topic .--products (based on above conditions):_ vegetation, animal, mineral; vary over area according to physical climatic, and geological conditions; kinds of products of each class, in each area, etc. _iii. sub-topic .--occupations (based on lesson ii):_ study of operations and conditions favourable and unfavourable under which each product is produced, gathered, and manufactured. industries, arising from work on the raw materials. _iv. sub-topic .--trade and commerce (based on lessons ii and iii):_ transportation, producers selling and manufacturers buying raw material, distributed to homes in country and city, to factories within the region itself, to regions beyond, across oceans, etc. manufactured products sent out, exports and imports. _v. sub-topic .--civil advantages (based on lessons i, iii, and iv):_ conditions of living--homes, dress, work and pleasure; trades, education, government, social, religious, etc. parts to whole the method of whole to parts cannot be followed in all cases even where a number of lesson units may possess important points of inter-relation. although, for instance, simple and compound addition and addition of fractions are only different phases of one process, no one would advocate the combining of these into such a unified lesson series. in canadian history, also, although the conditions of the quebec act, the coming of the united empire loyalists, and the passing of the constitutional act, have definite points of inter-relation, it would nevertheless be unwise to attempt to evolve these out of a single complex lesson unit. in such cases, therefore, the synthesis of the various parts must be made as the lessons proceed. moreover, it is well to ensure the complete organization of the elements by means of an outline review at the end of the lesson series. the student-teacher will meet an example of this process under the topical lesson in chapter xvii. precautions it is evident from the above considerations, that certain precautions should be observed in deciding upon the particular subject-matter to be included in each lesson topic. . a just balance should be maintained between the difficulty of each lesson unit and the ability of the class. matter that is too easy requires no effort in its mastery and hence is uninteresting. matter that is too difficult discourages effort, and is, therefore, equally uninteresting. it should be sufficiently easy for every pupil to master, and sufficiently difficult to require real effort. . the amount of matter included should be carefully adjusted to the length of time taken for the lesson and to the attainments of the class. if too much is attempted, there will be insufficient time for adequate drill and review, and hence there will be lack of thoroughness. if too little is attempted, time will be wasted in needless repetition. . each unit of instruction in any subject should, in general, grow out of the preceding unit taken in that subject, and be closely connected with it. it is in this way that a pupil's interest is aroused for the new problem and his knowledge becomes organized. neglect in this regard results in the possession of disconnected and unsystematized facts. each lesson should contain one or more central facts around which the other facts are grouped. this permits easy organization of the material of the lesson, and ensures its retention by the pupils. further, the pupils are by this means trained to discriminate between the essential and the non-essential. chapter xvii lesson types =the developing lesson.=--in the various lesson plans already considered, the aim has always appeared as an attempt to direct the learning process so that the pupil may both build up a new experience and also gain such control over it as will enable him to turn it to practical use. because in all such lessons the teacher is supposed to direct the pupils through the four steps of the learning process in such a way that they discover for themselves some important new experience, or develop it out of their own present knowledge, the lessons are spoken of as developing lessons. moreover, the two parts of the lesson in which the new experience is especially gained by the pupils, namely the selecting and relating processes, are often spoken of as a single step and called the step of _development,_ the lesson then being treated under four heads: problem, preparation, development, and application. =auxiliary lessons.=--it is evident, however, that there may be lessons in which this direct attempt to have the pupils build up some wholly new experience through a regularly controlled learning process, will not appear as the chief purpose of the lesson. in the previous consideration of the deductive lesson, it was pointed out that this type may be used to give a further mastery of general rules previously learned, rather than a knowledge of particular examples. such would be the case in an ordinary parsing and analysis lesson in grammar. here the primary purpose is, evidently, not to give the pupils a grammatical knowledge of the particular words and sentences which are being parsed and analysed, but rather to give them better control of certain general rules of language which they have partially mastered in previous lessons. so also a lesson in writing may seek, not to teach the form of some new letter, but to give skill in writing a letter form which the pupils have already learned. in an exercise in addition of fractions, also, the aim is not so much to have the pupil know these particular questions, as to have him gain a more complete control of the previously learned rule. in other lessons the pupils may be left to secure new knowledge largely for themselves, and the recitation be devoted to testing whether they have been able to accomplish this successfully. in still other lessons the teacher may merely outline a certain topic or certain topics, preparatory to such independent study by the pupils. the following outlines will explain and exemplify these auxiliary lesson types. the study lesson =purpose of study lesson.=--the purpose of the study lesson is the mastery by the pupils of a stated portion of the text-book. ultimately, however it is the cultivation of the power of gleaning information from the printed page, of selecting essential features, and of arranging these in their proper relationships. the main difficulty in connection with the study lesson is the adaptation of the matter to the interests of the pupils. this difficulty is sometimes due to their inability to interpret the language of the book, and to the difficulty of their distinguishing the salient features from the non-essential. the trouble in this regard is accentuated when they approach the lesson with an inadequate preparation of mind. the study lesson falls naturally into two parts, the assignment and the seat work. =the assignment.=--the object of the assignment is to put the pupils in an attitude of inquiry toward the new matter. it corresponds to the conception of the problem and the step of preparation in the development lesson. the most successful assignment is one in which the interest of the pupils is aroused to such a pitch that they are anxious to read more about the subject. in general it will consist of a recall of those ideas, or a statement of those facts upon which the interpretation of the new matter depends. most of the unsuccessful study lessons are due to insufficient care in the assignment. often pupils are told to read so many pages of the book, without any preliminary preparation and without any idea of what facts they are to learn. under such conditions, the result is usually a very slight interest in the lesson, and consequently an unsatisfactory grasp of it. =examples of assignment.=--a few examples will serve to illustrate what is meant by an adequate assignment. when a new reading lesson is to be prepared, the assignment should include the pronunciation and meaning of the different words, and a general understanding of the passage to be read. for a new spelling lesson, the assignment should include the pronunciation and meaning of the words, and any special difficulties that may appear in them. in assigning a history lesson on, say, the capture of quebec, the teacher should discuss with the class the position of quebec, the difficulties that would present themselves to a besieging army, the character and personal appearance of wolfe (making him stand out as vividly as possible), and the position seized by the british army, illustrating as far as possible by maps and diagrams. then the class will be in a mental attitude to read with interest the dramatic story of the taking of the fortress. if the pupils were about to study the geography of british columbia, the teacher might, in the assignment, ask them to note from the map of canada the position of the province and the direction of the mountain ranges; to infer the character and direction of the rivers and their value for navigation; to infer the nature of the climate, knowing the direction of the prevailing winds; to infer the character of the chief industries, knowing the physical features and climate. with these facts in mind the class will be able to read intelligently what the text-book says about british columbia. =the seat work.=--however good the assignment may be, there is always a danger that there will be much waste of time in connection with the seat work. the tendency to mind-wandering is always so great that the time devoted to the preparation of lessons at seats may to a large extent be lost, unless special precautions are taken in that regard. unfortunately every lesson cannot be made so enthralling that the pupil's mind is kept upon it in spite of distractions. to prevent this possible waste of time, suggestions have already been made in another connection (page above). these will bear repetition here. questions upon the matter to be studied might be placed on the black-board and pupils asked to prepare answers for these. the difficulty with this plan is, that, unless the questions are carefully thought out by the teacher, the pupils may get from their reading only a few disconnected facts instead of organized knowledge. the pupils might be asked to prepare lists of questions for themselves, and the one who had the best list might be permitted to put his questions to the rest of the class. the difficulty here is that most pupils have a tendency to question about what is unimportant and to neglect the important. in the higher classes, the pupils might be required to make a topical outline of the lesson studied. this requires considerable analytic ability, and the results at first are likely to be disappointing. however, it is an ability worth striving for. the individual who can readily outline what he has read has mastered the art of reading. =use of study lessons.=--there is a danger that the study lesson may be used too much or too little. in an ungraded school containing many classes, the teacher may be tempted to rely solely upon the study lesson as a means of intellectual advancement. used exclusively it becomes monotonous, and the pupils grow weary of the constant effort required. on the other hand, in the graded school, where a teacher has charge of only one class, there will be a tendency to depend entirely on the oral presentation of lessons, to the exclusion of the text-book altogether. the result is that pupils do not cultivate the power to obtain knowledge from books. the study lesson should alternate with the oral lesson, so that monotony may be avoided, and the pupils will reap the undoubted benefits of both methods. the recitation lesson =purpose of the recitation lesson.=--the recitation lesson is the complement of the study lesson. its purpose is to test the pupil's grasp of the facts he has read during the study period. incidentally the teacher clears up difficulties and corrects misconceptions on the part of the pupil. the facts of the text-book may be amplified from the teacher's stock of information. abstract facts may be illustrated in a concrete way. the important facts may be emphasized and the unimportant ones lightly passed over. the ultimate aim of the recitation lesson is to add something to the pupil's power of interpreting and organizing facts. =precautions.=--some precautions are to be noted in connection with the recitation lesson. ( ) care must be exercised that the pupils are not reciting mere words that have no solid basis of ideas. young children are particularly expert at verbalizing. ( ) care must also be taken that the pupils have not merely scrappy information, but have the ideas thoroughly organized. ( ) the teacher must know the facts to be recited well enough to be independent of the text-book during the recitation. to conduct the lesson with an open book before him is a confession of weakness on the part of the teacher. conducting the recitation lesson there are two methods of conducting the recitation lesson, namely, the question and answer method and the topical method. =a. the question and answer method.=--this is the easier method for the pupil, as he is called upon to answer only in a brief form detailed questions asked by the teacher. the onus of the analysis of the lesson rests largely upon the teacher. he must ask the questions in a proper sequence so that, if the answers of the pupils were written out, they would form a connected account of the matter. he must be able to detect from the pupils' answers whether they have real knowledge or are merely masquerading with words. to be able to question well is one of the most valuable accomplishments that a teacher can possess. the whole problem of the art of questioning will be considered in the next chapter. =b. the topical method.=--the topical recitation consists in the pupil's reporting the facts of the study lesson with a minimum of questioning on the part of the teacher. two advantages are apparent: ( ) it gives the pupil an excellent training in organizing his materials, and ( ) it develops his language power. it is to be feared that the topical recitation is not so frequently used as its value warrants. the reason is probably that it is a difficult method to follow. poor results are usually secured at first, teachers grow discouraged, they stop trying it, and thereafter put their whole faith in the question and answer recitation. this is unfortunate, for however good the latter may be, it is greatly inferior to the topical recitation in helping the pupil to institute relations among his facts, and in improving his power to use his mother-tongue effectively. successful topical recitations can be secured only at the price of long, patient, and persistent effort. the teacher can gradually work towards them from detailed questions to questions requiring the combination of a few sentences in answer, and thence to the complete outline. in almost every lesson the pupils may be called upon to summarize some topic after it has been gone over by means of detailed questions. in such answers the pupils may reasonably be expected to state the facts in their proper connection and in good language form. in reviews, also, in such subjects as history and geography, the pupils should be frequently called upon to recite topically. the drill lesson =purpose of drill lesson.=--the drill lesson involves the repetition of matter in the same form as it was originally learned, in order to fix it in the mind so firmly that its recall will eventually become automatic. in other words, the function of this type of lesson is habit-formation. it is necessary in those subjects that are more or less mechanical in nature, and that can be reduced to the plane of habit. the field of the drill lesson will, therefore, be largely restricted to spelling, writing, language, and the mechanical phases of art and arithmetic. =the method.=--as the purpose of the drill lesson is the formation of habit, the method will involve the application of the principles that lie at the basis of habit-formation. these are, ( ) attention to the thing to be done so as to obtain a vivid picture or a clear understanding of it, and ( ) repetition with attention. for instance, if the writing lesson is the formation of the capital e, the class will examine carefully a model form, note the parts of which it is composed, the relative size and position of the parts, how they are connected, etc. then will follow the repetition of the form by the pupils, each time with careful attention to the method of making it, comparison with the model, and the noting of defects in their work. this will continue until the letter can be made correctly without attention, that is, until the method of making it has been reduced to a habit. if the lesson is on the spelling of difficult words, the first step will be to observe the pronunciation of each, the division into syllables, the difficult part of the word, and the order of the letters. then the word will be repeated attentively until it can be spelled without effort. in a language lesson on the correct use, say, of "lie" and "lay," the pupils will first be called upon to observe the forms of each, "lie, lay, lain, lying," and "lay, laid, laying"--as used in sentences on the black-board, and the meaning of each group--"lie" meaning "to recline" and "lay" meaning "to place." the pupils will then repeat attentively the correct forms of the words in sentences, until they finally reach the stage when they unconsciously use the words correctly, or as habits of speech. the same principles apply in learning the addition and multiplication tables, and the tables of weights and measures in arithmetic; in the memorization of gems of poetry and prose; in the learning of dates, lists of events, and important provisions of acts in history; and in the memorization of lists of places and products in geography, where this is desirable. in all the cases mentioned, it must not be supposed that a single drill lesson will be sufficient for the fixing of the desired knowledge or skill. before instant and unconscious reaction can be depended upon, repetition will be needed at intervals for some time. =danger in mere repetition.=--in connection with the repetition necessary in the second stage of the drill lesson, an important precaution should be noted. it is impossible for anybody to repeat anything _attentively_ many times in succession unless there is some new element noted in each repetition. when there is no longer a new element, the repetition becomes mechanical, and hence comparatively useless so far as acquisition of knowledge or even habit is concerned. to ask a pupil who has difficulty with a combination in addition, or a product in multiplication, or the spelling of a word, to repeat it many times in succession, may be not only waste of time, but even worse, because a tendency toward mind-wandering may be encouraged. the practice of requiring pupils to write out new words, or words that have been mis-spelled in the dictation lesson, five, ten, or twenty times successively, cannot be too strongly condemned. the attention cannot possibly be concentrated upon the work beyond two or three repetitions, and the fact that pupils frequently make mistakes two or three words down the column and repeat this mistake to the end, is sufficient proof of the mechanical nature of the process. the little boy who had difficulty with the use of "went" and "gone," and was commanded by his teacher to write "i have gone" a hundred times on his slate, illustrates this principle exactly. he had been left to finish his task alone and, after writing "i have gone" faithfully forty or fifty times, grew tired of the monotony of the process. turning the slate over, he wrote on the other side, "i have went home" and left it on the desk for the teacher's approval. =how to overcome dangers.=--to avoid this difficulty, some device must be adopted to secure attention to each repetition until the knowledge is firmly fixed. for instance, instead of asking the pupil many times one after the other, what seven times six are, it would be better to introduce other combinations and come back frequently to seven times six. in that way the pupil would have to attend to it every time it came up. similarly, in learning to spell a troublesome word like "separate," the best plan would be to mix it up with other words and come back to it often. repetition is always necessary in the drill lesson, but it should always be _repetition with attention_. the review lesson =purpose of review lesson.=--as the name implies, a review is a new view of old knowledge. while the drill lesson repeats the matter in the same form as it was originally learned, the review lesson repeats the matter from another standpoint or in new relations. the function of the review lesson is the organization of the material of a series of lessons into an inter-connected whole, and incidentally the fixing of these facts in the mind by the additional repetitions. =kinds of review.=--almost every lesson gives opportunities for incidental reviews. the step of preparation recalls old ideas in new connections, and may be properly considered a review. a lesson on the "gerund" in grammar would require a recall of the various relations in which a noun may stand, and the various ways in which a verb may be completed. it is quite probable that the pupils have never before brought these facts together in an organized way. similarly, the step of expression affords opportunity for review. the solution of problems in simple interest confronts the pupils with new situations in which this principle can be applied. the reproduction of the matter of the history lesson requires the selection of the important facts from the mass of details given and the placing of these in their proper relationship to one another. but besides the incidental reviews which form a part of nearly all lessons, there must be lessons which are purely reviews. without these, the pupil, because of insufficient repetition, would rapidly forget the facts he had once learned or would never really know the facts at all, because he had not seen them in all their connections. there are two methods of conducting these reviews: ( ) by means of the topical outline, ( ) by means of the method of comparison. the topical review =purpose of topical outlines.=--by this method the pupil gets a bird's-eye view of a whole field. in learning the matter originally, his attention was largely concentrated upon the individual facts, and it is quite probable that he has since lost sight of some of the threads of unity running through them. the topical outline will bring these into prominence. it will enable the pupil to keep in his mind the most important headings of a subject, the sub-headings, and the individual facts coming under these. whatever may be said against the practice of memorizing topical outlines, it must be acknowledged that unless it is done the pupil's knowledge of the subject is likely to be very hazy, indefinite, and disconnected. =illustrations from history.=--as an illustration of the review lesson by means of the topical outline, take the history of the hudson's bay company. if the pupil has followed the order of the text-book, he has probably learned this subject in pieces--a bit here, another some pages later, and still another a few chapters farther on. in the multiplicity of other events, he has probably missed the connections among the facts, and a topical review will be necessary to establish these. he may be required to go through his history text-book, reading all the parts relating to the hudson's bay company. he will thus get a grasp of the relationships among the facts, and this will be made firmer if an outline such as the following is worked out with the assistance of the teacher. the hudson's bay company i. early history: . groseilliers and radisson interest prince rupert in possibilities of trade in north-western canada. two vessels fitted out for hudson's bay. report favourable. . charter granted hudson's bay company by charles ii, . . forts nelson, albany, rupert, and hayes attacked and captured by detroyes and d'iberville, . restored by treaty of utrecht, . ii. nature of fur-trade: . furs gathered by indians in winter. . conveyed to forts in summer, after incredible difficulties. . ceremonies on arrival of indians at forts. . articles exchanged for furs at first showy and worthless, but later more useful and valuable, for example, guns, hatchets, powder, shot, blankets, etc. iii. rivals of hudson's bay company: . coureurs-de-bois. . scottish traders--ranged from michilimackinac to saskatchewan. h.b. co. built cumberland house on saskatchewan to compete for interior trade. . north-west company, - --at first friendly to h.b. co., but later bitter enemies. iv. the selkirk settlement: . _establishment._--lord selkirk, a scottish philanthropist, and a shareholder in the hudson's bay co., purchased from the company , square miles of land around red river for scotch colonies, . about three hundred settlers came within three years. miles macdonell at head of the colony. . _trouble with north-west company._-- (_a_) suspicion of n.w. co. that colony was established by h.b. co. to compete for fur trade. (_b_) proclamation of macdonell that food should not be taken out of settlement. attack on colony by metis indians encouraged by n.w. co. withdrawal of colonists to lake winnipeg. (_c_) return with reinforcements under semple. skirmish at seven oaks, . semple with twenty others killed. (_d_) selkirk's descent upon fort william. arrest of several nor'westers. colony at red river restored. (_e_) nor'westers acquitted of murder of semple. selkirk convicted and heavily fined for acts of violence. selkirk withdrew from canada in disappointment and disgust. . _later progress._-- (_a_) hardships of pioneer life like those of ontario. (_b_) a series of disasters--grasshoppers, floods. (_c_) prosperity finally came. (_d_) government at first administered by governor of h.b. co., later assisted by council of fourteen members. v. amalgamation of rival companies: . _union._-- after withdrawal of selkirk, the h.b. co. and the n.w. co. united in , under name of former. . _subsequent progress._-- (_a_) governor sir george simpson extended posts westward to pacific. (_b_) through his energy britain was able to retain possession of western canada in spite of aggression of united states and russia. vi. relinquishment of administrative powers: . canadian government claimed that the rule of the company hindered development of western canada because it was interested only in trade. . _agreement with canadian government._-- (_a_) company sold prince rupert's land and gave up its trade monopoly. (_b_) in return.-- (i) received £ , . (ii) retained one twentieth of land south of the saskatchewan. (iii) retained its posts and trading privileges. . company still exists as a trading organization with many posts in the west and large stores in many cities. vii. services of h.b. co. to canada and the empire: . opened up a valuable trade in western canada. . explored and opened up the west for settlement. . retained for britain the territory west of rockies when it was in danger of falling into other hands. the subjects of the public and separate school course where topical reviews are most necessary are history and geography. the comparative review a thing always stands out most vividly in the mind when the relations of similarity and difference are perceived between it and other things. when we compare and contrast two things, certain features of each that would otherwise escape our attention are brought to light. we get a clearer idea of both the rabbit and the squirrel when we compare their various characteristics. great britain and germany are each better understood geographically, when we set up comparisons between them; pitt and walpole stand out more clearly as statesmen when we compare and contrast them. one of the most effective forms of review is that in which the relations of likeness and difference are set up between subjects that have already been studied. for instance, the geographical features of manitoba and british columbia may be effectively reviewed by instituting comparisons between them in regard to ( ) position and size, ( ) physical features, ( ) climate, ( ) industries, ( ) products, ( ) commercial centres. the careers of walpole and pitt might be reviewed by comparing and contrasting them with regard to ( ) circumstances under which each became prime minister, ( ) domestic policy, ( ) foreign policy, ( ) circumstances surrounding the resignation of each, ( ) personal character. whatever form the review lesson may take, the teacher should always keep in mind its two main purposes, namely, ( ) the organization of knowledge which comes through the apprehension of new relationships, and ( ) the deeper impression of facts on the mind which comes through attentive repetition. chapter xviii questioning =importance.=--as a teaching device, questioning must always occupy a place of the highest importance. while it may not be always true that good questioning is synonymous with good teaching, there can be no doubt that the good teacher must have, as one of his qualifications, the ability to question well. a good question is a problem to solve. a stimulating problem arouses and directs mental activity. well-directed mental activity is the prime requisite of all learning and one of the ends which all effective teaching endeavours to realize. questioning is one of the best means of securing that desirable activity of mind without which intellectual progress is impossible. the teacher who would master the technique of his art must study to attain skill in questioning. qualifications of the good questioner =a. knowledge of subject and of mind.=--the most obvious essentials are familiarity with the subject-matter and a knowledge of the mental processes of the child. without the first, the questions will be pointless, haphazard, and unsystematic; without the second, they will be ill-adjusted to the interests and attainments of the pupils. a thorough knowledge of the facts of the lesson and a keen insight into the workings of the child mind are indispensable. =b. analytic ability.=--as an accompaniment of the first of these qualifications, the good questioner must have analytic ability. the material of the lesson must be analysed into its elements and the relations of these must be clearly perceived if it is to be effectively presented to the pupils. the teacher must further have the power to discriminate between the important and the unimportant. the ability to seize upon the essential features and to give due prominence to these is one of the most valuable accomplishments a teacher can have. =c. knowledge of pupils' experiences.=--as an accompaniment of the second qualification, the good questioner must have a knowledge of the previous experience and of the capacities of the pupils. good teaching consists largely in the skilful adjustment of the new to the old. the teacher must ascertain what the pupils already know, what their interests are, and what matter they may reasonably be expected to apprehend, if he is to have them assimilate properly the facts of the lesson. he must further show sympathy and tact in order to inspire the pupils to their best effort. he must be able to detect unerringly the symptoms of inattention, listlessness, and misbehaviour, and by a well-directed question to bring back the wandering attention to the subject in hand. =faults in questioning.=--there are two serious weaknesses that many young teachers exhibit, namely, questioning when they ought to tell and telling when they ought to question. to tell pupils what they might easily discover for themselves is to deprive them of the joy of conquest and to miss an opportunity of exercising and strengthening their mental powers. on the other hand, to question upon matter which the pupils cannot reasonably be expected to know or discover is to discourage effort and encourage guessing. to know just when to question and when to tell requires considerable discrimination and insight on the part of the teacher. purposes of questioning questioning has three main purposes, namely: . to determine the limits of the pupil's present knowledge in order that the teacher may have a definite basis upon which to build the new material; . to direct the pupil's thought along a prescribed channel to a definite end, to lead him to make discoveries and form conclusions on his own account; . to ascertain how far he has grasped the meaning of the new material that has been presented. =a. preparatory.=--the first of these purposes may be designated as preparatory. here the teacher clears the ground for the presentation of the new matter by recalling the old related facts necessary to the interpretation of the new. in thus sounding the depths of the pupil's previous knowledge, the teacher should usually ask questions that demand fairly long answers instead of those which may be answered briefly. the onus of the recall should be placed largely upon the pupil. the teacher will do comparatively little talking; the pupil will do much. =b. developing.=--the second purpose may be described as developing. the pupil is led step by step to a conclusion. each question grows naturally out of the preceding question, the responsibility for this logical connection falling upon the teacher. the pupil has before him a certain set of conditions, and he is asked to infer the logical result of such conditions. he forms inferences, makes new discoveries, sets up new relationships, and formulates definitions and laws. it should be noted that this form of questioning gives no entirely new information to the pupil. it merely classifies and organizes what is already in his mind in a more or less indistinct and nebulous form. new information cannot be questioned out of a pupil; it must be given to him directly. =c. recapitulation.=--the third purpose of questioning may be described as recapitulatory. the pupil is asked to reproduce what he has learned during the progress of the lesson. at convenient intervals during the presentation and at the close, he should be asked to summarize in a connected manner the main points already covered. thus the teacher tests the pupil's comprehension of the facts of the lesson. the pupil, on his side, as a result of such reproduction, has the facts more clearly fixed in his mind. as in the first stage of the lesson, the answers should be of considerable length, logically connected, and expressed in good language. the responsibility for this is again thrown largely upon the pupil. he does most of the talking; the teacher does little. =how employed in lesson.=--it will thus be recognized that questioning is employed for different purposes at the three different stages of the lesson. at the opening of the lesson it prepares the mind of the pupil for what is to follow. during the presentation it leads the pupil to form his own inferences. at the close of the lesson it tests his grasp of the facts and gives these greater clearness and fixity in his mind. the first and third might both be designated as _testing_ purposes, and the second _training_. socratic questioning =its characteristics.=--developing, or training, questions, are sometimes referred to as socratic questions. the terms are, however, not altogether synonymous. the method of socrates had two divisions, known as _irony_ and _maieutics_. the former consisted in leading the pupil to express an opinion on some subject of current interest, an opinion that was apparently accepted by socrates. then, by a series of questions adroitly put, he drove his pupil into a contradiction or an absurd position, thus revealing the inadequacy of the answer. this phase of the socratic method is rarely applicable with young children. occasionally, in grammar or arithmetic, for instance, an incorrect answer may properly be followed up so as to lead the pupil into a contradiction, but it is usually not desirable to embarrass him unnecessarily. it is never agreeable to be covered with the confusion which such a situation usually brings about. the other phase of the socratic method, the _maieutics_, consisted in leading the pupil, by a further series of questions, to formulate the correct opinion of which the first hastily-given answer was only a fragment. this coincides with the developing method and may sometimes be profitably employed with young children. example of socratic questioning.--as an example of socratic questioning may be noted the following taken from plato's _minos_. socrates has questioned his companion concerning the nature of law and has received the answer, "law is the decree of the city." to show his companion the inadequacy of this definition, socrates engages with him in the following dialogue: _socrates_: justice and law, are highly honourable; injustice and lawlessness, highly dishonourable; the former preserves cities, the latter ruins them? _pupil_: yes, it does. _socrates_: well, then! we must consider law as something honourable; and seek after it, under the assumption that it is a good thing. you defined law to be the decree of the city: are not some decrees good, others evil? _pupil_: unquestionably. _socrates_: but we have already said that law is not evil? _pupil_: i admit it. _socrates_: it is incorrect therefore to answer, as you did broadly, that law is the decree of the city. an evil decree cannot be law. _pupil_: i see that it is incorrect. having shown his pupil the fallacy of his first definition, socrates proceeds to teach him that only what is right is lawful. this part of the dialogue proceeds as follows: _socrates_: those who know, must of necessity hold the same opinion with each other, on matters which they know: always and everywhere? _pupil_: yes--always and everywhere. _socrates_: physicians write respecting matters of health what they account to be true, and these writings of theirs are the medical laws? _pupil_: certainly they are. _socrates_: the like is true respecting the laws of farming, the laws of gardening, the laws of cookery. all these are the writings of persons, knowing in each of the respective pursuits? _pupil_: yes. _socrates_: in like manner, what are the laws respecting the government of a city? are they not the writings of those who know how to govern--kings, statesmen, and men of superior excellence? _pupil_: truly so. _socrates_: knowing men like these will not write differently from each other about the same things, nor change what they have once written. if, then, we see some doing this, are we to declare them knowing or ignorant? _pupil_: ignorant, undoubtedly. _socrates_: whatever is right, therefore, we may pronounce to be lawful in medicine, gardening, or cookery; whatever is not right, not to be lawful but lawless. and the like in treatises respecting just and unjust, prescribing how the city is to be administered. that which is right, is the regal law; that which is not right, is not so, but only seems to be law in the eyes of the ignorant, being in truth lawless. _pupil_: yes. it will be seen from the above examples, that much of the socratic questioning is really explanatory; the questions, though interrogative in form, being often rhetorical, and therefore assertive in value. the question =characteristics of a good question.=--good questions should seize upon the important features and emphasize these. unimportant details, though useful in giving vividness to a narrative and enabling the pupil to build up a clear picture of the scene or incident, may well be ignored in questioning. the teacher must see that the pupil grasps the essentials and must direct his questions towards the attainment of that end. the questions should be arranged in logical sequence, so that the answers, if written out in the order given, would form a connected account of the topic under discussion. further, the questions should require the expression of a judgment on the part of the pupil. in the main they should not be answerable by a single word or a brief phrase. one of the greatest weaknesses in the answers of pupils is the tendency _to_ extreme brevity. as a result, it is difficult to get pupils to give a connected and continuous narration, description, or exposition in any subject. the remedy for this defect is to ask questions which demand answers of considerable length, and to avoid those which require only a scrappy answer. =form of the question.=--it should ever be borne in mind that the teacher's language influences the language habits of his pupils. carelessly worded, poorly constructed questions are likely to result in answers having similar characteristics. on the other hand, correctness in the form of the questions asked, accuracy in the use of words, simple, straightforward statements of the thing wanted, will be reflected, dimly perhaps, in the form of the pupils' answers. care must, therefore, be exercised as to the form in which questions are asked. they should be stripped of all superfluous introductory words, such as, "who can tell?" "how many of you know?" etc. such prefaces are not only useless and a waste of time, but they also put before pupils a bad model if we are to expect concise and direct statements from them. the questions should be so clear and definite in meaning as to admit of only one interpretation. questions such as, "what happened after this?" "what did cromwell become?" "what about the rivers of germany?" "what might we say of this word?" are objectionable on the score of indefiniteness. many correct answers might be given for each and the pupils can only guess at what is required. if the question cannot be so stated as to make what is desired unmistakable, the information had better be given outright. questions should be brief and usually deal with only one point, except, perhaps in asking for summaries of what has been covered in the lesson. in the latter case it is frequently desirable to put a question involving several points in order to ensure definiteness, conciseness, and connectedness in the answer; for example, "for what is alexander mackenzie noted? state his great aim and describe his two most important undertakings connected therewith." but in dealing with matter taken up for the first time or involving original thought, this type of question, demanding as it does attention to several points, would put too great a demand upon the powers of young children. under such conditions it is best to ask questions requiring only one point in answer. the answer =form of answers.=--the possibility of improving the pupil's language power through his answers has already been referred to. to secure the best results in this regard, the teacher should insist on answers that are grammatically correct and, usually, in complete sentences. it would be pedantic, however, to insist always upon the latter condition. for such questions as, "what british officer was killed at queenston heights?" or "what province lies west of manitoba?" the natural answers are "general brock," or "saskatchewan." to require pupils to say, "the british officer killed at queenston heights was general brock," or "the province west of manitoba is saskatchewan," would be to make the recitation unnatural and formal. when answers are a mere echo of the question, with some slight inversion or addition, they become exceedingly mechanical, and useless from the point of view of language training. while it is desirable to avoid, as far as possible, questions that admit of answers of a single word or short phrase, such questions are sometimes necessary and are not objectionable. questions should not be thrown into the form of an elliptical statement in which the pupil merely fills a blank, for example, "the capital of ontario is...?" "the first english parliament was called by...?" nor should they be given in inverted form, as, "montreal is situated where?" "the great charter was signed by what king?" alternative questions such as, "is this a noun or an adjective?" "was charles i willing or unwilling to sign the petition of right?" as well as those questions that are answerable by "yes" or "no," require little thought to answer and should be avoided if possible. when they are used, the pupil should at once be required to give reasons for his answer. neither the form of the question nor the teacher's tone of voice or manner should afford any inkling as to the answer expected. =calling for answers.=--in order that the attention of the whole class may be maintained, the question should be proposed before the pupil who is to answer is indicated. no fixed order in calling upon the pupils should be adopted. if the pupils are never certain beforehand who is to be named to answer the question, they are more likely to be kept constantly on the alert. the questions should be carefully distributed among the class, the duller pupils being given rather more and easier questions than the brighter ones. one of the temptations that the teacher has to overcome is that of giving the clever and willing pupils the majority of the questions. the question should seldom be repeated unless the first wording is so unfortunate that the meaning is not clear and it is found necessary to recast it. to repeat questions habitually is to put a premium on inattention on the part of the pupils. a bad habit often noted among teachers is that of wording the question in several ways before any one is asked to answer it. =methods of dealing with answers.=--as has been already indicated in another connection, the answers of the pupils should be generally in complete sentences and frequently should be in the form of a continuous paragraph or series of paragraphs, especially in summaries and reviews. the continuous answer should be cultivated much more than it is, as a means of training pupils to organize their information and to express themselves in clear and connected discourse. on the other hand, however, children should be discouraged from giving more information than is demanded by the question. while it is desirable that the correctness of an answer should be indicated in some way, the teacher should guard against forming the habit of indicating every correct answer by a stereotyped word or phrase, such as, "yes" or "that's right." answers should seldom be repeated by the teacher, unless it is desirable to re-word them for purposes of emphasis. repetition of answers encourages careless articulation on the part of the pupil answering and inattention on the part of the others. one of the worst habits a teacher can contract is the "gramophonic" repetition of pupils' answers. the answers given by the pupils should almost invariably be individual, not collective. simultaneous answering makes a noisy class-room, cultivates a monotonous and measured method of speaking, and encourages the habit of relying on others. there are always a few leaders in the class that are willing to take the initiative in answering, and the others merely chime in with them. the method is not suitable for the expression of individual opinion, for all pupils must answer alike. there is, further, the possibility that absurd blunders may pass uncorrected, because in the general repetition the teacher cannot detect them. limitations though questioning is the most valuable of teaching devices, it is quite susceptible of being overworked. there is quite as much danger of using it too extensively as there is of using it too little. frequently, teachers try to question from pupils what they could not be expected to know. further, it is possible by too much questioning to cover up the point of the lesson rather than reveal it, and to mystify the pupils rather than clarify their ideas. these are the two main abuses of the device. after all, it should be remembered that, important as good questioning undoubtedly is, it is not the only thing in lesson technique. in teaching, as elsewhere, variety is the spice of life. sympathy, sincerity, enthusiasm in the teacher will do more to secure mental activity in the pupils than mere excellence in questioning. the energetic, enthusiastic, sympathetic teacher may secure better results than the teacher whose ability in questioning is well-nigh perfect, but who lacks these other qualities. if, however, to these qualities he adds a high degree of efficiency in questioning, his success in teaching is so much the more assured. part iii. educational psychology chapter xix consciousness =data of psychology.=--throughout the earlier parts of the text, occasional reference has been made to various classes of mental states, and to psychology, as the science which treats of these mental states, under the assumption that such references would be understood in a general way by the student-teacher. at the outset of a study of psychology as the science of mind, however, it becomes necessary to inquire somewhat more fully into the nature of the data with which the science is to deal. mind is usually defined either by contrasting it with the concrete world of matter, or by describing its activities. it is said, for instance, that mind is that which feels and knows, which hopes, fears, determines, etc. by some, indeed, mind is described as merely the sum of these states of knowing and feeling and willing. the practical man says, however, _i_ know and feel so-and-so, and _my_ wish is so-and-so. here an evident distinction is drawn between the knower, or conscious self, and his conscious activities. while, however, we may agree with the practical man that there is a mind, or self, that knows and wills and feels; yet it is evident that the self, or knower, can know himself only through his conscious states. it must be understood, therefore, that mind in its ultimate sense cannot be studied directly, but only the conscious states, or conditions of mind. thus psychology becomes a study of mental states, or states of consciousness; and it is, in fact, frequently described as the science of consciousness. =nature of consciousness.=--our previous study of the nature of experience has shown that various kinds of conscious states may arise in the mind, now the smell of burning cloth, now the sound of a ringing bell, now the feeling of bodily pain, now a remembered joy, now a future expectation or a resolution. such a conscious state was seen, moreover, to represent on the part of the mind, not a mere passive impression coming from some external source, but an active attitude resulting in definite experience. it signifies, in other words, a power to react in a fixed way toward impressions, and direct our conduct in accordance with the resulting states of consciousness. consciousness in the individual implies, therefore, that he is aware of phenomena as they are experienced, and is able to modify his behaviour accordingly. =types of consciousness.=--although allowable, from the standpoint of the learning process, to describe a conscious state as an attitude of awareness in which the individual grasps the significance of an experience in relation to his own needs; it must be recognized that not all consciousness manifests this meaningful quality, or this relation to a felt aim, or end. while lying, for instance, in a vague, half-awake state, although one is conscious, the mental condition is quite devoid of the meaningful quality referred to, and entirely lacks the feeling of reaction, or of mental effort. in this case there is no distinct reference to the needs of the self, and a lack of that focusing of attention necessary to give the consciousness a meaning and purpose in the life of the individual. all such passive, or effortless, states of consciousness, which make up those portions of mental existence in which no definite presentation seems to hold the attention, although falling within the sphere of the scientific psychologist, may nevertheless be left out of consideration in a study of educational psychology. learning involves apperception, and apperception is always giving a meaning to new presentations by actively bringing old knowledge to bear upon them. for the educator, therefore, psychology may be limited to a study of the definite states of consciousness which arise through an apperceiving act of attention, that is, to our states of experience and the processes connected therewith. for this reason, psychology is by some appropriately enough defined as the science of experience. =consciousness a stream.=--although we describe the data of psychology as facts, or states, of consciousness, a moment's reflection will show that our conscious life is not made up of a number of mental states, or experiences, completely separated one from the other. our consciousness is rather a unified whole, in which seemingly disconnected states blend into one continuous flow of conscious life. for this reason, consciousness is frequently compared to a stream, or river, moving onward in an unbroken course. this stream of consciousness appears as disjointed mental states, simply because the attention discriminates within this stream, and thus in a sense detaches different portions one from the other, or, as sometimes figuratively put, it creates successive waves on the stream of consciousness. a mental state, or experience, so-called, is such a discriminated portion of this stream of consciousness, and is, therefore, itself a process, the different processes blending in a continuous succession or relation to make up the unbroken flow of conscious life. for this reason psychology is frequently described as a study of conscious processes. value of educational psychology within the school the child secures a control of experience only by passing through a process of mental reconstruction, or of changes in consciousness. moreover, to bring about these mental changes, it is found necessary for the teacher's effort to conform as far as possible to the interests and tendencies of the child. so far, therefore, as the teacher's office is to direct and control the children's effort during the learning process, he must approach them primarily as mental, or conscious, beings. for this reason the educator should at least not violate the general principles governing all mental activity. by giving him an insight into the general principles underlying conscious processes, psychology should aid the teacher to control the learning process in the child. limitations of educational psychology =psychology cannot give: a. knowledge of subject-matter.=--it must not be assumed, however, that knowledge of psychology will necessarily imply a corresponding ability to teach. psychology, for instance, cannot decide what should be taught to the child. this, as we have seen, is a problem of social experience, and must be decided by considering the types of experience which will add to the social efficiency of the individual, or which will enable him best to do his duty to himself and to others. all, therefore, that psychology can do here is to explain the process by which experience is acquired, leaving to social ethics the problem of deciding what knowledge is of most worth. =b. love for children.=--again, psychology will not necessarily furnish that largeness of heart and sympathy for childhood, without which no teacher can be successful. indeed, it is felt by many that making children objects of psychological analysis will rather tend to destroy that more spiritual conception of their personality which should constitute the teacher's attitude toward his pupils. while this is no doubt true of the teacher who looks upon children merely as subjects for psychological analysis and experimentation, it is equally true that a knowledge of psychology will enable even the sympathetic teacher to realize more fully and deal more successfully with the difficulties of the pupil. =c. acquaintance with the individual child.=--again, the teacher's problem in dealing with the mental attitude of the particular child cannot always be interpreted through general principles. the general principle would be supposed to have an application to every child in a large class. it is often found, however, that the character and disposition of the particular child demands, not general, but special treatment. here, what is termed the knack of the sympathetic teacher is often more effective than the general principle of the psychologist. admitting so much, however, it yet may be argued that a knowledge of psychology will not hinder, but rather assist the sympathetic teacher in dealing even with special cases. methods of psychology =a. introspection.=--a unique characteristic of mind is its ability to turn attention inward and make an object of study of its own states, or processes. for instance, the mind is able to make its present sensation, its remembered state of anger, its idea of a triangle, etc., stand out in consciousness as a subject of study for conscious attention. on account of this ability to give attention to his own states of consciousness, man is said both to know and to know that he knows. this reflective method of studying our own mental states is known as the method of _introspection_. =b. objective method.=--facts of mind may, however, be examined objectively. as previously noted, man, by his words, acts, and works, gives expression to his conscious states. these different forms of expression are accepted, therefore, as external indications of corresponding states of mind, and afford the psychologist certain data for developing his science. one of the most important of these objective methods is known as child study. here, by the method of observing the acts and language of very young children, data are obtained concerning the native instincts of the child, concerning the genesis and development of the different mental processes, and the relation of these to physical development. a brief statement of the leading principles of child study will be found in chapter xxxi. =c. experimental method.=--a third method of studying mind is known as the _experimental_ method. here, as in the case of the ordinary physical experimenter, the psychologist seeks to control certain mental processes by isolating them and regulating their action. this may be effectively done in the study of certain processes. for instance, by passing the two points of a pair of compasses over different parts of the body, the tactile sensibility of the skin may be compared at these different parts. by this means it may be shown that the tip of the finger can detect the two points when only one twelfth of an inch apart, while on the middle of the back they may require to be two and a half inches apart to give a double impression. the experimental method is often used in connection with the objective method in child study. phases of consciousness =a. knowledge.=--although, as previously stated, the stream of consciousness must at all times be looked upon as a unity, it will be found upon analysis to present three more or less distinct phases. a state of consciousness implies, in the first place, being aware of something as an object of attention. in other words, something is seized upon by consciousness as a presentation, and to the extent to which one is aware of this object of consciousness, he is said to recognize, or to know it. a state of consciousness is always, therefore, a state of knowledge, or of intelligence. thus, whether we perceive this chair, imagine a mermaid, recall the looks of an absent friend, experience the toothache, judge the weight of this book, or become angry, our conscious state is a state of _knowledge_. =b. feeling.=--a conscious state is also a state of feeling. every conscious state has its feeling side, since it is a personal state, or since the mind itself is affected toward its own state. two men, for instance, may know equally well the taste of a particular food, but the taste may affect each one quite differently. to one the experience is pleasant, to the other it may be even painful. two boys may know equally that a point has been scored by the visiting team, but the personal attitude of each toward the experience may be quite different. the one finds in it a quality of joy; the other a quality of sorrow. in the same way the mind always feels more or less pleased or displeased in its present state of consciousness. to speak of any particular experience as painful, joyous, sorrowful, etc., is, therefore, to refer to it as a state of _feeling_. =c. will.=--consciousness is a state of effort, or will. it was especially pointed out above, that the purposeful consciousness always implies a straining or focusing of consciousness in order to attain a fuller control of the experience. this element of exertion manifest in consciousness may appear as a directing of attention, as the making of a choice, as determining upon a certain action, etc. this aspect of any conscious state is spoken of as a state of _will_, or volition. in the unity of the conscious life, therefore, there are three attitudes from which consciousness may be viewed: . it is a state of knowledge, or of intelligence. . it is a state of feeling. . it is a state of will. on account of this threefold aspect of mental states, consciousness has been represented in the following form: [illustration] the significance of comparing the threefold aspect of consciousness to the three sides of a triangle consists in the fact that if any side of a triangle is removed no triangle remains. in like manner, none of the three attributes of consciousness could be wanting without the conscious state ceasing to exist as such. no one, for instance, could feel the pressure of a tight shoe without at the same time knowing it, and fixing his attention upon it. neither could a person at any particular time know that the shoe was pinching him unless he was also attending to and feeling the experience. chapter xx mind and body =relation of mind to bodily organism.=--notwithstanding the antithesis which has been affirmed to exist between mind and matter, yet a very close relation exists between mind and the material organism known as the body. there are many ways in which this intimate connection manifests itself. mental excitement is always accompanied with agitation of the body and a disturbance of such bodily processes as breathing, the beating of the heart, digestion, etc. such mental processes as seeing, hearing, tasting, etc., are found also to depend upon the use of a bodily organ, as the eye, the ear, the tongue, without which it is quite impossible for the mind to come into relation with outside things. moreover, disease or injury, especially to the organs of sense or to the brain, weakens or destroys mental power. the size of the brain, also, is found to bear a certain relation to mental capacity; the weight of the average brain being about ounces, while the brain of an idiot often weighs only from to ounces. the nervous system [illustration: brain and spinal cord] =divisions of nervous system.=--this intimate connection between mind and body is provided for through the existence of that part of the bodily organism known as the nervous system, and it is this part, together with its associated organs of sense, that chiefly interests the student of psychology. a study of the character and functions of the various parts of the nervous system, and of the nervous substance of which these parts are composed, belongs to physiology rather than to psychology. as the student-teacher is given a general knowledge of the structure of the nervous system in his study of physiology, a brief description will suffice for the present purpose. the nervous system consists of two parts, ( ) the central part, or cerebro-spinal centre, and ( ) an outer part--the spinal nerves. the central part, or cerebro-spinal centre, includes the spinal cord, passing upward through the vertebrae of the spinal column and the brain. the brain consists of three parts: the cerebrum, or great brain, consisting of two hemispheres, which, though connected, are divided in great part by a longitudinal fissure; the cerebellum, or little brain; and the medulla oblongata, or bulb. the spinal nerves consist of thirty-one pairs, which branch out from the spinal cord. each pair of nerves contains a right and left member, distributed to the right and the left side of the body respectively. these nerves are of two kinds, sensory, or afferent, (in-carrying) nerves, which carry inward impressions from the outside world, and motor, or efferent, (out-carrying) nerves, which convey impulses outward to the muscles and cause them to contract. there are also twelve pairs of nerves connected with the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and face, which, instead of projecting from the spinal cord, proceed at once from the brain through openings in the cranium. these are, therefore, known as cerebral nerves. in their general character, however, they do not differ from the projection fibres. [illustration: pair of spinal nerves] =nervous substance.=--nervous substance is divided into two kinds--grey, or cellular, substance and white, or fibrous, substance. the greater part of the grey matter is situated as a layer on the outside of the cerebrum, or great brain, where it forms a rind from one twelfth to one eighth of an inch in thickness, known as the cortex. it is also found on the surface of the cerebellum. diffuse masses of grey matter are likewise met in the other parts of the brain, and extending downward through the centre of the spinal cord. the function of the grey matter is to form centres to which the nerve fibres tend and carry in stimulations, or from which they commence and carry out impulses. =the neuron.=--the centres of grey matter are composed of aggregations, or masses, of very small nerve cells called neurons. a neuron may range from / to / of an inch in diameter, and there are several thousand millions of these cells in the nervous system. a developed neuron consists of a cell body with numerous prolongations in the form of white, thread-like fibres. the neuron with its outgoing fibres is the unit of the nervous system. neurons are supposed to be of three classes, sensory to receive stimulations, motor to send out impulses to the muscles, and association to connect sensory and motor centres. [illustration: a neuron in stages of development] these neurons, as already noted, are collected into centres, and the outgoing fibres give connection to the cells, the number of connections for each neuron depending upon its outgoing fibres. some of these connections are already established within the system at birth, while others, as we shall see more fully later, are formed whenever the organism is brought into action in our thinking and doing. to speak of such connections being formed between nerve centres by means of their outgoing fibres does not necessarily mean a direct connection, but may imply only that the fibres of one cell approach nearly enough to those of another to admit of a nervous impulse passing from the one cell to the other. this is often spoken of as the establishment of a path between the centres. =the nerve fibres.=--the nerve fibres which transmit impressions to and from the centres of grey matter average about / of an inch in thickness, but are often of great length, some extending perhaps half the length of the body. large numbers of these fibres unite into a sheath or single nerve. it is estimated that the number of fibres in a single nerve number in most cases several thousand, those in the nerve of sight being estimated at about one hundred thousand. the fibres in the white substance of the brain are estimated at several hundred million. =classes of fibres.=--these fibres are supposed to be of four classes, as follows: . _sensory cerebral and spinal fibres_ these have already been referred to as spreading outward from the brain and spinal cord to different parts of the body. their office is, therefore, to carry inward to the centres of grey matter impressions received from the outside world, thus setting up a connection between the various senses and the cortex of the brain. . _motor cerebral and spinal fibres_ these fibres connect the centres of grey matter directly with the muscles, and thus provide a means of communication between these muscles and the cortex of the brain. . _association fibres_ these connect one part of the cortex with another within the same hemisphere. . _commissural fibres_ these connect corresponding centres of the two hemispheres of the cerebrum. [illustration] =function of parts.=--because the various cells are thus brought into relation, the whole nervous system combines into a single organism, which is able to receive impressions and provides conditions for the mind to interpret these impressions and, if necessary, react thereon. when, for instance, a stimulus is received by an end organ (the eye), it will be transmitted by a sensory nerve directly inward to a sensory centre, or cell, in the cortex of the brain. in such a case it may be interpreted by the mind and a line of action decided upon. then by means of associating cells and fibres a motor centre may be stimulated and an impulse transmitted along an outgoing motor nerve to a muscle, whereupon the necessary motor reaction will take place. a pupil may, for instance, receive the impression of a word through the ear or through the eye and thereupon make a motor response by writing the word. the arrows in the accompanying figure indicate the course of the stimulus and the response in such cases. the cortex =cortex the seat of consciousness.=--experiments in connection with the different nerve cords and centres have demonstrated that intelligent consciousness depends upon the nerve centres situated in the cortex of the cerebrum. for instance, a sensory impulse may be carried inward to the cells of the spinal cord and upward to the cerebellum without any resulting consciousness. when, however, the stimulus reaches a higher centre in the cortex of the brain, the mind becomes conscious, or interprets the impression, and any resulting action will be controlled by consciousness, through impulses given to the motor nerves. it is for this reason that the cortex is called the seat of consciousness, and that mind is said to reside in the brain. =localization of function.=--in addition, however, to placing the seat of consciousness in the cortex of the brain, psychologists also claim that different parts of the cortex are involved in different types of conscious activity. sensations of sight, for instance, involve certain centres in the cortex, sensations of sound other centres, the movements of the organs of speech still other centres. some go so far as to claim that each one of the higher intellectual processes, as memory, imagination, judgment, reasoning, love, anger, etc., involves neural activity in its own special section of the cortex. there seems no good evidence, however, to support this view. the fact seems rather that in all these higher processes, quite numerous centres of the cortex may be involved. the following figure indicates the main conclusions of the psychologists in reference to the localization of certain important functions in distinct areas of the cortex. [illustration: reflex acts] =nature of reflex action.=--while a lower nerve centre is not a seat for purposeful consciousness, these centres may, in addition to serving as transmission points for cortical messages, perform a special function by immediately receiving sensory impressions and transmitting motor impulses. a person, for instance, whose mind is occupied with a problem, may move a limb to relieve a cramp, wink the eye, etc., without any conscious control of the action. in such a case the sensory impression was reported to a lower sensory centre, directly carried to a lower motor centre, and the motor impulse given to perform the movement. in the same way, after one has acquired the habit of walking, although it usually requires conscious effort to initiate the movements, yet the person may continue walking in an almost unconscious manner, his mind being fully occupied with other matters. here, also, the complex actions involved in walking are controlled and regulated by lower centres situated in the cerebellum. in like manner a person will unconsciously close the eyelid under the stimulus of strong light. here the impression caused by the light stimulus, upon reaching the medulla along an afferent nerve, is deflected to a motor nerve and, without any conscious control of the movements, the muscles of the eyelid receive the necessary impulse to close. actions which are thus directed from a lower centre without conscious control, are usually spoken of as reflex acts. acts directed by consciousness are, on the other hand, known as voluntary acts. the difference in the working of the nervous mechanism in consciously controlled and in reflex action may be illustrated by means of the accompanying figures. [illustration: fig ] [illustration: fig ] the heavy lines in figure on the opposite page show that the sensory-motor arc is made through the cortex, and that the mind is, therefore, conscious both of the sense stimulus and also of the resulting action. figure shows the same arc through a lower centre, in which case the mind is not directly attending to the impression or the resulting action. =function of consciousness.=--the facts set forth above serve further to illustrate the purposeful character of consciousness as man interprets and adjusts himself to his surroundings. so long, for instance, as the individual walks onward without disturbance, his mind is free to dwell upon other matters, cortical activity not being necessary to control the process of walking. if, however, he steps upon anything which perhaps threatens him with a fall, the rhythmic interplay between sensory and motor activity going on in the lower centres is at once disturbed, and a message is flashed along the sensory nerve to the higher, or cortical, centres. this at once arouses consciousness, and the disturbing factor becomes an object of attention. consciousness thus appears as a means of adaptation to the new and varying conditions with which the organism is confronted. characteristics of nervous matter =a. plasticity.=--one striking characteristic of nervous matter is its plasticity. the nature of the connections within the nervous system have already been referred to. mention has also been made of the fact that numerous connections are established within the nervous system as a result of movements taking place within the organism during life. in other words, the movements within the nervous system which accompany stimulations and responses bring about changes in the structure of the organism. the cause for these changes seems to be that the neurons which chance to work together during any experience form connections with one another by means of their outgrowing fibres. by this means, traces of past experiences are in a sense stored up within the organism, and it is for this reason that our experiences are said to be recorded within the nervous system. =b. retentiveness.=--a second characteristic of nervous matter is its retentive power. in other words, the modifications which accompany any experience, besides taking on the permanent character referred to above, pre-dispose the system to transmit impulses again through the same centres. moreover, with each repetition of the nervous activity, there develops a still greater tendency for the movements to re-establish themselves. this power possessed by nervous tissue to establish certain modes of action carries with it also an increase in the ease and accuracy with which the movements are performed. for example, the impressions and impulses involved in the first attempts of the child to control the clasping of an object, are performed with effort and in an ineffective manner. the cause for this seems to be largely the absence of proper connections between the centres involved, as referred to above. this absence causes a certain resistance within the system to the nervous movements. when, however, the various centres involved in the movements establish the proper connections with one another, the act will be performed in a much more effective and easy manner. from this it is evident that the nervous system, as the result of former experiences, always retains a certain potential, or power, to repeat the act with greater ease, and thus improve conduct, or behaviour. this property of nervous matter will hereafter be referred to as its power of retention. =c. energy.=--another quality of nervous matter is its energy. by this is meant that the cells are endowed with a certain potential, or power, which enables them to transmit impressions and impulses and overcome any resistance offered. different explanations are given as to the nature of this energy, or force, with which nervous matter is endowed, but any study of these theories is unnecessary here. =d. resistance.=--a fourth characteristic to be noted regarding nervous matter is that a nervous impulse, or current, as it is transmitted through the system, encounters _resistance_, or consumes an amount of nervous energy. moreover, when the nervous current, whether sensory or motor, involves the establishment of new connections between cells, as when one first learns combinations of numbers or the movements involved in forming a new letter, a relatively greater amount of resistance is met or, in other words, a greater amount of nervous energy is expended. on the other hand, when an impulse has been transmitted a number of times through a given arc, the resistance is greatly lessened, or less energy is expended; as indicated by the ease with which an habitual act is performed. =education and nervous energy.=--it is evident from the foregoing, that the forming of new ideas or of new modes of action tends to use up a large share of nervous energy. for this reason, the learning of new and difficult things should not be undertaken when the body is in a tired or exhausted condition; for the resistance which must be overcome, and the changes which must take place in the nervous tissue during the learning process, are not likely to be effectively accomplished under such conditions. moreover, the energy thus lost must be restored through the blood, and therefore demands proper food, rest, and sleep on the part of the individual. it should be noted further that nervous tissue is more plastic during the early years of life. this renders it imperative, therefore, that knowledge and skill should be gained, as far as possible, during the plastic years. the person who wishes to become a great violinist must acquire skill to finger and handle the bow early in life. the person who desires to become a great linguist, if he allows his early years to pass without acquiring the necessary skill, cannot expect in middle life to train his vocal organs to articulate a number of different languages. =cortical habit.=--in the light of what has been seen regarding the character and function of the nervous system, it will now be possible to understand more fully two important forms of adjustment already referred to. when nervous movements are transmitted to the cortex of the brain, they not only awaken consciousness, or make the individual aware of something, but the present impression also leaves certain permanent effects in the nervous tissue of the cortex itself. since, however, cortical activity implies consciousness, the retention of such a tendency within the cortical centres will imply, not an habitual act in the ordinary sense, but a tendency on the part of a conscious experience to repeat itself. this at once implies an ability to retain and recall past experiences, or endows the individual with power of memory. cortical habit, therefore, or the establishment of permanent connections within the cortical centres, with their accompanying dynamic tendency to repeat themselves, will furnish the physiological conditions for a revival of former experience in memory, or will enable the individual to turn the past to the service of the present. =physical habits.=--the basis for the formation of physical habits appears also in this retentive power of nervous tissue. when the young boy, for instance, first mounts his new bicycle, he is unable, except with the most attentive effort and in a most laboured and awkward manner, either to keep his feet on the pedals, or make the handle-bars respond to the balancing of the wheel. in a short time, however, all these movements take place in an effective and graceful manner without any apparent attention being given to them. this efficiency is conditioned by the fact that all these movements have become habitual, or take place largely as reflex acts. in school also, when the child learns to perform such an act as making the figure , the same changes take place. here an impression must first proceed from the given copy to a sensory centre in the cortex. as yet, however, there is no vital connection established between the sensory centres and the motor centres which must direct the muscles in making the movement. as the movement is attempted, however, faint connections are set up between different centres. with each repetition the connection is made stronger, and the formation of the figure rendered less difficult. so long, however, as the connection is established within the cortex, the movement will not take place except under conscious direction. ultimately, however, similar connections between sensory and motor neurons may be established in lower centres, whereupon the action will be performed as a reflex act, or without the intervention of a directing act of consciousness. this evidently takes place when a student, in working a problem, can form the figures, while his consciousness is fully occupied with the thought phases of the problem. thus the neural condition of physical habit is the establishment of easy passages between sensory and motor nerves in centres lower than the cortex. chapter xxi instinct =definition of instinct.=--in a foregoing section, it was seen that our bodily movements divide into different classes according to their source, or origin. among them were noted certain inherited spontaneous, but useful, complex movements which follow, in a more or less uniform way, definite types of stimuli presented to the organism. such an inherited tendency on the part of an organism to react in an effective manner, but without any definite purpose in view, whenever a particular stimulus presents itself, is known as instinct, and the resulting action is described as an instinctive act. as an example of purely instinctive action may be taken the maternal instinct of insects whose larvæ require live prey when they are born. to provide this the mother administers sufficient poison to a spider or a caterpillar to stupefy it, and then bears it to her nest. placing the victim close to her eggs, she incloses the two together, thus providing food for her future offspring. this complex series of acts, so essential to the continuance of the species, and seemingly so full of purpose, is nevertheless conducted throughout without reference to past experience, and without any future end in view. instinct may, therefore, be defined as the ability of an organism to react upon a particular situation so as to gain a desirable end, yet without any purpose in view or any previous training. =characteristics of instinct.=--an instinctive act, it may be noted, is distinguished by certain well marked characteristics: . the action is not brought about by experience or guided by intelligence, but is a direct reaction on the part of the organism to definite stimulation. . although not the result of reason, instinctive action is purposeful to the extent that it shows a predisposition on the part of the organism to react in an effective manner to a particular situation. . an instinctive movement is a response in which the whole organism is concerned. it is the discomfort of the whole organism, for instance, that causes the bird to migrate or the child to seek food. in this respect it differs from a mere reflex action such as the winking of the eye, breathing, coughing, etc., which involves only some particular part of the organism. . although not a consciously purposed action, instinct nevertheless involves consciousness. in sucking, for instance, sensation accompanies both the discomfort of the organism giving rise to the movements and also the instinctive act itself. in this respect it differs from such automatic actions as breathing, the circulation of the blood, and the beating of the heart. =origin of instinct.=--the various instinctive movements with which an organism is endowed, not being a result of experience or education, a question at once arises as to their source, or origin. instinct has its origin in the fact that certain movements which have proved beneficial in the ancestral experience of the race have become established as permanent modes of reaction, and are transmitted to each succeeding generation. the explanation of this transmission of tendencies is, that beneficial movements are retained as permanent modifications of the nervous system of the animal, and are transmitted to the offspring as a _reactive tendency_ toward definite stimuli. the partridge family, for instance, has preserved its offspring from the attacks of foxes, dogs, and other enemies only by the male taking flight and dragging itself along the ground, thus attracting the enemy away from the direction of the nest. the complex movements involved in such an act, becoming established as permanent motor connections within the system, are transmitted to the offspring as predispositions. instinct would thus seem a physiological habit, or hereditary tendency, within the nervous system to react in a fixed manner under certain conditions. in many respects, however, instincts seem to depend more largely upon bodily development than upon nervous structure. while the babe will at first instinctively suck; yet as soon as teeth appear, the sucking at once gives way to the biting instinct. the sucking instinct then disappears so completely that only a process of education will re-establish it later. birds also show no instinctive tendency to fly until their wings are developed, while the young of even the fiercest animals will flee from danger, until such time as their bodily organism is properly developed for attack. from this it would seem that instinctive action depends even more upon general bodily structure and development than upon fixed co-ordinations within the nervous system. human instincts on account of the apparently intelligent character of human actions, it is often stated that man is a creature largely devoid of instincts. the fact is, however, that he is endowed with a large number of impulsive or instinctive tendencies to act in definite ways, when in particular situations. man has a tendency, under the proper conditions, to be fearful, bashful, angry, curious, sympathetic, grasping, etc. it is only, moreover, because experience finally gives man ideas of these instinctive movements, that they may in time be controlled by reason, and developed into orderly habits. =classification of human instincts.=--various attempts have been made to classify human instincts. for educational purposes, perhaps the most satisfactory method is that which classifies them according to their relation to the direct welfare of the individual organism. being inherited tendencies on the part of the organism to react in definite ways to definite stimuli, all instinctive acts should naturally tend to promote the good of the particular individual. different instincts will be found to differ, however, in the degree in which they involve the immediate good of the individual organism. on this basis the various human instincts may be divided into the following classes: . _individualistic instincts._--some instincts gain their significance because they tend solely to meet the needs of the individual. examples of these would be the instincts involved in securing food, as biting, chewing, carrying objects to the mouth; such instinctive expressions as crying, smiling, and uttering articulate sounds; rhythmical bodily movements; bodily expression of fear, etc. . _racial instincts._--these include such instinctive acts as make for the preservation of the species, as the sexual and parental instincts, jealousy, etc. the constructive instinct in man, also, may be considered parallel to the nesting instinct in birds and animals. . _social instincts._--among these are placed such instinctive tendencies as bashfulness, sympathy, the gregarious instinct, or love of companionship, anger, self-assertion, combativeness, etc. . _instincts of adjustment._--included among man's native tendencies are a number of complex responses which manifest themselves in his efforts to adjust himself to his surroundings. these may be called instinctive so far as concerns their mere impulsive tendency, which is no doubt inherited. in the operation of these so-called instincts, however, there is not seen that definite mode of response to a particular stimulus which is found in a pure instinct. since, however, these are important human tendencies, and since they deal specifically with the child's attitude in adapting himself to his environment, they rank from an educational standpoint among the most important of human instincts. these include such tendencies as curiosity, imitation, play, constructiveness and acquisitiveness. =human instincts modified by experience.=--although instinctive acts are performed without forethought or conscious purpose, yet in man they may be modified by experience. this is true to a degree even in the case of the instincts of the lower animals. young spiders, for instance, construct their webs in a manner inferior to that of their elders. in the case of birds, also, the first nest is usually inferior in structure to those of later date. in certain cases, indeed, if accounts are to be accepted, animals are able to vary considerably their instinctive movements according to the particular conditions. it is reported that a swallow had selected a place for her nest between two walls, the surfaces of which were so smooth that she could find no foundation for her nest. thereupon she fixed a bit of clay to each wall, laid a piece of light wood upon the clay supports, and with the stick as a foundation proceeded to construct her nest. on the whole, however, there seems little variation in animal instincts. the fish will come a second time to take food off the hook, the moth will fly again into the flame, and the spider will again and again build his web over the opening, only to have it again and again torn away. but whatever may be the amount of variation within the instincts of the lower animals, in the case of man instinctive action is so modified by experience that his instincts soon develop into personal habits. the reason for this is quite evident. as previously pointed out, an instinctive act, though not originally purposeful, is in man accompanied with a consciousness of both the bodily discomfort and the resulting movements. although, therefore, the child instinctively sucks, grasps at objects, or is convulsed with fear, these acts cannot take place without his gradually understanding their significance as states of experience. in this way he soon learns that the indiscriminate performance of an instinctive act may give quite different results, some being much more valuable to the individual than others. the young child, for instance, may instinctively bite whatever enters his mouth, but the older child has learned that this is not always desirable, and therefore exercises a voluntary control over the movement. =instincts differ in value.=--the fact that man's instinctive tendencies thus come within the range of experience, not only renders them amenable to reason, but also leaves the question of their ultimate outcome extremely indefinite. for this reason many instincts may appear in man in forms that seem undesirable. the instinct to seek food is a natural one, yet will be condemned when it causes the child to take fruit from the neighbour's garden. in like manner, the instinct to know his surroundings is natural to man, but will be condemned when it causes him to place his ear to the keyhole. the tendency to imitate is not in itself evil, yet the child must learn to weigh the value of what he imitates. one important reason, therefore, why the teacher should understand the native tendencies of the child is that he may direct their development into moral habits and suppress any tendencies which are socially undesirable. =education of instincts.=--in dealing with the moral aspects of the child's instinctive tendencies, the educator must bear in mind that one tendency may come in conflict with another. the individualistic instinct of feeding or ownership may conflict with the social instinct of companionship; the instinct of egoism, with that of imitation; and the instinct of fear, with that of curiosity. to establish satisfactory moral habits on the basis of instinct, therefore, it is often possible to proceed by a method of substitution. the child who shows a tendency to destroy school furniture can best be cured by having constructive exercises. the boy who shows a natural tendency to destroy animal life may have the same arrested by being given the care of animals and thus having his sympathy developed. in other cases, the removal of stimuli, or conditions, for awaking the instinctive tendency will be found effective in checking the development of an undesirable instinct into a habit. the boy who shows a spirit of combativeness may be cured by having a generous and congenial boy as his chum. the pupil whose social tendencies are so strong that he cannot refrain from talking may be cured by isolation. =instincts may disappear.=--in dealing with the instinctive tendencies of the child, it is important for the educator to remember that many of these are transitory in character and, if not utilized at the proper time, will perish for want of exercise. even in the case of animals, natural instincts will not develop unless the opportunity for exercise is provided at the time. birds shut up in a cage lose the instinct to fly; while ducks, after being kept a certain time from water, will not readily acquire the habit of swimming. in the same way, the child who is not given opportunity to associate with others will likely grow up a recluse. all work for a few years, and it will be impossible for jack to learn later how to play. the girl who during her childhood has no opportunity to display any pride through neatness in dress will grow up untidy and careless as to her personal appearance. in like manner, it is only the child whose constructive tendency is early given an opportunity to express itself who is likely to develop into an expert workman; while one who has no opportunity to give expression to his æsthetic instinct in early life will not later develop into an artist. curiosity =curiosity as motive.=--an important bearing of instinct upon the work of education is found in the fact that an instinctive tendency may add much to the force of the motive, or end, in any educative process. this is especially true in the case of such adaptive instincts as curiosity, imitation, and play. curiosity is the inquisitive attitude, or appetite, of the mind which causes it to seek out what is strange in its surroundings and make it an object of attention. as an instinctive tendency, its significance consists in the fact that it leads the individual to interpret his surroundings. a creature devoid of curiosity, therefore, would not discover either the benefits to be derived from his surroundings or the dangers to be avoided. in addition to its direct practical value in leading the individual to study his environment in order to meet actual needs, curiosity often seeks a more theoretic end, appearing merely as a feeling of wonder or a thirst for knowledge. =use and abuse of curiosity.=--while curiosity is needful for the welfare of the individual, an inordinate development of this instinct is both intellectually and morally undesirable. since curiosity directs attention to the novel in our surroundings, over-curiosity is likely to keep the mind wandering from one novelty to another, and thus interfere with the fixing of attention for a sufficient time to give definiteness to particular impressions. the virtue of curiosity is, therefore, to direct attention to the novel until it is made familiar. there is a type of curiosity, however, which craves for mere astonishment and not for understanding. it is such curiosity that causes children to pry into other people's belongings, and men into other people's affairs. =sensuous and apperceptive curiosity.=--curiosity may be considered of two kinds also from the standpoint of its origin. in early life, curiosity must rest largely upon sense perception, being essentially an appetite of the senses to meet and interpret the objective surroundings. a bright light, a loud noise, a moving object, at once awakens curiosity. at this stage, curiosity serves as a counteracting influence to the instinct of fear, the one leading the child to use his senses upon his surroundings, and the other causing him to use them in a careful and judicious manner. as the child grows in experience, however, his curiosity limits itself more and more in accordance with the law of apperception. here the object attracts attention not merely because of its sensuous properties, but because it suggests novel relations within the elements of past experience. the young child's curiosity, for instance, is aroused toward a strange plant simply because of its form and colour, that of the student of botany, because the plant presents features that do not relate themselves at once to his botanical experience. the first curiosity may be called objective, or sensuous, the second subjective, or apperceptive. =relation of two types.=--the distinction between sensuous and apperceptive curiosity is, of course, one of degree rather than one of kind. a novel object could not be an object of attention unless it bore some relation to the present mental content. the young child, however, seeks mainly to give meaning to novel sense impressions, and is not attracted to the more hidden relations in which objects may stand one to another. he is attracted, for instance, to the colour, scent, and general form of the flower, rather than to its structure. on the other hand, it is found that at a later stage curiosity is usually aroused toward a novel problem, to the extent to which the problem finds a setting in previous experience. this is seen in the fact that the young child takes no interest in having lessons grow out of each other in a connected manner, but must have his curiosity aroused to the present situation through its own intrinsic appeal. for this reason, young children are mainly interested in a lesson which deals with particular elements in a concrete manner, such as coloured blocks, bright pictures, and stories of action; while the older pupil seeks out the new problem because it stands in definite relation to what is already known. =importance of apperceptive curiosity.=--since curiosity depends upon novelty, it is evident that sensuous should ultimately give place to apperceptive curiosity. although objects first impress the senses with a degree of freshness and vigour, this freshness must disappear as the novelty of the impression wears off. when sensuous curiosity thus disappears, it is only by seeing in the world of sensuous objects other relations with their larger meaning, that healthy curiosity is likely to be maintained. thus it is that the curiosity of the student is attracted to the more hidden qualities of objects, to the tracing of cause and effect, and to the discovery of scientific truth in general. =novelty versus variety.=--while the familiar must lose something of its freshness through its very familiarity, it is to be noted that to remit any experience for a time will add something to the freshness of its revival. persons and places, for instance, when revisited after a period of absence, gain something of the charm of novelty. variety is, therefore, a means by which the effect of curiosity may be sustained, even after the original novelty has disappeared. this fact should be especially remembered in dealing with the studies of young children. without being constantly fed upon the novel, the child may yet avoid monotony by having a measure of variety within a reasonable number of interests. it is in this way, in fact, that permanent centres of interest can best be established. to keep a child's attention continually upon one line of experiences would destroy both curiosity and interest. to keep him ever attending to the novel would prevent the building up of any centres of interest. by variety within a reasonable number of subjects, both depth of interest and reasonable variety in interests will be obtained. this is, therefore, another reason why the school curriculum should show a reasonable number of subjects and reasonable variety in the presentation of these subjects. imitation =nature of imitation.=--in our study of the nervous system, attention was called to the close connection existing between sensory impulse and action. it may be noted further that, whenever the young child gains an idea of an action, he tends at once to express that idea in action. on account of this immediate connection between thought and expression, due to an inability to inhibit the motor discharge, a child, as soon as he is able to form ideas of the acts of others, must necessarily show a tendency to repeat, or reproduce, such acts. granting that this immediate connection between sensory impulse and motor response is an inherited capacity, the tendency of the young child to imitate the acts of others may be classified as an instinct. =imitation a complex.=--on closer examination, however, it will be found that imitation is really a complex of several tendencies. the nervous organism of the healthy young child is usually supercharged with nervous energy. this energy, like a swollen stream, seems ever striving to sweep away any resistance to the motor discharge of sensory impulses, and must necessarily reinforce the natural tendency to give immediate expression to ideas of action. moreover, the social instincts of the child, his sympathy, etc., give him a special interest in human beings and in their acts. these tendencies, therefore, focus his attention upon human action, and cause his ideas of such acts to become more vivid and interesting. for this reason, observation of human acts is more likely to lead to motor expression. that the social instincts of the child reinforce the tendency to imitate is indicated by the fact that his early imitations are of human acts especially, as yawning, smiling, crying, etc. the same is further evidenced in that, at a later stage, when ordinary objects enter into his imitative acts, the imitation is largely symbolic, and objects are endowed with living attributes. here blocks become men; sticks, horses, etc. =kinds of. a. spontaneous imitation.=--in its simplest form, imitation seems to follow directly upon the perception of a given act. as the child attends, now to the nod of the head, now to the shaking of the rattle, now to an uttered sound, he spontaneously reproduces these perceived acts. because in such cases the imitative act follows directly upon the perception of the copy, without the intervention of any determination to imitate, it is termed spontaneous, or unconscious, imitation. it is by spontaneous imitation that the child gains so much knowledge of the world about him, and so much power over the movements of his own body. the occupations and language of the home, the operations of the workman, the movements and gestures of the older children in their games, all these are spontaneously reproduced through imitation. this enables the child to participate largely in the social life about him. it is for this reason that he should observe only good models of language and conduct during his early years. =b. symbolic imitation.=--if we note the imitative acts of a child of from four to six years of age, we may find that a new factor is often entering into the process. at this stage the child, instead of merely copying the acts of others, further clothes objects and persons with fancied attributes through a process of imagination. by this means, the little child becomes a mother and the doll a baby; one boy becomes a teacher or captain, the others become pupils or soldiers. this form has already been referred to as symbolic imitation. frequent use is made of this type of imitation in education, especially in the kindergarten. through the gifts, plays, etc., of the kindergarten, the child in imagination exemplifies numberless relations and processes of the home and community life. the educative value of this type consists in the fact that the child, by acting out in a symbolic, or make-believe, way valuable social processes, though doing them only in an imaginative way, comes to know them better by the doing. =c. voluntary imitation.=--as the child's increasing power of attention gives him larger control of his experiences, he becomes able, not only to distinguish between the idea of an action and its reproduction by imitation, but also to associate some further end, or purpose, with the imitative process. the little child imitates the language of his fellows spontaneously; the mimic, for the purpose of bringing out certain peculiarities in their speech. when first imitating his elder painting with a brush, the child imitates merely in a spontaneous or unconscious way the act of brushing. when later, however, he tries to secure the delicate touch of his art teacher, he will imitate the teacher's movements for the definite purpose of adding to his own skill. because in this type the imitator first conceives in idea the particular act to be imitated, and then consciously strives to reproduce the act in like manner, it is classified as conscious, or voluntary, imitation. =use of voluntary imitation.=--teachers differ widely concerning the educational value of voluntary imitation. it is evident, however, that in certain cases, as learning correct forms of speech, in physical and manual exercises, in conduct and manners, etc., good models for imitation count for more than rules and precepts. on the other hand, to endeavour to teach a child by imitation to read intelligently could only result in failure. in such a case, the pupil, by attempting to analyse out and set up as models the different features of the teachers reading, would have his attention directed from the thought of the sentence. but without grasping the meaning, the pupil cannot make his reading intelligent. in like manner, to have a child learn a rule in arithmetic by merely imitating the process from type examples worked by the teacher, would be worse than useless, since it would prevent independent thinking on the child's part. the purpose here is not to gain skill in a mechanical process, but to gain knowledge of an intelligent principle. play =nature of play impulse.=--another tendency of early childhood utilized by the modern educator is the so-called instinct of play. according to some, the impulse to play represents merely the tendency of the surplus energy stored up within the nervous organism to express itself in physical action. according to this view, play would represent, not any inherited tendency, but a condition of the nervous organism. it is to be noted, however, that this activity spends itself largely in what seems instinctive tendencies. the boy, in playing hide-and-seek, in chasing, and the like, seems to express the hunting and fleeing instincts of his ancestors. playing with the doll is evidently suggested and influenced by the parental instinct, while in all games, the activity is evidently determined largely by social instincts. like imitation, therefore, play seems a complex, involving a number of instinctive tendencies. =play versus work.=--an essential characteristic of the play impulse is its freedom. by this is meant that the acts are performed, not to gain some further end, but merely for the sake of the activity itself. the impulse to play, therefore, must find its initiative within the child, and must give expression merely to some inner tendency. so long, for example, as the boy shovels the sand or piles the stones merely to exercise his physical powers, or to satisfy an inner tendency to imitate the actions of others, the operation is one of play. when, on the other hand, these acts are performed in order to clean up the yard, or because they have been ordered to be done by a parent, the process is one of work, for the impulse to act now lies in something outside the act itself. to compel a child to play, therefore, would be to compel him to work. =value of play: a. physical.=--play is one of the most effective means for promoting the physical development of the child. this result follows naturally from the free character of the play activity. since the impulse to act is found in the activity itself, the child always has a strong motive for carrying on the activity. on the other hand, when somewhat similar activities are carried on as a task set by others, the end is too remote from the child's present interests and tendencies to supply him with an immediate motive for the activity. play, therefore, causes the young child to express himself physically to a degree that tasks set by others can never do, and thus aids him largely in securing control of bodily movements. =b. intellectual and moral.=--in play, however, the child not only secures physical development and a control of bodily movements, but also exercises and develops other tendencies and powers. many plays and games, for instance, involve the use of the senses. whether the young child is shaking his rattle, rolling the ball, pounding with the spoon, piling up blocks and knocking them over, or playing his regular guessing games in the kindergarten, he is constantly stimulating his senses, and giving his sensory nerves their needed development. as imitation and imagination, by their co-operation, later enable the child to symbolize his play, such games as keeping store, playing carpenter, farmer, baker, etc., both enlarge the child's knowledge of his surroundings, and also awaken his interest and sympathy toward these occupations. other games, such as beans-in-the-bag, involve counting, and thus furnish the child incidental lessons in number under most interesting conditions. in games involving co-operation and competition, as the bowing game, the windmill, fill the gap, chase ball in ring, etc., the social tendencies of the child are developed, and such individual instincts as rivalry, emulation, and combativeness are brought under proper control. play in education =assigning play.=--in adapting play to the formal education of the child, a difficulty seems at once to present itself. if the teacher endeavours to provide the child with games that possess an educative value, physical, intellectual, or moral, how can she give such games to the children, and at the same time avoid setting the game as a task? that such a result might follow is evident from our ordinary observation of young children. to the boy interested in a game of ball, the request to come and join his sister in playing housekeeping would, more than likely, be positive drudgery. may it not follow therefore, that a trade or guessing game given by the kindergarten director will fail to call forth the free activity of the child? one of the arguments of the advocates of the montessori method in favour of that system is, that the specially prepared apparatus of that system is itself suggestive of play exercises; and that, by having access to the apparatus, the child may choose the particular exercise which appeals to his free activity at the moment. this supposed superiority of the montessori apparatus over the kindergarten games is, however, more apparent than real. what the skilful kindergarten teacher does is, through her knowledge of the interests and tendencies of the children, to suggest games that will be likely to appeal to their free activity, and at the same time have educative value along physical, intellectual, and moral lines. in this way, she does no more than children do among themselves, when one suggests a suitable game to his companions. in such a case, no one would argue, surely, that the leader is the only child to show free activity in the play. =stages in play.=--in the selecting of games, plays, etc., it is to be noted that these may be divided into at least three classes, according as they appeal to children at different ages. the very young child prefers merely to play with somewhat simple objects that can make an appeal to his senses, as the rattle, the doll, the pail and shovel, hammer, crayon, etc. this preference depends, on the one hand, upon his early individualistic nature, which would object to share the play with another; and, on the other hand, upon the natural hunger of his senses for varied stimulations. at about five years of age, owing to the growth of the child's imagination, symbolism begins to enter largely into his games. at this age the children love to play church, school, soldier, scavenger man, hen and chickens, keeping store, etc. at from ten to twelve years of age, co-operative and competitive games are preferred; and with boys, those games especially which demand an amount of strength and skill. this preference is to be accounted for through the marked development of the social instincts at this age and, in the case of boys, through increase in strength and will power. =limitations of play.=--notwithstanding the value of play as an agent in education, it is evident that its application in the school-room is limited. social efficiency demands that the child shall learn to appreciate the joy of work even more than the joy of play. moreover, as noted in the early part of our work, the acquisition of race experience demands that its problems be presented to the child in definite and logical order. this can be accomplished only by having them presented to the pupil by an educative agent and therefore set as a problem or a task to be mastered. this, of course, does not deny that the teacher should strive to have the pupil express himself as freely as possible as he works at his school problem. it does necessitate, however, that the child should find in his lesson some conscious end, or aim, to be reached beyond the mere activity of the learning process. this in itself stamps the ordinary learning process of the school as more than mere play. chapter xxii habit =nature of habit.=--when an action, whether performed under the full direction, or control, of attention and with a sense of effort, or merely as an instinctive or impulsive act, comes by repetition to be performed with such ease that consciousness may be largely diverted from the act itself and given to other matters, the action is said to have become habitual. for example, if a person attempts a new manner of putting on a tie, it is first necessary for him to stand before a glass and follow attentively every movement. in a short time, however, he finds himself able to perform the act easily and skilfully both without the use of a glass and almost without conscious direction. moreover if the person should chance in his first efforts to hold his arms and head in a certain way in order to watch the process more easily in the glass, it is found that when later he does the act even without the use of a glass, he must still hold his arms and head in this manner. =basis of habits.=--the ability of the organism to habituate an action, or make it a reflex is found to depend upon certain properties of nervous matter which have already been considered. these facts are: . nervous matter is composed of countless numbers of individual cells brought into relation with one another through their outgoing fibres. . this tissue is so plastic that whenever it reacts upon an impression a permanent modification is made in its structure. . not only are such modifications retained permanently, but they give a tendency to repeat the act in the same way; while every such repetition makes the structural modification stronger, and this renders further repetition of the act both easier and more effective. . the connections between the various nervous centres thus become so permanent that the action may run its course with a minimum of resistance within the nervous system. . in time the movements are so fixed within the system that connections are formed between sensory and motor centres at points lower than the cortex--that is, the stimulus and response become reflex. =an example.=--when a child strives to acquire the movements necessary in making a new capital letter, his eye receives an impression of the letter which passes along the sensory system to the cortex and, usually with much effort, finds an outlet in a motor attempt to form the letter. thus a permanent trace, or course, is established in the nervous system, which will be somewhat more easily taken on a future occasion. after a number of repetitions, the child, by giving his attention fully to the act, is able to form the letter with relative ease. as these movements are repeated, however, the nervous system, as already noted, may shorten the circuit between the point of sensory impression and motor discharge by establishing associations in centres lower than those situated in the cortex. whenever any act is repeated a great number of times, therefore, these lower associations are established with a resulting diminution of the impression upward through the cortex of the brain. this results also in a lessening of the amount of attention given the movement, until finally the act can be performed in a perfectly regular way with practically no conscious, or attentive, effort. =habit and consciousness.=--while saying that such habitual action may be performed with facility in the absence of conscious direction, it must not be understood that conscious attention is necessarily entirely absent during the performance of an habitual act. in many of these acts, as for instance, lacing and tieing a shoe, signing one's name, etc., conscious effort usually gives the first impulse to perform the act. there may be cases, however, in which one finds himself engaged in some customary act without any seeming initial conscious suggestion. this would be noted, for instance, where a person starts for the customary clothes closet, perhaps to obtain something from a pocket, and suddenly finds himself hanging on a hook the coat he has unconsciously removed from his shoulders. here the initial movement for removing the coat may have been suggested by the sight of the customary closet, or by the movement involved in opening the closet door, these impressions being closely co-ordinated through past experiences with those of removing the coat. when, also, a woman is sewing or kneading bread, although she seems to be able to give her attention fully to the conversation in which she may be engaged, yet no doubt a slight trace of conscious control is still exercised over the other movements. this is seen in the fact that, whenever the conversation becomes so absorbing that it takes a very strong hold on the attention, the habitual movements may cease without the person being at first aware that she has ceased working. =habit and nervous action.=--the general flow of the nervous energy during such processes as the above, in which there is an interchange between conscious and habitual control, may be illustrated by the following figures. in these figures the heavy lines indicate the process actually going on, while the broken lines indicate that although such nerve courses are established, they are not being brought into active operation in the particular case. [illustration: fig. , fig. , fig. a. sensory stimulus b. lower sensory centre c. higher sensory centre a' higher motor centre b' lower motor centre c' motor response] the arrows in figure indicate the course of sensory stimulation and motor response during the first efforts to acquire skill in any movement. no connections are yet set up between lower centres and the acts are under conscious control. the arrows in figure indicate the course of sensory stimulus and motor response in an ordinary habitual act, as when an expert fingers the piano keys or controls a bicycle while his mind is occupied with other matters. the arrows in figure indicate how, even in performing what is ordinarily an habitual act, the mind may at any time assume control of the movement. this is illustrated in the case of a person who, when unconsciously directing his bicycle along the road, comes to a narrow plank over a culvert. hereupon full attention may be given to the movements, that is, the acts may come under conscious control. formation of habits it is evident from the nature of the structure and properties of the nervous system, that man cannot possibly avoid the formation of habits. any act once performed will not only leave an indelible trace within the nervous system, but will also set up in the system a tendency to repeat the act. it is this fact that always makes the first false step exceedingly dangerous. moreover, every repetition further breaks down the present resistance and, therefore, in a sense further enslaves the individual to that mode of action. the word poorly articulated for the first time, the letter incorrectly formed, the impatient shrug of the shoulder--these set up their various tracks, create a tendency, and soon, through the establishment of lower connections, become unconscious habits. thus it is that every one soon becomes a bundle of habits. =precautions to be taken.=--a most important problem in relation to the life of the young child is that he should at the outset form right habits. this includes not only doing the right thing, but also doing it in the right way. for this he must have the right impression, make the right response, and continue this response until the proper paths are established in the nervous system, or, in other words, until practically all resistance within the system is overcome. it is here that teachers are often very lax in dealing with the pupil in his various forms of expressive work. they may indeed give the child the proper impression, for example, the correct form of the letter, the correct pronunciation of the new word, the correct position for the pen and the body, but too often they do not exercise the vigilance necessary to have the first responses develop into well-fixed habits. but it must be remembered that the child's first response is necessarily crude; for as already seen, there is always at first a certain resistance to the co-ordinated movements, on account of the tracks within the nervous system not yet being surely established. the result is that during the time this resistance is being overcome, there is constant danger of variations creeping into the child's responses. unless, therefore, he is constantly watched during this practice period, his response may fall much below the model, or standard, set by the teacher. take, for instance, the child's mode of forming a letter. at the outset he is given the correct forms for _g_ and _m_, but on account of the resistance met in performing these movements he may, if left without proper supervision, soon fall into such movements as [symbol] and [symbol]. the chief value of the montessori sandpaper letters consists in the fact that they enable the child to continue a correct movement without variation until all resistance within the nervous organism has been overcome. two facts should, therefore, be kept prominently in view by the teacher concerning the child's efforts to secure skill. first, the learner's early attempts must be necessarily crude, both through the resistance at first offered by the nervous system on account of the proper paths not being laid in the system, and also through the image of the movement not being clearly conceived. secondly, there is constant danger of variations from the proper standard establishing themselves during this period of resistance. value of habits =habits promote efficiency.=--but notwithstanding the dangers which seem to attend the formation of habits, it is only through this inevitable reduction of his more customary acts to unconscious habit that man attains to proficiency. only by relieving conscious attention from the ordinary mechanical processes in any occupation, is the artist able to attend to the special features of the work. unless, for instance, the scholar possesses as an unconscious habit the ability to hold the pen and form and join the various letters, he could never devote his attention to evolving the thoughts composing his essay. in like manner, without an habitual control of the chisel, the carver could not possibly give an absorbing attention to the delicate outlines of the particular model. it is only because the rider has habituated himself to the control of the handles, etc., that he can give his attention to the street traffic before him and guide the bicycle or automobile through the ever varying passages. the first condition of efficiency, therefore, in any pursuit, is to reduce any general movements involved in the process to unconscious habits, and thus leave the conscious judgment free to deal with the changeable features of the work. =habit conserves energy.=--another advantage of habit is that it adds to the individual's capacity for work. when any movements are novel and require our full attention, a greater nervous resistance is met on account of the laying down of new paths in the nerve centres. moreover longer nervous currents are produced through the cortex of the brain, because conscious attention is being called into play. these conditions necessarily consume a greater amount of nerve energy. the result is that man is able to continue for a longer time with less nervous exhaustion any series of activities after they have developed into habits. this can be seen by noting the ease with which one can perform any physical exercise after habituating himself to the movements, compared with the evident strain experienced when the exercise is first undertaken. =makes the disagreeable easy.=--another, though more incidental, advantage of the formation of habits, is that occupations in themselves uninteresting or even distasteful may, through habit, be performed at least without mental revulsion. this results largely from the fact that the growth of habit decreases the resistance, and thus lessens or destroys the disagreeable feeling. moreover, when such acts are reduced to mechanical habits, the mind is largely free to consider other things. in this way the individual, even in the midst of his drudgery, may enjoy the pleasures of memory or imagination. although, therefore, in going through some customary act, one may still dislike the occupation, the fact that he can do much of it habitually, leaves him free to enjoy a certain amount of mental pleasure in other ways. =aids morality.=--the formation of habits also has an important bearing on the moral life. by habituating ourselves to right forms of action, we no doubt make in a sense moral machines of ourselves, since the right action is the one that will meet the least nervous resistance, while the doing of the wrong action would necessitate the establishing of new co-ordinations in the nervous system. it is no doubt partly owing to this, that one whose habits are formed can so easily resist temptations; for to ask him to act other than in the old way is to ask him to make, not the easy, but the hard reaction. while this is true, however, it must not be supposed that in such cases the choice of the right thing involves only a question of customary nervous reaction. when we choose to do our duty, we make a conscious choice, and although earlier right action has set up certain nerve co-ordinations which render it now easy to choose the right, yet it must be remembered that _conscious judgment_ is also involved. in such cases man does the right mainly because his judgment tells him that it is right. if, therefore, he is in a situation where he must act in a totally different way from what is customary, as when a quiet, peace-loving man sees a ruffian assaulting a helpless person, a moral man does not hesitate to change his habitual modes of physical action. improvement of habitual reactions =to eliminate a habit.=--from what has been learned concerning the permanency of our habits, it is evident that only special effort will enable us to make any change in an habitual mode of reaction. in at least two cases, however, changes may be necessary. the fact that many of our early habits are formed either unconsciously, or in ignorance of their evil character, finds us, perhaps, as we come to years of discretion, in possession of certain habits from which we would gladly be freed. such habits may range from relatively unimportant personal peculiarities to impolite and even immoral modes of conduct. in attempting to free ourselves from such acts, we must bear in mind what has been noted concerning the basis of retention. to repeat an act at frequent intervals is an important condition of retaining it as a habit. on the other hand, the absence of such repetition is almost sure, in due time, to obliterate the nervous tendency to repeat the act. to free one's self from an undesirable habit, therefore, the great essential is to avoid resolutely, for a reasonable time, any recurrence of the banned habit. while this can be accomplished only by conscious effort and watchfulness, yet each day passed without the repetition of the act weakens by so much the old nerve co-ordinations. to attempt to break an old habit, gradually, however, as some would prefer, can result only in still keeping the habitual tendency relatively strong. =to modify a habit.=--at other times, however, we may desire not to eliminate an habitual co-ordination _in toto_, but rather to modify only certain phases of the reaction. in writing, for instance, a pupil may be holding his pen correctly and also using the proper muscular movements, but may have developed a habit of forming certain letters incorrectly, as [symbol] and [symbol]. in any attempt to correct such forms, a special difficulty is met in the fact that the incorrect movements are now closely co-ordinated with a number of correct movements, which must necessarily be retained while the other portions of the process are being modified. to effect such a modification, it is necessary for attention to focus itself upon the incorrect elements, and form a clear idea of the changes desired. with this idea as a conscious aim, the pupil must have abundant practice in writing the new forms, and avoid any recurrence of the old incorrect movements. this fact emphasizes the importance of attending to the beginning of any habit. in teaching writing, for instance, the teacher might first give attention only to the form of the letter and then later seek to have the child acquire the muscular movement. in the meantime, however, the child, while learning to form the letters, may have been allowed to acquire the finger movement, and to break this habit both teacher and pupil find much difficulty. by limiting the child to the use of a black-board or a large pencil and tablet, and having him make only relatively large letters while he is learning to form them, the teacher could have the pupil avoid this early formation of the habit of writing with the finger movement. =limitations of habit.=--from what has here been learned concerning the formation of physical habits, it becomes evident that there are limitations to these as forms of reaction. since any habit is largely an unconscious reaction to a particular situation, its value will be conditional upon the nature of the circumstances which call forth the reaction. these circumstances must occur quite often under almost identical conditions, otherwise the habit can have no value in directing our social conduct. on the contrary, it may seriously interfere with successful effort. for the player to habituate his hands to fingering the violin is very important, because this is a case where such constant conditions are to be met. for a salesman to habituate himself to one mode of presenting goods to his customers would be fatal, since both the character and the needs of the customers are so varied that no permanent form of approach could be effective in all cases. to habituate ourselves to some narrow automatic line of action and follow it even under varying circumstances, therefore, might prevent the mind from properly weighing these varying conditions, and thus deaden initiative. it is for this reason that experience is so valuable in directing life action. by the use of past experience, the mind is able to analyse each situation calling for reaction and, by noting any unusual circumstances it presents, may adapt even our habitual reactions to the particular conditions. the relation of habit to interest and attention is treated in chapter xxiv. chapter xxiii attention =nature of attention.=--in our study of the principles of general method, it was noted that the mind is able to set up and hold before itself as a problem any partially realized experience. from what has been said concerning nervous stimulation and the passing inward of sensuous impression, it might be thought that the mind is for the most part a somewhat passive recipient of conscious states as they chance to arise through the stimulations of the particular moment. further consideration will show, however, that, at least after very early childhood, the mind usually exercises a strong selective control over what shall occupy consciousness at any particular time. in the case of a student striving to unravel the mazes of his mathematical problem, countless impressions of sight, sound, touch, etc., may be stimulating him from all sides, yet he refuses in a sense to attend to any of them. the singing of the maid, the chilliness of the room as the fire dies out, even the pain in the limb, all fail to make themselves known in consciousness, until such time as the successful solution causes the person to direct his attention from the work in hand. in like manner, the traveller at the busy station, when intent upon catching his train, is perhaps totally unconscious of the impressions being received from the passing throngs, the calling newsboys, the shunting engines, and the malodorous cattle cars. this ability of the mind to focus itself upon certain experiences to the exclusion of other possible experiences is known as _attention_. =degree of attention.=--mention has already been made of states of consciousness in which the mind seems in a passive state of reverie. although the mind, even in such sub-conscious states, would seem to exercise some slight attention, it is yet evident that it does not exercise a definite selective control during such passive states of consciousness. attention proper, on the other hand, may be described as a state in which the mind focuses itself upon some particular impression, and thus makes it stand out more clearly in consciousness as a definite experience. from this standpoint it may be assumed that, in a state of waking reverie, the attention is so scattered that no impression is made to stand out clearly in consciousness. on the other hand, as soon as the mind focuses itself on a certain impression, for example, the report of a gun, the relation of two angles, or the image of a centaur, this stands out so clearly that it occupies the whole foreground of consciousness, while all other impressions hide themselves in the background. this single focal state of consciousness is, therefore, pre-eminently a state of attention while the former state of reverie, on account of its diffuse character, may be said to be relatively devoid of attention. =physical illustrations of attention.=--to furnish a physical illustration of the working of attention, some writers describe the stream of our conscious life as presenting a series of waves, the successive waves representing the impressions or ideas upon which attention is focused at successive moments. when attention is in a diffuse state, consciousness is likened to a comparatively level stream. the focusing of attention upon particular impressions and thus making them stand out as distinct states of consciousness is said to break the surface of the stream into waves. this may be illustrated as follows: [illustration: fig. --consciousness in a state of passive reverie. fig. --active consciousness. attention focussed on the definite experiences _a, b, c, d, e, f, g_.] by others, consciousness is described as a field of vision, in which the centre of vision represents the focal point of attention. for instance, if the student intent upon his problem in analysis does not notice the flickering light, the playing of the piano, or the smell of the burning meat breaking in upon him, it is because this problem occupies the centre of the attentive field. the other impressions, on the contrary, lie so far on the outside of the field that they fail to stand out in consciousness. this may be represented by the following diagram: [illustration: p represents the problem on which attention is fixed. a, b, c, d, e, represent impressions which, though stimulating the organism, do not attract definite attention.] it must be understood, however, that these are merely mechanical devices to illustrate the fact that when the mind selects, or attends to, any impression, this impression is made to stand out clearly as an object in consciousness; or, in other words, the particular impression becomes a clear-cut and definite experience. [illustration: probable adjusting of nerve ends during active attention] =neural basis of attention.=--the neural conditions under which the mind exercises such active attention seem to be that during the attentive state the nervous energy concentrates itself upon the paths and centres involved in the particular experience, the resistance being decreased in the paths connecting the cells traversed by the impulse. moreover, any nervous energy tending to escape in other channels is checked and the movements hindered, thus shutting off attention from other possible experiences. for instance, a person with little interest in horticulture might pass a flowering shrub, the colour, form, and scent making only a faint impression upon him. if, however, his companion should say, "what a lovely colour," his attention will direct itself to this quality, with the result that the colour stands out much more clearly in consciousness, and the other features practically escape his notice. here the suggestion of the companion focuses attention upon the colour, this being accompanied with a lessening of the resistance between the centres involved in interpreting the colour sensations. at the same time resistance in the arcs involving form and smell is increased, and the energy diverted from these arcs into that of colour. attention selective =attention and interest.=--at this point a question naturally arises why the mind, since it is continually subject to the influence of impressions from without and of reviving ideas from within, should select and focus attention upon certain of these to the exclusion of others. the answer usually given is that the mind feels in each case, at least vaguely, a personal interest in some change or adjustment to be wrought either in or through the impression which it makes an object of attention. when, for instance, the reader diverts his attention from the interesting story to the loud talking outside the window, he evidently desires to adjust his understanding more fully to the new and strange impression. so, also, when the spectator rivets his attention upon the flying ball, it is because he associates with this the interesting possibility of a change in the score. in like manner, the student in geometry fixes his attention upon the line joining the points of bisection of the sides, because he desires to change his present mental state of uncertainty as to its parallelism with the base into one of certainty. he further fixes his attention upon the qualities of certain bases and triangles, because through attending to these, he hopes to gain the desired experience concerning the parallelism of the two lines. =attention and the question.=--the general conditions for determining the course of attention will be further understood by a reference to two facts already established in connection with general method. it has been seen that the question and answer method is usually a successful mode of conducting the learning process. the reason for this is that the question is a most effective means of directing a selective act of attention. for instance, in an elementary science lesson on the candle flame, although the child, if left to himself, might observe the flame, he would not, in all probability, notice particularly the luminous part. or again, if a dry glass is simply held over the flame and then removed by the demonstrator, although the pupil may have watched the experiment in a general way, it is doubtful whether he would notice particularly the moisture deposited upon the glass. a question from the demonstrator, however, awakens interest, causes the mind to focus in a special direction, and banishes from consciousness features which might otherwise occupy attention. this is because the question suggests a problem, and thus awakens an expectant or unsatisfied state of mind, which is likely to be satisfied only by attending to what the question suggests as an object of attention. =attention and motive.=--it has already been noted that any process of learning is likely to be more effective when the child realizes a distinct problem, or aim, in the lesson, or feels a need for going through the learning process. the cause of this is that the aim, by awaking curiosity, etc., is an effective means of securing attention. when, for example, the pupil, in learning that � = , begins with the problem of finding out how many threes are contained in his twelve blocks, his curiosity can be satisfied only by grasping certain significant relations. in approaching the lesson, therefore, with such an actual problem before him, the child feels a desire to change, or alter, his present mental relation to the problem. in other words, he wishes to gain something involved in the problem which he does not now know or is not yet able to do. his desire to bring about this change or to reach this end not only holds his attention upon the problem, but also adjusts it to whatever ideas are likely to assist in solving the problem. when, therefore, pupils approach a lesson with an interesting problem in mind, the teacher finds it much easier to centre their attention upon those factors which make for the acquisition of the new experience. involuntary attention =nature of involuntary attention.=--attention is met in its simplest form when the mind spontaneously focuses itself upon any strong stimulus received through the senses, as a flashing light, a loud crash, a bitter taste, or a violent pressure. as already noted, the significance of this type of attention lies in the fact that the mind seeks to adjust itself intelligently to a new condition in its surroundings which has been suggested to it through the violent stimulus. the ability to attend to such stimuli is evidently an inherited capacity, and is possessed by animals as well as by children. it is also the only form of attention exercised by very young children, and for some time the child seems to have little choice but to attend to the ever varying stimuli, the attention being drawn now to a bright light, now to a loud voice, according to the violence of the impressions. on account of the apparent lack of control over the direction of attention, this type is spoken of as spontaneous, or involuntary, attention. =place and value.=--it is only, however, during his very early years that man lacks a reasonable control even over relatively strong stimulations. as noted above, the mind acquires an ability to concentrate itself upon a single problem in the midst of relatively violent stimulations. moreover, in the midst of various strong stimulations, it is able to select the one which it desires, to the exclusion of all others. at a relatively early age, for instance, the youth is able, in his games, to focus his attention upon the ball, and pays little attention to the shouts and movements of the spectators. on the other hand, however, it is also true that man never loses this characteristic of attending in an involuntary, or reflex, way to any strong stimulus. indeed, without the possession of this hereditary tendency, it is hard to see how he could escape any dangers with which his body might be threatened while his attention is strongly engaged an another problem. =educational precautions.=--that young children naturally tend to give their attention to strong stimuli, is a matter of considerable moment to the primary teacher. it is for this cause, among others, that reasonable quiet and order should prevail in the class-room during the recitation. when the pupil is endeavouring to fix his attention upon a selected problem, say the relation of the square foot to the square yard, any undue stimulation of his senses from the school-room environment could not fail to distract his attention from the problem before him. for the same reason, the external conditions should be such as are not likely to furnish unusual stimulations, as will be the case if the class-room is on a busy street and must be ventilated by means of open windows. finally, in the use of illustrative materials, the teacher should see that the concrete matter will not stimulate the child unduly in ways foreign to the lesson topic. for example, in teaching a nature lesson on the crow, the teacher would find great difficulty in keeping the children's attention on the various topics of the lesson, if he had before the class a live crow that kept cawing throughout the whole lesson period. nor would it seem a very effective method of attracting attention to the problem of a lesson, if the teacher were continually shouting and waving his arms at the pupils. non-voluntary attention =nature of non-voluntary attention.=--on account of the part played by interest in the focusing of attention, it is possible to distinguish a second type of spontaneous attention in which the mind seems directly attracted to an object of thought because of a natural satisfaction gained from contemplating the subject. the lover, apparently without any determination, and without any external stimulus to suggest the topic, finds his attention ever centring itself upon the image of his fair lady. the young lad, also, without any apparent cause, turns his thoughts constantly to his favourite game. here the impulse to attend is evidently from within, rather than from without, and arises from the interest that the mind has in the particular experience. this type of attention is especially manifest when trains of ideas pass through the mind without any apparent end in view, one idea suggesting another in accordance with the prevailing mood. the mind, in a half passive state, thinks of last evening, then of the house of a friend, then of the persons met there, then of the game played, etc. in the same way the attention of the student turns without effort to his favourite school subject, and its various aspects may pass in view before him without any effort or determination on his part. because in this type of attention the different thoughts stand out in consciousness without any apparent choice, or selection, on the part of the mind, it is described as non-voluntary attention. voluntary attention =nature of voluntary attention.=--the most important form of attention, however, is that in which the mind focuses itself upon an idea, not as a result of outside stimulation, but with some further purpose in view. for instance, when a person enters a room in which a strange object seems to be giving out musical notes automatically, he may at first give spontaneous attention to the sounds coming from the instrument. when, however, he approaches the object later with a desire to discover the nature of its mechanism, his attention is focused upon the object with a more remote aim, or end, in view, to discover where the music comes from. so also, when the lad mentioned in chapter ii fixed his attention on the lost coin, he set this object before his attention with a further end in view--how to regain it. because the person here _determines_ to attend to, or think about, a certain problem, in order that he may reach a certain consciously set end, this form of attention is described as voluntary, or active, attention. =near and remote ends.=--it is to be noted, however, that the interesting end toward which the mind strives in voluntary attention may be relatively near or remote. a child examining an automatic toy does it for the sake of discovering what is in the toy itself; an adult in order to see whether it is likely to interest his child. a student gives attention to the problem of the length of the hypotenuse because he is interested in the mathematical problem itself, the contractor because he desires to know how much material will be necessary for the roof of the building. one child may apply himself to mastering a reading lesson because the subject itself is interesting to him, another because he desires to take home a perfect report at the end of the week, and a third because a sense of obligation tells him that teacher and parents will expect him to study it. =how we attend to a problem.=--since voluntary attention implies mental movement directed to the attainment of some end, the mind does not simply keep itself focused on the particular problem. for instance, in attempting to solve the problem that the exterior angle of a triangle equals the sum of the two interior and opposite angles, no progress toward the attainment of the end in view could be made by merely holding before the mind the idea of their equality. it is, in fact, impossible for the attention to be held for any length of time on a single topic. this will be readily seen if one tries to hold his attention continuously upon, say, the tip of a pencil. when this is attempted, other ideas constantly crowd out the selected idea. the only sense, therefore, in which one holds his attention upon the problem in an act of voluntary attention is, that his attention passes forward and back between the problem and ideas felt to be associated with it. voluntary attention is, therefore, a mental process in which the mind shifts from one idea to another in attaining to a desired end, or problem. in this shifting, or movement, of voluntary attention, however, two significant features manifest themselves. first, in working forward and back from the problem as a controlling centre, attention brings into consciousness ideas more or less relevant to the problem. secondly, it selects and adjusts to the problem those that actually make for its solution, and banishes from consciousness whatever is felt to be foreign to obtaining the desired end. =example of controlled attention.=--to exemplify a process of voluntary attention we may notice the action of the mind in solving such a problem as: two trains started at the same moment from toronto and hamilton respectively, one going at the rate of thirty miles an hour and the other at the rate of forty miles an hour. supposing the distance between toronto and hamilton to be forty miles, in how many minutes will the trains meet? here the pupil must first fix his attention upon the problem--the number of minutes before the trains will meet. this at once forms both a centre and a standard for measuring other related ideas. in this way his attention passes to the respective rates of the two trains, thirty and forty miles per hour. then perhaps he fixes attention on the thought that one goes a mile in two minutes and the other a mile in - / minutes. but as he recognizes that this is leading him away from the problem, resistance is offered to the flow of attention in this direction, and he passes to the thought that in a _minute_ the former goes / mile and the later / of a mile. from this he passes to the thought that in one minute they together go - / miles. hereupon perhaps the idea comes to his mind to see how many miles they would go in an hour. this, however, is soon felt to be foreign to the problem, and resistance being set up in this direction, the attention turns to consider in what time the two together cover miles. now by dividing miles by - / , he obtains the number - / and is satisfied that his answer is - / minutes. the process by which the attention here selected and adjusted the proper ideas to the problem might be illustrated by the following figure: [illustration] here "p" represents the problem; a, b, c, d, and e, ideas accepted as relevant to the problem; and b', d' ideas suggested by b and d, but rejected as not adjustable to the problem. =factors in process.=--the above facts demonstrate, however, that the mind can take this attitude toward any problem only if it has a certain store of old knowledge relative to it. two important conditions of voluntary attention are therefore, first, that the mind should have the necessary ideas, or knowledge, with which to attend and, secondly, that it would select and adjust these to the purpose in view. here the intimate connection of voluntary attention to the normal learning process is apparent. the step of preparation, for instance, is merely putting the mind in the proper attitude to attend voluntarily to an end in view, namely the lesson problem; while the so-called analytic-synthetic process of learning involves the selecting and adjusting movements of voluntary attention. =spontaneous and voluntary attention distinguished.=--in describing voluntary attention as an active form of attention, psychologists assume that since the mind here wills, or resolves, to attend, in order to gain a certain end in view; therefore voluntary attention must imply a much greater degree of effort, or strain, than other types. that such is always the case, however, is at times not very apparent. if one may judge by the straining of eye or ear, the poise of the body, the holding of the breath, etc., when a person gives involuntary attention to any sudden impression, as a strange noise at night, it is evident that the difference of effort, or strain, in attending to this and some selected problem may not, during the time it continues, be very marked. it is of course true that in voluntary attention the mind must choose its own object of attention as an end, or aim, while in the involuntary type the problem seems thrust upon us. this certainly does imply a deliberate choice in the former, and to that extent may be said to involve an effort not found in the latter. in like manner, when seeking to attain the end which has been set up, the mind must select the related ideas which will solve its problem. this in turn may demand the grasping of a number of complex relations. to say, however, that all striving to attain an end is lacking in a case of involuntary attention would evidently be fallacious. when the mind is startled by a strange noise, the mind evidently does go out, though in a less formal way, to interpret a problem involuntarily thrust upon it. when, for instance, we receive the violent impression, the mind may be said to ask itself, "what strange impression is this?" and to that extent, even here, faces a selected problem. the distinguishing feature of voluntary attention, therefore, is the presence of a consciously conceived end, or aim, upon which the mind deliberately sets its attention as something to be thought _about_. attention in education =voluntary attention and learning.=--from what has been seen, it is evident that, when a pupil in his school approaches any particular problem, the learning process will represent a process of voluntary attention. this form of attention is, therefore, one of special significance to the teacher, since a knowledge of the process will cast additional light upon the learning process. the first condition of voluntary attention is the power to select some idea as an end, or problem, for attention. it was seen, however, that the focusing of attention upon any problem depends upon some form of desirable change to be effected in and through the set problem. for instance, unless the recovery of the coin is conceived as producing a desirable change, it would not become a deliberately set problem for attention. it is essential, therefore, that the end which the child is to choose as an object of attention should be one conceived as demanding a desired change, or adjustment. for instance, to ask a child to focus his attention upon two pieces of wood merely as pieces of wood is not likely to call forth an active effort of attention. to direct his attention to them to find out how many times the one is contained in the other, on the other hand, focuses his attention more strongly upon them; since the end to be reached will awaken his curiosity and set an interesting problem. =non-voluntary attention in education.=--on account of the ease with which attention seems to centre itself upon its object in non-voluntary attention, it is sometimes erroneously claimed that this is the type of attention to be aimed at in the educative process, especially with young children. such a view is, however, a fallacious one, and results from a false notion of the real character of both non-voluntary and voluntary attention. in a clear example of non-voluntary attention, the mind dwells upon the ideas merely on account of their inherent attractiveness, and passes from one idea to its associated idea without any purposeful end in view. this at once shows its ineffectiveness as a process of learning. when the young lover's thoughts revert in a non-voluntary way to the fair one, he perhaps passes into a state of mere reminiscence, or at best of idle fancy. even the student whose thoughts run on in a purposeless manner over his favourite subject, will merely revive old associations, or at best make a chance discovery of some new knowledge. in the same way, the child who delights in musical sounds may be satisfied to drum the piano by the hour, but this is likely to give little real advance, unless definite problems are set up and their attainment striven for in a purposeful way. =voluntary attention and interest.=--a corollary of the fallacy mentioned above is the assumption that voluntary attention necessarily implies some conflict with the mind's present desire or interest. it is sometimes said, for instance, that in voluntary attention, we compel our mind to attend, while our interest would naturally direct our attention elsewhere. but without a desire to effect some change in or through the problem being attended to, the mind would not voluntarily make it an object of attention. the misconception as to the relation of voluntary attention to interest is seen in an illustration often given as an example of non-voluntary attention. it is said, rightly enough, that if a child is reading an interesting story, and is just at the point where the plot is about to unravel itself, there will be difficulty in diverting his attention to other matters. this, it is claimed, furnishes a good example of the power of non-voluntary attention. but quite the opposite may be the case. when called upon, say by his parent, to lay aside the book and attend to some other problem, the child, it is true, shows a desire to continue reading. but this may be because he has a definite aim of his own in view--to find out the fate of his hero. this is a strongly felt need on his part, and his mind refuses to be satisfied until, by further attention to the problem before him, he has attained to this end. the only element of truth in the illustration is that the child's attention is strongly reinforced through the intense feeling tone associated with the selected, or determined, aim--the fate of his hero. the fact is, therefore, that a process of voluntary attention may have associated with its problem as strong an interest as is found in the non-voluntary type. =voluntary attention depends on problem.=--it is evident from the foregoing that the characteristic of voluntary attention is not the absence or the presence of any special degree of interest, but rather the conception of some end, or purpose, to be reached in and through the attentive process. in other words, voluntary attention is a state of mind in which the mental movements are not drifting without a chart, but are seeking to reach a set haven. a person who is greatly interested in automobiles, for instance, on seeing a new machine, may allow his attention to run now to this part of the machine, now to that, as each attracts him in turn. here no fixed purpose is being served by the attentive process, and attention may pass from part to part in a non-voluntary way, the person's general interest in automobiles being sufficient to keep the attention upon the subject. suddenly, however, he may notice something apparently new in the mechanism of the machine, and a desire arises to understand its significance. this at once becomes an end to which the mind desires to attain, and voluntary attention proceeds to direct the mental movements toward its attainment. to suppose, however, that the interest, manifest in the former mental movements, is now absent, would evidently be fallacious. the difference lies in this, that at first the attention seemed fixed on the object through a general interest only, and drifted from point to point in a purposeless way, while in the second case an interesting end, or purpose, controlled the mental movements, and therefore made each movement significant in relation to the whole conscious process. =attention and knowledge.=--mention has already been made of the relation of attention to interest. it should be noted, further, that the difference in our attention under different circumstances is largely dependent upon our knowledge. the stonecutter, as he passes the fine mansion, gives attention to the fretted cornice; the glazier, to the beautiful windows; the gardener, to the well-kept lawn and beds. even the present content of the mind has its influence upon attention. the student on his way to school, if busy with his spelling lesson, is attracted to the words and letters on posters and signs. if he is reviewing his botany, he notes especially the weeds along the walk; if carrying to his art teacher, with a feeling of pride, the finished landscape drawing, his attention goes out to the shade and colour of field and sky. that such a connection must exist between knowledge and attention is apparent from what has been already noted concerning the working of the law of apperception. =physical conditions of attention.=--from what was learned above regarding the relation of nervous energy to active attention, it is evident that the ability to attend to a problem at any given time will depend in part upon the physical condition of the organism. if, therefore, the nervous energy is lowered through fatigue or sickness, the attention will be weakened. for this reason the teaching of subjects, such as arithmetic, grammar, etc., which present difficult problems, and therefore make large demands upon the attention of the scholars, should not be undertaken when the pupils' energy is likely to be at a minimum. similarly, unsatisfactory conditions in the school-room, such as poor ventilation, uncomfortable seats, excessive heat or cold, all tend to lower the nervous energy and thus prevent a proper concentration of attention upon the regular school work. =precautions relating to voluntary attention.=--although voluntary attention is evidently the form of attention possessing real educational value, certain precautions would seem necessary concerning its use. with very young children the aim for attending should evidently not be too remote. in other words, the problem should involve matter in which the children have a direct interest. for this reason it is sometimes said that young children should set their own problems. this is of course a paradox so far as the regular school work is concerned, though it does apply to the pre-school period, and also justifies the claim that with young children the lesson problem should be closely connected with some vital interest. it would be useless, for instance, to try to interest young children in the british north america act by telling them that the knowledge will be useful when they come to write on their entrance examinations. the story of sir isaac brock, on the other hand, wins attention for itself through the child's patriotism and love of story. again, the problem demanding attention should not, in the case of young children, be too long or complex. for example, a young child might easily attend to the separate problems of finding out, ( ) how many marbles he must have to give four to james and three to william; ( ) how many times seven can be taken from twenty-eight; ( ) how many marbles james would have if he received four marbles four times; and ( ) how many james would have if he received three marbles three times. but if given the problem "to divide twenty-eight marbles between james and william, giving james four every time he gives william three," the problem may be too complex for his present power of attention. a young child has not the control over his knowledge necessary to continue any long process of selecting attention. a relatively short period of attention to any problem, therefore, exhausts the nervous energy in the centres connected with a particular set of experiences. it is for this reason that the lessons in primary classes should be short and varied. one of the objections, therefore, to a narrow curriculum is that attention would not obtain needed variety, and that a narrowness in interest and application may result. on the other hand, it is well to note that the child must in time learn to concentrate his attention for longer periods and upon topics possessing only remote, or indirect, interest. chapter xxiv the feeling of interest =nature of feeling.=--feeling has already been described (chapter xix) as the pleasurable or painful side of any state of consciousness. we may recall how it was there found that any conscious state, or experience, for instance, being conscious of the prick of a pin, of success at an examination, or of the loss of a friend, is not merely a state of knowledge, or awareness, but is also a state of feeling. it is a state of feeling because it _affects_ us, that is, because being a state of _our_ consciousness, it appeals to us pleasurably or painfully in a way that it can to no one else. =neural conditions of feeling.=--it has been seen that every conscious state, or experience, has its affective, or feeling, tone, and also that every experience involves the transmission of nervous energy through a number of connected brain cells. on this basis it is thought that the feeling side of any conscious state is conditioned by the degree of the resistance encountered as the nervous energy is transmitted. if the centres involved in the experience are not yet properly organized, or if the stimulation is strong, the resistance is greater and the feeling more intense. a new movement of the limbs in physical training, for example, may at first prove intensely painful, because the centres involved in the exercise are not yet organized. so also, because a very bright light stimulates the nerves violently, it causes a painful feeling. that morphine deadens pain is to be explained on the assumption that it decreases nervous energy, and thus lessens the resistance being encountered between the nervous centres affected at the time. =feeling and habit.=--that the intensity of a feeling is conditioned by the amount of the resistance seems evident, if we note the relation of feeling to habit. the first time the nurse-in-training attends a wounded patient, the experience is marked by intense feeling. after a number of such experiences, however, this feeling becomes much less. in like manner, the child who at first finds the physical exercise painful, as he becomes accustomed to the movements, finds the pain becoming less and less intense. in such cases it is evident that practice, by organizing the centres involved in the experience, decreases the resistance between them, and thus gradually decreases the intensity of the feeling. when finally the act becomes habitual, the nervous impulse traverses only lower centres, and therefore all feeling and indeed all consciousness will disappear, as happens in the habitual movements of the limbs in walking and of the arms during walking. classes of feelings =sensuous feeling.=--as already noted, while feelings vary in intensity according to the strength of the resistance, they also differ in kind according to the arcs traversed by the impulse. experiencing a burn on the hand would involve nervous impulses, or currents, other than those involved in hearing of the death of a friend. the one experience also differs in feeling from the other. our feeling states are thus able to be divided into certain important classes with more or less distinct characteristics for each. in one class are placed those feelings which accompany sensory impulses. the sensations arising from the stimulations of the sense organs, as a sweet or bitter taste, a strong smell, the touch of a hot, sharp, rough, or smooth object, etc., all present an affective, or feeling, side. so also feeling enters into the general or organic sensations arising from the conditions of the bodily organs; as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, the tension of the muscles, hunger, thirst, etc. the feeling which thus enters as a factor into any sensation is known as sensuous feeling. =ideal feeling.=--other feelings enter into our ideas and thoughts. the perception or imagination of an accident is accompanied with a painful feeling, the memory or anticipation of success with a feeling of joy, the thought of some particular person with a thrill of love. such feelings are known as ideal feelings. when a child tears his flesh on a nail, he experiences sensuous feeling, when he shrinks away, as he perceives the teeth of a snarling dog, he experiences an ideal feeling, known as the emotion of fear. =interest.=--a third type of feeling especially accompanies an active process of attention. in our study of attention, it was seen that any process of attention is accompanied by a concentration of nervous energy upon the paths or centres involved in the experience, thus organizing the paths more completely and thereby decreasing the resistance. the impulse to attend to any experience is, therefore, accompanied with a desirable feeling, because a new adjustment between nerve centres is taking place and resistance being overcome. this affective, or feeling, tone which accompanies a process of attention is known as the feeling of interest. =interest and attention.=--in discussions upon educational method, it is usually affirmed that the attention will focus upon a problem to the extent to which the mind is interested. while this statement may be accepted in ordinary language, it is not psychologically true that i first become interested in a strange presentation, and then attend to it afterwards. in such a case it is no more true to say that i attend because i am interested, than to say that i am interested because i attend. in other words, interest and attention are not successive but simultaneous, or, as sometimes stated, they are back and front of the same mental state. this becomes evident by noting the nervous conditions which must accompany interest and attention. when one is attending to any strange phenomenon, say a botanist to the structure of a rare plant, it is evident that there are not only new groupings of ideas in the mind, but also new adjustments being set up between the brain centres. this implies in turn a lessening of resistance between the cells, and therefore the presence of the feeling tone known as interest. =interest, attention, and habit.=--since the impulse to attend to a presentation is conditioned by a process of adjustment, or organization, between brain centres, it is evident that, while the novel presentations call forth interest and attention, repetition, by habituating the nervous arcs, will tend to deaden interest and attention. for this reason the story, first heard with interest and attention, becomes stale by too much repetition. the new toy fails to interest the child after the novelty has worn off. it must be noted, however, that while repetition usually lessens interest, yet when any set of experiences are repeated many times, instead of lessening interest the repetition may develop a new interest known as the interest of custom. thus it is that by repeating the experience the man is finally compelled to visit his club every evening, and the boy to play his favourite game every day. this secondary interest of custom arises because repetition has finally established such strong associations within the nervous system that they now have become a part of our nature and are thus able to make a new demand upon interest and attention. interest in education =uses of term: a. subjective; b. objective.=--that the educator describes interest as something that causes the mind to give attention to what is before it, when in fact interest and attention are psychologically merely two sides of a single process, is accounted for by the fact that the term "interest" may be used with two quite different meanings. psychologically, interest is evidently a feeling state, that is, it represents a phase of consciousness. my _interest_ in football, for instance, represents the _feeling_ of worth which accompanies attention to such experiences. in this sense interest and attention are but two sides of the single experience, interest representing the feeling, and attention the effort side of the experience. as thus applied, the term interest is said to be used subjectively. more, often, however, the term is applied rather to the thing toward which the mind directs its attention, the object being said to possess interest for the person. in this sense the rattle is said to have interest for the babe; baseball, for the young boy; and the latest fashions, for the young lady. since the interest is here assumed to reside in the object, it seems reasonable to say that our attention is attracted through interest, that is, through an interesting presentation. as thus applied, the term interest is said to be used objectively. =types of objective interest.=--the interest which various objects and occupations thus possess for the mind may be of two somewhat different types. in some cases the object possesses a direct, or intrinsic, interest for the mind. the young child, for instance, is spontaneously attracted to bright colours, the boy to stories of adventure, and the sentimental youth or maiden to the romance. in the case of any such direct interests, however, the feeling with which the mind contemplates the object may transfer itself at least partly to other objects associated more or less closely with the direct object of interest. it is thus that the child becomes interested in the cup from which his food is taken, and the lover in the lap dog which his fair one fondles. as opposed to the _direct interest_ which an object may have for the mind, this transferred type is known as _indirect interest_. =importance of transference of interest.=--the ability of the mind thus to transfer its interests to associated objects is often of great pedagogical value. abstract forms of knowledge become more interesting to young children through being associated with something possessing natural interest. a pupil who seems to take little interest in arithmetic may take great delight in manual training. by associating various mathematical problems with his constructive exercises, the teacher can frequently cause the pupil to transfer in some degree his primary interest in manual training to the associated work in arithmetic. in the same way the child in the primary grade may take more delight in the alphabet when he is able to make the letters in sand or by stick-laying. it may be said, in fact, that much of man's effort is a result of indirect interest. what is called doing a thing from a sense of duty is often a case of applying ourselves to a certain thing because we are interested in avoiding the disapproval of others. the child also often applies himself to his tasks, not so much because he takes a direct interest in them, but because he wishes to gain the approval and avoid the censure of teacher and parents. =native and acquired interest.=--interest may also be distinguished on the basis of its origin. as noted above, certain impressions seem to demand a spontaneous interest from the individual. for this cause the child finds his attention going out immediately to bright colours, to objects which give pleasure, such as candy, etc., or to that which causes personal pain. on the other hand, objects and occupations which at first seem devoid of interest may, after a certain amount of experience has been gained, become important centres of interest. a young child may at first show no interest in insects unless it be a feeling of revulsion. through the visit of an entomologist to his home, however, he may gain some knowledge of insects. this knowledge, by arousing an apperceptive tendency in the direction of insect study, gradually develops in him a new interest which lasts throughout his whole life. it is in this way that the various school subjects widen the narrow interests of the child. by giving him an insight into various phases of his social environment, the school curriculum awakens in him different centres of interest, and thus causes him to become in the truest sense a part of the social life about him. this fact is one of the strongest arguments, also, against a narrow public school course of study in a society which is itself a complex of diversified interests. =interest versus interests.=--on account of the evident connection of interest and attention, the teacher may easily err in dealing with the young pupil. it is allowable, as pointed out above, that the teacher should take advantage of any native interest to secure the attention and effort of the child in his school work. this does not mean, however, that children are to be given only problems in which they are naturally interested. it must be remembered, as seen in a former paragraph, that, according to the interest of custom, any line of school work, when intelligently followed, may soon build up a centre of interest for itself. for this reason a proper study of arithmetic should develop an interest in arithmetic; a study of history, an interest in history; and a study of geography, an interest in geography. the saying that school work should follow a child's interest might, therefore, be better expressed by saying that the child's interests should follow the school work. it is only, in fact, as any one becomes directly interested in his pursuits, that the highest achievement can be reached. it is not the workman who is always looking forward to pay-day, who develops into an artist, or the teacher who is waiting for the summer holiday, who is a real inspiration to her pupils. in like manner, it is only as the child forms centres of interest in connection with his school work, that his life and character are likely to be affected permanently thereby. =development of interests.=--the problem for the educator is, therefore, not so much to follow the interest of the child, as it is to develop in him permanent centres of interest. for this reason the following facts concerning the origin and development of interests should be understood by the practical educator. first among these is the fact that certain instinctive tendencies of early childhood may be made a starting-point for the development of permanent valuable interest. the young child has a tendency to collect or an instinct of ownership, which may be taken advantage of in directing him to make collections of insects, plants, coins, stamps, and thus prove of permanent educative value. his constructive tendencies, or desire to do with what comes into his hand, as well as his imitative instincts, may be turned to account in building up an interest in various occupations. his social instinct, also, provides a means for developing permanent emotional interests as sympathy, etc. in like manner, the character of the child's surroundings tends to create in him various centres of interest. the young child, for instance, who is surrounded with beautiful objects, is almost sure to develop an interest in works of art, while the child who is early provided with fable and story will develop an interest in history. =when to develop interests.=--it is to be noted further concerning many of these forms of interest, that youth is the special period for their development. the child who does not, during his early years, have an opportunity to develop his social tendencies, is not likely later in life to acquire an interest in his fellow-men. in the same manner, if youth is spent in surroundings void of æsthetic elements, manhood will be lacking in artistic interests. it is in youth also that our intellectual interests, such as love of reading, of the study of nature, of mathematics, must be laid. =interests must be limited.=--while emphasizing the importance of establishing a wide range of interests when educating a child, the teacher must remember that there is danger in a child acquiring too wide a range. this can result only in a dissipation of effort over many fields. while this prevents narrowness of vision and gives versatility of disposition, it may prevent the attainment of efficiency in any department, and make of the youth the proverbial "jack-of-all-trades." a study of the feeling of interest has been made at this stage on account of its close connection with the problem of attention, and in fact with the whole learning process. an examination of the other classes of feeling will be made at a later stage in the course. chapter xxv sense perception =sensation and perception distinguished.=--sensation and perception are two terms applied usually without much distinction of meaning to our recognition of the world of objects. when, for instance, a man draws near to a stove, he may say that it gives him a _sensation_ of heat, or perhaps that he _perceives_ it to be hot. in psychology, however, the term sensation has been used in two somewhat different meanings. by some the term is used to signify a state of consciousness conditioned merely upon the stimulation of a sense organ, as the eye, ear, etc., by its appropriate stimulus. to others, however, sensation signifies rather a mental image experienced by the mind as it reacts upon and interprets any sensory impression. perception, on the other hand, signifies the recognition of an external object as presented to the mind here and now. =sensation implies externality.=--when, however, a sensory image, such as smooth, yellow, cold, etc., arises in consciousness as a result of the mind reacting when an external stimulus is applied to some sense organ, it is evident that, at least after very early infancy, one never has the image without at once referring it to some external cause. if, for instance, a person is but half awake and receives a sound sensation, he does not ask himself, "what mental state is _this_?" but rather, "what is _that_?" this shows an evident tendency to refer our sensations at once to an external cause, or indicates that our sensations always carry with them an implicit reference to an external object. leaving, therefore, to the scientific psychologist to consider whether it is possible to have a pure sensation, we shall treat sensation as the recognition of a quality which is at least vaguely referred to an external object. in other words, sensation is a medium by which we are brought into relation with real things existing independently of our sensations. =perception involves sensation element.=--moreover, an object is perceived as present here and now only because it is revealed to us through one or more of the senses. when, for instance, i reach out my hand in the dark room and receive a sensation of touch, i perceive the table as present before me. when i receive a sensation of sound as i pass by the church, i perceive that the organ is being played. when i receive a colour sensation from the store window, i say that i perceive oranges. perception, therefore, involves the referring of the sensuous state, or image, to an external thing, while in adult life sensation is never accepted by our attention as satisfactory unless it is referred to something we regard as immediately presenting itself to us by means of the sensation. it is on account of this evident interrelation of the two that we speak of a process of sense perception. =perception an acquired power.=--on the other hand, however, investigation will show that this power to recognize explicitly the existence of an external object through the presentation of a sensation, was not at first possessed by the mind. the ability thus to perceive objects represents, therefore, an acquirement on the part of the individual. if a person, although receiving merely sensations of colour and light, is able to say, "yonder is an orange," he is evidently interpreting, or giving meaning to, the present sensations largely through past experience; for the images of colour and light are accepted by the mind as an indication of the presence of an external thing from which could be derived other images of taste, smell, etc., all of which go to make up the idea "orange." an ordinary act of perception, therefore, must involve not merely sensation, but also an interpretation of sensation through past experience. it is, in fact, because the recognition of an external object involves this conscious interpretation of the sensuous impressions, that people often suffer delusion. when the traveller passing by a lone graveyard interprets the tall and slender shrub laden with white blossoms as a swaying ghost, the misconception does not arise from any fault of mere vision, but from the type of former knowledge which the other surroundings of the moment call up, these evidently giving the mind a certain bias in its interpretation of the sensuous, or colour, impressions. =perception in adult life.=--in our study of general method, sense perception was referred to as the most common mode of acquiring particular knowledge. a description of the development of this power to perceive objects through the senses should, therefore, prove of pedagogical value. but to understand how an individual acquires the ability to perceive objects, it is well to notice first what takes place in an ordinary adult act of perception, as for instance, when a man receives and interprets a colour stimulus and says that he perceives an orange. if we analyse the person's idea of an orange we find that it is made up of a number of different quality images--colour, taste, smell, touch, etc., organized into a single experience, or idea, and accepted as a mental representation of an object existing in space. when, therefore, the person referred to above says that he perceives an orange, what really happens is that he accepts the immediate colour and light sensation as a sign of the whole group of qualities which make up his notion of the external object, orange, the other qualities essential to the notion coming back from past experience to unite with the presented qualities. owing to this fact, any ordinary act of perception is said to contain both presentative and representative elements. in the above example, for instance, the colour would be spoken of as a presentative element, because it is immediately presented to the mind in sensuous terms, or through the senses. anything beyond this which goes to make up the individual's notion orange, and is revived from past experience, is spoken of as representative. for the same reason, the sensuous elements involved in an ordinary act of perception are often spoken of as immediate, and the others as mediate elements of knowledge. =genesis of perception.=--to trace the development of this ability to mingle both presentative and representative elements of knowledge into a mental representation, or idea, of an external object, it is necessary to recall what has been noted regarding the relation of the nervous system to our conscious acts. when the young child first comes in contact with the world of strange objects with which he is surrounded, the impressions he receives therefrom will not at first have either the definite quality or the relation to an external thing which they later secure. as a being, however, whose first tendencies are those of movement, he grasps, bites, strokes, smells, etc., and thus goes out to meet whatever his surroundings thrust upon him. gradually he finds himself expand to take in the existence of a something external to himself, and is finally able, as the necessary paths are laid down in his nervous system, to differentiate various quality images one from the other; as, touch, weight, temperature, light, sound, etc. this will at once involve, however, a corresponding relating, or synthetic, attitude of mind, in which different quality images, when experienced together as qualities of some vaguely felt thing, will be organized into a more or less definite knowledge, or idea, of that object, as illustrated in the figure below. as the child in time gains the ability to _attend_ to the sensuous presentations which come to him, and to discriminate one sensation from another, he discovers in the vaguely known thing the images of touch, colour, taste, smell, etc., and finally associates them into the idea of a better known object, orange. [illustration: a. unknown thing. b. sensory stimuli. c. sensory images. d. idea of object.] =control of sensory image as sign.=--since the various sense impressions are carried to the higher centres of the brain, they will not only be interpreted as sensory images and organized into a knowledge of external objects, but, owing to the retentive power of the nervous tissue, will also be subject to recall. as the child thus gains more and more the ability to organize and relate various sensory images into mental representations, or ideas, of external objects, he soon acquires such control over these organized groups, that when any particular sensation image out of a group is presented to the mind, it will be sufficient to call up the other qualities, or will be accepted as a sign of the presence of the object. when this stage of perceptual power is reached, an odour coming from the oven enables a person to perceive that a certain kind of meat is within, or a noise proceeding from the tower is sufficient to make known the presence of a bell. to possess the ability thus to refer one's sensations to an external object is to be able to perceive objects. =fulness of perception based on sensation.=--from the foregoing account of the development of our perception of the external world, it becomes evident that our immediate knowledge, or idea, of an individual object will consist only of the images our senses have been able to discover either in that or other similar objects. to the person born without the sense of sight, for instance, the flower-bed can never be known as an object of tints and colours. to the person born deaf, the violin cannot really be known as a _musical_ instrument. moreover, only the person whose senses distinguish adequately variations in colour, sound, form, etc., is able to perceive fully the objects which present themselves to his senses. even when the physical senses seem equally perfect, one man, through greater power of discrimination, perceives in the world of objects much that totally escapes the observation of another. the result is that few of us enter as fully as we might into the rich world of sights, sounds, etc., with which we are surrounded, because we fail to gain the abundant images that we might through certain of our senses. factors involved in sensation passing to a consideration of the senses as organs through which the mind is made aware of the concrete world, it is to be noted that a number of factors precede the image, or mental interpretation, of the impression. when, for instance, the mind becomes cognizant of a musical note, an analysis of the whole process reveals the following factors: . the concrete object, as the vibrating string of a violin. . sound waves proceeding from the vibrating object to the sense organ. . the organ of sense--the ear. [illustration] . the nerves--cells and fibres involved in receiving and conveying the sense stimulus. . the interpreting cells. . the reacting mind, which interprets the impression as an image of sound. the different factors are somewhat arbitrarily illustrated in the accompanying diagram, the arrows indicating the physical stimulation and the conscious response: of the six factors involved in the sensation, and are purely physical and belong to the science of acoustics; , , and are physiological; is conscious, or psychological. it is because they always involve the immediate presence of some physical object, that the sensation elements involved in ordinary perception are spoken of as immediate, or presentative, elements of knowledge. classification of sensations our various sensations are usually divided into three classes as follows: . sensations of the special senses, including: sight, sound, touch (including temperature), taste, and smell. . motor, or muscular, sensations. . organic sensations. =sensations of the special senses.=--as a study of the five special senses has been made by the student-teacher under the heading of physiology, no attempt will be made to explain the structure of these organs. it must be noted, however, that not all senses are equally capable of distinguishing differences in quality. for example, it seems quite beyond our power to recall the tastes and odours of the various dishes of which we may have partaken at a banquet, while on the other hand we may recall distinctly the visual appearance of the room and the table. it is worthy of note, also, that in the case of smell, animals are usually much more discriminative than man. certain of our senses are, therefore, much more intellectual than others. by this is meant that for purposes of distinguishing the objects themselves, and for providing the mind with available images as materials for further thought, our senses are by no means equally effective. under this heading the special senses are classified as follows: higher intellectual senses: sight, hearing, touch. lower intellectual senses: taste and smell. =muscular sensations.=--under motor, or muscular, sensations are included the feelings which accompany consciousness of muscular exertion, or movement. in distinction from the other sense organs, the muscles are stimulated by having nervous energy pass outward over the motor nerves to the muscles. as the muscles are thus stimulated to movement, sensory nerves in turn convey inward from the muscles sensory impressions resulting from these movements. the important sensations connected with muscular action are those of strain, force, and resistance, as in lifting or pushing. by means of these motor sensations, joined with the sense of touch, the individual is able to distinguish especially weight, position, and change of position. in connection with the muscular sense, may be recalled that portion of the montessori apparatus known as the weight tablets. these wooden tablets, it will be noted, are designed to educate the muscular sense to distinguish slight differences in weight. the muscular sense is chiefly important, however, in that delicate distinctions of pressure, movement, and resistance must be made in many forms of manual expression. the interrelation between sensory impression and motor impulse within the nervous system, as illustrated in the figures on page , is already understood by the reader. for an adequate conscious control of movements, especially when one is engaged in delicate handwork, as painting, modelling, wood-work, etc., there must be an ability to perceive slight differences in strain, pressure, and movement. moreover, the most effective means for developing the muscular sense is through the expressive exercises referred to above. =organic sensations.=--the organic sensations are those states of consciousness that arise in connection with the processes going on within the organism, as circulation of the blood, digestion; breathing, or respiration; hunger; thirst; etc. the significance of these sensations lies in the fact that they reveal to consciousness any disturbances in connection with the vital processes, and thus enable the individual to provide for the preservation of the organism. education of the senses =importance.=--when it is considered that our general knowledge must be based on a knowledge of individuals, it becomes apparent that children should, through sense observation, learn as fully as possible the various qualities of the concrete world. only on this basis can they build their more general and abstract forms of knowledge. for this reason the child in his study of objects should, so far as safety permits, bring all of his senses to bear upon them and distinguish as clearly as possible all their properties. by this means only can he really know the attributes of the objects constituting his environment. moreover, without such a full knowledge of the various properties and qualities of concrete objects, he is not in a position to turn them fully to his own service. it is by distinguishing the feeling of the flour, that the cook discovers whether it is suited for bread-making or pastry. it is by noting the texture of the wood, that the artisan can decide its suitability for the work in hand. in fine, it was only by noting the properties of various natural objects that man discovered their social uses. =how to be effected.=--one of the chief defects of primary education in the past has been a tendency to overlook the importance of giving the child an opportunity to exercise his senses in discovering the properties of the objects constituting his environment. the introduction of the kindergarten, objective methods of teaching, nature study, school gardening, and constructive occupations have done much, however, to remedy this defect. one of the chief claims in favour of the so-called montessori method is that it provides especially for an education of the senses. in doing this, however, it makes use of arbitrarily prepared materials instead of the ordinary objects constituting the child's natural environment. the one advantage in this is that it enables the teacher to grade the stimulations and thus exercise the child in making series of discriminations, for instance, a series of colours, sounds, weights, sizes, etc. notwithstanding this advantage, however, it seems more pedagogical that the child should receive this needful exercise of the senses by being brought into contact with the actual objects constituting his environment, as is done in nature study, constructive exercises, art, etc. =dangers of neglecting the senses.=--the former neglect of an adequate exercise of the senses during the early education of the child was evidently unpedagogical for various reasons. as already noted, other forms of acquiring knowledge, such as constructive imagination, induction, and deduction, must rest primarily upon the acquisitions of sense perception. moreover, it is during the early years of life that the plasticity and retentive power of the nervous system will enable the various sense impressions to be recorded for the future use of the mind. further, the senses themselves during these early years show what may be termed a hunger for contact with the world of concrete objects, and a corresponding distaste for more abstract types of experience. =learning through all the senses.=--in recognizing that the process of sense perception constitutes a learning process, or is one of the modes by which man enters into new experience, the teacher should further understand that the same object may be interpreted through different senses. for example, when a child studies a new bird, he may note its form and colour through the eye, he may recognize the feeling and the outline through muscular and touch sensations, he may discover its song through the ear, and may give muscular expression to its form in painting or modelling. in the same way, in learning a figure or letter, he may see its form through the eye, hear its sound through the ear, make the sound and trace the form by calling various muscles into play, and thus secure a number of muscular sensations relative to the figure or letter. since all these various experiences will be co-ordinated and retained within the nervous system, the child will not only know the object better, but will also be able to recall more easily any items of knowledge concerning it, on account of the larger number of connections established within the nervous system. one chief fact to be kept in mind by the teacher, therefore, in using the method of sense perception, is to have the pupil study the object through as many different senses as possible, and especially through those senses in which his power of discrimination and recall seems greatest. =use of different images in teaching.=--the importance to the teacher of an intimate knowledge of different types of imagery and of a further acquaintance with the more prevailing images of particular pupils, is evident in various ways. in the first place, different school subjects may appeal more especially to different types of imagery. thus a study of plants especially involves visual, or sight, images; a study of birds, visual and auditory images; oral reading and music, auditory images; physical training, motor images; constructive work, visual, tactile, and motor images; a knowledge of weights and measures, tactile and motor images. on account of a native difference in forming images, also, one pupil may best learn through the eye, another through the ear, a third through the muscles, etc. in learning the spelling of words, for example, one pupil may require especially to visualize the word, another to hear the letters repeated in their order, and a third to articulate the letters by the movement of the organs of speech, or to trace them in writing. in choosing illustrations, also, the teacher will find that one pupil best appreciates a visual illustration, a second an auditory illustration, etc. some young pupils, for instance, might best appreciate a pathetic situation through an appeal to such sensory images as hunger and thirst. =an illustration.=--the wide difference in people's ability to interpret sensuous impressions is well exemplified in the case of sound stimuli. every one whose ear is physically perfect seems able to interpret a sound so far as its mere quality and quantity are concerned. in the case of musical notes, however, the very greatest difference is found in the ability of different individuals to distinguish pitch. so also the distinguishing of distance and direction in relation to sound is an acquired ability, in which different people will greatly differ. finally, to interpret the external relations involved in the sound, that is, whether the cry is that of an insect or a bird, or, if it is the former, from what kind of bird the sound is proceeding, this evidently is a phase of sense interpretation in which individuals differ very greatly. yet an adequate development of the sense of hearing might be supposed to give the individual an ability to interpret his surroundings in all these ways. =power of sense perception limited: a. by interest.=--it should be noted, however, that so far as our actual life needs are concerned, there is no large demand for an all-round ability to interpret sensuous impressions. for practical purposes, men are interested in different objects in quite different ways. one is interested in the colour of a certain wood, another in its smoothness, a third in its ability to withstand strain, while a fourth may even be interested in more hidden relations, not visible to the ordinary sense. this will justify one in ignoring entirely qualities in the object which are of the utmost importance to others. from such a practical standpoint, it is evidently a decided gain that a person is not compelled to see everything in an object which its sensuous attributes might permit one to discover in it. in the case of the man with the so-called untrained sense, therefore, it is questionable whether the failure to see, hear, etc., is in many cases so much a lack of ability to use the particular sense, as it is a lack of practical interest in this phase of the objective world. in such processes as induction and deduction, also, it is often the external relations of objects rather than their sensory qualities that chiefly interest us. indeed, it is sometimes claimed that an excessive amount of mere training in sense discrimination might interfere with a proper development of the higher mental processes. =b. by knowledge.=--from what has been discovered regarding the learning process, it is evident that the development of any sense, as sight, sound, touch, etc., is not brought about merely by exercising the particular organ. it has been learned, for instance, that the person who is able to observe readily the plant and animal life as he walks through the forest, possesses this skill, not because his physical eye, but because his mind, has been prepared to see these objects. in other words, it is because his knowledge is active along such lines that his eye beholds these particular things. the chief reason, therefore, why the exercise of any sense organ develops a power to perceive through that sense, is that the exercise tends to develop in the individual the knowledge and interest which will cause the mind to react easily and effectively on that particular class of impressions. a sense may be considered trained, therefore, to the extent to which the mind acquires knowledge of, and interest in, the objective elements. chapter xxvi memory and apperception =nature of memory.=--mention has been made of the retentive power of the nervous system, and of a consequent tendency for mental images to revive, or _re-present_, themselves in consciousness. it must now be noted that such a re-presentation of former experiences is frequently accompanied with a distinct recognition that the present image or images have a definite reference to past time. in other words, the present mental fact is able to be placed in the midst of other events believed to make up some portion of our past experience. such an ideal revival of a past experience, together with a recognition of the fact that it formerly occurred within our experience, is known as an act of memory. =neural conditions of memory.=--when any experience is thus reproduced, and recognized as a reproduction of a previous experience, there is physiologically a transmission of nervous energy through the same brain centres as were involved in the original experience. the mental reproduction of any image is conditioned, therefore, by the physical reproduction of a nervous impulse through a formerly established path. that this is possible is owing to the susceptibility of nervous tissue to take on habit, or to retain as permanent modifications, all impressions received. from this it is evident that when we say we retain certain facts in our mind, the statement is not in a sense true; for there is no knowledge stored up in consciousness as so many ideas. the statement is true, therefore, only in the sense that the mind is able to bring into consciousness a former experience by reinstating the necessary nervous impulses through the proper nervous arcs. what is actually retained, however, is the tendency to reinstate nervous movements through the same paths as were involved in the original experience. although, therefore, retention is usually treated as a factor in memory, its basis is, in reality, physiological. =memory distinguished from apperception.=--the distinguishing characteristics of memory as a re-presentation in the mind of a former experience is evidently the mental attitude known as recognition. memory, in other words, always implies a belief that the present mental state really represents a fact, or event, which formed a part of our past experience. in the apperceptive process as seen in an ordinary process of learning, on the other hand, although it seems to involve a re-presentation of former mental images in consciousness, this distinct reference of the revived imagery to past time is evidently wanting. when, for instance, the mind interprets a strange object as a pear-shaped, thin-rinded, many-seeded fruit, all these interpreting ideas are, in a sense, revivals of past experience; yet none carry with them any distinct reference to past time. in like manner, when i look at an object of a certain form and colour and say that it is a sweet apple, it is evidently owing to past experience that i can declare that particular object to be sweet. it is quite clear, however, that in such a case there is no distinct reference of the revived image of sweetness to any definite occurrence in one's former experience. such an apperceptive revival, or re-presentation of past experience, because it includes merely a representation of mental images, but fails to relate them to the past, cannot be classed as an act of memory. =but involves apperceptive process.=--while, however, the mere revival of old knowledge in the apperceptive process does not constitute an act of memory, memory is itself only a special phase of the apperceptive process. when i think of a particular anecdote to-day, and say i remember having the same experience on sunday evening last, the present mental images cannot be the very same images as were then experienced. the former images belonged to the past, while those at present in consciousness are a new creation, although dependent, as we have seen, upon certain physiological conditions established in the past. in an act of memory, therefore, the new presentation, like all new presentations, must be interpreted in terms of past experience, or by an apperceiving act of attention. whenever in this apperceptive act there is, in addition to the interpretation, a further feeling, or sense, of familiarity, the presentation is accepted by the mind as a reproduction from past experience, or is recognized as belonging to the past. when, on the way down the street, for instance, impressions are received from a passing form, and a resulting act of apperceiving attention, besides reading meaning into them, awakens a sense of familiarity, the face is recognized as one seen on a former occasion. memory, therefore, is a special mode of the apperceptive process of learning, and includes, in addition to the interpreting of the new through the old, a belief that there is an identity between the old and the new. factors of memory in a complete example of memory the following factors may be noted: . the original presentation--as the first perception of an object or scene, the reading of a new story, the hearing of a particular voice, etc. . retention--this involves the permanent changes wrought in the nervous tissue as a result of the presentation or learning process and, as mentioned above, is really physiological. . recall--this implies the re-establishment of the nervous movements involved in the original experiences and an accompanying revival of the mental imagery. . recognition--under this heading is included the sense of familiarity experienced in consciousness, and the consequent belief that the present experience actually occurred at some certain time as an element in our past experience. conditions of memory =a. physical conditions.=--one of the first conditions for an effective recollection of any particular experience will be, evidently, the strength of the co-ordinations set up in the nervous system during the learning process. the permanent changes brought about in the nervous tissue as a result of conscious experience is often spoken of as the physical basis of memory. the first consideration, therefore, relative to the memorizing of knowledge is to decide the conditions favourable to establishing such nervous paths during the learning process. first among these may be mentioned the condition of the nervous tissue itself. as already seen, the more plastic and active the condition of this tissue, the more susceptible it is to receive and retain impressions. for this reason anything studied when the body is tired and the mind exhausted is not likely to be remembered. it is for the same reason, also, that knowledge acquired in youth is much more likely to be remembered than things learned late in life. the intensity and the clearness of the presentation also cause it to make a stronger impression upon the system and thus render its retention more permanent. this demands in turn that attention should be strongly focused upon the presentations during any learning process. by adding to the clearness and intensity of any impressions, attention adds to the likelihood of their retention. the evident cause of the scholar's ability to learn even relatively late in life is the fact that he brings a much greater concentration of attention to the process than is usually found in others. repetition also, since it tends to break down any resistance to the paths which are being established in the nervous system during the learning process, is a distinct aid to retention. for this reason any knowledge acquired should be revived at intervals. this is especially true of the school knowledge being acquired by young children, and their acquisitions must be occasionally reviewed and used in various ways, if the knowledge is to become a permanent possession. a special application of the law of repetition may be noted in the fact that we remember better any topic learned, say, in four half-hours put upon it at different intervals, than we should by spending the whole two hours upon it at one time. another condition favourable to recall is the recency of the original experience. anything is more easily recalled, the more recently it has been learned. the physiological cause for this seems to be that the nervous co-ordinations being recent, they are much more likely to re-establish themselves, not having yet been effaced or weakened through the lapse of time. =b. mental conditions.=--it must be noted, however, that although there is evidently the above neural concomitant of recall, yet it is not the nervous system, but the mind, that actually recalls and remembers. the real condition of recall, therefore, is mental, and depends largely upon the number of associations formed between the ideas themselves in the original presentation. according to the law of association, different ideas arise in the mind in virtue of certain connections existing between the ideas themselves. it would be quite foreign to our present purpose to examine the theories held among philosophic psychologists regarding the principle of the association of ideas. it is evident, however, that ideas often come to our minds in consequence of the presence in consciousness of a prior idea. when we see the name "queenston heights," it suggests to us sir isaac brock; when we see a certain house, it calls to mind the pleasant evening spent there; and when we hear the strains of solemn music, it brings to mind the memories of the dead. equally evident is the fact that anything experienced in isolation is much harder to remember than one experienced in such a way that it may enter into a larger train of ideas. if, for instance, any one is told to call up in half an hour telephone , it is more than likely that the number will be forgotten, if the person goes on with other work and depends only on the mere impression to recall the number at the proper time. this would be the case also in spite of the most vivid presentation of the number by the one giving the order or the repetition of it by the person himself. if, however, the person says, even in a casual way, "call up ," and the person addressed associates the number with the confederation of the dominion, there is practically no possibility of the number going out of his mind. an important mental condition for recall, therefore, is that ideas should be learned in as large associations, or groups, as possible. it is for the above reason that the logical and orderly presentation of the topics in any subject and their thorough understanding by the pupil give more complete control over the subject-matter. when each lesson is taught as a disconnected item of knowledge, there seems nothing to which the ideas are anchored, and recall is relatively difficult. when, on the other hand, points of connection are established between succeeding lessons, and the pupil understands these, one topic suggests another, and the mind finds it relatively easy to recall any particular part of the related ideas. types of recall =a. involuntary.=--in connection with the working of the principle of association, it is interesting to note that practically two types of recall manifest themselves. as a result of their suggestive tendency, the ideas before consciousness at any particular time have a tendency to revive old experiences which the mind may recognize as such. here there is no effort on the part of the voluntary attention to recall the experience from the past, the operation of the law of association being, as it were, sufficient to thrust the revived image into the centre of the field of consciousness, as when the sight of a train recalls a recent trip. =b. voluntary.=--at times the mind may set out with the deliberate aim, or purpose, of reviving some forgotten experience. this is because attention is at the time engaged upon a definite problem, as when the student writing on his examination paper strives to recall the conditions of the constitutional act. this type is known as voluntary memory. such a voluntary attempt at recall is, however, of the same character as the involuntary type in that both involve association. what the mind really strives for is to start a train of ideas which shall suggest the illusive ideas involved in the desired answer. such a process of recall might be illustrated as follows: [illustration] here a, b, c, d, e represent the forgotten series of ideas to be recalled. a, b, c, d, e represent other better known ideas, some of which are associated with the desired ones. by having the mind course over the better known facts--a, b, c, d, e, attention may finally focus upon the relation a, a, b, and thus start up the necessary revival of a, b, c, d, e. =attention may hinder memory.=--while active attention is thus able under proper conditions to reinforce memory, yet occasionally attention seems detrimental to memory. that such is the case will become evident from the preceding figure. if the experience a, b, c, d, e, is directly associated only with a, b, but the mind believes the association to centre in c, d, e, attention is certain to keep focused upon the sub-group--c, d, e. at an examination in history, for example, we may desire to recall the circumstances associated with the topic, "the grand remonstrance," and feel vaguely that this is connected with a revolutionary movement. this may cause us, however, to fix attention, not upon the civil war, but upon the revolution of . in this case, instead of forcing a nervous impulse into the proper centres, attention is in reality diverting it into other channels. when, a few minutes later, we have perhaps ceased our effort to remember, the impulse seems of itself to stimulate the proper centres, and the necessary facts come to us apparently without any attentive effort. localization in time it has been pointed out that in an act of memory there must be a recognition of the present experience as one which has occurred in a series of past events. the definite reference of a memory image to a past series is sometimes spoken of as localization. the degree to which a memory image is localized in the past differs greatly, however, in different cases. your recollection of some interesting personal event in your past school history may be very definitely located as to time, image after image reinstating themselves in memory in the order of their actual occurrence. such a similar series of events must have taken place when, by means of handling a number of objects, you learned different number and quantity relations or, by drawing certain figures, discovered certain geometrical relations. at the present time, however, although you remember clearly the general relations, you are utterly unable to recall the more incidental facts connected with their original presentation, or even localize the remembered knowledge at all definitely in past time. nothing, in fact, remains as a permanent possession except the general, or scientific, truth involved in the experience. classification of memories =a. mechanical.=--the above facts would indicate that in many cases the mind would find it more effective to omit from conscious recall what may appear irrelevant in the original presentation, and fix attention upon only the essential features. from this standpoint, two somewhat different types of memory are to be found among individuals. with many people, it seems as if a past experience must be revived in every detail. if such a one sets out to report a simple experience, such as seeing a policeman arrest a man on the street, he must bring in every collateral circumstance, no matter how foreign to the incident. he must mention, for example, that he himself had on a new straw hat, that his companion was smoking a cigar, was accompanied by his dog, and was talking about his crops, at the time they observed the arrest. this type is known as a mechanical memory. very good examples of such will be seen in the persons of "farmer philip" in tennyson's _brook_ and the "landlady" in shakespeare's _king henry iv_. =b. logical.=--in another type of memory, the mind does not thus associate into the memory experience every little detail of the original experience. the outstanding facts, especially those which are bound by some logical sequence, are the only ones which enter into permanent association. such a type of mind, therefore, in recalling the past, selects out of the mass of experiences the incidents which will constitute a logical revival, and leaves out the trivial and incidental. this type is usually spoken of as a logical memory. this type of memory would, in the above incident, recall only the essential facts connected with the arrest, as the cause, the incidents, and the result. memory in education =value of memory.=--it is evident that without the ability to reinstate past experiences in our conscious life, such experiences could not serve as intelligent guides for our present conduct. each day, in fact, we should begin life anew so far as concerns intelligent adaptation, our acquired aptitude being at best only physical. it will be understood, therefore, why the ability to recall past experiences is accepted as an essential factor in the educative process. it will be noted, indeed, in our study of the history of education, that, at certain periods, the whole problem of education seemed to be to memorize knowledge so thoroughly that it might readily be reinstated in consciousness. modern education, however, has thrown emphasis upon two additional facts regarding knowledge. these are, first, that the ability to use past knowledge, and not the mere ability to recall it, is the mark of a truly educated man. the second fact is that, when any experience is clearly understood at the time of its presentation, the problem of remembering it will largely take care of itself. for these reasons, modern education emphasizes clearness of presentation and ability to apply, rather than the mere memorizing of knowledge. it is a question, however, whether the modern educator may not often be too negligent concerning the direct problem of the ability to recall knowledge. for this reason, the student-teacher may profitably make himself acquainted with the main conditions of retention and recall. =the training of memory.=--an important problem for the educator is to ascertain whether it is possible to develop in the pupil a general power of memory. in other words, will the memorizing of any set of facts strengthen the mind to remember more easily any other facts whatsoever? from what has been noted regarding memory, it is evident that, leaving out of consideration the physical condition of the organism, the most important conditions for memory at the time are attention to, and a thorough understanding of, the facts to be remembered. from this it must appear that a person's ability to remember any facts depends primarily, not upon the mere amount of memorizing he has done in the past, but upon the extent to which his interests and old knowledge cause him to attend to, understand, and associate the facts to be remembered. there seems no justification, therefore, for the method of the teacher who expected to strengthen the memories of her pupils for their school work by having them walk quickly past the store windows and then attempt to recall at school what they had seen. in such cases the boys are found to remember certain objects, because their interests and knowledge enable them to notice these more distinctly at the time of the presentation. the girls, on the other hand, remember other objects, because their interests and knowledge cause them to apprehend these rather than the others. apperception =apperception a law of learning.=--in the study of the lesson process, chapter iii, attention was called to the fact that the interpretation which the mind places upon any presentation depends in large measure upon the mind's present content and interest. it is an essential characteristic of mind that it always attempts to give meaning to any new impression, no matter how strange that impression may be. this end is reached, however, only as the mind is able to apply to the presentation certain elements of former experience. even in earliest infancy, impressions do not come to the organism as total strangers; for the organism is already endowed with instinctive tendencies to react in a definite manner to certain stimuli. as these reactions continue to repeat themselves, however, permanent modifications, as previously noted, are established in the nervous system, including both sensory and motor adjustments. since, moreover, these sensory and motor adjustments give rise to ideas, they result in corresponding associations of mental imagery. as these neural and mental elements are thus organized into more and more complex masses, the recurrence of any element within an associated mass is able to reinstate the other elements. the result is that when a certain sensation is received, as, for instance, a sound stimulus, it reinstates sensory impressions and motor reactions together with their associated mental images, thus enabling the mind to assert that a dog is barking in the distance. in such a case, the present impression is evidently joined with, and interpreted through, what has already formed a part of our experience. what is true of this particular case is true of all cases. new presentations are always met and interpreted by some complex experiences with which they have something in common, otherwise the stimuli could not be attended to at all. this ability of the mind to interpret new presentations in terms of old knowledge on account of some connection they bear to that content, is known as _apperception_. in other words, apperception is the law of the mind to attend to such elements in a new presentation as possess some degree of _familiarity_ with the already assimilated experience, although there may be no distinct recognition of this familiarity. conditions of apperception =a. present knowledge.=--since the mind can apperceive only that for which it is prepared through former experience, the interpretation of the same presentations will be likely to differ greatly in different individuals. the book lying before him is to the young child a place in which to find pictures, to the ignorant man a source of mysterious information, and to the scholar a symbolic representation of certain mathematical knowledge. in the same manner, the object outside the window is a noxious weed to the farmer, a flower to the naturalist, and a medicinal plant to the physician or the druggist. from this it is clear that the interpretation of the impressions must differ according to the character of our present knowledge. in other words, the more important the aspects read into any presentation, the more valuable will be the present experience. although when the child apperceives a stick as a horse, and the mechanic apperceives it as a lever, each interpretation is valuable within its own sphere, yet there is evidently a marked difference in the ultimate significance of the two interpretations. education is especially valuable, in fact, in that it so adds to the experience of the child that he may more fully apperceive his surroundings. =b. present interests and needs.=--but apperception is not solely dependent upon present knowledge. the interests and needs of the individual reflect themselves largely in his apperceptive tendencies. while the boy sees a tent in the folded paper, the girl is more likely to find in it a screen. to the little boy the lath is a horse, to the older boy it becomes a sword. feelings and interest, therefore, as well as knowledge, dominate the apperceptive process. nor should this fact be overlooked by the teacher. the study of a poem would be very incomplete and unsatisfactory if it stopped with the apprehension of the ideas. there must be emotional appreciation as well; otherwise the study will result in entire indifference to it. in introducing, for instance, the sonnet, "mysterious night" (page , _ontario reader, book iv_), the teacher might ask: "why can we not see the stars during the day?" the answer to this question would put the pupils in the proper intellectual attitude to interpret the ideas of the poem, but that is not enough. a recall of such an experience as his contemplation of the starry sky on a clear night will put the pupil in a suitable emotional attitude. he is a rare pupil who has not at some time gazed in wonder at the immense number and magnificence of the stars, or who has not thought with awe and reverence of the infinite power of the creator of "such countless orbs." a recall of these feelings of wonder, awe, and reverence will place the pupil in a suitable mood for the emotional appreciation of the poem. it is in the teaching of literature that the importance of a proper feeling attitude on the part of the pupil is particularly great. without it the pupil is coldly indifferent toward literature and will never cultivate an enthusiasm for it. factors in apperception =retention and recall.=--the facts already noted make it plain that apperception involves two important factors. first, apperception implies retention and recall. unless our various experiences left behind them the permanent effects already noted in describing the retentive power of the nervous organism and the consequent possibility of recall, there could be no adjustment to new impressions on the basis of earlier experiences. =attention.=--secondly, apperception involves attention. since to apperceive is to bring the results of earlier experience to bear actively upon the new impression, it must involve a reactive, or attentive, state of consciousness; for, as noted in our study of the learning process, it is only by selecting elements out of former experience that the new impression is given definite meaning in consciousness. for the child to apperceive the strange object as a "bug-in-a-basket," demands from him therefore a process of attention in which the ideas "bug" and "basket" are selected from former experience and read into the new impression, thereby giving it a meaning in consciousness. a reference to any of the lesson topics previously considered will provide further examples of these apperceptive factors. chapter xxvii imagination =nature of.=--in our study of the various modes of acquiring individual notions, attention was called to the fact that knowledge of a particular object may be gained through a process of imagination. like memory, imagination is a process of re-presentation, though differing from it in certain important regards. . although imagination depends on past experiences for its images, these images are used to build up ideal representations of objects without any reference to past time. . in imagination the associated elements of past experience may be completely dissociated. thus a bird may be imagined without wings, or a stone column without weight. . the dissociated elements may be re-combined in various ways to represent objects never actually experienced, as a man with wings, or a horse with a man's head. imagination is thus an apperceptive process by which we construct a mental representation of an object without any necessary reference to its actual existence in time. =product of imagination, particular.=--it is to be noted that in a process of imagination the mind always constructs in idea a representation of a _particular_ object or individual. for instance, the ideal picture of the house i imagine situated on the hill before me is that of a particular house, possessing definite qualities as to height, size, colour, etc. in like manner, the future visit to toronto, as it is being run over ideally, is constructed of particular persons, places, and events. so also when reading such a stanza as: the milk-white blossoms of the thorn are waving o'er the pool, moved by the wind that breathes along, so sweetly and so cool; if the mind is able to combine into a definite outline of a particular situation the various elements depicted, then the mental process of the reader is one of imagination. it is not true, of course, that the particular elements which enter into such an ideal representation are always equally vivid. yet one test of a person's power of imagination is the definiteness with which the mind makes an ideal representation stand out in consciousness as a distinct individual. types of imagination =a. passive.=--in dissociating the elements of past experience and combining them into new particular forms, the mind may proceed in two quite different ways. in some cases the mind seemingly allows itself to drift without purpose and almost without sense, building up fantastic representations of imaginary objects or events. this happens especially in our periods of day-dreaming. here various images, evidently drawn from past experience, come before consciousness in a spontaneous way and enter into most unusual forms of combination, with little regard even to probability. in these moods the timid lad becomes a strong hero, and his rustic audrey, a fair lady, for whose sake he is ever performing untold feats of valour. here the ideas, instead of being selected and combined for a definite purpose through an act of voluntary attention, are suggested one after the other by the mere law of association. because in such fantastic products of the imagination the various images appear in consciousness and combine themselves without any apparent control or purpose, the process is known as passive imagination, or phantasy. such a type, it is evident, will have little significance as an actual process of learning. =b. active, or constructive.=--opposed to the above type is that form of imagination in which the mind proceeds to build up a particular ideal representation with some definite purpose, or end, in view. a student, for example, who has never seen an aeroplane and has no direct knowledge of the course to be traversed, may be called upon in his composition work to describe an imaginary voyage through the air from toronto to winnipeg. in such an act of imagination, the selecting of elements to enter into the ideal picture must be chosen with an eye to their suitability to the end in view. when also a child is called upon in school to form an ideal representation of some object of which he has had no direct experience, as for instance, a mental picture of a volcano, he must in the same way, under the guidance of the teacher, select and combine elements of his actual experience which are adapted to the building up of a correct mental representation of an actual volcano. this type of imagination is known as active, or constructive, imagination. =factors in constructive imagination.=--in such a purposeful, or active, process of imagination the following factors may be noticed: . the purpose, end, or problem calling for the exercise of the imagination. . a selective act of attention, in which the fitness or unfitness of elements of past experience, or their adaptability to the ideal creation, is realized. . a relating, or synthetic, activity combining the selected elements into a new ideal representation. uses of imagination =imagination in education.=--one important application of imagination in school work is found in connection with the various forms of constructive occupation. in such exercises, it is possible to have the child first build up ideally the picture of a particular object and then have him produce it through actual expression. for example, a class which has been taught certain principles of cutting may be called upon to conceive an original design for some object, say a valentine. here the child, before proceeding to produce the actual object, must select from his knowledge of valentines certain elements and interpret them in relation to his principles of cutting. this ideal representation of the intended object is, therefore, a process of active, or constructive, imagination. in composition, also, the various events and situations depicted may be ideal creations to which the child gives expression in language. in geography and nature study likewise, constant use must be made of the imagination in gaining a knowledge of objects which have never come within the actual experience of the child. in science there is a further appeal to the child's imagination. when, for instance, he studies such topics as the law of gravity, chemical affinity, etc., the imagination must fill in much that falls outside the sphere of actual observation. in history and literature, also, the student can enter into the life and action of the various scenes and events only by building up ideal representations of what is depicted through the words of the author. =imagination in practical life.=--in addition to the large use of constructive imagination in school work, this process will be found equally important in the after affairs of life. it is by use of the imagination that the workman is able to see the changes we desire made in the decoration of the room or in the shape of the flower-beds. it is by the use of imagination, also, that the general is able to outline the plan of campaign that shall lead his army to victory. without imagination, therefore, the mind could not set up those practical aims toward the attainment of which most of life's effort is directed. in the dominion of conduct, also, imagination has its important part to play. it is by viewing in his imagination the effect of the one course of action as compared with the other, that man finally decides what constitutes the proper line of conduct. even when indifferent as to his moral conduct, man pictures to himself what his friends may say and think of certain lines of action. for the enjoyment of life, also, the exercise of imagination has a place. it is by filling up the present with ideals and hopeful anticipations for the future, that much of the monotony of our work-a-day hours is relieved. =development of imagination.=--a prime condition of a creative imagination is evidently the possession of an abundance of mental materials which may be dissociated and re-combined into new mental products. these materials, of course, consist of the images and ideas retained by the mind from former experiences. one important result, therefore, of providing the young child with a rich store of images of sight, sound, touch, movement, etc., is that it provides his developing imagination with necessary materials. but the mere possession of abundant materials in the form of past images will not in itself develop the imagination. here, as elsewhere, it is only by exercising imagination that ability to imagine can be developed. opportunity for such an exercise of the imagination, moreover, may be given the child in various ways. as already noted, a chief function of play is that it stimulates the child to use his imagination in reconstructing the objects about him and clothing them with many fancied attributes. in supplementary reading and story work, also, the imagination is actively exercised in constructing the ideal situations, as they are being presented in words by the book or the teacher. nature study, likewise, by bringing before the child the secret processes of nature, as noting, for instance, the life history of the butterfly, the germination of seeds, etc., will call upon him to use his imagination in various ways. on the other hand, to deprive a young child of all such opportunities will usually result in preventing a proper development of the imagination. chapter xxviii thinking =nature of thinking.=--in the study of general method, as well as in that of the foregoing mental processes, it has been taken for granted that our minds are capable of identifying different objects on the basis of some common feature or features. this tendency of the mind to identify objects and group individual things into classes, depends upon its capacity to detect similarity and difference, or to make comparisons. when the mind, in identifying objects, events, qualities, etc., discovers certain relations between its various states, the process is especially known as that of thinking. in its technical sense, therefore, thought implies a more or less explicit apprehension of relation. =thinking involved in all conscious states.=--it is evident, however, that every mental process must involve thinking, or a grasping of relations. when, by my merely touching an object, my mind perceives it is an apple, this act of perception, as already seen, takes place because elements of former experience come back as associated factors. this implies, evidently, that the mind is here relating elements of its past experience with the present touch sensation. perception of external objects, therefore, implies a grasping of relations. in the same way, if, in having an experience to-day, one recognizes it as identical with a former experience, he is equally grasping a relation. every act of memory, therefore, implies thinking. thus in all forms of knowledge the mind is apprehending relations; for no experience could have meaning for the mind except as it is discriminated from other experiences. in treating thinking as a distinct mental process, however, it is assumed that the objects of sense perception, memory, etc., are known as such, and that the mind here deals more directly with the relations in which ideas stand one to another. as a mental process, thinking appears in three somewhat distinct forms, known as conception, judgment, and reasoning. conception =the abstract notion.=--it was seen that at least in adult life, the perception of any object, as this particular orange, horse, cow, etc., really includes a number of distinct images of quality synthesised into the unity of a particular idea or experience. because of this union of a number of different sensible qualities in the notion of a single individual, the mind may limit its attention upon a particular quality, or characteristic, possessed by an object, and make this a distinct problem of attention. thus the mind is able to form such notions as length, roundness, sweetness, heaviness, four-footedness, etc. when such an attribute is thought of as something distinct from the object, the mental image is especially known as an abstract idea, or notion, and the process as one of abstraction. =the class notion.=--one or more of such abstracted qualities may, moreover, be recognized as common to an indefinite number of objects. for instance, in addition to its ability to abstract from the perception of a dog, the abstract notions four-footedness, hairy, barking, etc., the mind further gives them a general character by thinking of them as qualities common to an indefinite number of other possible individuals, namely, the class four-footed, hairy, barking objects. because the idea representing the quality or qualities is here accepted by the mind as a means of identifying a number of objects, the idea is spoken of as a class notion, and the process as one of classification, or generalization. thus it appears that, through its ability to detect sameness and difference, or discover relations, the mind is able to form two somewhat different notions. by mentally abstracting any quality and regarding it as something distinct from the object, it obtains an abstract notion, as sweetness, bravery, hardness, etc.; by synthesising and symbolizing the images of certain qualities recognized in objects, it obtains a general, or class, notion by which it may represent an indefinite number of individual things as, triangle, horse, desert, etc. thus abstract notions are supposed to represent qualities; class notions, things. because of its reference to a number of objects, the class notion is spoken of especially as a general notion, and the process of forming the notion as one of generalization. these two types of notions are technically known as concepts, and the process of their formation as one of conception. =formal analysis of process.=--at this point may be recalled what was stated in chapter xv concerning the development of a class notion. mention was there made of the theory that in the formation of such concepts, or class notions, as cow, dog, desk, chair, adjective, etc., the mind must proceed through certain set stages as follows: . comparison: the examination of a certain number of particular individuals in order to discover points of similarity and difference. . abstraction: the distinguishing of certain characteristics common to the objects. . generalization: the mental unification, or synthesis, of these common characteristics noted in different individuals into a class notion represented by a name, or general term. =but conception is involved in perception.=--from what has been seen, however, it is evident that the development of our concepts does not proceed in any such formal way. if the mind perceives an individual object with any degree of clearness, it must recognize the object as possessing certain qualities. if, therefore, the child can perceive such an object as a dog, it implies that he recognizes it, say, as a hairy, four-footed creature. to recognize these qualities, however, signifies that the mind is able to think of them as something apart from the object, and the child thus has in a sense a general notion even while perceiving the particular dog. whenever he passes to the perception of another dog, he undoubtedly interprets this with the general ideas already obtained from this earlier percept of a dog. to say, therefore, that to gain a concept he compares the qualities found in several individual things is not strictly true, for if his first percept becomes a type by which he interprets other dogs, his first experience is already a concept. what happens is that as this concept is used to interpret other individuals, the person becomes more conscious of the fact that his early experience is applicable to an indefinite number of objects. so also, when an adult first perceives an individual thing, say the fruit of the guava, he must apprehend certain qualities in relation to the individual thing. thereupon his idea of this particular object becomes in itself a copy for identifying other objects, or a symbol by which similar future impressions may be given meaning. in this sense the individual idea, or percept, will serve to identify other particular experiences. such being the case, this early concept of the guava has evidently required no abstraction of qualities beyond apprehending them while perceiving the one example of the fruit. this, however, is but to say that the perception of the guava really implied conception. =comparison of individuals necessary for correct concepts.=--it is, of course, true that the correctness of the idea as a class symbol can be verified only as we apply it in interpreting a number of such individual things. as the person meets a further number of individuals, he may even discover the presence of qualities not previously recognized. a child, for instance, may have a notion of the class triangle long before he discovers that all triangles have the property of containing two right angles. when this happens, he will later modify his first concept by synthesising into it the newly discovered quality. moreover, if certain features supposed to be common are later found to be accidental, if, for instance, a child's concept of the class fish includes the quality _always living in water_, his meeting with a flying fish will not result in an utterly new concept, but rather in a modification of the present one. thus the young child, who on seeing the chinese diplomat, wished to know where he had his laundry, was not without a class concept, although that concept was imperfect in at least one respect. =concept and term.=--a point often discussed in connection with conception is whether a general notion can be formed without language. by some it is argued that no concept could exist in the mind without the name, or general term. it was seen, however, that our first perception of any object becomes a sort of standard by which other similar experiences are intercepted, and is, therefore, general in character. from this it is evident that a rudimentary type of conception exists prior to language. in the case of the young child, as he gains a mental image of his father, the experience evidently serves as a centre for interpreting other similar individuals. we may notice that as soon as he gains control of language, other men are called by the term papa. this does not imply an actual confusion in identity, but his use of the term shows that the child interprets the new object through a crude concept denoted by the word papa. it is more than probable, moreover, that this crude concept developed as he became able to recognize his father, and had been used in interpreting other men before he obtained the term, papa. on the other hand, it is certain that the term, or class name, is necessary to give the notion a definite place in consciousness. factors involved in concept it will appear from the foregoing that a concept presents the following factors for consideration: . the essential quality or qualities found in the individual things, and supposed to be abstracted sooner or later from the individuals. . the concept itself, the mental image or idea representative of the abstracted quality; or the unification of a number of abstracted qualities, when the general notion implies a synthesis of different qualities. . the general term, or name. . the objects themselves, which the mind can organize into a class, because they are identified as possessing common characteristics. when, however, a single abstracted quality is taken as a symbol of a class of objects, for example, when the quality bitterness becomes the symbol for the class of bitter things, there can be no real distinction between the abstracted quality and the class concept. in other words, to fix attention upon the quality bitterness as a quality distinct from the object in which it is found, is at the same time to give it a general character, recognizing it as something which may be found in a number of objects--the class bitter things. here the abstract term is in a sense a general notion representative of a whole class of objects which agree in the possession of the quality. =intension of concepts.=--certain of our general notions are, however, much more complex than others. when a single attribute such as four-footedness is generalized to represent the class four-footed objects, the notion itself is relatively simple. in other words, a single property is representative of the objects, and in apprehending the members of the class all other properties they chance to possess may be left out of account. in many cases, however, the class notion will evidently be much more complex. the notion dog, for instance, in addition to implying the characteristic four-footedness, may include such qualities as hairy, barking, watchful, fearless, etc. this greater or less degree of complexity of a general notion is spoken of as its intensity. the notion dog, for instance, is more intensive than the notion four-footed animals; the notion lawyer, than the notion man. =extension of concepts.=--it is to be noted further that as a notion increases in intension it becomes limited to a smaller class of objects. from this standpoint, notions are said to differ in extension. the class lawyer, for instance, is not so extensive as the class man; nor the class dog, as the class four-footed objects. it will appear from the above that an abstract notion viewed as a sign of a class of objects is distinguished by its extension, while a class notion, so far as it implies a synthesis of several abstracted qualities, is marked rather by its intension. aims of conceptual lessons so far as school lessons aim to establish and develop correct class notions in the minds of the pupils, three somewhat distinct types of work may be noted: . to define classes in some lessons no attempt is made to develop an utterly new class notion, or concept; the pupils in fact may already know the class of objects in a general way and be acquainted with many of their characteristics. the object of the lesson is, therefore, to render the concept more scientific by having it include the qualities which essentially mark it as a class and especially separate it from other co-ordinate classes. in studying the grasshopper; for instance, in entomology, the purpose is not to give the child a notion of the insect in the ordinary sense of the term. this the pupil may already have. the purpose is rather to enable him to decide just what general characteristics distinguish this from other insects. the lesson may, therefore, leave out of consideration features which are common to all grasshoppers, simply because they do not enter into a scientific differentiation of the class. . to enlarge a concept in many lessons the aim seems to be chiefly to enlarge certain concepts by adding to their intensiveness. the pupil, for instance, has a scientific concept of a triangle, that is, one which enables him to distinguish a triangle from any other geometrical figure. he may, however, be led to see further that the three angles of every triangle equal two right angles. this is really having him discover a further attribute in relation to triangles, although this knowledge is not essential to the concept as a symbol of the members of the class. in the same way, in grammar the pupil is taught certain attributes common to verbs, as mood and tense, although these are not essential attributes from the standpoint of distinguishing the verb as a special class of words. . to build up new concepts =a. presentation of unknown individuals.=--in many lessons the chief object seems to be, however, to build up a new concept in the mind of the child. this would be the case when the pupil is presented with a totally unknown object, say a platypus, and called upon to examine its characteristics. in such lessons two important facts should be noticed. first, the child finds seemingly little difficulty in accepting a single individual as a type of a class, and is able to carry away from the lesson a fairly scientific class notion through a study of the one individual. in this regard the pupil but illustrates what has been said of the ability of the child to use his early percepts as standards to interpret other individuals. the pupil is able the more easily to form this accurate notion, because he no doubt has already a store of abstract notions with which to interpret the presentation, and also because his interest and attention is directed into the proper channels by the teacher. =b. division of known classes.=--a second common mode of developing new concepts in school work is in breaking up larger classes into co-ordinate sub-classes. this, of course, involves the developing of new concepts to cover these sub-classes. in such cases, however, the new notions are merely modified forms of the higher class notion. when, for example, the pupil gains general notions representative of the classes, proper noun and common noun, the new terms merely add something to the intension of the more extensive term noun. this will be evident by considering the difference between the notions noun and proper noun. both agree in possessing the attribute _used to name_. the latter is more intensive, however, because it signifies _used to name a particular object_. although in such cases the lesson seems in a sense to develop new general notions, they represent merely an adding to the intension of a notion already possessed by the child. =use of the term.=--a further problem regarding the process of conception concerns the question of the significance of a name. when a person uses such a term as dog, whale, hepatica, guava, etc., to name a certain object, what is the exact sense, or meaning, in which the name is to be applied? a class name, when applied scientifically to an object, is evidently supposed to denote the presence in it of certain essential characteristics which belong to the class. it is clear, however, that the ordinary man rarely uses these names with any scientific precision. a man can point to an object and say that it is a horse, and yet be ignorant of many of the essential features of a horse. in such cases, therefore, the use of the name merely shows that the person considers the object to belong to a certain class, but is no guarantee that he is thinking of the essential qualities of the class. it might be said, therefore, that a class term is used for two somewhat different purposes, either to denote the object merely, or to signify scientifically the attributes possessed by the object. it is in the second respect that danger of error in reasoning arises. so far as a name represents the attributes of a class, it will signify for us just those attributes which we associate with that class. so long, therefore, as the word fish means to us an animal living in the water, we will include in the class the whale, which really does not belong to the class, and perhaps exclude from the class the flying fish, although it is scientifically a member of the class. the definition it has been noted that, when man discovers common characteristics in a number of objects, he tends on this basis to unite such objects into a class. it is to be noted in addition, however, that in the same manner he is also able, by examining the characteristics of a large class of objects, to divide these into smaller sub-classes. although, for example, we may place all three-sided figures into one class and call them triangles, we are further able to divide these into three sub-classes owing to certain differences that may be noted among them. thus an important fact regarding classification is that while a class may possess some common quality or qualities, yet its members may be further divided into sub-classes and each of these smaller classes distinguished from the others by points of difference. owing to this fact, there are two important elements entering into a scientific knowledge of any class, first, to know of what larger class it forms a part, and secondly, to know what characteristics distinguish it from the other classes which go with it to make up this larger class. to know the class equilateral triangle, for instance, we must know, first, that it belongs to the larger class triangle, and secondly, that it differs from other classes of triangles by having its three sides equal. for this reason a person is able to know a class scientifically without knowing all of its common characteristics. for instance, the large class of objects known as words is subdivided into smaller classes known as parts of speech. taking one of these classes, the verb, we find that all verbs agree in possessing at least three common characteristics, they have power to assert, to denote manner, and to express time. to distinguish the verb, however, it is necessary to note only that it is a word used to assert, since this is the only characteristic which distinguishes it from the other classes of words. when, therefore, we describe any class of objects by first naming the larger class to which it belongs, and then stating the characteristics which distinguish it from the other co-ordinate classes, we are said to give a definition of the class, or to define it. the statement, "a trimeter is a verse of three measures," is a definition because it gives, first, the larger class (verse) to which the trimeters belong, and secondly, the difference (of three measures) which distinguishes the trimeter from all other verses. the statement, "a binomial is an algebraic expression consisting of two terms," is a definition, because it gives, first, the larger class (algebraic expression) to which binomials belong, and secondly, the difference (consisting of two terms) which distinguishes binomials from other algebraic expressions. judgment =nature of judgment.=--a second form, or mode, of thinking is known as judgment. our different concepts were seen to vary in their intension, or meaning, according to the number of attributes suggested by each. my notion _triangle_ may denote the attributes three-sided and three-angled; my notion _isosceles triangle_ will in that case include at least these two qualities plus equality of two of the sides. this indicates that various relations exist between our ideas and may be apprehended by the mind. when a relation between two concepts is distinctly apprehended in thought, or, in other words, when there is a mental assertion of a union between two ideas, or objects of thought, the process is known as _judgment_. judgment may be defined, therefore, as the apprehension, or mental affirmation, of a relation between two ideas. if the idea, or concept, _heaviness_ enters as a mental element into my idea _stone_, then the mind is able to affirm a relation between these concepts in the form, "stone is heavy." in like manner when the mind asserts, "glass is transparent" or "horses are animals," there is a distinct apprehension of a relation between the concepts involved. =judgment distinguished from statement.=--it should be noted that judgment is the mental apprehension of a relation between ideas. when this relation is expressed in actual words, it is spoken of as a proposition, or a predication. a proposition is, therefore, the statement of a judgment. the proposition is composed of two terms and the copula, one term constituting the subject of the proposition and the other the predicate. although a judgment may often be expressed in some other form, it can usually be converted into the above form. the proposition, "horses eat oats," may be expressed in the form, "horses are oat-eaters"; the proposition, "the sun melts the snow," into the form, "the sun is a-thing-which-melts-snow." =relation of judgment to conception.=--it would appear from the above examples that a judgment expresses in an explicit form the relations involved within the concept, and is, therefore, merely a direct way of indicating the state of development of any idea. if my concept of a dog, for example, is a synthesis of the qualities four-footed, hairy, fierce, and barking, then an analysis of the concept will furnish the following judgments: { a four-footed thing. { a hairy thing. a dog is { a fierce thing. { a barking thing. because in these cases a concept seems necessary for an act of judgment, it is said that judgment is a more advanced form of thinking than conception. on the other hand, however, judgment is implied in the formation of a concept. when the child apprehends the dog as a four-footed object, his mind has grasped four-footedness as a quality pertaining to the strange object, and has, in a sense, brought the two ideas into relation. but while judgment is implied in the formation of the concept, the concept does not bring explicitly to the mind the judgments it implies. the concept snow, for instance, implies the property of whiteness, but whiteness must be apprehended as a distinct idea and related mentally with the idea snow before we can be said to have formed, or thought, the judgment, "snow is white." judgment is a form of thinking separate from conception, therefore, because it does thus bring into definite relief relations only implied in our general notions, or concepts. one value of judgment is, in fact, that it enables us to analyse our concepts, and thus note more explicitly the relations included in them. =universal and particular judgments.=--judgments are found to differ also as to the universality of their affirmation. in such a judgment as "man is mortal," since mortality is viewed as a quality always joined to manhood, the affirmation is accepted as a universal judgment. in such a judgment as "men strive to subdue the air," the two objects of thought are not considered as always and necessarily joined together. the judgment is therefore particular in character. all of our laws of nature, as "air has weight," "pressure on liquids is transmitted in every direction," or "heat is conducted by metals," are accepted as universal judgments. =errors in judgment due to: a. faulty concepts.=--it may be seen from the foregoing that our judgments, when explicitly grasped by the mind and predicated in language, reflect the accuracy or inaccuracy of our concepts. whatever relations are, as it were, wrapped up in a concept may merge at any time in the form of explicit judgments. if the fact that the only chinamen seen by a child are engaged in laundry work causes this attribute to enter into his concept chinaman, this will lead him to affirm that the restaurant keeper, wan lee, is a laundry-man. the republican who finds two or three cases of corruption among democrats, may conceive corruption as a quality common to democrats and affirm that honest john smith is corrupt. faulty concepts, therefore, are very likely to lead to faulty judgments. a first duty in education is evidently to see that children are forming correct class concepts. for this it must be seen that they always distinguish the essential features of the class of objects they are studying. they must learn, also, not to conclude on account of superficial likeness that really unlike objects belong to the same class. the child, for instance, in parsing the sentence, "the swing broke down," must be taught to look for essential characteristics, and not call the word _swing_ a gerund because it ends in "ing"; which, though a common characteristic of gerunds, does not differentiate it from other classes of words. so, also, when the young nature student notes that the head of the spider is somewhat separated from the abdomen, he must not falsely conclude that the spider belongs to the class insects. in like manner, the pupil must not imagine, on account of superficial differences, that objects really the same belong to different classes, as for example, that a certain object is not a fish, but a bird, because it is flying through the air; or that a whale is a fish and not an animal, because it lives in water. the pupil must also learn to distinguish carefully between the particular and universal judgment. to affirm that "men strive to subdue the air," does not imply that "john smith strives to subdue the air." the importance of this distinction will be considered more fully in our next section. =b. feeling.=--faulty concepts are not, however, the only causes for wrong judgments. it has been noted already that feeling enters largely as a factor in our conscious life. man, therefore, in forming his judgments, is always in danger of being swayed by his feelings. our likes and dislikes, in other words, interfere with our thinking, and prevent us from analysing our knowledge as we should. instead, therefore, of striving to develop true concepts concerning men and events and basing our judgments upon these, we are inclined in many cases to allow our judgments to be swayed by mere feeling. =c. laziness.=--indifference is likewise a common source of faulty judgments. to attend to the concept and discover its intension as a means for correct judgment evidently demands mental effort. many people, however, prefer either to jump at conclusions or let others do their judging for them. =sound judgments based on scientific concepts.=--to be able to form correct judgments regarding the members of any class, however, the child should know, not only its common characteristics, but also the essential features which distinguish its members from those of co-ordinate classes. to know adequately the equilateral triangle, for instance, the pupil must know both the features which distinguish it from other triangles and also those in which it agrees with all triangles. to know fully the mentha family of plants, he must know both the characteristic qualities of the family and also those of the larger genus labiatae. from this it will be seen that a large share of school work must be devoted to building up scientific class notions in the minds of the pupils. without this, many of their judgments must necessarily be faulty. to form such scientific concepts, however, it is necessary to relate one concept with another in more indirect ways than is done through the formation of judgments. this brings us to a consideration of _reasoning_, the third and last form of thinking. reasoning =nature of reasoning.=--reasoning is defined as a mental process in which the mind arrives at a new judgment by comparing other judgments. the mind, for instance, is in possession of the two judgments, "stones are heavy" and "flint is a stone." by bringing these two judgments under the eye of attention and comparing them, the mind is able to arrive at the new judgment, "flint is heavy." here the new judgment, expressing a relation between the notions, _flint_ and _heavy_, is supposed to be arrived at, neither by direct experience, nor by an immediate analysis of the concept _flint_, but more indirectly by comparing the other judgments. the judgment, or conclusion, is said, therefore, to be arrived at mediately, or by a process of reasoning. reasoning is of two forms, deductive, or syllogistic, reasoning, and inductive reasoning. deduction =nature of deduction.=--in deduction the mind is said to start with a general truth, or judgment, and by a process of reasoning to arrive at a more particular truth, or judgment, thus: stone is heavy; flint is a stone; .'. flint is heavy. expressed in this form, the reasoning process, as already mentioned, is known as a syllogism. the whole syllogism is made up of three parts, major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. the three concepts involved in the syllogism are known as the major, the minor, and the middle term. in the above syllogism, _heavy_, the predicate of the major premise, is the major term; _flint_, the subject of the minor premise, is the minor term; and _stone_, to which the other two are related in the premises, is known as the middle term. because of this previous comparison of the major and the minor terms with the middle term, deduction is sometimes said to be a process by which the mind discovers a relation between two concepts by comparing them each with a third concept. =purpose of deduction.=--it is to be noted, however, as pointed out in chapter xv, that deductive reasoning takes place normally only when the mind is faced with a difficulty which demands solution. take the case of the boy and his lost coin referred to in chapter ii. as he faces the problem, different methods of solution may present themselves. it may enter his mind, for instance, to tear up the grate, but this is rejected on account of possible damage to the brickwork. finally he thinks of the tar and resorts to this method of recovery. in both of the above cases the boy based his conclusions upon known principles. as he considered the question of tearing up the grate, the thought came to his mind, "lifting-a-grate is a-thing-which-may-cause-damage." as he considered the use of the tar, he had in mind the judgment, "adhesion is a property of tar," and at once inferred that tar would solve his problem. in such practical cases, however, the mind seems to go directly from the problem in hand to a conclusion by means of a general principle. when a woman wishes to remove a stain, she at once says, "gasoline will remove it." here the mind, in arriving at its conclusion, seems to apply the principle, "gasoline removes spots," directly to the particular problem. thus the reasoning might seem to run as follows: problem: what will remove this stain? principle: gasoline will remove stains. conclusion: gasoline will remove this stain. here the middle term of the syllogism seems to disappear. it is to be noted, however, that our thought changes from the universal idea "stains," mentioned in the statement of the principle, to the particular idea "this stain" mentioned in the problem and in the conclusion. but this implies a middle term, which could be expressed thus: gasoline will remove stains; this is a stain; .'. gasoline will remove _this_. the syllogism is valuable, therefore, because it displays fully and clearly each element in the reasoning process, and thus assures the validity of the conclusion. =deduction in school recitation.=--it will be recalled from what was noted in our study of general method, that deduction usually plays an important part during an ordinary developing lesson. in the step of preparation, when the pupil is given a particular example in order to recall old knowledge, the example suggests a problem which is intended to call up certain principles which are designed to be used during the presentation. in a lesson on the "conjunctive pronoun," for instance, if we have the pupil recall his knowledge of the conjunction by examining the particular word "if" in such a sentence as, "i shall go if they come," he interprets the word as a conjunction simply because he possesses a general rule applicable to it, or is able to go through a process of deduction. in the presentation also, when the pupil is called on to examine the word _who_ in such a sentence as, "the man who met us is very old," and decides that it is both a conjunction and a pronoun, he is again making deductions, since it is by his general knowledge of conjunctions and pronouns that he is able to interpret the two functions of the particular word _who_. finally, as already noted, the application of an ordinary recitation frequently involves deductive processes. induction =nature of induction.=--induction is described as a process of reasoning in which the mind arrives at a conclusion by an examination of particular cases, or judgments. a further distinguishing feature of the inductive process is that, while the known judgments are particular in character, the conclusion is accepted as a general law, or truth. as in deduction, the reasoning process arises on account of some difficulty, or problem, presented to the mind, as for example: what is the effect of heat upon air? will glass conduct electricity? why do certain bodies refract light? to satisfy itself upon the problem, the mind appeals to actual experience either by ordinary observation or through experimentation. these observations or experiments, which necessarily deal with particular instances, are supposed to provide a number of particular judgments, by examining which a satisfactory conclusion is ultimately reached. =example of induction.=--as an example of induction, may be taken the solution of such a problem as, "does air exert pressure?" to meet this hypothesis we must evidently do more than merely abstract the manifest properties of an object, as is done in ordinary conception, or appeal directly to some known general principle, as is done in deduction. the work of induction demands rather to examine the two at present known but disconnected things, _air_ and _pressure_, and by scientific observation seek to discover a relation between them. for this purpose the investigator may place a card over a glass filled with water, and on inverting it find that the card is held to the glass. taking a glass tube and putting one end in water, he may place his finger over the other end and, on raising the tube, find that water remains in the tube. soaking a heavy piece of leather in water and pressing it upon the smooth surface of a stone or other object, he finds the stone can be lifted by means of the leather. reflecting upon each of these circumstances the mind comes to the following conclusions: air pressure holds this card to the glass, air pressure keeps the water in the tube, air pressure holds together the leather and the stone, .'. air exerts pressure. =how distinguished from, a. deduction, and b. conception.=--such a process as the above constitutes a process of reasoning, first, because the conclusion gives a new affirmation, or judgment, "air exerts pressure," and secondly, because the judgment is supposed to be arrived at by comparing other judgments. as a process of reasoning, however, it differs from deduction in that the final judgment is a general judgment, or truth, which seems to be based upon a number of particular judgments obtained from actual experience, while in deduction the conclusion was particular and the major premise general. it is for this reason that induction is defined as a process of going from the particular to the general. moreover, since induction leads to the formation of a universal judgment, or general truth, it differs from the generalizing process known as conception, which leads to the formation of a concept, or general idea. it is evident, however, that the process will enrich the concept involved in the new judgment. when the mind is able to affirm that air exerts pressure, the property, exerting-pressure, is at once synthesised into the notion air. this point will again be referred to in comparing induction and conception as generalizing processes. in speaking of induction as a process of going from the particular to the general, this does not signify that the process deals with individual notions. the particulars in an inductive process are particular cases giving rise to particular judgments, and judgments involve concepts, or general ideas. when, in the inductive process, it is asserted that air holds the card to the glass, the mind is seeking to establish a relation between the notions air and pressure, and is, therefore, thinking in concepts. for this reason, it is usually said that induction takes for granted ordinary relations as involved in our everyday concepts, and concerns itself only with the more hidden relations of things. the significance of induction as a process of going from the particular to the general, therefore, consists in the fact that the conclusion is held to be a wider judgment than is contained in any of the premises. =particular truth implies the general.=--describing the premises of an inductive process as particular truths, and the conclusion as a universal truth, however, involves the same fiction as was noted in separating the percept and the concept into two distinct types of notions. in the first place, my particular judgment, that air presses the card against the glass, is itself a deduction resting upon other general principles. secondly, if the judgment that air presses the card against the glass contains no element of universal truth, then a thousand such judgments could give no universal truth. moreover, if the mind approaches a process of induction with a problem, or hypothesis, before it, the general truth is already apprehended hypothetically in thought even before the particular instances are examined. when we set out, for instance, to investigate whether the line joining the bisecting points of the sides of a triangle is parallel with the base, we have accepted hypothetically the general principle that such lines are parallel with the base. the fact is, therefore, that when the mind examines the particular case and finds it to agree with the hypothesis, so far as it accepts this case as a truth, it also accepts it as a universal truth. although, therefore, induction may involve going from one particular experiment or observation to another, it is in a sense a process of going from the general to the general. that accepting the truth of a particular judgment may imply a universal judgment is very evident in the case of geometrical demonstrations. when it is shown, for instance, that in the case of the particular isosceles triangle abc, the angles at the base are equal, the mind does not require to examine other particular triangles for verification, but at once asserts that in every isosceles triangle the angles at the base are equal. =induction and conception interrelated.=--although as a process, induction is to be distinguished from conception, it either leads to an enriching of some concept, or may in fact be the only means by which certain scientific concepts are formed. while the images obtained by ordinary sense perception will enable a child to gain a notion of water, to add to the notion the property, boiling-at-a-certain-temperature, or able-to-be-converted-into-two-parts-hydrogen-and-one-part-oxygen, will demand a process of induction. the development of such scientific notions as oxide, equation, predicate adjective, etc., is also dependent upon a regular inductive process. for this reason many lessons may be viewed both as conceptual and as inductive lessons. to teach the adverb implies a conceptual process, because the child must synthesise certain attributes into his notion adverb. it is also an inductive lesson, because these attributes being formulated as definite judgments are, therefore, obtained inductively. the double character of such a lesson is fully indicated by the two results obtained. the lesson ends with the acquisition of a new term, adverb, which represents the result of the conceptual process. it also ends with the definition: "an adverb is a word which modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb," which indicates the general truth or truths resulting from the inductive process. =deduction and induction interrelated.=--in our actual teaching processes there is a very close inter-relation between the two processes of reasoning. we have already noted on page that, in such inductive lessons as teaching the definition of a noun or the rule for the addition of fractions, both the preparatory step and the application involve deduction. it is to be noted further, however, that even in the development of an inductive lesson there is a continual interplay between induction and deduction. this will be readily seen in the case of a pupil seeking to discover the rule for determining the number of repeaters in the addition of recurring decimals. when he notes that adding three numbers with one, one, and two repeaters respectively, gives him two repeaters in his answer, he is more than likely to infer that the rule is to have in the answer the highest number found among the addenda. so far as he makes this inference, he undoubtedly will apply it in interpreting the next problem, and if the next numbers have one, one, and three repeaters respectively, he will likely be quite convinced that his former inference is correct. when, however, he meets a question with one, two, and three repeaters respectively, he finds his former inference is incorrect, and may, thereupon, draw a new inference, which he will now proceed to apply to further examples. the general fact to be noted here, however, is that, so far as the mind during the examination of the particular examples reaches any conclusion in an inductive lesson, it evidently applies this conclusion to some degree in the study of the further examples, or thinks deductively, even during the inductive process. =development of reasoning power.=--since reasoning is essentially a purposive form of thinking, it is evident that any reasoning process will depend largely upon the presence of some problem which shall stimulate the mind to seek out relations necessary to its solution. power to reason, therefore, is conditioned by the ability to attend voluntarily to the problem and discover the necessary relations. it is further evident that the accuracy of any reasoning process must be dependent upon the accuracy of the judgments upon which the conclusions are based. but these judgments in turn depend for their accuracy upon the accuracy of the concepts involved. correct reasoning, therefore, must depend largely upon the accuracy of our concepts, or, in other words, upon the old knowledge at our command. on the other hand, however, it has been seen that both deductive and inductive reasoning follow to some degree a systematic form. for this reason it may be assumed that the practice of these forms should have some effect in giving control of the processes. the child, for instance, who habituates himself to such thought processes as ab equals bc, and ac equals bc, therefore ab equals ac, no doubt becomes able thereby to grasp such relations more easily. granting so much, however, it is still evident that close attention to, and accurate knowledge of, the various terms involved in the reasoning process is the sure foundation of correct reasoning. chapter xxix feeling =sensuous and ideal feeling.=--we have noted (chapter xxiv), that in addition to the general feeling tone accompanying an act of attention, and already described as a feeling of interest, there are two important classes of feeling known respectively as sensuous and ideal feeling. when a person says: "i feel tired" or "i feel hungry," he is referring to the feeling side of certain organic sensations. when he says: "the air feels cold" or "the paper feels smooth," he is referring to the feeling side of temperature and touch sensations. these are, therefore, examples of sensuous feeling. on the other hand, to say "i feel angry" or "i feel afraid," is to refer to a feeling state which accompanies perhaps the perception of some object, the recollection or anticipation of some act, or the inference that something is sure to happen, etc. these latter states are therefore known as ideal feelings. =quality of feeling states.=--the qualities of our various feeling states are distinguished under two heads, pleasure and pain. it might seem at first sight that our feeling states will fall into a much larger number of classes distinguished by differences in quality, or tone. the taste of an orange, the smell of lavender, the touch of a hot stove, the appreciation of a fine piece of music, and the appreciation of a lofty poem, seem at first sight to yield different feelings. the supposed difference in the quality of the feelings is due, however, to a difference in the knowledge elements accompanying the feelings, or to the fact that they are discriminated as different experiences. the idea of the music or the poem is of a higher grade than the sensory image of taste, and accordingly the feelings _appear_ to be different. the feelings may, of course, differ in intensity, but in _quality_ they are either pleasant or unpleasant. conditions of feeling tone =a. neural.=--the quality, or tone, of a feeling will vary according to the intensity of the impression. great heat stimulates the nerves violently and the resultant feeling state is painful; warmth gives a moderate stimulation and the resultant tone is pleasant. excessive cold also, because it stimulates violently, produces a painful feeling. since the intensity of a stimulus varies according to the resistance encountered in the nervous arc, the quality of a feeling state must, therefore, vary according to the resistance. it is for this reason that an experience, at first very painful, may lose much of its tone by repetition. by repetition the nerve centres are adapted to the experience, resistance is lessened, and the accompanying pain diminished. in this way, some work or exercise, which is at first positively unpleasant, may at least become endurable as the organism becomes adapted to the occupation. from this point of view, it is sometimes said that any impressions to which we are perfectly adapted give pleasurable feelings, while, in other cases the resultant tone will be painful. =b. mental.=--the law of perfect adaptation also explains why ideal feelings may at one time result in a pleasant, and at another time in a painful, feeling tone. according to the principle of apperception, the new experience must organize itself with whatever thoughts and feelings are now occupying consciousness. it necessarily happens that a given experience does not always equally harmonize with our present thoughts and feelings. the recognition of a friend under ordinary circumstances is agreeable, but amid certain associations or in a certain environment, such recognition would be disagreeable. so, too, while an original experience may have been agreeable, the memory of it may now be disagreeable; and vice versa. for instance, the memory of a former success or prosperity may, in the midst of present failure and poverty, be disagreeable; while the recollection of former failure and defeat may now, in the midst of success and prosperity, be agreeable. what is it that makes a sensation, a perception, a memory, or an apprehended relation pleasant under some circumstances and unpleasant under others? the rule appears to be that when the experience harmonizes with our present train of thought, when it promotes our present interests and intentions, it is pleasant; but when, on the other hand, it does not harmonize with our train of thought or thwarts or impedes our interests and purposes, it is unpleasant. =function of pleasure and pain.=--from what has been noted concerning co-ordination between the adaptation of the organism to impression and the quality of the accompanying feeling, it is evident that pleasure and pain each have their part to play in promoting the ultimate good of the individual. pain is beneficial, because it lets us know that there is some misadjustment to our environment, and thereby warns us to remove or cease doing what is proving injurious. in this connection, it may be noted that no disease is so dangerous as one that fails to make its presence known through pain. pleasure also is valuable in so far as it results from perfect adaptation to a perfect environment, since it induces the individual to continue beneficial acts. it must be remembered, however, that so far as heredity or education has adapted our organism to improper stimuli, pleasure is no proof that the good of the organism is being advanced. in such cases, redemption can come to the fallen world only through suffering. =feeling and knowing.=--since the intensity of a feeling state is conditioned by the amount of resistance, an intense state of feeling is likely to be accompanied by a lowering of intellectual activity. for this reason excessive hunger, heat or cold, intense joy, anger or sorrow, are usually antagonistic to intellectual work. the explanation for this seems to be that so much of our nervous energy is consumed in overcoming the resistance in the centres affected, that little is left for ordinary intellectual processes. this does not, of course, imply that no one can do intellectual work under such conditions; nor that the intellectual man is always devoid of strong feelings, although such is often the case. occasionally, however, a man is so strongly endowed with nervous energy, that even after overcoming the resistance being encountered, he still has a residue of energy to devote to ordinary intellectual processes. =feeling and will.=--although, as pointed out in the last paragraph, there is a certain antagonism between knowing and feeling, it has also been seen that every experience has its knowing as well as its feeling side. because of this co-ordination, the qualities of our feeling states become known to us, or are able to be distinguished by the mind. as a result of this recognition of a difference in our feeling states, we learn to seek states of pleasure and to avoid states of pain or, in other words, our mere states of feeling become desires. this means that we become able to contrast a present feeling with other remembered states, and seek either to continue the present desired state or to substitute another for the present undesirable feeling. in the form of desire, therefore, our feelings become strong motives, which may influence the will to certain lines of action. sensuous feelings while the sensations of the special senses, namely, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, have each their affective, or feeling, side, a minute study of these feelings is not necessary for our present purpose. it may be noted, however, that in the more intellectual senses, namely, sight, hearing, and touch, feeling tone is less marked, although strong feeling may accompany certain tactile sensations. in the lower senses of taste and smell, the feeling tone is more pronounced. under muscular sensation we meet such marked feeling tones as fatigue, exertion, and strain, while associated with the organic sensations are such feelings as hunger and thirst, and the various pains which usually accompany derangement and disease of the bodily organs. some of these feelings are important, because they are likely to influence the will by developing into desires in the form of appetites. many sensuous feelings are important also because they especially warn the mind regarding the condition of the organism. emotion =nature of emotion.=--an emotion differs from sensuous feeling, not in its content, but in its higher intensity, its greater complexity, and its more elaborate motor response. it may be defined as a succession of interconnected feelings with a more complex physical expression than a simple feeling. on reading an account of a battle, one may feel sad and express this sadness only in a gloomy appearance of the face. but if one finds that in this battle a friend has been killed, the feeling is much intensified and may become an emotion of grief, expressing itself in some complex way, perhaps in tears, in sobbing, in wringing the hands. similarly, a feeling of slight irritation expressed in a frowning face, if intensified, becomes the emotion of anger, expressed in tense muscles, rapidly beating heart, laboured breathing, perhaps a torrent of words or a hasty blow. =emotion and instinct.=--feeling and instinct are closely related. every instinct has its affective phase, that is, its satisfaction always involves an element of pleasure or pain. the satisfaction of the instincts of curiosity or physical activity illustrates this fact. on the other hand, every emotion has its characteristic instinctive response. fear expresses itself in all persons alike in certain characteristic ways inherited from a remote ancestry; anger expresses itself in other instinctive reactions; grief in still others. conditions of emotion an analysis of a typical emotion will serve to show the conditions under which it makes its appearance. let us take first the emotion of fear. suppose a person is walking alone on a dark night along a deserted street. his nervous currents are discharging themselves uninterruptedly over their wonted channels, his current of thought is unimpeded. suddenly there appears a strange and frightful object in his pathway. his train of thought is violently checked. his nervous currents, which a moment ago were passing out smoothly and without undue resistance into muscles of legs, arms, body, and face, are now suddenly obstructed, or in other words encounter violent resistance. he stands still. his heart momentarily stops beating. a temporary paralysis seizes him. as the nervous currents thus encounter resistance, the feeling tone known as fear is experienced. at the same time the currents burst their barriers and overflow into new channels that are easy of access, the motor centres being especially of this character. some of the currents, therefore, run to the involuntary muscles, and in consequence the heart beats faster, the breathing becomes heavier, the face grows pale, a cold sweat breaks forth, the hair "stands on end." other currents, through hereditary influences, pass to the voluntary muscles, and the person shrieks, and turns and flees. or take the emotion of anger. some fine morning in school everything is in good order, everybody is industriously at work, the lessons are proceeding satisfactorily. the current of the teacher's experience is flowing smoothly and unobstructedly. presently a troublesome boy, who has been repeatedly reproved for misconduct, again shows symptoms of idleness and misbehaviour. the smooth current of experience being checked, here also both a new feeling tone is experienced and the wonted nerve currents flow out into other brain centres. the teacher stops his work and gazes fixedly at the offending pupil. his heart beats rapidly, the blood surges to his face, his breathing becomes heavy, his muscles grow tense. in these reactions we have the nervous currents passing out over involuntary channels. then, perhaps, the teacher unfortunately breaks forth into a torrent of words or lays violent hands upon the offender. here the nervous currents are passing outward over the voluntary system. these illustrations indicate that three important conditions are present at the appearance of the emotion, namely, ( ) the presence of an unusual object in consciousness, ( ) the consequent disturbance of the smooth flow of experience or, in physiological terms, the temporary obstruction of the ordinary pathways of nervous discharge through the great resistance encountered, and ( ) the new feeling state with its concomitant overflow of the impulses into new motor channels, some of which lead to the involuntary muscles and others to the voluntary. the emotion proper consists in the feeling state which arises as a result of the resistance encountered by the nervous impulses as the smooth flow of experience is checked. the idea that i shall die some day arouses no emotion in me, because it in no way affects my ordinary thought processes, and therefore it in no way disturbs my nervous equilibrium. the perception of a wild animal about to kill me, because it suddenly thwarts and impedes the smooth flow of my experience through a suggestion of danger, produces an intense feeling and a diffused and intense derangement of the nervous equilibrium. =development of emotions.=--the question of paramount importance in connection with emotion is how to arouse and develop desirable emotions. the close connection of the three phases of the mind's manifestation--knowing, feeling, and willing, gives the key to the question. feeling cannot be developed alone apart from knowing and willing. in fact, if we attend carefully to the knowing and willing activities, the feelings, in one sense, take care of themselves. two principles, therefore, lie at the basis of proper emotional development: . the mind must be allowed to dwell upon only those ideas to which worthy emotions are attached. we must refuse to think those thoughts that are tinged with unworthy feelings. the apostle paul has expressed this very eloquently when he says in his epistle to the philippians: "finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." . the teacher's main duty in the above regard is to provide the pupil with a rich fund of ideas to which desirable feelings cling. an impressive manner, an enthusiastic attitude toward subjects of study, an evident interest in them, and apparent appreciation of them, will also aid much in inspiring pupils with proper feelings, for feelings are often contagious in the absence of very definite ideas. how often have we been deeply moved by hearing a poem impressively read even though we have very imperfectly grasped its meaning. the feelings of the reader have been communicated to us through the principle of contagion. similarly, in history, art, and nature study, emotions may be stirred, not only through the medium of the ideas presented, but also by the impressiveness, the enthusiasm, and the interest exhibited by the teacher in presenting them. . we must give expression to these emotions we wish to develop. expression means the probability of the recurrence of the emotion, and gradually an emotional habit is formed. an unselfish disposition is cultivated by performing little acts of kindness and self-denial whenever the opportunity offers. the expression of a desirable emotion, moreover, should not stop merely with an experience of the organic sensations or the reflex reactions accompanying the emotion. to listen to a sermon and react only by an emotional thrill, a quickened heart beat, or a few tears, is a very ineffective kind of expression. the only kind of emotional expression that is of much consequence either to ourselves or others is conduct. only in so far as our emotional experiences issue in action that is beneficial to those about us, are they of any practical value. =elimination of emotions.=--since certain of our emotions, such as anger and fear, are, in general, undesirable states of feeling, a question arises how such emotions may be prevented. it is sometimes said that, if we can inhibit the expression, the emotion will disappear, that is, if i can prevent the trembling, i will cease to be afraid. from what has just been learned, however, the emotion and its expression being really concomitant results of the antecedent obstruction of ordinary nervous discharges, emotion cannot be checked by checking the expression, but both will be checked if the nervous impulses can be made to continue in their wonted courses in spite of the disturbing presentations. the real secret of emotional control lies, therefore, in the power of voluntary attention. the effect of attention is to cause the nervous energy to be directed without undue resistance into its wonted channels, this, in turn, preventing its overflow into new channels. by thus directing the energy into wonted and open channels, attention prevents both the movements and the feeling that are concomitants of a disturbance of nervous equilibrium. by meeting the attack of the dog in a purposeful and attentive manner, we cause the otherwise damming-up nervous energy to continue flowing into ordinary channels, and in this way prevent both the feeling of fear and also the flow of the energy into the motor centres associated with the particular emotion. but while it is not scientifically correct in a particular case to say that we may inhibit the feeling by inhibiting the movements, it is of course true that, by avoiding a present emotional outburst, we are less likely in the future to respond to situations which tend to arouse the emotional state. on the other hand, to give way frequently to any emotional state will make it more difficult to avoid yielding to the emotion under similar conditions. other types of feeling =mood.=--our feelings and emotions become organized and developed in various ways. the sum total of all the feeling tones of our sensory and ideational processes at any particular time gives us our _mood_ at that time. if, for instance, our organic sensations are prevailingly pleasant, if the ideas we dwell upon are tinged with agreeable feeling, our mood is cheerful. we can to a large extent control our current of thought, and can as we will, except in case of serious bodily disturbances, attend, or not attend, to our organic sensations. consequently we are ourselves largely responsible for the moods we indulge. =disposition.=--a particular kind of mood frequently indulged in produces a type of emotional habit, our _disposition_. for instance, the teacher who permits the occurrences of the class-room to trouble him unnecessarily, and who broods over these afterwards, soon develops a worrying disposition. as we have it in our power to determine what habits, emotional and otherwise, we form, we alone are responsible for the dispositions we cultivate. =temperament.=--some of us are provided with nervous systems that are predisposed to particular moods. this predisposition, together with frequent indulgence in particular types of mood, gives us our _temperament_. the responsibility for this we share with our ancestors, but, even though predisposed through heredity to unfortunate moods, we can ourselves decide whether we shall give way to them. temperaments have been classified as _sanguine_, _melancholic_, _choleric_, and _phlegmatic_. the sanguine type is inclined to look on the bright side of things, to be optimistic; the melancholic tends to moodiness and gloom; the choleric is easily irritated, quick to anger; the phlegmatic is not easily aroused to emotion, is cold and sluggish. an individual seldom belongs exclusively to one type. =sentiments.=--certain emotional tendencies become organized about an object and constitute a _sentiment_. the sentiment of love for our mother had its basis in our childhood in the perception of her as the source of numberless experiences involving pleasant feeling tones. as we grew older, we understood better her solicitude for our welfare and her sacrifices for our sake--further experiences involving a large feeling element. thus there grew up about our mother an organized system of emotional tendencies, our sentiment of filial love. such sentiments as patriotism, religious faith, selfishness, sympathy, arise and develop in the same way. compared with moods, sentiments are more permanent in character and involve more complex knowledge elements. moreover, they do not depend upon physiological conditions as do moods. one's organic sensations may affect one's mood to a considerable extent, but will scarcely influence one's patriotism or filial love. chapter xxx the will voluntary control of action =types of movement.=--closely associated with the problem of voluntary attention is that of voluntary movement, or control of action. it is an evident fact that the infant can at first exercise no conscious control over his bodily movements. he has, it is true, certain reflex and instinctive tendencies which enable him to react in a definite way to certain special stimuli. in such cases, however, there is no conscious control of the movements, the bodily organs merely responding in a definite way whenever the proper stimulus is present. the eye, for instance, must wink when any foreign matter affects it; wry movements of the face must accompany the bitter taste; and the body must start at a sudden noise. at other times, bodily movements may be produced in a more spontaneous way. here the physical energy stored within the system gives rise to bodily activity and causes those random impulsive movements so evident during infancy and early childhood. when these movements, which are the only ones possible to very early childhood, are compared with the movements of a workman placing the brick in the wall or of an artist executing a delicate piece of carving, there is found in the latter movements the conscious idea of a definite end, or object, to be reached. to gain control of one's movements is, therefore, to acquire an ability to direct bodily actions toward the attainment of a given end. thus a question arises as to the process by which a child attains to this bodily control. =ideas of movements acquired.=--although, as pointed out above, a child's early instinctive and impulsive movements are not under conscious control, they nevertheless become conscious acts, in the sense that the movements are soon realized in idea. the movements, in other words, give rise to conscious states, and these in turn are retained as portions of past experience. for instance, although the child at first grasps the object only impulsively, he nevertheless soon obtains an idea, or experience, of what it means to grasp with the hand. so, also, although he may first stretch the limb impulsively or make a wry face reflexively, he secures, in a short time, ideas representative of these movements. as the child thus obtains ideas representative of different bodily movements, he is able ultimately, by fixing his attention upon any movement, to produce it in a voluntary way. =development of control: a. ideo-motor action.=--at first, on account of the close association between the thought centres and the motor centres causing the act, the child seems to have little ability to check the act, whenever its representative idea enters consciousness. it is for this reason that young children often perform such seemingly unreasonable acts as, for instance, slapping another person, kicking and throwing objects, etc. in such cases, however, it must not be assumed that these are always deliberate acts. more often the act is performed simply because the image of the act arises in the child's mind, and his control of the motor discharge is so weak that the act follows immediately upon the idea. this same tendency frequently manifests itself even in the adult. as one thinks intently of some favourite game, he may suddenly find himself taking a bodily position used in playing that game. it is by the same law also that the impulsive man tends to act out in gesture any act that he may be describing in words. such a type of action is described as ideo-motor action. =b. deliberate action.=--because the child in time gains ideas of various movements and an ability to fix his attention upon them, he thus becomes able to set one motor image against another as possible lines of action. one image may suggest to slap; the other to caress; the one to pull the weeds in the flower bed; the other, to lie down in the hammock. but attention is ultimately able, as noted in the last chapter, so to control the impulse and resistance in the proper nervous centres that the acts themselves may be indefinitely suspended. thus the mind becomes able to conceive lines of action and, by controlling bodily movement, gain time to consider the effectiveness of these toward the attainment of any end. when a bodily movement thus takes place in relation to some conscious end in view, it is termed a deliberate act. one important result of physical exercises with the young child is that they develop in him this deliberate control of bodily movements. the same may be said also of any orderly modes of action employed in the general management of the school. regular forms of assembly and dismissal, of moving about the class-room, etc., all tend to give the child this same control over his acts. =action versus result.=--as already noted, however, most of our movements soon develop into fixed habits. for this reason our bodily acts are usually performed more or less unconsciously, that is, without any deliberation as to the mere act itself. for this reason, we find that when bodily movements are held in check, or inhibited, in order to allow time for deliberation, attention usually fixes itself, not upon the acts themselves, but rather upon the results of these acts. for instance, a person having an axe and a saw may wish to divide a small board into two parts. although the axe may be in his hand, he is thinking, not how he is to use the axe, but how it will result if he uses this to accomplish the end. in the same way he considers, not how to use the saw, but the result of using the saw. by inhibiting the motor impulses which would lead to the use of either of these, the individual is able to note, say, that to use the axe is a quick, but inaccurate, way of gaining the end; to use the saw, a slow, but accurate, way. the present need being interpreted as one where only an approximate division is necessary, attention is thereupon given wholly to the images tending to promote this action; resistance is thus overcome in these centres, and the necessary motor discharges for using the axe are given free play. here, however, the mind evidently does not deliberate on how the hands are to use the axe or the saw, but rather upon the results following the use of these. volition =nature of will.=--when voluntary attention is fixed, as above, upon the results of conflicting lines of action, the mind is said to experience a conflict of desires, or motives. so long as this conflict lasts, physical expression is inhibited, the mind deliberating upon and comparing the conflicting motives. for instance, a pupil on his way to school may be thrown into a conflict of motives. on the one side is a desire to remain under the trees near the bank of the stream; on the other a desire to obey his parents, and go to school. so long as these desires each press themselves upon the attention, there results an inhibiting of the nervous motor discharge with an accompanying mental state of conflict, or indecision. this prevents, for the time being, any action, and the youth deliberates between the two possible lines of conduct. as he weighs the various elements of pleasure on the one hand and of duty on the other, the one desire will finally appear the stronger. this constitutes the person's choice, or decision, and a line of action follows in accordance with the end, or motive, chosen. this mental choice, or decision, is usually termed an act of will. =attention in will.=--such a choice between motives, however, evidently involves an act of voluntary attention. what really goes on in consciousness in such a conflict of motives is that voluntary attention makes a single problem of the twofold situation--school versus play. to this problem the attention marshals relative ideas and selects and adjusts them to the complex problem. finally these are built into an organized experience which solves the problem as one, say, of going to school. the so-called choice is, therefore, merely the mental solution of the situation; the necessary bodily action follows in an habitual manner, once the attention lessens the resistance in the appropriate centres. =factors in volitional act.=--such an act of volition, or will, is usually analysed in the following steps: . conflicting desires . deliberation--weighing of motives . choice--solving the problem . expression. as a mental process, however, an act of will does not include the fourth step--expression. the mind has evidently willed, the moment a conclusion, or choice, is reached in reference to the end in view. if, therefore, i stand undecided whether to paint the house white or green, an act of will has taken place when the conclusion, or mental decision, has been reached to paint the house green. on the other hand, however, only the man who forms a decision and then resolutely works out his decision through actual expression, will be credited with a strong will by the ordinary observer. =physical conditions of will.=--deliberation being but a special case of giving voluntary attention to a selected problem, it involves the same expenditure of nervous energy in overcoming resistance within the brain centres as was seen to accompany any act of voluntary attention. such being the case, our power of will at any given time is likely to vary in accordance with our bodily condition. the will is relatively weak during sickness, for instance, because the normal amount of nervous energy which must accompany the mental processes of deliberation and choice is not able to be supplied. for the same reason, lack of food and sleep, working in bad air, etc., are found to weaken the will for facing a difficulty, though we may nevertheless feel that it is something that ought to be done. an added reason, therefore, why the victim of alcohol and narcotics finds it difficult to break his habit is that the use of these may permanently lessen the energy of the nervous organism. in facing the difficult task of breaking an old habit, therefore, this person has rendered the task doubly difficult, because the indulgence has weakened his will for undertaking the struggle of breaking an old habit. on the other hand, good food, sleep, exercise in the fresh air, by quickening the blood and generating nervous energy, in a sense strengthens the will in undertaking the duties and responsibilities before it. abnormal types of will =the impulsive will.=--one important problem in the education of the will is found in the relation of deliberation to choice. as is the case in a process of learning, the mind in deliberating must draw upon past experiences, must select and weigh conflicting ideas in a more or less intelligent manner, and upon this basis finally make its choice. a first characteristic of a person of will, therefore, is to be able to deliberate intelligently upon any different lines of action which may present themselves. but in the case of many individuals, there seems a lack of this power of deliberation. on every hand they display almost a childlike impulsiveness, rushing blindly into action, and always following up the word with the blow. this type, which is spoken of as an impulsive will, is likely to prevail more or less among young children. it is essential, therefore, that the teacher should take this into account in dealing with the moral and the practical actions of these children. it should be seen that such children in their various exercises are made to inhibit their actions sufficiently to allow them to deliberate and choose between alternative modes of action. for this purpose typical forms of constructive work will be found of educational value. in such exercises situations may be continually created in which the pupil must deliberate upon alternative lines of action and make his choice accordingly. =the retarded will.=--in some cases a type of will is met in which the attention seems unable to lead deliberation into a state of choice. like hamlet, the person keeps ever weighing whether _to be or not to be_ is the better course. such people are necessarily lacking in achievement, although always intending to do great things in the future. this type of will is not so prevalent among young children; but if met, the teacher should, as far as possible, encourage the pupil to pass more rapidly from thought to action. =the sluggish will.=--a third and quite common defect of will is seen where the mind is either too ignorant or too lazy to do the work of deliberating. while such characters are not impulsive, they tend to follow lines of action merely by habit, or in accordance with the direction of others, and do little thinking for themselves. the only remedy for such people is, of course, to quicken their intellectual life. unless this can be done, the goodness of their character must depend largely upon the nobility of those who direct the formation of their habits and do their thinking for them. =development of will.=--by recalling what has been established concerning the learning process, we may learn that most school exercises, when properly conducted, involve the essential facts of an act of will. in an ordinary school exercise, the child first has before him a certain aim, or problem, and then must select from former experience the related ideas which will enable him to solve this problem. so far, however, as the child is led to select and reject for himself these interpreting ideas, he must evidently go through a process similar to that of an ordinary act of will. when, for example, the child faces the problem of finding out how many yards of carpet of a certain width will cover the floor of a room, he must first decide how to find the number of strips required. having come to a decision on this point, he must next give expression to his decision by actually working out this part of the problem. in like manner, he must now decide how to proceed with the next step in his problem and, having come to a conclusion on this point, must also give it expression by performing the necessary mathematical processes. it is for this reason, that the ordinary lessons and exercises of the school, when presented to the children as actual problems, constitute an excellent means for developing will power. =the essentials of moral character.=--it must be noted finally, that will power is a third essential factor in the attainment of real moral character, or social efficiency. we have learned that man, through the possession of an intelligent nature, is able to grasp the significance of his experience and thus form comprehensive plans and purposes for the regulation of his conduct. we have noted further that, through the development of right feeling, he may come to desire and plan for the attainment of only such ends as make for righteousness. yet, however noble his desires, and however intelligent and comprehensive his plans and purposes, it is only as he develops a volitional personality, or determination of character which impels toward the attainment of these noble ends through intelligent plans, that man can be said to live the truly efficient life. self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, these three alone lead life to sovereign power. in this connection, also, we cannot do better than quote huxley's description of an educated man, as given in his essay on _a liberal education_, a description which may be considered to crystallize the true conception of an efficient citizen: that man, i think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature, and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. chapter xxxi child study =scope and purpose of child study.=--by child study is meant the observation of the general characteristics and the leading individual differences exhibited by children during the periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. its purpose is to gather facts regarding childhood and formulate them into principles that are applicable in education. from the teacher's standpoint, the purpose is to be able to adapt intelligently his methods in each subject to the child's mind at the different stages of its development. in the education of the child we have our eyes fixed, at least partly, upon his future. the aim of education is usually stated in terms of what the child is to _become_. he is to become a socially efficient individual, to be fitted to live completely, to develop a good moral character, to have his powers of mind and body harmoniously developed. all these aims look toward the future. but what the child _becomes_ depends upon what he _is_. education, in its broadest sense, means taking the individual's present equipment of mind and body and so using it as to enable him to become something else in the future. the teacher must be concerned, therefore, not only with what he wishes the child to _become_ in the future, but also with what he _is_, here and now. =importance to the teacher.=--the adaptation of matter and method to the child's tendencies, capacities, and interests, which all good teaching demands, is possible only through an understanding of his nature. the teacher must have regard, not only to the materials and the method used in training, but also to the being who is to be trained. a knowledge of child nature will prevent expensive mistakes and needless waste. a few typical examples will serve to illustrate the immense importance a knowledge of child nature is to his teacher. . as has been already explained, when the teacher knows something about the instincts of children, he will utilize these tendencies in his teaching and work with them, not against them. he will, wherever possible, make use of the play instinct in his lessons, as for example, when he makes the multiplication drill a matter of climbing a stairway without stumbling or crossing a stream on stones without falling in. he will use the instinct of physical activity in having children learn number combinations by manipulating blocks, or square measure by actually measuring surfaces, or fractions by using scissors and strips of cardboard, or geographical features by modelling in sand and clay. he will use the imitative instinct in cultivating desirable personal habits, such as neatness, cleanliness, and order, and in modifying conduct through the inspiring presentation of history and literature. he will provide exercise for the instinct of curiosity by suggesting interesting problems in geography and nature study. . when the teacher understands the principle of eliminating undesirable tendencies by substitution, he will not regard as cardinal sins the pushing, pinching, and kicking in which boys give vent to their excess energy, but will set about directing this purposeless activity into more profitable channels. he will thus substitute another means of expression for the present undesirable means. he will, for instance, give opportunity for physical exercises, paper-folding and cutting, cardboard work, wood-work, drawing, colour work, modelling, etc., so far as possible in all school subjects. he will try to transform the boy who teases and bullies the smaller boys into a guardian and protector. he will try to utilize the boy's tendency to collect useless odds and ends by turning it into the systematic and purposeful collection of plants, insects, specimens of soils, specimens illustrating phases of manufactures, postage stamps, coins, etc. . when the teacher knows that the interests of pupils have much to do with determining their effort, he will endeavour to seize upon these interests when most active. he will thus be saved such blunders as teaching in december a literature lesson on _an apple orchard in the spring_, or assigning a composition on "tobogganing" in june, because he realizes that the interest in these topics is not then active. each season, each month of the year, each festival and holiday has its own particular interests, which may be effectively utilized by the presentation of appropriate materials in literature, in composition, in nature study, and in history. a current event may be taken advantage of to teach an important lesson in history or civics. for instance, an election may be made the occasion of a lesson on voting by ballot, a miniature election being conducted for that purpose. . when the teacher appreciates the extent of the capacities of children, he will not make too heavy demands upon their powers of logical reasoning by introducing too soon the study of formal grammar or the solution of difficult arithmetical problems. when he knows that the period from eight to twelve is the habit-forming period, he will stress, during these years such things as mechanical accuracy in the fundamental rules in arithmetic, the memorization of gems of poetry, and the cultivation of right physical and moral habits. when he knows the influence of motor expression in giving definiteness, vividness, and permanency to ideas, he will have much work in drawing, modelling, constructive work, dramatization, and oral and written expression. methods of child study =a. observation.=--from the teacher's standpoint the method of observation of individual children is the most practicable. he has the material for his observations constantly before him. he soon discovers that one pupil is clever, another dull; that one excels in arithmetic, another in history; that one is inclined to jump to conclusions, another is slow and deliberate. he is thus able to adapt his methods to meet individual requirements. but however advantageous this may be from the practical point of view, it must be noted that the facts thus secured are individual and not universal. such child study does not in itself carry one very far. to be of real value to the teacher, these particular facts must be recognized as illustrative of a general law. when the teacher discovers, for instance, that nobody in his class responds very heartily to an abstract discussion of the rabbit, but that everybody is intensely interested when the actual rabbit is observed, he may regard the facts as illustrating the general principle that children need to be appealed to through the senses. likewise when he obtains poor results in composition on the topic, "how i spent my summer holidays," but excellent results on "how to plant bulbs," especially after the pupils have planted a bed of tulips on the front lawn, he may infer the law, that the best work is obtained when the matter is closely associated with the active interests of pupils. by watching the children when they are on the school grounds, the teacher may observe how far the occupations of the home, or a current event, such as a circus, an election, or a war, influences the play of the children. thus the method of observation requires that not only individual facts should be obtained, but also that general principles should be inferred on the basis of these. care must be taken, however, that the facts observed justify the inference. =b. experiment.=--an experiment in any branch of science means the observation of results under controlled conditions. experimental child study must, to a large extent, therefore, be relegated to the psychological laboratory. such experiments as the localization of cutaneous impressions, the influence of certain operations on fatigue, or the discovery of the length of time necessary for a conscious reaction, can be successfully carried out only with more or less elaborate equipment and under favourable conditions. however, the school offers opportunity for some simple yet practical experiments in child study. the teacher may discover experimentally what is the most favourable period at which to place a certain subject on the school programme, whether, for instance, it is best to take mechanical arithmetic when the minds of the pupils are fresh or when they are weary, or whether the writing lesson had better be taught immediately after the strenuous play at recess or at a time when the muscles are rested. he may find out the response of the pupils to problems in arithmetic closely connected with their lives (for example, in a rural community problems relating to farm activities), as compared with their response to problems involving more or less remote ideas. he may discover to what extent concentration in securing neat exercises in one subject, composition for instance, affects the exercises in other subjects in which neatness has not been explicitly demanded. this latter experiment might throw some light upon the much debated question of formal discipline. in all these cases the teacher must be on his guard not to accept as universal principles what he has found to be true of a small group of pupils, until at least he has found his conclusions verified by other experimenters. =c. direct questions.=--this method involves the submission of questions to pupils of a particular age or grade, collecting and classifying their answers, and basing conclusions upon these. much work in this direction has been done in recent years by certain educators, and much illuminating and more or less useful material has been collected. a good deal of light has been thrown upon the apperceptive material that children have possession of by noting their answers to such questions as: "have you ever seen the stars? a robin? a pig? where does milk come from? where do potatoes come from?" etc., etc. the practical value of this method lies in the insight it gives into the interests of children, the kind of imagery they use, and the relationships they have set up among their ideas. every teacher has been surprised at times at the absurd answers given by children. these absurdities are usually due to the teacher's taking for granted that the pupils have possession of certain old knowledge that is actually absent. the moral of such occurrences is that he should examine very carefully what "mind stuff" the pupils have for interpreting the new material. =d. biographical studies of individual children.=--many books have been written describing the development of individual children. these descriptions doubtless contain much that is typical of all children, but one must be careful not to argue too much from an individual case. such records are valuable as confirmatory evidence of what has already been observed in connection with other children, or as suggestive of what may be looked for in them. periods of development the period covered by child study may be roughly divided into three parts, namely, ( ) infancy, extending from birth to three years of age, ( ) childhood, from three to twelve, and ( ) adolescence, from twelve to eighteen. while children during each of these periods exhibit striking dissimilarities one from another, there are nevertheless many characteristics that are fairly universal during each period. . infancy =a. physical characteristics.=--one of the striking features of infancy is the rapidity with which command of the bodily organs is secured. starting with a few inherited reflexes, the child at three years of age has attained fairly complete control of his sense organs and bodily movements, though he lacks that co-ordination of muscles by which certain delicate effects of hand and voice are produced. the relative growth is greater at this than at any subsequent period. another prominent characteristic is the tendency to incessant movement. the constant handling, exploring, and analysing of objects enhances the child's natural thirst for knowledge, and he probably obtains a larger stock of ideas during the first three years of his life than during any equal period subsequently. =b. mental characteristics.=--a conspicuous feature of infancy is the imitative tendency, which early manifests itself. through this means the child acquires many of his movements, his language power, and the simple games he plays. sense impressions begin to lose their fleeting character and to become more permanent. as evidence of this, few children remember events farther back than their third year, while many can distinctly recall events of the third and fourth years even after the lapse of a long period of time. the child at this period begins to compare, classify, and generalize in an elementary way, though his ideas are still largely of the concrete variety. his attention is almost entirely non-voluntary; he is interested in objects and activities for themselves alone, and not for the sake of an end. he is, as yet, unable to conceive remote ends, the prime condition of voluntary attention. his ideas of right and wrong conduct are associated with the approval and disapproval of those about him. . childhood =a. physical characteristics.=--in the earlier period of childhood, from three to seven years, bodily growth is very rapid. much of the vital force is thus consumed, and less energy is available for physical activity. the child has also less power of resistance and is thus susceptible to the diseases of childhood. his movements are for the same reason lacking in co-ordination. in the later period, from seven to twelve years, the bodily growth is less rapid, more energy is available for physical activity, and the co-ordination of muscles is greater. the brain has now reached its maximum size and weight, any further changes being due to the formation of associative pathways along nerve centres. this is, therefore, pre-eminently the habit-forming period. from the physical standpoint this means that those activities that are essentially habitual must have their genesis during the period between seven and twelve if they are to function perfectly in later life. the mastery of a musical instrument must be begun then if technique is ever to be perfect. if a foreign language is to be acquired, it should be begun in this period, or there will always be inaccuracies in pronunciation and articulation. =b. mental characteristics.=--the instinct of curiosity is very active in the earlier period of childhood, and this, combined with greater language power, leads to incessant questionings on the part of the child. he wants to know what, where, why, and how, in regard to everything that comes under his notice, and fortunate indeed is that child whose parent or teacher is sufficiently long-suffering to give satisfactory answers to his many and varied questions. to ignore the inquiries of the child, or to return impatient or grudging answers may inhibit the instinct and lead later to a lack of interest in the world about him. the imitative instinct is also still active and reveals itself particularly in the child's play, which in the main reflects the activities of those about him. he plays horse, policeman, school, indian, in imitation of the occupations of others. parents and teachers should depend largely upon this imitative tendency to secure desirable physical habits, such as erect and graceful carriage, cleanliness of person, orderly arrangement of personal belongings, neatness in dress, etc. the imagination is exceedingly active during childhood, fantastic and unregulated in the earlier period, under better control and direction in the later. it reveals itself in the love of hearing, reading, or inventing stories. the imitative play mentioned above is one phase of imaginative activity. the child's ideas of conduct, in this earlier stage of childhood, are derived from the pleasure or pain of their consequences. he has as yet little power of subordinating his lower impulses to an ideal end, and hence is not properly a moral being. good conduct must, therefore, be secured principally through the exercise of arbitrary authority from without. in the later period of childhood, acquired interests begin to be formed and, coincident with this, active attention appears. the child begins to be interested in the product, not merely in the process. the mind at this period is most retentive of sense impressions. this is consequently the time to bring the child into immediate contact with his environment through his senses, in such departments as nature study and field work in geography. thus is laid the basis of future potentialities of imagery, and through it appreciation of literature. on account of the acuteness of sense activity at this period, this is also the time for memorization of fine passages of prose and poetry. the child's thinking is still of the pictorial rather than of the abstract order, though the powers of generalization and language are considerably extended. the social interests are not yet strong, and hence co-operation for a common purpose is largely absent. his games show a tendency toward individualism. when co-operative games are indulged in, he is usually willing to sacrifice the interests of his team to his own personal glorification. . adolescence =a. physical characteristics.=--in early adolescence the characteristic physical accompaniments of early childhood are repeated, namely, rapid growth and lack of muscular co-ordination. from twelve to fifteen, girls grow more rapidly than boys and are actually taller and heavier than boys at corresponding ages. from fifteen onward, however, the boys rapidly outstrip the girls in growth. lack of muscular co-ordination is responsible for the awkward movements, ungainly appearance, ungraceful carriage, with their attendant self-consciousness, so characteristic of both boys and girls in early adolescence. =b. mental characteristics.=--ideas are gradually freed from their sensory accompaniments. the child thinks in symbols rather than in sensory images. consequently there is a greater power of abstraction and reflective thought. this is therefore the period for emphasizing those subjects requiring logical reasoning, for example, mathematics, science, and the reflective aspects of grammar, history, and geography. from association with others or from literature and history, ideals begin to be formed which influence conduct. this is brought about largely through the principle of suggestion. in the early years of adolescence children are very susceptible to suggestions, but the suggestive ideas must be introduced by a person who is trusted, admired, or loved, or under circumstances inspiring these feelings; hence the importance to the adolescent of having teachers of strong and inspiring personality. however, if the suggestive idea is to influence action, it must be introduced in such a way as not to set up a reaction against it. reaction will be set up if the idea is antagonistic to the present ideas, feelings, or aims, or if it is so persistently thrust upon the child that he begins to suspect that he is being unduly influenced. to avoid reaction the parent or teacher should introduce suggestive ideas indirectly. for instance, while the mind is concentrated upon one set of ideas, a suggestive idea that would otherwise be distasteful may be tolerated. it may lie latent for a time, and when it recurs it may be regarded as original, under which condition it is likely to issue in action. the adolescent stage is the period of greatest emotional development, and care should therefore be exercised to have the child's mind dwell upon only those ideas with which worthy emotions are associated. the emotional bent, whether good or bad, is determined to a large extent during this period of adolescence. so far as morality is the subordination of primitive instincts to higher ideas, the child now becomes a moral being. his conduct is now determined by reason and by ideals, and the primitive pleasure-pain motives disappear. it follows that coercion and arbitrary authority have little place in discipline at this period. social interests are prominent, evidenced by the tendency to co-operate with others for a common end. the games of the period are mainly of the co-operative variety and are marked by a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the sake of the team, or side. individual differences while, as noted above, all children have certain common characteristics at each of the three periods of development, it is even more apparent that every child is in many respects different from every other child. he has certain peculiarities that demand particular treatment. it is evident that it would be impossible to enumerate all the individual differences in children. the most that can be done is to classify the most striking differences and endeavour to place individual children in one or other of these classes. =a. differences in thought.=--one of the obvious classifications of pupils is that of "quick" and "slow." the former learns easily, but often forgets quickly; the latter learns slowly, but usually retains well. the former is keen and alert; the latter, dull and passive. the former frequently lacks perseverance; the latter is often tenacious and persistent. the former unjustly wins applause for his cleverness; the latter, equally unjustly, wins contempt for his dulness. the teacher must not be unfair to the dull plodder, who in later years may frequently outstrip his brilliant competitor in the race of life. some pupils think better in the abstract, others, in the concrete. the former will analyse and parse well in grammar, distinguish fine shades of meaning in language, manage numbers skilfully, or work out chemical equations accurately. the latter will be more successful in doing things, for instance, measuring boards, planning and planting a garden plot, making toys, designing dolls' clothes, and cooking. the schools of the past have all emphasized the ability to think in the abstract, and to a large extent ignored the ability to think in the concrete. this is unfair to the one class of thinkers. from the ranks of those who think in the abstract have come the great statesmen, poets, and philosophers; from the ranks of those who think in the concrete have come the carpenters, builders, and inventors. it will be admitted that the world owes as great a debt from the practical standpoint to the latter class as to the former. let the school not despise or ignore the pupil who, though unable to think well in abstract studies, is able to do things. =b. differences in action.=--there is a marked difference among children in the ability to connect an abstract direction with the required act. this is particularly seen in writing, art, and constructive work, subjects in which the aim is the formation of habit, and in which success depends upon following explicitly the direction given. the teacher will find it economical to give very definite instruction as to what is to be done in work in these subjects. it is equally important that instructions regarding conduct should be definite and unmistakable. as explained in the last chapter, there are two extreme and contrasting types of will exhibited by children, namely, the impulsive type and the obstructed type. in the former, action occurs without deliberation immediately upon the appearance of the idea in consciousness. this type is illustrated in the case of the pupil who, as soon as he hears a question, thoughtlessly blurts out an answer without any reflection whatever. in the adult, we find a similar illustration when, immediately upon hearing a pitiable story from a beggar, he hands out a dollar without stopping to investigate whether or not the action is well-advised. it is useless to plead in extenuation of such actions that the answer may be correct or the act noble and generous. the probability is equally great that the opposite may be the case. the remedy for impulsive action is patiently and persistently to encourage the pupil to reflect a moment before acting. in the case of the obstructed type of will, the individual ponders long over a course of action before he is able to bring himself to a decision. such is the child whom it is hard to persuade to answer even easy questions, because he is unable to decide in just what form to put his answer. on an examination paper he proceeds slowly, not because he does not know the matter, but because he finds it hard to decide just what facts to select and how to express them. the bashful child belongs to this type. he would like to answer questions asked him, to talk freely with others, to act without any feeling of restraint, but is unable to bring himself to do so. the obstinate child is also of this type. he knows what he ought to do, but the opposing motives are strong enough to inhibit action in the right direction. as already shown, the remedy for the obstructed will is to encourage rapid deliberation and choice and then immediate action, thrusting aside all opposing motives. show such pupils that in cases where the motives for and against a certain course of action are of equal strength, it often does not matter which course is selected. one may safely choose either and thus end the indecision. the "quick" child usually belongs to the impulsive type; the "slow" child, to the obstructed type. the former is apt to decide and act hastily and frequently unwisely; the latter is more guarded and, on the whole, more sound in his decision and action. =c. differences in temperament.=--all four types of temperament given in the formal classification are represented among children in school. the _choleric_ type is energetic, impulsive, quick-tempered, yet forgiving, interested in outward events. the _phlegmatic_ type is impassive, unemotional, slow to anger, but not of great kindness, persistent in pursuing his purposes. the _sanguine_ type is optimistic, impressionable, enthusiastic, but unsteady. the _melancholic_ type is pessimistic, introspective, moody, suspicious of the motives of others. most pupils belong to more than one class. perhaps the two most prominent types represented in school are ( ) that variety of the sanguine temperament which leads the individual to think himself, his possessions, and his work superior to all others, and ( ) that variety of the melancholic temperament which leads the individual to fancy himself constantly the victim of injustice on the part of the teacher or the other pupils. a pupil of the first type always believes that his work is perfectly done; he boasts that he is sure he made a hundred per cent. on his examinations; what he has is always, in his own estimation, better than that of others. when the teacher suggests that his work might be better done, the pupil appears surprised and aggrieved. such a child should be shown that he is right in not being discouraged over his own efforts, but wrong in thinking that his work does not admit of improvement. a pupil of the second type is continually imagining that the teacher treats him unjustly, that the other pupils slight or injure him, that, in short, he is an object of persecution. such a pupil should be shown that nobody has a grudge against him, that the so-called slights are entirely imaginary, and that he should take a sane view of these things, depending more upon judgment than on feeling to estimate the action of others toward him. =d. sex differences.=--boys differ from girls in the predominance of certain instincts, interests, and mental powers. in boys the fighting instinct, and capacities of leadership, initiative, and mastery are prominent. in girls the instinct of nursing and fondling, and the capacities to comfort and relieve are prominent. these are revealed in the games of the playground. the interests of the two sexes are different, since their games and later pursuits are different. in a system of co-education it is impossible to take full cognizance of this fact in the work of the school. yet it is possible to make some differentiation between the work assigned to boys and that assigned to girls. for instance, arithmetical problems given to boys might deal with activities interesting to boys, and those to girls might deal with activities interesting to girls. in composition the differentiation will be easier. such a topic as "a game of baseball" would be more suitable for boys, and on the other hand "how to bake bread" would make a stronger appeal to girls. similarly in literature, such a poem as _how they brought the good news from ghent to aix_ would be particularly interesting to boys, while _the romance of a swan's nest_ would be of greater interest to girls. as to mental capacities, boys are usually superior in those fields where logical reasoning is demanded, while girls usually surpass boys in those fields involving perceptive powers and verbal memory. for instance, boys succeed better in mathematics, science, and the reflective phases of history; girls succeed better in spelling, in harmonizing colours in art work, in distinguishing fine shades of meaning in language, and in memorizing poetry. the average intellectual ability of each sex is nearly the same, but boys deviate from the average more than girls. thus while the most brilliant pupils are likely to be boys, the dullest are also likely to be boys. it is a scientific fact that there are more individuals of conspicuously clever mind, but also more of weak intellect, among men than there are among women. =a caution.=--while it has been stated that the teacher should take notice of individual differences in his pupils, it may be advisable also to warn the student-teacher against any extravagant tendency in the direction of such a study. a teacher is occasionally met who seems to act on the assumption that his chief function is not to educate but to study children. too much of his time may therefore be spent in the conducting of experiments and the making of observations to that end. while the data thus secured may be of some value, it must not be forgotten that control of the subject-matter of education and of the method of presenting that subject-matter to the normal child, together with an earnest, enthusiastic, and sympathetic manner, are the prime qualifications of the teacher as an instructor. appendix suggested readings from books of reference chapter i bagley the educative process, chapter i. colvin the learning process, chapter ii. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapter i. thorndike principles of teaching, chapter i. chapter ii bagley educational values, chapters i, ii, iii. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapter iii. thorndike elements of psychology, chapter i. welton the psychology of education, chapter vi. chapter iii bagley the educative process, chapters iv, xiv. colvin the learning process, chapter i. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter i. raymont the principles of education, chapter xi. chapter iv bagley the educative process, chapters ii, xv. dewey the school and society, part i. raymont the principles of education, chapters vi, vii. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapter xviii. chapter v bagley the educative process, chapter i. raymont the principles of education, chapter iii. chapter vi bagley the educative process, chapter iii. dewey the school and society, part ii. raymont the principles of education, chapters i, iv. welton the psychology of education, chapter xiii. chapter vii landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter i. chapter viii landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter i. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter i. raymont the principles of education, chapter viii. chapter ix kirkpatrick fundamentals of child study, chapter iv. landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter vii. dewey the school and society, part ii. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapter ii. thorndike principles of teaching, chapter iii. chapter x betts the mind and its education, chapter vii. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter vi. thorndike principles of teaching, chapters iv, ix. chapter xi angell psychology, chapter vi. bagley the educative process, chapters iv, v, ix. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter v. raymont the principles of education, chapter viii. chapter xii betts psychology, chapter xvi. thorndike principles of teaching, chapter xiii. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter ix. chapter xiii landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter vi. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter vii. raymont the principles of education, chapter xii. chapter xiv mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapter iii. chapter xv bagley the educative process, chapters xix, xx. colvin the learning process, chapter xxii. mcmurry the method of the recitation, chapters viii, x. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapters v, vi. chapter xvi landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter iii. chapter xvii bagley the educative process, chapters xxi, xxii. landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter iv. strayer a brief course in the teaching process, chapters iv, viii, x. chapter xviii landon the principles and practice of teaching, chapter vi. raymont the principles of education, chapter xii. strayer a brief course in the educative process, chapter xi. chapter xix betts the mind and its education, chapter i. pillsbury essentials of education, chapter i. raymont the principles of education, chapter ii. welton the psychology of education, chapter i. chapter xx angell psychology, chapter ii. betts the mind and its education, chapter iii. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter ii. halleck education of the central nervous system. chapter xxi colvin the learning process, chapters iii, iv. kirkpatrick fundamentals of child study, chapter iv. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter x. thorndike principles of teaching, chapter iii. welton the psychology of education, chapter iv. chapter xxii angell psychology, chapter iii. bagley the educative process, chapter vii. betts the mind and its education, chapter v. colvin the learning process, chapters iii, iv. thorndike principles of teaching, chapter viii. thorndike elements of psychology, chapter xiii. chapter xxiii angell psychology, chapter iv. betts the mind and its education, chapter ii. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter v. welton the psychology of education, chapter viii. chapter xxiv angell psychology, chapter xxi. betts the mind and its education, chapter xiii. james talks to teachers, chapter x. welton the psychology of education, chapter vii. chapter xxv angell psychology, chapters v, vi. betts the mind and its education, chapter vi. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapters iv, vii. chapter xxvi angell psychology, chapter ix. bagley the educative process, chapters iv, xi. betts the mind and its education, chapter viii. thorndike elements of psychology, chapter iii. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter viii. chapter xxvii angell psychology, chapter viii. betts the mind and its education, chapter ix. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter viii. chapter xxviii angell psychology, chapters x, xii. bagley the educative process, chapters ix, x. betts the mind and its education, chapter x. colvin the learning process, chapter xxii. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter ix. thorndike elements of psychology, chapter vi. chapter xxix angell psychology, chapters xiii, xiv. betts the mind and its education, chapters xii, xiv. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapters xi, xii. chapter xxx angell psychology, chapters xx, xxii. betts the mind and its education, chapter xv. pillsbury essentials of psychology, chapter xiii. thorndike elements of psychology, chapter vi. chapter xxxi bagley the educative process, chapter xii. raymont the principles of education, chapter v. kirkpatrick fundamentals of child study. [secretary's circular no. -- - .] schedule of salaries for teachers, members of the supervising staff and others. january --august , , inclusive. boston school committee, secretary's office, january , . in school committee, january , . . ordered, that the salaries of teachers, members of the supervising staff, and others in the public schools are hereby established for the period january to august , , inclusive, in accordance with the following schedules and subject to the following restrictions: a. ordered, that the salaries of teachers, members of the supervising staff, and others who receive annual salaries, which have been fixed by order a of the salary schedule for the year ending august , , shall, during the period january to august , , inclusive, be fixed and advanced in accordance with the provisions of said order; provided, that the salaries of such persons in those ranks in which the minimum and maximum salaries in the following schedules have been increased over the minimum and maximum provided in the existing schedules by the same amount, be advanced by said amount on january , , and the salaries of such persons shall thereafter be advanced on their several anniversaries by the annual increment provided in the following schedules; and provided further, that the final increment shall be such amount as shall place the teacher on the maximum salary of the rank. b. ordered, that the salaries of teachers, members of the supervising staff, and others who receive annual salaries, which have been fixed by order a of the salary schedule for the year ending august , , shall, during the period january to august , , inclusive, be fixed and advanced in accordance with the provisions of said order; provided, that the salaries of such persons in those ranks in which the minimum and maximum salaries have been increased over the minimum and maximum provided in the existing schedules by unequal amounts, shall be advanced in the following manner: (a) the salaries of those teachers, members of the supervising staff, and others who have not reached the maximum salary of the existing schedule or who have not served one year on said maximum salary, shall, on january , , be advanced by the amount of the increase in the minimum of their respective schedules over the minimum of the existing schedules; and the salaries of such persons shall thereafter be advanced upon their respective anniversaries by the annual increment provided in the following schedules until the new maximum of their ranks is reached; provided, that the final increment shall be such amount as shall place the teacher upon the maximum salary of the rank. (b) the salaries of those teachers, members of the supervising staff, and others who on december , , have reached the maximum salary of the existing schedules, and who have served one full year thereon, shall on january , , be advanced by the amount of the increase in the maximum of the following schedule over the maximum of the existing schedule. c. ordered, that the salaries of masters of day elementary and day intermediate schools which have been fixed by order b of the existing salary schedule shall, during the period january to august , , inclusive, be fixed and advanced in accordance with the provisions of said order; provided, that the salaries of such masters shall on january , , be advanced by the amount of two hundred forty dollars ($ ) per annum, and the salaries of such masters shall thereafter be advanced upon their respective anniversaries by the annual increment provided in the following schedule until the new maximum of their rank is reached; and provided further, that the salaries of those masters who have reached the maximum of the existing schedule on december , , shall, on january , , be advanced by the receipt of one hundred twenty dollars ($ ) per annum to the new maximum of their rank in the following schedule: normal school. head master, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , master, director of model school, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , masters, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , junior masters, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , first assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , clerical assistant, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , latin and day high schools. head masters, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , masters, heads of departments, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , junior masters, appointed before june , , who have attained the rank of master , junior masters, appointed after june , , first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant principals, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , the rank of assistant principal shall be abolished as the position becomes vacant by the retirement of the present incumbents. first assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , industrial instructors, heads of departments (high school of practical arts), first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , junior assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors in mechanical department (mechanic arts high school), first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , co-ordinator, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , co-operative instructors (brighton, charlestown, dorchester, east boston and hyde park high schools), first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , industrial instructors (dorchester, east boston, and hyde park high schools and high school of practical arts), first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) clerical assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors--latin and day high schools. commercial branches instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , manual arts instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , salesmanship assistant instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , boston clerical school head master, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , head instructors in bookkeeping and head instructors in stenography, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum, , clerical instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , clerical assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , teachers of english, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) day elementary schools and day intermediate schools masters, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , sub-masters in charge, in addition to the regular salary of their rank sub-masters, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , masters' assistants in charge, in addition to the regular salary of their rank masters' assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , first assistants, grammar school, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , first assistant, primary school , the rank of first assistant, primary school, shall be abolished on the retirement or promotion of the present incumbent. first assistants in charge, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , prevocational assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) clerical assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , kindergartens. director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , first assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) trade school for girls. master (including regular, summer and evening terms), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , heads of departments, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , trade assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , helpers, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , vocational assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructor in personal and shop hygiene, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) bookkeeper (including evening and summer terms), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , clerical assistant (including evening and summer terms), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , boston trade school. master (including day, evening trade, summer, continuation and trade extension classes), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , vice-principal (including day, evening trade, summer, continuation and trade extension classes), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , division heads, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , shop foreman, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , shop instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors in academic and technical branches, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) bookkeeper (including evening term), first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , clerical assistant, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , evening classes assistants in charge, per evening $ . assistants, per evening . second assistants, per evening . toolkeeper, per evening . horace mann school for the deaf principal, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) evening schools director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , supervisors of divisions in evening elementary schools, per evening $ . high principals, per evening . assistants, per evening . typewriting assistants, per evening . laboratory assistants, per evening . clerical assistants, per evening . temporary clerical assistants, per evening . elementary. principals, per evening $ . first assistants, per evening . assistants, per evening . assistants, classes in lip reading, per evening . clerical assistants, per evening . day school for immigrants. instructors, first year, $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) continuation school. principal, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , heads of divisions, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , division foremen, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , shop foremen, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , shop instructors, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , trade assistants, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , helpers, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors, boys' classes, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , vocational assistant, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , (for teachers employed on a per diem basis see order no. .) clerical assistants, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , summer review schools. high school. principal, per session $ . assistants, per session . elementary schools. principal, per session . assistants in charge of branches, per session . assistants, per session . educational investigation and measurement. assistant director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , department of household science and arts. director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , assistant director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , teachers of cookery, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , teachers of sewing, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , department of manual arts. director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , first assistant director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant directors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , first assistants in manual arts, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants in manual arts, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , shop foremen, first year $ , , annual increase, $ , maximum , shop instructors, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , foremen, shop work, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors, shop work, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors in manual training, elementary schools, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant instructors in manual training, elementary schools, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum , medical inspection. director $ , school physicians school physician assigned to certificating office , nurses supervising nurse, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , school nurses, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , department of music director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , assistant directors, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistants in music, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , penmanship director $ , physical training director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , instructors in physical training, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant instructors in physical training, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , instructor of military drill, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , assistant instructors of military drill , armorer, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , playgrounds. play teachers-- one session $ . two sessions . supervisors-- one session . two sessions . first assistants-- one session . two sessions . assistants-- one session . two sessions . assistants in sand gardens-- one session . two sessions . "one session" in this schedule for playgrounds shall mean from the close of school on afternoons and saturday mornings during the school weeks, and one-half day during the summer season. "two sessions" shall mean forenoon and afternoon. gardening. supervisors of gardening-- one session $ . two sessions . instructors in gardening-- one session . two sessions . first assistants in gardening-- one session . two sessions . assistants in gardening-- one session . two sessions . assistants in school gardens-- one session . two sessions . "one session" means from the close of school on afternoons, saturday mornings during school weeks, and one-half day during the summer term. department of practice and training. first assistant director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , assistant directors, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , special classes. director, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum $ , medical inspector , first assistants in charge, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , instructors, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , speech improvement classes and classes for conservation of eyesight. instructor in charge of speech improvement classes $ , instructors, first year $ , , annual increase $ , maximum , teachers promoted to the rank of instructor from the rank of assistant, day elementary schools, shall be placed upon that year of the schedule for the rank of instructor that is at least $ higher than the rate they are on in the rank of assistant, day elementary schools, at the time of their promotion. vocational guidance. director, first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ , extended use of public schools. director $ , school centers. managers (per hour) $ . (all school centers not to exceed hours per year.) associate managers (see orders nos. and .) conductors, per session . special leaders, per session . leaders, per session . special helpers, per session . doormen, per session . pianists, per session . helpers, per session . matrons, per session . lecturers for public lectures not illustrated, english or non-english, per lecture, not more than . lecturers for public lectures illustrated with uncolored slides, when lantern and operator are furnished by the school committee, per lecture, not more than . per lecture (colored or uncolored slides) for non-english speaking people, not more than . (slides furnished by school committee.) lecturers for public lectures illustrated with colored slides when lantern and operator are furnished by the school committee, per lecture, not more than . per lecture (colored or uncolored slides) for non-english speaking people, not more than . (slides furnished by lecturer.) lecturers for public lectures illustrated with uncolored slides when lantern and operator are furnished by the lecturer, per lecture, not more than . lecturers for public lectures illustrated with colored slides when lantern and operator are furnished by the lecturer, per lecture, not more than . lecturers for public lectures illustrated with both colored slides and motion pictures furnished by the lecturer or lectures illustrated with songs or picture plays, character dramas or dramatic impersonations, per lecture, not more than . stereopticon lantern operators, per session . motion picture operators, per session . teachers specially assigned. to the model school sub-master, in addition to the regular salary of his rank $ . to the model school, master's assistant, first assistant in charge, assistants in grades, first assistant in kindergarten and assistant kindergarten, in addition to the regular salary of their rank . to teachers in day high schools, assigned to afternoon industrial classes, per two-hour period . to assistants, day elementary schools, assigned to latin or day high schools or to a special department, in addition to the regular salary of their rank . to assistants, day elementary schools, and assistants, day intermediate schools, assigned to the continuation school, if employed six hours per day, in addition to the regular salary of their rank to assistants, day elementary schools, and assistants, day intermediate schools, assigned to prevocational classes if employed six hours per day, in addition to the regular salary of their rank to assistants, day elementary schools, and assistants, day intermediate schools, assigned to boston disciplinary day school, in addition to the regular salary of their rank to teachers of cookery or sewing, assigned to prevocational classes for girls, in addition to the regular salary of their rank the additional compensation above provided for teachers specially assigned shall cease upon the return of said teachers to their former positions and shall not be taken into consideration in determining the compensation to which they may be entitled upon appointment to any other rank or grade. . ordered, that the compensation of substitute and temporary teachers is hereby fixed for the period january to august , , inclusive, at the following rates for each day of actual service, one-session days being reckoned as whole days: normal, latin and day high schools. master and junior masters, normal, latin and day high schools $ . first assistants and assistants, normal, latin and day high schools . junior assistants, latin and day high schools . instructors and assistant instructors in commercial branches or physical training, latin and day high schools . instructors in manual arts and co-operative instructors in day high schools . assistant instructors in manual arts, latin and day high schools . industrial instructors in day high schools . instructors in military drill, latin and day high schools . special assistants in mechanical departments, per day: first year . second year . third and subsequent years . emergency special assistants in mechanical departments, per day . special assistants, industrial departments, per day: first year . second year . third and subsequent years . teacher coaches or coaches in latin, day high schools, and boston trade school, per day . boston clerical school. teacher assistants, per day . aids, per day . day elementary and day intermediate schools. sub-masters $ . masters' assistants, first assistants in charge, and first assistants grammar . assistants, per day . assistants, horace mann school, per day . special assistants, horace mann school, per day . special assistants, in grades, per day . special assistants, fort strong school . prevocational assistants, per day . first assistants, kindergarten-- one session . two sessions . first assistants, kindergarten for one session, and assistants, kindergarten, for one session during the same day . assistants, kindergarten-- one session . two sessions . special assistants, kindergarten-- one session . two sessions . instructors, special classes . teachers of cookery and sewing, per day . attendants, open air classes, per day . special assistants, day school for immigrants, per half-day . continuation school and industrial schools and classes. instructors academic and technical branches, boston trade school . vocational and trade assistants (continuation school and trade school for girls)-- per hour . not to exceed per day . aids (continuation school and trade school for girls), per day: first year . second year . third and subsequent years . helpers (continuation school and trade school for girls), per day . toolkeepers (continuation school and boston trade school), per day: first year . second year . third and subsequent years . special instructors (continuation school), per half-day . special assistants (continuation school), per half-day . in this school, one two-hour session, together with such preparatory and follow-up work as may be required, shall constitute one-half day of service for teachers employed and paid on the basis of each half-day of service. student aids (trade school for girls), per day: first year . second and subsequent years . apprentice helpers (boston trade school), per day: first year . second and subsequent years . special shop foremen and foremen shop work, department of manual arts, boston trade school, and continuation school . instructors, shop work, and shop instructors, department of manual arts, boston trade school, and continuation school . shop assistants, department of manual arts, per day . school nurses . school physicians . temporary clerical assistants, latin, day high, continuation, trade schools and day elementary schools, per day . and that the compensation of substitute and temporary teachers of other ranks than those enumerated herein shall be one four-hundredth part of the minimum salary of the respective ranks for each day of actual service. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , any teacher or member of the supervising staff who may be designated by the superintendent, in accordance with the regulations to fill a vacancy caused by the death, disability or absence of a principal of a school or district, or of a director, assistant director, supervisor or supervising nurse, for a continuous period exceeding two weeks, shall receive in addition to his or her regular salary one-half of the difference between the said salary and the minimum salary of the higher position during the time of such service, but not including the summer vacation. teachers who may similarly be designated to fill the positions of sub-master, master's assistant, first assistant in charge, first assistant in charge, special classes, or first assistant, kindergarten, shall be paid at the rate of ninety-six dollars ($ ) per year in addition to the regular salary of their rank. . ordered, that during the period january to august , , or during such portion thereof as the dorchester high school is conducted on the two-platoon system, the head master of that school shall be paid at the rate of three hundred dollars ($ ) per annum in addition to the regular salary of his rank. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , high school teachers designated to take charge of a branch or colony of a high school in a separate building shall be paid at the rate of three hundred dollars ($ ) per year in addition to the regular salary of their rank. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , the salaries of temporary teachers of salesmanship are hereby established in accordance with the following schedule: day high schools, per period $ . evening high schools, per period $ . continuation schools, per half-day $ . (the term "period" is a teaching unit accompanied by a definite requirement of follow-up work.) . ordered, that for the period january to august , , deductions on account of absence of temporary teachers serving on an annual salary shall be made on the same basis as that established for regular teachers. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , in addition to the compensation provided for master's assistants, first assistants in charge, and assistants, day elementary schools, those assigned to classes attended exclusively by boys in grades above the third in the agassiz, bigelow, dudley, dwight, eliot, frederic w. lincoln, lawrence, quincy, sherwin, thomas n. hart and wendell phillips districts, shall be paid additional compensation at the rate of forty-eight dollars ($ ) per year, beginning with the second anniversary of their assignments to such classes and continuing until the expiration of such assignment. . ordered, that teachers who have been reappointed to the boston trade school, trade school for girls, or the continuation school following service in either school ending not later than the close of the regular term in the preceding year, or appointed to service in other parts of the day school system following such service in such schools, shall be paid for the period between august and the date of the reopening of the schools at the same rate for said period as they were paid during the month of june last preceding. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , marie a. solano be paid at the rate of six hundred dollars ($ ) per year in addition to her regular salary as first assistant, head of department, normal school, during her special assignment to the supervision of the foreign language work in intermediate schools and classes, and for lectures and instruction to the teachers of foreign languages in intermediate schools and classes. . ordered, that ellen s. bloomfield, assistant, day elementary schools, assigned to special service as teacher of penmanship in the normal and day elementary schools, be paid at the rate of one hundred forty-four dollars ($ ) per year in addition to the regular salary of her rank, for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the compensation of sarah m. lilley and helen l. smith, teachers of classes for conservation of eyesight, is hereby established at the rate of five dollars and seventy-five cents ($ . ) per day of service for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the salary of eleanor j. o'brien, vocational assistant, department of vocational guidance, is hereby established at the rate of twenty-one hundred forty-eight dollars ($ , ) per year, to take effect january , . . ordered, that the salary of irving o. scott, vocational assistant, department of vocational guidance, is hereby established at the rate of two thousand fifty-two dollars ($ , ) per year, for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the salary of margaret m. sallaway, vocational assistant, department of vocational guidance, is hereby established at the rate of seventeen hundred forty dollars ($ , ) per year, for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the salary of ethel fletcher, vocational assistant, department of vocational guidance, is hereby established at the rate of sixteen hundred forty-four dollars ($ , ) per year, for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the employment of frances mccormick as temporary vocational assistant, department of vocational guidance, is hereby authorized on six days a week, from january to august , , and that she be paid during such employment at the rate of five dollars ($ ) per day. . ordered, that the compensation of louis k. hull, temporary prevocational instructor, is hereby established at the rate of two dollars and twenty cents ($ . ) per two-hour period of service for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the compensation of pianists employed in connection with physical training exercises in the public latin school is hereby established at the rate of one dollar and fifty cents ($ . ) per session for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the compensation of the pianist in the normal school is hereby established at the rate of fifty cents ( c) per hour during the period january to august , . . ordered, that for the period january to august , , ethel d. hodson and caroline a. shay be paid at the rate of one hundred dollars ($ ) per year in addition to their regular salaries as instructors, day school for immigrants, during their special assignment to assist the director of evening schools in the organization and supervision of classes in americanization, provided that such additional compensation shall not be taken into consideration in determining the compensation to which said teachers may be entitled upon appointment to any other rank or grade. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , the compensation of margaret m. higgins and mary s. keene, associate managers in school centers, is hereby established at the rate of six dollars and fifty cents ($ . ) per day, for service not more than the equivalent of one hundred nineteen ( ) days during said period. . ordered, that for the period january to august , , the compensation of elizabeth w. pigeon and elizabeth r. teaffe, associate managers in school centers, is hereby established at the rate of five dollars and fifty cents ($ . ) per day, for service not more than the equivalent of one hundred thirty-nine ( ) days during said period. . ordered, that alice mcnally be paid at the rate of fifty dollars ($ ) per year in addition to her regular salary as assistant, eliot district, during her special assignment to the fort strong school for the period january to august , . . ordered, that the salary of the chief attendance officer is hereby established at the rate of thirty-one hundred twenty dollars ($ ) per annum, to take effect january , , and to continue until otherwise ordered. . ordered, that the salary of attendance officers is hereby established in accordance with the following schedule, to take effect january , , and to continue until otherwise ordered: first year $ , annual increase $ , maximum $ . . ordered, that the salary of the supervisor of licensed minors is hereby established at the rate of twenty-two hundred twenty dollars ($ ) per annum, to take effect january , , and to continue until otherwise ordered. . ordered, that the salaries of permanent substitutes in the public schools are hereby established at the rate of four hundred forty-four dollars ($ ) for the period january to june , , both included. ordered, that for the year ending august , , the salary of the research assistant, department of educational investigation and measurement, is hereby established at the following rate: minimum, $ , ; annual increase, $ ; maximum, $ , . ordered, that for the year ending august , , the salary of the rank of examiner in penmanship is hereby established at the rate of twelve hundred dollars ($ , ) per year. ordered, that the superintendent is authorized to fix the compensation of lecturers employed in school centers and whose compensation is not fixed in the salary schedule; provided, that such compensation, including any service or other charges, shall in no case exceed forty dollars ($ ) per evening. in school committee, january , . ordered, that the compensation of the rank of emergency assistant, day elementary schools, is hereby established at the rate of three dollars ($ ) per day of actual service, to take effect jan. , . ordered, that the compensation of the rank of emergency kindergarten assistant, day elementary schools, is hereby established at the rate of two dollars ($ ) for one session of actual service, and three dollars ($ ) for two sessions of actual service during the same day, to take effect jan. , . thornton d. apollonio, secretary. ( , - - -' .) [illustration: allied printing trades union council label boston, mass.] +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | transcriber's note | | | | inconsistent punctuation of subheadings and currency has | | been retained. minor typographical corrections are | | documented in the source of the associated html version. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ the republic of childhood froebel's gifts by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith the republic of childhood by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith i _froebel's gifts_ the republic of childhood _the kindergarten is the free republic of childhood._--froebel froebel's gifts by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith the true teacher is a student of human nature, and the student of human nature is the pupil of god.--horatio stebbins boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company the riverside press, cambridge copyright, , by kate douglas riggs and nora archibald smith. _all rights reserved._ _the riverside press, cambridge, mass., u. s. a._ electrotyped and printed by h. o. houghton and company. preface the three little volumes on that republic of childhood, the kindergarten, of which this handbook, dealing with the gifts, forms the initial number, might well be called chips from a kindergarten workshop. they are the outcome of talks and conferences on froebel's educational principles with successive groups of earnest young women here, there, and everywhere, for fifteen years, and represent as much practical work at the bench as a carpenter could show in a similar length of time. they are the result of mutual give and take, of question and answer, of effort and experience, of the friction of minds against one another, of ideas struck out in the heat of argument, and of varied experience with many hundred little children of all nationalities and conditions. they are not theories, written in the seclusion of the study; and if perchance they have the defects, so should they have the virtues, too, of work corrected and revised at every step by the "child in the midst." if it is objected that many things in them have been heard before, we can but say with montaigne: "truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first than his who spake them after." the various talks have been cut down here, enlarged there, condensed in one place, amplified in another, from year to year, as knowledge and experience have grown; many of the ideas which they advocated in the beginning have been eliminated, as being completely reversed by the passage of time, and much new matter has been added as the kindergarten principle has developed. they are as much a growth as a coral reef, though the authors have little hope that they will be as enduring. the kindergarten of is not the kindergarten of , for the science of education has made great strides in these past fifteen years. many things which were held to be vital principles when we began our talks with kindergarten students, we now find were but lifeless methods after all. it is not that time has reversed the fundamental principles on which the kindergarten rests,--these are as true as truth and as changeless; but the interpretation of them has greatly changed and broadened with the passage of years, and many of the instrumentalities of education which froebel devised are destined to further transformation in the future. for this reason, the last book on the kindergarten is sometimes the best book, since it naturally embodies the latest thought and discovery on the subject. these talks on the kindergarten have purposely been divested of a certain amount of technicality and detail, in the hope that they will thus reach not only kindergarten students, but the many mothers and teachers who really long to know what froebel's system of education is and what it aims to do. they will never of themselves make a kindergartner, and are not intended to do so; but they certainly should shed some light on froebel's theories, and establish a basis on which they can be worked out in the home and in the school. we shall attempt no defense of the kindergarten here. it has passed the experimental stage; it is no longer on trial for its life; and no longer humbly begging, hat in hand, for a place to lay its head. as an educational idea, it is a recognized part of the great system of child-training; and to say, in this year of our lord, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five, that one does not believe in the kindergarten is as if one said, i do not believe in electricity, or, i never saw much force in the law of gravitation. true, froebel's ideas are often misinterpreted and misapplied; often espoused by ignorant and sentimental persons; often degraded in their practical application; true, the ideal kindergarten and the ideal kindergartner are seldom seen--(though they are worth traveling a thousand miles _to_ see)--all this is true, and no one knows it better than we; but that a divine idea is wrongly used does not invalidate its divinity. that kindergarten principles are gaining ground everywhere; that every year more free and private kindergartens are established, more training schools opened, more students applying for instruction, more books written on the subject, more educational periodicals seeking for kindergarten articles, more cities adding it to their school systems, more normal schools giving courses in kindergarten training, more mothers and teachers seeking for light on froebel's principles,--all these are matters of statistics which any one may verify by consulting the reports of the commissioner of education and the various educational magazines. our modest volumes, of which the second will deal with the occupations, the third with the educational theories of froebel, do not claim to be deeply philosophic, nor even to be exhaustive. they are, in a sense, what is called a "popular" treatise on a scientific subject; and though some scientists decry such treatises, yet there are many persons to whom a simple message carries more conviction than a purely philosophic one. it is hoped that the psychologic principles on which the talks rest are at least measurably correct, though when doctors disagree on vital points, how shall the layman know the extent of his own ignorance? the authors have always been of a humble and docile spirit, and in the earlier years of their work with children, looking upon all treatises on education as inspired, tried faithfully to make the child's mind work according to the laws therein laid down. but sometimes the child's mind obstinately declined to follow the prescribed route; it refused to begin at the proper beginning of a subject and go on logically to the end, as the books decreed, but flew into the middle of it, and darted both ways, like a weaver's shuttle. if, then, any one of the theories we enunciate does not coincide with your particular educational creed, we can only say that ours, we fear, has sometimes been a "rule of thumb" psychology, and that in our experience it has occasionally been necessary to turn a psychologic law the other end foremost before it could be made to fit the child. we have endeavored not to be dogmatic in any of these talks, for we do not claim to have seen and counted all the facets of the crystal of truth. we humbly acknowledge that we have often been wrong in the past, and no reason has latterly been given us to believe ourselves infallible; but these disputed points in the kindergarten are, after all, of no more vital importance than the old theologic controversy as to how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. if the occupations are found to be based on incorrect psychologic principles, do not use them; if a similar objection is made to the gifts, substitute others. these are all accessories,--they are of no more importance than the leaves to the tree; if time and stress of weather strip them off, the life current is still there, and new ones will grow in their places. kate douglas wiggin. nora archibald smith. _august_, . contents page thoughts on the gifts of froebel froebel's first gift froebel's second gift the building gifts froebel's third gift froebel's fourth gift froebel's fifth gift froebel's sixth gift froebel's seventh gift froebel's eighth gift froebel's ninth gift froebel's tenth gift general remarks on the gifts froebel's gifts thoughts on the gifts of froebel "a correct comprehension of external, material things is a preliminary to a just comprehension of intellectual relations." friedrich froebel. "the a, b, c of things must precede the a, b, c of words, and give to the words (abstractions) their true foundations. it is because these foundations fail so often in the present time that there are so few men who think independently and express skillfully their inborn divine ideas." friedrich froebel. "perception is the beginning and the preliminary condition for thinking. one's own perceptions awaken one's own conceptions, and these awaken one's own thinking in later stages of development. let us have no precocity, but natural, that is consecutive, development." friedrich froebel. "every child brings with him into the world the natural disposition to see correctly what is before him, or, in other words, the truth. if things are shown to him in their connection, his soul perceives them thus as a conception. but if, as often happens, things are brought before his mind singly, or piecemeal, and in fragments, then the natural disposition to see correctly is perverted to the opposite, and the healthy mind is perplexed." friedrich froebel. "the linking together which is everywhere seen, and which holds the universe in its wholeness and unity, the eye receives, and thereby receives the representation, but without understanding it except as an impression and an image. but these first impressions are the root-fibres for the understanding that is developed later." friedrich froebel. "the correct perception is a preparation for correct knowing and thinking." friedrich froebel. "no new subject of instruction should come to the scholar, of which he does not at least conjecture that it is grounded in the former subject, and how it is so grounded as its application shows, and concerning which he does not, however dimly, feel it to be a need of the human spirit." friedrich froebel. "the sequences which the child builds, as well as the sequence of the kindergarten gifts, point on the one hand to physical evolution, wherein each form 'remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher,' and on the other to the process of historic development, which magnifies the present by linking with it the past and the future." susan e. blow. "let us educate the senses, train the faculty of speech, the art of receiving, storing, and expressing impressions, which is the natural gift of infants, and we shall not need books to fill up the emptiness of our teaching until the child is at least seven years old." e. seguin. "as soon as we, young or old, have taken to the habit of asking the book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation, we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the patchwork of others." e. seguin. "natural geometry (taking the word in its limited sense of study of form in space) is the object of a desire which generally precedes the artificial curiosity for the meaning of letters." e. seguin. "without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful." herbert spencer. "the truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them." herbert spencer. "if we consider it, we shall find that exhaustive observation is an element of all great success." herbert spencer. "learn to comprehend each thing in its entire history. this is the maxim of science guided by the reason." wm. t. harris. "geometrical facts and conceptions are easier to a child than those of arithmetic." thomas hill. "instruction must begin with actual inspection, not with verbal descriptions of things. from such inspection it is that certain knowledge comes. what is actually seen remains faster in the memory than description or enumeration a hundred times as often repeated." comenius. "observation is the absolute basis of all knowledge. the first object, then, in education, must be to lead the child to observe with accuracy; the second, to express with correctness the results of his observation." pestalozzi. "if in the external universe any one constructive principle can be detected, it is the geometrical." bulwer-lytton. "the education of the senses neglected, all after-education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency, which it is impossible to cure." lord bacon. "of this thing be certain: wouldst thou plant for eternity? then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart. wouldst thou plant for year and day? then plant into his shallow, superficial faculties, his self-love, and arithmetical understanding, what will grow there." thos. carlyle. froebel's first gift "i wish to find the right forms for awakening the higher senses of the child: what symbol does my ball offer to him? that of unity." "the ball connects the child with nature as much as the universe connects man with god." friedrich froebel. "line in nature is not found, unit and universe are round." "nature centres into balls." r. w. emerson. "from thy hand the worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims from that same hand its little shining sphere of starlit dew." o. w. holmes. "the small, a sphere as perfect as the great to the soul's absoluteness." robert browning. . the first gift consists of six soft woolen balls colored in the six standard colors derived from the spectrum, namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. the balls should be provided with strings for use in the various motions.[ ] [ ] "the string unites the ball, symbol of the outer world, with the child, and is the means by which it can act upon his inner nature." (e. g. seymour.) . froebel chose the ball as the first gift because it is the simplest shape, and the one from which all others may subsequently be derived; the shape most easily grasped by the hand as well as by the mind. it is an object which attracts by its pleasing color, and one which, viewed from all directions, ever makes the same impression.[ ] [ ] "the egyptians and the greeks hung geometrical forms over their cradles, so as to strike the eyes of the child with lawful relations. froebel introduces colored balls for the same purpose, which, considering the psychological and emotional condition of the child, leads to the joyful conception of motion, color, and life." (emma marwedel.) . the most important characteristics of the gift are unity, activity, color. the various colors serve to distinguish these several playmates of the child by special characteristics, and enable him to make his first clear analyses or abstractions, since the color is the only point wherein the objects differ. this contrast in color results in the abstraction of color from form. . since the ball is the most mobile of inanimate shapes, it may be considered as the "opposite equal" of the living organism. the quickness and ease of its motion as well as its elasticity cause the child to regard it as instinct with life, while its softness renders him able to grasp and handle it readily. its material is also of great advantage in that it lessens the possibility of startling noises which would distract the child from the contemplation of its qualities. by its use, he is first led to observation, and then to self-expression. as the simplest type-form as well as the most universal, it offers a satisfactory basis for the classification of objects in general; while its indefiniteness and adaptability make it a useful medium for the expression of the child's vague ideas. with the ball we give first impressions of _unity_, _form_, _color_, _material_, _mobility_, _motion_, _direction_, and _position_. the ball songs and plays are used as the first exercises in language, singing, and rhythm. . as the kindergarten gifts are designed to serve as an alphabet of form, by whose use the child may learn to read all material objects, it follows that they must form an organically connected sequence, moving in logical order from an object which contains all qualities, but directly emphasizes none, to objects more specialized in nature, and therefore more definitely suggestive as to use. "each successive gift in the series must not only be implicit in, but demanded by, its predecessor;" so froebel selects the ball, with its simplicity but great adaptability, for the starting-point of his series. . connected contrasts of motion, direction, and position are shown in the first gift. by the use of pigments, the so-called secondary colors, purple, orange, and green, may be produced from the opposite hues, red and blue, red and yellow, and blue and yellow. "the mind is aroused to attention and led to comparison by contrasts; on the groundwork of comparison, it is enabled to do the work of classification, of clear abstraction, of the formation of definite ideas by the connection of these contrasts."[ ] [ ] "suppose, e. g., that the child, by dint of repeated and varied playing with the blue ball of the first gift, has succeeded in getting a tolerably clear notion of the blue ball. if then you bring the yellow ball to his notice, his mind will be led to examine more closely and to compare the two playthings, resembling each other so fully in every respect, yet differing so widely in color. the other balls of the gift are introduced in judicious succession, offering new yet milder contrasts: these reconcile, combine, the contrasts first offered; they are aided in this by the colors of surrounding objects. the child begins to feel that these color impressions, however widely they differ, have a similar source; he is connecting the contrasts, and as he succeeds in this, he succeeds, too, in separating, abstracting, the _ball_ from its _color_." (w. n. hailmann.) * * * * * the ball a universal plaything. "the presentiment of truth always goes before the recognition of it," says froebel; and it would seem, indeed, as it, in selecting the first gift, he looked far back into the past of humanity, and there sought the thread which from the beginning connects all times and leads to the farthest future. "the ball is the last plaything of men, as well as the first with children." in kreutzer's "symbolik" we read that the educators of the young god bacchus gave him golden balls to play with, and also that the youthful princes of persia played with them, and alone had this privilege. it is a significant fact that we find balls even among the remains of the lake dwellers of northern italy and switzerland, while small, round balls, resembling marbles, have been found in the early egyptian tombs. the teutons made ball-plays national, and built houses in which to indulge in these exercises in all sections of germany, as late as the close of the sixteenth century. the ancient aztecs used the game of ball as a training in warfare for the young men of the nation; and that it was considered of great importance is evident from the fact that the tribute exacted by a certain aztec monarch from some of the cities conquered by him consisted of balls, and amounted to sixteen thousand annually. the ball entered into many of the favorite games alike of the greeks and the romans, the former having a special place in their gymnasiums and a special master for it. it may be noted also that nearly all our modern sports are based upon the effort to get possession of a ball. froebel's ideas of first gift. froebel considered the ball as an external counterpart of the child in the first stages of his development, its undivided unity corresponding to his mental condition, and its movableness to his instinctive activity. through its recognition he is led to separate himself from the external world, and the external world from himself.[ ] [ ] "but as he grows he gathers much, and learns the use of 'i' and 'me,' and finds 'i am not that i see, and other than the things i touch.' "so rounds he to a separate mind from whence clear memory may begin, as through the frame that binds him in his isolation grows defined." tennyson's _in memoriam_. froebel's intention was that the first gift should be used in the nursery,[ ] but as this is for the most part neglected, or imperfectly and unwisely done, we begin the series of kindergarten play-lessons with it, illustrating its qualities and asking questions concerning them, always diversifying the exercises with rhymes, games, and songs. we must remember that to the young child, as to primitive man, the activity of an object is more pleasing than its qualities, and we should therefore devise a series of games with the fascinating plaything which will lead the child to learn these qualities by practical experience. [ ] many suggestions for the use of the ball in the nursery may be found in froebel's _pedagogics of the kindergarten_, translated by josephine jarvis. manner of introduction. before beginning any exercise we should fully decide in our own minds the main point or points to be brought out,--color, form, or direction, for example; then, and only then, will the child gain a clear, definite impression, and have a distinct remembrance of what we have been trying to teach. by way of diversion, every song or rhyme in which the ball can play a symbolic part in action, and illustrate the point we wish to make, is of use in the lessons.[ ] [ ] see _kindergarten chimes_ (kate d. wiggin), pages - , oliver ditson publishing co. with this dainty colored plaything we begin our first bit of education,--not instruction, mere pouring in, but true education, drawing out, developing. the balls should be kept in a pretty basket, as the beautiful should be cultivated in every way in the true kindergarten; and when they are given to the class, it should be with some little song sung by the kindergartner or one of the older children. at the close of the lesson, as the basket is passed, each child may gently drop his ball into it, saying simply, "thank you for my ball," or naming its color. at other times they may be called by the names of fruits or flowers, the child saying, "i will give you a cherry," or, "i will give you a violet." method of introduction. the qualities of the ball must of course be brought before the child's observation in some more or less definite order, and it will be profitable to consider the relative claims of form and color to the first place. we might say, correctly, that to illustrate the ball, we should begin with its essential qualities.[ ] the essential quality is unity. unity depends on form, and the ball's form never changes; therefore we might conclude that this should be the first subject under consideration, since we always treat of the universal properties of objects before special ones, proceeding from homogeneous to heterogeneous. this view of the subject is supported by ratich's important maxim, "first the thing, and then its properties." [ ] "the infant begins to examine forms from the commencement of his existence; for without this knowledge it is doubtful if he could distinguish one object from another, or even be aware of an external world. gradually he begins to know objects apart and to recognize them, and in time discerns resemblances which cause him to classify them."--w. w. speer's _form lessons_. conrad diehl. on the other hand, conrad diehl says: "color is the first sensation of which an infant is capable. with the first ray of light that enters the retina of the eye, the presence of color forces itself on the mind.... when light is present, color is present. the first impression which the eye receives of an object is its color; its form is revealed by the action of light upon its surfaces. we recognize at a distance the color of a leaf, an apple, a flower or berry, long before we are able distinctly to make out their forms. in the absence of light, neither the color nor the form of an object can be seen."[ ] [ ] conrad diehl's _elements of ornamentation and color_. herbert spencer. spencer says:[ ] "the earliest impressions which the mind can assimilate are those given to it by the undecomposable sensations, resistance, light, sound, etc. manifestly decomposable states of consciousness cannot exist before the states of consciousness out of which they are composed. there can be no idea of form until some familiarity with light in its gradations and qualities, or resistance in its different intensities, has been acquired; for, as has long been known, we recognize visible form by means of varieties of light, and tangible form by means of varieties of resistance. similarly, no articulate sound is cognizable until the inarticulate sounds which go to make it up have been learned. and thus must it be in every other case."[ ] [ ] _education_, page . [ ] "that priority of color to form which, as already pointed out, has a psychological basis, and in virtue of which psychological basis arises this strong preference in the child, should be recognized from the very beginning."--spencer's _education_. froebel. the balance of authority seems to be, on the whole, upon the side of presenting color first to the young child, as we appeal to the emotions at this age rather than to the intellect; and while the senses revel in color, form follows more the law of use. let us hear, however, what the "great pioneer of child study" says upon this point. froebel says, as distinct and different as color and form may be in themselves, they are to the young child indivisible, as inseparable as body and life. nay, the idea of color seems to come to the child, as perhaps to mankind in general, through the forms; so, on the other hand, the forms gain prominence and impressiveness by the colors. hence ideas of colors must at first be coupled with ideas of form, and _vice versa_; color and form are in the beginning an undivided unity.[ ] [ ] "a person born blind, and suddenly enabled to see, would at first have no conception of _in_ or _out_ (of eye), and would be conscious of colors only, not of objects; when by his sense of touch he became acquainted with objects, and had time to associate mentally the objects he touched with the colors he saw, then, and not till then, would he begin to see objects."--preyer's _mind of the child_, page . "color cannot be abstracted from that which gives it vitality,--i. e., form,--from which it cannot be abstracted without rendering the color flat and meaningless." (geo. l. schreiber.) the color and form of the ball being indissolubly blended in the child's eyes, we can scarcely teach them separately at first. we may, however, consider each by itself, in order to present the subject more clearly. form. to teach form in an interesting manner, to make it plain to the child without giving him any terms, but rather coaxing him by ingenuity to formulate his own knowledge, is a difficult thing to do, and should not be attempted at all with very young children. it seems unnecessary to say that froebel did not intend the ball should be made a medium of object lessons for babies, although this distorted view of his idea seems to have entered the minds of some critics. the child, when old enough to enter a kindergarten, will generally know round objects, and be somewhat familiar with the ball already in his home plays. we should let him roll and grasp it in his tiny fingers, till gradually, in comparison with other objects handled in the same way, he notices the absence of corners, edges, or any obstructions which would meet his touch or eye. then we may ask him if he could make a ball out of a rough block of wood which we show. some bright little one will guess that a carpenter could do it with his tools. "what would he have to do?" "plane it off," will perhaps be the answer. "where and how is he to plane?" may be the next inquiry, and the child often answers, "all the rough parts and the parts that stick out." "why does he like to play ball?" he does not know exactly. "would he like to play ball with the scissors?" "why not?" "then why does he like to feel the ball in his hand?" after such preliminary conversations upon the form of the ball, we may lead the children first to note other round things in the room, and then to recall what they have at home of a similar shape and what they may have seen in the streets. these exercises are always delightful to the little ones, and are invaluable to the kindergartner, as they furnish a thorough test of the child's comprehension of the subject she has been handling.[ ] we should notice slight divergences from the spherical form in the objects the children name, and speak of them. they will soon be able to tell in every case where the egg or cobblestone is not "just round." [ ] "finding forms of the same general shape as those taken as types is of the highest importance. unless this is done, pupils are not learning to pass from the particular to the general. they are not taught to see many things through the one, and the impression they gain is that the particular forms observed are the only forms of this kind. unless that which the pupil observes aids him in interpreting something else, it is of no value to him. certain things are taught that through them other things may be seen. pupils should not be trained to see for the sake of the seeing, but that they may have the power to see." w. w. speer, _lessons in form_. they will of course mention stove-lids, dinner-plates, etc., as round objects, and the attempt to give a clear and definite understanding of the difference between solids and planes is difficult at first, but they very soon discriminate between rounding objects that possess thickness and those that are flat but have curved edges. a ball of putty or one of dough is a good thing with which to illustrate this difference. we must remember that any abstract teaching on form is too difficult at this time, much more difficult than color. let the children, during these first few weeks, draw circles on the blackboard and on paper, and sew, and draw pictures of balls, peaches, or round fruits; they may also make balls of wax, dough, or clay. rousseau says, "a child may forget what he sees, and sooner still what is said to him, but he never forgets what he has made." color. "the comprehension of the single tone of color gradually leads to the comprehension of the full chord; the recognition of single colors leads to the recognition of shades and their harmonious connections: thus, step by step, the capacity of comprehending nature in its beauty and with its treasures is developed."[ ] [ ] emma marwedel, _childhood's poetry and studies_, page . again, suppose the play-lesson for the day to be upon color. of course, the subject may be handled in a dozen different ways and serve for a dozen different lessons; a few hints only are here given, as in matters of detail it is better that each teacher should be free and unguided in the use of her own ingenuity. we may take, perhaps, the red[ ] ball, and, holding it high in the air, ask, "who has a ball exactly like mine? look carefully, now, and then show me." a volley of balls, comprising every color in the rainbow, will be shot into the air, and then becomes necessary the task of discrimination. we may find the red ones, and gratify the children by naming those who possess them, as it seems a great honor in their eyes. now they should be led to find every bit of red in the room,--andrew's stockings, mary's ribbon, the tiny pipings on katie's apron, jim's necktie, your belt, the flowers on the wall, etc. the scene will become intensely exciting; the bright eyes will begin searching in every corner of the room, and the transport which will greet us when anything far out of sight and of the right color is discovered is truly refreshing. [ ] professor earl barnes, of stanford university, reports that in his various color experiments on the pacific coast, children having been studied, a very large majority selected red as their favorite color. all the children, as far as possible, should be engaged in this diversion, while the most timid and backward should be kept near and encouraged with word and smile. the name of the color should not be asked for, or given, till it can be matched by all, and found in surrounding objects. we may ask what flowers they have seen which were like the color they are studying, and show them some of the more familiar kinds; also speak of the action of the sun in making certain fruits red,--the raspberries and strawberries, for instance. some rosy-faced little urchin in the class may be chosen and asked how he keeps such red cheeks, and from this the idea of red as the color of warmth and life may be developed. we may proceed with blue and yellow, then with violet, orange, and green, in like manner, constantly diversifying the exercises with plays, songs, and appropriate stories. hints on additional color exercises. the formation of the so-called secondary colors will not be very obvious to the younger children, nor is the fact to be taught scientifically or learned by them; they will, however, be greatly interested in the mixing of paints in small dishes, or the blending of different colored crayons on the blackboard. _red_ and _yellow_ into _orange_. _yellow_ and _blue_ into _green_. _blue_ and _red_ into _purple_. pieces of glass are serviceable objects with which to show the same thing, or we can buy the "gelatine films" from any kindergarten supply store. holding the red and yellow, one on the other, for instance, the piece nearer the eye will, of course, determine the shade; if the red piece be next the eye, the orange color will be deeper than if the yellow were in the same position. none of these experiments, however, will produce pure colors, the green and purple being especially unsatisfactory. among the devices with which to teach color may be recommended a color quilt made of various shades and shapes of woolens and silks or ribbons. this may be used as a sort of chart, to the great delight of the children, and is one of the valuable aids in teaching, because it calls out both individual and general action. we may also make a clothes-line of twine and suspend it from door to door, or between any two suitable points, attaching to it pieces of all colors, and, after a while, of various tints and shades of worsted, letting the children touch the ones designated, or find bits of the same color as their balls. cards wound with different tints and shades of the same color are also useful when the children have developed greater powers of discrimination, and a chart or map may be made by pasting colored squares, triangles, oblongs, or circles on a ground of gray bristol board. then, too, we may have a box of tablets of the simple geometrical figures, and, giving a quantity to the children, let them arrange the different colors in separate rows. children of all ages will be fascinated by the spectrum, "nature's palette of pure colors," which the sunlight streaming through a prism shows upon the wall; and as it can be supplemented by a spectrum chart for cloudy days, they will delight to arrange their colored papers to imitate it. the older children will gain much valuable knowledge by experimenting with the color tops, and if a color wheel with the accompanying maxwell disks can be obtained, the materials for color education will be quite complete. it must not be forgotten that the purpose of all these exercises is that the child may learn to know the six standards, and subsequently their intermediates, and may in time learn to use and combine them harmoniously. it is, therefore, essential that the colors supplied him shall be fresh and pure,[ ] and that he not only have freedom to make his own experiments, but materials to preserve them in permanent form when they prove successful. [ ] "care should be taken, in the selection of all materials for color lessons, to get as perfect foundation colors as possible; no faded or poor shades are allowable, as they lead the child astray." when the children are just making friends with the teacher and with each other, it is very interesting and profitable for them to formulate their mite of knowledge into a sentence, each one holding his ball high in the air with the right hand, and saying:-- my ball is red like a cherry. my ball is yellow like a lemon. my ball is blue like the sky. my ball is orange like a marigold. my ball is green like the grass. my ball is violet like a plum. we should not, however, allow this to degenerate into mere recitation, but let the child find his own objects of comparison, and change them when he chooses for any others that occur to him. this prevents parrot repetition, and gives room for individuality and real self-expression. motion; direction; position. the child of three or four years has seldom any conception of the terms:-- right----left. here ----there. up ----down. near ----far. over ----under. front----back. even if he has a dim idea of direction, he cannot express himself regarding it, nor is he certain enough of his knowledge to be able to move or place the ball according to dictation. motion is always easy and delightful to the child, and therefore he will move his ball in different directions, as the words and music suggest, when he would be too timid to express a thought, and is willing and happy to do in unison what he would hesitate to do by himself. the ball may be made a starting-point in giving the child an idea of various simple facts about objects in general, and in illustrating in movements the many terms with which we wish him to become familiar. the meaning of the terms to _swing_, _hop_, _jump_, _roll_, _spring_, _run away_, _come back_, _fall_, _draw_, _bounce,_ and _push_ may be taught by a like movement of the ball, urging the child to give his own interpretation of the motions in words. all the children may then make their balls hop, spring, roll, or swing at the same time, accompanying the movements by appropriate rhymes. the ball is more purely a plaything than anything which the child receives in the kindergarten, and its mobility is so charming, it so easily slips from his hands and travels so delightfully far when dropped, that exercises with it soon become riotous if not carefully guided. every play-lesson on the ball should close with some active exercise in which the children may indulge their wish for a game with their dear playfellow, and in which they may also gain greater skill and learn practically the laws of motion. when sitting at their tables, each pair of children may roll a ball to and fro, all beginning at the same moment; or the first pair may begin, the second and third follow, and so on until all are rolling. they may throw balls against the wall, or toss them in the air, or throw them alternately first in the air, then against the wall; they may toss them to each other at increasing distances. the whole company of children may be arranged in two rows and throw the balls to each other in unison, or they may pass them from hand to hand as in a wandering game,--all the exercises being accompanied with appropriate songs or rhymes. the laws of incidence and reflection may be simply taught by leading the children to note that if they strike the ball straight against the wall it will bound straight back, and then asking them to see if it returns when thrown in a slanting direction. symbolic stage of child's development. in order to present the ball in a more attractive light in the kindergarten, to suit it to the symbolic stage of the child's development, and to bring it nearer to his sympathies, we constantly, in our play, suppose it to be something which it resembles in certain of its characteristics. by its color, it may represent a fruit, a flower, or a gayly dressed child; by its form, an egg, a downy chicken, a tiny duckling; by its mobility, a bird, a squirrel, a baby; or when fastened to its string, a bucket in the well, a toy wagon, a pendulum, or a pet lamb tethered by the roadside. the child is always at home in the world of "make-believe," and delights in the stories and the many charming songs to which this imaginative use of the ball gives rise. perhaps we may wisely remind ourselves, however, that though the child's fancy is most vivid, and though the ball is well adapted to represent many objects, yet if it resemble in no single point the thing to which we liken it, we are indulging in empty imaginings which will only hinder the child's comprehension of truth.[ ] [ ] "the resemblance of the symbol to the thing signified is a very important matter in education, especially in kindergarten education."--geo. p. brown, _essentials of educational psychology._ coöperative exercises. the teacher who truly understands the great principles on which froebel built the kindergarten will ever be mindful of one of the highest of these,--"the brotherly union of those who are like-minded." even in the simple plays with the first gift, group work is easily possible. the stringing of the first gift beads or the supplementary modeling in clay may be made into a coöperative exercise, the work with the balls at the sand-table may have a similar aim, and many of the ball games are well fitted to unite the whole community of children, older and younger, in a common aim, a common purpose.[ ] [ ] "if, therefore, genuine brotherliness, ... consideration and respect for playmates and fellow-men, are again to become prevalent, they can become so only by being connected with the feeling of community abiding in each man (however much or little of it may be found), and by fostering this feeling with the greatest care."--friedrich froebel, _education of man_, page . what we should strive for. we must remember that on a carefully prepared plan of procedure depends much of the value of any system of education; therefore we must decide, when the child comes under our tutelage, what we wish to accomplish and what shall be our method of accomplishing it; and yet as the first gift is not the last, as it is but the first link in a chain of related objects, it is obvious that it must be chiefly useful as a starting-point. each lesson should be carefully studied by the teacher, for the foundation is being laid for all future acquisition. the kindergarten gifts are designed to lead to the mastery of material objects, but at the same time they are always connected with the child's experience and affection by being often transported into the region of fancy and feeling in a blending of realism and symbolism. omitting everything which has reference to the moral and physical development, and speaking now only of that which is intellectual, what we should strive for at the beginning is that the child may acquire a habit of quick observation, with clear and precise expression; that in due time he may see not only quickly, but accurately; in short, that a slight degree of judgment may begin to attend his perceptions, so that he may know as well as observe. it is not enough to awaken the curiosity of a child, and to heap up in his memory a mass of good materials which will combine of themselves in due time, and which the brain when more highly developed will arrange in systematic groups; we should endeavor as far as possible to control the first impressions which sink unconsciously into a child's mind, but still more careful should we be in the selection of those later ones which we try to inculcate, and of the links which we wish to establish between such and such perceptions, sentiments, or actions. we should seek to develop, side by side with the perceptions, the faculty of judging and acting rightly. to give a child very little to observe at a time, but to make him observe that little well and rightly, is the true way of forming and storing his mind. the process of receiving an idea must be through sensation, attention, and perception, conception and judgment being later processes. the curiosity to know must be kept alive, for it is our greatest ally, and the imagination must be fed, for the child remembers only what interests him. recognizing what is to be accomplished, we say, then:-- _a._ the ball is one of the first means used in awakening and developing the dawning consciousness and growing faculties of the child. _b._ the beginning must be well made, or no later step will seem clear. _c._ if the first opportunity which occurs of dealing with the gift (or with any instrumentality of education) is wasted, interest on the part of the child is permanently lessened. _d._ the mind retains clear impressions in proportion to the degree of spontaneous interest and attention with which they are received. _e._ the law of diminishing interest decrees that each point in a successful exercise shall be more interesting than the previous one. _f._ the lessons must not be confined to so narrow a channel that they become monotonous, and they must leave room for the child to develop and not attempt to prescribe his mental action. tiedemann says: "liberty of action even in imitated actions is one of the conditions of a child's happiness; besides that, it has the effect of exercising and developing all his faculties. example is the first tutor, and liberty the second, in the order of evolution; but the second is the better one, for it has inclination for its assistant." readings for the student. from cradle to school. _bertha meyer_. pages - . education. _herbert spencer_. - . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. - . education. _e. seguin_. , . the kindergarten. _emily shirreff_. . kindergarten at home. _emily shirreff_. . reminiscences of froebel. _von marenholtz-bülow_. , . lectures on child-culture. _w. n. hailmann_. . kindergarten guide. _j._ and _b. ronge_. - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. - . child-culture. _henry barnard_. , , - . education of man. _fr. froebel_. tr. by _j. jarvis_. , , . lectures to kindergartners. _e. p. peabody_. , , , , - . pedagogics of the kindergarten. _fr. froebel_. tr. by _j. jarvis_. - . paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. - . law of childhood. _w. n. hailmann_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . froebel and education by self-activity. _h. courthope bowen_. - . childhood's poetry and studies. _e. marwedel_. part i. - . childhood's poetry and studies. _e. marwedel_. part ii. - . a system of child-culture. _e. marwedel_. - . the dawn of history. _a. keary_. - . hints to teachers. _e. marwedel_. , . froebel's letters. tr. by _michaelis_ and _moore_. - , , - , , , . conscious motherhood. _e. marwedel_. , , , , , - , - , - , - . froebel's second gift "from the ball as a symbol of unity, we pass over in a consecutive manner to the manifoldness of form in the cube." "the child has an intimation in the cube of the unity which lies at the foundation of all manifoldness, and from which the latter proceeds." friedrich froebel. "notice has now become observation, and observation leads to discrimination. he sees and is curious by nature, but it belongs to us to lead him to observe and inquire." emily shirreff. . froebel's second gift consists of a wooden sphere, cube, and cylinder, two inches in diameter (as now made), with rods and standards for revolution.[ ] [ ] "the wooden sphere has no string like the balls of the first gift, because the child no longer needs the outward connection; he now realizes the spiritual connection between himself and the outer world." (e. g. seymour.) . in the first gift the child received objects of the same shape and size but of different colors, thus learning to separate color from form. in the second gift he receives unlike objects, and learns to distinguish them from each other by their individual peculiarities. the first gift suggests unity, and leads to the detection of resemblances; the second suggests variety or manifoldness, and emphasizes contrasts. . the most important characteristic of the gift is contrast of form, leading to the distinction of different objects. the mediation of contrasts here suggests the connection of all objects, however widely separated. . the purpose of the gift is to stimulate observation and comparison by presentation of striking contrasts, and to afford new bases for the classification of objects. spencer says that any systematic ministrations to the perceptions ought to be based upon the general truth that in the development of every faculty markedly contrasted impressions are the first to be distinguished; that hence sounds greatly differing in loudness and pitch, colors very remote from each other, and substances widely removed in hardness or texture should be the first supplied; and that in each case the progression must be by slow degrees to impressions more nearly allied.[ ] [ ] _education_, page . . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- { sphere. { cube. solids. { cylinder. { double cone. } seen in motion. { conoid. } planes. { circles. { squares. . the sphere and cube are sharply contrasting forms, and the cylinder illustrates the connecting link between the two, possessing characteristics of both. "the cylinder is the first example froebel gives of the intermediate transition--forms connecting opposites, which he explains as the very ground plan of nature, and on which his fundamental law of contrasts and connection of contrasts, the law of all harmonious development and creative industry, is based."[ ] [ ] e. shirreff. * * * * * points to be noted in each new gift. "that which follows is always conditioned upon that which goes before,"[ ] says froebel, and he makes this apparent to children through his educational processes; the gifts show this idea in concrete form. [ ] "we cannot evolve what has not first been involved." in entering upon a consideration of the second gift one thing cannot fail to impress us, and that is the continuous development in each new set of objects placed before the child; together with an increase of difficulty or complexity which is never without a corresponding forethought, careful arrangement, and attention to logical sequence; thus the newly introduced objects can never seem unnatural to him. we shall find that in every new gift or occupation there is always a suggestion of the last, enough to make it a pleasant reminder of knowledge gained and difficulties surmounted, and so the child sees not everything painfully strange, but something which at least recalls to his mind his former friend and familiar playfellow.[ ] [ ] "nothing charms us more than the recognition of the old in the new. the man who hurries through a foreign city, indifferent and inattentive to the passing crowd, feels a quick thrill of pleasure when in the midst of all the strangers he recognizes a familiar face." (e. minhinnick.) method of attack in first exercise. in the first lesson with the second gift the child will quickly see the similarities between his former worsted ball and his new companion, the wooden sphere. let him take these two balls together, and find out the similarities and dissimilarities, remembering that before he compares objects _consciously_, experiences should invariably be given him. we should always draw attention to the universal properties of things first and then proceed to the specific. the qualities common to all objects are the universal ones: form, size, color, material, etc. the invariable rule should be: simple before complex, concrete before abstract, unity before variety, universal qualities before special ones. if we are in doubt as to whether we shall first direct attention to the similarities or to the dissimilarities between the ball and sphere, we may recall the educational maxim, "the child's eye always at first seizes the analogous, the point of union, the whole connection of things, and only after that begins to discern differences and opposition."[ ] [ ] "the infant mind is transparent to resemblance, but opaque to difference."--susan e. blow, _symbolic education_, page . ball and sphere. in comparing the ball and the sphere the child will observe, in the first place that they are both round and both roll equally well, but that one has color, one being without; one is soft, the other hard; one quiet, one noisy; one a little rough to the touch, the other velvet smooth. he should find for and by himself, aided by our suggestive questioning, the reasons for these evident differences. it is absolutely necessary that each child should have one of the boxes containing the solids, or at least the three forms of the gift without the box, rods, and standards, and examine them thoroughly and often as he will be glad to do. if the solids as ordinarily manufactured are too costly for a kindergartner of limited means, she can substitute large marbles, blocks, and linen thread spools; the material does not matter so long as each child has the objects to handle. value of the discriminative power; method by which it may be developed. we need not be distressed if the lessons are a little noisy when the children are making the acquaintance of these wonderful new friends. to be sure they will pound the wooden forms heartily up and down on the table (if they are three-year old babies, they certainly would and should do so); but within bounds what does it matter? if it can be arranged so that other classes shall not be disturbed, and each child can have the same opportunity for experimenting as his neighbor, there will be no great harm done. we are endeavoring to rouse all the latent energies of the child by the presentation of these objects to his observation, and he must have full liberty to make the various experiments which suggest themselves to him. his desire to hear the sound of the objects is so manifest that it would be folly to try and thwart it. it is far better to use the desire for educational purposes and divert it into the channel of systematized noise. let us suppose that we are carpenters today and pound the wooden objects on the floor in exact time with a building song; let us play we are drummer boys and tap with our drumsticks for the soldiers to march; or shall we make believe that the sphere is a woodpecker and let it tap on the trees while we recite some simple little rhyme?[ ] [ ] for second gift songs, see _kindergarten chimes_ (kate d. wiggin), pages , , oliver ditson publishing co. "this craving of young children for information," says bernard perez, "is an emotional and intellectual absorbing power, as dominant as the appetite for nutrition, and equally needing to be watched over and regulated." it is not alone the noise of the sphere which delights the child,[ ] though this is always pleasing,--it is the knowledge he is gaining, the new ideas that dawn upon him for the first time in recognizable form. it is, in fact, a knowledge of cause and effect. he has often dropped the woolen ball and pounded it on the table, and it produced no sound. he does the same with the sphere and recognizes the difference. he will begin to experiment with other objects, by and by to classify his knowledge, and finally, he will see and remember that like causes produce like effects, and in progressing thus far will have made a tremendous stride. the child will see all the more clearly, in comparing the woolen ball and wooden sphere, the difference between soft and hard, rough and smooth, light and heavy, if he is allowed to perform his own experiments. [ ] "the sound is a yet higher sign of life to the child, as he then, and also later, likes to lend speech to all dumb things; therefore he also desires to hear sound and speech from everything."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . the cube. we will now turn to the investigation of the cube and open a new world of information to the child, and here we seem to deviate a little from the famous educational maxim, "proceed from the known to the unknown," and almost to make a leap into the dark. however, we very soon give the cylinder, and thus connect the opposites. here he meets a dazzling quantity of new appearances; the square sides or faces, and the many edges and corners, all of which must be viewed in comparison with the sphere. we can give him an experience of the faces of the cube without conscious analysis, by letting the ball roll against them. mediation of contrasts. of course we shall see the underlying idea of the gift to be the connection of opposites. not too much can be said of this law, so all-important and significant in froebel's system.[ ] we should bear it constantly in mind, and bring it in connection with every new phase of our work. froebel cannot be understood clearly unless this deep principle, which lies at the very root of his system, is appreciated and comprehended. at the same time it is, when formulated, an abstract and metaphysical statement, which one cannot grasp at once, but to which one must grow. [ ] "but each thing is recognized only when it is connected with the opposite of its kind, and when the union, accord, similitude with this object are found; and the connection with the opposite, and the discovery of the uniting, renders the recognition so much the more complete."--froebel's _education of man_, page . it may be said that comparatively few kindergartners know its value; nevertheless knowledge of this kind can never be useless or fruitless to the person who is forming the mind of the child, and who should be a perfect mistress of her science and her art. value of contrasts. these contrasts of the second gift, and all contrasts, arouse the mind to attention. we can have no judgment without comparison. we should have no idea of heat or darkness if we had not a conception of cold and light; the quality of sweetness would have no meaning if its opposite did not serve to stimulate comparison. the sphere is sharply contrasted with the cube, so that there may be a ready perception of the striking qualities of both. the more abrupt the contrast the more readily noticed and described; for it takes a more developed eye to discern the difference between a sphere and a spheroid, for instance, than between a sphere and a cube. the contrasts of the first gift were contrasts of color, mediations of them being shown also, and contrasts of direction and position or situation. another point less readily seen in the first gift perhaps was froebel's thought that the ball, in its perfect simplicity and unity, when first given to the young child, is regarded by him as another contrasted individuality, almost as capable of life in its varied movements as he is himself. mobility of sphere. the sphere is the symbol of motion, the cube the embodiment of rest, and the fact should be illustrated in divers ways. we may, for instance, place the sphere near the rim of a plate, and by inclining the latter a little, the sphere will roll rapidly round its own axis and round the rim. a few simple little rhymes may be taught, which the children may say or sing together while the sphere is journeying rapidly round and round the plate, for, as froebel says, the thought always grows clearer to the child when word and motion go hand in hand. sphere and cube. the cube can only be moved, on the contrary, when force is exerted, and then it merely slides, to stop when the force is removed. the children will soon see why the cube is so lazily inclined, and why the sphere is ever rolling, rolling about, scarcely to be kept still, for by various experiments we may show that the sphere stands only on a little part of its face, the cube on the whole. the sphere is always the same in whatever way regarded, and to whatever tests subjected. it is always an emblem of unity, and cannot be robbed of its simplicity, its unity, its freedom from all that is puzzling. the cube, on the contrary, being made to revolve on any one of its axes, constantly shows a different aspect, so that the child views it as a very extraordinary little block, full of fascinating surprises and whimsical apparitions. it is put upon the string, and, when whirled rapidly, mysteriously loses its identity, and appears to the little one's laughing gaze as an entirely different object; and yet as the motion grows more sedate, the new form fades away and the cube reappears so quickly as to make him rub his eyes and wonder if he has been dreaming. counting faces. the square faces of the cube, in comparison with the one curved, unbroken surface of the sphere, must now be noted, and may be counted if we are using the gift as a means of instruction. we must beware, however, of making this counting exercise into a lesson, or requiring that the number of faces shall be learned and recited. every teacher of experience will corroborate mr. w. n. hailmann when he says: "if the kindergartner sets the cube before the child and counts the faces, edges, and corners, so that he may 'know all about it,' the child's interest, if born at all, will soon die." if the faces are counted, as they are all so exactly alike, the children may sometimes be puzzled as to the number, by enumerating the same one more than once. this difficulty may be obviated by pasting a paper square of a different color on each face, and then submitting it to examination, giving each child an opportunity to count, since independent self-activity is to be more and more encouraged. if the faces, edges, and corners be made the integral point of an interesting story or play, the child will have little difficulty in recalling their number and character, but we must remember that "lively interest and steady progress come only from following and feeding the child's purposes." cylinder. we now proceed to the cylinder, the reconciliation of the two opposites; an object which having qualities possessed by both occupies a middle ground in which each has something in common. froebel originally took the doll[ ] as the intermediate form "uniting in itself the opposites of the sphere and cube," and thus showed that he understood child nature well, for no toy follows the ball with greater certainty than the doll. [ ] "but now as man both unites the single, which finds its limits in itself, and the manifold, which is constantly developing, and reconciles them within himself as opposites, there results also to the child from both, from _sphere_ and _cube_ outwardly united, the expression of the animate and active, especially as embodied in the _doll_."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . the cylinder, however, was subsequently selected, as being more in line with the other geometrical forms shown in the sequence of gifts. it is as easily moved as the sphere, upon one side; as prone to rest as the cube, when placed upon the other; it has the curved surface of the sphere and the flat faces of the cube; it has no corners but two curved edges; more edges than the sphere, fewer than the cube; less unity than the sphere, more than the cube. its importance as a mediation, or connecting link, is further shown by suspending the cube on a string, by which it may be twisted rapidly and caused to revolve; in this motion a cylinder being readily seen. when the cylinder is spun in like manner a sphere suddenly appears, and so the wonderful and subtle bond of union is complete.[ ] [ ] "on revolving the cylinder on an axis parallel to the circular faces, we find that it incloses a solid, opaque sphere; teaching us the lesson, not only that each member of the second gift contains each and all of the others, but that whatever is in the universe is in every individual part of it; that even the meanest holds the elements of the noblest; that the highest life is even in what in short-sighted conceit we call death."--w. n. hailmann, _law of childhood_, page . hints as to manner and method. let the children call the cylinder a "roller" or "barrel" if they choose, and tell them the right name when it is needful. each gift must be thoroughly understood before we pass to the next, or there will be no orderly development; but as the impressions have all been made through the senses of the child, we must not expect him to voice these impressions in logical phrases all at once, so beware of making the lesson irksome or wearisome to him through a formal questioning that does not properly belong to childhood. when the keen appetite for knowledge disappears we may well despair. if several children in our class express dislike of a certain exercise or lesson, and seem to dread its appearance, we may be well assured that the fault lies in our method of putting it before them, and strive in all humility for a better understanding of them, of ourselves, and of the subject. we must not, however, be too hard in our self-judgments and lose courage. we are not responsible for a child who is "born tired," and who seems to have no interest in anything, either in heaven above or in the earth beneath, until, by ingenuity and perseverance, we are able to open the eyes and ears which see and hear not. it will be remembered that in discussing the first play or lesson with the second gift great freedom was advised; but let us note the difference between liberty and lawlessness, between spontaneity and the confusion of self-assertion which is sometimes mistaken for it. no lesson or play amounts to anything unless conducted with order and harmony, unless at its close, no matter how merry and hearty the enjoyment, some quiet and lasting impression has been made on the mind. many teachers miss the happy medium, and in trying with the best intentions to allow the individuality of the child proper development, only succeed in gaining excitement and disorder. dangers of object lessons. the second gift is, more than any other, too much used for mere object lessons, and these are invariably dangerous because there is apt to be too much impressing of the teacher's own ideas upon the mind, and too little actual handling, perceiving, observing, comparing, judging, concluding, on the child's part, and that is the only logical way in which he is able to form a clearly crystallized idea. we can have no higher authority than dr. alexander bain, who says that the object lesson more than anything else demands a careful handling; there being "great danger lest an admirable device should settle down into a plausible but vicious formality." how to deal successfully with second gift. it is not uncommon to hear students in kindergarten training classes (and even some full-fledged kindergartners) express a distaste for the second gift, and it is, unfortunately, even more common to find the children dealing with it either sunk in deepest apathy, or mercifully oblivious of the matter in hand and chatting with their neighbors. the fact is that we have too commonly made the exercises dull, dreary affairs; we have doled out the forms to the children and asked a series of formal questions about them, giving no experiments, no concerted work, and no opportunity for action. the children have been intensely bored, therefore either stupid or wandering, and the kindergartner has attributed her want of success to the gift, and not to her method of dealing with it. let the light of imagination shine on the scene, and note the answering sparkle in the children's eyes. who cares for the names of all the faces on a stupid block; but who doesn't care when it's a house and johnnie can't find his mother, though he looks in the front door and the back door, the right-hand door, the left-hand door, the cellar-door, and finally the trap-door leading to the roof? nobody knows, or wants to know, when questioned if the cylinder rolls better on its flat circular face, or on its rounding face; but when it's a log of wood in the forest, and must be taken home for winter fires, then it is worth while to experiment and see how it may be moved most easily. the second gift, too, is delightful for groupwork in the sand table, where the objects may be treated symbolically, and likened to a hundred different things. with the second gift beads, which in the natural wood color are admirable supplements to the larger forms, the children are always charmed, assorting and stringing them according to fancy or dictation, and with the addition of sticks making them into rows of soldiers, trees in flowerpots, kitchen utensils, churns, stoves, lamps, and divers other household objects. the kindergartner may give many a lesson in the simple principles of mechanics with the second gift and its rods and standards, allowing the children to experiment freely as well as to follow her suggestions. the pulley, the steelyard, the capstan, the pump, the mechanical churn, the wheelbarrow, etc., may all be made, adding the beads where necessary, and thus the child gain a real working knowledge of simple machinery. treatment of previous gifts when passed over. the preceding gift need not entirely disappear, but be used occasionally for a pleasing review as a bond of friendly intercourse between older and younger pupils.[ ] this will convey an indirect hint, perhaps, to the little ones that it is not well to neglect old friends for new ones, but that they should still love and value the playthings and playmates of former days. [ ] "the giving of a new play by no means precludes the further use of the preceding and earlier plays. but, on the contrary, the use of the preceding play for some time longer with the new play, and alternating with it, makes the application of the new play so much the easier and more widely significant."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . second gift forms in architecture and cube in ancient times. these three objects, the sphere, cylinder, and cube, constitute a triad of forms united in architecture and sculpture producing the column, which is made up of the pedestal or base (the cube), the shaft (the cylinder), and the capital (the sphere). in a book on egyptian antiquities we find that, in the beginning of the culture of that country, the three graces, or goddesses of beauty, were represented by three cubes leaning upon each other. the egyptians did not, of course, know that it was the first regular form of solid bodies in nature or crystallization; but the significant fact again brings us to the thought expressed in the first lecture: "it would seem, indeed, as though froebel, in selecting his gifts, looked far back into the past of humanity, and there sought the thread which from the beginning connects all times and leads to the farthest future." froebel's monument. and here we leave the second gift, that trinity of forms which, wrought in marble, marks the place dear and sacred to all kindergartners, the grave of froebel,--a simple monument to one so great, yet so connected with our study and the child's experience that with all its simplicity it is strangely effective. a still more enduring monument he has in the millions of happy children who have found their way to knowledge through the door which he opened to them; indeed, if half the children he has benefited could build a tower of these tiny blocks to commemorate his life and death, its point would reach higher than st. peter's dome and draw the thoughts of men to heaven. suggestions of the gift. this gift can hardly be studied but that an inner unity, born of these reconciled contrasts, suggests itself to the imagination. the cube seems to stand as the symbol of the inorganic, the mineral kingdom, with its wonderful crystals; the cylinder as the type of vegetable life, suggesting the roots, stems, and branches, with their rounded sides, and forming a beautiful connection between the cube, that emblem of "things in the earth beneath," and the sphere which completes the trinity and speaks to us of a never-ending and perfect whole having "unity for its centre, diversity for its circumference." the cube seems to suggest rest, immobility; the cylinder, in this connection, growth; and the sphere, perfection, completeness,--so delicately poised it is,--only kept in its proper place by the most exquisite adjustment. and so to us, sometimes, the things that are visible become luminous with suggestions of greater realities which are yet unseen; and in the least we discern a faint radiance of the greatest. things that are small mirror things that are mighty. the tiny sphere is an emblem of the "big round world" and the planetary systems. the cube recalls the wonderful crystals, and shows the form that men reflect in architecture and sculpture. as for the cylinder it is nature's special form, and god has taught man through nature to use it in a thousand ways, and indeed has himself fashioned man more or less in its shape. mr. hailmann says: "the second gift presents types of the principal phases of human development; from the easy mobility of infancy and childhood,--the ball,--we pass through the half-steady stages of boyhood and girlhood, represented in the cylinder, to the firm character of manhood and womanhood for which the cube furnishes the formula." bishop brooks, speaking from the words, "the length and the breadth of it are equal," in his sermon on symmetry of life, uses the cube as a symbol of perfect character: the personal push of a life forward, its outreach laterally or the going out in sympathy to others, the upward reach toward god,--these he considers the three life dimensions. but such building must be done without nervous haste; the foundation must hint solidly of the threefold purpose; length, breadth, and thickness must be kept in proportion, if the perfect cube of life is ever to be found. note on second gift. [ ] "the second gift, even in the nursery, calls for modifications from the form in which it comes to us from froebel. it is incomparable in its rich symbolism for illustrating froebel's thought to mature minds, and answers quite a useful purpose in the nursery, where it may help mamma tell her stories. but in the kindergarten the child wants to build with blocks. hence, the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth gifts are indicated; the second gift, as such, is, to say the least, an anachronism. only in the form of the beads, or some similar expedient which gives many of these things for control, will it satisfy the kindergarten child. when he is expected to _study_ the cube, as an object lesson, to count the squares and corners and tell where they are, it is wholly unpalatable to him and entirely foreign to his plans." [ ] w. n. hailmann. thoughts on the discriminative power. "mind starts from discrimination. the consciousness of difference is the beginning of every intellectual exercise." "our intelligence is, therefore, absolutely limited by our power of discrimination; the other functions of intellect, the retentive power, for instance, are not called into play until we have first discriminated a number of things." "the minuteness or delicacy of the feeling of difference is the measure of the variety and multitude of our primary impressions and therefore of our stored-up recollections." "bear in mind the fact that until a difference is felt between two things, intelligence has not yet made the first step." "the higher arts of comparison to impress difference are best illustrated when both differences and agreements have to be noted, i. e., similarities and dissimilarities." "discrimination is the necessary prelude of every intellectual impression as the basis of our stored-up knowledge or memory." definition of the state of mind significantly named _indifference_,--"the state where differing impressions fail to be recognized as distinct." "the retentive power works up to the height of the discriminative power; it can do no more." alex. bain. "the most delightful and fruitful of all the intellectual energies is the perception of similarity and agreement, by which we rise from the individual to the general, trace sameness in diversity, and master instead of being mastered by the multiplicity of nature." friedrich froebel. "it is by comparisons that we ascertain the difference which exists between things, and it is by comparisons, also, that we ascertain the general features of things, and it is by comparisons that we reach general propositions. in fact, comparisons are at the bottom of all philosophy." louis agassiz. readings for the student. from cradle to school. _bertha meyer_. pages , . the kindergarten. _emily shirreff_. , . lectures on child-culture. _w. n. hailmann_. , . froebel and education by self-activity. _h. courthope bowen_. - . kindergarten guide. _j_. and _b. ronge_. - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. - . kindergarten at home. _emily shirreff_. - . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. , , . childhood's poetry and studies. _e. marwedel_. part ii. - . pedagogics of the kindergarten. _fr. froebel_. - . paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. - . law of childhood. _w. n. hailmann_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . education of man. _fr. froebel_. - . kindergarten toys. _h. hoffmann_. - . architecture, mysticism, and myth. _w. k. lethaby_. , . stories of industry. vols. i. and ii. _a. chase_ and _e. clow_. ethics of the dust. _john ruskin_. mme. a. de portugall's synoptical table, as given in "essays on the kindergarten." the building gifts the building gifts meet two very strongly marked tendencies in the child. _a._ the tendency to investigate. _b._ the tendency to transform. the first and second gifts consist of undivided units, each one of which stands in relation to a larger whole, or to a class of objects. the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth gifts are divided units, and their significance lies in the relationship of the parts to one another, and to the whole of which they are the parts. the effect of the building gifts is to develop the constructive powers of the child. their secondary importance lies in the fact that they afford striking fundamental perceptions of form, size, number, relation, and position. the following rules should govern the dictation exercises:-- building rules. . use all material in order to keep the idea of relation of parts to a whole, and because all unused material is wasted material.[ ] [ ] "in each construction the whole of the materials must be used; or at least each separate piece must be arranged so as to stand in some actual relation to the whole. while this awakens the thinking spirit, it also strengthens and elevates the imagination; because amidst so much variety, the underlying unity is made visibly apparent."--froebel's _letters_, tr. by michaelis and moore, page . . build on the squares of the table in order to develop accuracy and symmetry. . "induce the child to form other wholes gradually and systematically from the various parts of the cube. in doing this the laws of contrast and development must be your guide." koehler. . give names to each object constructed, thereby bringing it into relation with the child's experience; for the miniature model serves to interpret more clearly to him the object which it represents. . connect with the child's life and sympathy in order to increase his interest and develop the tendency to view things in their right relations. . "the younger the child, the more you should talk about the thing which you intend to construct. you should intersperse passing observations or short songs. as the children gain intelligence, this conversation will be replaced by more formal descriptions of the things represented." koehler. . begin with life forms and proceed from these to forms of beauty and knowledge. . allow no child to rely upon the blocks of his playmates in his building,--thus he will learn economy, self-reliance, and independence of action. this should not be carried too far, or rather the necessity and beauty of interdependence should also be taught. herein, indeed, lies more than at first appears. to make the most out of little is the great work of life; to be contented with what one has, and to make the best of it with happiness and contentment is surely no small lesson, and one which is constantly, though indirectly, taught in the kindergarten work and plays and lessons. . group work, or united building, should frequently be introduced. "every direction given by the kindergartner should be followed by spontaneous work (either in word or deed) by the child. this must not only be individual, but synthesized for the community." . often encourage the class to imitate some specially attractive form which has been produced by a child, and named according to his fancy. . accustom the child to develop figures or forms by slight changes rather than by rudely destroying each single one preparatory to constructing another. from learning to be strictly methodical in his actions, he will become so in his later reasoning. . "let the child, if possible, correct his own mistakes, and do not constantly interfere with his work. whatever he is able to do for himself, no one should do for him." koehler. froebel's third gift "all children have the building instinct, and 'to make a house' is a universal form of unguided play." "it is not a mere pastime, but a key with which to open the outer world, and a means of awakening the inner world." "this gift includes in itself more outward manifoldness, and, at the same time, makes the inward manifoldness yet more perceptible and manifest." "the plaything shows also the ultimate type of structures put together by human hand which stand in their substantiality around the child." friedrich froebel. "the definitely productive exercises begin with the third gift." susan e. blow. . the third gift is a wooden cube measuring two inches in each of its dimensions. it is divided once in its height, breadth, and thickness, according to the three dimensions which define a solid, and thus eight smaller cubes are produced. . we pass from the undivided to the divided unit, emphasizing the fact that unity still exists, though divisibility enters as a new factor. . the most important characteristics of the gift are contrasts of size resulting in the abstraction of form from size; increase of material as a whole, decrease of size in parts; increase of facilities in illustrating form and number. the new experience to be found in this first divided body is the idea of relativity; of the whole in its relation to the parts (each an embryo whole), and of the parts in relation to the whole. the form of the parts is like the form of the whole, but, in shape alike, the dissimilarity is in size; the fact becoming more apparent by a variety of combinations of a different number of parts: thus the relations of numbers are introduced to the observation of the child together with those of form and magnitude. . the third gift was intended by froebel to meet the necessities of the child at a period when, no longer satisfied with the external appearances of things, he strives to penetrate their internal conditions, and begins to realize the many different possibilities of the same element. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- {cube. solids. {square prism. {rectangular parallelopiped. planes. {square. {oblong. . froebel intends the building exercise to be carried on in a certain way with a view of establishing a law to regulate the child's activity. the upper and lower parts of the figure--the contrasts--are first brought into position, and the balance is established by the intermediates--right and left. the cube itself is divided according to the law of mediation of contrasts. the contrasts of exterior and interior, whole and parts, analysis and synthesis, are also brought into relation with each other. * * * * * hailmann on third gift. mr. w. n. hailmann says that the third gift marks an important step in the mental life of the child. heretofore, he has had to do with playthings indivisible, whole, complete in themselves. every impression, or, rather, every fact, came to him as a unit, a one, an indivisible whole. the analyses and syntheses that are presented to him in the first and second gifts come ready-made as it were, so that the joyous exercise of his instinctive activity, guided and directed by the judicious, loving mother, is sufficient to give him control of them; indeed, the first and second gifts hold to his mental development the same relation that the mother's milk holds to his physical growth. but the third gift satisfies the growing desire for independent activity, for the exercise of his own power of analysis and synthesis, of taking apart and putting together.[ ] [ ] "the idea of separation gained here in concrete form becomes typical of that condition which must always exist in any growth--the seed breaks through its coverings, and seems to divide itself into distinct parts, each having its function in the growth of the whole plant." (alice h. putnam.) simplicity but adaptability of the gifts. simple as this first building gift appears, it is capable of great things. it lends itself to a hundred practical lessons and a hundred charming transformations, but if it is not thoroughly comprehended it will never be well or effectively used by the kindergartner, and will be nothing more to her than to uninterested observers, who see in it nothing more than eight commonplace little blocks in a wooden box. froebel says if his educational materials are found useful it cannot be because of their exterior, which is as plain as possible and contains nothing new, but that their worth is to be found exclusively in their application. how children are to be reached. therefore these simple devices with which we carry on our education should never seem trifling, for we are compelled in teaching very young children to put forth all gentle allurements to the gaining of knowledge. they are to be reached chiefly by the charms of sense, novelty, and variety, and consequently, to please such active and imaginative little critics, our lessons must be fresh, vivid, vigorous, and to the point. what is necessary on part of kindergartner. to accomplish this, we can see that not only is absolute knowledge necessary, but that a well developed sensibility and imagination are needed in leading the child from the indefinite to the definite, from universal to particular, and from concrete to abstract. the worth of the gifts then, we repeat, lies exclusively in their application; the rude little forms must be used so that the child's imagination and sympathy will be reached. imagination in child and kindergartner. we may be thankful that this heaven-born imaginative faculty is the heritage of every child,--that it is hard to kill and lives on very short rations. the little boy ties a string around a stone and drags it through dust and mire with happy conviction that it is a go-cart. the little girl wraps up a stocking or a towel with tender hands, winds her shawl about it, and at once the god-given maternal instinct leaps into life,--in an instant she has it in her arms. she kisses its cotton head and sings it to sleep in divine unconsciousness of any incompleteness, for love supplies many deficiencies. so let us cherish the child heart in ourselves and never look with scorn upon the rude suggestions of the forms the child has built, but rather enter into the play, enriching it with our own imaginative power. the children will rarely perceive any incongruities, and surely we need not hint them, any more than we would remind a child needlessly that her doll is stuffed with sawdust and has a plaster head, when she thinks it a responsive and affectionate little daughter. middendorf said, "this is like a fresh bath for the human soul, when we dare to be children again with children.[ ] the burdens of life could not be borne were it not for real gayety of heart." [ ] "if we want to educate children, we must be children with them ourselves." (martin luther.) "if it were only the play and the mere outward apparatus," says the baroness von marenholtz-bülow, "we might indeed find our daily teaching monotonous, but the idea at the foundation of it and the contemplation of the being of man and its development in the child is an inexhaustible mine of interesting discovery." reasons for choice of third gift. this third gift satisfies the child's craving to take things to pieces. froebel did not choose it arbitrarily, for nature, human and physical, was an open handbook to him, and if we study deeply and sympathetically the reasons for his choice they will always be comprehended.[ ] fénelon says, "the curiosity of children is a natural tendency, which goes in the van of instruction." destruction after all is only constructive faculty turned back upon itself. the child, having no legitimate outlet for his creative instinct, pulls his playthings to pieces, to see what is inside,--what they are made of and how they are put together;[ ] but to his chagrin he finds it not so easy to reunite the tattered fragments. [ ] "what must we furnish to the child after the self-contained ball, after the hard sphere, every part of which is similar, and after the single solid cube? it must be something firm which can be easily pulled apart by the child's strength, and just as easily put together again. therefore it must also be something which is simple, yet multiform; and what should this be, after what we have perceived up to this point, and in view of what the surrounding world affords us, but the cube divided through the centre by three planes perpendicular to one another."--froebel's _pedagogics_. [ ] "_unmaking_ is as important as _making_ to the child. his destructive energy is as essential to him as his power of construction." (w. t. harris.) "the child wishes to discover the inside of the thing, being urged to this by an impulse he has not given to himself,--the impulse which, rightly recognized and rightly guided, seeks to know god in all his works.... where can the child seek for satisfaction of his impulse to research but from the thing itself?"--friedrich froebel, _education of man_. in the divided cube, however, he can gratify his desires, and at the same time possess the joy of doing right and destroying nothing, for the eight little blocks can be quickly united into their original form, and also into many other pleasing little forms, each one complete in itself, so that every analysis ends as it should, in synthesis. froebel calls this gift specifically "the children's delight," and indeed it is, responding so generously to their spontaneous activity, while at the same time it suits their small capabilities, for the possibilities of an object used for form study should not be too varied. "it must be suggestive through its limitations," says miss blow, "for the young mind may be as easily crushed by excess as by defect."[ ] [ ] "an element which slumbers like a viper under roses is that which is now so frequently provided as a plaything for children; it is, in a word, the already too complex and ornate, too finished toy. the child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough variety by means of it; his power of creative imagination, his power of giving outward form to his own idea, are thus actually deadened."--froebel's _pedagogics_. froebel was left motherless at a very early age, and during his first four years of life his father was entirely engrossed with parish duties, and the child had only occasional supervision from a hard-worked servant. thus it happened that he was frequently alone long hours at a time in a dusky room overshadowed by the neighboring church, and naturally strayed often to the window, from whence he might look down upon the busy world outside. he recalls that he was greatly interested at one time in some workmen who were repairing the church, and that he constantly turned from his post of observation to try and imitate their labors, but his only building material was the furniture of the room, and chairs and tables clumsily resisted his efforts to pile them up into suitable form. he tells us that this strong desire for building and the bitter disappointment of his repeated failures were still keenly remembered when he was a grown man, and thus suggested to him that children ought to be provided with materials for building among their playthings. he often noticed also, in later years, that all children seem to have the building instinct, corresponding to what dr. seguin calls "the building mania in the infancy of peoples," and that "to make a house is the universal form of unguided play."[ ] [ ] "one of the greatest and most universal delights of children is to construct for themselves a habitation of some sort, either in the garden or indoors, where chairs have generally to serve their purpose. instinct leads them, as it does all animals, to procure shelter and protection for their persons, individual outward self-existence and independence."--bertha von marenholtz-bülow, _child and child nature_. we now understand the meaning of the gift, the reason for its importance in froebel's plan, and its capabilities as a vehicle for delightful instruction. classes of forms. there are three different classes of forms for dictation and invention, variously named by kindergartners. . life forms, or upright forms, which are seen in the child's daily life, as a pair of boots, a chair, table, bed, or sofa. froebel calls them also object forms, or forms of things. ("the child demands that the object constructed stand in connection with himself, his life, or somebody or something in his life."--froebel.) . mathematical forms, or various combinations of the blocks, upright and supine, for mathematical exercises. they correspond to the forms of knowledge in logic. (also called by froebel forms of truth, forms of instruction, forms of learning.) . symmetrical forms, or flat designs formed by opposites and their intermediates. these are figures in which four of the blocks generally revolve in order around the other four as a centre. (also called by froebel picture forms, flower forms, star forms, dance forms.) life forms. life forms should be given first, as the natural tendency of the young child is to pile things up,[ ] and these forms seem simpler for dictation, are more readily grasped by the mind, and more fascinating to the imagination. they are the images of things both dear and familiar to him, and thus are particularly adapted to the beginning since the "starting point of the child's development is the heart and the emotions." it is easier for him to be an architect at first than an artist, though each will be comprehended in the other after a time.[ ] [ ] "the building or piling up is with the child, as with the development of the human race, and as with the fixed forms in nature, the first."--froebel's _education of man_. "towers, pyramids, up, up, connecting themselves with something high, voicing aspiration." [ ] "the representation of facts and circumstances of history, of geography, and especially of every-day life, by means of building, i hold to be in the highest degree important for children, even if these representations are imperfect and fall far short of their originals. the eye is at all events aroused and stimulated to observe with greater precision than before the object that has been represented.... and thus, by means of perhaps a quite imperfect outward representation, the inner perception is made more perfect."--froebel's _letters_, tr. by michaelis and moore, page . the dictations should be given very simply, clearly, and slowly, always using one set of terms to express a certain meaning, and having those absolutely correct. we should never give dictations from a book, but from memory, having prepared the lesson beforehand, and should remember that every exercise we give should "incite and develop self-activity." we must guard against mistakes or confusion in our own minds; it is very easy to confuse the child, and he will become inattentive and careless if he is unable to catch our meaning. brief stories should occasionally be told, just mere outlines to give color and force to the child's building, and connect it with his experience. if it is an armchair, grandmother may sit in it knitting the baby's stocking. if it is a well, describe the digging of it, the lining with stones or brick, the inflowing of the water, the letting down of the bucket and long chain, the clear, cool water coming up from the deep, dark hole in the ground on a hot summer's day. these, of course, are but the merest suggestions which experience may be trusted to develop. it is better, perhaps, to give a bit of word-painting to each object constructed than to wait till the end of the series for the day and tell a longer story, as the interest is thus more easily sustained. the children, too, should be encouraged to talk about the forms and tell little stories concerning them. the form created should never be destroyed, but transformed into the next in order by a few simple movements. symmetrical forms. "these forms, in spite of their regularity, are called forms of beauty. the mathematical forms which froebel designates forms of knowledge give only the skeleton from which the beautiful form develops itself. "symmetry of the parts which make up these simple figures gives the impression of beauty to the childish eye. he must have the elements of the beautiful before he is in a condition to comprehend it in its whole extent. "only what is simple gives light to the child at first. he can only operate with a small number of materials, therefore froebel gives only eight cubes for this object at this time." of course these three classes of forms are not to be kept arbitrarily separate, and the children finish and lay aside one set before attempting another. there are many cases where the three may be united, as indeed they are morally speaking in the life of every human being. when the distinctions are clear in our own minds, our knowledge and tact will guide us to introduce the gift properly, and carry it on in a natural, orderly, and rational manner, not restricting the child's own productive powers. if the children have had time to imbibe a love of symmetry and beauty, and have been trained to observe and delight in them, then this second class of forms will attract them as much, after a little, as the first, though more difficult of execution. each sequence starts from a definite point, the four outside blocks revolving round the central four, and going through or "dancing through," as froebel says, all the successive figures before returning in the opposite direction. all the dictations are most valuable intellectually, but should not be long-continued at one time, as they require great concentration of mind, and are consequently wearisome. hints from ronge's "guide." excellent exercises or suggestions for building can be found in ronge's "kindergarten guide." he mentions one pleasant little play which i will quote. "when each in the class has produced a different form, let the children rise and march round the table to observe the variety." let them sing in the ascending and descending scales:-- many pretty forms i see, which one seems the best to me? at another time let each child try to build the house he lives in, and while this is being done, let them join in singing some song about home. it is well to encourage singing during the building exercises, as we have so many appropriate selections.[ ] [ ] see _kindergarten chimes_ (kate d. wiggin), oliver ditson publishing co.: "building song," pages , ; "trade game," page ; "the carpenter," page . group work. with the first of the building gifts enters a new variety of group work, which was not adapted for the first and second gifts. the children may now be seated at square tables, one at each side, and build in unison in the centre, the form produced being of course four times as large and fine as any one of the number could have produced alone. all the suggestions or directions for building are necessarily carried out together, and the success of the completed form is obviously dependent on the coöperation of all four children. forms of beauty are very easily constructed in this manner, as well as forms of life, having four uniform sides, and when the little ones are somewhat more expert builders, life forms having opposite sides alike, or even four different sides, may be constructed. the other various forms of coöperative work are of course never to be neglected, that a social unity may be produced, in which "the might of each individual may be reinforced by the might of the whole." mathematical forms. a better idea of these may be obtained through a manipulation of the blocks and an arrangement of the geometrical forms in their regular order. the child, if he were taught as froebel intended, would make his first acquaintance with numbers in the nursery, beginning in a very small way and progressing slowly. the pupils of the kindergarten are a little older, and having already a slight knowledge of numbers (though not of course in their abstract relations) are able to accomplish greater things. the child can, with our guidance, make all possible combinations of the parts of the number eight. the principles of addition, subtraction, even multiplication and fractions, can also be mastered without one tear of misery or pang of torture. he grasps the whole first, then by simple processes, building with his own hands, he finds out and demonstrates for himself halves, fourths, and eighths, sometimes in different positions, but always having the same contents. method and manner of using the gift. even yet we must not suffer this to become work. the exercises should be repeated again and again, but we must learn to break off when the play is still delightful, and study ways to endow the next one with new life and charm, though it carry with it the same old facts. what we want to secure is, not a formidable number of parrot-like statements, but a firm foundation for future clearness of understanding, depth of feeling, and firmness of purpose. so, at the beginning of the exercise, we should not ask john if he remembers what we talked about last time, and expect him to answer clearly at once. because he does not answer our formal questions which do not properly belong to babyhood, we need not conclude he has learned nothing, for a child can show to our dull eyes only a very tiny glimpse of his wonderful inner world. let our aim be, that the child shall little by little receive impressions so clearly that he will recognize them when they appear again, and that he shall, after a time, know these impressions by their names. it is nothing but play after all, but it is in this childish play that deep meaning lies. a child is far less interested in that which is given him complete than in that which needs something from him to make it perfect. he loves to employ all his energies in conceiving and constructing forms; the less you do for him the better he enjoys it, if he has been trained to independence.[ ] [ ] "probably the chief wish of children is to do things for themselves, instead of to have things done for them. they would gladly live in a paradise of the home-made. for example, when we read how the 'prentices of london used to skate on sharp bones of animals, which they bound about their feet, we also wished, at least, to try that plan, rather than to wear skates bought in shops." (andrew lang.) "complete toys hinder the activity of children, encourage laziness and thoughtlessness, and do them more harm than can be told. the active tendency in them turns to the distortion of what is complete, and so becomes destructive." "any fusing together of lessons, work, and play, is possible only when the objects with which the child plays allow room for independent mental and bodily activity, i. e., when they are not themselves complete in the child's hand. had man found everything in the world fixed and prepared for use; had all means of culture, of satisfaction for the spiritual and material wants of his nature, been ready to his hand, there would have been no development, no civilization of the human race." pedantry and dogmatism must be eliminated from all the dictations; the life must not be shut out of the lessons in order that we may hear a pin drop, nor should they be allowed to degenerate into a tedious formalism and mechanical puppet-show, in which we pull the strings and the poor little dummies move with one accord. yet most emphatically a certain order and harmony must prevail, the forms must follow each other in natural sequence, the blocks must, invariably, be taken carefully from the box, so as to present a whole at the first glance, and at the close of the lesson should always be neatly put together again into the original form and returned to the box as a whole.[ ] [ ] "in order to furnish to the child at once clearly and definitely the _impression of the whole_, of _the self-contained_, the plaything before it is given to the child for his own free use must be opened as follows.... it will thus appear before the observing child as a cube closely united, yet easily separated and again restored."--froebel's _pedagogics_, pages , . and now one last word of warning about doing too much for the children in these exercises, and even guiding too much, carrying system and method too far in dictation. we must remember that an excess of systematizing crushes instead of developing originality, and that it is all too easy even in the kindergarten to turn children into machines incapable of acting when the guiding hand is removed. note. in opening the boxes, it is well to observe some simple form. it is not irksome, but, on the contrary, rather pleasing to the children, who delight in doing things in concert. boxes in centre of table. . draw the cover out one half space. . fingers of right hand placed on left-hand side of box. . turn entirely over from left to right. . withdraw lid and place on right-hand upper corner of table. . lift box gently and place on top of cover mouth upwards. readings for the student. reminiscences of froebel. _von marenholtz-bülow_. page . child and child nature. _von marenholtz-bülow_. , . education. _e. seguin_. , . lessons in form. _w. w. speer_. . pedagogics of the kindergarten. _fr. froebel_. - . education of man. _fr. froebel_. tr. by _josephine jarvis_. , . kindergarten at home. _e. shirreff_. - . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. - . paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. - . law of childhood. _w. n. hailmann_. - . kindergarten guide. _j_. and _b. ronge_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. - . froebel and education by self-activity. h. _courthope bowen_. - . kindergarten toys. _heinrich hoffmann_. - . conscious motherhood. _e. marwedel_. , . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . froebel's fourth gift "a new gift is demanded--a gift wherein the length, breadth, and thickness of a solid body shall be distinguished from each other by difference of size. such a gift will open the child's eyes to the three dimensions of space, and will serve also as a means of recognizing and interpreting the manifold forms and structures with which he is constantly brought in contact." "the inner difference, intimated in the three perpendicular axes of the cube (and the sphere), now becomes externally visible and abiding in each of its building blocks as a difference of size." fr. froebel. "the fourth gift incites the child to consider things in their relations to space, and to the forces of nature, and in his play with the bricks he is constantly engaged in efforts to adapt himself to the laws of their nature, while rendering them subservient to his ends." w. n. hailmann. . the fourth gift consists of a cube measuring two inches in each of its dimensions. it is divided once vertically in its height, and three times horizontally in its thickness, giving eight parallelopipeds or bricks, each two inches long, one inch wide, and one half inch thick. . like the third gift in form, size, material, and use, it is unlike it in division. in the third gift the parts were like each other, and like the whole, in the fourth they are like each other, but unlike the whole. . the most important characteristics of the gift are:-- _a._ approximation to surface in the symmetrical forms. _b._ greater height and greater extension, resulting in a greater possible inclosure of space. _c._ the illustration of two philosophical laws, viz., the law of equilibrium or balance, and the law of transmitted motion or propagation of force. . progress is shown in this gift as follows:-- _a._ in the difficulty of dictation and manipulation arising from the different character of the faces of the bricks, and the many positions which each brick can assume. _b._ in the necessity of perfect balance. _c._ in a clearer illustration of dimension. in the third gift the parts were equal in height, breadth, and thickness; in the fourth they are unequal, and therefore each dimension is emphasized. as to progression, the increase of difficulty suits the increase in the child's power of comprehension and receptivity. he is being developed thus far, not by rapid changes in material or greater exercise in number, but by practice with differing forms, each one bringing with it new knowledge and experience. the organs of perception are being constantly made to grow by exercise with intention. we are forming the scientific eye which can detect differences ever after at a glance. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- solids. { rectangular parallelopipeds. { square prisms. planes. { oblongs. { squares. . the fourth gift presents contrasts of dimension and, as to the area of its faces, contrasts of size and their mediation. * * * * * what the child has gained from third gift. the use of the third gift opened to the child quite a new world of experiences, each one of which was pleasant and instructive, combining all the delights of mental and physical activity, imagination, practical industry, and coöperation. he has gained an idea, distinct in proportion to the skill with which it has been placed before him, of the cube as a solid body having surfaces, corners, and edges; of a whole and its equal fractional parts; of the power of combining those parts into new wholes; and of the fact that form and size are two separate and distinct characteristics of objects. he has also gained new dexterity.[ ] his ten little fingers that seemed "all thumbs" as they arranged so carefully the clumsy little cubes of the low wall can now build the bunker hill monument with unerring skill, and can even, with the grave concentration that it demands, drop the last difficult little block cornerwise into the top of the church window. [ ] "a child trained for one year in a kindergarten would acquire a skillful use of his hands and a habit of accurate measurement of the eye which would be his possession through life." (w. t. harris.) the child has counted his cubes from one to eight until he knows them like the children of a family, and can divide them into sets of two and four with equal ease. these are the deeds. as to the new words the little box of blocks has brought him, their number is legion, comprising many terms of direction and position, names of tools and implements, buildings and places. truly if the kindergartner has been wise and faithful, the child has gained wonders from this simple unassuming toy, one which is almost too plain and rude to fix the momentary attention of a modern spoiled child, though even he will grow to appreciate its treasures if rightly guided. differences between third and fourth gifts. and now we approach another cubical box, containing the fourth gift, and, on opening it, see that it presents resemblances between and differences when compared with that just left behind. we notice at once the new method of division, and in separating it find that the parts, evidently in number the same as before, are entirely novel in form, though the whole was familiar in its aspect. if the child is old enough to understand the process of comparison, he will see that the parts of the two gifts have each six surfaces, eight corners, and twelve edges; but that while edges and corners are alike, the faces differ greatly on the new block, which he will probably call the "brick," as it is a familiar form and name to him. this process of comparison will be greatly facilitated if he models the two cubes in clay, and divides them with string or wire, the one into inch cubes, the other into bricks. dr. seguin's objections to the cube as the primary figure in the kindergarten. dr. e. seguin, in his celebrated "report on education," says, in regard to the use of the cube as the primary block or figure in the kindergarten: "had the kindergartners chosen it with their senses, as it must speak to the senses of the child, instead of with their mind, they would certainly never have selected the cube, a form in which similarity is everywhere, difference nowhere, a barren type incapable by itself of instigating the child to active comparison. had they, on the contrary, from infantile reminiscences, or from more philosophical indications, selected a block of brick-form, the child would soon have discovered and made use of the similarity of the straight lines, and of the difference of the three dimensions. for example: put a cube on your desk and let a pupil put one on his; you change the position of yours, he, accordingly, of his. if you renew these moves till both of you are tired, they will not make any perceptible change in the aspect of the object. the movement has been barren of any modification perceptible to the senses and appreciable to the mind. there has been no lesson unless you have, by words speaking to the mind, succeeded in making the child comprehend the idea of a cube derived from its intrinsic properties; a body with six equal sides and eight equal angles." answers to these objections. with all deference to dr. seguin, whose opinions and deductions are generally indisputable, we cannot regard as unwise the choice of the cube as the primary figure in the gifts. in the first place, froebel, having a sequence of forms in his mind, undoubtedly wished to introduce, early in that sequence, the one which would best serve him as a foundation for further division and subdivision. this need is, beyond question, better met in the cube than in the brick, which would lend itself awkwardly to regular division. secondly, although there is in the cube "similarity everywhere, difference nowhere," and therefore it might be called in truth a "barren type, incapable by itself of instigating the child to comparison and action," we do not introduce it, by itself, but in contrast with the sphere and cylinder. then, when it appears again in the building gifts, "as the simplest and most easily handled form element," the kindergartner has every opportunity to use it so that it may lead the child to comparison and action, and to develop the slowly dawning sense of difference and agreement without which she well knows "knowledge has not yet made the first step." but, if the cube is a form speaking little to the senses of a child, and requiring description by words spoken to the mind, it is evident that we should use great care in dealing with the second gift, lest we run needlessly into abstractions, and strive to give the child ideas of which he can have no comprehension. value of the brick form. the "brick" is a form rich in impressions, for we find that every position in which it is placed gives the child a new perception, and the union of these perceptions furnishes him with a complete idea of the object, and of its possible uses in relation to its form. dr. seguin does not rate it too highly when he says: "what a spring of effective movements, of perceptions and of ideas in the exercises with this form, where analogy and difference, incessantly noted by the touch and the view, challenge the mind to comparison and judgment!" dimension. the fourth gift contains all that the three former gifts showed, and introduces differences of dimension and equilibrium only hinted at before. it also, as froebel says, "throws into relief the perception of size by showing similarity of size with dissimilarity of dimension and position." as to dimension, the child built the shot-tower with the third gift, and knew that it was high, the platform and that it was broad, the well and that it was deep, the wall and saw that it was thick, etc., so that he has a conception of height, length, breadth; but in the fourth gift he is shown these dimensions in a single block. he is thus led from the known to the unknown.[ ] they are united and contrasted in one object, and therefore emphasized. [ ] "the three principal dimensions of space, which in the cube only make themselves known as differences of position, in the fourth gift become more prominent and manifest themselves as differences of size. these three relations of size are in the fourth gift as abiding and changeless as the position of the three principal directions was before and still is."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . equilibrium. as to the law of equilibrium, it is very forcibly brought to the child's attention every time his forms fall to the table when constructed without due regard to its principles. he soon sees its practical significance, takes care to follow its manifest expression, and to observe with more care the centre of gravity. great liberties could be taken with the stolid little cubes and they seldom showed any resentment; they quietly settled down into their places and resisted sturdily all the earthquake shocks which are apt to visit a kindergarten table during the building hour. the bricks on the other hand have to be humored and treated with deference. the moment one is placed upon another, end to end, the struggle begins, and in any of the high life forms, the utmost delicacy of touch is necessary as well as sure aim and steady hand. here comes in, too, a necessity of calculation not before required. the cubes could be placed on any side and always occupy the same space, but the building with the bricks will vary according as they are placed on the broad, the narrow, or the short face. they must also fit together and bear a certain relation to each other. in the dictations it will be perceived that we now have to specify the position which the brick must take as well as the place which it is to occupy. we designate the three faces of the brick as the broad face, the narrow face, and the short face or end. fourth gift building. the symmetrical forms are much more interesting than before and decidedly more artistic when viewed in comparison with the somewhat thick and clumsy designs made with the cubes. the fourth gift forms cover more space, approach nearer the surface, and the bricks slide gracefully from one position to another, and slip in and out of the different figures with a movement which seems like a swan's, compared with the goose-step of the stubby little cubes. it is a noteworthy fact that "the buds," as froebel calls them, of all the fourth gift beauty forms were contained in those of the third gift, and have here opened into fuller bloom. the life forms are much more artistic now, and begin to imitate a little more nearly the objects they are intended to represent. we can make more extensive buildings also since we have an additional height or length of eight inches over that of the third gift, and thus can cover double the amount of surface and inclose a much greater space. in the first play with the gift, the children's eyes, so keen in seeing play possibilities, quickly discover the value of the bricks in furniture-making, and set to work at once on tables and chairs, or bureaus and sofas and bedsteads. they engage too in a lively contest with the law of equilibrium, and experiment long and patiently until they comprehend its practical workings. when they understand the fourth gift fairly well, know the different faces and can handle the bricks with some dexterity, the third gift should be added and the two used together. they complement each other admirably, and give variety and strength to the building, whether forms of life, beauty, or knowledge are constructed. froebel, however, is most emphatic in directing that each set of blocks should be given to the child in its own box, opened so as to present a whole at the first glance, and carefully rebuilt and packed away when the play is over. the cubes and bricks should never be left jumbled together at the close of the exercise, nor should they be kept in and returned to a common receptacle. "unimportant as these little rules may appear," he says, "they are essential to the clear and definite development of the child, to his orderly apprehension of external objects, and to the logical unfolding of his own concepts and judgments." "the box of building blocks should be regarded by the child," he concludes, "as a worthy, an appreciated, and a loved comrade." the mathematical forms are constructed and applied in precisely the same manner as before. the fourth gift, however, offers a far greater number of these than its predecessor, while it is particularly adapted to show that objects identical in form and size may be produced in quite different ways. throughout all these guided plays, it should be remembered that time is always to be allowed the child for free invention, that the kindergartner should talk to him about what he has produced so that his thought may be discovered to himself,[ ] and that in all possible ways group work should be encouraged in order that his own strength and attainments may be multiplied by that of his playfellows and swell the common stock of power. froebel, the great advocate of the "together" principle says, "isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create life."[ ] [ ] "the child is allowed the greatest possible freedom of invention; the experience of the adult only accompanies and explains."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . [ ] _pedagogics_, page . it is perhaps needless to say that the philosophical laws which govern the outward manifestations of a moving force, as equilibrium or self-propagating activity, are for personal study, and are never to be spoken of abstractly to the child, but merely to be illustrated with simple explanations. transmitted motion. to show simply the law of transmitted motion, for instance, let the child place his eight bricks on end, in a row, one half inch apart, with their broad faces toward each other. then ask him to give the one at the right a very gentle push towards the others and see what will happen; the result is probably as great a delight as you could reasonably wish to put within his reach. when he asks, "what makes them do so?" as every thoughtful child is apt to do, let us ask the class the same question and set them thinking about it. "which brick did it?" we may say familiarly, and they will see it all in a moment,--where the force originated, how it gave itself to the next brick in order, that one in turn doing the same, and so on. this law of transmitted motion, when so simply illustrated in the fourth gift, easily suggests to the children the force of example, and indeed every physical law seems to have its correlate in the moral world. we may make the children see it very clearly through the seven poor, weak little bricks that fell down because they were touched by the first one. they really could not help it; now, how about seven little boys or girls? they can help doing things, can they not? by such simple exercises and appropriate comments the children may be made to realize their moral free agency. readings for the student. kindergarten at home. _emily shirreff_. pages - . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. , . kindergarten guide. _j_. and _b. ronge_. - . pedagogics of the kindergarten. _fr. froebel_. - . paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . froebel and education by self-activity. _h. courthope bowen_. , . kindergarten toys. _h. hoffmann_. - . froebel's fifth gift "the material for making forms increases by degrees, progressing according to law, as nature prescribes. the simple wild rose existed before the double one was formed by careful culture. children are too often overwhelmed with quantity and variety of material that makes formation impossible to them." "the demand of the new gift, therefore, is that the oblique line, hitherto only transiently indicated, shall become an abiding feature of its material." "in the forms made with the fifth gift there rules a living spirit of unity. even members and directions which are apparently isolated are discovered to be related by significant connecting members and links, and the whole shows itself in all its parts as one and living,--therefore, also, as a life-rousing, life-nurturing, and life-developing totality." fr. froebel. . the fifth gift is a three-inch cube, which, being divided equally twice in each dimension, produces twenty-seven one-inch cubes. three of these are divided into halves by one diagonal cut, and three others into quarters by two diagonal cuts crossing each other, making in all thirty-nine pieces, twenty-one of which are whole cubes, the same size as those of the third gift. . the fifth gift seems to be an extension of the third, from which it differs in the following points:-- the third gift is a two-inch cube, the fifth a three-inch cube; the third is divided once in each dimension, the fifth twice. in the third all the parts are like each other and like the whole; in the fourth, they are like each other but unlike the whole; and in the fifth they are not only for the most part unlike each other, but eighteen of them are unlike the whole. the third gift emphasized vertical and horizontal divisions producing entirely rectangular solids; the fifth, by introduction of the slanting line and triangular prism, extends the element of form. in the third gift, the slanting direction was merely implied in a transitory way by the position of the blocks; in the fifth it is definitely realized by their diagonal division. in number, the third gift emphasized two and multiples of two; the fifth is related to the fourth in its advance in complexity of form and mathematical relations. . the most important characteristics of the gift are: introduction of diagonal line and triangular form; division into thirds, ninths, and twenty-sevenths; illustration of the inclined plane and cube-root. as a result of these combined characteristics, it is specially adapted to the production of symmetrical forms. it includes not only multiplicity, but, for the first time, diversity of material. . the fifth gift realizes a higher unity through a greater variety than has been illustrated previously. it corresponds with the child's increasing power of analysis; it offers increased complexity to satisfy his growing powers of creation, and less definitely suggestive material in order to keep pace with his developing individuality. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- { cube. { rectangular parallelopiped. { square prism. { triangular prism. solids. { rhomboidal prism. { trapezoidal prism. { pentagonal prism. { hexagonal prism. { heptagonal prism. { octagonal prism. { square. { oblong. { right isosceles triangle. { rhomboid. planes. { trapezium. { trapezoid. { pentagon. { hexagon. { heptagon. { octagon. . the fifth gift shows the following contrasts and mediations:-- the diagonal line a connection between the horizontal and vertical; the right angle as a connection between the obtuse angle (largest) and the acute angle (smallest); in size of parts the half cube standing between the whole and quarter cubes. * * * * * we have thus far been proceeding from unity to variety, from the whole to its parts, from the simple to the complex, from easily constructed forms to those more difficult of manipulation and dictation, until we have arrived at the fifth gift. effect of the study of froebel's gifts on the kindergartner. how instructive and delightful have we found this orderly procedure; this development of great from little things; this thoughtful association of new and practical ideas with all that is familiar to the child mind and heart. every year the training teacher feels it anew herself, and is sure of the growing interest and sympathy of her pupils. many persons who fail to grasp the true meaning of the kindergarten seem to consider the balls and blocks and sticks with which we work most insignificant little objects; but we think, on the other hand, that nothing in the universe is small or insignificant if viewed in its right connection and undertaken with earnestness and enthusiasm. nothing in childhood is too slight for the notice, too trivial for the sympathy of those on whom the father of all has bestowed the holy dignity of motherhood or teacherhood; and to the kindergartner belongs the added dignity of approaching nearer the former than the latter, for hers indeed is a sort of vice-motherhood. we must always be impressed with the knowledge which we ourselves gain in studying these gifts and preparing the exercises with them. in concentration of thought; careful, distinct, precise, and expressive language; logical arrangement of ideas; new love of order, beauty, symmetry, fitness, and proportion; added ingenuity in adapting material to various uses, æsthetic and practical,--in all these ways every practical student of froebel must constantly feel a decided advance in ability. then, too, the simple rudiments of geometry have been reviewed in a new light; we have dealt with solid bodies and planes, and studied them critically so that we might draw the child's attention to all points of resemblance or difference; we have found some beautifully simple illustrations of familiar philosophical truths, and, best of all, have simplified and crystallized our knowledge of the relations of numbers so that the child's impressions of them may be easily and clearly gained. why we are required to study deeply and to know more than we teach. we have been required to look at each gift in its broadest aspect, and to observe it patiently and minutely in all its possibilities, for the larger the amount of knowledge the kindergartner possesses, the more free from error will be her practice. unless we know more than we expect to teach, we shall find that our lessons will be stiff, formal affairs, lacking variety, elasticity, and freshness, and marred continually by lack of illustration and spontaneity. lack of interest in the teacher is as fatal as lack of interest in the child; in fact, the one follows directly upon the heels of the other. for this reason, continued study is vitally necessary that new phases of truth may continually be seen. above all other people the teacher should go through life with eyes and ears open. unless she is constantly accumulating new information her mind will not only become like a stagnant pool, but she will find out that what she possesses is gradually evaporating. there is no state of equilibrium here; she who does not progress retrogresses. it should be a comparatively simple matter to gain enough knowledge for teaching,--the difficult thing is the art of imparting it. said lord bacon, "the art of well delivering the knowledge we possess to others is among the secrets left to be discovered by future generations." relation between gifts, and their relation to the child's mental and moral growth. these are a few of the technicalities which have been mastered up to this time by a faithful study of the gifts of froebel; and yet they are only technicalities, and do not include the half of what has been gained in ways more difficult to describe. "to clearly comprehend the gifts either individually or collectively we must clearly conceive their relation to and dependence on each other, for it is only in this intimate connection that they gain importance or value." if the kindergartner does not recognize the relationship which exists between them and their relation to the child's mental and moral growth, she uses them with no power or intelligence. we conceive nothing truly so long as we conceive it by itself; the individual example must be referred to the universal law before we can rightly apprehend its significance, and for a clear insight into anything whatsoever we must view it in relation to the class to which it belongs. we can never really know the part unless we know the whole, neither can we know the whole unless we know the part. pleasure of child at new gift. in the fifth gift, which, it may be said, can commonly only be used with profit after the child has neared or attained his fifth year, we find that we have not parted from our good old friend, the cube, that has taught us so many valuable lessons. we always find contained in each gift a reminder of the previous one, together with new elements which may have been implied before, but not realized. so, therefore, we have again the cube, but greatly enlarged, divided, and diversified. when the child sees for the first time even the larger box containing his new plaything, he feels joyful anticipation, surmising that as he has grown more careful and capable, he has been entrusted with something of considerable importance. if he has been allowed to use the third and fourth gifts together frequently, he will not be embarrassed by the amount of material in the new object. lest he be overwhelmed, however, by its variety as much as by its quantity, it might be well before presenting the new material as a whole to allow the child to play with a third gift in which one cube cut in halves and one in quarters have been substituted for two whole cubes. he will joyfully discover the new forms, study them carefully, and find out their distinctive peculiarities and their value in building. when he has used them successfully once or twice, and has learned how to place the triangular prisms to form the cube, then the mass of new material as a whole can have no terrors for him. how great is his pleasure when he withdraws the cover and finds indeed something full of immense possibilities; he feels, too, a command of his faculties which leads him to regard the new materials, not with doubt or misgiving, but with a conscious power of comprehension. its new features. at the first glance the most striking characteristics are its greater size and greater number of divisions, into thirds, ninths, and twenty-sevenths, instead of halves, quarters, and eighths. these divisions open a new field in number lessons, while the introduction of the slanting line and triangular prism makes a decided advance in form and architectural possibilities. importance of triangular form. the triangle, by the way, is a valuable addition in building exercises, for as a fundamental form in architecture it occurs very frequently in the formation of all familiar objects. indeed, the new form and its various uses in building constitute the most striking and valuable feature of the gift. we find it an interesting fact that all the grand divisions of the earth's surface have a triangular form, and that the larger islands assume this shape more or less. the operation of dividing the earth's surface into greater and lesser triangles is used in making a trigonometrical survey and in ascertaining the length of a degree of latitude or longitude. the triangle is also of great use in the various departments of mechanical work, as will be noted hereafter in connection with the seventh gift. difficulties of the fifth gift. the difficulties of the fifth gift are only apparent, for the well-trained child of the kindergarten sees more than any other, and he will grasp the small complexities with wonderful ease, smoothing out a path for himself while we are wondering how we shall make it plain to him. effect of good training. but here let us note that we can only succeed in attaining satisfactory results in kindergarten work by beginning intelligently and never discontinuing our patient watchfulness, self-command, and firmness of purpose,--firmness, remember, not stubbornness, for it is a rare gift to be able to yield rightly and at the proper time. if we help the little one too much in his first simple lessons or dictations; if we supply the word he ought to give; if, to save time and produce a symmetrical effect, we move a block here and there in weariness at some child's apparent stupidity, we shall never fail to reap the natural results. the effect of a rational conscientious and consistent behavior to the child in all our dealings with him is very great, and every little slip from the loving yet firm and straightforward course brings its immediate fruit. the perfectly developed child welcomes each new difficulty and invites it; the imperfectly trained pupil shrinks in half-terror and helplessness, feeling no hope of becoming master of these strange new impressions. arrangement of pieces. to return to the specific consideration of the gift, there must be a plan of arranging the various pieces which go to make up the whole cube. we have now for the first time the slanting line, the mediation of the two opposites, vertical and horizontal, and by this three of the small cubes are divided into halves and three into quarters. it is advisable, when building the cube, to place nine whole cubes in each of the two lower layers, keeping all the divided cubes in the upper or third layer, halves in the middle row, quarters at the back. then we may slide the box gently over the cube as in the third and fourth gifts, which enables us to have the blocks separated properly when taken out again, and forms the only expedient way of handling the pieces.[ ] [ ] "this procedure is by no means intended merely to make the withdrawal of the box easy for the child, but, on the contrary, brings to him much inner profit. it is well for him to receive his playthings in an orderly manner--not to have them tossed to him as fodder is tossed to animals. it is good for the child to begin his play with the perception of a whole, a simple self-contained unit, and from this unity to develop his representations. finally, it is essential that the playing child should receive his material so arranged that its various elements are discernible, and that by seeing them his mind may unconsciously form plans for using them. receiving his material thus arranged, the child will use it with ever-recurrent and increasing satisfaction, and his play will produce far more abiding results than the play of one whose material lies before him like a heap of cobblestones."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . the exercises with this gift are like those which have preceded it. exercises of the gift . informal questions by the kindergartner and answers by the children, on its introduction, that it may be well understood. this should be made entirely conversational, familiar, and playful, but a logical plan of development should be kept in mind. a consideration of the various pieces of the gift may occupy a part of each building or number lesson. . dictation, building by suggestion, and cooperative plays in the various forms. with all except advanced children the life forms are most useful and desirable.[ ] [ ] "the child, in a word, follows the same path as the man, and advances from use to beauty and from beauty to truth."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . . free invention with each lesson. . number and form lessons. in number there will of course be some repetition of what has been done before, but a sufficient amount of new presentation to awaken interest. it is only by constant review and repetition that we can assist children to remember these things and to receive them among their natural experiences, and fortunately the habit of repetition in childhood is a natural one, and therefore seldom irksome. errors in form teaching. as to the form lessons, we must remember that our method has nothing to do with scientific geometry, but is based entirely on inspection and practice. it lays the foundation of instruction in drawing, and forms an admirable preparation for different trades, as carpentry, cabinet-making, masonry, lock-smithing, pattern-making, etc. even in the primary schools, and how much more in the kindergarten, the form or geometrical work should be essentially practical and given by inspection. even there all scientific demonstration should be prohibited, and the teacher should be sparing in definitions. it is enough if the children recognize the forms by their special characteristics and by perceiving their relations, and can reproduce the solids in modeling, and the planes and outlines in tablets, sticks, rings, slats, drawing, and sewing.[ ] [ ] "the conference recommends that the child's geometrical education should begin as early as possible; in the kindergarten, if he attends a kindergarten, or if not, in the primary school. he should at first gain familiarity through the senses with simple geometrical figures and forms, plane and solid; should handle, draw, measure, and model them; and should gradually learn some of their simpler properties and relations."--_report of committee of ten_, page . life forms. we can now be quite methodical and workman-like in our building, and can learn to use all the parts economically and according to principle. we can discuss ground plans, cellars, foundations, basements, roofs, eaves, chimneys, entrances, and windows, and thus can make almost habitable dwellings and miniature models of larger objects.[ ] [ ] "the child's life moves from the house and its living-rooms, through kitchen and cellar, through yard and garden, to the wider space and activity of street and market, and this expansion of life is clearly reflected in the order and development of his productions."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . the child is a real carpenter now, and innocently happy in his labor. who can doubt that in these cheerful daily avocations he becomes in love with industry and perseverance, and as character is nothing but crystallized habit, he gets a decided bias in these directions which affects him for many a year afterward.[ ] [ ] "in some german kindergartens large building-logs are supplied in one corner of the play garden. these logs are a foot or more in length, three inches wide, and one inch thick. several hundred of these are kept neatly piled against the fence, and the children are expected to leave them in good order. this bit of voluntary discipline has its good uses on the playground, and the free building allowed with this larger material gives rise to individual effort, and tests the power of the children in a way which makes the later, more organized work at the tables far more full of meaning."--_kindergarten magazine_, november, . objects which he meets in his daily walks are to be constructed, and also objects with which he is not so familiar,[ ] so that by pleasant conversation the realm of his knowledge may be extended, and the sphere of his affections and fancies enlarged; for these exercises when properly conducted address equally head, heart, and hand. [ ] "as these building gifts afford a means of clearing the perceptions of the child, they give occasion for extending these perceptions, and for representing in their essential parts objects of which the child has only heard."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . froebel says of all this building, "it is essential to proceed from the cube as a whole. in this way the conception of the whole, of uniting, stamps itself upon the child's mind, and the evolution of the particular, partial, and manifold from unity is illustrated." group work. our opportunities for group work, or united building, are greatly extended, and none of them should be neglected, as it is essential to inculcate thus early the value of coöperation. we have material enough to call into being many different things on the children's tables; the house where they live, the church they see on sunday, the factory where their fathers or brothers work, the schoolhouse, the city hall, the public fountain, the stable, and the shops. thus we may create an entire village with united effort, and systematic, harmonious action. each object may be brought into intimate relation with the others by telling a story in which every form is introduced. this always increases the interest of the class, and the story itself seems to be more distinctly remembered by the child when brought into connection with what he has himself constructed. the third gift may be used with the fifth if we wish to increase the number of blocks for coöperative work, and is particularly adapted to the laying of foundations for large buildings in the sand-table. a large fifth gift, constructed on the scale of a foot instead of an inch, is very useful for united building. one child or the kindergartner may be the architect of the monument or other large form which is to be erected in the centre of the circle. the various children then bring the whole cubes, the halves, and quarters, and lay them in their appropriate places, and the erection when complete is the work of every member of the community. symmetrical forms. these are in number and variety almost endless, as we have thirty-nine pieces of different characters. edward wiebe says: "he who is not a stranger in mathematics knows that the number of combinations and permutations of thirty-nine different bodies cannot be counted by hundreds nor expressed by thousands, but that millions hardly suffice to exhaust all possible combinations." these forms naturally separate themselves, froebel says, into two distinct series, i. e., the series of squares and the series of triangles, and move from these to the circle as the conclusion of the whole series of representations. "from these forms approximating to the circle there is an easy transition to the representation of the different kinds of cog-wheels, and hence to a crude preliminary idea of mechanics." if the movements begin with the exterior part of the figure instead of the interior, we should make all the changes we wish in that direction before touching the centre, and _vice versa_. each definite beginning conditions a certain process of its own, and however much liberty in regard to changes may be allowed, they are always to be introduced within certain limits.[ ] we should leave ample room for the child's own powers of creation, but never disregard froebel's principle of connection of opposites; this alone will furnish him with the "inward guide" which he needs.[ ] it is only by becoming accustomed to a logical mode of action that the child can use this amount of material to good advantage. [ ] "with these forms of beauty it is above all important that they be developed one from another. each form in the series should be a modification or transformation of its predecessor. no form should be entirely destroyed. it is also essential that the series should be developed so that each step should show either an evolution into greater manifoldness and variety, or a return to greater simplicity."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . [ ] "this free activity ... is only possible when the law of free creativeness is known and applied; for that a free creativeness only can be a lawful one, we are taught by the smallest blade of grass, whose development takes place only according to immutable laws."--_reminiscences of froebel_, page . dangers of dictation. the dictations should be made with great care and simplicity. the child's mind must never be forced if it shows weariness, nor the more difficult lessons given in too noisy a room, as the nervous strain is very great under such circumstances. we should remember that great concentration is needed for a young child to follow these dictations, and we must be exceedingly careful in enforcing that strict attention for too long a time. a well-known specialist says that such exercises should not be allowed at first to take up more than a minute or two at a time; then, that their duration should gradually extend to five and ten minutes. the length of time which children closely and voluntarily attend to an exercise is as follows: children from five to seven years, about fifteen minutes; from seven to ten years, twenty minutes; from twelve to eighteen years, thirty minutes. a magnetic teacher can obtain attention somewhat longer, but it will always be at the expense of the succeeding lesson. "by teachers of high pretensions, lessons are often carried on greatly and grievously in excess of the proper limits; but when the results are examined they show that after a certain time has been exceeded, everything forced upon the brain only tends to drive out or to confuse what has been previously stored in it." we find, of course, that the mind can sustain more labor for a longer time when all the faculties are employed than when a single faculty is exerted, but the ambitious teacher needs to remind herself every day that no error is more fatal than to overwork the brain of a young child. other errors may perhaps be corrected, but the effects of this end only with life. to force upon him knowledge which is too advanced for his present comprehension, or to demand from him greater concentration, and for a longer period than he is physically fitted to give, is to produce arrested development.[ ] [ ] "whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has generally sacrificed wisdom, too." (jean paul.) mathematical forms. we must beware of abstractions in these forms of knowledge, and let the child see and build for himself, then lead him to express in numbers what he has seen and built. he will not call it arithmetic, nor be troubled with any visions of mathematics as an abstract science.[ ] [ ] "perceptions and recognitions which are with difficulty gained from _words_ are easily gained from facts and deeds. through actual experience the child gains in a trice a total concept, whereas the same concept expressed in words would be only grasped in a partial manner. the rare merit, the vivifying influence of this play-material is that, through the representations it makes possible, concepts are recognized at once in their wholeness and unity, whereas such an idea of a whole can only very gradually be gained from its verbal expression. it must, however, be added that later, through words, the concept can be brought into higher and clearer consciousness."--froebel's _pedagogics_, page . the cube may be divided into thirds, ninths, and twenty-sevenths, and the fact thus practically shown that whether the thirds are in one form or another, in long lines or squares, upright or flat, the contents remain the same. we may also illustrate by building, that like forms may be produced which shall have different contents, or different forms having the same contents. halves and quarters may be discussed and fully illustrated, and addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division may be continued as fully as the comprehension of the child will allow. during the practice with the forms of knowledge we should frequently illustrate the lawful evolution of one form from another, as in the series moving from the parallelopiped to the hexagonal prism. it should not be forgotten that whenever the cube is separated and divided, recombination should follow, and that the gift plays should always close with synthetic processes. some of the mathematical truths shown in the fifth gift were also seen in the third, but "repeated experiences," as froebel says, "are of great profit to the child."[ ] we should allow no memorizing in any of these exercises or meaningless and sing-song repetitions of words. we must always talk enough to make the lesson a living one, but not too much, lest the child be deprived of the use of his own thoughts and abilities. [ ] "it is through frequent return to a subject and intense activity upon it for short periods, that it 'soaks in' and becomes influential in the building of character. especially is this true if the principles of apperception and concentration are not forgotten by the teacher in working upon the disciplinary subjects." (geo. p. brown.) the fifth gift b. there is a supplemental box of blocks called in germany the fifth gift b, which may be regarded as a combination of the second and fifth gifts, and whose place in the regular line of material is between the fifth and sixth. it was brought out in berlin more than thirteen years ago, but has not so far been used to any extent in this country. it is a three-inch wooden cube divided into twelve one-inch cubes, eight additional cubes from each of which one corner is removed and which correspond in size to a quarter of a cylinder, six one-inch cylinders divided in halves, and three one-inch cubes divided diagonally into quarters like those of the fifth gift. hermann goldammer argues its necessity in his book "the gifts of the kindergarten" (berlin, ), when he says that the curved line has been kept too much in the background by kindergartners, and that the new blocks will enable children to construct forms derived from the sphere and cylinder, as well as from the cube. goldammer's remark in regard to the curved line is undoubtedly true, but it would seem that he himself indicates that the place of the new blocks (or of some gift containing curved lines) should be supplemental to the third, rather than the fifth, as they would there carry out more strictly the logical order of development and amplify the suggestions of the sphere, cube, and cylinder. it is possible that we need a third gift b and a fourth gift b, as well as some modifications of the one already existing, all of which should include forms dealing with the curve. goldammer says further: "in froebel's building boxes there are two series of development intended to render a child by his own researches and personal activity familiar with the general properties of solid bodies and the special properties of the cube and forms derived from it. these two series hitherto had the sixth gift as their last stage, although froebel himself wished to see them continued by two new boxes. he never constructed them, however, nor are the indications which he has left us with regard to those intended additions sufficiently clear to be followed by others." the curved forms of the fifth gift b are, of course, of marked advantage in building, especially in constructing entrances, wells, vestibules, rose-windows, covered bridges, railroad stations, viaducts, steam and horse cars, house-boats, fountains, lighthouses, as well as familiar household furniture, such as pianos, tall clocks, bookshelves, cradles, etc. though one may perhaps consider the fifth gift b as not entirely well placed in point of sequence, and needing some modification of its present form, yet no one can fail to enjoy its practical use, or to recognize the validity of the arguments for its introduction. readings for the student. paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. pages - . kindergarten guide. _j._ and _b. ronge_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte._ - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. - . froebel and education by self-activity. _h. courthope bowen_. , . pedagogics of the kindergarten. _fr. froebel_. - . art and the formation of taste. _walter crane_. , - . seven lamps of architecture. _john ruskin_. the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - , - . kindergarten toys. _h. hoffmann_. - . froebel's sixth gift "the artistically cultivated senses of the new generation will again restore pure, holy art." friedrich froebel. "life brings to each his task, and whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,--all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt; begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step." r. w. emerson. "the sixth gift reveals the value of axial contrasts." w. n. hailmann. . the sixth gift is a three-inch cube divided by various cuts into thirty-six pieces, eighteen of which are rectangular parallelopipeds, or bricks, the same size as those of the fourth gift, two inches long, one inch wide, and one half inch thick. twelve additional pieces are formed by cutting six of these parallelopipeds or units of measure in halves breadthwise, giving blocks with two square and four oblong faces. the remaining six pieces are formed by cutting three parallelopipeds or units of measure in halves, lengthwise, giving square prisms, columns, or pillars. . the sixth is the last of the solid gifts, and is an extension of the fourth, from which it differs in size and number of parts. it deals with multiples of the number two and three also; with halves rather than with quarters or thirds, the "half" being treated in a new manner, i. e., by dividing the unit of measure both in its length and breadth, giving two solids, different in form but alike in cubical contents. . the most important characteristics of the gift are:-- _a._ irregularity of division. _b._ introduction of column. _c._ extent of surface covered by symmetrical forms. _d._ greater inclosure of space in symmetrical forms. _e._ introduction of distinct style of architecture. _f._ greater height of life forms. _g._ severe simplicity of life forms produced by the rectangular solids. . the sixth gift has no great increase of difficulty, and though new forms are presented there is little complexity in dictation. the building needs a somewhat more careful handling, inasmuch as the life forms rise to considerable height and need the most exact balance. the child sees solids whose faces are all either squares or oblongs, but of different sizes, viz., oblongs of three sizes, squares of two sizes. this is the last of the building gifts; the child having received sufficient knowledge to be introduced step by step into the domain of the abstract, the first step being the planes of the seventh gift. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- { rectangular parallelopipeds. solids. { square prisms. { cubes. planes. { squares. { oblongs. . the brick of the sixth gift is identical with that of the fourth, therefore it presents the same contrasts and mediations. in number the different classes of blocks stand to each other as : : . we may add that the brick is the foundation form of the gift, and that we gain the remaining two forms, the square block and pillar, by dividing it in exactly opposite directions. * * * * * introduction of the gift. the sixth gift is so evidently an enlarged and diversified fourth gift, that it is well to compare it on its introduction with the fourth, as well as with its immediate predecessor in the series. when the fourth is placed beside it, and the contents of the two boxes brought to view, it is evident at once to the child that a higher round in the ladder of evolution has been reached, and a new and highly specialized form developed. he is fired at once with creative activity, and his eager hands so quiver with impatience to investigate the possibilities of the new blocks that the wise kindergartner does not detain him long with comparisons, only assuring herself that he notes the relation of the new gift to the former ones, that he compares the two new solids to the brick, or unit of measure, and to each other, and discovers how each has been produced. difficulties of the new gift. the difficulties of the new gift are very slight, as has been said, consisting neither in dictation, in mass of material, nor in new forms, lines, or angles. equilibrium alone presents novel problems, but this law the child now understands fairly well in its practical workings, while he has gained so much dexterity in his use of the other blocks that the height and delicate poise of the new forms are added attractions rather than obstacles. forms of life. the sixth gift far surpasses all the other building blocks in its decided adaptation to the purely architectural forms. the bricks of the fourth gift may be used as a foundation for the construction of large and ambitious structures, and with this additional material, the sixth gift may excel in producing elegant and graceful forms. the bricks of course admit of a much greater superficial extension and the inclosure of a more extensive space than has heretofore been possible. the children will unaided construct familiar objects, such as household furniture and implements, churches, fences, walled inclosures, and towers, with the new blocks, and seize with delight upon the possibilities of the column, which is really the distinctive feature of the gift. so far, the building of object forms will closely resemble those of the previous gifts, but a step in advance may be made by the children if the kindergartner is complete mistress of the new forms and knows their capabilities. the gift may serve as a primer of architecture if its materials are thoroughly exploited, and may lead later on to a healthy discontent with incorrect outline, with vulgar ornamentation, and with crudity of form.[ ] [ ] "the sense of beauty must be awakened in the soul in childhood if in later life he is to create the beautiful."--_reminiscences of froebel_, page . froebel himself, who had made exhaustive studies in architecture, and obtained the training necessary to enable him to take it up as a profession, has left us many examples of sixth gift building, which are to be found in all the german "guides." the structures are no longer rude representations, but have a marked grace and symmetry, and in their simplicity, clearness of outline, and fine proportion, strongly resemble early greek architecture. colonnades, commemorative columns, façades of palaces, belvederes, temples, arches, city gates, monuments, fountains, portals, fonts, observatories,--all can be constructed in miniature with due regard to law, fitness, and proportion, and as the soft, creamy-white structures rise on the various tables, we see borne out froebel's saying that the order of his building gifts was such that the child might be led in their use through the world's great architectural epochs from egypt to rome.[ ] [ ] "as the gifts proceed from the first to the sixth, observation is demanded with increasing strictness, relativity more and more appreciated, and the opportunity afforded for endless manifestations of the constructive faculty, while all the time impressions are forming in the mind which in due time will bear rich fruits of mathematical and practical knowledge as well as æsthetic culture, for the dawning sense of the beautiful as well as of the true is gaining consistency and power." (karl froebel.) forms of symmetry. although with this gift we cannot produce symmetrical forms in as great diversity as with the fifth, yet the materials are productive to the inventive mind, and when the pieces are arranged with care and taste, beautiful figures may always be developed, those having a triangular centre being novel and especially pleasing. although not as diversified, however, they have the added advantage of approaching nearer the plane; and that this progression may be more clearly shown, it seems evident that the symmetrical forms should only be produced by laying the columns, "square-faced blocks" and bricks, flat upon the table, and that the practice, advised by some authorities, of changing the figures by placing the blocks erect, or half erect, should be discouraged. forms of knowledge. in the forms of knowledge we find again much less diversity than in the fifth gift,--the rectilinear solids and consequent absence of oblique angles limiting us in the construction of geometrical forms. the blocks, however, offer excellent means for general arithmetical instruction, for working out problems as to areas, for further illustration of dimension, and for building many varieties of parallelopipeds, square prisms, and cubes, and studying the parallelograms which bound them. the elements of this knowledge, it is true, were gained with the fourth gift, but we must remember that interest in any subject is not necessarily decreased by repetition, and that the value of review depends upon whether or not it is mechanical.[ ] [ ] "what makes froebel's gifts particularly instructive is, indeed, the fact that the most varied materials constantly lead to the same observations, but always under different conditions, so that we obtain the necessary repetitions without the dryness, the tiresomeness, the fatigue inseparable from constant unvaried iteration. but they also accustom the child to discover similarity in things that appear to differ, to find resemblance in contrasts, unity in diversity, connection in what appears unconnected."--h. goldammer's _the kindergarten_, page . coöperative work. the group work at the square tables is now especially beautiful, both when forms of symmetry or object forms are constructed. the fourth gift may be used, as has been said, if more material is needed, and of course combines perfectly with the sixth gift blocks. a large sixth gift made as was suggested for the fifth, on the scale of a foot instead of an inch, is most useful for coöperative exercises in the centre of the ring, and the slender, graceful columns, for instance, which may thus be built in unison to commemorate some historic birthday, are so many concrete evidences to the child's eyes of the value of united effort. the gifts and their treatment by the kindergartner. every gift and occupation and exercise of the kindergarten has been developed with infinite love and forethought to meet the child's wishes and capabilities; every one of them has been so delicately adjusted to meet the demands of the case, and so gently drawn into the natural and legitimate channel of childlike play, that they never fail to meet with an enthusiastic reception from the child, nor to awaken the strongest interest in him. the kindergartner should be careful that he never builds hastily or lawlessly, and above all she should guide him to those forms which he will be able to construct with perfection and accuracy. she should always follow him in his work, answering his questions and suggesting new ideas, letting him feel in every way that she is in sympathy with him, and that none of his plans or experiments, however small they may be, are indifferent to her. it is always a delight to the child if his productions are understood by grown-up people, for he often feels somewhat doubtful of the value of his work until the seal of approval has been set upon it by a superior mind. underlying idea of froebel's gifts. if we have grasped the underlying idea which welds the mass of material which forms the kindergarten gifts into a harmoniously connected whole; if we have developed the analytical faculty sufficiently to perceive their relation to the child, the child's relation to them, and the reasons for their selection as mediums of education; if we see clearly why each object is given, what connection it has with the child's development, and what natural laws should govern it in play, then we comprehend froebel's own idea of their use. education _vs._ cramming. certainly the ignorant and unsympathetic kindergartner may err in dealing with them, and introduce the cramming process into her field of labor as easily as the public school teacher, for it is as easy to cram with objects as with books, and should this occur there is cause for grave uneasiness, since the opportunity for injuring the brain of the child is greater during these first years than at any other time. if we force the child, or make the lesson seem work to him, his faculties will rebel, he will be dull, inattentive, or restless, according to his temperament or physical state; he will not be interested in what we teach him, and therefore it will make no impression on him. the child has memory enough; he remembers the picnic in the woods, the glorious sail across the bay, the white foam in the wake of the boat, the very tint of the flowers that he gathered,--in fact, he remembers everything in which he is interested. if we would have him remember our teachings forever, we must make them worthy of being remembered forever. and to this end it is essential that only the best teachers be provided for little children. the ideal teacher should know her subject thoroughly, but should be able to boil it down, to condense it, so that the concentrated extract alone will remain, and this be presented to her pupils.[ ] [ ] "if you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams,--the more they are condensed the deeper they burn." in leaving these first six gifts, we need finally to remember these things:-- suggestions as to method. first, that we must not be too anxious to resolve these plays into the routine of lessons; with our younger pupils especially this is not admissible, and we must guard against it in all exercises with the kindergarten materials. second, we may assure ourselves, in all modesty, that it is a difficult matter, indeed, to direct these plays properly; that is, to have system and method enough to guard the children from all lawlessness, idleness, and disorder, and yet to keep from falling into a mechanical drill which will never produce the wished-for results. play is the natural, the appropriate business and occupation of the child left to his own resources, and we must strive to turn our lessons into that channel,--only thus shall we reach the highest measure of true success. third, we must strive by constant study and thought, by entering into the innermost chambers of the child-nature, and estimating its cravings and necessities, to penetrate the secret, the soul of the froebel gifts, then we shall never more be satisfied with their external appearances and superficial uses. note. in arranging the blocks of the sixth gift, place the eighteen bricks erect, in three rows, with their broad faces together. on top of these place nine of the square-faced blocks, thus forming a second layer. the third layer is formed by placing the remaining three blocks of this class on the back row, and filling in the space in front with the six pillars, placed side by side. readings for the student. paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. pages - . kindergarten guide. _j._ and _b. ronge_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. , . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . stones of venice. _john ruskin_. architecture, mysticism, and myth. _w. k. lethaby_. the sources of architectural types. _spencer's essays_, vol. ii. page . the two paths. _john ruskin_. (chapter on influence of imagination in architecture.) discourses on architecture. _e. e. viollet-le-duc_. tr. by _henry van brunt_. (first and second discourses.) froebel's seventh gift "the properties of number, form, and size, the knowledge of space, the nature of powers, the effects of material, begin to disclose themselves to him. color, rhythm, tone, and figure come forward at the budding-point and in their individual value. the child begins already to distinguish with precision nature and the world of art, and looks with certainty upon the outer world as separate from himself." friedrich froebel. "froebel's thin colored planes correspond with the mosaic wood or stone work of early man." h. poesche. "there is nothing in the whole present system of education more deserving of serious consideration than the sudden and violent transition from the material to the abstract which our children have to go through on quitting the parental house to enter a school. froebel therefore made it a point to bridge over this transition by a whole series of play-material, and in this series it is the laying-tablets which occupy the first place." h. goldammer. . the seventh gift consists of variously colored square and triangular tablets made of wood or pasteboard, the sides of the pieces being about one inch in length. circular and oblong pasteboard tablets have lately been introduced, as well as whole and half circles in polished woods. . the first six gifts illustrated solids, while the seventh, moving from the concrete towards the abstract, makes the transition to the surface. the building gifts presented to the child divided units, from which he constructed new wholes. through these he became familiar with the idea of a whole and parts, and was prepared for the seventh gift, which offers him not an object to transform, but independent elements to be combined into varied forms. these divided solids also offered the child a certain fixed amount of material for his use; after the introduction of the seventh gift, the amount to be used is optional with the kindergartner. . the child up to this time has seen the surface in connection with solids. he now receives the embodied surface separated from the solid, and gradually abstracts the general idea of "surface," learning to regard it not only as a part, but as an individual whole. this gift also emphasizes color and the various triangular forms, besides imparting the idea of pictorial representation, or the representation of objects by means of plane surfaces. . the gift leads the child from the object itself towards the representation of the object, thus sharpening the observation and preparing the way for drawing. it is also less definitely suggestive than previous gifts, and demands more creative power for its proper use. it appeals to the sense of form, sense of place, sense of color, and sense of number. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- squares. { right isosceles. { obtuse isosceles. triangles. { equilateral. { right-angled scalene. { oblong. { rhombus. { rhomboid. { trapezoid. in combination. { trapezium. { pentagon. { hexagon. { heptagon. { octagon. . the law of mediation of contrasts is shown in the forms of the gift. we have in the triangles, for instance, two lines running in opposite directions, connected by a third, which serves as the mediation. contrasts and their mediations are also shown in the squares and in the forms made by combination. this gift, representing the plane, is a link between the divided solid and the line. * * * * * step from solid to plane. we have now left the solid and are approaching abstraction when we begin the study of planes. all mental development has ever begun and must begin with the concrete, and progress by successive stages toward the abstract, and it was froebel's idea that his play-material might be used to form a series of steps up which the child might climb in his journey toward the abstract. beginning with the ball, a perfect type of wholeness and unity, we are led through diversity, as shown in the three solids of the second gift, toward divisibility in the building gifts, and approximation to surface in the sixth gift. the next move in advance is the partial abstraction of surface, shown in the tablets of the seventh gift. the tablets show two dimensions, length and breadth, the thickness being so trifling relatively that it need not be considered, as it does not mar the child's perception and idea of the plane. they are intended to represent surfaces, and should be made as thin as is consistent with durability. systematic relation between the tablets. the various tablets as first introduced in germany and in this country were commonly quite different in size and degrees of angles in the different kindergartens, as they were either cut out hastily by the teachers themselves, or made by manufacturers who knew very little of the subject. the former practice of dividing an oblong from corner to corner to produce the right-angled scalene triangle was much to be condemned, as it entirely set aside the law of systematic relation between the tablets and rendered it impossible to produce the standard angles, which are so valuable a feature of the gift. "one of the principal advantages of the kindergarten system is that it lays the foundation for a systematic, scientific education which will help the masses to become expert and artistic workmen in whatever occupation they may be engaged."[ ] [ ] _pamphlet on the seventh gift_. (milton bradley co.) in this direction the seventh gift has doubtless immense capabilities, but much of its force and value has been lost, much of the work thrown away which it has accomplished, for want of proper and systematic relation between the tablets. the order in which these are now derived and introduced is as follows:-- the square tablet is, of course, the type of quadrilaterals, and when it is divided from corner to corner a three-sided figure is seen,--the half square or right isosceles triangle; but one which is not the type of three-sided figures. the typical and simplest triangle, the equilateral, is next presented, and if this be divided by a line bisecting one angle, the result will be two triangles of still different shape, the right-angled scalene. if these two are placed with shortest sides together, we have another form, the obtuse-angled triangle, and this gives us all the five forms of the seventh gift. the square educates the eye to judge correctly of a right angle, and the division of the square gives the angle of °, or the mitre. the equilateral has three angles of ° each; the divided equilateral or right-angled scalene has one angle of °, one of °, and one of °, while the obtuse isosceles has one angle of °, and the remaining two each °. these are the standard angles ( °, °, °, and °) used by carpenter, joiner, cabinet-maker, blacksmith,--in fact, in all the trades and many of the professions, and the child's eye should become as familiar with them as with the size of the squares on his table. possibilities of the gift in mathematical instruction. edward wiebe says in regard to the relation of the seventh gift to geometry and general mathematical instruction: "who can doubt that the contemplation of these figures and the occupations with them must tend to facilitate the understanding of geometrical axioms in the future, and who can doubt that all mathematical instruction by means of froebel's system must needs be facilitated and better results obtained? that such instruction will be rendered fruitful in practical life is a fact which will be obvious to all who simply glance at the sequence of figures even without a thorough explanation, for they contain demonstratively the larger number of those axioms in elementary geometry which relate to the conditions of the plane in regular figures." as the tablets are used in the kindergarten, they are intended only "to increase the sum of general experience in regard to the qualities of things," but they may be made the medium of really advanced instruction in mathematics, such as would be suitable for a connecting-class or a primary school. all this training, too, may be given in the concrete, and so lay the foundation for future mathematical work on the rock of practical observation. the kindergarten child is expected only to know the different kinds of triangles from each other, and to be familiar with their simple names, to recognize the standard angles, and to know practically that all right angles are equally large, obtuse angles greater, and acute less than right angles. all this he will learn by means of play with the tablets, by dictations and inventions, and by constant comparison and use of the various forms. how and when tablets should be introduced. as to the introduction of the tablets, the square is first of all of course given to the child. a small cube of the third gift may be taken and surrounded on all its faces by square tablets, and then each one "peeled off," disclosing, as it were, the hidden solid. we may also mould cubes of clay and have the children slice off one of the square faces, as both processes show conclusively the relation the square plane bears to the cube whose faces are squares. if the first tablets introduced are of pasteboard, as probably will be the case, the new material should be noted and some idea given of the manufacture of paper. there is a vast difference in opinion concerning the introduction of this seventh gift, and it is used by the child in the various kindergartens at all times, from the beginning of his ball plays up to his laying aside of the fifth gift. it seems very clear, however, that he should not use the square plane until after he has received some impression of the three dimensions as they are shown in solid bodies, and this mr. hailmann tells us he has no proper means of gaining, save through the fourth gift.[ ] [ ] "the perception of the difference between a surface-extension and an extension in three dimensions begins late and is established slowly."--w. preyer, _the mind of the child_, page . as to the triangular tablets, it is evident enough they should not be dealt with until after the child has seen the triangular plane on the solid forms of the fifth gift. mr. hailmann says that a clear idea of the extension of solids in three dimensions can only come from a familiarity with the bricks, and again that the abstractions of the tablet should not be obtruded on the child's notice until he has that clear idea. though the six tablets which surround the cube may be given to the child at the first exercise, it is better to dictate simple positions of one or two squares first, and let him use the six in dictation and many more in invention. order of introducing triangles. the first triangle given is the right isosceles, showing the angle of forty-five degrees, and formed by bisecting the square with a diagonal line. the child should be given a square of paper and scissors and allowed to discover the new form for himself, letting him experiment until the desired triangle is obtained. he should then study the new form, its edges and angles, and then join his two right-angled triangles into a square, a larger triangle, etc. then let him observe how many positions these triangles may assume by moving one round the other. he will find them acting according to the law of opposites already familiar to him, and if not comprehended,[ ] yet furnishing him with an infallible criterion for his inventive work. [ ] "with this law i give children a guide for creating, and because it is the law according to which they, as creatures of god, have themselves been created, they can easily apply it. it is born with them."--_reminiscences of froebel_, page . the equilateral is then taken up, is compared with the half-square, and then studied by itself, its three equal sides and angles (each sixty degrees) being noted as well as the obtuse angles made by all possible combinations of the equilateral. next, as we have said, comes the right-angled scalene triangle, with its inequality of sides and angles, which must be studied and compared with the equilateral; and last of all, the obtuse isosceles triangle, which is dealt with in the same way. here, again, it should be noted that the two last forms should always be discovered by the child in his play with the equilateral, and that he should cut them himself from paper before he is given the regular pasteboard or wooden triangles for study. if presented for the first time in this latter form, they can never mean as much to him as if he had found them out for himself. dictations. the dictations should invariably be given so that opposites and their intermediates may be readily seen. the different triangles may be studied each in the same way, introducing them one at a time in the order named, afterwards allowing as free a combination as will produce symmetrical figures. it is best always to study one of a new kind, then two, then gradually give larger numbers. great possibilities undoubtedly lie in this gift, but it is well to remember that with young children it must not be made the vehicle of too abstract instruction. in order to make the dictations simple, the child must be perfectly familiar with the terms of direction, up, down, right, left, centre; with the simple names of the planes (squares, half-squares, equal-sided, blunt and sharp-angled triangles, etc.); and he must learn to know the longest edge of each triangle, that he may be able to place it according to direction. the children should be encouraged to invent, to give the dictation exercises to one another, and to copy the simpler forms of the lesson on blackboard or paper. some duplicate copies in colored papers may be made from their inventions, and the walls of the schoolroom ornamented with them. it will be a pleasure to the little ones themselves, and demonstrate to others how wonderful a gift this is and how charmingly the children use it. no exercise should be given without previous study, and in the first year's teaching it is wiser to draw or make the figures before giving the dictations. the materials, too, should be prepared beforehand, in such a form that they can be given out readily and quietly by the children at the opening of the exercise. to require a class of a dozen or more pupils to wait while the kindergartner assorts and counts the various colors and shapes of tablets to be used is positively to invite loss of interest on the children's part, and to produce in the teacher a hurry and worry and nervous tension which will infallibly ruin the play. life forms. the life forms are no longer absolute representations, but only more or less suggestive images of certain objects, and thus show still more clearly the orderly movement from concrete to abstract. hitherto in life forms the child has produced more or less real objects,--for instance, he built a miniature house, a fountain, a chair, or a sofa. they were not absolutely real, and therefore in one way merely images; but they were bodily images. he could place a little dish on the table, a tiny cup on the edge of the fountain, a doll could sit in the chair, and therefore they were all real for purposes of play, at least. with the tablets, however, the child can no longer make a chair, though by a certain arrangement of them he can make an image of it. the child will notice that many of the forms made with squares are flat pictures of those made with the third gift, and with the addition of the right isosceles triangles he can reproduce the façades of many of the elaborate object forms of the fifth. the various triangles differ greatly in their capabilities of producing life forms, the equilateral and the obtuse isosceles being especially deficient in this regard and requiring to be combined with the other tablets. the fact that both the right isosceles and right scalene triangles produce life forms in great variety seems to prove that, as goldammer says, "the right angle predominates in the products of human activity." symmetrical forms. the symmetrical forms are more varied and innumerable than those of any other gift, and with the addition of the brilliant colors of the pasteboard, or the soft shades of the wooden tablets, make figures which are undeniably beautiful, and which are mosaic-like in their effect. the whirling figures are interesting and new, and the child with developed eye and growing artistic taste will delight in their oddity, and yet be able to find opposites and their intermediates and make them as correctly as in the more methodical figures, where the exact right and left balanced the upper and lower extremes. here we note that the equilateral and obtuse isosceles triangles, so ill fitted to produce life forms, lend themselves to forms of symmetry in great variety. the various sequences of the latter in the third and fifth gifts may of course be faithfully reproduced in surface-extension with the tablets, and thus gain an added charm. the amount of material given to the child is now a matter for the decision of the kindergartner, and is dependent only on the ability of the child to use it to advantage. this increase of material presents a further difficulty, and it is time for us to add still another, that is, to expect more of the child, and to require that he produce not only something original, but something which shall, though simple, be really beautiful. inventions in borders are a new and charming feature of this gift, and the circular and oblong tablets as well as the squares and various triangles are well adapted to produce them. the various borders laid horizontally across the tablets may be divided by lines of sticks, and thus make an effect altogether different from anything we have had before. mathematical forms. the work with forms of knowledge, as has been fully shown, will be in geometry than in arithmetic, to which indeed the gift is not especially well adapted. in addition to the study and comparison of the various forms, their lines and angles, we have a great variety of figures to be produced by combination. we can make the nine regular forms already mentioned in the introduction in a variety of ways, and thus give new charm to the old truths. we must allow the child to experiment by himself very frequently, and interpret to him his discoveries when he makes them. the seventh gift in weaving. the square tablets afford a valuable aid to the occupation of weaving, as all the simple patterns can be formed with them, the child laying them upon his table until he has mastered the numerical principle upon which they are constructed. we can easily see how these same patterns may be further utilized as designs for inlaid tiles, or parquetry floors. thus the seventh gift may introduce children to subsequent practical life, and serve as a useful preparation for various branches of art-work. seventh gift parquetry. it is easy to see when we begin the practical use of the tablets that the essential characteristics of the gifts in their progress from solid to point are now becoming less marked, and that they begin to merge into the occupations, which develop from point to solid. the meeting-place of the two series is close at hand, and, like drops of water fallen near each other, they tremble with impatience to rush into one. the inventions which the child makes with tablets he now very commonly expresses a desire to give away, or to take home with him,--a thought which he seldom had with the gifts, wishing rather to show them in their place upon the tables. as this is a natural and legitimate desire, a supplement to the seventh gift has been devised, consisting of paper substitutes for the various forms, of the same size and appropriate coloring, and to be had either plain or gummed on the back. after the inventions have been made, they are easily transferred to paper with parquetry, and so can be bestowed according to the will of the inventor. group work. the parquetry of the seventh gift lends an added grace to coöperative work, for the children can now combine all their material in one form to decorate the room, or perhaps to send as a gift to an absent playmate. they may make an inlaid floor for the doll's house, a brightly colored windowpane for the sun to stream through, and with larger forms may even design an effective border for the wainscoting of the schoolroom.[ ] [ ] "the utility of this united action is not to be overlooked. the children all proceed according to one and the same law, they all work to produce one and the same result, the same purpose unites them all; in short, we see here in the children's play all that forms the base of every human society, all that renders it possible for men to act together in organized communities, such as are the family, the state, and the church. and to prepare for the future, to be mindful even amidst play of that which a child will afterwards require in order worthily to fill his place in the world, ought surely not to be among the least important ends of an education claiming to be in conformity with nature and reason."--h. goldammer, _the kindergarten_, page . the group work at the square tables is also carried on very fully with the tablets, the symmetrical figures when the colors are well combined being quite dazzling in beauty. color with seventh gift. in this connection, a danger may be noted in the treatment of the gifts, both by kindergartner and children. color appears again here in almost bewildering profusion after its long absence in the series, and is another straw to prove that the wind is blowing strongly toward the occupations. many of the pasteboard tablets are of different colors on the opposite sides, and though this is of great use in beauty forms, when properly treated, it is quite often unfortunate in forms of life, unless careful attention is given to arranging the material beforehand. the effect of a barn, for instance, with its front view checkered with violet, red, and yellow squares, may be imagined, or of a pigeon-house with a parti-colored green and blue roof, an orange standard, and red supports. yet these are no fancy pictures i have painted, and if the child places the tablets in this fashion, they are often allowed so to remain without criticism from the purblind kindergartner. she even sometimes dictates, herself, extravagant and vulgar combinations of color, such as a violet centre-piece with green corners and an orange border. there needs no reasoning to prove that such a person is radically unfit to handle the subject of color-teaching, and is sure to corrupt the children under her charge; for in general, if ordinarily well trained, they should now be far beyond the stage in which they would be satisfied with such crudity of combination. they have had their season of "playing with brightness," as mr. hailmann calls it, and should now begin to have really good ideas as to harmonious arrangement of hues. if they have not, if they really seem to prefer the pigeon-house or barn above mentioned, then they are viciously ill-taught, or altogether deficient in color sense. it has been noted that the older children often choose the light and dark wooden tablets, for invention, rather than the gay pasteboard forms; but this may be on account of the high polish of the wood, and its novelty in this guise, rather than because, as has been suggested, they have been surfeited with brightness. readings for the student. paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. pages - . law of childhood. _w. n. hailmann_. , . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . koehler's kindergarten practice. tr. by _mary gurney_. - . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. - . kindergarten and child-culture. _henry barnard_. , , . prang primary course in art education. part i. _mary d. hicks_, _josephine c. locke_. color in the school-room. _milton bradley_. elementary color. _milton bradley_. color teaching in public schools. _louis prang_, _j. s. clark_, _mary d. hicks_. color, an elementary manual for students. _a. h. church_. the principles of harmony and contrasts of colors. _m. e. chevreul_. students' text-book of color. _o. n. rood_. suggestions with regard to the use of color. _prang ed. co._ froebel's eighth gift the straight line. _the single and jointed slats and staff or stick._ "the knowledge of the linear lies at the foundation of the knowledge of each form; the forms are viewed and recognized by the intermediation of the straight-lined." friedrich froebel. "froebel's laths, wherewith the child can form letters, correspond to the beech-staves (_buchenen stäbchen_, now contracted to _buchstaben_, i. e., letters of the alphabet), whereon were carved the runes and magic symbols of our primitive ancestors." hermann poesche. "it will be readily seen how useful stick-laying may become in perspective drawing, in the study of planes and solids, in crystallography; how, while it insures an enjoyable familiarity with geometrical forms and secures ever-increasing manual skill and delicacy of touch, it develops at the same time the artistic sense of the children in a high degree." w. n. hailmann. . the wooden staffs of the eighth gift (sometimes called the tenth) are of various lengths, but have for their uniform thickness the tenth of an inch. they present, as now made, flat sides and square ends, are sometimes uncolored and sometimes dyed in the six primary colors. . the previous gifts dealt with solids and plane surfaces, wholes or divided wholes, while this one illustrates the edge or line. the previous gifts more definitely suggested their uses by their prominent characteristics; this depends for its value largely upon the ingenuity of the teacher. we have contrasts of size in the preceding gifts, both in the units themselves and in the component parts of which the divided units are made; but in this gift the dimension _length_ is alone emphasized. . the most important characteristic of the gift is the representation of the line. the relations of position and form enter as essential elements of usefulness. . the laying of sticks may be used as an occupation very early in the kindergarten course, and thus serve as a preparation for the first drawing exercises, but there should be no attempt at this time to give them their legitimate connection with the cube as the edge of the solid and with the tablet as a portion of the surface. later they may be introduced in their proper place in the sequence of gifts, and thus assume their true relation in the child's mind. this relation is made more evident as we can and should reproduce the lessons with the solids in outline with the sticks. when the child is more advanced, the connection of the sticks with the preceding objects will be more clearly explained and intelligently comprehended, and then they may be used in connection with softened peas or tiny corks, which serve to illustrate the points of contact of the sides of surfaces and edges of solids whose skeletons the child can then construct with these materials. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- angles of every degree. triangles, quadrilaterals, and additional polygons. skeletons of solids by means of corks or peas. . the law of the mediation of contrasts is shown in the fact that every line is a connection between opposite points. as in the other gifts, the law governs the use of the line in the formation of all outlines of objects and all symmetrical designs. * * * * * as we have already noted, the gifts of froebel are thus far solids, divided solids, planes and divided planes. relation of the single and jointed slats to the other gifts. how both are used. with the single and jointed slats we shall not deal separately, merely stating that they form a transition between the surface and the line, having more breadth and relation to the surface itself than to the edge, but manifestly tending towards the embodied line of which the little stick given by froebel is the realization. the jointed slats, generally ruled in half and quarter inches for measuring, may be used to show how one form is developed from another,--for instance, the rhombus from the square, the rhomboid from the oblong, and they are very useful also for explaining and illustrating the different kinds of angles, as the opening between the joints may be made narrower or wider at pleasure. the disconnected slats are used for the occasional play or exercise of interlacing, forming a variety of figures, geometrical and artistic, which hold together when carefully treated.[ ] [ ] "the slats form, in some sort, the transition from the surface-pictures of the laying-tablets to the lineal representations of the laying-sticks, but have this advantage over both tablets and sticks, that the forms constructed with them are not bound down to the surface of the table, but possess sufficient solidity to bear being removed from it."--h. goldammer, _the kindergarten_, page . materials of froebel's gifts. as to the unpretentious little sticks themselves, the use of these bits of waste wood is entirely unique and characteristic. no one else would have deemed them worthy of a place in school apparatus or among educational appliances; but froebel had the eye and mind of a true philosopher, ever seeing the great in the small,--ever bringing out of the commonplace material, which lies unused on every hand, all its inherent possibilities and capabilities of usefulness. froebel was no destructive reformer, but the most conservative of philosophers. how the stick is to be regarded. the stick of course is to be regarded in its relation to what comes before and after it,--as the embodied edge of the cube, as the tablet was its embodied face. the child should at last identify his stick, the embodiment of the straight line, with the axis of the sphere, the edge of the cube, and the side of the square.[ ] the sticks and rings are, properly speaking, one gift, contrasting the curved and straight lines. [ ] "just as we obtained the tablets from the cubes, of which they are the embodied faces, so now we obtain also the laying-sticks from the cube, whose edges they represent. but they are contained also in the laying-tablets, for one may regard the surface as produced by the progressive movement of a line, and this may be made clear to the child by slicing a square tablet into a number of sticks."--h. goldammer, _the kindergarten_, page . method and manner of lessons. although the stick exercises should make their appearance at least once every week after their introduction, they may always be varied by stories, and when occasionally connected with other objects, cut from paper to illustrate some point, are among the pleasantest and most fruitful exercises of the kindergarten. the sticks may be used for teaching number and elementary geometry, both in the kindergarten and school, or for reviewing and fixing knowledge already gained in these directions, for practice in the elements of designing, for giving a correct idea of outlines of familiar objects, and should constantly serve as an introduction to drawing and sewing lessons, to which they are the natural prelude. they should be used strictly after the manner of the other gifts, beginning with careful dictations, in which the various positions of one stick should be exhausted before proceeding to a greater number, with coöperative work, and with free invention. these exercises and original designs may be put into permanent form in parquetry, which is furnished for this gift in the various colored papers, as well as for the tablets. the inventions may also be transferred to paper by drawing, and to card-board by sewing. the exercises may continue from the various simple positions which one stick may assume to really complex dictations requiring from fifteen to twenty-five sticks, and introducing many difficult positions and outlines of new geometrical figures. forms of knowledge and number work. when we consider that the length of the sticks varies from one to six inches, and that the number given to the child is limited only by his capacity for using them successfully, we can see that the outlines of all the rectilinear plane figures can easily be made by their use. of course in these exercises there must be a great deal of incidental arithmetic, but the gift may also be used for definite number work, and is far better adapted to this purpose than any other in the series, since it presents a number of separate units which may be grouped or combined to suit any simple arithmetical process. representing the line as it does, it has less bodily substance than any previous gift, and hence comes nearest to the numerical symbols, as the next step to using a line would obviously be making one. it also offers very much the same materials for calculation as were used by the race in its childhood, and hence fits in with the inherited instincts of the undeveloped human being.[ ] [ ] "each following generation and each following individual man is to pass through the whole earlier development and cultivation of the human race,--and he does pass it; otherwise he would not understand the world past and present,--but not by the dead way of imitation, of copying, but by the living way of individual, free, active development and cultivation."--friedrich froebel, _education of man_, page . who has not seen him arranging twigs and branches in his play, counting them over and over or simulating the process, and delighting to divide them into groups? so the cave-dweller used them, doubtless, not in play, but in serious earnest, for some such purpose as keeping tally of the wild beasts he had killed, or the number of his enemies vanquished. "with a few packets of froebel's sticks," as has been very well said, "the child is provided with an excellent calculating machine." the use of this machine in the primary school in word making as well as in number work is practically unlimited; but in the kindergarten it may very well give a clear, practical understanding of the first four rules of arithmetic,--an understanding which will be based on personal activity and experience.[ ] [ ] "thus the child's sphere of knowledge, the world of his life, is again extended by the observation and recognition, by the development and cultivation, of the capacity of number; and an essential need of his inner nature, a certain yearning of his spirit, are thereby satisfied.... the knowledge of the relations of quantity extraordinarily heightens the life of the child."--friedrich froebel, _education of man_, page . evolution of the kindergarten stick. it is well by way of prelude to the first few lessons to draw from the children the origin and history of the tiny bit of wood given them for their play, and they will henceforth regard it in a new light and treat it with greater respect and care. let us trace it carefully from its baby beginnings in the seed, its germination and growth, the influences which surround and foster it from day to day, its steady increase in size and strength, its downward grasp and its upward reach, the hardening of the tender stem and slender cylindrical trunk into the massive oak or pine, the growth of its tough, strong garment of bark, its winter times of rest and spring times of renewal, until from the tender green twig so frail and pliant it has become too large to clasp with the arms, and high enough to swing its dry leaves into the church tower. then let us follow out its usefulness; for instance, we might first paint a glowing word-picture of the logging-camp, the chopping and hewing and felling, the life of the busy woodcutter in the leafy woods in autumn, or in the dense forests in winter time, when the snow, cold and white and dazzling, covers the ground with its fleecy carpet. again, let us depict the road and the busy teamsters driving their yokes of strong oxen with their heavy loads of logs to the towns and cities where they are to be sold. a scene, a perfect word-picture, should be painted of everything concerning the trip,--the crunching of the oxen's hoofs on the pressed snow, the creaking of the heavy truck as its runners slip along the smooth surface, the breath of the men and animals rising like steam into the clear, cold air. all these things rise in image before the child's eye and are not soon forgotten, you may be sure. the work and life of the river-drivers might also be described, and their manner of floating the logs down river in springtime when the water is high and the current strong. then perhaps the children will help to tell us about the mill of which they doubtless know something,--where the sawmills are built, how the water helps in turning the great wheel, the buzzing and hissing of the big saws, and the way in which they quickly make boards of the long, strong logs. this and much more may be said, and if it is well said, no child can ever look at the tiny stick afterwards and entirely forget the charm which once surrounded it.[ ] [ ] "these terse graphic descriptions of objects will be found very serviceable in sharpening and intensifying the powers of observation, as well as securing clearness, distinctness, accuracy, and life in verbal description. here the pupil learns practically to give due prominence to essentials, and to appreciate the full value of accessories; to look for and discover the fundamental ideas of which things are the modified, adorned, garbled, or stunted expression; to seek and find the very soul of things."--w. n. hailmann, _primary helps_, page . group work with sticks. the sticks are especially serviceable for group work of various kinds, either at the long or square tables. as the children have now an abundance of material they can make all the objects, perhaps, which may be mentioned in a story the kindergartner tells. if it is about the origin of thanksgiving day, for instance, abby, who sits at one end of the line, may make a picture of the mayflower, and john, her neighbor, make the speedwell. the next child may construct a cradle for oceanus, the little pilgrim baby born on shipboard; the next use his material for the indian huts the settlers saw after landing; and so on, each child making a different object, which remains upon his table until the close of the story. when this is completed, it will have been fully illustrated by the children with their sticks, and they will be delighted to inspect the different pictures which they will plainly see are much more varied and beautiful than any one of them could have made alone. thus the value of coöperation will be plainly shown, without a word from the kindergartner.[ ] [ ] "in this group work it is desirable that the common aims should be fully within the comprehension of each little worker, yet sufficiently beyond his powers of execution and endurance to make him sensible of the need of assistance. the former secures the possibility of individual enjoyment, and hence the only reliable incentive to persistence; the latter insures free subordination to the will of the whole, the essential condition of success."--w. n. hailmann, _primary helps_, page . forms of life. as to life forms in general, their number is practically unlimited, though as they are only line-pictures, and heavy lines at that, they are not as real as those made in the building gifts. they are easily made, however, and the veriest baby in the kindergarten who handles the sticks as a prelude to his drawing exercises invents with them all sorts of rude forms which he calls by appropriate names. the question of color as it enters into these forms needs, perhaps, a moment's consideration here. as the gift includes both white and colored sticks, would it not be well to use the former for all dictations in life forms, reserving the brilliant hues for the forms of symmetry whose charms they would greatly enhance? connection of other objects with stick dictations. we may sometimes connect simple, inexpensive objects with stick dictations, with a view to making them more realistic and delightful. when the little ones are just getting the various positions and corresponding terms into their minds, and when therefore it is advisable to keep them amused and happy with one to three sticks as long as possible,--that is, until the fundamental principles have become very familiar,--these objects are most invaluable. innumerable lessons may be practiced with one stick only, calling it at last a whipstock and giving it a bit of curly paper for a lash. far from being an instrument of punishment, it makes every child laugh with the glee of possession. with two sticks laid horizontally we may give a little paper horse-car, or when one is vertical and the other runs horizontally across its end, we may call it a candlestick and snip a half-circle of paper into the semblance of a flame. the effect is electrical, though the light be only one candle-power. and so on, _ad infinitum_; it is enough to give the hint for the play. we can cut little paper birds for the bird-cages, tumblers for the rude little tables, green leaves for the trees, etc., making the stick exercise, even in its first more difficult details, a time of great satisfaction and gladness. complete sets of these card-board objects, one for each child, should always be kept on hand; if well made they will last a year. forms of beauty. enough has already been said of the possibilities of the sticks to show that they are most valuable for symmetrical forms. they may be combined with the tablets, and thus very pretty effects be made, and when four children unite their material at the group work tables, the dictations and inventions produced are of course very large, and may be really beautiful if constructed on artistic principles. border work may be very fully carried out with the sticks, and another charming feature of the gift is the way in which it lends itself to the making of snow crystals. these are symmetrical combinations and modifications of familiar geometrical forms around the hexagon. mr. w. n. hailmann says regarding them: "at first, it is best to give each child only six or twelve sticks, and to dictate the central figure (a hexagon or hexagonal star) verbally or by means of a drawing on the blackboard. they may then receive a number of additional sticks, and let the central figure grow, all obeying the teacher's dictation, or each following his own inventive genius."[ ] [ ] "these forms are invaluable even as _silent_ teachers of geometrical and numerical relations. used judiciously in conversational lessons, leading to partial or complete analysis of the figures in spoken or written descriptions, their teaching power is inexhaustible."--w. n. hailmann's _primary helps_, page . in this gift, as well as in the seventh, the child's imitative and inventive powers are obviously more greatly taxed than in the others, and the danger will be, if he is not well trained, that, as he apparently can do anything with the material, he will end by doing nothing. the greater the freedom given to the child, the greater the necessity of teaching him to use that liberty in and through the law, and not to abuse it by failing to reach with its aid the highest ends. connection of sticks with drawing. we may make the laying of one-inch sticks in vertical and horizontal positions, in angles and squares, a prelude to the drawing of similar lines; and the copying of stick dictations, either from the table, or from memory, into drawing, is a most excellent exercise, calling into requisition great correctness and good judgment, besides an unusual amount of calculation, since the stick dictation will be on a scale of one inch, and the drawing on a scale of one fourth inch, reducing the original design to one in miniature. the child will almost always begin by attempting to make the picture exactly like his model in size without counting the inches and trying to make it mathematically correct; but after the idea is carefully explained and fully illustrated, he will have no further difficulty excepting, perhaps, with the more complicated figures containing slanting lines. ambidexterity. we should encourage in all possible ways the use of both hands in all the exercises with gifts and occupations, not only that one may be as skillful as the other, but also to avoid a one-sided position of the body which frequently leads to curvature of the spine. the well-known physiologist, professor brown-séquard, insists on the equal use of both hands, in order to induce the necessary equal flow of blood to the brain. through the effect of our irregular and abnormal development, the cause of which is the too persistent use of the right hand, one lobe of our brains and one side of our bodies are in a neglected and weakened condition, and the evils resulting from this weakness are many and widespread. dr. daniel wilson says: "in the majority of cases the defect, though it cannot be wholly overcome, may be in great part cured by early training, which will strengthen at once both the body and mind."[ ] [ ] "whenever the early and persistent cultivation of the full use of both hands has been accomplished, the result is greater efficiency, without any corresponding awkwardness or defect. in certain arts and professions, both hands are necessarily called into play. the skillful surgeon finds an enormous advantage in being able to transfer his instrument from one hand to the other. the dentist has to multiply instruments to make up for the lack of such acquired power. the fencer who can transfer his weapon to the left hand places his adversary at a disadvantage. the lumberer finds it indispensable, in the operation of his woodcraft, to learn to chop timber right-and-left-handed; and the carpenter may be frequently seen using the saw and hammer in either hand, and thereby not only resting his arm, but greatly facilitating his work. in all the fine arts the mastery of both hands is advantageous. the sculptor, the carver, the draughtsman, the engraver, the cameo-cutter, each has recourse at times to the left hand for special manipulative dexterity; the pianist depends little less on the left hand than on the right; and as for the organist, with the numerous pedals and stops of the modern grand organ, a quadrumanous musician would still find reason to envy the ampler scope which a briareus could command."--dr. daniel wilson, _left-handedness. a hint for educators_. abuse of eighth gift. no materials of the kindergarten (save the beans, lentils, etc., which serve to represent the point) have been so over-used and so abused as the sticks. when no other work was prepared for the children, when helpers were few, and it was desirable to give something which needed no supervision, when inexperienced students were to take charge of classes, when the kindergartner was weary and wanted a quiet moment to rest, when everybody was in a hurry, when the weather was very cold, or oppressively warm, when there was a torrent of rain, or had been a long drought, the sticks were hastily brought forth from the closet and as hastily thrust upon the children. these small sufferers, being thus provided with work-materials in which it was obvious that superior grown people took no interest, immediately lost interest themselves. in riotous kindergartens the sticks were broken, poked into pockets, and thrown on the floor; in the orderly ones they were gazed at apathetically, no one deeming it worth while to stir a hand to arrange them, save under pressure. sticks had been presented so often and in so tiresome a manner that they produced a kind of mental atrophy in the child,--they were arresting his development instead of forwarding it. such an abuse of material is entirely unnecessary in the kindergarten, where so many ways are provided of presenting the same truths in all sorts of different and charming guises. it is unnecessary and most unfortunate, for it has frequently thrown undeserved contempt on an innocent and attractive gift, which, when properly treated, is one of the most pleasing and useful which froebel has bequeathed to us. readings for the student. paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. pages - . kindergarten guide. _j. and b. ronge_. - . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . the kindergarten principle. _mary j. lyschinska_. - . law of childhood. _w. n. hailmann_. . kindergarten culture. _w. n. hailmann_. - . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . primary helps. _w. n. hailmann_. industrial art in schools.[ ] _charles g. leland_. drawing and decorative design. _charles g. leland_. art and the formation of taste. _walter crane_. manual of design. _richard redgrave, r. a._ principles of decorative design. _christopher dresser_. art and ornament in dress. introduction. _charles blanc_. [ ] circulars of information of the bureau of education, no. , . froebel's ninth gift the ring or curved line "art developed in the same way. the egyptian temples show us only straight-lined figures, which consequently show mathematical relations. only in later times appeared the lines of beauty, that is, the arched or circular lines. i carry the child on in the same way." friedrich froebel. "the curve bears with it in its unity and variety, its rich symbolism to everything which lives and moves, the most intimate relation to that which the child sees, feels, and loves." emma marwedel. "it might be said that to produce useful objects is the result of the struggle for life; but the tendency to create that which is simply artistic results from no such urgent need, yet it is found wherever the former exists." charles g. leland. "thou canst not wave thy staff in air, or dip thy paddle in the lake, but it carves the bow of beauty there, and the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." emerson. . the rings of the ninth gift are made of silvered wire, either soldered or unsoldered, and are whole circles three inches, two inches, and one inch in diameter, with their respective halves and quarters. . as the first six gifts emphasized solids and divided solids, the seventh, the plane, and the eighth, the straight line, so the ninth, the ring, embodies the curve, and illustrates the circumference of the sphere and the edge of the cylinder. . all the objects hitherto used have, with the exception of the ball and cylinder, dealt with straight lines and the figures formed by those lines. we now begin a series of exercises with the curve, and the variety of symmetrical figures that can be constructed is immensely increased. . much new knowledge can be conveyed by means of this fresh material, a complete set of new figures may be produced, and the imitation of objects passes from that of things constructed by man, which are mostly rectilinear, to those of nature in which curved lines in every possible variety prevail. . the geometrical forms illustrated in this gift are:-- { circles. { semicircles. planes. { quadrants. { sectors. { segments. by the union of straight and curved lines (sticks and rings) the entire geometry of the circle may be illustrated, and the child may thus become acquainted with the appearance of the diameter. radius. circumference. chord. arc. . the law of mediation of contrasts is shown as follows: the semicircles, when placed on the table with ends towards right or left, connect points of opposite direction up and down, and when placed with ends pointing upward or downward they connect the right with the left side. the circle is of course an unending line traced from a given point back to itself, according to certain laws, but it is also a union of two semicircles curving outward in opposite directions. "it is a representation of the general law, since the periphery and centre stand in contrast to each other, and are connected by the radii."--(froebel.) * * * * * the new gift and its charms. having already analyzed straight lines in the sticks, we will pass directly to the consideration of the ninth in the series of froebel's gifts, the rings, which are whole, half, and quarter circles of bright silvered wire. if the sticks were fascinating to the child as the embodied straight edge or line, and perfect treasure-houses of new possibilities to the kindergartner, the rings are just a bit more delightful as, with their glittering surface and curved lines, and their wonderful property of having neither beginning nor end, they are quite different in appearance from anything which precedes or follows them. of course the child sees at once that here is an entirely new field for invention, and he hastens to possess it, fully conscious of his power of combining the new elements. introduction of the ring. we must first discuss the new form with the children so as to be certain that they fully understand its relation to the other gifts. perhaps in a previous exercise with the eighth gift we have allowed the children to experiment with a stick, and to break it partially in a number of places so as to produce a measurably correct curved line, afterwards promising them that they should soon have perfect curves to play with. this exercise has its value because it illustrates practically that a curved line is one which changes its direction at every point. let us see when to-day's play begins if the children can think of any way to make such curves, save by the stick already used. some quick-witted little one will remember at once the surface of the ball and his repeated experiments in dividing it, and will suggest in sufficiently plain words that a curved line might be made from a clay sphere. his neighbor thinks a clay cylinder would make one more easily, and both experiments are tried by all the children with a resultant of quite perfect clay rings. then some one wants to make paper rings, and some one else cloth rings, and the wise kindergartner encourages all this experimenting, knowing that "the power of memory increases in the same ratio as delight, animation, and joy are connected with free mental activity." material of the rings. when the wire rings are at last given, some conversation about their material will be pleasant and timely, as it is of a kind we have not had before in the gifts, and shall not have again. the children will see that it is akin to the substance of which their sewing and weaving needles and their scissors are made, and possibly some one may know that both are products of iron. at this juncture it may be well to show a piece of iron, to let the children handle it and note its various properties, and while this is being done, to tell them of the many parts of the world in which it is found, of its great strength and usefulness, and that its value is greater than that of the shining yellow gold. a description of iron mines will easily follow, and the children will delight to hear of the great shafts sunk deep in the earth, of the baskets in which the miners travel up and down, of the darkness underground where they toil all day with pick and shovel, of the safety lamps they carry in their caps, of the mules that drag the loads of iron ore to and fro, and--startling fact, at which round eyes are invariably opened--that some of these mules have their stables down in the ground below, and never come up where the sun shines and the flowers bloom. if there is a foundry in the vicinity of the kindergarten, and we can take the little ones to see the huge furnaces, the intense fires, the molten iron, and the various roasting, melting, and moulding processes necessary in refining the ore, they will gain an ineffaceable idea of the value of the metal in human labor, and of the endless chain of hands, clasped each in the other, through which the slender wire rings have passed to reach them. first exercises. in the first dictation exercise several whole circles of the same size may be given, and their equality shown by laying one on top of the other. then we may lay them side by side in actual contact, and the important fact will be discovered by the children that circles can touch each other at one point only. subsequent exercises take up rings of different sizes, when concentric circles are of course made, showing one thing completely inclosed in another, and next follow the half and quarter rings, which the children must be led, as heretofore, to discover and make for themselves. with the semicircles, which offer still richer suggestions for invention than the whole rings, another property of the curved line is seen. two blocks, two tablets, two sticks could not touch each other without forming new angles, nor could they be so placed as to produce a complete figure. two semicircles, on the other hand, form no new angles when they touch, and they may be joined completely and leave no opening. in his work with the sticks the child became well versed in handling a comparatively large amount of material, so that now he can deal successfully from the first exercise with a fair number of whole, half, and quarter rings. we must be careful, however, not to give him too many of these in the beginning, lest he be overwhelmed with the riches at his command.[ ] [ ] "the number of rings should only gradually be augmented. satiety destroys every impulse of creation."--emma marwedel, _childhood's poetry and studies_, page . when the rings should be introduced. the rings should not be used freely until the child is familiar with vertical, horizontal, and slanting lines, and not only familiar in the sense of being able to receive and obey dictations intelligently, but in constantly making correct and artistic use of them in his creations. the practice with them, however, is often deferred entirely too long, and the intense pleasure and profit which the child gains from the beautiful and satisfying curved line are not given him until very late in the kindergarten course. this is manifestly unnecessary, for although, if we introduce froebel's gifts and occupations in orderly sequence, we make greater use of the straight line after the first and second gifts are passed than we do of the curve, yet we should not end with it, nor accept it as a finality; neither should we keep the child tied down altogether to the contemplation of such lines. there is no need of exhausting all the possibilities of the straight line before beginning work with the curve, for sufficient difficulties could be devised with the former to last an indefinite length of time. if the child understands the relation of the edge to the solid, and of the outline to the body; if he is skilled in the use of six to a dozen sticks laid in various positions, he can appreciate perfectly the relation of the curved edge or line to the spherical and circular objects which he has seen in the kindergarten. he remembers the faces of the cylinder, the conversation about spherical and flat rounding objects in his plays with the ball, and he has seen the circular as well as square paper-folding. he will be accustomed in that to the appearance of the semicircle, segment, quadrant, and sector, and will take great delight in cutting and drawing rings and crescents if we open the way for him. how we may keep the curve before the child's eye. although the gifts, from third to ninth, illustrate straight lines, angles, and rectilinear figures, yet the occupations present many facilities for keeping the curve before the eye of the child. in sewing, we introduce curving outlines during the study of the ball, and work out a series of objects in the vegetable and animal world in order to vary the mathematical precision of the making of lines, angles, and geometrical figures, as well as to illustrate more fully the spherical form. we may also use the circular paper-folding in some simple sequence as early as the child's development will permit, and we have, of course, at the very outset, the occupation of modeling, which is one of the most valuable of aids in this matter, and the stringing of wooden spheres and beads. the thread game enters here also, and makes a useful supplement to the rings, as the wet thread may be pushed while it lies on the surface of the table or slate into numberless different forms, all of which may be included under curving outlines. in linear drawing we give the child lines running in various directions at the earliest possible time, so that he may not grow into a strained and unnatural position of the hand, for this constant drawing of the vertical line, which is necessary to its execution with perfect precision by the young child, limits the freedom of the wrist and muscles, and instead of preparing him to write a good hand, does absolutely the reverse. the various exercises, on the other hand, in drawing the curves of circle and oval and their combinations are quite perfect preparations for clear, graceful penmanship. we also have, in drawing, miss emma marwedel's circular system, and the outline work performed by means of pasteboard patterns, most of which are of the curving outlines of leaves, flowers, fruits, and vegetables. when the children can draw quite well from these patterns we always encourage the drawing without them, merely looking at the object to be copied. these exercises are of the greatest value as connected with modeling when the subjects chosen for invention are comprehended under the sphere, prolate and oblate spheroid, ovoid, cone, etc., the cube with its straight lines coming last of all. in this way, while keeping up the regular sequence of lessons and occupations with the straight line, we do not debar the child from the contemplation of the line of beauty. uniting the straight and curved lines. after this, he takes great pleasure in uniting the straight and curved lines in his inventions with the sticks and rings given him together, and is quite able to use them separately or unitedly in his creative work. about this time the fruit of these exercises will begin to appear in his drawing. he will attempt to unite his straight lines by curves, and even essay large designs in curves which will be far from perfect, but nevertheless will not be without their value. copying inventions. the first trials of this kind may be in copying the inventions in rings which he has made on his table, exactly as he previously transferred his stick inventions to the slate. the spaces should be just as carefully counted, and accuracy expected in preserving the numerical proportions. but this needs much tact and patience on the part of the kindergartner, as well as skill in teaching; for the principles of drawing the curve are much less obvious to the child and much more difficult for him to comprehend than the measurement and calculation of straight lines with their various lengths and inclinations. these inventions with rings, which are often wonderfully beautiful,--so beautiful, in fact, that the uninstructed person is sometimes skeptical as to their production by the children,--may also be preserved in permanent form by parquetry. it is furnished in various colors for this gift, as for the seventh and eighth, and is greatly enjoyed by the children. if any should fear that the long contemplation of rectangular solids, planes, and straight lines in froebel's gifts should tend towards too great rigidity and barrenness of imagination in inventive work, it is obviously within our power, as has been shown, to vary this mathematical exactness, which is no doubt less agreeable to the child than the graceful image of his own fancy (could he attain it), by introducing the curve freely into many of the occupations and exercises with the kindergarten material in general. forms of life, beauty, and knowledge. the rings are of course not as well adapted to the production of objects constructed by man as were the sticks, but, nevertheless, the material is not without value in this direction. various fruits, flowers, and leaves may be made, as well as such objects as bowls, goblets, hour-glasses, baskets, and vases. when connected with sticks, the number of life forms is obviously much increased on account of the union of straight and curved lines thus made possible. tablets may also be added and contribute a new element to the possibilities for invention. for symmetrical forms, however, the gift is admirably adapted, since the child can hardly put two rings together without producing something pleasing.[ ] borders enter here in great variety, tablets and sticks being added when desirable, and the group work forms, combining the seventh, eighth, and ninth gifts, give full play to the creative impulses of the child, while calling constantly upon those principles of design which he has learned empirically. [ ] "it is true that the child produces forms of beauty with other material also, but it is the curved line which offers the strongest inducements to attempt such forms, since even the simplest combinations of a small number of semicircles and circles yield figures bearing the stamp of beauty."--h. goldammer's _the kindergarten_, page . the forms of knowledge which can be made with the ninth gift are necessarily few. it is not especially well fitted for number work, and development of geometrical form is limited to the planes and lines of the circle. wooden rings. miss emma marwedel introduced a supplement to the ninth gift in the form of wooden circles and half-circles in many colors. these are much heavier than the metal rings, therefore somewhat easier to handle and give, as she claims, "the child's creative powers a much larger field for æsthetic development." of course, this larger field is to be found in color blending, not in beauty of design, as the form elements remain the same. the bright hues are undoubtedly a great attraction, however, and perhaps are in line with that return to color which was noted in the seventh gift, when the architectural forms were laid aside. if we adopt the wooden rings we need not on that account lay aside the metal ones, for the two materials may be combined to great advantage. difficulties of the gift. the gift presents little difficulty, the dictations requiring less concentration than heretofore as the positions in which the rings may be placed are few and simple. froebel's purpose evidently was that the child should now concentrate his activity entirely upon design, and that he should use the material by itself, and in connection with sticks and tablets to give out in visible form whatever æsthetic impressions he had received through the preceding gifts. the office of the kindergartner is hardly now more than to suggest, merely to watch the child in his creative work, and to advise when necessary as to the most artistic disposition of the simple material. she may here, if she adopts this attitude, have the experience of seeing the direct result of her teachings, for the child's work will be a mirror in which she can see reflected her successes or her failures. froebel's idea. the idea of froebel in devising all these gifts was not, it seems hardly necessary to say, to instruct the child in abstractions, which do not properly belong to childhood, but to lead him early in life to the practical knowledge of things about him; to inculcate the love of industry, helpfulness, independence of thought and action, neatness, accuracy, economy, beauty, harmony, truth, and order. the gifts and occupations are only means to a great end, and if used in this sense will attain their highest usefulness. no dictation with any of the kindergarten materials, no study of lines, angles, oblongs, triangles, and pentagons, no work with numbers either concrete or abstract are fit employments for little children, if not connected in every possible way with their home pleasures and the natural objects of their love. only when thus connected do they produce real interest, only thus can agreement with the child's inner wants be secured. actual experiences in the child's life are its most natural and potent teachers. we need constantly to remember that the prime value of the kindergarten lies in its personal influence upon individuals, and seek to develop each separate member of our class according to his possibilities. an objection answered. the objection has been made that the study and practice with straight lines, angles, geometrical forms, cubes, and other rectangular solids would fit the child for later work in the exact and mathematical sciences more than for other branches of study. but yet it is difficult to see how, when the child's powers of observation are so carefully trained in every way; when he is constantly led to notice objects in nature and reproduce them with clay, pencil, chalk, or needle; when these objects are so frequently presented for his critical inspection and comparison; when he is led to see in the flowers, plants, rocks, and stars, the unity which holds together everything in the universe; when beauty and harmony, mingled freely, constitute the atmosphere of the ideal kindergarten,--it is difficult indeed to see how he can receive anything but benefit from the gift plays, which present at first mainly the straight line, seemingly deferring the curve to a later period when it can be managed more successfully. readings for the student. paradise of childhood. _edward wiebe_. pages , . kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. - . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . the kindergarten. principles of froebel's system. _emily shirreff_. - . industrial art in schools.[ ] _charles g. leland_. childhood's poetry and studies. with diagrams. _emma marwedel_. the grammar of ornament. _owen jones_. art. _sir john lubbock_. how to judge a picture. _van dyke_. [ ] circulars of information of the bureau of education, no. , . froebel's tenth gift the point "the awakening mind of the child ... is led from the material body and its regular division to the contemplation of the surface, from this to the contemplation of the line and to the point made visible." friedrich froebel. "and it is precisely thus that the first artistic work of primeval man occurs; he begins by the forming of simple rows, as strings of beads, or of shells, for instance." h. poesche. "for the last step in this analysis the child receives small lentil seeds or pebbles--concrete points, so to speak--with which he constructs the most wonderful pictures." w. n. hailmann. . the point made concrete, which forms the tenth and last of froebel's gifts, is represented by many natural objects, by beans, lentils, pebbles, shells, leaves, and buds of flowers, by seeds of various kinds, as well as by tiny spheres of clay and bits of wood and cork. . we have been moving by gradual analysis from the solid through the divided solid, the plane and the line, and thus have reached in logical sequence the point, into a series of which the line may be resolved. . the point which was visible in the preceding gifts, but inseparable from them, now in the tenth gift has an existence of its own. although it is an imaginary quantity having neither length, breadth, nor thickness, yet it is here illustrated by tangible objects which the child can handle. by its very lack of individuality, it lends itself to many charming plays and transformations. . by the use of the point the child learns practically the composition of the line, that its direction is determined by two points, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and that a curved line is one which changes its direction at every point. the gift closes the series of objects obtained by analysis from the solid, and prepares for the occupations which are developed by synthesis from the point. . the outlines of all geometrical plane figures both rectilinear and curvilinear may be illustrated with the point as well as straight and curved lines and angles of every degree. . the law of mediation of contrasts is no longer illustrated in the gift itself, but simply governs the use of the material. all lines and outlines of planes made with a series of dots show its workings, and the symmetrical figures, as we have noted from the first, owe to it their very existence. meeting-place of gifts and occupations. when we begin upon a consideration of the tenth gift, the last link in the chain of objects which froebel devised to "produce an all-sided development of the child," we see at once that the meeting-place of gift and occupation has been reached. the two series are now in fact so nearly one that the point is much more often used for occupation work than as a gift. this convergence of the series in regard to their practical use was first noted in the tablets, and has grown more and more marked with each succeeding object. though the point is in truth the last step which the child takes in the sequence of gifts as he journeys toward the abstract, yet we are met at once in practice by the apparently inconsistent fact that it is one of the first presented in the kindergarten. this can only be explained by the statement that it is in truth quite as much of an occupation as a gift, and is used in the former sense among the child's first work-materials as a preparation for later point-_making_ (perforating), and as an exercise in eye-training and accuracy of measurement. it is not an occupation, of course, for the reason that permanent results cannot be produced with it, and because no transformation of its material is possible. the point as a gift. before the child completes his kindergarten course, however, he should certainly be led to an intellectual perception of the interrelation of the gifts and their gradual development from solid to point, for their orderly progression according to law, though it be but dimly apprehended, will be most useful and strengthening to the mind. to discern the logical order of a single series of objects is a step toward the comprehension of world-order in mature life.[ ] [ ] "this coming-out of the child from the outer and superficial and his entrance into the inner view of things, which, because it is inner, leads to recognition, insight, and consciousness,--this coming-out of the child from the house-order to the higher world-order makes the boy a scholar."--friedrich froebel, _education of man_, page . the mind in later childhood should be what froebel describes his own to have been. "i often felt," he says, "as if my mind were a smooth, still pool scarce a handbreadth over, or even a single water-drop, in which surrounding things were clearly mirrored, while the blue vault of the sky was seen as well, reaching far away and above." when the derivation of plane and of straight and curved line and their place in the gifts are clearly understood by the child, there will be no difficulty in gaining an equally clear apprehension of the point and its position in the series. this may be done somewhat as follows. when the children are playing with blocks on some occasion, we may direct the conversation to the essential characteristics of the cube, its faces, edges, and corners. do they remember which one of their playthings is like the face of the cube; do they remember cutting clay tablets from the clay blocks? it is most unlikely that this experiment will have been forgotten, but if it has been, it may be easily repeated. speak next of the edges of the cube, and let the children recall the derivation of the stick. that portion of the cube not yet discussed will now be seized upon by the children, and they will ask if any of their playthings are like the cube's corners. can they think of anything; shall we not try to make something? now the clay appears, cubes are quickly fashioned, and each child is allowed to cut off the eight corners of his block. he has no sooner done this than he sees the nearest approach we can make to a point, and proceeds to make a design from them while he recalls the beans, shells, lentils, etc., he has used before in a similar way. it is well here to suggest making the bits of clay into tiny oblate spheroids, and laying them away to dry so that we may make a group work invention of them to-morrow. better still, however, is the instant introduction of sticks or wires to connect with the clay points, and thus form at once the skeleton of the solid, which will give an ineffaceable impression of the relation of point and line to each other. pleasure of child in point-laying and stringing. the pleasure the child finds in point-laying is not confined to the kindergarten, for playing with beads and pin-heads is an ordinary nursery occupation in all countries, and which of us cannot recall long happy hours on the seashore, or by the brookside, when we gathered and sorted shells and smooth glistening pebbles, and laid them in rows and patterns? the mere handling of a great store of these gave a midas-like delight, and what primitive artistic pleasure we felt as we arranged them according to the principle of repetition to border our garden-beds or to inclose our miniature parks and playgrounds. the same joy is felt in plucking, arranging, and stringing rose-hips, the seeds of the ailantus, the nasturtium, the pumpkin, or the "cheeses" of the mallow and wild geranium. miscellaneous materials. it will commonly be found that the child enjoys tenfold more the objects for point-work which he finds himself than the more perfect school-materials. imagine the joy, for instance, of a bevy of kindergarten children set free on pescadero beach (california), and allowed to ramble up and down its shining sands to pick up the wonderful pescadero pebbles. what colors of dull red and amber, of pink and palest green, what opaline lights, and smooth, glimmering surfaces! "busy work" with such materials would be worth while indeed,--yet easy to obtain as they are, they are almost never seen in use. smooth, white pebbles, washed entirely clean and sorted according to size, are not uncommonly seen in the kindergartens, however, and are especially useful in the sand-table, and if these and the shining cream-colored shells could be found by the children themselves, their pleasure in them would be immensely increased. that this is true is proved by the experience of many teachers with seed-work. one of our own brood of kindergartners once had a birthday melon party for one of her children. the melons were brought to the kindergarten room and there divided, the small host serving his guests himself. great interest was immediately shown in the jet-black seeds of the water-melon in contrast with the smaller light-colored seeds of the musk-melon, and unanimous appeals were made to the kindergartner that they might be saved and used for inventions. this was done, and they were always called for afterwards in point-work, rather than the beans, or vegetable and wooden lentils. in those kindergartens where the seeds of all fruits are saved by the children at lunch hour, it is also noted that the collection thus made is always the object of universal interest and preference. use of the gift. one of the first uses of the point may be in following the outline of some form of life which the kindergartner has drawn in white or colored chalk on the child's table. this is much more fascinating work than the placing of seeds one space apart, three in a row, etc., for the latter belongs to the "knowledge-acquiring side of the game," which, as froebel says, is the "quickly tiring side, only to be given quite casually at first, and as chance may provide suitable openings for it." the forms drawn in chalk may very well be of curving outlines of vegetables, fruits, leaves, and flowers to connect with the study of the first gift, and may include any other simple appropriate object which the kindergartner is capable of drawing. the more advanced child can of course make his own life forms without the aid of drawing, and if he is given different sizes and kinds of shells, seeds, or pebbles, often arranges them with great ability to imitate the shading of the object. the beginning of the forms of knowledge is in placing the points in regular order on the squared tables at the intersection of vertical and horizontal lines. next, the child lays one space vertical lines, three points in a line, then two space lines with five points, then horizontal lines, angles, parallelograms, borders, etc., following out the school of linear drawing, and in this way progresses in an orderly manner to the designing of symmetrical forms. curved lines of course are quite as easily represented as the straight, and really beautiful designs are often made by the children with them. tenth gift parquetry. tiny circles and squares of colored paper corresponding to the wooden lentils are also to be had with this gift, and afford a means of preserving the designs in permanent form. they are so small, however, as to give occasion for considerable patience in pasting them, and are rather difficult to arrange with regularity without first drawing the design. it is doubtful, in our opinion, if they may be considered to be of any particular educational benefit, if indeed they are not a positive harm to the child in that they require a too minute and long-sustained use of the finer muscles. objections to the gift. these strictures on the tenth gift parquetry bring us naturally to the criticisms lately made by eminent authorities upon some of the froebel materials. the objection that many of them require too minute handling and too close attention on the part of children of the kindergarten age seems, as far as the gifts are concerned, to hold especial weight in regard to point-work.[ ] [ ] the development of motor-ability in children and its furtherance or arrest by the kindergarten materials concerns the occupations more particularly, and as such will receive full consideration in a later volume. we need not consider here the physio-psychological tests lately made of the early motor-ability of children and the results which these have shown, but simply concern ourselves with what we have seen and noted many times in daily kindergarten practice. is it not true that the laying of beans and lentils one inch apart on the tables, for instance, is an occupation which requires very delicate handling on account of the smallness of the object, its easy mobility, and the exactness required to place it precisely at the crossing-point of vertical and horizontal lines? is it not true that such work requires considerable effort from the kindergartner to make it interesting to the child? is it not true that there is a cramp of the fingers, shown by a slight trembling, in getting hold of the tiny object and placing it, a cramp of the eye in foreseeing and following the movement, and a cramp of the body accompanying the tension of hand and arm? if all these observations are correct, or measurably so, if they hold with a majority of children, then point-laying as an occupation clearly needs considerable modification in the kindergarten. what are then the objections to the point as illustrated in bean, coffee-berry, seed, and wooden lentil? in a word, that when represented as above, it becomes too small and too mobile. the difficulty of using these materials is immensely increased by the fact that a slight movement of the child's table will send them all on the floor, while even an ill-timed cough or sneeze, or puff of wind, will blow them out of position. point-laying is quite difficult enough for the child's small powers under the best conditions, and need not be made more so by undue mobility in the materials with which it is carried on. this criticism would not hold of course as against large shells or pebbles or as against miss marwedel's hemispheres and ellipsoids. how these objections may be obviated. the only good reason for using the small materials to which the preceding objections have been made is a very good one, viz., that if we are to take any concrete object to represent the point, it should be as small as possible, since the point is in reality an intangible something, having no one of the three dimensions. this reasoning seems to be logical enough, and it is surely equally so, to insist that the child shall at some time derive his own points from the cube and make them as small as possible, that he may the better understand their relation to line, plane, and solid. when once this relation is understood, however, and before it is suggested to his mind, why may he not use the larger materials, even though they do not illustrate the point as perfectly? any lack in perfect representation would probably be more than compensated by the removal of the strain on the accessory muscles and the gain in artistic development. this latter point, indeed, needs special consideration, for there seems no doubt that the continued use of such small objects for design leads to accuracy and prettiness rather than breadth and power. the marwedel materials. if we throw out all the smaller materials used for point-laying, and it seems advisable so to do, we still have left smooth pebbles from one half to three fourths of an inch in diameter, and shells of any univalve, such as the "money-cowry" (_cyproea moneta_). these should be polished, as free from convolutions as possible, and not less than half an inch in diameter. to these we may add miss emma marwedel's wooden ellipsoids and hemispheres, already mentioned, which are satisfactory in size, and add the delights of color.[ ] [ ] _marwedel's materials for child-culture_. d. c. heath & co. the hemispheres, which are about one half inch in diameter, come in eight colors and also in the natural wood, are pierced for stringing, and are similar to ordinary button-moulds, having of course one flat side. the ellipsoids in the six rainbow hues, black gray, brown, and wood colors, resemble elliptical shells, having one flat side, are also pierced for stringing, and vary in length from three fourths of to something over an inch, being nearly an inch wide, perhaps, and a half inch thick. the children are invariably delighted with both hemispheres and ellipsoids, and need no stimulus from the kindergartner in their use. mind-pictures. in some of miss marwedel's pamphlets on the use of these materials, she speaks of the mind-pictures which can be made with them, and which are of course quite possible with any of the other gifts. these mind-pictures, showing form and number groups, are drawn by the kindergartner on the blackboard, where they are left a second and then erased. they are then copied from memory, and the results compared, described, and criticised by the children. this constitutes a valuable mental exercise, and if the tests are simple at first and made gradually more difficult will be most valuable in increasing the memory-span as well as in developing language power. abuse of the gift. if some of the materials used in the kindergarten are unwisely chosen, and if this objection applies in the gifts, especially to the point, then the kindergartner has been, and still is, unnecessarily increasing her sum of error, for no one of the connected series of objects (save the stick) is commonly so forced upon the child. it is somewhat unusual for this reason to find a whole class of children really enjoying point-work, though several conscientious and industrious members of the group may be toiling away with praiseworthy diligence. sometimes the children's feeling toward the gift goes beyond indifference and passes into active dislike, but in either attitude of mind the beans, lentils, etc., are likely to be mistreated. it is not that the work with them is not in itself pleasing to the child, but that it has been forced upon him _ad nauseam_, and that the kindergartner has lacked interest in presenting it. his own interest has in consequence gradually died out, and when once the fire is cold, who shall light it again? that there is no need of this abuse of the gift is clear enough, and it can only come from entire lack of originality in using froebel's materials, or from a mental or physical inertia on the part of the kindergartner, which causes her to prefer giving out such work as needs neither preparation nor previous thought. readings for the student. kindergarten guide. _kraus-boelte_. pages - . the kindergarten. _h. goldammer_. - . a system of child-culture. _emma marwedel_. - . hints to teachers. _emma marwedel_. . decorative design. _frank s. jackson_. art in education. _thos. davidson_. manual of design. _richard redgrave, r. a._ exercices et travaux pour les enfants. _fanny ch. delon_. manuel pratique des jardins d'enfants. _j. e. jacobs_ and _mme. von marenholtz-bülow_. general remarks on the gifts as we close the series of talks upon froebel's gifts and look back over the ground that has been covered, we see that a number of important subjects have been only lightly touched upon, while we have been altogether silent regarding others equally as vital. this is doubtless inevitable in any work upon the kindergarten which does not aim to be encyclopædic in character, but a few of the more serious omissions may be supplied before we close our consideration of the gifts and enter upon that of the occupations. first, then, a word on the subject of attention. difficulty of holding child's attention. it is not uncommon, when discussing any exercises with kindergarten materials which require dictation or guidance, to hear complaints of the difficulty of holding the children's attention. it may generally be said, doubtless, that when little children fail to give attention it is because they are not interested, and if the teacher finds the majority of her pupils listless, indifferent, and vagrant-minded, she may reasonably conclude that something is amiss either with the subject or with her presentation of it. the child is as yet too young to command his mental powers and "drive himself on by his own self-determination," and if we enforce an attention which he gives through fear, we lose the motive power of interest which froebel sought to utilize in the plays of the kindergarten. dr. george p. brown in a late article on "metaphysics and pedagogics"[ ] says, "every one admits that there is much that must be done by the child in his elementary education which is a task, for the reason that his ideas of its worth to himself cannot be sufficiently appreciated to arouse a lively and impelling interest in the doing of it," and he adds, "garfield once complained that he had done so long those things in which he was interested that he was losing his power to do that which did not interest him, which suggests the danger of relying entirely upon interest as an incentive to learn." [ ] _public school journal_, july, . that there is a danger here cannot be denied, but it is one which need hardly be considered at the kindergarten age, when that interest which comes from continued agreement between the work in hand and the child's inner wants is absolutely essential to the gaining of knowledge. mr. w. n. hailmann puts the whole matter in a nutshell when he says: "if the kindergartner has the penetration to discover these inner wants, and the skill to adapt the circumstances and her own purposes to these, she will find it easy to secure and hold the child's attention. without this penetration and skill, all else is unavailing. she may sing and cajole herself into hoarseness, she may smile and gesticulate herself into a mild sort of tarantism, or freeze herself at one end of the table into a statue of suppressed reproach,--if the instruction or dictation has no natural connection with the purposes of the children, these will remain uninterested or bored victims of her ill-directed enthusiasm." language teaching. the plays with the gifts open wide avenues for language teaching if conducted as froebel intended. he says many wise things on this subject in his "education of man," and the following is of absolute application. "our children will attain," he says, "to a far more fundamental insight into language, if we, when teaching them, connect the words more with the actual perception of the thing and the object.... our language would then again become a true language of life, that is, born of life and producing life; while it threatens otherwise, by merely outward consideration, to become more and more dead."[ ] [ ] _education of man_, page . from the first the child should be led to voice his small observations on the gifts in clear language and in approximately complete sentences, brief though they be. he can as easily say, "i would like a blue ball, please," if asked what color he prefers, as to jerk out a monosyllabic "blue!" after a little practice he will use a short sentence when comparing two objects, for instance, but as he naturally moves along the line of least resistance it is hardly to be expected that he will take the trouble to form complete sentences unless gently stimulated to do so. the stimulus must be gentle, however, and given at the right time, for any feeling that his words are criticised will lead him to self-repression, not expression. in gift work, too, he explains to the kindergartner what he is inventing, and for what purpose; he weaves gossamer threads of fancy about the objects constructed, or describes the forms of beauty and knowledge he has built by dictation. there is and should be constant interchange of conversation during the gift plays, and the kindergartner who directs them like a drill-sergeant, requiring her recruits only to be silent and obey, has entirely misconceived froebel's idea.[ ] [ ] it is a difficult thing to find the _via media_ between complete silence on the part of the children save when answering questions and a confusion of tongues like that at the building of babel, but there is such a _via media_, and it can be found by those who seek it diligently. it is undeniably much easier for the teacher to do all the talking, the children serving as audience, but the ideal to be reached is that she shall be the audience herself, or rather the chairman of the meeting, guiding the conversation, asking suggestive questions, and making wise comments. our language teaching, however, is not confined to the cultivation of greater powers of expression, for there is a direct gain in the child's vocabulary consequent upon his kindergarten experience. he absorbs many new words from his teachers, but many others he learns through his daily work and play, and these are his absolute possession,--the thing and the word together. an interesting series of experiments was once made in the san francisco free kindergartens relative to the number of new words which the child had mastered and used easily and freely after three years in the child-garden. these included terms of dictation, geometrical terms, names of tools, colors, materials, plants, animals, buildings, and places, new and poetic words of songs, games, and stories, etc., and the experiments established the fact that the child's vocabulary was fully as great as that of his parents and decidedly more choice. relation of word to object. it should be said here that there is great value to the child in learning to name things correctly from the very beginning. if the new word is a simple one, he can learn it with perfect ease, and then the object is properly labeled, so to speak, for future use.[ ] familiar names are sometimes used in the kindergarten when the correct term would be quite as easy to pronounce. this practice often arises from a false conception of symbolism, and is continued with an idea that it is pleasing to the child. sometimes the pseudonyms are absolutely misleading, as in the frequent speaking of squares as _boxes_, which must, of course, confuse the child as to the real nature of a plane. there are many cases where the geometrical name of a form can easily be taught if it is given _after_ the object is clearly understood.[ ] [ ] "at all stages of learning the mother tongue, the purely verbal exercises are more or less accompanied with the occupation of the mind upon things. if we suppose the child to become acquainted, in the first instance, with a variety of objects, the imparting of the names is a welcome operation, and the mental fusion of each name and thing is rapidly brought about. if the objects are in any way interesting, if they arouse or excite attention, their names are eagerly embraced. on the other hand, if objects are but languidly cared for, or if they are inconspicuous or confused with other things, we are indifferent both to the things themselves and to their designations." (alexander bain.) [ ] "language is the necessary tool of thought used in the conduct of the analysis and synthesis of investigation." (w. t. harris.) "what we are really seeking is the meaning _and_ the word. one is of no value without the other in the education of the child. there is no such thing as a valuable observation and investigation of natural objects without language in which to embody the results at every step." (geo. p. brown.) _report on correlation of studies by committee of fifteen_. with annotations by geo. p. brown. there is a distinction here as to age, which should be noted. though with babies of three years it is not only delightful, but necessary, to use objects symbolically, to give play-names to the lines they make, etc., with older children who are nearing the age of school instruction and therefore passing away from the "sense relations of things," it is just as essential to begin a more scientific nomenclature. value of knowledge gained by individual effort. one of the commonest errors in the kindergarten, as well as one of the most pernicious, is that of assisting the child too much in all his work. this is perhaps more universally true of the plays with the occupations than with the gifts, but even in the latter direction the practice is far too widespread.[ ] [ ] "of course, there is great difference between the disciplinary value of that study in which the pupil solves his own difficulties and that teaching in which the teacher accompanies the pupil, supplying the needed information or suggestion at every step of his progress. the latter is not worth much for character building for the reason that it is not apt to become a part of the organized self.... the school cannot afford to expend much energy in acquiring such knowledge." (geo. p. brown.) _report on correlation of studies by committee of fifteen_. with annotations by geo. p. brown. the kindergartner often forms his sentences for the child, over-directs him when he is matching colors, gives names to the objects he constructs without waiting for him to do so, moves his blocks, sticks, tablets, rings into more accurate position, changes his spacing when incorrect, rearranges his inventions, selects the colors for his parquetry work,--and all for what reasons? primarily, to produce a better effect, it is probable, glorying in the consciousness that the work on every child's table is exactly right, and blind to the truth that uniformity must always be mechanical; and secondarily, to quiet her own feeling of impatience, which sometimes comes from nervous exhaustion and sometimes from an over-eagerness to get a quantity of work done regardless of the method by which it is obtained. there is a thirdly, too, which is that the inaccurate work, the awkward designs, the unfortunate blending of colors which the little one inevitably makes at first, so offend her artistic eye that she trembles with eagerness to set them right, forgetting that by so doing she is imposing her superior taste upon the child and thereby failing to develop his. we shall never see this matter clearly, nor know how to bear with the crudity of the child's work, until we learn that the crudity is natural and therefore to be respected, and that it is in a sense beautiful after all, for it is a stage of being. this vice, for it is a vice, of assisting the child too much causes him to lose his own power of bravely and persistently overcoming difficulties, and makes him weak and dependent. it gives occasion for teachers to say, and apparently with justice, that kindergarten children need constant assistance in their school work, that they are always crying out for help, and seem incapable of taking a step alone. that this is not true of all kindergarten children we know, but that it should be true of any is a disgrace to our interpretation of froebel's system, which is, in reality, a very treasure-house of self-reliance, of self-development, and of independence of thought and action. value of interrelation in kindergarten work. one of the highest essentials of gift work is that it should not be isolated from other experiences of the child and concern itself merely with first principles of mathematics, with elements of construction, reproduction, and design, and with unrelated bits of knowledge. froebel says in the motto to one of the poems in the "mutter-spiel und kose-lieder,"-- "whatever singly with a child you've played, weave it together till a whole you've made. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "thus it will dawn upon his childish soul: the smallest thing belongs to some great whole." and again,-- "silently cherish your baby's dim thought, that life in itself is as unity wrought." nothing is more evident in all his writings, in his more formal works as well as in his autobiography, his volumes of letters and his reminiscences, than that his lifelong struggle was for unity in all things. he would have this unity expressed in simple concrete form in the kindergarten by a complete interrelation of all the activities of the child; and the gifts as "outward representations of his internal mental world" may be trusted to furnish us with an absolute test as to how far we are carrying out this principle in our teaching. whether or not the necessity of correlation decreases as age increases we need not discuss here, but that there is absolute need of it in the kindergarten probably no one will deny. if a single aim does not unify the kindergarten day, (or month, or season), it will be a succession of scrappy experiences, of surface impressions, no one of which can be permanent, because it was slight by itself and received no reinforcement from others. such instruction only serves to dissipate the mind, to blot out the dim feeling of unity inscribed there by its maker, and to render the child incapable and undesirous of binding his thoughts into a whole.[ ] [ ] "in the broad view we are safe in affirming that all truth is congruous, and that truth in one department of human knowledge will always reinforce truth in any other department. there is a unity in all truth. while it is true, as dr. harris affirms in his report on the correlation of studies, that the student does not come into the full consciousness of this fact before he attains the university, is it not also true that he can be so taught that he will _feel_ this unity before he can think it, and that his feeling it will hasten the development of the power to think it?"--geo. p. brown, "congruence in teaching," _public school journal_, sept., . what the subjects should be, around which the child's mental, physical, and spiritual activities may crystallize, furnishes a fruitful field for discussion; but, above all, they should be vital ones, for, as miss blow says, "serious injury may be done the mind by developing concentric exercises which belong not to the centre, but the circumference of thought." it would be fruitless to suggest suitable subjects here, for if they do not, on the one hand, conform to the growing mind of the particular child or class of children, they may either arrest or overtax development, and if, on the other hand, they do not proceed from the kindergartner's insight into principle, it would be but "superstitious imitation" for her to follow them out. no manual, no guide-book, no treatise, no lecture, can supply the want of fine intelligence and judgment in all these matters, and not until the teacher "comprehends the genesis of any principle from deeper principles can she emancipate herself from even the hypnotic suggestion of the principle itself, and convert external authority into inward freedom."[ ] [ ] w. t. harris. effect of froebel's gifts on the kindergartner. although uninterested and uninitiated persons doubtless regard the various gifts of froebel as very ordinary objects, made from commonplace materials, yet that this view of the matter is only a peep through a pin-hole is abundantly proven by their effect on the kindergartner. those of us who have seen successive groups of young women in training-classes approach the first few gifts have noted that interest is commonly mingled at first with a slight surprise that the objects should be considered worthy of so much study, while underneath lies a half-concealed amusement at the simple forms produced. yet this attitude of mind endures but for a season, for as soon as the gifts are studied and used practically, it is seen that they contain possibilities of indefinite expansion. when they are looked at through the glasses of imagination, it is wonderful how large they appear, and when one has toiled long hours to invent some sequence with them, one wonders at the reality and fascination of the forms produced. the outsider who glanced at the materials hastily would undoubtedly suppose them capable of only a limited number of changes and combinations, but the fact remains that every year kindergarten students invent hundreds of new forms with these simple, insignificant blocks and sticks and beans. how, then, does this change come about? how is it that the same student who once half-scorned the gifts, now, upon the completion of her course of training, looks upon them with affection, admiration, and respect? it is that her eyes have been opened, and whereas she was blind, now she sees. her imagination has been awakened, her literary instinct has been stirred, and she has come to look at things in the child way, which is always the poetic way. effect of froebel's gifts upon the child. the effect of froebel's gifts upon the child has been shown directly and indirectly through the entire series of talks, and need not now be recapitulated. if they are wisely presented and wisely conducted, "inward and outward, the limits of their influence and scope lie in infinity." froebel says in one of his letters: "no one would believe, without seeing it, how the child-soul--the child-life--develops when treated as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected life of the world, by some skilled kindergartner,--nay, even by one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it blooms into delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. oh, if i could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth that i now tell you in silence. then would i make the ears of a hundred thousand men ring with it! what keenness of sensation, what a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what calm and patience will not all these things call out in the children."[ ] [ ] froebel's _letters on the kindergarten_, page . it is not that we regard the connected series of gifts as inspired, nor as incapable of improvement, for it may be that as our psychological observations of children grow wiser, more sympathetic, and more subtle, we shall see cause to make radical changes in the objects which are froebel's legacy to the kindergarten. this we may do, but we can never improve upon the motherly tenderness of spirit with which they were devised by the great pioneer of child-study, nor upon the philosophic insight which based them on the universal instincts of childhood. by mrs. wiggin. the birds' christmas carol. illustrated. square mo, boards, cents. the story of patsy. illustrated. square mo, boards, cents. a summer in a caÃ�on. a california story. illustrated. mo, $ . . timothy's quest. a story for anybody, young or old, who cares to read it. mo, $ . . the same. new _holiday edition._ illustrated. crown vo, $ . . the story hour. a book for the home and kindergarten. by mrs. wiggin and nora a. smith. illustrated. mo, $ . . children's rights. by mrs. wiggin and nora a. smith. a book of nursery logic. mo, $ . . a cathedral courtship and penelope's english experiences. illustrated. mo, $ . . polly oliver's problem. illustrated. mo, $ . . the village watch-tower. mo, $ . . froebel's gifts. by mrs. wiggin and nora a. smith. mo. houghton, mifflin & co. boston and new york. transcriber's notes . passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. . the sidenotes are changed to section headings. . the word "cyproea moneta" uses an oe ligature in the original. . other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained. how to study by george fillmore swain, ll. d. gordon mckay professor of civil engineering in harvard university; past-president, am. soc. c. e.; formerly chairman of the boston transit commission; consulting engineer first edition fourteenth impression total issue, , mcgraw-hill book company, inc. new york: seventh avenue london: & bouverie st., e. c. copyright, , by the mcgraw-hill book company, inc. printed in the united states of america {v} preface the present paper has been suggested by a long experience in teaching, in which the writer has been continually surprised at the ignorance manifested by students in the higher classes of our technical schools and universities, or graduates from such schools, with reference to proper methods of study. if his experience is a reliable guide, & large majority of the graduates from such schools, as well as some teachers in them, have not acquired proper habits and methods of study, and have devoted little or no attention to the consideration of the subject, vital though it is. it is undoubtedly true that training in the proper habits and methods of study should be inculcated by each individual teacher in the course of his work, and exemplified by the occurrences in his class room. the individual teacher can do much in this direction, and indeed the writer may say that probably the most important part of his instruction during the past thirty-five years has been teaching his students how to study and how to think logically, by constant reiteration of principles in the class room and by making any failure {vi} on the part of a student the occasion for pointing out how such failure arose from improper methods of study or reasoning. nevertheless, it has seemed to the writer desirable to formulate, in a brief but simple manner, certain fundamental principles which he has been in the habit of pointing out in the class room, and that such a statement might perhaps be found useful with students of any grade as a set subject of study in itself, occupying one or more lessons. with this object in view, the present paper has been written, and it is hoped that it will prove useful to teachers as well as to students, suggesting to the former directions in which they may seek to discover defects in their students and in which they may urge improvement. most students desire to learn but do not know how. a student will frequently answer a question correctly, perhaps in the words of the book, but upon further probing the teacher will very likely find that he fails entirely to understand what he is talking about. the teacher should seek to discover if such is the case and should, if practicable, point out the cause of the trouble. the writer believes that if the students in our colleges will read this paper carefully and thoughtfully, and will endeavor to follow its precepts, {vii} they will derive some benefit. if such proves to be the case, and if this paper affords help in enabling students to save time and to study more understandingly, the aim of the writer will have been accomplished. {ix} contents page preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i. the proper mental attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_a_) distinction between reading and understanding . . . . (_b_) distinction between facts, opinions, and logical conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_c_) importance of the questioning habit . . . . . . . . . (_d_) inquiring into methods of ascertaining facts . . . . (_e_) studying evidence of reliability of a writer . . . . (_f_) importance of caution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_g_) importance of the scientific attitude of mind . . . . (_h_) intellectual modesty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_i_) wisdom rather than knowledge the aim . . . . . . . . ii. studying understandingly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_a_) importance of definite ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . ( ) use of the dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ( ) practice in definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . ( ) importance of the study of logic . . . . . . . . (_b_) stating a thing in different ways . . . . . . . . . . (_c_) stating a thing negatively as well as positively . . (_d_) observation of necessary qualifying words or phrases (_e_) reflection, illustration, and application . . . . . . (_f_) keeping the mind active . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_g_) study of causes of differences of opinion . . . . . . (_h_) discrimination of mere assertion from proof . . . . . iii. system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_a_) importance of grasping the fundamental idea . . . . . (_b_) preliminary arrangement of ideas . . . . . . . . . . (_c_) classification and arrangement . . . . . . . . . . . {x} iv. mental initiative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_a_) interest in subject of study essential . . . . . . . (_b_) formulation of problem essential . . . . . . . . . . (_c_) independent work essential . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_d_) drawing conclusions independent of author . . . . . (_e_) independence in arriving at conclusions . . . . . . (_f_) generalizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_g_) going beyond the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_h_) visualizing results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v. habits of work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_a_) selection of book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_b_) proper number of subjects to be studied at once . . (_c_) haste undesirable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_d_) taking studies seriously . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_e_) judicious skipping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_f_) systematic program of work . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_g_) cultivation of concentration . . . . . . . . . . . . (_h_) applying what is learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_i_) avoidance of indifference . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_j_) thorough knowledge of a few books . . . . . . . . . (_k_) list of references should be made . . . . . . . . . (_l_) frequent reviews desirable . . . . . . . . . . . . . (_m_) regular times for recreative study . . . . . . . . . (_n_) physical exercise essential . . . . . . . . . . . . suggestions to teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . importance of refusing to be discouraged, and of seeking the work one can do best . . . . . . references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . { } how to study "for the end of education and training is to help nature to her perfection in the complete development of all the various powers."--_richard mulcaster_, - . education is an opportunity, nothing more. it will not guarantee success, or happiness, or contentment, or riches. everything depends upon what development is produced by it and what use is made of it. it does not mean morality or usefulness. it may make a man more capable of doing harm in the world, for an educated scoundrel is clearly more dangerous than an ignorant one. properly employed, however, and combined with high character, with a due regard for the rights of others, and with simple and practicable but high ideals, it should help a man very greatly in making himself of service in the world and so in making his life really successful in the highest sense. what the student gets out of his education depends largely upon what he puts into it. the student is not an empty vessel to be pumped full of learning; he is a complex machine which education should help to run properly. { } the aim of education is purely utilitarian, and is expressed more clearly by the word power than by any other. its object is to give the man power to meet the problems of life, and to develop all his faculties to the greatest degree. the word "utilitarian," however, is to be interpreted in its broadest sense. it is not simply bread-and-butter utility that is aimed at. whatever makes a man more capable of legitimate enjoyment, or helps to make him contented and happy, or to enlarge his breadth of view, is really useful and helps to give him power. "the true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second, what is useful; and third, what is ornamental. to reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice." the only way that power and strength can be developed is by effort on the part of the student. the only real education is self-education. the best that the teacher can do for the student is to show him what he can do for himself and how he can do it. "if little labor, little are our gains; man's fortunes are according to his pains." but labor alone will not produce gains unless properly and intelligently directed. misdirected labor, though honest and well-intentioned, may { } lead to naught; just as any virtue, such for instance, as perseverance, if misdirected or misapplied, or in the wrong proportion, may become a vice. hegel's dictum that anything carried to its extreme tends to become its opposite, has profound significance. a student may work hard and earnestly in school or college and yet accomplish little or nothing. he should, therefore, be made to see--not only the necessity for hard work, and how to work--but also how to work _effectively_. among the most important things, then, for a student to learn, is how to study. without a knowledge of this his labor may be largely in vain. he may pass his examinations and yet know nothing thoroughly and have little power. the importance of knowing how to study is evident when we realize that the amount of knowledge that a student can acquire in college, compared with the whole mass of human knowledge, even that bearing upon a single specialty, is entirely insignificant; and furthermore, that a student is generally quite unable to foresee with any degree of correctness what his work in life will be. unless, therefore, his education has enabled him to take up a new subject or a new problem and to study and master it { } himself--that is to say, unless he has learned how to study, how to use his mind properly and to direct it efficiently upon the subject in hand--his education may have benefited him little and may not have fitted him for the career in which he finally finds himself. important as it is to learn how to study, it is singular that most students do not learn it, and that little effort is made to teach it. it is assumed that children know how to study because they have brains. probably a large majority of our college graduates today have not learned how to study properly, and find it difficult or impossible to take up a new study and master it. they have only learned how to do certain routine things in a mechanical way. they have learned by rote. it is with the hope of emphasizing this subject and of calling attention to some rules for proper study, that this article has been written. in its broadest sense, the question to be considered is, "how to investigate a problem." in doing this the first step is to get together all available information regarding the problem, including books, experimental data and results of experience, and to consider and digest this material. personal investigations and inquiry, { } further experimental research, correspondence, travel, etc., may then be necessary. this will be based, however, in general, upon a study of books, and with this part of the subject we are here particularly concerned. let us, therefore, consider the elements requisite for a proper method of study. { } i the proper mental attitude the first essential is that _the student should have the proper mental attitude_. that attitude should not be one of subservience, of blind believing, but should be one of mental courage and determination. his object is to understand the subject, not simply to read a book. if the book is a proper one for him to read, that is to say, if he has the proper preparation, and requisite mental power, then he is capable of mastering it. he is to master the book, the book is not to master him. he is to learn what the writer of the book thinks in matters of opinion, but he is never to accept such views blindly, and is to believe them only when he sees them to be true. many students accept blindly as truth whatever they see on a printed page that they are required to read. to do this, even if what is read be remembered, is to study by rote; it makes a routine, rule-of-thumb man, who merely imitates or copies. he should realize that nothing is true simply because it is in a book, but should accept it only when it passes the test of his own understanding. mental courage, therefore, is essential for a proper { } method of study, without which the student will become little more than a parrot. he must possess self-confidence, a consciousness of his power to master the subject, and a firm determination to master it. of course, nobody should read a book that he is incapable of mastering or unprepared to understand. a suitable preparation and sufficient mental power are of course essential, and are here assumed. the point is that the sense of his own power and the determination to use it should be constantly in his mind. students are of course frequently, if not generally, limited in the time which they have available for any given lesson, and they may not be able to follow out completely the methods recommended in this paper. it may therefore be necessary for a student frequently to accept a statement which he reads, although he is not at the time able to see the reason for it. in all cases, however, he should endeavor to perceive whether it is a mere fact or definition, or whether it has a reason, and if he cannot at the time understand the reason he should accept the statement only tentatively, making a note of it as something which he must return to and study further if he wishes thoroughly to master the subject. { } (_a_) the student must distinguish clearly between reading and understanding.--reading alone, no matter how extensive, or how retentive the memory, will not give wisdom or power. "who reads incessantly, and to his reading brings not a spirit and judgment equal or superior uncertain and unsettled still remains, deep versed in books, and shallow in himself." no doubt every one finds himself at times reading merely words or phrases without understanding them, reflecting about them, or translating them into terms which are intelligible to his understanding. such reading is worse than useless; it leads to actual mental injury. whenever we find ourselves doing this we should therefore arouse ourselves, make an effort of will, and concentrate our attention upon the subject, insisting upon understanding it. if for any reason we are unable to do this, we should close the book, take some exercise or recreation, or at any rate do something else, for we are not at the moment fitted for study. we might as well eat sawdust and deceive ourselves with thinking that we are taking nourishment. it is not what is read or what is remembered, but only what is understood, that gives power, { } "in this quest of knowledge ... there are two faults to be shunned--one, the taking of unknown things for known, and giving an assent to them too hastily, which fault he who wishes to escape (and all ought so to wish) will give time and diligence to reflect on the subjects proposed for his consideration. the other fault is that some bestow too great zeal and too much labor on things obscure and difficult, and at the same time useless."--_cicero: de officiis_. (_b_) the student must clearly distinguish mere facts from conclusions or opinions.--mere facts, some of which may be the result of laborious investigation, may be accepted without verification, if the authority is good. when the student reads that the river nile rises in equatorial africa, flows in a northerly direction through egypt into the mediterranean sea, he cannot verify this statement nor reason out that it must be so. it is a mere fact and a name, and he simply accepts it, perhaps looking at the map to fix the fact in his mind. so, too, if he reads that the atomic weight of oxygen is , or that a cubic foot of water weighs . pounds, he cannot be expected to perform the experiments necessary to verify these statements. if he were to do this throughout his reading, he would have to make all the investigations made in the subject since man has studied it, taking no advantage of the labor of others. { } very different are conclusions or opinions deduced from facts; and logical conclusions are very different from mere opinions. the facts may be sufficient to prove logically a certain conclusion. on the other hand, the facts may simply give reasonable ground, or appear to give reasonable ground, for a certain opinion, though they may fall far short of demonstration. the student must, therefore, discriminate constantly between mere statements of facts, necessary conclusions which follow therefrom, and mere opinions which they seem to render reasonable. some conclusions also, like those of mathematics or logic, may be arrived at by the unaided reason without the previous accumulation of facts deduced from experiments or observation. such truths or conclusions should be distinguished from those which are based upon facts, experiments or observation. if the student reads, therefore, that the sum of the angles of a plane triangle is equal to two right angles, he should see that this is not a mere fact, but an inevitable truth, the reason for which he should perceive, and not accept simply because he reads it. the continual exercise of this discrimination, which comes from an attitude of mental courage and independence, is an essential of proper study. { } (_c_) the student's mind should be a continual interrogation point.[ ]--he should always ask himself, regarding any statement which he reads, whether there is a reason for it, and if there is, whether it is inherent in the nature of things, so that he might independently arrive at it, or whether it follows from facts which the writer has observed. for instance, there is at first sight no reason why a cubic foot of water should weigh . pounds. it simply does and that is all there is to it; it does, because it does. but if he reads that a cubic foot of water at one point on the earth's surface weighs less than it does at another point, or that in the northern hemisphere the wind in a storm revolves around the storm center in a direction contrary to the motion of the hands of a clock, he should perceive that these facts, if true, have a reason for them, and he should endeavor to perceive that reason. it must be observed at this point that, strictly speaking, there must be a reason for any truth, even for what we may term mere facts, excepting those which are mere definitions. there is some reason, lying in the constitution and arrangement of its atoms, why a cubic foot of water at a given { } spot and at a given temperature weighs . pounds. but there is no reason why new york is miles from philadelphia; those two points miles apart are simply so named or defined. many truths which are accepted as mere facts, the explanation being unknown, in the course of time are explained by the progress of science. thus, for many years the fact that a magnetic needle pointed toward the north was a mere unexplained fact, but later the reason was discovered. the same is true of the fact that the pollution of drinking water by sewage may cause typhoid fever. the point is that the student must continually discriminate, continually inquire, and, as he reads, keep a list of points, the reason for which he cannot then discover, but which he perceives must have a discoverable reason. he should not go too deeply into this, but should preserve his sense of proportion; for if he follows every possible line of inquiry back to its source he will progress but slowly. thus, if he is studying descriptive astronomy and reads that the sun is ninety-two million miles from the earth, or that jupiter has nine moons, or that the star sirius is moving away from the earth with a velocity of eleven miles per second, or that the moon always turns the same half toward the { } earth, he should perceive that he cannot at that stage try to get back of these facts, but he may well make a note of them as questions to be later examined, if not as to the cause, at least as to how the fact is ascertained. it does not follow that he should never leave the subject until he has found a reason, for it may depend upon facts or principles of which he is not at the moment informed; but if such is the case, he should accept the fact tentatively, but make a mental note that it is something which clearly must have a reason which he is capable of perceiving, and which he will look up at some future time. in studying his book he may well make a list of such questions to ask the teacher or to look up later. students must of course proceed in a systematic way, and a student who has not studied physics cannot be expected to perceive reasons that depend upon the laws of physics, and yet without a knowledge of physics he may still perceive that a statement is not of a mere fact, but of something that must have a reason. to primitive peoples nature was a closed book. the simplest phenomena were beyond their understanding, and they, therefore, imagined deities of whose personal activities these phenomena { } were supposed to be manifestations. with the progress of science many phenomena once mysterious and looked upon as facts have become easily explained. the intelligent student, however, can generally distinguish between statements of the different kinds which have been described, and he should constantly endeavor to explain or seek the reason for new statements by relating them to the body of knowledge which he has previously gained. unfortunately, the average student reads only to accept what is written, whether fact, conclusion, or opinion, perhaps memorizing it verbatim under the impression that by so doing he is learning; he does not examine or reflect upon it, and often even accepts as facts what are explicitly stated to be mere expressions of opinion. thus palpable mistakes, or even typographical errors, which a careful student should detect at once, are often accepted and believed. it is for this reason that it is so easy to deceive most people, at least for part of the time. they do not think for themselves, and all that is necessary to make them believe what you say is in some way to get them to think you are an authority. (_d_) regarding facts which he does not then investigate the reason for, he should ask how they are ascertained.--this will { } draw his attention to methods of observation and experiment, or to the technique of the subject. how, for instance, is it ascertained that new york is miles from philadelphia, or that the sun is ninety-two million miles from the earth? it is always possible to ascertain, at least in a general way, how a fact is ascertained, though it may not be possible to determine the reason for the fact. this applies not alone to physical sciences, but to questions of an economic, historic or sociological character. if we read that at the battle of gettysburg union soldiers were killed, we do not inquire why; such a question is clearly meaningless; but we may well inquire how this was ascertained, whether by counting the dead upon the field or by the roll call, etc.; or if we read that following the issue of large quantities of paper currency during the civil war, the amount of gold in the country decreased, we may in this case also inquire how it was ascertained, and we may further perceive that this is a fact for which there must be a reason, and we may then or later ascertain why it is true. (_e_) the student must train himself to be constantly on the watch for evidence of reliability in the writer he is studying, in order that he may get a correct { } impression as to whether his statements of fact may be accepted, as well as his conclusions and opinions.--many writers are careless, some are entirely unreliable, and some wilfully distort. not only are the opinions sometimes expressed entirely unwarranted by the facts, but often statements of mere fact, such as those of statistics, may be grossly perverted, sometimes intentionally. erroneous conclusions or opinions which are the result of illogical reasoning from correct facts may be discovered by the student who himself knows how to reason, but perversions of fact may escape detection, if not traced back to original authorities or observations, which the student may not have time or opportunity to do. statistical results, or statements made in books on economics, history, and sociology, are particularly liable to distortion, intentionally or unintentionally. indeed by selecting certain statistics and excluding others, almost anything depending upon statistics may be proved. the importance is thus obvious of being able to detect signs of reliability and accuracy, and of discarding a writer who cannot be depended upon. it is also important to make it a rule to ask whether any result when reached appears to be reliable in the light of common sense. { } sometimes a suggestion of error will be observed if the subject is looked at in this light, which if traced back will lead to the discovery of some mistake in observation or some error in reasoning. evidence of unreliability shown by a writer may generally be discovered, if care is exercised. his temperament, age, environment, training, religion and other facts will contribute. one who is dogmatic or abusive in stating what are obviously mere opinions which cannot be demonstrated, or who is intolerant of those who reach different conclusions, is obviously by temperament untrustworthy. a writer who in a single instance can be shown to have intentionally distorted facts should, of course, be at once and forever rejected;[ ] one who has distorted facts unintentionally may perhaps be forgiven once. so a writer who, in a matter not capable of mathematical demonstration, and to some extent a matter of opinion, sets out to prove a preconceived idea, shows himself in general not possessed of the qualities which should inspire confidence. by these and other tests the student should constantly be on the watch to form his opinion of the credibility and reliability of a writer or experimenter whose work he is studying. he { } may thus guide himself as to the books which he should pursue carefully, remembering the dictum of bacon that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," except that very few, if any, are to be literally swallowed without digestion. by careful observance of the injunction to study constantly the credibility of a writer one may become what may be termed a discriminating student. (_f_) another essential element of a proper attitude of mind is caution.--always realize the possibility of error both in another and in yourself. be on your guard against intentional or unintentional deception. as bacon said, "read not to contradict and to confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to _weigh and consider_."[ ] the author you are reading may have made a mistake, or may be trying to mislead you. "when we think of the difficulty of finding the way, when we are most desirous to go right, how easy to mislead those whom we wish to go wrong!" be, therefore, always suspicious of { } your author, and subject all his statements to the test of your own intelligence.[ ] (_g_) study with an open mind, and with no preconceived ideas.--cultivate the scientific attitude of mind, which means, first to formulate clearly a problem, then to get together all the pertinent facts, and then to draw the logical conclusions. be ready to accept gladly any logical conclusion from the facts, even if unpalatable. truth is, or should be, the sole object of study.[ ] (_h_) be modest intellectually, yet self-reliant. train yourself to love correction.--remember these sayings from wise men: "whoso loveth correction loveth knowledge; but he that hateth reproof is brutish." --_proverbs_. "poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth correction; but he that regardeth reproof shall be honoured." --_proverbs_. { } "the beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of one's faults." --_epicurus_. "he that being often reproved hardeneth his neck shall suddenly be broken, and that without remedy." --_proverbs_. "reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee; reprove a wise man and he will love thee." --_proverbs_. "be not wise in thine own eyes."--proverbs. "the true beginning of wisdom is the desire of discipline." --_wisdom of solomon_. "censure and criticism never hurt anybody. if false they can't hurt you unless you are wanting in manly character; and if true, they show a man his weak points, and forewarn him against failure and trouble."--_gladstone_. "if there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's knowing too much. education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no cure for a big head. the best you can hope is that it will swell up and bust, and then, of course, there's nothing left. poverty never spoils a good man, but prosperity often does. it's easy to stand hard times, because that's the only thing you can do, but in good times the fool-killer has to do night work."--_lorimer: letters from a self-made merchant to his son at college_. intellectual modesty is quite consistent with self-reliance and mental courage. the study of books too often leads to intellectual arrogance, which is the surest bar to real mental progress. realize the limitations of your own knowledge; see clearly what you know and what you do not know, otherwise you will see the things you know out of { } proportion. make sure, however, that you know the fundamentals. socrates said that a knowledge of our ignorance is the first step toward true knowledge, and a persian proverb says: "he who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him. he who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him. he who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him. he who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise; follow him." ask yourself, which of these classes you belong to. (_i_) remember that the object of study should be to gain wisdom, rather than knowledge.--facts are important and must be learned; but far more important is it to gain wisdom and to train the mind and judgment so that truth may be distinguished from error. as the poet says: "knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, have ofttimes no connection. knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom, in minds attentive to their own. knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, wisdom is humble that he knows no more." the above points all have to do with the mental attitude of the student, and may be summarized by simply stating that the student must be possessed of _mental courage, self-reliance, discrimination, modesty, and caution, all in proper proportion_. [ ] "he that questioneth much shall learn much."--_bacon_. [ ] "mendax in uno praesumitur mendax in alio." [ ] "there are always people ready to assume that things are what they are called, because it is much easier to deal with names than to examine facts."--_bryce: south america_. [ ] "a wise man knows an ignorant one, because he has been ignorant himself, but the ignorant cannot recognize the wise, because he has never been wise."--_persian proverb_. [ ] "table talk proves that nine out of ten people read what amuses them, rather than what instructs them, and proves also, that the last thing they read is something which tells them disagreeable truths or dispels groundless hopes. that popular education results in an extensive reading of publications which foster pleasant illusions rather than of those which insist on hard realities, is beyond question."--_spencer: the coming slavery_. { } ii studying understandingly the second essential which may be named, connected with the first, and already mentioned, but now to be discussed, is that _the student should understand what he reads_. this may seem almost a needless injunction, yet it is very surprising how commonly it is disregarded. it is, however, easy to understand why this should be so. a child, as it grows up, must gain all its knowledge either by the exercise of its own reasoning powers or from its senses. how does it learn the meaning of words? certain nouns like "papa" or "cat" it may easily be made to understand by pointing at the object referred to and uttering the word, but how does it learn the meaning of abstract nouns, or of verbs and other parts of speech which cannot be illustrated by pantomime? it is almost inevitable that the child should use many words the meaning of which it does not understand, and when young children in school recite poetry at class-day exercises, it is almost certain that they do not understand the meaning of many of the words they use. thus, it happens that they come { } into the habit of using words and phrases without carefully examining their meanings. this tendency should be counteracted from the earliest stage. the child should be continually asked the meanings of words which it uses, and should be encouraged itself to inquire as to those meanings and to take the proper mental attitude. the use of the dictionary should be insisted upon even from an early age, the object being to avoid the formation of the habit of using words or phrases unintelligently, which is one of the worst habits that one can acquire. professor james, in his interesting book, "talks to teachers," illustrates this habit by an amusing anecdote: "a friend of mine visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography. glancing at the book, she said: 'suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom--warmer or colder than on top?' none of the class replying, the teacher said: 'i'm sure they know, but i think you don't ask the question quite rightly. let me try.' so, taking the book, she asked: 'in what condition is the interior of the globe?' and received the immediate answer from half the class at once; 'the interior of the globe is in a condition of igneous fusion!'" perhaps it may be thought that an incident like the foregoing would only occur in an elementary school. as a matter of fact, college students and graduates, and indeed most of us, { } do this very thing more often than we realize, even in subjects like mathematics or mechanics; and terms like "energy," "momentum," "rate of change," "period of vibration," "value," "social justice," etc., are often used without a clear understanding, and sometimes without any understanding at all, of what they mean. (_a_) the student should acquire and insist upon exercising the habit of forming definite ideas.--this is one of the most important injunctions to be observed as an essential principle of intelligent study.[ ] it is self-evident that facts or things cannot be reasoned about intelligently unless a definite idea is formed of the facts or things themselves. vagueness of idea not alone precludes a proper conception of the thing itself, but may vitiate all reasoning regarding it. the student must resolutely make up his mind that he must not rest satisfied with hazy, uncertain, half-formed ideas. a half knowledge of a thing may not be useless, but it is generally found that it is the other half that is needed. if the student could learn this one precept and continually apply it, he would have little difficulty in studying properly. { } it is not easy to state just how the habit of forming definite ideas may be acquired. to a certain extent it is intuitive. some students have it, while others do not; some can cultivate it, while others apparently cannot. it is probably safe to say, however, that a student who cannot cultivate it should not study books, or enter into a profession, but should go to work with his hands instead of taking a college course. such a man will be always likely to be misled, his conclusions can never be depended upon, and what we term education may do him harm rather than good. a definite idea is one that leaves no room for ambiguity--which means just one thing. the habit of forming such ideas habitually may be cultivated in several ways, as for instance: . study the dictionary.--by study of the dictionary, the student may train himself to distinguish slight differences in meaning between words, and habitually to use precisely the word with the proper meaning to express his idea. a knowledge of the derivation of words will often assist, and such books as archbishop trench's on "the study of words," or a course in english composition under a good teacher, accompanied by exercises in expression, will all contribute to { } the formation of the habit.[ ] sometimes, however, the dictionary may give little assistance, for it may be found that one term is defined by means of another and on looking up that other, it will be found to be defined by means of the first. sometimes also a definition of a word will be given in terms even more difficult to understand than the one which is defined. there are differences in dictionaries. the study of language, and particularly of the classics, if properly pursued, may be of great benefit, because it involves translating { } from one language into another, and should include much practice in discovering the precise word or phrase to express an idea. the reason why a study of the classics may be better than that of modern foreign languages, is that in studying the latter the object is more often considered--by the student at least--to become able to read professional books in a modern language, or to get a smattering which will be of use in travel or in business; while in the study of the classics these objects are entirely absent, and the attention is more apt to be concentrated on studying delicate shades of meaning. however, everything depends upon the teacher and the way the subject is taught.[ ] . the habit of forming definite ideas may also be cultivated by each day attempting to define a certain number of common words, and after making as good a definition as possible comparing the result with that in the dictionary. if the student will practise this, he will at first receive many surprises, for any word may be defined in various ways, all correct as far as they go, but only one of which is a true definition. for instance, a cow may be defined as a { } four-legged animal, but this, while correct, obviously does not define a cow, for the same definition would apply to many other animals that are not cows. what constitutes a definition? this subject is clearly allied with the discussion of the question as to what constitutes perfect knowledge; what elements, for instance, go to make up what may be called a perfect conception of a thing. according to liebnitz, perfect knowledge is clear, distinct, adequate, and intuitive. the student will do well to look up the discussion of this subject in jevon's "elementary lessons in logic" (lesson vii). the importance of forming definite ideas, as an essential of proper study, and of understanding what is read, cannot be exaggerated. without it one cannot acquire more than a partial knowledge, and one is always liable to those errors of reasoning which arise from the use of equivocal language, which may lead us unconsciously from one meaning of a word to another--a logical error which is perhaps the most fruitful cause of fallacious reasoning. . study logic.--logic is the science of correct reasoning. it teaches us how to discover truth, how to recognize it when discovered, how to arrive at general laws from facts collected by { } observation or experiment, and how to deduce new facts from those already found to be true. it is thus the science of sciences, and finds its application in every branch of knowledge. the training of his power of logical thought is, therefore, one of the things that should be constantly aimed at by the student. now all thinking is concerned, first of all, with _terms_ or names for things or qualities or conceptions of some sort. then, it is concerned with comparisons of things, and the discovery of their identity or dissimilarity, as when i say "iron is a metal" or "all metals are elements," each of which statements is a _proposition_, the truth or falsity of which i must be able to discover. finally, it is concerned in deducing new propositions from old ones, and so arriving at new truths, as when i discover from the two propositions stated above, the new truth that "iron is an element." but there are many chances for error in this process; for instance, i might say: "to call you an animal would be to state the truth"--to which you would agree; and, "to call you an ass would be to call you an animal"--to which you would also agree; from which i might conclude that, "to call you an ass would { } be to state the truth"--which you might have a vague idea was not true. if you wish to be sure that this conclusion is incorrect, you must be able to show just why it is incorrect. the study of logic would enable you to see just where the error lies. you must not be governed by vague ideas, or you will be intellectually at anybody's mercy. in the logical study of _terms_, they are classified and distinguished, and the importance made manifest of having in mind a clear definition of the meaning of a term before reasoning about it. many terms are ambiguous, as already explained, and may mean many different things, as for instance the terms "bill," "church," "evil," "value," "social justice." here, then, the importance of definite ideas will be manifest. pascal laid down the essentials of logical method in the statement "define everything and prove everything." in other words, do not attempt to think about a term until you have defined the term and have a clear idea what it means; and insist upon proving every statement at which you arrive, before accepting it finally and definitely; although for want of time, you may be obliged sometimes to accept or form a conclusion tentatively or provisionally. you may be able to draw correct conclusions from stated { } premises even though you do not understand the terms of the premises. for instance, if i say, "selenium is a dyad element" and "a dyad element is one capable of replacing two equivalents of hydrogen," i can correctly draw the conclusion that, "selenium is capable of replacing two equivalents of hydrogen," but i cannot know that the conclusion is correct unless i understand the meaning of the terms in the premises and so can be sure of the correctness of those premises. every student should, therefore, in the writer's opinion, take a systematic course in logic, or carefully study by himself such books as jevons' "elementary lessons in logic" or john stuart mill's "logic."[ ] (_b_) learn to state a thing in different ways or from different points of view.--almost anything may be looked at from different points of view, or a truth stated in different ways, { } and it may appear very different from different viewpoints. a student should practise doing this, first stating a principle perhaps from the mathematical point of view, and then in simple untechnical language that can be understood by one who is not a mathematician. the habit of stating even technical matters in simple untechnical language should be practised continually. as bishop berkeley urged, we should "think with the learned and speak with the vulgar." if you clearly understand a proposition, you can state it in clear and unambiguous language, though perhaps not in addisonian english. students frequently say "i understand that, but i cannot explain it." such a student deceives himself: he does not understand it. if he understands it thoroughly, he can explain it clearly and without ambiguity, and so that others will understand him. for this reason an acute observer can get the mental measure of a man after a few minutes' conversation. inaccurate or slipshod thinking will surely show itself in speech. (_c_) state a thing not only positively but negatively.--that is to say, state not only what it is, but what it is not, even if incompletely. perceive not only what it includes, but what it excludes. when a result or a { } principle is arrived at, it is essential not only to see that it is true, but how far the _reverse_ is _untrue_. the student does not really understand a thing unless he recognizes it from any point of view, can describe it from any point of view, can state it in language to suit the particular emergency, and can see why the other thing is untrue. as aristotle says: "we must not only state the truth, but the cause of the untrue statement; this is an element in our belief; for when it is made apparent why a statement not true appears to be true, our belief in the truth is confirmed." in other words, we must analyze every statement which is the result of reasoning, or a statement of opinion, and see what objections, if any, can be brought against it, and then convince ourselves where the truth lies and why. the lawyer has excellent practice in doing this, for in making his own argument he is obliged to scrutinize it closely to discover what objections he would make to it, if he were the counsel on the opposite side. the lawyer, however, does not always limit himself to the discovery of the truth, but often seeks to discover and bring to bear unsound but plausible arguments to refute the other side; and by his skill in dialectics he may often deliberately "make the worse appear { } the better reason." the student of mathematics, on the other hand, does not gain in that study much practice in weighing evidence or seeking objections to an argument, for he deals with principles which are rigid and not open to question. professor palmer, in his interesting book, "the problem of freedom," says: "until we understand the objection to any line of thought, we do not understand that thought; nor can we feel the full force of such objections until we have them urged upon us by one who believes them." this is precisely what the advocate endeavors to do beforehand, and in the court room he is very sure to have the objections to his line of thought urged upon him and the jury by one who at all events _appears_ to believe them. (_d_) in studying a statement, observe which are the necessary words and whether there are any unnecessary ones which might be omitted.--for instance, in the following sentence, "when a force acts upon a body, and the point of application of the force moves in the direction of the line of action of the force, the force is said to do work on the body," what is the necessity and significance of the qualifying phrase "in the direction of the line of action of { } the force?" are these words necessary, or could they be omitted? note whether another word could be substituted for one used, without rendering a statement incorrect, or whether such change would improve it and make it more accurate. for instance, in the definition "matter is that which can occupy space" would it be proper to substitute "does" for "can" or "occupies" for "can occupy"? note what word or words should be emphasized in order to convey the intended meaning. in the sentence "thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," several widely different meanings may be conveyed according to the word which is emphasized. students frequently seem to lack all sense of proportion and fail to acquire definite ideas because they do not see the meaning or necessity of qualifying words or phrases, or because they do not perceive where the emphasis should be placed. (_e_) reflect upon what is read: illustrate and apply a result after reaching it, before passing on to something else.[ ]--apply it to cases entirely different from those { } shown in the book, and try to observe how generally it is applicable. do not leave it in the abstract. an infallible test of whether you _understand_ what you have read is your ability to _apply_ it, particularly to cases entirely different from those used in the book. an abstract idea or result not illustrated or applied concretely is like food undigested; it is not assimilated, and it soon passes from the system. in illustrating, so far as time permits, the student should use pencil and paper, if the case demands, draw sketches where applicable, write out the statement arrived at in language different from that used by the author, study each word and the best method of expression, and practise to be concise and to omit everything unnecessary to the exact meaning. herndon in his "life of lincoln" says of that great man, "he studied to see the subject matter clearly and to express it truly and strongly; i have known him to study for hours the best way of three to express an idea." this kind of practice inevitably leads to a thorough grasp of a subject. some of these principles may be illustrated by considering the study of the algebraical conditions under which a certain number of unknown quantities may be found from a number of { } equations. the student will perhaps find the necessary condition expressed by the statement that "the number of independent equations must equal the number of unknown quantities." now this statement makes little or no concrete impression upon the minds of most students. they do not understand exactly what it means, and they can easily be trapped into misapplying it. to study it, the student should ask himself what each word of the statement means, and whether all are necessary. can the word "independent" be omitted? if not, why not? what does this word really mean in this connection? must each equation contain all the unknown quantities? may some of these equations contain none of the unknown quantities? what would be the condition of things if there were fewer equations than unknown quantities? what if there were more equations than unknown quantities? this problem too, affords a good illustration of the advantage of translation into other terms? what, for instance, is an equation anyway? is it merely a combination of letters with signs between? the student should translate, and perceive that an equation is really an intelligible sentence, expressing some statement of fact, { } in which the terms are merely represented by letters. an equation tells us something. let the student state what it tells in ordinary non-mathematical language. then again, a certain combination of equations, taken together, may express some single fact or conclusion which may be stated entirely independent of the terms of the equations. thus, in mechanics the three equations _[sigma]h_= ; _[sigma]v_= ; _[sigma]m_= ; taken together, merely say, in english, that a certain set of forces is in equilibrium; they are the mathematical statement of that simple fact. if the equations are fulfilled, the forces are in equilibrium; if not fulfilled, the forces are not in equilibrium. following this farther, the student should perceive, in non-mathematical language, that an equation is independent of other equations if the fact that it expresses is not expressed by any of the others, and cannot be deduced from the facts expressed in the others. the benefit of translation into common, everyday language, may be shown by another mathematical illustration. every student of algebra learns the binomial theorem, or expression for the square of the sum of two quantities; but he does not reflect upon it, illustrate it, or perceive { } its every-day applications, and if asked to give the square of , will fail to see that he should be able to give the answer instantly without pencil or paper, by mental arithmetic alone. any student who _fully grasps_ the binomial theorem can give (without hesitation) the square of , or of . , or any similar quantity. with practice and reflection, results which seem astonishing may be attained. (_f_) keep the mind active and alert.--do not simply sit and gaze upon a book, expecting to have ideas come to you, but exert the mind. study is active and intelligent, not dreamy. by this is not meant that haste is to be practised. on the contrary, what might perhaps be called a sort of dreamy thinking often gives time and opportunity for ideas to clarify and take shape and proportion in the mind. we often learn most in hours of comparative idleness, meditating without strenuous mental activity upon what we have read. such meditation is of the greatest value, but it is very different from the mental indolence of which the poet speaks when he says: "'tis thus the imagination takes repose in indolent vacuity of thought, and rests and is refreshed." { } this is beneficial to the proper extent; but it is rest, not study. (_g_) when you meet with differences of opinion upon a subject, reflect upon the reasons which may cause intelligent men to arrive at different conclusions.--these reasons are: . one or both may fail to grasp all the pertinent facts, or even the problem itself, or may assume, as true, facts or principles which are really erroneous. this should easily be ascertainable. . one or both may reason incorrectly even from accurate premises. this also should be discoverable. . one or both may see facts out of proportion--may lack a true mental balance or perspective. . one or both may illustrate the inherent stubbornness or imperviousness of the human mind. whether the student can discover the last two sources of error will depend upon his own mental characteristics. he must not forget, however, that on many matters no definite demonstrable conclusion is possible, and that the result must remain more or less a matter of opinion. (_h_) remember that a statement is not a proof. many students think they prove a statement by merely repeating it in different words. you do not understand a conclusion unless you can see the steps in its logical demonstration. { } it is quite surprising how many students commit this error. for instance, if i am asked why can i see through glass and i reply, because it is transparent, i am giving no reason at all, for transparent means what can be seen through, so i am simply saying that i can see through glass because i can see through glass. the same error often occurs in arguments or syllogisms. for instance, suppose i make the following statements: no unsportsmanlike act should be done; smith's act was unsportsmanlike; therefore, smith's act should not have been done. now, this of itself is not correct reasoning, for the reason that the word "unsportsmanlike" simply means something which no sportsman should do. the conclusion, therefore, is simply a repetition of the second statement. the real thing to be proved in this case is whether smith's act was or was not unsportsmanlike. [ ] "general ideas and great conceit are always in a fair way to bring about terrible misfortune."--_goethe_. [ ] "i tell you earnestly and authoritatively (i know i am right in this) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable--nay, letter by letter."--_ruskin: sesame and lilies_. "neither is a dictionary a bad book to read--it is full of suggestions."--_emerson_. benjamin franklin, writing to a lady who asked him to give her advice about reading said: "i would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful ... and as many of the terms of science are such as you cannot have met with in your common reading, and may therefore be unacquainted with, i think it would be well for you to have a good dictionary at hand to consult immediately when you meet a word you do not know the precise meaning of. this may at first seem troublesome and interrupting, but it is a trouble that will daily diminish, and you will daily find less and less occasion for your dictionary, as you will become more acquainted with the terms; and in the mean time you will read with more satisfaction because with more understanding." [ ] "a man who has no acquaintance with foreign languages, knows nothing of his own." [ ] "the principles of argumentation" by baker and huntington, is another excellent book, not treating of formal logic, but discussing the general principles which should govern the preparation of a paper or argument, the principles of evidence, and the logical fallacies in reasoning. it is recommended to readers. this book is, or has been, used in the course in english at harvard university, and similar books are used in other colleges. a thorough training in english under a good teacher is a good training in logic, for clear and logical writing requires clear and logical thinking. nevertheless, the writer strongly advocates the study of formal logic also. [ ] "it is not enough to know, we must also apply; it is not enough to will, we must also do."--_goethe_. { } iii the third essential for a proper method of study is system (_a_) discover the fundamental idea of the subject.--strip off the detail and get down to the root of the thing. see the really important point. then, after this has been clearly perceived and mastered, arrange the details in their proper relations to the fundamentals. the subject will thus have a skeleton, and upon this the details will be placed. a subject of study thus viewed may be compared to the human body, with its bony skeleton or framework, and all the various organs and parts supported by it; or to a tree, with its trunk, branches and leaves. thus to consider the relative importance of facts, to sift out the essential ones, will train the power of mental discrimination and cultivate the judgment. when this is done, subsequent facts relating to the subject can be correlated with what is already known, and will in this way be easily retained by the memory. remember and observe jacotot's maxim, "learn something accurately, and refer { } the rest to that." unessential facts, or those of secondary importance, may be passed over in the first reading, and left for a second or later reading, for a proper method of study _always involves re-reading_, perhaps many times. you cannot possibly know everything even of a single subject, hence the importance of knowing the fundamental things about it and knowing them thoroughly. even if you gain but an elementary knowledge of a subject, that knowledge may be thorough and should include fundamentals. thorough elementary knowledge must not be confused with _a smattering_. the latter is worse than useless, and is marked by vagueness, uncertainty, and failure to grasp fundamentals. but elementary knowledge, if clear and definite as far as it goes, is valuable, and the first step toward more complete knowledge. many students deceive themselves and others into thinking that they know something of a subject, because they have looked into it, while their knowledge may be entirely superficial and valueless. when the fundamental principle or fact is perceived, study this carefully until it is thoroughly mastered. one who knows how to study properly will thus pick out the sentence or the paragraph which contains the key to the { } subject--the fundamental fact or principle--and will read and re-read this many times until its full meaning is clearly grasped. when this is done it is sometimes remarkable how quickly the rest of the chapter or subject may be mastered, for it will often be found to consist of discussions or illustrations, which will be obvious once the fundamentals are clearly in the mind. the ordinary student, however, does not do this. he does not see the fundamental principle, and each illustration is like a separate problem, different from the others, which has to be studied by itself, and is never fully mastered, because the underlying fundamental principle is not grasped. (_b_) before you begin to study a subject, think it over carefully and find out what you already know of it or what you can arrive at by your unaided efforts.--try also to perceive what you expect to get out of the study of the subject, and how it is related with what you have already studied, and how it is to find application.[ ] the historian, edward gibbon, states in his autobiography that before reading any book, he made it a rule to reflect { } upon the subject, arranging and classifying what he already knew of it. this method may be followed to different degrees, depending on the subject. a student beginning the study of a new science which he has never studied before, can do comparatively little; but at least he can insist upon getting a clear idea of what the subject or problem is, its extent, what its objects and methods are, how it is related to other subjects, what its uses are, and how other studies will find their application in it. (_c_) classify and arrange what you have learned.--when you have finished part of a subject, stop and think over the ground that has been covered, and arrange the various points made. draw up a topical index and compare it with the table of contents. note the correlation or interdependence of facts and link them together. by the principle of association the retention of facts and principles in the memory will be much facilitated. note down concisely the steps of an argument in your own words, and see if the conclusion is justified. close the book from time to time and go over in your mind what you have learned. the importance of systematic classification is very great. the minds of many students are { } like a library without arrangement or catalogue; the books may be there, but cannot be found when wanted, and so are valueless for use.[ ] [ ] "we must keep carefully that rule of aristotle which teaches that the best way to learn anything well which has to be done after it is learned, is always to be a-doing while we are a-learning."--_richard mulcaster_. [ ] "there's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery."--_lorimer: letters from a self-made merchant to his son at college_. { } iv mental initiative it will become evident from the foregoing that a fourth essential for proper study is mental initiative. the student must have a definite purpose, and must do what is the proper thing without it being suggested to him. he must not simply do as he is told. if he have not initiative and cannot develop it, he will probably never study intelligently, nor gain a thorough understanding of what he reads, but will merely memorize. memory is a most important faculty; it is not, however, a _substitute_ for thought, but should be based upon it. thinking is essential in order to decide what to memorize. memory, however, is often made the sole factor in study. fundamental principles should frequently be memorized, so that by numberless repetitions they may be permanently impressed upon the consciousness, and can be repeated verbatim as a guide in any concrete case where they are to be applied. some suggestions may be useful as to the use and cultivation of mental initiative. { } (_a_) cultivate an interest in what you are studying, and some idea of what it leads to.--without interest your study will be perfunctory and of little use to you. make yourself believe that for you, at that time, it is the most important thing in the world. it is of course true that in most schools students are required to study definite subjects according to a curriculum arranged by the faculty. in some of these subjects a student may take little interest; indeed they may be so foreign to his natural tastes that he is not able to cultivate any interest in them. in such a case his study of them will be of little value to him. if, relying upon the judgment of those who prescribe the curriculum as necessary or desirable for the object which he has in view, he cannot persuade himself that they have value for him or make himself take an interest in them, it would probably be better for him to drop them even though he may thereby become a special student in the school or lose his degree. a degree which simply means slipshod, unintelligent and uninterested study of a considerable number of subjects embraced in the curriculum, is verily a "scrap of paper" not worth having. if you wish to concentrate your entire attention upon certain subjects in which { } you take an active interest you may become proficient in those, but you may become very narrow minded and altogether lacking in that all-around breadth of view which comes from the cultivation of other subjects which well informed men consider necessary. (_b_) insist upon first clearly formulating the problem, if one is before you.--many students literally do not know what they are doing, because they neglect this injunction, which is a necessary corollary of the necessity of forming definite ideas. do not proceed to endeavor to solve the problem until it is clearly formulated, no matter how long it may take. see what the data of the problem are, whether definite or not, and what is required. see also how variations of the data, if indefinite, would affect the result. (_c_) work independently of others.--solve your own difficulties and welcome them. do not expect things to be easy. you will never gain strength by being shown, but only by the exercise of your own unaided powers. therefore, do everything for yourself, so far as possible. seek only _suggestions_ from your teacher, when you need help, except in regard to mere matters of fact, which you could not be expected to { } reason out. let the suggestions be as slight as possible. if you have problems assigned, solve them entirely by yourself, even if you make mistakes. then, when those mistakes are pointed out, consider them with great care and discover the causes for them, and _remedy them_, so that you will not again make the same mistake or one analogous to it. you should delight in discovering difficulties which give you an opportunity to test and increase your strength and so avoid future errors. in the same way, examinations should be welcomed, not dreaded. the teacher does not mark you--you mark yourself; the teacher merely records the mark. even if you fail in the examination, that should indicate to you what you lack, and so be a benefit. indeed, it is better to fail than to scrape through.[ ] there must be a line somewhere. the man just above the line passes, and the man just below the line fails. the former may not be as capable as the latter, but, having passed, he does not remedy his faults; while the man who has failed is required to remedy his. huxley said that the next best thing to being right is to be completely and wholesomely wrong. { } (_d_) draw your own conclusions, whenever possible, before you know those of the writer you are studying.--when you read, "from the above it is evident," stop, close the book, and see if you can state what is evident. when you have written this down, compare with the result reached by the writer. practise such exercises in whatever form they present themselves. if your conclusions are different from those of the writer, in kind or in character, see which is right, or whether both are right. if you are right, why did the writer not reach your conclusion? was it because it was not pertinent to his problem? is it simply a difference of expression? the process of investigating any subject is a process of question and answer. the student must first propound to himself a question, and it must be the proper question. he must be able to perceive what the proper question is, under the circumstances. then he must give to himself the proper answer out of all the possible answers that are verbally correct, namely, the answer that affords a new vantage ground from which another question may be asked; and so the problem may be gradually unravelled. then again, many questions are indefinite, and { } can only be answered indefinitely; but to all questions a correct answer can be given, and the student must give the most definite answer the case admits of, and must gain the ability to qualify his answer or classify possible cases in such manner as may be necessary. (_e_) if you cannot see how the author reaches a stated conclusion, because he does not indicate the process which he follows, do not spend too much time trying to find out how he did it, but rather see if you can come to a conclusion in your own way, thus cultivating your own power and initiative rather than following the author.--a good textbook should not make things too clear, or relieve the student of the necessity of exerting himself. (_f_) learn to generalize.--draw the most general conclusion possible from the premises. try to see if a general principle can be laid down. this is a most important faculty to acquire. at the same time, avoid the prevalent fault of hasty generalization, based on insufficient data. (_g_) go beyond the book.--regard the book as suggestive and not final, as the assistant to your own powers that you are for the moment employing. pursue the subject as much farther { } as you have time for. in this way you may develop a faculty for independent thinking. (_h_) visualize your results so far as possible.--train the imagination by perceiving results in your mind, in concrete form, and in imagining applications of facts and principles. remember that use is the object of study, and try to see the use that may be made of what you have acquired. we have seen that there are four main requisites for proper study, viz.: ( ) mental courage; ( ) understanding; ( ) system; ( ) initiative. in addition to these may be mentioned ( ) proper habits and methods of work, under which head a number of minor but important suggestions may be made. [ ] "the greatest piece of good fortune is that which corrects our deficiencies and redeems our mistakes."--_goethe_. { } v proper habits and methods of work (_a_) select the best book for your purposes and study it thoroughly.--the best book for your purposes will depend upon circumstances. if you are beginning a subject, do not start with the most complete book, but take a more elementary one. remember that elementary knowledge is not the same thing as superficial knowledge, but may be quite the reverse. a knowledge of fundamental elementary principles is essential for the understanding of any subject. these should be obtained first from some elementary book, and made to form a skeleton or framework, upon which the more elaborate portions of the subject may be hung in their proper places. in large books there will be found too great detail for the beginner, and he will be discouraged by having too many things thrust upon his attention at once. elementary knowledge, thoroughly assimilated, is essential. begin, therefore, with the best elementary book there is, one which will make you { } think, weigh, understand, test and discriminate; and get from it the kernel of the subject; and gain, if possible, a stimulation to go beyond to a more elaborate treatise. (_b_) do not study too many subjects at once.--you need not concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, although when studying any one subject you should, for the time being, concentrate your entire attention upon it, as already explained; but the mind is rested by _change of occupation_ which comes by passing from one study to another of a different kind. the point is, that you should not dissipate your powers by taking up too many subjects, looking into them cursorily, then dropping them and passing on to something else. this habit of beginning many things and completing nothing, is most demoralizing and will result in your doing nothing well. do not attempt more than you can do properly. select first the subjects that will be directly useful to you, and study them thoroughly. gain the power of concentrating your attention on one subject with intentness for several hours at a time. in the end your mind will become tired, and you can then change to an entirely different subject, or even to recreation, such as the study of good fiction. { } the mind does not need idleness, but it does need change of occupation. probably from three to five studies are as many as the student can profitably pursue at once, but students differ greatly in this respect, as in others. (_c_) do not be in a hurry.--take time to think, so that you will not take the statements in the book for granted, but will study them with a sense of mastership. remember that here, as elsewhere, "the more haste the less speed." you may think that you have not time to think about your studies. the fact is, that you have not time _not_ to think about them, and that in the end you can do more in less time if you will insist upon taking pains. (_d_) do not take up a study lightly, but when taken up do not abandon it without good cause.--at the beginning of your study try to get a definite idea before your mind what you want to get out of your study, and keep this point before your mind as you progress in the subject. (_e_) cultivate the power of judicious skipping.--you can do this if you study with a sense of mastery and a clear idea of what you want to get. it is not necessary to read every word in the book. sometimes paragraphs, pages { } and perhaps chapters may be skipped. this, however, should not lead you into the habit of careless or superficial reading. (_f_) be systematic.--have set times for your study of each subject, a regular program of work. gain the habit of being able to start at once on your work without frittering away your time and thinking about beginning. apply yourself steadily and persistently and do not let your work consist of a series of spasmodic efforts. by systematically doing one thing at a time and passing from study to study, you can finally, after a period of continuous application, dependent upon your powers, alternate with a period of relaxation or amusement. your period of continuous study should not be so short as to prevent continuous effort, nor so long as to over-fatigue your mind. some students are restless, spasmodic, and while they seem to be continually employed, they achieve nothing. others by a steady, continuous pull, achieve much. (_g_) cultivate the power, by habitual practice, of fixing your mind intensely upon one thing for a considerable time.--if you can acquire this, it will be most valuable to you. it has been said that the difference between clever and ordinary men is often mainly { } a difference in the power of directing and controlling the mind through the attention. some minds go wool gathering or day dreaming, and flit from one thing to another in a desultory manner. others go straight toward the object in view. (_h_) remember to apply what you are studying.--study from things, by experiment, in the field, rather than entirely by books. in this way, what you learn will be real to you. book knowledge is of very little value in itself. (_i_) be interested thoroughly in what you are doing.--indifference is a fatal enemy to good work. every subject has its difficulties and you must not be discouraged by them. if you can learn how to overcome difficulties, you will find that doing so affords the keenest intellectual pleasure, and that each difficulty overcome by your own unaided efforts will make you much stronger in attacking the next one. (_j_) read the important things again and again until you know your book thoroughly.--as herbert spencer says, it is much better to know a few books thoroughly than to know many superficially. the same philosopher once said that if he had read as many books as certain other persons had read he would know { } as little as they did. remember the old latin proverb, "multum legere non multa." [read much but not many books.] if you learn your small book thoroughly and then take a larger one, you will be surprised to find how much of the latter you already know. you can then direct your attention to the new material and to relating it with the old. (_k_) make a list of references as you proceed.--summarize what you learn and construct an index. learn where to go to find what you do not know. you cannot learn everything even about one subject, and the next best thing to knowing it is to know where to find it or how to work it out yourself. (_l_) review your work frequently.--review is not re-studying, but is going quickly over the main points, looking at them all in their proper perspective. this will be assisted if you make summaries; writing out a statement of a thing helps you to understand it clearly and to fix it in the memory. as landon says: "the practice of reviewing keeps the mind in touch with the main lines of the subject; secures freshness and exactness of knowledge; shows what has been imperfectly learned, and gives an opportunity for remedying the trouble; strengthens { } the recollection and accustoms the mind to recover and give up its stores; saves waste of energy and the formation of bad mental habits; and thus leads to complete assimilation of the subject." (_m_) set special times for your recreative study.--cultivate some hobby as a relief from your concentrated study of books. music, some games of cards, chess, billiards, or other relaxations, are admirable means of recuperation. when you indulge in recreation or recreative reading, do not let the mind worry about problems of your previous studies. make your recreative reading in itself have some aim. do not allow yourself to develop in a one-sided manner, but have interests outside of your main study. (_n_) in connection with your studies do not neglect proper physical exercise.--remember that the preservation of your health should be your principal aim rather than to cram your head with book learning. study should not be allowed to interfere with a sufficient amount of physical exercise in the open air, but this should not be carried to the extent of severe bodily fatigue. a healthy body is necessary for the fullest cultivation of the mental powers, but { } on the other hand, the mind will not work when the body is exhausted. moreover, see that your studies are done under proper conditions of air, light, sun; that you have a comfortable chair, but not one which leads to somnolence. the suggestions contained in this paper should be of use not only to students but to the teacher who believes, as the writer does, that the main object which he should have in mind is not by lectures to pump his students full of information, but to train them, so far as possible, to think and study properly. with a good text book a lesson should be assigned and the student should be expected to master it. the lesson should not be so long that the average student cannot, in the time allowed, properly assimilate it. then in the class-room the teacher should call up a student, question him on the lesson, or give him a problem to work out on the blackboard. he should question the student at all points of his work to ascertain whether he really understands the subject. oftentimes the student will reply to a question with entire correctness, perhaps using the very words in the book, from which a superficial teacher might infer that he understood what he was saying; but if the teacher will probe more deeply, for instance by asking the student { } in a plausible way why some other and conflicting method or statement is not used, he will in many cases find the student quite as ready to accept the conflicting plausible method, showing that he had learned by rote and did not really understand. if the student correctly states a certain thing to be true, the teacher should make him explain why a conflicting statement is not true and should utilize the various suggestions in this paper, particularly those under the second and third essentials. he should also endeavor to cultivate in a student the proper attitude of mind, above discussed as the first essential, and while correcting unsparingly the faults of the student, should endeavor to make him perceive that, if he will think, he really has the capacity to understand what he is studying. if the teacher convinces himself that the student has not this capacity, he should not be allowed to go on with the class or perhaps should be required to withdraw from the school. it is an injury rather than a help to a man to endeavor to give him an education for which he is not fitted and which he cannot assimilate, and it often results in putting a man into a position in life for which he is entirely unadapted. the student should be made to realize that all labor is honorable, and that it is far better { } to be a successful mechanic, laborer, or clerk than an unsuccessful or incompetent lawyer, physician, or engineer. for every man there is some work which he is better fitted to do than anything else, and which he can do with reasonable success. his happiness in life will largely depend upon his finding this work. much time and effort are wasted in our schools in the endeavor to fit men for spheres for which they are not adapted. finally, the student should be again urged to realize the importance of not becoming discouraged. many an earnest student, after repeated failures, assumes a sort of hopeless, discouraged attitude of mind, which naturally leads him into the habit of trying to learn his lessons by memorizing in the hope of being able to pass, if only by scraping through, and into other bad habits which have been referred to in the foregoing pages. such an attitude of mind should be resolutely opposed, and the teacher, even when severely correcting a student, should encourage him to see the possibilities that are within his reach if he will exercise his will and put forth his utmost powers in a proper manner. success in the work of the world depends much more upon will than upon brains; but all faculties, { } whether mental or moral, can be cultivated and developed to an almost unlimited extent. a study of the biographies of men who have succeeded should be urged upon the student, and such a study will show how often success has been attained only after repeated failures. it is scarcely too much to say to a student that he can attain anything he desires, if he desires it with sufficient intensity; that is to say, if he possesses sufficient will power, and if he will train himself to direct his efforts properly. experience with students, however, will often show that a student is on the wrong track, or trying to do work for which he is not well adapted. if this can be demonstrated with reasonable certainty, the student should be the person most eager to take advantage of it, and should alter his course of study or his aim in life, in such a manner that he may train himself to do that work which he is best qualified to do. to put the right man in the right place should be one of the chief aims of education; but for a student to find that he is on the wrong track and that he had better change to another, is very different from becoming discouraged. the opportunities in the world are without number, and it is within the power of every man to be a successful, useful, and { } respected member of society. if a student finds himself constantly unsuccessful in his work, he should scrutinize himself carefully with the endeavor to ascertain the cause. he should not be too quick to conclude that he is on the wrong track, but should consult friends and teachers with frankness and sincerity. in no case, however, should he allow himself to become discouraged or disheartened, or to lose confidence in his own ability to attain ultimate success in some direction. there are three books known to the present writer on the subject of "how to study," but they do not appear to have been much used even by teachers. the ordinary student knows nothing of them. they are earnestly recommended to all who wish to learn how to study. first in order may be mentioned "the principles and practice of teaching and class management" by joseph landon, , new york, macmillan & company. this is a general book on the conduct of classes, but on pages to is found the best summary of this subject known to the writer. he has made much use of it in the present paper, and here makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. second, "how to study and teaching how to study" by frank m. mcmurry, , houghton, mifflin company. this is a very suggestive little book and will be valuable to any thoughtful student. third, "teaching children to study" by lida b. earhart, , riverside educational monograph, houghton, mifflin company. _the philosophy of teaching._ the teacher, the pupil, the school. by nathaniel sands. _new york_: harper & brothers, publishers, franklin square. . entered, according to act of congress, in the year , by harper & brothers, in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. _the teacher, the pupil, the school._ _teacher and pupil._ of the various callings to which the division of labor has caused man specially to devote himself, there is none to be compared for nobility or usefulness with that of the true teacher. yet neither teachers nor people at present realize this truth. among the very few lessons of value which might be derived from so-called "classical" studies, is that of the proper estimate in which the true teacher should be held; for among the greeks no calling or occupation was more honored. yet with a strange perversity, albeit for centuries the precious time of youth has been wasted, and the minds and morals of the young perverted by "classical" studies, this one lesson has been disregarded. what duty can be more responsible, what vocation more holy, than that of training the young in habits of industry, truthfulness, economy, and sobriety; of giving to them that knowledge and skill without which their lives would become a burden to themselves and to society? yet, while the merchant seeks to exercise the greatest caution in selecting the persons to whom he intrusts his merchandise, and yields respect to him who faithfully performs his commercial engagements; he makes but scant inquiry as to the character or qualifications of the mind-builder upon whose skill, judgment, and trustworthiness the future of his children will greatly depend. the position assigned by our social rules to the teacher accords, not with the nobility of his functions, but with the insufficient appreciation entertained of them by the people, and is accompanied by a corresponding inadequate remuneration. and what is the result? except a few single-hearted, noble men and women, by whom the profession of the teacher is illustrated and adorned; except a few self-sacrificing heroes and heroines whose love of children and of mankind reconciles them to an humble lot and ill-requited labors, the class of school-teachers throughout the whole civilized world barely reaches the level of that mediocrity which in all other callings suffices to obtain not merely a comfortable maintenance in the present, but a provision against sickness and for old age. what aspiring father, what cornelia among mothers, select for their children the profession of a teacher as a field in which the talents and just ambition of such children may find scope? nor can we hope for any improvement until a juster appreciation of the nobility of the teacher's vocation, and a more generous remuneration of his labors shall generally prevail. it is to the desire to aid somewhat in bringing about a juster appreciation in the minds alike of teachers and of people of the utility and nobleness of the teacher's labors and vocation that these pages owe their origin. when we consider the nature of the being over whose future the teacher is to exercise so great an influence, whose mind he is to store with knowledge, and whom he is to train in the practice of such conduct as shall lead to his happiness and well-being, we are lost in amazement at the extent of the knowledge and perfection of the moral attributes which should have been acquired by the teacher. it is his duty to make his pupils acquainted with that nature of which they form a part, by which they are surrounded, and which is "rubbing against them at every step in life." but he can not teach that of which he himself is ignorant. every science then may in turn become necessary or desirable to be employed as an instructive agent, every art may be made accessory to illustrate some item of knowledge or to elucidate some moral teaching. man is his subject, and with the nature of that subject and of his surroundings he must be acquainted, that the object to be attained and the means for its attainment may be known to him. what is man? what are his powers, what is his destiny, and for what purpose and for what object was he created? let us enter the laboratory of the chemist and commence our labors. let us take down the crucible and begin the analysis, and endeavor to solve this important problem. in studying the great cosmos we perceive each being seeking its happiness according to the instincts implanted in him by the creator, and only in man we see his happiness made dependent on the extent to which he contributes to the happiness of others. what, so far as we can see, would this earth be without any inhabitants? what great purpose in the economy of nature could it serve? a palace without a king, a house without an occupant, a lonely and tenantless world, while we now see it framed in all its beauty for the enjoyment of happiness. the being upon whom the art and science of the teacher is to be exercised is one to whom food, clothing, fuel, and shelter are needful; possessed of organs of digestion, whose functions should be made familiar to their possessor; of breathing organs, to whose healthful exercise pure air is essential; a being full of life and animation, locomotive--desirous of moving from place to place; an emotional being, susceptible to emotions of joy and sorrow, love and hate, hope and fear, reverence and contempt, and whose emotions should be so directed that their exercise should be productive of happiness to others. he is also an intellectual being, provided with senses by which to receive impressions and acquire a knowledge of external things; with organs of comparison and of reason, by which to render available for future use the impressions received through the senses in the past. lastly: he is also a social being, to whom perpetual solitude would be intolerable; sympathizing in the pains and pleasures of others, needing their protection, sympathy and co-operation for his own comfort, and desirous of conferring protection upon and of co-operating with them. but, further, he is a being who desires to be loved and esteemed, and finds the greatest charm of existence in the love and esteem he receives; to be loved and esteemed and cared for, he must love, esteem and care for others, and be generally amiable and useful. such is the being, susceptible of pain and pleasure, of sorrow and joy, whom the mind-builder is to train up so that, as far as possible, the former may be averted and the latter secured. the teacher, then, must train him in habits of industry and skill, that work may be pleasant and easy to him, and held in honorable esteem; for without work, skillfully performed, neither food, clothing, fuel nor shelter can be obtained in sufficient quantity to avoid poverty and suffering. knowledge also must be acquired by the laborer, in order that the work which is to be skillfully performed may be performed with that attention to the conditions of mechanical, chemical, electrical, and vital agencies necessary to render labor productive. a knowledge of the conditions of mechanics, of chemistry, of electricity, and of vital phenomena should be imparted by the teacher; and to impart this knowledge, he must first possess it. how sublime, then, are the qualifications, natural and acquired, which the true teacher should possess! how deep should be our reverence for him who, by his skill and knowledge, is capable, and by his moral qualities willing, to perform duties so onerous and so difficult. what station in life can be regarded as more exalted; whose utility can be compared with that of him who proves himself faithful to the duties he assumes, when he takes upon himself the office of a teacher of youth? the question which is ever present to the mind of the true teacher is: what can i do to insure the happiness of these beings confided to my charge, whose minds it is given to me to fashion, not according to my will, but according as my skill and judgment shall, more or less, enable me to adapt my teachings to their natures? what shall i seek to engrave upon the clear tablets of their young and tender minds, in order that their future lot may be a joyous one? let me illustrate (he will say) my profession. i will raise it high as the most honored among men, and for my monument i will say: "look around; see the good works of those whom i have taught and trained; they are my memorials!" such may, such will become the hope and aspiration common to teachers in that good day to come, when their labors shall be honored as they deserve; when parents, in all the different ranks into which society falls, shall vie with each other in the respect and honor tendered to the teacher, whose true place in society is at least not beneath that of the judge. the teachers to be developed by such a state of society will, as their first step, seek to obtain a clear and comprehensive view of the work they propose to accomplish, and will then seek to adopt the most judicious means to reach the end proposed. they will adapt their methods of teaching to the nature of the object to be taught and to the order in which the faculties of the human mind naturally unfold themselves, for true education is the natural unfolding of the intellectual germ. in order to obtain the knowledge necessary of the object to be taught, the true teacher turns to nature as his guide, for the voice of nature is the voice of god, and in reading her statutes we read that grand volume in which he has left an impress of himself. the science of nature is nothing more than the ability to read and interpret correctly the lessons taught. there was a period when mankind knew very little of the planet upon which they lived and moved and had their being; _there was_ a time when they knew almost nothing; and there _will_ come a time when they will know almost every thing that can be known by finite man. the earth is our _mother_, and _nature_ is our teacher, and if we listen to her voice, she will lead us higher and higher until we will stand the master and the king in the glorified temple of wisdom. to reach results so grand and a position so exalted, our natures must unfold in exact harmony with all the laws and forces which surround and control us from the time our existence commences until its close. from the period of conception until birth the child draws to itself all the essential elements required for the organization of a human being; the capabilities and powers of the parent are taxed and called upon to contribute their material to enable nature to reproduce itself. the child is born, and then, in a higher and more enlarged and more independent state of existence, commences drawing to itself the materials and substances necessary for its growth and unfolding. it draws in its mother's milk, it draws in the air, and it builds up in itself the unseen forces of life. nature, true to her mission, goes on unfolding the child, and teaches it daily and hourly the lessons best adapted to its condition. in a few days after it is born, its powers of observation begin to show signs of life and action, and it can distinguish light from darkness; in a few weeks its mother and nurse are known--in a few months quickened intelligence displays itself in all its actions; in about twelve months it has learned the most difficult art of balancing itself so as to walk, and also to speak a few words; at from two to two and a half years of age, only thirty months from birth, it has learned a language which it speaks, and has become familiar with a vast number of things surrounding it. from a state of entire ignorance it has in thirty months learned what would fill volumes. horses, cows, pigs, dogs, toys, whips, birds, people, trees, houses, fruit, food, clothes, music, sounds, parents, friends, and a thousand other things are all familiar to it. without professional teachers, almost without effort, all this valuable and indispensable knowledge has been acquired, through the unconscious adoption on the part of the mother of the true system of education--_e duco_--i lead forth, and hence nurse, cherish, build up, develop. the child feels or reaches out, like the tendril, to the material world, seeking to make itself acquainted with that world; even the young infant soon begins to observe closely, soon knows its mother from all other persons, clings to her, loves her above all; soon it recognizes light from darkness, sweet from bitter; soon, when it sees a dog it will recognize it and jump with delight almost out of its mother's arms; it will show an eager delight to watch the motions of the horse, and imitates the sounds employed by adults when driving. he spreads forth the tentacles of his feeble mind for knowledge, and his mind "grows by what it feeds upon," and it is for those intrusted with the infant's training to respond intelligently to the child's desire, to place within its reach the mental food adapted to its digestion, to nourish and develop it so that its mental hunger shall be at once gratified and excited anew. it is here, and to this end, that the able teacher steps in, to perfect the development of the future man and woman. he educates, by assisting the natural unfolding of the intellectual germ, he places within reach of the child-mind the food needed to its growth, and the child-mind reaches out its tentacles and absorbs the nourishment offered to it. thus the mind grows from _within outward_, and the teacher aids its development, as the careful husbandman by tilling and enriching the soil according to the nature of the plant he cultivates, produces a healthy and fruitful plant. the true teacher does not seek to teach by simply putting books into the child's hand, and bidding it to learn; he addresses himself to those faculties and powers of the child's mind, which bring it in relation with the world in which it lives. sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and thence observation, judgment, perception, reason, memory, hope, imagination, and the love of the beautiful are appealed to, developed and strengthened by natural exercise, even as the organs and limbs of the body are developed and strengthened by gymnastic and other appropriate exercises. education, mental and physical, is but the absorption of surrounding elements into the mind and body--an arrangement an assimilation of materials so as to incorporate them into the being to whose nourishment they are applied, just as the tree or plant assimilates to its growth and subsistence the materials which it draws from the air and the soil. it is thus apparent that a great change in the system and principles now adopted in teaching is required, and if we change the principles we must, of course, change the instruments. these are now adapted to the method of teaching from without inward. if we are to invert the system, and teach from within outward, then must our means and appliances be adapted to this change. the task, the forcing process, the stuffing and cramming must all give way to the natural mental growth, fostered, cherished, unfolded by culture, in accord with nature and with law. the inquiry then arises: what are to be the new means and appliances for mental culture? we have but to turn again to nature as our teacher and our guide; her instincts are unerring. the seed germinates and pushes forth its root from within outward. the expansion or growth takes place by means of the elements which it attracts to itself, when these are placed within its reach, and towards which it stretches forth its organs. these elements it assimilates into and makes a part of itself. this process of nature, so familiar to most of us, serves to illustrate exactly what should take place in intellectual growth. the mind hungers and feels out for and is impelled by a natural internal impulse to gather to itself the elements of knowledge; the wise teacher steps forward and becomes to the germinating intellect what the sun and dew and rain are to the plant. the mind must be fed in conformity with its longings, its wants, its desires. "blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness." the teacher develops this hunger and thirst by stimulating inquiry, and by presenting to the mind the use and beauty of knowledge; and when the mind gives signs that its hunger is temporarily appeased, that time is now required for mental digestion and assimilation, the wise teacher rests, and would no more attempt to stuff and cram the mind than the wise mother would seek to force food into her child's stomach. intellectual growth of some kind, not less than bodily growth, whether good or evil, is constantly taking place. it should be the teacher's care to render that growth a healthy one, calculated to insure the happiness of the subject, and, in securing his own happiness, to contribute to the happiness of others. the body being visible to the physical eye, its growth is also visible, and we do not think of feeling impatient at the long months and years required for it to attain its full proportions; nor do we seek by any forcing process to produce a man at instead of at or years of age. were the mind and its growth also visible to the eye, we would be equally careful in our treatment of it. man's first impulse in an uncivilized state has generally been a resort to force for the accomplishment of his objects; and as he took his first step forward the habits of his barbaric life remained with him. hence, the first steps in teaching were by force--the lash, the rod, the school penal code; but even as when hungry, wholesome and well-dressed food rejoices us, so will the mind gladly accept the mental food carefully prepared for it by the true teacher. we live in a world adapted by its creator to our happiness and highest well-being. it is not only possible, but easy, to win from nature all that is necessary or desirable, for our sustenance and comfort. it is the true teacher's duty to fit the child thus to win its happiness; and such a teacher has ever present to his mind the question: how am i to perform this duty? what sort of teaching and training am i to give to the subjects of my care? let us endeavor to find some direction to guide us to nature's answer to this question. _teaching and training_ whether we regard private schools or public schools, boarding or day schools, we find that much which goes on at them affords an important lesson, not as to what to follow, but what to avoid. is there any thing worthy of the name, of confiding intercourse between teacher and pupil known upon this continent, or to extend our inquiry, we may say, known anywhere? here and there exceptional instances will be found, as we have before said, both in this country and in europe, of men and women devoted to their noble profession, between whom and their pupils there has grown up the strongest bond of parental and fraternal affection. to these teachers the pupils run in every difficulty for its solution, in every danger for protection; but with these exceptions the teacher is looked upon as a task-master, sometimes even as a spy; the tasks set to be shirked as much as possible, the observation of the teacher to be eluded and deceived. lesson-time over, the children resort to their tame animals, to their weaving-machines, their wind-mills and dams; to their gardens, kites and ships; to swimming, rowing, foot-ball, marbles, leap-frog, base-ball and cricket. in the practice of these games, skill, dexterity and knowledge are acquired of which the pupils appreciate the utility, and enjoy not only for present, but for anticipated future use. natural history, to be taught in school and made a reality, by following the guide given us by nature in the amusements to which children resort of their own accord, should be a prominent subject of instruction and training in the school. cultivating the faculties of observation and of analysis, it should be among the earliest subjects of instruction, and, at the same time, of amusement. but they ought not to be taught from books; nature and the teacher are the only books to be employed until considerable progress has been made by the pupils. it is so easy to procure the things themselves for the study of botany; an abundant supply of wild flowers can be so readily obtained, sufficient to enable each child to be supplied with specimens for examination and dissection. the interest of the children in their study can be so easily awakened and sustained by the judicious teacher, the difficulties of the supposed hard words of scientific names disappear so readily, that the real difficulty is to understand how so obvious a subject of instruction is either wholly banished from the schools, or sought to be taught only from books, without any reference to living nature. the variety and multiplicity of insect life affords ample opportunity for the study of that branch of natural history--and entomology would be found not less beautiful and interesting than botany; the delightful excursions in which teachers and pupils would join for the gathering of objects of natural history would at the same time serve to strengthen the bond of affection which should exist between them. the nature of his own body and the functions of his various organs will soon interest the pupil, and along with instruction therein he would learn the qualities of the different kinds of animal and vegetable substances in use for food, their relative value and importance in building up his body; he would learn to compare the food now in use with that which was employed by our ancestors, and what has given rise to the adoption of the new and abandonment of the old; the methods of cookery best adapted to each kind of food, and what kinds of food are suitable for particular ages and states of health; what material, vegetable or animal, is most suitable for clothing, separately or in combination. he would learn to compare our present style of clothing with that adopted in past ages; he would learn the history of the changes which have been adopted, and while feeling desirous of retaining such as have been wisely adopted, might learn from past experience to desire to return to some good habits as to clothing which have been abandoned. the tight-fitting garments in which we unhealthily clothe our bodies, a fashion for which we are indebted to the use of armor in times when the chief occupation of man was mutual slaughter, and the great object of desire to secure protection against hostile weapons, might some time come to be discarded for the more healthful practices of the ancient asiatics and romans, if a general knowledge of the unhealthfulness of our present practices should come to prevail. the necessity and meaning of light and cleanliness, the indifference of the human body to all natural changes of temperature, when strengthened and maintained in health by wholesome food and efficient bathing, might lead to the taking of effective measures to restore the old roman bath to general use. as regards shelter, why a building on the ground is generally to be preferred to a cave or shelter in the ground--what materials are best adapted for roofs, what for walls, floors, windows, why we use stone or brick in one part of the country and wood in another; what sizes, shapes, means of warmth and ventilation, for privacy and social enjoyment, should be adopted, and as regards furniture and utensils, what are most suitable for the several parts of a dwelling; what should guide our selection of material, fabrics, shape, size and pattern; how to establish a communication from one part of a building to another; how water and light are to be had most readily. all these things should form the subject of school study and inquiry. the means of locomotion, how streets, roads and paths should be laid out and maintained; the construction and use of carriages, cars, wagons, tramways, railroads, ships, steamers, propelling power; where bridges should be built, and how; viaducts and embankments to cross valleys, cuttings and tunnels to penetrate hills and mountains; these, too, simply at first, and afterwards in more elaborate detail, should form subjects of school instruction, the rules determining the selection of each and the methods of their construction not being preached in lectures, _ex cathedra_, but evolved by a patient questioning of nature, by experiment and the socratic method of inquiry. exercise of the limbs under the direction of a skilled instructor, so that all the muscles of the body may be duly trained, and a healthy body built up to support a healthy mind. the kinds of recreation to be selected, whether bull-baiting, cock-fighting, rat-catching or prize-fighting, should be preferred to games of skill and strength, to the drama, literature, works of art, public walks, gardens, and museums; the comparative influence of all these upon the health, strength, courage, activity, humanity, refinement and happiness of society; how people may be led to prefer such as tend to general well-being to those which have a tendency to brutalize and debase. all these also should be dwelt upon in the school. how stores of food, of clothing, of fuel and of the materials for building may be collected and preserved; how present labor may be made to supply future wants, and the thought of future enjoyment be made to sweeten the present toil. how the means of instruction and of amusement may be secured. how all engaged in supplying one need of society co-operate with all who are engaged in supplying its other needs. what form of government is best, and how it may be best administered. how upright judges may be secured, justice administered, and society protected against internal and external foes. these and all the other subjects enumerated would, if handled by a true teacher, be found most attractive to children. the names given to the subjects at which we have glanced are: natural history, the mathematical and physical sciences in all their branches, vegetable and animal physiology, the political and social sciences; which should be presented in the order in which the attention and desire to learn could be aroused. it will hardly fail to strike the mind of the reader that nothing has yet been said about giving instruction in the use of those tools for acquiring knowledge, reading, writing, ciphering and drawing. the true teacher will understand the omission. the commencement of the instruction in reading, writing, ciphering, drawing, and in spelling, would take place as part of the object lesson which should be adopted as the first step to knowledge, and should be retained in the most advanced classes as the most perfect method of applying the knowledge which has been acquired. it would soon be understood by the pupils that the power of reading, of writing, of designing and of calculating is essential to the acquirement of knowledge, and to any thing like extent and variety of information on subjects relating to individual and social well-being. the desire of acquiring this knowledge would quicken the faculties of the children, augment their industry, and lighten the labors of the teacher to an indefinable extent. the teacher who should fail to impart a moderate degree of skill in these arts to most, and of excellence to many, at the same time that adequate progress was made in the study of the sciences we have named, should be deemed unfit for his profession, and not be allowed to relieve himself from disgrace by magnifying the difficulties of his task or by complaints of the idleness or want of capacity of his pupils. as children will take interest in what they learn in proportion to their understanding of its bearing upon their own happiness, and upon their actual life and surroundings, the knowledge of themselves as beings acted upon by surrounding objects and by their own kind, should be carefully imparted to them simultaneously with the knowledge of the qualities of the surrounding objects destined to act upon them. children thus worked upon by skilled and earnest instructors; led to find out and observe the properties of that nature of which they form a part; their minds nourished by the enjoyment which follows the mastering of every difficulty, and the addition of every fresh item of knowledge to their previous store; trained also in habits of healthfulness and of amiability; will not only cheerfully give themselves to study, but will also seek to dignify by their conduct and to improve by practice the knowledge they progressively acquire, soon understanding, among other things, why they are sent to school and the importance of that education, part of which they are to acquire at school. as the object of the school-teaching should be to prepare the pupils for actual life, they should be made familiar with the idea that all their means of subsistence and enjoyment can only be obtained by labor; not only should their attention be called to the fact, but they should be made sensible how much skill, knowledge and labor and economy were needed for the creation of existing stores, and are needed for their maintenance in undiminished quantity; nor can this be done in any way more fitly or completely than by performing under their eyes, and causing them to take part in, the actual business of production. the well-ordered school is an industrial school, in which every industrial occupation, manufacturing or agricultural, for the carrying on of which convenience can be made, should be successively practised by the children, under the direction of skilled workers. the farm, the factory, the shop, the counting-house and the kitchen, should each have its type in the school, and present to the minds of the children a picture of real life; while their practice would impart a skill and adaptability to the pupils which would insure their preparedness for all the vicissitudes of the most eventful life. can any reason be suggested for adopting a different system of instruction for girls than that which shall be determined on as best fitted for boys? we confess to our inability to perceive any--both are organisms of the same all-pervading nature--to both the most intimate knowledge of that which skill and perseverance secure, seems to be desirable for their happiness, and that of all mankind. of the two, perhaps, the greatest knowledge is needed for the woman, for hers is the more important and more perfected organism; to her is committed the performance of the chief functions of the highest act of organized beings, viz., reproduction; therefore, upon her knowledge and conduct, far more than upon that of the man, depends the future of the beings in whom she is to live again. another great object with the true teacher, will be so to train the judgment of his pupils as to avoid that forming of unconsidered opinion which is the parent of prejudice and a chief obstacle to progress. trained to investigate the foundations of every fact in nature and in science, to weigh the evidences on which they are asked to receive assertions, whether of a physical, moral or social nature, they will ever have a reason for the faith that is in them; and will know how to suspend judgment when the means of knowledge are insufficient. such pupils will not be apt to form opinions either in physical science, politics, or industrial life, without having first thoroughly examined the bases of the opinions they form and express, while the prejudices imbibed from nurses or parents, will be subjected to vigorous investigation, and either received as sound doctrine, or discarded as ill-founded and superstitious. of how many prejudices are we not the victims, without being ourselves in the least conscious of the fact! our political opinions, our social customs, are taken up like the fashion of a coat, without reason or reflection; and habit and association, but too often hold us captive long after reason has pronounced her condemnation; our minds have been warped from truth, and we fail to perceive our own deficiency, to recognize the mental dishonesty with which we are afflicted. all this will be averted in the case of those who in their youth are trained to a rigorous investigation of every fact presented to their minds, until the habit of truth, not merely of speaking and telling the truth, but that mental truthfulness which shrinks from accepting a falsehood for truth, and acknowledges ignorance rather than utter what is not assured--will become as much a part of the pupil's nature as is his desire for food. in short, he would be so trained as to feel as great a repugnance to plunge his mind into moral, as his body into material filth. again, while ever merciful and pitying to the criminal, he would be intolerant of falsehood wherever it might be found; and he would deem himself derelict in his duty, as a man and as a citizen, did he leave corruption to rot and fester in the commonwealth, because he and others like him would not take the trouble to raise their voices against wrongdoers! what a different aspect would not this great city of new york offer to our inspection to what it now presents, had a generation been trained in the knowledge, and practised in the observance of their duties as citizens! did those merchants and traders, who, in their private dealings would scorn a lie, but recognize the duty they owe as citizens and as men of truth, they would, by uniting, soon sweep away the serious discredit to our country and to republican institutions, the festering corruption of this city and of the state; yet it is to their supine, nay wicked tolerance of the evil that we owe the specimens of judicial corruption by which we are robbed and dishonored. can it be said that any system of education can be sound, which shall fail to demonstrate, at least to the older pupils, their duties as citizens, to take an active, intelligent and upright interest in public affairs; that shall fail to instruct them in the principles by which their judgments should be guided, and lead them to discard every action in public affairs, which they would not approve in private life? we must cease to live in books, in past mystifications, in useless theories, in foolish and unprofitable discussions, in ancient ideas and customs, and grasp the living present with all the richness, fullness and beauty of its life. the chemistry of nature, the work of her great laboratory, should be the study of youth as of age, instead of dead languages and the vain and foolish mythology of greeks and romans wherewith at present we poison the minds of the young. "can we take burning coals into our bosom and not be burned?" can we suffer the impressionable minds of youth to be impregnated with the filth of the heathen poets in their imaginings of gods as disgusting as themselves, without staining the pure tablet of the mind with spots and grossness, while the children acquire a distaste for that glorious nature whose volume should be their constant study? we have to deal with the great present, with life, not with death--to promote health, physical and moral, not to propagate infectious sickness. the present, wisely improved, leads to a happy future, and is the only road to that goal. we can not jump the present and its duties and reach the future so as to enjoy it, neither can the dead past lighten the labors of the living present. there is a past which still lives and vivifies the present, but the quaint and filthy imagery in which the ancient priests disguised from the profane--from all but the initiated--the mysteries of their lore, can be of small account to a people whose great duty is the dissemination of light and truth. every thing that has any relation to man's comfort and well-being, or to his happiness as a social being, that it is, and not the dead past that we should learn, and of the things that affect us most nearly we should learn first. what did the ancients know of steam, of electricity, of the material elements of nature, of her forces? and little as we know, how much of that little could be learned from a lifelong study of ancient lore? if there be aught of value in the laws of ancient rome which has not been translated into our native tongue, let it be translated; but let not our youth waste precious years in learning to play upon an instrument (greek or latin) which when learned can give forth no sound. but if we turn to nature and to her grand volume, we there find all the knowledge man can acquire. from her study, too, we can learn a lesson, not perhaps among the least important, as to the limits fixed by nature to human knowledge. to know of a surety what those things are which never can be known to mortal man, is a knowledge, the want of which has driven many to puerile and superstitious practices, and many more to madness and despair. from the great book of nature, god's book, is to be learned the principle of justice, of love, of wisdom, of truth; and as the germ of justice is developed in the mind, the mind is brought in contact with the great fountain, absorbs a portion of its light, enlarges, develops, becomes stronger, assimilates to itself the essence of the great godhead, and renders man godlike. so with each of the other faculties of man; each draws its nourishment from its special fountain. wisdom, love, justice, and truth should preside; and if judgment, sympathy and conscientiousness be judiciously trained and developed, they will help to develop harmoniously all the other faculties. but to this end they, and each and all of man's faculties, must be brought into a wholesome, natural contact, each with its proper food; and by natural we mean not that contact which might peradventure happen if left uncared for, but such as the nature of the faculty demands for its development in due harmony, to produce the greatest amount of happiness to its possessor. to supply this food, to bring to each faculty its proper aliment, is the business of the true teacher. if we desire a child to be truthful, we must bring it in contact with truth, and bring it to love truth by causing its practice to inure to the child's enjoyment. if we wish it to be wise, we must bring its mind in contact with wisdom, exercise its analytical powers, and train its judgment; let it see sound judgment producing happiness; let it see how beautiful and desirable is the possession of wisdom, and the child will soon learn to seek it for its own sake. to chastise a child for speaking that which is untrue may fill it with fear, but does not make it love truth. the love of truth and of wisdom must be cultivated as we cultivate the love of music. "seek me early, and ye shall find me." "knock, and it shall be opened unto you." that which the mind seeks it will find. the natural relationships are established, and it is only for us to work in harmony with, and not obstruct or interfere with them. it is the "true relationship of things" we need to learn. there is nothing in us that is not in nature. all the forces developed in man are but developments of nature; and all the forces required for his nourishment and strength exist in the bosom of nature. matter, light, heat, electricity are not produced by him. in nature they exist; remove any one of them and he perishes. to nature then must we ever turn as the reservoir of nourishment and as the teacher, by the study of whose volume we learn all of wisdom that can be known of mortal man, or that can tend to his well-being; and her true relationships must be the constant object of our search. before the knowledge of her true relationships disappear superstition and fear and mystery. the lightning's flash, the thunder's roar, the falling meteor and the sun's eclipse cease to terrify and alarm. witches, hobgoblins and demons come no longer to trouble us; the most unusual phenomena awaken only philosophical research and curiosity. and what is true of the full-grown man is not less true of the child. that school wherein children above the age of infancy fail to assist the teacher in his instruction, is an ill-ordered school. it is not the subject, but the teacher who is uninteresting; he scolds, worries and punishes his pupils, when he himself is the fitter subject for the lash. he awakens the sense of fear which should lie dormant, while the other faculties of his pupils slumber in spiritless inactivity. as the object of education is to prepare children to enter successfully and happily into life, and wisely to discharge all the duties devolving upon them as they unfold into men and women, and occupy the sphere assigned to them, the simple rule for the course of instruction seems to be, that they should learn those things in the order in which they can be received by the child's mind, which most vitally affect their well-being and happiness. as only a healthy, well-developed body can afford a home to a healthy, well-developed mind, physical culture claims early and constant attention, and should receive that careful regard to which the truth contained in the well-known aphorism: "we are fearfully and wonderfully made," entitles it. the teachings of the sciences of pathology and of sanitary science should be judiciously and carefully elucidated, practically and theoretically; presented step by step to the mind of the child; and the child's body and mind should be carefully trained, so as to develop all its physical and mental powers in harmony. gymnasiums for the body, conducted by men who have made themselves masters of anatomy and physiology, should be an essential feature in every school, so that ignorance and the desire to excel may not lead to putting a strain upon the system calculated materially to injure organs which need careful and judicious development. plays, games, dancing, marching and the gymnasium all require the careful supervision of a teacher well versed in a practical knowledge of the human system, and thoroughly appreciative of the great truth, "we are fearfully and wonderfully made." but the foundation for the school as for the life career must be laid at home, and much as the teacher can do, he can never supply deficiencies resulting from the want of a well-ordered home or of a healthy home training. never, save under necessity, should the parent yield up his sacred duty to another, at least during the tender years of childhood. the education of the heart and of the affections, is as essential as the school education, and these can never be so well cultivated as under the influence of home. all must be developed in order to maintain the true equilibrium. the boarding-school is not the place for children to attain a sound moral development, and the sooner parents generally understand this truth, the better for their children, for themselves and for society. as well uproot the flower, or shrub or tree, and expect it to flourish, as to cut the child off from the influence of home, and the care of a loving mother, father, brother and sister, and hope that the sympathetic faculties of its mind can attain their just development. physical culture, heretofore neglected among us--the body being left to grow up as it may happen or chance--will form a prominent feature of training in every well-ordered school. all the muscles of the body will be in turn exercised, developed. the ancient greeks afforded us here also a wise example, which we have signally failed to imitate. let us secure for our children all the advantages we can from an enlightened and natural system of education, and do all we can to perfect both mind and body. how often is the cry repeated, "mamma, tell me a story," and mamma, tired and weary, says she is too busy, or, for the want of a better, tells over again for the hundredth time, "little red riding hood," or some other equally foolish or more injurious tale, such as bluebeard or cinderella. anecdotes of great men, suitably arranged, events in history and biography, carrying with them valuable and important morals, will afford all the amusement the child desires, without developing a love for the marvellous and false, which leads it away in infancy from the simple, truthful, and natural. if children are to be taught to think naturally and truthfully, we can not begin too young, and it is the duty of parents to remember that valentine and orson, cinderella, bluebeard, and such stories, are a web of false and exaggerated statements that will, and do produce injurious effects upon the child's mind. the story of aladdin's lamp has made many a child desire to enjoy wealth without labor, and has exerted a most pernicious, though unsuspected, influence upon his future. children, not less than men, seek an easy road to the objects of their desires; and while works of imagination are to be by no means discarded in mental training, such should not be selected as give false notions of the busy and industrial life into which the child is to be introduced. even in the choice and use of the finest works of fiction, the greatest caution is necessary. the little one can hardly distinguish between a fable that amuses it, and a lie told to shield it from punishment. if it hear nothing but truth, it will know nothing but truth; and a truthful mind is a glorious thing to behold in children as in men. "an idle brain is the devil's workshop;" therefore let there be no idle brains, but let all work usefully and pleasantly. usefully we say, for even amusement is useful. we live in a world of use, in a world of beauty, a world that can be greatly improved, and human happiness largely increased, according as we avail ourselves of the knowledge already acquired for the right teaching and training of the young, so that they may grow up and develop into happy, self-supporting men and women, diffusing happiness to all around, themselves happy in proportion to the happiness they cause. _the school._ upon the organization and arrangement of the school largely depends the success of the educator. two things must be borne constantly in mind. first, to create truthful and intellectual atmosphere, where wisdom, honor, and knowledge can be inhaled as with the breath, and second, to make the school cheerful and attractive in every way possible. we must get rid of the idea now generally prevailing among children, that the school is to be resorted to with regret and escaped from with pleasure. so soon as the child will look at and become interested in pictures and toys, and will listen to tales and little stories, it can profitably be introduced in the school, the first department of which should be the infant-school, or, as the germans so aptly term it, the children's garden, or kinder garten. here plaiting, modelling, and building, with simple object lessons for the older infants, develop their powers of observation, and give employment and impart skill to little fingers which might else be engaged in destroying furniture or clothes, or in pilfering from the sugar-bowl. practical familiarity with the properties of lines, angles, circles, spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they will assist in making, will be a source alike of amusement and instruction. in the children's garden no teacher should have charge of more than about twelve children, who should regard her as their mother-teacher, while she should seek to win the love and confidence of the little ones as the beginning of her work. each class of twelve should have their own special room, while for general purposes, such as music, drilling, gymnastic exercises, games, tableaux, and exhibitions of the magic lantern, the oxyhydrogen microscope, the stereopticon, and the like, they should assemble in a large hall. the details of arrangements will readily suggest themselves. the main feature is to have all things natural, free, pleasant, cheerful, bright, refined, and unrestrained by external forms or rigid rules, at the same time that order is secured by an easy discipline. so deeply are we impressed with the importance and utility of the kinder garten, and with the high qualities required by the teacher of the very young, that we are more and more disposed to believe that the true order in rank and promotion among teachers should be, to speak in paradox, downwards; that is to say, the younger the children to be taught, the higher the rank and remuneration of the teacher; for not only is an extensive range of knowledge necessary to enable the teacher truthfully to answer the innumerable questions of inquisitive infancy, and to avoid giving false notions, to be afterwards with greater or less difficulty removed--always with a shock to the moral sentiment when the child discovers it has been deceived--but also a knowledge of the infant mind, a perception of the thoughts and fancies which chase one another through the infant brain, a knowledge and perceptive power which only a watchful and loving experience can acquire. an industry and a patience far beyond any needed by the teacher of more advanced pupils are also required by the highly-cultivated men and women, to whom alone the training of infant minds should be intrusted. advanced pupils go more than half-way to meet their teacher--the infant can render no assistance to his, all has to be borne, suffered and done for him--his future habits depend mainly on those given to him in his earliest years. yet the care of him in these important days is generally confided to ignorant nurses and to the less-skilled class of teachers. in building the school, a pleasing style of architecture should be adopted, and the walls of the main hall should be hung with diagrams of all kinds, illustrative of natural history in its largest sense, of the sciences and of the mechanical arts, and with portraits or busts of distinguished men. the walls of the class-rooms should be decorated with diagrams and maps and figures referring to the special branches taught therein. a large and commodious laboratory should be fitted up in the building, to enable every pupil to acquire experimentally that knowledge of chemical forces and action which books alone can never impart. a convenient observatory should afford facility for astronomical study and observation. on the top floors or around the building should be arranged workshops, where the use of tools and machinery could be taught. the classes should assemble in the large hall, in the morning, where they might join in singing or light gymnastic exercises, or listen to some short appropriate address before betaking themselves to their class-rooms. the teaching in these latter should be conducted, wherever practicable, upon the socratic method, and every branch of science and of art could be thus explained. the mother unconsciously uses this method in educating or drawing out the first perceptions of infancy and early youth; and the impressions derived from this method of acquiring knowledge are the most lasting, being such as become most absolutely assimilated with the pupil's mind. the teacher would also, at frequent intervals, conduct his class into the fields and woods for the study of botany, entomology, and geology, where nature would supply in abundance the materials, and the teacher would be the only book. instruction in the various trades which could be conveniently practised should receive attention, the taste of the pupils being made a guide to selection. some portion of the teaching which goes on in school should be performed by the pupils, under the supervision of the teacher. no adult can so thoroughly enter into a child's mind as can another child; nor is this the only reason. that is not fully known which can not be thoroughly used and applied, and knowledge can not be applied which its possessor can not himself impart. a perfect illustration of this truth is furnished us in the training of the soldier. upon nothing, perhaps, have the knowledge and skill of the most powerful intellects been more concentrated than upon the science and art of mutual slaughter; and in establishing the soldiers' drill, an exhaustive analysis of the means by which the desired object was to be attained has been pursued. the men whose intellects have developed that drill, have not been content to treat the soldier as a pupil only. each recruit has in turn to teach, as well as to learn to practise what he has learned, by drilling others whom he is made temporarily to command, as well as to practise his drill under the command of his officer; for only by such means could the highest degree of efficiency be secured. the reasons which led to the adoption of this principle in the barrack apply equally to the school. this principle of giving and receiving we also see exemplified in nature. animals inhale oxygen from the air and return carbonic acid, which serves to build up the structure of the plant, and the latter in its turn gives out oxygen to supply the consumption of animals. every day--in the middle of the day, in winter, in the summer, early in the morning, or in the evening--gymnastic training on the system of the swedish anatomist ling or of the german turners would form a portion of the curriculum, for which convenient apparatus would be provided. biography should form an important feature in the course of reading, its subjects being arranged in groups; and the true glory of a washington, a bentham, a stevenson, a morse, and a cobden distinguished from the false glare and tinsel of a louis xiv. and a marlborough. music, both vocal and instrumental, would be taught to all, but only those more gifted by nature would be educated to perform solo. nearly all persons can be trained to sing part-music pleasantly and intelligently, and to perform moderately on some instrument. the cultivation of the musical faculties harmonizes the mind, and affords a never-failing source of solace and recreation. the attempt to convert all persons into solo performers, and the hypocritical applause with which their discordant notes are indiscriminately greeted, deprives society of the pleasures which part-music well performed would afford, by encouraging all to attempt what they are pretty sure to do badly, to the exclusion of what they would be equally likely to do well. we have reserved for the last, to enumerate what is, perhaps, the most important of all the subjects of instruction. to all children, so soon as they can be promoted from the _kinder garten_--perhaps even to the higher grades therein--instruction in the conditions of human well-being, and in the phenomena and arrangements of social life should be given, and should be continued throughout their school career. what! teach political economy to children? even so. it will be conceded, that to teach the future laborers the laws by which the wages of their labor will be regulated, how high wages may be secured and low wages prevented--to teach the future capitalists the laws by which their profits will be determined, how large profits may be secured, and loss, failure, crises, and panics avoided--must be a desirable, if it be a practicable thing. is it practicable? the experience of twenty years has proved that it is. the experiment has been tried by mr. wm. ellis, the wise and noble founder of the birkbeck schools of london, england, who not only devoted his surplus means to the endowment of true schools, but gave also his time to instruct in the principles of the science of human well-being--alike the poor children by whom his schools were attended and the children of the queen of england. he also instructed and trained a corps of teachers, professional and volunteer, and by one of the latter a class was conducted in the winter of , ' at the normal school of this city of some to teachers engaged in the practical work of teaching in our common schools, who, under his guidance, became, after a short course of some twenty or more lessons, enthusiastic advocates for the introduction of this study into the schools; for not only does it teach the conditions of industrial success, but it is also a science of morals and of ethics far more worthy of the attention it has never yet received in this or, indeed, in any country, than that which is given to what goes under the name of moral teaching and training. it is by gradual steps--by the employment of the socratic method of instruction--with a rare use of text-books, that the most intricate problems of this science can be unfolded to pupils with such effect that a child of fourteen or fifteen years of age, who shall have passed through a course of four or five years' instruction, would put to the blush, with few exceptions, alike the members of both houses of the united states congress and of the british parliament. a museum and a library would be necessary adjuncts to such a school as we have described. it would need but a few seasons to get together in the various excursions taken by pupils and teachers, quite a collection of botanical, entomological, and geological specimens. these would serve as objects for illustrating the teacher's lessons, and for examination by the pupils. the drying, preservation, and arrangement of plants, animals, and minerals, in which the pupils would assist, would serve to impart to them a skill and dexterity, which they would know how to value, and would be eager to acquire, and, together with their frequent visits to the museum, would serve to cultivate a love of nature and devotion to the study of her works. the library, besides containing treatises on science and for reference, would be filled with books of travels, and the nobler english and foreign classics; the books would be loaned to the pupils as in ordinary circulating libraries, and a pleasant reading-room would be furnished with the better class of periodicals and newspapers. to be deprived for a time of the right to visit the museum or reading-room, or to borrow books from the library, would be one of the severest punishments known in the school. it is hardly necessary to say that the selection of the principal of such a school as we have indicated is among the most difficult problems of its establishment. his qualifications should be as near the perfection of manhood as can possibly be found. invited by a large and generous salary (to be dependent, beyond a stated sum, on the number of the pupils), it is to be hoped such a teacher could be found. such a principal, after a fixed period of probation, should not be removable except on a very large vote of the proprietors of the school to that effect, but his office should be vacated on his attaining the age of or years. the selection of teachers to assist him in his duties should be left to himself. the remuneration of the assistant teachers should also be large, and should be such as not only to enable them to live in comfort, but to make ample provision for their future when the age of labor shall have passed. the chief position in society should be assured to the principal and his assistants by the proprietors of the school. the visits of the former to the houses of the latter should be regarded as an honor, the greatest respect and deference should be paid to them, and the pupils should be taught to look upon them with love and respect next only to that they pay their parents. the best investment a parent can make of his wealth is in the proper education of his children. life is not merely to be born, to grow, to eat, to drink, and breathe. noise is not music. life is such as we take it and make it, or rather as it is taken hold of and made for us by those to whom the care of our youthful days is intrusted. let us endeavor to picture to ourselves the being likely to be produced by a system of teaching and training, continued for successive generations, such as we have indicated above. let us imagine the full development of the most complex of nature's organisms--a part of the one living organism of the universe, the latest product of her laboratory; considered, as a part of the great cosmos, the most perfect, yet but an integer in the whole; the ultimate development of nature's chemistry, yet forming an atom of her living unity; combining and possessing the widest relationships, even embracing therein the entire volume of that nature whose true relationships comprise all knowledge, truly "the noblest study of mankind." let us try and draw the picture of the developed man! robust and supple of limb, symmetrical of shape, his muscles swelling beneath their healthy development; with head erect, conscious of his strength and skill, which he puts forth for the protection of the weak, and for the purpose of drawing from nature her bounteous stores; free from sickness or disease, in harmony with nature, at peace with his fellow-men, possessing a competent knowledge of nature's laws, and guiding his conduct to be in accord therewith, "sitting beneath his own vine and fig-tree," "blessed in all the works of his hands," and diffusing blessings and happiness around. such is the picture of the healthy mind in a healthy frame, which it is in man's power to procreate and rear! _appendix._ department of public instruction,} corner of grand and elm streets, } new york, june th, . } to magnus gross, esq., _chairman of the "executive committee for the care, government and management of the college of the city of new york:"_ dear sir,--i have observed with surprise, and with a sense of deep regret, that the proposition is entertained by a large number of the trustees of filling the chair of latin and greek, now vacant, and even of establishing separate chairs for each, at the college of the city of new york; involving, with the necessary tutors, an outlay of not less than $ , per annum. the subject in all its bearings is one of too vast importance to be treated in the ordinary method of discussion by the committee, and i therefore beg leave to place my views in writing, to insure their receiving more matured consideration than oral observations could secure. i pass over the question (on which considerable difference of opinion exists) as to the propriety of sustaining at all, at the enforced expense of the public, an educational institution to supply the needs which the college of the city of new york is intended to meet. the college exists by law; we are its guardians, and the only question we have to consider is, how most efficiently and most economically to secure the attainment of the ends desired by the legislature. these ends we shall no doubt all agree to be--first: that any of the youth of this city possessed of special talents, but lacking means for their cultivation, may have placed within their reach an education the best possible for the development of their powers for the benefit of themselves and of the community; and, second, to provide for the comparatively well-to-do the means of pursuing useful studies in compensation for compelling them to provide for the instruction of their less fortunate citizens. as it is self-evident that whatever course of studies will tend to secure the first of these ends will tend also to secure the second and less important, we are spared the necessity of a two-fold investigation. a very few statistics suffice to show that neither of these ends has been hitherto attained by the college of the city of new york. it is immaterial what year we select for examination, the numbers which follow will be found to bear about the same relative proportions in every year. i quote from the trustees' report for merely because it is the latest document at hand which furnishes the numbers in the different classes and of the graduates; from this report i find, that while there were three hundred and eighty-one students in the introductory class, only twenty-five graduated in that year. the number of graduates in was thirty, and twenty-nine in july, . of the three hundred and eighty-one who composed the introductory class in , one hundred and fifty-one left the college during the year, and doubtless the two hundred and thirty who remained will have dwindled to about twenty-five or thirty by the year . without doubt some proportion of the three hundred and eighty-one leave the college because of the necessity they are under of obtaining, by their labor, the means of subsistence; but when it is remembered that these three hundred and eighty-one are the _picked youth from the many thousands attending the public schools_, and when the sacrifices and privations which men and youth imbued with a love of learning will make and undergo for the acquirement of knowledge are borne in mind, we must look to something in the constitution of the college itself to account for this result. in short, we can but come to the conclusion that the main cause of this falling off is to be found in the feeling which grows upon the pupils and their guardians, of the comparative uselessness of the studies to which they are consigned. let us examine the course of studies, as given from pages to of the report of the board of trustees for the year , or from pages to of the manual of the college. the first observation which must strike the mind of every thinker is the fact that the primary analysis--the main classification which has been adopted of studies which ought to be framed to fit the students for "complete living"--is one of "words," _i. e._, the tools of knowledge, instead of knowledge itself. or in the words of the report: "there are two courses of studies--ancient and modern--differing only in the languages studied." on examining the course for the introductory and freshman classes, a feeling of astonishment must fill the mind at the marked want of wisdom by which it was dictated, but which at the same time affords a sufficient explanation for the abandonment of the college by its students. even if "_words_" ought to be the real object of education, it would be supposed that english words would be more useful to a people whose mother-tongue is english, than the words of any other language; yet the students of the introductory and freshman classes of the ancient course receive instruction _five hours a week through both terms in latin and greek_, and _one lesson per week during one term in the english language_. the students of the modern course substitute for latin and greek the french and spanish languages. i purposely abstain from saying any thing as to the method of instruction, which is the converse of that adopted by nature, and as a consequence signally fails. this has been so forcibly put by president barnard, of columbia college, that i need only refer the members of our committee to his essay on "early mental training, and the studies best fitted for it." what steps are taken to familiarize the students of, say the freshman class, with that great nature of which they form a part? what, for instance, do they learn of the structure of their own bodies, and of the means of preserving health? _one lesson a week_ is given on physiology and hygiene, and that is all! the fear of making this letter too long compels me merely to refer the committee to pages to of mr. herbert spencer's chapter on "what knowledge is of most worth," in his work on education, in farther illustration of this subject, instead of making extracts from it as i would otherwise like to do. attention, it is true, is paid throughout the college course to mathematical studies, yet very little to their practical application; while to chemistry, the parent of modern physics, the manual (which is our guide) prescribes two lessons per week to the introductory class, and to the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes absolutely _none at all_! mining, mechanical engineering, architecture, theoretical agriculture, biology, and botany are utterly ignored; and no branch of zoology is even mentioned in the curriculum. we next come to a science more important, because universal in its application and in its need than any other, viz.: the science of human well-being, commonly called political or social economy. here, too, like exclusion! except that in the sophomore class, for one term, one hour per week is given to it. that is to say, a people who are to live by labor are left by the guardians of their education in ignorance of the laws by which the reward for that labor must be regulated; they who are to administer capital are to be left to blind chance whether to act in accordance with those laws of nature which determine its increase, or ignorantly to violate them! restrained again from quotation by the fear of wearying the committee, permit me to refer them to the lecture of dr. hodgson, delivered at the royal institution of great britain, on "the importance of the study of economic science," which will be found in the work of professor youmans, on "the culture demanded by modern life." i confess to a feeling of deep discouragement at the perusal of such a record as that presented by the course of studies at the college of the city of new york, especially when i find that this is the state of things a large number of the trustees seem desirous of perpetuating. my views on this subject are confirmed by the following remarks found in president barnard's essay on "early mental training, and the studies best fitted for it." "whatever may be the value of the study of the classics in a subjective point of view, _nothing could possibly more thoroughly unfit a man for any immediate usefulness_ in this matter-of-fact world, or make him _more completely a stranger in his own home_, than the purely classical education which used recently to be given, and which, with some slight improvement, is believed to be still given by the universities of england. this proposition is very happily enforced by a british writer, whose strictures on the system appeared in the london _times_ some twelve or thirteen years ago. "common things are quite as much neglected and despised in the education of the rich as in that of the poor. it is wonderful _how little_ a young gentleman may know when he has taken his university degrees, _especially if he has been industrious, and has stuck to his studies_. he may really _spend a long time in looking for somebody more ignorant than himself_. if he talks with the driver of the stage-coach that lands him at his father's door, he finds he knows nothing of horses. if he falls into conversation with a gardener, he knows nothing of plants or flowers. if he walks into the fields, he does not know the difference between barley, rye, and wheat; between rape and turnips; between natural and artificial grass. if he goes into a carpenter's yard, he does not know one wood from another. if he comes across an attorney, he has no idea of the difference between common and statute law, and is wholly in the dark as to those securities of personal and political liberty on which we pride ourselves. if he talks with a country magistrate, he finds his only idea of the office is that the gentleman is a sort of english sheik, as the mayor of the neighboring borough is a sort of cadi. if he strolls into any workshop or place of manufacture, it is always to find his level, and that a level far below the present company. if he dines out, and as a youth of proved talents and perhaps university honors is expected to be literary, his literature is confined to a few popular novels--the novels of the last century, or even of the last generation--history and poetry having been almost studiously omitted in his education. _the girl who has never stirred from home, and whose education has been economized, not to say neglected, in order to send her own brother to college_, knows vastly more of those things than he does. the same exposure awaits him wherever he goes, and whenever he has the audacity to open his mouth. _at sea he is a landlubber; in the country a cockney; in town a greenhorn; in science an ignoramus; in business a simpleton; in pleasure a milksop_--everywhere out of his element, everywhere at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by whatever word _utter ignorance_ and _incapacity_ are to be described. in society and in the work of life, he finds himself beaten by the youth whom at college he despised as frivolous or abhorred as profligate." take the preparation of our youth for their duties as citizens. here, again, a knowledge of political and social economy is indispensable. we have seen the attention it receives; and while two lessons a week for one hour, and that only to the senior class in its last term, are given to american citizens on the constitution of the united states and on international law, _none whatever is given on the science of government throughout the entire course of five years_! i might go through the whole course of studies with similar results. here and there, in this or that class, a small amount of attention is given to some of the sciences omitted in the other classes; but the entire record is one of the most disheartening character. _words! words!_ engross almost exclusively the attention of the students from the hour they enter the college until they leave it; and it is not to the five-and-twenty graduates the palm of useful industry should be awarded, but to the many who, in discouragement, abandon a course which tends to _unfit_ them for the great battle of life! what, then, are the reasons generally assigned for this perverse conventionalism of devoting the time of youth to the acquirement of dead words, to the unavoidable exclusion of nearly every thing that is of value? first, we are told that we can not understand the english language without a knowledge of latin, from which it is derived. the inaccuracy of this pretension is at once made manifest by reference to webster, where he states: "that english is composed of-- "_first._ saxon and danish words of teutonic and gothic origin. "_second._ british or welsh, cornish and amoric, which may be considered as of celtic origin. "_third._ norman, a mixture of french and gothic. "_fourth._ latin, a language formed on the celtic and teutonic. "_fifth._ french, chiefly latin corrupted, but with a mixture of celtic. "_sixth._ greek formed on the celtic and teutonic, with some coptic. "_seventh._ a few words directly from the italian, spanish, german, and other languages of the continent. "_eighth._ a few foreign words, introduced by commerce, or by political and literary intercourse. "of these, _the saxon words constitute our mother-tongue_, being words which our ancestors brought with them from asia. "the danish and welsh also are primitive words, and may be considered as a part of our vernacular language. they are of equal antiquity with the chaldee and syriac." but even were it true that our language was derived from the latin, wherein lies the difficulty in the way of the teacher explaining to his pupils the meanings of the parts of english words which are of latin origin, without the necessity of the pupil's acquiring the same knowledge by the roundabout process of learning one thousand words he will never need, for one that may at some time be to him of some service as a mnemonic? driven from this position, the advocates of "_classical_" studies tell us that the study of latin and greek serves as a training for the intellect. unquestionably the exercise of the faculties of the mind serves to develop the faculties so exercised; yet if this were the object to be attained, hebrew, nay, chinese, would be preferable to latin; but science develops the same faculties, and far more efficiently. the facts of science to be stored up in the mind are so infinite in number and magnitude that no man, however gifted, could ever hope to master them all, though he were to live a thousand years. but their arrangement in scientific order not only develops the analytical powers of the mind, but exercises the memory in a method infinitely more useful and powerful than the study of any language. finally we are told classical studies develop the taste. if then to this the advocates of such studies are driven, its mere announcement must suffice to banish latin and greek from all schools supported by taxation; for however essential it may be to provide the means of the best possible instruction, it is as absolutely out of the sphere of the trustees of public moneys to provide, at the public expense, so _mere a luxury_ as on this hypothesis latin and greek must be, as it would be to provide the public with costly jewels! but even for the cultivation and development of art and taste, science is the true curriculum! he who is ignorant of anatomy can not appreciate either sculpture or painting! a knowledge of optics, of botany and of natural history, are necessary, equally to the artist or to the connoisseur; a knowledge of acoustics to the musician and musical critic. "no artist," says mr. spencer, "can produce a healthful work of whatever kind without he understands the laws of the phenomena he represents; he must also understand how the minds of the spectator or listener will be affected by his work--a question of psychology." the spectator or listener must equally be acquainted with the laws of such phenomena, or he fails to attain to the highest appreciation. i now come to the last and most serious aspect of this question, and i fearlessly assert that classical studies have a most pernicious influence upon the morals and character of their votaries. it should not be forgotten that greeks and romans alike lived by slavery (which is robbery), by rapine, and by plunder; yet we, born into a christian community which lives by honest labor, propose to impregnate the impressionable minds of youth with the morals and literature of nations of robbers! this letter has already extended to so great a length that i am compelled to abstain from making extracts from the works of the greatest thinkers, which i had desired: and i can now but cite them in support, more or less pronounced, of the views above put forward, viz.: president barnard, of columbia college, who with rare honesty and boldness has spoken loudly against the conventional folly of classical studies; professor newman, himself professor of latin at the university of london, england; professors tindall, henfry, huxley, forbes, pajet, whewell, faraday, liebig, draper, de morgan, lindley, youmans, drs. hodgson, carpenter, hooker, acland, sir john herschell, sir charles lyell, dr. seguin, and, rising above them all in _educational science_, _bastiat_ and _herbert spencer_. to a modified extent, the name of mr. john stuart mill may be quoted--for he loudly advocates science for all--science, which is unavoidably excluded by the introduction of, or at least the prominence given to, latin and greek in our college. mr. mill, it is true also, advocates classical studies, but for certain special classes which exist in england who have no regular occupations in life. neither is it without importance as a guide to ourselves to observe that in the very best school in this country--a school perhaps not surpassed by any in the world, viz., the military academy at west point--neither latin nor greek studies are permitted. if now, in any career whatever, any use could be found for latin, it must be in that of the professional soldier, to whom, if to any one, the language and literature of the most military people the world has ever seen, should be of some service. but no! the wise men who framed the curriculum of west point, though they knew that the study of the campaigns of the romans would be serviceable to their students, provided for their study, _not_ by the roundabout method of first learning a language which could never be of any other use, but by the direct method of the study of those campaigns! are the pupils of west point generally found deficient in intellect? is not, on the contrary, the fact of having graduated at that school a passport to the _highest scientific_ and _practical_ employment? our duty to the people is clear; let us neither waste the precious time of our youth on worse than useless studies, nor the money of the citizens on worse than useless expenditure. i do earnestly hope that our committee will give to my observations their most serious deliberation. let us come to no hasty conclusion on this subject: accustomed as we have been to hear constantly repeated such conventional phrases as that "latin and greek are essential to the education of a gentleman;" that "classical studies are indispensable to a liberal education;" to hear applauded to the echo orators who have introduced into their speeches quotations of bad latin or worse greek by audiences of whom not one in one thousand understand what was said. we have been apt to receive such phrases as embodying truths, without ever examining their foundations. i respectfully urge the committee to consider well before they act, to study the reasons assigned by the great thinkers i have named for condemning, as, humbly following in their wake, i venture to condemn, as worse than mere waste of time, the years devoted to latin and greek studies. let us endeavor to make the college of this city worthy of the city and of the state; let us cast aside the trammels of mediæval ignorance, and supply to the pupils of the college "the culture demanded by modern life." let us in this, the first important matter which has come before our committee, act in harmony and without prejudice, for the welfare of the college and "for the advancement of learning," and so prove ourselves worthy of the sacred trust we have assumed. i am, dear sir, very truly yours, nathaniel sands, _member of "the executive committee for the care, government, and management of the college of the city of new york."_ _the philosophy of teaching._ the teacher, the pupil, the school. by nathaniel sands. vo, cloth, $ . an interesting and valuable work, in which the science of teaching is treated in a philosophical and practical manner, and a sketch is given of a school to be established on the principles developed in his pages. mr. sands takes the view that education, mental and physical, is but the absorption of surrounding elements into the mind and body--an arrangement and assimilation of materials so as to incorporate them into the being to whose nourishment they are applied, just as the tree or plant assimilates to its growth and subsistence the materials which it draws from the air and the soil; and his theory of teaching is based on these truths.--_n. y. times._ he advocates a radical change in the system of teaching youth. he proposes a school where pupils shall be taught by illustrations from nature as well as from books; where the museum, chemical laboratory, and workshop shall find a place; where, in short, the mind of the learner shall not be forced, but shall have just the kind of food suitable for its age and development.--_n. y. world._ much has been written upon education--much that is both wise and thoughtful, and much that has been but sound. among the most thoughtful and suggestive recent writings is an unpretentious work bearing the title of "the teacher, the pupil, the school," by mr. nathaniel sands. small as it is, it contains more ideas than many bulky volumes.--_n. y. tribune._ the question with which he mainly concerns himself is whether latin and greek, and certain other branches, shall be taught to the exclusion of more practical studies. he thinks that what is commonly known as the "culture demanded by modern life"--chemistry, mining, anatomy, natural history, political and social economy, the science of government, etc.--should take the place now usurped by classical studies. mr. sands believes in making no compromise between the useful sciences and the classics. he condemns "as worse than mere waste of time the years devoted to greek and latin," and would bar them out altogether.--_journal of commerce._ mr. sands, who has just been appointed one of the new board of education, has long been known as an advanced thinker on the subject he is now called upon to deal with. he has published a pamphlet on the philosophy of education.--_n. y. sun._ we have in this compact and unpretentious treatise a great deal of pith and acumen, brought to bear upon a most important subject--that of educational first principles. mr. sands has gone to the base of human teaching, discarding pretentious themes, in order to illustrate the simpler beauty of that eductive and inductive co-relationship which, beginning at the mother's breast, proceeds through all the quiet processes of mental development in infancy, childhood, and maturity.--_n. y. dispatch._ his hints may well arrest the attention of thoughtful men.--_n. y. tribune._ we commend it to the thoughtful consideration of all, but especially of our public men. * * * commissioners of schools and others charged with youthful training may advantageously consider the reflections.--_n. y. evening post._ harper & brothers, publishers, franklin square, new york. harper & brothers _will send the above work by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the united states, on receipt of $ _. works on education published by harper & brothers, new york. harper & brothers _will send any of the following books by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the united states, on receipt of the price_. harper's catalogue _and_ trade-list _will be sent by mail on receipt of five cents, or they may be obtained gratuitously on application to the publishers personally_. randall's popular education. first principles of popular education and public instruction. by s. s. randall, superintendent of public schools of the city of new york. mo, cloth, $ . sands's philosophy of teaching. the teacher, the pupil, the school. by nathaniel sands. vo, cloth. burton's observing faculties. the culture of the observing faculties in the family and the school; or, things about home, and how to make them instructive to the young. by warren burton, author of "the district school as it was," "helps to education," &c. mo, cloth, cents. calkins's primary object lessons. primary object lessons for a graduated course of development. a manual for teachers and parents, with lessons for the proper training of the faculties of the children. by n. a. calkins. illustrations. mo, cloth, $ . willson's object lessons a manual of information and suggestions for object lessons, in a course of elementary instruction. adapted to the use of the school and family charts, and other aids in teaching. by marcius willson. mo, cloth, $ . abbott's teacher. moral influences employed in the instruction and government of the young. by jacob abbott. with engravings. mo, cloth, $ . boesÃ�'s education in new york city. public education in the city of new york: its history, condition, and statistics. an official report to the board of education. by thomas boesÃ�, clerk of the board. with illustrations. vo, cloth, $ . beecher's training of children. the religious training of children in the family, the school, and the church. by catharine e. beecher. mo, cloth, $ . edgeworth's practical education. a treatise on practical education. by richard lovell edgeworth and maria edgeworth. engravings. mo, cloth, $ . sir william hamilton's essays. discussions on philosophy and literature, education and university reform. chiefly from the edinburgh review. corrected, vindicated, and enlarged, in notes and appendices. by sir william hamilton, bart. with an introductory essay, by rev. robert turnbull, d.d. vo, cloth, $ . dr. olin's college addresses. college life: its theory and practice. by rev. stephen olin, d.d., l.l.d., late president of the wesleyan university. mo, cloth, $ . potter & emerson's manual. the school and the schoolmaster. a manual for the use of teachers, employers, trustees, inspectors, &c., &c. in two parts. part i. by rt. rev. alonzo potter, d.d. part ii. by george b. emerson, a.m., of massachusetts. part i. the school; its objects, relations, and uses. with a sketch of the education most needed in the united states, the present state of common schools, the best means of improving them, and the consequent duties of parents, trustees, inspectors, &c. part ii. the proper character, studies, and duties of the teacher, with the best methods for the government and instruction for the common schools, and the principles on which school-houses should be built, arranged, warmed, and ventilated. engravings. mo, cloth, $ . everett on practical education. importance of practical education and useful knowledge: being a selection from the orations and discourses of edward everett, president of harvard university. mo, cloth, $ . transcriber's notes: passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_. additional spacing after block quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. heath's pedagogical library-- Émile: or, concerning education by jean jacques rousseau extracts _containing the principal elements of pedagogy found in the first three books; with an introduction and notes by_ jules steeg, dÉputÉ, paris, france translated by eleanor worthington formerly of the cook county (ill.) normal school d. c. heath & co., publishers boston -- new york -- chicago entered, according to act of congress, in the year , by ginn, heath, & co., in the office of the librarian of congress, at washington. printed in u. s. a. translator's preface. m. jules steeg has rendered a real service to french and american teachers by his judicious selections from rousseau's Émile. for the three-volume novel of a hundred years ago, with its long disquisitions and digressions, so dear to the heart of our patient ancestors, is now distasteful to all but lovers of the curious in books. "Émile" is like an antique mirror of brass; it reflects the features of educational humanity no less faithfully than one of more modern construction. in these few pages will be found the germ of all that is useful in present systems of education, as well as most of the ever-recurring mistakes of well-meaning zealots. the eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have for many readers the disadvantage of an english style long disused. it is hoped that this attempt at a new translation may, with all its defects, have the one merit of being in the dialect of the nineteenth century, and may thus reach a wider circle of readers. introduction. jean jacques rousseau's book on education has had a powerful influence throughout europe, and even in the new world. it was in its day a kind of gospel. it had its share in bringing about the revolution which renovated the entire aspect of our country. many of the reforms so lauded by it have since then been carried into effect, and at this day seem every-day affairs. in the eighteenth century they were unheard-of daring; they were mere dreams. long before that time the immortal satirist rabelais, and, after him, michael montaigne, had already divined the truth, had pointed out serious defects in education, and the way to reform. no one followed out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing. routine went on its way. exercises of memory,--the science that consists of mere words,--pedantry, barren and vain-glorious,--held fast their "bad eminence." the child was treated as a machine, or as a man in miniature, no account being taken of his nature or of his real needs; without any greater solicitude about reasonable method--the hygiene of mind--than about the hygiene of the body. rousseau, who had educated himself, and very badly at that, was impressed with the dangers of the education of his day. a mother having asked his advice, he took up the pen to write it; and, little by little, his counsels grew into a book, a large work, a pedagogic romance. this romance, when it appeared in , created a great noise and a great scandal. the archbishop of paris, christophe de beaumont, saw in it a dangerous, mischievous work, and gave himself the trouble of writing a long encyclical letter in order to point out the book to the reprobation of the faithful. this document of twenty-seven chapters is a formal refutation of the theories advanced in "Émile." the archbishop declares that the plan of education proposed by the author, "far from being in accordance with christianity, is not fitted to form citizens, or even men." he accuses rousseau of irreligion and of bad faith; he denounces him to the temporal power as animated "by a spirit of insubordination and of revolt." he sums up by solemnly condemning the book "as containing an abominable doctrine, calculated to overthrow natural law, and to destroy the foundations of the christian religion; establishing maxims contrary to gospel morality; having a tendency to disturb the peace of empires, to stir up subjects to revolt against their sovereign; as containing a great number of propositions respectively false, scandalous, full of hatred toward the church and its ministers, derogating from the respect due to holy scripture and the traditions of the church, erroneous, impious, blasphemous, and heretical." in those days, such a condemnation was a serious matter; its consequences to an author might be terrible. rousseau had barely time to flee. his arrest was decreed by the parliament of paris, and his book was burned by the executioner. a few years before this, the author would have run the risk of being burned with his book. as a fugitive, rousseau did not find a safe retreat even in his own country. he was obliged to leave geneva, where his book was also condemned, and berne, where he had sought refuge, but whence he was driven by intolerance. he owed it to the protection of lord keith, governor of neufchâtel, a principality belonging to the king of prussia, that he lived for some time in peace in the little town of motiers in the val de travera. it was from this place that he replied to the archbishop of paris by an apology, a long-winded work in which he repels, one after another, the imputations of his accuser, and sets forth anew with greater urgency his philosophical and religious principles. this work, written on a rather confused plan but with impassioned eloquence, manifests a lofty and sincere spirit. it is said that the archbishop was deeply touched by it, and never afterward spoke of the author of "Émile" without extreme reserve, sometimes even eulogizing his character and his virtues. the renown of the book, condemned by so high an authority, was immense. scandal, by attracting public attention to it, did it good service. what was most serious and most suggestive in it was not, perhaps, seized upon; but the "craze" of which it was the object had, notwithstanding, good results. mothers were won over, and resolved to nurse their own infants; great lords began to learn handicrafts, like rousseau's imaginary pupil; physical exercises came into fashion; the spirit of innovation was forcing itself a way. it was not among ourselves, however, that the theories of rousseau were most eagerly experimented upon; it was among foreigners, in germany, in switzerland, that they found more resolute partisans, and a field more ready to receive them. three men above all the rest are noted for having popularized the pedagogic method of rousseau, and for having been inspired in their labors by "Émile." these were basedow, pestalozzi, and froebel. basedow, a german theologian, had devoted himself entirely to dogmatic controversy, until the reading of "Émile" had the effect of enlarging his mental horizon, and of revealing to him his true vocation. he wrote important books to show how rousseau's method could be applied in different departments of instruction, and founded at dessau, in , an institution to bring that method within the domain of experience. this institution, to which he gave the name of "philanthropinum," was secular in the true sense of the word; and at that time this was in itself a novelty. it was open to pupils of every belief and every nationality, and proposed to render study easy, pleasant, and expeditious to them, by following the directions of nature itself. in the first rank of his disciples may be placed campe, who succeeded him in the management of the philanthropinum. pestalozzi of zürich, one of the foremost educators of modern times, also found his whole life transformed by the reading of "Émile," which awoke in him the genius of a reformer. he himself also, in , founded a school, in order to put in practice there his progressive and professional method of teaching, which was a fruitful development of seeds sown by rousseau in his book. pestalozzi left numerous writings,--romances, treatises, reviews,--all having for sole object the popularization of his ideas and processes of education. the most distinguished among his disciples and continuators is froebel, the founder of those primary schools or asylums known by the name of "kindergartens," and the author of highly esteemed pedagogic works. these various attempts, these new and ingenious processes which, step by step, have made their way among us, and are beginning to make their workings felt, even in institutions most stoutly opposed to progress, are all traceable to rousseau's "Émile." it is therefore not too much for frenchmen, for teachers, for parents, for every one in our country who is interested in what concerns teaching, to go back to the source of so great a movement. it is true that "Émile" contains pages that have outlived their day, many odd precepts, many false ideas, many disputable and destructive theories; but at the same time we find in it so many sagacious observations, such upright counsels, suitable even to modern times, so lofty an ideal, that, in spite of everything, we cannot read and study it without profit. there is no one who does not know the book by name and by reputation; but how many parents, and even teachers, have never read it! this is because a large part of the book is no longer in accordance with the actual condition of things; because its very plan, its fundamental idea, are outside of the truth. we are obliged to exercise judgment, to make selections. some of it must be taken, some left untouched. this is what we have done in the present edition. we have not, indeed, the presumption to correct rousseau, or to substitute an expurgated "Émile" for the authentic "Émile." we have simply wished to draw the attention of the teachers of childhood to those pages of this book which have least grown old, which can still be of service, can hasten the downfall of the old systems, can emphasize, by their energy and beauty of language, methods already inaugurated and reforms already undertaken. these methods and reforms cannot be too often recommended and set in a clear light. we have desired to call to the rescue this powerful and impassioned writer, who brings to bear upon every subject he approaches the magical attractiveness of his style. there is absolutely nothing practicable in his system. it consists in isolating a child from the rest of the world; in creating expressly for him a tutor, who is a phoenix among his kind; in depriving him of father, mother, brothers, and sisters, his companions in study; in surrounding him with a perpetual charlatanism, under the pretext of following nature; and in showing him only through the veil of a factitious atmosphere the society in which he is to live. and, nevertheless, at each step it is sound reason by which we are met; by an astonishing paradox, this whimsicality is full of good sense; this dream overflows with realities; this improbable and chimerical romance contains the substance and the marrow of a rational and truly modern treatise on pedagogy. sometimes we must read between the lines, add what experience has taught us since that day, transpose into an atmosphere of open democracy these pages, written under the old order of things, but even then quivering with the new world which they were bringing to light, and for which they prepared the way. reading "Émile" in the light of modern prejudices, we can see in it more than the author wittingly put into it; but not more than logic and the instinct of genius set down there. to unfold the powers of children in due proportion to their age; not to transcend their ability; to arouse in them the sense of the observer and of the pioneer; to make them discoverers rather than imitators; to teach them accountability to themselves and not slavish dependence upon the words of others; to address ourselves more to the will than to custom, to the reason rather than to the memory; to substitute for verbal recitations lessons about things; to lead to theory by way of art; to assign to physical movements and exercises a prominent place, from the earliest hours of life up to perfect maturity; such are the principles scattered broadcast in this book, and forming a happy counterpoise to the oddities of which rousseau was perhaps most proud. he takes the child in its cradle, almost before its birth; he desires that mothers should fulfil the sacred duty of nursing them at the breast. if there must be a nurse, he knows how to choose her, how she ought to be treated, how she should be fed. he watches over the movements of the new-born child, over its first playthings. all these counsels bear the stamp of good sense and of experience; or, rather, they result from a power of divination singular enough in a man who was not willing to take care of his own children. in this way, day by day, he follows up the physical and moral development of the little being, all whose ideas and feelings he analyzes, whom he guides with wisdom and with tact throughout the mazes of a life made up of convention and artifice. we have carefully avoided suppressing the fictions of the gardener and of the mountebank; because they are characteristic of his manner, and because, after all, these pre-arranged scenes which, as they stand, are anything in the world rather than real teaching, contain, nevertheless, right notions, and opinions which may suggest to intelligent teachers processes in prudent education. such teachers will not copy the form; they will not imitate the awkward clap-trap; but, yielding to the inspiration of the dominant idea, they will, in a way more in accordance with nature, manage to thrill with life the teaching of facts, and will aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas. this is the old method of socrates, the eternal method of reason, the only method which really educates. we have brought this volume to an end with the third book of "Émile." the fourth and fifth books which follow are not within the domain of pedagogy. they contain admirable pages, which ought to be read; which occupy one of the foremost places in our literature; which deal with philosophy, with ethics, with theology; but they concern themselves with the manner of directing young men and women, and no longer with childhood. the author conducts his Émile even as far as to his betrothal; he devotes an entire book to the betrothed herself, sophie, and closes his volume only after he has united them in marriage. we will not go so far. we will leave Émile upon the confines of youth, at the time when he escapes from school, and when he is about beginning to feel that he is a man. at this difficult and critical period the teacher no longer suffices. then, above all things, is needed all the influence of the family; the father's example, the mother's clear-sighted tenderness, worthy friendships, an environment of meritorious people, of upright minds animated by lofty ideas, who attract within their orbit this ardent and inquisitive being, eager for novelty, for action, and for independence. artifices and stratagems are then no longer good for anything; they are very soon laid open to the light. all that can be required of a teacher is that he shall have furnished his pupils with a sound and strong education, drawn from the sources of reason, experience, and nature; that he shall have prepared them to learn to form judgments, to make use of their faculties, to enter valiantly upon study and upon life. it seems to us that the pages of rousseau here published may be a useful guide in the pursuit of such a result. jules steeg. book first. the first book, after some general remarks upon education, treats especially of early infancy; of the first years of life; of the care to be bestowed upon very young children; of the nursing of them, of the laws of health. he makes education begin at birth; expresses himself on the subject of the habits to be given or to be avoided; discusses the use and meaning of tears, outcries, gestures, also the language that should be used with young children, so that, from their tenderest years, the inculcating of false ideas and the giving a wrong bent of mind may be avoided. general remarks. the object of education. coming from the hand of the author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates. man obliges one soil to nourish the productions of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another; he mingles and confounds climates, elements, seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. he overturns everything, disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he desires that nothing should be as nature made it, not even man himself. to please him, man must be broken in like a horse; man must be adapted to man's own fashion, like a tree in his garden.[ ] were it not for all this, matters would be still worse. no one wishes to be a half-developed being; and in the present condition of things, a man left to himself among others from his birth would be the most deformed among them all. prejudices, authority, necessities, example, all the social institutions in which we are submerged, would stifle nature in him, and would put nothing in its place. in such a man nature would be like a shrub sprung up by chance in the midst of a highway, and jostled from all sides, bent in every direction, by the passers-by. plants are improved by cultivation, and men by education. if man were born large and strong, his size and strength would be useless to him until he had learned to use them. they would be prejudicial to him, by preventing others from thinking of assisting him; and left to himself he would die of wretchedness before he had known his own necessities. we pity the state of infancy; we do not perceive that the human race would have perished if man had not begun by being a child. we are born weak, we need strength; we are born destitute of all things, we need assistance; we are born stupid, we need judgment. all that we have not at our birth, and that we need when grown up, is given us by education. this education comes to us from nature itself, or from other men, or from circumstances. the internal development of our faculties and of our organs is the education nature gives us; the use we are taught to make of this development is the education we get from other men; and what we learn, by our own experience, about things that interest as, is the education of circumstances. each of us is therefore formed by three kinds of teachers. the pupil in whom their different lessons contradict one another is badly educated, and will never be in harmony with himself; the one in whom they all touch upon the same points and tend toward the same object advances toward that goal only, and lives accordingly. he alone is well educated. now of these three different educations, that of nature does not depend upon us; that of circumstances depends upon us only in certain respects; that of men is the only one of which we are really masters, and that solely because we think we are. for who can hope to direct entirely the speech and conduct of all who surround a child? as soon, therefore, as education becomes an art, its success is almost impossible, since the agreement of circumstances necessary to this success is independent of personal effort. all that the utmost care can do is to approach more or less nearly our object; but, for attaining it, special good fortune is needed. what is this object? that of nature itself, as has just been proved. since the agreement of the three educations is necessary to their perfection, it is toward the one for which we ourselves can do nothing that we must direct both the others. but perhaps this word "nature" has too vague a meaning; we must here try to define it. in the natural order of things, all men being equal, the vocation common to all is the state of manhood; and whoever is well trained for that, cannot fulfil badly any vocation which depends upon it. whether my pupil be destined for the army, the church, or the bar, matters little to me. before he can think of adopting the vocation of his parents, nature calls upon him to be a man. how to live is the business i wish to teach him. on leaving my hands he will not, i admit, be a magistrate, a soldier, or a priest; first of all he will be a man. all that a man ought to be he can be, at need, as well as any one else can. fortune will in vain alter his position, for he will always occupy his own. our real study is that of the state of man. he among us who best knows how to bear the good and evil fortunes of this life is, in my opinion, the best educated; whence it follows that true education consists less in precept than in practice. we begin to instruct ourselves when we begin to live; our education commences with the commencement of our life; our first teacher is our nurse. for this reason the word "education" had among the ancients another meaning which we no longer attach to it; it signified nutriment. we must then take a broader view of things, and consider in our pupil man in the abstract, man exposed to all the accidents of human life. if man were born attached to the soil of a country, if the same season continued throughout the year, if every one held his fortune by such a tenure that he could never change it, the established customs of to-day would be in certain respects good. the child educated for his position, and never leaving it, could not be exposed to the inconveniences of another. but seeing that human affairs are changeable, seeing the restless and disturbing spirit of this century, which overturns everything once in a generation, can a more senseless method be imagined than to educate a child as if he were never to leave his room, as if he were obliged to be constantly surrounded by his servants? if the poor creature takes but one step on the earth, if he comes down so much as one stair, he is ruined. this is not teaching him to endure pain; it is training him to feel it more keenly. we think only of preserving the child: this is not enough. we ought to teach him to preserve himself when he is a man; to bear the blows of fate; to brave both wealth and wretchedness; to live, if need be, among the snows of iceland or upon the burning rock of malta. in vain you take precautions against his dying,--he must die after all; and if his death be not indeed the result of those very precautions, they are none the less mistaken. it is less important to keep him from dying than it is to teach him how to live. to live is not merely to breathe, it is to act. it is to make use of our organs, of our senses, of our faculties, of all the powers which bear witness to us of our own existence. he who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has been most truly conscious of what life is. a man may have himself buried at the age of a hundred years, who died from the hour of his birth. he would have gained something by going to his grave in youth, if up to that time he had only lived. the new-born child. the new-born child needs to stretch and to move his limbs so as to draw them out of the torpor in which, rolled into a ball, they have so long remained. we do stretch his limbs, it is true, but we prevent him from moving them. we even constrain his head into a baby's cap. it seems as if we were afraid he might appear to be alive. the inaction, the constraint in which we keep his limbs, cannot fail to interfere with the circulation of the blood and of the secretions, to prevent the child from growing strong and sturdy, and to change his constitution. in regions where these extravagant precautions are not taken, the men are all large, strong, and well proportioned. countries in which children are swaddled swarm with hunchbacks, with cripples, with persons crook-kneed, stunted, rickety, deformed in all kinds of ways. for fear that the bodies of children may be deformed by free movements, we hasten to deform them by putting them into a press. of our own accord we cripple them to prevent their laming themselves. must not such a cruel constraint have an influence upon their temper as well as upon their constitution? their first feeling is a feeling of constraint and of suffering. to all their necessary movements they find only obstacles. more unfortunate than chained criminals, they make fruitless efforts, they fret themselves, they cry. do you tell me that the first sounds they make are cries? i can well believe it; you thwart them from the time they are born. the first gifts they receive from you are chains, the first treatment they undergo is torment. having nothing free but the voice, why should they not use it in complaints? they cry on account of the suffering you cause them; if you were pinioned in the same way, your own cries would be louder. whence arises this unreasonable custom of swaddling children? from an unnatural custom. since the time when mothers, despising their first duty, no longer wish to nurse their own children at the breast, it has been necessary to intrust the little ones to hired women. these, finding themselves in this way the mothers of strange children, concerning whom the voice of nature is silent to them, seek only to spare themselves annoyance. a child at liberty would require incessant watching; but after he is well swaddled, they throw him into a corner without troubling themselves at all on account of his cries. provided there are no proofs of the nurse's carelessness, provided that the nursling does not break his legs or his arms, what does it matter, after all, that he is pining away, or that he continues feeble for the rest of his life? his limbs are preserved at the expense of his life, and whatever happens, the nurse is held free from blame. it is pretended that children, when left free, may put themselves into bad positions, and make movements liable to injure the proper conformation of their limbs. this is one of the weak arguments of our false wisdom, which no experience has ever confirmed. of that multitude of children who, among nations more sensible than ourselves, are brought up in the full freedom of their limbs, not one is seen to wound or lame himself. they cannot give their movements force enough to make them dangerous; and when they assume a hurtful position, pain soon warns them to change it. we have not yet brought ourselves to the point of swaddling puppies or kittens; do we see that any inconvenience results to them from this negligence? children are heavier, indeed; but in proportion they are weaker. they can scarcely move themselves at all; how can they lame themselves? if laid upon the back they would die in that position, like the tortoise, without being able ever to turn themselves again. [this want of intelligence in the care bestowed upon young children is seen particularly in those mothers who give themselves no concern about their own, do not themselves nurse them, intrust them to hireling nurses. this custom is fatal to all; first to the children and finally to families, where barrenness becomes the rule, where woman sacrifices to her own convenience the joys and the duties of motherhood.] would you recall every one to his highest duties? begin with the mothers; you will be astonished at the changes you will effect. from this first depravity all others come in succession. the entire moral order is changed; natural feeling is extinguished in all hearts. within our homes there is less cheerfulness; the touching sight of a growing family no longer attaches the husband or attracts the attention of strangers. the mother whose children are not seen is less respected. there is no such thing as a family living together; habit no longer strengthens the ties of blood. there are no longer fathers and mothers and children and brothers and sisters. they all scarcely know one another; how then should they love one another? each one thinks only of himself. when home is a melancholy, lonely place, we must indeed go elsewhere to enjoy ourselves. but let mothers only vouchsafe to nourish their children,[ ] and our manners will reform themselves; the feelings of nature will re-awaken in all hearts. the state will be repeopled; this chief thing, this one thing will bring all the rest into order again. the attractions of home life present the best antidote to bad morals. the bustling life of little children, considered so tiresome, becomes pleasant; it makes the father and the mother more necessary to one another, more dear to one another; it draws closer between them the conjugal tie. when the family is sprightly and animated, domestic cares form the dearest occupation of the wife and the sweetest recreation of the husband. thus the correction of this one abuse would soon result in a general reform; nature would resume all her rights. when women are once more true mothers, men will become true fathers and husbands. if mothers are not real mothers, children are not real children toward them. their duties to one another are reciprocal, and if these be badly fulfilled on the one side, they will be neglected on the other side. the child ought to love his mother before he knows that it is his duty to love her. if the voice of natural affection be not strengthened by habit and by care, it will grow dumb even in childhood; and thus the heart dies, so to speak, before it is born. thus from the outset we are beyond the pale of nature. there is an opposite way by which a woman goes beyond it; that is, when, instead of neglecting a mother's cares, she carries them to excess; when she makes her child her idol. she increases and fosters his weakness to prevent him from feeling it. hoping to shelter him from the laws of nature, she wards from him shocks of pain. she does not consider how, for the sake of preserving him for a moment from some inconveniences, she is heaping upon his head future accidents and perils; nor how cruel is the caution which prolongs the weakness of childhood in one who must bear the fatigues of a grown-up man. the fable says that, to render her son invulnerable, thetis plunged him into the styx. this allegory is beautiful and clear. the cruel mothers of whom i am speaking do far otherwise; by plunging their children into effeminacy they open their pores to ills of every kind, to which, when grown up, they fall a certain prey. watch nature carefully, and follow the paths she traces out for you. she gives children continual exercise; she strengthens their constitution by ordeals of every kind; she teaches them early what pain and trouble mean. the cutting of their teeth gives them fever, sharp fits of colic throw them into convulsions, long coughing chokes them, worms torment them, repletion corrupts their blood, different leavens fermenting there cause dangerous eruptions. nearly the whole of infancy is sickness and danger; half the children born into the world die before their eighth year. these trials past, the child has gained strength, and as soon as he can use life, its principle becomes more assured. this is the law of nature. why do you oppose her? do you not see that in thinking to correct her you destroy her work and counteract the effect of all her cares? in your opinion, to do without what she is doing within is to redouble the danger. on the contrary, it is really to avert, to mitigate that danger. experience teaches that more children who are delicately reared die than others. provided we do not exceed the measure of their strength, it is better to employ it than to hoard it. give them practice, then, in the trials they will one day have to endure. inure their bodies to the inclemencies of the seasons, of climates, of elements; to hunger, thirst, fatigue; plunge them into the water of the styx. before the habits of the body are acquired we can give it such as we please without risk. but when once it has reached its full vigor, any alteration is perilous to its well-being. a child will endure changes which a man could not bear. the fibres of the former, soft and pliable, take without effort the bent we give them; those of man, more hardened, do not without violence change those they have received. we may therefore make a child robust without exposing his life or his health; and even if there were some risk we still ought not to hesitate. since there are risks inseparable from human life, can we do better than to throw them back upon that period of life when they are least disadvantageous? a child becomes more precious as he advances in age. to the value of his person is added that of the cares he has cost us; if we lose his life, his own consciousness of death is added to our sense of loss. above all things, then, in watching over his preservation we must think of the future. we must arm him against the misfortunes of youth before he has reached them. for, if the value of life increases up to the age when life becomes useful, what folly it is to spare the child some troubles, and to heap them upon the age of reason! are these the counsels of a master? in all ages suffering is the lot of man. even to the cares of self-preservation pain is joined. happy are we, who in childhood are acquainted with only physical misfortunes--misfortunes far less cruel, less painful than others; misfortunes which far more rarely make us renounce life. we do not kill ourselves on account of the pains of gout; seldom do any but those of the mind produce despair.[ ] we pity the lot of infancy, and it is our own lot that we ought to pity. our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves. at birth a child cries; his earliest infancy is spent in crying. sometimes he is tossed, he is petted, to appease him; sometimes he is threatened, beaten, to make him keep quiet. we either do as he pleases, or else we exact from him what we please; we either submit to his whims, or make him submit to ours. there is no middle course; he must either give or receive orders. thus his first ideas are those of absolute rule and of slavery. before he knows how to speak, he commands; before he is able to act, he obeys; and sometimes he is punished before he knows what his faults are, or rather, before he is capable of committing them. thus do we early pour into his young heart the passions that are afterward imputed to nature; and, after having taken pains to make him wicked, we complain of finding him wicked. a child passes six or seven years of his life in this manner in the hands of women, the victim of his own caprice and of theirs. after having made him learn this and that,--after having loaded his memory either with words he cannot understand, or with facts which are of no use to him,--after having stifled his natural disposition by the passions we have created, we put this artificial creature into the hands of a tutor who finishes the development of the artificial germs he finds already formed, and teaches him everything except to know himself, everything except to know how to live and how to make himself happy. finally, when this enslaved child, this little tyrant, full of learning and devoid of sense, enfeebled alike in mind and body, is cast upon the world, he there by his unfitness, by his pride, and by all his vices, makes us deplore human wretchedness and perversity. we deceive ourselves; this is the man our whims have created. nature makes men by a different process. do you then wish him to preserve his original form? preserve it from the moment he enters the world. as soon as he is born take possession of him, and do not leave him until he is a man. without this you will never succeed. as the mother is the true nurse, the father is the true teacher. let them be of one mind as to the order in which their functions are fulfilled, as well as in regard to their plan; let the child pass from the hands of the one into the hands of the other. he will be better educated by a father who is judicious, even though of moderate attainments, than by the most skilful master in the world. for zeal will supplement talent better than talent can supply what only zeal can give. a father, when he brings his children into existence and supports them, has, in so doing, fulfilled only a third part of his task. to the human race he owes men; to society, men fitted for society; to the state, citizens. every man who can pay this triple debt, and does not pay it is a guilty man; and if he pays it by halves, he is perhaps more guilty still. he who cannot fulfil the duties of a father has no right to be a father. not poverty, nor severe labor, nor human respect can release him from the duty of supporting his children and of educating them himself. readers, you may believe my words. i prophesy to any one who has natural feeling and neglects these sacred duties,--that he will long shed bitter tears over this fault, and that for those tears he will find no consolation.[ ] [it being supposed that the father is unable or unwilling to charge himself personally with the education of his son, he must charge a third person with it, must seek out a master, a teacher for the child.] the qualifications of a good tutor are very freely discussed. the first qualification i should require in him, and this one presupposes many others, is, that he shall not be capable of selling himself. there are employments so noble that we cannot fulfil them for money without showing ourselves unworthy to fulfil them. such an employment is that of a soldier; such a one is that of a teacher. who, then, shall educate my child? i have told you already,--yourself. i cannot! then make for yourself a friend who can. i see no other alternative. a teacher! what a great soul he ought to be! truly, to form a man, one must be either himself a father, or else something more than human. and this is the office you calmly entrust to hirelings![ ] the earliest education. children's first impressions are purely those of feeling; they perceive only pleasure and pain. unable either to move about, or to grasp anything with their hands, they need a great deal of time to form sensations which represent, and so make them aware of objects outside of themselves. but, during all this time, while these objects are extending, and, as it were, receding from their eyes, assuming, to them, form and dimension, the constantly recurring sensations begin to subject the little creatures to the sway of habit. we see their eyes incessantly turning toward the light; and, if it comes to them from one side, unwittingly taking the direction of that side; so that their faces ought to be carefully turned toward the light, lest they become squint-eyed, or accustom themselves to look awry. they should, also, early accustom themselves to darkness, or else they will cry and scream as soon as they are left in the dark. food and sleep, if too exactly proportioned, become necessary to them after the lapse of the same intervals; and soon the desire arises not from necessity, but from habit. or rather, habit adds a new want to those of nature, and this must be prevented. the only habit a child should be allowed to form is to contract no habits whatever. let him not be carried upon one arm more than upon another; let him not be accustomed to put forth one hand rather than the other, or to use it oftener; nor to desire to eat, to sleep, to act in any way, at regular hours; nor to be unable to stay alone either by night or by day. prepare long beforehand for the time when he shall freely use all his strength. do this by leaving his body under the control of its natural bent, by fitting him to be always master of himself, and to carry out his own will in everything as soon as he has a will of his own. since the only kinds of objects presented to him are likely to make him either timid or courageous, why should not his education begin before he speaks or understands? i would habituate him to seeing new objects, though they be ugly, repulsive, or singular. but let this be by degrees, and from a distance, until he has become accustomed to them, and, from seeing them handled by others, shall at last handle them himself. if during his infancy he has seen without fear frogs, serpents, crawfishes, he will, when grown up, see without shrinking any animal that may be shown him. for one who daily sees frightful objects, there are none such. all children are afraid of masks. i begin by showing Émile the mask of a pleasant face. by and by some one puts the mask upon his own face, so that the child can see it. i begin to laugh; every one else laughs, and the child with the rest. by degrees i familiarize him with less comely masks, and finally with really hideous ones. if i have managed the process well, he will, far from being frightened at the last mask, laugh at it as he laughed at the first. after that, i shall not fear his being frightened by any one with a mask. when, in the farewell scene between hector and andromache, the little astyanax, terrified at the plume floating from a helmet, fails to recognize his father, throws himself, crying, upon his nurse's breast, and wins from his mother a smile bright with tears, what ought to be done to soothe his fear? precisely what hector does. he places the helmet on the ground, and then caresses his child. at a more tranquil moment, this should not have been all. they should have drawn near the helmet, played with its plumes, caused the child to handle them. at last the nurse should have lifted the helmet and laughingly set it on her own head--if, indeed, the hand of a woman dared touch the armor of hector. if i wish to familiarize Émile with the noise of fire-arms, i first burn some powder in a pistol. the quickly vanishing flame, the new kind of lightning, greatly pleases him. i repeat the process, using more powder. by degrees i put into the pistol a small charge, without ramming it down; then a larger charge; finally, i accustom him to the noise of a gun, to bombs, to cannon-shots, to the most terrific noises. i have noticed that children are rarely afraid of thunder, unless, indeed, the thunder-claps are so frightful as actually to wound the organ of hearing. otherwise, they fear it only when they have been taught that thunder sometimes wounds or kills. when reason begins to affright them, let habit reassure them. by a slow and well conducted process the man or the child is rendered fearless of everything. in this outset of life, while memory and imagination are still inactive, the child pays attention only to what actually affects his senses. the first materials of his knowledge are his sensations. if, therefore, these are presented to him in suitable order, his memory can hereafter present them to his understanding in the same order. but as he attends to his sensations only, it will at first suffice to show him very clearly the connection between these sensations, and the objects which give rise to them. he is eager to touch everything, to handle everything. do not thwart this restless desire; it suggests to him a very necessary apprenticeship. it is thus he learns to feel the heat and coldness, hardness and softness, heaviness and lightness of bodies; to judge of their size, their shape, and all their sensible qualities, by looking, by touching, by listening; above all, by comparing the results of sight with those of touch, estimating with the eye the sensation a thing produces upon the fingers. by movement alone we learn the existence of things which are not ourselves; and it is by our own movements alone that we gain the idea of extension. because the child has not this idea, he stretches out his hand indifferently to seize an object which touches him, or one which is a hundred paces distant from him. the effort he makes in doing this appears to you a sign of domination, an order he gives the object to come nearer, or to you to bring it to him. it is nothing of the kind. it means only that the object seen first within the brain, then upon the eye, is now seen at arm's length, and that he does not conceive of any distance beyond his reach. be careful, then, to walk often with him, to transport him from one place to another, to let him feel the change of position, and, in this way to teach him how to judge of distances. when he begins to know them, change the plan; carry him only where it is convenient for you to do so, and not wherever it pleases him. for as soon as he is no longer deceived by the senses, his attempts arise from another cause. this change is remarkable and demands explanation. the uneasiness arising from our wants expresses itself by signs whenever help in supplying these wants is needed; hence the cries of children. they cry a great deal, and this is natural. since all their sensations are those of feeling, children enjoy them in silence, when the sensations are pleasant; otherwise they express them in their own language, and ask relief. now as long as children are awake they cannot be in a state of indifference; they either sleep or are moved by pleasure and pain. all our languages are the result of art. whether there is a natural language, common to all mankind, has long been a matter of investigation. without doubt there is such a language, and it is the one that children utter before they know how to talk. this language is not articulate, but it is accentuated, sonorous, intelligible. the using of our own language has led us to neglect this, even so far as to forget it altogether. let us study children, and we shall soon acquire it again from them. nurses are our teachers in this language. they understand all their nurslings say, they answer them, they hold really connected dialogues with them. and, although they pronounce words, these words are entirely useless; the child understands, not the meaning of the words, but the accent which accompanies them. to the language of the voice is added the no less forcible language of gesture. this gesture is not that of children's feeble hands; it is that seen in their faces. it is astonishing to see how much expression these immature countenances already have. from moment to moment, their features change with inconceivable quickness. on them you see the smile, the wish, the fear, spring into life, and pass away, like so many lightning flashes. each time you seem to see a different countenance. they certainly have much more flexible facial muscles than ours. on the other hand, their dull eyes tell us almost nothing at all. such is naturally the character of their expression when all their wants are physical. sensations are made known by grimaces, sentiments by looks. as the first state of man is wretchedness and weakness, so his first utterances are complaints and tears. the child feels his need and cannot satisfy it; he implores aid from others by crying. if he is hungry or thirsty, he cries; if he is too cold or too warm, he cries; if he wishes to move or to be kept at rest, he cries; if he wishes to sleep or to be moved about, he cries. the less control he has of his own mode of living, the oftener he asks those about him to change it. he has but one language, because he feels, so to speak, but one sort of discomfort. in the imperfect condition of his organs, he does not distinguish their different impressions; all ills produce in him only a sensation of pain. from this crying, regarded as so little worthy of attention, arises the first relation of man to all that surrounds him; just here is forged the first link of that long chain which constitutes social order. when the child cries, he is ill at ease; he has some want that he cannot satisfy. we examine into it, we search for the want, find it, and relieve it. when we cannot find it, or relieve it, the crying continues. we are annoyed by it; we caress the child to make him keep quiet, we rock him and sing to him, to lull him asleep. if he persists, we grow impatient; we threaten him; brutal nurses sometimes strike him. these are strange lessons for him upon his entrance into life. the first crying of children is a prayer. if we do not heed it well, this crying soon becomes a command. they begin by asking our aid; they end by compelling us to serve them. thus from their very weakness, whence comes, at first, their feeling of dependence, springs afterward the idea of empire, and of commanding others. but as this idea is awakened less by their own wants, than by the fact that we are serving them, those moral results whose immediate cause is not in nature, are here perceived. we therefore see why, even at this early age, it is important to discern the hidden purpose which dictates the gesture or the cry. when the child stretches forth his hand with an effort, but without a sound, he thinks he can reach some object, because he does not properly estimate its distance; he is mistaken. but if, while stretching out his hand, he complains and cries, he is no longer deceived as to the distance. he is commanding the object to come to him, or is directing you to bring it to him. in the first case, carry him to the object slowly, and with short steps; in the second case, do not even appear to understand him. it is worth while to habituate him early not to command people, for he is not their master; nor things, for they cannot understand him. so, when a child wants something he sees, and we mean to give it to him, it is better to carry him to the object than to fetch the object to him. from this practice of ours he will learn a lesson suited to his age, and there is no better way of suggesting this lesson to him. maxims to keep us true to nature. reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. conscience, which makes us love the one and hate the other, is independent of reason, but cannot grow strong without its aid. before reaching years of reason, we do good and evil unconsciously. there is no moral character in our actions, although there sometimes is in our feeling toward those actions of others which relate to us. a child likes to disturb everything he sees; he breaks, he shatters everything within his reach; he lays hold of a bird just as he would lay hold of a stone, and strangles it without knowing what he is doing. why is this? at first view, philosophy would account for it on the ground of vices natural to us--pride, the spirit of domination, self-love, the wickedness of mankind. it would perhaps add, that the sense of his own weakness makes the child eager to do things requiring strength, and so prove to himself his own power. but see that old man, infirm and broken down, whom the cycle of human life brings back to the weakness of childhood. not only does he remain immovable and quiet, but he wishes everything about him to be in the same condition. the slightest change disturbs and disquiets him; he would like to see stillness reigning everywhere. how could the same powerlessness, joined to the same passions, produce such different effects in the two ages, if the primary cause were not changed? and where can we seek for this difference of cause, unless it be in the physical condition of the two individuals? the active principle common to the two is developing in the one, and dying out in the other; the one is growing, and the other is wearing itself out; the one is tending toward life, and the other toward death. failing activity concentrates itself in the heart of the old man; in the child it is superabounding, and reaches outward; he seems to feel within him life enough to animate all that surrounds him. whether he makes or unmakes matters little to him. it is enough that he changes the condition of things, and that every change is an action. if he seems more inclined to destroy things, it is not out of perverseness, but because the action which creates is always slow; and that which destroys, being more rapid, better suits his natural sprightliness. while the author of nature gives children this active principle, he takes care that it shall do little harm; for he leaves them little power to indulge it. but no sooner do they look upon those about them as instruments which it is their business to set in motion, than they make use of them in following their own inclinations and in making up for their own want of strength. in this way they become disagreeable, tyrannical, imperious, perverse, unruly; a development not arising from a natural spirit of domination, but creating such a spirit. for no very long experience is requisite in teaching how pleasant it is to act through others, and to need only move one's tongue to set the world in motion. as we grow up, we gain strength, we become less uneasy and restless, we shut ourselves more within ourselves. the soul and the body put themselves in equilibrium, as it were, and nature requires no more motion than is necessary for out preservation. but the wish to command outlives the necessity from which, it sprang; power to control others awakens and gratifies self-love, and habit makes it strong. thus need gives place to whim; thus do prejudices and opinions first root themselves within us. the principle once understood, we see clearly the point at which we leave the path of nature. let us discover what we ought to do, to keep within it. far from having too much strength, children have not even enough for all that nature demands of them. we ought, then, to leave them the free use of all natural strength which they cannot misuse. first maxim. we must aid them, supplying whatever they lack in intelligence, in strength, in all that belongs to physical necessity. second maxim. in helping them, we must confine ourselves to what is really of use to them, yielding nothing to their whims or unreasonable wishes. for their own caprice will not trouble them unless we ourselves create it; it is not a natural thing. third maxim. we must study carefully their language and their signs, so that, at an age when they cannot dissemble, we may judge which of their desires spring from nature itself, and which of them from opinion. fourth maxim. the meaning of these rules is, to allow children more personal freedom and less authority; to let them do more for themselves, and exact less from others. thus accustomed betimes to desire only what they can obtain or do for themselves, they will feel less keenly the want of whatever is not within their own power. here there is another and very important reason for leaving children absolutely free as to body and limbs, with the sole precaution of keeping them from the danger of falling, and of putting out of their reach everything that can injure them. doubtless a child whose body and arms are free will cry less than one bound fast in swaddling clothes. he who feels only physical wants cries only when he suffers, and this is a great advantage. for then we know exactly when he requires help, and we ought not to delay one moment in giving him help, if possible. but if you cannot relieve him, keep quiet; do not try to soothe him by petting him. your caresses will not cure his colic; but he will remember what he has to do in order to be petted. and if he once discovers that he can, at will, busy you about him, he will have become your master; the mischief is done. if children were not so much thwarted in their movements, they would not cry so much; if we were less annoyed by their crying, we would take less pains to hush them; if they were not so often threatened or caressed, they would be less timid or less stubborn, and more truly themselves as nature made them. it is not so often by letting children cry, as by hastening to quiet them, that we make them rupture themselves. the proof of this is that the children most neglected are less subject than others to this infirmity. i am far from wishing them to be neglected, however. on the contrary, we ought to anticipate their wants, and not wait to be notified of these by the children's crying. yet i would not have them misunderstand the cares we bestow on them. why should they consider crying a fault, when they find that it avails so much? knowing the value of their silence, they will be careful not to be lavish of it. they will, at last, make it so costly that we can no longer pay for it; and then it is that by crying without success they strain, weaken, and kill themselves. the long crying fits of a child who is not compressed or ill, or allowed to want for anything, are from habit and obstinacy. they are by no means the work of nature, but of the nurse, who, because she cannot endure the annoyance, multiplies it, without reflecting that by stilling the child to-day, he is induced to cry the more to-morrow. the only way to cure or prevent this habit is to pay no attention to it. no one, not even a child, likes to take unnecessary trouble. they are stubborn in their attempts; but if you have more firmness than they have obstinacy, they are discouraged, and do not repeat the attempt. thus we spare them some tears, and accustom them to cry only when pain forces them to it. nevertheless when they do cry from caprice or stubbornness, a sure way to prevent their continuing is, to turn their attention to some agreeable and striking object, and so make them forget their desire to cry. in this art most nurses excel, and when skilfully employed, it is very effective. but it is highly important that the child should not know of our intention to divert him, and that he should amuse himself without at all thinking we have him in mind. in this all nurses are unskilful. all children are weaned too early. the proper time is indicated by their teething. this process is usually painful and distressing. by a mechanical instinct the child, at that time, carries to his mouth and chews everything he holds. we think we make the operation easier by giving him for a plaything some hard substance, such as ivory or coral. i think we are mistaken. far from softening the gums, these hard bodies, when applied, render them hard and callous, and prepare the way for a more painful and distressing laceration. let us always take instinct for guide. we never see puppies try their growing teeth upon flints, or iron, or bones, but upon wood, or leather, or rags,--upon soft materials, which give way, and on which the tooth impresses itself. we no longer aim at simplicity, even where children are concerned. golden and silver bells, corals, crystals, toys of every price, of every sort. what useless and mischievous affectations they are! let there be none of them,--no bells, no toys. a little twig covered with its own leaves and fruit,--a poppy-head, in which the seeds can be heard rattling,--a stick of liquorice he can suck and chew, these will amuse a child quite as well as the splendid baubles, and will not disadvantage him by accustoming him to luxury from his very birth. language. from the time they are born, children hear people speak. they are spoken to not only before they understand what is said to them, but before they can repeat the sounds they hear. their organs, still benumbed, adapt themselves only by degrees to imitating the sounds dictated to them, and it is not even certain that these sounds are borne to their ears at first as distinctly as to ours. i do not disapprove of a nurse's amusing the child with songs, and with blithe and varied tones. but i do disapprove of her perpetually deafening him with a multitude of useless words, of which he understands only the tone she gives them. i would like the first articulate sounds he must hear to be few in number, easy, distinct, often repeated. the words they form should represent only material objects which can be shown him. our unfortunate readiness to content ourselves with words that have no meaning to us whatever, begins earlier than we suppose. even as in his swaddling-clothes the child hears his nurse's babble, he hears in class the verbiage of his teacher. it strikes me that if he were to be so brought up that he could not understand it at all, he would be very well instructed.[ ] reflections crowd upon us when we set about discussing the formation of children's language, and their baby talk itself. in spite of us, they always learn to speak by the same process, and all our philosophical speculations about it are entirely useless. they seem, at first, to have a grammar adapted to their own age, although its rules of syntax are more general than ours. and if we were to pay close attention to them, we should be astonished at the exactness with which they follow certain analogies, very faulty if you will, but very regular, that are displeasing only because harsh, or because usage does not recognize them. it is unbearable pedantry, and a most useless labor, to attempt correcting in children every little fault against usage; they never fail themselves to correct these faults in time. always speak correctly in their presence; order it so that they are never so happy with any one as with you; and rest assured their language will insensibly be purified by your own, without your having ever reproved them. but another error, which has an entirely different bearing on the matter, and is no less easy to prevent, is our being over-anxious to make them speak, as if we feared they might not of their own accord learn to do so. our injudicious haste has an effect exactly contrary to what we wish. on account of it they learn more slowly and speak more indistinctly. the marked attention paid to everything they utter makes it unnecessary for them to articulate distinctly. as they hardly condescend to open their lips, many retain throughout life an imperfect pronunciation and a confused manner of speaking, which makes them nearly unintelligible. children who are too much urged to speak have not time sufficient for learning either to pronounce carefully or to understand thoroughly what they are made to say. if, instead, they are left to themselves, they at first practise using the syllables they can most readily utter; and gradually attaching to these some meaning that can be gathered from their gestures, they give you their own words before acquiring yours. thus they receive yours only after they understand them. not being urged to use them, they notice carefully what meaning you give them; and, when they are sure of this, they adopt it as their own. the greatest evil arising from our haste to make children speak before they are old enough is not that our first talks with them, and the first words they use, have no meaning to them, but that they have a meaning different from ours, without our being able to perceive it. thus, while they seem to be answering us very correctly, they are really addressing us without understanding us, and without our understanding them. to such ambiguous discourse is due the surprise we sometimes feel at their sayings, to which we attach ideas the children themselves have not dreamed of. this inattention of ours to the true meaning words have for children seems to me the cause of their first mistakes, and these errors, even after children are cured of them, influence their turn of mind for the remainder of their life. the first developments of childhood occur almost all at once. the child learns to speak, to eat, to walk, nearly at the same time. this is, properly, the first epoch of his life. before then he is nothing more than he was before he was born; he has not a sentiment, not an idea; he scarcely has sensations; he does not feel even his own existence. [ ] it is useless to enlarge upon the absurdity of this theory, and upon the flagrant contradiction into which rousseau allows himself to fall. if he is right, man ought to be left without education, and the earth without cultivation. this would not be even the savage state. but want of space forbids us to pause at each like statement of our author, who at once busies himself in nullifying it. [ ] the voice of rousseau was heard. the nursing of children by their own mothers, which had gone into disuse as vulgar and troublesome, became a fashion. great ladies prided themselves upon returning to the usage of nature, and infants were brought in with the dessert to give an exhibition of maternal tenderness. this affectation died out, but in most families the good and wholesome custom of motherhood was retained. this page of rousseau's contributed its share to the happy result. [ ] this remark is not a just one. how often have we seen unhappy creatures disgusted with life because of some dreadful and incurable malady? it is true that suicide, being an act of madness, is more frequently caused by those troubles which imagination delights itself in magnifying up to the point of insanity. [ ] this is an allusion to one of the most unfortunate episodes in the life of rousseau,--his abandoning of the children whom thérèse levasseur bore him, and whom he sent to a foundling hospital because he felt within him neither courage to labor for their support, nor capacity to educate them. sad practical defect in this teacher of theories of education! [ ] for the particular example of education which he supposes, rousseau creates a tutor whom he consecrates absolutely, exclusively, to the work. he desires one so perfect that he calls him a prodigy. let us not blame him for this. the ideal of those who assume the noble and difficult office of a teacher of childhood cannot be placed too high. as to the pupil, rousseau imagines a child of average ability, in easy circumstances, and of robust health. he makes him an only son and an orphan, so that no family vicissitudes may disturb the logic of his plan. all this may be summed up by saying that he considers the child in himself with regard to his individual development, and without regard to his relations to ordinary life. this at the same time renders his task easy, and deprives him of an important element of education. [ ] no doubt this sarcasm is applicable to those teachers who talk so as to say nothing. a teacher ought, on the contrary, to speak only so as to be understood by the child. he ought to adapt himself to the child's capacity; to employ no useless or conventional expressions; his language ought to arouse curiosity and to impart light. book second. the second book takes the child at about the fifth year, and conducts him to about the twelfth year. he is no longer the little child; he is the young boy. his education becomes more important. it consists not in studies, in reading or writing, or in duties, but in well-chosen plays, in ingenious recreations, in well-directed experiments. there should be no exaggerated precautions, and, on the other hand, no harshness, no punishments. we must love the child, and encourage his playing. to make him realize his weakness and the narrow limits within which it can work, to keep the child dependent only on circumstances, will suffice, without ever making him feel the yoke of the master. the best education is accomplished in the country. teaching by means of things. criticism of the ordinary method. education of the senses by continually exercising them. avoid taking too many precautions. this is the second period of life, and the one at which, properly speaking, infancy ends; for the words _infans_ and _puer_ are not synonymous.[ ] the first is included in the second, and means _one who cannot speak_: thus in valerius maximus we find the expression _puerum infantem_. but i shall continue to employ the word according to the usage of the french language, until i am describing the age for which there are other names. when children begin to speak, they cry less often. this step in advance is natural; one language is substituted for another. as soon as they can utter their complaints in words, why should they cry, unless the suffering is too keen to be expressed by words? if they then continue to cry, it is the fault of those around them. after Émile has once said, "it hurts me," only acute suffering can force him to cry. if the child is physically so delicate and sensitive that he naturally cries about nothing, i will soon exhaust the fountain of his tears, by making them ineffectual. so long as he cries, i will not go to him; as soon as he stops, i will run to him. very soon his method of calling me will be to keep quiet, or at the utmost, to utter a single cry. children judge of the meaning of signs by their palpable effect; they have no other rule. whatever harm a child may do himself, he very rarely cries when alone, unless with the hope of being heard. if he fall, if he bruise his head, if his nose bleed, if he cut his finger, i should, instead of bustling about him with a look of alarm, remain quiet, at least for a little while. the mischief is done; he must endure it; all my anxiety will only serve to frighten him more, and to increase his sensitiveness. after all, when we hurt ourselves, it is less the shock which pains us than the fright. i will spare him at least this last pang; for he will certainly estimate his hurt as he sees me estimate it. if he sees me run anxiously to comfort and to pity him, he will think himself seriously hurt; but if he sees me keep my presence of mind, he will soon recover his own, and will think the pain cured when he no longer feels it. at his age we learn our first lessons in courage; and by fearlessly enduring lighter sufferings, we gradually learn to bear the heavier ones. far from taking care that Émile does not hurt himself, i shall be dissatisfied if he never does, and so grows up unacquainted with pain. to suffer is the first and most necessary thing for him to learn. children are little and weak, apparently that they may learn these important lessons. if a child fall his whole length, he will not break his leg; if he strike himself with a stick, he will not break his arm; if he lay hold of an edged tool, he does not grasp it tightly, and will not cut himself very badly. our pedantic mania for instructing constantly leads us to teach children what they can learn far better for themselves, and to lose sight of what we alone can teach them. is there anything more absurd than the pains we take in teaching them to walk? as if we had ever seen one, who, through his nurse's negligence, did not know how to walk when grown! on the contrary, how many people do we see moving awkwardly all their lives because they have been badly taught how to walk! Émile shall have no head-protectors, nor carriages, nor go-carts, nor leading-strings. or at least from the time when he begins to be able to put one foot before the other, he shall not be supported, except over paved places; and he shall be hurried over these. instead of letting him suffocate in the exhausted air indoors, let him be taken every day, far out into the fields. there let him run about, play, fall down a hundred times a day; the oftener the better, as he will the sooner learn to get up again by himself. the boon of freedom is worth many scars. my pupil will have many bruises, but to make amends for that, he will be always light-hearted. though your pupils are less often hurt, they are continually thwarted, fettered; they are always unhappy. i doubt whether the advantage be on their side. the development of their physical strength makes complaint less necessary to children. when able to help themselves, they have less need of the help of others. knowledge to direct their strength grows with that strength. at this second stage the life of the individual properly begins; he now becomes conscious of his own being. memory extends this feeling of personal identity to every moment of his existence; he becomes really one, the same one, and consequently capable of happiness or of misery. we must therefore, from this moment, begin to regard him as a moral being. childhood is to be loved. although the longest term of human life, and the probability, at any given age, of reaching this term, have been computed, nothing is more uncertain than the continuance of each individual life: very few attain the maximum. the greatest risks in life are at its beginning; the less one has lived, the less prospect he has of living. of all children born, only about half reach youth; and it is probable that your pupil may never attain to manhood. what, then, must be thought of that barbarous education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, loads the child with every description of fetters, and begins, by making him wretched, to prepare for him some far-away indefinite happiness he may never enjoy! even supposing the object of such an education reasonable, how can we without indignation see the unfortunate creatures bowed under an insupportable yoke, doomed to constant labor like so many galley-slaves, without any certainty that all this toil will ever be of use to them! the years that ought to be bright and cheerful are passed in tears amid punishments, threats, and slavery. for his own good, the unhappy child is tortured; and the death thus summoned will seize on him unperceived amidst all this melancholy preparation. who knows how many children die on account of the extravagant prudence of a father or of a teacher? happy in escaping his cruelty, it gives them one advantage; they leave without regret a life which they know only from its darker side.[ ] o men, be humane! it is your highest duty; be humane to all conditions of men, to every age, to everything not alien to mankind. what higher wisdom is there for you than humanity? love childhood; encourage its sports, its pleasures, its lovable instincts. who among us has not at times looked back with regret to the age when a smile was continually on our lips, when the soul was always at peace? why should we rob these little innocent creatures of the enjoyment of a time so brief, so transient, of a boon so precious, which they cannot misuse? why will you fill with bitterness and sorrow these fleeting years which can no more return to them than to you? do you know, you fathers, the moment when death awaits your children? do not store up for yourselves remorse, by taking from them the brief moments nature has given them. as soon as they can appreciate the delights of existence, let them enjoy it. at whatever hour god may call them, let them not die without having tasted life at all. you answer, "it is the time to correct the evil tendencies of the human heart. in childhood, when sufferings are less keenly felt, they ought to be multiplied, so that fewer of them will have to be encountered during the age of reason." but who has told you that it is your province to make this arrangement, and that all these fine instructions, with which you burden the tender mind of a child, will not one day be more pernicious than useful to him? who assures you that you spare him anything when you deal him afflictions with so lavish a hand? why do you cause him more unhappiness than he can bear, when you are not sure that the future will compensate him for these present evils? and how can you prove that the evil tendencies of which you pretend to cure him will not arise from your mistaken care rather than from nature itself! unhappy foresight, which renders a creature actually miserable, in the hope, well or ill founded, of one day making him happy! if these vulgar reasoners confound license with liberty, and mistake a spoiled child for a child who is made happy, let us teach them to distinguish the two. to avoid being misled, let us remember what really accords with our present abilities. humanity has its place in the general order of things; childhood has its place in the order of human life. mankind must be considered in the individual man, and childhood in the individual child. to assign each his place, and to establish him in it--to direct human passions as human nature will permit--is all we can do for his welfare. the rest depends on outside influences not under our control. neither slaves nor tyrants. he alone has his own way who, to compass it, does not need the arm of another to lengthen his own. consequently freedom, and not authority, is the greatest good. a man who desires only what he can do for himself is really free to do whatever he pleases. from this axiom, if it be applied to the case of childhood, all the rules of education will follow. a wise man understands how to remain in his own place; but a child, who does not know his, cannot preserve it. as matters stand, there are a thousand ways of leaving it. those who govern him are to keep him in it, and this is not an easy task. he ought to be neither an animal nor a man, but a child. he should feel his weakness, and yet not suffer from it. he should depend, not obey; he should demand, not command. he is subject to others only by reason of his needs, and because others see better than he what is useful to him, what will contribute to his well-being or will impair it. no one, not even his father, has a right to command a child to do what is of no use to him whatever. accustom the child to depend only on circumstances, and as his education goes on, you will follow the order of nature. never oppose to his imprudent wishes anything but physical obstacles, or punishments which arise from the actions themselves, and which he will remember when the occasion comes. it is enough to prevent his doing harm, without forbidding it. with him only experience, or want of power, should take the place of law. do not give him anything because he asks for it, but because he needs it. when he acts, do not let him know that it is from obedience; and when another acts for him, let him not feel that he is exercising authority. let him feel his liberty as much in your actions as in his own. add to the power he lacks exactly enough to make him free and not imperious, so that, accepting your aid with a kind of humiliation, he may aspire to the moment when he can dispense with it, and have the honor of serving himself. for strengthening the body and promoting its growth, nature has means which ought never to be thwarted. a child ought not to be constrained to stay anywhere when he wishes to go away, or to go away when he wishes to stay. when their will is not spoiled by our own fault, children do not wish for anything without good reason. they ought to leap, to run, to shout, whenever they will. all their movements are necessities of nature, which is endeavoring to strengthen itself. but we must take heed of those wishes they cannot themselves accomplish, but must fulfil by the hand of another. therefore care should be taken to distinguish the real wants, the wants of nature, from those which arise from fancy or from the redundant life just mentioned. i have already suggested what should be done when a child cries for anything. i will only add that, as soon as he can ask in words for what he wants, and, to obtain it sooner, or to overcome a refusal, reinforces his request by crying, it should never be granted him. if necessity has made him speak, you ought to know it, and at once to grant what he demands. but yielding to his tears is encouraging him to shed them: it teaches him to doubt your good will, and to believe that importunity has more influence over you than your own kindness of heart has. if he does not believe you good, he will soon be bad; if he believes you weak, he will soon be stubborn. it is of great importance that you at once consent to what you do not intend to refuse him. do not refuse often, but never revoke a refusal. above all things, beware of teaching the child empty formulas of politeness which shall serve him instead of magic words to subject to his own wishes all who surround him, and to obtain instantly what he likes. in the artificial education of the rich they are infallibly made politely imperious, by having prescribed to them what terms to use so that no one shall dare resist them. such children have neither the tones nor the speech of suppliants; they are as arrogant when they request as when they command, and even more so, for in the former case they are more sure of being obeyed. from the first it is readily seen that, coming from them, "if you please" means "it pleases me"; and that "i beg" signifies "i order you." singular politeness this, by which they only change the meaning of words, and so never speak but with authority! for myself, i dread far less Émile's being rude than his being arrogant. i would rather have him say "do this" as if requesting than "i beg you" as if commanding. i attach far less importance to the term he uses than to the meaning he associates with it. over-strictness and over-indulgence are equally to be avoided. if you let children suffer, you endanger their health and their life; you make them actually wretched. if you carefully spare them every kind of annoyance, you are storing up for them much unhappiness; you are making them delicate and sensitive to pain; you are removing them from the common lot of man, into which, in spite of all your care, they will one day return. to save them some natural discomforts, you contrive for them others which nature has not inflicted. you will charge me with falling into the mistake of those fathers i have reproached for sacrificing their children's happiness to considerations of a far-away future that may never be. not so; for the freedom i give my pupil will amply supply him with the slight discomforts to which i leave him exposed. i see the little rogues playing in the snow, blue with cold, and scarcely able to move their fingers. they have only to go and warm themselves, but they do nothing of the kind. if they are compelled to do so, they feel the constraint a hundred times more than they do the cold. why then do you complain? shall i make your child unhappy if i expose him only to those inconveniences he is perfectly willing to endure? by leaving him at liberty, i do him service now; by arming him against the ills he must encounter, i do him service for the time to come. if he could choose between being my pupil or yours, do you think he would hesitate a moment? can we conceive of any creature's being truly happy outside of what belongs to its own peculiar nature? and if we would have a man exempt from all human misfortunes, would it not estrange him from humanity? undoubtedly it would; for we are so constituted that to appreciate great good fortune we must be acquainted with slight misfortunes. if the body be too much at ease the moral nature becomes corrupted. the man unacquainted with suffering would not know the tender feelings of humanity or the sweetness of compassion; he would not be a social being; he would be a monster among his kind. the surest way to make a child unhappy is to accustom him to obtain everything he wants to have. for, since his wishes multiply in proportion to the ease with which they are gratified, your inability to fulfil them will sooner or later oblige you to refuse in spite of yourself, and this unwonted refusal will pain him more than withholding from him what he demands. at first he will want the cane you hold; soon he will want your watch; afterward he will want the bird he sees flying, or the star he sees shining. he will want everything he sees, and without being god himself how can you content him? man is naturally disposed to regard as his own whatever is within his power. in this sense the principle of hobbes is correct up to a certain point; multiply with our desires the means of satisfying them, and each of us will make himself master of everything. hence the child who has only to wish in order to obtain his wish, thinks himself the owner of the universe. he regards all men as his slaves, and when at last he must be denied something, he, believing everything possible when he commands it, takes refusal for an act of rebellion. at his age, incapable of reasoning, all reasons given seem to him only pretexts. he sees ill-will in everything; the feeling of imagined injustice embitters his temper; he begins to hate everybody, and without ever being thankful for kindness, is angry at any opposition whatever. who supposes that a child thus ruled by anger, a prey to furious passions, can ever be happy? he happy? he is a tyrant; that is, the vilest of slaves, and at the same time the most miserable of beings. i have seen children thus reared who wanted those about them to push the house down, to give them the weathercock they saw on a steeple, to stop the march of a regiment so that they could enjoy the drum-beat a little longer; and as soon as obedience to these demands was delayed they rent the air with their screams, and would listen to no one. in vain everybody tried eagerly to gratify them. the ease with which they found their wishes obeyed stimulated them to desire more, and to be stubborn about impossibilities. everywhere they found only contradictions, impediments, suffering, and sorrow. always complaining, always refractory, always angry, they spent the time in crying and fretting; were these creatures happy? authority and weakness conjoined produce only madness and wretchedness. one of two spoiled children beats the table, and the other has the sea lashed.[ ] they will have much to beat and to lash before they are satisfied with life. if these ideas of authority and of tyranny make them unhappy from their very childhood, how will it be with them when they are grown, and when their relations with others begin to be extended and multiplied? accustomed to seeing everything give way before them, how surprised they will be on entering the world to find themselves crushed beneath the weight of that universe they have expected to move at their own pleasure! their insolent airs and childish vanity will only bring upon them mortification, contempt, and ridicule; they must swallow affront after affront; cruel trials will teach them that they understand neither their own position nor their own strength. unable to do everything, they will think themselves unable to do anything. so many unusual obstacles dishearten them, so much contempt degrades them. they become base, cowardly, cringing, and sink as far below their real self as they had imagined themselves above it. let us return to the original order of things. nature has made children to be loved and helped; has she made them to be obeyed and feared? has she given them an imposing air, a stern eye, a harsh and threatening voice, so that they may inspire fear? i can understand why the roar of a lion fills other creatures with dread, and why they tremble at sight of his terrible countenance. but if ever there were an unbecoming, hateful, ridiculous spectacle, it is that of a body of magistrates in their robes of ceremony, and headed by their chief, prostrate before an infant in long clothes, who to their pompous harangue replies only by screams or by childish drivel![ ] considering infancy in itself, is there a creature on earth more helpless, more unhappy, more at the mercy of everything around him, more in need of compassion, of care, of protection, than a child? does it not seem as if his sweet face and touching aspect were intended to interest every one who comes near him, and to urge them to assist his weakness? what then is more outrageous, more contrary to the fitness of things, than to see an imperious and headstrong child ordering about those around him, impudently taking the tone of a master toward those who, to destroy him, need only leave him to himself! on the other hand, who does not see that since the weakness of infancy fetters children in so many ways, we are barbarous if we add to this natural subjection a bondage to our own caprices by taking from them the limited freedom they have, a freedom they are so little able to misuse, and from the loss of which we and they have so little to gain? as nothing is more ridiculous than a haughty child, so nothing is more pitiable than a cowardly child. since with years of reason civil bondage[ ] begins, why anticipate it by slavery at home? let us leave one moment of life exempt from a yoke nature has not laid upon us, and allow childhood the exercise of that natural liberty which keeps it safe, at least for a time, from the vices taught by slavery. let the over-strict teacher and the over-indulgent parent both come with their empty cavils, and before they boast of their own methods let them learn the method of nature herself. reasoning should not begin too soon. locke's great maxim was that we ought to reason with children, and just now this maxim is much in fashion. i think, however, that its success does not warrant its reputation, and i find nothing more stupid than children who have been so much reasoned with. reason, apparently a compound of all other faculties, the one latest developed, and with most difficulty, is the one proposed as agent in unfolding the faculties earliest used! the noblest work of education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! this is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. if children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated. but by addressing them from their tenderest years in a language they cannot understand, you accustom them to be satisfied with words, to find fault with whatever is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their teachers, to wrangle and rebel. and what we mean they shall do from reasonable motives we are forced to obtain from them by adding the motive of avarice, or of fear, or of vanity. nature intends that children shall be children before they are men. if we insist on reversing this order we shall have fruit early indeed, but unripe and tasteless, and liable to early decay; we shall have young savants and old children. childhood has its own methods of seeing, thinking, and feeling. nothing shows less sense than to try to substitute our own methods for these. i would rather require a child ten years old to be five feet tall than to be judicious. indeed, what use would he have at that age for the power to reason? it is a check upon physical strength, and the child needs none. in attempting to persuade your pupils to obedience you add to this alleged persuasion force and threats, or worse still, flattery and promises. bought over in this way by interest, or constrained by force, they pretend to be convinced by reason. they see plainly that as soon as you discover obedience or disobedience in their conduct, the former is an advantage and the latter a disadvantage to them. but you ask of them only what is distasteful to them; it is always irksome to carry out the wishes of another, so by stealth they carry out their own. they are sure that if their disobedience is not known they are doing well; but they are ready, for fear of greater evils, to acknowledge, if found out, that they are doing wrong. as the reason for the duty required is beyond their capacity, no one can make them really understand it. but the fear of punishment, the hope of forgiveness, your importunity, their difficulty in answering you, extort from them the confession required of them. you think you have convinced them, when you have only wearied them out or intimidated them. what results from this? first of all that, by imposing upon them a duty they do not feel as such, you set them against your tyranny, and dissuade them from loving you; you teach them to be dissemblers, deceitful, willfully untrue, for the sake of extorting rewards or of escaping punishments. finally, by habituating them to cover a secret motive by an apparent motive, you give them the means of constantly misleading you, of concealing their true character from you, and of satisfying yourself and others with empty words when their occasion demands. you may say that the law, although binding on the conscience, uses constraint in dealing with grown men. i grant it; but what are these men but children spoiled by their education? this is precisely what ought to be prevented. with children use force, with men reason; such is the natural order of things. the wise man requires no laws. well-regulated liberty. treat your pupil as his age demands. from the first, assign him to his true place, and keep him there so effectually that he will not try to leave it. then, without knowing what wisdom is, he will practise its most important lesson. never, absolutely never, command him to do a thing, whatever it may be.[ ] do not let him even imagine that you claim any authority over him. let him know only that he is weak and you are strong: that from his condition and yours he is necessarily at your mercy. let him know this--learn it and feel it. let him early know that upon his haughty neck is the stern yoke nature imposes upon man, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which every finite being must toil. let him discover this necessity in the nature of things; never in human caprice. let the rein that holds him back be power, not authority. do not forbid, but prevent, his doing what he ought not; and in thus preventing him use no explanations, give no reasons. what you grant him, grant at the first asking without any urging, any entreaty from him, and above all without conditions. consent with pleasure and refuse unwillingly, but let every refusal be irrevocable. let no importunity move you. let the "no" once uttered be a wall of brass against which the child will have to exhaust his strength only five or six times before he ceases trying to overturn it. in this way you will make him patient, even-tempered, resigned, gentle, even when he has not what he wants. for it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others. "there is no more," is an answer against which no child ever rebelled unless he believed it untrue. besides, there is no other way; either nothing at all is to be required of him, or he must from the first be accustomed to perfect obedience. the worst training of all is to leave him wavering between his own will and yours, and to dispute incessantly with him as to which shall be master. i should a hundred times prefer his being master in every case. it is marvellous that in undertaking to educate a child no other means of guiding him should have been devised than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, greed, vile fear,--all of them passions most dangerous, readiest to ferment, fittest to corrupt a soul, even before the body is full-grown. for each instruction too early put into a child's head, a vice is deeply implanted in his heart. foolish teachers think they are doing wonders when they make a child wicked, in order to teach him what goodness is; and then they gravely tell us, "such is man." yes; such is the man you have made. all means have been tried save one, and that the very one which insures success, namely, well-regulated freedom. we ought not to undertake a child's education unless we know how to lead him wherever we please solely by the laws of the possible and the impossible. the sphere of both being alike unknown to him, we may extend or contract it around him as we will. we may bind him down, incite him to action, restrain him by the leash of necessity alone, and he will not murmur. we may render him pliant and teachable by the force of circumstances alone, without giving any vice an opportunity to take root within him. for the passions never awake to life, so long as they are of no avail. do not give your pupil any sort of lesson verbally: he ought to receive none except from experience. inflict upon him no kind of punishment, for he does not know what being in fault means; never oblige him to ask pardon, for he does not know what it is to offend you. his actions being without moral quality, he can do nothing which is morally bad, or which deserves either punishment or reproof.[ ] already i see the startled reader judging of this child by those around us; but he is mistaken. the perpetual constraint under which you keep your pupils increases their liveliness. the more cramped they are while under your eye the more unruly they are the moment they escape it. they must, in fact, make themselves amends for the severe restraint you put upon them. two school-boys from a city will do more mischief in a community than the young people of a whole village. shut up in the same room a little gentleman and a little peasant; the former will have everything upset and broken before the latter has moved from his place. why is this? because the one hastens to misuse a moment of liberty, and the other, always sure of his freedom, is never in a hurry to use it. and yet the children of villagers, often petted or thwarted, are still very far from the condition in which i should wish to keep them. proceed slowly. may i venture to state here the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule in all education? it is, not to gain time, but to lose it. forgive the paradox, o my ordinary reader! it must be uttered by any one who reflects, and whatever you may say, i prefer paradoxes to prejudices. the most perilous interval of human life is that between birth and the age of twelve years. at that time errors and vices take root without our having any means of destroying them; and when the instrument is found, the time for uprooting them is past. if children could spring at one bound from the mother's breast to the age of reason, the education given them now-a-days would be suitable; but in the due order of nature they need one entirely different. they should not use the mind at all, until it has all its faculties. for while it is blind it cannot see the torch you present to it; nor can it follow on the immense plain of ideas a path which, even for the keenest eyesight, reason traces so faintly. the earliest education ought, then, to be purely negative. it consists not in teaching truth or virtue, but in shielding the heart from vice and the mind from error. if you could do nothing at all, and allow nothing to be done; if you could bring up your pupil sound and robust to the age of twelve years, without his knowing how to distinguish his right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would from the very first open to reason. without a prejudice or a habit, there would be in him nothing to counteract the effect of your care. before long he would become in your hands the wisest of men; and beginning by doing nothing, you would have accomplished a marvel in education. reverse the common practice, and you will nearly always do well. parents and teachers desiring to make of a child not a child, but a learned man, have never begun early enough to chide, to correct, to reprimand, to flatter, to promise, to instruct, to discourse reason to him. do better than this: be reasonable yourself, and do not argue with your pupil, least of all, to make him approve what he dislikes. for if you persist in reasoning about disagreeable things, you make reasoning disagreeable to him, and weaken its influence beforehand in a mind as yet unfitted to understand it. keep his organs, his senses, his physical strength, busy; but, as long as possible, keep his mind inactive. guard against all sensations arising in advance of judgment, which estimates their true value. keep back and check unfamiliar impressions, and be in no haste to do good for the sake of preventing evil. for the good is not real unless enlightened by reason. regard every delay as an advantage; for much is gained if the critical period be approached without losing anything. let childhood have its full growth. if indeed a lesson must be given, avoid it to-day, if you can without danger delay it until to-morrow. another consideration which proves this method useful is the peculiar bent of the child's mind. this ought to be well understood if we would know what moral government is best adapted to him. each has his own cast of mind, in accordance with which he must be directed; and if we would succeed, he must be ruled according to this natural bent and no other. be judicious: watch nature long, and observe your pupil carefully before you say a word to him. at first leave the germ of his character free to disclose itself. repress it as little as possible, so that you may the better see all there is of it. do you think this season of free action will be time lost to him? on the contrary, it will be employed in the best way possible. for by this means you will learn not to lose a single moment when time is more precious; whereas, if you begin to act before you know what ought to be done, you act at random. liable to deceive yourself, you will have to retrace your steps, and will be farther from your object than if you had been less in haste to reach it. do not then act like a miser, who, in order to lose nothing, loses a great deal. at the earlier age sacrifice time which you will recover with interest later on. the wise physician does not give directions at first sight of his patient, but studies the sick man's temperament, before prescribing. he begins late with his treatment, but cures the man: the over-hasty physician kills him. remember that, before you venture undertaking to form a man, you must have made yourself a man; you must find in yourself the example you ought to offer him. while the child is yet without knowledge there is time to prepare everything about him so that his first glance shall discover only what he ought to see. make everybody respect you; begin by making yourself beloved, so that everybody will try to please you. you will not be the child's master unless you are master of everything around him, and this authority will not suffice unless founded on esteem for virtue. there is no use in exhausting your purse by lavishing money: i have never observed that money made any one beloved. you must not be miserly or unfeeling, or lament the distress you can relieve; but you will open your coffers in vain if you do not open your heart; the hearts of others will be forever closed to you. you must give your time, your care, your affection, yourself. for whatever you may do, your money certainly is not yourself. tokens of interest and of kindness go farther and are of more use than any gifts whatever. how many unhappy persons, how many sufferers, need consolation far more than alms! how many who are oppressed are aided rather by protection than by money! reconcile those who are at variance; prevent lawsuits; persuade children to filial duty and parents to gentleness. encourage happy marriages; hinder disturbances; use freely the interest of your pupil's family on behalf of the weak who are denied justice and oppressed by the powerful. boldly declare yourself the champion of the unfortunate. be just, humane, beneficent. be not content with giving alms; be charitable. kindness relieves more distress than money can reach. love others, and they will love you; serve them, and they will serve you; be their brother, and they will be your children. blame others no longer for the mischief you yourself are doing. children are less corrupted by the harm they see than by that you teach them. always preaching, always moralizing, always acting the pedant, you give them twenty worthless ideas when you think you are giving them one good one. full of what is passing in your own mind, you do not see the effect you are producing upon theirs. in the prolonged torrent of words with which you incessantly weary them, do you think there are none they may misunderstand? do you imagine that they will not comment in their own way upon your wordy explanations, and find in them a system adapted to their own capacity, which, if need be, they can use against you? listen to a little fellow who has just been under instruction. let him prattle, question, blunder, just as he pleases, and you will be surprised at the turn your reasonings have taken in his mind. he confounds one thing with another; he reverses everything; he tires you, sometimes worries you, by unexpected objections. he forces you to hold your peace, or to make him hold his. and what must he think of this silence, in one so fond of talking? if ever he wins this advantage and knows the fact, farewell to his education. he will no longer try to learn, but to refute what you say. be plain, discreet, reticent, you who are zealous teachers. be in no haste to act, except to prevent others from acting. again and again i say, postpone even a good lesson if you can, for fear of conveying a bad one. on this earth, meant by nature to be man's first paradise, beware lest you act the tempter by giving to innocence the knowledge of good and evil. since you cannot prevent the child's learning from outside examples, restrict your care to the task of impressing these examples on his mind in suitable forms. violent passions make a striking impression on the child who notices them, because their manifestations are well-defined, and forcibly attract his attention. anger especially has such stormy indications that its approach is unmistakable. do not ask, "is not this a fine opportunity for the pedagogue's moral discourse?" spare the discourse: say not a word: let the child alone. amazed at what he sees, he will not fail to question you. it will not be hard to answer him, on account of the very things that strike his senses. he sees an inflamed countenance, flashing eyes, threatening gestures, he hears unusually excited tones of voice; all sure signs that the body is not in its usual condition. say to him calmly, unaffectedly, without any mystery, "this poor man is sick; he has a high fever." you may take this occasion to give him, in few words, an idea of maladies and of their effects; for these, being natural, are trammels of that necessity to which he has to feel himself subject. from this, the true idea, will he not early feel repugnance at giving way to excessive passion, which he regards as a disease? and do you not think that such an idea, given at the appropriate time, will have as good an effect as the most tiresome sermon on morals? note also the future consequences of this idea; it will authorize you, if ever necessity arises, to treat a rebellious child as a sick child, to confine him to his room, and even to his bed, to make him undergo a course of medical treatment; to make his growing vices alarming and hateful to himself. he cannot consider as a punishment the severity you are forced to use in curing him. so that if you yourself, in some hasty moment, are perhaps stirred out of the coolness and moderation it should be your study to preserve, do not try to disguise your fault, but say to him frankly, in tender reproach, "my boy, you have hurt me." i do not intend to enter fully into details, but to lay down some general maxims and to illustrate difficult cases. i believe it impossible, in the very heart of social surroundings, to educate a child up to the age of twelve years, without giving him some ideas of the relations of man to man, and of morality in human actions. it will suffice if we put off as long as possible the necessity for these ideas, and when they must be given, limit them to such as are immediately applicable. we must do this only lest he consider himself master of everything, and so injure others without scruple, because unknowingly. there are gentle, quiet characters who, in their early innocence, may be led a long way without danger of this kind. but others, naturally violent, whose wildness is precocious, must be trained into men as early as may be, that you may not be obliged to fetter them outright. the idea of property. our first duties are to ourselves; our first feelings are concentrated upon ourselves; our first natural movements have reference to our own preservation and well-being. thus our first idea of justice is not as due from us, but to us. one error in the education of to-day is, that by speaking to children first of their duties and never of their rights, we commence at the wrong end, and tell them of what they cannot understand, and what cannot interest them. if therefore i had to teach one of these i have mentioned, i should reflect that a child never attacks persons, but things; he soon learns from experience to respect his superiors in age and strength. but things do not defend themselves. the first idea to be given him, therefore, is rather that of property than that of liberty; and in order to understand this idea he must have something of his own. to speak to him of his clothes, his furniture, his playthings, is to tell him nothing at all; for though he makes use of these things, he knows neither how nor why he has them. to tell him they are his because they have been given to him is not much better, for in order to give, we must have. this is an ownership dating farther back than his own, and we wish him to understand the principle of ownership itself. besides, a gift is a conventional thing, and the child cannot as yet understand what a conventional thing is. you who read this, observe how in this instance, as in a hundred thousand others, a child's head is crammed with words which from the start have no meaning to him, but which we imagine we have taught him. we must go back, then, to the origin of ownership, for thence our first ideas of it should arise. the child living in the country will have gained some notion of what field labor is, having needed only to use his eyes and his abundant leisure. every age in life, and especially his own, desires to create, to imitate, to produce, to manifest power and activity. only twice will it be necessary for him to see a garden cultivated, seed sown, plants reared, beans sprouting, before he will desire to work in a garden himself. in accordance with principles already laid down i do not at all oppose this desire, but encourage it. i share his taste; i work with him, not for his pleasure, but for my own: at least he thinks so. i become his assistant gardener; until his arms are strong enough i work the ground for him. by planting a bean in it, he takes possession of it; and surely this possession is more sacred and more to be respected than that assumed by nuñez de balboa of south america in the name of the king of spain, by planting his standard on the shores of the pacific ocean. he comes every day to water the beans, and rejoices to see them thriving. i add to his delight by telling him "this belongs to you." in explaining to him what i mean by "belongs," i make him feel that he has put into this plot of ground his time, his labor, his care, his bodily self; that in it is a part of himself which he may claim back from any one whatever, just as he may draw his own arm back if another tries to hold it against his will. one fine morning he comes as usual, running, watering-pot in hand. but oh, what a sight! what a misfortune! the beans are uprooted, the garden bed is all in disorder: the place actually no longer knows itself. what has become of my labor, the sweet reward of all my care and toil? who has robbed me of my own? who has taken my beans away from me? the little heart swells with the bitterness of its first feeling of injustice. his eyes overflow with tears; his distress rends the air with moans and cries. we compassionate his troubles, share his indignation, make inquiries, sift the matter thoroughly. at last we find that the gardener has done the deed: we send for him. but we find that we have reckoned without our host. when the gardener hears what we are complaining of, he complains more than we. "what! so it was you, gentlemen, who ruined all my labor! i had planted some maltese melons, from seed given me as a great rarity: i hoped to give you a grand treat with them when they were ripe. but for the sake of planting your miserable beans there, you killed my melons after they had actually sprouted; and there are no more to be had. you have done me more harm than you can remedy, and you have lost the pleasure of tasting some delicious melons." jean jacques. "excuse us, my good robert. you put into them your labor, your care. i see plainly that we did wrong to spoil your work: but we will get you some more maltese seed, and we will not till any more ground without finding out whether some one else has put his hand to it before us." robert. "oh well, gentlemen, you may as well end the business; for there's no waste land. what i work was improved by my father, and it's the same with everybody hereabout. all the fields you see were taken up long ago." Émile. "mr. robert, do you often lose your melon-seed?" robert. "pardon, my young master: we don't often have young gentlemen about that are careless like you. nobody touches his neighbor's garden; everybody respects other people's work, to make sure of his own." Émile. "but i haven't any garden." robert. "what's that to me? if you spoil mine, i won't let you walk in it any more; for you are to understand that i'm not going to have all my pains for nothing." jean jacques. "can't we arrange this matter with honest robert? just let my little friend and me have one corner of your garden to cultivate, on condition that you have half the produce." robert. "i will let you have it without that condition; but remember, i will root up your beans if you meddle with my melons." in this essay on the manner of teaching fundamental notions to children it may be seen how the idea of property naturally goes back to the right which the first occupant acquired by labor. this is clear, concise, simple, and always within the comprehension of the child. from this to the right of holding property, and of transferring it, there is but one step, and beyond this we are to stop short. it will also be evident that the explanation i have included in two pages may, in actual practice, be the work of an entire year. for in the development of moral ideas, we cannot advance too slowly, or establish them too firmly at every step. i entreat you, young teachers, to think of the example i have given, and to remember that your lessons upon every subject ought to be rather in actions than in words; for children readily forget what is said or done to them. as i have said, such lessons ought to be given earlier or later, as the disposition of the child, gentle or turbulent, hastens or retards the necessity for giving them. in employing them, we call in an evidence that cannot be misunderstood. but that in difficult cases nothing important may be omitted, let us give another illustration. your little meddler spoils everything he touches; do not be vexed, but put out of his reach whatever he can spoil. he breaks the furniture he uses. be in no hurry to give him any more; let him feel the disadvantages of doing without it. he breaks the windows in his room; let the wind blow on him night and day. have no fear of his taking cold; he had better take cold than be a fool. do not fret at the inconvenience he causes you, but make him feel it first of all. finally, without saying anything about it, have the panes of glass mended. he breaks them again. change your method: say to him coolly and without anger, "those windows are mine; i took pains to have them put there, and i am going to make sure that they shall not be broken again." then shut him up in some dark place where there are no windows. at this novel proceeding, he begins to cry and storm: but nobody listens to him. he soon grows tired of this, and changes his tone; he complains and groans. a servant is sent, whom the rebel entreats to set him free. without trying to find any excuse for utter refusal, the servant answers, "i have windows to take care of, too," and goes away. at last, after the child has been in durance for several hours, long enough to tire him and to make him remember it, some one suggests an arrangement by which you shall agree to release him, and he to break no more windows. he sends to beseech you to come and see him; you come; he makes his proposal. you accept it immediately, saying, "well thought of; that will be a good thing for both of us. why didn't you think of this capital plan before?" then, without requiring any protestations, or confirmation of his promise, you gladly caress him and take him to his room at once, regarding this compact as sacred and inviolable as if ratified by an oath. what an idea of the obligation, and the usefulness, of an engagement will he not gain from this transaction! i am greatly mistaken if there is an unspoiled child on earth who would be proof against it, or who would ever after think of breaking a window purposely. falsehood. the force of example. we are now within the domain of morals, and the door is open to vice. side by side with conventionalities and duties spring up deceit and falsehood. as soon as there are things we ought not to do, we desire to hide what we ought not to have done. as soon as one interest leads us to promise, a stronger one may urge us to break the promise. our chief concern is how to break it and still go unscathed. it is natural to find expedients; we dissemble and we utter falsehood. unable to prevent this evil, we must nevertheless punish it. thus the miseries of our life arise from our mistakes. i have said enough to show that punishment, as such, should not be inflicted upon children, but should always happen to them as the natural result of their own wrong-doing. do not, then, preach to them against falsehood, or punish them confessedly on account of a falsehood. but if they are guilty of one, let all its consequences fall heavily on their heads. let them know what it is to be disbelieved even when they speak the truth, and to be accused of faults in spite of their earnest denial. but let us inquire what falsehood is, in children. there are two kinds of falsehood; that of fact, which refers to things already past, and that of right, which has to do with the future. the first occurs when we deny doing what we have done, and in general, when we knowingly utter what is not true. the other occurs when we promise what we do not mean to perform, and, in general, when we express an intention contrary to the one we really have. these two sorts of untruth may sometimes meet in the same case; but let us here discuss their points of difference. one who realizes his need of help from others, and constantly receives kindness from them, has nothing to gain by deceiving them. on the contrary, it is evidently his interest that they should see things as they are, lest they make mistakes to his disadvantage. it is clear, then, that the falsehood of fact is not natural to children. but the law of obedience makes falsehood necessary; because, obedience being irksome, we secretly avoid it whenever we can, and just in proportion as the immediate advantage of escaping reproof or punishment outweighs the remoter advantage to be gained by revealing the truth. why should a child educated naturally and in perfect freedom, tell a falsehood? what has he to hide from you? you are not going to reprove or punish him, or exact anything from him. why should he not tell you everything as frankly as to his little playmate? he sees no more danger in the one case than in the other. the falsehood of right is still less natural to children, because promises to do or not to do are conventional acts, foreign to our nature and infringements of our liberty. besides, all the engagements of children are in themselves void, because, as their limited vision does not stretch beyond the present, they know not what they do when they bind themselves. it is hardly possible for a child to tell a lie in making a promise. for, considering only how to overcome a present difficulty, all devices that have no immediate effect become alike to him. in promising for a time to come he actually does not promise at all, as his still dormant imagination cannot extend itself over two different periods of time. if he could escape a whipping or earn some sugar-plums by promising to throw himself out of the window to-morrow, he would at once promise it. therefore the laws pay no regard to engagements made by children; and when some fathers and teachers, more strict than this, require the fulfilling of such engagements, it is only in things the child ought to do without promising. as the child in making a promise is not aware what he is doing, he cannot be guilty of falsehood in so doing: but this is not the case when he breaks a promise. for he well remembers having made the promise; what he cannot understand is, the importance of keeping it. unable to read the future, he does not foresee the consequences of his actions; and when he violates engagements he does nothing contrary to what might be expected of his years. it follows from this that all the untruths spoken by children are the fault of those who instruct them; and that endeavoring to teach them how to be truthful is only teaching them how to tell falsehoods. we are so eager to regulate, to govern, to instruct them, that we never find means enough to reach our object. we want to win new victories over their minds by maxims not based upon fact, by unreasonable precepts; we would rather they should know their lessons and tell lies than to remain ignorant and speak the truth. as for us, who give our pupils none but practical teaching, and would rather have them good than knowing, we shall not exact the truth from them at all, lest they disguise it; we will require of them no promises they may be tempted to break. if in my absence some anonymous mischief has been done, i will beware of accusing Émile, or of asking "was it you?"[ ] for what would that be but teaching him to deny it? if his naturally troublesome disposition obliges me to make some agreement with him, i will plan so well that any such proposal shall come from him and never from me. thus, whenever he is bound by an engagement he shall have an immediate and tangible interest in fulfilling it. and if he ever fails in this, the falsehood shall bring upon him evil results which he sees must arise from the very nature of things, and never from the vengeance of his tutor. far from needing recourse to such severe measures, however, i am almost sure that Émile will be long in learning what a lie is, and upon finding it out will be greatly amazed, not understanding what is to be gained by it. it is very plain that the more i make his welfare independent of either the will or the judgment of others, the more i uproot within him all interest in telling falsehoods. when we are less eager to instruct we are also less eager to exact requirements from our pupil, and can take time to require only what is to the purpose. in that case, the child will be developed, just because he is not spoiled. but when some blockhead teacher, not understanding what he is about, continually forces the child to promise things, making no distinctions, allowing no choice, knowing no limit, the little fellow, worried and weighed down with all these obligations, neglects them, forgets them, at last despises them; and considering them mere empty formulas, turns the giving and the breaking of them into ridicule. if then you want to make him faithful to his word, be discreet in requiring him to give it. the details just entered upon in regard to falsehood may apply in many respects to all duties which, when enjoined upon children, become to them not only hateful but impracticable. in order to seem to preach virtue we make vices attractive, and actually impart them by forbidding them. if we would have the children religious, we tire them out taking them to church. by making them mumble prayers incessantly we make them sigh for the happiness of never praying at all. to inspire charity in them, we make them give alms, as if we disdained doing it ourselves. it is not the child, but his teacher, who ought to do the giving. however much you love your pupil, this is an honor you ought to dispute with him, leading him to feel that he is not yet old enough to deserve it. giving alms is the act of one who knows the worth of his gift, and his fellow-creature's need of the gift. a child who knows nothing of either can have no merit in bestowing. he gives without charity or benevolence: he is almost ashamed to give at all, as, judging from your example and his own, only children give alms, and leave it off when grown up. observe, that we make the child bestow only things whose value be does not know: pieces of metal, which he carries in his pocket, and which are good for nothing else. a child would rather give away a hundred gold pieces than a single cake. but suggest to this free-handed giver the idea of parting with what he really prizes--his playthings, his sugar-plums, or his luncheon; you will soon find out whether you have made him really generous. to accomplish the same end, resort is had to another expedient, that of instantly returning to the child what he has given away, so that he habitually gives whatever he knows will be restored to him. i have rarely met with other than these two kinds of generosity in children, namely, the giving either of what is no use to themselves, or else of what they are certain will come back to them. "do this," says locke, "that they may be convinced by experience that he who gives most generously has always the better portion." this is making him liberal in appearance and miserly in reality. he adds, that children will thus acquire the habit of generosity. yes; a miser's generosity, giving an egg to gain an ox. but when called upon to be generous in earnest, good-bye to the habit; they soon cease giving when the gift no longer comes back to them. we ought to keep in view the habit of mind rather than that of the hands. like this virtue are all others taught to children; and their early years are spent in sadness, that we may preach these sterling virtues to them! excellent training this! lay aside all affectation, you teachers; be yourselves good and virtuous, so that your example may be deeply graven on your pupils' memory until such time as it finds lodgment in their heart. instead of early requiring acts of charity from my pupil i would rather do them in his presence, taking from him all means of imitating me, as if i considered it an honor not due to his age. for he should by no means be in the habit of thinking a man's duties the same as a child's. seeing me assist the poor, he questions me about it and, if occasion serve, i answer, "my boy, it is because, since poor people are willing there should be rich people, the rich have promised to take care of those who have no money or cannot earn a living by their labor." "and have you promised it too?" inquires he. "of course; the money that comes into my hands is mine to use only upon this condition, which its owner has to carry out." after this conversation, and we have seen how a child may be prepared to understand it, other children besides Émile would be tempted to imitate me by acting like a rich man. in this case i would at least see that it should not be done ostentatiously. i would rather have him rob me of my right, and conceal the fact of his generosity. it would be a stratagem natural at his age, and the only one i would pardon in him. the only moral lesson suited to childhood and the most important at any age is, never to injure any one. even the principle of doing good, if not subordinated to this, is dangerous, false, and contradictory. for who does not do good? everybody does, even a wicked man who makes one happy at the expense of making a hundred miserable: and thence arise all our calamities. the most exalted virtues are negative: they are hardest to attain, too, because they are unostentatious, and rise above even that gratification dear to the heart of man,--sending another person away pleased with us. if there be a man who never injures one of his fellow-creatures, what good must he achieve for them! what fearlessness, what vigor of mind he requires for it! not by reasoning about this principle, but by attempting to carry it into practice, do we find out how great it is, how hard to fulfil. the foregoing conveys some faint idea of the precautions i would have you employ in giving children the instructions we sometimes cannot withhold without risk of their injuring themselves or others, and especially of contracting bad habits of which it will by and by be difficult to break them. but we may rest assured that in children rightly educated the necessity will seldom arise; for it is impossible that they should become intractable, vicious, deceitful, greedy, unless the vices which make them so are sowed in their hearts. for this reason what has been said on this point applies rather to exceptional than to ordinary cases. but such exceptional cases become common in proportion as children have more frequent opportunity to depart from their natural state and to acquire the vices of their seniors. those brought up among men of the world absolutely require earlier teaching in these matters than those educated apart from such surroundings. hence this private education is to be preferred, even if it do no more than allow childhood leisure to grow to perfection. negative or temporizing education. exactly contrary to the cases just described are those whom a happy temperament exalts above their years. as there are some men who never outgrow childhood, so there are others who never pass through it, but are men almost from their birth. the difficulty is that these exceptional cases are rare and not easily distinguished; besides, all mothers capable of understanding that a child can be a prodigy, have no doubt that their own are such. they go even farther than this: they take for extraordinary indications the sprightliness, the bright childish pranks and sayings, the shrewd simplicity of ordinary cases, characteristic of that time of life, and showing plainly that a child is only a child. is it surprising that, allowed to speak so much and so freely, unrestrained by any consideration of propriety, a child should occasionally make happy replies? if he did not, it would be even more surprising; just as if an astrologer, among a hundred false predictions, should never hit upon a single true one. "they lie so often," said henry iv., "that they end by telling the truth." to be a wit, one need only utter a great many foolish speeches. heaven help men of fashion, whose reputation rests upon just this foundation! the most brilliant thoughts may enter a child's head, or rather, the most brilliant sayings may fall from his lips, just as the most valuable diamonds may fall into his hands, without his having any right either to the thoughts or to the diamonds. at his age, he has no real property of any kind. a child's utterances are not the same to him as to us; he does not attach to them the same ideas. if he has any ideas at all on the subject, they have neither order nor coherence in his mind; in all his thoughts nothing is certain or stable. if you watch your supposed prodigy attentively, you will sometimes find him a well-spring of energy, clear-sighted, penetrating the very marrow of things. much oftener the same mind appears commonplace, dull, and as if enveloped in a dense fog. sometimes he outruns you, and sometimes he stands still. at one moment you feel like saying, "he is a genius," and at another, "he is a fool." you are mistaken in either case: he is a child; he is an eaglet that one moment beats the air with its wings, and the next moment falls back into the nest. in spite of appearances, then, treat him as his age demands, and beware lest you exhaust his powers by attempting to use them too freely. if this young brain grows warm, if you see it beginning to seethe, leave it free to ferment, but do not excite it, lest it melt altogether into air. when the first flow of spirits has evaporated, repress and keep within bounds the rest, until, as time goes on, the whole is transformed into life-giving warmth and real power. otherwise you will lose both time and pains; you will destroy your own handiwork, and after having thoughtlessly intoxicated yourself with all these inflammable vapors, you will have nothing left but the dregs. nothing has been more generally or certainly observed than that dull children make commonplace men. in childhood it is very difficult to distinguish real dullness from that misleading apparent dullness which indicates a strong character. at first it seems strange that the two extremes should meet in indications so much alike; and yet such is the case. for at an age when man has no real ideas at all, the difference between one who has genius and one who has not is, that the latter entertains only mistaken ideas, and the former, encountering only such, admits none at all. the two are therefore alike in this, that the dullard is capable of nothing, and the other finds nothing to suit him. the only means of distinguishing them is chance, which may bring to the genius some ideas he can comprehend, while the dull mind is always the same. during his childhood the younger cato was at home considered an idiot. no one said anything of him beyond that he was silent and headstrong. it was only in the antechamber of sulla that his uncle learned to know him. if he had never crossed its threshold, he might have been thought a fool until he was grown. if there had been no such person as caesar, this very cato, who read the secret of caesar's fatal genius, and from afar foresaw his ambitious designs, would always have been treated as a visionary.[ ] those who judge of children so hastily are very liable to be mistaken. they are often more childish than the children themselves. concerning the memory. respect children, and be in no haste to judge their actions, good or evil. let the exceptional cases show themselves such for some time before you adopt special methods of dealing with them. let nature be long at work before you attempt to supplant her, lest you thwart her work. you say you know how precious time is, and do not wish to lose it. do you not know that to employ it badly is to waste it still more, and that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all? you are troubled at seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. what! is it nothing to be happy? is it nothing to skip, to play, to run about all day long? never in all his life will he be so busy as now. plato, in that work of his considered so severe, the "republic," would have children accustomed to festivals, games, songs, and pastimes; one would think he was satisfied with having carefully taught them how to enjoy themselves. and seneca, speaking of the roman youth of old, says, "they were always standing; nothing was taught them that they had to learn when seated." were they of less account when they reached manhood? have no fear, then, of this supposed idleness. what would you think of a man who, in order to use his whole life to the best advantage, would not sleep? you would say, "the man has no sense; he does not enjoy life, but robs himself of it. to avoid sleep, he rushes on his death." the two cases are parallel, for childhood is the slumber of reason. apparent quickness in learning is the ruin of children. we do not consider that this very quickness proves that they are learning nothing. their smooth and polished brain reflects like a mirror the objects presented to it, but nothing abides there, nothing penetrates it. the child retains the words; the ideas are reflected; they who hear understand them, but he himself does not understand them at all. although memory and reason are two essentially different faculties, the one is never really developed without the other. before the age of reason, the child receives not ideas, but images. there is this difference between the two, that images are only absolute representations of objects of sense, and ideas are notions of objects determined by their relations. an image may exist alone in the mind that represents it, but every idea supposes other ideas. when we imagine, we only see; when we conceive of things, we compare them. our sensations are entirely passive, whereas all our perceptions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges. i say then that children, incapable of judging, really have no memory. they retain sounds, shapes, sensations; but rarely ideas, and still more rarely the relations of ideas to one another. if this statement is apparently refuted by the objection that they learn some elements of geometry, it is not really true; that very fact confirms my statement. it shows that, far from knowing how to reason themselves, they cannot even keep in mind the reasonings of others. for if you investigate the method of these little geometricians, you discover at once that they have retained only the exact impression of the diagram and the words of the demonstration. upon the least new objection they are puzzled. their knowledge is only of the sensation; nothing has become the property of their understanding. even their memory is rarely more perfect than their other faculties: for when grown they have nearly always to learn again as realities things whose names they learned in childhood. however, i am far from thinking that children have no power of reasoning whatever.[ ] i observe, on the contrary, that in things they understand, things relating to their present and manifest interests, they reason extremely well. we are, however, liable to be misled as to their knowledge, attributing to them what they do not have, and making them reason about what they do not understand. again, we make the mistake of calling their attention to considerations by which they are in no wise affected, such as their future interests, the happiness of their coming manhood, the opinion people will have of them when they are grown up. such speeches, addressed to minds entirely without foresight, are absolutely unmeaning. now all the studies forced upon these poor unfortunates deal with things like this, utterly foreign to their minds. you may judge what attention such subjects are likely to receive. on the study of words. pedagogues, who make such an imposing display of what they teach, are paid to talk in another strain than mine, but their conduct shows that they think as i do. for after all, what do they teach their pupils? words, words, words. among all their boasted subjects, none are selected because they are useful; such would be the sciences of things, in which these professors are unskilful. but they prefer sciences we seem to know when we know their nomenclature, such as heraldry, geography, chronology, languages; studies so far removed from human interests, and particularly from the child, that it would be wonderful if any of them could be of the least use at any time in life. it may cause surprise that i account the study of languages one of the useless things in education. but remember i am speaking of the studies of earlier years, and whatever may be said, i do not believe that any child except a prodigy, will ever learn two languages by the time he is twelve or fifteen.[ ] i admit that if the study of languages were only that of words, that is, of forms, and of the sounds which express them, it might be suitable for children. but languages, by changing their signs, modify also the ideas they represent. minds are formed upon languages; thoughts take coloring from idioms. reason alone is common to all. in each language the mind has its peculiar conformation, and this may be in part the cause or the effect of national character. the fact that every nation's language follows the vicissitudes of that nation's morals, and is preserved or altered with them, seems to confirm this theory. of these different forms, custom gives one to the child, and it is the only one he retains until the age of reason. in order to have two, he must be able to compare ideas; and how can he do this when he is scarcely able to grasp them? each object may for him have a thousand different signs, but each idea can have but one form; he can therefore learn to speak only one language. it is nevertheless maintained that he learns several; this i deny. i have seen little prodigies who thought they could speak six or seven: i have heard them speak german in latin, french, and italian idioms successively. they did indeed use five or six vocabularies, but they never spoke anything but german. in short, you may give children as many synonyms as you please, and you will change only their words, and not their language; they will never know more than one. to hide this inability we, by preference, give them practice in the dead languages, of which there are no longer any unexceptionable judges. the familiar use of these tongues having long been lost, we content ourselves with imitating what we find of them in books, and call this speaking them. if such be the greek and latin of the masters, you may judge what that of the children is. scarcely have they learned by heart the rudiments, without in the least understanding them, before they are taught to utter a french discourse in latin words; and, when further advanced, to string together in prose, phrases from cicero and cantos from virgil. then they imagine they are speaking latin, and who is there to contradict them?[ ] in any study, words that represent things are nothing without the ideas of the things they represent. we, however, limit children to these signs, without ever being able to make them understand the things represented. we think we are teaching a child the description of the earth, when he is merely learning maps. we teach him the names of cities, countries, rivers; he has no idea that they exist anywhere but on the map we use in pointing them out to him. i recollect seeing somewhere a text-book on geography which began thus: "what is the world? a pasteboard globe." precisely such is the geography of children. i will venture to say that after two years of globes and cosmography no child of ten, by rules they give him, could find the way from paris to st. denis. i maintain that not one of them, from a plan of his father's garden, could trace out its windings without going astray. and yet these are the knowing creatures who can tell you exactly where pekin, ispahan, mexico, and all the countries of the world are. i hear it suggested that children ought to be engaged in studies in which only the eye is needed. this might be true if there were studies in which their eyes were not needed; but i know of none such. a still more ridiculous method obliges children to study history, supposed to be within their comprehension because it is only a collection of facts.[ ] but what do we mean by facts? do we suppose that the relations out of which historic facts grow are so easily understood that the minds of children grasp such ideas without difficulty? do we imagine that the true understanding of events can be separated from that of their causes and effects? and that the historic and the moral are so far asunder that the one can be understood without the other? if in men's actions you see only purely external and physical changes, what do you learn from history? absolutely nothing; and the subject, despoiled of all interest, no longer gives you either pleasure or instruction. if you intend to estimate actions by their moral relations, try to make your pupils understand these relations, and you will discover whether history is adapted to their years. if there is no science in words, there is no study especially adapted to children. if they have no real ideas, they have no real memory; for i do not call that memory which retains only impressions. of what use is it to write on their minds a catalogue of signs that represent nothing to them? in learning the things represented, would they not also learn the signs? why do you give them the useless trouble of learning them twice? besides, you create dangerous prejudices by making them suppose that science consists of words meaningless to them. the first mere word with which the child satisfies himself, the first thing he learns on the authority of another person, ruins his judgment. long must he shine in the eyes of unthinking persons before he can repair such an injury to himself. no; nature makes the child's brain so yielding that it receives all kinds of impressions; not that we may make his childhood a distressing burden to him by engraving on that brain dates, names of kings, technical terms in heraldry, mathematics, geography, and all such words, unmeaning to him and unnecessary to persons at any age in life. but all ideas that he can understand, and that are of use to him, all that conduce to his happiness and that will one day make his duties plain, should early write themselves there indelibly, to guide him through life as his condition and his intellect require. the memory of which a child is capable is far from inactive, even without the use of books. all he sees and hears impresses him, and he remembers it. he keeps a mental register of people's sayings and doings. everything around him is the book from which he is continually but unconsciously enriching his memory against the time his judgment can benefit by it. if we intend rightly to cultivate this chief faculty of the mind, we must choose these objects carefully, constantly acquainting him with such as he ought to understand, and keeping back those he ought not to know. in this way we should endeavor to make his mind a storehouse of knowledge, to aid in his education in youth, and to direct him at all times. this method does not, it is true, produce phenomenal children, nor does it make the reputation of their teachers; but it produces judicious, robust men, sound in body and in mind, who, although not admired in youth, will make themselves respected in manhood. Émile shall never learn anything by heart, not even fables such as those of la fontaine, simple and charming as they are. for the words of fables are no more the fables themselves than the words of history are history itself. how can we be so blind as to call fables moral lessons for children? we do not reflect that while these stories amuse they also mislead children, who, carried away by the fiction, miss the truth conveyed; so that what makes the lesson agreeable also makes it less profitable. men may learn from fables, but children must be told the bare truth; if it be veiled, they do not trouble themselves to lift the veil.[ ] since nothing ought to be required of children merely in proof of their obedience, it follows that they can learn nothing of which they cannot understand the actual and immediate advantage, whether it be pleasant or useful. otherwise, what motive will induce them to learn it? the art of conversing with absent persons, and of hearing from them, of communicating to them at a distance, without the aid of another, our feelings, intentions, and wishes, is an art whose value may be explained to children of almost any age whatever. by what astonishing process has this useful and agreeable art become so irksome to them? they have been forced to learn it in spite of themselves, and to use it in ways they cannot understand. a child is not anxious to perfect the instrument used in tormenting him; but make the same thing minister to his pleasures, and you cannot prevent him from using it. much attention is paid to finding out the best methods of teaching children to read. we invent printing-offices and charts; we turn a child's room into a printer's establishment.[ ] locke proposes teaching children to read by means of dice; a brilliant contrivance indeed, but a mistake as well. a better thing than all these, a thing no one thinks of, is the desire to learn. give a child this desire, and you will not need dice or reading lotteries; any device will serve as well. if, on the plan i have begun to lay down, you follow rules exactly contrary to those most in fashion, you will not attract and bewilder your pupil's attention by distant places, climates, and ages of the world, going to the ends of the earth and into the very heavens themselves, but will make a point of keeping it fixed upon himself and what immediately concerns him; and by this plan you will find him capable of perception, memory, and even reasoning; this is the order of nature.[ ] in proportion as a creature endowed with sensation becomes active, it acquires discernment suited to its powers, and the surplus of strength needed to preserve it is absolutely necessary in developing that speculative faculty which uses the same surplus for other ends. if, then, you mean to cultivate your pupil's understanding, cultivate the strength it is intended to govern. give him constant physical exercise; make his body sound and robust, that you may make him wise and reasonable. let him be at work doing something; let him run, shout, be always in motion; let him be a man in vigor, and he will the sooner become one in reason. you would indeed make a mere animal of him by this method if you are continually directing him, and saying, "go; come; stay; do this; stop doing that." if your head is always to guide his arm, his own head will be of no use to him. but recollect our agreement; if you are a mere pedant, there is no use in your reading what i write. to imagine that physical exercise injures mental operations is a wretched mistake; the two should move in unison, and one ought to regulate the other. my pupil, or rather nature's pupil, trained from the first to depend as much as possible on himself, is not continually running to others for advice. still less does he make a display of his knowledge. on the other hand, he judges, he foresees, he reasons, upon everything that immediately concerns him; he does not prate, but acts. he is little informed as to what is going on in the world, but knows very well what he ought to do, and how to do it. incessantly in motion, he cannot avoid observing many things, and knowing many effects. he early gains a wide experience, and takes his lessons from nature, not from men. he instructs himself all the better for discovering nowhere any intention of instructing him. thus, at the same time, body and mind are exercised. always carrying out his own ideas, and not another person's, two processes are simultaneously going on within him. as he grows robust and strong, he becomes intelligent and judicious. in this way he will one day have those two excellences,--thought incompatible indeed, but characteristic of nearly all great men,--strength of body and strength of mind, the reason of a sage and the vigor of an athlete. i am recommending a difficult art to you, young teacher,--the art of governing without rules, and of doing everything by doing nothing at all. i grant, that at your age, this art is not to be expected of you. it will not enable you, at the outset, to exhibit your shining talents, or to make yourself prized by parents; but it is the only one that will succeed. to be a sensible man, your pupil must first have been a little scapegrace. the spartans were educated in this way; not tied down to books, but obliged to steal their dinners;[ ] and did this produce men inferior in understanding? who does not remember their forcible, pithy sayings? trained to conquer, they worsted their enemies in every kind of encounter; and the babbling athenians dreaded their sharp speeches quite as much as their valor. in stricter systems of education, the teacher commands and thinks he is governing the child, who is, after all, the real master. what you exact from him he employs as means to get from you what he wants. by one hour of diligence he can buy a week's indulgence. at every moment you have to make terms with him. these bargains, which you propose in your way, and which he fulfils in his own way, always turn out to the advantage of his whims, especially when you are so careless as to make stipulations which will be to his advantage whether he carries out his share of the bargain or not. usually, the child reads the teacher's mind better than the teacher reads his. this is natural; for all the sagacity the child at liberty would use in self-preservation he now uses to protect himself from a tyrant's chains; while the latter, having no immediate interest in knowing the child's mind, follows his own advantage by leaving vanity and indolence unrestrained. do otherwise with your pupil. let him always suppose himself master, while you really are master. no subjection is so perfect as that which retains the appearance of liberty; for thus the will itself is made captive. is not the helpless, unknowing child at your mercy? do you not, so far as he is concerned, control everything around him? have you not power to influence him as you please? are not his work, his play, his pleasure, his pain, in your hands, whether he knows it or not? doubtless he ought to do only what he pleases; but your choice ought to control his wishes. he ought to take no step that you have not directed; he ought not to open his lips without your knowing what he is about to say. in this case he may, without fear of debasing his mind, devote himself to exercises of the body. instead of sharpening his wits to escape an irksome subjection, you will observe him wholly occupied in finding out in everything around him that part best adapted to his present well-being. you will be amazed at the subtilty of his contrivances for appropriating to himself all the objects within the reach of his understanding, and for enjoying everything without regard to other people's opinions. by thus leaving him free, you will not foster his caprices. if he never does anything that does not suit him, he will soon do only what he ought to do. and, although his body be never at rest, still, if he is caring for his present and perceptible interests, all the reason of which he is capable will develop far better and more appropriately than in studies purely speculative. as he does not find you bent on thwarting him, does not distrust you, has nothing to hide from you, he will not deceive you or tell you lies. he will fearlessly show himself to you just as he is. you may study him entirely at your ease, and plan lessons for him which he will all unconsciously receive. he will not pry with suspicious curiosity into your affairs, and feel pleasure when he finds you in fault. this is one of our most serious disadvantages. as i have said, one of a child's first objects is to discover the weaknesses of those who have control of him. this disposition may produce ill-nature, but does not arise from it, but from their desire to escape an irksome bondage. oppressed by the yoke laid upon them, children endeavor to shake it off; and the faults they find in their teachers yield them excellent means for doing this. but they acquire the habit of observing faults in others, and of enjoying such discoveries. this source of evil evidently does not exist in Émile. having no interest to serve by discovering my faults, he will not look for them in me, and will have little temptation to seek them in other people. this course of conduct seems difficult because we do not reflect upon it; but taking it altogether, it ought not to be so. i am justified in supposing that you know enough to understand the business you have undertaken; that you know the natural progress of the human mind; that you understand studying mankind in general and in individual cases; that among all the objects interesting to his age that you mean to show your pupil, you know beforehand which of them will influence his will. now if you have the appliances, and know just how to use them, are you not master of the operation? you object that children have caprices, but in this you are mistaken. these caprices result from faulty discipline, and are not natural. the children have been accustomed either to obey or to command, and i have said a hundred times that neither of these two things is necessary. your pupil will therefore have only such caprices as you give him, and it is just you should be punished for your own faults. but do you ask how these are to be remedied? it can still be done by means of better management and much patience. physical training. man's first natural movements are for the purpose of comparing himself with whatever surrounds him and finding in each thing those sensible qualities likely to affect himself. his first study is, therefore, a kind of experimental physics relating to his own preservation. from this, before he has fully understood his place here on earth, he is turned aside to speculative studies. while yet his delicate and pliable organs can adapt themselves to the objects upon which they are to act, while his senses, still pure, are free from illusion, it is time to exercise both in their peculiar functions, and to learn the perceptible relations between ourselves and outward things. since whatever enters the human understanding enters by the senses, man's primitive reason is a reason of the senses, serving as foundation for the reason of the intellect. our first teachers in philosophy are our own feet, hands, and eyes. to substitute books for these is teaching us not to reason, but to use the reason of another; to believe a great deal, and to know nothing at all. in practising an art we must begin by procuring apparatus for it; and to use this apparatus to advantage, we must have it solid enough to bear use. in learning to think, we must therefore employ our members, our senses, our organs, all which are the apparatus of our understanding. and to use them to the best advantage, the body which furnishes them must be sound and robust. our reason is therefore so far from being independent of the body, that a good constitution renders mental operations easy and accurate. in indicating how the long leisure of childhood ought to be employed, i am entering into particulars which maybe thought ridiculous. "pretty lessons," you will tell me, "which you yourself criticize for teaching only what there is no need of learning! why waste time in instructions which always come of their own accord, and cost neither care nor trouble? what child of twelve does not know all you are going to teach yours, and all that his masters have taught him besides?" gentlemen, you are mistaken. i am teaching my pupil a very tedious and difficult art, which yours certainly have not acquired,--that of being ignorant. for the knowledge of one who gives himself credit for knowing only what he really does know reduces itself to a very small compass. you are teaching science: very good; i am dealing with the instrument by which science is acquired. all who have reflected upon the mode of life among the ancients attribute to gymnastic exercises that vigor of body and mind which so notably distinguishes them from us moderns. montaigne's support of this opinion shows that he had fully adopted it; he returns to it again and again, in a thousand ways. speaking of the education of a child, he says, "we must make his mind robust by hardening his muscles; inure him to pain by accustoming him to labor; break him by severe exercise to the keen pangs of dislocation, of colic, of other ailments." the wise locke,[ ] the excellent rollin,[ ] the learned fleury,[ ] the pedantic de crouzas,[ ] so different in everything else, agree exactly on this point of abundant physical exercise for children. it is the wisest lesson they ever taught, but the one that is and always will be most neglected. clothing. as to clothing, the limbs of a growing body should be entirely free. nothing should cramp their movements or their growth; nothing should fit too closely or bind the body; there should be no ligatures whatever. the present french dress cramps and disables even a man, and is especially injurious to children. it arrests the circulation of the humors; they stagnate from an inaction made worse by a sedentary life. this corruption of the humors brings on the scurvy, a disease becoming every day more common among us, but unknown to the ancients, protected from it by their dress and their mode of life. the hussar dress does not remedy this inconvenience, but increases it, since, to save the child a few ligatures, it compresses the entire body. it would be better to keep children in frocks as long as possible, and then put them into loosely fitting clothes, without trying to shape their figures and thereby spoil them. their defects of body and of mind nearly all spring from the same cause: we are trying to make men of them before their time. of bright and dull colors, the former best please a child's taste; such colors are also most becoming to them; and i see no reason why we should not in such matters consult these natural coincidences. but the moment a material is preferred because it is richer, the child's mind is corrupted by luxury, and by all sorts of whims. preferences like this do not spring up of their own accord. it is impossible to say how much choice of dress and the motives of this choice influence education. not only do thoughtless mothers promise children fine clothes by way of reward, but foolish tutors threaten them with coarser and simpler dress as punishment. "if you do not study your lessons, if you do not take better care of your clothes, you shall be dressed like that little rustic." this is saying to him, "rest assured that a man is nothing but what his clothes make him; your own worth depends on what you wear." is it surprising that sage lessons like this so influence young men that they care for nothing but ornament, and judge of merit by outward appearance only? generally, children are too warmly clothed, especially in their earlier years. they should be inured to cold rather than heat; severe cold never incommodes them when they encounter it early. but the tissue of their skin, as yet yielding and tender, allows too free passage to perspiration, and exposure to great heat invariably weakens them. it has been observed that more children die in august than in any other month. besides, if we compare northern and southern races, we find that excessive cold, rather than excessive heat, makes man robust. in proportion as the child grows and his fibres are strengthened, accustom him gradually to withstand heat; and by degrees you will without risk train him to endure the glowing temperature of the torrid zone. sleep. children need a great deal of sleep because they take a great deal of exercise. the one acts as corrective to the other, so that both are necessary. as nature teaches us, night is the time for rest. constant observation shows that sleep is softer and more profound while the sun is below the horizon. the heated air does not so perfectly tranquillize our tired senses. for this reason the most salutary habit is to rise and to go to rest with the sun. in our climate man, and animals generally, require more sleep in winter than in summer. but our mode of life is not so simple, natural, and uniform that we can make this regular habit a necessity. we must without doubt submit to regulations; but it is most important that we should be able to break them without risk when occasion requires. do not then imprudently soften your pupil by letting him lie peacefully asleep without ever being disturbed. at first let him yield without restraint to the law of nature, but do not forget that in our day we must be superior to this law; we must be able to go late to rest and rise early, to be awakened suddenly, to be up all night, without discomfort. by beginning early, and by always proceeding slowly, we form the constitution by the very practices which would ruin it if it were already established. it is important that your pupil should from the first be accustomed to a hard bed, so that he may find none uncomfortable. generally, a life of hardship, when we are used to it, gives us a far greater number of agreeable sensations than does a life of ease, which creates an infinite number of unpleasant ones. one too delicately reared can find sleep only upon a bed of down; one accustomed to bare boards can find it anywhere. no bed is hard to him who falls asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow. the best bed is the one which brings the best sleep. throughout the day no slaves from persia, but Émile and i, will prepare our beds. when we are tilling the ground we shall be making them soft for our slumber. exercise of the senses. a child has not a man's stature, strength, or reason; but he sees and hears almost or quite as well. his sense of taste is as keen, though he does not enjoy it as a pleasure. our senses are the first powers perfected in us. they are the first that should be cultivated and the only ones forgotten, or at least, the most neglected. to exercise the senses is not merely to use them, but to learn how to judge correctly by means of them; we may say, to learn how to feel. for we cannot feel, or hear, or see, otherwise than as we have been taught. there is a kind of exercise, purely natural and mechanical, that renders the body robust without injuring the mind. of this description are swimming, running, leaping, spinning tops, and throwing stones. all these are well enough; but have we nothing but arms and legs? have we not eyes and ears as well? and are they of no use while the others are employed? use, then, not only your bodily strength, but all the senses which direct it. make as much of each as possible, and verify the impressions of one by those of another. measure, count, weigh, and compare. use no strength till after you have calculated the resistance it will meet. be careful to estimate the effect before you use the means. interest the child in never making any useless or inadequate trials of strength. if you accustom him to forecast the effect of every movement, and to correct his errors by experience, is it not certain that the more he does the better his judgment will be? if the lever he uses in moving a heavy weight be too long, he will expend too much motion; if too short, he will not have power enough. experience will teach him to choose one exactly suitable. such practical knowledge, then, is not beyond his years. if he wishes to carry a burden exactly as heavy as his strength will bear, without the test of first lifting it, must he not estimate its weight by the eye? if he understands comparing masses of the same material but of different size, let him choose between masses of the same size but of different material. this will oblige him to compare them as to specific gravity. i have seen a well-educated young man who, until he had tried the experiment, would not believe that a pail full of large chips weighs less than it does when full of water. the sense of touch. we have not equal control of all our senses. one of them, the sense of touch, is in continual action so long as we are awake. diffused over the entire surface of the body, it serves as a perpetual sentinel to warn us of what is likely to harm us. by the constant use of this sense, voluntary or otherwise, we gain our earliest experience. it therefore stands less in need of special cultivation. we observe however, that the blind have a more delicate and accurate touch than we, because, not having sight to guide them, they depend upon touch for the judgments we form with the aid of sight. why then do we not train ourselves to walk, like them, in the dark, to recognize by the touch all bodies we can reach, to judge of objects around us, in short, to do by night and in the dark all they do in daytime without eyesight? so long as the sun shines, we have the advantage of them; but they can guide us in darkness. we are blind during half our life-time, with this difference, that the really blind can always guide themselves, whereas we dare not take a step in the dead of night. you may remind me that we have artificial light. what! must we always use machines? who can insure their being always at hand when we need them? for my part, i prefer that Émile, instead of keeping his eyes in a chandler's shop, should have them at the ends of his fingers. as much as possible, let him be accustomed to play about at night. this advice is more important than it would seem. for men, and sometimes for animals, night has naturally its terrors. rarely do wisdom, or wit, or courage, free us from paying tribute to these terrors. i have seen reasoners, free-thinkers, philosophers, soldiers, who were utterly fearless in broad daylight, tremble like women at the rustle of leaves by night. such terrors are supposed to be the result of nursery tales. the real cause is the same thing which makes the deaf distrustful, and the lower classes superstitious; and that is, ignorance of objects and events around us. the cause of the evil, once found, suggests the remedy. in everything, habit benumbs the imagination; new objects alone quicken it again. every-day objects keep active not the imagination, but the memory; whence the saying "ab assuetis non fit passio."[ ] for only the imagination can set on fire our passions. if, therefore, you wish to cure any one of the fear of darkness, do not reason with him. take him into the dark often, and you may be sure that will do him more good than philosophical arguments. when at work on the roofs of houses, slaters do not feel their heads swim; and those accustomed to darkness do not fear it at all. there will be one advantage of our plays in the dark. but if you mean them to be successful, you must make them as gay as possible. darkness is of all things the most gloomy; so do not shut your child up in a dungeon. when he goes into the dark make him laugh; when he leaves it make him laugh again; and all the time he is there, let the thought of what he is enjoying, and what he will find there when he returns, protect him from the shadowy terrors which might otherwise inhabit it. i have heard some propose to teach children not to be afraid at night, by surprising them. this is a bad plan, and its effect is contrary to the one sought: it only makes them more timid than before. neither reason nor habit can accustom us to a present danger, the nature and extent of which we do not know, nor can they lessen our dread of unexpected things however often we meet with them. but how can we guard our pupil against such accidents? i think the following is the best plan. i will tell my Émile, "if any one attacks you at night, you are justified in defending yourself; for your assailant gives you no notice whether he means to hurt you or only to frighten you. as he has taken you at a disadvantage, seize him boldly, no matter what he may seem to be. hold him fast, and if he offers any resistance, hit him hard and often. whatever he may say or do, never let go until you know exactly who he is. the explanation will probably show you that there is nothing to be afraid of; and if you treat a practical joker in this way, he will not be likely to try the same thing again." although, of all our senses, touch is the one most constantly used, still, as i have said, its conclusions are the most rude and imperfect. this is because it is always used at the same time with sight; and because the eye attains its object sooner than the hand; the mind nearly always decides without appealing to touch. on the other hand, the decisions of touch, just because they are so limited in their range, are the most accurate. for as they extend no farther than our arm's length, they correct the errors of other senses, which deal with distant objects, and scarcely grasp these objects at all, whereas all that the touch perceives it perceives thoroughly. besides, if to nerve-force we add muscular action, we form a simultaneous impression, and judge of weight and solidity as well as of temperature, size, and shape. thus touch, which of all our senses best informs us concerning impressions made upon us by external things, is the one oftenest used, and gives us most directly the knowledge necessary to our preservation. the sense of sight. the sense of touch confines its operations to a very narrow sphere around us, but those of sight extend far beyond; this sense is therefore liable to be mistaken. with a single glance a man takes in half his own horizon, and in these myriad impressions, and judgments resulting from them, how is it credible that there should be no mistakes? sight, therefore, is the most defective of all our senses, precisely because it is most far-reaching, and because its operations, by far preceding all others, are too immediate and too vast to receive correction from them. besides, the very illusions of perspective are needed to make us understand extension, and to help us in comparing its parts. if there were no false appearances, we could see nothing at a distance; if there were no gradations in size, we could form no estimate of distance, or rather there would be no distance at all. if of two trees the one a hundred paces away seemed as large and distinct as the other, ten paces distant, we should place them side by side. if we saw all objects in their true dimensions, we should see no space whatever; everything would appear to be directly beneath our eye. for judging of the size and distance of objects, sight has only one measure, and that is the angle they form with our eye. as this is the simple effect of a compound cause, the judgment we form from it leaves each particular case undecided or is necessarily imperfect. for how can i by the sight alone tell whether the angle which makes one object appear smaller than another is caused by the really lesser magnitude of the object or by its greater distance from me? an opposite method must therefore be pursued. instead of relying on one sensation only, we must repeat it, verify it by others, subordinate sight to touch, repressing the impetuosity of the first by the steady, even pace of the second. for lack of this caution we measure very inaccurately by the eye, in determining height, length, depth, and distance. that this is not due to organic defect, but to careless use, is proved by the fact that engineers, surveyors, architects, masons, and painters generally have a far more accurate eye than we, and estimate measures of extension more correctly. their business gives them experience that we neglect to acquire, and thus they correct the ambiguity of the angle by means of appearances associated with it, which enable them to determine more exactly the relation of the two things producing the angle. children are easily led into anything that allows unconstrained movement of the body. there are a thousand ways of interesting them in measuring, discovering, and estimating distances. "yonder is a very tall cherry-tree; how can we manage to get some cherries? will the ladder in the barn do? there is a very wide brook; how can we cross it? would one of the planks in the yard be long enough? we want to throw a line from our windows and catch some fish in the moat around the house; how many fathoms long ought the line to be? i want to put up a swing between those two trees; would four yards of rope be enough for it? they say that in the other house our room will be twenty-five feet square; do you think that will suit us? will it be larger than this? we are very hungry; which of those two villages yonder can we reach soonest, and have our dinner?" as the sense of sight is the one least easily separated from the judgments of the mind, we need a great deal of time for learning how to see. we must for a long time compare sight with touch, if we would accustom our eye to report forms and distances accurately. without touch and without progressive movement, the keenest eye-sight in the world could give us no idea of extent. to an oyster the entire universe must be only a single point. only by walking, feeling, counting, and measuring, do we learn to estimate distances. if we always measure them, however, our eye, depending on this, will never gain accuracy. yet the child ought not to pass too soon from measuring to estimating. it will be better for him, after comparing by parts what he cannot compare as wholes, finally to substitute for measured aliquot parts others, obtained by the eye alone. he should train himself in this manner of measuring instead of always measuring with the hand. i prefer that the very first operations of this kind should be verified by actual measurements, so that he may correct the mistakes arising from false appearances by a better judgment. there are natural measures, nearly the same everywhere, such as a man's pace, the length of his arm, or his height. when the child is calculating the height of the story of a house, his tutor may serve as a unit of measure. in estimating the altitude of a steeple, he may compare it with that of the neighboring houses. if he wants to know how many leagues there are in a given journey, let him reckon the number of hours spent in making it on foot. and by all means do none of this work for him; let him do it himself. we cannot learn to judge correctly of the extent and size of bodies without also learning to recognize their forms, and even to imitate them. for such imitation is absolutely dependent on the laws of perspective, and we cannot estimate extent from appearances without some appreciation of these laws. drawing. all children, being natural imitators, try to draw. i would have my pupil cultivate this art, not exactly for the sake of the art itself, but to render the eye true and the hand flexible. in general, it matters little whether he understands this or that exercise, provided he acquires the mental insight, and the manual skill furnished by the exercise. i should take care, therefore, not to give him a drawing-master, who would give him only copies to imitate, and would make him draw from drawings only. he shall have no teacher but nature, no models but real things. he shall have before his eyes the originals, and not the paper which represents them. he shall draw a house from a real house, a tree from a tree, a human figure from the man himself. in this way he will accustom himself to observe bodies and their appearances, and not mistake for accurate mutations those that are false and conventional. i should even object to his drawing anything from memory, until by frequent observations the exact forms of the objects had clearly imprinted themselves on his imagination, lest, substituting odd and fantastic shapes for the real things, he might lose the knowledge of proportion and a taste for the beauties of nature. i know very well that he will go on daubing for a long time without making anything worth noticing, and will be long in mastering elegance of outline, and in acquiring the deft stroke of a skilled draughtsman. he may never learn to discern picturesque effects, or draw with superior skill. on the other hand, he will have a more correct eye, a truer hand, a knowledge of the real relations of size and shape in animals, plants, and natural bodies, and practical experience of the illusions of perspective. this is precisely what i intend; not so much that he shall imitate objects as that he shall know them. i would rather have him show me an acanthus than a finished drawing of the foliation of a capital. yet i would not allow my pupil to have the enjoyment of this or any other exercise all to himself. by sharing it with him i will make him enjoy it still more. he shall have no competitor but myself; but i will be that competitor continually, and without risk of jealousy between us. it will only interest him more deeply in his studies. like him i will take up the pencil, and at first i will be as awkward as he. if i were an apelles, even, i will make myself a mere dauber. i will begin by sketching a man just as a boy would sketch one on a wall, with a dash for each arm, and with fingers larger than the arms. by and by one or the other of us will discover this disproportion. we shall observe that a leg has thickness, and that this thickness is not the same everywhere; that the length of the arm is determined by its proportion to the body; and so on. as we go on i will do no more than keep even step with him, or will excel him by so little that he can always easily overtake and even surpass me. we will get colors and brushes; we will try to imitate not only the outline but the coloring and all the other details of objects. we will color; we will paint; we will daub; but in all our daubing we shall be continually peering into nature, and all we do shall be done under the eye of that great teacher. if we had difficulty in finding decorations for our room, we have now all we could desire. i will have our drawings framed, so that we can give them no finishing touches; and this will make us both careful to do no negligent work. i will arrange them in order around our room, each drawing repeated twenty or thirty times, and each repetition showing the author's progress, from the representation of a house by an almost shapeless attempt at a square, to the accurate copy of its front elevation, profile, proportions, and shading. the drawings thus graded must be interesting to ourselves, curious to others, and likely to stimulate further effort. i will inclose the first and rudest of these in showy gilded frames, to set them off well; but as the imitation improves, and when the drawing is really good, i will add only a very simple black frame. the picture needs no ornament but itself, and it would be a pity that the bordering should receive half the attention. both of us will aspire to the honor of a plain frame, and if either wishes to condemn the other's drawing, he will say it ought to have a gilt frame. perhaps some day these gilded frames will pass into a proverb with us, and we shall be interested to observe how many men do justice to themselves by framing themselves in the very same way. geometry. i have said that geometry is not intelligible to children; but it is our own fault. we do not observe that their method is different from ours, and that what is to us the art of reasoning should be to them only the art of seeing. instead of giving them our method, we should do better to take theirs. for in our way of learning geometry, imagination really does as much as reason. when a proposition is stated, we have to imagine the demonstration; that is, we have to find upon what proposition already known the new one depends, and from all the consequences of this known principle select just the one required. according to this method the most exact reasoner, if not naturally inventive, must be at fault. and the result is that the teacher, instead of making us discover demonstrations, dictates them to us; instead of teaching us to reason, he reasons for us, and exercises only our memory. make the diagrams accurate; combine them, place them one upon another, examine their relations, and you will discover the whole of elementary geometry by proceeding from one observation to another, without using either definitions or problems, or any form of demonstration than simple superposition. for my part, i do not even pretend to teach Émile geometry; he shall teach it to me. i will look for relations, and he shall discover them. i will look for them in a way that will lead him to discover them. in drawing a circle, for instance, i will not use a compass, but a point at the end of a cord which turns on a pivot. afterward, when i want to compare the radii of a semi-circle, Émile will laugh at me and tell me that the same cord, held with the same tension, cannot describe unequal distances. when i want to measure an angle of sixty degrees, i will describe from the apex of the angle not an arc only, but an entire circle; for with children nothing must be taken for granted. i find that the portion intercepted by the two sides of the angle is one-sixth of the whole circumference. afterward, from the same centre, i describe another and a larger circle, and find that this second arc is one-sixth of the new circumference. describing a third concentric circle, i test it in the same way, and continue the process with other concentric circles, until Émile, vexed at my stupidity, informs me that every arc, great or small, intercepted by the sides of this angle, will be one-sixth of the circumference to which it belongs. you see we are almost ready to use the instruments intelligently. in order to prove the angles of a triangle equal to two right angles, a circle is usually drawn. i, on the contrary, will call Émile's attention to this in the circle, and then ask him, "now, if the circle were taken away, and the straight lines were left, would the size of the angles be changed?" it is not customary to pay much attention to the accuracy of figures in geometry; the accuracy is taken for granted, and the demonstration alone is regarded. Émile and i will pay no heed to the demonstration, but aim to draw exactly straight and even lines; to make a square perfect and a circle round. to test the exactness of the figure we will examine it in all its visible properties, and this will give us daily opportunity of finding out others. we will fold the two halves of a circle on the line of the diameter, and the halves of a square on its diagonal, and then examine our two figures to see which has its bounding lines most nearly coincident, and is therefore best constructed. we will debate as to whether this equality of parts exists in all parallelograms, trapeziums, and like figures. sometimes we will endeavor to guess at the result of the experiment before we make it, and sometimes to find out the reasons why it should result as it does. geometry for my pupil is only the art of using the rule and compass well. it should not be confounded with drawing, which uses neither of these instruments. the rule and compass are to be kept under lock and key, and he shall be allowed to use them only occasionally, and for a short time, lest he fall into the habit of daubing. but sometimes, when we go for a walk, we will take our diagrams with us, and talk about what we have done or would like to do. hearing. what has been said as to the two senses most continually employed and most important may illustrate the way in which i should exercise the other senses. sight and touch deal alike with bodies at rest and bodies in motion. but as only the vibration of the air can arouse the sense of hearing, noise or sound can be made only by a body in motion. if everything were at rest, we could not hear at all. at night, when we move only as we choose, we have nothing to fear except from other bodies in motion. we therefore need quick ears to judge from our sensations whether the body causing them is large or small, distant or near, and whether its motion is violent or slight. the air, when in agitation, is subject to reverberations which reflect it back, produce echoes, and repeat the sensation, making the sonorous body heard elsewhere than where it really is. in a plain or valley, if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the voices of men and the sound of horses' hoofs much farther than when standing upright. as we have compared sight with touch, let us also compare it with hearing, and consider which of the two impressions, leaving the same body at the same time, soonest reaches its organ. when we see the flash of a cannon there is still time to avoid the shot; but as soon as we hear the sound there is not time; the ball has struck. we can estimate the distance of thunder by the interval between the flash and the thunderbolt. make the child understand such experiments; try those that are within his own power, and discover others by inference. but it would be better he should know nothing about these things than that you should tell him all he is to know about them. we have an organ that corresponds to that of hearing, that is, the voice. sight has nothing like this, for though we can produce sounds, we cannot give off colors. we have therefore fuller means of cultivating hearing, by exercising its active and passive organs upon one another. the voice. man has three kinds of voice: the speaking or articulate voice, the singing or melodious voice, and the pathetic or accented voice, which gives language to passion and animates song and speech. a child has these three kinds of voice as well as a man, but he does not know how to blend them in the same way. like his elders he can laugh, cry, complain, exclaim, and groan. but he does not know how to blend these inflections with the two other voices. perfect music best accomplishes this blending; but children are incapable of such music, and there is never much feeling in their singing. in speaking, their voice has little energy, and little or no accent. our pupil will have even a simpler and more uniform mode of speaking, because his passions, not yet aroused, will not mingle their language with his. do not, therefore, give him dramatic parts to recite, nor teach him to declaim. he will have too much sense to emphasize words he cannot understand, and to express feelings he has never known. teach him to speak evenly, clearly, articulately, to pronounce correctly and without affectation, to understand and use the accent demanded by grammar and prosody. train him to avoid a common fault acquired in colleges, of speaking louder than is necessary; have him speak loud enough to be understood; let there be no exaggeration in anything. aim, also, to render his voice in singing, even, flexible, and sonorous. let his ear be sensitive to time and harmony, but to nothing more. do not expect of him, at his age, imitative and theatrical music. it would be better if he did not even sing words. if he wished to sing them, i should try to invent songs especially for him, such as would interest him, as simple as his own ideas. the sense of taste. of our different sensations, those of taste generally affect us most. we are more interested in judging correctly of substances that are to form part of our own bodies than of those which merely surround us. we are indifferent to a thousand things, as objects of touch, of hearing, or of sight; but there is almost nothing to which our sense of taste is indifferent. besides, the action of this sense is entirely physical and material. imagination and imitation often give a tinge of moral character to the impressions of all the other senses; but to this it appeals least of all, if at all. generally, also, persons of passionate and really sensitive temperament, easily moved by the other senses, are rather indifferent in regard to this. this very fact, which seems in some measure to degrade the sense of taste, and to make excess in its indulgence more contemptible, leads me, however, to conclude that the surest way to influence children is by means of their appetite. gluttony, as a motive, is far better than vanity; for gluttony is a natural appetite depending directly on the senses, and vanity is the result of opinion, is subject to human caprice and to abuse of all kinds. gluttony is the passion of childhood, and cannot hold its own against any other; it disappears on the slightest occasion. believe me, the child will only too soon leave off thinking of his appetite; for when his heart is occupied, his palate will give him little concern. when he is a man, a thousand impulsive feelings will divert his mind from gluttony to vanity; for this last passion alone takes advantage of all others, and ends by absorbing them all. i have sometimes watched closely those who are especially fond of dainties; who, as soon as they awoke, were thinking of what they should eat during the day, and could describe a dinner with more minuteness than polybius uses in describing a battle; and i have always found that these supposed men were nothing but children forty years old, without any force or steadiness of character. gluttony is the vice of men who have no stamina. the soul of a gourmand has its seat in his palate alone; formed only for eating, stupid, incapable, he is in his true place only at the table; his judgment is worthless except in the matter of dishes. as he values these far more highly than others in which we are interested, as well as he, let us without regret leave this business of the palate to him. it is weak precaution to fear that gluttony may take root in a child capable of anything else. as children, we think only of eating; but in youth, we think of it no more. everything tastes good to us, and we have many other things to occupy us. yet i would not use so low a motive injudiciously, or reward a good action with a sugar-plum. since childhood is or should be altogether made up of play and frolic, i see no reason why exercise purely physical should not have a material and tangible reward. if a young majorcan, seeing a basket in the top of a tree, brings it down with a stone from his sling, why should he not have the recompense of a good breakfast, to repair the strength used in earning it? a young spartan, braving the risk of a hundred lashes, stole into a kitchen, and carried off a live fox-cub, which concealed under his coat, scratched and bit him till the blood came. to avoid the disgrace of detection, the child allowed the creature to gnaw his entrails, and did not lift an eyelash or utter a cry.[ ] was it not just that, as a reward, he was allowed to devour the beast that had done its best to devour him? a good meal ought never to be given as a reward; but why should it not sometimes be the result of the pains taken to secure it? Émile will not consider the cake i put upon a stone as a reward for running well; he only knows that he cannot have the cake unless he reaches it before some other person does. this does not contradict the principle before laid down as to simplicity in diet. for to please a child's appetite we need not arouse it, but merely satisfy it; and this may be done with the most ordinary things in the world, if we do not take pains to refine his taste. his continual appetite, arising from his rapid growth, is an unfailing sauce, which supplies the place of many others. with a little fruit, or some of the dainties made from milk, or a bit of pastry rather more of a rarity than the every-day bread, and, more than all, with some tact in bestowing, you may lead an army of children to the world's end without giving them any taste for highly spiced food, or running any risk of cloying their palate. besides, whatever kind of diet you give children, provided they are used only to simple and common articles of food, let them eat, run, and play as much as they please, and you may rest assured they will never eat too much, or be troubled with indigestion. but if you starve them half the time, and they can find a way to escape your vigilance, they will injure themselves with all their might, and eat until they are entirely surfeited. unless we dictate to our appetite other rules than those of nature, it will never be inordinate. always regulating, prescribing, adding, retrenching, we do everything with scales in hand. but the scales measure our own whims, and not our digestive organs. to return to my illustrations; among country folk the larder and the orchard are always open, and nobody, young or old, knows what indigestion means. result. the pupil at the age of ten or twelve. supposing that my method is indeed that of nature itself, and that i have made no mistakes in applying it, i have now conducted my pupil through the region of sensations to the boundaries of childish reason. the first step beyond should be that of a man. but before beginning this new career, let us for a moment cast our eyes over what we have just traversed. every age and station in life has a perfection, a maturity, all its own. we often hear of a full-grown man; in contemplating a full-grown child we shall find more novelty, and perhaps no less pleasure. the existence of finite beings is so barren and so limited that when we see only what is, it never stirs us to emotion. real objects are adorned by the creations of fancy, and without this charm yield us but a barren satisfaction, tending no farther than to the organ that perceives them, and the heart is left cold. the earth, clad in the glories of autumn, displays a wealth which the wondering eye enjoys, but which arouses no feeling within us; it springs less from sentiment than from reflection. in spring the landscape is still almost bare; the forests yield no shade; the verdure is only beginning to bud; and yet the heart is deeply moved at the sight. we feel within us a new life, when we see nature thus revive; delightful images surround us; the companions of pleasure, gentle tears, ever ready to spring at the touch of tender feelings, brim our eyes. but upon the panorama of the vintage season, animated and pleasant though it be, we have no tears to bestow. why is there this difference? it is because imagination joins to the sight of spring-time that of following seasons. to the tender buds the eye adds the flowers, the fruit, the shade, sometimes also the mysteries that may lie hid in them. into a single point of time our fancy gathers all the year's seasons yet to be, and sees things less as they really will be than as it would choose to have them. in autumn, on the contrary, there is nothing but bare reality. if we think of spring then, the thought of winter checks us, and beneath snow and hoar-frost the chilled imagination dies. the charm we feel in looking upon a lovely childhood rather than upon the perfection of mature age, arises from the same source. if the sight of a man in his prime gives us like pleasure, it is when the memory of what he has done leads us to review his past life and bring up his younger days. if we think of him as he is, or as he will be in old age, the idea of declining nature destroys all our pleasure. there can be none in seeing a man rapidly drawing near the grave; the image of death is a blight upon everything. but when i imagine a child of ten or twelve, sound, vigorous, well developed for his age, it gives me pleasure, whether on account of the present or of the future. i see him impetuous, sprightly, animated, free from anxiety or corroding care, living wholly in his own present, and enjoying a life full to overflowing. i foresee what he will be in later years, using the senses, the intellect, the bodily vigor, every day unfolding within him. when i think of him as a child, he delights me; when i think of him as a man, he delights me still more. his glowing pulses seem to warm my own; i feel his life within myself, and his sprightliness renews my youth. his form, his bearing, his countenance, manifest self-confidence and happiness. health glows in his face; his firm step is a sign of bodily vigor. his complexion, still delicate, but not insipid, has in it no effeminate softness, for air and sun have already given him the honorable stamp of his sex. his still rounded muscles are beginning to show signs of growing expressiveness. his eyes, not yet lighted with the fire of feeling, have all their natural serenity. years of sorrow have never made them dim, nor have his cheeks been furrowed by unceasing tears. his quick but decided movements show the sprightliness of his age, and his sturdy independence; they bear testimony to the abundant physical exercise he has enjoyed. his bearing is frank and open, but not insolent or vain. his face, never glued to his books, is never downcast; you need not tell him to raise his head, for neither fear nor shame has ever made it droop. make room for him among you, and examine him, gentlemen. question him with all confidence, without fear of his troubling you with idle chatter or impertinent queries. do not be afraid of his taking up all your time, or making it impossible for you to get rid of him. you need not expect brilliant speeches that i have taught him, but only the frank and simple truth without preparation, ornament, or vanity. when he tells you what he has been thinking or doing, he will speak of the evil as freely as of the good, not in the least embarrassed by its effect upon those who hear him. he will use words in all the simplicity of their original meaning. we like to prophesy good of children, and are always sorry when a stream of nonsense comes to disappoint hopes aroused by some chance repartee. my pupil seldom awakens such hopes, and will never cause such regrets: for he never utters an unnecessary word, or wastes breath in babble to which he knows nobody will listen. if his ideas have a limited range, they are nevertheless clear. if he knows nothing by heart, he knows a great deal from experience. if he does not read ordinary books so well as other children, he reads the book of nature far better. his mind is in his brain, and not at his tongue's end. he has less memory than judgment. he can speak only one language, but he understands what he says: and if he does not say it as well as another, he can do things far better than they can. he does not know the meaning of custom or routine. what he did yesterday does not in any wise affect his actions of to-day. he never follows a rigid formula, or gives way in the least to authority or to example. everything he does and says is after the natural fashion of his age. expect of him, therefore, no formal speeches or studied manners, but always the faithful expression of his own ideas, and a conduct arising from his own inclinations. you will find he has a few moral ideas in relation to his own concerns, but in regard to men in general, none at all. of what use would these last be to him, since a child is not yet an active member of society? speak to him of liberty, of property, even of things done by common consent, and he may understand you. he knows why his own things belong to him and those of another person do not, and beyond this he knows nothing. speak to him of duty and obedience, and he will not know what you mean. command him to do a thing, and he will not understand you. but tell him that if he will do you such and such a favor, you will do the same for him whenever you can, and he will readily oblige you; for he likes nothing better than to increase his power, and to lay you under obligations he knows to be inviolable. perhaps, too, he enjoys being recognized as somebody and accounted worth something. but if this last be his motive, he has already left the path of nature, and you have not effectually closed the approaches to vanity. if he needs help, he will ask it of the very first person he meets, be he monarch or man-servant; to him one man is as good as another. by his manner of asking, you can see that he feels you do not owe him anything; he knows that what he asks is really a favor to him, which humanity will induce you to grant. his expressions are simple and laconic. his voice, his look, his gesture, are those of one equally accustomed to consent or to refusal. they show neither the cringing submission of a slave, nor the imperious tone of a master; but modest confidence in his fellow-creatures, and the noble and touching gentleness of one who is free, but sensitive and feeble, asking aid of another, also free, but powerful and kind. if you do what he asks, he does not thank you, but feels that he has laid himself under obligation. if you refuse, he will not complain or insist; he knows it would be of no use. he will not say, "i was refused," but "it was impossible." and, as has been already said, we do not often rebel against an acknowledged necessity. leave him at liberty and by himself, and without saying a word, watch what he does, and how he does it. knowing perfectly well that he is free, he will do nothing from mere thoughtlessness, or just to show that he can do it; for is he not aware that he is always his own master? he is alert, nimble, and active; his movements have all the agility of his years; but you will not see one that has not some definite aim. no matter what he may wish to do, he will never undertake what he cannot do, for he has tested his own strength, and knows exactly what it is. the means he uses are always adapted to the end sought, and he rarely does anything without being assured he will succeed in it. his eye will be attentive and critical, and he will not ask foolish questions about everything he sees. before making any inquiries he will tire himself trying to find a thing out for himself. if he meets with unexpected difficulties, he will be less disturbed by them than another child, and less frightened if there is danger. as nothing has been done to arouse his still dormant imagination, he sees things only as they are, estimates danger accurately, and is always self-possessed. he has so often had to give way to necessity that he no longer rebels against it. having borne its yoke ever since he was born, he is accustomed to it, and is ready for whatever may come. work and play are alike to him; his plays are his occupations, and he sees no difference between the two. he throws himself into everything with charming earnestness and freedom, which shows the bent of his mind and the range of his knowledge. who does not enjoy seeing a pretty child of this age, with his bright expression of serene content, and laughing, open countenance, playing at the most serious things, or deeply occupied with the most frivolous amusements? he has reached the maturity of childhood, has lived a child's life, not gaining perfection at the cost of his happiness, but developing the one by means of the other. while acquiring all the reasoning power possible to his age, he has been as happy and as free as his nature allowed. if the fatal scythe is to cut down in him the flower of our hopes, we shall not be obliged to lament at the same time his life and his death. our grief will not be embittered by the recollection of the sorrows we have made him feel. we shall be able to say, "at least, he enjoyed his childhood; we robbed him of nothing that nature gave him." in regard to this early education, the chief difficulty is, that only far-seeing men can understand it, and that a child so carefully educated seems to an ordinary observer only a young scapegrace. a tutor usually considers his own interests rather than those of his pupil. he devotes himself to proving that he loses no time and earns his salary. he teaches the child such accomplishments as can be readily exhibited when required, without regard to their usefulness or worthlessness, so long as they are showy. without selecting or discerning, he charges the child's memory with a vast amount of rubbish. when the child is to be examined, the tutor makes him display his wares; and, after thus giving satisfaction, folds up his pack again, and goes his way. my pupil is not so rich; he has no pack at all to display; he has nothing but himself. now a child, like a man, cannot be seen all at once. what observer can at the first glance seize upon the child's peculiar traits? such observers there are, but they are uncommon; and among a hundred thousand fathers you will not find one such. [ ] _puer_, child; _infans_, one who does not speak. [ ] reading these lines, we are reminded of the admirable works of dickens, the celebrated english novelist, who so touchingly depicts the sufferings of children made unhappy by the inhumanity of teachers, or neglected as to their need of free air, of liberty, of affection: david copperfield, hard times, nicholas nickleby, dombey and son, oliver twist, little dorrit, and the like. [ ] here he means xerxes, king of persia, who had built an immense bridge of boats over the hellespont to transport his army from asia into europe. a storm having destroyed this bridge, the all-powerful monarch, furious at the insubordination of the elements, ordered chains to be cast into the sea, and had the rebellious waves beaten with rods. [ ] the feeling of a republican, of the "citizen of geneva," justly shocked by monarchial superstitions. louis xiv. and louis xv. had had, in fact, from the days of their first playthings, the degrading spectacle of a universal servility prostrated before their cradle. the sentiment here uttered was still uncommon and almost unknown when rousseau wrote it. he did much toward creating it and making it popular. [ ] civil bondage, as understood by rousseau, consists in the laws and obligations of civilized life itself. he extols the state of nature as the ideal condition, the condition of perfect freedom, without seeing that, on the contrary, true liberty cannot exist without the protection of laws, while the state of nature is only the enslavement of the weak by the strong--the triumph of brute force. [ ] in this unconditional form the principle is inadmissible. any one who has the rearing of children knows this. but the idea underlying the paradox ought to be recognized, for it is a just one. we ought not to command merely for the pleasure of commanding, but solely to interpret to the child the requirements of the case in hand. to command him for the sake of commanding is an abuse of power: it is a baseness which will end in disaster. on the other hand, we cannot leave it to circumstances to forbid what ought not to be done. only, the command should be intelligible, reasonable, and unyielding. this is really what rousseau means. [ ] this is not strictly true. the child early has the consciousness of right and wrong; and if it be true that neither chastisement nor reproof is to be abused, it is no less certain that conscience is early awake within him, and that it ought not to be neglected in a work so delicate as that of education: on condition, be it understood, that we act with simplicity, without pedantry, and that we employ example more than lectures. rousseau says this admirably a few pages farther on. [ ] nothing is more injudicious than such a question, especially when the child is in fault. in that case, if he thinks you know what he has done, he will see that you are laying a snare for him, and this opinion cannot fail to set him against you. if he thinks you do not know he will say to himself, "why should i disclose my fault?" and thus the first temptation to falsehood is the result of your imprudent question.--[note by j. j. rousseau.] [ ] he refers to cato, surnamed of utica, from the african city in which he ended his own life. when a child, he was often invited by his brother to the house of the all-powerful sulla. the cruelties of the tyrant roused the boy to indignation, and it was necessary to watch him lest he should attempt to kill sulla. it was in the latter's antechamber that the scene described by plutarch occurred. [ ] while writing this i have reflected a hundred times that in an extended work it is impossible always to use the same words in the same sense. no language is rich enough to furnish terms and expressions to keep pace with the possible modifications of our ideas. the method which defines all the terms, and substitutes the definition for the term, is fine, but impracticable; for how shall we then avoid travelling in a circle? if definitions could be given without using words, they might be useful. nevertheless, i am convinced that, poor as our language is, we can make ourselves understood, not by always attaching the same meaning to the same words, but by so using each word that its meaning shall be sufficiently determined by the ideas nearly related to it, and so that each sentence in which a word is used shall serve to define the word. sometimes i say that children are incapable of reasoning, and sometimes i make them reason extremely well; i think that my ideas do not contradict each other, though i cannot escape the inconvenient contradictions of my mode of expression. [ ] another exaggeration: the idea is not to teach children to speak another language as perfectly as their own. there are three different objects to be attained in studying languages. first, this study is meant to render easy by comparison and practice the knowledge and free use of the mother tongue. second, it is useful as intellectual gymnastics, developing attention, reflection, reasoning, and taste. this result is to be expected particularly from the study of the ancient languages. third, it lowers the barriers separating nations, and furnishes valuable means of intercourse which science, industries, and commerce cannot afford to do without. the french have not always shown wisdom in ignoring the language of their neighbors or their rivals. [ ] from this passage, it is plain that the objections lately raised by intelligent persons against the abuse of latin conversations and verses are not of recent date, after all. [ ] there is indeed a faulty method of teaching history, by giving children a dry list of facts, names, and dates. on the other hand, to offer them theories upon the philosophy of history is quite as unprofitable. yet it is not an absurd error, but a duty, to teach them the broad outlines of history, to tell them of deeds of renown, of mighty works accomplished, of men celebrated for the good or the evil they have done; to interest them in the past of humanity, be it melancholy or glorious. by abuse of logic rousseau, in protesting against one excess, falls into another. [ ] rousseau here analyzes several of la fontaine's fables, to show the immorality and the danger of their "ethics." he dwells particularly upon the fable of the fox and the crow. in this he is right; the morality of the greater part of these fables leaves much to be desired. but there is nothing to prevent the teacher from making the application. the memory of a child is pliable and vigorous; not to cultivate it would be doing him great injustice. we need not say that a true teacher not only chooses, but by his instructions explains and rectifies everything he requires his pupil to read or to learn by heart. with this reservation one cannot but admire this aversion of rousseau's for parrot-learning, word-worship, and exclusive cultivation of the memory. in a few pages may here be found a complete philosophy of teaching, adapted to the regeneration of a people. [ ] rousseau here alludes to the typographical lottery invented by louis dumas, a french author of the eighteenth century. it was an imitation of a printing-office, and was intended to teach, in an agreeable way, not only reading, but even grammar and spelling. there may be good features in all these systems, but we certainly cannot save the child all trouble; we ought to let him understand that work must be in earnest. besides, as moralists and teachers, we ought not to neglect giving children some kinds of work demanding application. they will be in better spirits for recreation hours after study. [ ] it is well to combine the two methods; to keep the child occupied with what immediately concerns him, and to interest him also in what is more remote, whether in space or in time. he ought not to become too positive, nor yet should he be chimerical. the "order of nature" itself has provided for this, by making the child inquisitive about things around him, and at the same time about things far away. [ ] this expresses rather too vehemently a true idea. do not try to impart a rigid education whose apparent correctness hides grave defects. allow free course to the child's instinctive activity and turbulence; let nature speak; do not crave reserve and fastidiousness at the expense of frankness and vigor of mind. this is what the writer really means. [ ] an english philosopher, who died in . he wrote a very celebrated "treatise on the education of children." [ ] a celebrated professor, rector of the university of paris, who died in . he left a number of works on education. [ ] an abbé of the seventeenth century who wrote a much valued "history of the church," and a "treatise on the method and choice of studies." he was tutor to count vermandois, natural son to louis xiv. [ ] a professor of mathematics, born at lausanne, tutor to prince fredrick of hesse cassel. [ ] "passion is not born of familiar things." [ ] recorded as illustrating spartan education. book third. the third book has to do with the youth as he is between the ages of twelve and fifteen. at this time his strength is proportionately greatest, and this is the most important period in his life. it is the time for labor and study; not indeed for studies of all kinds, but for those whose necessity the student himself feels. the principle that ought to guide him now is that of utility. all the master's talent consists in leading him to discover what is really useful to him. language and history offer him little that is interesting. he applies himself to studying natural phenomena, because they arouse his curiosity and afford him means of overcoming his difficulties. he makes his own instruments, and invents what apparatus he needs. he does not depend upon another to direct him, but follows where his own good sense points the way. robinson crusoe on his island is his ideal, and this book furnishes the reading best suited to his age. he should have some manual occupation, as much on account of the uncertain future as for the sake of satisfying his own constant activity. side by side with the body the mind is developed by a taste for reflection, and is finally prepared for studies of a higher order. with this period childhood ends and youth begins. the age of study. although up to the beginning of youth life is, on the whole, a period of weakness, there is a time during this earlier age when our strength increases beyond what our wants require, and the growing animal, still absolutely weak, becomes relatively strong. his wants being as yet partly undeveloped, his present strength is more than sufficient to provide for those of the present. as a man, he would be very weak; as child, he is very strong. whence arises this weakness of ours but from the inequality between our desires and the strength we have for fulfilling them? our passions weaken us, because the gratification of them requires more than our natural strength. if we have fewer desires, we are so much the stronger. whoever can do more than his wishes demand has strength to spare; he is strong indeed. of this, the third stage of childhood, i have now to speak. i still call it childhood for want of a better term to express the idea; for this age, not yet that of puberty, approaches youth. at the age of twelve or thirteen the child's physical strength develops much faster than his wants. he braves without inconvenience the inclemency of climate and seasons, scarcely feeling it at all. natural heat serves him instead of clothing, appetite instead of sauce. when he is drowsy, he lies down on the ground and falls asleep. thus he finds around him everything he needs; not governed by caprices, his desires extend no farther than his own arms can reach. not only is he sufficient for himself, but, at this one time in all his life, he has more strength than he really requires. what then shall he do with this superabundance of mental and physical strength, which he will hereafter need, but endeavor to employ it in ways which will at some time be of use to him, and thus throw this surplus vitality forward into the future? the robust child shall make provision for his weaker manhood. but he will not garner it in barns, or lay it up in coffers that can be plundered. to be real owner of this treasure, he must store it up in his arms, in his brain, in himself. the present, then, is the time to labor, to receive instruction, and to study; nature so ordains, not i. human intelligence has its limits. we can neither know everything, nor be thoroughly acquainted with the little that other men know. since the reverse of every false proposition is a truth, the number of truths, like the number of errors, is inexhaustible. we have to select what is to be taught as well as the time for learning it. of the kinds of knowledge within our power some are false, some useless, some serve only to foster pride. only the few that really conduce to our well-being are worthy of study by a wise man, or by a youth intended to be a wise man. the question is, not what may be known, but what will be of the most use when it is known. from these few we must again deduct such as require a ripeness of understanding and a knowledge of human relations which a child cannot possibly acquire; such as, though true in themselves, incline an inexperienced mind to judge wrongly of other things. this reduces us to a circle small indeed in relation to existing things, but immense when we consider the capacity of the child's mind. how daring was the hand that first ventured to lift the veil of darkness from our human understanding! what abysses, due to our unwise learning, yawn around the unfortunate youth! tremble, you who are to conduct him by these perilous ways, and to lift for him the sacred veil of nature. be sure of your own brain and of his, lest either, or perhaps both, grow dizzy at the sight. beware of the glamour of falsehood and of the intoxicating fumes of pride. always bear in mind that ignorance has never been harmful, that error alone is fatal, and that our errors arise, not from what we do not know, but from what we think we do know.[ ] the incentive of curiosity. the same instinct animates all the different faculties of man. to the activity of the body, striving to develop itself, succeeds the activity of the mind, endeavoring to instruct itself. children are at first only restless; afterwards they are inquisitive. their curiosity, rightly trained, is the incentive of the age we are now considering. we must always distinguish natural inclinations from those that have their source in opinion. there is a thirst for knowledge which is founded only upon a desire to be thought learned, and another, springing from our natural curiosity concerning anything which nearly or remotely interests us. our desire for happiness is inborn, and as it can never be fully satisfied, we are always seeking ways to increase what we have. this first principle of curiosity is natural to the heart of man, but is developed only in proportion to our passions and to our advance in knowledge. call your pupil's attention to the phenomena of nature, and you will soon render him inquisitive. but if you would keep this curiosity alive, do not be in haste to satisfy it. ask him questions that he can comprehend, and let him solve them. let him know a thing because he has found it out for himself, and not because you have told him of it. let him not learn science, but discover it for himself. if once you substitute authority for reason, he will not reason any more; he will only be the sport of other people's opinions. when you are ready to teach this child geography, you get together your globes and your maps; and what machines they are! why, instead of using all these representations, do you not begin by showing him the object itself, so as to let him know what you are talking of? on some beautiful evening take the child to walk with you, in a place suitable for your purpose, where in the unobstructed horizon the setting sun can be plainly seen. take a careful observation of all the objects marking the spot at which it goes down. when you go for an airing next day, return to this same place before the sun rises. you can see it announce itself by arrows of fire. the brightness increases; the east seems all aflame; from its glow you anticipate long beforehand the coming of day. every moment you imagine you see it. at last it really does appear, a brilliant point which rises like a flash of lightning, and instantly fills all space. the veil of shadows is cast down and disappears. we know our dwelling-place once more, and find it more beautiful than ever. the verdure has taken on fresh vigor during the night; it is revealed with its brilliant net-work of dew-drops, reflecting light and color to the eye, in the first golden rays of the new-born day. the full choir of birds, none silent, salute in concert the father of life. their warbling, still faint with the languor of a peaceful awakening, is now more lingering and sweet than at other hours of the day. all this fills the senses with a charm and freshness which seems to touch our inmost soul. no one can resist this enchanting hour, or behold with indifference a spectacle so grand, so beautiful, so full of all delight. carried away by such a sight, the teacher is eager to impart to the child his own enthusiasm, and thinks to arouse it by calling attention to what he himself feels. what folly! the drama of nature lives only in the heart; to see it, one must feel it. the child sees the objects, but not the relations that bind them together; he can make nothing of their harmony. the complex and momentary impression of all these sensations requires an experience he has never gained, and feelings he has never known. if he has never crossed the desert and felt its burning sands scorch his feet, the stifling reflection of the sun from its rocks oppress him, how can he fully enjoy the coolness of a beautiful morning? how can the perfume of flowers, the cooling vapor of the dew, the sinking of his footstep in the soft and pleasant turf, enchant his senses? how can the singing of birds delight him, while the accents of love and pleasure are yet unknown? how can he see with transport the rise of so beautiful a day, unless imagination can paint all the transports with which it may be filled? and lastly, how can he be moved by the beautiful panorama of nature, if he does not know by whose tender care it has been adorned? do not talk to the child about things he cannot understand. let him hear from you no descriptions, no eloquence, no figurative language, no poetry. sentiment and taste are just now out of the question. continue to be clear, unaffected, and dispassionate; the time for using another language will come only too soon. educated in the spirit of our principles, accustomed to look for resources within himself, and to have recourse to others only when he finds himself really helpless, he will examine every new object for a long time without saying a word. he is thoughtful, and not disposed to ask questions. be satisfied, therefore, with presenting objects at appropriate times and in appropriate ways. when you see his curiosity fairly at work, ask him some laconic question which will suggest its own answer. on this occasion, having watched the sunrise from beginning to end with him, having made him notice the mountains and other neighboring objects on the same side, and allowed him to talk about them just as he pleases, be silent for a few minutes, as if in deep thought, and then say to him, "i think the sun set over there, and now it has risen over here. how can that be so?" say no more; if he asks questions, do not answer them: speak of something else. leave him to himself, and he will be certain to think the matter over. to give the child the habit of attention and to impress him deeply with any truth affecting the senses, let him pass several restless days before he discovers that truth. if the one in question does not thus impress him, you may make him see it more clearly by reversing the problem. if he does not know how the sun passes from its setting to its rising, he at least does know how it travels from its rising to its setting; his eyes alone teach him this. explain your first question by the second. if your pupil be not absolutely stupid, the analogy is so plain that he cannot escape it. this is his first lesson in cosmography. as we pass slowly from one sensible idea to another, familiarize ourselves for a long time with each before considering the next, and do not force our pupil's attention; it will be a long way from this point to a knowledge of the sun's course and of the shape of the earth. but as all the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are upon the same principle, and the first observation prepares the way for all the rest, less effort, if more time, is required to pass from the daily rotation of the earth to the calculation of eclipses than to understand clearly the phenomena of day and night. since the sun (apparently) revolves about the earth, it describes a circle, and we already know that every circle must have a centre. this centre, being in the heart of the earth, cannot be seen; but we may mark upon the surface two opposite points that correspond to it. a rod passing through these three points, and extending from one side of the heavens to the other, shall be the axis of the earth, and of the sun's apparent daily motion. a spherical top, turning on its point, shall represent the heavens revolving on their axis; the two extremities of the top are the two poles. the child will be interested in knowing one of them, which i will show him near the tail of ursa minor. this will serve to amuse us for one night. by degrees we shall grow familiar with the stars, and this will awaken a desire to know the planets and to watch the constellations. we have seen the sun rise at midsummer; we will also watch its rising at christmas or some other fine day in winter. for be it known that we are not at all idle, and that we make a joke of braving the cold. i take care to make this second observation in the same place as the first; and after some conversation to pave the way for it. one or the other of us will be sure to exclaim, "how queer that is! the sun does not rise where it used to rise! here are our old landmarks, and now it is rising over yonder. then there must be one east for summer, and another for winter." now, young teacher, your way is plain. these examples ought to suffice you for teaching the sphere very understandingly, by taking the world for your globe, and the real sun instead of your artificial sun. things rather than their signs. in general, never show the representation of a thing unless it be impossible to show the thing itself; for the sign absorbs the child's attention, and makes him lose sight of the thing signified. the armillary sphere[ ] seems to me poorly designed and in bad proportion. its confused circles and odd figures, giving it the look of a conjurer's apparatus, are enough to frighten a child. the earth is too small; the circles are too many and too large. some of them, the colures,[ ] for instance, are entirely useless. every circle is larger than the earth. the pasteboard gives them an appearance of solidity which creates the mistaken impression that they are circular masses which really exist. when you tell the child that these are imaginary circles, he understands neither what he sees nor what you mean. shall we never learn to put ourselves in the child's place? we do not enter into his thoughts, but suppose them exactly like our own. constantly following our own method of reasoning, we cram his mind not only with a concatenation of truths, but also with extravagant notions and errors. in the study of the sciences it is an open question whether we ought to use synthesis or analysis. it is not always necessary to choose either. in the same process of investigation we can sometimes both resolve and compound, and while the child thinks he is only analyzing, we can direct him by the methods teachers usually employ. by thus using both we make each prove the other. starting at the same moment from two opposite points and never imagining that one road connects them, he will be agreeably surprised to find that what he supposed to be two paths finally meet as one. i would, for example, take geography at these two extremes, and add to the study of the earth's motions the measurement of its parts, beginning with our own dwelling-place. while the child, studying the sphere, is transported into the heavens, bring him back to the measurement of the earth, and first show him his own home. the two starting-points in his geography shall be the town in which he lives, and his father's house in the country. afterward shall come the places lying between these two; then the neighboring rivers; lastly, the aspect of the sun, and the manner of finding out where the east is. this last is the point of union. let him make himself a map of all these details; a very simple map, including at first only two objects, then by degrees the others, as he learns their distance and position. you see now what an advantage we have gained beforehand, by making his eyes serve him instead of a compass. even with this it may be necessary to direct him a little, but very little, and without appearing to do so at all. when he makes mistakes, let him make them; do not correct them. wait in silence until he can see and correct them himself. or, at most, take a good opportunity to set in motion some thing which will direct his attention to them. if he were never to make mistakes, he could not learn half so well. besides, the important thing is, not that he should know the exact topography of the country, but that he should learn how to find it out by himself. it matters little whether he has maps in his mind or not, so that he understands what they represent, and has a clear idea of how they are made. mark the difference between the learning of your pupils and the ignorance of mine. they know all about maps, and he can make them. our maps will serve as new decorations for our room. imparting a taste for science. bear in mind always that the life and soul of my system is, not to teach the child many things, but to allow only correct and clear ideas to enter his mind. i do not care if he knows nothing, so long as he is not mistaken. to guard him from errors he might learn, i furnish his mind with truths only. reason and judgment enter slowly; prejudices crowd in; and he must be preserved from these last. yet if you consider science in itself, you launch upon an unfathomable and boundless sea, full of unavoidable dangers. when i see a man carried away by his love for knowledge, hastening from one alluring science to another, without knowing where to stop, i think i see a child gathering shells upon the seashore. at first he loads himself with them; then, tempted by others, he throws these away, and gathers more. at last, weighed down by so many, and no longer knowing which to choose, he ends by throwing all away, and returning empty-handed. in our early years time passed slowly; we endeavored to lose it, for fear of misusing it. the case is reversed; now we have not time enough for doing all that we find useful. bear in mind that the passions are drawing nearer, and that as soon as they knock at the door, your pupil will have eyes and ears for them alone. the tranquil period of intelligence is so brief, and has so many other necessary uses, that only folly imagines it long enough to make the child a learned man. the thing is, not to teach him knowledge, but to give him a love for it, and a good method of acquiring it when this love has grown stronger. certainly this is a fundamental principle in all good education. now, also, is the time to accustom him gradually to concentrate attention on a single object. this attention, however, should never result from constraint, but from desire and pleasure. be careful that it shall not grow irksome, or approach the point of weariness. leave any subject just before he grows tired of it; for the learning it matters less to him than the never being obliged to learn anything against his will. if he himself questions you, answer so as to keep alive his curiosity, not to satisfy it altogether. above all, when you find that he makes inquiries, not for the sake of learning something, but to talk at random and annoy you with silly questions, pause at once, assured that he cares nothing about the matter, but only to occupy your time with himself. less regard should be paid to what he says than to the motive which leads him to speak. this caution, heretofore unnecessary, is of the utmost importance as soon as a child begins to reason. there is a chain of general truths by which all sciences are linked to common principles and successively unfolded. this chain is the method of philosophers, with which, for the present, we have nothing to do. there is another, altogether different, which shows each object as the cause of another, and always points out the one following. this order, which, by a perpetual curiosity, keeps alive the attention demanded by all, is the one followed by most men, and of all others necessary with children. when, in making our maps, we found out the place of the east, we were obliged to draw meridians. the two points of intersection between the equal shadows of night and morning furnish an excellent meridian for an astronomer thirteen years old. but these meridians disappear; it takes time to draw them; they oblige us to work always in the same place; so much care, so much annoyance, will tire him out at last. we have seen and provided for this beforehand. i have again begun upon tedious and minute details. readers, i hear your murmurs, and disregard them. i will not sacrifice to your impatience the most useful part of this book. do what you please with my tediousness, as i have done as i pleased in regard to your complaints. the juggler. for some time my pupil and i had observed that different bodies, such as amber, glass, and wax, when rubbed, attract straws, and that others do not attract them. by accident we discovered one that has a virtue more extraordinary still,--that of attracting at a distance, and without being rubbed, iron filings and other bits of iron. this peculiarity amused us for some time before we saw any use in it. at last we found out that it may be communicated to iron itself, when magnetized to a certain degree. one day we went to a fair, where a juggler, with a piece of bread, attracted a duck made of wax, and floating on a bowl of water. much surprised, we did not however say, "he is a conjurer," for we knew nothing about conjurers. continually struck by effects whose causes we do not know, we were not in haste to decide the matter, and remained in ignorance until we found a way out of it. when we reached home we had talked so much of the duck at the fair that we thought we would endeavor to copy it. taking a perfect needle, well magnetized, we inclosed it in white wax, modelled as well as we could do it into the shape of a duck, so that the needle passed entirely through the body, and with its larger end formed the duck's bill. we placed the duck upon the water, applied to the beak the handle of a key, and saw, with a delight easy to imagine, that our duck would follow the key precisely as the one at the fair had followed the piece of bread. we saw that some time or other we might observe the direction in which the duck turned when left to itself upon the water. but absorbed at that time by another object, we wanted nothing more. that evening, having in our pockets bread prepared for the occasion, we returned to the fair. as soon as the mountebank had performed his feat, my little philosopher, scarcely able to contain himself, told him that the thing was not hard to do, and that he could do it himself. he was taken at his word. instantly he took from his pocket the bread in which he had hidden the bit of iron. approaching the table his heart beat fast; almost tremblingly, he presented the bread. the duck came toward it and followed it; the child shouted and danced for joy. at the clapping of hands, and the acclamations of all present, his head swam, and he was almost beside himself. the juggler was astonished, but embraced and congratulated him, begging that we would honor him again by our presence on the following day, adding that he would take care to have a larger company present to applaud our skill. my little naturalist, filled with pride, began to prattle; but i silenced him, and led him away loaded with praises. the child counted the minutes until the morrow with impatience that made me smile. he invited everybody he met; gladly would he have had all mankind as witnesses of his triumph. he could scarcely wait for the hour agreed upon, and, long before it came, flew to the place appointed. the hall was already full, and on entering, his little heart beat fast. other feats were to come first; the juggler outdid himself, and there were some really wonderful performances. the child paid no attention to these. his excitement had thrown him into a perspiration; he was almost breathless, and fingered the bread in his pocket with a hand trembling with impatience. at last his turn came, and the master pompously announced the fact. rather bashfully the boy drew near and held forth his bread. alas for the changes in human affairs! the duck, yesterday so tame, had grown wild. instead of presenting its bill, it turned about and swam away, avoiding the bread and the hand which presented it, as carefully as it had before followed them. after many fruitless attempts, each received with derision, the child complained that a trick was played on him, and defied the juggler to attract the duck. the man, without a word, took a piece of bread and presented it to the duck, which instantly followed it, and came towards his hand. the child took the same bit of bread; but far from having better success, he saw the duck make sport of him by whirling round and round as it swam about the edge of the basin. at last he retired in great confusion, no longer daring to encounter the hisses which followed. then the juggler took the bit of bread the child had brought, and succeeded as well with it as with his own. in the presence of the entire company he drew out the needle, making another joke at our expense; then, with the bread thus disarmed, he attracted the duck as before. he did the same thing with a piece of bread which a third person cut off in the presence of all; again, with his glove, and with the tip of his finger. at last, going to the middle of the room, he declared in the emphatic tone peculiar to his sort, that the duck would obey his voice quite as well as his gesture. he spoke, and the duck obeyed him; commanded it to go to the right, and it went to the right; to return, and it did so; to turn, and it turned itself about. each movement was as prompt as the command. the redoubled applause was a repeated affront to us. we stole away unmolested, and shut ourselves up in our room, without proclaiming our success far and wide as we had meant to do. there was a knock at our door next morning; i opened it, and there stood the mountebank, who modestly complained of our conduct. what had he done to us that we should try to throw discredit on his performances and take away his livelihood? what is so wonderful in the art of attracting a wax duck, that the honor should be worth the price of an honest man's living? "faith, gentlemen, if i had any other way of earning my bread, i should boast very little of this way. you may well believe that a man who has spent his life in practising this pitiful trade understands it much better than you, who devote only a few minutes to it. if i did not show you my best performances the first time, it was because a man ought not to be such a fool as to parade everything he knows. i always take care to keep my best things for a fit occasion; and i have others, too, to rebuke young and thoughtless people. besides, gentlemen, i am going to teach you, in the goodness of my heart, the secret which puzzled you so much, begging that you will not abuse your knowledge of it to injure me, and that another time you will use more discretion." then he showed us his apparatus, and we saw, to our surprise, that it consisted only of a powerful magnet moved by a child concealed beneath the table. the man put up his machine again; and after thanking him and making due apologies, we offered him a present. he refused, saying, "no, gentlemen, i am not so well pleased with you as to accept presents from you. you cannot help being under an obligation to me, and that is revenge enough. but, you see, generosity is to be found in every station in life; i take pay for my performances, not for my lessons." as he was going out, he reprimanded me pointedly and aloud. "i willingly pardon this child," said he; "he has offended only through ignorance. but you, sir, must have known the nature of his fault; why did you allow him to commit such a fault? since you live together, you, who are older, ought to have taken the trouble of advising him; the authority of your experience should have guided him. when he is old enough to reproach you for his childish errors, he will certainly blame you for those of which you did not warn him."[ ] he went away, leaving us greatly abashed. i took upon myself the blame of my easy compliance, and promised the child that, another time, i would sacrifice it to his interest, and warn him of his faults before they were committed. for a time was coming when our relations would be changed, and the severity of the tutor must succeed to the complaisance of an equal. this change should be gradual; everything must be foreseen, and that long beforehand. the following day we returned to the fair, to see once more the trick whose secret we had learned. we approached our juggling socrates with deep respect, hardly venturing to look at him. he overwhelmed us with civilities, and seated us with a marked attention which added to our humiliation. he performed his tricks as usual, but took pains to amuse himself for a long time with the duck trick, often looking at us with a rather defiant air. we understood it perfectly, and did not breathe a syllable. if my pupil had even dared to open his mouth, he would have deserved to be annihilated. all the details of this illustration are far more important than they appear. how many lessons are here combined in one! how many mortifying effects does the first feeling of vanity bring upon us! young teachers, watch carefully its first manifestation. if you can thus turn it into humiliation and disgrace, be assured that a second lesson will not soon be necessary. "what an amount of preparation!" you will say. true; and all to make us a compass to use instead of a meridian line! having learned that a magnet acts through other bodies, we were all impatience until we had made an apparatus like the one we had seen,--a hollow table-top with a very shallow basin adjusted upon it and filled with water, a duck rather more carefully made, and so on. watching this apparatus attentively and often, we finally observed that the duck, when at rest, nearly always turned in the same direction. following up the experiment by examining this direction, we found it to be from south to north. nothing more was necessary; our compass was invented, or might as well have been. we had begun to study physics. experimental physics. the earth has different climates, and these have different temperatures. as we approach the poles the variation of seasons is more perceptible,--all bodies contract with cold and expand with heat. this effect is more readily measured in liquids, and is particularly noticeable in spirituous liquors. this fact suggested the idea of the thermometer. the wind strikes our faces; air is therefore a body, a fluid; we feel it though we cannot see it. turn a glass vessel upside down in water, and the water will not fill it unless you leave a vent for the air; therefore air is capable of resistance. sink the glass lower, and the water rises in the air-filled region of the glass, although it does not entirely fill that space. air is therefore to some extent compressible. a ball filled with compressed air bounds much better than when filled with anything else: air is therefore elastic. when lying at full length in the bath, raise the arm horizontally out of the water, and you feel it burdened by a great weight; air is therefore heavy. put air in equilibrium with other bodies, and you can measure its weight. from these observations were constructed the barometer, the siphon, the air-gun, and the air-pump. all the laws of statics and hydrostatics were discovered by experiments as simple as these. i would not have my pupil study them in a laboratory of experimental physics. i dislike all that array of machines and instruments. the parade of science is fatal to science itself. all those machines frighten the child; or else their singular forms divide and distract the attention he ought to give to their effects. i would make all our own machines, and not begin by making the instrument before the experiment has been tried. but after apparently lighting by chance on the experiment, i should by degrees invent instruments for verifying it. these instruments should not be so perfect and exact as our ideas of what they should be and of the operations resulting from them. for the first lesson in statics, instead of using balances, i put a stick across the back of a chair, and when evenly balanced, measure its two portions. i add weights to each part, sometimes equal, sometimes unequal. pushing it to or fro as may be necessary, i finally discover that equilibrium results from a reciprocal proportion between the amount of weight and the length of the levers. thus my little student of physics can rectify balances without having ever seen them. when we thus learn by ourselves instead of learning from others, our ideas are far more definite and clear. besides, if our reason is not accustomed to slavish submission to authority, this discovering relations, linking one idea to another, and inventing apparatus, renders us much more ingenious. if, instead, we take everything just as it is given to us, we allow our minds to sink down into indifference; just as a man who always lets his servants dress him and wait on him, and his horses carry him about, loses finally not only the vigor but even the use of his limbs. boileau boasted that he had taught racine to rhyme with difficulty. there are many excellent labor-saving methods for studying science; but we are in sore need of one to teach us how to learn them with more effort of our own. the most manifest value of these slow and laborious researches is, that amid speculative studies they maintain the activity and suppleness of the body, by training the hands to labor, and creating habits useful to any man. so many instruments are invented to aid in our experiments and to supplement the action of our senses, that we neglect to use the senses themselves. if the graphometer measures the size of an angle for us, we need not estimate it ourselves. the eye which measured distances with precision intrusts this work to the chain; the steelyard saves me the trouble of measuring weights by the hand. the more ingenious our apparatus, the more clumsy and awkward do our organs become. if we surround ourselves with instruments, we shall no longer find them within ourselves. but when, in making the apparatus, we employ the skill and sagacity required in doing without them, we do not lose, but gain. by adding art to nature, we become more ingenious and no less skilful. if, instead of keeping a child at his books, i keep him busy in a workshop, his hands labor to his mind's advantage: while he regards himself only as a workman he is growing into a philosopher. this kind of exercise has other uses, of which i will speak hereafter; and we shall see how philosophic amusements prepare us for the true functions of manhood. i have already remarked that purely speculative studies are rarely adapted to children, even when approaching the period of youth; but without making them enter very deeply into systematic physics, let all the experiments be connected by some kind of dependence by which the child can arrange them in his mind and recall them at need. for we cannot without something of this sort retain isolated facts or even reasonings long in memory. in investigating the laws of nature, always begin with the most common and most easily observed phenomena, and accustom your pupil not to consider these phenomena as reasons, but as facts. taking a stone, i pretend to lay it upon the air; opening my hand, the stone falls. looking at Émile, who is watching my motions, i say to him, "why did the stone fall?" no child will hesitate in answering such a question, not even Émile, unless i have taken great care that he shall not know how. any child will say that the stone falls because it is heavy. "and what does heavy mean?" "whatever falls is heavy." here my little philosopher is really at a stand. whether this first lesson in experimental physics aids him in understanding that subject or not, it will always be a practical lesson. nothing to be taken upon authority. learning from the pupil's own necessities. as the child's understanding matures, other important considerations demand that we choose his occupations with more care. as soon as he understands himself and all that relates to him well enough and broadly enough to discern what is to his advantage and what is becoming in him, he can appreciate the difference between work and play, and to regard the one solely as relaxation from the other. objects really useful may then be included among his studies, and he will pay more attention to them than if amusement alone were concerned. the ever-present law of necessity early teaches us to do what we dislike, to escape evils we should dislike even more. such is the use of foresight from which, judicious or injudicious, springs all the wisdom or all the unhappiness of mankind. we all long for happiness, but to acquire it we ought first to know what it is. to the natural man it is as simple as his mode of life; it means health, liberty, and the necessaries of life, and freedom from suffering. the happiness of man as a moral being is another thing, foreign to the present question. i cannot too often repeat that only objects purely physical can interest children, especially those who have not had their vanity aroused and their nature corrupted by the poison of opinion. when they provide beforehand for their own wants, their understanding is somewhat developed, and they are beginning to learn the value of time. we ought then by all means to accustom and to direct them to its employment to useful ends, these being such as are useful at their age and readily understood by them. the subject of moral order and the usages of society should not yet be presented, because children are not in a condition to understand such things. to force their attention upon things which, as we vaguely tell them, will be for their good, when they do not know what this good means, is foolish. it is no less foolish to assure them that such things will benefit them when grown; for they take no interest in this supposed benefit, which they cannot understand. let the child take nothing for granted because some one says it is so. nothing is good to him but what he feels to be good. you think it far sighted to push him beyond his understanding of things, but you are mistaken. for the sake of arming him with weapons he does not know how to use, you take from him one universal among men, common sense: you teach him to allow himself always to be led, never to be more than a machine in the hands of others. if you will have him docile while he is young, you will make him a credulous dupe when he is a man. you are continually saying to him, "all i require of you is for your own good, but you cannot understand it yet. what does it matter to me whether you do what i require or not? you are doing it entirely for your own sake." with such fine speeches you are paving the way for some kind of trickster or fool,--some visionary babbler or charlatan,--who will entrap him or persuade him to adopt his own folly. a man may be well acquainted with things whose utility a child cannot comprehend; but is it right, or even possible, for a child to learn what a man ought to know? try to teach the child all that is useful to him now, and you will keep him busy all the time. why would you injure the studies suitable to him at his age by giving him those of an age he may never attain? "but," you say, "will there be time for learning what he ought to know when the time to use it has already come?" i do not know; but i am sure that he cannot learn it sooner. for experience and feeling are our real teachers, and we never understand thoroughly what is best for us except from the circumstances of our case. a child knows that he will one day be a man. all the ideas of manhood that he can understand give us opportunities of teaching him; but of those he cannot understand he should remain in absolute ignorance. this entire book is only a continued demonstration of this principle of education. finding out the east. the forest of montmorency. i do not like explanatory lectures; young people pay very little attention to them, and seldom remember them. things! things! i cannot repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words. our babbling education produces nothing but babblers. suppose that while we are studying the course of the sun, and the manner of finding where the east is, Émile all at once interrupts me, to ask, "what is the use of all this?" what an opportunity for a fine discourse! how many things i could tell him of in answering this question, especially if anybody were by to listen! i could mention the advantages of travel and of commerce; the peculiar products of each climate; the manners of different nations; the use of the calendar; the calculation of seasons in agriculture; the art of navigation, and the manner of travelling by sea, following the true course without knowing where we are. i might take up politics, natural history, astronomy, even ethics and international law, by way of giving my pupil an exalted idea of all these sciences, and a strong desire to learn them. when i have done, the boy will not have understood a single idea out of all my pedantic display. he would like to ask again, "what is the use of finding out where the east is?" but dares not, lest i might be angry. he finds it more to his interest to pretend to understand what he has been compelled to hear. this is not at all an uncommon case in superior education, so-called. but our Émile, brought up more like a rustic, and carefully taught to think very slowly, will not listen to all this. he will run away at the first word he does not understand, and play about the room, leaving me to harangue all by myself. let us find a simpler way; this scientific display does him no good. we were noticing the position of the forest north of montmorency, when he interrupted me with the eager question, "what is the use of knowing that?" "you may be right," said i; "we must take time to think about it; and if there is really no use in it, we will not try it again, for we have enough to do that is of use." we went at something else, and there was no more geography that day. the next morning i proposed a walk before breakfast. nothing could have pleased him better; children are always ready to run about, and this boy had sturdy legs of his own. we went into the forest, and wandered over the fields; we lost ourselves, having no idea where we were; and when we intended to go home, could not find our way. time passed; the heat of the day came on; we were hungry. in vain did we hurry about from place to place; we found everywhere nothing but woods, quarries, plains, and not a landmark that we knew. heated, worn out with fatigue, and very hungry, our running about only led us more and more astray. at last we sat down to rest and to think the matter over. Émile, like any other child, did not think about it; he cried. he did not know that we were near the gate of montmorency, and that only a narrow strip of woodland hid it from us. but to him this narrow strip of woodland was a whole forest; one of his stature would be lost to sight among bushes. after some moments of silence i said to him, with a troubled air, "my dear Émile, what shall we do to get away from here?" Émile. [_in a profuse perspiration, and crying bitterly._] i don't know. i'm tired. i'm hungry. i'm thirsty. i can't do anything. jean jacques. do you think i am better off than you, or that i would mind crying too, if crying would do for my breakfast? there is no use in crying; the thing is, to find our way. let me see your watch; what time is it? Émile. it is twelve o'clock, and i haven't had my breakfast. jean jacques. that is true. it is twelve o'clock, and i haven't had my breakfast, either. Émile. oh, how hungry you must be! jean jacques. the worst of it is that my dinner will not come here to find me. twelve o'clock? it was just this time yesterday that we noticed where montmorency is. could we see where it is just as well from this forest? Émile. yea; but yesterday we saw the forest, and we cannot see the town from this place. jean jacques. that is a pity. i wonder if we could find out where it is without seeing it? Émile. oh, my dear friend! jean jacques. did not we say that this forest is-- Émile. north of montmorency. jean jacques. if that is true, montmorency must be-- Émile. south of the forest. jean jacques. there is a way of finding out the north at noon. Émile. yes; by the direction of our shadows. jean jacques. but the south? Émile. how can we find that? jean jacques. the south is opposite the north. Émile. that is true; all we have to do is to find the side opposite the shadows. oh, there's the south! there's the south! montmorency must surely be on that side; let us look on that side. jean jacques. perhaps you are right. let us take this path through the forest. Émile. [_clapping his hands, with a joyful shout._] oh, i see montmorency; there it is, just before us, in plain sight. let us go to our breakfast, our dinner; let us run fast. astronomy is good for something! observe that even if he does not utter these last words, they will be in his mind. it matters little so long as it is not i who utter them. rest assured that he will never in his life forget this day's lesson. now if i had only made him imagine it all indoors, my lecture would have been entirely forgotten by the next day. we should teach as much as possible by actions, and say only what we cannot do. robinson crusoe. in his legitimate preference for teaching by the eye and hand and by real things, and in his aversion to the barren and erroneous method of teaching from books alone, rousseau, constantly carried away by the passionate ardor of his nature, rushes into an opposite extreme, and exclaims, "i hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we do not understand." then, checked in the full tide of this declamation by his own good sense, he adds:-- since we must have books, there is one which, to my mind, furnishes the finest of treatises on education according to nature. my Émile shall read this book before any other; it shall for a long time be his entire library, and shall always hold an honorable place. it shall be the text on which all our discussions of natural science shall be only commentaries. it shall be a test for all we meet during our progress toward a ripened judgment, and so long as our taste is unspoiled, we shall enjoy reading it. what wonderful book is this? aristotle? pliny? buffon? no; it is "robinson crusoe." the story of this man, alone on his island, unaided by his fellow-men, without any art or its implements, and yet providing for his own preservation and subsistence, even contriving to live in what might be called comfort, is interesting to persons of all ages. it may be made delightful to children in a thousand ways. thus we make the desert island, which i used at the outset for a comparison, a reality. this condition is not, i grant, that of man in society; and to all appearance Émile will never occupy it; but from it he ought to judge of all others. the surest way to rise above prejudice, and to judge of things in their true relations, is to put ourselves in the place of an isolated man, and decide as he must concerning their real utility. disencumbered of its less profitable portions, this romance from its beginning, the shipwreck of crusoe on the island, to its end, the arrival of the vessel which takes him away, will yield amusement and instruction to Émile during the period now in question. i would have him completely carried away by it, continually thinking of crusoe's fort, his goats, and his plantations. i would have him learn, not from books, but from real things, all he would need to know under the same circumstances. he should be encouraged to play robinson crusoe; to imagine himself clad in skins, wearing a great cap and sword, and all the array of that grotesque figure, down to the umbrella, of which he would have no need. if he happens to be in want of anything, i hope he will contrive something to supply its place. let him look carefully into all that his hero did, and decide whether any of it was unnecessary, or might have been done in a better way. let him notice crusoe's mistakes and avoid them under like circumstances. he will very likely plan for himself surroundings like crusoe's,--a real castle in the air, natural at his happy age when we think ourselves rich if we are free and have the necessaries of life. how useful this hobby might be made if some man of sense would only suggest it and turn it to good account! the child, eager to build a storehouse for his island, would be more desirous to learn than his master would be to teach him. he would be anxious to know everything he could make use of, and nothing besides. you would not need to guide, but to restrain him. here rousseau insists upon giving a child some trade, no matter what his station in life may be; and in he uttered these prophetic words, remarkable indeed, when we call to mind the disorders at the close of that century:-- you trust to the present condition of society, without reflecting that it is subject to unavoidable revolutions, and that you can neither foresee nor prevent what is to affect the fate of your own children. the great are brought low, the poor are made rich, the king becomes a subject. are the blows of fate so uncommon that you can expect to escape them? we are approaching a crisis, the age of revolutions. who can tell what will become of you then? all that man has done man may destroy. no characters but those stamped by nature are ineffaceable; and nature did not make princes, or rich men, or nobles. this advice was followed. in the highest grades of society it became the fashion to learn some handicraft. it is well known that louis xvi. was proud of his skill as a locksmith. among the exiles of a later period, many owed their living to the trade they had thus learned. to return to Émile: rousseau selects for him the trade of a joiner, and goes so far as to employ him and his tutor in that kind of labor for one or more days of every week under a master who pays them actual wages for their work. judging from appearances. the broken stick. if i have thus far made myself understood, you may see how, with regular physical exercise and manual labor, i am at the same time giving my pupil a taste for reflection and meditation. this will counterbalance the indolence which might result from his indifference to other men and from the dormant state of his passions. he must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher, or he will be as idle as a savage. the great secret of education is to make physical and mental exercises serve as relaxation for each other. at first our pupil had nothing but sensations, and now he has ideas. then he only perceived, but now he judges. for from comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations, with the judgments based on them, arises a kind of mixed or complex sensation which i call an idea. the different manner in which ideas are formed gives each mind its peculiar character. a mind is solid if it shape its ideas according to the true relations of things; superficial, if content with their apparent relations; accurate, if it behold things as they really are; unsound, if it understand them incorrectly; disordered, if it fabricate imaginary relations, neither apparent nor real; imbecile, if it do not compare ideas at all. greater or less mental power in different men consists in their greater or less readiness in comparing ideas and discovering their relations. from simple as well as complex sensations, we form judgments which i will call simple ideas. in a sensation the judgment is wholly passive, only affirming that we feel what we feel. in a preception or idea, the judgment is active; it brings together, compares, and determines relations not determined by the senses. this is the only point of difference, but it is important. nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. i see a child eight years old helped to some frozen custard. without knowing what it is, he puts a spoonful in his mouth, and feeling the cold sensation, exclaims, "ah, that burns!" he feels a keen sensation; he knows of none more so than heat, and thinks that is what he now feels. he is of course mistaken; the chill is painful, but does not burn him; and the two sensations are not alike, since, after encountering both, we never mistake one for the other. it is not, therefore, the sensation which misleads him, but the judgment based on it. it is the same when any one sees for the first time a mirror or optical apparatus; or enters a deep cellar in mid-winter or midsummer; or plunges his hand, either very warm or very cold, into tepid water; or rolls a little ball between two of his fingers held crosswise. if he is satisfied with describing what he perceives or feels, keeping his judgment in abeyance, he cannot be mistaken. but when he decides upon appearances, his judgment is active; it compares, and infers relations it does not perceive; and it may then be mistaken. he will need experience to prevent or correct such mistakes. show your pupil clouds passing over the moon at night, and he will think that the moon is moving in an opposite direction, and that the clouds are at rest. he will the more readily infer that this is the case, because he usually sees small objects, not large ones, in motion, and because the clouds seem to him larger than the moon, of whose distance he has no idea. when from a moving boat he sees the shore at a little distance, he makes the contrary mistake of thinking that the earth moves. for, unconscious of his own motion, the boat, the water, and the entire horizon seem to him one immovable whole of which the moving shore is only one part. the first time a child sees a stick half immersed in water, it seems to be broken. the sensation is a true one, and would be, even if we did not know the reason for this appearance. if therefore you ask him what he sees, he answers truly, "a broken stick," because he is fully conscious of the sensation of a broken stick. but when, deceived by his judgment, he goes farther, and after saying that he sees a broken stick, he says again that the stick really is broken, he says what is not true; and why? because his judgment becomes active; he decides no longer from observation, but from inference, when he declares as a fact what he does not actually perceive; namely, that touch would confirm the judgment based upon sight alone. the best way of learning to judge correctly is the one which tends to simplify our experience, and enables us to make no mistakes even when we dispense with experience altogether. it follows from this that after having long verified the testimony of one sense by that of another, we must further learn to verify the testimony of each sense by itself without appeal to any other. then each sensation at once becomes an idea, and an idea in accordance with the truth. with such acquisitions i have endeavored to store this third period of human life. to follow this plan requires a patience and a circumspection of which few teachers are capable, and without which a pupil will never learn to judge correctly. for example: if, when he is misled by the appearance of a broken stick, you endeavor to show him his mistake by taking the stick quickly out of the water, you may perhaps undeceive him, but what will you teach him? nothing he might not have learned for himself. you ought not thus to teach him one detached truth, instead of showing him how he may always discover for himself any truth. if you really mean to teach him, do not at once undeceive him. let Émile and myself serve you for example. in the first place, any child educated in the ordinary way would, to the second of the two questions above mentioned, answer, "of course the stick is broken." i doubt whether Émile would give this answer. seeing no need of being learned or of appearing learned, he never judges hastily, but only from evidence. knowing how easily appearances deceive us, as in the case of perspective, he is far from finding the evidence in the present case sufficient. besides, knowing from experience that my most trivial question always has an object which he does not at once discover, he is not in the habit of giving heedless answers. on the contrary, he is on his guard and attentive; he looks into the matter very carefully before replying. he never gives me an answer with which he is not himself satisfied, and he is not easily satisfied. moreover, he and i do not pride ourselves on knowing facts exactly, but only on making few mistakes. we should be much more disconcerted if we found ourselves satisfied with an insufficient reason than if we had discovered none at all. the confession, "i do not know," suits us both so well, and we repeat it so often, that it costs neither of us anything. but whether for this once he is careless, or avoids the difficulty by a convenient "i do not know," my answer is the same: "let us see; let us find out." the stick, half-way in the water, is fixed in a vertical position. to find out whether it is broken, as it appears to be, how much we must do before we take it out of the water, or even touch it! first, we go entirely round it, and observe that the fracture goes around with us. it is our eye alone, then, that changes it; and a glance cannot move things from place to place. secondly, we look directly down the stick, from the end outside of the water; then the stick is no longer bent, because the end next our eye exactly hides the other end from us. has our eye straightened the stick? thirdly, we stir the surface of the water, and see the stick bend itself into several curves, move in a zig-zag direction, and follow the undulations of the water. has the motion we gave the water been enough thus to break, to soften, and to melt the stick? fourth, we draw off the water and see the stick straighten itself as fast as the water is lowered. is not this more than enough to illustrate the fact and to find out the refraction? it is not then true that the eye deceives us, since by its aid alone we can correct the mistakes we ascribe to it. suppose the child so dull as not to understand the result of these experiments. then we must call touch to the aid of sight. instead of taking the stick out of the water, leave it there, and let him pass his hand from one end of it to the other. he will feel no angle; the stick, therefore, is not broken. you will tell me that these are not only judgments but formal reasonings. true; but do you not see that, as soon as the mind has attained to ideas, all judgment is reasoning? the consciousness of any sensation is a proposition, a judgment. as soon, therefore, as we compare one sensation with another, we reason. the art of judging and the art of reasoning are precisely the same. if, from the lesson of this stick, Émile does not understand the idea of refraction, he will never understand it at all. he shall never dissect insects, or count the spots on the sun; he shall not even know what a microscope or a telescope is. your learned pupils will laugh at his ignorance, and will not be very far wrong. for before he uses these instruments, i intend he shall invent them; and you may well suppose that this will not be soon done. this shall be the spirit of all my methods of teaching during this period. if the child rolls a bullet between two crossed fingers, i will not let him look at it till he is otherwise convinced that there is only one bullet there. result. the pupil at the age of fifteen. i think these explanations will suffice to mark distinctly the advance my pupil's mind has hitherto made, and the route by which he has advanced. you are probably alarmed at the number of subjects i have brought to his notice. you are afraid i will overwhelm his mind with all this knowledge. but i teach him rather not to know them than to know them. i am showing him a path to knowledge not indeed difficult, but without limit, slowly measured, long, or rather endless, and tedious to follow. i am showing him how to take the first steps, so that he may know its beginning, but allow him to go no farther. obliged to learn by his own effort, he employs his own reason, not that of another. most of our mistakes arise less within ourselves than from others; so that if he is not to be ruled by opinion, he must receive nothing upon authority. such continual exercise must invigorate the mind as labor and fatigue strengthen the body. the mind as well as the body can bear only what its strength will allow. when the understanding fully masters a thing before intrusting it to the memory, what it afterward draws therefrom is in reality its own. but if instead we load the memory with matters the understanding has not mastered, we run the risk of never finding there anything that belongs to it. Émile has little knowledge, but it is really his own; he knows nothing by halves; and the most important fact is that he does not now know things he will one day know; that many things known to other people he never will know; and that there is an infinity of things which neither he nor any one else ever will know. he is prepared for knowledge of every kind; not because he has so much, but because he knows how to acquire it; his mind is open to it, and, as montaigne says, if not taught, he is at least teachable. i shall be satisfied if he knows how to find out the "wherefore" of everything he knows and the "why" of everything he believes. i repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge, but to teach him how to acquire it at need; to estimate it at its true value, and above all things, to love the truth. by this method we advance slowly, but take no useless steps, and are not obliged to retrace a single one. Émile understands only the natural and purely physical sciences. he does not even know the name of history, or the meaning of metaphysics and ethics. he knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. he does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. he observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. with the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows something of extension and quantity. upon these figures and signs his senses rest their knowledge of the abstractions just named. he makes no attempt to learn the nature of things, but only such of their relations as concern himself. he estimates external things only by their relation to him; but this estimate is exact and positive, and in it fancies and conventionalities have no share. he values most those things that are most useful to him; and never deviating from this standard, is not influenced by general opinion. Émile is industrious, temperate, patient, steadfast, and full of courage. his imagination, never aroused, does not exaggerate dangers. he feels few discomforts, and can bear pain with fortitude, because he has never learned to contend with fate. he does not yet know exactly what death is, but, accustomed to yield to the law of necessity, he will die when he must, without a groan or a struggle. nature can do no more at that moment abhorred by all. to live free and to have little to do with human affairs is the best way of learning how to die. in a word, Émile has every virtue which affects himself. to have the social virtues as well, he only needs to know the relations which make them necessary; and this knowledge his mind is ready to receive. he considers himself independently of others, and is satisfied when others do not think of him at all. he exacts nothing from others, and never thinks of owing anything to them. he is alone in human society, and depends solely upon himself. he has the best right of all to be independent, for he is all that any one can be at his age. he has no errors but such as a human being must have; no vices but those from which no one can warrant himself exempt. he has a sound constitution, active limbs, a fair and unprejudiced mind, a heart free and without passions. self-love, the first and most natural of all, has scarcely manifested itself at all. without disturbing any one's peace of mind he has led a happy, contented life, as free as nature will allow. do you think a youth who has thus attained his fifteenth year has lost the years that have gone before? [ ] this might be carried too far, and is to be admitted with some reservations. ignorance is never alone; its companions are always error and presumption. no one is so certain that he knows, as he who knows nothing; and prejudice of all kinds is the form in which our ignorance is clothed. [ ] the armillary sphere is a group of pasteboard or copper circles, to illustrate the orbits of the planets, and their position in relation to the earth, which is represented by a small wooden ball. [ ] the imaginary circles traced on the celestial sphere, and figured in the armillary sphere by metallic circles, are called _culures_. [ ] rousseau here informs his readers that even these reproaches are expected, he having dictated them beforehand to the mountebank; all this scene has been arranged to deceive the child. what a refinement of artifice in this passionate lover of the natural! adequate preparation for the teacher of biological sciences in secondary schools. j. daley mcdonald submitted to the school of education of the university of california in partial fulfillment of the minor requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy. november th contents introduction retarding factors in improvement qualifications in subject matter scope of biology values and relations of biology adaptation of course to community conditions freedom from textbook slavery materials and laboratory equipment historical setting spirit of research qualifications in method factors determining correct method history of scientific method problem method accuracy and logical constructive thinking teacher's final method necessarily unique summary of necessary qualifications opportunity for adequate preparation lack of professional course requirements of teachers recommendation in zoology courses not adapted for teacher-preparation professional course the goal suggested modifications of present courses course in special methods practice teaching bibliography the use of the term _preparation_ herein is intended to indicate partially the limitation of the problem attempted. the following discussion will be concerned only with such attributes of the successful teacher as are the direct result, or at least greatly enhanced by thorough preparation. a sufficiently comprehensive and difficult problem remains after still further restriction of the field so as to include only subject matter and the method of biological science. it is scarcely necessary to make the statement that the standards of preparation and the facilities for meeting these standards have been enormously improved within the past few years. evidence of this is found in the changes recently made in the curricula of and the requirements for graduation from the california state teachers colleges. neither is it necessary to say that improvement must continue. such problems are evolutionary. notwithstanding that requirements for teachers certificates have been raised the country over, the universities are not generally making very rapid strides in affording opportunities for better preparation in subject-matter and special methods. in corroboration, witness the recent criticisms of the departmental courses in special methods now given in universities generally (swift, ; taylor, ). the length of time or the number of units of work required for certification may be increased but that does not insure a finer _quality_ of preparation. in attempting to explain the slow pace of improvement in the quality of preparation for the teaching of science, one becomes involved in a cycle. science had its development in the college and university whence it diffused slowly into the secondary schools, and finally slightly into the elementary grades. the differences between the aims of college science and secondary school science were and still are not taken sufficiently into account. as an inevitable result there are to be found in the curricula of high schools too many science courses that are mere dilutions of the college type, with no modification of purpose, and just enough change in method and subject matter to bring them partially within the power of understanding of the less mature mind. this situation in turn reflected upon the higher institutions of learning in such a way that it seemed that they were giving adequate training of the correct type. and such would have been the case had the college course in the particular science been planned for the express purpose of being diluted to suit secondary school needs. but it will be generally conceded that such courses never have existed. another retarding factor in the evolution of the problem has been the subordination of special training in subject matter to other really less important qualifications, in the selection of teachers. the table given below, compiled from statistics gathered in one of the states during , shows sufficient justification for the above statement. and not only has the preparation in subject matter been too little considered in choosing teachers, but also in the administration of schools specially intended for teacher-training. an educator of high standing in california is credited with making the criticism of the normal schools of the state; that they attempt to teach a person how to teach intelligently something about which he knows nothing. when teachers have adequate preparation in subject matter as well as in methods, and when they are employed to teach only those subjects for which they are fitted, then the problem of maintaining a high standard of teaching will be well nigh solved. subject | prepared & | not prepared | prepared and | total | teaching | & teaching | not teaching | -----------+------------+--------------+--------------+------- physiology | | | | -----------+------------+--------------+--------------+------- botany | | | | -----------+------------+--------------+--------------+------- zoology | | | | -----------+------------+--------------+--------------+------- agriculture| | | | -----------+------------+--------------+--------------+------- preparation in subject matter before facing the problem of preparation for the teaching of biological sciences in the secondary schools, there must be a clear conception of the aims and legitimate purposes of these sciences in the high school. we are fortunate in having the aims of biology clearly and concisely stated by the commission on the reorganization of secondary education of the n.e.a. ("reorganization of science in secondary schools", u.s. dep't. interior, bureau of education, bulletin , ). these aims will not be considered in their entirety but only in so far as they bear directly on the problems that follow. before proceeding further, for simplification we will assume that the teacher is assigned to teach biological sciences only. even then the field is quite comprehensive, for besides instruction in general biology, there will be courses of a more advanced type, in zoology, botany, physiology, and often bacteriology, sanitation, or agriculture. however, with preparation in the fundamentals necessary for biology a teacher should be able to conduct such courses without difficulty. thus the problem is sufficiently inclusive if it concerns preparation for biology alone. the brief literal translation of the word _biology_, science of life, is full explanation of its scope. a course in the subject is not zoology, nor botany, nor bacteriology, nor physiology--but rather all of these in one. biology should logically follow the nature study of the elementary grades. the course must be so planned that it will give the pupils the maximum of serviceable fundamentals and at the same time be a basis for further study in advanced courses, if he desires to continue; but such that he will miss none of the essentials if he does not. since science is the product of mature minds, the culmination of knowledge, then in this course for adolescents, the "ology" must not be too greatly stressed lest the essential part, the "bios" be obscured. the goal then is a course in which a study of plant life, a study of bacteria in relation to human welfare, a study of animal life, and the biology of the human, are all incorporated with well balanced emphasis. this is the type of course recommended by the commission on reorganization for the ninth or tenth year pupils, so is the end toward which preparation should be made. the next question concerns what constitutes adequate preparation for the direction of studies of animate nature. first and foremost is a realization of the aims, or better, the values, and relations of biology. it is a socializing subject and must be so taught--man is social. biology affects man vitally, directly his behavior follows natural laws, and indirectly by illustration and comparison brings him to a better understanding biologic laws underlying the organization of society. by way of illustration we need only to cite the struggle for existence and the division of labor with their far reaching influence in determining the course of evolution. it would be impossible, i believe, to teach biology so poorly that it did not have some socializing value; but it comes very near to being done in some cases, there is little doubt. a paramount aim is the improvement of living conditions, both as it concerns measures for group sanitation and factors in the health of the individual. this should be the almost exclusive aim in those parts of the course dealing with bacteria and disease, and the biology of man, or physiology and eugenics. biology has many applications in our economic life. it is the very foundation of agriculture. the lumber industry is beginning to find that there are biologic laws. the government of the united states some time ago established a bureau of fisheries for the purpose of studying the biological problems involved in the continuance and furtherance of our extensive fisheries industry. so far as the individual is concerned, biology should train him to observe life phenomena accurately and to form logical conclusions, through the use of problems. this ability is a valuable asset whatever his life work may be. also, if it is the right kind of a course, and well taught, it will enrich the life of the boy or girl through the aesthetic appeal of plants and animals, and so make possible a sincere appreciation and enjoyment of nature. in addition, the study of biology should make clear to the pupil the important part that the intensive study of the various biological sciences has played in the whole marvelous scientific progress of the past centuries. along with these values certain relations of biology must be well understood if it is to be well taught. these relations may be conveniently segregated into five groups, ) relations to world problems, ) to problems of the state, ) to the community, ) to the school curriculum, and ) to individual pupils. to world problems biology bears many relations, for example, it is fundamental in the analysis of immigration problems, especially those phases concerning health, over-population, and the probable hereditary effects of assimilation through hybridization. state problems of health protection, conservation of game and forests, control of rodents and other crop pests, and others can only be solved after gaining a thorough knowledge of the underlying natural laws, and acting in accordance with them. how inadequate a game conservation law of closed season, without regard to the breeding habits of the animal concerned! again, state regulations regarding the care of mentally deficient, especially in the prevention of intermarriage, must be given consideration from the biological as well as the ethical point of view. as we consider the smaller group unit so the relations of biology to that group become more special. a biology course may be readily standardized for national problems, but for any given community the course must be somewhat unique. a course planned for a rural population would not be fitted for a school in an overcrowded section of a city. where there are differences in social and biological problems there also must be fitting adaptive changes in the course in biology. in addition to these community relations, the teacher must keep in mind the relations between the biology course and the other courses in the curriculum of the school. such a question as this should arise in the mind of the teacher; how may my work be made to correlate with that of domestic science? the possibilities are many, there is the field of dietetics, scientific determination of the best methods of sweeping methods by bacterial culture methods, and the role of bacteria, yeasts and molds in the culinary arts constitute a few of them. how about cooperation with the english department? certainly every bit of written work, every oral recitation, should measure up to standards of ability in expression as well as to standards of attainment in the mastery of certain scientific information. this cooperation has been carried out to great mutual benefit in some schools. these illustrations are sufficient to illustrate, though the teacher should not overlook any department of the school. relations to class and to individual will be considered in conjunction with teaching methods. the values and interrelations of biology have been discussed at some length because they must serve as criteria in deciding what constitutes adequate preparation. the comprehensiveness and vital nature of the subject, biology, present at once an inspiration and an element of fear to the conscientious teacher. they cause him to regard in utter amazement, the applicant for a position who in answer to question replies "no, i have never taken any courses in biological science, but i can easily prepare myself to teach it, if need be." the impossibility of such impromptu development of skill in the teaching of biology will become more apparent as we proceed. besides a full appreciation of the aims and relations of the subject, the teacher must be able to construct a course especially adapted in content to the peculiar needs of the particular community. this follows from what was said of relations in a previous paragraph. the development of such a course demands sufficient knowledge of economics and sociology to make possible a correct analysis of local conditions and so find what is required. the course to fulfill the requirements will necessarily be to some extent new, and just to such extent may the teacher feel something of the inspiration of the pioneer. relative values must be established; emphasis must be properly placed--life of distant regions should not be taught except as local material may not be available to illustrate some very essential point, yet too often a carefully pickled grasshopper is transported from florida to california, there to be dissected by some unfortunate high school lad. not only must the larger divisions of the course be carefully balanced and tested for value, but each lesson must justify its induction into it. it is at this point that the relation to the individual is the chief criterion. each lesson of the series that makes up the course must justify its place by having some rather direct bearing upon the life of the individual pupil. the core of the lesson must be either the pupils problem or one in which his interest can be readily stimulated. herein is the value of the project method of science teaching, the problem is sure to be of interest to the pupil since he himself chooses it. other questions to which the lesson must give satisfactory answer are; why this particular lesson, at all? what relation does it bear to the preceding and following lessons? is it of real value to the pupil in his living? what biological phenomenon does it teach? is it the best problem to illustrate that particular phenomenon? what generalizations and practical applications can the _pupil_ make? the organization of a course in biology which is fitted to the needs of a certain community, the conditions of a particular class of pupils, and to the needs of the individual pupils so far as possible, requires that the teacher have an extensive knowledge of the subject matter as a background freeing him from the necessity of dependence on a textbook. anyway, a biology teacher conducting the right sort of a course, will see that the textbook is only an incidental, if used at all. a continuation of set assignments in most textbooks would dampen the ardor of pupils generally. besides, few localities have textbooks fitted to their specific needs. one that does have is new york city. in fact it has two, "elementary biology" by peabody & hunt, and "civic biology" by hunter. these both have a large sale throughout the united states, but, of course, in most localities they can be used only to furnish supplementary reading, since _portions_ only will be adapted to the conditions of the restricted locality. the fundamental life processes are the same the world over, but varying environmental conditions necessitates a variation in emphasis, in application, and in the choice of problems which make up the course. if the teacher is well prepared in subject matter, there is little use for a laboratory manual except as it may suggest new methods and new experimental materials. students of the high school age should never be compelled to follow a set laboratory outline with detailed instructions for procedure; it will kill every whit of initiative. the teacher must be so prepared, then, that he is able to steer a free course, employing books for reference and supplementary reading almost exclusively. he will cause the student to realize that the books are the result of _human_ effort and therefor not infallible, and that they must always take second place to first hand observation and experiment. the study of animate nature, with endless opportunity for observation and experiment on every hand, permits little excuse for such method as is illustrated by "be prepared to recite on the next three pages in the book, tomorrow, and read experiment so that you wont have to waste any time in getting started with the laboratory work". somewhere in the course of preparation the teacher must have obtained a thorough knowledge of laboratory apparatus and supplies. the selection of types of apparatus best fitted to the course, and the knowledge of where to buy are both necessary. also judgement must be exercised in purchase for few are the places where funds are adequate for the ideal equipment of a laboratory. the money value of every piece of apparatus must be balanced against its relative usefulness in the successful culmination of the course. besides this there must be a knowledge of the various uses to which the available apparatus may be put. a great deal depends on the ingenuity of the teacher in the adaptation of even comparatively simple apparatus. in connection with the laboratory part (and this should be the major part) of the course, there arises the question of field work and excursions. laboratory is at best merely a substitute for the great out-of-doors, so the more work that can be done in the field the better. aside from exploration to discover what parts of the particular locality will yield the largest fund of valuable biological information, the problem here is mainly one of method. the teacher to be at his best must be somewhat of a naturalist. upon his fund of interesting stories about the animals and plants that the children all know, will depend very largely the appeal of the work to the pupil. something of the spirit that distinguished john muir as the great naturalist is an inestimable asset to the teacher. if it is not among his natal blessings, he need not be completely discouraged for it can be acquired to some degree at least. besides the advantage just mentioned, the fauna and flora must be sufficiently well known so that _choice_ is possible for laboratory experiment and illustrative purposes. in order to present any subject well, its historical aspect enters into consideration. the influence of individuals, of governments, of religion, and of the social ideals have all had their share in determining the present status of the subject. science as it now is, is the result of growth, it has undergone evolution, and is at present evolving. this will be thoroughly understood by the teacher of science, and this understanding will determine in part the method of presentation. in the history of the development of science there are many men well worthy of hero worship. it is hard to find more inspirational characters than those of pasteur, and lazear; men who devoted (in latter instance, sacrificed life) their lives to service for humanity. in the life and work of charles darwin we find a splendid example of painstaking search for the truth. the records of the rocks, (paleontology, the nature-written history of biology) will often come to the rescue of the teacher in clearing up the presentation of the difficult problems of evolution. the historic attitude must be "put over" to the pupil too, for _he_ must know his world as the result of the evolutionary process, and as still in the process of evolution. even at the risk of adverse criticism i desire to include among the qualifications of a good teacher the spirit of research. this spirit can be acquired by specialization in one of the fields of biological science, followed by some actual research work. research in science is fundamental. it has three aims or ends, ) discovery of facts thus increasing the sum total of knowledge. this is science for science sake. ) individual development. and, ) social service. these last two aims are most important to the teacher. so, his problem for investigation should have some practical bearing, and should be of his own choosing, not pointedly suggested by the professor in charge as is too often the case. if the research student is given a problem which is some minor part of a larger problem being investigated by his professor it will preclude the very thing the prospective teacher needs, namely practice in recognizing, analyzing, and solving a problem in its entirety and solely on his own resources. being a mere helper is probably not the best way to secure such ability. investigation may be broadening and developing to the individual or it may prove to be quite the reverse, but that lies within the control of the individual. research for the teacher must emphasize equally actual additions to knowledge and personal attitude. it must not be an end in itself but a means to an end. the attitude of the investigator is essential to the understanding of children for the child is first of all an investigator. his questions, "what? why? how? when?" prove this beyond doubt. what is this but a search for truth, causal factors, and interrelations? education uses this wholesome curiosity as a foundation principle, so the teacher must exhibit a sympathetic understanding of this universal attribute of children. no better summary of a discussion of the values of research can be found for our purposes than that by g. w. a. luckey. it follows. "in order that teaching may be intelligent and in harmony with the laws of nature there must be a deeper and clearer knowledge of human growth and development. the teacher must know the nature of the individual to be taught and the ends to be reached in proper nurture. this can not be gained through the study of books alone, but may come through properly directed research in the workshop of life." one of the aims of present day education is "to develop a man, the best man possible under the conditions; to assist nature through nurture; to enable the individual to find himself and to evolve naturally and rapidly to the highest levels and even to rise above them. according to this conception ... the initiative must come from within. the aim of the teacher should be to develop a self-sustaining, self-directing, altruistic individual keenly alive to the interests of humanity. such an ideal is progressive, scientific, and fits one through studies of yesterday and today to live the best and truest life tomorrow. to see and appreciate this ideal, research is necessary." the last requirement to be considered in this discussion, is a good foundation in physics and chemistry. biological science is not entirely separable from physical science, for a majority of life phenomena, in final analysis can be explained only in terms of physical science. physiology has for its very foundation physics and chemistry. among the newest of the sciences is biochemistry, the chemistry of life; and within its limits are some of the most promising fields of research. no argument is necessary, a knowledge of physical science is indispensable in the interpretation of life phenomena, and the understanding of biological processes. preparation in methods method is more closely associated with personality and with native ability than is subject matter. so much more must preparation in this field be general in nature. it must mainly concern the general principles of the scientific method. specific problems and minor details will have to be worked out in actual practice. the final method found most satisfactory by any teacher, will be to some extent unique, but will be largely determined by three factors; the aptitudes of the teacher, himself, the group that he is teaching, and lastly, the consideration of the individual pupil. ability to adapt ones procedure so as to most nearly meet these requirements, will come about only through experience. ability to profit by experience, the human attribute which makes possible the progress of civilization, is a no less valuable asset to a teacher than to any other member of society. balliet points out that science teaching has passed through three stages in the past generation. the first stage is characterized by the textbook method, occasionally supplemented by illustrative experiment, performed by the teacher. the second stage is characterized by individual laboratory experiment, a manual for a guide, and by a lack of application of the principles except for a few traditional cases. the third stage improves upon the second by leading the pupil, after formulating his generalizations, to apply them to the facts and phenomena of nature. "but", continues balliet, "we must advance to a fourth stage. we must not only apply the generalizations, but make the _explanation_ of the facts and phenomena of nature--the interpretation of nature--the very goal of science teaching." all problems should be chosen then in the light of this last aim. the problems must be natural, not in any way artificial, and they should be those of the immediate environment of the pupil. to meet these obligations may be in some cases difficult, but it should not be impossible. in biological science there is a rich field permitting a considerable choice in method. there are observations, projects, experiments, excursions, individual reports, book readings, quizzes, and conferences. in a single well chosen problem or project nearly all of these will be employed. biology lends itself ideally to the problem method of teaching. by using some every day problem of the pupil, his interest is assured. even a seemingly simple problem if skilfully directed, will ramify into several fields of biology before its solution is completed. and the number of practicable problems is almost limitless, but not all are equally good for the purpose, so the teacher must often tactfully modify the pupils choice. original choices are likely to be too complex for the pupil to solve at his stage of progress, so must be simplified, without his feeling that he has been interfered with, without causing a wane in his interest. it is clear that the real problem in the problem-method is the teacher's. practically, it is quite impossible to handle _individual_ projects in large classes. in the writer's experience, he has had on the average different pupils per day in four separate classes. it is clearly beyond the power of any teacher to direct simultaneously eighty different projects, and it would be a physical impossibility to furnish the necessary laboratory apparatus. so, for this reason the teacher may find it necessary to divide, as diplomatically as possible, the classes into congenial groups, each with its problem, so that the total number of problems will be so limited that each one may be given adequate attention. it seems that such must be the limitation of the problem-method under the conditions prevailing in the public schools today. the procedure in solving a problem will consist of these steps in the order named, ) understanding of the purpose, ) the procedure or method of attack, ) observation of results, ) and the use of these in making some generalizations or arriving at some conclusions. then there must follow a testing of these generalizations or conclusions by further experimentation. accuracy must be the keynote of all work, accuracy in recording experiments, accuracy in observation, accuracy in drawing, which serves as a shortcut method of description. neatness is very desireable but should never supercede thinking and understanding. if the problem has stimulated some accurate logical thinking on the part of the pupil, then time spent on it has been well spent. if, besides, it has yielded some valuable useable information, the solving of the problem has been a marked success. the laboratory method has been such an emancipation from the textbook slavery that there is some tendency to elevate it to an end in itself, whereas it must serve only as a very valuable _means_ to an end. "the ideal laboratory is only a reasonably good substitute for the out-of-doors." so far as preparation in the methods of science teaching is concerned, much good may be accomplished in teachers courses and in practice teaching. but it must necessarily be of a general nature, for the unique individual method, determined by the interaction of teacher and pupil and the reaction of both to subject matter can evolve only hand in hand with teaching experience. before proceeding further it might be well, by way of summary, to remind ourselves that the minimum qualifications for a teacher of biology must include the following; a) a large fund of the most interesting and most valuable facts of biology, b) a full realization of the values and vital relations of biology to humanity, c) ability to develop a course meeting the unique needs of the community, d) familiarity with purchase and useability of laboratory equipment, e) knowledge of the history of science, f) spirit of and sympathy with research, g) a knowledge of physical science as related to biology, h) and knowledge of the laboratory method and its value in the promotion of accurate logical constructive thinking. opportunity for adequate preparation. what possibilities of making adequate preparation, are to be found in colleges and universities? and how much preparation is required by the teacher's recommendation or other standards of fitness? in search of the answers to our questions, we may study conditions at the university of california, for there is as good opportunity and standards are as high in this school as anywhere in the country. the quantity of preparation is fairly assured by the five-year requirement for the teacher's recommendation, but the quality of the preparation is not so certainly assured. with the possible exception of the education department, no department considers the training of teachers even nearly equal in importance to the production of specialists in the subject who shall devote their lives to research. the subject is regarded as an end in itself. if a person were directed to make preparation for the teaching of biology, he would be at a loss in searching for the biology department, or even a department that gave a good comprehensive course in biology. the subject as best taught in the secondary schools is subdivided into various components, each with its special aim. the prospective teacher has no carefully prepared course of study for his pursuit, as has the prospective doctor, engineer, or farmer. the state provides a specially adapted course of training for its veterinarians, those who care for its livestock. why not a special course of high standard for those who plan to devote their lives to the direction of the formative years of its children? it is probably explained in large part by the failure to recognize teaching as a profession. the schools of education throughout the country have been insisting upon real professional training for teachers but other departments are deplorably slow in cooperating. in order to avoid becoming entangled in abstractions, we may choose a specific instance to show the difficulties in the way of securing the correct _kind_ of preparation, even though the quantity is guaranteed. the zoology department (i choose this department neither because it is worse nor better than any other, but because i am better acquainted with the content of its courses) makes the following requirements for the teacher's recommendation: general zoology invertebrate zoology -- an advanced course which omits all consideration of insects, and all discussion of parasitic forms. vertebrate zoology -- mainly a course in comparative morphology, which gives no field knowledge of california vertebrates, the most essential thing for the high school teacher. and one subject from each of the following groups, group i comparative anatomy. cytology -- basic principles must be understood by the teacher but he should not have to spend one whole half year to acquire them. embryology -- the above is also true for this course. group ii. biology of water supplies -- this course is primarily for sanitary engineers. protozoology -- all that is necessary of this could be incorporated in a general course. parasitology -- essential for health instruction and for illustration of certain biological principles. group iii. experimental zoology } combination of these valuable. animal behavior } heredity, evolution, and eugenics -- this course is very essential for _any_ teacher. (required in the fifth year, the teachers' course, some work in research, and practice teaching.) taken as a whole, the chief criticism to be made is that the subject has been so subdivided to insure no overlapping of courses, that it becomes necessary to take every course in order to obtain a well rounded preparation in the field. this requires more time than any individual can devote to it, for he must also have preparation in botany, physiology, and bacteriology and hygiene, and in these departments the arrangement of courses is essentially the same. the general course in zoology is inadequate, for it is planned for an introduction to the more advanced courses and is careful not to steal too much from their fund of interesting information. the aim is to lay a thorough foundation rather than to discuss the more interesting facts and general principles of biology, though i am glad to believe that the present trend is decidedly in this latter direction. here we find adequate preparation for a teacher of _zoology_, but in no secondary school of the state will a teacher be employed for zoology alone. in high schools the biological science curriculum the first course must be _biology_, and it must be all-inclusive, for it is all of the biological science that the majority of the pupils will take. it would be a great step in advance if every school _required_ even that much for graduation. of the courses in invertebrate zoology and vertebrate zoology, it can be safely said that they overlook the importance of field work. boys and girls sometimes have a surprisingly large superficial knowledge of the plants and animals of their vicinity, and this knowledge is of the sort obtained through observation of their ways in nature, that is, it is a _field_ knowledge. the teacher must be prepared to use this to the greatest possible extent, but how can this be expected if the teacher knows little if any more than the children about the habits of plants and animals. such training would have to be obtained through some of the field work of the museum of vertebrate zoology. but no work in that department is required for the teachers recommendation. a knowledge, though not an intensive knowledge, of each of the subjects that make up the three groups included in the requirements is quite necessary but it is out of the question for a person to take them all unless he specialize in zoology. not all can be expected to major in zoology, and those that do will find it necessary to omit much that is essential in the other departments of biological science. each department should have a general course covering fully its field of work so that those majoring in some other department may in minimum time gain a fair knowledge of its field. it is very doubtful if such a course is given in any department at present. at present only a meagre view is had of the history of biology, until the fifth year when it is given as seminar work. and at no time, in any course, are the aims and relations of biology presented in such a way as to be helpful to one attempting to plan the most valuable type of high school course. graduate research has been sufficiently considered previously, and the teachers' course will be considered last. it will be conceded generally in thinking of the solution of the problem that the ideal arrangement would be a real teachers' course, at least five years in length. this could be comparatively easily accomplished by a slight modification of the departments concerned and their hearty cooperation with the department of education. the disregard for method on the part of the former and the failure to realize the importance of a thorough knowledge of subject matter by the latter, can are obstacles that can be easily overcome i am sure. the student would enter upon this course with the intention of becoming a teacher, just as does any student enter upon his professional course with the intention of becoming the professional man for which his training is preparing him. few freshmen now come to the university of california with the intention of becoming teachers in the secondary schools, that i admit, but the reasons and the remedy for that are not for discussion here. suffice it to say that when reward is adequate, then the profession will grow and come to be made up of the highest type of men and women. the time of the teachers course is not far distant and it might be worth while to see what could be done without radical modifications in the curricula of the departments as they now are. for a working basis i would like to present the following skeleton programme, which seems practicable. in this schedule all preparation except that in subject matter and method is understood to be included in "electives". a major in zoology is assumed. each biological science department would have a course of similar plan built about its major as a core. first year, geography or geology aims of science and its human values. chemistry electives second year, zoology, physics, electives third year, zoology--advanced courses botany, physiology electives fourth year, zoology--advanced courses bacteriology, and public health electives fifth year, zoology--research history of science teachers' course, correlated with and supplementary to practice teaching. electives the reasons for selection and sequence of subjects in this schedule are fairly evident from what has gone before, but a few points will bear additional explanation. a course in the aims and values of science should be introductory, for in the absence of general knowledge concerning values, such as has grown up with other professions, the student must be given early in his work an enthusiasm for it and a sort of guide for future choice of subjects for study. the difference in aim between university and secondary school science must be clearly understood at the start. too often, university courses accept science as an end in itself and it is taught from that point of view, whereas the prospective teacher must hold to his point of view, that to humanity generally science is only a very effective means to an end; it is just a faithful servant. the schedule just submitted may seem to be overbalanced with science courses, but it must be somewhat so, especially if courses are not to be completely reorganized. science would not need to consume quite so large a part of the time if special courses were given for teachers--another argument for a high grade, strictly professional course. duplication of teachers' courses in special methods would be eliminated for a single course for all of the departments of biological science would be sufficient. biology is the hub, and not the separate biological sciences, in the courses in this field in the secondary schools. the methods concerned are _biological methods_, and therefore a single course for all prospective teachers of biological science regardless of the nature of their major work, is a logical procedure. whether such a course is a success or a failure is largely dependent on the professor in charge. in the past there have been many failures, mainly because the person conducting it has never had secondary school experience, knows little or nothing of the problems, and has no sincere enthusiasm for the teaching of science to boys and girls below the university age. the course suggested would cover an entire year. at least that much time is required to give any direction or instruction that is worth while. the first half of the year might well be devoted to a digestion and correlation of all previous work, organizing it into a form easily useable in the work to follow. questions of method, recitation, laboratory and field work, textbooks and reference books purchase and use of equipment, must be given consideration in some part of the course. an outline course, with the separate lessons that make it up should be worked out in detail, for some particular locality, preferably the one where practice teaching is to be done. this should then be carefully tested by the criteria of a good biology course, as pointed out by the best authorities, and by _common sense_. but why make this skeleton outline beforehand? why be prepared in anything? it will be too late to prepare at the moment the problem has to be met. few new teachers will find a well planned course awaiting their arrival in a new field, and without previous experience a new teacher is likely to build up a course without due respect to relative values which comes only with a perspective of a course in its entirety. to illustrate, in the course given by an inexperienced teacher there is too much chance of six weeks time being spent on the study of the grasshopper, with only four weeks left at the end of the school year to be devoted to the biology of the human. the mapping of a course, by way of practice, gives the prospective teacher practice in the exercise of judgment, with helpful constructive criticism. practice teaching now becomes only the trying out of the course and accompanying methods. as, one practice teacher remarked when this plan was suggested "but, i might have to make my course all over." such would often be the case. any wide-awake teacher will change his course more or less from year to year. even if the first plan were entirely discarded the energy and thought prompted by its making would not be lost. and now let us change the name given to those in charge of practice teachers. advisor would be more fitting than _super_visor, for they should remain in the background except for rendering helpful service, and making constructive criticism in excess of destructive. in order for practice teaching to be effective there must be nothing of an artificial sort enter in. conditions must be of the regular sort met every day in the teaching game. this statement seems superfluous, but a visit to some of the classes where practice teaching is being done will justify its insertion here. the practice teacher should not be handed over a laboratory properly equipped. of course, the equipment should be available. the course should not be "ready-cut". the practice teacher must meet _all_ of the problems and this is cheating him out of a part of his fun. through his solution of these problems there will be a two-fold benefit, for the _advisor_ too may profit by the ingenuity of the newcomer. resignation should be requested of any advisor who has outgrown the ability to learn. it is most likely to be the "green" person, who will develop really new methods, or evolve a more fitting experiment, or turn a bit of apparatus to a new use. above all, the practice teacher should be required to scout for living material--there will usually be an abundance all about him, and much that is of interest should find its way into the laboratory. training in the use of living material can not be over emphasized. the course which i have outlined in the previous pages, is not satisfactory, but i firmly believe that it would be an improvement over the present situation. when tried out it would show many shortcomings, but by trial and improvement has our entire educational system evolved. even an ideal professional course in use today would be obsolete tomorrow. it would be unfortunate were it not so, for growth involves ecdysis, and growth is the law of nature. literature from which helpful suggestions were received during the course of this work. bagley, w. c. the training of teachers as a phase of democracy's educational programme. ed. adm. & supervsn. vol. no. , jan.' . balliet, t. m. and robinson, c. h. training of science teachers. n. e. a. report, vol. , , pp. - . bessey, c. e. preparation of botanical teachers. science, n.s., vol. , pp. - , . boas, f. s. teachers and research. contemp., vol. , pp. - . . boggs, l. p. making teachers. school & soc., vol. , pp. - . caldwell, w. o. preparation of the teacher of biology. school sci. & math., vol. , pp. - . coulter, j. g. the training of elementary science teachers. school rev., vol. , pp. - . curtis, c.b. secondary school science. ed. adm. & supervsn., vol. , nov. . dewey, j. d. democracy and education. kent r. a. university preparation of teachers for high schools. school rev., vol. , pp. - . lange, a. f. preparation of high school teachers from the standpoint of the university. u. c. a. report, , pp. - . lloyd, f. e. and bigelow, m. a. the teaching of biology. . longmans, green & co. luckey, g. w. a. essentials in the training of a teacher. school and society, vol. , pp. - . mcelroy, r. m. teaching teachers. ind., vol. , pp. -. pillsbury, w. h. buffalo plan of teacher training. elem. sch. jr. vol. , pp. - . swift, f. h. college courses in methods of teaching high school subjects. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . taylor, w. s. project methods in teacher-training courses. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . wieman, h. l. teaching the scientific method vs. teaching the facts of science. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . williams, j.t. teacher training in colleges. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . winship, a. e. prepare rather than train for teaching. n. e. a. report, , pp. - . ---- research vs. teaching. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . ---- research as a means of teacher training. sch. & soc., vol. , pp. - . ---- reorganization of science in secondary schools. u. s. dep't. interior, bureau ed., bull. , . ---- cardinal principles of secondary education. u. s. dep't. interior, bureau ed., bull. , . twiss, g.r.--principles of science teaching. macmillan. . transcriber's notes . passages in underlines are surrounded by _underscores_. . tables have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. . the original pages included corrections made by hand which have been retained in this e-text. . the following misprints have been corrected: "intellegently" corrected to "intelligently" (page ) "basterial" corrected to "bacterial" (page ) "would would" corrected to "would" (page ) "natuer" corrected to "nature" (page ) "abilty" corrected to "ability" (page ) "baillet" corrected to "balliet" (page ) "taht" corrected to "that" (page ) "modificacations" corrected to "modifications" (page ) "succes" corrected to "success" (page ) "in" corrected to "in" at start of sentence (page ) "fialures" corrected to "failures" (page ) "toworrow" corrected to "tomorrow" (page ) "teahcing" corrected to "teaching" (page ) . some of the punctuation errors, e.g., comma instead of period, extra period, etc. in the original have been silently corrected while those requiring interpretation have been left as such. . the titles listed in the table of contents do not match with the headings in the original text. however, no changes have been made in this e-text for these mismatches. . other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation have been retained. in the school-room. chapters in the philosophy of education. john s. hart, ll. d., principal of the new jersey state normal school . philadelphia: eldredge & brother, and south sixth street. entered according to act of congress, in the year , by eldredge & brother, in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the eastern district of pennsylvania. j. fagan & son stereotype founders, philadelphia. printed by sherman & co. to the teachers of the united states, and especially to the alumni of the philadelphia high school, and of the new jersey state normal school the following chapters are most respectfully dedicated by the author. preface. the views contained in this volume are the result of a prolonged and somewhat varied professional experience. this experience includes the training of more than five thousand young men and of nearly one thousand young women, a large portion of them for the office of teachers; and it has been gained in college, in boarding school, in a city high school, and in a state normal school. in all this prolonged and varied experience, i have constantly put myself in the attitude of a learner, and my aim in the present volume is to place before the younger members of the profession, in the briefest and clearest terms possible, the lessons i have myself learned. beginning with the question, what is teaching? and ending with the wider question, what is education? the book will be found to take a pretty free range over the whole field of practical inquiry among professional teachers. the thoughts presented are such as have been suggested to the writer in the school-room itself, while actively engaged either in teaching, or in superintending and directing the instruction given by others. these thoughts are for the most part purposely given in short, detached chapters, each complete in itself. such a method of presentation, though less imposing, seemed to have practical advantages for the reader too great to be neglected for the mere vanity of authorship. often one can find leisure to read a chapter of five or six pages on some point complete in itself, when he might not feel like reaching it through an intervening network of connected and dependent propositions. at the same time, it should be observed, the topics though detached are not isolated. there is everywhere an underlying thread of connection, the whole being based upon, if not constituting, a philosophy of education. contents. i. what is teaching? ii. the art of questioning iii. the difference between teaching and training iv. modes of hearing recitations v. on observing a proper order in the development of the mental faculties vi. teaching children what they do not understand vii. cultivating the memory in youth viii. knowledge before memory ix. power of words x. the study of language xi. cultivating the voice xii. eyes xiii. errors of the cave xiv. men of one idea xv. a talent for teaching xvi. teaching power xvii. growing xviii. loving the children xix. gaining the affections of the scholars xx. the obedience of children xxi. rarey as an educator xxii. a boarding-school experience xxiii. phrenology xxiv. normal schools xxv. practice-teaching xxvi. attention as a mental faculty, and as a means of mental culture xxvii. gaining the attention xxviii. counsels: . to a young teacher; . to a new pupil; . to a young lady on leaving school; . to a pupil on entering a normal school xxix. an argument for common schools xxx. what is education? in the school-room. i. what is teaching? in the first place, teaching is not simply telling. a class may be told a thing twenty times over, and yet not know it. talking to a class is not necessarily teaching. i have known many teachers who were brimful of information, and were good talkers, and who discoursed to their classes with ready utterance a large part of the time allotted to instruction; yet an examination of their classes showed little advancement in knowledge. there are several time-honored metaphors on this subject, which need to be received with some grains of allowance, if we would get at an exact idea of what teaching is. chiselling the rude marble into the finished statue; giving the impression of the seal upon the soft wax; pouring water into an empty vessel;--all these comparisons lack one essential element of likeness. the mind is, indeed, in one sense, empty, and needs to be filled. it is yielding, and needs to be impressed. it is rude, and needs polishing. but it is not, like the marble, the wax, or the vessel, a passive recipient of external influences. it is itself a living power. it is acted upon only by stirring up its own activities. the operative upon mind, unlike the operative upon matter, must have the active, voluntary co-operation of that upon which he works. the teacher is doing his work, only so far as he gets work from the scholar. the very essence and root of the work are in the scholar, not in the teacher. no one, in fact, in an important sense, is taught at all, except so far as he is self-taught. the teacher may be useful, as an auxiliary, in causing this action on the part of the scholar. but the one, indispensable, vital thing in all learning, is in the scholar himself. the old romans, in their word education (_educere_, to draw out), seem to have come nearer to the true idea than any other people have done. the teacher is to draw out the resources of the pupil. yet even this word comes short of the exact truth. the teacher must put in, as well as draw out. no process of mere pumping will draw out from a child's mind knowledge which is not there. all the power of the socratic method, could it be applied by socrates himself, would be unavailing to draw from a child's mind, by mere questioning, a knowledge, for instance, of chemical affinity, of the solar system, of the temperature of the gulf stream, of the doctrine of the resurrection. what, then, is teaching? teaching is causing any one to know. now no one can be made to know a thing but by the act of his own powers. his own senses, his own memory, his own powers of reason, perception, and judgment, must be exercised. the function of the teacher is to bring about this exercise of the pupil's faculties. the means to do this are infinite in variety. they should be varied according to the wants and the character of the individual to be taught. one needs to be told a thing; he learns most readily by the ear. another needs to use his eyes; he must see a thing, either in the book, or in nature. but neither eye nor ear, nor any other sense or faculty, will avail to the acquisition of knowledge, unless the power of attention is cultivated. attention, then, is the first act or power of the mind that must be roused. it is the very foundation of all progress in knowledge, and the means of awakening it constitute the first step in the educational art. when by any means, positive knowledge, facts, are once in possession of the mind, something must next be done to prevent their slipping away. you may tell a class the history of a certain event; or you may give them a description of a certain place or person; or you may let them read it; and you may secure such a degree of attention, that, at the time of the reading or the description, they shall have a fair, intelligible comprehension of what has been described or read. the facts are for the time actually in the possession of the mind. now, if the mind was, according to the old notion, merely a vessel to be filled, the process would be complete. but mind is not an empty vessel. it is a living essence, with powers and processes of its own. and experience shows us, that in the case of a class of undisciplined pupils, facts, even when fairly placed in the possession of the mind, often remain there about as long as the shadow of a passing cloud remains upon the landscape, and make about as much impression. the teacher must seek, then, not only to get knowledge into the mind, but to fix it there. in other words, the power of the memory must be strengthened. teaching, then, most truly, and in every stage of it, is a strictly co-operative process. you cannot cause any one to know, by merely pouring out stores of knowledge in his hearing, any more than you can make his body grow by spreading the contents of your market-basket at his feet. you must rouse his power of attention, that he may lay hold of, and receive, and make his own, the knowledge you offer him. you must awaken and strengthen the power of memory within him, that he may retain what he receives, and thus grow in knowledge, as the body by a like process grows in strength and muscle. in other words, learning, so far as the mind of the learner is concerned, is a growth; and teaching, so far as the teacher is concerned, is doing whatever is necessary to cause that growth. let us proceed a step farther in this matter. one of the ancients observes that a lamp loses none of its own light by allowing another lamp to be lit from it. he uses the illustration to enforce the duty of liberality in imparting our knowledge to others. knowledge, he says, unlike other treasures, is not diminished by giving. the illustration fails to express the whole truth. this imparting of knowledge to others, not only does not impoverish the donor, but it actually increases his riches. _docendo discimus._ by teaching we learn. a man grows in knowledge by the very act of communicating it. the reason for this is obvious. in order to communicate to the mind of another a thought which is in our own mind, we must give to the thought definite shape and form. we must handle it, and pack it up for safe conveyance. thus the mere act of giving a thought expression in words, fixes it more deeply in our own minds. not only so; we can, in fact, very rarely be said to be in full possession of a thought ourselves, until by the tongue or the pen we have communicated it to somebody else. the expression of it, in some form, seems necessary to give it, even in our own minds, a definite shape and a lasting impression. a man who devotes himself to solitary reading and study, but never tries in any way to communicate his acquisitions to the world, or to enforce his opinions upon others, rarely becomes a learned man. a great many confused, dreamy ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has little exact and reliable knowledge. the truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. i knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. he shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. had he been compelled to use his mental acquisitions in earning his bread, or had the love of christ constrained him to use them in the instruction of the poor and the ignorant, he might have become not only a useful, but a learned man. we see a beautiful illustration of this doctrine in the case of sabbath-school teachers, and one reason why persons so engaged usually love their work, is the benefit which they find in it for themselves. i speak here, not of the spiritual, but of the intellectual benefit. by the process of teaching others, they are all the while learning. this advantage in their case is all the greater, because it advances them in a kind of knowledge in which, more than in any other kind of knowledge, men are wont to become passive and stationary. in ordinary worldly knowledge, our necessities make us active. the intercourse of business, and of pleasure even, makes men keen. on these subjects we are all the while bandying thoughts to and fro; we are accustomed to give as well as take; and so we keep our intellectual armor bright, and our thoughts well defined. but in regard to growth in religious knowledge, we have a tendency to be mere passive recipients, like the young man just referred to. sabbath after sabbath we hear good, instructive, orthodox discourses, but there is no active putting forth of our own powers in giving out what we thus take in, and so we never make it effectually our own. the absorbing process goes on, and yet we make no growth. the quiescent audience is a sort of exhausted receiver, into which the stream from the pulpit is perennially playing, but never making it full. let a man go back and ask himself, what actual scriptural knowledge have i gained by the sermons of the last six months? what in fact do i retain in my mind, at this moment, of the sermons i heard only a month ago? so far as the hearing of sermons is concerned, the sabbath-school teacher may perhaps be no better off than other hearers. but in regard to general growth in religious knowledge, he advances more rapidly than his fellow-worshippers, because the exigencies of his class compel him to a state of mind the very opposite of this passive recipiency. he is obliged to be all the while, not only learning, but putting his acquisitions into definite shape for use, and the very act of using these acquisitions in teaching a class, fixes them in his own mind, and makes them more surely his own. i have used this instance of the sabbath-school teacher because it enforces an important hint already given, as to the mode of teaching. some teachers, especially in sabbath-schools, seem to be ambitious to do a great deal of talking. the measure of their success, in their own eyes, is their ability to keep up a continued stream of talk for the greater part of the hour. this is of course better than the embarrassing silence sometimes seen, where neither teacher nor scholar has anything to say. but at the best, it is only the pouring into the exhausted receiver enacted over again. we can never be reminded too often, that there is no teaching except so far as there is active coöperation on the part of the learner. the mind receiving must reproduce and give back what it gets. this is the indispensable condition of making any knowledge really our own. the very best teaching i have ever seen, has been where the teacher said comparatively little. the teacher was of course brimful of the subject. he could give the needed information at exactly the right point, and in the right quantity. but for every word given by the teacher, there were many words of answering reproduction on the part of the scholars. youthful minds under such tutelage grow apace. it is indeed a high and difficult achievement in the educational art, to get young persons thus to bring forth their thoughts freely for examination and correction. a pleasant countenance and a gentle manner, inviting and inspiring confidence, have something to do with the matter. but, whatever the means for accomplishing this end, the end itself is indispensable. the scholar's tongue must be unloosed, as well as the teacher's. the scholar's thoughts must be broached, as well as the teacher's. indeed, the statement needs very little qualification or abatement, that a scholar has learned nothing from us except what he has expressed to us again in words. the teacher who is accustomed to harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words, no matter how full of weighty meaning his words may be, is yet deceiving himself, if he thinks that his scholars are materially benefited by his intellectual activity, unless it is so guided as to awaken and exercise theirs. if, after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the subjects, on which he has himself been so productive, he will find that he has been only pouring water into a sieve. teaching can never be this one-sided process. of all the things we attempt, it is the one most essentially and necessarily a coöperative process. there must be the joint action of the teacher's mind and the scholar's mind. a teacher teaches at all, only so far as he causes this coactive energy of the pupil's mind. ii. the art of questioning. the measure of a teacher's success is not what he himself does, but what he gets his scholars to do. in nothing is this more noticeable, than in the different modes of putting a question to a scholar. one teacher will put a question in such a manner as to find out exactly how much or how little of the subject the child knows, and thereby encourage careful preparation; to give the pupil an open door, if he really knows the subject, to express his knowledge in a way that will be a satisfaction and pleasure to him; to improve his power of expression, to cultivate his memory, to increase his knowledge, and to make it more thorough and definite. another teacher will put his questions so as to secure none of these ends, but on the contrary so as to induce a most lamentable degree of carelessness and inaccuracy. let me illustrate this point, taking an example for greater convenience from a scriptural subject. suppose it to be a lesson upon christ's temptation, as recorded in the th chapter of matthew. the dialogue between teacher and scholar may be supposed to proceed somewhat in this wise: _teacher._ who was led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil? _pupil._ jesus. _t._ yes. now, when jesus had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward a---- what? how did he feel after that? _p._ hungry. _t._ yes, that is right. he was afterward "a hungered." now, then, the next scholar. who then came to jesus and said, if thou be the son of god, command that these stones be made bread? (scholar hesitates.) _t._ the t----? _p._ the tempter. _t._ yes, you are right. it was the tempter. who do you think is meant by the tempter?--the devil? _p._ yes. _t._ when a man has fasted, that is, has eaten nothing, for forty days and forty nights, and feels very hungry, would the suggestion of an easy mode of getting food be likely to be a strong temptation to him, or would it not? _p._ it would. _t._ yes, you are right again. it would be a strong temptation to him. i need not pursue this dialogue further. the reader will see at once how there may thus be the appearance of quite a brisk and fluent recitation, to which however the pupil contributes absolutely nothing. it requires nothing of him in the way of preparation, and only the most indolent and profitless use of his faculties while reciting. he could hardly answer amiss, unless he were an idiot, and yet he has the appearance, and he is often flattered into the belief, of having given some evidence of knowledge and proficiency. the opposite extreme from the method just exhibited, is that known as the topical method. it is the method pursued in the higher classes of schools, and among more advanced students. in the topical method, the teacher propounds a topic or subject, sometimes in the form of a question, but more commonly only by a title, a mere word or two, and then calls upon the pupil to give, in his own words, a full and connected narration or explanation of the subject, such as the teacher himself would give, if called upon to narrate or explain it. the subject already suggested, if profound topically, would be somewhat in this wise: the first temptation of jesus. or, more fully: narrate the circumstances of the first temptation of jesus, and show wherein his virtue was particularly tried in that transaction. the teacher, having propounded the subject clearly to the class, then waits patiently, maintaining silence himself, and requiring the members of the class to be silent and attentive, until the pupil interrogated is quite through, not hurrying him, not interrupting him, even with miscalled helps and hints, but leaving him to the free and independent action of his own faculties, in giving as full, connected, and complete an account of the matter as he can. when the pupil is quite through, the teacher then, but not before, makes any corrections or additional statements that may seem to be needed. in such an exercise as this, the pupil finds the absolute necessity of full and ample preparation; he has a powerful and healthy stimulus thus to prepare, in the intellectual satisfaction which one always feels in the successful discharge of any difficult task; and he acquires a habit of giving complete and accurate expression to his knowledge, by means of entire sentences, and without the help of "catch-words," or leading-strings of any kind. some classes, of course, are not sufficiently advanced to carry out fully the method here explained. but there are many intermediate methods, founded on the same principle, and suited to children in every stage of advancement. only let it be understood, whatever the stage, that the object of the recitation is, not to show what the teacher can say or do, but to secure the right thing being said and done by the pupil. to recur once more to the same subject, the temptation of christ. for a very juvenile class, the questioning might proceed on this wise: _t._ where was jesus led after his baptism? _p._ he was led into the wilderness. _t._ by whom was he led there? _p._ he was led by the spirit. _t._ for what purpose was he led into the wilderness? _p._ he was led into the wilderness to be tempted. _t._ by whom was he to be tempted? _p._ he was to be tempted by the devil. _t._ what bodily want was made the means of his first temptation? if the class is quite young, and this question seems too difficult, the teacher, instead of asking it, or after asking it and not getting a satisfactory answer, might say to his class, that jesus was first tempted through the sense of hunger. he was very hungry, and the devil suggested to him an improper means of relieving himself from the inconvenience. he might then go on with some such questions as these: _t._ what circumstance is mentioned as showing how very hungry he must have been? _p._ he had fasted forty days and forty nights. _t._ mention any way in which _you_ might be tempted to sin, if you were suffering from hunger? the foregoing questions, it will be perceived, are very simple, being suited to scholars just advanced beyond the infant class. yet no one of the questions, in its form, or terms, necessarily suggests the answer. no one of them can be answered by a mere "yes" or "no." no scholar, unacquainted with the subject, and with his book closed, can guess at the answer from the way in which the question is put. not a question has been given, simple as they all are, which does not require some preparation, and which does not, to some extent, give exercise to the pupil's memory, his judgment, and his capacity for expression. if the class is more advanced, the questions may be varied, so as to task and exercise these faculties more seriously. for instance, the teacher of a class somewhat older might be imagined to begin the exercise thus: _t._ after the baptism of jesus, which closes the d chapter of matthew, we have an account of several temptations to which he was exposed. now, open your books at the th chapter, and see if you can find out how many verses are occupied with the narrative of these temptations, and at what verse each temptation begins. the teacher then requires all the class to search in silence, and each one to get ready to answer, but lets no answer be given until all are prepared. when all have signified their readiness, some one is designated to give the answer. the books being closed, the questioning begins: _t._ name the different places into which jesus was taken to be tempted, and the verse in which each place is named. _p._ it is said in the st verse that jesus was led up into the wilderness; in the th verse, that he was taken up into the holy city, and set on a pinnacle of the temple; and in the th verse, that he was taken up into an exceedingly high mountain. _t._ what was the condition of jesus, when the devil proposed his first temptation? _p._ he had been fasting forty days and forty nights, and he was very hungry. i need not multiply these illustrations. i have not made them entirely in vain, if i have succeeded in producing in the mind of the reader the conviction of these two things: first, that it is a most important and difficult part of the teacher's art, to know how to ask a question; and secondly, that the true measure of the teacher's ability is, not so much what he himself is able to say to the scholars, as the fulness, the accuracy, and the completeness of the answers which he gets from them. iii. the difference between teaching and training. these two processes practically run into each other a good deal, but they ought not to be confounded. training implies more or less of practical application of what one has been taught. one may be taught, for instance, the exact forms of the letters used in writing, so as to know at once by the eye whether the letters are formed correctly or not. but only training and practice will make him a penman. training refers more to the formation of habits. a child may by reasoning be taught the importance of punctuality in coming to school; but he is trained to the habit of punctuality only by actually coming to school in good time, day after day. the human machine on which the teacher acts, is in its essential nature different from the material agencies operated on by other engineers. it is, as i have once and again said, a living power, with laws and processes of its own. constant care, therefore, must be exercised, in the business of education, not to be misled by analogies drawn from the material world. the steam-engine may go over its appointed task, day after day, the whole year round, and yet, at the end of the year, it will have no more tendency to go than before its first trip. not so the boy. going begets going. by doing a thing often, he acquires a facility, an inclination, a tendency, a habit of doing it. if a teacher or a parent succeeds in getting a child to do a thing once, it will be easier to get him to do it a second time, and still easier a third time. a teacher who is wise, when he seeks to bring about any given change in a child, whether it be intellectual or moral, will not ordinarily attempt to produce the change all at once, and by main force. he will not rely upon extravagant promises on the one side, nor upon scolding, threats, and violence on the other. solomon hits the idea exactly, when he speaks of "leading in the way of righteousness." we must take the young by the hand and lead them. when we have led them over the ground once, let us do it a second time, and then a third time, and so keep on, until we shall have established with them a routine, which they will continue to follow of their own accord, when the guiding hand which first led them is withdrawn. _this is training._ the theory of it is true, not only in regard to things to be done, which is generally admitted, but also in regard to things to be known, which is often ignored if not denied. a boy, we will say, has a repugnance to the study of arithmetic. perhaps he is particularly dull of comprehension on that subject. we shall not remove that repugnance by railing at him. we shall never make him admire it by expatiating on its beauties. it will not become clear to his comprehension by our pouring upon it all at once a sudden and overpowering blaze of light in the way of explanation. such a process rather confounds him. here again let us fall back upon the method of the great teacher, "line upon line, precept upon precept." we will first patiently conduct our boy through one of the simplest operations of arithmetic, say, a sum in addition. the next day we will conduct him again through the same process, or through another of the same sort. the steps will gradually become familiar to his mind, then easy, then clear. he learns first the practice of arithmetic, then the rules, then the relations of numbers, then the theory on which the rules and the practice are based, and finally, he hardly knows how, he becomes an arithmetician. he has been trained into a knowledge of the subject. you wish to teach a young child how to find a word in a dictionary. you give at first, perhaps, a verbal description of the mystery of a dictionary. you will tell him that, in such a book, all the words are arranged according to the letters with which they begin; that all the words beginning with the letter a are in the first part of the book; then those beginning with the letter b, then those beginning with c, and so on; you tell him that all the words beginning with one letter, covering some one or two hundred pages, are again re-arranged among themselves according to the second letter of each word, and then again still further re-arranged according to the third letter in each, and so on to the end. arouse his utmost attention, and explain the process with the greatest clearness that words can give, and then set him to find a word. see how awkward will be his first attempt, how confused his ideas, how little he has really understood what you have told him. you must repeat your directions patiently, over and over, "line upon line;" you must take him by the hand day after day, and train him into a knowledge of even so apparently simple a thing as finding a word in a dictionary. while teaching and training are thus distinguishable in theory, in practice they are well nigh inseparable. at least, they never should be separated. teaching has never done its perfect work, until, by training, the mind has learned to run in accustomed channels, until it sees what is true, and feels what is right, with the clearness, force, and promptitude, which come only from long-continued habit. iv. modes of hearing recitations. the first that i shall name is called the concert method. this is practised chiefly in schools for very young children, especially for those who cannot read. there are many advantages in this method, some of which are not confined to infant classes. the timid, who are frightened by the sound of their own voices when attempting to recite alone, are thereby encouraged to speak out; and those who have had any experience with such children, know that this is no small, or easy, or unimportant achievement. another benefit of the method is the pleasure it gives the children. the measured noise and motion connected with such concert exercises, are particularly attractive to young children. moreover, one good teacher, by the use of this method, may greatly multiply his efficiency. he may teach simultaneously fifty or sixty, instead of teaching only five or six. but in estimating this advantage, one error is to be guarded against. visitors often hear a large class of fifty or more go through an exercise of this kind, in which the scholars have been drilled to recite in concert; and if such persons have never been accustomed to investigate the fact, they often suppose that the answers given are the intelligent responses of all the members of the class. the truth is, however, in very many such cases, that only some half dozen or so really recite the answers from their own independent knowledge. these serve as leaders; the others, sheep-like, follow. still, by frequent repetition, even in this blind way, something gradually sticks to the memory, although the impression is always apt to be vague and undefined. the method of reciting in concert is chiefly useful in reciting rules and definitions, or other matters, where the very words are to be committed to memory. the impression of so large a body of sound upon the ear is very strong, and is a great help in the matter of mere verbal recollection. children too are very sympathetic, and a really skilful teacher, by the concert method, can do a great deal in cultivating the emotional nature of a large class. young children, too, it should be remembered, like all other young animals, are by nature restless and fidgety, and like to make a noise. it is possible, indeed, by a system of rigorous and harsh repression, to restrain this restlessness, and to keep these little ones for hours in such a state of decorous primness as not to molest weak nerves. but such a system of forced constraint is not natural to children, and is not a wise method of teaching. let the youngsters make a noise; i had almost said, the more noise the better, so it be duly regulated. let them exercise, not only their lungs, but their limbs, moving in concert, rising up, sitting down, turning round, marching, raising their hands, pointing to objects to which their attention is called, looking at objects which are shown to them. movement and noise are the life of a child. they should be regulated indeed, but not repressed. to make a young child sit still and keep silence for any great length of time, is next door to murder. i verily believe it sometimes is murder. the health, and even the lives of these little ones, are sacrificed to a false theory of teaching. there is no occasion for torturing a child in order to teach him. god did not so mean it. only let your teaching be in accordance with the wants of his young nature, and the school-room will be to him the most attractive spot of all the earth. time and again have i seen the teacher of a primary school obliged at recess to compel her children to go out of doors, so much more pleasant did they find the school-room than the play-ground. quite the opposite extreme from the concert method, is that which, for convenience, may be called the individual method. in this method, the teacher examines one scholar alone upon the whole lesson, and then another, and so on, until the class is completed. the only advantage claimed for this method is, that the individual laggard cannot screen his deficiencies, as he can when reciting in concert. he cannot make believe to know the lesson by lazily joining in with the general current of voice when the answers are given. his own individual knowledge, or ignorance, stands out. this is clear, and so far it is an advantage. but ascertaining what a pupil knows of a lesson, is only one end, and that by no means the most important end of a recitation. this interview between the pupil and teacher, called a recitation, has many ends besides that of merely detecting how much of a subject the pupil knows. a far higher end is to make him know more,--to make perfect that knowledge which the most faithful preparation on the part of the pupil always leaves incomplete. the disadvantages of the individual method are obvious. it is a great waste of time. if a teacher has a class of twenty, and an hour to hear them in, it gives him but three minutes for each pupil, supposing there are no interruptions. but there always are interruptions. in public schools the class oftener numbers forty than twenty, and the time for recitation is oftener half an hour than an hour. the teacher who pursues the individual method to its extreme, will rarely find himself in possession of more than one minute to each scholar. in so brief a time, very little can be ascertained as to what the scholar knows of the lesson, and still less can anything be done to increase that knowledge. moreover, while the teacher is bestowing his small modicum of time upon one scholar, all the other members of the class are idle, or worse. teaching, of all kinds of labor, is that in which labor-saving and time-saving methods are of the greatest moment. the teacher who is wise, will aim so to conduct a recitation that, first, his whole time shall be given to every scholar; and secondly, each scholar's mind shall be exercised with every part of the lesson, and just as much when others are reciting, as when it is his own time to recite. a teacher who can do this is teaching every scholar, all the time, just as much as if he had no scholar but that one. even this does not state the whole case. a scholar in such a class learns more in a given time, than he would if he were alone and the teacher's entire time were given exclusively to him. the human mind is wonderfully quickened by sympathy. in a crowd each catches, in some mysterious manner, an impulse from his fellows. the influence of associated numbers, all engaged upon the same thought, is universally to rouse the mind to a higher exercise of its powers. a mind that is dull, lethargic, and heavy in its movements when moving solitarily, often effects, when under a social and sympathetic impulse, achievements that are a wonder to itself. the teacher, then, who knows how thus to make a unit of twenty or thirty pupils, really multiplies himself twenty or thirty-fold, besides giving to the whole class an increased momentum such as always belongs to an aggregated mass. i have seen a teacher instruct a class of forty in such a way, as, in the first place, to secure the subordinate end of ascertaining and registering with a sufficient degree of exactness how much each scholar knows of the lesson by his own preparation, and secondly, to secure, during the whole hour, the active exercise and coöperation of each individual mind, under the powerful stimulus of the social instinct, and of a keenly awakened attention. such a teacher accomplishes more in one hour than the slave of the individual method can accomplish in forty hours. a scholar in such a class learns more in one hour than he would learn in forty hours, in a class of equal numbers taught on the other plan. such teaching is labor-saving and time-saving, in their highest perfection, employed upon the noblest of ends. v. on observing a proper order in the development of the mental faculties. education may be defined to be the process of developing in due order and proportion all the good and desirable parts of human nature. on this point all educators are substantially agreed. another truth, to which there is a general theoretical assent, is, that, in the order in which we develop the faculties, we should follow the leadings of nature, cultivating in childhood those faculties which seem most naturally to flourish in childish years, and reserving for maturer years the cultivation of those faculties which in the order of nature do not show much vigor until near the age of manhood, and which require for their full development a general ripening of all the other powers. the development of a human being is in some respects like that of a plant. there is one stage of growth suitable for the appearance and maturity of the leaf, another for the flower, a third for the fruit, and still a fourth for the perfected and ripened seed. the analogy has of course many limitations. in the human plant, for instance, one class of faculties, after maturing, does not disappear in order to make place for another class, as the flower disappears before there can be fruit. nor, again, is any class of faculties wanting altogether until the season for their development and maturity. the faculties all exist together--leaf, flower, fruit, and seed--at the same time, but each has its own best time for ripening. while these principles have received the general assent of educators, there has been a wide divergence among them as to some of the practical applications. which faculties do most naturally ripen early in life, and which late in life? according to my own observation, the latest of the human powers in maturing, as it is the most consummate, is the judgment. next in the order of maturity, and next also in majesty and excellence, is the reasoning power. reason is minister to the judgment, furnishing to the latter materials for its action, as all the other powers, memory, fancy, imagination, and so forth, are ministers to reason, and supply it with its materials. the reasoning power lacks true vigor and muscle, the judgment is little to be relied on, until we approach manhood. nature withholds from these faculties an earlier development, for the very reason, apparently, that they can ordinarily have but scanty materials for action until after the efflorescence of the other faculties. the mind must first be well filled with knowledge, which the other faculties have gathered and stored, before reason and judgment can have full scope for action. going to the other end of the scale, i have as little doubt that the earliest of all the faculties to bud and blossom, is the memory. children not only commit to memory with ease, but they take actual pleasure in it. tasks, under which the grown-up man recoils and reels, the child will assume with light heart, and execute without fatigue. committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the easiest of all tasks to the child. more than this. the things fixed in the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. things learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear. i recall instantly and without effort, texts of scripture, hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, with which i became familiar when a boy. but it is a labor of hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired since attaining the age of manhood. the creator seems to have arranged an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse. now to reverse this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put shackles and restraints upon the memory, nicknaming and ridiculing all memoriter exercises as parrot performances, is to ignore one of the primary facts of human nature. it is to be wiser than god. another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very morning and spring-time of life, is faith. i speak here, of course, not of religious belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to believe instinctively whatever is told him. that we all do thus believe until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no demonstration. everybody's experience attests the fact. it is equally plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. how slow and tedious would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by experience and reason! on the contrary, how much is the acquisition of knowledge expedited, during these years of helplessness and dependency, by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood. the same infinite wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the constitution of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of faith, which alone makes the father's and mother's love efficacious towards its intellectual growth and development. of what use were parents or teachers, in instructing a child which required proof for every statement that father, mother, or teacher gives? how cruel to force the confiding young heart into premature scepticism, by compelling him to hunt up reasons for everything, when he has reasons, to him all-sufficient, in the fact that father, mother, or teacher told him so? it may seem trifling to dwell so long upon these elementary points. yet there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle here laid down. educators and systems of education, enjoying the highest popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act upon the theory, that the first faculty of the mind to be developed is the reasoning power. indeed, they are not far from asserting that the whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power, and they bend accordingly their main energies upon training young children to go through certain processes of reasoning, so called. they require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to reason out a rule for himself for every process in arithmetic or grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. to commit blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. to receive as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. all authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of reasoning. children reason, of course. they should be encouraged and taught to reason. no teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a child's intellectual powers. but he will not consider this the season for its main, normal development. he will hold this subject for the present subordinate to many others. moreover, the methods of reasoning, which he does adopt, will be of a peculiar kind, suited to the nature of childhood, the results being mainly intuitional, rather than the fruits of formal logic. to oblige a young child to go through a formal syllogistic statement in every step in elementary arithmetic, for instance, is simply absurd. it makes nothing plain to a child's mind which was not plain before. on the contrary, it often makes a muddle of what had been perfectly clear. what was in the clear sunlight of intuition, is now in a haze, through the intervening medium of logical terms and forms, through which he is obliged to look at it. a primary teacher asks her class this question: "if i can buy marbles with penny, how many marbles can i buy with pennies?" a bright boy who should promptly answer " " would be sharply rebuked. little eight-year old solon on the next bench has been better trained than that. with stately and solemn enunciation he delivers himself of a performance somewhat of this sort. "if i can buy marbles with penny, how many marbles can i buy with pennies? answer--i can buy times as many marbles with pennies as i can buy with penny. if, therefore, i can buy marbles with penny, i can buy times as many marbles with pennies; and times marbles are marbles. therefore, if i can buy marbles with one penny, i can buy marbles with pennies." and this is termed reasoning! and to train children, by forced and artificial processes, to go through such a rigmarole of words, is recommended as a means of cultivating their reasoning power and of improving their power of expression! it is not pretended that children by such a process become more expert in reckoning. on the contrary, their movements as ready reckoners are retarded by it. instead of learning to jump at once to the conclusion, lightning-like, by a sort of intuitional process, which is of the very essence of an expert accountant, they learn laboriously to stay their march by a cumbersome and confusing circumlocution of words. and the expenditure of time and toil needed to acquire these formulas of expression, which nine times out of ten are to those young minds the mere _dicta magistri_, is justified on the ground that the children, if not learning arithmetic, are learning to reason. let me not be misunderstood. i do not advocate the disuse of explanations. let teachers explain, let children give explanations. let the rationale of the various processes through which the child goes, receive a certain amount of attention. but the extreme into which some are now going, in primary education, is that of giving too much time to explanation and to theory, and too little to practice. we reverse, too, the order of nature in this matter. what it now takes weeks and months to make clear to the immature understanding, is apprehended at a later day with ease and delight at the very first statement. there is a clear and consistent philosophy underlying this whole matter. it is simply this. in the healthy and natural order of development in educating a young mind, theory should follow practice, not precede it. children learn the practice of arithmetic very young. they take to it naturally, and learn it easily, and become very rapidly expert practical accountants. but the science of arithmetic is quite another matter, and should not be forced upon them until a much later stage in their advancement. to have a really correct apprehension of the principle of decimal notation, for instance, to understand that it is purely arbitrary, and that we might in the same way take any other number than ten as the base of a numerical scale,--that we might increase for instance by fives, or eights, or nines, or twelves, just as well as by tens--all this requires considerable maturity of intellect, and some subtlety of reasoning. indeed i doubt whether many of the pretentious sciolists, who insist so much on young children giving the rationale of everything, have themselves ever yet made an ultimate analysis of the first step in arithmetical notation. many of them would open their eyes were you to tell them, for instance, that the number of fingers on your two hands may be just as correctly expressed by the figures , , , , or , as by the figures ,--a truism perfectly familiar to every one acquainted with the generalizations of higher arithmetic. yet it is up-hill work to make the matter quite clear to a beginner. we may wisely therefore give our children at first an arbitrary rule for notation. we give them an equally arbitrary rule for addition. they accept these rules and work upon them, and learn thereby the practical operations of arithmetic. the theory will follow in due time. when perfectly familiar with the practice and the forms of arithmetic, and sufficiently mature in intellect, they awaken gradually and surely, and almost without an effort, to the beautiful logic which underlies the science. how do we learn language in childhood? is it not solely on authority and by example? a child who lives in a family where no language is used but that which is logically and grammatically correct, will learn to speak with logical and grammatical correctness long before it is able to give any account of the processes of its own mind in the matter, or indeed to understand those processes when explained by others. in other words, practice in language precedes theory. it should do so in other things. the parent who should take measures to prevent a child from speaking its mother tongue, except just so far and so fast as it could understand and explain the subtle logic which underlies all language, would be quite as wise as the teacher who refuses to let a child become expert in practical reckoning, until it can understand and explain at every step the rationale of the process,--who will not suffer a child to learn the multiplication table until it has mastered the metaphysics of the science of numbers, and can explain with the formalities of syllogism exactly how and why seven times nine make sixty-three. these illustrations have carried me a little, perhaps, from my subject. but they seemed necessary to show that i am not beating the air. i have feared lest, in our very best schools, in the rebound from the exploded errors of the old system, we have unconsciously run into an error in the opposite extreme. my positions on the particular point now under consideration may be summed up briefly, as follows: . in developing the faculties, we should follow the order of nature. . the faculties of memory and faith should be largely exercised and cultivated in childhood. . while the judgment and the reasoning faculty should be exercised during every stage of the intellectual development, the appropriate season for their main development and culture is near the close, rather than near the beginning, of an educational course. . the methods of reasoning used with children should be of a simple kind, dealing largely in direct intuitions, rather than formal and syllogistic. . it is a mistake to spend a large amount of time and effort in requiring young children formally to explain the rationale of their intellectual processes, and especially in requiring them to give such explanations before they have become by practice thoroughly familiar with the processes themselves. vi. teaching children what they do not understand. it is not uncommon to hear persons declaim against teaching children what they do not understand. if by this is meant that children should not learn a set of words as parrots do, merely by the ear, and without attaching any idea to what they utter, no one will dissent from the propriety of the rule. but if the meaning is that they should learn nothing except what they fully comprehend, the rule certainly needs to be hedged in by some grave precautions. there are indeed few things which any one, the oldest or the wisest, fully comprehends. who knows what matter is? certainly not the most eminent of philosophers. they do not pretend to know. we pick up a pebble. who can tell what it is, absolutely? we say that it is something which has certain qualities. but even these we know mainly by negations. the pebble is hard, that is, it does _not_ yield to pressure. it is opaque, that is, it does _not_ transmit light. it is heavy, that is, it does _not_ remain still, but goes towards the centre of the earth unless intercepted by some interposing body. who knows the meaning, absolutely, of a single article of the creed? certainly not the most eminent of divines. we know certain things about the great mysteries of the godhead, and even these things we know, not directly, but by certain faint, distant analogies, and we express our knowledge in terms chosen mainly from scripture and arranged with care by wise and learned men. these venerable formularies, containing the most exact verbal expression which the church has been able to frame, of what the scriptures teach about god and his ways, we commit to memory, and we repeat them with comfort and edification. but we do not pretend to penetrate the very essence of their meaning. who by searching can find out god? one must be god himself to understand him. we read that christ was tempted of the devil in the wilderness. there are many things in this transaction which we may be said, in a certain sense, to know. but a man will not proceed far in analyzing this knowledge before he will discover that there are mysteries underlying the whole, which he cannot penetrate. he knows some of the surface relations. but the things themselves, in their essence, are unknown. was christ tempted, as the devil tempts us, by suggesting thoughts in the mind? was the devil present in a bodily shape? did he utter an audible voice, by undulating the air, as we do? has he direct relations to matter, as we have? how could his offer of worldly power and riches be any real temptation to the saviour, when jesus knew that satan had no power to make his offer good? there are indeed few things, in revelation or out of revelation, in mind or in matter, which we really and fully comprehend. if, therefore, we are to teach children nothing but what they understand, we must either teach them nothing at all, or our rule must be materially qualified. no one knows absolutely but god. among created beings, there are almost infinite gradations of intelligence, although the highest created intelligence begins its range infinitely below that of the divine mind. a given formula of words, therefore, may express very different degrees of truth according to the degree of intelligence of the party using it. a catechism or a creed may convey twenty different degrees of meaning to twenty successive persons, varying in age, character, and culture. yet the very youngest and feeblest shall understand something of its meaning, while the wisest and oldest shall not have exhausted it. the young and feeble intellect, receiving a formula of truth with suitable explanations of its terms, takes in at once a portion of its meaning and gradually grows into a fuller comprehension of what it has received. a statement of doctrine received by a child at the age of five, conveys to him a few feeble rays of light. the same statement at the age of ten, means to him far more than it did before, while at twenty it is all luminous with knowledge. the mind itself grows and expands, and with every addition to its own vigor and stature, does it find new truths in those expressive and pregnant formulas of doctrine with which it has from childhood been familiar. it is like looking at a material object, first with the naked eye, and then with glasses of continually increased magnifying power. the more we increase the power, the more we see in the same bit of matter. yet no glass will ever reveal to us the very interior essence of even the smallest particle of dust. god only knows fully either any single thing or the sum of things. because, however, we cannot see into the essence of a pebble or a grain of sand, shall we shut our eyes to it altogether? shall we not look at it, first as an infant does, then as a child, then as a youth, then as a man, then as a philosopher? we can never see it as god does. but we shall see it with ever-growing powers of vision, until that which was to us at first only a rude mass becomes an exhaustless organized microcosm of wonders. i do not advocate the overloading of children with verbal statements of abstruse doctrines, whether of religion or of science. much less would i turn them into parrots, to repeat phrases to which they attach no meaning at all. but when it is demanded, on the other hand, that they shall learn nothing but what they understand, i demur. i ask for explanation of the rule. i insist that, every statement of truth which they learn, even the most elementary, contains depths which neither they nor their teachers can fathom. i insist that, both in science and religion, there are certain great, admitted elementary truths, reduced to forms of sound words with which the whole world is familiar; and that while these formularies contain many things which a child cannot understand, they yet contain many things of which even the youngest child has a fair comprehension. i insist that a carefully prepared religious creed or catechism, even though it contains many things beyond a child's present comprehension, is a fit subject for study. memory in childhood is quick and tenacious. the treasures first laid away in that great storehouse are the last to be removed. they may be overlaid by subsequent accumulations, but they are still ready for use. forms of sound words are certainly among the things which parents and teachers should store away in the young minds of which they have charge. if the child does not understand all that he thus places in his memory, he understands portions of it just as he sees certain qualities of the pebble which he holds in his hand, and he will see and understand more, as his mind expands and his powers of spiritual vision increase. vii. cultivating the memory in youth. many educators now-a-days are accustomed to speak slightly of the old-fashioned plan of committing to memory verses of scripture, hymns, catechisms, creeds, and other formulas of doctrine and sentiment in religion and science. many speak disparagingly even of memory itself, and profess to think it a faculty of minor importance, regarding its cultivation as savoring of old-fogyism, and sneering at all memoriter exercises among children as the chattering of parrots. it is never without amazement that i hear such utterances. memory is god's gift, by which alone we are able to retain our intellectual acquisitions. without it, study is useless, and education simply an impossibility. without it, there could be no such thing as growth in knowledge. we could know no more to-day than we knew yesterday, or last week, or last year. the man would be no wiser than the boy. without this faculty, the mind would be, not as now like the prepared plate which the photographer puts in his camera, and which retains indelibly on its surface the impressions of whatever objects pass before it; but would rather be like the window pane, before which passes from day to day the gorgeous panorama of nature, transmitting with equal and crystalline clearness the golden glory of the sun, the pale rays of the moon and stars, the soft green of meadow and woodland, images of beauty and loveliness, of light and shade, from every object on the earth and in the heavens; but retaining on its own surface not a line or a tint of the millions of rays that have passed through its substance, and remaining to the end the same bit of transparent glass, unchanged, unprofited by the countless changes it has received and transmitted. memory alone gives value to the products of every other faculty, stamping them with the seal of possessorship, and making them truly ours. in vain reason forges its bolts, in vain imagination paints its scenes, in vain the senses give us a knowledge of the shapes and forms of external nature, in vain ideas of any sort or from any source come into our minds, unless we have the power to retain and fix them there, and make them a part of our accumulated intellectual wealth. to do this is the office of memory, and whatever increases the activity and power of the memory, gives at once value and growth to every other power. memory has been well called the store-house of our ideas. the illustration is true not only in its main feature, but in many of the minor details. the value of what a man puts away in a store-house depends much upon the order and system with which the objects are stored. the wise and thrifty merchant has bins and boxes and compartments and pigeon-holes, all arranged with due order and symmetry, and every item of goods, as it is added to his stock, is put away at once in its appropriate place, where he can lay his hands upon it whenever it is wanted. there should be a like method and system in our mental accumulations. the remembrance of facts and truths is of little value to us unless we can remember them in their connections, and can so remember them as to be able to lay our hands upon any particular thought or fact just when and where it is wanted. many persons read and study voraciously, filling their minds most industriously with knowledge, but such a confusion of ideas prevails throughout their intellectual store-house, that their very wealth is only an embarrassment to them. the very first rule to be observed, therefore, in cultivating the memory, is to reduce our knowledge to some system. those who are charged with the training of the young should seek not only to store their minds with ideas, but to present these ideas to them in well ordered shapes and forms, and in due logical order and coherence. hence the peculiar value of requiring children at the proper age to commit to memory the grand formulas of christian doctrine, on which, in every church, its wisest and ablest men have expended their strength in placing great truths in connected and logical order and dependence. the creeds and catechisms of the christian church are among the best products of the human intellect as mere specimens of verbal statement, and are valuable, if for nothing else, as a means for exercising the memory. a child who has thoroughly mastered a good catechism has his intellectual store-house already reduced to some order and system. his mind is not the chaos that we so often find in those children who are gathered into our mission schools. the objects that are put away for safe-keeping differ in one respect from those things which are stored away in the memory. the material object is the same, whether we visit and inspect it from day to day or not. the banker's dollars are not increased in fineness or value by his handling them over carefully every day. not so with intellectual coin. the more frequently we re-examine our knowledge and pass it under review, the more does it become fixed in its character, the more full and exact in its proportions. handling it does not wear it out. even giving it away does not diminish it. in short, so far as the cultivation of the memory is concerned, the next best thing we can do, after reducing our knowledge to due order, is to give it a frequent and thorough re-examination. constant, almost endless repetition is the inexorable price of sound mental accumulation. a distinction is to be made between memory as a power of the mind and the remembrance of particular facts. one or two examples will illustrate this difference. the late dr. addison alexander, of the theological seminary at princeton, had memory as an intellectual power to a degree almost marvellous. the following instance may be cited. on one occasion, a large class of forty or fifty were to be matriculated in the seminary in the presence of the faculty. the ceremony of matriculation was very simple. the professors and the new students being all assembled, in a large hall, each student in turn presented himself before the professors, had his credentials examined by them, and if the same proved satisfactory, entered his name in full and his residence, in the register. when the matriculation was complete and the students had retired, there was some bantering among the professors as to which of them should take the register home and prepare from it an alphabetical roll,--a work always considered rather tedious and irksome. after a little hesitation, dr. alexander said, "there is no need of taking the register home; i will make the roll for you;" and, taking a sheet of paper, at once, from memory, without referring to the register, and merely from having heard the names as they were recorded, he proceeded to make out the roll, giving the names in full and giving them in their alphabetical order. this was a prodigious feat of pure memory; for in order to make the alphabetical arrangement in his mind, before committing it to paper, he must have had the entire mass of names present in his mind by a single act of the will. some of the wonderful games of chess performed by paul morphy are dependent in part upon a similar power of memory, by which the player is enabled to keep present in his mind, without seeing the board, a long series of complicated evolutions, past as well as prospective and possible. the same is true of every great military strategist. in all these cases, there is an act of pure memory, a direct and positive power of summoning into the mind its past experiences, such as can only take place where, either by natural gift or by special training, the memory as a faculty of the mind is in a high state of vigor. but there are other cases, in which a man is enabled to recall a great number of particular facts by a species of artifice or trick, which does not imply any special mental power, and the study of which does not tend, in any marked degree, to develop such power. more than thirty years ago, the late professor dod, of princeton college, in lecturing to a class on the subject of light, was explaining the solar spectrum, and after exhibiting the solar ray, divided into its seven primary colors, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, said, "if you will form a mnemonic word of the first letters of each of these words, you will be able, without further effort, to remember the order of the prismatic colors the rest of your lives," and he accordingly wrote upon the board and pronounced the uncouth and almost unpronounceable word, _vibgyor_, which probably not one of us has ever forgotten. an ingenious frenchman some years ago traversed the country and collected large audiences by his exhibitions of skill in this species of artifice, and by undertaking to initiate his hearers in the method of remembering prodigious numbers of historical facts by means of such artificial contrivances. mnemotechny, the name which he gave to his invention, is merely a trick of the memory. it is a means of remembering a particular set of facts or things by the aid of contrivances purely artificial and arbitrary. its possession does not imply, and its cultivation does not produce, real mnemonic power. it undoubtedly has its uses. but it is rather wealth gained by a lottery ticket than a wealth-producing power acquired by wise habits of business. in teaching the young, it is well not to neglect either of these principles. we should give our children from time to time ingenious and interesting contrivances for remembering important facts. these contrivances, if judicious in plan and execution, will be great helps to them. we may in this way bridge over the difficulty of remembering many of the important facts and dates in history. i would not discourage these artificial methods. though they are mere tricks, they are valuable. but they have by no means the same value as those methods of teaching which cultivate and produce true mnemonic power. this power, like every other mental power, is given in unequal measure to different individuals. like every other mental power, also, it grows mainly by exercise. no power of the mind is more capable of development. i have mentioned some things which tend to the growth of this power, such as presenting knowledge to children in logical and orderly arrangement, and frequent re-examination of knowledge already obtained. perhaps there is no quickener and invigorator of the memory equal to that of reciting to a judicious teacher before a large class of fellow-students. by a proper and skilful use of the art of questioning, under the excitement of answering before a large class, the mnemonic power is subjected to a healthy and invigorating test, and all such exercises promote powerfully the mental growth. a child may absorb knowledge by mere solitary reading and study, just as a sponge absorbs water, but the knowledge so acquired readily evaporates, or is squeezed out. something is needed to fix in the mind the knowledge that has been lodged there, and no process is more effectual to this end than that of class recitation. it is by telling other people what we have learned, that we learn it more effectually, and make it more completely our own. a good teacher, by good methods of recitation, can do more than all other persons and all other things to secure a sound and healthy growth of memory in the young. another thing highly necessary in cultivating a really good memory, is attaining the utmost possible clearness in our ideas. if the knowledge, when it first comes into the mind, is clearly and sharply defined, so that we really know a thing, instead of having vague and confused notions about it, we shall be the more likely to remember it permanently. nothing is more conducive towards giving these sharp and definite impressions than the use of visible illustrations. actual exhibition before a class of the objects talked about, actual experiments of the operations described, and the constant use of the chalk and the blackboard, presenting even abstract truths in concrete and visible symbols, as is done in algebra, chemistry, and logic, are among the means by which, chiefly, knowledge becomes well defined to the mind. such is the constitution of the mind, that we have a clearer apprehension of what we see than of what comes to us through any other sense, and the knowledge which comes to us by means of the sight, is, of all kinds of knowledge, the most lasting and the most easily recalled. hence, in teaching, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of visible illustration. another condition extremely favorable to the growth of memory, is the existence of a considerable degree of mental excitement at the time that knowledge enters the mind. metals weld easily only at a white heat. if we would obtain a vigorous grasp of knowledge, and incorporate it thoroughly into our other mental products, so that it shall become really ours, there should be the glow of mental heat at the time of our acquiring such knowledge. ideas that come into the mind when we are in an apathetic state, make no permanent lodgment. hence the importance of exciting a lively interest in that which is the subject of study. if the teacher has failed to excite this interest, and finds in his class no animation, no sympathy, no eagerness of attention, he may be sure that he is not accomplishing much. the child must, if possible, acquire a fondness for that which is to be remembered. love, in fact, is the parent of memory. viii. knowledge before memory. i have had frequent occasion to urge upon teachers the importance of cultivating the memory of their pupils. the old-fashioned plan of requiring the young to commit to memory precious truths, in those very words in which wise and far-thinking men have handed them down to us, has too much gone out of use. i have felt called upon, therefore, from time to time, to recall to the minds of teachers the unspeakable importance of early exercising the memory of children, and of storing their memories with wise sayings and rules. i would not take back anything i have said on this subject, but rather repeat and reiterate it. at the same time, i am aware that there is an extreme in this direction, and i therefore put in a word of caution. the danger to which i refer is that of requiring children to commit mere words, to which they attach no meaning, or without their having any real knowledge of the things expressed by the words. of course there is much in the formulas and rules of science that the immature minds of children cannot entirely comprehend, and i am far from saying that a child should commit nothing except what it can comprehend. but whatever in a rule or a doctrine they can understand, should be diligently explained to them, and the ingenuity of teachers should be exercised in awakening the minds of their scholars to the apprehension of real knowledge as a preliminary to the act of committing it to memory. an example or two will illustrate my meaning. children at school are required to commit to memory the tables of weights and measures. the exercise is one of acknowledged and indispensable importance. but it is possible for a child to repeat one of these tables with entire glibness and accuracy, pretty much as he would whistle yankee doodle, without any apprehension of the actual things which the terms of the table represent. he may learn to say "sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make a degree, three hundred and sixty degrees make a circle," with no more idea of the things expressed by this formula of words, than the parrot who has been taught to say, "you are a big fool." if the teacher will show the child an actual circle, with the degrees, minutes, and seconds marked, and will let him count them for himself, so that he has a real knowledge of the things, he will then not only commit this formula of words to memory more easily, but the knowledge itself will promote his mental growth. he will be feeding on real knowledge, not on its husks. so in learning about inches, feet, yards, rods, and miles, let the teacher, with foot-rule and yard-stick, show what these measures really are, let him by some familiar instance give the child an idea of what a mile is, and then let the memory be invoked to store up the knowledge gained. so with ounces, pounds, and hundred-weights. so with gills, quarts, and gallons. the common weights and measures are as necessary in the school-room as are spelling-books and arithmetics. the actual weights and measures, so far as possible, should be exhibited, should be seen and handled, and the child's mind made to grasp the very things which the terms express, that is, he should first get real knowledge, and then he should store his memory with it in exact words and forms of expression. this is the true mental order. knowledge first, then memory. get knowledge, then keep it. any other plan is like attempting to become rich by inflating your bags with wind, instead of filling them with gold, or attempting to grow fat by bolting food in a form which you cannot digest. some teachers, in their fear of cramming children with words, spend their whole time and energy in awakening thought, and none in fixing upon the memory the thoughts which have been awakened. they are so much afraid of making children parrots, that they discard rules entirely in teaching, or require pupils to frame rules for themselves. this is to go into the opposite extreme. the rules and formulas of science require the greatest care and consideration, and a large and varied knowledge. few even of men of learning and of those specially skilled in the meaning of words and the use of language, are qualified to frame scientific rules and propositions. to suppose that young children, just beginning to feel their way into any department of science, are competent to such a task, is simply absurd. yet this is by no means uncommon. a teacher will conduct a boy intelligently and skilfully through the process of doing a sum in arithmetic, or analyzing a sentence in grammar, and then say to him, "now, form a rule for yourself, stating how such things should be done." the first step here is right. take your pupil by the hand, and conduct him through the process or thing to be done. this is necessary to enable him to understand the rule. but when he thus gets the idea, then give him the rule or principle, as it is laid down in the book, in exact and well considered words, and let him commit those words thoroughly to memory, without the change or the omission of a word or a letter. what is thus true as to the method of teaching the common branches of knowledge, is equally true in the study of religious knowledge. i would not set a child to framing a creed or a catechism, nor, on the other hand, would i require him to commit such formulas to memory, without making some attempt to awaken in his mind previously an apprehension of the ideas which the creed or formula contains. i do not say that a child's mind is competent to grasp all the truths embraced in these symbols. but there is no portion of any religious creed or catechism that i have ever seen, some of the terms of which are not capable of being apprehended by children. a wise teacher, in undertaking to indoctrinate a child in such a formula, will begin by showing him as far as possible what the words mean, by exciting in him ideas on the subject, by filling his mind with actual knowledge of the truths contained in the formula. then, when the words of the formula have become to the child's mind instinct with meaning and life, the teacher will pause to stamp them in upon the memory. that is the way to study a catechism. first, give the child, so far as possible, the meaning, then grind the words into him. do not set him to making a catechism; do not let him stop at understanding the meaning, without committing the words. two phrases will cover the whole ground. knowledge before memory. memory as well as knowledge. ix. the power of words. words govern the world. let any one who doubts it, canvass the motives by which his own action is decided. considerations are presented to his mind, showing him that a certain course of conduct is right, or good, or expedient, or pleasant, and he adopts it. the considerations presented to his mind decide his action. but those considerations are in the form of arguments, and those arguments exist in words. the true original power, indeed, is in the thought. it is the thinker who generates the steam. but thought unexpressed accomplishes nothing. the writer and the speaker engineer it into action. thought, indeed, even in the mind of its originator, exists in words. for we really think only in words. much more, then, must the thought have some verbal expression, written or spoken, before it can influence the opinions or the actions of others. a man may have all the wisdom of solomon, yet will he exercise no influence upon human affairs unless he gives his wisdom utterance. profound thinkers sometimes, indeed, utter very little. but they must utter something. they originate and give forth a few thoughts or discoveries, which minds of a different order, writers and talkers, pick up, reproduce, multiply, and disseminate all over the surface of society. when a man unites these two functions, being both an original thinker and a skilful and industrious writer, the influence which he may exert upon his race is prodigious. if any one, for instance, would take the pains to trace the influences which have sprung from such a man as plato, he would have an illustration of what is meant. plato, while living, had no wealth, rank, or position of any kind, to add force to what he said or did. whatever he has done in the world, he has done simply by his power as a thinker and a writer. there were many grecians quite as subtle and acute in reasoning as he. but their thoughts died with them. plato, on the other hand, was an indefatigable writer, as well as an acute and profound thinker. he gave utterance to his ideas in words which, even in a dead language, have to this day a living power. when plato was dead, there remained his written words. they remain still. they have entered successively into the philosophies, the creeds, and the practical codes, of the grecian world, the roman, the saracen, and the christian. at this very hour hundreds of millions of human beings unconsciously hold opinions which the words of that wise old greek have helped to mould. the mere brute force of a military conqueror may make arbitrary changes in the current of human affairs. but no permanent change is ever made except by the force of opinion. the words of plato have done more to influence the destinies of men than have a hundred such men as genghis khan or tamerlane. four hundred millions of chinese, in half the actions which go to make up their lives, are now governed by maxims and opinions which have come down to them from remote antiquity, from a man whose very existence is almost a myth. those military heroes whose influence on society has been permanent have been propagandists as well as warriors. opinions and codes have gone with, and survived, their conquering armies. the armies of the elder napoleon were routed at waterloo. but the napoleonic ideas survived the shock, and they are at this day a part of the governing power of the world. it was the koran--the words, and the creed of mahomet--that gave to the mahometan conquest its permanent hold upon the nations. spoken words have in themselves greater power than merely written ones. there is a wonderful influence in the living voice to give force and emphasis to what is uttered. but the written word remains. what is lost in immediate effect, is more than gained in the permanent result. the successful writer has an audience for all time. he being dead still speaks. men are speaking now, who have gone to their final account twenty centuries ago. paul possibly may not have had the same influence with a popular assembly as the more eloquent apollos. but paul is speaking still through his ever-living epistles. he is speaking daily to more than a hundred millions of human beings. he is exerting through his writings a power incomparably greater than that even which he exercised as a living speaker. all men have not the commanding gifts of the apostle paul. yet after all, the main difference between ordinary men and men of the pauline stamp, is not so much in their natural powers, as in the spirit and temper of the men, in that entire consecration to the service of christ which paul had, and which they have not. it is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished even by men of ordinary talents, when they have that zeal and single-mindedness which may be attained by one as well as by another. we are accountable for the talents which we have, not for what we have not. but let each man see to it that he uses to the utmost every talent which his lord has committed to his trust. how much, for instance, may be accomplished by a man who has a gift for addressing a popular assembly! such a man by a few wise words, spoken at the right time and place, may do as much in five minutes, in pushing forward a general cause, as another man can do by the laborious drudgery of years. the words of the speaker touch the secret springs of action in a thousand breasts. he sends away a thousand men and women animated with a new impulse to duty, and that impulse is propagated and reproduced through hundreds of channels for long years to come. words are never entirely idle. they have at times a power like that of the electric bolt. they may sting like a serpent, and bite like an adder. in the ordinary intercourse of society, a man of good conversational powers may, even in discharging the customary civilities of life, put forth a large influence. the words dropped from minute to minute, throughout the day, in the millions of little transactions all the while going on between man and man, have an incalculable power in the general aggregate of the forces which keep society in motion. as with spoken, so with written words. the man who knows how to weave them into combinations which shall gain the popular ear, and sink into the popular heart, has a mighty gift for good or evil. the self-denying and almost saintly heber, by all his years of personal toil on the plains of india, did not accomplish a tithe of what has been accomplished for the cause of missions by his one missionary hymn. it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that those few written words are worth more to the cause than the lives of scores of ordinary missionaries. how many anxious souls, just wavering between a right and a wrong decision, have been led to make the final choice, and to decide for christ, by that beautiful hymn beginning "just as i am, without one plea"? who can doubt that the patient invalid of torquay, in the hour that she penned those touching words, did more for the conversion of sinners than many a minister of the gospel has done in the course of a long and laborious life? what a fund of consolation for pious hearts through all time is laid up in the hymns of that other sweet singer, mrs. steele? but as with spoken, so with written words, the great aggregate of their force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions, but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have apparently but an ephemeral existence. the dashing torrent and the mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. but it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the real wonders of vegetation. so these words which we read, and think we forget, hour by hour, all day long, are continually sinking into the soil of the heart, and influencing imperceptibly the growth of the germs of thought. the aggregate of all these minute, unnoticed influences is prodigious, incalculable. whoever can put words together wisely, either by the tongue or the pen, has a precious talent, which he may not innocently lay up in a napkin. the gift, like that of wealth, is not his by right of ownership, but only as a steward. it is his as a means to do good for the honor of his lord, and the welfare of his fellow-men. as i said in the beginning of these remarks, the world is governed by words. let christian men, by the industrious use of the gifts they have received, see to it that a greater proportion of this governing force in the world is contributed by the friends of christ. let them unceasingly fill up with the words of truth and righteousness every accessible channel of thought and opinion, and thus occupy till christ come. x. the study of language. the study of language has ever been considered a study of high importance, regarded merely as a means of intellectual cultivation. there are obvious reasons for this. the analysis of language is the analysis of thought. resolving complex forms of speech into simple ones, and again combining simple expressions into those which are complex, and investigating, alternately by logic and aesthetics, the varying properties of words and phrases, are operations which come nearer, perhaps, than any other in which we are engaged, towards subjecting spirit itself to the crucible of experiment. the study of grammar, the comparison of languages, the translation of thought from one language to another, are so many studies in logic and the laws of mind. the subtleties of language arise from the very nature of that subtle and mysterious essence, the human mind, of which speech is the prime agent and medium of communication. the class of studies under consideration bears nearly the same relation to the spiritual that anatomy does to the bodily part of us. it is by the dissecting-knife of a keen and well-tempered logic, applied to the examination of the various forms which human thought assumes, that we most truly learn the very essence and properties of thought itself. it is this intimate, immediate, indissoluble connection and correlation between mind and language, between human thought and human speech, between the soul itself and the mould into which it is cast, that gives such importance to the general class of studies known as philological. the study of language, more than any other study, tends to make the mind acute, discriminating, and exact. it tends also, in a most especial manner, to fit a person to train the minds of others to acuteness, discrimination, and exactness. the person who has learned to express a thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages; or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the present meaning of a word from its original starting-point in reason and fact, and mark intelligently its gradual departures and their causes; who can perceive the exact difference between words and phrases nearly synonymous, and who can express that difference in terms clear and intelligible to others,--that person has already attained both a high degree of intellectual acumen himself, and an important means of producing such acumen in others. the study of language is, in the profession of teaching, like the sharpening of tools in the business of the mechanic. words are the teacher's tools. human knowledge, even before it is expressed, and as it is laid up in the chambers of the mind, exists in words. we think in words. we teach in words. we are qualified to teach only so far as we have learned the use and power of words. xi. cultivating the voice. if we except the lower kinds of handicraft, nine-tenths of all that is done in the world is done by means of the voice,--by talking. it is by talking we buy and sell; by talking, the lawyer, the doctor, the minister, the teacher perform the chief of their functions; by talking, the intercourse and machinery of life are chiefly kept in motion. as it was by a word that creation was accomplished, as the worlds came into being and were moulded into shape, not by the hand, but by the omnific voice of god, _saying_, "let there be light and there was light," so in this lower sphere of human action, the tongue is mightier than the hand. the moulding, propelling forces of society come from the use of words. by words, more than by all other means, we persuade, convince, alarm, arouse, or soothe, or whatever else leads men to action and achievement; and while written words are full of power, yet even these are feeble as compared with spoken words, the living utterances of the human voice. not only so, but the manner of speaking, the tone and quality of the voice influence us quite as much as the words spoken. yet how strangely we neglect this wonderful instrument. the mechanic sees to it that his tools are as keen and strong as it is in the power of art and labor to make them. the sportsman spares no expense or care to have the articles that minister to his pleasure in the highest possible state of finish and perfection. how lavish we are in the purchase of instruments of music, and in keeping them properly tuned and cared for. yet this most wonderful organ, the voice, which god has given to every one of us, and which is worth more to us than all the instruments of music, all the inventions of pleasure, all the tools of trade, that human skill has devised, is left for the most part in utter neglect, without intelligent guidance, its wonderful powers almost totally uncultivated and undeveloped. we all feel the sway that a well cultivated and modulated voice has upon us, its power to give us pleasure and win our assent, and yet the great majority of us neglect to cultivate in ourselves that which may give us such a power over others. we are not oblivious of other advantages. we strive to make ourselves acceptable and to increase our influence, by attention to dress, by the adornment of our persons, and by the cultivation of our minds, by stores of knowledge and by accomplishments of various kinds, while the voice, which more than anything else is the direct instrument of the soul, is treated with neglect. we mumble and mutter what should come out clearly and distinctly; we speak with a nasal drawl, or in a sharp key that sets all the finer chords of sympathy ajar; we use just so much of the vocal power that is given us as is needed to express in the faintest way our most imperative wants, and indolently leave all the rest of its untold and exquisite resources to go to waste. mrs. siddons once made a shopkeeper turn pale with affright and unconsciously drop his goods upon the counter, simply by the tone in which, by way of experiment, she asked him the price of a pair of gloves. undoubtedly mrs. siddons had natural gifts of voice which do not belong to every one. but a great part of the wonderful fascination which she and the other members of that remarkable family exerted, was due to cultivation. if ministers of the gospel, and others who undertake to influence the minds of a congregation on the side of religion, would give this matter more attention, they would find it very greatly to their own advantage and that of others. the manner in which the words of eternal life are read and uttered from the pulpit is often such as to kill all vitality out of them. it is not enough that a preacher should be a good theologian, and that his sermon contain sound and valuable thoughts. the influence which they are to exert upon the people, is largely dependent upon the voice which gives them utterance. a competent teacher of elocution is quite as important a part of the machinery of a theological seminary, as a teacher of hebrew. yet, in organizing our seminaries, this matter is usually entirely ignored. xii. eyes. i have spoken much of blackboards, maps, pictorial cards, natural objects, and apparatus of various kinds, as among the urgent wants of the teacher. but there is one thing which he wants more than all these, and that is eyes. a good pair of eyes are to the teacher, in the government of his school, worth more than the rod, more than any system of merit or demerit marks, more than keeping in after school, more than scolding, reporting to parents, suspension, or expulsion, more than coaxing, premiums, and bribes in any shape or to any amount. the very first element in school government, as in every other government, is that the teacher should know what is going on in his little kingdom, and for this knowledge he needs a pair of eyes. most teachers, it is true, seem to be furnished with this article. but it is in appearance only. they have something in the upper part of the face which looks like eyes, but every one knows that appearances are deceiving. they look over a school or an assembly of any kind, and are vaguely conscious that things are going on wrong all around them, just as people sometimes grope about in a dark room filled with bats, and are aware that something is flitting about, but they have no power of seeing distinctly any one object. it is amazing how little some people see, who seem to have eyes. the fact is, there is an entirely mistaken notion on this whole subject. having the eyes open, and seeing, are two distinct things. infants have their eyes open, but they do not see anything, in the sense in which that word is generally used. light comes into those open windows, the moving panorama of external nature passes before them, but distinct vision, which recognizes and individualizes objects, is something more than a mere passive, bodily sensation. it is a mental act. it is the mind rousing itself into consciousness, and putting forth its powers into voluntary and self-determined activity. nothing in the history of childhood is more interesting than to watch this awakening of the mind in infancy, to notice how the whole face brightens up when the little stranger first begins actually to see things. the misfortune with many people is, that in this matter of vision they seem never to get beyond the condition of infancy. they go along the street, or they move about in a room, in a sort of dreamy state, their eyes open, but seeing nothing. a teacher of this kind, no matter what amount of disorder is going on before him, never sees any one particular act. he sees things in the mass, instead of seeing individual things. the difference between teachers in this faculty of seeing things is more marked probably than in any other quality that a man can have. two teachers may stand before the same class. one will merely be aware that there is a general disorder and noise throughout, being unable to identify any scholar in particular as transgressing. the other will notice that john is talking, that james is pulling his neighbor's hair, that william is drumming on the desk with his fingers, that andrew is munching an apple, that peter is making caricatures on his slate, and so on. to have this power of seeing things, it is not necessary that one should be sly, or should use stealth of any kind. knowledge gained by such mean practices never amounts to much, and always lowers a teacher in the estimation of his scholars; it weakens instead of strengthening him. whatever a teacher does in the way of observation of his scholars, should be done openly and aboveboard. and after all, more can be seen in this way, by one who knows how, than by any of the stealthy practices usually resorted to. darting the eyes about rapidly in one direction and another, is not a good way to make discoveries. seeing is accomplished, not so much by the activity of the bodily organ, as by mental activity. the man's mind must be awake. this in fact is the secret of the whole matter. the more the face and eyes are quiet, and the mind is on the alert, the more a man will see. seeing is rather a mental than a bodily act, though of course the bodily organ is necessary to its accomplishment. to be a good observer, one must maintain a quiet and composed demeanor, but be thoroughly wide awake within. xiii. errors of the cave. improvement comes by comparison. one of the most profound observations of bacon is that in which he remarks upon the dwarfing and distorting influence of solitariness upon the human faculties. the man who shuts himself up in his own little circle of thought and action as in a cave, having no consort with his fellows, evolving all his plans from his own solitary cogitation, must be more than human if he does not become one-sided, narrow, selfish, bigoted. a like result, but not so aggravated, is produced, when a man limits his range of thought and action to those of his own special calling or profession; when the merchant mingles only with merchants and knows only merchandise; when the teacher knows nothing but teaching and books; when the medical man spends every waking hour and every active exercise of thought upon his healing art; when any man forgets that, in the very fact of his being a man at all, he is something greater and nobler than he can possibly be in being merely a merchant, or teacher, or doctor, or lawyer, or the possessor of any other one special art or faculty. it is true, indeed, that in order to attain to eminence in any one department, a man must bend his main energies to that one thing; and he must give to it much solitary thought and study. but no department of action is isolated. no interest is unconnected with other interests. no truth stands alone, but forms a part in the great system of truth. study or action, therefore, which is entirely isolated, must needs be dwarfed and distorted. a man must go occasionally out of his own sphere in order fully to understand those very things with which he is most familiar. a man must study other languages, if he would hope fully to understand his own. a man must study more than languages merely if he would become a perfect linguist. the only way to understand arithmetic thoroughly is to study algebra. a parent who has only one child, and who gives his entire and exclusive attention to the study of that child, in order that he may, by a thorough understanding of its nature and disposition, be better able to teach and train it, will not be so likely to attain his object as he would if he were to spend a portion of his time in mingling with other children and in becoming acquainted with childhood generally. a teacher who should shut himself up in his own school-room, giving to it every moment of his waking hours, would not be likely to benefit so largely his own pupils, as if he were to spend a portion of his time in communing with other teachers and observing other methods besides his own. a teacher even who should mingle freely with those of his own profession, and get all the benefit to be derived from observation of the views and methods of other teachers, but should stop there, would not yet obtain that broad, comprehensive view, even of his own calling, and of the duties of his own particular school-room that he might have if he would travel occasionally beyond the walk of books and pedagogy, and become acquainted with the views and methods of men in other spheres of life, with merchants, lawyers, and doctors, with farmers, mechanics, and artisans. it is only by mingling with those outside of our own little specialty that we are disenthralled from the bonds of prejudice. it is wonderful to see the change produced in the minds of men of different religious denominations, when by any means they are thrown much into the actual fellowship of working together in some cause of common benevolence. how, without any argument, merely by the fact of their being brought out to a different point of view, the relative magnitude and importance of certain truths change in their estimation! the points in which christians differ become so much smaller; the points in which they agree become so much larger. the little stone at the mouth of the cave no longer hides the mountain in the distance. let the teacher, the merchant, the mechanic, the banker, the lawyer, the minister of religion even, still remember that he is a man, and that he can never reach a full and just estimate of his own position without sometimes going outside of it and placing himself in the position of other men. xiv. men of one idea. there is between the teacher and other operatives one obvious difference, arising from the difference in the materials upon which their labor is bestowed. that class of laborers whose toil and skill are exerted in modifying the forms of matter, succeed generally in proportion to the narrowness of the range to which each individual's attention is confined. it is possible (the writer has known it to be a fact) for the same person to sow the flax, to pull and rot it, to break it, hatchel it, spin it, warp it, weave it, dye or bleach it, and finally make it into clothes. i say this is _possible_, for i have seen it done, and i dare say many of my readers have seen the same. but how coarse and expensive is such a product, compared with that in which every step in the progress of production is made the subject of one individual's entire and undivided attention. if we were to go into the factories of lowell, or into any of the thousand workshops which are converting philadelphia into a great manufacturing centre, we would find the manufacture of an article approaching perfection just in proportion to the _im_perfection (in one sense) of the individual workmen employed in its production. the man who can make a pin-head better and cheaper than any one else, must give his attention to making pin-heads only. he need not know how to point a pin, or polish it, or cut the wire. on the contrary his skill in that one operation increases ordinarily in proportion to his want of skill in others. his perfection as a workman is in the direct ratio to his imperfection as a man. he operates upon matter, and the more nearly he can bring his muscles and his volitions to the uniformity and the precision of a mere machine--the more confined, monotonous, and undeviating are his operations--the higher is the price set upon his work, the better is he fitted for his task. not so the instructor of youth. the material operated on here is of a nature too subtle to be shaped and fashioned by the undeviating routine of any such mechanical operations. the process necessary to sharpen one intellect may terrify and confound another. the means which in one instance serve to convince, serve in other cases to confuse. the illustration which to one is a ray of light, is to another only "darkness visible." mind is not, like matter, fixed and uniform in its operations. the workman who is to operate upon a substance so subtle and so varying must not be a man of _one idea_--who knows one thing, and nothing more. it is not true in mind, as in matter, that perfection in the knowledge of one particular point is gained by withdrawing the attention from every other point. all truth and all knowledge are affiliated. the knowledge of arithmetic is increased by that of algebra, the knowledge of geography by that of astronomy, the knowledge of one language by knowing another. as no one thing in nature exists unconnected with other things, so no one item in the vast sum of human knowledge is isolated, and no person is likely to be perfectly acquainted with any one subject who confines his attention with microscopic minuteness to that subject. to understand thoroughly one subject, you must study it not only in itself, but in its relations. to know one thing well you must know very many other things. let us return then to the point from which we set out, namely: that one important difference between the teacher and other operatives arises from the difference in the objects on which they operate. the one operates upon matter, the other upon mind. the one attains perfection in his art by a process which in the other would produce an ignoramus, a bungler, a narrow-minded, conceited charlatan. hence the necessity on the part of those who would excel in the profession of teachers, of endeavoring continually to enlarge the bounds of their knowledge. hence the error of those who think that to teach anything well it is necessary to know only that one thing. that young woman who undertakes to teach a primary school, or even an infant class, has mistaken her calling if she supposes that because she has to teach only the alphabet or the "table card," she has therefore no need to know many other things. there are some things which every teacher needs. every teacher needs a cultivated taste, a disciplined intellect, and that enlargement of views which results only from enlarged knowledge. we all know how much we are ourselves benefited by associating habitually with persons of superior abilities. so it is in a still higher degree with children. there is something contagious in the fire of intellect. the human mind, as well as the human heart, has a wonderful power of assimilation. every judicious parent will say: let not my child be consigned to the care of an ill-informed, dull, spiritless teacher. let it be his happy lot, if possible, to be under one who has some higher ambition than merely to go through a certain prescribed routine of duties and lessons; one whose face beams with intelligence and whose lips drop knowledge; one who can cultivate in him the disposition to inquire, by his own readiness and ability to answer childish inquiries; who can lead the inquiries of a child into proper channels, and train him to a correct mode of thinking by being himself familiar with the true logical process, by having himself a cultivated understanding. such a teacher finds a pleasure in his task. he finds that he is not only teaching his pupils to read and to spell, to write and to cipher, but he is acquiring an ascendancy over them. he is exerting upon them a moral and intellectual power. he is leaving, upon a material far more precious than any coined in the mint, the deep and inerasible impress of his own character. let me repeat then, at the risk of becoming tiresome, what i hold to be an important and elementary truth, that the teacher should know very many things besides what he is required to teach. a good knowledge of history will enable him to invest the study of geography with new interest. acquaintance with algebra will give a clearness to his perceptions, and consequently to his mode of inculcating the principles, of arithmetic. the ability to delineate off-hand with chalk or pencil the forms of objects, gives him an unlimited power of illustrating every subject, and of clothing even the dullest with interest. familiarity with the principles of rhetoric and with the rules of criticism, gives at once elegance and ease to his language, and the means of more clearly detecting what is faulty in the language of others. a knowledge of latin or of french, or of any language besides his own, throws upon his own language a light of which he before had no conception. it produces in his ideas of grammar and of language generally, a change somewhat like that which the anatomist experiences from the study of comparative anatomy. the student of the human frame finds many things that he cannot comprehend until he extends his inquiries to other tribes of animals; to the monkey, the ox, the reptile, the fish, and even to the insect world. so it is with language. we return from the study of a foreign language invariably with an increased knowledge of our own. we have made one step at least from the technicalities of particular rules towards the principles and truths of general grammar. but it is not necessary to multiply illustrations. i have already said enough to explain my meaning. let me say, then, to every teacher, as you desire to rise in your profession, as you wish to make your task agreeable to yourself or profitable to your pupils, do not cease your studies as soon as you gain your election, but continue to be a learner as long as you continue to be a teacher, and especially strive by all proper means, and at all times, to enlarge the bounds of your knowledge. xv. a talent for teaching. there can be no doubt that some persons have a natural aptitude for teaching. as there are born poets, so there are born teachers. yet the man born with the true poetic temperament and faculty will never achieve success as a poet, unless he add study and labor to his natural gift. so the man born with a talent for teaching needs to cultivate the talent by patient study and practice, before he can become a thoroughly accomplished teacher. no man probably ever showed greater native aptitude for anything, than did benjamin west for painting. yet what long years of toil and study it took for him to become a really great painter? in teaching, as in every other profession, while men doubtless differ as to their original qualifications and aptitudes, yet the differences are not so great as they are often supposed to be, and they are by no means so great as those produced by study and practice. the man who has no special gift for this employment, but who faithfully and intelligently tries to perfect himself in it, is sure to be a better teacher than the one who has the natural gift, but adds to it no special study and preparation. indeed, if we exclude from consideration those very nice and delicate touches in education, which are so rare as to be quite exceptional, there is nothing in the business of teaching which may not be acquired by any person of average ability. when, therefore, we see a teacher not succeeding in gaining the attention of his scholars, or in securing obedience and respect, or in bringing them forward in their lessons, we are not disposed to free such a person from blame on the plea of his having no natural aptitude for teaching. we would respectfully say to such a teacher: if you know not how to impart knowledge, learn how; if you have no tact, get it. teaching is a business, as much as knitting stockings, or planting corn. either do not undertake to teach at all, or learn how it is to be done. if one-fourth of the labor bestowed upon the work of teaching were devoted to studying the business, the value of the remaining three-fourths would be quadrupled. it is painful to see the amount of hard work done in school with so little proportionate effect. if a man who knew nothing of farming, but who had a desire to be useful, were to dig a pit and bury therein a bushel of corn, and imagine that he was planting, his labor would not be wider of the mark than much that is bestowed in school. a man must learn how to do even so simple a thing as planting corn. let the teacher also learn how to plant the seeds of knowledge, how to prepare the soil, how to open it for the reception of truth, where and when to deposit the precious grains. i have no desire to discourage those faithful men and women who are so nobly striving to do good as teachers. but i cannot help expressing the regret that so much of this labor is without adequate result. why should persons act so differently in this matter from what they do in any other? if a woman wants to make a pair of stockings, she goes to some other woman who understands knitting, and sees how it is done, and learns the stitches, tries and experiments, and studies the matter, until it is all familiar to her. so of any other ordinary business. yet when it comes to teaching, anything like definite study or observation of the mode of doing it, is almost unknown! it is really no exaggeration to say that many teachers bungle in their work as egregiously as would a woman who should put yarn into a churn, and expect, after a proper amount of churning, to draw out stockings. in our schools are many professional teachers of approved skill. why should not a school-teacher, who is conscious of not succeeding as he would desire, spend an hour occasionally in observation? find out the name of some teacher who is particularly successful, and look on while the work is being done, and if possible see how it is done. then again, there are books on the subject, in which the business of teaching is explained in all its branches. get some of these books and read. the mere reading will not make you teachers. but it will set you to thinking. it will quicken your power of observation. it will help you to learn from your own experience. make a note of the difficulties you encounter, and the points in which you cannot accomplish what you desire. very likely you will find these very difficulties discussed in the books on teaching which you are reading. if not, lay your difficulties before some friend who is a successful teacher, and get advice. _anything_, rather than going on, week after week, without improvement. there _is_ a way of interesting your class in their lessons, of securing good order and punctual attendance, of making the scholars learn. only make up your mind that you will find out what that way is. if you think it cannot be done, of course it will not be done. if you have fairly made up your mind that it _may_ be done, and that _you_ can do it, it is half done already. you have no idea how much more pleasant the work will be, when you have once learned how to do it. one reason why so many teachers desert the ranks, is the irksomeness produced by want of success. few things are more intolerable than being obliged to do a thing while conscious of doing it in an awkward and bungling manner. on the other hand, almost any work is a pleasure, which one is conscious of doing well. xvi. teaching power. teachers differ greatly in their ability to bring a class forward in intellectual acquisition and growth. with one teacher pupils are all life and energy, they take hold of difficulties with courage, their ideas become clear, their very power of comprehension seems to gather strength. with another teacher, those same pupils, studying the same subject, are dull, heavy, easily discouraged, and make almost no progress. the ability thus to stimulate the intellectual activity of others, to give it at once momentum and progress, is the true measure of one's teaching power. it may be well to consider for a moment some of the conditions necessary to the existence and the exercise of this power. in the first place, we can exert no great, commanding influence over others, whether pupils or not, unless we have in a high degree their confidence. pupils must have faith in their teacher. i never knew an instance yet, where there was great intellectual ferment going on in a class, that the pupils did not believe the teacher infallible, or very nearly so. this principle of confidence in leadership is one of the great moving powers of the world. in teaching, it is specially important. this feeling may indeed be in excess. it may exist to such an extent as to extinguish all independence of thought, to induce a blind, unquestioning receptivity. such an extreme is of course opposed to true mental progress. but short of this extreme point, there is almost no amount of faith that children can have in their teacher, that, if well founded, is not of the highest advantage. seeing the firm, assured tread of father or mother, or of an older brother or sister, is a great aid to the tottering little one in putting forth its own steps while learning to walk. so the child is emboldened to send out its young, unpractised thoughts, by the confidence it has in the guidance and protection of its teacher. to acquire and retain the proper ascendancy over the mind of a child, two things are essential, ample knowledge and entire honesty. shallowness and pretension may mislead for a while. but to hold a child firmly and permanently, the teacher must abound in knowledge, and must have thoroughly honest convictions. the next condition to great teaching power is confidence in one's self. a timid, irresolute, hesitating utterance of one's own convictions fails to produce conviction in the minds of others. i do not recommend self-conceit. it is not necessary to be dogmatic. yet a certain style of self-assertion, bordering very closely upon these qualities, is needed in the teacher. in the higher regions of science and opinion, there are of course many points about which no one, at least no one well informed, would undertake to speak with authority. such subjects it becomes us all to approach with reverent humility, as at the best only inquirers after truth. but the case is very different with teachers of the common branches concerned in our present remarks. on these points the teacher ought to have a certainty and a readiness of knowledge, so as to be thoroughly self-reliant before the class. teaching is like fighting. self-reliance is half the battle. equally important with the former is it to have the affection of one's pupils. writers on metaphysics now-a-days dwell much, and very properly, on the influence of the body upon the mind, and the necessity of a healthy condition of the former in order to the full clearness and strength of our intellectual apprehensions. there is a still more intimate connection between our moral emotions and our mental action. the wish is father to the thought, in more senses than that intended by shakspeare. if the intellect is the seeing power of the soul, the affections are the atmosphere through which we look. the same object may appear to us very differently, as it is seen through the colorless medium of pure intellectual perception, or as it is enlarged and glorified by the mellowing haze of fond affection, or as it is distorted and obscured by the mists of prejudice and hate. when a child has a thorough dislike for a subject or for his teacher, the difficulty of learning is very greatly increased. not only is the willingness to study weak or wanting, but the very power of mental perception seems to be obstructed. the power of attention, the power of apprehension, the power of memory, the power of reasoning, are all paralyzed by dislike, and are equally vitalized by love and desire. mental action, in short, is influenced by the state of the heart as much as by the state of the body. if you do not expect great mental efforts from a child that is sickly, burning with fever, or racked with pain, neither may you expect the best and highest results from one whose heart is diseased and alienated, who approaches a subject with feelings of aversion and dislike, whose conceptions are clouded with prejudice. a teacher of great intellectual force, and with an overbearing will, may push forward even a reluctant and a rebellious class with a certain degree of speed. on the other hand, a teacher who enjoys the unbounded love of his scholars, may accomplish comparatively little, on account of lacking the other qualities needed for success. the highest measure of success in teaching is attained only where these several conditions meet,--where the teacher has and deserves the full confidence of the scholars, where he has full confidence in himself, is self-reliant and self-asserting, and where at the same time he has the warm affection of his pupils. love, after all, is the governing power of the human soul, as it is the crowning grace in the christian scheme. love is, in teaching, what sunshine and showers are in vegetation. by a system of forcing and artificial culture, the gardener may indeed produce a few hot-house plants, but for all great or general results, he must look to the genial operations of nature. xvii. growing. children often use the term "grown-up people." by it they mean persons who have come to the age of twenty, or twenty-one, and whose bodily growth is complete. but there are other kinds of growth, besides that of the body. what is a "grown-up" _teacher_? it is not difficult, certainly, to find some, in every locality, to whom this term could _not_ be applied, with any propriety. they have been engaged for years in the work, and yet they are the merest babes. they have no more skill than when they first took a class in hand. when a boy begins to use a penknife, he is very awkward. he cuts himself about as often as he cuts the stick. after a while, however, he learns to manage the matter better. he finds out how to handle the curious instrument with skill and even with elegance. but you will see teachers, so called, who seem never to make any of this progress in their work. they have no more idea now, than they had when they gave their first lesson, of what they must do to secure attention and silence, how they must manage to keep all the children busy, how to secure good attendance, or study of the lesson, how to gain affection and confidence, how to enforce order and obedience, how to do anything, except to sit, book in hand, and ask the questions one after the other round the class, and see that john, george, and james severally say the answers correctly. this is the idea of teaching with which they begin, and they make no progress towards anything better. they acquire no skill. they make no growth. they are "grown-up" bodily. but in all that pertains to teaching, they are still babes. they whittle as awkwardly and unskilfully as when the delicate instrument was first put into their clumsy fingers. they go on from year to year and learn nothing. some persons are born teachers, just as some are born poets or mechanics. that is, they are gifted with a natural aptitude for that particular work. but those most gifted by nature, are capable of improvement, and those having least natural gifts for teaching, may acquire a certain and a very considerable amount of skill, by proper observation and study. the point which i wish to make, and which i deem important, is, that teachers should not rest content with their present qualifications, whatever they may be, whether large or small. let it be the aim of every one to be a growing teacher. we come short, if we are not better teachers this year than we were last. we should aim and resolve to be better teachers next year than we are now. our education as teachers should never be considered as finished. forgetting the things which are behind, let us ever press forward. let us constantly aim upward. skill in teaching admits of infinite degrees, and no one will ever be perfect in it. efforts at improvement, if persistently followed up, are always rewarded with success, and success in such a work brings a most sweet recompense. what satisfaction is equal to that of feeling that one is steadily increasing in the power of guiding and moulding the minds of others? growing skill in anything, even in works requiring mechanical ingenuity, brings joy to the mind. how much more intense and pure the joy, when there is a consciousness of growth in this higher department of mental power? will the teacher, who reads these paragraphs, consider the matter? are you, as a teacher, growing? or are you working on in dull content in the same old routine? on your answer to these questions depend very largely, not only the welfare of your scholars and the amount of good you will achieve, but your own happiness and satisfaction in your work. the artist, who produces some great work of genius, has his reward not merely in the dollars which it may bring to his coffer, but in the inward satisfaction which successful achievement produces. the true artist is always struggling towards some unattainable ideal, and his joy is proportioned to the nearness of his approach to the imagined perfection. so in proportion as we approach in skill the great teacher, will be our joy in the work itself, apart from our joy in the results. to be a growing teacher requires a distinct aim to this end, and a resolute and persistent effort. it does not come by chance. it is not a weed that springs up spontaneously, and matures without culture. it is not the fruit of mere wishing. there must be _will_, a determined and resolute will. rules and theories will not accomplish it. there are books and essays in abundance on the art and practice of teaching. but back of means we must have, first of all, the propelling power. have you made up your mind to be stationary, or have you resolved to go forward? will you remain in the wilderness, or will you advance into the promised land and take possession? are you a deliberate, predetermined, contented dwarf, or will you resolutely grow? you may never become a giant, but do not remain an infant. if there is any one duty of the teacher more imperative than another, it is that of continued, persistent self-improvement. no element of progress is so efficient as a wholesome discontent. "i count not myself to _have_ attained," says the great apostle of progress. to sit down self-satisfied with present attainments is in itself a sign that you have not yet risen much. it is to belong to the owls and the bats of the lower valleys. one must already have ascended to lofty heights before he can even see the higher alps towering beyond. the teacher who would improve must, in a good sense, be restless. he must bestir himself. he must study and read and experiment, attend teachers' meetings and conventions, and take teachers' papers, and find out what other teachers are doing and have done, ever remembering that improvement comes mainly by comparison. xviii. loving the children. some teachers make the mistake of supposing that a love for the work and a love for the children are one and the same thing. the two things are certainly separable in thought, and they are often actually separated in action. it is of some importance to teachers to remember the difference. we see persons every day struggling with all their might to accomplish certain results. they have certain ideas which they wish to realize, certain theories which they wish to verify. to bring about these results, is a matter of pride with them. so that the end is gained, the means to be used are a matter of comparative indifference. their heart is set on the result, they care nothing for the machinery by which it is brought about. now, so long as the work is of a nature which requires only the use of mechanical powers, or of mere brute force, it is all very well. the sculptor need not fall in love with the block of marble on which he is working, in order to realize from it the conception of his mind. the engine which carries us thirty miles an hour towards the goal of our desires, will not speed us more or less for not being an object of our affections. but every man has a natural and proper dislike to becoming a mere machine for carrying out the schemes of others. children especially revolt at being treated in this way. if a teacher takes the charge of a class or of a school, for the purpose of showing to himself or to others how certain things may be done, the children are quick to find it out, and to resent it. no child, however humble or obscure, but feels indignant at being considered as a mere pawn upon a chess-board, or a mere wheel or pulley in some complicated piece of machinery. every individual child is to itself the centre of all human interests, and if you are to have any real and abiding influence upon him, he must first feel that you have a regard for himself, in his own proper person, independently of any schemes or plans of your own. you may love to see your children all present punctually, to see them making a good appearance, and by their orderly behavior and manners helping forward the school generally; you may love the work of teaching as giving you honorable and useful occupation. but something more than this is wanting. _you must love the children._ you must love each particular child. you must become interested in each child, not for what it is to you, or to the class, or to the school, but for what it is in itself, as a precious jewel, to be loved and admired, for those immortal qualities and capacities which belong to it as a human being. no matter how degraded or depraved or forbidding in appearance that child may be, it has qualities which, if brought out, may make it more glorious than an angel. if jesus loved him, you may love him. jesus did not stand off at a distance from the loathsome and filthy leper, while performing the miracle of healing. he first "_touched_" the leper, and said, "be thou clean." we are sometimes too fastidious in our benevolence, and shrink too much from coming into contact with those whom we would befriend. little real influence is ever produced upon any human being, without creating between you and him a bond of sympathy. if we would work strongly and efficiently upon the minds of children, we must really love them, not in the abstract, not in a general way, but concretely and individually. we must love john and william and mary and susie, simply and purely because he or she is, in himself or herself alone, an object of true interest and affection. in looking over a school, it is not difficult to discover at a glance which teachers thus love their children. it speaks in every word from the lips. it beams in every look from the eyes. it thrills in every tone of the voice. it has a language in the very touch of the hand and the movements of the person. some persons are naturally more fond of children than others are. but those not naturally thus inclined may cultivate the disposition. they _must_ do so if they mean to be teachers. no one is fitted to be a teacher, who has not learned to sympathize with the real wants and feelings of children. pretence here is all wasted. shams may do with grown persons sometimes, never with children. they have an instinctive perception of what is genuine and what is pretended, in professed love for them. in fact, the way to win the affection of a child is to love him, not to make professions of love. it is not always the easiest thing in the world to exercise this love. a teacher may have the charge of a class of children whose appearance, manners, and dispositions are exceedingly forbidding, perhaps even loathsome. yet observation and study will ordinarily discover some good quality even in the worst and most degraded. a talent for discovering what is good in a child is much more important in the work of elevating him, than the smartness at detecting and exposing his tricks, in which some teachers take pride. it is a bad sign, though not an uncommon one, to see evidences of cunning in a teacher. better by far to be outwitted and duped occasionally, than to forfeit that character of perfect sincerity and straightforwardness which secures the confidence of a child. the teacher who would love his children, particularly if he happens to have been entrusted with an unpromising class, must learn to wear the spectacles of charity. he must cultivate the habit of seeing things in their best light. while not blind to faults, he must be prompt and eagle-eyed to spy out every indication of good. above all, he must remember that no human soul, however degraded, is without some elements and possibilities of good, for whom there is the possibility that christ died. xix. gaining the affections of the scholars. the importance of this point is not to be measured by the mere gratification it affords. it adds undoubtedly to the happiness of the teacher in his work, to know that his scholars love him. nor is this a small consideration. the teacher has many vexatious rubs. he encounters much toil and self-denial; and whatever tends to mitigate these asperities, and to make his labor sweet, is for that very reason important. the teacher has, for a part at least of his reward, the enjoyment of a love as pure and unselfish as any known upon earth. he will doubtless go forward in duty, even where he fails of obtaining this precious foretaste of the heavenly bliss, and he has doubtless higher aims than any arising from mere gratification, of whatever sort. yet a boon so great is not to be despised or ignored. the ardent love which scholars sometimes give to their teachers is a high gratification, and something to be greatly prized for the mere pleasure it gives. and yet, after all, this is not its main value. the fact that children love their teacher, gives to the teacher almost unbounded influence over them. there is hardly a point, necessary to the success of a school or of a class, that scholars will not readily yield to a teacher whom they love. by this silken cord they can be drawn whithersoever the teacher wills. to please teacher, they will attend regularly, will come punctually, will be quiet and orderly, will learn their lessons, will be attentive to instruction. more than all this, many a child, by the love of an earthly friend, has been led to the love of his heavenly friend. the young heart is opened to receive the saviour, by the warmth of its love for one who so manifestly bears his image. perhaps there is no one, not even excepting a mother, who can so easily bring the young to the saviour, as the teacher who has thoroughly succeeded in winning his scholars' affections. there is another consideration in this matter, not so weighty as the one named, yet of great importance, and the more worthy to be named, because it is generally not rightly understood. i refer to the fact that children will learn so much more readily under a teacher whom they love. not only will they study better, and be more attentive, for the sake of pleasing their teacher, but by some mysterious process of the mind, love helps us to understand, as dislike disturbs and beclouds the understanding. when a child has a dislike or prejudice or ill-feeling of any kind against a teacher, or a subject of study, the effect upon the mind of the child is like that produced upon a spring of pure and sparkling water by stirring up the mud and sediment from the bottom. in the human organization the heart is at the bottom, and disturbing influences there cause us to see things through an impure medium. the calmness and serenity, produced by perfect love and trust, are the proper conditions for the right and best working of the understanding. we must get the heart right if we would see truth clearly, and that teacher who has won the love of his scholars has done much towards making the path of knowledge easy for them. let the teacher, then, aim to win the love of his scholars, first, because this love is in itself a boon to which the teacher has a rightful claim; secondly, because it gives him a powerful influence in moulding the character and habits of the children, and especially in bringing them to the saviour; and, thirdly, because it helps the scholars intellectually, enabling them to understand better and to learn faster. but how is this love to be gained? assuredly, _not_ by demanding it as a right, or by fretting, complaining, or scolding because your scholars do not love you. love only is the price for love. if you wish your scholars to love you, you must first love them, not pretend to do it,--children are quick to see through such pretences,--but really and truly love them. many teachers, however, sincerely love their scholars, and yet do not succeed in winning their affections. something in their manner and appearance is repulsive. there is in the face of some good people a hard and forbidding look, at which the heart takes alarm and retires within itself. the young heart, like the young buds in spring-time, requires an atmosphere of warmth and sunshine. if we would draw forth their warm affections towards us, we must not only feel love towards them in our hearts, but we must wear sunshine in our faces. a pleasant smile, a loving word, a soft, endearing tone of the voice, goes a great way with a child, especially where it is not put on, but springs from a loving heart. some teachers in avoiding this hard, repulsive manner, run to the opposite extreme, and lose the respect of their scholars by undue familiarity. children do not expect you to become their playmate and fellow, before giving you their love and confidence. their native tendency is to look up. they yearn for repose upon one superior to themselves. only, when the tender heart of youth thus looks up, let it not be into a region filled with clouds and cold, but into a sky everywhere pervaded with a clear, steady, warm sunlight. let there be no frown upon your brow, no harsh or angry word upon your lips, no exacting sternness in your eye. let the love which you feel in your heart beam forth naturally and spontaneously in loving looks and words, and you need not fear but that you will meet with a response. xx. the obedience of children. there is much misapprehension as to the true nature of obedience. wherein does obedience really consist? what is its essence? merely doing a specified act, which has been required, is not necessarily an act of obedience. a father may have a rule of his household that the children shall rise in the morning at five o'clock. a son who habitually disregards this rule, may rise at the appointed time on a particular morning, in order to join a companion on a fishing excursion, or for some object connected solely with his own pleasure and convenience. here the external act is the one required. he rises at the hour enjoined by his father's command. but his doing so has no reference to his father's wishes. it is not in any sense an act of obedience. something more than mere external compliance with a rule or a command is needed to constitute obedience. in other words, not only the act itself must be the one required, but the motive must be right. if i am led to do what my father or my mother requires, by mere dint of coaxing, or by the expectation of cakes or pennies or promised indulgence of any kind, if it is a bargain, in which i give so much compliance for so much per contra of self-gratification, the compliance rendered is not an act of obedience. as well might a man profess to obey his neighbor, because he gives him a bag of oats for a bag of corn. a great deal of what passes for obedience in families and schools, is mere barter. strip the matter of all glosses and disguises, and the naked truth remains, that children are hired to do what the parent or the teacher wants to have done. they do not obey, in any legitimate and wholesome use of the word. they are quiet when they should be quiet, they learn the lessons which they should learn, they abstain from whatever things they should abstain from, because they have learned that this is the only way to gain the indulgences which they desire. the parent and the teacher use a motive adequate to secure the outward act, but they do not secure obedience. it is not obedience for a child to do a thing because his reason and conscience tell him that the act in itself, without reference to his parents' wishes, is right and proper. at least it is not filial obedience. i may be obeying my conscience, but i am not obeying my father. many parents, who are above the weakness of bribing their children, satisfy themselves by reasoning with them. far be it from us to say a word against any legitimate appeal to the reason and conscience of a child. children, at the proper age, should be taught to reason and to judge for themselves, in regard to the right and wrong of actions, just as they should learn to walk alone, and not be forever dependent upon leading strings. only, let it be understood that just so far as the child acts on its own independent judgment, the act is not one of filial obedience. obedience is doing a thing because another, having competent authority, has enjoined it. the motive necessary to constitute any act an act of obedience, is a reference to the will and authority of another. it is submission of our will to the will of another. the child receives as true what his parents say, and because they say it; so, he does as right what they command, and because they command it. that fact is, and in the first instance it should be, to the child's mind, the ultimate and sufficient reason for either believing or doing--for faith or obedience. this faith and obedience rendered to my earthly father, which is only partial and temporary, besides serving its own immediate ends, in securing a well-ordered household and my own best interests as a child, has the further end of training me for that unqualified faith and obedience, which i am to render to my heavenly father, and which is of universal and permanent obligation. one object of the parental relation seems to be to fit the soul for this higher obedience. i must, however, learn to obey my father simply because he is my father, and because as such he has the right to command me, if thereby i am to learn, for a like reason, to obey my heavenly father. no lower motive will secure the end. submission to parental authority is not always the instinctive impulse of childhood. where this submission is not yielded, it must be enforced. authority, in other words, requires sanctions. the father has no right to command, unless he has the right to punish in case of disobedience. furthermore, if he does not, especially in the early childhood of his offspring, train them to a habit of real obedience and submission to authority, he does his children a great wrong. he deprives them of the benefit of that habit of obedience, which will be of the utmost value to them in their future religious life. a man forbids his child to eat green apples. the child abstains. that abstinence is not necessarily an act of obedience. he may abstain because his mother offers, in case of his doing so, to give him sugar-plums, and he prefers the sugar-plums to the apples. this is not obedience. or, his reason and experience may have taught him that the eating of green fruit will cause him sickness and pain, and so he abstains for the same reasons that his father, mother, or anybody else does. this is not obedience. but children often have not the forethought to look at remote consequences, or they have not the strength of purpose to deny a present gratification for the sake of a distant good, and especially for a good of which they have only a vague idea through the representations of their parents or teachers. suppose such a case. suppose a child with a strong inclination and desire for the thing forbidden, and with no clear apprehension that there is anything wrong or hurtful in the indulgence, except in the fact that the father has forbidden it, and with no temptation of a higher indulgence as a reward for abstaining. if, in such a case, the child abstains, he performs a true act of obedience. he really subjects his will to the will of his father. this kind of implicit obedience is greatly needed. it is to be secured just as our heavenly father secures obedience to some of his laws. if a child thrusts his finger into the candle, he violates a law, and he instantly suffers for it. we are surrounded by many such laws, without the observance of which we could not live a day. to teach us obedience to these laws, the penalty of transgression is immediate and sharp. there are other laws of our physical well-being, the penalties of which are remote, and in regard to those we have room for the exercise and cultivation of our reasoning powers. now in childhood, there are many things which a child should be taught to forbear doing as promptly as he forbears to thrust his hand into the fire. yet for these things there is no natural penalty. here the command of the parent should be interposed, and transgression should be promptly followed by penalty. the authority of the parent and the penalties by which he sustains it, guide the child during those years when reason and the power of self-denial are weak. but to make this discipline easy and effective, there should be no hesitation or uncertainty about the exercise of it. parents often have to strain their authority, and use very largely their right of punishment, because they are so unequal and irregular in their methods of government. a child soon ceases to thrust his finger into the fire. fire is not a thing which burns one day, and may be safely tampered with the next. so, if disobedience, invariably and promptly, without passion or caprice, and with the uniformity of a law of nature, brings such a penalty as to make the disobedience painful, there will be little transgression and little need of punishment. a child does not fret because he cannot play with fire. he will not fret because he cannot transgress a father's direct command, if he once knows that such commands _must_ be obeyed. xxi. rarey as an educator. parents, teachers, and all who are charged with the duty of training the young, may learn important lessons from the example of the late mr. rarey. the principles on which the horse is rendered obedient and docile do not differ essentially from those to be employed in the government of children or of men. some of the accounts of mr. rarey's system, however, which have been published, are liable to mislead, and to foster a mischievous error. his procedure was eminently kind and gentle. the horse became fully assured that no harm was intended towards him. this conviction is essential to success in securing a perfect and willing obedience, whether from brute or human. but the distinctness with which this feature of the treatment was brought out in mr. rarey's exhibitions, led some apparently to think that this was the main, if not the only feature. kindness alone, however, will not tame, and will not govern, brutes or men. there must be power. there must be, in the mind of the party to be governed, a full conviction that the power of the other party is superior to his own--that there is, in the party claiming obedience, an ample reserve of power fully adequate to enforce the claim. the more complete this conviction is, the less occasion there will be for the exercise of the power. the most headstrong horse, once convinced that he is helpless in this contest of strength, and convinced at the same time that his master is his friend, may be led by a straw. mr. rarey went through various preliminary steps, the object of which was to make the horse acquainted with him, and to prevent fright or panic. but obedience was not claimed, and was not given, until there had been a demonstration of power--until the horse was convinced that the man was entirely too much for him. by a very simple adjustment of straps to the forefeet of the animal, he became perfectly helpless in the hands of his tamer. the struggle, indeed, was sometimes continued for a good while. the horse put forth his prodigious strength to the utmost. he became almost wild at the perfect ease and quietude with which all his efforts were baffled, until at length, fully satisfied that further struggles were useless, he made a complete surrender, and lay down as peaceful and submissive as an infant. this point is of some importance. i do not underrate the value of kindness and love in any system of government, whether in the household, the school, the stable, the menagerie, or in civil society. but love is not the basis of government. obedience is yielded to authority, and authority is based on right and power. the child who complies with his father's wishes, only because a different course would make his father grieve, or give his mother a headache, or because his parents have reasoned with him and shown him that compliance is for his good, or who has been wheedled into compliance by petty bribes and promises, has not learned that doctrine of obedience which lies at the foundation of all government, human and divine. god has given to the parent the right to the obedience of his children, and the power to enforce it. that parent has failed in his duty who has not trained his child, not only to love him, but to obey him, in the strict sense of the word, that is to yield his will to the will of a superior, from a sense of appointed subordination and rightful authority. this sense of subordination and of obedience to appointed and rightful authority, is of the very essence of civil government, and the place where it is to be first and chiefly learned is in the household. to teach this is a main end of the parental relation. the parent who fails to teach it, fails to give his child the first element of good citizenship, and leaves him often to be in after-years the victim of his own uncontrolled passions and tempers. the want of a proper exercise of parental authority is, in this age of the world, the most prolific source of those frightful disorders that pervade society, and that threaten to upturn the very foundations of all civil government. the feeling of reverence, the sense of a respect for authority, the consciousness of being in a state of subordination, the feeling of obligation to do a thing simply because it is commanded by some one having a right to obedience--all these old-fashioned notions seem to be dying out of the minds of men. the popular cry is, don't make your children fear you. govern them by love. conquer them by kindness. treat them as mr. rarey did his horses. i protest against the notion. it is a mistake of mr. rarey's system, and it is not the true basis for government, whether of brutes or men. the doctrine may seem harsh in these dainty times. but, in my opinion, a certain degree of wholesome fear in the mind of a child towards its parent, is essential, and is perfectly compatible with the very highest love. i have never known more confiding, affectionate, and loving children, than those who not only regarded their parents as kind benefactors and sympathizing friends, but who looked up to them with a certain degree of reverence. the fear spoken of in the bible, as being cast out by perfect love, is quite a different emotion. it is rather a slavish fear, a feeling of dread and terror. it sees in its object not only power but hostility. it awakens not only dread but hate. the child's fear, on the contrary, sees power united with kindness. it obeys the one, it loves the other. it is the exact attitude of mind to which mr. rarey brought the horse that was subjected to his management. xxii. a boarding-school experience. i have often wished i had the descriptive power of the man who wrote "the diary of a physician." my experiences in another profession have not been wanting in incident, often of a curious and romantic kind, and sometimes almost startling. but the "diary of a schoolmaster," to be read with interest, requires something more than a good basis of facts. he who writes it must have, also, graphic and narrative powers--a special gift, of which nature has been sparing to me. i had one experience, however, many years ago, so remarkable in some of its features, that perhaps the bare facts, stated in the simplest form, without artifice or embellishment, will be found worthy of perusal. the youth who was the principal actor in the scene which i am about to describe, has been dead these many years, and i believe the family have nearly all died out. the only survivor that i knew anything of ten years ago was then blind, and ill of an incurable disease. there would, therefore, perhaps be no harm in giving the youth's real name; but as the name is one widely known, and as it is always best to avoid unnecessary intrusion upon private affairs, i have concluded to use a fictitious name, both for the person referred to and for the place from which he came. in other particulars the following incident is a simple narration of facts. at the time of which i am writing, i had a large boarding-school for boys, at princeton, new jersey. particular circumstances gave me, for several years, quite a run of patronage from a town in one of the western states, which for convenience i shall call tompkinsville. among those who applied for admission from this town were two brothers, bob and charlie graham. bob was only ten years old. charlie was fourteen, and as mature as most boys at nineteen. mature, i mean, not so much in his intellectual development, for in that respect he was rather behindhand, but in his passions, and in his habits of independent thought and action. i had many misgivings about the propriety of receiving these boys into the school. most of those that i had already from tompkinsville were of the fire-eating class, whom it had taken all my skill as a disciplinarian to bring into subjection, and i did not know what might be the effect of adding to their number two such combustible youths as these grahams were reputed to be. tompkinsville, indeed, had long been notorious for the fiery and lawless character of its inhabitants. while containing many most estimable families, where a generous and warm-hearted hospitality reigned supreme, yet no town, probably, in all the western states witnessed annually a greater number of street-fights and other deeds of violence of the most desperate character. no family in tompkinsville were more noted than the grahams, on the one hand for the passionate warmth of their attachments, and on the other for the fierceness and violence of their resentments. nothing was too much for them to do for you when their affections were touched. on the other hand, no law, human or divine, seemed to restrain them when their blood was up. when roused by what they regarded as an insult, they were human tigers, no less in the quickness than in the desperate ferocity of their anger. the father once, in open court, in a sudden rage, actually strode over the tables and heads of the lawyers, and seizing the presiding judge by the collar, dragged him from the bench and horsewhipped him in the presence of all his officials. charlie himself, of whom i am writing, gave, about two years after leaving school, a similar demonstration of violence. hearing that a young man, who was a fellow-student of his in a law office, had done something insulting, charlie drew up a formal written apology and presented it to the young man to sign, intending afterwards to post it. on the young man's refusing to sign the paper, charlie drew a weapon of some kind and sprang upon him. the young man being several years older, and very large and powerful, had no difficulty in disarming his assailant, throwing him upon the floor and holding him there. while thus down upon his back, bound hand and foot, and completely at the mercy of his antagonist, charlie still demanded, as fiercely as ever, the signing of the "apology," giving the young man, as the only alternative, either to kill him or to be killed. "if you let me up alive, i will shoot you at sight, as sure as my name is charles graham." knowing the desperate character of the family, and feeling too well assured of his own social position to care for any effect the signing of such a paper might have, the young man courageously let the ruffian up and signed the apology. two days after, charlie came back to the office, thoroughly mortified and penitent for his outrage, voluntarily gave up the paper, and apologized in the amplest manner for his folly. i might enumerate other instances by the score, were it necessary, to show the character of the boy with whom i had to deal. but these are probably sufficient. his passions were as quick as gunpowder, and as indiscriminate. had i known all that i afterwards knew in regard to his disposition and his antecedents, i certainly would not have undertaken the charge of his education. the grahams had been with me nearly a year without the occurrence of anything to attract attention or call for discipline. the school had considerable reputation among the people of tompkinsville for the strictness of its discipline. though the relations between the pupils and myself were for the most part thoroughly kind and friendly, yet it was well understood by every boy who entered school that the will of the principal was supreme. mr. graham had probably brought his boys to the school for that very reason. the routine of obedience had been so thoroughly established, that his boys, he thought, would submit through mere force of example. bob was too young to give any uneasiness. he fell, of course, into many of the peccadilloes of boys of his age, and received, without demur, the treatment of a little boy. charlie, for a long time, was almost a model of propriety. he was diligent in his studies, and observed the rules of the school with scrupulous care. he was fair, almost girlish, in appearance, and gentle in his speech. no one, merely observing the quiet, modest boy, going about his usual routine of duty, without noise or turbulence, would have dreamed of the sleeping volcano that lay beneath this placid exterior. about the middle of the second term i began to notice in charlie symptoms that i did not like. the harness evidently chafed him somewhere, and there was no telling when he might kick out of the traces. the crisis at length came. one morning, when the boys were in the washroom, under the charge of the senior teacher, charlie, with what precise provocation i could never ascertain, drew back his basin of water and threw it full into the teacher's face. here was a case. we were about to have an explosion. evidently the young fire-eater's blood was up. he was bent on having "a scene;" and, while his hand was in, he would quite likely make up for all the long months of peaceful inaction. all the tiger within him stood revealed. the matter was reported to me of course. after some little thought, my plan was chosen. not a word was said on the subject for several hours. meals, play-time, study-hours, lessons, everything went on as usual. at length, about eleven o'clock, charlie was summoned, not to the principal's desk, in the public school-room, but to my private office, in a remote part of the premises. as he entered the quiet apartment, it was evident that the intervening hours of reflection had not been lost upon him. he was pretty sure, of course, that i had sent for him in consequence of the occurrence of the morning. still he was not certain. not a word had been uttered in school on the subject--no allusion to it even. altogether there was something about the affair that mystified him. the following brief dialogue ensued. "where are your skates, charlie?" "in my box in the play-room, sir." "where is your sled?" "that is hanging up in the outer shed." "where is your fishing-line and your ball?" "they are in the play-room." "i wish you would get these and all your other playthings together before dinner. peter (this was the head waiter) has collected your boots and shoes, and sarah (the seamstress) has got your clothes together and packed your trunks. i have made out your accounts, and will be ready to send you home to your father by the afternoon train. you may help bob also to collect his playthings; he has not done anything wrong, but he is so young i think your father would not like to have him here alone so far from home." all this was said in a tone as utterly emotionless as i would have used if asking him whether he would be helped to beef or lamb at table. charlie was taken aback. if i had attempted to chastise him, if i had even used towards him the language of invective or reproach, he could have met the case. but here was an issue which he had never contemplated. after a moment of blank amazement, he said: "mr. h., i don't want to go home thus. it will grieve my father, and it will be a lasting stigma to me in tompkinsville, where it is counted an honor to belong to this school. i know i have done wrong, but can't you inflict some other punishment? i will submit to anything rather than be sent home in this way. put me in 'exile' and at the 'side-table,' for three days, or any time you please!" this was an extreme penalty, sometimes used in school for very grave offences. the boy who was subject to it was obliged to stand at a table by himself in the dining-room and eat bread and water, while the other boys and their teachers were at their meals. besides this, during the continuance of the penalty the culprit was not allowed to go upon the play-ground, or to speak to any one, nor was any one allowed to speak to him, under the penalty of being himself similarly punished. the punishment was, of course, a severe one in itself, and was very mortifying to a boy of high spirit. it was only resorted to in extreme cases, and was limited to one day. charlie begged that i would "exile" and "side-table" him for a week, if i pleased; only not send him home thus. "no, charlie; i am not sure that your father would approve of your being thus publicly disgraced before the school and the family, nor am i myself sure that it would be right in the case of a boy so far advanced towards manhood as you are. in assuming the charge of you, i never contemplated anything in our intercourse but such as occurs between gentlemen. since i have been mistaken in my estimate of you, let our intercourse cease. it would not alter your character to subject you to a humiliating punishment before the assembled school. if it were your brother bob, the case would be different. but you are almost a man. you have been treated here, as at home, with the consideration due to a young gentleman. i would myself revolt at seeing one of your years and standing treated as you request me to treat you. i cannot do it. you must go home." "oh, no! no! do not send me home! do anything else. i will submit to any punishment you please. flog me; _please_, flog me!" "flog you! never! i have no scruples, as you know, on the subject of corporal punishment, for i often chastise the smaller boys; but boys as old and mature as you are have sense enough to be governed by other considerations than fear, and especially fear of the rod. if they have not, i want nothing to do with them." "oh! mr. h., won't you _please_ to flog me?" and the boy actually went down on his knees and begged me to thrash him. he, charlie graham, whose veins ran fire, who, six hours before, would have leaped at my throat had i so much as raised my finger at him, was now begging me, as a special boon, to give him a whipping! i could hardly believe my senses. yet there was no doubt of the boy's sincerity, or of his earnestness. so, to give me time to reflect as to what should be done, i finally said, "charlie, i will think of what you have asked, and let you know at three o'clock." three o'clock came, and charlie again made his appearance. "do you still wish me to whip you?" "i do. i will make any apology you think proper to the teacher whom i insulted, and i will be most thankful to you to chastise me for the offence." "please to take off your coat." * * * * * when the painful affair was over, i gave him my hand cordially and frankly, and said, "charlie, you have honorably and courageously atoned for a grievous fault, and i assure you, i restore you not only to your position in school, but to my respect and confidence." i never had any further difficulty with charlie graham. years afterwards, when i met his father at the springs, he could hardly contain his amazement when i told him that i had once flogged his oldest son charlie, at his own particular request. it was, i suppose, the first and last time the hand of correction was ever laid on him. xxiii. phrenology. in the previous chapter i gave a leaf from my experience of life in a boarding-school. i propose now to give another leaf from the same book. the incident about to be narrated, however, is not given as an illustration of boarding-school life, but merely because it happened at school. it might have happened elsewhere, though the circumstances on that occasion were particularly favorable for giving to it a curious point. while i was at the head of the edgehill school, at princeton, n. j., a stranger called one day and announced himself as prof. ----. the name is one almost as well known in the history of phrenological science as that of prof. combe. he said he was about to give a lecture in princeton on the subject of phrenology, and as he was an entire stranger to myself and to all the pupils and teachers in the school, he thought it would be a good opportunity for making an interesting and critical experiment. he proposed, therefore, with my consent, to spend an hour, in presence of the school, in examining the heads of any of the boys that i might call up for that purpose. from the very intimate relations existing in a boarding-school, the characters of the boys would be well known to me and to their companions and teachers, and we would have therefore the means of knowing how far he succeeded in his experiment. thinking that an hour spent in this way would not be misspent, that it would at least give some variety to the monotonous routine of study and lessons, and, let me add, being not entirely without curiosity as to the result, i consented to his proposition, and called the school together in the large assembly-room. all the boys being in their seats, together with the teachers and the ladies of the household, i stated briefly the object of their assembling and the method in which it was proposed to proceed with the experiment. they were to observe entire silence, and to give no indication, by word or look, so far as they could help it, to show whether the professor was hitting the mark or not, as he read off to them the characters of their companions. the boys took to the idea at once, and the excitement very soon was at fever-heat. placing a chair upon the platform, in full view of the school, and the professor alongside of it, i called up _boy no. ._--this happened to be a lad about fourteen, from the interior of alabama. he was the most athletic boy in school. "full big he was of brawn and eke of bones," as chaucer says, in his picture of the miller. he could beat any boy in school in wrestling, and no doubt could flog any of them in a fist-fight, though on this point i speak only from conjecture, as this part of boys' amusements is not always as well known to their teachers as it is to the boys themselves. the professor, after some little manipulation of the cranium, read off the boy's character with tolerable accuracy. any one, however, with a grain of observation, who had seen the boy stalking up to the platform, with bold, almost defiant air, or had noticed his bull-neck, hard fist, and swaggering gait, could not have had much difficulty in guessing what kind of a boy he was, without resort to his bumps for information. it was written in unmistakable characters all over his physical conformation, from his head to his heels. i noticed, however, that while the professor's fingers were busy with the boy's cranium, his eyes were not less busy with the faces of his youthful auditors. whenever his interpretation of any bump was a palpable hit, his success could be all too plainly read in the upturned faces before him. if the success was very marked and decisive, the youngsters were entirely unable to restrain their expressions of surprise and admiration. it was very evident, from his method of procedure, that he was guided by these expressions, quite as much as by his fingering of the bumps. he would first mention lightly some trait of character. if it attracted no particular attention, he would quietly fall on to something else. but if the announcement seemed to create a little breeze, showing that he had made a hit, he would then dwell upon the point, and intensify his expressions, until, in some instances, the school was in quite an uproar of satisfaction. possibly there was a spice of malice in what followed. at all events, it seemed to me that that was a kind of game at which two could play, and if, under the circumstances, he chose to palm off for knowledge gained by the fingers, what he was really getting by means of his eyes and ears, there would be no great crime in punishing him a little for his impertinence. so, in calling the following boys, i selected some who were notorious in school for certain marked traits, but whose general appearance and manner gave no indication of their mental peculiarities; and i questioned the professor, in regard to each boy, after a method suited to the case. _boy no. _ was a youth of moderate abilities, and was, in all things, save one, just like other boys. but, in one matter, he had a peculiarity about which there could be no mistake. that was in the matter of music. so, after questioning the professor about various indifferent points, moral and intellectual, such as reverence, combativeness, secretiveness, language, ideality, etc., i asked incidentally something also about tune and music. the answer was such as might be safely given in regard to ninety-nine out of every hundred persons--some vague, indefinite epithet that would apply to almost any one. but, seeing a little sparkle in the eyes before him, the gentleman manipulated the cranium again, and then expressed himself somewhat more strongly. as his expressions increased in strength, the excitement of the audience increased, until he was quite lost in hyperbole, as they were in uproar. he even went into particulars. "now," said he, "though i never saw this boy before, yet i venture to say that his ear for music is so quick that he can pick up almost any tune by once hearing it played or whistled in the street. [a general rustle through the school, boys winking and giving knowing looks one to another.] i dare say he could now sing or whistle a hundred tunes from memory. [more knowing looks.] possibly he may never make a very accurate performer, on account of the very ease with which he picks up a tune. he learns a tune so easily by the ear, that he will not submit to the drudgery of studying it scientifically." "you think, then, professor, that the boy has decided indications of musical talent?" "undoubtedly. he has musical talents of a very high order [suppressed shouts] amounting almost to genius!" the fact was, poor charlie was the butt of the whole school, on account of his utter inability to learn the first elements of either the art or the science of music. he could neither sing, whistle, nor play. he could hardly tell "old hundred" from "yankee doodle." although he had been taking music-lessons for two years, he could not rise and fall through the eight notes, to save his neck. his attempts to do so were a sort of indiscriminate goo, goo, goo, like that of an infant; and the excitement among the boys, which the professor had mistaken for applause and admiration, grew out of their astonishment. they were simply laughing at him. _boy no. _ was a youth over fourteen years old, regularly and symmetrically formed in face, features, and person. there was nothing in his make or bearing to indicate any marked peculiarity. yet he had a peculiarity as marked as that of the preceding. he was singularly deficient in the capacity for mathematical studies. he was studying english grammar, geography, and latin, and got along in these branches about as well as the majority of his class. but when it came to the science of numbers, he seemed to stick fast. neither i nor any of my teachers had been able to get him beyond long division. it was as clear a case as i have ever known of natural deficiency in that department of the mental constitution. yet this boy was declared by the manipulator to have a decided talent for mathematics. _boy no. _ was my crack mathematician. he was really in mathematics what our manipulator had made out no. to be in music. his quickness in the perception of mathematical truth was wonderful. besides this natural readiness in everything pertaining to the science of quantity and the relations of numbers, he had received a good mathematical training, and he was in this department far in advance of his years. whenever we had a public exhibition, george was our show-card. the rapidity with which he would fill the blackboard, in solving difficult problems in quadratics, was almost bewildering. it was not every teacher even that could follow him in his quick but exact evolutions of complex algebraical formulæ. in greek and latin he hardly attained to mediocrity, being always behind his class, while in mathematics he was superior, not only to every boy in school, but to any boy of the same age that i have ever had in any school. but this boy received from the professor only a second or third-rate rank for mathematical indications, while highly praised for linguistics, in which he was decidedly inferior. the fact was, i saw that the gentleman was trying to read _me_, as well as the more youthful part of his audience; and so, in questioning him about this boy, i was malicious enough to be very minute and specific in my inquiries about any indications of a talent for language, while the questions about mathematics were propounded just like those about half a dozen other points; that is, with no special stress or emphasis, but just enough to draw from the professor a clear and distinct expression of opinion. _boy no. _ was perhaps the most critical case of all, yet the one most difficult to describe. he was good, and about equally good, in all his studies. he stood head in almost every class. he was so uniformly good that his character became monotonous, and would have been insipid, but for the manly vigor that marked all his performances. his moral were like his mental traits. he was indeed our model boy. in two years he had not had one demerit mark. he was on all sides rounded and complete--_totus teres atque rotundus_. the uniformity of his goodness was sometimes a source of anxiety to me. there was danger of his growing up with a self-satisfied, pharisaical spirit. thus far, however, i have not named the feature which i regarded as the critical one, and which had led me to select him as one of the subjects for examination. model boys are to be found in all schools. but this boy had a power of reticence which was to me a continual study, and it was this feature in his character that i wanted to bring out in the examination. he was not a sneak. there was nothing sly about him. his conduct was open and aboveboard. what he did was patent to all. but what he thought, or how he felt, no one knew. not grant himself could more perfectly keep his own counsel. if a new rule was promulgated, joseph obeyed it to the letter. but whether it was agreeable or disagreeable to him, no teacher could ever find out. nor was his obedience of that tame, passive sort which comes from indifference and lack of spirit. we all knew him to be resolute, and to be possessed of strong passions. but his power of self-restraint was equal to his power of reticence. he had, indeed, in a very marked degree, qualities which you look for only in those who have had a long schooling in the stern realities of life, and which you find rarely even then. he was as self-poised as a man of fifty, with not a particle of that easy impulsiveness so nearly universal at his age. none of the gentleman's performances surprised me so much as the character which he assigned to this boy, and all the more because something of the boy's self-continence and reserve was written upon his face and manner. he was represented by the professor, in general terms, as having a free and easy, rollicking sort of disposition--not being really worse than his companions, though probably having the reputation of being so. 'if he got into more scrapes than the others [joseph was never in a scrape in his life], it was more owing to his natural impulsiveness than to anything inherently bad in him. and then, when he did get into a scrape, he had no faculty for concealing it. his organ of secretiveness was unusually small. the boys would hardly admit him to a partnership in their plans of mischief, so sure was he inadvertently to let the cat out of the bag,' etc., etc. _boy no. _ was the weakest boy, mentally, that we had in school. he was barely able to take care of himself. some of his mistakes and blunders were so ridiculous, that they were handed down among the traditionary jokes of the school, and i am afraid even at this day to repeat them, lest they may be recognized. if the manipulator had had the cranium of daniel webster under his fingers, he could not have drawn a mental character more marked by every trait that belongs to intellectual greatness of the highest order. finding that he was making a decided impression upon his young hearers, the professor continued to pile up qualities and powers, until the scene became almost too much for the most practised gravity. the examinations occupied an hour, and i made copious notes of the whole, writing down, as nearly as i could, the exact expressions used by the operator. the report which i have now given of it is as nearly literal as it is safe to make it. when the professor was through, and was about to leave, he asked me privately to tell him how far he had succeeded in his experiments. not wishing to say anything disagreeable, i evaded the question to the best of my ability, answering with some vague generalities, but indicating sufficiently that it was not agreeable to be more explicit. he pressed me, however, to tell him candidly and explicitly whether he had succeeded, and how far. i then told him frankly that he had failed point-blank in every case. "ah," said he, "you are skeptical." "no, sir," said i, "skepticism implies doubt, and i have no longer any doubts on the subject. _my skepticism is entirely removed!_" xxiv. normal schools. the term normal school is an unfortunate misnomer, and its general adoption has led to much confusion of ideas. the word "normal," from the latin _norma_, a rule or pattern to work by, does not differ essentially from "model." a normal school, according to the meaning of the word, would be a pattern school, an institution which could be held up for imitation, to be copied by other schools of the same grade. but this meaning of the word is not what we mean by the thing. when we mean a school to be copied or imitated, we call it a model school. here the name and the thing agree. the name explains the thing. it is very different when we speak of a normal school. to the uninitiated, the term either conveys no meaning at all; or, if your hearer is a man of letters, it conveys to him an idea which you have at once to explain away. you have to tell him, in effect, that a normal school is not a normal school, and then that it is something else, which the word does not in the least describe. what then do we mean by a normal school? what is the thing which we have called by this unfortunate name? a normal school is a seminary for the professional education of teachers. it is an institution in which those who wish to become teachers learn how to do their work; in which they learn, not reading, but how to teach reading; not penmanship, but how to teach penmanship; not grammar, but how to teach grammar; not geography, but how to teach geography; not arithmetic, but how to teach arithmetic. the idea which lies at the basis of such an institute, is that knowing a thing, and knowing how to teach that thing to others, are distinguishable and very different facts. the knowledge of the subjects to be taught, may be gained at any school. in order to give to the teachers' seminary its full power and efficiency, it were greatly to be desired that the subjects themselves, as mere matters of knowledge, should be first learned elsewhere, before entering the teachers' school. this latter would then have to do only with its own special function, that of showing its matriculants how to use these materials in the process of teaching. unfortunately, we have not yet made such progress in popular education as to be able to separate these two functions to the extent that is desirable. many of those who attend a teachers' seminary, come to it lamentably ignorant of the common branches of knowledge. they have consequently first to study these branches in the normal school, as they would study them in any other school. that is, they have first to learn the facts as matters of knowledge, and then to study the art and science of teaching these facts to others. instead of coming with their brick and mortar ready prepared, that they may be instructed in the use of the trowel and the plumb-line, they have to make their brick and mix their mortar after they enter the institution. this is undoubtedly a drawback and a misfortune. but it cannot be helped at present. all we can do is to define clearly the true idea of the teachers' school, and then to work towards it as fast and as far as we can. a normal school is essentially unlike any other school. it has been compared indeed to those professional schools which are for the study of law, divinity, medicine, mining, engineering, and so forth. the normal school, it is true, is like these schools in one respect. it is established with reference to the wants of a particular profession. it is a professional school. but those schools have for their main object the communication of some particular branch of science. they teach law, divinity, medicine, mining, or engineering. they aim to make lawyers, divines, physicians, miners, engineers, not teachers of these branches. the professor in the law school aims, not to make professors of law, but lawyers. the medical professor aims, not to make medical lecturers, but practitioners. to render these institutions analogous to the teachers' seminary, their pupils should first study law, medicine, engineering, and so forth, and then sit at the feet of their gamaliels to be initiated into the secrets of the professorial chair, that they may in turn become professors of those branches to classes of their own. nor would such a plan, if it were possible, be altogether without its value. it surely needs no demonstration to prove, that in the highest departments, no less than in the lowest, something more than knowledge is needed in order to teach. an understanding of how to communicate one's knowledge, and practical skill in doing it, are as necessary in teaching theology, metaphysics, languages, infinitesimal analysis, or chemistry, as they are in teaching the alphabet. if there are bunglers, who know not how to go to work to teach a child its letters, or to open its young mind and heart to the reception of truth, whose school-rooms are places where the young mind and heart are in a state, either of perpetual torpor, or of perpetual nightmare, have these bunglers no analogues in the men of ponderous erudition that sometimes fill the professor's chair? have we no examples, in our highest seminaries of learning, of men very eminent in scientific attainments, who have not in themselves the first elements of a teacher? who impart to their students no quickening impulse? whose vast and towering knowledge may make them perhaps a grand feature in their college, attracting to it all eyes, but whose intellectual treasures, for all the practical wants of the students, are of no more use, than are the swathed and buried mummies in the pyramid of cheops! a teachers' seminary, if it were complete, would include in its curriculum of study the entire cycle of human knowledge, so far as it is taught by schools. our teachers of mathematics and of logic, of law and of medicine, need indeed a knowledge of the branches which they are to teach, and for this knowledge they do not need a teachers' seminary. but they need something more than this knowledge. besides being men of erudition, they need to be teachers, no less than the humbler members of the profession, who have only to teach the alphabet and the multiplication table; and there is in all teaching, high or low, something that is common to them all--an art and a skill which is different from the mere knowledge of the subjects; which is not necessarily learned in learning the subjects; which requires special, superadded gifts, and distinct study and training. there is, according to my observation, as great a lack of this special skill in the higher seminaries of learning, as in the lower seminaries. were it possible to have a normal school, not which should undertake to teach the entire encyclopædia of the sciences, but which, limiting itself to its one main function of developing the art and mystery of communicating knowledge, should turn out college professors, and even divinity, law, and medical professors,--men who were really skilful teachers,--it would work a change in those venerable institutions as marked and decisive as that which it is now effecting in the common schools. of course, no such scheme is possible; certainly, none such is contemplated. but i am very sure i shall not be considered calumnious, when i express the conviction, that there are learned and eminent occupants of professors' chairs, who might find great benefit in an occasional visit to a good normal school, or even to the class-room of a teacher trained in a normal school. i certainly have seen, in the very lowest department of the common school, a style of teaching, which, for a wise and intelligent comprehension of its object, and for its quickening power upon the intellect and conscience, would compare favorably with the very best teaching i have ever seen in a college or university. i come back, then, to the point from which i set out, namely, that a normal school, or teachers' seminary, differs essentially from every other kind of school. it aims to give the knowledge and skill that are needed alike in all schools. to make the point a little plainer, let me restate, with what clearness i can, some of the elementary truths and facts which lie at the foundation of the whole subject. though to many of my readers it may be going over a beaten track, it may not be so to all; and we all do well, even in regard to known and admitted truths, to bring them occasionally afresh to the mind. as it has been already said, a man may know a thing perfectly, and yet not be able to teach it. of course, a man cannot teach what he does not know. he must first have the knowledge. but the mere possession of knowledge does not make one a teacher, any more than the possession of powder and shot makes him a marksman, or the possession of a rod and line makes him an angler. the most learned men are often unfortunately the very men who have least capacity for communicating what they know. nor is this incapacity confined to those versed in book knowledge. it is common to every class of men, and to every kind of knowledge. let me give an example. the fact about to be stated, was communicated to me by a gentleman of eminent commercial standing in philadelphia, at that time the president of one of its leading banks. the fact occurred in his own personal experience. he was, at the time of its occurrence, largely engaged in the cloth trade. his faculties of mind and body, and particularly his sense of touch, had been so trained in this business, that in going rapidly over an invoice of cloth, as his eye and hand passed in quick succession from piece to piece, in the most miscellaneous assortment, he could tell instantly the value of each, with a degree of precision, and a certainty of knowledge, hardly credible. a single glance of the eye, a single touch, transient as thought, gave the result. his own knowledge of the subject, in short, was perfect, and it was rapidly winning him a fortune. yet when undertaking to explain to a younger and less experienced member of the craft, whom he wished to befriend, by what process he arrived at his judgment, in other words, to teach what he knew, he found himself utterly at a loss. his thoughts had never run in that direction. "oh!" said he, "you have only--to look at the cloth, and--and--to run your fingers over it,--thus. you will perceive at once the difference between one piece and another." it seems never to have occurred to him that another man's sensations and perceptions might in the same circumstances be quite different from his, and that in order to communicate his knowledge to one uninitiated, he must pause to analyze it; he must separate, classify, and name those several qualities of the cloth of which his senses took cognizance; he must then ascertain how far his interrogator perceived by his senses the same qualities which he himself did, and thus gradually get on common ground with him. let the receiving-teller of a bank be called upon to explain how it is that he knows at a glance a counterfeit bill from a genuine one, and in nine cases out of ten he will succeed no better than the cloth merchant did. knowing and communicating what we know, doing and explaining what we do, are distinct, separable, and usually very different processes. similar illustrations might be drawn from artists, and from men of original genius in almost every profession, who can seldom give any intelligible account of how they achieve their results. the mental habits best suited for achievement are rarely those best suited for teaching. marlborough, so celebrated for his military combinations, could never give any intelligible account of his plans. he had arrived at his conclusions with unerring certainty, but he was so little accustomed to observing his own mental processes, that he utterly failed in attempting to make them plain to others. he saw the points himself with perfect clearness, but he had no power to make others see them. to all objections to his plans, he could only say, "silly, silly, that's silly." it was much the same with cromwell. it is so with most men who are distinguished for action and achievement. patrick henry would doubtless have made but a third-rate teacher of elocution, and old homer but an indifferent lecturer on the art of poetry. to acquire knowledge ourselves, then, and to put others in possession of what we have acquired, are not only distinct intellectual processes, but they are quite unlike. in the former case, the faculties merely go out towards the objects to be known, as in the case of the cloth merchant passing his eye and finger over the bales of cloth. but in the case of one attempting to teach, several additional processes are needed, besides that of collecting knowledge. he must turn his thoughts inward, so as to arrange and classify properly the contents of his intellectual storehouse. he must then examine his own mind, his intellectual machinery, so as to understand exactly how the knowledge came in upon himself. he must lastly study the minds of his pupils, so as to know through what channels the knowledge may best reach them. the teacher may not always be aware that he does all these things, that is, he may not always have a theory of his own art. but the art itself he must have. he must first get the knowledge of the things to be taught; he must secondly study his knowledge; he must thirdly study himself; he must lastly study his pupil. he is a teacher at all only so far as he does at least these four things. in a normal school, as before said, the knowledge of the subject is presupposed. the object of the normal school is, not so much to make arithmeticians and grammarians, for instance, as to make teachers of arithmetic and grammar. this teaching faculty is a thing by itself, and quite apart from the subject matter to be taught. it underlies every branch of knowledge, and every trade and profession. the theologian, the mathematician, the linguist, the learned professor, no less than the teacher of the primary school, or of the sabbath-school, all need this supplementary knowledge and skill, in which consists the very essence of teaching. this knowledge of how to teach is not acquired by merely studying the subject to be taught. it is a study by itself. a man may read familiarly the _mechanique celeste_, and yet not know how to teach the multiplication table. he may read arabic or sanskrit, and not know how to teach a child the alphabet of his mother tongue. the sabbath-school teacher may dip deep into biblical lore, he may ransack the commentaries, and may become, as many sabbath-school teachers are, truly learned in bible knowledge, and yet be utterly incompetent to teach a class of children. he can no more hit the wandering attention, or make a lodgment of his knowledge in the minds of his youthful auditory, than the mere unskilled possessor of a fowling-piece can hit a bird upon the wing. the art of teaching is the one indispensable qualification of the teacher. without this, whatever else he may be, he is no teacher. how may this art be acquired? in the first place, many persons pick it up, just as they pick up a great many other arts and trades,--in a hap-hazard sort of way. they have some natural aptitude for it, and they grope their way along, by guess and by instinct, and through many failures, until they become good teachers, they hardly know how. to rescue the art from this condition of uncertainty and chance, is the object of the normal school. in such a school, the main object of the pupil is to learn how to make others know what he himself knows. the whole current of his thoughts and studies is turned into this channel. studying how to teach, with an experimental class to practise on, forms the constant topic of his meditations. it is surprising how rapidly, under such conditions, the faculty of teaching is developed; how fertile the mind becomes in devising practical expedients, when once the attention is roused and fixed upon the precise object to be attained, and the idea of what teaching really is, fairly has possession of the mind. for this purpose every well-ordered normal school has, in connection with it, as a part of its organization, a model school, to serve the double purpose of a school of observation and practice. thus, after these pupil-teachers are once familiar with the branches to be taught, and after they have become acquainted with the theory of teaching, as a science, it is surprising how soon, with even a little of this practice-teaching, they acquire the art. if the faculty of teaching is in them at all, a very few experimental lessons, under the eye of an experienced teacher, will develop it. the fact of possessing within one's self this gift, or power of teaching, sometimes breaks upon the possessor himself with all the force of a surprising and most delightful discovery. the good teacher does not indeed stop here. he goes on to improve in his art, as long as he lives. but his greatest single achievement is when he takes the first step,--when he first learns to teach at all. the pupil of a normal school gains there a start and an impulse, which carry him forward the rest of his life. a very little judicious experimental training redeems hundreds of candidates from utter and hopeless incompetency, and converts for them an awkward and painful drudgery into keen, hopeful and productive labor. xxv. practice-teaching. one feature of a normal school which distinguishes it especially from other schools, is the opportunity given to its matriculants for practising their art under the guidance and criticism of an experienced teacher. this practice-teaching is done in a model school, maintained for this purpose in connection with the main school. such is the theory. but serious difficulties are encountered in carrying the plan into practical effect, and these difficulties are so great as in some instances to have led to the entire abandonment of the plan, while very rarely have the conductors of normal schools been able to realize results in this matter commensurate with their wishes or with their views of what was desirable and right. some of the difficulties are the following: parents who send their children to the model school object to have their children taught to any considerable extent by mere pupil-teachers. the teachers of the model school, having little or no acquaintance with the normal pupils sent to teach under their supervision, do not feel that entire freedom in criticising the performance which is essential to its success. the irregularities produced by these practice-teachings have a tendency to impair the discipline of the classes in the model school. for these and other reasons which i need not dwell upon, i at least have always been obliged to be somewhat chary in regard to the amount of practice-teaching that was done in the institution under my care, and have never felt quite satisfied as to the result. at the beginning of the year , i determined to try the plan of having a considerable portion of the practice-teaching done in the normal school itself, the model school still holding its place in the system as furnishing an unrivalled opportunity for observation, and to some extent of practice also. the effect of thus extending the opportunity for practice by including the normal school in its operations has been most happy. the pupils have attained a degree of freedom in the exercise which is working the most marked and decisive results. they enter into it with more zest than into any other exercise of the class, and derive from it in some instances as much benefit as from all their other exercises put together. some detailed account of the method may perhaps be of interest to other laborers in the same field. the method is substantially the same as that followed in the girls high and normal school of philadelphia, from which indeed i borrowed the idea. once a week i make up a programme containing the names of those who are to teach during the following week, and the classes and lessons which they are severally to teach. the practice-pupils are thus enabled to prepare themselves fully for the exercise. it is an indispensable condition in all these exercises that the lesson be given without the use of the book. when a pupil enters a room to teach one of these assigned lessons, he is to bring with him only his crayon and pointer, and is expected to assume entire charge of the class, maintaining order, hearing the pupils recite, correcting their mistakes, illustrating the subject, if necessary, by diagrams or experiments, giving supplementary information drawn from other sources than the text-book, and acting in all respects as if he were the regular teacher. the regular teacher meanwhile sits by, observing in silence, and at the close of the day writes out a full and detailed criticism upon the performance in a book kept for this purpose, and gives the pupil an average for it, the maximum being . these criticisms, together with the teaching averages, are read next day by the principal to the pupil in the presence of the class to which he belongs, with additional comments in regard to any principles of teaching that may be involved in the criticisms. an essential element of success in this scheme, is that the teachers should be thoroughly faithful in the work of criticism, and point out the errors and shortcomings of the young practitioners, not with harshness, but with unsparing truthfulness and wise discrimination. practice-teaching under such conditions cannot fail to have a powerful effect. the pupils are stimulated by it to put forth the very best efforts of which they are capable, and the talent which they often develop is a surprise equally to themselves and their teachers. i cannot better give an idea of this practice-teaching, and especially of the criticism which is its vitalizing principle, than by quoting a few of the actual criticisms made during the last year. i feel sure they will interest teachers and perhaps the public. in making these extracts, i suppress, of course, the names of the parties. notes on practice-teaching. miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in elocution. she was animated and energetic in giving the vocal exercises, but she pitched her voice too high. the same shrill tone characterized the concert reading. many of the criticisms given by pupils were not loud enough to be heard by the whole class. one of the ladies, in giving a sketch of shakspeare, said "his principal works _was_ 'much ado about nothing,' 'merchant of venice,' etc.;" but the error passed unnoticed by pupils and teacher. miss ---- herself, said "hamlet thought it wasn't _him_." she marked the pupils too high, the worst readers in the class receiving and . teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in history. she was herself well prepared with the lesson, but she allowed the pupils too long a time to think and _guess_. a chronology lesson is apt to be dry and uninteresting; and unless the teacher calls upon the pupils in _rapid_ succession, thus keeping them wide awake, the interest will flag, and even good pupils will be inattentive. one of the pupils, after gaping two or three times, indulged in short naps during the recitation; the teacher evidently did not see her. miss ---- marked the pupils judiciously. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in arithmetic. she assisted the pupils too much. she did not require them to be accurate enough in answering questions; otherwise she taught well, the subject being rather a difficult one. miss ---- marked the pupils judiciously. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in grammar. she began the recitation well, spoke in a loud and decided tone, and was well prepared with the lesson. she failed to keep her class in order; she allowed pupils to speak without being called upon, and all to criticise and ask questions at the same instant--thus she became confused and sought refuge behind her book. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in the constitution of the united states. she was too quiet in conducting the recitation. the entire period was spent in repeating the mere words of the book; but once or twice the lady asked for the explanation of clauses, and then the answers given were neither full nor satisfactory, yet the lady ventured no comment of her own. many practical questions might have been given by the teacher respecting the executive departments, ambassadors, consuls, treaties, and so forth. the lesson contained many subjects of interest sufficient to occupy more than the allotted time. teachers should call more frequently for definitions, and always take it for granted that their pupils are ignorant of the meaning of even the simplest words. i venture to assert that more than one third of the class left the room without knowing the difference between a _reprieve_ and a _pardon_. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in arithmetic. she was well prepared with the lesson, seemed to understand the subject fully, and readily answered questions proposed by pupils; but she allowed too many pupils to speak at once, and did not pay enough attention to _signs_. one of the pupils began a sentence with a small letter, and miss ---- took no notice of it. miss ---- marked judiciously. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in the constitution. she failed entirely in teaching. she became embarrassed, and soon lost the respect and confidence of the class. pupils assumed all sorts of positions; and one picked up a ruler and began fanning himself, but was not rebuked by the teacher. the lady, not familiar with the names of the scholars, made several mistakes, (perfectly excusable); but, there being no sympathy between the teacher and the class, the pupils laughed immoderately, and seemed to enjoy the lady's embarrassment. the words of the book were repeated over and over again, without a word of explanation or comment, until the teacher, tired of the monotony, announced that the lesson was finished, and called upon me to fill up the remainder of the time. the lesson was one that needed thorough preparation on the part of the teacher, but miss ---- had merely studied the _words_ and not the _subject_; when asked a very simple question by one of the pupils, she was completely nonplussed. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in map drawing. she became somewhat confused in her work, and so did not distinctly enough give the points of criticism. i think she was not familiar enough with the map drawn to notice, with sufficient readiness, the great points of error in the work. several of the pupils were allowed, in one or two cases, to speak at the same time. she marked well, using a good scale of markings. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in arithmetic. she was either very careless or had not prepared the proper lesson, as she gave pupils problems to solve that were not in the lesson; in consequence of which some good pupils failed, as they had not prepared an advance lesson. she was too quiet, and spoke in so low a tone that many of the pupils did not hear her. the pupils were more animated than the teacher. miss ---- marked some pupils too high, others too low, and in one instance did not mark at all. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in history. she was thoroughly prepared with the lesson, and did not confine herself to the mere words of the text-book. she asked many good general questions connected with the subject, thus compelling pupils to think; and whenever the class failed to give the desired information, the lady very promptly gave it herself; she thus won the confidence of her pupils. miss ---- lacked animation and did not speak loud enough; otherwise she did well. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in grammar. she has improved since teaching for me before, but she still lacks energy and decision. she gave the pupil who was reciting all her attention, thus allowing an opportunity to some (who took advantage of it) to assume lounging positions, in which to await lazily for their turn to recite. some remained wide awake, and embarrassed miss ----, by speaking at any time, even interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, to ask questions. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in grammar. she taught well. she spoke in that decided tone which conveys a conviction of truth to pupils, and by so doing gained their confidence. she used the blackboards to advantage, and thoroughly inspected and criticised all writings that she had required to be put upon the boards. the facts she taught were correct, except one, which was, that "is ashamed" was a verb in the passive voice; in this she was corrected by a number of the class. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in elocution. she failed in teaching. the pupils read badly, and many errors were made, but there were no criticisms. the lady spoke in a very low tone, and seemed to be afraid of the class. she did not read a single line for the pupils. reading cannot be taught properly by arbitrary rules, the voice of the living teacher is indispensable. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in elocution. she cannot become a successful teacher until she studies the pronunciation of words. not only did she permit mistakes made by the pupils to pass unnoticed, but she mis-pronounced many words herself, hos-_pit_-a-ble, for _hos_-pi-ta-ble, _in_-tense for in-_tense_, etc.; the errors consisted chiefly in changing the accented syllable. in the word _machination_, however, though the accent was correctly marked, she taught the class to call it "mash-in-a-tion." there can be no possible excuse for such carelessness, or rather ignorance, since the lady had three days for the preparation of the lesson. the dictionary should be kept in constant use by pupils and teacher. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in the constitution. she did well. the lesson was a long one, and somewhat difficult, but the lady evinced thorough preparation. she ought to have disturbed the repose of the drones in the class, by calling upon them more frequently. explanations given by the teacher should be repeated by the pupils: first, to ascertain whether or not they have been properly understood, and secondly, to make a deeper impression upon the minds of the scholars. indeed, the whole business of teaching might be summed up in two words, namely, _simplify_ and _repeat_. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in map drawing. she was quite well prepared for the lesson, but did not always speak quite distinctly enough; she required all those pupils, who had criticisms to make, to stand, and then designated one to give them--a very good plan. miss ---- must be more careful in regard to the grammatical construction of her own sentences. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in mental arithmetic. she became somewhat confused, and so made several mistakes in her work. she attempted to solve several examples, but each time made some error, either of statement or solution. she was not careful enough in her markings, omitting to mark one of the pupils for absence, and two for recitation. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in map-drawing. she should have kept one of the divisions at the board drawing while the other were reciting. it was the first day of map description, she should therefore have given them an example of the work desired; instead of this she scolded them for not knowing her method. teachers should be careful never to ask for anything but what the pupil would reasonably be expected to know. if you insist that they shall give anything not found in the lesson, or not before given by the teacher, they will become angry and careless, as shown in the class to-day. she did not criticise the map drawn. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in constitution. she did well. she used the blackboards to advantage, and very carefully examined and criticised the work placed there by the pupils. she should speak in a louder and more decided tone. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in elocution. she gave a very short vocal exercise and omitted the concert reading. during the recitation she read _remarkably_ well; her voice was clear and full, her emphasis and inflections were correct, and her whole manner free from embarrassment. the entrance of three or four visitors did not in the least disconcert her; for her calmness and dignity, she deserves much commendation. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in geography. she taught well. she did not call upon enough members of the class for recitation. a subject that can be divided into portions small enough to enable the teacher to call upon each member of the class at each recitation, should be so divided. she made it still worse by calling upon several members to recite twice. with a little more energy on her part she could have had more work performed in the forty minutes. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in arithmetic. she taught very well. the subject, repetends, was a difficult one, which required careful preparation on the part of the teacher and close attention during the recitation. miss ----, conscious of this, made herself perfectly familiar with the lesson before appearing in class, and when pupils failed to explain examples from a want of knowledge, she was ready and able to give the necessary information. she marked judiciously. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in ancient history. she was sprightly and animated. she spoke in a clear, decided tone; but she pursued no regular plan in conducting the recitation. events in egyptian and assyrian history were indiscriminately mixed, the pupils became confused, and the lady herself was somewhat bewildered. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in grammar. she did not speak loud enough for the class to understand her. there was much disorder in the class, but no notice was taken of it by the teacher. some carried on a conversation among themselves, others asked questions without permission, often at the most inappropriate times. many errors passed unnoticed, and the lady gave corrections herself which she should have required of the pupils. several times, in attempting to correct, she made the errors worse; for instance she parsed verbs that were transitive and in the passive voice as being intransitive and active. she must endeavor to gain more confidence in herself. teaching average . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in geometry. she taught the class decidedly well. she deserves all the more credit, as it was a difficult lesson of her own class. she allowed but one error of work--that i noticed--to pass uncorrected. her method of calling upon the class for criticisms was very good. she should strive to speak a little more distinctly. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in physiology. she evinced perfect familiarity with the subject of the lesson. she did not confine herself to the text-book, but asked many good, general questions. one of the pupils did not understand a portion of the lesson which was to be explained by a diagram. miss ---- endeavored to make the matter clear by an explanation, which was very good, still the pupil did not see it clearly. i think the teacher would have succeeded in clearing the difficulty if she had used the _pointer_ instead of designating certain points by letters. she spoke a little too low. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in geography. she deserves great credit for the distinctness with which she speaks, for her care in the preparation of the lesson for the day, and for the promptness with which she stops all irregularities in the class. her marks for the day were a little too high; she did not make distinction enough between the good and the poor scholars. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in elocution. she succeeded admirably. the vocal exercises and concert reading were well given. the lady threw herself entirely into the work, and this was the real secret of her success. her grade of marking was too high; otherwise, she did very well. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in english literature. she did not spend enough time upon the lesson for the day, and consumed too much of the period in reviewing old lessons. she was not careful in examining the blackboards. _lbs._ was permitted to stand as the abbreviation for pounds sterling, and _whimsicalities_ was spelled with two l's. the lady made no deduction for errors; all the pupils with but one exception received . she deserves commendation for speaking in a loud, clear tone. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in constitution. she did nothing more than hear the recitations. she did not venture to give any explanations or to ask them of the class, but spent the whole period in repeating again and again the words of the text-book. it is probable that no pupil knew anything more of the subject on going from the room than when she entered. teachers should possess and impart to their pupils some information independent of the book. teaching average, . miss ---- taught the a class geometry. she did not question enough or criticise enough, but almost always called upon the class for criticisms. she added no remarks or criticisms herself; thus many important omissions and errors were unnoticed. she succeeded well in calling upon almost every member of the class. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in physiology. she was not sufficiently animated and self-possessed. the substance of the lesson was recited before the expiration of the period, which left the lady at a loss to know what she should do with the remainder of the time. it might have been profitably employed asking questions of importance connected with the lesson; but instead of doing so, miss ---- turned to me for assistance. she was asked her opinion of a disputed point, which, although of slight importance, merited some attention; but she passed it by, notwithstanding her attention was called to it several times. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in elocution. she displayed the tact and skill of an experienced teacher. she assumed full authority over the pupils (though they were her classmates), and her whole manner was such that a visitor entering the room would have supposed she was the permanent teacher. one secret of her success was that she had given the reading lesson much home practice and preparation. teaching average, . miss ---- taught the a class in literature. she taught well. though rather quiet, she succeeded in awakening the interest of her pupils, and the entire recitation was very animated. the class is a good one, and the pupils deserve as much commendation as the teacher. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in geography. she came before the class well prepared for her duties. she did not use the book, though it was written in the catechetical style--the one most difficult to teach without some such reference. she by her questions brought out a number of points not given in the text-book. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in rhetoric. she showed a thorough preparation of the lesson and taught well. she should have worked a little faster. pupils were allowed too much time to think. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in history. she taught with much dignity and self-possession. she did not teach simply by having the lesson recited as the author had given it, but asked for the definition of words, and gave information not found in the text-book. but one error was allowed to pass, which was that of calling queen victoria the grand-daughter of william of orange. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in physiology. she conducted the recitation in a very dignified and lady-like manner. the lesson was a difficult one, but the teacher seemed to understand the subject thoroughly. there was a reference to the _retina_ of the eye in the lesson; the pupils not having studied that subject, did not know what the retina was, and called upon the teacher for explanation; she attempted to describe it, but failed to make them understand because she did not thoroughly understand it herself. with this exception, she taught very well. teaching average, . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in elocution. she is a good teacher, and reads well. she maintained her dignity and composure during the entire recitation, though several visitors were present. nothing tends to embarrass a teacher so much as the entrance of strangers; the lady's calmness and self-possession then are worthy of much commendation. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in mental arithmetic. she read the questions distinctly, and had them correctly solved; but for the plan of recitation, she helped the pupils too much. the method was that called "chance assignment;" in this method, as the pupils have time to think of the problems, the work should be purely that of the memory, in regard to the example itself. teaching average . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in literature. she evinced thorough preparation, and displayed considerable tact in conducting the recitation. every pupil was called on and compelled to recite or confess ignorance. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in elocution. she selected a very difficult reading-lesson, and not only read it well herself, but insisted upon the pupils reading it well too. the lady has a good clear voice, but it lacks power; nothing will develop this quality but constant daily practice. teaching average . miss ---- taught the c class in ancient history. she did not succeed. her embarrassment was caused in a great measure by not knowing the names of the pupils. teachers should obtain lists of the names, if they are not familiar with them. the lesson being one in mythology, could have been made very interesting with a slight effort on the part of the teacher. many errors in pronunciation made by both teacher and pupils, were allowed to pass. teaching average . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in elocution. she taught well, but would have succeeded better if she had given the lesson a little more home practice. when delivering a passage requiring considerable force, she heightened the pitch of her voice, and thus gave an unpleasant shrillness, where the pure orotund tone was needed. teaching average . miss ---- gave the b class a lesson in elocution. she is a very sprightly, animated teacher, and reads well. she paid special attention to the correct orthoëpy of words, and insisted upon pupils' making use of their dictionaries whenever a word occurred with which they were not familiar. teaching average . miss ---- gave the d class a lesson in history. she is one of the best teachers in her class. she is sprightly, animated, and critical. the lesson was well taught; a map having been neatly drawn on the board, the teacher required the most important places referred to in the lesson, to be pointed out upon it. teaching average . miss ---- gave the a class a lesson in chemistry. she has improved very much in teaching. she understood the subject which she taught, and had given the lesson careful preparation. she requested one of the pupils to look for the orthoëpy of a word which occurred in the lesson. the lady turned over the leaves of the dictionary in a very careless manner, then took her seat, saying she could not find the word, although she must have been conscious all the while that she was not searching for it in the proper place. miss ----, instead of sending the lady to look for the word again, as she should have done, pronounced it herself. the teacher should require prompt obedience on the part of pupils. teaching average . miss ---- gave the c class a lesson in elocution. she is a very energetic teacher, and manifests a deep interest in her pupils--hence, her success. a visitor would have inferred from her manner, that she was the permanent teacher, not a mere substitute for a passing hour. teaching average, . xxvi. attention as a mental faculty, and as a means of mental culture. the illustrations which first led to a satisfactory elucidation of the subject, were drawn from the eye. there are many facts in the history of vision, which show that we may experience sensations and perceptions and other intellectual operations, and may at the time be conscious of the same, without giving them any attention, or, at least, without giving them such a degree of attention as to have the slightest recollection of them afterwards. when, for instance, we read a printed book, the eye glances so rapidly from sentence to sentence, that we can hardly persuade ourselves that we actually see successively every letter. we certainly have no recollection of having gone through such an innumerable train of conscious acts as the theory necessarily implies. that such, however, is the case, is proved by the fact, that if by accident any letter is omitted, or transposed, or put upside down, the eye at once detects the mistake. the fact is familiar to all. it can be accounted for only on the supposition that, even in the rapid and cursory perusal of a book, the eye actually passes from letter to letter, and gives to each a distinct notice. it not only notices each letter, but the position of each in reference to the other letters in the line, and even those nice diacritical points by which one letter is distinguished from another, as _c_ from _e_, _u_ from _n_, _b_ from _d_, _p_ from _q_. this notice, however, is so slight, the transition is so rapid, that we have no recollection of it afterwards, and we can hardly persuade ourselves that such has been the sober and yet most wonderful fact. take another instance. if, on the occasion of an evening assemblage, by a sudden movement of the gas-pipe, any one should instantly extinguish all the lights in the room and leave the building for a time in total darkness, and if, by an equally sudden movement, he should then restore the light to its previous condition, every one present would notice the change and have a distinct recollection of it afterwards. yet, every time we close our eyes in winking, that is, several times in every minute of our waking hours, we experience precisely this change from full and perfect vision to total darkness. but no one ever notices or remembers the fact of his winking, unless he stops to make it the subject of special attention. sight however is not the only means of illustrating this point. we are drawn to a similar conclusion by observing the workings of the mind itself, in the act of volition. whenever we make any single volition an object of special attention, we are conscious of that volition, and we have a distinct recollection of it afterwards. yet probably not one out of ten thousand, possibly not one out of a million, of our simple volitions, is ever known to us after the moment of its occurrence. in voluntary muscular action, every distinct movement requires a distinct volition. and how innumerable are the movements necessary to the accomplishment of any one of the ordinary purposes of life! we sit down for example to write a letter to a friend. the nimble pen dances from point to point over the darkening page, and when we reach the bottom, we have not the least recollection of having willed any one of those countless muscular movements which have been necessary to what, but for its every-day occurrence, would be accounted the greatest feat of legerdemain ever performed by man! take for example the act of reading aloud. every letter requires for its utterance at least one distinct muscular contraction. some letters require several. now it has been found on trial that we are able to pronounce more than a thousand letters in a minute. that is, during every minute that we are reading aloud, we perform between one and two thousand distinct muscular movements, and by necessity a like number of antecedent acts of the will, to say nothing of those other acts, not less numerous in the case of a speaker, connected with the general movement of the body in earnest gesticulation. yet after the hour's performance, what does the speaker or the reader remember of all these countless volitions? nothing but the one general purpose to please, instruct, or persuade an audience. the conclusion, toward which these illustrations point, is objected to by some writers, on the ground of the incredible rapidity which it attributes to our intellectual operations. is it possible, it is asked, that we can crowd into such a space of time so many acts of the will, and that we are, at the moment when each happens, conscious of its presence? is it not more probable that these rapid muscular actions are resolvable, in some way, into the law of habit? may they not become in some sense mechanical and automatic, so as to require no intervention of the will? take for example, the case of a person learning to play upon a musical instrument. the first step is to move the fingers from key to key with a slow motion, looking at the notes, and exerting an express act of volition at every note. by degrees, however, the motions somehow cling to each other, and to the impressions of the notes, in the way of associations, the acts of volition all the while growing less and less express, until at last they become quite evanescent and imperceptible. an expert will play from notes or from memory, and with a rapidity of motion that is perfectly bewildering, while at the same time he himself is carrying on quite a different train of thoughts in his mind, or even perhaps holding a conversation with another. hence, it is concluded, by the writers referred to, that in these cases there is really no intervention of that idea or state of the mind called will. the authorities for this hypothesis are among the highest that can be named in the history of intellectual science. let us see how far the hypothesis explains the facts of the case. the most rapid performer, it is obvious, can at any time retard his execution, until his movements become so slow that each one may be made, as originally it was made, the subject of special attention, and may be distinctly remembered afterwards. now, according to the hypothesis proposed, we will our actions, and are conscious both of the act, and the antecedent volition, so long as their rapidity is confined to a certain rate; but, as soon as the rapidity exceeds that rate, the operation is taken out of our hands, and is carried on by some unknown power, of which we know no more than we do of the circulation of the blood, or of the systole and diastole of the heart! such a supposition is about as reasonable as it would be to say that a projectile passes through the intermediate space, when it is thrown with such a moderate degree of velocity that we can see it, in its progress; but, when it is thrown with such velocity as to become invisible, it ceases to pass through the intermediate space, and reaches the goal only because projectiles have the habit of doing so! the hypothesis then breaks down, and we are forced back to our original supposition, namely, that those actions which are voluntary originally, never cease to be so; that when, as in the cases supposed, we retain no recollection of particular volitions, it is because of some law of our nature by which we are capable of recollecting only those acts upon which the attention has been fixed with a certain degree of intensity and for some perceptible space of time; that the volition, in other words, is too feeble and too rapid to leave any impression on the memory. to argue that there has been no volition, because we do not recollect it, is as absurd as it would be to say that there has been no muscular act, because in many cases we have as little recollection of the muscular act, as we have of the antecedent volition. besides, there are many other mental acts, as rapid as those which have been adduced,--so rapid that not the least recollection of them remains,--where, yet, this mechanical or automatic hypothesis affords not the least explanation. thus the expert accountant in a bank adds up a long column of figures with the same rapidity and ease with which ordinary persons would read a passage from a familiar author, and he brings out in the end the exact sum, which he can do in no other way than by taking note in passing of the precise character and value of each figure. yet, at the end of such a process, the accountant has no more recollection of those rapidly succeeding acts of the mind, than has the musical performer of those countless volitions put forth in the course of a piece of brilliant musical instrumentation. as to the objection, that the theory attributes an almost inconceivable rapidity to some of our mental operations, it may be answered, in the first place, that there is no reason, surely, why mind should not be capable of as rapid action as its handmaid, matter; and, in the second place, that our ideas of time are relative, quite as much as our ideas of space; and if the microscope has revealed a world of wonders too minute in point of space to be observed by the naked eye, in whose existence we yet believe with undoubting confidence, we may without greater difficulty believe in the existence of mental acts crowded into so narrow a point of time, so rapid and transitory in their occurrence, as to leave no impression upon the memory. the facts which have been adduced, then, teach clearly two things: first, that by far the greatest part of what we do and experience and are necessarily conscious of at the time of their occurrence, immediately fade from the recollection, as shadows pass over a landscape; and secondly, that in order to the recollection of any act or object, it is necessary that the mind be fixed upon it for some perceptible space of time and with some sensible degree of attention. it is this indissoluble connection of the attention with memory, this absolute dependence of the latter upon the former, which gives the subject such far-reaching import in considering the means of intellectual culture. how it is that we are able to exclude all subjects but one from the thoughts, is not very easy of explanation. it is obvious that we cannot do it by direct volition. the very fact of our willing not to attend to a particular object, fixes our attention upon it. that we have, however, some power and agency in fixing our attention on one object and in withdrawing it from another, is a fact within the knowledge and experience of every one, whether we can explain the mode by which it is done or not. we have the power of what the chemists call "elective affinity;" we make our choice of some one of the various objects claiming the attention, and fix it upon that; and it seems to be a law of our nature, that when we thus direct the attention to one object, all others, of themselves, and by some natural necessity, retire from the thoughts. this is as near an approach, probably, as we shall ever make, towards an exact verbal expression of a fact, for an intimate knowledge of which, after all, every man must refer to his own consciousness. this power of singling out and fastening upon some one object to the exclusion of all others,--in other words, this power of attention--exists in almost infinite degrees in different individuals. the degree in which it exists is the measure of a man's intellectual stature. no man can be truly great who does not possess it to a high degree. to command our attention is to command ourselves, to be truly master of our own powers and resources. the subject, then, becomes one of first importance in every kind of either mental or moral improvement. its vital connection with the faculty of memory has been already suggested. perhaps, however, this branch of the subject should be set forth with a little more distinctness. there are many vague, dreamy notions afloat on the subject of memory, standing comparisons and metaphors, intended to illustrate its uses and magnify its importance, but not declaring with any degree of precision what it is. it is called, for instance, the "storehouse of our ideas." the metaphor conveys undoubtedly a certain amount of truth in regard to the subject. at the same time, there are some important particulars, in which the comparison, for it is nothing more, conveys a wrong impression. experience teaches us, for instance, that recollections, unlike other articles of store, are from the time of their deposit undergoing a continual process of decay, and if they do not fade entirely from the mind, it is because we occasionally bring them anew under the review of the mind, and thus restore them to their original freshness and vigor. dismissing, therefore, the metaphor, i shall, i presume, express with sufficient accuracy the established doctrine on this subject by the following statements: that of the great multitude of mental operations which we experience, by far the larger part perish at the moment of their birth; that others, to which for any reason we give, at the time of their occurrence, some sufficient degree of attention, afterwards recur to us, or are in some way present to our thoughts; that this recurrence of former ideas to our thoughts is sometimes spontaneous, without any voluntary action on our part, and sometimes the consequence of a direct effort of the will; and lastly, that the capacity which we have of being thus revisited by former thoughts is called memory, while the thoughts themselves, which thus return, are called memories, or more commonly recollections. how it is that by an act of volition we can summon again into the mind an idea which has formerly been present, and which is now absent, we have the same difficulty in explaining which we had in explaining how, by an act of volition, we can banish a thought which is now present, or by the power of attention can detain some one thought to the exclusion of all others. to think what particular thing it is that we wish to remember, is in fact to have remembered it already. it is an obstruse and difficult inquiry, into which it is not necessary now to enter. a more important inquiry, and one connected directly with our present theme, relates to the different kinds of memory, and their connection severally with the faculty of attention. quickness of memory is that quality which is most easily developed, especially in young persons. it is also its most showy quality, and the temptation to give it an inordinate development is strong. the habit of getting things by rote, is easily acquired by practice. it is astonishing what masses of scripture texts young children will get by heart, when under some special stimulus of reward or display. i have often refused to publish marvellous feats of this kind, not because i thought the accounts incredible, (unfortunately, they were too true,) but because i thought they were a species of mental excess, and they should no more be encouraged than bodily excesses. a little girl in my own sunday-school once actually committed to memory the whole of the westminster assembly's shorter catechism in three days! six months afterwards she hardly knew a word of it. it had been a regular mental debauch. a few more such atrocities would have made her an idiot. college records tell us of what are called "crammed men," that is, men who literally stuff themselves with knowledge in order to pass a particular examination, or to gain a particular honor, and who afterwards forget their knowledge, as fast as they have acquired it. there is a well authenticated instance of a student who actually learned the six books of euclid by heart, though he could not tell the difference between an angle and a triangle. the memory of such men is quickened like that of the parrot. they learn purely by rote. real mental attention, the true digester of knowledge, is never roused. the knowledge which they gorge, is never truly assimilated and made their own. a quality of memory vastly more important than quickness, is tenacity. to hold on to what we get, is the secret of mental, no less than of pecuniary accumulations. the mind, too, like other misers, clings most tenaciously to that which has cost it most labor. come lightly, go lightly, the world over. knowledge which comes into the mind without toil and effort, without protracted and laborious attention, is apt to go as easily as it came. but, by far the most important quality of memory, for the practical purposes of life, is readiness. like quickness and tenacity, it is to be greatly improved, if not acquired by practice. it is in the cultivation of this quality, that the power of a good teacher shines forth most conspicuously. quickness and tenacity may be cultivated by solitary study. but readiness requires for its development a live teacher, and the stir of the school-room and the class. here it is that the art of questioning shows its wonderful resources. repeated and continued interrogatories, judiciously worded, have a sort of talismanic power. they oblige the scholar to bring out his knowledge from its hidden recesses, to turn it over and over, and inside out, and upside down, to look at it and to handle it, so that not only it becomes forever and indestructibly his own, but he can ever afterwards use it at will with the same readiness that he uses his hands or his eyes. this is what a skilful teacher may do for his scholars, by a knowledge and practice of the art of questioning. unfortunately, teachers in general find it much easier passively to hear a lesson, than to muster as much intellectual energy as is necessary to ask a question. it was a remark of bacon's, that, if we wish to commit anything to memory, we will accomplish more in ten readings, if at each perusal we make the attempt to repeat it from memory, referring to the book only when the memory fails, than we would by a hundred readings made in the ordinary way, and without any intervening trials. the explanation of this fact is, that each effort to recollect the passage secures to the subsequent perusal a more intense degree of attention; and it seems to be a law of our nature, not only that there is no memory without attention, which i have labored at some length to establish, but that the degree of memory is in a great measure proportioned to the degree of the attention. you will see at once the bearing of this fact upon that species of intellectual dissipation, called "general reading," in which the mental voluptuary reads merely for momentary excitement, in the gratification of an idle curiosity, and which is as enervating and debilitating to the intellectual faculties, as other kinds of dissipation are to the bodily functions. one book, well read and thoroughly digested, nay, one single train of thought, carefully elaborated and attentively considered, is worth more than any conceivable amount of that indolent, dreamy sort of reading in which many persons indulge. there is in fact no more unsafe criterion of knowledge than the number of books a man has read. a young man once told me he had read the entire list of publications of the american sunday-school union. he was about as wise as the man at the hotel, who began at the top of the bill of fare with the intention of eating straight through to the bottom! depend upon it, this mental gorging is debilitating and debauching alike to the moral and the intellectual constitution. there is too much reading even of good books. no one should ever read a book, without subsequent meditation or conversation about it, and an attempt to make the thoughts his own, by a vigorous process of mental assimilation. any continuous intellectual occupation, which does not leave us wiser and stronger, most assuredly will leave us weaker, just as filling the body with food which it does not digest, only makes it feeble and sickly. we are the worse for reading any book, if we are not the better for it. there is an obvious distinction on this subject, of some practical importance, first suggested, so far as i am aware, by the scotch metaphysician, dr. reid, between attention as directed to external objects, and the same faculty directed to what passes within us. when we attend to what is without us, to what we hear, or see, or smell, or taste, or touch, the process is called observation. when, on the other hand, dismissing for the time all notice of the external world, we turn our thoughts inward, and consider only what is passing in the inner chambers of the mind,--when, for instance, we analyze our motives, or notice the workings of passion, or scan the mysterious and subtle agency of the will, the process is called reflection. this latter species of attention is one much more difficult of development than the former. it is developed ordinarily much later in life,--seldom, i believe, developed to any considerable extent before the age of manhood,--developed by some professions and pursuits much more than by others,--and in a very large class of mankind, probably the majority, never developed at all. this species of attention, which is thus directed inwards, subjective attention some would call it,--in other words, the reflective powers,--are, i doubt not, capable of being cultivated much earlier in life than the age which i have indicated as the normal period of their development. i am constrained, however, in opposition to many high authorities in education, to doubt the wisdom of a precocious cultivation of this part of our intellectual system. in all our plans of education, we should closely follow nature, who seems to have reserved the judgment and the reflective powers for the latest, as they certainly are the most perfect, of her endowments. we, who are teachers, have chiefly to do with those whose powers are as yet immature, and whose attention is to be cultivated primarily in its direction to external objects. our business, in other words, is to train our pupils first of all to habits of observation. in doing this, it is of some practical importance to bear in mind the well-known difference, in respect to memory, between the objects of different senses. whether it be attributed to the different degrees of perfection with which the qualities of bodies are perceived, or to some difference in the qualities themselves, or whatever may be the cause, the fact is established beyond a question, that the knowledge which comes to us through the medium of the eye is of all kinds of knowledge the most easily and the most perfectly remembered. we remember, indeed, the temperature of one day as distinguished from that of another; we remember the sound of a voice; we can conceive, in its absence, the odor or the taste of a particular object; but none of these ideas come to us with that definiteness and perfection which mark our recollections of what we have seen. it requires, for instance, but ordinary powers of attention and perception, for a person who has one good look at a house, to recall distinctly to his mind the ideas of its height, shape, color, material, the number of stories, the pitch of the roof, the kind of shutters to the windows, the position of the door, the fashion of panels, the bell-handle, the plate, even the little canary-bird with its cage in the windows above, and the roses, geraniums, and what else may be fairer still, in the window below. these are all objects of sight. in their absence, he can bring to mind and describe them, with almost the same accuracy that he could if they were actually present. now, it is impossible to obtain a like precision and fulness in our conceptions of a quality which we have learned through any other sense. we form in the one case a mental image or picture of the object, which in the other case is impossible. we can by no possibility form a mental or any other image of the song of canary, of the perfume of a rose, or of any other quality, except those which address us through the eye. our conceptions of taste, smell, touch, and even of hearing, in the absence of the objects of sense, have a certain dimness, vagueness, mistiness, uncertainty about them. the conceptions of visible objects, on the contrary, are definite, precise, and most easily recalled. hence the knowledge derived through the sight, is, of all kinds of knowledge, the most accurate, the most easily acquired, and the most lasting. the practical application of these views to the science of teaching, is too obvious to require more than a passing notice. every thing which the young are to make the subject of their attention, for the purpose of remembering it, should be represented as far as possible to the eye. if the object itself, on account of its bulk, or its expensiveness, or for any other reason, cannot be exhibited for inspection, let there be some visible delineation of it by brush or pencil. if the thing to be remembered be something abstract or unreal, having neither form nor substance, perhaps it may have, or the teacher may make for it, some concrete, visible symbol, as has been done with the formulas of logic and the abstractions of arithmetic and algebra. these visible symbols on the slate and the blackboard give to those sciences all the advantages in this respect which were supposed to be peculiar to some of the branches of physical science. a boy who has forgotten every mere verbal rule both of arithmetic and algebra, will remember the formula, x^ + xy + y^ , just as perfectly and on the same principle, as he will remember the face of the man who taught it to him. it is something which he has seen. why has geometry in all ages been found to be of such peculiar value as a means of intellectual training? because of the visible delineation of its doctrines by diagrams addressed to the eye. how much more readily and certainly chemical science can now be acquired, since the adoption of the present mode of symbolizing its doctrines by combinations of letters and figures. arguments, conjectures, theories, respecting qualities addressed alike to every sense, respecting functions indeed not cognizable by any sense, are now presented on the board in visible symbolic formulas, which have the same advantage over the former mode of presenting the subject, that the sight of a chess-board during the progress of a game has over a mere verbal description of the movements. the truth of this doctrine is strikingly illustrated in the present mode of teaching geography, as compared with that once in use, when a child, instead of looking at the map of a country, with its boundaries and other physical characters painted to the eye, had to grope through a trackless wilderness of description. the study will be still more improved, when children shall be universally required to make as well as to look at maps,--when, to the definiteness of knowledge coming through the sight, there shall be added that inerasible impression upon the memory, which comes from fixedness and continuity of attention. it is impossible for a child to draw a map, without looking intently, and with continued attention, upon every part of that which is to be delineated. the two conditions to perfect recollection are combined, and the knowledge, which is the result, is the very last to fade from the memory. every teacher of small children knows how much more certainly they learn to spell by seeing than by hearing. you may repeat to a child five times over the sounds which make up a word, and he will not recollect it with half the certainty that he would on seeing it once. the same principle which leads to this result, and which indicates the propriety, not only of looking at maps but of making them, in order to the more perfect knowledge of geography, will suggest to the thoughtful teacher the expediency of children's not only looking at words, but of writing them, in order to become perfect spellers. mental arithmetic has its fascinations. it has, too, i am ready to admit, solid advantages. its advantages, however, i apprehend are not precisely those which are sometimes attributed to it. there can be no doubt, i think, that it helps to cultivate the reflective powers; that it requires, and by requiring gives, the ability to confine the attention to continued mental processes. but for making expert practical accountants, which is generally quoted as its distinguishing benefit, i confess i am partial to the slate and pencil, and to that venerable parallelogram, the old-fashioned multiplication table, in the shape it came down to us from pythagoras. the reader will not, of course, understand me as wishing to discard mental arithmetic. all that i mean to suggest is the inquiry, whether its advantages are not looked for in the wrong direction, whether they are not sometimes over-estimated, and whether this mode of teaching arithmetic, especially when pursued as a hobby, is not sometimes pushed too far, and made the means of curious display, rather than of solid and lasting benefit. in teaching mental arithmetic, too, for i would certainly teach it to some extent, i would suggest the expediency of teaching children, in performing these mental operations, to think in figures, in other words, to form conceptions of the arithmetical figures and signs, which are visible objects, rather than of quantities and relations, which are mere abstractions. multiplication is a mere metaphysical entity. the sign of multiplication is a simple, visible symbol, addressed to the eye, and capable of being conceived by the mind with unmistakable clearness and precision. a child counting its fingers in the first steps of learning to add and to take away, is a pretty sight, doubtless. but it is painful to see a person grown to man's estate, and in other respects well educated, as i have very often seen, still dependent upon the same infantile contrivance,--still counting fingers when required to add long columns of figures. count the fingers, if necessary, in order to get the child under way. but the sooner the leading-string can be dropped, and the child can be made to picture in his mind the pure figures and signs, their combinations and results, without reference to fingers, or apples, or cakes, or tops, the better for his arithmetic, and the better for his mental cultivation. the subject has a painful interest for the sabbath-school teacher. the teacher of the infant school, indeed, has some opportunity for employing this principle of pictorial representation, in teaching the little ones of his charge. the infant school-room usually has conveniences for maps and picture cards and diagrams, and even blackboards; and most infant school teachers wisely avail themselves of the opportunity afforded. but go into the main school-room--what can the teacher do? twenty, thirty, forty classes huddled together into one room, compact as sheep in a pen, how can the individual teacher, if disposed, use adequate visible illustrations for the instruction of his class? where shall he place his blackboard? where shall he hang up his maps? where shall he suspend his models? where shall he exhibit his specimens? the utmost that can be done in most of our schools, as at present provided for, is to have a few maps on the distant walls of the room which the superintendent may refer to, whenever he chooses, and which all the children may see who can! the time must come, however, when the teaching of religious truth will be considered of as much importance as the teaching of arithmetic or of chemistry, and the sabbath-school will have the same facilities for imparting instruction as the week-day school. but that time has not yet come. in the meanwhile, let the teacher carefully avail himself of whatever subsidiary aids are within his reach. no teacher should ever present himself before his class without a bible atlas and a bible dictionary in his hand. many of those things with which his class ought to be made acquainted, are here not only described, but delineated, with equal accuracy and beauty. thanks to the booksellers and the religious publication societies, the scenes of sacred history, and indeed religious topics generally, have been illustrated in cheap pictorial cards, both large and small, and with admirable fidelity and skill. these form a part of the indispensable furniture of the sunday-school teacher. they are to him as necessary as are experiments, or a cabinet of specimens, to the lecturer on the physical sciences. the sabbath-school teacher should be continually on the look-out for publications of this kind, not only for instructing and furnishing his own mind with definite ideas, but for exhibition to his class. a wise teacher will not only have something to say to his class, but also something to show. the ideas which the child gets from looking at really instructive pictures and maps, never leave him. how much also our intelligent apprehension of the scriptures is increased, by a knowledge of topography, and by associating each event in the sacred narration with the place in which it occurred? it may be proper to say, too, in this connection, that it is with a view to the principle now under consideration, that in preparing books and papers for the young, authors and publishers feel justified in giving so much labor and space to pictorial illustration. when, indeed, such illustrations are merely for display, they deserve the contempt which they often receive. but when these pictorial illustrations have a definite meaning and design, when they teach something, when they connect in the child's mind sound religious truth with distinct and easily remembered visible forms, they are a really valuable aid in the inculcation of doctrine. the power of attention, like all the mental powers, is by nature greater in some than in others. still, there is no power more susceptible of improvement. the importance of its cultivation cannot well be over-stated. it affects not one study only, but all studies; not one mode of study only, but every mode of study, by text-book or by lecture; lessons to be recited by memory, or those by question and answer; not even study only, but conduct and manners, the regulation of the heart and the formation of the character. the precise measure of a child's success, in every thing that pertains to his character and standing as a scholar, will in nine cases out of ten be his power and habit of attention. there are indeed lamentable cases of wilful and intentional disorder. yet every teacher knows that by far the greater portion of the things which interrupt and disturb a school arise from thoughtlessness and inattention. there are also equally undoubted cases of ignorance that is no crime. yet the great majority of those who fail in their studies, fail simply because they do not attend. to attend, however, means something more than merely to be bodily present, more even than to have the ears open and the eyes fixed in the direction of the speaker, when a thing is said, or done. an old lady used to sit in the same aisle with me in church, and unfortunately lived opposite me in the street, who was neither deaf nor blind, and who was never absent from church, and yet she sent over invariably on sunday evenings to know what it was the minister said about that meeting on wednesday night, or that meeting on friday night,--she did not rightly understand! but it is not necessary to go to church, to find those who "having eyes see not, and having ears hear not, neither do they understand," who look without seeing, and hear without comprehending. publish a notice in your school, making some change of hours or lessons, or giving any specific direction. no matter how simple, or how plainly expressed, the notice may be, or how particularly attention may be called beforehand to the announcement about to be made, where is the happy teacher who has been able on such an occasion to make himself understood by all? teachers and preachers and speakers of every name have generally very little idea how much they are misunderstood. let me give some instances. in my own sunday-school, i had neglected one morning to bring with me the teacher's class-books. after opening the school, i rang the bell as a signal for attention. there was a general hush throughout the room. all eyes were turned to the desk. i said: "your class-books unfortunately have been left behind this morning. they have been sent for, however, and they will soon be here. as soon as they come, i will bring them round to the several classes. in the meantime, you may go on with your regular lessons." the bell was then tapped again, and the routine of the school resumed. in about a minute, a girl came up to the desk, with, "sir, teacher says, will you please to send her class-book; it was not brought round, as usual, this morning, before school opened!" here was a class of ten girls, averaging twelve years of age, and not one of them, nor their teacher, had heard or understood the notice which i thought i had made so plain! here is another instance. at the examination for admission to the philadelphia high school, as a means of testing among other things how far this very faculty of hearing and of attention has been cultivated, the candidates are required to copy a passage from dictation. these exercises are always preserved for reference, and in order to show the fairness of the examination. on one occasion, when i was principal of the school, i took the pains to copy out a few of the exercises, in order to show the singular freaks into which an uncultivated ear may be led. one or two specimens will serve to illustrate the point. the first clause with its variations, was as follows:-- every breach of veracity indicates some latent vice. " bridge " rascality " " latest vice. " breech " feracity " " latinet vice. " preach " eracity " " late device. " branch " vivacity " " great advice. " " " veracity " " late advice. " " " " " " ladovice. " " " " " " ladened vice. every branch of veracity in the next some latent vice. every reach of their ascidity indicates some advice. in another part of the passage occurred the following: petty operations. petty alterations. petty observations. patriarchal occupations. petty oblations. now of what use is it to a boy who mistakes "petty" for "patriarchal," "latent vice" for "great advice," "breach of veracity" for "reach of their ascidity," who is so untrained that he really cannot hear what is said, or see what is done,--of what use is it to such a boy, merely because he has gone through a prescribed routine of books and classes, or perchance because he has attained a certain amount of years and of pounds avoirdupois, to be pushed forward into a higher department to attend lectures on chemistry, or anatomy, or morals, or history, or literature? it is preposterous. it is an insult to the professor, and an injury to the boy. this, then, is the burden of my song. we cannot take too much pains in early life in rousing this power of attention. depend upon it, no matter how much learning, so called, is crammed into a youth, his intellectual development has not begun until this power is roused. he may have a vague, dreamy sort of knowledge; he may do sums by rule, and he may parse by rote, and do many other wondrous things; but his powers are not invigorated, he does not grow, until he begins really to see and hear, and feel _terra firma_ under his feet. the principle which i am illustrating applies with special force to that part of a child's education which consists in learning the meaning of words. i have serious doubts whether children ordinarily learn much of the real meaning of words by committing definitions to memory. what is a definition? it is only expressing the meaning of one word by the use of another word as nearly as possible synonymous. now, in the case of a child, it is at least an even chance that that other word is just as unknown as the one it is intended to explain. it is like, in algebra, solving an equation with two unknown quantities, by giving the value of one unknown quantity in terms of the other. a child, for instance, is told that "potent" means "efficacious," that "power" means "ability," that "potion" means a "physical draught," that "potential" means "existing in possibility, not in act." these are definitions taken at random from a book in common use in our public schools. the definitions possibly are good enough for the purpose for which they were designed. i am not quarrelling with the definitions. but, surely, it is not by these that a child is to learn the meaning of the words. whether he is told that "power" means "ability," or "ability" means "power," that "potent" means "efficacious," or "efficacious" means "potent," in neither case, nine times out of ten, is any addition made to his stock of knowledge. it is not until much later in life,--until in fact our knowledge of words is already very much extended, that we profit much by learning formal definitions. but in childhood, we must learn the meaning and power of words, just as the mechanic becomes acquainted with his tools, by observing their use. a boy, for instance, reads this sentence. "the drug was very _efficacious_." if the word is quite new to him, and there is nothing in the clause preceding or following to indicate its meaning, it is not at all unlikely that he may suppose it to mean "poisonous." if, however, from the context, he finds that a person who had been sick, was made suddenly well, and this statement followed by the remark, that "the drug was very _efficacious_," he will probably get the idea that the word means "healing," or "curative." he reads again, in another place, that a certain mode of teaching penmanship was found to be very "efficacious." here is a new use of the word, quite different from the other, and he is obliged to exclude from his idea of its meaning every thing like "healing." so he goes on, every fresh example cutting off some extraneous idea which the previous examples had led him to attach to the word, and every step onward coming nearer to the general idea, though he may never express it in words, of something which accomplished its object, whatever that object may be. it is, i believe, chiefly by observing in this way the manner in which words are used, that children do and must learn their meaning. it is, in other words, by quickening and cultivating the habit of attention to the meaning,--by training a child, when he is reading, to imagine, not that he is reading the words, but that he is reading the sense, by accustoming him to look through the word, to the sense, just as he would look at objects out of doors through the window, and to consider the words, as he would consider the glass, merely as a medium, through which, and unmindful of it, he looks at something beyond,--_which something is the meaning_. let me not be misunderstood in regard to this matter of definitions. i believe it to be of the utmost importance that children should be constantly required to give definitions or explanations of the words whose meaning they have acquired. all i mean to call in question is, whether that meaning to any considerable extent is acquired by committing to memory formal definitions prepared by others. when they have once learned the meaning of a word, which is to be done mainly, if not only, by observing its use, then by all means let them be required to express that meaning by other words which they know. such an exercise cannot be too much insisted on. it is one of the best means of securing that attention to the signification of words, which is so much wanted. it requires the child, moreover, to bring his knowledge continually to the test. it cultivates at once accuracy of thought, and accuracy of language, which is the vehicle of thought. train a child, therefore, to the habit of attention, first to the meaning of words as gathered from observation of their use, and secondly to the expression of that meaning in language appropriate and intelligible to others. i have dwelt a little on this subject, because, as in the matter of hearing, i doubt whether people generally are aware how little children understand what they read. nor is this ignorance confined to children. in our acts of devotion, we are all in the habit of using certain stereotyped phrases, without attaching to them any definite meaning, without perhaps so much as having even thought whether they had a meaning. this same pernicious habit is seen also in our reading of the scriptures. we have read the phrases over from childhood, until we have become so familiar with them, that we are obliged often to stop, and by a sort of compulsory process to challenge each word as it passes, and see whether it really conveys any meaning to our mind. if i were to say to a class, "the bible tells us of a man who was older than his father," or some such apparent contradiction in terms, the sharp antithesis would doubtless arrest their attention, and i would at least be asked to explain myself. yet, ten to one, they have read, hundreds of times, of him who is "the _root_ and the _offspring_ of david, the bright and morning star," without noticing anything at all remarkable in the expression. it is to them merely something good and pious, couched in a very pleasant and sonorous flow of words, and meaning doubtless something very comforting and edifying. i was once teaching temporarily a young ladies' bible class. the average age of the members was at least seventeen. they were the pick from a large city school, and had been selected for their superior educational advantages and attainments. most of them were attending expensive private schools during the week. wishing to satisfy myself as to the general knowledge and the intellectual habits of the members, i took the plan of simply reading verse about, stopping from time to time to talk familiarly about anything which might happen to suggest itself. this verse among others was read: it is from the account of the miracle on the day of pentecost: "and there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them." i found, upon inquiring, that _not one_ in that large class had the remotest idea of what was meant by the word "cloven." one young lady thought it meant "fiery," another "flaming," another "winged," and so on. most of them, however, said that they really had never thought of the matter before. probably every one of them had read the passage hundreds of times; and when we began talking about it, no one of them seemed to have an idea that there was anything in the verse which she did not understand. it was not until i took it up, word by word, and challenged a peremptory and sharp scrutiny into the meaning attached to each word, that the remarkable fact came out which i have stated. one or two more leaves from my professional experience will be given. during the greater part of my professional life, it has been a part of my duty to examine candidates for the office of teacher in the public schools. out of ninety-eight candidates for the office of assistant teacher, whom i examined on one occasion, only one knew the meaning of the word "sumptuary," although in the public discussion then going on about the license law, the word was in daily use in the public papers; in fact, i took it out of the newspaper of that morning. on another occasion, out of fourteen candidates for the office of principal teacher of a boys' grammar school, four defined "friable" as that which can be fried; several did not know at all the meaning of "hibernating," and one, the successful candidate, said it meant "relating to ireland." by "successful" candidate, i mean the one who got the vote of the directors! this sober scrutiny into any one's knowledge of the meaning of words in common use, is one of the most reliable tests of his general intellectual progress and cultivation. it is one of the means by which in many city schools it is customary to test a candidate's fitness for promotion. to show how little people generally, and even teachers, are aware of the extent to which children misconceive the meaning of words in common use, i have transcribed a few examples from an examination of the kind which i once held. the definitions which i am about to quote were not the work of oral confusion and haste, but were given in writing, in circumstances of entire quietude and ample deliberation. the average age of the candidates, on the occasion referred to, was fourteen years and ten months, and no one of them was by law under thirteen years. _stature_--a picture; "i saw a stature of washington." _fabulous_--full of threads; "silk is fabulous." _accession_--the act of eating a great deal; "john got very sick after dinner by accession." _atonement_--a small insect; "queen mab was pulled by little atonements." sound, [orthodox]; "they went to the church of the atonement." _auxiliary_--to form; "the gardener did auxiliary his garden." _ingredient_--a native-born; "tobacco is an ingredient of this country." _fragment_--sweetmeats; "it was a fragment." _develop_--to swallow up; "god sent a whale to develop jonah." _exotic_--relating to a government; "some countries have a very exotic government." patriotic; "he was exotic in the cause of independence." absolute; "the government of turkey is exotic." standing out; "the company were exotic." _circumference_--distance through the middle. distance around the middle of the outside. _callous_--something which cannot be effected; "that america should gain her independence was supposed to be callous." _mobility_--belonging to the people; "the mobility of st. louis has greatly increased." _anomalous_--powerful; "his speech was considered anomalous." _adequate_--a land animal; "an elephant is an adequate." _transition_--the act of transcribing; "the transition of that book was gaining ground in the public mind." _gregarious_--pertaining to idols; "the sandwich islands worship gregarious." pertaining to an oak; "the druids were noted for their gregarious exercises." consisting of grain. grass-eating. full of talk. full of color. _propensity_--dislike; "he had a propensity to study." _artificially_--belonging to flowers. _fluctuation_--coming in great numbers; "there was a great fluctuation of emigrants." setting on fire. beating. _odium_--that you have a great tact at anything; "your odium is very great." a poisonous herb. pertaining to song; "he was an odium writer." a sweet smell; "the odium of new-mown hay." _transverse_--to turn over; "transverse that bucket and see what is in it." to change from verse; "some writers change books from transverse to verse." to verse again; "he transversed his copy." to spread abroad; "they transverse the bible." _utility_--relating to the soil; "the ground it remarkable for its utility." _quadruple_--relating to birds; "there was a number of quadruple." _alternate_--not ternate. _menace_--a tare in the flesh; "the dog caused a menace in john's arm." _vital_--relating to death; "vital spark of heavenly flame." _intrinsic_--not trinsic. weak, feeble; "he was a very intrinsic old man." _subservient_--one opposed to the upholding of servants. stubborn; "on account of the boy being subservient he was turned out of school." _perfidy_--trust; not to cheat; "such a man is perfidy; that is, everything can be trusted to him." accessible; "some persons have a great deal of perfidy." _access_--intermission; "joseph had access of his teacher to go into the room." _vicinity_--in the same direction; "pekin is in the vicinity of philadelphia." _subsequent_--preceding; "the subsequent chapter." _infectious_--to make fectious. _exquisite_--to be in a quisitive manner. to help. to find out. talkative. not required. _mingle_--to tear in pieces. _deride_--to ride down. _manifold_--made by the hand. pertaining to man; "forgive our manifold sins." i have failed entirely in the general drift of this chapter, if i have not made it obvious that the principle which i have been attempting to illustrate is one of singularly pervading influence, and of most various and manifold applications. the subject is indeed eminently suggestive. one single additional line of illustration, however, must suffice. i refer to the application of this principle to what may be called the incidentals of teaching and training. a child, for instance, should not only "spell out of book," as it is called, but his attention should by some means be directed to the way in which words are spelled. he should be accustomed to form, as it were, a mental image of each word, to think of it as having a particular form and appearance, so that his eye will detect instantly a wanting or an excrescent letter, just as he sees a wen, a defective limb, or a distorted feature on the person of an acquaintance. only fire his young ambition with the aim to spell well, and quicken his attention to the way in which words are spelled, and every time he reads a book he receives incidentally a lesson in spelling. a child should have stated exercises and systematic instructions in the art of reading. but quite as much improvement in this important and too much neglected accomplishment may be gained by not allowing children at any time to read in an improper manner. every demonstration at the blackboard, every text or hymn repeated from memory, every recitation in arithmetic, grammar, or geography, every exercise of every kind in which the voice is used and words are uttered, may be made an incidental lesson in reading. by being never allowed to pronounce words incorrectly, to utter them in a low or drawling manner, or to crowd and overlap them, as it were, one upon the other, the ear becomes accustomed to the correct sounds of the language, and immediately detects any variation from its accustomed standard. by thus insisting, in every vocal exercise, upon the full and correct pronunciation of the elementary sounds of the language, more may be done to make good readers and speakers than by all the pronouncing dictionaries and elocution books in print. let a child by all means take lessons in writing. let him learn plain text, german text, round hand, running hand, back hand, and the flourishes. but if he is to become rapidly master of that truly beautiful and most useful accomplishment, let the teacher insist upon his always attending to his manner of writing, and always writing as well as he can. whether he writes a composition, a sketch, a letter, whenever for any purpose he puts pen to paper, let him be required to form each letter distinctly, to write it gracefully, and to give to his exercise a neat and elegant appearance. teach him to think of a crooked line or a blotted page as of an untied shoe, or a dirty face. by thus making every written exercise an exercise in writing, his progress will be increased beyond your expectations, and you will soon see him looking with pleasure at the clean and symmetrical forms which flow so gracefully from his pen, as he goes from line to line over the virgin page, no half-formed or misshapen letters to embarrass, but all in every part as elegantly written as it is easily read. grammar should no doubt be taught by text-book and in stated lessons. the parts of speech, the conjugations and declensions, syntax and parsing, must all be systematically conned, the rules and definitions committed to memory, and the judgment exercised upon their application. at the same time every recitation of a child, as well as all his conversation, ought to be made an incidental and unconscious lesson in grammar. only never allow him to use unchallenged an incorrect or ungrammatical expression, train his ear to detect and revolt at it, as at a discordant note in music, let him if possible hear nothing but sterling, honest english, and he will then learn grammar to some purpose. if, on the contrary, he is allowed to recite and to talk in whatever language comes uppermost, and to hear continually those around him reciting and talking in a similar manner, he may parse till he is blind without learning "to speak and write the english language correctly." banish from the nursery, the school-room, and the play-ground, incorrect and ungrammatical expressions, and you do more than can be done in all other ways to preserve "the well of english undefiled." young persons need systematic instructions in the principles which should govern their conduct. they need not indeed be troubled with the more abstruse questions in the theory of morals. but the great obvious rules of duty should be taught them, in a systematic manner, by a competent instructor. but that man would be thought little acquainted with the influences which go to mould and form the character, who should suppose the matter ended here. the doctrines inculcated in the lesson, must be carried out and applied in all the petty incidents of the day. not an hour passes in a large family or a school, without an occurrence involving some principle in morals. a boy of moderate talents, notwithstanding all his exertions, is eclipsed by one more gifted, and he is tempted to envy. imagining himself aggrieved or insulted by his fellows, he burns for revenge. overtaken in a fault and threatened with punishment, he is tempted to lie. misled by the opinion of others, or esteeming some rule of his teachers harsh and unnecessary, he is inclined to disobey. these and a hundred other instances which might be named, will suggest to the thoughtful parent or teacher so many opportunities for giving incidentally the most important practical instruction in morals. in these and the manifold other illustrations which might be given, the essential point is to quicken and keep alive the attention. whatever be the subject of study, and whether the instructions be direct or incidental, let children be preserved from attending to it in a sluggish, listless, indifferent manner. the subject of study, in the case of young persons, is often of less importance than the manner of study. i have been led sometimes to doubt the value of many of the inventions for facilitating the acquisition of knowledge by children. that knowledge the acquisition of which costs no labor, will not be likely to make a deep impression, or to remain long upon the memory. it is by labor that the mind strengthens and grows: and while care should be taken not to overtask it by exertions beyond its strength, yet let it never be forgotten that mere occupation of the mind, even with useful and proper objects, is not the precise aim of education. the educator aims, not to make learned boys, but able men. to do this, he must tax their powers. he must rouse them to manly exertion. he must teach them to think, to discriminate, to digest what they have received, to work. every day there must be the glow of hard work,--not the exhaustion and languor which arise from too protracted confinement to study,--which have the same debilitating effect upon the mind that a similar process has upon the body,--but vigorous and hardy labor, such as wakens the mind from its lethargy, summons up the resolution and the will, and puts the whole internal man into a state of determined and positive activity. the boy in such a case feels that he is at work. he feels, too, that he is gaining something more than knowledge. he is gaining power. he is growing in strength. he grapples successfully to-day with a difficulty that would have staggered him yesterday. there is no mistaking this process; and no matter what the subject of study, the intellectual development what it gives, is worth infinitely more than all that vague, floating kind of knowledge sometimes sought after, which seems to be imbibed somehow from the atmosphere of the school-room, as it certainly evaporates the moment a boy enters the atmosphere of men and of active life. xxvii. gaining the attention. the teacher who fails to get the attention of his scholars, fails totally. the pupils may perhaps learn something, because they may give the lesson some study at home, under the direction of their parents. but they learn nothing from the teacher. he is really no teacher, though he may occupy the teacher's seat. there is, and there can be, no teaching, where the attention of the scholar is not secured. gaining the attention is an indispensable condition to the thing called teaching. not, however, the only indispensable thing. we have seen a class wrought by special tricks and devices to the highest pitch of excited attention,--fairly panting with eagerness, all eyes and ears, on the very tiptoe of aroused mental activity,--yet learning nothing. the teacher had the knack of stirring them up and lashing them into a half frenzy of excited expectation, without having any substantial knowledge wherewith to reward their eagerness. with all his one-sided skill, he was but a mountebank. to real, successful teaching, there must be these two things, namely, the ability to hold the minds of the children, and the ability to pour into the minds thus presented sound and seasonable instruction. lacking the latter ability, your pupil goes away with his vessel unfilled. lacking the former, you only pour water upon the ground. how shall the teacher secure attention? in the first place, let him make up his mind that he will have it. this is half the battle. let him settle it with himself, that until he does this, he is doing nothing; that without the attention of his scholars, he is no more a teacher, than is the chair he occupies. if he is not plus, he is zero, if not actually minus. with this truth fully realized, he will come before his class resolved to have a hearing; and this very resolution, written as it will be all over him, will have its effect upon his scholars. children are quick to discern the mental attitude of a teacher. they know, as if by instinct, whether he is in earnest or not, and in all ordinary cases they yield without dispute to a claim thus resolutely put. this, then, is the first duty of the teacher in this matter. he must go to his class with the resolute determination of making every scholar feel his presence all the time. the moment any scholar shows that the consciousness of his teacher's presence is not on his mind, as a restraining power, something is wrong. the first step towards producing that consciousness, as an abiding influence on the minds of the scholars, is for the teacher to determine in his own mind and bring it about. without being arrogant, without being dictatorial, without being or doing anything that is disagreeable or unbecoming, he must yet make up his mind to put forth in the class a distinct power of self-assertion. he must determine to make them feel that he is there, that he is there all the time, that he is there to every one of them. in the next place, the teacher must not disappoint the attention which his manner has challenged. he must have something valuable to communicate to the expectant minds before him. he must be thoroughly prepared in the lesson, so that the pupils shall feel that they are learning from him. his lips must keep knowledge. the human heart thirsts for knowledge. this is one of its natural instincts. it is indeed often much perverted, and many are to be found who even show aversion to being instructed. yet the normal condition of things is otherwise, and nothing is more common than to see children hanging with fondness around any one who has something to tell them. let the teacher then be sure to have something to say, as well as determined to say it. in the third place, the teacher must have his knowledge perfectly at command. it must be on the tip of his tongue. if he hesitates, and stops to think, or to look in his book for the purpose of hunting up what he has to tell them, he will be very apt to lose his chance. teaching children, particularly young children, is like shooting birds on the wing. the moment your bird is in sight, you must fire. the moment you have the child's eye, be ready to speak. this readiness of utterance is a matter to be cultivated. the ripest scholars are often sadly deficient in it. the very habit of profound study is apt to induce the opposite quality to readiness. a teacher who is conscious of this defect, must resolutely set himself to resist it and overcome it. he can do so, if he will. but it requires resolution and practice. in the fourth place, the teacher must place himself so that every pupil in the class is within the range of his vision. it is not uncommon to see a teacher pressing close up to the scholars in the centre of the class, so that those at the right and left ends are out of his sight; or if he turns his face to those on one side, he at the same time turns his back to those on the other. always sit or stand where you can all the while see the face of every pupil. i have, hundreds of times, seen the whole character of the instruction and discipline of a class changed by the observance of this simple rule. another rule is to use your eyes quite as much as your tongue. if you want your class to look at you, you must look at them. the eye has a magic power. it wins, it fascinates, it guides, it rewards, it punishes, it controls. you must learn how to see every child all the time. some teachers seem to be able to see only one scholar at a time. this will never do. while you are giving this absorbed, undivided attention to one, all the rest are running wild. neither will it do for the teacher to be looking about much, to see what is going on among the other classes in the room. your scholars' eyes will be very apt to follow yours. you are the engineer, they are the passengers. if you run off the track, they must do likewise. nor must your eye be occupied with the book, hunting up question and answer, nor dropped to the floor in excessive modesty. all the power of seeing that you have is needed for looking earnestly, lovingly, without interruption, into the faces and eyes of your pupils. but for the observance of this rule, another is indispensable. you must learn to teach without book. perhaps you cannot do this absolutely. but the nearer you can approach to it, the better. thorough preparation, of course, is the secret of this power. some teachers think they have prepared a lesson when they have gone over it once, and studied out all the answers. there could not be a greater mistake. this is only the first step in the preparation. you might as well think that you have learned the multiplication table, and are prepared to teach it, when you have gone over it once and seen by actual count that the figures are all right, and you know where to put your finger on them when required. you are prepared to teach a lesson when you have all the facts and ideas in it at your tongue's end, so that you can go through them all, in proper order, without once referring to the book. any preparation short of this will not do, if you want to command attention. once prepare a lesson in this way, and it will give you such freedom in the art of teaching, and you will experience such a pleasure in it, that you will never want to relapse into the old indolent habit. xxviii. counsels. * * * * * . _to a young teacher._ you are about to assume the charge of a class in the school under my care. allow me, in a spirit of frankness, to make to you a brief statement of some of the aims of the institution, and of the principles by which we are guided in their prosecution. . "unless the lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." i have no professional conviction more fixed and abiding than this, that no persons more need the direct, special, continual guidance of the holy spirit than those who undertake to mould and discipline the youthful mind. no preparation for this office is complete which does not include devout prayer for that wisdom which cometh from above. if any one possession, more than another, is the direct gift of the almighty, it would seem to be that of knowledge. the teacher, therefore, of all men, is called upon to look upwards to a source that is higher than himself. he needs light in his own mind; he should not count it misspent labor to ask for light to be given to the minds of his scholars. there is a teacher infinitely wiser and more skilful than any human teacher. the instructor must be strangely blind to the resources of his profession, who fails to resort habitually to that great, plenary, unbounded source of light and knowledge. while, therefore, we aim in this school to profit by all subsidiary and subordinate methods and improvements in the art of teaching, we first of all seek the aid of our heavenly father; we ask wisdom of him who "giveth liberally and upbraideth not." this, then, is the first principle that governs us in the work here assigned us. the fear of god is the beginning of knowledge. we who are teachers endeavor to show that we ourselves fear god, and we inculcate the fear of him as the first and highest duty of our scholars; and in every plan and effort to guide the young minds committed to us, we ourselves look for guidance to the only unerring source of light. . in proportion to the implicitness with which we rely upon divine aid, should be the diligence with which we use all the human means within our reach. it should therefore, in the second place, be the aim of the teachers of this school to acquaint themselves diligently with the most approved methods of teaching. no teachers will be retained who do not keep themselves well posted in the literature of their profession, and who are not found continually aiming at self-improvement. in whatever school of whatever country, any branch is taught by better methods than those practised here, it should be the duty of a teacher in this school to search it out, and to profit by the discovery. improvement comes by comparison. the man, or the institution, that fails to profit by the experience of others, is not wise. i hold it to be the duty of every teacher of this school to be habitually conversant with the educational journals of the day, and with the standard works on the theory of teaching, and to lose no opportunity for personal observation of the methods of others. i have often noticed, with equal pain and commiseration, that young teachers, after having once finished their preliminary studies and obtained a situation, are thereupon apparently quite content, making no further effort at improvement, but settling down for life in an inglorious mediocrity. the best teachers in this school are expected to be better teachers next year than they are now,--with ampler stores of knowledge, and a happier faculty for communicating it. this, then, is our second aim in this school. we aim to have teachers thoroughly posted in regard to the theory and the methods of teaching, prepared to ride upon the advance wave of every real improvement in the art. . i should, however, fail entirely to convey my meaning, were i to lead you to suppose that we expect to accomplish our ends mainly by fine-spun theories. i have no faith in any theory of education, which does not include, as one of its leading elements, _hard work_. the teachers of this school expect to work hard, and we expect the scholars to work hard. we have no royal road to learning. any knowledge, the acquisition of which costs nothing, is usually worth nothing. the mind, equally with the body, grows by labor. if some stuffing process could be invented, by which knowledge could be forced into a mind perfectly passive, the knowledge so acquired would be worthless to its possessor, and would soon pass away, leaving the mind as blank as it was before. knowledge, to be of any value, must be assimilated, as bodily food is. teaching is essentially a co-operative act. the mind of the teacher and the mind of the scholar must both act, and must act together, in intellectual co-operation and sympathy, if there is to be any true mental growth. teaching is not merely hearing lessons. it is not mere talking. it is something more than mere telling. it is causing a child to know. it is awakening attention, and then satisfying it. it is an out-and-out live process. the moment the mind of the teacher or the mind of the scholar flags, real teaching ceases. this, then, is our third aim. we aim in this school to accomplish results, not by fanciful theories, but by _bona fide_ hard work,--by keeping teachers and scholars, while at their studies, wide awake and full of life; not by exhausting drudgery, nor by fitful, irregular, spasmodic exertions, but by steady, persevering, animated, straight-forward work. . a fourth aim which we have steadily before us, is to make _thorough_ work of whatever acquisition we attempt. a little knowledge, well learned and truly digested, and made a part of the pupil's own intellectual stores, is worth more to him than any amount of facts loosely and indiscriminately brought together. in intellectual, as in other tillage, the true secret of thrift is to plough deep, not to skim over a large surface. the prevailing tendency at this time, in systems of education, is unduly to multiply studies. so many new sciences are being brought within the pale of popular knowledge, that it is no longer possible, in a school like this, to embrace within its course of study all the subjects which it is practicable and desirable for people generally to know. through the whole encyclopædia of arts and sciences, there is hardly one which has not its advocates, and which has not strong claims to recognition. the teacher is simply infatuated who attempts to embrace them all in his curriculum. he thereby puts himself under an absolute necessity of being superficial, and he generates in his scholars pretension and conceit. old james ross, the grammarian, famous as a teacher in philadelphia more than half a century ago, had on his sign simply these words, "greek and latin taught here." assuredly i would not advocate quite so rigid an exclusion as that, nor, if limited to only two studies, would it be those. but i have often thought mr. ross's advertisement suggestive. better even that extreme than the encyclopædic system which figures so largely on some circulars. mr. ross indeed taught nothing but latin and greek. but he taught these languages better probably than they have ever been taught on this continent; and any two branches thoroughly mastered are of more service to the pupil than twenty branches known imperfectly and superficially. a limited field, then, and thorough work. this is our fourth aim. . as a fifth aim, we endeavor, in the selection of subjects of study, not to allow the common english branches, as they are called, to be shoved aside. to read well, to write a good hand, to be expert in arithmetic, to have such a knowledge of geography and history as to read intelligently what is going on and the world, to have such a knowledge of one's own language as to use it correctly and purely in speaking and composition,--these are attainments to be postponed to no others. these are points of primary importance, to be aimed at by every one, whatever else he may omit. . we aim, in the sixth place, to mark the successive parts of the course of study by well defined limits. there are in the course of study successive stages of progress, and these stages are made as clear and precise as it is possible to make them; and no pupil is allowed to go forward until the ground behind is thoroughly mastered. at the same time, these stages in study should be kept all the while before the minds of the pupils as goals to be aimed at. there are, for this purpose, at briefly recurring intervals, examinations for promotion. while no pupil is permitted to go forward, except as the result of a rigorous examination, the idea of an advance should, if possible, never be allowed to be absent from his thoughts. that scholar should be counted worthy of highest honor, not who stands highest in a particular room, but who by successful examinations can pass most rapidly from room to room. that teacher is considered most successful, not who retains most pupils, but who in a given time pushes most pupils forward into a higher room. we want no scholar to stand still for a single week. motion, progress, definite achievement, must be the order of the day. . we aim, in the seventh place, to cultivate in every pupil a habit of attention and observation. youth is the time when the senses should be most assiduously trained. the young should be taught to see for themselves, to ascertain the qualities of objects by the use of their own eyes and hands, to notice whether a thing is distant and how far distant it is, whether it is heavy and how heavy, whether it has color and what color, whether it has form and what form. they should learn to study real things by actually noticing them with their own senses, and then learning to apply the right words to the knowledge so acquired. we aim to apply this habit of observation in all the branches of study, so that in every stage of progress the scholar shall know, not merely the names of things, but the things themselves. in other words, we would cultivate real, as well as verbal knowledge, and aim to awaken in every pupil an active, inquiring, observant state of mind. * * * * * . _to a new pupil._ you have just been admitted to the privileges of this institution, and are about to enter here upon a course of study. the occasion is one eminently suited for serious reflection. at the close of a school career it is difficult not to reflect. thoughts upon one's course will, at such a time, force themselves upon us. but then it is too late. the good we might have achieved, is beyond our grasp, and its contemplation is profitable only as a legitimate topic of contrition. how much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. how much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle wave. men are divided into two classes,--those who control their own destiny, doing what they mean to do, living according to a plan which they prefer and prepare, and those who are controlled by circumstances, who have a vague purpose of doing something or being somebody in the world, but leave the means to chance. the season of youth generally determines to which of these classes you will ultimately belong. it is here, at school, that you decide whether, when you come to man's estate, you will be a governing man, or whether you will be a mere aimless driveller. those who at the beginning of a course in school make to themselves a distinct aim, towards which day after day they work their course, undiscouraged by defeat, unseduced by ease or the temptation of a temporary pleasure, not only win the immediate objects of pursuit, but gain for themselves those habits of aiming, of perseverance, of self-control, which will make them hereafter controlling and governing men. those, on the contrary, who enter upon an academic career with an indefinite purpose of studying after a fashion, whenever it is not too hot, or too cold, or the lessons are not too hard, or there is nothing special going on to distract the attention, or who are content to swim along lazily with the multitude, trusting to the good-nature of the teacher, to an occasional deception, or to the general chapter of accidents, for escape from censure, and for such an amount of proficiency as on the whole will pass muster with friends or the public,--depend upon it, such youths are doomed, inevitably doomed, all their days, to be nobodies, or worse. let me, then, my young friend, as preliminary to your entering upon the duties before you, call to your mind some of those things, which, as an intelligent and responsible being, you should deliberately aim to follow or to avoid while in this school. in the counsels which i am going to give you, i shall make no attempt to say what is new or striking. my aim will be rather to recall to your memory some few of those familiar maxims, in which you have been, i dare say, often instructed elsewhere. . first of all, remember that men always, by a necessary law, fall below the point at which they aim. you well understand that if a projectile be hurled in the direct line of any elevated object, the force of gravity will cause the projectile to deflect from the line of direction, and this deflection and curvature will be great in proportion to the distance of the object to be reached. hence, in gunnery, the skilful marksman invariably takes aim above the point which he expects to hit. at certain distances, he will aim ° above the horizon at what is really but ° above it. so, in moral subjects, there is unfortunately a native and universal tendency downwards, which deflects us out of the line in which good resolutions would propel us. you aim to be distinguished, and you turn out only meritorious. you aim to be meritorious, and you fall into the multitude. you are content with being of the multitude, and you fall out of your class entirely. so also, as in physical projectiles, the extent of your departure from the right line is measured by the distance of the objects at which you aim. you resolve to avoid absolutely and entirely certain practices for a day or a week, and you can perhaps keep very close to the mark. but who can hold himself up to an exact fulfilment of his intentions for a whole term? i do not wish to discourage you. the drift of my argument is, not that you should make no aim, but that you should fix your aim _high_, and that you should then keep yourself up to your good resolutions, as long and as closely as you possibly can. . in the next place, remember that no excellence is ever attained without self-denial. wisdom's ways are indeed ways of pleasantness. the satisfaction of having done well and nobly is of a certain ravishing kind, far surpassing other enjoyments. but to obtain this high and satisfying pleasure, many minor and incompatible pleasures must be foregone. you cannot have the pleasure of being a first-rate scholar, and at the same time have your full swing of fun. i am not opposed to fun. i like it myself. no one enjoys it more. nor do i think the exercise and enjoyment of it incompatible with the highest scholastic excellence. but there is a place for all things, and school is not the place for fun. if you enjoy in moderation out of school the relaxation and refreshment which jokes, wit, and pleasantry give, you will be all the more likely to grapple successfully with the serious employments which await you here. still do not forget that your employments here are serious. study is a sober business. if you would acquire really useful knowledge, you must be willing to work. you must make up your mind to say "no" to the thousand opportunities and temptations to frivolous behavior that will beset you in school. you must not be content with being studious and orderly merely when the eye of authority is upon you. this is to be simply an eye-servant and a hypocrite. to have a little pleasantry in the school-room, to perpetrate or to join in some witty practical joke, may seem to you comparatively harmless. so it would be but for its expense. you buy it at the cost of benefits which no money can measure, and no future time can replace. there are seasons of the year when the farmer may indulge in relaxation,--may go abroad on excursions of pleasure, or may saunter away the time in comparative idleness at home. but in the few precious weeks of seedtime, every day, every hour is of moment. this is your seedtime. every hour of school-time that you waste in trifling is an injury and a loss to your future. remember, then, that you cannot reach high excellence in school, or that pure and noble enjoyment, which is its exceeding great reward, without self-denial. resolve, therefore, here and now, steadfastly, immovably, to say "no" to everything in school, no matter how innocent in itself, which shall interfere with the progress of study for a single moment. if you make such a fixed resolution, and live up to it, you will soon be surprised to find how easy and pleasant the discipline of school has become. . among the mischievous fallacies of young persons at school, i know none that work more to their own disadvantage than the opinion that a particular teacher is prejudiced against them. against this feeling it seems impossible to reason. when once scholars have it fairly in their heads that a certain teacher is partial, in whatever relates to their standing, i have been almost forced to the conclusion that it is best not to attempt reasoning with them. under such feelings, indeed, by a singular freak of human nature, scholars are often driven to do, in sheer bravado or defiance, the very things which they imagine to be unjustly imputed to them. allow me, my young friend, to ask you candidly and in all seriousness to turn this matter over in your own mind. what adequate motive can you imagine for a teacher's marking you otherwise than impartially? every teacher has an interest in having as many high marks and as few demerits under his signature as possible. it is not to his credit that he should be unable to maintain order without blackening his roll with bad marks. a class roll filled with 's is not the kind of evidence a teacher covets as to his skill in teaching. notice the intercourse between the teachers and those scholars who are admitted on all hands to be strictly and conscientiously correct in their behavior. see what a pleasure it affords the instructor to have to deal with such pupils. see what a satisfaction the teacher experiences when, at the close of the day, there is not a demerit mark on his book. judge, then, whether it is not likely to be a self-denial and a cross to him, when a sense of duty compels him to do otherwise. be slow, therefore, to impute bad marks to injustice, or ill nature. no man of course is infallible, and teachers make mistakes as well as other people. but the temptations to do intentional wrong are, in this case, all the other way. . closely connected with the habit just mentioned is the disposition to neglect particular branches of study. from disliking a teacher, the transition is easy to a dislike for his department. others again, without any personal feeling in the case, think that they have a natural fitness for one class of studies, and an equally natural _un_-fitness for another class. so they content themselves with proficiency in that in which they already excel, and neglect that in which they are deficient, and which therefore they find difficult. is this wise? the branches which you find difficult, are precisely those in which you need an instructor. besides, the object of education is to develop equally and harmoniously all your faculties. if the memory, the reasoning faculty, the imagination, or any one power of the mind, is active far beyond the other powers, that surely is no reason for giving additional stimulus and growth in that direction. on the contrary, bend your main energies towards bringing forward your other faculties to an equal development. if you have a natural or acquired preference for mathematics, and a dislike for languages, the former study will take care of itself: bend all your energies to the latter. so, if languages are your choice, and mathematical study your aversion, take hold of the odious task with steady and sturdy endeavor, and you will soon convert it into a pleasure. the same is true of grammar, of geography, of history, of composition, of rhetoric, of mental and moral science, of elocution,--of every branch. if you are wise, you will give your chief attention in school to those branches for which you feel the least inclination, and in which you find it most difficult to excel. you should do so, because, in the first place, this failure and disinclination, in nine cases out of ten, grow out of defective training heretofore, and not from any defect in your mental constitution; and, secondly, if your natural constitution should be, as in some cases it is, one-sided and exceptional, your aim should be to correct and cure, not to aggravate, the defects of nature. this advice, you will observe, relates to your course in school, not to your choice of a profession in life. when your career in school is finished, and you are about to select a profession, follow by all means the bent of your genius. do that for which you have the greatest natural or acquired aptitude. but here, the case is different. your aim in school is to develop your powers,--to grow into an accomplished and capable man,--to acquire complete command of all the mental resources god has given you. . there is a practice, common to school-life everywhere, known by the not very dignified name of cheating. there is, i fear, among young people generally, while at school, an erroneous and mischievous state of opinion on this subject. deception in regard to your lessons is not viewed, as it should be, in the light of a serious moral delinquency. an ingenuous youth, who would scorn to steal, and scorn to lie anywhere else than at school, makes no scruple to deceive a teacher. is honesty a thing of place and time? i do not say, i would not trust at my money-drawer the boy who has been cheating at his lessons, because a boy may have been led into the latter delinquency by a false notion of right, which as yet has not affected his integrity in matters of business. but this i do say. cheating at school blunts the moral sense; it impairs the sense of personal honor; it breaks down the outworks of integrity; it leads by direct and easy steps to that grosser cheating which ends in the penitentiary. on this subject, i once had a most painful experience. a boy left school with as fair a character for honesty as many others against whom nothing can be said except that they do sometimes practise deceit in regard to their lessons. i really believed him to be an honest boy, and recommended him as such. by means of the recommendation, he obtained in a large store a responsible post connected with the receipt and payment of money. his employer was pleased with his abilities, and disposed to give him rapid promotion. after a few months, i inquired after him, and found that he had been detected in forcing his balances! i do verily believe, the dishonest purpose, which led to this pecuniary fraud, grew directly out of a facility at deception acquired at school. he had cheated his teacher; he had cheated his father; he had obtained a fictitious average; he had gained a standing and credit in school not justly his due; why should he not exercise the same ingenuity in improving his pecuniary resources? independently of the moral effect of these deceptive practices upon your own character, is there not in the acts themselves an inherent meanness and baseness, from which a pure-minded youth would instinctively recoil? is there not something false and rotten in the prevailing sentiment on this subject among young persons at school? when by some convenient fiction you reach a higher standard than your merits entitle you to, is it not so far forth at the expense of some more conscientious competitor? and, after all, when you deceive a teacher into the belief that you are studying when you are not, that you know a thing when you do not know it, that you wrote a composition, or executed a drawing, which was done by some one else,--whom do you cheat but yourself? you may deceive the teacher, but the loss is yours. . if there could be such a thing as an innocent crime, i would say it was that of talking in school. there can hardly be named a more signal instance of an act so perfectly innocent in itself, becoming so seriously blame-worthy purely and solely by circumstances. i believe i express the common opinion of all who have had any experience in the matter, when i say that three fourths of all the intentional disorder, and at least nine tenths of all the actual interruptions to study, grow out of the practice of unlicensed talking. and yet this is the very last thing which young persons will admit into their serious, practical convictions as being an evil and a wrong. they may admit that they get bad marks by it; that it brings them into trouble; but that it is really an evil, meriting the strictures with which the teacher visits it, is more than they believe. what deceives them is this. they call to mind the events of a particular hour. there was during that hour, according to their recollection, a general attention to study, and no special disorder; perhaps some three or four of the pupils noted for talking. this talking, too, may have been about the lesson, or at all events was not such as to distract very perceptibly the current of instruction. hence the inference that a moderate amount of talking, such as that was, is perfectly consistent with decorum and progress. so it is. but what is to secure this moderate amount? what right have you to talk that is not enjoyed by your neighbor? if one may talk, so may all; if one does it, unchecked, so will all, as you very well know. how is the teacher to know whether you are talking about the lesson, or about the last cricket-match? this is a perfectly plain question, and i press you to an answer. there is no practical medium between unlimited license to talk--against which you would yourself be the first to protest--and an entire prohibition. i put it to your conscience, whether you do not believe, were this rule strictly and in good faith observed, that the interests of the school, and your own interest, comfort, and honor, would be greatly promoted? is the inconvenience which this rule imposes so great, or your habit of self-indulgence so strong, that you cannot, or will not, forego a slight temporary gratification for so substantial and lasting a benefit? . you will avoid much of the difficulty of observing this rule, if you give heed to the next counsel which i have now to give, and that is, that you economize carefully your time in school. on this point some excellent and conscientious pupils occasionally err. they are very faithful in home preparation; very attentive at lectures; very industrious in discharging any set duty. but they have not yet learned the true secret of all economy, whether of time, money, or any other good,--namely, the knowing how to use well the odds and ends. take care of the pence, was franklin's motto. if you once have the secret of occupying usefully, in studious preparation, or in wise repetition, all those little intervals of interrupted instruction, which necessarily occur throughout the day, you will in the first place almost insure for yourself an entire freedom from demerit marks of every kind; you will secondly add materially to your intellectual progress; and, lastly, you will acquire a habit of the utmost value in every station and walk in life; and, depend upon it, the habits you acquire at school, are of all your acquisitions by far the most important. . but i would be false to my most settled convictions, were i to stop here. i have been a teacher of the young nearly all my life, and as the result of such a life-long professional experience, i have no conviction more abiding than this, that the _fear of god is the beginning of knowledge_. i believe that mental growth is just as directly the gift of god as bodily growth; that the healthy action of the mind is as much dependent on his good pleasure as the healthy action of the bodily functions. god has not only made one mind superior to another, but of two minds naturally equal, he can, at his sovereign pleasure, make one grow and expand more rapidly than another. as he can give symmetry and strength to your limbs, and clothe your features with beauty and grace, so he can make you quick of apprehension, clear of discernment, ready and tenacious to remember, delicate in your appreciation of what is beautiful. while, therefore, you are diligent in your studies, remember that the reward of your labor, after all, is the gift of god. you will neglect one essential means of intellectual progress, if you neglect prayer. i mean, not prayer in general, but specific prayer for god's blessing on your studies; prayer that god will bless your efforts to learn. keep your mind, while engaged in study, in a habitual state of expectancy, especially when grappling with intellectual difficulties, as if inwardly looking up for help to that all-knowing spirit, who alone, of all beings, acts directly on our spirits. i cannot doubt that one who studies in such a frame of mind, will advance in his intellectual progress more rapidly for it. i have a most assured conviction that prayer is a direct and important means of mental growth. not only will the fear of god restrain you from many of the usual hindrances to study, of which i have already spoken, but a truly devout spirit is the very best state of mind for learning, even for learning purely intellectual truth. there are other and higher motives, why you should cultivate, habitually, the fear of god. of these motives, it is not my office to speak now. they are often pressed upon your attention. the one point to which i direct you now, is the importance of such a state of mind to your making the best, and surest, and noblest kind of mental growth. if you would grow rapidly in knowledge, grow symmetrically and beautifully, with all your faculties in harmonious preparation and dependence, fear god. keep your spirit in habitual intercourse and communion with that almighty spirit who is the source of all knowledge and wisdom. in the school-room, at your desk, in your recitations, and your exercises of every kind, let the thought that the eye of a loving father is upon you, diffuse habitually a calm and sweet peace through your spirit, and depend upon it, you will not find your mental vision dimmed by moving in so pure and serene an atmosphere. there are no quickeners to knowledge equal to love, reverence, and earnest prayer. let me, in conclusion, tender you my best wishes for your success in the career now before you. that success depends, in no small degree, upon the feeling and spirit with which you begin. only summon up your mind to a serious and determined resolution at the outset; aim high; do not flinch at self-denial; rise above the unworthy suspicion that this or that teacher is unfair to you; resist the disposition to shirk those studies that you find disagreeable or difficult; keep clear of every kind and degree of trickery; come straight up to a full and strict compliance with every rule; lay your plans to occupy usefully each golden moment of leisure; cultivate a constant sense of dependence upon god for success in study: and your success will be as certain as is the wish for it, which i once more, most respectfully and affectionately, tender you. * * * * * . _to a young lady on leaving a boarding-school._ you are about to leave school. the occasion is one certainly that cannot fail to awaken reflection. i suppose that no young lady, who had been at a place of education as long as you have been here, ever left it without serious thought. the excitement of the examination, the busy whirl of preparation for leaving, even the exhilarating anticipations of home-going, cannot entirely shut out from your mind the sober truth that the end of school-days is only the beginning of another career,--a career, the issue of which you can neither foresee, nor can you be indifferent to it. let us talk a little about this. the day on which a young man ends his college course is called, by an apparent misnomer, "commencement" day; that is, the day of commencing, or beginning. i understand very well that the name has a definite historical origin,--that in the old english colleges, from which our american colleges were modelled, the young man, on this day, begins his career as a bachelor of arts. his academical rank "commences" and dates from this point. but there would be a beautiful appropriateness in the term, even if it had no such special historical origin. the exit from the curriculum of the college or school, is, in truth, only the entrance into a more extended course. when your studies are nominally ended, they have really only begun. the longer you live, the more will you understand that the period of school-going is not the only, or even the main time of learning. the more thoroughly you have been taught here, the more certainly will you be a learner hereafter. i want no better test of the character of a school than the extent to which the idea prevails among its pupils and alumni, that it is a place for "finishing" one's studies. the idea is on a par with that of the young miss who reported that she had read through latin! there is, it is true, in this school, a definite curriculum of studies, and that curriculum you have honorably completed. you have just been received by public acknowledgment into the community of educated women. but you will be false to the honorable sisterhood, false, i am sure, to all the teachings you have received here, if you entertain for a moment the thought that no further intellectual acquisitions are before you. the branches which you have learned thus far are chiefly valuable to you for the power they have given you to make still further improvement. the studies pursued at school, and during the period of youth, are mainly intended for promoting intellectual growth, for giving us power, for perfecting our mental machinery. our real acquisitions come afterward. i speak, of course, of those who occupy the higher stations in society. to one who has to earn his bread by mere bodily toil, the few studies for which he has leisure in youth, must, of course, be such as are directly serviceable in his calling. but to those who claim to belong to the educated portion of the community, school studies are of right directed more to the development of the mental and moral powers, than to positive acquisition. your instructors return you to your friends and your home with a mind enlarged, with a taste refined, with a judgment corrected, ready to take your place and act well your part, as an educated woman. but remember, she is not an educated woman, who knows no more this year than she did last. true education is growth, and it never stands still. the tree which has ceased to grow, has begun to decay. this, then, is the one thought that i would have you take away with you from school. give no place to the idea that henceforth books and study and elegant culture are to be laid aside. it would be a dishonor to your school, and a mistake of the first magnitude for yourself. perhaps you will appreciate this point more adequately, if you will turn your thoughts inward for a moment, and reflect upon the change which has been quietly going on in your own self and during your residence here. one whose occupation calls him almost daily to communicate his ideas to young persons, either by formal address, or by more familiar ways, feels to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other person can, the change to which i refer. i mean that increased quickness of intellectual apprehension produced by a judicious and symmetrical course of study. let me give you an instance. it fell to my lot, not long since, to address a school containing three hundred young ladies, all boarders, all over seventeen years of age. they were the best audience i ever had. among them was not one, who did not appear to be intelligent and thoughtful, and with a mind more or less disciplined. but there were perceptible differences among them, and it is to this point that i would direct your attention. they were divided into four distinct classes, having attended the school severally one, two, three, and four years, and they were arranged before me in the order of their seniority as classes. the discourse was long and didactic, and portions of it were not easy to follow, containing a discussion of a rather abstruse point in mental philosophy. now it seemed to me, on concluding the address, that i could have gone through that assembly, and marked with tolerable accuracy, class by class, just where each class ended and another class began, simply by what i had read in the faces of my young auditors. it was written as plainly upon those upturned faces, as was the discourse itself upon the manuscript before me. those who had been four years in the school, undoubtedly learned manifold more from the exercise than the junior classes did. i could see it in the delivery of every paragraph. such is the uniform result of a proper course of study. it enables the student to grasp new truths with increased ease and readiness. we, who are teachers, feel this the moment we undertake to communicate our thoughts to an audience. the consequence is, we involuntarily measure what has been done educationally for a class of young persons, by the development which has been given to their powers,--by the manifest facility which they have gained for making further gains. that young woman is best educated who is best prepared to learn. let me, then, renew the appeal to your own consciousness. think for a moment upon the change which has been wrought in your own self during your career here. compare your present self with that other self that you may remember some three or four years back. how much more you can accomplish now than you could then! how much more clearly you can follow out a train of reasoning! how much more easily you can compass an argument! how much more you can enjoy what is beautiful! how much more quickly and accurately you can remember! how much more you can command your attention! whence this change, and what does it purport? it means that you are educated. you have now a degree of mental power that you had not then. your own consciousness tells you that you are now just in the condition to enter upon your harvest. the field is before you. you are girded for the work. and will you now indolently lay aside the sickle, and let the golden grain fall to the ground ungathered? could there be a more egregious mistake? last week, i saw from my window two parent birds tempting their young fledglings from the nest. day by day, week by week, i had seen the child-birds growing and gaining strength. their muscles were now well developed, their bodies were clothed with feathers, they had learned to use their wings,--they could fly. would it not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were, contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to soar? and will _you_ be content to remain forever only a fledgling, satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually using the wings which these years of honorable industry have given you? some of your sex are willing to admit the force of this argument when applied to men. a man, after graduating, is expected of course to continue his studies. his whole profession is one continued study. but somehow, it is thought, this truth does not hold good for women. let me hope that _you_ at least will not harbor such a notion. whatever may be said of "women's rights," one right certainly, and one duty, is to keep yourself abreast of the other sex in continued mental growth and culture, and in general intelligence. if you would awaken true respect in my sex, and i hold it a not unworthy ambition, you must in this matter do as we do, at least as those of us do who are worth your consideration at all. you must perseveringly, every year, add to your intellectual acquisitions. you must continue steadily to grow in knowledge and mental power. do not cease your studies, because you have ceased going to school. manage to have some elegant accomplishment or acquisition always in hand. a woman who is wise in this matter, never passes her prime. i speak not, of course, of the decrepitude of old age and of the decay of the faculties. but so long as the faculties remain unimpaired, a woman may become, and should aim to become, increasingly attractive, as she advances in years. poets sing of sweet sixteen. let me assure you, a woman may be charming at sixty. mrs. madison even at seventy was the most attractive woman in washington. in society, how soon one feels the difference between a person who reads, and one who does not read. two ladies may be of the same age. they may dress alike. they may have the same advantages of person. they may move in the same social circle. yet you will not have been ten minutes in their society, though the conversation has been on only the most common topics of the day, before you will feel that the one woman, though at thirty or forty, is still only a superannuated school-girl, with even less resources than when she left the seminary, while the other is a delightful companion for persons of any age, with ready knowledge for whatever turn the conversation may take, and so abounding in resources as not even to be open to the temptation of making a display of them. the one can talk only so long as the conversation turns on dress, gossip, or the discussion of private character. in listening to the talk of such a woman, you hardly hear a sentence which is not based upon personalities. her mind has not been fed and nurtured from day to day with beautiful and noble thoughts, with history and science and general knowledge. she may be amiable. she may have personal beauty. but you find her empty and vapid, and you weary of her, in spite of the very best intentions of being interested. how different the woman who, in spite of social exactions, and even of accumulating domestic duties, and of the time-consuming tax of dress, still keeps her mind fresh and growing, by means of reading and culture,--who is ever adding to her stores of knowledge some new science, to her varied skill some new attainment,--who has ever in hand some new book. it is true, indeed, that some ladies are blessed with more leisure for this purpose than others. but i fear it is not a question of more and less. it is too much a question of some and _none_. i hold that every woman is entitled to have, and by proper determination she may have, _some_ time for personal improvement. remember, we have duties to ourselves, as well as to others, and we have no duty to ourselves more sacred than this,--to rescue from our time some portion for the purpose of making ourselves more worthy of regard. to undertake to suggest what particular studies you should pursue, in this larger school to which you are now admitted, would lead me into a train of remark entirely too extended. one single practical suggestion may perhaps be pardoned. do not willingly relinquish the acquisitions already made. they are to you the true foundations for future improvement. you have fairly entered upon several important fields in the domain of science. you are familiar with the elements of natural philosophy, chemistry, botany, physiology, mental philosophy, rhetoric, and with the foundations of mathematical science. my advice is that in coming years you give to each of these branches, and of whatever else you have studied here, a stated systematic review. you have some skill in drawing and painting. let not so graceful an accomplishment die out from your fingers. you excel in music. i need not say, if you would retain this excellence, you must give time to practice and study. so, whatever talent or attainment you now have, let it be your fixed purpose not to let it pass from your possession. keep what you have, whatever else you may fail to do. to this end, as i said before, give to each of your school studies an occasional well-considered review. you will then always have in your mind certain fixed points, to which the miscellaneous knowledge picked up in your general reading will adhere, and around which it will accumulate in organized form. new studies, too, will naturally affiliate with the old, and will be easy and pleasant just in proportion as you keep the knowledge that you now have, fresh and bright. besides this general advice, there is one accomplishment in particular, which i would earnestly recommend to you, as i am in the habit of doing to all of your sex. cultivate assiduously the ability to read well. i stop to particularize this, because it is a thing so very much neglected, and because it is so very elegant, charming, and lady-like an accomplishment. where one person is really interested by music, twenty are pleased with good reading. where one person is capable of becoming a skilful musician, twenty may become good readers. where there is one occasion suitable for the exercise of musical talent, there are twenty for that of reading. the culture of the voice necessary for reading well, gives a delightful charm to the same voice in conversation. good reading is the natural exponent and vehicle of all good things. it is the most effective of all commentaries upon the works of genius. it seems to bring dead authors to life again, and makes us sit down familiarly with the great and good of all ages. did you ever notice what life and power the holy scriptures have, when well read? have you ever heard of the wonderful effects produced by elizabeth fry among the hardened criminals of newgate, by simply reading to them the parable of the prodigal son? princes and peers of the realm, it is said, counted it a privilege to stand in those dismal corridors, among felons and murderers, merely to share with them the privilege of witnessing the marvellous pathos which genius, taste, and culture could infuse into that simple story. what a fascination there is in really good reading! what a power it gives one! in the hospital, in the chamber of the invalid, in the nursery, in the domestic and the social circle, among chosen friends and companions, how it enables you to minister to the amusement, the comfort, the pleasure of dear ones, as no other art or accomplishment can. no instrument of man's devising can reach the heart, as does that most wonderful instrument, the human voice. it is god's special gift and endowment to his chosen creatures. fold it not away in a napkin. if you would double the value of all your other acquisitions; if you would add immeasurably to your own enjoyment, and to your power of promoting the enjoyment of others, cultivate with incessant care this divine gift. no music below the skies is equal to that of pure, silvery speech from the lips of a man or woman of high culture. * * * * * . _to a pupil on entering a normal school._ you have entered upon a new and untried path. as one having been often over this way, and well acquainted with the features of the country before you, its lights and shadows, its roses and its thorns, its safe walks and its hidden pitfalls, i desire to talk with you a while before you enter upon the untried scene. . first of all let me say to you, we give you a most hearty welcome. we are glad to see you here, and we tender to you in advance a warm and ready sympathy in the many little worries, annoyances, and discouragements that surely await you. for myself i may truly say, that, outside of my own home, i have no greater happiness than to be among my pupils, and few things could pain me more than to believe that any one who had been for any considerable time my pupil would not almost unconsciously claim me as a friend; and it is an unceasing well-spring of joy for me to know that among your companions are many who, in time of trouble or difficulty or anxiety of any kind, would come to the principal of the school, as sure of sympathy as if going to their own mother. this freedom of intercourse between teachers and their pupils, this mutual exchange of confidence on one side and of sympathy on the other, is a source of good and a source of pleasure, which neither you nor we, my young friend, can afford to forego; and if in the expression of this thought i have indulged in a rather unseemly use of the first person singular, it is not because i would claim for myself anything peculiar in this matter, but because, from my years and my position, i can perhaps, better than my associates, afford to speak out thus the inward promptings of the heart. we _all_ give you the right hand of fellowship, and trust it will not be many weeks, or days even, before you shall feel that you have here a home as well as a school, friends as well as teachers. . a very common feeling at the beginning of a course of study, is a feeling of discouragement. nearly all the studies are new, and you enter upon each with fresh eagerness. now, it is in the nature of every study while it is new, to seem boundless. under the guiding hand of a skilful teacher, its limits and capabilities are stretched out in one direction and another, interminable vistas spread out in the distance, and portentous difficulties rise up before the imagination, until the mind is bewildered. there is not one, of the formidable lists of studies before you, that might not of itself, so great are its capabilities, occupy your whole time. when you find yourself called to grapple at once with four or five such studies, to measure yourself with competitors, many of whom have had opportunities of preparation greatly superior to your own, and in the presence of teachers to whom the whole subject is as familiar and as plain as the alphabet, and when, in addition, the methods of recitation are for the most part new and strange, you are very apt to become discouraged, to feel that you shall never learn to recite in the manner required, that you can never master the difficulties before you. this feeling arises most frequently in the best class of minds, those most conscientious in regard to duty and most capable of comprehending the full length and breadth and depth of a subject. the shallow and the trifling are never troubled with the kind of difficulties now under consideration. i address myself to you, my young friend, because i know you have come here with an earnest purpose, with a mind acute enough to see something of the vast work before you, and i say to you, as one who has had large experience in conducting other pilgrims over the same track, never lose heart. difficulties which now seem insurmountable, will gradually disappear; subjects which now seem impenetrable, will soon lighten up. did you never enter a room in the dark? at first the apartment is a universal blank. after a while, as your eyes become adjusted to the place, one article after another of the furniture becomes outlined to the vision, until at length, especially if approaching day lends some additional rays of light, the whole scene stands out perfectly defined. so it is in entering upon a new study. many a passage in it will seem to you at first a worse than serbonian bog--a cave of impenetrable and undistinguishable darkness. but draw not back. look steadily on. light will come in time. your power of seeing will, with every new trial, receive adjustment and growth, and you will in the end see with full and open vision where now you have only dim glimpses and guesses. do not be discouraged, therefore, if at first you fail, or seem to yourself to fail, in almost every recitation you undertake. what seems impossible to-day, will be only next to impossible to-morrow, and only very difficult the day after. your failures are often only the proofs that you have a glimpse at least of something below the surface of things. a discouraged pupil is never a source of anxiety to me. it is only the self-confident and over-wearing that are hopeless. . i have spoken of recitations. let me urge you to form some definite idea of what a recitation is, and what kind of a recitation you, as a pupil of a normal school, should aim to make. and first of all, on this point, let me say, the mere answering of questions, and especially, the mere response of yes and no to questions, is not reciting,--assuredly not such reciting as is to fit you for the office of a teacher. and, in the next place, let me say, that repeating verbatim the words of the book, is not the method of recitation at which you should aim. i do not agree with those who would dissuade you entirely from cultivating the faculty and enriching the stores of memory. not only memory, in its general exercise, but a purely verbal memory, is important. in your lessons, are many things, rules, definitions, and so forth, that should be learned with the most literal exactness, and should be so fixed in the memory that they will come at your bidding, in any place, at any moment. there are, too, in some of your books, passages from noble authors, which furnish food and nourishment to the soul, and which the mind craves in the very form and lineaments of their birth--passages which are like nuggets of virgin gold, or coins from the mint of some great sovereign in the realms of thought. they form a part of your wealth, and you want them, neither clipped, nor defaced, nor alloyed, but with every word and point exactly as it came from the hand of the master. these precious gems of thought, the garnered wealth of the ages, will not be neglected by any one who is wise. treasure up in your intellectual storehouse as many of them as you can possibly compass, only with this proviso, be careful to select for this purpose the very best out of the great abundance that is before you, and make thorough work in what you do attempt to commit to memory. the act of memorizing will at once strengthen the faculty of memory itself, and will enrich you otherwise. by all means, therefore, learn by heart the leading definitions and rules of your text-books, and choice passages from all famous authors. but do not attempt in this way to commit to memory, or to recite verbatim, the pages of your history, geography, rhetoric, and so forth. such a practice would be a most unwise waste of your time, and would cause a weakening, rather than a strengthening, of your faculties. let me tell you exactly what i mean by reciting. your teacher goes to the board and, chalk in hand, explains to the class some point which they seem not to have apprehended. that is my idea of reciting. first get thorough possession of the thoughts or facts of the lesson, and then, imagining the class and the teacher to be ignorant of the subject, explain it to them, just as you will expect to do when the time comes that you will have a class of your own to instruct. it will aid you in preparing thus to recite a lesson, if in your rooms you will go over it aloud to each other, you and your room-mate, taking alternate portions. such a method of preparation will doubtless require some time. but one lesson so prepared will be worth more to you than a whole week of study conducted in the ordinary manner. remember, that in a normal school your object is, not merely to get knowledge, but to learn how to communicate what you have learned. first then go over a topic till you are sure you understand it. then go over it again and again until you can recite readily and perfectly every part of it, in its order. then practise yourself in telling it in your own words, aloud, if possible, to somebody else, until you can make the narration or explanation continuously, from beginning to end, and without the possibility of being thrown out or confused by any amount of interruptions. then at length are you prepared to recite. is this standard of recitation too high? is it not what every one of your teachers does daily, and what you yourself will have to do the very first time you take your position as a teacher of others? . this leads me by a natural transition to the subject of _study_. you need to learn how to study, as much as you need to learn how to recite. endeavor then to get some definite idea in your mind of what it is really to study. mere reading is not study. muttering the words over in a low, gurgling tone, or letting them glide in a soft, half-audible ripple upon your lips, is not study. going over the lesson in a listless, dreamy way, one eye on the book and one eye ready for whatever is going on in other parts of the room, is not study. study is work. study is agony. the whole soul must be roused, its every energy put forth, with a fixed, rapt attention, like that of a man struggling with a giant. study, worthy of the name, forgets for the time every thing else, excludes every thing else, is incapable of being diverted by any thing else, the whole internal and external man being bent upon making just one thing its own. such study of course soon exhausts the energies. it cannot be long protracted, nor need it be protracted. take rest in the season of rest; but, when you study, study with all your might. throw your whole soul into it. one hour of such study accomplishes more than whole days of listless poring over books. and, remember, you cannot study in this manner by merely willing to do it. it is an art, requiring training and practice, and thorough mental discipline. you might as well, on seeing the writing-master executing those marvels of penmanship, or the drawing-teacher with deft fingers limning with ease forms of grace and beauty, resolve to go forthwith to the board and do the same thing, as expect, by a mere _sic volo_, to become a student. you are here to learn how to study, and the art will come to you only by slow progress, and after many trials. give up the illusion that absolute seclusion and silence are necessary to study. i do not say that they are not at times desirable. but they do not of themselves generate earnest thought. the vacant mind, that has not yet learned to think, is when thus left to solitude and stillness, quite as likely to go a wool-gathering, or to fall asleep, as to wrestle with some hard uninviting train of thought. the appliances and the invitations to mental application, if we have really learned to study, must be mainly in ourselves, not in our surroundings. besides, the greater part of the actual thinking and study, that has to be done by those in professional life, that will have to be done by you, when you enter upon the practice of your profession as a teacher, must be done in circumstances not of your own choosing, just as time and opportunity may offer, by snatches, and at odd intervals, and often in the midst of distracting sights and sounds. i venture to say that three fourths of the graduates of this school, who are now teaching, have no opportunity for daily study and preparation for the duties of the school-room, except that afforded by a seat in the evening in the common sitting-room of the family, surrounded by children that are not always models of behavior, and within sight and hearing of all the petty details of household life. it is not therefore in itself undesirable that a part at least of your study at school should be performed in a common room, where there are some temptations to be resisted, some distractions to be ignored. acquiring the ability to study without distraction in the presence of others and in the midst even of confusion and noise, is as important to you as is the learning how to think aloud, in the presence of a class, which i have defined to be the true nature of a recitation. the ability to study and the ability to recite are intimately correlated, and the symptoms of both are unmistakable to the practised eye and ear. i know just as well, by a glance of the eye on entering a study-room, what pupils are making intellectual growth, as i do on entering the class-room and listening to the recitations. one might as well feign to be in a fever, as to feign study. nothing but the thing itself can assume its appearance. . i approach my next subject of remark with some hesitation. yet on no point, in the whole theory of mental action, have i a more fixed and assured conviction. perhaps i may explain my meaning better, if i introduce it with one or two comparisons. action of every kind, mental or material, is to be aided or accelerated, if at all, by forces of the same kind with the primary force. if a certain amount of weight avoirdupois will not make the scale kick the beam, we may produce the effect by laying on the requisite number of additional pounds,--by adding force of the same kind with the original. if the flame of one candle does not produce the illumination required for a particular effort, the addition of a second or a third will. if we wish to increase the speed of a locomotive, we do not whistle to it, or whip it, or say "get up;" we add steam. if on the other hand we wish our horse to travel faster, we use a motive addressed to his nature. we appeal to his generosity, his pride, or his fear. so mental action is influenced and induced by forces of the same nature with itself. one mind influences powerfully another mind, working upon us often, too, by mysterious influences that elude analysis. the influence of mind upon mind, other things being equal, is in proportion to the degree of perfection in which these three conditions exist, to wit, the fulness of accord and sympathy between the minds that are brought into contact, the closeness of the contact, and the greatness and power of the influencing and controlling mind. these three points hardly need explanation or argument. nothing is more obvious than that a mind fully in sympathy with another, does by that very circumstance exercise an increased mental power on that other. in like manner we all feel daily how our minds are lifted up, enlarged, enlightened, strengthened, by intercourse with one of powerful intellect. and how often have we felt, when ourselves wishing to influence any one, particularly when wishing to influence one much younger and weaker than ourselves, that we might accomplish our ends the better, if we could only know certainly and exactly what he was thinking, if we could as it were actually get into the chamber of his soul. this indeed we can never do. we think sometimes that we come very near to each other. but after all we never touch. between my mind and yours, between yours and that of the most intimate friend you have in the world, there is a barrier, high as heaven, deep as hell, impenetrable as adamant. thus far can we come and no farther. we can never enter into the soul of any human being. no human being can ever enter into ours. yet, my dear pupil, did it never occur to you, that there is one mind, and that a mind of infinitely great and transcendent power, to which there is no such barrier, and that this transcendent, all-knowing, all-powerful mind, is continually in direct contact with the very essence of your mind? can i influence your thinking faculties, and cannot the infinite god, who made those faculties? can he who gave our bodies all their power of growth and strength, not give growth and strength to our minds? i do not profess to understand how the divine mind acts upon the human mind. i cannot always understand even how one human mind acts upon another. but of the fact i make no more question, than i do of the powers of flame, of steam, or of gravitation. and, as one set here to guide you in your mental progress, in all sober earnestness, i exhort you devoutly to invoke the aid of the holy ghost in the promotion of your studies--not merely to help you to use your acquisitions rightly, for his honor and the good of your kind, but to help you in making those acquisitions. if you would rise superior to discouragement, if you would acquire that mental discipline which is to enable you to study, and to recite and to teach in the very best and highest manner, pray. call mightily upon god the holy ghost, who is after all the great educator and teacher of the human race. carry your feeble lamp to the great fountain of light and radiance. put your heart into full accord and sympathy with that of your dear elder brother. wrestle mightily with god in secret, as one that feels the burden of a great want. thus, my dear pupil, will you best fit yourself for the duties of a student and of a teacher. for, believe me, there is sound philosophy as well as religion, in the utterance of the wise man, "the fear of the lord is the beginning of knowledge." surely that man is a fool, who in cultivating mind, whether his own or that of another, neglects to invoke the aid of the infinite mind. xxix. an argument for common schools. the argument for popular education is familiar and trite, and yet it needs to be occasionally re-stated and enforced. there is no community in which there is not a considerable number of persons grossly and dangerously ignorant, and there are many communities in which the majority of the people are in this condition. there is no community in which the importance of general education is over-estimated; there are unfortunately many communities in which education is held to be the least important of public interests. a brief discussion of the subject, therefore, can never be entirely out of place. before proceeding to the direct argument, let me notice some of the most common objections. it is a not uncommon opinion, that the business of education should be left, like other kinds of business, to the laws of trade. it is said if a carpenter is wanted in any community, or a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a lawyer, or a doctor, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, lawyers, and doctors will make their appearance. if a store is wanted, a store will spring up. why not a school-house? those who use this argument forget the essential difference between the two classes of wants to be supplied. all men equally feel the distress, if naked, or hungry, or sick, or suffering from any material want. the poor man, no less than the rich, feels the pinchings of hunger, and will exert himself to remedy the evil. the sick man, even more than the well, appreciates the value of medicine and the necessity of a physician. not so in the matter of knowledge. a man must himself be educated, to understand the value of education. there are exceptions, of course. yet it is substantially true, that the want of education is not one of those felt and pinching necessities that compel men's attention, and that consequently may be left to shift for themselves. a man who has himself enjoyed the blessing of a good education, expects to provide schools for his children, as much as he expects to provide for them food and clothing. the wants of their minds are to him pressing realities, as much as are the wants of their bodies. not so with the ignorant and debased neighbors, who live within stone's throw of his dwelling. they, from their own experience, know nothing better, and are quite content, both for themselves and their children, to live on in the debased condition in which we see them. if these wretched creatures are ever moved to seek a higher style of living and being, the movement must originate outside of themselves. it is a case in which the man of higher advantages must think and act for those below him. it is a case in which people have a pressing need without knowing it, and in which consequently the laws of supply and demand do not meet the emergency. another common opinion on this subject is that private enterprise is adequate to meet the want. private enterprise in education is not indeed to be discarded. where the community as a whole, in its organized capacity, will do nothing, let individuals do what they can. in such cases, let those who appreciate the advantages of education, concert measures for the establishment of schools and the employment of teachers, and for inducing parents who are indifferent to send their children. by these private efforts, the community may be gradually awakened to the importance of the subject, and so be induced to take it up on their own account. but private benevolence is not sufficient for so great a work. private benevolence besides is apt to be fitful. it is at best subject to interruption by death and by reverses of fortune, while the cause is one which especially demands steadiness and continuity. the means for educating a community or a city should no more be subject to interruption, than the means of lighting it, or of supplying it with water. the argument for depending upon private enterprise for devising and providing the means for popular education, would apply equally well to matters of police, and to the protection of property. the strong-armed and the sagacious can take care of themselves. the stout-hearted and the good, by due concert and combination, could keep criminals in some check, even in a country where there were no courts of justice, or prisons, or detective police. but this is not the ordinary or the best mode of accomplishing the end, nor could it in any case be thoroughly efficient. the restraint and punishment of crime belong to society as a whole, in its sovereign capacity. to the same society belongs the duty of seeing that its members do not fall into degrading ignorance and vice. god, in ordaining human society, had something higher in view than merely providing for the punishment of crime. our heavenly father would have his children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into which they have fallen. without such an interposition on the part of society as a whole, the work will not be done. the mass of the people will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as such does not provide the means of education and general enlightenment. it is often urged against common schools, that they tend to impair parental obligation. let us look this objection fairly in the face. the argument is stated as follows. if the community, in its organic capacity as a civil government, provides systematically for the instruction of the young, the system, just so far as it is successful and complete, does away with the necessity for any other provision. the parent, finding this work done to his hands, feels no necessity of looking after it himself, and so gradually loses all sense of obligation on the subject. such a result, it is contended, is in contravention of the plainest dictates of nature and the most positive teachings of religion, both nature and religion requiring it as a primary duty of every parent to give his child a suitable education. in meeting this objection, the friends of common schools agree with the objector to the fullest extent in asserting the imperative, universal, irrepealable duty of the parent to educate his own child. the duty is not the less binding on the parent, because a like duty, covering the same point, rests also on the community. the interests involved are so momentous, that god in his wise ordination has given them a double security. it is a case in which two distinct parties are both separately required to see one and the same thing done. it is like taking two indorsers to a note. the obligation of one indorser is not impaired, because another man equally with himself is bound for payment if a child grows up in ignorance and vice, while god will undoubtedly hold the parent responsible, he will also not hold the community guiltless. both parties will be guilty before him, both parties will be punished. a man is bound to maintain a certain amount of cleanliness about his habitation. if he fails to do so, and if in consequence of this failure the atmosphere around him becomes tainted and malarious, he and his will suffer. disease and death will visit his abode. but the consequences will not end here. the infection will extend. the whole community will be affected by it. the whole community, equally with the individual, are bound to see that the cause of the infection is removed. the infection will not spare the community because the individual has generated it, nor will it spare the individual because the community has failed to remove it. each party has a duty and a peril of its own in regard to the same matter. the fact is, individuals and the community are so bound together, that on many points their obligations lie in coincident lines. the matter of education is one of these points. god has ordained the parental relation, and has implanted the parental affections, for this very reason, among others, that the faculties of the helpless young immortal may have due training and development,--that this development may not be left to chance, like that of a worthless weed, but may have the protection and guardianship which are the necessary birthright of every rational creature brought into being by the voluntary act of another. but god has ordained society also for this same end, among others, namely, that his rational creatures may have a competent agency, bound by the laws and necessities of its own welfare to make adequate provision for the instruction and education of every human being. the one duty does not conflict with the other. the one obligation does not impair the other. both lie in coincident lines. but, as a question of fact, is it true that common schools impair the sense of obligation in the minds of parents in regard to the duty of educating their children? i affirm the fact to be exactly the contrary. those communities in which there are no common schools, and in which the people generally are in a state of deplorable ignorance, are precisely those in which the sense of parental obligation on this point is at the lowest ebb. go to a region of country in which not one man in ten can read and write, and you will find that not one man in ten will care whether his children are taught to read and write. those communities on the contrary which have the best and most complete system of common schools, and in which this system has prevailed longest and has taken most complete hold of the public mind, are the very ones in which individuals will be found most keenly alive to the importance of the subject, and in which a parent will be regarded as a monster, if his children are allowed to grow up uneducated. the objection, therefore, has no foundation either in fact or in reason. there is moreover another consideration not to be overlooked. in this matter of education, it is after all but a small part which the school does for a child. the main part of the child's education always takes place at home. the teacher is at best only an aid to the parent, supplementing the influences of the home and the street. the child is taking lessons continually from the father and mother, whether they mean it or not. every teacher knows how much more rapidly a child improves at school, whose parents are well educated, and how difficult it is to teach a child who at home lives in an atmosphere of profound ignorance. the mind of the one whose home is a region of darkness and intellectual torpor, will be dwarfed and distorted, no matter what the efforts of its teachers. the mind of the one, on the contrary, whose home is the abode of intellectual light, warmth, and sunshine, will have a corresponding growth and expansion at school. there is a continual unconscious tuition, good or bad, received from the very atmosphere of the family. besides this, there is a great deal of direct, active duty to be performed by the parent in the education of the child. no matter how good the school, or how faithful the teacher, there always remains much to be done by the parent, even in regard to the school duties. the parent must see that lessons are prepared, that the child is properly provided with books, that the meal times and the other arrangements of the household are such as to help forward the child's studies. there are a hundred things which the father and mother can do to help or to hinder the work of the school. a child, whose parents give proper home supervision over his studies, will, other things being equal, make twice the progress of one whose parents give the matter no attention. the community, therefore, in establishing common schools, does by no means take the whole matter of education out of the hands of the parent. on the contrary, it still leaves with him the most important and necessary of the duties connected with the education of his children, while it gives him aids for the performance of the remaining duties, which no private means can ordinarily supply. i come, however, to a much graver objection. it is urged against common schools, as organized in this country, that religious instruction is excluded from them, and that without this element they only tend to make educated villains. education, it is said, without the restraining and sanctifying influences of religion, only puts into the hands of the multitude greater power for evil. if this objection is valid, the most enlightened and christian communities of the world have made, and are making, an enormous mistake. yet the objection is urged with seriousness by men whose purity of motive is above question, and whose personal character gives great weight to their opinions. the objection originated in england, where all attempts to make legislative provision for the education of the common people have been steadily resisted by a potential party in the established church. the arguments put forth in the english religious journals have been reproduced in the journals here, and have in many instances awakened the apprehensions of serious-minded persons. it is worth while, therefore, to give the subject some distinct consideration. in the first place, the facts are not exactly as stated by those making the objection. though little direct religious instruction may be given in the common school, there is usually a large amount of religious influence. a great majority of the teachers of our common schools are professing christians. very many of them are among our most active sabbath-school teachers. now a truly godly man or woman, at the head of a school, though never speaking a word directly on the subject of religion, yet by the power of a silent, consistent example, exerts a continual christian influence. in the second place, as a matter of fact, direct religious teaching is not entirely excluded from our public schools. i think, it by no means holds that prominent position in the course of study which it should hold. but it is not entirely excluded. the bible, with very rare exceptions, is read daily in all our common schools. it is appealed to as ultimate authority in questions of history and morals. it is quoted for illustration in questions of taste. it is in many schools a text-book for direct study. in the third place, nine out of ten of the children of the week-day school attend the sabbath-school. the sabbath-school supplements the instructions of the week-day school. the case, therefore, is not that of an education purely intellectual. moral and religious instruction accompanies the instruction in worldly knowledge. the sabbath-school, the church, and the family, by their combined and ceaseless activities, infuse into our course of elementary education a much larger religious ingredient than a stranger might suppose, who should confine his examination to a mere inspection of our common schools, or to the reading of the annual reports of our educational boards. but apart from all these considerations, taking the question in its naked form, is it true that mere intellectual education has the tendency alleged? i do not believe it. the constitution of the human mind gives no warrant for such an inference. recorded, indisputable facts, overwhelmingly disprove it. so far is it from being true that the mere diffusion of knowledge has a tendency to make men knaves and infidels, i believe the very opposite to be true. knowledge is the natural ally of religion. to hold otherwise, is to disparage and dishonor religion--to imply, if not to say, that ignorance is the mother of devotion. there is an inborn antagonism between the intellectual and the sensual nature of man. if you give to the intellect no development, you leave the senses as the ruling power. we see this strikingly illustrated in the idiotic, who are for the most part disgustingly sensual. among a population grossly ignorant and uneducated, sensualism prevails in its most appalling forms. the man is a sensualist, simply because he knows no higher pleasures. he is degraded, because he has no motives to be otherwise. he is barely above a brute. the amount of crime, of the coarsest and most debasing character, among the uneducated peasantry of england, is almost incredible. here is a description of an english peasant of the present day, given by a competent unimpeached witness, himself an englishman. i quote from a work on "the social condition and education of the people of england," by joseph kay, esq., of trinity college, cambridge, who was commissioned by the senate of the university to travel for the purpose of examining into the social condition of the poorer classes. says mr. kay: "you cannot address an english peasant, without being struck with the intellectual darkness which surrounds him. there is neither speculation in his eye nor intelligence in his countenance. his whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man. he is wanting too in the erect and independent bearing of a man. as a class, our peasants have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense. in nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. about one half of our poor can neither read nor write, have never been in any school, and know little, or positively nothing, of the doctrines of the christian religion, of moral duties, or of any higher pleasures than beer-drinking and spirit-drinking, and the grossest sensual indulgence. they live precisely like brutes, to gratify, so far as their means allow, the appetites of their uncultivated bodies, and then die, to go they have never thought, cared, or wondered whither. brought up in the darkness of barbarism, they have no idea that it is possible for them to attain any higher condition; they are not even sentient enough to desire, with any strength of feeling, to change their situation; they are not intelligent enough to be perseveringly discontented; they are not sensible to what we call the voice of conscience; they do not understand the necessity of avoiding crime, beyond the mere fear of the police and the jail; they have unclear, indefinite, and undefinable ideas of all around them; they eat, drink, breed, work, and die; and while they pass through their brute-like existence here, the richer and more intelligent classes are obliged to guard them with police and standing armies, and to cover the land with prisons, cages, and all kinds of receptacles for the perpetrators of crime." surely it must be some hallucination of mind, which leads men to suppose that the diffusion of knowledge among such a population, even though it be only scientific and intellectual knowledge, can have any natural or general tendency adverse to religion and morals. apart, however, from speculation, and as a pure question of fact, the recorded statistics of crime point unmistakably the other way. criminal records the world over prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the overwhelming majority of crimes are committed by persons deplorably ignorant. intellectual education, therefore, i contend, even when deprived of its natural ally and adjunct, religious training, has no natural tendency to produce knaves and villains. on the contrary, it is a most efficient corrective and restraint of the evil and debasing tendencies of human nature. if the intellect is not so high a region in man's constitution as the moral powers, which i readily grant, it is at least above the mere sensual part, in which vice and crime have their chief spring and aliment. the question fortunately is one susceptible of a direct appeal to facts. who are the men and women that people our jails and prisons? are they persons of education, or are they in the main persons deplorably ignorant? what is the record of criminal statistics on this point? i will quote a few of these statistics, from a great mass of similar evidence lying before me. out of , persons committed for crime in england and wales, during a series of years, , , or more than per cent., are reported as uneducated, either entirely unable to read and write, or able to do so only very imperfectly; , could read and write, but not fluently; and only (_less than one half per cent. of the whole_) were what we call educated persons. in nine consecutive years, beginning with the year , only educated females were brought to the bar of criminal justice in england and wales, out of , , females then living in that part of the united kingdom; and in the year , out of the same population, not one educated female was committed for trial. in a special commission, held in , to try those who had been guilty of rioting and disturbance in the manufacturing districts, out of thus tried, could neither read nor write, could read only, could read and write imperfectly, could read and write well, and only one had received superior instruction. in , in counties of england and wales, with a population of , , , there were convicted of crime only educated persons, or one for every , inhabitants. in other counties, with a population of , , , the records furnished _not one convict_ who had received more than the merest elements of instruction. in , in english counties, with a population of , , , there were convicted only instructed persons, or one to every , inhabitants, while the remaining counties and the whole of wales, with a population of , , , did not furnish one single conviction of a person who had received more than the mere elements of education. in , out of a total of , persons taken into custody, , could neither read nor write, and , could barely read, and could write very imperfectly. in the four best taught counties of england, the number of schools being one for every seven hundred inhabitants, the number of criminal convictions was one a year for every inhabitants. in the four worst taught counties, the number of schools being one for every inhabitants, the number of convictions was one a year for every inhabitants. that is, in one set of counties, the people were about twice as well educated as in the other, and one half as much addicted to crime. in other words, in proportion as the people were educated, were they free from crime. thrift and good morals usually keep pace with the spread of intelligence among the people. this has been the result in all those countries of europe where good common schools are maintained, as in iceland, norway, sweden, denmark, holland, belgium, and most of the german states. pauperism, with its attendant evils and crimes, is almost unknown in those countries, while in england, where the common people are worse educated than those of any protestant nation in the world, pauperism has become an evil which her wisest statesmen have given up as unmanageable. in , in addition to hundreds of persons assisted by charitable individuals, no less than , , paupers (_one out of every eight of the population!_) were relieved by the boards of guardians of the poor, at an expense from the public purse of nearly thirty millions of dollars. in our own country, the same pains have not been taken to collect statistics on this subject, because comparatively little controversy about it has existed here to call forth inquiry. we as a people have generally taken it for granted that popular education lessens crime and pauperism. still, facts enough have been recorded to show the same results here as elsewhere. when an educated villain is convicted, like monroe edwards or professor webster, the fact becomes so notorious by means of the press, that it is unconsciously multiplied in our imagination, and we think the instances more numerous than they really are. we never think of the scores of obscure villains that are convicted every week all the year round. a quotation or two from the facts which have been recorded, will be sufficient to satisfy us on this point. in the ohio penitentiary, out of inmates, nearly all were reported as ignorant, and as grossly so. in the auburn prison, new york, out of inmates, only could read and write. in the sing sing prison, no official record has been made on this point. but the rev. mr. luckey, for more than twenty years chaplain of the prison, is obliged by the prison regulations to superintend and read all the letters between the prisoners and their friends. in this manner he becomes personally acquainted with the condition of the convicts in regard to education. he reported a few months since to the writer of these pages, that while there are always some among the convicts who have been educated, yet the great mass of them are stolidly ignorant. there are usually between one and two hundred learning to read, and this does not include the half of those who are unable to read, as the attendance upon the class is voluntary, the accommodations are meagre, and most of the prisoners are indifferent to their own improvement. not five in a hundred can write otherwise than in the most clumsy and awkward manner, and with the grossest blunders in orthography, and not more than two in a hundred can write a sentence grammatically. out of the then in prison, only three were liberally educated, and two of these were foreigners. throughout the state of new york, in , the ratio of uneducated criminals to the whole number of uneducated persons was twenty-eight times as great as the ratio of educated inhabitants. in view of the facts which have been given, and which might be multiplied to almost any extent, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that mere intellectual education has some power to restrain men from the commission of crime. assuredly, ignorance and sin are natural adjuncts and allies. schools undoubtedly cost something. the community that undertakes to educate the masses, or the individual that undertakes to educate his children, must expect to have a serious bill to pay. it is a pernicious folly to inculcate the contrary. the advocate of popular education, who tries to persuade people into the experiment, under the assurance that the expense will be trifling, misleads his readers, and puts back the cause which he would fain put forward. but there is a most significant _per contra_ in the account, and on this there is no danger of dwelling too much. nothing is so costly as crime, and no preventive of crime is more efficient than education. schoolhouses are cheaper than jails, teachers and books are a better security than handcuffs and policemen. there are educated villains, it is true. but they are rare, and they attract the greater attention by the very fact of their rarity. but go into a prison, or a criminal court, or a police court, and see who they are that mainly occupy the proceedings of our expensive machinery of criminal justice. nine-tenths of those miserable creatures are in a state of most deplorable ignorance. degraded, sensual, with no knowledge of anything better than the indulgence of the lowest passions, without mental resources, or any avenue to intellectual enjoyment, they often resort to crime from sheer want of something better to do. when dr. johnson was asked, "who is the most miserable man?" his reply was, "the man who cannot read on a rainy day." there is profound meaning in the answer. the man who has been educated, who not only can read, but has acquired a taste for reading, and for reading of a proper kind, is rarely driven into low and debasing crime. he has resources within himself, which are a counterpoise to the incitements of his animal nature. his awakened intellect and conscience also make him understand more clearly the danger and guilt of a life of crime. many of the deeds which swell the records of our criminal courts spring from poverty, as every criminal lawyer well knows, and there is no remedy against extreme poverty so sure as education. the old adage says that knowledge is power. it is also wealth. a man with even an ordinary, common school education, can turn himself in a hundred ways, where a mere ignorant boor would be utterly helpless. the faculties are developed, ingenuity is quickened, the man's resources are enlarged. an educated man may be tempted to crime, but he is not driven into it, as hundreds are daily, by mere poverty, or by an intolerable hunger of the mind for enjoyment of some kind. schools, then, especially schools in which moral and religious truth is inculcated, are the most powerful means of lessening crime, and of lessening the costly and frightful apparatus of criminal administration. as schoolhouses and churches increase in the land, jails and prisons diminish. as knowledge is diffused, property becomes secure, and rises in value. a community, therefore, is bound to see that its members are properly educated, if for no other reason, in mere self-defence. the many must be educated, in order that the many may be protected. a great city is just as sacredly bound to provide for its teeming population the light of knowledge, as it is to provide material light for its streets. the one kind of illumination, equally with the other, is an essential part of its police. no matter what the cost, the dark holes and alleys must be flooded with the light of truth, before which the owls and bats and vampyres of society will be scattered to the winds. a great city without schools would be a hell,--a seething caldron of vice, impurity, and crime. no man of sound mind would choose such a place for the residence of himself and family, who had the means of living in any other place. if we could suppose two cities entirely equal in other respects, but in one of them a superior and costly system of free schools, while the other spent not a dollar upon schools, but depended solely upon the rigors of the law and the strong arm of avenging justice for restraining the ignorant and corrupt masses, can there be any doubt which city would be the safest and most desirable place of residence? whatever view of this subject may be taken in other countries, we in this country are shut up to the necessity of popular education. we at least have no choice. universal suffrage necessitates universal education. if we do not educate our people, educate universally, educate wisely and liberally, we can hardly expect to maintain permanently our popular institutions. the man's vote, who cannot read the names on the ballot which he throws into the box, counts just as much in deciding public affairs as yours, who are versed in statesmanship and political economy. he is a partner in the political firm. you can neither withdraw from the firm yourself, nor can you throw him out. in the absence of general education, this tremendous power of suffrage is something frightful to contemplate. "the greatest despotism on earth," says de tocqueville, "is an excited, untaught public sentiment; and we should hate not only despots, but despotism. when i feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, i care not to know who oppresses me; the yoke is not the easier, because it is held out to me by a million of men." the danger from this source is intensified by the immense immigration from abroad which is going on, and which bids fair very greatly to increase. the great majority of those who seek our shores, come here ignorant. with little knowledge of any kind, and with no knowledge whatever of the nature of republican institutions, these men, almost at once, are made sharers of the popular sovereignty, with all its tremendous powers of peace and war, order and anarchy, life and death. not to have a system of public education, by which these ignorant and dangerous masses shall be enlightened, and shall be assimilated to the rest, and to the better part, of the population, is simply suicidal. our national life hangs upon our common schools. besides this grave political consideration, affecting the interests of the entire body politic, and the question of the success and stability of our national institutions, there is another consideration coming home closely and individually to each man's personal interests. where the law of trial by jury prevails, every citizen, whether educated or ignorant, takes part in the administration of justice. twelve men, taken indiscriminately from the mass of the people, or if with any discrimination, taken more frequently from the lower walks of life than from the higher, are placed in a jury box to decide upon almost every possible question of human interests. the jury decides your fortune, your reputation. the jury says whether you live or die. go into a court of justice. are they light matters which those twelve men are to determine? look at the anxious faces of those whose estates, whose good name, whose worldly all hangs upon the intelligence of those twelve men, or of any one of them. what assurance have you, save that which comes from popular education, that these men will understand and do their duty? who would like to trust his legal rights or his personal safety to the verdict of a jury of neapolitan lazzaroni? in a few short years, the idle boys who are now prowling about the streets and alleys of our towns, the wharf-rats of our cities, will be a part of our jurymen. is it of no consequence to me, whether their minds shall be early trained and disciplined, so that they will be capable of following a train of argument, or of comprehending a statement of facts? how is it possible to administer justice with any degree of fairness and efficiency, where the majority of those who are to constitute the jurymen and the witnesses are stolidly ignorant? by common law, every man has a right to be tried by his peers. let law then provide that those shall, in some substantial sense, be my peers, on whose voice my all in life may depend. but let us recur once more to the economical part of the argument. when a community is taxed for the support of common schools, the question naturally rises among the taxpayers, is the system worth the cost? does the community, by the diffusion of knowledge and education, gain enough to counterbalance the large expense which such education involves? even if this question could not be answered in the affirmative, it would not follow that common schools should be dispensed with. common schools are needed as the best and cheapest protection against the crimes incident to an ignorant and degraded population. common schools are right and proper, because without them the majority of those created in the image of god will never attain to that noble manhood which is their rightful inheritance. but the argument will receive additional force, if it can be shown that general education increases the wealth of the community. that education does have this effect is evident, i think, from two independent lines of argument. first, an intelligent, educated man is capable individually of achieving greater material results than one who is ignorant. secondly, the general diffusion of intelligence through a community leads to labor-saving inventions, and thus increases its producing power. in regard to the first line of argument, some curious and instructive facts were collected a few years since by the late horace mann. his inquiries were directed to the efficiency of operatives in factories, a class of men who would seem to require as little general intelligence as any kind of laborers. it was found that, as a general rule, those operatives who could sign their names to their weekly receipts for money, were able to do one-third more work, and to do it better, than those who made their mark. nor is this at all to be wondered at. there is no kind of work, done by the aid of human muscle, that is purely mechanical. mind is partner in all that the body does. mind directs and controls muscle, and even in emergency gives it additional energy and power. no matter how simple the process in which an operative may be engaged, some cultivation of his mental powers is needed. without it he misdirects his own movements, and mistakes continually the orders of his superintending workman. a boy who has been to a good common school, and has had his mental activities quickened, and whose mind has been stimulated and roused by worthy motives, not only will be more industrious for it when he becomes a man, but his industry will be more effective. he will accomplish more, even as a day laborer, than the mere ignorant boor. when we come to any kind of skilled labor, the difference between the educated and the ignorant is still more apparent. an intelligent mechanic is worth twice as much as one ignorant and stupid. many years ago a very instructive fact on this point came under my own personal observation. a gentleman of my acquaintance had frequent need of the aid of a carpenter. the work to be done was not regular carpentry, but various odd jobs, alterations and adaptations to suit special wants, and no little time and materials were wasted in the perpetual misconceptions and mistakes of the successive workmen employed. at length a workman was sent who was a german, from the kingdom of prussia. after listening attentively to the orders given, and doing what he could to understand what his employer wanted, michael would whip out his pencil, and in two or three minutes, with a few rapid lines, would present a sketch of the article, so clear that any one could recognize it at a glance. it could be seen at once, also, whether the intention of his employer had been rightly conceived, and whether it was practicable. the consequence was, that so long as michael was employed, there was no more waste of materials and time, to say nothing of the vexation of continued failures. michael was not really more skilful as a carpenter than the many others who had preceded him. but his knowledge of drawing, gained in a common school in his native country, made his services worth from fifty cents to a dollar a day more than those of any other workman in the shop, and he actually received two dollars a day, when others in the same shop were receiving only a dollar and a quarter. he was always in demand, and he always received extra wages, and his work even at that rate was considered cheap. what was true of michael in carpentry, would be true of any other department of mechanical industry. in cabinet-making, in shoe-making, in tailoring, in masonry, in upholstery, in the various contrivances of tin and sheet iron with which our houses are made comfortable, in gas-fitting and plumbing, in the thousand-and-one necessities of the farm, the garden, and the kitchen, a workman who is ready and expert with his pencil, who has learned to put his own ideas, or those of another, rapidly on paper, is worth fifty per cent. more than his fellows who have not this skill. the example of this man was brought vividly to my mind at a later day, in philadelphia, when an important educational question was under discussion. rembrandt peale had two dreams, each worthy of his genius. one was to paint a washington which should go down to posterity; the other was so to simplify the elements of the art of drawing that young boys and girls might learn it as universally as they learn to read and write. he spent long years in maturing a little work for this purpose, no bigger than a primer or a spelling-book, and a determined effort was made on the part of some of the friends of popular education to introduce the study into the primary public schools of philadelphia. it was introduced into the high schools. but its benefits were limited to a comparatively small number. the hope and the aim of the friends of mr. peale's project were to make the study an elementary one--to make a certain amount of proficiency in drawing a test of promotion from the lower schools to the schools above it. this would have placed "graphics" alongside of the copy-book and the spelling-book. after struggling for several years with popular prejudice, the friends of the scheme were obliged to abandon it as hopeless. the idea was too much in advance of the times. could the plan have succeeded, and could the entire youthful population of that great city, which is preëminently a mechanical and manufacturing centre, have grown up with a familiar practised skill in the use of the pencil, in ordinary, off-hand drawing, such as our friend michael had, there can be no question that it would have added untold millions to the general wealth. if every boy and girl in that great metropolitan city were now obliged to spend as much time in learning to draw as is spent in learning to spell, and at the same age that they learn to spell, i do soberly believe that the addition to the wealth of the city, by the increased mechanical skill that would be developed, would be worth more than the entire cost of her public schools, although they do cost well-nigh a million of dollars annually. what is true of drawing, is true of every branch and accomplishment necessary to a complete education. a man is educated when all his capacities bodily and mental are developed, and a community is educated when all its members are. now if we could imagine two communities, of exactly equal numbers, and in physical circumstances exactly equal as to climate, soil, access to markets, and so forth, and if one of these communities should tax itself to the extent of even one-fourth of its income in promoting popular education, while the other spent not a dollar in this way, there can be little doubt as to which community would make the most rapid advances in wealth and in every other desirable social good. we happen to have on this subject one most striking and significant record. in , the english commissioners for foreign plantations addressed to the governors of the several colonies a series of questions concerning the condition of the settlements under their charge. one of these questions related to the means of popular education. the answers of two of the governors are preserved. one of them, the governor of connecticut, ruled a territory to which nature had not been specially propitious. its climate was bleak, its coast rockbound, its soil blest with only ordinary fertility. the other territory, virginia, had an extraordinary amount of natural advantages. it had fine harbors, numerous navigable streams, a climate more temperate by several degrees than its rival, the soil in its lowlands and valleys unsurpassed in any of the plantations for its capacity to produce wheat, corn, and tobacco, its mountains filled with untold treasures of lime, iron, and coal, (and, it now seems, with petroleum also,) and withal that wonderful variety of natural resources, which seems best suited to stimulate and reward the productive industry of its inhabitants. the governor of the less favored colony replied to the royal commissioners, as follows: "_one-fourth_ of the annual revenue of the colony is laid out in maintaining free schools for the education of our children." the policy thus early impressed upon the colony has been maintained with steadfast and almost proverbial consistency to this day, that region being known the world over as the land of schoolmasters. the governor of the other colony replied, "i thank god, there are no free schools, nor printing, and i hope we shall not have, these hundred years." to this policy she also has until lately only too faithfully adhered. now what is the result? by referring to the tables accompanying the census of , we find the following significant facts. . the average cash value of land was not quite $ an acre in one commonwealth (virginia), and a little over $ an acre in the other. . one commonwealth sustained only five inhabitants to every hundred acres of her soil, the other sustained eighteen inhabitants to every hundred acres. . the value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the population, was in one commonwealth $ to every inhabitant, in the other $ to every inhabitant. . the value of all property, real and personal, averaged by the acre, was in one commonwealth less than $ to the acre, in the other more than $ to the acre. to which facts i may add, what is true, though not in the census, it was the invention of eli whitney, a travelling schoolmaster from connecticut, that has trebled the value of land in nearly every southern state. i have been endeavoring to show that popular education, though it is expensive, tends to national wealth. the argument is that an educated population is capable of producing greater material results than a population uneducated can produce. the example of eli whitney, just referred to, suggests the other line of argument, which i shall now notice briefly in conclusion. this second argument is, that the general diffusion of intelligence in a community tends to quicken invention, and leads to the discovery of those scientific principles and of those ingenious labor-saving machines, by which the productive power of the community is so greatly multiplied. the cotton-gin, the steam-engine, the sewing-machine, and the reaping-machine would never have been invented in a nation of boors. it is not asserted that every boy who goes to school will become an inventor. but it is as certain as the laws of mind and matter can make it, that inventions abound in a nation in proportion to its progress in science and the general spread of intelligence among the masses. multiply common schools and you multiply inventions. how much these latter increase man's producing power, and so add to the aggregate of human wealth, it is needless to say. the invention of watt alone has quadrupled the productive power of the whole human race. the aggregate steam-power of one single country, great britain, equals the muscular capacity for labor of four hundred millions of men--more than twice the number of adult males capable of labor on our planet. its aggregate power throughout the earth is equal to the male capacity for manual work of four or five worlds like ours. the commerce, the navigation, the maritime warfare, the agriculture, the mechanic arts of the human race, have been revolutionized by this single invention not yet a century old. the application of scientific truths to the common industries of life is becoming every day more and more a necessity. the village carpenter, no less than the builder of the niagara suspension bridge, makes hourly reference to scientific laws. the carpenter who misapplies his formulæ for the strength of materials, builds a house which falls down. the properties of the various mechanical powers are involved in every machine. every machine, indeed, it has been well said, is a solidified mechanical theorem. the surveyor in determining the limits of one's farm, the architect in planning a house, the builder in planning his estimates, and the several master workmen who do the carpentry, masonry, and finishing, are all dependent upon geometric truths. bleaching, dyeing, calico-printing, gas-making, soap-making, sugar-refining, the reduction of metals from their ores, with innumerable other productive industries, are dependent upon chemistry. agriculture, the basis of all the other arts, is in the same condition. chemical knowledge, indeed, is doing for the productive powers of the soil what the application of steam has done for the increase of mechanical power. the farmer who wishes to double his crops, finds the means of doing so, not in multiplying his acres, but in applying a knowledge of the laws of chemistry to the cultivation of the soil already possessed. even physiology is adding to the wealth of the farming interest. the truth that the production of animal heat implies waste of substance, and that therefore preventing the loss of heat prevents the need for extra food--which is a purely theoretical conclusion--now guides the fattening of cattle. by keeping cattle warm, fodder is saved. experiments of physiologists have proved, not only that change of diet is beneficial, but that digestion is facilitated by a mixture of ingredients in each meal. both these truths are now influencing cattle-feeding. in the keen race of competition, the farmer who has a competent knowledge of the laws of animal and vegetable physiology and of agricultural chemistry, will surely distance the one who gropes along by guess and by tradition. a general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. in england, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. in another enterprise, £ , were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, had the parties known that less than one hundredth part by weight of the flour is changed in fermentation. but it is not necessary to multiply illustrations. suffice it to say, in conclusion, i hold it to be a most manifest truth, that the general education of a community increases largely its material wealth, both by the direct effect which knowledge has upon individuals in making them individually more productive, and by the increased control which the diffusion of knowledge gives to mankind over the powers of nature. a nation or a state is wisely economical which spends largely and even lavishly upon popular education. xxx. what is education? my last chapter, like the first, begins with a question. strange to say, no satisfactory definition of education has yet been given, nor has a definition of it often been even attempted. the literature of the subject is copious enough. but writers have busied themselves mainly with details, with methods of teaching, and so forth. a few, of a more philosophical turn of mind, have discussed the principles of the subject, and among these some have undertaken to develop their theories from the true starting-point of a definition. but among all these, from plato, who was the earliest systematic writer on the subject, to herbert spencer, the latest and the most pretentious, not one has given a definition of it which is not open to objection. it may seem presumptuous, perhaps, to undertake again that in which so many have failed. but there can be no harm in making at least an endeavor. what then are some of the elements which enter into our idea of education? to educate is, in the first place, to develop. it is to draw out and strengthen the powers and give them right direction. it is, therefore, something more than merely imparting knowledge. knowledge is to the child's mind what food is to the body. each is a means to an end. it is to cause growth. as by the proper use of food and exercise the limbs and muscles expand, and acquire their full and appointed size, symmetry, and strength, so by acquiring and using knowledge of various kinds, the various faculties of the mind attain their full power and proportion. for this reason mainly the pure mathematics and the ancient languages, latin and greek, have held their place in almost every course of liberal study, not because the knowledge of these branches is likely to be called for in ordinary professional business, but because the study of these branches is supposed to be particularly adapted to develop and invigorate certain important qualities of the mind. this development of the powers, then, is the first element involved in a just idea of education. but, secondly, nature plainly indicates a certain order to be observed in the development of the faculties. "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." so in the human plant. the time for the efflorescence of some of the faculties is in early youth. other faculties make little growth till near the age of manhood. a wise educator will carefully observe these facts, and not waste his energies and mar his work, either by attempting a premature development of those faculties which god seems to have meant to ripen later, or by neglecting to draw out and train in childhood those faculties which then most naturally and aptly spring into vigorous growth. youth, for instance, is the season, of all others, when the memory is to be cultivated; the season of all others, when the instinctive principle of faith is to have free play. so, too, the moral and emotional faculties may receive the first germs of their development at a very early stage in the history of the human being. the education of this part of our nature begins, indeed, with the first smile of recognition that passes between the infant and its mother. other faculties and powers, as the reason and the judgment, for instance, come to maturity nearer the age of manhood, and the normal period for their cultivation is accordingly near the end, rather than near the beginning, of an educational course. it is not, however, my object here to mark out an order for the development of the faculties, but only to note that there is such an order, and that the observance of this order is a most important element in our idea of what education is. the next element in this idea is that a certain proportion and symmetry be observed in the development of the powers. perhaps it might not be strictly accurate to say that any faculty may be cultivated too highly. yet there certainly is an excess whenever one faculty or power is cultivated quite out of proportion to the other faculties and powers. a man in boston a few years ago, by directing his attention exclusively for a long time to the single act of lifting, educated his body to the power of lifting enormous weights. but this power was gained at the expense of agility, grace, and many other bodily qualities quite as important as that of lifting weights. so the mental faculties may become one-sided by injudicious training. the memory may be inordinately developed at the expense of the reasoning power, the reason at the expense of the imagination, the feelings at the expense of the judgment, the mind at the expense of the body, the body at the expense of the mind. in all right education, therefore, the faculties are to be developed, not only in due order, but in due proportion. the next element that enters into our idea is that of a proper comprehensiveness. the educator must bear in mind that the being committed to his care is one of a complex nature, and that every part of this complex nature is to receive its due attention. physical education is included in his duties as well as mental, mental as well as moral and religious. no part is to be neglected. he should aim to secure for his subject full bodily health, agility, strength, symmetry, and power of endurance. the bodily senses are capable of a degree of cultivation that few seem to be aware of. perhaps, in our ordinary schemes of education, no part of our complex nature is so inadequately provided for, so almost ignored, as the physical. but, as in regard to the other points that have been raised, so here, it is not my object so much to particularize the several parts of human nature that require attention, as to recognize distinctly the fact that we are thus complex, and that the business of the educator is necessarily a many-sided one, requiring most varied knowledge and experience. but there is one important limitation to be observed here, otherwise our definition would be seriously amiss. in many works on education, it is stated, without qualification, that we ought to give to all our powers the fullest development of which they are capable. if we were unfallen angels, the rule might perhaps be a safe one. but for fallen human beings, it certainly needs some limitation. we have faculties and powers, not a few, which we need to repress rather than to cultivate. are we to give the fullest development of which they are capable, to anger, envy, jealousy, cunning, avarice, and lust? to state the question is to answer it. it is not every faculty of the child, therefore, that is to be developed, but only those parts of his nature which are good and desirable, those by which he can best discharge his duties to god and attain his highest excellence as a man. let us now gather up the several ideas which have been suggested, and see if we cannot compress them into some brief formula, as a definition of education, which, if not perfect and exhaustive of the subject, shall be both more comprehensive and more precise than those now afloat. definition.--education is developing, in due order and proportion, whatever is good and desirable in human nature. model text books for schools, academies and colleges. a new edition of the classics. * * * * * chase & stuart's classical series. edited by thomas chase, a.m., professor of classical literature, _haverford college_, penna. george stuart, a.m., professor of the latin language, _central high school_, philada. * * * * * references to harkness's latin grammar, and andrews & stoddard's latin grammar. * * * * * the publication of this edition of the classics was suggested by the constantly increasing demand by teachers for an edition which, by judicious notes, would give to the student the assistance really necessary to render his study profitable, furnishing explanations of passages difficult of interpretation, of peculiarities of syntax, &c., and yet would require him to make faithful use of his grammar and dictionary. it is believed that this classical series needs only to be known to insure its very general use. the publishers claim for it peculiar merit, and beg leave to call attention to the following important particulars: the purity of the texts. the clearness and conciseness of the notes, and their adaptation to the wants of students. the beauty of the type and paper. the handsome style of binding. the convenience of the shape and size. the low price at which the volumes are sold. the preparation of the whole series is the _original work_ of american scholars. the texts are not _mere reprints_, but are based upon a careful and painstaking comparison of _all the most improved editions_, with constant reference to the authority of the best manuscripts. no pains have been spared to make the notes accurate, clear, and _helpful to the learner_. points of geography, history, mythology, and antiquities are explained in accordance with the views of the best german scholars. the references to the grammars most in use in this country, viz.: harkness's latin grammar and andrews & stoddard's latin grammar, is in itself an advantage to be gained only by the use of this edition. desirous of affording professors and teachers of latin throughout the entire country an opportunity of becoming acquainted with these books, the publishers will send copies for examination, gratis, to every teacher of latin in the united states, on application, accompanied by a catalogue of the institution with which he is connected, or of which he is the principal. * * * * * the series, when complete, will consist of cÆsar's commentaries, virgil's Æneid, cicero's orations, horace, sallust and livy, of which there are now ready the following, viz.: cÆsar's commentaries on the gallic war. with explanatory notes, a vocabulary, geographical index, map of gaul, plan of the bridge, &c., &c. by prof. george stuart. price by mail, postpaid, $ . . per dozen, by express, $ . . the text of cæsar has been carefully compared with that of kraner, oehler, nepperdey, and other distinguished editors. much care has been bestowed upon this portion of the work, and it is hoped that whatever improvements have been introduced into the text by the learning and research of the german editors named, will be found in the present edition. the notes have been prepared with a very simple view,--to give the student that amount and kind of assistance which are really necessary to render his study profitable; to remove difficulties greater than his strength; and to afford or direct him to the sources of such information as is requisite to a thorough understanding of the author. virgil's Æneid. with explanatory notes, metrical index, remarks on classical versification, index of proper names, &c. by prof. thomas chase. price by mail, postpaid, $ . . per dozen, by express, $ . . the text of the Æneid here presented is based upon a careful collation of the editions of heyne, wagner, conington, ladewig, and ribbeck, with frequent reference to other standard authorities, and with constant and especial regard to the testimony of the best manuscripts. in the preparation of the notes, the endeavor has been made to meet the actual wants of students in our schools. frequent references are made to the grammars most in use, and explanations are furnished of passages difficult of interpretation, of peculiarities of syntax, and of such points of history, geography, mythology, and antiquities, as require elucidation. a metrical index has been added, in which the chief difficulties of scanning are solved. one thing is presumed throughout,--that the student will make a faithful use of his grammar and dictionary, the only way in which true scholars are made. cicero and horace will be issued about dec. . sallust and livy, during the following year. the unprecedented demand for the first two volumes of this series during the past few months evidences their adaptation to the actual wants of the recitation room. testimonials have been received from a large number of the most flourishing classical institutions of the country, in which they have already been adopted as text-books, and the principals of hundreds of schools have expressed their intention to commence their next term with these standard works. from every source but a single opinion has been expressed, viz.: that the publishers have more than fulfilled their promise in presenting a series of books which will be eagerly sought after by every student of the classics. * * * * * a manual of elocution. founded upon the philosophy of the human voice, with classified illustrations, suggested by and arranged to meet the practical difficulties of instruction. by m. s. mitchell. price by mail, postpaid, $ . . per dozen, by express, $ . . the compiler cannot conceal the hope that this glimpse of our general literature may tempt to individual research among its treasures, so varied and inexhaustible;--that this text-book for the school-room may become not only teacher, but friend, to those in whose hands it is placed, and while aiding, through systematic development and training of the elocutionary powers of the pupil, to overcome many of the practical difficulties of instruction, may accomplish a higher work in the cultivation and refinement of character. to afford teachers an idea of the character of the work, we append a list of the subjects treated of. articulation, pronunciation, accent, emphasis, modulation, melody of speech, pitch, tone, inflections, sense, cadence, force, stress, grammatical and rhetorical pauses, movement, reading of poetry, faults in the reading of poetry, action, attitude, analysis of the principles of gestures, and oratory. among the _gems of literature_ collected in this volume may be named the following, which will give a general idea of the character of the selections for practice, of which the volume is largely composed. a psalm of life. address at gettysburg. barbara frietchie. bonny kelmeny. bugle song. charge of the light brigade. death of little nell. dies iræ. elegy in a country churchyard. excelsior. godiva. invocation to light. laus deo. the american flag. oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud? the battle of ivry. the bells. the bridge of sighs. the great bell roland. the mantle of st. john de matha. the raven. the soldier from bingen. the song of the shirt. union and liberty. woman's education. work. * * * * * the model definer, with sentences showing the proper use of words. an elementary work, containing definitions and etymology for the little ones. by a. c. webb. price by mail, postpaid, cents. per dozen, by express, $ . . * * * * * the model etymology. giving not only the definitions, etymology, and analysis, but that which can be obtained only from an intimate acquaintance with the best authors, viz.: the correct use of words. by a. c. webb. price by mail, postpaid, cents. per dozen, by express, $ . . the importance of words cannot be over-estimated. knowledge can be imparted and received only by the medium of words, correctly used and properly understood. the basis of a good education must be laid with words, well chosen, properly arranged, and firmly implanted in the mind. from the richness of the english language, which gives many words to the same meaning, and many and diverse meanings to the same word, the proper _use_ of a word cannot be deduced from its _meaning_. how, then, is the knowledge of the use of words to be imparted to children? either by the teacher, or by conversation and reading. by the latter method the knowledge acquired is limited in extent; and as it is entirely dependent on the power of observation, the impressions received are faint and ill-defined, and the conclusions arrived at, frequently incorrect. the practice of arithmetic might possibly be left to such teaching, inasmuch as arithmetic is an exact science based on fixed principles, from which correct _reasoning_ must deduce correct _results_. but no reasoning can show to the child who has learned "_deduce, to draw_," that he must not say, "i tried _to deduce_ the horse from the stable;" or, "_deciduous, falling_." "the boy, _deciduous_ from the window, was killed." the importance and difficulty of the work demands that it shall not be left to the uncertainties of home teaching. the labor involved forbids that this essential part of education shall be imposed on the parent. like arithmetic, or any other department of knowledge, it should be performed by the teacher, in the time specially set apart for mental training. the plan adopted in the model word-book series is not new. all good dictionaries illustrate the meaning by a model. to quote from a _good author_, a sentence containing the word, as proof of its correct use, is the only authority allowed. a simple trial of the work either by requiring the child to form sentences similar to those given, or by memorizing the sentences as models for future use, will convince any one of the following advantages to be derived from the model word-book series: . saving of time. . increased knowledge of words. . ease to teacher and scholar. . a knowledge of the correct use of words. * * * * * the young student's companion; or, elementary lessons and exercises in translating from english into french. by m. a. longstreth, principal of a seminary for young ladies, philadelphia. price by mail, postpaid, $ . . per dozen, by express, $ . . the object of this little work is to present to the young student a condensed view of the elements of the french language, in a clear and simple manner, and, at the same time, to lessen the fatigue incurred by the teacher in giving repeated verbal explanations of the most important rules of etymology. no attempt has been made to teach the syntax of the language, with the exception of a few fundamental rules; neither have many idioms been introduced; the aim of the compiler being to avoid whatever might perplex or confuse. this little work, it will be remembered, is not intended to take the place of a grammar, but to prepare the pupil, by careful drilling, for larger and more comprehensive treatises; and it is believed that any child, who can distinguish the different parts of speech in english, will be able to understand and learn the lessons without difficulty; and that, if they are thoroughly learned, the succeeding course of french study will be much facilitated. in its preparation, the best authorities have been carefully consulted and followed, and assistance has been kindly furnished by several professors of the french language, whose experience in teaching enables them to judge of the wants of the young student. * * * * * martindale's history of the united states. from the discovery of america to the close of the late rebellion. by joseph c. martindale, m. d., principal of the madison grammar school, philadelphia. price by mail, postpaid, cents. per dozen, by express, $ . . the want of a history suitable for the schoolroom has long been felt by educators. in most instances, the histories presented have been too much encumbered with details of but little service to the pupils. this has been one of the causes which has prevented history from being one of the usual branches of study in our common schools outside of cities and towns; none can so well appreciate the difficulties which have surrounded this subject as the teacher. another cause which has precluded the study of history has been the high price of all the text-books on this subject. the very low price of the present treatise will obviate this difficulty. the author of this compend, a man of large experience in the schoolroom, deserves the thanks of teachers and scholars, for the concise and succinct form which he has treated this much neglected subject; ignoring all that does not properly appertain to the important events of our nation's existence, he has given us all that should be memorized, and in so agreeable a form as to be thoroughly mastered with but little effort. with this book in his hand, the scholar can in a single school-term obtain as complete a knowledge of the history of the united states as has heretofore required double the time and effort. teachers who are anxious to have their pupils proficient in this subject, or who are themselves desirous of reviewing the main points of history in order to pass a creditable examination, will find this _the book for their purposes_, and it will commend itself to the _live teacher as a book long needed_. the want of such a work suggested its preparation, and we are satisfied that in every schoolroom its advent will be welcomed by both teacher and pupil. the unprecedented success which has attended this work since its publication is the best recommendation of its merits, more than _twenty thousand copies_ having been sold during the past year. it is indorsed by prominent educators, is used in over fifty normal schools, and in hundreds of cities, towns, and townships throughout the entire country. teachers, directors, and all others interested in elementary education are invited to examine the book. * * * * * parker's grammar of the english language. based upon an analysis of the english sentence. with copious examples and exercises in parsing and the correction of false syntax, and an appendix, containing critical and explanatory notes, and lists of peculiar and exceptional forms. for the use of schools and academies, and those who write. by wm. henry parker, principal of ringgold grammar school, philadelphia. price by mail, postpaid, $ . . prepared by a grammar school principal, and arranged in the manner that many years of research and actual experience in the schoolroom have demonstrated to be the best for teaching, this book commends itself to teachers as a simple, progressive, and consistent treatise on grammar, the need of which has so long been recognized. we ask for it a careful and critical examination. the thorough acquaintance of the author with his subject, and his practical knowledge of the difficulties which beset the teacher in the use of the text-book, and the necessity for the teacher's supplying deficiencies and omissions and amending the text to suit constructions found daily in parsing, and in other practical exercises in grammar, have enabled him to prepare a work which will, on trial, be found a labor-saving aid to both teacher and pupil. * * * * * to teachers. the publishers desire to call the attention of teachers to their list of school roll-books, registers, grade books, &c. these have been prepared by an experienced, practical teacher, with the view of meeting a very pressing want of the schoolroom. it is hoped that in their preparation most of the defects usually found in school records have been avoided. the model roll-book, no. . for the use of schools. containing a record of attendance, punctuality, deportment, orthography, reading, penmanship, intellectual arithmetic, practical arithmetic, geography, grammar. parsing, and history, and several blanks for special studies not enumerated. price, $ . , by express. the model roll-book, no. . for the use of high schools, academies, and seminaries. containing a record of all the studies mentioned in roll-book, no. , together with elocution, algebra, geometry, composition, french, latin, philosophy, physiology, and several blanks for special studies not enumerated. price, $ . , by express. these roll-books are in use in the leading schools of boston, new york, philadelphia, cincinnati, chicago, and st. louis, and very extensively in select and high schools throughout the country. they will, on examination, be found to be the most complete and practical yet published. all teachers who use them speak of them with unqualified approval; once used, they will never be relinquished. the model pocket register and grade-book. a roll-book, register and record combined. adapted to any grade of school, from primary to college. handsomely and durably bound in fine cloth. price by mail, postpaid, cents. per dozen, by express, $ . . prof. e. a. sheldon, of the new york state normal school, and author of "lessons on objects," and "elementary instruction," says of this book: "your model pocket register is just the thing every teacher needs. i shall never again be without one." the model school-diary. designed as an aid in securing the co-operation of parents. it consists of a record of the attendance, deportment, recitations, &c., of a scholar, for every day in the week. at the close of the week it is to be sent to the parent or guardian, for his examination and signature. teachers will find in this diary an article that has long been needed. its low cost will insure its general use. copies will be mailed to teachers for examination, postpaid, on receipt of ten cents. price per dozen, by mail, postpaid, $ . . per dozen, by express, cents. rewards of merit. as there are many teachers who make use of these incentives to study, we have endeavored to meet the demand, with what success the teacher can judge after seeing our specimens. they are printed on the best quality of bristol card, colored in gold, silver, crimson, ultra-marine, and emerald, and are executed in the highest style of the lithographic art. they are chaste, ornate, and beautiful, and need but be seen to be appreciated. the teacher will, of course, not connect these gems of art with the common colored cards in vogue. price per set by mail, postpaid, cents. * * * * * _please address the publishers_, eldredge & brother, & south sixth street, philadelphia, pa. http://www.archive.org/details/childandcurricul deweuoft the child and the curriculum by john dewey [illustration: publisher's device] the university of chicago press chicago & london the university of chicago press, chicago & london the university of toronto press, toronto , canada copyright by the university of chicago. all rights reserved. published . twenty-eighth impression printed in the united states of america _the child and the curriculum_ profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented. they grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem--a problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as they stand, are conflicting. any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other. solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another point of view, and hence in a fresh light. but this reconstruction means travail of thought. easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for something with which to buttress it against attack. thus sects arise: schools of opinion. each selects that set of conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a complete and independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor in a problem, needing adjustment. the fundamental factors in the educative process are an immature, undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the matured experience of the adult. the educative process is the due interaction of these forces. such a conception of each in relation to the other as facilitates completest and freest interaction is the essence of educational theory. but here comes the effort of thought. it is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each belongs. the easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the child, or upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon _that_ as the key to the whole problem. when this happens a really serious practical problem--that of interaction--is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. we get the case of the child _vs._ the curriculum; of the individual nature _vs._ social culture. below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion lies this opposition. the child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal contacts. things hardly come within his experience unless they touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of his family and friends. his world is a world of persons with their personal interests, rather than a realm of facts and laws. not truth, in the sense of conformity to external fact, but affection and sympathy, is its keynote. as against this, the course of study met in the school presents material stretching back indefinitely in time, and extending outward indefinitely into space. the child is taken out of his familiar physical environment, hardly more than a square mile or so in area, into the wide world--yes, and even to the bounds of the solar system. his little span of personal memory and tradition is overlaid with the long centuries of the history of all peoples. again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. he passes quickly and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot to another, but is not conscious of transition or break. there is no conscious isolation, hardly conscious distinction. the things that occupy him are held together by the unity of the personal and social interests which his life carries along. whatever is uppermost in his mind constitutes to him, for the time being, the whole universe. that universe is fluid and fluent; its contents dissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity. but, after all, it is the child's own world. it has the unity and completeness of his own life. he goes to school, and various studies divide and fractionize the world for him. geography selects, it abstracts and analyzes one set of facts, and from one particular point of view. arithmetic is another division, grammar another department, and so on indefinitely. again, in school each of these subjects is classified. facts are torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged with reference to some general principle. classification is not a matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual pigeonholed. the vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences. the adult mind is so familiar with the notion of logically ordered facts that it does not recognize--it cannot realize--the amount of separating and reformulating which the facts of direct experience have to undergo before they can appear as a "study," or branch of learning. a principle, for the intellect, has had to be distinguished and defined; facts have had to be interpreted in relation to this principle, not as they are in themselves. they have had to be regathered about a new center which is wholly abstract and ideal. all this means a development of a special intellectual interest. it means ability to view facts impartially and objectively; that is, without reference to their place and meaning in one's own experience. it means capacity to analyze and to synthesize. it means highly matured intellectual habits and the command of a definite technique and apparatus of scientific inquiry. the studies as classified are the product, in a word, of the science of the ages, not of the experience of the child. these apparent deviations and differences between child and curriculum might be almost indefinitely widened. but we have here sufficiently fundamental divergences: first, the narrow but personal world of the child against the impersonal but infinitely extended world of space and time; second, the unity, the single wholeheartedness of the child's life, and the specializations and divisions of the curriculum; third, an abstract principle of logical classification and arrangement, and the practical and emotional bonds of child life. from these elements of conflict grow up different educational sects. one school fixes its attention upon the importance of the subject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents of the child's own experience. it is as if they said: is life petty, narrow, and crude? then studies reveal the great, wide universe with all its fulness and complexity of meaning. is the life of the child egoistic, self-centered, impulsive? then in these studies is found an objective universe of truth, law, and order. is his experience confused, vague, uncertain, at the mercy of the moment's caprice and circumstance? then studies introduce a world arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a world where all is measured and defined. hence the moral: ignore and minimize the child's individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences. they are what we need to get away from. they are to be obscured or eliminated. as educators our work is precisely to substitute for these superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found in studies and lessons. subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each lesson into specific facts and formulae. let the child proceed step by step to master each one of these separate parts, and at last he will have covered the entire ground. the road which looks so long when viewed in its entirety is easily traveled, considered as a series of particular steps. thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisions and consecutions of the subject-matter. problems of instruction are problems of procuring texts giving logical parts and sequences, and of presenting these portions in class in a similar definite and graded way. subject-matter furnishes the end, and it determines method. the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened; his is narrow experience which is to be widened. it is his to receive, to accept. his part is fulfilled when he is ductile and docile. not so, says the other sect. the child is the starting-point, the center, and the end. his development, his growth, is the ideal. it alone furnishes the standard. to the growth of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. personality, character, is more than subject-matter. not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal. to possess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion. moreover, subject-matter never can be got into the child from without. learning is active. it involves reaching out of the mind. it involves organic assimilation starting from within. literally, we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. it is he and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning. the only significant method is the method of the mind as it reaches out and assimilates. subject-matter is but spiritual food, possible nutritive material. it cannot digest itself; it cannot of its own accord turn into bone and muscle and blood. the source of whatever is dead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found precisely in the subordination of the life and experience of the child to the curriculum. it is because of this that "study" has become a synonym for what is irksome, and a lesson identical with a task. this fundamental opposition of child and curriculum set up by these two modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a series of other terms. "discipline" is the watchword of those who magnify the course of study; "interest" that of those who blazon "the child" upon their banner. the standpoint of the former is logical; that of the latter psychological. the first emphasizes the necessity of adequate training and scholarship on the part of the teacher; the latter that of need of sympathy with the child, and knowledge of his natural instincts. "guidance and control" are the catchwords of one school; "freedom and initiative" of the other. law is asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. the old, the conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and toil of the ages, is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins the affection of the other. inertness and routine, chaos and anarchism, are accusations bandied back and forth. neglect of the sacred authority of duty is charged by one side, only to be met by counter-charges of suppression of individuality through tyrannical despotism. such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion. common-sense recoils at the extreme character of these results. they are left to theorists, while common-sense vibrates back and forward in a maze of inconsistent compromise. the need of getting theory and practical common-sense into closer connection suggests a return to our original thesis: that we have here conditions which are necessarily related to each other in the educative process, since this is precisely one of interaction and adjustment. what, then, is the problem? it is just to get rid of the prejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct from degree) between the child's experience and the various forms of subject-matter that make up the course of study. from the side of the child, it is a question of seeing how his experience already contains within itself elements--facts and truths--of just the same sort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is of more importance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes, the motives, and the interests which have operated in developing and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now occupies. from the side of the studies, it is a question of interpreting them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and of discovering the steps that intervene between the child's present experience and their richer maturity. abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction. it is continuous reconstruction, moving from the child's present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies. on the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, geography, language, botany, etc., are themselves experience--they are that of the race. they embody the cumulative outcome of the efforts, the strivings, and the successes of the human race generation after generation. they present this, not as a mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in some organized and systematized way--that is, as reflectively formulated. hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's present experience, and those contained in the subject-matter of studies, are the initial and final terms of one reality. to oppose one to the other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to set the moving tendency and the final result of the same process over against each other; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child war with each other. if such be the case, the problem of the relation of the child and the curriculum presents itself in this guise: of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning? how does it assist us in dealing with the early stages of growth to be able to anticipate its later phases? the studies, as we have agreed, represent the possibilities of development inherent in the child's immediate crude experience. but, after all, they are not parts of that present and immediate life. why, then, or how, make account of them? asking such a question suggests its own answer. to see the outcome is to know in what direction the present experience is moving, provided it move normally and soundly. the far-away point, which is of no significance to us simply as far away, becomes of huge importance the moment we take it as defining a present direction of movement. taken in this way it is no remote and distant result to be achieved, but a guiding method in dealing with the present. the systematized and defined experience of the adult mind, in other words, is of value to us in interpreting the child's life as it immediately shows itself, and in passing on to guidance or direction. let us look for a moment at these two ideas: interpretation and guidance. the child's present experience is in no way self-explanatory. it is not final, but transitional. it is nothing complete in itself, but just a sign or index of certain growth-tendencies. as long as we confine our gaze to what the child here and now puts forth, we are confused and misled. we cannot read its meaning. extreme depreciations of the child morally and intellectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. the first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are treated as achievements. what we need is something which will enable us to interpret, to appraise, the elements in the child's present puttings forth and fallings away, his exhibitions of power and weakness, in the light of some larger growth-process in which they have their place. only in this way can we discriminate. if we isolate the child's present inclinations, purposes, and experiences from the place they occupy and the part they have to perform in a developing experience, all stand upon the same level; all alike are equally good and equally bad. but in the movement of life different elements stand upon different planes of value. some of the child's deeds are symptoms of a waning tendency; they are survivals in functioning of an organ which has done its part and is passing out of vital use. to give positive attention to such qualities is to arrest development upon a lower level. it is systematically to maintain a rudimentary phase of growth. other activities are signs of a culminating power and interest; to them applies the maxim of striking while the iron is hot. as regards them, it is perhaps a matter of now or never. selected, utilized, emphasized, they may mark a turning-point for good in the child's whole career; neglected, an opportunity goes, never to be recalled. other acts and feelings are prophetic; they represent the dawning of flickering light that will shine steadily only in the far future. as regards them there is little at present to do but give them fair and full chance, waiting for the future for definite direction. just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the "old education" that it made invidious comparisons between the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the former as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as much as possible; so it is the danger of the "new education" that it regard the child's present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves. in truth, his learnings and achievements are fluid and moving. they change from day to day and from hour to hour. it will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind the impression that a child of a given age has a positive equipment of purposes and interests to be cultivated just as they stand. interests in reality are but attitudes toward possible experiences; they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage they afford, not in the accomplishment they represent. to take the phenomena presented at a given age as in any way self-explanatory or self-contained is inevitably to result in indulgence and spoiling. any power, whether of child or adult, is indulged when it is taken on its given and present level in consciousness. its genuine meaning is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher level. it is just something to do with. appealing to the interest upon the present plane means excitation; it means playing with a power so as continually to stir it up without directing it toward definite achievement. continuous initiation, continuous starting of activities that do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as bad as the continual repression of initiative in conformity with supposed interests of some more perfect thought or will. it is as if the child were forever tasting and never eating; always having his palate tickled upon the emotional side, but never getting the organic satisfaction that comes only with digestion of food and transformation of it into working power. as against such a view, the subject-matter of science and history and art serves to reveal the real child to us. we do not know the meaning either of his tendencies or of his performances excepting as we take them as germinating seed, or opening bud, of some fruit to be borne. the whole world of visual nature is all too small an answer to the problem of the meaning of the child's instinct for light and form. the entire science of physics is none too much to interpret adequately to us what is involved in some simple demand of the child for explanation of some casual change that has attracted his attention. the art of raphael or of corot is none too much to enable us to value the impulses stirring in the child when he draws and daubs. so much for the use of the subject-matter in interpretation. its further employment in direction or guidance is but an expansion of the same thought. to interpret the fact is to see it in its vital movement, to see it in its relation to growth. but to view it as a part of a normal growth is to secure the basis for guiding it. guidance is not external imposition. _it is freeing the life-process for its own most adequate fulfilment._ what was said about disregard of the child's present experience because of its remoteness from mature experience; and of the sentimental idealization of the child's naïve caprices and performances, may be repeated here with slightly altered phrase. there are those who see no alternative between forcing the child from without, or leaving him entirely alone. seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some another. both fall into the same fundamental error. both fail to see that development is a definite process, having its own law which can be fulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions are provided. really to interpret the child's present crude impulses in counting, measuring, and arranging things in rhythmic series involves mathematical scholarship--a knowledge of the mathematical formulae and relations which have, in the history of the race, grown out of just such crude beginnings. to see the whole history of development which intervenes between these two terms is simply to see what step the child needs to take just here and now; to what use he needs to put his blind impulse in order that it may get clarity and gain force. if, once more, the "old education" tended to ignore the dynamic quality, the developing force inherent in the child's present experience, and therefore to assume that direction and control were just matters of arbitrarily putting the child in a given path and compelling him to walk there, the "new education" is in danger of taking the idea of development in altogether too formal and empty a way. the child is expected to "develop" this or that fact or truth out of his own mind. he is told to think things out, or work things out for himself, without being supplied any of the environing conditions which are requisite to start and guide thought. nothing can be developed from nothing; nothing but the crude can be developed out of the crude--and this is what surely happens when we throw the child back upon his achieved self as a finality, and invite him to spin new truths of nature or of conduct out of that. it is certainly as futile to expect a child to evolve a universe out of his own mere mind as it is for a philosopher to attempt that task. development does not mean just getting something out of the mind. it is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted. and this is impossible save as just that educative medium is provided which will enable the powers and interests that have been selected as valuable to function. they must operate, and how they operate will depend almost entirely upon the stimuli which surround them and the material upon which they exercise themselves. the problem of direction is thus the problem of selecting appropriate stimuli for instincts and impulses which it is desired to employ in the gaining of new experience. what new experiences are desirable, and thus what stimuli are needed, it is impossible to tell except as there is some comprehension of the development which is aimed at; except, in a word, as the adult knowledge is drawn upon as revealing the possible career open to the child. it may be of use to distinguish and to relate to each other the logical and the psychological aspects of experience--the former standing for subject-matter in itself, the latter for it in relation to the child. a psychological statement of experience follows its actual growth; it is historic; it notes steps actually taken, the uncertain and tortuous, as well as the efficient and successful. the logical point of view, on the other hand, assumes that the development has reached a certain positive stage of fulfilment. it neglects the process and considers the outcome. it summarizes and arranges, and thus separates the achieved results from the actual steps by which they were forthcoming in the first instance. we may compare the difference between the logical and the psychological to the difference between the notes which an explorer makes in a new country, blazing a trail and finding his way along as best he may, and the finished map that is constructed after the country has been thoroughly explored. the two are mutually dependent. without the more or less accidental and devious paths traced by the explorer there would be no facts which could be utilized in the making of the complete and related chart. but no one would get the benefit of the explorer's trip if it was not compared and checked up with similar wanderings undertaken by others; unless the new geographical facts learned, the streams crossed, the mountains climbed, etc., were viewed, not as mere incidents in the journey of the particular traveler, but (quite apart from the individual explorer's life) in relation to other similar facts already known. the map orders individual experiences, connecting them with one another irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances and accidents of their original discovery. of what use is this formulated statement of experience? of what use is the map? well, we may first tell what the map is not. the map is not a substitute for a personal experience. the map does not take the place of an actual journey. the logically formulated material of a science or branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the having of individual experiences. the mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the place of personal contact and immediate individual experience with the falling thing. but the map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result. through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of others' explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings--wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of the objective and generalized record of their performances. that which we call a science or study puts the net product of past experience in the form which makes it most available for the future. it represents a capitalization which may at once be turned to interest. it economizes the workings of the mind in every way. memory is less taxed because the facts are grouped together about some common principle, instead of being connected solely with the varying incidents of their original discovery. observation is assisted; we know what to look for and where to look. it is the difference between looking for a needle in a haystack, and searching for a given paper in a well-arranged cabinet. reasoning is directed, because there is a certain general path or line laid out along which ideas naturally march, instead of moving from one chance association to another. there is, then, nothing final about a logical rendering of experience. its value is not contained in itself; its significance is that of standpoint, outlook, method. it intervenes between the more casual, tentative, and roundabout experiences of the past, and more controlled and orderly experiences of the future. it gives past experience in that net form which renders it most available and most significant, most fecund for future experience. the abstractions, generalizations, and classifications which it introduces all have prospective meaning. the formulated result is then not to be opposed to the process of growth. the logical is not set over against the psychological. the surveyed and arranged result occupies a critical position in the process of growth. it marks a turning-point. it shows how we may get the benefit of past effort in controlling future endeavor. in the largest sense the logical standpoint is itself psychological; it has its meaning as a point in the development of experience, and its justification is in its functioning in the future growth which it insures. hence the need of reinstating into experience the subject-matter of the studies, or branches of learning. it must be restored to the experience from which it has been abstracted. it needs to be _psychologized_; turned over, translated into the immediate and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance. every study or subject thus has two aspects: one for the scientist as a scientist; the other for the teacher as a teacher. these two aspects are in no sense opposed or conflicting. but neither are they immediately identical. for the scientist, the subject-matter represents simply a given body of truth to be employed in locating new problems, instituting new researches, and carrying them through to a verified outcome. to him the subject-matter of the science is self-contained. he refers various portions of it to each other; he connects new facts with it. he is not, as a scientist, called upon to travel outside its particular bounds; if he does, it is only to get more facts of the same general sort. the problem of the teacher is a different one. as a teacher he is not concerned with adding new facts to the science he teaches; in propounding new hypotheses or in verifying them. he is concerned with the subject-matter of the science as _representing a given stage and phase of the development of experience_. his problem is that of inducing a vital and personal experiencing. hence, what concerns him, as teacher, is the ways in which that subject may become a part of experience; what there is in the child's present that is usable with reference to it; how such elements are to be used; how his own knowledge of the subject-matter may assist in interpreting the child's needs and doings, and determine the medium in which the child should be placed in order that his growth may be properly directed. he is concerned, not with the subject-matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a total and growing experience. thus to see it is to psychologize it. it is the failure to keep in mind the double aspect of subject-matter which causes the curriculum and child to be set over against each other as described in our early pages. the subject-matter, just as it is for the scientist, has no direct relationship to the child's present experience. it stands outside of it. the danger here is not a merely theoretical one. we are practically threatened on all sides. textbook and teacher vie with each other in presenting to the child the subject-matter as it stands to the specialist. such modification and revision as it undergoes are a mere elimination of certain scientific difficulties, and the general reduction to a lower intellectual level. the material is not translated into life-terms, but is directly offered as a substitute for, or an external annex to, the child's present life. three typical evils result: in the first place, the lack of any organic connection with what the child has already seen and felt and loved makes the material purely formal and symbolic. there is a sense in which it is impossible to value too highly the formal and the symbolic. the genuine form, the real symbol, serve as methods in the holding and discovery of truth. they are tools by which the individual pushes out most surely and widely into unexplored areas. they are means by which he brings to bear whatever of reality he has succeeded in gaining in past searchings. but this happens only when the symbol really symbolizes--when it stands for and sums up in shorthand actual experiences which the individual has already gone through. a symbol which is induced from without, which has not been led up to in preliminary activities, is, as we say, a _bare_ or _mere_ symbol; it is dead and barren. now, any fact, whether of arithmetic, or geography, or grammar, which is not led up to and into out of something which has previously occupied a significant position in the child's life for its own sake, is forced into this position. it is not a reality, but just the sign of a reality which _might_ be experienced if certain conditions were fulfilled. but the abrupt presentation of the fact as something known by others, and requiring only to be studied and learned by the child, rules out such conditions of fulfilment. it condemns the fact to be a hieroglyph: it would mean something if one only had the key. the clue being lacking, it remains an idle curiosity, to fret and obstruct the mind, a dead weight to burden it. the second evil in this external presentation is lack of motivation. there are not only no facts or truths which have been previously felt as such with which to appropriate and assimilate the new, but there is no craving, no need, no demand. when the subject-matter has been psychologized, that is, viewed as an out-growth of present tendencies and activities, it is easy to locate in the present some obstacle, intellectual, practical, or ethical, which can be handled more adequately if the truth in question be mastered. this need supplies motive for the learning. an end which is the child's own carries him on to possess the means of its accomplishment. but when material is directly supplied in the form of a lesson to be learned as a lesson, the connecting links of need and aim are conspicuous for their absence. what we mean by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result of this lack of motivation. the organic and vital mean interaction--they mean play of mental demand and material supply. the third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in most logical fashion, loses this quality, when presented in external, ready-made fashion, by the time it gets to the child. it has to undergo some modification in order to shut out some phases too hard to grasp, and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties. what happens? those things which are most significant to the scientific man, and most valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out. the really thought-provoking character is obscured, and the organizing function disappears. or, as we commonly say, the child's reasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, are not adequately developed. so the subject-matter is evacuated of its logical value, and, though it is what it is only from the logical standpoint, is presented as stuff only for "memory." this is the contradiction: the child gets the advantage neither of the adult logical formulation, nor of his own native competencies of apprehension and response. hence the logic of the child is hampered and mortified, and we are almost fortunate if he does not get actual non-science, flat and common-place residua of what was gaining scientific vitality a generation or two ago--degenerate reminiscence of what someone else once formulated on the basis of the experience that some further person had, once upon a time, experienced. the train of evils does not cease. it is all too common for opposed erroneous theories to play straight into each other's hands. psychological considerations may be slurred or shoved one side; they cannot be crowded out. put out of the door, they come back through the window. somehow and somewhere motive must be appealed to, connection must be established between the mind and its material. there is no question of getting along without this bond of connection; the only question is whether it be such as grows out of the material itself in relation to the mind, or be imported and hitched on from some outside source. if the subject-matter of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child, if it grows out of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows into application in further achievements and receptivities, then no device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist "interest." the psychologized _is_ of interest--that is, it is placed in the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worth of that life. but the externally presented material, conceived and generated in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and developed in motives alien to him, has no such place of its own. hence the recourse to adventitious leverage to push it in, to factitious drill to drive it in, to artificial bribe to lure it in. three aspects of this recourse to outside ways for giving the subject-matter some psychological meaning may be worth mentioning. familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection. we get used to the chains we wear, and we miss them when removed. 'tis an old story that through custom we finally embrace what at first wore a hideous mien. unpleasant, because meaningless, activities may get agreeable if long enough persisted in. _it is possible for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanical procedure if conditions are continually supplied which demand that mode of operation and preclude any other sort._ i frequently hear dulling devices and empty exercises defended and extolled because "the children take such an 'interest' in them." yes, that is the worst of it; the mind, shut out from worthy employ and missing the taste of adequate performance, comes down to the level of that which is left to it to know and do, and perforce takes an interest in a cabined and cramped experience. to find satisfaction in its own exercise is the normal law of mind, and if large and meaningful business for the mind be denied, it tries to content itself with the formal movements that remain to it--and too often succeeds, save in those cases of more intense activity which cannot accommodate themselves, and that make up the unruly and _declassé_ of our school product. an interest in the formal apprehension of symbols and in their memorized reproduction becomes in many pupils a substitute for the original and vital interest in reality; and all because, the subject-matter of the course of study being out of relation to the concrete mind of the individual, some substitute bond to hold it in some kind of working relation to the mind must be discovered and elaborated. the second substitute for living motivation in the subject-matter is that of contrast-effects; the material of the lesson is rendered interesting, if not in itself, at least in contrast with some alternative experience. to learn the lesson is more interesting than to take a scolding, be held up to general ridicule, stay after school, receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted. and very much of what goes by the name of "discipline," and prides itself upon opposing the doctrines of a soft pedagogy and upon upholding the banner of effort and duty, is nothing more or less than just this appeal to "interest" in its obverse aspect--to fear, to dislike of various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. the subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks origin and bearing in a growing experience. so the appeal is to the thousand and one outside and irrelevant agencies which may serve to throw, by sheer rebuff and rebound, the mind back upon the material from which it is constantly wandering. human nature being what it is, however, it tends to seek its motivation in the agreeable rather than in the disagreeable, in direct pleasure rather than in alternative pain. and so has come up the modern theory and practice of the "interesting," in the false sense of that term. the material is still left; so far as its own characteristics are concerned, just material externally selected and formulated. it is still just so much geography and arithmetic and grammar study; not so much potentiality of child-experience with regard to language, earth, and numbered and measured reality. hence the difficulty of bringing the mind to bear upon it; hence its repulsiveness; the tendency for attention to wander; for other acts and images to crowd in and expel the lesson. the legitimate way out is to transform the material; to psychologize it--that is, once more, to take it and to develop it within the range and scope of the child's life. but it is easier and simpler to leave it as it is, and then by trick of method to _arouse_ interest, to _make_ it _interesting_; to cover it with sugar-coating; to conceal its barrenness by intermediate and unrelated material; and finally, as it were, to get the child to swallow and digest the unpalatable morsel while he is enjoying tasting something quite different. but alas for the analogy! mental assimilation is a matter of consciousness; and if the attention has not been playing upon the actual material, that has not been apprehended, nor worked into faculty. how, then, stands the case of child _vs._ curriculum? what shall the verdict be? the radical fallacy in the original pleadings with which we set out is the supposition that we have no choice save either to leave the child to his own unguided spontaneity or to inspire direction upon him from without. action is response; it is adaptation, adjustment. there is no such thing as sheer self-activity possible--because all activity takes place in a medium, in a situation, and with reference to its conditions. but, again, no such thing as imposition of truth from without, as insertion of truth from without, is possible. all depends upon the activity which the mind itself undergoes in responding to what is presented from without. now, the value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to _determine the environment of the child_, and thus by indirection to direct. its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not for the child. it says to the teacher: such and such are the capacities, the fulfilments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that _their own activities_ move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves. let the child's nature fulfil its own destiny, revealed to you in whatever of science and art and industry the world now holds as its own. the case is of child. it is his present powers which are to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; his present attitudes which are to be realized. but save as the teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-expression which is embodied in that thing we call the curriculum, the teacher knows neither what the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, exercised, and realized. * * * * * transcriber's note. two half-title pages have been omitted. transcribers note: the spelling in this text has been preserved as in the original. obvious printer's errors have been corrected. you can find a list of the corrections made at the end of this e-text. chapter ix is the additional chapter on "the first day in school" mentioned on the title page. there is no entry in the table of contents for this chapter. * * * * * the teacher: or moral influences employed in the instruction and government of the young. new stereotype edition; with an additional chapter on "the first day in school." * * * * * by jacob abbott, late principal of the mt. vernon female school, boston, mass. * * * * * boston: published by whipple and damrell, no. cornhill. . * * * * * entered, according to act of congress, in the year , by jacob abbott, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. * * * * * power press of william s. damrell. to the trustees and patrons of the mt. vernon female school, boston. gentlemen: it is to efforts which you have made in the cause of education, with special regard to its moral and religious aspects, that i have been indebted for the opportunity to test by experiment, under the most pleasant and favorable circumstances, the principles which form the basis of this work. to you, therefore, it is respectfully inscribed, as one of the indirect results of your own exertions to promote the best interests of the young. i am very sincerely and respectfully yours, the author. preface. this book is intended to detail, in a familiar and practical manner, a system of arrangements for the organization and management of a school, based on the employment, so far as is practicable, of _moral influences_, as a means of effecting the objects in view. its design is, not to bring forward new theories or new plans, but to develope and explain, and to carry out to their practical applications, such principles as, among all skilful and experienced teachers, are generally admitted and acted upon. of course it is not designed for the skilful and the experienced themselves; but it is intended to embody what they already know, and to present it in a practical form, for the use of those who are beginning the work and who wish to avail themselves of the experience which others have acquired. although moral influences, are the chief foundations on which the power of the teacher over the minds and hearts of his pupils is, according to this treatise, to rest, still it must not be imagined that the system here recommended is one of persuasion. it is a system of authority,--supreme and unlimited authority, a point essential in all plans for the supervision of the young. but it is authority secured and maintained as far as possible by moral measures. there will be no dispute about the propriety of making the most of this class of means. whatever difference of opinion there may be, on the question whether physical force, is necessary at all, every one will agree that, if ever employed, it must be only as a last resort, and that no teacher ought to make war upon the body, unless it is proved that he cannot conquer through the medium of the mind. in regard to the anecdotes and narratives which are very freely introduced to illustrate principles in this work, the writer ought to state, that though they are all substantially true, that is, all except those which are expressly introduced as mere suppositions, he has not hesitated to alter very freely, for obvious reasons, the unimportant circumstances connected with them. he has endeavored thus to destroy the personality of the narratives, without injuring or altering their moral effect. from the very nature of our employment, and of the circumstances under which the preparation for it must be made, it is plain that, of the many thousands who are, in the united states, annually entering the work, a very large majority must depend for all their knowledge of the art except what they acquire from their own observation and experience, on what they can obtain from books. it is desirable that the class of works from which such knowledge can be obtained should be increased. some excellent and highly useful specimens have already appeared, and very many more would be eagerly read by teachers, if properly prepared. it is essential however that they should be written by experienced teachers, who have for some years been actively engaged, and specially interested in the work;--that they should be written in a very practical and familiar style,--and that they should exhibit principles which are unquestionably true, and generally admitted by good teachers, and not the new theories peculiar to the writer himself. in a word, utility, and practical effect, should be the only aim. boston, june , . contents chapter i.--interest in teaching. source of enjoyment in teaching. the boy and the steam engine. his contrivance. his pleasure, and the source of it. firing at the mark. plan of clearing the galleries in the british house of commons. pleasure of experimenting, and exercising intellectual and moral power. the indifferent, and inactive teacher. his subsequent experiments; means of awakening interest. offences of pupils. different ways of regarding them. teaching really attended with peculiar trials and difficulties. . moral responsibility for the conduct of pupils. . multiplicity of the objects of attention. page chapter ii.--general arrangements. objects to be aimed at, in the general arrangements. systematising the teacher's work. necessity of having only one thing to attend to at a time. . whispering and leaving seats. an experiment. method of regulating this. introduction of the new plan. difficulties. dialogue with pupils. study card. construction and use. . mending pens. unnecessary trouble from this source. degree of importance to be attached to good pens. plan for providing them. . answering questions. evils. each pupil's fair proportion of time. questions about lessons. when the teacher should refuse to answer them. rendering assistance. when to be refused. . hearing recitations. regular arrangement of them. punctuality. plan and schedule. general exercises. subjects to be attended to at them. general arrangements of government. power to be delegated to pupils. gardiner lyceum. its government. the trial. real republican government impracticable in schools. delegated power. experiment with the writing books. quarrel about the nail. offices for pupils. cautions. danger of insubordination. new plans to be introduced gradually. chapter iii.--instruction. the three important branches. the objects which are really most important. advanced scholars. examination of school and scholars at the outset. acting on numbers. extent to which it may be carried. recitation and instruction. . recitation. its object. importance of a thorough examination of the class. various modes. perfect regularity and order necessary. example. story of the pencils. time wasted by too minute an attention to individuals. example. answers given simultaneously to save time. excuses. dangers in simultaneous recitation. means of avoiding them. advantages of this mode. examples. written answers. . instruction. means of exciting interest. variety. examples. showing the connexion between the studies of school and the business of life. example, from the controversy between general and state governments. mode of illustrating it. proper way of meeting difficulties. leading pupils to surmount them. true way to encourage the young to meet difficulties. the boy and the wheelbarrow. difficult examples in arithmetic. proper way of rendering assistance. ( .) simply analyzing intricate subjects. dialogue on longitude. ( .) making previous truths perfectly familiar. experiment with the multiplication table. latin grammar lesson. geometry. . general cautions. doing work for the scholar. dulness. interest in all the pupils. making all alike. faults of pupils. the teacher's own mental habits. false pretensions. chapter iv.--moral discipline. first impressions. story. danger of devoting too much attention to individual instances. the profane boy. case described. confession of the boys. success. the untidy desk. measures in consequence. interesting the scholars in the good order of the school. securing a majority. example. reports about the desks. the new college building. modes of interesting the boys. the irregular class. two ways of remedying the evil. boys' love of system and regularity. object of securing a majority, and particular means of doing it. making school pleasant. discipline should generally be private. in all cases that are brought before the school, public opinion in the teacher's favor should be secured. story of the rescue. feelings of displeasure against what is wrong. the teacher under moral obligation, and governed, himself, by law. description of the _moral exercise_. prejudice. the scholars' written remarks, and the teacher's comments. the spider. list of subjects. anonymous writing. specimens. marks of a bad scholar. consequences of being behindhand. new scholars. a satirical spirit. variety. treatment of individual offenders. ascertaining who they are. studying their characters. securing their personal attachment. asking assistance. the whistle. open, frank dealing. example. dialogue with james. communications in writing. chapter v.--religious influence. the american mechanic at paris. a congregational teacher among quakers. parents have the ultimate right to decide how their children shall be educated. agreement in religious opinion, in this country. principle which is to guide the teacher on this subject. limits and restrictions to religious influence in school. religious truths which are generally admitted in this country. the existence of god. human responsibility. immortality of the soul. a revelation. nature of piety. salvation by christ. teacher to do nothing on this subject but what he may do by the common consent of his employers. reasons for explaining distinctly these limits. particular measures proposed. opening exercises. prayer. singing. direct instruction. mode of giving it. example; arrangement of the epistles in the new testament. dialogue. another example; scene in the woods. cautions. affected simplicity of language. evils of it. minute details. example; motives to study. dialogue. mingling religious influence with the direct discipline of the school. fallacious indications of piety. sincerity of the teacher. chapter vi.--mt. vernon school. reason for inserting the description. advantage of visiting schools; and of reading descriptions of them. addressed to a new scholar. . her personal duty. study card. rule. but one rule. cases when this rule may be waived. . at the direction of teachers. . on extraordinary emergencies. reasons for the rule. anecdote. punishments. incident described. confession. . order of daily exercises. opening of the school. schedules. hours of study and recess. general exercises. business. examples. sections. . instruction and supervision of pupils. classes. organization. sections. duties of superintendents. . officers. design in appointing them. their names and duties. example of the operation of the system. . the court. its plan and design. a trial described. . religious instruction. principles inculcated. measures. religious exercises in school. meeting on saturday afternoon. concluding remarks. chapter vii.--scheming. time lost upon fruitless schemes. proper province of ingenuity and enterprise. cautions. case supposed. the spelling class; an experiment with it; its success and its consequences. system of literary institutions in this country. directions to a young teacher on the subject of forming new plans. new institutions; new school books. ingenuity and enterprise very useful, within proper limits. ways of making known new plans. periodicals. family newspapers. teacher's meetings. rights of committees, trustees, or patrons, in the control of the school. principle which ought to govern. case supposed. extent to which the teacher is bound by the wishes of his employers. chapter viii.--reports of cases. plan of the chapter. hats and bonnets. injury to clothes. mistakes which are not censurable. tardiness; plan for punishing it. helen's lesson. firmness in measures united with mildness of manner. insincere confession: scene in a class. court. trial of a case. teacher's personal character. the way to elevate the character of the employment. six hours only to be devoted to school. the chestnut burr. scene in the wood. dialogue in school. an experiment. series of lessons in writing. the correspondence. two kinds of management. plan of weekly reports. the shopping exercise. example. artifices in recitations. keeping resolutions; notes of teacher's lecture. topics. plan and illustration of the exercise. introduction of music. tabu. mental analysis. scene in a class. the teacher. chapter i. interest in teaching. there is a most singular contrariety of opinion prevailing in the community, in regard to the _pleasantness_ of the business of teaching. some teachers go to their daily task, merely upon compulsion: they regard it as intolerable drudgery. others love the work: they hover around the school-room as long as they can, and never cease to think, and seldom to talk, of their delightful labors. unfortunately there are too many of the former class, and the first object, which, in this work, i shall attempt to accomplish, is to show my readers, especially those who have been accustomed to look upon the business of teaching as a weary and heartless toil, how it happens, that it is, in any case, so pleasant. the human mind is always, essentially, the same. that which is tedious and joyless to one, will be so to another, if pursued in the same way, and under the same circumstances. and teaching, if it is pleasant, animating, and exciting to one, may be so to all. i am met, however, at the outset, in my effort to show why it is that teaching is ever a pleasant work, by the want of a name for a certain faculty or capacity of the human mind, through which most of the enjoyment of teaching finds its avenue. every mind is so constituted as to take a positive pleasure in the exercise of ingenuity in adapting means to an end, and in watching their operation;--in accomplishing by the intervention of instruments, what we could not accomplish without;--in devising, (when we see an object to be effected, which is too great for our _direct_ and _immediate_ power) and setting at work, some _instrumentality_, which may be sufficient to accomplish it. it is said, that, when the steam engine was first put into operation, such was the imperfection of the machinery, that a boy was necessarily stationed at it, to open and shut alternately the cock, by which the steam was now admitted, and now shut out, from the cylinder. one such boy, after patiently doing his work for many days, contrived to connect this stop-cock with some of the moving parts of the engine, by a wire, in such a manner, that the engine itself did the work which had been entrusted to him; and after seeing that the whole business would go regularly forward, he left the wire in charge, and went away to play. such is the story. now if it is true, how much pleasure the boy must have experienced, in devising and witnessing the successful operation of his scheme; i do not mean the pleasure of relieving himself from a dull and wearisome duty; i do not mean the pleasure of anticipated play; but i mean the strong interest he must have taken in _contriving_ and _executing_ his plan. when, wearied out with his dull, monotonous work, he first noticed those movements of the machinery which he thought adapted to his purpose, and the plan flashed into his mind, how must his eye have brightened, and how quick must the weary listlessness of his employment have vanished. while he was maturing his plan, and carrying it into execution;--while adjusting his wires, fitting them to the exact length, and to the exact position,--and especially, when, at last, he watches the first successful operation of his contrivance,--he must have enjoyed a pleasure, which very few, even of the joyous sports of childhood, could have supplied. it is not, however, exactly the pleasure of exercising _ingenuity in contrivance_, that i refer to here; for the teacher has not, after all, a great deal of absolute contriving to do,--or rather his _principal business_ is not contriving. the greatest and most permanent source of pleasure to the boy, in such a case as i have described, is his feeling that he is accomplishing a great effect by a slight effort of his own; the feeling of power; acting through the _intervention of instrumentality_, so as to multiply his power. so great would be this satisfaction, that he would almost wish to have some other similar work assigned him, that he might have another opportunity to contrive some plan for its easy accomplishment. looking at an object to be accomplished, or an evil to be remedied, then studying its nature and extent, and devising and executing some means for effecting the purpose desired, is, in all cases, a source of pleasure; especially when, by the process, we bring to view or to operation, new powers, or powers heretofore hidden, whether they are our own powers, or those of objects upon which we act. experimenting has a sort of magical fascination for all. some do not like the trouble of making preparations, but all are eager to see the results. contrive a new machine, and every body will be interested to witness, or to hear of its operation;--develope any heretofore unknown properties of matter, or secure some new useful effect, from laws which men have not hitherto employed for their purposes, and the interest of all around you will be excited to observe your results;--and especially, you will yourself take a deep and permanent pleasure, in guiding and controlling the power you have thus obtained. this is peculiarly the case with experiments upon mind, or experiments for producing effects through the medium of voluntary acts of the human mind, so that the contriver must take into consideration the laws of mind in forming his plans. to illustrate this by rather a childish case: i once knew a boy who was employed by his father to remove all the loose small stones, which, from the peculiar nature of the ground, had accumulated in the road before the house. he was to take them up, and throw them over into the pasture, across the way. he soon got tired of picking them up one by one, and sat down upon the bank, to try to devise some better means of accomplishing his work. he at length conceived and adopted the following plan. he set up, in the pasture, a narrow board, for a target, or as boys would call it, a mark,--and then, collecting all the boys of the neighborhood, he proposed to them an amusement, which boys are always ready for,--firing at a mark. i need not say that the stores of ammunition in the street were soon exhausted; the boys working for their leader, when they supposed they were only finding amusement for themselves. here now, is experimenting upon the mind;--the production of useful effect with rapidity and ease, by the intervention of proper instrumentality;--the conversion, by means of a little knowledge of human nature, of that which would have otherwise been dull and fatiguing labor, into a most animating sport, giving pleasure to twenty, instead of tedious labor to one. now the contrivance and execution of such plans is a source of positive pleasure; it is always pleasant to bring the properties and powers of matter into requisition to promote our designs,--but there is a far higher pleasure in controlling, and guiding, and moulding to our purpose the movements of mind. it is this which gives interest to the plans and operation of human governments. they can do little by actual force. nearly all the power that is held, even by the most despotic executive, must be based on an adroit management of the principles of human nature, so as to lead men voluntarily to cooperate with the ruler, in his plans. even an army could not be got into battle, in many cases, without a most ingenious arrangement, by means of which half a dozen men can drive, literally drive, as many thousands, into the very face of danger and death. the difficulty of leading men to battle must have been for a long time a very perplexing one to generals. it was at last removed by the very simple expedient of creating a greater danger behind than there is before. without ingenuity of contrivance like this,--turning one principle of human nature against another, and making it for the momentary interest of men to act in a given way, no government could stand a year. i know of nothing which illustrates more perfectly the way by which a knowledge of human nature is to be turned to account in managing human minds, than a plan which was adopted for clearing the galleries of the british house of commons, as it was described to me by a gentleman who had visited london. it is well known that the gallery is appropriated to spectators, and that it sometimes becomes necessary to order them to retire, when a vote is to be taken, or private business is to be transacted. when the officer in attendance was ordered to clear the gallery, it was sometimes found to be a very troublesome and slow operation; for those who first went out, remained obstinately as close to the doors as possible, so as to secure the opportunity to come in again first, when the doors should be re-opened. the consequence was, there was so great an accumulation around the doors outside, that it was almost impossible for the crowd to get out. the whole difficulty arose from the eager desire of every one to remain as near as possible to the door, _through which they were to come back again_. i have been told, that, notwithstanding the utmost efforts of the officers, fifteen minutes were sometimes consumed in effecting the object, when the order was given that the spectators should retire. the whole difficulty was removed by a very simple plan. one door only was opened when the crowd was to retire, and they were then admitted through the other. the consequence was, that as soon as the order was given to clear the galleries, every one fled as fast as possible through the open door around to the one which was closed, so as to be ready to enter first, when that, in its turn, should be opened; this was usually in a few minutes, as the purpose for which the spectators were ordered to retire was usually simply to allow time for taking a vote. here it will be seen that by the operation of a very simple plan, the very eagerness of the crowd to get back as soon as possible, which had been the _sole cause of the difficulty_, was turned to account most effectually to remove it. before, they were so eager to return, that they crowded around the door so as to prevent others going out. but by this simple plan of ejecting them by one door, and admitting them by another, that very circumstance made them clear the passage at once, and hurried every one away into the lobby, the moment the command was given. the planner of this scheme must have taken great pleasure in seeing its successful operation; though the officer who should go steadily on, endeavoring to remove the reluctant throng by dint of mere driving, might well have found his task unpleasant. but the exercise of ingenuity in studying the nature of the difficulty with which a man has to contend, and bringing in some antagonist principle of human nature to remove it, or if not an antagonist principle, a similar principle, operating, by a peculiar arrangement of circumstances, in an antagonist manner, is always pleasant. from this source a large share of the enjoyment which men find in the active pursuits of life, has its origin. the teacher has the whole field, which this subject opens, fully before him. he has human nature to deal with, most directly. his whole work is experimenting upon mind; and the mind which is before him to be the subject of his operation, is exactly in the state to be most easily and pleasantly operated upon. the reason now why some teachers find their work delightful, and some find it wearisomeness and tedium itself, is that some do, and some do not take this view of their work. one instructer is like the engine-boy, turning without cessation or change, his everlasting stop-cock, in the same ceaseless, mechanical, and monotonous routine. another is like the little workman in his brighter moments, fixing his invention and watching with delight its successful and easy accomplishment of his wishes. one is like the officer, driving by vociferations and threats, and demonstrations of violence, the spectators from the galleries. the other, like the shrewd contriver, who converts the very cause which was the whole ground of the difficulty, to a most successful and efficient means of its removal. these principles show how teaching may, in some cases, be a delightful employment, while in others, its tasteless dulness is interrupted by nothing but its perplexities and cares. the school-room is in reality, a little empire of mind. if the one who presides in it, sees it in its true light; studies the nature and tendency of the minds which he has to control; adapts his plans and his measures to the laws of human nature, and endeavors to accomplish his purposes for them, not by mere labor and force, but by ingenuity and enterprise; he will take pleasure in administering his little government. he will watch, with care and interest, the operation of the moral and intellectual causes which he sets in operation; and find, as he accomplishes his various objects with increasing facility and power, that he will derive a greater and greater pleasure from his work. now when a teacher thus looks upon his school as a field in which he is to exercise skill and ingenuity and enterprise; when he studies the laws of human nature, and the character of those minds upon which he has to act; when he explores deliberately the nature of the field which he has to cultivate, and of the objects which he wishes to accomplish; and applies means, judiciously and skilfully adapted to the object; he must necessarily take a strong interest in his work. but when, on the other hand, he goes to his employment, only to perform a certain regular round of daily work, undertaking nothing, and anticipating nothing but this dull and unchangeable routine; and when he looks upon his pupils merely as passive objects of his labors, whom he is to treat with simple indifference while they obey his commands, and to whom he is only to apply reproaches and punishment when they disobey; such a teacher never can take pleasure in the school. weariness and dulness must reign in both master and scholars, when things, as he imagines, are going right; and mutual anger and crimination, when they go wrong. scholars never can be instructed by the power of any dull mechanical routine; nor can they be governed by the blind, naked strength of the master; such means must fail of the accomplishment of the purposes designed, and consequently the teacher who tries such a course must have constantly upon his mind the discouraging, disheartening burden of unsuccessful and almost useless labor. he is continually uneasy, dissatisfied and filled with anxious cares; and sources of vexation and perplexity continually arise. he attempts to remove evils by waging against them a useless and most vexatious warfare of threatening and punishment; and he is trying continually _to drive_, when he might know that neither the intellect nor the heart are capable of being driven. i will simply state one case, to illustrate what i mean by the difference between blind force, and active ingenuity and enterprise, in the management of school. i once knew the teacher of a school, who made it his custom to have writing attended to in the afternoon. the boys were accustomed to take their places, at the appointed hour, and each one would stick up his pen in the front of his desk for the teacher to pass around and mend them. the teacher would accordingly pass around, mending the pens from desk to desk, thus enabling the boys, in succession, to begin their task. of course each boy before he came to his desk was necessarily idle, and, almost necessarily, in mischief. day after day the teacher went through this regular routine. he sauntered slowly and listlessly through the aisles, and among the benches of the room, wherever he saw the signal of a pen. he paid of course very little attention to the writing, now and then reproving, with an impatient tone, some extraordinary instance of carelessness, or leaving his work to suppress some rising disorder. ordinarily, however, he seemed to be lost in vacancy of thought,--dreaming perhaps of other scenes, or inwardly repining at the eternal monotony and tedium of a teacher's life. his boys took no interest in their work, and of course made no progress. they were sometimes unnecessarily idle, and sometimes mischievous, but never usefully or pleasantly employed; for the whole hour was past before the pens could all be brought down. wasted time, blotted books, and fretted tempers, were all the results which the system produced. the same teacher afterwards acted on a very different principle. he looked over the field and said to himself, what are the objects i wish to accomplish in this writing exercise, and how can i best accomplish them? i wish to obtain the greatest possible amount of industrious and careful practice in writing. the first thing evidently is, to save the wasted time. he accordingly made preparation for mending the pens at a previous hour, so that all should be ready, at the appointed time, to commence the work together. this could be done quite as conveniently when the boys were engaged in studying, by requesting them to put out their pens at an appointed and _previous_ time. he sat at his table, and the pens of a whole bench were brought to him, and, after being carefully mended, were returned, to be in readiness for the writing hour. thus the first difficulty, the loss of time, was obviated. "i must make them _industrious_ while they write," was his next thought. after thinking of a variety of methods, he determined to try the following. he required all to begin together at the top of the page and write the same line, in a hand of the same size. they were all required to begin together, he himself beginning at the same time, and writing about as fast as he thought they ought to write, in order to secure the highest improvement. when he had finished his line, he ascertained how many had preceded him, and how many were behind. he requested the first to write slower, and the others faster, and by this means, after a few trials, he secured uniform, regular, systematic and industrious employment, throughout the school. probably there were, at first, difficulties in the operation of the plan, which he had to devise ways and means to surmount: but what i mean to present particularly to the reader is, that he was _interested in his experiments_. while sitting in his desk, giving his command to _begin_ line after line, and noticing the unbroken silence, and attention, and interest, which prevailed, (for each boy was interested to see how nearly with the master he could finish his work,) while presiding over such a scene, he must have been interested. he must have been pleased with the exercise of his almost military command, and to witness how effectually order and industry, and excited and pleased attention, had taken the place of listless idleness and mutual dissatisfaction. after a few days, he appointed one of the older and more judicious scholars, to give the word for beginning and ending the lines, and he sat surveying the scene, or walking from desk to desk, noticing faults, and considering what plans he could form for securing, more and more fully, the end he had in view. he found that the great object of interest and attention among the boys was, to come out right, and that less pains were taken with the formation of the letters, than there ought to be, to secure the most rapid improvement. but how shall he secure greater pains? by stern commands and threats? by going from desk to desk, scolding one, rapping the knuckles of another, and holding up to ridicule a third, making examples of such individuals as may chance to attract his special attention? no; he has learned that he is operating upon a little empire of mind, and that he is not to endeavor to drive them as a man drives a herd, by mere peremptory command or half angry blows. he must study the nature of the effect he is to produce, and of the materials upon which he is to work, and adopt, after mature deliberation, a plan to accomplish his purpose, founded upon the principles which ought always to regulate the action of mind upon mind, and adapted to produce the _intellectual effect_, which he wishes to accomplish. in the case supposed, the teacher concluded to appeal to emulation. while i describe the measure he adopted, let it be remembered that i am now only approving of the resort to ingenuity and invention, and the employment of moral and intellectual means, for the accomplishment of his purposes, and not of the measures themselves. i do not think the plan i am going to describe a wise one; but i do think that the teacher, while trying it, must _have been interested in his intellectual experiment_. his business, while pursued in such a way, could not have been a mere dull and uninteresting routine. he purchased, for three cents apiece, two long lead-pencils, an article of great value, in the opinion of the boys of country schools; and he offered them, as prizes, to the boy who would write most carefully; not to the one who should write _best_, but to the one whose book should exhibit most appearance of _effort_ and _care_ for a week. after announcing his plan, he watched, with strong interest its operation. he walked round the room while the writing was in progress, to observe the effect of his measure. he did not reprove those who were writing carelessly; he simply noticed who and how many they were. he did not commend those who were evidently making effort; he noticed who and how many they were, that he might understand how far, and upon what sort of minds, his experiment was successful, and where it failed. he was taking a lesson in human nature,--human nature as it exhibits itself in boys, and was preparing to operate more and more powerfully by future plans. the lesson which he learned by the experiment was this, that one or two prizes will not influence the majority of a large school. a few seemed to think that the pencils were possibly within their reach, and _they_ made vigorous efforts to secure them; but the rest wrote on as before. thinking it certain that they should be surpassed by the others, they gave up the contest, at once, in despair. the obvious remedy was to multiply his prizes, so as to bring one within the reach of all. he reflected too that the real prize, in such a case, is not the value of the pencil, but the _honor of the victory_; and as the honor of the victory might as well be coupled with an object of less, as well as with one of greater value, the next week he divided his two pencils into quarters, and offered to his pupils eight prizes instead of two. he offered one to every five scholars, as they sat on their benches, and every boy then saw, that a reward would certainly come within five of him. his chance, accordingly, instead of being one in twenty, became one in five. now is it possible for a teacher, after having philosophized upon the nature of the minds upon which he is operating, and surveyed the field, and ingeniously formed a plan, which plan he hopes will, through his own intrinsic power, produce certain effects,--is it possible for him when he comes, for the first day, to witness its operations, to come without feeling a strong interest in the result? it is impossible. after having formed such a plan, and made such arrangements, he will look forward, almost with impatience, to the next writing hour. he wishes to see whether he has estimated the mental capacities and tendencies of his little community aright; and when the time comes, and he surveys the scene, and observes the operation of his measure, and sees many more are reached by it, than were influenced before, he feels a strong gratification; and it is a gratification which is founded upon the noblest principles of our nature. he is tracing on a most interesting field, the operation of cause and effect. from being the mere drudge, who drives, without intellect or thought, a score or two of boys to their daily tasks, he rises to the rank of an intellectual philosopher, exploring the laws and successfully controlling the tendencies of mind. it will be observed too, that all the time this teacher was performing these experiments, and watching, with intense interest, the results, his pupils were going on undisturbed in their pursuits. the exercises in writing were not interrupted or deranged. this is a point of fundamental importance; for, if what i should say on the subject of exercising ingenuity and contrivance in teaching, should be the means, in any case, of leading a teacher to break in upon the regular duties of his school, and destroy the steady uniformity with which the great objects of such an institution should be pursued, my remarks had better never have been written. there may be variety in methods and plan; but through all this variety, the school, and every individual pupil of it, must go steadily forward in the acquisition of that knowledge which is of greatest importance in the business of future life. in other words, the variations and changes, admitted by the teacher, ought to be mainly confined to the modes of accomplishing those permanent objects to which all the exercises and arrangements of the school ought steadily to aim. more on this subject however in another chapter. i will mention one other circumstance, which will help to explain the difference in interest and pleasure with which teachers engage in their work. i mean the different views they take _of the offences of their pupils_. one class of teachers seem never to make it a part of their calculation that their pupils will do wrong, and when any misconduct occurs, they are disconcerted and irritated, and look and act as if some unexpected occurrence had broken in upon their plans. others understand and consider all this beforehand. they seem to think a little, before they go into their school, what sort of beings boys and girls are, and any ordinary case of youthful delinquency or dulness does not surprise them. i do not mean that they treat such cases with indifference or neglect, but that they _expect_ them, and _are prepared for them_. such a teacher knows that boys and girls, are the _materials_ he has to work upon, and he takes care to make himself acquainted with these materials, _just as they are_. the other class however, do not seem to know at all, what sort of beings they have to deal with, or if they know, do not _consider_. they expect from them what is not to be obtained, and then are disappointed and vexed at the failure. it is as if a carpenter should attempt to support an entablature by pillars of wood too small and weak for the weight, and then go on, from week to week, suffering anxiety and irritation, as he sees them swelling and splitting under the burden, and finding fault _with the wood_, instead of taking it to himself. it is, of course, one essential part of a man's duty in engaging in any undertaking, whether it will lead him to act upon matter or upon mind, to become first well acquainted with the circumstances of the case,--the materials he is to act upon, and the means which he may reasonably expect to have at his command. if he underrates his difficulties, or overrates the power of his means of overcoming them, it is his mistake; a mistake for which _he_ is fully responsible. whatever may be the nature of the effect which he aims at accomplishing, he ought fully to understand it, and to appreciate justly the difficulties which lie in the way. teachers however very often overlook this. a man comes home from his school at night, perplexed and irritated by the petty misconduct which he has witnessed, and been trying to check. he does not however, look forward and try to prevent the occasions of it, adapting his measures to the nature of the material upon which he has to operate; but he stands like the carpenter at his columns, making himself miserable in looking at it, after it occurs, and wondering what to do. "sir," we might say to him, "what is the matter?" "why, i have such boys, i can do nothing with them. were it not for _their misconduct_, i might have a very good school." "were it not for the boys? why, is there any peculiar depravity in them which you could not have foreseen?" "no; i suppose they are pretty much like all other boys," he replies despairingly; "they are all hair-brained and unmanageable. the plans i have formed for my school, would be excellent if my boys would only behave properly." "excellent plans," might we not reply, "and yet not adapted to the materials upon which they are to operate! no. it is your business to know what sort of beings boys are, and to make your calculations accordingly." * * * * * two teachers may therefore manage their schools in totally different ways: so that one of them, may necessarily find the business a dull, mechanical routine, except as it is occasionally varied by perplexity and irritation; and the other, a prosperous and happy employment. the one goes on mechanically the same, and depends for his power on violence, or on threats and demonstrations of violence. the other brings all his ingenuity and enterprise into the field, to accomplish a steady purpose, by means ever varying, and depends for his power, on his knowledge of human nature, and on the adroit adaptation of plans to her fixed and uniform tendencies. i am very sorry however to be obliged to say, that probably the latter class of teachers are decidedly in the minority. to practice the art in such a way as to make it an agreeable employment, is difficult, and it requires much knowledge of human nature, much attention and skill. and, after all, there are some circumstances necessarily attending the work which constitute a heavy drawback on the pleasures which it might otherwise afford. the almost universal impression that the business of teaching is attended with peculiar trials and difficulties, proves this. there must be some cause for an impression so general. it is not right to call it a prejudice, for, although a single individual may conceive a prejudice, whole communities very seldom do, unless in some case, which is presented at once to the whole, so that looking at it, through a common medium, all judge wrong together. but the general opinion in regard to teaching is composed of a vast number of _separate_ and _independent_ judgments, and there must be some good ground for the universal result. it is best therefore, if there are any real and peculiar sources of trial and difficulty in this pursuit, that they should be distinctly known and acknowledged at the outset. count the cost before going to war. it is even better policy to overrate, than to underrate it. let us see then what the real difficulties of teaching are. it is not however, as is generally supposed, _the confinement_. a teacher is confined, it is true, but not more than men of other professions and employments; not more than a merchant, and probably not as much. a physician is confined in a different way, but more closely than a teacher: he can never leave home: he knows generally no vacation, and nothing but accidental rest. the lawyer is confined as much. it is true, there are not throughout the year, exact hours which he must keep, but considering the imperious demands of his business, his personal liberty is probably restrained as much by it, as that of the teacher. so with all the other professions. although the nature of the confinement may vary, it amounts to about the same in all. on the other hand the teacher enjoys, in reference to this subject of confinement, an advantage, which scarcely any other class of men does or can enjoy. i mean vacations. a man in any other business may _force_ himself away from it, for a time, but the cares and anxieties of his business will follow him wherever he goes, and it seems to be reserved for the teacher, to enjoy alone the periodical luxury of a _real and entire release from business and care_. on the whole, as to confinement, it seems to me that the teacher has but little ground of complaint. there are however some real and serious difficulties which always have, and it is to be feared, always will, cluster around this employment; and which must, for a long time, at least, lead most men to desire some other employment for the business of life. there may perhaps be some, who by their peculiar skill, can overcome, or avoid them, and perhaps the science may, at some future day, be so far improved, that all may avoid them. as i describe them however now, most of the teachers into whose hands this treatise may fall, will probably find that their own experience corresponds, in this respect, with mine. . the first great difficulty which the teacher feels, is a sort of _moral responsibility for the conduct of others_. if his pupils do wrong, he feels almost personal responsibility for it. as he walks out, some afternoon, weary with his labors, and endeavoring to forget, for a little time, all his cares, he comes upon a group of boys, in rude and noisy quarrels, or engaged in mischief of some sort, and his heart sinks within him. it is hard enough for any one to witness their bad conduct, with a spirit unruffled and undisturbed, but for their teacher, it is perhaps impossible. he feels _responsible_; in fact he is responsible. if his scholars are disorderly, or negligent, or idle, or quarrelsome, he feels _condemned himself_, almost as if he were, himself, the actual transgressor. this difficulty is in a great degree, peculiar to a teacher. a physician is called upon to prescribe for a patient; he examines the case, and writes his prescription. when this is done, his duty is ended, and whether the patient obeys the prescription and lives, or neglects it and dies, the physician feels exonerated from all responsibility. he may, and in some cases does feel _anxious concern_, and may regret the infatuation by which, in some unhappy case, a valuable life may be hazarded or destroyed. but he feels no _moral responsibility_ for another's guilt. it is so with all the other employments in life. they do indeed often bring men into collision with other men. but though sometimes vexed, and irritated by the conduct of a neighbor, a client, or a patient, they feel not half the bitterness of the solicitude and anxiety which come to the teacher through the criminality of his pupil. in ordinary cases he not only feels responsible for efforts, but for their results; and when, notwithstanding all his efforts, his pupils will do wrong, his spirit sinks, with an intensity of anxious despondency, which none but a teacher can understand. this feeling of almost _moral accountability for the guilt of other persons_, is a continual burden. the teacher in the presence of the pupil never is free from it. it links him to them by a bond, which, perhaps, he ought not to sunder, and which he cannot sunder if he would. and sometimes, when those committed to his charge are idle, or faithless, or unprincipled, it wears away his spirits and his health together. i think there is nothing analogous to this moral connexion between teacher and pupil, unless it be in the case of a parent and child. and here on account of the comparative smallness of the number under the parent's care, the evil is so much diminished that it is easily borne. . the second great difficulty of the teacher's employments, is _the immense multiplicity of the objects of his attention and care_, during the time he is employed in his business. his scholars are individuals, and notwithstanding all that the most systematic can do, in the way of classification, they must be attended to in a great measure, as individuals. a merchant keeps his commodities together, and looks upon a cargo composed of ten thousand articles, and worth , dollars as one: he speaks of it as one: and there is, in many cases, no more perplexity in planning its destination, than if it were a single box of raisins. a lawyer may have a great many important cases, but he has only one at a time; that is, he _attends_ to but one at a time. that one may be intricate,--involving many facts and requiring to be examined in many aspects and relations. but he looks at but few of these facts and regards but few of these relations at a time. the points which demand his attention come, one after another, in regular succession. his mind may thus be kept calm. he avoids confusion and perplexity. but no skill or classification will turn the poor teacher's hundred scholars into one, or enable him, except to a very limited extent, and for a very limited purpose, to regard them as one. he has a distinct, and, in many respects, a different work to do for every one of the crowd before him. difficulties must be explained in detail; questions must be answered one by one; and each scholar's own conduct and character must be considered by itself. his work is thus made up of a thousand minute particulars, which are all crowding upon his attention at once, and which he cannot group together, or combine, or simplify. he must by some means or other attend to them in all their distracting individuality. and in a large and complicated school, the endless multiplicity and variety of objects of attention and care, impose a task under which few intellects can long stand. i have said that this endless multiplicity and variety cannot be reduced and simplified by classification. i mean, of course, that this can be done only to a very limited extent, compared with what may be effected in the other pursuits of mankind. were it not for the art of classification and system, no school could have more than ten scholars, as i intend hereafter to show. the great reliance of the teacher is upon this art, to reduce to some tolerable order, what would otherwise be the inextricable confusion of his business. he _must be systematic_. he must classify and arrange; but after he has done all that he can, he must still expect that his daily business will continue to consist of a vast multitude of minute particulars, from one to another of which the mind must turn with a rapidity, which, few of the other employments of life ever demand. these are the essential sources of difficulty with which the teacher has to contend; but, as i shall endeavor to show in succeeding chapters, though they cannot be entirely removed, they can be so far mitigated by the appropriate means, as to render the employment a happy one. i have thought it best however, as this work will doubtless be read by many, who, when they read it, are yet to begin their labors, to describe frankly and fully to them the difficulties which beset the path they are about to enter. "the wisdom of the prudent is, to understand his way. it is often wisdom to understand it beforehand." chapter ii. general arrangements. the distraction and perplexity of the teacher's life are, as was explained in the last chapter, almost proverbial. there are other pressing and exhausting pursuits, which wear away the spirit by the ceaseless care which they impose, or perplex and bewilder the intellect by the multiplicity and intricacy of their details. but the business of teaching, by a pre-eminence not very enviable, stands, almost by common consent, at the head of the catalogue. i have already alluded to this subject in the preceding chapter; and probably the greater majority of actual teachers will admit the truth of the view there presented. some will however, doubtless say, that they do not find the business of teaching so perplexing and exhausting an employment. they take things calmly. they do one thing at a time, and that without useless solicitude and anxiety. so that teaching, with them, though it has, indeed, its solicitudes and cares, as every other responsible employment must necessarily have, is, after all, a calm and quiet pursuit, which they follow from month to month, and from year to year, without any extraordinary agitations, or any unusual burdens of anxiety and care. there are indeed such cases, but they are exceptions; and unquestionably an immense majority, especially of those who are beginners in the work, find it such as i have described. i think it need not be so; or rather, i think the evil may be avoided to _a very great degree_. in this chapter i shall endeavor to show how order may be produced out of that almost inextricable mass of confusion, into which so many teachers, on commencing their labors, find themselves plunged. the objects then, to be aimed at in the general arrangements of schools, are two-fold. . that the teacher may be left uninterrupted, to attend to one thing at a time. . that the individual scholars may have constant employment, and such an amount and such kinds of study, as shall be suited to the circumstances and capacities of each. i shall examine each in their order. . the following are the principal things which, in a vast number of schools, are all the time pressing upon the teacher: or rather, they are the things which must, every where, press upon the teacher, except so far as, by the skill of his arrangements, he contrives to remove them. . giving leave to whisper or to leave seats. . mending pens. . answering questions in regard to studies. . hearing recitations. . watching the behavior of the scholars. . administering reproof and punishment for offences as they occur. a pretty large number of objects of attention and care, one would say, to be pressing upon the mind of the teacher at one and the same time,--and _all the time_, too! hundreds and hundreds of teachers in every part of our country, there is no doubt, have all these, crowding upon them from morning to night, with no cessation, except perhaps some accidental and momentary respite. during the winter months, while the principal common schools in our country are in operation, it is sad to reflect how many teachers come home, every evening, with bewildered and aching heads, having been vainly trying all the day, to do six things at a time, while he, who made the human mind, has determined that it shall do but one. how many become discouraged and disheartened by what they consider the unavoidable trials of a teacher's life, and give up in despair, just because their faculties will not sustain a six-fold task. there are multitudes who, in early life, attempted teaching, and, after having been worried, almost to distraction, by the simultaneous pressure of these multifarious cares, gave up the employment in disgust, and forever afterwards wonder how any body can like teaching. i know multitudes of persons to whom the above description will exactly apply. i once heard a teacher who had been very successful, even in large schools, say that he could hear two classes recite, mend pens, and watch his school, all at the same time; and that, without any distraction of mind, or any unusual fatigue. of course the recitations in such a case must be memoriter. there are very few minds however, which can thus perform triple or quadruple work, and probably none which can safely be tasked so severely. for my part, i can do but one thing at a time; and i have no question that the true policy for all, is, to learn, not _to do every thing at once_, but so to classify and arrange their work, that _they shall have but one thing to do_. instead of vainly attempting to attend simultaneously to a dozen things, they should so plan their work, that only one will demand attention. let us then examine the various particulars above mentioned in succession, and see how each can be disposed of, so as not to be a constant source of interruption and derangement. . _whispering and leaving seats._ in regard to this subject, there are very different methods, now in practice in different schools. in some, especially in very small schools, the teacher allows the pupils to act according to their own discretion. they whisper and leave their seats whenever they think it necessary. this plan may possibly be admissible in a very small school; that is, in one of ten or twelve pupils. i am convinced, however, that it is very bad here. no vigilant watch, which it is possible for any teacher to exert, will prevent a vast amount of mere talk, entirely foreign to the business of the school. i tried this plan very thoroughly, with high ideas of the dependence which might be placed upon conscience and a sense of duty, if these principles are properly brought out to action in an effort to sustain the system. i was told by distinguished teachers, that it would not be found to answer. but predictions of failure in such cases only prompt to greater exertions, and i persevered. but i was forced at last to give up the point, and adopt another plan. my pupils would make resolutions enough; they understood their duty well enough. they were allowed to leave their seats and whisper to their companions, whenever, in _their honest judgment, it was necessary for the prosecution of their studies_. i knew that it sometimes would be necessary, and i was desirous to adopt this plan to save myself the constant interruption of hearing and replying to requests. but it would not do. whenever, from time to time, i called them to account, i found that a large majority, according to their own confession, were in the habit of holding daily and deliberate communication with each other, on subjects entirely foreign to the business of the school. a more experienced teacher would have predicted this result; but i had very high ideas of the power of cultivated conscience; and in fact, still have. but then, like most other persons who become possessed of a good idea, i could not be satisfied without carrying it to an extreme. still it is necessary to give pupils, sometimes, the opportunity to whisper and leave seats. cases occur where this is unavoidable. it cannot therefore be forbidden altogether. how then, you will ask, can the teacher regulate this practice, so as to prevent the evils which will otherwise flow from it, without being continually interrupted by the request for permission? by a very simple method. _appropriate particular times at which all this business is to be done, and forbid it altogether_ at every other time. it is well on other accounts to give the pupils of a school a little respite, at least every hour; and if this is done, an intermission of study for two minutes each time, will be sufficient. during this time, _general_ permission should be given to speak or to leave seats, provided they do nothing at such a time to disturb the studies of others. this has been my plan for two or three years, and no arrangement which i have ever made, has operated for so long a time, so uninterruptedly, and so entirely to my satisfaction as this. it of course will require some little time, and no little firmness, to establish the new order of things, where a school has been accustomed to another course; but where this is once done, i know no one plan so simple and so easily put into execution, which will do so much towards relieving the teacher of the distraction and perplexity of his pursuits. in making the change, however, it is of fundamental importance that the pupils should themselves be interested in it. their cooperation, or rather the cooperation of the majority, which it is very easy to obtain, is absolutely essential to success. i say this is very easily obtained. let us suppose that some teacher, who has been accustomed to require his pupils to ask and obtain permission, every time they wish to speak to a companion, is induced by these remarks to introduce this plan. he says accordingly to his school: "you know that you are now accustomed to ask me whenever you wish to obtain permission to whisper to a companion, or to leave your seats: now i have been thinking of a plan which will be better for both you and me. by our present plan, you are sometimes obliged to wait before i can attend to your request. sometimes i think it is unnecessary, and deny you, when perhaps i was mistaken, and it was really necessary. at other times, i think it very probable, that when it is quite desirable for you to leave your seat, you do not ask, because you think you may not obtain permission, and you do not wish to ask and be refused. do you, or not, experience these inconveniences from our present plans?" the boys would undoubtedly answer in the affirmative. "i experience great inconvenience, too. i am very frequently interrupted when busily engaged, and it also occupies a great portion of my time and attention. it requires as much mental effort to consider and decide sometimes whether i ought to allow a pupil to leave his seat, as it would to decide a much more important question; therefore i do not like our plan, and i have another to propose." the boys are all attention to know what the new plan is. it will always be of great advantage to the school, for the teacher to propose his new plans from time to time to his pupils in such a way as this. it interests them in the improvement of the school, exercises their judgment, establishes a common feeling between teacher and pupil, and in many other ways will assist very much in promoting the welfare of the school. "my plan," continues the teacher, "is this:--to allow you all, besides the recess, a short time, two or three minutes perhaps, every hour;" (or every half hour, according to the character of the school, the age of the pupils, or other circumstances, to be judged of by the teacher,) "during which you may all whisper or leave your seats, without asking permission." instead of deciding the question of the _frequency_ of this general permission, the teacher may, if he pleases, leave it to the pupils to decide. it is often useful to leave the decision of such a question to them. on this subject, however, i shall speak in another place. it is only necessary, here, to say, that _this_ point may be safely left to them, since the time is so small which is to be thus appropriated. even if they vote to have the general permission to whisper every half hour, it will make but eight minutes in the forenoon. there being six half hours in the forenoon, and one of them ending at the close of school, and another at the recess, only _four_ of these _rests_, as a military man would call them, would be necessary; and four, of two minutes each, would make eight minutes. if the teacher thinks that evil would result from the interruption of the studies so often, he may offer the pupils _three_ minutes rest every _hour_, instead of _two_ minutes every _half hour_, and let them take their choice; or he may decide the case altogether himself. such a change, from _particular permission on individual requests to general permission at stated times_, would unquestionably be popular in every school, if the teacher managed the business properly. and by presenting it as an object of common interest,--an arrangement proposed for the common convenience of teacher and pupils, the latter may be much interested in carrying the plan into effect. we must not rely, however, entirely upon their _interest in it_. all that we can expect from such an effort to interest them, as i have described and recommended, is to get a _majority_ on our side, so that we may have only a small minority, to deal with by other measures. still _we must calculate on having this minority, and form our plans accordingly_, or we shall be sadly disappointed. i shall, however, in another place, speak of this principle of interesting the pupils in our plans, for the purpose of securing a majority in our favor, and explain the methods by which the minority is then to be governed. i only mean here to say, that, by such means, the teacher may easily interest a large proportion of the scholars, in carrying his plans into effect, and that he must expect to be prepared with other measures, for those, who will not be governed by these. you cannot reasonably expect however, that immediately after having explained your plan, it will, at once, go into full and complete operation. even those who are firmly determined to keep the rule, will, from inadvertence, for a day or two, make communication with each other. they must be _trained_, not by threatening and punishment, but by your good-humored assistance, to their new duties. when i first adopted this plan in my school, something like the following proceedings took place. "do you suppose that you will perfectly keep this rule, from this time?" "no sir," was the answer. "i suppose you will not. some, i am afraid, may not really be determined to keep it, and others will forget. now i wish every one would keep an exact account to day, of all the instances of speaking and leaving seats, out of the regular times, and be prepared to report them at the close of the school. of course, i shall have no punishment for it; but it will very much assist you to watch yourselves, if you expect to make a report at the end of the forenoon. do you like this plan?" "yes sir," was the answer, and all seemed to enter into it with spirit. in order to mark more definitely the times for communication i wrote, in large letters, on a piece of pasteboard, "study hours," and making a hole over the centre of it, i hung it upon a nail, over my desk. at the close of each half hour, a little bell was to be struck, and this card was to be taken down. when it was up, they were, on no occasion whatever, (except some such extraordinary occurrence as sickness, or my sending one of them on a message to another, or something clearly out of the common course,) to speak to each other; but were to wait, whatever they wanted, until the _study card_, as they called it, was taken down. "suppose now," said i, "that a young lady has come into school, and has accidentally left her book in the entry;--the book from which she is to study during the first half hour of the school: she sits near the door, and she might, in a moment, slip out and obtain it: if she does not, she must spend the half hour in idleness, and be unprepared in her lesson. what is it her duty to do?" "to go;" "not to go;" answered the scholars simultaneously. "it would be her duty _not_ to go; but i suppose it will be very difficult for me to convince you of it." "the reason is this," i continued; "if the one case i have supposed, were the _only_ one, which would be likely to occur, it would undoubtedly be better for her to go; but if it is understood that, in such cases, the rule may be dispensed with, there will be many others, where it will be equally necessary to lay it aside. scholars will differ in regard to the degree of inconvenience, which they must submit to, rather than break the rule. they will gradually do it on slighter and slighter occasions, until at last the rule will be disregarded entirely. we must, therefore, draw a _precise line_, and individuals must submit to a little inconvenience, sometimes, to promote the general good." at the close of the day, i requested all in the school to rise. while they were standing, i called them to account in the following manner. "now it is very probable that some have, from inadvertence, or from design, omitted to keep an account of the number of transgressions of the rule, which they have committed during the day; others, perhaps, do not wish to make a report of themselves. now as this is a common and voluntary effort, i wish to have none render assistance, who do not, of their own accord, desire to do so; all those, therefore, who are not able to make a report, from not having been correct in keeping it, and all those who are unwilling to report themselves, may sit." a very small number hesitatingly took their seats. "i am afraid that all do not sit, who really wish not to report themselves. now i am honest in saying i wish you to do just as you please. if a great majority of the school really wish to assist me in accomplishing the object, why, of course, i am glad; still, i shall not call upon any for such assistance, unless it is freely and voluntarily rendered." one or two more took their seats while these things were saying. among such, there would generally be some, who would refuse to have any thing to do with the measure, just from a desire to thwart and impede the plans of the teacher. if so, it is best to take no notice of them. if the teacher can contrive to obtain a great majority upon his side, so as to let them see that any opposition which they can raise, is of no consequence, and is not even noticed, they will soon be ashamed of it. the reports then of those who remained standing, were called for; first, those who had whispered only once were requested to sit; then those who had whispered more than once, and less than five times, &c. &c., until at last all were down. in such a case, the pupils might, if thought expedient, again be requested to rise, for the purpose of asking some other questions, with reference to ascertaining whether they had spoken most in the former or latter part of the forenoon. the number who had spoken inadvertently, and the number who had done it by design, might be ascertained. these inquiries accustom the pupils to render honest and faithful accounts of themselves. they become, by such means, familiarized to the practice, and by means of it, the teacher can, many times, receive most important assistance. all however, should be done in a pleasant tone, and with a pleasant and cheerful air. it should be considered by the pupils, not a reluctant confession of guilt, for which they are to be rebuked or punished, but the voluntary and free report of the result of an _experiment_, in which all are interested. some will have been dishonest in their reports: to diminish the number of these, the teacher may say, after the report is concluded: "we will drop the subject here to-day. to-morrow we will make another effort, when we shall be more successful. i have taken your reports as you have offered them, without any inquiry, because i had no doubt, that a great majority of this school would be honest, at all hazards. they would not, i am confident, make a false report, even if, by a true one, they were to bring upon themselves punishment; so that i think i may have confidence that nearly all these reports have been faithful. still, it is very probable, that, among so large a number, some may have made a report, which, they are now aware, was not perfectly fair and honest. i do not wish to know who they are; if there are any such cases, i only wish to say to the rest, how much pleasanter it is for you that you have been honest and open. the business is now all ended; you have done your duty; and though you reported a little larger number than you would, if you had been disposed to conceal, yet you go away from school with a quiet conscience. on the other hand, how miserable must any boy feel, if he has any nobleness of mind whatever, to go away from school, to-day, thinking that he has not been honest; that he has been trying to conceal his faults, and thus to obtain a credit which he did not justly deserve. always be honest, let the consequence be what it may." the reader will understand that the object of such measures is, simply _to secure as large a majority as possible_, to make _voluntary_ efforts to observe the rule. i do not expect that by such measures, _universal_ obedience can be exacted. the teacher must follow up the plan, after a few days, by other measures, for those who will not yield to such inducements as these. upon this subject, however, i shall speak more particularly at a future time. in my own school, it required two or three weeks to exclude whispering and communication by signs. the period necessary to effect the revolution will be longer or shorter, according to the circumstances of the school, and the dexterity of the teacher; and, after all, the teacher must not hope _entirely_ to exclude it. approximation to excellence is all that we can expect; for unprincipled and deceiving characters will perhaps always be found, and no system whatever can prevent their existence. proper treatment may indeed be the means of their reformation, but before this process has arrived at a successful result, others similar in character will have entered, so that the teacher can never expect perfection in the operation of any of his plans. i found so much relief from the change which this plan introduced, that i soon took measures for rendering it permanent; and though i am not much in favor of efforts to bring all teachers and all schools to the same plans, this principle of _whispering at limited and prescribed times alone_, seems to me well suited to universal adoption. the following simple apparatus has been used in several schools where this principle has been adopted. a drawing and description of it is inserted here, as by this means, some teachers, who may like to try the course here recommended, may be saved the time and trouble of contriving something of the kind themselves. the figure _a a a a_ is a board, about inches by , to which the parts are to be attached, and which is to be nailed against the wall, at the height of about feet, _b c d c_ is a plate of tin or brass, inches by , of the form represented in the drawing. at _c c_, the lower extremities of the parts at the sides, the metal is bent round, so as to clasp a wire which runs from _c_ to _c_, the ends of which wire are bent at right angles and run into the board. the plate will consequently turn on this axis, as on a hinge. at the top of the plate _d_, a small projection of the tin turns inwards, and to this, one end of the cord _m m_ is attached. this cord passes back from _d_ to _a_ small pulley at the upper part of the board, and at the tower end of it a tassel, loaded so as to be an exact counterpoise to the card, is attached. by raising the tassel, the plate will of course fall over forward till it is stopped by the part _b_ striking the board, when it will be in a horizontal position. on the other hand, by pulling down the tassel, the plate will be raised and drawn upwards against the board, so as to present its convex surface, with the words study hours upon it, distinctly to the school. in the drawing it is represented in an inclined position, being not quite drawn up, that the parts might more easily be seen. at _d_, there is a small projection of the tin upwards, which touches the clapper of the bell suspended above, every time the plate passes up or down, and thus give notice of its motions. [illustration] of course the construction may be varied very much, and it may be more or less expensive, according to the wishes of the teacher. in the first apparatus of this kind which i used, the plate was simply a card of pasteboard, from which the machine took its name. this was cut out with a penknife, and after being covered with marble paper, a strip of white paper was pasted along the middle, with the inscription upon it. the wire _c c_ and a similar one at the top of the plate, were passed through a perforation in the pasteboard, and then passed into the board. instead of a pulley, the cord, which was a piece of twine, was passed through a little staple made of wire and driven into the board. the whole was made in one or two recesses in school, with such tools and materials as i could then command. the bell was a common table bell, with a wire passing through the handle. the whole was attached to such a piece of pine board as i could get on the occasion. this coarse contrivance was, for more than a year, the grand regulator of all the movements of the school. i afterwards had one made in a better manner. the plate is of tin, gilded, the border and the letters of the inscription being black. a parlor bell rope passes over a brass pulley, and then runs downward in a groove made in the mahogany board to which the card is attached. a little reflection will, however, show the teacher that the form and construction of the apparatus for marking the times of study and of rest, may be greatly varied. the chief point is simply to secure the _principle_, of whispering at definite and limited times, and at those alone. if such an arrangement is adopted, and carried faithfully into effect, it will be found to relieve the teacher of more than half of the confusion and perplexity, which would otherwise be his hourly lot. i have detailed thus particularly the method to be pursued in carrying this principle into effect, because i am convinced of its importance, and the incalculable assistance which such an arrangement will afford to the teacher in all his plans. of course, i would not be understood to recommend its adoption, in those cases, where, teachers, from their own experience, have devised and adopted _other_ plans, which accomplish as effectually the same purpose. all that i mean, is to insist upon the absolute necessity of _some_ plan, to remove this very common source of interruption and confusion, and i recommend this mode where a better is not known. . the second of the sources of interruption, as i have enumerated them, is mending pens. this business ought, if possible, to have a specific time assigned to it. scholars are in general far too particular in regard to their pens. the teacher ought to explain to them that, in the transaction of the ordinary business of life, they cannot, always, have exactly such a pen as they would like. they must learn to write with various kinds of pens, and when furnished with one that the teacher himself would consider suitable to write a letter to a friend with, he must be content. they should understand that the _form_ of the letters is what is important in learning to write, not the smoothness and clearness of the hair lines; and that though writing looks better, when executed with a perfect pen, a person may _learn_ to write, nearly as well with one, which is not absolutely perfect. so certain is this, though often overlooked, that a person would perhaps learn faster with chalk upon a black board, than with the best goose-quill ever sharpened. i do not make these remarks to show that it is of no consequence, whether scholars have good or bad pens, but only that this subject deserves very much less of the time and attention of the teacher, than it usually receives. when the scholars are allowed, as they very generally are, to come, when they please, to present their pens, some four, five or six times in a day--breaking in upon any business--interrupting any classes--perplexing and embarrassing the teacher, however he may be employed,--there is a very serious obstruction to the progress of the scholars, which is by no means repaid by the improvement in this branch. there are several ways by which this evil may be remedied, or at least be very effectually curtailed. some teachers take their pens with them, and mend them in the evening at home. for various reasons, this cannot always be practised. there may, however, be a time set apart in the school specially for this purpose. but the best plan is, for the teacher not to mend the pens himself. let him choose from among the older and more intelligent of his scholars, four or five, whom he will teach. they will be very glad to learn, and to mend every day twenty-five or fifty pens each. very little ingenuity will be necessary to devise some plan, by which the scholars may be apportioned among these, so that each shall supply a given number, and the teacher be relieved entirely. . answering questions about studies. a teacher who does not adopt some system in regard to this subject, will be always at the mercy of his scholars. one boy will want to know how to parse a word, another where the lesson is, another to have a sum explained, and a fourth will wish to show his work, to see if it is right. the teacher does not like to discourage such inquiries. each one, as it comes up, seems necessary: each one too is answered in a moment; but the endless number, and the continual repetition of them consume his time and exhaust his patience. there is another view of the subject, which ought to be taken. perhaps it would not be far from the truth, to estimate the average number of scholars in the schools in our country, at fifty. at any rate, this will be near enough for our present purpose. there are three hours in each session, making one hundred and eighty minutes, which, divided among fifty, give about three minutes and a half to each individual. if the reader has, in his own school, a greater or a less number, he can easily correct the above, so as to adapt it to his own case, and ascertain the portion, which may justly be appropriated to each pupil. it will probably vary from two to four minutes. now a period of four minutes slips away very fast while a man is looking over perplexing problems, and if he exceeds that time at all, he is doing injustice to his other pupils. i do not mean that a man is to confine himself, rigidly, to the principle suggested by this calculation, of cautiously appropriating no more time to any one of his pupils, than such a calculation would assign to each; but simply that this is a point which should be kept in view, and have a very strong influence in deciding how far it is right to devote attention, exclusively, to individuals. it seems to me that it shows very clearly, that one ought to teach his pupils, as much as possible, _in masses_, and as little as possible, by private attention to individual cases. the following directions will help the teacher to carry these principles into effect. when you assign a lesson, glance over it yourself, and consider what difficulties are likely to arise. you know the progress which your pupils have made, and can easily anticipate their difficulties. tell them all together, in the class, what their difficulties will be, and how they may surmount them. give them directions how they are to act in the emergencies, which will be likely to occur. this simple step will remove a vast number of the questions, which would otherwise become occasions for interrupting you. with regard to other difficulties, which cannot be foreseen and guarded against, tell them to bring them to the class, the next recitation. half a dozen might, and very probably would meet with the same difficulty. if they bring it to you one by one, you have to answer it over and over again, whereas, when it is brought to the class, one explanation answers for all. as to all questions about the lesson,--where it is, and what it is, and how long it is,--never answer them. require each pupil to remember for himself, and if he was absent when the lesson was assigned, let him ask his class mate in a recess. you may refuse to give particular individuals the private assistance they ask for, in such a way as to discourage and irritate them, but it is not necessary. it can be done in such a manner, that the pupil will see the propriety of it, and acquiesce pleasantly in it. a child comes to you, for example, and says, "will you tell me, sir, where the next lesson is?" "were you not in the class at the time?" "yes sir, but i have forgotten." "well, i have forgotten too. i have a great many classes to hear, and of course a great many lessons to assign, and i never remember them; it is not necessary far me to remember." "may i speak to one of the class, to ask about it?" "you cannot speak, you know, till the study card is down; you may, then." "but i want to get my lesson now." "i don't know what you will do, then: i am sorry you don't remember." "besides," continues the teacher, looking pleasantly, however, while he says it, "if i knew, i think i ought not to tell you." "why, sir?" "because, you know, i have said i wish the scholars to remember where the lessons are, and not come to me. you know it would be very unwise for me, after assigning a lesson in the class, to spend my time in telling the individuals over again here. now if i should tell _you_, i should have to tell others, and thus adopt a practice, which i have condemned." take another case. you assign to a class of little girls a subject of composition, requesting them to copy their writing upon a sheet of paper, leaving a margin an inch wide at the top, and one of half an inch at the sides and bottom. the class take their seats, and, after a short time, one of them comes to you, saying she does not know how long an inch is. "don't you know any thing about it?" "no sir, not much." "should you think _that_ is more or less than an inch?" (pointing to a space on a piece of paper much too large.) "more." "then you know something about it. now i did not tell you to make the margins _exactly_ an inch, and half an inch, but only as near as you could tell." "would that be about right?" asks the girl, showing a distance. "i must not tell you, because you know i never in such cases help individuals; if that is as near as you can get it, you may make it so." it may be well, after assigning a lesson to a class, to say that all those who do not distinctly understand what they have to do, may remain after the class have taken their seats, and ask: the task may then be distinctly assigned again, and the difficulties, so far as they can be foreseen, explained. by such means, these sources of interruption and difficulty may, like the others, be almost entirely removed. perhaps not altogether, for many cases may occur, where the teacher may choose to give a particular class permission to come to him for help. such permission, however, ought never to be given, unless it is absolutely necessary, and should never be allowed to be taken, unless it is distinctly given. . hearing recitations. i am aware that many attempt to do something else, at the same time that they are hearing a recitation, and there may perhaps be some individuals, who can succeed in this. if the exercise, to which the teacher is attending, consists merely in listening to the reciting, from memory, some passage committed, it can perhaps be done. i hope however to show, in a future chapter, that there are other and far higher objects, which every teacher ought to have in view, and he who understands these objects, and aims at accomplishing them,--who endeavors to _instruct_ his class, to enlarge and elevate their ideas, to awaken a deep and paramount interest in the subject which they are examining, will find that his time must be his own, and his attention uninterrupted, while he is presiding at a class. all the other exercises and arrangements of the school are, in fact, preparatory and subsidiary to this. here, that is, in the classes, the real business of teaching is to be done. here, the teacher comes in contact with his scholars, mind with mind, and here, consequently, he must be uninterrupted and undisturbed. i shall speak more particularly on this subject hereafter, under the head of instruction; all i wish to secure in this place, is that the teacher should make such arrangements, that he can devote his exclusive attention to his classes, while he is actually engaged with them. each recitation, too, should have its specified time, which should be adhered to, with rigid accuracy. if any thing like the plan i have suggested for allowing rests of a minute or two, every half hour, should be adopted, it will mark off the forenoon into parts, which ought to be precisely and carefully observed. i was formerly accustomed to think, that i could not limit the time for my recitations without great inconvenience, and occasionally allowed one exercise to encroach upon the succeeding, and this upon the next, and thus sometimes the last was excluded altogether. but such a lax and irregular method of procedure is ruinous to the discipline of a school. on perceiving it, at last, i put the bell into the hands of a pupil, commissioning her to ring regularly, having, myself, fixed the times, saying that i would show my pupils that i could be confined myself to system, as well as they. at first, i experienced a little inconvenience, but this soon disappeared, and at last the hours and half hours of our artificial division, entirely superseded, in the school-room, the divisions of the clock face. but in order that i may be specific and definite, i will draw up a plan for the regular division of time, for a common school, not to be _adopted_, but to be _imitated_; i. e. i do not recommend exactly this plan, but that some plan, precise and specific, should be determined upon, and exhibited to the school, by a diagram like the following. forenoon. ix x xi xii +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ | reading. | writing. r. g. | arithmetic. | +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ afternoon. ii iii iv v +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ | grammar. | writing. r. g. | geography. | +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------------+--------------------+-----------------+ a drawing on a large sheet, made by some of the older scholars, (for a teacher should never do any thing of this kind which his scholars can do for him,) should be made and pasted up to view, the names of the classes being inserted in the columns, under their respective heads. at the double lines at ten and three, there might be a rest of two minutes; an officer appointed for the purpose, ringing a bell at each of the parts marked on the plan, and making the signal for the _rest_, whatever signal might be determined upon. it is a good plan to have a bell rung five minutes before each half hour expires, and then exactly at its close. the first one would be to notify the teacher, or teachers, if there are more than one in the school, that the time for their respective recitations is drawing to a close. at the second bell the new classes should take their places without waiting to be called for. the scholars will thus see that the arrangements of the school are based upon system, to which the teacher himself conforms, and not subjected to his own varying will. they will thus not only go on more regularly, but they will yield more easily and pleasantly to the necessary arrangements. the fact is, children love system and regularity. each one is sometimes a little uneasy under the restraint, which it imposes upon him individually, but they all love to see its operation upon others, and they are generally very willing to submit to its laws, if the rest of the community are required to submit too. they show this in their love of military parade; what allures them is chiefly the _order_ of it: and even a little child creeping upon the floor will be pleased when he gets his playthings in a row. a teacher may turn this principle to most useful account, in forming his plans for his school. it will be seen by reference to the foregoing plan, that i have marked the time for the recesses, by the letter r. at the top. immediately after them, both in the forenoon and in the afternoon, twenty minutes are left, marked g., the initial standing for general exercise. they are intended to denote periods during which all the scholars are in their seats with their work laid aside, ready to attend to what the teacher has to bring before the whole. there are so many occasions, on which it is necessary to address the whole school, that it is very desirable to appropriate a particular time for it. in most of the best schools, i believe this plan is adopted. i will mention some of the subjects, which would come up at such a time. . there are some studies, which can be advantageously attended to by the whole school together; such as punctuation, and, to some extent, spelling. . cases of discipline, which it is necessary to bring before the whole school, ought to come up at a regularly appointed time. by attending to them here, there will be a greater importance attached to them. whatever the teacher does, will seem to be more deliberate, and, in fact, _will be_ more deliberate. . general remarks, bringing up classes of faults which prevail; also general directions, which may at any time be needed: and in fact any business relating to the general arrangements of the school. . familiar lectures from the teacher, on various subjects,--very familiar in their form, and perhaps accompanied by questions addressed to the whole. the design of such lectures should be to extend the _general knowledge_ of the pupils in regard to those subjects on which they will need information in their progress through life. in regard to each of these particulars i shall speak more particularly hereafter, in the chapters to which they respectively belong. my only object, here, is to show, in the general arrangements of the school, how a place is to be found for them. my practice has been, to have two periods, of short duration, each day, appropriated to these objects. the first to the _business of the school_, and the second to such studies or lectures as could be most profitably attended to at such a time. * * * * * we come now to one of the most important subjects, which present themselves to the teacher's attention, in settling the principles upon which he shall govern his school. i mean the degree of influence which the boys themselves shall have in the management of its affairs. shall the government of school be a _monarchy_ or a _republic_? to this question, after much inquiry and many experiments, i answer, a monarchy; an absolute, unlimited monarchy; the teacher possessing exclusive power, as far as the pupils are concerned, though strictly responsible to the committee, or to the trustees, under whom he holds his office. while, however, it is thus distinctly understood that the power of the teacher is supreme, that all the power rests in him, and that he alone is responsible for its exercise, there ought, to be a very free and continual _delegation_ of power to the pupils. as much business as is possible, should be committed to them. they should be interested as much as possible in the affairs of the school, and led to take an active part in carrying them forward; though they should, all the time, distinctly understand, that it is only _delegated_ power which they exercise, and that the teacher can, at any time, revoke what he has granted, and alter or annul at pleasure, any of their decisions. by this plan, we have the responsibility resting where it ought to rest, and yet the boys are trained to business, and led to take an active interest in the welfare of the school. trust is reposed in them, which may be greater or less, as they are able to bear. all the good effects of reposing trust and confidence, and committing the management of important business to the pupils will be secured, without the dangers which would result from the entire surrender of the management of the institution into their hands. there have been, in several cases, experiments made with reference to ascertaining how far a government, strictly republican, would be admissible in a school. a very fair experiment of this kind was made at the gardiner lyceum, in maine. at the time of its establishment, nothing was said of the mode of government which it was intended to adopt. for some time, the attention of the instructers was occupied in arranging the course of study, and attending to the other concerns of the institution, and in the infant state of the lyceum, few cases of discipline occurred, and no regular system of government was necessary. before long, however, complaints were made that the students at the lyceum were guilty of breaking windows in an old building used as a town-house. the principal called the students together, mentioned the reports, and said that he did not know, and did not wish to know who were the guilty individuals. it was necessary, however, that the thing should be examined, and that restitution should be made; and relying on their faithfulness and ability, he should leave them to manage the business alone. for this purpose, he nominated one of the students as judge, some others as jury-men, and appointed the other officers necessary, in the same manner. he told them, that, in order to give them time to make a thorough investigation, they were excused from farther exercises during the day. the principal then left them, and they entered on the trial. the result was, that they discovered the guilty individuals, ascertained the amount of mischief done by each, and sent to the selectmen a message, by which they agreed to pay a sum equal to three times the value of the injury sustained. the students were soon after informed that this mode of bringing offenders to justice would, hereafter, be always pursued, and arrangements were made for organizing a _regular republican government_, among the young men. by this government, all laws which related to the internal police of the institution, were to be made, all officers were appointed, and all criminal cases were to be tried. the students finding the part of a judge too difficult for them to sustain, one of the professors was appointed to hold that office, and, for similar reasons, another of the professors was made president of the legislative assembly. the principal was the executive, with power to _pardon_, but not to _sentence_, or even _accuse_. some time after this, a student was indicted for profane swearing; he was tried, convicted, and punished. after this he evinced a strong hostility to the government. he made great exertions to bring it into contempt, and when the next trial came on, he endeavored to persuade the witnesses that giving evidence was dishonorable, and he so far succeeded, that the defendant was acquitted for want of evidence, when it was generally understood that there was proof of his guilt, which would have been satisfactory, if it could have been brought forward. for some time after this, the prospect was rather unfavorable, though many of the students themselves opposed with great earnestness these efforts, and were much alarmed lest they should lose their free government, through the perverseness of one of their number. the attorney general, at this juncture, conceived the idea of indicting the individual alluded to, for an attempt to overturn the government. he obtained the approbation of the principal, and the grand jury found a bill. the court, as the case was so important, invited some of the trustees of the lyceum who were in town, to attend the trial. the parent of the defendant was also informed of the circumstances and requested to be present, and he accordingly attended. the prisoner was tried, found guilty, and sentenced, if i mistake not, to an expulsion. at his earnest request, however, to be permitted to remain in the lyceum, and redeem his character, he was pardoned and restored, and became perfectly exemplary in his conduct and character. after this occurrence, the system went on in successful operation, for some time. the legislative power was vested in the hands of a general committee, consisting of eight or ten, chosen by the students from their own number. they met about once a week to transact such business as appointing officers, making and repealing regulations, and inquiring into the state of the lyceum. the instructers had a negative upon all their proceedings, but no direct and positive power. they could pardon, but they could assign no punishments, nor make laws inflicting any. now such a plan as this may succeed for a short time, and under very favorable circumstances; and the circumstance, which it is chiefly important should be favorable, is, that the man who is called to preside over such an association, should possess such a share of _generalship_, that he can really manage the institution _himself_, while the power is _nominally_ and _apparently_ in the hands of the boys. should this not be the case, or should the teacher, from any cause, lose his personal influence in the school, so that the institution should really be surrendered into the hands of the pupils, things must be on a very unstable footing. and accordingly where such a plan has been adopted, it has, i believe, in every instance, been ultimately abandoned. _real self-government_ is an experiment sufficiently hazardous among men; though providence, in making a daily supply of food necessary for every human being, has imposed a most-powerful check upon the tendency to anarchy and confusion. let the populace of london materially interrupt the order, and break in upon the arrangements of the community, and, in eight and forty hours, nearly the whole of the mighty mass will be in the hands of the devourer, hunger; and they will be soon brought to submission. on the other hand, a month's anarchy and confusion in a college or an academy, would be delight to half the students, or else times have greatly changed, since i was within college walls. although it is thus evident that the important concerns of a literary institution cannot be safely committed into the hands of the students, very great benefits will result from calling upon them to act upon, and to decide questions relative to the school, within such limits, and under such restrictions, as may appear best. such a practice will assist the teacher very much, if he manages it with any degree of dexterity: for it will interest his pupils in the success of the school, and secure, to a very considerable extent, their cooperation. it will teach them self-control and self-government, and will accustom them to submit to the majority,--that lesson, which, of all others, it is important for a republican to learn. in endeavoring to interest the pupils of a school in the work of cooperating with the teacher in its administration, no little dexterity will be necessary, at the outset. in all probability, the formal announcement of this principle, and the endeavor to introduce it, by a sudden revolution, would totally fail. boys, like men, must be gradually prepared for power, and they must exercise it only so far as they are prepared. this however can, very easily, be done. the teacher should say nothing of his general design, but when some suitable opportunity presents, he should endeavor to lead his pupils to cooperate with him, in some particular instance. for example, let us suppose that he has been accustomed to distribute the writing-books with his own hand, when the writing hour arrives, and that he concludes to delegate this simple business, first, to his scholars. he accordingly states to them, just before the writing exercise of the day on which he proposes the experiment, as follows. "i have thought that time will be saved, if you will help me distribute the books, and i will accordingly appoint four distributors, one for each division of the seats, who may come to me, and receive the books and distribute them, each to his own division. are you willing to adopt this plan?" the boys answer, "yes sir," and the teacher then looks carefully around the room, and selects four pleasant and popular boys,--boys who, he knows, would gladly assist him, and who would, at the same time, be agreeable to their school mates. this latter point is necessary, in order to secure the popularity and success of the plan. unless the boys are very different from any i have ever met with, they will be pleased with the duty thus assigned them. they will learn system and regularity by being taught to perform this simple duty in a proper manner. after a week, the teacher may consider their term of service as having expired, and thanking them, in public for the assistance they have rendered him, he may ask the scholars, if they are willing to continue the plan, and if the vote is in favor of it, as it unquestionably would be, each boy probably hoping that he should be appointed to the office, the teacher may nominate four others, including perhaps upon the list, some boy popular among his companions, but whom he has suspected to be not very friendly to himself or the school. i think the most scrupulous politician would not object to securing influence, by conferring office in such a case. if any difficulties arise from the operation of such a measure, it can easily be dropped, or modified. if it is successful, it may be continued, and the principle extended, till it very considerably modifies all the arrangements, and the whole management of the school. or let us imagine the following scene to have been the commencement of the introduction of the principle of limited self-government, into a school. the preceptor of an academy was sitting at his desk, at the close of school, while the pupils were putting up their books and leaving the room; a boy came in with angry looks, and, with his hat in his hands bruised and dusty, advanced to the master's desk, and complained that one of his companions had thrown down his hat upon the floor, and had almost spoilt it. the teacher looked calmly at the mischief, and then asked how it happened. "i don't know sir; i hung it up on my nail, and he pulled it down." "i wish you would ask him to come here," said the teacher. "ask him pleasantly." the accused soon came in, and the two boys stood together before the master. "there seems to be some difficulty between you boys, about a nail to hang your hats upon. i suppose each of you think it is your own nail." "yes sir," said both the boys. "it will be more convenient for me to talk with you about this to-morrow, than to-night, if you are willing to wait. besides, we can examine it more calmly, then. but if we put it off till then, you must not talk about it in the meantime, blaming one another, and keeping up the irritation that you feel. are you both willing to leave it just where it is, till to-morrow, and try to forget all about it till then? i expect i shall find you both a little to blame." the boys rather reluctantly consented. the next day the master heard the case and settled it, so far as it related to the two boys. it was easily settled in the morning, for they had had time to get calm, and were, after sleeping away their anger, rather ashamed of the whole affair, and very desirous to have it forgotten. that day, when the hour for the transaction of business came, the teacher stated to the school, that it was necessary to take some measures to provide each boy with a nail for his hat. in order to show that it was necessary, he related the circumstances of the quarrel which had occurred the day before. he did this, not with such an air and manner as to convey the impression that his object was to find fault with the boys, or to expose their misconduct, but to show the necessity of doing something to remedy the evil, which had been the cause of so unpleasant an occurrence. still, though he said nothing in the way of reproach or reprehension, and did not name the boys, but merely gave a cool and impartial narrative of the facts,--the effect, very evidently, was to bring such quarrels into discredit. a calm review of misconduct, after the excitement has gone by, will do more to bring it into disgrace, than the most violent invectives and reproaches, directed against the individuals guilty of it. "now boys," continued the master, "will you assist me in making arrangements to prevent the recurrence of all temptations of this kind hereafter? it is plain that every boy ought to have a nail appropriated expressly to his use. the first thing to be done is, to ascertain whether there are enough for all. i should like, therefore, to have two committees appointed; one, to count and report the number of nails in the entry, and also how much room there is for more; the other, to ascertain the number of scholars in school. they can count all who are here, and by observing the vacant desks, they can ascertain the number absent. when this investigation is made, i will tell you what to do next." the boys seemed pleased with the plan, and the committees were appointed, two members on each. the master took care to give the quarrellers some share in the work, apparently forgetting, from this time, the unpleasant occurrence which had brought up the subject. when the boys came to tell him their results, he asked them to make a little memorandum, in writing, as he might forget, before the time came for reading them. they brought him presently a rough scrap of paper, with the figures marked upon it. he told them he should forget which was the number of nails, and which the number of scholars, unless they wrote it down. "it is the custom among men," said he, "to make out their report, in such a case, fully, so that it would explain itself; and i should like to have you, if you are willing, to make out yours a little more distinctly." accordingly, after a little additional explanation, the boys made another attempt, and presently returned, with something like the following: "the committee for counting the nails report as follows: number of nails room for ." the other report was very similar, though somewhat rudely written and expressed, and both were perfectly satisfactory to the preceptor, as he plainly showed by the manner in which he received them. i need not finish the description of this case, by narrating, particularly, the reading of the reports, the appointment of a committee to assign the nails, and to paste up the names of the scholars, one to each. the work, in such a case, might be done in recesses, and out of school hours, and though, at first, the teacher will find, that it is as much trouble to accomplish business in this way, as it would be to attend to it directly himself,--yet after a very little experience, he will find that his pupils will acquire dexterity and readiness, and will be able to render him very material assistance in the accomplishment of his plans. this, however, _the assistance rendered to the teacher_, is not the object. the main design is to _interest the pupils_, in the management and the welfare of the school,--to identify them, as it were, with it. it will accomplish this object; and every teacher, who will try the experiment, and carry it into effect, with any tolerable degree of skill, will find that it will, in a short time, change the whole aspect of the school, in regard to the feelings subsisting between himself and his pupils. each teacher, who tries such an experiment, will find himself insensibly repeating it, and after a time he may have quite a number of officers and committees, who are entrusted with various departments of business. he will have a secretary, chosen by ballot, by the scholars, to keep a record of all the important transactions in the school, for each day. at first, he will dictate to the secretary, telling him precisely what to say, or even writing it for him, and merely requiring him to copy it into the book provided for the purpose. afterwards he will give him less and less assistance, till he can keep the record properly himself. the record of each day will be read on the succeeding, at the hour for business. he will have a committee of one or two to take care of the fire, and another to see that the room is constantly in good order. he will have distributors for each division of seats, to distribute books, and compositions, and pens, and to collect votes. and thus, in a short time, his school will become _regularly organized, as a society_, or _legislative assembly_. the boys will learn submission to the majority, in such unimportant things as may be committed to them: they will learn system and regularity; and every thing else that belongs to the science of political self government. there are dangers, however. what useful practice has not its dangers? one of these is, that the teacher will allow these arrangements to take up too much time. he must guard against this. i have found from experience that fifteen minutes each day, with a school of , is enough. this ought never to be exceeded. another danger is, that the boys will be so engaged in the duties of their _offices_, as to neglect their _studies_. this would be, and ought to be, fatal to the whole plan. avoid it in this manner. state publicly that you will not appoint any to office, who are not good scholars, always punctual, and always prepared; and when any boy, who holds an office, is going behind hand in his studies, say to him kindly, "you have not time to get your lessons, and i am afraid it is owing to the time you spend in helping me. now if you wish to resign your office, so as to have a little more time for your lessons, you can. in fact, i think you ought to do it. you may try it for a day or two, and i will notice how you recite, and then we can decide." such a communication will generally be found to have a powerful effect. if it does not remedy the evil, the resignation must be insisted on. a few decided cases of this kind, will effectually remove the evil i am considering. * * * * * another difficulty, which is likely to attend the plan of allowing the pupils of the school to decide some of the cases which occur, is, that it may tend to make them insubordinate; so that they will, in many instances, submit, with less good humor, to such decisions as you may consider necessary. i do not mean that this will be the case with all, but that there will be a few, who will be ungenerous enough, if you allow them to decide, sometimes, to endeavor to make trouble, or at least to show symptoms of impatience and vexation, because you do not allow them to decide always. sometimes this feeling may show itself by the discontented looks, or gestures, or even words, with which some unwelcome decision will be received. such a spirit should be immediately and decidedly checked. it will not be difficult to check, and even entirely to remove it. on one occasion, when, after learning the wishes of the scholars on some subject which had been brought before them, i decided contrary to it, there arose a murmur of discontent, all over the room. this was the more distinct, because i have always accustomed my pupils to answer questions asked, and to express their wishes and feelings on any subject i may present to them, with great freedom. i asked all those, who had expressed their dissatisfaction, to rise. about one third of the scholars arose. "perhaps you understood, that when i put the question to vote, i meant to abide by your decision, and that, consequently, i ought not to have reversed it, as i did, afterwards?" "yes sir;" "yes sir;" they replied. "do you suppose it would be safe to leave the decision of important questions to the scholars in this school?" "yes sir;" "no sir." the majority were, however, in the affirmative. thus far, only those who were standing, had answered. i told them, that as they were divided in opinion, they might sit, and i would put the question to the whole school. "you know," i continued, addressing the whole, "what sort of persons the girls, who compose this school are. you know about how many are governed, habitually, by steady principle, and how many by impulse and feeling. you know too, what proportion have judgment and foresight necessary to consider and decide independently, such questions as continually arise in the management of a school. now suppose i should resign the school into your own hands, as to its management, and only come in to give instruction to the classes, leaving all general control of its arrangements with you; would it go on safely or not?" as might have been foreseen, there was, when the question was fairly proposed, scarcely a solitary vote in favor of government by scholars. they seemed to see clearly the absurdity of such a scheme. "besides," i continued, "the trustees of this school have committed it to my charge; they hold me responsible; the public hold me responsible, not you. now if i should surrender it into your hands, and you, from any cause, should manage the trust unfaithfully, or unskilfully, i should necessarily be held accountable. i could never shift the responsibility upon you. now it plainly is not just or right, that one party should hold the power, and another be held accountable for its exercise. it is clear, therefore, in every view of the subject, that i should retain the management of this school in my own hands. are you not satisfied that it is?" the scholars universally answered, "yes sir." they seemed satisfied; and doubtless were. it was then stated to them, that the object in asking them to vote, was, in some cases, to obtain an expression of their opinion or their wishes, in order to help _me_ decide; and only in those cases where it was expressly stated, did i mean to give the final decision to them. still, however, if cases are often referred to them, the feeling will gradually creep in, that the school is managed on republican principles, as they call it; and they will, unless this point is specially guarded, gradually lose that spirit of entire and cordial subordination, so necessary for the success of any school. it should often be distinctly explained to them, that a republican government is one, where the power essentially resides in the community, and is exercised by a ruler, only so far as the community delegates it to him; whereas in the school, the government is based on the principle, that the power, primarily and essentially, resides in the teacher, the scholars exercising only such as he may delegate to them. with these limitations and restrictions, and with this express understanding, in regard to what is, in all cases, the ultimate authority, i think there will be no danger in throwing a very large share of the business which will, from time to time, come up in the school, upon the scholars, for decision. in my own experience, this plan has been adopted with the happiest results. a small red morocco wrapper lies constantly on a little shelf, accessible to all. by its side, is a little pile of papers, about one inch by six, on which any one may write her motion, or her _proposition_, as they call it, whatever it may be, and when written, it is enclosed in the wrapper, to be brought to me at the appointed time for attending to the general business of the school. through this wrapper, all questions are asked, all complaints entered, all proposals made. is there discontent in the school? it shows itself by "_propositions_" in the wrapper. is any body aggrieved or injured? i learn it through the wrapper. in fact it is a little safety valve, which lets off, what, if confined, might threaten explosion,--an index,--a thermometer, which reveals to me, from day to day, more of the state of public opinion in the little community, than any thing beside. these propositions are generally read aloud; some cases are referred to the scholars for decision; some i decide myself; others are laid aside without notice of any kind; others still, merely suggest remarks on the subjects to which they allude. the principles, then, which this chapter has been intended to establish, are simply these: in making your general arrangements, look carefully over your ground, consider all the objects which you have to accomplish, and the proper degree of time and attention, which each deserves. then act upon system. let the mass of particulars which would otherwise crowd upon you in promiscuous confusion, be arranged and classified. let each be assigned to its proper time and place; that your time may be your own,--under your own command,--and not, as is too often the case, at the mercy of the thousand accidental circumstances, which may occur. in government, be yourself supreme, and let your supremacy be that of _authority_. but delegate power, as freely as possible, to those under your care. show them that you are desirous of reposing trust in them, just so far as they show themselves capable of exercising it. thus interest them in your plans, and make them feel, that they participate in the honor or the disgrace of success or failure. i have gone much into detail in this chapter, proposing definite measures by which the principles i have recommended, may be carried into effect. i wish, however, that it may be distinctly understood, that all i contend for, is the _principles_ themselves; no matter what the particular measures are, by which they are secured. every good school must be systematic; but they need not all be on precisely the same system. as this work is intended almost exclusively for beginners, much detail has been admitted, and many of the specific measures here proposed, may perhaps be safely adopted, where no others are established. there may also perhaps be cases, where teachers, whose schools are already in successful operation, may engraft, upon their own plans, some things which are here proposed. if they should attempt it, it must be done cautiously and gradually. there is no other way by which they can be safely introduced or even introduced at all. this is a point of so much importance, that i must devote a paragraph to it, before closing the chapter. let a teacher propose to his pupils, formally, from his desk, the plan of writing propositions, for example, and procure his wrapper, and put it in its place;--and what would be the result? why, not a single paper, probably, could he get, from one end of the week to the other. but let him, on the other hand, when a boy comes to him to ask some question, the answer to which many in the school would equally wish to hear, say to the inquirer: "will you be so good as to write that question, and put it on my desk, and then, at the regular time, i will answer it to all the school." when he reads it, let him state, that it was written at his request, and give the other boys permission to leave their proposals or questions on his desk, in the same way. in a few days, he will have another, and thus the plan may be gently and gradually introduced. so with officers. they should be appointed among the scholars, only _as fast as they are actually needed_, and the plan should thus be cautiously carried only so far as it proves good on trial. be always cautious about innovations and changes. make no rash experiments on a large scale, but always test your principle in the small way, and then, if it proves good, gradually extend its operation, as circumstances seem to require. by thus cautiously and slowly introducing plans, founded on the systematic principles here brought to view, a very considerable degree of quiet, and order, and regularity may be introduced into the largest and most miscellaneous schools. and this order and quiet are absolutely necessary, to enable the teacher to find that interest and enjoyment in his work, which were exhibited in the last chapter; the pleasure of _directing and controlling mind_, and doing it, not by useless and anxious complaints, or stern threats and painful punishments; but by regarding the scene of labor in its true light, as a community of intellectual and moral beings, and governing it by moral and intellectual power. it is, in fact, the pleasure of exercising power. i do not mean arbitrary, personal authority, but the power to produce, by successful but quiet contrivance, extensive and happy results;--the pleasure of calmly considering every difficulty, and without irritation or anger, devising the proper moral means to remedy the moral evil: and then the interest and pleasure of witnessing its effects. chapter iii. instruction. there are three kinds of human knowledge which stand strikingly distinct from all the rest. they lie at the foundation. they constitute the roots of the tree. in other words, they are the _means_, by which all other knowledge is acquired. i need not say, that i mean, reading, writing, and calculation. teachers do not perhaps always consider, how entirely and essentially distinct these three are from all the rest. they are arts; the acquisition of them is not to be considered as knowledge, so much as the means, by which knowledge may be obtained. a child, who is studying geography, or history, or natural science, is learning _facts_,--gaining information; on the other hand, the one who is learning to write, or to read, or to calculate, may be adding little or nothing to his stock of knowledge. he is acquiring _skill_, which, at some future time, he may make the means of increasing his knowledge, to any extent. this distinction ought to be kept constantly in view, and the teacher should feel that these three fundamental branches stand by themselves, and stand first in importance. i do not mean to undervalue the others, but only to insist upon the superior value and importance of these. teaching a pupil to read, before he enters upon the active business of life, is like giving a new settler an axe, as he goes to seek his new home in the forest. teaching him a lesson in history, is, on the other hand, only cutting down a tree or two for him. a knowledge of natural history, is like a few bushels of grain, gratuitously placed in his barn; but the art of ready reckoning, is the plough, which will remain by him for years, and help him to draw out from the soil an annual treasure. the great object, then, of the common schools in our country, is to teach the whole population to read, to write, and to calculate. in fact, so essential is it, that the accomplishment of these objects should be secured, that it is even a question whether common schools should not be confined to them. i say it is a _question_, for it is sometimes made so, though public opinion has decided, that some portion of attention, at least, should be paid to the acquisition of additional knowledge. but after all, the amount of _knowledge_, which is actually acquired at schools, is very small. it must be very small. the true policy is, to aim at making all, good readers, writers, and calculators, and to consider the other studies of the school important, chiefly as practice, in turning these arts to useful account. in other words, the scholars should be taught these arts, thoroughly, first of all, and in the other studies, the main design should be to show them how to use, and interest them in using, the arts they have thus acquired. a great many teachers feel a much stronger interest in the one or two scholars they may have, in surveying, or in latin, than they do in the large classes, in the elementary branches, which fill the school. but a moment's reflection will show, that such a preference is founded on a very mistaken view. leading forward one or two minds, from step to step, in an advanced study, is certainly far inferior, in real dignity and importance, to opening all the stores of written knowledge, to fifty or a hundred. the man who neglects the interests of his school, in these great branches, to devote his time to two or three, or half a dozen older scholars, is unjust both to his employers and to himself. it is the duty, therefore, of every teacher, who commences a common district school, for a single season, to make, when he commences, an estimate, of the state of his pupils, in reference to these three branches. how do they all write? how do they all read? how do they calculate? it would be well if he would make a careful examination of the school, in this respect. let them all write a specimen. let all read; and let him make a memorandum of the manner, noticing how many read fluently, how many with difficulty, how many know only their letters, and how many are to be taught these. let him ascertain also, what progress they have made in arithmetic,--how many can readily perform the elementary processes, and what number need instruction in these. after thus surveying the ground, let him form his plan, and lay out his whole strength in carrying forward, as rapidly as possible, the _whole school_, in these studies. by this means he is acting, most directly and powerfully, on the intelligence of the whole future community in that place. he is opening to fifty or a hundred minds, stores of knowledge, which they will go on exploring, for years to come. what a descent now from such a work as this, to the mere hearing of the recitation of half a dozen boys in surveying! i repeat it, that a thorough and enlightened survey of the whole school should be taken, and plans formed for elevating the whole mass, in those great branches of knowledge, which are to be of immediate practical use to them in future life. if the school is of higher order, the teacher should, in the same manner, before he forms his plans, consider well what are the great objects which he has to accomplish. he should ascertain what is the existing state of his school, both as to knowledge and character;--how long, generally, his pupils are to remain under his care,--what are to be their future stations and conditions in life, and what objects he can reasonably hope to effect for them, while they remain under his influence. by means of this forethought, and consideration, he will be enabled to work understandingly. it is desirable, too, that what i have recommended, in reference to the whole school, should be done with each individual. ascertain, (by other means however than formal examination,) to what stage his education has advanced, and deliberately consider what objects you can reasonably expect to effect for him, while he remains under your care. you cannot indeed always form your plans to suit, so exactly, your general views in regard to the school and to individuals, as you could wish. but these general views will, in a thousand cases, modify your plans, or affect in a greater or less degree, all your arrangements. they will keep you to a steady purpose, and your work will go on far more systematically and regularly, than it would, if, as in fact many teachers do, you were to come headlong into your school, take things just as you find them, and carry them forward at random, without end or aim. this survey of your field being made, you are prepared to commence definite operations, and the great difficulty, in carrying your plans into effect, is, how to act more efficiently on _the greatest numbers at a time_. the whole business of public instruction, if it goes on at all, must go on by the teacher's skill in multiplying his power, by acting on _numbers at once_. in most books on education, we are taught, almost exclusively, how to operate on the _individual_. it is the error into which theoretic writers almost always fall. we meet, in every periodical, and in every treatise, and in fact, in almost every conversation on the subject, with remarks, which sound very well by the fire-side, but they are totally inefficient and useless in school, from their being apparently based upon the supposition, that the teacher has but _one_ pupil to attend to at a time. the great question in the management of schools, is not, how you can take _one_ scholar, and lead him forward, most rapidly, in a prescribed course, but how you can classify and arrange _numbers_, comprising every possible variety, both as to knowledge and capacity, so as to carry them all forward effectually together. the extent to which a teacher may multiply his power, by acting on numbers at a time, is very great. in order to estimate it, we must consider carefully what it is, when carried to the greatest extent, to which it is capable of being carried, under the most favorable circumstances. now it is possible for a teacher to speak so as to be easily heard by three hundred persons, and three hundred pupils can be easily so seated, as to see his illustrations or diagrams. now suppose that three hundred pupils, all ignorant of the method of reducing fractions to a common denominator, and yet all old enough to learn, are collected in one room. suppose they are all attentive and desirous of learning, it is very plain that the process may be explained to the whole at once, so that half an hour spent in that exercise, would enable a very large proportion of them to understand the subject. so, if a teacher is explaining to a class in grammar, the difference between a noun and verb, the explanation would do as well for several hundred, as for the dozen who constitute the class, if arrangements could only be made to have the hundreds hear it. but there are, perhaps, only a hundred in the school, and of these a large part understand already the point to be explained, and another large part are too young to attend to it. i wish the object of these remarks not to be misunderstood. i do not recommend the attempt to teach on so extensive a scale; i admit that it is impracticable; i only mean to show in what the impracticability consists, namely, in the difficulty of making such arrangements as to derive the full benefit from the instructions rendered. they are, in the nature of things, available to the extent i have represented, but, in actual practice, the full benefit cannot be derived. now, so far as we thus fall short of this full benefit, so far there is, of course, waste; and it is difficult or impossible to make such arrangements as will avoid the waste, in this manner, of a large portion of every effort, which the teacher makes. a very small class instructed by an able teacher, is like a factory of a hundred spindles, with a water-wheel of power sufficient for a thousand. in such a case, even if the owner, from want of capital, or any other cause, cannot add the other nine hundred, he ought to know how much of his power is in fact unemployed, and make arrangements to bring it into useful exercise, as soon as he can. the teacher in the same manner, should understand what is the full beneficial effect, which it is possible, _in theory_, to derive from his instructions. he should understand, too, that just so far as he falls short of this full effect, there is waste. it may be unavoidable; part of it unquestionably is, like the friction of machinery, unavoidable. still, it is waste; and it ought to be so understood, that by the gradual perfection of the machinery, it may be more and more fully prevented. always bear in mind then, when you are devoting your time to two or three individuals in a class, that you are losing a very large part of your labor. your instructions are conducive to good effect, only to the one tenth or one twentieth of the extent, to which, under more favorable circumstances, they might be made available. and though you cannot always avoid this loss, you ought always to be aware of it, and so to shape your measures, as to diminish it as much as possible. * * * * * we come now to consider the particular measures to be adopted, in giving instruction. * * * * * the objects which are to be secured, in the management of classes, are twofold, . recitation. . instruction. these two objects are, it is plain, entirely distinct. under the latter, is included all the explanation, and assistance, and additional information, which the teacher may give his pupils, and, under the former, such an _examination_ of individuals, as is necessary to secure their careful attention to their lessons. it is unsafe to neglect either of these points. if the class meetings are mere _recitations_, they soon become dull and mechanical: the pupils generally take little interest in their studies, and imbibe no literary spirit. their intellectual progress will, accordingly, suddenly cease, the moment they leave school, and cease to be called upon to recite lessons. on the other hand, if _instruction_ is all that is aimed at, and _recitation_, (by which i mean, as above explained, such an examination of individuals as is necessary to ascertain that they have faithfully performed the tasks assigned,) is neglected, the exercise soon becomes not much more than a lecture, to which those, and those only, will attend, who please. the business, therefore, of a thorough examination of the class must not be omitted. i do not mean, that each individual scholar must, every day, be examined; but simply that the teacher must, in some way or other, satisfy himself, by reasonable evidence, that the whole class are really prepared. a great deal of ingenuity may be exercised, in contriving means for effecting this object, in the shortest possible time. i know of no part of the field of a teacher's labors, which may be more facilitated, by a little ingenuity, than this. one teacher, for instance, has a spelling lesson to hear. he begins at the head of the line, and putting one word to each boy, goes regularly down, each successive pupil calculating the chances whether a word, which he can accidentally spell, will or will not come to him. if he spells it, the teacher cannot tell whether he is prepared or not. that word is only one among fifty, constituting the lesson. if he misses it, the teacher cannot decide that he was unprepared. it might have been a single accidental error. another teacher, hearing the same lesson, requests the boys to bring their slates, and as he dictates the words, one after another, requires all to write them. after they are all written, he calls upon the pupils to spell them aloud as they have written them, simultaneously, pausing a moment after each, to give those who are wrong, an opportunity to indicate it, by some mark opposite the word misspelled. they all count the number of errors and report them. he passes down the class, glancing his eye at the work of each one, to see that all is right, noticing particularly those slates, which, from the character of the boys, need a more careful inspection. a teacher, who had never tried this experiment, would be surprised at the rapidity with which such work will be done by a class, after a little practice. now how different are these two methods, in their actual results! in the latter case, the whole class are thoroughly examined. in the former, not a single member of it, is. let me not be understood to recommend exactly this method of teaching spelling, as the best one to be adopted, in all cases. i only bring it forward as an illustration of the idea, that a little machinery, a little ingenuity, in contriving ways of acting on the _whole_, rather than on individuals, will very much promote the teacher's designs. in order to facilitate such plans, it is highly desirable that the classes should be trained to military precision and exactness in these manipulations. what i mean by this, may perhaps be best illustrated, by describing a case: it will show, in another branch, how much will be gained by acting upon numbers at once, instead of upon each individual in succession. imagine, then, that a teacher requested all the pupils of his school, who could write, to take out their slates, at the hour for a general exercise. as soon as the first bustle of opening and shutting the desks was over, he looked around the room, and saw some ruling lines across their slates, others wiping them all over on both sides, with sponges, others scribbling, or writing, or making figures. "all those," says he, with a pleasant tone and look, "who have taken out any thing besides slates, may rise." several, in various parts of the room, stood up. "all those, who have written any thing since they took out their slates, may rise too, and those who have wiped their slates." when all were up, he said to them, though not with a frown or a scowl, as if they had committed some very great offence; "suppose a company of soldiers should be ordered to _form a line_, and instead of simply obeying that order, they should all set at work, each in his own way, doing something else. one man, at one end of the line, begins to load and fire his gun; another takes out his knapsack, and begins to eat his luncheon; a third amuses himself by going as fast as possible through the exercise; and another still, begins to march about, hither and thither, facing to the right and left, and performing all the evolutions he can think of. what should you say to such a company as that?" the boys laughed. "it is better," said the teacher, "when numbers are acting under the direction of one, that they should all act _exactly together_. in this way, we advance much faster, than we otherwise should. be careful therefore to do exactly what i command, and nothing more." "_provide a place, on your slates, large enough to write a single line_," added the teacher, in a distinct voice. i print his orders in italics, and his remarks and explanations in roman letter. "_prepare to write._" "i mean by this," he continued, "that you place your slates before you, with your pencils at the place where you are to begin, so that all may commence precisely at the same instant." the teacher who tries such an experiment as this, will find, at such a juncture, an expression of fixed and pleased attention upon every countenance in school. all will be intent; all will be interested. boys love order and system, and acting in concert; and they will obey, with great alacrity, such commands as these, if they are good-humoredly, though decidedly expressed. the teacher observed in one part of the room, a hand raised, indicating that the boy wished to speak to him. he gave him liberty by pronouncing his name. "i have no pencil;" said the boy. a dozen hands, all around him, were immediately seen fumbling in pockets and desks, and, in a few minutes, several pencils were reached out for his acceptance. the boy looked at the pencils, and then at the teacher; he did not exactly know, whether he was to take one or not. "all those boys," said the teacher, pleasantly, "who have taken out pencils, may rise." "have these boys done right, or wrong?" "right;" "wrong;" "right;" answered their companions, variously. "their motive was to help their classmate out of his difficulties; that is a good feeling, certainly." "yes sir; right;" "right." "but i thought you promised me a moment ago," replied the teacher, "not to do any thing, unless i commanded it. did i ask for pencils?" a pause. "i do not blame these boys at all, in this case, still it is better to adhere rigidly to the principle, of _exact obedience_, when numbers are acting together. i thank them, therefore, for being so ready to assist a companion, but they must put their pencils away, as they were taken out without orders." now such a dialogue as this, if the teacher speaks in a good-humored, though decided manner, would be universally well received, in any school. whenever strictness of discipline is unpopular, it is rendered so, simply by the ill-humored and ill-judged means, by which it is attempted to be introduced. but all children will love strict discipline, if it is pleasantly, though firmly maintained. it is a great, though very prevalent mistake, to imagine, that boys and girls like a lax and inefficient government, and dislike the pressure of steady control. what they dislike is, sour looks and irritating language, and they therefore very naturally dislike every thing introduced or sustained by their means. if, however, exactness and precision in all the operations of a class and of the school, are introduced and enforced, in the proper manner, i. e., by a firm, but mild and good-humored authority, scholars will universally be pleased with them. they like to see the uniform appearance,--the straight line,--the simultaneous movement. they like to feel the operation of system, and to realize, while they are at the school room, that they form a community, governed by fixed and steady laws, firmly but pleasantly administered. on the other hand, laxity of discipline, and the disorder which will result from it, will only lead the pupils to contemn their teacher, and to hate their school. by introducing and maintaining such a discipline as i have described, great facilities will be secured for examining the classes. for example, to take a case different from the one before described; let us suppose that a class have been performing a number of examples in addition. they come together to the recitation, and under one mode of managing classes, the teacher is immediately beset, by a number of the pupils, with excuses. one had no slate; another was absent when the lesson was assigned; a third performed the work, but it got rubbed out; and a fourth did not know what was to be done. the teacher stops to hear all these, and to talk about them; fretted himself, and fretting the delinquents by his impatient remarks. the rest of the class are waiting, and having nothing good to do, the temptation is almost irresistible to do something bad. one boy is drawing pictures on his slate, to make his neighbors laugh; another is whispering, and two more are at play. the disorder continues, while the teacher goes round examining slate after slate, his whole attention being engrossed by each individual, as the pupils come to him successively, while the rest are left to themselves, interrupted only by an occasional harsh or even angry, but utterly useless rebuke from him. but under _another_ mode of managing classes and schools, a very different result would be produced. a boy approaches the teacher to render an excuse, the teacher replies, addressing himself, however, to the whole class, "i shall give all an opportunity to offer their excuses presently. no one must come till he is called." the class then regularly take their places in the recitation seats; the prepared and unprepared together. the following commands are given and obeyed, promptly. they are spoken pleasantly, but still in the tone of command. "the class may rise." "all those, that are not fully prepared with this lesson, may sit." a number sit, and others, doubtful whether they are prepared or not, or thinking that there is something peculiar in their cases, which they wish to state, raise their hands, or make any other signal which is customary to indicate a wish to speak. such a signal ought always to be agreed upon, and understood in school. the teacher shakes his head; saying "i will hear you presently. if there is, on any account whatever, any doubt whether you are prepared, you must sit." "those that are standing may read their answers, to no. . unit figure?" _boys._ "five." _teacher._ "tens?" _b._ "six." _t._ "hundreds?" _b._ "seven." while these numbers are thus reading, the teacher looks at the boys, and can easily see whether any are not reading their own answers, but only following the rest. if they have been trained to speak exactly together, his ear will also at once detect any erroneous answer, which any one may give. he takes down the figures given by the majority, on his own slate, and reads them aloud. "this is the answer obtained by the majority: it is, undoubtedly right. those, who have different answers may sit." these directions, if understood and obeyed, would divide the class evidently into two portions. those standing, have their work done, and done correctly, and those sitting, have some excuse or error to be examined. a new lesson may now be assigned, and the first portion may be dismissed; which, in a well regulated school, will be two-thirds of the class. their slates may be slightly examined, as they pass by the teacher, on their way to their seats, to see that all is fair; but it will be safe to take it for granted, that a result, in which a majority agree, will be right. truth is consistent with itself, but error, in such a case, never is. this, the teacher can, at any time, show, by comparing the answers that are wrong; they will always be found, not only to differ from the correct result, but to contradict each other. the teacher may now, if be pleases, after the majority of the class have gone, hear the reasons of those who were unprepared, and look for the errors of those whose work was incorrect; but it is better to spend as little time as possible, in such a way. if a scholar is not prepared, it is not of much consequence, whether it is because he forgot his book, or mistook the lesson; or if it is ascertained that his answer is incorrect, it is, ordinarily, a mere waste of time, to search for the particular error. "i have looked over my work, sir," says the boy, perhaps, "and i cannot find where it is wrong." he means by it, that he does not believe that it is wrong. "it is no matter if you cannot," would be the proper reply, "since it certainly is wrong; you have made a mistake in adding, somewhere, but it is not worth while for me to spend two or three minutes apiece with all of you, to ascertain where. try to be careful next time." the cases of those who are unprepared at a recitation, ought, by no means, to be passed by, unnoticed, although it would be unwise to spend much time in examining each, in detail. "it is not of much consequence," the teacher might say, "whether you have good excuses, or bad, so long as you are not prepared. in future life, you will certainly be unsuccessful, if you fail, no matter for what reason, to discharge the duties which devolve upon you. a carpenter, for instance, would certainly lose his work, if he should not perform it faithfully, and in season. excuses, no matter how reasonable, will do him little good. so in this school. i want good recitations, not good excuses. i hope every one will be prepared to-morrow." it is not probable, however, that every one would be prepared the next day, in such a case; but, by acting steadily on these principles, the number of delinquencies would be so much diminished, that the very few which should be left, could easily be examined in detail, and the remedies applied. simultaneous recitation, by which i mean the practice of addressing a question to all the class, to be answered by all together, is a practice, which has been for some years rapidly extending in our schools, and, if adopted with proper limits and restrictions, is attended with great advantage. the teacher must guard against some dangers, however, which will be likely to attend it. . some will answer very eagerly, instantly after the question is completed. they wish to show their superior readiness. let the teacher mention this, expose, kindly, the motive which leads to it, and tell them it is as irregular to answer before the rest, as after them. . some will defer their answers, until they can catch those of their comrades, for a guide. let the teacher mention this fault, expose the motive which leads to it, and tell them that, if they do not answer independently, and at once, they had better not answer at all. . some will not answer at all. the teacher can tell by looking around the class who do not, for they cannot counterfeit the proper motion of the lips, with promptness and decision, unless they know what the answer is to be. he ought occasionally to say to such an one, "i perceive you do not answer;" and ask him questions individually. . in some cases, there is danger of confusion in the answers, from the fact that the question may be of such a nature, that the answer is long, and may, by different individuals, be differently expressed. this evil must be guarded against, by so shaping the question, as to admit of a reply in a single word. in reading large numbers, for example, each figure may be called for by itself, or they may be given one after another, the pupils keeping exact time. when it is desirable to ask a question to which the answer is necessarily long, it may be addressed to an individual, or the whole class may write their replies, which may then be read in succession. in a great many cases where simultaneous answering is practised, after a short time, the evils above specified are allowed to grow, until at last some half dozen bright members of a class answer for all, the rest dragging after them, echoing their replies, or ceasing to take any interest in an exercise, which brings no personal and individual responsibility upon them. to prevent this the teacher should exercise double vigilance, at such a time. he should often address questions to individuals alone, especially to those most likely to be inattentive and careless, and guard against the ingress of every abuse, which might, without close vigilance, appear. with these cautions, the method here alluded to will be found to be of very great advantage in many studies; for example, all the arithmetical tables may be recited in this way; words may be spelled, answers to sums given; columns of figures added, or numbers multiplied; and many questions in history, geography, and other miscellaneous studies, answered, especially the general questions asked for the purpose of a review. but besides being useful as a mode of examination, this plan of answering questions simultaneously, is a very important means of fixing in the mind, any facts, which the teacher may communicate to his pupils. if, for instance, he says some day to a class, that vasco de gama was the discoverer of the passage round the cape of good hope, and leaves it here, in a few days, not one in twenty, will recollect the name. but let him call upon them all to spell it, simultaneously, and then to pronounce it distinctly, three or four times in concert, and the word will be very strongly impressed upon the mind. the reflecting teacher will find a thousand cases, in the instruction of his classes, and in his general exercises, in the school, in which this principle will be of great utility. it is universal in its application. what we _say_, we fix by the very act of saying it, in the mind. hence reading aloud, though a slower, is a far more thorough method, than reading silently; and it is better, in almost all cases, whether in the family, or in sabbath, or common schools, when general instructions are given, to have the leading points fixed in the mind, by questions, answered simultaneously. but we are wandering a little from our subject; which is, in this part of our chapter, the methods of _examining_ a class, not of giving or fixing instructions. another mode of examining classes, which it is important to describe, consists in requiring _written answers_ to the questions asked. the form and manner, in which this plan may be adopted, is various. the class may bring their slates to the recitation, and the teacher may propose questions successively, the answers to which all the class may write, numbering them carefully. after a dozen answers are written, the teacher may call, at random, for them; or he may repeat a question, and ask each pupil to read the answer he had written; or he may examine the slates. perhaps this method may be very successfully employed in reviews, by dictating to the class, a list of questions, relating to the ground they have gone over, for a week, and to which they are to prepare answers, written out at length, and to be brought in at the next exercise. this method may be made more formal still, by requiring a class to write a full and regular abstract of all they have learned, during a specified time. the practice of thus reducing to writing what has been learned, will be attended with many advantages, so obvious that they need not be described. it will be perceived that three methods of examining classes have now been named, and these will afford the teacher the means of introducing a very great variety, in his mode of conducting his recitations, while he still carries his class forward steadily in their prescribed course. each is attended with its peculiar advantages. the _single replies_, coming from individuals specially addressed, are more rigid, and more to be relied upon;--but they consume a great deal of time, and while one is questioned, it requires much skill, to keep up interest in the rest. the _simultaneous answers_ of a class awaken more general interest, but it is difficult, without special care, to secure, by this means, a thorough examination of all. the _written replies_, are more thorough, but they require more time, and attention, and while they habituate the pupil to express his thoughts in writing, they would, if exclusively adopted, fail to accustom him to an equally important practice, that of the oral communication of his thoughts. a constant variety, of which these three methods should be the elements, is unquestionably the best mode. we not only, by this means, secure in a great degree the advantages which each is fitted to produce, but we gain, also, the additional advantage and interest of variety. by these, and perhaps by other means, it is the duty of the teacher to satisfy himself that his pupils are really attentive to their duties. it is not perhaps necessary, that every individual should be, every day, minutely examined; this is, in many cases, impossible. but the system of examination should be so framed, and so administered, as to be daily felt by all, and to bring upon every one, a daily responsibility. * * * * * we come now to consider the second general head, which was to be discussed in this chapter. the study of books alone, is insufficient to give knowledge to the young. in the first stage, learning to read, a book is of no use whatever, without the voice of the living teacher. the child cannot take a step alone. as the pupil, however, advances in his course, his dependence upon his teacher for guidance and help, continually diminishes, until, at last, the scholar sits in his solitary study, with no companion but his books, and desiring, for a solution of every difficulty, nothing but a larger library. in schools, however, the pupils have made so little progress in this course, that they all need more or less of this oral assistance. difficulties must be explained; questions must be answered; the path must be smoothed, and the way pointed out, by a guide, who has travelled it before, or it will be impossible for the pupil to go on. this is the part of our subject, which we now approach. the great principle which is to guide the teacher, in this part of his duty, is this; _assist your pupils, in such a way, as to lead them, as soon as possible, to do without assistance_. this is fundamental. in a short time they will be away from your reach; they will have no teacher to consult; and unless you teach them how to understand books themselves, they must necessarily stop suddenly in their course, the moment you cease to help them forward. i shall proceed, therefore, to consider the subject, in the following plan:-- . means of exciting interest in study. . the kind and degree of assistance to be rendered. . miscellaneous suggestions. . interesting the pupils in their studies. there are various principles of human nature, which may be of great avail, in accomplishing this object. making intellectual effort, and acquiring knowledge, are always pleasant to the human mind, unless some peculiar circumstances render them otherwise. the teacher has, therefore, only to remove obstructions, and sources of pain, and the employment of his pupils will be, of itself, a pleasure. "i am going to give you a new exercise to-day," said a teacher to a class of boys, in latin. "i am going to have you parse your whole lesson, in writing. it will be difficult, but i think you may be able to accomplish it." the class looked surprised. they did not know what _parsing in writing_ could be. "you may first, when you take your seats, and are ready to prepare the lesson, write upon your slates, a list of the ten first nouns, arranging them in a column. do you understand so far?" "yes sir." "then rule lines for another column, just beyond this. in parsing nouns, what is the first particular to be named?" "what the noun is from." "yes; that is, its nominative. now you may write, at the head of the first column, the word _nouns_, and at the head of the second, _nom._, for nominative. then rule a line for the third column. what shall this contain?" "the declension." "yes; and the fourth?" "gender." "the fifth?" "number." in the same manner the other columns were designated; the sixth, was to contain case; the seventh, the word, with which the noun was connected, in construction; and the eighth, a reference to the rule. "now i wish you," continued the teacher, "to fill up such a table as this, with _ten_ nouns. do you understand how i mean?" "yes sir;" "no sir;" they answered, variously. "all who do understand may take their seats; as i wish to give as little explanation, as possible. the more you can depend upon yourselves, the better." those who saw clearly what was to be done, left the class, and the teacher continued his explanation to those who were left behind. he made the plan perfectly clear to them, by taking a particular noun, and running it through the table, showing what should be written opposite to the word, in all the columns; and then dismissed them. the class separated, as every class would, in such a case, with strong interest in the work before them. it was not so difficult as to perplex them, and yet it required attention and care. they were interested and pleased;--pleased with the effort which it required them to make, and they anticipated, with interest and pleasure, the time of coming again to the class, to report and compare their work. when the time for the class came, the teacher addressed them somewhat as follows: "before looking at your slates, i am going to predict what the faults are. i have not seen any of your work, but shall judge altogether from my general knowledge of school-boys, and the difficulties i know they meet with do you think i shall succeed?" the scholars made no reply, and an unskilful teacher would imagine, that time spent in such remarks, would be wholly wasted. by no means. the influence of it was to awaken universal interest in the approaching examination of the slates. every scholar would be intent, watching, with eager interest, to see whether the imagined faults would be found upon his work. the class was, by that single pleasant remark, put into the best possible state, for receiving the criticisms of the teacher. "the first fault, which i suppose will be found, is, that some are unfinished." the scholars looked surprised. they did not expect to have that called a fault. "how many plead guilty to it?" a few raised their hands, and the teacher continued. "i suppose that some will be found partly effaced. the slates were not laid away carefully, or they were not clean, so that the writing is not distinct. how many find this the case with their work?" "i suppose that, in some cases, the lines will not be perpendicular, but will slant, probably towards the left, like writing." "i suppose also, that, in some cases, the writing will be careless, so that i cannot easily read it. how many plead guilty to this?" after mentioning such other faults as occurred to him, relating chiefly to the form of the table, and the mere mechanical execution of the work, he said: "i think i shall not look at your slates to-day. you can all see, i have no doubt, how you can considerably improve them, in mechanical execution, in your next lesson; and i suppose you would a little prefer that i should not see your first imperfect efforts. in fact, i should rather not see them. at the next recitation, they probably will be much better." one important means by which the teacher may make his scholars careful of their reputation, is to show them, thus, that he is careful of it himself. now, in such a case as this, for it is, except in the principles which it is intended to illustrate, imaginary, a very strong interest would be awakened in the class, in the work assigned them. intellectual effort, in new and constantly varied modes, is in itself a pleasure, and this pleasure the teacher may deepen and increase very easily, by a little dexterous management, designed to awaken curiosity, and concentrate attention. it ought, however, to be constantly borne in mind, that this variety should be confined, to the modes of pursuing an object, which is permanent, and constant, and steadily pursued. for instance, if a little class are to be taught simple addition, after the process is once explained, which may be done, perhaps, in two or three lessons, they will need many days of patient practice, to render it familiar, to impress it firmly in their recollection, and to enable them to work with rapidity. now this object must be steadily pursued. it would be very unwise for the teacher to say to himself; my class are tired of addition, i must carry them on to subtraction, or give them some other study. it would be equally unwise, to keep them many days performing example after example, in monotonous succession, each lesson a mere repetition of the last. he must steadily pursue his object, of familiarizing them fully with this elementary process, but he may give variety and spirit to the work, by changing occasionally the modes. one week he may dictate examples to them, and let them come together to compare their results; one of the class being appointed to keep a list of all who are correct, each day. at another time, each one may write an example, which he may read aloud to all the others, to be performed and brought in at the next time. again, he may let them work on paper, with pen and ink, that he may see how few mistakes they make, as mistakes in ink, cannot be easily removed. he may excite interest by devising ingenious examples, such as finding out how much all the numbers from one to fifty will make, when added together, or the amount of the ages of the whole class; or any such example, the result of which they might feel a little interest in learning. thus the object is steadily pursued, though the means of pursuing it, are constantly changing. we have the advantage of regular progress in the acquisition of knowledge truly valuable, while this progress is made, with all the spirit and interest which variety can give. the necessity of making such efforts as this, however, to keep up the interest of the class in their work, and to make it pleasant to them, will depend altogether upon circumstances; or rather, it will vary much with circumstances. a class of pupils somewhat advanced in their studies, and understanding and feeling the value of knowledge, will need very little of such effort as this; while young and giddy children, who have been accustomed to dislike books and school, and every thing connected with them, will need more. it ought, however, in all cases, to be made a means, not an end;--the means to lead on a pupil to an _interest in progress in knowledge itself_, which is, after all, the great motive, which ought to be brought, as soon and as extensively as possible, to operate in the school-room. another way to awaken interest in the studies of the school, is to bring out as frequently, and as distinctly, as possible, the connexion between these studies and the practical business of life. the events which are occurring around you, and which interest the community in which you are placed, may, by a little ingenuity, be connected, in a thousand ways, with the studies of the school. if the practice, which has been already repeatedly recommended, of appropriating a quarter of an hour, each day, to a general exercise, should be adopted, it will afford great facilities for doing this. suppose, for example, while the question between the general government and the state of south carolina, was pending, and agitating the whole country, almost every one looking, with anxious interest, every day, for intelligence from the scene of the conflict, that the teacher of a school, had brought up the subject, at such a general exercise as has been mentioned. he describes, in a few words, the nature of the question, and, in such a manner, as to awaken, throughout the school, a strong interest in the result of the contest. he then says, "i wish now to make you all more fully acquainted with this case, and the best way of doing it, which occurs to me, is as follows: "there are several studies in school, which throw light upon this controversy; especially history, geography, and political economy. now, i shall take the classes in these studies, for a day or two, out of their regular course, and assign them lessons which relate to this subject, and then hear them recite in the general exercise, that you may all hear. the first class in geography may take therefore, for their next lesson, the state of south carolina; to-morrow they will recite in the hearing of the whole school, when i shall make such additional explanations, as will occur to me. the next day, i shall assign to the class in history, a passage giving an account of the formation of this government; and afterwards lessons will be recited from the political class book, explaining the mode of collecting money for the use of our government, by duties, and the relative powers of the general and state governments. after hearing all these lessons recited, with my remarks in addition, you will be the better able to understand the subject, and then i shall bring in a newspaper now and then, and keep you acquainted with the progress of the affair." now the propriety of taking up the particular subject, which i have here introduced, by way of illustration, in such a way, would depend altogether upon the character and standing of the school; the age and mental maturity of the scholars, and their capacity to understand the circumstances of such a case, and to appreciate those considerations which give interest to it. the principle however, is applicable to all; and one such experiment, dexterously carried through, will do more towards giving boys and girls, clear and practical ideas of the reason why they go to school, and of the importance of acquiring knowledge, than the best lecture on such a subject, which ever was delivered. there is no branch of study attended to in school, which may, by judicious efforts, be made more effectual in accomplishing this object,--leading the pupils to see the practical utility, and the value of knowledge, than composition. if such subjects as are suitable themes for _moral essays_, are assigned, the scholars will indeed dislike the work of writing, and derive little benefit from it. the mass of pupils in our schools, are not to be writers of moral essays or orations, and they do not need to form that style of empty, florid, verbose declamation, which the practice of writing composition in our schools, as it is too frequently managed, tends to form. assign practical subjects,--subjects relating to the business of the school,--or the events taking place around you. is there a question before the community, on the subject of the location of a new school-house? assign it to your pupils, as a question for discussion, and direct them not to write empty declamation, but to obtain, from their parents, the real arguments in the case, and to present them, distinctly and clearly, and in simple language, to their companions. was a building burnt by lightning in the neighborhood? let those who saw the scene, describe it; their productions to be read by the teacher aloud; and let them see that clear descriptions please, and that good legible writing can be read fluently, and that correct spelling, and punctuation, and grammar, make the article go smoothly and pleasantly, and enable it to produce its full effect. is a public building going forward in the neighborhood of your school? you can make it a very fruitful source of subjects and questions, to give interest and impulse to the studies of the school-room. your classes in geometry may measure,--your arithmeticians may calculate, and make estimates,--your writers may describe its progress, from week to week, and anticipate the scenes, which it will in future years exhibit. by such means, the practical bearings and relations of the studies of the school-room, may he constantly kept in view; but i ought to guard the teacher, while on this subject, most distinctly, against the danger of making the school-room a scene of literary amusement, instead of study. these means of awakening interest, and relieving the tedium of the uninterrupted and monotonous study of text books, must not encroach on the regular duties of the school. they must be brought forward with judgment and moderation, and made subordinate and subservient to these regular duties. their design is, to give spirit, and interest, and a feeling of practical utility, to what the pupils are doing, and if resorted to, with these restrictions, and within these limits, they will produce powerful, but safe results. another way to excite interest, and that of the right kind in school, is not to _remove_ difficulties, but to teach the pupils how to _surmount_ them. a text book so contrived as to make study mere play, and to dispense with thought and effort, is the worst text book that can be made, and the surest to be, in the end, a dull one. the great source of literary enjoyment, which is the successful exercise of intellectual power, is, by such a mode of presenting a subject, cut off. secure therefore severe study. let the pupil see that you are aiming to secure it, and that the pleasure which you expect that they will receive, is that of firmly and patiently encountering and overcoming difficulty; of penetrating, by steady and persevering effort, into regions, from which the idle and the inefficient are debarred; and that it is your province to lead them forward, not to carry them. they will soon understand this, and like it. never underrate the difficulties which your pupils will have to encounter, or try to persuade them that what you assign is _easy_. doing easy things is generally dull work, and it is especially discouraging and disheartening for a pupil to spend his strength in doing what is really difficult for him, when his instructer, by calling his work easy, gives him no credit, for what may have been severe and protracted labor. if a thing is really hard for the pupil, his teacher ought to know it, and admit it. the child then feels that he has some sympathy. it is astonishing how great an influence may be exerted over a child, by his simply knowing that his efforts are observed and appreciated. you pass a boy in the street, wheeling a heavy load, in a barrow; now simply stop to look at him, with a countenance which says, "that is a heavy load; i should not think that boy could wheel it;" and how quick will your look give fresh strength and vigor to his efforts. on the other hand, when, in such a case, the boy is faltering under his load, try the effect of telling him, "why, that is not heavy; you can wheel it easily enough; trundle it along." the poor boy will drop his load, disheartened and discouraged, and sit down upon it, in despair. no, even if the work you are assigning to a class is easy, do not tell them so, unless you wish to destroy all their spirit and interest in doing it; and if you wish to excite their spirit and interest, make your work difficult, and let them see that you know it is so. not so difficult as to tax their powers too heavily, but enough so, to require a vigorous and persevering effort. let them distinctly understand too, that you know it is difficult,--that you mean to make it so,--but that they have your sympathy and encouragement, in the efforts which it calls them to make. you may satisfy yourself that human nature is, in this respect, what i have described, by some such experiment as the following:--select two classes, not very familiar with elementary arithmetic, and offer to each of them the following example in addition:-- &c. &c. the numbers may be continued, according to the obvious law regulating the above, until each one of the nine digits has commenced the line. or, if you choose multiplication, let the example be this:-- multiply by --------- now, when you bring the example to one of the classes, address the pupils as follows: "i have contrived for you a very difficult sum. it is the most difficult one that can be made, with the number of figures contained in it, and i do not think that any of you can do it, but you may try. i shall not be surprised if every answer should contain mistakes." to the other class, say as follows:-- "i have prepared an example for you, which i wish you to be very careful to perform correctly. it is a little longer than those you have had heretofore, but it is to be performed upon the same principles, and you can all do it correctly, if you really try." now under such circumstances the first class will go to their seats with ardor and alacrity; determined to show you that they can do work, even if it is difficult. and if they succeed, they come to the class the next day, with pride and pleasure. they have accomplished something, which you admit it was not easy to accomplish. on the other hand, the second class will go to their seats, with murmuring looks and words; and with a hearty dislike of the task you have assigned them. they know that they have something to do, which, however easy it may be to the teacher, is really difficult for them, and they have to be perplexed and wearied with the work, without having at last, even the little satisfaction of knowing that the teacher appreciates the difficulties with which they had to contend. . we now come to consider the subject of rendering assistance to the pupil, which is one of the most important and delicate parts of a teacher's work. the great difference, which exists among teachers, in regard to the skill they possess in this part of their duty, is so striking that it is very often noticed by others; and perhaps skill here is of more avail, in deciding the question of success or failure, than any thing besides. the first great principle, is, however, simple and effectual. ( .) _divide and subdivide a difficult process, until your steps are so short, that the pupil can easily take them._ most teachers forget the difference between the pupil's capacity and their own, and they pass rapidly forward, through a difficult train of thought, in their own ordinary gait, their unfortunate followers vainly trying to keep up with them. the case is precisely analagous to that of the father, who walks with the step of a man, while his little son is by his side, wearying and exhausting himself, with fruitless efforts to reach his feet as far, and to move them as rapidly, as a full gown man. but to show what i mean by subdividing a difficult process, so as to make each step simple, i will take a case which may serve as an example. i will suppose that the teacher of a common school, undertakes to show his boys, who, we will suppose, are acquainted with nothing but elementary arithmetic, how longitude is ascertained, by means of the eclipses of jupiter's satellites; not a very simple question, (as it would, at first view, strike one,) but still one which, like all others, may be, merely by the power of the subdivision alluded to, easily explained. i will suppose that the subject has come up at a general exercise,--perhaps the question was asked in writing, by one of the older boys. i will present the explanation, chiefly in the form of question and answer, that it may be seen, that the steps are so short, that the boys may take them themselves. "which way," asks the teacher, "are the rocky mountains from us?" "west," answer two or three of the boys. in such cases as this, it is very desirable that the answers should be general, so that throughout the school, there should be a spirited interest in the questions and replies. this will never be the case, if a small number of the boys only take part in the answers; and many teachers complain, that, when they try this experiment, they can seldom induce many of the pupils to take a part. the reason ordinarily is, that they say that _any_ of the boys may answer, instead of that _all_ of them may. the boys do not get the idea that it is wished that an universal reply should come from all parts of the room in which every one's voice should be heard. if the answers were feeble, in the instance we are supposing, the teacher would perhaps say; "i only heard one or two answers: do not more of you know where the rocky mountains are? will you all think, and answer together? which way are they from us?" "west," answer a large number of boys. "you do not answer fully enough yet; i do not think more than forty answered, and there are about sixty here. i should like to have _every one in the room_ answer, and all precisely together." he then repeats the question, and obtains a full response. a similar effort will always succeed. "now, does the sun, in going round the earth, pass over the rocky mountains, or over us, first?" to this question, the teacher hears a confused answer. some do not reply; some say, "over the rocky mountains;" others, "over us;" and others still, "the sun does not move at all." "it is true that the sun, strictly speaking, does not move; the earth turns round, presenting the various countries, in succession, to the sun, but the effect is precisely the same as it would be, if the sun moved, and accordingly i use that language. now, how long does it take the sun to pass round the earth?" "twenty four hours." "does he go towards the west, or towards the east, from us?" "towards the west." but it is not necessary to give the replies; the questions alone will be sufficient. the reader will observe that they inevitably lead the pupil, by short and simple steps, to a clear understanding of the point to be explained. "will the sun go towards, or from, the rocky mountains, after leaving us?" "how long did you say it takes the sun to go round the globe, and come to us again?" "how long to go half round?" "quarter round?" "how long will it take him to go to the rocky mountains?" no answer. "you cannot tell. it would depend upon the distance. suppose then the rocky mountains were half round the globe, how long would it take the sun to go to them?" "suppose they were quarter round?" "the whole distance is divided into portions called degrees; in all. how many will the sun pass, in going half round? in going quarter round?" "ninety degrees then make one quarter of the circumference of the globe. this you have already said will take six hours. in one hour then, how many degrees will the sun pass over?" perhaps no answer. if so, the teacher will subdivide the question, on the principle we are explaining, so as to make the steps such that the pupils _can_ take them. "how many degrees will the sun pass over in three hours?" "forty-five." "how large a part of that, then, will he pass, in one hour?" "one third of it." "and what is one third of forty-five?" the boys would readily answer fifteen, and the teacher would then dwell for a moment, on the general truth, thus deduced, that the sun, in passing round the earth, passes over fifteen degrees every hour. "suppose then it takes the sun one hour to go from us to the river mississippi, how many degrees west of us, would the river be?" having thus familiarized the pupils to the fact, that the motion of the sun is a proper measure of the difference of longitude between two places, the teacher must dismiss the subject, for a day, and when the next opportunity of bringing it forward occurs, he would perhaps take up the subject of the sun's motion as a measure of _time_. "is the sun ever exactly over our heads?" "is he ever exactly south of us?" "when he is exactly south of us, or in other words, exactly opposite to us, in his course round the earth, he is said to be in our meridian. for the word meridian means a line drawn exactly north or south from any place." there is no limit to the simplicity which may be imparted, even to the most difficult subjects, by subdividing the steps. this point for instance, the meaning of meridian, may be the subject, if it were necessary, of many questions, which would render it simple to the youngest child. the teacher may point to the various articles in the room, or buildings, or other objects without, and ask if they are or are not in his meridian. but to proceed: "when the sun is exactly opposite to us, in the south, at the highest point to which he rises, what o'clock is it?" "when the sun is exactly opposite to us, can he be opposite to the rocky mountains?" "does he get opposite to the rocky mountains, before, or after, he is opposite to us?" "when he is opposite to the rocky mountains, what o'clock is it there?" "is it twelve o'clock here, then, before, or after it is twelve o'clock there?" "suppose the river mississippi is fifteen degrees from us, how long is it twelve o'clock here, before it is twelve o'clock there?" "when it is twelve o'clock here then, what time will it be there?" some will probably answer "one," and some "eleven." if so, the step is too long, and may be subdivided thus: "when it is noon here, is the sun going towards the mississippi, or has he passed it?" "then has noon gone by, at that river, or has it not yet come?" "then will it be one hour before, or one hour after noon?" "then will it be eleven, or one?" such minuteness and simplicity would, in ordinary cases, not be necessary. i go into it here, merely to show, how, by simply subdividing the steps, a subject ordinarily perplexing, may be made plain. the reader will observe that in the above, there are no explanations by the teacher, there are not even leading questions; that is, there are no questions whose form suggests the answers desired. the pupil goes on from step to step, simply because he has but one short step to take at a time. "can it be noon, then," continues the teacher, "here and at a place fifteen degrees west of us, at the same time?" "can it be noon here, and at a place ten miles west of us, at the same time?" it is unnecessary to continue the illustration, for it will be very evident to every reader, that by going forward in this way, the whole subject may be laid out before the pupils, so that they shall perfectly understand it. they can, by a series of questions like the above, be led to see by their own reasoning, that time, as denoted by the clock, must differ in every two places, not upon the same meridian, and that the difference must be exactly proportional to the difference of longitude. so that a watch, which is right in one place, cannot, strictly speaking, be right in any other place, east or west of the first: and that, if the time of day, at two places, can be compared, either by taking a chronometer from one to another, or by observing some celestial phenomenon, like the eclipses of jupiter's satellites, and ascertaining precisely the time of their occurrence, according to the reckoning at both; the distances east or west, by degrees, may be determined. the reader will observe, too, that the method by which this explanation is made, is strictly in accordance with the principle i am illustrating,--which is by simply _dividing the process into short steps_. there is no ingenious reasoning on the part of the teacher, no happy illustrations; no apparatus, no diagrams. it is a pure process of mathematical reasoning, made clear and easy by _simple analysis_. in applying this method, however, the teacher should be very careful not to subdivide too much. it is best that the pupils should walk as fast as they can. the object of the teacher should be to smooth the path, not much more than barely enough to enable the pupil to go on. he should not endeavor to make it very easy. ( .) truths must not only be taught to the pupils, but they must be _fixed_, and _made familiar_. this is a point which seems to be very generally overlooked. "can you say the multiplication table?" said a teacher, to a boy, who was standing before him, in his class. "yes sir." "well, i should like to have you say the line beginning nine times one." the boy repeated it slowly, but correctly. "now i should like to have you try again, and i will, at the same time, say another line, to see if i can put you out." the boy looked surprised. the idea of his teacher's trying to perplex and embarrass him, was entirely new. "you must not be afraid," said the teacher; "you will undoubtedly not succeed in getting through, but you will not be to blame for the failure. i only try it, as a sort of intellectual experiment." the boy accordingly began again, but was soon completely confused by the teacher's accompaniment; he stopped in the middle of his line saying, "i could say it, only you put me out." "well, now try to say the alphabet, and let me see if i can put you out there." as might have been expected the teacher failed. the boy went regularly onward to the end. "you see now," said the teacher to the class which had witnessed the experiment, "that this boy knows his alphabet, in a different sense, from that in which he knows his multiplication table. in the latter, his knowledge is only imperfectly his own; he can make use of it only under favorable circumstances. in the former it is entirely his own; circumstances have no control over him." a child has a lesson in latin grammar to recite. she hesitates and stammers, miscalls the cases, and then corrects herself, and if she gets through at last, she considers herself as having recited well; and very many teachers would consider it well too. if she hesitates a little longer than usual, in trying to summon to her recollection a particular word, she says, perhaps, "don't tell me," and if she happens at last to guess right, she takes her book with a countenance beaming with satisfaction. "suppose you had the care of an infant school," might the instructer say to such a scholar; "and were endeavoring to teach a little child to count, and she should recite her lesson to you in this way; 'one, two, four, no, three;--one, two, three,-- -- stop, don't tell me,--five--no four--four--, five,-- -- -- i shall think in a minute,--six--is that right? five, six, &c.' should you call that reciting well?" nothing is more common than for pupils to say, when they fail of reciting their lesson, that they could say it at their seats, but that they cannot now say it, before the class. when such a thing is said for the first time, it should not be severely reproved, because nine children in ten honestly think, that if the lesson was learned so that it could be recited any where, their duty is discharged. but it should be kindly, though distinctly explained to them, that, in the business of life, they must have their knowledge so much at command, that they can use it, at all times, and in all circumstances, or it will do them little good. one of the most common causes of difficulty in pursuing mathematical studies, or studies of any kind, where the succeeding lessons depend upon those which precede, is the fact that the pupil, though he may understand what precedes, is not _familiar_ with it. this is very strikingly the case with geometry. the class study the definitions, and the teacher supposes they fully understand them; in fact, they do _understand_ them, but the name and the thing are so feebly connected in their minds, that a direct effort, and a short pause, are necessary to recall the idea, when they hear or see the word. when they come on therefore to the demonstrations, which, in themselves, would be difficult enough, they have double duty to perform. the words used do not readily suggest the idea, and the connexion of the ideas requires careful study. under this double burden, many a young geometrician sinks discouraged. a class should go on slowly, and dwell on details, so long as to fix firmly, and make perfectly familiar, whatever they undertake to learn. in this manner, the knowledge they acquire will become their own. it will be incorporated, as it were, into their very minds, and they cannot afterwards be deprived of it. the exercises which have for their object this rendering familiar what has been learned, may be so varied as to interest the pupil very much, instead of being tiresome, as it might, at first be supposed. suppose, for instance, a teacher has explained to a large class in grammar, the difference between an adjective and an adverb: if he leave it here, in a fortnight, one half would have forgotten the distinction, but by dwelling upon it, a few lessons, he may fix it for ever. the first lesson might be to write twenty short sentences containing only adjectives. the second to write twenty, containing only adverbs. the third, to write sentences in two forms, one containing the adjective, and the other expressing the same idea by means of the adverb, arranging them in two columns, thus, he writes well. | his writing is good. again, they may make out a list of adjectives, with the adverbs derived from each, in another column. then they may classify adverbs on the principle of their meaning, or according to their termination. the exercise may be infinitely varied, and yet the object of the whole may be, to make _perfectly familiar_, and to fix for ever in the mind, the distinction explained. these two points seem to me to be fundamental, so far as assisting pupils through the difficulties which lie in their way, is concerned. diminish the difficulties as far as is necessary, by merely shortening and simplifying the steps, and make thorough work as you go on. these principles carried steadily into practice, will be effectual, in leading any mind through any difficulties which may occur. and though they cannot perhaps be fully applied to every mind, in a large school, yet they can be so far acted upon, in reference to the whole mass, as to accomplish the object for a very large majority. . _general cautions._ a few miscellaneous suggestions, which we shall include under this head, will conclude this chapter. ( .) never do any thing _for_ a scholar, but teach him to do it for himself. how many cases occur, in the schools of our country, where the boy brings his slate to the teacher, saying he cannot do a certain sum. the teacher takes the slate and pencil,--performs the work in silence,--brings the result,--and returns the slate to the hands of his pupil, who walks off to his seat, and goes to work on the next example; perfectly satisfied with the manner in which he is passing on. a man who has not done this a hundred times himself, will hardly believe it possible that such a practice can prevail. it is so evidently a waste of time, both for master and scholar. ( .) never get out of patience with dulness. perhaps i ought to say, never get out of patience with any thing. that would perhaps be the wisest rule. but above all things, remember that dulness and stupidity, and you will certainly find them in every school, are the very last things to get out of patience with. if the creator has so formed the mind of a boy, that he must go through life slowly and with difficulty, impeded by obstructions which others do not feel, and depressed by discouragements which others never know, his lot is surely hard enough, without having you to add to it the trials and suffering, which sarcasm and reproach from you, can heap upon him. look over your school-room, therefore, and wherever you find one, whom you perceive the creator to have endued with less intellectual power than others, fix your eye upon him with an expression of kindness and sympathy. such a boy will have suffering enough from the selfish tyranny of his companions; he ought to find in you, a protector and friend. one of the greatest pleasures which a teacher's life affords, is, the interest of seeking out such an one, bowed down with burdens of depression and discouragement,--unaccustomed to sympathy and kindness, and expecting nothing for the future, but a weary continuation of the cheerless toils, which have imbittered the past;--and the pleasure of taking off the burden, of surprising the timid disheartened sufferer by kind words and cheering looks, and of seeing, in his countenance, the expression of ease and even of happiness, gradually returning. ( .)the teacher should be interested in _all_ his scholars, and aim equally to secure the progress of all. let there be no neglected ones in the school room. we should always remember that, however unpleasant in countenance and manners that bashful boy, in the corner, may be, or however repulsive in appearance, or unhappy in disposition, that girl, seeming to be interested in nobody, and nobody appearing interested in her, they still have, each of them, a mother, who loves her own child, and takes a deep and constant interest in its history. those mothers have a right too, that their children should receive their full share of attention, in a school which has been established for the common and equal benefit of all. ( .) do not hope or attempt to make all your pupils alike. providence has determined that human minds should differ from each other, for the very purpose of giving variety and interest to this busy scene of life. now if it were possible for a teacher, so to plan his operations, as to send his pupils forth upon the community, formed on the same model, as if they were made by machinery, he would do so much, towards spoiling one of the wisest of the plans which the almighty has formed, for making this world a happy scene. let it be the teacher's aim to cooperate with, not vainly to attempt to thwart the designs of providence. we should bring out those powers with which the creator has endued the minds placed under our control. we must open our garden to such influences as shall bring forward all the plants, each, in a way corresponding to its own nature. it is impossible, if it were wise, and it would be foolish, if it were possible, to stimulate, by artificial means, the rose, in hope of its reaching the size and magnitude of the apple-tree, or to try to cultivate the fig and the orange, where wheat only will grow. no; it should be the teacher's main design, to shelter his pupils from every deleterious influence, and to bring every thing to bear upon the community of minds before him, which will encourage, in each one, the developement of its own native powers. for the rest, he must remember that his province is to cultivate, not to create. error on this point, is very common. many teachers, even among those who have taken high rank, through the success with which they have labored in this field, have wasted much time, in attempting to do what can never be done; to form the character of those brought under their influence, after a certain uniform model, which they have conceived as the standard of excellence. their pupils must write just such a hand, they must compose in just such a style, they must be similar in sentiment and feeling, and their manners must be formed according to a fixed and uniform model; and when, in such a case, a pupil comes under their charge whom providence has designed to be entirely different from the beau ideal adopted as the standard, more time and pains, and anxious solicitude is wasted in vain attempts to produce the desired conformity, than half the school require beside. ( .) do not allow the faults or obliquities of character, or the intellectual or moral wants, of any individual, of your pupils, to engross a disproportionate share of your time. i have already said, that those who are peculiarly in need of sympathy or help, should receive the special attention they seem to require; what i mean to say now, is, do not carry this to an extreme. when a parent sends you a pupil, who, in consequence of neglect or mismanagement, at home, has become wild and ungovernable, and full of all sorts of wickedness, he has no right to expect, that you shall turn your attention away from the wide field, which, in your whole school-room, lies before you, to spend your time, and exhaust your spirits and strength, in endeavoring to repair the injuries which his own neglect has occasioned. when you open a school, you do not engage, either openly or tacitly, to make every pupil who may be sent to you, a learned or a virtuous man. you do engage to give them all faithful instruction, and to bestow upon each such a degree of attention, as is consistent with the claims of the rest. but it is both unwise and unjust, to neglect the many trees in your nursery, which by ordinary attention, may be made to grow straight and tall, and to bear good fruit, that you may waste your labor upon a crooked stick, from which all your toil can secure very little beauty or fruitfulness. let no one now understand me to say, that such cases are to be neglected. i admit the propriety, and in fact, have urged the duty, of paying to them a little more than their due share of attention. what i now condemn is the practice, of which all teachers are in danger, of devoting such a disproportionate and unreasonable degree of attention to them, as to encroach upon their duties to others. the school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation _of the mass_, in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dulness or precocity, should draw you away from its steady pursuit. ( .) the teacher should guard against unnecessarily imbibing those faulty mental habits, to which his station and employment expose him. accustomed to command, and to hold intercourse with minds which are immature and feeble, compared with our own, we gradually acquire habits, that the rough collisions and the friction of active life, prevent from gathering around other men. narrowminded prejudices and prepossessions are imbibed, through the facility, with which, in our own little community, we adopt and maintain opinions. a too strong confidence in our own views on every subject, almost inevitably comes, from never hearing our opinions contradicted or called in question; and we express those opinions in a tone of authority and even sometimes of arrogance, which we acquire in the school-room, for there, when we speak, nobody can reply. these peculiarities show themselves first, and in fact, most commonly, in the school-room; and the opinions thus formed, very often relate to the studies and management of the school. one has a peculiar mode of teaching spelling, which is successful almost entirely through the magic influence of his interest in it, and he thinks no other mode of teaching this branch, is even tolerable. another must have all his pupils write on the angular system, or the anti-angular system, and he enters with all the zeal into a controversy on the subject, as if the destiny of the whole rising generation, depended upon its decision. tell him that all that is of any consequence in any handwriting, is, that it should be legible, rapid, and uniform, and that, for the rest, it would be better that every human being should write a different hand, and he looks upon you with astonishment, wondering that you cannot see the vital importance of the question, whether the vertex of an o should be pointed or round. so in every thing. he has _his way_ in every minute particular,--a way from which he cannot deviate, and to which he wishes every one else to conform. this set, formal mannerism is entirely inconsistent with that commanding, intellectual influence, which the teacher should exert in the administration of his school. he should work, with what an artist calls boldness and freedom of touch. activity and enterprise of mind should characterize all his measures, if he wishes to make bold, original, and efficient men. ( .) assume no false appearances, in your school, either as to knowledge or character. perhaps it may justly be said to be the common practice of teachers in this country, to affect dignity of deportment in the presence of their pupils, which, in other cases, is laid aside; and to pretend to superiority in knowledge, and an infallibility of judgment, which no sensible man would claim before other sensible men, but which an absurd fashion seems to require of the teacher. it can however scarcely be said to be a fashion, for the temptation is almost exclusively confined to the young and the ignorant, who think they must make up by appearance, what they want in reality. very few of the older, and more experienced, and successful instructers in our country, fall into it at all. but some young beginner, whose knowledge is very limited, and who, in manner and habits, has only just ceased to be a boy, walks into his school-room with a countenance of forced gravity, and with a dignified and solemn step, which is ludicrous even to himself. i describe accurately, for i describe from recollection. this unnatural, and forced, and ludicrous dignity, cleaves to him like disease, through the whole period of his duty. in the presence of his scholars, he is always under restraint,--assuming a stiff, and formal dignity, which is as ridiculous as it is unnatural. he is also obliged to resort to arts which are certainly not very honorable, to conceal his ignorance. a scholar, for example, brings him a sum in arithmetic, which he does not know how to perform. this may be the case with a most excellent teacher,--and one well qualified for his business. in order to be successful as a teacher, it is not necessary to understand every thing. instead, however, of saying frankly, i do not understand that example, i will look at it and examine it, he looks at it embarrassed and perplexed, not knowing how he shall escape the exposure of his ignorance. his first thought is, to give some general directions to the pupil, and send him to his seat to make a new experiment, hoping that in some way or other, he scarcely knows how, he will get through; and, at any rate, if he does not, the teacher at least gains time by manoeuvre, and is glad to postpone his trouble, though he knows it must soon return. all efforts to conceal ignorance, and all affectation of knowledge not possessed, are as unwise as they are dishonest. if a scholar asks a question which you cannot answer, or brings you a difficulty which you cannot solve, say frankly, "i do not know." it is the only way to avoid continual anxiety and irritation, and the surest means of securing real respect. let the scholars understand that the superiority of the teacher does not consist in his infallibility, or in his universal acquisitions, but in a well balanced mind, where the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is distinctly marked; in a strong desire to go forward, in mental improvement; and in fixed principles of action, and systematic habits. you may even take up in school, a study entirely new to you, and have it understood at the outset, that you know no more of it than the class commencing, but that you can be their guide, on account of the superior maturity and discipline of your powers, and the comparative ease with which you can meet and overcome difficulties. this is the understanding which ought always to exist between master and scholars. the fact that the teacher does not know every thing, cannot long be concealed, if he tries to conceal it; and in this, as in every other case, honesty is the best policy. chapter iv. moral discipline. under the title which i have placed at the head of this chapter, i intend to discuss the methods by which the teacher is to secure a moral ascendency over his pupils, so that he may lead them to do what is right, and bring them back to duty, when they do what is wrong. i shall use, in what i have to say, a very plain and familiar style; and as very much depends, not only on the general principles by which the teacher is actuated, but also on the tone and manner in which, in cases of discipline, he addresses his pupils, i shall describe particular cases, real and imaginary, because by this method, i can better illustrate the course to be pursued. i shall also present and illustrate the various principles which i consider important, and in the order in which they occur to my mind. . the first duty then, of the teacher, when he enters his school, is, to beware of the danger of making an unfavorable impression, at first, upon his pupils. many years ago, when i was a child, the teacher of the school where my early studies were performed, closed his connexion with the establishment, and, after a short vacation, another was expected. on the appointed day, the boys began to collect, some from curiosity, at an early hour, and many speculations were started, as to the character of the new instructer. we were standing near a table, with our hats on,--and our position, and the exact appearance of the group is indelibly fixed on my memory,--when a small and youthful looking man, entered the room, and walked up towards us. supposing him to be some stranger, or rather, not making any supposition at all, we stood looking at him as he approached, and were thunder-struck at hearing him accost us with a stern voice and sterner brow, "take off your hats. take off your hats, and go to your seats." the conviction immediately rushed upon our minds, that this must be our new teacher. the first emotion was that of surprise, and the second was that of the ludicrous; though i believe we contrived to smother the laugh, until we got out into the open air. so long since was this little occurrence, that i have entirely forgotten the name of the teacher, and have not the slightest recollection of any other act in his administration of the school. but this recollection of his first greeting of his pupils, and the expression of his countenance at the moment, will go with me to the end of life. so strong are first impressions. be careful, then, when you first see your pupils, that you meet them with a smile. i do not mean a pretended cordiality, which has no existence in the heart, but think of the relation, which you are to sustain to them, and think of the very interesting circumstances, under which, for some months at least, your destinies are to be united to theirs, until you cannot help feeling a strong interest in them. shut your eyes, for a day or two, to their faults, if possible, and take an interest in all their pleasures and pursuits, that the first attitude, in which you exhibit yourself before them, may be one, which shall allure, not repel. . in endeavoring to correct the faults of your pupils, do not, as many teachers do, seize only upon _those particular cases_ of transgression, which may happen to come under your notice. these individual instances are very few, probably, compared with the whole number of faults, against which you ought to exert an influence. and though you perhaps ought not to neglect those, which may accidentally come under your notice, yet the observing and punishing such cases, is a very small part of your duty. you accidentally hear, i will suppose, as you are walking home from school, two of your boys in earnest conversation, and one of them uses profane language. now, the course to be pursued in such a case, is most evidently, not to call the boy to you, the next day, and punish him, and there let the matter rest. this would perhaps be better than nothing. but the chief impression which it would make upon the individual, and upon the other scholars, would be, "i must take care how i _let the master hear me_ use such language again." a wise teacher, who takes enlarged and extended views of his duty, in regard to the moral progress of his pupils, would act very differently. he would look at the whole subject. "does this fault," he would say to himself, "prevail among my pupils? if so, how extensively?" it is comparatively of little consequence to punish the particular transgression. the great point is, to devise some plan to reach the whole evil, and to correct it, if possible. in one case, where such a circumstance occurred, the teacher managed it most successfully, in the following way. he said nothing to the boy, and in fact, the boy did not know that he was overheard. he allowed a day or two to elapse, so that the conversation might be forgotten, and then took an opportunity, one day, after school, when all things had gone on pleasantly, and the school was about to be closed, to bring forward the whole subject. he told the boys that he had something to say to them, after they had laid by their books, and were ready to go. the desks were soon closed, and every face in the room was turned towards the master, with a look of fixed attention. it was almost evening. the sun had gone down. the boys' labors were over. the day was done, and their minds were at rest, and every thing was favorable for making a deep and permanent impression. "a few days ago," says the teacher, when all was still, "i accidentally overheard some conversation between two of the boys of this school, and one of them swore." there was a pause. "perhaps you expect that i am now going to call the boy out, and punish him. is that what i ought to do?" there was no answer. "i think a boy who uses bad language of any kind, does what he knows is wrong. he breaks god's commands. he does what he knows would be displeasing to his parents, and he sets a bad example. he does wrong, therefore, and justly deserves punishment." there were, of course, many boys, who felt that they were in danger. every one, who had used profane language, was aware that he might be the one, who had been overheard, and, of course, all were deeply interested in what the teacher was saying. "he might, i say," continued the teacher, "justly be punished, but i am not going to punish him; for if i should, i am afraid that it would only make him a little more careful hereafter, not to commit this sin when i could possibly be within hearing, instead of persuading him, as i wish to, to avoid such a sin, in future, altogether. i am satisfied that that boy would be far happier, even in this world, if he would make it a principle always to do his duty, and never, in any case, to do wrong. and then when i think how soon he, and all of us will be in another world, where we shall all be judged for what we do here, i feel strongly desirous of persuading him to abandon entirely this practice. i am afraid that punishing him now, would not do that." "besides," continues the teacher, "i think it very probable that there are many other boys in this school, who are sometimes guilty of this fault, and i have thought that it would be a great deal better and happier for us all, if, instead of punishing this particular boy, whom i have accidentally overheard, and who probably is not more to blame than many other boys in school, i should bring up the whole subject, and endeavor to persuade all to reform." i am aware that there are, unfortunately, in our country, a great many teachers, from whose lips, such an appeal as this, would be wholly in vain. the man who is accustomed to scold, and storm, and punish, with unsparing severity, every transgression, under the influence of irritation and anger, must not expect that he can win over his pupils to confidence in him, and to the principles of duty, by a word. but such an appeal will not be lost, when it comes from a man, whose daily and habitual management corresponds with it. but to return to the story: the teacher made some farther remarks, explaining the nature of the sin, not in the language of execration, and affected abhorrence, but calmly, temperately, and without any disposition to make the worst of the occurrence which had taken place. in concluding what he said, he addressed the boys as follows: "now boys, the question is, do you wish to abandon this habit, or not; if you do, all is well. i shall immediately forget all the past, and will do all i can to help you resist and overcome temptation in future. but all i can do, is, only to help you; and the first thing to be done, if you wish to engage in this work of reform, is, to acknowledge your fault; and i should like to know how many are willing to do this." "i wish all those who are willing to tell me whether they use profane language, would rise." every individual but one, rose. "i am very glad to see so large a number," said the teacher; "and i hope you will find that the work of confessing and forsaking your faults, is, on the whole, pleasant, not painful business. now those who can truly and honestly say, that they never do use profane language, of any kind, may take their seats." three only, of the whole number, which consisted of not far from , sat down. it was in a sea-port town, where the temptation to yield to this vice is even greater, than would be, in the interior of our country, supposed possible. "those who are now standing," pursued the teacher, "admit that they do, sometimes at least, commit this sin. i suppose all, however, are determined to reform; for i do not know what else should induce you to rise and acknowledge it here, unless it is a desire, hereafter to break yourselves of the habit. but do you suppose that it will be enough for you merely to resolve here, that you will reform?" "no sir," said the boys. "why? if you now sincerely determine never more to use a profane word, will you not easily avoid it?" the boys were silent. some said faintly, "no sir." "it will not be easy for you to avoid the sin hereafter," continued the teacher, "even if you do now, sincerely and resolutely, determine to do so. you have formed the habit of sin, and the habit will not be easily overcome. but i have detained you long enough now. i will try to devise some method, by which you may carry your plan into effect, and to-morrow i wilt tell you what it is." so they were dismissed for the day. the pleasant countenance and cheerful tone of the teacher conveying to them the impression, that they were engaging in the common effort to accomplish a most desirable purpose, in which they were to receive the teacher's help; not that he was pursuing them, with threatening and punishment, into the forbidden practice into which they had wickedly strayed. great caution is however, in such a case, necessary, to guard against the danger, that the teacher, in attempting to avoid the tones of irritation and anger, should so speak of the sin, as to blunt their sense of its guilt, and lull their consciences into a slumber. at the appointed time, on the following day, the subject was again brought before the school, and some plans proposed, by which the resolutions now formed, might be more certainly kept. these plans were readily and cheerfully adopted by the boys, and in a short time, the vice of profaneness was, in a great degree, banished from the school. this whole account is substantially fact. i hope the reader will keep in mind the object of the above illustration, which is to show, that it is the true policy of the teacher, not to waste his time and strength, in contending against _such accidental instances_ of transgression, as may chance to fall under his notice, but to take an enlarged and extended view of the whole ground, endeavoring to remove _whole classes of faults_,--to elevate and improve _multitudes, together_. by these means, his labors will not only be more effectual, but far more pleasant. you cannot come into collision with an individual scholar, to punish him for a mischievous spirit, or even to rebuke him for some single act, by which he has given you trouble, without an uncomfortable and uneasy feeling, which makes, in ordinary cases, the discipline of a school, the most unpleasant part of a teacher's duty. but you can plan a campaign against a whole class of faults, and put into operation a system of measures to correct them, and watch from day to day the operation of that system, with all the spirit and interest of a game. it is in fact a game, where your ingenuity and moral power are brought into the field, in opposition to the evil tendencies of the hearts which are under your influence. you will notice the success or the failure of the means you may put into operation, with all the interest with which the experimental philosopher observes the curious processes he guides; though your interest may be much purer and higher; for he works upon matter, but you are experimenting upon mind. remember then, as, for the first time you take your new station, that it is not your duty, simply to watch with an eagle eye for those accidental instances of transgression, which may chance to fall under your notice; you are to look over the whole ground; you are to make yourself acquainted, as soon as possible, with the classes of character, and classes of faults, which may prevail in your dominions, and to form deliberate and well digested plans, for improving the one and correcting the other. and this is to be the course pursued, not only with great delinquencies, such as those to which i have already alluded, but to every little transgression against the rules of order and propriety. you can correct them far more easily and pleasantly in the mass, than in detail. to illustrate this principle by another case. a teacher, who takes the course i am condemning, approaches the seat of one of his pupils, and asks to see one of his books. as the boy opens his desk, the teacher observes that it is in complete disorder. books, maps, papers, playthings, are there in promiscuous confusion; and from the impulse of the moment, the displeased teacher pours out upon the poor boy a torrent of reproach. "what a looking desk! why, john! i am really ashamed of you. look," continues he, holding up the lid, so that the boys in the neighborhood can look in; "see what a mass of disorder and confusion. if ever i see your desk in such a state again, i shall most certainly punish you." the boys around laugh; very equivocally, however, for with the feeling of amusement, there is mingled the fear that the angry master may take it into his head to inspect their dominions. the boy accidentally exposed, looks sullen, and begins to throw his books into some sort of arrangement, just enough to shield himself from the charge of absolutely disobeying, and there the matter ends. another teacher takes no apparent notice of the confusion he thus accidentally witnesses. "i must take up," thinks he to himself, "the subject of order, before the whole school. i have not yet spoken of it." he thanks the boy for the book he borrowed, and goes away. he makes a memorandum of the subject, and the boy does not know that the condition of his desk was noticed; perhaps he does not even know that there was any thing amiss. a day or two after, at a time regularly appropriated to such subjects, he addresses the boys as follows: "in our efforts to improve the school as much as possible, there is one subject, which we must not forget. i mean the order of the desks." the boys all begin to open their desk lids. "you may stop a moment," says the teacher. "i shall give you all an opportunity to examine your desks presently." "i do not know what the condition of your desks is. i have not examined them, and have not, in fact, seen the inside of more than one or two. as i have not brought up this subject before, i presume that there are a great many, which can be arranged better than they are. will you all now look into your desks, and see whether you consider them in good order. stop a moment however. let me tell you what good order is. all those things which are alike, should be arranged together. books should be in one place, papers in another, and thus every thing should be classified. again, every thing should be so placed that it can be taken out without disturbing other _things_. there is another principle also, which i will mention, the various articles should have _constant_ places,--that is, they should not be changed from day to day. by this means, you soon remember where every thing belongs, and you can put away your things much more easily every night, than if you had every night to arrange them in a new way. now will you look into your desks, and tell me whether they are, on these three principles, well arranged." the boys of most schools, where this subject had not been regularly attended to, would nearly all answer in the negative. "i will allow you then, some time to-day, fifteen minutes to arrange them, and i hope you will try to keep them in good order hereafter. a few days hence, i shall examine them. if any of you wish for assistance or advice from me, in putting them in order, i shall be happy to render it." by such a plan, which will occupy but little more time than the irritating and useless scolding, which i supposed in the other case, how much more will be accomplished. such an address would, of itself, probably, be the means of putting in order, and keeping in order, at least one half; and following up the plan in the same manner, and in the same spirit, with which it was begun, would secure the rest. i repeat it, therefore, make it a principle in all cases, to aim as much as possible at the correction of those faults which are likely to be general, by _general measures_. you avoid by this means, a vast amount of irritation and impatience, both on your own part, and on the part of your scholars, and you produce at least twenty times the useful effect. . the next principle which occurs to me, as deserving the teacher's attention in the outset of his course, is this: interest your scholars in doing something themselves to elevate the moral character of the school, so as to secure a _decided majority, who will, of their own accord, co-operate with you_. let your pupils understand, not by any formal speech you make to that effect, but by the manner in which, from time to time, you incidentally allude to the subject, that you consider the school, when you commence it, as _at par_, so to speak,--that is, on a level with other schools, and that your various plans for improving and amending it, are not to be considered in the light of finding fault, and punishing transgressions, and controlling evil propensities, so as just to keep things in a tolerable state; but as efforts to improve and carry forward, to a state of excellence not yet attained, all the affairs of the institution. such is the tone and manner of some teachers, that they never appear to be more than merely satisfied. when the scholars do right, nothing is said about it. the teacher seems to consider that a matter of course. it does not appear to interest or please him at all. nothing arouses him, but when they do wrong, and that only excites him to anger and frowns. now, in such a case, there can of course be no stimulus to effort on the part of the pupils, but the cold and heartless stimulus of fear. now, it is wrong for the teacher to expect that things will go right in his school, as a matter of course. all that he can expect, _as a matter of course_, is, that things should go on as well as they do ordinarily in schools,--the ordinary amount of idleness,--the ordinary amount of misconduct. this is the most that he can expect to come as a matter of course; he should feel this, and then, all he can gain which will be better than this, will be a source of positive pleasure; a pleasure which his pupils have procured for him, and which consequently they should share. they should understand that the teacher is engaged in various plans for improving the school, in which they should be invited to engage, not from the selfish desire of thereby saving him trouble, but because it will really be happy employment for them to engage in such an enterprise, and because, by such efforts, their own moral powers will be exerted and strengthened in the best possible way. in another chapter, i have explained to what extent, and in what manner, the assistance of the pupils may be usefully and successfully employed, in carrying forward the general arrangements of the school. the same _principles_ will apply here, though perhaps a little more careful and delicate management is necessary, in interesting them in subjects which relate to moral discipline. one important method of doing this, is, to present these plans before the minds of the scholars, as experiments,--moral experiments, whose commencement, progress, and results, they may take a great interest in witnessing. let us take, for example, the case alluded to under the last head,--the plan of effecting a reform in regard to keeping desks in order. suppose the teacher were to say, when the time had arrived, at which he had promised to give them an opportunity to put them in order, "i think it would be a good plan to keep some account of our efforts for improving the school in this respect. we might make a record of what we do to-day, noting the day of the month, and the number of desks which may be found to be disorderly. then at the end of any time you may propose, we will have the desks examined again, and see how many are disorderly. we can then see how much improvement has been made, in that time. should you like to adopt the plan?" if the boys should appear not much interested in the proposal, the teacher might, at his own discretion, waive it. in all probability, however, they would like it, and would indicate their interest by their countenances, or perhaps by a response. if so, the teacher might proceed. "you may all examine your desks then, and decide whether they are in order, or not. i do not know, however, but that we ought to appoint a committee to examine them; for perhaps all the boys would not be honest, and report their desks as they really are." "yes sir;" "yes sir;" say the boys. "do you mean that you will be honest, or that you would like to have a committee appointed?" there was a confused murmur. some answer one, and some the other. "i think," proceeds the teacher, "the boys will be honest, and report their desks just as they are. at any rate, the number of dishonest boys in this school, cannot be so large as materially to affect the result. i think we had better take your own statements. as soon as the desks are all examined, those who have found theirs in a condition which does not satisfy them, are requested to rise and be counted." the teacher then looks around the room, and selecting some intelligent boy who has influence among his companions, and whose influence he is particularly desirous of enlisting on the side of good order, says, "shall i nominate some one to keep an account of this plan?" "yes sir," say the boys. "well, i nominate william jones. how many are in favor of requesting william jones to perform this duty?" "it is a vote. william, i will thank you to write upon a piece of paper, that on the th of december, the subject of order in the desks was brought up, and that the boys resolved on making an effort to improve the school in this respect. then say, that the boys reported all their desks which they thought were disorderly, and that the number was ; and that after a week or two, the desks are to be examined again, and the disorderly ones counted, that we may see how much we have improved. after you have written it, you may bring it to me, and i will: tell you whether it is right." "how many desks do you think will be found to be disorderly, when we come to make the examination?" the boys hesitate. the teacher names successively several numbers, and asks, whether they think the real number will be greater or less. he notices their votes upon them, and at last fixes upon one, which seems to be about the general sense of the school. then the teacher, himself mentions the number, which he supposes will be found to be disorderly. his estimate will ordinarily be larger than that of the scholars; because he knows better how easily resolutions are broken. this number too, is recorded, and then the whole subject is dismissed. now, of course, no reader of these remarks, will understand me to be recommending, by this imaginary dialogue, (for the whole of it is imaginary,) a particular course to be taken in regard to this subject, far less the particular language to be used. all i mean is, to show by a familiar illustration, how the teacher is to endeavor to enlist the interest, and to excite the curiosity of his pupils, in his plans for the improvement of his school, by presenting them as moral experiments, which they are to assist him in trying,--experiments, whose progress they are to watch, and whose results they are to predict. if the precise steps which i have described, should actually be taken, although it would occupy but a few minutes, and would cause no thought, and no perplexing care, yet it would undoubtedly be the means of awakening a very general interest in the subject of order, throughout the school. all would be interested in the work of arrangement. all would watch, too, with interest, the progress and the result of the experiment; and if, a few days after, the teacher should accidentally, in recess, see a disorderly desk, a pleasant remark, made with a smile, to the bystanders, "i suspect my prediction will turn out the correct one," would have far more effect, than the most severe reproaches, or the tingling of a rap over the knuckles with a rattan. i know, from experience, that scholars of every kind, can be led, by such measures as these, or rather by such a spirit as this, to take an active interest, and to exert a most powerful influence, in regard to the whole condition of the institution. i have seen the experiment successful in boys' schools, and in girls' schools; among very little children, and among the seniors and juniors at college. in one of the colleges of new england, a new and beautiful edifice was erected. the lecture rooms were fitted up in handsome style, and the officers, when the time for the occupation of the building approached, were anticipating with regret, what seemed to be the unavoidable defacing, and cutting, and marking of the seats and walls. it was however thought, that if the subject was properly presented to the students, they would take an interest in preserving the property from injury. they were accordingly addressed somewhat as follows: "it seems, young gentlemen, to be generally the custom in colleges, for the students to ornament the walls and benches of their recitation rooms, with various inscriptions and carricatures, so that after the premises have been for a short time in the possession of a class, every thing within reach, which will take an impression from a penknife, or a trace from a pencil, is covered with names, and dates, and heads, and inscriptions of every kind. the faculty do not know what you wish in this respect, in regard to the new accommodations which the trustees have now provided for you, and which you are soon to enter. they have had them fitted up for you handsomely, and if you wish to have them kept in good order, we will assist you. if the students think proper to express by a vote, or in any other way, their wish to keep them in good order, we will engage to have such incidental injuries, as may from time to time occur, immediately repaired. such injuries will, of course, be done; for whatever may be the wish and general opinion of the whole, it is not to be expected that every individual, in so large a community, will be careful. if, however, as a body, you wish to have the building preserved in its present state, and will, as a body, take the necessary precautions, we will do our part." the students responded to this appeal most heartily. they passed a vote, expressing a desire to preserve the premises in order, and for many years, and for ought i know, to the present hour, the whole is kept as a room occupied by gentlemen should be kept. at some other colleges, and those, too, sustaining the very highest rank among the institutions of the country, the doors of the public buildings are sometimes _studded with nails, as thick as they can possibly be driven, and then covered with a thick coat of sand, dried into the paint, as a protection from the knives of the students_!! the particular methods, by which the teacher is to interest his pupils in his various plans for their improvement, cannot be very fully described here. in fact, it does not depend so much on the methods he adopts, as upon the view which he himself takes of these plans, and the _tone and manner in which he speaks of them to his pupils_. a teacher, for example, perhaps on the first day of his labors in a new school, calls a class to read. they pretend to form a line, but it crooks in every direction. one boy is leaning back against a desk; another comes forward as far as possible, to get near the fire; the rest lounge in every position and in every attitude. john is holding up his book high before his face, to conceal an apple, from which he is endeavoring to secure an enormous bite. james is by the same sagacious device, concealing a whisper, which he is addressing to his next neighbor, and moses is seeking amusement by crowding and elbowing the little boy who is unluckily standing next him. "what a spectacle!" says the master to himself, as he looks at this sad display. "what shall i do?" the first impulse is, to break forth upon them at once, with all the artillery of reproof, and threatening, and punishment. i have seen, in such a case, a scolding and frowning master walk up and down before such a class, with a stern and angry air, commanding this one to stand back, and that to come forward, ordering one boy to put down his book, and scolding at a second for having lost his place, and knocking the knees of another with his rule, because he was out of the line. the boys scowl at their teacher, and, with ill-natured reluctance, they obey, just enough to escape punishment. another teacher looks calmly at the scene, and says to himself, "what shall i do to remove effectually these evils? if i can but interest the boys in reform, it will be far more easy to effect it, than if i attempt to accomplish it by the mere exercise of my authority." in the meantime, things go on, during the reading, in their own way. the teacher simply _observes_. he is in no haste to commence his operations. he looks for the faults; watches, without seeming to watch, the movements which he is attempting to control. he studies the materials with which he is to work, and lets their true character develope itself. he tries to find something to approve in the exercise, as it proceeds, and endeavors to interest the class, by narrating some fact, connected with the reading, or making some explanation which interests the boys. at the end of the exercise, he addresses them, perhaps, as follows: "i have observed, boys, in some military companies, that the officers are very strict, requiring implicit and precise obedience. the men are required to form a precise line." (here there is a sort of involuntary movement all along the line, by which, it is very sensibly straightened.) "they make all the men stand erect," (at this word, heads go up, and straggling feet draw in, all along the class,) "in the true military posture. they allow nothing to be done in the ranks, but to attend to the exercise," (john hastily crowds his apple into his pocket,) "and thus they regulate every thing, in exact and steady discipline, so that all things go on in a most systematic and scientific manner. this discipline is so admirable in some countries, especially in europe, where much greater attention is paid to military tactics than in our country, that i have heard it said by travellers, that some of the soldiers who mount guard at public places, look as much like statues, as they do like living men. "other commanders act differently. they let the men do pretty much as they please. so you will see such a company lounging into a line, when the drum beats, as if they took little interest in what was going on. while the captain is giving his commands, one is eating his luncheon; another is talking with his next neighbor. part are out of the line; part lounge on one foot; they hold their guns in every position; and on the whole, present a very disorderly and unsoldier-like appearance. "i have observed, too, that boys very generally prefer to _see_ the strict companies, but perhaps they would prefer to _belong_ to the lax ones." "no sir;" "no sir;" say the boys. "suppose you all had your choice either to belong to a company like the first one i described, where the captain was strict in all his requirements, or to one like the latter, where you could do pretty much as you pleased, which should you prefer?" unless i entirely mistaken in my idea of the inclinations of boys, it would be very difficult to get a single honest expression of preference for the latter. they would say with one voice, "the first." "i suppose it would be so. you would be put to some inconvenience by the strict commands of the captain, but then you would be more than paid by the beauty of regularity and order, which you would all witness. there is nothing so pleasant as regularity, and nobody likes regularity more than boys do. to show this, i should like to have you now form a line as exact as you can." after some unnecessary shoving and pushing, increased by the disorderly conduct of a few bad boys, a line is formed. most of the class are pleased with the experiment, and the teacher takes no notice of the few exceptions. the time to attend to _them_, will come by and by. "hands down." the boys obey. "shoulders back." "there;--there is a very perfect line." "do you stand easily in that position?" "yes sir." "i believe your position is the military one, now, pretty nearly; and military men study the postures of the human body, for the sake of finding the one most easy; for they wish to preserve as much as possible of the soldiers' strength, for the time of battle. i should like to try the experiment of your standing thus, at the next lesson. it is a very great improvement upon your common mode. are you willing to do it?" "yes sir;" say the boys. "you will get tired, i have no doubt. in fact, i do not expect you will succeed, the first day, very well. you will probably become restless and uneasy, before the end of the lesson, especially the smaller boys. i must excuse it, i suppose, if you do, as it will be the first time." by such methods as these, the teacher will certainly secure a majority in favor of all his plans. but perhaps some experienced teacher, who knows from his own repeated difficulties with bad boys, what sort of spirits the teacher of district schools has sometimes to deal with, may ask, as he reads this, "do you expect that such a method as this, will succeed in keeping your school in order? why, there are boys in almost every school, whom you would no more coax into obedience and order in this way, than you would persuade the northeast wind to change its course by reasoning." i know there are. and my readers are requested to bear in mind, that my object is not now to show, how the whole government of the school may be secured, but how one important advantage may be gained, which will assist in accomplishing the object. all i should expect or hope for, by such measures as these, is _to interest and gain over to our side, the majority_. what is to be done with those who cannot be reached by such kinds of influence, i shall endeavor presently to show. the object now is, simply to gain the _majority_,--to awaken a general interest, which you can make effectual in promoting your plans, and thus to narrow the field of discipline, by getting those right, who can be got right by such measures. thus securing a majority to be on your side in the general administration of the school, is absolutely indispensable to success. a teacher may, by the force of mere authority, so control his pupils, as to preserve order in the school-room, and secure a tolerable progress in study, but the heart will not be in it. the progress in knowledge must accordingly be, in ordinary cases, slow, and the cultivation of moral principle must be, in such a case, entirely neglected. the principles of duty cannot be inculcated by fear; and though pain and terror must, in many instances, be called in to coerce an individual offender, whom milder measures will not reach, yet these agents, and others like them, can never be successfully employed, as the ordinary motives to action. they cannot produce any thing but mere external and heartless obedience in the presence of the teacher, with an inclination to throw off all restraint, when the pressure of stern authority is removed. we should all remember that our pupils are, but a very short time, under our direct control. even when they are in school, the most untiring vigilance will not enable us to watch, except for a very small portion of the time, any individual. many hours of the day, too, they are entirely removed from our inspection, and a few months will take them away from us altogether. subjecting them then to mere external restraint, is a very inadequate remedy for the moral evil, to which they are exposed. what we aim at, is to bring forward and strengthen an internal principle, which will act, when both parent and teacher are away, and control where external circumstances are all unfavorable. i have thus far under this head, been endeavoring to show the importance of securing, by gentle measures, a majority of the scholars, to co-operate with the teacher in his plans. the methods of doing this, demand a little attention. ( .) the teacher should study human nature as it exhibits itself in the school-room, by taking an interest in the sports and enjoyments of the pupils, and connecting, as much as possible, what is interesting and agreeable, with the pursuits of the school, so as to lead the scholars to like the place. an attachment to the institution and to the duties of it, will give the teacher a very strong hold upon the community of mind which exists there. ( .) every thing which is unpleasant in the discipline of the school should be attended to, as far as possible, privately. sometimes it is necessary to bring a case forward in public, for reproof or punishment, but this is seldom. in some schools, it is the custom to postpone cases of discipline, till the close of the day, and then, just before the boys are dismissed at night, all the difficulties are settled. thus, day after day, the impression which is last made upon their minds, is received from a season of suffering, and terror, and tears. now such a practice may be attended with many advantages, but it seems to be, on the whole, unwise. awing the pupils, by showing them the consequences of doing wrong, should be very seldom resorted to. it is far better to allure them, by showing them the pleasures of doing right. doing right is pleasant to every body, and no persons are so easily convinced of this, or rather so easily led to see it, as children. now the true policy is, to let them experience the pleasure of doing their duty, and they will easily be allured to it. in many cases, where a fault has been publicly committed, it seems, at first view, to be necessary that it should be publicly punished; but the end will, in most cases, be answered, if it is noticed publicly, so that the pupils may know that it received attention, and then the ultimate disposal of the case, may be made a private affair, between the teacher and the individual concerned. if, however, every case of disobedience, or idleness, or disorder, is brought out publicly before the school, so that all witness the teacher's displeasure, and feel the effects of it, (for to witness it, is to feel its most unpleasant effects,) the school becomes, in a short time, hardened to such scenes. unpleasant associations become connected with the management of the school, and the scholars are prepared to do wrong with less reluctance, since the consequence is only a repetition of what they are obliged to see every day. besides, if a boy does something wrong, and you severely reprove him in the presence of his class, you punish the class, almost as much as you do him. in fact, in many cases, you punish them more; for i believe it is almost invariably more unpleasant for a good boy to stand by and listen to rebukes, than for a bad boy to take them. keep these things, therefore, as much as possible, out of sight. never bring forward cases of discipline, except on mature deliberation, and for a distinct and well-defined purpose. ( .) never bring forward a case of discipline of this kind, unless you are sure that public opinion will go in your favor. if a case comes up, in which the sympathy of the scholars is excited for the criminal, in such a way as to be against yourself, it will always do more harm than good. now this, unless there is great caution, will often be the case. in fact, it is probable that a very large proportion of the punishments which are ordinarily inflicted in schools, only prepare the way for more offences. it is, however, possible to bring forward individual cases in such a way, as to produce a very strong moral effect, of the right kind. this is to be done by seizing upon those peculiar emergencies, which will arise in the course of the administration of a school, and which each teacher must watch for, and discover himself. they cannot be pointed out. i may, however, give a clearer idea of what is meant, by such emergencies, by an example. it is a case which actually occurred, as here narrated. in a school where nearly all the pupils were faithful and docile, there were one or two boys, who were determined to find amusement in those mischievous tricks, so common in schools and colleges. there was one boy in particular, who was the life and soul of all these plans. devoid of principle, idle as a scholar, morose and sullen in his manners, he was, in every respect, a true specimen of the whole class of mischief-makers, wherever they are to be found. his mischief consisted, as usual, in such exploits as stopping up the keyhole, upsetting the teacher's inkstand, or fixing something to his desk to make a noise, and interrupt the school. it so happened, that there was a standing feud between the boys of his neighborhood, and those of another, situated a mile or two from it. by his malicious activity, he had stimulated this quarrel to a high pitch, and was very obnoxious to the boys of the other party. one day, when taking a walk, the teacher observed a number of boys with excited looks, and armed with sticks and stones, standing around a shoe-maker's shop, to which his poor pupil had gone for refuge from them. they had got him completely within their power, and were going to wait until he should be wearied with his confinement, and come out, when they were going to inflict upon him the punishment they thought he deserved. the teacher interfered, and by the united influence of authority, management, and persuasion, succeeded in effecting a rescue. the boy would probably have preferred to owe his safety to any one else, than to the teacher, whom he had so often tried to tease; but he was glad to escape in any way. the teacher said nothing about the subject, and the boy soon supposed it was entirely forgotten. but it was not forgotten. the teacher knew perfectly well that the boy would, before long, be at his old tricks again, and was reserving this story as the means of turning the whole current of public opinion against such tricks should they again occur. one day he came to school, in the afternoon, and found the room filled with smoke; the doors and windows were all closed, though, as soon as he came in, some of the boys opened them. he knew by this circumstance, that it was roguery, not accident, which caused the smoke. he appeared not to notice it, however, said he was sorry it smoked, and asked the mischievous boy, for he was sure to be always near in such a case, to help him fix the fire. the boy supposed it was understood to be accidental, and perhaps secretly laughed at the dulness of his master. in the course of the afternoon, the teacher ascertained, by private inquiries, that his suspicions were correct, as to the author of the mischief. at the close of school, when the studies were ended, and the books laid away, he told the scholars that he wanted to tell them a story. he then, with a pleasant tone and manner, gave a very minute, and, to the boys, a very interesting narrative of his adventure, two or three weeks before, when he rescued this boy from his danger. he called him, however, simply _a boy_, without mentioning his name, or even hinting that he was a member of the school. no narrative could excite a stronger interest among an audience of school-boys, than such an one as this; and no act of kindness from a teacher, would make as vivid an impression, as interfering to rescue a trembling captive, from such a situation as the one this boy had been in. the scholars listened with profound interest and attention, and though the teacher said little about his share in the affair, and spoke of what he did, as if it were a matter of course, that he should thus befriend a boy in distress, an impression, very favorable to himself, must have been made. after he had finished his narrative, he said, "now should you like to know who this boy was?" "yes sir;" "yes sir;" said they, eagerly. "it was a boy that you all know." the boys looked around upon one another. who could it be? "he is a member of this school." there was an expression of fixed, and eager, and increasing interest, on every face in the room. "he is here now," said the teacher, winding up the interest and curiosity of the scholars, by these words, to the highest pitch. "but i cannot tell you his name; for what return do you think he made to me? to be sure it was no very great favor that i did him; i should have been unworthy the name of teacher, if i had not done it for him, or for any boy in my school. but at any rate, it showed my good wishes for him,--it showed that i was his friend, and what return do you think he made me for it? why, to-day he spent his time between schools in filling the room with smoke, that he might torment his companions here, and give me trouble, and anxiety and suffering, when i should come. if i should tell you his name, the whole school would turn against him for his ingratitude." the business ended here, and it put a stop, a final stop to all malicious tricks in the school. now it is not very often that so fine an opportunity occurs, to kill, by a single blow, the disposition to do wilful, wanton injury, as this circumstance afforded; but the principle illustrated by it,--bringing forward individual cases of transgression, in a public manner, only for the sake of the general effect, and so arranging what is said and done as to produce the desired effect upon the public mind, in the highest degree, may very frequently be acted upon. cases are continually occurring, and if the teacher will keep it constantly in mind, that when a particular case comes before the whole school, the object is an influence upon the whole, and not the punishment or reform of the guilty individual, he will insensibly so shape his measures, as to produce the desired result. ( .) there should be a great difference made between the _measures you take_ to prevent wrong, and the _feelings of displeasure_ against wrong, when it is done. the former should be strict, authoritative, unbending; the latter should be mild and gentle. your measures, if uniform and systematic will never give offence, however powerfully you may restrain and control. it is the morose look, the harsh expression, the tone of irritation and fretfulness which is so unpopular in school. the sins of childhood are by nine tenths of mankind enormously overrated, and perhaps none overrate them, more extravagantly, than teachers. we confound the trouble they give us, with their real moral turpitude, and measure the one by the other. now if a fault prevails in school, one teacher will scold and fret himself about it, day after day, until his scholars are tired both of school and of him: and yet he will do nothing effectual to remove it. another will take efficient and decided measures, and yet say very little on the subject, and the whole evil will be removed, without suspending for a moment, the good humor, and pleasant feeling, which should prevail in school. the expression of your displeasure on account of any thing that is wrong, will seldom or never do any good. the scholars consider it scolding; it is scolding, and though it may, in many cases, contain many sound arguments and eloquent expostulations, it operates simply as a punishment. it is unpleasant to hear it. general instruction must indeed be given, but not general reproof. ( .) feel that, in the management of the school, _you_ are under obligation as well as the scholars, and let this feeling appear in all that you do. your scholars wish you to dismiss school earlier than usual on some particular occasion, or to allow them an extra holiday. show by the manner in which you consider and speak of the question, that your main inquiry is what is _your duty_. speak often of your responsibility to your employers, not formally, but incidentally and naturally as you will speak, if you feel this responsibility. it will assist very much too, in securing cheerful, good-humored obedience to the regulations of the school, if you extend their authority over yourself. not that the teacher is to have no liberty from which the scholars are debarred; this would be impossible. but the teacher should submit, himself, to every thing which he requires of his scholars, unless it is in cases where a different course is _necessary_. suppose for instance, a study card, like the one described in a preceding chapter, is made, so as to mark the time of recess and of study. the teacher near the close of recess, is sitting with a group of his pupils around him, telling them some story. they are all interested, and they see he is interested. he looks at his watch, and shows by his manner, that he is desirous of finishing what he is saying, but that he knows that the striking of the bell will cut short his story. perhaps he says not a word about it, but his pupils see that he is submitting to the control which is placed over them: and when the card goes up, and he stops instantly in the middle of his sentence, and rises with the rest, each one to go to his own place, to engage at once in their several duties, he teaches them a most important lesson, and in the most effectual way. such a lesson of fidelity and obedience, and such an example of it, will have more influence, than a half hour's scolding about whispering without leave, or a dozen public punishments. at least so i find it, for i have tried both. show then continually, that you see and enjoy the beauty of system and strict discipline, and that you submit to it yourself, as well as require it of others. ( .) lead your pupils to see that they must share with you, the credit or the disgrace, which success or failure may bring. lead them to feel this, not by telling them so, for there are very few things which can be impressed upon children by direct efforts to impress them; but by so speaking of the subject, from time to time, as to lead them to see that you understand it so. repeat, with judicious caution, what is said of the school, both for and against it, and thus endeavor to interest the scholars in its public reputation. this feeling of interest in the institution may very easily be awakened. it sometimes springs up, spontaneously, and where it is not guided aright by the teacher, sometimes produces very bad effects upon the minds of the pupils, in rival institutions. when two schools are situated near each other, evil consequences will result from this feeling, unless the teacher manages it so as to deduce good consequences. i recollect, that, in my boyish days, there was a standing quarrel between the boys of a town school and an academy, which were in the same village. we were all ready, at any time, when out of school, to fight for the honor of our respective institutions, but very few were ready to be diligent and faithful, when in it, though it would seem that that might have been rather a more effectual means of establishing the point. if the scholars are led to understand that the school is to a great extent their institution, that they must assist to sustain its character, and that they share the honor if any honor is acquired, a feeling will prevail in the school, which may be turned to a most useful account. ( .) in giving instruction on moral duty, the subject should be taken up generally, in reference to imaginary cases, or cases which are unknown to most of the scholars. if this is done, the pupils feel that the object of bringing up the subject is to do good; whereas, if questions of moral duty are only brought up, from time to time, when some prevailing or accidental fault in school calls for it, the feeling will be that the teacher is only endeavoring to remove from his own path a source of inconvenience and trouble. the most successful mode of giving general moral instruction that i have known, and which has been adopted in many schools, with occasional variations of form, is the following. when the time has arrived a subject is assigned, and small papers are distributed to the whole school, that all may write something concerning it. these are then read and commented on by the teacher, and are made the occasion of any remarks, which he may wish to make. the interest is strongly excited to hear the papers read, and the instruction which the teacher may give, produces a deeper effect, when engrafted thus, upon something which originates in the minds of the pupils. to take a particular case; a teacher addressed his scholars thus. "the subject for the moral exercise to day, is _prejudice_. each one may take one of the papers which have been distributed, and you may write upon them any thing you please relating to the subject. as many as have thought of any thing to write, may raise their hands." one or two only of the older scholars gave the signal. "i will mention the kinds of communications you can make, and perhaps what i say will suggest something to you. as fast as you think of any thing, you may raise your hands, and as soon as i see a sufficient number up, i will give directions to begin. you can describe any case in which you have been prejudiced, yourselves, either against persons or things." here a number of the hands went up. "you can mention any facts relating to antipathies of any kind, or any cases where you know other persons to be prejudiced. you can ask any questions in regard to the subject, questions about the nature of prejudice, or the causes of it, or the remedy for it." as he said this, many hands were successively raised, and at last, directions were given for them to begin to write. five minutes were allowed, and at the end of that time the papers were collected and read. the following specimens, transcribed verbatim from the originals, with the remarks made, as nearly as they could be remembered immediately after the exercise, will give an idea of the ordinary operation of this plan. "i am very much prejudiced against spiders, and every insect in the known world, with scarcely an exception. there is a horrid sensation created by their ugly forms, that makes me wish them all to jericho. the butterfly's wings are pretty, but he is dreadful ugly. there is no affectation in this, for my pride will not permit me to show this prejudice to any great degree, when i can help it. i do not fear the little wretches; but i do hate them. anti-spider-sparer." "this is not expressed very well, the phrases, "_to jericho_" and "_dreadful ugly_," are vulgar, and in very bad taste. such a dislike too is more commonly called an antipathy, than a prejudice, though perhaps it comes under the general head of prejudices." "how may we overcome prejudice? i think that when we are prejudiced against a person, it is the hardest thing in the world to overcome it." "a prejudice is usually founded on some unpleasant association connected with the subject of it. the best way to overcome the prejudice, therefore, is to connect some pleasant association with it. "for example, (to take the case of the antipathy to the spider, alluded to in the last article,) the reason why that young lady dislikes spiders, is undoubtedly because she has some unpleasant idea associated with the thought of that animal, perhaps for example, the idea of their crawling upon her--which is certainly not a very pleasant one for any body. now the way to correct such a prejudice, is to try to connect some pleasant thoughts with the sight of the animal. "i once found a spider in an empty apartment, hanging in its web on the wall, with a large ball of eggs which it had suspended by its side. my companion and myself cautiously brought up a tumbler under the web, and pressed it suddenly against the wall, so as to enclose both spider and eggs within it. we then contrived to run in a pair of shears, so as to cut off the web, and let both the animal and its treasure fall down into the tumbler. we put a book over the top, and walked off with our prize, to a table, to see what it would do. "at first it tried to climb up the side of the tumbler, but its feet slipped, from the smooth glass. we then inclined the glass, so as to favor its climbing and to enable it to reach the book at the top. as soon as it touched the book, it was safe. it could cling to the book easily, and we placed the tumbler again upright, to watch its motions. "it attached a thread to the book and let itself down by it to the bottom of the tumbler, and walked round and round the ball of eggs, apparently in great trouble. presently it ascended by its thread, and then came down again. it attached a new thread to the ball, and then went up, drawing the ball with it. it hung the ball at a proper distance from the book, and bound it firmly in its place by threads running from it, in every direction, to the parts of the book which were near, and then the animal took its place, quietly by its side. "now i do not say, that if any body had a strong antipathy to a spider, seeing one perform such a work as this would entirely remove it; but it would certainly soften it. it would _tend_ to remove it. it would connect an interesting and pleasant association, with the object. so if she should watch a spider in the fields making his web. you have all seen those beautiful, regular webs, in the morning dew, ("yes, sir," "yes sir.") composed of concentric circles, and radii diverging in every direction. ("yes sir.") well, watch a spider when making one of these, or observe his artful ingenuity and vigilance, when he is lying in wait for a fly. by thus connecting pleasant ideas, with the sight of the animal, you will destroy the unpleasant association which constitutes the prejudice. in the same manner, if i wished to create an antipathy to a spider, in a child, it would be very easily done. i would tie her hands behind her, and put three or four upon her, to crawl over her face. "thus you must destroy prejudices in all cases, by connecting pleasant thoughts and associations with the objects of them." "i am very often prejudiced against new scholars, without knowing why?" "we sometimes hear a person talk in this way, 'i do not like such, or such a person, at all.'" "'why?' "'oh i don't know, i do not like her at all. i can't bear her.' "'but why not. what is your objection to her.' "'oh i don't know, i have not any particular reason, but i never did like her.' "now whenever you hear any person talk so, you may be sure that her opinion, on any subject, is worth nothing at all. she forms opinions in one case, without grounds, and it depends merely upon accident, whether she does not, in other cases." "why is it that so many of our countrymen are, or seem to be prejudiced against the unfortunate children of africa? almost every _large white_ boy, who meets a _small black_ boy, insults him, in some way or other." "it is so hard to _overcome_ prejudices, that we ought to be careful how we _form_ them." "when i see a new scholar enter this school and she does not happen to suit me exactly in her ways and manners, i very often get prejudiced against her, though sometimes i find her a valuable friend, after i get acquainted with her." "there is an inquiry i should like very much to make, though i suppose it would not be quite right to make it. i should like to ask all those who have some particular friend in school, and who can recollect the impression which the individual made upon them when they first saw her, to rise, and then i should like to inquire in how many cases the first impression was favorable, and in how many unfavorable." "yes sir." "yes sir." "do you mean you would like to have the inquiry made?" "yes sir." "all, then, who have intimate friends, and can recollect the impression which they first made upon them, may rise." [about thirty rose; more than two thirds of whom voted that the first impression made by the persons who had since become their particular friends, was unfavorable.] "this shows how much dependence you can justly place on first impressions." "it was the next monday morning, after i had attained the wise age of years, that i was called up into my mother's room, and told that i was the next day going to school. "i called forth all my reasoning powers, and with all the ability of a child of four years, i reasoned with my mother, but to no purpose. i told her that i _hated_ the school mistress then; though i had never seen her. the very first day i tottered under the weight of the mighty foolscap. i only attended her school two quarters; with prejudice i went, and with prejudice i came away. "the old school-house is now torn down, and a large brick house takes the place of it. but i never pass by without remembering my teacher. i am prejudiced to [against] the very spot. * * * * * "is it not right to allow prejudice, to have influence over our minds as far as this? if any thing comes to our knowledge, with which wrong seems to be connected, and one in whom we have always felt confidence is engaged in it, is it not right to allow our prejudice in favor of this individual to have so much influence over us, as to cause us to believe that all is really right, though every circumstance which has come to our knowledge is against such a conclusion? i felt this influence not many weeks since, in a very great degree." "no; it would not be prejudice in such a case. that is, a _prejudice_ would not be a sufficient ground to justify withholding blame. well grounded confidence in such a person, if there was reason for it, ought to leave such an effect, but not prejudice." * * * * * the above may be considered as a fair specimen of the ordinary operation of such an exercise. it is taken as an illustration, not by selection from the large number of similar exercises which i have witnessed, but simply because it was an exercise occurring at the time when a description was to be written. besides the articles quoted above, there were thirty or forty others, which were read and commented on. the above will, however, be sufficient to give the reader a clear idea of the exercise, and to show what is the nature of the moral effect it is calculated to produce. the subjects which may be advantageously brought forward in such a way, are of course very numerous. they are such as the following. in connexion with each, give the suggestions as to the kind of articles to be written, which the pupils may receive at the time the subject is assigned. . duties to parents. anecdotes of good or bad conduct at home. questions. cases where it is most difficult to obey. dialogues between parents and children. excuses which are often made for disobedience. . selfishness. cases of selfishness any of the pupils have observed. dialogues they have heard exhibiting it. questions about its nature. indications of selfishness. . faults of the school. any bad practices the scholars may have observed in regard to general deportment, recitations, habits of study, or the scholars' treatment of one another. each scholar may write what is his own greatest trouble in school, and whether he thinks any thing can be done to remove it. any thing they think can be improved in the management of the school by the teacher. unfavorable things they have heard said about it, out of school, though without names. . excellences of the school. good practices, which ought to be persevered in. any little incidents the scholars may have noticed illustrating good character. cases which have occurred in which scholars have done right, in temptation, or when others around were doing wrong. favorable reports in regard to the school, in the community around. . the sabbath. any thing the scholars may have known to be done on the sabbath which they doubt whether right or wrong. questions in regard to the subject. various opinions they have heard expressed. difficulties they have in regard to proper ways of spending the sabbath. ( .) we have one other method to describe, by which a favorable moral influence may be exerted in school. the method can, however, go into full effect, only where there are several pupils who have made considerable advances in mental cultivation. it is to provide a way, by which teachers and pupils may write, anonymously, for the school. this may be done by having a place of deposit for such articles as may be written, where any person may leave what he wishes to have read, nominating, by a memorandum, upon the article itself, the reader. if a proper feeling on the subject of good discipline, and the formation of good character, prevails in school, many articles, which will have a great deal of effect upon the pupils, will find their way through such an avenue, once opened. the teacher can himself often bring forward, in this way, his suggestions, with more effect than he otherwise could do. such a plan is, in fact like the plan of a newspaper for an ordinary community, where sentiments and opinions stand on their own basis, and influence the community just in proportion to their intrinsic merits, unassisted by the authority of the writer's name, and unimpeded by any prejudice which may exist against him. in my own school, this practice has had a very powerful effect. i have, myself, often thus anonymously addressed my pupils, and i have derived great assistance from communications which many of the pupils have written. sometimes we have had full discussions of proposed measures, and at others, criticisms of the management of the school, or of prevailing faults. sometimes good humored satires, and sometimes simple descriptions. 'tis true the practice is not steadily kept up. often, for months together, there is not an article offered. still the place of deposit remains, and, after a time, some striking communication is made, which awakens general attention, and calls out other pens, until the fifteen minutes, corresponding to the afternoon general exercise, in the plan provided in a preceding chapter, (which is all which is allowed to be devoted to such purposes,) is not sufficient to read what is daily offered. of course, in such a plan as this, the teacher must have the usual editorial powers, to comment upon what is written, or to alter or suppress it at pleasure.[a] [footnote a: the following articles, which were really offered for such a purpose, will serve as specimens. one or two were written by teachers. i do not know the authors of the others. i do not offer them as remarkable compositions: every teacher will see that they are not so. the design of inserting them is merely to show that the ordinary literary ability to be found in every school, may be turned to useful account, by simply opening a channel for it, and to furnish such teachers as may be inclined to try the experiment, the means of making the plan clearly understood by their pupils. marks of a bad scholar. "at the time when she should be ready to take her seat at school, she commences preparation for leaving home. to the extreme annoyance of those about her, all is now hurry and bustle and ill humor. thorough search is to be made for every book or paper, for which she has occasion; some are found in one place, some in another, and others are forgotten altogether. being finally equipped, she casts her eye at the clock, hopes to be in tolerable good season, (notwithstanding that the hour for opening the school has already arrived,) and sets out, in the most violent hurry. after so much haste, she is unfitted for attending properly to the duties of the school, until a considerable time after her arrival. if present at the devotional exercises, she finds it difficult to command her attention, even when desirous of so doing, and her deportment at this hour, is accordingly marked with an unbecoming listlessness and abstraction. when called to recitations, she recollects that some task was assigned, which till that moment, she had forgotten; of others she had mistaken the extent, most commonly thinking them to be shorter than her companions suppose. in her answers to questions with which she should be familiar, she always manifests more or less of hesitation, and what she ventures to express, is very commonly in the form of a question. in these, as in all exercises, there is an inattention to general instructions. unless what is said be addressed particularly to herself, her eyes are directed towards another part of the room; it may be her thoughts are employed about something not at all connected with the school. if reproved by her teacher, for negligence in any respects, she is generally provided with an abundance of excuses, and however mild the reproof, she receives it as a piece of extreme severity. throughout her whole deportment, there is an air of indolence, and a want of interest in those exercises which should engage her attention. in her seat, she most commonly sits in some lazy posture;--either with her elbows upon her desk, her head leaning upon her hands, or with her seat tipped forwards or backwards. when she has occasion to leave her seat, it is in a sauntering, lingering gait;--perhaps some trick is contrived on the way, for exciting the mirth of her companions. about every thing in which it is possible to be so, she is untidy. her books are carelessly used, and placed in her desk without order. if she has a piece of waste paper to dispose of, she finds it much more convenient to tear it into small pieces, and scatter it about her desk, than to put it in a proper place. her hands and clothes are usually covered with ink. her written exercises are blotted, and full of mistakes." the consequences of being behindhand. "the following incident, which i witnessed on a late journey, illustrates an important principle, and i will relate it. when our steamboat started from the wharf, all our passengers had not come. after we had proceeded a few yards, there appeared among the crowd on the wharf, a man with his trunk under his arm,--out of breath,--and with a most disappointed and disconsolate air. the captain determined to stop for him, but stopping an immense steamboat, moving swiftly through the water, is not to be done in a moment. so we took a grand sweep, wheeling majestically around an english ship, which was at anchor in the harbor. as we came towards the wharf again, we saw the man in a small boat, coming off from it. as the steamboat swept round, they barely succeeded in catching a rope from the stern, and then immediately the steam engine began its work again, and we pressed forward,--the little boat following us so swiftly, that the water around her was all in a foam. they pulled upon the rope attached to the little boat, until they drew it alongside. they then let down a rope with a hook in the end of it, from an iron crane, which projected over the side of the steamboat, and hooked it into a staple in the front of the small boat. "_hoist away_;" said the captain. the sailors hoisted, and the front part of the little boat began to rise, the stern still ploughing and foaming through the water, and the man still in it, with his trunk under his arm. they "hoisted away," until i began to think that the poor man would actually tumble out behind. he clung to the seat, and looked as though he was saying to himself, "i will take care how i am tardy the next time." however, after awhile, they hoisted up the stern of the boat, and he got safely on board. _moral._ though coming to school a few minutes earlier or later, may not in itself be a matter of much consequence, yet the habit of being five minutes too late, if once formed, will, in actual life, be a source of great inconvenience, and sometimes of lasting injury." new scholars. "there is, at----, a young ladies' school, taught by mr.----. * * * * * * * * * but with all these excellences, there is one fault, which i considered a great one, and which does not comport with the general character of the school for kindness and good feeling. it is the little effort made by the scholars to become acquainted with the new ones who enter. whoever goes there, must push herself forward, or she will never feel at home. the young ladies seem to forget, that the new comer must feel rather unpleasantly, in the midst of a hundred persons, to whom she is wholly a stranger, and with no one to speak to. two or three will stand together, and instead of deciding upon some plan, by which the individual may be made to feel at ease, something like the following conversation takes place. _miss x._ how do you like the looks of miss a., who entered school to-day? _miss y._ i don't think she is very pretty, but she looks as if she might be a good scholar. _miss x._ she does not strike me very pleasantly; did you ever see such a face? and her complexion is so dark, i should think she had always lived in the open air; and what a queer voice she has! _miss y._ i wonder if she has a taste for arithmetic? _miss x._ she does not look as if she had much taste for any thing; see, how strangely she fixes her hair. _miss s._ whether she has much taste or not, some one of us ought to go and get acquainted with her. see how unpleasantly she feels. _miss x._ i don't want to get acquainted with her, until i know whether i shall like her or not. thus nothing is done to relieve her. when she does become acquainted, all her first strange appearance is forgotten; but this is sometimes not the case for several weeks. it depends entirely on the character of the individual herself. if she is forward, and willing to make the necessary effort, she can find many friends; but if she is diffident, she has much to suffer. this arises principally from thoughtlessness. the young ladies do not seem to realize that there is any thing for them to do. they feel enough at home themselves, and the remembrance of the time when they entered school, does not seem to arise in their minds." a satirical spirit. "i witnessed, a short time since, a meeting between two friends, who had had but little intercourse before, for a long while. i thought a part of their conversation might be useful, and i shall, therefore, relate it, as nearly as i can recollect, leaving each individual to draw her own inferences. for some time, i sat silent but not uninterested, while the days of 'auld lang syne' came up to the remembrance of the two friends. after speaking of several individuals, who were among their former acquaintances, one asked, 'do you remember miss w.?' 'yes,' replied the former, 'i remember her as the fear, terror, and abhorrence of all who knew her.' _i_ knew the lady by report, and asked why she was so regarded, the reply was, 'because she was so severe, so satirical in her remarks upon others. she spared neither friend or foe.' the friends resumed conversation. 'did you know,' said the one who had first spoken of miss w., 'that she sometimes had seasons of bitter repentance for indulging in this unhappy propensity of hers? she would, at such times, resolve to be more on her guard, but after all her good resolutions, she would yield to the slightest temptations. when she was expressing, and apparently really _feeling_ sorrow for having wounded the feelings of others, those who knew her, would not venture to express any sympathy, for very likely, the next moment, _that_ would be turned into ridicule. no confidence could be placed in her.' a few more facts will be stated respecting the same individual, which i believe are strictly true. miss w. possessed a fine and well cultivated mind, great penetration, and a tact at discriminating character, rarely equalled. she could, if she chose, impart a charm to her conversation, that would interest, and even fascinate those who listened to it; still she was not beloved. weaknesses and foibles met with unmerciful severity; and well-meaning intentions and kind actions did not always escape without the keen sarcasm, which it is so difficult for the best regulated mind to bear unmoved. the mild and gentle seemed to shrink from her, and thus she, who might have been the bright and beloved ornament of the circle in which she moved, was regarded with distrust, fear, and even hatred. this dangerous habit of making satirical remarks was evinced in childhood; it was cherished; 'it grew with her growth and strengthened with her strength,' until she became what i have described." laura. though such a satirical spirit is justly condemned, a little good-humored raillery may sometimes be allowed, as a mode of attacking faults in school which cannot be reached by graver methods. the teacher must not be surprised, if some things connected with his own administration, come in, sometimes, for a share. variety. "i was walking out, a few days since, and not being particularly in haste, i concluded to visit a certain school for an hour or two. in a few minutes after i had seated myself on the sofa, the '_study card_,' was dropped, and the general noise and confusion, indicated that recess had arrived. a line of military characters, bearing the title of the 'freedom's band,' was soon called out, headed by one of their own number. the tune chosen to guide them was kendall's march. "'please to form a regular line,' said the lady commander. 'remember that there is to be no speaking in the ranks. do not begin to step, until i strike the bell. miss b., i requested you not to step until i gave the signal.' "presently the command was given, and the whole line _stepped_, for a few minutes, to all intents and purposes. again the bell sounded;--'some of you have lost the step,' said the general. 'look at me, and begin again. left! right! left! right!' the line was once more in order, and i observed a new army on the opposite side of the room, performing the same manoeuvres, always to the tune of 'kendall's march.' after a time, the recess closed, and order was again restored. in about half an hour, i approached a class, which was reciting behind the railing. 'miss a.,' said a teacher, 'how many kinds of magnitude are there?' _miss a._ ('answer inaudible.') _several voices._ 'we can't hear.' _teacher._ 'will you try to speak a little louder, miss a.?' "some of the class at length seemed to guess the meaning of the young lady; but _i_ was unable to do even that, until the answer was repeated by the teacher. finding that i should derive little instruction from the recitation; i returned to the sofa. "in a short time the _propositions_ were read. 'proposed that the committee be impeached, for not providing suitable pens.' 'lost, a pencil, with a piece of india-rubber attached to it, by a blue riband,' &c. &c. "recess was again announced, and the lines commenced their evolutions to the tune of kendall's march.' thought i, 'oh! that there were a new tune under the sun!' "before the close of school, some compositions were read. one was entitled 'the magical ring,' and commenced, 'as i was sitting alone last evening, i heard a gentle tap on the door, and immediately a beautiful fairy appeared before me. she placed a ring on my finger, and left me.' the next began, 'it is my week to write composition, but i do not know what to say. however, i must write something, so it shall be a dialogue.' another was entitled the magical shoe,' and contained a marvellous narration of adventures made in a pair of shoes, more valuable than the farfamed 'seven league boots.' a fourth began, 'are you acquainted with that new scholar?' 'no; but i don't believe i shall like her.' and soon the 'magical thimble,' the 'magical eye-glass,' &c., were read, in succession, until i could not but exclaim, 'how pleasing is variety!' school was at length closed, and the young ladies again attacked the piano. 'oh!' repeated i, to myself, '_how pleasing is variety_!' as i left the room, to the tune of kendall's march."] by means like these, it will not be difficult for any teacher to obtain, so far an ascendancy over the minds of his pupils, as to secure an overwhelming majority in favor of good order, and co-operation with him in his plans for elevating the character of the school. but let it be distinctly understood, that this, and this only, has been the object of this chapter, thus far: the first point brought up, was the desirableness of making, at first, a favourable impression,--the second, the necessity of taking general views of the condition of the school, and aiming to improve it in the mass, and not merely to rebuke or punish accidental faults,--and the third, the importance and the means of gaining a general influence and ascendency over the minds of the pupils. but, though an overwhelming majority can be reached by such methods as these, all cannot. we must have the majority secured, however, in order to enable us to reach and to reduce the others. but to this work we must come at last. . i am therefore now to consider under a fourth general head, what course is to be taken with _individual_ offenders, whom the general influences of the school-room will not control. ( .) the first point to be attended to, is to ascertain who they are. not by appearing suspiciously to watch any individuals, for this would be almost sufficient to make them bad, if they were not so before. observe, however; notice, from day to day, the conduct of individuals, not for the purpose of reproving or punishing their faults, but to enable you to understand their characters. this work will often require great adroitness, and very close scrutiny; and you will find, as the results of it, a considerable variety of character, which the general influences above described, will not be sufficient to control. the number of individuals will not he great, but the diversity of character comprised in it, will be such, as to call into exercise all your powers of vigilance and discrimination. on one seat, you will find a coarse, rough looking boy, who will openly disobey your commands and oppose your wishes; on another, a more sly rogue, whose demure and submissive look is assumed, to conceal a mischief-making disposition. here is one, whose giddy spirit is always leading him into difficulty, but who is of so open and frank a disposition, that you will most easily lead him back to duty; but there is another, who, when reproved, will fly into a passion; and there, a third, who will stand sullen and silent before you, when he has done wrong, and is neither to be touched by kindness, nor awed by authority. now all these characters must be studied. it is true that the caution given in a preceding part of this chapter, against devoting undue and disproportionate attention to such persons must not be forgotten. still, these individuals will require, and it is right that they should receive, a far greater degree of attention, so far as the moral administration of the school is concerned, than their mere numbers would appear to justify. this is the field in which the teacher is to study human nature; for here it shows itself without disguise. it is through this class, too, that a very powerful moral influence is to be exerted upon the rest of the school. the manner in which such individuals are managed; the tone the teacher assumes towards them; the gentleness with which he speaks of their faults, and the unbending decision with which he restrains them from wrong, will have a most powerful effect upon the rest of the school. that he may occupy this field, therefore, to the best advantage, it is necessary that he should first thoroughly explore it. by understanding the dispositions and characters of such a class of pupils as i have described, i do not mean merely watching them, with vigilance, in school, so that none of their transgressions shall go unobserved and unpunished. i intend a far deeper and more thorough examination of character. every boy has something or other which is good in his disposition and character, which he is aware of, and on which he prides himself; find out what it is, for it may often be made the foundation, on which you may build the superstructure of reform. every one has his peculiar sources of enjoyment,--and objects of pursuit, which are before his mind from day to day; find out what they are, that by taking an interest in what interests him, and perhaps sometimes assisting him in his plans, you can bind him to you. every boy is, from the circumstances in which he is placed at home, exposed to temptations, which have perhaps, had a far greater influence in the formation of his character, than any deliberate and intentional depravity of his own; ascertain what these temptations are, that you may know where to pity him, and where to blame. the knowledge which such an examination of character will give you, will not be confined to making you acquainted with the individual. it will be the most valuable knowledge which a man can possess, both to assist him in the general administration of the school, and in his intercourse among mankind in the business of life. men are but boys, only with somewhat loftier objects of pursuit. their principles, motives, and ruling passions are essentially the same. extended commercial speculations are, so far as the human heart is concerned, substantially what trading in jack-knives and toys is, at school, and building a snow fort, to its own architects, the same as erecting a monument of marble. ( .) after exploring the ground, the first thing to be done, as a preparation for reforming individual character, in school, is, to secure the personal attachment of the individuals to be reformed. this must not be attempted by professions and affected smiles, and still less by that sort of obsequiousness, common in such cases, which produces no effect but to make the bad boy suppose that his teacher is afraid of him; which, by the way, is, in fact, in such cases, usually true. approach the pupil in a bold and manly, but frank and pleasant manner. approach him as his superior, but still, as his friend; desirous to make him happy, not merely to obtain his good-will. and the best way to secure these appearances, is, just to secure the reality. actually be the boy's friend. really desire to make him happy;--happy, too, in his own way, not in yours. feel that you are his superior, and that you must and will enforce obedience; but with this feel, that probably obedience will be rendered, without any contest. if these are really the feelings which reign within you, the boy will see it, and they will exert a strong influence over him, but you cannot counterfeit appearances. a most effectual way to secure the good will of a scholar, is, to ask him to assist you. the creator has so formed the human heart, that doing good must be a source of pleasure, and he who tastes this pleasure once, will almost always wish to taste it again. to do good to any individual, creates or increases the desire to do it. there is a boy in your school, who is famous for his skill in making whistles from the green branches of the poplar. he is a bad boy, and likes to turn his ingenuity to purposes of mischief. you observe him some day in school, when he thinks your attention is engaged in another way, blowing softly upon one, which he has concealed in his desk, for the purpose of amusing his neighbors, without attracting the attention of the teacher. now there are two remedies. will you try the physical one? then call him out into the floor; inflict painful punishment, and send him smarting to his seat, with his heart full of anger and revenge, to plot some new and less dangerous scheme of annoyance. will you try the moral one? then wait till the recess, and while he is out at his play, send a message out by another boy, saying that you have heard he is very skilful in making whistles, and asking him to make one for you to carry home to a little child at your boarding-house. what would, in ordinary cases, be the effect? it would certainly be a very simple application; but its effect would be, to open an entirely new train of thought and feeling for the boy. "what!" he would say to himself, while at work on his task, "give the master _pleasure_ by making whistles! who ever heard of such a thing? i never thought of any thing but giving him trouble and pain.--i wonder who told him i could make whistles?" he would find, too, that the new enjoyment was far higher and purer than the old, and would have little disposition to return to the latter. i do not mean by this illustration, that such a measure as this, would be the only notice that ought to be taken of such an act of wilful disturbance in school. probably it would not. what measures in direct reference to the fault committed, would be necessary, would depend upon the circumstances of the case. it is not necessary to our purpose, that they should be described here. the teacher can awaken in the hearts of his pupils, a personal attachment for him, by asking in various ways, their assistance in school, and then appearing honestly gratified with the assistance rendered. boys and girls are delighted to have what powers and attainments they possess, brought out into action, especially where they can lead to useful results. they love to be of some consequence in the world, and will be especially gratified to be able to assist their teacher. even if the studies of a turbulent boy are occasionally interrupted for half an hour, that he might help you arrange papers, or rule books, or cut the tops of quills, or distribute exercises, it will be time well spent. get him to co-operate with you in any thing, and he will feel how much pleasanter it is to co-operate, than to thwart and oppose; and by judicious measures of this kind, almost any boy may be brought over to your side. another means of securing the personal attachment of boys, is to notice them,--to take an interest in their pursuits, and the qualities and powers which they value in one another. it is astonishing what an influence is exerted by such little circumstances, as stopping at a play ground a moment, to notice with interest, though perhaps without saying a word, speed of running,--or exactness of aim,--the force with which a ball is struck,--or the dexterity with which it is caught or thrown. the teacher must, indeed, in all his intercourse with his pupils, never forget his station, nor allow them to lay aside the respect, without which authority cannot be maintained. but he may be, notwithstanding this, on the most intimate and familiar footing with them all. he may take a strong and open interest in all their enjoyments, and thus awaken on their part, a personal attachment to himself, which will exert over them a constant and powerful control. ( .) the efforts described under the last head, for gaining a personal influence over those, who from their disposition and character are most in danger of doing wrong, will not be sufficient entirely to prevent transgression. cases of deliberate, intentional wrong will occur, and the question will rise, what is the duty of the teacher in such an emergency? when such cases occur, the course to be taken is, first of all, to come to a distinct understanding on the subject with the guilty individual. think of the case calmly, until you have obtained just and clear ideas of it. endeavor to understand precisely in what the guilt of it consists. notice every palliating circumstance, and take as favorable a view of the thing as you can, while, at the same time, you fix most firmly in your mind the determination to put a stop to it. then go to the individual, and lay the subject before him, for the purpose of understanding distinctly from his own lips, what he intends to do. i can however, as usual, explain more fully what i mean, by describing a particular case, substantially true. the teacher of a school observed, himself, and learned from several quarters, that a certain boy was in the habit of causing disturbance during time of prayer, at the opening and close of school, by whispering, playing, making gestures to the other boys, and throwing things about from seat to seat. the teacher's first step was, to speak of the subject, generally, before the whole school, not alluding, however, to any particular instance which had come under his notice. these general remarks produced, as he expected, but little effect. he waited for some days, and the difficulty still continued. had the irregularity been very great, it would have been necessary to have taken more immediate measures, but he thought the case admitted of a little delay. in the meantime, he took a little pains to cultivate the acquaintance of the boy, to discover and to show that he noticed what was good in his character and conduct, occasionally to get from him some little assistance, and thus to gain some personal ascendancy over him. one day, when every thing had gone smoothly and pleasantly, the teacher told the boy, at the close of school, that he wanted to talk with him a little, and asked him to walk home with him. it was not uncommon for the teacher to associate thus, with his pupils, out of school, and this request, accordingly, attracted no special attention. on the walk, the teacher thus accosted the criminal. "do you like frank, open dealing, james?" james hesitated a moment, and then answered faintly, "yes sir." "most boys do, and i do; and i supposed that you would prefer being treated in that way. do you?" "yes sir." "well, i am going to tell you of one of your faults. i have asked you to walk with me, because i supposed it would be pleasanter for you to have me see you privately, than to bring it up in school." james said it would be pleasanter. "well, the fault is, being disorderly at prayer time. now if you like frank and open dealing, and are willing to deal so with me, i should like to talk with you a little about it, but if you are not willing, i will dismiss the subject. i do not wish to talk with you now about it, unless you yourself desire it. but if we talk at all, we must both be open, and honest, and sincere. now should you rather have me talk with you or not?" "yes sir, i should rather have you talk with me now, than in school." the teacher then described his conduct, in a mild manner, using the style of simple narration,--admitting no harsh epithets,--no terms of reproach. the boy was surprised, for he supposed he had not been noticed. he thought, perhaps he should have been punished, if he had been observed. the teacher said in conclusion: "now, james, i do not suppose you have done this from any designed irreverence towards god, or deliberate intention of giving me trouble and pain. you have several times lately, assisted me, in various ways, and i know from the cheerful manner with which you comply with my wishes, that your prevailing desire is, to give me pleasure, not pain. you have fallen into this practice through thoughtlessness; but that does not alter the character of the sin. to do so, is a great sin against god, and a great offence against good order in school. you see, yourself, that my duty to the school, will require me to adopt the most decided measures, to prevent the continuance and the spread of such a practice. i should be imperiously bound to do it, even if the individual was the very best friend i had in school, and if the measures necessary, should bring upon him great disgrace and suffering. do you not think it would be so?" "yes sir," said james, seriously, "i suppose it would." "i want to remove the evil, however, in the pleasantest way. do you remember my speaking on this subject, in school the other day?" "yes sir." "well, my object in that, was, almost entirely, to persuade you to reform, without having to speak to you directly. i thought it would be pleasanter to you to be reminded of your duty in that way. but i do not think it did you much good. did it?" "i don't think i have played so much since then." "nor i. you have improved a little, but you have not decidedly and thoroughly reformed. so i was obliged to take the next step which would be least unpleasant to you; that is, talking with you alone. now you told me, when we began, that you would deal honestly and sincerely with me, if i would with you. i have been honest and open. i have told you all about it, so far as i am concerned. now i wish you to be honest, and tell me what you are going to do. if you think, from this conversation, that you have done wrong, and if you are fully determined to do so no more, and to break off at once, and for ever from this practice, i should like to have you tell me, and then the whole thing will be settled. on the other hand, if you feel about it pretty much as you have done, i should like to have you tell me that too, honestly and frankly, that we may have a distinct understanding, and that i may be considering what to do next. i shall not be offended with you for giving me either of these answers, but be sure that you are honest; you promised to be so." the boy looked up in his master's face, and said, with great earnestness, "mr. t., i _will_ do better. i _will not_ trouble you any more." i have detailed this case, thus particularly, because it exhibits clearly what i mean, by going directly and frankly to the individual, and coming at once, to a full understanding. in nine cases out of ten, this course will be effectual. for four years, and with a very large school, i have found this sufficient, in every case of discipline which has occurred, except in three or four instances, where something more was required. to make it successful, however, it must be done properly. several things are necessary. it must be deliberate; generally better after a little delay. it must be indulgent, so far as the view which the teacher takes of the guilt of the pupil, is concerned; every palliating consideration must be felt. it must be firm and decided, in regard to the necessity of a change, and the determination of the teacher to effect it. it must also be open and frank; no insinuations, no hints, no surmises, but plain, honest, open dealing. in many cases, the communication may be made most delicately, and most successfully, in writing. the more delicately you touch the feelings of your pupils, the more tender these feelings will become. many a teacher hardens and stupefies the moral sense of his pupils, by the harsh and rough exposures, to which he drags out the private feelings of the heart. a man may easily produce such a state of feeling in his school-room, that to address even the gentlest reproof to any individual, in the hearing of the next, would be a most severe punishment; and on the other hand, he may so destroy that sensitiveness, that his vociferated reproaches will be as unheeded as the idle wind. if now, the teacher has taken the course recommended in this chapter; if he has, by his general influence in the school, done all in his power to bring the majority of his pupils to the side of order and discipline; if he has then studied, attentively and impartially, the characters of those who cannot thus be led; if he has endeavored to make them his friends, and to acquire, by every means, a personal influence over them; if, finally, when they do wrong, he goes, plainly, but in a gentle and delicate manner, to them, and lays before them the whole case; if he has done all this, he has gone as far as moral influence will carry him. my opinion is, that this course, faithfully and judiciously pursued, will in almost all instances succeed; but it will not in all; and where it fails, there must be other, and more vigorous and decided measures. what these measures of restraint or punishment shall be, must depend upon the circumstances of the case; but in resorting to them, the teacher must be decided and unbending. the course above recommended, is not trying lax and inefficient measures, for a long time, in hopes of their being ultimately successful, and then, when they are found not to be so, changing the policy. there should be, through the whole, the tone and manner of _authority_, not of _persuasion_. the teacher must be a _monarch_, and while he is gentle and forbearing, always looking on the favorable side of conduct so far as guilt is concerned, he must have an eagle eye, and an efficient hand, so far as relates to arresting the evil, and stopping the consequences. he may slowly and cautiously, and even tenderly approach a delinquent. he may be several days in gathering around him the circumstances, of which he is ultimately to avail himself, in bringing him to submission; but, while he proceeds thus slowly, and tenderly, he must come with the air of authority and power. the fact that the teacher bases all his plans, on the idea of his ultimate authority, in every case, may be perfectly evident to all the pupils, while he proceeds with moderation and gentleness, in all his specific measures. let it be seen, then, that the constitution of your school is a monarchy, absolute and unlimited,--but let it also be seen, that the one who holds the power, is himself under the control of moral principle, in all that he does, and that he endeavors to make the same moral principle which guides him, go as far as it is possible to make it go, in the government of his subjects. chapter v. religious influence. in consequence of the unexampled religious liberty enjoyed in this country, for which it is happily distinguished above all other countries on the globe, there necessarily results a vast variety of religious sentiment and action. we cannot enjoy the blessings without the inconveniences of freedom. where every man is allowed to believe as he pleases, some will undoubtedly believe wrong, and others will be divided, by embracing views of a subject which are different, though perhaps equally consistent with truth. hence, we have among us, every shade and every variety of religious opinion, and in many cases, contention and strife, resulting from hopeless efforts to produce uniformity. a stranger who should come among us, would suppose from the tone of our religious journals, and from the general aspect of society on the subject of religion, that the whole community was divided into a thousand contending sects, who hold nothing in common, and whose sole objects are, the annoyance and destruction of each other. but if we leave out of view some hundreds, or if you please, some thousands of theological controversialists, who manage the public discussions, and say and do all that really comes before the public on this subject, it will be found, that there is vastly more religious truth admitted by common consent, among the people of new england, than is generally supposed. this common ground, i shall endeavor briefly to describe. for it is very plain, that the teacher must, in ordinary cases, confine himself to it. by common consent, however, i do not mean the consent of every body; i mean that of the great majority of serious, thinking men. but let us examine, first, for a moment, what right any member of the community has to express and to disseminate his opinions, with a view to the inquiry, whether the teacher is really bound to confine himself to what he can do, on this subject, with the common consent of his employers. the french nation has been, for some time, as is well known, strongly agitated with questions of politics. it is with difficulty that public tranquillity is preserved. every man takes sides. now in this state of things, a wealthy gentleman, opposed to the revolutionary projects so constantly growing up there, and from principle and feeling, strongly attached to a monarchial government, wishes to bring up his children, with the same feelings which he himself cherishes. he has a right to do so. no matter if his opinions are wrong. he ought, it will be generally supposed in this country, to be republican. i suppose him to adopt opinions, which will generally, by my readers, be considered wrong, that i may bring more distinctly to view the right he has to educate his children as _he thinks_ it proper that they should be educated. he may be wrong to _form_ such opinions. but the opinions once formed, he has a right, with which no human power can justly interfere, to educate his children in conformity with those opinions. it is alike the law of god and nature, that the father should control, as he alone is responsible, the education of his child. now under these circumstances, he employs an american mechanic, who is residing in paris, to come to his house and teach his children the use of the lathe. after some time, he comes into their little workshop, and is astonished to find the lathe standing still, and the boys gathered round the republican turner, who is telling them stories of the tyranny of kings, the happiness of republicans, and the glory of war. the parent remonstrates. the mechanic defends himself. "i am a republican," he says, "upon principle, and wherever i go, i must exert all the influence in my power, to promote free principles, and to expose the usurpations and the tyranny of kings." to this the frenchman might very properly reply, "in your efforts to promote your principles, you are limited, or you ought to be limited to modes that are proper and honorable. i employ you for a distinct and specific purpose, which has nothing to do with questions of government; and you ought not to allow your love of republican principles, to lead you to take advantage of the position in which i place you, and interfere with my plans for the political education of my children." now for the parallel case. a member of a congregational society, is employed to teach a school, in a district, occupied exclusively by quakers,--a case not uncommon. he is employed there, not as a religious teacher, but for another specific and well-defined object. it is for the purpose of teaching the children of that district, _reading_, _writing_, and _calculation_, and for such other purposes, analogous to this, as the law, providing for the establishment of district schools, contemplated. now when he is placed in such a situation, with such a trust confided to him, and such duties to discharge, it is not right for him, to make use of the influence, which this official station gives him, over the minds of the children committed to his care, for the accomplishment of _any other purposes whatever_, which the parents would disapprove. it would not be considered right, by men of the world, to attempt to accomplish any other purposes, in such a case; and are the pure and holy principles of piety, to be extended by methods more exceptionable, than those by which political and party contests are managed? there is a very great and obvious distinction between the general influence which the teacher exerts as a member of the community, and that which he can employ in his school room as teacher. he has unquestionably a right to exert _upon the community, by such means as he shares in common with every other citizen_, as much influence as he can command, for the dissemination of his own political, or religious, or scientific opinions. but the strong ascendency, which, in consequence of his official station, he has obtained over the minds of his pupils, is sacred. he has no right to use it for any purpose _foreign to the specific objects_ for which he is employed, unless by _the consent, expressed or implied_, of those by whom he is entrusted with his charge. the parents who send their children to him, to be taught to read, to write and to calculate, may have erroneous views of their duty, as parents, in other respects. he _may know_ that their views are erroneous. they may be taking a course, which the teacher _knows_ is wrong. but he has not, on this account, a right to step in between the parent and the child, to guide the latter according to his own opinions, and to violate the wishes and thwart the plans of the former. god has constituted the relation between the parent and the child, and according to any view, which a rational man can take of this relation, the parent is alone responsible for the guidance he gives to that mind, so entirely in his power. he is responsible to god; and where our opinions, in regard to the manner in which any of the duties, arising from the relation, are to be performed, differ from his, we have no right to interfere, without his consent, to rectify what we thus imagine to be wrong. i know of but one exception, which any man whatever would be inclined to make, to this principle; and that is, where the parent would, if left to himself, take such a course, as would ultimately make his children _unsafe members of society_. the _community_ have a right to interfere, in such a case, as they in fact do by requiring every man to provide for the instruction of his children, and in some other ways which need not now be specified. beyond this, however, no interference contrary to the parent's consent, is justifiable. where parents will do wrong, notwithstanding any persuasions which we can address to them, we must not violate the principles of an arrangement, which god has himself made, but submit patiently to the awful consequences, which will, in some cases, occur,--reflecting that the responsibility for these consequences, is on the head of those who neglect their duty, and that the being who makes them liable, will settle the account. whatever, then, the teacher attempts to do, beyond the _specific_ and _defined_ duties, which are included among the objects for which he is employed, must be done _by permission_,--by the voluntary consent, whether tacit, or openly expressed, of those by whom he is employed. this of course confines him to what is, generally, common ground, among his particular employers. in a republican country, where all his patrons are republican, he may without impropriety, explain and commend to his pupils, as occasion may occur, the principles of free governments, and the blessings which may be expected to flow from them. but it would not be justifiable for him to do this, under a monarchy, or in a community divided in regard to this subject, because this question does not come within the objects, for the promotion of which, his patrons have associated, and employed him,--and consequently, he has no right, while continuing their teacher, to go into it, without their consent. in the same manner, an episcopal teacher, in a private school, formed and supported by episcopalians, may use and commend forms of prayer, and explain the various usages of that church, exhibiting their excellence, and their adaptation to the purposes for which they are intended. he may properly do this, because in the case supposed, the patrons of the school are _united_ on this subject, and their _tacit consent_ may be supposed to be given. but place the same teacher over a school of quaker children, whose parents dislike forms and ceremonies of every kind, in religion, and his duty would be changed altogether. so, if a roman catholic is entrusted with the instruction of a common district school, in a community composed of many protestant denominations, it would be plainly his duty to avoid all influence, direct or indirect, over the minds of his pupils, except in those religious sentiments and opinions which are common to himself and all his employers. i repeat the principle. _he is employed for a specific purpose, and he has no right to wander from that purpose, except as far as he can go, with the common consent of his employers._ now, the common ground, on religious subjects, in this country, is very broad. there are indeed, many principles, which are, in my view, essential parts of christianity, which are subjects of active discussion among us. but setting these aside, there are other principles equally essential, in regard to which the whole community are agreed; or at least, if there is a dissenting minority, it is so small, that it is hardly to be considered. let us look at some of these principles. . our community is agreed that _there is a god_. there is probably not a school in our country, where the parents of the scholars would not wish to have the teacher, in his conversation with his pupils, take this for granted, and allude reverently and judiciously to that great being, with the design of leading them to realize his existence, and to feel his authority. . our community are agreed, that _we are responsible to god for all our conduct_. though some persons absurdly pretend to believe, that the being who formed this world, if indeed they think there is any such being, has left it and its inhabitants to themselves, not inspecting their conduct, and never intending to call them to account, they are too few among us to need consideration. a difference of opinion on this subject, might embarrass the teacher in france, and in other countries in europe, but not here. however negligent men may be in _obeying_ god's commands, they do almost universally in our country, admit in theory, the authority from which they come; and believing this, the parent, even if he is aware that he himself does not obey these commands, chooses to have his children taught to respect them. the teacher will thus be acting with the consent of his employers, in almost any part of our country, in endeavoring to influence his pupils to perform moral duties, not merely from worldly motives, nor from mere abstract principles of right and wrong, but _from regard to the authority of god_. . the community are agreed, too, in the belief of _the immortality of the soul_. they believe, almost without exception, that there is a future state of being, to which this is introductory and preparatory, and almost every father and mother in our country, wish to have their children keep this in mind, and to be influenced by it, in all their conduct. . the community are agreed, that _we have a revelation from heaven_. i believe there are very few instances where the parents would not be glad to have the bible read from time to time, its geographical and historical meanings illustrated, and its moral lessons brought to bear upon the hearts and lives of their children. of course, if the teacher is so unwise as to make such a privilege, if it were allowed him, the occasion of exerting an influence, upon one side or the other of some question which divides the community around him, he must expect to excite jealousy and distrust, and to be excluded from a privilege, which he might otherwise have been permitted freely to enjoy. there may, alas! be some cases, where the use of the scriptures is altogether forbidden in school. but probably in almost every such case, it would be found, that it is from fear of its perversion to sect or party purposes, and not from any unwillingness to have the bible used in the way i have described. . the community are agreed in theory, that _personal attachment to the supreme being, is the duty of every human soul_; and every parent, with exceptions so few that they are not worth naming, wishes that his children should cherish that affection, and yield their hearts to its influence. he is willing therefore that the teacher, of course without interfering with the regular duties for the performance of which he holds his office, should, from time to time, so speak of this duty,--of god's goodness to men,--of his daily protection,--and his promised favors, as to awaken, if possible, this attachment, in the hearts of his children. of course, it is very easy for the teacher, if he is so disposed, to abuse this privilege also. he can, under pretence of awakening and cherishing the spirit of piety in the hearts of his pupils, present the subject in such aspects and relations, as to arouse the sectarian or denominational feelings of some of his employers. but i believe if this was honestly and fully avoided, there are few, if any, parents, in our country, who would not be gratified to have the great principle of love to god, manifest itself in the instructions of the school-room, and showing itself, by its genuine indications in the hearts and conduct of their children. . the community are agreed, not only in believing that piety consists primarily, in love to god, but that _the life of piety is to be commenced by penitence for past sins, and forgiveness, in some way or other, through a saviour_. i am aware that one class of theological writers, in the heat of controversy, charge the other with believing that jesus christ was nothing more nor less than a teacher of religion, and there are unquestionably, individuals, who take this view. but these individuals are few. there are very few in our community, who do not in some sense, look upon jesus christ as our _saviour_,--our redeemer; who do not feel themselves _in some way_, indebted to him, for the offer of pardon. there may be, here and there, a theological student, or a contributor to the columns of a polemical magazine, who ranks jesus christ with moses and with paul. but the great mass of the fathers and mothers, of every name and denomination through all the ranks of society, look up to the saviour of sinners, with something at least of the feeling, that he is the object of extraordinary affection and reverence. i am aware however, that i am approaching the limit, which, in many parts of our country, ought to bound the religious influence of the teacher in a public school; and on this subject, as on every other, he ought to do nothing directly or indirectly, which would be displeasing to those who have entrusted children to his care. so much ground, it seems, the teacher may occupy, by common consent, in new-england, and it certainly is a great deal. it may be doubted whether, after all our disputes, there is a country in the world, whose inhabitants have so much in common, in regard to religious belief. there is, perhaps, no country in the world, where the teacher may be allowed to do so much, towards leading his pupils to fear god, and to obey his commands, with the cordial consent of parents, as he can here.[b] [footnote b: in speaking of this common ground, and in commenting upon it, i wish not to be understood that i consider these truths as comprising all that is essential in christianity. very far from it. a full expression of the christian faith, would go far in advance of all here presented. we must not confound however, what is essential to prepare the way for the forgiveness of sin, with what is essential that a child should understand, in order to secure his penitence and forgiveness. the former is a great deal; the latter, very little.] the ground which i have been laying out, is common, all over our country; in particular places, there will be, even much more, that is common. of course, the teacher, in such cases, will be at much greater liberty. if a roman catholic community establish a school, and appoint a roman catholic teacher, he may properly, in his intercourse with his scholars, allude, with commendation, to the opinions and practices of that church. if a college is established by the methodist denomination, the teacher of that institution may, of course, explain and enforce there, the views of that society. each teacher is confined only to _those views which are common to the founders and supporters of the particular institution, to which he is attached_. i trust the principle which i have been attempting to enforce, is fully before the reader's mind, namely, that moral and religious instruction in a school, being in a great degree extra-official, in its nature, must be carried no farther than the teacher can go with the common consent, either expressed or implied, of those who have founded, and who support his school. of course, if those founders forbid it altogether, they have a right to do so, and the teacher must submit. the only question that can justly arise, is, whether, he will remain in such a situation, or seek employment, where a door of usefulness, here closed against him, will be opened. while he remains, he must honestly and fully submit to the wishes of those, in whose hands providence has placed the ultimate responsibility of training up the children of his school. it is only for a partial and specific purpose, that they are placed under his care. the religious reader may inquire, why i am so anxious to restrain, rather than to urge on, the exercise of religious influence in schools. "there is far too little," some one will say, "instead of too much, and teachers need to be encouraged and led on in this duty, not to be restrained from it." there is, indeed, far too little religious influence exerted in common schools. what i have said, has been intended to prepare the way for an increase of it. my view of it is this: if teachers do universally confine themselves to limits, which i have been attempting to define, they may accomplish within these limits, a vast amount of good. by attempting however, to exceed them, the confidence of parents is destroyed or weakened, and the door is closed. in this way, injury to a very great extent has been done in many parts of our country. parents are led to associate with the very idea of religion, indirect and perhaps secret efforts to influence their children, in a way which they themselves would disapprove. they transfer to the cause of piety itself, the dislike which was first awakened by exceptionable means to promote it; and other teachers, seeing these evil effects, are deterred from attempting what they might easily and pleasantly accomplish. before therefore, attempting to enforce the duty, and to explain the methods of exerting religious influence in school, i thought proper, distinctly to state, with what restrictions, and within what limits, the work is to be done. * * * * * there are many teachers who profess to cherish the spirit, and to entertain the hopes of piety, who yet make no effort whatever to extend its influence to the hearts of their pupils. others appeal sometimes to religious truth, merely to assist them in the government of the school. they perhaps bring it before the minds of disobedient pupils, in a vain effort to make an impression upon the conscience of one who has done wrong, and who cannot by other means be brought to submission. but the pupil, in such cases, understands, or at least he believes, that the teacher applies to religious truth, only to eke out his own authority, and of course, it produces no effect. another teacher thinks he must, to discharge his duty, give a certain amount weekly, of what he considers religious instruction. he accordingly appropriates a regular portion of time to a formal lecture or exhortation, which he delivers without regard to the mental habits of thought and feeling which prevail among his charge. he forgets that the heart must be led, not driven, to piety, and that unless his efforts are adapted to the nature of the minds he is acting upon, and suited to influence them, he must as certainly fail of success, as when there is a want of adaptedness between the means and the end in any other undertaking whatever. the arrangement which seems to me as well calculated as any for the religious exercises of a school, is this: . in the morning open the school with a very short prayer, resembling in its object and length, the opening prayer in the morning, at congregational churches. the posture, which from four years' experience, i would recommend at this exercise, is sitting, with the heads reclined upon the desks. the prayer, besides being short, should be simple in its language, and specific in its petitions. a degree of particularity and familiarity, which might be improper elsewhere, is not only allowable here, but necessary to the production of the proper effect. that the reader may understand to what extent i mean to be understood to recommend this, i will subjoin a form, such as in spirit i suppose such a prayer ought to be. "our father in heaven, who has kindly preserved the pupils and the teacher of this school during the past night, come and grant us a continuance of thy protection and blessing during this day. we cannot spend the day prosperously and happily without thee. come then, and be in this school-room during this day, and help us all to be faithful and successful in duty. "guide the teacher in all that he may do. give him wisdom and patience, and faithfulness. may he treat all his pupils with kindness; and if any of them should do any thing that is wrong, wilt thou help him, gently but firmly to endeavor to bring him back to duty. may he sympathize with the difficulties and trials of all, and promote the present happiness, as well as the intellectual progress, of all who are committed to his care. "take care of the pupils too. may they spend the day pleasantly and happily together. wilt thou who didst originally give us all our powers, direct and assist us all, this day, in the use and improvement of them. remove difficulties from our path, and give us all, fidelity and patience in every duty. let no one of us destroy our peace and happiness this day, by breaking any of thy commands,--or encouraging our companions, in sins--or neglecting, in any respect, our duty. we ask all in the name of our great redeemer _amen_." of course the prayer of each day will be varied, unless, in special cases, the teacher prefers to read some form like the above. but let every one be _minute and particular_, relating especially to school,--to school temptations, and trials, and difficulties. let every one be filled with expressions relating to school, so that it will bear upon every sentence, the impression, that it is the petition of a teacher and his pupils, at the throne of grace. . if the pupils can sing, there may be a single verse, or sometimes two verses of some well known hymn, sung after the prayer, at the opening of the school. teachers will find it much easier to introduce this practice, than it would at first be supposed. in almost every school, there are enough who can sing to begin, especially if the first experiment is made in a recess, or before or after school; and the beginning once made, the difficulty is over. if but few tunes are sung, a very large proportion of the scholars will soon learn them. . let there be no other regular exercise until the close of the afternoon school. when that hour has arrived, let the teacher devote a very short period, five minutes perhaps, to religious _instruction_, given in various ways. at one time, he may explain and illustrate some important truth. at another, read, and comment upon, a very short portion of scripture. at another, relate an anecdote, or fact, which will tend to interest the scholars in the performance of duty. the teacher should be very careful not to imitate on these occasions, the formal style of exhortation from the pulpit. let him use no cant and hackneyed phrases, and never approach the subject of personal piety,--i. e. such feelings as penitence for sin, trust in god, and love for the saviour,--unless his own heart is really, at the time, warmed by the emotions which he wishes to awaken in others. children very easily detect hypocrisy. they know very well, when a parent or teacher is talking to them on religious subjects, merely as a matter of course, for the sake of effect; and such constrained and formal efforts never do any good. let then every thing which you do, in reference to this subject, be done with proper regard to the character and condition of the youthful mind, and in such a way as shall be calculated to _interest_, as well as to _instruct_. a cold and formal exhortation, or even an apparently earnest one, delivered in a tone of affected solemnity, will produce no good effect. perhaps i ought not to say it will produce no good effect: for good does sometimes result, as a sort of accidental consequence, from almost any thing. i mean it will have no effectual _tendency_ to do good. you must vary your method too, in order to interest your pupils. watch their countenances when you are addressing them, and see if they look interested. if they do not, be assured that there is something wrong, or at least something ill-judged, or inefficient, in your manner of explaining the truths which you wish to have produce an effect upon their minds. that you may be prepared to bring moral and religious truths before their minds in the way i have described, your own mind must take a strong interest in this class of truths. you must habituate yourself to look at the moral and religious aspects and relations of all that you see and hear. when you are reading, notice such facts, and remember such narratives, as you can turn to good account, in this way. in the same way, treasure up in mind such occurrences as may come under your own personal observation, when travelling, or when mixing with society. that the spirit and manner of these religious exercises, may be the more distinctly understood, i will give some examples. let us suppose then that the hour for closing school has come. the books are laid aside; the room is still; the boys expect the few words which the teacher is accustomed to address to them, and looking up to him, they listen to hear what he has to say. "you may take your bibles." the boys, by a simultaneous movement, open their desks, and take from them their copies of the sacred volume. "what is the first book of the new testament?" "matthew:" they all answer, at once. "the second?" "mark." "the third?" "luke." "the next?" "john." "the next?" "the acts." "the next?" many answer, "romans." "the next?" a few voices say, faintly and with hesitation, "first of corinthians." "i perceive your answers become fainter and fainter. do you know what is the last book of the new testament?" the boys answer promptly, "revelations." "do you know what books are between the acts and the book of revelation?" some say, "no sir;" some begin to enumerate such books as occur to them, and some perhaps begin to name them promptly, and in their regular order. "i do not mean," interrupts the teacher, "the _names_ of the books, but the _kinds_ of books." the boys hesitate. "they are epistles or letters. do you know who wrote the letters?" "paul," "peter," answer many voices at once. "yes, there were several writers. now the point which i wish to bring before you is this; do you know in what order, i mean on what principles, the books are arranged?" "no sir;" is the universal reply. "i will tell you. first come all paul's epistles. if you turn over the leaves of the testament, you will see that paul's letters are all put together, after the book of the acts; and what i wish you to notice is, that they are arranged in the _order_ of _their length_. the longest comes first, and then the next; and so on to the shortest, which is the epistle to philemon. this of course, comes last--no;--i am wrong in saying it is the last of paul's epistles, there is one more,--to the hebrews; and this comes after all the others, for there has been a good deal of dispute whether it was really written by paul. you will see that his name is not at the beginning of it, as it is in his other epistles: so it was put last." "then comes the epistle of james. will you see whether it is longer than any that come after it?" the boys, after a minute's examination, answer, "yes sir," "yes sir." "what comes next?" "the epistles of peter." "yes; and you will see that the longest of peter's epistles is next in length to that of james': and indeed all his are arranged in the order of their length." "yes sir." "what comes next?" "john's." "yes, and they arranged in the order of their length. do you now understand the principles of the arrangement of the epistles?" "yes sir." "i should like to have any of you who are interested in it, try to express this principle in a few sentences, on paper, and lay it on my desk to-morrow, and i will read what you write. you will find it very difficult to express it. now you may lay aside your books. it will be pleasanter for you if you do it silently." intelligent children will be interested even in so simple a point as this,--much more interested than a maturer mind, unacquainted with the peculiarities of children, would suppose. by bringing up, from time to time, some such literary inquiry as this, they will be led insensibly to regard the bible as opening a field for interesting intellectual research, and will more easily be led to study it. at another time, the teacher spends his five minutes in aiming to accomplish a very different object. i will suppose it to be one of those afternoons, when all has gone smoothly and pleasantly, in school. there has been nothing to excite strong interest or emotion; and there has been, (as every teacher knows there sometimes will be,) without any assignable cause which he can perceive, a calm, and quiet, and happy spirit, diffused over the minds and countenances of the little assembly. his evening communication should accord with this feeling, and he should make it the occasion to promote those pure and hallowed emotions in which every immortal mind must find its happiness, if it is to enjoy any, worth possessing. when all is still, the teacher addresses his pupils as follows. "i have nothing but a simple story to tell you to-night. it is true, and the fact interested me very much when i witnessed it, but i do not know that it will interest you now, merely to hear it repeated. it is this: "last vacation, i was travelling in a remote and thinly settled country, among the mountains, in another state; i was riding with a gentleman on an almost unfrequented road. forests were all around us, and the houses were small and very few. "at length, as we were passing a humble and solitary dwelling, the gentleman said to me, 'there is a young woman sick in this house; should you like to go in and see her?' 'yes sir' said i, 'very much. she can have very few visiters i think, in this lonely place, and if you think she would like to see us, i should like to go.' "we turned our horses towards the door, and as we were riding up, i asked what was the matter with the young woman. "'consumption,' the gentleman replied, 'and i suppose she will not live long.' "at that moment we dismounted and entered the house. it was a very pleasant summer's afternoon, and the door was open. we entered and were received by an elderly lady, who seemed glad to see us. in one corner of the room was a bed, on which was lying the patient whom we had come to visit. she was pale and thin in her countenance, but there was a very calm and happy expression beaming in her eye. i went up to her bedside and asked her how she did. "i talked with her some time, and found that she was a christian. she did not seem to know whether she would get well again or not, and in fact, she did not seem to care much about it. she was evidently happy then, and believed she should continue so. she had been penitent for her sins, and sought and obtained forgiveness, and enjoyed, in her loneliness, not only the protection of god, but also his presence in her heart, diffusing peace and happiness there. when i came into the house, i said to myself, i pity, i am sure, a person who is confined by sickness in this lonely place, with nothing to interest or amuse her;' but when i came out, i said to myself, 'i do not pity her at all.'" never destroy the effect of such a communication as this, by attempting to follow it up with an exhortation, or with general remarks, vainly attempting to strengthen the impression. _never_, do i say? perhaps there may be some exceptions. but children are not reached by formal exhortations; their hearts are touched and affected in other ways. sometimes you must reprove, sometimes you must condemn. but indiscriminate and perpetual harangues about the guilt of impenitence, and earnest entreaties to begin a life of piety, only harden the hearts they are intended to soften, and consequently confirm those who hear them in the habits of sin. in the same way a multitude of other subjects, infinite in number and variety, may be brought before your pupils at stated seasons for religious instruction. it is unnecessary to give any more particular examples, but still it may not be amiss to suggest a few general principles, which ought to guide those who are addressing the young, on every subject, and especially on the subject of religion. . _make no effort to simplify language._ children always observe this, and are always displeased with it, unless they are very young; and it is not necessary. they can understand ordinary language well enough, if the _subject_ is within their comprehension, and treated in a manner adapted to their powers. if you doubt whether children can understand language, tell such a story as this, with ardor of tone and proper gesticulation, to a child only two or three years old; "i saw an enormous dog in the street the other day. he was sauntering along slowly, until he saw a huge piece of meat lying down on the ground. he grasped it instantly between his teeth and ran away with all speed, until he disappeared around a corner so that i could see him no more." in such a description, there is a large number of words which such a child would not understand if they stood alone, but the whole description would be perfectly intelligible. the reason is, the _subject_ is simple; the facts are such as a very little child would be interested in; and the connexion of each new word, in almost every instance, explains its meaning. that is the way by which children learn all language. they learn the meaning of words, not by definitions, but by their connexion in the sentences in which they hear them; and by long practice, they acquire an astonishing facility of doing this. 'tis true they sometimes mistake, but not often, and the teacher of children of almost any age, need not be afraid that he shall not be understood. there is no danger from his using the _language_ of men, if his subject, and the manner in which he treats it, and the form and structure of his sentences are what they ought to be. of course there may be cases, in, fact there often will be cases, where particular words will require special explanation, but they will be comparatively few, and instead of making efforts to avoid them, it will be better to let them come. the pupils will be interested and profited by the explanation. perhaps some may ask what harm it will do, to simplify language, when talking to children. "it certainly can do no injury," they may say, "and it diminishes all possibility of being misunderstood." it does injury in at least three ways. ( .) it disgusts the young persons to whom it is addressed, and prevents their being interested in what is said. i once met two children twelve years of age, who had just returned from hearing a very able discourse, delivered before a number of sabbath schools, assembled on some public occasion. "how did you like the discourse?" said i. "very well indeed," they replied, "only," said one of them, smiling, "he talked to us as if we were all little children." girls and boys however young, never consider themselves little children, for they can always look down upon some younger than themselves. they are mortified, when treated as though they could not understand what is really within the reach of their faculties. they do not like to have their powers underrated; and they are right in this feeling. it is common to all, old and young. ( ) children are kept back in learning language, if their teacher makes effort to _come down_, as it is called, to their comprehension in the use of words. notice that i say, _in the use of words_, for as i shall show presently, it is absolutely necessary to come down to the comprehension of children, in some other respects. if however, in the use of words, those who address children, confine themselves to such words as children already understand, how are they to make progress in that most important of all studies, the knowledge of language. many a mother keeps back her child, in this way, to a degree that is hardly conceivable; thus doing all in her power to perpetuate in the child an ignorance of its mother tongue. teachers ought to make constant efforts to increase their scholars' stock of words, by using new ones from time to time, taking care to explain them when the connexion does not do it for them. so that instead of _coming down_ to the language of childhood, he ought rather to go as far away from it, as he possibly can, without leaving his pupils behind him. ( ) but perhaps the greatest evil of this practice is, it satisfies the teacher. he thinks he addresses his pupils in the right manner, and overlooks, altogether, the real peculiarities, in which the power to interest the young depends. he talks to them in simple language, and wonders why they are not interested. he certainly is _plain_ enough. he is vexed with them for not attending to what he says, attributing it to their dulness or regardlessness of all that is useful or good, instead of perceiving that the great difficulty is his own want of skill. these three evils are sufficient to deter the teacher from the practice. . present your subject not in its _general views_, but in its _minute details_. this is the great secret of interesting the young. present it in its details, and in its practical exemplifications; do this with any subject whatever, and children will always be interested. to illustrate this, let us suppose two teachers, wishing to explain to their pupils the same subject, and taking the following opposite methods of doing it. one, at the close of school, addresses his charge as follows; "the moral character of any action, that is, whether it is right or wrong, depends upon the _motives_ with which it is performed. men look only at the outward conduct, but god looks at the heart. in order now that any action should be pleasing to god, it is necessary it should be performed from the motive of a desire to please him. "now there are a great many other motives of action which prevail among mankind, besides this right one. there is love of praise, love of money, affection for friends, &c." by the time the teacher has proceeded thus far, he finds, as he looks around the room, that the countenances of his pupils are assuming a listless and inattentive air. one is restless in his seat, evidently paying no attention. another has reclined his head upon his desk, lost in a reverie, and others are looking round the room, at one another, or at the door, restless and impatient, hoping the dull lecture will soon be over. the other teacher says; "i have thought of an experiment i might try, which would illustrate to you a very important subject. suppose i should call one of the boys, a., to me, and should say to him; 'i want you to go to your seat and transcribe for me a piece of poetry, as handsomely as you can. if it is written as well as you can possibly write it, i will give you cents.' suppose i say this to him privately, so that none of the rest of the boys can hear, and he goes to take his seat, and begins to work. you perceive that i have presented to him a motive to exertion." "yes sir," say the boys, all looking with interest at the teacher, wondering how this experiment is going to end. "well, what would that motive be?" "money." "the quarter of a dollar." "love of money," or perhaps other answers are heard, from the various parts of the room. "yes, love of money, it is called. now suppose i should call another boy, one with whom i was particularly acquainted, and, who, i should know would make an effort to please me, and should say to him, 'for a particular reason, i want you to copy this poetry'--giving him the same--'i wish you to copy it handsomely, for i wish to send it away, and have not time to copy it myself. can you do it as well as not?' "suppose the boy should say he could, and should take it to his seat, and begin; neither of the boys knowing what the other was doing. i should now have offered to this second boy a motive. would it be the same with the other?" "no sir." "what was the other?" "love of money." "what is this?" the boys hesitate. "it might be called," continues the teacher, "friendship. it is the motive of a vast number of the actions which are performed in this world. "do you think of any other common motive of action, besides love of money and friendship?" "love of honor," says one "fear," says another. "yes," continues the teacher, "both these are common motives. i might, to exhibit them, call two more boys, one after the other, and say to the one, i will thank you to go and copy this piece of poetry as well as you can. i want to send it to the school committee as a specimen of improvement made in this school. "to the other, i might say; 'you have been a careless boy to-day; you have not got your lessons well. now take your seat, and copy this poetry. do it carefully. unless you take pains, and do it as well as you possibly can, i shall punish you severely, before you go home.' "how many motives have i got now? four, i believe." "yes sir," say the boys. "love of money, friendship, love of honor, and fear. we called the first boy a.; let us call the others, b. c and d.; no, we shall remember better to call them by the name of their motives. we will call the first, m. for money; the second, f. for friendship; the third, h. for honor; and the last f.;--we have got an f. already; what shall we do? on the whole, it is of no consequence, we will have two f.'s, we shall remember not to confound them. "but there are a great many other motives entirely distinct from these. for example, suppose i should say to a fifth boy, 'will you copy this piece of poetry? it belongs to one of the little boys in school: he wants a copy of it, and i told him i would try to get some one to copy it for him.' this motive now would be benevolence; that is, if the boy, who was asked to copy it, was not particularly acquainted with the other, and did it chiefly to oblige him. we will call this boy b. for benevolence. "now suppose i call a sixth boy, and say to him, i have set four or five boys to work, copying this piece of poetry; now i want you to set down and see if you cannot do it better than any of them. no one of them knows that any other is writing, except you, but after the others are all done, i will compare them and see if yours is not the best.' this would be trying to excite emulation. we must call this boy then, e.--but the time i intended to devote to talking with you on this subject for to-day, is expired. perhaps, to-morrow, i will take up the subject again." the reader now will observe that the grand peculiarity of the instructions given by this last teacher, as distinguished from those of the first, consists in this; that the parts of the subject are presented _in detail_, and in _particular exemplification_. in the first case, the whole subject was despatched in a single, general, and comprehensive description; in the latter, it is examined minutely, one point being brought forward at a time. the discussions are enlivened too, by meeting and removing such little difficulties, as will naturally come up, in such an investigation. boys and girls will take an interest in such a lecture; they will regret to have it come to a conclusion, and will give their attention when the subject is again brought forward, on the following day. let us suppose the time for continuing the exercise to have arrived. the teacher resumes the discussion thus. "i was talking to you yesterday about the motives of action; how many had i made?" some say, "four," some "five," some "six." "can you name any of them?" the boys attempt to recollect them, and they give the names in the order in which they accidentally occur to the various individuals. of course, the words fear, emulation, honor, friendship, and others, come in confused and irregular sounds, from every part of the school-room. "you do not recollect the order," says the teacher, "and it is of no consequence, for the order i named was only accidental. now to go on with my account; suppose all these boys to sit down, and go to writing, each one acting under the impulse of the motive which had been presented to him individually. but in order to make the supposition answer my purpose, i must add two other cases. i will imagine that one of these boys is called away, a few minutes, and leaves his paper on his desk, and that another boy, of an ill-natured and morose disposition, happening to pass by and see his paper, thinks he will sit down and write upon it a few lines, just to plague and vex the one who was called away. we will also suppose that i call another boy to me, who, i have reason to believe, is a sincere christian, and say to him, 'here is a new duty for you to perform this afternoon. this piece of poetry is to be copied; now do it carefully and faithfully. you know that this morning you committed yourself to god's care during the day; now remember he has been watching you all the time, thus far, and he will be noticing you all the time you are doing this; he will be pleased if you do your duty faithfully.' "the boys thus all go to writing. now suppose a stranger should come in, and seeing them all busy, should say to me, "'what are all these boys doing?' "'they are writing.' "'what are they writing?' "'they are writing a piece of poetry.' "'they seem to be very busy; they are very industrious, good boys.' "'oh no! it is not by any means certain that they are _good_ boys.' "'i mean that they are good boys _now_; that they are doing right at _this time_.' "'_that_ is not certain; some of them are doing right and some are doing very wrong; though they are all writing the same piece of poetry.' "the stranger would perhaps look surprised while i said this, and would ask an explanation, and i might properly reply as follows. "'whether the boys are, at this moment, doing right, or wrong, depends not so much upon what they are doing, as upon the feelings of the heart with which they are doing it. i acknowledge that they are all doing the same thing outwardly,--they are all writing the same extract, and they are all doing it attentively and carefully, but they are thinking of very different things.' "'what are they thinking of?' "do you see that boy?' i might say, pointing to one of them. his name is m.' he is writing for money. he is saying to himself all the time, 'i hope i shall get the quarter of a dollar.' he is calculating what he shall buy with it, and every good or bad letter that he makes, he is considering the chance whether he shall succeed or fail in obtaining it.' "'what is the next boy to him thinking of?' "'his name is b. he is copying to oblige a little fellow, whom he scarcely knows, and is trying to make his copy handsome so as to give him pleasure. he is thinking how gratified his schoolmate will be when he receives it, and is forming plans to get acquainted with him.' "do you see that boy in the back seat. he has maliciously taken another boy's place just to spoil his work. he knows too that he is breaking the rules of the school, in being out of his place, but he stays, notwithstanding, and is delighting himself with thinking how disappointed and sad his schoolmate will be, when he comes in and finds his work spoiled, because he was depending on doing it all himself.' "'i see,' the stranger might say by this time, 'that there is a great difference among these boys; have you told me about them all?' "'no,' i might reply, 'there are several others. i will only mention one more. he sits in the middle of the second desk. he is writing carefully, simply because he wishes to do his duty and please god. he thinks that god is present, and loves him, and takes care of him, and he is obedient and grateful in return. i do not mean that he is all the time thinking of god, but love to him is his motive of effort.' "do you see now, boys, what i mean to teach you by this long supposition?" "yes sir." "i presume you do. perhaps it would be difficult for you to express it in words, i can express it in general terms, thus, "_our characters depend not on what we do, but on the spirit and motive with which we do it._ what i have been saying throws light upon one important verse in the bible, which i should like to have read. james have you a bible in your desk?" "yes sir." "will you turn to samuel xvi: . and then rise and read it. read it loud, so that all the school can hear." james reads as follows. "man looketh on the outward appearance, but god looketh on the heart." this is the way to reach the intellect and the heart of the young. go _into detail_. explain truth and duty, not in an abstract form, but exhibit it, _in actual and living examples_. ( .) be very cautious how you bring in the awful sanctions of religion, to assist you directly, in the discipline of your school. you will derive a most powerful indirect assistance, from the influence of religion in the little community which you govern. but this will be, through the prevalence of its spirit in the hearts of your pupils, and not from any assistance which you can usually derive from it in managing particular cases of transgression. many teachers make great mistakes in this respect. a bad boy, who has done something openly and directly subversive of the good order of the school, or the rights of his companions, is called before the master, who thinks that the most powerful weapon to wield against him is the bible. so while the trembling culprit stands before him, he administers to him a reproof, which consists of an almost ludicrous mixture of scolding, entreaty, religious instruction, and threatening of punishment. but such an occasion as this is no time to touch a bad boy's heart. he is steeled, at such a moment, against any thing but mortification, and the desire to get out of the hands of the master; and he has an impression, that the teacher appeals to religious principles, only to assist him to sustain his own authority. of course, religious truth, at such a time, can make no good impression. there may be exceptions to this rule. there doubtless are. i have found some; and every successful teacher who reads this, will probably call some to mind, some which have occurred in the course of his own experience. i am only speaking of what ought to be the general rule, which is, to reserve religious truths for moments of a different character altogether. bring the principles of the bible forward when the mind is calm, when the emotions are quieted, and all within is at rest; and in exhibiting them, be actuated not by a desire to make your duties of government easier, but to promote the real and permanent happiness of your charge. ( .) do not be eager to draw from your pupils, an expression of their personal interest in religious truth. lay before them, and enforce, by all the means in your power, the principles of christian duty, but do not converse with them for the purpose of gratifying your curiosity in regard to their piety, or your spiritual pride by counting up the numbers of those who have been led to piety by your influence. beginning to act from christian principles is the beginning of a new life, and it may be an interesting subject of inquiry to you, to ascertain how many of your pupils have experienced the change. but, in many cases, it would merely gratify curiosity to know. there is no question too, that in very many instances, the faint glimmering of religious interest, which would have kindled into a bright flame, is extinguished at once and perhaps for ever, by the rough inquiries of a religious friend. besides if you make inquiries, and form a definite opinion of your pupils, they will know that this is your practice, and many a one will repose in the belief that you consider him or her a christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those, who maintain the form and pretences of piety, without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. they trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. the best way, in fact the only way, to guard against this danger, especially with the young, is to show, by your manner of speaking and acting on this subject, at all times, that you regard a truly religious life, as the only evidence of piety;--and that consequently, however much interest your pupils may apparently take in religious instruction, they cannot know, and you cannot know, whether christian principle reigns within them, in any other way than by following them through life and observing how, and with what spirit, the various duties of it are performed. there are very many fallacious indications of piety; so fallacious and so plausible, that there are very few, even among intelligent christians, who are not often greatly deceived. "by their fruits ye shall know them," said the saviour, a direction sufficiently plain, one would think, and pointing to a test, sufficiently easy to be applied. but it is slow and tedious work to wait for fruits; and we accordingly seek a criterion, which will help us quicker to a result. you see your pupil serious and thoughtful. it is well: but it is not proof of piety. you see him deeply interested when you speak of his obligations to his maker, and the duties he owes to him. this is well; but it is no proof of piety. you know he reads his bible daily and offers his morning and evening prayers. when you speak to him of god's goodness, and of his past ingratitude, his bosom heaves with emotion, and the tear stands in his eye. it is all well. you may hope that he is going to devote his life to the service of god. but you cannot know; you cannot even believe, with any great confidence. these appearances are not piety. they are not conclusive evidences of it. they are only, in the young, faint grounds of hope, that the genuine fruits of piety will appear. i am aware that there are many persons, so habituated to judging with confidence of the piety of others, from some such indications as i have described, that they will think i carry my cautions to the extreme. perhaps i do; but the saviour said, "by their fruits ye shall know them," and it is safest to follow his direction. by the word fruits, however, our saviour unquestionably does not mean, the mere moral virtues of this life. the fruits to be looked at, are the fruits of _piety_, that is, indications of permanent attachment to the creator, and a desire to obey his commands. we must look for these. there is no objection to your giving particular individuals special instruction, adapted to their wants and circumstances. you may do this, by writing, or in other ways, but do not lead them to make up their minds fully that they are christians, in such a sense as to induce them to feel that the work is done. let them understand that becoming a christian is _beginning_ a work, not _finishing_ it. be cautious how you form an opinion even yourself on the question of the genuineness of their piety. be content not to know. you will be more faithful and watchful if you consider it uncertain, and they will be more faithful and watchful too. ( .) bring, very fully and frequently, before your pupils the practical duties of religion in all their details, especially their duties at home; to their parents and to their brothers and sisters. do not, however, allow them to mistake morality for religion. show them clearly what piety is, in its essence, and this you can do most successfully by exhibiting its effects. ( .) finally let me insert as the keystone of all that i have been saying in this chapter, be sincere, and ardent, and consistent, in your own piety. the whole structure which i have been attempting to build, will tumble into ruins without this. be constantly watchful and careful, not only to maintain intimate communion with god, and to renew it daily in your seasons of retirement, but guard your conduct. let piety control and regulate it. show your pupils that it makes you amiable, patient, forbearing, benevolent in little things, as well as in great things, and your example will co-operate with your instructions, and allure your pupils to walk in the paths which you tread. but no clearness and faithfulness in religious teaching will atone for the injury which a bad example will effect. conduct speaks louder than words, and no persons are more shrewd than the young, to discover the hollowness of empty professions, and the heartlessness of mere pretended interest in their good. * * * * * i am aware that this book may fall into the hands of some, who may take little interest in the subject of this chapter. to such i may perhaps owe an apology, for having thus fully discussed a topic, in which only a part of my readers can be supposed to be interested. my apology is this. it is obvious and unquestionable that we all owe allegiance to the supreme. it is so obvious and unquestionable, as to be entirely beyond the necessity of proof, for it is plain that nothing but such a bond of union, can keep the peace, among the millions of distinct intelligences with which the creation is filled. it is therefore the plain duty of every man, to establish that connexion between himself and his maker, which the bible requires, and to do what he can to bring others to the peace and happiness of piety. these truths are so plain that they admit of no discussion and no denial, and it seems to me highly unsafe, for any man to neglect or to postpone the performance of the duty which arises from them. a still greater hazard is incurred, when such a man having forty or fifty fellow beings almost entirely under his influence, leads them, by his example, away from their maker, and so far, that he must in many cases hopelessly confirm the separation. with these views i could not, when writing on the duties of a teacher of the young, refrain from bringing distinctly to view, this, which has so imperious a claim. chapter vi. the mt. vernon school. there is perhaps no way, by which teachers can, in a given time, do more to acquire a knowledge of their art, and an interest in it, than by visiting each others schools. it is not always the case, that any thing is observed by the visiter, which he can directly and wholly introduce into his own school; but what he sees, suggests to him modifications or changes, and it gives him, at any rate, renewed strength and resolution in his work, to see how similar objects are accomplished, or similar difficulties removed, by others. i have often thought, that there ought on this account, to be far greater freedom and frequency in the interchange of visits, than there is. next, however, to a visit to a school, comes the reading of a vivid description of it. i do not mean a cold, theoretical exposition of the general principles of its management and instruction, for these are essentially the same, in all good schools. i mean a minute account of the plans and arrangements by which these general principles are applied. suppose twenty, of the most successful teachers in new england would write such a description, each of his own school, how valuable would be the volume which should contain them! with these views, i have concluded to devote one chapter to a description of the school which has been for four years under my care. the account was originally prepared and _printed_, but not published, for the purpose of distribution among the scholars, simply because this seemed to be the easiest and surest method of making them, on their admission to the school, acquainted with its arrangements and plans. it is addressed, therefore, throughout, to a pupil, and i preserve its original form, as, by its being addressed to pupils, and intended to influence them, it is an example of the mode of address, and the kind of influence recommended in this work. it was chiefly designed for new scholars; a copy of it was presented to each, on the day of her admission to the school, and it was made her first duty to read it attentively. the system which it describes is one, which gradually grew up in the institution under the writer's care. the school was commenced with a small number of pupils, and without any system or plan whatever, and the one here described, was formed insensibly and by slow degrees, through the influence of various and accidental circumstances. i have no idea that it is superior to the plans of government and instruction adopted in many other schools. it is true that there must necessarily be _some_ system in every large school; but various instructers will fall upon different principles of organization, which will naturally be such as are adapted to the habits of thought and manner of instruction of their respective authors, and consequently each will be best for its own place. while, therefore, some system,--some methodical arrangement, is necessary in all schools, it is not necessary that it should be the same in all. it is not even desirable that it should be. i consider this plan, as only one among a multitude of others, each of which will be successful, not by the power of its intrinsic qualities, but just in proportion to the ability and faithfulness with which it is carried into effect. there may be features of this plan, which teachers who may read it, may be inclined to adopt. in other cases suggestions may occur to the mind of the reader, which may modify in some degree his present plans. others may merely be interested in seeing how others effect, what they, by easy methods, are equally successful in effecting. it is in these, and similar ways, that i have often myself been highly benefited in visiting schools, and in reading descriptions of them; and it is for such purposes, that i insert the account here. to a new scholar, on her admission to the mt. vernon school. as a large school is necessarily somewhat complicated in its plan, and as new scholars usually find that it requires some time, and gives them no little trouble, to understand the arrangements they find in operation here, i have concluded to write a brief description of these arrangements, by help of which, you will, i hope, the sooner feel at home in your new place of duty. that i may be more distinct and specific, i shall class what i have to say, under separate heads. i. your personal duty. your first anxiety as you come into the school-room, and take your seat among the busy multitude, if you are conscientiously desirous of doing your duty, will be, lest, ignorant as you are of the whole plan and of all the regulations of the institution, you should inadvertently do what will be considered wrong. i wish first then to put you at rest on this score. there is but one rule of this school. that you can easily keep. you will observe on one side of my desk a clock upon the wall, and upon the other a piece of apparatus that is probably new to you. it is a metallic plate upon which are marked in gilded letters, the words "_study hours_." this is upright, but it is so attached by its lower edge to its support, by means of a hinge, that it can fall over from above, and thus be in a _horizontal_ position; or it will rest in an _inclined_ position,--_half down_, as it is called. it is drawn up and let down by a cord passing over a pulley. when it passes either way, its upper part touches a bell, which gives all in the room notice of its motion. now when this "_study card_"[c] as the scholars call it, is _up_ so that the words "study hours" are presented to the view of the school, it is the signal for silence and study. there is then to be no communication and no leaving of seats except at the direction of teachers. [footnote c: this apparatus has been previously described. see p. .] when it is _half down_, each scholar may leave her seat and whisper, but she must do nothing which will disturb others. when it is _down_, all the duties of school are suspended and scholars are left entirely to their liberty. as this is the only rule of the school, it deserves a little more full explanation; for not only your progress in study, but your influence in promoting the welfare of the school, and consequently your peace and happiness while you are a member of it, will depend upon the strictness with which you observe it. whenever, then, the study card goes up, and you hear the sound of its little bell, immediately and instantaneously stop, whatever you are saying. if you are away from your seat go directly to it, and there remain, and forget in your own silent and solitary studies, so far as you can, all that are around you. you will remember that all _communication_ is forbidden. whispering, making signs, writing upon paper or a slate, bowing to any one,--and in fact, _every_ possible way, by which one person may have any sort of mental intercourse with another, is wrong. a large number of the scholars take a pride and pleasure in carrying this rule into as perfect an observance as possible. they say, that as this is the only rule with which i trouble them, they ought certainly to observe this faithfully. i myself however put it upon other ground. i am satisfied, that it is better and pleasanter for you to observe it most rigidly, if it is attempted to be enforced at all. you will ask, "cannot we obtain permission of you or of the teachers to leave our seats or to whisper, if it is necessary?" the answer is, "no." you must never ask permission of me or of the teachers. you can leave seats or speak at the _direction_ of the teachers, i. e. when they of their own accord, ask you to do it, but you are never to ask their permission. if you should, and if any teachers should give you permission, it would be of no avail. i have never given them authority to grant any permissions of the kind. you will then say, are we never on any occasion whatever to leave our seats in study hours? yes you are. there are two ways. . _at the direction of teachers._ going to and from recitations, is considered as at the _direction_ of teachers. so if a person is requested by a teacher to transact any business, or is elected to a public office, or appointed upon a committee,--leaving seats or speaking, so far as is really necessary for the accomplishing such a purpose, is considered as at the direction of teachers, and is consequently right. in the same manner, if a teacher should ask you individually, or give general notice to the members of class to come to her seat for private instruction, or to go to any part of the school-room for her, it would be right to do it. the distinction, you observe, is this. the teacher may _of her own accord_, direct any leaving of seats which she may think necessary to accomplish the objects of the school. she must not however, _at the request of an individual_ for the sake of her mere private convenience, give her permission to speak or to leave her seat. if for example a teacher should say to you in your class, "as soon as you have performed a certain work you may bring it to me,"--you would in bringing it, be acting under her _direction_ and would consequently do right. if however you should want a pencil and should ask her to give you leave to borrow it, even if she should give you leave, you would do wrong to go, for you would not be acting at her _direction_, but simply by her _consent_, and she has no authority to grant consent. . the second case in which you may leave your seat is when some very uncommon occurrence takes place which is sufficient reason for suspending all rules. if your neighbor is faint, you may speak to her and if necessary lead her out. if your mother or some other friend should come into the school-room you can go and sit with her upon the sofa, and talk about the school. and so in many other similar cases. be very careful not to abuse this privilege, and make slight causes the grounds of your exceptions. it ought to be a very clear case. if a young lady is unwell in a trifling degree, so as to need no assistance, you would evidently do wrong to talk to her. the rule, in fact, is very similar to that which all well bred people observe at church. they never speak or leave their seats unless some really important cause, such as sickness, requires them to break over all rules and go out. you have in the same manner, in really important cases, such as serious sickness in your own case or in that of your companions, or the coming in of a stranger, or any thing else equally extraordinary, power to lay aside any rule and to act as the emergency may require. in using this discretion however, be sure to be on the safe side; in such cases never ask permission. you must act on your own responsibility. _reasons for this rule._ when the school was first established, there was no absolute prohibition of whispering. each scholar was allowed to whisper in relation to her studies. they were often, very often, enjoined to be conscientious and faithful, but as might have been anticipated, the experiment failed. it was almost universally the practice to whisper more or less about subjects entirely foreign to the business of the school. this they all repeatedly acknowledged; and the scholars almost unanimously admitted, that the good of the school required the prohibition of all communication during certain hours. i gave them their choice, either always to ask permission when they wished to speak, or to have a certain time allowed for the purpose, during which free inter-communication might be allowed to all the school;--with the understanding, however, that out of this time, no permission should ever be asked or granted. they very wisely chose the latter plan, and the study card was constructed and put up to mark the times of free communication, and of silent study. the card was at first down every half hour for one or two minutes. the scholars afterwards thinking, that their intellectual habits would be improved and the welfare of the school promoted, by their having a longer time for uninterrupted study, of their own accord, without any influence from me, proposed that the card should be down only once an hour. this plan was adopted by them, by vote. i wish it to be understood that it was not _my_ plan, but _theirs_, and that i am at any time willing to have the study card down once in half an hour, whenever a majority of the scholars, voting by ballot, desire it. you will find that this system of having a distinct time for whispering, when all may whisper freely, all communication being entirely excluded at other times, will at first give you some trouble. it will be hard for you, if you are not accustomed to it, to learn conscientiously and faithfully to comply. besides, at first you will often need some little information, or an article which you might obtain in a moment, but which you cannot innocently ask for till the card is down, and this might keep you waiting an hour. you will, however, after a few such instances, soon learn to make your preparations before hand, and if you are a girl of enlarged views and elevated feelings, you will good humoredly acquiesce in suffering a little inconvenience yourself, for the sake of helping to preserve those _distinct_ and well _defined_ lines, by which all boundaries must be marked, in a large establishment, if order and system are to be preserved at all. though at first you may experience a little inconvenience, you will soon take pleasure in the scientific strictness of the plan. it will gratify you to observe the profound stillness of the room where a hundred are studying. you will take pleasure in observing the sudden transition from the silence of study hours to the joyful sounds, and the animating activity of recess, when the study card goes down; and then when it rises again at the close of the recess, you will be gratified to observe how suddenly the sounds which have filled the air and made the room so lively a scene are hushed into silence by the single and almost inaudible touch of that little bell. you will take pleasure in this, for young and old always take pleasure in the strict and rigid operation of _system_, rather than in laxity and disorder. i am convinced also that the scholars do like the operation of this plan for i do not have to make any efforts to sustain it. with the exception that occasionally, usually not oftener than once in several months, i allude to the subject, and that chiefly on account of a few careless and unfaithful individuals, i have little to say or to do to maintain the authority of the study card. most of the scholars obey it of their own accord, implicitly and cordially. and i believe they consider this faithful monitor, not only one of the most useful, but one of the most agreeable friends they have. we should not only regret its services, but miss its company, if it should be taken away. this regulation then, viz., to abstain from all communication with one another, and from all leaving of seats, at certain times which are marked by the position of the study card, is the only one which can properly be called a _rule_ of the school. there are a great many arrangements and plans relating to the _instruction_ of the pupils, but no other specific _rules_ relating to _their conduct_. you are, of course, while in the school, under the same moral obligations which rest upon you elsewhere. you must be kind to one another, respectful to superiors, and quiet and orderly in your deportment. you must do nothing to encroach upon another's rights, or to interrupt and disturb your companions in their pursuits. you must not produce disorder, or be wasteful of the public property, or do any thing else which you might know is in itself wrong. but you are to avoid these things, not because there are any rules in this school against them, for there are none;--but because they are in _themselves wrong_;--in all places and under all circumstances, wrong. the universal and unchangeable principles of duty are the same here as elsewhere. i do not make rules pointing them out, but expect that you will, through your own conscience and moral principle, discover and obey them. such a case as this, for example, once occurred. a number of little girls began to amuse themselves in recess with running about among the desks in pursuit of one another, and they told me, in excuse for it, that they did not know that it was "_against the rule_." "it is not against the rule;" said i, "i have never made any rule against running about among the desks." "then," asked they, "did we do wrong?" "do you think it would be a good plan," i inquired, "to have it a common amusement in the recess, for the girls to hunt each other among the desks?" "no sir," they replied simultaneously. "why not? there are some reasons i do not know, however whether you will have the ingenuity to think of them." "we may start the desks from their places," said one. "yes," said i, "they are fastened down very slightly, so that i may easily alter their position." "we might upset the inkstands," said another. "sometimes," added a third, "we run against the scholars who are sitting in their seats." "it seems then you have ingenuity enough to discover the reasons. why did not these reasons prevent your doing it." "we did not think of them before." "true; that is the exact state of the case. now when persons are so eager to promote their own enjoyment, as to forget the rights and the comforts of others, it is _selfishness_. now is there any rule in this school against selfishness." "no sir." "you are right. there is not. but selfishness is wrong,--very wrong, in whatever form it appears,--here, and every where else; and that, whether i make any rules against it or not." you will see from this anecdote that though there is but one rule of the school, i by no means intend to say that there is only _one way of doing wrong here_. that would be very absurd. you _must not do any thing which you may know, by proper reflection, to be in itself wrong_. this however is an universal principle of duty, not a _rule_ of the mt. vernon school. if i should attempt to make rules which would specify and prohibit every possible way by which you might do wrong, my laws would be innumerable. and even then i should fail of securing my object, unless you had the disposition to do your duty. no legislation can enact laws as fast as a perverted ingenuity can find means to evade them. you will perhaps ask what will be the consequence if we transgress, either the single rule of the school, or any of the great principles of duty. in other words what are the punishments which are resorted to in the mt. vernon school? the answer is there are no punishments. i do not say that i should not, in case all other means should fail, resort to the most decisive measures to secure obedience and subordination. most certainly, i should do so, as it would plainly be my duty to do it. if you should at any time be so unhappy as to violate your obligations to yourself, to your companions, or to me,--should you misimprove your time, or exhibit an unkind or a selfish spirit, or be disrespectful or insubordinate to your teachers,--i should go frankly and openly, but kindly to you, and endeavor to convince you of your fault. i should very probably do this by addressing a note to you, as i suppose this should be less unpleasant to you than a conversation. in such a case, i shall hope that you will as frankly and openly reply; telling me whether you admit your fault and are determined to amend, or else informing me of the contrary. i shall wish you to be _sincere_, and then i shall know what course to take next. but as to the consequences which may result to you if you should persist in what is wrong, it is not necessary that you should know them before hand. they who wander from duty, always plunge themselves into troubles they do not anticipate; and if you do what, at the time you are doing it, you know to be wrong, it will not be unjust that you should suffer the consequences, even if they were not beforehand understood and expected. this will be the case with you all through life, and it will be the case here. i say it _will_ be the case here; i ought rather to say that it _will be_ the case, should you be so unhappy as to do wrong and to persist in it. such cases however never occur. at least they occur so seldom, and at intervals so great, that every thing of the nature of punishment, that is, the depriving a pupil of any enjoyment, or subjecting her to any disgrace, or giving her pain in any way in consequence of her faults, except the simple pain of awakening conscience in her bosom is almost entirely unknown. i hope that you will always be ready to confess and forsake your faults, and endeavor while you remain in school, to improve in character, and attain as far as possible, every moral excellence. i ought to remark before dismissing this topic, that i place very great confidence in the scholars in regard to their moral conduct and deportment, and they fully deserve it. i have no care and no trouble in what is commonly called _the government of the school_. neither myself nor any one else is employed in any way in watching the scholars, or keeping any sort of account of them. i should not at any time hesitate to call all the teachers in an adjoining room, leaving the school alone for half an hour, and i should be confident, that at such a time order, and stillness, and attention to study would prevail as much as ever. the scholars would not look to see whether i was in my desk, but whether the study card was up. the school was left in this way, half an hour every day, during a quarter, that we might have a teachers' meeting, and the school went on, generally quite as well, to say the least, as when the teachers were present. one or two instances of irregular conduct occurred. i do not now recollect precisely what they were. they were however, fully acknowledged and not repeated, and i believe the scholars were generally more scrupulous and faithful then than at other times. they would not betray the confidence reposed in them. this plan was continued until it was found more convenient to have the teachers' meeting in the afternoons. when any thing wrong is done in school, i generally state the case and request the individuals who have done it to let me know who they are. they do it sometimes by notes and sometimes in conversation,--but they always do it. the plan _always_ succeeds. the scholars all know that there is nothing to be feared from confessing faults to me;--but that on the other hand, it is a most direct and certain way to secure returning peace and happiness. i can illustrate this by describing a case which actually occurred. though the description is not to be considered so much an accurate account of what occurred in a particular case, as an illustration of the _general spirit and manner_ in which such cases are disposed of. i accidentally understood, that some of the younger scholars were in the habit, during recesses and after school, of ringing the door bell and then running away to amuse themselves with the perplexity of their companions, who should go to the door and find no one there. i explained in a few words, one day, to the school, that this was wrong. "how many," i then asked, "have ever been put to the trouble to go to the door, when the bell has thus been rung? they may rise." a very large number of scholars stood up. those who had done the mischief were evidently surprised at the extent of the trouble they had occasioned. "now," i continued, "i think all will be convinced that the trouble which this practice has occasioned to the fifty or sixty young ladies, who cannot be expected to find amusement in such a way, is far greater than the pleasure it can have given to the few who are young enough to have enjoyed it. therefore it was wrong. do you think the girls who rang the bell might have known this, by proper reflection?" "yes sir," the school generally answered. "i do not mean," said i, "if they had set themselves formally at work to think about the subject; but with such a degree of reflection as ought reasonably to be expected of little girls, in the hilarity of recess and of play. "yes sir," was still the reply, but fainter than before. "there is one way by which i might ascertain whether you were old enough to know that this was wrong, and that is by asking those who have refrained from doing this, because they supposed it would be wrong, to rise. then if some of the youngest scholars in school should stand up, as i have no doubt they would, it would prove that all might have known, if they had been equally conscientious. but if i ask those to rise who have _not_ rung the bell, i shall make known to the whole school who they are that have done it, and i wish that the exposure of faults should be private, unless it is _necessary_ that it should be public. i will therefore not do it. i have myself however, no doubt that all might have known that it was wrong." "there is," continued i, "another injury which must grow out of such a practice. this i should not have expected the little girls could think of. in fact, i doubt whether any in school will think of it. can any one tell what it is?" no one replied. "i should suppose that it would lead you to disregard the bell when it rings, and that consequently a gentleman or lady might sometimes ring in vain; the scholars near the door, saying, 'oh it is only the little girls.'" "yes sir," was heard from all parts of the room. i found from farther inquiry that this had been the case, and i closed by saying, "i am satisfied, that those who have inadvertently fallen into this practice are sorry for it, and that if i should leave it here, no more cases of it would occur, and this is all i wish. at the same time, they who have done this, will feel more effectually relieved from the pain which having done wrong must necessarily give them, if they individually acknowledge it to me. i wish therefore that all who have done so, would write me notes stating the facts. if any one does not do it, she will punish herself severely, for she will feel for many days to come, that while her companions were willing to acknowledge their faults, she wished to conceal and cover hers. conscience will reproach her bitterly for her insincerity, and whenever she hears the sound of the door bell, it will remind her not only of her fault, but of what is far worse _her willingness to appear innocent when she was really guilty_." before the close of the school i had eight or ten notes acknowledging the fault, describing the circumstances of each case, and expressing promises to do so no more. it is by such methods as this, rather than by threatening and punishment, that i manage the cases of discipline which from time to time occur, but even such as this, slight as it is, occur very seldom. weeks and weeks sometimes elapse without one. when they do occur they are always easily settled by confession and reform. sometimes i am asked to _forgive_ the offence. but i never forgive. i have no power to forgive. god must forgive you when you do wrong, or the burden must remain. my duty is, to take measures to prevent future transgression, and to lead those who have been guilty of it, to god for pardon. if they do not go to him, though they may satisfy me, as principal of a school, by not repeating the offence,--they must remain _unforgiven_. i can _forget_, and i do forget. for example, in this last case, i have not the slightest recollection of any individual who was engaged in it. the evil was entirely removed, and had it not afforded me a convenient illustration here, perhaps i should never have thought of it again,--still it may not yet be _forgiven_. it may seem strange that i should speak so seriously of god's forgiveness for such a trifle as that. does he notice a child's ringing a door bell in play? he notices when a child is willing to yield to temptation, to do what she knows to be wrong, and to act, even in the slightest trifle, from a selfish disregard for the convenience of others. this spirit he always notices, and though i may stop any particular form of its exhibition, it is for him alone to forgive it and to purify the heart from its power. but i shall speak more particularly on this subject under the head of religious instruction. ii. order of daily exercises. there will be given you when you enter the school a blank schedule, in which the divisions of each forenoon for one week are marked, and in which your own employments for every half hour are to be written. a copy of this is inserted on page . * * * * * this schedule, when filled up, forms a sort of a map of the week, in which you can readily find what are your duties for any particular time. the following description will enable you better to understand it. _opening of the school._ the first thing which will call your attention as the hour for the commencement of the school approaches in the morning, is the ringing of a bell, five minutes before the time arrives, by the regulator, who sits at the curtained desk before the study card. one minute before the time, the bell is rung again, which is the signal for all to take their seats and prepare for the opening of the school. when the precise moment arrives, the study card is drawn up, and at the sound of its little bell, all the scholars recline their heads upon their desks and unite with me in a very short prayer for god's protection and blessing during the day. i adopted the plan of allowing the scholars to sit, because i thought it would be pleasanter for them, and they have in return been generally, so far as i know, faithful in complying with my wish that they would all assume the posture proposed, so that the school may present the uniform and serious aspect which is proper, when we are engaged in so solemn a duty. if you move your chair back a little, you will find the posture not inconvenient, but the only reward you will have for faithfully complying with the general custom is the pleasure of doing your duty, for no one watches you, and you would not be called to account should you neglect to conform. after the prayer we sing one or two verses of a hymn. the music is led by the piano; and we wish all to join in it who can sing. the exercises which follow are exhibited to the eye by the following diagram. mount vernon school. schedule of studies. . _miss_ +-------+----------+------------+-----+-------------+-----+-----------+ | | first | second | | third | | fourth | | | hour. | hour. | | hour. | | hour. | +-------+----------+------------+--+--+-------------+--+--+-----------+ | | evening | languages. |g.|r.|mathematics. |g.|r.| sections. | | | lessons. | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+--+------+------+--+--+-----+-----+ |monday.| | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+ +------+------+--+ +-----+-----+ | tues. | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+ +------+------+--+ +-----+-----+ | wed. | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+ +------+------+--+ +-----+-----+ |thurs. | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+ +------+------+--+ +-----+-----+ |friday.| | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+ +------+------+--+ +-----+-----+ | sat. | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+-----+------+-----+--+--+------+------+--+--+-----+-----+ _first hour.--evening lessons._ (see plan; page .) we then, as you will see by the schedule, commence the first hour of the day. it is marked evening lessons, because most, though not all, of the studies are intended to be prepared out of school. these studies are miscellaneous in their character, comprising geography, history, natural and intellectual philosophy, and natural history. this hour, like all the other hours for study, is divided into two equal parts, some classes reciting in the first part, and others in the second. a bell is always rung _five minutes before the time_ for closing the recitation, to give the teachers notice that their time is nearly expired, and then again _at the time_, to give notice to new classes to take their places. thus you will observe that five minutes before the half hour expires, the bell will ring; soon after which the classes in recitation will take their seats. precisely at the end of the half hour, it will ring again, when new classes will take their places. in the same manner notice is given five minutes before the second half of the hour expires, and so in all the other three hours. at the end of the first hour, the study card will be let half down, five minutes, and you will perceive that the sound of its bell will immediately produce a decided change in the whole aspect of the room. it is the signal, as has been before explained, for universal permission to whisper, and to leave seats, though not for loud talking or play, so that those who wish to continue their studies may do so without interruption. when the five minutes has expired, the card goes up again, and its sound immediately restores silence and order. _second hour.--languages._ (see plan.) we then commence the second hour of the school. this is devoted to the study of the languages. the latin, french, and english classes recite at this time. by english classes i mean those studying the english _as a language_, i. e. classes in grammar, rhetoric, and composition. the hour is divided as the first hour is, and the bell is rung in the same way, i. e. at the close of each half hour, and also five minutes before the close, to give the classes notice that the time for recitation is about to expire. _first general exercise._ (see plan.) you will observe then, that there follows upon the schedule, a quarter of an hour marked g. that initial stands for general exercise, and when it arrives each pupil is to lay aside her work, and attend to any exercise which may be proposed. this quarter of an hour is appropriated to a great variety of purposes. sometimes i give a short and familiar lecture on some useful subject connected with science or art, or the principles of duty. sometimes we have a general reading lesson. sometimes we turn the school into a bible class. again the time is occupied in attending to some general _business_ of the school. the bell is rung one minute before the close of the time, and when the period appropriated to this purpose has actually expired, the study card, for the first time in the morning, is let entirely down, and the room is at once suddenly transformed into a scene of life and motion and gaiety. _first recess._ (see plan.) the time for the recess is a quarter of an hour, and as you will see, it is marked r. on the schedule. we have various modes of amusing ourselves and finding exercise and recreation in recesses. sometimes the girls bring their battledoors to school. sometimes they have a large number of soft balls, with which they amuse themselves. a more common amusement is marching to the music of the piano. for this purpose, a set of signals by the whistle has been devised, by which commands are communicated to the school. in these and similar amusements the recess passes away, and one minute before it expires the bell is rung, to give notice of the approach of study hours. at this signal the scholars begin to prepare for a return to the ordinary duties of school, and when at the full expiration of the recess, the study card again goes up, silence, and attention, and order is immediately restored. _third hour--mathematics._ (see plan.) there follows next, as you will see by reference to the schedule, an hour marked mathematics. it is time for studying and reciting arithmetic, algebra, geometry and similar studies. it is divided as the previous hours were, into two equal parts, and the bell is rung as has been described, five minutes before the close, and precisely at the close of each half hour. _second general exercise.--business._ (see plan.) then follows two quarter hours, appropriated like those heretofore described, the first to a general exercise, the second to a recess. at the first of these, the general business of the school is transacted. as this business will probably appear new to you, and will attract your attention, i will describe its nature and design. at first you will observe a young lady rise at the secretary's desk, to read a journal of what was done the day before. the notices which i gave, the arrangements i made,--the subjects discussed and decided,--and in fact every thing important and interesting in the business or occurrences of the preceding day--is recorded by the secretary of the school, and read at this time. this journal ought not to be a mere dry record of votes and business, but as far as possible, an interesting description in a narrative style, of the occurrences of the day. the secretary must keep a memorandum, and ascertain that every thing important really finds a place in the record, but she may employ any good writer in school to prepare, from her minutes, the full account. after the record is read, you will observe me take from a little red morocco wrapper, which has been brought to my desk, a number of narrow slips of paper, which i am to read aloud. in most assemblies it is customary for any person wishing it, to rise in his place, and propose any plan, or as it is called, "make any motion" that he pleases. it would be unpleasant for a young lady to do this, in presence of a hundred companions, and we have consequently resorted to another plan. the red wrapper is placed in a part of the room, accessible to all, and any one who pleases, writes upon a narrow slip of paper anything she wishes to lay before the school, and deposits it there, and at the appointed time, the whole are brought to me. these propositions are of various kinds. i can perhaps best give you an idea of them, by such specimens as occur to me. "a. b. resigns her office of copyist, as she is about to leave school." "proposed, that a class in botany be formed. there are many who would like to join it." "when will vacation commence?" "proposed, that a music committee be appointed, so that we can have some marching in recess." "proposed that school begin at nine o'clock." "mr. abbott. will you have the goodness to explain to us what is meant by the veto message." "proposed that we have locks upon our desks." you see that the variety is very great, and there are usually from four or five to ten or fifteen of such papers daily. you will be at liberty to make in this way, any suggestion or inquiry, or to propose any change you please in any part of the instruction or administration of the school. if any thing dissatisfies you, you ought not to murmur at it in private, or complain of it to your companions; thus injuring, to no purpose, both your own peace and happiness and theirs,--but you ought immediately to bring up the subject in the way above described, that the evil may be removed. i receive some of the most valuable suggestions in this way, from the older and more reflecting pupils. these suggestions are read. sometimes i decide myself. sometimes i say the pupils may decide. sometimes i ask their opinion and wishes, and then, after taking them into consideration, come to a conclusion. for example, i will insert a few of these propositions, as these papers are called, describing the way in which they would be disposed of. most of them are real cases. "mr. abbott. the first class in geography is so large that we have not room in the recitation seats. cannot we have another place?" after reading this, i should perhaps say, "the class in geography may rise and be counted." they rise. those in each division are counted by the proper officer, as will hereafter be explained, and the numbers are reported aloud to me. it is all done in a moment. "how many of you think you need better accommodations?" if a majority of hands are raised, i say, "i wish the teacher of that class would ascertain whether any other place of recitation is vacant, or occupied by a smaller class at that time, and report the case to me." "proposed, that we be allowed to walk upon the common in the recesses." "i should like to have some plan formed, by which you can walk on the common in recesses, but there are difficulties. if all should go out together, it is probable that some would be rude and noisy, and that others would come back tardy and out of breath. besides, as the recess is short, so many would be in haste to prepare to go out, that there would be a great crowd and much confusion in the ante-room and passage ways. i do not mention these as insuperable objections, but only as difficulties which there must be some plan to avoid. perhaps, however, they cannot be avoided. do any of you think of any plan?" i see perhaps two or three hands raised, and call upon the individuals by name, and they express their opinions. one says that a part can go out at a time. another proposes that those who are tardy one day should not go out again, &c. "i think it possible that a plan can be formed on these or some such principles. if you will appoint a committee who will prepare a plan, and mature its details, and take charge of the execution of it, you may try the experiment. i will allow it to go on as long as you avoid the evils i have above alluded to." a committee is then raised to report in writing at the business hour of the following day. "proposed, that the study card be down every half hour." "you may decide this question yourselves. that you may vote more freely, i wish you to vote by ballot. the boxes will be open during the next recess. the vote-receivers will write the question, and place it upon the boxes. all who feel interested in the subject, may carry in their votes, ay or nay. when the result is reported to me i will read it to the school." * * * * * in this and similar ways the various business brought up is disposed of. this custom is useful to the scholars, for it exercises and strengthens their judgment and their reflecting powers more than almost any thing besides; so that if interesting them in this way in the management of the school, were of no benefit to me, i should retain the practice, as most valuable to them. but it is most useful to me and to the school. i think nothing has contributed more to its prosperity than the active interest which the scholars have always taken in its concerns, and the assistance they have rendered me in carrying my plans into effect. you will observe that in transacting this business, very little is actually done by myself, except making the ultimate decision. all the details of business are assigned to teachers, or to officers and committees appointed for the purpose. by this means we despatch business very rapidly. the system of offices will be explained in another place; but i may say here that all appointments and elections are made in this quarter hour, and by means of the assistance of these officers the transaction of business is so facilitated that much more can sometimes be accomplished than you would suppose possible. i consider this period as one the most important in the whole morning. _second recess._ (see plan.) after the expiration of the quarter hour above described, the study card is dropped, and a recess succeeds. _fourth hour.--sections._ (see plan.) in all the former part of the day the scholars are divided into _classes_, according to their proficiency in particular branches of study, and they resort to their _recitations_ for _instruction_. they now are divided into six _sections_ as we call them, and placed under the care of _superintendents_ not for instruction, but for what may be called supervision. _teaching_ a pupil is not all that is necessary to be done for her in school. there are many other things, to be attended to--such as supplying her with the various articles necessary for her use,--seeing that her desk is convenient,--that her time is well arranged,--that she has not too much to do, nor too little,--and that no difficulty which can be removed, obstructs her progress in study, or her happiness in school. the last hour is appropriated to this purpose, with the understanding, however, that such a portion of it as is not wanted by the superintendent, is to be spent in study. you will see then, when the last hour arrives, that all the scholars go in various directions, to the meetings of their respective sections. here they remain as long as the superintendent retains them. sometimes they adjourn almost immediately; perhaps after having simply attended to the distribution of pens for the next day; at other times they remain during the hour, attending to such exercises as the superintendent may plan. the design, however, and nature of this whole arrangement, i shall explain more fully in another place. _close of the school._ as the end of the hour approaches, five minutes notice is given by the bell, and when the time arrives, the study card is half dropped for a moment before the closing exercises. when it rises again the room is restored to silence and order. we then sing a verse or two of a hymn, and commend ourselves to god's protection in a short prayer. as the scholars raise their heads from the posture of reverence they have assumed, they pause a moment till the regulator lets down the study card, and the sound of its bell is the signal that our duties at school are ended for the day. iii. instruction and supervision of pupils. for the instruction of the pupils, the school is divided into _classes_, and for their general supervision, into _sections_, as has been intimated in the preceding chapter. the head of a _class_ is called a _teacher_, and the head of a _section_ a _superintendent_. the same individual may be both the teacher of a class, and the superintendent of a section. the two offices are, however, entirely distinct in their nature and design. as you will perceive by recalling to mind the daily order of exercises, the classes meet and recite during the first three hours of the school, and the sections assemble on the fourth and last. we shall give each a separate description. . classes. the object of the division into classes is _instruction_. whenever it is desirable that several individuals should pursue a particular study, a list of their names is made out, a book selected, a time for recitation assigned, a teacher appointed, and the exercises begin. in this way a large number of classes have been formed, and the wishes of parents or the opinion of the principal, and in many cases that of the pupil, determines how many and what shall be assigned to each individual. a list of these classes, with the average age of the members, the name of the teacher, and the time of recitation, is posted in a conspicuous place, and public notice is given whenever a new class is formed. you will therefore have the opportunity to know all the arrangements of school in this respect, and i wish you to exercise your own judgment and discretion a great deal, in regard to your studies. i do not mean i expect you to _decide_, but to _reflect_ upon them. look at the list, and consider what am most useful for you. propose to me or to your parents, changes, whenever you think any are necessary; and when you finish one study, reflect carefully, yourself, on the question what you shall next commence. the scholars prepare their lessons when they please. they are expected to be present and prepared at the time of recitation, but they make the preparation when it is most convenient. the more methodical and systematic of the young ladies, mark the times of _study_ as well as of _recitation_ upon their schedules, so that the employment of their whole time at school is regulated by a systematic plan. you will observe too, that by this plan of having a great many classes reciting through the first three hours of the morning, every pupil can be employed as much or as little as her parents please. in a case of ill health, she may, as has often been done in such cases at the request of parents, join one or two classes only, and occupy the whole forenoon in preparing for them, and be entirely free from school duties at home. or she may, as is much more frequently the case, choose to join a great many classes, so as to fill up, perhaps, her whole schedule with recitations, in which case she must prepare all her lessons at home. it is the duty of teachers to take care, however, when a pupil pleads want of time as a reason for being unprepared in any lesson, that the case is fully examined, that it may be ascertained whether the individual has joined too many classes, in which case some one should be dropped, and thus the time and the employments of each individual should be so adjusted as to give her constant occupation _in school_, and as much more as her parents may desire. by this plan of the classes, each scholar goes on just as rapidly in her studies, as her time, and talents, and health will allow. no one is kept back by the rest. each class goes on regularly and systematically, all its members keeping exactly together in that study, but the various members of it will have joined a greater or less number of other classes, according to their age, or abilities, or progress in study, so that all will or may have full employment for their time. when you first enter the school, you will, for a day or two, be assigned to but few classes, for your mind will be distracted by the excitement of new scenes and pursuits, and the intellectual effort necessary for _joining_ a class is greater than that requisite for _going on_ with it, after being once under way. after a few days you will come to me and say, perhaps, (for this is ordinarily the process:) "mr. abbott, i think i have time for some more studies." "i will thank you to bring me your schedule," i say in reply, "so that i can see what you have now to do." by glancing my eye over the schedule in such a case, i see in a moment what duties have been already assigned you, and from my general schedule, containing all the studies of the school, i select what would be most suitable for you, after conferring with you about your past pursuits, and your own wishes or those of your parents in regard to your future course. additions are thus made, until your time is fully occupied. * * * * * the manner of recitation in the classes, is almost boundlessly varied. the design is not to have you commit to memory what the book contains, but to understand and digest it,--to incorporate it fully into your own mind, that it may come up in future life, in such a form as you wish it for use. do not then, in ordinary cases, endeavor to fix _words_, but _ideas_ in your minds. conceive clearly,--paint distinctly to your imagination what is described,--contemplate facts in all their bearings and relations, and thus endeavor to exercise the judgment and the thinking and reasoning powers, rather than the mere memory, upon the subjects which will come before you. . sections. in describing the order of daily exercises, i alluded to the _sections_ which assemble in the last hour of the school. it is necessary that i should fully describe the system of sections, as it constitutes a very important part of the plan of the school. besides giving the scholars the necessary intellectual instruction, there are, as i have already remarked, a great many other points which must receive attention, in order to promote their progress, and to secure the regular operation and general welfare of the school. these various points have something common in their nature, but it is difficult to give them a common name. they are such as supplying the pupils with pens and paper, and stationary of other kinds,--becoming acquainted with each individual, ascertaining that she has enough, and not too much to do,--arranging her work so that no one of her duties shall interfere with another,--assisting her to discover and to correct her faults,--and removing any sources of difficulty or causes of discontent, which may gradually come in her way. these, and a multitude of similar points constituting what may be called the general _administration_ of the school, become, when the number of pupils is large, a most important branch of the teacher's duty. to accomplish these objects more effectually, the school is divided into six sections, arranged not according to proficiency in particular studies, as the several classes are, but according to _age and general maturity of mind_. each one of these sections is assigned to the care of a superintendent. these superintendents, it is true, during most of school hours are also teachers. their duties however as _teachers_, and as _superintendents_ are entirely distinct. i shall briefly enumerate the duties which devolve upon her in the latter capacity. . a superintendent ought to prepare an exact list of the members of her section, and to become intimately acquainted with them, so as to be as far as possible their friend and confidant, and to feel a stronger interest in their progress in study and their happiness in school, and a greater personal attachment to them than to any other scholars. . she is to superintend the preparation of their schedules,--to see that each one has enough and not too much to do, by making known to me the necessity of a change where such necessity exists;--to see that the schedules are submitted to the parents, and that their opinion, or suggestions if they wish to make any, are reported to me. . she is to take care that all the daily wants of her section are supplied,--that all have pens and paper, and desks of suitable height. if any are new scholars, she ought to interest herself in assisting them to become acquainted in school,--if they are friendless and alone, to find companions for them, and to endeavor in every way, to make their time pass pleasantly and happily. . to watch the characters of the members of her section. to inquire of their several teachers as to the progress they make in study, and the faithfulness and punctuality with which they prepare their lessons. she ought to ascertain whether they are punctual at school, and regular in their habits,--whether their desks are neat and well arranged, and their exercises carefully executed. she ought to correct, through her own influence, any evils of this kind she may find, or else immediately to refer the cases where this cannot be done, to me. the better and the more pleasantly to accomplish the object of exerting a favorable influence upon the characters of the members of their sections, the superintendents ought often to bring up subjects connected with moral and religious duty in section meetings. this may be done in the form of subjects assigned for composition, or proposed for free discussion in writing or conversation, or, the superintendents may write themselves, and read to the section the instructions they wish to give. . though the superintendents as such, have necessarily speaking, no _teaching_ to do, still they ought particularly to secure the progress of every pupil in what may be called the _essential_ studies, such as reading, writing, and spelling. for this purpose they either see that their pupils are going on successfully in classes in school, in these branches, or they may attend to them in the section, provided that they never allow such instruction to interfere with their more appropriate and important duties. in a word, the superintendents are to consider the members of their sections as pupils confided to their care, and they are not merely to discharge mechanically any mere routine of duty, such as can be here pointed out, but to exert all their powers,--their ingenuity, their knowledge of human character, their judgment and discretion in every way, to secure for each of those committed to their care, the highest benefits which the institution to which they belong can afford. they are to keep a careful and faithful record of their plans and of the history of their respective sections, and to endeavor, as faithfully and as diligently, to advance the interests of the members of them, as if the sections were separate and independent schools of their own. a great responsibility is thus evidently intrusted to them, but not a great deal of _power_. they ought not to make changes, except in very plain cases, without referring the subject to me. they ought not to make rash experiments, or even to try many new plans without first obtaining my approval of them. they ought to refer all cases which they cannot easily manage, to my care. they ought to understand the distinction between _seeing that a thing is done_, and _doing it_. for example, if a superintendent thinks that one of her section is in too high a class in arithmetic, her duty is not to undertake, by her own authority, to remove her to a lower one, for, as superintendent, she has no authority over arithmetic classes; nor should she go the opposite extreme of saying, "i have no authority over arithmetic classes, and therefore i have nothing to do with this case." she ought to go to the teacher of the class to which her pupil had been unwisely assigned, converse with her, obtain her opinion, then find some other class more suited to her attainments, and after fully ascertaining all the facts in the case, bring them to me, that i may make the change. this is _superintendence_;--_looking over_ the condition and progress of the scholar. the superintendents have thus great responsibility, and yet comparatively little power. they accomplish a great deal of good, and in its ordinary course it is by their direct personal efforts; but in making changes and remedying defects and evils, they act generally in a different way. the last hour of school is devoted to the sections. no classes recite then, but the sections meet, if the superintendents wish, and attend to such exercises as they provide. each section has its own organization, its own officers and plans. these arrangements of course, vary in their character according to the ingenuity and enterprise of the superintendents, and more especially according to the talents and intellectual ardor of the members of the section. the two upper sections are called senior, the next two middle, and the two younger junior. the senior sections are distinguished by using paper for section purposes, with a light blue tinge. to the middle sections is assigned a light straw color; and to the junior, pink. these colors are used for the schedules of the members, and for the records, and other documents of the section. this account, though it is brief, will be sufficient to explain to you the general principles of the plan. you will soon become acquainted with the exercises and arrangements of the particular section to which you will be assigned, and by taking an active interest in them, and endeavoring to co-operate with the superintendent in all her measures, and to comply with her wishes, you will very materially add to her happiness, and do your part towards elevating the character of the circle to which you will belong. iv. officers. in consequence of the disposition early manifested by the scholars, to render me every assistance in their power in carrying into effect the plans of the school, and promoting its prosperity, i gradually adopted the plan of assigning to various officers and committees, a number of specific duties, relating to the general business of the school. these offices have gradually multiplied as the school has increased, and as business has accumulated. the system has, from time to time, been revised, condensed, and simplified, and at the present time it is thus arranged. the particular duties of each officer, are minutely described to the individuals themselves at the time of their election; all i intend here is to give a general view of the plan, such as is necessary for the scholars at large. there are then, _five departments_ of business entrusted to officers of the school, the names of the officers, and a brief exposition of their duties are as follows. [i omit the particular explanation of the duties of the officers, as the arrangement must vary in different schools, and the details of any one plan can only be useful in the school-room to which it belongs. it will be sufficient to name the officers of each department with their duties in general terms.] . regulators. to assist in the ordinary routine of business in school--ringing the bells--managing the study card--distributing and collecting papers--counting votes, &c. . secretaries. keeping the records and executing writing of various kinds. . accountants. keeping a register of the scholars, and various other duties connected with the accounts. . librarians. to take charge of books and stationary. . curators. to secure neatness and good order in the apartments. the secretaries and accountants are appointed by the principal, and will generally be chosen from the teachers. the first in each of the other departments are chosen by ballot, by the scholars. each one thus chosen nominates the second in her department, and they two, the assistants. these nominations must be approved at a teacher's meeting, for if a scholar is inattentive to her studies, disorderly in her desk, or careless and troublesome in her manners, she evidently ought not to be appointed to public office. no person can hold an office in two of these departments. she can, if she pleases, however, resign one to accept another. each of these departments ought often to assemble and consult together, and form plans for carrying into effect with greater efficiency, the objects entrusted to them. they are to keep a record of all their proceedings, the head of the department acting as secretary for this purpose. the following may be given as an example of the manner in which business is transacted by means of these officers. on the day that the above description of their duties was written, i wished for a sort of directory, to assist the collector employed to receive payments for the bills; and, to obtain it, i took the following steps. at the business quarter hour, i issued the following order. "before the close of school i wish the distributors to leave upon each of the desks, a piece of paper," (the size i described.) "it is for a purpose which i shall then explain." accordingly at any leisure moment, before the close of school, each one went with her box to the stationary shelves, which you will see in the corners of the room, where a supply of paper, of all the various sizes, used in school, is kept, and taking out a sufficient number, they supplied all the desks in their respective divisions. when the time for closing school arrived, i requested each young lady to write the name of her parent or guardian upon the paper, and opposite to it, his place of business. this was done in a minute or two. "all those whose parent's or guardian's name begins with a letter above _m._ may rise." they rose. "the distributors may collect the papers." the officers then passed round in regular order, each through her own division, and collected the papers. "deliver them at the accountant's desk." they were accordingly carried there, and received by the accountants. in the same manner the others were collected and received by the accountants, but kept separate. "i wish now the second accountant would copy these in a little book i have prepared for the purpose, arranging them alphabetically, referring all doubtful cases again to me." the second accountant then arranged the papers, and prepared them to go into the book, and the writer who belongs to the department copied them fairly. i describe this case, because it was one which occurred at the time i was writing the above description, and not because there is any thing otherwise peculiar in it. such cases are continually taking place, and by the division of labor above illustrated, i am very much assisted in a great many of the duties, which would otherwise consume a great portion of my time. any of the scholars may, at any time, make suggestions in writing, to any of these officers, or to the whole school. and if an officer should be partial, or unfaithful, or negligent in her duty, any scholar may propose her impeachment. after hearing what she chooses to write in her defence, a vote is taken on sustaining the impeachment. if it is sustained, she is deprived of the office and another appointed to fill her place. v. the court. i have already described how all serious cases of doing wrong or neglect of duty are managed in the school. i manage them myself, by coming as directly and as openly as i can, to the heart and conscience of the offender. there are, however, a number of little transgressions, too small to be individually worthy of serious attention, but which are yet troublesome to the community, when frequently repeated. these relate chiefly to _order in the school rooms_. these misdemeanors are tried, half in jest, and half in earnest, by a sort of _court_, whose forms of process might make a legal gentleman smile. they however fully answer our purpose. i can best give you an idea of the court, by describing an actual trial. i ought however first to say, that any young lady, who chooses to be free from the jurisdiction of the court, can signify that wish to me, and she is safe from it. this however is never done. they all see the useful influence of it, and wish to sustain it. near the close of school, i find perhaps on my desk a paper of which the following may be considered a copy. it is called the indictment. we accuse miss a. b. of having waste papers in the aisle opposite her desk, at o'clock, on friday, oct. . c. d. } e. f. } witnesses. i give notice after school that a case is to be tried. those interested, twenty or thirty perhaps, gather around my desk, while the sheriff goes to summon the accused and the witnesses. a certain space is marked off as the precincts of the court, within which no one must enter in the slightest degree, on pain of imprisonment, i. e. confinement to her seat until the court adjourns. "miss a. b.; you are accused of having an untidy floor about your desk. have you any objection to the indictment?" while she is looking over the indictment, to discover a misspelled word, or an error in the date, or some other latent flaw, i appoint any two of the bystanders, jury. the jury come forward to listen to the cause. the accused returns the indictment, saying, she has no objection, and the witnesses are called upon to present their testimony. perhaps the prisoner alleges in defence that the papers were out _in the aisle_, not _under her desk_, or that she did not put them there, or that they were too few, or too small, to deserve attention. my charge to the jury would be somewhat as follows. "you are to consider and decide whether she was guilty of disorder; taking into view the testimony of the witnesses, and also her defence. it is considered here that each young lady is responsible not only for the appearance of the carpet _under her desk_, but also for the _aisle opposite to it_, so that her first ground of defence must be abandoned. so also with the second, that she did not put them there. she ought not to _have_ them there. each scholar must keep her own place in a proper condition;--so that if disorder is found there, no matter who made it, she is responsible, if she only had time to remove it. as to the third, you must judge whether enough has been proved by the witnesses to make out real disorder." the jury write _guilty_ or _not guilty_ upon the paper, and it is returned to me. if sentence is pronounced it is usually confinement to the seat, during a recess, or part of a recess, or something that requires slight effort or sacrifice, for the public good. the sentence is always something _real_, though always _slight_, and the court has a great deal of influence in a double way; making amusement, and preserving order. the cases tried are very various, but none of the serious business of the school is entrusted to it. its sessions are always held out of school hours; and in fact it is hardly considered by the scholars as a constituent part of the arrangements of the school. so much so, that i hesitated much about inserting an account of it in this description. vi. religious instruction. in giving you this account, brief as it is, i ought not to omit to speak of one feature of our plan, which we have always intended should be one of the most prominent and distinctive characteristics of the school. the gentlemen who originally interested themselves in its establishment, had mainly in view the exertion, by the principal, of a decided moral and religious influence over the hearts of the pupils. knowing, as they did, how much more dutiful and affectionate at home you would be, how much more successful in your studies at school, how much happier in your intercourse with each other, and in your prospects for the future both here and hereafter, if your hearts could be brought under the influence of christian principle, they were strongly desirous that the school should be so conducted, that its religious influence, though gentle and alluring in its character, should be frank, and open, and decided. i need not say that i myself entered very cordially into these views. it has been my constant effort, and one of the greatest sources of my enjoyment, to try to win my pupils to piety, and to create such an atmosphere in school, that conscience, and moral principle, and affection for the unseen jehovah, should reign here. you can easily see hew much pleasanter it is for me to have the school controlled by such an influence, than if it were necessary for we to hire you to diligence in duty, by prizes or rewards, or to deter you from neglect or from transgression, by reproaches, and threatenings, and punishments. the influence which the school has thus exerted has always been cordially welcomed by my pupils, and approved, so far as i have known, by their parents, though four or five denominations, and fifteen or twenty different congregations have been, from time to time, represented in the school. there are few parents who would not like to have their children _christians_;--sincerely and practically so;--for every thing which a parent can desire in a child is promoted, just in proportion as she opens her heart to the influence of the spirit of piety. but that you may understand what course is taken, i shall describe, first what i wish to effect in the hearts of my pupils, and then what means i take to accomplish the object. . a large number of young persons of your age, and in circumstances similar to those in which you are placed perform with some fidelity their various outward duties, _but maintain no habitual and daily communion with god_. it is very wrong for them to live thus without god, but they do not see,--or rather do not feel the guilt of it. they only think of their accountability to _human beings_ like themselves, for example their parents, teachers, brothers and sisters, and friends. consequently they think most of their _external_ conduct, which is all that human beings can see. their _hearts_ are neglected and become very impure,--full of evil thoughts, and desires, and passions, which are not repented of, and consequently not forgiven. now what i wish to accomplish in regard to all my pupils is, that they should begin to _feel their accountability to god_, and to act according to it. that they should explore their _hearts_ and ask god's forgiveness for all their past sins, through jesus christ, who died for them that they might be forgiven; and that they should from this time, try to live _near to god_, feel his presence, and enjoy that solid peace and happiness which flows from a sense of his protection. when such a change takes place, it relieves the mind from that constant and irritating uneasiness, which the great mass of mankind feel as a constant burden; the ceaseless forebodings of a troubled conscience, reproaching them for their past accumulated guilt, and warning them of a judgment to come. the change which i endeavor to promote, relieves the heart-both of the present suffering and of the future danger. after endeavoring to induce you to begin to act from christian principle, i wish to explain to you, your various duties to yourselves, your parents, and to god. * * * * * . the measures to which i resort to accomplish these objects are three. first. _religious exercises in school._ we open and close the school with a very short prayer, and one or two verses of a hymn. sometimes i occupy ten or fifteen minutes at one of the general exercises, or at the close of the school, in giving instruction upon practical religious duty. the subjects are sometimes suggested by a passage of scripture read for the purpose, but more commonly in another way. you will observe often at the close of the school or at an appointed general exercise, that a scholar will bring to my desk a dark-colored morocco wrapper, containing several small strips of paper upon which questions relating to moral or religious duty, or subjects for remarks from me, or anecdotes, or short statements of facts, giving rise to inquiries of various kinds, are written. this wrapper is deposited in a place accessible to all the scholars, and any one who pleases, deposits in it any question or suggestion on religious subjects which may occur to her. you can, at any time, do this yourself, thus presenting any doubt, or difficulty, or inquiry, which may at any time occur to you. second. _religious exercise on saturday afternoon._ in order to bring up more distinctly and systematically the subject of religious duty, i established a long time ago, a religious meeting on saturday afternoon. it is intended for those who feel interested in receiving such instruction, and who can conveniently attend at that time. if you have not other engagements, and if your parents approve of it, i should be happy to have you attend. there will be very little to interest you except the subject itself, for i make all the instructions which i give there as plain, direct, and practical as is in my power. a considerable number of the scholars usually attend, and frequently bring with them many of their female friends. you can at any time invite any one whom you please, to come to the meeting. it commences at half past three and continues about half an hour. third. _personal religious instruction._ in consequence of the large number of my pupils, and the constant occupation of my time in school, i have scarcely any opportunity of religious conversation with them, even with those who particularly desire it. the practice has therefore arisen, and gradually extended itself almost universally in school, of writing to me on the subject. these communications are usually brief notes, expressing the writer's interest in the duties of piety, or bringing forward her own peculiar practical difficulties, or making specific inquiries, or asking particular instruction in regard to some branch of religious duty. i answer in a similar way,--very briefly and concisely however,--for the number of notes of this kind which i receive, is very large, and the time which i can devote to such a correspondence necessarily limited. i should like to receive such communications from all my pupils; for advice or instruction communicated in reply, being directly personal, is far more likely to produce effect. besides my remarks being in writing, can be read a second time, and be more attentively considered and re-considered, than when words are merely spoken. these communications must always be begun by the pupil. i never, (unless there may be occasional exceptions in some few very peculiar cases) commence. i am prevented from doing this both by my unwillingness to obtrude such a subject personally upon those who might not welcome it, and by want of time. i have scarcely time to write to all those who are willing first to write to me. many cases have occurred where individuals have strongly desired some private communication with me, but have hesitated long, and shrunk reluctantly from the first step. i hope it will not be so with you. should you ever wish to receive from me any direct religious instruction, i hope you will write immediately and freely. i shall very probably not even notice that it is the first time i have received such a communication from you. so numerous and so frequent are these communications that i seldom observe, when i receive one from any individual for the first time, that it comes from one who has not written me before. * * * * * such are the means to which i resort in endeavoring to lead my pupils to god and to duty. and you will observe that the whole design of them is to win and to allure, not to compel. the regular devotional exercises of school, are all which you will _necessarily_ witness. these are very short, occupying much less time than many of the pupils think desirable. the rest is all private and voluntary. i never make any effort to urge any one to attend the saturday meeting, nor do i, except in a few rare and peculiar cases, ever address any one personally, unless she desires to be so addressed. you will be left therefore in this school unmolested,--to choose your own way. if you should choose to neglect religious duty, and to wander away from god, i shall still do all in my power to make you happy in school, and to secure for you in future life, such a measure of enjoyment, as can fall to the share of one, over whose prospects in another world there hangs so gloomy a cloud. i shall never reproach you, and perhaps may not even know what your choice is. should you on the other hand prefer the peace and happiness of piety, and be willing to begin to walk in its paths, you will find many both among the teachers and pupils of the mt. vernon school to sympathize with you, and to encourage and help you on your way. chapter vii. scheming. the best teachers in our country, or rather those who might be the best, lose a great deal of their time, and endanger, or perhaps entirely destroy their hopes of success, by a scheming spirit, which is always reaching forward to something new. one has in his mind some new school book, by which arithmetic, grammar, or geography are to be taught with unexampled rapidity, and his own purse to be filled, in a much more easy way, than by waiting for the rewards of patient industry. another has the plan of a school, bringing into operation new principles of management or instruction, which he is to establish on some favored spot, and which is to become in a few years a second hofwyl. another has some royal road to learning, and though he is trammeled and held down by what he calls the ignorance and stupidity of his trustees or his school committee, yet if he could fairly put his principles and methods to the test, he is certain of advancing the science of education half a century at least, at a single leap. ingenuity in devising new ways, and enterprise in following them, are among the happiest characteristics of a new country rapidly filling with a thriving population. without these qualities there could be no advance; society must be stationary; and from a stationary to a retrograde condition, the progress is inevitable. the disposition to make improvements and changes may however be too great. if so, it must he checked. on the other hand a slavish attachment to old established practices may prevail. then the spirit of enterprise and experiment must be awakened and encouraged. which of these two is to be the duty of a writer at any time, will of course depend upon the situation of the community at the time he writes, and of the class of readers for which he takes his pen. now at the present time, it is undoubtedly true, that, while among the great mass of teachers there may be too little originality and enterprise, there is still among many a spirit of innovation and change, to which a caution ought to be addressed. but before i proceed, let me protect myself from misconception by one or two remarks. . there are a few individuals in various parts of our country, who by ingenuity and enterprise, have made real and important improvements in many departments of our science, and are still making them. the science is to be carried forward by such men. let them not therefore understand that any thing which i shall say, applies at all to those real improvements which are from time to time, brought before the public. as examples of this there might easily be mentioned, were it necessary, several new modes of study, and new text books, and literary institutions on new plans, which have been brought forward within a few years, and proved, on actual trial, to be of real and permanent value. these are, or rather they were, when first conceived by the original projectors, new schemes; and the result has proved that they were good ones. every teacher too must hope that such improvements will continue to be made. let nothing therefore which shall be said on the subject of scheming in this chapter, be interpreted as intended to condemn real improvements of this kind, or to check those which may now be in progress, by men of age or experience, or of sound judgment, who are capable of distinguishing between a real improvement and a whimsical innovation, which can never live any longer than it is sustained by the enthusiasm of the original inventor. . there are a great many teachers in our country, who make their business a mere dull and formal routine, through which they plod on, month after month, and year after year, without variety or change, and who are inclined to stigmatize with the appellation of idle scheming, all plans, of whatever kind, to give variety or interest to the exercises of the school. now whatever may be said in this chapter against unnecessary innovation and change, does not apply to efforts to secure variety in the details of daily study, while the great leading objects are steadily pursued. this subject has already been discussed in the chapter on instruction, where it has been shown that every wise teacher, while he pursues the same great object, and adopts in substance the same leading measures at all times, will exercise all the ingenuity he possesses, and bring all his inventive powers into requisition to give variety and interest to the minute details. * * * * * to explain now what is meant by such scheming as is to be condemned, let us suppose a case, which is not very uncommon. a young man, while preparing for college, takes a school. when he first enters upon the duties of his office, he is diffident and timid, and walks cautiously in the steps which precedent has marked out for him. distrusting himself, he seeks guidance in the example which others have set for him, and very probably he imitates precisely, though it may be insensibly and involuntarily, the manners and the plans of his own last teacher. this servitude soon however, if he is a man of natural abilities, passes away: he learns to try one experiment after another, until he insensibly finds that a plan may succeed, even if it was not pursued by his former teacher. so far it is well. he throws greater interest into his school, and into all its exercises by the spirit with which he conducts them. he is successful. after the period of his services has expired, he returns to the pursuit of his studies, encouraged by his success, and anticipating further triumphs in his subsequent attempts. he goes on through college we will suppose, teaching from time to time in the vacations, as opportunity occurs, taking more and more interest in the employment, and meeting with greater and greater success. this success is owing in a very great degree to the _freedom_ of his practice, that is to his escape from the thraldom of imitation. so long as he leaves the great objects of the school untouched, and the great features of its organization unchanged, his many plans for accomplishing these objects in new and various ways, awaken interest and spirit both in himself and in his scholars, and all goes on well. now in such a case as this, a young teacher philosophizing upon his success and the causes of it, will almost invariably make this mistake; viz., he will attribute to something essentially excellent in his plans, the success which, in fact results from the novelty of them. when he proposes something new to a class, they all take an interest in it, because it is _new_. he takes, too, a special interest in it because it is an experiment which he is trying, and he feels a sort of pride and pleasure in securing its success. the new method which he adopts, may not be, _in itself_, in the least degree better than old methods. yet it may succeed vastly better in his hands, than any old method he had tried before. and why? why because it is new. it awakens interest in his class, because it offers them variety, and it awakens interest in him, because it is a plan which he has devised, and for whose success therefore he feels that his credit is at stake. either of these circumstances is abundantly sufficient to account for its success. either of these would secure success, unless the plan was a very bad one indeed. this may easily be illustrated by supposing a particular case. the teacher has, we will imagine, been accustomed to teach spelling in the usual way, by assigning a lesson in the spelling book, which the scholars have studied in their seats, and then they have recited by having the words put to them individually in the class. after sometime, he finds that one class has lost its interest in this study. he can _make_ them get the lesson it is true, but he perceives perhaps that it is a weary task to them. of course they proceed with less alacrity, and consequently with less rapidity and success. he thinks, very justly, that it is highly desirable to secure cheerful, not forced, reluctant efforts from his pupils, and he thinks of trying some new plan. accordingly he says to them, "boys, i am going to try a new plan for this class." the mere annunciation of a new plan awakens universal attention. the boys all look up, wondering what it is to be. "instead of having you study your lessons in your seats, as heretofore, i am going to let you all go together into one corner of the room, and choose some one to read the lesson to you, spelling all the words aloud. you will all listen and endeavor to remember how the difficult ones are spelled. do you think you can remember?" "yes, sir," say the boys. children always think they _can_ do every thing which is proposed to them as a new plan or experiment, though they are very often inclined to think they _cannot_ do what is required of them as a task. "you may have," continues the teacher, "the words read to you once, or twice, just as you please. only if you have them read but once, you must take a shorter lesson." he pauses and looks round upon the class. some say, "once," some, "twice." "i am willing that you should decide this question. how many are in favor of having shorter lessons, and having them read but once?----how many prefer longer lessons, and having them read twice?" after comparing the numbers, it is decided according to the majority, and the teacher assigns, or allows them to assign a lesson. "now," he proceeds, "i am not only going to have you study in a different way, but recite in a different way too. you may take your slates with you, and after you have had time to hear the lesson read slowly and carefully twice, i shall come and dictate to you the words aloud, and you will all write them from my dictation. then i shall examine your slates, and see how many mistakes are made." any class of boys now would be exceedingly interested in such a proposal as this, especially if the master's ordinary principles of government and instruction had been such, as to interest the pupils in the welfare of the school, and in their own progress in study. they will come together in the place assigned, and listen to the one who is appointed to read the words to them, with every faculty aroused, and their whole souls engrossed in the new duties assigned them. the teacher, too, feels a special interest in his experiment. whatever else be may be employed about, his eye turns instinctively to this group, with an intensity of interest, which an experienced teacher who has long been in the field, and who has tried experiments of this sort a hundred times, can scarcely conceive. for let it be remembered that i am describing the acts and feelings of a new beginner; of one who is commencing his work, with a feeble and trembling step, and perhaps this is his first step from the beaten path in which he has been accustomed to walk. this new plan is continued, we will suppose, a week, during which time the interest of the pupils continues. they get longer lessons, and make fewer mistakes than they did by the old method. now in speculating on this subject, the teacher reasons very justly, that it is of no consequence whether the pupil receives his knowledge through the eye, or through the ear; whether they study in solitude or in company. the point is to secure their progress in learning to spell the words of the english language, and as this point is secured far more rapidly and effectually by his new method, the inference is to his mind very obvious, that he has made a great improvement,--one of real and permanent value. perhaps he will consider it an extraordinary discovery. but the truth is, that in almost all such cases as this, the secret of the success is, not that the teacher has discovered a _better_ method than the ordinary ones, but that he has discovered a _new_ one. the experiment will succeed in producing more successful results, just as long as the novelty of it continues to excite unusual interest and attention in the class, or the thought that it is a plan of the teacher's own invention, leads him to take a peculiar interest in it. and this may be a month, or perhaps a quarter, and precisely the same effects would have been produced, if the whole had been reversed, that is, if the plan of dictation had been the old one, which in process of time had, in this supposed school, lost its interest, and the teacher by his ingenuity and enterprise had discovered and introduced what is now the common mode. "very well," perhaps my reader will reply, "it is surely something gained to awaken and continue interest in a dull study, for a quarter, or even a month. the experiment is worth something as a pleasant and useful change, even if it is not permanently superior to the other." it is indeed worth something. it is worth a great deal; and the teacher who can devise and execute such plans, _understanding their real place and value, and adhering steadily through them all, to the great object which ought to engage his attention_, is in the almost certain road to success as an instructer. what i wish is, not to discourage such efforts; they ought to be encouraged to the utmost, but to have their real nature and design, and the real secret of their success fully understood, and to have the teacher, above all, take good care that all his new plans are made, not the substitutes for the great objects which he ought to keep steadily in view, but only the means by which he may carry them into more full and complete effect. in the case we are supposing however, we will imagine that the teacher does not do this. he fancies that he has made an important discovery, and begins to inquire whether the _principle_, as he calls it, cannot be applied to some other studies. he goes to philosophizing upon it, and can find many reasons why knowledge received through the ear makes a more ready and lasting impression, than when it comes through the eye. he tries to apply the method to arithmetic and geography, and in a short time is forming plans for the complete metamorphosis of his school. when engaged in hearing a recitation, his mind is distracted with his schemes and plans; and instead of devoting his attention fully to the work he may have in hand, his thoughts are wandering continually to new schemes and fancied improvements, which agitate and perplex him, and which elude his efforts to give them a distinct and definite form. he thinks he must however, carry out his _principle_. he thinks of its applicability to a thousand other cases. he revolves, over and over again in his mind, plans for changing the whole arrangement of his school. he is again and again lost in perplexity, his mind is engrossed and distracted, and his present duties are performed with no interest, and consequently with little spirit or success. now his error is in allowing a new idea, which ought only to have suggested to him an agreeable change for a time, in one of his classes, to swell itself into undue and exaggerated importance, and to draw off his mind from what ought to be the objects of his steady pursuit. perhaps some teacher of steady intellectual habits and a well balanced mind may think that this picture is fanciful, and that there is little danger that such consequences will ever actually result from such a cause. but far from having exaggerated the results, i am of opinion that i might have gone much farther. there is no doubt that a great many instances have occurred, in which some simple idea like the one i have alluded to, has led the unlucky conceiver of it, in his eager pursuit far deeper into the difficulty, than i have here supposed. he gets into a contention with the school committee, that formidable foe to the projects of all scheming teachers; and it would not be very difficult to find many actual cases, where the individual has, in consequence of some such idea, quietly planned and taken measures to establish some new institution, where he can carry on, unmolested, his plans, and let the world see the full results of his wonderful discoveries. we have in our country a very complete system of literary institutions, so far as external organization will go, and the prospect of success is far more favorable in efforts to carry these institutions into more complete and prosperous operation, than in plans for changing them, or substituting others in their stead. were it not that such a course would be unjust to individuals, a long and melancholy catalogue might easily be made out, of abortive plans which have sprung up in the minds of young men, in the manner i have described, and which after perhaps temporary success, have resulted in partial or total failure. these failures are of every kind. some are school-books on a new plan, which succeed in the inventor's hand, chiefly on account of the spirit which carried it into effect; but which in ordinary hands, and under ordinary circumstances, and especially after long continued use, have failed of exhibiting any superiority. others are institutions, commenced with great zeal by the projectors, and which succeed just as long as that zeal continues. zeal will make any thing succeed for a time. others are new plans of instruction or government, generally founded on some good principle carried to an extreme, or made to grow into exaggerated and disproportionate importance. examples almost innumerable, of these things might be particularized, if it were proper, and it would be found upon examination, that the amount of ingenuity and labor wasted upon such attempts, would have been sufficient, if properly expended, to have elevated very considerably the standard of education, and to have placed existing institutions in a far more prosperous and thriving state than they now exhibit. the reader will perhaps ask, shall we make no efforts at improvement? must every thing in education go on in a uniform and monotonous manner; and while all else is advancing, shall our cause alone stand still? by no means. it must advance; but let it advance mainly by the industry and fidelity of those who are employed in it; by changes slowly and cautiously made; not by great efforts to reach forward to brilliant discoveries, which will draw off the attention from essential duties, and after leading the projector through perplexities and difficulties without number, end in mortification and failure. were i to give a few concise and summary directions in regard to this subject to a young teacher, they would be the following: . examine thoroughly the system of public and private schools as now constituted in new england, until you fully understand it, and appreciate its excellences and its completeness; see how fully it provides for the wants of the various classes of our population. by this i mean to refer only to the completeness of the _system_, as a system of organization. i do not refer at all to the internal management of these institutions: this last is, of course, a field for immediate and universal effort at progress and improvement. . if after fully understanding this system as it now exists, you are of opinion that something more is necessary; if you think some classes of the community are not fully provided for, or that some of our institutions may be advantageously exchanged for others, whose plan you have in mind; consider whether your age, and experience, and standing, as an instructer are such as to enable you to place confidence in your opinion. i do not mean by this, that a young man may not make a useful discovery; but only that he may be led away by the ardor of early life, to fancy that essential and important, which is really not so. it is important that each one should determine whether this is not the case with himself, if his mind is revolving some new plan. . perhaps you are contemplating only a single new institution, which is to depend for its success, on yourself and some coadjutors whom you have in mind, and whom you well know. if this is the case, consider whether the establishment you are contemplating can be carried on, after you shall have left it, by such men as can ordinarily be obtained. if the plan is founded on some peculiar notions of your own, which would enable you to succeed in it, when others, also interested in such a scheme, would probably fail, consider whether there may not be danger that your plan may be imitated by others, who cannot carry it into successful operation, so that it may be the indirect means of doing injury. a man is, in some degree, responsible for his example, and for the consequences which may indirectly flow from his course, as well as for the immediate results which he produces. the fellenberg school at hofwyl has perhaps, by its direct results, been as successful for a given time, as perhaps any other institution in the world; but there is a great offset to the good which it has thus done, to be found in the history of the thousand wretched imitations of it, which have been started only to linger a little while and die, and in which a vast amount of time, and talent, and money have been wasted. consider the influence you may have upon the other institutions of our country, by attaching yourself to some one under the existing organization. if you take an academy or a private school, constituted and organized like other similar institutions, success in your own, will give you influence over others. a successful teacher of an academy, raises the standard of academic instruction. a college professor, if he brings extraordinary talents to bear upon the regular duties of that office, throws light, universally, upon the whole science of college discipline and instruction. by going, however, to some new field, establishing some new and fanciful institution, you take yourself from such a sphere;--you exert no influence over others, except upon feeble imitators, who fail in their attempts, and bring discredit upon your plans by the awkwardness with which they attempt to adopt them. how much more service to the cause of education, have professors cleaveland and silliman rendered by falling in with the regularly organized institutions of the country, and elevating them, than if in early life, they had given themselves to some magnificent project of an establishment, to which their talents would unquestionably have given temporary success, but which would have taken them away from the community of teachers, and confined the results of their labors to the more immediate effects which their daily duties might produce. . perhaps, however, your plan is not the establishment of some new institution, but the introduction of some new study or pursuit into the one with which you are connected. before, however, you interrupt the regular plans of your school to make such a change, consider carefully what is the real and appropriate object of your institution. every thing is not to be done in school. the principles of division of labor apply with peculiar force to this employment; so that you must not only consider whether the branch, which you are now disposed to introduce, is important, but whether it is really such an one as it is, on the whole, best to include among the objects to be pursued in such an institution. many teachers seem to imagine, that if any thing is in itself important, and especially if it is an important branch of education, the question is settled of its being a proper object of attention in school. but this is very far from being the case. the whole work of education can never be intrusted to the teacher. much must of course remain in the hands of the parent; it ought so to remain. the object of a school is not to take children out of the parental hands, substituting the watch and guardianship of a stranger, for the natural care of father and mother. far from it. it is only the association of the children for those purposes which can be more successfully accomplished by association. it is an union for few, specific, and limited objects, for the accomplishment of that part, (and it is comparatively a small part of the general objects of education) which can be most successfully affected by public institutions, and in assemblies of the young. . if the branch which you are desiring to introduce appears to you to be an important part of education, and if it seems to you that it can be most successfully attended to in schools, then consider whether the introduction of it, _and of all the other branches having equal claims_, will, or will not give to the common schools too great a complexity. consider whether it will succeed in the hands of ordinary teachers. consider whether it will require so much time and effort, as will draw off, in any considerable degree, the attention of the teacher from the more essential parts of his duty. all will admit that it is highly important that every school should be simple in its plan,--as simple as its size and general circumstances will permit, and especially, that the public schools in every town and village of our country should never lose sight of what is, and must be, after all, their great design--_teaching the whole population to read, write, and calculate_. . if it is a school-book, which you are wishing to introduce, consider well before you waste your time in preparing it, and your spirits in the vexatious work of getting it through the press, whether it is, _for general use_, so superior to those already published, as to induce teachers to make a change in favor of yours. i have italicised the words _for general use_, for no delusion is more common than for a teacher to suppose, that because a text-book which he has prepared and uses in manuscript, is better for _him_ than any other work which he can obtain, it will therefore be better for _general circulation_. every man, if he has any originality of mind, has of course some peculiar method of his own, and he can of course prepare a text-book which will be better adapted to this method, than those ordinarily in use. the history of a vast multitude of textbooks, arithmetics, geographies, and grammars, is this. a man of a somewhat ingenious mind, adopts some peculiar mode of instruction in one of these branches, and is quite successful, not because the method has any very peculiar excellence, but simply because he takes a greater interest in it, both on account of its novelty and also from the fact that it is his own invention. he conceives the plan of writing a text-book, to develope and illustrate this method. he hurries through the work. by some means or other, he gets it printed. in due time it is regularly advertised. the annals of education gives notice of it; the author sends a few copies to his friends, and that is the end of it. perhaps a few schools may make a trial of it, and if, for any reason, the teachers who try it are interested in the work, perhaps in their hands, it succeeds. but it does not succeed so well as to attract general attention, and consequently does not get into general circulation. the author loses his time and his patience. the publisher, unless unfortunately it was published on the author's account, loses his paper. and in a few months, scarcely any body knows that such a book ever saw the light. it is in this way, that the great multitude of school-books which are now constantly issuing from the press, take their origin. far be it from me to discourage the preparation of good school-books. this department of our literature offers a fine field for the efforts of learning and genius. what i contend against, is the endless multiplicity of useless works, hastily conceived and carelessly executed, and which serve no purpose, but to employ uselessly, talents, which if properly applied, might greatly benefit both the community and the possessor. . if, however, after mature deliberation you conclude that you have the plan of a school-book which you ought to try to mature and execute, be slow and cautious about it. remember that so great is now the competition in this branch, nothing but superior excellences will secure the favorable reception of a work. examine all that your predecessors have done before you. obtain, whatever may be the trouble and expense, all other text books on the subject, and examine them thoroughly. if you see that you can make a very decided advance on all that has been done, and that the public will probably submit to the inconvenience and expense of a change, to secure the result of your labors, go forward slowly and thoroughly in your work. no matter how much investigation, how much time and labor it may require. the more difficulty you may find, in gaining the eminence, the less likely will you be to be followed by successful competitors. . consider in forming your text-book, not merely the whole subject on which you are to write, but also look extensively and thoroughly at the institutions throughout the country, and consider carefully the character of the teachers by whom you expect it to be used. sometimes a man publishes a text-book, and when it fails on trial, he says, "it is because they did not know how to use it. the book in itself was good. the whole fault was in the awkwardness and ignorance of the teacher." how absurd! as if to make a good text-book, it was not as necessary to adapt it to teachers as to scholars. _a good text-book which the teachers for whom it was intended did not know how to use!!_ i. e. a good contrivance but entirely unfit for the purpose for which it was intended. . lastly, in every new plan, consider carefully whether its success in your hands, after you have tried it, and found it successful, be owing to its novelty and to your own special interest, or to its own innate and intrinsic superiority. if the former, use it so long as it will last, simply to give variety and interest to your plans. recommend it in conversation or in other ways to teachers with whom you are acquainted; not as a wonderful discovery, which is going to change the whole science of education, but as one method among others, which may be introduced from time to time, to relieve the monotony of the teacher's labors. in a word do not go away from the established institutions of our country, or deviate from the great objects which are at present, and ought to be pursued by them, without great caution, circumspection, and deliberate inquiry. but within these limits, exercise ingenuity and invention as much as you will. pursue steadily the great objects which demand the teacher's attention; they are simple and few. never lose sight of them, nor turn to the right or to the left to follow any ignis fatuus which may endeavor to allure you away; but exercise as much ingenuity and enterprise as you please, in giving variety and interest to the modes by which these objects are pursued. * * * * * if planning and scheming are confined within these limits, and conducted on these principles, the teacher will save all the agitating perplexity and care which will otherwise be his continual portion. he can go forward peaceably and quietly, and while his own success is greatly increased, he may be of essential service to the cause in which he is engaged, by making known his various experiments and plans to others. for this purpose it seems to me highly desirable that every teacher should keep a journal of all his plans. in these should be carefully entered all his experiments: the new methods he adopts; the course he takes in regard to difficulties which may arise; and any interesting incidents which may occur, which it would be useful for him to refer to, at some future time. these or the most interesting of them should be made known to other teachers. this may be done in several ways. ( .) by publishing them in periodicals devoted to education. such contributions, furnished by judicious men, would be among the most valuable articles in such a work. they would be far more valuable than any general speculations, however well conceived or expressed. ( .) in news-papers intended for general circulation. there are very few editors whose papers circulate in families, who would not gladly receive articles of this kind, to fill a teacher's department in their columns. if properly written they would be read with interest and profit by multitudes of parents, and would throw much light on family government and instruction. ( .) by reading them in teacher's meetings. if half a dozen teachers who are associated in the same vicinity, would meet once a fortnight, simply to hear each other's journals, they would be amply repaid for their time and labor. teacher's meetings will be interesting and useful, when those who come forward in them, will give up the prevailing practice of delivering orations, and come down at once to the scenes and to the business of the school-room. there is one topic connected with the subject of this chapter, which deserves a few paragraphs. i refer to the rights of the committee, or the trustees, or patrons, in the control of the school. the right to such control, when claimed at all, is usually claimed in reference to the teacher's new plans, which renders it proper to allude to the subject here; and it ought not to be omitted, for a great many cases occur, in which teachers have difficulties with the trustees or committee of their school. sometimes these difficulties have amounted to an open rupture; at other times, only to a slight and temporary misunderstanding, arising from what the teacher calls an unwise and unwarrantable interference on the part of the committee, or the trustees, in the arrangements of the school. difficulties of some sort very often arise. in fact, a right understanding of this subject, is, in most cases, absolutely essential to the harmony and co-operation of the teacher, and the representatives of his patrons. there are then, it must be recollected, three different parties connected with every establishment for education; the parents of the scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves. sometimes, as for example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and whatever influence they exert, they must exert in their individual capacity. at other times, as in a common district or town school, they are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose, are their legal representatives. in other instances, a board of trustees are constituted by the appointment of the founders of the institution, or by the legislature of a state, to whom is committed the oversight of its concerns, and who are consequently the representatives of the founders and patrons of the school. there are differences between these various modes of organization which i shall not now stop to examine, as it will be sufficiently correct for my purpose to consider them all as only various ways of organizing the _employers_, in the contract, by which the teacher is employed. the teacher is the agent; the patrons, represented in these several ways, are the principals. when, therefore, in the following paragraphs, i use the word _employers_, i mean to be understood to speak of the committee, or the trustees, or the visiters, or the parents themselves, as the case, in each particular institution, may be; that is, the persons, for whose purpose, and at whose expense, the institution is maintained; or their representatives. now there is a very reasonable, and almost universally established rule, which teachers are very frequently prone to forget, viz., _the employed ought always to be responsible to the employers, and to be under their direction_. so obviously reasonable is this rule, and in fact, so absolutely indispensable in the transaction of all the business of life, that it would be idle to attempt to establish and illustrate it here. it has, however, limitations, and it is applicable to a much greater extent, in some departments of human labor, than in others. it is _applicable_ to the business of teaching, and though, i confess, that it is somewhat less absolute and imperious here, still, it is obligatory, i believe, to far greater extent, than teachers have been generally willing to admit. a young lady, i will imagine, wishes to introduce the study of botany into her school. the parents or the committee object; they say, that they wish the children to confine their attention exclusively to the elementary branches of education. "it will do them no good," says the chairman of the committee, "to learn by heart some dozen or two of learned names. we want them to read well, to write well, and to calculate well, and not to waste their time in studying about pistils and stamens and nonsense." now what is the duty of the teacher in such a case? why, very plainly her duty is the same as that of the governor of a state, where the people, through their representatives, regularly chosen, negative a proposal, which he considers calculated to promote the public good. it is his duty to submit to the public will, and though he may properly do all in his power, to present the subject to his employers in such a light, as to lead them to regard it as he does, he must still, until they do so regard it, bow to their authority; and every magistrate, who takes an enlarged and comprehensive view of his duties as the executive of a republican community, will do this without any humiliating feelings of submission to unauthorized interference with his plans. he will, on the other hand, enjoy the satisfaction of feeling that he confines himself to his proper sphere, and leave to others, the full possession of rights which properly pertain to them. it is so with every case, where the relation of employer and employed subsists. you engage a carpenter to erect a house for you, and you present your plan; instead of going to work and executing your orders according to your wishes, he goes to criticising and condemning it: he finds fault with this, and ridicules that, and tells you, you ought to make such and such an alteration in it. it is perfectly right for him to give his opinion, in the tone and spirit of _recommendation or suggestion_, with a distinct understanding that with his employer rests the power and the right to decide. but how many teachers take possession of their school room as though it was an empire in which they are supreme, who resist every interference of their employers, as they would an attack upon their personal freedom, and who feel, that in regard to every thing connected with school, they have really no actual responsibility. in most cases, the employers, knowing how sensitive teachers very frequently are on this point, acquiesce in it, and leave them to themselves. whenever in any case, they think that the state of the school requires their interference, they come cautiously and fearfully to the teacher, as if they were encroaching upon his rights, instead of advancing with the confidence and directness with which employers have always a right to approach the employed; and the teacher, with the view he has insensibly taken of the subject, being perhaps confirmed by the tone and manner which his employers use, makes the conversation, quite as often, an occasion of resentment and offence as of improvement. he is silent, perhaps, but in his heart he accuses his committee or his trustees of improper interference in _his_ concerns, as though it was no part of _their_ business to look after work which is going forward for their advantage, and for which they pay. perhaps some individuals, who have had some collision with their trustees or committee, will ask me if i mean, that a teacher ought to be entirely and immediately under the supervision and control of the trustees, just as a mechanic is when employed by another man. by no means. there are various circumstances connected with the nature of this employment; the impossibility of the employers fully understanding it in all its details; and the character and the standing of the teacher himself, which always will, in matter of fact, prevent this. the employers always will, in a great many respects, place more confidence in the teacher and in his views, than they will in their own. but still, the ultimate power is theirs. even if they err,--if they wish to have a course pursued which is manifestly inexpedient and wrong, _they still have a right to decide_. it is their work: it is going on at their instance, and at their expense, and the power of ultimate decision, on all disputed questions, must, from the very nature of the case, rest with them. the teacher may, it is true, have his option either to comply with their wishes or to seek employment in another sphere; but while he remains in the employ of any persons, whether in teaching or in any other service, he is bound to yield to the wishes of his employers, when they insist upon it, and to submit pleasantly to their direction, when they shall claim their undoubted right to direct. this is to be done, it must be remembered, when they are wrong, as well as when they are right. the obligation of the teacher is not founded upon _the superior wisdom_ of his employers, in reference to the business for which they have engaged him, for they are very probably his inferiors in this respect; _but upon their right as employers_, to determine _how their own work shall be done_. a gardener, we will suppose, is engaged by a gentleman to lay out his grounds. the gardener goes to work, and after a few hours the gentleman comes out to see how he goes on, and to give directions. he proposes something which the gardener, who, to make the case stronger, we will suppose knows better that the proprietor of the grounds, considers ridiculous and absurd; nay, we will suppose it is ridiculous and absurd. now what can the gardener do? there are, obviously, two courses. he can say to the proprietor, after a vain attempt to convince him he is wrong, "well, sir, i will do just as you say. the grounds are yours: i have no interest in it, or responsibility, except to accomplish your wishes." this would be right. or he might say, "sir, you have a right to direct upon your own grounds, and i do not wish to interfere with your plans; but i must ask you to obtain another gardener. i have a reputation at stake, and this work, if i do it even at your direction, will be considered as a specimen of my taste and of my planning, so that i must in justice to myself, decline remaining in your employment." this too, would be right, though probably, both in the business of gardening and of teaching, the case ought to be a strong one, to render it expedient. but it would not be right for him, after his employer should have gone away, to say to himself, with a feeling of resentment at the imaginary _interference_; "i shall not follow any such directions; i understand my own trade and shall receive no instructions in it from him;" and then disobeying all directions, go on and do the work contrary to the orders of his employer, who alone has a right to decide. and yet a great many teachers take a course as absurd and unjustifiable as this would be. whenever the parents, or the committee, or the trustees express, however mildly and properly, their wishes in regard to the manner in which they desire to have their own work performed, their pride is at once aroused. they seem to feel it an indignity, to act in any other way, than just in accordance with their own will and pleasure; and they absolutely refuse to comply, resenting the interference as an insult. or else, if they apparently yield, it is with mere cold civility, and entirely without any honest desires to carry the wishes thus expressed, into actual effect. parents may, indeed, often misjudge. a good teacher will, however, soon secure their confidence, and they will acquiesce in his opinion. but they ought to be watchful; and the teacher ought to feel and acknowledge their authority, on all questions connected with the education of their children. they have originally entire power in regard to the course which is to be pursued with them. providence has made the parents responsible and wholly responsible for the manner in which their children are prepared for the duties of this life, and it is interesting to observe, how very cautious the laws of society are, about interfering with the parent's wishes, in regard to the education of the child. there are many cases, in which enlightened governments might make arrangements which would be better than those made by the parents, if they are left to themselves. but they will not do it; they ought not to do it. god has placed the responsibility in the hands of the father and mother, and unless the manner in which it is exercised is calculated to endanger or to injure the community, there can rightfully be no interference except that of argument and persuasion. it ought also to be considered that upon the parents will come the consequences of the good or bad education of their children, and not upon the teacher, and consequently it is right that they should direct. the teacher remains, perhaps, a few months with his charge, and then goes to other places, and perhaps hears of them no more. he has thus very little at stake. the parent has every thing at stake, and it is manifestly unjust to give one man the power of deciding, while he escapes all the consequences of his mistakes, if he makes any, and to take away all the _power_ from those, upon whose heads, all the suffering, which will follow an abuse of the power, must descend. chapter viii. reports of cases. there is perhaps no way, by which a writer can more effectually explain his views on the subject of education, than by presenting a great variety of actual cases, whether real or imaginary, and describing particularly the course of treatment he would recommend in each. this method of communicating knowledge is very extensively resorted to in the medical profession, where writers detail particular cases, and report the symptoms and the treatment for each succeeding day, so that the reader may almost fancy himself actually a visiter at the sick bed, and the nature and effects of the various prescriptions become fixed in the mind, with almost as much distinctness and permanency as actual experience would give. this principle has been kept in view, the reader may perhaps think, too closely, in all the chapters of this volume; almost every point brought up, having been illustrated by anecdotes and narratives. i propose, however, devoting one chapter now, to presenting a number of miscellaneous cases, without any attempt to arrange them. sometimes the case will be merely stated, the reader being left to draw the inference; at others, such remarks will be added as the case suggests. all will however be intended to answer some useful purpose, either to exhibit good or bad management and its consequences, or to bring to view some trait of human nature, as it exhibits itself in children, which it may be desirable for the teacher to know. let it be understood, however, that these cases are not selected with reference to their being strange, or extraordinary. they are rather chosen because they are common, i. e. they, or cases similar, will be constantly occurring to the teacher, and reading such a chapter will be the best substitute for experience which the teacher can have. some are descriptions of literary exercises or plans which the reader can adopt in classes, or with a whole school; others are cases of discipline,--good or bad management, which the teacher can imitate or avoid. the stories are from various sources, and are the results of the experience of several individuals. . hats and bonnets. the master of a district school was accidentally looking out of the window one day, and he saw one of the boys throwing stones at a hat, which was put up for that purpose upon the fence. he said nothing about it at the time, but made a memorandum of the occurrence, that he might bring it before the school, at the proper time. when the hour, set apart for attending to the general business of the school, had arrived, and all were still, he said, "i saw one of the boys throwing stones at a hat to-day, did he do right or wrong?" there were one or two faint murmurs which sounded like "_wrong_," but the boys generally made no answer. "perhaps it depends a little upon the question whose hat it was. do you think it does depend upon that?" "yes sir." "well, suppose then it was not his own hat, and he was throwing stones at it without the owner's consent, would it be plain in that case, whether he was doing right or wrong?" "yes sir; wrong," was the universal reply. "suppose it was his own hat, would he have been right? has a boy a right to do what he pleases with his own hat?" "yes sir," "yes sir," "no sir," "no sir," answered the boys confusedly. "i do not know whose hat it was. if the boy who did it is willing to rise and tell me, it will help us to decide this question." the boy knowing that a severe punishment was not in such a case to be anticipated, and in fact, apparently pleased with the idea of exonerating himself from the blame of wilfully injuring the property of another, rose and said, "i suppose it was i, sir, who did it, and it was my own hat?" "well," said the master, "i am glad you are willing to tell frankly how it was; but let us look at this case. there are two senses in which a hat may be said to belong to any person. it may belong to him because he bought it and paid for it, or it may belong to him because it fits him, and he wears it. in other words a person may have a hat, as his property, or he may have it only as a part of his dress. now you see, that according to the first of these senses, all the hats in this school, belong to your fathers. there is not in fact a single boy in this school who has a hat of his own." the boys laughed. "is not this the fact?" "yes sir." "it certainly is so, though i suppose james did not consider it. your fathers bought your hats. they worked for them, and paid for them. you are only the wearers, and consequently every generous boy, and in fact every honest boy, will be careful of the property which is intrusted to him, but which strictly speaking is not his own." . mistakes. a wide difference must always be made between mistakes arising from carelessness, and those resulting from circumstances beyond control; such as want of sufficient data, &c. the former are always censurable; the latter never; for they may be the result of correct reasoning from insufficient data, and it is the reasoning only for which the child is responsible. "what do you suppose a prophet is?" said an instructer to a class of little boys. the word occurred in their reading lesson. the scholars all hesitated; at last one ventured to reply: "if a man should sell a yoke of oxen, and get more for them than they are worth, he would be a prophet." "yes," said the instructer, "that is right, that is one kind of _profit_, but this is another and a little different," and he proceeded to explain the word, and the difference of the spelling. this child had, without doubt, heard of some transaction of the kind which he described, and had observed that the word _profit_ was applied to it. now the care which he had exercised in attending to it at the time, and remembering it when the same word, (for the difference in the spelling he of course knew nothing about,) occurred again, was really commendable. the fact, which is a mere accident, that we affix very different significations to the same sound, was unknown. the fault, if anywhere, was in the language and not in him; for he reasoned correctly from the data he possessed, and he deserved credit for it. . tardiness. "my duty to this school," said a teacher to his pupils, "demands, as i suppose you all admit, that i should require you all to be here punctually at the time appointed for the commencement of the school. i have done nothing on this subject yet, for i wished to see whether you would not come early, on principle. i wish now however to inquire in regard to this subject, and to ascertain how many have been tardy, and to consider what must be done hereafter." he made the inquiries and ascertained pretty nearly how many had been tardy, and how often within a week. the number was found to be so great, that the scholars admitted that something ought to be done. "what shall i do?" asked he. "can any one propose a plan which will remedy the difficulty?" there was no answer. [transcriber's note: the footnote marker for the following footnote is missing.] [footnote d: the above, and one or two of the succeeding articles have been before published, in periodicals.] "the easiest and pleasantest way to secure punctuality, is for the scholars to come early of their own accord, upon principle. it is evident from the reports, that many of you do so; but some do not. now there is no other plan which will not be attended with very serious difficulty, but i am willing to adopt the one which will be pleasantest to yourselves, if it will be likely to accomplish the object. has any one any plan to propose." there was a pause. "it would evidently," continued the teacher, "be the easiest for me to leave this subject, and do nothing about it. it is of no personal consequence to me, whether you come early or not, but as long as i hold this office, i must be faithful, and i have no doubt the school committee, if they knew how many of you were tardy, would think i ought to do something to diminish the evil. "the best plan i can think of, is that all who are tardy should lose their recess." the boys looked rather anxiously at one another, but continued silent. "there is a great objection to this plan from the fact that a boy is sometimes necessarily absent, and by this rule he will lose his recess with the rest, so that the innocent will be punished with the guilty." "i should think, sir," said william, "that those who are _necessarily_ tardy, might be excused." "yes, i should be very glad to excuse them, if i could find out who they are." the boys seemed to be surprised at this remark, as if they thought it would not be a difficult matter to decide. "how can i tell?" asked the master. "you can hear their excuses, and then decide." "yes," said the teacher, "but here are fifteen or twenty boys tardy this morning; now how long would it take me to hear their excuses, and understand each case thoroughly, so that i could really tell whether they were tardy from good reasons or not?" no answer. "should you not think it would take a minute apiece?" "yes sir." "it would undoubtedly, and even then i could not in many cases tell. it would take fifteen minutes at least. i cannot do this in school-hours, for i have not time, and if i do it in recess, it will consume the whole of every recess. now i need the rest of a recess, as well as you, and it does not seem to me to be just that i should lose the whole of mine, every day, and spend it in a most unpleasant business, when i take pains, myself, to come punctually every morning. would it be just?" "no sir." "i think it would be less unjust to deprive all of their recess who are tardy, for then the loss of a recess by a boy who had not been to blame, would not be very common, and the evil would be divided among the whole, but in the plan of my hearing the excuses, it would all come upon one." after a short pause one of the boys said that they might be required to bring written excuses. "yes that is another plan," said the teacher, "but there are objections to it. can any of you think what they are? i suppose you have all been, either at this school, or at some other, required to bring written excuses, so that you have seen the plan tried; now have you never noticed any objection to it?" one boy said that it gave the parents a great deal of trouble at home. "yes," said the teacher, "this is a great objection; it is often very inconvenient to write. but that is not the greatest difficulty; can any of you think of any other?" there was a pause. "do you think that these written excuses are, after all, a fair test of the real reasons for tardiness? i understand that sometimes boys will tease their fathers or mothers for an excuse, when they do not deserve it, 'yes sir,' and sometimes they will loiter about when sent of an errand before school, knowing that they can get a written excuse when they might easily have been punctual." "yes sir, yes sir," said the boys. "well, now, if we adopt this plan, some unprincipled boy would always contrive to have an excuse, whether necessarily tardy or not; and besides, each parent would have a different principle and a different opinion as to what was a reasonable excuse, so that there would be no uniformity, and consequently no justice in the operation of the system." the boys admitted the truth of this, and as no other plan was presented, the rule was adopted of requiring all those who were tardy, to remain in their seats during the recess, whether they were necessarily tardy or not. the plan very soon diminished the number of loiterers. . helen's lesson. the possibility of being inflexibly firm in measures, and at the same time gentle and mild in manners and language, is happily illustrated in the following description, which is based on an incident narrated by mrs. sherwood. "mrs. m. had observed even during the few days that helen had been under her care, that she was totally unaccustomed to habits of diligence and application. after making all due allowance for long indulged habits of indolence and inattention, she one morning assigned an easy lesson to her pupil, informing her at the same time, that she should hear it immediately before dinner. helen made no objections to the plan, but she silently resolved not to perform the required task. being in some measure a stranger, she thought her aunt would not insist upon perfect obedience, and besides in her estimation, she was too old to be treated like a child. "during the whole morning, helen exerted herself to be mild and obliging; her conduct towards her aunt was uncommonly affectionate. by these, and various other artifices, she endeavored to gain her first victory. meanwhile, mrs. m. quietly pursued her various avocations, without apparently noticing helen's conduct. at length dinner hour arrived; the lesson was called for, and found unprepared. mrs. m. told helen she was sorry she had not got the lesson, and went on to explain one or two sentences more fully, and concluded, by saying that she hoped it would be learned before tea-time. "helen, finding she was not to come to the table, began to be a little alarmed. she was acquainted in some measure with the character of her aunt, still she hoped to be allowed to partake of the dessert as she had been accustomed to on similar occasions at home, and soon regained her wonted composure. but the dinner cloth was removed, and there sat helen, suffering not a little from hunger; still she would not complain; she meant to convince her aunt that she was not moved by trifles. "a walk had been proposed for the afternoon, and as the hour drew near, helen made preparations to accompany the party. mrs. m. reminded her of her lesson, but she just noticed the remark by a toss of the head, and was soon in the green fields, apparently the gayest of the gay. after her return from the excursion, she complained of a head-ache which in fact she had; she threw herself languidly on the sofa, sighed deeply, and took up her history. "tea was now on the table, and most tempting looked the white loaf. mrs. m. again heard the pupil recite, but was sorry to find the lesson still imperfectly prepared. she left her, saying she thought an half hour's study would conquer all the difficulties she found in the lesson. "during all this time, mrs. m. appeared so perfectly calm, composed, and even kind, and so regardless of sighs and doleful exclamations, that helen entirely lost her equanimity and let her tears flow freely and abundantly. her mother was always moved by her tears, and would not her aunt relent? no. mrs. m. quietly performed the duties of the table, and ordered the tea-equipage to be removed. this latter movement brought helen to reflection. it is useless to resist, thought she, indeed why should i wish to. nothing too much has been required of me. how ridiculous i have made myself appear, in the eyes of my aunt, and even of the domestics. "in less than an hour, she had the satisfaction of reciting her lesson perfectly; her aunt made no comments on the occasion, but assigned her the next lesson, and went on sewing. helen did not expect this; she had anticipated a refreshing cup of tea, after the long siege. she had expected that even something nicer than usual would be necessary to compensate her for past sufferings. at length, worn out by long continued watching and fasting, she went to the closet, provided herself with a cracker, and retired to bed to muse deliberately on the strange character of her aunt. "teachers not unfrequently threaten their pupils with some proper punishment, but when obliged to put the threat into execution, contrive in some indirect way, to abate its rigor and thus destroy all its effects. for example, a mother was in the habit, when her little boy ran beyond his proscribed play-ground, of putting him into solitary confinement. on such occasions, she was very careful to have some amusing book, or diverting plaything in a conspicuous part of the room, and not unfrequently a piece of gingerbread was given to solace the runaway. the mother thought it very strange her little boy should so often transgress, when he knew what to expect from such a course of conduct. the boy was wiser than the mother; he knew perfectly well how to manage. he could play with the boys beyond the garden gate, and if detected, to be sure he was obliged to spend a quiet hour in the pleasant parlor. but this was not intolerable as long as he could expect a paper of sugar-plums, a cake, or at least something amply to compensate him for the loss of a game at marbles." . complaints of long lessons. a college officer assigned lessons which the idle and ignorant members of the class thought too long. they murmured for a time, and at last openly complained. the other members of the class could say nothing in behalf of the professor, awed by the greatest of all fears to a collegian, the fear of being called a "_fisher_," or a "_blueskin_." the professor paid no attention to the petitions and complaints which were poured in upon him, and which, though originated by the idle, all were compelled to vote for. he coldly, and with uncompromising dignity, went on the excitement in the class increased, and what is called a college rebellion, with all its disastrous consequences to the infatuated rebels, ensued. another professor had the dexterity to manage in a different way. after hearing that there was dissatisfaction, he brought up the subject as follows:-- "i understand, gentlemen, that you consider your lessons too long. perhaps i have overrated the abilities of the class, but i have not intended to assign you more than you can accomplish. i feel no other interest in the subject, than the pride and pleasure it would give me, to have my class stand high, in respect to the amount of ground it has gone over, when you come to examination. i propose, therefore, that you appoint a committee in whose abilities and judgment you can confide, and let them examine this subject and report. they might ascertain how much other classes have done, and how much is expedient for this class to attempt; and then, by estimating the number of recitations assigned to this study, they can easily determine what should be the length of the lessons." the plan was adopted, and the report put an end to the difficulty. . english composition. the great prevailing fault of writers in this country, is an affectation of eloquence. it is almost universally the fashion to aim not at striking thoughts, simply and clearly expressed, but at splendid language, glowing imagery, and magnificent periods. it arises, perhaps, from the fact that public speaking is the almost universal object of ambition, and consequently, both at school and at college, nothing is thought of but oratory. vain attempts at oratory, result in nine cases out of ten, in grandiloquence and empty verbiage;--common thoughts expressed in pompous periods. the teacher should guard against this, and assign to children such subjects as are within the field of childish observation. a little skill on his part will soon determine the question which kind of writing shall prevail in his school. the following specimens, both written with some skill, will illustrate the two kinds of writing alluded to. both were written by pupils of the same age, twelve; one a boy, the other a girl. the subjects were assigned by the teacher. i need not say that the following was the writer's first attempt at composition, and that it is printed without alteration. the pains of a sailor's life. the joyful sailor embarks on board of his ship, the sails are spread to catch the playful gale, swift as an arrow he cuts the rolling wave. a few days thus sporting on the briny wave, when suddenly the sky is overspread with clouds, the rain descends in torrents, the sails are lowered, the gale begins, the vessel is carried with great velocity, and the shrouds unable to support the tottering mast, gives way to the furious tempest; the vessel is drove among the rocks, is sprung aleak, the sailor works at the pumps, till, faint and weary, is heard from below, six feet of water in the hold, the boats are got ready, but before they are into them, the vessel dashed against a reef of rocks, some in despair throw themselves into the sea, others get on the rocks without any clothes or provisions, and linger a few days, perhaps weeks or months, living on shell fish or perhaps taken up by some ship. others get on pieces of the wreck, and perhaps be cast on some foreign country, where perhaps he may be taken by the natives, and sold into slavery where he never more returns. in regard to the following specimen, it should be stated that when the subject was assigned, the pupil was directed to see how precisely she could imitate the language and conversation which two little children really lost in the woods would use. while writing, therefore, her mind was in pursuit of the natural, and the simple, not of the eloquent. two children lost in the woods. _emily._ look here! see how many berries i've got. i don't believe you've got so many. _charles._ yes, i'm sure i have. my basket's most full; and if we hurry, we shall get ever so many before we go home. so pick away as fast as you can, emily. _emily._ there mine is full. now we'll go and find some flowers for mother. you know somebody told us there were some red ones, close to that rock. _charles._ well, so we will. we'll leave our baskets here, and come back and get them. _emily._ but if we can't find our way back, what shall we do? _charles._ poh! i can find the way back. i only want a quarter to seven years old, and i shan't lose myself, i know. _emily._ well! we've got flowers enough, and now i'm tired and want to go home. _charles._ i don't, but if you are tired we'll go and find our baskets. _emily._ where do you think they are? we've been looking a great while for them. i know we are lost, for when we went after the flowers we only turned once, and coming back, we have turned three times. _charles._ have we? well never mind, i guess we shall find them. _emily._ i'm afraid we shan't. do let's run _charles._ well so do. oh, emily! here's a brook, and i am sure we didn't pass any brook, going. _emily._ oh, dear! we must be lost. hark! charles! didn't you hear that dreadful noise just now? wasn't it a bear? _charles._ poh! i should love to see a bear here. i guess if he should come near me, i would give him one good slap that would make him feel pretty bad. i could kill him at the first hit. _emily._ i should like to see you taking hold of a bear. why didn't you know bears were stronger than men? but only see how dark it grows; we shan't see ma' to-night, i'm afraid. _charles._ so am i: do let's run some more. _emily._ o charles, do you believe we shall ever find the way out of this dreadful long wood? _charles._ let's scream, and see if somebody wont come. _emily._ well, (screaming) ma'! ma'! _charles._ (screaming also) pa'! pa'! _emily._ oh, dear! there's the sun setting. it will be dreadfully dark by and by, won't it? we have given enough for a specimen. the composition though faulty in many respects, illustrates the point we had in view. . insincere confession. an assistant in a school informed the principal that she had some difficulty in preserving order in a certain class, composed of small children. the principal accordingly went into the class, and something like the following dialogue ensued. "your teacher informs me," said the principal, "that there is not perfect order in this class. now if you are satisfied that there has not been order, and wish to help me discover and correct the fault, we can do it very easily. if, on the other hand, you do not wish to co-operate with me, it will be a little more difficult for me to correct it, and i must take a different course. now i wish to know, at the outset, whether you do or do not wish to help me." a faint "yes sir," was murmured through the class. "i do not wish you to assist me, unless you really and honestly desire it yourselves; and if you undertake to do it, you must do it honestly. the first thing which will be necessary, will be an open and thorough exposure of all which has been wrong, and this you know will be unpleasant. but i will put the question to vote, by asking how many are willing that i should know, entirely and fully, all that they have done in this class, that has been wrong." very nearly all the hands were raised at once, promptly, and the others were gradually brought up, though with more or less of hesitation. "are you willing, not only to tell me yourselves what you have done, but also, in case any one has forgotten something which she has done, that others should tell me of it?" the hands were all raised. after obtaining thus from the class a distinct and universal expression of willingness that all the facts should be made known, the principal called upon all those who had any thing to state, to raise their hands, and those who raised them, had opportunity to say what they wished. a great number of very trifling incidents were mentioned, such as could not have produced any difficulty in the class, and consequently could not have been the real instances of disorder alluded to. or at least, it was evident if they were, that in the statement, they must have been so palliated and softened, that a really honest confession had not been made. this result might in such a case, have been expected. such is human nature, that in nine cases out of ten, unless such a result had been particularly guarded against, it would have inevitably followed. not only will such a result follow in individual cases like this, but unless the teacher watches and guards against it, it will grow into a habit. i mean boys will get a sort of an idea that it is a fine thing to confess their faults, and by a show of humility and frankness will deceive their teacher, and perhaps themselves, by a sort of acknowledgement, which in fact exposes nothing of the guilt which the transgressor professes to expose. a great many cases occur, where teachers are pleased with the confession of faults, and scholars perceive it, and the latter get into the habit of coming to the teacher, when they have done something which they think may get them into difficulty, and make a sort of half confession, which, by bringing forward every palliating circumstance, and suppressing every thing of different character, keeps entirely out of view all the real guilt of the transgression. the criminal is praised by the teacher for the frankness and honesty of the confession, and his fault is freely forgiven. he goes away therefore well satisfied with himself, when in fact he has been only submitting to a little mortification, voluntarily, to avoid the danger of a greater; much in the same spirit with that which leads a man to receive the small-pox by inoculation, to avoid the danger of taking it in the natural way. the teacher who accustoms his pupils to confess their faults, voluntarily, ought to guard carefully against this danger. when such a case as the one just described occurs, it will afford a favorable opportunity of showing distinctly to pupils the difference between an honest and an hypocritical confession. in this instance; the teacher proceeded thus; "now i wish to ask you one more question, which i wish you all to answer by your votes, honestly. it is this. do you think that the real disorder which has been in this class, that is, the real cases which you referred to, when you stated to me, that you thought that the class was not in good order, have been now really exposed, so that i honestly and fully understand the case? how many suppose so?" not a single hand was raised. "how many of you think, and are willing to avow your opinion, that i have _not_ been fully informed of the case?" a large proportion held up their hands. "now it seems the class pretended to be willing that i should know all the affair. you pretended to be willing to tell me the whole, but when i call upon you for the information, instead of telling me honestly, you attempt to amuse me by little trifles, which in reality made no disturbance, and you omit the things which you know were the real objects of my inquiries. am i right in my supposition?" they were silent. after a moment's pause, one perhaps raised her hand, and began now to confess something, which she had before concealed. the teacher however interrupted her, by saying, "i do not wish to have the confession made now. i gave you all time to do that, and now i should rather not hear any more about the disorder. i gave an opportunity to have it acknowledged, but it was not honestly improved, and now i should rather not hear. i shall probably never know. "i wished to see whether this class would be honest,--really honest, or whether they would have the insincerity to pretend to be confessing, when they were not doing so honestly, so as to get the credit of being frank and sincere, when in reality they are not so. now am i not compelled to conclude that this latter is the case?" such an example will make a deep and lasting impression. it will show that the teacher is upon his guard; and there are very few, so hardened in deception, that they would not wish that they had been really sincere, rather than rest under such an imputation. . court. a pupil, quite young, (says a teacher,) came to me one day with a complaint that one of her companions had got her seat. there had been some changes in the seats by my permission, and probably from some inconsistency in the promises which i had made, there were two claimants for the same desk. the complainant came to me, and appealed to my recollection of the circumstance. "i do not recollect anything about it," said i. "why! mr. b." replied she, with astonishment. "no," said i, "you forget that i have, every day, arrangements, almost without number, of such a kind to make, and as soon as i have made one, i immediately forget all about it." "why, don't you remember that you got me a new baize?" "no; i ordered a dozen new baizes at that time, but i do not remember who they were for." there was a pause; the disappointed complainants seemed not to know what to do. "i will tell you what to do. bring the case into court and i will try it, regularly." "why, mr. b.! i do not like to do any thing like that, about it; besides, i do not know how to write an indictment." "oh!" i replied, "they will like to have a good trial. it will make a new sort of case. all our cases thus far have been for _offences_, that is what they call criminal cases, and this will be only an examination of the conflicting claims of two individuals to the same property, and it will excite a good deal of interest. i think you had better bring it into court." she went slowly and thoughtfully to her seat, and presently returned with an indictment. "mr. b. is this right?" it was as follows:-- i accuse miss a. b. of coming to take away my seat, the one mr. b. gave me. witnesses. { c. d. { e. t. "why, ---- ---- yes,--that will do; and yet it is not exactly right. you see this is what they call a civil case." "i don't think it is very _civil_." "no, i don't mean it was civil to take your seat. but this is not a case where a person is prosecuted for having done anything wrong." the plaintiff looked a little perplexed, as if she could not understand how it could be otherwise than wrong, for a girl to usurp her seat. "i mean, you do not bring it into court, as a case of wrong. you do not want her to be punished; do you?" "no; i only want her to give me up my seat; i don't want her to be punished." "well, then, you see, that although she may have done wrong to take your seat, it is not in that point of view, that you bring it into court. it is a question about the right of property, and the lawyers call such cases, _civil_ cases, to distinguish them from cases where persons are tried for the purpose of being punished for doing wrong. these are called criminal cases." the aggrieved party still looked perplexed. "well, mr. b." she continued, "what shall i do? how shall i write it? i cannot say anything about _civil_, in it, can i?" a form was given her, which would be proper for the purpose, and the case was brought forward, and the evidence on both sides examined. the irritation of the quarrel was soon dissipated, in the amusement of a semi-serious trial, and both parties good humoredly acquiesced in the decision. . teachers' personal character. much has been said within a few years, by writers in the subject of education, in this country, on the desirableness of raising the business of teaching to the rank of a learned profession. there is but one way of doing this, and that is raising the personal characters and attainments of teachers themselves. whether an employment is elevated or otherwise in public estimation, depends altogether on the associations connected with it in the public mind; and these depend altogether on the characters of the individuals who are engaged in it. franklin, by the simple fact that he was a printer himself, has done more towards giving dignity and respectability to the employment of printing, than a hundred orations on the intrinsic excellence of the art. in fact all mechanical employments have, within a few years risen in rank, in this country, not through the influence of efforts to impress the community directly with a sense of their importance, but simply because mechanics themselves have risen in intellectual and moral character. in the same manner the employment of the teacher will be raised most effectually in the estimation of the public, not by the individual who writes the most eloquent oration on the intrinsic dignity of the art, but by the one who goes forward most successfully in the exercise of it, and who by his general attainments, and public character, stands out most fully to the view of the public, as a well informed, liberal minded, and useful man. if this is so, and it cannot well be denied, it furnishes every teacher a strong motive to exertion, for the improvement of his own personal character. but there is a stronger motive still, in the results which flow directly to himself, from such efforts. no man ought to engage in any business which, as mere business, will engross all his time and attention. the creator has bestowed upon every one a mind, upon the cultivation of which, our rank among intelligent beings, our happiness, our moral and intellectual power, every thing valuable to us, depend. and after all the cultivation which we can bestow, in this life, upon this mysterious principle, it will still be in embryo. the progress which it is capable of making is entirely indefinite. if by ten years of cultivation, we can secure a certain degree of knowledge and power, by ten more, we can double, or more than double it, and every succeeding year of effort, is attended with equal success. there is no point of attainment where we must stop, or beyond which effort will bring in a less valuable return. look at that teacher, and consider for a moment, his condition. he began to teach when he was twenty years of age, and now he is forty. between the years of fifteen and twenty he made a vigorous effort to acquire such an education as would fit him for these duties. he succeeded, and by these efforts he raised himself from being a mere laborer, receiving for his daily toil a mere daily subsistence, to the respectability and the comforts of an intellectual pursuit. but this change once produced, he stops short in his progress. once seated in his desk, he is satisfied, and for twenty years he has been going through the same routine, without any effort to advance or to improve. he does not reflect that the same efforts, which so essentially altered his condition and prospects at twenty, would have carried him forward to higher and higher sources of influence and enjoyment, as long as he should continue them. his efforts ceased when he obtained a situation as teacher, at forty dollars a month, and though twenty years have glided away, he is now exactly what he was then. there is probably no employment whatever which affords so favorable an opportunity for personal improvement,--for steady intellectual and moral progress, as that of teaching. there are two reasons for this. first, there is time for it. with an ordinary degree of health and strength, the mind can be vigorously employed at least ten hours a day. as much as this, is required of students, in many literary institutions. in fact ten hours to study, seven to sleep, and seven to food, exercise, and recreation, is perhaps as good an arrangement as can be made; at any rate, very few persons will suppose that such a plan allows too little under the latter head. now six hours is as much as is expected of teachers under ordinary circumstances, and it is as much as ought ever to be bestowed. for though he may labor four hours out of school, in some new field, his health and spirits will soon sink under the burden, if after his weary labors during the day in school, he gives up his evenings to the same perplexities and cares. and it is not necessary. no one who knows any thing of the nature of the human mind, and who will reflect a moment on the subject, can doubt that a man can make a better school, by expending six hours labor upon it, which he can go through with, with some alacrity and ardor, than he can by driving himself on to ten. every teacher therefore, who is commencing his work, should begin with the firm determination of devoting only six hours daily to the pursuit. make as good a school, and accomplish as much for it, as you can in six hours, and let the rest go. when you come from your school room at night, leave all your perplexities and cares behind you. no matter what unfinished business or unsettled difficulties remain. dismiss them all till another sun shall rise, and the hour of duty for another day shall come. carry no school work home with you and do not talk of your work. you will then get refreshment and rest. your mind during the evening will be in a different world from that in which you have moved during the day. at first this will be difficult. it will be hard for you, unless your mind is uncommonly well disciplined, to dismiss all your cares; and you will think, each evening, that some peculiar emergency demands your attention, _just at that time_, and that as soon as you have passed the crisis, you will confine yourself to what you admit are generally reasonable limits. but if you once allow school with its perplexities and cares to get possession of the rest of the day, it will keep possession. it will intrude itself into all your waking thoughts, and trouble you in your dreams. you will lose all command of your powers, and besides cutting off from yourself all hope of general intellectual progress, you will in fact destroy your success as a teacher. exhaustion, weariness, and anxiety will be your continual portion, and in such a state, no business can be successfully prosecuted. there need be no fear that employers will be dissatisfied, if the teacher acts upon this principle. if he is faithful and enters with all his heart into the discharge of his duties during six hours, there will be something in the ardor, and alacrity, and spirit with which his duties will be performed, which parents and scholars will both be very glad to receive, in exchange for the languid, and dull, and heartless toil, in which the other method must sooner or later result. * * * * * if the teacher then, will confine himself to such a portion of time, as is, in fact, all he can advantageously employ, there will be much left which can be devoted to his own private employment,--more than is usual in the other employments of life. in most of these other employments, there is not the same necessity for limiting the hours which a man may devote to his business. a merchant, for example, may be employed nearly all the day, at his counting-room, and so may a mechanic. a physician may spend all his waking-hours in visiting patients, and feel little more than healthy fatigue. the reason is that in all these employments, and in fact in most of the employments of life, there is so much to diversify, so many little incidents constantly occurring to animate and relieve, and so much bodily exercise, which alternates with, and suspends the fatigues of the mind, that the labors may be much longer continued, and with less cessation, and yet the health not suffer. but the teacher, while engaged in his work, has his mind continually on the stretch. there is little to relieve, little respite, and he is almost entirely deprived of bodily exercise. he must, consequently, limit his hours of attending to his business, or his health will soon sink under labors which providence never intended the human mind to bear. there is another circumstance which facilitates the progress of the teacher. it is a fact that all this general progress has a direct and immediate bearing upon his pursuits. a lawyer may read in an evening an interesting book of travels, and find nothing to help him with his case, the next day, in court,--but almost every fact which the teacher thus learns, will come _at once into use,_ in some of his recitations at school. we do not mean to imply by this that the members of the legal profession have not need of a great variety and extent of knowledge; they doubtless have. it is simply in the _directness_ and _certainty_, with which the teacher's knowledge may be applied to his purpose, that the business of teaching has the advantage over every other pursuit. this fact now has a very important influence in encouraging, and leading forward the teacher, to make constant intellectual progress, for every step brings at once a direct reward. . the chestnut burr. _a story for school-boys._[e] one fine pleasant morning, in the fall of the year, the master was walking along towards school, and he saw three or four boys under a large chestnut tree, gathering chestnuts. [footnote e: originally written for a periodical.] one of the boys was sitting upon the ground, trying to open some chestnut burrs, which he had knocked off from the tree. the burrs were green, and he was trying to open them by pounding them with a stone. he was a very impatient boy and was scolding, in a loud angry tone, against the burrs. he did not see, he said, what in the world chestnuts were made to grow so for. they ought to grow right out in the open air, like apples, and not have such vile porcupine skins on them,--just to plague the boys. so saying he struck with all his might a fine large burr, crushed it to pieces, and then jumped up, using at the same time profane and wicked words. as soon as he turned round he saw the master standing very near him. he felt very much ashamed and afraid, and hung down his head. "roger," said the master, (for this boy's name was roger) "can you get me a chestnut burr?" roger looked up for a moment, to see whether the master was in earnest, and then began to look around for a burr. a boy who was standing near the tree, with a red cap full of burrs in his hand, held out one of them. roger took the burr and handed it to the master, who quietly put it into his pocket, and walked away without saying a word. as soon as he was gone, the boy with the red cap, said to roger, "i expected the master would have given you a good scolding for talking so." "the master never scolds," said another boy, who was sitting on a log pretty near, with a green satchel in his hand, "but you see if he does not remember it." roger looked as if he did not know what to think about it. "i wish," said he, "i knew what he is going to do with that burr." that afternoon, when the lessons had been all recited, and it was about time to dismiss the school, the boys put away their books, and the master read a few verses in the bible, and then offered a prayer, in which he asked god to forgive all the sins which any of them had committed that day, and to take care of them during the night. after this he asked the boys all to sit down. he then took his handkerchief out of his pocket, and laid it on the desk, and afterwards he put his hand into his pocket again; and took out the chestnut burr, and all the boys looked at it. "boys," said he, "do you know what this is?" one of the boys in the back seat, said, in a half whisper, "it is nothing but a chestnut burr." "lucy," said the master, to a bright-eyed little girl, near him, "what is this?" "it is a chestnut burr, sir," said she. "do you know what it is for?" "i suppose there are chestnuts in it." "but what is this rough prickly covering for?" lucy did not know. "does any body here know?" said the master. one of the boys said he supposed it was to hold the chestnuts together, and keep them up on the tree. "but i heard a boy say," replied the master, "that they ought not to be made to grow so. the nut itself, he thought, ought to hang alone on the branches, without any prickly covering,--just as apples do." "but the nuts themselves have no stems to be fastened by," answered the same boy. "that is true, but i suppose this boy thought that god could have made them grow with stems, and that this would have been better than to have them in burrs." after a little pause the master said he would explain to them what the chestnut burr was for, and wished them all to listen attentively. "how much of the chestnut is good to eat, william?" asked he, looking at a boy before him. "only the meat." "how long does it take the meat to grow?" "all summer i suppose, it is growing." "yes; it begins early in the summer and gradually swells and grows until it has become of full size and is ripe, in the fall. now suppose there was a tree out here near the school-house, and the chestnut meats should grow upon it without any shell or covering, suppose too that they should taste like good ripe chestnuts at first, when they were very small. do you think they would be safe?" william said, "no! the boys would pick and eat them before they had time to grow." "well, what harm would there be in that; would it not be as well to have the chestnuts early in the summer, as to have them in the fall?" william hesitated. another boy who sat next to him said, "there would not be so much meat in the chestnuts, if they were eaten before they had time to grow." "right," said the master, "but would not the boys know this, and so all agree to let the little chestnuts stay, and not eat them while they were small?" william said he thought they would not. if the chestnuts were good, he was afraid they would pick them off and eat them, if they were small. all the rest of the boys in the school thought so too. "here then," said the master, "is one reason for having prickles around the chestnuts when they are small. but then it is not necessary to have all chestnuts guarded from boys in this way; a great many of the trees are in the woods, which the boys do not see; what good do the burrs do in these trees?" the boys hesitated. presently the boy who had the green satchel under the tree with roger, who was sitting in one corner of the room, said, "i should think they would keep the squirrels from eating them." "and besides," continued he after thinking a moment, "i should suppose if the meat of the chestnut had no covering, the rain might wet it and make it rot, or the sun might dry and wither it." "yes," said the master, "these are very good reasons why the nut should be carefully guarded. first the meats are packed away in a hard brown shell, which the water cannot get through; this keeps it dry, and away from dust, and other things which might injure it. then several nuts thus protected grow closely together inside this green prickly covering; which spreads over them and guards them from the larger animals and the boys. where the chestnut gets its full growth and is ripe, this covering you know splits open, and the nuts drop out, and then any body can get them and eat them." the boys were then all satisfied that it was better that chestnuts should grow in burrs. "but why," asked one of the boys, "do not apples grow so?" "can any body answer that question," asked the master. the boy with the green satchel said that apples had a smooth, tight skin, which kept out the wet, but he did not see how they were guarded from animals. the master said is was by their taste. "they are hard and sour before they are full grown, and so the taste is not pleasant, and nobody wants to eat them,--except sometimes a few foolish boys, and these are punished by being made sick. when the apples are full grown they change from sour to sweet, and become mellow; then they can be eaten. can you tell me of any other fruits which are preserved in this way?" one boy answered, "strawberries and blackberries," and another said, "peaches and pears." another boy asked why the peach-stone was not outside the peach, so as to keep it from being eaten. but the master said he would explain this another time. then he dismissed the scholars, after asking roger to wait until the rest had gone, as he wished to see him alone. . the series of writing lessons. c.[f] very many pupils soon become weary of the dull and monotonous business of writing, unless some plans are devised, to give interest and variety to the exercise, and on this account, this branch of education, in which improvement may be most rapid, is often the last and most tedious to be acquired. [footnote f: the articles to which this letter is prefixed were communicated for the work, by different teachers at the request of the author.] a teacher, by adopting the following plan, succeeded in awakening a great degree of interest in this subject, and consequently, of promoting rapid improvement. the plan was this; he prepared, on a large sheet of paper, a series of lessons in coarse hand, beginning with straight lines, and proceeding to the elementary parts of the various letters, and finally to the letters themselves. this paper was posted up in a part of the room accessible to all. the writing-books were made of three sheets of fool's-cap paper, folded into a convenient size, which was to be ruled by each pupil; for it was thought important that each one should learn this art. every pupil in school then, being furnished with one of these writing books, was required to commence this series, and to practice each lesson until he could write it well; then, and not till then, he was permitted to pass to the next. a few brief directions were given under each lesson, on the large sheet. for example, under the line of straight marks, which constituted the first lesson, was written as follows: _straight, equidistant, parallel, smooth, well terminated_ these directions were to call the attention of the pupil to the excellences which he must aim at, and when he supposed he had secured them, his book was to be presented to the teacher for examination. if approved the word _passed_, or afterwards simply _p._ was written under the line, and he could then proceed to the next lesson. other requisites were necessary besides the correct formation of the letters, to enable one to pass; for example, the page must not be soiled or blotted, no paper must be wasted, and, in no case, a leaf torn out. as soon as _one line_ was written in the manner required, the scholar was allowed to pass; in a majority of cases however, not less than a page would be practised, and in many instances a sheet would be covered, before one line could be produced which would be approved. one peculiar excellency of this method was, that although the whole school were working under a regular and systematic plan, individuals could go on independently; that is, the progress of no scholar was retarded by that of his companion; the one more advanced, might easily pass the earlier lessons in few days, while the others would require weeks of practice to acquire the same degree of skill. during the writing hour, the scholars would practice, each at the lesson where he left off before, and at a particular time, each day, the books were brought from the regular place of deposit, and laid before the teacher for examination. without some arrangement for an examination of all the books together, the teacher would be liable to interruption at any time, from individual questions and requests, which would consume much time, and benefit only a few. when a page of writing could not pass, a brief remark, calling the attention of the pupil to the faults which prevented it, was sometimes made in pencil at the bottom of the page. in other cases, the fault was of such a character as to require full and minute oral directions to the pupil. at last, to facilitate the criticism of the writing, a set of arbitrary marks; indicative of the various faults, was devised, and applied, as occasion might require, to the writing books, by means of red ink. these marks, which were very simple in their character, were easily remembered, for there was generally some connexion between the sign and the thing signified. for example; the mark denoting that letters were too short, was simply lengthening them in red ink. a faulty curve was denoted, by making a new curve over the old one, &c. the following are the principal criticisms and directions for which marks were contrived. strokes rough. curve wrong. bad termination. too slanting, and the reverse. too broad, and the reverse. not parallel. form of the letter bad. large stroke made too fine, and the reverse. too tall, or too short. stems not straight. careless work. paper wasted. almost well enough to pass. bring your book to the teacher. former fault not corrected. a catalogue of these marks, with an explanation, was made out and placed where it was accessible to all, and by means of them the books could be very easily and rapidly, but thoroughly criticised. after the plan had gone on for some time, and its operation was fully understood, the teacher gave up the business of examining the books into the hands of a committee, appointed by him from among the older and more advanced pupils. that the committee might be unbiased in their judgment, they were required to examine and decide upon the books, without knowing the names of the writers. each scholar was indeed required to place her name on the right hand upper corner of every page of her writing-book, for the convenience of the distributors; but this corner was turned down, when the book was brought in, that it might not be seen by the committee. this committee were entrusted with plenary powers, and there was no appeal from their decision. in case they exercised their authority in an improper way, or failed on any account to give satisfaction, they were liable to impeachment, but while they continued in office, they were to be strictly obeyed. this plan went on successfully for three months, and with very little diminution of interest. the whole school went regularly through the lessons in coarse hand, and afterwards through a similar series in fine hand, and improvement in this branch was thought to be greater than at any former period in the same length of time. the same principle of arranging the several steps of an art or a study into a series of lessons, and requiring the pupil to pass regularly from one to the other, might easily be applied to other studies, and would afford a pleasant variety. . the correspondence. a master of a district school was walking through the room, with a large rule in his hands, and as he came up behind two small boys, he observed that they were playing with some papers. he struck them once or twice, though not very severely on the head, with the rule which he had in his hand. tears started from the eyes of one. they were called forth by a mingled feeling of grief, mortification, and pain. the other who was of "sterner stuff," looked steadily into the master's face, and when his back was turned, shook his fist at him and laughed in defiance. another teacher seeing a similar case, did nothing. the boys when they saw him; hastily gathered up their playthings and put them away. an hour or two after, a little boy who sat near the master, brought them a note addressed to them both. they opened it and read as follows. to edward and john, i observed, when i passed you to-day, from your concerned looks, and your hurried manner of putting something into your desk, that you were doing something that you knew was wrong. when you attempt to do any thing whatever, which conscience tells you is wrong, you only make yourself uneasy and anxious while you do it, and then you are forced to resort to concealment and deception, when you see me coming. you would be a great deal happier, if you would always be doing your duty, and then you would never be afraid. your affectionate teacher, ---- ----. as the teacher was arranging his papers in his desk, at the close of school, he found a small piece of paper neatly folded up in the form of a note, and addressed to him. he read as follows, dear teacher, we are very much obliged to you for writing us a note. we were making a paper box. we know it was wrong, and are determined not to do so any more. we hope you will forgive us. your pupils, edward, john. which of these teachers understood human nature best? . weekly reports. the plan described by the following article, which was furnished by a teacher for insertion here, was originally adopted, so far as i know, in a school on the kennebec. i have adopted it with great advantage. * * * * * c. a teacher had one day been speaking to her scholars of certain cases of slight disorder in the school, which, she remarked, had been gradually creeping in, and which, she thought, it devolved upon the scholars, by systematic efforts, to repress. she enumerated instances of disorder in the arrangement of the rooms, leaving the benches out of their places, throwing waste papers upon the floor, having the desk in disorder, inside, spilling water upon the entry floor, disorderly deportment, such as too loud talking or laughing in recess, or in the intermission at noon, or when coming to school, and making unnecessary noise in going to, or returning from recitations. "i have a plan to propose," said the teacher, "which i think may be the pleasantest way of promoting a reform, in things of this kind. it is this. let several of your number be chosen a committee to prepare, statedly--perhaps as often as once a week,--a written report of the state of the school. the report might be read before the school at the close of each week. the committee might consist in the whole, of seven or eight, or even of eleven or twelve individuals who should take the whole business into their hands. this committee might appoint individuals of their number, to write, in turn, each week. by this arrangement, it would not be known to the school generally, who are the writers of any particular report, if the individuals wish to be anonymous. two individuals might be appointed at the beginning of the week, who should feel it their business to observe particularly the course of things from day to day, with reference to the report. individuals not members of the committee, can render assistance by any suggestions they may present to this committee. these should however generally be made in writing." "subjects for such a report will be found to suggest themselves very abundantly, though you may not perhaps think so at first. the committee may be empowered, not only to state the particulars in which things are going wrong, but the methods by which they may be made right. let them present us with any suggestions they please. if we do not like them, we are not obliged to adopt them. for instance, it is generally the case whenever a recitation is attended in the corner yonder, that an end of one of the benches is put against the door, so as to occasion a serious interruption to the exercises when a person wishes to come in or go out. it would come within the province of the committee to attend to such a case as this, that is, to bring it up in the report. the remedy in such a case is a very simple one. suppose however, that instead of the _simple_ remedy, our committee should propose that the classes reciting in the said corner should be dissolved and the studies abolished. we should know the proposal was an absurd one; but then it would do no hurt;--we should have only to reject it." "again, besides our faults, let our committee notice the respects in which we are doing particularly well, that we may be encouraged to go on doing well, or even to do better. if they think for example, that we are deserving of credit for the neatness with which books are kept,--for their freedom from blots or scribblings, or dog's-ears, by which school-books are so commonly defaced, let them tell us so. and the same of any other excellence." with the plan as thus presented, the scholars were very much pleased. it was proposed by one individual that such a committee should be appointed immediately, and a report prepared for the ensuing week. this was done. the committee were chosen by ballot. the following may be taken as a specimen of their reports. weekly report. 'the committee appointed to write the weekly report have noticed several things which they think wrong. in the first place there have been a greater number of tardy scholars, during the past week than usual. much of this tardiness we suppose is owing to the interest felt in building the bower; but we think this business ought to be attended to only in play hours: if only one or two come in late when we are reading in the morning, or after we have composed ourselves to study at the close of the recess, every scholar must look up from her book,--we do not say they ought to do so, but only that they will do so. however, we anticipate an improvement in this respect, as we know "a word to the wise is sufficient." 'in the two back rows we are sorry to say that we have noticed whispering. we know that this fact will very much distress our teacher, as she expects assistance, and not trouble from our older scholars. it is not our business to reprove any one's misconduct, but it is our duty to mention it, however disagreeable it may be. we think the younger scholars during the past week have much improved in this respect. only three cases of whispering among them have occurred to our knowledge. 'we remember some remarks made a few weeks ago, by our teacher, on the practice of prompting each other in the classes. we wish she would repeat them, for we fear that by some they are forgotten. in the class in geography, particularly in the questions on the map, we have noticed sly whispers, which we suppose were the hints of some kind friend designed to refresh the memory of her less attentive companion. we propose that the following question be now put to vote. shall the practice of prompting in the classes be any longer continued? 'we would propose that we have a composition exercise _this_ week similar to the one on thursday last. it was very interesting, and we think all would be willing to try their thinking powers once more. we would propose also that the readers of the compositions should sit near the centre of the room, as last week many fine sentences escaped the ears of those seated in the remote corners. 'we were requested by a very public-spirited individual to mention once more the want of three nails, for bonnets in the entry. also, to say that the air from the broken pane of glass on the east side of the room, is very unpleasant to these who sit near. 'proposed that the girls who exhibited so much taste and ingenuity in the arrangement of the festoons of evergreen, and tumblers of flowers around the teacher's desk, be now requested to remove the faded roses and drooping violets. we have gazed on these sad emblems long enough. 'finally, proposed that greater care be taken by those who stay at noon, to place their dinner baskets in proper places. the contents of more than one, were partly strewed upon the entry floor this morning.' if such a measure as this is adopted, it should not be continued uninterrupted for a very long time. every thing of this sort should be occasionally changed, or it sooner or later becomes only a form. . the shopping exercise. c. i have often when going a shopping found difficulty and trouble in making change. i could never calculate very readily and in the hurry and perplexity of the moment, i was always making mistakes. i have heard others often make the same complaint, and i resolved to try the experiment of regularly teaching children to make change. i had a bright little class in arithmetic, who were always ready to engage with interest in any thing new, and to them i proposed my plan. it was to be called the shopping exercise. i first requested each individual to write something upon her slate, which she would like to buy, if she was going a shopping, stating the quantity she wished and the price of it. to make the first lesson as simple as possible, i requested no one to go above ten, either in the quantity or price. when all were ready, i called upon some one to read what she had written. her next neighbor was then requested to tell us how much the purchase would amount to; then the first one named a bill, which she supposed to be offered in payment, and the second showed what change was needed. a short specimen of the exercise will probably make it clearer than mere description. _mary._ eight ounces of candy at seven cents. _susan._ fifty-six cents. _mary._ one dollar. _susan._ forty-four cents. _susan._ nine yards of lace at eight cents. _anna._ seventy-two cents. _susan._ two dollars. _anna._ one dollar and twenty-eight cents. _anna._ three pieces of tape at five cents. _jane._ fifteen cents. _anna._ three dollars. _jane_. eighty-five cents. _several voices._ wrong. _jane._ two dollars and eighty-five cents. _jane._ six pictures at eight cents. _sarah._ forty-two cents. _several voices._ wrong. _sarah._ forty-eight cents. _jane._ one dollar. _sarah._ sixty-two cents. _several voices._ wrong. _sarah._ fifty-two cents. it will be perceived that the same individual who names the article and the price, names also the bill which she would give in payment, and the one who sits next her, who calculated the amount, calculated also the change to be returned. she then proposed her example to the one next in the line, with whom the same course was pursued, and thus it passed down the class. the exercise went on for some time in this way, till the pupils had become so familiar with it, that i thought it best to allow them to take higher numbers. they were always interested in it, and made great improvement in a short time, and i, myself, derived great advantage from listening to them. there is one more circumstance, i will add, which may contribute to the interest of this account. while the class were confined in what they purchased, to the number ten, they were sometimes inclined to turn the exercise into a frolic. the variety of articles which they could find costing less than ten cents was so small, that for the sake of getting something new, they would propose examples really ludicrous, such as these. three meeting-houses at two cents. four pianos at nine cents. but i soon found that if i allowed this at all, then attention was diverted from the main object, and occupied in seeking the most diverting and curious examples. . artifices in recitations. c. the teacher of a small, newly established school, had all of his scholars classed together in some of their studies. at recitations he usually sat in the middle of the room, while the scholars occupied the usual places at their desks, which were arranged around the sides. in the recitation in rhetoric, the teacher, after a time, observed that one or two of the class seldom answered appropriately the questions which came to them; but yet, were always ready with some kind of answer--generally an exact quotation of the words of the book. upon noticing these individuals more particularly, he was convinced that their books were open before them, in some concealed situation. another practice not uncommon in the class, was that of _prompting_ each other, either by whispers or writing. the teacher took no notice publicly of these practices, for some time, until at the close of an uncommonly good recitation, he remarked, "well, i think we have had a fine recitation to-day. it is one of the pleasantest things i ever do, to hear a lesson that is learned as well as this. do you think it would be possible for us to have as good an exercise every day?" "yes sir," answered several faintly. "do you think it would be reasonable for me to expect of every member of the class, that she should always be able to recite all her lessons, without ever missing a single question?" "no sir," answered all. "i do not expect it," said the teacher. "all i wish is, that each of you should be faithful in your efforts to prepare your lessons. i wish you to study from a sense of duty, and for the sake of your own improvement. you know i do not punish you for failures. i have no going up or down, no system of marking. your only reward when you have made faithful preparation for a recitation, is the feeling of satisfaction which you will always experience; and when you have been negligent, your only punishment is a sort of uneasy feeling of self-reproach. i do not expect you all to be invariably prepared with every question of your lessons. sometimes you will be unavoidably prevented from studying them, and at other times, when you have studied them very carefully, you may have forgotten, or you may fail from some misapprehension of the meaning in some cases. do not, in such a case, feel troubled because you may not have appeared as well as some individual who has not been half as faithful as yourself. if you have done your duty that is enough. on the other hand, you ought to feel no better satisfied with yourselves when your lesson has not been studied well, because you may have happened to know the parts which came to you. have i _done_ well should always be the question, not have i managed to _appear_ well? "i will say a word here," continued the teacher, "upon a practice, which i have known to be very common in some schools, and which i have been sorry to notice occasionally in this. i mean that of prompting, or helping each other along in some way, at recitations. now, where a severe punishment is the consequence of a failure, there might seem to be some reasonableness in helping your companions out of difficulty, though even then, such tricks are departures from honorable dealing. but especially when there is no purpose to be served but that of appearing to know more than you do, it certainly must be considered a very mean kind of artifice. i think i have sometimes observed an individual to be prompted, where evidently the assistance was not desired, and even where it was not needed. to whisper to an individual the answer to a question, is sometimes to pay her rather a poor compliment, at least; for it is the same as saying, 'i am a better scholar than you are; let me help you along a little.' "let us then hereafter, have only fair, open, honest dealings with each other, no attempts to appear to advantage by little artful manoeuvering;--no prompting,--no peeping into books. be faithful and conscientious, and then banish anxiety for your success. do you not think you shall find this the pleasantest course?"--"yes sir," answered every scholar. "are you willing to pledge yourselves to adopt it?" "yes sir." "those who are, may raise their hands," said the teacher. every hand was raised; and the pledge, there was evidence to believe, was honorably sustained. . keeping resolutions. the following are notes of a familiar lecture on this subject, given by a teacher at some general exercise in the school. the practice of thus reducing to writing what the teacher may say on such subjects will be attended with excellent effects. this is a subject upon which young persons find much difficulty. the question is asked a thousand times, "how shall i ever learn to keep my resolutions?" perhaps, the great cause of your failures is this. you are not sufficiently _definite_ in forming your purposes. you will resolve to do a thing, without knowing with certainty whether it is even possible to do it. again, you make resolutions which are to run on indefinitely, so that of course, they can never be fully kept. for instance, one of you will resolve to _rise earlier in the morning_. you fix upon no definite hour, on any definite number of mornings, only you are going to "_rise earlier_." morning comes and finds you sleepy and disinclined to rise. you remember your resolution of rising earlier. "but then it is _very early_," you say. you resolved to rise earlier, but you didn't resolve to rise just then. and this, it may be, is the last of your resolution. or, perhaps you are, for a few mornings, a little earlier; but then at the end of a week or fortnight, you do not know exactly, whether your resolution has been broken or kept, for, you had not decided whether to rise earlier for ten days, or for ten years. in the same vague and general manner, a person will resolve to be _more studious_, or more diligent. in the case of an individual, of a mature and well-disciplined mind, of acquired firmness of character, such a resolution might have effect. the individual will really devote more time and attention to his pursuits. but, for one of you to make such a resolution, would do no sort of good. it would only be a source of trouble and disquiet. you perceive there is nothing definite,--nothing fixed about it. you have not decided what amount of additional time or attention to give to your studies, or, when you will begin, or when you will end. there is no one time when you will feel that you are breaking your resolution, because there were no particular times when you were to study more. you waste one opportunity and another, and then, with a feeling of discouragement, and self-reproach, conclude to abandon your resolution. "oh! it does no good to make resolutions," you say; "i never shall keep them." now, if you would have the business of making resolutions a pleasant and interesting, instead of a discouraging, disquieting one, you must proceed in a different manner. be definite and distinct in your plan,--decide exactly what you will do, and how you will do it--when you will begin and when you will end. instead of resolving to "rise earlier," resolve to rise at the ringing of the sunrise bells, or at some other definite time. resolve to try this, as an experiment, for one morning, or for one week, or fortnight. decide positively, if you decide at all, and then, rise when the time comes, sleepy or not sleepy. do not stop to repent of your resolution, or to consider the wisdom or folly of it, when the time for acting under it, has once arrived. in all cases, little and great, make this a principle,--to consider well before you begin to act, but after you have begun to act, never stop to consider. resolve as deliberately as you please; but be sure to keep your resolution, whether a wise one or an unwise one, after it is once made. never allow yourself to re-consider the question of getting up, after the morning has come, except it be, for some unforeseen circumstance. get up for that time, and be more careful how you make resolutions again. . topics. c. the plan of the topic exercise, as we called it, is this. six or seven topics are given out, information upon which is to be obtained from any source, and communicated verbally before the whole school, or sometimes before a class formed for this purpose, the next day. the subjects are proposed both by teacher and scholars, and if approved, adopted. the exercise is intended to be voluntary, but ought to be managed in a way sufficiently interesting to induce all to join. at the commencement of the exercise the teacher calls upon all who have any information in regard to the topic assigned, suppose, for example it is _alabaster_, to rise. perhaps twenty individuals out of forty rise. the teacher may, perhaps, say to those in their seats, "do you not know any thing of this subject? have you neither seen nor heard of alabaster, and had no means of ascertaining any thing in regard to it? if you have, you ought to rise. it is not necessary that you should state a fact altogether new and unheard of, but if you tell me its color, or some of the uses to which it is applied, you will be complying with my request." after these remarks, perhaps a few more rise, and possibly the whole school. individuals are then called upon at random, each to state only one particular in regard to the topic in question. this arrangement is made so as to give all an opportunity to speak: if any scholar, after having mentioned one fact, has something still farther to communicate, she remains standing till called upon again. as soon as an individual has exhausted her stock of information, or if the facts that she intended to mention are stated by another, she takes her seat. the topics at first most usually selected, are the common objects by which we are surrounded; for example, glass, iron, mahogany, &c. the list will gradually extend itself, until it will embrace a large number of subjects. the object of this exercise is to induce pupils to seek for general information in an easy and pleasant manner, as by the perusal of books, newspapers, periodicals, and conversation with friends. it induces care and attention in reading, and discrimination in selecting the most useful and important facts from the mass of information. as individuals are called upon, also, to express their ideas _verbally_, they soon acquire by practice, the power of expressing their ideas with clearness and force, and communicating with ease and confidence the knowledge they possess. . music. c. the girls of our school often amused themselves in recess by collecting into little groups for singing. as there seemed to be a sufficient power of voice and a respectable number who were willing to join in the performance, it was proposed one day, that singing should be introduced as a part of the devotional exercises of the school. the first attempt nearly resulted in a failure; only a few trembling voices succeeded in singing old hundred, to the words, "be thou," &c. on the second day, peterborough was sung with much greater confidence on the part of the increased number of singers. the experiment was tried with greater and greater success for several days, when the teacher proposed that a systematic plan should be formed, by which there night be singing regularly at the close of school. it was then proposed, that a number of singing books be obtained, and one of the scholars, who was well acquainted with common tunes, be appointed as chorister. her duty should be, to decide what particular tune may be sung each day, inform the teacher of the metre of the hymn, and take the lead in the exercise. this plan being approved of by the scholars, was adopted, and put into immediate execution. several brought copies of the sabbath school hymn book which they had in their possession, and the plan succeeded beyond all expectation. the greatest difficulty in the way was to get some one to lead. the chorister, however, was somewhat relieved from the embarrassment which she would naturally feel in making a beginning, by the appointment of one or two individuals with herself, who were to act as her assistants. these constituted the leading committee, or as it was afterwards termed, _singing committee_. singing now became a regular and interesting exercise of the school, and the committee succeeded in managing the business themselves. . tabu. c. an article was one day read in a school relating to the "tabu" of the sandwich islanders. tabu is a term with them which signifies consecrated,--not to be touched--to be let alone--not to be violated. thus according to their religious observances, a certain day will be proclaimed _tabu_, that is, one upon which there is to be no work, or no going out. a few days after this article was read, the scholars observed one morning, a flower stuck up in a conspicuous place against the wall, with the word tabu in large characters above it. this excited considerable curiosity. the teacher informed them, in explanation, that the flower was a very rare and beautiful specimen brought by one of the scholars, which he wished all to examine. "you would naturally feel a disposition to examine it by the touch;" said he, "but you will all see, that by the time it was touched by sixty individuals, it would be likely to be injured, if not destroyed. so i concluded to label it, _tabu_. and it has occurred to me that this will be a convenient mode of apprising you generally, that any article had better not be handled. you know we sometimes have some apparatus exposed, which would be liable to injury from disturbance, where there are so many persons to touch it. i shall in such a case, just mention that an article is tabu, and you will understand that it is not only not to be _injured_, but not even _touched_." a little delicate management of this sort will often have more influence over young persons, than the most vehement scolding, or the most watchful and jealous precautions. the tabu was always most scrupulously regarded, after this, whenever employed. . mental analysis. scene; a class in arithmetic at recitation. the teacher gives them an example in addition, requesting them when they have performed it to rise. some finish it very soon, others are very slow in accomplishing the work. "i should like to ascertain," says the teacher, "how great is the difference of rapidity, with which different members of the class work in addition. i will give you another example, and then notice by my watch, the shortest and longest time required to do it." the result of the experiment was, that some members of the class were two or three times as long in doing it, as others. "perhaps you think," said the teacher, "that this difference is altogether owing to difference of skill, but it is not. it is mainly owing to the different methods adopted by various individuals. i am going to describe some of these, and as i describe them, i wish you would notice them carefully, and tell me which you practice. there are then three modes of adding up a column of figures, which i shall describe." . "i shall call the first _counting_. you take the first figure, and then add the next to it, by counting up regularly. there are three distinct ways of doing this. (a.) counting by your fingers. ("yes sir.") you take the first figure,--suppose it is seven, and the one above it, eight. now you recollect that to add eight, you must count all the fingers of one hand, and all but two again. so you say seven--eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen." "yes sir," "yes sir," said the scholars. (b.) "the next mode of counting is to do it mentally, without using your fingers at all, but as it is necessary for you to have some plan to secure your adding the right number, you divide the units into sets of two each. thus you remember that eight consists of four twos, and you accordingly say, when adding eight to seven, seven;--eight, nine;--ten, eleven;--twelve, thirteen;" &c. (c.) "the third mode is, to add by three, in the same way. you recollect that eight consists of two threes and a two; so you say, seven;--eight, nine, ten;--eleven, twelve, thirteen;--fourteen, fifteen." the teacher here stops to ascertain how many of the class are accustomed to add in either of these modes. it is a majority. . "the next general method is _calculating_. that is, you do not unite one number to another by the dull and tedious method of applying the units, one by one, as in the ways described under the preceding head, but you come to a result more rapidly by some mode of calculating. these modes are several. (a.) doubling a number, and then adding or subtracting as the case may require. for instance in the example already specified; in order to add seven and eight, you say, "twice seven are fourteen and one are fifteen;" ("yes sir," "yes sir,") or "twice eight are sixteen, and taking one off, leaves fifteen. ("yes sir.") (b.) another way of calculating is to skip about the column, adding those numbers which you can do most easily, and then bringing in the rest as you best can. thus, if you see three eights in one column, you say three times eight are twenty-four, and then you try to bring in the other numbers. often in such cases, you forget what you have added and what you have not, and get confused, ("yes sir,") or you omit something in your work, and consequently it is incorrect. (c.) if nines occur, you sometimes add ten, and then take off one, for it is very easy to add ten. (d.) another method of calculating, which is, however, not very common, is this. to take our old case, adding eight to seven, you take as much from the eight to add to the seven as will be sufficient to make ten, and then it will be easy to add the rest. thus, you think in a minute, that three from the eight will make the seven a ten, and then there will be five more to add, which will make fifteen. if the next number was seven, you would say five of it will make twenty, and then there will be two left, which will make twenty-two. this mode, though it may seem more intricate than any of the others, is in fact more rapid than any of them, when one is little accustomed to it. these are the four principal modes of calculating which occur to me. pupils do not generally practice any one of them exclusively, but occasionally resort to each, according to the circumstances of the particular case." the teacher here stopped to inquire how many of the class were accustomed to add by calculating in either of these ways; or in any simpler ways. . "there is one more mode which i shall describe: it is by _memory_. before i explain this mode i wish to ask you some questions which i should like to have you answer as quick as you can. how much is four times five?--four _and_ five? how much is seven times nine?--seven _and_ nine? eight times six?--eight _and_ six? nine times seven?--nine _and_ seven?" after asking a few questions of this kind, it was perceived that the pupils could tell much more readily what was the result when the numbers were to be multiplied, then when they were to be added. "the reason is," said the teacher, "because you committed the multiplication table to memory, and have not committed the addition table. now many persons have committed the addition table, so that it is perfectly familiar to them, and when they see any two numbers, the amount which is produced when they are added together comes to mind in an instant. adding in this way is the last of the three modes i was to describe. now of these three methods, the last is undoubtedly the best. if you once commit the addition table thoroughly, you have it fixed for life; whereas if you do not, you have to make the calculation over again every time, and thus lose a vast amount of labor. i have no doubt that there are some in this class who are in the habit of _counting_, who have ascertained that seven and eight for instance, make fifteen; by counting up from seven to fifteen, _hundreds of times_. now how much better it would be, to spend a little time in fixing the fact in the mind once for all, and then when you come to the case, seven and eight are--say at once "fifteen,"--instead of mumbling over and over again, hundreds of times, "seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen." the reason then, that some of the class add so slowly, is not probably because they want skill and rapidity of execution, but became they work to a great disadvantage, by working in the wrong way. i have often been surprised at the dexterity and speed with which some scholars can count with their fingers, when adding, and yet they could not get through the sum very, quick--at least they would have done it in half the time, if the same effort had been made in travelling on a shorter road. we will therefore study the addition table now, in the class, before we go on any farther." * * * * * the foregoing narratives, it is hoped, may induce some of the readers of this book to keep journals of their own experiments, and of the incidents which may, from time to time come under their notice, illustrating the principles of education, or simply the characteristics and tendencies of the youthful mind. the business of teaching will excite interest and afford pleasure, just in proportion to the degree in which it is conducted by operations of mind upon mind, and the means of making it most fully so, are, careful practice, based upon, and regulated by, the results of careful observation. every teacher then should make observations and experiments upon mind a part of his daily duty, and nothing will more facilitate this, than keeping a record of results. there can be no opportunity for studying human nature, more favorable than the teacher enjoys. the materials are all before him; his very business, from day to day, brings him to act directly upon them; and the study of the powers and tendencies of the human mind is not only the most interesting and the noblest that can engage human attention, but every step of progress he makes in it, imparts an interest and charm, to what would otherwise be a weary toil. it at once relieves his labors, while it doubles their efficiency and success. chapter ix. the teacher's first day. the teacher enters upon the duties of his office by a much more sudden transition than is common in the other avocations and employments of life. in ordinary cases, business comes at first by slow degrees, and the beginner is introduced to the labors and responsibilities of his employment, in a very gradual manner. the young teacher, however, enters, by a single step, into the very midst of his labors. having, perhaps, never even heard a class recite before, he takes a short walk some winter morning, and suddenly finds himself instated at the desk,--his fifty scholars all around, looking him in the face, all waiting to be employed. everything comes upon him at once. he can do nothing until the day and the hour for opening the school arrives,--then he has everything to do. under these circumstances it is not surprising that the young teacher should look forward with unusual solicitude to his first day in school; and he desires, ordinarily, special instructions in respect to this occasion. some such special instructions we propose to give in this chapter. the experienced teacher may think some of them too minute and trivial. but he must remember that they are intended for the youngest beginner in the humblest school; and if he recalls to mind his own feverish solicitude on the morning when he went to take his first command in the district school, he will pardon the seeming minuteness of detail. . it will be well for the young teacher to take opportunity, between the time of his engaging his school and that of his commencing it,--to acquire as much information in respect to it, beforehand, as possible,--so as to be somewhat acquainted with the scene of his labors before entering upon it. ascertain the names and the characters of the principal families in the district, their ideas and wishes in respect to the government of the school, the kind of management adopted by one or two of the last teachers, the difficulties they fell into, the nature of the complaints made against them, if any, and the families with whom difficulty has usually arisen. this information must of course be obtained in private conversation; a good deal of it must be, from its very nature, highly confidential; but it is very important that the teacher should be possessed of it. he will necessarily become possessed of it by degrees, in the course of his administration, when, however, it may be too late to be of any service to him. but by judicious and proper efforts to acquire it beforehand, he will enter upon the discharge of his duties with great advantage. it is like a navigator's becoming acquainted beforehand with the nature and the dangers of the sea over which he is about to sail. such inquiries as these will, in ordinary cases, bring to the teacher's knowledge, in most districts in our country, some cases of peculiarly troublesome scholars, or unreasonable and complaining parents,--and stories of their unjustifiable conduct on former occasions, will come to him; exaggerated by the jealousy of rival neighbours. there is danger that his resentment may be roused a little, and that his mind will assume a hostile attitude at once towards such individuals; so that he will enter upon his work rather with a desire to seek a collision with them, or at least with secret feelings of defiance towards them,--feelings which will lead to that kind of unbending perpendicularity in his demeanour towards them which will almost inevitably lead to a collision. now this is wrong. there is indeed a point where firm resistance to unreasonable demands becomes a duty. but as a general principle it is most unquestionably true, that it is the teacher's duty _to accommodate himself to the character and expectations of his employers_, not to face and brave them. those italicized words _may be_ understood to mean something which would be entirely wrong; but in the sense in which i mean to use them, there can be no question that they indicate the proper path for one employed by others to do work _for them_, in all cases, to pursue. if therefore the teacher finds by his inquiries into the state of his district that there are some peculiar difficulties and dangers there, let him not cherish a disposition to face and resist them, but to avoid them. let him go with an intention to soothe rather than to irritate feelings which have been wounded before,--to comply with the wishes of all so far as he can, even if they are not entirely reasonable,--and while he endeavours to elevate the standard and correct the opinions prevailing among his employers, by any means in his power, to aim at doing it gently; and in a tone and manner suitable to the relation he sustains;--in a word, let him skilfully _avoid_ the dangers of his navigation, not obstinately run his ship against a rock on purpose, on the ground that the rock has no business to be there. this is the spirit then with which these preliminary inquiries, in regard to the patrons of the school, ought to be made. we come now to a second point. . it will assist the young teacher very much in his first day's labors, if he takes measures for seeing and conversing with some of the older or more intelligent scholars, on the day or evening before he begins his school, with a view of obtaining from them some acquaintance with the internal arrangements and customs of the school. the object of this is to obtain the same kind of information with respect to the interior of the school, that was recommended in respect to the district, under the former head. he may call upon a few families, especially those which furnish a large number of scholars for the school, and make as many minute inquiries of them, as he can, respecting all the interior arrangements to which they have been accustomed; what reading books and other text books have been used,--what are the principal classes in all the several departments of instruction,--and what is the system of discipline, and of rewards and punishments to which the school has been accustomed. if in such conversations the teacher should find a few intelligent and communicative scholars, he might learn a great deal about the past habits and condition of the school, which would be of great service to him. not, by any means, that he will adopt and continue these methods as a matter of course,--but only that a knowledge of them will render him very important aid in marking out his own course. the more minute and full the information of this sort is which he thus obtains, the better. if practicable, it would be well to make out a catalogue of all the principal classes, with the names of those individuals belonging to them, who will probably attend the new school, and the order in which they were usually called upon to read or recite. the conversation which would be necessary to accomplish this, would of itself be of great service. it would bring the teacher into an acquaintance with several important families and groups of children, under the most favorable circumstances. the parents would see and be pleased with the kind of interest they would see the teacher taking in his new duties. the children would be pleased to be able to render their new instructer some service, and would go to the school-room on the next morning with a feeling of acquaintance with him, and a predisposition to be pleased. and if by chance any family should be thus called upon, that had heretofore been captious or complaining, or disposed to be jealous of the higher importance or influence of other families,--that spirit would be entirely softened and subdued by such an interview with their new instructer at their own fireside, on the evening preceding the commencement of his labors. the great object, however, which the teacher would have in view, in such inquiries, should be the value of the information itself. as to the use which he will make of it, we shall speak hereafter. . it is desirable that the young teacher should meet his scholars first in an unofficial capacity. for this purpose repair to the school-room, on the first day, at an early hour, so as to see and become acquainted with the scholars as they come in, one by one. the intercourse between teacher and pupil should be like that between parents and children, where the utmost freedom is united with the most perfect respect. the father who is most firm and decisive in his family government, can mingle most freely in the conversation and sports of his children without any derogation of his authority, or diminution of the respect they owe. young teachers, however, are prone to forget this, and to imagine that they must assume an appearance of stern authority, always, when in the presence of their scholars, if they wish to be respected or obeyed. this they call keeping up their dignity. accordingly they wait, on the morning of their induction into office, until their new subjects are all assembled, and then walk in with an air of the highest dignity, and with the step of a king. and sometimes a formidable instrument of discipline is carried in the hand to heighten the impression. now there is no question that it is of great importance that scholars should have a high idea of the teacher's firmness and inflexible decision in maintaining his authority and repressing all disorder of every kind. but this impression should be created by their seeing how he _acts_, in the various emergencies which will spontaneously occur, and not by assumed airs of importance or dignity, feigned for effect. in other words, their respect for him should be based on _real traits_ of character, as they see them brought out into natural action, and not on appearances assumed for the occasion. it seems to me, therefore, that it is best for the teacher first to meet his scholars with the air and tone of free and familiar intercourse, and he will find his opportunity more favorable for doing this, if he goes early, on the first morning of his labors, and converses freely with those whom he finds there, and with others as they come in. he may take an interest with them in all the little arrangements connected with the opening of the school. the building of the fire, the paths through the snow, the arrangements of seats, calling upon them for information or aid, asking their names, and, in a word, entering fully and freely into conversation with them, just as a parent, under similar circumstances, would do with his children. all the children thus addressed will be pleased with the gentleness and affability of the teacher. even a rough and ill-natured boy, who has perhaps come to the school with the express determination of attempting to make mischief, will be completely disarmed, by being asked pleasantly to help the teacher fix the fire, or alter the position of his desk. thus by means of the half hour during which the scholars are coming together, and of the visits made in the preceding evening, as described under the last head, the teacher will find, when he calls upon the children to take their seats, that he has made a very large number of them his personal friends. many of these will have communicated their first impressions to the others, so that he will find himself possessed, at the outset, of that which is of vital consequence in the opening of any administration,--a strong party in his favor. . the time for calling the school to order, and commencing exercises of some sort, will at length arrive, though if the work of making personal acquaintances is going on pleasantly, it may perhaps be delayed a little beyond the usual hour. when, however, the time arrives, we would strongly recommend that the first service by which the regular duties of the school are commenced should be an act of religious worship. there are many reasons why the exercises of the school should every day be thus commenced, and there are special reasons for it on the first day. there are very few districts where parents would have any objection to this. they might indeed, in some cases, if the subject were to be brought up formally before them as a matter of doubt, anticipate some difficulties, or create imaginary ones, growing out of the supposed sensitiveness of contending sects. but if the teacher were, of his own accord, to commence the plain, faithful, and honest discharge of this duty as a matter of course, very few would think of making any objection to it; and almost all would be satisfied and pleased with its actual operation. if, however, the teacher should, in any case, have reason to believe that such a practice would be contrary to the wishes of his employers, it would, according to views we have presented in another chapter, be wrong for him to attempt to introduce it. he might, if he should see fit, make such an objection a reason for declining to take the school; but he ought not, if he takes it, to act counter to the known wishes of his employers, in so important a point. but if, on the other hand, no such objections are made known to him, he need not raise the question himself at all, but take it for granted that in a christian land there will be no objection to imploring the divine protection and blessing at the opening of a daily school. if this practice is adopted, it will have a most powerful influence upon the moral condition of the school. it must be so. though many will be inattentive, and many utterly unconcerned,--yet it is not possible to bring children, even in form, into the presence of god every day, and to utter in their hearing the petitions, which they ought to present, without bringing a powerful element of moral influence to bear upon their hearts. the good will be made better,--the conscientious more conscientious still,--and the rude and savage will be subdued and softened by the daily attempt to lead them to the throne of their creator. to secure this effect, the devotional service must be an honest one. there must be nothing feigned or hypocritical; no hackneyed phrases used without meaning, or intonations of assumed solemnity. it must be honest, heartfelt, simple prayer; the plain and direct expression of such sentiments as children ought to feel, and of such petitions as they ought to offer. we shall speak presently of the mode of avoiding some abuses to which this exercise is liable; but if these sources of abuse are avoided, and the duty is performed in that plain, simple, direct, and honest manner, in which it certainly will be, if it springs from the heart, it must have a great influence on the moral progress of the children, and in fact in all respects on the prosperity of the school. but then independently of the _advantages_ which may be expected to result from the practice of daily prayer in school,--it would seem to be the imperious _duty_ of the teacher to adopt it. so many human minds committed thus to the guidance of one,--at a period when the character receives so easily and so permanently its shape and direction,--and in a world of probation like this, is an occasion which seems to demand the open recognition of the hand of god on the part of any individual to whom such a trust is committed. the duty springs so directly out of the attitude in which the teacher and pupil stand in respect to each other, and the relation they together bear to the supreme, that it would seem impossible for any one to hesitate to admit the duty, without denying altogether the existence of a god. how vast the responsibility of _giving form and character to the human soul_! how mighty the influence of which the unformed minds of a group of children are susceptible! how much their daily teacher must inevitably exert upon them! if we admit the existence of god at all, and that he exerts any agency whatever in the moral world which he has produced, here seems to be one of the strongest cases in which his intervention should be sought. and then when we reflect upon the influence which would be exerted upon the future religious character of this nation, by having the millions of children training up in the schools, accustomed, through all the years of early life, to being brought daily into the presence of the supreme, with thanksgiving, confession, and prayer, it can hardly seem possible that the teacher who wishes to be faithful in his duties, should hesitate in regard to this. some teacher may, perhaps, say that he cannot perform it because he is not a religious man;--he makes no pretensions to piety. but this can surely be no reason. he _ought to be_ a religious man, and his first prayer offered in school may be the first act by which he becomes so. entering the service of jehovah is a work which requires no preliminary steps. it is to be done at once, by sincere confession, and an honest prayer for forgiveness for the past, and strength for time to come. a daily religious service in school may be, therefore, the outward act by which he, who has long lived without god, may return to his duty. if, from such considerations, the teacher purposes to have a daily religious service in his school, he should by all means begin on the first day,--and when he first calls his school to order. he should mention to his pupils the great and obvious duty of imploring god's guidance and blessing in all their ways, and then read a short portion of scripture, with an occasional word or two of simple explanation, and offer, himself, a short and simple prayer. in some cases, teachers are disposed to postpone this duty a day or two, from timidity or other causes, hoping that after becoming acquainted a little with the school, and having completed their more important arrangements, they shall find it easier to begin. but this is a sad mistake. the longer it is postponed, the more difficult and trying it will be. and then the moral impressions will be altogether more strong and salutary, if an act of solemn religious worship is made the first opening act of the school. where the teacher has not sufficient confidence that the general sense of propriety among his pupils will preserve good order and decorum during the exercise, it may be better for him to _read_ a prayer, selected from books of devotion, or prepared by himself expressly for the occasion. by this plan his school will be, during the exercise, under his own observation as at other times. it may, in some schools, where the number is small, or the prevailing habits of seriousness and order are good, be well to allow the older scholars to read the prayer in rotation, taking especial care that it does not degenerate into a mere reading exercise; but that it is understood, both by readers and hearers, to be a solemn act of religious worship. in a word, if the teacher is really honest and sincere in his wish to lead his pupils to the worship of god, he will find no serious difficulty in preventing the abuses and avoiding the dangers which some might fear, and in accomplishing vast good, both in promoting the prosperity of the school, and in the formation of the highest and best traits a individual character. we have dwelt, perhaps, longer on this subject than we ought to have done in this place; but its importance, when viewed in its bearings on the thousands of children daily assembling in our district schools, must be our apology. the embarrassments and difficulties arising from the extreme sensitiveness which exists among the various denominations of christians in our land, threaten to interfere very seriously with giving a proper degree of religious instruction to the mass of the youthful population. but we must not, because we have no national _church_, cease to have a national _religion_. all our institutions ought to be so administered as openly to recognise the hand of god, and to seek his protection and blessing; and in regard to none is it more imperiously necessary than in respect to our common schools. . after the school is thus opened, the teacher will find himself brought to the great difficulty which embarrasses the beginning of his labors, i. e. how to find immediate employment at once, for the thirty or forty children who all look up to him waiting for their orders. i say thirty or forty, for the young teacher's first school will usually be a small one. his object, i think, should be, in all ordinary cases, for the first few days, twofold. first, to revive and restore, in the main, the general routine of classes and exercises pursued by his predecessor in the same school. and secondly, while doing this, to become as fully acquainted with his scholars as possible. it is best then, _ordinarily_, for the teacher to begin the school as his predecessor closed it, and make the transition to his own perhaps more improved method, a gradual one. in some cases a different course is wise undoubtedly,--as, for example, where a teacher is commencing a private school, on a previously well-digested plan of his own,--or where one who has had experience, and has confidence in his power to bring his new pupils promptly and at once into the system of classification and instruction which he prefers. it is difficult however to do this, and requires a good deal of address and decision; it is far easier and safer, and in almost all cases, better in every respect for a young teacher to revive and restore the former arrangements in the main, and take his departure from them. he may afterwards make changes, as he may find them necessary or desirable, and even bring the school soon into a very different state from that in which he finds it; but it will generally be more pleasant for himself, and better for the school, to avoid the shock of a sudden and entire revolution. the first thing then, when the scholars are ready to be employed, is to set them at work, in classes or upon lessons, as they would have been employed had the former teacher continued in charge of the school. to illustrate clearly how this may be done, we may give the following dialogue. _teacher._ "can any one of the boys inform me what was the first lesson that the former master used to hear in the morning?" the boys are silent, looking to one another. _teacher._ "did he hear _any_ recitation immediately after school began?" _boys_;--faintly and with hesitation. "no sir." _teacher._ "how long was it before he began to hear lessons?" several boys simultaneously. "about half an hour." "a little while." "quarter of an hour." "what did he do at this time?" "mended pens." "set copies." "looked over sums," and various other answers are perhaps given. the teacher then makes a memorandum of this, and then inquires; "and what lesson came after this?" "geography." "all the boys in this school who studied geography may rise." a considerable number rise. "did you all recite together?" "no sir." "there are two classes then?" "yes sir." "yes sir." "more than two." "all who belong to the class that recites first in the morning may remain standing; the rest may sit." the boys obey, and eight or ten of them remain standing. the teacher calls upon one of them to produce his book, and assigns them a lesson, in regular course. he then requests some one of the number to write out, in the course of the day, a list of the class, and to bring it with him to the recitation the next morning. "are there any other scholars in the school who think it would be well for them to join this class?" in answer to this question probably some new scholars might perhaps rise, or some hitherto belonging to other classes, who might be of suitable age and qualifications to be transferred. if these individuals should appear to be of the proper standing and character, they might at once be joined to the class in question, and directed to take the same lesson. in the same manner the other classes would pass in review before the teacher; and he would obtain a memorandum of the usual order of exercises, and in a short time set all his pupils at work preparing for the lessons of the next day. he would be much aided in this by the previous knowledge which he would have obtained by private conversation, as recommended under a former head. some individual cases would require a little special attention, such as new scholars; small children, &c.; but he would be able, before a great while, to look around him and see his whole school busy with the work he had assigned them, and his own time for the rest of the morning, in a great degree, at his own command. i ought to say, however, that it is not probable that he would long continue these arrangements unaltered. in hearing the different classes, he would watch for opportunities for combining them, or discontinuing those where the number was small,--he would alter the times of recitation, and group individual scholars into classes, so as to bring the school, in a very short time, into a condition corresponding more nearly with his own views. all this can be done very easily and pleasantly when the wheels are once in motion; for a school is like a ship in one respect,--most easily steered in the right direction, when under sail. by this plan also the teacher obtains what is almost absolutely necessary at the commencement of his labors, time for _observation_. it is of the first importance that he should become acquainted, as early as possible, with the characters of the boys, especially to learn who those are which are most likely to be troublesome. there always will be a few, who will require special watch and care, and generally there will be only a few. a great deal depends on finding these individuals out, in good season, and bringing the pressure of a proper authority to bear upon them soon. by the plan i have recommended, of not attempting to remodel the school wholly at once, the teacher obtains time for noticing the pupils, and learning something about their individual characters. in fact, so important is this, that it is the plan of some teachers, whenever they commence a new school, to let the boys have their own way, almost entirely, for a few days, in order to find out fully who the idle and mischievous are. this is perhaps going a little too far; but it is certainly desirable to enjoy as many opportunities for observation as can be secured on the first few days of the school. . make it then a special object of attention, during the first day or two, to discover who the idle and mischievous individuals are. they will have generally seated themselves together in little knots, for as they are aware that the new teacher does not know them, they will imagine that, though perhaps separated before, they can now slip together again, without any trouble. it is best to avoid, if possible, an open collision with any of them at once, in order that they may be the better observed. whenever, therefore, you see idleness or play, endeavour to remedy the evil for the time, by giving the individual something special to do, or by some other measure, without however seeming to notice the misconduct. continue thus adroitly to stop every thing disorderly, while at the same time you notice and remember where the tendencies to disorder exist. by this means the individuals who would cause most of the trouble and difficulty in the discipline of the school will soon betray themselves, and those too, whose fidelity and good behaviour can be relied upon, will also be known. the names of the former should be among the first which the teacher learns, and their characters should be among the first which he studies. the most prominent among them, those apparently most likely to make trouble, he should note particularly, and make inquiries out of school respecting them,--their characters,--their education at home, &c., so as to become acquainted with them as early and as fully as possible;--for he must have this full acquaintance with them before he is prepared to commence any decided course of discipline with them. the teacher often does irreparable injury by rash action at the outset. he sees, for instance, a boy secretly eating an apple which he has concealed in his hand, and which he bites, with his book before his mouth, or his head under the lid of his desk. it is perhaps the first day of the school, and the teacher thinks he had better make an example at the outset, and calls the boy out, knowing nothing about his general character, and inflicts some painful or degrading punishment before all the school. a little afterwards, as he becomes gradually acquainted with the boy, he finds that he is of mild, gentle disposition, generally obedient and harmless, and that his offence was only an act of momentary thoughtlessness, arising from some circumstances of peculiar temptation at the time, a boy in the next seat perhaps had just before handed him the apple. the teacher regrets, when too late, the hasty punishment. he perceives that instead of having the influence of salutary example upon the other boys, it must have shocked their sense of justice, and excited dislike towards a teacher so quick and severe, rather than of fear of doing wrong themselves. it would be safer to postpone such decided measures a little,--to avoid all open collisions if possible for a few days. in such a case as the above, the boy might be kindly spoken to in an under-tone, in such a way as to show both the teacher's sense of the impropriety of disorder, and also his desire to avoid giving pain to the boy. if it then turns out that the individual is ordinarily a well-disposed boy, all is right, and if he proves to be habitually disobedient and troublesome, the lenity and forbearance exercised at first, will facilitate the effect aimed at by subsequent measures. avoid then, for the few first days, all open collision with any of your pupils, that you may have opportunity for minute and thorough observation. and here the young teacher ought to be cautioned against a fault which beginners are very prone to fall into, that of forming unfavorable opinions of some of their pupils from their air and manner, before they see any thing in their conduct which ought to be disapproved. a boy or girl comes to the desk to ask a question, or make a request, and the teacher sees in the cast of countenance, or in the bearing or tone of the individual, something indicating a proud, or a sullen, or an ill-humored disposition, and conceives a prejudice, often entirely without foundation, which weeks perhaps do not wear away. every experienced teacher can recollect numerous cases of this sort, and he learns, after a time, to suspend his judgment. be cautious therefore on this point, and in the survey of your pupils which you make during the first few days of your school, trust to nothing but the most sure and unequivocal evidences of character; for many of your most docile and faithful pupils will be found among those whose appearance at first prepossessed you strongly against them. one other caution ought also to be given. do not judge too severely in respect to the ordinary cases of misconduct in school. the young teacher almost invariably does judge too severely. while engaged himself in hearing a recitation, or looking over a "sum," he hears a stifled laugh, and, looking up, sees the little offender struggling with the muscles of his countenance to restore their gravity. the teacher is vexed at the interruption, and severely rebukes or punishes the boy,--when, after all, the offence, in a moral point of view, was an exceedingly light one; at least it might very probably have been so. in fact, a large proportion of the offences against order committed in school are the mere momentary action of the natural buoyancy and life of childhood. this is no reason why they should be indulged, or why the order and regularity of the school should be sacrificed, but it should prevent their exciting feelings of anger or impatience, or very severe reprehension. while the teacher should take effectual measures for restraining all such irregularities, he should do it with the tone and manner which will show that he understands their true moral character, and deals with them, not as heinous sins which deserve severe punishment, but as serious inconveniences which he is compelled to repress. there are often cases of real moral turpitude in school,--such as where there is intentional, wilful mischief, or disturbance, or habitual disobedience, and there may even be, in some cases, open rebellion. now the teacher should show that he distinguishes these cases from such momentary acts of thoughtlessness as we have described; and a broad distinction ought to be made in the treatment of them. in a word then,--what we have been recommending under this head is, that the teacher should make it his special study, for his first few days in school, to understand the characters of his pupils,--to learn who are the thoughtless ones, who the mischievous, and who the disobedient and rebellious;--and to do this with candid, moral discrimination, and with as little open collision with individuals as possible. . another point to which the teacher ought to give his early attention, is to separate the bad boys as soon as he can, from one another. the idleness and irregularity of children in school often depends more on accidental circumstances than on character. two boys may be individually harmless and well disposed, and yet they may be of so mercurial a temperament, that, together, the temptation to continual play will be irresistible. another case that more often happens, is, where one is actively and even intentionally bad, and is seated next to an innocent but perhaps thoughtless boy, and contrives to keep him always in difficulty. now remove the former away, where there are no very frail materials for him to act upon, and place the latter where he is exposed to no special temptation, and all would be well. this is all very obvious, and known familiarly to all teachers who have had any experience. but beginners are not generally so aware of it at the outset as to make any direct and systematic efforts to examine the school with reference to its condition in this respect. it is usual to go on, leaving the boys to remain seated as chance or their own inclinations grouped them, and to endeavour to keep the peace among the various neighbourhoods, by close supervision, rebukes, and punishment. now these difficulties may be very much diminished, by looking a little into the arrangement of the boys at the outset, and so modifying it as to diminish the amount of temptation to which the individuals are exposed. this should be done, however, cautiously, deliberately, and with good nature;--keeping the object of it a good deal out of view. it must be done cautiously and deliberately, for the first appearances are exceedingly fallacious in respect to the characters of the different children. you see perhaps some indications of play between two boys upon the same seat, and hastily conclude that they are disorderly boys and must be separated. something in the air and manner of one or both of them confirms this impression, and you take the necessary measures at once. you then find, when you become more fully acquainted with them, that the appearances which you observed were only momentary and accidental, and that they would have been as safe together as any two boys in the school. and perhaps you will even find, that, by their new position, you have brought one or the other into circumstances of peculiar temptation. wait, therefore, before you make such changes, till you have ascertained _actual character_,--doing this, however, without any unnecessary delay. in such removals, too, it is well, in many cases, to keep the motive and design of them as much as possible out of view. for by expressing suspicion of a boy, you injure his character in his own opinion, and in that of others, and tend to make him reckless. besides, if you remove a boy from a companion whom he likes, avowedly to prevent his playing, you offer him an inducement, if he is a bad boy, to continue to play in his new position for the purpose of thwarting you, or from the influence of resentment. it would be wrong indeed to use any subterfuge, or duplicity of any kind, to conceal your object,--but you are not bound to explain it, and in the many changes which you will be compelled to make, in the course of the first week, for various purposes, you may include many of these, without explaining particularly the design or intention of any of them. in some instances, however, you may frankly state the whole case, without danger, provided it is done in such a manner as not to make the boy feel that his character is seriously injured in your estimation. it must depend upon the tact and judgment of the teacher, to determine upon the particular course to be pursued in the several cases, though he ought to keep these general principles in view in all. in one instance, for example, he will see two boys together, james and joseph we will call them, exhibiting a tendency to play, and after inquiring into their characters he will find that they are good-natured, pleasant boys, and that he had better be frank with them on the subject. he calls one of them to his desk, and perhaps the following dialogue ensues. "james, i am making some changes in the seats, and thought of removing you to another place. have you any particular preference for that seat?" the question is unexpected, and james hesitates. he wants to sit next to joseph, but doubts whether it is quite prudent to avow it,--so he says slowly and with hesitation, "no sir,--i do not know that i have." "if you have any reason, i wish you would tell me frankly, for i want you to have such a seat as will be pleasant to you." james does not know what to say. encouraged, however, by the good-humored tone and look which the master assumes, he says, timidly, "joseph and i thought we should like to sit together,--if you are willing." "oh,--you and joseph are particular friends then, i suppose." "why,--yes sir." "i am not surprised then, that you want to sit together,--though, to tell the truth, that is rather a reason why i should separate you." "why sir?" "because i have observed that when two great friends are seated together, they are always more apt to whisper and play.--have not you observed it?" "why,--yes sir." "you may go and ask joseph to come here." when the two boys make their appearance again, the teacher continues. "joseph, james tells me that you and he want to sit together, and says you are particular friends. but i tell him," he adds, smiling, "that that is rather a reason for separating you. now if i should put you both into different parts of the school, next to boys that you are not acquainted with, it would be a great deal easier for you to be still and studious than it is now. do not you think so yourselves?" the boys look at one another and smile. "however, there is one way you can do. you can guard against the extra temptation by extra care; and on the whole, as i believe you are pretty good boys, i will let you have your choice. you may stay as you are, and make extra exertion to be perfectly regular and studious, or i will find seats for you where it will be a great deal easier for you to be so. which do you think you should rather do?" the boys hesitate, look at one another, and presently say that they had rather sit together. "well," said the teacher, "it is immaterial to me whether you sit together or apart, if you are only good boys. so you may take your seats and try it a little while. if you find it too hard work to be studious and orderly together, i can make a change hereafter. i shall soon see." such a conversation will have many good effects. it will make the boys expect to be watched, without causing them to feel that their characters have suffered. it will stimulate them to great exertion to avoid all misconduct, and it will prepare the way for separating them afterwards without awakening feelings of resentment, if the experiment of their sitting together should fail. * * * * * another case would be managed perhaps in a little different way, where the tendency to play was more decided. after speaking to the individuals mildly, two or three times, you see them again at play. you ask them to wait that day after school and come to your desk. they have, then, the rest of the day to think occasionally of the difficulty they have brought themselves into, and the anxiety and suspense which they will naturally feel, will give you every advantage for speaking to them with effect;--and if you should be engaged a few minutes with some other business, after school, so that they should have to stand a little while in silent expectation, waiting for their turn, it would contribute to the permanence of the effect. "well, boys," at length you say, with a serious but frank tone of voice, "i saw you playing in a disorderly manner to-day. and in the first place i want you to tell me honestly all about it. i am not going to punish you,--but i want you to be open and honest about it. what were you doing?" the boys hesitate. "george, what did you have in your hand?" "a piece of paper." "and what were you doing with it?" _george._ "william was trying to take it away from me." "was there any thing on it?" "yes sir." "what?" george looks down a little confused. _william._ "george had been drawing some pictures on it. "i see each of you are ready to tell of the other's fault, but it would be much more honorable if each was open in acknowledging his own. have i ever had to speak to you before for playing together in school?" "yes sir, i believe you have," says one, looking down. "more than once?" "yes sir." "more than twice?" "i do not recollect exactly,--i believe you have." "well, now, what do you think i ought to do next?" the boys have nothing to say. "do you prefer sitting together, or are you willing to have me separate you?" "we should rather sit together, sir, if you are willing," says george. "i have no objection to your sitting together, if you could only resist the temptation to play. i want all the boys in the school to have pleasant seats." there is a pause,--the teacher hesitating what to do. "suppose now i were to make one more experiment, and let you try to be good boys in your present seat, would you really try?" "yes sir."--"yes sir, we will," are the replies. "and if i should find that you still continue to play, and should have to separate you, will you move into your new seats pleasantly, and with good humor, feeling that i have done right about it?" "yes sir, we will." * * * * * thus it will be seen that there may be cases where the teacher may make arrangements for separating his scholars, on an open and distinct understanding with them in respect to the cause of it. we have given these cases not that exactly such ones will be very likely to occur, or that when they do, the teacher is to manage them in exactly the way here described, but to exhibit more clearly to the reader than could be done by any general description, the spirit and tone which a teacher ought to assume towards his pupils. we wished to exhibit this in contrast with the harsh and impatient manner, which teachers too often assume in such a case;--as follows. "john williams and samuel smith, come here to me," exclaims the master, in a harsh, impatient tone, in the midst of the exercises of the afternoon. the scholars all look up from their work;--the culprits slowly rise from their seats, and with a sullen air come down to the floor. "you are playing, boys, all the time, and i will not have it. john, do you take your books and go and sit out there by the window, and, samuel, you come and sit here on this front seat,--and if i catch you playing again i shall certainly punish you severely." the boys make the move, with as much rattling and disturbance as is possible without furnishing proof of wilful intention to make a noise, and when they get their new seats, and the teacher is again engaged upon his work, they exchange winks and nods, and, in ten minutes, are slyly cannonading each other with paper balls. * * * * * in regard to all the directions that have been given under this head, i ought to say again before concluding it, that they are mainly applicable to the case of beginners, and of small schools. the general principles are, it is true, of universal application, but it is only where a school is of moderate size that the details of position, in respect to individual scholars, can be minutely studied. more summary processes are necessary, i am aware, when the school is very large, and the time of the teacher is incessantly engaged. . in some districts in new england, the young teacher will find one or more boys, generally among the larger ones, who will come to the school with the express determination to make a difficulty if they can. the best way is generally to face these individuals at once, in the most direct and open manner, and, at the same time, with perfect good humor, and kindness of feeling and deportment towards them personally. an example or two will best illustrate what i mean. a teacher heard a rapping noise repeatedly, one day, just after he had commenced his labors, under such circumstances as to lead him to suppose it was designed. he did not appear to notice it, but remained after school until the scholars had all gone, and then made a thorough examination. he found at length a broken place in the plastering, where a _lath_ was loose, and a string was tied to the end of it, and thence carried along the wall under the benches, to the seat of a mischievous boy, and fastened to a nail. by pulling the string he could spring the lath, and then let it snap back to its place. he left every thing as it was, and the next day while engaged in a lesson, he heard the noise again. he rose from his seat. the scholars all looked up from their books. "did you hear that noise?" said he. "yes sir." "do you know what it is?" "no sir." "very well, i only wanted to call your attention to it. i may perhaps speak of it again, by and by." he then resumed his exercise as if nothing had happened. the guilty boy was agitated and confused, and was utterly at a loss to know what to do. what could the teacher mean? had he discovered the trick?--and if so what _was_ he going to do? he grew more and more uneasy, and resolved that, at all events, it was best for him to retreat. accordingly, at the next recess, as the teacher had anticipated, he went slyly to the lath, cut the string, then returned to his seat, and drew the line in, rolled it up, and put it in his pocket. the teacher, who was secretly watching him, observed the whole manoeuvre. at the close of the school, when the books were laid aside, and all was silence, he treated the affair thus. "do you remember the noise to which i called your attention early this afternoon? "yes, sir." "i will explain it to you now. one of the boys tied a string to a loose lath in the side of the room, and then having the end of it at his seat, he was pulling it, to make a noise to disturb us." the scholars all looked astonished, and then began to turn round towards one another to see who the offender could be. the culprit began to tremble. "he did it several times yesterday, and would have gone on doing it, had i not spoken about it to-day. do you think this was wrong or not?" "yes sir;" "wrong;" "wrong;" are the replies. "what harm does it do?" "it interrupts the school." "yes. is there any other harm?" the boys hesitate. "it gives me trouble and pain. should you not suppose it would?" "yes sir." "have i ever treated any boy or girl in this school unjustly or unkindly?" "no sir;" "no sir." "then why should any boy or girl wish to give me trouble or pain?" there was a pause. the guilty individual expected that the next thing would be to call him out for punishment. "now what do you think i ought to do with such a boy?" no answer. "perhaps i ought to punish him, but i am very unwilling to do that. i concluded to try another plan, to treat him with kindness and forbearance. so i called your attention to it this afternoon, to let him know that i was observing it, and to give him an opportunity to remove the string. and he did. he went in the recess and cut off the string. i shall not tell you his name, for i do not wish to injure his character. all i want is to have him a good boy." a pause. "i think i shall try this plan; for he must have some feelings of honor and gratitude, and if he has, he certainly will not try to give me pain or trouble win after this. and now i shall say no more about it, nor think any more about it; only, to prove that it is all as i say, if you look there under that window, after school, you will see the lath with the end of the string round it, and by pulling it, you can make it snap." * * * * * another case, a little more serious in its character, is the following. a teacher having had some trouble with a rude and savage-looking boy, made some inquiry respecting him out of school, and incidentally learned that he had once or twice before openly rebelled against the authority of the school, and that he was now, in the recesses, actually preparing a club with which he was threatening to defend himself, if the teacher should attempt to punish him. the next day, soon after the boys had gone out, he took his hat and followed them, and turning round a corner of the schoolhouse, found the boys standing around the young rebel, who was sitting upon a log, shaving the handle of the club smooth, with his pocket-knife. he was startled at the unexpected appearance of the teacher, and the first impulse was to hide his club behind him, but it was too late, and supposing that the teacher was ignorant of his designs, he went on sullenly with his work, feeling, however, greatly embarrassed. "pleasant day, boys," said the teacher. "this is a fine sunny nook for you to talk in." "seems to me, however, you ought to have a better seat than this old log," continued he, taking his seat at the same time by the side of the boy. "not so bad a seat, however, after all. what are you making, joseph?" joseph mumbled out something inarticulate by way of reply. "i have got a sharper knife," said he, drawing his penknife out of his pocket. and then, "let me try it," he continued, gently taking the club out of joseph's hand. the boys looked surprised, some exchanged nods and winks, others turned away to conceal a laugh; but the teacher engaged in conversation with them, and soon put them all at their ease, except poor joseph, who could not tell how this strange interview was likely to end. in the mean time the teacher went on shaving the handle smooth, and rounding the ends. "you want," said he, "a rasp or coarse file for the ends, and then you could finish it finely. but what are you making this formidable club for?" joseph was completely at a loss what to say. he began to show evident marks of embarrassment and confusion. "i know what it is for; it is to defend yourself against me with, is it not, boys?" said he, appealing to the others. a faint "yes sir," or two, was the reply. "well now, joseph, it will be a great deal better for us both to be friends than to be enemies. you had better throw this club away, and save yourself from punishment by being a good boy. come now," said he, handing him back his club, "throw it over into the field as far as you can, and we will all forget that you ever made it." joseph sat the picture of shame and confusion. better feelings were struggling for admission, and the case was decided by a broad-faced, good-natured-looking boy, who stood by his side saying almost involuntarily, "better throw it, joe." the club flew, end over end, into the field. joseph returned to his allegiance, and never attempted to rise in rebellion again. the ways by which boys engage in open, intentional disobedience, are, of course, greatly varied, and the exact treatment will depend upon the features of the individual case. but the frankness, the openness, the plain dealing, and the kind and friendly tone, which it is the object of the foregoing illustrations to exhibit, should characterize all. . we have already alluded to the importance of a delicate regard for the _characters_ of the boys, in all the measures of discipline adopted at the commencement of a school. this is in fact of the highest importance at all times, and is peculiarly so at the outset. a wound to the feelings is sometimes inflicted by a single transaction, which produces a lasting injury to the character. children are very sensitive to ridicule or disgrace, and some are most acutely so. a cutting reproof administered in public, or a punishment which exposes the individual to the gaze of others, will often burn far more deeply into the heart than the teacher imagines. and it is often the cause of great and lasting injury too. by destroying the character of a pupil, you make him feel that he has nothing more to lose or gain, and destroy that kind of interest in his own moral condition, which alone will allure him to virtuous conduct. to expose children to public ridicule or contempt, tends either to make them sullen and despondent, or else to arouse their resentment and to make them reckless and desperate. most persons remember through life, some instances in their early childhood, in which they were disgraced or ridiculed at school; and the permanence of the recollection is a test of the violence of the effect. be very careful then to avoid, especially at the commencement of the school, publicly exposing those who do wrong. sometimes you may make the offence public, as in the case of the snapping of the lath described under a former head, while you kindly conceal the name of the offender. even if the school generally understand who he is, the injury of public exposure is almost altogether avoided, for the sense of disgrace does not come nearly so vividly home to the mind of a child, from hearing occasional allusions to his offence by individuals among his play-mates, as when he feels himself at a particular time the object of universal attention and dishonor. and then besides, if the pupil perceives that the teacher is tender of his reputation, he will, by a feeling somewhere between imitation and sympathy, begin to feel a little tender of it too. every exertion should be made therefore, to lead children to value their character, and to help them to preserve it; and especially to avoid, at the beginning, every unnecessary sacrifice of it. and yet there are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. if a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. by this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure the influence of the school on the right side, many good effects are sometimes attained. his pride and self-conceit are humbled,--his bad influence receives a very decided check, and he is forced to draw back at once from the prominent stand he has occupied. richard jones; for example, is a rude, coarse, self-conceited boy,--often doing wrong both in school and out, and yet possessed of that peculiar influence which a bad boy often contrives to exert in school. the teacher, after watching some time for an opportunity to humble him, one day overhears a difficulty among the boys, and looking out of the window, observes that he is taking away a sled from one of the little boys, to slide down hill upon, having none of his own. the little boy resists as well as he can, and complains bitterly; but it is of no avail. at the close of the school that day, the teacher commences conversation on the subject as follows. "boys, do you know what the difference is between stealing and robbery?" "yes sir." "what?" the boys hesitate, and look at one another. "suppose a thief were to go into a man's store in the day time, and take away something secretly, would it be stealing or robbery?" "stealing." "suppose he should meet him in the road and take it away by force?" "then it would be robbery." "yes; when that which belongs to another is taken secretly, it is called stealing; when it is taken openly or with violence, it is called robbery. which now do you think is the worst?" "robbery." "yes, for it is more barefaced and determined--then it gives a great deal more pain to the one who is injured. to-day i saw one of the boys in this school taking away another boy's sled, openly and with violence." the boys all look round towards richard. "was that of the nature of stealing or robbery?" "robbery," say the boys. "was it real robbery?" they hesitate. "if any of you think of any reason why it was not real robbery, you may name it." "he gave the sled back to him," says one of the boys. "yes. and therefore to describe the action correctly, we should not say richard robbed a boy of his sled, but that he robbed him of his sled _for a time_, or he robbed him of the use of his sled. still, in respect to the nature and the guilt of it, it was robbery." "there is another thing which ought to be observed about it. whose sled was it that richard took away?" "james thompson's." "james, you may stand up." "notice his size, boys,--i should like to have richard jones stand up too, so that you might compare them; but i presume he feels very much ashamed of what he has done, and it would be very unpleasant for him to stand up. you all remember, however, how large he is. now when i was a boy, it used to be considered dishonorable and cowardly for a large, strong boy to abuse a little one who cannot defend himself. is it considered so now?" "yes sir." "it ought to be, certainly; though, were it not for such a case as this, we should not have thought of considering richard jones a coward. it seems he did not dare to try to take away a sled from a boy who was as big as himself, but attacked little james, for he knew he was not strong enough to defend himself." * * * * * now, in some such cases as this, great good may be done both in respect to the individual, and to the state of public sentiment in school, by openly exposing a boy's misconduct. the teacher must always take care, however, that the state of mind and character in the guilty individual, is such that public exposure is adapted to work well as a remedy, and also that in managing it he carries the sympathies of the other boys with him. to secure this, he must avoid all harsh and exaggerated expressions, or direct reproaches, and while he is mild and gentle and forbearing himself, lead the boys to understand and feel the nature of the sin which he exposes. the opportunities for doing this to advantage will, however, be rare. generally it will be best to manage cases of discipline more privately, so as to protect the characters of those that offend. * * * * * the teacher should thus, in accordance with the directions we have given, commence his labors with careful circumspection, patience, frankness, and honest good will towards every individual of his charge. he will find less difficulty at the outset than he would have expected, and soon have the satisfaction of perceiving that a mild but most efficient government is quietly and firmly established in the little kingdom over which he is called to reign. * * * * * transcriber's note: summarized here are the corrections applied to the text. we can then see how much improvement has been "improvement" was printed as "impovement" at his own discretion, waive it. "waive" was printed as "wave" evil consequences will result "consequences" was printed as "conquences" between the boys of a town school and an academy "academy" was printed as "acadamy" sits at the curtained desk "sits" was printed as "sists" proposed, that a music committee be appointed "that" was printed as "that" misspelled word "misspelled" was printed as "mispelled" in periodicals devoted to education "devoted" was printed as "dovoted" are cases of discipline "discipline" was printed as "dicipline" none * * * * * transcriber's note: every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible; please see detailed list of printing issues at the end of the text, after the index. * * * * * the new education a review of progressive educational movements of the day by scott nearing, ph.d. wharton school, university of pennsylvania author of "social adjustment," "the super race," "wages in the united states," "social sanity," "reducing the cost of living," etc. chicago new york row, peterson & company copyright, row, peterson & company * * * * * preface during , , and , as a part of a general plan to write a book on education, i reread a great deal of the classical educational literature, and carefully perused most of the current material in magazine and book form. an interest aroused by undergraduate and graduate work in the department of pedagogy had been whetted by the revolutionary activity in every field of educational endeavor. the time seemed ripe for an effective piece of constructive educational writing, yet i could not see my way clear to begin it. glaring faults there were; remedies appeared ready at hand and easy of application; the will of an aroused public opinion alone seemed to be lacking. by what method could this wheel horse of reform best be harnessed to the car of educational progress? i was still seeking for an answer to this riddle when the editors of "the ladies' home journal" asked me to consider the preparation of a series of articles. "we have done some sharp destructive work in our criticisms of the schools," they said. "now we are going to do some constructive writing. we are in search of two things:--first, a constructive article outlining in general a possible scheme for reorganizing the course of study; second, a series of articles describing in a readable way the most successful public school work now being done in the united states. we want you to visit the schools, study them at first-hand, and bring back a report of the best that they have to offer. when your investigation is completed, we shall expect you to write the material up in such a form that each reader, after finishing an article, will exclaim,--'there is something that we must introduce into our schools.'" that was my opportunity. instead of writing a book to be read by a thousand persons, i could place a number of constructive articles before two million readers. the invitation was a godsend. the articles, when completed, formed a natural sequence. first there was the general article (chapter ) suggesting the reorganization. then followed descriptions of the schools in which some such reorganizations had been effected. prepared with the same point of view, the articles constituted an acceptable series, having a general object and a connecting idea running throughout. what more natural than to write a few words of introduction and conclusion, and put the whole in book form? the style of the articles has been changed somewhat, and considerable material has been added to them; but, in the main, they stand as they were written--simple descriptions of some of the most advanced school work now being done in the united states. looked at from any standpoint, this study is a collection of articles rather than a book, yet there is sufficient relation between the articles to give a measure of continuity to the thought which they convey. in no sense is the work pedagogical or theoretical. it is, on the contrary, a record of the impressions made on a traveler by a number of school systems and schools. the articles purported to cover the most progressive work which is being done in the most progressive schools. although the selection of successful schools was made only after a careful canvass among the leading educators of the country, there are undoubtedly many instances, still at large, which are in every sense as worthy of commendation as any here recorded. this fact does not in any way vitiate the purpose of the original articles, which was to set down a statement of some educational successes in such a way that the lay reader, grasping the significance of these ventures, might see in them immediate possibilities for the schools in his locality. behind all of the chapters is the same idea--the idea of educating children--an idea which has taken firm hold of the progressive educators in every section of the community. the schoolmaster is breaking away from the traditions of his craft. he has laid aside the birch, the three "r's," the categorical imperative, and a host of other instruments invented by ancient pedagogical inquisitors, and with an open mind is going up and down the world seeking to reshape the schools in the interests of childhood. the task is herculean, but the enthusiasm and energy which inspire his labors are sufficient to overcome even those obstacles which are apparently insurmountable. contents page introduction. the old education i. the critical spirit and the schools ii. some harsh words from the inside iii. a word from huxley and spencer iv. some honest facts v. have we fulfilled the object of education? chapter i. the new basis for education i. can there be a new basis? ii. social change iii. keeping up with the times iv. education in the early home v. city life and the new basis for education chapter ii. teaching boys and girls i. the new school machinery ii. rousseau versus a class of forty iii. the fallacious "average" iv. the five ages of childhood v. age distribution in one grade vi. shall child or subject matter come first? vii. the vicious practices of one "good" school viii. boys and girls--the one object of educational activity chapter iii. fitting schools to children i. child growth--a primary factor in child life ii. children need health first iii. play as a means to growth iv. some things which a child must learn v. what schools must provide to meet child needs vi. the educational work of the small town vii. the educational problems of an industrial community viii. beginning with child needs chapter iv. progressive notes in elementary education i. the kindergarten ii. translating the three r's iii. playing at mathematics iv. a model english lesson v. an original fairy story vi. the crow and the scarecrow vii. school and home viii. breaking new ground ix. the school and the community x. new keys for old locks xi. school and shop xii. half a chance to study xiii. thwarting satan in the summer time xiv. sending the whole child to school xv. smashing the school machine xvi. all hands around for an elementary school xvii. from a blazed trail to a paved highway chapter v. keeping the high school in step with life i. the responsibility of the high school ii. an experiment in futures iii. the success habit iv. the help-out spirit v. joining hands with the elementary schools vi. the abolition of "mass play" vii. experimental democracy viii. breaching [the] chinese wall of high school classicism ix. an up-to-date high school x. from school to shop and back again xi. fitting the high school graduate into life xii. the high school as a public servant chapter vi. higher education at lowville i. lowville and the neighborhood ii. lowville academy iii. the school's opportunity iv. field work as education v. real domestic science vi. one instance of success chapter vii. a great city school system i. "co-operation" and "progressivism" ii. an educational creed iii. vitalizing the kindergarten iv. regenerating the grades v. popularizing high school education vi. a city university vii. special schools for special classes viii. special schools for special children ix. playground and summer schools x. mr. dyer and the men who stood with him chapter viii. the oyler school of cincinnati i. an experiment in social education ii. an appeal for applied education iii. solving a local problem iv. domestic science which domesticates v. making commercial products in the grades vi. a real interest in school vii. the mothers' club viii. the disappearance of "discipline" ix. the spirit of oyler chapter ix. vitalizing rural education i. the call of the country ii. making bricks with straw iii. making the one-room country school worth while iv. repainting the little red schoolhouse v. a fairyland of rural education vi. the task of the country school chapter x. out of the mouths of babes and sucklings i. miss belle ii. going to work through the children iii. beginning on muffins iv. taking the boys in hand v. "busy work" as an asset vi. marguerite vii. winning over the families chapter xi. wide-awake sleepy eye i. fitting schools to needs ii. getting the janitor in line iii. the department of agriculture iv. a short course for busy people v. letting the boys do it vi. a look at the domestic science vii. how it works out viii. theoretical and practical chapter xii. the south for the new education i. a dream of empire ii. finding the way iii. jem's father iv. club life militant v. canning clubs vi. recognition day for boys and girls vii. teaching grown-ups to read viii. george washington, junior ix. a step toward good health x. theory and practice xi. a people coming to its own chapter xiii. the spirit of the new education i. the standard of education ii. standardization was a failure iii. education as growth iv. child needs and community needs v. the final test of education the new education introduction the old education i the critical spirit and the schools "everybody is doing it," said a high school principal the other day. "i look through the new books and i find it; it stands out prominently in technical as well as in popular magazines; even the educational papers are taking it up,--everybody seems to be whacking the schools. yesterday i picked up a funny sheet on which there were four raps at the schools. one in particular that i remember ran something like this,-- "'james,' said the teacher, 'if thomas has three red apples and william has five yellow apples, how many apples have thomas and william?' "james looked despondent. "'don't you know?' queried the teacher, 'how much three plus five is?' "'oh, yes, ma'am, i know the answer, but the formula, ma'am,--it's the formula that appals me.' "probably nine-tenths of the people who read that story enjoyed it hugely," continued the schoolman, "and they enjoyed it because it struck a responsive chord in their memories. at one time or another in their school lives, they, too, bowed in dejection before the tyranny of formulas." this criticism of school formulas is not confined to popular sources. prominent authorities in every field which comes in contact with the school are barbarous in their onslaughts. state and city superintendents, principals, teachers, parents, employers,--all have made contribution to the popular clamor. on every hand may be gleaned evidences of an unsatisfied critical spirit. ii some harsh words from the inside the commissioner of education of new york state writes of the schools,--[ ] "a child is worse off in a graded school than in an ungraded one, if the work of a grade is not capable of some specific valuation, and if each added grade does not provide some added power. the first two grades run much to entertainment and amusement. the third and fourth grades repeat the work supposed to have been done in the first two. too many unimportant and unrelated facts are taught. it is like the wearying orator who reels off stories only to amuse, seems incapable of choosing an incident to enforce a point, and makes no progress toward a logical conclusion. "when but one-third of the children remain to the end of the elementary course, there is something the matter with the schools. when half of the men who are responsible for the business activities and who are guiding the political life of the country tell us that children from the elementary schools are not able to do definite things required in the world's real affairs, there is something the matter with the schools. when work seeks workers, and young men and women are indifferent to it or do not know how to do it, there is something the matter with the schools.[ ] "there is a waste of time and productivity in all of the grades of the elementary schools."[ ] "the things that are weighing down the schools are the multiplicity of studies which are only informatory, the prolongation of branches so as to require many text-books, and the prolixity of treatment and illustration that will accommodate psychological theory and sustain pedagogical methods which have some basis of reason, but which have been most ingeniously overdone."[ ] former united states commissioner of education, e. e. brown, is responsible for the statement that,--"with all that we have done to secure regular and continuous attendance at school, it is still a mark of distinction when any city is able to keep even one-half of the pupils who are enrolled in its schools until they have passed even the seventh grade."[ ] here is an illustration, from the pen of a widely known educational expert, of the character of educational facilities in the well-to-do suburb of an eastern city. after describing two of the newer schools ( ) prof. hanus continues,--"the maple avenue school is too small for its school population, without a suitable office for the principal or a common room for the teachers, and, of course, very inadequately equipped for the work it ought to do; it ought, therefore, to be remodeled and added to without delay. the chestnut street school is old, gloomy, crowded, badly ventilated, and badly heated, has steep and narrow stairways, and it would be dangerous in case of fire. there are fire escapes, to be sure, but the access to some of these, though apparently easy in a fire drill, might be seriously inadequate and dangerous in case of haste or panic due to a real fire. in such a building sustained good work by teachers and pupils is very difficult.... "the high school is miserably housed. it is dingy, badly lighted and badly ventilated. these defects constitute a serious menace to the physical welfare of pupils and teachers and, of course, seriously interfere with good work. it is crowded. intercommunication is devious and inconvenient. the building is quite unfit for high school uses. some of the school furniture is very poor; the physical and chemical classrooms and laboratories are very unsatisfactory, and its biological laboratory and equipment scarcely less so. the assembly room is too small, badly arranged, and badly furnished. there are no toilet-rooms for the teachers, and there is no common room. there is no satisfactory or adequate lunch-room. the library is in crowded quarters; the principal's office space is altogether too small, and his private office almost derisively so."[ ] overwork in the school is said to be alarmingly prevalent. "it is generally recognized by physicians and educators to-day that many children in the schools are being seriously injured through nervous overstrain. throughout the world there is a developing conviction that one of the most important duties of society is to determine how education may be carried on without depriving children of their health. it is probable that we are not requiring too much work of our pupils, but they are not accomplishing their tasks economically in respect to the expenditure of nervous energy. some experiments made at home and abroad seem to indicate that children could accomplish as much intellectually, with far less dissipation of nervous energy, if they were in the schoolroom about one-half the time which they now spend there. german educators and physicians are convinced that a fundamental reform in this respect is needed. in fact, among school children we are learning the same lesson as among factory employees, viz., that high pressure and long hours are not economy but waste of time."[ ] the school has been rendered monotonous. "we have worked for system till the public schools have become machines. it has been insistently proclaimed that all children must do things the same way for so long a time, that many of us have actually come to believe it. children unborn are predestined to work after the same fashion that their grandparents did."[ ] iii a word from huxley and spencer these are typical of a host of similar criticisms of the schools which leading educators, men working within the school system, are directing against it. out of the fullness of their experience they spread the conviction that the school often fails to prepare for life, that it frequently distorts more effectively than it builds. the thought is not new. thomas huxley asked, years ago, whether education should not be definitely related to life. he wrote,--"if there were no such things as industrial pursuits, a system of education which does nothing for the faculties of observation, which trains neither the eye nor the hand, and is compatible with utter ignorance of the commonest natural truths, might still be reasonably regarded as strangely imperfect. and when we consider that the instruction and training which are lacking are exactly those which are of most importance for the great mass of our population, the fault becomes almost a crime, the more so in that there is no practical difficulty in making good these defects."[ ] approaching the matter from another side, tyler puts a pertinent question in his "growth and education,--" "in the grammar grade is learning and mental discipline of chief importance to the girl, or is care of the body and physical exercise absolutely essential at this period? no one seems to know, and very few care. what would nature say?"[ ] herbert spencer answers tyler's question in spirited fashion. "while many years are spent by a boy in gaining knowledge, of which the chief value is that it constitutes 'the education of a gentleman;' and while many years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which fit her for evening parties; not an hour is spent by either of them in preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities--the management of a family."[ ] "for shoe-making or house-building, for the management of a ship or a locomotive-engine, a long apprenticeship is needful. it is, then, that the unfolding of a human being in body and mind, may we superintend and regulate it with no preparation whatever?"[ ] one fact is self-evident,--the existence of a body of criticism and hostility is prima facia evidence of weakness on the part of the institution criticised, particularly when the criticism comes strong and sharp from school-men themselves. the extent and severity of school criticism certainly bespeaks the careful consideration of those most interested in maintaining the efficiency of the school system. iv some honest facts let us face the facts honestly. if you include country schools, and they must be included in any discussion of american education, the school mortality,--i. e., the children who drop out of school between the first and eighth years--is appalling. we may quarrel over percentages, but the dropping out is there. the united states commissioner of education writes,--[ ] "of twenty-five million children of school age ( to ), less than twenty million are enrolled in schools of all kinds and grades, public and private; and the average daily attendance does not exceed fourteen million, for an average school term of less than months of days each. the average daily attendance of those enrolled in the public schools is only days in the year, less than - / months. the average attendance of the entire school population is only - / days, or months of days each. assuming that this rate of attendance shall continue through the school years ( to ), the average amount of schooling received by each child of the school population will be , days, or a little more than years of school months. this bureau has no reliable statistics on the subject, but it is quite probable that less than half the children of the country finish successfully more than the first grades; only about one-fourth of the children ever enter high school; and less than in every do the full years of high school work. fewer than in receive any education above the high school." taking this dropping out into consideration, it is probable that the majority of children who enter american schools receive no more education than will enable them to read clumsily, to write badly, to spell wretchedly, and to do the simplest mathematical problems (addition, subtraction, etc.) with difficulty. in any real sense of the word, they are neither educated nor cultured. judge draper, superintendent of public instruction in new york state, writes,--[ ] "we cannot exculpate the schools. they are as wasteful of child life as are the homes. from the bottom to the top of the american educational system we take little account of the time of the child.... we have eight or nine elementary grades for work which would be done in six if we were working mainly for productivity and power. we have shaped our secondary schools so that they confuse the thinking of youth and break the equilibrium between education and vocations, and people and industries.... in the graded elementary schools of the state of new york, less than half of the children remain to the end of the course. they do not start early enough. they do not attend regularly enough. the course is too full of mere pedagogical method, exploitation and illustration, if not of kinds and classes of work. the terms are too short and the vacations too long.... more than half of the children drop out by the time they are fourteen or fifteen, the limits of the compulsory attendance age, because the work of the schools is behind the age of the pupils, and we do not teach them the things which lead them and their parents to think it will be worth their while to remain." observe that judge draper writes of the graded schools only. could you conceive of a more stinging rebuke to an institution from a man who is making it his business to know its innermost workings? these statements refer, not to the small percentage of children who go to high school, but to that great mass of children who leave the school at, or before, fourteen years of age. if you do not believe them, go among working children and find out what their intellectual qualifications really are. one fact must be clearly borne in mind,--the school system is a social institution. in the schools are the people's children. public taxes provide the funds for public education. perhaps no great institution is more generally a part of community interest and experience than the public school system. the most surprising thing about the school figures is the overwhelming proportion of students in the elementary grades-- , , of the , , . if you draw three lines, the first representing the number of children in the elementary schools, the second showing the number in the high school, and the third the number of students in colleges, professional and normal schools, the contrast is astonishing. it is perfectly evident, therefore, that the real work of education must be done in the elementary grades. the high schools with a million students, and the universities, colleges, professional and normal schools with three hundred thousand more, constitute an increasingly important factor in education; at the same time, for every seven students in these higher schools, there are ninety-three children in the elementary grades. the proportion is so unexpected that it staggers us--more than nine-tenths of the children who attend school in the united states are in the elementary grades! can this be the school system of which our forefathers dreamed when they established a universal, free education nearly a hundred years ago? did they foresee that such an overwhelming proportion of american children would never have an opportunity to secure more than the rudiments of an education? be that as it may, the facts glower menacingly at us from city, town and countryside,--the overcrowded elementary grades and the higher schools with but a scant proportion of the students. so, if we wish to educate the great mass of american children, we must go to the primary grades to do it. there are, in the public schools, , teachers, four-fifths of whom are women. these teachers are at work in , school buildings having a total value of $ , , , . each year some four hundred and fifty million dollars are devoted to maintaining and adding to this educational machine. the school system is the greatest saving fund which the american people possess. the total value of school property is greater than the entire fortune of the richest american. each year the people spend upon their schools a sum sufficient to construct a panama canal or a transcontinental railway system. thus the public school is the greatest public investment in the united states. it is one thing to invest, and quite a different matter to be assured a fair return on the investment. nevertheless, the individual investor believes in his right to a fair return. from their public investments, the people, in fairness, can demand no more; in justice to themselves, they may accept no less. are they receiving a fair return? the people of the united states have invested nearly a billion dollars in the public school system; each year they contribute nearly half a billion dollars more toward the same end. are they getting what they pay for? turn to another section of the report of the commissioner of education, and note how, in mild alarm, he protests against teachers' salaries so low "that it is clearly impossible to hire the services of men and women of good native ability and sufficient scholarship, training and experience to enable them to do satisfactory work;" against the schoolhouses, which are "cheap, insanitary, uncomfortable and unattractive;" against "thousands of schools" in which "one teacher teaches from twenty to thirty classes a day;" against "courses of study ill-adapted to the interest of country children or the needs of country life;" against "a small enrollment of the total children of school age," and a school attendance so low that "the average of the entire school population is only - / days per year."[ ] the tone of these statements is certainly not reassuring. perhaps it is high time that the citizens inquired into the status of their educational securities--their public school system. v have we fulfilled the object of education? the object of education is complete living. a perfect educational system would prepare those participating in it to live every phase of their lives, and to derive from life all possible benefit. any educational system which enables men to live completely is therefore fulfilling its function. on the other hand, an educational system which does not prepare for life is not meeting the necessary requirements. charles dickens, in his characteristic way, thus describes in "hard times" a public school class under the title "murdering the innocents:" "'in this life, we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but facts.' "the speaker and the school master swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. so mr. m'choakumchild (the school master) began in his best manner. he went to work on this preparatory lesson, not unlike morgiana in the forty thieves--looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. say, good mr. m'choakumchild: when from thy store thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think thou wilt always kill outright the robber fancy lurking within, or sometimes only maim him and distort him!" is the picture overdrawn? are there grades in our large american cities where conditions similar to those just portrayed may be found? every parent who has a child in the public schools, every taxpayer who contributes to school support, has a right to a direct, impartial and honest answer to that question. among educators as well as among members of the general public a spirit of educational unrest has developed. everywhere there is an ill-defined feeling of dissatisfaction with the work of the schools; everywhere an earnest desire to see the schools do more effectively the school work which is regarded, on every hand, as imperative. the facts of school failure are more generally known than the facts of school success; yet there are successful schools. indeed, some of the school systems of the united states are doing remarkably effective work. emphasis has been lavished on the failure side of the educational problem, until public opinion is fairly alive to the necessity of some action. the time is, therefore, ripe for a positive statement of educational policy. many schools have succeeded. let us read the story of the good work. efficient educational systems are in operation. let us model the less successful experiments on those more successful ones. circumstances force people to live in one place, to see one set of surroundings and meet one kind of folks, until they are led to believe, almost inevitably, that their kind is _the_ kind. schools are the victims of just such provincialism. although the school superintendents and principals, and some of the school teachers meet their co-workers from other cities, the people whose children attend the schools almost never have an opportunity to learn intelligently what other schools are doing. this city develops one educational idea, and that city develops another idea. although both ideas may deserve widespread consideration, and perhaps universal adoption, they will fail to measure up to the full stature of their value unless the people in all communities learn about them intelligently. footnotes: [footnote : "american education," andrew s. draper, boston; houghton mifflin co., , pp. - .] [footnote : ibid., p. .] [footnote : ibid., p. .] [footnote : idem.] [footnote : the responsibility of the school, e. e. brown, u. s. commissioner of education. a pamphlet privately printed in philadelphia, , containing a series of addresses.] [footnote : report on the programme of studies in the public schools of montclair, n. j., paul h. hanus, cambridge, mass., pp. and .] [footnote : report on national vitality, irving fisher, washington government print., , pp. - .] [footnote : the problem of individualizing instruction, w. f. andrew, education, vol. , p. ( ).] [footnote : evolution and ethics, t. h. huxley, new york, d. appleton & co., , p. .] [footnote : growth and education, j. m. tyler, houghton mifflin co., new york, , p. .] [footnote : education, h. spencer, new york, d. appleton & co., , p. .] [footnote : supra, p. .] [footnote : annual report, u. s. commissioner of education, ; washington government print., , vol. i, pp. - .] [footnote : conserving childhood, andrew s. draper; the child workers of the nation, proceedings of the fifth annual conference on child labor, chicago, ill., jan. - , ; new york, , pp. - .] [footnote : report u. s. commissioner of education, , vol. i, p. .] chapter i the new basis for education[ ] i can there be a new basis? can there be a new basis for education? does the foundation upon which education rests really change? is the educational system of one age necessarily unfitted to provide for the educational needs of the next? these, and a multitude of the similar questions which people interested in educational progress are asking themselves, arise out of the process of transition that is seemingly one of the fundamental propositions of the universe. all things change, and are changing, from the smallest cell to the most highly organized creature, the noblest mountain range, and the vastest sun in the heavens. to-day differs from yesterday as to-morrow must differ from to-day. all things are becoming. test this statement with the observed facts of life. here is a garden, well-planted and watered. the soil is loamy and black. on all its surface there is nothing, save a clod here and there, to relieve the warm, moist regularity. come to-morrow and the level surface is broken by tiny green shoots which have appeared at intervals, thrusting through the top crust. next week the black earth is striped with rows of green. onions, beets, lettuce, and peas are coming up. go back to the hills which you climbed in boyhood, ascend their chasmed sides and note how even they have changed. each year some part of them has disappeared into the rapid torrent. had you been there in april, you might have seen particles of your beloved hills in every water-course, hurrying toward the lowlands and the sea. while you watch them, the clouds change in the sky, the sunset wanes, and the forest covers the bared hills. nature, fickle mistress of our destinies, spreads a never-ending panorama before our eyes that we may recognize the one great law of her being,--the law of progression. ii social change how well does this principle of change apply to the organization of society! the absolute monarchy of one age yields to the semi-democracy of the next. yesterday the church itself traded in men's bodies,--holding slaves, and accepting, without question, the proceeds of slavery. to-day machines replace men in a thousand industries. to-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;--on the one side, those who believe that the man should be the slave; on the other, those who hold that the slavery of the machine is alone necessary and just. thus is every social institution altered from age to age. thus is effected that transformation which men have chosen to call progress. how profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,--the children who enroll in the schools! under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. how vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. even while you raise your hands in supplication, the child has passed from your life forever, leaving naught save a man to confront you. from these mighty scythe strokes which change sweeps across the meadows of time, naught is exempt. the petals fall from the fairest flower; the bluest sky becomes overcast; the greatest feats of history are surpassed; and the social machinery, adequate for the needs of one age, sinks into the insignificance of desuetude in the age which follows. thus does the inevitable come to pass. thus does the social institution, wrought through centuries of turmoil and anguish, become useless in the newer civilization which is arising on every hand. the educational system in its inception was well founded, but the changes of time invalidate the original idea. yesterday the school fulfilled the needs of men. to-day it fails to meet a situation which reshapes itself with each rising and each setting of the sun. each epoch must have its institutions. with the work of the past as a background, the present must constantly reshape the institutions which the past has bequeathed to it. these modified institutions, handed on in turn by the present, must again be rebuilt to meet the needs of the future; and so on through each succeeding age. iii keeping up with the times at times the march of progress is so rapid that even the most advanced grow breathless with attempts to keep abreast of the vanguard. again, marking time for ages, progressive movements seem wholly dead, and the path to the future is overgrown with tradition, and blocked by oblivion and decay. the rapid advances of the nineteenth century, challenging the quickest to keep pace, forced upon many institutions surroundings wholly foreign to their bent and scope. nowhere is this more true than in the case of the educational system, which had its rise in an age of individualized industry and governmental non-interference, and now faces a newly inaugurated socialization of industry and an impromptu system of government control. the new basis of education lies in the changes which the nineteenth century wrought in industry, transforming village life into city dwelling, and substituting for the skilled mechanic, using a tool, the machine, employing the unskilled worker. the men of the eighteenth century made political institutions, and were content with democracy; the men of the nineteenth century, accepting government as it stood, built up a new industry. the society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon the political and industrial triumphs of our forefathers, can never be successful unless it recognizes the fundamental character of the issues which nineteenth century industry and eighteenth century politics have brought into twentieth century life. is it too much to ask that the school stand foremost in this recognition of change, when it is in the school that the ideas of the new generation are moulded, tempered, and burnished? may we not expect that in its lessons to the young our educational system shall speak the language of the twentieth century rather than that of the eighteenth? iv education in the early home before the modern system of industry had its inception, while the old hand trades still held sway, at a time when the household was the center of work and pleasure, when the family made its butter, cheese, oatmeal, ale, clothing, tools, and utensils,--in such an atmosphere of domestic industry, froebel wrote his famous "education of man." note this description of the way in which a father may educate his son. "the son accompanies his father everywhere, to the field and to the garden, to the shop and to the counting house, to the forest and to the meadow; in the care of domestic animals and in the making of small articles of household furniture; in the splitting, sawing, and piling up of wood; in all the work his father's trade or calling involves."[ ] in another passage he calls upon parents, "more particularly fathers (for to their special care and guidance the child ripening into boyhood is confided)," to contemplate "their parental duties in child guidance;"[ ] and he prefaces this exhortation with a long list of illustrations, suggesting the methods which may be pursued by the farm laborer, the goose-herd, the gardener, the forester, the blacksmith, and other tradesmen and craftsmen, in the education of their sons. any such man, froebel points out, may take his child at the age of two or three and teach him some of the simple rules of his trade. how different is the position of the son of a workman in a modern american city! an american city dweller reading froebel's discussion would not conceive of it as applying in any sense to him, or to his life. v city life and the new basis for education the very thought of city life precludes the possibility of home work. the narrow house, the tenement, the great shop or factory, on the one hand, prevent the mechanic from carrying on his trade near his family; and on the other hand, make it impossible for the father whose work lies far from his home to give his boys the "special care and guidance" about which froebel writes. the system of industry which was established in england during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and which secured a foothold in both germany and the united states during the first half of the nineteenth century, has revolutionized the basis of our lives. the workshop has been transplanted from the home to the factory; both men and women leave their homes for ten, eleven, or even twelve hours a day to carry on their industrial activities; great centers of population collect about the centers of industry; the farm, the flock of geese, the garden, the forest, and the blacksmith shop disappear; food, clothing, and other necessaries of life--formerly the product of home industry--are produced in great factories; and the city home, stripped of its industrial functions, restricted in scope, robbed of its adults, presents little opportunity for the education of the city child. standing on the threshold of his meager dwelling, this child of six looks forward to a life which must be based on the instruction provided in a public school system. the country boy still has his ten-acre lot, where he may run and play. there are flowers and freckles in the spring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. the general farm is a storehouse of useful information in rudimentary form. from day to day and from year to year the country boy may learn and enjoy. the city boy is differently situated. his playground is the street, where he plays under the wheels of wagons, automobiles, and trolley cars; or else he plays in a public playground in company with hundreds, or even thousands, of other children. even then his activities are restricted by city ordinances, monitors, policemen, and other exponents of law and order. the city home, whether tenement or single house, cannot begin to supply the opportunities for growth and development which were furnished by life in the open. where else, then, does the responsibility for such growth and development rest than upon the school? on the farm the boy learned his trade, as froebel suggests, at the hands of his father. the father of the city boy spends his working hours in a mill, or in an office, where boys under fourteen or sixteen are forbidden by law to go. the city home is unavoidably deprived of the chance to provide adequate recreation or adequate vocational training for its children. the burden in both cases shifts to the school. a hundred years ago practically all industries were carried on in connection with the home. the weaver, the carpenter, the hatter, the cobbler, the miller, lived and worked on the same premises. then steam was applied to industry; the machine replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machinery, or do some one of the many hundreds of things now done in factories. the change from home industry to factory industry is well named the industrial revolution. it completely overturned the established and accepted means of making a living. the industrial upheaval has changed every phase of modern life. industry itself has replaced apprenticeship by a degree of specialization undreamed of in primitive life. from the superintendent to the office boy, from the boss roller to the yard laborer, from the chief clerk to the stenographer, the work of men and women is monotonous and specialized. the city has grown up as a logical product of an industrial system which centers thousands, or even tens of thousands, of workmen in one place of employment. the city home differs fundamentally from the country home as the city differs from the country. the changes now going on in farming are no less significant than those which the nineteenth century witnessed in manufacturing. science has been applied to agriculture. old methods are brought into question. intensive study and specialization are widespread. the time has passed when a farmer can afford to neglect the agricultural bulletins or papers. to be successful, he must be a trained specialist in his line, and the school and college are called upon to provide the training. no individual is responsible for these changes. they have come as the logical product of a long series of discoveries and inventions. new methods, built upon the ideas and methods of the past, have created a new civilization. the civilized world, reorganized and reconstituted, rebuilt in all of its economic phases, demands a new teaching which shall relate men and women to the changed conditions of life. this is the new basis for education,--this the new foundation upon which must be erected a superstructure of educational opportunity for succeeding generations. it remains for education to recognize the change and to remodel the institutions of education in such a way that they shall meet the new needs of the new life. footnotes: [footnote : portions of this chapter originally appeared in the journal of education.] [footnote : "the education of man," f. froebel. translated by w. n. halliman, new york; d. appleton & co. , p. .] [footnote : ibid., p. .] chapter ii teaching boys and girls i the new school machinery the influence which the industrial changes of the past hundred years has had on education is considerable. with the transformation of the home workshop into the factory has come the transition from rural and village life to life in great industrial cities and towns. the introduction of specialized machinery has placed upon education the burden of vocational training. more important still, it has so augmented the size of the educational problem that an intricate system of school machinery has been devised to keep the whole in order. the rural, or village, school was a one or two-room affair, housing a handful of pupils. aside from matters of discipline, the administration of the school was scarcely a problem. general superintendents, associate superintendents, compulsory attendance laws, card index systems, and purchasing departments were unknown. the school was a simple, personal business conducted by the teacher in very much the same way that the corner grocer conducted his store--on faith and memory. the growth of cities and towns necessitated the introduction of elaborate school machinery. in place of a score of pupils, thousands, tens, and even hundreds of thousands were placed under the same general authority. city life made some form of administrative machinery inevitable. the increasing size of the school system,--and in new, growing cities the school system increases with a rapidity equal to the rate of growth of the population,--leads to increase in class size. a school of twenty pupils is still common in rural districts. in the elementary grades of american city schools, investigators find fifty, sixty, and in some extreme cases, seventy pupils under the charge of one teacher, while the average number, per teacher, is about forty. recrimination is idle. the obvious fact remains that the rate of growth in school population is greater than the rate of growth in the school plant. the schools in many cities have not caught up with their educational problem. the result is a multiplication of administrative problems, not the least of which is the question of class size. ii rousseau versus a class of forty a toilsome journey it is from the education of an individual child by an individual teacher (rousseau's emile) to the education of forty children by one teacher (the normal class in american elementary city schools). rousseau pictured an ideal; we face a reality--complex, expanding, at times almost menacing. the difference between rousseau's ideal and the modern actuality is more serious than it appears superficially. rousseau's idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. the modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children as if each child were like all the rest. a teacher who can individualize forty children, understand the peculiarities of each child, and teach in a way that will enable each of the children to benefit fully by her instruction, is indeed a master, perhaps it would be fairer to say a super-master in pedagogy. a class of forty is almost inevitably taught as a group. there is another feature about the large school system which is even more disastrous to the welfare of the individual child. rousseau studied the individual to be educated, and then prescribed the course of study. the city teacher, no matter how intimately she may be acquainted with the needs of her children, has little or no say in deciding upon the subjects which she is to teach her class. such matters are for the most part determined by a group of officials--principals, superintendents, and boards of education,--all of whom are engaged primarily in administrative work, and some of whom have never taught at all, nor entered a psychological laboratory, nor engaged in any other occupation that would give first-hand, practical, or theoretical knowledge of the problems encountered in determining a course of study. a course of study must be devised, however, even though some of the responsible parties have no first-hand knowledge of the points at issue. the method by which it is devised is of peculiar importance to this discussion. the administrative officials, having in mind an average child, prepare a course of study which will meet that average child's needs. theoretically, the plan is admirable. it suffers from one practical defect,--there is no such thing as an average child. iii the fallacious "average" averages are peculiarly tempting to americans. they supply the same deeply-felt want in statistics that headlines do in newspapers. they tell the story at a glance. in this peculiar case the story is necessarily false. an average may be taken only of like things. it is possible to average the figures , , and by adding them together and dividing by . the average is . such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the , , and are exactly alike. one of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, hence they may be averaged. unlike mathematical units, all children are different. they differ in physical, in mental, and in spiritual qualities. their hair is different in color and in texture. their feet and hands vary in size. some children are apt at mathematics, others at drawing, and still others at both subjects. some children have a strong sense of moral obligation,--an active conscience,--others have little or no moral stamina. no two children in a family are alike, and no two children in a school-room are alike. after an elaborate computation of hereditary possibilities, biologists announce that the chance of any two human creatures being exactly alike is one in five septillions. in simple english, it is quite remote. iv the five ages of childhood a very ingenious statement of the case is made by dr. bird t. baldwin. children, says dr. baldwin, have five ages,-- . a chronological age, . a physical age, . a mental age, . a moral age, . a school age. two children, born on the same day, have the same age in years. one is bound to grow faster than the other in some physical respect. therefore the two children have different physical ages, or rates of development. in the same way they have differing mental and moral ages. the school age, a resultant of the first three, is a record of progress in school. even when children are born on the same day, the chances that they will grow physically, mentally, and morally at exactly the same rate, and will make exactly the same progress in school, are remote indeed. school children are, therefore, inevitably different. v age distribution in one grade a very effective illustration of the differences in chronological age, in school age, and in the rate of progress in school is furnished in the report of the superintendent of schools for springfield, mass. there are in this report a series of figures dealing with the ages, and time in school, of fifth-grade pupils in springfield. the first table shows the number of years in school and the age of all the fifth-grade pupils. table _age and time in school, fifth grade, springfield, december, _ years in ages school total -----------------------------+---+----------------------------------- .. .. .. .. .. ..| | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. -----------------------------+---+----------------------------------- .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. -----------------------------+---+----------------------------------- .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. | | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| | .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| ..| .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| ..| .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| ..| .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| ..| .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..| ..| .. .. .. .. .. .. .. total .. .. .. | | .. .. , -----------------------------+---+----------------------------------- theoretically, children in springfield enter the school at six, and spend one year in each grade. if all of the children in the springfield schools had lived up to this theory, there would be , eleven years of age, and , in the fifth grade. a glance at the table shows that only , or about per cent of the children, are both eleven years of age and five years in the school. among the , fifth-grade children, , or per cent, have been in school five years, and , or per cent, are eleven years of age. the superintendent follows this general table with other tables giving a more detailed analysis of over and under age pupils, and of rate of progress in school. table _age and progress groups of fifth-grade pupils in springfield, december, _ young | normal | over-age | total | | | per | per | per | per no. cent | no. cent | no. cent | no. cent rapid | | | normal | | | slow | | | --- -- | --- -- | --- -- | ----- --- total | | | , the inferences from table are very clear. of the , fifth-grade pupils, , or per cent, are not only under-age for the grade, but they have progressed at more than normal speed. they are the exceptionally capable pupils of the grade. at the other extreme we find children, or per cent of all in the grade, who need special attention because they are both over-age and slow. feeble-minded children rarely advance beyond the second grade; hence we know that none of these are feeble-minded, but among their number will be found many who will be little profited by the ordinary curriculum; of them are already years old, and are years old. a majority of them will, in all probability, drop out of school as soon as they reach the age of , unless prior to that time some new element of interest is introduced that will make a strong appeal; for example, some activity toward a vocation. a further study of the over-age column shows that pupils, per cent, are over-age, but they have reached their present position in less than usual time; while of them, also over-age, have required the full five years to reach their present grade position. unless by limiting the required work of these over-age pupils to the essentials, or by some administrative arrangement involving special grouping with relatively small numbers in a class, so that we can in the one case maintain, and in the other case bring about, accelerated progress, there is little likelihood that any large number will remain in school to complete the ninth grade, much less take a high school course; for four years hence their ages will range from to years. the pupils who are of normal age, but slow, are also subjects for special attention, for they have repeated from one to three grades, or have failed to secure from two to six half-yearly promotions, and are in danger of acquiring the fatal habit of failure, if they have not already acquired it. the superintendent then goes on to emphasize the imperative duty resting on each principal, to examine and to understand the varying capacities of individual children in his school. without such an understanding real educational progress cannot be made. this study is most illuminating. nothing could more effectually show variation in individual children than the difference in one city grade of the most obvious of characteristics--age and progress in school. the infinitely greater variations in the subtle characteristics that distinguish children can be more readily guessed at than measured. under these circumstances, the attempt to prepare studies for an "average child" is manifestly futile. the course may be organized, but it will hardly meet the needs of large numbers of the individual children who take it. vi shall child or subject matter come first? the old education presupposed an average child, and then prepared a course of study which would fit his needs. the new education recognizes the absurdity of averaging unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate truth that each child is an individual, differing in needs, capacity, outlook, energy, and enthusiasm from every other child. an arithmetic average can be struck, but when it is applied to children it is a hypothetical and not a real quantity. there is not, and never will be, an average child; hence, a school system planned to meet the needs of the average child fits the needs of no child at all. mathematics may be taught to the average child. so may history and geography. while subject matter comes first in the minds of educators, a course of study designed to meet average conditions is a possibility. the moment, however, that the schools cease to teach subjects and begin to teach boys and girls, such a proceeding is out of the question. the temptation in a complex school system, where children are grouped by hundreds and thousands, to allow the detail of administration to overtop the functions of education is often irresistible. the teacher with forty pupils learns to look upon her pupils as units. the superintendent and principals, seeking ardently for an overburdened commercial ideal named "efficiency," sacrifice everything else to the perfection of the mechanism. among the smooth clicking cogs, child individuality has only the barest chance for survival. vii the vicious practices of one "good" school there are school systems in which organization has overgrown child welfare, in which pedagogy has usurped the place of teaching. in such systems the teacher teaches the prescribed course of study, whether or no. the officers of administration, aiming at some mechanical ideal, shape the schools to meet the requirements of system. the proneness of some teachers and school administrators alike to overemphasize mechanics, and to underemphasize the welfare of individual children is well illustrated in a recent statement by dr. w. e. chancellor, who, in writing of a first-hand investigation made in a city in the northeast, describes a condition which he says "i know by fairly authoritative reports does exist in a considerable number of cities and towns--not merely in a school here and there, but generally and characteristically. "in the city to which i definitely refer," dr. chancellor continues, "i found that the intermediate and grammar grade teachers had systematically, deliberately, and successfully sacrificed hundreds of boys and girls upon the altar of examinations to the fetish of good schools. they have been so anxious to have good schools that they have kept an average of per cent of their pupils one grade lower than they belong. in some schools the average runs to above per cent. "some teachers and some school superintendents cannot see that the school is simply a machine for developing boys and girls; cannot see that the machine in itself is worthless save as it contributes to human welfare. a school may be so good as actually to damage the souls and bodies of human beings. it damages their souls when the machine operators, seeking per cent in every subject, keep boys and girls in grammar schools until they average sixteen years of age."[ ] dr. chancellor continues with a stinging arraignment of school officials who sacrifice children to systems. the article strikes an answering chord in the experiences of many men and women. a friend came recently to our bungalow, and, with a troubled face, spoke of his daughter's ill-health. "she is not sick," he said, "but just ailing. these first may days have taken her appetite. she needs the country air." the daughter was a dear little girl of twelve--any one might have envied the father of his treasure--and we offered to keep her with us for a month in the country, and to go over her school work with her every day. the father accepted our proposal on the spot, but two days later he came back to say that he could not make the arrangements. "it cannot be done," he explained, "because the school will not let her off. i told the principal about my daughter's health and showed him the advantage of a month in the country with her school work carefully supervised. her school is rather crowded, and as i want her to go on with her class in the autumn, i asked him if he could arrange to keep her place for her. in reply he said,-- "'i cannot do as you wish. such cases as yours interfere seriously with the working of the school.'" viii boys and girls--the one object of educational activity perhaps our language was not as temperate as it should have been, but we told that father something which we would fain repeat until every educator and every parent in the united states has heard it and written it on the tables of his heart,-- the one object of education is to assist and prepare children to live. why have we established a billion-dollar school system in the united states? is it to pay teachers' salaries, to build new school houses, and to print text-books by the million? hardly. these things are incidents of school business, but they are no more reason for the school's existence than fertilizer and seed are reasons for making a garden. gardens are cultivated in order to secure plants and flowers; the school organization of which americans so often boast exists to educate children. "of course," you exclaim, "we knew that before." did you? then why was my friend forced to choose between the wreck of his daughter's health and the disarrangement of a bit of school machinery? why is dr. chancellor able to describe a situation existing "generally and characteristically," in which the welfare of children is bartered away for high promotion averages? the truth is that society still tolerates, and often accepts, the belief that the purpose of education is the formation of a school system. we have yet to learn that, to use herbert spencer's phrase, the object of education is the preparation of children for complete living. education exists for the purpose of preparing and assisting children to live. to do that work effectively, it must devote only so much effort to school administration and to school machinery as will perform for boys and girls that very effective service. no two children are alike, and no two children have exactly similar needs. there are, however, certain kinds of needs which all children have in common. it is obviously impossible to discuss in the abstract the needs of any individual child. it is just as obviously possible to analyze child needs, and to classify them in workable groups. it is true that all children are different; so are all roses different, yet all have petals and thorns in common. similarly, there are certain needs which are common to all children who play, who grow, who live among their fellows, and who expect to do something in life. the matter may be stated more concretely thus,-- i. the school exists to assist and prepare children to live. ii. living involves three kinds of needs, which it is the duty of the school to understand and interpret. . needs which the child has because he is a physical being. . needs which result from the child's surroundings. . needs which arise in connection with the things which the child hopes to do in life. a further analysis of these groups of needs constitutes the subject matter of the next chapter. footnotes: [footnote : sacrificing children, w. e. chancellor, journal of education, vol. , pp. - (may , ).] chapter iii fitting schools to children i child growth--a primary factor in child life in the first place children have certain needs because in common with many other living creatures they develop through spontaneous, self-expressive activity. the growth of children is a growth in body, in mind and in soul. during the first six years of life the bodies of children grow rapidly, and during these years we wisely make no attempt to train their minds. from six to twelve or thirteen body growth is slower, the mind is having its turn at development, and during these years the children start to school. then, at twelve or thirteen or fourteen, differing with different races and different individuals, all normal children enter the fairyland of adolescence. life takes on new meanings, human relationships are closer, great currents of feeling run deep and strong through the child's being, because there is coming into his life one of the most wonderful of human experiences--the dawning of sex consciousness. this period of sex awakening produces a profound change in the lives of boys, but it works an even greater transformation in the lives of girls. for both sexes it is a time of rapid physical growth and of severe mental and spiritual strain. it is a time when the energies of the body are so entirely devoted to the development of sex functions that great mental stress should above all things be avoided, yet it is at this very time--think of it!--when we send our boys and girls to high school, and force them to spend a great part of their waking hours in severe intellectual efforts. ii children need health first had we set out with the deliberate intention of torturing our children we could have devised no better method. if we had applied ourselves to physiology, found out the time when the child needed the most energy for physical growth and the most relief from mental strain, and had then set out to plan a course of study which would wreck his health, we should have built a school system which gave him the comparatively easy work of the elementary grades until he was fourteen, and then, at the most critical period of his life, sent him into a new system of schools to study new, abstract subjects. what is it that our children must have before they can acquire anything else? health! we cry the word aloud, emphasizing and exhorting--nothing without health! yet, despite our protest, at a period of rapid physical growth, at the time of severe spiritual trial, there yawns the high school--grim for boys, ghastly for girls--with its ever-recurring demand: "work, study; study, work." considering the child's physical welfare, the high school is placed at exactly the point (fourteen to eighteen years) where it is best calculated to destroy the delicate balance of sanity, rendering its victims unable to stand the burden and heat of life's later day. we cannot escape the fact that children have bodies. the first duty of the schools, therefore, is to recognize the existence of these bodies by giving them due attention, particularly at the crucial periods of physical growth. therefore every school must provide as much physical training as is necessary to insure normal body growth at each particular age. then there are certain rules of health--"hygiene," they are called--which should be taught to every child. since bodies do not stay normal if they are abused every child should have right ideas of body care. most important of all, the schools must instruct children in sex hygiene because the growth of sex consciousness is one of the most significant of the changes which occur in the life of a child. "but must sex hygiene be taught in the school?" you will ask. undoubtedly it must. if it were a choice between sex instruction in the home or in the school, there would be no hesitation about delegating it to the home; but since most homes neglect the discussion of sex matters, leaving the children to gain their knowledge of sex from unreliable sources on the streets, the choice lies between the perversion of sex as it is taught on the streets, and the science of sex as it should be taught in the schools. iii play as a means to growth children's minds grow as well as their bodies--grow in retention, in grasp, and in power. memory work (the learning of poems, songs, and formulas) helps to make minds more retentive, while all studies, but particularly number work, increase mental grasp and power. besides body growth and mind growth all children have soul growth. they develop human sympathy, and they are interested in esthetic things. to supply these needs the school must give the child literature and art. simple these lessons must be, particularly in the elementary grades; but there is scarcely a child who will not respond to the noble in literature or the beautiful in art if these things are presented to him in an understandable way. the bodies, minds, and souls of children grow. they are all sacred. each child needs a normal body, an active mind, a healthy and a beautiful soul. we dare not develop bodies at the expense of minds and souls, but neither may we educate minds at the expense of souls and bodies--a tendency which has been fearfully prevalent in american education. the most valuable means of securing this all-important growth is "play," which froebel said contained the germinal leaves of all later life. growth comes only through expression. one does not develop muscle by watching the strong man in the circus, but by exercising. the child's chief means of expression is through play, hence play is the child's method of securing growth. in their earliest infancy children play. their frolics and antics are really "puppy play," the product of overflowing life and animal spirits. at this "puppy play" stage, when the child plays merely to work off surplus energy, the most essential thing is a place to play, and the school must meet this need by providing playgrounds. as children grow older they turn to a more advanced type of play. instead of romping and frolicking individually they play in groups. it is in these group plays that the child gets his first idea of the duty which he owes to his fellows, his first glimmering of a social sense. in the home and in the school he is in a subordinate position, but in the "gang," or "set," he is as good as the next. group play teaches democracy. more than that, group play has a moral value. each one must play fair. those who do not are ruthlessly ostracized, so children learn to abide by the decision of the crowd. while children's plays should be as untrammeled as possible, it is the duty of the school to stimulate group play by suggesting new games, organizing athletic meets, getting up interclass sports, and in other ways supervising and directing games and sports. in the course of the child's life play takes another form, the form of creative work. boys build wagons and houses; girls cook, and make dolls. the "puppy play" of their early childhood has evolved into a form of creative activity that sooner or later grips every human creature. we want to plant, to build, to plan, to make. it is the creative power within us yearning for expression, hence the well-planned school will provide simple forms of manual training by means of which both boys and girls will be taught to use their hands so skillfully that they may translate an idea into a concrete product. civilization has been described as the art of playing. big folks are apt to look down on play because most of it is done by children. but listen, big folks: when anna plays dolls she does it in a frank, serious, whole-souled way that you seldom imitate. there is no activity so vital to the child as play, nor does any man succeed at his work unless he can "play at it" with the fervor and abandon of a child. iv some things which a child must learn so much for the needs which a child has because he is a living creature. suppose we turn now to some other needs--the needs which arise because the child is in a great universe and surrounded by his fellowmen. wherever a child lives and whatever he does he must always face certain surrounding conditions. first among his surroundings are people. no one except robinson crusoe can get away from people, and even crusoe had his man friday. since we are compelled, whether we like it or not, to live with people, the school must teach language (oral and written), in order that the children may learn to tell others what they think, and may likewise understand the thoughts of others. the better the language the more clearly can they understand each other. in order that children may have a proper respect for the rights of others the school should teach ethics by means of simple stories about people. teachers should explain how men live in groups, and how, if group life is to be tolerable, men must respect each other's rights. perhaps in the upper elementary grades, and certainly in the high school, there should be some simple work in psychology in order that children may know how people's minds work. then besides the people of the present there are the people of the past, and, because the things which they did enable us to live as we do, children should be taught history, particularly the history of their own country, state, and town. the child comes into contact, in addition to people, with the institutions which people have constructed--the home, the school, the state, the industrial system. every child who grows to maturity will participate in the activity of these institutions, hence every child should be taught about them. in the last two years of the elementary grades civics can be successfully taught, since even at twelve years children are interested in the things which are happening around them. in the high schools this work can be carried much further in the form of social and industrial problem courses. the most universal and by far the largest of the child's surroundings consist of the things about him. he lives in a world, a very little world to be sure, but to him it is great; and a knowledge of the world comes through a study of geography. beginning with the geography of his native town (not with the basin of the ganges) he can learn successively about the geography of the county, the state, the country, and then of the world. surrounding the child on every hand are plants and animals. nature study gives him an intelligent interest in them. as he grows older general nature study may be subdivided into geology, botany, zoology; and the forces of nature may be examined in astronomy, chemistry, and physics: but most of these subjects are too specialized for the elementary grades, and should appear, if at all, in the high schools. there is a group of courses which belongs in every school--elementary school as well as high school--namely, the courses which prepare children for life activity. growth and training in the art of living enable children to fulfill the third function of their being--that of doing. every man and every woman needs work in order to live, and it is a part of the duty of education to prepare them for that work. first of all, as modern society has developed, every man and many women need an income-producing trade or occupation; hence it is the duty of the schools to provide trade and professional educations (really the same thing under different names). no child should be permitted to leave the schools until he is proficient in some income-giving work. the character of the teaching must be altered to suit the locality, but the principle is absolute. further, since men should not devote their entire lives to the same task, because they require a change of occupation, the school should aim to provide an avocation, or secondary occupation, which may occupy leisure hours. manual training, agriculture, art work, and civics will supply different people with occupations for spare time. finally, since one of the chief duties of society is to insure a healthy and increasingly valuable supply of human beings, no one should leave the schools without a thorough domestic training, including training for parenthood. while this training should be given in a measure to boys, it should be intended primarily for girls, and should include biology, hygiene, chemistry, dietetics, psychology, and nursing. although the elementary grades can provide only the simplest training along these lines that training should be given to every future housekeeper and mother. v what schools must provide to meet child needs if, up to this point, we have rightly described child needs, the school must be so organized as to provide for growth and play, for instructing the child in a knowledge of people, institutions, things and ideas, and for preparing every child to do his work in life. these subjects must be so apportioned over the grades that each child has the benefit of them. the high school is a continuation of the elementary school. it is in the high school that children should begin to specialize, because specialization before the beginning of adolescence is undesirable; but since, in many localities, almost all of the children leave before reaching the high school, these subjects must be taught in the elementary grades. certain things every child must know. if he is going to drop school at fourteen, as three-quarters of the american school children do, he must be reached in the first eight school grades. if he goes to high school he may there be given an opportunity to complete and intensify the education which the elementary school has started. we believe that these fundamental principles of education are sufficiently flexible to fit any community in the united states; they will apply to places of the most divergent school needs. vi the educational work of the small town let us begin by applying the scheme to a mining village of three thousand inhabitants, a typical industrial community. in this village more than nine-tenths of the children leave school at or before fourteen years of age, so that whatever school training they get must be secured between the ages of six and fourteen. the kind of activities that the children will take up in life is fixed by the custom of the town. the great majority of the boys go into the mines or shops, while practically all of the girls help around the home until they marry. a small number work in stores and factories. the life is rather primitive; the houses are set far apart; the children have an abundance of play space; they are required to do chores in homes where they receive little home training. the town affords an unparalleled opportunity to learn nasty things in a nasty way. almost all of the educational work in such a town must be done in the elementary schools. while high school facilities may be afforded they will appeal to a vanishingly small percentage of the children. the elementary schools in such a village must provide organized games for the younger children and organized sports for the older ones; a sufficient amount of physical training to insure robust bodies; careful instruction in physiology, body hygiene, and sex hygiene; simple manual training for the younger children; thorough preparation in the reading and writing of english; the fundamentals of numbers; geography with particular reference to the geographic conditions in the immediate locality; civics and history--particularly american history; a thorough drill in english and american literature; a minimum amount of instruction in fine art--drawing, painting, modeling; an extensive system of nature study, supplemented by field trips. this course should be required of boys and girls alike. in addition to these studies the boys in a coal-mining village should receive careful instruction in geology, particularly in the mineralogy of the region in which the mine is located; technical training in mining, drafting, and shop work; and a sufficient training in agriculture to enable them to make good kitchen gardens, since gardening is one of the chief avocations of men in such a community. parallel to this special training for boys the schools should provide for girls a thorough course in domestic science, with particular emphasis on economical purchasing, and an education for parenthood, including hygiene, dietetics, psychology, and nursing. such a course of study given in a typical mining village would tend to make of the boys educated, trained workmen, and of the girls educated, trained mothers. to be sure this course would not make of the boys railroad presidents or united states senators; but even that is not a drawback because, incredible as it may sound to many old-fashioned ears, the vast majority of these boys will be miners and mechanics. the question is, therefore, shall they be good miners or bad ones? united states senatorships bother them not a whit. if there are, as there always will be in such a village, a few exceptional children who desire more advanced work, the teacher can do exactly what he does now--namely, give them special instruction. such an educational system as that outlined would require more training in the teachers, and an additional outlay for tools and school-rooms, but it would train the boys and girls of the village to live their lives effectively. the mine-village educational problem is rendered especially easy of solution because the community is small in size, and because there are only two occupations, mining and homekeeping, into which the children go. a similar situation may be found in most of the agricultural districts, except that the boys take up farming instead of mining, while the girls are called upon to participate in farm work to the extent of caring for chickens and pigs, and sometimes for milk. in such an agricultural community the same outline for study might apply, except that in training for occupations boys should be taught the facts regarding soil fertility, fruit culture, dairying, market gardening, and other agricultural problems, while girls need instruction which will fit them for domestic life and for parenthood. in new york state a number of agricultural high schools giving a course such as the one just hinted at, have met with marked success. most country children do not go to high school, however--although they are doing so in increasing numbers--and hence the necessity for shaping the elementary course along similar lines. vii the educational problems of an industrial community when the mining village and the farming district are replaced by the industrial town and the city, the school problem is greatly complicated by the crowding of many people into a small space and by the great diversity of occupations which the people pursue. the larger the town the worse the crowding and the greater the variety of jobs. otherwise the problem of education remains largely the same. the most apparent need of the town child is a place to play, and the plainest duty of the town elementary school is to provide play space. in thinly settled places there is no such need. in towns and cities there is no more imperative duty resting on the school than the furnishing of playgrounds and gymnasiums for children. the practice of building school houses without gymnasiums and without play spaces cannot be too strongly condemned. it is robbing children of the chance to grow into normal human beings. the other side of the town problem--the question of occupations--has been settled in germany, and more recently in certain american cities, by the "continuation" school, which unties the gordian knot by cutting it. instead of allowing children to stop school at fourteen the "continuation" system requires partial school attendance until they are eighteen. under this system, when children reach the end of the elementary schools they may either go on with a high school course for four years, or else they may take a "continuation" course for four years. for example, if a boy elects to be a carpenter he spends forty hours a week as a carpenter's apprentice. then for fourteen hours a week he goes to a school where he is taught mechanical drawing, designing, the testing of materials, and any other subjects which bear on carpentering. the time he spends in school is credited on the time sheets of his employer. so at the end of four years the boy, at eighteen, has been well trained in the practice of carpentering by working at his job, and well schooled in its theory by taking a "continuation" course which bore directly on his work. thus wage-earning and education are united to produce a well-trained man. the school problem of the city suburb is very different from that of the mining village, the rural community, the industrial town, or the city. the children have space, good homes, and abundant opportunity to go through high school and even through college. under these conditions the elementary grades can be directly preparatory for high school work, since six or even seven out of ten children will go to high school. in the city suburb there need be little specialization in the elementary grades. the high school, with a general course and two or three special courses, can be relied upon for all necessary specific training. viii beginning with child needs in the industrial town, in the city, and in the city suburb the high school is being looked to as the place where specialized training must be given. the trade school can succeed a little, but its effectiveness will always be limited by the narrow technical character of its instruction, which makes the "continuation" school generally preferable. the high school is not a separate institution, but an integral part of the school system. in a high school, therefore, the children should move naturally from the studies of the elementary grades to more advanced studies, but the purpose of both elementary and high schools is the same--the preparation of children for living. children have needs which the schools are here to supply. certain of these needs are common to all children, and to that extent all schools must provide similar training. other needs, varying with the size and character of the community, call for a like variation in the course of study. chapter iv progressive notes in elementary education i the kindergarten no single chapter can contain all of the progressive notes that are being sounded in american elementary education; yet it is possible, after some arbitrary picking and choosing, to describe a number of the most typical and most successful educational innovations. at the bottom of most up-to-date elementary school systems is the kindergarten. not so often as it might be, but still frequently, the child begins school work there. the games, the songs, the children's sports of these kindergarten years, make a joyous entry-way into the grades. in gary the kindergarten child sees life. the flowers, leaves, grasses, lichens, fruits, butterflies, moths, and birds are usually brought to the classroom. the gary children go on expeditions to explore nature's wonderland, besides making excursions to squares, parks, and to the open country. the kindergartners of cincinnati plant tulip bulbs in the city parks, and visit farms in order to have a chance to meet the farm animals. singing, visiting, playing, shaping, building, the kindergarten child sees life on many sides. perhaps, finally, other cities following the lead of cincinnati will introduce the kindergarten spirit and kindergarten activities into the lower grades where they will clarify an atmosphere, fetid and dank with concepts which to the six-year-old are meaningless abstractions. ii translating the three r's at best the kindergarten reaches but a few. even in cities which boast of a system of organized kindergartens, only a small portion of the children attend them. on the other hand, since practically all school children enter the grades, it is on them that an inquiry into elementary education must be focused. the time has passed when reading, writing, and arithmetic made up the entirety of a satisfactory elementary education. like the kindergarten, the elementary school must touch life; like the kindergarten, it must provide for child needs. everywhere schools are turning from the old methods of teaching spelling, multiplication, and syntax to the new methods of teaching children,--yes, and teaching them those things which they need, irrespective of name. three r's no longer suffice. the child requires training from the alpha to the omega of life. compare, for example, the old method of teaching geography with the new. under the abandoned system, the child began with capes, peninsulas, continents, meridians, trade routes, rivers, boundaries and products. under the new system, he begins with the town in which he lives. each schoolroom in newark, for example, is provided with a large map of the city. in addition to these complete maps, each child is given a series of small maps, each of which centers about a familiar square, store, or public building. then, from this simple beginning, the child fills in the surrounding streets and buildings. newark geography begins in the third grade with a description of the school yard and the surroundings of the school lot. after all, what more simple geography could be conceived than the geography that you already know. borneo and beloochistan are abstractions except to the most traveled, but what child has not noted the red bricks and ugly iron fences surrounding his own school yard? charity and geography both begin logically at home. when in the later newark grades the children are taught about europe and australasia, they are taught on a background of the geography of yards, alleys, squares, streets and playgrounds with which they are familiar. geography thus concretely presented, becomes comprehensible to even the dullest mind. iii playing at mathematics the passing system of elementary mathematics took the innocents through addition, subtraction and the abatis of multiplication tables, until every child was fully convinced that multiplication is vexation, division's twice as bad, the rule of three perplexes me, and practice drives one mad. to-day arithmetic begins with life. the teachers at gary organize games in which the children are divided into two sides. some of the children play the game, while others keep score. unconsciously, under the stress of the most gripping of impulses--the desire to win--these little scorekeepers learn addition. as they advance in the work, they take up practical problems--measure the room for flooring and measure the school pavement for cementing. at school no. , in indianapolis, one of the teachers wanted a cold-frame and a hot-bed for use in connection with her nature work. the class in mathematics made the measurements; the drawing class provided the plans; the boys in the seventh and eighth grades dug the pit and constructed the beds. the higher grade mathematics work in indianapolis is extremely concrete. prices and descriptions of materials are supplied, and the children are asked to compute given problems involving the buying of meats, groceries, and other household articles; the cost of heating and lighting the home; the cost of home furnishing; the construction of buildings; cost-keeping in various factories; the management of the city hospital; the taxation of indianapolis; the estimation and construction of pavement; and, generally, the mathematical problems involved in the conduct of public and private business. mathematics is alive when it is joined to the problem of life. well taught, it becomes a part of the real experiences of childhood and furnishes a foundation for the knowledge of later life. iv a model english lesson of all subjects taught in the schools, english is the most practical, because it is most used in life. we buy with it, sell with it, converse with it, write with it, adore with it, and protest with it. english is the open sesame of life in english-speaking countries. in some classes the english period would be fascinating even for adults. what experience could be more delightful than a visit to a third or fourth grade room in which the children were writing original poems, fables and stories! the monotony of routine english work was completely broken down; the children were enthusiastic,--enthusiastic to such a degree that they had all written poetry. just before halloween the teacher had distributed pictures of a witch on a broomstick, with a cat at her side, riding toward the moon. each child was called upon for an original poem on this picture. one boy of eight wrote:-- there was an old witch who flew up in the sky, to visit the moon that was shining so high. another child improved somewhat upon the versification-- the witch's cat was as black as her hat, as black as her hat was he. he had yellow eyes which looked very wise as he sailed high over the trees. how many of you mature men and women could have done a better piece of work than dorothy hall, nine and a half years old? the moonlight people when the stars are twinkling, and the ground with snow is white, and we are just awaking for to see the morning light; little moonlight people are dancing here and there o'er a snow white carpet, dancing everywhere. this same class of little people, after learning riley's "pixie people," were asked to write down what they believed were the circumstances under which riley composed the poem. their reasons varied all the way from a dream of butterflies, to cornfields. seventh and eighth grade children in this same city (newton, mass.) write books, the titles of which are selected by the children with the approval of the teacher. "a boy's life in new york," "fairy stories," "a book about airships," "a story of boarding school life," are a few of the titles. having chosen his title, the child outlines the work and then begins on it, writing it week by week, illustrating the text with drawings, illuminating and decorating the margins with water colors, painting a tasty cover, and at last, as the product of a year's work in english, taking home a book written, hand printed, hand illumined, covered and bound by the author. could you recognize in this fascinating task the dreaded english composition and spelling of your childhood days? one eighth grade lad, who had always made a rather poor showing in school, decided to write his book on birds. as he worked into the subject it gradually got hold of him. in the early spring he found himself, at half past four, morning after morning, out in the squares, the parks and the fields, watching for the birds. he became absorbed in writing his book, but at the same time the teachers of other subjects found him taking additional interest in them. the whole tone of his school work improved; and when, in may, he delivered an illustrated lecture, before one of the teachers' meetings, on the birds of newton, he was triumphant. in less than a year he had vitalized his whole being with an interest in one study. "in his talk to the teachers," said superintendent spalding, "he showed a deeper knowledge of the subject than most of the teachers present possessed." those who remember with a shiver of dread the syntax, parsing, sentence diagramming, paragraph dissecting, machine composition construction of the grammar grades, should have stepped with me into the class of an indianapolis teacher of seventh grade english. the teacher sat in the back of the room. the class bent forward, attentively listening while a roughly clad, uncouth boy, slipshod in attitude, stumbled through the broken periods of his ungrammatical sentences. "and esau went out after a venison," he was saying, "and jacob's mother cooked up some goat's meat till it smelled like a venison. and then jacob, he took the venison--i mean the goat's meat to isaac, and isaac couldn't tell it wasn't esau because"--so the story continued for two or three minutes. when it was ended, the boy stood looking gloomily at the class. "well, class?" queried miss howes, "has any one any criticism to make?" instantly, three-quarters of the class was on its feet. "well, edward." edward, a manly fellow, spoke quietly to the boy who had told the story. "paul, you don't talk quite loud enough. then you should raise and lower your voice more." several of the class (having intended to make the same criticism) sat down with edward. the teacher turned. "yes, mary." "paul, your grammar wasn't very good. you didn't make periods." one by one, in a spirit of kindly helpfulness, criticisms were made. when the children had finished, miss howes said: "paul, you did very well. this is your first time in this class, isn't it?" "yes'm." "yes, paul, you did very well; but, paul"--and with care and precision she outlined his mistakes, suggesting in each case ways of avoiding them in the future. throughout the grades in indianapolis the children have some oral english work every day. when they reach the seventh and eighth years this oral work takes on quite pretentious forms. beginning with aesop's fables, the children tell fairy tales, bible stories, greek legends, norse legends, animal stories, and any other stories that the teacher thinks appropriate. each child may select in the particular group of stories whatever topic seems most interesting. each day has its written english work, too. on monday, letters are written and criticized; tuesday is composition day; on wednesday each scholar writes a description of the day in a season journal; thursday is set aside for the revision and correction of compositions; and on friday, the letters for the following monday are written. wherever possible, the subjects for written work are selected with reference to the other studies which the child is taking. v an original fairy story the work is arranged primarily to arouse interest. at halloween, the theme is timely, and one girl, dorothy morrison, selects as her title, "how the witch got the black cat for her prisoner." read this charming fairy tale--an original piece of work by a girl of twelve: "years ago, when the witch rode her broomstick, no snarling black cat accompanied her on her midnight rides. that wicked person was always planning and plotting how to get some nice young girl to go with her. "at this time there lived a beautiful fairy, who was condemned to death by a cruel magician, who had no reason to do so. this good fairy, eilene, finally decided to take the shape of a bird and to fly through the tiny window of her prison to her old friend, mr. moon. "she did so, and when she arrived at her friend's home she assumed the form of a fairy and entreated him to keep her safe from the cruel clutches of the magician. "he promised to do his best. "the next halloween, the witch, crono, rode up to the moon and on spying eilene she exclaimed, 'aha, just what i have been looking for--a nice young maiden.' "eilene became frightened at first and clutched the moon's hand. just then crono grabbed at her, but she was too quick for her, for she changed herself into a bird and flew out of the reaches of the witch. "shaking her fist at the girl she muttered, 'i will get you yet.' "then the witch returned to her caldron and eilene returned to the moon. mr. moon then advised her to be careful for crono wanted her for her prisoner. she did not heed this because she thought that she could outwit crono with all her fairy power, but she was mistaken, for crono had more power than she. one day, while sitting at the moon's knee, listening to the story of how he got up in the sky, eilene's hands and feet were tied, and before mr. moon could help her, what little power that fat personage possessed was taken from him. "crono transformed eilene into a snarling black cat which now always accompanies her on her halloween rides when she tells the grinning jack-o'-lanterns of how she captured eilene. "because mr. moon loved eilene so well, crono gave him a picture of the fairy, which he always keeps near him, and even to this day, if we look up at the moon, we can see the picture of eilene. so let us remember that, although the black cat does appear fierce, she is really good at heart." vi the crow and the scarecrow when corn was sprouting, "crows and scarecrows" was announced as a topic, and one irish lad, giving rein to his imagination, wrote:-- the crow and the scarecrow "having a story to write concerning a crow, i decided to go to the zoological gardens and seek an interview with one of the species. accordingly i went, and after passing numerous cages containing all kinds of animals, i arrived at the bird cages. here in one cage all by himself i met mr. crow. he was a big bird with coal-black feathers that glistened in the sunlight. "i made a bow, explained my errand and asked for a story. he cocked his head to one side, looked steadily for a few seconds and then actually winked at me. 'well, young man,' he said in a throaty voice, 'you have certainly come to the right place. but as it is near my lunch time i must be brief. "'in the first place, i was the leader of as wild and mischievous a band of crows as you ever heard tell of. there was one particular farm in our territory we loved to visit. the owner's name was silas whimple and he was the grouchiest, most miserly man in the county. he lived alone and what part of the ground that was tilled, he did it himself. as much to tease as to eat, we would pay him an occasional flying visit, digging up his newly planted seeds, nibbling at the young green shoots, or, later on, scratching up his potatoes. all his shouting and screaming did not scare us a bit. one day one of my companions came winging with the news that silas had a farm hand. i laughed and said, "if there is another man on the farm then silas whimple must be dead." off we flew to investigate. sure enough, out in a patch of potatoes was a man. watching him quite a while, i saw he did not move or make a noise as silas would. he just stood still. i came down to take a closer look, when who should come to the doorway but silas himself. he was laughing and shouting, "now i have something to keep you away. the scarecrow shall keep you from bothering me any more." he laughed and laughed, but i watched my chance and flew behind this being and scratched off his cap. then the story was out. it was only a straw man. i went back to my companions and explained, and before evening we had picked the scarecrow to pieces. next day i was unfortunate enough to put my foot in a wire trap and then they sent me up here for life.' "at this moment his keeper came up with something to eat, so i bade him good-bye and left." english, in these classes, is so alive with interest that the children write with ardor and read eagerly the literature which, improperly handled, they learn so soon to despise. the time-honored studies of the old curriculum may be charged with interest if they are linked to life. the most irksome task has its pleasant aspects. even the three r's may be translated into current thought. vii school and home even more significant for the future is the work which is being done in a few cities to train girls for their chief work in life--homemaking. the home schools at indianapolis and providence are, perhaps, typical. the indianapolis school board bought a number of wretched homes near one school in a crowded district. the boys in the school renovated the homes, converting one into a rug shop, another into a mop factory, and still a third into a shoe-shop. in these shops the children of the school did their trade work. another house was made into a model home--(model for that quarter)--in which the domestic science department was located. of this home the girls took entire charge, living in it by the day. there they were taught, by practical experience, the art of homemaking. the home school of providence, rhode island, under the direction of mrs. ada wilson trowbridge, has received nation-wide recognition. six hundred dollars, appropriated by the board of education, renovated and furnished the flat on willard avenue in which the school is held. the girls who elect to take work in the home school--the work is wholly elective--may come on monday and tuesday, or on wednesday and thursday. the hours are to , or : to : . on friday, anyone comes who cares to. the day pupils are from the grammar schools and the evening pupils come from the factories and shops. seventy-five names on the waiting list of day classes indicate the popularity of the school. "we try to keep the school like the homes from which these girls come," explained mrs. trowbridge, as she showed her tastefully arranged apartment. "the girls in the technical high school worked out the color schemes, selected the patterns and bought the materials. we tried to get things which were good looking and durable." the three kinds of work, ( ) cooking, ( ) housekeeping, and ( ) sewing, are carried on in rotation, a girl spending one entire afternoon at cooking, the next at sewing and a third at housework. thus each girl does an afternoon's job in each subject. the cooking class studies successively "breakfast," "lunch" and "dinner," in each case preparing menus and cooking the food. a meal is served nearly every day. the service falls to the housekeeping class, which is also responsible for cleaning up, tending the furnace, washing, ironing and the like. included in this part of the work are a number of thorough discussions of personal hygiene and home sanitation. to the sewing class, the girls bring their home sewing problems. certain classes darn stockings while a teacher reads to them. some girls make underclothing and dresses. the beginners hem table cloths, napkins, towels, dustcloths, etc., for the school. the classes are small (ten to fifteen) making individual work possible. "no, no," protested mrs. trowbridge, "we have no course of study, or else, if you please, there are as many courses as there are girls. each girl has her problems and we aim to meet them." the backyard, utilized as a garden, furnishes vegetables which the girls cook and can. these vegetables, together with canned fruits, jellies, jams and pickles, which the girls put up, give the school such an excellent source of revenue that last year it turned over $ to the superintendent of schools. the crowning work of the school was done in a bare upstairs room which the girls papered and painted themselves. "two of them have since done the same thing with rooms at home," declared mrs. trowbridge, happily. "isn't that good for a start?" the home school stays close to home problems, dealing with the facts of life as the girls who come to school see them. it would hardly be fair to expect more of any school. viii breaking new ground the regular work of the public school has been supplemented, of late years, by a number of significant innovations, of which the most far-reaching is, perhaps, a medical inspection of schools which involves a thorough physical examination of all school children by experts. by this scheme, the defect of the individual child is corrected, and the danger of widespread contagion or infection in the schoolroom is reduced to a minimum. following these physical examinations, the children who are clearly sub-normal are placed in special classes or special schools, where, under the direction of specially fitted teachers, they do any mental work for which they are fitted, in the interims of time between manual activities. weaving, woodworking, folding and similar employments hold the attention of sub-normal children where intellectual work will not. the special school, freed from the throttling grip of an iron-clad course of study, studies the need of each child, and makes a course of study to fit the need. although the special school has been used for incorrigibles, its real value rests in its care of the defective child. anaemic children and those who show a tubercular tendency are treated in open air schools. in springfield a special school was constructed. in providence an old building was employed. in all cases, however, the windows are notable by their absence. the school supplies caps and army blankets, a milk lunch in the middle of the forenoon and the afternoon, and a plain, wholesome dinner at noon. a few months of such treatment works wonders with most of the children. it seems only fair that the sick school child should be treated to fresh air and full nutrition, even though the well child is not so favored. the open air school has borne fruit, however, in the establishment of numerous open-window classes. against these classes, there seems to be only one complaint. the children are too lively. fancy! they get a supply of oxygen sufficient to stimulate them into life during school hours. how tragic this must seem to the teacher who is in the habit of calming the troubled spirits of her class by a generous administration of closed windows and carbon dioxide. a few cities are attempting to relieve underfeeding by the provision of wholesome school lunches at cost. buffalo leads in the work, with chicago, philadelphia and a number of other cities trailing behind. when you remember that the chicago school board reported that in the chicago schools there were "five thousand children who were habitually hungry," while "ten thousand others do not have sufficient nourishing food," you will perhaps agree that the time has come for some action. among the liveliest educational movements of the day is that of providing school children with a legitimate occupation and a convenient place to be occupied outside of school hours. chicago, with an unequaled system of playgrounds, and philadelphia, with a department devoted to school gardens, are leaders in two fields which promise great things for the future welfare of american city school children. ix the school and the community not content with doing those needful things involved in the education of children of school age, the school is reaching far out into the community. night schools came first, as a means of education for those who could not attend school during the daytime. every progressive city and town has a night school now, and the scholars who come after working hours use the same expensive equipment that is furnished to the regular classes. machines, cooking apparatus, maps and blackboard all do double duty. in the foreign quarters, particularly, the night schools attract a large following of adults, eager to learn the language and ways of the new land. though many a one falls asleep over the tasks, who shall say that the spirit is not willing? public lectures are being used more and more as a means of public education. there is scarcely an up-to-date city that has not some public lectures connected with its school or library system, while in a center like new york, the board of education has established an elaborate organization for the delivery of lectures in public school buildings throughout the city. the lecture topics--widely advertised through the schools and elsewhere--cover every field of thought. perhaps the whole movement of the schools to influence the community may be summed up in the phrase, "a wider use of the school plant." why should not the schools be open, as they are in gary, day and evening, too? why should the mothers and fathers not be organized into "home and school leagues," meeting in the schools as they do on a large scale in philadelphia? why should not the social sentiment of a community be crystallized around its schoolhouse, as it has been in rochester? is it better to have the children playing in the street in the summer time, or in the school yards and playgrounds, as they do in minneapolis and st. paul? the billion dollars invested in the school plant must be made to yield a return in broader social service with each succeeding year. x new keys for old locks nor have progressive educators been satisfied to change the methods of teaching old subjects. more important still, they have introduced new courses which aim to open larger fields for child experience. hygiene, nature study, civics, manual training and domestic science have all been called upon to enrich the elementary school curriculum. the nineteenth century physiology--names of muscles and bones, symptoms of diseases and the like--has been replaced in the twentieth century schools by a physiology which aims to teach that the body is worth caring for and developing into something of which every boy and girl may be proud. beginning with nature study and elementary science, the hygiene course in indianapolis emphasizes, first, the care of the body and then, in the seventh and eighth grades, public health, private and public sanitation, etc. from nature and her doings, the child is led to see the application of the laws of physiology and hygiene to the life of the individual and of the community. nature study, elementary science, horticulture and school gardens have taken their place, on a small scale, in all progressive educational systems. there is an education in watching things grow; an education in the sequence and significance of the seasons, which brick and cement pavements can never afford. scattered attempts are being made to teach children the relation between individual and community life. all of the seventh and eighth grade children in indianapolis visit the city bureaus--water, light, health, fire and police. trips to factories teach them the relation between industry and the individual life, while social concepts are developed by newspaper and magazine reading, book reading and class discussions of the articles and books which are read. at election time they discuss politics; they take up strikes and labor troubles; woman suffrage is occasionally touched upon; and they are even asked to suggest methods of making a given wage cover family needs. the widespread introduction of domestic science and elementary manual training renders any special discussion of them unnecessary. in some instances, however, they are developed to a high degree. in gary, indianapolis and cincinnati, seventh and eighth grade girls make their own garments, cook and serve meals to teachers or to other classes; while in the advanced grades the boys make furniture, sleds, derricks, bridges and telegraph instruments. chair caning, weaving and clay modeling are also widely used in the hand work of both boys and girls. fitchburg, mass., has developed a practical arts school, paralleling the seventh and eighth grades in the grammar school. the school includes a commercial course, a practical arts course, a household arts course and a literary course. the regular literature, composition, spelling, mathematics, geography, history and science of the seventh and eighth grades is supplemented by social dancing, physical training and music in all of these courses; and in addition for the commercial course by typewriting, shorthand, bookkeeping, business arithmetic and designing; for the practical arts course, by drawing, designing, printing, making and repairing; for the household arts course, by cooking, sewing, homekeeping and household arts; and for the literary course, by half-time in modern language and the other half in manual training and household arts. at the end of the sixth year (at about twelve years of age) children in fitchburg may elect to take this school of practical arts instead of the regular grammar school course. the results of this election are extraordinary. the practical course was planned for the children who expected to leave school at fourteen, or at the end of the eighth grade. curiously enough, all types of children have flocked into it. sons of doctors, lawyers and well-to-do business men; boys and girls preparing for college, and children who must stop school in a year or two are all clamoring for admission. in spite of the fact that pupils are kept in these schools six hours a day instead of five, as in the other schools, the attendance at the end of two years has outrun the accommodations. the children who leave this applied work and enter the high school are apparently not a whit less able to do the high school work than those children who have come up through the regular grades. the new education is broader than the old, because it accepts and adopts any study which seems likely to meet the needs or wants of any class of children or of any individual child. the storehouse of the mind is to-day unlocked with educational keys of which educators in past generations scarcely dreamed. xi school and shop for the present, at least, there are a great number of children who must leave school at fourteen, whether they have completed the grammar grades or not. with them, the problem of education shapes itself into this question: "shall they be well or badly prepared for their work?" the boys enter the shops and mills; the girls marry and make homes. are they to be efficient workers and housekeepers? the answer rests largely with the schools. ohio has provided, for the solution of the problem, a continuation school law, modeled on the more extensive plans of the german continuation school system. the law reads: "in case the board of education of any school district establishes part-time day schools for the instruction of youths over fourteen years of age who are engaged in regular employment, such board of education is authorized to require all youths who have not satisfactorily completed the eighth grade of the elementary schools to continue their schooling until they are sixteen years of age; provided, however, that such youths, if they have been granted age and schooling certificates and are regularly employed, shall be required to attend school not to exceed eight hours a week between the hours of : a. m. to : p. m. during the school term." cleveland and cincinnati, acting under this authority, have established continuation schools. in cleveland they are voluntary; in cincinnati they are compulsory. in both cities, children between fourteen and sixteen may attend school, during factory time, for four hours each week. little enough, you protest. yes, but it is a beginning. the child in such a continuation school may choose between academic work, art, drawing and designing, shop-work, millinery, dressmaking and domestic science. in some cases a continuation course is possible. thus far the system has worked admirably. equally significant are the massachusetts vocational schools, which are intended to provide a technical training for the boys who wish to pass directly from the grammar school into industry. under the massachusetts law, the state pays half of the running expenses of any vocational school which is organized with the approval of the state director of vocational training. the springfield school, under the supervision of e. e. macnary, is housed on one floor of a factory building. the boys may not come at an earlier age than fourteen and mr. macnary insists, where possible, that they complete the regular seventh grade work before coming to him. his school, which includes pattern making, cabinet work, carpentry and machine shop work, is run on the "job" plan. that is, a boy is assigned to a job such as making a head-stock for a lathe. the boy makes his drawings, writes his specifications, orders his material and tools, estimates the cost of the job, makes the head-stock and then figures up his actual costs and compares them with the estimated cost. not until he has gone through all of the operations, may he turn to a new piece of work. "we tried the half-day and half-day in shop plan," mr. macnary explains, "but it was not a success. it disturbed the boys too much. so we hit on the plan of letting each boy divide his time as he needed to. when he has drawing and estimating to do, he does that and when the time for lathe work comes, he turns to that. it breaks up any system in your school, but it gives the best chance to the individual boy." one day a week all of the boys meet the teachers in conference to discuss their work and to make and receive general suggestions. the boys who come to mr. macnary's school are boys who would probably leave the regular school at fourteen. many boys come because they are discouraged with the grade work, and of these "grade failures," many succeed admirably in the new school. during the two years of this shop-work, the boys get a training which enables them to take and hold good positions in the trades. as one foreman said, "a boy gets more training in the two years of that school than he gets in three years of any shop." these are but an index of the myriad of attempts which cities are making to bring school and shop together, to train for usefulness, to start boys in life. xii half a chance to study there are other ways in which the school may help. for example, in the case of homework. on the one hand, homework for the sake of homework may be eliminated. on the other hand, children may be given half a chance to read and study. one day in a squalid back street i glanced through the window of a corner house. the front of the house was a grocery store. the room into which i happened to look was a general dwelling room. on one side stood the kitchen stove; the floor was littered with children and rubbish, and just under the window a child sat, her book before her on the supper-covered dining table, doing multiplication examples--her homework. the well-to-do child, less than ten squares away, who bent over her problems in a quiet room, could scarcely appreciate the difficulties attached to homework, when the family lives in three rooms and does everything possible to reduce the bill for kerosene. there is just one place in every neighborhood where the child can find light, air and quiet--that place is the school. why then should the school not be open for the child? "why, indeed," asked the schoolmen of newark, n. j. passing from thought to deed, they opened schools in the crowded neighborhoods four nights a week from to . into these evening study classes, in charge of advisory teachers, any child might come at all. the city librarian, generous in co-operation, lent library books in batches of forty, for two months at a time. evening after evening, the boys and girls assemble and with text-books or library books, do those things in the school which are impossible in the home. for what other purpose should the school exist? xiii thwarting satan in the summer time another project, equally effective, involves the opening of schools during the summer time. the farmer needed his boy for the harvest, so summer vacations became the established rule, but the city street needs neither the boy nor the girl at any time of the year. idleness and mischief link hands with street children and dance away toward delinquency. then why not have school in the summer time? why not? the answer takes the form of vacation schools. in most cases the work of the vacation school is designed primarily to interest the child. games, stories, gardening, manual work of various sorts, excursions and similar devices are relied upon to maintain interest. a few cities, like indianapolis, worcester and gary, on the other hand, have established vacation schools in which children may make up back work, or pursue studies in which they are especially interested. as a means of bringing below-grade children up to the standard of affording an opportunity for the able children to advance more rapidly in school, and, in general, as a means of keeping city children usefully occupied during the summer months, the vacation school has won its place. newark, making an even more radical departure from tradition, runs some schools twelve months in the year. edgar g. pitkin, principal of a school in an immigrant district, first put the idea into practice. at the end of the regular session in june, he announced to his children that school would start again on the following monday. fearfully he approached the building. the streets about the school seemed unusually deserted that monday morning. suppose no one should be there! when the gong sounded, however, more than seven-tenths of the two thousand children belonging in the school were in their places. the attendance that summer was ninety-two per cent, and the promotion ninety-five per cent. during the three summer months there were exactly two cases of discipline. "you see what happened," mr. pitkin explained. "all of the bright ambitious children came back and the loafers stayed away. from that picked crowd nothing but good work could be expected. there was no attendance officer on duty, but the children were regular. order was so good that on hot days we put up the sashes between rooms, and on the second floor, where four class-rooms were thrown into one, four classes worked industriously under four teachers without the least friction." this school has been organized on a year schedule. if the children come four terms each year instead of three, they will reduce the time between the first and eighth grades by one-third, which means a saving to them and to the school. since it is the able children who come, the twelve months' school affords them an opportunity to go quickly through work on which the slower classmates must hold a more moderate pace. xiv sending the whole child to school it is a long step from the school of-- reading, and writing and 'rithmetic, taught to the tune of the hickory stick, to the school which aims at the education of the whole child; yet that step has been attempted in gary, indiana. there, perhaps more consistently than anywhere else in the united states, the school authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. many schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the parks and squares; but in no school that i have visited did i find a more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and vocation and recreation, in one complete system. this result, which to some may sound unbelievably like the impossible, is accomplished first, by engaging experts to teach such special subjects as botany and physical training; second, by abolishing grade promotions and permitting each child to advance in his subject when he is ready to do so; third, by keeping the school open morning, afternoon and evening during practically the entire year; fourth, by making the work of interest to each individual child. perhaps this matter of interest sums up better than any other the spirit of the gary schools. the system aims to make the school so attractive that children will prefer to be there rather than to be anywhere else. how is this done? take the case of john frena, who occupies a place of no particular distinction in the fifth year of the gary schools. john's school day (from : a. m. to : p. m.) is divided equally between regular work (reading, writing, geography, etc.) and special work (play, nature study, manual training and the like). a day of john's school life reads like this: _first period_--playground, games, sports and gymnastics, under the direction of an expert. _second period_--nature study, elementary science and physical geography. _third and fourth periods_--reading, writing, spelling and language. _lunch hour._ _fifth period_--playground (as before). _sixth period_--drawing and manual training. _seventh and eighth periods_--history, political geography and arithmetic. during his school day, john has played, used his head and his hands, and alternated the work in such a way that no one part of it ever became irksome. next week, music and literature will be substituted on john's program for drawing; the following week manual training will replace one period of play. the four special subjects (drawing and manual training, music and literature, nature study and science, and plays and games) rotate regularly. each day, however, includes four periods of this special work and four periods of regular work. such a plan sounds complicated. in reality, it is very easy. the gymnasium teacher stays in the gymnasium, the drawing teacher in the drawing room. in the regular work, there are forty children in each class. for science and manual training these classes split in two. at the end of each period, or of each two periods, depending on the subject, the children pass from one room to another. while this system brings them under several teachers each day, it enables them to take a subject like art with one teacher for twelve years. meanwhile our little friend john has shown himself bright in language, but slow in arithmetic. immediately he is advanced in language, and perhaps placed in a lower arithmetic class. he may even be transferred to another teacher for special arithmetic work. the system permits this flexibility because it allows each teacher, an expert in her own field, to shape her work to suit her pupils. better still, if john cannot master his arithmetic in the regular classes, he may attend voluntary classes on saturday, at night, or during the summer months. the schools afford him every chance to keep up in every subject, and if he cannot make his way in this subject or in that, he works in the fields which are open to him, doing what he can to make his course a success. john, in the schools of gary, is john frena, with all of john frena's limitations and possibilities. the gary school seeks to bridge the limitations, expand the possibilities, and give john frena a thousand and one reasons for believing that if there is any place in the world where he can grow into a complete man, that place is the gary school. xv smashing the school machine one of the oft-repeated complaints against the old education arose from the iron-clad system of promotion which once in each year, with automatic precision, separated the sheep from the goats, saying to the sheep, "go higher," and to the goats, "repeat the grade." for the sheep, the system worked fairly well, at least that once; but for the goats, it was a tragedy. the child who had failed in one out of six branches, side by side with the child failing in six out of six, repeated the year. the new education affords several remedies for this situation. of these the most generally known is promotion twice yearly. while this affords considerable relief, it is greatly improved upon in springfield, mass., by the division of each grade into three divisions--advanced, normal and backward. these divisions the teacher handles separately so that when promotion time comes the children who have shown special aptitude are prepared to go into the next grade. meantime the children have been constantly changing from one division in the class to another. perhaps the most generally practicable plan for relieving the mechanical features of promotion is found in indianapolis, and even more intensely in gary, where children are promoted by subjects rather than by grades. in indianapolis, the child entering the sixth grade, takes all english with one teacher from that time until the end of the eighth grade. if the child is strong in english, he advances rapidly. if he is weak in english, the teacher gives him special attention. learning each pupil's capabilities in her particular branch, the teacher is able to give the individual child, over a series of years, the help which his special case requires. in gary the departmental idea is carried through the entire school system. in the emerson school, for instance, children may take eighth grade work in english and high school work in nature study or history. the departmental work is strengthened in gary, in indianapolis, and in a number of other cities, by afternoon work, saturday classes and vacation schools. here, a child interested in any phase of the school work or desiring to make up work in which he is deficient, may spend his spare time to his heart's content. an even greater individuation of children exists in fitchburg and newton, mass., and in providence, r. i. children from the country and foreign children who have difficulty with their english, together with any other children who do not fit into any grade, are placed in an ungraded class. a typical ungraded class of fifty pupils contained germans, russians, greeks, french, italians and polish children, who were unable to speak english on entering the school. the ages of these children varied from eight to fifteen. as soon as the ungraded children appear to be fitted for any special grade, they are transferred. this ungraded work is supplemented by "floating teachers," who are located in each school for the purpose of dealing with special cases. the case of any child who, for this reason or that, cannot keep up with the work in a particular subject, is handed over to these teachers. thus individual attention is secured in individual cases. xvi all hands around for an elementary school these progressive educational steps are not isolated instances of success in new lines, nor are they incompatible with good work. they may be welded into a unified system, aglow with the real interests of real life. it is possible to correlate the old standard courses and the new fields in such a way that the child will gain in interest and in life experience. nowhere is this possibility better illustrated than in the elementary schools of indianapolis. take as an example school no. , which is located in an average district. the children, neither very rich nor very poor, possess the advantages and disadvantages of that great mass known as "common people." the children in grades one to three, inclusive, in addition to studying the three r's, spend thirty minutes each day learning to measure, fold, cut and weave paper. in grades four and five, an hour and a half per week is devoted to simple weaving, knife-work, raffia work, sewing and basketry. grade six has four and a half hours of similar work each week, while in grades seven and eight, the pupils are occupied for one-third of their entire school time in art work, book-binding, pottery work, weaving (blankets and rugs), chair caning, cooking, sewing and printing. "but how is it possible?" queries the defender of the old system. "how can the necessary subjects be taught in two-thirds of the time now devoted to them? are we not already crowded to death?" yes, crowded with dead work, the proof of which lies in the fact that the children who devote a third of the time to apply their knowledge get as good or better marks in the academic work than the three-thirds children. that, however, is not the really important point. this course of study is valuable because it gives a rounded, unified training. this is how the course is organized. the school life is a unit, into which each department fits and in which it works. the spelling lesson is covered in the classroom and set in type in the print shop. the grammar lesson consists in revising compositions with regulation proofreaders' corrections. the art department designs clothes which are made in the sewing classes. the drawing room furnishes plans for the wood and iron work and designs for basketry and pottery. in the english classes, the problems of caning and weaving are written and discussed. the mathematical problems are problems of the school. children in the sixth year keep careful accounts of personal receipts and expenditures--accounts which are balanced semi-weekly. the boy in one woodworking class makes out an order for materials. a boy in another class makes the necessary computations and fills the order. all costs of dressmaking and cooking materials are carefully kept and dealt with as arithmetic problems. for the older boys, shop-cards are kept, showing the amount and price of materials used and the time devoted to a given operation. these again form a basis for mathematical work. the whole is knit together in a civics class, which deals with the industrial, political and social questions, in their relations to the child and to the community. best of all, the things which the children talk and figure about, plan and make, have value. the seventh and eighth year girls make clothes which they are proud to show and wear; they cook lunch for which some of the teachers pay a cost price. the baskets are taken home. eighty chairs are caned by the children each year. the bindery binds magazines, songs and special literature. the boys make sleds and carts, hall stands, umbrella racks, center tables and stools. they make cupboards and shelves for the school, quilting-frames on which the girls do patchwork. rags are woven into rag carpets and sold. the print shop prints all of the stationery for the school. each can of preserves, in the ample stock put up by the girls, is labeled thus: "preserved peaches" with labels printed by the boys. june, , witnessed a triumph for the entire school. the children in the upper class had taken up the study of book-making. they even went to a bindery and saw a book bound and lettered. then, to show what they had learned, they composed, set up and printed-- a book about books by june a class. this book of twenty-eight pages, tastefully covered and decorated, contained three half-tone cuts which the children paid for by means of entertainments; an essay by hazel almas on "the history of books," one by adele wise on "the printing of a book," and one by ruth kingelman on "the art of bookbinding"; the program of the commencement exercises, and a collection of poems and wise sayings. the children went further and invited mr. charles bookwalter, the owner of the bookbindery where they had learned their lesson, to come and talk to them on commencement day. he came, made a splendid address and went away filled with wonder before these achievements of fourteen-year-old grammar school children. each grade has a special subject of study. this year the boys in the eighth a are studying saws; the boys in eighth b, lumbering; the girls in eighth a are investigating wool and silk; while in eighth b the girls are studying cotton and flax. this "study" means much. not only do the children discuss the topics, write about them, read books on them, and do problems concerning them, but they visit the factories and study the processes from beginning to end. when the problem of pins came up, the teacher desired several copies of a description of pin-making, so she asked the class to write out a letter to the manufacturers. the class, left to select, decided to send this letter: school no. , indianapolis, ind., oct. , . american pin company, waterbury, conn. _dear sirs_: on seeing the pamphlet on pins you have been kind enough to send us, i have decided to write and ask you if you would kindly send us about twenty of your pamphlets on the making of pins. we are in the eighth grade, and expect to go out into the world in january, and your process of making pins will be spread abroad to the whole world. we are very anxious to know more about the making of pins, and we are very much interested in your process. yours sincerely, ruth harrison. need i say that the american pin company sent immediately twenty duplicates of the desired pamphlet? the work in this school where thought and activity go hand in hand, is done by the regular grade teachers--done, and done well. they are as enthusiastic as the pupils. four years' trial has convinced them. on the day that i visited the school, i walked into a classroom where twenty girls were busy sewing. the order was perfect. every one was busy. the teacher was nowhere in evidence. "that teacher," explained the principal to me later, "is off at a teachers' meeting. she left these girls on their honor to work. you see the result." i saw and marveled. yet why marvel? was not this a typical product of the system which knits thought and activity into such a harmonious, fascinating whole as the most fortunate adults find in later life? out of such a school may we not well develop harmony and keen life? never yet have men gathered grapes from thistles, but often and often have they plucked from fig trees the figs which they craved and sought. xvii from a blazed trail to a paved highway pages might be filled with descriptions of similar successes, yet i think that my point is already sufficiently established. how can we disagree regarding so plain a matter? the path of educational progress has led away from the three r's along a trail, blazed at first by a few men and women who dreamed and stepped forward hesitatingly. often they retraced their steps, discouraged, and gave over the little they had gained. by degrees, however, the trail was blazed. the way became clearer. after all it was possible to connect education with life. slowly the light of this truth dawned upon men's minds. gradually the way opened before them. one by one they trod the path, bridging the worst defiles, straightening the road, cutting out the thickets and filling in the morasses, until at last, behold the way, explored by hesitating, derided pioneers, no longer a trail, but a broad highway. others have gone--their name is legion--and have succeeded. the three r's are but the beginning of an adequate elementary curriculum. you, in your own city, with your own teachers, can vitalize your elementary schools. you can teach the children to use their heads and hands together, and thus show them the way to a deeper interest in your schools, and a larger outlook on their work in life. chapter v keeping the high school in step with life i the responsibility of the high school "every pupil of high school maturity should be in high school atmosphere whether he has completed the work of the grammar grades or not," insists dr. f. e. spaulding. "perhaps the high school course of study is not adapted to the needs of such children. well, so much the worse for the course of study. the sooner the high school suits its work to the needs of fourteen and fifteen-year-old boys and girls, the sooner it will be filling its true place in the community." such opinions, voiced in this case by a man whose national reputation is founded on his splendid work as superintendent of the school system of newton mass., bespeak the attitude of the most progressive american high schools. the high school is not a training ground for colleges, nor is it a repository of classical lore. as an advanced school it differs no more from the elementary school than the six cylinder automobile differs from the four cylinder car. though its work is more complex, like the elementary school it exists for the sole purpose of helping children to live wholesome, efficient lives. ii an experiment in futures children who get stranded in the seventh or eighth grades may have failed in one subject or in several. over age and out of place, they lose interest, become discouraged and at fourteen drop out of school to work or to idle. in newton, as in every other town, there were a number of just such children whom mr. spaulding decided to get into the high school. "there they will be among children of their own age," he explained. "they may take a new line of work and acquire a real interest." "but they will fail in their high school work as they have failed in their grade work," protested the doubters. mr. spaulding, smiling his quiet, genial smile, tried his experiment all the same. from the seventh and eighth grades of the newton schools he picked the boys and girls who were fifteen or more at their next birthdays. these pupils, seventy in all--forty girls and thirty boys--were transferred, without examination, into the high school. "these youngsters were going to drop out of school for good in one year, or two at the outside," explained mr. spaulding, "so i made up my mind that during that year at least they should have some high school training. they went to the regular high school teachers for their hand-work; but for their studies, i put them in charge of three capable grade teachers, who were responsible for seeing that each child was making good. i put it to the grade teachers this way: 'here are a lot of children who have got the failure habit by failing all through their school course. unless we want to send them out of our school to make similar failures in life, we must teach them to succeed. take each child on his own merits, give him work that he can do and let him learn success.' "we gave these boys and girls twenty hours a week of technical work (drawing, designing, shop-work, cooking and sewing) and ten hours a week of academic work (english, mathematics, civics and hygiene). shop costs, buying of materials and simple accounting covered their mathematics. those were the things which would probably be most needful in life. the boys got deeply interested in civics, and we let them go as far and as fast as they pleased. with the girls we discussed hygiene, dressing and a lot of other things in which they were interested. "when those children entered the school they were boisterous and rough. the girls dressed gaudily, reveling in cheap finery. by christmas, to all appearances, their classes differed in no way from the other high school classes. they all brushed their hair. the boys were neater and the girls were becomingly dressed.["] most of the seventy children stayed through the year. twenty-seven of the forty girls and seventeen of the thirty boys entered the regular high school course the next fall. they were thus put into competition with their former seventh and eighth grade comrades, although they had had only two-fifths as much academic work as the regular eighth grade pupils. there was the test. could these derelicts, after one year of special care, take their places in the regular freshman high school work? after the end of the first quarter, a study made of the children in the high school showed that on the average there were fifty-four hundredths of one failure for each scholar. among the twenty-seven girls from the special classes, however, there was but seventeen-hundredths of a failure for each girl, or one-third as many failures as in the whole school. the boys made an even better showing. of the entire seventeen, only one boy failed, and in only one subject. iii the success habit "we had given them something they liked and could do," mr. spaulding concluded. "they succeeded a few times, got the success habit, learned to like school, went into the regular high school course and succeeded there." as an illustration of the way in which the new plan works, take the case of james rawley. james was in a serious predicament. time after time the court had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but james had taken the pitcher once too often to the well, and the open doors of the state reform school stared him grimly in the face. "it will be best for him in the long run," commented the judge. "each month of this wild life makes him a little less fit to keep his place in the community. he has had his last chance." yet there was one ray of hope, for james lived in and out of boston, a city located near the newton technical high school. this fact led james's custodians to propose to the judge that he give james one more trial, this time in the newton technical high school. the judge, also of the initiated, agreed to the suggestion, and james, a dismal eighth grade failure, entered the newton technical high school in one of the special transfer classes. just a word about james. he began life badly. his mother died when he was young; and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt, who first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, james became entirely uncontrollable. he was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable. the people with whom james was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy and he was placed on a farm near boston. there, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. time after time he ran away to boston. he went on from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering and a distaste for regularity and direction. taken into custody by the juvenile court, and placed on probation with a family outside of boston, james again ran away to mingle with a crowd of his old associates in boston. it was at this point that the court decided to send him to the reform school. it was likewise at this time that some friendly people took him in charge, found him a home in newton, and started his life anew in the newton technical high school, which james entered with a special transfer class. promoted to the regular freshman class on trial, james has renewed his interest in education and bids fair to make his way through the high school. james is doing well in the newton technical high school. though he does not like all of the regular high school work, he has a full course, and is working at it persistently. heretofore school has never appealed to him--in fact, he hated it cordially--but the school at newton offered him such a variety of subjects that he was able to find some which were attractive. since then he has been working on those subjects. there are many cities in which every school door would have been closed to james, because he did not fit into the school system, but the superintendent of the newton schools believes in making the school fit the needs of the boy. a fantastic theory? well, perhaps a trifle, from one viewpoint; nevertheless, it is the soul of education. iv the help-out spirit as a result of this special promotion policy, there are practically no over-age pupils in the grammar schools of newton. instead of square pegs in round holes, the newton high school can boast of sixty or seventy children who come, each year, in search of a new opening for which they are technically not ready, but into which they may grow. after coming to the high school, two-thirds of them find an incentive sufficient to lead them to continue with an education of which they had already wearied. the newton high school, recognizing its obligation to serve the people, strains every nerve to enable boys and girls to take high school work. the printing teacher pointed to his class of twenty. "only three of them do not work on saturdays and after school. they couldn't come here if they didn't work. hiney, there, was in a bakeshop all day at three and a half a week. we got him a job afternoons and saturdays that pays him three dollars. that tall fellow will send himself through high school on the six dollars a week that he gets from a drug store where he works outside of school hours." "we aim," added mr. spaulding, "to do everything in our power to make it possible for the boys to come here. if their parents cannot afford to send them, we find work for them to do outside of school hours." that is virile work, is it not? and the result? during the past eight years the number of pupils in the newton schools who are over fourteen has increased three times as fast as the number of pupils who are under fourteen. the school authorities have searched the highways and byways of the educational world until one-quarter of the school children of newton are in the high schools. v joining hands with the elementary schools the same result which is attained informally at newton is accomplished more formally by the organization of the junior high schools which have sprung up in berkeley and los angeles, california; evansville, indiana; dayton, ohio, and a number of other progressive educational centers. the child's school life under this plan is divided into three parts--the elementary grades (years one to six), the junior high school (years seven to nine) and the high school proper (years ten to twelve). the break, if break there must be, between the elementary and the high school, thus comes at age twelve and at age fifteen, instead of, as formerly, coming at age fourteen, when the temptation to leave school is so strong. then, too, the sharp transition from work by grades to work by departments is made easier because the junior high school combines the two, leading the pupil gradually over from the grade method to the department method. though the junior high school has so great a popularity, its work is eclipsed by the still more revolutionary program of those educators who advocate the complete abolition of any line between the elementary and the high school, and the establishment of a public school of twelve school years. this plan, coupled with promotion by subjects rather than by grades, replaces the machine method of promotion and the gap between elementary and high schools by an easy, natural progression adaptable to the needs of any student, from the end of the kindergarten to the beginning of the university. superintendent wirt of gary, indiana, has established such a twelve-year course in the emerson school. the grades, numbered from one to twelve, are so arranged that a girl may take half of her subjects in school year eight (last grammar grade) and the other half in school year nine (first high school grade). in order to make the harmony more complete, mr. wirt places the elementary rooms, containing the second grade pupils, next door to the rooms which shelter high school seniors. on this side of the hall is a kindergarten; directly across from it is a class in high school geometry. the same plan, on a larger scale, has been adopted by i. b. gilbert, principal of the union high school, grand rapids, michigan, which houses twelve hundred students. "we have obliterated the sharp line of distinction between the grades," declared mr. gilbert. "the school, which is a new one, has a very complete equipment--physical, chemical, and biological laboratories, two cooking rooms, dressmaking and millinery rooms, an art department, a woodworking shop, a forge room and a machine shop; the print shop, though not yet installed, is to be put in this year. by bringing children of all grades to the school, we place at the disposal of grade pupils apparatus ordinarily reserved for high school pupils only. at the same time, our equipment is in constant use and the cost of establishing a separate industrial department or school for the grades is eliminated. "these are merely the surface advantages, however. the real gain to the students is in other and most significant directions. first, the abolishing of rigid grading allows each child to follow his own bent. at the beginning of the adolescent period, when the old interests begin to lag, some new ideas must be furnished if the child is to be kept in school. we provide that new stimulus by beginning departmental work with the seventh year (at twelve or thirteen). then, if the child shows any particular preference for any line of work, he may pursue it. from the seventh grade up, promotion is by subjects entirely, and not by grades. if a student elects art, she may follow up her art work for the next six years; similarly, a boy may follow shop-work, or a girl domestic science or millinery. in order to fit the school more quickly to the pupils' need, we make a division at the beginning of the eighth grade of those pupils desiring to take academic work and those desiring to take industrial work in the high school. the latter group does extra sewing or shop-work twice each week. "again, we take all over-age and over-size pupils from the schools in this section of the city, and by placing them in ungraded classes, permit them to take the work which they can do. here is a boy who cannot master grammar. that is no reason why he should not design jewelry, so we give him fourth year language, and take him into the tenth year class in jewelry design. yes, and he makes good, doing excellent craft work and gradually pulling up in his language. by this means we make our twelve grade school fit the needs of any and every pupil who may come to it. "we have a natural educational progress for twelve years," concluded mr. gilbert. "there is no break anywhere. instead of making it hard to step from grade eight to grade nine, we interrelate them so intimately that the student scarcely feels the change from one to the other. the result? last june there were pupils in our eighth grade. of that number , or more than three-quarters of them reported in the ninth grade this fall. we have cancelled the invitation to quit school at the end of the eighth grade and our children stay with us." vi the abolition of "mass play" thus the dark narrow passage-way from the elementary to the higher schools is being widened, lighted, paved and sign-posted. in some school systems it has disappeared altogether, leaving the promotion from the eighth year to the first year high school as easy as the step from the seventh to the eighth grade. after the children have reached the high school, however, the task is only begun. first they must be individualized, second socialized, and third taught. "the trouble with the girls," complained wm. mcandrew, in discussing his four thousand washington irvingites, "is that they have always been taught mass play. take singing, for instance. a class started off will sing beautifully all together, but get one girl on her feet and she is afraid to utter a note. the grade instruction has taught them group acting and group thinking. i step into a class of freshmen with a 'good morning, girls'. "'good morning,' they chorus. "'are you glad to see me, girls?' "'yes sir,' again in chorus. "'do you wished i was hanged?' "'yes sir,' generally,-- "'oh, no sir,' cries one girl who has begun to cerebrate. the idea catches all over the class, and again the chorus comes,-- "'oh, no sir, no sir.' "so it goes. the bright girl takes her cue from the teacher and the class takes the cue from the bright girl. they must be taught to think and do for themselves." everyone interested in school children should visit the washington irving school (new york) and watch the truly wonderful mcandrew system of individualization. in the office, you are cordially greeted. you wish to see the school? by all means! but no teacher is detailed to serve you. instead, a messenger goes in search of the reception committee. two of the school girls, after a formal introduction, start your tour of inspection, if you are fortunate enough to be there at nine, with a visit to one of the assembly rooms, where, in groups of three or four hundred, the girls enjoy three-quarters of an hour each morning. the word "enjoy" is used advisedly, for, unlike the ordinary assembly, this one is conducted entirely by the girls. each morning a different chairman and secretary is selected, so that in the course of the year every girl has had her turn. the chairman, after calling the meeting to order and appointing two critics for the day, reads her own scripture selection, and then calls upon some girl to lead the salute to the flag. the minutes of the previous day's meeting are then read, discussed and accepted. after fifteen minutes of singing--singing of everything from "faust" to "rags"--the chairman calls on the two critics for their criticism of the conduct of that day's meeting. some special event is then in order. on one monday in december miss sage, head of the biology department, described the biological laboratory in the new school building. after she had finished, the chairman rose. "will anyone volunteer to tell in a few words the principal points which miss sage made?" three girls were promptly on their feet, giving, in clear, collected language, an analysis of the talk. after you, as a guest, have been conducted to the platform, introduced to the chairman, and given a seat of honor, the chairman turns to the assembly, with the announcement,-- "girls, i wish to introduce to you our guest of this morning." instantly the whole assembly rises, singing blithely, "good morning, honored guest, we the girls of the washington irving high school are glad to welcome you." the proceedings having come to an end, the chairman declares the meeting adjourned and you look about, realizing with a start that the girls--freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors--have spent three-quarters of an hour in charge of themselves, and have done it with interest, and with striking efficiency. continuing your journey, you find the process of individualization everywhere present. here a girl is in front of a class, directing the calisthenics which precede each class hour. there a girl is standing at the front of the room, leading singing or quizzing in geometry. "yes, it was a wrench," mr. mcandrew admits. "you see, the teachers hated to give up. they had been despots during all of their teaching lives, and the idea of handing the discipline and a lot of the responsibility of the school over to the girls hurt them dreadfully, but they have tried it and found that it works." vii experimental democracy the high school pupil, after discovering himself, must next determine his relation to the community. it is one thing to break down what mr. mcandrew calls the w. i. (wooden indian) attitude. it is quite another to relate pupils to the community in which they live. yet this, too, can be done. the school is a society--incomplete in certain respects, yet in its broad outline similar to the city and the state. the social work of the school consists in showing the citizens of the school-community how to enjoy the privileges and act up to the responsibilities of citizenship. the emerson school at gary and the union high school at grand rapids, organized into complete schools from the first grade to the end of the high school, are miniature working models of the composite world in which all of the children will live. particularly effective work has been done on the social side of high school organization at the william penn high school (philadelphia), where mr. lewis has turned the conduct of student affairs over to a student government association, directed by a board of governors of eighteen, on which the faculty, represented by five members, holds an advisory position only. the association gives some annual event, like a may day fete, in which all of the girls take part. it assumes charge of the corridors, elevators, and lunch rooms; grants charters to clubs and student societies, and assumes a general direction of student affairs. "it really doesn't take much time," irene litchman, the first term ( - ) president, explained. "we like it and we're proud to do it. we used to have teachers everywhere taking charge of things. now we do it all ourselves." true enough, madame president, and it is well done, as any casual observer may see. similar testimony is to be had from the sick girls who have received letters and flowers, from the children whose christmas has been brightened by association-dressed dolls, and from the girls whose misunderstandings with members of the faculty have been settled by the student association. each class in the washington irving high school (new york) gives one reception a term to one of the other classes. in addition, an annual reception and play are given by the entire school. the plays for these occasions are written, costumed and staged by the students. last year the reception was given to mrs. dix, wife of the governor of new york, and the play "rip van winkle" was acted by eighteen hundred girls. such organizations and activities lead high school students to feel social relationships, and to assume responsibilities as members of the social group. viii breaching the chinese wall of high school classicism a high school education is included, by progressive communities, in the birthright of every child. since only a small part of these children are preparing for college, the school must offer more than the traditional high school course. the principal of a great western high school which housed nearly two thousand children, pointed to one room in which a tiny class bent over their books. "that is probably the last class in greek that we shall ever have in the school," he said. "they are sophomores. only two freshmen elected greek this fall, and we decided not to form the class." time was when greek was one of the pillars of the high school course of study. in this particular school, splendidly equipped laboratories, sewing rooms, and shops have claimed the children. the classics are still popular with a small minority, but the vast majority come to learn some lesson which will direct their steps along the pathway of life. everywhere the technical high school courses are gaining by leaps and bounds. the william penn high school (philadelphia), established in , is to-day enrolling four-fifths of the girls who enter philadelphia high schools. in some cities, technical work and classical work are done in the same building; in other cities, they are sheltered separately, but everywhere the high school is opening its doors to that great group of school children who, at seventeen or eighteen, must and will enter the arena of life. the technical high school has not gained its prestige easily, however. the bitter contests between the old and the new are well portrayed by one dramatic episode from the history of the los angeles high school. mr. john h. francis, now superintendent of the schools of los angeles, was head of the commercial department in the los angeles high school. despite opposition and ridicule the department grew until it finally emerged as a full-fledged technical high school, claiming a building of its own,--a building which mr. francis insisted should contain accommodations for two thousand students. the authorities protested,--"two thousand technical students? why, los angeles is not a metropolis." mr. francis gained his point, however, and the building was erected to accommodate two thousand children. when the time for opening arrived it was discovered, to the astonishment of the doubters, that more students wanted to come into the school than the school would hold. when mr. francis announced that students up to two thousand would be admitted in order of application, excitement in school circles ran high, and on the day before registration day a line began to form which grew in length as the day wore on, until by nightfall it extended for squares from the school. all that night the boys and girls camped in their places, waiting for the morning which would bring an opportunity to attend the technical high school. though less dramatic in form, the rush toward technical high school courses is equally significant. it is not that the old high school has lost, but that the new high school is drawing in thousands of boys and girls who, from lack of interest in classical education, would have gone directly from the grammar school into the mill or the office. ix an up-to-date high school the modern high school is housed in a building which contains, in addition to the regular class rooms, gymnasiums, a swimming tank, physics, and chemical laboratories; cooking, sewing, and millinery rooms; wood-working, forge, and machine shops; drawing rooms; a music room; a room devoted to arts and crafts; and an assembly room. this arrangement of rooms presupposes mr. gilbert's plan of making the high school, like the community, an aggregation of every sort of people, doing every sort of work. physical training in the high school has not yet come into its own, though it is on the road to recognition. all of the newer high schools have gymnasiums, but the children do not use them for more than thirty, forty, or fifty minutes a week. sometimes the work is optional. the west technical of cleveland, with its outdoor basket ball court, its athletic grounds and grandstand, in addition to the indoor gymnasium, offers a good example of effective preparation for physical training. william d. lewis of the william penn high school sends all students who have physical defects to the gymnasium three, four, or even five times a week, until the defects are corrected. these exceptions merely serve to emphasize the fact that we have not yet learned that high school children have bodies which are as much in need of development and training as the minds which the bodies support. several real attempts are being made to teach high school boys and girls to care for their bodies, as they would for any other precious thing. hygiene is taught, positively,--the old time "don'ts" being replaced by a series of "do's." in many schools, careful efforts are being made to give a sound sex education. the program at william penn, in addition to the earlier work in biology and in personal and community hygiene, includes a senior course, extending through the year, in domestic sanitation and eugenics. the course, given by the women in charge of physical training, deals frankly with the domestic and personal problems which the girls must face. the time is ripe for other schools to fall in line behind these much-needed pioneers. the course of study in the modern high school is a broad one. latin may always be taken, and sometimes there is greek. french, german and spanish, mathematics, history, physics, chemistry, biology, and civics are almost universally offered on the cultural side of the curriculum. in addition, girls may take dress designing, sewing, millinery and home economics; boys may take wood-working, forge work, machine-tool work, electricity, printing, and house designing; and both boys and girls have an opportunity to elect art, arts and crafts work and music. in some schools the combination of subjects group themselves into definite courses, as in the newton high school, which offers,-- the classical course. the scientific course. the general course. the technical course. the technology-college course. the extra technical course. the fine arts course. the business course. other schools, like the indianapolis manual training school, permit the pupil, with the advice of the principal, to make his own combination of subjects. whether prepared by the school or by the pupil, however, the courses lead to college, to normal schools, to advanced technical schools, or to some definite vocation. on one subject, progressive high schools are in absolute agreement,--the course of study must furnish both culture and technical training in a form which meets the needs of high school children. x from school to shop and back again the tendency toward vocational training finds its extreme expression in the so-called industrial co-operative course in which boys and girls spend part of their time in school and part in the factory. note this legal document. "the party of the second part agrees to place, as far as possible, the facilities of his establishment at the disposal of the school committee for general educational purposes along industrial lines." in these words, the individual manufacturers of providence, rhode island, who are co-operating with the school board for the establishment of the industrial co-operative course in the technical high school, place their mills and factories at the disposal of the school authorities. the plan instituted at the suggestion of the manufacturers themselves has won the approval of all parties during the two years of its operation. the providence experiment differs from those of cincinnati and fitchburg, mass., in two respects,--in the first place, the school authorities have a written contract with the manufacturers. in the second place, they may decide what the character of the shop-work shall be. the boy who elects to take the industrial co-operative course in providence spends ten weeks in a shop at the end of his freshman year. apprenticeship papers are signed, the boy gives a bond, which is forfeited if he drops the course without a satisfactory reason, and for three years he spends weeks in the shop and weeks in school, alternating, one week in the shop, the next in the school. for their shop-work the boys receive ten cents, twelve cents, and fourteen cents an hour during the first, second, and third years, respectively. though this wage is not high, it is sufficient to enable the boys to earn enough during the year ($ to $ ) to pay for their keep at home during their high school course. at the present time sixty-two providence boys are working part time in machine shops, in drafting rooms, in machine tool construction, in pattern making and in jewelry making. in order to keep the scheme elastic, the school offers to form a class in any trade for which sixteen or more boys will apply. the part-time course is primarily educational and secondarily vocational. since it may determine the character of the shop-work, the school is in a position to insure its educational value. again, the academic training is still received in the school, while the technical work, heretofore done in school rooms, is carried on in the fields of real industry. as a supplement of the old time system of apprenticeship, the part-time school is an undoubted success, because it adds to shop apprentice work all of the essential elements of a high school education. xi fitting the high school graduate into life the high school has not done its full duty when it has educated the child,--it must go a step farther and educate him for something; then it must go a step beyond that and help him to find himself in his chosen profession. this vocational guidance which is filling so large a place in public discussions, may mean guidance to a job or it may include guidance in the job. in either case children must be led to decide upon the kind of work for which they are fitted before they leave the school. jesse b. davis, principal of the central high school at grand rapids, furnishes a brilliant example of this vocational directing. mr. davis begins his work through the theme writing and oral composition of the seventh and eighth grades. the purpose of the pupils' reading and discussion is to arouse their vocational ambition and to lead them to appreciate the value of further education and training for life. this study upon the part of the pupil is supplemented by talks given by mr. davis, prominent business and professional men and high school boys who have come back to finish their education after a few years of battle with the world. the high school classes in english are small--never more than twenty-five, and the work is so arranged that the teacher may get a good idea of the capability of each student. to facilitate this, the english department has prepared a series of essay subjects in the writing of which the pupil gives the teacher a very definite idea of himself. beginning with "my three wishes;" the pupil next writes a story about his ancestry; an essay on "my church," which explains his belief; an essay on "the part i'd like to play in high school;" a study of "my best friend," and finally an essay on "the work of my early school days," which shows the pupil's likes and dislikes. in addition to this, the teacher notes any physical defects--eyesight, hearing, and the like--which might incapacitate the pupil for particular vocations. this data, together with reports from all departments on neatness, sincerity, ambition and other qualities is filed in the office. during the second term of the freshman year papers are written on approved biographies, dealing in each case with the qualities, opportunities and education of the great one. these essays, read in class, form the basis for a compilation of the elements necessary for success in life. the work of the sophomore year begins with the preparation of a class list of professions, semi-professions and trades,--a list which is checked with the permanent list kept by the department. succeeding classes thus discover the breadth of the vocational field, besides adding to the knowledge accumulated by their predecessors. after completing this list, the pupils write a letter to the teacher, choosing a vocation and assigning reasons for the choice. when the pupil cannot decide, the teacher assigns the vocation apparently best suited to the pupil's capacity. an essay on his vocation is then prepared by each pupil, showing first, what kind of activity and what responsibilities the vocation involves; second, its social, intellectual and financial advantages; third, the corresponding disadvantages; fourth, the qualifications and traits necessary to success in the vocation; and fifth, the reasons for choosing the vocation. then, under the advice of the teacher, the pupil writes to some man well known in the profession of his choice--some lawyer, mining engineer, doctor or contractor--explaining what he is doing, and asking for advice. the generous responses given by men in all walks of life do much to confirm the pupil in his faith, or to make him see that his choice is an unwise one. at the beginning of the junior year those pupils preparing for college send for the catalogues of the colleges which stand highest in the line of work in which they are interested, and write an essay, giving the comparative value of the courses offered by the various institutions. by this means judgment takes the place of sentiment in the selection of a college. while the college preparatory pupils are engaged in writing on their college courses, pupils who are going directly from the high school into business write an elaborate essay on the kind of preparation necessary for their vocation, the qualities requisite for success in it, and the best place and means of entering it. studies of the proper relations between employer and employed occupy the second half of the junior year. the work of the senior year deals, in the first half, with the relation between a citizen and his city; the second half, with the relation between a citizen and the state. the pupil has thus passed from the narrower to the broader aspects of his work in life. the effectiveness of the work is enhanced by the organization of the high school boys into a junior association of commerce (in an exact imitation of the grand rapids association of commerce), which meets in the rooms of the latter on saturday morning; transacts business; listens to an address by a specialist, and then visits his works, if he is engaged in a local industry. on the saturday before thanksgiving ( ), for example, mr. vanwallen, of the vanwallen tannery co., gave the boys a talk on the tanning industry, then took them through his tannery, where they saw the processes of manufacture. the business men of grand rapids, who are highly pleased with this practical turn in education, co-operate heartily in every way. the boys are urged, during the summer months, to take a position in the work which they have chosen, start at the bottom and find out whether their beliefs regarding the industry are true. then, too, the free library makes a point of collecting books and articles on various professions and vocations, and placing them prominently before the students. the english department (with five periods a week) does other work, but none so vital to the pupils' lives as this of directing them in the thing which they hope to do when they leave school. the school may do more than direct the pupils in the choice of their occupations, by actually securing positions for them. the head of the commercial department in the newton (massachusetts) high school has a card for every student, giving on one side a record of class work for four years, and on the other side a statement of positions and pay of the graduate. new pupils are placed; old pupils are offered better opportunities. employers are interviewed in attempts to have them promote graduates. through this system, mr. maxim keeps in constant touch with the labor market and with graduates of his school. certainly the high school must prepare students for life. whether, in addition, it shall constitute itself a public employment bureau, finding positions for students, keeping in touch with their careers, and assisting in their advancement, is a matter yet to be determined. xii the high school as a public servant will the high school retain its present form? probably not. if the berkeley-los angeles plan prevails, there will be three steps in the public schools,--from elementary to junior high, to high school. if the gary plan wins, there will be twelve years of schooling, following one another as consecutively as day follows night. whether the los angeles or the gary plan is adopted, one thing seems reasonably certain,--the high school will keep in close touch with life. the high school is securing a surer grip on the world with each passing day. it is reaching out toward the grades, calling the pupils to come; it is reaching out into the world, making places there for them to occupy. the modern high school has ceased to be an adjunct to the college. instead, it is a distinctive unit in educational life, taking boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen and relating them to the world in which they must live. the era of the high school course is being succeeded by the era of the high school boy and the high school girl. first, last, now and always, the boys and girls, not the course, deserve primary consideration. whatever their needs, the high school must supply them if it is to become a public servant, responsible for training children of high school age in the noble art of living. chapter vi higher education at lowville[ ] i lowville and the neighborhood away off in northwestern new york state, where the sun shines fiercely in the summer mid-day, where the ice forms thick on the lakes, and the snow lies on the north side of the hills from thanksgiving well on to easter, there is a town of some three thousand inhabitants, called lowville. the comfortable homes, brick stores, wide tree-bordered streets, smiling hills and giddy children look very much the same at lowville as they do in any one of a thousand similar towns east of the mississippi. situated far back from the line of ordinary travel, the town is typical of a great class. stretching in all directions about lowville is a fertile, prosperous, agricultural region, farmed by good farmers, who are intelligently awake to the problem of scientific agriculture in its multiple phases. these farmers grow fruits, raise general farm produce, breed a little stock, cut some timber, besides all of the time-honored occupations of the professional farmer. the boys and girls growing up in the town or the neighboring countryside, blessed with good air, and a cheap supply of wholesome food, look pleasantly forward toward life as something worth living. so much for the good side of lowville. sad indeed is it to recall that there is another side. anyone who has been in close contact with country life can readily imagine the ignorance, bigotry, prejudice, unfairness and unsociableness of the population; the tendency to cling to the past no matter what its shortcomings; the unwillingness to venture into even the rosiest future which involves change. lowville is blessed a great deal and cursed a very little. the blessings are being augmented and the curses minimized by means of the local high school. ii lowville academy lowville academy is an ancient private school whose usefulness was immensely enhanced when it was converted into a public high school. when mr. w. f. h. breeze took over the principalship he made no particular objection to the old class rooms and wooden stairs, but he was very insistent upon discovering, first, what the community needed, and second, whether or not the school was meeting the need. more than half (at the present time sixty-five per cent.) of the pupils at the school came from outside of the village. that is, they come from the farms. as farmers' boys, many of them have been brought up to all of the unscientific crudities which have been handed down in american agriculture since the early settlers took the land from the indians in grateful recognition of their instructions in fertilization. while many agricultural anachronisms may be laid to the door of the redskins, planting by the moon and several equally absurd customs are traceable to the higher civilization of western europe. saturated with traditional agricultural lore--some better and some worse--the boys and girls from outside of lowville, sixty-five in each hundred high school students, were growing up to become the owners of promising new york farms. they needed, first of all, an education which should equip them with all of the culture of our schools, beside giving them a knowledge of the sciences of agriculture and of mechanics. those boys and girls who were planning to go to college required an advance course in those purgatorial topics which, for some inexplicable reason, are still regarded as necessary preliminaries to a college education. most of the girls in lowville and the immediate vicinity hope to marry sooner or later, and to preside over wholesome, clean homes. for home-making, also, there were certain possible educational provisions. as prospective farmers, mechanics, college students, business men and women, as prospective fathers and mothers, the boys and girls of lowville were looking to the schools--high as well as elementary--for an education which should enable them to do successfully and efficiently those things which life was holding before them. furthermore, lowville had no spot around which community interests and civic ideas could center. there was intelligent interest in lowville, its streets, schools, trees, houses, and business interests; there was, too, an interest, expressed among the neighboring farmers, in the wonderful strides of agriculture; furthermore, men and women were anxious to discuss political and social happenings in other parts of the world. what more natural than that the school be converted into a center of interest and education for lowville and the surrounding territory. adults, as well as young folks, needed school help. adults as well as young folks should then be accommodated in the lowville schools. iii the school's opportunity "there was a peculiar opportunity," said mr. breeze, in his crisp direct way. "the place needed organizing in educational lines. people were anxious to have it done. they wanted the advantage of a modern educational institution, but no one had provided it, so i made up my mind that my business was to do it." mr. breeze made his first innovation in the course of study, supplementing the old course by domestic science, several phases of agriculture and mechanics. then he correlated the various branches in such a way that the subjects all harmonized with the work which any particular student was doing. "we made up our minds," mr. breeze explained, "that if we were to hold the children and to educate them usefully, we must make our course fit the things which they had to do in life. the work must come down to earth. it had to be practical--that is, applicable to everyday affairs. some people confuse practical with pecuniary. there is no relation between the two words. practical means usable. we set out to make a usable education." "no education is usable which has frills," mr. breeze insists. "frills are nice for looks, but you can't put on frills until you have a garment to which they may be attached. our school is providing the garment--we will leave the frills to some one else." with this idea in mind, the applied courses in the school were organized. wood-alcohol cook stoves, such as those used in the village, ordinary sewing machines, typewriters for the commercial course, and the simplest tools for the machine shop, made up the equipment. "these boys have but a few tools at home," mr. breeze says. "when they go on the farm they will be compelled to use these tools. why, then, should they be taught mechanics with tools which they cannot duplicate on their farms without an unjustifiable extravagance?" iv field work as education pursuant to such philosophy, the boys began their shop-work by equipping the shop, building benches, tool-chests, cabinets, and saw horses; putting lath and plaster on the ceiling; setting up the simple tools and putting the shop in running order. meanwhile, the agricultural students set up two cream separators and a milk-tester, and arranged their laboratory. then the school was ready for applied work, or rather, the students having graduated from a course in shop equipment, were ready for shop practice. the entire class in agriculture makes inspection of nearby farms--here to see a well-managed orchard, there a new type of cow-barn or silo. again they inspect the soil of a district, going carefully over it, picking samples and testing them on return to the school. in fruit-packing season, the students visit the packing houses, or else, in the case of some of the boys, they take a week of employment with a good fruit packer. in season they practice tree pruning, grafting, budding, transplanting and spraying. whenever possible, the applied work of the school is done in connection with the real applied work of life. the physics and chemistry are both related to the agriculture and the mechanics courses in the most intimate manner. from the earliest lessons in physics through analyses of heat, light and the principles of mechanics, the theories are constantly interpreted in practical problems which arise in the daily work of the lowville farmer. the physics teacher, enthusiastic over his students and his work, builds machines and testing devices, which the boys and girls use in solving the problems which they bring from their homes. no less close to the life of the place is the chemical laboratory, which offers opportunity for the analysis of soil, the chemistry of fertilizers, experiments in testing food and milk, and a number of other matters pertaining to agriculture and domestic life. the mechanical courses are closely related to the work in agriculture, since most of the boys who take up the mechanical work are to go on the farms. the course in mechanics passes quickly over the elements of the work--most boys have learned to use saw, plane, chisel, auger, and hammer years before. the smithing work of tempering, annealing, welding, soldering and removing rust, all leads up to the real work of the shops,--the making of products. the boys make pruning knives, squares and drawing boards, grafting hooks, nail boxes, apple-boxing devices (for this is an apple country), cement rollers, mallets, whiffle-trees, bob-sleds, holders for saw filing, bag-holders, chicken-coops, poultry exhibit boxes, hammer handles, greenhouse flats. besides, they have exercises in belt-lacing, in cement work, and reinforced concrete. then, too, they make models of barns and bridges, computing strains, lumber-costs, labor-costs, floor spacing and arrangement. the agricultural course deals, in some detail, with fruit-growing, animal husbandry, grain-growing, and related topics. though the scope of such a course is necessarily limited in a high school, it forms an invaluable addition to the knowledge of the boy who cannot go to an agricultural college before he begins his life on the farm. taught by an agricultural expert, the work assumes real importance to the prospective farmer. nor are the girls of lowville neglected. v real domestic science the domestic science department, in charge of an expert, takes up household economics, sewing, dietetics and cooking. the work throughout is practical, the girls learning the principles of sanitation, and their application to the household; domestic art and home decoration; lighting, heating and ventilation. the sewing classes cover the usual exercises in simple hemming and darning, making towels, hemming napkins, and the like; then underclothes, and later dresses are made. in the cooking laboratory the girls learn food values and food combinations, the cooking of simple dishes, the preparation of entire meals. the girl who finishes the domestic science course in the lowville academy is competent to organize a home, cook, sew, keep house and make as efficient use of her opportunities as does her brother who has been trained in mechanics or agriculture. it is not in the applied courses alone that an extraordinary amount of co-operation has been attained. the academic branches, likewise, are so adjusted as to bear directly upon the work of the remaining courses. the academic co-ordination is particularly noticeable in the english work, which is required of everyone during the entire high school course. english composition is made to serve as a connecting, co-ordinating study--related to all of the other courses in the school. the student in agriculture writes reports on various phases of agricultural work, collecting them in a folder and arranging them in order, according to subject. chemistry reports, history reports, all are made a legitimate part of the work in english. the results of this system have been more than satisfactory to mr. breeze and his staff of co-workers. students who would have left at the end of the grammar school, are attracted by the high school program, and "saved" by a high school course. the appeal of the school is a wide one. there are no class of boys and girls in lowville who cannot find something worth while in the high school. often a student otherwise not brilliant will succeed remarkably in a particular line. of one such boy in particular mr. breeze spoke. vi one instance of success "he had no taste for greek, but his reports and analysis in agriculture and mechanics were brilliant. the excellent drawing and sketching and the careful work showed how much appeal the applied course had made to his mind; yet but for the agricultural course he would never have come to high school. a farmer's son with little taste for the ordinary academic studies was inspired by the idea of improved, scientific farming and was getting a thorough insight into the principles of agriculture, chemistry, physics, and mechanics, which will be of the greatest service to him when he takes up farming. such topics as judging the age of cows, breed of cattle, cost of milk production, the cost of cow-barn construction, grain, hay, cattle rations, silage, and nutrition will all bear directly on the work of the farm in which he is so deeply interested.["] so much for the contribution of the lowville high school to the students who have gone out of its class-rooms and class excursions, stronger in body and more alert of mind. no less remarkable has been its service to the community. at the suggestion of the school authorities acting in co-operation with the grange, the state, and several other agencies, lowville has secured an agricultural specialist, whose business it is to travel through the countryside, advising farmers, discussing their problems and suggesting better methods of operating the farms, or of experimenting in new directions. each winter for one week, a school for adults is held, with courses in agriculture for the men and courses in domestic science for the women. the teachers,--experts from the cornell school of agriculture,--are exceptionally well prepared to deal with the problems of new york state farmers. higher education at lowville is education for everyone in lowville and vicinity who wants it. with one eye on community needs and the other on the best means of supplying them, the lowville academy is giving to the citizens of lowville a twentieth century higher education. footnotes: [footnote : much of the material in this chapter appeared originally in the journal of education.] chapter vii a great city school system[ ] i "co-operation" and "progressivism" if any two words in the english language can express the spirit of the cincinnati schools, they are "co-operation" and "progressivism." the people of cincinnati, high and low, have banded themselves together in an endeavor to make good schools. cincinnati schools are not a monument to any individual or group of individuals, rather they are the handiwork of the citizenship. in their eagerness for educational progress, the people are not hypnotized by every cry of "lo here! lo there!" nor do they live in terror of new educational ideas. their one aim, the education of cincinnati's children, takes precedence over every other consideration. perhaps that fact explains both the co-operation and the progressivism. co-operation in the educational work of cincinnati has been developed to a remarkable degree. "there is not a civic society in the whole town which is not working with the schools," says former superintendent dyer. mr. dyer might have left out the word "civic" and still have been very close to the truth. mr. frederick a. geier, a leader among the manufacturers who have made possible the "half time in shop, half time in school" system, says of his activity in co-operating with the school authorities: "as a citizen of cincinnati, i am interested in the schools for two reasons: first, because good schools will bring under their influence the maximum number of pupils and parents, and it is the best agency i can conceive of for producing a high quality of citizenship; second, as a manufacturer i feel that the material prosperity of a community is directly related to the mental and manual equipment of its people." showing his faith by his works, mr. geier has labored in season and out of season to make the schools of cincinnati the most progressive in the country. speaking as "a woman and mother," mrs. isabella c. pendleton, of the civic league, which has played an active part in building up school sentiment, says: "i consider that the most important features of our school system are the manual training for boys and the domestic science for girls. i am happy to say that to-day a girl on graduating from our schools is capable of taking care of a home." as public schools go, that is not an insignificant achievement. no wonder mrs. pendleton, a woman and mother, is interested in schools which accomplish such vital results. from what extraordinary sources do the schools in cincinnati secure their support! "all of the local dentists have been brought into close contact with the school system by the efforts of the dental society to introduce mouth hygiene into the schools," says dr. sidney g. rauh. "we dentists," adds dr. rauh, "are firm believers in general co-operation." no less cordial is the board of health in its endorsement of the schools, and in its efforts to raise the health standard of school children. "i do not believe there is any city in the united states which offers as good an example of the spirit of co-operation as cincinnati does," affirms carl dehoney, of the chamber of commerce. "why are we so active in co-operating with the schools? simply because we realize that good schools, and especially practical schools, which will fit young men and women for their real life work, have a tremendous bearing upon the efficiency of the people of the city." mr. w. c. cauldius, also of the chamber of commerce, says: "our school development is the result of a few years of public support and sympathy." in similar enthusiastic words the leaders of every phase of cincinnati life express their interest in educational progress. ii an educational creed let no one infer from what has been said that the people of cincinnati are agreed upon all of the details of educational policy, nor upon the fundamentals either, for that matter, but they have adopted an educational creed which runs about as follows: . i believe in making the schools provide for the educational necessities of every child. . i believe that this can be done when all work together. . i believe that new ideas are the life-blood of educational advance. that simple creed adopted by teachers, principals, mothers, manufacturers, dentists and trade unionists has become a great motive force in the upbuilding of the cincinnati schools. the most evident thing about the cincinnati school organization is its democracy. the feudal spirit of lordship and serfdom existing in many schools between superintendents and principals on the one hand, and teachers on the other, is nowhere evident in the cincinnati schools; instead, each teacher, thrown upon her own initiative, is a creative artist, solving her particular problem as she believes that it should be solved, and abiding by the consequence of her failure or success. early in his work mr. dyer made it clear that he would not tolerate a mechanical system of education. "up here on the hill, in a wealthy suburban district, is a grammar school. its organization, administration and course of study must necessarily differ from that other school, located in the heart of the factory district. the principal of each of these schools has a problem to face--each will succeed in proportion as he grasps the significance of his own problem and the readiest means for its solution." is not that a refreshing sentiment from a superintendent of city schools? note this other delightful touch: "my teachers soon learned that i regard the teacher who works exactly like another teacher as pretty poor stuff." before the axe of such incisive radicalism, how the antiquated structure of the old school machinery came crashing to the ground, to be replaced by a system which recognized each teacher as an individual builder of manhood and womanhood, working to meet the needs of individual children. it is not an idle boast which the english make when they glory in the absence of a curriculum; for even the best curriculum, if mismanaged, is speedily converted into a noose, the knot of which adjusts itself mechanically under the left ear of teacher and child alike. the school authorities of cincinnati destroyed both knot and rope by giving to their teachers and principals this injunction: "make your school fit the needs of your children and your community." the old-time, machine-minded school superintendent, filled with the spirit of co-operative coercion, assembles his teachers. "now let's all work together," he exclaims, "here, susie smith, this is what you are to teach your pupils, and this is the way in which you are to do it." it was in quite a different spirit that mr. dyer said to each one of his teachers: "you do your work, i'll do mine, and together we will make the schools go." it was in this spirit that the teachers were called together to confer on the reorganization of the course of study. each teacher in each grade had her say in the matter. if the most insignificant teacher in cincinnati said to mr. dyer: "i have an idea that i think would improve the work in my grade," his invariable reply was: "then try it. there is no way to determine the value of ideas except to try them." by that policy mr. dyer surrounded himself with a group of vitally interested people, each one suited to the task in which he believed implicitly, and each one fully convinced that the success or failure of that part of the cincinnati school system with which he was immediately concerned, depended directly upon his efforts. no wonder the schools succeeded! iii vitalizing the kindergarten the kindergartens are at the basis of the educational system of cincinnati, and they are in charge of a woman who believes in herself and in her work. perhaps the people of cincinnati are not justified in believing that their kindergartens are the very best in the whole united states, but miss julia bothwell, who directs them, says, modestly enough, that she has visited kindergartens in many cities, adopting their schemes and improving in response to their suggestions, until she is convinced that no other city in the land can show a better kindergarten system than that of cincinnati. in truth, her plan is ordinarily referred to as the "cincinnati idea." cincinnati children begin their kindergarten work at four and a half or five, entering the first grade at six. while in the kindergarten they play the games and sing the songs that all kindergartens play and sing, but with this difference: their plays and songs are built around the things that they do. the yellow october leaves of cincinnati's parks half shadow the activity of the busy classes of little kindergarten folks who go there to work and to learn. the park commissioners, like every one else in cincinnati, are in thorough sympathy with the work of the schools, so they allot to each kindergarten class a plot in the park, in which the children--using all of the tools themselves--plant tulip bulbs under the direction of the park gardeners. "tulips are the first thing up in the spring," miss both well explained, "so we have decided to use them. for years we tried gardens, but children of kindergarten age are not willing to give gardens as much attention as they require; then, too, the gardens ran wild during the summer, so we have settled on the tulip. after the children have planted the bulbs they sing and talk about their work. then, early in the spring, they begin to visit their plots, watching the first shoots of green as they appear, looking eagerly for the buds, and then, at last, as the reward of their interest, picking the flowers and taking them home. thus, each child, during his kindergarten course, sees the complete cycle from bulb to flower." besides this flower-culture in the park, the children grow hyacinths in the school rooms, visit the woods to collect autumn leaves and spring flowers, make excursions to the country, where they may see animals and crops, and always, for a few days after an excursion, talk about the things which they saw, draw them, sing about them and play games about them. in order to facilitate the work the board of education leases a farm, to which the kindergartens go in succession. by these means the life of the city kindergarten child is thoroughly linked with nature. these things are not new in kindergartening, however. they have merely taken firm root in the fertile soil of cincinnati's educational enthusiasm. the real excellence of miss bothwell's experiment consists in connecting the kindergarten with the early elementary grades on the one hand and with the community on the other. the first grade children of cincinnati come back to the kindergarten teachers for an hour's kindergartening once each week, in order to clinch the kindergarten influence on the lives of the first graders. the first grade teachers meet the director of kindergartening once each week, for a discussion of kindergarten methods, and an initiation into the kindergarten spirit. thus the lump of first grade abstraction is leavened with the leaven of kindergarten concretes, and the grade teachers get the spirit of kindergarten work. in the near future miss bothwell hopes to have the kindergarten work extend to the second grade, in order that the spirit, rhythm, harmony and joy of the kindergarten may thoroughly permeate the roots of the cincinnati school system. even more significant--if anything could be more significant than the breakdown of the ironclad, first grade traditions--is the grip which the kindergartens of cincinnati have secured on the people. the cincinnati kindergartener is more than a teacher--she serves many masters. in the morning she holds kindergarten classes. on two afternoons a week she does kindergarten work with first grade children; on one afternoon she holds a conference with the supervisor; on a fourth afternoon she visits the classes of first grade teachers or confers with mothers' clubs, and on her remaining afternoon she visits her children in their homes. out of these varied duties has come: first, a group spirit among the kindergarteners, built upon frequent interchange of plans and ideas; second, an understanding of the relation between the problems of the kindergarten and the problems of the grades; third, a sympathetic grasp of the home conditions surrounding the life of many a difficult child; and fourth, sixty-one mothers' clubs, one organized in connection with each kindergarten, which furnish a social gathering-place for mothers, an opportunity to influence parental ideas, and a body of invaluable public sentiment. the idea of a kindergarten, usually regarded as a small part of the school program, has been evolved until, in this one city, it is a potent influence, working on children, teachers, parents and public opinion. iv regenerating the grades the kindergarten is not alone in its appeal to the child and in its affiliation with the community. traditional grade education has likewise been modified and rehabilitated until it makes an appeal to parent and child alike. in the first place, a consistent effort has been made to provide accommodations for the physical education in the grades of the fifty-seven elementary schools. twenty-five now have fully equipped gymnasiums in which children have two or three periods of exercise each week. in the schools not so equipped the physical work is confined to calisthenics. each year the board of education appropriates five hundred dollars for the public school athletic league, which organizes meets and games, open to all public school pupils free of charge. besides field days, baseball, soccer and football there is an athletic badge awarded to all pupils who pass an "efficiency" test in athletic activities. the academic work of the grades is alive with enthusiasm. history, so often made a mass of dead names and dates, is taught in terms of life. the children learn that history is in reality a record of the things which people did, and of the forces which were at work in their lives; furthermore, that the commonplace acts of to-day will be the history of to-morrow. translated into ideas and social changes, history stimulates thought, turning the child's mind from the purely personal side of life to the social activities of which history is made. arithmetic and geography begin at home, in the things which the children know and do. both are taught in terms of child experience. both call to the child mind the things of daily life. english, too, which is so important an element in education, is made to reflect child experiences. teaching the reading lesson of "eyes and no eyes" one teacher asked her class: "well, children, what did you see on your way to school this morning? what did you see, elmer?" "well, i saw--i saw--" and elmer sat down. "i saw that it had been raining in the night by the mud in the streets," said alice; while john had seen trolley cars, and remembered that the number on one of them was . a seventh grade girl had read the psalm beginning, "who shall ascend unto the hill of the lord, or who shall stand in his holy place?" after asking what a psalm was, and who wrote the psalms, the teacher asked: "who was david?" "he was the king of palestine," replied one boy promptly. after straightening out the history the teacher next asked: "for what was david noted?" "for being solomon's father," ventured one little girl. "oh, no," protested a boy, "he was the fighter." "sure enough," said the teacher, "would the fact that he was a warrior naturally influence his thoughts?" after an affirmative answer from the class: "where do we find any evidence of that in this psalm, george?" asked the teacher. george considered the reading a moment. "oh, i see, it's where he says, 'the lord mighty in battle.'" after an elaboration of this idea the teacher went on to ask why david wrote, "lift up your heads, oh ye gates, and the king of glory shall come in." by careful questioning the class was led to see that cities had walls and gates; that david, who had won many victories, was accustomed to have the gates thrown wide to receive him, and that his triumphal entries had made a deep impression on his thoughts. after some more discussion the psalm was read again, this time with surprising intelligence and feeling. one eighth grade class in english was engaged in preparing a catalog of all of the pictures in the school, looking up the painters, their lives, their principal works, and the circumstances connected with the painting of the pictures which hung on the school wall. in the same room a girl had written a description of a sunset, in which she had said: "the western sky is illuminated with a fiery red, and the edges of the clouds are also tinted with a silvery hue." "what would corot say about that?" asked the teacher. the girl thought a moment. "i guess he would say that there was too much color." "yes," smiled the teacher, "he would say, 'let's go home and wait for a few moments.'" the essay work in the upper grades is linked with all of the other school work. the children write about civics, architecture, localities, books and pictures. one girl of thirteen wrote on "the reaper"--"as i enter my bedroom one picture especially catches my gaze. it hangs on the eastern wall. it is the picture of a large city by moonlight. the moon is bright and the stars are out. a beautiful lake borders the far end of the city, and the moon makes the lake look like a mirror. the church steeple stands out clear against the sky. it is a beautiful summer night, and while the city sleeps an angel descends and bears a little child to the heavens above. some mother must have given up one of her beloved flowers." no less valuable are the essays describing an ideal kitchen, a location for a house, a home, school life, and the various other things with which the child comes in contact. last among the academic branches, there is a carefully organized eighth grade course in civics, which, beginning with the geography and early history of cincinnati, covers family relations and the tenement problem; the protection of public health--street cleaning, sewage, water, smoke abatement, and the activities of the board of health in providing for sanitation and the suppression of disease; the protection of life and property; the business life of the community--relation of the citizen to business life, the growth of commerce and industry in cincinnati; cincinnati as a manufacturing center, the labor problem, and the regulation of business by the government; the necessity for civic beauty; the educational forces of the community; the care of dependents and delinquents; the functions of government; and the collection and expenditure of city funds. in this way the child, before he leaves the elementary school, is given an idea of the real meaning of citizenship. beginning in the kindergarten, the art work extends through the high school, including in the lower elementary grades, paper-cutting and pasting related to school work, the seasons and the holidays. from the third grade on, the children make real products--trays, boxes, blotter pads, calendars, booklets and folios--work which is supplemented by object and constructive drawing and designing. shop-work is given to boys, and domestic science to girls, in all of the schools. the point at which these subjects are introduced and the amount of time devoted to them depends upon--what do you think? the regulations prescribed in the course of study? not a bit of it! it depends upon the needs of the community and of the child. schools which are located in the poorer districts begin manual training and domestic science with the second grade, though ordinarily they are not introduced until the sixth. normally the children are given one and one-half or two hours a week of such work, but over-age, backward and defective children may spend as much as half of their time upon it. for some of the girls a five-room flat has been rented, in which they are taught housekeeping in all of its phases. otherwise the domestic science consists of hand and machine sewing, the designing and making of simple garments, the planning and preparation of food, and the organization and care of a household. wherever possible, the boys make useful products in their shop-work, instead of constructing show pieces which have no value. from top to bottom the grades are shaped to meet the needs of children. each class and each school is built around this central idea. the school system, instead of taking the usual form of a cumbrous machine, is a delicate mechanism adjusted to the wants of cincinnati children. v popularizing high school education not content with making the grades interesting, the school authorities of cincinnati have made the high schools so profitable and popular that ninety-five out of each one hundred children who complete the eighth grade go to the cincinnati high schools. furthermore, during the past six years the high school attendance in cincinnati has doubled. these two noteworthy conditions are the product of carefully matured and efficiently executed plans, and of infinite labor. yet the results have more than repaid the labor which they cost. "our first task," explained dr. e. d. lyon, principal of the hughes high school, "was to persuade the community that it needed high school training. next we secured two fine new high school buildings. then those of us who are engaged in high school work faced the supreme task. we had to prove to the people that their expenditures on high schools were worth while, by providing a high school education that would mean something to the pupils and to the community." note the spirit of social obligation--a feeling prevalent throughout the cincinnati schools. "most parents fail to see the importance of the high school problem," said assistant superintendent roberts, "because they never make consistent efforts to have their children choose their vocations intelligently. we began our work right there, at the bottom, by telling the parents of grade children about the high school courses, and what they meant. eighth grade teachers, under the guidance of mr. f. p. goodwin, are expected to talk to their classes regularly on the vocational opportunities in cincinnati and elsewhere, and to help the children get started right in high school careers. besides that, we take the grade children on trips to the high schools, showing them on each trip some striking feature of high school work. parents' meetings are held, in which the high schools are explained and discussed, and we send circulars to the parents of sixth, seventh and eighth grade pupils, explaining the high school work as simply as may be." after arousing such expectations, the high school cannot fulfill its obligations in any way other than by the provision of a thorough course of study adapted to the needs of all types of pupils. the preparation for this in cincinnati has been made with consummate skill. the pupil, on entering the high school, may select any one of the nine general courses, in which there are twenty-three possible combinations of subjects. four of the courses--general, classical, domestic science and manual training--prepare for various colleges and technical schools. the other five courses--commercial, technical co-operative course for boys; technical co-operative course for girls; art and music, lead to vocations. housed in the same high school building is this range of work, which permits boys and girls to select a course which will bear directly on almost any line of work that they may care to follow in later life. each course is shaped to give the children who select it a definite training in the line of their interest. the general course prepares pupils for college; the domestic science course shows girls how to make and keep a home; the commercial course turns out bookkeepers; the technical co-operative courses, enabling boys and girls to spend part of their time in the school and part in the factory, are arranged in co-operation with the principal industries of cincinnati. the art and music courses, like the other special work, are in the hands of experts who are competent to give a practical direction to the activity of their pupils. in passing, it is interesting to note that the people of cincinnati are getting the best possible use out of their splendid high school equipment. in addition to the regular classes which fill the woodward high school from : to : , the pupils in the continuation courses occupy the building every afternoon and all day saturday. five nights a week it is filled by an enthusiastic night school, three thousand strong, and during six weeks of the summer vacation a summer school holds its sessions there. it would be difficult to find a school plant which comes nearer to being used one hundred per cent of its time. to be sure, such things were not done "in father's time," but then the people of cincinnati have a theory that while a good thing is worth all it costs, it does not pay to let even the best of things decay for lack of use. that is why the school system tingles from end to end with vigor and enthusiasm. vi a city university besides the kindergarten, elementary schools, and high schools, the city of cincinnati has a university, which, like all of the other educational forces of the city, is tied up with the general educational program. those graduates of the cincinnati high schools who desire to go to college, may pass from the high school of cincinnati into the university of cincinnati without a break in the continuity of their education. the university of cincinnati is a municipal university. the city appropriates one-half of one mill on the general assessment, for university purposes. the board of education appropriates ten thousand dollars a year toward the maintenance of the teachers' college, the school in which the city teachers are trained. the training school for kindergarteners is affiliated with the university, having the same entrance requirements as the other university courses. in explanation of this close connection between the city and the university, president dabney begins his report to the board of directors by saying: "an effort has been made in this report to explain the service of the university to the city and people of cincinnati. it is therefore not only an official report to the directors, but is also a statement for the information of all citizens." begun in this spirit of public obligation, the report details the services of the teachers' college in supplying teachers; of the school of economics and political science in supplying municipal experts; and of the engineering school for its inauguration of the widely-known industrial co-operative courses--for be it known to the uninitiated that the five hundred students of the university engineering school spend alternately two weeks in the school and two weeks in a shop. more than that, the engineering school furnishes experts for municipal engineering work. that the students of the university may feel the interest of the city in their work, preference is given to the university graduates in appointments of teachers, of municipal engineers, and of employees on such municipal work as testing food, inspecting construction, and the like. university students may thus occupy their spare time in practical municipal work. "the university should lead the progressive thought of the community," says president dabney, and by way of making good his proposition he avails himself of every opportunity to turn his students into municipal activities, or to co-operate in any way with the forces that are making for a greater cincinnati. vii special schools for special classes there are children in cincinnati, as in every other city, who cannot afford to go to the high school. the easiest answer to such children is, "well, then, don't." the fairest answer is a system of schools which will enable them to secure an education even though they are at work. cincinnati in selecting the latter course has opened a school for the education of every important group unable to attend the high schools who wish to avail themselves of advanced educational opportunities. first there is the night school work, which, in addition to the ordinary academic courses, offers special opportunities in machine shop practice, blacksmithing, mechanical and architectural drawing, and domestic science. as these courses are carried forward in the woodward high school building the students have all of the advantages of high school equipment. night school, coming after a day's exertion, is so trying that only the most robust can profit by it. no small importance therefore attaches to the operation of the compulsory continuation schools under the ohio law, which empowers cities to compel working children between fourteen and sixteen years of age to attend school for not more than eight hours a week between the hours of : a. m. and : p. m.--hours which will presumably be subtracted from shop time. by means of this adaptation of the german system even those children who must leave school at fourteen are guaranteed school work for the next two years at least. although this is but a minimum requirement, it represents a beginning in the right direction. no less significant than this compulsory system are the voluntary continuation schools for those over sixteen years of age, which have been established for machinists' apprentices, for printers' apprentices, for saleswomen, and for housewives. the first two courses are conducted under the direction of a genius named renshaw, who takes from the machine shop boys of every age, nationality and experience, fits them somewhere into his four-year course; gives them a numbered time check from his time board; teaches them reading, writing, arithmetic, mechanical drawing, geometry, algebra and trigonometry by means of an ingenious series of blueprints, which constitute their sole text-book; visits them in their shops, giving suggestions and advice about the shop work, and finally sends them out finished craftsmen, with an excellent foundation in the theoretical side of the trades. the work is entirely voluntary, yet so excellent is it that a number of cincinnati manufacturers send their apprentices to mr. renshaw, paying them regular wages for the four hours of credit which the said renshaw registers weekly on the boys' time-cards. "one firm sends sixty boys here each week," commented mr. renshaw's assistant. "that makes two hundred and forty hours of school work each week for which they pay regular wages. well, sir, the superintendent there told me that they didn't so much as notice the loss." "i tried to explain my system to one superintendent," said mr. renshaw, "but he wouldn't even listen. 'it makes no difference how you do it,' he grumbled, 'i don't care about that. i know that the boys are neater, more careful, more accurate, and better all-around workmen after they have been with you for a while. that's enough explanation for me.'" acting on such sentiments the manufacturer peremptorily dismisses the boy who does not do his school tasks satisfactorily. the responsibility is in the school, whose growing enrollment and influence tell their own story. firms send their boys to the school with the comment that the hours of school time, for which they are paid, do not add to the cost of shop management, but do add to the value of the boys to the shop. increased efficiency pays. a school of salesmanship for women has met with a like success. the leading stores, glad of an opportunity to raise the standard of their employees, grant the saleswomen a half day each week, without loss of pay, during which they take the salesmanship course. the course has the hearty backing of the best cincinnati merchants, who see in it an opportunity, as mr. dyer put it, "to make their employees the most skilled and intelligent, the most obliging and trustworthy, the best treated and best paid--in short, the very best type of saleswomen in the country." that this work may keep pace with the demand for it the school authorities offer industrial instruction in any pursuit for which a class of twenty-five can be organized. "a large number of women were born too soon to get the advantage of the courses in domestic science now being offered in our high schools," comments mr. dyer in his dry way. scores of such women anxious to learn all that was known about domestic arts constituted a class for which the school was well equipped to provide. "then suppose we give them what they need," said mr. dyer. just fancy--a continuous course in domestic science! yet there it is, in cincinnati, with an enrollment of more than eleven hundred women, attending the public schools to learn domestic arts. what could be more rational than this cincinnati system of making a school--even though it be a continuation school--to fit the educational needs of cincinnati people--grown-ups and children alike? viii special schools for special children the cincinnati schools provide for special children as well as for special classes of people. first there are the unusually bright children, who "mark-time" in the ordinary classes. these children were placed in "rapidly moving classes." while omitting none of the work, they were allowed to go as fast as their mental development would allow them, instead of as slowly as the other members of the class made it necessary to move. at the beginning the teacher found these exceptionally able children lacking in effort and attention, qualities which they had not needed to keep their place in the grades. "the extra work and responsibility stimulated their mental activity, increased their power of attention, fostered thoroughness and accuracy, developed resourcefulness and initiative, and those other qualities necessary for leadership." why should it not be so? why should not the specially able child be taught as thoroughly as the defective one? yet mr. dyer, speaking from experience, remarks: "strange to say, it is harder to establish such classes than defective and retarded ones." strange indeed! for the sub-normal or retarded children cincinnati has made ample provision. spending from a quarter to a half of their time in manual work, the children are no longer tortured with the doing of things beyond their powers. the overgrown boys have instruction in shop work. the overgrown girls have a furnished flat in which they learn the arts of home-making at first hand. there are in all over four hundred children in these schools. similar accommodations are provided for other special groups. the anaemic and tubercular children are taught in two open-air schools; six teachers are detailed to instruct the deaf children; one teacher devotes her time to the blind children, and ten teachers are employed to take charge of those children who are mentally defective. thus, by adjusting the schools to the needs of special groups of people, and of special individuals, cincinnati is providing an education which reaches the individual members of the community. ix playground and summer schools the vacation school is planned to meet the needs of the children in the crowded districts during the hot summer months. "for that reason," says mr. dyer, "it provides industrial work of all kinds unassociated with book instruction, but mingled with a great amount of recreational activity--excursions, stories, folk-dancing, and a wide variety of games." the field of industrial activity is a broad one, including cooking, nursing, housekeeping, sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving and basketry; drawing and color work, brush and plastic work; bench work with tools, making useful articles; sports and games, including folk-dancing for girls and ball for boys. the primary and kindergarten classes offer a delightful round of song, story, games, excursions, paper work and other forms of construction. for the girls who have to take care of babies there are special classes. the boys make useful articles in the shops, and the girls, in sewing-room and cooking laboratory, learn to do the things around which the interests of the home always center. by co-operation with the park commissioners, the playgrounds were made an integral part of the summer school work. besides the recreational summer school cincinnati has maintained for the past five years an academic summer school, in which children might make up back work in school, or do special work in any line which was of particular interest to them. in these schools "the very best instructors that can be secured" are employed, and their recommendations are accepted by the school principals when the fall term opens. "this school is one of the means taken to deal with the problem of repeaters in our schools," says mr. dyer. "instead of requiring children who are behind to fall back a year, they may, if they are not hopeless failures, but only deficient in a few studies, remove their deficiencies in the summer school and go on with their class. we have followed up these pupils," mr. dyer adds, "and found that a normal percentage keep up with the class in succeeding years." x mr. dyer and the men who stood with him a spirit of comradeship and hearty co-operation breathes from every nook and cranny of the cincinnati schools. principals and teachers alike sense the fact. alike they aim toward the upbuilding of the schools. "never in my life have i found such a spirit of mutual helpfulness," says assistant superintendent roberts. "every teacher has felt that she had a part to play, that she counted, that her suggestions were worth while, and she has worked earnestly toward this end." "everywhere i encounter the same willingness to co-operate with the schools," said superintendent condon, after spending three months in the place that mr. dyer vacated when he became superintendent of the boston schools. "there is a heartiness in it, too, that grips a man." "there is always the jolliest good-fellowship in the schoolman's club," exclaimed a grammar school principal. "it's always 'roberts' and 'lyon' and 'dyer' there. they're as good as the rest, no better. we all go there to work, and to work hard for the schools." on such a spirit is the school system of cincinnati founded. from its point of vantage, set upon its high hill of ministry to child needs, it flashes like a searchlight through the storm of nineteenth century pedagogical obscurity. the optimist sings a new, glad song; the pessimist is confounded; the searcher after educational truth uncovers reverently before this masterpiece of educational organization, this practical demonstration of the wonders that may be accomplished where head and heart work together through the schools, for the children. such is the triumph, but whose the glory? "it is not mine," protests mr. dyer, "i did only my part." "nor mine," "nor mine," echo his assistants. truly, wisely, bravely spoken. the glory is not to mr. dyer, nor to any other one man or woman--the glory is to mr. dyer and the men and women who worked with him for the cincinnati schools. "my predecessor was an able organizer," explained mr. dyer. "he left things in splendid condition, and we took up his work. there were five things which marked great epochs in the upbuilding of the cincinnati schools: "first, we established the merit system for the appointment of teachers. "second, we improved the school buildings and equipment. "third, we organized special courses for children who were not able to profit by the regular work. "fourth, by putting applied work in the grades we gave the children a chance to use their hands as well as their heads. "fifth, we enlarged the school system by adding buildings and courses until there was a place in the schools for every boy and girl, man and woman in cincinnati who wanted an education. "that was the sum total of our work. it was a long and difficult task." mr. dyer's tall form straightened a trifle. his earnest, determined face relaxed. from under his bushy eyebrows flashed a gleam of triumph--the triumph of a strong, purposeful, successful man. "but when it was all over," he concluded, "and when the things for which we had striven were accomplished we knew that they were worth while." when mr. dyer left his position in cincinnati to become superintendent of the boston schools, there was, on every hand, a feeling of loss and of uncertainty among those most interested in the city's educational problems. during those months which elapsed between mr. dyer's departure for boston and the election of his successor there was a feeling that, after all, perhaps he was not replaceable. then the successor came,--a quiet man, with a constructive imagination that enabled him to grasp, readily and completely, cincinnati's educational need. there had been an era of radical educational adjustment in the city. the school system had been changed,--artfully changed, it is true--but changed, nevertheless, in all of the essential elements of its being. some of the changes had been made with such rapidity that their foundations had not been fully completed. the brilliant school policy which mr. dyer had inaugurated needed rounding out for fulfilment and completion. randall j. condon saw these things; and he saw, furthermore, that in a community so awakened as cincinnati, almost any educational program was feasible, so long as it remained reasonable. the cincinnati school people who went to providence for the purpose of inviting mr. condon to take charge of the cincinnati schools, felt the constructive power of his leadership. providence had been educationally transformed, and mr. condon was the man responsible for the transformation. the people of cincinnati have every cause to congratulate themselves upon the new school head. at the outset mr. condon said,--"i purpose, to the best of my ability, to live up to and follow out the policies inaugurated by mr. dyer." with the utmost fidelity he has kept his word. there is far more in mr. condon's administration than a mere follow-up policy. everywhere he is building. in the face of a difficult financial situation which compels a serious curtailment of expenses for the time being, he is insisting upon additional kindergartens, extended high school accommodations, a more intimate correlation of the elementary and high school system, and an extensive system of recreation and social centers. it is upon the latter point that mr. condon is laying the greatest emphasis at the outset of his administration. the cincinnati policy which mr. condon has inaugurated with regard to civic centers is admirably summed up in his statement of the case. "a larger use of the school house for social, recreational and civic purposes should be encouraged. the school house belongs to all of the people, and should be open to all the people upon equal terms,--as civic centers for the free discussion of all matters relating to local and city government, and for the non-partisan consideration of all civic questions; as recreational centers, especially for the younger members of the community, to include the use of the baths and gymnasiums for games and sports, and other physical recreations, the use of class-rooms and halls for music, dramatics, and other recreational activities, and for more distinct social purposes; as educational centers in which the more specific educational facilities and equipment may be used by classes or groups of younger or older people, in any direction which makes for increased intelligence, and for greater economic and educational efficiency; as social centers in which the community may undertake a larger social service in behalf of its members,--stations from which groups and organizations of social workers may prosecute any non-partisan and non-sectarian work for the improvement of the social and economic conditions of the neighborhood, rendering any service which may help to improve the condition of the homes, giving assistance to the needy, disseminating information, helping to employment, and in general affording the community in its organized capacity an opportunity to serve in a larger measure the needs of the individual members." here is, indeed, a broad-gauge social school policy, to which the administrative authorities of the cincinnati schools are fully committed. the movement for social centers in the schools is to be under the direction of a social secretary appointed by the superintendent. until the organization is more highly perfected, principals are free, under certain restrictions, to open their schools for classes, groups, and all other legitimate community activities. mr. condon's activities in the direction of socialized school buildings finds a ready response. "there was already a large use of a number of the schools for community meetings--for welfare associations, for boys' and girls' study clubs, and for musical and social gatherings." the program is a program of extension, rather than of innovation. it has already won the approval of the citizenship. spontaneity must be the soul of such a movement. "it was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they should develop their own." one by one centers are being formed. the board of education furnishes the building, the local social center organization pays the immediate expenses which its activities incur. the movement has been started right. "i am a great believer in democracy," mr. condon says. "the people can be trusted to settle social questions as they should be settled, provided all sides can be fully presented and time taken for deliberation. the school house affords the one opportunity where all can meet on common ground as american citizens and as good neighbors, where the question of wealth and position may be forgotten, and where what a man is in himself, and what he is willing to do for the common good, counts most." such is the spirit in which mr. dyer, the men and women who worked with him, and the men and women who succeeded him, have striven for the advancement of education; such the spirit of co-operation and progressiveism which dominates this great city school system. footnotes: [footnote : much of this material appeared originally in educational foundations.] chapter viii the oyler school of cincinnati i an experiment in social education on the west side of cincinnati, separated from the main part of the town by railroad yards, waste land and stagnant water, surrounded by factories and a myriad of little homes, stands the oyler school. "can any good thing come out of nazareth?" queried a doubter. answers, in bell tones, the philosopher, "if a man can build a better house or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he fix his home in the woods, the world will find a path to his door." because oyler has built a better school in a better community the world sits at oyler's feet to learn of its experiment in social education. the first time that i went to the oyler school i encountered a committee of manufacturers. a committee of manufacturers in a public school during business hours! these men had met to talk with the school principal over the location of a library, which the entire community had worked to secure. when the time came to go before the park board over in the center of the city, to secure a playground near the oyler school, the local bank furnished automobiles, and dozens of business men, leaving their offices, took the opportunity to endorse the work of the school, and to second its demands that play space be given to west end children. the manufacturers have become interested because in less than a decade the oyler school has changed the face of the community, creating harmony out of discord, and order out of chaos. the struggle of oyler is the story of a man, a delivered message, a thriving, enthusiastic school and a reborn neighborhood. many years ago--about twenty to be exact--a young man named voorhes was made first assistant in a west end school. like other young men who go into school work he applied himself earnestly to his tasks, but unlike most of them he did some hard thinking at the same time. among other things he thought about the relation between the school and the community, wondering why the two were so completely divorced from one another. then the problem was focused on one concrete example--a boy named john, nearly sixteen years old, who had succeeded in getting only as far as the eighth grade. john, who had never taken kindly to language or grammar, began thinking pretty seriously toward the end of his last year in the grammar school. he tried, he struggled, but the syntax was too much for him. after all, it was not his fault, and he complained bitterly against a punishment in the form of "leaving down" for something which he could not help. his training was so inadequate that he was entirely unable to pass the high school examinations which, in those days, were like the laws of the medes and the persians. "i am safe in saying that he did not know the difference between a verb and a preposition," said mr. voorhes, "but during the grammar lesson he could make a drawing of the face of the teacher that was in no sense a caricature. this phase of his ability gave me a cue to what might be done for him. knowing both the superintendent and the principal of the technical school, i talked the situation over with them, begging them, with all the persuasive power at my command, to take the boy, forgetting his shortcomings, and magnifying his peculiar talents, which i felt sure were considerable along mechanical lines. they acceded to my request, giving john a place in the school, to which he walked three miles back and forth daily for three years. for many years john has been superintendent of the lighting plant of a large city, and his experience has always stood out before me as a terrible rebuke to the then dominant educational regime, which could offer john nothing but a sneer. these facts took such a vital hold on me, seeming to reinforce so fully the thought that the industrial abilities which i had acquired back on the farm proved of incalculable value to me, that the resolution to promote industrial education became a fixed part of my educational creed. the memory of that lesson in educational equity kept the need for industrial training constantly in my mind, till i had opportunity to give it expression in the oyler school." john bespoke the needs of the community by which oyler was surrounded. it was so different from other communities. there were the ugly straggling factory buildings, the miserable homes, their squalid tenants, and worst of all there were the rough, boisterous, over-age, uninterested, incorrigible boys and girls, who flitted from school to home, to street, to jail, and then, gripped by the infirm hand of the law, in the form of a juvenile court probation officer, or a truant officer, they came back to school unwillingly enough to begin the cycle all over again. "as for discipline," remarked one of the city school officials, "the school hadn't known it for years, the probation officer couldn't keep the children in school and the juvenile court couldn't keep them out of jail. even the majesty of the law is lost on children, you know." the children taunted the police; the police hated the children; the home repelled; the factory called, grimly; child labor flourished, and the school despaired. ii an appeal for applied education such were the conditions when mr. voorhes became school principal. grinding factories, wretched homes, parental ignorance, social neglect, educational impotence--few men could enter such a field of battle with a light heart, but mr. voorhes did. what, think you, was his first move? he addressed to the heads of all of the factories in the neighborhood a letter, suggesting the establishment of a manual training department in connection with the grade work of the oyler school. "as i become more and more familiar with existing conditions in our school district," he wrote, "i am convinced that a manual training department would be of vital importance to the school and to the general welfare of the community. such departments are being looked upon to-day as necessary adjuncts to modern school equipment. "our school is being drained constantly of its life force by the adjacent factory demands, and if we could send pupils forth with trained hands as well as trained minds they could render a much more useful service, which, in time, would not only show itself in more profitable returns to employers, but must also tend toward a higher standard of culture in the neighborhood, and a longer continuance in school by our pupils. "i know of no other section of the city where the actual need should make a stronger appeal for support than here. anything you may do will be greatly appreciated." "you can imagine my surprise," says mr. voorhes, "when during the next few days my mail brought me a hearty response of checks and pledges amounting to nearly a thousand dollars." manual training was assured! no! not yet. the board of education reached the conclusion that manual training in the grades was undesirable. "with the exception of $ which i was told to use as i saw fit the checks and pledges were alike returned to the donors. that $ gave a piano to our kindergarten." that failure back in was the seed-ground of later success. the community was interested to the extent of a thousand dollars at least. the manufacturers were not only interested in education, but were willing to support it financially. there was a change of administration. mr. f. b. dyer became superintendent of schools and at once met the situation by establishing a manual training center in the oyler school. iii solving a local problem the end was not yet, however. the truant officers and the juvenile court were still busy keeping oyler children out of mischief and in school. the conventional type of manual training--one period per week in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades--was not holding the pupils. "the children were not getting enough manual work to establish either habit or efficiency," mr. voorhes comments, "besides, this work reached only to the sixth grade. at this time there were in the school fifty boys and girls below the fifth grade who were from two to five years behind their normal classes. that is to say, they were--most of them--of that unfortunate class that has seen more trouble in a few years than most of us see in a lifetime. i was constantly asking myself: 'where do these folks come in?' 'what is our school doing to help their function in life?' 'are we really of any assistance to them after all?' 'is it worth their while to come to our school?' my sympathy for the pupils was constantly growing, and i went at last in desperation to the superintendent with a plan for a revolution in the organization of my school, a revolution that i was sure would meet the needs of the community and one upon which i was willing to stake my reputation if i had any." at this point it is worth remembering, parenthetically, that cincinnati school men have a habit of going about their school problems in very much that spirit, beginning by sizing up the needs of the community, continuing by becoming imbued with an idea of the community needs and ending by presenting this idea to the school authorities and getting--within bounds--carte blanche to make their schools serve the locality in which they are situated. this was mr. voorhes's experience. he was told to go ahead and make good--a permission of which he availed himself in an astoundingly short space of time by introducing a system of applied education, aimed to meet the needs of the children who attended the oyler school. "there is a peculiar situation," said mr. dyer, "and it needs peculiar handling. you have only one problem to solve--that of the west end. go ahead!" mr. voorhes did go ahead with a plan under which all children in the sixth and seventh grades were given three periods a week in laboratories and shops. subnormal pupils in the third, fourth and fifth grades were to have four and one-half hours (one school day) for applied work each week. in order to give special help to backward pupils they were sent in small groups to the seventh and eighth grade teachers while their classes were doing applied work. below-grade children go to the eighth grade teacher for special work in arithmetic and geography, and the seventh grade teacher for english and history. in this way the backward children from the lower grades have special training by the best equipped teachers in the school. the eighth grade pupils give one-fifth of their time to applied work. during the year the boys have, in addition to the shop-work, twenty lessons in preparing and cooking plain, substantial meals. to make this "siss" work palatable to the sterner sex much of it takes the form of instruction in camp life--cooking in tin cans and other handy home-made devices. in a community where boys have always been trained to regard home work as menial, but where the absence of servants makes a "lift" from the husband or brother such a godsend to the wife at odd times, the value of giving grade boys a taste for cooking can hardly be over-estimated. the boys also receive twenty lessons in the simpler forms of sewing--darning, hemming, sewing on buttons. at the same time the girls are taught the use of simple tools. iv domestic science which domesticates beginning with the second grade the girls have domestic science while the boys are at manual training. this domestic science has a truer ring to it than most of the teaching which passes under that name. the children at oyler have a peculiar need for domestic science, because in many of the homes mother works out, and even when she is not away her knowledge of domestic arts is so rudimentary that she can impart little to her daughters. so it comes about that the oyler school seeks to teach the girls all that they would have under intelligent direction in a normal home. once each week they cook and once they sew, devoting from one-eighth to one-fifth of their entire time to these activities. by way of preparation for both cooking and sewing they are carefully trained in buying. they must make the dollar go a long way--buying in season the things cheapest at that time and preparing them in a way to yield the maximum of return. for example, they are called upon in january to buy a cent dinner for six persons. laura wickersham's cost list is: soup meat $ . can of tomatoes . spaghetti . cheese . bread . butter, etc. . ---- $ . gus potts, a mere boy, makes this suggestion: meat $ . potatoes . cabbage . bread . milk . butter . coffee . ---- $ . in their cooking laboratory they learn to cook simple foods, one thing at a time, until they reach the upper grades, where they must prepare entire meals on limited allowances. the sewing is equally practical. the girls learn to patch, darn, hem and make underclothing and dresses. then, going into homes where no intelligent needlework has ever been done--where frequently a darning needle is unknown--they teach the mother and older sisters how to sew, until whole families, under the influence of one school child, improve their wardrobe and reduce their cost for clothing. certain sewing days in school, called darning days, are sacred to the renovation of worn-out garments which the girls bring from home. the oyler system may not turn out artists in dress design--it has no such aim. the children who come to its class-rooms are ignorant of the simplest devices known to civilization for the making of comfortable homes. the domestic science courses are organized to take care of their children by teaching them to be intelligent home-makers. v making commercial products in the grades no less practical is the work of the boys in the shops, since the great majority of them will enter factories. the shop-work is designed to familiarize them with the ideas underlying shop practice. instead of making useless joints and surfaces the boys turn out finished, marketable products. the eighth grade boys, with the aid of the instructor, have built a drill-press from the scraps of machinery which were found lying about. now they are at work on an engine. elaborate products you will say, for eighth grade boys, yet these boys are likely interested, they do their task with zest, and linger about the shop after school hours are over--anxious to complete the jobs which the day's work has begun. boys in grades two to six made three dozen hammer handles for use in the high school machine shops. of forty-two pieces of rough stock there were produced thirty-six handles, a record which some commercial shops might envy. these same boys made a book and magazine rack, of rather elaborate design, and an umbrella rack for each of the schools in cincinnati. these racks, displayed in the offices of the various principals, would stand comparison with a high grade factory product. the boys are now engaged in making a desk book-rack (a scroll saw exercise) for every school teacher in cincinnati. when they have finished there will be more than a thousand. besides these routine class exercises the oyler boys are privileged to make anything which appeals to them and for which they can supply the material. the school machines are theirs, subject to their use at any time. taking advantage of this, the boys sharpen the home knives and hatchets, make axe handles, umbrella racks, hall stands, stools, sleds, cane chairs, and repair or make any product which fancy or home necessity may dictate. vi a real interest in school let no one infer that the academic branches are neglected at oyler. far from it, they are taught with consummate skill by a corps of teachers who enjoy the work because they find the children interested. strange to relate, an interest in school came in at the front door with mr. voorhes' new plan for applied education. the wild boys and dishevelled girls of the west end, who had erstwhile hated school, came now to participate in school activities with an interest seldom surpassed in public or private schools. "you see," mr. voorhes remarked, "a day a week in the shop or laboratories is just about enough to keep down the high spirits of the older ones, and at the same time give them an applied education of which they feel the value. that one day of practical work did the trick. it made the other four days of academic work taste just as good as pie." mr. voorhes' plan arrived. it won the interest of the children and later with the assistance of the mothers' club and the kindergarten it won the sympathy of the community. vii the mothers' club like all of the other school centers in cincinnati, oyler has a kindergarten and a mothers' club, around which the change in community feeling has centered, until mr. voorhes describes them as "the most important influence that ever came into our school." yet the kindergarten here, as elsewhere, has had a life and death grapple for existence. in the west end, dominated by its conservative, german atmosphere, the pleas for kindergartens fell on deaf ears. at last, after much preparation, a meeting of mothers and children was held for the purpose of forming an organization; at the meeting there were thirteen children and five mothers, and all antagonistic, or at best suspicious. "i went around and played with every one of those children," said mr. voorhes, "talking to the mothers, and trying to persuade them that this was not failure, but merely the forerunner of success. the next day i went into every grade, saying to the children: "'what was the matter? mother did not come to the mothers' meeting yesterday.' "'oh, she couldn't leave the baby.' "'leave the baby! why, of course not. no one expected her to leave the baby. tell her to come and bring the baby along.'" so another meeting was held, and another to which the babies were brought--some women bringing as many as three, who were too young to go to school. at one mothers' meeting, after the club had been well organized, there were twenty women, listening, discussing and nursing babies, all at once. if the beginnings of the experiment were discouraging the results have more than offset the original disappointment. at the last meeting (in january) seventy of the eighty-five paid up members were present, intelligent, eager, interested, participating heartily in the discussions. it has cost years of labor, but these mothers have reached the point where they can talk intelligently about the children and their needs. "only yesterday," said miss phelps, kindergarten director, "one mother said to me: 'i used to be the most impatient woman with my children--i simply couldn't stand it when they refused to do what i told them. the other day my mother said to me, "you're about the most patient woman i ever saw. what's done it?" and i said to her: "well, mother, i do not know of anything except those folks at the kindergarten, which all helped me to look at children in a very different way."'" through the mothers' meetings the mothers have come to feel that they are co-operating with the teacher and the school. those mothers who have children in the upper grades as well as in the kindergarten go to the grade teachers too, seeking advice, or making suggestions. they have learned to feel that they are an essential part of the educational plan, and their enthusiastic interest tells of the advantages gained by this co-operation. the oyler mothers' club has been the center of the movement to clear up the community. through them and through the grades refuse has been cleaned and kept from the streets. the club maintains, out of its fund, a medicine chest at the school, which is used by the visiting nurse. it has cleaned up the children, and that is no small item. "back in ," says mr. voorhes, "i had five hundred of the children vaccinated in my office, and such dirt and vermin i never saw! nearly every child had the high water mark on his wrist, and their clothes and bodies were filthy. they didn't know a bathtub from a horse trough; they don't now for the matter of that, because there are scarcely a dozen houses in this section that have bathtubs, but the children are clean." each year the old members of the mothers' club bring in the new mothers, saying to miss phelps: "this is my mother, i brought her," "this is mine!" with a delighted satisfaction in having added something to the club. the kindergarten, filling two rooms, is thriving, and the kindergarten teachers, visiting and advising in the home, are cordially welcomed everywhere. viii the disappearance of "discipline" "discipline," smiled mr. voorhes, "no, we don't mention the word any more. five years ago the discipline problem in this school was more serious than in any school in town. we couldn't handle it, not even with a club. to-day the discipline looks after itself." the disciplining of an undisciplined school may sound like an immensely difficult task. wrongly essayed it would be. rightly directed it becomes the merest child's play. the teachers have disciplined the school--disciplined it through kindness--and here, again, the inspiration may be traced to the mothers' club and the kindergarten, for it was in the kindergarten that the first real attempt was made to bring this school into closer relations with the home by home visiting. little by little the example told on the grade teachers, who went to see the children when they were absent; nor was it long before a custom grew up in the school, by virtue of which a teacher who wished to visit one absent child, might pick her own time to make her visit. if perchance the psychological moment was during school hours, she went then, while another teacher or the principal took her place. among the many illustrations of the efficiency of this system one stands out strongly. a boy had been away for a week, sick with rheumatism, when his teacher decided to call and see him. she went hesitatingly, however, for this boy had been rough and troublesome all through school, but particularly to her. at last her mind was made up. she visited the boy and came away radiant, overjoyed at the cordial reception he had given her. again she went, and the mother, opening the door with a glad face, said: "come right in, tom's been looking for you." "is he better?" the teacher asked. "yes, pretty much, but he said that he would get well right quick when you came to see him again." does anyone wonder that the boy should feel so kindly over attentions to which he was not accustomed? is it strange that he should have come back to school with a firm resolve to be decent to his teacher? discipline? there is no longer a problem of discipline. the teachers are enthusiastic over the work, because they can see its results in the changed homes and lives about them. the children engaged in occupations which they enjoy and sensing the efforts of the school in their behalf, discipline themselves by being frank and hearty in work or in play. mr. voorhes is not surprised at this transformation. the plan on which he staked his reputation was a simple one, based on the idea of serving a community which he had studied carefully, by providing for it an education that met its needs. though revolutionary from an educational viewpoint, the plan succeeded because it was socially sound--because it linked together the school and the community, of which the school is a logical part. ix the spirit of oyler oyler has a motto, a very shibboleth, "the school for the community and the community for the school." not only do its principal and teachers believe that the school must center its activities about the needs of the community in which it is located, but they put their belief into practice, studying the community diligently and seeking to find an answer for every need which it manifests. out of this spirit of service has grown up a warmth of feeling and interest among the teachers seldom surpassed anywhere. "when i came to oyler i felt about it as sherman felt about war," says mr. voorhes. "now i would not trade places with any school man in cincinnati. the teachers feel the same way. never yet have we had a teacher who wanted to leave. each one has her class, that is enough. we have no problem of discipline now. the children and their parents are working for the school.["] sometimes people get the idea that mr. voorhes does not do very much. one visitor spent half a day observing, and then sitting down in his office she said: "mr. voorhes, i have been here half a day and i haven't seen you around at all. what do you do?" "madam," answered mr. voorhes, "i am a man of leisure. all i do is to sit here at this desk, ready to get behind any one of my teachers, with two hundred and fifty pounds from the shoulder, in order to prevent anybody or anything from getting in the way of her work." small wonder that the teachers like to stay. small wonder that the work which the school does commands the respect of the people of cincinnati. in the school, as well as in the neighborhood, each person has a task and a fair chance to do it well. from its position as "the worst school in cincinnati" oyler has risen, first in its own esteem, and then in the esteem of the city, until it is looked upon everywhere as a factor in the life of the west end, and an invaluable cog in the educational machinery of the city. its tone has changed, too. mr. roberts, who came, a total stranger, to assist in the work while mr. voorhes was sick, says, "i have never heard a word of discourtesy or a bit of rudeness since i came to this school." that is strong testimony for a new man in a new place. splendidly done, oyler! mr. voorhes has not stopped working. on the contrary, he is at it harder than ever, shaping his school to the ever-changing community needs. he has stopped disciplining, though, and he has stopped wondering about the success of his experiment. time was when oyler looked upon high school attendance much as a new york gunman looks at sunday school. last year of the thirty-three children in the eighth grade, eighteen--more than half--went to high school. the tradition against high school has been replaced by a healthy desire for more education. "one day a week in the shops," mr. voorhes says, "means interest and enthusiasm. our children compete in high school with the children of grammar schools from the well-to-do sections, and with the best our boys and girls hold their own." the community is interested. parents and manufacturers alike come to the school, consult, advise, suggest, co-operate. the school boy is no longer sneered at by "the gang." the school has made its place in the community, and "the gang" is enthusiastically engaged in school work. the complexion of the neighborhood has changed, too. it is less rough, the police have less to do. houses are neater, children better clothed and cared for. oyler has won the hearts of its people, improved the food on their tables and the clothes on their backs, sent the children to high school, and their mothers to mothers' clubs; and the people who once uttered their profanity indiscriminately in every direction now swear by oyler. chapter ix vitalizing rural education i the call of the country there is a call of the land just as there is a call of the city, though the call of the city has sounded so insistently during the past century that men innumerable, heeding it, have cast in their lot with the throngs of city dwellers. yet the city proves so unsatisfying that thousands are turning from its rows of brick houses and lines of paved streets to the fruit trees, dairy herds, market gardens and broad acres of the countryside. the call of the city is answered by a call which is becoming equally distinct--the call "back to the land." the ten-acre lot may not be any nearer paradise than the "great white way," but there is about it a breadth of quiet wholesomeness which cannot make its presence felt in the bustle of the clanging cars and the rushing whirl of crowded streets. the unsmoked blue of the sky is over the country, as are the fragrance of flowers, woods and mown grass; the stars are brilliant by night, and by day the birds sing, and the cows and barnyard fowls talk philosophically together. the children have room to run and play between their periods of work, which is very near of kin to blessedness, because, aside from being instructive, it binds the child into the family group in a way that factory work can never do. the country cries health and enthusiasm to the world-weary soul as it does to the barefoot boy. whittier was very near the heart of things when he wrote: blessings on thee, little man, barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! with thy turned-up pantaloons, and thy merry whistled tunes; with thy red lips, redder still kissed by strawberries on the hill. despite the loneliness, isolation and overwork in some country places, the rural life is, on the whole, very rich in-- sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools. country life holds a great promise for the future--a promise of vigorous manhood and womanhood, and of earnest, sane living. through the rapidly progressing country school, more perhaps than through any other agency, this promise may be fulfilled. there are two possibilities in the development of the country school. on the one hand, several one-room schools may be consolidated into one central graded school, to which the children are transported at public expense; on the other hand, the old-time, one-room school may be reorganized and vitalized. ii making bricks with straw even the doughtiest son of the soil must needs admit that the farmer of the past, living secluded in his house or village, was provincial, narrow, bigoted and individualistic. times are rapidly changing, however, and out of the old desolation of rural individualism there is arising the spirit of wholesome, virile co-operation, which has transformed the face of many a country district almost in the twinkling of an eye. nowhere is this co-operative spirit better expressed than in the consolidated country schools, which are organized, like the city school, by subjects and grades. considered from any viewpoint, the consolidated school is superior, as a form of organization, to the district school. rather, the consolidated school permits organization, and the district school does not. wherever it has been tried the testimony in favor of consolidation is overwhelming. "comparison," cried one county superintendent in consternation. "comparison! there is no comparison. the old one-room school, like the one-horse plough, has seen its day. the farmers in this country, after figuring it out, have reached the conclusion that the one-room school is in the same class with a lot of other old-fashioned machinery--good in its day, but not good enough for them. that is why over eighty per cent of our schools have been consolidated. you see it's this way: the farmers need labor badly, and rather than see their sons go to a school where they are called on once or twice a day by a sadly overworked teacher they would put them to work on the farm. the consolidated school wins them with its good course of study and the boys stay in school." that is the first, and perhaps the most vital, advantage of the consolidated school--it permits the enlargement of the course of study. sewing, cooking, agriculture, manual training, drawing and music, have all been introduced, because the teachers have time for them. high school work has been added, too. the consolidated school, in so far as the course of study is concerned, is very nearly on a par with the graded school of the city. have you ever attended a one-room country school? if you have not you can form but the faintest idea of what it means to the teacher. her day is so split up with little periods of class work that she can never do anything thoroughly. here, for example, is an average schedule of work for a one-room class in indiana: daily program forenoon time class grade : opening exercises all : reading primary : reading first : reading second : reading third : reading sixth : grammar fourth : grammar fifth : grammar sixth : grammar seventh : grammar eighth : reading fourth : reading seventh : recess all : reading primary : reading first : numbers second : numbers third : arithmetic fourth : arithmetic fifth : arithmetic seventh : arithmetic eighth : reading fifth noon noon all appalling, do you say? what other word describes it adequately? there are twenty-one teaching periods in the morning; twenty-four in the afternoon. forty-five times each day that teacher must call up and teach a new class. the college professor is "overloaded" with fourteen classes a week. this woman had two hundred and twenty-five. will any one be so absurd as to suppose that she can do them or herself justice? consolidation, among its many advantages, reduces the number of classes per day, and increases the time which the teacher may devote to each class. note the contrast between that schedule of a one-room teacher and the teaching schedule of a consolidated school teacher in the same county: teacher's daily program forenoon time class grade : opening exercises all : desk -b : phonetics -a : phonetics -b : reading -a : reading second : rest exercise all : nature all : rest all : words -b : words -a : numbers second : history -a the "district," or one-room, schools in montgomery county, indiana, have twenty-three pupils per teacher, scattered over six grades. the consolidated schools in the same county show sixteen pupils per teacher, in three grades. while the teacher in the district school averages twenty-seven recitations a day, the teacher in the consolidated school has eleven; but the time per recitation is: district, thirteen minutes; consolidated, twenty-nine minutes. the number of minutes which the district teacher may give to each grade is fifty minutes; the consolidated teacher has one hundred and seventeen minutes per grade. badly sprinkled with figures as that statement is, it gives some idea of the increased opportunities for effective teaching in the consolidated school. no teacher can do justice to twenty-seven classes per day, and an average recitation period of thirteen minutes is so short as to be almost unworthy of mention. most consolidated schools, in addition to the ordinary rooms, have an assembly room in which lectures, festivals, socials, public meetings, and farmers' institutes are held. acting as a center for community life, the consolidated school takes a real place in the instruction of the community. the big brick or stone building, well constructed and surrounded, as it usually is, by well-kept grounds, furnishes the same kind of local monument that the court house supplies in the county seat. people point proudly to it as "their" public building. it is an experience of note in traveling across an open farming country to come suddenly upon a splendidly-equipped, two-story school, set down, at a point of vantage, several miles away from the nearest railroad. the consolidated school at linden, montgomery county, indiana, for example, situated in a town of scarcely three hundred inhabitants, is equipped with gas from its own gas-plant; with steam heat; ample toilet accommodations; an assembly room; and halls so broad that the primary children may play some of their games there in bad weather. one of the most widely discussed among consolidated schools is the john swaney consolidated school, of putnam county, illinois.[ ] the john swaney school occupies a twenty-four acre campus, lying a mile and a half from the nearest village, and ten miles from the nearest town. the agitation for consolidation in putnam county led john swaney and his wife to give twenty-four acres as a campus for a local consolidated school. hence the name and much of the success which has attended the work of the school. the school cost $ , , equipped. it is of brick with four class-rooms, two laboratories, a library, offices, a manual training shop, a domestic science kitchen, and a basement play-room. the building is lighted, heated, and ventilated in the most modern fashion. the john swaney school thus came into existence with an equipment adequate for any school and elaborate for a school situated far from the channels of trade and industry. the course of study organized includes all of the modern specialized work which the effective city school is able to do. securing good teachers and possessing unique facilities, the school carries boys and girls through a series of years, in which intellectual, experimental, manual, recreational, and social activities combine to make the school the center of community life and community influence. the school campus is used as a laboratory and a play ground. the trees provide subject matter for a course in horticulture. the fertile land is turned to agricultural use, and the broad expanse of twenty-four acres furnishes additional space for games and sports. the social life of this school is no less effective than is its location and equipment. the teachers' cottage, an old school building converted for this purpose, furnishes a center for the life of the teaching staff, and makes a background for the social life of the entire school. there are two strong literary societies, including all of the pupils in the school. each year plays are presented on the school stage. there are musical organizations, parents' conferences, entertainments, and community gatherings of all descriptions. in every sense, the john swaney school is a community center. prosperity has followed in the wake of this educational development. the john swaney school is known far and wide, and consequently farm renters and farm buyers alike seek the locality because of the educational opportunities which the school affords for their children, and because of the social opportunities which the community around the school affords for them. the movement for school consolidation, like many another good movement, originated in massachusetts. from that state it has spread extensively to indiana, minnesota, iowa, kansas, idaho, washington, and a number of other states,--east, west, and south. in every progressive rural community, wherever prosperous farmers and comfortable farm homes are found, there the consolidation movement is being discussed, agitated, or operated. the movement toward consolidation has been particularly active during the past few years in the south. the southern states are, for the most part, largely agricultural communities. the rural population far outnumbers the urban population, and it is in these districts, therefore, that the consolidated school can have its greatest influence. by , the state of louisiana alone was able to report over consolidated county schools. georgia, florida, and north carolina show themselves almost equally active in forwarding this generally accepted progressive educational movement. the difficulties involved in consolidation may be summed up under two heads. there is, first of all, the conservatism and prejudice of those people who believe that the things which were good enough for their fathers, are still good enough for them. secondly, there are the technical difficulties involved in transporting pupils from distant localities to the school center. roads are bad at certain times of the year. wagons are costly. desirable drivers are difficult to secure. these factors, taken together, make the administrative difficulties of the consolidated school far greater than those of the old-time one-room country school. the forces operating to overcome these difficulties are destined ultimately to triumph. the widespread acceptance of an agricultural education that followed upon the work of experiment stations, universities and high schools, has convinced even the most reactionary of the old-time group that there are, at least, certain things in the new generation which surpass, in their economic and social value, the like things of the old. the inroads of scientific agriculture have played havoc with agricultural tradition and conservatism. the obvious merits of the new scheme are destined to overcome the prejudices which the long continuance of the old scheme created. the technical difficulties of transportation are being met in a number of ways. wagon builders in various parts of the country are devoting themselves to the designing and building of wagons which will be cheap and effective. state and local authorities are actively engaged in the improvement of roads. the near future promises a standard of transportation facilities that will far surpass any that the consolidation movement has thus far enjoyed. the details of transportation administration are being worked out variously in different communities, and always with a view to the particular needs of the community involved. while the disadvantages of consolidation lie mainly in the overcoming of prejudice and the solution of administrative problems, the advantages of consolidation seem to be primarily educational and social. the consolidated school is the only method thus far devised for giving graded school and high school privileges under adequately paid teachers to the inhabitants of rural communities. again the consolidated school is the only method of securing a school attendance sufficiently large to provide the incentive arising from competition and emulation for pupils of each grade or age. furthermore, the consolidated school, standing out as the most distinctive feature of a rural landscape, is readily converted into a center of rural life and activity where young folks and old folks alike find a common ground for social interests. the advantages of the rural school are thus summed up by mabel carney,[ ]--"for the complete and satisfying solution of the problem of rural education and for the general reconstruction and redirection of country life, the consolidated country school is the best agency thus far devised." the reasons for this statement are summed up under seven heads. in the first place, the consolidated school is a democratic, public school, directly in the hands of the people who support it. secondly, it is at the door of farm houses and is wholly available, even more available, when public transportation is provided, than the present one-teacher school. third, every child in the farm community is reached by it. all children may attend because of the transportation facilities afforded. fourth, the cost of the school is reasonable. fifth, it accommodates all grades, including the high school. the country high school, by excluding the younger children, denies modern educational facilities to any except pupils of high school grade. sixth, it preserves a balanced course of study. while educating in terms of farm-life experience, it does not force children prematurely into any vocation, although it prepares them generally for all vocations. lastly, the consolidated school is the best social and educational center for the rural community that has been thus far organized. however just may be the judging of a tree by its fruit, the fruit of the consolidation movement seems uniformly good. first, because the children get to school; and second, because after they get there they are taught something worth while. when the schools of a district are consolidated, transportation must be furnished for the students. union township, montgomery county, indiana, covering one hundred and six square miles, has replaced thirty-seven district schools with six consolidated schools. some of the children are brought as far as five miles in wagons, or on the interurban electric cars. the wagon calls at stated hours, and the children must be ready. tardiness is therefore reduced, until one county reports ten hundred and ninety-one cases of tardiness in its district schools (for - ) and ninety-two cases in consolidated schools, although in this county there are more children in the consolidated than in the district schools. then, too, the children stay later in the consolidated schools. in montgomery county, indiana, the children who have not finished the eighth grade and who are staying away from school constitute twenty-nine per cent. of the population in the consolidated schools, as against sixty-three per cent. in the district schools. the vernon consolidated school in trumbull county, ohio, has enrolled nearly nine-tenths of the children of school age. before the consolidation only three-fifths were in school. theoretically, the introduction of agriculture, manual training, and other applied courses which are found in most consolidated schools, should have some effect on the lives of the children. in order to show its extent superintendent hall, of montgomery county, indiana, asked one thousand children (five hundred in district schools and five hundred in consolidated schools) what they proposed to do after they left school. arranged according to the kind of school in which the children were, the answers showed as follows: _district_ _consolidated_ _chosen profession_ _schools_ _schools_ teaching business farming law mechanics medicine ministry stock-breeding miscellaneous --- --- total agricultural studies--stock-breeding and farming--and mechanics show up strongly in the consolidated schools, at the expense of teaching, business and law in the district schools. while such figures do not prove anything, they indicate the direction in which the minds of consolidated school children are moving. eli m. rapp, of berks county, pennsylvania, voices the spirit of the consolidation movement when he says: "the consolidated school furnishes the framework for a well-organized, rural education. its course of study is broader, its appeal is stronger, its service to the community more pronounced, and, best of all, it holds the children. progressive rural communities have wakened up to the fact that unless their children are educated together there is a strong probability that they will be ignorant separately." iii making the one-room country school worth while the brilliant success of the consolidated schools reveals the possibilities of team-work in rural education, but it cannot detract from the wonderful work which has been done, and is still being done, by the one-room rural school. always there will be districts so sparsely settled that the consolidated school is not feasible. in such localities the one-room school, transformed as it may be by enlightened effort, must still be relied upon to provide education. nor is this outcome undesirable. the one-room country school bristles with educational possibilities. under intelligent direction, even its cumbersome organization may yield a plenteous harvest of useful knowledge and awakened interest. the droning reading lesson and the sing-song multiplication table are heard no more in the progressive country school. in their place are english work, which reflects the spirit of rural things, and the arithmetic of the farm. here is a boy of thirteen, in a one-room country school, writing an essay on "selecting, sowing and testing seed corn," an essay amply illustrated by pen and ink drawings of growing corn, corn in the ear and individual corn kernels. mabel gorman asks, "does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?" after describing the services of birds in destroying weed seeds and dangerous insects and emphasizing their beauty and cheerfulness, she concludes: "the question is, does it pay the farmer to protect the birds?" the only answer is that anything that adds to the attractiveness of the farm is worthy of cultivation. happily a farmer who protects the birds secures a double return--increased profit from his crop and increased pleasure of living. viola lawson, writing on the subject, "how to dust and sweep," makes some pertinent comments. "i think if a house is very dirty, a carpet sweeper is not a very good thing. a broom is best, because you can't get around the corners with a sweeper." note this hint to the school board: "we spend about one-third of our time in the school house, so it is very important to keep the dust down. the directors ought to let the school have dustless chalk. if they did there wouldn't be so much throat trouble among teachers and children. then so many children are so careless about cleaning their feet, boys especially. they go out and curry the horses, and clean out the stables, and get their feet all nasty. then they come to school and bring that dust into the schoolroom. isn't that awful?" viola is thirteen. over in eastern wisconsin miss ellen b. mcdonald, county superintendent of oconto county, has her children engaged in contests all the year round--growing corn, sugar beets, alaska peas and potatoes; the boys making axe handles and the girls weaving rag carpet. during the summer miss mcdonald writes to the children who are taking part in the contests suggesting methods and urging good work. one of the letters began with the well-known lines: say, how do you hoe your row, young man, say, how do you hoe your row, do you hoe it fair, do you hoe it square, do you hoe it the best you know? "how are you getting along with the contests?" continues the letter. "are you taking good care of your beets, peas, corn or garden? remember that it will pay you well for all the work you do upon it." in reply one girl writes: "my corn is a little over five feet high. my tomatoes have little tomatoes on, but mamma's are just beginning to blossom. my beets are growing fine. i planted them very late. my lettuce is much better than mamma's. we have been eating it right along." mark the note of exultation over the fact that her crop is ahead of her mother's. sometimes the school child brings from school knowledge which materially helps his father. here is a wisconsin english lesson, and a proof of the saying, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," all in one. these country boys and girls take an interest in english work, because it deals with the things they know. miss ellen b. mcdonald, county superintendent of schools in oconto county, wisconsin, publishes a column of school news in each of the three county newspapers. here is one of her contributions, in the form of an english lesson and a counting lesson combined: (a "rag-baby tester" is a device for determining the fertility of seed corn before it is planted.) "my dear miss mcdonald: "the rag-baby tester is causing a whole lot of excitement. we have tested one lot and this morning started another. we notice one thing in particular, the corn which was dried by stove heat sprouts perfectly, while that dried in granaries, etc., is not sprouting at all. last fall papa saved his seed corn, selecting it very carefully, and hung it up in the granary to dry. i selected several ears from the same field and at the same time, and dried them on the corn tree at school. upon testing them this spring papa's corn does not sprout at all, while mine is sprouting just exactly as good as the golden glow sent out to the school children. this morning i am testing some more of papa's, and if that fails he will have to buy his seed, a thing he has never had to do before. we tested the corn secured from four of our interested farmers last week and one lot germinated; the other three did not. this morning pupils from seven different homes brought seed to be tested. we had a package of last year's seed left and tested several kernels of that, as well as some sent out this year, and we think last year's seed is testing a little the better." the new arithmetic, like the new english, deals with the country. it seems a little odd, just at first, to see boys and girls standing at the board computing potato yields, milk yields, the contents of granaries, the price of bags and the cost of barns and chicken houses; yet what more natural than that the country child should figure out his and perhaps his father's problems in the arithmetic class at school? the geography is no less pertinent. soil formation, drainage, the location and grouping of farm buildings, the physical characteristics of the township and of the county are matters of universal interest and concern. every school in berks county, pennsylvania, is provided with a fine soil survey map of the county, made by the united states geological survey. what more ideal basis for rural geography? here and there a country school is waking up to the physical needs of country children. "country boys are not symmetrically developed," asserts superintendent rapp, of berks county. "they are flat-chested and round-shouldered." that is interesting, indeed. mr. rapp explains: "it is because of the character of their work, nearly all of which tends to flatten the chest. whether or not that is the explanation, the fact remains, and with it the no less evident fact that it is the business of the school to correct the defects. in an effort to do this we have worked out a series of fifty games which the children are taught in the schools." in may a great "field day and play festival" is held, to which the entire county is invited. each school trains and sends in its teams. trolleys, buggies, autos and hay wagons contribute their quota, until five thousand people have gathered in an out-of-the-way spot to help the children enjoy themselves. mr. rapp is a great believer in activity. tireless himself, he has fifty teacher-farmers--men who teach in the winter and farm in the summer--an excellent setting for country boys and girls. he believes in activity for children, too. "if the school appealed as it ought to the motor energies of children, instead of having to drive them in, you would have to drive them out." to prove his point mr. rapp cites the instance of one man teacher, who, before the days of manual training in the schools, decided to have manual training in his one-room berks county school. "he did the work himself," mr. rapp says, "dug out the cellar and set up a shop in it. the only help he had was the help of the pupils, and the work was done in recess time and after school. they made their own tools, cabinets, book-cases, picture-frames, clock-frames, and anything else they wanted. and do you know, when it got dark, that man would send the children home from the school in order to be rid of them." consolidated schools help. they make rural education broader and easier, but the one-room country school, presided over by a live teacher, may be made worth while. social events, sports, contests in farm work and domestic work, studies couched in terms of the country, may all prove potent factors in shaping the child and the community. iv repainting the little red schoolhouse without, as well as within, the little red school-house may be transformed. the course of study may establish a standard in rural thought. the rural school-house may set a standard of rural architecture and landscape gardening. how typical of old-time country schools are the lines: still sits the school-house by the road, a ragged beggar sunning. around it still the sumacs grow, and blackberry vines are running. the unpainted, rough exterior of the little school vied with the unkempt school grounds. both supplied subjects for artistic treatment. to the consternation of the poet and the romancer, the modern one-room school is painted, and the school yard, instead of being filled with a thicket of blackberry and sumac, is laid out for playground, flower-beds and gardens. the up-to-date country school, while far less picturesque, is much more architectural and more useful. the state superintendent of education in wisconsin furnishes free to local school boards plans of modern one-room schools. with a hall at each end for wraps, an improved heating and ventilating device, and all of the light coming from the north side, where there is one big window from near the floor to the ceiling, these buildings, costing from two thousand dollars up, provide in every way for the health and comfort of the children. the superintendent may go farther than to suggest in wisconsin, however, for if a school building becomes dilapidated he may condemn it, and then state aid to local education is refused until suitable buildings are provided. the law has proved an excellent deterrent to educational parsimony. superintendent kern, of rockford, illinois, has done particularly effective work in beautifying his schools. within the schools are tastefully painted and decorated. outside there are flower-beds, hedges, individual garden plots, neatly-cut grass, and all of the other necessaries for a well-kept yard. no longer crude and unsightly, the rockford school yards are models which any one in the neighborhood may copy with infinite advantage. as the school becomes the center of community life local pride makes more and more demands. could you visit some of the finer school buildings in ohio, indiana, wisconsin and illinois you would be better able to understand why men boast of "our school" in the same tone that they use when boasting of their corn yields. v a fairyland of rural education you will perhaps be somewhat skeptical--you big folks who have ceased to believe in little people--when you hear that out in western iowa there is a county which is an educational fairyland. yet if you had traveled up and down the country, gone into the wretched country school buildings, seen the lack-luster teaching and the indifferent scholars, which are so appallingly numerous; if you had read in the report of the investigating committee which has just completed its survey of wisconsin rural schools the statement that in many districts the hog pens were on a better plane of efficiency than the school houses; if you had seen the miserable inadequacy of country schools north, east, south and west, and had then been transported into the midst of the school system of page county, iowa, you would have been sure that you had passed through the looking-glass into the queer world beyond. yet page county is there--a fairyland presided over by a really, truly fairy. the schools in page county, iowa, which, by the way, is one of the best corn counties in iowa, are little republics in which the children have the fun, do the work and grow up strong and kind. each school has its song, its social gatherings, its clubs, and its teams. how you would have pricked up your ears if you had driven past the hawley school and heard a score of lusty voices shouting the school song to the tune of "everybody's doing it!" december was the time of the page county contests, when each school sent its exhibits of dressmaking, cooking, rope-splicing, barn-planning, essay-writing and its corn-judging teams to the county seat, where they were displayed and judged very much as they would be at a county fair. further, it was the time when the prizes were to be awarded to the boy having the best acre of alfalfa, of corn and of potatoes. (queer, isn't it, but last year a girl got the first prize for the best crop of potatoes.) december is a great month in page county. this year more than three thousand exhibits were sent into clarinda, the county seat. every boy and girl is on tip-toe with expectancy, and after the awards the successful schools are as proud as turkey cocks. "we have never taken the thing seriously here before," explained a farmer who had left his work in mid-afternoon and come in to teach the boys of a school how to judge seed corn. "this year we're going down there to clarinda for all that's in it." if he hadn't meant what he said he would scarcely have been spending his hours in the school-room. if the hawleyville boys had not been thoroughly in earnest they would not have been there, after school, learning how to judge corn. the community around each school is agog with excitement while preparations are being made for the county contest. the men folk advise the boys regarding their corn-judging and their models of farm implements and farm buildings, while the women give lessons galore in the mysteries of country cooking, for it is no small matter to be hailed and crowned as the best fourteen-year-old cook in page county, iowa. one page county teacher conducts her domestic science work in the evening at the homes of the girls. on a given day of each week the entire class visits the home of one of the girls, prepares, cooks and eats a meal. what an opportunity to inculcate lessons in domestic economy at first hand! what a chance to show the behind-the-time housekeeper (for there are such even in page county) how things are being done! because page county is a great corn county much school time is devoted to corn. in every school hangs a string of seed corn which is brought in by the boys in the fall, dried during the winter, and in the spring tested for fertility. a babcock milk-tester, owned by the county, circulates from school to school, enabling the children to test the productivity of their cows. teams of boys, under the direction of the school, make their own road drags, and care for stretches of road--from one to five miles. the boys doing the best work are rewarded with substantial prizes. do you begin to suspect the reason for the interest which the big folks take in the doings of page county's little folks? it is because the little folks go to schools which are a vital part of the community. three times a year there is, in each school, a gathering of the friends and parents of the children. sometimes they celebrate thanksgiving, sometimes they have a "parents' day." anyway, the boys decorate the school, the girls cook cake and candy, and the parents come and have a good evening. the children begin with their school song, sung, perhaps, like this kile school song, to the tune of "home, sweet home": . what school is the dearest, the neatest and best, what school is more pleasant, more dear than the rest, whose highways and byways have charms from each day, whose roads and alfalfa, they have come to stay. _chorus._ kile, kile, our own kile, we love her, we'll praise her, we'll all work for kile. . whose corn is so mellow, whose cane is so sweet, whose taters are so mellow, whose coal's hard to beat, whose ma's and whose grandpa's are brave, grand and true, their love for their children they never do rue. there follows a program like the program of any other social evening, except that very often the parents take part as well as the children. the things are interesting, too, like this little duet, sung at the thanksgiving entertainment by two of the kile girls: . if a body pays the taxes, surely you'll agree, that a body earns a franchise, whether he or she. _chorus._ every man now has the ballot, none, you know, have we, but we have brains and we can use them, just as well as he. . if a city's just a household, as it is, they say, then every city needs housecleaning, needs it right away. . every city has its fathers, honors them, i we'en, but every city must have mothers, that the house be clean. . man now makes the laws for women, kindly, too, at that, but they often seem as funny as a man-made hat. the grand event of this fairyland comes in the summer, when the boys and girls from all of the schools go to the county seat for a summer camp, where, between attending classes and lectures, playing games and reveling in the joys of camp life, they come to have a very much broader view of the world and a more intense interest in one another. they are only one-room schools out there in page county, but they have adapted themselves to the needs of the community, focusing the attention of parents and children alike on the bigger things in rural life, and the ways in which a school may help a countryside to appreciate and enjoy them. so the boys and girls of page county have their fairyland, and are devoted to the good fairy, who, in the shape of a generous, kindly county superintendent, helps them to enjoy it. vi the task of the country school the teacher of a one-room school in berks county was quizzing a class about columbus. "where was he born?" she queried. "in genoa." "and where is genoa, ella?" "on the mediterranean sea," replied ella promptly. "what was his business?" was her next question. "he was a sailor," ventured a bright boy. "a sailor," chorused the class. "why was he a sailor, edith?" edith shook her head. "yes, george." "why, because he lived on the sea." "of course. now think a minute. do many of the boys from this country become sailors?" "no'm," from the class. "what do they become?" "farmers," cried the class, hissing the "f" and flattening the "a." certainly, the boys in a farming community, brought up on the farm, naturally become farmers, yet in the interim, between babyhood and farmer life, they go to school. how absurdly easy the task of the school--to determine that they shall be intelligent, progressive, enthusiastic, up-to-date farmers. the girls, too, marry farmers, keep farmers' homes and raise farmers' sons. how simple is the duty of seeing that they are prepared to do these things well! the task of the city school is complex because of the vast number of businesses, professions, industrial occupations and trades which children enter. in comparison the country school has the plainest of plain sailing. what are the ingredients of successful farmers and farmers' wives? what proportion of physical education, of mental training, of technical instruction in agriculture, of suggestions for practical farm work, of dressmaking, sewing and cooking, enter into the making of farmers' boys and farmers' girls who will live up to the traditions of the american farm? to what extent must the school be a center for social activity and social enthusiasm? how shall the school make the farm and the small country town better living places for the men and women of to-morrow? the duty of the country school is simple and clear. it must fit country children for country life. first it must know what are the needs of the country; then, manned by teachers whose training has prepared them to appreciate country problems, it will become the power that a country school ought to be in directing the thoughts and lives of the community. footnotes: [footnote : an extensive reference to this school will be found in "country life and the country school," mabel carney, row, peterson & company, chicago, .] [footnote : supra, pp. - .] chapter x out of the mouths of babes and sucklings i miss belle the sun shone mildly, though it was still late january, while the wind, which occasionally rustled the dry leaves about the fence corners, had scarcely a suggestion of winter in its soft touch. across the white pike, and away on either side over the rolling blue grass meadows, the kentucky landscape unfolded itself, lined with brown and white fences, and dotted with venerable trees. a buggy, drawn by a carefully-stepping bay horse, came over the knoll ahead, framing itself naturally into the beautiful landscape. surely, that must be joe and miss belle; it was so like her, since she always seemed at home everywhere, making herself a natural part of her surroundings. another moment and there was no longer any doubt. it was miss belle with three youngsters crowded into her lap and beside her in the narrow buggy seat, while a dangling leg in the rear suggested an occupant of the axle. "well, well," cried miss belle, cordially, as joe stopped, glad of any excuse not to go, "where are you bound for? you didn't come all the way over to ride back with me?" "no, indeed, miss belle," i laughed back, "no one ever expects to ride with you so near the school-house. i'll walk along ahead until you begin to unload." "go along, now you're casting reflections on joe's speed. come, joe, we'll show him." joe, who did not leave his accustomed walk at once, finally yielded to the suggestion of a gentle blow from the whip and broke into a trot. "lem'me walk with you," cried the rider on the springs, slipping from her perch and stepping out beside the buggy. so we journeyed for half a mile. the horse, under constant urging, jogged along, while the spring rider and i trotted side by side over the well-made pike. then miss belle drew rein in front of a small, yellow house. "now, out you go," she exclaimed to her young companions. "all out here but one. goodbye, dearies. all right, up you get," and in a moment we were snugly fixed in the buggy for a half hour's ride behind joe. "you see those two little girls who got off there," said miss belle, pointing to the house we had just left, "well, they are two of a family of six--two younger than those. their mother died last winter, so naturally i take an interest in them. their father does his best with them, but it is a big task for a man to handle alone." the last child was unloaded by this time, and miss belle, settling herself back comfortably, chatted about her work in a one-room country school in the blue grass belt of kentucky. ii going to work through the children "maybe there are thirty-five families that my school ought to draw from," she began. "six years ago when i took this school some of them surely did need help. dearie me! the things they didn't know about comfort and decency would fix up a whole neighborhood for life. they wore stockings till they dropped off. some of the girls put on sweaters in october, wore them till christmas, washed them, and then wore them till spring. you never saw such utterly wretched homes. there was hardly a window shade in the neighborhood, nor a curtain either. it wasn't that the women didn't care--they simply didn't know. "i saw it all," said miss belle, nodding her head thoughtfully, "and it worried me a great deal at first. i just had to get hold of those people and help them--i had made up my mind to that. impatience wouldn't do, though, so i said to myself, 'now, my dear, don't you be in any hurry. you can't do anything with the old folks, they're too proud. if you succeed at all it's got to be through the children.' so i just waited, keeping my eyes open, and teaching school all of the while, until, the first thing i knew, the way opened up--you never would guess how--it was through biscuits.["] iii beginning on muffins "the folks around here never had seen anything except white bread. there wasn't a piece of cornbread or of graham anywhere. you know what their white bread is, too--heavy, sour, badly made and only half cooked. the old folks were satisfied, though, and there didn't seem to be any way to go at it except through the youngsters. day after day i saw them take raw white biscuits and sandwiches made of salt-rising white bread out of their baskets, wondering how they could eat them. still i didn't say anything, but every lunch time i ate corn muffins or graham wafers, with all of the gusto i could master. one day a little girl up and asked me: "'say, miss belle, what may you all be eatin'?' "'corn muffins,' said i. 'ever taste them?' "'nope.' "'well, wouldn't you like a taste?' "'sure i would.' "she took it, and a great big one, too. 'um,' says she, smacking her lips, 'um.' "'like it?' i asked. "'um,' says she again, like a baby with a full stomach. "'oh, miss belle,' piped up annie, 'how do you make 'em?' "that was the chance i had been waiting for. "'would you like to know?' i asked, and to a chorus of 'sure,' ''deed we would,' 'oh, yes,' i put the recipe on the board, and it wasn't two days before those girls brought in as good corn muffins as i ever tasted. little annie is a good cook--never saw a better--and before the week was out she says to me: "'miss belle, ma's mad with you.' "'what all's the matter?' i asked. "'she says since you taught us to make those corn muffins she'll be eaten out of house and home. the first night i made 'em pa ate eleven. he hasn't slackened off a bit since. he must have 'em every day.' "that made the going pretty easy," miss belle went on. "the muffins were mighty good, they were new, and, by comparison, the white biscuits didn't have a show. it wasn't long before i had the whole neighborhood making corn muffins, graham wafers, black bread, graham bread and whole-wheat bread. they sure did catch on to the idea quickly. every monday i put a recipe on the board. these women knew how to cook the fancy things. it was the plain, simple, wholesome things that they needed to know about, so my recipes were always for them. during the week each of the children cooks the thing and brings it to me, and the one who gets the best result puts a recipe on the board friday. "you see, after i once got started it wasn't hard to follow up any line i liked. by the time i was putting a recipe a week on the board the mothers got naturally interested and would come to school to ask about this recipe and that. they wouldn't take any advice, you understand, not they! they knew all about cooking, so they thought, but they were mighty proud of the things their daughters did, particularly when they took the prizes at the county fair. besides that, it made a whole lot of difference at home, because the things they made helped out a lot and tasted mighty good on the table." miss belle's next move was against the cake--soggy, sticky stuff, full of butter, that was very generally eaten by all of the families that could afford it. expensive and fearfully indigestible it made up, together with bread, almost the entire contents of most lunch baskets. "i couldn't see quite how to go about the cake business," miss belle commented, "because they were particularly proud of it. finally, though, i hit on an idea. one of the women in the neighborhood was sick. she was a good cook and knew good cooking when she saw it, so i got my sister to make an angel cake, which i took around to her. i do believe it was the first light cake she had ever tasted--anyway, she was tickled to death. it wasn't long after that before every one who could afford to do it was making angel food. of course it's expensive, but since they were bound to make cake, that was a lot better than the other." similar tactics gradually replaced the fried meats by roasts and stews. when miss belle came, meat swam in fat while it cooked and came from the stove loaded with grease. everybody fried meat, and when by chance they bought a roast they began by boiling all of the juice out of it before they put it in the oven. miss belle's stews and roasts made better eating, though. the men-folks liked them hugely and the old frying process was doomed. "no," concluded miss belle, laughingly, "you can't do a thing with the old folks. why if i was to go into a kitchen belonging to one of those women and tell her how to sift flour she would run me out quick, but when annie comes home and makes such muffins that the man of the family eats eleven the first time, there is no way to answer back. the muffins speak for themselves." iv taking the boys in hand while the girls were making over the diet of the neighborhood miss belle was working through the boys to improve the strains of corn used by the farmers, the methods of fertilizing and the quality of the truck patches. a few years ago when the farmer scorned newfangled ideas it was the boys that took home methods for numbering and testing each ear of corn to determine whether or not the kernels on it would sprout when they were planted. the farmer who turns a deaf ear to argument can offer no effective reply to a corn-tester in which only one kernel in three has sprouted. the ears are infertile, from one cause or another, and the sooner he replaces them by fertile seed the better for his corn crop. out beside a white limestone pike stands the school in which miss belle has done her work. one would hardly stop to look at it, because it differs in no way from thousands of similar country school-houses. modest and unassuming, like miss belle, it holds only one feature of real interest--the faces of the children. bright, eager, enthusiastic, they labor earnestly over their lessons in order that they may get at their "busy work," and linger over their "busy work" during recess and after school, because it glides so swiftly from their deft fingers. in this, as in everything else which she does, miss belle has a system. the child whose lessons are not done, and done up to a certain grade, is not taught new stitches or new designs. even the youngest responds to the stimulus, and the little girl in a pink frock, with pink ribbons on her brown pig-tails, lays aside the mat she is making to write "annie belle lewis" on the board, and to tell you that she is seven; while john murphy, of the mature age of eleven, stops crocheting ear-mufflers for a moment to tell you what he is doing and why he does it. v "busy work" as an asset "you never would guess what a help the 'busy work' is," smiled miss belle. "you see, they never can do it until their lessons are finished, so they are as good at arithmetic as they are at patching. then i always teach the little ones patterns and stitches where they have to count, 'one, two, three, four, five, and drop one,' you know, and in the shortest time they learn their number work. it seems to go so much more quickly when they do it in connection with some pieces that they can see. but you never would guess the best thing the sewing has done--it has stopped gossiping. it's hard to believe, i know, but it's true. there used to be a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. people told tales, there was ill feeling, and folks quarreled a great deal of the time. it wasn't long before i found out that it was the girls who did most of the tale-bearing. no wonder, either! they weren't very busy in school, and they had nothing much to do at home except to listen and talk. really, they hadn't any decent interest in life. of course there was no use in saying anything, but i felt that if i could get them busy at something they liked they would stop talking. it wasn't enough to start them at dressmaking, either, but when i started in on hard, fancy work designs i had them. they made pretty clothes, embroidered them; made lace and doilies. most of the girls can pick up a new irish-lace pattern from a fashion-book as easily as i can, and they are rabid for new patterns. the same girls who did most of the tale-bearing are busy at work, and i find them swapping patterns and recipes instead of stories." while the girls patch, darn, crochet, hem, knit, weave baskets, make garments and do the various kinds of "busy work," the boys clean the school yard, plant walnut trees--mrs. faulconer, the county superintendent, is having the school children plant nut trees along all the pikes--and do anything else which is not beneath their dignity. "they have no work benches," lamented miss belle, "i hope they will get them soon, although there is really no place to put them." indeed, in a little building packed with fifty children and the school-room furniture the space is narrow. yet this little one-room building at locust grove has left such a mark on the community that when the county school board recently decided to transfer miss belle to a larger school the member from her district promptly resigned, and refused to be placated until every other member of the board had apologized to him and promised to leave miss belle in his school. "we never saw the old gentleman mad before," said a neighbor. "but he certainly was mad then. he had watched miss belle's work grow, and knew what it had meant to the children; so when they proposed to take her away he went right up in the air." vi marguerite what wonder? he had seen the magic workings of a hand that felt the pulse, judged the symptoms, and prescribed a sure-to-cure remedy for a countryside full of ignorance, drunkenness, bitter hatreds and never-ending quarrels. within a stone's throw of his house he had seen the transformation in the life of a little girl named marguerite. since her birth she had lived in darkness, but into her desolate home miss belle had sent light. "you never saw a worse home," says miss belle. "her mother was woefully ignorant of everything in the way of home-making. the children were wretchedly dressed. the house was barrenness itself--no shades, no curtains, no decorations of any kind. it was pathetic. when she came to school neither she nor her mother could sew a stitch." marguerite, an apt girl with her fingers, eagerly learned the needlework lessons of the school. she taught her mother to sew, while she herself made portieres and curtains, lightening up the old home with a rare new beauty. here again is lillie, who is very slow at needlework and arithmetic, but who has put the family diet on a wholesome basis by learning to cook some of the most delicious, nourishing dishes. her bread--the best in fayette county--is light as a feather. hannah comes back after leaving school to learn how to ply her needle. until a year ago christmas she could not sew a stitch; now her stitches are so neat as to be almost invisible. mrs. hawly, aroused to enthusiasm by her thirteen-year-old daughter, has come to school, learned plain and fancy sewing, and started to make her own and her daughter's clothes. everywhere are the marks of a teacher's handiwork stamped indelibly on the lives of her scholars and their families. small wonder that the old gentleman on the board was loath to part with miss belle! vii winning over the families with supreme joy miss belle tells of her conquest of the fathers of her boys and girls--her family, as she calls it. "the children were very poorly cared for," she says. "the fathers spent the money for whiskey, and the mothers lacked the means and the knowledge to clothe the children better. sometimes they were pitiful in their poor shoes and thin clothes. well, sir, we got up a christmas entertainment, and, except for one or two, the children wore the same clothes they had been coming to school in all winter--shabby, patched and dirty as some of them were. they stood up there, though, one and all, to do their turns and speak their pieces, and their fathers were ashamed. they saw their children in old clothes, and the children of some of the neighbors all fixed up, and they just couldn't stand it. "it surely did make a difference the next year." miss belle's cheery face broadened with a satisfied smile. "the men didn't say a word--you know our men aren't in the habit of saying very much--but they went to town themselves the day before the entertainment and came back with new dresses for the girls and new clothes for the boys. of course some of them were so small they would scarcely go on, while others were miles big; but every one had something new and no one felt badly. "this christmas," concluded miss belle, "our entertainment packed the school-house, and some were turned away. just to show you how crowded it was--there were twenty-four babies there. i was ready for them, though, with two pounds of stick candy; so whenever a baby squalled he got a stick of candy quick." strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the schools. they would never have come had it not been for the wonderful things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm. one girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework, brought her mother to school--a hard woman who had a standing quarrel with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. it took a little tact, but when the right moment arrived miss belle suggested that she pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. the woman went at last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, substituting kindness for her previous rule of incivility. to her surprise her enemies have all disappeared. the mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children, have for the first time seen one another at their best. sitting over a friendly cup of tea, chatting about jane's dress or willie's lessons, they have learned the art of social intercourse. slowly the lesson has come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of five years ago. nine months in each year miss belle mccubbing holds her classes in the locust grove school, which stands on the military pike, seven miles outside of lexington, kentucky. "angels watch over that school," says mrs. faulconer. doubtless these angels are the good angels of the community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness. boys and girls, doing miss belle's "busy work," fathers and mothers learning from their children, have heaped upon miss belle's deserving head the peerless praise of a community come to itself--regenerated in thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the lives of a teacher and her children. chapter xi wide-awake sleepy eye i fitting schools to needs this is the story of a school that was built to fit a town, and it begins with a hypothetical case. suppose that there was a town--a prosperous town of some , souls, set down in the middle of a well-to-do farming district. as for business, the town has a few industries and some stores; the countryside is engaged in general farming. suppose that the school board of such a town should come to you and say: "we are looking for a school superintendent. are you the one?" suppose you said, "yes." how would you prove your point? out in minnesota there is a town named sleepy eye, set down in a well-to-do farming district. at the head of the sleepy eye schools there is j. a. cederstrom. mr. cederstrom has proved by a very practical demonstration that he is "the one." when mr. cederstrom took charge of the sleepy eye schools he found an excellent school plant, an intelligent community and a school system that was like the school system of every other up-to-date two-thousand-inhabitant town in the middle west. before mr. cederstrom there lay a choice. he could continue the work exactly as it had always been carried on, improve the school machinery, and make a creditable showing at examination time. that path looked like the path of least resistance. mr. cederstrom did not take it, however. instead he made up his mind that after measuring the community and the children he would, to use his own words, "fit the work to their respective needs." "the work offered has been somewhat varied," mr. cederstrom explains. "i have not attempted to follow any set course or outline of work made out by some one else who is not familiar with our conditions and needs." where does there exist a more admirable statement of the principle underlying the new education? this man, when given charge of a school plant, deliberately chose to make the school fit the needs of the community upon which the school was dependent for support. oblivious of tradition he set about remodeling the school in the interest of its constituency. sleepy eye is located in a farming district. many of the boys who come to the sleepy eye school will manage farms when they are grown men, and many of the sleepy eye girls will marry farmers and manage them. here were farmer men and farmer women in the making. what more natural than to organize a department of agriculture? a department of agriculture in a school? yes, truly; and a short winter course for farm boys and girls who could not come the year round, and a school experiment station with school farms for the children, and a live farmers' institute that met in the school and was fed and cared for by the department of domestic science, and all sorts of courses built up around the needs of the children and of the community. ii getting the janitor in line as a result of this method of course-making the school janitor found himself on the instruction staff of the school. one day a couple of the short course boys were in the engine-room while the janitor was repairing a defective pipe in the heating plant. the boys lent a hand in the work; and one of them, having a practical turn of mind, suggested that he would like to learn more about pipe-fitting in order to install a water system on the farm at home. the janitor repeated the remark to mr. cederstrom, who called the boys out and had a talk with them regarding the possibilities of the plan. the outlook for the course was not bright. every instructor in the mechanical department was working on full time. only one way out remained and that way led to the janitor. the janitor was a busy man during the day, but his evenings were comparatively free. after some parleying he agreed to give a course in elementary plumbing and steam-fitting on tuesday and thursday evenings at seven-thirty. so the boys came to school in the evening, and under the direction of the school janitor learned how to install a water system in their homes. their work for the year consisted in making a model water system for a house, a barn and the other farm buildings. the materials for this course were picked up from the school's scrap-heap. perhaps some people will not understand the spirit of it--getting the janitor in line to give a course in steam-fitting from the odds and ends that are found on the scrap-heap. such a proceeding is unconventional in the extreme. but, on the other hand, here were boys who wished to know how they might go back and improve their homes. who shall say that the imparting of such knowledge is not the business of a real school? iii the department of agriculture let us go back for a moment to the organization of the department of agriculture. the school at sleepy eye have available what every other school should have--five acres of tillable ground. this tract at sleepy eye is devoted to tests and experimental work, to flower gardens and to individual school gardens--one for each child who applies. the experimental work and tests are carried on exactly as they would be at a state experiment station. in the section of minnesota surrounding sleepy eye, corn is the great staple crop. therefore on the demonstration grounds of the department of agriculture, independent school district no. , sleepy eye, minnesota, they are growing a number of plots of corn, each plot variously planted, fertilized, cultivated, and cared for, so that the children may learn at first-hand scientific methods of discovering the best kinds of crop, and the best ways of handling a crop in their own locality. the allotment of the school gardens carried with it instruction in engineering and in civics at the same time that the bonds between home and school were cemented. the part of the school land that was to be devoted to school gardens was turned over to the older boys, who surveyed it in exactly the same way that the united states government surveyed the homestead tracts. the plot was laid out in towns and ranges. the sections were staked and numbered. then the children who wished to take up plots went into the newly surveyed territory, picked their plots, and filed an application with the land commissioner for a plot, stating the section, town and range. after that a line formed and the plots ( � feet) were allotted. no child was permitted to take up an allotment unless he had the endorsement of a parent or guardian. the form on which this endorsement was secured was as follows: name____________________ grade______________ _______ sec____ town__________ range________ application for land in public school garden, dept. of agr., sleepy eye high school "it is assumed that the parent or guardian who endorses this application will co-operate with the school authorities and have the applicant care for and weed said land during the growing season, and devote at least two and a half hours each week this summer to the agricultural work as may be directed or required by the director of the department of agriculture, mr. haw. "i hereby apply for...... sec...... town....... range...... in the public school garden of sleepy eye high school, and will cultivate and care for same as may be directed by the proper authorities, and will keep a careful record of the returns therefrom and report same on or before oct. , . i will do the additional agricultural work that may be directed as indicated above. ................................. applicant. endorsed by ........................ parent or guardian." the form carried on its opposite side statements showing the character of crop and its value, the amount paid for seeds and an itemized statement of the returns. the school gardens proved an admirable success. the children had learned the details of a great historical event in their own state--the giving out of free land; the boys had conducted a miniature survey; rivalry had been developed in the competition over plots; the gardens, laid out side by side, served as a splendid object lesson in quality of work; no boy or girl could allege a teacher's unfairness from an untilled, weedy plot; the parents were made to feel that the school was doing something practical for their children; the children were taught a simple form of accounting and cost-keeping; and, best of all, they were made to feel their citizenship in the school. the department of agriculture has, in addition to its experimental farm, a well-equipped laboratory, in which tests and experiments are carried on. sleepy eye is located in a dairy section; therefore one of the chief functions of this laboratory has been the testing of milk. any farmer may bring milk samples and have the babcock test applied to determine the percentage of butter fat which an individual cow is yielding. iv a short course for busy people in the neighborhood of sleepy eye, as in many other places, there are many boys and girls who cannot attend school throughout the year, but who would welcome a chance to go to school in the winter months. agricultural colleges have recognized this need by the organization of "short courses" during the winter months. only a few children can go to college, however. lack of preparation and lack of funds compel them to remain at home. it was for them that the school at sleepy eye organized a short course like that given in the agricultural colleges, extending from the end of november to the middle of march. of the pupils attending this course, some of the boys are as old as thirty-seven, and some of the girls as young as fifteen; yet all come, eager to find out some of the things which the school has to teach them. the agricultural work of the short course centered around the agricultural problems of the brown county farm. planting, milk and cream testing, work in seed testing and germination, and treatment of seeds for fungus growths, corn judging, and similar topics covered the work of the term. the short course boys had already learned many lessons in the practical school of farm work. the school at sleepy eye offered them in addition the knowledge which science has recently accumulated regarding the work of the farm. as the successful farmer must be a trained mechanic, the short course laid great stress on manual training. the boys were taught how to handle and care for tools, how to frame a building, how to make eveners, hayracks, watering troughs, wagon boxes, and similar useful farm articles. in the blacksmith shop the simpler problems in forging were covered, including the making of hooks, clevises, cold chisels and other small tools. while the boys were engaged in agricultural and mechanical work the girls took domestic science. in addition to the elementary work in cooking and sewing there were advanced courses in dress designing, so planned as to prepare a girl to work out her own patterns and make up her own materials. let no one suppose that the short course neglected academic work. indeed, it was originally intended to enable boys and girls who felt too big for the local school, or who had no time to take the entire term there, to review common school subjects. the courses in industrial work, in agriculture and in domestic science were offered in addition to these regular school studies. the proof of the pudding is in the eating. the boys and girls who take the short course for the first year come back in considerable numbers to take a second and a third year of work during the winter months. the short course is a success, because it gives the boys and girls who take it training and knowledge which they would not otherwise acquire. v letting the boys do it the school at sleepy eye needed a farm building on the school farm. the short course boys and some of the older boys in the school were anxious to learn. what more natural procedure than for the school to buy the lumber and have the boys do the work? exactly this proceeding was followed, and the pupils erected the building which they needed to carry on the applied work of the school. the mechanical work of the school is splendidly organized. first of all, the pupils built a large part of the equipment themselves. five simple forges, made by the students of pineboards and concrete, form an excellent shop equipment, besides giving the boys who did the work an inkling of the ease with which a forge can be erected in connection with the tool-house on the farm. the boys built a turning lathe, on which the wood turning of the school is done. besides the shop-work there is a well-organized course in mechanical drawing. the whole department is prepared to teach boys, particularly farm boys, some of the things which they will most need in the mechanical work on the farms. the mechanical courses are open to the boys in the grades, as well as to the high school and the short course pupils. the work is graded, and may be followed through the high school course. vi a look at the domestic science while the boys are in the shops the girls are occupied with domestic science. a well-equipped laboratory and sewing-room furnish the basis for some thorough work. the domestic science department is one to which mr. cederstrom points with justifiable pride. "of all my constructive work since coming here," he says, "i probably take my greatest pride in our domestic science department, where elementary and advanced work is offered in cooking and in household economy." because the space in the school was small, and the demand for instruction large, mr. cederstrom planned the domestic science tables himself, and superintended their building. again the effectiveness of the school's work is shown by its results. with the modest equipment which the funds and space available provided, the girls in the domestic science department each year serve a dinner to the farmers and farmers' wives attending the annual farmers' institute held in the school in february. on one occasion the department baked almost half a cord of bread, roasted one hundred and forty pounds of beef, and fed five hundred and seventeen persons at one dinner. the sewing work includes a complete course in dressmaking. students are required to make patterns from pictures selected in fashion magazines. these patterns are then used in cutting out the garments, which the girls themselves make up. each girl in the high school is required to take at least one year each of cooking and of sewing. these courses occupy five periods a week. an additional year in each course is optional. most of the girls eagerly elect it. mr. cederstrom takes a very practical view of such educational matters. "our girls like the domestic science work," he says. "they take as much pride in bringing to my office a good loaf of bread, or a well-prepared dish of vegetables or meat as they do in being able to give a perfect demonstration of a theorem in geometry, or a perfect conjugation or declension of a latin word. possibly ten years from now they may have more demand upon their ability to prepare a square meal for a hungry life companion, or to cut out a dress or apron for a younger member of the family than they will have need of doing some of the other things which i have just mentioned." they do not teach domestic science for its own sake out in sleepy eye; they see farther ahead than that. mr. cederstrom is making his work practical, because, as he says, "we are anxious to do what little we can toward making our girls more efficient and capable as housekeepers, wives, and possibly as mothers." vii how it works out there are two questions that naturally arise: first, what is the effect of this work on the children? second, what is its effect on the farmers? both questions must be answered briefly, though the answers to both might be followed out through pages of illustrative detail. the children like the school at sleepy eye. the boys and girls come early and stay late. the school doors open at eight o'clock and are not closed until dark. there are always pupils there from the beginning to the end of that period. the children are not interested in the applied work alone. their interest in that has led them very often to an interest in some of the academic studies toward which they had no particular inclination. the homes in sleepy eye are also interested in the school. as one woman remarked: "my girls like to do work about the house now; they never did before." school work which gives girls a new desire and a new viewpoint on the work in the home is a step, and a long one, toward building sounder homes and stronger family ties. there are some sleepy eye homes in which the interest of the boys in the school shops has led their parents to buy benches and tools which the children may use at home. the school at sleepy eye has interested the farmers. it has persuaded them that high grade seed is better than mongrel seed. consequently the farmers are shelling more bushels of corn to the acre planted. the school has persuaded the farmers that well-bred cattle are more profitable than mongrel cattle. consequently the farmers are raising the standard of their herds. when the farmers come into sleepy eye they go to the school. perhaps they have milk to be tested; perhaps they are looking for suggestions regarding soil or blight; perhaps they want to know the latest facts about the scale or rust; perhaps they want some advice about farm implements. in any case they go to the school. the farmers have been led to the school through the children. the boys have gone home to their fathers with suggestions and improvements of inestimable value in the management of the farm. the girls have gone home to their mothers with practical ideas on the running of the household. these demonstrations of school efficiency have done more than argument or persuasion ever could hope to do in convincing the fathers and mothers of the usefulness of the school. viii theoretical and practical the work in mechanics seems to interfere in no essential particular with the regular academic work of the school. the boys and girls are interested and enthusiastic. that counts for a great deal. then, too, boys and girls come to school for the mechanical work who would not come at all if the mechanical work were not there. the academic work which such boys take is clear gain. through the mechanical work many pupils become interested in the school, and the school means, for all pupils, academic as well as applied work. "we do not discount those parts of an education that were once the sum total of the work in every high school," mr. cederstrom says. "they are all offered and taken by the students. we are trying to give in addition to these academic branches the kind of education which will appeal to the children as being of a common-sense order." there is in the high school a latin course, a scientific course, beside the agricultural course and the industrial course. all of the students are required to take this academic work. many, in addition, take the industrial and agricultural work, even when they do not receive credit in their academic course. each high school student is allowed two periods a day in laboratory work, shop-work, or some other form of applied education. in addition to those periods, the students may work in the shops or laboratory after school, if they please. many of them get their applied education in that way. how great is the fire that a little spark kindles! it was more than a thousand miles away that i first heard of the school at sleepy eye. it happened in this way. the clock had scarcely announced that it was high noon when a group of men drew their chairs up to a dinner table generously loaded with country hotel fare. there were two school directors in this happen-so party, a carter, a salesman, a lawyer, a farmer and two teachers, who talked with a professional twang. the salesman listened impatiently to the educational clap-trap, watching for an opening between phrases. when at last the loophole appeared: "gentlemen," said he, "you're interested in schools? then you ought to see some real schools. did you ever go to a school to listen to a phonograph?" then, turning to the farmers: "did you ever go to school to get your horses shod? you go to school for both in sleepy eye, minnesota. they're the greatest schools i have ever seen. they run from seven in the morning till eight at night, and accommodate every kid that wants an education. gentlemen, if you want to see real schools go to sleepy eye." chapter xii the south for the new education i a dream of empire a keen atlanta business man leaned forward on his chair and spoke eagerly. "yes, sir," he exclaimed, "the world is ours. we have the biggest, finest batch of undeveloped resources in the country--perhaps on the planet. iron, coal, stone, timber, power--our hills are full of them, so full that we have never even inventoried our treasure-house. our possibilities are beyond the power of words, and we've got to live up to them." this man knew georgia and the south. he had helped, and still is helping to convert the iron, coal, timber, and water-power into southern prosperity. he was still unsatisfied. "the trouble with us is, we can't go fast enough," he admitted. "do you know why? do you know the biggest burden we have to carry--the most determined enemy we have to fight? well, sir, it's ignorance--the ignorance of the common man about his farm or his trade; the ignorance of the business man about outside things; the ignorance of the teachers who are supposed to enlighten us." he leaned forward again. "that sounds strong, doesn't it? but it's gospel." i reminded him of the rapidity with which the south was forging ahead in its educational activities. he threw his head back proudly. "of course," he cried, "the experiment stations, the colleges, the high schools, the club movement, and all that--of course we're going ahead. i'm not speaking of that. my point is that we must wake up to two things. first of all, we must never make the mistakes that you did in the north when you built up your educational system. that means no pedantry, or classical snobbery. we mustn't go that way. our way is plain though. i see it more clearly every time i think the matter over--we must train the intelligence of the southern people." he continued, in his enthusiastic mood. "yes, there is a great future for the south. its resources make a future possible; but unless those resources are intelligently used, our prosperity will not go very deep, or reach very far. we must take the people with us." this man's view typifies the educational vision that is sweeping over the south. "we must take the people with us," he said. there is nothing novel in the idea; but coming as it did from a representative business man, it carried weight and conviction. another thing he said in the same connection enforced his argument. "they talk about the race problem in the south," he said. "that is, the old generation does. we younger men are not so much concerned about the race problem as we are concerned about efficiency in industry and in agriculture. the races are here to stay; we cannot change that if we would. meanwhile, all of us, whites as well as blacks, are slovenly in our farming, indifferent in our business transactions, and hopelessly behind in our methods of conducting affairs. from top to bottom we need trained intelligence. that, more than anything else, will solve the south's problems." ii finding the way the step is a short one from a vision of trained intelligence to a demand for effective education. throughout the south, the will to progress is everywhere in evidence, and with unerring accuracy, one community after another is turning to this as the way. there is no southern city in which the agitation for increased educational activity is not being pushed with vigor and intensity. on all hands there appears the result of a conviction that the only means by which the effectiveness of the south can be maintained and increased, lie along the path of increased educational opportunities. the south, if it is to fulfill the greatness of its promise, must remodel its educational system in the interests of a larger south, as the west has remodeled its educational system in the interest of a larger west. the notable state universities of the middle and far west, the normal schools, the prevalent system of education, have been felt, and are now being felt, in the progressive, efficient, western population. nothing less than a generally educated public could have made the west in the brief years that have elapsed since it was a wilderness. nothing save general education can make the resources of the south yield up their greatest advantage to the southern people. the time for traditional formalism has passed in the south, as it has passed in every other progressive community. whatever the needs of the community may be, those needs must be met through some form of public education. in the south the most pressing need appears in the demand for intelligent farming. for decades the tenant farmers, largely negroes, cultivated their farms as their fathers had cultivated. they raised cotton because the raising of cotton offered the path of least resistance. farm animals were scarce, because the farm animals only came with surplus cash, and surplus cash was scarce indeed in districts where the tenant farmers lived through the year on the credit obtained from the prospective cotton crops. there was little corn raised, because the people did not understand the need for raising corn, nor did they realize the financial possibilities of the southern corn crop. in a word, the agricultural south lacked the knowledge which modern scientific agriculture has brought. the past generation has seen a revolution in southern agriculture, because of the revolution which has occurred in southern agricultural education. led by the experiment stations and universities, the south has undertaken to reorganize its system of living from the land. the atlanta banker fully realized the need for culture. he was himself a cultured gentleman; but he also saw that before the people of the south could have culture, they must have an economic system directed with sufficient intelligence to supply the necessaries of life, which must always be taken for granted before the possibilities of culture are realized. cultural education comes after, and not before, education for intelligent and direct vocational activity. during the educational revolution of the past twenty-five years, no section of the country has thrown itself into the foreground of educational progress with more vigor and with greater earnestness and zeal than that displayed in the south. in certain directions the south has proved a leader in the inauguration and administration of new activities. in other directions the southern states have followed actively and energetically. a traveler through the new south stumbles unavoidably upon countless illustrations of the part which modern education is playing in southern life. individuals, families, communities, are being re-made by the new education. iii jem's father jem wasn't a good boy, but he was interested in his school. he was one of those fortunate boys who lived in a county that had been possessed by the corn club idea, and the corn club was the thing which had given jem his school interest. jem never took to studies. each year he had told his mother that "there weren't no use in goin' back to that there school again." persistently she had sent him back, until one year when jem found a reason for going. a new teacher came to jem's school--a young man fresh from normal school, full of enthusiasm, energy, and new ideas. the boys felt from the start that he was their friend, and before many weeks had elapsed, the community began to feel his presence. this new teacher was particularly enthusiastic over the "club idea." "we must get the boys and girls doing something together" he kept saying to his classes. the year wore on, but interest in the school did not flag, because all through the winter months there were entertainments, parents' meetings, literary meetings, spelling bees, reading hours, and other evening activities. in fact, the time came when there was a light in the school-house three or four nights in each week. toward spring the new teacher began to push the "club idea." he started with the boys, and, as luck would have it, picked out jem. "jem," he said one day, "i want you to stay after school, i want to speak to you a minute." jem stayed, not knowing exactly what was coming. when the rest of the pupils had tumbled out of the school door, and disappeared along the muddy road, the teacher and jem sat down together. "jem," said the teacher, "we ought to have a corn club in this school." jem looked up doggedly, but gave no sign of interest or enthusiasm. "you see," the teacher said, "it's this way. farming isn't all that it might be around here. people raise things the way they have always been raised. our county superintendent has an idea. he proposes to teach the farmers in this county how to raise corn." jem looked skeptical. "are you to do the teaching?" he asked. "no," was the answer, "you are." "i?" said jem. "yes," said the teacher, "you and the other boys in the school." jem scratched his head. "i ain't never taught no one nothing in my life," he commented. "it's this way," the teacher went on. "up at washington and out at the state college they have been doing a lot of thinking and working with corn. they found, for instance, that if you pick seed corn carefully, you get a better crop than if you are careless in seed selection. they have also found that if you follow certain rules about planting and cultivation you get a better crop. for years the men at the experiment station and at washington talked about these things in farmers' bulletins. they established experiment farms, and demonstration farms, too. lately they have been doing something more, and something which i think is better than anything so far--they have decided to have the boys teach their fathers how to raise corn." "do you mean to say," asked jem, "that i could teach dad anything about corn-raisin'?" "yes," said the teacher, "you can, and, what is more, you will, won't you?" "well," said jem, "i dunno." "here is what we have to do," said the teacher. "this year the county superintendent is going to offer prizes for the boy with the best acre of corn. he sends out rules. you have to plough a certain way, plant a certain way, and cultivate a certain way. if you do not follow the rules you are not allowed to stay in the contest. now i'll tell you what i want to do. the boys in this school are as smart, if not smarter, than the boys in any other school in the country; so i guess it is up to us to get some of those prizes right here at home." jem was visibly interested. "money prizes?" he asked. "yes, money prizes," said the teacher. "the first prize will be fifty dollars." jem's eyes opened wide. "i'm in for that," he said with conviction. that night, when jem sat down to supper, he broached the corn proposition to his father. "shucks," his father exclaimed. "you raise an acre of corn? why you wouldn't get twenty-five bushels!" "twenty-five," said jem, contemptuously. "i'd get a hundred." "a hundred," said his father. "here, look here, boy, i have been farming this land for thirty odd years, and the best i ever done on an acre of corn was seventy bushels. i'll tell you what, though," he added conclusively, "this here talk about corn clubs makes me tired. you and your hundred bushels! i was looking over the paper when it came in this noon, and i saw a piece about a chap over by southport with over a hundred bushels to the acre. do you know what i'm goin' to do tonight? i'm goin' to write that editor a letter, and tell him that any paper that publishes lies like that ain't fit for my family to see. this year's subscription ain't run out, but they don't need to send me the rest. i'll get a paper somewhere else." despite home opposition, jem persisted and prevailed. his father gave him an acre grudgingly, but it was a good acre. and when, following the rules which he and the other boys who had agreed to enter the contest read over with the teacher, he disked his land and ploughed his narrow, deep furrows, he listened, not without misgivings, to the remarks which his elder brother passed at his expense. "say, jem," this brother remarked, "you have spent three times as much time on that acre as any acre of corn raised in this county was ever worth. are you diggin' graves for 'possums?" when, later in the season, jem cultivated with persistent regularity, he was forced to listen to similar comments. jem wasn't good at repartee; so he said nothing; but, sustained by the encouragement of the new teacher, who came to see his acre every week, jem followed the rules to the letter. he had his reward at harvest time. when the ears first set it became apparent that jem had a good crop. as they developed, the goodness of the crop became more manifest; but when the acre had been harvested, put through the sheller and bagged, and jem had stowed in his pocket a certificate of "ninety-six bushels on one acre," it was time for some explanations. "jem," said his father at the supper table on the evening of that memorable day when jem's corn went through the sheller, and his certificate showed ninety-six bushels, "i wrote a letter to that editor, and sent him next year's subscription in advance." iv club life militant the experience of jem's father has been duplicated many times by parents and communities during the past ten years of club growth in the south. the school, working through the children, has educated fathers, mothers, villages, and whole counties. all of the agencies of government,--local, state, and national,--have cooperated to make the children's clubs one of the leading agencies in developing that trained intelligence which is so great an asset in the prosperity of any community. thanks to the tireless efforts of men like william h. smith, the children's clubs have become one of the most aggressive factors in educating rural communities to higher standards of efficiency. there are many kinds of clubs--corn clubs, potato clubs, tomato clubs, pig clubs. anything which the children can raise is a legitimate object of club activity. the work in the south started with corn clubs. the corn-club idea in mississippi grew out of an educational experience of professor william h. smith.[ ] for years professor smith had taught, in a mildly progressive way, the time-honored subjects which were included in the study-course of the rural school. two of professor smith's students, a boy of twenty and a girl of seventeen, left school; and they left, as the boy told professor smith very frankly, because the school taught them very little that would be of use later on in the work which they would be called upon to do. this boy expected to grow cotton; the girl expected to marry the boy, manage his domestic affairs and attend to the many duties which fall to the lot of women on a farm. when he left school, the boy put it to professor smith in this way: "i am goin' to be a farmer. i ain't fitted to be nothing else, and book learnin' ain't helpin' me none. it's just a waste of time. i've got to clear land and work it into a farm. if i was goin' to be a bookkeeper or an engineer, or somethin', what you are teachin' me here might help; but i can't remember that i have ever learned a thing since i got the hang how to figure the interest on a mortgage, that will be of any account to me on a farm. almost all the boys has got to be a farmer like me. you know, professor, it appears to me like these schools for the people ought to be teachin' the children of the people how to make a livin' on the farm--how to make life better and easier, instead of just makin' us plum disgusted with ourselves." this experience, standing out among a multitude of similar experiences, led professor smith to an interest in some form of educational work that would help boys and girls in their lives on the farm. the outcome of his thinking and experimenting, combined with the thinking and experimenting of many another capable educational leader, is the club idea for boys and girls alike. there was a real need for the corn club. for the year the total corn area in alabama was , , acres. on these acres the farmers secured an average of . bushels per acre. ten years later, in , the total acreage had decreased to , , , and the per acre yield had decreased to . bushels per acre. here was a decrease of , acres in corn; of , , bushels in the corn crop; and of . of a bushel in the average yield per acre. the boys' corn club movement was started in alabama in . that year two hundred and sixty-five boys were enrolled. the average per acre yield of corn in the state was . bushels. the next year the enrollment of boys reached twenty-one hundred; the total yield increased more than sixty per cent.; and the average number of bushels per acre rose to eighteen. the figures for and show an increase, though less extensive, in the total acreage and the total yield of corn for each year. southern land will grow corn. properly treated, it will better a yield of twelve bushels per acre, five, ten, and even fifteen-fold. the leaders of southern agricultural education knew this. they knew, furthermore, that the betterment could never be brought about until the farmers were convinced that it was possible. how could they be shown? the farmers' bulletin had a place; the experiment farm had a place; but if it were only possible to make every farm an experiment farm! the way lay through the boys. they could be induced to organize miniature experiments in scores of farms in every county, and then the farmers would see! backed by a carefully worked out organization, the authorities set out with the deliberate purpose of educating the farmer through his son. if his corn yield was low, he would learn how to get a larger yield. if he raised no corn, he would learn of the spot-cash value of corn. boys were organized into clubs; directions were given; prizes were offered, and the boys went to work with a will. for the most part they took one acre. when compared to the yield on surrounding acres, the corn crops secured by the boys are little short of phenomenal. in pike county, alabama, where the number of boys engaging in corn club contests increased from one in to two hundred and seventy in , the average number of bushels per acre grown by the boys rose from . to . . in the entire state there were one hundred and thirty-seven boys who made over a hundred bushels per acre each in . the average per acre for each of these boys was one hundred and twenty-seven bushels, and the total profit on their corn crop was $ , . records made by individual boys through the southern states run very high. claude mcdonald, of hamer, s. c., raised - / bushels at a cost of . ¢ a bushel. junius hill, of attalla, ala., raised - / bushels. ben leath, of kensington, ga., raised - / bushels. john bowen, of grenada, miss., raised - / bushels. eber a. kimbrough, alexander city, ala., raised - / bushels; and bebbie beeson, monticello, miss., raised - / bushels.[ ] these boys were all state prize winners. there are several things worthy of note about these record yields. practically all of the high yields were made on deeply ploughed, widely separated rows. the record made by bennie beeson ( - / bushels, at a cost of fourteen cents per bushel) was secured on dark, upland soil, with a clay sub-soil, ploughing to a depth of ten inches, rows three feet apart, hills six inches apart, with ten cultivations. beeson used - / tons of manure and eight dollars' worth of other fertilizer on his acre. the seed corn was new era. barnie thomas, who grew bushels on rich, sandy loam, ploughed nine inches, planted his rows three and one-half feet apart, and kept the hills ten inches apart. he cultivated six times, and selected his own seed from the field. many of the boys making the fine records developed and selected their own seed. one boy, with an acre yield of . bushels, cleared six hundred and ninety-five dollars, counting prizes. another boy, with a yield of - / bushels, reports that his father's yield was thirty bushels. john bowen, with a yield of - / bushels, reports the yield on nearby acres as forty bushels. arthur hill, with - / bushels, reports the nearby yields as twenty bushels. such figures, uncertified, would challenge the credulity of the uninitiated. the land on which these record yields were secured had been raising twenty, forty, and fifty bushels of corn to the acre. over great sections, the per acre average was well under twenty. into this desolation of agricultural inefficiency, a few thousand school boys entered. under careful supervision and proper guidance, with little additional expenditure of money or of time, they produced results wholly unbelievable to the old-time farmer. yet he saw the crop, husked, and watched it through the sheller. there was no magic and no chicanery. he had learned a lesson. the records cited above are exceptionally high. there were hundreds of others almost equally good. "twenty-one georgia club members from the seventh congressional district alone grew , bushels at an average cost of cents per bushel; boys in gordon county, georgia, average bushels, of them making , bushels. the boys who stood highest in georgia averaged . bushels and made a net profit of more than $ each, besides prizes won. in alabama boys average bushels at an average cost of cents. in monroe county, alabama, boys averaged bushels. in yazoo county, mississippi, boys averaged . bushels at an average cost of . cents. in lee county, mississippi, boys averaged bushels at an average cost of cents. sixty-five boys in mississippi averaged . bushels at an average cost of cents. twenty mississippi boys averaged . bushels at an average cost of cents. ninety-two boys in louisiana grew , bushels on acres; of these boys had above bushels each, although the weather conditions were very unfavorable in that state. in north carolina boys averaged bushels. in the same state boys averaged bushels. in buncombe county, north carolina, boys averaged bushels. in sussex county, virginia, boys averaged bushels. fifteen boys in the vicinity of memphis, tenn., where the business men contributed about $ , to aid the work, averaged . bushels at an average cost of cents per bushel. many other records in other states were equally good in view of the fact that a drought prevailed very generally throughout the south in .["][ ] such returns challenge the attention of the most hidebound. these boys got results that exceeded anything that had ever been heard of in their communities. the old folks who had scoffed; the wise-acres whose advice was not taken; and the "i told you so" farmers who had uttered their predictions, all stood aside, while the boys, pointer in hand, taught their respective communities one of the best lessons they had ever learned. v canning clubs parallel with the boys' corn clubs are the girls' canning clubs. if the boys could grow corn (in a number of cases the corn contests were won by girls), why might it not be possible to have the girls do something along parallel lines? the idea found expression in the girls' tomato clubs and similar organizations. during , three hundred and twenty-five girls were enrolled in such clubs in virginia and south carolina. dr. knapp and his fellow workers decided that one-tenth of an acre would be enough for a good garden. each girl was urged to plant some other kind of vegetable in addition to her tomatoes, and to can surplus fruit. in , more than three thousand girls, in eight different states, had joined clubs and planted their gardens. by the number had grown to twenty-three thousand girls in twelve states. many of the girls put up more than five hundred quart cans of tomatoes from their plots, besides ketchup, pickles, chow-chow, preserves, and other products. quite a number of girls put up more than a thousand quart cans, and one girl put up fifteen hundred quart cans. some of the girls, in addition to the prizes, had a net profit of as much as a hundred dollars on their gardens. the united states bureau of plant industry sets forth the object of the girls' demonstration work as follows: "( ) to encourage rural families to provide purer and better food at a lower cost, and utilize the surplus and otherwise waste products of the orchard and garden, and make the poultry yard an effective part of the farm economy. ( ) to stimulate interest and wholesome cooperation among members of the family in the home. ( ) to provide some means by which girls may earn money at home, and, at the same time, get the education and viewpoint necessary for the ideal farm life. ( ) to open the way for practical demonstrations in home economics. ( ) to furnish earnest teachers a plan for aiding their pupils and helping their communities."[ ] vi recognition day for boys and girls the most astonishing thing about the club activity is the recognition which it has won wherever it has been worked out on an extensive basis. the reason for this general recognition is quite obvious, and its effect is no less stimulating. public officials and business men have vied with one another in their efforts to reward the winners of county and state club contests. the same bulletin which records the astonishing figures on corn yields, tells about the things that were done for the , boys who were members of corn clubs. fifty-two georgia boys received diplomas signed by the governor of the state and other officials, for producing more than a hundred bushels per acre each, at an average cost of less than thirty cents per bushel. business men and citizens generally subscribed liberally money, free railroad transportation, and trips to state capitals. in the total value of the prizes offered in the south to the boys' corn clubs approximated fifty thousand dollars. in oklahoma, one thousand dollars in gold was offered to the one hundred and twenty boys making the best record in that state. the state prize winners were sent to washington for a week, where they were received at the white house by the president, and at the capitol by the speaker of the house of representatives. they were presented with special cards of admission to the senate and house of representatives, and, when visiting congress, they were presented to their senators and congressmen. by special invitation these distinguished visitors appeared before the committee on agriculture at the house of representatives. they also visited the office of the secretary of agriculture. they were photographed, and large diplomas bearing the seal of the department and the signature of the secretary were awarded to them. one does not wonder at the widespread recognition accorded these boys, in view of the fact that their efforts have been responsible for an immense increase in the business prosperity of their respective states. once more have educators demonstrated the possibilities of teaching parents through the education of children. vii teaching grown-ups to read the educational work which is being done in the uplands of the south has already received widespread recognition. the slogan, "down with the moonshine still and up with the moonlight school," typifies the spirit of the upland community. one might journey far before discovering a more enthusiastic people than the teachers and the scholars of the southern uplands. the appalling extent of illiteracy among the descendants of marion's men finds a parallel in their pathetic desire for some form of education. the southern hill whites love the old and fear the new. traditionally, they belong to a past generation; actually, they are reaching out for the better things which the new generation can offer. the moonlight schools are attended by old people and young alike. the struggling colleges, the industrial and technical schools, with their record of privation and hardship, bear eloquent testimony to the genuine efforts which the upland population is making in these early years of its educational awakening. every sincere effort among the hill whites meets with instant response. for the most part, they deprive themselves of the necessaries of life in order that they may send their children to school. boys skimp and save; girls walk for miles along mountain trails and paths; communities give of the scanty means of their effort for the building and maintenance of schools. everywhere the spirit of the new education is permeating the southern upland communities. viii george washington, junior one teacher, whose years of effort in the piedmont have brought her the confidence and co-operation of the community, tells of the success of one of her earliest ventures with a boy of thirteen. the boy's father was bad; his mother slovenly and indifferent. the boy himself was bright and active. when the time came for him to enter the cotton mill, the teacher protested to his family, but without success. still there was something that she could do for him, still she saw an opportunity of serving him, and she asked him to come to her home with a number of other boys, for a couple of nights a week, when they sat together, reading, or playing games. the boy had appeared sullen at first, but toward the end of his school term he showed an active interest. it became apparent that he was particularly clever at languages. none of his lessons troubled him, and, with the assistance of the teacher, he learned italian readily, and during the evenings, when the other boys played games or talked, he worked over his italian sentences with vital interest. just before christmas, during the first year that this boy had spent in the mill, a friend visited his teacher, became interested in her work, and asked if there was any way in which she could help. "you may," said the teacher. "you may buy andy an outfit." the friend went to the city with the order in her pocket,--a hat, a suit, and a complete outfit, new, as a christmas present for andy. on christmas eve, andy alone came to the teacher's house. she had not asked the other boys,--partly because most of them preferred to stay at home, partly because she had no such fine present for them as she had for andy. "never in my life," the teacher said, "had i seen andy clean. i made up my mind that for once he should have a clean body as well as clean clothes." when andy came that christmas eve, the teacher took him into a room where there were towels, soap, a basin, and a new outfit of clothes. "andy," she said, "this is your christmas present from my friend, and now you are going to give me a christmas present, too. you are going to wash up and dress up." andy followed directions, and when he emerged from the room in his spick and span outfit, his hat set side-wise on his wet, newly combed hair, he stood up very straight, surveying himself as best he could from head to foot, and exclaimed,--"gee! i feel just like george washington." the bath and the new suit were a realization of his highest ideal. "andy and i were always friends after that," said the teacher, "and since andy was the moving spirit among the boys in the village, the boys and i got along well together. it was my introduction to the heart of the community, and it came with andy's realization of an ideal which he had long cherished." ix a step toward good health having won andy over, the teacher prepared to work her way past some of the barriers of prejudice which the community had placed between itself and civilization. the girls offered the readiest opening. "the homes were wretched," the teacher said. "the people did not know the simplest health rules. they were strangers to sanitation or cleanliness. their housekeeping was primitive and their cooking miserable. i had won the boys by getting them together in something that resembled a club. i decided that my best path to the girls, and from them to the community, lay through housekeeping." the hypothesis was, at least, worthy of a try-out. the teacher began by keeping her own house in the most approved manner, and asking the girls to come in and help her do it. "you'll like to take supper with me this evening," she would say to a group of girls at recess time. "speak to your mothers when you go home, and you, sadie and annie, will stay over night and sleep in the spare bed." they were slow to respond at first. long habit made them suspicious, but when the first few girls had spent their night with the teacher and had come home with the tales of her wonderful household arrangements, the others were looking eagerly for a chance to duplicate their experiences. "am i next?" a little girl asked anxiously one day, after the invitations to a party had been given out. the assurance that she was, made her face shine for the remainder of the afternoon. "the school girls all came willingly," the teacher said. "it was after i had them so interested that one of the factory hands came in. it was saturday night, and she rapped on the door before coming in with a hesitating touch, as if she was afraid. she sat down across from me, smoothing her dress and looking unhappy." "you'll not understand," said the factory girl, apologetically. "but mame is in your school--she's my sister. you had her up last week to spend the night. you'll remember?" the teacher nodded. "she came home, and ever since she's been telling us about the way you did things. and i've been thinking,----" she stopped and looked at the teacher, half suspiciously, half appealingly. "i've been thinking how nice it would be for me, if i could do them things the same as you. you see," she spoke rapidly, "i'm gettin' married soon now, and when mame came a-telling that way, and our house like it always is, and the baby crying, and nothing done exceptin' ma a-scoldin', and i says to myself, i says, if i could do things like that teacher can do 'em mebbe i wouldn't make mistakes like ma makes 'em." she paused for breath, looking expectant. "you would like to come here to see how i do things?" the teacher asked. the girl nodded eagerly. "come monday after hours, and spend the night with me." "after that," the teacher said, "it was a great deal easier. the next thing i wanted to do was to get the children examined for glasses and throat trouble. there were two second-rate country doctors there who knew little or nothing about modern medicine. the nearest man that i could trust was forty miles away. he was a specialist, too, and high priced. still, i sat down and wrote him a letter, telling him how we were fixed. he answered by return mail, making a special rate and setting a day. i hoped to take twelve of the children, but i had car fare for only seven. then came our windfall. i told the railroad what i was trying to do, and they made a special excursion rate and took the children at less than half fare. we were all able to go, and the extra money went for a treat to soda and the movies." the children went back home, singing the praises of the trip, the teacher, and the doctor. they went back, too, with expert advice and assistance, and with the good news that others would soon have a turn. group by group, the needy children were brought down to the specialist in the city. some were even operated on, although at the outset the parents would not hear of operations. in the end the children won, however. their enthusiasm for the teacher and their doctor carried the day. "it has been slow," the teacher said, "but at the end of it all, they see better, hear better, eat more wholesome, nourishing food, live better, and understand themselves better. on the whole it has paid." x theory and practice[ ] the rural schools of the south have no monopoly on progressive educational views. a number of southern cities have taken up their position in the vanguard of educational progress. notable among these cities is columbus, georgia,--a city of , people, in which superintendent roland b. daniel has undertaken a vigorous policy of shaping the schools in the interests of the community. there were in , , children of school age in columbus. of this number, , were in the schools. the school population is rather unevenly divided, racially,-- , of the children of school age are white, and , are colored. about one-quarter of the white population depends for its livelihood upon the mills. columbus is surrounded by an agricultural district from which come many children in search of high school training. the city of columbus presents an industrial problem of an unusually complex character, and the manner in which this problem has been handled by the schools is worthy of the highest commendation. superintendent daniel has laid down three definite planks in his educational platform for the city of columbus. in the first place, he aims to provide school accommodations which are fitted to the peculiar needs of each part of the community. in the second place, he aims to shape the school system of columbus in terms of the local environment of the children. in the third place, he has inaugurated a high school policy, which makes high school training practical as well as theoretical. among the mill operatives of columbus, superintendent daniel estimates that there are approximately children of school age. the situation presented by these children was critical in the extreme. there was an absence of compulsory education laws; few of the children attended any school, and when they did enter a school they seldom remained long enough to secure any marked educational advantage. less than per cent. of the children continued in school after they were old enough to work in the cotton mills. pursuant of his intention to make the schools supply the needs of all of the children of columbus, superintendent daniel organized the north highlands school in the factory district. of this school he says: "it is not made to conform, either in course of study or hours, to the other schools of similar rank in the system, for the board desires to meet the conditions and convenience of the people for whom the school was established. classroom work begins in the morning at o'clock and continues until o'clock, with a recess of minutes at : . the afternoon session begins at o'clock, and the school closes for the day at : o'clock." the long intermission in the middle of the day is given in order to allow the children to take hot lunches to parents, brothers, and sisters who are working in the mill. many of the mills are located at some distance from the school. some of the children are called upon to walk as much as two miles during the noon hour, in order to carry the lunches. these "dinner toters," when carrying lunch baskets for persons outside of the family, receive cents per week per basket. in case several baskets are carried, the income thus earned is considerable. the school thus organized on the basis of local needs is further specialized in a way that will appeal to the needs of the mill operative group. the academic courses are similar to the courses offered in the other schools, except that more emphasis is laid upon the "three r's." superintendent daniel says that the time is very limited in which these children will attend school, and more attention is given as to what may be regarded as fundamental. "while the prescribed course contemplates seven years, few continue after the fifth or sixth year, so strong is the call of the mills. not more than per cent finish this school and pursue their studies further." the three morning hours and the first hour in the afternoon are devoted to academic studies, while the last hour and a half of the day is given to practical work. the boys are required to take elementary courses in woodwork and gardening, alternating these two branches on alternate days. the girls are given work in basketry, sewing, cooking, poultry raising, and gardening. the results of the introduction of this applied work are summed up by superintendent daniel in this way,--"in all of these lines of work it is now the hope of the school only to better living conditions a little among the people for whom it was especially organized. the transformation is necessarily slow. in the beginning, no doubt, the advocates of this type of school thought that many might be induced to continue in school and do more advanced work, especially along vocational lines. in this respect the school has been a disappointment to some. we are seldom able to induce pupils to finish even the limited course offered in this school." the north highland school, in addition to its work for the children, has begun an organized effort to raise the standards of the local community. every day the principal and teachers of the school visit some of the homes, giving helpful suggestions, caring for the sick, and in any other possible way contributing to home life. superintendent daniel reports the progress in this respect by saying,--"confidence is now so strong that one of the teachers every saturday morning collects the physically defective ones in the community and takes them to the free clinic for operations or treatment. at first parents would see their children die rather than permit them to be operated upon, but now they seldom decline to permit them to be taken by a teacher to the free clinic, when in the judgment of the teacher it is necessary." the school has made an effort to organize the older people of the community. there are entertainments and school gatherings in which parents and children alike participate. as a further help to those parents who are compelled to work in the mills, the school grounds, which are amply provided with a full play equipment, are open to all of the children at all hours of the day and all days of the week. "it is not infrequent," says superintendent daniel, "that, when the mother goes to work at in the morning, she sends her children to the school to enjoy the privileges of the grounds until the opening of the school at o'clock." the work of the negro schools is similarly fitted to the industrial needs of the negro children. boys and girls alike devote a considerable portion of their time to industrial work. the main purpose of this work for negroes is to prepare them for the line of industrial opportunity open to them. the school reports that it has developed a number of good blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, seamstresses, and laundresses. pupils who remain in the schools long enough to complete the course are able to earn, upon leaving school, about twice what they would be able to earn had no such training been provided. a vigorous attempt has been made to reorganize grade work in the interests of clearness and effectiveness. as superintendent daniel puts the matter,--"we undertook to place before the teachers a definite problem, and to put suggestions into tangible form. we stated that all subjects could be taught with the books merely as helps and means to an end, and contend further for the doctrine that a working knowledge of books and subjects is far more desirable than accomplishing the feat of memorizing the printed page." many teachers will be astonished by the doctrine which superintendent daniel evolves from this statement of educational theory. "the teachers were asked to conduct the work in such a manner that it would not be necessary to recite or take written tests with closed books, but that school books be used as tools with which to work, and that the child should use text-books as adults do books of reference, while the teacher guides and directs in the development of thought.["] this attempt of superintendent daniel to proceed with the grammar school work in a more natural way, and to relate all of it more closely to life, met with some interesting results, as may be gathered from the following test questions which were worked out by teachers in pursuance of the instructions to make text-books incidental and thought primary in the school work. arithmetic, third b roy shops for his mother at kirven's. he buys boxes of hair pins at $. each, towels at $. each, and handkerchiefs for $. . what was his bill? if he hands the clerk $ . , how much change will he receive? third a if isabel's pair of shoes cost $ , how much will shoes for all the girls in the class cost? geography third b turn to the map on page and find and write the names of seven different shore forms. arithmetic, fourth b in our room are pupils. the class receives tablets and pencils for the term. how many of each does each child receive? geography, fourth b what products may be sent to us from new england? if they were shipped from portsmouth, n. h., on what bodies of water would they travel? geography, fourth a why does the united states carry on more trade with the british isles than with germany? at what seaport would our vessels land in the british isles? what would they carry and what would they bring back? geography, fifth a what highways of trade will be used for shipping oranges from san francisco to columbus, ga., by way of the panama canal? how many miles is this, approximately? (use rule and map on page .) geography, fifth b what is the chief industry of the people of columbus, and why? describe the climate of our city, tell what fruits, vegetables and farm products find a market here. what would a boat coming up the river bring to columbus? what would it carry back? superintendent daniel's viewpoint is clear and sane. "it is not sufficient," he says, "to maintain courses in domestic science and manual training for the grades, and to teach other subjects as if they belonged to another realm." consequently he has made every endeavor to bring together the forces of the community and of the school in a sympathetic whole, around which the educational life of the town must center. the industrial high school is an integral and highly important part of the work in the columbus schools. side by side with the academic high school, it affords an opportunity for the children who do not intend to continue their educational work beyond high school grade to get some assistance in the direction of a training for life activity. it was originally intended to duplicate, in a measure, the conditions and hours maintained in the industrial plants of the city. formerly the school was open for eleven calendar months; at the present time a vacation of six weeks is allowed. the school hours are from o'clock in the morning until o'clock in the afternoon, for five days each week. pupils who have not maintained the required standard during the week are compelled to attend school on saturday. all pupils of the industrial high school are required to take academic work of high school grade in mathematics, history, english, and science. the introduction of manual training and domestic science into the grades of all columbus schools has pointed many children in the direction of the industrial high school. while it is not the intention of the school authorities to make the work of the industrial high school final, it is hoped that those children who are enabled to continue with educational work are benefited markedly by this specialized course. throughout this deliberate attempt of the columbus school administration to make the schools fit the needs of the community there is evidence of a scientific spirit which is in the last degree commendable. the community need is first ascertained. the school work is then organized in response to this community need. if, perchance, the first effort meets with little success, additional effort is continued until some measure of success is assured. the school authorities are not afraid to change their opinions or their system. they are not even afraid to fail on a given experiment. the one thing of which they are afraid is failure to provide for the educational needs of the community. xi a people coming to its own the first great battle in the educational awakening of the south has been won. the people realize the necessity for an intelligently active population. the second battle is well under way. the people of the south are shaping the schools to meet the peculiar educational needs which the economic and social problems of the south present. a rallying-cry is ringing through the southern states,--"the schools for the people; the people for the schools; and a higher standard of education and of life for the community." the south is in line for the new education. school officials are working. superintendent daniel writes,--"everyone connected with the system has been too intent on doing his work well and in establishing and maintaining the ideals of the system to be disturbed by petty difficulties. the teachers," he adds, "have appeared to feel that it was rather a privilege than a burden to participate in making the columbus system efficient through the preparation of her children for life."[ ] the public is asking for a correlation of school with life, and the schools are educating the south through the children. footnotes: [footnote : now state superintendent. see an article "'corn-club' smith," p. c. macfarlane, collier's weekly, may , , p. .] [footnote : united states department of agriculture, bureau of plant industry, results of boys' demonstration work in corn clubs in , washington, may, , p. .] [footnote : op. cit., pp. - .] [footnote : u. s. department of agriculture, bureau of plant industry, girls' demonstration work, washington, january, , pp. - .] [footnote : for a full statement of the work of the columbus schools see "industrial education in columbus,["] ga., r. b. daniel, u. s. bureau of education, bulletin , government printing office, . also, the annual report of the columbus public schools for the year ending august , .] [footnote : annual report of the columbus public schools, , p. .] chapter xiii the spirit of the new education i the standard of education the educational experiments described in the preceding chapters are replete with the spirit of the new education. from the virile educational systems of the country a protest is being sounded against traditional formalism. school men have learned that that which is is not necessarily right. each concept, each method, must run the gauntlet of critical analysis. it is not sufficient to allege in support of an educational principle that the results derived from its application have been satisfactory in the past. insistently the question is repeated, "what are its effects upon the problems of to-day?" educational ancestor worship is no more acceptable to the progressive spirit of the western world than is ancestor worship in any other form. the past has made its contribution, and has died in making it. for the contribution the present is grateful, but it must steadfastly refuse in its own name, and in the name of the future, to be bound by any decree of the past which will not stand the acid test of present experience. the old education was beset by traditionalism. under its dominance, education, defined once and for all, was established as a standard to which men must attain; hence a preceptor, guiding his young charges along the straight path to knowledge, might, with perfect confidence, admonish them, "lo here, the three r's is education," or "lo there, greek and higher mathematics is education," according as his training had been in the three r's or in greek. in either case he felt certain of his general ground. once and for all the educational standard had been set. by that standard new ideas were judged, and either justified or condemned. under this predetermined scheme there was a formula for education--a formula as definite as that for making bread or pickling pork. the formula was applied to each child who presented himself to the administration. if the formula worked successfully the child was declared educated in the same way that pork which has been successfully treated by the proper processes is declared to be pickled. if the formula did not work the child was not educated. he sat in school with a dunce-cap upon his head, or else played hookey and spent his hours in fishing, swimming or idling. perhaps, in view of the recent contributions of science, it would be more illuminating to say that the old education inoculated the child with a predetermined educational virus. if the virus "took" the child was declared immune to the bacteria of ignorance, illiteracy, stupidity and other prevalent social complaints. if the virus did not take the schoolmaster ostentatiously washed his hands of the recreant. ii standardization was a failure only one argument need be urged against this method of attacking the educational problem--it did not work. in the first place, the most brilliant school successes often turned out to be the most arrant life failures, while the school derelicts frequently became life successes of stellar magnitude. to the thinking man the inference was plain; the formula was not an unqualified success. not only was this true of the children who went through school, but there were crowds of children for whom the school held no attraction whatever. they attended a few sessions, wasted a scant bit of energy in educational effort, and then dropped out, hopeless of obtaining results by further "study." the old education read out of the school those children who could not benefit by its teachings. how utterly different the concept which has gripped the minds of progressive, modern educators! under their guidance education has become what herbert spencer called it--a preparation for complete living. no longer a fixed, objective standard, education has been recognized as an enlargement of the life horizon of each individual boy or girl in the community. "teach us individual needs," proclaim the educational progressives, "and we will tell you what the character of education must be." thus has education ceased to be an objective standard, created by one age and handed down rigidly immobile to the ages succeeding. instead it is accepted as a fulfilment--a complement--to child needs. always education has been regarded as a process of molding life and character. the chief difference between the old and the new education is that the old education made a mold, and then forced the child to fit the mold, while the new education begins by determining the character of child needs, and then fits the mold to the needs. the old education was like the farmer who built a corn-sheller, and then attempted to find ears of corn which would fit into the sheller; the new education is like the farmer who first measured the corn and then built his sheller to fit the corn. the old education selected the class which was able to conform to its requirements; the new education serves all classes. iii education as growth under the impetus given to it by modern thinkers, education has become the direction of growth, rather than the application of a formula. the child is a developing creature. it has become the function of education to watch over and guide the development. nor do the modern schools consider mental development as the sole object of educational endeavor. physical growth is an equally essential part of child life. therefore the direction of physical growth becomes just as vital a part of the educational machinery. aesthetic and spiritual growth require like emphasis. each phase of child life receives independent consideration. the old education through mental impression is giving way before the new education through physical, mental and spiritual expression. expression is the essence of growth; and since the school is to foster child growth it must place child expression in a place of paramount importance. child needs, rather than abstract standards, have thus become the basis of school activity. the old education developed its course of study by surveying the interests of adults, and picking from among them those, apparently the most simple, which were fit for children. the new education applies the laboratory method--studying children and their interests--reports, among its other findings, the quite evident fact that children enter into life as whole-heartedly as adults; that the field of their interest lies, not in the left-over problems of older people, but in their own problems and processes; and that therefore the educator must found his philosophy and his practice on an understanding of the child and child needs. there is in the world a phenomenon called adult life, with its phases, problems and ideals. there is likewise in the world a phenomenon called child life, with its phases, problems and ideals. a complete understanding of either may not be derived through a study of the other. child needs exist separate from and different from adult needs. it is the business of the new education to understand them and meet them. two appeals are reaching the ears of the modern educator: the first, the appeal of the child; the second, the appeal of the community. the appeal of the child is an appeal for the opportunity of developing all of its faculties. physically, children grow. the school, recognizing this fact, is making a vigorous effort to break the shell of custom, which has confined its activities to purely intellectual pursuits, and provide a physical training which will lead the school child to perfect normal body growth, as well as normal growth of mind. even in its intellectual activity the school is recognizing the importance of making the child mind an active machine for thought, rather than a passive storehouse for information. though less emphasized, the training for sensual growth is becoming of ever increasing importance in the new education. above all, the aesthetic side of child life is being expanded in an effort to round out a completed adulthood. iv child needs and community needs the recognition of child needs, which forms so integral a part of the new education, is paralleled by a similar recognition of the needs of the community. the progressive educator is laying aside for a moment the details of his task, and asking himself the pertinent question: "what should the community expect in return for the annual expenditure of a billion dollars on public education?" what are community needs if not the needs for manhood and womanhood? they are well summed up in three words--virility, efficiency, citizenship. possessed of those attributes a group of individuals rounds itself inevitably into a vigorous, progressive community. they are normal qualities which a people must demand if their social standards are to be maintained. since they constitute so vital an element in social life, a community lavish in its expenditures for schools may surely expect the school product to be virile, efficient, worthy citizens. the new education, recognizing the justice of this demand, is crying out insistently for social, as well as individual, training in the school. the new educational institutions have set themselves to meet the needs of the child and of the community. their success depends upon their ability to understand these needs and to supply them. the old-fashioned schoolmaster asked: "how can i compel?" his answer was the rod. the modern schoolmaster asks: "how can i direct?" his answer is a laboratory, open-minded, scientific method, and a host of varied courses designed to meet the needs of individual children and of individual communities. communities vary as greatly in their characteristics as do children. it is now certain that no formula will provide education for all children. each new study of community needs makes it more evident that no system will supply education for all communities. it is the business of the educator to study the individual child and the individual community, and then to provide an education that will assist both to grow normally and soundly in all of their parts. v the final test of education the school is a servant, not a master. in that fact lies its greatness--the greatness of its opportunity and of its responsibility. as an institution its object is service--assistance in growth. development is the goal of education. virility, efficiency, citizenship, manhood, womanhood--these are its legitimate products. its tools and formulas are such as will most effectively serve these ends. when the increase of knowledge leads to new methods and formulas which will prove more effective than the old ones, then the old ones must be laid aside, reverently, perhaps, but none the less firmly, and the new ones adopted. changes may not be made hastily and without due consideration; but when experiment has shown that the new device is more advantageous in furthering the objects of education than the old and tried formulas, a change is inevitable. the first and last word on the subject is spoken when this question is asked and answered: "does education exist for children, or do children exist for education?" if children exist for education, then it is just that an objective educational standard should be created; it is fair that a hard and fast course of study be mapped out in conformity with that standard; it is right that educational machinery be constructed which automatically turns away from the schools any child who does not conform to the school system as it is. if children exist for education, they should either conform to its requirements, or else, if they will not or cannot conform, they should be mercilessly thrust aside. if, on the other hand, education exists for children, then the primal consideration must be child needs. if any one child, or any group of children, has needs which are not met by existing educational institutions, then these institutions must be remodeled. if an adequate congenial education is a part of the birthright of every american child, then educational institutions must be reorganized and reshaped until they provide that birthright in the fullest possible measure. already the answer has been formulated. already educators have recognized the potency of the saying: "the schools were made for the children, not the children for the schools." hence it follows that no school system is so sacred, no method of teaching so venerable, no textbook so infallible, no machinery of administration so permanent, that it must not give way before the educational needs of childhood. concerning the educational problem of to-day, yesterday cannot speak with authority. each age has its problems--problems which may be solved by that age, or handed on unsolved to the future. the past is dead. only its voice--its advice and suggestion--serves as a guide or as a warning. of authority it should have not an atom. the educational opportunities of to-day are without peer. the educational machinery, ready at hand, is being transformed to meet the newly understood needs of the child and of the community. the spirit of the new education is the spirit of service, the spirit of fair dealing, the spirit of growth for the individual and of advancement for society. here are individual needs. there are aligned the social obligations and requirements of the age. in so far as it lies within the power of the school, the children who leave its doors shall have their needs supplied, and shall be equipped to play their part as virile, efficient citizens in a greater community. such is the spirit of the new education. index age distribution, . and school progress, . ages of childhood, . american school system, statistics of, , . applied education, need for, . applied work, cincinnati, . in the grades, . average children and the old education, . fallacy of, . berks county schools, manual training in, . physical training in, . boys and girls, object of educating, . brown, e. e., quoted, . carney, mabel, quoted, . chancellor, w. r., quoted, , . change, prevalence of, . in social structure, . child growth, stages of, . child needs, recognition of, . and community needs, . childhood, ages of, . children, needs of analyzed, . social needs of, . varying capacity of, , . vs. subject matter, . cincinnati, educational advantages of, . kindergarten work in, . school system of, . school policy continued, . special school work in, . schools, co-operation in, . creed of, . general support of, . new plans for, . social centers in, . social work of, . city and country, educational value of, . city home, effect of industrial changes on, , . city life and the new basis for education, , . civic education, necessity for, . civics teaching in the grades, cincinnati, . club activity in schools, recognition of, . columbus, ga., curriculum of schools, . local needs basis of, , . school policy of, , . community and the school, . education applied to a small town, . life, contribution of schools to, . needs and child life, . consolidated school, advantages of, , . course of study in, . daily program in, . disadvantages of, . growth of in south, , . continuation high school work, . schools in ohio, . co-operation, spirit of in consolidated schools, . country, the call of the, , . country life, transformation in, , . country school, daily program in a district, . daily program in a consolidated, . two possibilities of, . the duty of, . new geography, . task of, , . transformation in, , . schools and physical training, . courses of study, correlation in, . home school, . criticism of schools, general, . significance, . curriculum, content of, . requirements of, . defectives, treatment of, cincinnati, . discipline, disappearance of, oyler school, . distribution of age, . district school, daily program in, . domestic science, course in lowville high school, . course in page county, . home school movement, . importance of, . in the grades, . in a kentucky school, - . in sleepy eye schools, - . problems in, . draper, a. s., quoted, , , . education and the industrial revolution, , , . and the success habit, . as growth, . city, effect of industrial changes on, , . creed of, cincinnati schools, . elastic system of, . essentials of, , . for home-making, . for life, . for the whole child, . in the early home, , . place of physical training in, . public lectures and, . purpose of, , . new basis for, . new studies, . object of, , , . social importance of, , . specialization in, . standard of, . theory and practice, - . in kentucky, reaching parents through children, - . in the south, canning clubs, , . corn clubs, - , - . effect of on corn yield, - . improving health, . improving home life, , . teaching parents through children, - , - . educational advance in cincinnati, . educational formulas, danger of, . educational needs and the small town, . educational problems of an industrial community, . educational work and the small town, . elementary grades, activities of, . co-operation in, . special studies for, . spirit of service in, . english, as a stimulus for other studies, . constructive work in, , . new methods for, . organization of, grand rapids high school, . original work, . story work and, . use of in other studies, . enrollment and attendance, statistics of, , . facts, place of in education, . fallacy of average children, , . fisher, irving, quoted, . formalism in education, danger of, . froebel, f., quoted, . gary, plan of the schools in, . geography, new method of teaching, . geography and arithmetic, method of teaching in a southern school, - . geography in newark, . grade work, regeneration of, cincinnati, . grades, amalgamation of with high school, . applied work in, . grand rapids high school, vocational guidance in, . growth, and child activity, . and education, . through play, . of children, stages in, . hanus, p. h., quoted, , . health, importance of, . high school, amalgamation of with grades, . at lowville, . course of study in cincinnati, . future of, . growing importance of, - . popularization of cincinnati, . promotion to, without examinations, . responsibility of, . social status of, . high school children, experiments with, . high school courses, arrangement of, . high school status, superintendent spaulding on, . high school training, right of children to, . high schools, co-operation with elementary grades, . technical development of, . home, education in, , . home making, education for, . home school, activities of, . course of work in, . in indianapolis, . in providence, . home visiting in the grades, . home work, disadvantages of, . opportunities for in school, . huxley, t. h., quoted, . industrial communities, educational problems, . industrial high school, place of in the school system, . industrial system, effect of on education, . institutions, effects of change upon, . john swaney school, course of study, . equipment of, . social life in, , . junior high schools, outlook for, . kentucky education, teaching a community to cook, - . kindergartens, at gary, ind., . progressive work in, . in relation to grade work, . vitalized work in, . linden, ind., equipment of consolidated schools, . locust grove school, method of teaching a community, - . lowville high school, courses in, . domestic science in, . social service of, . work in, . mass training, defects of, . mathematics, and life problems, . in gary schools, . in indianapolis schools, . mothers' clubs, organization of, . work of, cincinnati, , . needs of school children, . new basis for education, . and city life, , . new education in the south, - . newark vacation school, . newton technical high school, success of, . north highland school, industrial training in, , . raising community standards, . oconto county, wis., schools, agricultural work in, - . the new arithmetic, , . the new english, , . ohio, continuation schools, . old education, spirit of, . one-room school, making it worth while, - . possibilities of, - . open air schools, . results of, . original work in english, . overwork, extent in schools, , . oyler school, social education in, . page county, iowa, contests in schools, . domestic science, . ideal schools in, - . social life in, , . training for country life, - . physical training and education, . a part of school work, . play, and growth, . creative forms of, . stages of, . playgrounds, cincinnati, . popularized high schools, cincinnati, . promotion for special students, . promotion, improvements in, . new methods of, . promotion average, fetish of, , . public lectures, and education, . rapp, eli, quoted, , . regeneration of grade work, cincinnati, . rural districts, needs of, . school and community, . school and shop work in high school, . school feeding, . school children, needs of, . school equipment, educational nature of, . school houses, social uses for, . school machinery, abolition of, . necessity for, . new standards of, . school mortality, statistics of, . school plant, wider use of, . school progress and age distribution, . school work related to shop work, . schools, agricultural training at sleepy eye, - . agricultural training in oconto county, wis., - . agricultural training in page county, , . and the community, . as public servants, . city, effect on children, , . condition of, montclair, n. j., , . consolidated vs. district, , . courses at sleepy eye, minn., . courses fitted to community needs at sleepy eye, , . domestic science at sleepy eye, minn., - . elementary plumbing at sleepy eye, minn., . equipment at sleepy eye, . equipment of linden, ind., . general criticism of, . influence on community at sleepy eye, minn., . local service of, . mechanical course at sleepy eye, minn., . montgomery county, ind., , . page county, iowa, - . purpose of, , . short agricultural course at sleepy eye, minn., , . size of, . social uses of, cincinnati, . self-government in high schools, , . sex hygiene, importance of, . shop work and school work, . sleepy eye, minn., course in domestic science, - . course in elementary plumbing and steam-fitting, . courses given in schools, . department of agriculture, - . equipment for mechanical work, . fitting schools to community needs, , . influence on community at large, . mechanical course, . sleepy eye, minn., short course in agriculture, , . small town, educational work of, . smith, w. h., "corn club," . social centers in cincinnati schools, . social change, . social education, cincinnati, . content of, . social importance of education, , . social needs of children, . southern schools, corn clubs in, - , - . special school for defectives, cincinnati, . special schools, cincinnati, . specialization in education, . spencer, h., quoted, . standard of education, . story work and english, . student organization in high school, . subjects of study, summary of, . success habits in education, . summer schools, cincinnati, . technical high schools, development of, . three "r's," progressive work in, . twelve-year schools, possibilities of, . tyler, j. m., quoted, . university of cincinnati, social relations of, . vacation schools in newark, . vernon school, before and after consolidation, . vocational guidance in high schools, . vocational training, appeal of, . cincinnati, . in elementary grades, . lowville, . washington irving high school, procedure in, . waste in education, , . extent of, , . wider use of the schools, lowville, . william penn high school, student organization in, . * * * * * transcriber's note: every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been fixed. corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below: page : missing quote added article, will exclaim,--"[']there is something that we must introduce into our schools.'" page : added missing word viii. breaching [the] chinese wall of high school classicism page : typo corrected i. "coöperation"[co-operation] and "progressivism" page : typo corrected standing on the threshhold[threshold] of his meager dwelling, this child of six looks forward page : typo corrected school district establishes part-time day schools for the instruction of youths over fourteen years af[of] age who are engaged in regular employment, such board of education page : typo corrected buying of materials and simple acounting[accounting] covered their mathematics. those were the things which would probably page : missing quote added school classes. they all brushed their hair. the boys were neater and the girls were becomingly dressed.["] page : typo corrected "yes, it was a wrench," mr. mcandrews[mcandrew] admits. "you see, the teachers hated to give up. they had been page : missing quote added will all bear directly on the work of the farm in which he is so deeply interested.["] page : missing quote added that is enough. we have no problem of discipline now. the children and their parents are working for the school.["] page : missing quote added first thing i knew, the way opened up--you never would guess how--it was through biscuits.["] page : typo corrected biggest burden we have to carry--the most determined enemy we have to fight? well, sir, its's[it's] ignorance--the ignorance of the common man about his farm or his page : missing quote added other states were equally good in view of the fact that a drought prevailed very generally throughout the south in .["][ ] footnote : missing quote added for a full statement of the work of the columbus schools see "industrial education in columbus,["] ga., r. b. daniel, page : missing quote added should use text-books as adults do books of reference, while the teacher guides and directs in the development of thought.["] democracy and education by john dewey transcriber's note: i have tried to make this the most accurate text possible but i am sure that there are still mistakes. please feel free to email me any errors or mistakes that you find. citing the chapter and paragraph. haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email addresses for now. david reed i would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary school teacher for more years than i can remember. thanks. contents: chapter one: education as a necessity of life chapter two: education as a social function chapter three: education as direction chapter four: education as growth chapter five: preparation, unfolding, and formal discipline chapter six: education as conservative and progressive chapter seven: the democratic conception in education chapter eight: aims in education chapter nine: natural development and social efficiency as aims chapter ten: interest and discipline chapter eleven: experience and thinking chapter twelve: thinking in education chapter thirteen: the nature of method chapter fourteen: the nature of subject matter chapter fifteen: play and work in the curriculum chapter sixteen: the significance of geography and history chapter seventeen: science in the course of study chapter eighteen: educational values chapter nineteen: labor and leisure chapter twenty: intellectual and practical studies chapter twenty-one: physical and social studies: naturalism and humanism chapter twenty-two: the individual and the world chapter twenty-three: vocational aspects of education chapter twenty-four: philosophy of education chapter twenty-five: theories of knowledge chapter twenty-six: theories of morals chapter one: education as a necessity of life . renewal of life by transmission. the most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. a stone when struck resists. if its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. while the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. if it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. as long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. it uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. to say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. as long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment. in all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely. after a while they succumb; they die. the creature is not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal. but continuity of the life process is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one individual. reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous sequence. and though, as the geological record shows, not merely individuals but also species die out, the life process continues in increasingly complex forms. as some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being. continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms. we have been speaking of life in its lowest terms--as a physical thing. but we use the word "life" to denote the whole range of experience, individual and racial. when we see a book called the life of lincoln we do not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology. we look for an account of social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of the conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in the development of character; of signal struggles and achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. in precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of the athenian people, of the american nation. "life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and occupations. we employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. and to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of continuity through renewal applies. with the renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. the continuity of any experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. yet the life of the group goes on. the primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of education. on one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group--its future sole representatives--and the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group. on the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life. even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves. with the growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases. mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required. beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. education, and education alone, spans the gap. society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. this transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. if the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. now it is a work of necessity. if a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. yet the death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. but the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. yet this renewal is not automatic. unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. in fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. the young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. how much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity! . education and communication. so obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. but justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means. only as we have grasped the necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context. society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. there is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. what they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a common understanding--like-mindedness as the sociologists say. such things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. the communication which insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions--like ways of responding to expectations and requirements. persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others. a book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof. individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work for a common end. the parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. if, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community. but this would involve communication. each would have to know what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own purpose and progress. consensus demands communication. we are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social group there are many relations which are not as yet social. a large number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like plane. individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used. such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools, mechanical or fiscal. so far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely their respective activities touch one another. giving and taking of orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests. not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. to be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. one shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations. the experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. to formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning. except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. all communication is like art. it may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power. in final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. it enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. a man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. the inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable. . the place of formal education. there is, accordingly, a marked difference between the education which every one gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. in the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not the express reason of the association. while it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical. religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc. only gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the institution. even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with physical output. but in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an immediate human fact, gains in importance. while it is easy to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. the need of training is too evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account. since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will secure this ability. if humanity has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect--its effect upon conscious experience--we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young. we are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education--that of direct tuition or schooling. in undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. they have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. for the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. in part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know what they are like. to savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn. but as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults widens. learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations. much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its spirit. ability to share effectively in adult activities thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in view. intentional agencies--schools--and explicit material--studies--are devised. the task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special group of persons. without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the resources and achievements of a complex society. it also opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in informal association with others, since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered. but there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from indirect to formal education. sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. these qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available opportunities. formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead--abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. what accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily interests. but in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in symbols. it is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. such material is relatively technical and superficial. taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. for this measure is connection with practical concerns. such material exists in a world by itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression. there is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience. the permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy. hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of education. when the acquiring of information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning--that is, egoistic specialists. to avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling. summary. it is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a self-renewing process. what nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life. this education consists primarily in transmission through communication. communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. it modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. that the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature. that is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the purpose of the association in connection with the association of the older with the younger. as societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. as formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. this danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill. chapter two: education as a social function . the nature and meaning of environment. we have seen that a community or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and that this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the immature members of the group. by various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. all of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. we also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up--words which express the difference of level which education aims to cover. etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. when we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity--that is, a shaping into the standard form of social activity. in this chapter we are concerned with the general features of the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its own social form. since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming. things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily conveyed. beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and inserted. how then are they communicated? given the impossibility of direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. the answer, in general formulation, is: by means of the action of the environment in calling out certain responses. the required beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. but the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of others. thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain disposition of action. the words "environment," "medium" denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. they denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies. an inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an environment. for the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences which affect it. on the other hand, some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him. the things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. thus the activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his environment. the environment of an antiquarian, as an antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is concerned, and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections with that period. in brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being. water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the fish's activities--to its life. the north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition. . the social environment. a being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. what he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. a being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. for they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. when he moves he stirs them and reciprocally. we might as well try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions. the manufacturer moreover is as truly socially guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling his finished goods. thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act. what we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium nurtures its immature members. there is no great difficulty in seeing how it shapes the external habits of action. even dogs and horses have their actions modified by association with human beings; they form different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do. human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli which influence them; by creating a certain environment in other words. food, bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which the natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. by operating steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which function with the same uniformity as the original stimuli. if a rat is put in a maze and finds food only by making a given number of turns in a given sequence, his activity is gradually modified till he habitually takes that course rather than another when he is hungry. human actions are modified in a like fashion. a burnt child dreads the fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy as automatically as he avoids touching fire. so far, however, we are dealing with what may be called training in distinction from educative teaching. the changes considered are in outer action rather than in mental and emotional dispositions of behavior. the distinction is not, however, a sharp one. the child might conceivably generate in time a violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of toys resembling it. the aversion might even persist after he had forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. in some cases, altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the action. yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with no corresponding thought or emotion. we have to find, then, some differentia of training from education. a clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in the social use to which his action is put. some one else uses the horse to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to the horse to perform the act--he gets food, etc. but the horse, presumably, does not get any new interest. he remains interested in food, not in the service he is rendering. he is not a partner in a shared activity. were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which others have. he would share their ideas and emotions. now in many cases--too many cases--the activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. he is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. his instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure. but to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to others. in other cases, he really shares or participates in the common activity. in this case, his original impulse is modified. he not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that animate the others. a tribe, let us say, is warlike. the successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with fighting and victory. the presence of this medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then in fact when he is strong enough. as he fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition. it is not surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense of others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. only in this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group. thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group. if we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow. setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step. making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step. as soon as he is possessed by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to secure success. his beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form similar to those of others in the group. he will also achieve pretty much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient of his habitual pursuits. the importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. it almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. but learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the principle just laid down. it would probably be admitted with little hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to others to wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. but it may be asked how this principle of shared activity applies to getting through speech or reading the idea of, say, a greek helmet, where no direct use of any kind enters in. what shared activity is there in learning from books about the discovery of america? since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about many things, let us see how it works. the baby begins of course with mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is, no idea. sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on. the sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in choctaw, a seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with an action which is participated in by a number of people. when the mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts something on the baby's head. being taken out becomes an interest to the child; mother and child not only go out with each other physically, but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common. by conjunction with the other factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the child that it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity into which it enters. the bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience. in short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. and they acquire the same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because they are used in a common experience by both. the guarantee for the same manner of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are first employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active connection between the child and a grownup. similar ideas or meanings spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action where what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. if two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the left" to the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully carry on their hunt together. understanding one another means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common pursuit. after sounds have got meaning through connection with other things employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for which they stand are combined. thus the words in which a child learns about, say, the greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. they now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use. for the time being, the one who understands the words "greek helmet" becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. he engages, through his imagination, in a shared activity. it is not easy to get the full meaning of words. most persons probably stop with the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the greeks once wore. we conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. when words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. they set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning. thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he realizes the meaning of what he does. . the social medium as educative. our net result thus far is that social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail certain consequences. a child growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively, stimulated more than other impulses which might have been awakened in another environment. save as he takes an interest in music and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable to share in the life of the group to which he belongs. some kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the individual is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the social environment exercises an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set purpose. in savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation (constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into the practices and beliefs of the group. even in present-day societies, it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled youth. in accord with the interests and occupations of the group, certain things become objects of high esteem; others of aversion. association does not create impulses or affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects to which they attach themselves. the way our group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory. what is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect. it seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well could have escaped recognition in past ages. we incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. but the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things. just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up by current social occupations. the main texture of disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences. what conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning. while this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may be worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most marked. first, the habits of language. fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity. the babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. while speech habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native tongue. secondly, manners. example is notoriously more potent than precept. good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. despite the never ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners. and manners are but minor morals. moreover, in major morals, conscious instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which it falls in with the general "walk and conversation" of those who constitute the child's social environment. thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation. if the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. the effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand information as to what others think. such taste never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. to say that the deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the situations into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned. we rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. but in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. and these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others. . the school as a special environment. the chief importance of this foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. we never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference. and any environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect. an intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children. but schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members. roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols. written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with others. in addition, the written form tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life. the achievements accumulated from generation to generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen temporarily out of use. consequently as soon as a community depends to any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. to take an obvious illustration: the life of the ancient greeks and romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. in similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, british, germans, italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but the nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit statement and attention. in precisely similar fashion, our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures. hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters. this mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific, as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. first, a complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. it has to be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a gradual and graded way. the relationships of our present social life are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could not readily share in many of the most important of them. not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition. there would be no seeing the trees because of the forest. business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome. the first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a simplified environment. it selects the features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. then it establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more complicated. in the second place, it is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes. it establishes a purified medium of action. selection aims not only at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable. every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. the school has the duty of omitting such things from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. by selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the power of this best. as a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. the school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end. in the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment. such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word. as a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. each household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each club, is another. passing beyond these more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch. each such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions of its members. a clique, a club, a gang, a fagin's household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership, or a political party. each of them is a mode of associated or community life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. there are also communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the earth. for they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing. in the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical matter. there were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous. but with the development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the united states are composed of a combination of different groups with different traditional customs. it is this situation which has, perhaps more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young. only in this way can the centrifugal forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the same political unit be counteracted. the intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. the assimilative force of the american public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. the school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments into which he enters. one code prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association. as a person passes from one of the environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for different occasions. this danger imposes upon the school a steadying and integrating office. summary. the development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge. it takes place through the intermediary of the environment. the environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being. the social environment consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members. it is truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. by doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit. the deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the activities of the various groups to which they may belong. as a society becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a special social environment which shall especially look after nurturing the capacities of the immature. three of the more important functions of this special environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to themselves, to be influenced. chapter three: education as direction . the environment as directive. we now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance. of these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of the individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled; direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly. direction expresses the basic function, which tends at one extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation or ruling. but in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning sometimes read into the term "control." it is sometimes assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies are naturally purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus antisocial. control then denotes the process by which he is brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common ends. since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. systems of government and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has seriously affected educational ideas and practices. but there is no ground for any such view. individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others. but they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in conjoint and cooperative doings. otherwise, no such thing as a community would be possible. and there would not even be any one interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony unless he thought that thereby he could gain some personal advantage. control, in truth, means only an emphatic form of direction of powers, and covers the regulation gained by an individual through his own efforts quite as much as that brought about when others take the lead. in general, every stimulus directs activity. it does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. put the other way around, a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. it meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it. there is an adaptation of the stimulus and response to each other. a light is the stimulus to the eye to see something, and the business of the eye is to see. if the eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside interruption. to some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to do. this general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects. in the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts, the stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not sufficiently definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses. there is always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. this energy may be wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the successful performance of an act. it does harm by getting in the way. compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the expert. there is little axis of direction in the energies put forth; they are largely dispersive and centrifugal. direction involves a focusing and fixating of action in order that it may be truly a response, and this requires an elimination of unnecessary and confusing movements. in the second place, although no activity can be produced in which the person does not cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which does not fit into the sequence and continuity of action. a person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still harder blow. adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow. in short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. at a given time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially called out, those be selected which center energy upon the point of need. successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those which precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved. focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one spatial, the other temporal. the first insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance required for further action. obviously, it is not possible to separate them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea. activity must be centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for what comes next. the problem of the immediate response is complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for future occurrences. two conclusions emerge from these general statements. on the one hand, purely external direction is impossible. the environment can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses. these responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual. even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. if he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes. while the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all, participate in the direction which their actions finally take. in the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. to overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. to take into account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. speaking accurately, all direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss. on the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations of others may be short-sighted. it may accomplish its immediate effect, but at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person out of balance. a threat may, for example, prevent a person from doing something to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable consequences if he persists. but he may be left in the position which exposes him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse things. his instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and trickery more than would otherwise have been the case. those engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of those they direct. . modes of social direction. adults are naturally most conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do. as a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. but the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention on our part. . when others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled. in such cases, our control becomes most direct, and at this point we are most likely to make the mistakes just spoken of. we are even likely to take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. in all such cases of immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate between physical results and moral results. a person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. a child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt. but no improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow. a harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child away from the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will follow as if he had been snatched away. but there may be no more obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other. a man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary. when we confuse a physical with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way. in general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. if a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. in such a state, every act is alike to him. whatever moves him does move him, and that is all there is to it. in some cases, it is well to permit him to experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order that he may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. but some courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to allow of this course being pursued. direct disapproval is now resorted to. shaming, ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. or contrary tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his troublesome line of behavior. his sensitiveness to approbation, his hope of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action in another direction. . these methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more important and permanent mode of control. this other method resides in the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends. the very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his activity. this fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is meant by the social environment. we are given to separating from each other the physical and social environments in which we live. the separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in current psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact with a purely physical environment. there is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. a smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change. otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of another. comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded as personal. the physical medium is reduced to a mere means of personal contact. in contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and as measures of results. even if the mother never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the household life. imitation, emulation, the need of working together, enforce control. if the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach the thing in order to get it. where there is giving there must be taking. the way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child has watched the mother. when the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young. in saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming disposition. we have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the part played in the joint activity by the use of things. the philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated by a false psychology. it is frequently stated that a person learns by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon his mind through the gateway of the senses. having received a store of sensory impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas--into things with a meaning. an object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to convey different impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc., which aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing. but as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the meaning with which it is identified. a chair is a thing which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odor and refreshing taste, etc. the difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning; the former does not. a noise may make me jump without my mind being implicated. when i hear a noise and run and get water and put out a blaze, i respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant need of being extinguished. i bump into a stone, and kick it to one side purely physically. i put it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it, intelligently; i respond to a meaning which the thing has. i am startled by a thunderclap whether i recognize it or not--more likely, if i do not recognize it. but if i say, either out loud or to myself, that is thunder, i respond to the disturbance as a meaning. my behavior has a mental quality. when things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently. in both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or controlled. but in the merely blind response, direction is also blind. there may be training, but there is no education. repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. all of us have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without our knowing what we were about. consequently they possess us, rather than we them. they move us; they control us. unless we become aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the result, we do not control them. a child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. it would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view--as having a certain meaning. and not till he knew what he was about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. to have an idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. it is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. to have the same ideas about things which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. otherwise, there is no common understanding, and no community life. but in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa. that is, the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive situation. to pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what they are doing. a pin may pass in the course of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. but each may do his part without knowledge of what others do or without any reference to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate result--his own pay. there is, in this case, no common consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute to a single outcome. but if each views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior. there is an understanding set up between the different contributors; and this common understanding controls the action of each. suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person who caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted without knowing where the ball came from or went to. clearly, such action would be without point or meaning. it might be physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed. but suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing, and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the other. the behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially intelligent and guided. take one more example of a less imaginary kind. an infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence. if he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort. he is physically controlled by his own organic state. but when he makes a back and forth reference, his whole attitude changes. he takes an interest, as we say; he takes note and watches what others are doing. he no longer reacts just to his own hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are doing for its prospective satisfaction. in that way, he also no longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his own state. it becomes an object for him. his attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent. and in such noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his own state, he is socially directed. it will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. one of them has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action for prospective consequences. the other point is persons modify one another's dispositions only through the special use they make of physical conditions. consider first the case of so-called expressive movements to which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists, natural gestures of all kinds. in themselves, these are not expressive. they are organic parts of a person's attitude. one does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. but others use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in which that person finds himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. the frown signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing something to restore confidence. a man at some distance is waving his arms wildly. one has only to preserve an attitude of detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will be on the level of any remote physical change which we happen to note. if we have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a windmill. but if interest is aroused, we begin to participate. we refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or that we should do. we have to judge the meaning of his act in order to decide what to do. is he beckoning for help? is he warning us of an explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? in one case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to run away. in any case, it is the change he effects in the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves. our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting. language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. ) a case of this joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation. hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. but language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results. a child sees persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways. if he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to use things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which will fit in. if a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. the prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. when children go to school, they already have "minds"--they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of language. but these "minds" are the organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously required by putting things to use in connection with the way other persons use things. the control is inescapable; it saturates disposition. the net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual. it is not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct personal appeal from others, important as is this method at critical junctures. it consists in the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and competition. mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations. and mind in this sense is the method of social control. . imitation and social psychology. we have already noted the defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. only comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons. the purport of our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things. interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment. but it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent only when things are used to produce a result. and the only way one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering activity from him. such are our two main conclusions. it is desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to physical objects. in substance, this so-called social psychology has been built upon the notion of imitation. consequently, we shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition. according to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of others. the latter serve as models. the imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. according to our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of common interest. the basic error in the current notion of imitation is that it puts the cart before the horse. it takes an effect for the cause of the effect. there can be no doubt that individuals in forming a social group are like-minded; they understand one another. they tend to act with the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar circumstances. looked at from without, they might be said to be engaged in "imitating" one another. in the sense that they are doing much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough. but "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as an explanation of itself. it is an explanation of the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power. objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. this social fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the likeness. a considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli. quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry and attack the insulter. this statement may be met by citing the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in different ways in groups having different customs. in one group, it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous disregard. this happens, so it is said, because the model set for imitation is different. but there is no need to appeal to imitation. the mere fact that customs are different means that the actual stimuli to behavior are different. conscious instruction plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. still more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way current in his group, he is literally out of it. he can associate with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave. the pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way is unremitting. what is called the effect of imitation is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the selective influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and ratifications of those with whom one associates. suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it back, and the game goes on. here the stimulus is not just the sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. it is the situation--the game which is playing. the response is not merely rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,--that the game may continue. the "pattern" or model is not the action of the other person. the whole situation requires that each should adapt his action in view of what the other person has done and is to do. imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. the child has an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going. he may then note how the other person catches and holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. he imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. and he imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. one has only to consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that he may so behave. the pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. as matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon disposition. idiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. when we find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats. imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. it involves close observation, and judicious selection of what will enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. used for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in the development of effective action. this excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities. only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to natural inclinations. only failure to take account of the situations in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting social control. . some applications to education. why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization? doubtless the first answer to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. but careful study has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those of civilized man. it has made it certain that native differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. in a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. only a small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. the advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends. we start not so much with superior capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our capacities. the savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. prior human efforts have made over natural conditions. as they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors. every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring conditions. because the activities of children today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured ages to attain. the dice have been loaded by all the successes which have preceded. stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a civilization. but the uses to which they are put are civilization, and without the things the uses would be impossible. time otherwise necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. a body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature. thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. if we add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the positive resources of civilization. if greece, with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because greece operated for social ends such resources as it had. but whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition. intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life--physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools--it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances. by it we are led to share vicariously in past human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present. we are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. in countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social outlooks. so significant is it of a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become almost synonymous. the emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its dangers--dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice. why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? that education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? it is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. but its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. it requires that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with things. not that the use of language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. "these things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others undone." and for the school "these things" mean equipment with the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity. for when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. when treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. we may secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which things have in the life of which he is a part. we may secure technical specialized ability in algebra, latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. only by engaging in a joint activity, where one person's use of material and tools is consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained. summary. the natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born. consequently they have to be directed or guided. this control is not the same thing as physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting at any one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of continuity into the sequence of acts. the action of others is always influenced by deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. but in some cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals, the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing action. since in such cases we are most conscious of controlling the action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the importance of this sort of control at the expense of a more permanent and effective method. the basic control resides in the nature of the situations in which the young take part. in social situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what others are doing and make it fit in. this directs their action to a common result, and gives an understanding common to the participants. for all mean the same thing, even when performing different acts. this common understanding of the means and ends of action is the essence of social control. it is indirect, or emotional and intellectual, not direct or personal. moreover it is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not external and coercive. to achieve this internal control through identity of interest and understanding is the business of education. while books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used. chapter four: education as growth . the conditions of growth. in directing the activities of the young, society determines its own future in determining that of the young. since the young at a given time will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were given at an earlier period. this cumulative movement of action toward a later result is what is meant by growth. the primary condition of growth is immaturity. this may seem to be a mere truism--saying that a being can develop only in some point in which he is undeveloped. but the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or lack. it is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative, the other positive. capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. we may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state--a capacity to become something different under external influences. but we also mean by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. now when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively present--the ability to develop. our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. we treat it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. this fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he becomes a man. this comparative standpoint is legitimate enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption. children, if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little children. the seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. the fulfillment of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to say, an ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. the futility of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult resents the imputation of having no further possibilities of growth; and so far as he finds that they are closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of loss, instead of falling back on the achieved as adequate manifestation of power. why an unequal measure for child and man? taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a positive force or ability,--the pouter to grow. we do not have to draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational doctrines would have it. where there is life, there are already eager and impassioned activities. growth is not something done to them; it is something they do. the positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and plasticity. ( ) it sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive, still more absurd as a power. yet if helplessness were all there were in dependence, no development could ever take place. a merely impotent being has to be carried, forever, by others. the fact that dependence is accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. being merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. for ( ) it would only build a wall around impotence. with reference to the physical world, the child is helpless. he lacks at birth and for a long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own living. if he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an hour. on this side his helplessness is almost complete. the young of the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. he is physically weak and not able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with the physical environment. . the thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however, some compensating power. the relative ability of the young of brute animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound up with the life of those about them. they are compelled, so to speak, to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. human infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just because of their social capacity. we sometimes talk and think as if they simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they being passive recipients. if it were said that children are themselves marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. but observation shows that children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social intercourse. few grown-up persons retain all of the flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them. inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to control them) is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of interest and attention as to the doings of people. the native mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. the statement that children, before adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not contradict the truth of this statement. it would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on their own behalf, not that it does not exist. but the statement is not true as matter of fact. the facts which are cited in support of the alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness with which they go to their mark. if the ends which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, which have consequently ceased to interest them. most of the remainder of children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter to an adult's egoism. to a grown-up person who is too absorbed in his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs. from a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. there is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. in making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. it often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world. . the specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth constitutes his plasticity. this is something quite different from the plasticity of putty or wax. it is not a capacity to take on change of form in accord with external pressure. it lies near the pliable elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings while retaining their own bent. but it is something deeper than this. it is essentially the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a later situation. this means power to modify actions on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop dispositions. without it, the acquisition of habits is impossible. it is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive reactions. the human being is born with a greater number of instinctive tendencies than other animals. but the instincts of the lower animals perfect themselves for appropriate action at an early period after birth, while most of those of the human infant are of little account just as they stand. an original specialized power of adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one route only. a being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied. a chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after hatching. this means that definite coordinations of activities of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected in a few trials. an infant requires about six months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate with his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. as a result, the chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment. the infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is at a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. in learning an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to change of circumstances. a possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. he learns to learn. the importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance of prolonged infancy. this prolongation is significant from the standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the young. the presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and affection. the need for constant continued care was probably a chief means in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions. it certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of affectionate and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest in the well-being of others which is essential to associated life. intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of many new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and planning for the future. thus there is a reciprocal influence. increasing complexity of social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control. hence it provides a further push to social progress. . habits as expressions of growth. we have already noted that plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior experience factors which modify subsequent activities. this signifies the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. we have now to consider the salient features of habits. in the first place, a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing. a habit means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. it is an active control of the environment through control of the organs of action. we are perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the expense of control of the environment. we think of walking, talking, playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the etcher, the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness, and accuracy on the part of the organism. they are that, of course; but the measure of the value of these qualities lies in the economical and effective control of the environment which they secure. to be able to walk is to have certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so with all other habits. education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his environment. the definition expresses an essential phase of growth. but it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of control of means for achieving ends. if we think of a habit simply as a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as wax conforms to the seal which impresses it. the environment is thought of as something fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard of changes taking place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to this fixity of external conditions. habit as habituation is indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our surroundings--to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily associates, etc. conformity to the environment, a change wrought in the organism without reference to ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait of such habituations. aside from the fact that we are not entitled to carry over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth notice. in the first place, we get used to things by first using them. consider getting used to a strange city. at first, there is excessive stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. gradually certain stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are degraded. we can say either that we do not respond to them any longer, or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to them--an equilibrium of adjustment. this means, in the second place, that this enduring adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific adjustments, as occasion arises. we are never interested in changing the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept just as it already is. upon this background our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. habituation is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the environment to our own activities as of our activities to the environment. a savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. it adapts itself. but its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. a civilized people enters upon the scene. it also adapts itself. it introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. as a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. the savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment. the significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive and motor phase. it means formation of intellectual and emotional disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of action. any habit marks an inclination--an active preference and choice for the conditions involved in its exercise. a habit does not wait, micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. if its expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and intense craving. a habit also marks an intellectual disposition. where there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is applied. there is a definite way of understanding the situations in which the habit operates. modes of thought, of observation and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the habits that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant. in unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum precisely because the habits involved are not of a high grade. but there are habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. such statements are, however, understatements. the habits of mind involved in habits of the eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. above all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. we speak of fixed habits. well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their possessor always has them as resources when needed. but the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things. this fact explains two points in a common notion about habits: their identification with mechanical and external modes of action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits." many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit. a habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not easily thrown off even though judgment condemn it. habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which intelligence is disconnected from them. routine habits are unthinking habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. as we have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity of our natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an appropriate and efficient way of acting. routine habits, and habits that possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity. they mark the close of power to vary. there can be no doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with growing years. the instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes into a "settling down," which means aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. only an environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process of forming habits can counteract this tendency. of course, the same hardening of the organic conditions affects the physiological structures which are involved in thinking. but this fact only indicates the need of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is invoked to its maximum possibility. the short-sighted method which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth. . the educational bearings of the conception of development. we have had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. we have been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. if our conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite educational consequences. when it is said that education is development, everything depends upon how development is conceived. our net conclusion is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life. translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming. . development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is, with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means the direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific objects of observation and thought. but the comparative view is not final. the child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. the adult uses his powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli which redirect his powers and keep them developing. ignoring this fact means arrested development, a passive accommodation. normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. the difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions. with respect to the development of powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child should be growing in manhood. with respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. one statement is as true as the other. three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or development,--that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. growth is regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. the educational counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly, failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly, an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic skill at the expense of personal perception. in all cases, the adult environment is accepted as a standard for the child. he is to be brought up to it. natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances--as obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into conformity with external standards. since conformity is the aim, what is distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded as a source of mischief or anarchy. conformity is made equivalent to uniformity. consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown. since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing, external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it. whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end. . since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education. it is a commonplace to say that education should not cease when one leaves school. the point of this commonplace is that the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth. the inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling. when we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. abandoning this notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. since life means growth, a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims. hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. we first look with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got over as rapidly as possible. then the adult formed by such educative methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. this ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of education is with that quality. realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence. life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest. even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power, we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in themselves. they are signs of possible growth. they are to be turned into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or cultivated for their own sake. excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their fixation and thus to arrested development. what impulses are moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and teacher. the true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be better put than in the words of emerson: "respect the child. be not too much his parent. trespass not on his solitude. but i hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion: would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child's nature? i answer,--respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself.... the two points in a boy's training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points." and as emerson goes on to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the teacher. it requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of god; and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness." summary. power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth. plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of habits. habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes. habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. the former furnishes the background of growth; the latter constitute growing. active habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in applying capacities to new aims. they are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth. since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. the criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact. intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but john fiske, in his excursions of an evolutionist, is accredited with its first systematic exposition. this conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions of the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and plasticity noted in this chapter. chapter five: preparation, unfolding, and formal discipline . education as preparation. we have laid it down that the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth. this conception contrasts sharply with other ideas which have influenced practice. by making the contrast explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to light. the first contrast is with the idea that education is a process of preparation or getting ready. what is to be prepared for is, of course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. children are not regarded as social members in full and regular standing. they are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. the conception is only carried a little farther when the life of adults is considered as not having meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for "another life." the idea is but another form of the notion of the negative and privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which flow from putting education on this basis. in the first place, it involves loss of impetus. motive power is not utilized. children proverbially live in the present; that is not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence. the future just as future lacks urgency and body. to get ready for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague chance. under such circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination. the future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. why be in a hurry about getting ready for it? the temptation to postpone is much increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to adventure. naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible. a third undesirable result is the substitution of a conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual under instruction. for a severe and definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the serious business of life. it is impossible to overestimate the loss which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point. it fails most just where it thinks it is succeeding--in getting a preparation for the future. finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. the future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make it work. promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. healthy work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely unconscious. the stimulus resides in the situation with which one is actually confronted. but when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future, rewards for their present sacrifices. everybody knows how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for. it is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the future. if education is growth, it must progressively realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later requirements. growing is not something which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. if the environment, in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is surely taken care of. the mistake is not in attaching importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present effort. because the need of preparation for a continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant as possible. then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of. . education as unfolding. there is a conception of education which professes to be based upon the idea of development. but it takes back with one hand what it proffers with the other. development is conceived not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward a definite goal. the goal is conceived of as completion,--perfection. life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding toward it. logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation theory. practically the two differ in that the adherents of the latter make much of the practical and professional duties for which one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal and spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding. the conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. it simulates the style of the latter. it pays the tribute of speaking much of development, process, progress. but all of these operations are conceived to be merely transitional; they lack meaning on their own account. they possess significance only as movements toward something away from what is now going on. since growth is just a movement toward a completed being, the final ideal is immobile. an abstract and indefinite future is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of present power and opportunity. since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable. consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be translated into something which stands for it. otherwise we should be compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an unfolding from within, and hence sacred. unless we set up some definite criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with proper development. since that is not practicable, a working substitute is set up. usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would like to have a child acquire. consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the pupil what is desired. if what is desired is obtained, that is evidence that the child is unfolding properly. but as the pupil generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the result is a random groping after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of dependence upon the cues furnished by others. just because such methods simulate a true principle and claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child how much will stick. within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. both start from the conception of a whole--an absolute--which is "immanent" in human life. the perfect or complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it is operative here and now. but it is present only implicitly, "potentially," or in an enfolded condition. what is termed development is the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up. froebel and hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive realization of manifestation of the complete principle is effected. according to hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical institutions which embody the different factors in the absolute. according to froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits of the absolute. when these are presented to the child, the whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. a single example may indicate the method. every one familiar with the kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in which the children gather. it is not enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the children. it must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind in general." froebel's recognition of the significance of the native capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most effective single force in modern educational theory in effecting widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. but his formulation of the notion of development and his organization of devices for promoting it were badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. he failed to see that growing is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis upon the completed product. thus he set up a goal which meant the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into abstract and symbolic formulae. a remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic language, transcendental. that is, it is something apart from direct experience and perception. so far as experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be intelligently grasped and stated. this vagueness must be compensated for by some a priori formula. froebel made the connection between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. to regard known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori formula--and every a priori conception must be arbitrary--is an invitation to romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and treat them as laws. after the scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which the inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought home to children. adults being the formulators of the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of the technique. the result was that froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of instruction has ever seen. with hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of the inaccessible absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic, form. his philosophy, like froebel's, marks in one direction an indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life. the weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in fraud. in his philosophy of history and society culminated the efforts of a whole series of german writers--lessing, herder, kant, schiller, goethe--to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great collective institutional products of humanity. for those who learned the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of institutions or of culture as artificial. it destroyed completely--in idea, not in fact--the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of "objective mind"--language, government, art, religion--in the formation of individual minds. but since hegel was haunted by the conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. each in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing process of the absolute mind. taken as such a step or stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral element in the total, which is reason. against institutions as they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions. conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education. institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." individuals, save the great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have no share or lot in it. in the later nineteenth century, this type of idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution. "evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. as against it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of individuals are impotent. or, rather, they are but the means by which it works itself out. social progress is an "organic growth," not an experimental selection. reason is all powerful, but only absolute reason has any power. the recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in the intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational philosophy. it indicated a genuine advance beyond rousseau, who had marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the notion that social conditions are not natural. but in its notion of a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the hegelian theory swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying the individual in the abstract. some of hegel's followers sought to reconcile the claims of the whole and of individuality by the conception of society as an organic whole, or organism. that social organization is presupposed in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted. but the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented by the place and functions of the other organs. as one portion of the bodily tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the hand only, another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the organism, so one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the mechanical operations of society, another for those of a statesman, another for those of a scholar, and so on. the notion of "organism" is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in social organization--a notion which in its educational application again means external dictation instead of growth. . education as training of faculties. a theory which has had great vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." it has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific powers of accomplishment. a trained person is one who can do the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy, promptness, etc. that this is an outcome of education was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative development. but the theory in question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. there is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master. consequently education should get directly at the business of training them. but this implies that they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. being there already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. in the phrase "formal discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through repeated exercise. the forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing, feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise upon material presented. in its classic form, this theory was expressed by locke. on the one hand, the outer world presents the material or content of knowledge through passively received sensations. on the other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. knowledge results if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and divided in nature itself. but the important thing for education is the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established habitudes. the analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last secures automatic skill. even the faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, locke thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity. locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. it seemed to do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. one of the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind should work. the other supplied definite mental powers, which were few in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. the scheme appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. it was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers. it was objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual. this kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon locke. it became, without explicit reference to locke, a common-place of educational theory and of psychology. practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. it made the elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. all that was necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers. this practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, etc. by grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. there are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational application. ( ) perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. there are no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. there are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system. there are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. but these tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) instead of being latent intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment so as to bring about other changes. something in the throat makes one cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus modify the subsequent stimulus. the hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. but the withdrawal alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the needs of the organism. it is by such specific changes of organic activities in response to specific changes in the medium that that control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. ) is effected. now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings are of this kind. in any legitimate sense of the words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition) upon them. ( ) consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might strengthen a muscle by practice. it consists rather (a) in selecting from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which are especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. that is to say, among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated--or else no training occurs. as we have already noted, the primary reactions, with a very few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practically of much use in the case of the human infant. hence the identity of training with selective response. (compare p. .) (b) equally important is the specific coordination of different factors of response which takes place. there is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which effect grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call out just these reactions and no others, and an establishment of connection between the two. but the coordinating does not stop here. characteristic temperature reactions may take place when the object is grasped. these will also be brought in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with the optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame, independent of close contact, may steer one away. or the child in handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues. the ear response is then brought into the system of response. if a certain sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the complex response. ( ) the more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid and the less generally available is the training secured. in equivalent language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training. the usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior. according to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and recollection which may be employed whenever these powers are needed. as matter of fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection with other things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. he may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. he is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. the scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. the connections which are employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions) are deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms of letters and words. having been excluded, they cannot be restored when needed. the ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not available for perceiving and recalling other things. in the ordinary phraseology, it is not transferable. but the wider the context--that is to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer," but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a narrow and rigid, coordination. ( ) going to the root of the matter, the fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. there is no such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. to talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. exercise may react upon circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength, but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in connection with the material means which accomplish them. vigor will enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would if he were weak. but only by employing ball and racket, ball and club, sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. moreover, the difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to "develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport. the former is uniform and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. the latter is varied from moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordinations forming have to be kept flexible and elastic. consequently, the training is much more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and includes more factors. exactly the same thing holds of special and general education of the mind. a monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. one may be an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor judgment in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields. ( ) consequently, such powers as observation, recollection, judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of the occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject matters. a man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to work (in other words by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. observation is an outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and subject matter. it will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter employed. it is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in observing and recalling and for what purpose. and it is only repeating in another form what has already been said, to declare that the criterion here must be social. we want the person to note and recall and judge those things which make him an effective competent member of the group in which he is associated with others. otherwise we might as well set the pupil to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which is about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. if the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better habits than those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with subject matter which is more significant in life. in concluding this portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special and general education has nothing to do with the transferability of function or power. in the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous and impossible. but some activities are broad; they involve a coordination of many factors. their development demands continuous alternation and readjustment. as conditions change, certain factors are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance come to the front. there is constant redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. thus there is practice in prompt making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to meet change in subject matter. wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development, general education is bound to result. for this is what "general" means; broad and flexible. in practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social relationships. a person may become expert in technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or engineering or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action and judgment outside of his specialty. if however his concern with these technical subject matters has been connected with human activities having social breadth, the range of active responses called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider. isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to securing a general training of mind. literature, art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose. summary. the conception that the result of the educative process is capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. the first contrasting conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some future duty or privilege. specific evil effects were pointed out which result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed--namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present. consequently it defeats its own professed purpose. the notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth. but as worked out in the theories of froebel and hegel, it involves ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the present environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. some implicit whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already implicit. since that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of, something has to be found to represent it. according to froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the absolute whole which is in process of unfolding. according to hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual representatives. emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the direct growth of experience in richness of meaning. another influential but defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth, certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering, willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the training of these faculties through repeated exercise. this theory treats subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general powers. criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged powers from one another and from the material upon which they act. the outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability--qualities which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another. as matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all of the organs of response. we are accustomed however to ignore most of these modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment. this statement should be compared with what was said earlier about the sequential ordering of responses (p. ). it is merely a more explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive arrangement occurs. chapter six: education as conservative and progressive . education as formation. we now come to a type of theory which denies the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. according to it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties resident in mind itself. it is rather the formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content by means of a subject matter presented from without. education proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without. that education is formative of mind is not questioned; it is the conception already propounded. but formation here has a technical meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating from without. herbart is the best historical representative of this type of theory. he denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. the mind is simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in reaction to the various realities which act upon it. these qualitatively different reactions are called presentations (vorstellungen). every presentation once called into being persists; it may be driven below the "threshold" of consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced by the reaction of the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. what are termed faculties--attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed by the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and with new presentations. perception, for example, is the complication of presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation above the threshold of consciousness by getting entangled with another presentation, etc. pleasure is the result of reinforcement among the independent activities of presentations; pain of their pulling different ways, etc. the concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different qualities. the "furniture" of the mind is the mind. mind is wholly a matter of "contents." the educational implications of this doctrine are threefold. ( ) this or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that arrangement among the reactions called out. the formation of mind is wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper educational materials. ( ) since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving organs" which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is all important. the effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed. the business of the educator is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and, secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. the control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal. ( ) certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down. presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the step of "preparation,"--that is, calling into special activity and getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which are to assimilate the new one. then after the presentation, follow the processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of the newly formed content to the performance of some task. everything must go through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages. herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the region of routine and accident. he brought it into the sphere of conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and subservience to tradition. moreover, everything in teaching and discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content with vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual symbols. he abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made attention to concrete subject matter, to the content, all-important. herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence in bringing to the front questions connected with the material of study than any other educational philosopher. he stated problems of method from the standpoint of their connection with subject matter: method having to do with the manner and sequence of presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction with old. the fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are occupied with their environment. the theory represents the schoolmaster come to his own. this fact expresses at once its strength and its weakness. the conception that the mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of life. the philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. it emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing in common experiences. it exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. it insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. it takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its essence,--vital energy seeking opportunity for effective exercise. all education forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. moreover, the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes place through them. it is a process of reconstruction, reorganization. . education as recapitulation and retrospection. a peculiar combination of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. the individual develops, but his proper development consists in repeating in orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and human history. the former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made to occur by means of education. the alleged biological truth that the individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the history of the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past. cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in the mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived such a life. consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject matter of their education at this time is the material--especially the literary material of myths, folk-tale, and song--produced by humanity in the analogous stage. then the child passes on to something corresponding, say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch of culture. in this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small school in germany (followers of herbart for the most part), has had little currency. but the idea which underlies it is that education is essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind is adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past. this idea has had such immense influence upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme formulation. in the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. embyronic growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of lower forms of life. but in no respect is it a strict traversing of past stages. if there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary development would clearly not have taken place. each new generation would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence. development, in short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior scheme of growth. and this suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. the great advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. the business of education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. the social environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. to ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational function. a biologist has said: "the history of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct method." surely it would be foolish if education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious experience so that they become increasingly successful. the two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled from association with the false context which perverts them. on the biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. the other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past history so far as they are of help for the future. since they represent the results of prior experience, their value for future experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. literatures produced in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an enormous difference between availing ourselves of them as present resources and taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective character. ( ) the distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse of the idea of heredity. it is assumed that heredity means that past life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into them. thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. but for educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an individual. education must take the being as he is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment of native activities is a basic fact. that they were produced in such and such a way, or that they are derived from one's ancestry, is not especially important for the educator, however it may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact that they now exist. suppose one had to advise or direct a person regarding his inheritance of property. the fallacy of assuming that the fact it is an inheritance, predetermines its future use, is obvious. the advisor is concerned with making the best use of what is there--putting it at work under the most favorable conditions. obviously he cannot utilize what is not there; neither can the educator. in this sense, heredity is a limit of education. recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy and the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of trying to make by instruction something out of an individual which he is not naturally fitted to become. but the doctrine does not determine what use shall be made of the capacities which exist. and, except in the case of the imbecile, these original capacities are much more varied and potential, even in the case of the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to utilize. consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity, the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment which will adequately function whatever activities are present. the relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of language. if a being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-receptors and no connections between the two sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time to try to teach him to converse. he is born short in that respect, and education must accept the limitation. but if he has this native equipment, its possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk any language or what language he will talk. the environment in which his activities occur and by which they are carried into execution settles these things. if he lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men refused to talk to one another and used only that minimum of gestures without which they could not get along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal organs. if the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons speaking the chinese language, the activities which make like sounds will be selected and coordinated. this illustration may be applied to the entire range of the educability of any individual. it places the heritage from the past in its right connection with the demands and opportunities of the present. ( ) the theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce between the process and product of growth which has been criticized. to keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational subject matter. but an individual can live only in the present. the present is not just something which comes after the past; much less something produced by it. it is what life is in leaving the past behind it. the study of past products will not help us understand the present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they were the products. a knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. and the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past. under such circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum. men escape from the crudities of the present to live in its imagined refinements, instead of using what the past offers as an agency for ripening these crudities. the present, in short, generates the problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when we search. the past is the past precisely because it does not include what is characteristic in the present. the moving present includes the past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own movement. the past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but od condition that it be seen as the past of the present, and not as another and disconnected world. the principle which makes little of the present act of living and operation of growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to the past because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. but having turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden with the spoils of the past. a mind that is adequately sensitive to the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of motives for interest in the background of the present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection. . education as reconstruction. in its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. it has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end--the direct transformation of the quality of experience. infancy, youth, adult life,--all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible meaning. we thus reach a technical definition of education: it is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. ( ) the increment of meaning corresponds to the increased perception of the connections and continuities of the activities in which we are engaged. the activity begins in an impulsive form; that is, it is blind. it does not know what it is about; that is to say, what are its interactions with other activities. an activity which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the connections which had been imperceptible. to recur to our simple example, a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. henceforth he knows that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain act of vision (and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain light means a source of heat. the acts by which a scientific man in his laboratory learns more about flame differ no whit in principle. by doing certain things, he makes perceptible certain connections of heat with other things, which had been previously ignored. thus his acts in relation to these things get more meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is about" when he has to do with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting them happen--all synonymous ways of saying the same thing. at the same stroke, the flame has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its intellectual content. ( ) the other side of an educative experience is an added power of subsequent direction or control. to say that one knows what he is about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and avert undesirable ones. a genuinely educative experience, then, one in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a capricious activity on the other. (a) in the latter one "does not care what happens"; one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of one's act (the evidences of its connections with other things) with the act. it is customary to frown upon such aimless random activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. but there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from everything else. but in fact such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. individuals act capriciously whenever they act under external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed upon other acts. one may learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are not perceived or anticipated. but we learn only because after the act is performed we note results which we had not noted before. but much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the result--say the answer--and the method pursued. so far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle. such action is essentially capricious, and leads to capricious habits. (b) routine action, action which is automatic, may increase skill to do a particular thing. in so far, it might be said to have an educative effect. but it does not lead to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the meaning-horizon. and since the environment changes and our way of acting has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some critical moment. the vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude. the essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process. this is verbally self-contradictory, but only verbally. it means that experience as an active process occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. the later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the things possessing this meaning. every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and all education resides in having such experiences. it remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. for purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. in static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main. but not in progressive communities. they endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own. men have long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. but we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents. summary. education may be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively. that is to say, it may be treated as process of accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past for a resource in a developing future. the former finds its standards and patterns in what has gone before. the mind may be regarded as a group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. in this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which the later are to be assimilated. emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to regard them as of little account. but these experiences do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both the activities and the environment. the defect of the herbartian theory of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant interaction and change. the same principle of criticism applies to theories which find the primary subject matter of study in the cultural products--especially the literary products--of man's history. isolated from their connection with the present environment in which individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting environment. their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to do at the present time. the idea of education advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as external formation, and as recapitulation of the past. chapter seven: the democratic conception in education for the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with education as it may exist in any social group. we have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education as it operates in different types of community life. to say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group. particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. to make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life. . the implications of human association. society is one word, but many things. men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. one man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. it often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious, associations. there are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. in many modern states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. from this standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (see ante, p. .) the terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. they have both a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. in social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost. society is conceived as one by its very nature. the qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. but when we look at the facts which the term denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are included. if it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "society" which hold it together. there is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. in seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. we cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. we must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. but, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. the problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement. now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with other groups. from these two traits we derive our standard. how numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? how full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? if we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. hence, the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. if we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members--it is readily communicable--and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it. in short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. i. let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically governed state. it is not true there is no common interest in such an organization between governed and governors. the authorities in command must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must call some of their powers into play. talleyrand said that a government could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. this cynical declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of coercive force. it may be said, however, that the activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading--that such a government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for fear. in a way, this statement is true. but it overlooks the fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. the real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. in evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward--say comfort and ease--many other capacities are left untouched. or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them. instead of operating on their own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain. this is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the social group. stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. in order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. there must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves. and the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. a separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis. the evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane. lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought. the more activity is restricted to a few definite lines--as it is when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences--the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. this condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. it is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in. much is said about scientific management of work. it is a narrow view which restricts the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the muscles. the chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the relations of a man to his work--including his relations to others who take part--which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is doing. efficiency in production often demands division of labor. but it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions. the tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry--those who supply its aims. because of their lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in industry. intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with technical production and marketing of goods. no doubt, a very acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the failure to take into account the significant social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional life. ii. this illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. the isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial spirit into relief. but this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. it marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. the essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group. that savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. it springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. on such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. it would certainly occasion reconstruction. it is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical environment. but the principle applies even more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it--the sphere of social contacts. every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. it remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of space. . the democratic ideal. the two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. the first signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. the second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit--its continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by varied intercourse. and these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society. upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. the devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. the superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. but there is a deeper explanation. a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. the extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. these more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. they secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests. the widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. on the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. but after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. obviously a society to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. a society marked off into classes need he specially attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. a society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. the result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others. . the platonic educational philosophy. subsequent chapters will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in education. in the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education was especially conspicuous. the first one to be considered is that of plato. no one could better express than did he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use. much which has been said so far is borrowed from what plato first consciously taught the world. but conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their application. he never got any conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. if we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. we shall have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities--what he called justice--as a trait of both individual and social organization. but how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? in dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just and harmonious social order. everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. a disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different models and standards. under such conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain consistency of mind. only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. a society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought astray. it puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. only in a just state will these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. we seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. however, plato suggested a way out. a few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom--or truth--may by study learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. if a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. an education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained. it would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. it would be impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the activities of others. yet the society in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw. while he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. for him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that. consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows to which one of three classes an individual belongs. there being no recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. there were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's constitution. hence education would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and progress. in some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants. others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. they become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace. but their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. those who possess this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the legislators of the state--for laws are the universals which control the particulars of experience. thus it is not true that in intent, plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. but it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. we cannot better plato's conviction that an individual is happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective use. but progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. it is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes. although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static ideals. he thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was unchangeable. hence while he would radically change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would subsequently have no place. the final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered. though they might not be inherently important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. the breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. for the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state. . the "individualistic" ideal of the eighteenth century. in the eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different circle of ideas. "nature" still means something antithetical to existing social organization; plato exercised a great influence upon rousseau. but the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of free development of individuality in all its variety. education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of instruction and discipline. moreover, the native or original endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. social arrangements were thought of as mere external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves. nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance of the movement. in reality its chief interest was in progress and in social progress. the seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society--toward cosmopolitanism. the positive ideal was humanity. in membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated; while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of the state. the doctrine of extreme individualism was but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity. the emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society. the heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the social estate in which they found themselves. they attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. such limitation was both distorting and corrupting. their impassioned devotion to emancipation of life from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature. to give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of humanity. unrestrained faith in nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of law. the newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every other. natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions. education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in insuring this more social society. it was plainly seen that economic and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of thought and feeling. the first step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. what was called social life, existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. how could it be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own destruction? "nature" must then be the power to which the enterprise was to be left. even the extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current derived itself from this conception. to insist that mind is originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. if the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by means of the natural environment. and since the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth. . education as national and as social. as soon as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side became obvious. merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. not only was some method required but also some positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction. the "complete and harmonious development of all powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity, required definite organization for its realization. private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work. a pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his example. but even pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the support of the state. the realization of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the activities of existing states. the movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered schools. so far as europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement in political life--a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent movements. under the influence of german thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. the "state" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. to form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. the historic situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the napoleonic conquests, especially in germany. the german states felt (and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and maintaining their political integrity and power. externally they were weak and divided. under the leadership of prussian statesmen they made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public education. this change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. the individualistic theory receded into the background. the state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal. when the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social efficiency. and with the immense importance attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism. since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like subordination. the educational process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development. since, however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. the reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic" character of the state. the individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions does he attain true personality. what appears to be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective reason manifested in the state--the only way in which he can become truly rational. the notion of development which we have seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination to existing institutions. the extent of the transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. in his treatise on pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes man. mankind begins its history submerged in nature--not as man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. the peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. this creative effort is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. its acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. but there is the great difficulty. each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes. who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? we must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity. "all culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them. simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. rulers are simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better tools for their own intentions." even the subsidy by rulers of privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. for the rulers' interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. we have in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth century individualistic cosmopolitanism. the full development of private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea of progress. in addition we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. but in less than two decades after this time, kant's philosophic successors, fichte and hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular the regeneration of germany is to be accomplished by an education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and laws. in this spirit, germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational enterprises. two results should stand out from this brief historical survey. the first is that such terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. plato had the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and social coherency and stability. his situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. the eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. the idealistic philosophy of germany in the early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and complete development of cultured personality with social discipline and political subordination. it made the national state an intermediary between the realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the other. consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in the more recent terminology of "social efficiency." all this reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: the conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind. these considerations pave the way for our second conclusion. one of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider social aim. the earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of administration. in europe, in the continental states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. the social aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim. this confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse. on the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries. they are largely international in quality and method. they involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries. at the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its neighbors. each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that each has interests which are exclusively its own. to question this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and political science. this contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a function and test of education than has yet been attained. is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others. externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political boundaries. neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely negative means. it is not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by another. school facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers. accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers. the ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public system of education. the same principle has application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another. it is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would stimulate international jealousy and animosity. the emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. the secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind. if these applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately grasped. this conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims. otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently applied. summary. since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction implies a particular social ideal. the two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. an undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. a society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. the platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. the so-called individualism of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was to be the organ. but it lacked any agency for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon nature. the institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution. there is a much neglected strain in rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. he opposed the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the citizen nor the man. under existing conditions, he preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. but there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own endeavor, as embodied in the emile, was simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch. chapter eight: aims in education . the nature of an aim. the account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic community. for it assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education--or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. and this means a democratic society. in our search for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. our whole conception forbids. we are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. and the latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. for in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own. our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. we approach the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. any exhibition of energy has results. the wind blows about the sands of the desert; the position of the grains is changed. here is a result, an effect, but not an end. for there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills what went before it. there is mere spatial redistribution. one state of affairs is just as good as any other. consequently there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of transformation and realization. consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes in the sands when the wind blows them about. the results of the bees' actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what has preceded. when the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares the way for the next. when cells are built, the queen lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. when they are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves. now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. since aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? to talk about an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense. it is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. an aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process. given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. if bees anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an aim. hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education--or any other undertaking--where conditions do not permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be. in the next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. the foresight functions in three ways. in the first place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in the way. in the second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of means. it facilitates an economical selection and arrangement. in the third place, it makes choice of alternatives possible. if we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we can then compare the value of the two courses of action; we can pass judgment upon their relative desirability. if we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. we intervene to bring about this result or that. of course these three points are closely connected with one another. we can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. the more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. in turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it. where only a single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning attaching to the act is limited. one only steams ahead toward the mark. sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. but if unexpected difficulties offer themselves, one has not as many resources at command as if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the possibilities of the field. he cannot make needed readjustments readily. the net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently. to foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities. to do these things means to have a mind--for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one another. to have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions in the way,--or, if it is really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration--it is to have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. mind is capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present conditions. and these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose. a man is stupid or blind or unintelligent--lacking in mind--just in the degree in which in any activity he does not know what he is about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. a man is imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms plans apart from study of the actual conditions, including his own capacities. such relative absence of mind means to make our feelings the measure of what is to happen. to be intelligent we must "stop, look, listen" in making the plan of an activity. to identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show its value--its function in experience. we are only too given to making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." we forget that it comes from the adjective "conscious." to be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent. . the criteria of good aims. we may apply the results of our discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing of aims. ( ) the aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. it must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and difficulties of the situation. theories about the proper end of our activities--educational and moral theories--often violate this principle. they assume ends lying outside our activities; ends foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from some outside source. then the problem is to bring our activities to bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. they are something for which we ought to act. in any case such "aims" limit intelligence; they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities. they limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means. ( ) we have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the attempt to realize them. this impression must now be qualified. the aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. the act of striving to realize it tests its worth. if it suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. but usually--at least in complicated situations--acting upon it brings to light conditions which had been overlooked. this calls for revision of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. an aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. an end established externally to the process of action is always rigid. being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. what happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. such an end can only be insisted upon. the failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances. the value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change conditions. it is a method for dealing with conditions so as to effect desirable alterations in them. a farmer who should passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. one of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. a good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. the aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action. ( ) the aim must always represent a freeing of activities. the term end in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or conclusion of some process. the only way in which we can define an activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it terminates--as one's aim in shooting is the target. but we must remember that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to carry out. strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also by the sight on the gun. the different objects which are thought of are means of directing the activity. thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of activity. or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship--he wants to do something with it. the doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. the object is but a phase of the active end,--continuing the activity successfully. this is what is meant by the phrase, used above, "freeing activity." in contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the activity. it is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be attained and possessed. when one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. as compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which is alone worth while. in other words, the external idea of the aim leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience. every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. we call it end when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. a farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. it certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely as means which he has to employ to get something else in which alone he is interested. in the former case, his entire course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own value. he has the experience of realizing his end at every stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely. for if he does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself blocked. the aim is as definitely a means of action as is any other portion of an activity. . applications in education. there is nothing peculiar about educational aims. they are just like aims in any directed occupation. the educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. the conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons change. his aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies work together, instead of against one another. it would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of plant growth, etc. his purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day. foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan--that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed. it is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. it is as absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function--whether farming or educating. any aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm. and it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like education. and consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete situations in which they find themselves. as a recent writer has said: "to lead this boy to read scott's novels instead of old sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from john's make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,--these are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education." bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims. ( ) an educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. the tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. in general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated. there is also an inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and place. the larger range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount to. thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood. so if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the import of the babbling impulses of infancy. but it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated. ( ) an aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating with the activities of those undergoing instruction. it must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities. unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is worthless. instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the situation. it operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with the fixed end in view. every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions. since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details which do not count? the vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. teachers receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is current in the community. the teachers impose them upon children. as a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter. this distrust of the teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. the latter receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition, and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims. ( ) educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to be general and ultimate. every activity, however specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out indefinitely into other things. so far as a general idea makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. but "general" also means "abstract," or detached from all specific context. and such abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means. that education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. a truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into account. this means a wider and more flexible observation of means. the more interacting forces, for example, the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate resources. he will see a greater number of possible starting places, and a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants to do. the fuller one's conception of possible future achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. if one knew enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and fruitfully. understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator's real concern. we premise (as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that there is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them as competitors. when we come to act in a tangible way we have to select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition, since they mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene. one cannot climb a number of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible, competing worlds. or, putting the matter in a slightly different way, one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and observations, and another statement another set of questions, calling for other observations. then the more general ends we have, the better. one statement will emphasize what another slurs over. what a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor. summary. an aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation and choice of ways of acting. it signifies that an activity has become intelligent. specifically it means foresight of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and experiment. a true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of action from without. the latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an externally dictated order to do such and such things. instead of connecting directly with present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it is to be reached. instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit set to activity. in education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish. chapter nine: natural development and social efficiency as aims . nature as supplying the aim. we have just pointed out the futility of trying to establish the aim of education--some one final aim which subordinates all others to itself. we have indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any number of them, all consistent with one another. as matter of fact, a large number have been stated at different times, all having great local value. for the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. and we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis--that is, such things as are taking care of themselves fairly well. we tend rather to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. we frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. it is, then, do paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has least of in actual fact. a time of domination by authority will call out as response the desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized individual activities the need of social control as an educational aim. the actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus balance each other. at different times such aims as complete living, better methods of language study, substitution of things for words, social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. the following discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies. we begin with a consideration that education is a process of development in accordance with nature, taking rousseau's statement, which opposed natural to social (see ante, p. ); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes social to natural. ( ) educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to resort to nature as a standard. nature is supposed to furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. the positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the natural endowment of those educated. its weakness is the ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical. the constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the work. since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity better than rousseau, we shall turn to him. "education," he says, "we receive from three sources--nature, men, and things. the spontaneous development of our organs and capacities constitutes the education of nature. the use to which we are taught to put this development constitutes that education given us by men. the acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes that of things. only when these three kinds of education are consonant and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. if we are asked what is this end, the answer is that of nature. for since the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." then he defines nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the opinion of others." the wording of rousseau will repay careful study. it contains as fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction with a curious twist. it would be impossible to say better what is said in the first sentences. the three factors of educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment. this statement certainly covers the ground. his other two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. but it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other statements of rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these three things as factors which must work together to some extent in order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate and independent operations. especially does he believe that there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of the native organs and faculties. he thinks that this development can go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. and it is to this separate development that education coming from social contact is to be subordinated. now there is an immense difference between a use of native activities in accord with those activities themselves--as distinct from forcing them and perverting them--and supposing that they have a normal development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard and norm of all learning by use. to recur to our previous illustration, the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of proper educative growth. the start is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. but it is absurd to suppose that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself would evolve a perfect speech. taken literally, rousseau's principle would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development of articulate speech--which they are--but as furnishing language itself--the standard for all teaching of language. the point may be summarized by saying that rousseau was right, introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their development. as matter of fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. and the office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth through putting powers to the best possible use. the instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of operation,--a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. but the notion of a spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure mythology. the natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. there is no learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he identified god with nature; to him the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good creator. to paraphrase the old saying about the country and the town, god made the original human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put. consequently the development of the former furnishes the standard to which the latter must be subordinated. when men attempt to determine the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with a divine plan. the interference by social arrangements with nature, god's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals. rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in modifying the attitude towards children's interests. but it is hardly necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which they are employed. that neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. but the moral is not to leave them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide an environment which shall organize them. returning to the elements of truth contained in rousseau's statements, we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the means of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate a number of desirable specific aims. ( ) natural development as an aim fixes attention upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor. the aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our educational practices. "nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that "nature" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer--are verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious. ( ) the aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for physical mobility. in rousseau's words: "children are always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious." when he says that "nature's intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact fairly. but if he had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of the muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. in other words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by use of the bodily organs in explorations, in handling of materials, in plays and games. ( ) the general aim translates into the aim of regard for individual differences among children. nobody can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different individuals. the difference applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. as rouseau said: "each individual is born with a distinctive temperament. we indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. therefore after we have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive." lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. capacities bud and bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. we must strike while the iron is hot. especially precious are the first dawnings of power. more than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. educational concern with the early years of life--as distinct from inculcation of useful arts--dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by pestalozzi and froebel, following rousseau, of natural principles of growth. the irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous system. "while growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at another. the methods which shall recognize in the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most effective." observation of natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. they show themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and doings,--that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and when not aware of being under observation. it does not follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be taken account of. we must see to it that the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to nothing. many tendencies that trouble parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them. at all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils to be eliminated. that artificiality against which the conception of following nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to force children directly into the mold of grown-up standards. in conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one another. before the time of rousseau educational reformers had been inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it. all the differences between peoples and between classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to differences of training, of exercise, and practice. originally, mind, reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all. this essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. as a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. it substituted specific instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from individual to individual (just as they differ, as rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment, memory, and generalization. upon this side, the doctrine of educative accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern biology, physiology, and psychology. it means, in effect, that great as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. on the other hand, the doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. it meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (see ante, p. ). rousseau's statement that everything is good as it comes from the hands of the creator has its signification only in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: "everything degenerates in the hands of man." and again he says: "natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his fellow man. civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. good political institutions are those which make a man unnatural." it is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social life as it now exists that he rested the notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal. that evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will be put to better uses. . social efficiency as aim. a conception which made nature supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly fail to call out a protest. the opposing emphasis took the form of a doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. it is not surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in that conception. it is a fact that we must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the development of power--that is to say, efficiency--means. the error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than of utilization to secure efficiency. the doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning. ( ) translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the relationships of persons to one another. if an individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. he misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. if he is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. no scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. yet in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. with the change from an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis. there is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. a democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. this principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. as a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. new industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. consequently an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. when the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less definite training. but, most of all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of inequities. it is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. wherever social control means subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is danger that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. differences of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of individuals are to be. we have an unconscious revival of the defects of the platonic scheme (ante, p. ) without its enlightened method of selection. ( ) civic efficiency, or good citizenship. it is, of course, arbitrary to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. but the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational ability. these traits run from whatever make an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. the aim of civic efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a training of mental power at large. it calls attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be done are things which involve one's relationships with others. here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too narrowly. an over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last analysis security of social progress depends upon them. for scientific men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social efficiency. it must be borne in mind that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in a give and take of experience. it covers all that makes one's own experience more worth while to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. in the broadest sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests of others. when social efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,--intelligent sympathy or good will. for sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. what is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find the good of their own choice. social efficiency, even social service, are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons, and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent. . culture as aim. whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. when the "natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. when efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. whether called culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual--and he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. its opposite is the mediocre, the average. whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. for how can there be a society really worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities? the fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid division of inferior and superior. the latter are supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are confined to providing external products. when social efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over. but if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. the separation of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential justification. the aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within the process of experience. when it is measured by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic. results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. to set up an external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it with something purely "inner." and the idea of perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions. what is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others--which is not capable of free and full communication. what is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally--and therefore exclusively. what one is as a person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. this transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish. any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher, student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently worth while. why then should it be thought that one must take his choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others, or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul or the building of an inner spiritual life and personality? what happens is that since neither of these things is persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. one tries each course by turns. there is no greater tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of life. the dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of antagonists. summary. general or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying the specific problems of education. consequently it is a test of the value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are suggested by another. we have applied this test to three general aims: development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or personal mental enrichment. in each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated come into conflict with each other. the partial statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. from this point of view training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. but when we recognize that natural activities mean native activities which develop only through the uses in which they are nurtured, the conflict disappears. similarly a social efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. but social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities. this is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. and there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of meanings. donaldson, growth of brain, p. . we must not forget that rousseau had the idea of a radically different sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than existing states as these are worse than the state of nature. chapter ten: interest and discipline . the meaning of the terms. we have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. the former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at. the latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. his fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events. consequently he does whatever he can to influence the direction present occurrences take. one is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the window; it is all the same to him. the other is like a man who has planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate. he cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed picnic. if a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him, if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way if he foresees the consequence in time. in many instances, he can intervene even more directly. the attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences. there are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest. these words suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than another. interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of solicitude and attentive eagerness. such words as interest, affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible result. they take for granted the objective changes. but the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in the other. what is anticipated is objective and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. but for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response. the difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort. while such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward objects--toward what is foreseen. we may call the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts of the situation. such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their course in a world by themselves. but they are always responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction with other changes. life activities flourish and fail only in connection with changes of the environment. they are literally bound up with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about us. instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of such a separate world. they afford convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of the self are bound up with the movement of persons and things. interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation. the word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination. (i) an occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as an interest. thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting japanese prints, or banking. (ii) by an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him. in some legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing at court. he has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs. a silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his profits and liabilities. (iii) when we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis falls directly upon his personal attitude. to be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. to take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. we say of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself in it. both terms express the engrossment of the self in an object. when the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated. interest is taken to mean merely the effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure. separated from any objective development of affairs, these are reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. this procedure is properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of education. but the objection is based upon the fact--or assumption--that the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. the remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material. it is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with present powers. the function of this material in engaging activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. if the material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary, semi-coerced effort. the word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,--that which connects two things otherwise distant. in education, the distance covered may be looked at as temporal. the fact that a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. we overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is something intervening. in learning, the present powers of the pupil are the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit. between the two lie means--that is middle conditions:--acts to be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. only through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities reach a satisfactory consummation. these intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end depends upon them. to be means for the achieving of present tendencies, to be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different names for the same thing. when material has to be made interesting, it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived. to make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been applied to the doctrine of interest in education. so much for the meaning of the term interest. now for that of discipline. where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence are required. it is obvious that a very large part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary solicitations. a man of strong will, in the popular usage of the words, is a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. his ability is executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out his aims. a weak will is unstable as water. clearly there are two factors in will. one has to do with the foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon the person. (i) obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. a man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. in fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while. stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the end. the really executive man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full as possible. the people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. they pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. when they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves. they are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. that the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized. (ii) there is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of results. ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a person. they are something to look at and for curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve. there is no such thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided intellectuality. a person "takes it out" as we say in considering the consequences of proposed lines of action. a certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in action. and most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable. a person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline. discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for carrying through the action undertaken. to know what one is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. discipline is positive. to cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task--these things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence in accomplishment. it is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline are connected, not opposed. (i) even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power--apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences--is not possible without interest. deliberation will be perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. parents and teachers often complain--and correctly--that children "do not want to hear, or want to understand." their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns. this is a state of things that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of methods which increase indifference and aversion. even punishing a child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of connection. in the long run, its value is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims. (ii) that interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more obvious. employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested in what they are doing. if one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick to his work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it merely from a sense of obligation. interest measures--or rather is--the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving one to act for its realization. . the importance of the idea of interest in education. interest represents the moving force of objects--whether perceived or presented in imagination--in any experience having a purpose. in the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an educative development is that it leads to considering individual children in their specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. one who recognizes the importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. attitudes and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal the same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of natural aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. but the facts of interest also supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of education. rightly understood, they put us on our guard against certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. too frequently mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that exist independently. knowledge is then regarded as an external application of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions which this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as a combination of the two. subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary application of mind to it or through the impressions it makes on mind. the facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. the things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or retarding it. these statements are too formal to be very intelligible. an illustration may clear up their significance. you are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter. if you are an expert, your formed habits take care of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. suppose, however, you are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does not work well. you then have to use intelligence. you do not wish to strike the keys at random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. you attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine. your attention is not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. it is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your occupation. your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result intended. you have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are. this foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. action that does not involve such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. in neither case is it intelligent. to be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent. if we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the same. there is an activity in process; one is taken up with the development of a theme. unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together with continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be reached. the whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the end. leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. let there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming--abortive intelligence. if this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment of aims. intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned. nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and partakes. other things, the independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and hinder. the individual's act may be initial in a course of events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of his response with energies supplied by other agencies. conceive mind as anything but one factor partaking along with others in the production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless. the problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. the remedy for the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training. discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. in short, the root of the error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of which observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. it consists in regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a present material. in historic practice the error has cut two ways. on one hand, it has screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. to say that they are "disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. it has not been enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not really contribute to the cultivation of the self. that they were "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the realm of rational discussion. by its nature, the allegation could not be checked up. even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. his failure was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods. the responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end. it was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined. in the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in constructive power of achievement. as we have already seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort to foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting, and an active identification with some anticipated consequences. identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material. a person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in hand. the more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern it has for the habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it--and hence the more discipline of will. to attend to material because there is something to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive power. application just for the sake of application, for the sake of training, is alone disciplinary. this is more likely to occur if the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of discipline. the logical result is expressed with literal truth in the words of an american humorist: "it makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it." the counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be learned. in the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means so much material to be studied. various branches of study represent so many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete within itself. history is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the entire curriculum. having a ready-made existence on their own account, their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. this idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be complete by itself--for educational purposes at least. later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning of the subject matter of instruction. at this point, we need only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence studies represents things in the part which they play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. just as one "studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with any fact or truth. it becomes an object of study--that is, of inquiry and reflection--when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. numbers are not objects of study just because they are numbers already constituting a branch of learning called mathematics, but because they represent qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes depends. stated thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract. translated into details, it means that the act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned. study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. this connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education. . some social aspects of the question. while the theoretical errors of which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. a change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts to modify social conditions. men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. the ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic attitude. art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical. like every mode of action, it brings about changes in the world. the changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about. no ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and display. many of our existing social activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes. neither the people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and free interest in their work. because of the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately engaged. the same conditions force many people back upon themselves. they take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies. they are aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify conditions. their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner landscape. even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life--not a temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. the very word art may become associated not with specific transformation of things, making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. the separation and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this situation. thus interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made perverse. compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture. this state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. the intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. moreover, the majority of human beings still lack economic freedom. their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources of the environment. our economic conditions still relegate many men to a servile status. as a consequence, the intelligence of those in control of the practical situation is not liberal. instead of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human in so far as they are exclusive. this state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational traditions. it throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher education. it accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of life. but it also helps define the peculiar problem of present education. the school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. but it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions. and just here the true conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance. persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. to organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social conditions. to oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. a reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. it can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time. but this is not a reason for nominally accepting one educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to another. it is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it persistently. summary. interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity having an aim. interest means that one is identified with the objects which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its realization. any activity with an aim implies a distinction between an earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also intermediate steps. to have an interest is to take things as entering into such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in isolation. the time difference between the given incomplete state of affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it demands continuity of attention and endurance. this attitude is what is practically meant by will. discipline or development of power of continuous attention is its fruit. the significance of this doctrine for the theory of education is twofold. on the one hand it protects us from the notion that mind and mental states are something complete in themselves, which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects and topics so that knowledge results. it shows that mind and intelligent or purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things enter are identical. hence to develop and train mind is to provide an environment which induces such activity. on the other side, it protects us from the notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated and independent. it shows that subject matter of learning is identical with all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action. the developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived, is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and facts on the other. chapter eleven: experience and thinking . the nature of experience. the nature of experience can be understood only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined. on the active hand, experience is trying--a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. on the passive, it is undergoing. when we experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. we do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar combination. the connection of these two phases of experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience. mere activity does not constitute experience. it is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it. when an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance. we learn something. it is not experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence. henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn. being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action. blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. so far as this happens, everything is writ in water. there is none of that cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that term. on the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. they are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. there is no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning. we get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what is coming--no added control. only by courtesy can such an experience be called experience. to "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of things. two conclusions important for education follow. ( ) experience is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. but ( ) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. it includes cognition in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to something, or has meaning. in schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. the very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. the former is then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor. the intimate union of activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other. it would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them. some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. (a) in part bodily activity becomes an intruder. having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with. for the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his mind. and the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it has to do something. but its activities, not being utilized in occupation with things which yield significant results, have to be frowned upon. they lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of mischief. the chief source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind away from its material. a premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. the teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur. the nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate. the neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally meaningless fooling--both very different from the normal play of children. physically active children become restless and unruly; the more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to give them free play. it may be seriously asserted that a chief cause for the remarkable achievements of greek education was that it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and body. (b) even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used. the senses--especially the eye and ear--have to be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say. the lips and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been stowed away. the senses are then regarded as a kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and avenues of knowledge. to keep the eyes on the book and the ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace. moreover, reading, writing, and figuring--important school arts--demand muscular or motor training. the muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back out of the mind into external action. for it happens that using the muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency to repeat. the obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more or less. for the senses and muscles are used not as organic participants in having an instructive experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind. before the child goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are organs of the process of doing something from which meaning results. the boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to note the various pressures of the string on his hand. his senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow "conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something with a purpose. the qualities of seen and touched things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly perceived; they have a meaning. but when pupils are expected to use their eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in order to reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting training is simply of isolated sense organs and muscles. it is such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it mechanical. it is customary for teachers to urge children to read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning. but if they originally learned the sensory-motor technique of reading--the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for--by methods which did not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. the vocal organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. drawing, singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way; for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily activity so that a separation of body from mind--that is, from recognition of meaning--is set up. mathematics, even in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil. (c) on the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of relations or connections. it is altogether too common to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments. the latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare them. it is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their connections--with what goes before and comes after. then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall be brought out. as matter of fact, every perception and every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. we do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection with something else--the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or the "period" which it represents, and so on. a wagon is not perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon. and these connections are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and so on. judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of familiar objects. words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas. and in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing with what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas. the substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. but we are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations which confer significance. we get so thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with. there is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter. all authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is the genuinely intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter. the failure arises in supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience--without that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken. it is assumed that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation. hence the deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world. an ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance. an experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. it tends to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. because of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty. . reflection in experience. thought or reflection, as we have already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. no experience having a meaning is possible without some element of thought. but we may contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of reflection found in them. all our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them--what psychologists call the method of trial and error. we simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure. some experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process. we see that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are. we do not see the details of the connection; the links are missing. our discernment is very gross. in other cases we push our observation farther. we analyze to see just what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence. this extension of our insight makes foresight more accurate and comprehensive. the action which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected to. but if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are there. the method extends our practical control. for if some of the conditions are missing, we may, if we know what the needed antecedents for an effect are, set to work to supply them; or, if they are such as to produce undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the superfluous causes and economize effort. in discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is made explicit. its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is very different. hence the quality of the experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call this type of experience reflective--that is, reflective par excellence. the deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience. thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous. their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its place. the occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does. thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent element in our experience. it makes it possible to act with an end in view. it is the condition of our having aims. as soon as an infant begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion, judging. for he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so recognizes a relationship. any future development, however elaborate it may be, is only an extending and a refining of this simple act of inference. all that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what is noted just those factors which point to something to happen. the opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior. the former accepts what has been customary as a full measure of possibility and omits to take into account the connections of the particular things done. the latter makes the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of our personal action with the energies of the environment. it says, virtually, "things are to be just as i happen to like them at this instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue just as i have found them in the past." both refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow from present action. reflection is the acceptance of such responsibility. the starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going to turn out. as this is written, the world is filled with the clang of contending armies. for an active participant in the war, it is clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and that happening. he is identified, for the time at least, with the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. but even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends. to think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome. to fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to think. it is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering apparatus. to consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think. nor will the reflective experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space. imagine the war done with, and a future historian giving an account of it. the episode is, by assumption, past. but he cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it, though not for the historian. to take it by itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively. reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of the course of events. for the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent. for neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon imagination. but the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. if we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. we desire this or that outcome. one wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all. from this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality. the general who allows his hopes and desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation will surely make a mistake in calculation. while hopes and fears may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in the degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations and reasonings. there is, however, no incompatibility between the fact that the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's self out of the data. the almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is designed to influence the result. only gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance for education. to say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are uncertain or doubtful or problematic. only what is finished, completed, is wholly assured. where there is reflection there is suspense. the object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the basis of what is already given. certain other facts about thinking accompany this feature. since the situation in which thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating. acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring. it is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand. we sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. but all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for. it also follows that all thinking involves a risk. certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. the invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. the conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical. their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact. the greeks acutely raised the question: how can we learn? for either we know already what we are after, or else we do not know. in neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative because we know already; on the second, because we do not know what to look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we tell that it is what we were after. the dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance. nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. the possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact which the greek dilemma overlooked. the perplexities of the situation suggest certain ways out. we try these ways, and either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more confused--in which case, we know we are still ignorant. tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along provisionally. taken by itself, the greek argument is a nice piece of formal logic. but it is also true that as long as men kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only slow and accidental advance. systematic advance in invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture. while the greeks made knowledge more than learning, modern science makes conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to discovery. to recur to our illustration. a commanding general cannot base his actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. he has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy. he then infers certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare facts of the given situation. his inference is more or less dubious and hypothetical. but he acts upon it. he develops a plan of procedure, a method of dealing with the situation. the consequences which directly follow from his acting this way rather than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections. what he already knows functions and has value in what he learns. but will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress of events? in form, yes, though not of course in content. it is self-evident that his guesses about the future indicated by present facts, guesses by which he attempts to supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the basis of a method which shall take effect in the campaign. that is not his problem. but in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and not merely passively following the course of events, his tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate to his situation. he will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or not. in the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions. otherwise his later "i told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that yields emotional satisfaction--and includes a large factor of self-deception. the case is comparable to that of an astronomer who from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future eclipse. no matter how great the mathematical probability, the inference is hypothetical--a matter of probability. the hypothesis as to the date and position of the anticipated eclipse becomes the material of forming a method of future conduct. apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is made to some far part of the globe. in any case, some active steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions. and apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking. it remains suspended. knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls thinking and makes it fruitful. so much for the general features of a reflective experience. they are (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural anticipation--a tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis. it is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane. they make thinking itself into an experience. nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out. and since it can never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences. yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action. summary. in determining the place of thinking in experience we first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with something which is undergone in consequence. a separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience. thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences. it notes not only that they are connected, but the details of the connection. it makes connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. the stimulus to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some act, performed or to be performed. then we anticipate consequences. this implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence indeterminate. the projection of consequences means a proposed or tentative solution. to perfect this hypothesis, existing conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the hypothesis developed--an operation called reasoning. then the suggested solution--the idea or theory--has to be tested by acting upon it. if it brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid. otherwise it is modified, and another trial made. thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental testing. while all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. for we live not in a settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective, and where retrospect--and all knowledge as distinct from thought is retrospect--is of value in the solidity, security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future. it is most important for the practice of science that men in many cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable error involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as described. it refines them. chapter twelve: thinking in education . the essentials of method. no one doubts, theoretically, the importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. but apart from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to think. the parceling out of instruction among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three. thinking which is not connected with increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just as thought (see ante, p. ). and skill obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used. it consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement. and information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing load. since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace of intelligence. the sole direct path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind. we speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it takes. i. the initial stage of that developing experience which is called thinking is experience. this remark may sound like a silly truism. it ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. on the contrary, thinking is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated in isolation. in fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. experience is then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. so, oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do with physical existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not mental value. speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction lies in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed. what is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical situation as the initiating phase of thought. experience is here taken as previously defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do something to one in return. the fallacy consists in supposing that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of arithmetic, or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct personal experience of a situation. even the kindergarten and montessori techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions, without "waste of time," that they tend to ignore--or reduce--the immediate crude handling of the familiar material of experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made. but the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial and error sort. an individual must actually try, in play or work, to do something with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity, and then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material employed. this is what happens when a child at first begins to build with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects. hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible. to realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of school; the sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in ordinary life. and careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life. they give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results. that the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking means of course that it should suggest something to do which is not either routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting what is new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. an effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be mentally connected with what is done. the most significant question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it involves. at first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured well up to the standard here set. the giving of problems, the putting of questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is a large part of school work. but it is indispensable to discriminate between genuine and simulated or mock problems. the following questions may aid in making such discrimination. (a) is there anything but a problem? does the question naturally suggest itself within some situation or personal experience? or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic? is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school? (b) is it the pupil's own problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he deals with it? obviously, these two questions overlap. they are two ways of getting at the same point: is the experience a personal thing of such a nature as inherently to stimulate and direct observation of the connections involved, and to lead to inference and its testing? or is it imposed from without, and is the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement? such questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to which current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits. the physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience. what is there similar to the conditions of everyday life which will generate difficulties? almost everything testifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading, and the reproduction of what is told and read. it is hardly possible to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground, in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. much of it is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the school. no one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons. reflection on this striking contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally suggest themselves. no amount of improvement in the personal technique of the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. there must be more actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more opportunities for doing things, before the gap can be overcome. and where children are engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises in the course of their doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent modes of instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and ingenious. as a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather, they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. hence the lamentable waste in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing with them to the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. a pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher. his problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and outward deportment. relationship to subject matter is no longer direct. the occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the teacher's requirements. the pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal "studies." the thinking thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the best. at its worst, the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the requirements of school life, but how to seem to meet them--or, how to come near enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount of friction. the type of judgment formed by these devices is not a desirable addition to character. if these statements give too highly colored a picture of usual school methods, the exaggeration may at least serve to illustrate the point: the need of active pursuits, involving the use of material to accomplish purposes, if there are to be situations which normally generate problems occasioning thoughtful inquiry. ii. there must be data at command to supply the considerations required in dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself. teachers following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to think things out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their own heads. the material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the relations of things. in other words, to think effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand. a difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all difficulties call out thinking. sometimes they overwhelm and submerge and discourage. the perplexing situation must be sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with so that pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling it. a large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring. in one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means the subject matter for reflection is provided. memory, observation, reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. the relative proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific features of the particular problem in hand. it is foolish to insist upon observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts independently. it is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence upon sense-presentations. no one can carry around with him a museum of all the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. a well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so to speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what they yield. on the other hand, a quality or relation of even a familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just the fact that is helpful in dealing with the question. in this case direct observation is called for. the same principle applies to the use to be made of observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the other. direct observation is naturally more vivid and vital. but it has its limitations; and in any case it is a necessary part of education that one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others. excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading or listening) is to be depreciated. most objectionable of all is the probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question in hand for himself. there is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually both too much and too little information supplied by others. the accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is made too much of. "knowledge," in the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things. frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. this static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. it not only lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. no one could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk. pupils who have stored their "minds" with all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. they have no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead static level. on the other hand, it is quite open to question whether, if information actually functioned in experience through use in application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually at command. iii. the correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings, suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. careful observation and recollection determine what is given, what is already there, and hence assured. they cannot furnish what is lacking. they define, clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer. projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose. the data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. but the suggestions run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. they forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done). inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known. in this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is presented) is creative,--an incursion into the novel. it involves some inventiveness. what is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. when newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in its materials. they were familiar; many of them commonplaces--sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers. these were not original ideas; they were established facts. his originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. the same is true of every striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every admirable artistic production. only silly folk identify creative originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others. the operation is novel, not the materials out of which it is constructed. the educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original in a projection of considerations which have not been previously apprehended. the child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it. there is a genuine increment of experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. the charm which the spontaneity of little children has for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual originality. the joy which children themselves experience is the joy of intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used without misunderstanding. the educational moral i am chiefly concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important as are these things. it is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. when it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. the communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. but what he directly gets cannot be an idea. only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think. when the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate learning. the rest lies with the one directly concerned. if he cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and find his own way out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some correct answer with one hundred per cent accuracy. we can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own activities generate, support, and clinch ideas--that is, perceived meanings or connections. this does not mean that the teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. in such shared activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a teacher--and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better. iv. ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or dignified theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. they are anticipations of some continuity or connection of an activity and a consequence which has not as yet shown itself. they are therefore tested by the operation of acting upon them. they are to guide and organize further observations, recollections, and experiments. they are intermediate in learning, not final. all educational reformers, as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of traditional education. they have opposed pouring in from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. but it is not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an idea identical with having an experience which widens and makes more precise our contact with the environment. activity, even self-activity, is too easily thought of as something merely mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only through the vocal organs. while the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged by all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has already been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its manipulation. these results are genuine and not to be despised. but practice in applying what has been gained in study ought primarily to have an intellectual quality. as we have already seen, thoughts just as thoughts are incomplete. at best they are tentative; they are suggestions, indications. they are standpoints and methods for dealing with situations of experience. till they are applied in these situations they lack full point and reality. only application tests them, and only testing confers full meaning and a sense of their reality. short of use made of them, they tend to segregate into a peculiar world of their own. it may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies (to which reference has been made in section of chapter x) which isolate mind and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves. however this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality attaches to much of what is learned in schools. it can hardly be said that many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal; but it assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the subject matter of their vital experiences possesses. they learn not to expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. that it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a matter of course. the bad effects are twofold. ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning. and the attitudes which spring from getting used to and accepting half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and efficiency of thought. if we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development of thought. where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences. ideas are not segregated, they do not form an isolated island. they animate and enrich the ordinary course of life. information is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in direction of action. the phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely. they may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to employ manual and constructive activities in a physical way, as means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be used almost exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary, ends. but the disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural" education to assume that such activities are merely physical or professional in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies which isolate mind from direction of the course of experience and hence from action upon and with things. when the "mental" is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily activity and movements. they are regarded as at the best mere external annexes to mind. they may be necessary for the satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external decency and comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an indispensable role in the completion of thought. hence they have no place in a liberal education--i.e., one which is concerned with the interests of intelligence. if they come in at all, it is as a concession to the material needs of the masses. that they should be allowed to invade the education of the elite is unspeakable. this conclusion follows irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is--namely, the purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. while it is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so as to give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished. but this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for folding their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school knowledge. every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for establishing cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. classroom instruction falls into three kinds. the least desirable treats each lesson as an independent whole. it does not put upon the student the responsibility of finding points of contact between it and other lessons in the same subject, or other subjects of study. wiser teachers see to it that the student is systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help understand the present one, and also to use the present to throw additional light upon what has already been acquired. results are better, but school subject matter is still isolated. save by accident, out-of-school experience is left in its crude and comparatively irreflective state. it is not subject to the refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and comprehensive material of direct instruction. the latter is not motivated and impregnated with a sense of reality by being intermingled with the realities of everyday life. the best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this interconnection. it puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings. summary. processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they center in the production of good habits of thinking. while we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative experience. the essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. they are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience--that there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity. chapter thirteen: the nature of method . the unity of subject matter and method. the trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and administration or government. we have been concerned with the two former in recent chapters. it remains to disentangle them from the context in which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature. we shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the considerations of the last chapter. before taking it up, it may be well, however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the connection of subject matter and method with each other. the idea that mind and the world of things and persons are two separate and independent realms--a theory which philosophically is known as dualism--carries with it the conclusion that method and subject matter of instruction are separate affairs. subject matter then becomes a ready-made systematized classification of the facts and principles of the world of nature and man. method then has for its province a consideration of the ways in which this antecedent subject matter may be best presented to and impressed upon the mind; or, a consideration of the ways in which the mind may be externally brought to bear upon the matter so as to facilitate its acquisition and possession. in theory, at least, one might deduce from a science of the mind as something existing by itself a complete theory of methods of learning, with no knowledge of the subjects to which the methods are to be applied. since many who are actually most proficient in various branches of subject matter are wholly innocent of these methods, this state of affairs gives opportunity for the retort that pedagogy, as an alleged science of methods of the mind in learning, is futile;--a mere screen for concealing the necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate acquaintance with the subject in hand. but since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and intentional phase of the process, the notion of any such split is radically false. the fact that the material of a science is organized is evidence that it has already been subjected to intelligence; it has been methodized, so to say. zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge represents crude, scattered facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after they have been subjected to careful examination, to deliberate supplementation, and to arrangement to bring out connections which assist observation, memory, and further inquiry. instead of furnishing a starting point for learning, they mark out a consummation. method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. never is method something outside of the material. how about method from the standpoint of an individual who is dealing with subject matter? again, it is not something external. it is simply an effective treatment of material--efficiency meaning such treatment as utilizes the material (puts it to a purpose) with a minimum of waste of time and energy. we can distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by itself; but the way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material. method is not antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction of subject matter to desired results. it is antithetical to random and ill-considered action,--ill-considered signifying ill-adapted. the statement that method means directed movement of subject matter towards ends is formal. an illustration may give it content. every artist must have a method, a technique, in doing his work. piano playing is not hitting the keys at random. it is an orderly way of using them, and the order is not something which exists ready-made in the musician's hands or brain prior to an activity dealing with the piano. order is found in the disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and brain so as to achieve the result intended. it is the action of the piano directed to accomplish the purpose of the piano as a musical instrument. it is the same with "pedagogical" method. the only difference is that the piano is a mechanism constructed in advance for a single end; while the material of study is capable of indefinite uses. but even in this regard the illustration may apply if we consider the infinite variety of kinds of music which a piano may produce, and the variations in technique required in the different musical results secured. method in any case is but an effective way of employing some material for some end. these considerations may be generalized by going back to the conception of experience. experience as the perception of the connection between something tried and something undergone in consequence is a process. apart from effort to control the course which the process takes, there is no distinction of subject matter and method. there is simply an activity which includes both what an individual does and what the environment does. a piano player who had perfect mastery of his instrument would have no occasion to distinguish between his contribution and that of the piano. in well-formed, smooth-running functions of any sort,--skating, conversing, hearing music, enjoying a landscape,--there is no consciousness of separation of the method of the person and of the subject matter. in whole-hearted play and work there is the same phenomenon. when we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward which we sustain the attitude. when a man is eating, he is eating food. he does not divide his act into eating and food. but if he makes a scientific investigation of the act, such a discrimination is the first thing he would effect. he would examine on the one hand the properties of the nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the organism in appropriating and digesting. such reflection upon experience gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing--the how. when we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and method as our terms. there is the thing seen, heard, loved, hated, imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing, loving, hating, imagining, etc. this distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes, that we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and not as a distinction in thought. then we make a division between a self and the environment or world. this separation is the root of the dualism of method and subject matter. that is, we assume that knowing, feeling, willing, etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its isolation, and which then may be brought to bear upon an independent subject matter. we assume that the things which belong in isolation to the self or mind have their own laws of operation irrespective of the modes of active energy of the object. these laws are supposed to furnish method. it would be no less absurd to suppose that men can eat without eating something, or that the structure and movements of the jaws, throat muscles, the digestive activities of stomach, etc., are not what they are because of the material with which their activity is engaged. just as the organs of the organism are a continuous part of the very world in which food materials exist, so the capacities of seeing, hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically connected with the subject matter of the world. they are more truly ways in which the environment enters into experience and functions there than they are independent acts brought to bear upon things. experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies. for the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the how and the what. while there is no way of walking or of eating or of learning over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there are certain elements in the act which give the key to its more effective control. special attention to these elements makes them more obvious to perception (letting other factors recede for the time being from conspicuous recognition). getting an idea of how the experience proceeds indicates to us what factors must be secured or modified in order that it may go on more successfully. this is only a somewhat elaborate way of saying that if a man watches carefully the growth of several plants, some of which do well and some of which amount to little or nothing, he may be able to detect the special conditions upon which the prosperous development of a plant depends. these conditions, stated in an orderly sequence, would constitute the method or way or manner of its growth. there is no difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous development of an experience. it is not easy, in either case, to seize upon just the factors which make for its best movement. but study of cases of success and failure and minute and extensive comparison, helps to seize upon causes. when we have arranged these causes in order, we have a method of procedure or a technique. a consideration of some evils in education that flow from the isolation of method from subject matter will make the point more definite. (i) in the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have spoken) of concrete situations of experience. there can be no discovery of a method without cases to be studied. the method is derived from observation of what actually happens, with a view to seeing that it happen better next time. but in instruction and discipline, there is rarely sufficient opportunity for children and youth to have the direct normal experiences from which educators might derive an idea of method or order of best development. experiences are had under conditions of such constraint that they throw little or no light upon the normal course of an experience to its fruition. "methods" have then to be authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an expression of their own intelligent observations. under such circumstances, they have a mechanical uniformity, assumed to be alike for all minds. where flexible personal experiences are promoted by providing an environment which calls out directed occupations in work and play, the methods ascertained will vary with individuals--for it is certain that each individual has something characteristic in his way of going at things. (ii) in the second place, the notion of methods isolated from subject matter is responsible for the false conceptions of discipline and interest already noted. when the effective way of managing material is treated as something ready-made apart from material, there are just three possible ways in which to establish a relationship lacking by assumption. one is to utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling the palate. another is to make the consequences of not attending painful; we may use the menace of harm to motivate concern with the alien subject matter. or a direct appeal may be made to the person to put forth effort without any reason. we may rely upon immediate strain of "will." in practice, however, the latter method is effectual only when instigated by fear of unpleasant results. (iii) in the third place, the act of learning is made a direct and conscious end in itself. under normal conditions, learning is a product and reward of occupation with subject matter. children do not set out, consciously, to learn walking or talking. one sets out to give his impulses for communication and for fuller intercourse with others a show. he learns in consequence of his direct activities. the better methods of teaching a child, say, to read, follow the same road. they do not fix his attention upon the fact that he has to learn something and so make his attitude self-conscious and constrained. they engage his activities, and in the process of engagement he learns: the same is true of the more successful methods in dealing with number or whatever. but when the subject matter is not used in carrying forward impulses and habits to significant results, it is just something to be learned. the pupil's attitude to it is just that of having to learn it. conditions more unfavorable to an alert and concentrated response would be hard to devise. frontal attacks are even more wasteful in learning than in war. this does not mean, however, that students are to be seduced unaware into preoccupation with lessons. it means that they shall be occupied with them for real reasons or ends, and not just as something to be learned. this is accomplished whenever the pupil perceives the place occupied by the subject matter in the fulfilling of some experience. (iv) in the fourth place, under the influence of the conception of the separation of mind and material, method tends to be reduced to a cut and dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps. no one can tell in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar are compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method, certain preordained verbal formulae. instead of being encouraged to attack their topics directly, experimenting with methods that seem promising and learning to discriminate by the consequences that accrue, it is assumed that there is one fixed method to be followed. it is also naively assumed that if the pupils make their statements and explanations in a certain form of "analysis," their mental habits will in time conform. nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching. flexibility and initiative in dealing with problems are characteristic of any conception to which method is a way of managing material to develop a conclusion. mechanical rigid woodenness is an inevitable corollary of any theory which separates mind from activity motivated by a purpose. . method as general and as individual. in brief, the method of teaching is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends. but the practice of a fine art is far from being a matter of extemporized inspirations. study of the operations and results of those in the past who have greatly succeeded is essential. there is always a tradition, or schools of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take them captive. methods of artists in every branch depend upon thorough acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must know canvas, pigments, brushes, and the technique of manipulation of all his appliances. attainment of this knowledge requires persistent and concentrated attention to objective materials. the artist studies the progress of his own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails. the assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made rules and trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of every art. such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of materials, of the ways in which one's own best results are assured, supply the material for what may be called general method. there exists a cumulative body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body authorized by past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an individual ignores at his peril. as was pointed out in the discussion of habit-forming (ante, p. ), there is always a danger that these methods will become mechanized and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being powers at command for his own ends. but it is also true that the innovator who achieves anything enduring, whose work is more than a passing sensation, utilizes classic methods more than may appear to himself or to his critics. he devotes them to new uses, and in so far transforms them. education also has its general methods. and if the application of this remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of the pupil, it is equally real in the case of the latter. part of his learning, a very important part, consists in becoming master of the methods which the experience of others has shown to be more efficient in like cases of getting knowledge. these general methods are in no way opposed to individual initiative and originality--to personal ways of doing things. on the contrary they are reinforcements of them. for there is radical difference between even the most general method and a prescribed rule. the latter is a direct guide to action; the former operates indirectly through the enlightenment it supplies as to ends and means. it operates, that is to say, through intelligence, and not through conformity to orders externally imposed. ability to use even in a masterly way an established technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter also depends upon an animating idea. if knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us what to do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate? what is meant by calling a method intellectual? take the case of a physician. no mode of behavior more imperiously demands knowledge of established modes of diagnosis and treatment than does his. but after all, cases are like, not identical. to be used intelligently, existing practices, however authorized they may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of particular cases. accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the physician what inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to try. they are standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they economize a survey of the features of the particular case by suggesting the things to be especially looked into. the physician's own personal attitudes, his own ways (individual methods) of dealing with the situation in which he is concerned, are not subordinated to the general principles of procedure, but are facilitated and directed by the latter. the instance may serve to point out the value to the teacher of a knowledge of the psychological methods and the empirical devices found useful in the past. when they get in the way of his own common sense, when they come between him and the situation in which he has to act, they are worse than useless. but if he has acquired them as intellectual aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique experiences in which he engages, they are of constructive value. in the last resort, just because everything depends upon his own methods of response, much depends upon how far he can utilize, in making his own response, the knowledge which has accrued in the experience of others. as already intimated, every word of this account is directly applicable also to the method of the pupil, the way of learning. to suppose that students, whether in the primary school or in the university, can be supplied with models of method to be followed in acquiring and expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that has lamentable consequences. (see ante, p. .) one must make his own reaction in any case. indications of the standardized or general methods used in like cases by others--particularly by those who are already experts--are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with exercise of his own judgment. if what was said earlier (see p. ) about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. we have set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the same for all. then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they are charged. ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary. only the exceptional are allowed to have originality. the measure of difference between the average student and the genius is a measure of the absence of originality in the former. but this notion of mind in general is a fiction. how one person's abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. it is irrelevant to his work. what is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning. mind, individual method, originality (these are convertible terms) signify the quality of purposive or directed action. if we act upon this conviction, we shall secure more originality even by the conventional standard than now develops. imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. and measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them. thus we stifle the distinctive quality of the many, and save in rare instances (like, say, that of darwin) infect the rare geniuses with an unwholesome quality. . the traits of individual method. the most general features of the method of knowing have been given in our chapter on thinking. they are the features of the reflective situation: problem, collection and analysis of data, projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas, experimental application and testing; the resulting conclusion or judgment. the specific elements of an individual's method or way of attack upon a problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and his acquired habits and interests. the method of one will vary from that of another (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities vary, as his past experiences and his preferences vary. those who have already studied these matters are in possession of information which will help teachers in understanding the responses different pupils make, and help them in guiding these responses to greater efficiency. child-study, psychology, and a knowledge of social environment supplement the personal acquaintance gained by the teacher. but methods remain the personal concern, approach, and attack of an individual, and no catalogue can ever exhaust their diversity of form and tint. some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. among the most important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness), and responsibility. . it is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative terms than in positive ones. self-consciousness, embarrassment, and constraint are its menacing foes. they indicate that a person is not immediately concerned with subject matter. something has come between which deflects concern to side issues. a self-conscious person is partly thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his performances. diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of ideas. taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious of one's attitude. the former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. it is a sign of whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is dealing with. the latter is not of necessity abnormal. it is sometimes the easiest way of correcting a false method of approach, and of improving the effectiveness of the means one is employing,--as golf players, piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give especial attention to their position and movements. but this need is occasional and temporary. when it is effectual a person thinks of himself in terms of what is to be done, as one means among others of the realization of an end--as in the case of a tennis player practicing to get the "feel" of a stroke. in abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate object--as when the player strikes an attitude thinking of the impression it will make upon spectators, or is worried because of the impression he fears his movements give rise to. confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness. it should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a form of self-consciousness--or of "cheek." confidence is not a name for what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. it denotes the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do. it denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. it signifies rising to the needs of the situation. we have already pointed out (see p. ) the objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact that they are studying or learning. just in the degree in which they are induced by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying and learning. they are in a divided and complicated attitude. whatever methods of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to do and transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair directness of concern and action. persisted in, the pupil acquires a permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of action beside that which the subject matter supplies. dependence upon extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations of life. . open-mindedness. partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking sides in some movement. all the more reason, therefore, for an attitude of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all sides. in the chapter on aims it was shown that foreseen ends are factors in the development of a changing situation. they are the means by which the direction of action is controlled. they are subordinate to the situation, therefore, not the situation to them. they are not ends in the sense of finalities to which everything must be bent and sacrificed. they are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development of a situation. a target is not the future goal of shooting; it is the centering factor in a present shooting. openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that. efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. but intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. these are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. the worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli. open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age. exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school. the teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve. probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results. the zeal for "answers" is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest. open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. to hang out a sign saying "come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of hospitality. but there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of development. results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried; processes may not be forced. they take their own time to mature. were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked. . single-mindedness. so far as the word is concerned, much that was said under the head of "directness" is applicable. but what the word is here intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose; the absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the professed aim is but a mask. it is equivalent to mental integrity. absorption, engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own sake, nurture it. divided interest and evasion destroy it. intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not matters of conscious purpose but of quality of active response. their acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent, but self-deception is very easy. desires are urgent. when the demands and wishes of others forbid their direct expression they are easily driven into subterranean and deep channels. entire surrender, and wholehearted adoption of the course of action demanded by others are almost impossible. deliberate revolt or deliberate attempts to deceive others may result. but the more frequent outcome is a confused and divided state of interest in which one is fooled as to one's own real intent. one tries to serve two masters at once. social instincts, the strong desire to please others and get their approval, social training, the general sense of duty and of authority, apprehension of penalty, all lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to "pay attention to the lesson," or whatever the requirement is. amiable individuals want to do what they are expected to do. consciously the pupil thinks he is doing this. but his own desires are not abolished. only their evident exhibition is suppressed. strain of attention to what is hostile to desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional responses. the mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself to what is intrinsically more desirable. a systematized divided attention expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result. one has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present time when outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of divided attention--double-mindedness. we are so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. it may be; if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual effects. obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available when one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going out to more congenial affairs. more subtle and more permanently crippling to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of habitual self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which accompanies it. a double standard of reality, one for our own private and more or less concealed interests, and another for public and acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of us, integrity and completeness of mental action. equally serious is the fact that a split is set up between conscious thought and attention and impulsive blind affection and desire. reflective dealings with the material of instruction is constrained and half-hearted; attention wanders. the topics to which it wanders are unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with them are furtive. the discipline that comes from regulating response by deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. they enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. not subject to rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing. school conditions favorable to this division of mind between avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private, ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard to find. what is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external coercive pressure, has this tendency. motivation through rewards extraneous to the thing to be done has a like effect. everything that makes schooling merely preparatory (see ante, p. ) works in this direction. ends being beyond the pupil's present grasp, other agencies have to be found to procure immediate attention to assigned tasks. some responses are secured, but desires and affections not enlisted must find other outlets. not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon drill exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any engagement of thought--exercises have no purpose but the production of automatic skill. nature abhors a mental vacuum. what do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity? were they merely kept in temporary abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be a matter of so much moment. but they are not abolished; they are not suspended; they are not suppressed--save with reference to the task in question. they follow their own chaotic and undisciplined course. what is native, spontaneous, and vital in mental reaction goes unused and untested, and the habits formed are such that these qualities become less and less available for public and avowed ends. . responsibility. by responsibility as an element in intellectual attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. ideas, as we have seen, are intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution of a perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses. it is only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one has made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one is committed to by acceptance. observation and recognition, belief and assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally presented. it would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in instruction--that is, fewer things supposedly accepted,--if a smaller number of situations could be intellectually worked out to the point where conviction meant something real--some identification of the self with the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of results. the most permanent bad results of undue complication of school subjects and congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are), but the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and believing a thing. intellectual responsibility means severe standards in this regard. these standards can be built up only through practice in following up and acting upon the meaning of what is acquired. intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we are considering. there is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon all the details of a subject. intellectual thoroughness is seeing a thing through. it depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details. it is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the purpose is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may be, to the steps of action externally imposed and directed. summary. method is a statement of the way the subject matter of an experience develops most effectively and fruitfully. it is derived, accordingly, from observation of the course of experiences where there is no conscious distinction of personal attitude and manner from material dealt with. the assumption that method is something separate is connected with the notion of the isolation of mind and self from the world of things. it makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical, constrained. while methods are individualized, certain features of the normal course of an experience to its fruition may be discriminated, because of the fund of wisdom derived from prior experiences and because of general similarities in the materials dealt with from time to time. expressed in terms of the attitude of the individual the traits of good method are straightforwardness, flexible intellectual interest or open-minded will to learn, integrity of purpose, and acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of one's activity including thought. this point is developed below in a discussion of what are termed psychological and logical methods respectively. see p. . chapter fourteen: the nature of subject matter . subject matter of educator and of learner. so far as the nature of subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add to what has been said (see ante, p. ). it consists of the facts observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in course of a development of a situation having a purpose. this statement needs to be rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials of school instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. what is the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing, mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics, chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? let us recur to two of the points made earlier in our discussion. the educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and directs the learner's course. in last analysis, all that the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional dispositions. obviously studies or the subject matter of the curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying an environment. the other point is the necessity of a social environment to give meaning to habits formed. in what we have termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly in the matrix of social intercourse. it is what the persons with whom an individual associates do and say. this fact gives a clew to the understanding of the subject matter of formal or deliberate instruction. a connecting link is found in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the doings and rites of a primitive social group. they represent the stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their conception of their own collective life. not being obviously a part of the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting, making war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. even more pains are consciously taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in the ordinary processes of association. as the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the content of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of instruction. as we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to perpetuate group life. once started on this road of selection, formulation, and organization, no definite limit exists. the invention of writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus. finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school study with the habits and ideals of the social group are disguised and covered up. the ties are so loosened that it often appears as if there were none; as if subject matter existed simply as knowledge on its own independent behoof, and as if study were the mere act of mastering it for its own sake, irrespective of any social values. since it is highly important for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (see ante, p. ) the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make clear the connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to show in some detail the social content and function of the chief constituents of the course of study. the points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and of student. to the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject matter, going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply definite standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the crude activities of the immature. (i) the material of school studies translates into concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current social life which it is desirable to transmit. it puts clearly before the instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to be perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the meanings had not been standardized. (ii) a knowledge of the ideas which have been achieved in the past as the outcome of activity places the educator in a position to perceive the meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless reactions of the young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them so that they will amount to something. the more the educator knows of music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child. organized subject matter represents the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to theirs. it does not represent perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is the best at command to further new experiences which may, in some respects at least, surpass the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and works of art. from the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies represent working resources, available capital. their remoteness from the experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. the subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc. the latter represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing state. it enters directly into the activities of the expert and the educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge. the need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude to subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. the teacher presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. that is, the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning. hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. when engaged in the direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and response of the pupil. to understand the latter in its interplay with subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be not on itself but on the topic in hand. or to state the same point in a somewhat different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and capacities. hence simple scholarship is not enough. in fact, there are certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter--taken by itself--which get in the way of effective teaching unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with its interplay in the pupil's own experience. in the first place, his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's acquaintance. it involves principles which are beyond the immature pupil's understanding and interest. in and of itself, it may no more represent the living world of the pupil's experience than the astronomer's knowledge of mars represents a baby's acquaintance with the room in which he stays. in the second place, the method of organization of the material of achieved scholarship differs from that of the beginner. it is not true that the experience of the young is unorganized--that it consists of isolated scraps. but it is organized in connection with direct practical centers of interest. the child's home is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical knowledge. his own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the tales of his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information together. but the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized on the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to one another--not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily movements, and friends. to the one who is learned, subject matter is extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. to the one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through his personal occupations. the problem of teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert already knows. hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter and the characteristic needs and capacities of the student. . the development of subject matter in the learner. it is possible, without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner. in its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent ability--power to do. this kind of subject matter, or known material, is expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. then this material gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or information. finally, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or logically organized material--that of the one who, relatively speaking, is expert in the subject. i. the knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read, write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. the popular tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action with knowledge. when education, under the influence of a scholastic conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand. recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary, always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. arts and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends. popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. ken and can are allied words. attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both affection and of looking out for its welfare. mind means carrying out instructions in action--as a child minds his mother--and taking care of something--as a nurse minds the baby. to be thoughtful, considerate, means to heed the claims of others. apprehension means dread of undesirable consequences, as well as intellectual grasp. to have good sense or judgment is to know the conduct a situation calls for; discernment is not making distinctions for the sake of making them, an exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair with reference to acting. wisdom has never lost its association with the proper direction of life. only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing. having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in acquaintance or familiarity. the things we are best acquainted with are the things we put to frequent use--such things as chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes, food, knives and forks on the commonplace level, differentiating into more special objects according to a person's occupations in life. knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a purpose. we have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that we can anticipate how it will act and react--such is the meaning of familiar acquaintance. we are ready for a familiar thing; it does not catch us napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. this attitude carries with it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease and illumination; while the things with which we are not accustomed to deal are strange, foreign, cold, remote, "abstract." ii. but it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary stage of knowledge will darken understanding. it includes practically all of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical study. modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well as things. impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to be adapted to maintaining successful connections with others; a large fund of social knowledge accrues. as a part of this intercommunication one learns much from others. they tell of their experiences and of the experiences which, in turn, have been told them. in so far as one is interested or concerned in these communications, their matter becomes a part of one's own experience. active connections with others are such an intimate and vital part of our own concerns that it is impossible to draw sharp lines, such as would enable us to say, "here my experience ends; there yours begins." in so far as we are partners in common undertakings, the things which others communicate to us as the consequences of their particular share in the enterprise blend at once into the experience resulting from our own special doings. the ear is as much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the eye is available for reading reports of what happens beyond its horizon. things remote in space and time affect the issue of our actions quite as much as things which we can smell and handle. they really concern us, and, consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing with things at hand falls within personal experience. information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter. the place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a criterion for estimating the value of informational material in school. does it grow naturally out of some question with which the student is concerned? does it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning? if it meets these two requirements, it is educative. the amount heard or read is of no importance--the more the better, provided the student has a need for it and can apply it in some situation of his own. but it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice as it is to lay them down in theory. the extension in modern times of the area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and distributing information--genuine and alleged--have created an immense bulk of communicated subject matter. it is much easier to swamp a pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. all too frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world of personal acquaintance. the sole problem of the student is to learn, for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the constituent parts of this strange world. probably the most conspicuous connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the body of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in the rows and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel, scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries. the imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. the statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge. the record of knowledge, independent of its place as an outcome of inquiry and a resource in further inquiry, is taken to be knowledge. the mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth. if this identification of knowledge with propositions stating information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction. the "course of study" consists largely of information distributed into various branches of study, each study being subdivided into lessons presenting in serial cutoff portions of the total store. in the seventeenth century, the store was still small enough so that men set up the ideal of a complete encyclopedic mastery of it. it is now so bulky that the impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it all is obvious. but the educational ideal has not been much affected. acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning, or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed; the easier portions being assigned to the earlier years, the more difficult to the later. the complaints of educators that learning does not enter into character and affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work, against cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and principles, all follow from this state of affairs. knowledge which is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to become merely verbal. it is no objection to information that it is clothed in words; communication necessarily takes place through words. but in the degree in which what is communicated cannot be organized into the existing experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is, pure sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. then it operates to call out mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums." to be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving added significance to the search for solution and to the solution itself. informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. it is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. it has the office of an intellectual middleman. it condenses and records in available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. when one is told that brutus assassinated caesar, or that the length of the year is three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference is . . . . one receives what is indeed knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to knowing. his acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what is communicated. . science or rationalized knowledge. science is a name for knowledge in its most characteristic form. it represents in its degree, the perfected outcome of learning,--its consummation. what is known, in a given case, is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with rather than that which we think about. in its honorable sense, knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere tradition. in knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not dubiously otherwise. but experience makes us aware that there is difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our certainty. we are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is natural. the undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation; it is prone to assertion. it likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. familiarity, common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,--a greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. a socrates is thus led to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective love of wisdom, and a descartes to say that science is born of doubting. we have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves they are tentative and provisional. our predilection for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. we are satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. if these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our assumptions have been confirmed. even in the case of failure, we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of circumstance. we charge the evil consequence not to the error of our schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter) but to untoward fate. we even plume ourselves upon our firmness in clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out. science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural propensities and the evils which flow from them. it consists of the special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and results are tested. it is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous; learned, not native. to this fact is due the unique, the invaluable place of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its right use. without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. one in that case not merely conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of knowledge. for he does not become acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from authorized conviction. on the other hand, the fact that science marks the perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary experience--a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the term abstract. when this isolation appears in instruction, scientific information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of information. science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. at first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception that science is organized or systematized knowledge. the opposition, however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition is completed. not organization but the kind of organization effected by adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. the knowledge of a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. it is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends--practically organized. its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its organization with reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. but scientific subject matter is organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a specialized undertaking. reference to the kind of assurance attending science will shed light upon this statement. it is rational assurance,--logical warranty. the ideal of scientific organization is, therefore, that every conception and statement shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to others. conceptions and propositions mutually imply and support one another. this double relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is meant by the terms logical and rational. the everyday conception of water is more available for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the chemist's notion of it. the latter's description of it as h is superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. it states the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is arrived at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the structure of things. strictly speaking, it does not indicate the objective relations of water any more than does a statement that water is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst, etc. it is just as true that water has these relations as that it is constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in combination with one of oxygen. but for the particular purpose of conducting discovery with a view to ascertainment of fact, the latter relations are fundamental. the more one emphasizes organization as a mark of science, then, the more he is committed to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition of science. for method defines the kind of organization in virtue of which science is science. . subject matter as social. our next chapters will take up various school activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages in that evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. it remains to say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our prior remarks have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. a difference in breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even in the data and ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are motivated by purposes. for there is a difference in the social scope of purposes and the social importance of problems. with the wide range of possible material to select from, it is important that education (especially in all its phases short of the most specialized) should use a criterion of social worth. all information and systematized scientific subject matter have been worked out under the conditions of social life and have been transmitted by social means. but this does not prove that all is of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and supplying the equipment of members of present society. the scheme of a curriculum must take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing community life; it must select with the intention of improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better than the past. moreover, the curriculum must be planned with reference to placing essentials first, and refinements second. the things which are socially most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the experiences in which the widest groups share, are the essentials. the things which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical pursuits are secondary. there is truth in the saying that education must first be human and only after that professional. but those who utter the saying frequently have in mind in the term human only a highly specialized class: the class of learned men who preserve the classic traditions of the past. they forget that material is humanized in the degree in which it connects with the common interests of men as men. democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the use in forming a course of study of criteria which are broadly human. democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class. the notion that the "essentials" of elementary education are the three r's mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals. unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are unrealizable; it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood, "making a living," must signify for most men and women doing things which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of pecuniary reward. for preparation of large numbers for a life of this sort, and only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading, writing, spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain amount of muscular dexterity, "essentials." such conditions also infect the education called liberal, with illiberality. they imply a somewhat parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest problems of common humanity. a curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest. summary. the subject matter of education consists primarily of the meanings which supply content to existing social life. the continuity of social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present activity by past collective experience. as social life grows more complex, these factors increase in number and import. there is need of special selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may be adequately transmitted to the new generation. but this very process tends to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself, apart from its function in promoting the realization of the meanings implied in the present experience of the immature. especially is the educator exposed to the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the pupil's ability to appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set statements, irrespective of its organization into his activities as a developing social member. the positive principle is maintained when the young begin with active occupations having a social origin and use, and proceed to a scientific insight in the materials and laws involved, through assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and facts communicated by others who have had a larger experience. since the learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood that these contrasts are relative, not absolute. but in the earlier stages of learning at least they are practically all-important. chapter fifteen: play and work in the curriculum . the place of active occupations in education. in consequence partly of the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom, the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable modification. the desirability of starting from and with the experience and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters, has led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work, similar to those in which children and youth engage outside of school. modern psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties of older theory a complex group of instinctive and impulsive tendencies. experience has shown that when children have a chance at physical activities which bring their natural impulses into play, going to school is a joy, management is less of a burden, and learning is easier. sometimes, perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and strain of "regular" school work. there is no reason, however, for using them merely as agreeable diversions. study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression to joyous emotion, etc. when exercises which are prompted by these instincts are a part of the regular school program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for attention to a large variety of materials and processes distinctly educative in effect, and cooperative associations which give information in a social setting are provided. in short, the grounds for assigning to play and active work a definite place in the curriculum are intellectual and social, not matters of temporary expediency and momentary agreeableness. without something of the kind, it is not possible to secure the normal estate of effective learning; namely, that knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of activities having their own end, instead of a school task. more specifically, play and work correspond, point for point, with the traits of the initial stage of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last chapter, in learning how to do things and in acquaintance with things and processes gained in the doing. it is suggestive that among the greeks, till the rise of conscious philosophy, the same word, techne, was used for art and science. plato gave his account of knowledge on the basis of an analysis of the knowledge of cobblers, carpenters, players of musical instruments, etc., pointing out that their art (so far as it was not mere routine) involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon, control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure--all of which had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art. doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out of school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern themselves in school with things radically different. school time seemed too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do any way. in some social conditions, this reason has weight. in pioneer times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable intellectual and moral training. books and everything concerned with them were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were the only means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. wherever such conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating school activity upon books. the situation is very different, however, in most communities to-day. the kinds of work in which the young can engage, especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. that prevention of child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point. on the other hand, printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such universal circulation, and all the opportunities of intellectual culture have been so multiplied, that the older type of book work is far from having the force it used to possess. but it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-product of play and work in most out-of-school conditions. it is incidental, not primary. consequently the educative growth secured is more or less accidental. much work shares in the defects of existing industrial society--defects next to fatal to right development. play tends to reproduce and affirm the crudities, as well as the excellencies, of surrounding adult life. it is the business of the school to set up an environment in which play and work shall be conducted with reference to facilitating desirable mental and moral growth. it is not enough just to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual exercises. everything depends upon the way in which they are employed. . available occupations. a bare catalogue of the list of activities which have already found their way into schools indicates what a rich field is at hand. there is work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather, cloth, yarns, clay and sand, and the metals, with and without tools. processes employed are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding, modeling, pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations characteristic of such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc. outdoor excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving, painting, drawing, singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and writing as active pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring skill for future use), in addition to a countless variety of plays and games, designate some of the modes of occupation. the problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education--that is, to intellectual results and the forming of a socialized disposition. what does this principle signify? in the first place, the principle rules out certain practices. activities which follow definite prescription and dictation or which reproduce without modification ready-made models, may give muscular dexterity, but they do not require the perception and elaboration of ends, nor (what is the same thing in other words) do they permit the use of judgment in selecting and adapting means. not merely manual training specifically so called but many traditional kindergarten exercises have erred here. moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an incidental requirement. not because mistakes are ever desirable, but because overzeal to select material and appliances which forbid a chance for mistakes to occur, restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a minimum, and compels the use of methods which are so remote from the complex situations of life that the power gained is of little availability. it is quite true that children tend to exaggerate their powers of execution and to select projects that are beyond them. but limitation of capacity is one of the things which has to be learned; like other things, it is learned through the experience of consequences. the danger that children undertaking too complex projects will simply muddle and mess, and produce not merely crude results (which is a minor matter) but acquire crude standards (which is an important matter) is great. but it is the fault of the teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due season the inadequacy of his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus to attempt exercises which will perfect his powers. meantime it is more important to keep alive a creative and constructive attitude than to secure an external perfection by engaging the pupil's action in too minute and too closely regulated pieces of work. accuracy and finish of detail can be insisted upon in such portions of a complex work as are within the pupil's capacity. unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent overdoing of external control are shown quite as much in the material supplied as in the matter of the teacher's orders. the fear of raw material is shown in laboratory, manual training shop, froebelian kindergarten, and montessori house of childhood. the demand is for materials which have already been subjected to the perfecting work of mind: a demand which shows itself in the subject matter of active occupations quite as well as in academic book learning. that such material will control the pupil's operations so as to prevent errors is true. the notion that a pupil operating with such material will somehow absorb the intelligence that went originally to its shaping is fallacious. only by starting with crude material and subjecting it to purposeful handling will he gain the intelligence embodied in finished material. in practice, overemphasis upon formed material leads to an exaggeration of mathematical qualities, since intellect finds its profit in physical things from matters of size, form, and proportion and the relations that flow from them. but these are known only when their perception is a fruit of acting upon purposes which require attention to them. the more human the purpose, or the more it approximates the ends which appeal in daily experience, the more real the knowledge. when the purpose of the activity is restricted to ascertaining these qualities, the resulting knowledge is only technical. to say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with wholes is another statement of the same principle. wholes for purposes of education are not, however, physical affairs. intellectually the existence of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation. exaggerated devotion to formation of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose always shows itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose. laboratory work is made to consist of tasks of accurate measurement with a view to acquiring knowledge of the fundamental units of physics, irrespective of contact with the problems which make these units important; or of operations designed to afford facility in the manipulation of experimental apparatus. the technique is acquired independently of the purposes of discovery and testing which alone give it meaning. kindergarten employments are calculated to give information regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form certain habits of manipulation of material (for everything must always be done "just so"), the absence of more vital purposes being supposedly compensated for by the alleged symbolism of the material used. manual training is reduced to a series of ordered assignments calculated to secure the mastery of one tool after another and technical ability in the various elements of construction--like the different joints. it is argued that pupils must know how to use tools before they attack actual making,--assuming that pupils cannot learn how in the process of making. pestalozzi's just insistence upon the active use of the senses, as a substitute for memorizing words, left behind it in practice schemes for "object lessons" intended to acquaint pupils with all the qualities of selected objects. the error is the same: in all these cases it is assumed that before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must be known. in fact, the senses are normally used in the course of intelligent (that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities perceived are factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment. witness the different attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite, with respect to the grain and other properties of wood, the matter of size, angles, and proportion of parts, to the attitude of a pupil who has an object-lesson on a piece of wood, where the sole function of wood and its properties is to serve as subject matter for the lesson. the failure to realize that the functional development of a situation alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is the cause of the false notions which have prevailed in instruction concerning the simple and the complex. for the person approaching a subject, the simple thing is his purpose--the use he desires to make of material, tool, or technical process, no matter how complicated the process of execution may be. the unity of the purpose, with the concentration upon details which it entails, confers simplicity upon the elements which have to be reckoned with in the course of action. it furnishes each with a single meaning according to its service in carrying on the whole enterprise. after one has gone through the process, the constituent qualities and relations are elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its own. the false notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert, the one for whom elements exist; isolates them from purposeful action, and presents them to beginners as the "simple" things. but it is time for a positive statement. aside from the fact that active occupations represent things to do, not studies, their educational significance consists in the fact that they may typify social situations. men's fundamental common concerns center about food, shelter, clothing, household furnishings, and the appliances connected with production, exchange, and consumption. representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level; they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality. to charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving, construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry over these fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a merely bread and butter value is to miss their point. if the mass of mankind has usually found in its industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried on. the continually increasing importance of economic factors in contemporary life makes it the more needed that education should reveal their scientific content and their social value. for in schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but for their own content. freed from extraneous associations and from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply modes of experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly liberalizing in quality. gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time. it affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they occupy in present social organization. carried on in an environment educationally controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture, injurious and helpful animal life, etc. there is nothing in the elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring for the growth of seeds. instead of the subject matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations. as students grow mature, they will perceive problems of interest which may be pursued for the sake of discovery, independent of the original direct interest in gardening--problems connected with the germination and nutrition of plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc., thus making a transition to deliberate intellectual investigations. the illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school occupations,--wood-working, cooking, and on through the list. it is pertinent to note that in the history of the race the sciences grew gradually out from useful social occupations. physics developed slowly out of the use of tools and machines; the important branch of physics known as mechanics testifies in its name to its original associations. the lever, wheel, inclined plane, etc., were among the first great intellectual discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less intellectual because they occurred in the course of seeking for means of accomplishing practical ends. the great advance of electrical science in the last generation was closely associated, as effect and as cause, with application of electric agencies to means of communication, transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and more economical production of goods. these are social ends, moreover, and if they are too closely associated with notions of private profit, it is not because of anything in them, but because they have been deflected to private uses:--a fact which puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public scientific and social interests. in like ways, chemistry grew out of processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in recent times has found innumerable new uses in industry. mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however, means literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in counting to keep track of things and in measuring is even more important to-day than in the times when it was invented for these purposes. such considerations (which could be duplicated in the history of any science) are not arguments for a recapitulation of the history of the race or for dwelling long in the early rule of thumb stage. but they indicate the possibilities--greater to-day than ever before--of using active occupations as opportunities for scientific study. the opportunities are just as great on the social side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity in its past or in its future. the most direct road for elementary students into civics and economics is found in consideration of the place and office of industrial occupations in social life. even for older students, the social sciences would be less abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as sciences (less as formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in their direct subject-matter as that is found in the daily life of the social groups in which the student shares. connection of occupations with the method of science is at least as close as with its subject matter. the ages when scientific progress was slow were the ages when learned men had contempt for the material and processes of everyday life, especially for those concerned with manual pursuits. consequently they strove to develop knowledge out of general principles--almost out of their heads--by logical reasons. it seems as absurd that learning should come from action on and with physical things, like dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that it should come from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a piece of leather. but the rise of experimental methods proved that, given control of conditions, the latter operation is more typical of the right way of knowledge than isolated logical reasonings. experiment developed in the seventeenth and succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing when men's interests were centered in the question of control of nature for human uses. the active occupations in which appliances are brought to bear upon physical things with the intention of effecting useful changes is the most vital introduction to the experimental method. . work and play. what has been termed active occupation includes both play and work. in their intrinsic meaning, play and industry are by no means so antithetical to one another as is often assumed, any sharp contrast being due to undesirable social conditions. both involve ends consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials and processes designed to effect the desired ends. the difference between them is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection of means and ends. in play, the interest is more direct--a fact frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity is its own end, instead of its having an ulterior result. the statement is correct, but it is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that play activity is momentary, having no element of looking ahead and none of pursuit. hunting, for example, is one of the commonest forms of adult play, but the existence of foresight and the direction of present activity by what one is watching for are obvious. when an activity is its own end in the sense that the action of the moment is complete in itself, it is purely physical; it has no meaning (see p. ). the person is either going through motions quite blindly, perhaps purely imitatively, or else is in a state of excitement which is exhausting to mind and nerves. both results may be seen in some types of kindergarten games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic that only the adult is conscious of it. unless the children succeed in reading in some quite different idea of their own, they move about either as if in a hypnotic daze, or they respond to a direct excitation. the point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense of a directing idea which gives point to the successive acts. persons who play are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate their present responses. the anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. consequently play is free, plastic. where some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. when the intended act is another activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead and it is possible to alter it easily and frequently. if a child is making a toy boat, he must hold on to a single end and direct a considerable number of acts by that one idea. if he is just "playing boat" he may change the material that serves as a boat almost at will, and introduce new factors as fancy suggests. the imagination makes what it will of chairs, blocks, leaves, chips, if they serve the purpose of carrying activity forward. from a very early age, however, there is no distinction of exclusive periods of play activity and work activity, but only one of emphasis. there are definite results which even young children desire, and try to bring to pass. their eager interest in sharing the occupations of others, if nothing else, accomplishes this. children want to "help"; they are anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect external changes: setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for animals, etc. in their plays, they like to construct their own toys and appliances. with increasing maturity, activity which does not give back results of tangible and visible achievement loses its interest. play then changes to fooling and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing. observable results are necessary to enable persons to get a sense and a measure of their own powers. when make-believe is recognized to be make-believe, the device of making objects in fancy alone is too easy to stimulate intense action. one has only to observe the countenance of children really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease to afford adequate stimulation. when fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into work. like play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in that activity is subordinated to an external result, but in the fact that a longer course of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result. the demand for continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence must be shown in selecting and shaping means. to extend this account would be to repeat what has been said under the caption of aim, interest, and thinking. it is pertinent, however, to inquire why the idea is so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an ulterior material result. the extreme form of this subordination, namely drudgery, offers a clew. activity carried on under conditions of external pressure or coercion is not carried on for any significance attached to the doing. the course of action is not intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining some reward at its conclusion. what is inherently repulsive is endured for the sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a gain hitched on by others. under unfree economic conditions, this state of affairs is bound to exist. work or industry offers little to engage the emotions and the imagination; it is a more or less mechanical series of strains. only the hold which the completion of the work has upon a person will keep him going. but the end should be intrinsic to the action; it should be its end--a part of its own course. then it affords a stimulus to effort very different from that arising from the thought of results which have nothing to do with the intervening action. as already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure in schools supplies an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations of mature life under conditions where the occupation can be carried on for its own sake. if in some cases, pecuniary recognition is also a result of an action, though not the chief motive for it, that fact may well increase the significance of the occupation. where something approaching drudgery or the need of fulfilling externally imposed tasks exists, the demand for play persists, but tends to be perverted. the ordinary course of action fails to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. so in leisure time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation by any kind of means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to. or, in less extreme cases, there is recourse to idle amusement; to anything which passes time with immediate agreeableness. recreation, as the word indicates, is recuperation of energy. no demand of human nature is more urgent or less to be escaped. the idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely fallacious, and the puritanic tradition which disallows the need has entailed an enormous crop of evils. if education does not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination. education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effect upon habits of mind. art is again the answer to this demand. summary. in the previous chapter we found that the primary subject matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do things of a fairly direct sort. the educational equivalent of this principle is the consistent use of simple occupations which appeal to the powers of youth and which typify general modes of social activity. skill and information about materials, tools, and laws of energy are acquired while activities are carried on for their own sake. the fact that they are socially representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained which makes them transferable to out-of-school situations. it is important not to confuse the psychological distinction between play and work with the economic distinction. psychologically, the defining characteristic of play is not amusement nor aimlessness. it is the fact that the aim is thought of as more activity in the same line, without defining continuity of action in reference to results produced. activities as they grow more complicated gain added meaning by greater attention to specific results achieved. thus they pass gradually into work. both are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. work is psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as a part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the activity as an end to which activity is merely a means. work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art--in quality if not in conventional designation. chapter sixteen: the significance of geography and history . extension of meaning of primary activities. nothing is more striking than the difference between an activity as merely physical and the wealth of meanings which the same activity may assume. from the outside, an astronomer gazing through a telescope is like a small boy looking through the same tube. in each case, there is an arrangement of glass and metal, an eye, and a little speck of light in the distance. yet at a critical moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned with the birth of a world, and have whatever is known about the starry heavens as its significant content. physically speaking, what man has effected on this globe in his progress from savagery is a mere scratch on its surface, not perceptible at a distance which is slight in comparison with the reaches even of the solar system. yet in meaning what has been accomplished measures just the difference of civilization from savagery. although the activities, physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change is slight in comparison with the development of the meanings attaching to the activities. there is no limit to the meaning which an action may come to possess. it all depends upon the context of perceived connections in which it is placed; the reach of imagination in realizing connections is inexhaustible. the advantage which the activity of man has in appropriating and finding meanings makes his education something else than the manufacture of a tool or the training of an animal. the latter increase efficiency; they do not develop significance. the final educational importance of such occupations in play and work as were considered in the last chapter is that they afford the most direct instrumentalities for such extension of meaning. set going under adequate conditions they are magnets for gathering and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual considerations. they provide vital centers for the reception and assimilation of information. when information is purveyed in chunks simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it tends to stratify over vital experience. entering as a factor into an activity pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or as a widening of the content of the aim--it is informing. the insight directly gained fuses with what is told. individual experience is then capable of taking up and holding in solution the net results of the experience of the group to which he belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over long stretches of time. and such media have no fixed saturation point where further absorption is impossible. the more that is taken in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation. new receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon information gained. the meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature and man. this is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when translated into educational equivalents. so translated, it signifies that geography and history supply subject matter which gives background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of technical skill. with every increase of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in significant content. we realize that we are citizens of no mean city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens, and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we are heirs and continuers. thus our ordinary daily experiences cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance. of course if geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which a person studies simply because he is sent to school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned. activity is divided, and two separate worlds are built up, occupying activity at divided periods. no transmutation takes place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting its connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by entering into immediate activity. ordinary experience is not even left as it was, narrow but vital. rather, it loses something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. it is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information. it parts with its flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. mere amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears. normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond its immediate self. it does not passively wait for information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. curiosity is not an accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of connections with other things. curiosity is but the tendency to make these conditions perceptible. it is the business of educators to supply an environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active. within a certain kind of environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning which accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. one may cook, or hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the literal--or physical--sense. but nevertheless the consequences of the act remain far-reaching. to walk involves a displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt wherever there is matter. it involves the structure of the limbs and the nervous system; the principles of mechanics. to cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change the chemical relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the assimilation of food and the growth of the body. the utmost that the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry, physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and connections perceptible. the task of education, once more, is to see to it that such activities are performed in such ways and under such conditions as render these conditions as perceptible as possible. to "learn geography" is to gain in power to perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to recognize its human connections. for what is called geography as a formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles which have been discovered in other men's experience about the natural medium in which we live, and in connection with which the particular acts of our life have an explanation. so history as a formulated study is but the body of known facts about the activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own lives are continuous, and through reference to which our own customs and institutions are illuminated. . the complementary nature of history and geography. history and geography--including in the latter, for reasons about to be mentioned, nature study--are the information studies par excellence of the schools. examination of the materials and the method of their use will make clear that the difference between penetration of this information into living experience and its mere piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether these studies are faithful to the interdependence of man and nature which affords these studies their justification. nowhere, however, is there greater danger that subject matter will be accepted as appropriate educational material simply because it has become customary to teach and learn it. the idea of a philosophic reason for it, because of the function of the material in a worthy transformation of experience, is looked upon as a vain fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology in support of what is already done. the words "history" and "geography" suggest simply the matter which has been traditionally sanctioned in the schools. the mass and variety of this matter discourage an attempt to see what it really stands for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the experience of pupils. but unless the idea that there is a unifying and social direction in education is a farcical pretense, subjects that bulk as large in the curriculum as history and geography, must represent a general function in the development of a truly socialized and intellectualized experience. the discovery of this function must be employed as a criterion for trying and sifting the facts taught and the methods used. the function of historical and geographical subject matter has been stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook. while geography emphasizes the physical side and history the social, these are only emphases in a common topic, namely, the associated life of men. for this associated life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its achievements and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum. it takes place on the earth. this setting of nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history. nature is the medium of social occurrences. it furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies. when this interdependence of the study of history, representing the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it becomes a literary phantasy--for in purely literary history the natural environment is but stage scenery. geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences. the classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the home of man expresses the educational reality. but it is easier to give this definition than it is to present specific geographical subject matter in its vital human bearings. the residence, pursuits, successes, and failures of men are the things that give the geographic data their reason for inclusion in the material of instruction. but to hold the two together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. when the ties are broken, geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated fragments too often found. it appears as a veritable rag-bag of intellectual odds and ends: the height of a mountain here, the course of a river there, the quantity of shingles produced in this town, the tonnage of the shipping in that, the boundary of a county, the capital of a state. the earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively inert. geography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination--even to the romantic imagination. it shares in the wonder and glory that attach to adventure, travel, and exploration. the variety of peoples and environments, their contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation. the mind is moved from the monotony of the customary. and while local or home geography is the natural starting point in the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not an end in itself. when not treated as a basis for getting at the large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar objects. the reason is the same. the imagination is not fed, but is held down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known. but when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village proprietors are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. sunlight, air, running water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil officers and their duties--all these things are found in the local environment. treated as if their meaning began and ended in those confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously learned. as instruments for extending the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples and things otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which they are put. sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. to follow their course is to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter of course. the same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical study which tend to become specialized and separate. mathematical or astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial, geography, all make their claims. how are they to be adjusted? by an external compromise that crowds in so much of each? no other method is to be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational center of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject. from this center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is needed to help appreciate the significance of human activities and relations. the differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions, the special inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in the temperate regions, cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a member of the solar system. economic activities deeply influence social intercourse and political organization on one side, and reflect physical conditions on the other. the specializations of these topics are for the specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose experience is social. to include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced; verbally, it is. but in educational idea there is but one reality, and it is pity that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of names tends to conceal the identity of meaning. nature and the earth should be equivalent terms, and so should earth study and nature study. everybody knows that nature study has suffered in schools from scrappiness of subject matter, due to dealing with a large number of isolated points. the parts of a flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it lives. the result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination. the lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths in order that they might attract and hold the mind. in numberless cases, more or less silly personifications were resorted to. the method was silly, but it expressed a real need for a human atmosphere. the facts had been torn to pieces by being taken out of their context. they no longer belonged to the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. to compensate, recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations. the real remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of fragments made meaningless through complete removal from the situations in which they are produced and in which they operate. when nature is treated as a whole, like the earth in its relations, its phenomena fall into their natural relations of sympathy and association with human life, and artificial substitutes are not needed. . history and present social life. the segregation which kills the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social life. the past just as past is no longer our affair. if it were wholly gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. let the dead bury their dead. but knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present. history deals with the past, but this past is the history of the present. an intelligent study of the discovery, explorations, colonization of america, of the pioneer movement westward, of immigration, etc., should be a study of the united states as it is to-day: of the country we now live in. studying it in process of formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open to comprehension. genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. its principle is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its making,--to follow it through the successive stages of its growth. to apply this method to history as if it meant only the truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past, is one-sided. it means equally that past events cannot be separated from the living present and retain meaning. the true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems. this general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its bearing upon a number of points. the biographical method is generally recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. the lives of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital historic episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. they condense into vivid pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over so much space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and unravel them. there can be no doubt of the psychological soundness of this principle. but it is misused when employed to throw into exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to the social situations which they represent. when a biography is related just as an account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions that aroused him and to which his activities were a response, we do not have a study of history, for we have no study of social life, which is an affair of individuals in association. we get only a sugar coating which makes it easier to swallow certain fragments of information. much attention has been given of late to primitive life as an introduction to learning history. here also there is a right and a wrong way of conceiving its value. the seemingly ready-made character and the complexity of present conditions, their apparently hard and fast character, is an almost insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into their nature. recourse to the primitive may furnish the fundamental elements of the present situation in immensely simplified form. it is like unraveling a cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser features of the pattern appear. we cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the sort of results we should desire from an experiment. social relationships and modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest terms. when this social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive life becomes simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of savagery. primitive history suggests industrial history. for one of the chief reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days of the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had to be traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has been brought forward in culture. we do not need to go into disputes regarding the economic interpretation of history to realize that the industrial history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of social life in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do. it presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in the interests of security and prosperity of social life. it thus reveals the successive causes of social progress. its other service is to put before us the things that fundamentally concern all men in common--the occupations and values connected with getting a living. economic history deals with the activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as does no other branch of history. the one thing every individual must do is to live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each individual his fair contribution to the general well being and see to it that a just return is made to him. economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more liberalizing than political history. it deals not with the rise and fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers and principalities exist. industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes, and failures with nature than does political history--to say nothing of the military history into which political history so easily runs when reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. for industrial history is essentially an account of the way in which man has learned to utilize natural energy from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular energies of other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality, the resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to extend a common dominion over her. when the history of work, when the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of domesticating and cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture and distribution, are left out of account, history tends to become merely literary--a systematized romance of a mythical humanity living upon itself instead of upon the earth. perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is intellectual history. we are only just beginning to realize that the great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians, generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors who have put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and controlled experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his struggles, triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to others. one of the advantages of industrial history as a history of man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance in the methods and results of knowledge. at present men are accustomed to eulogize intelligence and reason in general terms; their fundamental importance is urged. but pupils often come away from the conventional study of history, and think either that the human intellect is a static quantity which has not progressed by the invention of better methods, or else that intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a negligible historic factor. surely no better way could be devised of instilling a genuine sense of the part which mind has to play in life than a study of history which makes plain how the entire advance of humanity from savagery to civilization has been dependent upon intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to which the things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical writings have been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to overcome. pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical value in teaching. intelligent insight into present forms of associated life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless innocence. historical knowledge helps provide such insight. it is an organ for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of making known the forces which have woven the pattern. the use of history for cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral significance. it is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this virtue or that vice. but such teaching is not so much an ethical use of history as it is an effort to create moral impressions by means of more or less authentic material. at best, it produces a temporary emotional glow; at worst, callous indifference to moralizing. the assistance which may be given by history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding of the social situations of the present in which individuals share is a permanent and constructive moral asset. summary. it is the nature of an experience to have implications which go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. bringing these connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the experience. any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections. normal communication with others is the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the net results of the experience of the group and even the race with the immediate experience of an individual. by normal communication is meant that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one is eager to give and the other to take. it contrasts with telling or stating things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another, merely in order to test him to see how much he has retained and can literally reproduce. geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal experience. the active occupations described in the previous chapter reach out in space and time with respect to both nature and man. unless they are taught for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their chief educational value is that they provide the most direct and interesting roads out into the larger world of meanings stated in history and geography. while history makes human implications explicit and geography natural connections, these subjects are two phases of the same living whole, since the life of men in association goes on in nature, not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of development. chapter seventeen: science in the course of study . the logical and the psychological. by science is meant, as already stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation, reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure a settled, assured subject matter. it involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible. it is, like all knowledge, an outcome of activity bringing about certain changes in the environment. but in its case, the quality of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor and not an incident of the activity. both logically and educationally, science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage. science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications of any knowledge. logical order is not a form imposed upon what is known; it is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. for it means that the statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to one who understands it the premises from which it follows and the conclusions to which it points (see ante, p. ). as from a few bones the competent zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a statement in mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can form an idea of the system of truths in which it has its place. to the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block. just because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of everyday life are hidden. to the layman the bones are a mere curiosity. until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make anything out of them would be random and blind. from the standpoint of the learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting point from which to set out. it is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to start in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified. the necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant experience. the pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. he acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace its connections with the objects and operations with which he is familiar--often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. there is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. what more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? the outcome is written large in the history of education. pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. the pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience. the method of the advanced student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such omissions as may make the subject easier. the chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method of the expert or specialist. the apparent loss of time involved is more than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest secured. what the pupil learns he at least understands. moreover by following, in connection with problems selected from the material of ordinary acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached their perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with material within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and intellectual distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning is only symbolic. since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get some insight into what scientific method means than that they should copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have reached. students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered," but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. and it is safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of purely technical and symbolically stated information. in fact, those who do become successful men of science are those who by their own power manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction into it. the contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science in education, and the result generally achieved is painful. herbert spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that from all points of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. but his argument unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be communicated in a ready-made form. passing over the methods by which the subject matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science. instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan. but there is no magic attached to material stated in technically correct scientific form. when learned in this condition it remains a body of inert information. moreover its form of statement removes it further from fruitful contact with everyday experiences than does the mode of statement proper to literature. nevertheless that the claims made for instruction in science were unjustifiable does not follow. for material so taught is not science to the pupil. contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves suffice to meet the need. while they are an indispensable portion of scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute scientific method. physical materials may be manipulated with scientific apparatus, but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in the ways in which they are handled, from the materials and processes used out of school. the problems dealt with may be only problems of science: problems, that is, which would occur to one already initiated in the science of the subject. our attention may be devoted to getting skill in technical manipulation without reference to the connection of laboratory exercises with a problem belonging to subject matter. there is sometimes a ritual of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion. it has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific statements, or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols. the statement applies, of course, to all use of language. but in the vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the thing signified. association with familiar material is so close that the mind does not pause upon the sign. the signs are intended only to stand for things and acts. but scientific terminology has an additional use. it is designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the things directly in their practical use in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive system. ultimately, of course, they denote the things of our common sense acquaintance. but immediately they do not designate them in their common context, but translated into terms of scientific inquiry. atoms, molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical propositions in the study of physics--all these have primarily an intellectual value and only indirectly an empirical value. they represent instruments for the carrying on of science. as in the case of other tools, their significance can be learned only by use. we cannot procure understanding of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing to their work when they are employed as part of the technique of knowledge. even the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference from the squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the everyday empirical thing. qualities which do not count for the pursuit of knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are important for this purpose are accentuated. if one carries his study far enough, he will find even the properties which are significant for spatial knowledge giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of other things--perhaps a knowledge of the general relations of number. there will be nothing in the conceptual definitions even to suggest spatial form, size, or direction. this does not mean that they are unreal mental inventions, but it indicates that direct physical qualities have been transmuted into tools for a special end--the end of intellectual organization. in every machine the primary state of material has been modified by subordinating it to use for a purpose. not the stuff in its original form but in its adaptation to an end is important. no one would have a knowledge of a machine who could enumerate all the materials entering into its structure, but only he who knew their uses and could tell why they are employed as they are. in like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical conceptions only when he sees the problems in which they function and their specific utility in dealing with these problems. "knowing" the definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without knowing what they do. in one case, as in the other, the meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of which it is a member. . science and social progress. assuming that the development of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience. in general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends. it is the agency of progress in action. progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. but this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. more important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. with increased culture and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. this projection of new possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends. that science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature. the wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science. railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. but none of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary to our daily life. it must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. there is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of greek culture in all respects. science is still too recent to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. men move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. this fact places upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and legs. the advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. science taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. it has brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. it has brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. the coincidence of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. to subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity. the problem of an educational use of science is then to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. the method of science engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. the word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational. under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. to say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. such a mode of practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. it lends itself to deception and quackery. industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. experimental science means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. it means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. science is experience becoming rational. the effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. by the same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. instead of being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance. the term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also that which is far away from life. but abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. situations do not literally repeat themselves. habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. but when the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. for abstraction deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. it signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. it is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience available for guidance of another. science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large scale. it aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further use. it is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress. in any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. from the standpoint of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential. whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience may perish in its passing. but abstraction and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. no one can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. the man of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor when. but intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other mechanical tools. generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. it is the functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its extension to clarify and direct new situations. reference to these possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. generalization is essentially a social device. when men identified their interests exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations were correspondingly restricted. the viewpoint did not permit a wide and free survey. men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure of all possible values. scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in time and space. while this emancipation from the conditions and episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range of fruitful novel applications in practice. terms and propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. a meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. it must acquire a local habitation. names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body. formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the completion of the work of thought. persons know many things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and personal. an individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon it with efficiency. artists and executives often have their knowledge in this state. but it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive. to formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. he must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own. otherwise his communication cannot be understood. he talks a language which no one else knows. while literary art furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies the science. aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed meanings. to sum up: science represents the office of intelligence, in projection and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. it is the sole instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. and if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very different from those of merely speculative theorizing. the latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action. there is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its direction to new possibilities. . naturalism and humanism in education. there exists an educational tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the curriculum. the quarrel between the representatives of the two interests is easily explicable historically. literature and language and a literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before experimental science came into being. the latter had naturally to win its way. no fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly it may possess. but the assumption, from whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both studies. human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. ). man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon insight into nature's processes. whatever natural science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions of human action. to be aware of the medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality. one who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual self-possession. that science may be taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too true. this happens whenever information about the world is made an end in itself. the failure of such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational attitude. dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. the notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. science, or the highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them (see below, ch. xix). the idea of science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. taking theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world. in adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic disadvantage. so far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class. for, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. they tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. for modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. it would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of greek and latin. greek and roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. but to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. any subject matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational. summary. science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in experience. instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a belief. the achievement of this aim gives logical character to the statements. educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. when this fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. the function which science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit and predilection. the logical traits of abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with this function. in emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men. thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. upon the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (see p. ). the laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems. chapter eighteen: educational values the considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. the specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. they are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. the aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. it happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. it has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. an explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another. . the nature of realization or appreciation. much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. it is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. all language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." it stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. as we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. if it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. it is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience. at the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will become an end in themselves. formal education is peculiarly exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with it. in colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a representative experience. the terms "mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing. it is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing is by having it. but it is the difference between reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape. we are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school studies. this is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction. before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the material and the problems which it conveys. from the standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically conveyed. in the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. nothing need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. the first and basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them. getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. as regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual progress. the rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of study. . the nature of standards of valuation. every adult has acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience. he has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on. not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. these principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. they overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. in reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations. an individual may have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own musical standards. but if in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. the appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences. probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. but it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. a youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of others. without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate into realities. his "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. thus there grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones. a person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. but of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition. in similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and definition. he has a standard which can be depended upon. he may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in china. he may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal. it is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. the formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. there are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home. . appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or representative experiences. they are not to be distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding. only a personal response involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." the imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. the engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. this leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "fine art," as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information. theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. but it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. the result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside. meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with what is done. an adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in teaching. the emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies in contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement. the educative value of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of what is going on. in effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations. their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to be used for tangible results is important, but not when isolated from the appreciative side. were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would be no road from a direct activity to representative knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity so as to expand and enrich it. when the representative creative imagination is made merely literary and mythological, symbols are rendered mere means of directing physical reactions of the organs of speech. . in the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about the place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. the omission at that point was intentional. at the outset, there is no sharp demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. the activities mentioned in chapter xv contain within themselves the factors later discriminated into fine and useful arts. as engaging the emotions and the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts their quality. as demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the element of technique indispensable to artistic production. from the standpoint of product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective, though even in this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation they often have a rudimentary charm. as experiences they have both an artistic and an esthetic quality. when they emerge into activities which are tested by their product and when the socially serviceable value of the product is emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts. when they develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts. in one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. it denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing, much less--like depreciation--a lowered and degraded prizing. this enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience appealing, appropriable--capable of full assimilation--and enjoyable, constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting, etc., in education. they are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation in the most general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies of an intensified, enhanced appreciation. as such, they are not only intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose beyond themselves. they have the office, in increased degree, of all appreciation in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of later experiences. they arouse discontent with conditions which fall below their measure; they create a demand for surroundings coming up to their own level. they reveal a depth and range of meaning in experiences which otherwise might be mediocre and trivial. they supply, that is, organs of vision. moreover, in their fullness they represent the concentration and consummation of elements of good which are otherwise scattered and incomplete. they select and focus the elements of enjoyable worth which make any experience directly enjoyable. they are not luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which makes any education worth while. . the valuation of studies. the theory of educational values involves not only an account of the nature of appreciation as fixing the measure of subsequent valuations, but an account of the specific directions in which these valuations occur. to value means primarily to prize, to esteem; but secondarily it means to apprise, to estimate. it means, that is, the act of cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act of passing judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as compared with something else. to value in the latter sense is to valuate or evaluate. the distinction coincides with that sometimes made between intrinsic and instrumental values. intrinsic values are not objects of judgment, they cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater and less, better or worse. they are invaluable; and if a thing is invaluable, it is neither more nor less so than any other invaluable. but occasions present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when we must let one thing go in order to take another. this establishes an order of preference, a greater and less, better and worse. things judged or passed upon have to be estimated in relation to some third thing, some further end. with respect to that, they are means, or instrumental values. we may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of money, and so on. as an appreciative realization, each of these is an intrinsic value. it occupies a particular place in life; it serves its own end, which cannot be supplied by a substitute. there is no question of comparative value, and hence none of valuation. each is the specific good which it is, and that is all that can be said. in its own place, none is a means to anything beyond itself. but there may arise a situation in which they compete or conflict, in which a choice has to be made. now comparison comes in. since a choice has to be made, we want to know the respective claims of each competitor. what is to be said for it? what does it offer in comparison with, as balanced over against, some other possibility? raising these questions means that a particular good is no longer an end in itself, an intrinsic good. for if it were, its claims would be incomparable, imperative. the question is now as to its status as a means of realizing something else, which is then the invaluable of that situation. if a man has just eaten, or if he is well fed generally and the opportunity to hear music is a rarity, he will probably prefer the music to eating. in the given situation that will render the greater contribution. if he is starving, or if he is satiated with music for the time being, he will naturally judge food to have the greater worth. in the abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a particular situation in which choice has to be made, there is no such thing as degrees or order of value. certain conclusions follow with respect to educational values. we cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. it is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum value. in so far as any study has a unique or irreplaceable function in experience, in so far as it marks a characteristic enrichment of life, its worth is intrinsic or incomparable. since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself. and this is not an end to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients. and what has been said about appreciation means that every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. it is true of arithmetic as it is of poetry that in some place and at some time it ought to be a good to be appreciated on its own account--just as an enjoyable experience, in short. if it is not, then when the time and place come for it to be used as a means or instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped. never having been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss something of its capacity as a resource for other ends. it equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values, that is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in which they are to be used. the way to enable a student to apprehend the instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon ability to use number. it also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of time recently devoted to the undertaking. science for example may have any kind of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters as a means. to some the value of science may be military; it may be an instrument in strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be technological, a tool for engineering; or it may be commercial--an aid in the successful conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be philanthropic--the service it renders in relieving human suffering; or again it may be quite conventional--of value in establishing one's social status as an "educated" person. as matter of fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon one of them as its "real" end. all that we can be sure of educationally is that science should be taught so as to be an end in itself in the lives of students--something worth while on account of its own unique intrinsic contribution to the experience of life. primarily it must have "appreciation value." if we take something which seems to be at the opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of statement applies. it may be that, at the present time, its chief value is the contribution it makes to the enjoyment of leisure. but that may represent a degenerate condition rather than anything necessary. poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. it has had an enormous patriotic value. homer to the greeks was a bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. in any case, it may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it--or else the poetry is artificial poetry. the same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic of a study with reference to its motivating force. those responsible for planning and teaching the course of study should have grounds for thinking that the studies and topics included furnish both direct increments to the enriching of lives of the pupils and also materials which they can put to use in other concerns of direct interest. since the curriculum is always getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and with subjects which represent mainly the energy of some influential person or group of persons in behalf of something dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and revision to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose. then there is always the probability that it represents the values of adults rather than those of children and youth, or those of pupils a generation ago rather than those of the present day. hence a further need for a critical outlook and survey. but these considerations do not mean that for a subject to have motivating value to a pupil (whether intrinsic or instrumental) is the same thing as for him to be aware of the value, or to be able to tell what the study is good for. in the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it is not necessary to ask what it is good for. this is a question which can be asked only about instrumental values. some goods are not good for anything; they are just goods. any other notion leads to an absurdity. for we cannot stop asking the question about an instrumental good, one whose value lies in its being good for something, unless there is at some point something intrinsically good, good for itself. to a hungry, healthy child, food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring him to consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a motive to eat. the food in connection with his appetite is a motive. the same thing holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics. neither they nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness the purposes learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the eagerness continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods which are to come of it. the proof of a good is found in the fact that the pupil responds; his response is use. his response to the material shows that the subject functions in his life. it is unsound to urge that, say, latin has a value per se in the abstract, just as a study, as a sufficient justification for teaching it. but it is equally absurd to argue that unless teacher or pupil can point out some definite assignable future use to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying value. when pupils are genuinely concerned in learning latin, that is of itself proof that it possesses value. the most which one is entitled to ask in such cases is whether in view of the shortness of time, there are not other things of intrinsic value which in addition have greater instrumental value. this brings us to the matter of instrumental values--topics studied because of some end beyond themselves. if a child is ill and his appetite does not lead him to eat when food is presented, or if his appetite is perverted so that he prefers candy to meat and vegetables, conscious reference to results is indicated. he needs to be made conscious of consequences as a justification of the positive or negative value of certain objects. or the state of things may be normal enough, and yet an individual not be moved by some matter because he does not grasp how his attainment of some intrinsic good depends upon active concern with what is presented. in such cases, it is obviously the part of wisdom to establish consciousness of connection. in general what is desirable is that a topic be presented in such a way that it either have an immediate value, and require no justification, or else be perceived to be a means of achieving something of intrinsic value. an instrumental value then has the intrinsic value of being a means to an end. it may be questioned whether some of the present pedagogical interest in the matter of values of studies is not either excessive or else too narrow. sometimes it appears to be a labored effort to furnish an apologetic for topics which no longer operate to any purpose, direct or indirect, in the lives of pupils. at other times, the reaction against useless lumber seems to have gone to the extent of supposing that no subject or topic should be taught unless some quite definite future utility can be pointed out by those making the course of study or by the pupil himself, unmindful of the fact that life is its own excuse for being; and that definite utilities which can be pointed out are themselves justified only because they increase the experienced content of life itself. . the segregation and organization of values. it is of course possible to classify in a general way the various valuable phases of life. in order to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (see ante, p. ) to give breadth and flexibility to the enterprise of education, there is some advantage in such a classification. but it is a great mistake to regard these values as ultimate ends to which the concrete satisfactions of experience are subordinate. they are nothing but generalizations, more or less adequate, of concrete goods. health, wealth, efficiency, sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract terms which sum up a multitude of particulars. to regard such things as standards for the valuation of concrete topics and process of education is to subordinate to an abstraction the concrete facts from which the abstraction is derived. they are not in any true sense standards of valuation; these are found, as we have previously seen, in the specific realizations which form tastes and habits of preference. they are, however, of significance as points of view elevated above the details of life whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details are distributed, and whether they are well proportioned. no classification can have other than a provisional validity. the following may prove of some help. we may say that the kind of experience to which the work of the schools should contribute is one marked by executive competency in the management of resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency); by sociability, or interest in the direct companionship of others; by aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at least some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or interest in some mode of scientific achievement; and by sensitiveness to the rights and claims of others--conscientiousness. and while these considerations are not standards of value, they are useful criteria for survey, criticism, and better organization of existing methods and subject matter of instruction. the need of such general points of view is the greater because of a tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation from one another of the various pursuits of life. the idea is prevalent that different studies represent separate kinds of values, and that the curriculum should, therefore, be constituted by gathering together various studies till a sufficient variety of independent values have been cared for. the following quotation does not use the word value, but it contains the notion of a curriculum constructed on the idea that there are a number of separate ends to be reached, and that various studies may be evaluated by referring each study to its respective end. "memory is trained by most studies, but best by languages and history; taste is trained by the more advanced study of languages, and still better by english literature; imagination by all higher language teaching, but chiefly by greek and latin poetry; observation by science work in the laboratory, though some training is to be got from the earlier stages of latin and greek; for expression, greek and latin composition comes first and english composition next; for abstract reasoning, mathematics stands almost alone; for concrete reasoning, science comes first, then geometry; for social reasoning, the greek and roman historians and orators come first, and general history next. hence the narrowest education which can claim to be at all complete includes latin, one modern language, some history, some english literature, and one science." there is much in the wording of this passage which is irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to make it clear. the phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition within which the author is writing. there is the unquestioned assumption of "faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which men happen to live and the bodies they happen to carry around with them. but with allowances made for these matters (even with their complete abandonment) we find much in contemporary educational philosophy which parallels the fundamental notion of parceling out special values to segregated studies. even when some one end is set up as a standard of value, like social efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be but a verbal heading under which a variety of disconnected factors are comprised. and although the general tendency is to allow a greater variety of values to a given study than does the passage quoted, yet the attempt to inventory a number of values attaching to each study and to state the amount of each value which the given study possesses emphasizes an implied educational disintegration. as matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely but unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is familiar. one accepts, for the most part, the studies of the existing course and then assigns values to them as a sufficient reason for their being taught. mathematics is said to have, for example, disciplinary value in habituating the pupil to accuracy of statement and closeness of reasoning; it has utilitarian value in giving command of the arts of calculation involved in trade and the arts; culture value in its enlargement of the imagination in dealing with the most general relations of things; even religious value in its concept of the infinite and allied ideas. but clearly mathematics does not accomplish such results, because it is endowed with miraculous potencies called values; it has these values if and when it accomplishes these results, and not otherwise. the statements may help a teacher to a larger vision of the possible results to be effected by instruction in mathematical topics. but unfortunately, the tendency is to treat the statement as indicating powers inherently residing in the subject, whether they operate or not, and thus to give it a rigid justification. if they do not operate, the blame is put not on the subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy of pupils. this attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the conception of experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist side by side and limit one another. students of politics are familiar with a check and balance theory of the powers of government. there are supposed to be independent separate functions, like the legislative, executive, judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these checks all the others and thus creates an ideal balance. there is a philosophy which might well be called the check and balance theory of experience. life presents a diversity of interests. left to themselves, they tend to encroach on one another. the ideal is to prescribe a special territory for each till the whole ground of experience is covered, and then see to it each remains within its own boundaries. politics, business, recreation, art, science, the learned professions, polite intercourse, leisure, represent such interests. each of these ramifies into many branches: business into manual occupations, executive positions, bookkeeping, railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and commerce, etc., and so with each of the others. an ideal education would then supply the means of meeting these separate and pigeon-holed interests. and when we look at the schools, it is easy to get the impression that they accept this view of the nature of adult life, and set for themselves the task of meeting its demands. each interest is acknowledged as a kind of fixed institution to which something in the course of study must correspond. the course of study must then have some civics and history politically and patriotically viewed: some utilitarian studies; some science; some art (mainly literature of course); some provision for recreation; some moral education; and so on. and it will be found that a large part of current agitation about schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the due meed of recognition to be given to each of these interests, and with struggles to secure for each its due share in the course of study; or, if this does not seem feasible in the existing school system, then to secure a new and separate kind of schooling to meet the need. in the multitude of educations education is forgotten. the obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure and distraction of pupils, and a narrow specialization fatal to the very idea of education. but these bad results usually lead to more of the same sort of thing as a remedy. when it is perceived that after all the requirements of a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is not laid to the isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing subjects, and this recognition made the basis of reorganization of the system. no, the lack is something to be made up for by the introduction of still another study, or, if necessary, another kind of school. and as a rule those who object to the resulting overcrowding and consequent superficiality and distraction usually also have recourse to a merely quantitative criterion: the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as fads and frills, and return to the good old curriculum of the three r's in elementary education and the equally good and equally old-fashioned curriculum of the classics and mathematics in higher education. the situation has, of course, its historic explanation. various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. these deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools. with the rapid change of political, scientific, and economic interests in the last century, provision had to be made for new values. though the older courses resisted, they have had at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a monopoly. they have not, however, been reorganized in content and aim; they have only been reduced in amount. the new studies, representing the new interests, have not been used to transform the method and aim of all instruction; they have been injected and added on. the result is a conglomerate, the cement of which consists in the mechanics of the school program or time table. thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which we have mentioned. this situation in education represents the divisions and separations which obtain in social life. the variety of interests which should mark any rich and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in separate institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods. business is business, science is science, art is art, politics is politics, social intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals, recreation is recreation, and so on. each possesses a separate and independent province with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding. each contributes to the others only externally and accidentally. all of them together make up the whole of life by just apposition and addition. what does one expect from business save that it should furnish money, to be used in turn for making more money and for support of self and family, for buying books and pictures, tickets to concerts which may afford culture, and for paying taxes, charitable gifts and other things of social and ethical value? how unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in breadth and refinement; that it should directly, and not through the money which it supplies, have social service for its animating principle and be conducted as an enterprise in behalf of social organization! the same thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of the pursuit of art or science or politics or religion. each has become specialized not merely in its appliances and its demands upon time, but in its aim and animating spirit. unconsciously, our course of studies and our theories of the educational values of studies reflect this division of interests. the point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the unity or integrity of experience. how shall it be full and varied without losing unity of spirit? how shall it be one and yet not narrow and monotonous in its unity? ultimately, the question of values and a standard of values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of life. educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools, materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and richness of experience. how shall we secure breadth of outlook without sacrificing efficiency of execution? how shall we secure the diversity of interests, without paying the price of isolation? how shall the individual be rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the cost of his intelligence? how shall art, science, and politics reinforce one another in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends pursued at one another's expense? how can the interests of life and the studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead of dividing men from one another? with the questions of reorganization thus suggested, we shall be concerned in the concluding chapters. summary. fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. but since educational values are generally discussed in connection with the claims of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration of aim and interest is here resumed from the point of view of special studies. the term "value" has two quite different meanings. on the one hand, it denotes the attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth while, for its own sake, or intrinsically. this is a name for a full or complete experience. to value in this sense is to appreciate. but to value also means a distinctively intellectual act--an operation of comparing and judging--to valuate. this occurs when direct full experience is lacking, and the question arises which of the various possibilities of a situation is to be preferred in order to reach a full realization, or vital experience. we must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into the appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the instrumental, concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond themselves. the formation of proper standards in any subject depends upon a realization of the contribution which it makes to the immediate significance of experience, upon a direct appreciation. literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best--a heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration. but every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality. contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of instrumental and derived values in studies. the tendency to assign separate values to each study and to regard the curriculum in its entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of segregated values is a result of the isolation of social groups and classes. hence it is the business of education in a democratic social group to struggle against this isolation in order that the various interests may reinforce and play into one another. chapter nineteen: labor and leisure . the origin of the opposition. the isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to opposition between them. probably the most deep-seated antithesis which has shown itself in educational history is that between education in preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. the bare terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already made that the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed, but reflect a division within social life. were the two functions of gaining a livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the opportunities of leisure, distributed equally among the different members of a community, it would not occur to any one that there was any conflict of educational agencies and aims involved. it would be self-evident that the question was how education could contribute most effectively to both. and while it might be found that some materials of instruction chiefly accomplished one result and other subject matter the other, it would be evident that care must be taken to secure as much overlapping as conditions permit; that is, the education which had leisure more directly in view should indirectly reinforce as much as possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work, while that aiming at the latter should produce habits of emotion and intellect which would procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. these general considerations are amply borne out by the historical development of educational philosophy. the separation of liberal education from professional and industrial education goes back to the time of the greeks, and was formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into those who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this necessity. the conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given to the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the other servile in its social status. the latter class labored not only for its own subsistence, but also for the means which enabled the superior class to live without personally engaging in occupations taking almost all the time and not of a nature to engage or reward intelligence. that a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without saying. human beings have to live and it requires work to supply the resources of life. even if we insist that the interests connected with getting a living are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those connected with enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it were admitted that there is something engrossing and insubordinate in material interests which leads them to strive to usurp the place belonging to the higher ideal interests, this would not--barring the fact of socially divided classes--lead to neglect of the kind of education which trains men for the useful pursuits. it would rather lead to scrupulous care for them, so that men were trained to be efficient in them and yet to keep them in their place; education would see to it that we avoided the evil results which flow from their being allowed to flourish in obscure purlieus of neglect. only when a division of these interests coincides with a division of an inferior and a superior social class will preparation for useful work be looked down upon with contempt as an unworthy thing: a fact which prepares one for the conclusion that the rigid identification of work with material interests, and leisure with ideal interests is itself a social product. the educational formulations of the social situation made over two thousand years ago have been so influential and give such a clear and logical recognition of the implications of the division into laboring and leisure classes, that they deserve especial note. according to them, man occupies the highest place in the scheme of animate existence. in part, he shares the constitution and functions of plants and animals--nutritive, reproductive, motor or practical. the distinctively human function is reason existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe. hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this distinctive human prerogative. the life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. from reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements of human nature--the appetites and the active, motor, impulses. in themselves greedy, insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their own satiety, they observe moderation--the law of the mean--and serve desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason. such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most adequately stated by aristotle. but this state of things is reflected in the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of society. only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason capable of operating as a law of life. in the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion. such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves--that is, means for the ends of others. the great body of artisans are in one important respect worse off than even slaves. like the latter they are given up to the service of ends external to themselves; but since they do not enjoy the intimate association with the free superior class experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a lower plane of excellence. moreover, women are classed with slaves and craftsmen as factors among the animate instrumentalities of production and reproduction of the means for a free or rational life. individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. in order that one may live worthily he must first live, and so with collective society. the time and energy spent upon mere life, upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for the latter. means are menial, the serviceable is servile. the true life is possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had without effort and without attention. hence slaves, artisans, and women are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that others, those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life of leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while. to these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base or mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. some persons are trained by suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for ability to use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical commodities and rendering personal service. this training is a mere matter of habituation and technical skill; it operates through repetition and assiduity in application, not through awakening and nurturing thought. liberal education aims to train intelligence for its proper office: to know. the less this knowledge has to do with practical affairs, with making or producing, the more adequately it engages intelligence. so consistently does aristotle draw the line between menial and liberal education that he puts what are now called the "fine" arts, music, painting, sculpture, in the same class with menial arts so far as their practice is concerned. they involve physical agencies, assiduity of practice, and external results. in discussing, for example, education in music he raises the question how far the young should be practiced in the playing of instruments. his answer is that such practice and proficiency may be tolerated as conduce to appreciation; that is, to understanding and enjoyment of music when played by slaves or professionals. when professional power is aimed at, music sinks from the liberal to the professional level. one might then as well teach cooking, says aristotle. even a liberal concern with the works of fine art depends upon the existence of a hireling class of practitioners who have subordinated the development of their own personality to attaining skill in mechanical execution. the higher the activity the more purely mental is it; the less does it have to do with physical things or with the body. the more purely mental it is, the more independent or self-sufficing is it. these last words remind us that aristotle again makes a distinction of superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. for there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's life is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own medium. that is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. but the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental doing. this infection is shown by the fact that civic activity and civic excellence need the help of others; one cannot engage in public life all by himself. but all needs, all desires imply, in the philosophy of aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack, privation; they are dependent upon something beyond themselves for completion. a purely intellectual life, however, one carries on by himself, in himself; such assistance as he may derive from others is accidental, rather than intrinsic. in knowing, in the life of theory, reason finds its own full manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing irrespective of any application is alone independent, or self-sufficing. hence only the education that makes for power to know as an end in itself, without reference to the practice of even civic duties, is truly liberal or free. . the present situation. if the aristotelian conception represented just aristotle's personal view, it would be a more or less interesting historical curiosity. it could be dismissed as an illustration of the lack of sympathy or the amount of academic pedantry which may coexist with extraordinary intellectual gifts. but aristotle simply described without confusion and without that insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that was before him. that the actual social situation has greatly changed since his day there is no need to say. but in spite of these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread of democracy, with the extension of science and of general education (in books, newspapers, travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools), there remains enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view a most enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between culture and utility in present education. behind the intellectual and abstract distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms a social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of self-directive thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the control of the activities of others. aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it renders the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and practice of excellence." the force of the statement is almost infinitely increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present, that all persons, instead of a comparatively few, are free. for when the mass of men and all women were regarded as unfree by the very nature of their bodies and minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor moral hypocrisy in giving them only the training which fitted them for mechanical skill, irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their capacity to share in a worthy life. he was permanently right also when he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as well as those which degrade the condition of the body are mechanical, since they deprive the intellect of leisure and dignity,"--permanently right, that is, if gainful pursuits as matter of fact deprive the intellect of the conditions of its exercise and so of its dignity. if his statements are false, it is because they identify a phase of social custom with a natural necessity. but a different view of the relations of mind and matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better than aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea obsolete in fact--in the actual conduct of life and education. aristotle was permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of external products to understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free play of ideas. if there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary separation of the two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce between efficiency in producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought; between significant knowledge and practical achievement. we hardly better matters if we just correct his theoretical misapprehension, and tolerate the social state of affairs which generated and sanctioned his conception. we lose rather than gain in change from serfdom to free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is simply an increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production. so we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry. we are in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into separate functions and of society into separate classes only so far as we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment. in short, ability to transcend the greek philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere shifting about of the theoretical symbols meaning free, rational, and worthy. it is not secured by a change of sentiment regarding the dignity of labor, and the superiority of a life of service to that of an aloof self-sufficing independence. important as these theoretical and emotional changes are, their importance consists in their being turned to account in the development of a truly democratic society, a society in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. it is not a mere change in the concepts of culture--or a liberal mind--and social service which requires an educational reorganization; but the educational transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to the changes implied in social life. the increased political and economic emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has effected the development of a common school system of education, public and free. it has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. but the revolution is still incomplete. the idea still prevails that a truly cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of thought. as a consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent mixture. certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition that they have the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content of the term liberal being uselessness for practical ends. this aspect is chiefly visible in what is termed the higher education--that of the college and of preparation for it. but is has filtered through into elementary education and largely controls its processes and aims. but, on the other hand, certain concessions have been made to the masses who must engage in getting a livelihood and to the increased role of economic activities in modern life. these concessions are exhibited in special schools and courses for the professions, for engineering, for manual training and commerce, in vocational and prevocational courses; and in the spirit in which certain elementary subjects, like the three r's, are taught. the result is a system in which both "cultural" and "utilitarian" subjects exist in an inorganic composite where the former are not by dominant purpose socially serviceable and the latter not liberative of imagination or thinking power. in the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in even the same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival of traits once exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure. the "utility" element is found in the motives assigned for the study, the "liberal" element in methods of teaching. the outcome of the mixture is perhaps less satisfactory than if either principle were adhered to in its purity. the motive popularly assigned for making the studies of the first four or five years consist almost entirely of reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write, and figure accurately is indispensable to getting ahead. these studies are treated as mere instruments for entering upon a gainful employment or of later progress in the pursuit of learning, according as pupils do not or do remain in school. this attitude is reflected in the emphasis put upon drill and practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill. if we turn to greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the acquisition of skill was subordinated as much as possible to acquisition of literary content possessed of aesthetic and moral significance. not getting a tool for subsequent use but present subject matter was the emphasized thing. nevertheless the isolation of these studies from practical application, their reduction to purely symbolic devices, represents a survival of the idea of a liberal training divorced from utility. a thorough adoption of the idea of utility would have led to instruction which tied up the studies to situations in which they were directly needed and where they were rendered immediately and not remotely helpful. it would be hard to find a subject in the curriculum within which there are not found evil results of a compromise between the two opposed ideals. natural science is recommended on the ground of its practical utility, but is taught as a special accomplishment in removal from application. on the other hand, music and literature are theoretically justified on the ground of their culture value and are then taught with chief emphasis upon forming technical modes of skill. if we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed more carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we might find it easier to construct a course of study which should be useful and liberal at the same time. only superstition makes us believe that the two are necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it is useful and cultural because it is useless. it will generally be found that instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of intellectual insight--surely cultural values--also in the same degree renders what is learned limited in its use. not that it makes it wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine activities carried on under the supervision of others. narrow modes of skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which is achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily put to use in new situations and is under personal control. it was not the bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain activities seem servile to the greeks but the fact that the activities directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days, the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a personal appreciation of their meaning. so far as farming and the trades were rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for results external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics, they were illiberal--but only so far. the intellectual and social context has now changed. the elements in industry due to mere custom and routine have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements derived from scientific inquiry. the most important occupations of today represent and depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry. the area of the human world influenced by economic production and influencing consumption has been so indefinitely widened that geographical and political considerations of an almost infinitely wide scope enter in. it was natural for plato to deprecate the learning of geometry and arithmetic for practical ends, because as matter of fact the practical uses to which they were put were few, lacking in content and mostly mercenary in quality. but as their social uses have increased and enlarged, their liberalizing or "intellectual" value and their practical value approach the same limit. doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much work is still carried on. the invention of machines has extended the amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. it is a commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. something of the same kind is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in industry. they may release the mind for thought upon other topics. but when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature, and history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage of this opportunity. more fundamental is the fact that the great majority of workers have no insight into the social aims of their pursuits and no direct personal interest in them. the results actually achieved are not the ends of their actions, but only of their employers. they do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned. it is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and which will make any education designed simply to give skill in such undertakings illiberal and immoral. the activity is not free because not freely participated in. nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which, keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. and such an education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing economic situation. in the degree in which men have an active concern in the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. in what is termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external and autocratic. hence the split between inner mental action and outer physical action of which the traditional distinction between the liberal and the utilitarian is the reflex. an education which should unify the disposition of the members of society would do much to unify society itself. summary. of the segregations of educational values discussed in the last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most fundamental. while the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and absolute, it is really historical and social. it originated, so far as conscious formulation is concerned, in greece, and was based upon the fact that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted upon the results of the labor of others. this fact affected the psychological doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire, theory and practice. it was embodied in a political theory of a permanent division of human beings into those capable of a life of reason and hence having their own ends, and those capable only of desire and work, and needing to have their ends provided by others. the two distinctions, psychological and political, translated into educational terms, effected a division between a liberal education, having to do with the self-sufficing life of leisure devoted to knowing for its own sake, and a useful, practical training for mechanical occupations, devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content. while the present situation is radically diverse in theory and much changed in fact, the factors of the older historic situation still persist sufficiently to maintain the educational distinction, along with compromises which often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures. the problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it. aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of natural slaves necessarily coincide. chapter twenty: intellectual and practical studies . the opposition of experience and true knowledge. as livelihood and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence and execution, knowledge and activity. the latter set of oppositions doubtless springs from the same social conditions which produce the former conflict; but certain definite problems of education connected with them make it desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged separation of knowing and doing. the notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a long history. the history so far as conscious statement is concerned takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated by plato and aristotle. much as these thinkers differed in many respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to its organ. knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests. again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was never self-sufficing. rational knowing on the other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself. hence the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth. this sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that athenian philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of knowledge and conduct. in a search for something to replace them, it hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of belief and activity. since custom and tradition were identified with experience, it followed at once that reason was superior to experience. moreover, experience, not content with its proper position of subordination, was the great foe to the acknowledgment of the authority of reason. since custom and traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason for its legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the inherently unstable and inadequate nature of experience. the statement of plato that philosophers should be kings may best be understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human affairs. the former secures unity, order, and law; the latter signify multiplicity and discord, irrational fluctuations from one estate to another. the grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere custom, are not far to seek. increasing trade and travel, colonizations, migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. the customs and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply from one another. civil disturbance had become a custom in athens; the fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. the increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had brought into ken many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity and speculation. the situation tended to raise the question as to the existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of nature and society. reason was the faculty by which the universal principle and essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving change,--the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent and uniform. the results of the work of the senses, preserved in memory and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit, constituted experience. experience at its best is thus represented in the various handicrafts--the arts of peace and war. the cobbler, the flute player, the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the skill they have. this means that the bodily organs, particularly the senses, have had repeated contact with things and that the result of these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till ability in foresight and in practice had been secured. such was the essential meaning of the term "empirical." it suggested a knowledge and an ability not based upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a large number of separate trials. it expressed the idea now conveyed by "method of trial and error," with especial emphasis upon the more or less accidental character of the trials. so far as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. if new circumstances resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was likely. even to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past practice. just because of the lack of science or reason in "experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor best. the empiric easily degenerates into the quack. he does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend--to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others--to "bluff." moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he knows others--as the history of athens showed that the common craftsmen thought they could manage household affairs, education, and politics, because they had learned to do the specific things of their trades. experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon which reason lays hold. the philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state of affairs. the senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and desires. they lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants and the welfare of the body. they are important only for the life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in relation to the body. in contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. there is something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. its material is inherently variable and untrustworthy. it is anarchic, because unstable. the man who trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of from country to country. its connection with the "many," with various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries conflict in its train. only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. out of experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within the individual and between individuals. from experience no standard of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom proved. its logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the particular individual which his experience leads him to believe true and good at a particular time and place. finally practice falls of necessity within experience. doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. to produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. all the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object. to know, to grasp a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of vicissitude, chance, and diversity. truth has no lack; it is untouched by the perturbations of the world of sense. it deals with the eternal and the universal. and the world of experience can be brought under control, can be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of reason. it would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted in full technical definiteness. but they all of them profoundly influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education. the contempt for physical as compared with mathematical and logical science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under this estimate of the respective values of experience and reason--or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and the intellectual. medieval philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition. to know reality meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or god, and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that relation. contemplation of supreme reality was the ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate. experience had to do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural objects of knowledge. when we add to this motive the force derived from the literary character of the roman education and the greek philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies which obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes, we can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in educational philosophies but in the higher schools. . the modern theory of experience and knowledge. as we shall see later, the development of experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates a radical transformation of the view just set forth. but before coming to that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. in general, it presents us with an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine of the relations of experience and reason. to plato experience meant habituation, or the conservation of the net product of a lot of past chance trials. reason meant the principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control. devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really were. to the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around. reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms which had to be filled in by experience, by sense observations, in order to get significance and validity; or else were mere indurated prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found protection under august names. the great need was to break way from captivity to conceptions which, as bacon put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience to find out what nature was like. appeal to experience marked the breach with authority. it meant openness to new impressions; eagerness in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the relations they sustained to one another. it was the irruption into the mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over them by preconceived ideas. the change was twofold. experience lost the practical meaning which it had borne from the time of plato. it ceased to mean ways of doing and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and cognitive. it meant the apprehension of material which should ballast and check the exercise of reasoning. by the modern philosophic empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of knowing. the only question was how good a way it is. the result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. practice was not so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or aftermath of knowledge. the educational result was only to confirm the exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of certain habits. in the second place, the interest in experience as a means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the mind as purely receptive. the more passive the mind is, the more truly objects will impress themselves upon it. for the mind to take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate true knowledge--to defeat its own purpose. the ideal was a maximum of receptivity. since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism--that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge with the reception and association of sensory impressions. in john locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties, like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account, such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (see ante, p. .) but some of his successors, especially in france in the latter part of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the conjoint presence of other sensations. locke had held that the mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be exercised upon the material received. his french successors razed away the powers and derived them also from impressions received. as we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest in education as method of social reform. (see ante, p. .) the emptier the mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by bringing the right influences to bear upon it. thus helvetius, perhaps the most extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that education could do anything--that it was omnipotent. within the sphere of school instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office in protesting against mere book learning. if knowledge comes from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind. words, all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of objects with which they may be associated, convey nothing but sensations of their own shape and color--certainly not a very instructive kind of knowledge. sensationalism was an extremely handy weapon with which to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly upon tradition and authority. with respect to all of them, it set up a test: where are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are received? if such objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as the result of false associations and combinations. empiricism also insisted upon a first-hand element. the impression must be made upon me, upon my mind. the further we get away from this direct, first-hand source of knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the resulting idea. as might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive side. of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. introduced into the schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about the way in which they did it was quite wrong. so far, there is nothing to complain of. but the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent full good being got from them. "object lessons" tended to isolate the mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself. the more isolated the object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. the theory worked not only in the direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce instruction to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to the neglect of thinking. according to the theory there was no need of thinking in connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory such thinking would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking consisted simply in combining and separating sensory units which had been received without any participation of judgment. as a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least after the early years of infancy. its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. there are at least three serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an educational philosophy of knowledge. (a) the historical value of the theory was critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs about the world and political institutions. it was a destructive organ of criticism of hard and fast dogmas. but the work of education is constructive, not critical. it assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as correct as possible from the start. sensationalism is highly unfitted for this constructive task. mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness to meanings (ante, p. ), not response to direct physical stimuli. and meaning exists only with reference to a context, which is excluded by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a combination of sense-impressions. the theory, so far as educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere physical excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated objects and qualities. (b) while direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. direct acquaintance with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one thing. as an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted. in precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations, but when employed except as aids to thought--the apprehension of meaning--they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical understanding. they arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific physical symbols. just as the race developed especial symbols as tools of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must progress from concrete to abstract symbols--that is, symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. and undue absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this growth. (c) a thoroughly false psychology of mental development underlay sensationalistic empiricism. experience is in truth a matter of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things. what even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the consequent effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (see ante, p. .) fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. the neglect of the deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. nothing is more uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency to learn about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they are put through trying to do something with them. it is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. its educational influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and methods. it introduced greater regard for observation of things directly and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance attached to verbal symbolization. but its own scope was so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed more directly to thought. consequently it left unimpaired the scope of informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies. . experience as experimentation. it has already been intimated that sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure. with respect to the former, it omits the primary position of active response which puts things to use and which learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from use. it would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. for it would be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling, reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow upon motor response to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not isolated qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing, and the changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected to produce. in other words, what he learns are connections. even such qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the consequences these activities effect. we learn what things are hard and what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with them. in like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will do in reply to the children's activities. and the combination of what things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting and checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new changes constitutes experience. the methods of science by which the revolution in our knowledge of the world dating from the seventeenth century, was brought about, teach the same lesson. for these methods are nothing but experimentation carried out under conditions of deliberate control. to the greek, it seemed absurd that such an activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes in leather, or using wax and needle and thread, could give an adequate knowledge of the world. it seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from a reason above experience. but the introduction of the experimental method signified precisely that such operations, carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested. in other words, it is only needed to conduct such an operation as the pouring of an acid on a metal for the purpose of getting knowledge instead of for the purpose of getting a trade result, in order to lay hold of the principle upon which the science of nature was henceforth to depend. sense perceptions were indeed indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense perceptions in their natural or customary form than in the older science. they were no longer regarded as containing within themselves some "form" or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be stripped off by rational thought. on the contrary, the first thing was to alter and extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given objects of sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all sorts of experimental devices. to accomplish this in a way which would arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas (like those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science. but these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge in themselves. they were implements for instituting, conducting, interpreting experimental inquiries and formulating their results. the logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge, a philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational knowledge and explanation. experience is no longer a mere summarizing of what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the suggestions. when trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure and method, it becomes reasonable--rational. when what we suffer from things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant--enlightening and instructive. the antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative justification. the bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and purely intellectual studies is self-evident. the distinction is not intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which can be regulated. practical activities may be intellectually narrow and trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on under the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external result. but childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the time when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. it is inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from childlike work and play to logically organized subject matter. the discussions of this chapter and the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to those results. (i) experience itself primarily consists of the active relations subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings. in some cases, the initiative in activity is on the side of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain checkings and deflections of endeavors. in other cases, the behavior of surrounding things and persons carries to a successful issue the active tendencies of the individual, so that in the end what the individual undergoes are consequences which he has himself tried to produce. in just the degree in which connections are established between what happens to a person and what he does in response, and between what he does to his environment and what it does in response to him, his acts and the things about him acquire meaning. he learns to understand both himself and the world of men and things. purposive education or schooling should present such an environment that this interaction will effect acquisition of those meanings which are so important that they become, in turn, instruments of further learnings. (ante, ch. xi.) as has been repeatedly pointed out, activity out of school is carried on under conditions which have not been deliberately adapted to promoting the function of understanding and formation of effective intellectual dispositions. the results are vital and genuine as far as they go, but they are limited by all kinds of circumstances. some powers are left quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only occasional and whimsical stimulations; others are formed into habits of a routine skill at the expense of aims and resourceful initiative and inventiveness. it is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men's learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought) into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning. a slight inspection of the improved methods which have already shown themselves effective in education will reveal that they have laid hold, more or less consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual" studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits represent an intellectualizing of practical pursuits. it remains to grasp the principle with greater firmness. (ii) the changes which are taking place in the content of social life tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will intellectualize the play and work of the school. when one bears in mind the social environment of the greeks and the people of the middle ages, where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted to cultivate intelligence. but now that even the occupations of the household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation and intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands otherwise. it is true that many of those who now engage in them are not aware of the intellectual content upon which their personal actions depend. but this fact only gives an added reason why schooling should use these pursuits so as to enable the coming generation to acquire a comprehension now too generally lacking, and thus enable persons to carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) the most direct blow at the traditional separation of doing and knowing and at the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has been given by the progress of experimental science. if this progress has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing. the analysis and rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge and power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained purely mentally--just inside the head. men have to do something to the things when they wish to find out something; they have to alter conditions. this is the lesson of the laboratory method, and the lesson which all education has to learn. the laboratory is a discovery of the condition under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not merely externally productive. if, in too many cases at present, it results only in the acquisition of an additional mode of technical skill, that is because it still remains too largely but an isolated resource, not resorted to until pupils are mostly too old to get the full advantage of it, and even then is surrounded by other studies where traditional methods isolate intellect from activity. summary. the greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. thus they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other source of authority in life and belief. since they desired a rational standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat opposition of reason and experience. the more the former was exalted, the more the latter was depreciated. since experience was identified with what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation. this influence fell in with many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity. the modern age began with a revolt against this point of view, with an appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves rational for protection. but various circumstances led to considering experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive reception of isolated "sensations." hence the education reform effected by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of the bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent reorganization. meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the experimental method in science makes another conception of experience explicitly desirable and possible. this theory reinstates the idea of the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive--a matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. but the ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as to result in securely tested knowledge. "experience" then ceases to be empirical and becomes experimental. reason ceases to be a remote and ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made fruitful in meaning. educationally, this change denotes such a plan for the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the previous chapters. chapter twenty-one: physical and social studies: naturalism and humanism allusion has already been made to the conflict of natural science with literary studies for a place in the curriculum. the solution thus far reached consists essentially in a somewhat mechanical compromise whereby the field is divided between studies having nature and studies having man as their theme. the situation thus presents us with another instance of the external adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention upon the philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs. in general, it may be said that the educational division finds a reflection in the dualistic philosophies. mind and the world are regarded as two independent realms of existence having certain points of contact with each other. from this point of view it is natural that each sphere of existence should have its own separate group of studies connected with it; it is even natural that the growth of scientific studies should be viewed with suspicion as marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy to encroach upon the domain of spirit. any theory of education which contemplates a more unified scheme of education than now exists is under the necessity of facing the question of the relation of man to nature. . the historic background of humanistic study. it is noteworthy that classic greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern form. socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was not attainable and not very important. the chief thing to know is the nature and end of man. upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep significance--all moral and social achievement. plato, however, makes right knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the essential features of nature. his chief treatise, entitled the republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on social organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature. since he accepts the socratic doctrine that right achievement in the former depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of knowledge. since he accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the socratic conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good or end of nature itself. to attempt to determine the end of man apart from a knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature is impossible. it is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics and to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. but on the other hand, knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary stage in bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of existence as the law of human action, corporate and individual. to use the modern phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they are in the interests of humanistic and ideal ends. aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of naturalistic studies. he subordinates (ante, p. ) civic relations to the purely cognitive life. the highest end of man is not human but divine--participation in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life. such knowing deals with what is universal and necessary, and finds, therefore, a more adequate subject matter in nature at its best than in the transient things of man. if we take what the philosophers stood for in greek life, rather than the details of what they say, we might summarize by saying that the greeks were too much interested in free inquiry into natural fact and in the aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and were too deeply conscious of the extent in which society is rooted in nature and subject to its laws, to think of bringing man and nature into conflict. two factors conspire in the later period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies. one is the increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the other is the political and rhetorical bent of roman life. greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the alexandrians and romans was inherited from alien sources. consequently it looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking out directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration. we cannot do better than quote the words of hatch to indicate the consequences for educational theory and practice. "greece on one hand had lost political power, and on the other possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage. it was natural that she should turn to letters. it was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon speech. the mass of men in the greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education. our own comes by direct tradition from it. it set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the entire civilized world. we study literature rather than nature because the greeks did so, and because when the romans and the roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed greek teachers and followed in greek paths." the so-called practical bent of the romans worked in the same direction. in falling back upon the recorded ideas of the greeks, they not only took the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they procured just the kind of material and method suited to their administrative talents. for their practical genius was not directed to the conquest and control of nature but to the conquest and control of men. mr. hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature because the greeks, and the romans whom they taught, did so. what is the link that spans the intervening centuries? the question suggests that barbarian europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased intensity the roman situation. it had to go to school to greco-roman civilization; it also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. not merely for its general ideas and their artistic presentation but for its models of law it went to the records of alien peoples. and its dependence upon tradition was increased by the dominant theological interests of the period. for the authorities to which the church appealed were literatures composed in foreign tongues. everything converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to make the language of the learned a literary language instead of the mother speech. the full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method. scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of learning as a term of reproach. but all that it means is the method of the schools, or of the school men. in its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and invention. and at bottom what is called scholasticism is the whole-hearted and consistent formulation and application of the methods which are suited to instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made, rather than as something which students are to find out for themselves. so far as schools still teach from textbooks and rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than upon that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are scholastic--minus the logical accuracy and system of scholasticism at its best. aside from laxity of method and statement, the only difference is that geographies and histories and botanies and astronomies are now part of the authoritative literature which is to be mastered. as a consequence, the greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. life found its support in authority, not in nature. the latter was moreover an object of considerable suspicion. contemplation of it was dangerous, for it tended to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the rules of living were already contained. moreover nature could be known only through observation; it appealed to the senses--which were merely material as opposed to a purely immaterial mind. furthermore, the utilities of a knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular; they connected with the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the literary tradition concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being. . the modern scientific interest in nature. the movement of the fifteenth century which is variously termed the revival of learning and the renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present life, and accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with nature. it was naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the dominant supernaturalistic interest. it is possible that the influence of a return to classic greek pagan literature in bringing about this changed mind has been overestimated. undoubtedly the change was mainly a product of contemporary conditions. but there can be no doubt that educated men, filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to greek literature for congenial sustenance and reinforcement. and to a considerable extent, this interest in greek thought was not in literature for its own sake, but in the spirit it expressed. the mental freedom, the sense of the order and beauty of nature, which animated greek expression, aroused men to think and observe in a similar untrammeled fashion. the history of science in the sixteenth century shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature largely borrowed their points of departure from the new interest in greek literature. as windelband has said, the new science of nature was the daughter of humanism. the favorite notion of the time was that man was in microcosm that which the universe was in macrocosm. this fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man were later separated and a sharp division made between language and literature and the physical sciences. four reasons may be suggested. (a) the old tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions. politics, law, and diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative literature, for the social sciences did not develop until the methods of the sciences of physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were much further advanced. the same is largely true of history. moreover, the methods used for effective teaching of the languages were well developed; the inertia of academic custom was on their side. just as the new interest in literature, especially greek, had not been allowed at first to find lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so when it found its way into them it joined hands with the older learning to minimize the influence of experimental science. the men who taught were rarely trained in science; the men who were scientifically competent worked in private laboratories and through the medium of academies which promoted research, but which were not organized as teaching bodies. finally, the aristocratic tradition which looked down upon material things and upon the senses and the hands was still mighty. (b) the protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of interest in theological discussion and controversies. the appeal on both sides was to literary documents. each side had to train men in ability to study and expound the records which were relied upon. the demand for training men who could defend the chosen faith against the other side, who were able to propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the other side, was such that it is not too much to say that by the middle of the seventeenth century the linguistic training of gymnasia and universities had been captured by the revived theological interest, and used as a tool of religious education and ecclesiastical controversy. thus the educational descent of the languages as they are found in education to-day is not direct from the revival of learning, but from its adaptation to theological ends. (c) the natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which sharpened the opposition of man and nature. francis bacon presents an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and humanistic interest. science, adopting the methods of observation and experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature--to impose preconceived notions upon her--and was to become her humble interpreter. in obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command her practically. "knowledge is power." this aphorism meant that through science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution of his own ends. bacon attacked the old learning and logic as purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with discovery of the unknown. through the new method of thought which was set forth in his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to emerge, and these discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the service of man. men were to give up their futile, never-finished effort to dominate one another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating nature in the interests of humanity. in the main, bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. but he "anticipated" the advance. he did not see that the new science was for a long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human exploitation. he thought that it would rapidly give man new ends. instead, it put at the disposal of a class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement at the expense of another class. the industrial revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. but it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. but capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place. production and commerce were carried on as if the new science had no moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to economies in production and utilization of saving in self-interest. naturally, this application of physical science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible one) strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science was materialistic in its tendencies. it left a void as to man's distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving, and expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity. (d) moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science, which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by a sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter, constituting nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of human life to illusion. in the former case, it allowed the claims of certain studies to be peculiar consignees of mental values, and indirectly strengthened their claim to superiority, since human beings would incline to regard human affairs as of chief importance at least to themselves. in the latter case, it called out a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion upon the value of physical science, giving occasion for treating it as an enemy to man's higher interests. greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical phrase as teleological. new science was expounded so as to deny the reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. sounds, colors, ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely subjective--as mere impressions in the mind. objective existence was then treated as having only quantitative aspects--as so much mass in motion, its only differences being that at one point in space there was a larger aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there were greater rates of motion than at others. lacking qualitative distinctions, nature lacked significant variety. uniformities were emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be the discovery of a single mathematical formula applying to the whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety of phenomena could be derived. this is what a mechanical philosophy means. such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science. it takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. science does confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events. hence its mechanical and quantitative character. but in leaving them out of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them to a purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends. thus while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power over nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis than ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will, the philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced the world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space. thus the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and the humanistic studies as two disconnected groups. since the difference between better and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience, any philosophy of science which excludes them from the genuine content of reality is bound to leave out what is most interesting and most important to mankind. . the present educational problem. in truth, experience knows no division between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world. man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy. from the standpoint of human experience, and hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims, and the aims themselves. this philosophy is vouched for by the doctrine of biological development which shows that man is continuous with nature, not an alien entering her processes from without. it is reinforced by the experimental method of science which shows that knowledge accrues in virtue of an attempt to direct physical energies in accord with ideas suggested in dealing with natural objects in behalf of social uses. every step forward in the social sciences--the studies termed history, economics, politics, sociology--shows that social questions are capable of being intelligently coped with only in the degree in which we employ the method of collected data, forming hypotheses, and testing them in action which is characteristic of natural science, and in the degree in which we utilize in behalf of the promotion of social welfare the technical knowledge ascertained by physics and chemistry. advanced methods of dealing with such perplexing problems as insanity, intemperance, poverty, public sanitation, city planning, the conservation of natural resources, the constructive use of governmental agencies for furthering the public good without weakening personal initiative, all illustrate the direct dependence of our important social concerns upon the methods and results of natural science. with respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education should take its departure from this close interdependence. it should aim not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as a record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature, economics, and politics. pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information and technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. for the latter procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience. outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in connection with various modes of human action. (see ante, p. .) in all the social activities in which they have shared they have had to understand the material and processes involved. to start them in school with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them. there is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education should be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to advance to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to its pursuit as their particular occupation in life. but at present, the pupil too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the results of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his daily experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material is presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. the habit of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject matter, such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert in a given field, is carried back into the high schools. pupils in the latter simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their supposed ability. the cause of this procedure lies in following tradition, rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy. but the effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea that the sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man, and vice versa. a large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of the teaching of the sciences, for those who never become scientific specialists, is the result of a separation which is unavoidable when one begins with technically organized subject matter. even if all students were embryonic scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this is the most effective procedure. considering that the great majority are concerned with the study of sciences only for its effect upon their mental habits--in making them more alert, more open-minded, more inclined to tentative acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded or suggested,--and for achieving a better understanding of their daily environment, it is certainly ill-advised. too often the pupil comes out with a smattering which is too superficial to be scientific and too technical to be applicable to ordinary affairs. the utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before. the usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is intimately associated with industrial processes and results. these in turn are so many cases of science in action. the stationary and traction steam engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the electric motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. pupils at an early age are practically acquainted with these things. not only does the business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific applications, but household pursuits, the maintenance of health, the sights seen upon the streets, embody scientific achievements and stimulate interest in the connected scientific principles. the obvious pedagogical starting point of scientific instruction is not to teach things labeled science, but to utilize the familiar occupations and appliances to direct observation and experiment, until pupils have arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental principles by understanding them in their familiar practical workings. the opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the "purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. as matter of fact, any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended in its widest possible range of meanings. perception of meanings depends upon perception of connections, of context. to see a scientific fact or law in its human as well as in its physical and technical context is to enlarge its significance and give it increased cultural value. its direct economic application, if by economic is meant something having money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual connections. the important thing is that the fact be grasped in its social connections--its function in life. on the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an intelligent sense of human interests. the social interest, identical in its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with man. knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession as the accumulation of physical details. men may keep busy in a variety of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology of literary productions. unless such activity reacts to enlarge the imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of children. it has the letter without the spirit of activity. it readily degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life. any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. the humanistic spirit of the greeks was native and intense but it was narrow in scope. everybody outside the hellenic circle was a barbarian, and negligible save as a possible enemy. acute as were the social observations and speculations of greek thinkers, there is not a word in their writings to indicate that greek civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient. there was, apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of the despised outsider. within the greek community, the intense social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture was based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes necessary to the existence of the state, as aristotle declared, and yet not genuine parts of it. the development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself. the same revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a class of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of industry--claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of class barriers. this state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview. consequently, it was one sided. culture, under such circumstances, inevitably represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class which was in direct social control. such a tradition as to culture is, as we have seen (ante, p. ), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks off one class from another, rather than fundamental common interests. its standards are in the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been gained rather than widely to extend the range of culture. the modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry and of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned as attacks upon the culture derived from the past. but a wider educational outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for making intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving greater solidity to the culture of those having superior resources. in short, when we consider the close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining literary studies. we have before us the need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly democratic. summary. the philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past. this dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have noted) of greek thought. it arose partly because of the fact that the culture of rome and of barbarian europe was not a native product, being borrowed directly or indirectly from greece, and partly because political and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary documents. at the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. but the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as merely material from man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce mind to a subjective illusion. in education, accordingly, the tendency was to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of technical information regarding the physical world, and to reserve the older literary studies as distinctively humanistic. the account previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational scheme of studies based upon it, are designed to overcome the separation, and to secure recognition of the place occupied by the subject matter of the natural sciences in human affairs. the influence of greek ideas and usages upon the christian church. pp. - . chapter twenty-two: the individual and the world . mind as purely individual. we have been concerned with the influences which have effected a division between work and leisure, knowing and doing, man and nature. these influences have resulted in splitting up the subject matter of education into separate studies. they have also found formulation in various philosophies which have opposed to each other body and mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical mechanism and ideal purpose. upon the philosophical side, these various dualisms culminate in a sharp demarcation of individual minds from the world, and hence from one another. while the connection of this philosophical position with educational procedure is not so obvious as is that of the points considered in the last three chapters, there are certain educational considerations which correspond to it; such as the antithesis supposed to exist between subject matter (the counterpart of the world) and method (the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to treat interest as something purely private, without intrinsic connection with the material studied. aside from incidental educational bearings, it will be shown in this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of mind and the world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship between knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or freedom, and social control and authority. the identification of the mind with the individual self and of the latter with a private psychic consciousness is comparatively modern. in both the greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the individual as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence operated. the individual was in no true sense the knower; the knower was the "reason" which operated through him. the individual interfered at his peril, and only to the detriment of the truth. in the degree in which the individual rather than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion were substituted for true knowledge. in greek life, observation was acute and alert; and thinking was free almost to the point of irresponsible speculations. accordingly the consequences of the theory were only such as were consequent upon the lack of an experimental method. without such a method individuals could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the results of the inquiries of others. without such liability to test by others, the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible; results were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency, agreeable quality, or the prestige of their authors. in the barbarian period, individuals were in a still more humble attitude to truth; important knowledge was supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing remained for the minds of individuals except to work it over after it had been received on authority. aside from the more consciously philosophic aspects of these movements, it never occurs to any one to identify mind and the personal self wherever beliefs are transmitted by custom. in the medieval period there was a religious individualism. the deepest concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. in the later middle ages, this latent individualism found conscious formulation in the nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge as something built up within the individual through his own acts, and mental states. with the rise of economic and political individualism after the sixteenth century, and with the development of protestantism, the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the individual in achieving knowledge for himself. this led to the view that knowledge is won wholly through personal and private experiences. as a consequence, mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly individual. thus upon the educational side, we find educational reformers, like montaigne, bacon, locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs happen to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have grown up in and been tested by personal experience. the reaction against authority in all spheres of life, and the intensity of the struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action and inquiry, led to such an emphasis upon personal observations and ideas as in effect to isolate mind, and set it apart from the world to be known. this isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch of philosophy known as epistemology--the theory of knowledge. the identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between the knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge was possible at all. given a subject--the knower--and an object--the thing to be known--wholly separate from one another, it is necessary to frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other so that valid knowledge may result. this problem, with the allied one of the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting upon the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic thought. the theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of the mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. we are not directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind had been set over the world of realities. the increasing use of the term "consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there is an inner world of conscious states and processes, independent of any relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact. in short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of thought in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism. . individual mind as the agent of reorganization. it should be obvious that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of the practical movement. instead of being its transcript, it was a perversion. men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving to be free from connection with nature and one another. they were striving for greater freedom in nature and society. they wanted greater power to initiate changes in the world of things and fellow beings; greater scope of movement and consequently greater freedom in observations and ideas implied in movement. they wanted not isolation from the world, but a more intimate connection with it. they wanted to form their beliefs about it at first hand, instead of through tradition. they wanted closer union with their fellows so that they might influence one another more effectively and might combine their respective actions for mutual aims. so far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the past, much of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when accepted on authority. men must observe for themselves, and form their own theories and personally test them. such a method was the only alternative to the imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which reduced mind to the formal act of acquiescing in truth. such is the meaning of what is sometimes called the substitution of inductive experimental methods of knowing for deductive. in some sense, men had always used an inductive method in dealing with their immediate practical concerns. architecture, agriculture, manufacture, etc., had to be based upon observation of the activities of natural objects, and ideas about such affairs had to be checked, to some extent, by results. but even in such things there was an undue reliance upon mere custom, followed blindly rather than understandingly. and this observational-experimental method was restricted to these "practical" matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between practice and theoretical knowledge or truth. (see ch. xx.) the rise of free cities, the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the evolution of new methods of producing commodities and doing business, threw men definitely upon their own resources. the reformers of science like galileo, descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods into ascertaining the facts about nature. an interest in discovery took the place of an interest in systematizing and "proving" received beliefs. a just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed, have emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in gaining knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what authorities they were vouched for. but it would not have isolated the individual from the world, and consequently isolated individuals--in theory--from one another. it would have perceived that such disconnection, such rupture of continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in their endeavors. as matter of fact every individual has grown up, and always must grow up, in a social medium. his responses grow intelligent, or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings and values. (see ante, p. .) through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, he gradually acquires a mind of his own. the conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the truth. the self achieves mind in the degree in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the self is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own account. yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. in one sense, knowledge is that which we take for granted. it is that which is settled, disposed of, established, under control. what we fully know, we do not need to think about. in common phrase, it is certain, assured. and this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. it denotes not a sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without reserve or quibble. of course we may be mistaken. what is taken for knowledge--for fact and truth--at a given time may not be such. but everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our intercourse with one another and nature is what, at the given time, is called knowledge. thinking on the contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. it marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession. through its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the state of things reorganized. clearly the last few centuries have been typically a period of revision and reorganization of beliefs. men did not really throw away all transmitted beliefs concerning the realities of existence, and start afresh upon the basis of their private, exclusive sensations and ideas. they could not have done so if they had wished to, and if it had been possible general imbecility would have been the only outcome. men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted exceptions; they used new mechanical appliances to bring to light data inconsistent with what had been believed; they used their imaginations to conceive a world different from that in which their forefathers had put their trust. the work was a piecemeal, a retail, business. one problem was tackled at a time. the net results of all the revisions amounted, however, to a revolution of prior conceptions of the world. what occurred was a reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient than a cutting loose from all connections would have been. this state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or reconstruction of accepted beliefs. every new idea, every conception of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an individual. new ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a society governed by custom does not encourage their development. on the contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is current. the man who looks at things differently from others is in such a community a suspect character; for him to persist is generally fatal. even when social censorship of beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support and reward to those who entertain them. hence they remain mere fancies, romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations. the freedom of observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence. but, upon the whole, modern european society first permitted, and then, in some fields at least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which deviate from what custom prescribes. discovery, research, inquiry in new lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in some degree tolerable. however, as we have already noted, philosophic theories of knowledge were not content to conceive mind in the individual as the pivot upon which reconstruction of beliefs turned, thus maintaining the continuity of the individual with the world of nature and fellow men. they regarded the individual mind as a separate entity, complete in each person, and isolated from nature and hence from other minds. thus a legitimate intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism. when the activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive to effect transformations of them which will in turn win general conviction, there is no opposition between the individual and the social. the intellectual variations of the individual in observation, imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of social conservation. but when knowledge is regarded as originating and developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied. when the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with his fellows. moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of different centers of life. it has its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else. but when men act, they act in a common and public world. this is the problem to which the theory of isolated and independent conscious minds gave rise: given feelings, ideas, desires, which have nothing to do with one another, how can actions proceeding from them be controlled in a social or public interest? given an egoistic consciousness, how can action which has regard for others take place? moral philosophies which have started from such premises have developed four typical ways of dealing with the question. (i) one method represents the survival of the older authoritative position, with such concessions and compromises as the progress of events has made absolutely inevitable. the deviations and departures characterizing an individual are still looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are evidences of the disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in an individual apart from external authoritative guidance. in fact, as distinct from principle, intellectual individualism is tolerated in certain technical regions--in subjects like mathematics and physics and astronomy, and in the technical inventions resulting therefrom. but the applicability of a similar method to morals, social, legal, and political matters, is denied. in such matters, dogma is still to be supreme; certain eternal truths made known by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable limits to individual observation and speculation. the evils from which society suffers are set down to the efforts of misguided individuals to transgress these boundaries. between the physical and the moral sciences, lie intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only grudgingly yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact. although past history has demonstrated that the possibilities of human good are widened and made more secure by trusting to a responsibility built up within the very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads of variation of beliefs. educationally, emphasis may not be put on eternal truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and individual variation is discouraged. (ii) another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract intellectualism. a formal logical faculty is set up in distinction from tradition and history and all concrete subject matter. this faculty of reason is endowed with power to influence conduct directly. since it deals wholly with general and impersonal forms, when different persons act in accord with logical findings, their activities will be externally consistent. there is no doubt of the services rendered by this philosophy. it was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving criticism of doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest behind them; it accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the notion that beliefs had to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness. it undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance upon argument, discussion, and persuasion. it made for clarity and order of exposition. but its influence was greater in destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations among men. its formal and empty nature, due to conceiving reason as something complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile attitude toward historical institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it impotent in the suggestion of specific aims and methods. bare logic, however important in arranging and criticizing existing subject matter, cannot spin new subject matter out of itself. in education, the correlative is trust in general ready-made rules and principles to secure agreement, irrespective of seeing to it that the pupil's ideas really agree with one another. (iii) while this rationalistic philosophy was developing in france, english thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated streams of consciousness. legal arrangements, especially penal administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. education was to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for security in the pursuit of one's own happiness. chief emphasis was put, however, upon trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into harmony with that of others. in commerce, each aims at the satisfaction of his own wants, but can gain his own profit only by furnishing some commodity or service to another. thus in aiming at the increase of his own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to the consciousness of others. again there is no doubt that this view expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangements are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which they make to intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience. it also did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the control of a leisure class. in both ways, this philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern. but it was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine that every individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and pains, and that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect ways of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. in other words, it made explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and readapt common concerns. it made union among men a matter of calculation of externals. it lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of carlyle that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only a "cash nexus" among men. the educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious. (iv) typical german philosophy followed another path. it started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of descartes and his french successors. but while french thought upon the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, german thought (as in hegel) made a synthesis of the two. reason is absolute. nature is incarnate reason. history is reason in its progressive unfolding in man. an individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions. for an absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal and empty; as absolute it must include all content within itself. thus the real problem is not that of controlling individual freedom so that some measure of social order and concord may result, but of achieving individual freedom through developing individual convictions in accord with the universal law found in the organization of the state as objective reason. while this philosophy is usually termed absolute or objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational purposes at least, institutional idealism. (see ante, p. .) it idealized historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an immanent absolute mind. there can be no doubt that this philosophy was a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the nineteenth century from the isolated individualism into which it had fallen in france and england. it served also to make the organization of the state more constructively interested in matters of public concern. it left less to chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less to the workings of private self-interest. it brought intelligence to bear upon the conduct of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally organized education in the interests of the corporate state. it sanctioned and promoted freedom of inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical phenomena. but in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to reinstate the principle of authority. it made for efficiency of organization more than did any of the types of philosophy previously mentioned, but it made no provision for free experimental modification of this organization. political democracy, with its belief in the right of individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to it. . educational equivalents. it is not necessary to consider in detail the educational counterparts of the various defects found in these various types of philosophy. it suffices to say that in general the school has been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness the assumed antithesis between purely individualistic methods of learning and social action, and between freedom and social control. the antithesis is reflected in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive for learning, and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the school, between method of instruction and methods of government; and in the slight opportunity afforded individual variations. when learning is a phase of active undertakings which involve mutual exchange, social control enters into the very process of learning. when the social factor is absent, learning becomes a carrying over of some presented material into a purely individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition. there is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the opponents of freedom in school to identify it with absence of social direction, or, sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement. but the essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an individual to make his own special contribution to a group interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere authoritative dictation of his acts. because what is often called discipline and "government" has to do with the external side of conduct alone, a similar meaning is attached, by reaction, to freedom. but when it is perceived that each idea signifies the quality of mind expressed in action, the supposed opposition between them falls away. freedom means essentially the part played by thinking--which is personal--in learning:--it means intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them. but because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of individuality--or freedom--cannot be separated from opportunity for free play of physical movements. enforced physical quietude may be unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which test the ideas suggested. much has been said about the importance of "self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been restricted to something merely internal--something excluding the free use of sensory and motor organs. those who are at the stage of learning from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the implications of a problem or idea preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity, may need little perceptible overt activity. but the whole cycle of self-activity demands an opportunity for investigation and experimentation, for trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering what can be done with materials and appliances. and this is incompatible with closely restricted physical activity. individual activity has sometimes been taken as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or alone. relief from need of attending to what any one else is doing is truly required to secure calm and concentration. children, like grown persons, require a judicious amount of being let alone. but the time, place, and amount of such separate work is a matter of detail, not of principle. there is no inherent opposition between working with others and working as an individual. on the contrary, certain capacities of an individual are not brought out except under the stimulus of associating with others. that a child must work alone and not engage in group activities in order to be free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which measures individuality by spatial distance and makes a physical thing of it. individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double meaning. in the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he has his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. the phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking. only by a pupil's own observations, reflections, framing and testing of suggestions can what he already knows be amplified and rectified. thinking is as much an individual matter as is the digestion of food. in the second place, there are variations of point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person. when these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method of study and recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably result. originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. the harm is greater now than when the whole community was governed by customary beliefs, because the contrast between methods of learning in school and those relied upon outside the school is greater. that systematic advance in scientific discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will deny. if it is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of any such originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and reproducing things already known by the better informed, the reply is twofold. (i) we are concerned with originality of attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not with originality as measured by product. no one expects the young to make original discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature and man. but it is not unreasonable to expect that learning may take place under such conditions that from the standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery. while immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint, whenever there is genuine learning. (ii) in the normal process of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways. there is something fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them. too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it. the result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that which marks off one from another, goes unused and undirected. teaching then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher. at most he learns simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship. hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied. as maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or less random physical experimentation is reduced. activity is defined or specialized in certain channels. to the eyes of others, the student may be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and vocal organs. but because this attitude is evidence of intense mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have to find their intellectual way about. and even with the adult, it does not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. it marks an intermediate period, capable of being lengthened with increased mastery of a subject, but always coming between an earlier period of more general and conspicuous organic action and a later time of putting to use what has been apprehended. when, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of obvious, or external, freedom. it is enough to identify the freedom which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. if attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care of itself. the individual who has a question which being really a question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is intellectually free. whatever initiative and imaginative vision he possesses will be called into play and control his impulses and habits. his own purposes will direct his actions. otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his memorizings and reproductions, will partake of intellectual servility. such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. it is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic. summary. true individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief. aside from sporadic instances, like the height of greek thought, it is a comparatively modern manifestation. not but that there have always been individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote them. for various reasons, however, the new individualism was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation from everything else. in the theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced the epistemological problem: the question as to the possibility of any cognitive relationship of the individual to the world. in its practical phase, it generated the problem of the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on behalf of general or social interests,--the problem of social direction. while the philosophies which have been elaborated to deal with these questions have not affected education directly, the assumptions underlying them have found expression in the separation frequently made between study and government and between freedom of individuality and control by others. regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. a society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to a limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within each class. a progressive society counts individual variations as precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. hence a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational measures. chapter twenty-three: vocational aspects of education . the meaning of vocation. at the present time the conflict of philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and function of vocational factors in education. the bald statement that significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity: there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete details of vocational education. but a mental review of the intellectual presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural education. traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual activity not involving the active use of bodily organs. culture has also tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a cultivation of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate from either social direction or service. it has been an escape from the former, and a solace for the necessity of the latter. so deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not merely pecuniary. a vocation means nothing but such a direction of life activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates. the opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence upon the others, on the social side. occupation is a concrete term for continuity. it includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical labor or engagement in gainful pursuits. we must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one and only one to each person. such restricted specialism is impossible; nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line of activity. in the first place, each individual has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the degree in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) no one is just an artist and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that condition, he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind of monstrosity. he must, at some period of his life, be a member of a family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career. he is a member of some organized political unit, and so on. we naturally name his vocation from that one of the callings which distinguishes him, rather than from those which he has in common with all others. but we should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational phases of education. (ii) as a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by its association with other callings. a person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment. he cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other relationships--a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and sympathy of his interests. what is true of an artist is true of any other special calling. there is doubtless--in general accord with the principle of habit--a tendency for every distinctive vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its specialized aspect. this means emphasis upon skill or technical method at the expense of meaning. hence it is not the business of education to foster this tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the scientific inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on. . the place of vocational aims in education. bearing in mind the varied and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon which a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education for the more distinctive activity of an individual. . an occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service. to find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness. nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. a right occupation means simply that the aptitudes of a person are in adequate play, working with the minimum of friction and the maximum of satisfaction. with reference to other members of a community, this adequacy of action signifies, of course, that they are getting the best service the person can render. it is generally believed, for example, that slave labor was ultimately wasteful even from the purely economic point of view--that there was not sufficient stimulus to direct the energies of slaves, and that there was consequent wastage. moreover, since slaves were confined to certain prescribed callings, much talent must have remained unavailable to the community, and hence there was a dead loss. slavery only illustrates on an obvious scale what happens in some degree whenever an individual does not find himself in his work. and he cannot completely find himself when vocations are looked upon with contempt, and a conventional ideal of a culture which is essentially the same for all is maintained. plato (ante, p. ) laid down the fundamental principle of a philosophy of education when he asserted that it was the business of education to discover what each person is good for, and to train him to mastery of that mode of excellence, because such development would also secure the fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious way. his error was not in qualitative principle, but in his limited conception of the scope of vocations socially needed; a limitation of vision which reacted to obscure his perception of the infinite variety of capacities found in different individuals. . an occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. education through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method. it calls instincts and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. it has an end in view; results are to be accomplished. hence it appeals to thought; it demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity cannot be either routine or capricious. since the movement of activity must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation and ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discover and readapt means of execution. in short, an occupation, pursued under conditions where the realization of the activity rather than merely the external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements which were laid down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims, interest, and thinking. (see chapters viii, x, xii.) a calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth. it provides an axis which runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one another. the lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in some branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever has to do with his concern. he unconsciously, from the motivation of his occupation, reaches out for all relevant information, and holds to it. the vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. such organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant. no classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and cold. . the only adequate training for occupations is training through occupations. the principle stated early in this book (see chapter vi) that the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient preparation for later responsibilities comes by making the most of immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases of education. the dominant vocation of all human beings at all times is living--intellectual and moral growth. in childhood and youth, with their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and unconcealed. to predetermine some future occupation for which education is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future right employment. to repeat the principle we have had occasion to appeal to so often, such training may develop a machine-like skill in routine lines (it is far from being sure to do so, since it may develop distaste, aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of those qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning which make an occupation intellectually rewarding. in an autocratically managed society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the development of freedom and responsibility, a few do the planning and ordering, the others follow directions and are deliberately confined to narrow and prescribed channels of endeavor. however much such a scheme may inure to the prestige and profit of a class, it is evident that it limits the development of the subject class; hardens and confines the opportunities for learning through experience of the master class, and in both ways hampers the life of the society as a whole. (see ante, p. .) the only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations be indirect rather than direct; namely, through engaging in those active occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at the time. only in this way can there be on the part of the educator and of the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so that the proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be indicated. moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a constant process as long as growth continues. it is a conventional and arbitrary view which assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen for adult life is made once for all at some particular date. one has discovered in himself, say, an interest, intellectual and social, in the things which have to do with engineering and has decided to make that his calling. at most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which further growth is to be directed. it is a sort of rough sketch for use in direction of further activities. it is the discovery of a profession in the sense in which columbus discovered america when he touched its shores. future explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and extensive sort remain to be made. when educators conceive vocational guidance as something which leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid, hampering further growth. in so far, the calling chosen will be such as to leave the person concerned in a permanently subordinate position, executing the intelligence of others who have a calling which permits more flexible play and readjustment. and while ordinary usages of language may not justify terming a flexible attitude of readjustment a choice of a new and further calling, it is such in effect. if even adults have to be on the lookout to see that their calling does not shut down on them and fossilize them, educators must certainly be careful that the vocational preparation of youth is such as to engage them in a continuous reorganization of aims and methods. . present opportunities and dangers. in the past, education has been much more vocational in fact than in name. (i) the education of the masses was distinctly utilitarian. it was called apprenticeship rather than education, or else just learning from experience. the schools devoted themselves to the three r's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all kinds of labor. taking part in some special line of work, under the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. the two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as that explicitly so termed. (ii) to a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was essentially vocational--it only happened that their pursuits of ruling and of enjoying were not called professions. for only those things were named vocations or employments which involved manual labor, laboring for a reward in keep, or its commuted money equivalent, or the rendering of personal services to specific persons. for a long time, for example, the profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that of the valet or barber--partly because it had so much to do with the body, and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to some definite person. but if we go behind words, the business of directing social concerns, whether politically or economically, whether in war or peace, is as much a calling as anything else; and where education has not been completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the past have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this business. moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the spending of money, have been made into definite callings. unconsciously to themselves the higher institutions of learning have been made to contribute to preparation for these employments. even at present, what is called higher education is for a certain class (much smaller than it once was) mainly preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits. in other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work, training for the calling of teaching and special research. by a peculiar superstition, education which has to do chiefly with preparation for the pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and for literary callings, and for leadership, has been regarded as non-vocational and even as peculiarly cultural. the literary training which indirectly fits for authorship, whether of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine articles, is especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and author writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane education against the encroachments of a specialized practical education, without recognizing that his own education, which he calls liberal, has been mainly training for his own particular calling. he has simply got into the habit of regarding his own business as essentially cultural and of overlooking the cultural possibilities of other employments. at the bottom of these distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which recognizes as employment only those pursuits where one is responsible for his work to a specific employer, rather than to the ultimate employer, the community. there are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis upon vocational education--for the disposition to make explicit and deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) in the first place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the rendering of tangible services to society. in theory, men and women are now expected to do something in return for their support--intellectual and economic--by society. labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded moral ideal. while there is still much admiration and envy of those who can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment condemns such lives. social responsibility for the use of time and personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be. (ii) in the second place, those vocations which are specifically industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century and a half. manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local, and consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. they engage the best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. the manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced a hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs. the problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to do with the relations of capital and labor. the great increase in the social importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship of schooling to industrial life. no such vast social readjustment could occur without offering a challenge to an education inherited from different social conditions, and without putting up to education new problems. (iii) in the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly mentioned: industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical, rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. its technique is now technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc. the economic revolution has stimulated science by setting problems for solution, by producing greater intellectual respect for mechanical appliances. and industry received back payment from science with compound interest. as a consequence, industrial occupations have infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural possibilities than they used to possess. the demand for such education as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the machines they operate. under the old regime all workers in a craft were approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. personal knowledge and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because work was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. now the operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool to his own purposes. while the intellectual possibilities of industry have multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great masses, less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand production for local markets. the burden of realizing the intellectual possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school. (iv) in the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in science, more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and less associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols. as a result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not only more of the content of science than it used to, but greater opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made. the ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of the worker in the laboratory. but in schools, association with machines and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of the students is insight. the separation of shop and laboratory, where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional, the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the following up of any intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the shop the advantage of emphasizing the social bearings of the scientific principle, as well as, with many pupils, of stimulating a livelier interest. (v) finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology of learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line with the increased importance of industry in life. for modern psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of exploring, experimentation, and "trying on." it reveals that learning is not the work of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization of original capacities into activities having significance. as we have already seen (ante, p. ), in older pupils work is to educative development of raw native activities what play is for younger pupils. moreover, the passage from play to work should be gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into work the elements of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf of greater control. the reader will remark that these five points practically resume the main contentions of the previous part of the work. both practically and philosophically, the key to the present educational situation lies in a gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods so as to utilize various forms of occupation typifying social callings, and to bring out their intellectual and moral content. this reconstruction must relegate purely literary methods--including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of consecutive and cumulative activities. but our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a technical preparation for industries and professions as they now operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions in the school. the problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with out-of-school experience. the problem is not easy of solution. there is a standing danger that education will perpetuate the older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of acquiescence in the untransformed, unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our defective industrial regime. put in concrete terms, there is danger that vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits. education would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of its transformation. the desired transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. it signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied in something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible--which breaks down the barriers of distance between them. it denotes a state of affairs in which the interest of each in his work is uncoerced and intelligent: based upon its congeniality to his own aptitudes. it goes without saying that we are far from such a social state; in a literal and quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. but in principle, the quality of social changes already accomplished lies in this direction. there are more ample resources for its achievement now than ever there have been before. no insuperable obstacles, given the intelligent will for its realization, stand in the way. success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything else. for the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental disposition--an educative change. this does not mean that we can change character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart from a change in industrial and political conditions. such a conception contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of participative response in social affairs. but it does mean that we may produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. for such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their work. on the other hand, those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse. they are stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to make up for the distance which separates them from others by the impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment which they can make upon others. it would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. taking its stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade education--that is, greater technical efficiency. technical proficiency is often sadly lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts--not merely for the sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but for the greater happiness found in work. for no one cares for what one cannot half do. but there is a great difference between a proficiency limited to immediate work, and a competency extended to insight into its social bearings; between efficiency in carrying out the plans of others and in one forming one's own. at present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes both the employing and the employed class. while the latter often have no concern with their occupation beyond the money return it brings, the former's outlook may be confined to profit and power. the latter interest generally involves much greater intellectual initiation and larger survey of conditions. for it involves the direction and combination of a large number of diverse factors, while the interest in wages is restricted to certain direct muscular movements. but none the less there is a limitation of intelligence to technical and non-humane, non-liberal channels, so far as the work does not take in its social bearings. and when the animating motive is desire for private profit or personal power, this limitation is inevitable. in fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of others. any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination. those who are in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a liberal, a cultural occupation, and one which fits for directive power the youth in whom they are directly interested. to split the system, and give to others, less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture and service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a society nominally democratic. such a vocational education inevitably discounts the scientific and historic human connections of the materials and processes dealt with. to include such things in narrow trade education would be to waste time; concern for them would not be "practical." they are reserved for those who have leisure at command--the leisure due to superior economic resources. such things might even be dangerous to the interests of the controlling class, arousing discontent or ambitions "beyond the station" of those working under the direction of others. but an education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning of a vocation would include instruction in the historic background of present conditions; training in science to give intelligence and initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production; and study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future worker into touch with the problems of the day and the various methods proposed for its improvement. above all, it would train power of readaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them. this ideal has to contend not only with the inertia of existing educational traditions, but also with the opposition of those who are entrenched in command of the industrial machinery, and who realize that such an educational system if made general would threaten their ability to use others for their own ends. but this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of social reorganization upon educational reconstruction. it is accordingly an encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to the demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and to make intelligence practical and executive. summary. a vocation signifies any form of continuous activity which renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the accomplishment of results. the question of the relation of vocation to education brings to a focus the various problems previously discussed regarding the connection of thought with bodily activity; of individual conscious development with associated life; of theoretical culture with practical behavior having definite results; of making a livelihood with the worthy enjoyment of leisure. in general, the opposition to recognition of the vocational phases of life in education (except for the utilitarian three r's in elementary schooling) accompanies the conservation of aristocratic ideals of the past. but, at the present juncture, there is a movement in behalf of something called vocational training which, if carried into effect, would harden these ideas into a form adapted to the existing industrial regime. this movement would continue the traditional liberal or cultural education for the few economically able to enjoy it, and would give to the masses a narrow technical trade education for specialized callings, carried on under the control of others. this scheme denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation of the older social division, with its counterpart intellectual and moral dualisms. but it means its continuation under conditions where it has much less justification for existence. for industrial life is now so dependent upon science and so intimately affects all forms of social intercourse, that there is an opportunity to utilize it for development of mind and character. moreover, a right educational use of it would react upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection with legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious features of the present industrial and commercial order. it would turn the increasing fund of social sympathy to constructive account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic sentiment. it would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their industrial fate. it would enable them to saturate with meaning the technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our machine system of production and distribution. so much for those who now have the poorer economic opportunities. with the representatives of the more privileged portion of the community, it would increase sympathy for labor, create a disposition of mind which can discover the culturing elements in useful activity, and increase a sense of social responsibility. the crucial position of the question of vocational education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:--whether intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured under egoistic or social conditions. no discussion of details is undertaken in this chapter, because this conclusion but summarizes the discussion of the previous chapters, xv to xxii, inclusive. chapter twenty-four: philosophy of education . a critical review. although we are dealing with the philosophy of education, do definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has there been an explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of education. this topic is now introduced by a summary account of the logical order implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the philosophic issues involved. afterwards we shall undertake a brief discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the theories of knowledge and of morals implied in different educational ideals as they operate in practice. the prior chapters fall logically into three parts. i. the first chapters deal with education as a social need and function. their purpose is to outline the general features of education as the process by which social groups maintain their continuous existence. education was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of experience through a process of transmission, partly incidental to the ordinary companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly deliberately instituted to effect social continuity. this process was seen to involve control and growth of both the immature individual and the group in which he lives. this consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the quality of the social group concerned--the kind of society aiming at its own perpetuation through education. the general discussion was then specified by application to social groups which are intentionally progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation of established customs. such societies were found to be democratic in quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent members, and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs operating under the control of a superior class. the sort of education appropriate to the development of a democratic community was then explicitly taken as the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis of education. ii. this analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or social content, and as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as directive guardians of this reorganization. (see chapters vi-vii.) this distinction was then used to outline the respective characters of subject matter and method. it also defined their unity, since method in study and learning upon this basis is just the consciously directed movement of reorganization of the subject matter of experience. from this point of view the main principles of method and subject matter of learning were developed (chapters xiii-xiv.) iii. save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the democratic criterion and its application in present social life. in the subsequent chapters (xviii-xxii) we considered the present limitation of its actual realization. they were found to spring from the notion that experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests, each having its own independent value, material, and method, each checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by the others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. we then proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this segregation. on the practical side, they were found to have their cause in the divisions of society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes and groups--in other words, in obstruction to full and flexible social interaction and intercourse. these social ruptures of continuity were seen to have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms or antitheses--such as that of labor and leisure, practical and intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and association, culture and vocation. in this discussion, we found that these different issues have their counterparts in formulations which have been made in classic philosophic systems; and that they involve the chief problems of philosophy--such as mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the mind and the world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc. underlying these various separations we found the fundamental assumption to be an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions, bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. consequently, there was indicated a philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and function of mind in an activity which controls the environment. thus we have completed the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first portion of this book: such as the biological continuity of human impulses and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the growth of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the uses made of it in the social medium; the necessity of utilization of individual variations in desire and thinking for a progressively developing society; the essential unity of method and subject matter; the intrinsic continuity of ends and means; the recognition of mind as thinking which perceives and tests the meanings of behavior. these conceptions are consistent with the philosophy which sees intelligence to be the purposive reorganization, through action, of the material of experience; and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies mentioned. . the nature of philosophy. our further task is to extract and make explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. we have already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in terms of the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that these problems originate in the conflicts and difficulties of social life. the problems are such things as the relations of mind and matter; body and soul; humanity and physical nature; the individual and the social; theory--or knowing, and practice--or doing. the philosophical systems which formulate these problems record the main lineaments and difficulties of contemporary social practice. they bring to explicit consciousness what men have come to think, in virtue of the quality of their current experience, about nature, themselves, and the reality they conceive to include or to govern both. as we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways which imply a certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both subject matter and method. with respect to subject matter, philosophy is an attempt to _comprehend_--that is, to gather together the varied details of the world and of life into a single inclusive whole, which shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce the plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. on the side of the attitude of the philosopher and of those who accept his conclusions, there is the endeavor to attain as unified, consistent, and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible. this aspect is expressed in the word 'philosophy'--love of wisdom. whenever philosophy has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. witness the fact that almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also organized ways of living, those who accepted their tenets being committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness the intimate connection of philosophy with the theology of the roman church in the middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at national crises, its association with political struggles. this direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon life obviously differentiates philosophy from science. particular facts and laws of science evidently influence conduct. they suggest things to do and not do, and provide means of execution. when science denotes not simply a report of the particular facts discovered about the world but a _general attitude_ toward it--as distinct from special things to do --it merges into philosophy. for an underlying disposition represents an attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to the considerations which govern conduct. hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject matter. for this reason, the definition of such conceptions as generality, totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from the side of the disposition toward the world which they connote. in any literal and quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject matter of knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the question. the very nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids. in a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to philosophy. for obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the world. it is for the sciences to say what generalizations are tenable about the world and what they specifically are. but when we ask what sort of permanent disposition of action toward the world the scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic question. from this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a quantitative summation. it means rather consistency of mode of response in reference to the plurality of events which occur. consistency does not mean literal identity; for since the same thing does not happen twice, an exact repetition of a reaction involves some maladjustment. totality means continuity--the carrying on of a former habit of action with the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. instead of signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means keeping the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that each borrows and gives significance to every other. any person who is open-minded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration and responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic disposition. one of the popular senses of philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without complaint. this meaning is a tribute to the influence of the stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of philosophy in general. but in so far as it suggests that the wholeness characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract meaning, from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and to embody what is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified in any scheme. an analogous interpretation applies to the generality and ultimateness of philosophy. taken literally, they are absurd pretensions; they indicate insanity. finality does not mean, however, that experience is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper levels of meaning--to go below the surface and find out the connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. in like manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its context--which constitutes its significance. it is of assistance to connect philosophy with thinking in its distinction from knowledge. knowledge, grounded knowledge, is science; it represents objects which have been settled, ordered, disposed of rationally. thinking, on the other hand, is prospective in reference. it is occasioned by an unsettlement and it aims at overcoming a disturbance. philosophy is thinking what the known demands of us--what responsive attitude it exacts. it is an idea of what is possible, not a record of accomplished fact. hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking. it presents an assignment of something to be done--something to be tried. its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and suggesting methods for dealing with them. philosophy might almost be described as thinking which has become conscious of itself--which has generalized its place, function, and value in experience. more specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because there is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various interests in life. where interests are so superficial that they glide readily into one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized to come into conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not perceptible. but when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the religious, or the economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the conservative concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest in freedom, or when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there is a stimulus to discover some more comprehensive point of view from which the divergencies may be brought together, and consistency or continuity of experience recovered. often these clashes may be settled by an individual for himself; the area of the struggle of aims is limited and a person works out his own rough accommodations. such homespun philosophies are genuine and often adequate. but they do not result in systems of philosophy. these arise when the discrepant claims of different ideals of conduct affect the community as a whole, and the need for readjustment is general. these traits explain some things which are often brought as objections against philosophies, such as the part played in them by individual speculation, and their controversial diversity, as well as the fact that philosophy seems to be repeatedly occupied with much the same questions differently stated. without doubt, all these things characterize historic philosophies more or less. but they are not objections to philosophy so much as they are to human nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set. if there are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that uncertainty. if there are different diagnoses of the cause of a difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is, the conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. with respect to what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring agreement and certainty. the thing itself is sure. but with reference to what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate. one would not expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same philosophy of life as those who were having a hard struggle for existence. if the possessing and the dispossessed had the same fundamental disposition toward the world, it would argue either insincerity or lack of seriousness. a community devoted to industrial pursuits, active in business and commerce, is not likely to see the needs and possibilities of life in the same way as a country with high aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning the energies of nature to mechanical account. a social group with a fairly continuous history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. even if the same data were present, they would be evaluated differently. but the different sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different scheme of values. as for the similarity of problems, this is often more a matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being translated into the terms of contemporary perplexities. but in certain fundamental respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to time with only such changes as are due to change of social context, including the growth of the sciences. the fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because philosophers become a specialized class which uses a technical language, unlike the vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. but where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be discovered. at this point, the intimate connection between philosophy and education appears. in fact, education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions. the student of philosophy "in itself" is always in danger of taking it as so much nimble or severe intellectual exercise--as something said by philosophers and concerning them alone. but when philosophic issues are approached from the side of the kind of mental disposition to which they correspond, or the differences in educational practice they make when acted upon, the life-situations which they formulate can never be far from view. if a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be artificial. the educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. if we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education. unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic--or verbal--or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct. public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which they are educative--that is to say, in the degree in which they modify mental and moral attitudes. and at the best, such methods are compromised by the fact they are used with those whose habits are already largely set, while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of operation. on the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such a broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is the business of philosophy to provide. positive science always implies practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve. isolated from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its disclosures are used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the means of sustenance of life or to manufacture war material to wipe life out. if society is interested in one of these things rather than another, science shows the way of attainment. philosophy thus has a double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out values which have become obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what values are merely sentimental because there are no means for their realization; and also that of interpreting the results of specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor. it is impossible that it should have any success in these tasks without educational equivalents as to what to do and what not to do. for philosophic theory has no aladdin's lamp to summon into immediate existence the values which it intellectually constructs. in the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods of managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized aims. by the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. education is the laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested. it is suggestive that european philosophy originated (among the athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. the earlier history of philosophy, developed by the greeks in asia minor and italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is understood to-day. it had nature for its subject, and speculated as to how things are made and changed. later the traveling teachers, known as the sophists, began to apply the results and the methods of the natural philosophers to human conduct. when the sophists, the first body of professional educators in europe, instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management of city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of the individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of knowledge and action. can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be learned, they asked? what is learning? it has to do with knowledge. what, then, is knowledge? how is it achieved? through the senses, or by apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone a preliminary logical discipline? since learning is coming to know, it involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the greek way of putting it. how is such a transition possible? is change, becoming, development really possible and if so, how? and supposing such questions answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue? this last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action. was not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man? and consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest of all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness and the citizen's life were secondary? or, on the other hand, was the vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense, demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that bound men together in their community life? was not the only true, because the only moral, life gained through obedient habituation to the customary practices of the community? and was not the new education an enemy to good citizenship, because it set up a rival standard to the established traditions of the community? in the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose from their original practical bearing upon education and were discussed on their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an independent branch of inquiry. but the fact that the stream of european philosophical thought arose as a theory of educational procedure remains an eloquent witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and education. "philosophy of education" is not an external application of ready-made ideas to a system of practice having a radically different origin and purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems of the formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to the difficulties of contemporary social life. the most penetrating definition of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the theory of education in its most general phases. the reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and methods thus go hand in hand. if there is especial need of educational reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems, it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development of democracy. such practical changes cannot take place without demanding an educational reformation to meet them, and without leading men to ask what ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes, and what revisions they require of the ideas and ideals which are inherited from older and unlike cultures. incidentally throughout the whole book, explicitly in the last few chapters, we have been dealing with just these questions as they affect the relationship of mind and body, theory and practice, man and nature, the individual and social, etc. in our concluding chapters we shall sum up the prior discussions with respect first to the philosophy of knowledge, and then to the philosophy of morals. summary. after a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the generalized theory of education. philosophy was stated to be a form of thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is uncertain in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the nature of the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to be tested in action. philosophic thinking has for its differentia the fact that the uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread social conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized interests and institutional claims. since the only way of bringing about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a modification of emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is at once an explicit formulation of the various interests of life and a propounding of points of view and methods through which a better balance of interests may be effected. since education is the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted practice. chapter twenty-five: theories of knowledge . continuity versus dualism. a number of theories of knowing have been criticized in the previous pages. in spite of their differences from one another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts with the theory which has been positively advanced. the latter assumes continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions, separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. the origin of these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. these barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. this absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. every such social condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a sincere account of experience. when it gets beyond dualism--as many philosophies do in form--it can only be by appeal to something higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental realm. and in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality. so far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and procedures. the outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated factors and values which has been described. (see chapter xviii.) the present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory of knowing. in the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and higher rational knowing. the first is connected with everyday affairs, serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized intellectual pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with the immediate environment. such knowing is depreciated, if not despised, as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. rational knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate, intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application in behavior. socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned class remote from concern with the means of living. philosophically, the difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal. experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars, acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. reason deals with universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter of concrete details. in the educational precipitate, the pupil is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific information, each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to become familiar with a certain number of laws and general relationships. geography, as often taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond the rudiments of figuring, the latter. for all practical purposes, they represent two independent worlds. another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word "learning." on the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is known, as that is handed down by books and learned men. it is something external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material commodities in a warehouse. truth exists ready-made somewhere. study is then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage. on the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when he studies. it is an active, personally conducted affair. the dualism here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. there is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing--if it only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. the separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method is the educational equivalent of this dualism. socially the distinction has to do with the part of life which is dependent upon authority and that where individuals are free to advance. another dualism is that of activity and passivity in knowing. purely empirical and physical things are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions. physical things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey themselves into consciousness by means of the sense organs. rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the mind, an activity carried on better if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the senses and external objects. the distinction between sense training and object lessons and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in books, and appropriated--so it is thought--by some miraculous output of mental energy, is a fair expression in education of this distinction. socially, it reflects a division between those who are controlled by direct concern with things and those who are free to cultivate themselves. another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect and the emotions. the emotions are conceived to be purely private and personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in apprehending facts and truths,--except perhaps the single emotion of intellectual curiosity. the intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a disturbing heat. the mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward to considerations of personal advantage and loss. thus in education we have that systematic depreciation of interest which has been noted, plus the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to apply that mind to the truths to be known. thus we have the spectacle of professional educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need of reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions, prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and punishments. the effect of this situation in crippling the teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it deserves. all of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing, theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and the body as its organ and means. we shall not repeat what has been said about the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class which, relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of expression and social direction. nor is it necessary to speak again of the educational evils which spring from the separation. we shall be content to summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of this conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity. (i) the advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system. too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain and the rest of the body. but in fact the nervous system is only a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working together. instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively with one another. the brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it. note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next stimulus will be. see what happens, for example, when a carpenter is at work upon a board, or an etcher upon his plate--or in any case of a consecutive activity. while each motor response is adjusted to the state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that motor response shapes the next sensory stimulus. generalizing this illustration, the brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing of activity so as to maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such modifications in future action as are required because of what has already been done. the continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random activity where there is nothing cumulative. what makes it continuous, consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares the way for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the results already attained--the basis of all responsibility. no one who has realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something isolated from all activity, complete on its own account. (ii) the development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery of evolution. for the philosophic significance of the doctrine of evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler and more complex organic forms until we reach man. the development of organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a minimum. as activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more marked role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan for. the effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in itself. for the doctrine of organic development means that the living creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and, forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own activities accordingly. if the living, experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it is effective. it cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator. (iii) the development of the experimental method as the method of getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere opinion--the method of both discovery and proof--is the remaining great force in bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge. the experimental method has two sides. (i) on one hand, it means that we have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm the conception entertained. short of such specific changes, our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of experiments to be tried. (ii) on the other hand, the experimental method of thinking signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in just the degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is made on the basis of thorough observation of present conditions. experimentation, in other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting. such surplus activity--a surplus with reference to what has been observed and is now anticipated--is indeed an unescapable factor in all our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are noted and are used to make predictions and plans in similar situations in the future. the more the meaning of the experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out of a certain way of treating the material resources and obstacles which confront us embodies a prior use of intelligence. what we call magic was with respect to many things the experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his luck, not his ideas. the scientific experimental method is, on the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically--or immediately--unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful. the experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as a practical device. hence it is not surprising that men have not recognized its full scope. for the most part, its significance is regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters. it will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and moral matters. men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the responsibility of directing their activity by thought. they tend to confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the rival systems of dogma they will accept. hence the schools are better adapted, as john stuart mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. but every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach and deploying greater range of things in space. in time the theory of knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the methods which are less successful. . schools of method. there are various systems of philosophy with characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. some of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism, realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. many of them have been criticized in connection with the discussion of some educational problem. we are here concerned with them as involving deviations from that method which has proved most effective in achieving knowledge, for a consideration of the deviations may render clearer the true place of knowledge in experience. in brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other experiences. the word "freely" marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and that of habit. habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future. thus it also has the function of making one experience available in subsequent experiences. within certain limits, it performs this function successfully. but habit, apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty. prevision of change is not part of its scope, for habit assumes the essential likeness of the new situation with the old. consequently it often leads astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the machine. but a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what he is about. he knows the conditions under which a given habit works, and is in a position to introduce the changes which will readapt it to new conditions. in other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an object which determine its applicability in a given situation. to take an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are accustomed to react to other events which threaten the security of their life. since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the same methods to scare away the comet. to us, the method is plainly absurd--so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. the only reason we do not act in some analogous fashion is because we do not take the comet as an isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in its connections with other events. we place it, as we say, in the astronomical system. we respond to its connections and not simply to the immediate occurrence. thus our attitude to it is much freer. we may approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided by its connections. we can bring into play, as we deem wise, any one of the habits appropriate to any one of the connected objects. thus we get at a new event indirectly instead of immediately--by invention, ingenuity, resourcefulness. an ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a network of interconnections that any past experience would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new experience. in fine, while a habit apart from knowledge supplies us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that selection may be made from a much wider range of habits. two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (see ante, p. .) (i) one, the more tangible, is increased power of control. what cannot be managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose barriers between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them if we cannot overcome them. genuine knowledge has all the practical value attaching to efficient habits in any case. (ii) but it also increases the meaning, the experienced significance, attaching to an experience. a situation to which we respond capriciously or by routine has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get nothing mentally from it. but wherever knowledge comes into play in determining a new experience there is mental reward; even if we fail practically in getting the needed control we have the satisfaction of experiencing a meaning instead of merely reacting physically. while the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge is future or prospective. for knowledge furnishes the means of understanding or giving meaning to what is still going on and what is to be done. the knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by personal acquaintance and by study of what others have ascertained and recorded. but it is knowledge to him because it supplies the resources by which he interprets the unknown things which confront him, fills out the partial obvious facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees their probable future, and makes plans accordingly. when knowledge is cut off from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling, it drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. there is much emotional satisfaction to be had from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed knowledge, and the satisfaction is a legitimate one. but this contemplative attitude is aesthetic, not intellectual. it is the same sort of joy that comes from viewing a finished picture or a well composed landscape. it would make no difference if the subject matter were totally different, provided it had the same harmonious organization. indeed, it would make no difference if it were wholly invented, a play of fancy. applicability to the world means not applicability to what is past and gone--that is out of the question by the nature of the case; it means applicability to what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in the moving scene in which we are implicated. the very fact that we so easily overlook this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out of reach as knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and future. we cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge of its past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its future. we ignore the prospective reference just because it is so irretrievably implied. yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. they regard knowledge as something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing with what is yet to be. and it is this omission which vitiates them and which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an adequate conception of knowledge condemns. for one has only to call to mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge to realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing experience of the students--how largely it seems to be believed that the mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in books constitutes knowledge. no matter how true what is learned to those who found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing which makes it knowledge to the pupils. it might as well be something about mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the individual's own life. at the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social conditions. it was a method for systematizing and lending rational sanction to material accepted on authority. this subject matter meant so much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to bear upon it. under present conditions the scholastic method, for most persons, means a form of knowing which has no especial connection with any particular subject matter. it includes making distinctions, definitions, divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making them--with no objective in experience. the view of thought as a purely physical activity having its own forms, which are applied to any material as a seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which underlies what is termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic method generalized. the doctrine of formal discipline in education is the natural counterpart of the scholastic method. the contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis upon the particular and the general respectively--or upon bare facts on one side and bare relations on the other. in real knowledge, there is a particularizing and a generalizing function working together. so far as a situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved into details, as sharply defined as possible. specified facts and qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and it is through our sense organs that they are specified. as setting forth the problem, they may well be termed particulars, for they are fragmentary. since our task is to discover their connections and to recombine them, for us at the time they are partial. they are to be given meaning; hence, just as they stand, they lack it. anything which is to be known, whose meaning has still to be made out, offers itself as particular. but what is already known, if it has been worked over with a view to making it applicable to intellectually mastering new particulars, is general in function. its function of introducing connection into what is otherwise unconnected constitutes its generality. any fact is general if we use it to give meaning to the elements of a new experience. "reason" is just the ability to bring the subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance of the subject matter of a new experience. a person is reasonable in the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event which immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its connection with the common experience of mankind. without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no intellectual growth. without placing these particulars in the context of the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of the past--without the use of reason or thought--particulars are mere excitations or irritations. the mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic schools is that each fails to see that the function of sensory stimulation and thought is relative to reorganizing experience in applying the old to the new, thereby maintaining the continuity or consistency of life. the theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. it holds that knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual resources--of all the habits that render our action intelligent. only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens. knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live. summary. such social divisions as interfere with free and full intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of the separated classes one-sided. those whose experience has to do with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings in whose active production they have had no share are practical rationalists. those who come in direct contact with things and have to adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists. those concerned with progress, who are striving to change received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve received truth emphasize the universal and the fixed--and so on. philosophic systems in their opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit formulation of the traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided segments of experience--one-sided because barriers to intercourse prevent the experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by that of others who are differently situated. in an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is made available in giving direction and meaning to another. the recent advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to work out and formulate such a theory. their educational equivalent is the connection of the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with activities, or occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life. chapter twenty-six: theories of morals . the inner and the outer. since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set up between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of morals. since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic theory of morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed in moral training, a brief critical discussion is in place. it is a commonplace of educational theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim of school instruction and discipline. hence it is important that we should be on our guard against a conception of the relations of intelligence to character which hampers the realization of the aim, and on the look-out for the conditions which have to be provided in order that the aim may be successfully acted upon. the first obstruction which meets us is the currency of moral ideas which split the course of activity into two opposed factors, often named respectively the inner and outer, or the spiritual and the physical. this division is a culmination of the dualism of mind and the world, soul and body, end and means, which we have so frequently noted. in morals it takes the form of a sharp demarcation of the motive of action from its consequences, and of character from conduct. motive and character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing exclusively in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are regarded as outside of mind, conduct having to do simply with the movements which carry out motives; consequences with what happens as a result. different schools identify morality with either the inner state of mind or the outer act and results, each in separation from the other. action with a purpose is deliberate; it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental weighing of considerations pro and eon. it also involves a conscious state of longing or desire for the end. the deliberate choice of an aim and of a settled disposition of desire takes time. during this time complete overt action is suspended. a person who does not have his mind made up, does not know what to do. consequently he postpones definite action so far as possible. his position may be compared to that of a man considering jumping across a ditch. if he were sure he could or could not make it, definite activity in some direction would occur. but if he considers, he is in doubt; he hesitates. during the time in which a single overt line of action is in suspense, his activities are confined to such redistributions of energy within the organism as will prepare a determinate course of action. he measures the ditch with his eyes; he brings himself taut to get a feel of the energy at his disposal; he looks about for other ways across, he reflects upon the importance of getting across. all this means an accentuation of consciousness; it means a turning in upon the individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes, etc. obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into conscious recognition is a part of the whole activity in its temporal development. there is not first a purely psychical process, followed abruptly by a radically different physical one. there is one continuous behavior, proceeding from a more uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more overt, determinate, or complete state. the activity at first consists mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism; as these are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as a whole acts--some definite act is undertaken. we may distinguish, of course, the more explicitly conscious phase of the continuous activity as mental or psychical. but that only identifies the mental or psychical to mean the indeterminate, formative state of an activity which in its fullness involves putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment. our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are important, because they represent inchoate, nascent activities. they fulfill their destiny in issuing, later on, into specific and perceptible acts. and these inchoate, budding organic readjustments are important because they are our sole escape from the dominion of routine habits and blind impulse. they are activities having a new meaning in process of development. hence, normally, there is an accentuation of personal consciousness whenever our instincts and ready formed habits find themselves blocked by novel conditions. then we are thrown back upon ourselves to reorganize our own attitude before proceeding to a definite and irretrievable course of action. unless we try to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find ourselves. the conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment implied in activity in uncertain situations. this role of mind in continuous activity is not always maintained, however. desires for something different, aversion to the given state of things caused by the blocking of successful activity, stimulates the imagination. the picture of a different state of things does not always function to aid ingenious observation and recollection to find a way out and on. except where there is a disciplined disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run loose. instead of its objects being checked up by conditions with reference to their practicability in execution, they are allowed to develop because of the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield. when we find the successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial surroundings, natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles in the air and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which involves the pains of thought. so in overt action we acquiesce, and build up an imaginary world in, mind. this break between thought and conduct is reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind as inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer. for the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's experience. the social situation may be such as to throw the class given to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires without providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can be used to reorganize the environment. under such conditions, men take revenge, as it were, upon the alien and hostile environment by cultivating contempt for it, by giving it a bad name. they seek refuge and consolation within their own states of mind, their own imaginings and wishes, which they compliment by calling both more real and more ideal than the despised outer world. such periods have recurred in history. in the early centuries of the christian era, the influential moral systems of stoicism, of monastic and popular christianity and other religious movements of the day, took shape under the influence of such conditions. the more action which might express prevailing ideals was checked, the more the inner possession and cultivation of ideals was regarded as self-sufficient--as the essence of morality. the external world in which activity belongs was thought of as morally indifferent. everything lay in having the right motive, even though that motive was not a moving force in the world. much the same sort of situation recurred in germany in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it led to the kantian insistence upon the good will as the sole moral good, the will being regarded as something complete in itself, apart from action and from the changes or consequences effected in the world. later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as themselves the embodiment of reason. the purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction. this is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism. it was said in effect that the important thing morally is not what a man is inside of his own consciousness, but what he does--the consequences which issue, the charges he actually effects. inner morality was attacked as sentimental, arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective--as giving men leave to dignify and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest or any caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an ideal of conscience. results, conduct, are what counts; they afford the sole measure of morality. ordinary morality, and hence that of the schoolroom, is likely to be an inconsistent compromise of both views. on one hand, certain states of feeling are made much of; the individual must "mean well," and if his intentions are good, if he had the right sort of emotional consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility for full results in conduct. but since, on the other hand, certain things have to be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of others, and of social order in general, there is great insistence upon the doing of certain things, irrespective of whether the individual has any concern or intelligence in their doing. he must toe the mark; he must have his nose held to the grindstone; he must obey; he must form useful habits; he must learn self-control,--all of these precepts being understood in a way which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly done, irrespective of the spirit of thought and desire in which it is done, and irrespective therefore of its effect upon other less obvious doings. it is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated the method by which both of these evils are avoided. one or both of these evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or old, cannot engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking under conditions which engage their interest and require their reflection. for only in such cases is it possible that the disposition of desire and thinking should be an organic factor in overt and obvious conduct. given a consecutive activity embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result is to be obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of dictated directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and there the rise of conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate reflection are inevitable. they are inevitable as the spirit and quality of an activity having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated realm of inner consciousness. . the opposition of duty and interest. probably there is no antithesis more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting from "principle" and from "interest." to act on principle is to act disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal considerations. to act according to interest is, so the allegation runs, to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. it substitutes the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral law. the false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already been criticized (see chapter x), but some moral aspects of the question will now be considered. a clew to the matter may be found in the fact that the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually use the term "self-interest." starting from the premises that unless there is interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they end with the conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from principle or from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there "is something in it" for himself. the premise is sound; the conclusion false. in reply the other school argues that since man is capable of generous self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he is capable of acting without interest. again the premise is sound, and the conclusion false. the error on both sides lies in a false notion of the relation of interest and the self. both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity. as a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an interest of the self and without interest. if the self is something fixed antecedent to action, then acting from interest means trying to get more in the way of possessions for the self--whether in the way of fame, approval of others, power over others, pecuniary profit, or pleasure. then the reaction from this view as a cynical depreciation of human nature leads to the view that men who act nobly act with no interest at all. yet to an unbiased judgment it would appear plain that a man must be interested in what he is doing or he would not do it. a physician who continues to serve the sick in a plague at almost certain danger to his own life must be interested in the efficient performance of his profession--more interested in that than in the safety of his own bodily life. but it is distorting facts to say that this interest is merely a mask for an interest in something else which he gets by continuing his customary services--such as money or good repute or virtue; that it is only a means to an ulterior selfish end. the moment we recognize that the self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action, the whole situation clears up. a man's interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is found in that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred to be that kind of a self. the mistake lies in making a separation between interest and self, and supposing that the latter is the end to which interest in objects and acts and others is a mere means. in fact, self and interest are two names for the same fact; the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals and measures the quality of selfhood which exists. bear in mind that interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a certain object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the ground. unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in what is done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor selflessness--which would mean absence of virility and character. as employed everywhere outside of this particular theoretical controversy, the term "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims and objects which habitually interest a man. and if we make a mental survey of the kind of interests which evoke the use of this epithet, we shall see that they have two intimately associated features. (i) the generous self consciously identifies itself with the full range of relationships implied in its activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself and considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii) it readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new consequences as they become perceptible. when the physician began his career he may not have thought of a pestilence; he may not have consciously identified himself with service under such conditions. but, if he has a normally growing or active self, when he finds that his vocation involves such risks, he willingly adopts them as integral portions of his activity. the wider or larger self which means inclusion instead of denial of relationships is identical with a self which enlarges in order to assume previously unforeseen ties. in such crises of readjustment--and the crisis may be slight as well as great--there may be a transitional conflict of "principle" with "interest." it is the nature of a habit to involve ease in the accustomed line of activity. it is the nature of a readjusting of habit to involve an effort which is disagreeable--something to which a man has deliberately to hold himself. in other words, there is a tendency to identify the self--or take interest--in what one has got used to, and to turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an unexpected thing which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes up. since in the past one has done one's duty without having to face such a disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has been? to yield to this temptation means to narrow and isolate the thought of the self--to treat it as complete. any habit, no matter how efficient in the past, which has become set, may at any time bring this temptation with it. to act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it. the principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and spirit--the care for the diseased. the principle is not what justifies an activity, for the principle is but another name for the continuity of the activity. if the activity as manifested in its consequences is undesirable, to act upon principle is to accentuate its evil. and a man who prides himself upon acting upon principle is likely to be a man who insists upon having his own way without learning from experience what is the better way. he fancies that some abstract principle justifies his course of action without recognizing that his principle needs justification. assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide desirable occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a whole--that is, in its continuous development--which keeps a pupil at his work in spite of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles. where there is no activity having a growing significance, appeal to principle is either purely verbal, or a form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous considerations clothed with a dignified title. undoubtedly there are junctures where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and where reinforcement is needed. but what carries a person over these hard stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his occupation. duties are "offices"--they are the specific acts needed for the fulfilling of a function--or, in homely language--doing one's job. and the man who is genuinely interested in his job is the man who is able to stand temporary discouragement, to persist in the face of obstacles, to take the lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction. . intelligence and character. a noteworthy paradox often accompanies discussions of morals. on the one hand, there is an identification of the moral with the rational. reason is set up as a faculty from which proceed ultimate moral intuitions, and sometimes, as in the kantian theory, it is said to supply the only proper moral motive. on the other hand, the value of concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly underestimated, and even deliberately depreciated. morals is often thought to be an affair with which ordinary knowledge has nothing to do. moral knowledge is thought to be a thing apart, and conscience is thought of as something radically different from consciousness. this separation, if valid, is of especial significance for education. moral education in school is practically hopeless when we set up the development of character as a supreme end, and at the same time treat the acquiring of knowledge and the development of understanding, which of necessity occupy the chief part of school time, as having nothing to do with character. on such a basis, moral education is inevitably reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons about morals. lessons "about morals" signify as matter of course lessons in what other people think about virtues and duties. it amounts to something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already animated by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of others. without such a regard, it has no more influence on character than information about the mountains of asia; with a servile regard, it increases dependence upon others, and throws upon those in authority the responsibility for conduct. as a matter of fact, direct instruction in morals has been effective only in social groups where it was a part of the authoritative control of the many by the few. not the teaching as such but the reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was an incident made it effective. to attempt to get similar results from lessons about morals in a democratic society is to rely upon sentimental magic. at the other end of the scale stands the socratic-platonic teaching which identifies knowledge and virtue--which holds that no man does evil knowingly but only because of ignorance of the good. this doctrine is commonly attacked on the ground that nothing is more common than for a man to know the good and yet do the bad: not knowledge, but habituation or practice, and motive are what is required. aristotle, in fact, at once attacked the platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is like an art, such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better than a man who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of disease and remedies. the issue turns, however, upon what is meant by knowledge. aristotle's objection ignored the gist of plato's teaching to the effect that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the good except as he had passed through years of practical habituation and strenuous discipline. knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got either from books or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged education. it was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience of life. irrespective of plato's position, it is easy to perceive that the term knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate and vital personal realization,--a conviction gained and tested in experience,--and a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that persons in general believe so and so--a devitalized remote information. that the latter does not guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly affect character, goes without saying. but if knowledge means something of the same sort as our conviction gained by trying and testing that sugar is sweet and quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise. every time a man sits on a chair rather than on a stove, carries an umbrella when it rains, consults a doctor when ill--or in short performs any of the thousand acts which make up his daily life, he proves that knowledge of a certain kind finds direct issue in conduct. there is every reason to suppose that the same sort of knowledge of good has a like expression; in fact "good" is an empty term unless it includes the satisfactions experienced in such situations as those mentioned. knowledge that other persons are supposed to know something might lead one to act so as to win the approbation others attach to certain actions, or at least so as to give others the impression that one agrees with them; there is no reason why it should lead to personal initiative and loyalty in behalf of the beliefs attributed to them. it is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper meaning of the term knowledge. it is enough for educational purposes to note the different qualities covered by the one name, to realize that it is knowledge gained at first hand through the exigencies of experience which affects conduct in significant ways. if a pupil learns things from books simply in connection with school lessons and for the sake of reciting what he has learned when called upon, then knowledge will have effect upon some conduct--namely upon that of reproducing statements at the demand of others. there is nothing surprising that such "knowledge" should not have much influence in the life out of school. but this is not a reason for making a divorce between knowledge and conduct, but for holding in low esteem this kind of knowledge. the same thing may be said of knowledge which relates merely to an isolated and technical specialty; it modifies action but only in its own narrow line. in truth, the problem of moral education in the schools is one with the problem of securing knowledge--the knowledge connected with the system of impulses and habits. for the use to which any known fact is put depends upon its connections. the knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a different import. our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct activity having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in geography and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge, was based upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between knowledge and activity. what is learned and employed in an occupation having an aim and involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge, whether consciously so regarded or not. for it builds up a social interest and confers the intelligence needed to make that interest effective in practice. just because the studies of the curriculum represent standard factors in social life, they are organs of initiation into social values. as mere school studies, their acquisition has only a technical worth. acquired under conditions where their social significance is realized, they feed moral interest and develop moral insight. moreover, the qualities of mind discussed under the topic of method of learning are all of them intrinsically moral qualities. open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, assumption of responsibility for developing the consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral traits. the habit of identifying moral characteristics with external conformity to authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the ethical value of these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to reduce morals to a dead and machinelike routine. consequently while such an attitude has moral results, the results are morally undesirable--above all in a democratic society where so much depends upon personal disposition. . the social and the moral. all of the separations which we have been criticizing--and which the idea of education set forth in the previous chapters is designed to avoid--spring from taking morals too narrowly,--giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed, and, on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so as to limit morals to a list of definitely stated acts. as a matter of fact, morals are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with others. and potentially this includes all our acts, even though their social bearing may not be thought of at the time of performance. for every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition--it sets up a certain kind of inclination and desire. and it is impossible to tell when the habit thus strengthened may have a direct and perceptible influence on our association with others. certain traits of character have such an obvious connection with our social relationships that we call them "moral" in an emphatic sense--truthfulness, honesty, chastity, amiability, etc. but this only means that they are, as compared with some other attitudes, central:--that they carry other attitudes with them. they are moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated and exclusive, but because they are so intimately connected with thousands of other attitudes which we do not explicitly recognize--which perhaps we have not even names for. to call them virtues in their isolation is like taking the skeleton for the living body. the bones are certainly important, but their importance lies in the fact that they support other organs of the body in such a way as to make them capable of integrated effective activity. and the same is true of the qualities of character which we specifically designate virtues. morals concern nothing less than the whole character, and the whole character is identical with the man in all his concrete make-up and manifestations. to possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few namable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices of life. the moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis, identical with each other. it is then but to restate explicitly the import of our earlier chapters regarding the social function of education to say that the measure of the worth of the administration, curriculum, and methods of instruction of the school is the extent to which they are animated by a social spirit. and the great danger which threatens school work is the absence of conditions which make possible a permeating social spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral training. for this spirit can be actively present only when certain conditions are met. (i) in the first place, the school must itself be a community life in all which that implies. social perceptions and interests can be developed only in a genuinely social medium--one where there is give and take in the building up of a common experience. informational statements about things can be acquired in relative isolation by any one who previously has had enough intercourse with others to have learned language. but realization of the meaning of the linguistic signs is quite another matter. that involves a context of work and play in association with others. the plea which has been made for education through continued constructive activities in this book rests upon the fact they afford an opportunity for a social atmosphere. in place of a school set apart from life as a place for learning lessons, we have a miniature social group in which study and growth are incidents of present shared experience. playgrounds, shops, workrooms, laboratories not only direct the natural active tendencies of youth, but they involve intercourse, communication, and cooperation,--all extending the perception of connections. (ii) the learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. there should be a free interplay between the two. this is possible only when there are numerous points of contact between the social interests of the one and of the other. a school is conceivable in which there should be a spirit of companionship and shared activity, but where its social life would no more represent or typify that of the world beyond the school walls than that of a monastery. social concern and understanding would be developed, but they would not be available outside; they would not carry over. the proverbial separation of town and gown, the cultivation of academic seclusion, operate in this direction. so does such adherence to the culture of the past as generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this makes an individual feel more at home in the life of other days than in his own. a professedly cultural education is peculiarly exposed to this danger. an idealized past becomes the refuge and solace of the spirit; present-day concerns are found sordid, and unworthy of attention. but as a rule, the absence of a social environment in connection with which learning is a need and a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of the school; and this isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to life and so infertile in character. a narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits--marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education to further. there is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be good; he must be good for something. the something for which a man must be good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from living with others balances with what he contributes. what he gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life--a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. what he materially receives and gives is at most opportunities and means for the evolution of conscious life. otherwise, it is neither giving nor taking, but a shifting about of the position of things in space, like the stirring of water and sand with a stick. discipline, culture, social efficiency, personal refinement, improvement of character are but phases of the growth of capacity nobly to share in such a balanced experience. and education is not a mere means to such a life. education is such a life. to maintain capacity for such education is the essence of morals. for conscious life is a continual beginning afresh. summary. the most important problem of moral education in the school concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct. for unless the learning which accrues in the regular course of study affects character, it is futile to conceive the moral end as the unifying and culminating end of education. when there is no intimate organic connection between the methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is not integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life, while morals become moralistic--a scheme of separate virtues. the two theories chiefly associated with the separation of learning from activity, and hence from morals, are those which cut off inner disposition and motive--the conscious personal factor--and deeds as purely physical and outer; and which set action from interest in opposition to that from principle. both of these separations are overcome in an educational scheme where learning is the accompaniment of continuous activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize the materials of typical social situations. for under such conditions, the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond school walls. all education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral. it forms a character which not only does the particular deed socially necessary but one which is interested in that continuous readjustment which is essential to growth. interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest. note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) study of child life by marion foster washburne the library of home economics a complete home-study course on the new profession of home-making and art of right living; the practical application of the most recent advances in the arts and sciences to home and health prepared by teachers of recognized authority for home-makers, mothers, teachers, physicians, nurses, dietitians, professional house managers, and all interested in home, health, economy and children twelve volumes nearly three thousand pages, one thousand illustrations tested by use in correspondence instruction revised and supplemented [illustration: american school of home economics] chicago american school of home economics [illustration: a modern madonna.] authors isabel bevier, ph.m. professor of household science, university of illinois. author u.s. government bulletins, "development of the home economics movement in america," etc. alice peloubet norton, m.a. assistant professor of home economics, school of education, university of chicago; director of the chautauqua school of domestic science. s. maria elliott instructor in home economics, simmons college; formerly instructor school of housekeeping, boston. anna barrows director chautauqua school of cookery; lecturer teachers' college, columbia university, and simmons college; formerly editor "american kitchen magazine;" author "home science cook book." alfred cleveland cotton, a.m., m.d. professor diseases of children, rush medical college, university of chicago; visiting physician presbyterian hospital, chicago; author of "diseases of children." bertha m. terrill, a.b. professor in home economics in hartford school of pedagogy; author of u.s. government bulletins. kate heintz watson formerly instructor in domestic economy, lewis institute; lecturer university of chicago. marion foster washburne editor "the mothers' magazine;" lecturer chicago froebel association; author "everyday essays", "family secrets," etc. margaret e. dodd graduate massachusetts institute of technology; teacher of science, woodward institute. amy elizabeth pope with the panama canal commission; formerly instructor in practical and theoretical nursing, training school for nurses, presbyterian hospital, new york city. maurice le bosquet, s.b. director american school of home economics; member american public health association and american chemical society. contributors and editors ellen h. richards author "cost of food," "cost of living," "cost of shelter," "food materials and their adulteration," etc., etc.; chairman lake placid conference on home economics. mary hinman abel author of u.s. government bulletins, "practical sanitary and economic cooking," "safe food," etc. thomas d. wood, m.d. professor of physical education, columbia university. h.m. lufkin, m.d. professor of physical diagnosis and clinical medicine, university of minnesota. otto folin, ph.d. special investigator, mclean hospital, waverly, mass. t. mitchell prudden, m.d., ll.d. author "dust and its dangers," "the story of the bacteria," "drinking water and ice supplies," etc. frank chouteau brown architect, boston, mass.; author of "the five orders of architecture," "letters and lettering." mrs. melvil dewey secretary lake placid conference on home economics. helen louise johnson professor of home economics, james millikan university, decatur. frank w. allen, m.d. instructor rush medical college, university of chicago. * * * * * managing editor maurice le bosquet, s.b. director american school of home economics. board of trustees of the american school of home economics * * * * * mrs. arthur courtenay neville president of the board. miss maria parloa founder of the first cooking school in boston; author of "home economics," "young housekeeper," u.s. government bulletins, etc. mrs. mary hinman abel co-worker in the "new england kitchen," and the "rumford food laboratory;" author of u.s. government bulletins, "practical sanitary and economic cooking," etc. miss alice ravenhill special commissioner sent by the british government to report on the schools of home economics in the united states; fellow of the royal sanitary institute, london. mrs. ellen m. henrotin honorary president general federation of woman's clubs. mrs. frederic w. schoff president national congress of mothers. mrs. linda hull larned past president national household economics association; author of "hostess of to-day." mrs. walter mcnab miller chairman of the pure food committee of the general federation of woman's clubs. mrs. j.a. kimberly vice president of the national household economics association. mrs. john hoodless government superintendent of domestic science for the province of ontario; founder ontario normal school of domestic science, now the macdonald institute. [illustration: a madonna of the wild. a takima mother, with papoose] study of child life by marion foster washburne associate editor mother's magazine; author "everyday essays," "family secrets," etc.; lecturer to chicago froebel association [illustration: american school of home economics] chicago american school of home economics contents an open letter development of the child faults and their remedies character building play occupations art and literature in child life studies and accomplishments financial training religious training application of principles other people's children the sex question fathers the unconscious influence answers to questions bibliography supplemental study program index american school of home economics chicago january , . my dear madam: in beginning this subject of the "study of child life" there may be lurking doubts in your mind as to whether any reliable rules can really be laid down. they seem to arise mostly from the perception of the great difference between children. what will do for one child will not do for another. some children are easily persuaded and gentle, others willful, still others sullen unresponsive. how, then, is it possible that a system of education and training can be devised suitable for their various dispositions? we must remember that children are much more alike than they are different. one may have blue eyes, another gray, another black, but they all have two. we are, therefore, in a position to make rules for creatures having two eyes and these rules apply to eyes of all colors. children may be nervous, sanguine, bilious, or plethoric, but they all have the same kind of internal organs end the same general rules of health apply to them all. in this series of lessons i have endeavored to set forth principles briefly and to confirm them by instances within the experience of every observer of childhood. the rules given are such as are held at present by the best educators to be based upon sound philosophy, not at variance with the slight array or scientific facts at our command. perhaps you yourself may be able to add to the number of reliable facts intelligently reported that must be collected before much greater scientific advance is possible. there is, to be sure, an art of application of these rules both in matters of health of body and of health of mind and this art must be worked out by each mother for each individual child. we all recognize that it is a long endeavor before we can apply to our own lives such principles of conduct as we heartily acknowledge to be right. why, then, expect to be able to apply principles instantly and unerringly to a little child? if a rule fails when you attempt to apply it, before questioning the principle, may it not be well to question your own tact and skill? so far as i can advise with you in special instances of difficulty, i shall be very glad to do so; not that i shall always know what to do myself, but that we can get a little more light upon the problems by conferring together. i know well how difficult a matter this of child training is, for every day, in the management of my own family of children, i find each philosophy, science and art as i can command very much put to the test. sincerely yours, [signature: marion foster washburne.] instructor [illustration: freidrich froebel by courtesy of the perry pictures co., malden, mass.] study of child life part i. the young of the human species is less able to care for itself than the young of any other species. most other creatures are able to walk, or at any rate stand, within a few hours of birth. but the human baby is absolutely dependent and helpless, unable even to manufacture all the animal heat that he requires. the study of his condition at birth at once suggests a number of practical procedures, some of them quite at variance with the traditional procedures. how the child develops [sidenote: condition at birth] let us see, then, exactly what his condition is. in the first place, he is, as virchow, an authority on physiological subjects declares, merely a spinal animal. some of the higher brain centers do not yet exist at all, while others are in too incomplete a state for service. the various sensations which the baby experiences--heat, light, contact, motion, etc.--are so many stimuli to the development of these centers. if the stimulus is too great, the development is sometimes unduly hastened, with serious results, which show themselves chiefly in later life. the child who is brought up a noisy room, is constantly talked to and fondled, is likely to develop prematurely, to talk and walk at an early age; also to fall into nervous decay at an early age. and even if by reason of an unusually good heredity he escapes these dangers, it is almost certain that his intellectual power is not so great in adult life as it would have been under more favorable conditions. a new baby, like a young plant, requires darkness and quiet for the most part. as he grows older, and shows a spontaneous interest in his surroundings, he may fittingly have more light, more companionship, and experience more sensations. [sidenote: weight at birth] the average boy baby weighs about seven pounds at birth; the average girl, about six and a half pounds. the head is larger in proportion to the body than in after life; the nose is incomplete, the legs short and bowed, with a tendency to fall back upon the body with the knees flexed. this natural tendency should be allowed full play, for the flexed position is said to be favorable to the growth of the bones, permitting the cartilaginous ends of the bones to lie free from pressure at the joints. the plates of the skull are not complete and do not fit together at the edges. great care needs to be taken of the soft spot thus left exposed on the top of the head--the undeveloped place where the edges of these bones come together. any injury here in early life is liable to affect the mind. [sidenote: state of development] the bony enclosures of the middle ear are unfinished and the eyes also are unfinished. it is a question yet to be settled, whether a new-born baby is blind and deaf or not. at a rate, he soon acquires a sensitiveness to both light and sound, although it is three years or more before he has amassed sufficient experience to estimate with accuracy the distance of objects seen or herd. he can cry, suck, sneeze, cough, kick, and hold on to a finger. all of these acts, though they do not yet imply personality, or even mind, give evidence of a wonderful organism. they require the co-operation of many delicate nerves and muscles--a co-operation that has as yet baffled the power of scientists to explain. although the young baby is in almost constant motion while he is awake, he is altogether too weak to turn himself in bed or to escape from an uncomfortable position, and he remains so for many weeks. this constant motion is necessary to his muscular development, his control of his own muscles, his circulation, and, very probably, to the free transmission of nervous energy. therefore, it is of the first importance that he has freedom to move, and he should be given time every day to move and stretch before the fire, without clothes on. it is well to rub his back and legs at the same time, thus supplementing his gymnastics with a gentle massage. [sidenote: educational beginnings.] by the time he is four or five weeks old it is safe to play with him, a little every day, and froebel has made his "play with the limbs" one of his first educational exercises. in this play the mother lays the baby, undressed, upon a pillow and catches the little ankles in her hands. sometimes she prevents the baby from kicking, so that he has to struggle to get his legs free; sometimes she helps him, so that he kicks more freely and regularly; sometimes she lets him push hard against her breast. all the time she laughs and sings to him, and froebel has made a little song for this purposes. since consciousness is roused and deepened by sensations, remembered, experienced, and compared, it is evident that this is more than a fanciful play; that it is what froebel claimed for it--a real educational exercise. by means, of it the child may gain some consciousness of companionship, and thus, by contrast, a deeper self-consciousness. [sidenote: first efforts] the baby is at first unable to hold up its head, and in this he is just like all other animals, for no animal, except man, holds up its head constantly. the human baby apparently makes the effort, because he desires to see more clearly--he could doubtless see clearly enough for all physical purposes with his head hung down, but not enough to satisfy his awakening mentality. the effort to hold the head up and to look around is therefore regarded by most psychologists as one of the first tokens of an awakening intellectual life. and this is true, although the first effort seems to arise from an overplus of nervous energy which makes the neck muscles contract, just as it makes other muscles contract. the first slight raisings of the head are like the first kicking movements, merely impulsive; but the child soon sees the advantage of this apparently accidental movement and tries to master it. preyer[a] considers that the efforts to balance the head among the first indications that the child's will is taking possession of his muscles. his own boy arrived at this point when he was between three and four months old. [sidenote: reflex grasping] the grasp of the new-born baby's hand has a surprising power, but the baby himself has little to do with it. the muscles act because of a stimulus presented by the touch of the fingers, very much as the muscles of a decapitated frog contract when the current of electricity passes over them. this is called reflex grasping, and dr. louis robinson,[b] thinking that this early strength of gasp was an important illustration of and evidence for evolution, tried experiments on some sixty new-born babies. he found that they could sustain their whole weight by the arms alone when their hands were clasped about a slender rod. they grasped the rod at once and could be lifted from the bed by it and kept in this position about half a minute. he argued that this early strength of arm, which soon begins to disappear, was survival from the remote period when the baby's ancestors were monkeys or monkey-like people who lived in trees. [sidenote: beginnings of will power] however this may be, during the first week the baby's hands are much about his face. by accident they reach, the mouth, they are sucked; the child feels himself suck its own fist; he feels his fist being sucked. some day it will occur to him that that fist belongs to the same being who owns the sucking mouth. but at this point, miss shinn[c] has observed, the baby is often surprised and indignant that he cannot move his arms around and at the same time suck his fist. this discomfort helps him to make an effort to get his fist into his mouth and keep it there, and this effort shows his will, beginning to take possession of his hands and arms. [sidenote: growth of will] since any faculty grows by its own exercise, just as muscles grow by exercise, every time the baby succeeds in getting his hands to his mouth as a result of desire, every time that he succeeds in grasping an object as result of desire, his will power grows. action of this nature brings in new sensations, and the brain centers used for recording such sensations grow. as the sensations multiply, he compares them, and an idea is born. for the beginnings of mental development no other mechanism is actually needed than a brain and a hand and the nerves connecting them. laura bridgeman and helen keller, both of them deaf and blind, received their education almost entirely through their hands, and yet they were unusually capable of thinking. the child's hands, then, from the beginning, are the servants of his brain-instruments by means of which he carries impressions from the outer world to the seat of consciousness, and by which in turn he imprints his consciousness upon the outer world. [sidenote: intentional grasping] the average baby does not begin to grasp objects with intention before the fourth month. the first grasping seems to be done by feeling, without the aid of the eye, and is done with the fingers with no attempt to oppose the thumb to them. so closely does the use of the thumbs set opposite the fingers in grasping coincide with the first grasping with the aid of sight, that some observers have been led to believe that as soon as the baby learns to use its thumb in this way he proves that he is beginning to grasp with intention. [sidenote: order of development] the order of development seems to be, _first_, automatism, the muscles contracting of themselves in response to nervous stimuli; _second_, instinct, the inherited wisdom of the race, which discovered ages ago that the hand could be used to greater advantage when the thumb was separated from the fingers; and _thirdly_, the child's own intelligence and will making use of this natural and inherited machinery. this order holds true of the development, not only of the hand, but of the whole organism. [sidenote: looking] a little earlier than this, during the third month, the baby first looks upon his own hands and notices them. darwin tells us that his boy looked at his own hands and seemed to study them until his eyes crossed. about the same then the child notices his foot and uses his hand to carry it to its mouth. it is some time later that he discovers that he can move his feet without his hands. [sidenote: tearing] about this time, three or four months old, the child begins to tear paper into pieces, and may be easily taught to let the piece, that have found their way into his mouth be taken out again. now, too, he begins to throw things, or to drop them; then he wants to get them back again, and the patient mother must pick them up and give them back many times. sometimes a baby is punished for this proclivity, but it is really a part of his development, and at least once a day he should be allowed to play in this manner to his heart's content. it is tact, not discipline, that is needed, and the more he is helped the sooner he will live through this stage and come to the next point where he begins to throw things. [sidenote: throwing] in this stage, of course, he must be given the proper things to throw--small, bright-colored worsted balls, bean-bags, and other harmless objects. if he is allowed to discover the pleasure there is in smashing glass and china, he will certainly be, for a time, a very destructive little person. when later he is able to creep throw his ball and creep after it--he will amuse himself for hours at a time, and so relieve those who have patiently attended him up to this time. _in general we may lay down the rule, that the more time and attention of the right sort is to a young child, the less will need to be given as he grows older_. it is poor economy to neglect a young child, and try to make it up on the growing boy or girl. this is to substitute a complicated and difficult problem for a simple one. [sidenote: the grasping instinct] it is some time before a child's will can so overcome his newly-acquired tendency to grasp every possible object that he can keep his hand off of anything that invites him. the many battles between mothers and children it the subject of not touching forbidden things are at this stage a genuine wrong and injustice to the child. so young a child is scarcely more responsible for touching whatever he can reach that is a piece of steel for being drawn toward a powerful magnet. preyer says that it is years before voluntary inhibitions of grasping become possible. the child has not the necessary brain machinery. commands and sparring of the hands create bewilderment and tend to build up a barrier between mother and child. instead of doing such thing, simply put high out of reach and sight whatever the child must not touch. another way in which young children are often made to suffer because of the ignorance of parents is the leaving of undesired food on the child's plate. every child, when he does not want his food, pushes the plate away from him, and many mothers push it back and scold. the real truth is that the motor suggestion of the food upon the plate is so strong that the child feels as if he were being forced to eat it every time he looks at the plate; to escape from eating it he is obliged to push it out of sight. [sidenote: the three months' baby] but this difficulty comes later. now we are concerned with a three-months-old baby. at this stage the child is usually able to balance his head, to sit up against pillows, to seize and grasp objects, and to hold out his arm, when he wishes to be taken. although he may have made number of efforts to sit erect, and may have succeeded for a few minutes at a time, he still is far from being able to sit alone, unsupported. this he does not accomplish until the fifth or the month. [sidenote: danger of forcing] there is nothing to be gained by trying to make him sit alone sooner; indeed, there is danger in it--danger in forcing young bones and muscles to do work beyond their strength, and danger also to the nerves. it is safe to say that _a normal child always exercises all its faculties to the utmost without need of urging, and any exercise beyond the point of natural fatigue, if persisted in, is sure to bring about abnormal results_. [sidenote: creeping] the first efforts toward creeping often appear in the bath when the child turns over and raise, himself upon his hands and knees. this is sign that he might creep sooner, if he were not impeded by clothing. he should be allowed to spread himself upon a blanket every day for an hour or two, and to get on his knees as frequently as he pleases. often he needs a little help to make him creep forward, for most babies creep backward at first, their arms being stronger than their legs. here the mother may safely interfere, pushing the legs as they ought to go and showing the child how to manage himself; for very often he becomes much excited over his inability to creep forward. the climbing instinct begins to appear by this time--the seventh month--and here the stair-case has its great advantages. it ought not to be shut from him by a gate, but he should be taught how to climb up and down it in safety. to do this, start him at the head of the stairs, and, you yourself being below him, draw first one knee and then the other over the step, thus showing him how to creep backward. two lessons of about twenty minutes each will be sufficient. the only danger is creeping down head foremost, but if he once learns thoroughly to go backward, and has not been allowed the other way at all, he will never dream of trying it. in going down backward, if he should slip, he can easily save himself by catching the stairs with his hands as he slips past. the child who creeps is often later in his attempts to walk than the child who does not; and, therefore, when he is ready to walk, his legs will be all the stronger, and the danger of bow-legs will be past. as long as the child remains satisfied with creeping, he is not yet ready either mentally or physically for walking. [sidenote: standing] if the child has been allowed to creep about freely, he will soon be standing. he will pull himself to his feet by means of any chair, table, or indeed anything that he may get hold of. to avoid injuring him, no flimsy chairs or spindle-legged tables should be allowed in his nursery. he will next begin to sidle around a chair, shuffling his feet in a vague fashion, and sometimes, needing both of his hands to seize some coveted object, he will stand without clinging, leaning on his stomach. an unhurried child may remain at this stage for weeks. [sidenote: walking] let alone, as he should be, he will walk without knowing how he does it, and will be the stronger for having overcome his difficulties himself. he should not be coaxed to stand or walk. the things in his room actually urge him to come and get them. any further persuasion is forced, and may urge him beyond his strength. walking-chairs and baby-jumpers are injurious in this respect. they keep the child from his native freedom of sprawling, climbing, and pulling himself up. the activity they do permit is less varied and helpful than the normal activity, and the child, restricted from the preparatory motions, begins to walk too soon. [sidenote: alternate growth] a curious fact in the growth of children is that they seem to grow heavier for a certain period, and then to grow taller for a similar period. that is, a very young baby, say, two months old, will grow fatter for about six weeks, and then for the next six weeks will grow longer, while the child of six years changes his manner of growth every three or four months. these periods are variable, or at least their law has not yet been established, but the observant mother can soon make the period out for herself in the case of her own child. for two or three days, when the manner of growth seems to be changing from breadth to length, and vice versa, the children are likely to be unusually nervous and irritable, and these aberrations must, of course, be patiently borne with. [sidenote: precocity] [sidenote: early ripening] in all these things some children develop earlier than others, but too early development is to be regretted. precocious children are always of a delicate nervous organization. fiske[d] has proved to us that the reason why the human young is so far more helpless and dependent than the young of any other species is because the activities of the human race have become so many, so widely varied, and so complex, that they could not fix themselves in the nervous structure before birth. there a only a few things that the chick needs to know in order to lead a successful chicken life; as a consequence these few things are well impressed upon the small brain before ever he chips the shell; but the baby needs to learn a great many things--so many that there is no time or room to implant them before birth, or indeed, in the few years immediately succeeding birth. to hurry the development, therefore, of certain few of these faculties, like the faculties of talking, and walking, of imitation or response, is to crowd out many other faculties perhaps just beginning to grow. such forcing will limit the child's future development to the few faculties whose growth is thus early stimulated. precocity in a child, therefore, is a thing to be deplored. his early ripening foretells a early decay and a wise mother is she who gives her child ample opportunity for growing, but no urging. [sidenote: ample opporunity for growth] ample opportunity for growth includes ( ) wholesome surroundings, ( ) sufficient sleep, ( ) proper clothing, ( ) nourishing food. we will take up these topics in order. [footnote a: w. preyer. professor of physiology, of jena, author of "the mind of the child." d. appleton & co.] [footnote b: dr. robinson. physician and evolutionist, paper in the eclectic, vol. .] [footnote c: miss millicent shinn, american psychologist, author of "biography of a baby."] [footnote d: john fiske, writer on evolutionary philosophy. his theory of infancy is perhaps his most important contribution to science.] wholesome surroundings the whole house in which the child lives ought to be well warmed and equally well aired. sunlight also is necessary to his well-being. if it is impossible to have this in every room, as sometimes happens in city homes, at least the nursery must have it. in the central states of the union plants and trees exposed to the southern sun put forth their leaves two weeks sooner than those exposed to the north. the infant cannot fail to profit by the same condition, for the young child may be said to lead in part a vegetative as well as an animal life, and to need air and sunshine and warmth as much as plants do. the very best room in the house is not too good for the nursery, for in no other room is such important and delicate work being done. [illustration: john fiske] [sidenote: temperature] the temperature is a matter of importance. it should not be decided by guess-work, but a thermometer should be hung upon a wall at a place equally removed from draft and from the source of heat. the temperature for children during the first year should be about degrees fahrenheit during the day and not lower than degrees at night. children who sleep with the mother will not be injured by a temperature to degrees lower at night. [sidenote: fresh air] it is important to provide means for the ingress of fresh air. it is not sufficient to air the room from another room unless that other room has in it an open window. even then the nursery windows should be opened wide from fifteen minutes to half an hour night and morning, while the child is in another room; and this even when the weather is at zero or below. it does not take long to warm up room that has been aired. perhaps the best means of obtaining the ingress of fresh air without creating a draft upon the floor, where the baby spends so much of his time, is to raise the window six inches at the top or bottom and insert a board cut to fit the aperture. [sidenote: daily outing] but no matter how well ventilated the nursery may be, all children more than six weeks old need unmodified outside air, and need it every day, no matter what the weather, unless they are sick. the daily outing secures them better appetites, quiet sleep, and calmer nerves. let them be properly clothed and protected in their carriages, and all weathers are good for them. children who take their naps in their baby-carriages may with advantage be wheeled into a sheltered spot, covered warmly, and left to sleep in the outer air. they are likely to sleep longer than in the house, and find more refreshment in their sleep. sufficient sleep. few children in america get as much sleep as they really need. preyer gives the record of his own child, and the hours which this child found necessary for his sleep and growth may be taken for a standard. in the first month, sixteen, in full, out of twenty-four hours were spent in sleep. the sleep rarely lasted beyond two hours at a time. in the second month about the same amount was spent in sleep, which lasted from three to six hours at a time. in the sixth month, it lasted from six to eight hours at a time, and began to diminish to fifteen hours in the twenty-four. in the thirteenth month, fourteen hours' sleep daily; it the seventeenth, prolonged sleep began, ten hours without interruption; in the twentieth, prolonged sleep became habitual, and sleep in the day-time was reduced to two hours. in the third year, the night sleep lasted regularly from eleven to twelve hours, and sleep in the daytime was no longer required. [sidenote: naps] preyer's record stops here. but it may be added that children from three to eight years still require eleven hours' sleep; and, although the child of three nay not need a daily nap, it is well for him, until he is six years old, to lie still for an hour in the middle of the day, amusing himself with a picture book or paper and pencil, but not played with or talked to by any other person. such a rest in the middle of the day favors the relaxation of muscles and nerves and breaks the strain of a long day of intense activity. proper clothing. proper clothing for a child includes three things: (a) equal distribution of warmth, (b) freedom from restraint, (c) light weight. _equal distribution of warmth_ is of great importance, and is seldom attained. the ordinary dress for a young baby, for example, leaves the arms and the upper part of the chest unprotected by more than one thickness of flannel and one of cotton--the shirt and the dress. about the child's middle, on the contrary, there are two thicknesses of flannel--a shirt and band--and five of cotton, i.e., the double bands of the white and flannel petticoats, and the dress. over the legs, again, are two thicknesses of flannel and two of cotton, i.e., the pinning blanket, flannel skirt, white skirt, and dress. the child in a comfortably warm house needs two thicknesses of flannel and one of cotton all over it, and no more. [sidenote: the gertrude suit] the practice of putting extra wrappings about the abdomen is responsible for undue tenderness of those organs. dr. grosvenor, of chicago, who designed a model costume for a baby, which he called the gertrude suit, says that many cases of rupture are due to bandaging of the abdomen. when the child cries the abdominal walls normally expand; if they are tightly bound, they cannot do this, and the pressure upon one single part, which the bandages may not hold quite firmly, becomes overwhelming, and results in rupture. dr. grosvenor also thinks that many cases of weak lungs, and even of consumption in later life, are due to the tight bands of the skirts pressing upon the soft ribs of the young child, and narrowing the lung space. [sidenote: objection to the pinning blanket] _freedom from restraint._. not only should the clothes not bind the child's body in any way, but they should not be so long as to prevent free exercise of the legs. the pinning-blanket is objectionable on this account. it is difficult for the child to kick in it; and as we have seen before, kicking is necessary to the proper development of the legs. undue length of skirt operates in the same way--the weight of cloth is a check upon activity. the first garment of a young baby should not be more than a yard in length from the neck to the bottom of the hem, and three-quarters of a yard is enough for the inner garment. the sleeves, too, should be large and loose, and the arm-size should be roomy, so as to prevent chafing. the sleeves may be tied in at the wrist with a ribbon to insure warmth. _lightness of weight._ the underclothing should be made of pure wool, so as to gain the greatest amount of warmth from the least weight. in the few cases where wool would cause irritation, a silk and wool fixture makes a softer but more expensive garment. under the best conditions, clothes restrict and impede free development somewhat, and the heavier they are the more they impede it. therefore, the effort should be to get the greatest amount of warmth with the least possible weight. knit garments attain this most perfectly, but the next best thing is all-wool flannel of a fine grade. the weave known as stockinet is best of all, because goods thus made cling to the body and yet restrict its activity very little. the best garments for a baby are made according to the accompanying diagram. [sidenote: princess garment] they consist of three garments, to be worn one over the other, each one an inch longer in every way than the underlying one. the first is a princess garment, made of white stockinet, which takes the place of shirt, pinning-blanket, and band. before cutting this out, a box-pleat an inch and a half wide should be laid down the middle of the front, and a side pleat three-fourths of an inch wide on either side of the placket in the back. the sleeve should have a tuck an inch wide. these tucks and pleats are better run in be hand, so that they may be easily ripped. as the baby grows and the flannel shrinks, these tucks and pleats can be let out. [illustration: diagram of the "gertrude" suit.] the next garment, which goes over this, is made in the same way, only an inch larger in every measurement. it is made of baby flannel, and takes the place of the flannel petticoat with its cotton band. over these two garments any ordinary dress may be worn. dressed in this suit, the child is evenly covered with too thicknesses of flannel and one of cotton. as the skirts are rather short, however, and he is expected to move his legs about freely, he may well wear long white wool stockings. as the child grows older, the principles underlying this method of clothing should be borne in mind, and clothes should be designed and adapted so as to meet these three requirements. food. [sidenote: natural food] [sidenote: bottle-fed babies] the natural food of a young baby is his mother's milk, and no satisfactory substitute for it has yet been found. some manufactured baby foods do well for certain children; to others they are almost poison; and for none of them are they sufficient. the milk of the cow is not designed for the human infant. it contains too much casein, and is too difficult of digestion. various preparations of milk and grains are recommended by nurses and physicians, but no conscientious nurse or physician pretends that any of them begins to equal the nutritive value of human milk. more women can nurse their babies than now think they can; the advertisements of patent foods lead them to think the rather of little importance, and they do not make the necessary effort to preserve and increase the natural supply of milk. the family physician can almost always better the condition of the mother who really desires to nurse her own child, and he should be consulted and his directions obeyed. the importance of a really great effort to this direction is shown by the fact that the physical culture records, now so carefully kept in many of our schools and colleges, prove that bottle-fed babies are more likely to be of small stature, and to have deficient bones, teeth and hair, than children who have been fed on mother's milk. [sidenote: simple diet] the food question is undoubtedly the most important problem to the physical welfare of the child, and has, as well, a most profound effect upon his disposition and character. indiscriminate feeding is the cause of much of the trouble and worry of mothers. this subject is taken up at length in other papers of this course, and it will suffice to say here that the table of the family with young children should be regulated largely by the needs of the growing sons and daughters. the simplified diet necessary may well be of benefit to other members of the family. faults and their remedies. the child born of perfect parents, brought up perfectly, in a perfect environment, would probably have no faults. even such a child, however, would be at times inconvenient, and would do and say things at variance with the order of the adult world. therefore he might seem to a hasty, prejudiced observer to be naughty. and, indeed, imperfectly born, imperfectly trained as children now are, many of their so-called faults are no more than such inconvenient crossings of an immature will with an adult will. [illustration: jean paul richter] [sidenote: the child's world and the adult's world] no grown person, for instance, likes to be interrupted, and is likely to regard the child who interrupts him wilfully naughty. no young child, on the contrary, objects to being interrupted in his speech, though he may object to being interrupted in his play; and he cannot understand why an adult should set so much store on the quiet listening which is so infrequent in his own experience. grown persons object to noise; children delight in it. grown persons like to have things kept in their places; to a child, one place as good as another. grown persons have a prejudice in favor of cleanliness; children like to swim, but hate to wash, and have no objections whatever to grimy hands and faces. none of these things imply the least degree of obliquity on the child's part; and yet it is safe to say that nine-tenths of the children who are punished are punished for some of these things. the remedy for these inconveniences is time and patience. the child, if left to himself, without a word of admonishment, would probably change his conduct in these respects, merely by the force of imitation, provided that the adults around him set him, a persistent example of courtesy, gentleness, and cleanliness. [sidenote: real faults] the faults that are real faults, as richter[a] says, are those faults which increase with age. these it is that need attention rather than those that disappear of themselves as the child grows older. this rule ought to be put in large letters, that every one who has to train children may be daily reminded by it; and not exercise his soul and spend his force in trying to overcome little things which may perhaps be objectionable, but which will vanish to-morrow. concentrate your energies on the overcoming of such tendencies as may in time develop into permanent evils. [sidenote: training the will] to accomplish this, you most, of course, train the child's own will, because no one can force another person into virtue against his will. the chief object of all training is, as we shall see in the next section, to lead the child to love righteousness, to prefer right doing to wrong doing; to make right doing a permanent desire. therefore, in all the procedures about to be suggested, an effort is made to convince the child of the ugliness and painfulness of wrong doing. [sidenote: natural punishment] punishment, as herbert spencer[b] agrees with froebel[c] in pointing out, should be as nearly as possible a representation of the natural result of the child's action; that is, the fault should be made to punish itself as much as possible without the interference of any outside person; for the object is not to make the child bend his will to the will of another, but make him see the fault itself as an undesirable thing. [sidenote: breaking the will] the effort to break the child's will has long been recognized as disastrous by all educators. a broken will is worse misfortune than a broken back. in the latter case the man is physically crippled; in the former, he is morally crippled. it is only a strong, unbroken, persistent will that is adequate to achieve self-mastery, and mastery of the difficulties of life. the child who is too yielding and obedient in his early days is only too likely to be weak and incompetent in his later days. the habit of submission to a more mature judgment is a bad habit to insist upon. the child should be encouraged to think out things for himself; to experiment and discover for himself why his ideas do not work; and to refuse to give them up until he is genuinely convinced of their impracticability. [sidenote: emergencies] it is true that there are emergencies in which his immature judgment and undisciplined will must yield to wiser judgment and steadier will; but such yielding should not be suffered to become habitual. it is a safety valve merely, to be employed only when the pressure of circumstances threatens to become dangerous. an engine whose safety valve should be always in operation could never generate much power. nor is there much difficulty in leading even a very strong-willed and obstinate child to give up his own way under extraordinary circumstances. if he is not in the habit of setting up his own will against that of his mother or teacher, he will not set it up when the quick, unfamiliar word of command seems to fit in the with the unusual circumstances. many parents practice crying "wolf! wolf!" to their children, and call the practice a drill of self-control; but they meet inevitably with the familiar consequences: when the real wolf comes the hackneyed cry, often proved false, is disregarded. [illustration: herbert spencer] [sidenote: disobedience] when the will is rightly trained, disobedience is a fault that rarely appears, because, of course, where obedience is seldom required, it is seldom refused. the child needs to obey--that is true; but so does his mother need to obey, and all other persons about him. they all need to obey god, to obey the laws of nature, the impulses of kindness, and to follow after the ways of wisdom. where such obedience is a settled habit of the entire household, it easily, and, as it were, unconsciously, becomes the habit of the child. where such obedience is not the habit of the household, it is only with great difficulty that it can become the habit of the child. his will must set itself against its instinct of imitativeness, and his small house, not yet quite built, must be divided against itself. probably no cold even rendered entire obedience to any adult who did not himself hold his own wishes in subjection. as emerson says, "in dealing with my child, my latin and my greek, my accomplishments and my money, stead me nothing, but as much soul as i have avails. if i a willful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if i please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. but, if i renounce my will and act for the soul, setting that up as an umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me." [sidenote: negative goodness] suppose the child to be brought to such a stage that he is willing to do anything his father or mother says; suppose, even, that they never tell him to do anything that he does not afterwards discover to be reasonable and just; still, what has he gained? for twenty years he has not had the responsibility for a single action, for a single decision, right or wrong. what is permitted is right to him; what is forbidden is wrong. when he goes out into the world without his parents, what will happen? at the best he will not lie, or steal, or commit murder. that is, he will do none of these things in their bald and simple form. but in their beginnings these are hidden under a mask of virtue and he has never been trained to look beneath that mask; as happened to richard feveril,[d] sin may spring upon him unaware. some one else, all his life, has labeled things for him; he is not in the habit of judging for himself. he is blind, deaf, and helpless--a plaything of circumstances. it is a chance whether he falls into sin or remains blameless. [sidenote: real disobedience] disobedience, then, in a true sense, does not mean failure to do as he is told to do. it means failure to do the things that he knows to be right. he must be taught to listen and obey the voice of his own conscience; and if that voice should ever speak, as it sometimes does, differently from the voice of the conscience of his parents or teachers, its dictates must still be respected by these older and wiser persons, and he must be permitted to do this thing which in itself may be foolish, but which is not foolish, to him. [sidenote: liberty] and, on the other hand, the child who will have his own way even when he knows it to be wrong should be allowed to have it within reasonable limits. richter says, leave to him the sorry victory, only exercising sufficient ingenuity to make sure that it is a sorry one. what he must be taught is that it is not at all a pleasure to have his own way, unless his own way happens to be right; and this he can only be taught by having his own way when the results are plainly disastrous. every time that a willful child does what he wants to do, and suffers sharply for it, he learns a lesson that nothing but this experience can teach him. [sidenote: self-punishment] but his suffering must be plainly seen to be the result of his deed, and not the result of his mother's anger. for example, a very young child who is determined to play with fire may be allowed to touch the hot lamp or a stove, whenever affairs can be so arranged that he is not likely to burn himself too severely. one such lesson is worth all the hand-spattings and cries of "no, no!" ever resorted to by anxious parents. if he pulls down the blocks that you have built up for him, they should stay down, while you get out of the room, if possible, in order to evade all responsibility for that unpleasant result. prohibitions are almost useless. in order to convince yourself of this, get some one to command you not to move your right arm or to wink your eye. you will find it almost impossible to obey for even a few moments. the desire to move your arm, which was not at all conscious before, will become overpowering. the prohibition acts like a suggestion, and is an implication that you would do the negative act unless you were commanded not to. miss alcott, in "little men," well illustrates this fact in the story of the children who were told not to put beans up their noses and who straightway filled their noses with beans. [sidenote: positive commands] as we shall see in the next section, froebel meets this difficulty by substituting positive commands for prohibitions; that is, he tells the child to do instead of telling him not to do. tiedemann[e] says that example is the first great evolutionary teacher, and liberty is the second. in the overcoming of disobedience, no other teachers are needed. the method may be tedious; it may be many years before the erratic will is finally led to work in orderly channels; but there is no possibility of abridging the process. there is no short and sudden cure for disobedience, and the only hope for final cure is the steady working of these two great forces, _example_ and _liberty._ to illustrate the principles already indicated, we will consider some specific problems together with suggestive treatment for each. [footnote a: jean paul richter, "der einsige." german writer and philosopher. his rather whimsical and fragmentary book on education, called "levana," contains some rare scraps of wisdom much used by later writers on educational topics.] [footnote b: herbert spencer, english philosopher and scientist. his book on "education" is sound and practical.] [footnote c: freidrich froebel, german philosopher and educator, founder of the kindergarten system, and inaugurator of the new education. his two great books are "the education of man" and "the mother play."] [footnote d: "the ordeal of richard feveril," by george meredith.] [footnote e: tiedemann, german psychologist.] quick temper. this, as well as irritability and nervousness, very often springs from a wrong physical condition. the digestion may be bad, or the child may be overstimulated. he may not be sleeping enough, or may not get enough outdoor air and exercise. in some cases the fault appears because the child lacks the discipline of young companionship. even the most exemplary adult cannot make up to the child for the influence of other children. he perceives the difference between himself and these giants about him, and the perception sometimes makes him furious. his struggling individuality finds it difficult to maintain itself under the pressure of so many stronger personalities. he makes, therefore, spasmodic and violent attempts of self-assertion, and these attempts go under the name of fits of temper. the child who is not ordinarily strong enough to assert himself effectively will work himself up into a passion in order to gain strength, much as men sometimes stimulate their courage by liquor. in fact, passion is a sort of moral intoxication. [sidenote: remedy--solitude and quiet] but whether the fits of passion are physical or moral, the immediate remedy is the same--his environment must be promptly changed and his audience removed. he needs solitude and quiet. this does not mean shutting him into a closet, but leaving him alone in a quiet room, with plenty of pleasant things about. this gives an opportunity for the disturbed organism to right itself, and for the will to recover its normal tone. some occupation should be at hand--blocks or other toys, if he is too young to read; a good book or two, such as miss alcott's "little men" and "little women," when he is old enough to read. if he is destructive in his passion, he must be put in a room where there are very few breakables to tempt him. if he does break anything he must be required to help mend it again. to shout a threat to this effect through the door when the storm of temper is still on, is only to goad him into fresh acts of rebellion. let him alone while he is in this temporarily insane state, and later, when he is sorry and wants to be good, help him to repair the mischief he has wrought. it is as foolish to argue with or to threaten the child in this state as it would be were he a patient in a lunatic asylum. it is sometimes impossible to get an older child to go into retreat. then, since he cannot be carried, and he is not open to remonstrance or commands, go out of the room yourself and leave him alone there. at any cost, loneliness and quiet must be brought to bear upon him. such outbursts are exceedingly exhausting, using up in a few minutes as much energy as would suffice for many days of ordinary activity. after the attack the child needs rest, even sleep, and usually seeks it himself. the desire should be encouraged. [sidenote: precautions to be taken] every reasonable precaution should be taken against the recurrence of the attacks, for every lapse into this excited state makes him more certain the next lapse and weakens the nervous control. this does not mean that you should give up any necessary or right regulations for fear of the child's temper. if the child sees that you do this, he will on occasion deliberately work himself up into a passion in order to get his own way. but while you do not relax any just regulations, you may safely help him to meet them. give him warning. for instance, do not spring any disagreeable commands upon him. have his duties as systematized as possible so that he may know what to expect; and do not under any circumstances nag him nor allow other children to tease him. sullenness. this fault likewise often has a physical cause, seated very frequently in the liver. see that the child's food is not too heavy. give him much fruit, and insist upon vigorous exercise out of doors. or he may perhaps not have enough childish pleasures. for while most children are overstimulated, there still remain some children whose lives are unduly colorless and eventless. a sullen child is below the normal level of responsiveness. he needs to be roused, wakened, lifted out of himself, and made to take an active interest in other persons and in the outside world. [sidenote: inheritance and example] in many cases sullenness is an inherited disposition intensified by example. it is unchildlike and morbid to an unusual degree and very difficult to cure. the mother of a sullen child may well look to her own conduct and examine with a searching eye the peculiarities of her own family and of her husband's. she may then find the cause of the evil, and by removing the child from the bad example and seeing to it that every day contains a number of childish pleasures, she may win him away from a fault that will otherwise cloud his whole life. lying all lies are not bad, nor all liars immoral. a young child who cannot yet understand the obligations of truthfulness cannot be held morally accountable for his departure from truth. lying is of three kinds. ( .) _the imaginative lie._ ( .) _the evasive lie._ ( .) _the politic lie._ [sidenote: imaginative "lying"] ( .) it is rather hard to call the imaginative lie a lie at all. it is so closely related to the creative instinct which makes the poet and novelist and which, common among the peasantry of a nation, is responsible for folk-lore and mythology, that it is rather an intellectual activity misdirected than a moral obliquity. very imaginative children often do not know the difference between what they imagine and what they actually see. their minds eye sees as vividly as their bodily eye; and therefore they even believe their own statements. every attempt at contradiction only brings about a fresh assertion of the impossible, which to the child becomes more and more certain as he hears himself affirming its existence. punishment is of no use at all in the attempt to regulate this exuberance. the child's large statements should be smiled at and passed over. in the meantime, he should be encouraged in every possible way to get a firm, grasp of the actual world about him. manual training, if it can be obtained, is of the greatest advantage, and for a very young child, the performance every day of some little act, which demands accuracy and close attention, is necessary. for the rest, wait; this is one of the faults that disappear with age. [sidenote: the lie of evasion] ( .) the lie of evasion is a form of lying which seldom appears when the relations between child and parents are absolutely friendly and open. however, the child who is very desirous of approval may find it difficult to own up to a fault, even when he is certain that the consequence of his offense will not be at all terrible. this is the more difficult, because the more subtle condition. it is obvious that the child who lies merely to avoid punishment can be cured of that fault by removing from him the fear of punishment. to this end, he should be informed that there will be no punishment whatever for any fault that he freely confesses. for the chief object of punishment being to make him face his own fault and to see it as something ugly and disagreeable, that object is obviously accomplished by a free and open confession, and no further punishment is required. but when the child in spite of such reassurance still continues to lie, both because he cannot bear to have you think him capable of wrong-doing, and because he is not willing to acknowledge to himself that he is capable of wrong-doing, the situation becomes more complex. all you can do is to urge upon him the superior beauty of frankness; to praise him and love him, especially when he does acknowledge a fault, thus leading him to see that the way to win your approval--that approval which he desires so intensely--is to face his own shortcomings with a steady eye and confess them to you unshrinkingly. [sidenote: the politic lie] ( .) the politic lie is of course the worst form of lying, partly because it is so unchildlike. this is the kind of fault that will grow with age; and grow with such rapidity that the mother must set herself against it with all the force at her command. the child who lies for policy's sake, in order to achieve some end which is most easily achieved by lying, is a child led into wrong-doing by his ardent desire to get something or do something. discover what this something is, and help him to get it by more legitimate means. if you point out the straight path, and show the goal well in view, at the end of it, he may be persuaded not to take the crooked path. [sidenote: inherited crookedness] but there are occasionally natures that delight in crookedness and that even in early childhood. they would rather go about getting their heart's desire in some crooked, intricate, underhanded way than by the direct route. such a fault is almost certain to be an inherited one; and here again, a close study of the child's relatives will often help the mother to make a good diagnosis, and even suggest to her the line of treatment. [sidenote: extreme cases] in an extreme case, the family may unite in disbelieving the child who lies, not merely disbelieving him, when he is lying, but disbelieving him all the time, no matter what he says. he must be made to see, and, that without room for any further doubt, that the crooked paths that he loves do not lead to the goal his heart desires, but away from it. his words, not being true to the facts, have lost their value, and no one around him listens to them. he is, as it were, rendered speechless, and his favorite means of getting his own way is thus made utterly valueless. such a remedy is in truth a terrible one. while it is being administered, the child suffers to the limit of his endurance; and it is only justified in an extreme case, and after the failure of all gentler means. jealousy. [sidenote: justice and love] too often this deadly evil is encouraged in infancy, instead of being promptly uprooted as it ought to be. it is very amusing, if one does not consider the consequences, to sec a little child slap and push away the father or the older brother, who attempts to kiss the mother; but this is another fault that grows with years, and a fault so deadly that once firmly rooted it can utterly destroy the beauty and happiness of an otherwise lovely nature. the first step toward overcoming it must be to make the reign of strict justice in the home so obvious as to remove all excuse for the evil. the second step is to encourage the child's love for those very persons of whom he is most likely to be jealous. if he is jealous of the baby, give him special care of the baby. jealousy indicates a temperament overbalanced emotionally; therefore, put your force upon the upbuilding of the child's intellect. give him responsibilities, make him think out things for himself. call upon him to assist in the family conclaves. in every way cultivate his power of judgment. the whole object of the treatment should be to strengthen his intellect and to accustom his emotions to find outlet in wholesome, helpful activity. one wise mother made it a rule to pet the next to the baby. the baby, she said, was bound to be petted a good deal because of its helplessness and sweetness, therefore she made a conscious effort to pet the next to the youngest, the one who had just been crowded out of the warm nest of mother's lap by the advent of the newcomer. such a rule would go far to prevent the beginnings of jealousy. selfishness. this is a fault to which strong-willed children are especially liable. the first exercise of will-power after it has passed the stage of taking possession of the child's own organism usually brings him into conflict with those about him. to succeed in getting hold of a thing against the wish of someone else, and to hold on to it when someone else wants it, is to win a victory. the coveted object becomes dear, not so much for its own sake, as because it is a trophy. such a child knows not the joy of sharing; he knows only the joys of wresting victory against odds. this is indeed an evil that grows with the years. the child who holds onto his apple, his candy, or toy, fights tooth and nail everyone who wants to take it from him, and resists all coaxing, is liable to become a hard, sordid, grasping man, who stops at no obstacle to accomplish his purpose. yet in the beginning, this fault often hides itself and escapes attention. the selfish child may be quiet, clean, and under ordinary circumstances, obedient. he may not even be quarrelsome; and may therefore come under a much less degree of discipline than his obstreperous, impulsive, rebellious little brother. yet, in reality, his condition calls for much more careful attention than does the condition of the younger brother. [sidenote: the only child] however, the child who has no brother at all, either older or younger, nor any sister, is almost invited by the fact of his isolation to fall into this sin. only children may be--indeed, often are--precocious, bright, capable, and well-mannered, but they are seldom spontaneously generous. their own small selves occupy an undue proportion of the family horizon, and therefore of their own. [sidenote: kindergarten a remedy] this is where the kindergarten has its great value. in the true kindergarten the children live under a dispensation of loving justice, and selfishness betrays itself instantly there, because it is alien to the whole spirit of the place. showing itself, it is promptly condemned, and the child stands convicted by the only tribunal whose verdict really moves him--a jury of his peers. normal children hate selfishness and condemn it, and the selfish child himself, following the strong, childish impulse of imitation, learns to hate his own fault; and so quick is the forgiveness of children that he needs only to begin to repent before the circle of his mates receives him again. this is one reason why the kindergarten takes children at such an early age. aiming, as it does, to lay the foundations for right thinking and feeling, it must begin before wrong foundations are too deeply laid. its gentle, searching methods straighten the strong will that is growing crooked, and strengthen the enfeebled one. [sidenote: intimate association a help] but if the selfish child is too old for the kindergarten, he should belong to a club. consistent selfishness will not long be tolerated here. the tacit or outspoken rebuke of his mates has many times the force of a domestic rebuke; because thereby he sees himself, at least for a time, as his comrades see him, and never thereafter entirely loses his suspicion that they may be right. their individual judgment he may defy, but their collective judgment has in it an almost magical power, and convinces him in spite of himself. [sidenote: cultivate affections] whatever strong affections the selfish boy shows most be carefully cultivated. love for another is the only sure cure for selfishness. if he loves animals, let him have pets, and give into his hands the whole responsibility for the care of them. it is better to let the poor animals suffer some neglect, than to take away from the boy the responsibility for their condition. they serve him only so far as he can be induced to serve them. the chief rule for the cure of selfishness is, then, to watch every affection, small and large, encourage it, give it room to grow, and see to it that the child does not merely get delight out of it, but that he works for it, that he sacrifices himself for those whom he loves. laziness. [sidenote: the physical cause] this condition is often normal, especially during adolescence. the developing boy or girl wants to lop and to lounge, to lie sprawled over the floor or the sofa. quick movement is distasteful to him, and often has an undue effect upon the heart's action. he is normally dreamy, languid, indifferent, and subject to various moods. these things are merely tokens of the tremendous change that is going on within his organism, and which heavily drains his vitality. certain duties may, of course, be required of him at this stage, but they should be light and steady. he should not be expected to fill up chinks and run errands with joyful alacrity. the six- or eight-year-old may be called upon for these things, and not he harmed, but this is not true of the child between twelve and seventeen. he has absorbing business on hand and should not be too often called away from it. [sidenote: laziness and rapid growth] laziness ordinarily accompanies rapid growth of any kind. the unusually large child, even if he has not yet reached the period of adolescence, is likely to be lazy. his nervous energies are deflected to keep up his growth, and his intelligence is often temporarily dulled by the rapidity of his increase in size. [sidenote: hurry not natural] moreover, it is not natural for any child to hurry. hurry is in itself both a result of nervous strain and a cause of it; and grown people whose nerves have been permanently wrenched away from normal quietude and steadiness, often form a habit of hurry which makes them both unfriendly toward children and very bad for children. these young creatures ought to go along through their days rather dreamily and altogether serenely. every turn of the screw to tighten their nerves makes more certain some form of early nervous breakdown. they ought to have work to do, of course,--enough of it to occupy both mind and body--but it should be quiet, systematic, regular work, much of it performed automatically. only occasionally should they be required to do things with a conscious effort to attain speed. [sidenote: abnormal laziness] however, there is a degree of laziness difficult of definition which is abnormal; the child fails to perform any work with regularity, and falls behind both at school and at home. this may be the result of ( ) _poor assimilation_, ( ) _of anaemia_, or it may be ( ) _the first symptom of some disease_. ( .) poor assimilation may show itself either by (a) thinness and lack of appetite; (b) fat and abnormal appetite; (c) retarded growth; or (d) irregular and poorly made teeth and weak bones. [sidenote: anaemia] ( .) anaemia betrays itself most characteristically by the color of the lips and gums. these, instead of being red, are a pale yellowish pink, and the whole complexion has a sort of waxy pallor. in extreme cases this pallor even becomes greenish. as the disease is accompanied with little pain, and few if any marked symptoms, beyond sleepiness and weakness, it often exists for some time without being suspected by the parents. ( .) the advent of many other diseases is announced by a languid indifference to surroundings, and a slow response to the customary stimuli. the child's brain seems clouded, and a light form of torpor invades the whole body. the child, who is usually active and interested in things about him, but who loses his activity and becomes dull and irresponsive, should be carefully watched. it may be that he is merely changing his form of growth--_i.e._, is beginning to grow tall after completion of his period of laying on flesh, or vice versa. or he may be entering upon the period of adolescence. but if it is neither of these things, a physician should be consulted. [sidenote: monotony] a milder degree of laziness may be induced by a too monotonous round of duties. try changing them. make them as attractive as possible. for, of course, you do not require him to perform these duties for your sake, whatever you allow him to suppose about it, but chiefly for the sake of their influence on his character. therefore, if the influence of any work is bad, you will change it, although the new work may not be nearly so much what you prefer to have him do. whatever the work is, if it is only emptying waste-baskets, don't nag him, merely expect him to do it, and expect it steadily. [sidenote: helping] in their earlier years all children love to help mother. they like any piece of real work even better than play. if this love of activity was properly encouraged, if the mother permitted the child to help, even when he succeeded only in hindering, he might well become one those fortunate persons who love to work. this is the real time for preventing laziness. but if this early period has been missed, the next best thing is to take advantage of every spontaneous interest as it arises; to hitch the impulse, as it were, to some task that must be steadily performed. for example, if the child wants to play with tools, help him to make a small water-wheel, or any other interesting contrivance, and keep him at it by various devices until he has brought it to a fair degree of completion your aim is to stretch his will each time he attempts to do something a little further than it tends to go of itself; to let him work a little past his first impulse, so that he may learn by degrees to work when work is needed, and not only when he feels like it. untidiness [sidenote: neatness not natural] essentially a fault of immaturity as this is, we must beware how we measure it by a too severe adult standard. it is not natural for any young creature to take an interest in cleanliness. even the young animals are cared for in this respect by their parents; the cow licks her calf; the cat, her kittens; and neither calf nor kittens seem to take much interest in the process. the conscious love of cleanliness and order grows with years, and seems to be largely a matter of custom. the child who has always lived in decent surroundings by-and-by finds them necessary to his comfort, and is willing to make a degree of effort to secure them. on the contrary, the street boy who sleeps in his clothes, does not know what it is to desire a well-made bed, and an orderly room. [sidenote: remedies] [sidenote: example] [sidenote: habit] the obvious method of overcoming this difficulty, then, is not to chide the child for the fault, but to make him so accustomed to pleasant surroundings that he not help but desire them. the whole process of making the child love order is slow but sure. it consists in ( ) _patient waiting on nature_: first, keep the baby himself sweet and clean, washing the young child yourself, two or three times a day, and showing your delight in his sweetness; dressing him so simply that he keeps in respectable order without the necessity of a painful amount of attention. ( ) _example_: he is to be accustomed to orderly surroundings, and though you ordinarily require him to put away some of his things himself, you do also assist this process by putting away a good deal to which you do not call attention. you make your home not only orderly but pretty, and yourself, also, that his love for you may lead him into a love for daintiness. ( ) _habits_: a few set observances may be safely and steadfastly demanded, but these should be _very_ few: such as that he should not come to breakfast without brushing his teeth and combing his hair, or sit down to any meal with unwashed hands. make them so few that you can be practically certain that they are attended to, for the whole value of the discipline is not in the superior condition of his teeth, but in the habit of mind that is being formed. impudence. impudence is largely due to, ( ) lack of perception: ( ) to bad example and to suggestion; and ( ) to a double standard of morality. [sidenote: lack of perception] ( .) in the first place, too much must not be expected of the young savages in the nursery. remember that the children there are in a state very much more nearly resembling that of savage or half-civilized nation than resembling your own, and that, therefore, while they will undoubtedly take kindly to showy ceremonial, they are not ripe yet for most of the delicate observances. at best, you can only hope to get the crude material of good manners from them. you can hope that they will be in the main kind in intention, and as courteous under provocation as is consistent with their stage of development. if you secure this, you need not trouble yourself unduly over occasional lapses into perfectly innocent and wholesome barbarism. good manners are in the main dependent upon quick sympathies, because sympathies develop the perceptions. a child is much less likely to hurt the feelings or shock the sensibilities of a person whom he loves tenderly than of one for whom he cares very little. this is the chief reason why all children are much more likely to be offensive in speech and action before strangers than when alone in the bosom of their families. they are so far from caring what a stranger thinks or feels that they cannot even forecast his displeasure, nor imagine its reaction upon mother or father. the more, then, that the child's sympathies are broadened, the more he is encouraged to take an interest in all people, even strangers, the better mannered will he become. [sidenote: bad example] ( .) bad example is more common than is usually supposed. very few parents are consistently courteous toward their children. they permit themselves a sharp tone of voice, and rough and abrupt habits of speech, that would scarcely be tolerated by any adult. even an otherwise gentle and amiable woman is often disagreeable in her manner toward her children, commanding them to do things in a way well calculated to excite opposition, and rebuking wrong-doing in unmeasured terms. she usually reserves her soft and gentle speeches for her own friends and for her husband's, yet discourtesy cannot begin to harm them as it harms her children. it is true that the children are often under foot when she is busiest, when, indeed, she is so distracted as to not be able to think about manners, but if she would acknowledge to herself that she ought to be polite, and that when she fails to be, it is because she has yielded to temptation; and if, moreover, she would make this acknowledgment openly to her children and beg their pardon for her sharp words, as she expects them to beg hers, the spirit of courtesy, at any rate, would prevail in her house, and would influence her children. children are lovingly ready to forgive an acknowledged fault, but keen-eyed beyond belief in detecting a hidden one. [sidenote: double standard] ( .) the most fertile cause of impudence is assumption of a double standard of morality, one for the child and another for the adult. impudence is, at bottom, the child's perception of this injustice, and his rebellion against it. when to this double standard,--a standard that measures up gossip, for instance, right for the adult and listening to gossip as wrong for the child--when to this is added the assumption of infallibility, it is no wonder that the child fairly rages. for, if we come to analyze them, what are the speeches which find so objectionable? "do it yourself, if you are so smart." "maybe, i am rude, but i'm not any ruder than you are." "i think you are just as mean as mean can be; i wouldn't be so mean!" is this last speech any worse in reality than "you are a very naughty little girl, and i am ashamed of you," and all sorts of other expressions of candid adverse opinion? besides these forms of impudence, there is the peculiarly irritating: "well, you do it yourself; i guess i can if you can." in all these cases the child is partly it the right. he is stating the feet as he sees it, and violently asserting that you are not privileged to demand more of him than of yourself. the evil comes in through the fact that he is doing it in an ugly spirit. he is not only desirous of stating the truth, but of putting you in the wrong and himself in the right, and if this hurts you, so much the better. all this is because he is angry, and therefor, in impudence, the true evil to be overcome is the evil of anger. [sidenote: example] show him, then, that you are open to correction. admit the justice of the rebuke as far as you can, and set him an example of careful courtesy and forbearance at the very moment when these traits are most conspicuously lacking in him. if some special point is involved, some question of privilege, quietly, but very firmly, defer the consideration of it until he is master of himself and can discuss the situation with an open mind and in a courteous manner. corporal punishment. in all these examples, which are merely suggestive, it is impossible to lay down an absolute moral recipe, because circumstances so truly alter cases--in all these no mention is made of corporal punishment. this is because corporal punishment is never necessary, never right, but is always harmful. [sidenote: moral confusion] there are three principal reasons why it should not be resorted to: _first_, because it is indiscriminate. to inflict bodily pain as a consequence of widely various faults, leads to moral confusion. the child who is spanked for lying, spanked for disobedience, and spanked again for tearing his clothes, is likely enough to consider these three things as much the same, as, at any rate, of equal importance, because they all lead to the same result. this is to lay the foundation for a permanent moral confusion, and a man who cannot see the nature of a wrong deed, and its relative importance, is incapable of guiding himself or others. corporal punishment teaches a child nothing of the reason why what he does is wrong. wrong must seem to him to be dependent upon the will of another, and its disagreeable consequences to be escapable if only he can evade the will of that other. [sidenote: fear versus love] _second_: corporal punishment is wrong because it inculcates fear of pain as the motive for conduct, instead of love of righteousness. it tends directly to cultivate cowardice, deceitfulness, and anger--three faults worse than almost any fault against which it can be employed. true, some persons grow up both gentle and straightforward in spite of the fact that they have been whipped in their youth, but it is in spite of, and not because of it. in their homes other good qualities must have counteracted the pernicious effect of this mistaken procedure. [sidenote: sensibilities blunted] _third_: corporal punishment may, indeed, achieve immediate results such as seem at the moment to be eminently desirable. the child, if he be young enough, weak enough, and helpless enough, may be made to do almost anything by fear of the rod; and some of the things he may thus be made to do may be exactly the things that he ought to do; and this certainty of result is exactly what prompts many otherwise just and thoughtful persons to the use of corporal punishment. but these good results are obtained at the expense of the future. the effect of each spanking is a little less than the effect of the preceding one. the child's sensibilities blunt. as in the case of a man with the drug habit, it requires a larger and larger dose to produce the required effect. that is, if he is a strong child capable of enduring and resisting much. if, on the contrary, he is a weak child, whose slow budding will come only timidly into existence, one or two whippings followed by threats, may suffice to keep him in a permanently cowed condition, incapable of initiative, incapable of spontaneity. the method of discipline here indicated, while it is more searching than any corporal punishment, does not have any of its disadvantages. it is more searching, because it never blunts the child's sensibilities, but rather tends to refine them, and to make them more responsive. [sidenote: educative discipline] [sidenote: permanent results] the child thus trained should become more susceptible, day by day, to gentle and elevating influences. this discipline is educative, explaining to the child why what he does is wrong, showing him the painful effects as inherent in the deed itself. he cannot, therefore, conceive of himself as being ever set free from the obligation to do right; for that obligation within his experience does not rest upon his mother's will or ability to inflict punishment, but upon the very nature of the universe of which he is a part. the effects of such discipline are therefore permanent. that which happens to the child in the nursery, also happens to him in the great world when he reaches manhood. his nursery training interprets and orders the world for him. he comes, therefore, into the world not desiring to experiment with evil, but clear-eyed to detect it, and strong-armed to overcome it. we are now ready to consider our subject in some of its larger aspects. test questions the following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the regular members of the a.s.h.e. answer in writing and send in for the correction and comment of the instructor. they are intended to emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the lesson. [illustration: "caritas" from a painting in the boston public library, by abbot h. thayer] study of child life. part i. read carefully. in answering these questions you are earnestly requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. in all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject. . how does fiske account for the prolonged helplessness of the human infant? to what practical conclusions does this lead? . name the four essentials for proper bodily growth. . how does the child's world differ from that of the adult? . in training a child morally, how do you know which faults are the most important and should have, therefore, the chief attention? . in training the will, what end must be held steadily in view? . what are the advantages or disadvantages of a broken will? . is obedience important? obedience to what? how do you train for prompt obedience in emergencies? . what is the object of punishment? does corporal punishment accomplish this object? . what kind of punishment is most effective? . have any faults a physical origin? if so, name some of them and explain. . what are the two great teachers according to tiederman? . what can you say of the fault of untidiness? . what are the dangers of precocity? . what do you consider were the errors your own parents made in training their children? . are there any questions which you would like to ask in regard to the subjects taken up in this lesson? note.--after completing the test, sign your full name. study of child life part ii. character building [sidenote: froebel's philosophy] although we have taken up the question of punishment and the manner of dealing with various childish iniquities before the question of character-building, it has only been done in order to clear the mind of some current misconceptions. in the statements of froebel's simple and positive philosophy of child culture, misconception on the part of the reader must be guarded against, and these misconceptions generally arise from a feeling that, beautiful as his optimistic philosophy may be, there are some children too bad to profit by it--or at least that there are occasions when it will not work out in practice. in the preceding section we have endeavored to show in detail how this method applies to a representative list of faults and shortcomings, and having thus, we hope, proved that the method is applicable to a wide range of cases--indeed to all possible cases--we will proceed to recount the fundamental principles which froebel, and before him pestalozzi,[a] enunciated; which times who adhere to the new education are to-day working out into the detail of school-room practice. [sidenote: object of moral training.] as previously stated, the object of the moral training of the child is the inculcation of the love of righteousness. froebel is not concerned with laying down a mass of observances which the child must follow, and which the parents must insist upon. he thinks rather that the child's nature once turned into the right direction and surrounded by right influences will grow straight without constant yankings and twistings. the child who loves to do right is safe. he may make mistakes as to what the right is, but he will learn by these mistakes, and will never go far astray. [sidenote: the reason why] however, it is well to save him as far as possible from the pain of these mistakes. we need to preserve in him what has already been implanted there; the love of understanding the reasons for conduct. when the child asks "why?" therefore, he should seldom be told "because mother says so." this is to deny a rightful activity of his young mind; to give him a monotonous and insufficient reason, temporary in its nature, instead of a lasting reason which will remain with him through life. dante says all those who have lost what he calls "the good of the intellect" are in the inferno. and when you refuse to give your child satisfactory reasons for the conduct you require of him, you refuse to cultivate in him that very good of the intellect which is necessary for his salvation. [sidenote: advantage of positive commands] as soon, however, as your commands become positive instead of negative, the difficulty of meeting the situation begins to disappear. it is usually much easier to tell the child why he should do a thing than why he should not do its opposite. for example, it is much easier to make him see that he ought to be a helpful member of the family than to make him understand why he should stop making a loud noise, or refrain from waking up the baby. there is something in the child which in calm moments recognizes that love demands some sacrifice. to this something you must appeal and these calm moments, for the most part, you must choose for making the appeal. the effort is to prevent the appearance of evil by the active presence of good. the child who is busy trying to be good has little time to be naughty. [sidenote: original goodness] froebel's most characteristic utterance is perhaps this: "a suppressed or perverted good quality--a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood, or misguided--lies originally at the bottom of every shortcoming in man. hence the only and infallible remedy for counteracting any shortcoming and even wickedness is to find the originally good source, the originally good side of the human being that has been repressed, disturbed, or misled into the shortcoming, and then to foster, build up, and properly guide this good side. thus the shortcoming will at last disappear, although it may involve a hard struggle against habit, but not against original depravity in man, and this is accomplished so much the more rapidly and surely because man himself tends to abandon his shortcomings, for man prefers right to wrong." the natural deduction from this is that we should say "do" rather than "don't"; open up the natural way for rightful activity instead of uttering loud warning cries at the entrance to every wrong path. [sidenote: kindergarten methods] it is for this reason that the kindergarten tries by every means to make right doing delightful. this is one of the reasons for its songs, dances, plays, its bright colors, birds, and flowers. and in this respect it may well be imitated in every home. no one loves that which is disagreeable, ugly, and forbidding; yet many little children are expected to love right doing which is seldom attractively presented to them. the results of such treatment are apparent in the grown people of to-day. most persons have an underlying conviction that sinners, or at any rate unconscientious persons, have a much easier and pleasanter time of it than those who try to do right. to the imagination of the majority of adults sin is dressed in glittering colors and virtue in gray, somber garments. there are few who do not take credit for right doing as if they had chosen a hard and disagreeable part instead of the more alluring ways of wrong. this is because they have been mis-taught in childhood and have come to think of wrongdoing as pleasant and virtue as hard, whereas the real truth is exactly the opposite. it is wrongdoing that brings unpleasant consequences and virtue that brings happiness. [sidenote: right doing made easy] there are those who object that by the kindergarten method right doing is made too easy. the children do not have to put forth enough effort, they say; they are not called upon to endure sufficient pain; they do not have the discipline which causes them to choose right no matter how painful right may be for the moment. whether this dictum is ever true or not, it certainly is not true in early childhood. the love of righteousness needs to be firmly rooted in the character before it is strained and pulled upon. we do not start seedlings in the rocky soil or plant out saplings in time of frost. if tests and trials of virtue must come, let them come in later life when the love of virtue is so firmly established that it may be trusted to find a way to its own satisfaction through whatever difficulties may oppose. [sidenote: neighbors' opinions] in the very beginning of any effort to live up to froebel's requirements it is evident that children must not be measured by the way they appear to the neighbors. this is to reaffirm the power of that rigid tradition which has warped so many young lives. she who is trying to fix her child's heart upon true and holy things may well disregard her neighbor's comments on the child's manners or clothes or even upon momentary ebullitions of temper. she is working below the surface of things, is setting eternal forces to work, and she cannot afford to interrupt this work for the sake of shining the child up with any premature outside polish. if she is to have any peace of mind or to allow any to the child, if she is to live in any way a simple and serene life, she must establish a few fundamental principles by which she judges her child's conduct and regulates her own, and stand by these principles through thick and thin. [sidenote: the family republic] perhaps the most fundamental principle is that enunciated by fichte. "each man," he says, "is a free being in a world of other free beings." therefore his freedom is limited only by the freedom of the other free beings. that is, they must "divide the world amongst them." stated in the form of a command he says again, "restrict your freedom through the freedom of all other persons with whom you come in contact." this is a rule that even a three-year-old child can be made to understand, and it is astonishing with what readiness he will admit its justice. he call do anything he wants to, you explain to him, except bother other people. and, of course, the corollary follows that every one else can do whatever he pleases except to bother the child. [sidenote: rights of others] this clear and simple doctrine can be driven home with amazing force, if you strictly respect the child's right as you require him to respect yours. you should neither allow any encroachments upon your own proper privileges, except so far as you explain that this is only a loving permission on your part, and not to be assumed as a precedent or to be demanded as a right; nor should you yourself encroach upon his privileges. if you do not expect him to interrupt you, you must not interrupt him. if you expect him to let you alone when you are busy, you must let hint alone when he is busy, that is, when he is hard at work playing. if you must call him away from his playing, give him warning, so that he may have time to put his small affairs in order before obeying your command. the more carefully you do this the more willing will be his response on the infrequent occasions when you must demand immediate attention. in some such fashion you teach the child to respect the rights of others by scrupulously respecting those rights to which he is most alive, namely, his own. the next step is to require him with you to think out the rights of others, and both of you together should shape your conduct so as to leave these rights unfringed. [sidenote: the child's share in ruling] as soon as the young child's will has fully taken possession of his own organism he will inevitably try to rule yours. the establishment of the law of which i have just spoken will go far toward regulating this new-born desire. but still he must be allowed in some degree to rule others, because power to rule others is likely to be at some time during his life of great importance to him. to thwart him absolutely in this respect, never yielding yourself to his imperious demands, is alike impossible and undesirable. his will must not be shut up to himself and to the things that he can make himself do. in various ways, with due consideration for other people's feelings, with courtesy, with modesty, he may well be encouraged to do his share of ruling. and while, of course, he will not begin his ruling in such restrained and thoughtful fashion as is implied by these limitations, yet he must be suffered to begin; and the rule for the respect of the rights of others should be suffered gradually to work out these modifications. a safe distinction may be made as follows: permit him, since he is so helpless, to rule and persuade others to satisfy his legitimate desires, such as the desire for food, sleep, affection, and knowledge; but when be demands indulgencies, reserve your own liberty of choice, so as to clearly demonstrate to him that you are exercising choice, and in doing so, are well within your own rights. [sidenote: low voice commands] there is one simple outward observation which greatly assists us the inculcation of these fundamental truths--that is the habit of using a low voice in speaking, especially when issuing a command or administering a rebuke. a loud, insistent voice practically insures rebellion. this is because the low voice means that you have command of yourself, the loud voice that you have lost it. the child submits to a controlled will, but not to one as uncontrolled as his own. in both cases he follows your example. if you are self-controlled, he tends to become so; if you are excited and angry, he also becomes so, or if he is already so, his excitement and anger increases. while most mothers rely altogether too much upon speech as a means of explaining life to the child, yet it must be admitted that speech has a great function to perform in this regard. nevertheless it is well to bear in mind that it is not true that a child will always do what you tell him to do, no matter how plain you may tell him, nor how perfectly you may explain your reasons. [sidenote: limitations of words] in the first place, speech means less to children than to grown persons. each word has a smaller content of experience. they cannot get the full force of the most clear and eloquent statement. therefore all speech must be reinforced by example, and by as many forms of concrete illustrations as can be commanded. each necessary truth should enter the child's mind by several channels; hearing, eye-sight, motor activity should all be called upon. many truths may be dramatized. this, where the mother is clever enough to employ it, is the surest method of appeal. but in any case, speech alone must not be relied upon, nor the child considered a hopeless case who does not respond to it. denunciatory speech especially needs wise regulation. as richter says, "what is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea, of justice, toward grown-up people, should be much more observed toward children, namely, that one should never judgingly declare, for instance, 'you are a liar,' or even, 'you are a bad boy,' instead of saying, 'you have told an untruth,' or 'you have done wrong.' for since the power to command yourself implies at the same time the power of obeying, man feels a minute after his fault as free as socrates, and the branding mark of his _nature_, not his _deed_, must seem to him blameworthy of punishment. "to this must be added that every individual's wrong actions, owing to his inalienable sense of a moral aim and hope, seem to him only short, usurped interregnums of the devil, or comets in the uniform solar system. the child, consequently, under such a moral annihilation, feels the wrong-doing of others more than his own; and this all the more because, in him, want of reflection and the general warmth of his feelings, represent the injustice of others in a more ugly light than his own." [sidenote: example versus precept] if any one desires to prove the superior force of example over precept, let him try teaching a baby to say "thank you" or "please," merely by being scrupulously careful to say these things to the baby on all fit occasions. no one has taken the statistics of the number of times every small child is exhorted to perfect himself in this particular observance; but it is safe to say that in the united states alone these injunctions are spoken something like a million times a day and all quite unnecessarily. the child will say "please" and "thank you" without being told to do so, if he merely has his attention called to the fact that the people around him all use these phrases. [sidenote: politeness to children] the truth is, too many parents forget to speak these agreeable words whenever they ask favors of their own children; so the force of their example is marred. what you do to the child himself, remember, always outweighs anything you do to others before him. this is the reason why it is necessary that you should acknowledge your own shortcomings to the child, if you expect him to acknowledge his to you. it is also necessary sometimes to point out clearly the kind and considerate things that you are in the habit of doing to others, lest the untrained mind of the young child may fail to see and so miss the force of your example. but in thus revealing your own good deeds to the child, remember the motive, and reveal them only (a) when he cannot perceive them of himself, (b) when he needs to perceive them in order that his own conduct may be influenced by them, and (c) at the time when he is most likely to appreciate them. this latter requirement precludes you from announcing your own righteousness when he is naughty, and compels you, of course, to go directly against your native impulse, which is to mention your deeds of sacrifice and kindness only when you are angry and mean to reproach him with them. when you tell him how devoted you have been at some moment when you are both thoroughly angry, he is in danger of either denying or hating your devotion; but when you refer to it tenderly, and, as your heart will then prompt you, modestly, at some loving moment, he will give it recognition, and be moved to love goodness more devotedly because you embody it. [sidenote: law-making habit] another important rule is this: do not make too many rules. some women are like legislatures in perpetual session. the child who is confused and tantalized by the constant succession of new laws learns presently to disregard them, and to regulate his life according to certain deductions of his own--sometimes surprisingly wise and politic deductions. the way to re yourself of this law-making habit is to stop thinking of every little misdeed as the beginning of a great wrong. it is very likely an accident and a combination of circumstances such as may not happen again. to treat misdemeanors which are not habitual nor characteristic as evanescent is the best way to make them evanescent. they should not be allowed to enter too deeply into your consciousness or into that of your child. [sidenote: live with your children] in order to be able to discriminate between accidental wrong-doing, and that which is the first symptom of wrong-thinking, you must be in close touch with your children. this brings us to froebel's great motto, "come, let us live with our children!" this means that you are not merely to talk with your child, to hear from his lips what he is doing, but to live so closely with him, that in most cases you know what he is doing without any need of his telling you. when, however, he does tell you something which happened in the school play-ground or otherwise out of the range of your knowledge, be careful not to moralize over it. make yourself as agreeable a secret-keeper as his best friend of his own age; let your moralizing be so rare that it is effective for that very reason. if the occasion needs moral reflection at all--and that seldom happens--the wise way is to lead the child to do his own reflecting; to arrive at his own conclusions, and if you must lead him, by all means do so as invisibly as possible. for the most part it is safe to take the confessions lightly, and well to keep your own mind young by looking at things from the boy's point of view. [sidenote: the subject of sex] if, however, there is to be perfect confidence between you, the one subject which is usually kept out of speech between mothers and children must be no forbidden subject between them; you must not refuse to answer questions about the mystery of sex. if you are not the fit person to teach your child these important facts, who is? certainly not the school-mates and servants from whom he is likely to learn them if you refuse to furnish the information. usually it is sufficient simply to answer the child's honest questions honestly; but any mother who finds herself unable to cope with this simple matter in this simple spirit, will find help in margaret morley's "song of life," in the wood-allen publications, and the books of the rev. sylvanus stall.[b] in respect to these matters more than in respect to others, but also in respect to all matters, children often do not know that they are doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe that they do not intend wrong-doing. as we have seen from our analysis of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments. such things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out for himself is the greatest help a child can have. [sidenote: righteousness] the formation of the bent of the child's nature as a whole is a matter of unconscious education, but as he grows in the power to reason, conscious education must direct his mental activity. it is not enough for him, as it is not enough for any grown person, to do the best that he knows; he must learn to know the best. the word righteousness itself means right-wiseness, i.e., right knowingness. to quote froebel again, "in order, therefore, to impart true, genuine firmness to the natural will-activity of the boy, all the activities of the boy, his entire will should proceed from and have reference to the development, cultivation, and representation of the internal. instruction in example and in words, which later on become precept and example, furnishes the means for this. neither example alone, nor words will do; not example alone, for it is particular and special, and the word is needed to give the particular individual example universal applicability; not words alone, for example is needed to interpret and explain the word, which is general, spiritual, and of many meanings. "but instruction and example alone and in themselves are not sufficient; they must meet a good pure heart and this is the outcome of proper educational influences in childhood." [sidenote: moral precocity] lest these directions should seem to demand an almost superhuman degree of control and wisdom on the part of the mother, remember that moral precocity is as much to be guarded against a mental precocity. remember that you are neither required to be a perfect mother nor to rear a perfect child. as spencer remarks, a perfect child in this imperfect world would be sadly out of joint with the times, would indeed be a martyr. if your basic principles are right and if your child has before him the daily and hourly spectacle of a mother who is trying to conform herself to high standards, he will grow as fast as it is safe for him to grow. spencer says: "our higher moral faculties like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex. as a consequence they are both comparatively late in their evolution, and with the one as with the other, a very early activity produced by stimulation will be at the expense of the future character. hence the not uncommon fact that those who during childhood were instanced as models of juvenile goodness, by and by undergo some disastrous and seemingly inexplicable change, and end by being not above but below par; while relatively exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood not so promising. "be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results, constantly bearing in mind the fact that the higher morality, like the higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow growth; and you will then have more patience with those imperfections of nature which your child hourly displays. you will be less prone to constant scolding, and threatening, and forbidding, by which many parents induce a chronic irritation, in a foolish hope that they will thus make their children what they should be." [sidenote: rules in character building] in conclusion, the rules that may be safely followed in character-building may be summed up thus: ( ) recognize that the object of your training is to help the child to love righteousness. command little and then use positive commands rather than prohibitions. use "do" rather than "don't." ( ) make right-doing delightful. ( ) establish fichte's doctrine of right, see page . ( ) teach by example rather than precept. therefore respect the child's rights as you wish him to respect yours. ( ) use a low voice, especially in commanding or rebuking. ( ) in chiding, remember richter's rule and rebuke the sin and not the sinner. ( ) confess your own misdeeds, by this means and others securing the confidence of your children. finally, remember that this is an imperfect world, you are an imperfect mother, and the best results you can hope for are likely to be imperfect. but the results may be so founded upon eternal principles as to tend continually to give place to better and better results. [footnote a: pestalozzi, educator, philosopher, and reformer. author of "how gertrude teaches her children."] [footnote b: "what a young girl ought to know" and "what a young woman ought to know" by dr. mary wood allen. "what a young boy ought to know," "what a young man ought to know," by rev. sylvanus stall.] play although froebel is best known as the educator who first took advantage of play as a means of education, he was not, in reality, the first to recognize the high value of this spontaneous activity. he was indeed the first to put this recognition into practice and to use the force generated during play to help the child to a higher state of knowledge. but before him plato said that the plays of children have the mightiest influence on the maintenance or the non-maintenance of laws; that during the first three years the child should be made "cheerful" and "kind" by having sorrow and fear and pain kept away from him and by soothing him with music and rhythmic movements. [sidenote: aristotle] aristotle held that children until they were five years old "should be taught nothing, not even necessary labor, lest it hinder growth, but should be accustomed to use much motion as to avoid a indolent habit of body, and this," he added, "can he acquired by various means, among others by play, which ought to be neither illiberal, nor laborious, or lazy." [sidenote: luther] luther rebukes those who despise the plays of children and says that solomon did not prohibit scholars from play at the proper time. fenelon, locke, schiller, and richter all admit the deep significance of this universal instinct of youth. preyer, speaking not as a philosopher or educator, but as a scientist, mentions "the new kinds of pleasurable sensations with some admixture of intellectual elements," which are gained when the child gradually begins to play. much that is called play he considers true experimenting, especially when the child is seen to be studying the changes produced by his own activity, as when he tears paper into small bits, shakes a bunch of keys, opens and shuts a box, plays with sand, and empties bottles, and throws stones into the water. "the zeal with which these seemingly aimless movements are executed is remarkable. the sense of gratification must be very great, and is principally due to the feeling of his own power, and of being the cause of the various changes." [sidenote: educational value of play] all these authorities are quoted here in order to show that the practical recognition of play which obtains among the advanced educators to-day is not a piece of sentimentalism, as stern critics sometimes declare, but the united opinion of some of the wisest minds of this and former ages. as froebel says, "play and speech constitute the element in which the child lives. at this stage (the first three years of childhood) he imparts to everything the virtues of sight, feeling, and speech. he feels the unity between himself and the whole external world." and froebel conceives it to be of the profoundest importance that this sense of unity should not be disturbed. he finds that play is the most spiritual activity of man at this age, "and at the same time typical of human life as a whole--of the inner, hidden, natural life of man and all things; it gives, therefore, joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world: it holds the sources of all that is good. the child that plays thoroughly until physical fatigue forbids will surely be a thorough, determined man, capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion and welfare of himself and others." but all play does not deserve this high praise. it fits only the play under right conditions. fortunately these are such that every mother can command them. there are three essentials: ( ) freedom, ( ) sympathy, ( ) right materials. [sidenote: freedom] ( ) freedom is the first essential, and here the child of poverty often has the advantage of the child of wealth. there are few things in the poverty-stricken home too good for him to play with; in its narrow quarters, he becomes, perforce, a part of all domestic activity. he learns the uses of household utensils, and his play merges by imperceptible degrees into true, healthful work. in the home of wealth, however, there is no such freedom, no such richness of opportunity. the child of wealth has plenty of toys, but few real things to play with. he is shut out of the common activity of the family, and shut in to the imitation activity of his nursery. he never gets his small hands on realities, but in his elegant clothes is confined to the narrow conventional round that is falsely supposed to be good for him. froebel insists upon the importance of the child's dress being loose, serviceable, and inconspicuous, so that he may play as much as possible without consciousness of the restrictions of dress. the playing child should also have, as we have noticed in the first section, the freedom of the outside world. this does not mean merely that he should go out in his baby-buggy, or take a ride in the park, but that he should be able to play out-of-doors, to creep on the ground, to be a little open-air savage, and play with nature as he finds it. [sidenote: sympathy] ( ) sympathy is much more likely to rise spontaneously in the mother's breast for the child's troubles than for the child's joys. she will stop to take him up and pet him when he is hurt, no matter how busy she is, but she too often considers it waste of time to enter into his plays with him; yet he needs sympathy in joy as much as in sorrow. her presence, her interest in what he is doing, doubles his delight in it and doubles its value to him. moreover, it offers her opportunity for that touch and direction now and then, which may transform a rambling play, without much sequence or meaning, into a consciously useful performance, a dramatization, perhaps, of some of the child's observations, or an investigation into the nature of things. ( ) right material. even given freedom and sympathy, the child needs something more in order to play well: he needs the right materials. the best materials are those that are common to him and to the rest of the world, far better than expensive toys that mark him apart from the world of less fortunate children. such toys are not in any way desirable, and they may even be harmful. what he needs are various simple arrangements of the four elements--earth, air, fire and water. [sidenote: mud-pies] ( ) _earth_. the child has a noted affinity for it, and he is specially happy when he has plenty of it on hands, face, and clothes. the love of mud-pies is universal; children of all nationalities and of all degrees of civilization delight in it. no activity could be more wholesome. [sidenote: sand] next to mud comes sand. it is cleaner in appearance and can be brought into the house. a tray of moistened sand, set upon a low table, should be in every nursery, and the sand pile in every yard. [sidenote: clay] clay is more difficult to manage indoors, because it gets dry and sifts all about the house, but if a corner of the cellar, where there is a good light, can be given up for a strong table and a jar of clay mixed with some water, it will be found a great resource for rainy days. if modeling aprons of strong material, buttoned with one button at the neck, be hung near the jar of clay, the children may work in this material without spoiling their clothes. clay-modeling is an excellent form of manual training, developing without forcing the delicate muscles of the fingers and wrists, and giving wide opportunity for the exercise of the imagination. [sidenote: digging] earth may be played with in still another way. children should dig in it; for all pass through the digging stage and this should be given free swing. it develops their muscles and keeps them busy at helpful and constructive work. they may dig a well, make a cave, or a pond, or burrow underground and make tunnels like a mole. give them spades and a piece of ground they can do with as they like, dress them in overalls, and it will be long before you are asked to think of another amusement for them. [illustration: pattern of a modelling apron] [sidenote: gardens] in still another way the earth may be utilized, for children may make gardens of it. indeed, there are those who say that no child's education is complete until he has had a garden of his own and grown in it all sorts of seeds from pansies to potatoes. but a garden is too much for a young child to care for all alone. he needs the help, advice, and companionship of some older person. you must be careful, however, to give help only when it is really desired; and careful also not to let him feel that the garden is a task to which he is driven daily, but a joy that draws him. [sidenote: kites windmills soap-bubbles] ( ) _the air_. the next important plaything is the air. the kite and the balloon are only two instruments to help the child play with it. little windmills made of colored paper and stuck by means of a pin at the end of a whittled stick, make satisfactory toys. one of their great advantages is that even a very young child can make them for himself. blowing soap-bubbles is another means of playing with air. by giving the children woolen mittens the bubbles may be caught and tossed about as well as blown. ( ) _water_. perhaps the very first thing he learns to play with is water. almost before he knows the use of his hands and legs he plays with water in his bath, and sucks his sponge with joy, thus feeling the water with his chief organs of touch, his mouth and tongue. a few months later he will be glad to pour water out of a tin cup. even when he is two or three years old, be may be amused by the hour, by dressing him in a woolen gown, with his sleeves rolled high, and setting him down before a big bowl or his own bath-tub half full of warm water. to this may be added a sponge, a tin cup, a few bits of wood, and some paper. they should not be given all at once, but one at a time, the child allowed to exhaust the possibilities of each before another is added. still later he may be given the bits of soap left after a cake of soap is used up. give him also a few empty bottles or bowls and let him put them away with a solid mass of soap-suds in them and see what will happen. when he is older--past the period of putting everything in his mouth--he may be given a few bits of bright ribbons, petals of artificial flowers, or any bright colored bits of cloth which can color the water. children love to sprinkle the grass with the hose or to water the flowers with the sprinkling can. they enjoy also the metal fishes, ducks, and boats which may be drawn about in the water by means of a magnet. presently they reach the stage when they must have toy-boats, and next they long to go into real boats and go rowing and sailing. they want to fish, wade, swim, and skate. [sidenote: dangerous pastimes] some of those pastimes are dangerous, but they are sure to be indulged in at some time or other, with or without permission. there never grew a child to sturdy manhood who was successfully kept away from water. the wise mother, then, will not forbid this play, but will do her best to regulate it, to make it safe. she will think out plans for permitting children to go swimming in a safe place with some older person. she will let them go wading, and at holiday time will take them boat-riding. if she permits as much activity in these respects as possible, her refusal when it does come will be respected; and the child will not, unless perhaps in the first bitterness of disappointment, think her unfriendly and fussy. above all, he is not likely to try to deceive her, to run off and take a swim on the sly, and thus fall into true danger. [sidenote: precaution with fire] ( ) _fire_ is another inevitable plaything. miss shinn reports that the first act of her little niece that showed the dawn of voluntary control of the muscles was the clinging of her eyes to the flame of a candle, at the end of the second week. the sense of light and the pleasure derived from it is of the chief incentives to a baby's intellectual development. but since fire is dangerous the child must be taught this fact as quickly and painlessly as possible. he will probably have to be burned once before he really understands it, but by watching you can make this pain very small and slight, barely sufficient to give the child a wholesome fear of playing with unguarded fire. for instance, show that the lamp globe is hot. it is not hot enough to injure him, but quite hot enough to be unpleasant to his sensitive nerves. put your own hand on the lamp and draw it away with a sharp cry, saying warningly, "hot, hot!" do not put his hand on the lamp, but let him put it there himself and then be very sympathetic over the result. usually one such lesson is sufficient. only do not permit yourself to call everything hot which you do not want him to touch. he will soon discover that you are untruthful and will never again trust you so fully. [sidenote: bonfires] under _proper regulations_, however, fire may be played with safely. bonfires with some older person in attendance are safe enough and prevent unlawful bonfires in dangerous places. the rule should be that none of the children may play with fire except with permission; and then that permission should be granted as often as possible that the children may be encouraged to ask for it. a stick smouldering at one end and waved about in circles and ellipses is not dangerous when elders are by, but it is dangerous if played with on the sly. playing with fire on the sly is the most dangerous thing a child can do, and the only way to prevent it is to permit him to play with fire in the open. a beautiful game can be made from number of christmas tree candles of various colors and a bowl of water. the candles are lighted and the wax dropped into the water, making little colored circles which float about. these can be linked together such a fashion as to form patterns which may be lifted out on sheets of paper. [sidenote: magic lantern] the magic lantern is an innocent and comparatively cheap means of playing with light. if it is well taken care of and fresh slides added from time to time it can be made a source of pleasure for years. jack-o'-lanterns are great fun, and when pumpkins are not available, oranges may be used instead. [sidenote: rhythmic movements] besides these elemental playthings the child gets much valuable pleasure out of the rhythmic use of his own muscles. all such plays plato thought should be regulated by music, and with this froebel agreed, but in the household this is often impossible. the children must indulge in many movements when there is no one about who has leisure to make music for them. still, when they come to the quarrelsome age, a few minutes' rhythmic play to the sound of music will be found to harmonize the whole group wonderfully. for this purpose the ordinary hippity-hop, fast or slow according to the music, is sufficient. it is as if the regulation of the body to the laws of harmony reacted upon minds and nerves. such an exercise is particularly valuable just before bed-time. the children go to sleep then with their minds under the influence of harmony and wake in the morning inclined to be peaceful and happy. [sidenote: songs] a book of kindergarten songs, such as mrs. gaynor's "songs of the child world" and eleanor smith's "songs for the children," ought to be in every household, and the mother ought to familiarize herself with a dozen or so of these perfectly simple melodies. of course the children must learn them with her. when once this has been done she has a valuable means of amusing them and bringing them within her control at any time. she may hum one of the songs or play it. the children must guess what it is and then act out their guess in pantomime, so that she can see what they mean. perhaps it is a windmill song; their arms fly around and around in time to the music, now fast, now slow. perhaps it is a spring song; the children are birds building their nests. other songs turn them into shoemakers, galloping horses, or soldiers. [sidenote: dramatic plays] dramatic plays, whether simple, like this, or elaborate, are, as goethe shows in _wilhelm meister_, of the greatest possible educational advantage. in them the child expresses his ideas of the world about him and becomes master of his own ideas. he acts out whatever he has heard or seen. he acts out also whatever he is puzzling about, and by making the terms of his problem clear to his consciousness usually solves it. [sidenote: dancing] as for dancing, richter exclaims: "i know not whether i should most deprecate children's balls or most praise children's dances. for the harmony connected with it (dancing) imparts to the affections and the mind that material order which reveals the highest, and regulates the beat of the pulse, the step, and even the thought. music is the meter of this poetic movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a silent music. finally, this also ranks among the advantages of his eye and heel pleasure; that children with children, by no harder canon than the musical, light as sound, may be joined in a rosebud feast without thorns or strife." the dances may be of the simplest kind, such as "ring around a rosy," "here we go, to and fro," "old dan tucker" and the "virginia reel." the old-fashioned singing plays, such as "london bridge," "where oats, peas, beans, and barley grow," and "pop goes the weasel" have their place and value. several collections of them have been made and published, but usually quite enough material may be found for these plays in the memories of the people of any neighborhood. [sidenote: toys] all these plays, it will be noticed, call for very simple and inexpensive apparatus, in most cases for no apparatus at all. nevertheless there is a place for toys. all children ought to have a few, both because of the innocent pleasure they afford and because they need to have certain possessions which are inalienably their own. a simple and inexpensive list of suitable toys adapted to various ages is given at the end of this section. most of them are exactly the toys that parents usually buy. but it will be noticed that none of them are very elaborate or expensive, and that the patrol wagon is not among them. this is because the patrol wagon directly leads to plays that are not only uneducational but positively harmful in their tendencies. the children of a whole neighborhood were once led into the habit of committing various imitation crimes for the sake of being arrested and carried off in miniature patrol wagon. it any such expensive and elaborate toys are bought, it may well be the plain express wagon or the hook and ladder and fire engine. the first of these leads to plays of industry, the second to those of heroism. list of toys suitable for various ages. ball, rubber ring, soft animals and rag dolls ......... before year blocks and bells ............................................. year small chair and table .................................... / years noah's ark .................................................. years picture books ............................................... years materials and instruments .............................. to years carts, stick-horses, and reins ..................... / to years boats, ships, engines, tin or wooden animals, dolls, dishes, broom, spade, sand-pile, bucket, etc ................ years hoop, games and story books ................................. years occupations [sidenote: home kindergarten] there are a number of books designed to teach mothers how to carry the kindergarten occupations over into the home; but while such books may be helpful in a few cases, in most cases better occupations present themselves in the course of the day's work. the kindergarten occupations themselves follow increasingly the order of domestic routine. for example, many children in the kindergarten make mittens out of eiderdown flannel in the fall, when their own mothers are knitting their mittens, and make little hoods either for themselves or for their dolls. at other periods they put up little glasses of preserves or jelly, and study the industry of the bees and the way they put up their tiny jars of jelly. their attention is called also to the preparations that the squirrels and other animals make for winter, and to that of the trees and flowers. in other words, the occupations in the kindergarten are designed to bring the children into conscious sympathy with the life of nature and of the home. [sidenote: kindergarten methods] that mother who keeps this purpose in mind and applies it to the occupations that come up naturally in the course of a day's work, will thereby bring the kindergarten spirit into her own home much more truly than if she invests in a number of perforated sewing cards and colored strips of paper for weaving. not that there is any harm in these bits of apparatus, provided that the sewing cards are large and so perforated as not to task the eyes and young fingers of the sewer. but unless for some special purpose, such as the making of a christmas or birthday gift, these devices are unnecessary and better left to the school, which has less richness of material at hand than has the home. [sidenote: helping mother] in allowing the children to enter a workers into the full life of the home several good things are accomplished. ( ) the eager interest of the developing mind is utilized to brighten those duties which are likely to remain permanent duties. not does this observation apply only to girls. domestic obligations are supposed to rest chiefly upon them, but the truth is that boys need to feel these obligations as keenly as the girls, if they are to grow into considerate and helpful husbands and fathers. the usual division of labor into forms falsely called masculine and feminine is, therefore, much to be deplored. moreover, at an early age children are seldom sex-conscious, and any precocity in this direction is especially evil in its results; yet many mothers from the beginning make such a division between what they require of their boys and of their girls as to force this consciousness upon them. all kinds of work, then, should be allowed in the beginning, however it may differentiate later on, and little boys as well as little girls should be taught to take an interest in sewing, dish-washing, sweeping, dusting, and cooking--in all the forms of domestic activity. this is so far recognized among educators that the most progressive primary schools now teach cooking to mixed classes of boys and girls, and also sewing. these activities are recognized as highly educational, being, as they are, interwoven with the history of the race and with its daily needs. when they are studied in their full sum of relationship, they increase the child's knowledge of both the past and the living world. [sidenote: teaching mother] ( ) besides the deepening of the child's interest in that work which in some form or other he will have with him always, is the quickening of the mother's own interest in what may have come to seem to her mere daily drudgery. any woman who undertakes to perform so simple an operation as dish-washing with the help of a bright happy child, asking sixteen questions to the minute, will find that common-place operation full of possibilities; and if she will answer all the questions she will probably find her knowledge strained to the breaking point, and will discover there is more to be known about dish-washing than she ever dreamed of before; while in cooking, if she will make an effort to look up the science, history, and ethics involved in the cooking and serving of a very simple meal, she will not be likely to regard the task as one beneath her, but rather as one beyond her. no one can so lead her away from false conventions and narrow prejudices as a little child whom she permits to help her and teach her. [sidenote: the love of work] ( ) the child's spontaneous joy in being active and in doing any service is being utilized, as it should be, in the performance of his daily duties. we have already referred to the fact that all children in the beginning love to work, and that there must be something the matter with our education since this love is so early lost and so seldom reacquired. if when young children wish to help mother they are almost invariably permitted to do so, and their efforts greeted lovingly, this delight in helpfulness will remain a blessing to them throughout life. [sidenote: to make "helping" of benefit] but in order to get these benefits from the domestic activities two or three simple rules must be observed. ( ) do not go silently about your work, expecting your child to be interested and to understand without being talked to. play with him while you work with him, and see the realization of youthfulness that comes to yourself while you do it. many tasks fit for childish hands are in their nature too monotonous for childish minds. here your imagination must come into play to rouse and excite his activity. for instance, you are both shelling peas. when he begins to be tired you suggest to him, "here is a cage full of birds, let us open the door for them;" or you may tell a story while you work, but it should be a story about that very activity, or the child will form the habit of dreaming and dawdling over his work. such stories may be perfectly simple and even rather pointless and yet do good work; the whole object is to keep the child's fly-away imagination turned upon the work at hand, thus lending wings to his thought, and lightness to his fingers. moreover, the mother who talks with her child while working is training in him the habit of bright unconscious conversation, thus giving him a most useful accomplishment. making a game or a play out of the work is, of course, conducive to the same good results. when the story or the talk drags, the game with its greater dramatic power may be substituted. [sidenote: fatigue] ( ) children should neither be allowed to work to the point of fatigue nor to stop when they please. fatigue, as our latest investigators in physiological psychology have conclusively proved, is productive of an actual poison in the blood and as such is peculiarly harmful to young children. but while work--or for that matter play either--must never be pushed past the point of healthful fatigue, it may well be pushed past the point of spontaneous interest and desire: the child may be happily persuaded by various hidden means to do a little more than he is quite ready to do. by this device, which is one of the recognized devices of the kindergarten, mothers increase by imperceptible degrees that power of attention which makes will power. [sidenote: willing industry] ( ) set the example of willing industry. neither let the child conceive of you as an impersonal necessary part of the household machinery, nor as an unwilling martyr to household necessities. most mothers err in one or the other of these two directions, and many of them err in both: they either, (a) perform the innumerable services of the household so quietly and steadily that the child does not perceive the effort that the performance costs and, therefore, as far as his consciousness is concerned, is deprived of the force of his mother's example, or (b) they groan aloud over their burdens and make their daily martyrdom vocal. either way is wrong, for it is a mistake not to let a child see that your steady performance of tasks, which cannot be always delightful, is a result of self-discipline; and it is equally a mistake to let him think that this discipline is one against which you rebel. for in reality you are so far from being unwilling to bind yourself in his service that if he needed it you would promptly double and quadruple your exertions. it is exactly what you do when he is sick or in danger; and if he dies the sorest ache of your heart is the ache of the love that can no longer be of service to the beloved. [sidenote: monotony] ( ) remember that monotony is the curse of labor for both child and adult, but that _monotony cannot exist where new intellectual insights are constantly being given_. therefore, while the daily round of labor, shaped by the daily recurring demands for food, warmth, cleanliness, and sleep, goes on without much change, seize every opportunity to deepen the child's perception of the relation of this routine to the order of the larger world. for instance, if a new house is being built near by, visit it with the children, comparing it with your own house, figure out whether it is going to be easier to keep clean and to warm than your house is and why. if you need to call in the carpenter, the plumber, the paper-hanger, or the stoveman, try to have him come when the children are at home, and let them satisfy their intense curiosity as to his work. this knowledge will sooner or later be of practical value, and it is immediately of spiritual value. [sidenote: beautiful work] ( ) beautify the work as much as possible by letting the artistic sense have full play. this rule is so important that the attempt to establish it in the larger world outside of the home has given rise to the movement known as the arts and crafts movement, which has its rise in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us until the common things of daily living--the furniture, the books, the carpets, the chinaware--are made to express that creative joy in the maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one. this creative joy, in howsoever small degree, may be present in most of the things that the child does. if he sets the table, he may set it beautifully, taking real pleasure in the coloring of the china and the shine of the silver and glass. he ought not to be permitted to set it untidily upon a soiled tablecloth. [sidenote: the right spirit] ( ) this is a negative rule, but perhaps the most important of all: do not nag. the child who is driven to his work and kept at it by means of a constant pressure of a stronger will upon his own, is deriving little, if any, benefit from it; and as you are not teaching him to work for the sake of his present usefulness, which is small at the best, but for the sake of his future development, you are more desirous that he should perform a single task in a day in the right spirit, than that he should run a dozen errands in the wrong spirit. ( ) besides a regular time each day for the performance of his set share in the household work, give him warning before the arrival of that hour. children have very incomplete notions of time; they become much absorbed in their own play; and therefore no child under nine or ten years of age should be expected to do a given thing at a given time without warning that the time is at hand. [sidenote: "busy work"] besides these occupations which are truly part of the business of life come any number of other occupations--a sort of a cross between real play and steady work, what teachers call "busy work"--and here the suggestions of the kindergarten may be of practical value to the mother. for instance, weaving, already referred to, may keep an active child interested and quiet for considerable periods of time. besides the regular weaving mats of paper, to be had from any kindergarten supply store, wide grasses and rushes may be braided into mats, raffia and rattan may be woven into baskets, and strips of cloth woven into iron-holders. a visit to any neighboring kindergarten will acquaint the mother with a number of useful, simple objects that can be woven by a child. whatever he weaves or whatever he makes should be applied to some useful purpose, not merely thrown away; and while it is true that a conscientious desire to live up to this rule often results in a considerable clutter of flimsy and rather undesirable objects about the house, still, ways may be devised for slowly retiring the oldest of them from view, and disposing of others among patient relatives. [sidenote: sewing] sewing is another occupation ranch used in the kindergarten as well as in the home. beginning with the simple stringing of large wooden beads upon shoe-strings, it passes on to sewing on buttons, and sewing doll clothes to the making of real clothing. this last in its simplest form can be begun sooner than most parents suppose, especially if the child is taught the use of the sewing machine. there is really no reason why a child, say six years old, should not learn to sew upon the machine. his interest in machinery is keen at this period, and two or three lessons are usually sufficient to teach him enough about the mechanism to keep him from injuring it. once he has learned to sew upon the machine, he may be given sheets and towels to hem, and even sew up the seams of larger and more complex articles. he will soon be able to make aprons for himself and his sisters and mother. toy sewing machines are now sold which are really useful playthings, and on which the child can manufacture a number of small articles. those run by a treadle are preferable to those run by a hand crank, because they leave the child's hands free to guide the work. [sidenote: drawing cutting pasting] drawing, painting, cutting and pasting are excellent occupations for children. a large black-board is a useful addition to the nursery furnishings, but the children should be required to wash it off with a damp cloth, instead of using the eraser furnished for the purpose, as the chalk dust gets into the room and fills the children's lungs. plenty of soft pencils and crayons, also large sheets of inexpensive drawing paper, should be at hand upon a low table so that they can draw the large free outlines which best develop their skill, whenever the impulse moves them. if they have also blunt scissors for cutting all sorts of colored papers and a bottle of innocuous library paste, they will be able to amuse themselves at almost any time. [sidenote: painting] some water colors are now made which are harmless for children so young that they are likely to put the paints in their mouths. paints are on the whole less objectionable than colored chalks, because the crayons drop upon the floor and get trodden into the carpet. if children are properly clothed as they should be in simple washable garments, there is practically no difficulty connected with the free use of paints, and their educational value is, of course, very high. test questions the following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the regular members of the a.s.h.e. answer in writing and send in for the correction and comment of the instructor. they are intended to emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the lesson. study of child life part ii read carefully. in answering these questions you are earnestly requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. in all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject. . state fichte's doctrine of rights and show how it applies to child training. if possible, give an example from your own experience. . what is the aim of moral training? . what two sayings of froebel most characteristically sum up his philosophy? . what is the value of play in education? . what are the natural playthings? tell what, in your childhood, you got out of these things, or if you were kept away from them, what the prohibition meant to you. . what do you think about children's dancing? and acting? . do you agree with those who think that the kindergarten makes right doing too easy? state the reasons for your opinion. . what can you say of commands, reproofs, and rules? . should you let the children help you about the house, even when they are so little as to be troublesome? why? if they are unwilling to help, how do you induce them to help? . what would you suggest as regular duties for children of to years? of to years? . which do you consider the more important, the housework or the child? . wherein may the mother learn from the child? . what is the difference between amusing children and playing with them? what is the proper method? . mention some good rules in character building. . from your own experience as a child what can you say of teaching the mysteries of sex? . are there any questions you would like to ask, or subjects which you wish to discuss in connection with this lesson? note.--after completing the test sign your full name. [illustration: madonna and child by murillo, spanish painter of the seventeenth century] study of child life part iii art and literature in child life the influence of art upon the life of a young child is difficult of measurement. it may freely be said, however, that there is little or no danger in exaggerating its influence, and considerable danger in underrating it. it is difficult of measurement because the influence is largely an unconscious one. indeed, it may be questioned whether that form of art which gives him the most conscious and outspoken pleasure is the form that in reality is the most beneficial; for, unquestionably, he will get great satisfaction from circus posters, and the poorly printed, abominably illustrated cheap picture-books afford him undeniable joy. he is far less likely to be expressive of his pleasure in a sun-shiny nursery, whose walls, rugs, white beds, and sun-shiny windows are all well designed and well adapted to his needs. nevertheless, in the end the influence of this room is likely to be the greater influence and to permanently shape his ideas of the beautiful; while he is entirely certain, if allowed to develop artistically at all, to grow past the circus poster period. this fact--the fact that the highest influence of art is a secret influence, exercised not only by those decorations and pictures which flaunt themselves for the purpose, but also by those quiet, necessary, every-day things, which nevertheless may most truly express the art spirit--this fact makes it difficult to tell what art and what kind of art is really influencing the child, and whether it is influencing him in the right directions. [sidenote: color] until he is three years old, for example, and often until he is past that age, he is unable to distinguish clearly between green, gray and blue; and hence these cool colors in the decorations around him, or in his pictures, have practically no meaning for him. he has a right, one might suppose, to the gratification of his love for clear reds and yellows, for the sharp, well-defined lines and flat surfaces, whose meaning is plain to his groping little mind. some of the best illustrators of children's books have seemed to recognize this. for example, boutet de monvil in his admirable illustrations of joan of arc meets these requirements perfectly, and yet in a manner which must satisfy any adult lover of good art. the caldecott picture books, and walter crane's are also good in this respect, and the perkins pictures issued by the prang educational co. have gained a just recognition as excellent pictures for hanging on the nursery wall. many of the illustrations in color in the standard magazines are well worth cutting out, mounting and framing. this is especially true of howard pyle's work and that of elizabeth shippen green. [sidenote: classic art] since photogravures and photographs of the masterpieces can be had in this country very inexpensively, there is no reason why children should not be made acquainted at an early age with the art classics, but there is danger in giving too much space to black and white, especially in the nursery where the children live. their natural love of color should be appealed to do deepen their interest in really good pictures. [illustration: "my mary"] [illustration: "blow, wind blow" perkins' pictures] nevertheless, it is a matter of considerable difficulty still to find colored pictures which are inexpensive and yet really good. the detaille prints, while not yet cheap, are not expensive either, and are excellent for this purpose; but the insipid little pictures of fairies, flowers, and birds may be really harmful, as helping to form in the young child's mind too low an ideal of beauty--of cultivating in him what someone has called "the lust of the eye." [sidenote: plastic art] what holds true of the pictorial art holds equally true of the plastic art. as prof. veblin of the university of chicago has scathingly declared, our ideals of the beautiful are so mingled with worship of expense that few of us can see the genuine beauty in any object apart from its expensiveness. for this reason as well as, perhaps, because of a remnant of barbarism in us, we love gold and glitter, and a great deal of elaboration in our vases, and are far from being over-critical of any piece of statuary which costs a respectable sum. [illustration: relief medallion by andrea della robbia, in foundling hospital, florence.] a certain appreciation, however, of the real value of a good plaster-cast has been gaining among us of late years, and many public schools, especially in the large cities, have been establishing standards of good taste in this respect. good casts and bas-relief, decorate their halls and class-rooms. there are few homes that cannot afford to follow their example. but in buying these things be not misled by sales and advertised bargains. it is more than seldom that the placques, casts, and vases thus obtained are such as could have any valuable influence whatever upon the young lives with which they are brought in contact. meretricious and showy ornaments, designed to look as if they cost more than they really do, have no business in the sincere home where the children are being sincerely educated. [sidenote: music] the same general laws apply to music. no art has a greater and more insinuating influence. the very songs with which the mother sings the baby to sleep have an occult influence which is later revealed and made plain. such songs, then, should be simple. they may be nothing but improvisations, the mother's mind and heart making music, but they should not be melodramatic songs of the music-hall order. no such mawkish sentimentalism as that shown in "the gypsy's warning," for example, or other songs which belong to the cheap theater should have a place in the holy of holies--that inmost self of the child--which responds to music. the simple folk-songs of all nations, eleanor smith's and most of mrs. gaynor's songs, already mentioned, and the songs collected by reinecke, called "fifty children's songs," are excellent for this purpose. the old-fashioned nonsense songs, such as "billy boy," "mary had a little lamb" and "hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle," may also have a pleasant and harmless place of their own. instrumental music should be on the same general order, not loud and showy, but clear, simple, sweet, and free from startling effects. dashing pieces, rag-time pieces, marches, two-steps, and familiar tunes with variations, instead of bringing about a spirit of gentleness and harmony, actually tend to produce self-assertiveness and quarrelsomeness. let any mother who does not believe this try the effort of an hour of the one kind of music on one evening, and an hour of the other kind on another evening. the difference will be immediately apparent. [sidenote: the drama] the influence of the drama must not be forgotten. this form of art, fallen so low among us since the time of the puritans that it can scarcely be called an art at all, is, nevertheless, the art which perhaps above all others has an immediate and yet lasting influence. children are themselves instinctively dramatic. they like to compose and act out all sorts of dramas of their own, from playing house (which is nothing but a drama prolonged from day to day), to such dramatic games as statue-posing and dumb crambo. all children like to dress up, to wear masks, and to imitate the peculiarities of persons about them; to try on, as it were, the world as they see it, and discover thereby how the actors in it feel. goethe's wilhelm meister has already been referred to. in this--his great book on education--he practically bases all education upon the drama, and even throws the treatise itself into dramatic form. this does not mean, however, that all children should be permitted to go to the theater as freely as they like. no; the plays which they compose and act for themselves have a far higher value educationally than most of the spectacular presentations of the old fairy tales with which they are usually regaled, and certainly more than the sensational melodramas which give them false ideas of art and morality. they should go sometimes to the theater to see really good and simple plays, but they should be oftener encouraged to get up for themselves plays at home. if, as they grow older, they are helped to think out their costumes with something of historical accuracy, to be true to the spirit and scenery of the times in which the representations are laid, the activity can be made to increase in value to them as the years go by. there is no other art, perhaps, by which the child so intimately links the world spirit with his own spirit. it is for this reason that the school of education in the university of chicago is equipped with small theaters in which the children act. [sidenote: literature] as for the art of literature, not all children love reading, perhaps, but certainly all children love to hear stories told, and the skilful mother will direct this spontaneous affection into a love for reading. no other single love, except perhaps the love of nature, so emancipates the child from the thrall of circumstances. if he can escape from the small ills of life into fairy-land merely by opening the covers of a book, be sure that these ills will not have power to crush him, unless they be very great ills indeed. [sidenote: fairy tales] there are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all sorts are nothing but lies. poor souls, with their faces against the stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. they make no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear under many forms, even under the form of play. all rightly told and rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true. the painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. some literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling the truth only in another than an every day form. in the same way the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the imagination. if children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without hesitation, "yes." it is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it is inside truth. there is magic in it and a mystery. the child who is never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. it is not only that the imagination--the divinest quality of man, because the quality that makes man in his degree a creator--does not receive culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a narrow circle of interests. [sidenote: imagination and sympathy] for sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon imagination. if you cannot imagine how you would feel under your neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. the person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose experience and habits are similar to his own. he never escapes from the narrow circle of his own personality. but the man whose imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human--yes! even with creatures and things below the human level. without imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects which are not yet human. it is not possible, obviously, for him to be a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world by means of the imagination. it is not possible for him, even, to be a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside the pale of those sympathies. by all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children, and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the best magazines. read with them. let some reading enter into every day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms. [sidenote: books] as to the books to choose, choose the best. generally speaking, the best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. as in music you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the brothers grimm and by andrew lang. hans christian andersen's fairy stories of course are classics. hawthorne's tanglewood tales give excellent suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies. many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which helped to make the world what it should be. for the rest there are two standard children's magazines which help to form a good taste in literature and which are continually suggestive of the right sort of reading material. these are the youth's companion and st. nicholas. [sidenote: nature study] finally, all appreciation of literature and art depends upon a love of and some knowledge of nature. fairy stories and mythology especially are so dependent upon nature for their inner meaning and significance as scarcely to be intelligible without some knowledge of natural processes and laws. of course, it is true that art in its turn idealizes nature and fills her beautiful form with a beautiful soul; so that the child who is being developed on all sides needs to take his books and his pictures out of doors in order to get the full good of them. [sidenote: art and nature] no amount of music, art, and literature can make up for the free life in the fields and under the sky which all these arts describe and interpret. if he should be so unhappy as to have to choose between nature and art, it would be better for him to choose nature, because then, perhaps, art might be born in his own soul. but there is happily no need for such a painful choice. he can sing his little song out of doors with the birds and notice how they join in the chorus. he can paint evening sunsets with the pine-trees against it far better out of doors than indoors with copy perched before him. he can look down the aisles of the real woods to watch for the enchanted princess, or for the chivalrous knight whose story he is reading. art and nature belong together in the unified soul of the child. well for him and for the world in which he lives if they are never divorced, but he goes on to the end loving them both and seeing them both as one. children's associates if the child was intended to grow into a man of family, merely, family training might be sufficient for him, but since he must grow into a member of society, social training is as necessary for him as family training. failure to recognize this truth is at the bottom of the current misconceptions of the kindergarten. there are still thousands of persons who suppose it is only a superior sort of day-nursery where children may be safely kept and innocently employed while the mother gets the housework done. [sidenote: the kindergarten] while this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by no means the function of the kindergarten. this method of instruction aims at much more. it aims to lay foundations for a complete later education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and aptitudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, constitute the safety and welfare of society. for this reason no home, however well ordered, can supply to the child what the kindergarten supplies. for the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family, while the kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. it is the wide world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized kindergarten, it will contain within itself a wide variety of children--children of wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding--and will bring them all under one just rule. for only by this commingling of many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy. [sidenote: exclusive associates] parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the kindergarten as to desire that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set; that in the kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is accustomed to associate with. but if the kindergarten acceded to this demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an atmosphere of exclusiveness. a wisdom greater than the mother's has ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. if he has any freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling list. indeed, even those kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent individualities of almost every type. for no neighborhood, however equal in wealth and fashion, ever produced children of an unvarying quality. in any circle, no matter how exclusive, there are mischievous children, children who use bad language, children who have sly, mean tricks, children who do not speak the truth, and who are in other ways quite as undesirable as the children of the poor and ignorant. it is often asserted, indeed, that the children of exclusive neighborhoods very often show more varieties of badness than the children of the open street. the records of the private kindergarten as compared with the public kindergarten amply prove this statement. [sidenote: evil example] since, then, whether you confine your child to the limits of your own circle or not, you cannot successfully keep him from playing with children who are more or less objectionable, what are you going to do to keep him from the harm of such association? you have to make him strong enough to withstand temptation and resist the force of evil example. of course, he must have as little of the wrong example, especially in his younger and tenderer years, as can be managed without too greatly checking his activity and curtailing his freedom. yet after all he is to be taught a positive and not a negative righteousness, and if his home training is not sufficient to enable him to stand against a certain downward pull from the outside, there is something the matter with it. while he must not be strained too hard, nor too constantly associate with children whose manners put his manners to the test, still he ought by degrees, almost imperceptibly, to be accustomed to holding to the truth, to that which is found good, no matter whether his associates find it desirable or not. [sidenote: social training] a good kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for there her child meets with all sorts of other children. the very influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on his side. every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. in every stand that he takes against temptation, he is unobtrusively reinforced. moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the play-ground. it is promptly held up to general obloquy, and the good child finds to his surprise that he is not the only one who thinks that teasing, for example, is mean and selfish and that a violent temper is ugly. [sidenote: responsibility to society] moreover, in the kindergarten the sense of social responsibility is borne in upon him. perhaps it comes to him first when he is chosen to lead the march and finds that he must be careful not to squeeze through too narrow places, lest someone get into trouble. in dealing out pencils, worsted, and other materials he must be careful to show strict impartiality, and give no preference to his own personal friends. in a hundred small ways he is helped to regulate his own conduct, so that it may conduce to the welfare of the whole school. where there are no kindergartens, the task becomes a more difficult one for the mother, for it becomes necessary, then, that she herself should undertake the social training of her child, and this means that she must know his playmates, not only through his report of them, but through her own observation of them, and that they must be sufficiently at home with her to betray their true characters in her presence. and this means, of course, that she must become her child's playmate. there are few women who think that they have time for this, but there are also few who would not be benefited by it. if anywhere there is a fountain of youth, it gushes up invisibly wherever playing children are, and she who plays with them gets sprinkled by it. [sidenote: sharing the child's play] if there be no time during the busy day when she can justly enter into the children's free play, at least there is a little while in the late afternoon or in the early evening when she can do so, if she will. an hour or two a week spent in active association with children at their games will make her intimately acquainted with all their playmates, and, moreover, constitute her a power of first magnitude among them. her motherhood thus extends itself, and she blesses not only her own children, but all those who come near her children. in this respect no kindergarten can take the place of the mother's own companionship with the child in his social life. [sidenote: the children's hour] in an ideal condition the child has his kindergarten in the morning; his quiet hours, one of them entirely solitary, in the afternoon; his social time, when he, his brothers and sisters and mother, are joined with the other children and mothers in the neighborhood, in the late afternoon, and his family time, with both father and mother, in the evening before going to bed. in thus sharing her child's social life the mother admits the claim upon her of social responsibility; she sees that her duty is not to her own home alone, but to the other homes with which hers is linked--not to her own child alone, but to all children whose lives touch her child's life. her own nature widens with the perception, and she enhances her direct teaching with the force of a beautiful example. studies and accomplishments [sidenote: abstract studies] there may easily be too many studies and too many accomplishments in the life of any child. as our schools are constituted there are certainly too many studies of the wrong kind being carried on every day. but there are also too few studies of the right kind. in one of our large cities a test was once made as to how much the children who left school at the fifth grade, as per cent of them do, had actually learned in a way that would be of practical value to them, and the results were most discouraging. these city children who could recite their tables of measurements with glibness, and who performed with a fair degree of success several hundred examples dealing with units of measure, could not tell whether their school-room floor contained one acre or two hundred and forty! none of them suspected that it contained less than an acre. although they could bound the states of the union, and give the principal exports and imports, they knew next to nothing of their own city and of its actual relation to the countries which they studied in their geography lessons. the teachers, in explanation, laid much of the blame for this state of affairs upon the parents, saying that they took but little interest in their children's studies, and never attempted to link them to the things of every-day life. but while this claim might be justified to some extent, it was by no means sufficient to cover the facts of the case. the truth is, it was quite as much the teachers' duty to link these abstract studies with concrete facts, as it was the parents'. [sidenote: dead knowledge] such an experience, however, suggests the manner in which parents can best help on the work of children in school. so long as these studies are still taught in the dead, monotonous way common to text-books, children will be racked nervously, and not benefited mentally in the effort to master them. fathers and mothers who by the exercise of some ingenuity manage to show the child that his arithmetical knowledge is of actual help in solving the questions of every-day life; that his history has bearings upon the progress of events around him, and that his geography relates to actual places which, perhaps, father and mother may have seen, or which their books tell about--such fathers and mothers will make their children's school work easier, at the same time that they increase the sum of their children's knowledge. it is dead knowledge only--knowledge wrenched from its living content--that is difficult of digestion. [sidenote: the new education] it is natural for a young mind to like to learn, as it is for a healthy stomach to be supplied with food; but knowledge, like the food, must be fit for the use that is to be made of it and for the organ that is to receive it; and the brain, like the stomach, has a signal which it flies to show whether the food is what it wants or not. the brain exhibits interest exactly as the stomach exhibits appetite. the object of scientific education is to discover what the spontaneous, universal interest of children of certain ages is, and to meet that interest with the fullest possible supply of knowledge in every conceivable form. scientific education does not depend upon text-books or upon merely verbal explanations, but gets the idea home to the child by the means of a varied appeal to all the senses and sensibilities. for this reason the most advanced schools have many more studies and what are commonly called accomplishments than the public or parochial schools. that is, they add to the three r's--reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic--drawing, modeling, painting, manual training, physical culture, dramatic representation, music, field trips, and laboratory work. [sidenote: correlation of studies] yet this apparently great increase of subjects in the number of studies actually lessens the amount of work required of the child, because all these different activities, by means of what is called correlation, are brought to bear upon the same subject. for example, the class which goes out for a field trip to visit a near-by brook sees the water actually at work, cutting its way to the river, and thence to the sea. they measure its force and note its effects; they make a water-color sketch of some curve of it; they notice what birds and insects are about; what flowers grow there; what indications there may be of burrowing animals. when they get back to school they model, perhaps, some bird that they have noticed; or in the geographical laboratory, with streams of water try to reproduce in miniature the action of the brook upon the soil through which it flows. for their arithmetic lesson they estimate the number of years the brook must have been flowing to have cut its valley to its present depth. they make a full report and description of their day's work for their reading and writing lesson. they have thus gained an immense amount of information, and have done a great deal of hard work; but instead of being nervously exhausted, they are bright and exhilarated. such fatigue as they know is wholesome and fits them for a sound night's sleep. [sidenote: home expedients] when it is impossible to send the child to such a school as this, something may be done by supplementing the ordinary school by some of these procedures. the clay jar, the crayons, and the paints have already been suggested, and with the parents' interest in the child's studies, helping him to model and paint things which he studies at school, he will instantly show the good effect of the home training and encouragement. as for field trips, the regular sunday walk, or evening stroll, may be made to take its place. if you think that you do not know enough to teach your child on these walks, give him then the privilege of teaching you. he will work the harder in order to rise to the occasion. [sidenote: physical culture] as for physical culture, if your school is without it, your barn, your parlor, and your lawn may supply it in some sort. in the barn may be a trapeze; there is already the ladder and the hay-loft; on the lawn may be a swing, trees to climb, and the tennis court. in your parlor may be a little home dancing school, where for a half an hour or so, the children march, skip, or two-step to music of your making. in the wood shed may be a carpenter's bench with real tools, where he may work and get some of the good of manual training. [sidenote: showy accomplishments] accomplishments, meaning thereby showy things that children do for the edification of guests, are of doubtful value. it is pleasant, of course, to have your little girl play a piece or two on the piano to entertain your visitors, but it is not nearly so important as health and strength, and a cheerful temper. sometimes all three of these are sacrificed to the two or three hours' practice a day. often, too, this extra work after school hours--work full as monotonous and nervous and uninteresting as the school work itself--is just what is needed to transform a healthy young girl into a nervous invalid. this is especially true, if she undertakes, as she usually does, to study music when she is about thirteen years old--the very time when, if wise physicians could regulate affairs to their liking, she would be taken out of school altogether and required to do nothing more than a little light housework every day. [sidenote: natural talent] of course, if she is naturally musical some kind of help and sympathy must be given her in her attempt to master the piano or violin or to manage her own voice. but while she should be allowed to learn as much as her unurged energies permit her to learn, she should not be required to practice more than a very small amount, say half an hour a day. the bulk of her musical education should be acquired in the vacation time, when she can give two hours a day without overstraining. the same general rules hold good of dancing, painting, the acquirements of foreign languages, a special course of reading, or any other work undertaken in addition to the regular school work. this latter, as it is now constituted, is quite as severe a nervous and intellectual strain as most young people can undergo with safety. [sidenote: "enthusiasms"] there is one characteristic in young people which needs to be noted in this connection:--the desire to take up some form of work, to strive with it furiously for a brief while, to drop it unfinished; take up another with equal eagerness, drop that in turn and go on to a third. this performance is peculiarly irritating to all systematic and ambitious parents. sometimes they rigidly insist that each task shall be finished before a new one is assumed. but in reality, is this necessary? it seems to be as natural for a young mind to set eagerly to work for a short time at each new bit of knowledge, as it is for a nursing child to require refreshments every two or three hours. it is an adult trait to stick to a task, even though a very long one, until it is accomplished. the youthful trait is to take kindly to a clutter of unfinished tasks. the youthful consciousness is of a world full of jostling interests. why not let the children alone, and allow them to spring lightly from one enthusiasm to another? of course you will help them to finish, either at the first sitting or at the second or at the third, the task that was undertaken when that particular enthusiasm was at its height. the drawing which has remained on the easel during the foot-ball season may be suggestively brought to notice again in the quiet times between thanksgiving and christmas. the boat begun last summer may well be finished in the days of the succeeding spring when all the earth is full of the sound of running water. thus each task, though not completed at once, gets done in the end; and the youthful capacity for many sympathies and many desires has not been narrowed. [sidenote: parental vanity] such a line of conduct presupposes, of course, that the parent considers only the child's best welfare, and not his own parental vanity. he is not desirous that his son shall do anything so well as to attract the attention and admiration of the neighbors. he is desirous merely that the boy shall grow up wholesomely and happily, showing such superiority as there may be in him when the fitting time and opportunity present themselves. he will not attempt to make a musician of an unmusical child, nor a mechanic of an artistic child. he will not object to the brilliant and impractical dreams of the young inventor, but will help to make them practicable; and though he may squirm at some of the investigations of the budding scientist, he will not forbid them. [sidenote: development of intellect] for such a parent recognizes that the important thing, educationally, is to secure the reaction of expression upon thought and feeling. that is, he is not trying to secure at this time--at any time during youth--perfect expression of any thought or feeling, but only to deepen feeling and clarify thought by encouraging all attempts at expression. he does not wish his child to make a finished picture or a perfect statue, but to acquire a greater sensitiveness to color and form by each attempt to express that color and form which he already knows. thus whatever studies and accomplishments his child may be in the act of acquiring are seen to be nothing as acquisitions, but the child himself is seen to be growing stage by stage within the clumsy scaffolding. financial training the financial training of children ought really to be considered under the head of moral training, but in some respects it can come equally well under the head of intellectual training; for to spend money well requires both self-control and intelligence. some persons seem to think that all that a child can be taught in this regard is to save money, and they meet the situation by purchasing various shapes and styles of savings banks. but it is entirely possible to teach the child too thoroughly in this respect and to make him so fond of his jingling pennies safe within a yellow crockery pig or iron cupolaed mansion that be will not spend them for any object, however laudable. others evade the issue as long as possible by giving the child no money at all; while most of us pursue an uncertain and wabbly course, sometimes giving money, sometimes withholding it, sometimes exhorting the child to spend, and sometimes to save. [sidenote: regular allowance] in truth spending wisely is a difficult problem. as a rule the child may safely be induced to lay by for a season and then encouraged to spend for some generous purpose. christmas and other festivals offer excellent opportunities for proper disbursement of the hoarded funds. these may be supposed to have accumulated from irregular gifts; but as the child grows older he should come into receipt of a regular definite allowance, perhaps conditioned upon his performance of some stated duty. a certain part of his allowance he may he permitted to spend upon such frivolities as are naturally dear to his young heart; another part of it he should be encouraged--not commanded--to put aside for larger purposes. the giving of this allowance must not be confused with the pernicious habit of bribing the child to the performance of those little daily courtesies and duties which he ought to be willing to perform out of love and a sense of right. a certain part of his daily work, such as seeing that the match-boxes all over the house are filled, or some similar share of the general labor of the household, may be regarded as that for which he is paid wages; and any extra task which does not justly belong to him, he may sometimes be paid for performing; but not always. for instance, he ought to be willing to run to the grocery for mother without demanding that he be paid a penny for the job; yet sometimes the penny may be forthcoming. the point is that he should be ready to work, even to work hard, without pay, and yet that he should never feel that his mother withholds pay from him when she can give it and he receive it without injury. [sidenote: spending foolishly] when the money is once his, he should be allowed to feel the full happiness and responsibility of possession, and if he insists upon spending it foolishly, should be allowed to do it and to suffer to the full the uncomfortable consequences. if, on the contrary, he will not spend it at all, his mother must use every means in her power to lessen the desire for ownership and to increase his love for others and his eagerness to please them. as judgment develops the allowance may well be increased to provide for necessities in the way of incidentals and clothing until at the "age of discretion" he is in full charge of the funds for his personal expenses. he should be encouraged to apply his knowledge of commercial arithmetic in the keeping of personal accounts. experience in spending a fixed amount of money is especially needful for the daughters. most young men have the value of money and financial responsibility forced upon them in the natural course of events, but too often the young wife has not had the training qualifying her for the equal financial partnership which should exist in the ideal marriage. [illustration: the infant galahad--first sight of the grail from the mural paintings by edwin a. abbey in the boston public library] religious training [sidenote: sunday school teachers] if the common school is not sufficient for the secular education of the child, certainly the sunday school is not sufficient for his religious education. in the common schools the teachers are more or less trained for their work. it is a life occupation with them; by means of it they earn their living, and their daily success with their pupils marks their rate of progress toward higher fields of endeavor. nothing of this sort is true in the sunday school. while occasionally it happens that a day school teacher becomes a sunday school teacher, this is seldom true, for most teachers who teach during the week feel that they need the sunday for rest; and while some sunday school teachers betray a commendable earnestness and zeal for their work, and associations and conventions have latterly added somewhat to the joint effort to better the conditions, still it remains true that the teaching in the sunday schools is far below the pedagogic level of the common schools. yet the subject which is dealt with in the sunday schools, instead of being of less importance than that dealt with in the common schools, is of pre-eminently greater importance. because of its subtlety, its intimacy with the hidden springs of conduct, it calls for the exercise of the very highest teaching skill. some sort of recognition of these two facts--that sunday school teachers are in most cases very inadequately trained for their work, and that the work itself is of great importance, and of equally great difficulty--has led to the issuing of many quarterlies, international lesson leaflets, and other sunday school aids. necessary as such help may be under present conditions, they cannot possibly meet the many difficulties of the case. if the central committees, who issue these leaflets, were composed wholly of the wisest men and women on earth, it would still be impossible for them to give lessons to the millions of children in their various denominations which should meet the personal needs, and daily interests of these young people. [sidenote: sunday school training] as a consequence, sunday school teaching is and must be largely theoretical and still more largely exegetical, and with neither theory nor exegesis is the young mind of the developing child very much concerned. what he needs is not the historical side of religion or of that great body of religious literature which we call the bible, but a living faith which links all that was taught by the prophets and apostles, centuries ago, with what is happening in the child's own town and family at that very moment. it is a wide gap to bridge, and it cannot be bridged by a semi-historical review backed by picture cards, golden texts, and stars for good behavior. these things are merely the marks of an endeavor to fitly accomplish a great task, an endeavor almost absurdly out of proportion to this aim, rendered significant, however, because it is the earnest of a great faith and a great hope. so far as sunday schools help children, it is because of this spirit of faithfulness, and not because of the form which it has assumed. in choosing, then, whether you shall send your child to a sunday school, choose by the presence or absence of this spirit. if you know the teachers of the sunday school to be earnest, loving, and devoted, you may with safety assume that their personal influence will make up for what is archaic in their method of teaching. where the spirit is present only in a few, or where it manifests itself only occasionally, as at seasons of revival, you may well hesitate to let your child attend. a great improvement would come about if parents would show a greater interest and encourage proper teachers to take charge of classes. it is a thankless task at present. [sidenote: theory not practice] there is one great danger in the teaching of any sunday school--one which the best of them cannot wholly escape--and that is, that, in the very nature of things, they teach theory and not practice. harmful as this may be, indeed as it surely is in adult life, it does not begin to be so harmful as it does in youth, for the young child, as we have seen, is and should remain a unit in consciousness. his life, his intellect, and his will are one--an undivided trinity. the divorce of these three is at any time a regrettable occurrence; the divorce of them in early life is an almost irreparable disaster. [sidenote: useless truths] the current theory is that children will learn many truths in the sunday school which they will not put into practice then, perhaps, but which they will find useful in later life. this fallacy underlies, of course, almost all conventional education and has only been overthrown by the dictum of modern psychology, that there is but small storage accommodation in the brain for facts which have no immediate relation to life. what may be termed the saturating power of the brain is limited, and after it has soaked up a rather small number of truths, it can contain no more until it has in some way disposed of those that it still has--either by making them part of its own living structure, which is done only by making immediate application of them; or by dropping them below the threshold of consciousness, that is, in common language, forgetting them. moreover, the brain may form the habit of easily dropping all that relates to a given subject into the limbo where unused things lie disregarded, and when this becomes the habitual method of disposing of religious instruction, the results are particularly deplorable. [sidenote: the mother as teacher] feeble as her own knowledge may be, a mother has certain advantages as a teacher of her children over any but the exceptional sunday school teacher. for, first, she knows the children, and, knowing them, knows their needs. secondly, she knows their daily lives and continually during the week can point out wherein they fail to live up to their sunday's lesson. and again and most important, she loves them tenderly, and from love flows wisdom. usually the mother gives her own children a love far beyond that given by anyone else, and this deeper love sharpens her intellectual faculties and makes her both a keen observer and a good tactician. giving her children some simple lesson on sunday afternoon, she finds a hundred opportunities to make the lesson living and vital to them during the succeeding week. [sidenote: religious enthusiasm] in the early years of the child's life, the mother is usually the one to decide whether he shall attend sunday school or not, but as he approaches adolescence he is likely to take the matter in his own hands, and if it happens that some revivalist or a new stirring preacher comes in contact with his life at this time, he is very likely to be swept off his feet with a sudden zeal of religious enthusiasm, which his mother fears to check. the reports of memberships, baptisms, etc., show that a large number become converted and join the church during adolescence. while this does not in the least argue that the conclusions that they reach at that time are therefore unsound--for adolescence is not a disease, nor a form of insanity, but a normal, if excitable, condition--still it does prove, when coupled with the further fact that in adult life these young converts often relapse into their previous condition, that a more lasting basis for religion must be found than the emotional intensity of this period of life. a religion to be lasting must be coldly reaffirmed by the intellect: the dictum of the heart alone is not sufficient. religious enthusiasm, like all other forms of enthusiasm, tends of itself to bring about the opposite condition, and to be succeeded by fits of despondency and bitterness as intense and severe as the enthusiasm itself was brilliant and ecstatic. the history of all great religious leaders amply proves this. they had their bitter hours of wrestling with the powers of darkness, hours which almost counter-balanced the hours of uplift. only clearly thought-out intellectual convictions reinforced by the habit of daily righteous living can secure the soul against such emotional aberrations. [sidenote: danger of reaction] therefore, although the religious excitability of adolescence must not be thwarted lest it be turned into less helpful channels, and lest religion lose all the beauty and compelling power lent to it by the glow of youthful feelings, yet it must be so balanced and ordered by a clear reason, and especially by the habit of putting each enthusiasm to the test of conduct, that the young mind may remain true to its law of growth, developing harmoniously on all three sides at once. the danger of permitting a young boy or girl while under the influence of this emotional instability to enter into any special form of religious service is the danger of reaction. he will discover that all is not as his early vision led him to suppose--because that early vision was of things too high and holy for any earthly realization--and he may turn against what seems to him to be hypocrisy and pretense with a bitterness proportioned to his former love. many honest, faithful men and women remain in this state of reaction for the rest of their lives. [sidenote: a difficult period] nevertheless, it will not do to thwart these young beginnings. they must neither be nipped in the bud nor forced to a premature ripening. above all they must not be suffered to endure the killing frost of ridicule. the period is a difficult one, but, as dr. stanley hall points out, it is supremely the mother's opportunity. if she can hold her boy's or her girl's confidence now, can ease their eager young hearts with an intelligent sympathy, she can probably keep them from any public commitment. perhaps they may desire to confide in the minister; if so, let the mother confide in him first. perhaps they have bosom friends, passing through the same stirring experience; then let the mother win over these friends. her object should be to shelter this beautiful sentiment; to keep it safe from exposure; above all, to utilize it as a motive-power--as an incentive to noble action. the kindergarten rule is a good one: as quick as a love springs in a child's breast, give it something to do. when the love of god awakes there, give it much to do. usually, the only way open is to join the church, to make a public profession. the wise mother will see to it that there are other ways, urging the young knight to serve his king by going forth into the world immediately about him and fighting against all forms of evil, giving him a practical, definite quest. the result of such restriction of public speech, and stimulation of private deed, will be a sincere, lowly-minded religion, so inwoven with the truest activities as to be inseparable from them. such a religion knows no reaction. [sidenote: bible study] now is supremely the time for a study of the bible. interesting as a divine story book to the young children, it becomes the book of life to these older ones. in teaching it at home, a few simple rules need to be borne in mind. the first is that the bible must be thought of not as a series of disconnected texts and thoughts, but as a connected whole. the division of king james' bible into verses and chapters is but poorly adapted to this purpose. the illogical, strange character of the paragraphing, as measured by the standards of modern english, is apparent at a glance, for often a verse will end in the middle of a sentence, and the sentence be concluded in the next verse. the chapters in the same way often fail to finish the subject with which they deal, and sometimes include several subjects. therefore, the mother who undertakes to read the bible to her children needs first to go through the lesson herself, and to decide what subject, not what chapter, she will take up that day. there is a reader's edition of the bible, and one called the "children's bible," both of which aim to leave out all repetition and references and to arrange the bible narrative in a simple, consecutive order, nevertheless employing the beautiful bible language. these editions might prove of considerable help to mothers who feel unequal to doing the work by themselves. [sidenote: children's bible] second, comparable to this in importance is the reading of the bible and talking about it in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice; for what you want is to make the bible teachings live in to-day. you must not, therefore, suggest by your tone or manner that they belong to another day, and that they are, in some sense, to be shut out from common life and speech. this does not mean such common use of biblical phrases in every day conversation as to cause it to grow into that form or irreverence known as cant, but it does mean simple usage of bible thought, and the effort to fit it to the conditions of daily life. such a habit in itself will force any family to discriminate as to what things in the bible are living and eternal, and what things belong rightly to that far away time and place of which the bible narrative treats, thus practicing both teacher and pupils--that is, both parents and children--in the art of finding the universal spirit of truth under all temporal disguises. without this art the bible is a closed book, even to the closest student. [sidenote: making lessons real] again, every effort should be made to help the home bible class to understand the period studied in that week's lesson, and to this end secular literature and art should be freely called upon, not only such stories, for example, as "ben hur," but other stories not necessarily religious, which deal with the same time and place; they are of great help in putting vividly before the children and parents the temporal setting of the eternal stories. cannon farrar's "life of christ" is a very great help to the realization of the new testament scenes, as is also tissot's "pictorial life of christ." in short every art should be made to deepen and clarify the conceptions roused by the study of the bible. [sidenote: in conclusion] the mother who undertakes the tremendous task of rightly training her children, will need to exercise herself daily in all the christian virtues--and if there are any pagan ones not included under faith, hope, charity, patience, and humility, to exercise those also. with these virtues to support her, she will be able to use whatever knowledge she may acquire. without them she can do nothing. test questions the following questions constitute the "written recitation" which the regular members of the a.s.h.e. answer in writing and send in for the correction and comment of the instructor. they are intended to emphasize and fix in the memory the most important points in the lesson. part iii read carefully. in answering these questions you are earnestly requested _not_ to answer according to the text-book where opinions are asked for, but to answer according to conviction. in all cases credit will be given for thought and original observation. place your name and full address at the head of the paper; use your own words so that your instructor may be sure that you understand the subject. . how can you bring the influence of art to bear upon your child? . what is the influence of music? how can you employ it? . do you believe in fairy tales for children? state your reasons. . how would you encourage the love of nature in your child? . what is it that the kindergarten can do better than the home? . suppose that your child had some undesirable acquaintances, how would you meet the situation? . what can you say of accomplishments for children? . if manual training, physical culture, domestic science, etc., are not taught in your schools and you wish your children to get some of the advantages of these studies, how will you set about it? . what do you understand to be the correlation of studies? . should parents become acquainted with the teachers of their children and their methods? why? . how may children be taught the use of money? . state the advantages and disadvantages of sunday schools. what have they meant in _your own_ experience? . how will you train your child religiously? can anyone take this task from you? . what rules must be borne in mind in teaching the bible at home? . give some experience of your own (or of a friend) in the training of a child wherein a success has been achieved. . are there any questions you would like to ask or subjects which you wish to discuss in connection with the lessons on the study of child life? note.--after completing the test sign it with your full name. supplementary notes on study of child life by marion foster washburne application of principles. in this "study of child life" we have considered some of the fundamental principles of education. when we think of the complex inheritance of the american people it is, perhaps, no wonder that many families contain individuals varying so widely from each other as to seem to require each a complete system of education all to himself. we are a people born late in the history of the race, and our blood is mingled of the norseman's, the celt's, and the latin's. advancing civilization alone would tend to make us more complex, our problems more subtle; but in addition to this we are mixed of all races, and born in times so strenuous that, sooner or later, every fibre of our weaving is strained and brought into prominence. in the letters from my students this fact, with which i was already familiar in a general sort of way, has been brought more particularly to my attention. in all cases, the situation has been responsible for much confusion and difficulty. in a good many, it has led to family tragedies, varying in magnitude from the unhappiness of the misunderstood child to that of the lonely woman, suffering in adult life from the faults of her upbringing, and the failure of the family ties whose need she felt the more as the duties of motherhood pressed upon her. if it were possible for me to violate the confidence of my pupils i could prove very conclusively that the old-fashioned system of bringing up children on the three r's and a spanking did not work so well as some persons seem to think. i could prove that the problem has grown past the point where instinct and tradition may be held as sufficient to solve it. everyone, seeing these letters, would be obliged to confess, "yes, indeed, here is plain need of training for parents." yet, at the same time, these same persons would be tempted to inquire, "but can any training meet such a difficult situation?" here is despair; and some cause for it. when one's own mother has not understood one; when one has lived lonely in the midst of brothers and sisters who are more strange than strangers; when one's childhood is full of the memory of obscure but intense sufferings, one flies for relief, perhaps, to any one who offers it hopefully enough; but one does not really expect to get it. _can_ training, especially by correspondence, meet the need? not wholly, of course, let us be frank to admit. no amount of theory, however excellent, can take the place of the drill given only in the hard school of experience. but when the theory is not merely theory, but sound principle, based on scientific observation, confirmed by the wide experience of many persons, it is as valuable in practical life as any rule of mathematics to the practical engineer. we all know that the technical correspondence schools really do fit young mechanics to move on and up in the trade. by correspondence he is given what froebel calls the interpreting word. the experience in application the student has to supply himself. so in the matter of education. there are genuine principles which underlie the development of every child that lives--even the feeble-minded, deaf, and blind. read helen keller's wonderful life, if you want to see the proof of it. just as surely as a child has two legs and has to learn to walk on them by a series of prolonged experiments, just so surely he has (a) a sense of justice, (b) an instinct for freedom, (c) a love of play. every kind of child has all these instincts, as much as he has love for food and drink; and to educate him consists in developing these instincts into (a) the habit of dealing justly by others, (b) the right use of freedom, (c) love of work. the particular methods may differ. the principles _do not and cannot differ_. she who would succeed in child training must hold to these truths with all her might and main--making them, in fact, her religion, for they are the doctrines of the christian religion as applied to motherhood. to hold them lightly, or even experimentally, will not do. one most walk in faith. and that the faith may not be blind, but may be based on experience and understanding, let me suggest this means of proof: instead of asking yourself how the laws laid down in these little books would fit this or that particular child, your own or another's, ask how they would have fitted you, if they had been applied to you by your own mother. take the chapter on faults, pick out the one which was yours, in childhood--oh, of course, you've got over it now!--think of some bitter trouble into which that fault hurried you, and conceive that, instead of the punishment you did receive, you had been treated as the lesson suggests--what, do you think, would have been the result? and so with the other chapters--even with that much-mooted question of companionship. test the truth of them all by their imaginary application to the child you know best. when you can, find the principles that your own mother did employ in your education, and examine the result of what she did. some of the principles will suddenly become luminous to you, i am sure; and some things that happened in the past receive an explanation. such a self-examination, to be of any value, must be rigidly honest. there is too much at stake here for you to permit any remnants of bitter feeling to influence your judgment--and you will surely be surprised to find how many bitter resentments will show that they yet have life. the past is dead, as far as your power to change it is concerned; but it lives, as a thing that you can use. here is your own child, to be helped or hindered by what you may have endured. it will all have been worth while, if by means of it you can save him from some bruises and falls. every bitterness will be sweetened if you can look through it and find the truth which shall serve this dearer little self who looks to you for guidance. then, when you have found the principles true--and not one minute before!--put them rigidly into practice. i say, not one minute before you are convinced, because it is better to hold the truth lightly in the memory as a mere interesting theory you have never had time to test, than to swallow it, half assimilated. truth is a real and living power, once it is applied to life; and to half-use it in doubt, and fear, is to invite indigestion and consequent disgust. take of these teachings that which you are sure is sound and right, and use it faithfully, and unremittingly. be careful that no plea of expediency, no hurry of the moment, makes you false. if you are thus faithful in small things, one after the other, in a series fitted to your own peculiar constitution, the others will prove themselves to you; for they are coherent truths, and not one lives to itself alone, but joins hands with all the rest. being truths, they fit all human minds--yours and mine, and those of our children, no matter how diverse we may be. other people's children isn't it ridiculously true that, as soon as we get enlightened ourselves, we burn to enlighten the rest of the world? we do not seem to remember our own feelings during the years of darkness, and the contentment of those who remain as we were surpasses our power of comprehension. it is really comforting to my own sense of impatience and balked zeal to find how many of my pupils are dreadfully concerned about other people's children. this one's heart burns over the little boy next door who is shamefully mismanaged and who already begins to show the ill effects of his treatment. that one has a sister-in-law who refuses to listen to a word spoken in season. between my smiles--those comfortable smiles with which we recognize our own shortcomings--i, too, am really concerned about the sister-in-law's children. it is true that their mother ought to be taught better, and that, if she isn't, those innocent lambs are going to suffer for it. off at this distance, without the ties of kindred to draw me too close for clear judgment, i see, though, that we have to walk very cautiously here, for fear of doing more harm than good. better that those benighted women never heard the name of child-study, than to hear it only to greet it with rebellion and hatred. yet to force any of our principles upon her attention when she is in a hostile mood--or to _force_ them, indeed, in any mood--is to invite just this attitude. most of us, by the time that we are sufficiently grown up to undertake the study of child life, have outgrown the habit of plainly telling our friends to their faces just what we think of their faults; yet this is a safe and pleasant pastime beside that other of trying to tell them how to bring up their children. you stand it from me, because you have invited it, and perhaps still more because you never see me, and the personal element enters only slightly and pleasantly into our relationship. i sometimes think that students pour out their hearts to me, much as we used to talk to our girl friends in the dark. i'm very sure i should never dare to say to their faces what i write so freely on the backs of their papers! you see, the adult, too, has his love of freedom; and while he can stand an indirect, impersonal preachment, which he may reject if he likes without apology, he will not stand the insistence of a personal appeal. i've let "little women" shame me into better conduct, when i was a girl, at times when no direct speech from a living soul would have brought me to anything but defiance--haven't you? we have to apply our principles to the adult world about us, well as to the child-world, and teach, when we permit ourselves to teach at all, chiefly by example, by cheerful confession of fallibility, by open-mindedness. above all things, we have to respect the freedom of these others, about whom we are so inconveniently anxious. it is fair, though, that the spoken word should interpret what we do. it is fair enough to tell your sister-in-law what you think and ask her judgment upon it, if you can trust yourself not to rub your own judgment in too hard. if you are unmarried, and a teacher, you will have to concede to her preposterous marital conceit a humble and inquiring attitude, and console your flustered soul by setting it to the ingenious task of teaching by means of a graduated series of artful inquiries. don't, oh don't! seek for an outspoken victory. be content if some day you hear her proclaim your truth as her own discovery. it never was yours, anyway, any more than it is hers or than it is mine. be glad that, while she claims it, she at least holds it close. if you are a mother, you are in an easier case. you can do to your own children just what she ought to do to hers, and tell about it softly, as if sure of her sympathy. if you are very sincere in your desire for the welfare of her child, you may even ask her advice about yours, and so gain the right to offer a little in exchange--say one-tenth of what she gives. all these warnings apply to unsought advice--a dangerous thing to offer under any circumstances. except there is a real emergency, you had better avoid it. if your nephew or little neighbor is winning along through his troubles fairly well, best keep hands off. but if you absolutely _must_ interfere, guard yourself as i suggest, and remember that, even then, you will assuredly get burned, if you play long with that dangerous fire of maternal pride! when your advice is sought, you are in a different position. then you have a right to speak out, though if you are wise and loving you will temper that right with charity. no one can be too gentle in dealing with a soul that honestly asks for help; but one can easily be too timid. think, under these circumstances, of yourself not at all; but put yourself as much as possible in her place; be led by her questions; and answer fearlessly from the depths of the best truth you hold. then leave it. you can do no more. what becomes of that truth, once you have lovingly spoken it, is no more of your concern. the sex question always convinced of the importance of this subject, convictions have deepened to the point of dismay since learning, through this school, of the many women who have suffered and who continue to suffer, both mentally and physically, because, in early girlhood, they were not taught those finer physiological facts upon which the very life of the race depends. yet, strangely enough, these very victims find it almost impossible to give their children the knowledge necessary to save them from a similar fate. it is as if the lack of early training in themselves leaves them helpless before a situation from which they suffer but which they have never mastered. of course such feelings, in themselves morbid, are not to be trusted. faced with a task like this we have only to ask ourselves not "is it hard?" but "is it in truth my task?" if it is, we may be sure that we shall be given strength to do it, provided only that we are sincere in our willingness to do it and do not count our feelings at all. it is preposterous to have such feelings, in the first place. they are wholly the product of false teaching. for we have no right--as we recognize when we stop to think about it in calmness of spirit, and apart from our special difficult--to sit in scornful judgment upon any of the laws of nature. when we find ourselves in rebellion against them, what we have to do is to change the state of our minds, for change the laws we cannot. if we women could inaugurate a gigantic strike against the present method of bearing children--and i imagine that millions would join such a strike if it held out any promise of success!--we still could accomplish nothing. to fret ourselves into a frazzle over it, is to accomplish less than nothing;--it is to enter upon the pathway to destruction. in teaching our children, then, we have first to conquer ourselves--that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must underlie all teaching. having done so, we shall find our task easier than we supposed. the children's own questions will lead us; and if we simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how far it may probe, we shall find ourselves not only enlightening but receiving enlightenment. for nothing is so sure an antidote to morbidness as the unspoiled mind of a child. he looks at the facts with such a calm, level gaze that proportions are restored to us as we follow his look. many of my letters show that adult women, wives and mothers, still grope for the truth that lies plain to the eyes of any simple child--the truth that there is no such thing as clean and unclean, only use and misuse. others, through love, and the splendid revelations that it makes, have risen so far above their former misconceptions that they fear to tell a child the facts before he has experienced the love. i can imagine that in an ideal world some such reticence might be good and right--but this is far from an ideal world. we have to train our children relatively, not absolutely, in the knowledge that we do not control all their environment. i think the solution of the difficulty is to teach the facts of sex in a perfectly calm, unemotional, matter-of-fact manner, just as one teaches the laws of digestion. when knowledge of evil is thrust upon our child let us be sorry with him that those other children have never been taught, and that they are doing their bodies such sad mischief. but don't exaggerate it; don't be too shocked; don't condemn the poor little sinners, who are also victims, too severely. charity toward wrong-doing is the best prophylactic against imitation. we never feel the lure of a sin which grieves us in another; but often the call of a sin which we too strongly condemn. because the very strength of the condemnation rouses our imaginations, is in itself an emotion, and, since it is certainly not a loving one, must necessarily be linked with all other unloving and therefore evil emotions. as far as possible, let us keep feeling out of this subject, until such time as the true and beautiful feeling of love between husband and wife arises and uplifts it. fathers and now comes the editor of these lessons and accuses me of neglecting the fathers! nothing in this world could be farther from my thoughts. not only do i agree with him that "all ordinary children have fathers, and it might be well to put in a paragraph;" but i am cheerfully willing to write a whole book on the subject, provided that a mere modicum of readers can be assured me. i fairly ache to talk to fathers, having a really great ideal of them, and whenever a class of them can be induced to take up a correspondence course i shall be glad to conduct it. joking aside, however, i truly feel that the saddest lack many of our children have to suffer is the lack of fathers; and the saddest lack our men have to suffer is the lack of children. so little are most men awake to this subject that i am perfectly convinced that much of the prevalent "race suicide" is due to their objections to a large family, rather than to their wives'. upon them comes the burden of support. they get few of the joys which belong to children, and nearly all of the woes. seldom do they share the games of their offspring, or their happy times; and almost always the worst difficulties are thrust upon them for solution. not that they often solve them! how can we expect it? there is edgar growing very untruthful and defiant. we have concealed all the first stages of the disease for fear of bothering poor tired papa. at last it reaches such a height that we can conceal it no longer. we fling the desperate boy at the very head of the bewildered father, and then have turns of bitter disappointment because the remedies that are applied may be so much cruder, even, than our own. here is a boy who gets close to his father only to find the proximity very uncomfortable; and a father who becomes acquainted with his son only through the ugly revelations of his worst faults. not but that the fathers are somewhat to blame, too. without urging by us, they ought, of course to take a spontaneous interest in the lives for which they are responsible. they ought to, and they often do; but the interest is sometimes ill-advised, and consequently unwelcome. there are fathers whose interest is a most inconvenient thing. when they are at home, they run everything, growl at everything, upset, as like as not, all that the mother has been trying to do during the day. i know wives who are distinctly glad to encourage their husbands in the habit of lunching down-town, so that they can have a little room for their own peculiar form of activity. and maybe we all have times of sympathizing with the woman in this familiar story: there was a man once who never left the house without a list of directions to his wife as to how she should manage things during his absence. "better have the children carry umbrellas this morning; it's going to rain," said he, as he went out of the door. "be sure to put on their rubbers. and since the baby is so croupy i'd get out his winter flannels, if i were you." "yes, dear," said the patient wife. "make your mind easy. i'll take just as good care of them as if they were my own children." of course this is an extreme case. there are other fathers whose whole idea of the parental relation seems to be indulgence. no system of discipline, however mild, can be carried out when such a man wins the children's hearts and ruins their dispositions. it is he, isn't it? (i don't quite recollect the tale) who was sent, after death, to the warm regions, there to expiate his many sins of omission. and his adoring children, who had been hauled to heaven by the main strength, let us say, of their mother, found that the only thing they could do for him was to call out celestial hose company number one and ask them to play awhile upon the overheated apartments of poor tired papa. the truth is--sit close and let no man hear what we say!--that these fathers are much what we, the mothers, make them. if, under the mistaken idea of saving father from all the worries of the children, we hurry the youngsters off to bed before he comes home in the evening, conceal our heart-burnings over them, do our correspondence-school work in secret and solitude, meditate in the same fashion over plans for their upbringing, talk to our neighbors but never to him about the daily troubles, how can we expect any man on earth, no matter how susceptible of later angelic growth, to become a wise and devoted father? tired or not, he is a father, not a mere bread-winner. whether he likes it at the moment or not, it is for his soul's health for him to enter into the full life of his family, including those problems which are at the very heart of it, after his day of grinding, and very likely unloving, work at the office. here love enters to interpret, to soften, to make all principles live. here alone he can give himself to those gentler forms of judgment which are necessary as much to the completion of his own character as to the happiness and welfare of his wife and children. someone has said that we wrong our friends when we ask nothing of them; and certainly it is true that we wrong our husbands when we do not demand big and splendid things of them. that word demand troubles me a little. so many women demand--and demand terribly! but what they demand is indulgence, sympathy, interest--i think sometimes that they crave a man's utter absorption in themselves much as a man craves strong drink. it is their form of intoxication. such demanding is not, of course, what i mean. demand nothing for yourself, beyond simple justice. not love, for that flies at the very sound of demand, and dies before nagging. but demand for the man himself, call upon his nobler qualities, and don't let him palm off on you his second-best. many a man is loved and honored by his business associates whose wife and children never catch a glimpse of the finer side of him. demand the exercise of these fine traits in the home. demand that he be a fine man in the eyes of his children as in the eyes of his friends. be sure that he will rise to the occasion with a splendid sense of having, now, a home that is a home, of having a wife who is wived to the man he likes best to be. this bids fair to be--as i knew it would, if once i permitted myself to write at all on the subject--not a paragraph, but a whole essay--or perhaps, if i did not check myself, a whole volume! but after all, what i want to say is merely that as no child can be born without a father, so he cannot be properly trained without a father's daily assistance. and that, since most fathers come to the task even more untrained than the mothers, some training must be undertaken. by whom? by the mother. it is, i solemnly believe, your duty to go ahead a little on this part of the journey, find out what ought to be done, and teach, coax, induce your husband to co-operate with you in these things. no one knows better than you do that he is only a boy at heart after all--perhaps the very dearest boy of them all. this boy you have to help while yet the other children are little--but be sure that, as you teach him, so, all the time, will he teach you. every principle laid down in this book, above all others the principle of _freedom_, will apply to him. he will take the lessons a trifle more reluctantly but more lastingly than the younger boys; and in a little while you will be envied of all your women friends because of the competency, the reliability, the contentment of your children's father. the unconscious influence when all is said and done, it remains true that the finest, the most subtle and penetrating influence in education is precisely that education for which no rules can be laid down. it is the silent influence of the motives which impel the persons who constantly surround us. if we examine for a little our own childhood we see at once that this is so. what are those canons of conduct by which we judge others and even occasionally ourselves? whence came that list of _impossible_ things, those things that are so closed to us that we cannot, even under great stress, of temptation, conceive ourselves as yielding to them? there is an enlightening story of a young man, born and bred a gentleman, who, by the way of fast living falls upon poverty. in the hard pressure of his financial affairs he is about to commit suicide, when suddenly he finds, in an empty cab, a roll of bills amounting to some thousands of dollars. the circumstances are such that he knows that he can, if he will, discover the owner; or, he can, without fear of detection, keep the money himself. he makes up his mind, deliberately, to keep it, and then, almost against his will, subconsciously as it were, walks to the office of the man who lost the money and restores it to him. now, doubtless, in his downward career he had done many things which judged by any absolute standard of morality were quite as wrong as the keeping of that money would have been, but the fact remained that he could not do that deed. others, yes, but not that. he was a gentleman, and gentlemen do not steal private property, whatever they may do about public property. yet probably, in all his life he had not once been told not to steal--not one word had he been taught, openly, on the subject. no one whom he knew stole. he was never expected to steal. stealing was a sin beyond the pale. so strong was this unconscious, _but unvarying_ influence, that by it he was saved, in the hour of extreme need, from even feeling the force of a temptation that to a boy born and reared, say, in the slums, would have been overwhelming. now, considering such things, i take it that it behooves us, as parents, to look closely at the sort of persons that we are, clear inside of us. to examine, as if with the clear eyes of our own children, waiting to be clouded by our sophistries, the motives from which we habitually act in the small affairs of everyday life. are we influenced by fear of what the neighbors will say? have we one standard of courtesy for company times, and another for private moments? if so, why? are we self-indulgent about trifles? are we truthful in spirit as well as in letter? do we permit ourselves to cheat the street-car and the railroad company, teaching the child at our side to sit low that he may ride for half-fare? do we seek justice in our bargaining, or are we sharp and self-considerate? do we practice democracy, or only talk it and wave the flag at it? and so on with a hundred other questions as to those small repeated acts, which, springing from base motives, may put our unconscious influence with our children in the already over-weighted down-side of the scale; or met bravely and nobly, at some expense of convenience, may help to enlighten the weight of inherited evil. sometimes i wonder how much of what we call inherited evil is the result not of heredity at all, but of this sort of unconscious education. answers to questions the self-distrustful child. "your question is an excellent one. the answer to it is really contained in your answer to the question about obedience. if a child obey _laws_ not persons, and is steadily shown the reasonableness of what is required of him, he comes to trust those laws and to trust himself when he is conscious of obeying. but in addition to this general training, it might be well to give a self-distrustful child easy work to do--work well within his ability--then to praise him for performing it; give him something a little harder, but still within his reach, and so on, steadily calling on him for greater and greater effort, but seeing to it that the effort is not too great and that it bears visible fruit. he should never be allowed to be discouraged; and when he droops over his work, some strong, friendly help may well he given him. sensitive, conscientious children, such as i imagine you were, are sometimes overwhelmed in this way by parents, quite unconscious of the pain they are giving by assigning tasks that are beyond the strength and courage of the young toilers. "at the same time, much might be done by training the child's attention from _product_ to _process_. you know the st. louis fair does not aim to show what has been done, but _how_ things are done. so a child--so you--can find happiness and intellectual uplift in studying the laws at work under the simplest employment instead of counting the number of things _finished_." company ways "a boy who is visiting us is so beset with rules and 'nagged' even by glances and nudges, that i wonder that he is not bewildered and rebellious. he seems good and pleasant and obedient ( years old), but i keep wondering why?" "perhaps these were company ways inspired by an over-anxiety on his mother's part that he should appear well. oh, i have been so tempted in this direction!--for of course people look at my children to see if they prove the truth of my teachings, and as they are vigorous, free and active youngsters, with decided characteristics they often do the most unexpected and uncomfortable things! there must be good points both in the boy himself--the boy you mention--and in his training which offset the bad effects of the 'nagging' you notice--and possibly the nagging itself may not be customary when he is at home. and perhaps the mother knows that you are a close observer of children." theory before practice "there is only one danger in learning about the training of children in advance of their advent, and that is the danger of being too sure of ourselves--too systematic. the best training is that which is most invisible--which leaves the child most in freedom. almost the whole duty of mothers is to provide the right environment and then just love and enjoy the child as he moves and grows in it. but to do this apparently easy thing requires so much simplicity and directness of vision and most of us are so complex and confused that considerable training and considerable effort are required to put us into the right attitude. "for myself, soon after i took my kindergarten training, which i did with three babies creeping and playing about the schoolroom, i read george meredith's 'ordeal of richard feveril' (referred to on p. , part i) and felt that that book was an excellent counter-balance, saving me, in the nick of time, from imposing any system, however perfect, upon my children. perhaps you will enjoy reading it, too." the emotional appeal "doing right from love of parent may easily become too strong a factor and too much reliance may be placed upon it. there are few dangers in child training more real than the danger of over working the emotional appeal. you do not wish your child to form the habit of working for approval, do you?" the food question "the food question can be met in less direct ways with your young baby. no food but that which is good for him need be seen. it is seldom good to have so young a child come to the family table. it is better he would have his own meals, so that he is satisfied with proper foods before the other appears. or, if he must eat when you do, let him have a little low table to himself, spread with his own pretty little dishes and his own chair, with perhaps a doll for companion or playmate. from this level he cannot see or be tempted by the viands on the large table; yet, if his table is near your chair you can easily reach and serve him. it is a real torment to a young child to see things he must not touch or eat, and it is a perfectly unnecessary source of trouble. "my four children ate at such a low table till the oldest was eight years old, when he was promoted to our table, and the others followed in due order." air castles "what a wonderful reader you were as a child! and certainly the books you mention were far beyond you. yet i can not quite agree that the habit of air-castle building is pernicious. indeed i believe in it. it needs only to be balanced by practical effort, directed towards furnishing an earthly foundation for the castle. build, then, as high and splendid as you like, and love them so hard that you are moved to lay a few stones on the solid earth as a beginning of a more substantial structure; and some day you may wake to find some of your castles coming true. those practical foundation stones underlying a tremendous tower of idealism have a genuine magic power. build all you like about your baby, for instance. think what things mary pondered in her heart. "no, i'm never worried about idealism except when it is contented with itself and makes but little effort at outward realization. but the fact that you are taking this course proves that you will work to realize your ideals. "i don't think it very bad either to read to 'kill time.' though if you go on having a family, you won't have any time to kill in a very little while. but do read on when you can, otherwise you may be shut in, first you know, to too small a world, and a mother needs to draw her own nourishment from _all_ the world, past and present." duty to oneself "yes, i should say you were distinctly precocious, and that you are almost certainly suffering from the effects of that early brilliancy. but the degree was not so great as to permanently injure you, especially if you see what is the matter, and guard against repeating the mistakes of your parents. i mean that you can now treat your own body and mind and nerves as you wish they had treated them. pretend that you are your own little child, and deal with yourself tenderly and gently, making allowances for the early strain to which you were subjected. so few of us american women, with our alert minds, and our puritanic consciences, have the good sense and self-control to refrain from driving ourselves; and if, as often happens, we have formed the bad habit early in life, reform is truly difficult, but not impossible. we can get the good of our disability by conscientiously driving home the principle that in order to 'love others as ourselves' we must learn to _love ourselves as we love others_. we have literally no right to be unreasonably exacting toward ourselves,--but perhaps i am taking too much upon myself by preaching outside the realm of child study." the mother and the teacher "your paper has been intensely interesting to me. i have always held that a true teacher was really a mother, though of a very large flock, just as a true mother is really a teacher, though of a very small school. the two points of view complete each other and i doubt if either mother or teacher can see truly without the other. they tell us, you know, that our two eyes, with their slight divergence of position, are necessary to make us, see things as having more than one side; and the mother and the teacher, one seeing the individual child, the other the child as the member of the race, need each other to see the child as the complex, many-sided individual he really is. "in your school, do you manage to get the mothers to co-operate? here, i am trying to get near my children's teachers. they try, too; but it is not altogether easy for any of us. we need some common meeting ground--some neutral activity which we could share. if you have any suggestions, i shall be glad to have them. of course, i visit school and the teachers visit me, and we are friendly in an arm's length sort of fashion. that is largely because they believe in corporal punishment and practice it freely and it is hard for us to look straight at each other over this disagreement." corporal punishment. to the matron of a girls' orphan asylum "now to the specific questions you ask. my answers must, of course, be based upon general principles--the special application, often so very difficult a matter, must be left to you. to begin with corporal punishment. you say you are 'personally opposed, but that your early training and the literal interpretation of solomon's rod keep you undecided.' surely your own comment later shows that part, at least, of the influence of your early training was _against_ corporal punishment, because you saw and felt its evils in yourself. such early training may have made you unapt in thinking of other means of discipline; but it can hardly have made you think of corporal punishment as _right_. "and how can anyone take solomon's rod any more literally than she does the savior's cross? we are bid, on a higher authority than solomon's proverbs, to take up our cross and follow him. this we all interpret figuratively. would you dream, for instance, of binding heavy crosses of wood upon the backs of your children because you felt yourselves so enjoined in the literal sense of the scriptures? why, then, take the rod literally? it is as clearly used to designate any form of orderly discipline as the cross is used to designate endurance of necessary sorrows. 'the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.' "as to your next question about quick results, i must recognize that you are in a most difficult position. for not the best conceivable intentions, nor the highest wisdom, can make the unnatural conditions you have to meet, as good as natural ones. in any asylum many purely artificial requirements must be made to meet the artificial situation. time and space, those temporal appearances, grow to be menacing monsters, take to themselves the chief realities. nevertheless, _so far as you are able_, you surely want to do the natural, right, unforced thing. and with each successful effort will come fresh wisdom and fresh strength for the next. "let me suggest, in the case you mention, of insolence, that three practical courses are open to you: one to send or lead the child quietly from the room, with the least aggressiveness possible, so as not further to excite her opposition, and to keep her apart from the rest until she is sufficiently anxious for society to be willing to make an effort to deserve it; or two, to do nothing, permitting a large and eloquent silence to accentuate the rebellious words; or three, to call for the condemnation of the child's mates. speaking to one or two whose response you are sure of first, ask each one present for a expression of opinion. this is so severe a punishment that it ought not often to be invoked; but it is deadly sure." stealing "the question of honesty is, indeed, most difficult. i do not think it would lower the standard of morality to _assume_ honesty, as the thing you expected to find, to accept almost any other explanation, to agree with the whole body of children that dishonesty was so much the fault of dreadfully poor people who had nothing unless they stole it, that it could not be their fault, who had so much--couldn't be the fault of anyone who was well brought up as they were. emphasize, in story and side allusion, at all sorts of odd moments when no concrete desire called away the children's minds, the fact that honesty is to be expected everywhere, except among terribly unfortunate people--of course assuming that they with their good shelter and good schooling are among the fortunate ones. then you will give each child not only plenty of everything, but things individualized, easily distinguished, and a place to put them in. i've often thought that the habit of buying things wholesale--so many dolls, all exactly alike, so many yards of calico for dresses, all exactly alike, leads, in institutions like yours, to a vague conception of private property, and even of individuality itself. if some room could be allowed for free choice--the children be allowed to buy their own calicoes, within a given price, or to choose the trimmings or style, etc. i feel sure the result would be a sturdier self-respect and a greater sense of that difference between individuals which needs emphasizing just as much as does the solidarity of individuals." bibliography books for mothers fundamental books (philosophy of education--pedagogy) the science of rights ($ . , postage c), j.g. fichte. education of man ($ . , postage c), friedrich froebel. mottoes and commentaries of froebel's mother play ($ . , postage c), translated by susan e. blow. the part played by infancy in the evolution of man ($ . , postage c), from "a century of science," article by john fiske. how gertrude teaches her children ($ . , postage c), pestalozzi. levana, bohn library ($ . , postage c), jean paul richter. education ($ . , postage c), herbert spencer. general books on education household education ($ . , postage c), harriet martineau. bits of talk about home matters ($ . , postage c), h.h. jackson. biography of a baby ($ . , postage c), millicent shinn. study of child nature ($ . , postage c), elizabeth harrison. two children of the foot hills ($ . , postage c), elizabeth harrison. the moral instruction of children ($ . , postage c), felix adler. the children of the future ($ . , postage c), nora a. smith. children's rights ($ . , postage c), kate douglas wiggin and nora a. smith. republic of childhood ( vols., each $ . ; postage c), kate douglas wiggin and nora a. smith. educational reformers ($ . , postage c), quick. lectures to kindergartners ($ . , postage c), elizabeth peabody. the place of the story in early education ($ . , postage c), sara e. wiltse. children's ways ($ . , postage c), sully. kindergarten and child culture papers ($ . , postage c), barnard. adolescence ( vols., $ . ; postage c), g. stanley hall. psychology and advanced the mind of the child ( vols., each $ . , postage c), w. preyer. the intellectual and moral development of the child ($ . , postage c), g. compayre. child study ($ . , postage c), amy tanner. the story of the mind ($ . , postage c), j. mark baldwin. psychology (briefer course, $ . ; postage c. advanced course, vols., $ . ; postage c), james. school and society ($ . , postage c), john dewey. emile ($ . , postage c), rousseau. pedagogics of the kindergarten ($ . , postage c), froebel. education by development ($ . , postage c), froebel. kindergarten and child culture papers, henry barnard. letters to a mother on the philosophy of froebel ($ . , postage c), blow. studies of childhood ($ . , postage c), sully. mental development ($ . , postage c), baldwin. education of central nervous system ($ . , postage c), halleck. child observations, imitative symbolic education ($ . , postage c), blow. interest as related to will ($ . , postage c), dewey. religious training christian nurture ($ . , postage c), horace bushnell. on holy ground ($ . , postage c), w.l. worcester. the psychology of religion ($ . , postage c), e.d. starbuck. the sex question the song of life ($ . , postage c), margaret morley. what a young boy ought to know ($ . , postage c), rev. sylvanus stall. what a young girl ought to know ($ . , postage c), rev. sylvanus stall. duties of parents to children in regard to sex ($ . , postage c), rev. wm. l. worcester. how to tell the story of reproduction to children, pamphlet c; order from mothers' union, harrison street, kansas city, mo. of general interest to mothers wilhelm meister ($ . , postage c), goethe. story of my life ($ . , postage c), helen keller. the ordeal of richard feveril ($ . , postage c), george meredith. up from slavery ($ . , postage c), booker t. washington. emmy lou ($ . , postage c), mrs. george madden marten. the golden age ($ . , postage c), kenneth grahame. dream days ($ . , postage c), kenneth grahame. in the morning glow ($ . , postage c), roy rolf gilson. man and his handiwork, wood. primitive industry ($ . , postage c), abbott. every day essays ($ . , postage c), marion foster washburne. family secrets ($ . , postage c), marion foster washburne. books for children fairy tales grimm's fairy tales ($ . , postage c). andrew lang's green, yellow, blue and red fairy books (each $ . , postage c). hans christian andersen's fairy tales ($ . , portage c). tanglewood tales ($ . , postage c), hawthorne. the wonder book ($ . , postage c), hawthorne. old fashioned fairy tales by tom hood, retold by marion foster washburne. (in press.) adventures of a brownie, by dinah maria mulock craik. edited by marion foster washburne. (in press.) a few books for various ages water babies ($ . , postage c), charles kingsley. at the back of the north wind ($ . , postage c), george mcdonald. little lame price ($ . , postage c), dinah maria mulock craik. in the child world ($ . , postage c), emilie poulson. nature myths ($ . , postage c), flora j. cooke. sharp eyes ($ . , postage c), gibson. stories mother nature told ($ . , postage c), jane andrew. jungle books ( vols, each $ . ; postage c), kipling. just-so stories ($ . , postage c), kipling. music for children finger plays ($ . , postage c), emilie poulson. fifty children's songs, reinecke. songs of the child world ( vols., each $ . ; postage c), gaynor. songs for the children ( vols., each $ . ; postage c), eleanor smith. selected studies (instrumental), ($ . , postage c), heller. pictures for children detaille prints, boutet de monvil, joan of arc. caldecott: picture books ( vols., each $ . ; postage c). walter crane: picture books ($ . , postage c). colored illustrations cut from magazines, notably those drawn by howard pyle, elizabeth shippen greene, and jessie wilcox smith. see articles in "craftsman" for december, , february and april, , "decorations for school room and nursery." _note_.--books in the above list may be purchased through the american school of home economics at the prices given. members of the school will receive students' discount. program for supplemental work on the study of child life by marion foster washburne. meeting i infancy. (study pages - ) (a) its meaning. see fiske on "the part played by infancy in the evolution of man" in "a century of science" ( c). (b) general laws of progression. see millicent shinn's "biography of a baby" ( c), and w. preyer's "the mind of the child" ( c). give resumes of these two books. (c) practical conclusions. hold experience meeting to conclude afternoon. meeting ii faults and their remedies. (study pages - ) (a) general principles of moral training. read herbert spencer on "education" ( c), chapter on "punishment"; also call for quotations from h.h. jackson's "bits of talk about home matters" ( c). (b) corporal punishment. why it is wrong. (c) positive versus negative moral training. read extracts from froebel's "education of man" ( c), and richter's "levana" ( c), kate douglas wiggin's "children's rights" ( c), and elizabeth harrison's "study of child nature" ( c), are easier and pleasanter reading, sound, but less fundamental. choice may be made between these two sets of books, according to conditions. (select answer to test questions on part i and send them to the school.) meeting iii character building. (study pages - ) read extracts from froebel, pestalozzi, and harriet martineau. (a) from froebel to show general principles ( c). (b) from pestalozzi ( c) or if that is not available, from "mottoes and commentaries on froebel's mother-play" ( c), to show ideal application of these general principles. (c) from harriet martineau's "household education" ( c), "children's rights" ( c), to show actual application of these general principles. experience meeting. meeting iv educational value of play and occupations. (study pages - ) (a) general principles--quote authorities from past to present. read from "education of man" ( c) and "mother play" ( c). (b) representative and symbolic plays. see "education of man" ( c) and "letters to a mother on the philosophy of froebel" ( c). dancing and drama from richter's "levana" ( c). (c) nature's playthings (earth, air, fire, and water). ask members of class to describe plays of their own childhood and tell what they meant to them. (select answer to test questions on part ii.) meeting v art and literature in child life. (study pages - ) ask members to bring good pictures and story-books, thus making exhibit. (a) place of pictures in children's lives. of color. of modeling. influence of artistic surroundings. if anyone knows of a model nursery or schoolroom, let her describe it. are drawing and modeling at school "fads" or living bases for educational processes? see dewey on "the school and society" ( c). (b) place of fiction in education. see "the place of the story in early education" ( c). (c) accomplishments. practical discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of music lessons, the languages, and other work out of school. see "adolescence," by g. stanley hall. meeting vi social and religious training. (study pages - and supplement) (a) the question of associations. see dewey's "the school and society" ( c), "the republic of childhood" ( c). quote "up from slavery" ( c) and "story of my life" ( c), to show that the humblest companions may sometimes be the most desirable. (b) the new education. see catalogues of the francis w. parker school, chicago, ill., ( c); the elementary school, university of chicago, ( c); state normal school, hyannis, mass., ( c); "school gardens," bulletin no. , office of experiment stations, department of agriculture, washington, d.c., ( c). (c) the sex question. where are the foundations of morality laid--church, school, home, or street? read entire, "duties of parents to children in regard to sex" (pamphlet, c). (d) religious training. read from "christian nurture" ( c) and "psychology of religion" ( c). (select answer to test questions on part iii.) for more extended program, book lists for mothers, children's book list, loan papers, send to the national congress of mothers, mrs. e.c. grice, corresponding secretary, arch street, philadelphia, pa. price, cents each. see also "the child in home, school, and state," with address by president roosevelt.--report of the n.c.m. for . price, c. note.--when reference books mentioned in the foregoing program are not available from public libraries, they may be borrowed of the a.s.h.e. for the cost of postage indicated in parentheses. three books may be borrowed at one time by a class, one by an individual. for class work, a book may be kept for two weeks, or longer, if there is no other call for it. send stamps with requests, which should be made several weeks in advance to avoid disappointment. index abnormal laziness, abstract studies, accomplishments and studies, showy, accounts, personal, adolescence, religious excitability, adult's world, advantage of positive commands, affections, cultivation of, aims of kindergarten, air as a plaything, castles, allowance, regular, alternate growth of children, anaemia, answer honest questions, answers to questions, application of principles, aristotle's teachings, art and literature in child life, and nature, classic, influence of, plastic, associates, children's, exclusive, baby-jumpers, bandaging the abdomen, beginnings of will, bible, children's, bible lessons made real, study, bonfires, books for children, , bottle-fed babies, breaking the will, busy work, care of pets, cause of impudence, of irritability and nervousness, of rupture, of temper, character building, rules in, children, other people's, children's associates, bible, clubs, value of, hour, the, child's share in family republic, world, classic art, clay modeling, climbing, clothing, proper, color, colored pictures, commands, disagreeable, positive, useless, company ways, conclusion, condition at birth, consciousness of self, corporal punishment, , correlation of studies, correspondence training, costume model, creeping, cultivate affections, cutting and pasting, daily outing, dancing for children, danger of forcing, dangerous pastimes, darwin's observations, depravity, original, development of intellect, premature, diagram of gertrude suit, diet, simple, disadvantages of sunday schools, disagreeable commands, discipline, educative, disobedience, real, double standard of morality, double standards, drama, dramatic games, plays, drawing and painting, dress for play, dress, proper, duties, systematized, duty to one's self, education, the new, scientific, educational beginnings, exercises, value of play, educative discipline, effect of sunday school teaching, emergencies, enthusiasm, religious, "enthusiasms", essentials of play, evasive lying, evils, permanent, resulting from corporal punishment, example, bad, courteous, evil, versus precept, , exclusive associates, fairy tales, family republic, fathers, responsibilities of, fatigue harmful to children, faults and their remedies, real, temporary, fear versus love, feeding, indiscriminate, financial training, fire as a plaything, first grasping, fiske's doctrine of right, teachings, food, natural, question, undesired, forcing, danger of, fresh air, froebel's great motto, philosophy, fundamental principles of the new education, games, dramatic, gardens for children, gertrude suit, goodness, original, goodness, negative, grasping, , growth of children, of will, helping, mother, home kindergarten, how the child develops, imagination and sympathy, imitativeness, instinct of, imaginative lying, immature judgment, impudence, cause of, incomplete development at birth, indiscriminate feeding, punishment, industry, willing, influence of art, inherited crookedness, disposition, instinct, of imitativeness, instrumental music, intellect, development of, irritability, cause of, jealousy, justice and love in the family, kindergarten, aims of, as a remedy for selfishness, methods, methods in the home, social advantages of, knit garments, law-making habit, laziness, liberty, , limitations of words, literature, and art, looking, love of work, versus fear, low voice commands, lungs, weak, luther's teachings, lying, evasive, imaginative, kinds of, politic, magazines for children, magic lantern, massage, meaning of righteousness, model costume, modeling apron, clay, monotony undesirable, moral precocity, training, object of, mother and teacher, mother, teaching, mothers as teachers, mud pies, muscular development, music for children, instrumental, study of, mystery of sex, nagging, naps, natural food, punishment, talent, nature study, negative goodness, neighbors' opinions, nervousness, cause of, new education, the, principles of, normal child, nursery requisites, object of moral training, of punishment, objection to pinning blanket, obligation of truthfulness, occupations, only child, the, opportunity for growth, order of development, other people's children, outing, daily, painting and drawing, parental indulgence, vanity, pasting and cutting, permanent evils, personal accounts, pets, care of, physical cause of laziness, culture, culture records, philosophy, froebel's, pictures, colored, pinning blanket, objection to, plastic art, play, educational value of, essentials of, with the limbs, politeness to children, politic lie, the, positive commands, , precautions to prevent attacks of temper, with fire, precocity, moral, premature development, preyer's record, , principles, application of, prohibitions, useless, punishment, corporal, indiscriminate, natural, object of, self, questions, answers to, quick temper, real disobedience, faults, reflex grasping, regular allowance, religious enthusiasm, excitability of adolescence, training, remedy for fits of temper, responsibilities of fathers, restrictions of dress, rhythmic movements, richter's views, , right doing, made easy, righteousness, meaning of, right material for play, rights of others, rules in character building, rupture, cause of, sand piles, scientific education, self-distrustful child, selfishness, self-mastery, punishment, sewing, sex, mystery of, question, the, showy accomplishments, simple diet, sleep, sufficient, social advantages of kindergarten, soft spot in head, solitude remedy for temper, songs for children, spencer's view, spending foolishly, wisely, standard of morality, double, standing, stanley hall's views, stealing, stockinet for undergarments, story telling, studies, abstract, and accomplishments, correlation of, success in child training, sullenness, sunday school, disadvantage of, effect of, teachers, sunlight necessary for growth, sympathy and imagination, in play, symptoms of anaemia, systematized duties, talent, natural, teaching mother, telling stories, temperament, emotional, temperature of nursery, temper, cause of, precautions to prevent attacks of, temporary faults, theater, theory before practice, thermometer in nursery, throwing, tiedemann's teachings, touching forbidden things, toys, , , training, financial, for parents, religious, truthfulness, obligations of, unconscious influence, underclothing, undesired food, undisciplined will, unresponsiveness, unsought advice, untidiness, its remedy, useless commands, prohibitions, value of children's clubs, vanity, parental, variable periods of growth, ventilation, means of, walking, water as a plaything, colors, weak lungs, weight at birth, wholesome surroundings, will, beginnings of, breaking, the, growth of, willful child, willing industry, will, undisciplined, work, beautiful, love of, wrappings, extra, autobiography of friedrich froebel translated and annotated by emilie michaelis, _head mistress of the croydon kindergarten and preparatory school_, and h. keatley moore, mus. bac., b.a., _examiner in music to the froebel society and vice-chairman of the croydon kindergarten company._ *"come, let us live for our children."* syracuse, n.y.: c.w. bardeen, publisher. . german books on pedagogy. . _comenius. grosse unterrichtslehre._ mit einer einleitung, "j. comenius, sein leben und werken," von lindner. price $ . . . _helvetius. von menschen, seinen geisteskraften und seiner erziehung._ mit einer einleitung, "cl. adr. helvetius, - . ein zeit- und lebensbild," von lindner. mo, pp. . price $ . . . _pestalozzi. wie gertrud ihre kinder lehrt._ mit einer einleitung, "j.h. pestalozzi's leben, werke, und grundsätze," von riedel. price $ . . . _niemeyer. grundsätze die erziehung und des unterrichtes._ mit einer einleitung "aug. herm. niemeyer, sein leben und werken," von lindner. vols. price $ . . . _diesterweg. rhenische blätter._ mit einer einleitung, "f.a.w. diesterweg," von jessen. price $ . . . _jacotot. universal unterricht._ mit einer "darstellung des lebens und der lehre jacotot's," von goering. mo, pp. . price $ . . . _fröbel._ pädagogische schriften. herausgegeben von seidel. vols. price $ . . . _fichte._ pädagogisch schriften und ideen. mit "biographischer einleitung und gedrängter darstellung von fichte's pädagogik," von keferstein. price $ . . . _martin luther._ pädagogische schrifte. mit einleitung von schumann. price $ . . . _herder als pädagog._ von morres. price cts. . _geschichte der pädagogik._ in biographen, uebersichten, und proben aus pädagogischen hauptwerken. von niedergesaess. price $ . . . _lexikon der pädagogik._ von sander. price $ . . for sale by *c.w. bardeen, publisher, syracuse, n.y.* preface to the american edition. it will be long before we have a biography of froebel to compare with deguimp's _pestalozzi_, of which an english translation has just appeared. meantime we must content ourselves with two long autobiographical letters contained in this volume, which, though incomplete, have yet the peculiar charm that comes from the candid record of genuine impressions. the first of these letters, that to the duke of meiningen, has already appeared in english, in a translation by miss lucy wheelock for barnard's _american journal of education_, since reprinted in pp. - of his _kindergarten and child culture_, (see p. ), and in a small volume under the title _autobiography of froebel_ (see p. ). while a faithful attempt to reproduce the original, this translation struggled in vain to transform froebel's rugged and sometimes seemingly incoherent sentences into adequate and attractive english, so that the long letter has proved to most english readers formidable and repellant. but in the original it is one of the most charming productions in literature, candid and confidential in tone, and detailing those inner gropings for ideas that became convictions which only an autobiography can reveal. these qualities are so admirably preserved in the translation by miss emily michaelis and h. keatley moore that it seemed to leave nothing to be desired. they have not only given a faithful rendering, but they have impressed upon it the loving touch of faithful disciples. accordingly i purchased from the english publishers the american rights to this translation; and have reproduced not only this letter, but that to the philosopher krause, with barop's "critical moments," and the "chronological abstract," all from duplicates of the english plates. the rest of the volume appears for the first time. the bibliography seemed desirable, and is confined to attainable books likely to be of value to american teachers. the index is full, but not fuller than the fragmentary character of the material seemed to require. the table of contents will also serve to make reference easy to the principal evens of froebel's history. in the lives of pestalozzi and of froebel many resemblances may be traced. both were sons of clergymen. both were half-orphans from their earliest recollections. both were unhappy in childhood, were misunderstood, companionless, awkward, clumsy, ridiculed. both were as boys thrown into the almost exclusive society of women, and both retained to the last strongly feminine characteristics. both were throughout life lacking in executive ability; both were financially improvident. both were dependent for what they did accomplish upon friends, and both had the power of inspiring and retaining friendships that were heroic, pestalozzi's krüsi corresponding with froebel's middendorf. both became teachers only by accident, and after failure in other professions. both saw repeated disaster in the schools they established, and both were to their last days pointed at as visionary theorists of unsound mind. both failed to realize their ideas, but both planted their ideas so deeply in the minds of others that they took enduring root. both lacked knowledge of men, but both knew and loved children, and were happiest when personally and alone they had children under their charge. both delighted in nature, and found in solitary contemplation of flowers and woods and mountains relief from the disappointments they encountered among their fellows. but there were contrasts too. pestalozzi had no family ties, while froebel maintained to the last the closest relations with several brothers and their households. pestalozzi married at twenty-three a woman older than himself, on whom he thereafter relied in all his troubles. froebel deferred his marriage till thirty-six and then seems to have regarded his wife more as an advantage to his school than as a help-meet to himself. pestalozzi was diffident, and in dress and manner careless to the point of slovenliness; froebel was extravagant in his self-confidence, and at times almost a dandy in attire. pestalozzi was always honest and candid, while froebel was as a boy untruthful. pestalozzi was touchingly humble, and eager to ascribe the practical failure of his theories to his personal inefficiency; froebel never acknowledged himself in the wrong, but always attributed failure to external causes. on the other hand, while froebel was equable in temperament, pestalozzi was moody and impressionable, flying from extreme gaiety to extreme dejection, slamming the door if displeased with a lesson a teacher was giving, but coming back to apologize if he met a child who smiled upon him. under rousseau's influence pestalozzi was inclined to skepticism, and limited religious teaching in school to the reading of the gospels, and the practice of christianity; froebel was deeply pious, and made it fundamental that education should be founded plainly and avowedly upon religion. intellectually the contrast is even stronger. while froebel had a university education, pestalozzi was an eminently ignorant man; his penmanship was almost illegible, he could not do simple sums in multiplication, he could not sing, he could not draw, he wore out all his handkerchiefs gathering pebbles and then never looked at them afterward. froebel was not only a reader but a scientific reader, always seeking first to find out what others had discovered that he might begin where they left off; pestalozzi boasted that he had not read a book in forty years. naturally, therefore, pestalozzi was always an experimenter, profiting by his failures but always failing in his first attempts, and hitting upon his most characteristic principles by accident; while froebel was a theorist, elaborating his ideas mentally before putting them in practice, and never satisfied till he had properly located them in his general scheme of philosophy. and yet, curiously enough, it is pestalozzi who was the author. his "leonard and gertrude" was read by every cottage fireside, while froebel's writings were intelligible only to his disciples. pestalozzi had an exuberant imagination and delightful directness and simplicity of expression; froebel's style was labored and obscure, and his doctrines may be better known through the "child and child nature" of the baroness marenholz von buelow than through his own "education of man." the account of froebel's life given in this volume is supplemented somewhat by the "reminiscences" of this same baroness, who became acquainted with him in , and was thereafter his most enthusiastic and successful apostle. till some adequate biography appears, that volume and this must be relied upon for information of the man who shares equally with pestalozzi the honor of educational reform in this century. c.w. bardeen. syracuse, june , . comments upon froebel and his work. und als er so, wie wichard lange richtig sagt, der apostel des weiblichen gechlechts geworden war, starb er, der geniale, unermüdlich thätige, von liebe getragene mann.--schmidt, _geschichte der pädagogik_, cöthen, , iv. . en résumé, rousseau aurait pu être déconcerté par les inventions pratiques, un peu subtiles parfois, de l'ingénieux froebel. il eût souri, comme tout le monde, des artifices par lesquels il obligeait l'enfant à se faire acteur au milieu de ses petits camarades, à imiter tour à tour le soldat qui monte la garde, le cordonnier qui travaille, le cheval qui piétine, l'homme fatigué qui se repose. mais, sur les principes, il se serait mis aisément d'accord avec l'auteur de _l'education de l'homme_, avec un penseur à l'âme tendre et noble, qui remplaçait les livres par les choses, qui à une instruction pédantesque substituait l'éducation intérieure, qui aux connaissances positives préférait la chaleur du sentiment, la vie intime et profonde de l'âme, qui respectait la liberté et la spontanéité de l'enfant, qui enfin s'efforçait d'écarter de lui les mauvaises influences et de faire à son innocence un milieu digne d'elle--compayrÉ's _histoire critique des doctrines de l'Éducation en france depuis le xvime siécle_, paris, , ii. . we might say that his effort in pedagogy consists chiefly in organizing into a system the sense intuitions which pestalozzi proposed to the child somewhat at random and without direct plan.--compayrÉ's _history of pedagogy_, payne's translation, boston, , p. . er war gleich pestalozzi von den höchsten ideen der zeit getragen und suchte die erziehung an diese ideen anzuknüpfen. so lange die mutter nicht nach den gesetzen der natur ihr kind erzieht und bildet und dafür nicht ihr leben einsetst, so lange--davon geht er aus--sind alle reformen der schule auf sand gebaut. trotsdem verlegt er einen theil der mütterlichen aufgabe in den kindergarten, in welchem er die kinder vor ihre schulpflichtigkeit vereinigt wissen will, ( ) um auf die häusliche erziehung ergänzend und verbessernd einzuwirken, ( ) um das kind aus dem einzelleben heraus zum verkehr mil seinesgleichen zu führen, und ( ) um dem weiblichen geschlechte gelegenheit zu geben, sich auf seinen erzieherischen beruf vorzubereiten.--bÖhm's _kurzgefasste geschichte der pädagogik_, nürnberg, , p. . le jardin d'enfants est évidemment en opposition avec l'idée fondamentale de pestalozzi; car celui-ci avait confié entièrement à la mère et au foyer domestique la tâche que froebel remet, en grande partie, aux jardins d'enfants et à sa directrice. a l'égard des rapports de l'éducation domestique, telle qui elle est à l'heure qu'il est, on doit reconnaître que froebel avait un coup-d'oeil plus juste que pestalozzi.--_histoire d'Éducation_, frederick dittes, redolfi's french translation, paris, , p. . while others have taken to the work of education their own pre-conceived notions of what that work should be, froebel stands consistently alone in seeking in the nature of the child the laws of educational action--in ascertaining from the child himself how we are to educate him.--joseph payne, _lectures on the science and art of education_, syracuse, , p. . years afterwards, the celebrated jahn (the "father jahn" of the german gymnastics) told a berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who made all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. this queer fellow was froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the solitary rambles in the forest. as the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children,--he merely superintends the development of inborn faculties. so far froebel agrees with pestalozzi; but in one respect he was beyond him, and has thus become, according to michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. pestalozzi said that the faculties were developed by exercise. froebel added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing _voluntary activity_. action proceeding from inner impulse (_selbsthäligkeit_) was the one thing needful, and here froebel as usual refers to god: "god's every thought is a work, a deed." as god is the creator, so must man be a creator also. living acting, conceiving,--these must form a triple cord within every child of man, though the sound now of this string, now of that may preponderate, and then again of two together. pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; fichte on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. froebel, whose mind, like that of frederick maurice, delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that "all progress lay through opposites to their reconciliations," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common life and in well-organized common employments. these assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. so he invented the term _kindergarten_, garden of children, and called the superintendents "children's gardeners."--r.h. quick, in _encyclopaedia britannica_, xix edition. table of contents. page introductory , letter to the duke of meiningen - birth and early life , enters the girls' school goes away from home to stadt-ihm is apprenticed to a forester returns to his father's house goes to the university of jena , returns home again goes to bamberg as clerk becomes land-surveyor goes to the oberfalz as accountant soon after to mecklenberg gets small inheritance from his uncle goes to frankfurt , becomes teacher in the model school , visits pestalozzi resigns to become a private tutor , takes his three pupils to yverdon returns to frankfurt goes to the university of göttingen , goes to berlin , enters the army , , becomes curator in berlin , , enlists in the army again , supplementary remarks by the translators , letter to krause - begins at griesheim his ideal work , undertakes education of his nephews moves to keilhau , note by the translators critical moments in the froebel community - froebel goes to the wartensee then to willisau , then to the orphanage at burgdorf , visits berlin notes by the translators , death of froebel chronological abstract of froebel's life and movement - bibliography of froebel - index - introductory. the year was the centenary of froebel's birth, and in the present "plentiful lack" of faithful translations of froebel's own words we proposed to the froebel society to issue a translation of the "education of man," which we would undertake to make at our own cost, that the occasion might be marked in a manner worthy of the english branch of the kindergarten movement. but various reasons prevented the society from accepting our offer, and the lamentable deficiency still continues. we have therefore endeavoured to make a beginning by the present work, consisting of froebel's own words done into english as faithfully as we know how to render them, and accompanied with any brief explanation of our own that may be essential to the clear understanding of the passages given. we have not attempted to rewrite our author, the better to suit the practical, clear-headed, common-sense english character, but have preferred simply to present him in an english dress with his national and personal peculiarities untouched. in so doing we are quite aware that we have sacrificed interest, for in many passages, if not in most, a careful paraphrase of froebel would be much more intelligible and pithy to english readers than a true rendering, since he probably possesses every fault of style except over-conciseness; but we feel that it is better to let froebel speak for himself. for the faithfulness of translation we hope our respective nationalities may have stood us in good stead. we would, however, add that a faithful translation is not a verbal translation. the translator should rather strive to write each sentence as the author would have written it in english. froebel's opinions, character, and work grow so directly out of his life, that we feel the best of his writing that a student of the kindergarten system could begin with is the important autobiographical "letter to the duke of meiningen," written in the year , but never completed, and in all probability never sent to the sovereign whose name it bears. that this is the course froebel would himself have preferred will, we think, become quickly apparent to the reader. besides, in the boyhood and the earliest experiences of froebel's life, we find the sources of his whole educational system. that other children might be better understood than he was, that other children might have the means to live the true child-life that was denied to himself, and that by their powers being directed into the right channels, these children might become a blessing to themselves and to others, was undoubtedly in great part the motive which induced froebel to describe so fully all the circumstances of his peculiar childhood. we should undoubtedly have a clearer comprehension of many a great reformer if he had taken the trouble to write out at length the impressions of his life's dawn, as froebel has done. in froebel's particular case, moreover, it is evident that although his account of himself is unfinished, we fortunately possess all that is most important for the understanding of the origin of the kindergarten system. after the "letter to the duke of meiningen," we have placed the shorter account of his life which froebel included in a letter to the philosopher krause. a sketch of barop's, which varies the point of view by regarding the whole movement more in its outer aspect than even froebel himself is able to do, seemed to us also desirable to translate; and finally we have added also a carefully prepared "chronology" extended from lange's list. our translation is made from the edition of froebel's works published by dr. wichard lange at berlin in . emilie michaelis. h. keatley moore. the croydon kindergarten, _january _. autobiography of froebel. (a letter to the duke of meiningen.) i was born at oberweissbach, a village in the thuringian forest, in the small principality of schwarzburg-rudolstadt, on the st april, . my father was the principal clergyman, or pastor, there.[ ] (he died in .) i was early initiated into the conflict of life amidst painful and narrowing circumstances; and ignorance of child-nature and insufficient education wrought their influence upon me. soon after my birth my mother's health began to fail, and after nursing me nine months she died. this loss, a hard blow to me, influenced the whole environment and development of my being: i consider that my mother's death decided more or less the external circumstances of my whole life. the cure of five thousand souls, scattered over six or seven villages, devolved solely on my father. this work, even to a man so active as my father, who was very conscientious in the fulfilment of his duty as minister, was all-absorbing; the more so since the custom of frequent services still prevailed. besides all this, my father had undertaken to superintend the building of a large new church, which drew him more and more from his home and from his children. i was left to the care of the servants; but they, profiting by my father's absorption in his work, left me, fortunately for me, to my brothers, who were somewhat older than myself.[ ] this, in addition to a circumstance of my later life, may have been the cause of that unswerving love for my family, and especially for my brothers, which has, to the present moment, been of the greatest importance to me in the conduct of my life. although my father, for a village pastor, was unusually well informed--nay, even learned and experienced--and was an incessantly active man, yet in consequence of this separation from him during my earliest years i remained a stranger to him throughout my life; and in this way i was as truly without a father as without a mother. amidst such surroundings i reached my fourth year. my father then married again, and gave me a second mother. my soul must have felt deeply at this time the want of a mother's love,--of parental love,--for in this year occurs my first consciousness of self. i remember that i received my new mother overflowing with feelings of simple and faithful child-love towards her. these sentiments made me happy, developed my nature, and strengthened me, because they were kindly received and reciprocated by her. but this happiness did not endure. soon my step-mother rejoiced in the possession of a son of her own;[ ] and then her love was not only withdrawn entirely from me and transferred to her own child, but i was treated with worse than indifference--by word and deed, i was made to feel an utter stranger. i am obliged here to mention these circumstances, and to describe them so particularly, because in them i see the first cause of my early habit of introspection, my tendency to self-examination, and my early separation from companionship with other men. soon after the birth of her own son, when i had scarcely entered my boyhood, my step-mother ceased to use the sympathetic, heart-uniting "thou" in speaking to me, and began to address me in the third person, the most estranging of our forms of speech. and as in this mode of address the third person, "he," isolates the person addressed, it created a great chasm between my step-mother and me.[ ] at the beginning of my boyhood, i already felt utterly lonely, and my soul was filled with grief. some coarse-minded people wished to make use of my sentiments and my mood at this time to set me against my step-mother, but my heart and mind turned with indignation from these persons, whom i thenceforth avoided, so far as i was able. thus i became, at an early age, conscious of a nobler, purer, inner-life, and laid the foundation of that proper self-consciousness and moral pride which have accompanied me through life. temptations returned from time to time, and each time took a more dangerous form: not only was i suspected as being capable of unworthy things, but base conduct was actually charged against me, and this in such a way as left no doubt of the impropriety of the suspicion and of the untruthfulness of the accusation. so it came to pass that in the first years of my boyhood i was perforce led to live to myself and in myself--and indeed to study my own being and inner consciousness, as opposed to external circumstances. my inward and my outward life were at that time, even during play and other occupations, my principal subjects for reflection and thought. a notable influence upon the development and formation of my character was also exercised by the position of my parents' house. it was closely surrounded by other buildings, walls, hedges, and fences, and was further enclosed by an outer courtyard, a paddock, and a kitchen garden. beyond these latter i was strictly forbidden to pass. the dwelling had no other outlook than on to the buildings to right and left, the big church in front, and at the back the sloping fields stretching up a high hill. for a long time i remained thus deprived of any distant view: but above me i saw the sky, clear and bright as we so often find it in the hill country; and around me i felt the pure fresh breeze stirring. the impression which that clear sky and that pure air then made on me has remained ever since present to my mind. my perceptions were in this manner limited to only the nearest objects. nature, with the world of plants and flowers, so far as i was able to see and understand her, early became an object of observation and reflection to me. i soon helped my father in his favourite occupation of gardening, and in this way received many permanent perceptions; but the consciousness of the real life in nature only came to me further on, and i shall return to the point hereafter in the course of my narrative. our domestic life at this time gave me much opportunity for occupation and reflection. many alterations went on in our house; both my parents were exceedingly active-minded, fond of order, and determined to improve their dwelling in every possible way. i had to help them according to my capacity, and soon perceived that i thereby gained strength and experience; while through this growth of strength and experience my own games and occupations became of greater value to me. but from my life in the open air amongst the objects of nature, and from the externals of domestic life, i must now turn to the inner aspects of my home and family. my father was a theologian of the old school, who held knowledge and science in less estimation than faith; but yet he endeavoured to keep pace with the times. for this purpose he subscribed to the best periodicals he could obtain, and carefully examined what information they offered him. this helped not a little to elevate and enlighten the old-fashioned truly christian life which reigned in our family. morning and evening all its members gathered together, and even on sunday as well, although on that day divine service would of course also call upon us to assemble for common religious worship. zollikofer, hermes, marezoll, sturm, and others, turned our thoughts, in those delightful hours of heavenly meditation, upon our innermost being, and served to quicken, unfold, and raise up the life of the soul within us. thus my life was early brought under the influence of nature, of useful handiwork, and of religious feelings; or, as i prefer to say, the primitive and natural inclinations of every human being were even in my case also tenderly fostered in the germ. i must mention here, with reference to my ideas regarding the nature of man, to be treated of later, and as throwing light upon my professional and individual work, that at this time i used repeatedly, and with deep emotion, to resolve to try and be a good and brave man. as i have heard since, this firm inward resolution of mine was in flagrant contrast with my outward life. i was full of youthful energy and in high spirits, and did not always know how properly to moderate my vivacity. through my want of restraint i got into all kinds of scrapes. often, in my thoughtlessness, i would destroy the things i saw around me, in the endeavour to investigate and understand them. my father was prevented by his manifold occupations from himself instructing me. besides, he lost all further inclination to teach me, after the great trouble he found in teaching me to read--an art which came to me with great difficulty. as soon as i could read, therefore, i was sent to the public village school. the position in which my father stood to the village schoolmasters, that is to say, to the cantor,[ ] and to the master of the girls' school, and his judgment of the value of their respective teaching, decided him to send me to the latter. this choice had a remarkable influence on the development of my inner nature, on account of the perfect neatness, quiet, intelligence, and order which reigned in the school; nay, i may go further, and say the school was exactly suitable for such a child as i was. in proof of this i will describe my entrance into the school. at that time church and school generally stood in strict mutual relationship, and so it was in our case. the school children had their special places in church; and not only were they obliged to attend church, but each child had to repeat to the teacher, at a special class held for the purpose every monday, some passage of scripture used by the minister in his sermon of the day before, as a proof of attention to the service. from these passages that one which seemed most suitable to children was then chosen for the little ones to master or to learn by heart, and for that purpose one of the bigger children had during the whole week, at certain times each day, to repeat the passage to the little children, sentence by sentence. the little ones, all standing up, had then to repeat the text sentence by sentence in like manner, until it was thoroughly imprinted on their memories. i came into school on a monday. the passage chosen for that week was, "seek ye first the kingdom of god." i heard these words every day in the calm, serious, somewhat sing-song voices of the children, sometimes repeated by one child, sometimes by the whole number. and the text made an impression upon me such as none had ever done before and none ever did after. indeed, this impression was so vigorous and permanent, that to this day every word spoken, with the special tone and expression then given to it, is still vivid in my mind. and yet that is now nearly forty years ago! perhaps even then the simple boy's heart felt that these words would be the foundation and the salvation of his life, bringing to him that conviction which was to become later on to the working and striving man a source of unconquerable courage, of unflinching, ever-ready, and cheerful self-sacrifice. in short, my introduction into that school was my birth into the higher spiritual life. here i break off my narrative to ask myself whether i dare venture to pause yet a little longer over this first period of my life. but this was the time when the buds began to unfold on my tree of life; this was the time when my heart found its pivot-point, and when first my inner life awoke. if, then, i succeed in giving an exact description of my early boyhood, i shall have provided an important aid to the right understanding of my life and work as a man. for that reason i venture to dwell at some inordinate length on this part of my life, and the more willingly since i can pass more quickly over later periods. it often suggests itself to me, while thus reviewing and describing my life, just as it does with teaching and education--namely, that those things which are by most men thrown aside as common and unimportant are the very things which are, as i take it, of weightiest import. in my eyes, it is always a mistake to leave a gap in the rudimentary and fundamental part of a subject. still i know one may exhaust the patience of a reader by touching on every minute detail, before he has been permitted to glance at the whole picture and to gather its scope and object. therefore i beg your highness[ ] to pass over, at all events on the first reading, anything that may appear too long and too detailed. against standing rules, i was received in the girls' school, on account of the position of my father as pastor of the district. for the same reason i was placed, not with the pupils of my own age, but close to the teacher, which brought me among the elder girls. i joined in their lessons as far as i could. in two subjects i was quite able to do this. first, i could read the bible with them; and, secondly, i had to learn line by line, instead of the little texts of the younger children already spoken of, the hymns for the following sunday's service. of these, two especially light up the gloomy lowering dawn of my early boyhood, like two brilliant stars. they are--"schwing dich auf, mein herz und geist," and "es kostet viel ein christ zu sein."[ ] these hymns were hymns of life to me. i found my own little life expressed therein; and they took such a hold upon me that often in later years i have found strength and support in the message which they carried to my soul. my father's home life was in complete harmony with this discipline of the school. although divine service was held twice on sundays, i was but very seldom allowed to miss attending each service. i followed my father's sermons with great attention, partly because i thought i found in them many allusions to his own position, profession, and life. looking back, i consider it of no slight importance that i used to hear the service from the vestry, because i was there separated from the congregation, and could the better keep my attention from wandering. i have already mentioned that my father belonged to the old orthodox school of theology; and in consequence the language both of his hymns and of his sermons was mystical and symbolic--a style of speech which, in more than one sense, i should call a stone-language, because it requires an overwhelming power to burst its walls, and free from this outer shell the life contained within. but what the full strength of later life seems too weak to attain, is often accomplished by the living, life-awakening, and life-giving power of some simple, thoughtful young soul, by some young spirit first unfolding its wings, busily seeking everywhere for the causes and connections of all things. even for such a youth, the treasure is to be gained only after long examination, inquiry, and reflection. if ever i found that for which i so longingly sought, then was i filled with exceeding joy. the surroundings amidst which i had grown up, especially those in which my first childhood was passed, had caused my senses to be much and early exercised. the pleasures of the senses were from the first, therefore, an object for the closest consideration with me. the results of this analysing and questioning habit of my early boyhood were perfectly clear and decisive, and, if not rendered into words, were yet firmly settled in my mind. i recognised that the transitory pleasures of the senses were without enduring and satisfying influence on man, and that they were therefore on no account to be pursued with too great eagerness. this conviction stamped and determined my whole being, just as my questioning examination and comparison of the inner with the outer world, and my study of their inter-connection, is now the basis of my whole future life. unceasing self-contemplation, self-analysis, and self-education have been the fundamental characteristics of my life from the very first, and have remained so until these latest days. to stir up, to animate, to awaken, and to strengthen, the pleasure and power of the human being to labour uninterruptedly at his own education, has become and always remained the fundamental principle and aim of my educational work. great was my joy when i believed i had proved completely to my own satisfaction that i was not destined to go to hell. the stony, oppressive dogmas of orthodox theology i very early explained away, perhaps assisted in this by two circumstances. firstly, i heard these expressions used over and over again, from my habit of being present at the lessons given by my father in our own house, in preparation for confirmation. i heard them used also in all sorts of ways, so that my mind almost unconsciously constructed some sort of explanation of them. secondly, i was often a mute witness of the strict way in which my father performed his pastoral duties, and of the frequent scenes between him and the many people who came to the parsonage to seek advice and consolation. i was thus again constantly attracted from the outer to the inner aspects of life. life, with its inmost motives laid bare, passed before my eyes, with my father's comments pronounced upon it; and thing and word, act and symbol were thus perceived by me in their most vivid relationship. i saw the disjointed, heavy-laden, torn, inharmonious life of man as it appeared in this community of five thousand souls, before the watchful eyes of its earnest, severe pastor. matrimonial and sexual circumstances especially were often the objects of my father's gravest condemnation and rebuke. the way in which he spoke about these matters showed me that they formed one of the most oppressive and difficult parts of human conduct; and, in my youth and innocence, i felt a deep pain and sorrow that man alone, among all creatures, should be doomed to these separations of sex, whereby the right path was made so difficult for him to find. i felt it a real necessity for the satisfaction of my heart and mind to reconcile this difficulty, and yet could find no way to do so. how could i at that age, and in my position? but my eldest brother, who, like all my elder brothers, lived away from home, came to stay with us for a time; and one day, when i expressed my delight at seeing the purple threads of the hazel buds, he made me aware of a similar sexual difference in plants. now was my spirit at rest. i recognised that what had so weighed upon me was an institution spread over all nature, to which even the silent, beautiful race of flowers was submitted. from that time humanity and nature, the life of the soul and the life of the flower, were closely knit together in my mind; and i can still see my hazel buds, like angels, opening for me the great god's temple of nature. i now had what i needed: to the church was added the nature-temple; to the religious christian life, the life of nature; to the passionate discord of human life the tranquil peace of the life of plants. from that time it was as if i held the clue of ariadne to guide me through the labyrinth of life. an intimate communion with nature for more than thirty years (although, indeed, often interrupted, sometimes for long intervals) has taught me that plants, especially trees, are a mirror, or rather a symbol, of human life in its highest spiritual relations; and i think one of the grandest and deepest fore-feelings that have ever emanated from the human soul, is before us when we read, in the holy scriptures, of a tree of knowledge of good and evil. the whole of nature teaches us to distinguish good from evil; even the world of crystals and stones--though not so vividly, calmly, clearly, and manifestly as the world of plants and flowers. i said my hazel buds gave me the clue of ariadne. many things grew clear to me: for instance, the earliest life and actions of our first parents in paradise, and much connected therewith. there are yet three points touching my inner life up to my tenth year, which, before i resume the narrative of my outer life, i should like to mention here. the folly, superstition, and ignorance of men had dared to assume then, as they have done lately, that the world would soon come to an end. my mind, however, remained perfectly tranquil, because i reasoned thus with myself firmly and definitely:--mankind will not pass from the world, nor will the world itself pass away, until the human race has attained to that degree of perfection of which it is capable on earth. the earth, nature in its narrowest sense, will not pass away, moreover, until men have attained a perfect insight into its essence. this idea has returned to me during my life in many a varied guise, and i have often been indebted to its influence for peace, firmness, perseverance, and courage. towards the end of this epoch, my eldest brother, already spoken of, was at the university, and studied theology.[ ] philosophic criticism was then beginning to elucidate certain church dogmas. it was therefore not very surprising that father and son often differed in opinion. i remember that one day they had a violent dispute about religion and church matters. my father stormed, and absolutely declined to yield; my brother, though naturally of a mild disposition, flushed deep-red with excitement; and he, too, could not abandon what he had recognised as true. i was present also on this as on many other occasions, an unobserved witness, and can still see father and son standing face to face in the conflict of opinion. i almost thought i understood something of the subject in dispute; i felt as if i must side with my brother, but there seemed at the same time something in my father's view which indicated the possibility of a mutual understanding. already i felt in a dim way that every illusion has a true side, which often leads men to cling to it with a desperate firmness. this conviction has become more and more confirmed in me the longer i have lived; and when at any time i have heard two men disputing for the truth's sake, i have found that the truth is usually to be learnt from both sides. therefore i have never liked to take sides; a fortunate thing for me.[ ] another youthful experience which also had a decided influence in forming my cast of character, was the following:--there are certain oft-repeated demands made upon the members of our established church; such as, to enter upon the service of christ, to show forth christ in one's life, to follow jesus, etc. these injunctions were brought home to me times without number through the zeal of my father as a teacher of others and a liver himself of a christian life. when demands are made on a child which are in harmony with child nature, he knows no reluctance in fulfilling them; and as he receives them entirely and unreservedly, so also he complies with them entirely and unreservedly. that these demands were so often repeated convinced me of their intense importance; but i felt at the same time the difficulty, or indeed, as it seemed to me, the impossibility of fulfilling them. the inherent contradiction which i seemed to perceive herein threw me into great depression; but at last i arrived at the blessed conviction that human nature is such that it is not impossible for man to live the life of jesus in its purity, and to show it forth to the world, if he will only take the right way towards it. this thought, which, as often as it comes into my mind, carries me back even now to the scenes and surroundings of my boyhood, may have been not improbably amongst the last mental impressions of this period, and it may fitly close, therefore, the narrative of my mental development at this age. it became, later, the point whereon my whole life hinged. from what i have said of my boyish inner life, it might be assumed that my outer life was a happy and peaceful one. such an assumption would, however, not be correct. it seems as if it had always been my fate to represent and combine the hardest and sharpest contrasts. my outer life was really in complete contrast with my inner. i had grown up without a mother; my physical education had been neglected, and in consequence i had acquired many a bad habit. i always liked to be doing something or another, but in my clumsy way i made mistakes as to choice of materials, of time, and of place, and thus often incurred the severe displeasure of my parents. i felt this, being of a sensitive disposition, more keenly and more persistently than my parents; the more so as i felt myself generally to blame in form rather than in substance, and in my inmost heart i could see there was a point of view from whence my conduct would seem, in substance at all events, not altogether wrong, still less blameworthy. the motives assigned to my actions were not those which actuated me, so far as i could tell; and the consciousness of being misjudged made me really what i had been believed to be before, a thoroughly naughty boy. out of fear of punishment i hid even the most harmless actions, and when i was questioned i made untruthful answers. in short, i was set down as wicked, and my father, who had not always time to investigate the justice of the accusations against me, remembered only the facts as they were represented to him. my neglected childhood called forth the ridicule of others; when playing with my step-brother, i was always, according to my mother, the cause of anything that went wrong. as the mind of my parents turned more and more away from me, so on my side my life became more and more separated from theirs; and i was abandoned to the society of people who, if my disposition had not been so thoroughly healthy, might have injured me even more than they did. i longed to escape from this unhappy state of things; and i considered my elder brothers fortunate in being all of them away from home. just at this melancholy time came home my eldest brother. he appeared to me as an angel of deliverance, for he recognised amidst my many faults my better nature, and protected me against ill-treatment. he went away again after a short stay; but i felt that my soul was linked to his, thenceforth, down to its inmost depths; and indeed, after his death, this love of mine for him turned the whole course of my life.[ ] the boon was at last vouchsafed me, and that at my greatest need, to leave my father's house. had it been otherwise, the flagrant contradiction between my outer and inner life must necessarily have developed the evil inclinations which had begun in earnest to fasten upon me. a new life entirely different from the former now opened before me. i was ten years and nine months old. but i pause yet another moment in the contemplation of this period before i pass to its narration. in order to be clearly understood by your serene highness, which is very necessary to me if i am to attain my object, i will compare, with your permission, my former life with my present. i shall endeavour to show how i trace the connection of my earlier and my later life; how my earlier life has proved for me the means of understanding my later; how, in general, my own individual life has become to me a key to the universal life, or, in short, to what i call the symbolic life and the perpetual, conditioned, and unbroken chain of existence. since, throughout the period which i have just described, my inner self, my life and being, my desires and endeavours, were not discerned by my parents, so is it with me now with regard to certain german governments.[ ] and just as my outward life then was imperfect and incomplete, through which incompleteness my inner life was misunderstood, so also now the imperfection and incompleteness of my establishment prevent people from discerning the true nature, the basis, the source, the aim and purpose, of my desires and endeavours, and from promoting them, after recognising their value, in a right princely and patriotic spirit. the misapprehension, the oppression under which i suffered in my early years, prepared me to bear similar evils later on, and especially those which weigh upon me in the present circumstances of my life. and as i see my present private and public life and my destiny reflected in a part of my former life, just so do i read and trace the present universal life in my former individual life. moreover, in the same way as i tried as child or boy to educate myself to be a worthy man according to those laws which god had implanted, unknown to me, within my nature, so now do i strive in the same way, according to the same laws, and by the same method, to educate the children of my country. that for which i strove as a boy, not yet conscious of any purpose; the human race now strives for with equal unconsciousness of purpose, but for all that none the less truly. the race is, however, surrounded by less favourable circumstances than those which influenced me in my boyhood. life in its great as well as in its small aspects, in humanity and the human race as well as in the individual (even though the individual man often wilfully mars his own existence)--life, in the present, the past, and the future, has always appeared to me as a great undivided whole, in which one thing is explained, is justified, is conditioned and urged forward by the other. in order that, if it be possible, there should remain no obscurity whatever in my actions, thoughts, and life, i shall proceed to consider them all, down to the very latest event which has happened to me; that is, the writing-down of this statement of my life for your highness. my life experience it is which urges me to do this; not any whim or caprice. common worldly wisdom would challenge such a step if it were known; no one would desire to take it, no one would dare to take it. i dare it, and i do it, because my childhood has taught me that where for trust we find distrust, where for union we find division, where for belief we find doubt, there but sad fruit will come to the harvest, and a burdensome and narrow life alone can follow. i return again to the narrative of the development of my inner and outer life. a new existence now began for me, entirely opposed to that which i had hitherto led. an uncle on my mother's side came to visit us in this year; he was a gentle, affectionate man.[ ] his appearance among us made a most agreeable impression upon me. this uncle, being a man of experience, may have noticed the adverse influences which surrounded me; for soon after his departure he begged my father by letter to turn me over to him entirely. my father readily consented, and towards the end of the year i went to him. he had early lost both wife and child, and only his aged mother-in-law lived in his house with him. in my father's house severity reigned supreme; here, on the contrary, mildness and kindness held sway. there i encountered mistrust; here i was trusted. there i was under restraint; here i had liberty. hitherto i had hardly ever been with boys of my own age; here i found forty schoolfellows, for i joined the upper class of the town school.[ ] the little town of stadt-ilm is situated in a somewhat wide valley, and on the banks of a small limpid stream.[ ] my uncle's house had gardens attached, into which i could go if i liked; but i was also at liberty to roam all over the neighbourhood, if only i obeyed the strict rule of the house to return punctually at the time appointed. here i drank in fresh life-energy in long draughts; for now the whole place was my playground, whereas formerly, at home, i had been limited to our own walls. i gained freedom of soul and strength of body. the clergyman who taught us never interfered with our games, played at certain appointed playgrounds, and always with great fun and spirit. deeply humiliating to me were the frequent slights i received in our play, arising from my being behind boys of my age in bodily strength, and more especially in agility; and all my dash and daring could not replace the robust, steady strength, and the confident sureness of aim which my companions possessed. happy fellows! they had grown up in continual exercise of their youthful boyish strength. i felt myself exceedingly fortunate when i had at length got so far that my schoolfellows could tolerate me as a companion in their games. but whatever i accomplished in this respect by practice, by continual effort of will, and by the natural course of life, i always felt myself physically deficient in contrast with their uncramped boyish powers. setting aside that which i had been robbed of by my previous education, my new life was vigorous and unfettered by external restraint; and they tell me i made good use of my opportunity. the world lay open before me, as far as i could grasp it. it may indeed be because my present life was as free and unconstrained as my former life had been cramped and constrained, anyhow the companions of my youth have reminded me of several incidents of that time which make me think that my good spirits led me to the borders of wildness and extravagance; although as a boy i considered my demeanour quieter by far than that of my companions of my own age. my communion with nature, silent hitherto, now became freer and more animated. and as, at the same time, my uncle's house was full of peace and quiet contemplation, i was able as i grew up to develop that side of my character also; thus on every side my life became harmoniously balanced. in two places, alike centres of education, i found myself as before quite at home, even though i was more frequently than ever the victim of absence of mind--i mean the church and the school. in the latter i especially enjoyed the hours devoted to religious instruction. as with my uncle himself, and with his life, so was it also with his sermons; they were gentle, mild, and full of lovingkindness. i could follow them quite readily, and in the monday repetition at school i was able to give a good account of them. but the religious instruction of our own school-teacher responded best to my needs; all that i had worked out for myself was placed by him in a fuller light, and received from him a higher confirmation. later in life, when i had grown to manhood, i spoke with my uncle on the excellence of this teaching, and he made reply that it was indeed very good, but was too philosophical and abstruse for those to whom it was addressed; "for thee," continued he, "it may have been well suited, since thou hadst already received such unusually good instruction from thy father." let that be as it may, this teaching enlightened, animated, and warmed me,--nay, glowed within me till my heart was completely melted, especially when it touched upon the life, the work, and the character of jesus. at this i would burst into tears, and the longings to lead in future a similar life took definite form, and wholly filled my soul. when i now hear tales of the ebullitions of my youthful spirit occurring in that period of my life, i cannot help thinking that they must have led superficial observers to the erroneous opinion that the monitions and teachings of religion swept over my spirit without leaving a trace of their passage. and yet how wrongly would such observers have judged the true state of my inner life! the subjects best taught in the school of stadt-ilm were reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. latin was miserably taught, and still worse learnt. here, as in so many similar schools, the teaching utterly lacked the elucidation of first principles. the time spent on latin was therefore not wasted upon me, in so far that i learnt from it that such a method of teaching could bear no fruit among the scholars. arithmetic was a very favourite study of mine; and as i also received private tuition in this subject, my progress was so rapid that i came to equal my teacher both in theory and practice, although his attainments were by no means despicable. but how astonished was i when, in my twenty-third year, i first went to yverdon, and found i could not solve the questions there being set to the scholars! this was one of the experiences which prepossessed me so keenly in favour of pestalozzi's method of teaching, and decided me to begin arithmetic myself from the very beginning over again, according to his system. but more of this later. in physical geography we repeated our tasks parrot-wise, speaking much and knowing nothing; for the teaching on this subject had not the very least connection with real life, nor had it any actuality for us, although at the same time we could rightly name our little specks and patches of colour on the map. i received private tuition in this subject also. my teacher wished to advance further with me; he took me to england. i could find no connection between that country and the place and country in which i dwelt myself, so that of this instruction also i retained but little. as for actual instruction in german, it was not to be thought of; but we received directions in letter-writing and in spelling. i do not know with what study the teaching of spelling was connected, but i think it was not connected with any; it hovered in the air. i had lessons, furthermore, in singing and in pianoforte playing, but without result. i merely mention all this now, in order to be able to refer to it later on. my life the whole time of my stay with my uncle had three aspects: the religious life developing and building up my moral being; the external life made up of boyish play, into which i threw my whole energy; and the life of thought quietly showing itself within my uncle's peaceful home. to this last influence also i yielded myself with equal earnestness, and felt no suspicion of the apparent contradiction which my outward life exhibited to such a mood. like my school-fellows, i lived without control; as far as i saw or felt, i was untrammelled; and yet i do not call to mind that any of us ever committed a seriously culpable action. here i am obliged to mention something which as an educationist i can by no means pass lightly by. we received instruction from two schoolmasters: one was pedantic and rigid; the other, more especially our class-teacher (_conrector_), was large-hearted and free. the first never had any influence over his class; the second could do whatever he pleased with us, and if he had but set his mind to it, or perhaps if he had been aware of his power, he might have done some thoroughly good sound work with his class. in the little town of stadt-ilm were two ministers, both ephors[ ] of the school. my uncle, the principal minister, was mild, gentle, and kind-hearted, impressive in daily life as in his sacred office or in the pulpit; the other minister was rigid even to sternness, frequently scolding and ordering us about. the first led us with a glance. a word from him, and surely few were so brutish as to refuse that word admittance to their heart. the long exhortations of the other went, for the most part, over our heads, leaving no trace behind. like my father, my uncle was a true shepherd of his flock; but a gentle lovingkindness to all mankind reigned in him. my father was moved by the conviction of the rectitude of his actions; he was earnest and severe. both have been dead over twenty years; but how different is the spirit they have left behind amongst their congregations. here, they are glad at being released from so strict a control, and, if i am rightly informed, unbridled license has sprung up amongst them; there, the little town raises itself to higher and ever higher prosperity, and all things are made to serve towards mental culture, as well as towards a right citizen-like business activity. i permit myself this digression, because these results were paralleled as a life-experience in my own life. in this manner i lived, up to my confirmation; all but a few weeks, that is, which i spent at my parents' house during the long holidays. here, too, everything seemed to take a gentler turn, and the domestic, thrifty activity which filled the place, and always struck me anew in my periodical visits home, wrought upon me with most beneficial effect. the copper-plate engravings in my father's library were the first things i sought out, especially those representing scenes in the history of the world. a table showing our (german) alphabet in its relations with many others made a surprising impression upon me. it enabled me to recognise the connection and the derivation of our letters from the old phoenician characters. this gave me a dim conception of the inner connection of all those languages of which, as my brother had studied and was still studying them, i often heard, and saw in print. especially the greek language lost much of its strangeness in my eyes, now that i could recognise its characters in the german alphabet. all this, however, had no immediate consequence in my life; these things, as echoes from my youth, produced their effect upon me at a later time. at this time, too, i read all sorts of boys' books. the story of samuel lawill impressed me most vividly; i, too, longed for such a ring, which by its warning pressure on my finger could hinder my hand from effecting unworthy purposes, and i was very angry with the youthful owner of the ring in the story, who threw it away in irritation because it pressed him right hard at a moment when he wished to commit a passionate deed.[ ] my confirmation, and the preparation for it, all conducted by my uncle, was over. i had received from it the most impressive and the most far-reaching influence in my whole life, and all my life-threads found in it their point of union and repose. i had now to be prepared for some business calling, and the question was raised, for which? that i should not study at the university had already been decided long before by the express determination of my step-mother. for since two of my brothers[ ] had devoted themselves to study, she feared that the further additional expense would be too heavy a burden upon my father's means. it may be that this intention had already influenced and limited my whole course of instruction; and probably only the little narrow circle of future business aims had been considered; the eye had not looked upon the boy as a future man. possibly from this cause i was kept so little to latin; it was enough if i learnt, as our mode of expression ran, to "state a _casus_" (that is, to decline a noun). from my own experience it was thus shown to me how eminently injurious it is in education and in instruction to consider only a certain circle of future activities or a certain rank in life. the wearisome old-fashioned education _ad hoc_ (that is, for some one special purpose) has always left many a noble power of man's nature unawakened. a career in our country frequently chosen by the worthiest and most anxious parents for their sons is that of a post in the treasury and exchequer. aspirants to such a post have two means of entering and two starting-points in this career; either they become a clerk to one of the minor officials in the treasury or exchequer, or the personal servant of one of the highest officials. as my knowledge of writing and figures seemed to my father satisfactory and sufficient for such a post, and as he knew well that it might lead, not merely to a life free from pecuniary cares, but even to wealth and fortune, he chose this career as mine. but the minor treasury official who might have found employment for such a young man, showed various reasons why he could not or would not as yet receive me as a clerk. there was something in my nature which revolted against the second mode i have mentioned of entering this career; something which i never afterwards experienced, but which at the time absolutely prevented me from choosing such a mode of starting in my future profession, and that in spite of the most alluring hopes that were held out to me. my father meant well and honestly by me, but fate ruled it against him. strangely enough, it happened that in my later capacity of schoolmaster, i became the educator and teacher of two of the nephews of that very man into whose service my father had meant to have sent me; and i hope to god that i have been of greater service to that family by filling the heart and brain of these young people with good and useful notions than if i had brushed the clothes and shoes of their uncle, and spread his table with savoury dishes. in the latter case, very likely an externally easy and happy existence might have been mine, whereas now i wage a constant fight with cares and difficulties. suffice it to say, this career was closed to me; a second was proposed by my mother, but from this my father delivered me by expressing a decided disapproval. my own desires and inclinations were now at last consulted. i wanted to be an agriculturist in the full meaning of the word; for i loved mountain, field, and forest; and i heard also that to learn anything solid in this occupation one must be well acquainted with geometry and land-surveying. from what i had learnt of the latter by snatches now and then, the prospect of knowing more about it delighted me much; and i cared not whether i began with forestry, with farming, or with geometry and land-surveying. my father tried to find a position for me; but the farmers asked too high a premium. just at this time he became acquainted with a forester who had also a considerable reputation as land-surveyor and valuer. they soon came to terms, and i was apprenticed to this man for two years, to learn forestry, valuing, geometry, and land-surveying. i was fifteen years and a half old when i became an apprentice to the forester, on midsummer day . it was two days' journey from my home to the forester's, for his district was not in our country. the man often gave me proofs of his thorough and many-sided knowledge; but he did not understand the art of conveying his knowledge to others, especially because what he knew he had acquired only by dint of actual experience.[ ] further, some work of timber-floating[ ] with which he had been entrusted hindered him from devoting to me the stipulated time necessary for my instruction. as soon as i saw this quite clearly, my own activity of mind urged me to make use of the really excellent books on forestry and geometry which i found lying to my hand. i also made acquaintance with the doctor of a little town near by, who studied natural science for his amusement; and this friend lent me books on botany, through which i learnt also about other plants than just those of the forest. a great deal of my time during the absence of the forester (when i was left quite to myself) i devoted to making a sort of map of the neighbourhood i lived in; but botany was my special occupation. my life as forester's apprentice was a four-fold one: firstly, there was the homelier and more practical side of life; then the life spent with nature, especially forest-nature; then also a life of the study, devoted to work at mathematics and languages; and lastly, the time spent in gaining a knowledge of plants. my chosen profession and the other circumstances of my position might have brought me into contact with many kinds of men; but nevertheless my life remained retired and solitary. my religious church life now changed to a religious communion with nature, and in the last half-year i lived entirely amongst and with my plants, which drew me towards them with fascination, notwithstanding that as yet i had no sense of the inner life of the plant world. collecting and drying specimens of plants was a work i prosecuted with the greatest care. altogether this time of my life was devoted in many various ways to self-education, self-instruction, and moral advancement. especially did i love to indulge my old habit of self-observation and introspection. i must mention yet another event of the greatest importance from the point of view of my inner life. an hour's walk from where i then lived was a small country town. a company of strolling actors arrived there, and played in the prince's castle in the town. after i had seen one of their performances, hardly any of those which followed passed without my attendance. these performances made a deep and lively impression upon me, and this the more that i felt as if my soul at last received nourishment for which it had long hungered. the impressions thus gained lasted so much the longer, and had so much the greater influence on my self-culture, in that after each performance my hour's walk home by dark or in the starlight allowed me to recapitulate what i had heard, and so to digest the meaning of the play. i remember especially how deeply a performance of iffland's _huntsmen_ moved me, and how it inspired me with firm moral resolutions, which i imprinted deep in my mind under the light of the stars. my interest in the play made me seek acquaintance with the actors, and especially with one of them, an earnest young man who attracted my attention, and to whom i spoke about his profession. i congratulated him on being a member of such a company, able to call up such ennobling sentiments in the human soul; perhaps even expressed a wish that i could become a member of such a company. then the honest fellow described the profession of an actor as a brilliant, deceitful misery, and confessed to me that he had been only forced by necessity to adopt this profession, and that he was soon about to abandon it. once again i learned by this to divide cause from effect, internal from external things. my visits to the play brought upon me a most unpleasant experience, for my father, when i spoke to him without concealment of my playgoing, reproached me very bitterly for it. he looked upon my conduct as deserving the highest punishment, which was in absolute contradiction with my own view; for i placed the benefit i had derived from my attendance at the play side by side with what i had received by my attendance at church, and expressed something of the kind to my father. as often happened in later life, so also on this occasion it was my eldest brother who was the mediator between my father and myself. on midsummer day my apprenticeship came to an end. the forester, who could now have made my practical knowledge of service to himself, wished to keep me another year. but i had by this time acquired higher views; i wished to study mathematics and botany more thoroughly, and i was not to be kept back from my purpose. when my apprenticeship was over i left him, and returned to my father's house. my master knew well that he had not done his duty towards me, and with this probably humiliating consciousness before him, and in spite of the thoroughly satisfactory testimonial that he gave me, he committed a very mean action against me. he did not know anything about my private study; for instance, my completely working through some elementary mathematical books, which i had found myself quite well able to understand. besides, he was dissatisfied that i would not stay another year with him. he therefore sent a letter to my father, in which he complained bitterly of my conduct, and shifted the blame of my ignorance of my calling entirely on to my shoulders. this letter actually arrived at home before i did; and my father sent it on to my eldest brother, who was minister in a village through which i had to pass on my way home. soon after i reached my brother's house he communicated to me the contents of this inculpatory letter. i cleared myself by exposing the unconscientious behaviour of my master, and by showing my private work. i then wrote a reply to my master, clearly refuting all his accusations, and exhibiting on the other hand his behaviour towards me; and with this i satisfied my father and my brother. but the latter reproached me for having suffered wrongdoing so long without complaint. to that i gave the simple answer, that my father, at the beginning of my apprenticeship, had told me not to come to him with any complaint, as i should never be listened to, but should be considered as wrong beforehand. my brother, who knew my father's severity and his views on such points, was silent. but my mother saw in one declaration of the forester the confirmation of her own opinion about me. the forester declared, that if ever anything was made of me, the same good fortune might be told of the first-comer without further trouble, and my mother assented heartily to his opinion. thus disappeared once more the light, the sunshine, which had gladdened me with its warmth, especially in the more recent part of my life. the wings of my mind, which had begun to flutter of themselves, were again bound, and my life once more appeared all cold and harsh before me. then it happened that my father had to send some money to my brother (traugott), who was studying medicine in jena. the matter pressed; so, as i had nothing to do, it was decided that i should be the messenger. when i reached jena i was seized by the stirring intellectual life of the place, and i longed to remain there a little time. eight weeks of the summer half-year's session of yet remained. my brother wrote to my father that i could fill that time usefully and profitably in jena, and in consequence of this letter i was permitted to stay. i took lessons in map and plan-drawing, and i devoted all the time i had to the work. at michaelmas i went home with my brother, and my step-mother observed that i could now fairly say i had passed through the university. but i thought differently; my intelligence and my soul had been stimulated in many ways, and i expressed my wish to my father to be allowed to study finance there, thus returning to my previous career. my father was willing to give his permission if i could tell him how to find the means. i possessed a very small property inherited from my mother, but i thought it would be insufficient. however, after having conferred with my brother, i talked it over with my father. i was still a minor, and therefore had to ask the consent of my trustee to realise my property; but as soon as i had obtained this i went as a student to jena, in . i was then seventeen years and a half old. a testimonial from my father attesting my capacity for the curriculum procured me matriculation without difficulty. my matriculation certificate called me a student of philosophy, which seemed very strange, because i had set before me as the object of my studies practical knowledge; and as to philosophy, of which i had so often heard, i had formed a very high idea of it. the word made a great impression upon my dreamy, easily-excited, and receptive nature. although the impression disappeared almost as soon as conceived, it gave, however, higher and unexpected relations to my studies. the lectures i heard were only those which promised to be useful in the career i had now again embraced. i heard lectures on applied mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, mineralogy, botany, natural history, physics, chemistry, accounts, cultivation of forest trees and management of forests, architecture, house-building, and land-surveying. i continued topographical drawing. i heard nothing purely theoretical except mathematics; and of philosophical teaching and thought i learnt only so much as the intercourse of university life brought with it; but it was precisely through this intercourse that i received in various ways a many-sided intellectual impulse. i usually grasped what had been taught; the more thoroughly since, through my previous life, i had become well acquainted with the principal subjects, and already knew their relation to practical work. some of the lectures were almost easy for me--for instance, those on mathematics. i have always been able to perceive with ease and pleasure relations of geometrical figures and of planes; so that it seemed inexplicable to me that every farmer should not be equally capable of understanding them. this i had said before to my brother, who tried to give me an explanation; but i did not yet grasp it. i had expected i don't know exactly what, but certainly something higher, something grandiose; very likely i had expected something with more life in it. the mathematical course, therefore, at first seemed to me unimportant; but later on i found that i, also, could not follow every detail. however, i did not think much of this, because i readily understood the general meaning, and i said to myself that particular cases would not cause me any mental fatigue if i found it necessary to learn them. the lectures of my excellent teacher were not so useful to me as they might have been, if i could have seen in the course of instruction and in its progress somewhat more of necessary connection and less of arbitrary arrangement. this want of necessary connection was the reason of the immediate dislike i always took to every course of instruction. i felt it even in pure mathematics, still more was it the case in applied mathematics, and most of all in experimental physics. here it seemed to me as if everything were arranged in arbitrary series, so that from the very first i found this study a fatigue. the experiments failed to arrest my attention. i desired and sought after some inner connection between the phenomena, deduced from and explained by some simple root principles. but that was the very point withheld from me. mathematical demonstrations came like halting messengers; they only became clear to the mind's eye when the truth to be demonstrated lay before me already in all its living strength. on the other hand, my attention was riveted by the study of gravitation, of force, of weight, which were living things to me, because of their evident relation to actual facts. in mechanics (natural philosophy) i could not understand why so many of the so-called "mechanical powers" were assumed, and why several of them were not reduced to cases of the inclined plane. in mineralogy my previous education had left many gaps unfilled, especially as regards the powers of observation. i was fond of mineral specimens, and gave myself much trouble to comprehend their several properties; but in consequence of my defective preparation i found insuperable difficulties in my way, and perceived thereby that neglect is neither quickly nor lightly to be repaired. the most assiduous practice in observation failed to make my sight so quick and so accurate as it ought to have been for my purpose. at that time i failed to apprehend the fact of my deficient quickness of sight; it ought to have taught me much, but i was not prepared to learn the lesson. chemistry fascinated me. the excellent teacher (göttling) always demonstrated the true connection of the phenomena under consideration; and the theory of chemical affinity took strong hold upon me. note-taking at these lectures was a thing i never thought of doing; for that which i understood forthwith became a part of me, and that which i failed to understand seemed to me not worth writing down. i have often felt sorry for it since. but as regards this point, i have always had through my whole life the perfectly clear conviction that when i had mastered a whole subject in its intimate relations i could go back upon, and then understand, details which at the time of hearing had been unintelligible to me. in botany i had a clear-sighted, kind-hearted teacher (batsch). his natural system of botany[ ] gave me great satisfaction, although i had always a painful perception of how much still remained for him to classify. however, my view of nature as one whole became by his means substantially clearer, and my love for the observation of nature in detail became more animated. i shall always think of him with gratitude. he was also my teacher in natural history. two principles that he enunciated seized upon me with special force, and seemed to me valid. the first was the conception of the mutual relationship of all animals, extending like a network in all directions; and the second was that the skeleton or bony framework of fishes, birds, and men was one and the same in plan, and that the skeleton of man should be considered as the fundamental type which nature strove to produce even in the lower forms of creation.[ ] i was always highly delighted with his expositions, for they suggested ideas to me which bore fruit both in my intelligence and in my emotional nature. invariably, whenever i grasped the inter-connection and unity of phenomena, i felt the longings of my spirit and of my soul were fulfilled. i easily understood the other courses i attended, and was able to take a comprehensive glance over the subjects of which they treated. i had seen building going on, and had myself assisted in building, in planting, etc.; here, therefore, i could take notes, and write complete and satisfactory memoranda of the lectures. my stay in jena had taught me much; by no means so much as it ought to have taught me, but yet i had won for myself a standpoint, both subjective and objective. i could already perceive unity in diversity, the correlation of forces, the interconnection of all living things, life in matter, and the principles of physics and biology. one thing more i have to bring forward from this period. up till now my life had met with no sympathetic recognition other than the esteem which i had enjoyed of the country physician during my apprenticeship--he who encouraged me to study natural science, and smoothed away for me many a difficulty. but now such sympathy was destined to offer itself as a means of education and improvement. for there were in jena just then two scientific associations, one for natural history and botany, the other for mineralogy, as it was then called. many of the young students, who had shown living interest and done active work in natural science, were invited to become members by the president, and this elevating pleasure was also offered to me. at the moment i certainly possessed few qualifications for membership; the most i could say was that my faculty for arranging and classifying might be made of some use in the natural history society, and this, indeed, actually came to pass. although my admission to this society had no great effect upon my later life, because it was dissolved at the death of its founder, and i did not keep up my acquaintance with the other members afterwards, yet it awakened that yearning towards higher scientific knowledge which now began to make itself forcibly felt within me. during my residence at the university i lived in a very retired and economical way; my imperfect education, my disposition, and the state of my purse alike contributing to this. i seldom appeared at places of public resort, and in my reserved way i made my brother (traugott) my only companion; he was studying medicine in jena during the first year of my residence there.[ ] the theatre alone, of which i was still passionately fond, i visited now and then. in the second year of this first studentship, in spite of my quiet life, i found myself in an awkward position. it began, indeed, with my entrance into the university, but did not come to a head till my third half-year. when i went to the university, my father gave me a bank draft for a small amount to cover my expenses, not only for the first half-year, but for the entire residence, i think. my brother, who, as i said, was with me at jena for the first year, wished me to lend him part of my allowance, all of which i did not then require, whereas he was for the moment in difficulties. he hoped soon to be able to repay me the money. i gladly gave him the greater part of my little draft; but unfortunately i could not get the money back, and therefore found myself in greater and greater difficulties. my position became terribly urgent; my small allowance had come to an end by the close of the first year, but i could not bring myself to leave the university, especially now that a yearning for scientific knowledge had seized me, and i hoped for great things from my studies. besides, i thought that my father might be induced to support me at the university another half-year. my father would hear nothing of this so far as he was concerned; and my trustee would not agree to the conditions offered by my father (to cover an advance); so i had to pay the penalty of their obstinacy. towards the end of my third half-year the urgency of my difficulties increased. i owed the keeper of an eating-house (for meals) thirty thalers, if i am not mistaken. as this man had caused me to be summoned for payment several times before the senate of the university, and i had never been able to pay, and as he had even addressed my father, only to receive from him a sharp refusal to entertain the matter, i was threatened with imprisonment in the case of longer default of payment. and i actually had to submit to this punishment. my step-mother inflamed the displeasure of my father, and rejoiced at his inflexibility. my trustee, who still had the disposal of some property of mine, could have helped me, but did not, because the letter of the law was against any interference from his side. each one hoped by the continuance of my sorry plight to break the stubbornness of the other. i served as scapegoat to the caprices of the obstinate couple, and languished as such nine weeks long in the university prison at jena.[ ] at last my father consented to advance me money on my formally abandoning, before the university board, all claim on his property in the shape of inheritance; and so, in the end, i got free. in spite of the gloom into which my position as a prisoner plunged me, the time of my arrest was not utterly barren. my late endeavours towards scientific knowledge had made me more and more conscious of my need of a solid foundation in my knowledge of latin; therefore i now tried to supply deficiencies to the extent of my ability, and with the help of a friend. it was extremely hard to me, this working my way through the dead and fragmentary teaching of an elementary grammar. it always seemed to me as if the mere outer acquisition of a language could but little help forward my true inner desire for knowledge, which was deeply in earnest, and was the result of my own free choice. but wherever the knowledge of language linked itself to definite external impressions, and i was able to perceive its connection with facts, as, for instance, in the scientific nomenclature of botany, i could quickly make myself master of it. this peculiarity of mind passed by me unnoticed at the time; i knew and understood too little, nay, indeed, almost nothing of myself as yet, even as regards the actions of my every-day life. a second occupation of this prison period was the preparation of an exercise (or academical thesis) in geometry, which i undertook that i might the sooner obtain an independent position in some profession. thirdly, i studied winckelmann's "letters on art." through them some germs of higher artistic feeling may have been awakened within me; for i examined the engravings which the work contains with intense delight. i could quite perceive the glow of pleasure that they aroused, but at the time i took little account of this influence, and indeed the feeling for art altogether was late in developing itself in me. when i now glance over the earlier and later, the greater and smaller, artistic emotions which have swayed me, and observe their source and direction, i see that it was with arts (sculpture as well as music) as it was with languages--i never succeeded in accomplishing the outward acquisition of them: yet i now feel vividly that i, too, might have been capable of something in art had i had an artistic education. further, there came into my hands, during the time of my imprisonment, a bad translation of an abridgment of the zendavesta. the discovery [in these ancient persian scriptures] of similar life-truths to our own, and yet coupled with a quite separate religious standpoint from ours, aroused my attention, and gave some feeling of universality to my life and thought; this, however, disappeared as quickly as it had come. by the beginning of the summer term in i was at length set free from arrest. i at once left jena and my academical career, and returned to my father's house. i was just nineteen years old. it was but natural that i should enter my parents' house with heavy heart, overclouded soul, and oppressed mind. but spring warmed and awakened all nature once more, and recalled to life, too, my slumbering desire for better things. as yet i had busied myself but little with german literature, and the names of schiller, goethe, wieland, and the rest i now, for the first time, began to learn. in this, too, it was with me as in so many other things; any mental influence that came before me i had either to fully interweave with my inner life, or else altogether to forego its acquisition. with this peculiarity of temperament, i could master only a rather restricted amount of mental material. my father's library was once more ransacked. i found not much that was of any use to me, for it contained chiefly theological works; but i seized with the greatest enjoyment on a book which had come out some ten years before in gotha, a general view of all the sciences and fine arts in their various ramifications, with a short sketch of the object of the several sciences and of the literature of each department. the arrangement was based upon the usual division of the faculties, but it served to give me a general outlook, long desired, over the whole of human knowledge, and i was right glad to have found this "mappe du monde littéraire"--for that was its title. i resolved to turn this book to the best advantage i could, and set about putting my resolution into practice. in order to make a collection of comprehensive extracts of scientific matters from the several periodicals received by my father (who shared for that purpose in a joint subscription with other preachers and educated people), i had already begun a sort of diary. the form of this journal was shapeless--everything was put down as it came, one thing after the other; and thereby the use of it all was rendered very inconvenient. now, however, i perceived the value of division according to a settled plan, and soon hit upon a scheme of procedure. i aimed at collecting all that seemed worthy to be known, all that was necessary for cultured men in general, and for myself in my own calling in particular; and this rich treasure was to be brought out under favourable circumstances, or whenever need was, from its storehouse. also i desired to acquire a general idea of those subjects which the craving for knowledge, growing ever more and more sharp within my soul, was always urging me thoroughly to work through over again. i felt happy in my work; and i had already been chained to my task for several days, from early morning till late at night, in my little distant chamber with its iron-barred windows, when my father suddenly and unexpectedly walked into the room. he looked over what i had done, and remarked the quantity of paper used over it, which indeed was not small. upon this cursory inspection he held my work for a foolish waste of time and paper; and it would have been all over with my labour of love for that time, if my brother (christoph), who had so often stood as protector by my side, had not just then been on a visit with us. he had become the minister of a place which lay a few hours' journey from oberweissbach, and at this moment was staying with my parents. my father at once told him of what he considered my useless, if not indeed injurious occupation; but my brother saw it differently. i ventured, therefore, to continue, with the silent permission of my father. and indeed the work proved of actual service to me, for it brought a certain order, breadth, and firmness into my ideas which had the most beneficial effect upon me. my father now strove to procure me a settled position in my chosen calling; or at all events to provide some active work which would bring me into nearer connection with it. and for this purpose a fortunate opportunity soon offered. some of my father's relatives had property in the district of hildburghausen, managed by a steward. the friendly footing on which my father stood with these relatives permitted me to study practical farming under this steward. there i took part in all the ordinary farming occupations. these, however, did not attract me greatly, and i ought to have at once discovered what an unsuitable career i had chosen, if i had but understood my own nature. the thing that most painfully occupied my mind at this time was the absence of cordial understanding between me and my father. at the same time i could not help esteeming and honouring him. notwithstanding his advanced age he was still as strong and as healthy in body as in mind, penetrating in speech and counsel, vigorous in fulfilment and actual work, earnest, nay, hard, in address. he had a firm, strong will, and at the same time was filled with noble, self-sacrificing endeavour. he never shirked skirmish nor battle in the cause of what he deemed the better part; he carried his pen into action, as a soldier carries his sword, for the true, the good, and the right. i saw that my father was growing old and was drawing near the grave, and it made me sorry to feel that i was yet a stranger to such a father. i loved him, and felt how much good resulted from that love; so i took the resolution to write to my father, and by letter to show him my true nature, so far as i could understand myself. long did i revolve this letter in my mind; never did i feel strength nor courage to write it. meanwhile a letter called me back home in november, after i had been some months engaged on the estate. i was called upon to help my father, now quite weak and almost bedridden; at all events i could assist him in his correspondence. family and other cares and the activities of life absorbed my whole time. what i meant to have done in my letter now happily became possible in speech from man to man, in glances from eye to eye. my father was occupied by cares for my future prospects up till the end. he died in february . may his enlightened spirit look down full of peace and blessing upon me as i write; may he now be content with that son who so loved him! i now stood in every respect my own master, and might decide the direction of my future life for myself, according to the circumstances which lay around me. with this intention i once more left the paternal roof at easter, to undertake the post of clerk in the office of woods and forests which formed one part of the general administration (divided into treasury, woods and forests, and tithe departments) of the as yet episcopal territory of bamberg.[ ] my district lay amidst unusual and lovely scenery; my duties were light, and when they were over i was free to roam in the neighbourhood, now doubly beautiful in the springtime, to live out my life in freedom, and gain strength for mind and soul. thus once again i lived much out of doors and in companionship with nature. my chief was proud of the possession of a considerable library, of which i made good use; and in this manner many of the publications then issuing from the press, and treating of matters connected with the occupation which i had chosen, passed through my hands, as well as those on other subjects. i was especially attracted by some volumes which contained aphorisms, thoughts, and observations on conduct, selected from ancient and modern writers and thinkers. my character grew upon and entwined itself around these aphorisms, which i could easily glance over, and as easily retain, and, more than all, which i could weave into my own life and thoughts, and by which i could examine my conduct. i made extracts of those which were in closest accord with my inner life, and bore them always about my person. amidst these surroundings my life contained many elements of growth. although my chief, as well as his family, was a strong roman catholic, he chose a (protestant) private tutor recommended to him by professor carus. this gentleman had many excellent qualities, so that we soon became great friends. we had also both of us the pleasure of being acquainted with some highly-cultured people, the families of the physician, of the minister, and of the schoolmaster in the neighbouring protestant village, which was as yet still a fief of the empire.[ ] my friend the tutor was a young man quite out of the common, with an actively inquiring mind; especially fond of making plans for wide-stretching travel, and comprehensive schemes of education. our intercourse and our life together were very confidential and open, for the subjects he cared for were those dear to me; but we were of diametrically opposite natures. he was a man of scholastic training, and i had been deficiently educated. he was a youth who had plunged into strife with the world and society; my thought was how to live in peace with myself and all men. besides, our outward lives bore such different aspects that a truly intimate friendship could not exist between us. nevertheless our very contrasts bound us more closely together than we deemed. practical land surveying at this time chiefly interested me, for it at once satisfied my love for out-of-doors life, and fully occupied my intelligence. but the everlasting scribbling which now fell to my share i could not long endure, in spite of my otherwise pleasant life. early in the spring of i left my situation and went to bamberg, feeling sure that the political changes by which bamberg had been transferred to bavaria, and the general survey of the district which was therefore in contemplation, would immediately provide me with a sphere of work suited to my capabilities. my expectations were not falsified. in pursuance of my plan i introduced myself to the land-surveyors in bamberg, and at once received employment from one of them. he had had considerable surveys in hand, and was still engaged upon them. as i showed some proficiency in mapping, he entrusted me with the preparation of the necessary maps which accompanied the surveys. this kept me employed for some time on work sufficiently remunerative for my needs. of course the question in hand with the new government was the appointment of land-surveyors, and those who were resident in the town were invited to send in maps of bamberg as specimens of their work. through the instruction i had enjoyed in my youth i was not unacquainted with such work. i therefore took pleasure in drawing a map, which i sent in. my work was approved, and i received something for it; but being a stranger, inexperienced, and young, and having hardly taken the best way towards my purposed aim, i obtained no appointment. after i had finished the work i have mentioned the survey of a small private property was put into my hands to carry out. from this engagement ensued consequences which were most important for me. i note only one point here. one of the joint owners of this property was a young doctor of philosophy, who leaned towards the new school of schelling. it could hardly be expected but that we should talk over things which stirred our mental life, and so it came about that he lent me schelling's "bruno, oder über die welt-seele"[ ] to read. what i read in that book moved me profoundly, and i thought i really understood it. the friendly young fellow, not much older than myself--we had already met in jena,--saw the lively interest i was taking in the book, and, in fact, i talked it over with him many a time. one day, after we had been to see an important picture-gallery together, he addressed me in these words, which from his mouth sounded startlingly strange, and which at the time seemed to me inexplicable:-- "guard yourself against philosophy; she leads you towards doubt and darkness. devote yourself to art, which gives life, peace, and joy." it is true i retained the young man's words, but i could not understand them, for i regarded philosophy as a necessary part of the life of mankind, and could not grasp the notion that one could be verging towards darkness and doubt when one calmly investigated the inner life. art, on the other hand, lay much further from me than philosophy; for except a profound enjoyment in works of art (for which i could give no clear reason), no glimmering of an active æsthetic sense had yet dawned upon me. this remark of my friend the doctor's called my attention to myself, however, and to my life and its aim, and made me aware of two very different and widely separate systems of life. my friend, the tutor of the government official under whom i had served at bamberg, had in the meantime left his situation. he told me before leaving that he had it in his mind to go to frankfurt, and thence into france. i saw his departure with regret, little dreaming that life would in a few years bring us together again, and that he would indirectly decide my future career. but, as it so often happens in life, parting in this instance but led up to meeting, and meeting to parting. the occurrences i have named had little result upon my outward life, which for the time ran its peaceful course. i pass over many circumstances important to the uplifting and development of my character and my moral life, and come at once to the close of my stay in bamberg. i had now once more earnestly to turn my attention to procuring certain and settled employment. in truth, as regarded my future, i stood quite alone. i had no one to lend me a helping hand, so i made up my mind to go forward, trusting only in god and destiny. i determined to seek for a situation by means of the _allgemeine anzeiger der deutschen_,[ ] a paper then very much read, and i thought it would be good to send in to the editor, as a proof of my assertions of competency, an architectural design, and also a specimen of my work in practical surveying, together with explanations of both of them. as soon as my plan was fully conceived i set to work at it. for the architectural sketch i chose a design of a nobleman's country mansion, with the surrounding outbuildings. when i had finished it, with very few professional appliances to help me, it contained a complete working out of all the various necessary plans, and as a critical test of its accuracy and suitability to the proposed scale of dimensions, i added a statement of all the particulars and conditions involved in it. for the land-surveying i chose a table of measurements compiled from the map i had previously drawn, which i carried through under certain arbitrary assumptions. these works, together with my advertisement, i sent in to the office of the paper i have mentioned, with the request that the editor, after reading my testimonials and inspecting my work, would add a few confirmatory words as to my qualifications. work and testimonials alike were to the satisfaction of the editor, and my request for an editorial comment was granted. i received several offers, each one containing something tempting about it. it was difficult to make a choice, but at last i decided to accept a position offered me as private secretary to the president and privy-councillor von dewitz, of mecklenburg-strelitz, at this time resident on one of his estates, gross-milchow. amongst the other offers was one from privy-councillor von voldersdorf, who was looking out for an accountant for his estates in the oberpfalz.[ ] this situation did not suit me so well as the other, but i accepted a proposition to fill up the time till the arrangements for the other post had been completed, by going down to these estates of herr von voldersdorf, and bringing into order, according to a certain specified plan, the heavy accounts of his steward, which were at this time much in arrear. i set off for the oberpfalz in the first days of . but i was soon called away to mecklenburg to the situation at gross-milchow which i had definitively chosen, and in the raw, frightfully severe winter-time of february i journeyed thither by the mail-coach. yet, short as had been my stay in the oberpfalz, and continual and uninterrupted as had been my labour in order that i might get through the work i had undertaken, the time i spent in bavaria yielded me much that was instructive. the men, ingenuous, lively young fellows from saxony and prussia, received me very kindly, and the variety of their different services and their readiness to talk about them, gave me a good insight into the inner relationship between the landed aristocracy and their retainers. in recalling these circumstances i thankfully acknowledge how my ever-tender loving destiny took pains kindly to prepare me for each vocation next to come. i had never before had the opportunity to see the mode of keeping accounts used on a great estate, to say nothing of keeping them myself, and here i had this very work to do, and that after a plan both ample and clear, in which every particular, down to the single details, was carefully provided for. this was of the greatest service to me. precisely the conduct of such well-ordered accounts was to be my work later on; therefore, having the general plan i have referred to firmly established in my mind, and being well practised in its operation, i set off well prepared for my new sphere of work. thanks to this, i was able to satisfy most completely not only my new employer, but also his lady, who used to examine everything minutely with severe scrutiny. the surroundings of herr von dewitz's estate were uncommonly pretty for that part of the country. lakes and hills and the fresh foliage of trees abounded, and what nature had perhaps overlooked here and there art had made good. my good fortune has always led me amongst pretty natural scenery. i have ever thankfully enjoyed what nature has spread before my eyes, and she has always been in true motherly unity with me. as soon as i had gained some facility in it my new work became simple, ran its regular course which was repeated week by week, and gave me time to think about my own improvement. however, my engagement on this estate was, after all, but a short one. the bent of my life and disposition was already taken. a star had arisen within my mind which i was impelled to follow. on this account i could regard my employment at this time only as a sheet anchor, to be let go as soon as an opportunity offered itself to resume my vocation. this opportunity was not long in making its appearance. my uncle (hoffmann), who, like my brother, bore me always lovingly in his thoughts, had lately died. even on his deathbed he thought of me, and charged my brother to do all he could to find me some settled occupation for life, and at any rate to prevent me from leaving the post i held at the moment before i had some reasonable prospect of a secure and better engagement elsewhere. providence willed it otherwise. his death, through the small inheritance which thereby came to me, gave me the means of fulfilling the dearest wish of my heart. so wonderfully does god direct the fate of men. i must mention one circumstance before i part for ever in this account of my life from my gentle, loving second-father. on my journey to mecklenburg, when i saw my uncle (at stadt-ilm) for the last time, i had the deep joy of a talk with him, such as a trusting father might hold with his grown-up son, bound to him by every tie of affection. he freely pointed out the faults which had shown themselves in my boyhood, and told me of the anxiety they had at one time caused him, and in this way he went back to the time when i was taken into his family, and to the causes of that. "i loved your mother very dearly," said he; "indeed, she was my favourite out of all my brothers and sisters. in you i seemed to see my sister once more, and for her love i took charge of you and bestowed on you that affection which hitherto had been hers alone." and dear as my own mother had become to me already through the many kind things i had heard said of her, so that i had even formed a distinct conception of what she was like, and seemed actually to remember her, she became even dearer to me after these reminiscences of my uncle than before, for did i not owe to her this noble and high-minded second-father? my conversation with my uncle first made clear to me what in later life i have found repeatedly confirmed--that the sources, springs or motives of one's present actions often lie far away beyond the present time, outside the present circumstances, and altogether disconnected with the persons with whom one is concerned at the moment then passing. i have also repeatedly observed in the course of my life that ties are the faster, the more enduring and the truer the more they spring from higher, universal, and impersonal sources. the person who in mecklenburg stood next above me in position in the house and in the family was the private tutor, whom i found already there--a young doctor of philosophy of göttingen university. we did not come much into contact on the whole since he as a university graduate took a far higher stand than i; but through i came into some connection with the clergymen of the district, and this was of benefit to me. as for the farmers the bailiffs, etc., their hospitable nature was quite sufficient of itself to afford me a hearty welcome. thus i lived in a way i had for a long time felt i much needed, amidst many-sided companionable good-fellowship, cheerful and free. healthy as i was in body and soul, in head and heart, my thoughts full of brightness and cheerfulness, it was not long before my mind again felt an eager desire for higher culture. the young tutor went away, and after his departure my craving for culture grew keener and keener, for i missed the intellectual converse i had been able to hold with him. but i was soon again to receive succour. the president,[ ] besides the family at home, had two sons at the pädagogium in halle.[ ] they came to visit their parents, accompanied by their special tutor, a gentleman destined to become famous later on as the renowned scholar, dr. wollweide. dr. wollweide was a mathematician and a physicist, and i found him freely communicative. he was so kind as to mention and explain to me the many various problems he had set before himself to work out. this caused my long slumbering and suppressed love for mathematics as a science, and for physics, to spring up again, fully awake. for some time past my tendency had leaned more and more towards architecture, and, indeed, i had now firmly determined to choose that as my profession, and to study it henceforth with all earnestness. my intellectual cravings and the choice of a profession seemed at last to run together, and i felt continually bright and happy at the thought. i seized the opportunity of the presence of the scholar whom i have named to learn from him what were the best books on those subjects which promised to be useful to me, and my first care was to become possessed of them. architecture was now vigorously studied, and other books, too, were not suffered to lie idle. the following books took great hold upon me: pröschke's "fragments on anthropology" (a small unpretending book), novalis' works, and arndt's "germany" and "europe."[ ] the first of these at one stroke drew together, so that i could recognise in them myself as a connected whole, my outer existence, my inner character, my disposition, and the course of my life. i for the first time realised myself and my life as a single entity in contrast to the whole world outside of me.[ ] the second book lay before me the most secret emotions, perceptions, and intentions of my inmost soul, clear, open, and vivid. if i parted with that book it seemed as if i had parted with myself; if anything happened to the book i felt as though it had happened to me, only more deeply and with greater pain. the third book taught me of man in his broad historical relations, set before me the general life of my kind as one great whole, and showed me how i was bound to my own nation, both to my ancestors and my contemporaries. yet the service this last book had done me was hardly recognised at this time; for my thoughts were bent on a definite outward aim, that of becoming an architect. but i could at all events recognise the new eager life which had seized me, and to mark this change to myself, i now began to use as a christian name the last instead of the first of my baptismal names.[ ] other circumstances also impelled me to make this change; and, further, it freed me from the memory of the many disagreeable impressions of my boyhood which clustered round the name i was then called. the time had come when i could no longer remain satisfied with my present occupation; and i therefore sent in my resignation. the immediate outward circumstance which decided me was this. i had kept up a correspondence with the young man whom i had known as a private tutor when i held a government clerkship in bamberg, and who left his situation to go to frankfurt, and then on into france.[ ] he had afterwards lived some time in frankfurt, occupying himself with teaching, and now was again a private tutor in a merchant's house in the netherlands. i imparted to him my desire to leave my present post, and to seek a situation with an architect; and asked his opinion whether i should not be most likely to effect my object at frankfurt, where so many streams of diverse life and of men intermingle. and as my friend was accurately acquainted with the ins and outs of frankfurt life, i asked him to give me such indications as he could of the best road to take towards the fulfilment of my designs. my friend entered heartily into my project, and wrote to me that he intended himself to spend some time in frankfurt again in the early summer; and he suggested that if i could manage to be there at the same time, a mutual consideration of the whole matter on the spot would be the best way of going to work. in consequence of this i at once firmly decided to leave my situation in the following spring, and to join my friend at frankfurt. but where was i to find the money necessary for such a journey? i had required the whole of my salary up till now to cover my personal expenses and the settlement of some debts i had run up at bamberg. in this perplexity i wrote again to my eldest brother, who had up till now understood me so well, and i asked him for assistance. i was at this time in a peculiar dilemma. on the one hand, i felt very keenly that i must get out of my present position, while on the other, by my unchanging changeableness i feared to wear out the indulgence and patience of my worthy brother. in this strait i just gave him what seemed to me as i wrote it an exact account of my real state of mind; telling him that i could only find my life-aim in a continual striving towards inward perfection. my brother's answer arrived. with a joyful tremor and agitation i held it in my hands. for hours together i carried it about me before i unsealed it, for days together before i read it; it seemed so improbable that my brother would feel himself able to help me towards the accomplishment of the desire of my soul, and i feared to find in that letter the frustration of my life's endeavour. when, after some days of vacillation between hope and doubt, i could bear the situation no longer, and opened the letter, i was not a little astonished that it began by addressing me at once in terms of the most moving sympathy. as i read on the contents agitated me deeply. the letter gave me the news of my beloved uncle's death, and informed me of legacies left by him to me and my brothers. thus fate itself, though in a manner so deeply affecting, provided me with the means for working out my next plan. the die was now cast. from this moment onwards my inner life received a quite new signification and a fresh character, and yet i was unconscious of all this. i was like a tree which flowers and knows it not. my inward and outward vocation and endeavour, my true life-destiny and my apparent life-aim were still, however, in a state of separation, and indeed of conflict, of which i had not the remotest conception. my resolve held firm to make architecture my profession; it was purely as a future architect that i took leave of all my companions. at the end of april , with peace in my heart, cheerfulness in my soul, an eager disposition, and a mind full of energy, i quitted my old surroundings. the first days of an unusually lovely may (and i might here again recall what i pointed out above, that my inner and personal life invariably went familiarly hand in hand with external nature) i spent with a friend, as a holiday, in the best sense of the word. this was a dear friend of mine, who lived on an exceedingly finely-situated farm in the uckermark.[ ] art had improved the beauty of the somewhat simple natural features of the place, in the most cunningly-devised fashion. in this beautiful, retired, and even solitary spot, i flitted, as it were, from one flower to another like a very butterfly. i had always passionately loved nature in her adornments of colour and of dewy pearls, and clung to her closely with the gladsomeness of youth. here i made the discovery that a landscape which we look upon in sympathetic mood shines with enhanced brilliancy; or as i put the truth into words at the time, "the more intimately we attach ourselves to nature, the more she glows with beauty and returns us all our affection." this was the first time my mind had ventured to give expression to a sentiment which thrilled my soul. often in later life has this phrase proved itself a very truth to me. my friend one day begged me to write something in his album: i did so unwillingly. to write anything borrowed went against me, for it jarred with the relations existing between me and the book's owner; and to think of anything original was a task i felt to be almost beyond my powers. however, after long thinking it over in the open air, comparing my friend's life and my own in all their aspects, i decided upon the following phrase:--"to thee may destiny soon grant a settled home and a loving wife! to me, while she drives me restless abroad, may she leave but just so much time as to allow me fairly to discern my relations with my inmost self and with the world." then my thoughts grew clear, and i continued, "thou givest man bread; let my aim be to give man himself." i did not even then fully apprehend the meaning of what i had said and written, or i could not of course have held so firmly to my architecture scheme. i knew as yet neither myself nor my real life, neither my goal nor my life's path thither. and long afterwards, when i had for some time been engaged upon my true vocation, i was not a little astonished over the prophetic nature of this album-phrase of mine. in later life i have often observed that a man's spirit, when it first begins to stir within him, utters many a far-away prophetic thought, which yet, in riper age, attains its realisation, its consummation. i have especially noticed this recently in bright-minded and active children; in fact, i have often been quite astounded at the really deep truths expressed by them in their butterfly life. i seemed to catch glimpses of a symbolic truth in this; as if indeed the human soul were even already beginning to shake itself free from its chrysalis-wrapping, or were bursting off the last fragments of the eggshell. in may , while on my journey, i visited my eldest brother, of whom i have so often spoken, and shall have yet so often to speak, and found him in another district, to which he had been appointed minister. he was as kind and full of affection as ever; and instead of blaming me, spoke with especial approval of my new plans. he told me of projects which had allured him in his youth, and still allured, but which he had lacked the strength of mind to speak of. his father's advice and authority had overawed him in youth, and now the chain of a settled position in life held him fast. to follow the inward voice faithfully and without swerving was the advice he offered me, and he wrote this memorandum in my album when i left him, as a life motto:--"the task of man is a struggle towards an end. do your duty as a man, dear brother, with firmness and resolution, fight against the difficulties which will thrust themselves in your path, and be assured you will attain the end." thus cheered by sympathy and approval, i went my way from my brother's, strengthened and confirmed in my determination. my road lay over the wartburg.[ ] luther's life and fame were then not nearly so well appreciated and so generally understood as now, after the tercentenary festival of the reformation.[ ] my early education had not been of the kind to give me a complete survey of luther's life and its struggle; i was hardly thoroughly acquainted indeed with the separate events of it. yet i had learnt in some sort to appreciate this fighter for the truth, by having in my last years at school to read aloud the augsburg confession to the assembled congregation during the afternoon service on certain specified sundays, according to an old-fashioned church custom.[ ] i was filled with a deep sense of reverence as i climbed "luther's path," thinking at the same time that luther had left much behind still to be done, to be rooted out, or to be built up. shortly before midsummer day, as i had arranged with my friend, i reached frankfurt. during my many weeks' journey in the lovely springtime, my thoughts had had time to grow calm and collected. my friend, too, was true to his word; and we at once set to work together to prepare a prosperous future for me. the plan of seeking a situation with an architect was still firmly held to, and circumstances seemed favourable for its realisation; but my friend at last advised me to secure a livelihood by giving lessons for a time, until we should find something more definite than had yet appeared. every prospect of a speedy fulfilment of my wishes seemed to offer, and yet in proportion as my hopes grew more clear, a certain feeling of oppression manifested itself more and more within me. i soon began seriously to ask myself, therefore:-- "how is this? canst thou do work in architecture worthy of a man's life? canst thou use it to the culture and the ennoblement of mankind?" i answered my own question to my satisfaction. yet i could not conceal from myself that it would be difficult to follow this profession conformably with the ideal i had now set before me. notwithstanding this, i still remained faithful to my original scheme, and soon began to study under an architect with a view to fitting myself for my new profession. my friend, unceasingly working towards the accomplishment of my views, introduced me to a friend of his, herr gruner, the headmaster at that time of the frankfurt model school,[ ] which had not long been established. here i found open-minded young people who met me readily and ingenuously, and our conversation soon ranged freely over life and its many-sided aspects. my own life and its object were also brought forward and talked over. i spoke openly, manifesting myself just as i was, saying what i knew and what i did not know about myself. "oh," said gruner, turning to me, "give up architecture; it is not your vocation at all. become a teacher. we want a teacher in our own school. say you agree, and the place shall be yours." my friend was for accepting gruner's proposal, and i began to hesitate. added to this, an external circumstance now came to my knowledge which hastened my decision. i received the news namely, that the whole of my testimonials, and particularly those that i had received in jena, which were amongst them, had been lost. they had been sent to a gentleman who took a lively interest in my affairs, and i never found out through what mischance they were lost. i now read this to mean that providence itself had thus broken up the bridge behind me, and cut off all return. i deliberated no longer, but eagerly and joyfully seized the hand held out to me, and quickly became a teacher in the model school of frankfurt-on-the-main.[ ] the watchword of teaching and of education was at this time the name of pestalozzi. it soon became evident to me that pestalozzi was to be the watchword of my life also; for not only gruner, but also a second teacher at the school, were pupils of pestalozzi, and the first-named had even written a book on his method of teaching. the name had a magnetic effect upon me, the more so as during my self-development and self-education it had seemed to me an aspiration--a something perhaps never to be familiarly known, yet distinct enough, and at all events inspiriting. and now i recalled how in my early boyhood, in my father's house, i had got a certain piece of news out of some newspaper or another, or at least that is how the matter stood in my memory. i gathered that in switzerland a man of forty, who lived retired from the world,--pestalozzi by name,--had taught himself, alone and unaided, reading, writing, and arithmetic. just at that time i was feeling the slowness and insufficiency of my own development, and this news quieted me, and filled me with the hope and trust that i, too, might, through my own endeavour, repair the deficiencies of my bringing-up. as i have grown older i have also found it consolatory to remark how the culture of vigorous, capable men has not seldom been acquired remarkably late in life. and in general i must acknowledge it as part of the groundwork underlying my life and the evolution of my character, that the contemplation of the actual existences of real men always wrought upon my soul, as it were, by a fruitful rain and the genial warmth of sunshine; while the isolated truths these lives enshrined, the principles those who lived them had thought out and embodied in some phrase or another, fell as precious seed-corn, as it were, or as solvent salt crystals upon my thirsty spirit. and while on this head i cannot help especially calling to mind how deep and lasting was the impression made upon me in my last year at school by the accounts in the holy scriptures of the lives of earnestly striving youths and men. i mention it here, but i shall have to return to the subject later on.[ ] now to return to the new life which i had begun. it was only to be expected that each thing and all things i heard of pestalozzi seized powerfully upon me; and this more especially applies to a sketchy narrative of his life, his aims, and his struggles, which i found in a literary newspaper, where also was stated pestalozzi's well-known desire and endeavour--namely, in some nook or corner of the world, no matter where, to build up an institution for the education of the poor, after his own heart. this narrative, especially the last point of it, was to my heart like oil poured on fire. there and then the resolution was taken to go and look upon this man who could so think and so endeavour to act, and to study his life and its work. three days afterwards (it was towards the end of august ) i was already on the road to yverdon,[ ] where pestalozzi had not long before established himself. once arrived there, and having met with the friendliest reception by pestalozzi and his teachers, because of my introductions from gruner and his colleagues, i was taken, like every other visitor, to the class-rooms, and there left more or less to my own devices. i was still very inexperienced, both in the theory and practice of teaching, relying chiefly in such things upon my memory of my own school-time, and i was therefore very little fitted for a rigorous examination into details of method and into the way they were connected to form a whole system. the latter point, indeed, was neither clearly thought out, nor was it worked out in practice. what i saw was to me at once elevating and depressing, arousing and also bewildering. my visit lasted only a fortnight. i worked away and tried to take in as much as i could; especially as, to help me in the duties i had undertaken, i felt impelled to give a faithful account in writing of my views on the whole system, and the effect it had produced upon me. with this idea i tried to hold fast in my memory all i heard. nevertheless i soon felt that heart and mind would alike come to grief in a man of my disposition if i were to stay longer with pestalozzi, much as i desired to do so. at that time the life there was especially vigorous; internally and externally it was a living, moving, stirring existence, for prince hardenberg, commissioned by the austrian government, had come to examine thoroughly into pestalozzi's work.[ ] the fruits of my short stay with pestalozzi were as follows:-- in the first place, i saw the whole training of a great educational institution, worked upon a clear and firmly-settled plan of teaching. i still possess the "teaching-plan" of pestalozzi's institution in use at that time. this teaching-plan contains, in my opinion, much that is excellent, somewhat also that is prejudicial. excellent, i thought, was the contrivance of the so-called "exchange classes."[ ] in each subject the instruction was always given through the entire establishment at the same time. thus the subjects for teaching were settled for every class, but the pupils were distributed amongst the various classes according to their proficiency in the subject in hand, so that the whole body of pupils was redistributed in quite a distinct division for each subject. the advantage of this contrivance struck me as so undeniable and so forcible that i have never since relinquished it in my educational work, nor could i now bring myself to do so. the prejudicial side of the teaching-plan, against which i intuitively rebelled, although my own tendencies on the subject were as yet so vague and dim, lay, in my opinion, in its incompleteness and its onesidedness. several subjects of teaching and education highly important to the all-round harmonious development of a man seemed to me thrust far too much into the background, treated in step-motherly fashion, and superficially worked out. the results of the arithmetical teaching astounded me, yet i could not follow it into its larger applications and wider extent. the mechanical rules of this branch of instruction seemed to whirl me round and round as in a whirlpool. the teacher was krüsi. the teaching, in spite of the brilliant results within its own circle, and in spite of the sharpness of the quickened powers of perception and comprehension in the children by which it attained those results, yet, to my personal taste, had something too positive in its setting forth, too mechanical in its reception. and josias schmid[ ] had already, even at that time, felt the imperfection of this branch of instruction. he imparted to me the first ground-principles of his later work on the subject, and his ideas at once commanded my approval, for i saw they possessed two important properties, manysidedness and an exhaustive scientific basis. the teaching of drawing was also very incomplete, especially in its first commencement; but drawing from right-angled prisms with equal sides, in various lengths, which was one of the exercises required at a later stage, and drawing other mathematical figures by means of which the comprehension of the forms of actual objects of every-day life might be facilitated were much more to my mind. schmid's method of drawing had not yet appeared. in physical geography, the usual school course, with its many-coloured maps, had been left far behind. tobler, an active young man, was the principal teacher in this section. still, even this branch had far too much positive instruction[ ] for me. particularly unpleasant to me was the commencement of the course, which began with an account of the bottom of the sea, although the pupils could have no conception of their own as to its nature or dimensions. nevertheless the teaching aroused astonishment, and carried one involuntarily along with it through the impression made by the lightning-quickness of the answers of the children. in natural history i heard only the botany. the principal teacher, who had also prepared the plan of instruction in this subject for all the school, was hopf, like the rest an active young man. the school course arranged and carried out by him had much that was excellent. in each separate instance--for example, the shape and position of leaves, flowers, etc.--he would first obtain all the possible varieties of form by question and answer between the class and himself, and then he would select from the results the form which was before them in nature. these lessons, which were in this way made so attractive, and whose merits spoke for themselves, showed, however, when it came to practical application, an unpractical, i had almost said, a self-contradictory aspect. (when, afterwards, in , i visited yverdon for the second time, i found to my regret neither tobler nor hopf there.) with the method used for the german language i could not at all bring myself into sympathy, although it has been introduced into later school books elsewhere. here also the arbitrary and non-productive style of teaching ran strongly counter to me at every step. singing was taught from figures.[ ] reading was taught from pestalozzi's well-known "a.b.c." [memorandum.--all this lay dark within me, its value unrecognised even by myself. but my intellectual position tended to become more settled by passing through these experiences. as to my state at the time, i have, as accurately as may be, described it above, as at once exalted and depressed, animated and dull. that pestalozzi himself was carried away and bewildered by this great intellectual machine of his appears from the fact that he could never give any definite account of his idea, his plan, his intention. he always said, "go and see for yourself" (very good for him who knew _how_ to look, how to hear, how to perceive); "it works splendidly!"[ ] it was at that time, indeed, surprising and inexplicable to me that pestalozzi's loving character did not win every one's heart as it won mine, and compel the staff of teachers to draw together into a connected whole, penetrated with life and intellectual strength in every part. his morning and evening addresses were deeply touching in their simplicity; and yet i remarked in them even already at that time some slight traces of the unhappy dissensions afterwards to arise.[ ]] i left yverdon in mid-october ( ) with a settled resolution to return thither as soon as possible for a longer stay. as soon as i got back to frankfurt, i received my definite appointment from the consistorium.[ ] the work that awaited me upon my arrival from switzerland at the model school (which was, in fact, properly two schools, one for boys and one for girls) was a share in the arrangement of an entirely new educational course and teaching-plan for the whole establishment. the school contained four or five classes of boys and two or three of girls; altogether about two hundred children. the staff consisted of four permanent masters and nine visiting masters. as i threw myself heartily into the consideration of the necessities and the present position of the school, and of the instruction given there, the working out of this plan was left almost wholly in my hands, under the conditions imposed upon us. the scheme i produced not only succeeded in winning the approbation of the authorities, but proved itself during a long period of service beneficial in the highest degree, both to the institution itself and to its efficiency; notwithstanding that it put the teachers to some considerable personal inconvenience, as well as making larger claims upon their time than was usual. the subjects of instruction which fell to my share were arithmetic, drawing, physical geography, and german. i generally taught in the middle classes. in a letter to my brother i spoke of the impression made upon me by my first lesson to a class of thirty or forty boys ranging from nine to eleven; it seemed as if i had found something i had never known, but always longed for, always missed, as if my life had at last discovered its native element. i felt as happy as the fish in the water, the bird in the air. but before i pursue this side of the development of my life i must touch upon another which was far more important to the evolution of my character as man, as teacher, and as educationist, and which, indeed, soon absorbed the first within itself. not long after my old friend, to meet with whom i had come to frankfurt, had introduced me to gruner, he went back himself to his work as private tutor. afterwards he heard of a family (in frankfurt) desiring a private tutor for the sons. since he could not introduce me personally to this family he did so by letter, and several weeks before my journey to yverdon he had, in fact, written to them about me in very kindly terms. it was for three sons principally that instruction and education were required. they came to see me, and after they had gone their personal peculiarities and their previous teaching and training, with the results, were fully described to me, and i was then consulted as to their future education. now to education as an object[ ] i had in truth never yet given a thought, and the question threw me into great perplexity. nevertheless it required an answer, and moreover a precise answer. in the life and circumstances of these lads i discovered frequent similarities with my own boyhood, which sprang to my memory as i listened. i could therefore answer the questions which were put to me out of the development and educational experiences of my own life; and my reply, torn as it was from actual life, keenly felt and vigorously expressed, bore upon it the stamp of truth. it was satisfactory to the parents; and education--development, which hitherto had been subjective alone for me--that is, as self-development--now took an objective form, a change which was distinctly painful to me. long, long it was before i could bring this business of education into a form expressible by words. i only knew education, and i could only educate, through direct personal association. this, then, i cultivated to the best of my power, following the path whither my vocation and my life now called me. to say truth, i had a silent inward reluctance towards private tutorship. i felt the constant interruptions and the piece-meal nature of the work inseparable from the conditions of the case, and hence i suspected that it might want vitality; but the trusting indulgence with which i was met, and especially the clear, bright, friendly glance which greeted me from the two younger lads, decided me to undertake to give the boys lessons for two hours a day, and to share their walks. the actual teaching was to be in arithmetic and german. the first was soon arranged. i simply followed pestalozzi's course. but as to the language i encountered great difficulties. i began by teaching it from the regular school-books then used, and indeed still in use. i prepared myself to the best of my ability for each lesson, and worked up whatever i felt myself ignorant of in the most careful and diligent way. but the mode of teaching employed in these books frustrated my efforts. i could neither get on myself nor get my pupils on with it. so i began to take for my method pestalozzi's "mothers' book." in this way we went on much better, but still i was not satisfied; and, indeed, i may say that for a very long time no system of instruction in german did satisfy me. in arithmetic, by using the "tables of units"[ ] in pestalozzi's pamphlet, i arrived at the same results which i had seen in switzerland. very often my pupils had the answer ready when the last word of the question had scarcely been spoken. yet i presently found out some defects in this method of teaching, of which i shall speak later on.[ ] when we were out walking together, i endeavoured to my utmost to penetrate into the lives of the children, and so to influence them for good. i lived my own early life over again, but in a happier way, for it now lay clear and intelligible before me in its special as well as its general characteristics. all my thoughts and work were now directed to the subject of the culture and education of man. this period of my life became full of zeal, of active development, of advancing culture, and, in consequence, of happiness. and my life in the model school also, with my boys and with my excellent colleagues, unusually clever men, was very elevating and encouraging. owing to the position and surroundings of the school buildings, which, though not apparently extensive as seen from the street, contained a considerable courtyard and a spacious garden, the scholars enjoyed perfect freedom of exercise, and could play just as they liked in courtyard or garden; with the result, moreover, of thereby affording a most important opportunity to the various teachers of becoming really intimate with the characters of the boys they taught. and there grew up out of all this a voluntary resolution on the part of the teachers that every teacher should take his boys for a walk once a week. each adopted the method he liked best; some preferred to occupy the time of the walk over a permanent subject; others preferred leaving the subject to chance. i usually occupied my class with botanising; and also as geographical master, i turned these occasions to profit by leading on my boys to think for themselves and to apprehend the relations of various parts of the earth's surface: on these and other perceptions gained in this way i based my instruction in physiography, making them my point of departure. the town was at once my starting-place and my centre. from it i extended our observations to the right and to the left, on this side and on that. i took the river main as a base line, just as it lay; or i used the line of hills or the distant mountains. i settled firmly the direction of the four quarters of the compass. in everything i followed the leading of nature herself, and with the data so obtained i worked out a representation of the place from direct observation, and on a reduced scale, in some level spot of ground or sandy tract carefully chosen for the purpose. when my representation (or map) was thoroughly understood and well impressed on every one's mind, then we reconstructed it in school on a black board placed horizontally. the map was first sketched by teachers and pupils between them, and then each pupil had to do it by himself as an exercise. these representations of the earth's surface of ours had a round contour, resembling the circular outline of the visible horizon. at the next public examination of the school, i was fortunate enough, although this first attempt was full of imperfections, to win the unanimous approval of the parents present; and not only that, but the especial commendation of my superiors. every one said, "that is how physiography[ ] should be taught. a boy must first learn all about his home before he goes further afield." my boys were as well acquainted with the surroundings of the town as with their own rooms at home; and gave rapid and striking answers as to all the natural peculiarities of the neighbourhood. this course was the fountain-head of the teaching method which i afterwards thoroughly worked out, and which has now been in use for many years. in arithmetic i did not take the lower, but the middle classes; and here also my teaching received cheering encomiums. in drawing i also taught the middle classes. my method in this subject was to work at the thorough comprehension and the representation of planes and solids in outline, rising from the simplest forms to complex combinations. i not only had the gratification of obtaining good results, which thoroughly satisfied those who tested them, but also of seeing my pupils work with pleasure, with ardour, and with individuality. in the girls' school i had to teach orthography[ ] in one of the elementary classes. this lesson, ordinarily standing by itself, disconnected with anything, i based upon correct pronunciation.[ ] the teaching was imperfect, certainly; but it nevertheless gained an unmistakable charm for both teacher and pupils; and, finally, its results were very satisfactory. in one of the other classes of the girls' school i taught preparatory drawing. i took this by combinations of single lines; but the method was wanting in a logically necessary connection, so that it did not satisfy me. i cannot remember whether the results of this teaching were brought to the test or not. such was the outcome of my first attempts as a teacher. the kind indulgence and approval granted to me, more because of my good intentions and the fire of my zeal than for my actual performance, spurred me on to plunge deeper into the inquiry as to the nature of true teaching. but the whole system of a large school must have its settled form, with its previously-appointed teaching-course arranged as to times and subjects; and everything must fit in like a piece of clockwork. my system, on the other hand, called only for ready senses and awakened intellect. set forms could only tolerate this view of education so far as it served to enliven and quicken them. but i have unfortunately again and again observed during my career, that even the most active life, if its activity and its vitality be not properly understood and urged ever onward, easily stiffens into bony rigidity. enough, my mind, now fully awakened, could not suffer these set forms, necessary though they were; and i felt that i must seek out some position in which my nature could unfold itself freely according to the needs of the development of my life and of my mind. this longing endeavour of life and mind, which could not submit to the fetters of external limitations, may have been the more exaggerated at the time by my becoming acquainted with arndt's "fragments on human culture,"[ ] which i had purchased. this book satisfied at once my character, my resolves, and my aspirations; and what hitherto lay isolated within me was brought into ordered connection through its pages, while ideas which possessed me without my perceiving them took definite form and expression as the book brought them to light. indeed, i thought then that arndt's book was the bible of education. in those days i spoke of my life and my aims in the following words: "i desire to educate men whose feet shall stand on god's earth, rooted fast in nature, while their head towers up to heaven, and reads its secrets with steady gaze, whose heart shall embrace both earth and heaven, shall enjoy the life of earth and nature with all its wealth of forms, and at the same time shall recognise the purity and peace of heaven, that unites in its love god's earth with god's heaven." in these phrases i now see my former life and aims vividly brought before me as in a picture. little by little a desire gained strength within me to free myself from my engagement at the model school, to which i had bound myself as teacher for at least three years. the headmaster (gruner), whom i have already named, was sufficiently a student of men to have perceived that so excitable a man as i could never work harmoniously in such an institution as that which he directed; so i was released from my engagement, under the condition that i should provide a suitable successor. fate was propitious to me once more. i found a young private tutor with whom i had long been in friendly correspondence, and who had all those qualities which were lacking in me. he was not only thoroughly proficient in the grammar of his mother tongue (german), but also in the grammar of the classical tongues; and, if i am not mistaken, in french also. he had a knowledge of geography far beyond anything i could boast, was acquainted with history, knew arithmetic, possessed some familiarity with botany,--much greater, indeed, than i suspected. and what was worth more than all this, he was full of vigour in mind, heart, and life. therefore the school was every way the gainer by my departure, so greatly the gainer indeed, that from that time no further change has been necessary. that same teacher still lives and works in that same post.[ ] before i begin a new chapter of my career, there are yet a few things which need mention. to know french was at that time the order of the day, and not to know it stamped a man at once as of a very low degree of culture. to acquire a knowledge of french, therefore, became one of my chief aims at the moment. it was my good fortune to obtain instruction from an unrivalled teacher of french, m. perrault, a frenchman by birth, who still, even though an old man, diligently worked at the study of his mother tongue, and who at the same time wrote and spoke german with elegance. i pursued the study with ardour, taking two lessons a day, because i desired to reach a certain proficiency by a given time. slow, however, were my steps, for i was far from having a sufficient knowledge of my own tongue whereon to build a bridge that might carry me into french. i never could properly acquire what i did not fully understand in such a way that it had a living meaning for me; and so from all the genuine zeal and considerable cost which i spent over this study i gained by no means a corresponding result; but i did learn a good deal, much more even than i then knew how to turn to account. my teacher cast on one side all the usual grammatical difficulties of french study, he aimed at imparting the language as a living thing. but i with my ignorance of language could not completely follow this free method of teaching; and yet, nevertheless, i felt that the teacher had fully grasped the meaning and the method of his work, and i always enjoyed the lessons on this account. he was especially successful in accustoming my ear to the french pronunciation, always separating and reducing it to its simple sounds and tones, and never merely saying "this is pronounced like the german _p_, or _b_, or _ä_, or _ö_," etc. the best thing resulting from this course of study was the complete exposure of my ignorance of german grammar. i must do myself the justice to say that i had given myself extraordinary trouble over the works of the most celebrated german grammarians, trying to bring life and interconnection or even a logical consequence into german grammar; but i only confused myself the worse thereby. one man said one thing, another quite the reverse; and not one of all of them, as far as i could see, had educed his theories from the life and nature of the speech itself. i turned away a second time, quite disheartened, from the german grammarians, and once more took my own road. but unfortunately the dry forms of grammar had, quite against my own will, stuck like scales over my eyes, dimming my perceptions; i could find no means to rid myself of them, and they wrought fatally upon me now and long afterwards. the more thoroughly i knew them the more they stiffened and crushed me. my departure from the school was now arranged, and i could let my mind pursue its development free and unshackled. as heretofore, so now also, my kindly fate came lovingly to my help: i can never speak of it with sufficient thankfulness. the three lads to whom i had hitherto given private instruction in arithmetic and language now needed a tutor, as their former tutor was leaving them. the confidential charge was laid upon me, because i of all men best knew their nature and its needs, of seeking out some fit teacher and educator for them from amongst my acquaintance. as for myself this tutor business lay far from my own thoughts, and i therefore looked round me in every direction, and with all earnestness, for some one else. amongst others i applied to my eldest brother, telling him my views as to the necessary requirements of a true educator. my brother wrote back very decidedly and simply, that he could not propose any one to me as a teacher and educator who would fulfil the requirements i had set forth, and further, he did not think i should ever be able to find such a person; for if one should be found possessing ample knowledge and experience of life in its external aspects, he would be deficient in a vigorous inner life of his own, and in the power to recognise and foster it in himself and his pupils; and, on the other hand, another man who might have this power would be deficient in the first-named (practical) qualities. i reported the result of my labours. it caused much disappointment, indeed it could not be otherwise, because the welfare of the children was really sought, in all love and truth, and the highest and best obtainable at that day was desired on their behalf. the family did not venture to press the post upon me personally, knowing my love of freedom and independence. so stood matters for several months. at last, moved by my earnest affection for the lads, and by my care to deserve the confidence with which their mother had entrusted to my hands the provision for their education, i endeavoured to look at things from the point of view of their parents. this brought me at last to the determination to become myself the educator and teacher of the lads. after a hard struggle with myself, the hardest and most exhausting i had undergone for a long time, i made known my decision. it was thankfully received, and understood quite in the spirit which had actuated me in forming it. i communicated my decision to gruner, with whom i still kept in the friendliest relation. he looked at me with downright astonishment, and said, "you will lose all hopes of the position you have so long sought and waited for." i replied that i should protect myself as to my position and my relations with others by a very definite written contract. to which the man of experience retorted, "certainly, and everything will be punctually fulfilled, so that you cannot say that any one condition of all those you stood out so firmly for has failed to be observed; nevertheless you will find you will lose on all points." so spake experienced shrewdness, and what had i to set against it? i spoke of the educational necessities and wants of these children. "good," said he, "then you will leave your own educational necessities and your own wants out of the question?" how it mortified me, that worldly wisdom should be able to speak thus, and that i was unable to controvert it! we talked no more about the matter. and keen as was the internal conflict over this decision and this resolve of mine, equally keen was the external contest which i had to wage in entering on my new post. there were, namely, two immutable conditions in our agreement. one was that i should never be compelled to live in town with my pupils, and that when i began my duties my pupils should be handed over entirely to my care, without any restriction; that they should follow me into the country, and there form a restricted and perfectly isolated circle, and that when they returned to town life my duties as preceptor should be at an end. the time for beginning my new career drew nigh. as the stipulated dwelling for myself and my pupils was not yet ready, i was expected to take up my abode, for a few days, with my pupils in their town house. but i felt that it was clear that the least want of firmness at the outset would endanger my whole educational plan; therefore, i stood firm, and indeed gained my point, though at the price of being called headstrong, self-willed, and stubborn. that my assumption of my post was attended with a sharp contest was a very good and wholesome discipline for me. it was the fitting inauguration of a position and a sphere of work which was henceforth to be attended, for me, with perpetual and never-ending strife. but as to this family and all its members, my earnest unbending maintenance of my resolve had a most wholesome effect upon them, even to winning in the end their comprehension and approval, though this was later and long after i had quitted the situation. it was ten or eleven years afterwards--that is, four or five years after my departure--that the mother of these lads expressed her entire approval of the adamantine perseverance i had exhibited in my convictions. i entered my new sphere of educational work in july . i was twenty-five years old, as far as years went, but younger by several years in regard to the development of my character. i neither felt myself so old as i was, nor indeed had i any conception or realisation of my age. i was only conscious of the strength and striving of my life, the extent of my mental culture, the circumstances of my experience in the world, and especially of--what shall i call it?--the shiftlessness and undeveloped state of my culture as far as its helplessness with the external world was concerned, of my ignorance of life both as to what it really was, and how it showed in its outer aspect. the state of my culture was such as only to serve to plunge me into conflict, through the contradiction and opposition in which i found myself henceforward with all existing methods; and consequently the whole period of my tutorial career was one continual contest. it was a salutary thing for me that this was my appointed lot from the very beginning. now and later on i was therefore able to say to myself by way of consolation and encouragement: "you knew beforehand just how it would be." still, unpleasantness seldom arrives in exactly the manner expected, and the unexpected is always the hardest to bear. thus it was with me in this case; my situation seemed to contain insurmountable difficulties. i sought the basis for them in imperfect culture; and the cause of the disconnected nature of the culture i had been able to attain, lay, so i perceived, in the interruptions which marred my university career. educator and teacher, however, i had determined to become and to remain; and as far as i could know my own feelings and my own powers, i must and would work out my profession in an independent free fashion of my own, founded on the view of man and his nature and relationships which had now begun to dawn upon me. yet every man finds it above all things difficult to understand himself, and especially hard was it in my own case. i began to think that i must look for help outside myself, and seek to acquire from others the knowledge and experience i needed. and thus there came to me once again the idea of fitting myself by continuing my university studies to become founder, principal, and manager of an educational establishment of my own. but the fact was to be considered that i had turned away from the educational path on which i had entered. now, when the imperfection of my training pressed itself upon me, i not only sought help from nature as of old, that school allotted to me by fate, but i turned also for assistance to my fellow-men who had divided out the whole field of education and teaching into separate departments of science, and had added to these the assistance of a rich literature. this need of help so troubled and oppressed me, and threw my whole nature into such confusion, that i resolved, as soon as might be, once more to proceed to one of the universities, and necessarily, therefore, to relinquish as speedily as possible my occupation as an educator. as i always discussed everything important with my brother, i wrote to him on this occasion as usual, telling him of my plans and of my resolve. but for this time, at least, my nature was able to work out its difficulty without his help. i soon came to see that i had failed to appreciate my position, and had misunderstood myself; and, therefore, before i had time to get an answer from my brother to my first letter i wrote to him again, telling him that my university plans had been given up, and that my fixed resolve now was to remain at my post. he rejoiced doubly at my decision, because this time he would have been unable to agree with me.[ ] no sooner had i firmly come to my decision than i began to apply my thoughts vigorously to the subjects of education and instruction. the first thing that absorbed me was the clear conviction that to educate properly one must share the life of one's pupil. then came the questions, "what is elementary education? and of what value are the educational methods advocated by pestalozzi? above all, what is the purpose of education?" in answering the question, "what is the purpose of education?" i relied at that time upon the following observations: man lives in a world of objects, which influence him, and which he desires to influence; therefore he ought to know these objects in their nature, in their conditions, and in their relations with each other and with mankind. objects have form, measurement, and number. by the expression, "the external world," at this time i meant only nature; my life was so bound up in natural objects that i altogether passed by the productions of man's art or manufacture. therefore for a long time it was an effort to me to regard man's handiwork, with pestalozzi's scholars, tobler and hopf, as a proper subject for elementary culture, and it broadened my inward and outward glance considerably when i was able to look upon the world of the works of man as also part of the "external world." in this way i sought, to the extent of such powers as i consciously possessed at that time, to make clear the meaning of all things through man, his relations with himself, and with the external world. the most pregnant thought which arose in me at this period was this: all is unity, all rests in unity, all springs from unity, strives for and leads up to unity, and returns to unity at last. this striving in unity and after unity is the cause of the several aspects of human life. but between my inner vision and my outer perception, presentation, and action was a great gulf fixed. therefore it seemed to me that everything which should or could be required for human education and instruction must be necessarily conditioned and given, by virtue of the very nature of the necessary course of his development, in man's own being, and in the relationships amidst which he is set. a man, it seemed to me, would be well educated, when he had been trained to care for these relationships and to acknowledge them, to master them and to survey them. i worked hard, severely hard, during this period, but both the methods and the aims of education came before me in such an incoherent heap, so split up into little fragments, and so entirely without any kind of order, that during several years i did not make much progress towards my constant purpose of bringing all educational methods into an orderly sequence and a living unity. as my habitual and therefore characteristic expression of my desires then ran, i longed to see, to know, and to show forth, all things in inter-connection. for my good fortune, however there came out about that time certain educational writings by seller,[ ] jean paul,[ ] and others. they supported and elevated me, sometimes by their concurrence with my own views, expressed above, sometimes by the very contrary. the pestalozzian method i knew, it is true, in its main principles, but not as a living force, satisfying the needs of man. what especially lay heavy upon me at this time, however, painfully felt by myself though not apparent to my pupils, was the utter absence of any organised connection between the subjects of education. joyful and unfettered work springs from the conception of all things as one whole, and forms a life and a lifework in harmony with the constitution of the universe and resting firmly upon it. that this was the true education i soon felt fervently convinced, and so my first educational work consisted merely in being with my pupils and influencing them by the power of my life and work; more than this i was not at all in a position to give. oh, why is it that man knows so ill and prizes so little the blessings that he possesses for the first time? when i now seek to make myself clear as to the proper life and work of an educator, my notes of that time rise fresh and fair to meet me. i look back from now into that childhood of my teacher's life, and learn from it; just as i look back into the childhood of my man's life, and survey that, and learn from that, too. why is all childhood and youth so full of wealth and so unconscious of it, and why does it lose it without knowing it only to learn what it possessed when it is for ever lost? ought this always to be so? ought it to be so for every child, for every youth? will not a time come at last, come perhaps soon, when the experience, the insight, the knowledge of age, and wisdom herself, shall build up a defence, a shelter, a protection for the childhood of youth? of what use to mankind is the old man's experience and the greybeard's wisdom when they sink into the grave with their possessors? at first my life and my work with my pupils was confined within narrow limits. it consisted in merely living, lounging, and strolling in the open air, and going for walks. although i was disgusted with the methods of town education, i did not yet venture to convert life amidst nature into an educational course. that was taught me by my young pupils themselves; and as from the circumstances of my own culture i eagerly fostered to my utmost every budding sense for nature that showed itself, there soon developed amongst them a life-encompassing, life-giving, and life-raising enjoyment of natural objects. in the following year[ ] this way of life was further enhanced by the father giving his sons a piece of meadowland for a garden, at the cultivation of which we accordingly worked in common. the greatest delight of my pupils was to make little presents of the produce of their garden to their parents and also to me. how their eyes would gleam with pleasure when they were fortunate enough to be able to accomplish this. pretty plants and little shrubs from the fields, the great garden of god, were transplanted by us to the children's gardens, and there carefully tended. great was the joy, especially of the two younger ones, when such a colonist frankly enrolled himself amongst the citizens of the state. from this time forth my own childhood no longer seemed wasted. i acknowledged how entirely different a thing is the cultivation of plants, to one who has watched them and studied them in all the stages of their own free development, from what it is to one who has always stood aloof from nature. and here already, living cheerfully and joyfully in the bosom of nature with my first pupils, i began to tell myself that the training of natural life was closely akin to the training of human life. for did not those gifts of flowers and plants express appreciation and acknowledgment of the love of parents and teacher? were they not the outcome of the characteristic lovingness and the enthusiastic thankfulness of childhood? a child that of its own accord and of its own free will seeks out flowers, cares for them, and protects them, so that in due time he can weave a garland or make a nosegay with them for his parents or his teacher, can never become a bad child, a wicked man. such a child can easily be led towards love, towards thankfulness, towards recognition of the fatherliness of god, who gives him these gifts and permits them to grow that he, as a cheerful giver in his turn, may gladden with them the hearts of his parents. that time of conflict contained within it an element of special and peculiar meaning to myself. it brought before me my past life in its many various stages of development; and especially the chief events which had formed and influenced it, with their causes and their effects. and it always seemed to me of particular importance to go back upon the very earliest occurrences in my life. but of the actual matters of fact of my earliest years very few traces now remained; for my mother, who could have kept them in her memory for me, and from whom i could now have learnt them, had died even before my life had really awakened. amongst the few relics remaining to me was a written address from my godmother (the so-called baptismal letter), which she had sent me immediately after my baptism, according to the thuringian custom of the time, as a sort of portion or dowry for my entrance into life. it had come into my possession after the death of my father. this letter, of a simple, christian, tenderly religious, womanly soul, expressed in plain and affecting terms the true relation of the young christian to that to which by his baptism he had become bound. through these words the inner life of both mind and soul, of my boyhood and of my youth, was brought before me with all its peace and blessedness; and i could not help seeing how much that i then longed for had since come to pass. my soul, upon this thought, regained that original inspiriting, enlightening, and quickening unity of which i stood so much in need. but at the same time all the resolutions of my boyhood and youth also rushed back upon me, and made it manifest how much more had yet to happen before they, too, were accomplished; and with them they brought the memory of those types and ideals with which the feeble boyish imagination had sought to strengthen itself. but my life had been far too much an inward and strictly personal life to have been able, or even to have dared to stand forth in any outwardly definite form, or to take any fixed relation to other lives, except in matters of feeling and intelligence. indeed the power of manifesting myself properly was a very late accomplishment with me, and was, in fact, not gained until long after the recommencement of my present educational work.[ ] i cannot now remember, during all the time of this educational work, that my personal life stood out in any way from the usual ordinary existence of men; but before i can speak with certainty upon this point i must procure information as to the circumstances of my earlier life. this much is clear, that my life at the time i am speaking of has remained in my memory only in its general ordinary human aspect. it is true, however, that then, as always in my later life, it was and ever has been very difficult to me to separate in thought my inner life from my outer, and to give definite form and outward expression to the inner life, especially as to religious matters. i dare not deny, that although the definite religious forms of the church reached my heart readily both by way of the emotions and by sincere conviction, and cleansed and quickened me, yet i have always felt great reluctance to speak of these definite religious forms with others, particularly with pupils and students. i could never make them so clear and living to a simple healthy soul as they were to myself. from this i conclude that the naturally trained child requires no definite church forms, because the lovingly-fostered, and therefore continuously and powerfully-developed human life, as well as the untroubled child-life also, is and must be in itself a christian life. i further conclude that a child to whom the deeper truths of life or of religion were given in the dogmatic positive forms of church creeds would imperatively need when a young man to be surrounded by pure and manly lives, whereby those rigid creeds might be illuminated and quickened into life. otherwise the child runs great danger of casting away his whole higher life along with the dogmatic religious forms which he has been unable to assimilate. there, indeed, is the most elevated faith to be found, where form and life work towards a whole, shed light upon each other, and go side by side in a sisterly concord, like the inward life with the outward life, or the special with the universal. but i must return from this long digression, and resume the account of my life and work as an educator. bodily exercises were as yet unknown to me in their educational capacity. i was acquainted only with jumping over a cord and with walking on stilts through my own boyish practice therein. as they fell into no relation with our common life, neither with the pursuits and thoughts of my pupils nor with my own, we regarded them purely as childish games. what the year brings to a man in the season when nature lies clear and open before him, that it does not bring to him in the season when nature is more often locked away from his gaze. and as the two seasons bring diverse gifts, so do they require diverse things in return. in the latter part of the year, when man is perforce driven more upon himself, his occupations should take on more narrowly personal characteristics. just as the winter's life with nature is more fixed and narrowed, so also is the winter's life with men; therefore, a boy's life at this time needs material of some definite fashion, or needs fashionless material which can be shaped into definite fashion. my pupils soon came to me, urged by this new necessity. what life requires that life provides, wherever life is or has been; what youth requires that youth provides, wherever youth is or has been. and what the later man's life requires from a man, or from men in general, that also is provided by the boy's life and the youth's life when these have been genuinely lived through. the demand of my pupils set me upon the following question: "what did you do as a boy? what happened to you to satisfy that need of yours for something to do and to express? by what, at the same period of your life, was this need most fully met, or what did you then most desire for this purpose?" then there came to me a memory from out my earliest boyhood, which yielded me all i wanted in my emergency. it was the easy art of impressing figures and forms by properly arranged simple strokes on smooth paper.[ ] i have often made use of this simple art in my later life, and have never found it fail in its object; and on this occasion, too, it faithfully served my pupils and me, for our skill, at first weak both on the part of teacher and pupil, grew rapidly greater with use. from these forms impressed upon paper we rose to making forms out of paper itself, and then to producing forms in paste-board, and finally in wood. my later experience has taught me much more as to the best shapes and materials for the study of forms,[ ] of which i shall speak in its proper place. i must, however, permit myself to dwell a little upon this extremely simple occupation of impressing forms on paper, because at the proper age it quite absorbs a boy, and completely fills and contents the demands of his faculties. why is this? it gives the boy, easily and spontaneously, and yet at the same time imperceptibly, precise, clear, and many-sided results due to his own creative power. man is compelled not only to recognise nature in her manifold forms and appearances, but also to understand her in the unity of her inner working, of her effective force. therefore he himself follows nature's methods in the course of his own development and culture, and in his games he imitates nature at her work of creation. the earliest natural formations, the fixed forms of crystals, seem as if driven together by some secret power external to themselves; and the boy in his first games gladly imitates these first activities of nature, so that by the one he may learn to comprehend the other. does not the boy take pleasure in building, and what else are the earliest fixed forms of nature but built-up forms? however, this indication that a higher meaning underlies the occupation and games which children choose out for themselves must for the present suffice. and since these spontaneous activities of children have not yet been thoroughly thought out from a high point of view, and have not yet been regarded from what i might almost call their cosmical and anthropological side, we may from day to day expect some philosopher to write a comprehensive and important book about them.[ ] from the love, the attention, the continued interest and the cheerfulness with which these occupations are plied by children other important considerations also arise, of quite a different character. a boy's game necessarily brings him into some wider or fuller relationship, into relationship with some more elevated group of ideas. is he building a house?--he builds it so that he may dwell in it like grown-up people do, and have just such another cupboard, and so forth, as they have, and be able to give people things out of it just as they do. and one must always take care of this: that the child who receives a present shall not have his nature cramped and stunted thereby; according to the measure of how much he receives, so much must he be able to give away. in fact, this is a necessity for a simple-hearted child. happy is that little one who understands how to satisfy this need of his nature, to give by producing various gifts of his own creation! as a perfect child of humanity, a boy ought to desire to enjoy and to bestow to the very utmost, for he dimly feels already that he belongs to the whole, to the universal, to the comprehensive in nature, and it is as part of this that he lives; therefore, as such would he accordingly be considered and so treated. when he has felt this, the most important means of development available for a human being at this stage has been discovered. with a well-disposed child at such a time nothing has any value except as it may serve for a common possession, for a bond of union between him and his beloved ones. this aspect of the child's character must be carefully noticed by parents and by teachers, and used by them as a means of awakening and developing the active and presentative side of his nature; wherefore none, not even the simplest gifts from a child, should ever be suffered to be neglected. to sketch my first attempt as an educator in one phrase, i sought with all my powers to give my pupils the best possible instruction, and the best possible training and culture, but i was unable to fulfil my intentions, to attain my end, in the position i then occupied, and with the degree of culture to which i had myself attained. as soon as this had become fully evident to me, it occurred to my mind that nothing else could be so serviceable to me as a sojourn for a time with pestalozzi. i expressed my views on this head very decidedly, and accordingly, in the summer of , it was agreed that i should take my three pupils with me to yverdon. so it soon afterwards came about i was teacher and scholar, educator and pupil, all at the same time. if i were to attempt to put into one sentence all i expected to find at yverdon, i should say it was a vigorous inner life amongst the boys and youths, quickening, manifesting itself in all kinds of creative activity, satisfying the manysidedness of man, meeting all his necessities, and occupying all his powers both mental and bodily. pestalozzi, so i imagined, must be the heart, the life-source, the spiritual guide of this life and work; from his central point he must watch over the boy's life in all its bearings, see it in all its stages of development, or at all events sympathise with it and feel with it, whether as the life of the individual, of the family, of the community, of the nation, of mankind at large. with such expectations i arrived at yverdon. there was no educational problem whose resolution i did not firmly expect to find there. that my soul soon faithfully mirrored the life which there flowed around me, my report for sufficiently shows.[ ] to throw myself completely into the midst, into the very heart, of pestalozzi's work, i wished to live in the main buildings of the institution, that is to say, in the castle itself.[ ] we would have cheerfully shared the lot of the ordinary scholars, but our wish could not be granted, some outside jealousies standing in the way. however, i soon found a lodging, in immediate proximity to the institution, so that we were able to join the pupils at their dinner, their evening meal, and their supper, and to take part in the whole courses of their instruction, so far as the subjects chosen by us were concerned; indeed, to share in their whole life. i soon saw much that was imperfect; but, notwithstanding, the activity which pressed forth on all sides, the vigorous effort, the spiritual endeavour of the life around me, which carried me away with it as it did all other men who came within its influence, convinced me that here i should presently be able to resolve all my difficulties. as far as regarded myself personally, i had nothing more earnest to do for the time than to watch that my pupils gained the fullest possible profit from this life which was so rich in vigour for both body and soul. accordingly we shared all lessons together; and i made it my special business to reason out with pestalozzi each branch of instruction from its first point of connection with the rest, and thus to study it from its very root. the forcible, comprehensive, stimulating life stimulated me too, and seized upon me with all its comprehensiveness and all its force. it is true it could not blind me to many imperfections and deficiencies, but these were retrieved by the general tendency and endeavour of the whole system; for this, though containing several absolute contradictions, manifest even at that time, yet vindicated on a general view its inner connection and hidden unity. the powerful, indefinable, stirring, and uplifting effect produced by pestalozzi when he spoke, set one's soul on fire for a higher, nobler life, although he had not made clear or sure the exact way towards it, nor indicated the means whereby to attain it. thus did the power and manysidedness of the educational effort make up for deficiency in unity and comprehensiveness; and the love, the warmth, the stir of the whole, the human kindness and benevolence of it replaced the want of clearness, depth, thoroughness, extent, perseverance, and steadiness. in this way each separate branch of education was in such a condition as to powerfully interest, but never wholly to content the observer, since it prepared only further division and separation and did not tend towards unity. the want of unity of effort, both as to means and aims, i soon felt; i recognised it in the inadequacy, the incompleteness, and the unlikeness of the ways in which the various subjects were taught. therefore i endeavoured to gain the greatest possible insight into all, and became a scholar in all subjects--arithmetic, form, singing, reading, drawing, language, physical geography, the natural sciences, etc. i could see something higher, and i believed in a higher efficiency, a closer unity of the whole educational system; in truth, i believed i saw this clearer, though not with greater conviction, than pestalozzi himself. i held that land happy, that man fortunate, by whom the means of true education should be developed and applied, and the wish to see this benefit conferred upon my country naturally sprang from the love i bore my native land.[ ] the result was the written record of already referred to. where there is the germ of disunion, where the whole is split up, even sometimes into contradictory parts, and where an absolute reconciling unity is wanting, where what connection there may be is derived rather from casual outward ties than from inner necessary union, the whole system must of necessity dig its own grave, and become its own murderer. now it was exactly at such a time of supreme crisis that i had the good or the evil fortune to be at yverdon. all that was good and all that was bad, all that was profitable and all that was unprofitable, all that was strong and all that was weak, all that was empty and all that was full, all that was selfish and all that was unselfish amongst pestalozzi and his friends, was displayed openly before me. i happened to be there precisely at the time of the great commission of . neither pestalozzi nor his so-called friends, neither any individuals nor the whole community, could give me, or would give me, what i wanted. in the methods laid down by them for teaching boys, for the thorough education of boys as part of one great human family,--that is, for their higher instruction,--i failed to find that comprehensiveness which is alone sufficient to satisfy the human being. thus it was with natural history, natural science, german, and language generally, with history, and above all, with religious instruction. pestalozzi's devotional addresses were very vague, and, as experience showed, were only serviceable to those already in the right way.[ ] i spoke of all these things very earnestly and decidedly with pestalozzi, and at last i made up my mind, in , to quit yverdon along with my pupils. but before i continue further here, it is my duty to consider my life and work from yet another point of view. amongst the various branches of education, the teaching of languages struck me with especial force as defective, on account of its great imperfection, its capriciousness and lifelessness. the search for a satisfactory method for our native language occupied me in preference to anything else. i proceeded on the following basis:-- language is an image, a representation of our separate (subject) world, and becomes manifest to the (object) world outside ourselves principally through combined and ordered sounds. if, therefore, i would image forth anything correctly, i must know the real nature of the original object. the theme of our imagery and representation, the outside world, contains objects, therefore i must have a definite form, a definite succession of sounds, a definite word to express each object. the objects have qualities, therefore our language must contain adjectives expressing these qualities. the qualities of objects are fundamental or relative; express what they are, what they possess, and what they become. passing now to singing and music, it happened very luckily for me that just at this time nägeli and pfeifer brought out their "treatise on the construction of a musical course according to the principles of pestalozzi." nägeli's knowledge of music generally, and especially of church music, made a powerful impression upon me, and brought music and singing before me as a means for human culture; setting the cultivation of music, and especially of singing, in a higher light than i had ever conceived possible. nägeli was very capable in teaching music and singing, and in representing their function as inspiring aids to pure human life; and although nearly twenty years have elapsed since i heard those lessons of his, the fire of the love for music which they kindled burns yet, active for good, within my breast. and further, i was taught and convinced by these two super-excellent music teachers, who instructed my pupils, that purely instrumental music, such as that of the violin or of the pianoforte, is also in its essence based upon and derived from vocal music, though developed through the independent discovery of a few simple sound-producing instruments. not only have i never since left the path thus opened to me at its origin, but i have consistently traced it onwards in all care and love, and continue to rejoice in the excellent results obtained. this course of music-teaching, as extended and applied later on, has always enjoyed the approbation of the thoughtful and experienced amongst music teachers. i also studied the boys' play, the whole series of games in the open air, and learned to recognise their mighty power to awake and to strengthen the intelligence and the soul as well as the body. in these games and what was connected with them i detected the mainspring of the moral strength which animated the pupils and the young people in the institution. the games, as i am now fervently assured, formed a mental bath of extraordinary strengthening-power;[ ] and although the sense of the higher symbolic meaning of games had not yet dawned upon me, i was nevertheless able to perceive in each boy genuinely at play a moral strength governing both mind and body which won my highest esteem. closely akin to the games in their morally strengthening aspect were the walks, especially those of the general walking parties, more particularly when conducted by pestalozzi himself. these walks were by no means always meant to be opportunities for drawing close to nature, but nature herself, though unsought, always drew the walkers close to her. every contact with her elevates, strengthens, purifies. it is from this cause that nature, like noble great-souled men, wins us to her; and whenever school or teaching duties gave me respite, my life at this time was always passed amidst natural scenes and in communion with nature. from the tops of the high mountains near by i used to rejoice in the clear and still sunset, in the pine-forests, the glaciers, the mountain meadows, all bathed in rosy light. such an evening walk came indeed to be an almost irresistible necessity to me after each actively-spent day. as i wandered on the sunlit, far-stretching hills, or along the still shore of the lake, clear as crystal, smooth as a mirror, or in the shady groves, under the tall forest trees, my spirit grew full with ideas of the truly god-like nature and priceless value of a man's soul, and i gladdened myself with the consideration of mankind as the beloved children of god. there is no question but that pestalozzi's general addresses, especially those delivered in the evening, when he used to delight in evoking a picture of noble manliness and true love of mankind and developing it in all its details, very powerfully contributed towards arousing such an inner life as that just described. yet i did not lose myself in empty fancies; on the contrary, i kept my practical work constantly before my eyes. from thinking about my dead parents my thoughts would wander back over the rest of my family, turning most often to that dear eldest brother of mine, who has now not been referred to for some time in these pages. he had become the faithful watchful father of several children. i shared in his unaffected fatherly cares, and my soul was penetrated with the desire that he might be able to give his sons such an education as i should feel obliged to point out to him as being the best. already, ever since i was at frankfurt, i had communicated to him my thoughts on education and methods of teaching. what now occurred to me out of my new knowledge as applicable to his case, i extracted, collected together, and classified, so as to be able to impart it to him for his use at the first opportunity. one thing which greatly contributed to the better consideration and elucidation of the pestalozzian mode of teaching was the presence of a large number of young men sent from various governments as students to yverdon. with some of these i was on terms of intimacy, and to the exchange of ideas which went on amongst us i owe at least as much as to my own observation. on the whole i passed a glorious time at yverdon, elevated in tone, and critically decisive for my after life. at its close, however, i felt more clearly than ever the deficiency of inner unity and interdependence, as well as of outward comprehensiveness and thoroughness in the teaching there. to obtain the means of a satisfactory judgment upon the best method of teaching the classical tongues, i took greek and latin under a young german, who was staying there at that time; but i was constructing a method of my own all the while, by observing all the points which seemed valuable, as they occurred in actual teaching. but the want of a satisfactory presentation of the classical tongues as part of the general means of education and culture of mankind, especially when added to the want of a consideration of natural history as a comprehensive and necessary means of education, and above all the uncertain wavering of the ground-principles on which the whole education and teaching rested at yverdon, decided me not only to take my pupils back to their parents' house, but to abandon altogether my present educational work, in order to equip myself, by renewed study at some german university, with that due knowledge of natural science which now seemed to me quite indispensable for an educator. in the year i returned from yverdon by bern, schaffhausen, and stuttgart to frankfurt. i should have prepared to go to the university at once, but found myself obliged to remain at my post till the july of the following year. the piece-meal condition of the methods of teaching and of education which surrounded me hung heavy on my mind, so that i was extremely glad when at last i was able to shake myself free from my position. in the beginning of july i went to göttingen. i went up at once, although it was in the middle of the session, because i felt that i should require several months to see my way towards harmonising my inward with my outward life, and reconciling my thoughts with my actions. and it was in truth several months before i gained peace within myself, and before i arrived at that unity which was so necessary to me, between my inward and my outward life, and at the equally necessary harmony between aim, career, and method. mankind as a whole, as one great unity, had now become my quickening thought. i kept this conception continually before my mind. i sought after proofs of it in my little world within, and in the great world without me; i desired by many a struggle to win it, and then to set it worthily forth. and thus i was led back to the first appearance of man upon our earth, to the land which first saw man, and to the first manifestation of mankind, his speech. linguistic studies, the learning of languages, philology, etc., now formed the object of my attack. the study of oriental tongues seemed to me the central point, the fountain head, whither my search was leading me; and at once i began upon them with hebrew and arabic. i had a dim idea of opening up a path through them to other asiatic tongues, particularly those of india[ ] and persia. i was powerfully stimulated and attracted by what i had heard about the study of these languages, then in its early youth--namely, the acknowledgment of a relationship between persian and german. greek also attracted me in quite a special way on account of its inner fulness, organisation, and regularity. my whole time and energy were devoted to the two languages i have named.[ ] but i did not get far with hebrew in spite of my genuine zeal and my strict way with myself, because between the manner of looking at a language congenial to my mind and the manner in which the elementary lesson book presented it to me, lay a vast chasm which i could find no means to bridge over. in the form in which language was offered to me, i could find and see no means of making it a living study; and yet, nevertheless, nothing would have drawn me from my linguistic studies had i not been assured by educated men that these studies, especially my work on indian and persian tongues, were in reality quite beside the mark at which i aimed. hebrew also was abandoned; but, on the other hand, greek irresistibly enthralled me, and nearly all my time and energy were finally given to its study, with the help of the best books. i was now free, happy, in good mental and bodily health and vigour, and i gained peace within myself and without, through hard work, interrupted only by an indisposition which kept me to my room for a few weeks. after working all day alone, i used to walk out late in the evening, so that at least i might receive a greeting from the friendly beams of the setting sun. to invigorate my spirit as well as my bodily frame i would walk on till near midnight in the beautiful neighbourhood which surrounds göttingen. the glittering starry sky harmonised well with my thoughts, and a new object which appeared in the heavens at this time, aroused my wonder in an especial degree. i knew but little of astronomy, and the expected arrival of a large comet[ ] was, therefore, quite unknown to me; so that i found out the comet for myself, and that was a source of special attraction. this object absorbed my contemplation in those silent nights, and the thought of the all-embracing, wide-spreading sphere of law and order above, developed and shaped itself in my mind with especial force during my night-wanderings. i often turned back home that i might note down in their freshness the results of these musings; and then after a short sleep i rose again to pursue my studies. in this way the last half of the summer session passed quickly away, and michaelmas arrived. the development of my inner life had meanwhile insensibly drawn me little by little quite away from the study of languages, and led me towards the deeper-lying unity of natural objects. my earlier plan gradually reasserted itself, to study nature in her first forms and elements. but the funds which still remained to me were now too small to permit of the longer residence at the university which that plan necessitated. as i had nothing at all now to depend upon save my own unaided powers, i at first thought to gain my object by turning them to some practical account, such as literary work. i had already begun to prepare for this, when an unexpected legacy changed my whole position. up to now i had had one aunt still living, a sister of my mother's, who had spent all the best years of her life in my native village, enjoying excellent health and free from care. by her sudden death i obtained, in a manner i had little expected, the means of pursuing my much-desired studies. this occurrence made a very deep impression upon me, because this lady was the sister of that uncle of mine whose death had enabled me to travel from gross milchow to frankfurt, and so first set me upon my career as an educator. and now again the death of a loved one made it possible for me to attain higher culture in the service of this career. both brother and sister had loved with the closest affection my own mother, dead so far too soon, and this love they had extended to her children after her. may these two loving and beloved ones who through their death gave me a higher life and a higher vocation, live for ever through my work and my career. my position was now a very pleasant one, and i felt soothing and cheering influences such as had not visited me before. in the autumn holidays, too, a friendly home was ready to receive me. besides the country-clergyman brother, who so often was a power for good in my life, i had another brother, also older than i, who had been living more than ten years as a well-established tradesman and citizen in osterode, amongst the harz mountains; head of a quiet, self-contained, happy family, and father of some fine children. my previous life and endeavours as an educator had already brought me into connection with this circle; for i had not failed whenever i found anything suitable to my brother's needs to let him know of it, as he was the conscientious teacher and educator of his own children. it was in this peaceful, active family-circle of an intellectual tradesman's home that i passed all the vacation time during which the university regulations released me from vigorous work. it could not prove otherwise than that such a visit should be of the greatest service to me in my general development, and i remember it with thankfulness even yet on that account. i return now to my university life. physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and natural history in general, were my principal studies. the inner law and order embracing all things, and in itself conditioned and necessitated, now presented itself to me in such clearness that i could see nothing either in nature or in life in which it was not made manifest, although varying greatly according to its several manifestations, in complexity and in gradation. just at this time those great discoveries of the french and english philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer unity. and the labours of the german and swedish philosophers to express these essentially conditioned fundamental laws in terms of weight and number, so that they might be studied and understood in their most exact expression, and in their mutual interchange and connection, fitted in exactly with my own longings and endeavours. natural science and natural researches now seemed to me, while themselves belonging to a distinct plane of vital phenomena, the foundation and cornerstones which served to make clear and definite the laws and the progress of the development, the culture, and the education of mankind. it was but natural that such studies should totally absorb me, occupy my whole energies, and keep me most busily employed. i studied chemistry and physics with the greatest possible zeal, but the teaching of the latter did not satisfy me so thoroughly as that of the former. what in the current half-year's term i was regarding rather from a theoretical standpoint, i intended in the next half-year to study practically as a factor of actual life: hence i passed to organic chemistry and geology.[ ] those laws which i was able to observe in nature i desired to trace also in the life and proceedings of man, wherefore i added to my previous studies history, politics, and political economy. these practical departments of knowledge brought vividly home to me the great truth that the most valuable wealth a man can possess lies in a cultivated mind, and in its suitable exercise upon matters growing out of its own natural conditions. i saw further that wealth arose quite as much from vigour of production as from saving by economical use; and that those productions were the most valuable of all, which were the outcome and representation of lofty ideas or remarkable thoughts; and finally, that politics itself was in its essence but a means of uplifting man from the necessities of nature and of life to the freedom of the spirit and the will. while i received much benefit from the lectures on natural history at the university, i could not fall in with the views held there as to fixed forms--crystallography, mineralogy, and natural philosophy. from what i had heard of the natural history lectures of professor weiss in berlin, i felt sure that i could acquire a correct view of both these subjects from him. and also since my means would not allow me to stay even so long as one entire session more at göttingen, whilst on the other hand i might hope at berlin to earn enough by teaching to maintain a longer university career there, i came to the conclusion to go to berlin at the beginning of the next winter session to study mineralogy, geology, and crystallography under weiss, as well as to do some work at physics and physical laws. after a stay of a few weeks with my brother at osterode, i went to berlin in october . the lectures for which i had so longed really came up to the needs of my mind and soul, and awakened in me, more fervent than ever, the certainty of the demonstrable inner connection of the whole cosmical development of the universe. i saw also the possibility of man's becoming conscious of this absolute unity of the universe, as well as of the diversity of things and appearances which is perpetually unfolding itself within that unity; and then, when i had made clear to myself, and brought fully home to my consciousness, the view that the infinitely varied phenomena in man's life, work, thought, feeling, and position, were all summed up in the unity of his personal existence, i felt myself able to turn my thoughts once more to educational problems. to make sure of my power to maintain myself at the university, i undertook some teaching at a private school of good reputation.[ ] my work here, beyond the sufficient support it afforded me during residence, had no positive effect upon the endeavour of my life, for i found neither high intelligence, lofty aims, nor unity in the course of instruction. the fateful year had now begun. all men grasped weapons, and called on one another to fly to arms to defend the fatherland. i, too, had a home, it is true, a birthplace, i might say a motherland, but i could not feel that i had a fatherland.[ ] my home sent up no cry to me; i was no prussian,[ ] and thus it came about that the universal call to arms (in berlin) affected me, in my retired life, but little. it was quite another sentiment which drew me to join the ranks of german soldiers; my enthusiasm was possibly small, but my determination was firmly fixed as the rocks themselves. this sentiment was the consciousness of a pure german brotherhood, which i had always honoured in my soul as a lofty and sublime ideal; one which i earnestly desired might make itself felt in all its fulness and freedom all over germany. besides the fidelity with which i clung to my avocation as an educator also influenced my action in this matter. even if i could not say truly that i had a fatherland, i must yet acknowledge that every boy, that every child, who might perhaps later on come to be educated by me would have a fatherland, that this fatherland was now requiring defence, and that the child was not in a position to share in that defence. it did not seem possible to imagine that a young man capable of bearing arms could become a teacher of children and boys whose fatherland he had refused to defend with his blood and even with his life if need were; that he who now did not feel ashamed to shrink from blows could exist without blushing in after years, or could incite his pupils to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and for unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and contempt. such was the second main reason which influenced me. thirdly, this summons to war seemed to me an expression of the general need of the men, the land, and the times amidst which i lived, and i felt that it would be altogether unworthy and unmanly to stand by without fighting for this general need, and without taking my share in warding off the general danger. before these convictions all considerations gave way, even that of my bodily constitution, which was far too weakly for such a life. as comrades i selected the lützowers; and at eastertide i arrived at dresden on my road to join the infantry division of lützow's corps at leipzig.[ ] through the retired nature of my self-concentrated life it came about naturally that i, although a regularly matriculated student, had held aloof from the other students, and had gained no settled acquaintance amongst them; thus, out of all the vigorous comrades whom i met at dresden, many of whom were like myself, berlin students, i did not find one man i knew. i made but few new friends in the army, and these few i was fated to encounter on the first day of my entrance into my new work of soldiering. our sergeant at the first morning halt after our march out from dresden, introduced me to a comrade from erfurt as a thüringer, and therefore a fellow-countryman. this was langethal; and casually as our acquaintance thus began, it proved to be a lasting friendship. our first day's march was to meissen, where we halted. we had enjoyed lovely spring weather during our march, and our repose was gladdened by a still lovelier evening. i found all the university students of the corps, driven by a like impulse, collected together in an open place by the shores of elbe and near a public restaurant; and some old meissen wine soon served us as a bond of union. we sat about twenty strong in a jolly group at a long table, and began by welcoming and pledging one another to friendship. it was here that langethal introduced me to a university friend of his at berlin, the young middendorff, a divinity student from the mark.[ ] keeping together in a merry little society till the middle of the lovely spring night, we united again next morning in a visit to the splendid cathedral of meissen. thus from the very first did we three join fast in a common struggle towards and on behalf of the higher life, and even if we have not always remained in the like close outward bonds of union, we have from that time to this, now near upon fifteen years, never lost our comradeship in the inner life and our common endeavour after self-education. both langethal and middendorff had a third friend, named bauer, amongst our comrades of the camp. with him also, as i think, i made acquaintance as early as at meissen, but it was more particularly at havelberg, later on, that bauer and i struck up a friendship together, which has ever since endured. even when we have not been together in outward life, we have always remained one in our endeavours after the highest and best. bauer closed the narrow circle of my friends amongst our companions in arms.[ ] i remained true to my previous way of life and thought in the manner in which i viewed my new soldier life. my main care was always to educate myself for the actual calling which at the moment i was following; thus, amongst the first things i took in hand was an attempt at finding the inner necessity and connection of the various parts of the drill and the military services, in which, without any previous acquaintance with military affairs, i managed, in consequence of my mathematical and physical knowledge, to succeed very fairly and without any great difficulty. i was able to protect myself, therefore, against many small reprimands, which fell tolerably frequently on those who had thought this or that instruction might be lightly passed over as too trivial to be attended to. it came about in this way, when we were continually drilling, after the cessation of the armistice, that the military exercises we performed gave me genuine pleasure on account of their regularity, their clearness, and the precision of their execution. in probing into their nature i could see freedom beneath their recognised necessity. during the long sojourn of our corps in havelberg previously alluded to, i strengthened my inner life, so far as the military service permitted, by spending all the time i could in the open air, in communion with nature, to a perception of whose loveliness a perusal of g. forster's "travels in rhineland" had newly unlocked my senses.[ ] we friends took all opportunities of meeting one another. by-and-by we set to work to make this easier by three of us applying to be quartered together. in the rough, frank life of war, men presented themselves to me under various aspects, and so became a special object of my thoughts as regards their conduct, and their active work, and most of all as to their higher vocation. man and the education of man was the subject which occupied us long and often in our walks, and in our open-air life generally. it was particularly these discussions which drew me forcibly towards middendorff, the youngest of us. i liked well our life of the bivouac, because it made so much of history clear to me; and taught me, too, through our oft-continued and severely laborious marches and military manoeuvres, the interchanging mutual relations of body and spirit. it showed me how little the individual man belongs to himself in war time; he is but an atom in a great whole, and as such alone must he be considered. through the chance of our corps being far removed from the actual seat of war, we lived our soldier life, at least i did, in a sort of dream, notwithstanding the severe exertions caused by our military manoeuvres, and we heard of the war only in the same sleepy way. now and then, at leipzig, at dalenburg, at bremen, at berlin, we seemed to wake up; but soon sank back into feeble dreaminess again. it was particularly depressing and weakening to me never to be able to grasp our position as part of the great whole of the campaign, and never to find any satisfactory explanation of the reason or the aim of our manoeuvres. that was my case at least; others may have seen better and clearer than i. i gained one clear benefit from the campaign; in the course of the actual soldier life i became enthusiastic upon the best interests of the german land and the german people; my efforts tended to become national in their scope. and in general, so far as my fatigues allowed, i kept the sense of my future position always before me; even in the little skirmishes that we had to take part in i was able to gather some experiences which i saw would be useful to me in my future work. our corps marched through the mark,[ ] and in the latter part of august through priegnitz, mecklenburg, the districts of bremen and hamburg, and holstein, and in the last days of we reached the rhine. the peace (may th, ) prevented us from seeing paris, and we were stationed in the netherlands till the breaking up of the corps. at last, in july , every one who did not care to serve longer had permission to return to his home and to his former calling. upon my entrance into a corps of prussian soldiers i had received, through the influence of some good friends, the promise of a post under the prussian government--namely, that of assistant at the mineralogical museum of berlin, under weiss. thither then, as the next place of my destined work, i turned my steps. i desired also to see the rhine and the main, and my birthplace as well; so i went by dusseldorf back to lünen, and thence by mainz, frankfurt, and rudolstadt to berlin. thus i had lived through the whole campaign according to my strength, greater or less, in a steady inner struggle towards unity and harmony of life, but what of outward significance and worth recollection had i received from the soldier's life? i left the army and the warlike career with a total feeling of discontent. my inner yearning for unity and harmony, for inward peace, was so powerful that it shaped itself unconsciously into symbolical form and figure. in a ceaseless, inexplicable, anxious state of longing and unrest, i had passed through many pretty places and many gardens on my homeward way, without any of them pleasing me. in this mood i reached f----, and entered a fairly large and handsomely-stocked flower garden. i gazed at all the vigorous plants and fresh gay flowers it offered me, but no flower took my fancy. as i passed all the many varied beauties of the garden in review before my mind, it fell upon me suddenly that i missed the lily. i asked the owner of the garden if he had no lilies there, and he quietly replied, _no_! when i expressed my surprise, i was answered as quietly as before that hitherto no one had missed the lily. it was thus that i came to know what i missed and longed for. how could my inner nature have expressed itself more beautifully in words? "thou art seeking silent peacefulness of heart, harmony of life, clear purity of soul, by the symbol of this silent, pure, simple lily." that garden, in its beautiful variety, but without a lily, appeared to me as a gay life passed through and squandered without unity and harmony. another day i saw many lovely lilies blooming in the garden of a house in the country. great was my joy; but, alas! they were separated from me by a hedge. later on i solved this symbol also; and until its solution image and longing remained stored in my memory. one thing i ought to notice--namely, that in the place where i was vainly seeking for lilies in the garden a little boy of three years old came up trustfully and stood by my side. i hastened to the scene of my new duties. how variously the different outward circumstances of my life henceforth affected me as to the life within, now that this had won for itself once more an assured individual form, and how my life again resumed its true and highest aspect, i must pass over here, since to develop these considerations with all their connections would take me too long. in the first days of august i arrived at berlin, and at once received my promised appointment. my duties busied me the greater part of the day amongst minerals, dumb witnesses to the silent thousand-fold creative energy of nature, and i had to see to their arrangement in a locked, perfectly quiet room. while engaged on this work i continually proved to be true what had long been a presentiment with me--namely, that even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock, torn from their original bed, there lay germs of transforming, developing energy and activity. amidst the diversity of forms around me, i recognised under all kinds of various modifications one law of development. all the points that in göttingen i had thought i traced amidst outward circumstances, confirmatory of the order of the soul's development, came before me here also, in a hundred and again a hundred phenomena. what i had recognised in things great or noble, or in the life of man, or in the ways of god, as serving towards the development of the human race, i found i could here recognise also in the smallest of these fixed forms which nature alone had shaped. i saw clearly, as never yet i had seen before, that the godlike is not alone in the great; for the godlike is also in the very small, it appears in all its fulness and power in the most minute dimensions. and thereafter my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein i might descry mankind, and man's development and history. these things began to stir powerfully within me; and what i now vaguely perceived i was soon to view more definitely, and to be able to study with thoroughness. geology and crystallography not only opened up for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavour. nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development. man, as i saw, receives from a knowledge of natural objects, even because of their immense deep-seated diversity, a foundation for, and a guidance towards, a knowledge of himself and of life, and a preparation for the manifestation of that knowledge. what i thus clearly perceived in the simpler natural objects i soon traced in the province of living nature, in plants and growing things, so far as these came under my observation, and in the animal kingdom as well. soon i became wholly penetrated and absorbed by the thought that it must be beyond everything else vital to man's culture and development, to the sure attainment of his destiny and fulfilment of his vocation, to distinguish these tendencies accurately and sharply not only in their separate ascending grades, but also throughout the whole career of life. moreover, i made a resolution that for some time i would devote myself to the study of the higher methods of teaching, so as to fit myself as a teacher in one of the higher centres of education, as, for example, one of the universities, if that might be. but it was not long before i found a double deficiency, which quickly discouraged me in this design. for, firstly, i wanted a fund of specially learned and classical culture; and next, i was generally deficient in the preparatory studies necessary for the higher branches of natural science. the amount of interest in their work shown by university students was, at the same time, not at all serious enough to attract me to such a career. i soon perceived a double truth: first, that a man must be early led towards the knowledge of nature and insight into her methods--that is, he must be from the first specially trained with this object in view; and next, i saw that a man, thus led through all the due stages of a life-development should in order to be quite sure to accomplish in all steadiness, clearness, and certainty his aim, his vocation, and his destiny, be guarded from the very beginning against a crowd of misconceptions and blunders. therefore i determined to devote myself rather to the general subject of the education of man. though the splendid lectures i heard on mineralogy, crystallography, geology, etc., led me to see the uniformity of nature in her working, yet a higher and greater unity lay in my own mind. to give an example, it was always most unsatisfactory to me to see form developed from a number of various ground-forms. the object which now lay before my efforts and my thought was to bring out the higher unity underlying external form in such a self-evident shape that it should serve as a type or principle whence all other forms might be derived. but as i held the laws of form to be fixed, not only for crystals, but also just as firmly for language, it was more particularly a deep philosophical view of language which eventually absorbed my thoughts. again, ideas about language which i had conceived long ago in switzerland crowded before my mind. it seemed to me that the vowels _a_, _o_, _u_, _e_, _i_, _ä_, _au_, _ei_, resembled, so to speak, force, spirit, the (inner) subject, whilst the consonants symbolised matter, body, the (outer) object. but just as in life and in nature all opposites are only relatively opposed, and within every circle, every sphere, both opposites are found to be contained, so also in language one perceives within the sphere of speech-tones the two opposites of subject and object. for example, the sound _i_ depicts the absolute subject, the centre, and the sound _a_ the absolute material object; the sound _e_ serves for life as such, for existence in general; and _o_ for individual life, for an existence narrowed to itself alone. language, not alone as the material for the expression of thought, but also as a type or epitome of all forms and manifestations of life, appeared to me to underlie the universal laws of expression. in order to learn these laws thoroughly, as exemplified in the teaching of the classical languages, i now returned again to the study of these latter, under the guidance of a clever teacher; and i began to strike out the special path which seemed to me absolutely necessary to be followed in their acquisition. from this time onwards i gave all my thoughts to methods of education, whereto i was also further incited by some keen critical lectures on the history of ancient philosophy. these again afforded me a clear conviction of the soundness of my views of nature and of the laws of human development. through my work at the dynamical, chemical, and mathematical aspects of nature i came once more upon the consideration of the laws of number, particularly as manifested through figures; and this led me to a perfectly fresh general view of the subject--namely, that number should be regarded as horizontally related.[ ] that way of considering the subject leads one to very simple fundamental conceptions of arithmetic, which, when applied in practice, prove to be as accurate as they are clear. the connection of these (dynamical and arithmetical) phenomena was demonstrably apparent to me; since arithmetic may be considered, firstly, as the outward expression of the manifestation of force, secondly (in its relationship to man), as an example of the laws of human thought. on all sides, through nature as well as through history, through life as well as through science (and as regards the latter through pure science as well as through the applied branches), i was thus encountered and appealed to by the unity, the simplicity, and the unalterably necessary course, of human development and human education. i became impelled by an irresistible impulse towards the setting forth of that unity and simplicity, with all the force, both of my pen and of my life, in the shape of an educational system. i felt that education as well as science would gain by what i may call a more human, related, affiliated, connected treatment and consideration of the subjects of education. i was led to this conviction on another ground, as follows:--although my friends langethal, middendorff, and bauer served with me all through the war in the same corps, and even in the same battalion, we were a great deal apart towards the close of the campaign, especially at the time we were quartered in the netherlands, so that i, at all events, at the disbanding of the corps, knew not whither the others had gone. it was, therefore, an unexpected pleasure when, after a while, i found them all at berlin again. my friends pursued their theological studies with earnestness, and i my natural science; therefore, at first we came little into contact with one another. so passed several months, when suddenly life threw us closer together again. this came about through the call to arms in . we all enlisted again together as volunteers. on account of our previous service, and by royal favour, we were at once promoted to officer's rank, and each one was appointed to a regiment. however, there was such a throng of volunteers that it was not necessary for any state officials to be called upon to leave their posts, or for students to interrupt their studies, and we therefore received counter-orders commanding us to stay at home. middendorff, who felt sure of his speedy departure for the army, preferred not to take lodgings for the short time of his stay in berlin, and as there was room enough in mine for us both, he came and stayed with me. yet we still seemed to draw very little closer together at first, because of the diversity of our pursuits; but soon a bond of union wove itself again, which was all the stronger on that very account. langethal and middendorff had endeavoured to secure a sufficiency for their support at the university by taking private tutorships in families, making such arrangements as that their university studies should not be interfered with. in the beginning of their work all seemed simple and easy, but they soon came upon difficulties both as regards the teaching and the training of the children entrusted to them. as our former conversations had so often turned upon these very subjects they now came to me to consult me, especially about mathematical teaching and arithmetic, and we set apart two hours a week, in which i gave them instruction on these matters. from this moment our mutual interchange of thought again became animated and continuous. * * * * * here the autobiography breaks off abruptly. herr wichard lange had some trouble in deciphering it from froebel's almost unreadable rough draft, and here and there he had even to guess at a word or so. froebel had intended to present this letter to the duke of meiningen at the close of , when the negotiations began to be held about a proposed national educational institution at helba, to be maintained by the duke, after the similar proposal made to the prince of rudolstadt for quittelsdorf earlier in the year had broken down. it is not known whether the present draft was ever finished, properly corrected, and polished into permanent form, nor whether it was ever delivered to the duke. it is highly probable that we have here all that froebel accomplished towards it. it may be added that soon after froebel's repeated plans and drafts for the helba institution had culminated in the final extensive well-known plan of the spring of , the whole scheme fell through, from the jealousy of the prince's advisers, who feared froebel's influence too much to allow him ever to get a footing amongst them. another fragment of autobiography, going on to a further period of his life, occurs in a long letter to the philosopher krause,[ ] dated keilhau, th march, , in reply to an article written by krause five years before ( ) in oken's journal, the well-known _isis_[ ] in which article krause had found fault with froebel's two explanatory essays on keilhau, written in , separately published, and appearing also in the _isis_, because keilhau was there put forward as "an educational institution for all germany" (allgemeine deutsche erziehungs-anstalt), whereas krause desired it should rather style itself "a german institution for universal culture" (deutsche anstalt für allgemeine menschliche bildung). the rapid growth of keilhau gave froebel at the time no leisure for controversy. in began the cruel persecutions which eventually compelled him to leave keilhau. now whenever froebel was under the pressure of outward difficulty, he always sought for help from within, and from his inward contemplation derived new courage and new strength to face his troubles. out of such musings in the present time of adversity the long-awaited reply to krause at length emerged. the disputative part, interesting in itself, does not here concern us. we pass at once to the brief sketch of his life contained in later parts of the letter, omitting what is not autobiographical. the earlier of these passages relate more succinctly the events of the same period already more fully described in the letter to the duke of meiningen; but we think it better to print the passages in full, in spite of their being to a great extent a repetition of what has gone before. certain differences, however, will be found not unworthy of notice. the krause letter succeeded the other and more important letter (to the duke of meiningen) by some few months. its immediate outcome was a warm friendship between krause and froebel; the latter, with middendorff as his companion, journeying to göttingen to make the philosopher's personal acquaintance, in the autumn of . long discussions on education took place at this interesting meeting, as we know from leonhardi, krause's pupil. krause made froebel acquainted with the works of comenius, amongst other things, and introduced him to the whole learned society of göttingen, where he made a great, if a somewhat peculiar, impression. part of froebel's letter to krause, dated keilhau, th march, . ... you have enjoyed, without doubt, unusual good fortune in having pursued the strict path of culture. you have sailed by charybdis without being swallowed up by scylla.[ ] but my lot has been just the reverse. as i have already told you in the beginning of this letter, i was very early impressed with the contradictions of life in word and deed--in fact, almost as soon as i was conscious of anything, living as a lonely child in a very narrowed and narrowing circle. a spirit of contemplation, of simplicity, and of childlike faith; a stern, sometimes cruel, self-repression; a carefully-fostered inward yearning after knowledge by causes and effects, together with an open-air life amidst nature, especially amidst the world of plants, gradually freed my soul from the oppression of these contradictions. thus, in my tenth and eleventh years, i came to dream of life as a connected whole without contradictions. everywhere to find life, harmony, freedom from contradictions, and so to recognise with a keener and clearer perception the life-unity after which i dimly groped, was the silent longing of my heart, the mainspring of my existence. but the way thither through the usual school course, all made up of separate patches, considering things merely in their outward aspect, and connected by mere arbitrary juxtaposition, was too lifeless to attract me; i could not remember things merely put together without inner connection, and so it came about that after two of my elder brothers had devoted themselves to study, and because my third brother showed great capacity for study also, my own education was narrowed; but so much the more closely did a loving, guiding providence bind my heart in communion with nature.[ ] in silent, trustful association with nature and my mathematics, i lived for several years after my confirmation. in the latter part of the time my duties led me towards the study of natural laws, and thus towards the perception of the unity so often longed for in soul and spirit, and now at last gradually becoming clear from amidst the outwardly clashing phenomena of nature.[ ] at last i could no longer resist the craving for knowledge which i felt within me. i thrust on one side all the ordinary school-learning which i utterly failed to appropriate in its customary disconnected state (it was meant only to be learned by rote, and this i never could recognise as the exclusive condition of a really comprehensive culture of the human mind), and i went up in the middle of my eighteenth year to the university of jena. as i had been for two years past living completely with nature and my mathematics, and dependent upon myself alone for any culture i might have arrived at, i came to the university much like a simple plant of nature myself. i was at this time peculiarly moved by a little knowledge i had picked up about the solar system, including particularly a general conception of kepler's laws, whereby the laws of the spheres appealed to me on the one hand as an all-embracing, world-encircling whole, and on the other as an unlimited individualisation into separate natural objects. my own culture had been hitherto left to myself, and so also now i had to select my own studies and to choose my courses of lectures for myself. it was to be expected that the lectures of the professors would produce a singular effect upon me, and so they did. i chose as my courses natural history, physics, and mathematics, but i was little satisfied. i seldom gained what i expected. everywhere i sought for a sound method deriving itself from the fundamental principle lying at the root of the subject in hand, and afterwards summing up all details into that unity again; everywhere i sought for recognition of the quickening interconnection of parts, and for the exposition of the inner all-pervading reign of law. only a few lectures made some poor approach to such methods, but i found nothing of the sort in those which were most important to me, physics and mathematics. especially repugnant to me was the piece-meal patchwork offered to us in geometry, always separating and dividing, never uniting and consolidating. i was, however, perfectly fascinated with the mathematical rules of "combination, permutation, and variation," but unhappily i could not give much time to their study, which i have regretted ever since. otherwise, what i learned from the lectures was too slight for what i wanted, being, unluckily, altogether foreign to my nature, and more often a mere getting of rules by heart rather than an unfolding of principles. the theoretical and philosophical courses on various subjects did not attract me either, something about them always kept me at a distance; and from what i heard of them amongst my fellow-students, i could gather that here, too, all was presented in an arbitrary fashion, unnaturally divided, cut up, so to speak, into lifeless morsels; so that it was useless for my inner life to seek for satisfaction in those regions of study. but as i said above, there were some of the lectures which fostered my interest in the inner connection of all vital phenomena, and even helped me to trace it with some certainty in some few restricted circles. but my financial position did not permit me to remain long at the university; and as my studies were those which fitted the student for practical professional life, though they were regarded from a higher point of view by myself in the privacy of my own thoughts, i had to return to ordinary every-day work, and use them as a means to earn my living. yet, though i lived the outward business life to all appearance, it remained ever foreign to my nature; i carried my own world within me, and it was that for which i cared and which i cherished. my observation of life (and especially that of my own life, which i pursued with the object of self-culture), joined with the love of nature and with mathematics to work creatively upon me; and they united to fill my little mental world with many varied life-forms, and taught me at the same time to regard my own existence as one member of the great universal life. my plan of culture was very simple: it was to seek out the innermost unity connecting the most diverse and widely-separated phenomena, whether subjective or objective, and whether theoretical or practical, to learn to see the spiritual side of their activity, to apprehend their mutual relations as facts and forms of nature, or to express them mathematically; and, on the other hand, to contemplate the natural and mathematical laws as founded in the innermost depths of my own life as well as in the highest unity of the great whole, that is indeed to regard them in their unconditioned, uncaused necessity, as "absolute things-in-themselves." thus did i continue without ceasing to systematise, symbolise, idealise, realise and recognise identities and analogies amongst all facts and phenomena, all problems, expressions, and formulas which deeply interested me; and in this way life, with all its varied phenomena and activities, became to me more and more free from contradictions, more harmonious, simple, and clear, and more recognisable as a part of the life universal. after i had lived for some years the isolated life i have described, though i was engaged the whole time in ordinary professional pursuits, all at once there broke upon my soul, in harmony with the seasons of nature, a springtime such as i had not before experienced; and an unexpected life and life-aim budded and blossomed in my breast. all my inner life and life-aims had become narrowed to the circle of self-culture and self-education. the outer life, my profession, i carried on as a mere means of subsistence, quite apart from my real inner self, and my sphere of operation was limited. i was driven perforce from pillar to post till at last i had arrived where the main unites herself with the rhine.[ ] here there budded and opened to my soul one lovely bright spring morning, when i was surrounded by nature at her loveliest and freshest, this thought, as it were by inspiration:--that there must exist somewhere some beautifully simple and certain way of freeing human life from contradiction, or, as i then spake out my thought in words, some means of restoring to man, himself, at peace internally; and that to seek out this way should be the vocation of my life. and yet my life, to all appearance, my studies and my desires, belonged to my purely external vocation,[ ] and to its external citizenlike relations; and by no means to mankind at large, either regarded in itself or in its educational needs. therefore this idea of mine was in such violent contrast with my actual life that it utterly surprised me. in fact, and perhaps greatly because of this contrast, the idea would undoubtedly have been quite forgotten, had not other circumstances occurred to revive it. on myself and on my life at the time it seemed to have not the slightest effect, and it soon passed from my memory. but later on in this same journey,[ ] as i climbed down from the wartburg, and turned round to look at the castle, there rushed upon me once more this thought of a higher educational vocation as my proper life-work; and again, being so far removed from my actual external life, it only flashed upon me with a momentary effulgence an instant, and then sank. this, unconsciously to me, and therefore quite disregarded by me, was the real position of my inner life when i arrived at the goal of my journey, frankfurt, from whence my life was so soon to develop so largely. my energies at the moment were devoted towards attaining some definite professional position for myself.[ ] but in proportion as i began to examine my profession more closely in its practical aspect, so did it begin to prove insufficient of itself to satisfy me as the occupation of my life. then there came to me the definite purpose of living and working at my profession rather to use it as a means to win some high benefit for mankind.[ ] the restlessness of youth, nay, that chance, rather, which has always lovingly guided me, threw me unexpectedly into relations with a man whose knowledge of mankind, and whose penetrating glance into my inner being turned me at our very first interview from the profession of an architect to that of a teacher and an educator, two spheres of work which had, never previously occurred to me, still less had appeared to me as the future objects of my life.[ ] but the very first time i found myself before thirty or forty boys from nine to eleven years old, for that was the class allotted to me to teach, i felt thoroughly at home. in fact, i perceived that i had at last found my long-missed life element; and as i wrote to my brother at the time, i was as well pleased as the fish in the water, i was inexpressibly happy. yet here from the very first moment (and what a number of sacrifices had to be made, what a wealth of activity was poured out!) i had to give information, advice, and decisions on matters which hitherto i had not thought it necessary seriously to consider, and so also here, in my new position, i soon came to feel myself isolated, to stand alone. i sought counsel where i had so often found it. i looked within myself and to nature for help. here my plan of culture, hitherto followed only for my own needs, came opportunely to my assistance. when i was consulted by others, i looked to nature for the answer, and let nature, life, spirit, and law speak for themselves through me; then the answer was not merely satisfactory. no! its simple, unhesitating confidence and youthful freshness gladdened and quickened the inquirer. this was all well enough when universal human interests were concerned, but how about matters of instruction? i could, in fact, fairly confess that in many respects i had no title to call myself a cultured man, for hitherto all my culture had been fragmentary or imaginative. once again i found myself in conflict with my environment; for i could not possibly torture my scholars with what i myself had refused to be tortured with--namely, the learning by heart of disconnected rules. i was therefore compelled to strike out fresh paths for myself, which indeed my post rendered a delightful task; because i not only had full liberty accorded me in this matter, but was even urged onwards in that direction by my duty, since the institution was a model school for the higher development of teaching. my past self-culture, self-teaching, and self-development, and my study of nature and of life now stood me in good stead. but this letter is not intended to contain the whole history of the development of my mind; and i will therefore pass quickly forward, just mentioning that from this time for six years onwards, during which i thrice completely changed the conditions of my life,[ ] i held most earnestly by this same temper of mind and this same endeavour; and although i still always lived in isolation as to my personal inner life, yet i was at many points in full contact with the brisk mental effort and activity of that stirring time ( to ), as regards teaching, philosophy, history, politics, and natural science.[ ] but the nobler, the more varied, the more animating was the life surrounding me, and the more i found all without me, as also all within me, striving and tending towards harmony and unity, by so much the less could i longer be restrained from seeking out this unity, even should it be at the sacrifice of all that was dear to me, if need were for that. i was impelled to seek to develop this unity all bright and living within my own soul, and to contemplate it in definite, clear, and independent form, so that finally i might be able to set it forth in my actual life with sureness and certainty. after nine years' interval i visited the university a second time; first (spring of ) at göttingen, and then a year and a half later (autumn of ) at berlin.[ ] i now began to pursue the study of languages. the linguistic treasures which recent discoveries had brought us from asia excited my deepest interest wherever i came into contact with them. but in general the means of acquiring languages were too lifeless, too wanting in connection to be of any use to me; and the effort to work them out afresh in my own way, soon led me to a renewed study of nature. nature held me henceforth so fast that for years i was chained uninterruptedly to her study, though truly languages went on as a side-study during the time. yet it was not as separate entities that i considered the phenomena i was working at; rather was it as parts of the great whole of natural life, and this also i regarded as reposing in one supreme unity together with all mankind; nature and man, the two opposite mutually casting light upon each other and mirroring each other. after the german war of the spring of had interrupted my studies at berlin, and i had made acquaintance with a soldier's life, its need, and its habits in lützow's corps, i returned in to my studies and to a scientific public post in berlin. the care, the arrangement, and in part the investigation and explanation of crystals were the duties of my office. thus i reached at last the central point of my life and life-aim, where productiveness and law, life, nature, and mathematics united all of them in the fixed crystalline form, where a world of symbols offered itself to the inner eye of the mind; for i was appointed assistant to weiss at the mineralogical museum of the berlin university.[ ] for a long time it was my endeavour and my dearest wish to devote myself entirely to an academical career, which then appeared to me as my true vocation and the only solution of the riddle of my life; but the opportunities i had of observing the natural history students of that time, their very slight knowledge of their subject, their deficiency of perceptive power, their still greater want of the true scientific spirit, warned me back from this plan. on the other hand, the need of man for a life worthy of his manhood and of his species pressed upon me with all the more force, and, therefore, teaching and education again asserted themselves vigorously as the chief subjects occupying my thoughts. consequently i was only able to keep my mind contented with the duties of my post for two years; and, meanwhile, the stones in my hand and under my eyes turned to living, speaking forms. the crystal-world, in symbolic fashion, bare unimpeachable witness to me, through its brilliant unvarying shapes, of life and of the laws of human life, and spake to me with silent yet true and readable speech of the real life of the world of mankind. leaving everything else, sacrificing everything else,[ ] i was driven back upon the education of man, driven also to my refuge in nature, wherein as in a mirror i saw reflected the laws of the development of being, which laws i was now to turn to account for the education of my race. my task was to educate man in his true humanity, to educate man in his absolute being, according to the universal laws of all development.[ ] therefore, leaving berlin, and laying down my office, i began late in the autumn of that educational work which, though it still takes its impulse from me and exists under my leadership, yet in its deepest nature is self-sufficient and self-conditioned. although i was not perhaps then capable of putting my convictions into words, i at once realised this work in my own mind as comprehensive and world-embracing in its nature, as an everlasting work to be evermore performed for the benefit of the whole human race; yet i nevertheless linked it, and for this very reason, to my own personal life; that is, since i had no children of my own, i took to me my dear nephews whom i most deeply loved, in order through them and with them to work out blessings for my home and my native land, for schwarzburg and thuringia, and so for the whole wide fatherland itself.[ ] the eternal principles of development, as i recognised them within me, would have it thus and not otherwise. timidly, very timidly, did i venture to call my work by the title of "german," or "universal german" education; and, indeed, i struck that out from one of my manuscripts, although it was precisely the name required to start with as it expressed the broad nature of my proposed institution. an appeal to the general public to become thorough _men_ seemed to me too grandiose, too liable to be misunderstood, as, indeed, in the event, it only too truly proved; but to become thorough germans, so i thought, would seem to them something in earnest, something worth the striving for, especially after such hard and special trials as had recently been endured by the german nation. with your penetrating judgment you quarrelled with that term "german education;" but, after all, even the appeal to be made thorough germans proved to be too grandiose and liable to be misunderstood. for every one said "german? well, i _am_ german, and have been so from my birth, just as a mushroom is a mushroom;[ ] what, then, do i want with education to teach me to be a thorough german?" what would these worthy people have said, had i asked them to train themselves to become thorough men? now had i planned my educational institute altogether differently, had i offered to train a special class, body-servants, footmen or housemaids, shoemakers or tailors, tradesmen or merchants, soldiers or even noblemen, then should i have gained fame and glory for the great usefulness and practical nature of my institution, for certain; and surely all men would have hastened to acknowledge it as an important matter, and as a thing to be adequately supported by the state. i should have been held as the right man in the right place by the state and by the world; and so much the more because as a state-machine i should have been engaged in cutting out and modelling other state-machines. but i--i only wanted to train up free, thinking, independent men! now who wants to be, or who cares to suffer another to be, a free-thinking, independent man? if it was folly to talk about educating persons as germans, what was it to talk about educating them as men? the education of germans was felt to be something extraordinary and farfetched; the education of men was a mere shadow, a deceitful image, a blind enthusiasm.[ ] from this digression i now return, to continue my attempt at making myself known to you, as far as is possible, in a letter; by which i mean my real inner self, as manifested in my endeavours and my hopes. permit me, therefore, to go a step nearer towards what lies deepest in my soul, at least that of it which is communicable to another person. i have started by stating my position from the side of knowledge, now let me state it also from another side. my experience, especially that gained by repeated residences at the university, had taught me beyond a doubt that the method of education hitherto in use, especially where it involved learning by rote, and where it looked at subjects simply from the outside or historically, and considered then capable of apprehension by mere exercise work, dulled the edge of all high true attainment, of all real mental insight, of all genuine progress in scientific culture, of self-contemplation, and thus of all real knowledge, and of the acquisition of truth through knowledge. i might almost go further, and say that its tendency was towards rendering all these worthy objects impossible. therefore, i was firmly convinced, as of course i still am, that the whole former educational system, even that which had received improvement, ought to be exactly reversed, and regarded from a diametrically opposite point of view--namely, that of a system of development. i answered those who kept asking what it was that i really did want after all, with this sentence: "i want the exact opposite of what now serves as educational method and as teaching-system in general." i was, and am, completely convinced, that after this fashion alone genuine knowledge and absolute truth, by right the universal possessions of mankind, shall find once again, not alone single students here and there, but the vast majority of all our true-hearted young men and of our professors spreading far and wide the elements of a noble humanised life. to bring this into a practical scheme i held to be my highest duty, a duty which i could never evade, and one which i could never shake off, since a man cannot shake off his own nature. our greatest teachers, even pestalozzi himself not excepted, seemed to me too bare, too empirical,[ ] and arbitrary, and therefore not sufficiently scientific in their principles--that is, not sufficiently led by the laws of our being; they seemed to me in no wise to recognise the divine element in science, to feel its worth, and to cherish it. therefore i thought and hoped, with the courage and inexperience of youth, that all scientific and learned men, that the universities, in one word, would immediately recognise the purport of my efforts, and would strive with all their might to encourage me by word and deed. in this i was egregiously mistaken; nevertheless i am not ashamed of the error. but few persons raised their voices for me or against me; and, indeed, your article in the _isis_ is the single sun-ray which really generously warmed and enlightened my life and lifework. enough! the universities paid no heed to the simple schoolmaster.[ ] as to the "able editors," they, in their reviews, thought very differently from me; but why should i trouble myself further with remembering their performances, which were written simply with the object of degrading me and my work? they never succeeded in shaking my convictions in the least. i regard the simple course of development, proceeding from analysis to synthesis, which characterises pure reasoned thought, as also the natural course of the development of every human being. such a course of development, exactly opposite to the path taken by the old-fashioned methods of education, i now see mankind about to enter upon; nay, it has been actually entered upon already in a few single cases, though these cases are almost unknown and therefore unregarded; and with this new course of development a new period is to begin, a new age for all mankind, and therefore in the higher inner sense a new world; a world, perceiving and understanding, perceived and understood; a world of crystal clearness, creating an altogether new life for science, and carrying onward therefore the true science, that is, the science of being, and all that is founded upon this and conditioned by this.[ ] i may image forth the position of my educational establishment with regard to the universities, under the figure of family life. in a healthily constituted family it is the mother who first cares for, watches over, and develops the child, teaches him to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest," deriving everything she teaches from its central unity, and gathering up her teaching into that unity again. the father receives his son from the hand and the heart of the mother; with his soul already full of true active life, of desire for the knowledge of causes and effects, for the understanding of the whole and its ramifications; with his mind open to the truth and his eyes to the light, and with a perpetually nourished yearning for creative activity, able to observe while building up, and to recognise while taking apart; such in himself and his surroundings, always active, creative, full of thought and endeavour, does the father receive his son in his home, to train and teach him for the wider life outside. thus should it be with my educational institute and the universities; as regards the growth and development of man i only desire to take the place of the silently working, tenderly cherishing mother. the life, the will, the understanding, these three must form the common chord or triad of the harmony of human life, now one tone, now another, now two of the three, rising powerfully above the rest. but where these tones are separate and inharmonious there they work to discord, as we see but too clearly in daily life:-- "wrestling with life and with death, suspended between them we hang." in whatever family this chord is from the first set sweetly in tune, its pure concords uniting to form the fundamental harmony of existence, there all the hobgoblins of ordinary life, which even yet often unite to annoy us, will be driven far away, there will joy and peace perpetually inhabit, there will heaven descend to earth and earth rise up to heaven; to a heaven, moreover, as full of contentment, as responsive to every yearning of the soul as ever the church has painted. but since all true and earnest life must arise from and return to the ideal life, to life in itself, so must a school of development, which is to lead men, by means of their ordinary life, towards that higher life, be itself a true school of religious training in the most comprehensive sense of the word. man ought not to be contented with teaching merely directed to satisfy his needs as a child of earth, but must demand and receive from education a true foundation, a creative, satisfying preparation for all the grades of development of nature and the world which mankind encounters, and for the everlasting here and beyond of each new moment of existence, for the everlasting rest, the everlasting activity, the everlasting life in god. as, however, it is only as a christian, be he consciously or unconsciously so, baptised or unbaptised, taking the christian name or rejecting it, that he can think and act after this fashion, you can see at once the reason why my system of education feels itself to be, and in fact claims to be, an education after the true spirit, and following the precepts of jesus christ. through love, mutual faith, and a common aim towards acquiring, manifesting, and acting out knowledge, there has grown up round me a little company of men bound together by beautiful human bonds, the like of which you would with difficulty find elsewhere. in your last letter you desired to have some account of these friends and members of my household. i will describe them for you. but if my account is to be anything more than a lifeless list of names, and if, though it cannot be the closely-branched tree of life which actually exists, it is at least to come as near it as a garland or a nosegay to the tree, you must permit me to go back a little into my past life; for out of the self-same spirit, whence arose my own endeavours and which gave its direction to my own life, arose also the circle of those friends who are now so closely united with me. the german war of , in which so much seed-corn was sowed that perhaps only the smaller part of it has yet sprung up, to say nothing of blossoming and fruitage, sowed also the seed whence sprang the first beginnings of our association, and of our harmonious circle. in april jahn led me and other berlin students to meet my future comrades in arms, lützow's "black troop;" we went from berlin to dresden, and thence for the most part to leipzig. on this march jahn made me acquainted before we reached meissen with another berlin student, heinrich langethal, of erfurt, as a fellow-countryman of mine; and langethal introduced me to his friend and fellow-student in theology, middendorff, of brechten, near dortmund.[ ] a wonderfully lovely spring evening spent together by the friendly shores of elbe, and a visit to the magnificent cathedral of meissen, brought me nearer to these and other comrades; but it was the pleasant banks of havel at havelberg, the charming situation of the grand cathedral, the "rhine travels" of georg forster, a common love for nature, and above all a common eager yearning for higher culture that bound us three for ever together.[ ] the war in all its exhilaration and depression, its privation and pleasure, its transient and its permanent aspects, flowed on; sometimes nearer to us, sometimes further away. in august i was released from service, and returned to berlin, there to enter upon the post[ ] at the university museum, which i have already mentioned. soon after, quite unexpectedly, i ran against my friends again, who had come back to berlin to finish their studies. after being somewhat separated by the nature of our work, they as eagerly studying theology as i did natural science, our common need and inner aspiration brought us once more together. they had taken some private teaching, and were frequently driven to seek my counsel and instruction by the difficulties of their new position. when the war broke out afresh in , middendorff had been living for several months previously with me as room companion. thus had life thrown us closely together, so that i could see each one exactly as he was, in all his individuality, with his qualities and his deficiencies, with what he could contribute, and what he would have to receive from others. in october i left my post, and quitted berlin, without as yet confiding to any one exactly what outward aim i had in view, simply saying that i would write and give some account of myself as soon as i had found what i set out to seek. in november of the same year my dearly loved brother,[ ] the eldest now living, whom i made my confidant so far as that was possible, and who was at that time a manufacturer at osterode in the harz district, gave me his two sons to educate. they were his only sons, though not his only children; two boys of six and eight years old respectively. with these boys i set out for a village on the urn called griesheim, and there i added to my little family, first two, then a third, that is, altogether three other nephews, the orphan sons of my late dearest brother,[ ] he who had always best sympathised with me through life. he had been minister at griesheim, and his widow still lived there. he had died of hospital fever in , just after the cessation of the war. i reckon, therefore, the duration of my present educational work from november th, . already i had written from osterode to middendorff at berlin, inviting him and langethal to join me and help in working out a system of life and education worthy of _man_. it was only possible for middendorff to reach me by april , and langethal could not arrive until even the following september. the latter, however, sent me, by middendorff, his brother, a boy of eleven years old;[ ] so that i now had six pupils. in june of the same year ( ) family reasons caused me to move from griesheim to this place, keilhau.[ ] next came other pupils also, with langethal's arrival in september. my household was growing fast, and yet i had no house of my own. in a way only comprehensible to him who knows the workings of the mind, i managed by november to get the school that i now occupy built as a frame-house, but without being in possession of the ground it stood on. i pass over the space of a year, which was nevertheless so rich in experiences of trouble and joy, of times when we were cast down, and other times when we were lifted up, that its description would easily fill many times the space even of this long letter. in june of the following year i became in the most remarkable way possessor of the little farm which i still hold, in keilhau, and thus for the first time possessor also of the land upon which the schoolhouse had already been erected.[ ] as yet there were no other buildings there. in september i brought to the household, still further increased, and now so rich with children and brothers, its _housewife_, in the person of a lady whom a like love of nature and of childhood with my own, and a like high and earnest conception of education, as the preparation for a life worthy of man, had drawn towards me. she was accompanied by a young girl whom she had some time before adopted as a daughter, and who now came with her to assist her in the duties of the household.[ ] we had now a severe struggle for existence for the whole time up to . with all our efforts we never could get the school house enlarged; other still more necessary buildings had to be erected first, under pressing need for them.[ ] in the year , on ascension day, my brother from osterode, whose two sons were already my pupils, came to join me with his whole family and all his possessions; urged by his love for his boys, and a wish to help in the advancement of my life's purpose. as my brother, beyond the two sons i have mentioned, had three daughters, my family was increased by five persons through his arrival.[ ] the completion of the school-house was now pushed on with zeal; but it was before we got it finished. our life from this point becomes so complex that it is impossible to do more than just mention what applies to the association formed by our still united members. in , middendorff's sister's son barop, till then a divinity student in halle, visited us; and he was so impressed by the whole work that he was irresistibly driven soon afterwards to join us in our life-task.[ ] since , with the exception of such breaks as his work in life demanded, he has been uninterruptedly one of our community, sharing in our work. at this moment[ ] he is in berlin, serving his one year with the colours as a volunteer, and devoting what time he has to spare, to earnest study, especially that of natural science. we hope to have him back with us next spring. in the autumn of langethal became engaged to my wife's adopted daughter, who had come with her from berlin; and middendorff became engaged to my brother's eldest daughter. ascension day was the wedding-day for both couples. heaven blessed each marriage with a daughter, but took back to itself the little one of langethal. still another faithful colleague must i remember here, herr carl from hildburghausen, who has been since new year's day a member of our institute, his particular work being to teach instrumental music and singing. he lives and works in the true spirit of the institute, and is bound up heart and soul with its fortunes.[ ] of other teachers, who have assisted us in the institute for greater or less time, i need not speak; they never properly belonged to our circle. amongst all the specially associated members of our little band, not one breach has occurred since the beginning of our work. i would i could feel that i had accomplished what i have aimed at in this letter--namely, to make you acquainted with the inner deep seated common life which really binds together the members composing our outwardly united association; although it has only been feasible rather to suggest by implication the internal mental phenomena of the external bonds of union than properly to indicate them and to set them clearly forth. * * * * * this ends the autobiographical part of the krause letter. here and there in the footnotes the present editors, profound admirers of the great master, have ventured to criticise frankly the inordinate belief in himself which was at once froebel's strength, and his weakness. on the one hand, his noble and truly gigantic efforts were only made possible by his almost fanatical conviction in his principles and in his mission. on the other hand, this dogmatic attitude made it very difficult to work with him, for persons of any independence of mind. he could scarcely brook discussion, never contradiction. this is most characteristically shown by a fragment of froebel's dated st april, , as follows:-- "i consider my own work and effort as _unique_ in all time, as _necessary_ in itself, and as the _messenger of reformation_ for all ages, working forwards and backwards, offering and giving to mankind all that it needs, and all that it perpetually seeks on every side. i have no complaint to make if others think otherwise about it; i can bear with them;[ ] i can even, if need be, live with them, and this i have actually done; but i can share no life-aim with them, they and i have no _unity_ of purpose in life. it is not i, it is they who are at fault herein; i do not separate myself from them, they withdraw themselves from me." to get a view of froebel's work from the practical side, so as to supplement the account we have received from froebel himself as to the origination and development of the principles upon which that work was based, we have selected a sketch by barop entitled "critical moments in the froebel community;" written for dr. lange's edition by barop (then the principal and proprietor of keilhau) about the year . critical moments in the froebel community. under this heading barop writes as follows:-- about we were in an unusually critical position. you know how little means we had when we began to create our institution.[ ] middendorff had sacrificed his entire inheritance from his father, but the purchase of the ground and the erection of necessary buildings called for considerable sums, so that middendorff's addition to the capital had disappeared like drops of water falling on a hot stone. my father-in-law, christian ludwig froebel, had later on come forward and placed his entire fortune unconditionally in the hands of his brother,[ ] but even this sacrifice was not sufficient to keep away care and want from the door. my own father was a man of means, but he was so angry at my joining the froebel community at keilhau[ ] that he refused me any assistance whatever. mistrust surrounded us on all sides in these early years of our work; open and concealed enmities assailed us both from near and far, and sought to embitter our lot and to nip our efforts in the bud. none the less for this, the institution blossomed quick and fair; but later on, through the well-known persecution directed against associations of students, it was brought to the verge of ruin, for the spirit of was incarnate within it, and it was this spirit which at the time (about ) was the object of the extremest irritation.[ ] it would carry me too far were i to attempt to give a complete account of these things. at times it really seemed as if the devil himself must be let loose against us. the number of our pupils sank to five or six, and as the small receipts dwindled more and more, so did the burden of debt rise higher and higher till it reached a giddy height. creditors stormed at us from every side, urged on by lawyers who imbrued their hands in our misery. froebel would run out at the back door and escape amongst the hills whenever dunning creditors appeared. middendorff, and he alone, generally succeeded in quieting them, a feat which might seem incredible to all but those who have known the fascination of middendorff's address. sometimes quite moving scenes occurred, full of forbearance, trustfulness, and noble sentiment, on the part of workmen who had come to ask us for their money. a locksmith, for instance, was strongly advised by his lawyer to "bring an action against the scamps," from whom no money was to be got, and who were evidently on the point of failure. the locksmith indignantly repudiated the insult thus levelled against us, and replied shortly that he had rather lose his hard-earned money than hold a doubt as to our honourable conduct, and that nothing was further from his thoughts than to increase our troubles. ah! and these troubles were hard to bear, for middendorff had already married, and i followed his example. when i proposed for my wife, my future father-in-law and mother-in-law[ ] said, "you surely will not remain longer in keilhau?" i answered, "yes! i do intend to remain here. the idea for which we live seems to me to be in harmony with the spirit of the age, and also of deep importance in itself; and i have no doubt but that men will come to believe in us because of our right understanding of this idea, in the same way that we ourselves believe in the invisible." as a matter of fact, none of us have ever swerved one instant from the fullest belief in our educational mission, and the most critical dilemma in the times we have passed through has never revealed one single wavering soul in this little valley. when our distress had risen to its highest pitch, a new and unexpected prospect suddenly revealed itself.[ ] several very influential friends of ours spoke to the duke of meiningen of our work. he summoned froebel to him, and made inquiries as to his plans for the future. froebel laid before him a plan for an educational institute,[ ] complete in every particular, which we had all worked at in common to draw up, in which not only the ordinary "learned" branches of education but also handicrafts, such as carpentering, weaving, bookbinding, tilling the ground and so on were used as means of culture. during half the school hours studies were to be pursued, and the other half was to be occupied by handiwork of one kind or another. this work was to give opportunities for direct instruction; and above all it was so planned as to excite in the mind of the child a necessity for explanations as well as to gratify his desire for creativeness and for practical usefulness. the awakening of this eager desire for learning and creative activity, was one of the fundamental thoughts of friedrich froebel's mind. the object-teaching of pestalozzi seemed to him not to go far enough; and he was always seeking to regard man not only as a receptive being, but a creative, and especially as a productive one. we never could work out our ideas in keilhau satisfactorily, because we could not procure efficient technical teaching; and before all things we wanted the pupils themselves. but now by the help of the duke of meiningen our keenest hopes seemed on the point of gratification. the working out of the plan spoken of above, led us to many practical constructions in which already lay the elements of the future kindergarten occupations. these models are now scattered far and wide, and indeed are for the most part lost; but the written plan has been preserved. the duke of meiningen was much pleased with froebel's explanations of this plan, and with the complete and open-hearted way in which everything was laid before him. a proposition was now made that froebel should receive the estate of helba with thirty acres of land, and a yearly subsidy of , florins.[ ] in passing it may be noticed that froebel was consulted by the duke as to the education of the hereditary prince. froebel at once said outright that no good would be done for the future ruler if he were not brought up in the society of other boys. the duke came to his opinion, and the prince was actually so taught and brought up. when froebel came back from meiningen[ ] the whole community was naturally overjoyed; but their joy did not last very long. a man of high station in meiningen who was accustomed to exercise a sort of dictatorship in educational matters, as he was the right-hand man of the prince in such things, a man also who had earned an honourable place in literature (of which no one surely would seek to deprive him), feared much lest the elevation of froebel should injure his own influence. we were therefore, all of a sudden, once again assailed with the meanest and most detestable charges, to which our unfortunate position at keilhau lent a convenient handle. the duke received secret warnings against us. he began to waver, and in a temporising way sent again to froebel, proposing that he should first try a provisional establishment of twenty pupils as an experiment. froebel saw the intention in the duke's mind, and was thrown out of humour at once; for when he suspected mistrust he lost all hope, and immediately cast from his mind what a few hours before had so warmly encouraged him. therefore froebel at once broke off all negotiations, and set out for frankfurt, to discuss the work at keilhau with his friends; since after so many troubles he had almost begun to lose faith in himself. here by chance he met the well-known musical composer schnyder, from wartensee. he told this gentleman of the events which had just occurred, talked to him of his plans and of our work at keilhau, and exercised upon him that overpowering influence which is the peculiar property of creative minds. schnyder saw the value of his efforts, and begged him to set up an educational establishment in his castle on the wartensee, in switzerland.[ ] froebel hurriedly seized with joy the hand thus held out to him, and at once set off for wartensee with his nephew, my brother-in-law ferdinand. there friedrich and ferdinand froebel had already been living and working some little time when i was asked by the rest of the community who still remained at keilhau to go and see for myself exactly how they were getting on in switzerland. with ten thalers[ ] in my pocket, and in possession of one old summer coat, which i wore, and a threadbare frock-coat, which i carried over my arm, i set off on "shanks's mare"[ ] to travel the whole way. if i were to go into details as to what i went through on that journey, i should probably run the risk of being charged with gross exaggeration. enough, i got to my destination, and when i asked in the neighbourhood about my friends and their doings, i learned from every one that there was nothing further to say against "the heretics," than that they were heretics. a few peasant children from the neighbourhood had found their way to them, but no one came to them from any distance, as had been reckoned upon from the first by froebel as a source of income. the ill-will of the clergy, which began to show itself immediately the institution was founded, and which became stronger as the footing of our friends grew firmer, was able to gather to itself a following sufficient to check any quick growth of our undertaking. besides, the basis for such an establishment was not to be found at wartensee. schnyder had, indeed, with a generosity never too greatly to be admired and praised, made over to us his castle and all its furniture, his plate, his splendid library,--in short, all that was in or around the castle was fully at our disposition; but he would permit no new buildings or alterations of any sort, and as the rooms assigned to us were in no way suitable for our use, it was evident that his generous support must be regarded as only a temporary and passing assistance. we perceived the evil of our situation in all its keenness, but we saw no way out of the difficulty. in a most remarkable way there dawned upon us a new prospect at the very moment when we least expected it. we were sitting one day in a tavern near wartensee, and talking of our struggles with some strangers who happened to be there. three travellers were much interested in our narrative. they gave themselves out as business people from willisau,[ ] and soon informed us that they had formed the notion of trying to get some assistance for us, and our enterprise for their native town. this they actually did. we received an invitation from twenty associated well-to-do families in willisau to remove our school there, and more fully to work out our plans amongst them. the association had addressed the cantonal authorities, and a sort of castle was allotted provisionally to us. about forty pupils from the canton at once entered the school, and now we seemed at last to have found what we had so long been seeking. but the priests rose up furiously against us with a really devilish force. we even went in fear of our lives, and were often warned by kind-hearted people to turn back, when we were walking towards secluded spots, or had struck along the outlying paths amongst the mountains. to what abominable means this spirit of bigotry resorted, the following example may serve to show. in willisau a church festival is held once a year, in which a communion-wafer is shown, miraculously spotted with blood. the drops of blood were believed by the people to have been evoked from the figure of jesus by the crime of two gamblers; who, having cursed jesus, flung their sword at him, whereupon the devil appeared. as "god be with us"[ ] seized the villains by the throat, a few drops of blood trickled from jesus' wounds. to prevent others, therefore, from falling in a like way into the power of the arch-deceiver, a yearly commemorative festival is held at willisau. the wafer is shown as a warning to devout people, who flock in crowds from all parts of the neighbourhood to join in the procession which closes the ceremony. we felt of course compelled to attend, and as we wished to take our part, we offered to lead the singing. i feared an outbreak, and i earnestly implored my friends to keep quiet under any circumstances, and whatever happened, to give no pretext for any excitement. our singing was finished, when in the place of the expected preacher, suddenly there appeared a blustering, fanatical capuchin monk. he exhausted himself in denunciations of this god-forsaken, wicked generation, sketched in glaring colours the pains of hell awaiting the accursed race, and then fell fiercely upon the alarmed willisauers, upbraiding them, as their worst sin, with the fostering of heretics in their midst, the said "heretics" being manifestly ourselves. fiercer and fiercer grew his threats, coarser and coarser his insults against us and our well-wishers, more and more horrible his pictures of the flames of hell, into grave danger of which the willisauers, he said, had fallen by their awful sin. froebel stood as if benumbed, without moving a muscle, or changing a feature, exactly in face of the capuchin, in amongst the people; and we others also looked straight before us, immovable. the parents of our pupils, as well as the pupils themselves, and many others, had already fled midway in the monk's jeremiad. every one expected the affair to end badly for us; and our friends, outside the church, were taking precautions for our safety, and concerting measures for seizing the monk who was thus inciting the mob to riot. we stood quite still all the time in our places listening patiently to the close of the capuchin's tirade: "win, then, for yourselves an everlasting treasure in heaven." shouted he, "bring this misery to an end, and suffer the wretched men to remain no longer amongst you. hunt the wolves from the land, to the glory of god and the rage of the devil. then will peace and blessing return, and great joy in heaven with god, and on earth with those who heartily serve him and his saints. amen." hardly had he uttered the last word than he disappeared through a side door and was no more seen. as for us, we passed quietly through the staring and threatening mob. no hand was raised against us at that moment, but danger lay about us on every side, and it was no pleasure to recognise the fact that the sword of damokles always hung by a hair over our head. feeling very uneasy at our insecure condition, i was sent, on the part of the rest, to the authorities of the canton, especially to abbe girard,[ ] and the mayor, eduard pfyffer, to beg that they would provide for our safety with all the means in their power. on my way i was recognised by a priest for one of the newly-introduced "heretics" as i rested a moment in an inn. the people there began to talk freely about me, and to cast looks of hatred and contempt at me. at last, the priest waxing bolder and bolder, accused me aloud of abominable heresy. i arose slowly, crossed with a firm step over to the black-frocked one, and asked him, "do you know, sir, who jesus christ was, and do you hold him in any particular esteem?" quite nonplussed by my firm and quiet address he stammered out, "certainly, he is god the son, and we must all honour him and believe on him, if we are to escape everlasting damnation." i continued, "then perhaps you can tell me whether christ was a catholic or a protestant?" the black-frock was silenced, the crowd stared, and presently began to applaud. the priest made off, and i was left in peace. my question had answered better than a long speech. in eduard pfyffer i found an estimable sterling man of humane and firm character. he started from the fundamental principle that it was of little use freeing the people from this or that special superstition, but that we should do better by working for the future against sloth of thought and want of independent mental character from the very bottom--namely, by educating our young people. therefore, he set great store by our undertaking. and when i told him of our downcast spirits and the absolute danger in which we lived at the moment, he replied:--"there is only one way to ensure your safety. you must win over the people. work on a little longer, and then invite them all from far and near to a public examination. if this test wins over the crowd to your side, then, and only then, are you out of harm's reach." i went home, and we followed this counsel. the examination was held on a lovely day in autumn. a great crowd from several cantons flocked together, and there appeared delegates from the authorities of zürich, of bern, and other cantons. our contest with the clerical party, which had been commented upon in most of the swiss journals, had drawn all eyes upon us. we scored a great victory with our examination. the children developed so much enthusiasm, and answered so readily, that all were agreeably surprised, and rewarded us with loud applause. from seven in the morning till seven in the evening lasted this examination, closing with games and gymnastic exercises performed by the whole school. we rejoiced within ourselves; for our undertaking might now be regarded as fairly floated. the institution was spoken of in the great council of the canton, and most glowing speeches were delivered in our favour by herr pfyffer, herr amrhyn, and others. the council decided that the castle and its outbuildings should be let to us at a very cheap rate, and that the capuchin who had openly incited to riot against us should be expelled from the canton. a little time after this examination a deputation from bern came to invite froebel to undertake the organisation of an orphanage at burgdorf. froebel suggested that he should not be restricted to teach orphans alone in the new establishment; his request was granted, and he then accepted the invitation. with this, it seemed to me, my mission in switzerland was at an end, and i began to long to return to keilhau; my eldest son was now a year old, and i had never yet seen him. middendorff left his family, and replaced me at willisau, living there for four years far away from wife and child.[ ] at keilhau i found things had improved, and the numbers had increased most cheeringly. i determined to throw all my strength into the work of raising the mother institution from her slough of debt. i began by a piece of honourable swindling: and borrowed of peter to pay paul, covering one debt with another, but at the same time making it appear that we were paying our way. in this fashion our damaged credit was restored, and as the receipts grew happily greater and greater, i began to gain ground. eventually i was able to send help to the other branches of our community, to increase my help as time went on, and to prepare a place of refuge for them if anything went wrong elsewhere. in switzerland our enterprise did not develop as rapidly as we desired, in spite of the sanction of the council of the canton. the institution at willisau gained unlimited confidence there; but the malevolent opposition of the clerical party secretly flourished as before, and succeeded in depriving it of all aid from more distant places. under these circumstances we could not attain that prosperity which so much activity and self-sacrificing work on the part of our circle must otherwise infallibly have brought. ferdinand froebel and middendorff remained in willisau. froebel and his wife went to burgdorf, to found and direct the proposed orphanage.[ ] in his capacity as director, froebel had to give what was called a repetitive course to the teachers. in that canton, namely, there was an excellent regulation which gave three months' leave to the teachers once in every two years.[ ] during this leave they assembled at burgdorf, mutually communicated their experiences, and enriched their culture with various studies. froebel had to preside over the debates and to conduct the studies, which were pursued in common. his own observations and the remarks of the teachers brought him anew to the conviction that all school education was as yet without a proper foundation, and, therefore, that until the education of the nursery was reformed nothing solid and worthy could be attained. the necessity of training gifted capable mothers occupied his soul, and the importance of the education of childhood's earliest years became more evident to him than ever. he determined to set forth fully his ideas on education, which the tyranny of a thousand opposing circumstances had always prevented him from working out in their completeness; or at all events to do this as regards the earliest years of man, and then to win over the world of women to the actual accomplishment of his plans. pestalozzi's "mothers' book" (_buch der mütter_) froebel would replace by a complete theoretical and practical system for the use of women in general. an external circumstance supervened at this point to urge him onwards. his wife grew alarmingly ill, and the physicians prescribed complete absence from the sharp swiss mountain air. froebel asked to be permitted to resign his post, that he might retire to berlin. the willisau institution, although outwardly flourishing, was limited more and more narrowly by the bigotry of the priests, and must evidently now be soon given up, since the government had passed into the hands of the jesuit party. langethal and ferdinand froebel were nominated directors of burgdorf.[ ] middendorff rejoined his family at keilhau. later on, langethal split off from the community and accepted the direction of a girls' school in bern (that school which, after langethal, the well-known fröhlich conducted); but froebel never forgave him this step. ferdinand froebel remained, till his sudden and early death, director of the orphanage at burgdorf. a public funeral, such as has never found its equal at burgdorf, bore witness to the amount of his great labours, and to the general appreciation of their value. when friedrich froebel came back from berlin, the idea of an institution for the education of little children had fully taken shape in his mind. i took rooms for him in the neighbouring blankenburg.[ ] long did he rack his brains for a suitable name for his new scheme. middendorff and i were one day walking to blankenburg with him over the steiger pass. he kept on repeating, "oh, if i could only think of a suitable name for my youngest born!" blankenburg lay at our feet, and he walked moodily towards it. suddenly he stood still as if fettered fast to the spot, and his eyes assumed a wonderful, almost refulgent, brilliancy. then he shouted to the mountains so that it echoed to the four winds of heaven, "_eurêka!_ i have it! kindergarten shall be the name of the new institution!" thus wrote barop in or about the year , after he had seen all his friends pass away, and had himself become prosperous and the recipient of many honours. the university of jena made him a doctor, and the prince of rudolstadt created him his minister of education. froebel slept in liebenstein, and middendorff at the foot of the kirschberg in keilhau. they sowed and reaped not; and yet to possess the privilege of sowing, was it not equivalent in itself to reaping a very great reward? in any event, it is delightful to remember that froebel, in the april of , the year in which he died (june st), received public honours at the hands of the general congress of teachers held in gotha. when he appeared that large assembly rose to greet him as one man; and middendorff, too, who was inseparable from froebel, so that when one appeared the other was not far off, had before his death (in ) the joy of hearing a similar congress at salzungen declare the system of froebel to be of world-wide importance, and to merit on that account their especial consideration and their most earnest examination. a few words on middendorff, culled from lange's account, may be serviceable. middendorff was to froebel as aaron was to moses. froebel, in truth, was "slow of speech and of a slow tongue" (exod. iv. ), and middendorff was "his spokesman unto the people" (v. ). it was the latter's clearness and readiness of speech which won adherents for froebel amongst people who neither knew him nor could understand him. in middendorff had immense success in hamburg; but when froebel came, later on, to occupy the ground thus conquered beforehand, he had to contend against much opposition, for every one missed the easy eloquence of middendorff, which had been so convincing. dr. wichard lange came to know froebel when the latter visited hamburg in the winter of - . at this time he spent almost every afternoon and evening with him, and held the post of editor of froebel's _weekly journal_. even after this close association with froebel, he found himself unable thoroughly to go with the schemes for the education of little children, the kindergarten, and with those for the training of kindergarten teachers. "never mind!" said froebel, out of humour, when lange told him this; "if you cannot come over to my views now, you will do so in ten years' time; but sooner or later, _come you must_!" dr. lange nobly fulfilled the prophecy, and the edition of froebel's collected works (berlin ), from which we derive the present text (and much of the notes), was his gift of repentance to appease the wrath of the manes of his departed friend and master. nor was he content with this; but by his frequent communications to _the educational journal_ (_die rheinischen blätter_), originally founded by diesterweg, and by the froebelian spirit which he was able to infuse into the large boys'-school which he long conducted at hamburg, he worked for the "new education" so powerfully and so unweariedly that he must be always thankfully regarded as one of the principal adherents of the great teacher. his connection with the froebel community was further strengthened by a most happy marriage with the daughter of middendorff. [ ] johann jacob froebel, father of friedrich, belonged to the old lutheran protestant church. [ ] these were four ( ) august, who went into business, and died young. ( ) christoph, a clergyman in griesheim, who died in of the typhus, which then overspread all central germany, having broken out in the over-crowded hospitals after the battle of leipzig; he was the father of julius, karl, and theodor, the wish to benefit whom led their uncle friedrich to begin his educational work in griesheim in . ( ) christian ludwig, first a manufacturer in osterode, and then associated with friedrich from onwards,--born th june, , died th january, . ( ) traugott, who studied medicine at jena, became a medical man, and was burgomaster of stadt-ilm. friedrich august wilhelm himself was born on the st april, , and died on the st june, . he had no sisters. [ ] karl poppo froebel, who became a teacher, and finally a publisher,--born ; died th march, : not to be confounded with his nephew, karl, son of christoph, now living in edinburgh. [ ] this needs explanation. in germany, even by strangers, children are universally addressed in the second person singular, which carries with it a certain caressing sentiment. grown persons would be addressed (except by members of their own family, or intimate friends) in the third person plural. thus, if one met a child in the street, one might say, _willst du mit mir kommen_? (wilt thou come with me?); whereas to a grown person the proper form would be, _wollen sie mit mir kommen_? (will they--meaning, will you--come with me?). the mode of speech of which froebel speaks here is now almost obsolete, and even in his day was only used to a person of markedly inferior position. our sentence would run in this case, _will er mit mir kommen_? (will he--meaning, will you, john or thomas--come with me?), and carries with it a sort of contemptuous superciliousness, as if the person spoken to were beneath the dignity of a direct address. it is evident, therefore, that to a sensitive, self-torturing child like froebel, being addressed in this manner would cause the keenest pain; since, as he justly says, it has the effect, by the mere form of speech, of _isolating_ the person addressed. such a one is not to be considered as of our family, or even of our rank in life. [ ] the cantor would combine the duties of precentor (whence his title), leading the church singing and training the choristers, with those of the schoolmaster of the village boys' school. in large church-schools the cantor is simply the choir-master. the great bach was cantor of the thomas-schule, leipzig. [ ] it will be remembered that this letter is addressed to the duke of meiningen. [ ] "arise, my heart and spirit," and "it costs one much (it is a difficult task) to be a christian." [ ] christoph froebel is here meant. he studied at the university of jena. [ ] in this case froebel's usually accurate judgment of his own character seems at fault; his opinions being always most decided, even to the point of sometimes rendering him incapable of fairly appreciating the views of others. [ ] froebel is alluding to his undertaking the education of his brother christoph's sons, in november , when he finally decided to devote his life to the cause of education. [ ] at the time froebel was writing this autobiographical letter ( ), and seeking thereby to enlist the duke of meiningen's sympathies in his work, in order to found a fresh institution at helba, he was undergoing what was almost a persecution at keilhau. all associations of progressive men were frowned upon as politically dangerous, and keilhau, amongst the rest, was held in suspicion. somewhat of this is seen in the interesting account by barop further on ("critical moments at keilhau"). [ ] herr hoffmann, a clergyman, representing the state in church matter for the district of stadt-ilm; a post somewhat analogous to that of our archdeacon. [ ] equal to an english middle-class school. [ ] the ilm, flowing through thuringia into the saale, a tributary of the elbe. oberweissbach is upon the schwarza, also flowing into the saale. weimar stands upon the ilm, jena upon the saale. [ ] superintendents. the _ephors_ of ancient sparta amongst their duties had that of the superintendence of education, whence the german title. [ ] this story is not now popular, but its nature is sufficiently indicated in the text. [ ] christoph and traugott. [ ] in germany a _forstmann_, or forester, if he has studied forest cultivation in a school of forestry, rises eventually to the position of supervisor of forests (_forst-meister_). the forester who does not study remains in the inferior position. [ ] in the german state forests, the timber, when cut down, is frequently not transported by road, but is made to slide down the mountain-sides by timber-shoots into the streams or rivers; it is then made up into rafts, and so floated down to its destination. [ ] jussieu's natural system of botany may possibly be here alluded to. the celebrated "genera plantarum" appeared in , and froebel was at jena in . on the other hand, a.j.g. batsch, froebel's teacher, professor at the university since , had published in - his "anleitung zur kentniss und geschichte der pflanzen," vols. we have not seen this work. batsch also published an "introduction to the study of natural history," which reached a second edition in . [ ] in justice to froebel and his teacher, it must be remembered that the theory of evolution was not as yet formed, and that those who dimly sought after some explanation of the uniformity of the vertebrate plan, which they observed, were but all too likely to be led astray. [ ] the text (lange, berlin, ) says _meinen ältesten bruder_, that is, "of my eldest brother;" but this is quite an error, whether of froebel or of herr lange we cannot at present say. as we have already said in a footnote on p. , august was the eldest brother of friedrich, and christoph was the eldest then living. traugott, who was at jena with friedrich, was his next older brother, youngest of the first family, except only friedrich himself. it is traugott who is meant in this passage. [ ] "in carcer;" that is, in the prison of the university, where in the last resort students who fail to comply with university regulations are confined. the "carcer" still exists in german universities. it has of course nothing to do with the ordinary prison of the town. [ ] the prince-bishop of bamberg shared in the general napoleonic earthquake. the domain of the bishopric went to bavaria ultimately, the title alone remaining to the church. [ ] shared the fate of the bamberg possessions, and of many other principalities and small domains at that time existent; namely, absorption under the napoleonic _régime_ into the neighbouring states. this went to bavaria; see the text, later on. [ ] bruno, or the over-soul. [ ] "general intelligencer of the german people." [ ] upper palatinate, a province in the north of bavaria. [ ] herr von dewitz, his employer. [ ] the pädagogium in halle answered somewhat to our grammar schools with a mixture of boarders and day-scholars. it was founded by francke in , after the ideas of the famous basedow, and was endowed by means of a public subscription. [ ] these were two pamphlets by the famous patriot and poet ernst moritz arndt ( - ), published in . [ ] that is, froebel realised the distinction of the subject-world from the object-world. [ ] that is, he signed wilhelm froebel instead of friedrich froebel, for a time. it cannot have been for long, however. [ ] the young man mentioned on page . [ ] the pretty district bordering the river ucker, in pleasing contrast with the sandy plains of brandenburg; it lies at no great distance from berlin, so that it forms the favourite goal for a short excursion with the people of that arid city. [ ] whither luther fled for refuge after the diet of worms in ; and where, protected by the elector of saxony, he lay concealed for a year. during this year he translated the bible. [ ] held all over protestant germany in . [ ] our children still in like manner "say their catechism" at afternoon church in old-fashioned country places. [ ] this school, still in existence up to and later, but now no longer in being, had been founded under gruner, a pupil of pestalozzi, to embody and carry out the educational principles of the latter. [ ] there is a smaller town called frankfurt, on the oder. "am main," or "an der oder," is, therefore, added to the greater or the smaller frankfurt respectively, for distinction's sake. [ ] he never does, for this interesting record remains a fragment. [ ] situate at the head of the lake of neuchatel, but in the canton of vaud, in switzerland. [ ] austria was not the only country alive to the importance of this new teaching. prussia and holland also sent commissioners to study pestalozzi's system, and so did many other smaller states. the czar (alexander i.) sent for pestalozzi to a personal interview at basel. [ ] _wandernde classen._ some of our later english schools have adopted a similar plan. [ ] one of pestalozzi's teachers, to whom especially was confided the arrangement of the arithmetical studies. [ ] by positive instruction froebel means learning by heart, or by being told results; as distinguished from actual education or development of the faculties, and the working out of results by pupils for themselves. [ ] this must mean the system invented by rousseau, a modern development of which is the chevé system now widely used on the continent. in england the tonic-sol-fa notation, which uses syllables instead of figures, but which rests fundamentally on the same principles, is much more familiar. [ ] _"geht und schaut, es geht ungehür (ungeheuer)."_ [ ] the miserable quarrels between niederer and schmid, which so distressed the later years of pestalozzi, are here referred to. [ ] a consistorium in germany is a sort of clerical council or convocation, made up of the whole of the established clergy of a province, and supervising church and school matters throughout that province, under the control of the ministry of religion and education. no educator could establish a school or take a post in a school without the approval of this body. [ ] that is, the education of other minds than his own; something beyond mere school-teaching. [ ] _einertabelle_; tables or formulas extending to units only; a system embodied to a large extent in sonnenschein's "abc of arithmetic," for teaching just the first elements of the art. [ ] like other matters, this, too, has been left undone, as far as the present (unfinished) letter is concerned. [ ] _erdkunde._ [ ] _recht schreiben._ [ ] _recht sprechen._ [ ] one of arndt's pamphlets, then quite new. [ ] . [ ] he would have refused to countenance froebel's throwing up his engagement. [ ] georg friedrich seller ( - ), a bavarian by birth, became a highly-esteemed clergyman in coburg. he wrote on religious and moral subjects, and those amongst the list of his works, the most likely to be alluded to by froebel, are "a bible for teachers," "methods of religious teaching for schools," "religious culture for the young," etc. [ ] jean paul friedrich richter ( - ). no doubt the celebrated "levana," richter's educational masterpiece, which was published in this same year, , is here alluded to. [ ] . [ ] this is in . but the expression of his thought remained a difficult matter with froebel to the end of his life, a drawback to which many of his friends have borne witness; for instance, madame von marenholtz-bülow. [ ] probably done with the point of a knitting needle, etc. the design is then visible on the other side of the paper in an embossed form. [ ] this account is dated , it is always necessary to remember. [ ] after all, the work was left to froebel himself to do. these words were written in . the "menschen erziehung" of froebel ("education of man"), which appeared the year before, had also touched upon the subject. it was further developed in his "mutter und koselieder" ("mother's songs and games"), in which his first wife assisted him. that appeared in . in the same year was also founded the _sonntags-blatt_ (_sunday journal_), to which many essays and articles on this subject were contributed by froebel. the third volume ("pädagogik") of dr. wichard lange's complete edition of froebel's works is largely made up of these _sonntags-blatt_ articles. the whole kindergarten system rests mainly on this higher view of children's play. [ ] a report that froebel drew up for the princess regent of rudolstadt in , giving a voluminous account of the theory and practice pursued at yverdon (wichard's "froebel," vol. i., p. ). [ ] the castle of yverdon, an old feudal stronghold, which pestalozzi had received from the municipality of that town in , to enable him to establish a school and work out his educational system there. [ ] froebel desired to see in rudolstadt, or elsewhere in thuringia (his "native land"), an institution like that of pestalozzi at yverdon; and he sought to interest the princess regent of rudolstadt by the full account of yverdon already mentioned. [ ] this would scarcely seem probable to those who admire and love pestalozzi. but we must remember that religious teaching appeals so intimately to individual sympathies that it is quite possible that what was of vital service to many others was not of so much use to froebel, who was, as he frankly admits, out of harmony on many points with his noble-hearted teacher. [ ] that the boys' characters were immersed in an element of strengthening and developing games as the body is immersed in the water of a strengthening bath, seems to be froebel's idea. [ ] sanskrit is here probably meant. [ ] hebrew and arabic. [ ] the comet of , one of the most brilliant of the present century, was an equal surprise to the most skilled astronomers as to froebel. observations of its path have led to a belief that it has a period of years; so that it was possibly seen by our ancestors in , and may be seen by our remote descendants in . the appearance of this comet was synchronous with an unusually fine vintage harvest, and "wine of the great comet year" was long held in great esteem. [ ] _geognosie._ [ ] the plamann school, an institution of considerable merit. plamann was a pupil of pestalozzi. one of the present writers studied crystallography later on with a professor who had been a colleague of froebel's in this same school, and who himself was also a pupil of pestalozzi. [ ] froebel is here symbolically expressing the longing which pervaded all noble spirits at that time for a free and united germany, for a great fatherland. the tender mother's love was symbolised by the ties of home (motherland), but the father's strength and power (fatherland) was only then to be found in german national life in the one or two large states like prussia, etc. it needed long years and the termination of this period of preparation by two great wars, those of and of , to bind the whole people together, and make germany no longer a "geographical expression" but a mighty nation. [ ] in the beginning of this great contest it was prussia who declared war against the common enemy and oppressor, napoleon. the other german powers, for the most part, held aloof. [ ] the baron von lützow formed his famous volunteer corps in march . his instructions were to harass the enemy by constant skirmishes, and to encourage the smaller german states to rise against the tyrant napoleon. the corps became celebrated for swift, dashing exploits in small bodies. froebel seems to have been with the main body, and to have seen little of the more active doings of his regiment. their favourite title was "lützow's wilde verwegene schaar" (lützow's wild bold troop). amongst the volunteers were many distinguished men; for instance, the poet körner, whose volume of war poetry, much of it written during the campaign, is still a great favourite. one of the poems, "lützow's wilde jagd" ("lützow's wild chase"), is of world-wide fame through the musical setting of the great composer weber. in june came the armistice of which froebel presently speaks. during the fresh outbreak of war after the armistice the corps was cut to pieces. it was reorganised, and we find it on the rhine in december of the same year. it was finally dissolved after napoleon's abdication and exile to elba, th april, and the peace of paris th may, . [ ] _die grafschaft mark._ the mark of brandenburg (so called as being the mark or frontier against slavic heathendom in that direction during the dark ages) is the kernel of the prussian monarchy. it was in the character of markgraf of brandenburg, that the hohenzollern princes were electors of the german empire; their title as king was due not to brandenburg, but to the dukedom of prussia in the far east (once the territory of the teutonic military order), which was elevated to the rank of an independent kingdom in . the title of the present emperor of germany still begins "william, emperor of germany, king of prussia. markgraf of brandenburg," etc., etc., showing the importance attached to this most ancient dignity. the mark of brandenburg contains berlin. middendorff seems to have been then living in the mark. froebel cannot have forgotten that by origin wilhelm middendorff was a westphalian. [ ] of bauer little further is to be known. he was afterwards professor in the frederick-william gymnasium (grammar school) in berlin, but has no further connection with froebel's career. on the other hand, a few words on langethal and middendorff seem necessary here. heinrich langethal was born in erfurt, september rd, . he joined froebel at keilhau in . he was a faithful colleague of froebel's there, and at willisau and burgdorf, but finally left him at the last place, and undertook the management of a girls' school at bern. he afterwards became a minister in schleusingen, returning eventually to keilhau. one of the present writers saw him there in . he was then quite blind, but happy and vigorous, though in his eightieth year. he died in . wilhelm middendorff, the closest and truest friend froebel ever had, without whom, indeed, he could not exist, because each formed the complement of the other's nature, was born at brechten, near dortmund, in westphalia, september th, , and died at keilhau november th, , a little over a year after his great master. (froebel had passed away at marienthal july st, .) [ ] "ansichten vom nieder rhein, flandern, holland, england, frankreich in april, mai, und juni " ("sketches on the lower rhine, flanders," etc.). johann georg forster ( - ), the author of this book, accompanied his father, the naturalist, in captain cook's journey round the world. he then settled in warrington (england) in ; taught languages, and translated many foreign books into english, etc. he left england in , and served many princes on the continent as librarian, historiographer, etc., amongst others the czarina catherine. he was librarian to the elector of mainz when the french revolution broke out, and was sent as a deputation to paris by the republicans of that town, who desired union with france. he died at paris in . his prose is considered classical in germany, having the lightness of french and the power of english gained through his large knowledge of those literatures. [ ] the mark of brandenburg. [ ] it is to be regretted that froebel has not developed this point more fully. he speaks of "die betrachtung des zahlensinnes in horizontaler oder seiten-richtung," and one would be glad of further details of this view of number. we think that the full expression of the thought here shadowed out, is to be found in the kindergarten occupations of mat-weaving, stick-laying, etc., in their arithmetical aspect. certainly in these occupations, instead of number being built up as with bricks, etc., it is laid along horizontally. [ ] carl christian friedrich krause, an eminent philosopher, and the most learned writer on freemasonry in his day, was born in . at eisenberg, in saxony. from to he was a professor at jena, afterwards teaching in dresden, göttingen, and munich, at which latter place he died in . [ ] lorenz oken, the famous naturalist and man of science, was born at rohlsbach, in swabia, st august, . (his real name was ockenfuss.) in oken was appointed ordinary professor of natural history at jena, and in he founded his celebrated journal, the _isis_, devoted chiefly to science, but also admitting comments on political matters. the latter having given offence to the court of weimar, oken was called upon either to resign his professorship or suppress the _isis_. he chose the former alternative, sent in his resignation, transferred the publication of the _isis_ to rudolstadt, and remained at jena as a private teacher of science. in he broached in the _isis_ the idea of an annual gathering of german _savants_, and it was carried out successfully at leipzig in the following year. to oken, therefore, may be indirectly ascribed the genesis of the annual scientific gatherings common on the continent, as well as of the british association for the advancement of science, which at the outset was avowedly organised after his model. he died in . [ ] those acquainted with the classical mythology will forgive us for noting that charybdis was, and is, a whirlpool on the sicilian shore of the straits of messina, face to face with some caverns under the rock of scylla, on the italian shore, into which the waves rush at high tide with a roar not unlike a dog's bark. [ ] the peculiar dreamy boy, who by his nature was set against much of his work, and therefore seemed but an idle fellow to his schoolmaster, was thought to be less gifted than his brothers, and on that account fitted not so much for study as for simple practical life. in oberweissbach he was set down as "moonstruck." all this is more fully set forth in the meiningen letter, and the footnotes to it. [ ] this was the time when he was apprenticed to the forester in neuhaus, in the thüringer wald, and necessarily studied mathematics, nature, and the culture of forest trees. eyewitnesses have described him as extremely peculiar in all his ways, even to his dress, which was often fantastic. he was fond of mighty boots and great waving feathers in his green hunter's-hat, etc. [ ] _i.e._, frankfurt. [ ] architecture, etc., at this time. [ ] from mecklenburg to frankfurt. [ ] _i.e._, as an architect. [ ] his plan evidently was to use architecture, probably gothic architecture, as a means of culture and elevation for mankind, and not merely to practise it to gain money. [ ] it was in that froebel was appointed by gruner teacher in the normal school at frankfurt. [ ] . teacher in the model school. . tutor to the sons of herr von holzhausen near frankfurt. . a resident at yverdon with pestalozzi. [ ] froebel was driven to yverdon by the perusal of some of pestalozzi's works which gruner had lent him. he stayed with pestalozzi for a fortnight, and returned with the resolve to study further with the great swiss reformer at some future time. in , he became tutor to herr von holzhausen's somewhat spoilt boys, demanded to have the entire control of them, and for this object their isolation from their family. the grateful parents, with whom froebel was very warmly intimate, always kept the rooms in which he dwelt with his pupils exactly as they were at that time, in remembrance of his remarkable success with these boys. madame von holzhausen had extraordinary influence with froebel, and he continued in constant correspondence with her. in froebel and his pupils went to yverdon, and remained till . but the philosophic groundwork of pestalozzi's system failed to satisfy him. pestalozzi's work started from the external needs of the poorest people, while froebel desired to found the columns supporting human culture upon theoretically reasoned grounds and upon the natural sciences. a remarkable difference existed between the characters of the two great men. pestalozzi was diffident, acknowledged freely his mistakes, and sometimes blamed himself for them bitterly; froebel never thought himself in the wrong, if anything went amiss always found some external cause for the failure, and in self-confidence sometimes reached an extravagant pitch. [ ] either froebel or his editor has made a blunder here. froebel went to göttingen in july (see p. ), and to berlin in october (see p. ). [ ] at this time, however, the symbols of the inorganic world did not appeal to froebel with the same force as those of the organic world. in a letter to madame von holzhausen. st march, , he writes: "it is the highest privilege of natural forms or of natural life that they contain agreement and perfection within themselves as a whole class, while differing and filled with imperfection in particular individuals; for look at the loveliest blooming fruit-tree, the sweetest rose, the purest lily, and your eye can always detect deficiencies, imperfections, differences in each one, regarded as a single phenomenon, a separate bloom; and, further, the same want of perfection appears also in every single petal: on the other hand, wherever mathematical symmetry and precise agreement are found, _there is death_". [ ] not a figure of speech altogether; for froebel did really decline a professorship of mineralogy which was offered him at this time, in order to set forth on his educational career. [ ] that is, putting development into a formula-- thesis-+-antithesis | synthesis. the true synthesis is that springing from the thesis and its opposite, the antithesis. another type of the formula is this-- proposition-+-counter-proposition | compromise. understanding by "compromise" (_vermittlung_) that which results from the union of the two opposites, that which forms part of both and which links them together. the formula expressed in terms of human life, for example, is-- father-+-mother | child. philosophic readers acquainted with hegel and his school will recognise a familiar friend in these formulæ. [ ] froebel travelled from berlin to osterode, and took with him both his brother christian's sons, ferdinand and wilhelm, to griesheim; there to educate them together with the three orphans of his brother christoph, who had died in , of hospital fever, whilst nursing the french soldiers. of the sons of christian, ferdinand studied philosophy, and at his death was director of the orphanage founded by froebel in burgdorf; wilhelm, who showed great talent, and was his uncle's favourite nephew, died early through the consequences of an accident, just after receiving his "leaving certificate" from the gymnasium of rudolstadt. as regards the sons of christoph, they were the immediate cause of froebel's going to griesheim, for their widowed mother sent for her brother-in-law to consult him as to their education. julius, the eldest, was well prepared in keilhau for the active life he was afterwards destined to live. he went from school to munich, first, to study the natural sciences; and while yet at the university several publications from his pen were issued by cotta. later on he took an official post in weimar, and continued to write from time to time. meanwhile he completed his studies in jena and berlin under karl von ritter, the great authority on cosmography, and under the distinguished naturalist, alexander von humboldt. in he became professor at the polytechnic school in zurich; but his literary avocations eventually drew him to dresden. here he was chosen deputy to the national assembly at frankfurt in . after the dissolution of that assembly, julius froebel, in common with many others of the more advanced party, was condemned to death. he escaped to switzerland before arrest, and fled to new york. in after life he was permitted to return to germany, and eventually he was appointed consul at smyrna. karl froebel, the next son, went to jena also. he then took a tutorship in england, and it was at this time ( ) that his pamphlet, "a preparation for euclid," appeared. he returned to the continent to become director of the public schools at zürich. he left zürich in for hamburg, where he founded a lyceum for young ladies. some years later, when this had ceased to exist, he went again to england, and eventually founded an excellent school at edinburgh with the aid of his wife; which, indeed, his wife and he still conduct. his daughters show great talent for music, and one of them was a pupil of the distinguished pianist, madame schumann (widow of the great composer). [ ] or, as we say, a is a. [ ] a great deal of froebel's irony might all too truly be still applied to current educational work. [ ] empiricism--that is, _a posteriori_ investigations, based on actual facts and not _a priori_ deductions from theories, or general laws, did good service before froebel's time, and will do good service yet, froebel notwithstanding. in froebel's time the limits kant so truly set to the human understanding were overstepped on every side; fichte, schelling, and hegel were teaching, and the latter especially had an overpowering influence upon all science. every one constructed a philosophy of the universe out of his own brain. krause, the recipient of this letter, never attained to very great influence, though had he been in hegel's chair he might perhaps have wielded hegel's authority, and there was for a long time a great likelihood of his appointment. meanwhile he reconstructed the university at göttingen. even practical students of nature, such as oken, did homage to the general tendency which had absorbed all the eager spirits of the vanguard of human advancement, amongst them froebel himself. we see how firmly set froebel was against experience-teaching, _a posteriori_ work, or, as he calls it, empiricism. the kantist, arthur schopenhauer, was not listened to, and dwelt apart, devouring his heart in bitter silence; breaking out at last with the dreary creed of pessimism. [ ] froebel is here hardly fair. how should people know much of him as yet? he had at this time written the following works:--( ) "on the universal german educational institute of rudolstadt" ( ); ( ) "continuation of the account of the universal german educational institute at keilhau" ( ); ( ) "christmas at keilhau: a christmas gift to the parents of the pupils at keilhau, to the friends and the members of the institute" ( ); ( ) "the menschen erziehung," the full title of which was "the education of man: the art of education, instruction, and teaching, as attempted to be realised at the universal educational institute at keilhau, set forth by the originator, founder, and principal of the institute, friedrich froebel" ( ), never completed; ( ) _family weekly journal of education for self-culture and the training of others_, edited by friedrich froebel, leipzig and keilhau. but froebel, in his unbusiness-like way, published all these productions privately. they came out of course under every disadvantage, and could only reach the hands of learned persons, and those to whom they were really of interest, by the merest chance. further, froebel, as has already abundantly appeared, was but a poor author. his stiff, turgid style makes his works in many places most difficult to understand, as the present translators have found to their cost, and he was therefore practically unreadable to the general public. in his usual self-absorbed fashion, he did not perceive these deficiencies of his, nor could he be got to see the folly of private publication. indeed, on the contrary, he dreamed of fabulous sums which one day he was to realise by the sale of his works. it is needless to add that the event proved very much the reverse. as to criticism, it was particularly the "able editor" harnisch who pulled to pieces the "menschen erziehung" so pitilessly on its appearance, and who is probably here referred to. [ ] this passage may serve as a sufficient illustration of froebel's metaphysical way of looking at his subject. it is scarcely our habit at the present day to regard the science of being (ontology) as a science at all, since it is utterly incapable of verification; but it is not difficult to trace the important truth really held by froebel even through the somewhat perplexing folds of scholastic philosophy in which he has clothed it. [ ] see the previous footnote, p. . [ ] these events and situations are fully set forth in the letter to the duke of meiningen, _ante._ [ ] as mineralogist. [ ] christian ludwig froebel. [ ] christoph. [ ] this younger langethal afterwards became a professor in the university of jena. [ ] the minister's widow lost her widow's privilege of residence at griesheim by the death of her father, and bought a farm at keilhau. [ ] froebel told his sister-in-law that he "desired to be a father to her orphaned children." the widow understood this in quite a special and peculiar sense, whereof froebel had not the remotest idea. later on, when she came to know that froebel was engaged to another lady, she made over to him the keilhau farm, and herself went to live at volkstädt. [ ] this young girl, the adopted daughter of the first madame froebel, was named ernestine chrispine, and afterwards married langethal. froebel's first wife, henrietta wilhelmine hoffmeister, was born at berlin th september, , and was therefore thirty-eight at the time of her marriage. she was a remarkable woman, highly cultured, a pupil of schleiermacher and of fichte. before her marriage with froebel she had been married to an official in the war office, and had been separated from him on account of his misconduct. middendorff and langethal knew the family well, and had frequently spoken with froebel about this lady, who was admired and respected by both of them. froebel saw her once in the mineralogical museum at berlin, and was wonderfully struck by her, especially because of the readiness in which she entered into his educational ideas. when afterwards he desired to marry, he wrote to the lady and invited her to give up her life to the furtherance of those ideas with which she had once shown herself to be so deeply penetrated, and to become his wife. she received his proposal favourably, but her father, an old war office official, at first made objections. eventually she left her comfortable home to plunge amidst the privations and hardships of all kinds abundantly connected with educational struggles. she soon rose to great honour with all the little circle, and was deeply loved and most tenderly treated by froebel himself. in her willingness to make sacrifices and her cheerfulness under privations, she set them all an example. she died at blankenburg in may . [ ] the expected dowry was never forthcoming, which made matters harder. [ ] christian had already assisted his brother at griesheim, and before that, to the utmost of his power. the three daughters were ( ) albertine, born th december, , afterwards married middendorff; ( ) emilie, born th july, , married barop, died th august, , at keilhau; ( ) elise, born th january, , married dr. siegfried schaffner, one of the keilhau colleagues, later on. [ ] johannes arnold barop, middendorff's nephew, was born at dortmund, th november, . he afterwards became proprietor and principal of keilhau. [ ] march . [ ] this excellent man was drowned in the saale while bathing, soon after this letter was written. [ ] he always regarded himself as perfectly tolerant. [ ] froebel moved from griesheim to keilhau in . [ ] in . [ ] it was in that barop formally and definitely joined the froebel community. [ ] the long turmoil of the napoleonic wars, the outcome of the french revolution, ceased in ; and the minds of the students and the other youths of the country, set free from this terrible struggle for liberty, turned towards the reformation of their own country. many associations were formed: perhaps here and there wild talk was indulged in. the government grew alarmed, and though the students had invariably acted with perfect legality, all their associations were dispersed and forbidden. [ ] christian froebel and his wife. [ ] this was - . [ ] this is the interesting plan of the public educational institution and orphanage in helba, with which admirers of froebel are probably already well acquainted. it is given in full in lange's "froebel," vol. i., p. . [ ] say £ . [ ] in . [ ] the wartensee is a small lake in the canton luzern, not far from sempach. [ ] about s. [ ] auf schuster's rappen,--_i.e._, on foot. (this was in .) [ ] a small town not far away, still in the canton luzern. [ ] this was a familiar name for the devil, till a few years back, in germany; surprisingly recalling the term "eumenides" for the greek furies, since it originated in a desire to speak of so powerful an enemy in respectful terms, lest he should take offence. [ ] a swiss educational writer of great power and charm. his school books, "sur la langue maternelle," are really valuable. [ ] the editors venture to call attention to these little facts as a sample of the extraordinary devotion and sacrifice which froebel knew how to inspire in his colleagues. this exchange of barop and middendorff took place in . [ ] in . [ ] this regulation is still happily in force. [ ] in . [ ] blankenburg lies on the way from schwarzburg to rudolstadt, about two hours' walk away from keilhau. chronological abstract of the principal events in the life of froebel, and the froebel community. * * * * * . june th.--birth of christian ludwig froebel. . sept. th.--birth of friedrich froebel's first wife, henriette wilhelmine hoffmeister, at berlin. christian froebel's wife, johanna caroline mügge, was also born in , on august th. . april st.--_birth of friedrich froebel_, at oberweissbach, thuringia. . froebel is sent to superintendent hoffman in stadt ilm. sept. rd.--birth of heinrich langethal, at erfurt. . sept. .--birth of wilhelm middendorff, at brechten, near dortmund, in westphalia. . froebel is sent to neuhof in the thuringian forest to learn forestry. . froebel returns home; goes thence as student to jena. . he leaves jena (having closed his career there with nine weeks' imprisonment for debt), and soon afterwards begins to study farming with a relative of his father's at hildburghausen. dec. th.--birth of albertine froebel (madame middendorff), eldest daughter of christian froebel. . death of froebel's father. froebel becomes actuary to the forestry department of the episcopal state of bamberg. nov. th.--birth of johannes arnold barop, at dortmund, in westphalia. . froebel goes to bamberg, and takes part in the governmental land survey, necessary upon the change of government, bamberg now passing to bavaria. . he takes, one after the other, two situations as secretary and accountant of a large country estate, first, that of herr von völdersdorf in baireuth, afterwards that of herr von dewitz in gross milchow, mecklenburg. july th.--birth of emilie froebel (madame barop), second daughter of christian froebel. . death of froebel's maternal uncle, superintendent hoffman. froebel determines to become an architect, and sets out for frankfurt to study there. becomes, however, teacher in the model school at frankfurt, on gruner's invitation. visits pestalozzi, at yverdon, for a short time. . he becomes tutor in the family of herr von holzhausen in the suburbs of frankfurt. . he goes to pestalozzi at yverdon with his pupils. . he draws up an account of pestalozzi's work for the princess of rudolstadt. . froebel returns to frankfurt from yverdon. . he goes to the university of göttingen. . he proceeds thence to the university of berlin. . froebel, langethal, and middendorff enlist in lützow's regiment of chasseurs, a volunteer corps enrolled to take part in the resistance to napoleon's invasion of prussia. . jan. th.--birth of elise froebel (madame schaffner), christian's youngest daughter. after the peace of paris (may th, ) froebel is appointed assistant in the mineralogical museum of the university of berlin, and takes his post there in august. . nov. th.--froebel founds his "universal german educational institute" in griesheim. . transference of the school to keilhau. arrival of langethal and middendorff. . first marriage of froebel. . christian froebel arrives at keilhau with his wife and daughters froebel writes "to the german people." . froebel publishes (privately) "principles, aims, and inner life of the universal german educational institute in keilhau," and "aphorisms." . he publishes the pamphlets "on german education, especially as regards the universal german educational institute at keilhau," and "on the universal german educational institute at keilhau." . he publishes "continuation of the account of the educational institute at keilhau." . he publishes the pamphlet "christmas at keilhau." . marriages of langethal and middendorff. froebel publishes the "education of man" ("menschen erziehung"). later he founds the weekly _family journal of education_. . letter to the duke of meiningen (translated in this present work), uncompleted, probably never sent to the duke. . letter to krause (partly translated in the present work). barop formally becomes a member of the educational community at keilhau. . plan for a national educational institute in helba, under the auspices of the duke of meiningen, now completed, the whole keilhau community having worked upon it under froebel's direction. . death of wilhelm carl, one of the keilhau community, by drowning in the saale. . froebel breaks with the duke of meiningen, and gives up the helba project. visit to frankfurt, and meeting with schnyder. acceptance of schnyder's offer of his castle at wartensee. opening of the institution at wartensee by froebel and his nephew ferdinand. . barop goes to wartensee. transference of the school from wartensee to willisau. froebel pays a short visit to keilhau. . froebel brings his wife to willisau. the bernese administration invites him to consider a plan for the foundation of an orphanage at burgdorf. he is appointed lecturer for the repetitive courses for young teachers held there. langethal comes from keilhau to willisau, barop returns to keilhau. . froebel, his wife, and langethal undertake the foundation of the orphanage for bern, in burgdorf. middendorff and elise froebel go from keilhau to willisau and join ferdinand froebel there. froebel writes "the new year demands a renewal of life." . froebel and his wife leave burgdorf for berlin. ferdinand froebel and langethal take over the direction of the orphanage. . opening of the first kindergarten in blankenburg. . commencement of froebel's _sunday journal_. . froebel and middendorff go to dresden. death of madame froebel. . guttenberg festival ( th anniversary of the invention of printing). opening of the universal german kindergarten at blankenburg, as a joint-stock company. froebel and middendorff in the following years make several journeys from keilhau to various parts of germany endeavouring to promote the erection of kindergartens. . general congress of teachers, called by froebel, at rudolstadt. second journey of froebel to dresden in the autumn. . froebel settles at liebenstein intending to train kindergarten teachers there. work at hamburg, first by middendorff, then by froebel. . froebel returns to liebenstein. through the influence of madame von marenholtz-bülow he receives the neighbouring country seat of marienthal from the grand duke of weimar for the purposes of his training college. foundation of a new _weekly journal of education_ by froebel, edited by lange. marriage of elise froebel to dr. siegfried schaffner. . jan. th.--death of christian ludwig froebel. july.--second marriage of froebel, with luise levin. first appearance of the _journal for friedrich froebel's educational aims_. . april.--froebel is called to join the educational congress at gotha, under the presidency of theodor hoffman. june .--_death of froebel._ his educational establishment at marienthal is removed to keilhau, under the superintendence of middendorff. madame luise froebel also assists to train students in the methods of the kindergarten at keilhau. . middendorff enthusiastically received at the congress at salzungen, when addressing it on the froebelian methods. nov. th.--death of middendorff. madame luise froebel, for a time, directs keilhau. . madame luise froebel goes in the spring to dresden, to assist dr. marquart in his kindergarten and training establishment for kindergarten teachers. madame marquart had been a pupil of froebel. keilhau ceases to be a training school for kindergarten teachers. in the autumn madame luise froebel accepts the directorship of the public free kindergarten in hamburg, and trains students there. (she is still actively employed at hamburg in the cause of the kindergarten; .) first introduction of the kindergarten system into england by miss prætorius, who founds a kindergarten at fitzroy square. madame von marenholtz bülow, who was the support of froebel's latest years, whose influence with the grand duke of weimar procured him marienthal, and whose whole leisure and power was devoted to his service, and to the interpretation of his ideas, comes to england to lecture and write in support of the cause of the kindergarten. publishes a pamphlet on "infant gardens," in english. madame ronge introduces the kindergarten system at manchester; and shortly afterwards the manchester kindergarten association is founded. . miss eleonore heerwart (pupil of middendorff and madame luise froebel), and the baroness adèle von portugall (pupil of madame von marenholtz-bülow and of madame schrader, the great niece of froebel), come to england, and are both engaged at manchester as kindergarten teachers, but not in the same establishment. . august th.--death of madame barop (emilie froebel). . the baroness bertha von marenholtz-bülow promotes the foundation of the journal _the education of the future_, and dr. carl schmidt of coethen undertakes the editorship. . april.--madame michaelis comes to england to assist the kindergarten movement. is appointed in the summer to lecture to the school-board teachers at croydon. founds croydon kindergarten, january , with mrs. berry. nov.--the london school board appoint miss bishop (pupil of miss prætorius) as their first lecturer on the kindergarten system to their teachers of infant schools. about the same time miss heerwart (who had left manchester to found a kindergarten of her own in dublin in ) is appointed principal of the kindergarten training college established at stockwell by the british and foreign school society. the froebel society of london is formed by miss doreck, miss heerwart, miss bishop, madame michaelis, professor joseph payne, and miss manning; miss doreck being the first president. very soon these were joined by miss shireff (president since , when miss doreck died), by her sister mrs. william grey, by miss mary gurney, and by many other well-known friends of educational progress. . autumn.--the london kindergarten training college is founded by the froebel society, but as a separate association (dissolved ). . may.--the croydon kindergarten company (limited), is founded to extend madame michaelis's work in teaching and training, madame michaelis becoming the company's head mistress. . langethal died. celebration of the centenary of froebel's birth by a concert, given at willis's rooms, london, on the part of the froebel society, to raise funds for a memorial kindergarten at blankenburg, by a fund raised at croydon for the same purpose, and by a _soirée_ and conversazione, presided over by mr. w. woodall, m.p., given at the stockwell training college by the british and foreign school society. . january.--the bedford kindergarten company (limited) founded, mainly upon the lines of the croydon company. first (and present) head mistress, miss sim. miss heerwart goes to blankenburg to found the memorial kindergarten there. . international exhibition, south kensington (health and education). a conference on education was held in june, the section devoted to infant education being largely taken up with an important discussion of froebel's principles, in which speakers of other nations joined the english authorities in debate. the british and foreign society organised a complete exhibition of kindergarten work and materials, to which all the chief london kindergarten establishments (including croydon) contributed; and most establishments gave lessons in turn, weekly, to classes of children, in order to show publicly the practical application of kindergarten methods. these lessons were given gratuitously in the rooms devoted to the kindergarten section of the exhibition. in october this section was closed by a conference of kindergarten teachers from all england, held in the lecture theatre of the albert hall. autumn.--dr. wichard lange, the biographer of froebel, and collector of froebel's works (from whose collection the present translation has been made), and by his numerous articles one of the best friends to the advocacy of froebel's educational principles, died, under somewhat painful circumstances. bibliography of froebel. * * * * * walter, l. die froebel-literatur. vo, pp. . dresden. $ . * * * * * gesammelte paedagogische schriften, hrsg. w. lange. vo, vols. [i. autobiographie; ii. menschenerziehung; iii. pädagogik des kindergartens]. berlin, . paedagogische schriften, hrsg. friedrich seidel. mo, vols. [i. menschen-erziehung, pp. ; ii. kindergarten-wesen, pp. ; iii. mutter- und kose-lieder, pp. ]. wien, . . menschen-erziehung. erziehungs-, unterrichts-, und lehrkunst. mo, pp. . wien, . . the education of man. translated by josephine jarvis. mo, pp. . new york, . . ---- the same, translated and annotated by w.n. hailmann. mo, pp. . new york, . . l'education de l'homme. traduit de l'allemand par la baronne de crombugghe. mo, pp. . paris, . mutter- und kose-lieder. dichtung und bilder zur edlen pflege des kindheitlebens. ein familien-buch. mo, pp. . wien, . . mother's songs, games and stories. froebel's "mutter- und kose-lieder" rendered in english by frances and emily lord. containing the whole of the original illustrations, and the music, rearranged for children's voices, with pianoforthe accompaniment. vo, pp. . london, . . mother-play, and nursery songs. illustrated by fifty engravings. with notes to mothers. by friedrich froebel. translated from the german. to, pp. . boston, . . the mother's book of song. two-part songs for little singers, on the kindergarten system. the music composed by lady baker; edited by g.a. macfarran. mo. new york. autobiographie. berlin, . the autobiography of friedrich froebel. translated by h. keatley moore and emilie michaelis. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . [this contains the "letter to the duke of meiningen," never completed, a shorter account of his life in a letter to the philosopher krause, a sketch of barop's, and a chronology extended from lange.] autobiography of froebel. materials to aid a comprehension of the work of the founder of the kindergarten. mo, pp. . new york, . . [this contains the "letter to the duke of meiningen," miss lucy wheelock's translation, taken from barnard's _journal of education_.] froebel's explanation of the kindergarten system. london, . . * * * * * hauschmann, a.b. fr. froebel: die entwicklung s. erziehungs-idee in s. leben. vo, pp. . eisenach, . . kriege, matilda h. the founder of the kindergarten. a sketch. mo, pp. . new york. [see also marenholz-buelow, in next list below.] marenholz-buelow, baroness b. von. reminiscences of friedrich froebel. translated by mrs. horace mann. with a sketch of the life of friedrich froebel, by emily shirreff. mo, pp. . boston, . . [see also goldammer, marenholz-buelow.] phelps, wm. f. froebel (chautauqua text-book, no. ). mo, pp. . . shirreff, emily. froebel: a sketch of his life, with letters to his wife. mo. london, . . [see also marenholz-buelow, above, and shirreff, below.] * * * * * bailey's kindergarten system. boston. . barnard, henry. papers on froebel's kindergarten, with suggestions on principles and methods of child culture in different countries. vo, pp. . hartford, . . beesau, amable. the spirit of education. translated by mrs. e.m. mccarthy. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . berry, ada, and emily michaelis. kindergarten songs and games. mo. london. . buckland, anna. the use of stories in the kindergarten. mo, pp. . new york. . ---- the happiness of childhood. mo, pp. , in one volume with the above. new york. . [the two are reprinted in "essays on the kindergarten." below.] carpenter, harvey. the mother's and kindergartner's friend. mo. boston, . . christie, alice m. see marenholz-buelow, perez, below. douai, adolf. the kindergarten. a manual for the introduction of froebel's system of primary education into public schools; and for the use of mothers and private teachers. with plates. mo, pp. . new york, . . dupanloup, monseigneur. the child. translated, with the author's permission, by kate anderson. mo, pp. . dublin, . . eckhart, t. die arbeit als erziehungsmittel. vo, pp. . wien, . essays on the kindergarten: being a selection of lectures read before the london froebel society. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . [see buckland, heerwart, hoggan, shirreff.] fellner, a. der volkskindergarten und die krippe. mo, pp. . wien, . frye, alex. e. the child and nature, or geography teaching with sand modelling. mo, pp. . hyde park, . . goldammer, h. the kindergarten. a handbook of froebel's method of education, gifts, and occupations. with introduction, etc., by baroness b. von marenholtz-bülow. translated by william wright. vo. berlin, . . ---- gymnastische spiele und bildungsmittel für kinder von - jahren. vo, pp. . berlin, . gurney, mary. see koehler, below. hailmann, w.n. primary helps, or modes of making froebel's methods available in primary schools. d ed. vo, pp. , with full-page illustrations. syracuse, . . ---- four lectures on early child culture. mo, pp. . milwaukee. . ---- kindergarten culture in the family and kindergarten. a complete sketch of froebel's system of early education, adapted to american institutions. for the use of mothers and teachers. mo, pp. , and plates. cincinnati, . . ---- the kindergarten messenger and the new education. vols. v, vi, [completing the series]. vo, vols., pp. , . syracuse, , . . ---- primary methods. a complete and methodical presentation of the use of kindergarten material in the work of the primary school, unfolding a systematic course of manual training in connection with arithmetic, geometry, drawing, and other school studies. mo, pp. . new york, . . hailmann, e.l. songs, games, and rhymes for the kindergarten. mo. springfield. . heerwart, eleonore. music for the kindergarten. to. london, . . ---- froebel's mutter- und kose-lieder. mo, pp. [the last is reprinted in "essays on the kindergarten," above.] hoffmann, h. kindergarten toys, and how to use them. toronto. . ---- kindergarten gifts. new york. . hoggan, frances e. on the physical education of girls. mo, pp. . [this is reprinted in "essays on the kindergarten," above.] hopkins, louisa p. how shall my child be taught? practical pedagogy, or the science of teaching. illustrated, mo, pp. . boston, . . ---- educational psychology. a treatise for parents and educators. mo, pp. . boston, . . hubbard, clara. merry songs and games, for the use of the kindergarten. to, pp. . st. louis, . . hughes, james. the kindergarten: its place and purpose. new york. . jacobs, j.f. manuel pratique des jardins d'enfants. to. brussels, . johnson, anna. education by doing, or occupations and busy work for primary classes. mo, pp. . new york, . . kindergarten and the school, by four active workers. mo, pp. . springfield, . . koehler, a. die praxis des kindergartens. to, vols., with more than plates. weimar, . ---- the same, translated by mary gurney. part i [first gifts]. mo, ill. london, . . kraus-boelte, maria, and john kraus. the kindergarten guide, illustrated. vol. i [the gifts]. new york, . . ---- the kindergarten and the mission of women. new york. . kriege, a.l. rhymes and tales for the kindergarten and nursery. mo, new york. . laurie's kindergarten manual. new york. . ---- kindergarten action songs and exercises. london. . lyschinska, mary. principles of the kindergarten. ill., to, london, . . mann, mrs. horace. see marenholz-buelow, above, and peabody, below. marenholz-buelow, baroness b. von. the child and child-nature. translated by alice m. christie. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . ---- the same, translated as "a free rendering of the german" by matilda h. kriege, under the title "the child, its nature and relations; an elucidation of froebel's principles of education." mo, pp. . new york, . . ---- the school work-shop. translated by miss susan e. blow. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . ---- hand-work and head-work: their relation to one another. translated by alice m. christie. mo. london, . . maudsley, h. sex in mind and education. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . meiklejohn, j.m.d. the new education. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . meyer, bertha. von der wiege his zur schule. mo, pp. . berlin, . ---- aids to family government, or from the cradle to the school, according to froebel. translated from the second german edition. to which has been added an essay on the rights of children and the true principles of family government, by herbert spencer. mo, pp. . new york, . . moore, n.a. kindergartner's manual of drawing exercises for young children upon figures of plane geometry. to, pp. , and plates. springfield. . morgenstein, lina. das paradies der kindheit. eine ausfuhrliche anleitung fur mütter und erzieherinnen. f. froebel's spiel-beschäftigungen in haus und kindergarten. d ed. vo, pp. . leipzig, . mulley, jane, and m.e. tabram. songs and games for our little ones. mo. london, . . noa, henrietta. plays for the kindergarten: music by c.j. richter. mo. new york. . payne, joseph. froebel and the kindergarten system. d ed. london, . [now rare, but printed in "lectures on education," syracuse, , $ . .] ---- a visit to german schools. london, . peabody, elizabeth p. moral culture of infancy, and kindergarten guide, with music for the plays. by mrs. horace mann, and elizabeth p. peabody. mo, pp. . boston, . . ---- the education of the kindergartner. pittsburgh, . ---- the nursery: a lecture. ---- the identification of the artisan and artist the proper object of american education. ---- froebel's kindergarten, with a letter from henry barnard. mo, pp. . ---- lectures in the training schools for kindergartners. mo, pp. . [includes those on "the education of the kindergartner" and "the nursery," named above.] ---- education in the home, the kindergarten, and the primary school. with an introduction by e. adelaide manning. mo, pp. . london, . . [a reprint of the "lectures in the training schools."] ---- and mary mann. after kindergarten, what? a primer of reading and writing for the intermediate class, and primary schools generally. mo. new york. . perez, bernard. the first three years of childhood. edited and translated by alice m. christie, with an introduction by james sully. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . plays and songs, for kindergarten and family. springfield. . pollock, louisa. national kindergarten manual. mo, pp. . boston, . . ---- national kindergarten songs and plays. mo, pp. . boston. . ---- cheerful echoes: from the national kindergarten for children from to years of age. mo, pp. . boston, . . preyer, w. the mind of the child. mo, vols. new york, . . richards, b.w. learning and health. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . richter, k. kindergarten und schule. leipzig. ronge, johann and bertha. a practical guide to the english kindergarten (children's garden), for the use of mothers, governesses, and infant teachers: being an exposition of froebel's system of infant training: accompanied by a variety of instructive and amusing games, industrial and gymnastic exercises, also numerous songs set to music, th ed. to, pp. , and plates. london, . . shirreff, emily. essays and lectures on the kindergarten. principles of froebel's system, and their bearing on the higher education of women, schools, family, and industrial life. mo, pp. . syracuse, . . ---- progressive development according to froebel's principles. mo, pp. . ---- wasted forces. mo, pp. . ---- the kindergarten in relation to schools. mo, pp. . new york. . ---- the kindergarten in relation to family life. mo, pp. . new york. . [the last four are given in "essays on the kindergarten," above] ---- home education and the kindergarten. mo. london, . . ---- the kindergarten at home. mo. london, . . ---- claim of froebel's system to be called "the new education." new york, . . ---- essays and lectures in the kindergarten. new york. . singleton, j.e. occupations and occupation games. mo, london, . . steele's kindergarten handbook. new york. . steiger's kindergarten tracts. nos. new york. . straight, h.h. aspects of industrial education. vo, pp. . syracuse, . . thompson, mrs. elizabeth. kindergarten homes, for orphans and other destitute children; a new way to ultimately dispense with prisons and poor-houses. mo, pp. . new york, . . weber, a. die vier ersten schuljahre in vorbindung mit e. kindergarten. vo, pp. . gotha. . ---- die geschichte der volksschulpädagogik und der kleinkindererziehung. mo, pp. . dresden, . wiebe, e. the paradise of childhood. a manual for instruction in f. froebel's educational principles, and a practical guide to kindergartners. to, pp. and plates. springfield. . ---- the paradise of childhood: a manual of instruction and a practical guide to kindergartners. to, plates. london, . . ---- songs, music, and movement plays. springfield. . wiggins's kindergarten chimes. springfield. . wiltsie's stories for kindergartens and primary schools. boston. . all books of which prices are given may be had of the publisher of this volume. index. aaron to froebel's moses activity at yverdon actor, life of an adventists, doctrine of Æsthetic sense agriculturalist, life of an , aim of educational work albums, sentiments in , alexander i. sends for pestalozzi amrhyn, herr ante-darwinian theories "aphorisms" arabic, study of architecture as a profession , , , , , , architectural efforts arithmetic, teaching of , , , , , ---- philosophy of arndt, ernest moritz ---- "fragments of culture" art, study of , art of teaching astronomy , attire, peculiarities of augsburg confession austria interested in pestalozzi bach a cantor baireuth , bamberg, life at , , barop, johannes arnold , , , , , , ---- "critical moments" - batsch, a.j.g. bauer, herr , , belief in himself berlin, life at , , , , , , bern ---- langethal's school at berry, mrs. , best friend, froebel's , bible biographies ---- in schools "bible of education" birth of froebel , , bishop, miss, appointed london lecturer bivouac life agreeable blankenburg , , boarding-school life book-keeping botany, love of , , , , brandenburg, mark of british and foreign school society , brothers of froebel. [see froebel, below.] burgdorf, orphanage at , , , , cantor carl, herr , carus, professor characteristics in boyhood chemistry , , ---- organic chevé system of singing child's need of construction crispine, ernestine christian education essential ---- family life ---- forms "christmas at keilhau" church and school , ---- attendance class divisions elastic classical education ---- teaching "come let us live _with_ them" comenius comet of commission of companionship comprehensiveness essential conditions of tutorship confinement in boyhood confirmation congress of teachers at rudolstadt ---- at gotha ---- at salzungen construction essential to a child "continuation of the account of keilhau" contradiction, life freed from cosmical development crisis at yverdon croydon kindergarten crystals a witness of life crystallography , culture, froebel's plan of ---- his own insufficient death of froebel , ---- of his father ---- of his first wife development, analysis to synthesis ---- of being, laws of ---- vs. memorizing devotes himself to study of education dewitz, herr von , , , diary begun diesterweg divine worship at home , doreck, miss drawing, study of , , , dresden , , duration of the world earlier and later life compared early education ---- mental struggles , education _ad hoc_ ---- aim of ---- as an object ---- at jena ---- in relationships ---- purpose of ---- reaches beyond life "education of man" , , , , educator and teacher energy in play ---- in rocks england, first kindergarten in ephors escape from creditors "exchange classes" expression of thought difficult eyes, deficient power of "family journal of education" , , family ties , father of froebel. [see froebel, johann jacob.] ---- and mother fatherland vs. motherland fichte , financial difficulties , , , , first consciousness of self ---- grasp of the word kindergarten ---- idea of a school of his own ---- work as a teacher following nature in geography foresight of vocation as a teacher forestry-apprentice form-development form fixed for language forms, study of , forster, johann georg ---- "rhine travels" , francke's pädagogium frankfurt, life at , , , , ---- model school french, study of froebel, temporary change of name ---- family ---- johann jacob, the _father_ , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , _brothers._ ---- augustus , ---- christoph , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ---- his widow misunderstands froebel ---- julius karl theodor , ---- christian ludwig , , , , , , , , , ---- traugott , , , , ---- karl poppo , _nephews._ ---- ferdinand , , , , , ---- wilhelm , ---- julius , ---- karl , _nieces._ ---- albertine [middendorf] , ---- emilie [barop] , , ---- elise [schaffner] , , ---- luise, madame froebel society , froebel's style as an author , fröhlich games ---- a mental bath gardening , geography, teaching of geology , geometry , , , german brotherhood ---- land and people ---- language teaching ---- literature "german education" gifts, first suggestion of girard, abbe girls' school at oberweissbach , godlike not alone in the great godmother of froebel goethe gotha, congress of teachers at göttingen, life at , , , , göttling government offices , , grammar, study of grammarians at odds greek, study of , grey, mrs. william griesheim , , gross-milchow , gruner, herr , , , , , , ---- book on pestalozzian methods gurney, mary , , gymnastic exercises halie hamburg , , hardenburg, prince harmonious development harnisch havelberg , , hazel-buds the clue of ariadne hebrew, study of heerwart, eleonore , , hegel ---- his formulae adopted helba, national institution at , , , hell, belief in , hermes higher methods of teaching hildburghausen , history hoffmann, herr , , , , , hoffman, thedor hoffmeister, henrietta wilhelmine , holzhausen, herr von , ---- madame von , home of froebel , , , ---- abandoned , ---- life , hopf , identities and analogies sought out iffland's "huntsman" illusions have a true side impressions of pestalozzi imprisoned for debt , individual life key to the universal inner meaning of the vowels inner law and order instrumental music derived from vocal introspection a characteristic , , , , , , , , , , "isis" , isolation of froebel , , , jahn jena, life at , , , jesus christ, education based on "journal of education" , , "journal for froebel's educational aims" joy of teaching jussieu's botany kant keilhau, life at , , , , , , kindergarten occupations knowledge of self through objects körner in the "wilde schaar" krause, carl c.f. , , ---- letter to , - , krüsi lange, wichard , , , ---- editor of "family journal" ---- editor of froebel's works , , langethal, heinrich , , , , , , , , , , , , language, philosophy of , ---- teaching of , , , , latin, study of , , , legacies , leipzig leonhardi lessons from nature's training letter to the duke of meiningen , - , ---- to krause - , , "levana" liebenstein, life at life as a connected whole "life, will, understanding" lilies, vain search for london kindergarten college love of nature. [see nature, love of.] luther, martin lützow, baron von , manchester kindergarten association mankind as one great unity manner in teaching manning, miss manual training at helba map-drawing , "mappe du monde litteraire" marenholz-bülow, baroness von , , , , marienthal , marquart, dr. ---- madame master of the girls' school mathematics matrimony mechanical powers, the mecklenburg , meiningen, duke of , , ---- letter to , - , , , meissen , memorizing of rules vs. development , , "menschen erziehung" , , , , mental struggles metaphysics , methods of education michaelis, mme. , , middendorf, wilhelm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , mineralogy , , ---- professorship declined misapprehension of froebel's motives model school at frankfurt "moonstruck," froebel so considered moral influence of the teacher , ---- pride mother of froebel , , "mothers' songs" , mugge, johanna caroline "mutter- and koselieder" , nägeli ---- and pfeifer's "musical course" name temporarily changed napoleonic wars , ---- reaction from natural history , , , natural history society at jena nature, communion with ---- love of , , , , , , , , , , , , , ---- as an educator nature's work vs. man's nature-temple nephews of froebel. [see froebel, ferdinand, etc.] netherlands, froebel in the neuhof , nieces of froebel. [see froebel, albertine, etc.] niederer note-taking novalis's works number horizontally related oberfalz oberweissbach , object-teaching oken, lorenz , ---- "isis" "on german education" "on the universal german education at keilhau" oriental tongues, study of orphanage at burgdorf , , , , orthodox theology , , , orthography "pädagogik" pädagogium at halle paper, pricking of, suggested , payne, joseph , permutations of numbers perrault, m. persian language, study of personal characteristics of froebel , , , , , , , ---- of pestalozzi pestalozzi , - , , , , , - , , , ---- aims contrasted with froebel's , , , ---- "buch der matter" ---- "einertabelle" ---- general addresses ---- school. [see yverdon.] pfyffer, eduard , , philology, study of , , , philosophy, danger of physical backwardness ---- constitution ---- education ---- geography , physics , , , physiography , plamann school plans for life-work play a subject of study ---- for school boys ---- influence of political economy politics portugall, baroness adele von "positive instruction" praetorious, miss pricking paper suggested ---- philosophy of "principles, aims, and inner life" private tutorship professorship declined pronunciation , prophetic sentiments pröschke's "fragments" prussian, froebel not a public school-examination purpose of education quittelsdorf reaction from napoleonic wars reading, teaching of , recognition by others relationship, education in religious experiences , , , , , , ---- instruction , , ---- persecution repulsion to menial service "rhenische blätter" rhine, froebel crosses the richter, jean paul rigidity in teaching rocks a mirror of mankind ronge, madame , rousseau's system of singing rudolstadt , ---- prince of , ---- princess regent of , , "samuel lawhill" sanskrit, study of schaffner, siegfried schelling ---- school of schiller schleiermacher schmidt, carl schmidt, josias ---- quarrels with niederer schnyder , schopenhauer, arthur schrader, madame schwartzburg-rudolstadt scientific extracts scribbling distasteful self-consciousness , self-development becomes objective self-discipline seiler, george frederick senses exercised set forms in teaching sex-life in plants sexual conditions , shirreff, emily , , , singing , skeleton of man as type soldier, froebel as a - , , "sonntags-blatt," articles in soul-cultivation ---- emerging from chrysalis sound method from fundamental principle special education , speech-tones spelling, teaching of spiritual endeavor at yverdon. [see religious experiences.] ---- experiences stadt-ilm , step-brother of froebel step-mother of froebel , , , stimulation at yverdon stockwell kindergarten college "stone-language" sturm style of froebel's writing , subject vs. object "sunday journal" surveying, study of , , symbols to the inner eye taking sides teacher in the plamann school ---- requirements of a teachers' institutes at burgdorf teaching suggested "teaching-plan" of pestalozzi "the education of the future" "the new education" an antithesis "the new year demands a renewal of life" theatrical performances , theological disputations third person in address "thou," the german thuringian forest, the "to the german people" tobler , translators, aims of the trustee of froebel's property , uckermark, the uncle of froebel. [see hoffman, herr.] unconscious tuition ---- wealth of youth unity , ---- from clashing phenomena ---- in nature ---- lacking at yverdon ---- of natural objects ---- of the universe "universal german" education , universities neglect froebel vivacity of early impulses voldersdorf, herr von , von dewitz , , , ---- holzhausen, madame , , ---- lützow, baron , ---- marenholz-bülow , , ---- portugall, baroness adéle ---- voldersdorf , vowels, inner meaning of ---- vs. consonants walks with pupils , wartburg, the , wartensee, the , , was christ catholic or protestant? weber's "wilde jagd" weimar, grand duke of , weiss, prof. , wichard's "froebel" wieland wife [first] of froebel , willisau, school a , - , winckelmann's "letters on art" wollweider, dr. works written by froebel , , , yverdon, pestalozzi's school at , - , - , ---- lack of unity, etc ---- wavering of ground principles zendavista zollikofer the education of the child by ellen key introductory note edward bok, editor of the "ladies' home journal," writes: "nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought into print. to me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way straight for every parent and it should find a place in every home in america where there is a child." the education of the child goethe showed long ago in his werther a clear understanding of the significance of individualistic and psychological training, an appreciation which will mark the century of the child. in this work he shows how the future power of will lies hidden in the characteristics of the child, and how along with every fault of the child an uncorrupted germ capable of producing good is enclosed. "always," he says, "i repeat the golden words of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as one of these,' and now, good friend, those who are our equals, whom we should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects; they should have no will of their own; do we have none? where is our prerogative? does it consist in the fact that we are older and more experienced? good god of heaven! thou seest old and young children, nothing else. and in whom thou hast more joy, thy son announced ages ago. but people believe in him and do not hear him--that, too, is an old trouble, and they model their children after themselves." the same criticism might be applied to our present educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed the new commandments in which they say they believe. they continue to educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed. the new belief is really equivalent to goethe's thoughts given above, i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ of virtue. even men of modern times still follow in education the old rule of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil, instead of the new method, the system of allowing nature quietly and slowly to help itself, taking care only that the surrounding conditions help the work of nature. this is education. neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by carlyle when he said that the marks of a noble and original temperament are wild, strong emotions, that must be controlled by a discipline as hard as steel. people either strive to root out passions altogether, or they abstain from teaching the child to get them under control. to suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime common to those who announce loudly that education should only develop the real individual nature of the child. they are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is justified. just as little are they convinced of the possibility that evil can be changed into good. education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. at the same time, there is the other certainty that through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may be transformed. only when this stage is reached will education begin to be a science and art. we will then give up all belief in the miraculous effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere in accordance with the principle of the indestructibility of matter. we shall never believe that a characteristic of the soul can be destroyed. there are but two possibilities. either it can be brought into subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane. madame de stael's words show much insight when she says that only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. for success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. what it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. it means to treat the child as really one's equal, that is, to show him the same consideration, the same kind confidence one shows to an adult. it means not to influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him to become but to be influenced by the impression of what the child himself is; not to treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with the seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character. somewhere rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature does not fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of education. what would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature, and recognised that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, "do not educate"? not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day methods of training children. education is determined to create a beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow. to let him move about freely in this world until he comes into contact with the permanent boundaries of another's right will be the end of the education of the future. only then will adults really obtain a deep insight into the souls of children, now an almost inaccessible kingdom. for it is a natural instinct of self-preservation which causes the child to bar the educator from his innermost nature. there is the person who asks rude questions; for example, what is the child thinking about? a question which almost invariably is answered with a black or a white lie. the child must protect himself from an educator who would master his thoughts and inclinations, or rudely handle them, who without consideration betrays or makes ridiculous his most sacred feelings, who exposes faults or praises characteristics before strangers, or even uses an open-hearted, confidential confession as an occasion for reproof at another time. the statement that no human being learns to understand another, or at least to be patient with another, is true above all of the intimate relation of child and parent in which, understanding, the deepest characteristic of love, is almost always absent. parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace is never greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace under all external unrest. the child has to enter into relations with his own infinite world, to conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams. but what does he experience? obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole livelong day. the child is always required to leave something alone, or to do something different, to find something different, or want something different from what he does, or finds, or wants. he is always shunted off in another direction from that towards which his own character is leading him. all of this is caused by our tenderness, vigilance, and zeal, in directing, advising, and helping the small specimen of humanity to become a complete example in a model series. i have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying" because he wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished to drag him into the city. another child of six years was disciplined because she had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,--a natural appellation for one who was always dirty. these are typical examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. it was a spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might be allowed to go to hell on saturday evening to play with the bad little boys there. the child felt in its innermost consciousness that he had a right to be naughty, a fundamental right which is accorded to adults; and not only to be naughty, but to be naughty in peace, to be left to the dangers and joys of naughtiness. to call forth from this "unvirtue" the complimentary virtue is to overcome evil with good. otherwise we overcome natural strength by weak means and obtain artificial virtues which will not stand the tests which life imposes. it seems simple enough when we say that we must overcome evil with good, but practically no process is more involved, or more tedious, than to find actual means to accomplish this end. it is much easier to say what one shall not do than what one must do to change self-will into strength of character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please into amiability, restlessness into personal initiative. it can only be brought about by recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic or perverse, is as natural and indispensable as the good, and that it becomes a permanent evil only through its one-sided supremacy. the educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. he forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow the camels of grown people. the art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed to go on by itself. but educators who, day in and day out, are consciously transforming the environment and themselves are still a rare product. most people live on the capital and interest of an education, which perhaps once made them model children, but has deprived them of the desire for educating themselves. only by keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a companion half-way good enough for one's children. to bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting one's feet on a narrow path, it means never placing ourselves in danger of meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without words that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. it means the humble realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are infinite, while the ways of being useful to him are few. how seldom does the educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age, is making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvellous shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each impression. the slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least act of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for life in the finely strung soul of the child. while on the other side unexpected friendliness, kind advances, just indignation, make quite as deep an impression on those senses which people term as soft as wax but treat as if they were made of cowhide. relatively most excellent was the old education which consisted solely in keeping oneself whole, pure, and honourable. for it did not at least depreciate personality, although it did not form it. it would be well if but a hundredth part of the pains now taken by parents were given to interference with the life of the child and the rest of the ninety and nine employed in leading, without interference, in acting as an unforeseen, an invisible providence through which the child obtains experience, from which he may draw his own conclusions. the present practice is to impress one's own discoveries, opinions, and principles on the child by constantly directing his actions. the last thing to be realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the things with which he comes in contact. by a new soul he understands only a new generation of an old humanity to be treated with a fresh dose of the old remedy. we teach the new souls not to steal, not to lie, to save their clothes, to learn their lessons, to economise their money, to obey commands, not to contradict older people, say their prayers, to fight occasionally in order to be strong. but who teaches the new souls to choose for themselves the path they must tread? who thinks that the desire for this path of their own can be so profound that a hard or even mild pressure towards uniformity can make the whole of childhood a torment. the child comes into life with the inheritance of the preceding members of the race; and this inheritance is modified by adaptation to the environment. but the child shows also individual variations from the type of the species, and if his own character is not to disappear during the process of adaptation, all self-determined development of energy must be aided in every way and only indirectly influenced by the teacher, who should understand how to combine and emphasise the results of this development. interference on the part of the educator, whether by force or persuasion, weakens this development if it does not destroy it altogether. the habits of the household, and the child's habits in it must be absolutely fixed if they are to be of any value. amiel truly says that habits are principles which have become instincts, and have passed over into flesh and blood. to change habits, he continues, means to attack life in its very essence, for life is only a web of habits. why does everything remain essentially the same from generation to generation? why do highly civilised christian people continue to plunder one another and call it exchange, to murder one another en masse, and call it nationalism, to oppress one another and call it statesmanship? because in every new generation the impulses supposed to have been rooted out by discipline in the child, break forth again, when the struggle for existence--of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the state--begins. these passions are not transformed by the prevalent education of the day, but only repressed. practically this is the reason why not a single savage passion has been overcome in humanity. perhaps man-eating may be mentioned as an exception. but what is told of european ship companies or siberian prisoners shows that even this impulse, under conditions favourable to it, may be revived, although in the majority of people a deep physical antipathy to man-eating is innate. conscious incest, despite similar deviations, must also be physically contrary to the majority, and in a number of women, modesty--the unity between body and soul in relation to love--is an incontestable provision of nature. so too a minority would find it physically impossible to murder or steal. with this list i have exhausted everything which mankind, since its conscious history began, has really so intimately acquired that the achievement is passed on in its flesh and blood. only this kind of conquest can really stand up against temptation in every form. a deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one speaks of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system of education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages. while fine words are spoken about individual development, children are treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents; and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every one else, people usually begin by attempting to make them respectable and useful members of society. but the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in becoming a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such, while strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual human being. the new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child by degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him his responsibility towards his environment. but in other respects, none of the individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life will be suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or others. the right balance must be kept between spencer's definition of life as an adaptation to surrounding conditions, and nietzsche's definition of it as the will to secure power. in adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but individual exercise of power is just as important. through adaptation life attains a fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors. thoughtful people, as i have already stated, talk a good deal about personality. but they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. and so they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts which will have freedom when they are grown. people still hardly realise how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men, the sweet girls, the respectable officials, and so on. and new types with higher ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up. nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. but she also constantly makes small deviations. in this way different species, even of the human race, have come into existence. but man himself does not yet see the significance of this natural law in his own higher development. he wants the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already stamped with approval to be reproduced by each new generation. so we get no new individuals, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or bad-tempered examples of the genus man. the still living instincts of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity. conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to produce new types. but this last characteristic is the most valuable. the educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. he should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation. using other people's opinion as a standard results in subordinating one's self to their will. so we become a part of the great mass, led by the superman through the strength of his will, a will which could not have mastered strong personalities. it has been justly remarked that individual peoples, like the english, have attained the greatest political and social freedom, because the personal feeling of independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal form. accordingly legal freedom has been constantly growing. for the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of society, it is essential that education shall awake the feeling of independence; it should invigorate and favour the disposition to deviate from the type in those cases where the rights of others are not affected, or where deviation is not simply the result of the desire to draw attention to oneself. the child should be given the chance to declare conscientiously his independence of a customary usage, of an ordinary feeling, for this is the foundation of the education of an individual, as well as the basis of a collective conscience, which is the only kind of conscience men now have. what does having an individual conscience mean? it means submitting voluntarily to an external law, attested and found good by my own conscience. it means unconditionally heeding the unwritten law, which i lay upon myself, and following this inner law even when i must stand alone against the whole world. it is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular one, that it is original natures, particularly talented beings, who are badly treated at home and in school. no one considers the sources of conduct in a child who shows fear or makes a noise, or who is absorbed in himself, or who has an impetuous nature. mothers and teachers show in this their pitiable incapacity for the most elementary part in the art of education, that is, to be able to see with their own eyes, not with pedagogical doctrines in their head. i naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their conventional morality, no appreciation of the significance of the child's putting into exercise his own powers. just as little is this to be expected of those christian believers who think that human nature must be brought to repentance and humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast, must be tamed with the rod,--a theory which the bible is brought to support. i am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and consequently should cease using old methods of education. this class may reply that the new ideas in education cannot be carried out. but the obstacle is simply that their new thoughts have not made them into new men; the old man in them has neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own soul, and that of the child, according to the new thoughts. those who have "tried spencer and failed," because spencer's method demands intelligence and patience, contend that the child must be taught to obey, that truth lies in the old rule, "as the twig is bent the tree is inclined." bent is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal which extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience. but the new ideal is that man, to stand straight and upright, must not be bent at all only supported, and so prevented from being deformed by weakness. one often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude desire for mastery still alive and breaking out when the child is obstinate. "you won't!" say father and mother; "i will teach you whether you have a will. i will soon drive self-will out of you." but nothing can be driven out of the child; on the other hand, much can be scourged into it which should be kept far away. only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as a pre-condition to a higher training. the child is then in such a high degree controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure is often the only language he fully understands. consequently for some children discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice of certain habits. for other children, the stricter methods are entirely unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child can remember a blow, he is too old to receive one. the child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience must be absolute. if such obedience has become habitual from the tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child straight. the dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can only be made effective when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny atmosphere of home. and if people refrain from laying the foundations of obedience while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining, spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the child is older and his caprice disagreeable. with a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently and immediately. the effort of training should be directed at an early period to arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions according to rousseau and spencer's recommendation. so certain habits will become impressed in the flesh and blood of the child. constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it has become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some other discomfort,--discomforts against which crying is the child's only weapon. crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. but this does not master the will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea that older people strike small children, when small children cry. this is not an ethical idea. but when the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation is the absolute result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable. in both cases the child is silenced by interfering with his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on his will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will, and accomplishes this by a good motive. one method encourages a base emotion, fear. the other corrects the will in a way that combines it with one of the most important experiences of life. the one punishment keeps the child on the level of the animal. the other impresses upon him the great principle of human social life, that when our pleasure causes displeasure to others, other people hinder us from following our pleasures; or withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will. it is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to good behaviour at table, etc. if every time an act of naughtiness is repeated, the child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn that whoever is disagreeable to others must remain alone. thus a right application is made of a right principle. small children, too, must learn not to touch what belongs to other people. if every time anything is touched without permission, children lose their freedom of action one way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free action is not to injure others. it is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty japanese rooms are ideal places in which to bring up children. our modern crowded rooms are, so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. during the year in which the real education of the child is proceeding by touching, tasting, biting, feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the cry, "let it alone." for the temperament of the child as well as for the development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery, adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of movement. but if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient, a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn that every place occupied by him has its limits. if it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child should really dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming influence. when a mother strikes a child because he touches the light, the result is that he does this again when the mother is away. but let him burn himself with the light, then he is certain to leave it alone. in riper years when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar, the loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment. most boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their favourite possession. but only the loss of it will be a real education through experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience which cannot be too strongly impressed. we hear parents who have begun with spencer and then have taken to corporal punishment declare that when children are too small to repair the clothing which they have torn there must be some other kind of punishment. but at that age they should not be punished at all for such things. they should have such simple and strong clothes that they can play freely in them. later on, when they can be really careful, the natural punishment would be to have the child remain at home if he is careless, has spotted his clothes, or torn them. he must be shown that he must help to put his clothes in good condition again, or that he will be compelled to buy what he has destroyed carelessly with money earned by himself. if the child is not careful, he must stay at home, when ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat alone if he is too late for meals. it may be said that there are simple means by which all the important habits of social life may become a second nature. but it is not possible in all cases to apply spencer's method. the natural consequences occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes are too slow in their action. if it seems necessary to interfere directly, such action must be consistent, quick, and immutable. how is it that the child learns very soon that fire burns? because fire does so always. but the mother who at one time strikes, at another threatens, at another bribes the child, first forbids and then immediately after permits some action; who does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience, but constantly gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and just as often in another, has not learned the effective educational methods of the fire. the old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to the character a fixed type rested on its consistent qualities. it was consistently strict, not as at present a lax hesitation between all kinds of pedagogical methods and psychological opinions, in which the child is thrown about here and there like a ball, in the hands of grown people; at one time pushed forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside, only to be brought back again, kissed till it, is disgusted, first ordered about, and then coaxed. a grown man would become insane if joking titans treated him for a single day as a child is treated for a year. a child should not be ordered about, but should be just as courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn courtesy. a child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment him and are often the cause of sexual hyperaesthesia. the child's demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are sincere, but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special occasions. this is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are disregarded. nor should the child be forced to express regret in begging pardon and the like. this is excellent training for hypocrisy. a small child once had been rude to his elder brother and was placed upon a chair to repent his fault. when the mother after a time asked if he was sorry, he answered, "yes," with emphasis, but as the mother saw a mutinous sparkle in his eyes she felt impelled to ask, "sorry for what?" and the youngster broke out, "sorry that i did not call him a liar besides." the mother was wise enough on this occasion, and ever after, to give up insisting on repentance. spontaneous penitence is full of significance, it is a deeply felt desire for pardon. but an artificial emotion is always and everywhere worthless. are you not sorry? does it make no difference to you that your mother is ill, your brother dead, your father away from home? such expressions are often used as an appeal to the emotions of children. but children have a right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have them as undisturbed as grown people. the same holds good of their sympathies and antipathies. the sensitive feelings of children are constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. but the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. just as there are few better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,--would i consent to be treated as i have just treated my child? if it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's life is a constant torment. as to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks of tenderness. only by example can generous instincts be provoked. above all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately gives away. gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital for work or sacrifice. in order to secure for children the pleasure of giving and the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments, as well as of replacing property of their own or of others which they may have destroyed, they should at an early age be accustomed to perform seriously certain household duties for which they receive some small remuneration. but small occasional services, whether volunteered or asked for by others, should never be rewarded. only readiness to serve, without payment, develops the joy of generosity. when the child wants to give away something, people should not make a presence of receiving it. this produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of being generous can be had for nothing. at every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. this is what is least understood in present-day training. thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing. people find themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which stand in no relation with the realities of life. i mean, above all, what are still called means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows. many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent through association of ideas. but what kinds of association? is it not with physical pain and shame? gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has been superseded in all its forms. the movement to abolish torture, imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline. but the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up as an animal. those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of animals. even animals can be trained without striking them, but they can only be trained by men who have become men themselves. others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road as humanity. this is an utter absurdity. we should also, on this theory, teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice fetish worship. if the child is to reproduce all the lower development stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the common inheritance of the race. if we have abandoned torture and painful punishments for adults, while they are retained for children, it is because we have not yet seen that their soul life so far as a greater and more subtle capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same progress as that of adult mankind. the numerous cases of child suicide in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal punishment; or have taken place after its administration. both soul and body are equally affected by this practice. where this is not the result, blows have even more dangerous consequences. they tend to dull still further the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice of the person punished. i once heard a child pointed out in a school as being so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a flogging. then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had made him what he was. if statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those who had been flogged would certainly be more numerous than those who had been pampered. society has gradually given up employing retributive punishments because people have seen that they neither awaken the feeling of guilt, nor act as a deterrent, but on the contrary retribution applied by equal to equal brutalises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates the victim to exercise the same violence towards others that has been endured by himself. but other rules are applied to the psychological processes of the child. when a child strikes his small sister the mother strikes him and believes that he will see and understand the difference between the blows he gets and those he gives, that he will see that the one is a just punishment and the other vicious conduct. but the child is a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same, although the mother gives it a different name. corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by comenius, who compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands to put it into tune. these brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them. they have no educative power on all the innumerable fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely related combinations. in order to give real training, the first thing after the second or third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow among the possibilities of education. it is best if parents, as soon as the child is born, agree never to strike him, for if they once begin with this convenient and easy method, they continue to use corporal discipline even contrary to their first intention, because they have failed while using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence. if people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's peace. but as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human beings in other respects, i should like to request them to think over the development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times. through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to the great advantage of society and the individual. but it may be hard to awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a noble and complete development. only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator may be formed. corporal punishment was natural in rough times. the body is tangible; what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. the heat of passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower capacities. but it has since been discovered that the soul may be impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them. the educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. to punish for this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece of stupidity. it works against the possibility of elevating the child beyond the level of the beast or the savage. the educator to whose mind flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of education. administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience, his brutality, not his intelligence. a small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. as his nurse reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, "yes, to-night i really have something to tell god," and prayed with deep earnestness, "dear god, tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me any more." nothing would more effectively further the development of education than for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. they would then learn to educate with the head instead of with the hand. and as to public educators, the teachers, their position could be no better raised than by legally forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under penalty of final loss of position. that people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a very elementary conception of their work. they should constantly keep before them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in dealing with children. the most frequent as well as the most dangerous of the numerous mistakes made in handling children is that people do not remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past point of view. the adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame, his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. lacking these beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the crime of destroying the childhood of the new generation,--the only time in life in which the guardian of education can really be a kindly providence. so strongly do i feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well as ignoble that i experience physical disgust in touching the hand of a human being that i know has struck a child; and i cannot close my eyes after i have heard a child in the street threatened with corporal punishment. blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. as early as walther von der vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man respects a word more than a blow. the exercise of physical force delivers the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. a child never believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge verbally, that the blows were due to love, that they were administered because they were necessary. the child is too keen not to know that such a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself in a better way. lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests. i do not now refer to the system of flogging employed by miserable people year in and year out at home, or, particularly in schools, that of beating children outrageously, or to the limits of brutality. i do not mean even the less brutal blows administered by undisciplined teachers and parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or fatigue or disgust,--blows which are simply the active expression of a tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the want of self-discipline and selfculture. still less do i refer to the cruelties committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies are stimulated by their disciplinary power and who use it to force their victims to silence, as certain criminal trials have shown. i am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and teachers who, with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard as their duty to the child. these are accustomed to adduce the good effects of corporal discipline as a proof that it cannot be dispensed with. the child by being whipped is, they say, not only made good but freed from his evil character, and shows by his whole being that this quick and summary method of punishment has done more than talks, and patience, and the slowly working penalties of experience. examples are adduced to prove that only this kind of punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the habit of lying and the like. those who adopt this system do not perceive that they have only succeeded, through this momentarily effective means, in repressing the external expression of an evil will. they have not succeeded in transforming the will itself. it requires constant vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create an ever higher capacity for the discovery of intelligent methods. the fault that is repressed is certain to appear on every occasion when the child dares to show it. the educator who finds in corporal punishment a short way to get rid of trouble, leads the child a long way round, if we have the only real development in view, namely that which gradually strengthens the child's capacity for self-control. i have never heard a child over three years old threatened with corporal punishment without noticing that this wonderfully moral method had an equally bad influence on parents and children. the same can be said of milder kinds of folly, coaxing children by external rewards. i have seen some children coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. but in neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of will increased. only when one is able to make the bath itself attractive is that energy of will developed that gains a victory over the feeling of fear or discomfort and produces a real ethical impression, viz., that virtue is its own reward. wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit or fault by corporal punishment, a real ethical result is not reached. the child has only learnt to fear an unpleasant consequence, which lacks real connection with the thing itself, a consequence it well knows could have been absent. such fear is as far removed as heaven from the conviction that the good is better than the bad. the child soon becomes convinced that the disagreeable accompaniment is no necessary result of the action, that by greater cleverness the punishment might have been avoided. thus the physical punishment increases deception not morality. in the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. only with the greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the superiority of the good established. the good comes to be seen as more productive of happiness to the individual himself and his environment. so the child learns to love the good. by teaching the child that punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the cause of punishment. despite all the new talk of individuality the greatest mistake in training children is still that of treating the "child" as an abstract conception, as an inorganic or personal material to be formed and transformed by the hands of those who are educating him. he is beaten, and it is thought that the whole effect of the blow stops at the moment when the child is prevented from being bad. he has, it is thought, a powerful reminder against future bad behaviour. people no not suspect that this violent interference in the physical and psychical life of the child may have lifelong effects. as far back as forty years ago, a writer showed that corporal punishment had the most powerful somatic stimulative effects. the flagellation of the middle ages is known to have had such results; and if i could publish what i have heard from adults as to the effect of corporal punishment on them, or what i have observed in children, this alone would be decisive in doing away with such punishment in its crudest form. it very deeply influences the personal modesty of the child. this should be preserved above everything as the main factor in the development of the feeling of purity. the father who punishes his daughter in this way deserves to see her some day a "fallen woman." he injures her instinctive feeling of the sanctity of her body, an instinct which even in the case of a small child can be passionately profound. only when every infringement of sanctity (forcible caressing is as bad as a blow) evokes an energetic, instinctive repulsion, is the nature of the child proud and pure. children who strike back when they are punished have the most promising characters of all. numerous are the cases in which bodily punishment can occasion irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who administers it, though he may triumphantly declare how the punishment in the specific case has helped. most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has injured them in one way or another, but when they take up the training of their own children they depend on the effect of such chastisement. what burning bitterness and desire for vengeance, what canine fawning flattery, does not corporal punishment call forth. it makes the lazy lazier, the obstinate more obstinate, the hard, harder. it strengthens those two emotions, the root of almost all evil in the world, hatred and fear. and as long as blows are made synonymous with education, both of these emotions will keep their mastery over men. one of the most frequent occasions for recourse to this punishment is obstinacy, but what is called obstinacy is only fear or incapacity. the child repeats a false answer, is threatened with blows, and again repeats it just because he is afraid not to say the right thing. he is struck and then answers rightly. this is a triumph of education; refractoriness is overcome. but what has happened? increased fear has led to a strong effort of thought, to a momentary increase of self-control. the next day the child will very likely repeat the fault. where there is real obstinacy on the part of children, i know of cases when corporal punishment has filled them with the lust to kill, either themselves or the person who strikes them. on the other hand i know of others, where a mother has brought an obstinate child to repentance and self-mastery by holding him quietly and calmly on her knees. how many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. even where blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute straightforwardness and the down-right personal courage to show oneself as one is. as long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no perfect honour will be found in children. so long as the home and the school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the child himself at the cost of humanity. the child uses on animals, on his young brothers and sisters, on his comrades, the methods applied to himself. he puts in practice the same argument, that "badness" must be cured with blows. only children accustomed to be treated mildly, learn to see that influence can be gained without using force. to see this is one of man's privileges, sacrificed by man through descending to the methods of the brute. only by the child seeing his teacher always and everywhere abstaining from the use of actual force, will he come himself to despise force on all those occasions which do not involve the defence of a weaker person against physical superiority. the foundation of the desire for war is to be sought for less in the war games than in the teachers' rod. to defend corporal discipline, children's own statements are brought in evidence, they are reported as saying they knew they deserved such discipline in order to be made good. there is no lower example of hypocrisy in human nature than this. it is true the child may be sincere in other cases in saying that he feels that through punishment he has atoned for a fault which was weighing upon his conscience. but this is really the foundation of a false system of ethics, the kind which still continues to be preached as christian, namely; that a fault may be atoned for by sufferings which are not directly connected with the fault. the basis of the new morality is just the opposite as i have already shown. it teaches that no fault can be atoned for, that no one can escape the results of his actions in any way. untruthfulness belongs to the faults which the teacher thinks he must most frequently punish with blows. but there is no case in which this method is more dangerous. when the much-needed guide-book for parents is published, the well-known story of george washington and the hatchet must appear in it, accompanied by the remark which a clever ten-year-old child added to the anecdote: "it is no trouble telling the truth when one has such a kind father." i formerly divided untruthfulness into unwilling, shameless, and imaginative lies. a short time ago i ran across a much better division of lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully conscious untruthfulness which must be punished, and "hot" lies; the expression of an excited temperament or of a vigorous fancy. i agree with the author of this distinction that the last should not be punished but corrected, though not with a pedantic rule of thumb measure, based on how much it exceeds or falls short of truth. it is to be cured by ridicule, a dangerous method of education in general, but useful when one observes that this type of untruthfulness threatens to develop into real untrustworthiness. in dealing with these faults we are very strict towards children, so strict that no lawyer, no politician, no journalist, no poet, could exercise his profession if the same standard were applied to them as to children. the white lie is, as a french scientist has shown, partly caused by pure morbidness, partly through some defect in the conception. it is due to an empty space, a dead point in memory, or in consciousness, that produces a defective idea or gives one no idea at all of what has happened. in the affairs of everyday life the adults are often mistaken as to their intentions or acts. they may have forgotten about their actions, and it requires a strong effort of memory to call them back into their minds; or they suggest to themselves that they have done, or not done, something. in all of these cases, if they were forced to give a distinct answer, they would lie. in every case of this kind, where a child is concerned, the lie is assumed to be a conscious one, and when on being submitted to a strict cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes confused, and blushes, it is looked upon as a proof that he knows he has been telling an untruth, although as a rule there has been no instance of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted confession from the child that he has lied. yet in all these complicated psychological problems, corporal punishment is treated as a solution. the child who never hears lying at home, who does not see exaggerated weight placed on small, merely external things, who is not made cowardly by fear, who hears conscious lies always spoken of with contempt, will get out of the habit of untruthfulness simply by psychological means. first he will find that untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a repetition of it, scorn and lack of confidence. but these methods should not be applied to untruthfulness caused by distress or by richness of imagination; or to such cases as originate from the obscure mental ideas noted above, ideas whose connection with one another the child cannot make clear to himself. the cold untruth on the other hand, must be punished; first by going over it with the child, then letting him experience its effect in lack of confidence, which will only be restored when the child shows decided improvement in this regard. it is of the greatest importance to show children full and unlimited confidence, even though one quietly maintains an attitude of alert watchfulness; for continuous and undeserved mistrust is just as demoralising as blind and easy confidence. no one who has been beaten for lying learns by it to love truth. the accuracy of this principle is illustrated by adults who despise corporal punishment in their childhood yet continue to tell untruths by word and deed. fear may keep the child from technical untruth, but fear also produces untrustworthiness. those who have been beaten in childhood for lying have often suffered a serious injury immeasurably greater than the direct lie. the truest men i ever knew lie voluntarily and involuntarily; while others who might never be caught in a lie are thoroughly false. this corruption of personality begins frequently at the tenderest age under the influence of early training. children are given untrue motives, half-true information; are threatened, admonished. the child's will, thought, and feeling are oppressed; against this treatment dishonesty is the readiest method of defence. in this way educators who make truth their highest aim, make children untruthful. i watched a child who was severely punished for denying something he had unconsciously done, and noted how under the influence of this senseless punishment he developed extreme dissimulation. truthfulness requires above everything unbroken determination; and many nervous little liars need nourishing food and life in the open air, not blows. a great artist, one of the few who live wholly according to the modern principles of life, said to me on one occasion: "my son does not know what a lie is, nor what a blow is. his step-brother, on the other hand, lied when he came into our house; but lying did not work in the atmosphere of calm and freedom. after a year the habit disappeared by itself, only because it always met with deep astonishment." this makes me, in passing, note one of the other many mistakes of education, viz., the infinite trouble taken in trying to do away with a fault which disappears by itself. people take infinite pains to teach small children to speak distinctly who, if left to themselves, would learn it by themselves, provided they were always spoken to distinctly. this same principle holds good of numerous other things, in children's attitude and behaviour, that can be left simply to a good example and to time. one's influence should be used in impressing upon the child habits for which a foundation must be laid at the very beginning of his life. there is another still more unfortunate mistake, the mistake of correcting and judging by an external effect produced by the act, by the scandal it occasions in the environment. children are struck for using oaths and improper words the meaning of which they do not understand; or if they do understand, the result of strictness is only that they go on keeping silence in matters in which sincerity towards those who are bringing them up is of the highest importance. the very thing the child is allowed to do uncorrected at home, is not seldom corrected if it happens away from home. so the child gets a false idea that it is not the thing that deserves punishment, but its publicity. when a mother is ashamed of the bad behaviour of her son she is apt to strike him--instead of striking her own breast! when an adventurous feat fails he is beaten, but he is praised when successful. these practices produce demoralisation. once in a wood i saw two parents laughing while the ice held on which their son was sliding; when it broke suddenly they threatened to whip him. it required strong self-control in order not to say to this pair that it was not the son who deserved punishment but themselves. on occasions like these, parents avenge their own fright on their children. i saw a child become a coward because an anxious mother struck him every time he fell down, while the natural result inflicted on the child would have been more than sufficient to increase his carefulness. when misfortune is caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a rule, enough to prevent a repetition of it. if it is not sufficient blows have no restraining effect; they only embitter. the boy finds that adults have forgotten their own period of childhood; he withdraws himself secretly from this abuse of power, provided strict treatment does not succeed in totally depressing the level of the child's will and obstructing his energies. this is certainly a danger, but the most serious effect of corporal punishment is that it has established an unethical morality as its result. until the human being has learnt to see that effort, striving, development of power, are their own reward, life remains an unbeautiful affair. the debasing effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great cruelties produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or success sets the value to deeds and actions. a complete revolution in this crude theory of value must come about before the earth can become the scene of a happy but considerate development of power on the part of free and fine human beings. every contest decided by examinations and prizes is ultimately an immoral method of training. it awakens only evil passions, envy and the impression of injustice on the one side, arrogance on the other. after i had during the course of twenty years fought these school examinations, i read with thorough agreement a short time ago, ruskin's views on the subject. he believed that all competition was a false basis of stimulus, and every distribution of prizes a false means. he thought that the real sign of talent in a boy, auspicious for his future career, was his desire to work for work's sake. he declared that the real aim of instruction should be to show him his own proper and special gifts, to strengthen them in him, not to spur him on to an empty competition with those who were plainly his superiors in capacity. moreover it ought not to be forgotten that success and failure involve of themselves their own punishment and their own reward, the one bitter, the other sweet enough to secure in a natural way increased strength, care, prudence, and endurance. it is completely unnecessary for the educator to use, besides these, some special punishments or special rewards, and so pervert the conceptions of the child that failure seems to him to be a wrong, success on the other hand as the right. no matter where one turns one's gaze, it is notorious that the externally encouraging or awe-inspiring means of education, are an obstacle to what are the chief human characteristics, courage in oneself and goodness to others. a people whose education is carried on by gentle means only (i mean the people of japan), have shown that manliness is not in danger where children are not hardened by corporal punishment. these gentle means are just as effective in calling forth selfmastery and consideration. these virtues are so imprinted on children, at the tenderest age, that one learns first in japan what attraction considerate kindliness bestows upon life. in a country where blows are never seen, the first rule of social intercourse is not to cause discomfort to others. it is told that when a foreigner in japan took up a stone to throw it at a dog, the dog did not run. no one had ever thrown a stone at him. tenderness towards animals is the complement in that country of tenderness in human relationship, a tenderness whose result is observed, among other effects, in a relatively small number of crimes against life and security. war, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing more than different expressions of the tiger nature still alive in man. when the rod is thrown away, and when, as some one has said, children are no longer boxed on their ears but are given magnifying glasses and photographic cameras to increase their capacity for life and for loving it, instead of learning to destroy it, real education in humanity will begin. for the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant an example as japan, i should like to mention a fact closer to us. our germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. it was introduced with christianity. corporal discipline was turned into a religious duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a part of spiritual guardianship. i once asked our great poet, victor rydberg, and he said that he had found no proof that corporal punishment was usual among the germans in heathen times. i asked him whether he did not believe that the fact of its absence had encouraged the energetic individualism and manliness in the northern peoples. he thought so, and agreed with me. finally, i might note from our own time, that there are many families and schools, our girls' schools for example, and also boys' schools in some countries, where corporal punishment is never used. i know a family with twelve children whose activity and capacity are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of duty alone. corporal punishment is never used in this home; a determined but mild mother has taught the children to obey voluntarily, and has known how to train their wills to self-control. by "voluntary obedience," i do not mean that the child is bound to ask endless questions for reasons, and to dispute them before he obeys. a good teacher never gives a command without there being some good reason, but whether the child is convinced or not, he must always obey, and if he asks "why" the answer is very simple; every one, adults as well as children, must obey the right and must submit to what cannot be avoided. the great necessity in life must be imprinted in childhood. this can be done without harsh means by training the child, even previous to his birth, by cultivating one's self-control, and after his birth by never giving in to a child's caprices. the rule is, in a few cases, to work in opposition to the action of the child, but in other cases work constructively; i mean provide the child with material to construct his own personality and then let him do this work of construction. this is, in brief, the art of education. the worst of all educational methods are threats. the only effective admonitions are short and infrequent ones. the greatest skill in the educator is to be silent for the moment and then so reprove the fault, indirectly, that the child is brought to correct himself or make himself the object of blame. this can be done by the instructor telling something that causes the child to compare his own conduct with the hateful or admirable types of behaviour about which he hears information. or the educator may give an opinion which the child must take to himself although it is not applied directly to him. on many occasions a forceful display of indignation on the part of the elder person is an excellent punishment, if the indignation is reserved for the right moment. i know children to whom nothing was more frightful than their father's scorn; this was dreaded. children who are deluged with directions and religious devotions, who receive an ounce of morality in every cup of joy, are most certain to be those who will revolt against all this. nearly every thinking person feels that the deepest educational influences in his life have been indirect; some good advice not given to him directly; a noble deed told without any direct reference. but when people come themselves to train others they forget all their own personal experience. the strongest constructive factor in the education of a human being is the settled, quiet order of home, its peace, and its duty. open-heartedness, industry, straightforwardness at home develop goodness, desire to work, and simplicity in the child. examples of artistic work and books in the home, its customary life on ordinary days and holidays, its occupations and its pleasures, should give to the emotions and imagination of the child, periods of movement and repose, a sure contour and a rich colour. the pure, warm, clear atmosphere in which father, mother, and children live together in freedom and confidence; where none are kept isolated from the interests of the others; but each possesses full freedom for his own personal interest; where none trenches on the rights of others; where all are willing to help one another when necessary,--in this atmosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can attain their richest development, and individuality find its just freedom. as the evolution of man's soul advances to undreamed-of possibilities of refinement, of capacity, of profundity; as the spiritual life of the generation becomes more manifold in its combinations and in its distinctions; the more time one has for observing the wonderful and deep secrets of existence, behind the visible, tangible, world of sense, the more will each new generation of children show a more refined and a more consistent mental life. it is impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. we need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can not even name. thus they will come to understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. the conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in future generations. this transformation can be helped by the training of the present, by casting aside the withered foliage which now covers the budding possibilities of life. the house must once more become a home for the souls of children, not for their bodies alone. for such homes to be formed, that in their turn will mould children, the children must be given back to the home. instead of the study preparation at home for the school taking up, as it now does, the best part of a child's life, the school must get the smaller part, the home the larger part. the home will have the responsibility of so using the free time as well on ordinary days as on holidays, that the children will really become a part of the home both in their work and in their pleasures. the children will be taken from the school, the street, the factory, and restored to the home. the mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life to the children. thus natural training in the spirit of rousseau and spencer will be realised; a training for life, by life at home. such was the training of old scandinavia; the direct share of the child in the work of the adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the life of our scandinavian forefathers (with whom the boy began to be a man at twelve years of age), unity, character, and strength. things specially made for children, the anxious watching over all their undertakings, support given to all their steps, courses of work and pleasure specially prepared for children,--these are the fundamental defects of our present day education. an eighteen-yearold girl said to me a short time ago, that she and other girls of the same age were so tired of the system of vigilance, protection, amusement, and pampering at school and at home, that they were determined to bring up their own children in hunger, corporal discipline, and drudgery. one can understand this unfortunate reaction against an artificial environment, the environment in which children and young people of the present grow up; an existence that evokes a passionate desire for the realities of life, for individual action at one's own risk and responsibility, instead of being, as is now the case, at home and in the school, the object of another's care. what is required, above all, for the children of the present day, is to be assigned again real home occupations, tasks they must do conscientiously, habits of work arranged for week days and holidays without oversight, in every case where the child can help himself. instead of the modern school child having a mother and servants about him to get him ready for school and to help him to remember things, he should have time every day before school to arrange his room and brush his clothes, and there should be no effort to make him remember what is connected with the school. the home and the school should combine together systematically to let the child suffer for the results of his own negligence. just the reverse of this system rules to-day. mothers learn their children's lessons, invent plays for them, read their story books to them, arrange their rooms after them, pick up what they have let fall, put in order the things they have left in confusion, and in this and in other ways, by protective pampering and attention, their desire for work, their endurance, the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities proper to the child, become weak and passive. the home now is only a preparation for school. in it, young people growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on their part. they are trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return. then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in earlier generations were a beautiful custom among the young. to restore this custom, all the means usually adopted now to protect the child from physical and psychical dangers and inconveniences, will have to be removed. throw the thermometer out of the window and begin with a sensible course of toughening; teach the child to know and to bear natural pain. corporal punishment must be done away with not because it is painful but because it is profoundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable. repress the egoistic demands of the child when he interferes with the work or rest of others; never let him either by caresses or by nagging usurp the rights of grown people; take care that the servants do not work against what the parents are trying to insist on in this and in other matters. we must begin in doing for the child in certain ways a thousand times more and in others a hundred thousand times less. a beginning must be made in the tenderest age to establish the child's feeling for nature. let him live year in and year out in the same country home; this is one of the most significant and profound factors in training. it can be held to even where it is now neglected. the same thing holds good of making a choice library, commencing with the first years of life; so that the child will have, at different periods of his life, suitable books for each age; not as is now often the case, get quite spoilt by the constant change of summer excursions, by worthless children's books, and costly toys. they should never have any but the simplest books; the so-called classical ones. they should be amply provided with means of preparing their own playthings. the worst feature of our system are the playthings which imitate the luxury of grown people. by such objects the covetous impulse of the child for acquisition is increased, his own capacity for discovery and imagination limited, or rather, it would be limited if children with the sound instinct of preservation, did not happily smash the perfect playthings, which give them no creative opportunity, and themselves make new playthings from fir cones, acorns, thorns, and fragments of pottery, and all other sorts of rubbish which can be transformed into objects of great price by the power of the imagination. to play with children in the right way is also a great art. it should never be done if children do not themselves know what they are going to do; it should always be a special treat for them as well as their elders. but the adults must always on such occasions, leave behind every kind of educational idea and go completely into the child's world of thought and imagination. no attempt should be made to teach them at these times anything else but the old satisfactory games. the experiences derived from these games about the nature of the children, who are stimulated in one direction or another by the game, must be kept for later use. games in this way increase confidence between children and adults. they learn to know their elders better. but to allow children to turn all the rooms into places to play in, and to demand constantly that their elders shall interest themselves in them, is one of the most dangerous species of pampering common to the present day. the children become accustomed to selfishness and mental dependence. besides this constant educational effort brings with it the dulling of the child's personality. if children were free in their own world, the nursery, but out of it had to submit to the strict limits imposed by the habits, wills, work, and repose of parents, their requirements and their wishes, they would develop into a stronger and more considerate race than the youth of the present day. it is not so much talking about being considerate, but the necessity of considering others, of really helping oneself and others, that has an educational value. in earlier days, children were quiet as mice in the presence of elder persons. instead of, as they do now, breaking into a guest's conversation, they learned to listen. if the conversation of adults is varied, this can be called one of the best educational methods for children. the ordinary life of children, under the old system, was lived in the nursery where they received their most important training from an old faithful servant and from one another. from their parents they received corporal punishment, sometimes a caress. in comparison with this system, the present way of parents and children living together would be absolute progress, if parents could but abstain from explaining, advising, improving, influencing every thought and every expression. but all spiritual, mental, and bodily protective rules make the child now indirectly selfish, because everything centres about him and therefore he is kept in a constant state of irritation. the six-yearold can disturb the conversation of the adult, but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed about eight o'clock, even when he, with wide open eyes, longs for a conversation that might be to him an inspiring stimulus for life. certainly some simple habits so far as conduct and order, nourishment and sleep, air and water, clothing and bodily movement, are concerned, can be made the foundations for the child's conceptions of morality. he cannot be made to learn soon enough that bodily health and beauty must be regarded as high ethical characteristics, and that what is injurious to health and beauty must be regarded as a hateful act. in this sphere, children must be kept entirely independent of custom by allowing the exception to every rule to have its valid place. the present anxious solicitude that children should eat when the clock strikes, that they get certain food at fixed meals, that they be clothed according to the degree of temperature, that they go to bed when the clock strikes, that they be protected from every drop of unboiled water and every extra piece of candy, this makes them nervous, irritable slaves of habit. a reasonable toughening process against the inequalities, discomforts, and chances of life, constitutes one of the most important bases of joy of living and of strength of temper. in this case too, the behaviour of the person who gives the training, is the best means of teaching children to smile at small contretemps, things which would throw a cloud over the sun, if one got into the habit of treating them as if they were of great importance. if the child sees the parent doing readily an unpleasant duty, which he honestly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a parent endure trouble or an unexpected difficulty easily, he will be in honour bound to do the like. just as children without many words learn to practice good deeds when they see good deeds practiced about them; learn to enjoy the beauty of nature and art when they see that adults enjoy them, so by living more beautifully, more nobly, more moderately, we speak best to children. they are just as receptive to impressions of this kind as they are careless of those made by force. since this is my alpha and omega in the art of education, i repeat now what i said at the beginning of this book and half way through it. try to leave the child in peace; interfere directly as seldom as possible; keep away all crude and impure impressions; but give all your care and energy to see that personality, life itself, reality in its simplicity and in its nakedness, shall all be means of training the child. make demands on the powers of children and on their capacity for self-control, proportionate to the special stage of their development, neither greater nor lesser demands than on adults. but respect the joys of the child, his tastes, work, and time, just as you would those of an adult. education will thus become an infinitely simple and infinitely harder art, than the education of the present day, with its artificialised existence, its double entry morality, one morality for the child, and one for the adult, often strict for the child and lax for the adult and vice versa. by treating the child every moment as one does an adult human being we free education from that brutal arbitrariness, from those over-indulgent protective rules, which have transformed him. whether parents act as if children existed for their benefit alone, or whether the parents give up their whole lives to their children, the result is alike deplorable. as a rule both classes know equally little of the feelings and needs of their children. the one class are happy when the children are like themselves, and their highest ambition is to produce in their children a successful copy of their own thoughts, opinions, and ideals. really it ought to pain them very much to see themselves so exactly copied. what life expected from them and required from them was just the opposite--a richer combination, a better creation, a new type, not a reproduction of that which is already exhausted. the other class strive to model their children not according to themselves but according to their ideal of goodness. they show their love by their willingness to extinguish their own personalities for their children's sake. this they do by letting the children feel that everything which concerns them stands in the foreground. this should be so, but only indirectly. the concerns of the whole scheme of life, the ordering of the home, its habits, intercourse, purposes, care for the needs of children, and their sound development, must stand in the foreground. but at present, in most cases, children of tender years, as well as those who are older, are sacrificed to the chaotic condition of the home. they learn self-will without possessing real freedom, they live under a discipline which is spasmodic in its application. when one daughter after another leaves home in order to make herself independent they are often driven to do it by want of freedom, or by the lack of character in family life. in both directions the girl sees herself forced to become something different, to hold different opinions, to think different thoughts, to act contrary to the dictates of her own being. a mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter, said not long ago that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented daughters. such an asylum would be as necessary as a protection against pampering parents as against those who are overbearing. both alike, torture their children though in different ways, by not understanding the child's right to have his own point of view, his own ideal of happiness, his own proper tastes and occupation. they do not see that children exist as little for their parent's sake as parents do for their children's sake. family life would have an intelligent character if each one lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to do the same. none should tyrannise over, nor should suffer tyranny from, the other. parents who give their home this character can justly demand that children shall accommodate themselves to the habits of the household as long as they live in it. children on their part can ask that their own life of thought and feeling shall be left in peace at home, or that they be treated with the same consideration that would be given to a stranger. when the parents do not meet these conditions they themselves are the greater sufferers. it is very easy to keep one's son from expressing his raw views, very easy to tear a daughter away from her book and to bring her to a tea-party by giving her unnecessary occupations; very easy by a scornful word to repress some powerful emotion. a thousand similar things occur every day in good families through the whole world. but whenever we hear of young people speaking of their intellectual homelessness and sadness, we begin to understand why father and mother remain behind in homes from which the daughters have hastened to depart; why children take their cares, joys, and thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the old and the young generation are as mutually dependent as the roots and flowers of plants, so often separate with mutual repulsion. this is as true of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple bourgeois or peasant parents. perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the first class, the latter torment their children in a naive way, while the former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. rarely is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character, makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals. such artists are often simple women who have passed no examinations, founded no clubs, and written no books. the highly cultivated mothers and the socially useful mothers on the other hand are not seldom those who call forth criticism from their sons. it seems almost an invariable rule that mothers should make mistakes when they wish to act for the welfare of their sons. "how infinitely valuable," say their children, "would i have found a mother who could have kept quiet, who would have been patient with me, who would have given me rest, keeping the outer world at a distance from me, with kindly soothing hands. oh, would that i had had a mother on whose breast i could have laid my head, to be quiet and dream." a distinguished woman writer is surprised that all of her well-thought-out plans for her children fail--those children in whom she saw the material for her passion for governing, the clay that she desired to mould. the writer just cited says very justly that maternal unselfishness alone can perform the task of protecting a young being with wisdom and kindliness, by allowing him to grow according to his own laws. the unselfish mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of her life energy, powers of soul and spirit to a growing being and then open all doors to him, leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths, and ask for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. but to most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son in the book just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she tortures another; if she has not this capacity by nature, why in the world should i recognise her as my mother at all." certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous system in a state of irritation. they make work hard and play joyless, whenever they take a part in it. at the present time, too, the school gets control of the child, the home loses all the means by which formerly it moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life. the school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more to outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for holiday. young people, often, have no other impression of home than that it is a place where they meet society which bores them. parents surrender their children to schools in those years in which they should influence their minds. when the school gives them back they do not know how to make a fresh start with the children, for they themselves have ceased to be young. but getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. it is very interesting to observe a face that is getting old. what time makes out of a face shows better than anything else what the man has made out of time. most men in the early period of middle age are neither intellectually fat nor lean, they are hardened or dried up. naturally young people look upon them with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that there is such a thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize for its whole work of inner development. but they look in vain for this second eternal youth in their elders, filled with worldly nothingnesses and things of temporary importance. with a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future plans and they go out in the world in order to choose their spiritual parents. this is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man must sow a hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of children. when i began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by its weight and size really gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much joy on its young mother, i began to think about the education of my future children. then as now my educational ideal was that the children should be happy, that they should not fear. fear is the misfortune of childhood, and the sufferings of the child come from the half-realised opposition between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way in which these possibilities are actually handled. it may be said that life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our possibilities of happiness. but the difference between the sufferings of the adult from existence, and the sufferings of the child caused by adults, is tremendous. the child is unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings imposed upon him by adults and the more impatient the child is against unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more certainly will he some day be driven to find means to transform for himself and for others the hard necessities of life. a poet, rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition into child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence for it, wrote as follows: "where we behold children we suspect there are princes, but as to the kings, where are they?" not only life's tragic elements diminish and dam up its vital energies. equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being. fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. until they see that the word "child" is only another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars. the mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown worlds in the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the worlds which like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue orb of heaven; the father should see in his child the king's son whom he must serve humbly with his own best powers, and then the child will come to his own; not to the right of asking others to become the plaything of his caprices but to the right of living his full strong personal child's life along with a father and a mother who themselves live a personal life, a life from whose sources and powers the child can take the elements he needs for his own individual growth. parents should never expect their own highest ideals to become the ideals of their child. the free-thinking sons of pious parents and the christian children of freethinkers have become almost proverbial. but parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their own ideals which is the same thing as making children idealists. this can often lead to a quite different system of thought from that pursued by the parent. as to ideals, the elders should here as elsewhere, offer with timidity their advice and their experience. yes they should try to let the young people search for it as if they were seeking fruit hidden under the shadow of leaves. if their counsel is rejected, they must show neither surprise nor lack of self-control. the query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth in the most serious way. i felt that posterity had done much for its forefathers. it had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of their daily effort. we must in the child see the new fate of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the woof of world events. we must realise that every pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its influence through centuries and centuries in ever widening circles. through our fathers, without our will and without choice, we are given a destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. through our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain measure, as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race. by a realisation of all this in an entirely new way, by seeing the whole process in the light of the religion of development, the twentieth century will be the century of the child. this will come about in two ways. adults will first come to an understanding of the child's character and then the simplicity of the child's character will be kept by adults. so the old social order will be able to renew itself. psychological pedagogy has an exalted ancestry. i will not go back to those artists in education called socrates and jesus, but i commence with the modern world. in the hours of its sunrise, in which we, who look back, think we see a futile renaissance, then as now the spring flowers came up amid the decaying foliage. at this period there came a demand for the remodelling of education through the great figure of modern times, montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for realities. in his essays, in his letters to the countess of gurson, are found all of the elements for the education of the future. about the great german and swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, comenius, basedow, pestalozzi, salzmann, froebel, herbart, i do not need to speak. i will only mention that the greatest men of germany, lessing, herder, goethe, kant and others, took the side of natural training. in regard to england it is well known that john locke in his thoughts on education, was a worthy predecessor of herbert spencer, whose book on education in its intellectual, moral, and physical relations, was the most noteworthy book on education in the last century. it has been noted that spencer in educational theory is indebted to rousseau; and that in many cases, he has only said what the great german authorities, whom he certainly did not know, said before him. but this does not diminish spencer's merit in the least. absolutely new thoughts are very rare. truths which were once new must be constantly renewed by being pronounced again from the depth of the ardent personal conviction of a new human being. that rational thoughts on the subject of pedagogy as on other subjects, are constantly expressed and re-expressed, shows among other things that reasonable, or practically untried education has certain principles which are as axiomatic as those of mathematics. every reasonable thinking man must as certainly discover anew these pedagogical principles, as he must discover anew the relation between the angles of a triangle. spencer's book it is true has not laid again the foundation of education. it can rather be called the crown of the edifice founded by montaigne, locke, rousseau, and the great german specialists in pedagogy. what is an absolutely novel factor in our times is the study of the psychology of the child, and the system of education that has developed from it. in england, through the scientist darwin, this new study of the psychology of the child was inaugurated. in germany, preyer contributed to its extension. he has done so partly by a comprehensive study of children's language, partly by collecting recollections of childhood on the part of the adult. finally he experimented directly on the child, investigating his physical and psychical fatigue and endurance, acuteness of sensation, power, speed, and exactness in carrying out physical and mental tasks. he has studied his capacity of attention in emotions and in ideas at different periods of life. he has studied the speech of children, association of ideas in children, etc. during the study of the psychology of the child, scholars began to substitute for this term the expression "genetic psychology." for it was found that the big-genetic principle was valid for the development both of the psychic and the physical life. this principle means that the history of the species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. the psychology of the child is of the same significance for general psychology as embryology is for anatomy. on the other hand, the description of savage peoples, of peoples in a natural condition, such as we find in spencer's descriptive sociology or weitz's anthropology is extremely instructive for a right conception of the psychology of the child. it is in this kind of psychological investigation that the greatest progress has been made in this century. in the great publication, zeitschrift fur psychologie, etc., there began in a special department for the psychology of children and the psychology of education. in , there were as many as one hundred and six essays devoted to this subject, and they are constantly increasing. in the chief civilised countries this investigation has many distinguished pioneers, such as prof. wundt, prof. t. h. ribot, and others. in germany this subject has its most important organ in the journal mentioned above. it numbers among its collaborators some of the most distinguished german physiologists and psychologists. as related to the same subject must be mentioned wundt's philosophischen studien, and partly the vierteljahrschrift fur wissenschaftlichie philosophie. in france, there was founded in , the annee psychologique, edited by binet and beaunis, and also the bibliotheque de pedagogie et de psychologie, edited by binet. in england there are the journals, mind and brain. special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. in germany the first to be founded was that of wundt in the year at leipzig. france has a laboratory for experimental psychology at paris, in the sorbonne, whose director is binet; italy, one in rome. in america experimental psychology is zealously pursued. as early as , there were in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental psychology and four journals. there should also be mentioned the societies for child psychology. recently one has been founded in germany, others before this time have been at work in england and america. a whole series of investigations carried out in kraepelin's laboratory in heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain can do in the way of work and impressions. an english specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the modern school system, will be able to get along without originally creative men, because the receptive activities of modern man will absorb the cooperative powers of the brain to the disadvantage of the productive powers. and even if this were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process called a school curriculum. a champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological science is to be found in sweden in the person of prof. hjalmar oehrwal who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the field of psychology. one of his conclusions is that the so-called technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like, are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue. all work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic whether one regards the quantity produced or its value as an exercise. rest should be nothing more than rest,--freedom to do only what one wants to, or to do nothing at all. as to fear, he proves, following binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats, and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy. he shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the character. this result comes about partly when all unnecessary terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger. prof. axel key's investigations on school children have won international recognition. in sweden they have supplied the most significant material up to the present time for determining the influence of studies on physical development and the results of intellectual overstrain. it is to be hoped that when through empirical investigation we begin to get acquainted with the real nature of children, the school and the home will be freed from absurd notions about the character and needs of the child, those absurd notions which now cause painful cases of physical and psychical maltreatment, still called by conscientious and thinking human beings in schools and in homes, education. by helen key the century of the child cr. vo. with frontispiece. net, $ . contents: the right of the child to choose his parents, the unborn race and woman's work, education, homelessness, soul murder in the schools, the school of the future, religious instruction, child labor and the crimes of children. this book has gone through more than twenty german editions and has been published in several european countries. "a powerful book."--n. y. times. the education of the child reprinted from the authorized american edition of "the century of the child," with introductory note by edward bok. cr. vo. net cents "nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought into print. to me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way straight for every parent, and it should find a place in every home in america where there is a child."--edward bok, editor of the ladies' home journal. love and marriage cr. vo ellen key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views. in europe and particularly in her own native sweden her name holds an honored place as a representative of progressive thought. new york g. p. putnam's sons london clever, original, and fascinating the lost art of reading mount tom edition new edition in two volumes i. the child and the book a manual for parents and for teachers in schools and colleges ii. the lost art of reading or, the man and the book two volumes, crown vo. sold separately. each net, $ , by gerald stanley lee "i must express with your connivance the joy i have had, the enthusiasm i have felt, in gloating over every page of what i believe is the most brilliant book of any season since carlyle's and emerson's pens were laid aside. the title does not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. it is a highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism in education, library science, science in general, and life in general. it is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. every sentence is tinglingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of suggestiveness. i do not know who mr. lee is, but i know this--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine that we have no worthy successors to the old brahminical writers of new england. "i have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. it is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. it makes me believe that after all we have n't a great kindergarten about us in authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. i can conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning the horizon."--wm. sloane kennedy in boston transcript. how to tell stories to children and some stories to tell by sara cone bryant [illustration] london george g. harrap & co. ltd. & portsmouth street kingsway w.c. =books for story-tellers= _uniform with this volume_ =how to tell stories to children= and some stories to tell. by sara cone bryant. tenth impression. =stories to tell to children= with fifty-three stories to tell. by sara cone bryant. seventh impression. =the book of stories for the story-teller= by fanny coe. fourth impression. =songs and stories for the little ones= by e. gordon browne, m.a. with melodies chosen and arranged by eva browne. new and enlarged edition. =character training= a graded series of lessons in ethics, largely through story-telling. by e.l. cabot and e. eyles. third impression. pages. =stories for the story hour= from january to december. by ada m. marzials. second impression. =stories for the history hour= from augustus to rolf. by nannie niemeyer. second impression. =stories for the bible hour= by r. brimley johnson, b.a. =nature stories to tell to children= by h. waddingham seers. * * * * * miss maud lindsay's popular books =mother stories= with line illustrations. =more mother stories= with line illustrations. the riverside press limited, edinburgh great britain _to my mother_ the first, best story-teller this little book is dedicated preface the stories which are given in the following pages are for the most part those which i have found to be best liked by the children to whom i have told these and others. i have tried to reproduce the form in which i actually tell them,--although that inevitably varies with every repetition,--feeling that it would be of greater value to another story-teller than a more closely literary form. for the same reason, i have confined my statements of theory as to method, to those which reflect my own experience; my "rules" were drawn from introspection and retrospection, at the urging of others, long after the instinctive method they exemplify had become habitual. these facts are the basis of my hope that the book may be of use to those who have much to do with children. it would be impossible, in the space of any pardonable preface, to name the teachers, mothers, and librarians who have given me hints and helps during the past few years of story-telling. but i cannot let these pages go to press without recording my especial indebtedness to the few persons without whose interested aid the little book would scarcely have come to be. they are: mrs elizabeth young rutan, at whose generous instance i first enlarged my own field of entertaining story-telling to include hers, of educational narrative, and from whom i had many valuable suggestions at that time; miss ella l. sweeney, assistant superintendent of schools, providence, r.i., to whom i owe exceptional opportunities for investigation and experiment; mrs root, children's librarian of providence public library, and miss alice m. jordan, boston public library, children's room, to whom i am indebted for much gracious and efficient aid. my thanks are due also to mr david nutt for permission to make use of three stories from _english fairy tales_, by mr joseph jacobs, and _raggylug_, from _wild animals i have known_, by mr ernest thompson seton; to messrs frederick a. stokes company for _five little white heads_, by walter learned, and for _bird thoughts_; to messrs kegan paul, trench, trübner & co. ltd. for _the burning of the ricefields_, from _gleanings in buddha-fields_, by mr lafcadio hearn; to messrs h.r. allenson ltd. for three stories from _the golden windows_, by miss laura e. richards; and to mr seumas mcmanus for _billy beg and his bull_, from _in chimney corners_. s.c.b. contents introduction page the story-teller's art recent revival the difference between telling a story and reading it aloud some reasons why the former is more effective chapter i the purpose of story-telling in school its immediate advantages to the teacher its ultimate gifts to the child chapter ii selection of stories to tell the qualities children like, and why qualities necessary for oral delivery examples: _the three bears_, _the three little pigs_, _the old woman and her pig_ suggestions as to the type of story especially useful in the several primary grades selected list of familiar fairy tales chapter iii adaptation of stories for telling how to make a long story short how to fill out a short story general changes commonly desirable examples: _the nürnberg stove_, by ouida; _the king of the golden river_, by ruskin; _the red thread of courage_, _the elf and the dormouse_ analysis of method chapter iv how to tell the story essential nature of the story kind of appreciation necessary suggestions for gaining mastery of facts arrangement of children the story-teller's mood a few principles of method, manner and voice, from the psychological point of view chapter v some specific schoolroom uses exercise in retelling illustrations cut by the children as seat-work dramatic games influence of games on reading classes stories selected and adapted for telling especially for kindergarten and class i. nursery rhymes five little white heads bird thoughts how we came to have pink roses raggylug the golden cobwebs why the morning-glory climbs the story of little tavwots the pig brother the cake the pied piper of hamelin town why the evergreen trees keep their leaves in winter the star dollars the lion and the gnat especially for classes ii. and iii. the cat and the parrot the rat princess the frog and the ox the fire-bringer the burning of the ricefields the story of wylie little daylight the sailor man the story of jairus's daughter especially for classes iv. and v. arthur and the sword tarpeia the buckwheat the judgment of midas why the sea is salt billy beg and his bull the little hero of haarlem the last lesson the story of christmas the child-mind; and how to satisfy it a short list of books in which the story-teller will find stories not too far from the form in which they are needed introduction not long ago, i chanced to open a magazine at a story of italian life which dealt with a curious popular custom. it told of the love of the people for the performances of a strangely clad, periodically appearing old man who was a professional story-teller. this old man repeated whole cycles of myth and serials of popular history, holding his audience-chamber in whatever corner of the open court or square he happened upon, and always surrounded by an eager crowd of listeners. so great was the respect in which the story-teller was held, that any interruption was likely to be resented with violence. as i read of the absorbed silence and the changing expressions of the crowd about the old man, i was suddenly reminded of a company of people i had recently seen. they were gathered in one of the parlours of a women's college, and their serious young faces had, habitually, none of the childlike responsiveness of the italian populace; they were suggestive, rather, of a daily experience which precluded over-much surprise or curiosity about anything. in the midst of the group stood a frail-looking woman with bright eyes. she was telling a story, a children's story, about a good and a bad little mouse. she had been asked to do that thing, for a purpose, and she did it, therefore. but it was easy to see from the expressions of the listeners how trivial a thing it seemed to them. that was at first. but presently the room grew quieter; and yet quieter. the faces relaxed into amused smiles, sobered in unconscious sympathy, finally broke in ripples of mirth. the story-teller had come to her own. the memory of the college girls listening to the mouse-story brought other memories with it. many a swift composite view of faces passed before my mental vision, faces with the child's look on them, yet not the faces of children. and of the occasions to which the faces belonged, those were most vivid which were earliest in my experience. for it was those early experiences which first made me realise the modern possibilities of the old, old art of telling stories. it had become a part of my work, some years ago, to give english lectures on german literature. many of the members of my class were unable to read in the original the works with which i dealt, and as these were modern works it was rarely possible to obtain translations. for this reason, i gradually formed the habit of telling the story of the drama or novel in question before passing to a detailed consideration of it. i enjoyed this part of the lesson exceedingly, but it was some time before i realised how much the larger part of the lesson it had become to the class. they used--and they were mature women--to wait for the story as if it were a sugarplum and they, children; and to grieve openly if it were omitted. substitution of reading from a translation was greeted with precisely the same abatement of eagerness that a child shows when he has asked you to tell a story, and you offer, instead, to "read one from the pretty book." and so general and constant were the tokens of enjoyment that there could ultimately be no doubt of the power which the mere story-telling exerted. the attitude of the grown-up listeners did but illustrate the general difference between the effect of telling a story and of reading one. everyone who knows children well has felt the difference. with few exceptions, children listen twice as eagerly to a story told as to one read, and even a "recitation" or a so-called "reading" has not the charm for them that the person wields who can "tell a story." and there are sound reasons for their preference. the great difference, including lesser ones, between telling and reading is that the teller is free; the reader is bound. the book in hand, or the wording of it in mind, binds the reader. the story-teller is bound by nothing; he stands or sits, free to watch his audience, free to follow or lead every changing mood, free to use body, eyes, voice, as aids in expression. even his mind is unbound, because he lets the story come in the words of the moment, being so full of what he has to say. for this reason, a story told is more spontaneous than one read, however well read. and, consequently, the connection with the audience is closer, more electric, than is possible when the book or its wording intervenes. beyond this advantage, is the added charm of the personal element in story-telling. when you make a story your own and tell it, the listener gets the story, _plus your appreciation of it_. it comes to him filtered through your own enjoyment. that is what makes the funny story thrice funnier on the lips of a jolly raconteur than in the pages of a memoir. it is the filter of personality. everybody has something of the curiosity of the primitive man concerning his neighbour; what another has in his own person felt and done has an especial hold on each one of us. the most cultured of audiences will listen to the personal reminiscences of an explorer with a different tingle of interest from that which it feels for a scientific lecture on the results of the exploration. the longing for the personal in experience is a very human longing. and this instinct or longing is especially strong in children. it finds expression in their delight in tales of what father or mother did when they were little, of what happened to grandmother when she went on a journey, and so on, but it also extends to stories which are not in themselves personal: which take their personal savour merely from the fact that they flow from the lips in spontaneous, homely phrases, with an appreciative gusto which suggests participation. the greater ease in holding the attention of children is, for teachers, a sufficient practical reason for telling stories rather than reading them. it is incomparably easier to make the necessary exertion of "magnetism," or whatever it may be called, when nothing else distracts the attention. one's eyes meet the children's gaze naturally and constantly; one's expression responds to and initiates theirs without effort; the connection is immediate. for the ease of the teacher, then, no less than for the joy of the children, may the art of story-telling be urged as pre-eminent over the art of reading. it is a very old, a very beautiful art. merely to think of it carries one's imaginary vision to scenes of glorious and touching antiquity. the tellers of the stories of which homer's _iliad_ was compounded; the transmitters of the legend and history which make up the _gesta romanorum_; the travelling raconteurs whose brief heroic tales are woven into our own national epic; the grannies of age-old tradition whose stories are parts of celtic folk-lore, of germanic myth, of asiatic wonder-tales,--these are but younger brothers and sisters to the generations of story-tellers whose inventions are but vaguely outlined in resultant forms of ancient literatures, and the names of whose tribes are no longer even guessed. there was a time when story-telling was the chiefest of the arts of entertainment; kings and warriors could ask for nothing better; serfs and children were satisfied with nothing less. in all times there have been occasional revivals of this pastime, and in no time has the art died out in the simple human realms of which mothers are queens. but perhaps never, since the really old days, has story-telling so nearly reached a recognised level of dignity as a legitimate and general art of entertainment as now. its present popularity seems in a way to be an outgrowth of the recognition of its educational value which was given impetus by the german pedagogues of froebel's school. that recognition has, at all events, been a noticeable factor in educational conferences of late. the function of the story is no longer considered solely in the light of its place in the kindergarten; it is being sought in the first, the second, and indeed in every standard where the children are still children. sometimes the demand for stories is made solely in the interests of literary culture, sometimes in far ampler and vaguer relations, ranging from inculcation of scientific fact to admonition of moral theory; but whatever the reason given, the conclusion is the same: tell the children stories. the average teacher has yielded to the pressure, at least in theory. cheerfully, as she has already accepted so many modifications of old methods by "new thought," she accepts the idea of instilling mental and moral desiderata into the receptive pupil, _viâ_ the charming tale. but, confronted with the concrete problem of what desideratum by which tale, and how, the average teacher sometimes finds her cheerfulness displaced by a sense of inadequacy to the situation. people who have always told stories to children, who do not know when they began or how they do it; whose heads are stocked with the accretions of years of fairyland-dwelling and nonsense-sharing,--these cannot understand the perplexity of one to whom the gift and the opportunity have not "come natural." but there are many who can understand it, personally and all too well. to these, the teachers who have not a knack for story-telling, who feel as shy as their own youngest scholar at the thought of it, who do not know where the good stories are, or which ones are easy to tell, it is my earnest hope that the following pages will bring something definite and practical in the way of suggestion and reference. how to tell stories to children chapter i the purpose of story-telling in school let us first consider together the primary matter of the _aim_ in educational story-telling. on our conception of this must depend very largely all decisions as to choice and method; and nothing in the whole field of discussion is more vital than a just and sensible notion of this first point. what shall we attempt to accomplish by stories in the schoolroom? what can we reasonably expect to accomplish? and what, of this, is best accomplished by this means and no other? these are questions which become the more interesting and practical because the recent access of enthusiasm for stories in education has led many people to claim very wide and very vaguely outlined territory for their possession, and often to lay heaviest stress on their least essential functions. the most important instance of this is the fervour with which many compilers of stories for school use have directed their efforts solely toward illustration of natural phenomena. geology, zoology, botany, and even physics are taught by means of more or less happily constructed narratives based on the simpler facts of these sciences. kindergarten teachers are familiar with such narratives: the little stories of chrysalis-breaking, flower-growth, and the like. now this is a perfectly proper and practicable aim, but it is not a primary one. others, to which at best this is but secondary, should have first place and receive greatest attention. what is a story, essentially? is it a text-book of science, an appendix to the geography, an introduction to the primer of history? of course it is not. a story is essentially and primarily a work of art, and its chief function must be sought in the line of the uses of art. just as the drama is capable of secondary uses, yet fails abjectly to realise its purpose when those are substituted for its real significance as a work of art, so does the story lend itself to subsidiary purposes, but claims first and most strongly to be recognised in its real significance as a work of art. since the drama deals with life in all its parts, it can exemplify sociological theory, it can illustrate economic principle, it can even picture politics; but the drama which does these things only, has no breath of its real life in its being, and dies when the wind of popular tendency veers from its direction. so, you can teach a child interesting facts about bees and butterflies by telling him certain stories, and you can open his eyes to colours and processes in nature by telling certain others; but unless you do something more than that and before that, you are as one who should use the venus of milo for a demonstration in anatomy. the message of the story is the message of beauty, as effective as that message in marble or paint. its part in the economy of life is _to give joy_. and the purpose and working of the joy is found in that quickening of the spirit which answers every perception of the truly beautiful in the arts of man. to give joy; in and through the joy to stir and feed the life of the spirit: is not this the legitimate function of the story in education? because i believe it to be such, not because i ignore the value of other uses, i venture to push aside all aims which seem secondary to this for later mention under specific heads. here in the beginning of our consideration i wish to emphasise this element alone. a story is a work of art. its greatest use to the child is in the everlasting appeal of beauty by which the soul of man is constantly pricked to new hungers, quickened to new perceptions, and so given desire to grow. the obvious practical bearing of this is that story-telling is first of all an art of entertainment; like the stage, its immediate purpose is the pleasure of the hearer,--his pleasure, not his instruction, first. now the story-teller who has given the listening children such pleasure as i mean may or may not have added a fact to the content of their minds; she has inevitably added something to the vital powers of their souls. she has given a wholesome exercise to the emotional muscles of the spirit, has opened up new windows to the imagination, and added some line or colour to the ideal of life and art which is always taking form in the heart of a child. she has, in short, accomplished the one greatest aim of story-telling,--to enlarge and enrich the child's spiritual experience, and stimulate healthy reaction upon it. of course this result cannot be seen and proved as easily and early as can the apprehension of a fact. the most one can hope to recognise is its promise, and this is found in the tokens of that genuine pleasure which is itself the means of accomplishment. it is, then, the signs of right pleasure which the story-teller must look to for her guide, and which it must be her immediate aim to evoke. as for the recognition of the signs,--no one who has ever seen the delight of a real child over a real story can fail to know the signals when given, or flatter himself into belief in them when absent. intimately connected with the enjoyment given are two very practically beneficial results which the story-teller may hope to obtain, and at least one of which will be a kind of reward to herself. the first is a relaxation of the tense schoolroom atmosphere, valuable for its refreshing recreative power. the second result, or aim, is not so obvious, but is even more desirable; it is this: story-telling is at once one of the simplest and quickest ways of establishing a happy relation between teacher and children, and one of the most effective methods of forming the habit of fixed attention in the latter. if you have never seen an indifferent child aroused or a hostile one conquered to affection by a beguiling tale, you can hardly appreciate the truth of the first statement; but nothing is more familiar in the story-teller's experience. an amusing, but--to me--touching experience recently reaffirmed in my mind this power of the story to establish friendly relations. my three-year-old niece, who had not seen me since her babyhood, being told that aunt sara was coming to visit her, somehow confused the expected guest with a more familiar aunt, my sister. at sight of me, her rush of welcome relapsed into a puzzled and hurt withdrawal, which yielded to no explanations or proffers of affection. all the first day she followed me about at a wistful distance, watching me as if i might at any moment turn into the well-known and beloved relative i ought to have been. even by undressing time i had not progressed far enough to be allowed intimate approach to small sacred nightgowns and diminutive shirts. the next morning, when i opened the door of the nursery where her maid was brushing her hair, the same dignity radiated from the little round figure perched on its high chair, the same almost hostile shyness gazed at me from the great expressive eyes. obviously, it was time for something to be done. disregarding my lack of invitation, i drew up a stool, and seating myself opposite the small unbending person, began in a conversational murmur: "m--m, i guess those are tingly-tanglies up there in that curl lottie's combing; did you ever hear about the tingly-tanglies? they live in little girls' hair, and they aren't any bigger than _that_, and when anybody tries to comb the hair they curl both weeny legs round, _so_, and hold on tight with both weeny hands, _so_, and won't let go!" as i paused, my niece made a queer little sound indicative of query battling with reserve. i pursued the subject: "they like best to live right over a little girl's ear, or down in her neck, because it is easier to hang on, there; tingly-tanglies are very smart, indeed." "what's ti-ly-ta-lies?" asked a curious, guttural little voice. i explained the nature and genesis of tingly-tanglies, as revealed to me some decades before by my inventive mother, and proceeded to develop their simple adventures. when next i paused the small guttural voice demanded, "say more," and i joyously obeyed. when the curls were all curled and the last little button buttoned, my baby niece climbed hastily down from her chair, and deliberately up into my lap. with a caress rare to her habit she spoke my name, slowly and tentatively, "an-ty sai-ry?" then, in an assured tone, "anty sairy, i love you so much i don't know what to do!" and, presently, tucking a confiding hand in mine to lead me to breakfast, she explained sweetly, "i didn' know you when you comed las' night, but now i know you all th' time!" "oh, blessed tale," thought i, "so easy a passport to a confidence so desired, so complete!" never had the witchery of the story to the ear of a child come more closely home to me. but the fact of the witchery was no new experience. the surrender of the natural child to the story-teller is as absolute and invariable as that of a devotee to the priest of his own sect. this power is especially valuable in the case of children whose natural shyness has been augmented by rough environment or by the strangeness of foreign habit. and with such children even more than with others it is also true that the story is a simple and effective means of forming the habit of concentration, of fixed attention; any teacher who deals with this class of children knows the difficulty of doing this fundamental and indispensable thing, and the value of any practical aid in doing it. more than one instance of the power of story-telling to develop attentiveness comes to my mind, but the most prominent in memory is a rather recent incident, in which the actors were boys and girls far past the child-stage of docility. i had been asked to tell stories to about sixty boys and girls of a club; the president warned me in her invitation that the children were exceptionally undisciplined, but my previous experiences with similar gatherings led me to interpret her words with a moderation which left me totally unready for the reality. when i faced my audience, i saw a squirming jumble of faces, backs of heads, and the various members of many small bodies,--not a person in the room was paying the slightest attention to me; the president's introduction could scarcely be said to succeed in interrupting the interchange of social amenities which was in progress, and which looked delusively like a free fight. i came as near stage fright in the first minutes of that occasion as it is comfortable to be, and if it had not been impossible to run away i think i should not have remained. but i began, with as funny a tale as i knew, following the safe plan of not speaking very loudly, and aiming my effort at the nearest children. as i went on, a very few faces held intelligently to mine; the majority answered only fitfully; and not a few of my hearers conversed with their neighbours as if i were non-existent. the sense of bafflement, the futile effort, forced the perspiration to my hands and face--yet something in the faces before me told me that it was no ill-will that fought against me; it was the apathy of minds without the power or habit of concentration, unable to follow a sequence of ideas any distance, and rendered more restless by bodies which were probably uncomfortable, certainly undisciplined. the first story took ten minutes. when i began a second, a very short one, the initial work had to be done all over again, for the slight comparative quiet i had won had been totally lost in the resulting manifestation of approval. at the end of the second story, the room was really orderly to the superficial view, but where i stood i could see the small boy who deliberately made a hideous face at me each time my eyes met his, the two girls who talked with their backs turned, the squirms of a figure here and there. it seemed so disheartening a record of failure that i hesitated much to yield to the uproarious request for a third story, but finally i did begin again, on a very long story which for its own sake i wanted them to hear. this time the little audience settled to attention almost at the opening words. after about five minutes i was suddenly conscious of a sense of ease and relief, a familiar restful feeling in the atmosphere; and then, at last, i knew that my audience was "with me," that they and i were interacting without obstruction. absolutely quiet, entirely unconscious of themselves, the boys and girls were responding to every turn of the narrative as easily and readily as any group of story-bred kindergarten children. from then on we had a good time together. the process which took place in that small audience was a condensed example of what one may expect in habitual story-telling to a group of children. once having had the attention chained by crude force of interest, the children begin to expect something interesting from the teacher, and to wait for it. and having been led step by step from one grade of a logical sequence to another, their minds--at first beguiled by the fascination of the steps--glide into the habit of following any logical sequence. my club formed its habit, as far as i was concerned, all in one session; the ordinary demands of school procedure lengthen the process, but the result is equally sure. by the end of a week in which the children have listened happily to a story every day, the habit of listening and deducing has been formed, and the expectation of pleasantness is connected with the opening of the teacher's lips. these two benefits are well worth the trouble they cost, and for these two, at least, any teacher who tells a story well may confidently look--the quick gaining of a confidential relation with the children, and the gradual development of concentration and interested attention in them. these are direct and somewhat clearly discernible results, comfortably placed in a near future. there are other aims, reaching on into the far, slow modes of psychological growth, which must equally determine the choice of the story-teller's material and inform the spirit of her work. these other, less immediately attainable ends, i wish now to consider in relation to the different types of story by which they are severally best served. first, unbidden claimant of attention, comes the fairy story no one can think of a child and a story, without thinking of the fairy tale. is this, as some would have us believe, a bad habit of an ignorant old world? or can the fairy tale justify her popularity with truly edifying and educational results? is she a proper person to introduce here, and what are her titles to merit? oh dear, yes! dame fairy tale comes bearing a magic wand in her wrinkled old fingers, with one wave of which she summons up that very spirit of joy which it is our chief effort to invoke. she raps smartly on the door, and open sesames echo to every imagination. her red-heeled shoes twinkle down an endless lane of adventures, and every real child's footsteps quicken after. she is the natural, own great-grandmother of every child in the world, and her pocketfuls of treasures are his by right of inheritance. shut her out, and you truly rob the children of something which is theirs; something marking their constant kinship with the race-children of the past, and adapted to their needs as it was to those of the generation of long ago! if there were no other criterion at all, it would be enough that the children love the fairy tale; we give them fairy stories, first, because they like them. but that by no means lessens the importance of the fact that fairy tales are also good for them. how good? in various ways. first, perhaps, in their supreme power of presenting truth through the guise of images. this is the way the race-child took toward wisdom, and it is the way each child's individual instinct takes, after him. elemental truths of moral law and general types of human experience are presented in the fairy tale, in the poetry of their images, and although the child is aware only of the image at the time, the truth enters with it and becomes a part of his individual experience, to be recognised in its relations at a later stage. every truth and type so given broadens and deepens the capacity of the child's inner life, and adds an element to the store from which he draws his moral inferences. the most familiar instance of a moral truth conveyed under a fairy-story image is probably the story of the pure-hearted and loving girl whose lips were touched with the wonderful power of dropping jewels with every spoken word, while her stepsister, whose heart was infested with malice and evil desires, let ugly toads fall from her mouth whenever she spoke. i mention the old tale because there is probably no one of my readers who has not heard it in childhood, and because there are undoubtedly many to whose mind it has often recurred in later life as a sadly perfect presentment of the fact that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." that story has entered into the forming consciousness of many of us, with its implications of the inevitable result of visible evil from evil in the heart, and its revelation of the loathsomeness of evil itself. and no less truly than this story has served to many as an embodiment of moral law has another household tale stood for a type of common experience. how much the poorer should we be, mentally, without our early prophecy of the "ugly ducklings" we are to meet later in life!--those awkward offspring of our little human duckyard who are mostly well kicked and buffeted about, for that very length of limb and breadth of back which needs must be, to support swan's wings. the story of the ugly duckling is much truer than many a bald statement of fact. the english-speaking world bears witness to its verity in constant use of the title as an identifying phrase: "it is the old story of the ugly duckling," we say, or "he has turned out a real ugly duckling." and we know that our hearers understand the whole situation. the consideration of such familiar types and expressions as that of the ugly duckling suggests immediately another good reason for giving the child his due of fairy lore. the reason is that to omit it is to deprive him of one important element in the full appreciation of mature literature. if one thinks of it, one sees that nearly all adult literature is made by people who, in their beginnings, were bred on the wonder tale. whether he will or no, the grown-up author must incorporate into his work the tendencies, memories, kinds of feeling which were his in childhood. the literature of maturity is, naturally, permeated by the influence of the literature of childhood. sometimes it is apparent merely in the use of a name, as suggestive of certain kinds of experience; such are the recurrences of reference to the cinderella story. sometimes it is an allusion which has its strength in long association of certain qualities with certain characters in fairydom--like the slyness of brother fox, and the cruelty of brother wolf. sometimes the association of ideas lies below the surface, drawing from the hidden wells of poetic illusion which are sunk in childhood. the man or woman whose infancy was nourished exclusively on tales adapted from science-made-easy, or from biographies of good men and great, must remain blind to these beauties of literature. he may look up the allusion, or identify the reference, but when that is done he is but richer by a fact or two; there is no remembered thrill in it for him, no savour in his memory, no suggestion to his imagination; and these are precisely the things which really count. leaving out the fairy element is a loss to literary culture much as would be the omission of the bible or of shakespeare. just as all adult literature is permeated by the influence of these, familiar in youth, so in less degree is it transfused with the subtle reminiscences of childhood's commerce with the wonder world. to turn now from the inner to the outer aspects of the old-time tale is to meet another cause of its value to children. this is the value of its style. simplicity, directness, and virility characterise the classic fairy tales and the most memorable relics of folklore. and these are three of the very qualities which are most seriously lacking in much of the new writing for children, and which are always necessary elements in the culture of taste. fairy stories are not all well told, but the best fairy stories are supremely well told. and most folk-tales have a movement, a sweep, and an unaffectedness which make them splendid foundations for taste in style. for this, and for poetic presentation of truths in easily assimilated form, and because it gives joyous stimulus to the imagination, and is necessary to full appreciation of adult literature, we may freely use the wonder tale. closely related to, sometimes identical with, the fairy tale is the old, old source of children's love and laughter, the nonsense tale under this head i wish to include all the merely funny tales of childhood, embracing the cumulative stories like that of the old woman and the pig which would not go over the stile. they all have a specific use and benefit, and are worth the repetition children demand for them. their value lies, of course, in the tonic and relaxing properties of humour. nowhere is that property more welcome or needed than in the schoolroom. it does us all good to laugh, if there is no sneer nor smirch in the laugh; fun sets the blood flowing more freely in the veins, and loosens the strained cords of feeling and thought; the delicious shock of surprise at every "funny spot" is a kind of electric treatment for the nerves. but it especially does us good to laugh when we are children. every little body is released from the conscious control school imposes on it, and huddles into restful comfort or responds gaily to the joke. more than this, humour teaches children, as it does their grown-up brethren, some of the facts and proportions of life. what keener teacher is there than the kindly satire? what more penetrating and suggestive than the humour of exaggerated statement of familiar tendency? is there one of us who has not laughed himself out of some absurd complexity of over-anxiety with a sudden recollection of "clever alice" and her fate? in our household clever alice is an old _habituée_, and her timely arrival has saved many a situation which was twining itself about more "ifs" than it could comfortably support. the wisdom which lies behind true humour is found in the nonsense tale of infancy as truly as in mature humour, but in its own kind and degree. "just for fun" is the first reason for the humorous story; the wisdom in the fun is the second. and now we come to the nature story no other type of fiction is more familiar to the teacher, and probably no other kind is the source of so much uncertainty of feeling. the nature story is much used, as i have noticed above, to illustrate or to teach the habits of animals and the laws of plant-growth; to stimulate scientific interest as well as to increase culture in scientific fact. this is an entirely legitimate object. in view of its present preponderance, it is certainly a pity, however, that so few stories are available, the accuracy of which, from this point of view, can be vouched for. the carefully prepared book of to-day is refuted and scoffed at to-morrow. the teacher who wishes to use story-telling chiefly as an element in nature study must at least limit herself to a small amount of absolutely unquestioned material, or else subject every new story to the judgment of an authority in the line dealt with. this is not easy for the teacher at a distance from the great libraries, and for those who have access to well-equipped libraries it is a matter of time and thought. it does not so greatly trouble the teacher who uses the nature story as a story, rather than as a text-book, for she will not be so keenly attracted toward the books prepared with a didactic purpose. she will find a good gift for the child in nature stories which are stories, over and above any stimulus to his curiosity about fact. that good gift is a certain possession of all good fiction. one of the best things good fiction does for any of us is to broaden our comprehension of other lots than our own. the average man or woman has little opportunity actually to live more than one kind of life. the chances of birth, occupation, family ties, determine for most of us a line of experience not very inclusive and but little varied; and this is a natural barrier to our complete understanding of others, whose life-line is set at a different angle. it is not possible wholly to sympathise with emotions engendered by experience which one has never had. yet we all long to be broad in sympathy and inclusive in appreciation; we long, greatly, to know the experience of others. this yearning is probably one of the good but misconceived appetites so injudiciously fed by the gossip of the daily press. there is a hope, in the reader, of getting for the moment into the lives of people who move in wholly different sets of circumstances. but the relation of dry facts in newspapers, however tinged with journalistic colour, helps very little to enter such other life. the entrance has to be by the door of the imagination, and the journalist is rarely able to open it for us. but there is a genius who can open it. the author who can write fiction of the right sort can do it; his is the gift of seeing inner realities, and of showing them to those who cannot see them for themselves. sharing the imaginative vision of the story-writer, we can truly follow out many other roads of life than our own. the girl on a lone country farm is made to understand how a girl in a city sweating-den feels and lives; the london exquisite realises the life of a californian ranchman; royalty and tenement dwellers become acquainted, through the power of the imagination working on experience shown in the light of a human basis common to both. fiction supplies an element of culture,--that of the sympathies, which is invaluable. and the beginnings of this culture, this widening and clearing of the avenues of human sympathy, are especially easily made with children in the nature story. when you begin, "there was once a little furry rabbit,"[ ] the child's curiosity is awakened by the very fact that the rabbit is not a child, but something of a different species altogether. "now for something new and adventuresome," says his expectation, "we are starting off into a foreign world." he listens wide-eyed, while you say, "and he lived in a warm, cosy nest, down under the long grass with his mother"--how delightful, to live in a place like that; so different from little boys' homes!--"his name was raggylug, and his mother's name was molly cottontail. and every morning, when molly cottontail went out to get their food, she said to raggylug, 'now, raggylug, remember you are only a baby rabbit, and don't move from the nest. no matter what you hear, no matter what you see, don't you move!'"--all this is different still, yet it is familiar, too; it appears that rabbits are rather like folks. so the tale proceeds, and the little furry rabbit passes through experiences strange to little boys, yet very like little boys' adventures in some respects; he is frightened by a snake, comforted by his mammy, and taken to a new house, under the long grass a long way off. these are all situations to which the child has a key. there is just enough of strangeness to entice, just enough of the familiar to relieve any strain. when the child has lived through the day's happenings with raggylug, the latter has begun to seem veritably a little brother of the grass to him. and because he has entered imaginatively into the feelings and fate of a creature different from himself, he has taken his first step out into the wide world of the lives of others. [footnote : see _raggylug_, page .] it may be a recognition of this factor and its value which has led so many writers of nature stories into the error of over-humanising their four-footed or feathered heroes and heroines. the exaggeration is unnecessary, for there is enough community of lot suggested in the sternest scientific record to constitute a natural basis for sympathy on the part of the human animal. without any falsity of presentation whatever, the nature story may be counted on as a help in the beginnings of culture of the sympathies. it is not, of course, a help confined to the powers of the nature story; all types of story share in some degree the powers of each. but each has some especial virtue in dominant degree, and the nature story is, on this ground, identified with the thought given. the nature story shares its influence especially with the historical story as the one widens the circle of connection with other kinds of life, the other deepens the sense of relation to past lives; it gives the sense of background, of the close and endless connection of generation with generation. a good historical story vitalises the conception of past events and brings their characters into relation with the present. this is especially true of stories of things and persons in the history of our own race. they foster race-consciousness, the feeling of kinship and community of blood. it is this property which makes the historical story so good an agent for furthering a proper national pride in children. genuine patriotism, neither arrogant nor melodramatic, is so generally recognised as having its roots in early training that i need not dwell on this possibility, further than to note its connection with the instinct of hero-worship which is quick in the healthy child. let us feed that hunger for the heroic which gnaws at the imagination of every boy and of more girls than is generally admitted. there have been heroes in plenty in the world's records,--heroes of action, of endurance, of decision, of faith. biographical history is full of them. and the deeds of these heroes are every one a story. we tell these stories, both to bring the great past into its due relation with the living present, and to arouse that generous admiration and desire for emulation which is the source of so much inspiration in childhood. when these stories are tales of the doings and happenings of our own heroes, the strong men and women whose lives are a part of our own country's history, they serve the double demands of hero-worship and patriotism. stories of wise and honest statesmanship, of struggle with primitive conditions, of generous love and sacrifice, and--in some measure--of physical courage, form a subtle and powerful influence for pride in one's people, the intimate sense of kinship with one's own nation, and the desire to serve it in one's own time. it is not particularly useful to tell batches of unrelated anecdote. it is much more profitable to take up the story of a period and connect it with a group of interesting persons whose lives affected it or were affected by it, telling the stories of their lives, or of the events in which they were concerned, as "true stories." these biographical stories must, usually, be adapted for use. but besides these there is a certain number of pure stories--works of art--which already exist for us, and which illuminate facts and epochs almost without need of sidelights. such may stand by themselves, or be used with only enough explanation to give background. probably the best story of this kind known to lovers of modern literature is daudet's famous _la dernière classe_.[ ] [footnote : see _the last lesson_, page .] the historical story, to recapitulate, gives a sense of the reality and humanness of past events, is a valuable aid in patriotic training, and stirs the desire of emulating goodness and wisdom. chapter ii selection of stories to tell there is one picture which i can always review, in my own collection of past scenes, though many a more highly coloured one has been irrevocably curtained by the folds of forgetfulness. it is the picture of a little girl, standing by an old-fashioned marble-topped dressing-table in a pink, sunny room. i can never see the little girl's face, because, somehow, i am always looking down at her short skirts or twisting my head round against the hand which patiently combs her stubborn curls. but i can see the brushes and combs on the marble table quite plainly, and the pinker streaks of sun on the pink walls. and i can hear. i can hear a low, wonder-working voice which goes smoothly on and on, as the fingers run up the little girl's locks or stroke the hair into place on her forehead. the voice says, "and little goldilocks came to a little bit of a house. and she opened the door and went in. it was the house where three bears lived; there was a great bear, a little bear, and a middle-sized bear; and they had gone out for a walk. goldilocks went in, and she saw"--the little girl is very still; she would not disturb that story by so much as a loud breath; but presently the comb comes to a tangle, pulls,--and the little girl begins to squirm. instantly the voice becomes impressive, mysterious: "she went up to the table, and there were _three plates of porridge_. she tasted the first one"--the little girl swallows the breath she was going to whimper with, and waits--"and it was too hot! she tasted the next one, and _that_ was too hot. then she tasted the little bit of a plate, and that--was--just--right!" how i remember the delightful sense of achievement which stole into the little girl's veins when the voice behind her said "just right." i think she always chuckled a little, and hugged her stomach. so the story progressed, and the little girl got through her toilet without crying, owing to the wonder-working voice and its marvellous adaptation of climaxes to emergencies. nine times out of ten, it was the story of _the three bears_ she demanded when, with the appearance of brush and comb, the voice asked, "which story shall mother tell?" it was a memory of the little girl in the pink room which made it easy for me to understand some other children's preferences when i recently had occasion to inquire about them. by asking many individual children which story of all they had heard they liked best, by taking votes on the best story of a series, after telling it, and by getting some obliging teachers to put similar questions to their pupils, i found three prime favourites common to a great many children of about the kindergarten age. they were _the three bears_, _three little pigs_, and _the little pig that wouldn't go over the stile_. some of the teachers were genuinely disturbed because the few stories they had introduced merely for amusement had taken so pre-eminent a place in the children's affection over those which had been given seriously. it was of no use, however, to suggest substitutes. the children knew definitely what they liked, and though they accepted the recapitulation of scientific and moral stories with polite approbation, they returned to the original answer at a repetition of the question. inasmuch as the slightest of the things we hope to do for children by means of stories is quite impossible unless the children enjoy the stories, it may be worth our while to consider seriously these three which they surely do enjoy, to see what common qualities are in them, explanatory of their popularity, by which we may test the probable success of other stories we wish to tell. here they are,--three prime favourites of proved standing. the story of the three little pigs[ ] [footnote : adapted from joseph jacobs's _english fairy tales_ (david nutt, - long acre, w.c. s.).] once upon a time there were three little pigs, who went from home to seek their fortune. the first that went off met a man with a bundle of straw, and said to him:-- "good man, give me that straw to build me a house." the man gave the straw, and the little pig built his house with it. presently came along a wolf, and knocked at the door, and said:-- "little pig, little pig, let me come in." but the pig answered:-- "no, no, by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin." so the wolf said:-- "then i'll huff, and i'll puff, and i'll blow your house in." so he huffed, and he puffed, and he blew his house in, and ate up the little pig. the second little pig met a man with a bundle of furze, and said:-- "good man, give me that furze to build me a house." the man gave the furze, and the pig built his house. then once more came the wolf, and said: "little pig, little pig, let me come in." "no, no, by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin." "then i'll puff, and i'll huff, and i'll blow your house in." so he huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed and he huffed, and at last he blew the house in, and ate up the little pig. the third little pig met a man with a load of bricks, and said:-- "good man, give me those bricks to build me a house with." the man gave the bricks, and he built his house with them. again the wolf came, and said:-- "little pig, little pig, let me come in." "no, no, by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin." "then i'll huff, and i'll puff, and i'll blow your house in." so he huffed, and he puffed, and he huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down. finding that he could not, with all his huffing and puffing, blow the house down, he said:-- "little pig, i know where there is a nice field of turnips." "where?" said the little pig. "oh, in mr smith's field, and if you will be ready to-morrow morning we will go together, and get some for dinner." "very well," said the little pig. "what time do you mean to go?" "oh, at six o'clock." so the little pig got up at five, and got the turnips before the wolf came crying:-- "little pig, are you ready?" the little pig said: "ready! i have been and come back again, and got a nice potful for dinner." the wolf felt very angry at this, but thought that he would be a match for the little pig somehow or other, so he said:-- "little pig, i know where there is a nice apple-tree." "where?" said the pig. "down at merry-garden," replied the wolf, "and if you will not deceive me i will come for you, at five o'clock to-morrow, and get some apples." the little pig got up next morning at four o'clock, and went off for the apples, hoping to get back before the wolf came; but it took long to climb the tree, and just as he was coming down from it, he saw the wolf coming. when the wolf came up he said:-- "little pig, what! are you here before me? are they nice apples?" "yes, very," said the little pig. "i will throw you down one." and he threw it so far that, while the wolf was gone to pick it up, the little pig jumped down and ran home. the next day the wolf came again, and said to the little pig:-- "little pig, there is a fair in town this afternoon; will you go?" "oh yes," said the pig, "i will go; what time?" "at three," said the wolf. as usual the little pig went off before the time, and got to the fair, and bought a butter-churn, which he was rolling home when he saw the wolf coming. so he got into the churn to hide, and in so doing turned it round, and it rolled down the hill with the pig in it, which frightened the wolf so much that he ran home without going to the fair. he went to the little pig's house, and told him how frightened he had been by a great round thing which came past him down the hill. then the little pig said:-- "ha! ha! i frightened you, then!" then the wolf was very angry indeed, and tried to get down the chimney in order to eat up the little pig. when the little pig saw what he was about, he put a pot full of water on the blazing fire, and, just as the wolf was coming down, he took off the cover, and in fell the wolf. quickly the little pig clapped on the cover, and when the wolf was boiled ate him for supper. the story of the three bears[ ] [footnote : adapted from joseph jacobs's _english fairy tales_ (david nutt, - long acre, w.c. s.).] once upon a time there were three bears, who lived together in a house of their own, in a wood. one of them was a little small wee bear, and one was a middle-sized bear, and the other was a great huge bear. they had each a pot for their porridge,--a little pot for the little small wee bear, and a middle-sized pot for the middle-sized bear, and a great pot for the great huge bear. and they had each a chair to sit in,--a little chair for the little small wee bear, and a middle-sized chair for the middle-sized bear, and a great chair for the great huge bear. and they had each a bed to sleep in,--a little bed for the little small wee bear, and a middle-sized bed for the middle-sized bear, and a great bed for the great huge bear. one day, after they had made the porridge for their breakfast, and poured it into their porridge-pots, they walked out into the wood while the porridge was cooling, that they might not burn their mouths, by beginning too soon to eat it. and while they were walking, a little girl named goldilocks came to the house. she had never seen the little house before, and it was such a strange little house that she forgot all the things her mother had told her about being polite: first she looked in at the window, and then she peeped in at the keyhole; and seeing nobody in the house, she lifted the latch. the door was not fastened, because the bears were good bears, who did nobody any harm, and never suspected that anybody would harm them. so goldilocks opened the door, and went in; and well pleased she was when she saw the porridge on the table. if goldilocks had remembered what her mother had told her, she would have waited till the bears came home, and then, perhaps, they would have asked her to breakfast; for they were good bears--a little rough, as the manner of bears is, but for all that very good-natured and hospitable. but goldilocks forgot, and set about helping herself. so first she tasted the porridge of the great huge bear, and that was too hot. and then she tasted the porridge of the middle-sized bear, and that was too cold. and then she went to the porridge of the little small wee bear, and tasted that: and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right; and she liked it so well, that she ate it all up. then goldilocks sat down in the chair of the great huge bear, and that was too hard for her. and then she sat down in the chair of the middle-sized bear, and that was too soft for her. and then she sat down in the chair of the little small wee bear, and that was neither too hard nor too soft, but just right. so she seated herself in it, and there she sat till the bottom of the chair came out, and down she came, plump upon the ground. then goldilocks went upstairs into the bed-chamber in which the three bears slept. and first she lay down upon the bed of the great huge bear; but that was too high at the head for her. and next she lay down upon the bed of the middle-sized bear, and that was too high at the foot for her. and then she lay down upon the bed of the little small wee bear; and that was neither too high at the head nor at the foot, but just right. so she covered herself up comfortably, and lay there till she fell fast asleep. by this time the three bears thought their porridge would be cool enough; so they came home to breakfast. now goldilocks had left the spoon of the great huge bear standing in his porridge. "somebody has been at my porridge!" said the great huge bear, in his great, rough, gruff voice. and when the middle-sized bear looked at his, he saw that the spoon was standing in it too. "somebody has been at my porridge!" said the middle-sized bear, in his middle-sized voice. then the little small wee bear looked at his, and there was the spoon in the porridge-pot, but the porridge was all gone. "somebody has been at my porridge, and has eaten it all up!" said the little small wee bear, in his little, small, wee voice. upon this, the three bears, seeing that someone had entered their house, and eaten up the little small wee bear's breakfast, began to look about them. now goldilocks had not put the hard cushion straight when she rose from the chair of the great huge bear. "somebody has been sitting in my chair!" said the great huge bear, in his great, rough, gruff voice. and goldilocks had crushed down the soft cushion of the middle-sized bear. "somebody has been sitting in my chair!" said the middle-sized bear, in his middle-sized voice. and you know what goldilocks had done to the third chair. "somebody has been sitting in my chair and has sat the bottom out of it!" said the little small wee bear, in his little, small, wee voice. then the three bears thought it necessary that they should make further search; so they went upstairs into their bed-chamber. now goldilocks had pulled the pillow of the great huge bear out of its place. "somebody has been lying in my bed!" said the great huge bear, in his great, rough, gruff voice. and goldilocks had pulled the bolster of the middle-sized bear out of its place. "somebody has been lying in my bed!" said the middle-sized bear, in his middle-sized voice. and when the little small wee bear came to look at his bed, there was the bolster in its place; and the pillow in its place upon the bolster; and upon the pillow was the shining, yellow hair of little goldilocks! "somebody has been lying in my bed,--and here she is!" said the little small wee bear, in his little, small, wee voice. goldilocks had heard in her sleep the great, rough, gruff voice of the great huge bear; but she was so fast asleep that it was no more to her than the roaring of wind or the rumbling of thunder. and she had heard the middle-sized voice of the middle-sized bear, but it was only as if she had heard someone speaking in a dream. but when she heard the little, small, wee voice of the little small wee bear, it was so sharp, and so shrill, that it awakened her at once. up she started, and when she saw the three bears on one side of the bed, she tumbled herself out at the other, and ran to the window. now the window was open, because the bears, like good, tidy bears as they were, always opened their bed-chamber window when they got up in the morning. out little goldilocks jumped, and ran away home to her mother, as fast as ever she could. the old woman and her pig[ ] [footnote : adapted from joseph jacobs's _english fairy tales_ (david nutt, - long acre, w.c. s.).] it happened one day that as an old woman was sweeping her house she found a little crooked sixpence. "what," said she, "shall i do with this little sixpence? i will go to market, and buy a little pig." on the way home she came to a stile; but the piggy wouldn't go over the stile. so she left the piggy and went on a little further, till she met a dog. she said to him, "dog, dog, bite pig; piggy won't go over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the dog wouldn't bite piggy. a little further on she met a stick. so she said: "stick! stick! beat dog! dog won't bite pig; piggy won't go over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the stick wouldn't beat the dog. a little further on she met a fire. so she said: "fire! fire! burn stick! stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the fire wouldn't burn the stick. a little further on she met some water. so she said: "water! water! quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the water wouldn't quench the fire. a little further on she met an ox. so she said: "ox! ox! drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the ox wouldn't drink the water. a little further on she met a butcher. so she said: "butcher! butcher! kill ox; ox won't drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the butcher wouldn't kill the ox. a little further on she met a rope. so she said: "rope! rope! hang butcher; butcher won't kill ox; ox won't drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the rope wouldn't hang the butcher. a little further on she met a rat. so she said: "rat! rat! gnaw rope; rope won't hang butcher; butcher won't kill ox; ox won't drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the rat wouldn't gnaw the rope. a little further on she met a cat. so she said: "cat! cat! kill rat; rat won't gnaw rope; rope won't hang butcher; butcher won't kill ox; ox won't drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and i sha'n't get home to-night." but the cat said to her, "if you will go to yonder cow, and fetch me a saucer of milk, i will kill the rat." so away went the old woman to the cow. but the cow refused to give the milk unless the old woman first gave her a handful of hay. so away went the old woman to the haystack; and she brought the hay to the cow. when the cow had eaten the hay, she gave the old woman the milk; and away she went with it in a saucer to the cat. as soon as it had lapped up the milk, the cat began to kill the rat; the rat began to gnaw the rope; the rope began to hang the butcher; the butcher began to kill the ox; the ox began to drink the water; the water began to quench the fire; the fire began to burn the stick; the stick began to beat the dog; the dog began to bite the pig; the little pig in a fright jumped over the stile; and so the old woman did get home that night. * * * * * the briefest examination of these three stories reveals the fact that one attribute is beyond dispute in each. something happens, all the time. every step in each story is an event. there is no time spent in explanation, description, or telling how people felt; the stories tell what people did, and what they said. and the events are the links of a sequence of the closest kind; in point of time and of cause they follow as immediately as it is possible for events to follow. there are no gaps, and no complications of plot requiring a return on the road. a second common characteristic appears on briefest examination. as you run over the little stories you will see that each event presents a distinct picture to the imagination, and that these pictures are made out of very simple elements. the elements are either familiar to the child or analogous to familiar ones. each object and happening is very like everyday, yet touched with a subtle difference, rich in mystery. for example, the details of the pictures in the goldilocks story are parts of everyday life,--house, chairs, beds, and so on; but they are the house, chairs, and beds of three bears; that is the touch of marvel which transforms the scene. the old woman who owned the obstinate pig is the centre of a circle in which stand only familiar images,--stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. so it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but pigs. simplicity, with mystery, is the keynote of all the pictures, and these are clear and distinct. still a third characteristic common to the stories quoted is a certain amount of repetition. it is more definite, and of what has been called the "cumulative" kind, in the story of the old woman; but in all it is a distinctive feature. here we have, then, three marked characteristics common to three stories almost invariably loved by children,--action, in close sequence; familiar images, tinged with mystery; some degree of repetition. it is not hard to see why these qualities appeal to a child. the first is the prime characteristic of all good stories,--"stories as is stories"; the child's demand for it but bears witness to the fact that his instinctive taste is often better than the taste he later develops under artificial culture. the second is a matter of common-sense. how could the imagination create new worlds, save out of the material of the old? to offer strange images is to confuse the mind and dull the interest; to offer familiar ones "with a difference" is to pique the interest and engage the mind. the charm of repetition, to children, is a more complex matter; there are undoubtedly a good many elements entering into it, hard to trace in analysis. but one or two of the more obvious may be seized and brought to view. the first is the subtle flattery of an unexpected sense of mastery. when the child-mind, following with toilful alertness a new train of thought, comes suddenly on a familiar epithet or expression, i fancy it is with much the same sense of satisfaction that we older people feel when in the midst of a long programme of new music the orchestra strikes into something we have heard before,--handel, maybe, or one of the more familiar beethoven sonatas. "i know that! i have heard that before!" we think, triumphant, and settle down to enjoyment without effort. so it is, probably, with the "middle-sized" articles of the bears' house and the "and i sha'n't get home to-night" of the old woman. each recurrence deepens the note of familiarity, tickles the primitive sense of humour, and eases the strain of attention. when the repetition is cumulative, like the extreme instance of _the house that jack built_, i have a notion that the joy of the child is the pleasure of intellectual gymnastics, not too hard for fun, but not too easy for excitement. there is a deal of fun to be got out of purely intellectual processes, and childhood is not too soon for the rudiments of such fun to show. the delight the healthy adult mind takes in working out a neat problem in geometry, the pleasure a musician finds in following the involutions of a fugue, are of the same type of satisfaction as the liking of children for cumulative stories. complexity and mass, arrived at by stages perfectly intelligible in themselves, mounting steadily from a starting-point of simplicity; then the same complexity and mass resolving itself as it were miraculously back into simplicity, this is an intellectual joy. it does not differ materially, whether found in the study of counterpoint, at thirty, or in the story of the old woman and her pig, at five. it is perfectly natural and wholesome, and it may perhaps be a more powerful developing force for the budding intellect than we are aware. for these reasons let me urge you, when you are looking for stories to tell little children, to apply this threefold test as a kind of touchstone to their quality of fitness: are they full of action, in close natural sequence? are their images simple without being humdrum? are they repetitive? the last quality is not an absolute requisite; but it is at least very often an attribute of a good child-story. having this touchstone in mind for general selection, we can now pass to the matter of specific choices for different ages of children. no one can speak with absolute conviction in this matter, so greatly do the taste and capacity of children of the same age vary. any approach to an exact classification of juvenile books according to their suitability for different ages will be found impossible. the same book in the hands of a skilful narrator may be made to afford delight to children both of five and ten. the following are merely the inferences drawn from my own experience. they must be modified by each teacher according to the conditions of her small audience. in general, i believe it to be wise to plan the choice of stories much as indicated in the table given on page . at a later stage, varying with the standard of capacity of different classes, we find the temper of mind which asks continually, "is that true?" to meet this demand, one draws on historical and scientific anecdote, and on reminiscence. but the demand is never so exclusive that fictitious narrative need be cast aside. all that is necessary is to state frankly that the story you are telling is "just a story," or--if it be the case--that it is "part true and part story." at all stages i would urge the telling of bible stories, as far as is allowed by the special circumstances of the school. these are stories from a source unsurpassed in our literature for purity of style and loftiness of subject. more especially i urge the telling of the christ-story, in such parts as seem likely to be within the grasp of the several classes. in all bible stories it is well to keep as near as possible to the original unimprovable text.[ ] some amplification can be made, but no excessive modernising or simplifying is excusable in face of the austere grace and majestic simplicity of the original. such adaptation as helps to cut the long narrative into separate units, making each an intelligible story, i have ventured to illustrate according to my own personal taste, in two stories given in chapter vi. the object of the usual modernising or enlarging of the text may be far better attained for the child listener by infusing into the text as it stands a strong realising sense of its meaning and vitality, letting it give its own message through a fit medium of expression. [footnote : _stories from the old testament_, by s. platt, retells the old testament story as nearly as possible in the actual words of the authorised version.] the stories given in pages to are grouped as illustrations of the types suitable for different stages. they are, however, very often interchangeable; and many stories can be told successfully to all classes. a vitally good story is little limited in its appeal. it is, nevertheless, a help to have certain plain results of experience as a basis for choice; that which is given is intended only for such a basis, not in the least as a final list. certain types of story classified for kindergarten and class i.: little rhymed stories (including the best of the nursery rhymes and the more poetic fragments of mother goose) stories with rhyme in parts nature stories (in which the element of personification is strong) nonsense tales wonder tales for classes ii. and iii.: nonsense tales wonder tales fairy and folk tales fables legends nature stories (especially stories of animals) for classes iv. and v.: folk tales fables myths and allegories developed animal stories legends: historic and heroic historical stories humorous adventure stories "true stories" the wonder tales most familiar and accessible to the teacher are probably those included in the collections of andersen and the brothers grimm. so constant is the demand for these that the following list may be found useful, as indicating which of the stories are more easily and effectively adapted for telling, and commonly most successful. it must be remembered that many of these standard tales need such adapting as has been suggested, cutting them down, and ridding them of vulgar or sophisticated detail. from the brothers grimm: the star dollars the cat and the mouse the nail the hare and the hedgehog snow-white and rose-red mother holle thumbling three brothers the little porridge pot little snow-white the wolf and the seven little kids the sea mouse from andersen: little tiny the lark and the daisy the ugly duckling the seven stories of the snow queen the flax the little match girl the fir-tree the red shoes olé luköié monday saturday sunday the elf of the rose five peas in a pod the portuguese duck the little mermaid (much shortened) the nightingale (shortened) the girl who trod on a loaf the emperor's new clothes another familiar and easily attainable type of story is the classic myth, as retold in kupfer's _legends of greece and rome_.[ ] of these, again, certain tales are more successfully adapted to children than others. among the best for telling are: arachne pandora midas apollo and daphne apollo and hyacinthus narcissus latona and the rustics proserpine [footnote : a well-nigh indispensable book for teachers is guerber's _myths of greece and rome_, which contains in brief form a complete collection of the classic myths.] chapter iii adaptation of stories for telling it soon becomes easy to pick out from a collection such stories as can be well told; but at no time is it easy to find a sufficient number of such stories. stories simple, direct, and sufficiently full of incident for telling, yet having the beautiful or valuable motive we desire for children, do not lie hidden in every book. and even many of the stories which are most charming to read do not answer the double demand, for the appeal to the eye differs in many important respects from that to the ear. unless one is able to change the form of a story to suit the needs of oral delivery, one is likely to suffer from poverty of material. perhaps the commonest need of change is in the case of a story too long to tell, yet embodying some one beautiful incident or lesson; or one including a series of such incidents. the story of _the nürnberg stove_, by ouida,[ ] is a good example of the latter kind; ruskin's _king of the golden river_ will serve as an illustration of the former. [footnote : see _bimbi_, by ouida. (chatto. s.)] the problem in one case is chiefly one of elimination; in the other it is also in a large degree one of rearrangement. in both cases i have purposely chosen extreme instances, as furnishing plainer illustration. the usual story needs less adaptation than these, but the same kind, in its own degree. condensation and rearrangement are the commonest forms of change required. pure condensation is probably the easier for most persons. with _the nürnberg stove_ in mind for reference, let us see what the process includes. this story can be readily found by anyone who is interested in the following example of adaptation, for nearly every library includes in its catalogue the juvenile works of mlle. de la ramée (ouida). the suggestions given assume that the story is before my readers. the story as it stands is two thousand four hundred words long, obviously too long to tell. what can be left out? let us see what must be kept in. the dramatic climax toward which we are working is the outcome of august's strange exploit,--his discovery by the king and the opportunity for him to become an artist. the joy of this climax is twofold: august may stay with his beloved hirschvogel, and he may learn to make beautiful things like it. to arrive at the twofold conclusion we must start from a double premise,--the love of the stove and the yearning to be an artist. it will, then, be necessary to include in the beginning of the story enough details of the family life to show plainly how precious and necessary hirschvogel was to the children; and to state definitely how august had learned to admire and wish to emulate hirschvogel's maker. we need no detail beyond what is necessary to make this clear. the beginning and the end of a story decided upon, its body becomes the bridge from one to the other; in this case it is august's strange journey, beginning with the catastrophe and his grief-dazed decision to follow the stove. the journey is long, and each stage of it is told in full. as this is impossible in oral reproduction, it becomes necessary to choose typical incidents, which will give the same general effect as the whole. the incidents which answer this purpose are: the beginning of the journey, the experience on the luggage train, the jolting while being carried on men's shoulders, the final fright and suspense before the king opens the door. the episode of the night in the bric-a-brac shop introduces a wholly new and confusing train of thought; therefore, charming as it is, it must be omitted. and the secondary thread of narrative interest, that of the prices for which the stove was sold, and the retribution visited on the cheating dealers, is also "another story," and must be ignored. each of these destroys the clear sequence and the simplicity of plot which must be kept for telling. we are reduced, then, for the whole, to this: a brief preliminary statement of the place hirschvogel held in the household affections, and the ambition aroused in august; the catastrophe of the sale; august's decision; his experiences on the train, on the shoulders of men, and just before the discovery; his discovery, and the _dénouement_. this not only reduces the story to tellable form, but it also leaves a suggestive interest which heightens later enjoyment of the original. i suggest the adaptation of kate douglas wiggin, in _the story hour_, since in view of the existence of a satisfactory adaptation it seems unappreciative to offer a second. the one i made for my own use some years ago is not dissimilar to this, and i have no reason to suppose it more desirable. ruskin's _king of the golden river_ is somewhat difficult to adapt. not only is it long, but its style is mature, highly descriptive, and closely allegorical. yet the tale is too beautiful and too suggestive to be lost to the story-teller. and it is, also, so recognised a part of the standard literary equipment of youth that teachers need to be able to introduce children to its charm. to make it available for telling, we must choose the most essential events of the series leading up to the climax, and present these so simply as to appeal to children's ears, and so briefly as not to tire them. the printed story is eight thousand words in length. the first three thousand words depict the beauty and fertility of the treasure valley, and the cruel habits of hans and schwartz, its owners, and give the culminating incident which leads to their banishment by "west wind." this episode,--the west wind's appearance in the shape of an aged traveller, his kind reception by the younger brother, little gluck, and the subsequent wrath of hans and schwartz, with their resulting punishment,--occupies about two thousand words. the rest of the story deals with the three brothers after the decree of west wind has turned treasure valley into a desert. in the little house where they are plying their trade of goldsmiths, the king of the golden river appears to gluck and tells him the magic secret of turning the river's waters to gold. hans and schwartz in turn attempt the miracle, and in turn incur the penalty attached to failure. gluck tries, and wins the treasure through self-sacrifice. the form of the treasure is a renewal of the fertility of treasure valley, and the moral of the whole story is summed up in ruskin's words, "so the inheritance which was lost by cruelty was regained by love." it is easy to see that the dramatic part of the story and that which most pointedly illustrates the underlying idea, is the triple attempt to win the treasure,--the two failures and the one success. but this is necessarily introduced by the episode of the king of the golden river, which is, also, an incident sure to appeal to a child's imagination. and the regaining of the inheritance is meaningless without the fact of its previous loss, and the reason for the loss, as a contrast with the reason for its recovery. we need, then, the main facts recorded in the first three thousand words. but the west wind episode must be avoided, not only for brevity, but because two supernatural appearances, so similar, yet of different personalities, would hopelessly confuse a told story. our oral story is now to be made out of a condensed statement of the character of the valley and of its owners, and the manner of its loss; the intervention of the king of the golden river; the three attempts to turn the river to gold, and gluck's success. gluck is to be our hero, and our underlying idea is the power of love _versus_ cruelty. description is to be reduced to its lowest terms, and the language made simple and concrete. with this outline in mind, it may be useful to compare the following adaptation with the original story. the adaptation is not intended in any sense as a substitute for the original, but merely as that form of it which can be _told_, while the original remains for reading. the golden river[ ] [footnote : adapted from ruskin's _king of the golden river_.] there was once a beautiful little valley, where the sun was warm, and the rains fell softly; its apples were so red, its corn so yellow, its grapes so blue, that it was called the treasure valley. not a river ran into it, but one great river flowed down the mountains on the other side, and because the setting sun always tinged its high cataract with gold after the rest of the world was dark, it was called the golden river. the lovely valley belonged to three brothers. the youngest, little gluck, was happy-hearted and kind, but he had a hard life with his brothers, for hans and schwartz were so cruel and so mean that they were known everywhere around as the "black brothers." they were hard to their farm hands, hard to their customers, hard to the poor, and hardest of all to gluck. at last the black brothers became so bad that the spirit of the west wind took vengeance on them; he forbade any of the gentle winds, south and west, to bring rain to the valley. then, since there were no rivers in it, it dried up, and instead of a treasure valley it became a desert of dry, red sand. the black brothers could get nothing out of it, and they wandered out into the world on the other side of the mountain-peaks; and little gluck went with them. hans and schwartz went out every day, wasting their time in wickedness, but they left gluck in the house to work. and they lived on the gold and silver they had saved in treasure valley, till at last it was all gone. the only precious thing left was gluck's gold mug. this the black brothers decided to melt into spoons, to sell; and in spite of gluck's tears, they put it in the melting pot, and went out, leaving him to watch it. poor little gluck sat at the window, trying not to cry for his dear golden mug, and as the sun began to go down, he saw the beautiful cataract of the golden river turn red, and yellow, and then pure gold. "oh, dear!" he said to himself, "how fine it would be if the river were really golden! i needn't be poor, then." "it wouldn't be fine at all!" said a thin, metallic little voice, in his ear. "mercy, what's that!" said gluck, looking all about. but nobody was there. suddenly the sharp little voice came again. "pour me out," it said, "i am too hot!" it seemed to come right from the oven, and as gluck stood, staring in fright, it came again, "pour me out; i'm too hot!" gluck was very much frightened, but he went and looked in the melting pot. when he touched it, the little voice said, "pour me out, i say!" and gluck took the handle and began to pour the gold out. first came out a tiny pair of yellow legs; then a pair of yellow coat-tails; then a strange little yellow body, and, last, a wee yellow face, with long curls of gold hair. and the whole put itself together as it fell, and stood up on the floor,--the strangest little yellow dwarf, about a foot high! "dear, me!" said gluck. but the little yellow man said, "gluck, do you know who i am? i am the king of the golden river." gluck did not know what to say, so he said nothing; and, indeed, the little man gave him no chance. he said, "gluck, i have been watching you, and what i have seen of you, i like. listen, and i will tell you something for your good. whoever shall climb to the top of the mountain from which the golden river falls, and shall cast into its waters three drops of holy water, for him and him only shall its waters turn to gold. but no one can succeed except at the first trial, and anyone who casts unholy water in the river will be turned into a black stone." and then, before gluck could draw his breath, the king walked straight into the hottest flame of the fire, and vanished up the chimney! when gluck's brothers came home, they beat him black and blue, because the mug was gone. but when he told them about the king of the golden river they quarrelled all night, as to which should go to get the gold. at last, hans, who was the stronger, got the better of schwartz, and started off. the priest would not give such a bad man any holy water, so he stole a bottleful. then he took a basket of bread and wine, and began to climb the mountain. he climbed fast, and soon came to the end of the first hill. but there he found a great glacier, a hill of ice, which he had never seen before. it was horrible to cross,--the ice was slippery, great gulfs yawned before him, and noises like groans and shrieks came from under his feet. he lost his basket of bread and wine, and was quite faint with fear and exhaustion when his feet touched firm ground again. next he came to a hill of hot, red rock, without a bit of grass to ease the feet, or a particle of shade. after an hour's climb he was so thirsty that he felt that he must drink. he looked at the flask of water. "three drops are enough," he thought; "i will just cool my lips." he was lifting the flask to his lips when he saw something beside him in the path. it was a small dog, and it seemed to be dying of thirst. its tongue was out, its legs were lifeless, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips. it looked piteously at the bottle which hans held. hans raised the bottle, drank, kicked at the animal, and passed on. a strange black shadow came across the blue sky. another hour hans climbed; the rocks grew hotter and the way steeper every moment. at last he could bear it no longer; he must drink. the bottle was half empty, but he decided to drink half of what was left. as he lifted it, something moved in the path beside him. it was a child, lying nearly dead of thirst on the rock, its eyes closed, its lips burning, its breath coming in gasps. hans looked at it, drank, and passed on. a dark cloud came over the sun, and long shadows crept up the mountain-side. it grew very steep now, and the air weighed like lead on hans's forehead, but the golden river was very near. hans stopped a moment to breathe, then started to climb the last height. as he clambered on, he saw an old, old man lying in the path. his eyes were sunken, and his face deadly pale. "water!" he said; "water!" "i have none for you," said hans; "you have had your share of life." he strode over the old man's body and climbed on. a flash of blue lightning dazzled him for an instant, and then the heavens were dark. at last hans stood on the brink of the cataract of the golden river. the sound of its roaring filled the air. he drew the flask from his side and hurled it into the torrent. as he did so, an icy chill shot through him; he shrieked and fell. and the river rose and flowed over the black stone. when hans did not come back gluck grieved, but schwartz was glad. he decided to go and get the gold for himself. he thought it might not do to steal the holy water, as hans had done, so he took the money little gluck had earned, and bought holy water of a bad priest. then he took a basket of bread and wine, and started off. he came to the great hill of ice, and was as surprised as hans had been, and found it as hard to cross. many times he slipped, and he was much frightened at the noises, and was very glad to get across, although he had lost his basket of bread and wine. then he came to the same hill of sharp, red stone, without grass or shade, that hans had climbed. and like hans he became very thirsty. like hans, too, he decided to drink a little of the water. as he raised it to his lips, he suddenly saw the same fair child that hans had seen. "water!" said the child. "water! i am dying." "i have not enough for myself," said schwartz, and passed on. a low bank of black cloud rose out of the west. when he had climbed for another hour, the thirst overcame him again, and again he lifted the flask to his lips. as he did so, he saw an old man who begged for water. "i have not enough for myself," said schwartz, and passed on. a mist, of the colour of blood, came over the sun. then schwartz climbed for another hour, and once more he had to drink. this time, as he lifted the flask, he thought he saw his brother hans before him. the figure stretched its arms to him, and cried out for water. "ha, ha," laughed schwartz, "do you suppose i brought the water up here for you?" and he strode over the figure. but when he had gone a few yards farther, he looked back, and the figure was not there. then he stood at the brink of the golden river, and its waves were black, and the roaring of the waters filled all the air. he cast the flask into the stream. and as he did so the lightning glared in his eyes, the earth gave way beneath him, and the river flowed over the two black stones. when gluck found himself alone, he at last decided to try his luck with the king of the golden river. the priest gave him some holy water as soon as he asked for it, and with this and a basket of bread he started off. the hill of ice was much harder for gluck to climb, because he was not so strong as his brothers. he lost his bread, fell often, and was exhausted when he got on firm ground. he began to climb the hill in the hottest part of the day. when he had climbed for an hour he was very thirsty, and lifted the bottle to drink a little water. as he did so he saw a feeble old man coming down the path toward him. "i am faint with thirst," said the old man; "will you give me some of that water?" gluck saw that he was pale and tired, so he gave him the water, saying, "please don't drink it all." but the old man drank a great deal, and gave back the bottle two-thirds emptied. then he bade gluck good speed, and gluck went on merrily. some grass appeared on the path, and the grasshoppers began to sing. at the end of another hour, gluck felt that he must drink again. but, as he raised the flask, he saw a little child lying by the roadside, and it cried out pitifully for water. after a struggle with himself gluck decided to bear the thirst a little longer. he put the bottle to the child's lips, and it drank all but a few drops. then it got up and ran down the hill. all kinds of sweet flowers began to grow on the rocks, and crimson and purple butterflies flitted about in the air. at the end of another hour, gluck's thirst was almost unbearable. he saw that there were only five or six drops of water in the bottle, however, and he did not dare to drink. so he was putting the flask away again when he saw a little dog on the rocks, gasping for breath. he looked at it, and then at the golden river, and he remembered the dwarf's words, "no one can succeed except at the first trial"; and he tried to pass the dog. but it whined piteously, and gluck stopped. he could not bear to pass it. "confound the king and his gold, too!" he said; and he poured the few drops of water into the dog's mouth. the dog sprang up; its tail disappeared, its nose grew red, and its eyes twinkled. the next minute the dog was gone, and the king of the golden river stood there. he stooped and plucked a lily that grew beside gluck's feet. three drops of dew were on its white leaves. these the dwarf shook into the flask which gluck held in his hand. "cast these into the river," he said, "and go down the other side of the mountains into the treasure valley." then he disappeared. gluck stood on the brink of the golden river, and cast the three drops of dew into the stream. where they fell, a little whirlpool opened; but the water did not turn to gold. indeed, the water seemed vanishing altogether. gluck was disappointed not to see gold, but he obeyed the king of the golden river, and went down the other side of the mountains. when he came out into the treasure valley, a river, like the golden river, was springing from a new cleft in the rocks above, and flowing among the heaps of dry sand. and then fresh grass sprang beside the river, flowers opened along its sides, and vines began to cover the whole valley. the treasure valley was becoming a garden again. gluck lived in the valley, and his grapes were blue, and his apples were red, and his corn was yellow; and the poor were never driven from his door. for him, as the king had promised, the river was really a river of gold. * * * * * it will probably be clear to anyone who has followed these attempts, that the first step in adaptation is analysis, careful analysis of the story as it stands. one asks oneself, what is the story? which events are necessary links in the chain? how much of the text is pure description? having this essential body of the story in mind, one then decides which of the steps toward the climax are needed for safe arrival there, and keeps these. when two or more steps can be covered in a single stride, one makes the stride. when a necessary explanation is unduly long, or is woven into the story in too many strands, one disposes of it in an introductory statement, or perhaps in a side remark. if there are two or more threads of narrative, one chooses among them, and holds strictly to the one chosen, eliminating details which concern the others. in order to hold the simplicity of plot so attained, it is also desirable to have but few personages in the story, and to narrate the action from the point of view of one of them,--usually the hero. to shift the point of view of the action is confusing to the child's mind. when the analysis and condensation have been accomplished, the whole must be cast in simple language, keeping if possible the same kind of speech as that used in the original, but changing difficult or technical terms to plain, and complex images to simple and familiar ones. all types of adaptation share in this need of simple language,--stories which are too short, as well as those which are too long, have this feature in their changed form. the change in a short story is applied oftenest where it becomes desirable to amplify a single anecdote, or perhaps a fable, which is told in very condensed form. such an instance is the following anecdote of heroism, which in the original is quoted in one of f.w. robertson's lectures on poetry. a detachment of troops was marching along a valley, the cliffs overhanging which were crested by the enemy. a sergeant, with eleven men, chanced to become separated from the rest by taking the wrong side of a ravine, which they expected soon to terminate, but which suddenly deepened into an impassable chasm. the officer in command signalled to the party an order to return. they mistook the signal for a command to charge; the brave fellows answered with a cheer, and charged. at the summit of the steep mountain was a triangular platform, defended by a breastwork, behind which were seventy of the foe. on they went, charging up one of those fearful paths, eleven against seventy. the contest could not long be doubtful with such odds. one after another they fell; six upon the spot, the remainder hurled backwards; but not until they had slain nearly twice their own number. there is a custom, we are told, amongst the hillsmen, that when a great chieftain of their own falls in battle, his wrist is bound with a thread either of red or green, the red denoting the highest rank. according to custom, they stripped the dead, and threw their bodies over the precipice. when their comrades came, they found their corpses stark and gashed; but round both wrists of every british hero was twined the red thread! this anecdote serves its purpose of illustration perfectly well, but considered as a separate story it is somewhat too explanatory in diction, and too condensed in form. just as the long story is analysed for reduction of given details, so this must be analysed,--to find the details implied. we have to read into it again all that has been left between the lines. moreover, the order must be slightly changed, if we are to end with the proper "snap," the final sting of surprise and admiration given by the point of the story; the point must be prepared for. the purpose of the original is equally well served by the explanation at the end, but we must never forget that the place for the climax, or effective point in a story told, is the last thing said. that is what makes a story "go off" well. imagining vividly the situation suggested, and keeping the logical sequence of facts in mind, shall we not find the story telling itself to boys and girls in somewhat this form? the red thread of courage[ ] [footnote : see also _the red thread of honour_, by sir francis doyle, in _lyra heroica_.] this story which i am going to tell you is a true one. it happened while the english troops in india were fighting against some of the native tribes. the natives who were making trouble were people from the hill-country, called hillsmen, and they were strong enemies. the english knew very little about them, except their courage, but they had noticed one peculiar custom, after certain battles,--the hillsmen had a way of marking the bodies of their greatest chiefs who were killed in battle by binding a red thread about the wrist; this was the highest tribute they could pay a hero. the english, however, found the common men of them quite enough to handle, for they had proved themselves good fighters and clever at ambushes. one day, a small body of the english had marched a long way into the hill country, after the enemy, and in the afternoon they found themselves in a part of the country strange even to the guides. the men moved forward very slowly and cautiously, for fear of an ambush. the trail led into a narrow valley with very steep, high, rocky sides, topped with woods in which the enemy might easily hide. here the soldiers were ordered to advance more quickly, though with caution, to get out of the dangerous place. after a little they came suddenly to a place where the passage was divided in two by a big three-cornered boulder which seemed to rise from the midst of the valley. the main line of men kept to the right; to save crowding the path, a sergeant and eleven men took the left, meaning to go round the rock and meet the rest beyond it. they had been in the path only a few minutes when they saw that the rock was not a single boulder at all, but an arm of the left wall of the valley, and that they were marching into a deep ravine with no outlet except the way they came. both sides were sheer rock, almost perpendicular, with thick trees at the top; in front of them the ground rose in a steep hill, bare of woods. as they looked up, they saw that the top was barricaded by the trunks of trees, and guarded by a strong body of hillsmen. as the english hesitated, looking at this, a shower of spears fell from the wood's edge, aimed by hidden foes. the place was a death trap. at this moment, their danger was seen by the officer in command of the main body, and he signalled to the sergeant to retreat. by some terrible mischance, the signal was misunderstood. the men took it for the signal to charge. without a moment's pause, straight up the slope, they charged on the run, cheering as they ran. some were killed by the spears that were thrown from the cliffs, before they had gone half way; some were stabbed as they reached the crest, and hurled backward from the precipice; two or three got to the top, and fought hand to hand with the hillsmen. they were outnumbered, seven to one; but when the last of the english soldiers lay dead, twice their number of hillsmen lay dead around them! when the relief party reached the spot, later in the day, they found the bodies of their comrades, full of wounds, huddled over and in the barricade, or crushed on the rocks below. they were mutilated and battered, and bore every sign of the terrible struggle. _but round both wrists of every british soldier was bound the red thread!_ the hillsmen had paid greater honour to their heroic foes than to the bravest of their own brave dead. * * * * * another instance is the short poem, which, while being perfectly simple, is rich in suggestion of more than the young child will see for himself. the following example shows the working out of details in order to provide a satisfactorily rounded story. the elf and the dormouse[ ] [footnote : adapted from _the elf and the dormouse_, by oliver herford, in _a treasury of verse for little children_. (harrap. s. net.)] once upon a time a dormouse lived in the wood with his mother. she had made a snug little nest, but sleepy-head, as she called her little mousie, loved to roam about among the grass and fallen leaves, and it was a hard task to keep him at home. one day the mother went off as usual to look for food, leaving sleepy-head curled up comfortably in a corner of the nest. "he will lie there safely till i come back," she thought. presently, however, sleepy-head opened his eyes and thought he would like to take a walk out in the fresh air. so he crept out of the nest and through the long grass that nodded over the hole in the bank. he ran here and he ran there, stopping again and again to cock his little ears for sound of any creeping thing that might be close at hand. his little fur coat was soft and silky as velvet. mother had licked it clean before starting her day's work, you may be sure. as sleepy-head moved from place to place his long tail swayed from side to side and tickled the daisies so that they could not hold themselves still for laughing. presently something very cold fell on sleepy-head's nose. what could it be? he put up his little paw and dabbed at the place. then the same thing happened to his tail. he whisked it quickly round to the front. ah, it was raining! now sleepy-head couldn't bear rain, and he had got a long way from home. what would mother say if his nice furry coat got wet and draggled? he crept under a bush, but soon the rain found him out. then he ran to a tree, but this was poor shelter. he began to think that he was in for a soaking when what should he spy, a little distance off, but a fine toadstool which stood bolt upright just like an umbrella. the next moment sleepy-head was crawling underneath the friendly shelter. he fixed himself up as snugly as he could, with his little nose upon his paws and his little tail curled round all, and before you could count six, eight, ten, twenty, he was fast asleep. now it happened that sleepy-head was not the only creature that was caught by the rain that morning in the wood. a little elf had been flitting about in search of fun or mischief, and he, too, had got far from home when the raindrops began to come pattering through the leafy roof of the beautiful wood. it would never do to get his pretty wings wet, for he hated to walk--it was such slow work and, besides, he might meet some big wretched animal that could run faster than himself. however, he was beginning to think that there was no help for it, when, on a sudden, there before him was the toadstool, with sleepy-head snug and dry underneath! there was room for another little fellow, thought the elf, and ere long he had safely bestowed himself under the other half of the toadstool, which was just like an umbrella. sleepy-head slept on, warm and comfortable in his furry coat, and the elf began to feel annoyed with him for being so happy. he was always a great mischief, and he could not bear to sit still for long at a time. presently he laughed a queer little laugh. he had got an idea! putting his two small arms round the stem of the toadstool he tugged and he pulled until, of a sudden, snap! he had broken the stem, and a moment later was soaring in air safely sheltered under the toadstool, which he held upright by its stem as he flew. sleepy-head had been dreaming, oh, so cosy a dream! it seemed to him that he had discovered a storehouse filled with golden grain and soft juicy nuts with little bunches of sweet-smelling hay, where tired mousies might sleep dull hours away. he thought that he was settled in the sweetest bunch of all, with nothing in the world to disturb his nap, when gradually he became aware that something had happened. he shook himself in his sleep and settled down again, but the dream had altered. he opened his eyes. rain was falling, pit-a-pat, and he was without cover on a wet patch of grass. what could be the matter? sleepy-head was now wide awake. said he, "dear me, where is my toadstool?" from these four instances we may, perhaps, deduce certain general principles of adaptation which have at least proved valuable to those using them. these are suggestions which the practised story-teller will find trite. but to others they may prove a fair foundation on which to build a personal method to be developed by experience. i have given them a tabular arrangement below. the preliminary step in all cases is _analysis of the story._ the aim, then, is to _reduce_ a long story or to _amplify_ a short one. for the first, the need is _elimination_ of secondary threads of narrative, extra personages, description, irrelevant events. for the second, the great need is of _realising imagination_. for both, it is desirable to keep _close logical sequence_, _a single point of view_, _simple language_, _the point at the end._ chapter iv how to tell the story selection, and, if necessary, adaptation--these are the preliminaries to the act of telling. that, after all, is the real test of one's power. that is the real joy, when achieved; the real bugbear, when dreaded. and that is the subject of this chapter, "how to tell a story." how to tell a story: it is a short question which demands a long answer. the right beginning of the answer depends on a right conception of the thing the question is about; and that naturally reverts to an earlier discussion of the real nature of a story. in that discussion it was stated that a story is a work of art,--a message, as all works of art are. to tell a story, then, is to pass on the message, to share the work of art. the message may be merely one of humour,--of nonsense, even; works of art range all the way from the "victory" to a "dresden shepherdess," from an "assumption" to a "broken pitcher," and farther. each has its own place. but whatever its quality, the story-teller is the passer-on, the interpreter, the transmitter. he comes bringing a gift. always he gives; always he bears a message. this granted, the first demand of the story-teller is not far to seek. no one can repeat a message he has not heard, or interpret what he does not understand. you cannot give, unless you first possess. the first demand of the story-teller is that he possess. he must _feel_ the story. whatever the particular quality and appeal of the work of art, from the lightest to the grandest emotion or thought, he must have responded to it, grasped it, felt it intimately, before he can give it out again. listen, humbly, for the message. i realise that this has an incongruous sound, when applied to such stories as that of the little pig at the stile or of the greedy cat who ate up man and beast. but, believe me, it does apply even to those. for the transmittable thing in a story is the identifying essence, the characterising savour, the peculiar quality and point of view of the humour, pathos, or interest. every tale which claims a place in good fiction has this identifying savour and quality, each different from every other. the laugh which echoes one of seumas mcmanus's rigmaroles is not the chuckle which follows one of joel chandler harris's anecdotes; the gentle sadness of an andersen allegory is not the heart-searching tragedy of a tale from the greek; nor is any one story of an author just like any other of the same making. each has its personal likeness, its facial expression, as it were. and the mind must be sensitised to these differences. no one can tell stories well who has not a keen and just feeling of such emotional values. a positive and a negative injunction depend on this premise,--the positive, cultivate your feeling, striving toward increasingly just appreciation; the negative, never tell a story you do not feel. fortunately, the number and range of stories one can appreciate grow with cultivation; but it is the part of wisdom not to step outside the range at any stage of its growth. i feel the more inclined to emphasise this caution because i once had a rather embarrassing and pointed proof of its desirability,--which i relate for the enlightening of the reader. there is a certain nonsense tale which a friend used to tell with such effect that her hearers became helpless with laughter, but which for some reason never seemed funny to me. i could not laugh at it. but my friend constantly urged me to use it, quoting her own success. at last, with much curiosity and some trepidation, i included it in a programme before people with whom i was so closely in sympathy that no chill was likely to emanate from their side. i told the story as well as i knew how, putting into it more genuine effort than most stories can claim. the audience smiled politely, laughed gently once or twice, relapsed into the mildest of amusement. the most one could say was that the story was not a hopeless failure. i tried it again, after study, and yet again; but the audiences were all alike. and in my heart i should have been startled if they had behaved otherwise, for all the time i was telling it i was conscious in my soul that it was a stupid story! at last i owned my defeat to myself, and put the thing out of mind. some time afterward, i happened to take out the notes of the story, and idly looked them over; and suddenly, i do not know how, i got the point of view! the salt of the humour was all at once on my lips; i felt the tickle of the pure folly of it; it _was_ funny. the next afternoon i told the story to a hundred or so children and as many mothers,--and the battle was won. chuckles punctuated my periods; helpless laughter ran like an under-current below my narrative; it was a struggle for me to keep sober, myself. the nonsense tale had found its own atmosphere. now of course i had known all along that the humour of the story emanated from its very exaggeration, its absurdly illogical smoothness. but i had not _felt_ it. i did not really "see the joke." and that was why i could not tell the story. i undoubtedly impressed my own sense of its fatuity on every audience to which i gave it. the case is very clear. equally clear have been some happy instances where i have found audiences responding to a story i myself greatly liked, but which common appreciation usually ignored. this is an experience even more persuasive than the other, certainly more to be desired. every story-teller has lines of limitation; certain types of story will always remain his or her best effort. there is no reason why any type of story should be told really ill, and of course the number of kinds one tells well increases with the growth of the appreciative capacity. but none the less, it is wise to recognise the limits at each stage, and not try to tell any story to which the honest inner consciousness says, "i do not like you." let us then set down as a prerequisite for good story-telling, _a genuine appreciation of the story_. now, we may suppose this genuine appreciation to be your portion. you have chosen a story, have felt its charm, and identified the quality of its appeal. you are now to tell it in such wise that your hearers will get the same kind of impression you yourself received from it. how? i believe the inner secret of success is the measure of force with which the teller wills the conveyance of his impression to the hearer. anyone who has watched, or has himself been, the teller of a story which held an audience, knows that there is something approaching hypnotic suggestion in the close connection of effort and effect, and in the elimination of self-consciousness from speaker and listeners alike. i would not for a moment lend the atmosphere of charlatanry, or of the ultra-psychic, to the wholesome and vivid art of story-telling. but i would, if possible, help the teacher to realise how largely success in that art is a subjective and psychological matter, dependent on her control of her own mood and her sense of direct, intimate communion with the minds attending her. the "feel" of an audience,--that indescribable sense of the composite human soul waiting on the initiative of your own, the emotional currents interplaying along a medium so delicate that it takes the baffling torture of an obstruction to reveal its existence,--cannot be taught. but it can and does develop with use. and a realisation of the immense latent power of strong desire and resolution vitalises and disembarrasses the beginner. that is, undoubtedly, rather an intangible beginning; it sets the root of the matter somewhat in the realm of "spirits and influences." there are, however, outward and visible means of arriving at results. every art has its technique. the art of story-telling, intensely personal and subjective as it is, yet comes under the law sufficiently not to be a matter of sheer "knack." it has its technique. the following suggestions are an attempt to state what seem the foundation principles of that technique. the general statements are deduced from many consecutive experiences; partly, too, they are the results of introspective analysis, confirmed by observation. they do not make up an exclusive body of rules, wholly adequate to produce good work, of themselves; they do include, so far as my observation and experience allow, the fundamental requisites of good work,--being the qualities uniformly present in successful work of many story-tellers. first of all, most fundamental of all, is a rule without which any other would be but folly: _know your story._ one would think so obvious a preliminary might be taken for granted. but alas, even slight acquaintance with the average story-teller proves the dire necessity of the admonition. the halting tongue, the slip in name or incident, the turning back to forge an omitted link in the chain, the repetition, the general weakness of statement consequent on imperfect grasp: these are common features of the stories one hears told. and they are features which will deface the best story ever told. one must know the story absolutely; it must have been so assimilated that it partakes of the nature of personal experience; its essence must be so clearly in mind that the teller does not have to think of it at all in the act of telling, but rather lets it flow from his lips with the unconscious freedom of a vivid reminiscence. such knowledge does not mean memorising. memorising utterly destroys the freedom of reminiscence, takes away the spontaneity, and substitutes a mastery of form for a mastery of essence. it means, rather, a perfect grasp of the gist of the story, with sufficient familiarity with its form to determine the manner of its telling. the easiest way to obtain this mastery is, i think, to analyse the story into its simplest elements of plot. strip it bare of style, description, interpolation, and find out simply _what happened_. personally, i find that i get first an especially vivid conception of the climax; this then has to be rounded out by a clear perception of the successive steps which lead up to the climax. one has, so, the framework of the story. the next process is the filling in. there must be many ways of going about this filling in. doubtless many of my readers, in the days when it was their pet ambition to make a good recitation in school, evolved personally effective ways of doing it; for it is, after all, the same thing as preparing a bit of history or a recitation in literature. but for the consideration of those who find it hard to gain mastery of fact without mastery of its stated form, i give my own way. i have always used the childlike plan of talking it out. sometimes inaudibly, sometimes in loud and penetrating tones which arouse the sympathetic curiosity of my family, i tell it over and over, to an imaginary hearer. that hearer is as present to me, always has been, as stevenson's "friend of the children" who takes the part of the enemy in their solitary games of war. his criticism (though he is a most composite double-sexed creature who should not have a designating personal pronoun) is all-revealing. for talking it out instantly brings to light the weak spots in one's recollection. "what was it the little crocodile said?" "just how did the little pig get into his house?" "what was that link in the chain of circumstances which brought the wily fox to confusion?" the slightest cloud of uncertainty becomes obvious in a moment. and as obvious becomes one's paucity of expression, one's week-kneed imagination, one's imperfect assimilation of the spirit of the story. it is not a flattering process. but when these faults have been corrected by several attempts, the method gives a confidence, a sense of sureness, which makes the real telling to a real audience ready and spontaneously smooth. scarcely an epithet or a sentence comes out as it was in the preliminary telling; but epithets and sentences in sufficiency do come; the beauty of this method is that it brings freedom instead of bondage. a valuable exception to the rule against memorising must be noted here. especially beautiful and indicative phrases of the original should be retained, and even whole passages, where they are identified with the beauty of the tale. and in stories like _the three bears_ or _red riding hood_ the exact phraseology of the conversation as given in familiar versions should be preserved; it is in a way sacred, a classic, and not to be altered. but beyond this the language should be the teller's own, and probably never twice the same. sureness, ease, freedom, and the effect of personal reminiscence come only from complete mastery. i repeat, with emphasis: know your story. the next suggestion is a purely practical one concerning the preparation of physical conditions. see that the children are seated in close and direct range of your eye; the familiar half-circle is the best arrangement for small groups of children, but the teacher should be at a point _opposite_ the centre of the arc, _not in_ its centre: thus [illustration], not thus [illustration]; it is important also not to have the ends too far at the side, and to have no child directly behind another, or in such a position that he has not an easy view of the teacher's full face. little children have to be physically close in order to be mentally close. it is, of course, desirable to obtain a hushed quiet before beginning; but it is not so important as to preserve your own mood of holiday, and theirs. if the fates and the atmosphere of the day are against you, it is wiser to trust to the drawing power of the tale itself, and abate the irritation of didactic methods. and never break into that magic tale, once begun, with an admonition to ethel or tommy to stop squirming, or a rebuke to "that little girl over there who is not listening." make her listen! it is probably your fault if she is not. if you are telling a good story, and telling it well, she can't help listening,--unless she is an abnormal child; and if she is abnormal you ought not to spoil the mood of the others to attend to her. i say "never" interrupt your story; perhaps it is only fair to amend that, after the fashion of dear little marjorie fleming, and say "never--if you can help it." for, of course, there are exceptional occasions, and exceptional children; some latitude must be left for the decisions of good common sense acting on the issue of the moment. the children ready, your own mood must be ready. it is desirable that the spirit of the story should be imposed upon the room from the beginning, and this result hangs on the clearness and intensity of the teller's initiatory mood. an act of memory and of will is the requisite. the story-teller must call up--it comes with the swiftness of thought--the essential emotion of the story as he felt it first. a single volition puts him in touch with the characters and the movement of the tale. this is scarcely more than a brief and condensed reminiscence; it is the stepping back into a mood once experienced. let us say, for example, that the story to be told is the immortal fable of _the ugly duckling_. before you open your lips the whole pathetic series of the little swan's mishaps should flash across your mind,--not accurately and in detail, but blended to a composite of undeserved ignominy, of baffled innocent wonderment, and of delicious underlying satire on average views. with this is mingled the feeling of andersen's delicate whimsicality of style. the dear little ugly duckling waddles, bodily, into your consciousness, and you pity his sorrows and anticipate his triumph, before you begin. this preliminary recognition of mood is what brings the delicious quizzical twitch to the mouth of a good raconteur who begins an anecdote the hearers know will be side-splitting. it is what makes grandmother sigh gently and look far over your heads, when her soft voice commences the story of "the little girl who lived long, long ago." it is a natural and instinctive thing with the born story-teller; a necessary thing for anyone who will become a story-teller. from the very start, the mood of the tale should be definite and authoritative, beginning with the mood of the teller and emanating therefrom in proportion as the physique of the teller is a responsive medium. now we are off. knowing your story, having your hearers well arranged, and being as thoroughly as you are able in the right mood, you begin to tell it. tell it, then, simply, directly, dramatically, with zest. _simply_ applies both to manner and matter. as to manner, i mean without affectation, without any form of pretence, in short, without posing. it is a pity to "talk down" to the children, to assume a honeyed voice, to think of the edifying or educational value of the work one is doing. naturalness, being oneself, is the desideratum. i wonder why we so often use a preposterous voice,--a super-sweetened whine, in talking to children? is it that the effort to realise an ideal of gentleness and affectionateness overreaches itself in this form of the grotesque? some good intention must be the root of it. but the thing is none the less pernicious. a "cant" voice is as abominable as a cant phraseology. both are of the very substance of evil. "but it is easier to _say,_ 'be natural' than to _be_ it," said one teacher to me desperately. beyond dispute. to those of us who are cursed with an over-abundant measure of self-consciousness, nothing is harder than simple naturalness. the remedy is to lose oneself in one's art. think of the story so absorbingly and vividly that you have no room to think of yourself. live it. sink yourself in that mood you have summoned up, and let it carry you. if you do this, simplicity of matter will come easily. your choice of words and images will naturally become simple. it is, i think, a familiar precept to educators, that children should not have their literature too much simplified for them. we are told that they like something beyond them, and that it is good for them to have a sense of mystery and power beyond the sense they grasp. that may be true; but if so it does not apply to story-telling as it does to reading. we have constantly to remember that the movement of a story told is very swift. a concept not grasped in passing is irrevocably lost; there is no possibility of turning back, or lingering over the page. also, since the art of story-telling is primarily an art of entertainment, its very object is sacrificed if the ideas and images do not slip into the child's consciousness smoothly enough to avoid the sense of strain. for this reason short, familiar, vivid words are best. simplicity of manner and of matter are both essential to the right appeal to children. _directness_ in telling is a most important quality. the story, listened to, is like the drama, beheld. its movement must be unimpeded, increasingly swift, winding up "with a snap." long-windedness, or talking round the story, utterly destroys this movement. the incidents should be told, one after another, without explanation or description beyond what is absolutely necessary; and _they should be told in logical sequence._ nothing is more distressing than the cart-before-the-horse method,--nothing more quickly destroys interest than the failure to get a clue in the right place. sometimes, to be sure, a side remark adds piquancy and a personal savour. but the general rule is, great discretion in this respect. every epithet or adjective beyond what is needed to give the image, is a five-barred gate in the path of the eager mind travelling to a climax. explanations and moralising are usually sheer clatter. some few stories necessarily include a little explanation, and stories of the fable order may quaintly end with an obvious moral. but here again, the rule is--great discretion. it is well to remember that you have one great advantage over the writer of stories. the writer must present a clear image and make a vivid impression,--all with words. the teller has face, and voice, and body to do it with. the teller needs, consequently, but one swiftly incisive verb to the writer's two; but one expressive adjective to his three. often, indeed, a pause and an expressive gesture do the whole thing. it may be said here that it is a good trick of description to repeat an epithet or phrase once used, when referring again to the same thing. the recurrent adjectives of homer were the device of one who entertained a childlike audience. his trick is unconscious and instinctive with people who have a natural gift for children's stories. of course this matter also demands common sense in the degree of its use; in moderation it is a most successful device. brevity, close logical sequence, exclusion of foreign matter, unhesitant speech,--to use these is to tell a story directly. after simplicity and directness, comes that quality which to advise, is to become a rock of offence to many. it is the suggestion, "tell the story _dramatically_." yet when we quite understand each other as to the meaning of "dramatically," i think you will agree with me that a good story-teller includes this in his qualities of manner. it means, not in the manner of the elocutionist, not excitably, not any of the things which are incompatible with simplicity and sincerity; but with a whole-hearted throwing of oneself into the game, which identifies one in a manner with the character or situation of the moment. it means responsively, vividly, without interposing a blank wall of solid self between the drama of the tale and the mind's eye of the audience. it is such fun, pure and simple, so to throw oneself into it, and to see the answering expressions mimic one's own, that it seems superfluous to urge it. yet many persons do find it difficult. the instant, slight but suggestive change of voice, the use of onomatopoetic words, the response of eyes and hands, which are all immediate and spontaneous with some temperaments, are to others a matter of shamefacedness and labour. to those, to all who are not by nature bodily expressive, i would reiterate the injunction already given,--not to pretend. do nothing you cannot do naturally and happily. but lay your stress on the inner and spiritual effort to appreciate, to feel, to imagine out the tale; and let the expressiveness of your body grow gradually with the increasing freedom from crippling self-consciousness. the physique will become more mobile as the emotion does. the expression must, however, always _remain suggestive rather than illustrative_. this is the side of the case which those who are over-dramatic must not forget. the story-teller is not playing the parts of his stories; he is merely arousing the imagination of his hearers to picture the scenes for themselves. one element of the dual consciousness of the tale-teller remains always the observer, the reporter, the quiet outsider. i like to think of the story-teller as a good fellow standing at a great window overlooking a busy street or a picturesque square, and reporting with gusto to the comrade in the rear of the room what of mirth or sadness he sees; he hints at the policeman's strut, the organ-grinder's shrug, the schoolgirl's gaiety, with a gesture or two which is born of an irresistible impulse to imitate; but he never leaves his fascinating post to carry the imitation further than a hint. the verity of this figure lies in the fact that the dramatic quality of story-telling depends closely upon the _clearness and power with which the story-teller visualises the events and characters he describes_. you must hold the image before the mind's eye, using your imagination to embody to yourself every act, incident and appearance. you must, indeed, stand at the window of your consciousness and watch what happens. this is a point so vital that i am tempted to put it in ornate type. you must _see_ what you _say_! it is not too much, even, to say, "you must see more than you say." true vividness is lent by a background of picture realised by the listener beyond what you tell him. children see, as a rule, no image you do not see; they see most clearly what you see most largely. draw, then, from a full well, not from a supply so low that the pumps wheeze at every pull. dramatic power of the reasonably quiet and suggestive type demanded for telling a story will come pretty surely in the train of effort along these lines; it follows the clear concept and sincerity in imparting it, and is a natural consequence of the visualising imagination. it is inextricably bound up, also, with the causes and results of the quality which finds place in my final injunction, to tell your story _with zest_. it might almost be assumed that the final suggestion renders the preceding one superfluous, so direct is the effect of a lively interest on the dramatic quality of a narration; but it would not of itself be adequate; the necessity of visualising imagination is paramount. zest is, however, a close second to this clearness of mental vision. it is entirely necessary to be interested in your own story, to enjoy it as you tell it. if you are bored and tired, the children will soon be bored and tired, too. if you are not interested your manner cannot get that vitalised spontaneity which makes dramatic power possible. nothing else will give that relish on the lips, that gusto, which communicates its joy to the audience and makes it receptive to every impression. i used to say to teachers, "tell your story with all your might," but i found that this by a natural misconception was often interpreted to mean "laboriously." and of course nothing is more injurious to the enjoyment of an audience than obvious effort on the part of the entertainer. true zest can be--often is--extremely quiet, but it gives a savour nothing else can impart. "but how, at the end of a hard morning's work, can i be interested in a story i have told twenty times before?" asks the kindergarten or primary teacher, not without reason. there are two things to be said. the first is a reminder of the wisdom of choosing stories in which you originally have interest; and of having a store large enough to permit variety. the second applies to those inevitable times of weariness which attack the most interested and well-stocked story-teller. you are, perhaps, tired out physically. you have told a certain story till it seems as if a repetition of it must produce bodily effects dire to contemplate, yet that happens to be the very story you must tell. what can you do? i answer, "make believe." the device seems incongruous with the repeated warnings against pretence; but it is necessary, and it is wise. pretend as hard as ever you can to be interested. and the result will be--before you know it--that you will _be_ interested. that is the chief cause of the recommendation; it brings about the result it simulates. make believe, as well as you know how, and the probability is that you will not even know when the transition from pretended to real interest comes. and fortunately, the children never know the difference. they have not that psychological infallibility which is often attributed to them. they might, indeed, detect a pretence which continued through a whole tale; but that is so seldom necessary that it needs little consideration. so then: enjoy your story; be interested in it,--if you possibly can; and if you cannot, pretend to be, till the very pretence brings about the virtue you have assumed. there is much else which might be said and urged regarding the method of story-telling, even without encroaching on the domain of personal variations. a whole chapter might, for example, be devoted to voice and enunciation, and then leave the subject fertile. but voice and enunciation are after all merely single manifestations of degree and quality of culture, of taste, and of natural gift. no set rules can bring charm of voice and speech to a person whose feeling and habitual point of view are fundamentally wrong; the person whose habitual feeling and mental attitude are fundamentally right needs few or no rules. as the whole matter of story-telling is in the first instance an expression of the complex personal product, so will this feature of it vary in perfection according to the beauty and culture of the human mechanism manifesting it. a few generally applicable suggestions may, however, be useful,--always assuming the story-teller to have the fundamental qualifications of fine and wholesome habit. these are not rules for the art of speaking; they are merely some practical considerations regarding speaking to an audience. first, i would reiterate my earlier advice, be simple. affectation is the worst enemy of voice and enunciation alike. slovenly enunciation is certainly very dreadful, but the unregenerate may be pardoned if they prefer it to the affected mouthing which some over-nice people without due sense of values expend on every syllable which is so unlucky as to fall between their teeth. next i would urge avoidance of a fault very common with those who speak much in large rooms,--the mistaken effort at loudness. this results in tightening and straining the throat, finally producing nasal head-tones or a voice of metallic harshness. and it is entirely unnecessary. there is no need to speak loudly. the ordinary schoolroom needs no vocal effort. a hall seating three or four hundred persons demands no effort whatever beyond a certain clearness and definiteness of speech. a hall seating from five to eight hundred needs more skill in aiming the voice, but still demands no shouting. it is indeed largely the psychological quality of a tone that makes it reach in through the ear to the comprehension. the quiet, clear, restful, persuasive tone of a speaker who knows his power goes straight home; but loud speech confuses. never speak loudly. in a small room, speak as gently and easily as in conversation; in a large room, think of the people farthest away, and speak clearly, with a slight separation between words, and with definite phrasing,--aiming your _mind_ toward the distant listeners. if one is conscious of nasality or throatiness of voice, it certainly pays to study the subject seriously with an intelligent teacher. but a good, natural speaking-voice, free from extraordinary vices, will fill all the requirements of story-telling to small audiences, without other attention than comes indirectly from following the general principles of the art. to sum it all up, then, let us say of the method likely to bring success in telling stories, that it includes sympathy, grasp, spontaneity: one must appreciate the story, and know it; and then, using the realising imagination as a constant vivifying force, and dominated by the mood of the story, one must tell it with all one's might,--simply, vitally, joyously. chapter v some specific schoolroom uses of story-telling in chapter ii., i have tried to give my conception of the general aim of story-telling in school. from that conception, it is not difficult to deduce certain specific uses. the one most plainly intimated is that of a brief recreation period, a feature which has proved valuable in many classes. less definitely implied, but not to be ignored, was the use of the story during, or accessory to, the lesson in science or history. but more distinctive and valuable than these, i think, is a specific use which i have recently had the pleasure of seeing exemplified in great completeness in the schools of providence, rhode island. some four years ago, the assistant superintendent of schools of that city, miss ella l. sweeney, introduced a rather unusual and extended application of the story in her primary classes. while the experiment was in its early stages, it was my good fortune to be allowed to make suggestions for its development, and as the devices in question were those i had been accustomed to use as a pastime for children, i was able to take some slight hand in the formative work of its adoption as an educational method. carried out most ably by the teachers to whom it was entrusted, the plan has evolved into a more inclusive and systematic one than was at first hoped for; it is one from which i have been grateful to learn. tersely stated, the object of the general plan is the freeing and developing of the power of expression in the pupils. i think there can be no need of dwelling on the desirability of this result. the apathy and "woodenness" of children under average modes of pedagogy is apparent to anyone who is interested enough to observe. in elementary work, the most noticeable lack of natural expression is probably in the reading classes; the same drawback appears at a later stage in english composition. but all along the line every thoughtful teacher knows how difficult it is to obtain spontaneous, creative reaction on material given. story-telling has a real mission to perform in setting free the natural creative expression of children, and in vitalising the general atmosphere of the school. the method in use for this purpose in providence (and probably elsewhere, as ideas usually germinate in more than one place at once) is a threefold _giving back_ of the story by the children. two of the forms of reproduction are familiar to many teachers; the first is the obvious one of telling the story back again. it is such fun to listen to a good story that children remember it without effort, and later, when asked if they can tell the story of _the red-headed woodpecker_ or _the little red hen_, they are as eager to try it as if it were a personal experience which they were burning to impart. each pupil, in the providence classes, is given a chance to try each story, at some time. then that one which each has told especially well is allotted to him for his own particular story, on which he has an especial claim thereafter. it is surprising to note how comparatively individual and distinctive the expression of voice and manner becomes, after a short time. the child instinctively emphasises the points which appeal to him, and the element of fun in it all helps to bring forgetfulness of self. the main inflections and the general tenor of the language, however, remain imitative, as is natural with children. but this is a gain rather than otherwise, for it is useful in forming good habit. in no other part of her work, probably, has a teacher so good a chance to foster in her pupils pleasant habits of enunciation and voice. and this is especially worth while in the big city schools, where so many children come from homes where the english of the tenement is spoken. i have since wished that every city primary teacher could have visited with me the first-grade room in providence where the pupils were german, russian, or polish jews, and where some of them had heard no english previous to that year,--it being then may. the joy that shone on their faces was nothing less than radiance when the low-voiced teacher said, "would you like to tell these ladies some of your stories?" they told us their stories, and there was truly not one told poorly or inexpressively; all the children had learned something of the joy of creative effort. but one little fellow stands out in my memory beyond all the rest, yet as a type of all the rest. rudolph was very small, and square, and merry of eye; life was one eagerness and expectancy to him. he knew no english beyond that of one school year. but he stood staunchly in his place and told me the story of the little half chick with an abandon and bodily emphasis which left no doubt of his sympathetic understanding of every word. the depth of moral reproach in his tone was quite beyond description when he said, "little half chick, little half chick, when _i_ was in trubbul you wouldn't help _me_!" he heartily relished that repetition, and became more dramatic each time. through it all, in the tones of the tender little voice, the sidewise pose of the neat dark head, and the occasional use of a chubby pointing finger, one could trace a vague reflection of the teacher's manner. it was not strong enough to dominate at all over the child's personality, but it was strong enough to suggest possibilities. in different rooms, i was told _the half chick_, _the little red hen_, _the three bears_, _the red-headed woodpecker_, _the fox and the grapes_, and many other simple stories, and in every instance there was a noticeable degree of spontaneity and command of expression. when the reading classes were held, the influence of this work was very visible. it had crept into the teachers' method, as well as the children's attitude. the story interest was still paramount. in the discussion, in the teachers' remarks, and in the actual reading, there was a joyousness and an interest in the subject-matter which totally precluded that preoccupation with sounds and syllables so deadly to any real progress in reading. there was less of the mechanical in the reading than in any i had heard in my visits to schools; but it was exceptionally accurate. the second form of giving back which has proved a keen pleasure and a stimulus to growth is a kind of "seat-work." the children are allowed to make original illustrations of the stories by cutting silhouette pictures. it will be readily seen that no child can do this without visualising each image very perfectly. in the simplest and most unconscious way possible, the small artists are developing the power of conceiving and holding the concrete image of an idea given, the power which is at the bottom of all arts of expression. through the kindness of miss sweeney, i am able to insert several of these illustrations. they are entirely original, and were made without any thought of such a use as this. the pictures and the retelling are both popular with children, but neither is as dear to them as the third form of reproduction of which i wish to speak. this third kind is taken entirely on the ground of play, and no visibly didactic element enters into it. it consists simply of _playing the story_. when a good story with a simple sequence has been told, and while the children are still athrill with the delight of it, they are told they may play it. [illustration: the fox and the grapes] [illustration: "there was an old woman who lived in a shoe"] "who would like to be red riding hood?" says the teacher; up go the little girls' hands, and mary or hannah or gertrude is chosen. "who will be the wolf?" johnny or marcus becomes the wolf. the kind woodchopper and the mother are also happily distributed, for in these little dramatic companies it is an all-star cast, and no one realises any indignity in a subordinate _rôle_. "now, where shall we have little red riding hood's house? 'over in that corner,' katie? very well, riding hood shall live over there. and where shall the grandmother's cottage be?" the children decide that it must be a long distance through the wood,--half-way round the schoolroom, in fact. the wolf selects the spot where he will meet red riding hood, and the woodchopper chooses a position from which he can rush in at the critical moment, to save red riding hood's life. then, with gusto good to see, they play the game. the teacher makes no suggestions; each actor creates his part. some children prove extremely expressive and facile, while others are limited by nature. but each is left to his spontaneous action. [illustration: "great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats ... followed the piper for their lives."] in the course of several days several sets of children have been allowed to try; then if any of them are notably good in the several _rôles_, they are given an especial privilege in that story, as was done with the retelling. when a child expresses a part badly, the teacher sometimes asks if anyone thinks of another way to do it; from different examples offered, the children then choose the one they prefer; this is adopted. at no point is the teacher apparently teaching. she lets the audience teach itself and its actors. the children played a good many stories for me during my visit in providence. of them all, _red riding hood_, _the fox and the grapes_, and _the lion and the mouse_ were most vividly done. it will be long before the chief of the little red riding hoods fades from my memory. she had a dark, foreign little face, with a good deal of darker hair tied back from it, and brown, expressive hands. her eyes were so full of dancing lights that when they met mine unexpectedly it was as if a chance reflection had dazzled me. when she was told that she might play, she came up for her riding hood like an embodied delight, almost dancing as she moved. (her teacher used a few simple elements of stage-setting for her stories, such as bowls for the bears, a cape for riding hood, and so on.) [illustration: "the piper piped and the children danced, ... all but one little lame boy, who could not keep up with the rest."] the game began at once. riding hood started from the rear corner of the room, basket on arm; her mother gave her strict injunctions as to lingering on the way, and she returned a respectful "yes, mother." then she trotted round the aisle, greeting the woodchopper on the way, to the deep wood which lay close by the teacher's desk. there master wolf was waiting, and there the two held converse,--master wolf very crafty indeed, red riding hood extremely polite. the wolf then darted on ahead and crouched down in the corner which represented grandmother's bed. riding hood tripped sedately to the imaginary door, and knocked. the familiar dialogue followed, and with the words "the better to eat you with, my dear!" the wolf clutched red riding hood, to eat her up. but we were not forced to undergo the threatened scene of horrid carnage, as the woodchopper opportunely arrived, and stated calmly, "i will not let you kill little red riding hood." all was now happily culminated, and with the chopper's grave injunction as to future conduct in her ears, the rescued heroine tiptoed out of the woods, to her seat. i wanted to applaud, but i realised in the nick of time that we were all playing, and held my peace. [illustration: hiawatha pictures] _the fox and the grapes_ was more dramatically done, but was given by a single child. he was the chosen "fox" of another primary room, and had the fair colouring and sturdy frame which matched his swedish name. he was naturally dramatic. it was easy to see that he instinctively visualised everything, and this he did so strongly that he suggested to the onlooker every detail of the scene. he chose for his grape-trellis the rear wall of the room. standing there, he looked longingly up at the invisible bunch of grapes. "my gracious," he said, "what fine grapes! i will have some." then he jumped for them. "didn't get them," he muttered, "i'll try again," and he jumped higher. "didn't get them this time," he said disgustedly, and hopped up once more. then he stood still, looked up, shrugged his shoulders, and remarked in an absurdly worldly-wise tone, "those grapes are sour!" after which he walked away. of course the whole thing was infantile, and without a touch of grace; but it is no exaggeration to say that the child did what many grown-up actors fail to do,--he preserved the illusion. it was in still another room that i saw the lion and mouse fable played. the lion lay flat on the floor for his nap, but started up when he found his paw laid on the little mouse, who crouched as small as she could beside him. (the mouse was by nature rather larger than the lion, but she called what art she might to her assistance.) the mouse persuaded the lion to lift his paw, and ran away. presently a most horrific groaning emanated from the lion. the mouse ran up, looked him over, and soliloquised in precise language,--evidently remembered, "what is the matter with the lion? oh, i see; he is caught in a trap." and then she gnawed with her teeth at the imaginary rope which bound him. "what makes you so kind to me, little mouse?" said the rescued lion. "you let me go, when i asked you," said the mouse demurely. "thank you, little mouse," answered the lion; and therewith, finis. it is not impossible that all this play atmosphere may seem incongruous and unnecessary to teachers used to more conventional methods, but i feel sure that an actual experience of it would modify that point of view conclusively. the children of the schools where story-telling and "dramatising" were practised were startlingly better in reading, in attentiveness, and in general power of expression, than the pupils of like social conditions in the same grades of other cities which i visited soon after, and in which the more conventional methods were exclusively used. the teachers, also, were stronger in power of expression. but the most noticeable, though the least tangible, difference was in the moral atmosphere of the schoolroom. there had been a great gain in vitality in all the rooms where stories were a part of the work. it had acted and reacted on pupils and teachers alike. the telling of a story well so depends on being thoroughly vitalised that, naturally, habitual telling had resulted in habitual vitalisation. this result was not, of course, wholly due to the practice of story-telling, but it was in some measure due to that. and it was a result worth the effort. i beg to urge these specific uses of stories, as both recreative and developing, and as especially tending toward enlarged power of expression: retelling the story; illustrating the story in seat-work; dramatisation. stories selected and adapted for telling especially for kindergarten and class i. wee willie winkie runs through the town, upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown, rapping at the window, crying through the lock, "are the children in their beds, for now it's eight o'clock?" * * * * * there was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile, he found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; he bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, and they all lived together in a little crooked house. * * * * * cushy cow bonny, let down thy milk, and i will give thee a gown of silk; a gown of silk and a silver tee, if thou wilt let down thy milk to me. * * * * * "little girl, little girl, where have you been?" "gathering roses to give to the queen." "little girl, little girl, what gave she you?" "she gave me a diamond as big as my shoe." * * * * * little bo-peep has lost her sheep, and can't tell where to find them; leave them alone, and they'll come home, and bring their tails behind them. little bo-peep fell fast asleep, and dreamt she heard them bleating; but when she awoke, she found it a joke, for still they all were fleeting. then up she took her little crook, determin'd for to find them; she found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed, for they'd left their tails behind them. five little white heads[ ] [footnote : from _mother-song and child-song_, charlotte brewster jordan.] by walter learned five little white heads peeped out of the mould, when the dew was damp and the night was cold; and they crowded their way through the soil with pride; "hurrah! we are going to be mushrooms!" they cried. but the sun came up, and the sun shone down, and the little white heads were withered and brown; long were their faces, their pride had a fall-- they were nothing but toadstools, after all. bird thoughts[ ] [footnote : _ibid_.] i lived first in a little house, and lived there very well; i thought the world was small and round, and made of pale blue shell. i lived next in a little nest, nor needed any other; i thought the world was made of straw, and brooded by my mother. one day i fluttered from the nest to see what i could find. i said, "the world is made of leaves; i have been very blind." at length i flew beyond the tree, quite fit for grown-up labours. i don't know how the world _is_ made, and neither do my neighbours! how we came to have pink roses[ ] [footnote : told me by miss elizabeth mccracken.] once, ever and ever so long ago, we didn't have any pink roses. all the roses in the world were white. there weren't any red ones at all, any yellow ones, or any pink ones,--only white roses. and one morning, very early, a little white rosebud woke up, and saw the sun looking at her. he stared so hard that the little white rosebud did not know what to do; so she looked up at him and said, "why are you looking at me so hard?" "because you are so pretty!" said the big round sun. and the little white rosebud blushed! she blushed pink. and all her children after her were little pink roses! raggylug[ ] [footnote : adapted from mr ernest thompson seton's _wild animals i have known._ (david nutt, - long acre, w.c. s. net.)] once there was a little furry rabbit, who lived with his mother deep down in a nest under the long grass. his name was raggylug, and his mother's name was molly cottontail. every morning, when molly cottontail went out to hunt for food, she said to raggylug, "now, raggylug, lie still, and make no noise. no matter what you hear, no matter what you see, don't you move. remember you are only a baby rabbit, and lie low." and raggylug always said he would. one day, after his mother had gone, he was lying very still in the nest, looking up through the feathery grass. by just cocking his eye, so, he could see what was going on up in the world. once a big blue-jay perched on a twig above him, and scolded someone very loudly; he kept saying, "thief! thief!" but raggylug never moved his nose, nor his paws; he lay still. once a lady-bird took a walk down a blade of grass, over his head; she was so top-heavy that pretty soon she tumbled off and fell to the bottom, and had to begin all over again. but raggylug never moved his nose nor his paws; he lay still. the sun was warm, and it was very still. suddenly raggylug heard a little sound, far off. it sounded like "swish, swish," very soft and far away. he listened. it was a queer little sound, low down in the grass, "rustle--rustle--rustle"; raggylug was interested. but he never moved his nose or his paws; he lay still. then the sound came nearer, "rustle--rustle--rustle"; then grew fainter, then came nearer; in and out, nearer and nearer, like something coming; only, when raggylug heard anything coming he always heard its feet, stepping ever so softly. what could it be that came so smoothly,--rustle--rustle--without any feet? he forgot his mother's warning, and sat up on his hind paws; the sound stopped then. "pooh," thought raggylug, "i'm not a baby rabbit, i am three weeks old; i'll find out what this is." he stuck his head over the top of the nest, and looked--straight into the wicked eyes of a great big snake. "mammy, mammy!" screamed raggylug. "oh, mammy, mam--" but he couldn't scream any more, for the big snake had his ear in his mouth and was winding about the soft little body, squeezing raggylug's life out. he tried to call "mammy!" again, but he could not breathe. ah, but mammy had heard the first cry. straight over the fields she flew, leaping the stones and hummocks, fast as the wind, to save her baby. she wasn't a timid little cottontail rabbit then; she was a mother whose child was in danger. and when she came to raggylug and the big snake, she took one look, and then hop! hop! she went over the snake's back; and as she jumped she struck at the snake with her strong hind claws so that they tore his skin. he hissed with rage, but he did not let go. hop! hop! she went again, and this time she hurt him so that he twisted and turned; but he held on to raggylug. once more the mother rabbit hopped, and once more she struck and tore the snake's back with her sharp claws. zzz! how she hurt! the snake dropped raggy to strike at her, and raggy rolled on to his feet and ran. "run, raggylug, run!" said his mother, keeping the snake busy with her jumps; and you may believe raggylug ran! just as soon as he was out of the way his mother came too, and showed him where to go. when she ran, there was a little white patch that showed under her tail; that was for raggy to follow,--he followed it now. far, far away she led him, through the long grass, to a place where the big snake could not find him, and there she made a new nest. and this time, when she told raggylug to lie low you'd better believe he minded! the golden cobwebs[ ] a story to tell by the christmas tree [footnote : this story was told me in the mother-tongue of a german friend, at the kindly instance of a common friend of both; the narrator had heard it at home from the lips of a father of story-loving children for whom he often invented such little tales. the present adaptation has passed by hearsay through so many minds that it is perhaps little like the original, but i venture to hope it has a touch of the original fancy, at least.] i am going to tell you a story about something wonderful that happened to a christmas tree like this, ever and ever so long ago, when it was once upon a time. it was before christmas, and the tree was trimmed with bright spangled threads and many-coloured candles and (name the trimmings of the tree before you), and it stood safely out of sight in a room where the doors were locked, so that the children should not see it before the proper time. but ever so many other little house-people had seen it. the big black pussy saw it with her great green eyes; the little grey kitty saw it with her little blue eyes; the kind house-dog saw it with his steady brown eyes; the yellow canary saw it with his wise, bright eyes. even the wee, wee mice that were so afraid of the cat had peeped one peep when no one was by. but there was someone who hadn't seen the christmas tree. it was the little grey spider! you see, the spiders lived in the corners,--the warm corners of the sunny attic and the dark corners of the nice cellar. and they were expecting to see the christmas tree as much as anybody. but just before christmas a great cleaning-up began in the house. the house-mother came sweeping and dusting and wiping and scrubbing, to make everything grand and clean for the christ-child's birthday. her broom went into all the corners, poke, poke,--and of course the spiders had to run. dear, dear, _how_ the spiders had to run! not one could stay in the house while the christmas cleanness lasted. so, you see, they couldn't see the christmas tree. spiders like to know all about everything, and see all there is to see, and these were very sad. so at last they went to the christ-child and told him about it. "all the others see the christmas tree, dear christ-child," they said; "but we, who are so domestic and so fond of beautiful things, we are _cleaned up_! we cannot see it, at all." the christ-child was sorry for the little spiders when he heard this, and he said they should see the christmas tree. the day before christmas, when nobody was noticing, he let them all go in, to look as long as ever they liked. they came creepy, creepy, down the attic stairs, creepy, creepy, up the cellar stairs, creepy, creepy, along the halls,--and into the beautiful room. the fat mother spiders and the old papa spiders were there, and all the little teeny, tiny, curly spiders, the baby ones. and then they looked! round and round the tree they crawled, and looked and looked and looked. oh, what a good time they had! they thought it was perfectly beautiful. and when they had looked at everything they could see from the floor, they started up the tree to see more. all over the tree they ran, creepy, crawly, looking at every single thing. up and down, in and out, over every branch and twig, the little spiders ran, and saw every one of the pretty things right up close. they stayed till they had seen all there was to see, you may be sure, and then they went away at last, _quite_ happy. then, in the still, dark night before christmas day, the dear christ-child came, to bless the tree for the children. but when he looked at it--_what_ do you suppose?--it was covered with cobwebs! everywhere the little spiders had been they had left a spider-web; and you know they had been everywhere. so the tree was covered from its trunk to its tip with spider-webs, all hanging from the branches and looped round the twigs; it was a strange sight. what could the christ-child do? he knew that house-mothers do not like cobwebs; it would never, never do to have a christmas tree covered with those. no, indeed. so the dear christ-child touched the spider's webs, and turned them all to gold! wasn't that a lovely trimming? they shone and shone, all over the beautiful tree. and that is the way the christmas tree came to have golden cobwebs on it. why the morning-glory climbs[ ] [footnote : this story was given me by miss elisabeth mccracken, who wrote it some years ago in a larger form, and who told it to me in the way she had told it to many children of her acquaintance.] once the morning-glory was flat on the ground. she grew that way, and she had never climbed at all. up in the top of a tree near her lived mrs jennie wren and her little baby wren. the little wren was lame; he had a broken wing and couldn't fly. he stayed in the nest all day. but the mother wren told him all about what she saw in the world, when she came flying home at night. she used to tell him about the beautiful morning-glory she saw on the ground. she told him about the morning-glory every day, until the little wren was filled with a desire to see her for himself. "how i wish i could see the morning-glory!" he said. the morning-glory heard this, and she longed to let the little wren see her face. she pulled herself along the ground, a little at a time, until she was at the foot of the tree where the little wren lived. but she could not get any farther, because she did not know how to climb. at last she wanted to go up so much, that she caught hold of the bark of the tree, and pulled herself up a little. and little by little, before she knew it, she was climbing. and she climbed right up the tree to the little wren's nest, and put her sweet face over the edge of the nest, where the little wren could see. that was how the morning-glory came to climb. the story of little tavwots[ ] [footnote : adapted from _the basket woman_, by mary austin.] this is the story an indian woman told a little white boy who lived with his father and mother near the indians' country; and tavwots is the name of the little rabbit. but once, long ago, tavwots was not little,--he was the largest of all four-footed things, and a mighty hunter. he used to hunt every day; as soon as it was day, and light enough to see, he used to get up, and go to his hunting. but every day he saw the track of a great foot on the trail, before him. this troubled him, for his pride was as big as his body. "who is this," he cried, "that goes before me to the hunting, and makes so great a stride? does he think to put me to shame?" "t'-sst!" said his mother, "there is none greater than thou." "still, there are the footprints in the trail," said tavwots. and the next morning he got up earlier; but still the great footprints and the mighty stride were before him. the next morning he got up still earlier; but there were the mighty foot-tracks and the long, long stride. "now i will set me a trap for this impudent fellow," said tavwots, for he was very cunning. so he made a snare of his bowstring and set it in the trail overnight. and when in the morning he went to look, behold, he had caught the sun in his snare! all that part of the earth was beginning to smoke with the heat of it. "is it you who made the tracks in my trail?" cried tavwots. "it is i," said the sun; "come and set me free, before the whole earth is afire." then tavwots saw what he had to do, and he drew his sharp hunting-knife and ran to cut the bowstring. but the heat was so great that he ran back before he had done it; and when he ran back he was melted down to half his size! then the earth began to burn, and the smoke curled up against the sky. "come again, tavwots," cried the sun. and tavwots ran again to cut the bowstring. but the heat was so great that he ran back before he had done it, and he was melted down to a quarter of his size! "come again, tavwots, and quickly," cried the sun, "or all the world will be burnt up." and tavwots ran again; this time he cut the bowstring and set the sun free. but when he got back he was melted down to the size he is now! only one thing is left of all his greatness: you may still see by the print of his feet as he leaps in the trail, how great his stride was when he caught the sun in his snare. the pig brother[ ] [footnote : from _the golden windows_, by laura e. richards. (h.r. allenson ltd. s. d. net.)] there was once a child who was untidy. he left his books on the floor, and his muddy shoes on the table; he put his fingers in the jam pots, and spilled ink on his best pinafore; there was really no end to his untidiness. one day the tidy angel came into his nursery. "this will never do!" said the angel. "this is really shocking. you must go out and stay with your brother while i set things to rights here." "i have no brother!" said the child. "yes, you have," said the angel. "you may not know him, but he will know you. go out in the garden and watch for him, and he will soon come." "i don't know what you mean!" said the child; but he went out into the garden and waited. presently a squirrel came along, whisking his tail. "are you my brother?" asked the child. the squirrel looked him over carefully. "well, i should hope not!" he said. "my fur is neat and smooth, my nest is handsomely made, and in perfect order, and my young ones are properly brought up. why do you insult me by asking such a question?" he whisked off, and the child waited. presently a wren came hopping by. "are you my brother?" asked the child. "no, indeed!" said the wren. "what impertinence! you will find no tidier person than i in the whole garden. not a feather is out of place, and my eggs are the wonder of all for smoothness and beauty. brother, indeed!" he hopped off, ruffling his feathers, and the child waited. by-and-by a large tommy cat came along. "are you my brother?" asked the child. "go and look at yourself in the glass," said the tommy cat haughtily, "and you will have your answer. i have been washing myself in the sun all the morning, while it is clear that no water has come near you for a long time. there are no such creatures as you in my family, i am humbly thankful to say." he walked on, waving his tail, and the child waited. presently a pig came trotting along. the child did not wish to ask the pig if he were his brother, but the pig did not wait to be asked. "hallo, brother!" he grunted. "i am not your brother!" said the child. "oh yes, you are!" said the pig. "i confess i am not proud of you, but there is no mistaking the members of our family. come along, and have a good roll in the barnyard! there is some lovely black mud there." "i don't like to roll in mud!" said the child. "tell that to the hens!" said the pig brother. "look at your hands and your shoes, and your pinafore! come along, i say! you may have some of the pig-wash for supper, if there is more than i want." "i don't want pig-wash!" said the child; and he began to cry. just then the tidy angel came out. "i have set everything to rights," she said, "and so it must stay. now, will you go with the pig brother, or will you come back with me, and be a tidy child?" "with you, with you!" cried the child; and he clung to the angel's dress. the pig brother grunted. "small loss!" he said. "there will be all the more wash for me!" and he trotted off. the cake[ ] [footnote : from _the golden windows_, by laura e. richards. (h.r. allenson ltd. s. d. net.)] a child quarrelled with his brother one day about a cake. "it is my cake!" said the child. "no, it is mine!" said his brother. "you shall not have it!" said the child. "give it to me this minute!" and he fell upon his brother and beat him. just then came by an angel who knew the child. "who is this that you are beating?" asked the angel. "it is my brother," said the child. "no, but truly," said the angel, "who is it?" "it is my brother, i tell you!" said the child. "oh no," said the angel, "that cannot be; and it seems a pity for you to tell an untruth, because that makes spots on your soul. if it were your brother, you would not beat him." "but he has my cake!" said the child. "oh," said the angel, "now i see my mistake. you mean that the cake is your brother; and that seems a pity, too, for it does not look like a very good cake,--and, besides, it is all crumbled to pieces." the pied piper of hamelin town[ ] [footnote : from traditions, with rhymes from browning's _the pied piper of hamelin_.] once i made a pleasure trip to a country called germany; and i went to a funny little town, where all the streets ran uphill. at the top there was a big mountain, steep like the roof of a house, and at the bottom there was a big river, broad and slow. and the funniest thing about the little town was that all the shops had the same thing in them; bakers' shops, grocers' shops, everywhere we went we saw the same thing,--big chocolate rats, rats and mice, made out of chocolate. we were so surprised that after a while, "why do you have rats in your shops?" we asked. "don't you know this is hamelin town?" they said. "what of that?" said we. "why, hamelin town is where the pied piper came," they told us; "surely you know about the pied piper?" "_what_ about the pied piper?" we said. and this is what they told us about him. it seems that once, long, long ago, that little town was dreadfully troubled with rats. the houses were full of them, the shops were full of them, the churches were full of them, they were _everywhere_. the people were all but eaten out of house and home. those rats, they fought the dogs and killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats, and licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, split open the kegs of salted sprats, made nests inside men's sunday hats, and even spoiled the women's chats by drowning their speaking with shrieking and squeaking in fifty different sharps and flats! at last it got so bad that the people simply couldn't stand it any longer. so they all came together and went to the town hall, and they said to the mayor (you know what a mayor is?), "see here, what do we pay you your salary for? what are you good for, if you can't do a little thing like getting rid of these rats? you must go to work and clear the town of them; find the remedy that's lacking, or--we'll send you packing!" well, the poor mayor was in a terrible way. what to do he didn't know. he sat with his head in his hands, and thought and thought and thought. suddenly there came a little _rat-tat_ at the door. oh! how the mayor jumped! his poor old heart went pit-a-pat at anything like the sound of a rat. but it was only the scraping of shoes on the mat. so the mayor sat up, and said, "come in!" and in came the strangest figure! it was a man, very tall and very thin, with a sharp chin and a mouth where the smiles went out and in, and two blue eyes, each like a pin; and he was dressed half in red and half in yellow--he really was the strangest fellow!--and round his neck he had a long red and yellow ribbon, and on it was hung a thing something like a flute, and his fingers went straying up and down it as if he wanted to be playing. he came up to the mayor and said, "i hear you are troubled with rats in this town." "i should say we were," groaned the mayor. "would you like to get rid of them? i can do it for you." "you can?" cried the mayor. "how? who are you?" "men call me the pied piper," said the man, "and i know a way to draw after me everything that walks, or flies, or swims. what will you give me if i rid your town of rats?" "anything, anything," said the mayor. "i don't believe you can do it, but if you can, i'll give you a thousand guineas." "all right," said the piper, "it is a bargain." and then he went to the door and stepped out into the street and stood, and put the long flute-like thing to his lips, and began to play a little tune. a strange, high, little tune. and before three shrill notes the pipe uttered, you heard as if an army muttered; and the muttering grew to a grumbling; and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; and out of the houses the rats came tumbling! great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats, grave old plodders, gay young friskers, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, cocking tails and pricking whiskers, families by tens and dozens, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives-- followed the piper for their lives! from street to street he piped, advancing, from street to street they followed, dancing. up one street and down another, till they came to the edge of the big river, and there the piper turned sharply about and stepped aside, and all those rats tumbled hurry skurry, head over heels, down the bank into the river _and--were--drowned_. every single one. no, there was one big old fat rat; he was so fat he didn't sink, and he swam across, and ran away to tell the tale. then the piper came back to the town hall. and all the people were waving their hats and shouting for joy. the mayor said they would have a big celebration, and build a tremendous bonfire in the middle of the town. he asked the piper to stay and see the bonfire,--very politely. "yes," said the piper, "that will be very nice; but first, if you please, i should like my thousand guineas." "h'm,--er--ahem!" said the mayor. "you mean that little joke of mine; of course that was a joke." (you see it is always harder to pay for a thing when you no longer need it.) "i do not joke," said the piper very quietly; "my thousand guineas, if you please." "oh, come, now," said the mayor, "you know very well it wasn't worth sixpence to play a little tune like that; call it one guinea, and let it go at that." "a bargain is a bargain," said the piper; "for the last time,--will you give me my thousand guineas?" "i'll give you a pipe of tobacco, something good to eat, and call you lucky at that!" said the mayor, tossing his head. then the piper's mouth grew strange and thin, and sharp blue and green lights began dancing in his eyes, and he said to the mayor very softly, "i know another tune than that i played; i play it to those who play me false." "play what you please! you can't frighten me! do your worst!" said the mayor, making himself big. then the piper stood high up on the steps of the town hall, and put the pipe to his lips, and began to play a little tune. it was quite a different little tune, this time, very soft and sweet, and very, very strange. and before he had played three notes, you heard a rustling, that seemed like a bustling of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling; small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering, little hands clapping and little tongues chattering, and like fowls in a farmyard when barley is scattering, out came the children running. all the little boys and girls, with rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, and sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, tripping and skipping, ran merrily after the wonderful music with shouting and laughter. "stop, stop!" cried the people. "he is taking our children! stop him, mr mayor!" "i will give you your money, i will!" cried the mayor, and tried to run after the piper. but the very same music that made the children dance made the grown-up people stand stock-still; it was as if their feet had been tied to the ground; they could not move a muscle. there they stood and saw the piper move slowly down the street, playing his little tune, with the children at his heels. on and on he went; on and on the children danced; till he came to the bank of the river. "oh, oh! he will drown our children in the river!" cried the people. but the piper turned and went along by the bank, and all the children followed after. up, and up, and up the hill they went, straight toward the mountain which is like the roof of a house. and just as they got to it, the mountain _opened_,--like two great doors, and the piper went in through the opening, playing the little tune, and the children danced after him--and--just as they got through--the great doors slid together again and shut them all in! every single one. no, there was one little lame child, who couldn't keep up with the rest and didn't get there in time. but none of his little companions ever came back any more, not one. but years and years afterward, when the fat old rat who swam across the river was a grandfather, his children used to ask him, "what made you follow the music, grandfather?" and he used to tell them, "my dears, when i heard that tune i thought i heard the moving aside of pickle-tub boards, and the leaving ajar of preserve cupboards, and i smelled the most delicious old cheese in the world, and i saw sugar barrels ahead of me; and then, just as a great yellow cheese seemed to be saying, 'come, bore me'--i felt the river rolling o'er me!" and in the same way the people asked the little lame child, "what made you follow the music?" "i do not know what the others heard," he said, "but i, when the piper began to play, i heard a voice that told of a wonderful country hard by, where the bees had no stings and the horses had wings, and the trees bore wonderful fruits, where no one was tired or lame, and children played all day; and just as the beautiful country was but one step away--the mountain closed on my playmates, and i was left alone." that was all the people ever knew. the children never came back. all that was left of the piper and the rats was just the big street that led to the river; so they called it the street of the pied piper. and that is the end of the story. why the evergreen trees keep their leaves in winter[ ] [footnote : adapted from florence holbrook's _a book of nature myths_. (harrap & co. d.)] one day, a long, long time ago, it was very cold; winter was coming. and all the birds flew away to the warm south, to wait for the spring. but one little bird had a broken wing and could not fly. he did not know what to do. he looked all round, to see if there was any place where he could keep warm. and he saw the trees of the great forest. "perhaps the trees will keep me warm through the winter," he said. so he went to the edge of the forest, hopping and fluttering with his broken wing. the first tree he came to was a slim silver birch. "beautiful birch-tree," he said, "will you let me live in your warm branches until the springtime comes?" "dear me!" said the birch-tree, "what a thing to ask! i have to take care of my own leaves through the winter; that is enough for me. go away." the little bird hopped and fluttered with his broken wing until he came to the next tree. it was a great, big oak-tree. "o big oak-tree," said the little bird, "will you let me live in your warm branches until the springtime comes?" "dear me," said the oak-tree, "what a thing to ask! if you stay in my branches all winter you will be eating my acorns. go away." so the little bird hopped and fluttered with his broken wing till he came to the willow-tree by the edge of the brook. "o beautiful willow-tree," said the little bird, "will you let me live in your warm branches until the springtime comes?" "no, indeed," said the willow-tree; "i never speak to strangers. go away." the poor little bird did not know where to go; but he hopped and fluttered along with his broken wing. presently the spruce-tree saw him, and said, "where are you going, little bird?" "i do not know," said the bird; "the trees will not let me live with them, and my wing is broken so that i cannot fly." "you may live on one of my branches," said the spruce; "here is the warmest one of all." "but may i stay all winter?" "yes," said the spruce; "i shall like to have you." the pine-tree stood beside the spruce, and when he saw the little bird hopping and fluttering with his broken wing, he said, "my branches are not very warm, but i can keep the wind off because i am big and strong." so the little bird fluttered up into the warm branch of the spruce, and the pine-tree kept the wind off his house; then the juniper-tree saw what was going on, and said that she would give the little bird his dinner all the winter, from her branches. juniper berries are very good for little birds. the little bird was very comfortable in his warm nest sheltered from the wind, with juniper berries to eat. the trees at the edge of the forest remarked upon it to each other: "i wouldn't take care of a strange bird," said the birch. "i wouldn't risk my acorns," said the oak. "i would not speak to strangers," said the willow. and the three trees stood up very tall and proud. that night the north wind came to the woods to play. he puffed at the leaves with his icy breath, and every leaf he touched fell to the ground. he wanted to touch every leaf in the forest, for he loved to see the trees bare. "may i touch every leaf?" he said to his father, the frost king. "no," said the frost king, "the trees which were kind to the bird with the broken wing may keep their leaves." so north wind had to leave them alone, and the spruce, the pine, and the juniper-tree kept their leaves through all the winter. and they have done so ever since. the star dollars[ ] [footnote : adapted from grimms' _fairy tales_.] there was once a little girl who was very, very poor. her father and mother had died, and at last she had no little room to stay in, and no little bed to sleep in, and nothing more to eat except one piece of bread. so she said a prayer, put on her little jacket and her hood, and took her piece of bread in her hand, and went out into the world. when she had walked a little way, she met an old man, bent and thin. he looked at the piece of bread in her hand, and said, "will you give me your bread, little girl? i am very hungry." the little girl said, "yes," and gave him her piece of bread. when she had walked a little farther she came upon a child, sitting by the path, crying. "i am so cold!" said the child. "won't you give me your little hood, to keep my head warm?" the little girl took off her hood and tied it on the child's head. then she went on her way. after a time, as she went, she met another child. this one shivered with the cold, and she said to the little girl, "won't you give me your jacket, little girl?" and the little girl gave her her jacket. then she went on again. by-and-by she saw another child, crouching almost naked by the wayside. "o little girl," said the child, "won't you give me your dress? i have nothing to keep me warm." so the little girl took off her dress and gave it to the other child. and now she had nothing left but her little shirt. it grew dark, and the wind was cold, and the little girl crept into the woods, to sleep for the night. but in the woods a child stood, weeping and naked. "i am cold," she said, "give me your little shirt!" and the little girl thought, "it is dark, and the woods will shelter me; i will give her my little shirt"; so she did, and now she had nothing left in all the world. she stood looking up at the sky, to say her night-time prayer. as she looked up, the whole skyful of stars fell in a shower round her feet. there they were, on the ground, shining bright, and round. the little girl saw that they were silver dollars. and in the midst of them was the finest little shirt, all woven out of silk! the little girl put on the little silk shirt, and gathered the star dollars; and she was rich, all the days of her life. the lion and the gnat[ ] [footnote : this story has been told by the rev. albert e. sims to children in many parts of england. on one occasion it was told to an audience of over three thousand children in the great assembly hall, mile end, london.] far away in central africa, that vast land where dense forests and wild beasts abound, the shades of night were once more descending, warning all creatures that it was time to seek repose. all day long the sun had been like a great burning eye, but now, after painting the western sky with crimson and scarlet and gold, he had disappeared into his fleecy bed; the various creatures of the forest had sought their holes and resting-places; the last sound had rumbled its rumble, the last bee had mumbled his mumble, and the last bear had grumbled his grumble; even the grasshoppers that had been chirruping, chirruping, through all the long hours without a pause, at length had ceased their shrill music, tucked up their long legs, and given themselves to slumber. there on a nodding grass-blade, a tiny gnat had made a swinging couch, and he too had folded his wings, closed his tiny eyes, and was fast asleep. darker, darker, darker became the night until the darkness could almost be felt, and over all was a solemn stillness as though some powerful finger had been raised, and some potent voice had whispered, "hu--sh!" just when all was perfectly still, there came suddenly from the far away depths of the forest, like the roll of thunder, a mighty roar--r--r--r! in a moment all the beasts and birds were wide awake, and the poor little gnat was nearly frightened out of his little senses, and his little heart went pit-a-pat. he rubbed his little eyes with his feelers, and then peered all around trying to penetrate the deep gloom as he whispered in terror--_"what--was--that?"_ what do _you_ think it was?... yes, a lion! a great, big lion who, while most other denizens of the forest slept, was out hunting for prey. he came rushing and crashing through the thick undergrowth of the forest, swirling his long tail and opening wide his great jaws, and as he rushed he ro-ar-r-r-ed! presently he reached the spot where the little gnat hung panting at the tip of the waving grass-blade. now the little gnat was not afraid of lions, so when he saw it was only a lion, he cried out-- "hi, stop, stop! what are you making that horrible noise about?" the lion stopped short, then backed slowly and regarded the gnat with scorn. "why, you tiny, little, mean, insignificant creature you, how dare you speak to me?" he raged. "how dare i speak to you?" repeated the gnat quietly. "by the virtue of _right_, which is always greater than _might_. why don't you keep to your own part of the forest? what right have you to be here, disturbing folks at this time of night?" by a mighty effort the lion restrained his anger--he knew that to obtain mastery over others one must be master over oneself. "what _right_?" he repeated in dignified tones. "_because i'm king of the forest._ that's why. i can do no wrong, for all the other creatures of the forest are afraid of me. i do what i please, i say what i please, i eat whom i please, i go where i please--simply because i'm king of the forest." "but who told you you were king?" demanded the gnat. "just answer me that!" "who told me?" roared the lion. "why, everyone acknowledges it--don't i tell you that everyone is afraid of me?" "indeed!" cried the gnat disdainfully. "pray don't say _all_, for i'm not afraid of you. and further, i deny your right to be king." this was too much for the lion. he now worked himself into a perfect fury. "you--you--you deny my right as king?" "i _do_, and, what is more, you shall never be king until you have fought and conquered me." the lion laughed a great lion laugh, and a lion laugh cannot be laughed at like a cat laugh, as everyone ought to know. "fight--did you say fight?" he asked. "who ever heard of a lion fighting a gnat? here, out of my way, you atom of nothing! i'll blow you to the other end of the world." but though the lion puffed his cheeks until they were like great bellows, and then blew with all his might, he could not disturb the little gnat's hold on the swaying grass-blade. "you'll blow all your whiskers away if you are not careful," he said, with a laugh--"but you won't move me. and if you dare leave this spot without fighting me, i'll tell all the beasts of the forest that you are afraid of me, and they'll make _me_ king." "ho, ho!" roared the lion. "very well, since you will fight, let it be so." "you agree to the conditions, then? the one who conquers shall be king?" "oh, certainly," laughed the lion, for he expected an easy victory. "are you ready?" "quite ready." "then--go!" roared the lion. and with that he sprang forward with open jaws, thinking he could easily swallow a million gnats. but just as the great jaws were about to close upon the blade of grass whereto the gnat clung, what should happen but that the gnat suddenly spread his wings and nimbly flew--where do you think?--right into one of the lion's nostrils! and there he began to sting, sting, sting. the lion wondered, and thundered, and blundered--but the gnat went on stinging; he foamed, and he moaned, and he groaned--still the gnat went on stinging; he rubbed his head on the ground in agony, he swirled his tail in furious passion, he roared, he spluttered, he sniffed, he snuffed--and still the gnat went on stinging. "o my poor nose, my nose, my nose!" the lion began to moan. "come down, come down, come down! my nose, my nose, my nose!! you're king of the forest, you're king, you're king--only come down. my nose, my nose, my nose!" so at last the gnat flew out from the lion's nostril and went back to his waving grass-blade, while the lion slunk away into the depths of the forest with his tail between his legs--_beaten_, and by a tiny gnat! "what a fine fellow am i, to be sure!" exclaimed the gnat, as he proudly plumed his wings. "i've beaten a lion--a lion! dear me, i ought to have been king long ago, i'm so clever, so big, so strong--_oh!_" the gnat's frightened cry was caused by finding himself entangled in some silky sort of threads. while gloating over his victory, the wind had risen, and his grass-blade had swayed violently to and fro unnoticed by him. a stronger gust than usual had bent the blade downward close to the ground, and then something caught it and held it fast and with it the victorious gnat. oh, the desperate struggles he made to get free! alas! he became more entangled than ever. you can guess what it was--a spider's web, hung out from the overhanging branch of a tree. then--flipperty-flopperty, flipperty-flopperty, flop, flip, flop--down his stairs came cunning father spider and quickly gobbled up the little gnat for his supper, and that was the end of him. a strong lion--and what overcame him? _a gnat._ a clever gnat--and what overcame him? _a spider's web!_ he who had beaten the strong lion had been overcome by the subtle snare of a spider's thread. especially for classes ii. and iii. the cat and the parrot once there was a cat, and a parrot. and they had agreed to ask each other to dinner, turn and turn about: first the cat should ask the parrot, then the parrot should invite the cat, and so on. it was the cat's turn first. now the cat was very mean. he provided nothing at all for dinner except a pint of milk, a little slice of fish, and a biscuit. the parrot was too polite to complain, but he did not have a very good time. when it was his turn to invite the cat, he cooked a fine dinner. he had a roast of meat, a pot of tea, a basket of fruit, and, best of all, he baked a whole clothes-basketful of little cakes!--little, brown, crispy, spicy cakes! oh, i should say as many as five hundred. and he put four hundred and ninety-eight of the cakes before the cat, keeping only two for himself. well, the cat ate the roast, and drank the tea, and sucked the fruit, and then he began on the pile of cakes. he ate all the four hundred and ninety-eight cakes, and then he looked round and said:-- "i'm hungry; haven't you anything to eat?" "why," said the parrot, "here are my two cakes, if you want them?" the cat ate up the two cakes, and then he licked his chops and said, "i am beginning to get an appetite; have you anything to eat?" "well, really," said the parrot, who was now rather angry, "i don't see anything more, unless you wish to eat me!" he thought the cat would be ashamed when he heard that--but the cat just looked at him and licked his chops again,--and slip! slop! gobble! down his throat went the parrot! then the cat started down the street. an old woman was standing by, and she had seen the whole thing, and she was shocked that the cat should eat his friend. "why, cat!" she said, "how dreadful of you to eat your friend the parrot!" "parrot, indeed!" said the cat. "what's a parrot to me?--i've a great mind to eat you, too." and--before you could say "jack robinson"--slip! slop! gobble! down went the old woman! then the cat started down the road again, walking like this, because he felt so fine. pretty soon he met a man driving a donkey. the man was beating the donkey, to hurry him up, and when he saw the cat he said, "get out of my way, cat; i'm in a hurry and my donkey might tread on you." "donkey, indeed!" said the cat, "much i care for a donkey! i have eaten five hundred cakes, i've eaten my friend the parrot, i've eaten an old woman,--what's to hinder my eating a miserable man and a donkey?" and slip! slop! gobble! down went the old man and the donkey. then the cat walked on down the road, jauntily, like this. after a little, he met a procession, coming that way. the king was at the head, walking proudly with his newly married bride, and behind him were his soldiers, marching, and behind them were ever and ever so many elephants, walking two by two. the king felt very kind to everybody, because he had just been married, and he said to the cat, "get out of my way, pussy, get out of my way,--my elephants might hurt you." "hurt me!" said the cat, shaking his fat sides. "ho, ho! i've eaten five hundred cakes, i've eaten my friend the parrot, i've eaten an old woman, i've eaten a man and a donkey; what's to hinder my eating a beggarly king?" and slip! slop! gobble! down went the king; down went the queen; down went the soldiers,--and down went all the elephants! then the cat went on, more slowly; he had really had enough to eat, now. but a little farther on he met two land-crabs, scuttling along in the dust. "get out of our way, pussy," they squeaked. "ho, ho ho!" cried the cat in a terrible voice. "i've eaten five hundred cakes, i've eaten my friend the parrot, i've eaten an old woman, a man with a donkey, a king, a queen, his men-at-arms, and all his elephants; and now i'll eat you too." and slip! slop! gobble! down went the two land-crabs. when the land-crabs got down inside, they began to look around. it was very dark, but they could see the poor king sitting in a corner with his bride on his arm; she had fainted. near them were the men-at-arms, treading on one another's toes, and the elephants, still trying to form in twos,--but they couldn't, because there was not room. in the opposite corner sat the old woman, and near her stood the man and his donkey. but in the other corner was a great pile of cakes, and by them perched the parrot, his feathers all drooping. "let's get to work!" said the land-crabs. and, snip, snap, they began to make a little hole in the side, with their sharp claws. snip, snap, snip, snap,--till it was big enough to get through. then out they scuttled. then out walked the king, carrying his bride; out marched the men-at-arms; out tramped the elephants, two by two; out came the old man, beating his donkey; out walked the old woman, scolding the cat; and last of all, out hopped the parrot, holding a cake in each claw. (you remember, two cakes were all he wanted?) but the poor cat had to spend the whole day sewing up the hole in his coat! the rat princess[ ] [footnote : adapted from frank rinder's _old world japan_. in telling this story the voice should be changed for the sun, cloud, wind, and wall, as is always done in the old story of _the three bears_.] once upon a time, there was a rat princess, who lived with her father, the rat king, and her mother, the rat queen, in a ricefield in far away japan. the rat princess was so pretty that her father and mother were quite foolishly proud of her, and thought no one good enough to play with her. when she grew up, they would not let any of the rat princes come to visit her, and they decided at last that no one should marry her till they had found the most powerful person in the whole world; no one else was good enough. and the father rat started out to find the most powerful person in the whole world. the wisest and oldest rat in the ricefield said that the sun must be the most powerful person, because he made the rice grow and ripen; so the rat king went to find the sun. he climbed up the highest mountain, ran up the path of a rainbow, and travelled and travelled across the sky till he came to the sun's house. "what do you want, little brother?" the sun said, when he saw him. "i come," said the rat king, very importantly, "to offer you the hand of my daughter, the princess, because you are the most powerful person in the world; no one else is good enough." "ha, ha!" laughed the jolly round sun, and winked with his eye. "you are very kind, little brother, but if that is the case the princess is not for me; the cloud is more powerful than i am; when he passes over me i cannot shine." "oh, indeed," said the rat king, "then you are not my man at all"; and he left the sun without more words. the sun laughed and winked to himself. and the rat king travelled and travelled across the sky till he came to the cloud's house. "what do you want, little brother?" sighed the cloud when he saw him. "i come to offer you the hand of my daughter, the princess," said the rat king, "because you are the most powerful person in the world; the sun said so, and no one else is good enough." the cloud sighed again. "i am not the most powerful person," he said; "the wind is stronger than i,--when he blows, i have to go wherever he sends me." "then you are not the person for my daughter," said the rat king proudly; and he started at once to find the wind. he travelled and travelled across the sky, till he came at last to the wind's house, at the very edge of the world. when the wind saw him coming he laughed a big, gusty laugh, "ho, ho!" and asked him what he wanted; and when the rat king told him that he had come to offer him the rat princess's hand because he was the most powerful person in the world, the wind shouted a great gusty shout, and said, "no, no, i am not the strongest; the wall that man has made is stronger than i; i cannot make him move, with all my blowing; go to the wall, little brother!" and the rat king climbed down the sky-path again, and travelled and travelled across the earth till he came to the wall. it was quite near his own ricefield. "what do you want, little brother?" grumbled the wall when he saw him. "i come to offer you the hand of the princess, my daughter, because you are the most powerful person in the world, and no one else is good enough." "ugh, ugh," grumbled the wall, "i am not the strongest; the big grey rat who lives in the cellar is stronger than i. when he gnaws and gnaws at me i crumble and crumble, and at last i fall; go to the rat, little brother." and so, after going all over the world to find the strongest person, the rat king had to marry his daughter to a rat, after all; but the princess was very glad of it, for she wanted to marry the grey rat, all the time. the frog and the ox once a little frog sat by a big frog, by the side of a pool. "oh, father," said he, "i have just seen the biggest animal in the world; it was as big as a mountain, and it had horns on its head, and it had hoofs divided in two." "pooh, child," said the old frog, "that was only farmer white's ox. he is not so very big. i could easily make myself as big as he." and he blew, and he blew, and he blew, and swelled himself out. "was he as big as that?" he asked the little frog. "oh, much bigger," said the little frog. the old frog blew, and blew, and blew again, and swelled himself out, more than ever. "was he bigger than that?" he said. "much, much bigger," said the little frog. "i can make myself as big," said the old frog. and once more he blew, and blew, and blew, and swelled himself out,--and he burst! self-conceit leads to self-destruction. the fire-bringer[ ] [footnote : adapted from _the basket woman_, by mary austin.] this is the indian story of how fire was brought to the tribes. it was long, long ago, when men and beasts talked together with understanding, and the grey coyote was friend and counsellor of man. there was a boy of the tribe who was swift of foot and keen of eye, and he and the coyote ranged the wood together. they saw the men catching fish in the creeks with their hands, and the women digging roots with sharp stones. this was in summer. but when winter came on, they saw the people running naked in the snow, or huddled in caves of the rocks, and most miserable. the boy noticed this, and was very unhappy for the misery of his people. "i do not feel it," said the coyote. "you have a coat of good fur," said the boy, "and my people have not." "come to the hunt," said the coyote. "i will hunt no more, till i have found a way to help my people against the cold," said the boy. "help me, o counsellor!" then the coyote ran away, and came back after a long time; he said he had found a way, but it was a hard way. "no way is too hard," said the boy. so the coyote told him that they must go to the burning mountain and bring fire to the people. "what is fire?" said the boy. and the coyote told him that fire was red like a flower, yet not a flower; swift to run in the grass and to destroy, like a beast, yet no beast; fierce and hurtful, yet a good servant to keep one warm, if kept among stones and fed with small sticks. "we will get this fire," said the boy. first the boy had to persuade the people to give him one hundred swift runners. then he and they and the coyote started at a good pace for the far away burning mountain. at the end of the first day's trail they left the weakest of the runners, to wait; at the end of the second, the next stronger; at the end of the third, the next; and so for each of the hundred days of the journey; and the boy was the strongest runner, and went to the last trail with the counsellor. high mountains they crossed, and great plains, and giant woods, and at last they came to the big water, quaking along the sand at the foot of the burning mountain. it stood up in a high peaked cone, and smoke rolled out from it endlessly along the sky. at night, the fire spirits danced, and the glare reddened the big water far out. there the counsellor said to the boy, "stay thou here till i bring thee a brand from the burning; be ready and right for running, for i shall be far spent when i come again, and the fire spirits will pursue me." then he went up to the mountain; and the fire spirits only laughed when they saw him, for he looked so slinking, inconsiderable, and mean, that none of them thought harm from him. and in the night, when they were at their dance about the mountain, the coyote stole the fire, and ran with it down the slope of the burning mountain. when the fire spirits saw what he had done they streamed out after him, red and angry, with a humming sound like a swarm of bees. but the coyote was still ahead; the sparks of the brand streamed out along his flanks, as he carried it in his mouth; and he stretched his body to the trail. the boy saw him coming, like a falling star against the mountain; he heard the singing sound of the fire spirits close behind, and the labouring breath of the counsellor. and when the good beast panted down beside him, the boy caught the brand from his jaws and was off, like an arrow from a bent bow. out he shot on the homeward path, and the fire spirits snapped and sang behind him. but fast as they pursued he fled faster, till he saw the next runner standing in his place, his body bent for the running. to him he passed it, and it was off and away, with the fire spirits raging in chase. so it passed from hand to hand, and the fire spirits tore after it through the scrub, till they came to the mountains of the snows; these they could not pass. then the dark, sleek runners with the backward streaming brand bore it forward, shining starlike in the night, glowing red in sultry noons, violet pale in twilight glooms, until they came in safety to their own land. and there they kept it among stones and fed it with small sticks, as the counsellor advised; and it kept the people warm. ever after the boy was called the fire-bringer; and ever after the coyote bore the sign of the bringing, for the fur along his flanks was singed and yellow from the flames that streamed backward from the brand. the burning of the ricefields[ ] [footnote : adapted from _gleanings in buddha-fields_, by lafcadio hearn. (kegan paul, trench, trübner and co. ltd. s. net.)] once there was a good old man who lived up on a mountain, far away in japan. all round his little house the mountain was flat, and the ground was rich; and there were the ricefields of all the people who lived in the village at the mountain's foot. mornings and evenings, the old man and his little grandson, who lived with him, used to look far down on the people at work in the village, and watch the blue sea which lay all round the land, so close that there was no room for fields below, only for houses. the little boy loved the ricefields, dearly, for he knew that all the good food for all the people came from them; and he often helped his grand father to watch over them. one day, the grandfather was standing alone, before his house, looking far down at the people, and out at the sea, when, suddenly, he saw something very strange far off where the sea and sky meet. something like a great cloud was rising there, as if the sea were lifting itself high into the sky. the old man put his hands to his eyes and looked again, hard as his old sight could. then he turned and ran to the house. "yone, yone!" he cried, "bring a brand from the hearth!" the little grandson could not imagine what his grandfather wanted with fire, but he always obeyed, so he ran quickly and brought the brand. the old man already had one, and was running for the ricefields. yone ran after. but what was his horror to see his grandfather thrust his burning brand into the ripe dry rice, where it stood. "oh, grandfather, grandfather!" screamed the little boy, "what are you doing?" "quick, set fire! thrust your brand in!" said the grandfather. yone thought his dear grandfather had lost his mind, and he began to sob; but a little japanese boy always obeys, so though he sobbed, he thrust his torch in, and the sharp flame ran up the dry stalks, red and yellow. in an instant, the field was ablaze, and thick black smoke began to pour up, on the mountain side. it rose like a cloud, black and fierce, and in no time the people below saw that their precious ricefields were on fire. ah, how they ran! men, women, and children climbed the mountain, running as fast as they could to save the rice; not one soul stayed behind. and when they came to the mountain top, and saw the beautiful rice-crop all in flames, beyond help, they cried bitterly, "who has done this thing? how did it happen?" "i set fire," said the old man, very solemnly; and the little grandson sobbed, "grandfather set fire." but when they came fiercely round the old man, with "why? why?" he only turned and pointed to the sea. "look!" he said. they all turned and looked. and there, where the blue sea had lain, so calm, a mighty wall of water, reaching from earth to sky, was rolling in. no one could scream, so terrible was the sight. the wall of water rolled in on the land, passed quite over the place where the village had been, and broke, with an awful sound, on the mountain side. one wave more, and still one more, came; and then all was water, as far as they could look, below; the village where they had been was under the sea. but the people were all safe. and when they saw what the old man had done, they honoured him above all men for the quick wit which had saved them all from the tidal wave. the story of wylie[ ] [footnote : adapted from _rab and his friends_, by dr john brown.] this is a story about a dog,--not the kind of dog you often see in the street here; not a fat, wrinkly pugdog, nor a smooth-skinned bulldog, nor even a big shaggy fellow, but a slim, silky-haired, sharp-eared little dog, the prettiest thing you can imagine. her name was wylie, and she lived in scotland, far up on the hills, and helped her master take care of his sheep. you can't think how clever she was! she watched over the sheep and the little lambs like a soldier, and never let anything hurt them. she drove them out to pasture when it was time, and brought them safely home when it was time for that. when the silly sheep got frightened and ran this way and that, hurting themselves and getting lost, wylie knew exactly what to do,--round on one side she would run, barking and scolding, driving them back; then round on the other, barking and scolding, driving them back, till they were all bunched together in front of the right gate. then she drove them through as neatly as any person. she loved her work, and was a wonderfully fine sheepdog. at last her master grew too old to stay alone on the hills, and so he went away to live. before he went, he gave wylie to two kind young men who lived in the nearest town; he knew they would be good to her. they grew very fond of her, and so did their old grandmother and the little children: she was so gentle and handsome and well behaved. so now wylie lived in the city where there were no sheep farms, only streets and houses, and she did not have to do any work at all,--she was just a pet dog. she seemed very happy and she was always good. but after a while, the family noticed something odd, something very strange indeed, about their pet. every single tuesday night, about nine o'clock, wylie _disappeared_. they would look for her, call her,--no, she was gone. and she would be gone all night. but every wednesday morning, there she was at the door, waiting to be let in. her silky coat was all sweaty and muddy and her feet heavy with weariness, but her bright eyes looked up at her masters as if she were trying to explain where she had been. week after week the same thing happened. nobody could imagine where wylie went every tuesday night. they tried to follow her to find out, but she always slipped away; they tried to shut her in, but she always found a way out. it grew to be a real mystery. where in the world did wylie go? you never could guess, so i am going to tell you. in the city near the town where the kind young men lived was a big market like (naming one in the neighbourhood). every sort of thing was sold there, even live cows and sheep and hens. on tuesday nights, the farmers used to come down from the hills with their sheep to sell, and drive them through the city streets into the pens, ready to sell on wednesday morning; that was the day they sold them. the sheep weren't used to the city noises and sights, and they always grew afraid and wild, and gave the farmers and the sheepdogs a great deal of trouble. they broke away and ran about, in everybody's way. but just as the trouble was worst, about sunrise, the farmers would see a little silky, sharp-eared dog come trotting all alone down the road, into the midst of them. and then! in and out the little dog ran like the wind, round and about, always in the right place, driving--coaxing--pushing--making the sheep mind like a good school-teacher, and never frightening them, till they were all safely in! all the other dogs together could not do as much as the little strange dog. she was a perfect wonder. and no one knew whose dog she was or where she came from. the farmers grew to watch for her, every week, and they called her "the wee fell yin" which is scots for "the little terror"; they used to say when they saw her coming, "there's the wee fell yin! now we'll get them in." every farmer would have liked to keep her, but she let no one catch her. as soon as her work was done she was off and away like a fairy dog, no one knew where. week after week this happened, and nobody knew who the little strange dog was. but one day wylie went to walk with her two masters, and they happened to meet some sheep farmers. the sheep farmers stopped short and stared at wylie, and then they cried out, "why, _that's the dog_! that's the wee fell yin!" and so it was. the little strange dog who helped with the sheep was wylie. her masters, of course, didn't know what the farmers meant, till they were told all about what i have been telling you. but when they heard about the pretty strange dog who came to market all alone, they knew at last where wylie went, every tuesday night. and they loved her better than ever. wasn't it wise of the dear little dog to go and work for other people when her own work was taken away? i fancy she knew that the best people and the best dogs always work hard at something. any way she did that same thing as long as she lived, and she was always just as gentle, and silky-haired, and loving as at first. little daylight[ ] [footnote : adapted from _at the back of the north wind_, by george macdonald.] once there was a beautiful palace, which had a great wood at one side. the king and his courtiers hunted in the wood near the palace, and there it was kept open, free from underbrush. but farther away it grew wilder and wilder, till at last it was so thick that nobody knew what was there. it was a very great wood indeed. in the wood lived eight fairies. seven of them were good fairies, who had lived there always; the eighth was a bad fairy, who had just come. and the worst of it was that nobody but the other fairies knew she _was_ a fairy; people thought she was just an ugly old witch. the good fairies lived in the dearest little houses! one lived in a hollow silver birch, one in a little moss cottage, and so on. but the bad fairy lived in a horrid mud house in the middle of a dark swamp. now when the first baby was born to the king and queen, her father and mother decided to name her "daylight," because she was so bright and sweet. and of course they had a christening party. and of _course_ they invited the fairies, because the good fairies had always been at the christening party when a princess was born in the palace, and everybody knew that they brought good gifts. but, alas, no one knew about the swamp fairy, and she was not invited,--which really pleased her, because it gave her an excuse for doing something mean. the good fairies came to the christening party, and, one after another, five of them gave little daylight good gifts. the other two stood among the guests, so that no one noticed them. the swamp fairy thought there were no more of them; so she stepped forward, just as the archbishop was handing the baby back to the lady-in-waiting. "i am just a little deaf," she said, mumbling a laugh with her toothless gums. "will your reverence tell me the baby's name again?" "certainly, my good woman," said the bishop; "the infant is little daylight." "and little daylight it shall be, forsooth," cried the bad fairy. "i decree that she shall sleep all day." then she laughed a horrid shrieking laugh, "he, he, hi, hi!" everyone looked at everyone else in despair, but out stepped the sixth good fairy, who by arrangement with her sisters had remained in the background to undo what she could of any evil that the swamp fairy might decree. "then at least she shall wake all night," she said, sadly. "ah!" screamed the swamp fairy, "you spoke before i had finished, which is against the law, and gives me another chance." all the fairies started at once to say, "i beg your pardon!" but the bad fairy said, "i had only laughed 'he, he!' and 'hi, hi!' i had still 'ho, ho!' and 'hu, hu!' to laugh." the fairies could not gainsay this, and the bad fairy had her other chance. she said,-- "since she is to wake all night, i decree that she shall wax and wane with the moon! ho, ho, hu, hu!" out stepped the seventh good fairy. "until a prince shall kiss her without knowing who she is," she said, quickly. the swamp fairy had been prepared for the trick of keeping back one good fairy, but she had not suspected it of two, and she could not say a word, for she had laughed "ho, ho!" and "hu, hu!" the poor king and queen looked sad enough. "we don't know what you mean," they said to the good fairy who had spoken last. but the good fairy smiled. "the meaning of the thing will come with the thing," she said. that was the end of the party, but it was only the beginning of the trouble. can you imagine what a queer household it would be, where the baby laughed and crowed all night, and slept all day? little daylight was as merry and bright all night as any baby in the world, but with the first sign of dawn she fell asleep, and slept like a little dormouse till dark. nothing could waken her while day lasted. still, the royal family got used to this; but the rest of the bad fairy's gift was a great deal worse,--that about waxing and waning with the moon. you know how the moon grows bigger and brighter each night, from the time it is a curly silver thread low in the sky till it is round and golden, flooding the whole sky with light? that is the waxing moon. then, you know, it wanes; it grows smaller and paler again, night by night, till at last it disappears for a while, altogether. well, poor little daylight waxed and waned with it. she was the rosiest, plumpest, merriest baby in the world when the moon was at the full; but as it began to wane her little cheeks grew paler, her tiny hands thinner, with every night, till she lay in her cradle like a shadow-baby, without sound or motion. at first they thought she was dead, when the moon disappeared, but after some months they got used to this too, and only waited eagerly for the new moon, to see her revive. when it shone again, faint and silver, on the horizon, the baby stirred weakly, and then they fed her gently; each night she grew a little better, and when the moon was near the full again, she was again a lively, rosy, lovely child. so it went on till she grew up. she grew to be the most beautiful maiden the moon ever shone on, and everyone loved her so much, for her sweet ways and her merry heart, that someone was always planning to stay up at night, to be near her. but she did not like to be watched, especially when she felt the bad time of waning coming on; so her ladies-in-waiting had to be very careful. when the moon waned she became shrunken and pale and bent, like an old, old woman, worn out with sorrow. only her golden hair and her blue eyes remained unchanged, and this gave her a terribly strange look. at last, as the moon disappeared, she faded away to a little, bowed, old creature, asleep and helpless. no wonder she liked best to be alone! she got in the way of wandering by herself in the beautiful wood, playing in the moonlight when she was well, stealing away in the shadows when she was fading with the moon. her father had a lovely little house of roses and vines built for her, there. it stood at the edge of a most beautiful open glade, inside the wood, where the moon shone best. there the princess lived with her ladies. and there she danced when the moon was full. but when the moon waned, her ladies often lost her altogether, so far did she wander; and sometimes they found her sleeping under a great tree, and brought her home in their arms. when the princess was about seventeen years old, there was a rebellion in a kingdom not far from her father's. wicked nobles murdered the king of the country and stole his throne, and would have murdered the young prince, too, if he had not escaped, dressed in peasant's clothes. dressed in his poor rags, the prince wandered about a long time, till one day he got into a great wood, and lost his way. it was the wood where the princess daylight lived, but of course he did not know anything about that nor about her. he wandered till night, and then he came to a queer little house. one of the good fairies lived there, and the minute she saw him she knew all about everything; but to him she looked only like a kind old woman. she gave him a good supper and a bed for the night, and told him to come back to her if he found no better place for the next night. but the prince said he must get out of the wood at once; so in the morning he took leave of the fairy. all day long he walked, and walked; but at nightfall he had not found his way out of the wood, so he lay down to rest till the moon should rise and light his path. when he woke the moon was glorious; it was three days from the full, and bright as silver. by its light he saw what he thought to be the edge of the wood, and he hastened toward it. but when he came to it, it was only an open space, surrounded with trees. it was so very lovely, in the white moonlight, that the prince stood a minute to look. and as he looked, something white moved out of the trees on the far side of the open space. it was something slim and white, that swayed in the dim light like a young birch. "it must be a moon fairy," thought the prince; and he stepped into the shadow. the moon fairy came nearer and nearer, dancing and swaying in the moonlight. and as she came, she began to sing a soft, gay little song. but when she was quite close, the prince saw that she was not a fairy after all, but a real human maiden,--the loveliest maiden he had ever seen. her hair was like yellow corn, and her smile made all the place merry. her white gown fluttered as she danced, and her little song sounded like a bird note. the prince watched her till she danced out of sight, and then until she once more came toward him; and she seemed so like a moonbeam herself, as she lifted her face to the sky, that he was almost afraid to breathe. he had never seen anything so lovely. by the time she had danced twice round the circle, he could think of nothing in the world except the hope of finding out who she was, and staying near her. but while he was waiting for her to appear the third time, his weariness overcame him, and he fell asleep. and when he awoke, it was broad day, and the beautiful maiden had vanished. he hunted about, hoping to find where she lived, and on the other side of the glade he came upon a lovely little house, covered with moss and climbing roses. he thought she must live there, so he went round to the kitchen door and asked the kind cook for a drink of water, and while he was drinking it he asked who lived there. she told him it was the house of the princess daylight, but she told him nothing else about her, because she was not allowed to talk about her mistress. but she gave him a very good meal and told him other things. he did not go back to the little old woman who had been so kind to him first, but wandered all day in the wood, waiting for the moontime. again he waited at the edge of the dell, and when the white moon was high in the heavens, once more he saw the glimmering in the distance, and once more the lovely maiden floated toward him. he knew her name was the princess daylight, but this time she seemed to him much lovelier than before. she was all in blue like the blue of the sky in summer. (she really was more lovely, you know, because the moon was almost at the full.) all night he watched her, quite forgetting that he ought not to be doing it, till she disappeared on the opposite side of the glade. then, very tired, he found his way to the little old woman's house, had breakfast with her, and fell fast asleep in the bed she gave him. the fairy knew well enough by his face that he had seen daylight, and when he woke up in the evening and started off again she gave him a strange little flask and told him to use it if ever he needed it. this night the princess did not appear in the dell until midnight, at the very full of the moon. but when she came, she was so lovely that she took the prince's breath away. just think!--she was dressed in a gown that looked as if it were made of fireflies' wings, embroidered in gold. she danced around and around, singing, swaying, and flitting like a beam of sunlight, till the prince grew quite dazzled. but while he had been watching her, he had not noticed that the sky was growing dark and the wind was rising. suddenly there was a clap of thunder. the princess danced on. but another clap came louder, and then a sudden great flash of lightning that lit up the sky from end to end. the prince couldn't help shutting his eyes, but he opened them quickly to see if daylight was hurt. alas, she was lying on the ground. the prince ran to her, but she was already up again. "who are you?" she said. "i thought," stammered the prince, "you might be hurt." "there is nothing the matter. go away." the prince went sadly. "come back," said the princess. the prince came. "i like you, you do as you are told. are you good?" "not so good as i should like to be," said the prince. "then go and grow better," said the princess. the prince went, more sadly. "come back," said the princess. the prince came. "i think you must be a prince," she said. "why?" said the prince. "because you do as you are told, and you tell the truth. will you tell me what the sun looks like?" "why, everybody knows that," said the prince. "i am different from everybody," said the princess,--"i don't know." "but," said the prince, "do you not look when you wake up in the morning?" "that's just it," said the princess, "i never do wake up in the morning. i never can wake up until--" then the princess remembered that she was talking to a prince, and putting her hands over her face she walked swiftly away. the prince followed her, but she turned and put up her hand to tell him not to. and like the gentleman prince that he was, he obeyed her at once. now all this time, the wicked swamp fairy had not known a word about what was going on. but now she found out, and she was furious, for fear that little daylight should be delivered from her spell. so she cast her spells to keep the prince from finding daylight again. night after night the poor prince wandered and wandered, and never could find the little dell. and when daytime came, of course, there was no princess to be seen. finally, at the time that the moon was almost gone, the swamp fairy stopped her spells, because she knew that by this time daylight would be so changed and ugly that the prince would never know her if he did see her. she said to herself with a wicked laugh:-- "no fear of his wanting to kiss her now!" that night the prince did find the dell, but no princess came. a little after midnight he passed near the lovely little house where she lived, and there he overheard her waiting-women talking about her. they seemed in great distress. they were saying that the princess had wandered into the woods and was lost. the prince didn't know, of course, what it meant, but he did understand that the princess was lost somewhere, and he started off to find her. after he had gone a long way without finding her, he came to a big old tree, and there he thought he would light a fire to show her the way if she should happen to see it. as the blaze flared up, he suddenly saw a little black heap on the other side of the tree. somebody was lying there. he ran to the spot, his heart beating with hope. but when he lifted the cloak which was huddled about the form, he saw at once that it was not daylight. a pinched, withered, white, little old woman's face shone out at him. the hood was drawn close down over her forehead, the eyes were closed, and as the prince lifted the cloak, the old woman's lips moaned faintly. "oh, poor mother," said the prince, "what is the matter?" the old woman only moaned again. the prince lifted her and carried her over to the warm fire, and rubbed her hands, trying to find out what was the matter. but she only moaned, and her face was so terribly strange and white that the prince's tender heart ached for her. remembering his little flask, he poured some of his liquid between her lips, and then he thought the best thing he could do was to carry her to the princess's house, where she could be taken care of. as he lifted the poor little form in his arms, two great tears stole out from the old woman's closed eyes and ran down her wrinkled cheeks. "oh, poor, poor mother," said the prince pityingly; and he stooped and kissed her withered lips. as he walked through the forest with the old woman in his arms, it seemed to him that she grew heavier and heavier; he could hardly carry her at all; and then she stirred, and at last he was obliged to set her down, to rest. he meant to lay her on the ground. but the old woman stood upon her feet. and then the hood fell back from her face. as she looked up at the prince, the first, long, yellow ray of the rising sun struck full upon her,--and it was the princess daylight! her hair was golden as the sun itself, and her eyes as blue as the flower that grows in the corn. the prince fell on his knees before her. but she gave him her hand and made him rise. "you kissed me when i was an old woman," said the princess, "i'll kiss you now that i am a young princess." and she did. and then she turned her face toward the dawn. "dear prince," she said, "is that the sun?" the sailor man[ ] [footnote : from _the golden windows_, by laura e. richards. (h.r. allenson ltd. s. d. net.)] once upon a time, two children came to the house of a sailor man, who lived beside the salt sea; and they found the sailor man sitting in his doorway knotting ropes. "how do you do?" asked the sailor man. "we are very well, thank you," said the children, who had learned manners, "and we hope you are the same. we heard that you had a boat, and we thought that perhaps you would take us out in her, and teach us how to sail, for that is what we most wish to know." "all in good time," said the sailor man. "i am busy now, but by-and-by, when my work is done, i may perhaps take one of you if you are ready to learn. meantime here are some ropes that need knotting; you might be doing that, since it has to be done." and he showed them how the knots should be tied, and went away and left them. when he was gone the first child ran to the window and looked out. "there is the sea," he said. "the waves come up on the beach, almost to the door of the house. they run up all white, like prancing horses, and then they go dragging back. come and look!" "i cannot," said the second child. "i am tying a knot." "oh!" cried the first child, "i see the boat. she is dancing like a lady at a ball; i never saw such a beauty. come and look!" "i cannot," said the second child. "i am tying a knot." "i shall have a delightful sail in that boat," said the first child. "i expect that the sailor man will take me, because i am the eldest and i know more about it. there was no need of my watching when he showed you the knots, because i knew how already." just then the sailor man came in. "well," he said, "my work is over. what have you been doing in the meantime?" "i have been looking at the boat," said the first child. "what a beauty she is! i shall have the best time in her that ever i had in my life." "i have been tying knots," said the second child. "come, then," said the sailor man, and he held out his hand to the second child. "i will take you out in the boat, and teach you to sail her." "but i am the eldest," cried the first child, "and i know a great deal more than she does." "that may be," said the sailor man; "but a person must learn to tie a knot before he can learn to sail a boat." "but i have learned to tie a knot," cried the child. "i know all about it!" "how can i tell that?" asked the sailor man. the story of jairus's daughter[ ] [footnote : this should usually be prefaced by a brief statement of jesus habit of healing and comforting all with whom he came in close contact. the exact form of the preface must depend on how much of his life has already been given in stories.] once, while jesus was journeying about, he passed near a town where a man named jairus lived. this man was a ruler in the synagogue, and he had just one little daughter about twelve years of age. at the time that jesus was there the little daughter was very sick, and at last she lay a-dying. her father heard that there was a wonderful man near the town, who was healing sick people whom no one else could help, and in his despair he ran out into the streets to search for him. he found jesus walking in the midst of a crowd of people, and when he saw him he fell down at jesus feet and besought him to come into his house, to heal his daughter. and jesus said, yes, he would go with him. but there were so many people begging to be healed, and so many looking to see what happened, that the crowd thronged them, and kept them from moving fast. and before they reached the house one of the man's servants came to meet them, and said, "thy daughter is dead; trouble not the master to come farther." but instantly jesus turned to the father and said, "fear not; only believe, and she shall be made whole." and he went on with jairus, to the house. when they came to the house, they heard the sound of weeping and lamentation; the household was mourning for the little daughter, who was dead. jesus sent all the strangers away from the door, and only three of his disciples and the father and mother of the child went in with him. and when he was within, he said to the mourning people, "weep not; she is not dead; she sleepeth." when he had passed, they laughed him to scorn, for they knew that she was dead. then jesus left them all, and went alone into the chamber where the little daughter lay. and when he was there, alone, he went up to the bed where she was, and bent over her, and took her by the hand. and he said, "maiden, arise." and her spirit came unto her again! and she lived, and grew up in her father's house. especially for classes iv. and v. arthur and the sword[ ] [footnote : adapted from sir thomas malory.] once there was a great king in britain named uther, and when he died the other kings and princes disputed over the kingdom, each wanting it for himself. but king uther had a son named arthur, the rightful heir to the throne, of whom no one knew, for he had been taken away secretly while he was still a baby by a wise old man called merlin, who had him brought up in the family of a certain sir ector, for fear of the malice of wicked knights. even the boy himself thought sir ector was his father, and he loved sir ector's son, sir kay, with the love of a brother. when the kings and princes could not be kept in check any longer, and something had to be done to determine who was to be king, merlin made the archbishop of canterbury send for them all to come to london. it was christmas time, and in the great cathedral a solemn service was held, and prayer was made that some sign should be given, to show who was the rightful king. when the service was over, there appeared a strange stone in the churchyard, against the high altar. it was a great white stone, like marble, with something sunk in it that looked like a steel anvil; and in the anvil was driven a great glistening sword. the sword had letters of gold written on it, which read: "whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all england." all wondered at the strange sword and its strange writing; and when the archbishop himself came out and gave permission, many of the knights tried to pull the sword from the stone, hoping to be king. but no one could move it a hair's breadth. "he is not here," said the archbishop, "that shall achieve the sword; but doubt not, god will make him known." then they set a guard of ten knights to keep the stone, and the archbishop appointed a day when all should come together to try at the stone,--kings from far and near. in the meantime, splendid jousts were held, outside london, and both knights and commons were bidden. sir ector came up to the jousts, with others, and with him rode kay and arthur. kay had been made a knight at allhallowmas, and when he found there was to be so fine a joust he wanted a sword, to join it. but he had left his sword behind, where his father and he had slept the night before. so he asked young arthur to ride for it. "i will well," said arthur, and rode back for it. but when he came to the castle, the lady and all her household were at the jousting, and there was none to let him in. thereat arthur said to himself, "my brother sir kay shall not be without a sword this day." and he remembered the sword he had seen in the churchyard. "i will to the churchyard," he said, "and take that sword with me." so he rode into the churchyard, tied his horse to the stile, and went up to the stone. the guards were away to the tourney, and the sword was there, alone. going up to the stone, young arthur took the great sword by the hilt, and lightly and fiercely he drew it out of the anvil. then he rode straight to sir kay, and gave it to him. sir kay knew instantly that it was the sword of the stone, and he rode off at once to his father and said, "sir, lo, here is the sword of the stone; i must be king of the land." but sir ector asked him where he got the sword. and when sir kay said, "from my brother," he asked arthur how he got it. when arthur told him, sir ector bowed his head before him. "now i understand ye must be king of this land," he said to arthur. "wherefore i?" said arthur. "for god will have it so," said ector; "never man should have drawn out this sword but he that shall be rightwise king of this land. now let me see whether ye can put the sword as it was in the stone, and pull it out again." straightway arthur put the sword back. then sir ector tried to pull it out, and after him sir kay; but neither could stir it. then arthur pulled it out. thereupon, sir ector and sir kay kneeled upon the ground before him. "alas," said arthur, "mine own dear father and brother, why kneel ye to me?" sir ector told him, then, all about his royal birth, and how he had been taken privily away by merlin. but when arthur found sir ector was not truly his father, he was so sad at heart that he cared not greatly to be king. and he begged his father and brother to love him still. sir ector asked that sir kay might be seneschal when arthur was king. arthur promised with all his heart. then they went to the archbishop and told him that the sword had found its master. the archbishop appointed a day for the trial to be made in the sight of all men, and on that day the princes and knights came together, and each tried to draw out the sword, as before. but as before, none could so much as stir it. then came arthur, and pulled it easily from its place. the knights and kings were terribly angry that a boy from nowhere in particular had beaten them, and they refused to acknowledge him king. they appointed another day, for another great trial. three times they did this, and every time the same thing happened. at last, at the feast of pentecost, arthur again pulled out the sword before all the knights and the commons. and then the commons rose up and cried that he should be king, and that they would slay any who denied him. so arthur became king of britain, and all gave him allegiance. tarpeia there was once a girl named tarpeia, whose father was guard of the outer gate of the citadel of rome. it was a time of war,--the sabines were besieging the city. their camp was close outside the city wall. tarpeia used to see the sabine soldiers when she went to draw water from the public well, for that was outside the gate. and sometimes she stayed about and let the strange men talk with her, because she liked to look at their bright silver ornaments. the sabine soldiers wore heavy silver rings and bracelets on their left arms,--some wore as many as four or five. the soldiers knew she was the daughter of the keeper of the citadel, and they saw that she had greedy eyes for their ornaments. so day by day they talked with her, and showed her their silver rings, and tempted her. and at last tarpeia made a bargain, to betray her city to them. she said she would unlock the great gate and let them in, _if they would give her what they wore on their left arms._ the night came. when it was perfectly dark and still, tarpeia stole from her bed, took the great key from its place, and silently unlocked the gate which protected the city. outside, in the dark, stood the soldiers of the enemy, waiting. as she opened the gate, the long shadowy files pressed forward silently, and the sabines entered the citadel. as the first man came inside, tarpeia stretched forth her hand for her price. the soldier lifted high his left arm. "take thy reward!" he said, and as he spoke he hurled upon her that which he wore upon it. down upon her head crashed--not the silver rings of the soldier, but the great brass shield he carried in battle! she sank beneath it, to the ground. "take thy reward," said the next; and his shield rang against the first. "thy reward," said the next--and the next--and the next--and the next; every man wore his shield on his left arm. so tarpeia lay buried beneath the reward she had claimed, and the sabines marched past her dead body, into the city she had betrayed. the buckwheat[ ] [footnote : adapted from hans christian andersen.] down by the river were fields of barley and rye and golden oats. wheat grew there, too, and the heaviest and richest ears bent lowest, in humility. opposite the corn was a field of buckwheat, but the buckwheat never bent; it held its head proud and stiff on the stem. the wise old willow-tree by the river looked down on the fields, and thought his thoughts. one day a dreadful storm came. the field-flowers folded their leaves together, and bowed their heads. but the buckwheat stood straight and proud. "bend your head, as we do," called the field-flowers. "i have no need to," said the buckwheat. "bend your head, as we do!" warned the golden wheat-ears; "the angel of the storm is coming; he will strike you down." "i will not bend my head," said the buckwheat. then the old willow-tree spoke: "close your flowers and bend your leaves. do not look at the lightning when the cloud bursts. even men cannot do that; the sight of heaven would strike them blind. much less can we who are so inferior to them!" "'inferior,' indeed!" said the buckwheat. "now i _will_ look!" and he looked straight up, while the lightning flashed across the sky. when the dreadful storm had passed, the flowers and the wheat raised their drooping heads, clean and refreshed in the pure, sweet air. the willow-tree shook the gentle drops from its leaves. but the buckwheat lay like a weed in the field, scorched black by the lightning. the judgment of midas[ ] [footnote : adapted from _old greek folk-stories_, by josephine preston peabody. (harrap & co. d.)] the greek god pan, the god of the open air, was a great musician. he played on a pipe of reeds. and the sound of his reed-pipe was so sweet that he grew proud, and believed himself greater than the chief musician of the gods, apollo, the sun-god. so he challenged great apollo to make better music than he. apollo consented to the test, for he wished to punish pan's vanity, and they chose the mountain tmolus for judge, since no one is so old and wise as the hills. when pan and apollo came before tmolus, to play, their followers came with them, to hear, and one of those who came with pan was a mortal named midas. first pan played; he blew on his reed-pipe, and out came a tune so wild and yet so coaxing that the birds hopped from the trees to get near; the squirrels came running from their holes; and the very trees swayed as if they wanted to dance. the fauns laughed aloud for joy as the melody tickled their furry little ears. and midas thought it the sweetest music in the world. then apollo rose. his hair shook drops of light from its curls; his robes were like the edge of the sunset cloud; in his hands he held a golden lyre. and when he touched the strings of the lyre, such music stole upon the air as never god nor mortal heard before. the wild creatures of the wood crouched still as stone; the trees kept every leaf from rustling; earth and air were silent as a dream. to hear such music cease was like bidding farewell to father and mother. when the charm was broken, the hearers fell at apollo's feet and proclaimed the victory his. all but midas. he alone would not admit that the music was better than pan's. "if thine ears are so dull, mortal," said apollo, "they shall take the shape that suits them." and he touched the ears of midas. and straightway the dull ears grew long, pointed, and furry, and they turned this way and that. they were the ears of an ass! for a long time midas managed to hide the tell-tale ears from everyone; but at last a servant discovered the secret. he knew he must not tell, yet he could not bear not to; so one day he went into the meadow, scooped a little hollow in the turf, and whispered the secret into the earth. then he covered it up again, and went away. but, alas, a bed of reeds sprang up from the spot, and whispered the secret to the grass. the grass told it to the tree-tops, the tree-tops to the little birds, and they cried it all abroad. and to this day, when the wind sets the reeds nodding together, they whisper, laughing, "midas has the ears of an ass! oh, hush, hush!" why the sea is salt[ ] [footnote : there are many versions of this tale, in different collections. this one is the story which grew up in my mind, about the bare outline related to me by one of mrs rutan's hearers. what the original teller said, i never knew, but what the listener felt was clear. and in this form i have told it a great many times.] once there were two brothers. one was rich, and one was poor; the rich one was rather mean. when the poor brother used to come to ask for things it annoyed him, and finally one day he said, "there, i'll give it to you this time, but the next time you want anything, you can go below for it!" presently the poor brother did want something, and he knew it wasn't any use to go to his brother; he must go below for it. so he went, and he went, and he went, till he came below. it was the queerest place! there were red and yellow fires burning all around, and kettles of boiling oil hanging over them, and a queer sort of men standing round, poking the fires. there was a chief man; he had a long curly tail that curled up behind, and two ugly little horns just over his ears; and one foot was very queer indeed. and as soon as anyone came in the door, these men would catch him up and put him over one of the fires, and turn him on a spit. and then the chief man, who was the worst of all, would come and say, "eh, how do you feel now? how do you feel now?" and of course the poor people screamed and screeched and said, "let us out! let us out!" that was just what the chief man wanted. when the poor brother came in, they picked him up at once, and put him over one of the hottest fires, and began to turn him round and round like the rest; and of course the chief man came up to him and said, "eh, how do you feel now? how do you feel now?" but the poor brother did not say, "let me out! let me out!" he said, "pretty well, thank you." the chief man grunted and said to the other men, "make the fire hotter." but the next time he asked the poor brother how he felt, the poor brother smiled and said, "much better now, thank you." the chief man did not like this at all, because, of course, the whole object in life of the people below was to make their victims uncomfortable. so he piled on more fuel and made the fire hotter still. but every time he asked the poor brother how he felt, the poor brother would say, "very much better"; and at last he said, "perfectly comfortable, thank you; couldn't be better." you see when the poor brother was on earth he had never once had money enough to buy coal enough to keep him warm; so he liked the heat. at last the chief man could stand it no longer. "oh, look here," he said, "you can go home." "oh no, thank you," said the poor brother, "i like it here." "you _must_ go home," said the chief man. "but i won't go home," said the poor brother. the chief man went away and talked with the other men; but no matter what they did they could not make the poor brother uncomfortable; so at last the chief man came back and said,-- "what'll you take to go home?" "what have you got?" said the poor brother. "well," said the chief man, "if you'll go home quietly i'll give you the little mill that stands behind my door." "what's the good of it?" said the poor brother. "it is the most wonderful mill in the world," said the chief man. "anything at all that you want, you have only to name it, and say, 'grind this, little mill, and grind quickly,' and the mill will grind that thing until you say the magic word, to stop it." "that sounds nice," said the poor brother. "i'll take it." and he took the little mill under his arm, and went up, and up, and up, till he came to his own house. when he was in front of his little old hut, he put the little mill down on the ground and said to it, "grind a fine house, little mill, and grind quickly." and the little mill ground, and ground, and ground the finest house that ever was seen. it had fine big chimneys, and gable windows, and broad piazzas; and just as the little mill ground the last step of the last flight of steps, the poor brother said the magic word, and it stopped. then he took it round to where the barn was, and said, "grind cattle, little mill, and grind quickly." and the little mill ground, and ground, and ground, and out came great fat cows, and little woolly lambs, and fine little pigs; and just as the little mill ground the last curl on the tail of the last little pig, the poor brother said the magic word, and it stopped. he did the same thing with crops for his cattle, pretty clothes for his daughters, and everything else they wanted. at last he had everything he wanted, and so he stood the little mill behind his door. all this time the rich brother had been getting more and more jealous, and at last he came to ask the poor brother how he had grown so rich. the poor brother told him all about it. he said, "it all comes from that little mill behind my door. all i have to do when i want anything is to name it to the little mill, and say, 'grind that, little mill, and grind quickly,' and the little mill will grind that thing until--" but the rich brother didn't wait to hear any more. "will you lend me the little mill?" he said. "why, yes," said the poor brother, "i will." so the rich brother took the little mill under his arm and started across the fields to his house. when he got near home he saw the farm-hands coming in from the fields for their luncheon. now, you remember, he was rather mean. he thought to himself, "it is a waste of good time for them to come into the house; they shall have their porridge where they are." he called all the men to him, and made them bring their porridge-bowls. then he set the little mill down on the ground, and said to it, "grind oatmeal porridge, little mill, and grind quickly!" the little mill ground, and ground, and ground, and out came delicious oatmeal porridge. each man held his bowl under the spout. when the last bowl was filled, the porridge ran over on the ground. "that's enough, little mill," said the rich brother. "you may stop, and stop quickly." but this was not the magic word, and the little mill did not stop. it ground, and ground, and ground, and the porridge ran all round and made a little pool. the rich brother said, "no, no, little mill, i said, 'stop grinding, and stop quickly.'" but the little mill ground, and ground, faster than ever; and presently there was a regular pond of porridge, almost up to their knees. the rich brother said, "stop grinding," in every kind of way; he called the little mill names; but nothing did any good. the little mill ground porridge just the same. at last the men said, "go and get your brother to stop the little mill, or we shall be drowned in porridge." so the rich brother started for his brother's house. he had to swim before he got there, and the porridge went up his sleeves, and down his neck, and it was horrid and sticky. his brother laughed when he heard the story, but he came with him, and they took a boat and rowed across the lake of porridge to where the little mill was grinding. and then the poor brother whispered the magic word, and the little mill stopped. but the porridge was a long time soaking into the ground, and nothing would ever grow there afterwards except oatmeal. the rich brother didn't seem to care much about the little mill after this, so the poor brother took it home again and put it behind the door; and there it stayed a long, long while. years afterwards a sea captain came there on a visit. he told such big stories that the poor brother said, "oh, i daresay you have seen wonderful things, but i don't believe you ever saw anything more wonderful than the little mill that stands behind my door." "what is wonderful about that?" said the sea captain. "why," said the poor brother, "anything in the world you want,--you have only to name it to the little mill and say, 'grind that, little mill, and grind quickly,' and it will grind that thing until--" the sea captain didn't wait to hear another word. "will you lend me that little mill?" he said eagerly. the poor brother smiled a little, but he said, "yes," and the sea captain took the little mill under his arm, and went on board his ship and sailed away. they had head-winds and storms, and they were so long at sea that some of the food gave out. worst of all, the salt gave out. it was dreadful, being without salt. but the captain happened to remember the little mill. "bring up the salt box!" he said to the cook. "we will have salt enough." he set the little mill on deck, put the salt box under the spout, and said,-- "grind salt, little mill, and grind quickly!" and the little mill ground beautiful, white, powdery salt. when they had enough, the captain said, "now you may stop, little mill, and stop quickly." the little mill kept on grinding; and the salt began to pile up in little heaps on the deck. "i said, 'stop,'" said the captain. but the little mill ground, and ground, faster than ever, and the salt was soon thick on the deck like snow. the captain called the little mill names and told it to stop, in every language he knew, but the little mill went on grinding. the salt covered all the decks and poured down into the hold, and at last the ship began to settle in the water; salt is very heavy. but just before the ship sank to the water-line, the captain had a bright thought: he threw the little mill overboard! it fell right down to the bottom of the sea. _and it has been grinding salt ever since._ billy beg and his bull[ ] [footnote : adapted from _in chimney corners_, by seumas mcmanus. i have ventured to give this in the somewhat hibernian phraseology suggested by the original, because i have found that the humour of the manner of it appeals quite as readily to the boys and girls of my acquaintance as to maturer friends, and they distinguish as quickly between the savour of it and any unintentional crudeness of diction.] once upon a time, there was a king and a queen, and they had one son, whose name was billy. and billy had a bull he was very fond of, and the bull was just as fond of him. and when the queen came to die, she put it as her last request to the king, that come what might, come what may, he'd not part billy and the bull. and the king promised that, come what might, come what may, he would not. then the good queen died, and was buried. after a time, the king married again, and the new queen could not abide billy; no more could she stand the bull, seeing him and billy so thick. so she asked the king to have the bull killed. but the king said he had promised, come what might, come what may, he'd not part billy beg and his bull, so he could not. then the queen sent for the hen-wife, and asked what she should do. "what will you give me," said the hen-wife, "and i'll very soon part them?" "anything at all," said the queen. "then do you take to your bed, very sick with a complaint," said the hen-wife, "and i'll do the rest." so the queen took to her bed, very sick with a complaint, and the king came to see what could be done for her. "i shall never be better of this," she said, "till i have the medicine the hen-wife ordered." "what is that?" said the king. "a mouthful of the blood of billy beg's bull." "i can't give you that," said the king, and went away, sorrowful. then the queen got sicker and sicker, and each time the king asked what would cure her she said, "a mouthful of the blood of billy beg's bull." and at last it looked as if she were going to die. so the king finally set a day for the bull to be killed. at that the queen was so happy that she laid plans to get up and see the grand sight. all the people were to be at the killing, and it was to be a great affair. when billy beg heard all this, he was very sorrowful, and the bull noticed his looks. "what are you doitherin' about?" said the bull to him. so billy told him. "don't fret yourself about me," said the bull, "it's not i that'll be killed!" the day came, when billy beg's bull was to be killed; all the people were there, and the queen, and billy. and the bull was led out, to be seen. when he was led past billy he bent his head. "jump on my back, billy, my boy," says he, "till i see what kind of a horseman you are!" billy jumped on his back, and with that the bull leaped nine miles high and nine miles broad and came down with billy sticking between his horns. then away he rushed, over the head of the queen, killing her dead, where you wouldn't know day by night or night by day, over high hills, low hills, sheep walks and bullock traces, the cove o' cork, and old tom fox with his bugle horn. when at last he stopped he said, "now, billy, my boy, you and i must undergo great scenery; there's a mighty great bull of the forest i must fight, here, and he'll be hard to fight, but i'll be able for him. but first we must have dinner. put your hand in my left ear and pull out the napkin you'll find there, and when you've spread it, it will be covered with eating and drinking fit for a king." so billy put his hand in the bull's left ear, and drew out the napkin, and spread it; and, sure enough, it was spread with all kinds of eating and drinking, fit for a king. and billy beg ate well. but just as he finished he heard a great roar, and out of the forest came a mighty bull, snorting and running. and the two bulls at it and fought. they knocked the hard ground into soft, the soft into hard, the rocks into spring wells, and the spring wells into rocks. it was a terrible fight. but in the end, billy beg's bull was too much for the other bull, and he killed him, and drank his blood. then billy jumped on the bull's back, and the bull off and away, where you wouldn't know day from night or night from day, over high hills, low hills, sheep walks and bullock traces, the cove o' cork, and old tom fox with his bugle horn. and when he stopped he told billy to put his hand in his left ear and pull out the napkin, because he'd to fight another great bull of the forest. so billy pulled out the napkin and spread it, and it was covered with all kinds of eating and drinking, fit for a king. and, sure enough, just as billy finished eating, there was a frightful roar, and a mighty great bull, greater than the first, rushed out of the forest. and the two bulls at it and fought. it was a terrible fight! they knocked the hard ground into soft, the soft into hard, the rocks into spring wells, and the spring wells into rocks. but in the end, billy beg's bull killed the other bull, and drank his blood. then he off and away, with billy. but when he came down, he told billy beg that he was to fight another bull, the brother of the other two, and that this time the other bull would be too much for him, and would kill him and drink his blood. "when i am dead, billy, my boy," he said, "put your hand in my left ear and draw out the napkin, and you'll never want for eating or drinking; and put your hand in my right ear, and you'll find a stick there, that will turn into a sword if you wave it three times round your head, and give you the strength of a thousand men beside your own. keep that; then cut a strip of my hide, for a belt, for when you buckle it on, there's nothing can kill you." billy beg was very sad to hear that his friend must die. and very soon he heard a more dreadful roar than ever he heard, and a tremendous bull rushed out of the forest. then came the worst fight of all. in the end, the other bull was too much for billy beg's bull, and he killed him and drank his blood. billy beg sat down and cried for three days and three nights. after that he was hungry; so he put his hand in the bull's left ear, and drew out the napkin, and ate all kinds of eating and drinking. then he put his hand in the right ear and pulled out the stick which was to turn into a sword if waved round his head three times, and to give him the strength of a thousand men beside his own. and he cut a strip of the hide for a belt, and started off on his adventures. presently he came to a fine place; an old gentleman lived there. so billy went up and knocked, and the old gentleman came to the door. "are you wanting a boy?" says billy. "i am wanting a herd-boy," says the gentleman, "to take my six cows, six horses, six donkeys, and six goats to pasture every morning, and bring them back at night. maybe you'd do." "what are the wages?" says billy. "oh, well," says the gentleman, "it's no use to talk of that now; there's three giants live in the wood by the pasture, and every day they drink up all the milk and kill the boy that looks after the cattle; so we'll wait to talk about wages till we see if you come back alive." "all right," says billy, and he entered service with the old gentleman. the first day, he drove the six cows, six horses, six donkeys, and six goats to pasture, and sat down by them. about noon he heard a kind of roaring from the wood; and out rushed a giant with two heads, spitting fire out of his two mouths. "oh! my fine fellow," says he to billy, "you are too big for one swallow and not big enough for two; how would you like to die, then? by a cut with the sword, a blow with the fist, or a swing by the back?" "that is as may be," says billy, "but i'll fight you." and he buckled on his hide belt, and swung his stick three times round his head, to give him the strength of a thousand men besides his own, and went for the giant. and at the first grapple billy beg lifted the giant up and sunk him in the ground, to his armpits. "oh, mercy! mercy! spare my life!" cried the giant. "i think not," said billy; and he cut off his heads. that night, when the cows and the goats were driven home, they gave so much milk that all the dishes in the house were filled, and the milk ran over and made a little brook in the yard. "this is very queer," said the old gentleman; "they never gave any milk before. did you see nothing in the pasture?" "nothing worse than myself," said billy. and next morning he drove the six cows, six horses, six donkeys, and six goats to pasture again. just before noon he heard a terrific roar; and out of the wood came a giant with six heads. "you killed my brother," he roared, fire coming out of his six mouths, "and i'll very soon have your blood! will you die by a cut of the sword, or a swing by the back?" "i'll fight you," said billy. and buckling on his belt and swinging his stick three times round his head, he ran in and grappled the giant. at the first hold, he sunk the giant up to the shoulders in the ground. "mercy, mercy, kind gentleman!" cried the giant. "spare my life!" "i think not," said billy, and cut off his heads. that night the cattle gave so much milk that it ran out of the house and made a stream, and turned a mill wheel which had not been turned for seven years! "it's certainly very queer," said the old gentleman; "did you see nothing in the pasture, billy?" "nothing worse than myself," said billy. and the next morning the gentleman said, "billy, do you know, i only heard one of the giants roaring in the night, and the night before only two. what can ail them, at all?" "oh, maybe they are sick or something," says billy; and with that he drove the six cows, six horses, six donkeys, and six goats to pasture. at about ten o'clock there was a roar like a dozen bulls, and the brother of the two giants came out of the wood, with twelve heads on him, and fire spouting from every one of them. "i'll have you, my fine boy," cries he; "how will you die, then?" "we'll see," says billy; "come on!" and swinging his stick round his head, he made for the giant, and drove him up to his twelve necks in the ground. all twelve of the heads began begging for mercy, but billy soon cut them short. then he drove the beasts home. and that night the milk overflowed the mill-stream and made a lake, nine miles long, nine miles broad, and nine miles deep; and there are salmon and whitefish there to this day. "you are a fine boy," said the gentleman, "and i'll give you wages." so billy was herd. the next day, his master told him to look after the house while he went up to the king's town, to see a great sight. "what will it be?" said billy. "the king's daughter is to be eaten by a fiery dragon," said his master, "unless the champion fighter they've been feeding for six weeks on purpose kills the dragon." "oh," said billy. after he was left alone, there were people passing on horses and afoot, in coaches and chaises, in carriages and in wheelbarrows, all going to see the great sight. and all asked billy why he was not on his way. but billy said he didn't care about going. when the last passer-by was out of sight, billy ran and dressed himself in his master's best suit of clothes, took the brown mare from the stable, and was off to the king's town. when he came there, he saw a big round place with great high seats built up around it, and all the people sitting there. down in the midst was the champion, walking up and down proudly, with two men behind him to carry his heavy sword. and up in the centre of the seats was the princess, with her maidens; she was looking very pretty, but nervous. the fight was about to begin when billy got there, and the herald was crying out how the champion would fight the dragon for the princess's sake, when suddenly there was heard a fearsome great roaring, and the people shouted, "here he is now, the dragon!" the dragon had more heads than the biggest of the giants, and fire and smoke came from every one of them. and when the champion saw the creature, he never waited even to take his sword,--he turned and ran; and he never stopped till he came to a deep well, where he jumped in and hid himself, up to the neck. when the princess saw that her champion was gone, she began wringing her hands, and crying, "oh, please, kind gentlemen, fight the dragon, some of you, and keep me from being eaten! will no one fight the dragon for me?" but no one stepped up, at all. and the dragon made to eat the princess. just then, out stepped billy from the crowd, with his fine suit of clothes and his hide belt on him. "i'll fight the beast," he says, and swinging his stick three times round his head, to give him the strength of a thousand men besides his own, he walked up to the dragon, with easy gait. the princess and all the people were looking, you may be sure, and the dragon raged at billy with all his mouths, and they at it and fought. it was a terrible fight, but in the end billy beg had the dragon down, and he cut off his heads with the sword. there was great shouting, then, and crying that the strange champion must come to the king to be made prince, and to the princess, to be seen. but in the midst of the hullabaloo billy begs slips on the brown mare and is off and away before anyone has seen his face. but, quick as he was, he was not so quick but that the princess caught hold of him as he jumped on his horse, and he got away with one shoe left in her hand. and home he rode, to his master's house, and had his old clothes on and the mare in the stable before his master came back. when his master came back, he had a great tale for billy, how the princess's champion had run from the dragon, and a strange knight had come out of the clouds and killed the dragon, and before anyone could stop him had disappeared in the sky. "wasn't it wonderful?" said the old gentleman to billy. "i should say so," said billy to him. soon there was proclamation made that the man who killed the dragon was to be found, and to be made son of the king and husband of the princess; for that, everyone should come up to the king's town and try on the shoe which the princess had pulled from off the foot of the strange champion, that he whom it fitted should be known to be the man. on the day set, there was passing of coaches and chaises, of carriages and wheelbarrows, people on horseback and afoot, and billy's master was the first to go. while billy was watching, at last came along a raggedy man. "will you change clothes with me, and i'll give you boot?" said billy to him. "shame to you to mock a poor raggedy man!" said the raggedy man to billy. "it's no mock," said billy, and he changed clothes with the raggedy man, and gave him boot. when billy came to the king's town, in his dreadful old clothes, no one knew him for the champion at all, and none would let him come forward to try the shoe. but after all had tried, billy spoke up that he wanted to try. they laughed at him, and pushed him back, with his rags. but the princess would have it that he should try. "i like his face," said she; "let him try, now." so up stepped billy, and put on the shoe, and it fitted him like his own skin. then billy confessed that it was he that killed the dragon. and that he was a king's son. and they put a velvet suit on him, and hung a gold chain round his neck, and everyone said a finer-looking boy they'd never seen. so billy married the princess, and was the prince of that place. the little hero of haarlem[ ] [footnote : told from memory of the story told me when a child.] a long way off, across the ocean, there is a little country where the ground is lower than the level of the sea, instead of higher, as it is here. of course the water would run in and cover the land and houses, if something were not done to keep it out. but something is done. the people build great, thick walls all round the country, and the walls keep the sea out. you see how much depends on those walls,--the good crops, the houses, and even the safety of the people. even the small children in that country know that an accident to one of the walls is a terrible thing. these walls are really great banks, as wide as roads, and they are called "dikes." once there was a little boy who lived in that country, whose name was hans. one day, he took his little brother out to play. they went a long way out of the town, and came to where there were no houses, but ever so many flowers and green fields. by-and-by, hans climbed up on the dike, and sat down; the little brother was playing about at the foot of the bank. suddenly the little brother called out, "oh, what a funny little hole! it bubbles!" "hole? where?" said hans. "here in the bank," said the little brother; "water's in it." "what!" said hans, and he slid down as fast as he could to where his brother was playing. there was the tiniest little hole in the bank. just an air-hole. a drop of water bubbled slowly through. "it is a hole in the dike!" cried hans. "what shall we do?" he looked all round; not a person or a house in sight. he looked at the hole; the little drops oozed steadily through; he knew that the water would soon break a great gap, because that tiny hole gave it a chance. the town was so far away--if they ran for help it would be too late; what should he do? once more he looked; the hole was larger, now, and the water was trickling. suddenly a thought came to hans. he stuck his little forefinger right into the hole, where it fitted tight; and he said to his little brother, "run, dieting! go to the town and tell the men there's a hole in the dike. tell them i will keep it stopped till they get here." the little brother knew by hans' face that something very serious was the matter, and he started for the town, as fast as his legs could run. hans, kneeling with his finger in the hole, watched him grow smaller and smaller as he got farther away. soon he was as small as a chicken; then he was only a speck; then he was out of sight. hans was alone, his finger tight in the bank. he could hear the water, slap, slap, slap, on the stones; and deep down under the slapping was a gurgling, rumbling sound. it seemed very near. by-and-by, his hand began to feel numb. he rubbed it with the other hand; but it got colder and more numb, colder and more numb, every minute. he looked to see if the men were coming; the road was bare as far as he could see. then the cold began creeping, creeping, up his arm; first his wrist, then his arm to the elbow, then his arm to the shoulder; how cold it was! and soon it began to ache. ugly little cramp-pains streamed up his finger, up his palm, up his arm, till they reached into his shoulder, and down the back of his neck. it seemed hours since the little brother went away. he felt very lonely, and the hurt in his arm grew and grew. he watched the road with all his eyes, but no one came in sight. then he leaned his head against the dike, to rest his shoulder. as his ear touched the dike, he heard the voice of the great sea, murmuring. the sound seemed to say,-- "i am the great sea. no one can stand against me. what are you, a little child, that you try to keep me out? beware! beware!" hans' heart beat in heavy knocks. would they never come? he was frightened. and the water went on beating at the wall, and murmuring, "i will come through, i will come through, i will get you, i will get you, run--run--before i come through!" hans started to pull out his finger; he was so frightened that he felt as if he must run for ever. but that minute he remembered how much depended on him; if he pulled out his finger, the water would surely make the hole bigger, and at last break down the dike, and the sea would come in on all the land and houses. he set his teeth, and stuck his finger tighter than ever. "you shall _not_ come through!" he whispered, "i will _not_ run!" at that moment, he heard a far-off shout. far in the distance he saw a black something on the road, and dust. the men were coming! at last, they were coming. they came nearer, fast, and he could make out his own father, and the neighbours. they had pickaxes and shovels, and they were running. and as they ran they shouted, "we're coming; take heart, we're coming!" the next minute, it seemed, they were there. and when they saw hans, with his pale face, and his hand tight in the dike, they gave a great cheer,--just as people do for soldiers back from war; and they lifted him up and rubbed his aching arm with tender hands, and they told him that he was a real hero and that he had saved the town. when the men had mended the dike, they marched home like an army, and hans was carried high on their shoulders, because he was a hero. and to this day the people of haarlem tell the story of how a little boy saved the dike. the last lesson[ ] [footnote : adapted from the french of alphonse daudet.] little franz didn't want to go to school, that morning. he would much rather have played truant. the air was so warm and still,--you could hear the blackbird singing at the edge of the wood, and the sound of the prussians drilling, down in the meadow behind the old sawmill. he would _so_ much rather have played truant! besides, this was the day for the lesson in the rule of participles; and the rule of participles in french is very, very long, and very hard, and it has more exceptions than rule. little franz did not know it at all. he did not want to go to school. but, somehow, he went. his legs carried him reluctantly into the village and along the street. as he passed the official bulletin-board before the town hall, he noticed a little crowd round it, looking at it. that was the place where the news of lost battles, the requisition for more troops, the demands for new taxes were posted. small as he was, little franz had seen enough to make him think, "what _now_, i wonder?" but he could not stop to see; he was afraid of being late. when he came to the school-yard his heart beat very fast; he was afraid he _was_ late, after all, for the windows were all open, and yet he heard no noise,--the schoolroom was perfectly quiet. he had been counting on the noise and confusion before school,--the slamming of desk covers, the banging of books, the tapping of the master's cane and his "a little less noise, please,"--to let him slip quietly into his seat unnoticed. but no; he had to open the door and walk up the long aisle, in the midst of a silent room, with the master looking straight at him. oh, how hot his cheeks felt, and how hard his heart beat! but to his great surprise the master didn't scold at all. all he said was, "come quickly to your place, my little franz; we were just going to begin without you!" little franz could hardly believe his ears; that wasn't at all the way the master was accustomed to speak. it was very strange! somehow--everything was very strange. the room looked queer. everybody was sitting so still, so straight--as if it were an exhibition day, or something very particular. and the master--he looked strange, too; why, he had on his fine lace jabot and his best coat, that he wore only on holidays, and his gold snuff-box in his hand. certainly it was very odd. little franz looked all round, wondering. and there in the back of the room was the oddest thing of all. there, on a bench, sat _visitors_. visitors! he could not make it out; people never came except on great occasions,--examination days and such. and it was not a holiday. yet there were the agent, the old blacksmith, the farmer, sitting quiet and still. it was very, very strange. just then the master stood up and opened school. he said, "my children, this is the last time i shall ever teach you. the order has come from berlin that henceforth nothing but german shall be taught in the schools of alsace and lorraine. this is your last lesson in french. i beg you, be very attentive." _his last lesson in french!_ little franz could not believe his ears; his last lesson--ah, _that_ was what was on the bulletin-board! it flashed across him in an instant. that was it! his last lesson in french--and he scarcely knew how to read and write--why, then, he should never know how! he looked down at his books, all battered and torn at the corners; and suddenly his books seemed quite different to him, they seemed--somehow--like friends. he looked at the master, and he seemed different, too,--like a very good friend. little franz began to feel strange himself. just as he was thinking about it, he heard his name called, and he stood up to recite. it was the rule of participles. oh, what wouldn't he have given to be able to say it off from beginning to end, exceptions and all, without a blunder! but he could only stand and hang his head; he did not know a word of it. then through the hot pounding in his ears he heard the master's voice; it was quite gentle; not at all the scolding voice he expected. and it said, "i'm not going to punish you, little franz. perhaps you are punished enough. and you are not alone in your fault. we all do the same thing,--we all put off our tasks till to-morrow. and--sometimes--to-morrow never comes. that is what it has been with us. we alsatians have been always putting off our education till the morrow; and now they have a right, those people down there, to say to us, 'what! you call yourselves french, and cannot even read and write the french language? learn german, then!'" and then the master spoke to them of the french language. he told them how beautiful it was, how clear and musical and reasonable, and he said that no people could be hopelessly conquered so long as it kept its language, for the language was the key to its prison-house. and then he said he was going to tell them a little about that beautiful language, and he explained the rule of participles. and do you know, it was just as simple as abc! little franz understood every word. it was just the same with the rest of the grammar lesson. i don't know whether little franz listened harder, or whether the master explained better; but it was all quite clear, and simple. but as they went on with it, and little franz listened and looked, it seemed to him that the master was trying to put the whole french language into their heads in that one hour. it seemed as if he wanted to teach them all he knew, before he went,--to give them all he had,--in this last lesson. from the grammar he went on to the writing lesson. and for this, quite new copies had been prepared. they were written on clean, new slips of paper, and they were:-- france: alsace. france: alsace. all up and down the aisles they hung out from the desks like little banners, waving:-- france: alsace. france: alsace. and everybody worked with all his might,--not a sound could you hear but the scratching of pens on the "france: alsace." even the little ones bent over their up and down strokes with their tongues stuck out to help them work. after the writing came the reading lesson, and the little ones sang their _ba_, _be_, _bi_, _bo_, _bu_. right in the midst of it, franz heard a curious sound, a big deep voice mingling with the children's voices. he turned round, and there, on the bench in the back of the room, the old blacksmith sat with a big abc book open on his knees. it was his voice franz had heard. he was saying the sounds with the little children,--_ba_, _be_, _bi_, _bo_, _bu_. his voice sounded so odd, with the little voices,--so very odd,--it made little franz feel queer. it seemed so funny that he thought he would laugh; then he thought he wouldn't laugh, he felt--he felt very queer. so it went on with the lessons; they had them all. and then, suddenly, the town clock struck noon. and at the same time they heard the tramp of the prussians' feet, coming back from drill. it was time to close school. the master stood up. he was very pale. little franz had never seen him look so tall. he said:-- "my children--my children"--but something choked him; he could not go on. instead he turned and went to the blackboard and took up a piece of chalk. and then he wrote, high up, in big white letters, "vive la france!" and he made a little sign to them with his head, "that is all; go away." the story of christmas there was once a nation which was very powerful, very fortunate, and very proud. its lands were fruitful; its armies were victorious in battle; and it had strong kings, wise lawgivers, and great poets. but after a great many years, everything changed. the nation had no more strong kings, no more wise lawgivers; its armies were beaten in battle, and neighbouring tribes conquered the country and took the fruitful lands; there were no more poets except a few who made songs of lamentation. the people had become a captive and humiliated people; and the bitterest part of all its sadness was the memory of past greatness. but in all the years of failure and humiliation, there was one thing which kept this people from despair; one hope lived in their hearts and kept them from utter misery. it was a hope which came from something one of the great poets of the past had said, in prophecy. this prophecy was whispered in the homes of the poor, taught in the churches, repeated from father to son among the rich; it was like a deep, hidden well of comfort in a desert of suffering. the prophecy said that some time a deliverer should be born for the nation, a new king even stronger than the old ones, mighty enough to conquer its enemies, set it free, and bring back the splendid days of old. this was the hope and expectation all the people looked for; they waited through the years for the prophecy to come true. in this nation, in a little country town, lived a man and a woman whose names were joseph and mary. and it happened, one year, that they had to take a little journey up to the town which was the nearest tax-centre, to have their names put on the census list; because that was the custom in that country. but when they got to the town, so many others were there for the same thing, and it was such a small town, that every place was crowded. there was no room for them at the inn. finally, the innkeeper said they might sleep in the stable, on the straw. so they went there for the night. and while they were there, in the stable, their first child was born to them, a little son. and because there was no cradle to put him in, the mother made a little warm nest of the hay in the big wooden manger where the oxen had eaten, and wrapped the baby in swaddling clothes, and laid him in the manger, for a bed! that same night, on the hills outside the town, there were shepherds, keeping their flocks through the darkness. they were tired with watching over the sheep, and they stood or sat about, drowsily, talking and watching the stars. and as they watched, behold, an angel of the lord appeared unto them! and the glory of the lord shone round about them! and they were sore afraid. but the angel said unto them, "fear not, for behold i bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. _for unto you is born, this day, in the city of david, a saviour,--which is christ the lord._ and this shall be a sign unto you: ye shall find the babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes, _lying in a manger_." and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising god, and saying, "glory to god in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." when the angels were gone up from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "let us now go even unto bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the lord hath made known unto us." and they came, with haste, and they found mary, and joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. and when they saw him in the manger, they knew that the wonderful thing the angel said had really happened, and that the great deliverer was born at last. the child-mind; and how to satisfy it "it is the grown people who make the nursery stories," wrote stevenson, "all the children do is jealously to preserve the text." and the grown person, whether he makes his stories with pen or with tongue, should bring two qualities at least to the work--simplicity of language and a serious sincerity. the reason for the simplicity is obvious, for no one, child or otherwise, can thoroughly enjoy a story clouded by words which convey no meaning to him. the second quality is less obvious but equally necessary. no absence of fun is intended by the words "serious sincerity," but they mean that the story-teller should bring to the child an equal interest in what is about to be told; an honest acceptance, for the time being, of the fairies, or the heroes, or the children, or the animals who talk, with which the tale is concerned. the child deserves this equality of standpoint, and without it there can be no entire success. as for the stories themselves, the difficulty lies with the material, not with the _child_. styles may be varied generously, but the matter must be quarried for. out of a hundred children's books it is more than likely that ninety-nine will be useless; yet perhaps out of one autobiography may be gleaned an anecdote, or a reminiscence which can be amplified into an absorbing tale. almost every story-teller will find that the open eye and ear will serve him better than much arduous searching. no one book will yield him the increase to his repertoire which will come to him by listening, by browsing in chance volumes and magazines, and even newspapers, by observing everyday life, and in all remembering his own youth, and his youthful, waiting audience. and that youthful audience? a rather too common mistake is made in allowing overmuch for the creative imagination of the normal child. it is not creative imagination which the normal child possesses so much as an enormous credulity and no limitations. if we consider for a moment we see that there has been little or nothing to limit things for him, therefore anything is possible. it is the years of our life as they come which narrow our fancies and set a bound to our beliefs; for experience has taught us that for the most part a certain cause will produce a certain effect. the child, on the contrary, has but little knowledge of causes, and as yet but an imperfect realisation of effects. if we, for instance, go into the midst of a savage country, we know that there is the chance of our meeting a savage. but to the young child it is quite as possible to meet a red indian coming round the bend of the brook at the bottom of the orchard, as it is to meet him in his own wigwam. the child is an adept at make-believe, but his make-believes are, as a rule, practical and serious. it is credulity rather than imagination which helps him. he takes the tales he has been _told_, the facts he has observed, and for the most part reproduces them to the best of his ability. and "nothing," as stevenson says, "can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring incongruities. the chair he has just been besieging as a castle is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasuance he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner." the child, in fact, is neither undeveloped "grown-up" nor unspoiled angel. perhaps he has a dash of both, but most of all he is akin to the grown person who dreams. with the dreamer and with the child there is that unquestioning acceptance of circumstances as they arise, however unusual and disconcerting they may be. in dreams the wildest, most improbable and fantastic things happen, but they are not so to the dreamer. the veriest cynic amongst us must take his dreams seriously and without a sneer, whether he is forced to leap from the edge of a precipice, whether he finds himself utterly incapable of packing his trunk in time for the train, whether in spite of his distress at the impropriety, he finds himself at a dinner-party minus his collar, or whether the riches of el dorado are laid at his feet. for him at the time it is all quite real and harassingly or splendidly important. to the child and to the dreamer all things are possible; frogs may talk, bears may be turned into princes, gallant tailors may overcome giants, fir-trees may be filled with ambitions. a chair may become a horse, a chest of drawers a coach and six, a hearthrug a battlefield, a newspaper a crown of gold. and these are facts which the story-teller must realise, and choose and shape the stories accordingly. many an old book, which to a modern grown person may seem prim and over-rigid, will be to the child a delight; for him the primness and the severity slip away, the story remains. such a book as mrs sherwood's _fairchild family_ is an example of this. to a grown person reading it for the first time, the loafing propensities of the immaculate mrs fairchild, who never does a hand's turn of good work for anyone from cover to cover, the hard piety, the snobbishness, the brutality of taking the children to the old gallows and seating them before the dangling remains of a murderer, while the lesson of brotherly love is impressed are shocking when they are not amusing; but to the child the doings of the naughty and repentant little fairchilds are engrossing; and experience proves to us that the twentieth-century child is as eager for the book as were ever his nineteenth-century grandfather and grandmother. good mrs timmin's _history of the robins_, too, is a continuous delight; and from its pompous and high-sounding dialogue a skilful adapter may glean not only one story, but one story with two versions; for the infant of eighteen months can follow the narrative of the joys and troubles, errors and kindnesses of robin, dicky, flopsy and pecksy; while the child of five or ten or even more will be keenly interested in a fuller account of the birds' adventures and the development of their several characters and those of their human friends and enemies. from these two books, from miss edgeworth's wonderful _moral tales_; from miss wetherell's delightful volume _mr rutherford's children_; from jane and ann taylor's _original poems_; from thomas day's _sandford and merton_; from bunyan's _pilgrim's progress_ and lamb's _tales from shakespeare_, and from many another old friend, stories may be gathered, but the story-teller will find that in almost all cases adaptation is a necessity. the joy of the hunt, however, is a real joy, and with a field which stretches from the myths of greece to _uncle remus_, from _le morte d'arthur_ to the _jungle books_, there need be no more lack of pleasure for the seeker than for the receiver of the spoil. * * * * * the following is a list of valuable sources for the story-teller, all yielding either good original material for adaptation, or stories which need only a slight alteration in the telling.[ ] [footnote : readers may be interested in _a history of story-telling_, by arthur ransome. (jack.)] the bible. mother goose's melody. (bullen.) the story hour, by _kate douglas wiggin_. (gay & hancock.) stories for kindergarten. (ginn.) st nicholas magazine, bound volumes. (warne.) little folks, bound volumes. (cassell.) fables and nursery tales, edited by _prof. charles eliot norton_. (heath.) stories to tell the littlest ones, by _sara gone bryant_. (harrap.) mother stories, by _maud lindsay_. (harrap.) more mother stories, by _maud lindsay_. (harrap.) Æsop's fables. stories to tell to children, by _sara cone bryant_. (harrap.) the book of stories for the story-teller, by _fanny coe_. (harrap.) songs and stories for the little ones, by _gordon browne_. (harrap.) character training (stories with an ethical bearing), by _e.l. cabot_ and _e. eyles_. (harrap.) stories for the story hour, by _ada m. marzials_. (harrap.) stories for the history hour, by _nannie niemeyer_. (harrap.) stories for the bible hour, by _r. brimley johnson_. (harrap.) nature stories to tell to children, by _h. waddingham seers_. (harrap.) old time tales, by _florence dugdale_. (collins.) the mabinogion. (dent.) percy's reliques. (warne.) told through the ages series. (harrap.) legends of greece and rome, by _g.h. kupfer, m.a._ favourite greek myths, by _l.s. hyde_. stories of robin hood, by _j.w. mcspadden_. stories of king arthur, by _u.w. cutler._ stories from greek history, by _h.l. havell, b.a._ stories from wagner, by _j.w. mcspadden_. britain long ago (stories from old english and celtic sources), by _e.m. wilmot-buxton, f.r.hist.s._ stories from scottish history (selected from "tales of a grandfather"), by _madalen edgar, m.a._ stories from greek tragedy, by _h.l. havell, b.a._ stories from the earthly paradise, by _madalen edgar, m.a._ stories from chaucer, by _j.w. mcspadden_. stories from the old testament, by _mrs s. platt_. told by the northmen (stories from the norse eddas and sagas), by _e.m. wilmot-buxton, f.r.hist.s_. stories from don quixote, by _h.l. havell, b.a._ the story of roland and the peers of charlemagne, by _james baldwin_. (teachers in need of good stories should keep themselves acquainted with the development of this series, as fresh volumes are constantly added. the material is precisely the right kind for the story-teller, since the stories have come to us from distant days when, as the national inheritance of this race or that, they were told in homely cabins by parents to their children, or sung by bards to festive companies.) stories of the english, by _f_. (blackwood.) old greek folk stories, by _josephine peabody_. (harrap.) red cap tales, by _s.r. crockett_. (black.) a child's book of saints, by _wm. canton_. (dent.) cuchulain, the hound of ulster, by _eleanor hull_. (harrap.) the high deeds of finn, by _t.w. rolleston, m.a._ (harrap.) the book of the epic, by _h.a. guerber_. (harrap.) the myths of greece and rome, by _h.a. guerber_. (harrap.) myths of the norsemen, by _h.a. guerber_. (harrap.) myths and legends of the middle ages, by _h.a. guerber_. (harrap.) hero-myths and legends of the british race, by _m.i. ebbutt, m.a._ (harrap.) the minstrelsy of the scottish border. gleanings in buddha-fields, by _lafcadio hearn_. (kegan paul.) the golden windows, by _laura e. richards_. (allenson.) hans andersen's fairy tales. grimm's fairy tales. english fairy tales, by _joseph jacobs_. (nutt.) folk-tales from many lands, by _lilian gask_. (harrap.) celtic fairy tales, by _joseph jacobs_. (nutt.) indian fairy tales, by _joseph jacobs_. (nutt.) west african folk-tales, by _w.h. barker_ and _c. sinclair_. (harrap.) russian fairy tales, by _r. nisbet bain_. (harrap.) cossack fairy tales, by _r. nisbet bain_. (harrap.) the happy prince, by _oscar wilde_. (nutt.) donegal fairy tales, by _seumas mcmanus_. in chimney corners, by _seumas mcmanus_. the arabian nights. the blue fairy book (and others), by _andrew lang_. (longmans.) fairy stories, by _john finnemore_. (s.s. union.) the japanese fairy book. (constable.) fairy tales from far japan, translated by _susan bollard_. (religious tract society.) in the child's world. (philip.) legends from fairyland, by _holme lee_. (warne.) the king of the golden river, by _john ruskin_. (grant allen.) the welsh fairy book, by _jenkyn thomas_. (unwin.) at the back of the north wind, by _george macdonald_. (blackie.) tell-me-why stories about animals, by _c.h. claudy_. (harrap.) tell-me-why stories about great discoveries, by _c.h. claudy_. (harrap.) uncle remus, by _joel chandler harris_. (routledge.) macaulay's lays of ancient rome. le morte d'arthur, by _sir thomas malory_. (macmillan.) the boy's froissart, by _henry newbolt_. (macmillan.) stories from dante, by _susan cunnington_. (harrap.) the jungle books, by _rudyard kipling_. (macmillan.) just so stories, by _rudyard kipling_. (macmillan.) wood magic, by _richard jefferies_. (longmans.) among the farmyard people, by _clara d. pierson_. (murray.) among the night people, by _clara d. pierson_. (murray.) among the meadow people, by _clara d. pierson_. (murray.) the animal story book, by _andrew lang_. (longmans.) wild animals i have known, by _ernest thompson seton_. (nutt.) a book of nature myths, by _florence holbrook_. (harrap.) more nature myths, by _f.v. farmer_. (harrap.) parables from nature, by _mrs a. gatty_. (bell.) northern trails, by _w.j. long_. (ginn.) the kindred of the wild, by _chas. g.d. roberts_. (duckworth.) rab and his friends, by _dr john brown_. a child's garden of verses, by _r.l. stevenson_. (longmans.) a treasury of verse for little children, compiled by _madalen edgar, m.a._ (harrap.) a treasury of verse for boys and girls, compiled by _madalen edgar, m.a._ (harrap.) a treasury of ballads, compiled by _madalen edgar, m.a._ (harrap.) bimbi, by _ouida_. (chatto.) stories from shakespeare, by _dr thomas carter_. (harrap.) stories from the faerie queene, by _laurence h. dawson_. (harrap.) moral tales, by _maria edgeworth_. (macmillan.) stories to tell to children by sara cone bryant contents some suggestions for the story-teller stories for reproduction story-telling in teaching english two little riddles in rhyme the little pink rose the cock-a-doo-dle-doo the cloud the little red hen the gingerbread man the little jackals and the lion the country mouse and the city mouse little jack rollaround how brother rabbit fooled the whale and the elephant the little half-chick the lambikin the blackberry-bush the fairies the adventures of the little field mouse another little red hen the story of the little rid hin the story of epaminondas and his auntie the boy who cried "wolf!" the frog king the sun and the wind the little jackal and the alligator the larks in the cornfield a true story about a girl my kingdom piccola the little fir tree how moses was saved the ten fairies the elves and the shoemaker who killed the otter's babies? early the brahmin, the tiger, and the jackal the little jackal and the camel the gulls of salt lake the nightingale margery's garden the little cotyledons the talkative tortoise robert of sicily the jealous courtiers prince cherry the gold in the orchard margaret of new orleans the dagda's harp the tailor and the three beasts the castle of fortune david and goliath the shepherd's song the hidden servants some suggestions for the story-teller concerning the fundamental points of method in telling a story, i have little to add to the principles which i have already stated as necessary, in my opinion, in the book of which this is, in a way, the continuation. but in the two years which have passed since that book was written, i have had the happiness of working on stories and the telling of them, among teachers and students all over this country, and in that experience certain secondary points of method have come to seem more important, or at least more in need of emphasis, than they did before. as so often happens, i had assumed that "those things are taken for granted;" whereas, to the beginner or the teacher not naturally a story-teller, the secondary or implied technique is often of greater difficulty than the mastery of underlying principles. the few suggestions which follow are of this practical, obvious kind. take your story seriously. no matter how riotously absurd it is, or how full of inane repetition, remember, if it is good enough to tell, it is a real story, and must be treated with respect. if you cannot feel so toward it, do not tell it. have faith in the story, and in the attitude of the children toward it and you. if you fail in this, the immediate result will be a touch of shame-facedness, affecting your manner unfavorably, and, probably, influencing your accuracy and imaginative vividness. perhaps i can make the point clearer by telling you about one of the girls in a class which was studying stories last winter; i feel sure if she or any of her fellow students recognizes the incident, she will not resent being made to serve the good cause, even in the unattractive guise of a warning example. a few members of the class had prepared the story of "the fisherman and his wife." the first girl called on was evidently inclined to feel that it was rather a foolish story. she tried to tell it well, but there were parts of it which produced in her the touch of shamefacedness to which i have referred. when she came to the rhyme,-- "o man of the sea, come, listen to me, for alice, my wife, the plague of my life, has sent me to beg a boon of thee," she said it rather rapidly. at the first repetition she said it still more rapidly; the next time she came to the jingle she said it so fast and so low that it was unintelligible; and the next recurrence was too much for her. with a blush and a hesitating smile she said, "and he said that same thing, you know!" of course everybody laughed, and of course the thread of interest and illusion was hopelessly broken for everybody. now, any one who chanced to hear miss shedlock tell that same story will remember that the absurd rhyme gave great opportunity for expression, in its very repetition; each time that the fisherman came to the water's edge his chagrin and unwillingness was greater, and his summons to the magic fish mirrored his feeling. the jingle is foolish; that is a part of the charm. but if the person who tells it feels foolish, there is no charm at all! it is the same principle which applies to any address to any assemblage: if the speaker has the air of finding what he has to say absurd or unworthy of effort, the audience naturally tends to follow his lead, and find it not worth listening to. let me urge, then, take your story seriously. next, "take your time." this suggestion needs explaining, perhaps. it does not mean license to dawdle. nothing is much more annoying in a speaker than too great deliberateness, or than hesitation of speech. but it means a quiet realization of the fact that the floor is yours, everybody wants to hear you, there is time enough for every point and shade of meaning and no one will think the story too long. this mental attitude must underlie proper control of speed. never hurry. a business-like leisure is the true attitude of the storyteller. and the result is best attained by concentrating one's attention on the episodes of the story. pass lightly, and comparatively swiftly, over the portions between actual episodes, but take all the time you need for the elaboration of those. and above all, do not feel hurried. the next suggestion is eminently plain and practical, if not an all too obvious one. it is this: if all your preparation and confidence fails you at the crucial moment, and memory plays the part of traitor in some particular, if, in short, you blunder on a detail of the story, never admit it. if it was an unimportant detail which you misstated, pass right on, accepting whatever you said, and continuing with it; if you have been so unfortunate as to omit a fact which was a necessary link in the chain, put it in, later, as skillfully as you can, and with as deceptive an appearance of its being in the intended order; but never take the children behind the scenes, and let them hear the creaking of your mental machinery. you must be infallible. you must be in the secret of the mystery, and admit your audience on somewhat unequal terms; they should have no creeping doubts as to your complete initiation into the secrets of the happenings you relate. plainly, there can be lapses of memory so complete, so all-embracing, that frank failure is the only outcome, but these are so few as not to need consideration, when dealing with so simple material as that of children's stories. there are times, too, before an adult audience, when a speaker can afford to let his hearers be amused with him over a chance mistake. but with children it is most unwise to break the spell of the entertainment in that way. consider, in the matter of a detail of action or description, how absolutely unimportant the mere accuracy is, compared with the effect of smoothness and the enjoyment of the hearers. they will not remember the detail, for good or evil, half so long as they will remember the fact that you did not know it. so, for their sakes, as well as for the success of your story, cover your slips of memory, and let them be as if they were not. and now i come to two points in method which have to do especially with humorous stories. the first is the power of initiating the appreciation of the joke. every natural humorist does this by instinct and the value of the power to story-teller can hardly be overestimated. to initiate appreciation does not mean that one necessarily gives way to mirth, though even that is sometimes natural and effective; one merely feels the approach of the humorous climax, and subtly suggests to the hearers that it will soon be "time to laugh." the suggestion usually comes in the form of facial expression, and in the tone. and children are so much simpler, and so much more accustomed to following another's lead than their elders, that the expression can be much more outright and unguarded than would be permissible with a mature audience. children like to feel the joke coming, in this way; they love the anticipation of a laugh, and they will begin to dimple, often, at your first unconscious suggestion of humor. if it is lacking, they are sometimes afraid to follow their own instincts. especially when you are facing an audience of grown people and children together, you will find that the latter are very hesitant about initiating their own expression of humor. it is more difficult to make them forget their surroundings then, and more desirable to give them a happy lead. often at the funniest point you will see some small listener in an agony of endeavor to cloak the mirth which he--poor mite--fears to be indecorous. let him see that it is "the thing" to laugh, and that everybody is going to. having so stimulated the appreciation of the humorous climax, it is important to give your hearers time for the full savor of the jest to permeate their consciousness. it is really robbing an audience of its rights, to pass so quickly from one point to another that the mind must lose a new one if it lingers to take in the old. every vital point in a tale must be given a certain amount of time: by an anticipatory pause, by some form of vocal or repetitive emphasis, and by actual time. but even more than other tales does the funny story demand this. it cannot be funny without it. every one who is familiar with the theatre must have noticed how careful all comedians are to give this pause for appreciation and laughter. often the opportunity is crudely given, or too liberally offered; and that offends. but in a reasonable degree the practice is undoubtedly necessary to any form of humorous expression. a remarkably good example of the type of humorous story to which these principles of method apply, is the story of "epaminondas." it will be plain to any reader that all the several funny crises are of the perfectly unmistakable sort children like, and that, moreover, these funny spots are not only easy to see; they are easy to foresee. the teller can hardly help sharing the joke in advance, and the tale is an excellent one with which to practice for power in the points mentioned. epaminondas is a valuable little rascal from other points of view, and i mean to return to him, to point a moral. but just here i want space for a word or two about the matter of variety of subject and style in school stories. there are two wholly different kinds of story which are equally necessary for children, i believe, and which ought to be given in about the proportion of one to three, in favor of the second kind; i make the ratio uneven because the first kind is more dominating in its effect. the first kind is represented by such stories as the "pig brother," which has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. it is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,--it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralizing. the story becomes a part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals which is an inescapable and necessary possession of the heir of civilization. children do not object to these stories in the least, if the stories are good ones. they accept them with the relish which nature seems to maintain for all truly nourishing material. and the little tales are one of the media through which we elders may transmit some very slight share of the benefit received by us, in turn, from actual or transmitted experience. the second kind has no preconceived moral to offer, makes no attempt to affect judgment or to pass on a standard. it simply presents a picture of life, usually in fable or poetic image, and says to the hearer, "these things are." the hearer, then, consciously or otherwise, passes judgment on the facts. his mind says, "these things are good;" or, "this was good, and that, bad;" or, "this thing is desirable," or the contrary. the story of "the little jackal and the alligator" is a good illustration of this type. it is a character-story. in the naive form of a folk tale, it doubtless embodies the observations of a seeing eye, in a country and time when the little jackal and the great alligator were even more vivid images of certain human characters than they now are. again and again, surely, the author or authors of the tales must have seen the weak, small, clever being triumph over the bulky, well-accoutred, stupid adversary. again and again they had laughed at the discomfiture of the latter, perhaps rejoicing in it the more because it removed fear from their own houses. and probably never had they concerned themselves particularly with the basic ethics of the struggle. it was simply one of the things they saw. it was life. so they made a picture of it. the folk tale so made, and of such character, comes to the child somewhat as an unprejudiced newspaper account of to-day's happenings comes to us. it pleads no cause, except through its contents; it exercises no intentioned influence on our moral judgment; it is there, as life is there, to be seen and judged. and only through such seeing and judging can the individual perception attain to anything of power or originality. just as a certain amount of received ideas is necessary to sane development, so is a definite opportunity for first-hand judgments essential to power. in this epoch of well-trained minds we run some risk of an inundation of accepted ethics. the mind which can make independent judgments, can look at new facts with fresh vision, and reach conclusions with simplicity, is the perennial power in the world. and this is the mind we are not noticeably successful in developing, in our system of schooling. let us at least have its needs before our consciousness, in our attempts to supplement the regular studies of school by such side-activities as story-telling. let us give the children a fair proportion of stories which stimulate independent moral and practical decisions. and now for a brief return to our little black friend. "epaminondas" belongs to a very large, very ancient type of funny story: the tale in which the jest depends wholly on an abnormal degree of stupidity on the part of the hero. every race which produces stories seems to have found this theme a natural outlet for its childlike laughter. the stupidity of lazy jack, of big claus, of the good man, of clever alice, all have their counterparts in the folly of the small epaminondas. evidently, such stories have served a purpose in the education of the race. while the exaggeration of familiar attributes easily awakens mirth in a simple mind, it does more: it teaches practical lessons of wisdom and discretion. and possibly the lesson was the original cause of the story. not long ago, i happened upon an instance of the teaching power of these nonsense tales, so amusing and convincing that i cannot forbear to share it. a primary teacher who heard me tell "epaminondas" one evening, told it to her pupils the next morning, with great effect. a young teacher who was observing in the room at the time told me what befell. she said the children laughed very heartily over the story, and evidently liked it much. about an hour later, one of them was sent to the board to do a little problem. it happened that the child made an excessively foolish mistake, and did not notice it. as he glanced at the teacher for the familiar smile of encouragement, she simply raised her hands, and ejaculated "'for the law's sake!'" it was sufficient. the child took the cue instantly. he looked hastily at his work, broke into an irrepressible giggle, rubbed the figures out, without a word, and began again. and the whole class entered into the joke with the gusto of fellow-fools, for once wise. it is safe to assume that the child in question will make fewer needless mistakes for a long time because of the wholesome reminder of his likeness with one who "ain't got the sense he was born with." and what occurred so visibly in his case goes on quietly in the hidden recesses of the mind in many cases. one "epaminondas" is worth three lectures. i wish there were more of such funny little tales in the world's literature, all ready, as this one is, for telling to the youngest of our listeners. but masterpieces are few in any line, and stories for telling are no exception; it took generations, probably, to make this one. the demand for new sources of supply comes steadily from teachers and mothers, and is the more insistent because so often met by the disappointing recommendations of books which prove to be for reading only, rather than for telling. it would be a delight to print a list of fifty, twenty-five, even ten books which would be found full of stories to tell without much adapting. but i am grateful to have found even fewer than the ten, to which i am sure the teacher can turn with real profit. the following names are, of course, additional to the list contained in "how to tell stories to children." all about johnnie jones. by carolyn verhoeff. milton bradley co., springfield, mass. valuable for kindergartners as a supply of realistic stories with practical lessons in simplest form. old deccan days. by mary frere. joseph mcdonough, albany, new york. a splendid collection of hindu folk tales, adaptable for all ages. the silver crown. by laura e. richards. little, brown & co., boston. poetic fables with beautiful suggestions of ethical truths. the children's hour. by eva march tappan. houghton, mifflin & co., boston, new york, and chicago. a classified collection, in ten volumes, of fairy, folk tales, fables, realistic, historical, and poetical stories. for the children's hour. by carolyn bailey and clara lewis. milton bradley co., springfield. a general collection of popular stories, well told. the sons of cormac. by aldis dunbar. longmans, green & co., london. rather mature but very fine irish stories. for the benefit of suggestion to teachers in schools where story-telling is newly or not yet introduced in systematic form, i am glad to append the following list of stories which have been found, on several years' trial, to be especially tellable and likable, in certain grades of the providence schools, in rhode island. the list is not mine, although it embodies some of my suggestions. i offer it merely as a practical result of the effort to equalize and extend the story-hour throughout the schools. its makers would be the last to claim ideal merit for it, and they are constantly improving and developing it. i am indebted for the privilege of using it to the primary teachers of providence, and to their supervisor, miss ella l. sweeney. stories for reproduction first grade chicken little the dog and his shadow barnyard talk the hare and the hound little red hen five little rabbits little gingerbread boy the three bears the lion and the mouse the red-headed wood- the hungry lion pecker the wind and the sun little red riding-hood the fox and the crow little half-chick the duck and the hen the rabbit and the turtle the hare and the tortoise the shoemaker and the the three little robins fairies the wolf and the kid the wolf and the crane the crow and the pitcher the cat and the mouse the fox and the grapes snow-white and rose-red second grade the north wind the lark and her little the mouse pie ones the wonderful traveler the wolf and the goslings the wolf and the fox the ugly duckling the star dollars the country mouse and the the water-lily city mouse the three goats the three little pigs the boy and the nuts diamonds and toads the honest woodman the thrifty squirrel the pied piper how the robin's breast king midas became red the town musicians the old woman and her raggylug pig peter rabbit the sleeping apple the boy who cried "wolf" the cat and the parrot third grade the crane express how the mole became little black sambo blind the lantern and the fan how fire was brought to why the bear has a short the indians tail echo why the fox has a white piccola tip to his tail the story of the morning- why the wren flies low glory seed jack and the beanstalk the discontented pine the talkative tortoise tree fleet wing and sweet voice the bag of winds the golden fleece the foolish weather-vane the little boy who wanted the shut-up posy the moon pandora's box benjy in beastland the little match girl tomtit's peep at the world fourth grade arachne the first snowdrop the porcelain stove the three golden apples moufflou androclus and the lion clytie the old man and his the legend of the trailing donkey arbutus the leak in the dike latona and the frogs king tawny mane dick whittington and his the little lame prince cat appleseed john dora, the little girl of the narcissus lighthouse why the sea is salt proserpine the little hero of haarlem the miraculous pitcher the bell of justice story-telling in teaching english i have to speak now of a phase of elementary education which lies very close to my warmest interest, which, indeed, could easily become an active hobby if other interests did not beneficently tug at my skirts when i am minded to mount and ride too wildly. it is the hobby of many of you who are teachers, also, and i know you want to hear it discussed. i mean the growing effort to teach english and english literature to children in the natural way: by speaking and hearing,--orally. we are coming to a realization of the fact that our ability, as a people, to use english is pitifully inadequate and perverted. those americans who are not blinded by a limited horizon of cultured acquaintance, and who have given themselves opportunity to hear the natural speech of the younger generation in varying sections of the united states, must admit that it is no exaggeration to say that this country at large has no standard of english speech. there is no general sense of responsibility to our mother tongue (indeed, it is in an overwhelming degree not our mother tongue) and no general appreciation of its beauty or meaning. the average young person in every district save a half-dozen jealously guarded little precincts of good taste, uses inexpressive, ill-bred words, spoken without regard to their just sound-effects, and in a voice which is an injury to the ear of the mind, as well as a torment to the physical ear. the structure of the language and the choice of words are dark matters to most of our young americans; this has long been acknowledged and struggled against. but even darker, and quite equally destructive to english expression, is their state of mind regarding pronunciation, enunciation, and voice. it is the essential connection of these elements with english speech that we have been so slow to realize. we have felt that they were externals, desirable but not necessary adjuncts,--pretty tags of an exceptional gift or culture. many an intelligent school director to-day will say, "i don't care much about how you say a thing; it is what you say that counts." he cannot see that voice and enunciation and pronunciation are essentials. but they are. you can no more help affecting the meaning of your words by the way you say them than you can prevent the expressions of your face from carrying a message; the message may be perverted by an uncouth habit, but it will no less surely insist on recognition. the fact is that speech is a method of carrying ideas from one human soul to another, by way of the ear. and these ideas are very complex. they are not unmixed emanations of pure intellect, transmitted to pure intellect: they are compounded of emotions, thoughts, fancies, and are enhanced or impeded in transmission by the use of word-symbols which have acquired, by association, infinite complexities in themselves. the mood of the moment, the especial weight of a turn of thought, the desire of the speaker to share his exact soul-concept with you,--these seek far more subtle means than the mere rendering of certain vocal signs; they demand such variations and delicate adjustments of sound as will inevitably affect the listening mind with the response desired. there is no "what" without the "how" in speech. the same written sentence becomes two diametrically opposite ideas, given opposing inflection and accompanying voice-effect. "he stood in the front rank of the battle" can be made praiseful affirmation, scornful skepticism, or simple question, by a simple varying of voice and inflection. this is the more unmistakable way in which the "how" affects the "what." just as true is the less obvious fact. the same written sentiment, spoken by wendell phillips and by a man from the bowery or an uneducated ranchman, is not the same to the listener. in one case the sentiment comes to the mind's ear with certain completing and enhancing qualities of sound which give it accuracy and poignancy. the words themselves retain all their possible suggestiveness in the speaker's just and clear enunciation, and have a borrowed beauty, besides, from the associations of fine habit betrayed in the voice and manner of speech. and, further, the immense personal equation shows itself in the beauty and power of the vocal expressiveness, which carries shades of meaning, unguessed delicacies of emotion, intimations of beauty, to every ear. in the other case, the thought is clouded by unavoidable suggestions of ignorance and ugliness, brought by the pronunciation and voice, even to an unanalytical ear; the meaning is obscured by inaccurate inflection and uncertain or corrupt enunciation; but, worst of all, the personal atmosphere, the aroma, of the idea has been lost in transmission through a clumsy, ill-fitted medium. the thing said may look the same on a printed page, but it is not the same when spoken. and it is the spoken sentence which is the original and the usual mode of communication. the widespread poverty of expression in english, which is thus a matter of "how," and to which we are awakening, must be corrected chiefly, at least at first, by the common schools. the home is the ideal place for it, but the average home of the united states is no longer a possible place for it. the child of foreign parents, the child of parents little educated and bred in limited circumstances, the child of powerful provincial influences, must all depend on the school for standards of english. and it is the elementary school which must meet the need, if it is to be met at all. for the conception of english expression which i am talking of can find no mode of instruction adequate to its meaning, save in constant appeal to the ear, at an age so early that unconscious habit is formed. no rules, no analytical instruction in later development, can accomplish what is needed. hearing and speaking; imitating, unwittingly and wittingly, a good model; it is to this method we must look for redemption from present conditions. i believe we are on the eve of a real revolution in english teaching,--only it is a revolution which will not break the peace. the new way will leave an overwhelming preponderance of oral methods in use up to the fifth or sixth grade, and will introduce a larger proportion of oral work than has ever been contemplated in grammar and high school work. it will recognize the fact that english is primarily something spoken with the mouth and heard with the ear. and this recognition will have greatest weight in the systems of elementary teaching. it is as an aid in oral teaching of english that story-telling in school finds its second value; ethics is the first ground of its usefulness, english the second,--and after these, the others. it is, too, for the oral uses that the secondary forms of story-telling are so available. by secondary i mean those devices which i have tried to indicate, as used by many american teachers, in the chapter on "specific schoolroom uses," in my earlier book. they are re-telling, dramatization, and forms of seat-work. all of these are a great power in the hands of a wise teacher. if combined with much attention to voice and enunciation in the recital of poetry, and with much good reading aloud by the teacher, they will go far toward setting a standard and developing good habit. but their provinces must not be confused or overestimated. i trust i may be pardoned for offering a caution or two to the enthusiastic advocate of these methods,--cautions the need of which has been forced upon me, in experience with schools. a teacher who uses the oral story as an english feature with little children must never lose sight of the fact that it is an aid in unconscious development; not a factor in studied, conscious improvement. this truth cannot be too strongly realized. other exercises, in sufficiency, give the opportunity for regulated effort for definite results, but the story is one of the play-forces. its use in english teaching is most valuable when the teacher has a keen appreciation of the natural order of growth in the art of expression: that art requires, as the old rhetorics used often to put it, "a natural facility, succeeded by an acquired difficulty." in other words, the power of expression depends, first, on something more fundamental than the art-element; the basis of it is something to say, accompanied by an urgent desire to say it, and yielded to with freedom; only after this stage is reached can the art-phase be of any use. the "why" and "how," the analytical and constructive phases, have no natural place in this first vital epoch. precisely here, however, does the dramatizing of stories and the paper-cutting, etc., become useful. a fine and thoughtful principal of a great school asked me, recently, with real concern, about the growing use of such devices. he said, "paper-cutting is good, but what has it to do with english?" and then he added: "the children use abominable language when they play the stories; can that directly aid them to speak good english?" his observation was close and correct, and his conservatism more valuable than the enthusiasm of some of his colleagues who have advocated sweeping use of the supplementary work. but his point of view ignored the basis of expression, which is to my mind so important. paper-cutting is external to english, of course. its only connection is in its power to correlate different forms of expression, and to react on speech-expression through sense-stimulus. but playing the story is a closer relative to english than this. it helps, amazingly, in giving the "something to say, the urgent desire to say it," and the freedom in trying. never mind the crudities,--at least, at the time; work only for joyous freedom, inventiveness, and natural forms of reproduction of the ideas given. look for very gradual changes in speech, through the permeating power of imitation, but do not forget that this is the stage of expression which inevitably precedes art. all this will mean that no corrections are made, except in flagrant cases of slang or grammar, though all bad slips are mentally noted, for introduction at a more favorable time. it will mean that the teacher will respect the continuity of thought and interest as completely as she would wish an audience to respect her occasional prosy periods if she were reading a report. she will remember, of course that she is not training actors for amateur theatricals, however tempting her show-material may be; she is simply letting the children play with expression, just as a gymnasium teacher introduces muscular play,--for power through relaxation. when the time comes that the actors lose their unconsciousness it is the end of the story-play. drilled work, the beginning of the art, is then the necessity. i have indicated that the children may be left undisturbed in their crudities and occasional absurdities. the teacher, on the other hand, must avoid, with great judgment, certain absurdities which can easily be initiated by her. the first direful possibility is in the choice of material. it is very desirable that children should not be allowed to dramatize stories of a kind so poetic, so delicate, or so potentially valuable that the material is in danger of losing future beauty to the pupils through its present crude handling. mother goose is a hardy old lady, and will not suffer from the grasp of the seven-year-old; and the familiar fables and tales of the "goldilocks" variety have a firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable--or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature--are sorely hurt in their metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. they are for telling only. another point on which it is necessary to exercise reserve is in the degree to which any story can be acted. in the justifiable desire to bring a large number of children into the action one must not lose sight of the sanity and propriety of the presentation. for example, one must not make a ridiculous caricature, where a picture, however crude, is the intention. personally represent only such things as are definitely and dramatically personified in the story. if a natural force, the wind, for example, is represented as talking and acting like a human being in the story, it can be imaged by a person in the play; but if it remains a part of the picture in the story, performing only its natural motions, it is a caricature to enact it as a role. the most powerful instance of a mistake of this kind which i have ever seen will doubtless make my meaning clear. in playing a pretty story about animals and children, some children in a primary school were made by the teacher to take the part of the sea. in the story, the sea was said to "beat upon the shore," as a sea would, without doubt. in the play, the children were allowed to thump the floor lustily, as a presentation of their watery functions! it was unconscionably funny. fancy presenting even the crudest image of the mighty sea, surging up on the shore, by a row of infants squatted on the floor and pounding with their fists! such pitfalls can be avoided by the simple rule of personifying only characters that actually behave like human beings. a caution which directly concerns the art of story telling itself, must be added here. there is a definite distinction between the arts of narration and dramatization which must never be overlooked. do not, yourself, half tell and half act the story; and do not let the children do it. it is done in very good schools, sometimes, because an enthusiasm for realistic and lively presentation momentarily obscures the faculty of discrimination. a much loved and respected teacher whom i recently listened to, and who will laugh if she recognizes her blunder here, offers a good "bad example" in this particular. she said to an attentive audience of students that she had at last, with much difficulty, brought herself to the point where she could forget herself in her story: where she could, for instance, hop, like the fox, when she told the story of the "sour grapes." she said, "it was hard at first, but now it is a matter of course; and the children do it too, when they tell the story." that was the pity! i saw the illustration myself a little later. the child who played fox began with a story: he said, "once there was an old fox, and he saw some grapes;" then the child walked to the other side of the room, and looked up at an imaginary vine, and said, "he wanted some; he thought they would taste good, so he jumped for them;" at this point the child did jump, like his role; then he continued with his story, "but he couldn't get them." and so he proceeded, with a constant alternation of narrative and dramatization which was enough to make one dizzy. the trouble in such work is, plainly, a lack of discriminating analysis. telling a story necessarily implies non-identification of the teller with the event; he relates what occurs or occurred, outside of his circle of consciousness. acting a play necessarily implies identification of the actor with the event; he presents to you a picture of the thing, in himself. it is a difference wide and clear, and the least failure to recognize it confuses the audience and injures both arts. in the preceding instances of secondary uses of story-telling i have come some distance from the great point, the fundamental point, of the power of imitation in breeding good habit. this power is less noticeably active in the dramatizing than in simple re-telling; in the listening and the re-telling, it is dominant for good. the child imitates what he hears you say and sees you do, and the way you say and do it, far more closely in the story-hour than in any lesson-period. he is in a more absorbent state, as it were, because there is no preoccupation of effort. here is the great opportunity of the cultured teacher; here is the appalling opportunity of the careless or ignorant teacher. for the implications of the oral theory of teaching english are evident, concerning the immense importance of the teacher's habit. this is what it all comes to ultimately; the teacher of young children must be a person who can speak english as it should be spoken,--purely, clearly, pleasantly, and with force. it is a hard ideal to live up to, but it is a valuable ideal to try to live up to. and one of the best chances to work toward attainment is in telling stories, for there you have definite material, which you can work into shape and practice on in private. that practice ought to include conscious thought as to one's general manner in the schoolroom, and intelligent effort to understand and improve one's own voice. i hope i shall not seem to assume the dignity of an authority which no personal taste can claim, if i beg a hearing for the following elements of manner and voice, which appeal to me as essential. they will, probably, appear self-evident to my readers, yet they are often found wanting in the public school-teacher; it is so much easier to say "what were good to do" than to do it! three elements of manner seem to me an essential adjunct to the personality of a teacher of little children: courtesy, repose vitality. repose and vitality explain themselves; by courtesy i specifically do not mean the habit of mind which contents itself with drilling children in "good-mornings" and in hat-liftings. i mean the attitude of mind which recognizes in the youngest, commonest child, the potential dignity, majesty, and mystery of the developed human soul. genuine reverence for the humanity of the "other fellow" marks a definite degree of courtesy in the intercourse of adults, does it not? and the same quality of respect, tempered by the demands of a wise control, is exactly what is needed among children. again and again, in dealing with young minds, the teacher who respects personality as sacred, no matter how embryonic it be, wins the victories which count for true education. yet, all too often, we forget the claims of this reverence, in the presence of the annoyances and the needed corrections. as for voice: work in schoolrooms brings two opposing mistakes constantly before me: one is the repressed voice, and the other, the forced. the best way to avoid either extreme, is to keep in mind that the ideal is development of one's own natural voice, along its own natural lines. a "quiet, gentle voice" is conscientiously aimed at by many young teachers, with so great zeal that the tone becomes painfully repressed, "breathy," and timid. this is quite as unpleasant as a loud voice, which is, in turn, a frequent result of early admonitions to "speak up." neither is natural. it is wise to determine the natural volume and pitch of one's speaking voice by a number of tests, made when one is thoroughly rested, at ease, and alone. find out where your voice lies when it is left to itself, under favorable conditions, by reading something aloud or by listening to yourself as you talk to an intimate friend. then practise keeping it in that general range, unless it prove to have a distinct fault, such as a nervous sharpness, or hoarseness. a quiet voice is good; a hushed voice is abnormal. a clear tone is restful, but a loud one is wearying. perhaps the common-sense way of setting a standard for one's own voice is to remember that the purpose of a speaking voice is to communicate with others; their ears and minds are the receivers of our tones. for this purpose, evidently, a voice should be, first of all, easy to hear; next, pleasant to hear; next, susceptible of sufficient variation to express a wide range of meaning; and finally, indicative of personality. is it too quixotic to urge teachers who tell stories to little children to bear these thoughts, and better ones of their own, in mind? not, i think, if it be fully accepted that the story hour, as a play hour, is a time peculiarly open to influences affecting the imitative faculty; that this faculty is especially valuable in forming fine habits of speech; and that an increasingly high and general standard of english speech is one of our greatest needs and our most instant opportunities in the american schools of to-day. and now we come to the stories! stories to tell to children two little riddles in rhyme[ ] [ ] these riddles were taken from the gaelic, and are charming examples of the naive beauty of the old irish, and of dr. hyde's accurate and sympathetic modern rendering. from "beside the fire" (david nutt, london). there's a garden that i ken, full of little gentlemen; little caps of blue they wear, and green ribbons, very fair. (flax.) from house to house he goes, a messenger small and slight, and whether it rains or snows, he sleeps outside in the night. (the path.) the little pink rose once there was a little pink rosebud, and she lived down in a little dark house under the ground. one day she was sitting there, all by herself, and it was very still. suddenly, she heard a little tap, tap, tap, at the door. "who is that?" she said. "it's the rain, and i want to come in;" said a soft, sad, little voice. "no, you can't come in," the little rosebud said. by and by she heard another little tap, tap, tap on the window pane. "who is there?" she said. the same soft little voice answered, "it's the rain, and i want to come in!" "no, you can't come in," said the little rosebud. then it was very still for a long time. at last, there came a little rustling, whispering sound, all round the window: rustle, whisper, whisper. "who is there?" said the little rosebud. "it's the sunshine," said a little, soft, cheery voice, "and i want to come in!" "n--no," said the little pink rose, "you can't come in." and she sat still again. pretty soon she heard the sweet little rustling noise at the key-hole. "who is there?" she said. "it's the sunshine," said the cheery little voice, "and i want to come in, i want to come in!" "no, no," said the little pink rose, "you cannot come in." by and by, as she sat so still, she heard tap, tap, tap, and rustle, whisper, rustle, all up and down the window pane, and on the door, and at the key-hole. "who is there?" she said. "it's the rain and the sun, the rain and the sun," said two little voices, together, "and we want to come in! we want to come in! we want to come in!" "dear, dear!" said the little rosebud, "if there are two of you, i s'pose i shall have to let you in." so she opened the door a little wee crack, and in they came. and one took one of her little hands, and the other took her other little hand, and they ran, ran, ran with her, right up to the top of the ground. then they said,-- "poke your head through!" so she poked her head through; and she was in the midst of a beautiful garden. it was springtime, and all the other flowers had their heads poked through; and she was the prettiest little pink rose in the whole garden! the cock-a-doo-dle-doo[ ] [ ] from "the ignominy of being grown up," by dr. samuel m. crothers, in the atlantic monthly for july, . a very little boy made this story up "out of his head," and told it to his papa i think you littlest ones will like it; i do. once upon a time there was a little boy, and he wanted to be a cock-a-doo-dle-doo so he was a cock-a-doo-dle-doo. and he wanted to fly up into the sky. so he did fly up into the sky. and he wanted to get wings and a tail. so he did get some wings and a tail. the cloud[ ] [ ] adapted from the german of robert reinick's maarchen, lieder-und geschichtenbuch (velhagen und klasing, bielefeld and leipsic). one hot summer morning a little cloud rose out of the sea and floated lightly and happily across the blue sky. far below lay the earth, brown, dry, and desolate, from drouth. the little cloud could see the poor people of the earth working and suffering in the hot fields, while she herself floated on the morning breeze, hither and thither, without a care. "oh, if i could only help the poor people down there!" she thought. "if i could but make their work easier, or give the hungry ones food, or the thirsty a drink!" and as the day passed, and the cloud became larger, this wish to do something for the people of earth was ever greater in her heart. on earth it grew hotter and hotter; the sun burned down so fiercely that the people were fainting in its rays; it seemed as if they must die of heat, and yet they were obliged to go on with their work, for they were very poor. sometimes they stood and looked up at the cloud, as if they were praying, and saying, "ah, if you could help us!" "i will help you; i will!" said the cloud. and she began to sink softly down toward the earth. but suddenly, as she floated down, she remembered something which had been told her when she was a tiny cloud-child, in the lap of mother ocean: it had been whispered that if the clouds go too near the earth they die. when she remembered this she held herself from sinking, and swayed here and there on the breeze, thinking,--thinking. but at last she stood quite still, and spoke boldly and proudly. she said, "men of earth, i will help you, come what may!" the thought made her suddenly marvelously big and strong and powerful. never had she dreamed that she could be so big. like a mighty angel of blessing she stood above the earth, and lifted her head and spread her wings far over the fields and woods. she was so great, so majestic, that men and animals were awe-struck at the sight; the trees and the grasses bowed before her; yet all the earth-creatures felt that she meant them well. "yes, i will help you," cried the cloud once more. "take me to yourselves; i will give my life for you!" as she said the words a wonderful light glowed from her heart, the sound of thunder rolled through the sky, and a love greater than words can tell filled the cloud; down, down, close to the earth she swept, and gave up her life in a blessed, healing shower of rain. that rain was the cloud's great deed; it was her death, too; but it was also her glory. over the whole country-side, as far as the rain fell, a lovely rainbow sprang its arch, and all the brightest rays of heaven made its colors; it was the last greeting of a love so great that it sacrificed itself. soon that, too, was gone, but long, long afterward the men and animals who were saved by the cloud kept her blessing in their hearts. the little red hen the little red hen was in the farmyard with her chickens, when she found a grain of wheat. "who will plant this wheat?" she said. "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen, and she planted the grain of wheat. when the wheat was ripe she said, "who will take this wheat to the mill?" "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen, and she took the wheat to the mill. when she brought the flour home she said, "who will make some bread with this flour?" "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen. when the bread was baked, she said, "who will eat this bread?" "i will," said the goose "i will," said the duck "no, you won't," said the little red hen. "i shall eat it myself. cluck! cluck!" and she called her chickens to help her. the gingerbread man[ ] [ ] i have tried to give this story in the most familiar form; it varies a good deal in the hands of different story-tellers, but this is substantially the version i was "brought up on." the form of the ending was suggested to me by the story in carolyn bailey's for the children's hour (milton bradley co.). once upon a time there was a little old woman and a little old man, and they lived all alone in a little old house. they hadn't any little girls or any little boys, at all. so one day, the little old woman made a boy out of gingerbread; she made him a chocolate jacket, and put cinnamon seeds in it for buttons; his eyes were made of fine, fat currants; his mouth was made of rose-colored sugar; and he had a gay little cap of orange sugar-candy. when the little old woman had rolled him out, and dressed him up, and pinched his gingerbread shoes into shape, she put him in a pan; then she put the pan in the oven and shut the door; and she thought, "now i shall have a little boy of my own." when it was time for the gingerbread boy to be done she opened the oven door and pulled out the pan. out jumped the little gingerbread boy on to the floor, and away he ran, out of the door and down the street! the little old woman and the little old man ran after him as fast as they could, but he just laughed, and shouted,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and they couldn't catch him. the little gingerbread boy ran on and on, until he came to a cow, by the roadside. "stop, little gingerbread boy," said the cow; "i want to eat you." the little gingerbread boy laughed, and said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "and a little old man, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and, as the cow chased him, he looked over his shoulder and cried,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the cow couldn't catch him. the little gingerbread boy ran on, and on, and on, till he came to a horse, in the pasture. "please stop, little gingerbread boy," said the horse, "you look very good to eat." but the little gingerbread boy laughed out loud. "oho! oho!" he said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and, as the horse chased him, he looked over his shoulder and cried,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the horse couldn't catch him. by and by the little gingerbread boy came to a barn full of threshers. when the threshers smelled the gingerbread boy, they tried to pick him up, and said, "don't run so fast, little gingerbread boy; you look very good to eat." but the little gingerbread boy ran harder than ever, and as he ran he cried out,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and when he found that he was ahead of the threshers, he turned and shouted back to them,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the threshers couldn't catch him. then the little gingerbread boy ran faster than ever. he ran and ran until he came to a field full of mowers. when the mowers saw how fine he looked, they ran after him, calling out, "wait a bit! wait a bit, little gingerbread boy, we wish to eat you!" but the little gingerbread boy laughed harder than ever, and ran like the wind. "oho! oho!" he said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "a barn full of threshers, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and when he found that he was ahead of the mowers, he turned and shouted back to them,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the mowers couldn't catch him. by this time the little gingerbread boy was so proud that he didn't think anybody could catch him. pretty soon he saw a fox coming across a field. the fox looked at him and began to run. but the little gingerbread boy shouted across to him, "you can't catch me!" the fox began to run faster, and the little gingerbread boy ran faster, and as he ran he chuckled,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "a barn full of threshers, "a field full of mowers, "and i can run away from you, i can! "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" "why," said the fox, "i would not catch you if i could. i would not think of disturbing you." just then, the little gingerbread boy came to a river. he could not swim across, and he wanted to keep running away from the cow and the horse and the people. "jump on my tail, and i will take you across," said the fox. so the little gingerbread boy jumped on the fox's tail, and the fox swam into the river. when he was a little way from shore he turned his head, and said, "you are too heavy on my tail, little gingerbread boy, i fear i shall let you get wet; jump on my back." the little gingerbread boy jumped on his back. a little farther out, the fox said, "i am afraid the water will cover you, there; jump on my shoulder." the little gingerbread boy jumped on his shoulder. in the middle of the stream the fox said, "oh, dear! little gingerbread boy, my shoulder is sinking; jump on my nose, and i can hold you out of water." so the little gingerbread boy jumped on his nose. the minute the fox got on shore he threw back his head, and gave a snap! "dear me!" said the little gingerbread boy, "i am a quarter gone!" the next minute he said, "why, i am half gone!" the next minute he said, "my goodness gracious, i am three quarters gone!" and after that, the little gingerbread boy never said anything more at all. the little jackals and the lion[ ] [ ] the four stories of the little jackal, in this book, are adapted from stories in old deccan days, a collection of orally transmitted hindu folk tales, which every teacher would gain by knowing. in the hindu animal legends the jackal seems to play the role assigned in germanic lore to reynard the fox, and to "bre'r rabbit" in the stories of our southern negroes: he is the clever and humorous trickster who comes out of every encounter with a whole skin, and turns the laugh on every enemy, however mighty. once there was a great big jungle; and in the jungle there was a great big lion; and the lion was king of the jungle. whenever he wanted anything to eat, all he had to do was to come up out of his cave in the stones and earth and roar. when he had roared a few times all the little people of the jungle were so frightened that they came out of their holes and hiding-places and ran, this way and that, to get away. then, of course, the lion could see where they were. and he pounced on them, killed them, and gobbled them up. he did this so often that at last there was not a single thing left alive in the jungle besides the lion, except two little jackals,--a little father jackal and a little mother jackal. they had run away so many times that they were quite thin and very tired, and they could not run so fast any more. and one day the lion was so near that the little mother jackal grew frightened; she said,-- "oh, father jackal, father jackal! i b'lieve our time has come! the lion will surely catch us this time!" "pooh! nonsense, mother!" said the little father jackal. "come, we'll run on a bit!" and they ran, ran, ran very fast, and the lion did not catch them that time. but at last a day came when the lion was nearer still and the little mother jackal was frightened about to death. "oh, father jackal, father jackal!" she cried; "i'm sure our time has come! the lion's going to eat us this time!" "now, mother, don't you fret," said the little father jackal; "you do just as i tell you, and it will be all right." then what did those cunning little jackals do but take hold of hands and run up towards the lion, as if they had meant to come all the time. when he saw them coming he stood up, and roared in a terrible voice,-- "you miserable little wretches, come here and be eaten, at once! why didn't you come before?" the father jackal bowed very low. "indeed, father lion," he said, "we meant to come before; we knew we ought to come before; and we wanted to come before; but every time we started to come, a dreadful great lion came out of the woods and roared at us, and frightened us so that we ran away." "what do you mean?" roared the lion. "there's no other lion in this jungle, and you know it!" "indeed, indeed, father lion," said the little jackal, "i know that is what everybody thinks; but indeed and indeed there is another lion! and he is as much bigger than you as you are bigger than i! his face is much more terrible, and his roar far, far more dreadful. oh, he is far more fearful than you!" at that the lion stood up and roared so that the jungle shook. "take me to this lion," he said; "i'll eat him up and then i'll eat you up." the little jackals danced on ahead, and the lion stalked behind. they led him to a place where there was a round, deep well of clear water. they went round on one side of it, and the lion stalked up to the other. "he lives down there, father lion!" said the little jackal. "he lives down there!" the lion came close and looked down into the water,--and a lion's face looked back at him out of the water! when he saw that, the lion roared and shook his mane and showed his teeth. and the lion in the water shook his mane and showed his teeth. the lion above shook his mane again and growled again, and made a terrible face. but the lion in the water made just as terrible a one, back. the lion above couldn't stand that. he leaped down into the well after the other lion. but, of course, as you know very well, there wasn't any other lion! it was only the reflection in the water! so the poor old lion floundered about and floundered about, and as he couldn't get up the steep sides of the well, he was drowned dead. and when he was drowned the little jackals took hold of hands and danced round the well, and sang,-- "the lion is dead! the lion is dead! "we have killed the great lion who would have killed us! "the lion is dead! the lion is dead! "ao! ao! ao!" the country mouse and the city mouse[ ] [ ] the following story of the two mice, with the similar fables of the boy who cried wolf, the frog king, and the sun and the wind, are given here with the hope that they may be of use to the many teachers who find the over-familiar material of the fables difficult to adapt, and who are yet aware of the great usefulness of the stories to young minds. a certain degree of vividness and amplitude must be added to the compact statement of the famous collections, and yet it is not wise to change the style-effect of a fable, wholly. i venture to give these versions, not as perfect models, surely, but as renderings which have been acceptable to children, and which i believe retain the original point simply and strongly. once a little mouse who lived in the country invited a little mouse from the city to visit him. when the little city mouse sat down to dinner he was surprised to find that the country mouse had nothing to eat except barley and grain. "really," he said, "you do not live well at all; you should see how i live! i have all sorts of fine things to eat every day. you must come to visit me and see how nice it is to live in the city." the little country mouse was glad to do this, and after a while he went to the city to visit his friend. the very first place that the city mouse took the country mouse to see was the kitchen cupboard of the house where he lived. there, on the lowest shelf, behind some stone jars, stood a big paper bag of brown sugar. the little city mouse gnawed a hole in the bag and invited his friend to nibble for himself. the two little mice nibbled and nibbled, and the country mouse thought he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life. he was just thinking how lucky the city mouse was, when suddenly the door opened with a bang, and in came the cook to get some flour. "run!" whispered the city mouse. and they ran as fast as they could to the little hole where they had come in. the little country mouse was shaking all over when they got safely away, but the little city mouse said, "that is nothing; she will soon go away and then we can go back." after the cook had gone away and shut the door they stole softly back, and this time the city mouse had something new to show: he took the little country mouse into a corner on the top shelf, where a big jar of dried prunes stood open. after much tugging and pulling they got a large dried prune out of the jar on to the shelf and began to nibble at it. this was even better than the brown sugar. the little country mouse liked the taste so much that he could hardly nibble fast enough. but all at once, in the midst of their eating, there came a scratching at the door and a sharp, loud miaouw! "what is that?" said the country mouse. the city mouse just whispered, "sh!" and ran as fast as he could to the hole. the country mouse ran after, you may be sure, as fast as he could. as soon as they were out of danger the city mouse said, "that was the old cat; she is the best mouser in town,--if she once gets you, you are lost." "this is very terrible," said the little country mouse; "let us not go back to the cupboard again." "no," said the city mouse, "i will take you to the cellar; there is something especial there." so the city mouse took his little friend down the cellar stairs and into a big cupboard where there were many shelves. on the shelves were jars of butter, and cheeses in bags and out of bags. overhead hung bunches of sausages, and there were spicy apples in barrels standing about. it smelled so good that it went to the little country mouse's head. he ran along the shelf and nibbled at a cheese here, and a bit of butter there, until he saw an especially rich, very delicious-smelling piece of cheese on a queer little stand in a corner. he was just on the point of putting his teeth into the cheese when the city mouse saw him. "stop! stop!" cried the city mouse. "that is a trap!" the little country mouse stopped and said, "what is a trap?" "that thing is a trap," said the little city mouse. "the minute you touch the cheese with your teeth something comes down on your head hard, and you're dead." the little country mouse looked at the trap, and he looked at the cheese, and he looked at the little city mouse. "if you'll excuse me," he said, "i think i will go home. i'd rather have barley and grain to eat and eat it in peace and comfort, than have brown sugar and dried prunes and cheese,--and be frightened to death all the time!" so the little country mouse went back to his home, and there he stayed all the rest of his life. little jack rollaround[ ] [ ] based on theodor storm's story of der kleine hawelmanu (george westermann, braunschweig). very freely adapted from the german story. once upon a time there was a wee little boy who slept in a tiny trundle-bed near his mother's great bed. the trundle-bed had castors on it so that it could be rolled about, and there was nothing in the world the little boy liked so much as to have it rolled. when his mother came to bed he would cry, "roll me around! roll me around!" and his mother would put out her hand from the big bed and push the little bed back and forth till she was tired. the little boy could never get enough; so for this he was called "little jack rollaround." one night he had made his mother roll him about, till she fell asleep, and even then he kept crying, "roll me around! roll me around!" his mother pushed him about in her sleep, until she fell too soundly aslumbering; then she stopped. but little jack rollaround kept on crying, "roll around! roll around!" by and by the moon peeped in at the window. he saw a funny sight: little jack rollaround was lying in his trundle-bed, and he had put up one little fat leg for a mast, and fastened the corner of his wee shirt to it for a sail, and he was blowing at it with all his might, and saying, "roll around! roll around!" slowly, slowly, the little trundle-bed boat began to move; it sailed along the floor and up the wall and across the ceiling and down again! "more! more!" cried little jack rollaround; and the little boat sailed faster up the wall, across the ceiling, down the wall, and over the floor. the moon laughed at the sight; but when little jack rollaround saw the moon, he called out, "open the door, old moon! i want to roll through the town, so that the people can see me!" the moon could not open the door, but he shone in through the keyhole, in a broad band. and little jack rollaround sailed his trundle-bed boat up the beam, through the keyhole, and into the street. "make a light, old moon," he said; "i want the people to see me!" so the good moon made a light and went along with him, and the little trundle-bed boat went sailing down the streets into the main street of the village. they rolled past the town hall and the schoolhouse and the church; but nobody saw little jack rollaround, because everybody was in bed, asleep. "why don't the people come to see me?" he shouted. high up on the church steeple, the weather-vane answered, "it is no time for people to be in the streets; decent folk are in their beds." "then i'll go to the woods, so that the animals may see me," said little jack. "come along, old moon, and make a light!" the good moon went along and made a light, and they came to the forest. "roll! roll!" cried the little boy; and the trundle-bed went trundling among the trees in the great wood, scaring up the chipmunks and startling the little leaves on the trees. the poor old moon began to have a bad time of it, for the tree-trunks got in his way so that he could not go so fast as the bed, and every time he got behind, the little boy called, "hurry up, old moon, i want the beasts to see me!" but all the animals were asleep, and nobody at all looked at little jack rollaround except an old white owl; and all she said was, "who are you?" the little boy did not like her, so he blew harder, and the trundle-bed boat went sailing through the forest till it came to the end of the world. "i must go home now; it is late," said the moon. "i will go with you; make a path!" said little jack rollaround. the kind moon made a path up to the sky, and up sailed the little bed into the midst of the sky. all the little bright stars were there with their nice little lamps. and when he saw them, that naughty little jack rollaround began to tease. "out of the way, there! i am coming!" he shouted, and sailed the trundle-bed boat straight at them. he bumped the little stars right and left, all over the sky, until every one of them put his little lamp out and left it dark. "do not treat the little stars so," said the good moon. but jack rollaround only behaved the worse: "get out of the way, old moon!" he shouted, "i am coming!" and he steered the little trundle-bed boat straight into the old moon's face, and bumped his nose! this was too much for the good moon; he put out his big light, all at once, and left the sky pitch-black. "make a light, old moon! make a light!" shouted the little boy. but the moon answered never a word, and jack rollaround could not see where to steer. he went rolling criss-cross, up and down, all over the sky, knocking into the planets and stumbling into the clouds, till he did not know where he was. suddenly he saw a big yellow light at the very edge of the sky. he thought it was the moon. "look out, i am coming!" he cried, and steered for the light. but it was not the kind old moon at all; it was the great mother sun, just coming up out of her home in the sea, to begin her day's work. "aha, youngster, what are you doing in my sky?" she said. and she picked little jack rollaround up and threw him, trundle-bed boat and all, into the middle of the sea! and i suppose he is there yet, unless somebody picked him out again. how brother rabbit fooled the whale and the elephant[ ] [ ] adapted from two tales included in the records of the american folk-lore society. one day little brother rabbit was running along on the sand, lippety, lippety, when he saw the whale and the elephant talking together. little brother rabbit crouched down and listened to what they were saying. this was what they were saying:-- "you are the biggest thing on the land, brother elephant," said the whale, "and i am the biggest thing in the sea; if we join together we can rule all the animals in the world, and have our way about everything." "very good, very good," trumpeted the elephant; "that suits me; we will do it." little brother rabbit snickered to himself. "they won't rule me," he said. he ran away and got a very long, very strong rope, and he got his big drum, and hid the drum a long way off in the bushes. then he went along the beach till he came to the whale. "oh, please, dear, strong mr. whale," he said, "will you have the great kindness to do me a favor? my cow is stuck in the mud, a quarter of a mile from here. and i can't pull her out. but you are so strong and so obliging, that i venture to trust you will help me out." the whale was so pleased with the compliment that he said, "yes," at once. "then," said the rabbit, "i will tie this end of my long rope to you, and i will run away and tie the other end round my cow, and when i am ready i will beat my big drum. when you hear that, pull very, very hard, for the cow is stuck very deep in the mud." "huh!" grunted the whale, "i'll pull her out, if she is stuck to the horns." little brother rabbit tied the rope-end to the whale, and ran off, lippety, lippety, till he came to the place where the elephant was. "oh, please, mighty and kindly elephant," he said, making a very low bow "will you do me a favor?" "what is it?" asked the elephant. "my cow is stuck in the mud, about a quarter of a mile from here," said little brother rabbit, "and i cannot pull her out. of course you could. if you will be so very obliging as to help me--" "certainly," said the elephant grandly, "certainly." "then," said little brother rabbit, "i will tie one end of this long rope to your trunk, and the other to my cow, and as soon as i have tied her tightly i will beat my big drum. when you hear that, pull; pull as hard as you can, for my cow is very heavy." "never fear," said the elephant, "i could pull twenty cows." "i am sure you could," said the rabbit, politely, "only be sure to begin gently, and pull harder and harder till you get her." then he tied the end of the rope tightly round the elephant's trunk, and ran away into the bushes. there he sat down and beat the big drum. the whale began to pull, and the elephant began to pull, and in a jiffy the rope tightened till it was stretched as hard as could be. "this is a remarkably heavy cow," said the elephant; "but i'll fetch her!" and he braced his forefeet in the earth, and gave a tremendous pull. "dear me!" said the whale. "that cow must be stuck mighty tight;" and he drove his tail deep in the water, and gave a marvelous pull. he pulled harder; the elephant pulled harder. pretty soon the whale found himself sliding toward the land. the reason was, of course, that the elephant had something solid to brace against, and, too, as fast as he pulled the rope in a little, he took a turn with it round his trunk! but when the whale found himself sliding toward the land he was so provoked with the cow that he dove head first, down to the bottom of the sea. that was a pull! the elephant was jerked off his feet, and came slipping and sliding to the beach, and into the surf. he was terribly angry. he braced himself with all his might, and pulled his best. at the jerk, up came the whale out of the water. "who is pulling me?" spouted the whale. "who is pulling me?" trumpeted the elephant. and then each saw the rope in the other's hold. "i'll teach you to play cow!" roared the elephant. "i'll show you how to fool me!" fumed the whale. and they began to pull again. but this time the rope broke, the whale turned a somersault, and the elephant fell over backwards. at that, they were both so ashamed that neither would speak to the other. so that broke up the bargain between them. and little brother rabbit sat in the bushes and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. the little half-chick there was once upon a time a spanish hen, who hatched out some nice little chickens. she was much pleased with their looks as they came from the shell. one, two, three, came out plump and fluffy; but when the fourth shell broke, out came a little half-chick! it had only one leg and one wing and one eye! it was just half a chicken. the hen-mother did not know what in the world to do with the queer little half-chick. she was afraid something would happen to it, and she tried hard to protect it and keep it from harm. but as soon as it could walk the little half-chick showed a most headstrong spirit, worse than any of its brothers. it would not mind, and it would go wherever it wanted to; it walked with a funny little hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, and got along pretty fast. one day the little half-chick said, "mother, i am off to madrid, to see the king! good-by." the poor hen-mother did everything she could think of, to keep him from doing so foolish a thing, but the little half-chick laughed at her naughtily. "i'm for seeing the king," he said; "this life is too quiet for me." and away he went, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, over the fields. when he had gone some distance the little half-chick came to a little brook that was caught in the weeds and in much trouble. "little half-chick," whispered the water, "i am so choked with these weeds that i cannot move; i am almost lost, for want of room; please push the sticks and weeds away with your bill and help me." "the idea!" said the little half-chick. "i cannot be bothered with you; i am off for madrid, to see the king!" and in spite of the brook's begging he went away, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick. a bit farther on, the half-chick came to a fire, which was smothered in damp sticks and in great distress. "oh, little half-chick," said the fire, "you are just in time to save me. i am almost dead for want of air. fan me a little with your wing, i beg." "the idea!" said the little half-chick. "i cannot be bothered with you; i am off to madrid, to see the king!" and he went laughing off, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick. when he had hoppity-kicked a good way, and was near madrid, he came to a clump of bushes, where the wind was caught fast. the wind was whimpering, and begging to be set free. "little half-chick," said the wind, "you are just in time to help me; if you will brush aside these twigs and leaves, i can get my breath; help me, quickly!" "ho! the idea!" said the little half-chick. "i have no time to bother with you. i am going to madrid, to see the king." and he went off, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, leaving the wind to smother. after a while he came to madrid and to the palace of the king. hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, the little half-chick skipped past the sentry at the gate, and hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, he crossed the court. but as he was passing the windows of the kitchen the cook looked out and saw him. "the very thing for the king's dinner!" she said. "i was needing a chicken!" and she seized the little half-chick by his one wing and threw him into a kettle of water on the fire. the water came over the little half-chick's feathers, over his head, into his eye; it was terribly uncomfortable. the little half-chick cried out,-- "water, don't drown me! stay down, don't come so high!" but the water said, "little half-chick, little half-chick, when i was in trouble you would not help me," and came higher than ever. now the water grew warm, hot, hotter, frightfully hot; the little half-chick cried out, "do not burn so hot, fire! you are burning me to death! stop!" but the fire said, "little half-chick, little half-chick, when i was in trouble you would not help me," and burned hotter than ever. just as the little half-chick thought he must suffocate, the cook took the cover off, to look at the dinner. "dear me," she said, "this chicken is no good; it is burned to a cinder." and she picked the little half-chick up by one leg and threw him out of the window. in the air he was caught by a breeze and taken up higher than the trees. round and round he was twirled till he was so dizzy he thought he must perish. "don't blow me so? wind," he cried, "let me down!" "little half-chick, little half-chick," said the wind, "when i was in trouble you would not help me!" and the wind blew him straight up to the top of the church steeple, and stuck him there, fast! there he stands to this day, with his one eye, his one wing, and his one leg. he cannot hoppity-kick any more, but he turns slowly round when the wind blows, and keeps his head toward it, to hear what it says. the lambikin[ ] [ ] from indian fairy tales. by joseph jacobs (david nutt). once upon a time there was a wee, wee lambikin, who frolicked about on his little tottery legs, and enjoyed himself amazingly. now one day he set off to visit his granny, and was jumping with joy to think of all the good things he should get from her, when whom should he meet but a jackal, who looked at the tender young morsel and said, "lambikin! lambikin! i'll eat you!" but lambikin only gave a little frisk and said,-- "to granny's house i go, where i shall fatter grow; then you can eat me so." the jackal thought this reasonable, and let lambikin pass. by and by he met a vulture, and the vulture, looking hungrily at the tender morsel before him, said, "lambikin! lambikin! i'll eat you!" but lambikin only gave a little frisk, and said,-- "to granny's house i go, where i shall fatter grow; then you can eat me so." the vulture thought this reasonable, and let lambikin pass. and by and by he met a tiger, and then a wolf and a dog and an eagle, and all these, when they saw the tender little morsel, said, "lambikin! lambikin! i'll eat you!" but to all of them lambikin replied, with a little frisk,-- "to granny's house i go, where i shall fatter grow; then you can eat me so." at last he reached his granny's house, and said, all in a great hurry, "granny, dear, i've promised to get very fat; so, as people ought to keep their promises, please put me into the corn-bin at once." so his granny said he was a good boy, and put him into the corn-bin, and there the greedy little lambikin stayed for seven days, and ate, and ate, and ate, until he could scarcely waddle, and his granny said he was fat enough for anything, and must go home. but cunning little lambikin said that would never do, for some animal would be sure to eat him on the way back, he was so plump and tender. "i'll tell you what you must do," said master lambikin; "you must make a little drumikin out of the skin of my little brother who died, and then i can sit inside and trundle along nicely, for i'm as tight as a drum myself." so his granny made a nice little drumikin out of his brother's skin, with the wool inside, and lambikin curled himself up snug and warm in the middle and trundled away gayly. soon he met with the eagle, who called out,-- "drumikin! drumikin! have you seen lambikin?" and mr. lambikin, curled up in his soft, warm nest, replied,-- "fallen into the fire, and so will you on little drumikin! tum-pa, tum-too!" "how very annoying!" sighed the eagle, thinking regretfully of the tender morsel he had let slip. meanwhile lambikin trundled along, laughing to himself, and singing,-- "tum-pa, tum-too; tum-pa, tum-too!" every animal and bird he met asked him the same question,-- "drumikin! drumikin! have you seen lambikin?" and to each of them the little slyboots replied,-- "fallen into the fire, and so will you on little drumikin! tum-pa, tum-too!" tum-pa, tum-too! tum-pa, tum-too!" then they all sighed to think of the tender little morsel they had let slip. at last the jackal came limping along, for all his sorry looks as sharp as a needle, and he, too, called out,-- "drumikin! drumikin! have you seen lambikin?" and lambikin, curled up in his snug little nest, replied gayly,-- "fallen into the fire, and so will you on little drumikin! tum-pa--" but he never got any further, for the jackal recognized his voice at once, and cried, "hullo! you've turned yourself inside out, have you? just you come out of that!" whereupon he tore open drumikin and gobbled up lambikin. the blackberry-bush[ ] [ ] from celia thaxter's stories and poems for children. a little boy sat at his mother's knees, by the long western window, looking out into the garden. it was autumn, and the wind was sad; and the golden elm leaves lay scattered about among the grass, and on the gravel path. the mother was knitting a little stocking; her fingers moved the bright needles; but her eyes were fixed on the clear evening sky. as the darkness gathered, the wee boy laid his head on her lap and kept so still that, at last, she leaned forward to look into his dear round face. he was not asleep, but was watching very earnestly a blackberry-bush, that waved its one tall, dark-red spray in the wind outside the fence. "what are you thinking about, my darling?" she said, smoothing his soft, honey-colored hair. "the blackberry-bush, mamma; what does it say? it keeps nodding, nodding to me behind the fence; what does it say, mamma?" "it says," she answered, 'i see a happy little boy in the warm, fire-lighted room. the wind blows cold, and here it is dark and lonely; but that little boy is warm and happy and safe at his mother's knees. i nod to him, and he looks at me. i wonder if he knows how happy he is! "'see, all my leaves are dark crimson. every day they dry and wither more and more; by and by they will be so weak they can scarcely cling to my branches, and the north wind will tear them all away, and nobody will remember them any more. then the snow will sink down and wrap me close. then the snow will melt again and icy rain will clothe me, and the bitter wind will rattle my bare twigs up and down. "'i nod my head to all who pass, and dreary nights and dreary days go by; but in the happy house, so warm and bright, the little boy plays all day with books and toys. his mother and his father cherish him; he nestles on their knees in the red firelight at night, while they read to him lovely stories, or sing sweet old songs to him,--the happy little boy! and outside i peep over the snow and see a stream of ruddy light from a crack in the window-shutter, and i nod out here alone in the dark, thinking how beautiful it is. "'and here i wait patiently. i take the snow and the rain and the cold, and i am not sorry, but glad; for in my roots i feel warmth and life, and i know that a store of greenness and beauty is shut up safe in my small brown buds. day and night go again and again; little by little the snow melts all away; the ground grows soft; the sky is blue; the little birds fly over crying, "it is spring! it is spring!" ah! then through all my twigs i feel the slow sap stirring. "'warmer grow the sunbeams, and softer the air. the small blades of grass creep thick about my feet; the sweet rain helps swell my shining buds. more and more i push forth my leaves, till out i burst in a gay green dress, and nod in joy and pride. the little boy comes running to look at me, and cries, "oh, mamma! the little blackberry-bush is alive and beautiful and green. oh, come and see!" and i hear; and i bow my head in the summer wind; and every day they watch me grow more beautiful, till at last i shake out blossoms, fair and fragrant. "'a few days more, and i drop the white petals down among the grass, and, lo! the green tiny berries! carefully i hold them up to the sun; carefully i gather the dew in the summer nights; slowly they ripen; they grow larger and redder and darker, and at last they are black, shining, delicious. i hold them as high as i can for the little boy, who comes dancing out. he shouts with joy, and gathers them in his dear hand; and he runs to share them with his mother, saying, "here is what the patient blackberry-bush bore for us: see how nice, mamma!" "'ah! then indeed i am glad, and would say, if i could, "yes, take them, dear little boy; i kept them for you, held them long up to sun and rain to make them sweet and ripe for you;" and i nod and nod in full content, for my work is done. from the window he watches me and thinks, "there is the little blackberry-bush that was so kind to me. i see it and i love it. i know it is safe out there nodding all alone, and next summer it will hold ripe berries up for me to gather again."'" then the wee boy smiled, and liked the little story. his mother took him up in her arms, and they went out to supper and left the blackberry-bush nodding up and down in the wind; and there it is nodding yet. the fairies[ ] [ ] by william allingham. up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together; green jacket, red cap, and white owl's feather! down along the rocky shore some make their home-- they live on crispy pancakes of yellow tide-foam; some in the reeds of the black mountain-lake, with frogs for their watch-dogs, all night awake. high on the hilltop the old king sits; he is now so old and gray, he's nigh lost his wits. with a bridge of white mist columbkill he crosses, on his stately journeys from slieveleague to rosses; or going up with music on cold starry nights, to sup with the queen of the gay northern lights. they stole little bridget for seven years long; when she came down again her friends were all gone. they took her lightly back, between the night and morrow; they thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow. they have kept her ever since deep within the lake, on a bed of flag-leaves, watching till she wake. by the craggy hillside, through the mosses bare, they have planted thorn-trees, for pleasure here and there. is any man so daring as dig them up in spite, he shall find their sharpest thorns in his bed at night. up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together; green jacket, red cap, and white owl's feather! the adventures of the little field mouse once upon a time, there was a little brown field mouse; and one day he was out in the fields to see what he could see. he was running along in the grass, poking his nose into everything and looking with his two eyes all about, when he saw a smooth, shiny acorn, lying in the grass. it was such a fine shiny little acorn that he thought he would take it home with him; so he put out his paw to touch it, but the little acorn rolled away from him. he ran after it, but it kept rolling on, just ahead of him, till it came to a place where a big oak-tree had its roots spread all over the ground. then it rolled under a big round root. little mr. field mouse ran to the root and poked his nose under after the acorn, and there he saw a small round hole in the ground. he slipped through and saw some stairs going down into the earth. the acorn was rolling down, with a soft tapping sound, ahead of him, so down he went too. down, down, down, rolled the acorn, and down, down, down, went the field mouse, until suddenly he saw a tiny door at the foot of the stairs. the shiny acorn rolled to the door and struck against it with a tap. quickly the little door opened and the acorn rolled inside. the field mouse hurried as fast as he could down the last stairs, and pushed through just as the door was closing. it shut behind him, and he was in a little room. and there, before him, stood a queer little red man! he had a little red cap, and a little red jacket, and odd little red shoes with points at the toes. "you are my prisoner," he said to the field mouse. "what for?" said the field mouse. "because you tried to steal my acorn," said the little red man. "it is my acorn," said the field mouse; "i found it." "no, it isn't," said the little red man, "i have it; you will never see it again." the little field mouse looked all about the room as fast as he could, but he could not see any acorn. then he thought he would go back up the tiny stairs to his own home. but the little door was locked, and the little red man had the key. and he said to the poor mouse,-- "you shall be my servant; you shall make my bed and sweep my room and cook my broth." so the little brown mouse was the little red man's servant, and every day he made the little red man's bed and swept the little red man's room and cooked the little red man's broth. and every day the little red man went away through the tiny door, and did not come back till afternoon. but he always locked the door after him, and carried away the key. at last, one day he was in such a hurry that he turned the key before the door was quite latched, which, of course, didn't lock it at all. he went away without noticing,--he was in such a hurry. the little field mouse knew that his chance had come to run away home. but he didn't want to go without the pretty, shiny acorn. where it was he didn't know, so he looked everywhere. he opened every little drawer and looked in, but it wasn't in any of the drawers; he peeped on every shelf, but it wasn't on a shelf; he hunted in every closet, but it wasn't in there. finally, he climbed up on a chair and opened a wee, wee door in the chimney-piece,--and there it was! he took it quickly in his forepaws, and then he took it in his mouth, and then he ran away. he pushed open the little door; he climbed up, up, up the little stairs; he came out through the hole under the root; he ran and ran through the fields; and at last he came to his own house. when he was in his own house he set the shiny acorn on the table. i guess he set it down hard, for all at once, with a little snap, it opened!--exactly like a little box. and what do you think! there was a tiny necklace inside! it was a most beautiful tiny necklace, all made of jewels, and it was just big enough for a lady mouse. so the little field mouse gave the tiny necklace to his little mouse-sister. she thought it was perfectly lovely. and when she wasn't wearing it she kept it in the shiny acorn box. and the little red man never knew what had become of it, because he didn't know where the little field mouse lived. another little red hen[ ] [ ] adapted from the verse version, which is given here as an alternative. once upon a time there was a little red hen, who lived on a farm all by herself. an old fox, crafty and sly, had a den in the rocks, on a hill near her house. many and many a night this old fox used to lie awake and think to himself how good that little red hen would taste if he could once get her in his big kettle and boil her for dinner. but he couldn't catch the little red hen, because she was too wise for him. every time she went out to market she locked the door of the house behind her, and as soon as she came in again she locked the door behind her and put the key in her apron pocket, where she kept her scissors and a sugar cooky. at last the old fox thought up a way to catch the little red hen. early in the morning he said to his old mother, "have the kettle boiling when i come home to-night, for i'll be bringing the little red hen for supper." then he took a big bag and slung it over his shoulder, and walked till he came to the little red hen's house. the little red hen was just coming out of her door to pick up a few sticks for kindling wood. so the old fox hid behind the wood-pile, and as soon as she bent down to get a stick, into the house he slipped, and scurried behind the door. in a minute the little red hen came quickly in, and shut the door and locked it. "i'm glad i'm safely in," she said. just as she said it, she turned round, and there stood the ugly old fox, with his big bag over his shoulder. whiff! how scared the little red hen was! she dropped her apronful of sticks, and flew up to the big beam across the ceiling. there she perched, and she said to the old fox, down below, "you may as well go home, for you can't get me." "can't i, though!" said the fox. and what do you think he did? he stood on the floor underneath the little red hen and twirled round in a circle after his own tail. and as he spun, and spun, and spun, faster, and faster, and faster, the poor little red hen got so dizzy watching him that she couldn't hold on to the perch. she dropped off, and the old fox picked her up and put her in his bag, slung the bag over his shoulder, and started for home, where the kettle was boiling. he had a very long way to go, up hill, and the little red hen was still so dizzy that she didn't know where she was. but when the dizziness began to go off, she whisked her little scissors out of her apron pocket, and snip! she cut a little hole in the bag; then she poked her head out and saw where she was, and as soon as they came to a good spot she cut the hole bigger and jumped out herself. there was a great big stone lying there, and the little red hen picked it up and put it in the bag as quick as a wink. then she ran as fast as she could till she came to her own little farm-house, and she went in and locked the door with the big key. the old fox went on carrying the stone and never knew the difference. my, but it bumped him well! he was pretty tired when he got home. but he was so pleased to think of the supper he was going to have that he did not mind that at all. as soon as his mother opened the door he said, "is the kettle boiling?" "yes," said his mother; "have you got the little red hen?" "i have," said the old fox. "when i open the bag you hold the cover off the kettle and i'll shake the bag so that the hen will fall in, and then you pop the cover on, before she can jump out." "all right," said his mean old mother; and she stood close by the boiling kettle, ready to put the cover on. the fox lifted the big, heavy bag up till it was over the open kettle, and gave it a shake. splash! thump! splash! in went the stone and out came the boiling water, all over the old fox and the old fox's mother! and they were scalded to death. but the little red hen lived happily ever after, in her own little farmhouse. the story of the little rid hin[ ] [ ] from horace e. scudder's doings of the bodley family in town and country (houghton, mifflin & co.). there was once't upon a time a little small rid hin, off in the good ould country where yees ha' nivir bin. nice and quiet shure she was, and nivir did any harrum; she lived alane all be herself, and worked upon her farrum. there lived out o'er the hill, in a great din o' rocks, a crafty, shly, and wicked ould folly iv a fox. this rashkill iv a fox, he tuk it in his head he'd have the little rid hin: so, whin he wint to bed, he laid awake and thaught what a foine thing 'twad be to fetch her home and bile her up for his ould marm and he. and so he thaught and thaught, until he grew so thin that there was nothin' left of him but jist his bones and shkin. but the small rid hin was wise, she always locked her door, and in her pocket pit the key, to keep the fox out shure. but at last there came a schame intil his wicked head, and he tuk a great big bag and to his mither said,-- "now have the pot all bilin' agin the time i come; we'll ate the small rid hin to-night, for shure i'll bring her home." and so away he wint wid the bag upon his back, an' up the hill and through the woods saftly he made his track. an' thin he came alang, craping as shtill's a mouse, to where the little small rid hin lived in her shnug ould house. an' out she comes hersel', jist as he got in sight, to pick up shticks to make her fire: "aha!" says fox, "all right. "begorra, now, i'll have yees widout much throuble more;" an' in he shlips quite unbeknownst, an' hides be'ind the door. an' thin, a minute afther, in comes the small rid hin, an' shuts the door, and locks it, too, an' thinks, "i'm safely in." an' thin she tarns around an' looks be'ind the door; there shtands the fox wid his big tail shpread out upon the floor. dear me! she was so schared wid such a wondrous sight, she dropped her apronful of shticks, an' flew up in a fright, an' lighted on the bame across on top the room; "aha!" says she, "ye don't have me; ye may as well go home." "aha!" says fox, "we'll see; i'll bring yees down from that." so out he marched upon the floor right under where she sat. an' thin he whiruled around, an' round an' round an' round, fashter an' fashter an' fashter, afther his tail on the ground. until the small rid hin she got so dizzy, shure, wid lookin' at the fox's tail, she jist dropped on the floor. an' fox he whipped her up, an' pit her in his bag, an' off he started all alone, him and his little dag. all day he tracked the wood up hill an' down again; an' wid him, shmotherin' in the bag, the little small rid hin. sorra a know she knowed awhere she was that day; says she, "i'm biled an' ate up, shure, an' what'll be to pay?" thin she betho't hersel', an' tuk her schissors out, an' shnipped a big hole in the bag, so she could look about. an' 'fore ould fox could think she lept right out--she did, an' thin picked up a great big shtone, an' popped it in instid. an' thin she rins off home, her outside door she locks; thinks she, "you see you don't have me, you crafty, shly ould fox." an' fox, he tugged away wid the great big hivy shtone, thimpin' his shoulders very bad as he wint in alone. an' whin he came in sight o' his great din o' rocks, jist watchin' for him at the door he shpied ould mither fox. "have ye the pot a-bilin'?" says he to ould fox thin; "shure an' it is, me child," says she; "have ye the small rid hin?" "yes, jist here in me bag, as shure as i shtand here; open the lid till i pit her in: open it--niver fear." so the rashkill cut the sthring, an' hild the big bag over; "now when i shake it in," says he, "do ye pit on the cover." "yis, that i will;" an' thin the shtone wint in wid a dash, an' the pot oy bilin' wather came over them ker-splash. an' schalted 'em both to death, so they couldn't brathe no more; an' the little small rid hin lived safe, jist where she lived before. the story of epaminondas and his auntie[ ] [ ] a southern nonsense tale. epaminondas used to go to see his auntie 'most every day, and she nearly always gave him something to take home to his mammy. one day she gave him a big piece of cake; nice, yellow, rich gold-cake. epaminondas took it in his fist and held it all scrunched up tight, like this, and came along home. by the time he got home there wasn't anything left but a fistful of crumbs. his mammy said,-- "what you got there, epaminondas?" "cake, mammy," said epaminondas. "cake!" said his mammy. "epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! that's no way to carry cake. the way to carry cake is to wrap it all up nice in some leaves and put it in your hat, and put your hat on your head, and come along home. you hear me, epaminondas?" "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. next day epaminondas went to see his auntie, and she gave him a pound of butter for his mammy; fine, fresh, sweet butter. epaminondas wrapped it up in leaves and put it in his hat, and put his hat on his head, and came along home. it was a very hot day. pretty soon the butter began to melt. it melted, and melted, and as it melted it ran down epaminondas' forehead; then it ran over his face, and in his ears, and down his neck. when he got home, all the butter epaminondas had was on him. his mammy looked at him, and then she said,-- "law's sake! epaminondas, what you got in your hat?" "butter, mammy," said epaminondas; "auntie gave it to me." "butter!" said his mammy. "epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! don't you know that's no way to carry butter? the way to carry butter is to wrap it up in some leaves and take it down to the brook, and cool it in the water, and cool it in the water, and cool it in the water, and then take it on your hands, careful, and bring it along home." "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. by and by, another day, epaminondas went to see his auntie again, and this time she gave him a little new puppy-dog to take home. epaminondas put it in some leaves and took it down to the brook; and there he cooled it in the water, and cooled it in the water, and cooled it in the water; then he took it in his hands and came along home. when he got home, the puppy-dog was dead. his mammy looked at it, and she said,-- "law's sake! epaminondas, what you got there?" "a puppy-dog, mammy," said epaminondas. "a puppy-dog!" said his mammy. "my gracious sakes alive, epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! that ain't the way to carry a puppy-dog! the way to carry a puppy-dog is to take a long piece of string and tie one end of it round the puppy-dog's neck and put the puppy-dog on the ground, and take hold of the other end of the string and come along home, like this." "all right, mammy," said epaminondas. next day, epaminondas went to see his auntie again, and when he came to go home she gave him a loaf of bread to carry to his mammy; a brown, fresh, crusty loaf of bread. so epaminondas tied a string around the end of the loaf and took hold of the end of the string and came along home, like this. (imitate dragging something along the ground.) when he got home his mammy looked at the thing on the end of the string, and she said,-- "my laws a-massy! epaminondas, what you got on the end of that string?" "bread, mammy," said epaminondas; "auntie gave it to me." "bread!!!" said his mammy. "o epaminondas, epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with; you never did have the sense you was born with; you never will have the sense you was born with! now i ain't gwine tell you any more ways to bring truck home. and don't you go see your auntie, neither. i'll go see her my own self. but i'll just tell you one thing, epaminondas! you see these here six mince pies i done make? you see how i done set 'em on the doorstep to cool? well, now, you hear me, epaminondas, you be careful how you step on those pies!" "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. then epaminondas' mammy put on her bonnet and her shawl and took a basket in her hand and went away to see auntie. the six mince pies sat cooling in a row on the doorstep. and then,--and then,--epaminondas was careful how he stepped on those pies! he stepped (imitate)--right--in--the--middle--of--every--one. . . . . . . . . and, do you know, children, nobody knows what happened next! the person who told me the story didn't know; nobody knows. but you can guess. the boy who cried "wolf!" there was once a shepherd-boy who kept his flock at a little distance from the village. once he thought he would play a trick on the villagers and have some fun at their expense. so he ran toward the village crying out, with all his might,-- "wolf! wolf! come and help! the wolves are at my lambs!" the kind villagers left their work and ran to the field to help him. but when they got there the boy laughed at them for their pains; there was no wolf there. still another day the boy tried the same trick, and the villagers came running to help and got laughed at again. then one day a wolf did break into the fold and began killing the lambs. in great fright, the boy ran for help. "wolf! wolf!" he screamed. "there is a wolf in the flock! help!" the villagers heard him, but they thought it was another mean trick; no one paid the least attention, or went near him. and the shepherd-boy lost all his sheep. that is the kind of thing that happens to people who lie: even when they tell the truth no one believes them. the frog king did you ever hear the old story about the foolish frogs? the frogs in a certain swamp decided that they needed a king; they had always got along perfectly well without one, but they suddenly made up their minds that a king they must have. they sent a messenger to jove and begged him to send a king to rule over them. jove saw how stupid they were, and sent a king who could not harm them: he tossed a big log into the middle of the pond. at the splash the frogs were terribly frightened, and dove into their holes to hide from king log. but after a while, when they saw that the king never moved, they got over their fright and went and sat on him. and as soon as they found he really could not hurt them they began to despise him; and finally they sent another messenger to jove to ask for a new king. jove sent an eel. the frogs were much pleased and a good deal frightened when king eel came wriggling and swimming among them. but as the days went on, and the eel was perfectly harmless, they stopped being afraid; and as soon as they stopped fearing king eel they stopped respecting him. soon they sent a third messenger to jove, and begged that they might have a better king,--a king who was worth while. it was too much; jove was angry at their stupidity at last. "i will give you a king such as you deserve!" he said; and he sent them a stork. as soon as the frogs came to the surface to greet the new king, king stork caught them in his long bill and gobbled them up. one after another they came bobbing up, and one after another the stork ate them. he was indeed a king worthy of them! the sun and the wind the sun and the wind once had a quarrel as to which was the stronger. each believed himself to be the more powerful. while they were arguing they saw a traveler walking along the country highway, wearing a great cloak. "here is a chance to test our strength," said the wind; "let us see which of us is strong enough to make that traveler take off his cloak; the one who can do that shall be acknowledged the more powerful." "agreed," said the sun. instantly the wind began to blow; he puffed and tugged at the man's cloak, and raised a storm of hail and rain, to beat at it. but the colder it grew and the more it stormed, the tighter the traveler held his cloak around him. the wind could not get it off. now it was the sun's turn. he shone with all his beams on the man's shoulders. as it grew hotter and hotter, the man unfastened his cloak; then he threw it back; at last he took it off! the sun had won. the little jackal and the alligator the little jackal was very fond of shell-fish. he used to go down by the river and hunt along the edges for crabs and such things. and once, when he was hunting for crabs, he was so hungry that he put his paw into the water after a crab without looking first,--which you never should do! the minute he put in his paw, snap!--the big alligator who lives in the mud down there had it in his jaws. "oh, dear!" thought the little jackal; "the big alligator has my paw in his mouth! in another minute he will pull me down and gobble me up! what shall i do? what shall i do?" then he thought, suddenly, "i'll deceive him!" so he put on a very cheerful voice, as if nothing at all were the matter, and he said,-- "ho! ho! clever mr. alligator! smart mr. alligator, to take that old bulrush root for my paw! i'll hope you'll find it very tender!" the old alligator was hidden away beneath the mud and bulrush leaves, and he couldn't see anything. he thought, "pshaw! i've made a mistake." so he opened his mouth and let the little jackal go. the little jackal ran away as fast as he could, and as he ran he called out,-- "thank you, mr. alligator! kind mr. alligator! so kind of you to let me go!" the old alligator lashed with his tail and snapped with his jaws, but it was too late; the little jackal was out of reach. after this the little jackal kept away from the river, out of danger. but after about a week he got such an appetite for crabs that nothing else would do at all; he felt that he must have a crab. so he went down by the river and looked all around, very carefully. he didn't see the old alligator, but he thought to himself, "i think i'll not take any chances." so he stood still and began to talk out loud to himself. he said,-- "when i don't see any little crabs on the land i most generally see them sticking out of the water, and then i put my paw in and catch them. i wonder if there are any fat little crabs in the water today?" the old alligator was hidden down in the mud at the bottom of the river, and when he heard what the little jackal said, he thought, "aha! i'll pretend to be a little crab, and when he puts his paw in, i'll make my dinner of him." so he stuck the black end of his snout above the water and waited. the little jackal took one look, and then he said,-- "thank you, mr. alligator! kind mr. alligator! you are exceedingly kind to show me where you are! i will have dinner elsewhere." and he ran away like the wind. the old alligator foamed at the mouth, he was so angry, but the little jackal was gone. for two whole weeks the little jackal kept away from the river. then, one day he got a feeling inside him that nothing but crabs could satisfy; he felt that he must have at least one crab. very cautiously, he went down to the river and looked all around. he saw no sign of the old alligator. still, he did not mean to take any chances. so he stood quite still and began to talk to himself,--it was a little way he had. he said,-- "when i don't see any little crabs on the shore, or sticking up out of the water, i usually see them blowing bubbles from under the water; the little bubbles go puff, puff, puff, and then they go pop, pop, pop, and they show me where the little juicy crabs are, so i can put my paw in and catch them. i wonder if i shall see any little bubbles to-day?" the old alligator, lying low in the mud and weeds, heard this, and he thought, "pooh! that's easy enough; i'll just blow some little crab-bubbles, and then he will put his paw in where i can get it." so he blew, and he blew, a mighty blast, and the bubbles rose in a perfect whirlpool, fizzing and swirling. the little jackal didn't have to be told who was underneath those bubbles: he took one quick look, and off he ran. but as he went, he sang,-- "thank you, mr. alligator! kind mr. alligator! you are the kindest alligator in the world, to show me where you are, so nicely! i'll breakfast at another part of the river." the old alligator was so furious that he crawled up on the bank and went after the little jackal; but, dear, dear, he couldn't catch the little jackal; he ran far too fast. after this, the little jackal did not like to risk going near the water, so he ate no more crabs. but he found a garden of wild figs, which were so good that he went there every day, and ate them instead of shell-fish. now the old alligator found this out, and he made up his mind to have the little jackal for supper, or to die trying. so he crept, and crawled, and dragged himself over the ground to the garden of wild figs. there he made a huge pile of figs under the biggest of the wild fig trees, and hid himself in the pile. after a while the little jackal came dancing into the garden, very happy and care-free,--but looking all around. he saw the huge pile of figs under the big fig tree. "h-m," he thought, "that looks singularly like my friend, the alligator. i'll investigate a bit." he stood quite still and began to talk to himself,--it was a little way he had. he said,-- "the little figs i like best are the fat, ripe, juicy ones that drop off when the breeze blows; and then the wind blows them about on the ground, this way and that; the great heap of figs over there is so still that i think they must be all bad figs." the old alligator, underneath his fig pile, thought,-- "bother the suspicious little jackal, i shall have to make these figs roll about, so that he will think the wind moves them." and straightway he humped himself up and moved, and sent the little figs flying,--and his back showed through. the little jackal did not wait for a second look. he ran out of the garden like the wind. but as he ran he called back,-- "thank you, again, mr. alligator; very sweet of you to show me where you are; i can't stay to thank you as i should like: good-by!" at this the old alligator was beside himself with rage. he vowed that he would have the little jackal for supper this time, come what might. so he crept and crawled over the ground till he came to the little jackal's house. then he crept and crawled inside, and hid himself there in the house, to wait till the little jackal should come home. by and by the little jackal came dancing home, happy and care-free,--but looking all around. presently, as he came along, he saw that the ground was all scratched up as if something very heavy had been dragged over it. the little jackal stopped and looked. "what's this? what's this?" he said. then he saw that the door of his house was crushed at the sides and broken, as if something very big had gone through it. "what's this? what's this?" the little jackal said. "i think i'll investigate a little!" so he stood quite still and began to talk to himself (you remember, it was a little way he had), but loudly. he said,-- "how strange that my little house doesn't speak to me! why don't you speak to me, little house? you always speak to me, if everything is all right, when i come home. i wonder if anything is wrong with my little house?" the old alligator thought to himself that he must certainly pretend to be the little house, or the little jackal would never come in. so he put on as pleasant a voice as he could (which is not saying much) and said,-- "hullo, little jackal!" oh! when the little jackal heard that, he was frightened enough, for once. "it's the old alligator," he said, "and if i don't make an end of him this time he will certainly make an end of me. what shall i do?" he thought very fast. then he spoke out pleasantly. "thank you, little house," he said, "it's good to hear your pretty voice, dear little house, and i will be in with you in a minute; only first i must gather some firewood for dinner." then he went and gathered firewood, and more firewood, and more firewood; and he piled it all up solid against the door and round the house; and then he set fire to it! and it smoked and burned till it smoked that old alligator to smoked herring! the larks in the cornfield there was once a family of little larks who lived with their mother in a nest in a cornfield. when the corn was ripe the mother lark watched very carefully to see if there were any sign of the reapers' coming, for she knew that when they came their sharp knives would cut down the nest and hurt the baby larks. so every day, when she went out for food, she told the little larks to look and listen very closely to everything that went on, and to tell her all they saw and heard when she came home. one day when she came home the little larks were much frightened. "oh, mother, dear mother," they said, "you must move us away to-night! the farmer was in the field to-day, and he said, 'the corn is ready to cut; we must call in the neighbors to help.' and then he told his son to go out to-night and ask all the neighbors to come and reap the corn to-morrow." the mother lark laughed. "don't be frightened," she said; "if he waits for his neighbors to reap the corn we shall have plenty of time to move; tell me what he says to-morrow." the next night the little larks were quite trembling with fear; the moment their mother got home they cried out, "mother, you must surely move us to-night! the farmer came to-day and said, 'the corn is getting too ripe; we cannot wait for our neighbors; we must ask our relatives to help us.' and then he called his son and told him to ask all the uncles and cousins to come to-morrow and cut the corn. shall we not move to-night?" "don't worry," said the mother lark; "the uncles and cousins have plenty of reaping to do for themselves; we'll not move yet." the third night, when the mother lark came home, the baby larks said, "mother, dear, the farmer came to the field to-day, and when he looked at the corn he was quite angry; he said, 'this will never do! the corn is getting too ripe; it's no use to wait for our relatives, we shall have to cut this corn ourselves.' and then he called his son and said, 'go out to-night and hire reapers, and to-morrow we will begin to cut.'" "well," said the mother, "that is another story; when a man begins to do his own business, instead of asking somebody else to do it, things get done. i will move you out to-night." a true story about a girl once there were four little girls who lived in a big, bare house, in the country. they were very poor, but they had the happiest times you ever heard of, because they were very rich in everything except just money. they had a wonderful, wise father, who knew stories to tell, and who taught them their lessons in such a beautiful way that it was better than play; they had a lovely, merry, kind mother, who was never too tired to help them work or watch them play; and they had all the great green country to play in. there were dark, shadowy woods, and fields of flowers, and a river. and there was a big barn. one of the little girls was named louisa. she was very pretty, and ever so strong; she could run for miles through the woods and not get tired. and she had a splendid brain in her little head; it liked study, and it thought interesting thoughts all day long. louisa liked to sit in a corner by herself, sometimes, and write thoughts in her diary; all the little girls kept diaries. she liked to make up stories out of her own head, and sometimes she made verses. when the four little sisters had finished their lessons, and had helped their mother sew and clean, they used to go to the big barn to play; and the best play of all was theatricals. louisa liked theatricals better than anything. they made the barn into a theatre, and the grown people came to see the plays they acted. they used to climb up on the hay-mow for a stage, and the grown people sat in chairs on the floor. it was great fun. one of the plays they acted was jack and the bean-stalk. they had a ladder from the floor to the loft, and on the ladder they tied a squash vine all the way up to the loft, to look like the wonderful bean-stalk. one of the little girls was dressed up to look like jack, and she acted that part. when it came to the place in the story where the giant tried to follow jack, the little girl cut down the bean-stalk, and down came the giant tumbling from the loft. the giant was made out of pillows, with a great, fierce head of paper, and funny clothes. another story that they acted was cinderella. they made a wonderful big pumpkin out of the wheelbarrow, trimmed with yellow paper, and cinderella rolled away in it, when the fairy godmother waved her wand. one other beautiful story they used to play. it was the story of pilgrim's progress; if you have never heard it, you must be sure to read it as soon as you can read well enough to understand the old-fashioned words. the little girls used to put shells in their hats for a sign they were on a pilgrimage, as the old pilgrims used to do; then they made journeys over the hill behind the house, and through the woods, and down the lanes; and when the pilgrimage was over they had apples and nuts to eat, in the happy land of home. louisa loved all these plays, and she made some of her own and wrote them down so that the children could act them. but better than fun or writing louisa loved her mother, and by and by, as the little girl began to grow into a big girl, she felt very sad to see her dear mother work so hard. she helped all she could with the housework, but nothing could really help the tired mother except money; she needed money for food and clothes, and some one grown up, to help in the house. but there never was enough money for these things, and louisa's mother grew more and more weary, and sometimes ill. i cannot tell you how much louisa suffered over this. at last, as louisa thought about it, she came to care more about helping her mother and her father and her sisters than about anything else in all the world. and she began to work very hard to earn money. she sewed for people, and when she was a little older she taught some little girls their lessons, and then she wrote stories for the papers. every bit of money she earned, except what she had to use, she gave to her dear family. it helped very much, but it was so little that louisa never felt as if she were doing anything. every year she grew more unselfish, and every year she worked harder. she liked writing stories best of all her work, but she did not get much money for them, and some people told her she was wasting her time. at last, one day, a publisher asked louisa, who was now a woman, to write a book for girls. louisa was not very well, and she was very tired, but she always said, "i'll try," when she had a chance to work; so she said, "i'll try," to the publisher. when she thought about the book she remembered the good times she used to have with her sisters in the big, bare house in the country. and so she wrote a story and put all that in it; she put her dear mother and her wise father in it, and all the little sisters, and besides the jolly times and the plays, she put the sad, hard times in,--the work and worry and going without things. when the book was written, she called it "little women," and sent it to the publisher. and, children, the little book made louisa famous. it was so sweet and funny and sad and real,--like our own lives,--that everybody wanted to read it. everybody bought it, and much money came from it. after so many years, little louisa's wish came true: she bought a nice house for her family; she sent one of her sisters to europe, to study; she gave her father books; but best of all, she was able to see to it that the beloved mother, so tired and so ill, could have rest and happiness. never again did the dear mother have to do any hard work, and she had pretty things about her all the rest of her life. louisa alcott, for that was louisa's name, wrote many beautiful books after this, and she became one of the most famous women of america. but i think the most beautiful thing about her is what i have been telling you: that she loved her mother so well that she gave her whole life to make her happy. my kingdom the little louisa i told you about, who wrote verses and stories in her diary, used to like to play that she was a princess, and that her kingdom was her own mind. when she had unkind or dissatisfied thoughts, she tried to get rid of them by playing they were enemies of the kingdom; and she drove them out with soldiers; the soldiers were patience, duty, and love. it used to help louisa to be good to play this, and i think it may have helped make her the splendid woman she was afterward. maybe you would like to hear a poem she wrote about it, when she was only fourteen years old.[ ] it will help you, too, to think the same thoughts. [ ] from louisa m. alcott's life, letters, and journals (little, brown & co.). copyright, , by louisa m. alcott. copyright, , by j. s. p. alcott. a little kingdom i possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell, and very hard i find the task of governing it well; for passion tempts and troubles me, a wayward will misleads, and selfishness its shadow casts on all my words and deeds. how can i learn to rule myself, to be the child i should, honest and brave, nor ever tire of trying to be good? how can i keep a sunny soul to shine along life's way? how can i tune my little heart to sweetly sing all day? dear father, help me with the love that casteth out my fear, teach me to lean on thee, and feel that thou art very near, that no temptation is unseen, no childish grief too small, since thou, with patience infinite, doth soothe and comfort all. i do not ask for any crown but that which all may win, nor seek to conquer any world, except the one within. be thou my guide until i find, led by a tender hand, thy happy kingdom in myself, and dare to take command. piccola[ ] [ ] from celia thaxter's stories and poems for children (houghton, mifflin & co.). poor, sweet piccola! did you hear what happened to piccola, children dear? 't is seldom fortune such favor grants as fell to this little maid of france. 'twas christmas-time, and her parents poor could hardly drive the wolf from the door, striving with poverty's patient pain only to live till summer again. no gifts for piccola! sad were they when dawned the morning of christmas-day; their little darling no joy might stir, st. nicholas nothing would bring to her! but piccola never doubted at all that something beautiful must befall every child upon christmas-day, and so she slept till the dawn was gray. and full of faith, when at last she woke, she stole to her shoe as the morning broke; such sounds of gladness filled all the air, 't was plain st. nicholas had been there! in rushed piccola sweet, half wild: never was seen such a joyful child. "see what the good saint brought!" she cried, and mother and father must peep inside. now such a story who ever heard? there was a little shivering bird! a sparrow, that in at the window flew, had crept into piccola's tiny shoe! "how good poor piccola must have been!" she cried, as happy as any queen, while the starving sparrow she fed and warmed, and danced with rapture, she was so charmed. children, this story i tell to you, of piccola sweet and her bird, is true. in the far-off land of france, they say, still do they live to this very day. the little fir tree [when i was a very little girl some one, probably my mother, read to me hans christian andersen's story of the little fir tree. it happened that i did not read it for myself or hear it again during my childhood. one christmas day, when i was grown up, i found myself at a loss for the "one more" story called for by some little children with whom i was spending the holiday. in the mental search for buried treasure which ensued, i came upon one or two word-impressions of the experiences of the little fir tree, and forthwith wove them into what i supposed to be something of a reproduction of the original. the latter part of the story had wholly faded from my memory, so that i "made up" to suit the tastes of my audience. afterward i told the story to a good many children, at one time or another, and it gradually took the shape it has here. it was not until several years later that, in re-reading andersen for other purposes, i came upon the real story of the little fir tree, and read it for myself. then indeed i was amused, and somewhat distressed, to find how far i had wandered from the text. i give this explanation that the reader may know i do not presume to offer the little tale which follows as an "adaptation" of andersen's famous story. i offer it plainly as a story which children have liked, and which grew out of my early memories of andersen's "the little fir tree"]. once there was a little fir tree, slim and pointed, and shiny, which stood in the great forest in the midst of some big fir trees, broad, and tall, and shadowy green. the little fir tree was very unhappy because he was not big like the others. when the birds came flying into the woods and lit on the branches of the big trees and built their nests there, he used to call up to them,-- "come down, come down, rest in my branches!" but they always said,-- "oh, no, no; you are too little!" and when the splendid wind came blowing and singing through the forest, it bent and rocked and swung the tops of the big trees, and murmured to them. then the little fir tree looked up, and called,-- "oh, please, dear wind, come down and play with me!" but he always said,-- "oh, no; you are too little, you are too little!" and in the winter the white snow fell softly, softly, and covered the great trees all over with wonderful caps and coats of white. the little fir tree, close down in the cover of the others, would call up,-- "oh, please, dear snow, give me a cap, too! i want to play, too!" but the snow always said,-- "oh no, no, no; you are too little, you are too little!" the worst of all was when men came into the wood, with sledges and teams of horses. they came to cut the big trees down and carry them away. and when one had been cut down and carried away the others talked about it, and nodded their heads. and the little fir tree listened, and heard them say that when you were carried away so, you might become the mast of a mighty ship, and go far away over the ocean, and see many wonderful things; or you might be part of a fine house in a great city, and see much of life. the little fir tree wanted greatly to see life, but he was always too little; the men passed him by. but by and by, one cold winter's morning, men came with a sledge and horses, and after they had cut here and there they came to the circle of trees round the little fir tree, and looked all about. "there are none little enough," they said. oh! how the little fir tree pricked up his needles! "here is one," said one of the men, "it is just little enough." and he touched the little fir tree. the little fir tree was happy as a bird, because he knew they were about to cut him down. and when he was being carried away on the sledge he lay wondering, so contentedly, whether he should be the mast of a ship or part of a fine city house. but when they came to the town he was taken out and set upright in a tub and placed on the edge of a sidewalk in a row of other fir trees, all small, but none so little as he. and then the little fir tree began to see life. people kept coming to look at the trees and to take them away. but always when they saw the little fir tree they shook their heads and said,-- "it is too little, too little." until, finally, two children came along, hand in hand, looking carefully at all the small trees. when they saw the little fir tree they cried out,-- "we'll take this one; it is just little enough!" they took him out of his tub and carried him away, between them. and the happy little fir tree spent all his time wondering what it could be that he was just little enough for; he knew it could hardly be a mast or a house, since he was going away with children. he kept wondering, while they took him in through some big doors, and set him up in another tub, on the table, in a bare little room. pretty soon they went away, and came back again with a big basket, carried between them. then some pretty ladies, with white caps on their heads and white aprons over their blue dresses, came bringing little parcels. the children took things out of the basket and began to play with the little fir tree, just as he had often begged the wind and the snow and the birds to do. he felt their soft little touches on his head and his twigs and his branches. and when he looked down at himself, as far as he could look, he saw that he was all hung with gold and silver chains! there were strings of white fluffy stuff drooping around him; his twigs held little gold nuts and pink, rosy balls and silver stars; he had pretty little pink and white candles in his arms; but last, and most wonderful of all, the children hung a beautiful white, floating doll-angel over his head! the little fir tree could not breathe, for joy and wonder. what was it that he was, now? why was this glory for him? after a time every one went away and left him. it grew dusk, and the little fir tree began to hear strange sounds through the closed doors. sometimes he heard a child crying. he was beginning to be lonely. it grew more and more shadowy. all at once, the doors opened and the two children came in. two of the pretty ladies were with them. they came up to the little fir tree and quickly lighted all the little pink and white candles. then the two pretty ladies took hold of the table with the little fir tree on it and pushed it, very smoothly and quickly, out of the doors, across a hall, and in at another door. the little fir tree had a sudden sight of a long room with many little white beds in it, of children propped up on pillows in the beds, and of other children in great wheeled chairs, and others hobbling about or sitting in little chairs. he wondered why all the little children looked so white and tired; he did not know that he was in a hospital. but before he could wonder any more his breath was quite taken away by the shout those little white children gave. "oh! oh! m-m! m-m!" they cried. "how pretty! how beautiful! oh, isn't it lovely!" he knew they must mean him, for all their shining eyes were looking straight at him. he stood as straight as a mast, and quivered in every needle, for joy. presently one little weak child-voice called out,-- "it's the nicest christmas tree i ever saw!" and then, at last, the little fir tree knew what he was; he was a christmas tree! and from his shiny head to his feet he was glad, through and through, because he was just little enough to be the nicest kind of tree in the world! how moses was saved thousands of years ago, many years before david lived, there was a very wise and good man of his people who was a friend and adviser of the king of egypt. and for love of this friend, the king of egypt had let numbers of the israelites settle in his land. but after the king and his israelitish friend were dead, there was a new king, who hated the israelites. when he saw how strong they were, and how many there were of them, he began to be afraid that some day they might number more than the egyptians, and might take his land from him. then he and his rulers did a wicked thing. they made the israelites slaves. and they gave them terrible tasks to do, without proper rest, or food, or clothes. for they hoped that the hardship would kill off the israelites. they thought the old men would die and the young men be so ill and weary that they could not bring up families, and so the race would vanish away. but in spite of the work and suffering, the israelites remained strong, and more and more boys grew up, to make the king afraid. then he did the wickedest thing of all. he ordered his soldiers to kill every boy baby that should be born in an israelitish family; he did not care about the girls, because they could not grow up to fight. very soon after this evil order, a boy baby was born in a certain israelitish family. when his mother first looked at him her heart was nearly broken, for he was even more beautiful than most babies are,--so strong and fair and sweet. but he was a boy! how could she save him from death? somehow, she contrived to keep him hidden for three whole months. but at the end of that time, she saw that it was not going to be possible to keep him safe any longer. she had been thinking all this time about what she should do, and now she carried out her plan. first, she took a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it all over with pitch so that it was water-tight, and then she laid the baby in it; then she carried it to the edge of the river and laid it in the flags by the river's brink. it did not show at all, unless one were quite near it. then she kissed her little son and left him there. but his sister stood far off, not seeming to watch, but really watching carefully to see what would happen to the baby. soon there was the sound of talk and laughter, and a train of beautiful women came down to the water's edge. it was the king's daughter, come down to bathe in the river, with her maidens. the maidens walked along by the river's side. as the king's daughter came near to the water, she saw the strange little basket lying in the flags, and she sent her maid to bring it to her. and when she had opened it, she saw the child; the poor baby was crying. when she saw him, so helpless and so beautiful, crying for his mother, the king's daughter pitied him and loved him. she knew the cruel order of her father, and she said at once, "this is one of the hebrews' children." at that moment the baby's sister came to the princess and said, "shall i go and find thee a nurse from the hebrew women, so that she may nurse the child for thee?" not a word did she say about whose child it was, but perhaps the princess guessed; i don't know. at all events, she told the little girl to go. so the maiden went, and brought her mother! then the king's daughter said to the baby's mother, "take this child away and nurse it for me, and i will give thee wages." was not that a strange thing? and can you think how happy the baby's mother was? for now the baby would be known only as the princess's adopted child, and would be safe. and it was so. the mother kept him until he was old enough to be taken to the princess's palace. then he was brought and given to the king's daughter, and he became her son. and she named him moses. but the strangest part of the whole story is, that when moses grew to be a man he became so strong and wise that it was he who at last saved his people from the king and conquered the egyptians. the one child saved by the king's own daughter was the very one the king would most have wanted to kill, if he had known. the ten fairies[ ] [ ] adapted from the facts given in the german of die zehn {feeen?}, by h. a. guerber. once upon a time there was a dear little girl, whose name was elsa. elsa's father and mother worked very hard and became rich. but they loved elsa so much that they did not like to have her do any work; very foolishly, they let her play all the time. so when elsa grew up, she did not know how to do anything; she could not make bread, she could not sweep a room, she could not sew a seam; she could only laugh and sing. but she was so sweet and merry that everybody loved her. and by and by, she married one of the people who loved her, and had a house of her own to take care of. then, then, my dears, came hard times for elsa! there were so many things to be done in the house, and she did not know how to do any of them! and because she had never worked at all it made her very tired even to try; she was tired before the morning was over, every day. the maid would come and say, "how shall i do this?" or "how shall i do that?" and elsa would have to say, "i don't know." then the maid would pretend that she did not know, either; and when she saw her mistress sitting about doing nothing, she, too, sat about, idle. elsa's husband had a hard time of it; he did not have good things to eat, and they were not ready at the right time, and the house looked all in a clutter. it made him sad, and that made elsa sad, for she wanted to do everything just right. at last, one day, elsa's husband went away quite cross; he said to her, as he went out the door, "it is no wonder that the house looks so, when you sit all day with your hands in your lap!" little elsa cried bitterly when he was gone, for she did not want to make her husband unhappy and cross, and she wanted the house to look nice. "oh, dear," she sobbed, "i wish i could do things right! i wish i could work! i wish--i wish i had ten good fairies to work for me! then i could keep the house!" as she said the words, a great gray man stood before her; he was wrapped in a strange gray cloak that covered him from head to foot; and he smiled at elsa. "what is the matter, dear?" he said. "why do you cry?" "oh, i am crying because i do not know how to keep the house," said elsa. "i cannot make bread, i cannot sweep, i cannot sew a seam; when i was a little girl i never learned to work, and now i cannot do anything right. i wish i had ten good fairies to help me!" "you shall have them, dear," said the gray man, and he shook his strange gray cloak. pouf! out hopped ten tiny fairies, no bigger than that! "these shall be your servants, elsa," said the gray man; "they are faithful and clever, and they will do everything you want them to, just right. but the neighbors might stare and ask questions if they saw these little chaps running about your house, so i will hide them away for you. give me your little useless hands." wondering, elsa stretched out her pretty, little, white hands. "now stretch out your little useless fingers, dear!" elsa stretched out her pretty pink fingers. the gray man touched each one of the ten little fingers, and as he touched them he said their names: "little thumb; fore-finger; thimble-finger; ring-finger; little finger; little thumb; forefinger; thimble-finger; ring-finger; little finger!" and as he named the fingers, one after another, the tiny fairies bowed their tiny heads; there was a fairy for every name. "hop! hide yourselves away!" said the gray man. hop, hop! the fairies sprang to elsa's knee, then to the palms of her hands, and then-whisk! they were all hidden away in her little pink fingers, a fairy in every finger! and the gray man was gone. elsa sat and looked with wonder at her little white hands and the ten useless fingers. but suddenly the little fingers began to stir. the tiny fairies who were hidden away there weren't used to staying still, and they were getting restless. they stirred so that elsa jumped up and ran to the cooking table, and took hold of the bread board. no sooner had she touched the bread board than the little fairies began to work: they measured the flour, mixed the bread, kneaded the loaves, and set them to rise, quicker than you could wink; and when the bread was done, it was the nicest you could wish. then the little fairy-fingers seized the broom, and in a twinkling they were making the house clean. and so it went, all day. elsa flew about from one thing to another, and the ten fairies did it all, just right. when the maid saw her mistress working, she began to work, too; and when she saw how beautifully everything was done, she was ashamed to do anything badly herself. in a little while the housework was going smoothly, and elsa could laugh and sing again. there was no more crossness in that house. elsa's husband grew so proud of her that he went about saying to everybody, "my grandmother was a fine housekeeper, and my mother was a fine housekeeper, but neither of them could hold a candle to my wife. she has only one maid, but, to see the work done, you would think she had as many servants as she has fingers on her hands!" when elsa heard that, she used to laugh, but she never, never told. the elves and the shoemaker once upon a time there was an honest shoemaker, who was very poor. he worked as hard as he could, and still he could not earn enough to keep himself and his wife. at last there came a day when he had nothing left but one piece of leather, big enough to make one pair of shoes. he cut out the shoes, ready to stitch, and left them on the bench; then he said his prayers and went to bed, trusting that he could finish the shoes on the next day and sell them. bright and early the next morning, he rose and went to his work-bench. there lay a pair of shoes, beautifully made, and the leather was gone! there was no sign of any one's having been there. the shoemaker and his wife did not know what to make of it. but the first customer who came was so pleased with the beautiful shoes that he bought them, and paid so much that the shoemaker was able to buy leather enough for two pairs. happily, he cut them out, and then, as it was late, he left the pieces on the bench, ready to sew in the morning. but when morning came, two pairs of shoes lay on the bench, most beautifully made, and no sign of any one who had been there. the shoemaker and his wife were quite at a loss. that day a customer came and bought both pairs, and paid so much for them that the shoemaker bought leather for four pairs, with the money. once more he cut out the shoes and left them on the bench. and in the morning all four pairs were made. it went on like this until the shoemaker and his wife were prosperous people. but they could not be satisfied to have so much done for them and not know to whom they should be grateful. so one night, after the shoemaker had left the pieces of leather on the bench, he and his wife hid themselves behind a curtain, and left a light in the room. just as the clock struck twelve the door opened softly, and two tiny elves came dancing into the room, hopped on to the bench, and began to put the pieces together. they were quite naked, but they had wee little scissors and hammers and thread. tap! tap! went the little hammers; stitch, stitch, went the thread, and the little elves were hard at work. no one ever worked so fast as they. in almost no time all the shoes were stitched and finished. then the tiny elves took hold of each other's hands and danced round the shoes on the bench, till the shoemaker and his wife had hard work not to laugh aloud. but as the clock struck two, the little creatures whisked away out of the window, and left the room all as it was before. the shoemaker and his wife looked at each other, and said, "how can we thank the little elves who have made us happy and prosperous?" "i should like to make them some pretty clothes," said the wife, "they are quite naked." "i will make the shoes if you will make the coats," said her husband. that very day they set about it. the wife cut out two tiny, tiny coats of green, two weeny, weeny waistcoats of yellow, two little pairs of trousers, of white, two bits of caps, bright red (for every one knows the elves love bright colors), and her husband made two little pairs of shoes with long, pointed toes. they made the wee clothes as dainty as could be, with nice little stitches and pretty buttons; and by christmas time, they were finished. on christmas eve, the shoemaker cleaned his bench, and on it, instead of leather, he laid the two sets of gay little fairy-clothes. then he and his wife hid away as before, to watch. promptly at midnight, the little naked elves came in. they hopped upon the bench; but when they saw the little clothes there, they laughed and danced for joy. each one caught up his little coat and things and began to put them on. then they looked at each other and made all kinds of funny motions in their delight. at last they began to dance, and when the clock struck two, they danced quite away, out of the window. they never came back any more, but from that day they gave the shoemaker and his wife good luck, so that they never needed any more help. who killed the otter's babies[ ]? [ ] adapted from the story as told in fables and folk tales from an eastern forest, by walter skeat. once the otter came to the mouse-deer and said, "friend mouse-deer, will you please take care of my babies while i go to the river, to catch fish?" "certainly," said the mouse-deer, "go along." but when the otter came back from the river, with a string of fish, he found his babies crushed flat. "what does this mean, friend mouse-deer?" he said. "who killed my children while you were taking care of them?" "i am very sorry," said the mouse-deer, "but you know i am chief dancer of the war-dance, and the woodpecker came and sounded the war-gong, so i danced. i forgot your children, and trod on them." "i shall go to king solomon," said the otter, "and you shall be punished." soon the mouse-deer was called before king solomon. "did you kill the otter's babies?" said the king. "yes, your majesty," said the mouse-deer, "but i did not mean to." "how did it happen?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the mouse-deer, "that i am chief dancer of the war-dance. the woodpecker came and sounded the war-gong, and i had to dance; and as i danced i trod on the otter's children." "send for the woodpecker," said king solomon. and when the woodpecker came, he said to him, "was it you who sounded the war-gong?" "yes, your majesty," said the woodpecker, "but i had to." "why?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the woodpecker, "that i am chief beater of the war-gong, and i sounded the gong because i saw the great lizard wearing his sword." "send for the great lizard," said king solomon. when the great lizard came, he asked him, "was it you who were wearing your sword?" "yes, your majesty," said the great lizard; "but i had to." "why?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the great lizard, "that i am chief protector of the sword. i wore my sword because the tortoise came wearing his coat of mail." so the tortoise was sent for. "why did you wear your coat of mail?" said the king. "i put it on, your majesty," said the tortoise, "because i saw the king-crab trailing his three-edged pike." then the king-crab was sent for. "why were you trailing your three-edged pike?" said king solomon. "because, your majesty," said the kingerab, "i saw that the crayfish had shouldered his lance." immediately the crayfish was sent for. "why did you shoulder your lance?" said the king. "because, your majesty," said the crayfish, "i saw the otter coming down to the river to kill my children." "oh," said king solomon, "if that is the case, the otter killed the otter's children. and the mouse-deer cannot be held, by the law of the land!" early[ ] [ ] from the singing leaves, by josephine preston peabody (houghton, mifflin and co.). i like to lie and wait to see my mother braid her hair. it is as long as it can be, and yet she doesn't care. i love my mother's hair. and then the way her fingers go; they look so quick and white,-- in and out, and to and fro, and braiding in the light, and it is always right. so then she winds it, shiny brown, around her head into a crown, just like the day before. and then she looks and pats it down, and looks a minute more; while i stay here all still and cool. oh, isn't morning beautiful? the brahmin, the tiger, and the jackal do you know what a brahmin is? a brahmin is a very good and gentle kind of man who lives in india, and who treats all the beasts as if they were his brothers. there is a great deal more to know about brahmins, but that is enough for the story. one day a brahmin was walking along a country road when he came upon a tiger, shut up in a strong iron cage. the villagers had caught him and shut him up there for his wickedness. "oh, brother brahmin, brother brahmin," said the tiger, "please let me out, to get a little drink! i am so thirsty, and there is no water here." "but brother tiger," said the brahmin, "you know if i should let you out, you would spring on me and eat me up." "never, brother brahmin!" said the tiger. "never in the world would i do such an ungrateful thing! just let me out a little minute, to get a little, little drink of water, brother brahmin!" so the brahmin unlocked the door and let the tiger out. the moment he was out he sprang on the brahmin, and was about to eat him up. "but, brother tiger," said the brahmin, "you promised you would not. it is not fair or just that you should eat me, when i set you free." "it is perfectly right and just," said the tiger, "and i shall eat you up." however, the brahmin argued so hard that at last the tiger agreed to wait and ask the first five whom they should meet, whether it was fair for him to eat the brahmin, and to abide by their decision. the first thing they came to, to ask, was an old banyan tree, by the wayside. (a banyan tree is a kind of fruit tree.) "brother banyan," said the brahmin, eagerly, "does it seem to you right or just that this tiger should eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" the banyan tree looked down at them and spoke in a tired voice. "in the summer," he said, "when the sun is hot, men come and sit in the cool of my shade and refresh themselves with the fruit of my branches. but when evening falls, and they are rested, they break my twigs and scatter my leaves, and stone my boughs for more fruit. men are an ungrateful race. let the tiger eat the brahmin." the tiger sprang to eat the brahmin, but the brahmin said,-- "wait, wait; we have asked only one. we have still four to ask." presently they came to a place where an old bullock was lying by the road. the brahmin went up to him and said,-- "brother bullock, oh, brother bullock, does it seem to you a fair thing that this tiger should eat me up, after i have just freed him from a cage?" the bullock looked up, and answered in a deep, grumbling voice,-- "when i was young and strong my master used me hard, and i served him well. i carried heavy loads and carried them far. now that i am old and weak and cannot work, he leaves me without food or water, to die by the wayside. men are a thankless lot. let the tiger eat the brahmin." the tiger sprang, but the brahmin spoke very quickly:-- "oh, but this is only the second, brother tiger; you promised to ask five." the tiger grumbled a good deal, but at last he went on again with the brahmin. and after a time they saw an eagle, high overhead. the brahmin called up to him imploringly,-- "oh, brother eagle, brother eagle! tell us if it seems to you fair that this tiger should eat me up, when i have just saved him from a frightful cage?" the eagle soared slowly overhead a moment, then he came lower, and spoke in a thin, clear voice. "i live high in the air," he said, "and i do no man any harm. yet as often as they find my eyrie, men stone my young and rob my nest and shoot at me with arrows. men are a cruel breed. let the tiger eat the brahmin!" the tiger sprang upon the brahmin, to eat him up; and this time the brahmin had very hard work to persuade him to wait. at last he did persuade him, however, and they walked on together. and in a little while they saw an old alligator, lying half buried in mud and slime, at the river's edge. "brother alligator, oh, brother alligator!" said the brahmin, "does it seem at all right or fair to you that this tiger should eat me up, when i have just now let him out of a cage?" the old alligator turned in the mud, and grunted, and snorted; then he said, "i lie here in the mud all day, as harmless as a pigeon; i hunt no man, yet every time a man sees me, he throws stones at me, and pokes me with sharp sticks, and jeers at me. men are a worthless lot. let the tiger eat the brahmin!" at this the tiger was bound to eat the brahmin at once. the poor brahmin had to remind him, again and again, that they had asked only four. "wait till we've asked one more! wait until we see a fifth!" he begged. finally, the tiger walked on with him. after a time, they met the little jackal, coming gayly down the road toward them. "oh, brother jackal, dear brother jackal," said the brahmin, "give us your opinion! do you think it right or fair that this tiger should eat me, when i set him free from a terrible cage?" "beg pardon?" said the little jackal. "i said," said the brahmin, raising his voice, "do you think it is fair that the tiger should eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" "cage?" said the little jackal, vacantly. "yes, yes, his cage," said the brahmin. "we want your opinion. do you think--" "oh," said the little jackal, "you want my opinion? then may i beg you to speak a little more loudly, and make the matter quite clear? i am a little slow of understanding. now what was it?" "do you think," said the brahmin, "it is right for this tiger to eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" "what cage?" said the little jackal. "why, the cage he was in," said the brahmin. "you see--" "but i don't altogether understand," said the little jackal, "you 'set him free,' you say?" "yes, yes, yes!" said the brahmin. "it was this way: i was walking along, and i saw the tiger--" "oh, dear, dear!" interrupted the little jackal; "i never can see through it, if you go on like that, with a long story. if you really want my opinion you must make the matter clear. what sort of cage was it?" "why, a big, ordinary cage, an iron cage," said the brahmin. "that gives me no idea at all," said the little jackal. "see here, my friends, if we are to get on with this matter you'd best show me the spot. then i can understand in a jiffy. show me the cage." so the brahmin, the tiger, and the little jackal walked back together to the spot where the cage was. "now, let us understand the situation," said the little jackal. "brahmin, where were you?" "i stood here by the roadside," said the brahmin. "tiger, where were you?" said the little jackal. "why, in the cage, of course," roared the tiger. "oh, i beg your pardon, father tiger," said the little jackal, "i really am so stupid; i cannot quite understand what happened. if you will have a little patience,--how were you in the cage? what position were you in?" "i stood here," said the tiger, leaping into the cage, "with my head over my shoulder, so." "oh, thank you, thank you," said the little jackal, "that makes it much clearer; but i still don't quite understand--forgive my slow mind--why did you not come out, by yourself?" "can't you see that the door shut me in?" said the tiger. "oh, i do beg your pardon," said the little jackal. "i know i am very slow; i can never understand things well unless i see just how they were if you could show me now exactly how that door works i am sure i could understand. how does it shut?" "it shuts like this," said the brahmin, pushing it to. "yes; but i don't see any lock," said the little jackal, "does it lock on the outside?" "it locks like this," said the brahmin. and he shut and bolted the door! "oh, does it, indeed?" said the little jackal. "does it, indeed! well, brother brahmin, now that it is locked, i should advise you to let it stay locked! as for you, my friend," he said to the tiger, "i think you will wait a good while before you'll find any one to let you out again!" then he made a very low bow to the brahmin. "good-by, brother," he said. "your way lies that way, and mine lies this; good-by!" the little jackal and the camel all these stories about the little jackal that i have told you, show how clever the little jackal was. but you know--if you don't, you will when you are grown up-- that no matter how clever you are, sooner or later you surely meet some one who is cleverer. it is always so in life. and it was so with the little jackal. this is what happened. the little jackal was, as you know, exceedingly fond of shell-fish, especially of river crabs. now there came a time when he had eaten all the crabs to be found on his own side of the river. he knew there must be plenty on the other side, if he could only get to them, but he could not swim. one day he thought of a plan. he went to his friend the camel, and said,-- "friend camel, i know a spot where the sugar-cane grows thick; i'll show you the way, if you will take me there." "indeed i will," said the camel, who was very fond of sugar-cane. "where is it?" "it is on the other side of the river," said the little jackal; "but we can manage it nicely, if you will take me on your back and swim over." the camel was perfectly willing, so the little jackal jumped on his back, and the camel swam across the river, carrying him. when they were safely over, the little jackal jumped down and showed the camel the sugar-cane field; then he ran swiftly along the river bank, to hunt for crabs; the camel began to eat sugar-cane. he ate happily, and noticed nothing around him. now, you know, a camel is very big, and a jackal is very little. consequently, the little jackal had eaten his fill by the time the camel had barely taken a mouthful. the little jackal had no mind to wait for his slow friend; he wanted to be off home again, about his business. so he ran round and round the sugar-cane field, and as he ran he sang and shouted, and made a great hullabaloo. of course, the villagers heard him at once. "there is a jackal in the sugar-cane," they said; "he will dig holes and destroy the roots; we must go down and drive him out." so they came down, with sticks and stones. when they got there, there was no jackal to be seen; but they saw the great camel, eating away at the juicy sugar-cane. they ran at him and beat him, and stoned him, and drove him away half dead. when they had gone, leaving the poor camel half killed, the little jackal came dancing back from somewhere or other. "i think it's time to go home, now," he said; "don't you?" "well, you are a pretty friend!" said the camel. "the idea of your making such a noise, with your shouting and singing! you brought this upon me. what in the world made you do it? why did you shout and sing?" "oh, i don't know why," said the little jackal,--"i always sing after dinner!" "so?" said the camel, "ah, very well, let us go home now." he took the little jackal kindly on his back and started into the water. when he began to swim he swam out to where the river was the very deepest. there he stopped, and said,-- "oh, jackal!" "yes," said the little jackal. "i have the strangest feeling," said the camel,--"i feel as if i must roll over." "'roll over'!" cried the jackal. "my goodness, don't do that! if you do that, you'll drown me! what in the world makes you want to do such a crazy thing? why should you want to roll over?" "oh, i don't know why," said the camel slowly, "but i always roll over after dinner!" so he rolled over. and the little jackal was drowned, for his sins, but the camel came safely home. the gulls of salt lake the story i am going to tell you is about something that really happened, many years ago, when most of the mothers and fathers of the children here were not born, themselves. at that time, nearly all the people in the united states lived between the atlantic ocean and the mississippi river. beyond were plains, reaching to the foot of the mighty rocky mountains, where indians and wild beasts roamed. the only white men there were a few hunters and trappers. one year a brave little company of people traveled across the plains in big covered wagons with many horses, and finally succeeded in climbing to the top of the great rockies and down again into a valley in the very midst of the mountains. it was a valley of brown, bare, desert soil, in a climate where almost no rain falls; but the snows on the mountain-tops sent down little streams of pure water, the winds were gentle, and lying like a blue jewel at the foot of the western hills was a marvelous lake of salt water,--an inland sea. so the pioneers settled there and built them huts and cabins for the first winter. it had taken them many months to make the terrible journey; many had died of weariness and illness on the way; many died of hardship during the winter; and the provisions they had brought in their wagons were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. all their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. they made the barren land good by spreading water from the little streams over it,--what we call "irrigating;" and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and prayers, and careful eyes. in good time the seeds sprouted, and the dry, brown earth was covered with a carpet of tender, green, growing things. no farmer's garden at home in the east could have looked better than the great garden of the desert valley. and from day to day the little shoots grew and flourished till they were all well above the ground. then a terrible thing happened. one day the men who were watering the crops saw a great number of crickets swarming over the ground at the edge of the gardens nearest the mountains. they were hopping from the barren places into the young, green crops, and as they settled down they ate the tiny shoots and leaves to the ground. more came, and more, and ever more, and as they came they spread out till they covered a big corner of the grain field. and still more and more, till it was like an army of black, hopping, crawling crickets, streaming down the side of the mountain to kill the crops. the men tried to kill the crickets by beating the ground, but the numbers were so great that it was like beating at the sea. then they ran and told the terrible news, and all the village came to help. they started fires; they dug trenches and filled them with water; they ran wildly about in the fields, killing what they could. but while they fought in one place new armies of crickets marched down the mountain-sides and attacked the fields in other places. and at last the people fell on their knees and wept and cried in despair, for they saw starvation and death in the fields. a few knelt to pray. others gathered round and joined them, weeping. more left their useless struggles and knelt beside their neighbors. at last nearly all the people were kneeling on the desolate fields praying for deliverance from the plague of crickets. suddenly, from far off in the air toward the great salt lake, there was the sound of flapping wings. it grew louder. some of the people looked up, startled. they saw, like a white cloud rising from the lake, a flock of sea gulls flying toward them. snow-white in the sun, with great wings beating and soaring, in hundreds and hundreds, they rose and circled and came on. "the gulls! the gulls!" was the cry. "what does it mean?" the gulls flew overhead, with a shrill chorus of whimpering cries, and then, in a marvelous white cloud of spread wings and hovering breasts, they settled down over the seeded ground. "oh! woe! woe!" cried the people. "the gulls are eating what the crickets have left! they will strip root and branch!" but all at once, some one called out,-- "no, no! see! they are eating the crickets! they are eating only the crickets!" it was true. the gulls devoured the crickets in dozens, in hundreds, in swarms. they ate until they were gorged, and then they flew heavily back to the lake, only to come again with new appetite. and when at last they finished, they had stripped the fields of the cricket army; and the people were saved. to this day, in the beautiful city of salt lake, which grew out of that pioneer village, the little children are taught to love the sea gulls. and when they learn drawing and weaving in the schools, their first design is often a picture of a cricket and a gull. the nightingale[ ] [ ] adapted from hans christian andersen. a long, long time ago, as long ago as when there were fairies, there lived an emperor in china, who had a most beautiful palace, all made of crystal. outside the palace was the loveliest garden in the whole world, and farther away was a forest where the trees were taller than any other trees in the world, and farther away, still, was a deep wood. and in this wood lived a little nightingale. the nightingale sang so beautifully that everybody who heard her remembered her song better than anything else that he heard or saw. people came from all over the world to see the crystal palace and the wonderful garden and the great forest; but when they went home and wrote books about these things they always wrote, "but the nightingale is the best of all." at last it happened that the emperor came upon a book which said this, and he at once sent for his chamberlain. "who is this nightingale?" said the emperor. "why have i never heard him sing?" the chamberlain, who was a very important person, said, "there cannot be any such person; i have never heard his name." "the book says there is a nightingale," said the emperor. "i command that the nightingale be brought here to sing for me this evening." the chamberlain went out and asked all the great lords and ladies and pages where the nightingale could be found, but not one of them had ever heard of him. so the chamberlain went back to the emperor and said, "there is no such person." "the book says there is a nightingale," said the emperor; "if the nightingale is not here to sing for me this evening i will have the court trampled upon, immediately after supper." the chamberlain did not want to be trampled upon, so he ran out and asked everybody in the palace about the nightingale. at last, a little girl who worked in the kitchen to help the cook's helper, said, "oh, yes, i know the nightingale very well. every night, when i go to carry scraps from the kitchen to my mother, who lives in the wood beyond the forest, i hear the nightingale sing." the chamberlain asked the little cook-maid to take him to the nightingale's home, and many of the lords and ladies followed after. when they had gone a little way, they heard a cow moo. "ah!" said the lords and ladies, "that must be the nightingale; what a large voice for so small a creature!" "oh, no," said the little girl, "that is just a cow, mooing." a little farther on they heard some bull-frogs, in a swamp. "surely that is the nightingale," said the courtiers; "it really sounds like church-bells!" "oh, no," said the little girl, "those are bullfrogs, croaking." at last they came to the wood where the nightingale was. "hush!" said the little girl, "she is going to sing." and, sure enough, the little nightingale began to sing. she sang so beautifully that you have never in all your life heard anything like it. "dear, dear," said the courtiers, "that is very pleasant; does that little gray bird really make all that noise? she is so pale that i think she has lost her color for fear of us." the chamberlain asked the little nightingale to come and sing for the emperor. the little nightingale said she could sing better in her own greenwood, but she was so sweet and kind that she came with them. that evening the palace was all trimmed with the most beautiful flowers you can imagine, and rows and rows of little silver bells, that tinkled when the wind blew in, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of wax candles, that shone like tiny stars. in the great hall there was a gold perch for the nightingale, beside the emperor's throne. when all the people were there, the emperor asked the nightingale to sing. then the little gray nightingale filled her throat full, and sang. and, my dears, she sang so beautifully that the emperor's eyes filled up with tears! and, you know, emperors do not cry at all easily. so he asked her to sing again, and this time she sang so marvelously that the tears came out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks. that was a great success. they asked the little nightingale to sing, over and over again, and when they had listened enough the emperor said that she should be made "singer in chief to the court." she was to have a golden perch near the emperor's bed, and a little gold cage, and was to be allowed to go out twice every day. but there were twelve servants appointed to wait on her, and those twelve servants went with her every time she went out, and each of the twelve had hold of the end of a silken string which was tied to the little nightingale's leg! it was not so very much fun to go out that way! for a long, long time the nightingale sang every evening to the emperor and his court, and they liked her so much that the ladies all tried to sound like her; they used to put water in their mouths and then make little sounds like this: glu-glu-glug. and when the courtiers met each other in the halls, one would say "night," and the other would say "ingale," and that was conversation. at last, one day, there came a little package to the emperor, on the outside of which was written, "the nightingale." inside was an artificial bird, something like a nightingale, only it was made of gold, and silver, and rubies, and emeralds, and diamonds. when it was wound up it played a waltz tune, and as it played it moved its little tail up and down. everybody in the court was filled with delight at the music of the new nightingale. they made it sing that same tune thirty-three times, and still they had not had enough. they would have made it sing the tune thirty-four times, but the emperor said, "i should like to hear the real nightingale sing, now." but when they looked about for the real little nightingale, they could not find her anywhere! she had taken the chance, while everybody was listening to the waltz tunes, to fly away through the window to her own greenwood. "what a very ungrateful bird!" said the lords and ladies. "but it does not matter; the new nightingale is just as good." so the artificial nightingale was given the real nightingale's little gold perch, and every night the emperor wound her up, and she sang waltz tunes to him. the people in the court liked her even better than the old nightingale, because they could all whistle her tunes,--which you can't do with real nightingales. about a year after the artificial nightingale came, the emperor was listening to her waltz-tune, when there was a snap and whir-r-r inside the bird, and the music stopped. the emperor ran to his doctor but he could not do anything. then he ran to his clock-maker, but he could not do much. nobody could do much. the best they could do was to patch the gold nightingale up so that it could sing once a year; even that was almost too much, and the tune was pretty shaky. still, the emperor kept the gold nightingale on the perch in his own room. a long time went by, and then, at last, the emperor grew very ill, and was about to die. when it was sure that he could not live much longer, the people chose a new emperor and waited for the old one to die. the poor emperor lay, quite cold and pale, in his great big bed, with velvet curtains, and tall candlesticks all about. he was quite alone, for all the courtiers had gone to congratulate the new emperor, and all the servants had gone to talk it over. when the emperor woke up, he felt a terrible weight on his chest. he opened his eyes, and there was death, sitting on his heart. death had put on the emperor's gold crown, and he had the gold sceptre in one hand, and the silken banner in the other; and he looked at the emperor with his great hollow eyes. the room was full of shadows, and the shadows were full of faces. everywhere the emperor looked, there were faces. some were very, very ugly, and some were sweet and lovely; they were all the things the emperor had done in his life, good and bad. and as he looked at them they began to whisper. they whispered, "do you remember this?" "do you remember that?" the emperor remembered so much that he cried out loud, "oh, bring the great drum! make music, so that i may not hear these dreadful whispers!" but there was nobody there to bring the drum. then the emperor cried, "you little gold nightingale, can you not sing something for me? i have given you gifts of gold and jewels, and kept you always by my side; will you not help me now?" but there was nobody to wind the little gold nightingale up, and of course it could not sing. the emperor's heart grew colder and colder where death crouched upon it, and the dreadful whispers grew louder and louder, and the emperor's life was almost gone. suddenly, through the open window, there came a most lovely song. it was so sweet and so loud that the whispers died quite away. presently the emperor felt his heart grow warm, then he felt the blood flow through his limbs again; he listened to the song until the tears ran down his cheeks; he knew that it was the little real nightingale who had flown away from him when the gold nightingale came. death was listening to the song, too; and when it was done and the emperor begged for more, death, too, said, "please sing again, little nightingale!" "will you give me the emperor's gold crown for a song?" said the little nightingale. "yes," said death; and the little nightingale bought the emperor's crown for a song. "oh, sing again, little nightingale," begged death. "will you give me the emperor's sceptre for another song?" said the little gray nightingale. "yes," said death; and the little nightingale bought the emperor's sceptre for another song. once more death begged for a song, and this time the little nightingale got the banner for her singing. then she sang one more song, so sweet and so sad that it made death think of his garden in the churchyard, where he always liked best to be. and he rose from the emperor's heart and floated away through the window. when death was gone, the emperor said to the little nightingale, "oh, dear little nightingale, you have saved me from death! do not leave me again. stay with me on this little gold perch, and sing to me always!" "no, dear emperor," said the little nightingale, "i sing best when i am free; i cannot live in a palace. but every night when you are quite alone, i will come and sit in the window and sing to you, and tell you everything that goes on in your kingdom: i will tell you where the poor people are who ought to be helped, and where the wicked people are who ought to be punished. only, dear emperor, be sure that you never let anybody know that you have a little bird who tells you everything." after the little nightingale had flown away, the emperor felt so well and strong that he dressed himself in his royal robes and took his gold sceptre in his hand. and when the courtiers came in to see if he were dead, there stood the emperor with his sword in one hand and his sceptre in the other, and said, "good-morning!" margery's garden[ ] [ ] i have always been inclined to avoid, in my work among children, the "how to make" and "how to do" kind of story; it is too likely to trespass on the ground belonging by right to its more artistic and less intentional kinsfolk. nevertheless, there is a legitimate place for the instruction-story. within its own limits, and especially in a school use, it has a real purpose to serve, and a real desire to meet. children have a genuine taste for such morsels of practical information, if the bites aren't made too big and too solid. and to the teacher of the first grades, from whom so much is demanded in the way of practical instruction, i know that these stories are a boon. they must be chosen with care, and used with discretion, but they need never be ignored. i venture to give some little stories of this type, which i hope may be of use in the schools where country life and country work is an unknown experience to the children. there was once a little girl named margery, who had always lived in the city. the flat where her mother and father lived was at the top of a big apartment-house, and you couldn't see a great deal from the windows, except clothes-lines on other people's roofs. margery did not know much about trees and flowers, but she loved them dearly; whenever it was a pleasant sunday she used to go with her mother and father to the park and look at the lovely flower-beds. they seemed always to be finished, though, and margery was always wishing she could see them grow. one spring, when margery was nine, her father's work changed so that he could move into the country, and he took a little house a short distance outside the town where his new position was. margery was delighted. and the very first thing she said, when her father told her about it, was, "oh, may i have a garden? may i have a garden?" margery's mother was almost as eager for a garden as she was, and margery's father said he expected to live on their vegetables all the rest of his life! so it was soon agreed that the garden should be the first thing attended to. behind the little house were apple trees, a plum tree, and two or three pear trees; then came a stretch of rough grass, and then a stone wall, with a gate leading into the pasture. it was in the grassy land that the garden was to be. a big piece was to be used for corn and peas and beans, and a little piece at the end was to be saved for margery. "what shall we have in it?" asked her mother. "flowers," said margery, with shining eyes,--"blue, and white, and yellow, and pink,--every kind of flower!" "surely, flowers," said her mother, "and shall we not have a little salad garden in the midst, as they do in england?" "what is a salad garden?" margery asked. "it is a garden where you have all the things that make nice salad," said her mother, laughing, for margery was fond of salads; "you have lettuce, and endive, and romaine, and parsley, and radishes, and cucumbers, and perhaps little beets and young onions." "oh! how good it sounds!" said margery. "i vote for the salad garden." that very evening, margery's father took pencil and paper, and drew out a plan for her garden; first, they talked it all over, then he drew what they decided on; it looked like the diagram on the next page. "the outside strip is for flowers," said margery's father, "and the next marks mean a footpath, all the way round the beds; that is so you can get at the flowers to weed and to pick; there is a wider path through the middle, and the rest is all for rows of salad vegetables." "papa, it is glorious!" said margery. papa laughed. "i hope you will still think it glorious when the weeding time comes," he said, "for you know, you and mother have promised to take care of this garden, while i take care of the big one." "i wouldn't not take care of it for anything!" said margery. "i want to feel that it is my very own." her father kissed her, and said it was certainly her "very own." two evenings after that, when margery was called in from her first ramble in a "really, truly pasture," she found the expressman at the door of the little house. "something for you, margery," said her mother, with the look she had when something nice was happening. it was a box, quite a big box, with a label on it that said:-- miss margery brown, woodville, mass. from seeds and plants company, boston. margery could hardly wait to open it. it was filled with little packages, all with printed labels; and in the packages, of course, were seeds. it made margery dance, just to read the names,--nasturtium, giant helianthus, coreopsis, calendula, canterbury bells: more names than i can tell you, and other packages, bigger, that said, "peas: dwarf telephone," and "sweet corn," and such things! margery could almost smell the posies, she was so excited. only, she had seen so little of flowers that she did not always know what the names meant. she did not know that a helianthus was a sunflower till her mother told her, and she had never seen the dear, blue, bell-shaped flowers that always grow in old-fashioned gardens, and are called canterbury bells. she thought the calendula must be a strange, grand flower, by its name; but her mother told her it was the gay, sturdy, every-dayish little posy called a marigold. there was a great deal for a little city girl to be surprised about, and it did seem as if morning was a long way off! "did you think you could plant them in the morning?" asked her mother. "you know, dear, the ground has to be made ready first; it takes a little time,--it may be several days before you can plant." that was another surprise. margery had thought she could begin to sow the seed right off. but this was what was done. early the next morning, a man came driving into the yard, with two strong white horses; in his wagon was a plough. i suppose you have seen ploughs, but margery never had, and she watched with great interest, while the man and her father took the plough from the cart and harnessed the horses to it. it was a great, three-cornered piece of sharp steel, with long handles coming up from it, so that a man could hold it in place. it looked like this:-- "i brought a two-horse plough because it's green land," the man said. margery wondered what in the world he meant; it was green grass, of course, but what had that to do with the kind of plough? "what does he mean, father?" she whispered, when she got a chance. "he means that this land has not been ploughed before, or not for many years; it will be hard to turn the soil, and one horse could not pull the plough," said her father. so margery had learned what "green land" was. the man was for two hours ploughing the little strip of land. he drove the sharp end of the plough into the soil, and held it firmly so, while the horses dragged it along in a straight line. margery found it fascinating to see the long line of dark earth and green grass come rolling up and turn over, as the knife passed it. she could see that it took real skill and strength to keep the line even, and to avoid the stones. sometimes the plough struck a hidden stone, and then the man was jerked almost off his feet. but he only laughed, and said, "tough piece of land; be a lot better the second year." when he had ploughed, the man went back to his cart and unloaded another farm implement. this one was like a three-cornered platform of wood, with a long, curved, strong rake under it. it was called a harrow, and it looked like this:-- the man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform and drove all over the strip of land. it was fun to watch, but perhaps it was a little hard to do. the man's weight kept the harrow steady, and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it did not stay in ridges. "he scrambles the ground, father!" said margery. "it needs scrambling," laughed her father. "we are going to get more weeds than we want on this green land, and the more the ground is broken, the fewer there will be." after the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and margery's father said he would do the rest of the work in the late afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he was a boy. so margery did not see any more done until the next day. but the next day there was hard work for margery's father! every bit of that "scrambled" turf had to be broken up still more with a mattock and a spade, and then the pieces which were full of grass-roots had to be taken on a fork and shaken, till the earth fell out; then the grass was thrown to one side. that would not have had to be done if the land had been ploughed in the fall; the grass would have rotted in the ground, and would have made fertilizer for the plants. now, margery's father put the fertilizer on the top, and then raked it into the earth. at last, it was time to make the place for the seeds. margery and her mother helped. father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden. then he took the cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to another stake, and drove that down. that made a straight line for him to see. then he hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and scattered fertilizer in it. pretty soon the whole garden was in lines of little trenches. "now for the corn," said father. margery ran and brought the seed box, and found the package of corn. it looked like kernels of gold, when it was opened. "may i help?" margery asked, when she saw how pretty it was. "if you watch me sow one row, i think you can do the next," said her father. so margery watched. her father took a handful of kernels, and, stooping, walked slowly along the line, letting the kernels fall, five or six at a time, in spots about a foot apart; he swung his arm with a gentle, throwing motion, and the golden seeds trickled out like little showers, very exactly. it was pretty to watch; it made margery think of a photograph her teacher had, a photograph of a famous picture called "the sower." perhaps you have seen it. putting in the seed was not so easy to do as to watch; sometimes margery got in too much, and sometimes not enough; but her father helped fix it, and soon she did better. they planted peas, beans, spinach, carrots, and parsnips. and margery's father made a row of holes, after that, for the tomato plants. he said those had to be transplanted; they could not be sown from seed. when the seeds were in the trenches they had to be covered up, and margery really helped at that. it is fun to do it. you stand beside the little trench and walk backward, and as you walk you hoe the loose earth back over the seeds; the same dirt that was hoed up you pull back again. then you rake very gently over the surface, with the back of a rake, to even it all off. margery liked it, because now the garden began to look like a garden. but best of all was the work next day, when her own little particular garden was begun. father brown loved margery and margery's mother so much that he wanted their garden to be perfect, and that meant a great deal more work. he knew very well that the old grass would begin to come through again on such "green" soil, and that it would make terribly hard weeding. he was not going to have any such thing for his two "little girls," as he called them. so he fixed that little garden very fine! this is what he did. after he had thrown out all the turf, he shoveled clean earth on to the garden,-- as much as three solid inches of it; not a bit of grass was in that. then it was ready for raking and fertilizing, and for the lines. the little footpaths were marked out by father brown's feet; margery and her mother laughed well when they saw it, for it looked like some kind of dance. mr. brown had seen gardeners do it when he was a little boy, and he did it very nicely: he walked along the sides of the square, with one foot turned a little out, and the other straight, taking such tiny steps that his feet touched each other all the time. this tramped out a path just wide enough for a person to walk. the wider path was marked with lines and raked. margery thought, of course, all the flowers would be put in as the vegetables were; but she found that it was not so. for some, her father poked little holes with his finger; for some, he made very shallow ditches; and some very small seeds were just scattered lightly over the top of the ground. margery and her mother had taken so much pains in thinking out how the flowers would look prettiest, that maybe you will like to hear just how they designed that garden. at the back were the sweet peas, which would grow tall, like a screen; on the two sides, for a kind of hedge, were yellow sunflowers; and along the front edge were the gay nasturtiums. margery planned that, so that she could look into the garden from the front, but have it shut away from the vegetable patch by the tall flowers on the sides. the two front corners had coreopsis in them. coreopsis is a tall, pretty, daisy-like flower, very dainty and bright. and then, in little square patches all round the garden, were planted white sweet alyssum, blue bachelor's buttons, yellow marigolds, tall larkspur, many-colored asters and zinnias. all these lovely flowers used to grow in our grandmothers' gardens, and if you don't know what they look like, i hope you can find out next summer. between the flowers and the middle path went the seeds for that wonderful salad garden; all the things mrs. brown had named to margery were there. margery had never seen anything so cunning as the little round lettuce-seeds. they looked like tiny beads; it did not seem possible that green lettuce leaves could come from those. but they surely would. mother and father and margery were all late to supper that evening. but they were all so happy that it did not matter. the last thing margery thought of, as she went to sleep at night, was the dear, smooth little garden, with its funny foot-path, and with the little sticks standing at the end of the rows, labeled "lettuce," "beets," "helianthus," and so on. "i have a garden! i have a garden!" thought margery, and then she went off to dreamland. the little cotyledons this is another story about margery's garden. the next morning after the garden was planted, margery was up and out at six o'clock. she could not wait to look at her garden. to be sure, she knew that the seeds could not sprout in a single night, but she had a feeling that something might happen while she was not looking. the garden was just as smooth and brown as the night before, and no little seeds were in sight. but a very few mornings after that, when margery went out, there was a funny little crack opening up through the earth, the whole length of the patch. quickly she knelt down in the footpath, to see. yes! tiny green leaves, a whole row of them, were pushing their way through the crust! margery knew what she had put there: it was the radish-row; these must be radish leaves. she examined them very closely, so that she might know a radish next time. the little leaves, no bigger than half your little-finger nail, grew in twos,--two on each tiny stem; they were almost round. margery flew back to her mother, to say that the first seeds were up. and her mother, nearly as excited as margery, came to look at the little crack. each day, after that, the row of radishes grew, till, in a week, it stood as high as your finger, green and sturdy. but about the third day, while margery was stooping over the radishes, she saw something very, very small and green, peeping above ground, where the lettuce was planted. could it be weeds? no, for on looking very closely she saw that the wee leaves faintly marked a regular row. they did not make a crack, like the radishes; they seemed too small and too far apart to push the earth up like that. margery leaned down and looked with all her eyes at the baby plants. the tiny leaves grew two on a stem, and were almost round. the more she looked at them the more it seemed to margery that they looked exactly as the radish looked when it first came up. "do you suppose," margery said to herself, "that lettuce and radish look alike? they don't look alike in the market!" day by day the lettuce grew, and soon the little round leaves were easier to examine; they certainly were very much like radish leaves. then, one morning, while she was searching the ground for signs of seeds, margery discovered the beets. in irregular patches on the row, hints of green were coming. the next day and the next they grew, until the beet leaves were big enough to see. margery looked. then she looked again. then she wrinkled her forehead. "can we have made a mistake?" she thought. "do you suppose we can have planted all radishes?" for those little beet leaves were almost round, and they grew two on a stem, precisely like the lettuce and the radish; except for the size, all three rows looked alike. it was too much for margery. she ran to the house and found her father. her little face was so anxious that he thought something unpleasant had happened. "papa," she said, all out of breath, "do you think we could have made a mistake about my garden? do you think we could have put radishes in all the rows?" father laughed. "what makes you think such a thing?" he asked. "papa," said margery, "the little leaves all look exactly alike! every plant has just two tiny leaves on it, and shaped the same; they are roundish, and grow out of the stem at the same place." papa's eyes began to twinkle. "many of the dicotyledonous plants look alike at the beginning," he said, with a little drawl on the big word. that was to tease margery, because she always wanted to know the big words she heard. "what's 'dicotyledonous'?" said margery, carefully. "wait till i come home to-night, dear," said her father, "and i'll tell you." that evening margery was waiting eagerly for him, when her father finished his supper. together they went to the garden, and father examined the seedlings carefully. then he pulled up a little radish plant and a tiny beet. "these little leaves," he said, "are not the real leaves of the plant; they are only little food-supply leaves, little pockets to hold food for the plant to live on till it gets strong enough to push up into the air. as soon as the real leaves come out and begin to draw food from the air, these little substitutes wither up and fall off. these two lie folded up in the little seed from the beginning, and are full of plant food. they don't have to be very special in shape, you see, because they don't stay on the plant after it is grown up." "then every plant looks like this at first?" said margery. "no, dear, not every one; plants are divided into two kinds: those which have two food leaves, like these plants, and those which have only one; these are called dicotyledonous, and the ones which have but one food leaf are monocotyledonous. many of the dicotyledons look alike." "i think that is interesting," said margery. "i always supposed the plants were different from the minute they began to grow." "indeed, no," said father. "even some of the trees look like this when they first come through; you would not think a birch tree could look like a vegetable or a flower, would you? but it does, at first; it looks so much like these things that in the great nurseries, where trees are raised for forests and parks, the workmen have to be very carefully trained, or else they would pull up the trees when they are weeding. they have to be taught the difference between a birch tree and a weed." "how funny!" said margery dimpling. "yes, it sounds funny," said father; "but you see, the birch tree is dicotyledonous, and so are many weeds, and the dicotyledons look much alike at first." "i am glad to know that, father," said margery, soberly. "i believe maybe i shall learn a good deal from living in the country; don't you think so?" margery's father took her in his arms. "i hope so, dear," he said; "the country is a good place for little girls." and that was all that happened, that day. the talkative tortoise[ ] [ ] very freely adapted from one of the fables of bidpai. once upon a time, a tortoise lived in a pond with two ducks, who were her very good friends. she enjoyed the company of the ducks, because she could talk with them to her heart's content; the tortoise liked to talk. she always had something to say, and she liked to hear herself say it. after many years of this pleasant living, the pond became very low, in a dry season; and finally it dried up. the two ducks saw that they could no longer live there, so they decided to fly to another region, where there was more water. they went to the tortoise to bid her good-by. "oh, don't leave me behind!" begged the tortoise. "take me with you; i must die if i am left here." "but you cannot fly!" said the ducks. "how can we take you with us?" "take me with you! take me with you!" said the tortoise. the ducks felt so sorry for her that at last they thought of a way to take her. "we have thought of a way which will be possible," they said, "if only you can manage to keep still long enough. we will each take hold of one end of a stout stick, and do you take the middle in your mouth; then we will fly up in the air with you and carry you with us. but remember not to talk! if you open your mouth, you are lost." the tortoise said she would not say a word; she would not so much as move her mouth; and she was very grateful. so the ducks brought a strong little stick and took hold of the ends, while the tortoise bit firmly on the middle. then the two ducks rose slowly in the air and flew away with their burden. when they were above the treetops, the tortoise wanted to say, "how high we are!" but she remembered, and kept still. when they passed the church steeple she wanted to say, "what is that which shines?" but she remembered, and held her peace. then they came over the village square, and the people looked up and saw them. "look at the ducks carrying a tortoise!" they shouted; and every one ran to look. the tortoise wanted to say, "what business is it of yours?" but she didn't. then she heard the people shout, "isn't it strange! look at it! look!" the tortoise forgot everything except that she wanted to say, "hush, you foolish people!" she opened her mouth,-- and fell to the ground. and that was the end of the tortoise. it is a very good thing to be able to hold one's tongue! robert of sicily[ ] [ ] adapted from longfellow's poem. an old legend says that there was once a king named robert of sicily, who was brother to the great pope of rome and to the emperor of allemaine. he was a very selfish king, and very proud; he cared more for his pleasures than for the needs of his people, and his heart was so filled with his own greatness that he had no thought for god. one day, this proud king was sitting in his place at church, at vesper service; his courtiers were about him, in their bright garments, and he himself was dressed in his royal robes. the choir was chanting the latin service, and as the beautiful voices swelled louder, the king noticed one particular verse which seemed to be repeated again and again. he turned to a learned clerk at his side and asked what those words meant, for he knew no latin. "they mean, 'he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted them of low degree,'" answered the clerk. "it is well the words are in latin, then," said the king angrily, "for they are a lie. there is no power on earth or in heaven which can put me down from my seat!" and he sneered at the beautiful singing, as he leaned back in his place. presently the king fell asleep, while the service went on. he slept deeply and long. when he awoke the church was dark and still, and he was all alone. he, the king, had been left alone in the church, to awake in the dark! he was furious with rage and surprise, and, stumbling through the dim aisles, he reached the great doors and beat at them, madly, shouting for his servants. the old sexton heard some one shouting and pounding in the church, and thought it was some drunken vagabond who had stolen in during the service. he came to the door with his keys and called out, "who is there?" "open! open! it is i, the king!" came a hoarse, angry voice from within. "it is a crazy man," thought the sexton; and he was frightened. he opened the doors carefully and stood back, peering into the darkness. out past him rushed the figure of a man in tattered, scanty clothes, with unkempt hair and white, wild face. the sexton did not know that he had ever seen him before, but he looked long after him, wondering at his wildness and his haste. in his fluttering rags, without hat or cloak, not knowing what strange thing had happened to him, king robert rushed to his palace gates, pushed aside the startled servants, and hurried, blind with rage, up the wide stair and through the great corridors, toward the room where he could hear the sound of his courtiers' voices. men and women servants tried to stop the ragged man, who had somehow got into the palace, but robert did not even see them as he fled along. straight to the open doors of the big banquet hall he made his way, and into the midst of the grand feast there. the great hall was filled with lights and flowers; the tables were set with everything that is delicate and rich to eat; the courtiers, in their gay clothes, were laughing and talking; and at the head of the feast, on the king's own throne, sat a king. his face, his figure, his voice were exactly like robert of sicily; no human being could have told the difference; no one dreamed that he was not the king. he was dressed in the king's royal robes, he wore the royal crown, and on his hand was the king's own ring. robert of sicily, half naked, ragged, without a sign of his kingship on him, stood before the throne and stared with fury at this figure of himself. the king on the throne looked at him. "who art thou, and what dost thou here?" he asked. and though his voice was just like robert's own, it had something in it sweet and deep, like the sound of bells. "i am the king!" cried robert of sicily. "i am the king, and you are an impostor!" the courtiers started from their seats, and drew their swords. they would have killed the crazy man who insulted their king; but he raised his hand and stopped them, and with his eyes looking into robert's eyes he said, "not the king; you shall be the king's jester! you shall wear the cap and bells, and make laughter for my court. you shall be the servant of the servants, and your companion shall be the jester's ape." with shouts of laughter, the courtiers drove robert of sicily from the banquet hall; the waiting-men, with laughter, too, pushed him into the soldiers' hall; and there the pages brought the jester's wretched ape, and put a fool's cap and bells on robert's head. it was like a terrible dream; he could not believe it true, he could not understand what had happened to him. and when he woke next morning, he believed it was a dream, and that he was king again. but as he turned his head, he felt the coarse straw under his cheek instead of the soft pillow, and he saw that he was in the stable, with the shivering ape by his side. robert of sicily was a jester, and no one knew him for the king. three long years passed. sicily was happy and all things went well under the king, who was not robert. robert was still the jester, and his heart was harder and bitterer with every year. many times, during the three years, the king, who had his face and voice, had called him to himself, when none else could hear, and had asked him the one question, "who art thou?" and each time that he asked it his eyes looked into robert's eyes, to find his heart. but each time robert threw back his head and answered, proudly, "i am the king!" and the king's eyes grew sad and stern. at the end of three years, the pope bade the emperor of allemaine and the king of sicily, his brothers, to a great meeting in his city of rome. the king of sicily went, with all his soldiers and courtiers and servants,--a great procession of horsemen and footmen. never had been a gayer sight than the grand train, men in bright armor, riders in wonderful cloaks of velvet and silk, servants, carrying marvelous presents to the pope. and at the very end rode robert, the jester. his horse was a poor old thing, many-colored, and the ape rode with him. every one in the villages through which they passed ran after the jester, and pointed and laughed. the pope received his brothers and their trains in the square before saint peter's. with music and flags and flowers he made the king of sicily welcome, and greeted him as his brother. in the midst of it, the jester broke through the crowd and threw himself before the pope. "look at me!" he cried; "i am your brother, robert of sicily! this man is an impostor, who has stolen my throne. i am robert, the king!" the pope looked at the poor jester with pity, but the emperor of allemaine turned to the king of sicily, and said, "is it not rather dangerous, brother, to keep a madman as jester?" and again robert was pushed back among the serving-men. it was holy week, and the king and the emperor, with all their trains, went every day to the great services in the cathedral. something wonderful and holy seemed to make all these services more beautiful than ever before. all the people of rome felt it: it was as if the presence of an angel were there. men thought of god, and felt his blessing on them. but no one knew who it was that brought the beautiful feeling. and when easter day came, never had there been so lovely, so holy a day: in the great churches, filled with flowers, and sweet with incense, the kneeling people listened to the choirs singing, and it was like the voices of angels; their prayers were more earnest than ever before, their praise more glad; there was something heavenly in rome. robert of sicily went to the services with the rest, and sat in the humblest place with the servants. over and over again he heard the sweet voices of the choirs chant the latin words he had heard long ago: "he hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted them of low degree." and at last, as he listened, his heart was softened. he, too, felt the strange blessed presence of a heavenly power. he thought of god, and of his own wickedness; he remembered how happy he had been, and how little good he had done; he realized, that his power had not been from himself, at all. on easter night, as he crept to his bed of straw, he wept, not because he was so wretched, but because he had not been a better king when power was his. at last all the festivities were over, and the king of sicily went home to his own land again, with his people. robert the jester came home too. on the day of their home-coming, there was a special service in the royal church, and even after the service was over for the people, the monks held prayers of thanksgiving and praise. the sound of their singing came softly in at the palace windows. in the great banquet room, the king sat, wearing his royal robes and his crown, while many subjects came to greet him. at last, he sent them all away, saying he wanted to be alone; but he commanded the jester to stay. and when they were alone together the king looked into robert's eyes, as he had done before, and said, softly, "who art thou?" robert of sicily bowed his head. "thou knowest best," he said, "i only know that i have sinned." as he spoke, he heard the voices of the monks singing, "he hath put down the mighty from their seat,"--and his head sank lower. but suddenly the music seemed to change; a wonderful light shone all about. as robert raised his eyes, he saw the face of the king smiling at him with a radiance like nothing on earth, and as he sank to his knees before the glory of that smile, a voice sounded with the music, like a melody throbbing on a single string:-- "i am an angel, and thou art the king!" then robert of sicily was alone. his royal robes were upon him once more; he wore his crown and his royal ring. he was king. and when the courtiers came back they found their king kneeling by his throne, absorbed in silent prayer. the jealous courtiers[ ] [ ] adapted from the facts given in the german of h. a. guerber's marchen und erzahlungen (d. c. heath & co.). i wonder if you have ever heard the anecdote about the artist of dusseldorf and the jealous courtiers. this is it. it seems there was once a very famous artist who lived in the little town of dusseldorf. he did such fine work that the elector, prince johann wilhelm, ordered a portrait statue of himself, on horseback, to be done in bronze. the artist was overjoyed at the commission, and worked early and late at the statue. at last the work was done, and the artist had the great statue set up in the public square of dusseldorf, ready for the opening view. the elector came on the appointed day, and with him came his favorite courtiers from the castle. then the statue was unveiled. it was very beautiful,-- so beautiful that the prince exclaimed in surprise. he could not look enough, and presently he turned to the artist and shook hands with him, like an old friend. "herr grupello," he said, "you are a great artist, and this statue will make your fame even greater than it is; the portrait of me is perfect!" when the courtiers heard this, and saw the friendly hand-grasp, their jealousy of the artist was beyond bounds. their one thought was, how could they safely do something to humiliate him. they dared not pick flaws in the portrait statue, for the prince had declared it perfect. but at last one of them said, with an air of great frankness, "indeed, herr grupello, the portrait of his royal highness is perfect; but permit me to say that the statue of the horse is not quite so successful: the head is too large; it is out of proportion." "no," said another, "the horse is really not so successful; the turn of the neck, there, is awkward." "if you would change the right hind-foot, herr grupello," said a third, "it would be an improvement." still another found fault with the horse's tail. the artist listened, quietly. when they had all finished, he turned to the prince and said, "your courtiers, prince, find a good many flaws in the statue of the horse; will you permit me to keep it a few days more, to do what i can with it?" the elector assented, and the artist ordered a temporary screen built around the statue, so that his assistants could work undisturbed. for several days the sound of hammering came steadily from behind the enclosure. the courtiers, who took care to pass that way, often, were delighted. each one said to himself, "i must have been right, really; the artist himself sees that something was wrong; now i shall have credit for saving the prince's portrait by my artistic taste!" once more the artist summoned the prince and his courtiers, and once more the statue was unveiled. again the elector exclaimed at its beauty, and then he turned to his courtiers, one after another, to see what they had to say. "perfect!" said the first. "now that the horse's head is in proportion, there is not a flaw." "the change in the neck was just what was needed," said the second; "it is very graceful now." "the rear right foot is as it should be, now," said a third, "and it adds so much to the beauty of the whole!" the fourth said that he considered the tail greatly improved. "my courtiers are much pleased now," said the prince to herr grupello; "they think the statue much improved by the changes you have made." herr grupello smiled a little. "i am glad they are pleased," he said, "but the fact is, i have changed nothing!" "what do you mean?" said the prince in surprise. "have we not heard the sound of hammering every day? what were you hammering at then?" "i was hammering at the reputation of your courtiers, who found fault simply because they were jealous," said the artist. "and i rather think that their reputation is pretty well hammered to pieces!" it was, indeed. the elector laughed heartily, but the courtiers slunk away, one after another, without a word. prince cherry[ ] [ ] a shortened version of the familiar tale. there was once an old king, so wise and kind and true that the most powerful good fairy of his land visited him and asked him to name the dearest wish of his heart, that she might grant it. "surely you know it," said the good king; "it is for my only son, prince cherry; do for him whatever you would have done for me." "gladly," said the great fairy; "choose what i shall give him. i can make him the richest, the most beautiful, or the most powerful prince in the world; choose." "none of those things are what i want," said the king. "i want only that he shall be good. of what use will it be to him to be beautiful, rich, or powerful, if he grows into a bad man? make him the best prince in the world, i beg you!" "alas, i cannot make him good," said the fairy; "he must do that for himself. i can give him good advice, reprove him when he does wrong, and punish him if he will not punish himself; i can and will be his best friend, but i cannot make him good unless he wills it." the king was sad to hear this, but he rejoiced in the friendship of the fairy for his son. and when he died, soon after, he was happy to know that he left prince cherry in her hands. prince cherry grieved for his father and often lay awake at night, thinking of him. one night, when he was all alone in his room, a soft and lovely light suddenly shone before him, and a beautiful vision stood at his side. it was the good fairy. she was clad in robes of dazzling white, and on her shining hair she wore a wreath of white roses. "i am the fairy candide," she said to the prince. "i promised your father that i would be your best friend, and as long as you live i shall watch over your happiness. i have brought you a gift; it is not wonderful to look at, but it has a wonderful power for your welfare; wear it, and let it help you." as she spoke, she placed a small gold ring on the prince's little finger. "this ring," she said, "will help you to be good; when you do evil, it will prick you, to remind you. if you do not heed its warnings a worse thing will happen to you, for i shall become your enemy." then she vanished. prince cherry wore his ring, and said nothing to any one of the fairy's gift. it did not prick him for a long time, because he was good and merry and happy. but prince cherry had been rather spoiled by his nurse when he was a child; she had always said to him that when he should become king he could do exactly as he pleased. now, after a while, he began to find out that this was not true, and it made him angry. the first time that he noticed that even a king could not always have his own way was on a day when he went hunting. it happened that he got no game. this put him in such a bad temper that he grumbled and scolded all the way home. the little gold ring began to feel tight and uncomfortable. when he reached the palace his pet dog ran to meet him. "go away!" said the prince, crossly. but the little dog was so used to being petted that he only jumped up on his master, and tried to kiss his hand. the prince turned and kicked the little creature. at the instant, he felt a sharp prick in his little finger, like a pin prick. "what nonsense!" said the prince to himself. "am i not king of the whole land? may i not kick my own dog, if i choose? what evil is there in that?" a silver voice spoke in his ear: "the king of the land has a right to do good, but not evil; you have been guilty of bad temper and of cruelty to-day; see that you do better to-morrow." the prince turned sharply, but no one was to be seen; yet he recognized the voice as that of fairy candide. he followed her advice for a little, but presently he forgot, and the ring pricked him so sharply that his finger had a drop of blood on it. this happened again and again, for the prince grew more self-willed and headstrong every day; he had some bad friends, too, who urged him on, in the hope that he would ruin himself and give them a chance to seize the throne. he treated his people carelessly and his servants cruelly, and everything he wanted he felt that he must have. the ring annoyed him terribly; it was embarrassing for a king to have a drop of blood on his finger all the time! at last he took the ring off and put it out of sight. then he thought he should be perfectly happy, having his own way; but instead, he grew more unhappy as he grew less good. whenever he was crossed, or could not have his own way instantly, he flew into a passion. finally, he wanted something that he really could not have. this time it was a most beautiful young girl, named zelia; the prince saw her, and loved her so much that he wanted at once to make her his queen. to his great astonishment, she refused. "am i not pleasing to you?" asked the prince in surprise. "you are very handsome, very charming, prince," said zelia; "but you are not like the good king, your father; i fear you would make me very miserable if i were your queen." in a great rage, prince cherry ordered the young girl put in prison; and the key of her dungeon he kept. he told one of his friends, a wicked man who flattered him for his own purposes, about the thing, and asked his advice. "are you not king?" said the bad friend, "may you not do as you will? keep the girl in a dungeon till she does as you command, and if she will not, sell her as a slave." "but would it not be a disgrace for me to harm an innocent creature?" said the prince. "it would be a disgrace to you to have it said that one of your subjects dared disobey you!" said the courtier. he had cleverly touched the prince's worst trait, his pride. prince cherry went at once to zelia's dungeon, prepared to do this cruel thing. zelia was gone. no one had the key save the prince himself; yet she was gone. the only person who could have dared to help her, thought the prince, was his old tutor, suliman, the only man left who ever rebuked him for anything. in fury, he ordered suliman to be put in fetters and brought before him. as his servants left him, to carry out the wicked order, there was a clash, as of thunder, in the room, and then a blinding light. fairy candide stood before him. her beautiful face was stern, and her silver voice rang like a trumpet, as she said, "wicked and selfish prince, you have become baser than the beasts you hunt; you are furious as a lion, revengeful as a serpent, greedy as a wolf, and brutal as a bull; take, therefore, the shape of those beasts whom you resemble!" with horror, the prince felt himself being transformed into a monster. he tried to rush upon the fairy and kill her, but she had vanished with her words. as he stood, her voice came from the air, saying, sadly, "learn to conquer your pride by being in submission to your own subjects." at the same moment, prince cherry felt himself being transported to a distant forest, where he was set down by a clear stream. in the water he saw his own terrible image; he had the head of a lion, with bull's horns, the feet of a wolf, and a tail like a serpent. and as he gazed in horror, the fairy's voice whispered, "your soul has become more ugly than your shape is; you yourself have deformed it." the poor beast rushed away from the sound of her words, but in a moment he stumbled into a trap, set by bear-catchers. when the trappers found him they were delighted to have caught a curiosity, and they immediately dragged him to the palace courtyard. there he heard the whole court buzzing with gossip. prince cherry had been struck by lightning and killed, was the news, and the five favorite courtiers had struggled to make themselves rulers, but the people had refused them, and offered the crown to suliman, the good old tutor. even as he heard this, the prince saw suliman on the steps of the palace, speaking to the people. "i will take the crown to keep in trust," he said. "perhaps the prince is not dead." "he was a bad king; we do not want him back," said the people. "i know his heart," said suliman, "it is not all bad; it is tainted, but not corrupt; perhaps he will repent and come back to us a good king." when the beast heard this, it touched him so much that he stopped tearing at his chains, and became gentle. he let his keepers lead him away to the royal menagerie without hurting them. life was very terrible to the prince, now, but he began to see that he had brought all his sorrow on himself, and he tried to bear it patiently. the worst to bear was the cruelty of the keeper. at last, one night, this keeper was in great danger; a tiger got loose, and attacked him. "good enough! let him die!" thought prince cherry. but when he saw how helpless the keeper was, he repented, and sprang to help. he killed the tiger and saved the keeper's life. as he crouched at the keeper's feet, a voice said, "good actions never go unrewarded!" and the terrible monster was changed into a pretty little white dog. the keeper carried the beautiful little dog to the court and told the story, and from then on, cherry was carefully treated, and had the best of everything. but in order to keep the little dog from growing, the queen ordered that he should be fed very little, and that was pretty hard for the poor prince. he was often half starved, although so much petted. one day he had carried his crust of bread to a retired spot in the palace woods, where he loved to be, when he saw a poor old woman hunting for roots, and seeming almost starved. "poor thing," he thought, "she is even hungrier than i;" and he ran up and dropped the crust at her feet. the woman ate it, and seemed greatly refreshed. cherry was glad of that, and he was running happily back to his kennel when he heard cries of distress, and suddenly he saw some rough men dragging along a young girl, who was weeping and crying for help. what was his horror to see that the young girl was zelia! oh, how he wished he were the monster once more, so that he could kill the men and rescue her! but he could do nothing except bark, and bite at the heels of the wicked men. that could not stop them; they drove him off, with blows, and carried zelia into a palace in the wood. poor cherry crouched by the steps, and watched. his heart was full of pity and rage. but suddenly he thought, "i was as bad as these men; i myself put zelia in prison, and would have treated her worse still, if i had not been prevented." the thought made him so sorry and ashamed that he repented bitterly the evil he had done. presently a window opened, and cherry saw zelia lean out and throw down a piece of meat. he seized it and was just going to devour it, when the old woman to whom he had given his crust snatched it away and took him in her arms. "no, you shall not eat it, you poor little thing," she said, "for every bit of food in that house is poisoned." at the same moment, a voice said, "good actions never go unrewarded!" and instantly prince cherry was transformed into a little white dove. with great joy, he flew to the open palace window to seek out his zelia, to try to help her. but though he hunted in every room, no zelia was to be found. he had to fly away, without seeing her. he wanted more than anything else to find her, and stay near her, so he flew out into the world, to seek her. he sought her in many lands, until one day, in a far eastern country, he found her sitting in a tent, by the side of an old, white-haired hermit. cherry was wild with delight. he flew to her shoulder, caressed her hair with his beak, and cooed in her ear. "you dear, lovely little thing!" said zelia. "will you stay with me? if you will, i will love you always." "ah, zelia, see what you have done!" laughed the hermit. at that instant, the white dove vanished, and prince cherry stood there, as handsome and charming as ever, and with a look of kindness and modesty in his eyes which had never been there before. at the same time, the hermit stood up, his flowing hair changed to shining gold, and his face became a lovely woman's face; it was the fairy candide. "zelia has broken your spell," she said to the prince, "as i meant she should, when you were worthy of her love." zelia and prince cherry fell at the fairy's feet. but with a beautiful smile she bade them come to their kingdom. in a trice, they were transported to the prince's palace, where king suliman greeted them with tears of joy. he gave back the throne, with all his heart, and king cherry ruled again, with zelia for his queen. he wore the little gold ring all the rest of his life, but never once did it have to prick him hard enough to make his finger bleed. the gold in the orchard[ ] [ ] an italian folk tale. there was once a farmer who had a fine olive orchard. he was very industrious, and the farm always prospered under his care. but he knew that his three sons despised the farm work, and were eager to make wealth fast, through adventure. when the farmer was old, and felt that his time had come to die, he called the three sons to him and said, "my sons, there is a pot of gold hidden in the olive orchard. dig for it, if you wish it." the sons tried to get him to tell them in what part of the orchard the gold was hidden; but he would tell them nothing more. after the farmer was dead, the sons went to work to find the pot of gold; since they did not know where the hiding-place was, they agreed to begin in a line, at one end of the orchard, and to dig until one of them should find the money. they dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, round the tree-roots and between them. but no pot of gold was to be found. it seemed as if some one must have stolen it, or as if the farmer had been wandering in his wits. the three sons were bitterly disappointed to have all their work for nothing. the next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given; the fine cultivating they had had from the digging brought so much fruit, and of so fine a quality, that when it was sold it gave the sons a whole pot of gold! and when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meant when he said, "there is gold hidden in the orchard; dig for it." margaret of new orleans if you ever go to the beautiful city of new orleans, somebody will be sure to take you down into the old business part of the city, where there are banks and shops and hotels, and show you a statue which stands in a little square there. it is the statue of a woman, sitting in a low chair, with her arms around a child, who leans against her. the woman is not at all pretty: she wears thick, common shoes, a plain dress, with a little shawl, and a sun-bonnet; she is stout and short, and her face is a square-chinned irish face; but her eyes look at you like your mother's. now there is something very surprising about this statue: it was the first one that was ever made in this country in honor of a woman. even in old europe there are not many monuments to women, and most of the few are to great queens or princesses, very beautiful and very richly dressed. you see, this statue in new orleans is not quite like anything else. it is the statue of a woman named margaret. her whole name was margaret haughery, but no one in new orleans remembers her by it, any more than you think of your dearest sister by her full name; she is just margaret. this is her story, and it tells why people made a monument for her. when margaret was a tiny baby, her father and mother died, and she was adopted by two young people as poor and as kind as her own parents. she lived with them until she grew up. then she married, and had a little baby of her own. but very soon her husband died, and then the baby died, too, and margaret was all alone in the world. she was poor, but she was strong, and knew how to work. all day, from morning until evening, she ironed clothes in a laundry. and every day, as she worked by the window, she saw the little motherless children from the orphan asylum, near by, working and playing about. after a while, there came a great sickness upon the city, and so many mothers and fathers died that there were more orphans than the asylum could possibly take care of. they needed a good friend, now. you would hardly think, would you, that a poor woman who worked in a laundry could be much of a friend to them? but margaret was. she went straight to the kind sisters who had the asylum and told them she was going to give them part of her wages and was going to work for them, besides. pretty soon she had worked so hard that she had some money saved from her wages. with this, she bought two cows and a little delivery cart. then she carried her milk to her customers in the little cart every morning; and as she went, she begged the left-over food from the hotels and rich houses, and brought it back in the cart to the hungry children in the asylum. in the very hardest times that was often all the food the children had. a part of the money margaret earned went every week to the asylum, and after a few years that was made very much larger and better. and margaret was so careful and so good at business that, in spite of her giving, she bought more cows and earned more money. with this, she built a home for orphan babies; she called it her baby house. after a time, margaret had a chance to get a bakery, and then she became a bread-woman instead of a milk-woman. she carried the bread just as she had carried the milk, in her cart. and still she kept giving money to the asylum. then the great war came, our civil war. in all the trouble and sickness and fear of that time, margaret drove her cart of bread; and somehow she had always enough to give the starving soldiers, and for her babies, besides what she sold. and despite all this, she earned enough so that when the war was over she built a big steam factory for her bread. by this time everybody in the city knew her. the children all over the city loved her; the business men were proud of her; the poor people all came to her for advice. she used to sit at the open door of her office, in a calico gown and a little shawl, and give a good word to everybody, rich or poor. then, by and by, one day, margaret died. and when it was time to read her will, the people found that, with all her giving, she had still saved a great deal of money, and that she had left every cent of it to the different orphan asylums of the city,--each one of them was given something. whether they were for white children or black, for jews, catholics, or protestants, made no difference; for margaret always said, "they are all orphans alike." and just think, dears, that splendid, wise will was signed with a cross instead of a name, for margaret had never learned to read or write! when the people of new orleans knew that margaret was dead, they said, "she was a mother to the motherless; she was a friend to those who had no friends; she had wisdom greater than schools can teach; we will not let her memory go from us." so they made a statue of her, just as she used to look, sitting in her own office door, or driving in her own little cart. and there it stands to-day, in memory of the great love and the great power of plain margaret haughery, of new orleans. the dagda's harp[ ] [ ] the facts from which this story was constructed are found in the legend as given in ireland's story, johnston and spencer (houghton, mifflin, & co.). you know, dears, in the old countries there are many fine stories about things which happened so very long ago that nobody knows exactly how much of them is true. ireland is like that. it is so old that even as long ago as four thousand years it had people who dug in the mines, and knew how to weave cloth and to make beautiful ornaments out of gold, and who could fight and make laws; but we do not know just where they came from, nor exactly how they lived. these people left us some splendid stories about their kings, their fights, and their beautiful women; but it all happened such a long time ago that the stories are mixtures of things that really happened and what people said about them, and we don't know just which is which. the stories are called legends. one of the prettiest legends is the story i am going to tell you about the dagda's harp. it is said that there were two quite different kinds of people in ireland: one set of people with long dark hair and dark eyes, called fomorians--they carried long slender spears made of golden bronze when they fought--and another race of people who were golden-haired and blue-eyed, and who carried short, blunt, heavy spears of dull metal. the golden-haired people had a great chieftain who was also a kind of high priest, who was called the dagda. and this dagda had a wonderful magic harp. the harp was beautiful to look upon, mighty in size, made of rare wood, and ornamented with gold and jewels; and it had wonderful music in its strings, which only the dagda could call out. when the men were going out to battle, the dagda would set up his magic harp and sweep his hand across the strings, and a war song would ring out which would make every warrior buckle on his armor, brace his knees, and shout, "forth to the fight!" then, when the men came back from the battle, weary and wounded, the dagda would take his harp and strike a few chords, and as the magic music stole out upon the air, every man forgot his weariness and the smart of his wounds, and thought of the honor he had won, and of the comrade who had died beside him, and of the safety of his wife and children. then the song would swell out louder, and every warrior would remember only the glory he had helped win for the king; and each man would rise at the great tables his cup in his hand, and shout "long live the king!" there came a time when the fomorians and the golden-haired men were at war; and in the midst of a great battle, while the dagda's hall was not so well guarded as usual, some of the chieftains of the fomorians stole the great harp from the wall, where it hung, and fled away with it. their wives and children and some few of their soldiers went with them, and they fled fast and far through the night, until they were a long way from the battlefield. then they thought they were safe, and they turned aside into a vacant castle, by the road, and sat down to a banquet, hanging the stolen harp on the wall. the dagda, with two or three of his warriors, had followed hard on their track. and while they were in the midst of their banqueting, the door was suddenly burst open, and the dagda stood there, with his men. some of the fomorians sprang to their feet, but before any of them could grasp a weapon, the dagda called out to his harp on the wall, "come to me, o my harp!" the great harp recognized its master's voice, and leaped from the wall. whirling through the hall, sweeping aside and killing the men who got in its way, it sprang to its master's hand. and the dagda took his harp and swept his hand across the strings in three great, solemn chords. the harp answered with the magic music of tears. as the wailing harmony smote upon the air, the women of the fomorians bowed their heads and wept bitterly, the strong men turned their faces aside, and the little children sobbed. again the dagda touched the strings, and this time the magic music of mirth leaped from the harp. and when they heard that music of mirth, the young warriors of the fomorians began to laugh; they laughed till the cups fell from their grasp, and the spears dropped from their hands, while the wine flowed from the broken bowls; they laughed until their limbs were helpless with excess of glee. once more the dagda touched his harp, but very, very softly. and now a music stole forth as soft as dreams, and as sweet as joy: it was the magic music of sleep. when they heard that, gently, gently, the fomorian women bowed their heads in slumber; the little children crept to their mothers' laps; the old men nodded; and the young warriors drooped in their seats and closed their eyes: one after another all the fomorians sank into sleep. when they were all deep in slumber, the dagda took his magic harp, and he and his golden-haired warriors stole softly away, and came in safety to their own homes again. the tailor and the three beasts[ ] [ ] from beside the fire, douglas hyde (david nutt, london). there was once a tailor in galway, and he started out on a journey to go to the king's court at dublin. he had not gone far till he met a white horse, and he saluted him. "god save you," said the tailor. "god save you," said the horse. "where are you going?" "i am going to dublin," said the tailor, "to build a court for the king and to get a lady for a wife, if i am able to do it." for, it seems the king had promised his daughter and a great lot of money to any one who should be able to build up his court. the trouble was, that three giants lived in the wood near the court, and every night they came out of the wood and threw down all that was built by day. so nobody could get the court built. "would you make me a hole," said the old white garraun, "where i could go a-hiding whenever the people are for bringing me to the mill or the kiln, so that they won't see me; for they have me perished doing work for them." "i'll do that, indeed," said the tailor, "and welcome." he brought his spade and shovel, and he made a hole, and he said to the old white horse to go down into it till he would see if it would fit him. the white horse went down into the hole, but when he tried to come up again, he was not able. "make a place for me now," said the white horse, "by which i'll come up out of the hole here, whenever i'll be hungry." "i will not," said the tailor; "remain where you are until i come back, and i'll lift you up." the tailor went forward next day, and the fox met him. "god save you," said the fox. "god save you," said the tailor. "where are you going," said the fox. "i'm going to dublin, to try will i be able to make a court for the king." "would you make a place for me where i'd go hiding?" said the fox. "the rest of the foxes do be beating me, and they don't allow me to eat anything with them." "i'll do that for you," said the tailor. he took his axe and his saw, and he made a thing like a crate, and he told the fox to get into it till he would see whether it would fit him. the fox went into it, and when the tailor got him down, he shut him in. when the fox was satisfied at last that he had a nice place of it within, he asked the tailor to let him out, and the tailor answered that he would not. "wait there until i come back again," says he. the tailor went forward the next day, and he had not walked very far until he met a modder-alla; and the lion greeted him. "god save you," said the lion. "god save you," said the tailor. "where are you going?" said the lion. "i'm going to dublin till i make a court for the king if i'm able to make it," said the tailor. "if you were to make a plough for me," said the lion, "i and the other lions could be ploughing and harrowing until we'd have a bit to eat in the harvest." "i'll do that for you," said the tailor. he brought his axe and his saw, and he made a plough. when the plough was made he put a hole in the beam of it, and he said to the lion to go in under the plough till he'd see was he any good of a ploughman. he placed the lion's tail in the hole he had made for it, and then clapped in a peg, and the lion was not able to draw out his tail again. "loose me out now," said the lion, "and we'll fix ourselves and go ploughing." the tailor said he would not loose him out until he came back himself. he left him there then, and he came to dublin. when he came to dublin, he got workmen and began to build the court. at the end of the day he had the workmen put a great stone on top of the work. when the great stone was raised up, the tailor put some sort of contrivance under it, that he might be able to throw it down as soon as the giant would come as far as it. the workpeople went home then, and the tailor went in hiding behind the big stone. when the darkness of the night was come, he saw the three giants arriving, and they began throwing down the court until they came as far as the place where the tailor was in hiding up above, and a man of them struck a blow of his sledge on the place where he was. the tailor threw down the stone, and it fell on him and killed him. they went home then and left all of the court that was remaining without throwing it down, since a man of themselves was dead. the tradespeople came again the next day, and they were working until night, and as they were going home the tailor told them to put up the big stone on the top of the work, as it had been the night before. they did that for him, went home, and the tailor went in hiding the same as he did the evening before. when the people had all gone to rest, the two giants came, and they were throwing down all that was before them, and as soon as they began, they put two shouts out of them. the tailor was going on manoeuvring until he threw down the great stone, and it fell upon the skull of the giant that was under him, and it killed him. there was only the one giant left in it then, and he never came again until the court was finished. then when the work was over, the tailor went to the king and told him to give him his wife and his money, as he had the court finished; and the king said he would not give him any wife until he would kill the other giant, for he said that it was not by his strength he killed the two giants before that, and that he would give him nothing now until he killed the other one for him. then the tailor said that he would kill the other giant for him, and welcome; that there was no delay at all about that. the tailor went then till he came to the place where the other giant was, and asked did he want a servant-boy. the giant said he did want one, if he could get one who would do everything that he would do himself. "anything that you will do, i will do it," said the tailor. they went to their dinner then, and when they had it eaten, the giant asked the tailor "would it come with him to swallow as much broth as himself, up out of its boiling." the tailor said, "it will come with me to do that, but that you must give me an hour before we begin on it." the tailor went out then, and he got a sheep-skin, and he sewed it up till he made a bag of it, and he slipped it down under his coat. he came in then and said to the giant to drink a gallon of the broth himself first. the giant drank that up out of its boiling. "i'll do that," said the tailor. he was going on until he had it all poured into the skin, and the giant thought he had it drunk. the giant drank another gallon then, and the tailor let another gallon down into the skin, but the giant thought he was drinking it. "i'll do a thing now that it won't come with you to do," said the tailor. "you will not," said the giant. "what is it you would do?" "make a hole and let out the broth again," said the tailor. "do it yourself first," said the giant. the tailor gave a prod of the knife, and he let the broth out of the skin. "do that you," said he. "i will," said the giant, giving such a prod of the knife into his own stomach that he killed himself. that is the way the tailor killed the third giant. he went to the king then, and desired him to send him out his wife and his money, for that he would throw down the court again unless he should get the wife. they were afraid then that he would throw down the court, and they sent the wife to him. when the tailor was a day gone, himself and his wife, they repented and followed him to take his wife off him again. the people who were after him were following him till they came to the place where the lion was, and the lion said to them: "the tailor and his wife were here yesterday. i saw them going by, and if ye loose me now, i am swifter than ye, and i will follow them till i overtake them." when they heard that, they loosed out the lion. the lion and the people of dublin went on, and they were pursuing him, until they came to the place where the fox was, and the fox greeted them, and said: "the tailor and his wife were here this morning, and if ye will loose me out, i am swifter than ye, and i will follow them, and overtake them." they loosed out the fox then. the lion and the fox and the army of dublin went on then, trying would they catch the tailor, and they were going till they came to the place where the old white garraun was, and the old white garraun said to them that the tailor and his wife were there in the morning, and "loose me out," said he; "i am swifter than ye, and i'll overtake them." they loosed out the old white garraun then, and the old white garraun, the fox, the lion, and the army of dublin pursued the tailor and his wife together, and it was not long till they came up with him, and saw himself and the wife out before them. when the tailor saw them coming, he got out of the coach with his wife, and he sat down on the ground. when the old white garraun saw the tailor sitting down on the ground, he said, "that's the position he had when he made the hole for me, that i couldn't come up out of, when i went down into it. i'll go no nearer to him." "no!" said the fox, "but that's the way he was when he was making the thing for me, and i'll go no nearer to him." "no!" says the lion, "but that's the very way he had, when he was making the plough that i was caught in. i'll go no nearer to him." they all went from him then and returned. the tailor and his wife came home to galway. the castle of fortune[ ] [ ] adapted from the german of der faule und der fleissige by robert reinick. one lovely summer morning, just as the sun rose, two travelers started on a journey. they were both strong young men, but one was a lazy fellow and the other was a worker. as the first sunbeams came over the hills, they shone on a great castle standing on the heights, as far away as the eye could see. it was a wonderful and beautiful castle, all glistening towers that gleamed like marble, and glancing windows that shone like crystal. the two young men looked at it eagerly, and longed to go nearer. suddenly, out of the distance, something like a great butterfly, of white and gold, swept toward them. and when it came nearer, they saw that it was a most beautiful lady, robed in floating garments as fine as cobwebs and wearing on her head a crown so bright that no one could tell whether it was of diamonds or of dew. she stood, light as air, on a great, shining, golden ball, which rolled along with her, swifter than the wind. as she passed the travelers, she turned her face to them and smiled. "follow me!" she said. the lazy man sat down in the grass with a discontented sigh. "she has an easy time of it!" he said. but the industrious man ran after the lovely lady and caught the hem of her floating robe in his grasp. "who are you, and whither are you going?" he asked. "i am the fairy of fortune," the beautiful lady said, "and that is my castle. you may reach it to-day, if you will; there is time, if you waste none. if you reach it before the last stroke of midnight, i will receive you there, and will be your friend. but if you come one second after midnight, it will be too late." when she had said this, her robe slipped from the traveler's hand and she was gone. the industrious man hurried back to his friend, and told him what the fairy had said. "the idea!" said the lazy man, and he laughed; "of course, if a body had a horse there would be some chance, but walk all that way? no, thank you!" "then good-by," said his friend, "i am off." and he set out, down the road toward the shining castle, with a good steady stride, his eyes straight ahead. the lazy man lay down in the soft grass, and looked rather wistfully at the faraway towers. "if i only had a good horse!" he sighed. just at that moment he felt something warm nosing about at his shoulder, and heard a little whinny. he turned round, and there stood a little horse! it was a dainty creature, gentle-looking, and finely built, and it was saddled and bridled. "hola!" said the lazy man. "luck often comes when one isn't looking for it!" and in an instant he had leaped on the horse, and headed him for the castle of fortune. the little horse started at a fine pace, and in a very few minutes they overtook the other traveler, plodding along on foot. "how do you like shank's mare?" laughed the lazy man, as he passed his friend. the industrious man only nodded, and kept on with his steady stride, eyes straight ahead. the horse kept his good pace, and by noon the towers of the castle stood out against the sky, much nearer and more beautiful. exactly at noon, the horse turned aside from the road, into a shady grove on a hill, and stopped. "wise beast," said his rider; "'haste makes waste,' and all things are better in moderation. i'll follow your example, and eat and rest a bit." he dismounted and sat down in the cool moss, with his back against a tree. he had a lunch in his traveler's pouch, and he ate it comfortably. then he felt drowsy from the heat and the early ride, so he pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled himself for a nap. "it will go all the better for a little rest," he said. that was a sleep! he slept like the seven sleepers, and he dreamed the most beautiful things you could imagine. at last, he dreamed that he had entered the castle of fortune and was being received with great festivities. everything he wanted was brought to him, and music played while fireworks were set off in his honor. the music was so loud that he awoke. he sat up, rubbing his eyes, and behold, the fireworks were the very last rays of the setting sun, and the music was the voice of the other traveler, passing the grove on foot! "time to be off," said the lazy man, and looked about him for the pretty horse. no horse was to be found. the only living thing near was an old, bony, gray donkey. the man called, and whistled, and looked, but no little horse appeared. after a long while he gave it up, and, since there was nothing better to do, he mounted the old gray donkey and set out again. the donkey was slow, and he was hard to ride, but he was better than nothing; and gradually the lazy man saw the towers of the castle draw nearer. now it began to grow dark; in the castle windows the lights began to show. then came trouble! slower, and slower, went the gray donkey; slower, and slower, till, in the very middle of a pitch-black wood, he stopped and stood still. not a step would he budge for all the coaxing and scolding and beating his rider could give. at last the rider kicked him, as well as beat him, and at that the donkey felt that he had had enough. up went his hind heels, and down went his head, and over it went the lazy man on to the stony ground. there he lay groaning for many minutes, for it was not a soft place, i can assure you. how he wished he were in a soft, warm bed, with his aching bones comfortable in blankets! the very thought of it made him remember the castle of fortune, for he knew there must be fine beds there. to get to those beds he was even willing to bestir his bruised limbs, so he sat up and felt about him for the donkey. no donkey was to be found. the lazy man crept round and round the spot where he had fallen, scratched his hands on the stumps, tore his face in the briers, and bumped his knees on the stones. but no donkey was there. he would have lain down to sleep again, but he could hear now the howls of hungry wolves in the woods; that did not sound pleasant. finally, his hand struck against something that felt like a saddle. he grasped it, thankfully, and started to mount his donkey. the beast he took hold of seemed very small, and, as he mounted, he felt that its sides were moist and slimy. it gave him a shudder, and he hesitated; but at that moment he heard a distant clock strike. it was striking eleven! there was still time to reach the castle of fortune, but no more than enough; so he mounted his new steed and rode on once more. the animal was easier to sit on than the donkey, and the saddle seemed remarkably high behind; it was good to lean against. but even the donkey was not so slow as this; the new steed was slower than he. after a while, however, he pushed his way out of the woods into the open, and there stood the castle, only a little way ahead! all its windows were ablaze with lights. a ray from them fell on the lazy man's beast, and he saw what he was riding: it was a gigantic snail! a snail as large as a calf! a cold shudder ran over the lazy man's body, and he would have got off his horrid animal then and there, but just then the clock struck once more. it was the first of the long, slow strokes that mark midnight! the man grew frantic when he heard it. he drove his heels into the snail's sides, to make him hurry. instantly, the snail drew in his head, curled up in his shell, and left the lazy man sitting in a heap on the ground! the clock struck twice. if the man had run for it, he could still have reached the castle, but, instead, he sat still and shouted for a horse. "a beast, a beast!" he wailed, "any kind of a beast that will take me to the castle!" the clock struck three times. and as it struck the third note, something came rustling and rattling out of the darkness, something that sounded like a horse with harness. the lazy man jumped on its back, a very queer, low back. as he mounted, he saw the doors of the castle open, and saw his friend standing on the threshold, waving his cap and beckoning to him. the clock struck four times, and the new steed began to stir; as it struck five, he moved a pace forward; as it struck six, he stopped; as it struck seven, he turned himself about; as it struck eight, he began to move backward, away from the castle! the lazy man shouted, and beat him, but the beast went slowly backward. and the clock struck nine. the man tried to slide off, then, but from all sides of his strange animal great arms came reaching up and held him fast. and in the next ray of moonlight that broke the dark clouds, he saw that he was mounted on a monster crab! one by one, the lights went out, in the castle windows. the clock struck ten. backward went the crab. eleven! still the crab went backward. the clock struck twelve! then the great doors shut with a clang, and the castle of fortune was closed forever to the lazy man. what became of him and his crab no one knows to this day, and no one cares. but the industrious man was received by the fairy of fortune, and made happy in the castle as long as he wanted to stay. and ever afterward she was his friend, helping him not only to happiness for himself, but also showing him how to help others, wherever he went. david and goliath[ ] [ ] from the text of the king james version of the old testament, with introduction and slight interpolations, changes of order, and omissions. a long time ago, there was a boy named david, who lived in a country far east of this. he was good to look upon, for he had fair hair and a ruddy skin; and he was very strong and brave and modest. he was shepherd-boy for his father, and all day--often all night--he was out in the fields, far from home, watching over the sheep. he had to guard them from wild animals, and lead them to the right pastures, and care for them. by and by, war broke out between the people of david's country and a people that lived near at hand; these men were called philistines, and the people of david's country were named israel. all the strong men of israel went up to the battle, to fight for their king. david's three older brothers went, but he was only a boy, so he was left behind to care for the sheep. after the brothers had been gone some time, david's father longed very much to hear from them, and to know if they were safe; so he sent for david, from the fields, and said to him, "take now for thy brothers an ephah of this parched corn, and these ten loaves, and run to the camp, where thy brothers are; and carry these ten cheeses to the captain of their thousand, and see how thy brothers fare, and bring me word again." (an ephah is about three pecks.) david rose early in the morning, and left the sheep with a keeper, and took the corn and the loaves and the cheeses, as his father had commanded him, and went to the camp of israel. the camp was on a mountain; israel stood on a mountain on the one side, and the philistines stood on a mountain on the other side; and there was a valley between them. david came to the place where the israelites were, just as the host was going forth to the fight, shouting for the battle. so he left his gifts in the hands of the keeper of the baggage, and ran into the army, amongst the soldiers, to find his brothers. when he found them, he saluted them and began to talk with them. but while he was asking them the questions his father had commanded, there arose a great shouting and tumult among the israelites, and men came running back from the front line of battle; everything became confusion. david looked to see what the trouble was, and he saw a strange sight: on the hillside of the philistines, a warrior was striding forward, calling out something in a taunting voice; he was a gigantic man, the largest david had ever seen, and he was all dressed in armor, that shone in the sun: he had a helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders; his spear was so tremendous that the staff of it was like a weaver's beam, and his shield so great that a man went before him, to carry it. "who is that?" asked david. "it is goliath, of gath, champion of the philistines," said the soldiers about. "every day, for forty days, he has come forth, so, and challenged us to send a man against him, in single combat; and since no one dares to go out against him alone, the armies cannot fight." (that was one of the laws of warfare in those times.) "what!" said david, "does none dare go out against him?" as he spoke, the giant stood still, on the hillside opposite the israelitish host, and shouted his challenge, scornfully. he said, "why are ye come out to set your battle in array? am i not a philistine, and ye servants of saul? choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. if he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants; but if i prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants, and serve us. i defy the armies of israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together!" when king saul heard these words, he was dismayed, and all the men of israel, when they saw the man, fled from him and were sore afraid. david heard them talking among themselves, whispering and murmuring. they were saying, "have ye seen this man that is come up? surely if any one killeth him that man will the king make rich; perhaps he will give him his daughter in marriage, and make his family free in israel!" david heard this, and he asked the men if it were so. it was surely so, they said. "but," said david, "who is this philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living god?" and he was stirred with anger. very soon, some of the officers told the king about the youth who was asking so many questions, and who said that a mere philistine should not be let defy the armies of the living god. immediately saul sent for him. when david came before saul, he said to the king, "let no man's heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this philistine." but saul looked at david, and said, "thou art not able to go against this philistine, to fight with him, for thou art but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth." then david said to saul, "once i was keeping my father's sheep, and there came a lion and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock; and i went out after the lion, and struck him, and delivered the lamb out of his mouth, and when he arose against me, i caught him by the beard, and struck him, and slew him! thy servant slew both the lion and the bear; and this philistine shall be as one of them, for he hath defied the armies of the living god. the lord, who delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this philistine." "go," said saul, "and the lord be with thee!" and he armed david with his own armor,--he put a helmet of brass upon his head, and armed him with a coat of mail. but when david girded his sword upon his armor, and tried to walk, he said to saul, "i cannot go with these, for i am not used to them." and he put them off. then he took his staff in his hand and went and chose five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he had; and his sling was in his hand; and he went out and drew near to the philistine. and the philistine came on and drew near to david; and the man that bore his shield went before him. and when the philistine looked about and saw david, he disdained him, for david was but a boy, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. and he said to david, "am i a dog, that thou comest to me with a cudgel?" and with curses he cried out again, "come to me, and i will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field." but david looked at him, and answered, "thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield; but i come to thee in the name of the lord of hosts, the god of the armies of israel, whom thou hast defied. this day will the lord deliver thee into my hand; and i will smite thee, and take thy head from thee, and i will give the carcasses of the host of the philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a god in israel! and all this assembly shall know that the lord saveth not with sword and spear; for the battle is the lord's, and he will give you into our hands." and then, when the philistine arose, and came, and drew nigh to meet david, david hasted, and ran toward the army to meet the philistine. and when he was a little way from him, he put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and put it in his sling, and slung it, and smote the philistine in the forehead, so that the stone sank into his forehead; and he fell on his face to the earth. and david ran, and stood upon the philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of its sheath, and slew him with it. then, when the philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. but the army of israel pursued them, and victory was with the men of israel. and after the battle, david was taken to the king's tent, and made a captain over many men; and he went no more to his father's house, to herd the sheep, but became a man, in the king's service. the shepherd's song david had many fierce battles to fight for king saul against the enemies of israel, and he won them all. then, later, he had to fight against the king's own soldiers, to save himself, for king saul grew wickedly jealous of david's fame as a soldier, and tried to kill him. twice, when david had a chance to kill the king, he let him go safe; but even then, saul kept on trying to take his life, and david was kept away from his home and land as if he were an enemy. but when king saul died, the people chose david for their king, because there was no one so brave, so wise, or so faithful to god. king david lived a long time, and made his people famous for victory and happiness; he had many troubles and many wars, but he always trusted that god would help him, and he never deserted his own people in any hard place. after a battle, or when it was a holiday, or when he was very thankful for something, king david used to make songs, and sing them before the people. some of these songs were so beautiful that they have never been forgotten. after all these hundreds and hundreds of years, we sing them still; we call them psalms. often, after david had made a song, his chief musician would sing with him, as the people gathered to worship god. sometimes the singers were divided into two great choruses, and went to the service in two processions; then one chorus would sing a verse of david's song, and the other procession would answer with the next, and then both would sing together; it was very beautiful to hear. even now, we sometimes do that with the songs of david in our churches. one of the psalms that everybody loves is a song that david made when he remembered the days before he came to saul's camp. he remembered the days and nights he used to spend in the fields with the sheep, when he was just a shepherd boy; and he thought to himself that god had taken care of him just as carefully as he used to care for the little lambs. it is a beautiful song; i wish we knew the music that david made for it, but we only know his words. i will tell it to you now, and then you may learn it, to say for yourselves. the lord is my shepherd; i shall not want. he maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. he restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and i will dwell in the house of the lord for ever. the hidden servants[ ] [ ] adapted, with quotations, from the poem in the hidden servants, by francesca alexander (little, brown & co.). this is a legend about a hermit who lived long ago. he lived high up on the mountain-side in a tiny cave; his food was roots and acorns, a bit of bread given by a peasant, or a cheese brought by a woman who wanted his prayers; his work was praying, and thinking about god. for forty years he lived so, preaching to the people, praying for them, comforting them in trouble, and, most of all, worshiping in his heart. there was just one thing he cared about: it was to make his soul so pure and perfect that it could be one of the stones in god's great temple of heaven. one day, after the forty years, he had a great longing to know how far along he had got with his work,--how it looked to the heavenly father. and he prayed that he might be shown a man-- "whose soul in the heavenly grace had grown to the selfsame measure as his own; whose treasure on the celestial shore could neither be less than his nor more." as he looked up from his prayer, a white-robed angel stood in the path before him. the hermit bowed before the messenger with great gladness, for he knew that his wish was answered. "go to the nearest town," the angel said, "and there, in the public square, you will find a mountebank (a clown) making the people laugh for money. he is the man you seek, his soul has grown to the selfsame stature as your own; his treasure on the celestial shore is neither less than yours nor more." when the angel had faded from sight, the hermit bowed his head again, but this time with great sorrow and fear. had his forty years of prayer been a terrible mistake, and was his soul indeed like a clown, fooling in the market-place? he knew not what to think. almost he hoped he should not find the man, and could believe that he had dreamed the angel vision. but when he came, after a long, toilful walk, to the village, and the square, alas! there was the clown, doing his silly tricks for the crowd. the hermit stood and looked at him with terror and sadness, for he felt that he was looking at his own soul. the face he saw was thin and tired, and though it kept a smile or a grin for the people, it seemed very sad to the hermit. soon the man felt the hermit's eyes; he could not go on with his tricks. and when he had stopped and the crowd had left, the hermit went and drew the man aside to a place where they could rest; for he wanted more than anything else on earth to know what the man's soul was like, because what it was, his was. so, after a little, he asked the clown, very gently, what his life was, what it had been. and the clown answered, very sadly, that it was just as it looked,--a life of foolish tricks, for that was the only way of earning his bread that he knew. "but have you never been anything different?" asked the hermit, painfully. the clown's head sank in his hands. "yes, holy father," he said, "i have been something else. i was a thief! i once belonged to the wickedest band of mountain robbers that ever tormented the land, and i was as wicked as the worst." alas! the hermit felt that his heart was breaking. was this how he looked to the heavenly father,--like a thief, a cruel mountain robber? he could hardly speak, and the tears streamed from his old eyes, but he gathered strength to ask one more question. "i beg you," he said, "if you have ever done a single good deed in your life, remember it now, and tell it to me;" for he thought that even one good deed would save him from utter despair. "yes, one," the clown said, "but it was so small, it is not worth telling; my life has been worthless." "tell me that one!" pleaded the hermit. "once," said the man, "our band broke into a convent garden and stole away one of the nuns, to sell as a slave or to keep for a ransom. we dragged her with us over the rough, long way to our mountain camp, and set a guard over her for the night. the poor thing prayed to us so piteously to let her go! and as she begged, she looked from one hard face to another with trusting, imploring eyes, as if she could not believe men could be really bad. father, when her eyes met mine something pierced my heart! pity and shame leaped up, for the first time, within me. but i made my face as hard and cruel as the rest, and she turned away, hopeless. "when all was dark and still, i stole like a cat to where she lay bound. i put my hand on her wrist and whispered, 'trust me, and i will take you safely home.' i cut her bonds with my knife, and she looked at me to show that she trusted. father, by terrible ways that i knew, hidden from the others, i took her safe to the convent gate. she knocked; they opened; and she slipped inside. and, as she left me, she turned and said, 'god will remember.' "that was all. i could not go back to the old bad life, and i had never learned an honest way to earn my bread. so i became a clown, and must be a clown until i die." "no! no! my son," cried the hermit, and now his tears were tears of joy. "god has remembered; your soul is in his sight even as mine, who have prayed and preached for forty years. your treasure waits for you on the heavenly shore just as mine does." "as yours? father, you mock me!" said the clown. but when the hermit told him the story of his prayer and the angel's answer, the poor clown was transfigured with joy, for he knew that his sins were forgiven. and when the hermit went home to his mountain, the clown went with him. he, too, became a hermit, and spent his time in praise and prayer. together they lived, and worked, and helped the poor. and when, after two years, the man who had been a clown died, the hermit felt that he had lost a brother holier than himself. for ten years more the hermit lived in his mountain hut, thinking always of god, fasting and praying, and doing no least thing that was wrong. then, one day, the wish once more came, to know how his work was growing, and once more he prayed that he might see a being-- "whose soul in the heavenly grace had grown to the selfsame measure as his own; whose treasure on the celestial shore could neither be less than his nor more." once more his prayer was answered. the angel came to him, and told him to go to a certain village on the other side of the mountain, and to a small farm in it, where two women lived. in them he should find two souls like his own, in god's sight. when the hermit came to the door of the little farm, the two women who lived there were overjoyed to see him, for every one loved and honored his name. they put a chair for him on the cool porch, and brought food and drink. but the hermit was too eager to wait. he longed greatly to know what the souls of the two women were like, and from their looks he could see only that they were gentle and honest. one was old, and the other of middle age. presently he asked them about their lives. they told him the little there was to tell: they had worked hard always, in the fields with their husbands, or in the house; they had many children; they had seen hard times,--sickness, sorrow; but they had never despaired. "but what of your good deeds," the hermit asked,--"what have you done for god?" "very little," they said, sadly, for they were too poor to give much. to be sure, twice every year, when they killed a sheep for food, they gave half to their poorer neighbors. "that is very good, very faithful," the hermit said. "and is there any other good deed you have done?" "nothing," said the older woman, "unless, unless--it might be called a good deed--" she looked at the younger woman, who smiled back at her. "what?" said the hermit. still the woman hesitated; but at last she said, timidly, "it is not much to tell, father, only this, that it is twenty years since my sister-in-law and i came to live together in the house; we have brought up our families here; and in all the twenty years there has never been a cross word between us, or a look that was less than kind." the hermit bent his head before the two women, and gave thanks in his heart. "if my soul is as these," he said, "i am blessed indeed." and suddenly a great light came into the hermit's mind, and he saw how many ways there are of serving god. some serve him in churches and in hermit's cells, by praise and prayer; some poor souls who have been very wicked turn from their wickedness with sorrow, and serve him with repentance; some live faithfully and gently in humble homes, working, bringing up children, keeping kind and cheerful; some bear pain patiently, for his sake. endless, endless ways there are, that only the heavenly father sees. and so, as the hermit climbed the mountain again, he thought,-- "as he saw the star-like glow of light, in the cottage windows far, how many god's hidden servants are!" emile by jean-jacques rousseau translated by barbara foxley author's preface this collection of scattered thoughts and observations has little order or continuity; it was begun to give pleasure to a good mother who thinks for herself. my first idea was to write a tract a few pages long, but i was carried away by my subject, and before i knew what i was doing my tract had become a kind of book, too large indeed for the matter contained in it, but too small for the subject of which it treats. for a long time i hesitated whether to publish it or not, and i have often felt, when at work upon it, that it is one thing to publish a few pamphlets and another to write a book. after vain attempts to improve it, i have decided that it is my duty to publish it as it stands. i consider that public attention requires to be directed to this subject, and even if my own ideas are mistaken, my time will not have been wasted if i stir up others to form right ideas. a solitary who casts his writings before the public without any one to advertise them, without any party ready to defend them, one who does not even know what is thought and said about those writings, is at least free from one anxiety--if he is mistaken, no one will take his errors for gospel. i shall say very little about the value of a good education, nor shall i stop to prove that the customary method of education is bad; this has been done again and again, and i do not wish to fill my book with things which everyone knows. i will merely state that, go as far back as you will, you will find a continual outcry against the established method, but no attempt to suggest a better. the literature and science of our day tend rather to destroy than to build up. we find fault after the manner of a master; to suggest, we must adopt another style, a style less in accordance with the pride of the philosopher. in spite of all those books, whose only aim, so they say, is public utility, the most useful of all arts, the art of training men, is still neglected. even after locke's book was written the subject remained almost untouched, and i fear that my book will leave it pretty much as it found it. we know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. the wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. they are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man. it is to this study that i have chiefly devoted myself, so that if my method is fanciful and unsound, my observations may still be of service. i may be greatly mistaken as to what ought to be done, but i think i have clearly perceived the material which is to be worked upon. begin thus by making a more careful study of your scholars, for it is clear that you know nothing about them; yet if you read this book with that end in view, i think you will find that it is not entirely useless. with regard to what will be called the systematic portion of the book, which is nothing more than the course of nature, it is here that the reader will probably go wrong, and no doubt i shall be attacked on this side, and perhaps my critics may be right. you will tell me, "this is not so much a treatise on education as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education." what can i do? i have not written about other people's ideas of education, but about my own. my thoughts are not those of others; this reproach has been brought against me again and again. but is it within my power to furnish myself with other eyes, or to adopt other ideas? it is within my power to refuse to be wedded to my own opinions and to refuse to think myself wiser than others. i cannot change my mind; i can distrust myself. this is all i can do, and this i have done. if i sometimes adopt a confident tone, it is not to impress the reader, it is to make my meaning plain to him. why should i profess to suggest as doubtful that which is not a matter of doubt to myself? i say just what i think. when i freely express my opinion, i have so little idea of claiming authority that i always give my reasons, so that you may weigh and judge them for yourselves; but though i would not obstinately defend my ideas, i think it my duty to put them forward; for the principles with regard to which i differ from other writers are not matters of indifference; we must know whether they are true or false, for on them depends the happiness or the misery of mankind. people are always telling me to make practicable suggestions. you might as well tell me to suggest what people are doing already, or at least to suggest improvements which may be incorporated with the wrong methods at present in use. there are matters with regard to which such a suggestion is far more chimerical than my own, for in such a connection the good is corrupted and the bad is none the better for it. i would rather follow exactly the established method than adopt a better method by halves. there would be fewer contradictions in the man; he cannot aim at one and the same time at two different objects. fathers and mothers, what you desire that you can do. may i count on your goodwill? there are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. in the first place, "is it good in itself" in the second, "can it be easily put into practice?" with regard to the first of these it is enough that the scheme should be intelligible and feasible in itself, that what is good in it should be adapted to the nature of things, in this case, for example, that the proposed method of education should be suitable to man and adapted to the human heart. the second consideration depends upon certain given conditions in particular cases; these conditions are accidental and therefore variable; they may vary indefinitely. thus one kind of education would be possible in switzerland and not in france; another would be adapted to the middle classes but not to the nobility. the scheme can be carried out, with more or less success, according to a multitude of circumstances, and its results can only be determined by its special application to one country or another, to this class or that. now all these particular applications are not essential to my subject, and they form no part of my scheme. it is enough for me that, wherever men are born into the world, my suggestions with regard to them may be carried out, and when you have made them what i would have them be, you have done what is best for them and best for other people. if i fail to fulfil this promise, no doubt i am to blame; but if i fulfil my promise, it is your own fault if you ask anything more of me, for i have promised you nothing more. book i god makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. he forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. he confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. he mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. he destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. she would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by. tender, anxious mother, [footnote: the earliest education is most important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. if the author of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them milk to feed the child. address your treatises on education to the women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than men, not only is their influence always predominant in education, its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at the mercy of their children, who show them very plainly whether their education was good or bad. the laws, always more concerned about property than about people, since their object is not virtue but peace, the laws give too little authority to the mother. yet her position is more certain than that of the father, her duties are more trying; the right ordering of the family depends more upon her, and she is usually fonder of her children. there are occasions when a son may be excused for lack of respect for his father, but if a child could be so unnatural as to fail in respect for the mother who bore him and nursed him at her breast, who for so many years devoted herself to his care, such a monstrous wretch should be smothered at once as unworthy to live. you say mothers spoil their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but it is worse to deprave them as you do. the mother wants her child to be happy now. she is right, and if her method is wrong, she must be taught a better. ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers, their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to the child than the blind affection of the mother. moreover, i must explain what i mean by a mother and that explanation follows.] i appeal to you. you can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. tend and water it ere it dies. one day its fruit will reward your care. from the outset raise a wall round your child's soul; another may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution. plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. if a man were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm him by preventing others from coming to his aid; [footnote: like them in externals, but without speech and without the ideas which are expressed by speech, he would be unable to make his wants known, while there would be nothing in his appearance to suggest that he needed their help.] left to himself he would die of want before he knew his needs. we lament the helplessness of infancy; we fail to perceive that the race would have perished had not man begun by being a child. we are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. all that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education. this education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. the inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things. thus we are each taught by three masters. if their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated. now of these three factors in education nature is wholly beyond our control, things are only partly in our power; the education of men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and deed of all with whom the child has to do. viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible, since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favour us if we are to reach it. what is this goal? as we have just shown, it is the goal of nature. since all three modes of education must work together, the two that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond our control. perhaps this word nature has too vague a meaning. let us try to define it. nature, we are told, is merely habit. what does that mean? are there not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle nature? such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally. the plant keeps its artificial shape, but the sap has not changed its course, and any new growth the plant may make will be vertical. it is the same with a man's disposition; while the conditions remain the same, habits, even the least natural of them, hold good; but change the conditions, habits vanish, nature reasserts herself. education itself is but habit, for are there not people who forget or lose their education and others who keep it? whence comes this difference? if the term nature is to be restricted to habits conformable to nature we need say no more. we are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment. as soon as we become conscious of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. these tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped by our prejudices. before this change they are what i call nature within us. everything should therefore be brought into harmony with these natural tendencies, and that might well be if our three modes of education merely differed from one another; but what can be done when they conflict, when instead of training man for himself you try to train him for others? harmony becomes impossible. forced to combat either nature or society, you must make your choice between the man and the citizen, you cannot train both. the smaller social group, firmly united in itself and dwelling apart from others, tends to withdraw itself from the larger society. every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing to him.[footnote: thus the wars of republics are more cruel than those of monarchies. but if the wars of kings are less cruel, their peace is terrible; better be their foe than their subject.] this defect is inevitable, but of little importance. the great thing is to be kind to our neighbours. among strangers the spartan was selfish, grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice, and harmony ruled his home life. distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. such philosophers will love the tartars to avoid loving their neighbour. the natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole, dependent only on himself and on his like. the citizen is but the numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on its denominator; his value depends upon the whole, that is, on the community. good social institutions are those best fitted to make a man unnatural, to exchange his independence for dependence, to merge the unit in the group, so that he no longer regards himself as one, but as a part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life. a citizen of rome was neither caius nor lucius, he was a roman; he ever loved his country better than his life. the captive regulus professed himself a carthaginian; as a foreigner he refused to take his seat in the senate except at his master's bidding. he scorned the attempt to save his life. he had his will, and returned in triumph to a cruel death. there is no great likeness between regulus and the men of our own day. the spartan pedaretes presented himself for admission to the council of the three hundred and was rejected; he went away rejoicing that there were three hundred spartans better than himself. i suppose he was in earnest; there is no reason to doubt it. that was a citizen. a spartan mother had five sons with the army. a helot arrived; trembling she asked his news. "your five sons are slain." "vile slave, was that what i asked thee?" "we have won the victory." she hastened to the temple to render thanks to the gods. that was a citizen. he who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social life knows not what he asks. ever at war with himself, hesitating between his wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor a citizen. he will be of no use to himself nor to others. he will be a man of our day, a frenchman, an englishman, one of the great middle class. to be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take, and must follow that course with vigour and persistence. when i meet this miracle it will be time enough to decide whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he contrives to be both. two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. one is public and common to many, the other private and domestic. if you wish to know what is meant by public education, read plato's republic. those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written. in popular estimation the platonic institute stands for all that is fanciful and unreal. for my own part i should have thought the system of lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed it to writing. plato only sought to purge man's heart; lycurgus turned it from its natural course. the public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither country nor patriot. the very words should be struck out of our language. the reason does not concern us at present, so that though i know it i refrain from stating it. i do not consider our ridiculous colleges [footnote: there are teachers dear to me in many schools and especially in the university of paris, men for whom i have a great respect, men whom i believe to be quite capable of instructing young people, if they were not compelled to follow the established custom. i exhort one of them to publish the scheme of reform which he has thought out. perhaps people would at length seek to cure the evil if they realised that there was a remedy.] as public institutes, nor do i include under this head a fashionable education, for this education facing two ways at once achieves nothing. it is only fit to turn out hypocrites, always professing to live for others, while thinking of themselves alone. these professions, however, deceive no one, for every one has his share in them; they are so much labour wasted. our inner conflicts are caused by these contradictions. drawn this way by nature and that way by man, compelled to yield to both forces, we make a compromise and reach neither goal. we go through life, struggling and hesitating, and die before we have found peace, useless alike to ourselves and to others. there remains the education of the home or of nature; but how will a man live with others if he is educated for himself alone? if the twofold aims could be resolved into one by removing the man's self-contradictions, one great obstacle to his happiness would be gone. to judge of this you must see the man full-grown; you must have noted his inclinations, watched his progress, followed his steps; in a word you must really know a natural man. when you have read this work, i think you will have made some progress in this inquiry. what must be done to train this exceptional man! we can do much, but the chief thing is to prevent anything being done. to sail against the wind we merely follow one tack and another; to keep our position in a stormy sea we must cast anchor. beware, young pilot, lest your boat slip its cable or drag its anchor before you know it. in the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it. if such a one leave his own station he is fit for nothing else. his education is only useful when fate agrees with his parents' choice; if not, education harms the scholar, if only by the prejudices it has created. in egypt, where the son was compelled to adopt his father's calling, education had at least a settled aim; where social grades remain fixed, but the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether he is not harming his son by educating him for his own class. in the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it. it matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. life is the trade i would teach him. when he leaves me, i grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. all that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. in vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place. "occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses." the real object of our study is man and his environment. to my mind those of us who can best endure the good and evil of life are the best educated; hence it follows that true education consists less in precept than in practice. we begin to learn when we begin to live; our education begins with ourselves, our first teacher is our nurse. the ancients used the word "education" in a different sense, it meant "nurture." "educit obstetrix," says varro. "educat nutrix, instituit paedagogus, docet magister." thus, education, discipline, and instruction are three things as different in their purpose as the dame, the usher, and the teacher. but these distinctions are undesirable and the child should only follow one guide. we must therefore look at the general rather than the particular, and consider our scholar as man in the abstract, man exposed to all the changes and chances of mortal life. if men were born attached to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year round, if every man's fortune were so firmly grasped that he could never lose it, then the established method of education would have certain advantages; the child brought up to his own calling would never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties of any other condition. but when we consider the fleeting nature of human affairs, the restless and uneasy spirit of our times, when every generation overturns the work of its predecessor, can we conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if he would never leave his room, as if he would always have his servants about him? if the wretched creature takes a single step up or down he is lost. this is not teaching him to bear pain; it is training him to feel it. people think only of preserving their child's life; this is not enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty, to live at need among the snows of iceland or on the scorching rocks of malta. in vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken. teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. a man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. he would have fared better had he died young. our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. civilised man is born and dies a slave. the infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. all his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions. i am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. our heads are not good enough as god made them, they must be moulded outside by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. the caribs are better off than we are. the child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived of its freedom. it is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move. it is fortunate if it has room to breathe, and it is laid on its side so that water which should flow from its mouth can escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this purpose. the new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long. his limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them. even the head is confined by a cap. one would think they were afraid the child should look as if it were alive. thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements. the child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains strength very slowly. he was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has gained nothing by birth. the inaction, the constraint to which the child's limbs are subjected can only check the circulation of the blood and humours; it can only hinder the child's growth in size and strength, and injure its constitution. where these absurd precautions are absent, all the men are tall, strong, and well-made. where children are swaddled, the country swarms with the hump-backed, the lame, the bow-legged, the rickety, and every kind of deformity. in our fear lest the body should become deformed by free movement, we hasten to deform it by putting it in a press. we make our children helpless lest they should hurt themselves. is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper? their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they find every necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry. their first words you say are tears. that is so. from birth you are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture. their voice alone is free; why should they not raise it in complaint? they cry because you are hurting them; if you were swaddled you would cry louder still. what is the origin of this senseless and unnatural custom? since mothers have despised their first duty and refused to nurse their own children, they have had to be entrusted to hired nurses. finding themselves the mothers of a stranger's children, without the ties of nature, they have merely tried to save themselves trouble. a child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded. so long as the nurse's negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life. its limbs are kept safe at the expense of its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault. these gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? if the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. children have been found in this position purple in the face, their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the blood, and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very quiet because he had not strength to cry. how long a child might survive under such conditions i do not know, but it could not be long. that, i fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling clothes. it is maintained that unswaddled infants would assume faulty positions and make movements which might injure the proper development of their limbs. that is one of the empty arguments of our false wisdom which has never been confirmed by experience. out of all the crowds of children who grow up with the full use of their limbs among nations wiser than ourselves, you never find one who hurts himself or maims himself; their movements are too feeble to be dangerous, and when they assume an injurious position, pain warns them to change it. we have not yet decided to swaddle our kittens and puppies; are they any the worse for this neglect? children are heavier, i admit, but they are also weaker. they can scarcely move, how could they hurt themselves! if you lay them on their backs, they will lie there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over. not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women no longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood becomes a burden; means are found to avoid it. they will destroy their work to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race the charm which was given them for its increase. this practice, with other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming fate of europe. her arts and sciences, her philosophy and morals, will shortly reduce her to a desert. she will be the home of wild beasts, and her inhabitants will hardly have changed for the worse. i have sometimes watched the tricks of young wives who pretend that they wish to nurse their own children. they take care to be dissuaded from this whim. they contrive that husbands, doctors, and especially mothers should intervene. if a husband should let his wife nurse her own baby it would be the ruin of him; they would make him out a murderer who wanted to be rid of her. a prudent husband must sacrifice paternal affection to domestic peace. fortunately for you there are women in the country districts more continent than your wives. you are still more fortunate if the time thus gained is not intended for another than yourself. there can be no doubt about a wife's duty, but, considering the contempt in which it is held, it is doubtful whether it is not just as good for the child to be suckled by a stranger. this is a question for the doctors to settle, and in my opinion they have settled it according to the women's wishes, [footnote: the league between the women and the doctors has always struck me as one of the oddest things in paris. the doctors' reputation depends on the women, and by means of the doctors the women get their own way. it is easy to see what qualifications a doctor requires in paris if he is to become celebrated.] and for my own part i think it is better that the child should suck the breast of a healthy nurse rather than of a petted mother, if he has any further evil to fear from her who has given him birth. ought the question, however, to be considered only from the physiological point of view? does not the child need a mother's care as much as her milk? other women, or even other animals, may give him the milk she denies him, but there is no substitute for a mother's love. the woman who nurses another's child in place of her own is a bad mother; how can she be a good nurse? she may become one in time; use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred times before his nurse has developed a mother's affection for him. and this affection when developed has its drawbacks, which should make any feeling woman afraid to put her child out to nurse. is she prepared to divide her mother's rights, or rather to abdicate them in favour of a stranger; to see her child loving another more than herself; to feel that the affection he retains for his own mother is a favour, while his love for his foster-mother is a duty; for is not some affection due where there has been a mother's care? to remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on their nurses, to treat them as mere servants. when their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. after a few years the child never sees her again. the mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. but she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse. how emphatically would i speak if it were not so hopeless to keep struggling in vain on behalf of a real reform. more depends on this than you realise. would you restore all men to their primal duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you. every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, the home becomes gloomy, the spectacle of a young family no longer stirs the husband's love and the stranger's reverence. the mother whose children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is no home life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit; fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters cease to exist. they are almost strangers; how should they love one another? each thinks of himself first. when the home is a gloomy solitude pleasure will be sought elsewhere. but when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step by itself will restore mutual affection. the charms of home are the best antidote to vice. the noisy play of children, which we thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father rely more on each other and grow dearer to one another; the marriage tie is strengthened. in the cheerful home life the mother finds her sweetest duties and the father his pleasantest recreation. thus the cure of this one evil would work a wide-spread reformation; nature would regain her rights. when women become good mothers, men will be good husbands and fathers. my words are vain! when we are sick of worldly pleasures we do not return to the pleasures of the home. women have ceased to be mothers, they do not and will not return to their duty. could they do it if they would? the contrary custom is firmly established; each would have to overcome the opposition of her neighbours, leagued together against the example which some have never given and others do not desire to follow. yet there are still a few young women of good natural disposition who refuse to be the slaves of fashion and rebel against the clamour of other women, who fulfil the sweet task imposed on them by nature. would that the reward in store for them might draw others to follow their example. my conclusion is based upon plain reason, and upon facts i have never seen disputed; and i venture to promise these worthy mothers the firm and steadfast affection of their husbands and the truly filial love of their children and the respect of all the world. child-birth will be easy and will leave no ill-results, their health will be strong and vigorous, and they will see their daughters follow their example, and find that example quoted as a pattern to others. no mother, no child; their duties are reciprocal, and when ill done by the one they will be neglected by the other. the child should love his mother before he knows what he owes her. if the voice of instinct is not strengthened by habit it soon dies, the heart is still-born. from the outset we have strayed from the path of nature. there is another by-way which may tempt our feet from the path of nature. the mother may lavish excessive care on her child instead of neglecting him; she may make an idol of him; she may develop and increase his weakness to prevent him feeling it; she wards off every painful experience in the hope of withdrawing him from the power of nature, and fails to realise that for every trifling ill from which she preserves him the future holds in store many accidents and dangers, and that it is a cruel kindness to prolong the child's weakness when the grown man must bear fatigue. thetis, so the story goes, plunged her son in the waters of styx to make him invulnerable. the truth of this allegory is apparent. the cruel mothers i speak of do otherwise; they plunge their children into softness, and they are preparing suffering for them, they open the way to every kind of ill, which their children will not fail to experience after they grow up. fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her. she keeps children at work, she hardens them by all kinds of difficulties, she soon teaches them the meaning of pain and grief. they cut their teeth and are feverish, sharp colics bring on convulsions, they are choked by fits of coughing and tormented by worms, evil humours corrupt the blood, germs of various kinds ferment in it, causing dangerous eruptions. sickness and danger play the chief part in infancy. one half of the children who are born die before their eighth year. the child who has overcome hardships has gained strength, and as soon as he can use his life he holds it more securely. this is nature's law; why contradict it? do you not see that in your efforts to improve upon her handiwork you are destroying it; her cares are wasted? to do from without what she does within is according to you to increase the danger twofold. on the contrary, it is the way to avert it; experience shows that children delicately nurtured are more likely to die. provided we do not overdo it, there is less risk in using their strength than in sparing it. accustom them therefore to the hardships they will have to face; train them to endure extremes of temperature, climate, and condition, hunger, thirst, and weariness. dip them in the waters of styx. before bodily habits become fixed you may teach what habits you will without any risk, but once habits are established any change is fraught with peril. a child will bear changes which a man cannot bear, the muscles of the one are soft and flexible, they take whatever direction you give them without any effort; the muscles of the grown man are harder and they only change their accustomed mode of action when subjected to violence. so we can make a child strong without risking his life or health, and even if there were some risk, it should not be taken into consideration. since human life is full of dangers, can we do better than face them at a time when they can do the least harm? a child's worth increases with his years. to his personal value must be added the cost of the care bestowed upon him. for himself there is not only loss of life, but the consciousness of death. we must therefore think most of his future in our efforts for his preservation. he must be protected against the ills of youth before he reaches them: for if the value of life increases until the child reaches an age when he can be useful, what madness to spare some suffering in infancy only to multiply his pain when he reaches the age of reason. is that what our master teaches us? man is born to suffer; pain is the means of his preservation. his childhood is happy, knowing only pain of body. these bodily sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other forms of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction. it is not the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it is mental suffering that leads to despair. we pity the sufferings of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are of our own making. the new-born infant cries, his early days are spent in crying. he is alternately petted and shaken by way of soothing him; sometimes he is threatened, sometimes beaten, to keep him quiet. we do what he wants or we make him do what we want, we submit to his whims or subject him to our own. there is no middle course; he must rule or obey. thus his earliest ideas are those of the tyrant or the slave. he commands before he can speak, he obeys before he can act, and sometimes he is punished for faults before he is aware of them, or rather before they are committed. thus early are the seeds of evil passions sown in his young heart. at a later day these are attributed to nature, and when we have taken pains to make him bad we lament his badness. in this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. the tutor completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. when at length this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon the world, and his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed, we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. we are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is cast in another mould. would you keep him as nature made him? watch over him from his birth. take possession of him as soon as he comes into the world and keep him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise. the real nurse is the mother and the real teacher is the father. let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their method, let the child pass from one to the other. he will be better educated by a sensible though ignorant father than by the cleverest master in the world. for zeal will atone for lack of knowledge, rather than knowledge for lack of zeal. but the duties of public and private business! duty indeed! does a father's duty come last. [footnote: when we read in plutarch that cato the censor, who ruled rome with such glory, brought up his own sons from the cradle, and so carefully that he left everything to be present when their nurse, that is to say their mother, bathed them; when we read in suetonius that augustus, the master of the world which he had conquered and which he himself governed, himself taught his grandsons to write, to swim, to understand the beginnings of science, and that he always had them with him, we cannot help smiling at the little people of those days who amused themselves with such follies, and who were too ignorant, no doubt, to attend to the great affairs of the great people of our own time.] it is not surprising that the man whose wife despises the duty of suckling her child should despise its education. there is no more charming picture than that of family life; but when one feature is wanting the whole is marred. if the mother is too delicate to nurse her child, the father will be too busy to teach him. their children, scattered about in schools, convents, and colleges, will find the home of their affections elsewhere, or rather they will form the habit of caring for nothing. brothers and sisters will scarcely know each other; when they are together in company they will behave as strangers. when there is no confidence between relations, when the family society ceases to give savour to life, its place is soon usurped by vice. is there any man so stupid that he cannot see how all this hangs together? a father has done but a third of his task when he begets children and provides a living for them. he owes men to humanity, citizens to the state. a man who can pay this threefold debt and neglect to do so is guilty, more guilty, perhaps, if he pays it in part than when he neglects it entirely. he has no right to be a father if he cannot fulfil a father's duties. poverty, pressure of business, mistaken social prejudices, none of these can excuse a man from his duty, which is to support and educate his own children. if a man of any natural feeling neglects these sacred duties he will repent it with bitter tears and will never be comforted. but what does this rich man do, this father of a family, compelled, so he says, to neglect his children? he pays another man to perform those duties which are his alone. mercenary man! do you expect to purchase a second father for your child? do not deceive yourself; it is not even a master you have hired for him, it is a flunkey, who will soon train such another as himself. there is much discussion as to the characteristics of a good tutor. my first requirement, and it implies a good many more, is that he should not take up his task for reward. there are callings so great that they cannot be undertaken for money without showing our unfitness for them; such callings are those of the soldier and the teacher. "but who must train my child?" "i have just told you, you should do it yourself." "i cannot." "you cannot! then find a friend. i see no other course." a tutor! what a noble soul! indeed for the training of a man one must either be a father or more than man. it is this duty you would calmly hand over to a hireling! the more you think of it the harder you will find it. the tutor must have been trained for his pupil, his servants must have been trained for their master, so that all who come near him may have received the impression which is to be transmitted to him. we must pass from education to education, i know not how far. how can a child be well educated by one who has not been well educated himself! can such a one be found? i know not. in this age of degradation who knows the height of virtue to which man's soul may attain? but let us assume that this prodigy has been discovered. we shall learn what he should be from the consideration of his duties. i fancy the father who realises the value of a good tutor will contrive to do without one, for it will be harder to find one than to become such a tutor himself; he need search no further, nature herself having done half the work. some one whose rank alone is known to me suggested that i should educate his son. he did me a great honour, no doubt, but far from regretting my refusal, he ought to congratulate himself on my prudence. had the offer been accepted, and had i been mistaken in my method, there would have been an education ruined; had i succeeded, things would have been worse--his son would have renounced his title and refused to be a prince. i feel too deeply the importance of a tutor's duties and my own unfitness, ever to accept such a post, whoever offered it, and even the claims of friendship would be only an additional motive for my refusal. few, i think, will be tempted to make me such an offer when they have read this book, and i beg any one who would do so to spare his pains. i have had enough experience of the task to convince myself of my own unfitness, and my circumstances would make it impossible, even if my talents were such as to fit me for it. i have thought it my duty to make this public declaration to those who apparently refuse to do me the honour of believing in the sincerity of my determination. if i am unable to undertake the more useful task, i will at least venture to attempt the easier one; i will follow the example of my predecessors and take up, not the task, but my pen; and instead of doing the right thing i will try to say it. i know that in such an undertaking the author, who ranges at will among theoretical systems, utters many fine precepts impossible to practise, and even when he says what is practicable it remains undone for want of details and examples as to its application. i have therefore decided to take an imaginary pupil, to assume on my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required for the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood, when he needs no guide but himself. this method seems to me useful for an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to the visionary; for as soon as he departs from common practice he has only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know, or the reader will know for him, whether he is following the development of the child and the natural growth of the human heart. this is what i have tried to do. lest my book should be unduly bulky, i have been content to state those principles the truth of which is self-evident. but as to the rules which call for proof, i have applied them to emile or to others, and i have shown, in very great detail, how my theories may be put into practice. such at least is my plan; the reader must decide whether i have succeeded. at first i have said little about emile, for my earliest maxims of education, though very different from those generally accepted, are so plain that it is hard for a man of sense to refuse to accept them, but as i advance, my scholar, educated after another fashion than yours, is no longer an ordinary child, he needs a special system. then he appears upon the scene more frequently, and towards the end i never lose sight of him for a moment, until, whatever he may say, he needs me no longer. i pass over the qualities required in a good tutor; i take them for granted, and assume that i am endowed with them. as you read this book you will see how generous i have been to myself. i will only remark that, contrary to the received opinion, a child's tutor should be young, as young indeed as a man may well be who is also wise. were it possible, he should become a child himself, that he may be the companion of his pupil and win his confidence by sharing his games. childhood and age have too little in common for the formation of a really firm affection. children sometimes flatter old men; they never love them. people seek a tutor who has already educated one pupil. this is too much; one man can only educate one pupil; if two were essential to success, what right would he have to undertake the first? with more experience you may know better what to do, but you are less capable of doing it; once this task has been well done, you will know too much of its difficulties to attempt it a second time--if ill done, the first attempt augurs badly for the second. it is one thing to follow a young man about for four years, another to be his guide for five-and-twenty. you find a tutor for your son when he is already formed; i want one for him before he is born. your man may change his pupil every five years; mine will never have but one pupil. you distinguish between the teacher and the tutor. another piece of folly! do you make any distinction between the pupil and the scholar? there is only one science for children to learn--the duties of man. this science is one, and, whatever xenophon may say of the education of the persians, it is indivisible. besides, i prefer to call the man who has this knowledge master rather than teacher, since it is a question of guidance rather than instruction. he must not give precepts, he must let the scholar find them out for himself. if the master is to be so carefully chosen, he may well choose his pupil, above all when he proposes to set a pattern for others. this choice cannot depend on the child's genius or character, as i adopt him before he is born, and they are only known when my task is finished. if i had my choice i would take a child of ordinary mind, such as i assume in my pupil. it is ordinary people who have to be educated, and their education alone can serve as a pattern for the education of their fellows. the others find their way alone. the birthplace is not a matter of indifference in the education of man; it is only in temperate climes that he comes to his full growth. the disadvantages of extremes are easily seen. a man is not planted in one place like a tree, to stay there the rest of his life, and to pass from one extreme to another you must travel twice as far as he who starts half-way. if the inhabitant of a temperate climate passes in turn through both extremes his advantage is plain, for although he may be changed as much as he who goes from one extreme to the other, he only removes half-way from his natural condition. a frenchman can live in new guinea or in lapland, but a negro cannot live in tornea nor a samoyed in benin. it seems also as if the brain were less perfectly organised in the two extremes. neither the negroes nor the laps are as wise as europeans. so if i want my pupil to be a citizen of the world i will choose him in the temperate zone, in france for example, rather than elsewhere. in the north with its barren soil men devour much food, in the fertile south they eat little. this produces another difference: the one is industrious, the other contemplative. society shows us, in one and the same spot, a similar difference between rich and poor. the one dwells in a fertile land, the other in a barren land. the poor man has no need of education. the education of his own station in life is forced upon him, he can have no other; the education received by the rich man from his own station is least fitted for himself and for society. moreover, a natural education should fit a man for any position. now it is more unreasonable to train a poor man for wealth than a rich man for poverty, for in proportion to their numbers more rich men are ruined and fewer poor men become rich. let us choose our scholar among the rich; we shall at least have made another man; the poor may come to manhood without our help. for the same reason i should not be sorry if emile came of a good family. he will be another victim snatched from prejudice. emile is an orphan. no matter whether he has father or mother, having undertaken their duties i am invested with their rights. he must honour his parents, but he must obey me. that is my first and only condition. i must add that there is just one other point arising out of this; we must never be separated except by mutual consent. this clause is essential, and i would have tutor and scholar so inseparable that they should regard their fate as one. if once they perceive the time of their separation drawing near, the time which must make them strangers to one another, they become strangers then and there; each makes his own little world, and both of them being busy in thought with the time when they will no longer be together, they remain together against their will. the disciple regards his master as the badge and scourge of childhood, the master regards his scholar as a heavy burden which he longs to be rid of. both are looking forward to the time when they will part, and as there is never any real affection between them, there will be scant vigilance on the one hand, and on the other scant obedience. but when they consider they must always live together, they must needs love one another, and in this way they really learn to love one another. the pupil is not ashamed to follow as a child the friend who will be with him in manhood; the tutor takes an interest in the efforts whose fruits he will enjoy, and the virtues he is cultivating in his pupil form a store laid up for his old age. this agreement made beforehand assumes a normal birth, a strong, well-made, healthy child. a father has no choice, and should have no preference within the limits of the family god has given him; all his children are his alike, the same care and affection is due to all. crippled or well-made, weak or strong, each of them is a trust for which he is responsible to the giver, and nature is a party to the marriage contract along with husband and wife. but if you undertake a duty not imposed upon you by nature, you must secure beforehand the means for its fulfilment, unless you would undertake duties you cannot fulfil. if you take the care of a sickly, unhealthy child, you are a sick nurse, not a tutor. to preserve a useless life you are wasting the time which should be spent in increasing its value, you risk the sight of a despairing mother reproaching you for the death of her child, who ought to have died long ago. i would not undertake the care of a feeble, sickly child, should he live to four score years. i want no pupil who is useless alike to himself and others, one whose sole business is to keep himself alive, one whose body is always a hindrance to the training of his mind. if i vainly lavish my care upon him, what can i do but double the loss to society by robbing it of two men, instead of one? let another tend this weakling for me; i am quite willing, i approve his charity, but i myself have no gift for such a task; i could never teach the art of living to one who needs all his strength to keep himself alive. the body must be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong. i know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. the weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. all sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting. a feeble body makes a feeble mind. hence the influence of physic, an art which does more harm to man than all the evils it professes to cure. i do not know what the doctors cure us of, but i know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. what matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need. medicine is all the fashion in these days, and very naturally. it is the amusement of the idle and unemployed, who do not know what to do with their time, and so spend it in taking care of themselves. if by ill-luck they had happened to be born immortal, they would have been the most miserable of men; a life they could not lose would be of no value to them. such men must have doctors to threaten and flatter them, to give them the only pleasure they can enjoy, the pleasure of not being dead. i will say no more at present as to the uselessness of medicine. my aim is to consider its bearings on morals. still i cannot refrain from saying that men employ the same sophism about medicine as they do about the search for truth. they assume that the patient is cured and that the seeker after truth finds it. they fail to see that against one life saved by the doctors you must set a hundred slain, and against the value of one truth discovered the errors which creep in with it. the science which instructs and the medicine which heals are no doubt excellent, but the science which misleads us and the medicine which kills us are evil. teach us to know them apart. that is the real difficulty. if we were content to be ignorant of truth we should not be the dupes of falsehood; if we did not want to be cured in spite of nature, we should not be killed by the doctors. we should do well to steer clear of both, and we should evidently be the gainers. i do not deny that medicine is useful to some men; i assert that it is fatal to mankind. you will tell me, as usual, that the doctors are to blame, that medicine herself is infallible. well and good, then give us the medicine without the doctor, for when we have both, the blunders of the artist are a hundredfold greater than our hopes from the art. this lying art, invented rather for the ills of the mind than of the body, is useless to both alike; it does less to cure us of our diseases than to fill us with alarm. it does less to ward off death than to make us dread its approach. it exhausts life rather than prolongs it; should it even prolong life it would only be to the prejudice of the race, since it makes us set its precautions before society and our fears before our duties. it is the knowledge of danger that makes us afraid. if we thought ourselves invulnerable we should know no fear. the poet armed achilles against danger and so robbed him of the merit of courage; on such terms any man would be an achilles. would you find a really brave man? seek him where there are no doctors, where the results of disease are unknown, and where death is little thought of. by nature a man bears pain bravely and dies in peace. it is the doctors with their rules, the philosophers with their precepts, the priests with their exhortations, who debase the heart and make us afraid to die. give me a pupil who has no need of these, or i will have nothing to do with him. no one else shall spoil my work, i will educate him myself or not at all. that wise man, locke, who had devoted part of his life to the study of medicine, advises us to give no drugs to the child, whether as a precaution, or on account of slight ailments. i will go farther, and will declare that, as i never call in a doctor for myself, i will never send for one for emile, unless his life is clearly in danger, when the doctor can but kill him. i know the doctor will make capital out of my delay. if the child dies, he was called in too late; if he recovers, it is his doing. so be it; let the doctor boast, but do not call him in except in extremity. as the child does not know how to be cured, he knows how to be ill. the one art takes the place of the other and is often more successful; it is the art of nature. when a beast is ill, it keeps quiet and suffers in silence; but we see fewer sickly animals than sick men. how many men have been slain by impatience, fear, anxiety, and above all by medicine, men whom disease would have spared, and time alone have cured. i shall be told that animals, who live according to nature, are less liable to disease than ourselves. well, that way of living is just what i mean to teach my pupil; he should profit by it in the same way. hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather a virtue than a science. temperance and industry are man's true remedies; work sharpens his appetite and temperance teaches him to control it. to learn what system is most beneficial you have only to study those races remarkable for health, strength, and length of days. if common observation shows us that medicine neither increases health nor prolongs life, it follows that this useless art is worse than useless, since it wastes time, men, and things on what is pure loss. not only must we deduct the time spent, not in using life, but preserving it, but if this time is spent in tormenting ourselves it is worse than wasted, it is so much to the bad, and to reckon fairly a corresponding share must be deducted from what remains to us. a man who lives ten years for himself and others without the help of doctors lives more for himself and others than one who spends thirty years as their victim. i have tried both, so i think i have a better right than most to draw my own conclusions. for these reasons i decline to take any but a strong and healthy pupil, and these are my principles for keeping him in health. i will not stop to prove at length the value of manual labour and bodily exercise for strengthening the health and constitution; no one denies it. nearly all the instances of long life are to be found among the men who have taken most exercise, who have endured fatigue and labour. [footnote: i cannot help quoting the following passage from an english newspaper, as it throws much light on my opinions: "a certain patrick o'neil, born in , has just married his seventh wife in . in the seventeenth year of charles ii. he served in the dragoons and in other regiments up to , when he took his discharge. he served in all the campaigns of william iii. and marlborough. this man has never drunk anything but small beer; he has always lived on vegetables, and has never eaten meat except on few occasions when he made a feast for his relations. he has always been accustomed to rise with the sun and go to bed at sunset unless prevented by his military duties. he is now in his th year; he is healthy, his hearing is good, and he walks with the help of a stick. in spite of his great age he is never idle, and every sunday he goes to his parish church accompanied by his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren."] neither will i enter into details as to the care i shall take for this alone. it will be clear that it forms such an essential part of my practice that it is enough to get hold of the idea without further explanation. when our life begins our needs begin too. the new-born infant must have a nurse. if his mother will do her duty, so much the better; her instructions will be given her in writing, but this advantage has its drawbacks, it removes the tutor from his charge. but it is to be hoped that the child's own interests, and her respect for the person to whom she is about to confide so precious a treasure, will induce the mother to follow the master's wishes, and whatever she does you may be sure she will do better than another. if we must have a strange nurse, make a good choice to begin with. it is one of the misfortunes of the rich to be cheated on all sides; what wonder they think ill of mankind! it is riches that corrupt men, and the rich are rightly the first to feel the defects of the only tool they know. everything is ill-done for them, except what they do themselves, and they do next to nothing. when a nurse must be selected the choice is left to the doctor. what happens? the best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe. i shall not consult the doctor about emile's nurse, i shall take care to choose her myself. i may not argue about it so elegantly as the surgeon, but i shall be more reliable, i shall be less deceived by my zeal than the doctor by his greed. there is no mystery about this choice; its rules are well known, but i think we ought probably to pay more attention to the age of the milk as well as its quality. the first milk is watery, it must be almost an aperient, to purge the remains of the meconium curdled in the bowels of the new-born child. little by little the milk thickens and supplies more solid food as the child is able to digest it. it is surely not without cause that nature changes the milk in the female of every species according to the age of the offspring. thus a new-born child requires a nurse who has recently become mother. there is, i know, a difficulty here, but as soon as we leave the path of nature there are difficulties in the way of all well-doing. the wrong course is the only right one under the circumstances, so we take it. the nurse must be healthy alike in disposition and in body. the violence of the passions as well as the humours may spoil her milk. moreover, to consider the body only is to keep only half our aim in view. the milk may be good and the nurse bad; a good character is as necessary as a good constitution. if you choose a vicious person, i do not say her foster-child will acquire her vices, but he will suffer for them. ought she not to bestow on him day by day, along with her milk, a care which calls for zeal, patience, gentleness, and cleanliness. if she is intemperate and greedy her milk will soon be spoilt; if she is careless and hasty what will become of a poor little wretch left to her mercy, and unable either to protect himself or to complain. the wicked are never good for anything. the choice is all the more important because her foster-child should have no other guardian, just as he should have no teacher but his tutor. this was the custom of the ancients, who talked less but acted more wisely than we. the nurse never left her foster-daughter; this is why the nurse is the confidante in most of their plays. a child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. at every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. if once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined. a child should know no betters but its father and mother, or failing them its foster-mother and its tutor, and even this is one too many, but this division is inevitable, and the best that can be done in the way of remedy is that the man and woman who control him shall be so well agreed with regard to him that they seem like one. the nurse must live rather more comfortably, she must have rather more substantial food, but her whole way of living must not be altered, for a sudden change, even a change for the better, is dangerous to health, and since her usual way of life has made her healthy and strong, why change it? country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women, and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise to themselves and their children. when they take nurslings from the upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they will form better chyle and supply more milk. i do not hold with this at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children fed in this way less liable to colic and worms. that need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter. [footnote: women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass. this supplies vegetable juices to their milk. there are still those species which are unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which i very much doubt.] milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal, is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants. the milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome than the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar to its own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction. if quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk. if a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, i do not think it would be troubled with worms. milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to go sour, but i am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. there are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents. people are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. this is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish children and young animals; if it did not curdle it would merely pass away without feeding them. [footnote: although the juices which nourish us are liquid, they must be extracted from solids. a hard-working man who ate nothing but soup would soon waste away. he would be far better fed on milk, just because it curdles.] in vain you dilute milk and use absorbents; whoever swallows milk digests cheese, this rule is without exception; rennet is made from a calf's stomach. instead of changing the nurse's usual diet, i think it would be enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind. it is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet indigestible, but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome. reform your cookery, use neither butter nor oil for frying. butter, salt, and milk should never be cooked. let your vegetables be cooked in water and only seasoned when they come to table. the vegetable diet, far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful supply of milk. [footnote: those who wish to study a full account of the advantages and disadvantages of the pythagorean regime, may consult the works of dr. cocchi and his opponent dr. bianchi on this important subject.] if a vegetable diet is best for the child, how can meat food be best for his nurse? the things are contradictory. fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early years. it enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has a powerful effect on their young bodies. its effects can never be destroyed. so i should not agree with those who take a country woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and her nursling with her. i would rather send him to breathe the fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town. he will take his new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor will follow him. the reader will bear in mind that this tutor is not a paid servant, but the father's friend. but if this friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice can be followed, you will say to me, "what shall i do instead?" i have told you already--"do what you are doing;" no advice is needed there. men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it. the more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. disease and vice are the sure results of over-crowded cities. of all creatures man is least fitted to live in herds. huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die. man's breath is fatal to his fellows. this is literally as well as figuratively true. men are devoured by our towns. in a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always renewed from the country. send your children to renew themselves, so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. women hurry home that their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children. they would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon destroy the taste for other delights. the new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little wine is usually added. i think the wine might be dispensed with. as nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely that they are of much value to her creatures. in the same way it is unnecessary to take the precaution of heating the water; in fact among many races the new-born infants are bathed with no more ado in rivers or in the sea. our children, made tender before birth by the softness of their parents, come into the world with a constitution already enfeebled, which cannot be at once exposed to all the trials required to restore it to health. little by little they must be restored to their natural vigour. begin then by following this custom, and leave it off gradually. wash your children often, their dirty ways show the need of this. if they are only wiped their skin is injured; but as they grow stronger gradually reduce the heat of the water, till at last you bathe them winter and summer in cold, even in ice-cold water. to avoid risk this change must be slow, gradual, and imperceptible, so you may use the thermometer for exact measurements. this habit of the bath, once established, should never be broken off, it must be kept up all through life. i value it not only on grounds of cleanliness and present health, but also as a wholesome means of making the muscles supple, and accustoming them to bear without risk or effort extremes of heat and cold. as he gets older i would have the child trained to bathe occasionally in hot water of every bearable degree, and often in every degree of cold water. now water being a denser fluid touches us at more points than air, so that, having learnt to bear all the variations of temperature in water, we shall scarcely feel this of the air. [footnote: children in towns are stifled by being kept indoors and too much wrapped up. those who control them have still to learn that fresh air, far from doing them harm, will make them strong, while hot air will make them weak, will give rise to fevers, and will eventually kill them.] when the child draws its first breath do not confine it in tight wrappings. no cap, no bandages, nor swaddling clothes. loose and flowing flannel wrappers, which leave its limbs free and are not too heavy to check his movements, not too warm to prevent his feeling the air. [footnote: i say "cradle" using the common word for want of a better, though i am convinced that it is never necessary and often harmful to rock children in the cradle.] put him in a big cradle, well padded, where he can move easily and safely. as he begins to grow stronger, let him crawl about the room; let him develop and stretch his tiny limbs; you will see him gain strength from day to day. compare him with a well swaddled child of the same age and you will be surprised at their different rates of progress. [footnote: the ancient peruvians wrapped their children in loose swaddling bands, leaving the arms quite free. later they placed them unswaddled in a hole in the ground, lined with cloths, so that the lower part of the body was in the hole, and their arms were free and they could move the head and bend the body at will without falling or hurting themselves. when they began to walk they were enticed to come to the breast. the little negroes are often in a position much more difficult for sucking. they cling to the mother's hip, and cling so tightly that the mother's arm is often not needed to support them. they clasp the breast with their hand and continue sucking while their mother goes on with her ordinary work. these children begin to walk at two months, or rather to crawl. later on they can run on all fours almost as well as on their feet.--buffon. m. buffon might also have quoted the example of england, where the senseless and barbarous swaddling clothes have become almost obsolete. cf. la longue voyage de siam, le beau voyage de canada, etc.] you must expect great opposition from the nurses, who find a half strangled baby needs much less watching. besides his dirtyness is more perceptible in an open garment; he must be attended to more frequently. indeed, custom is an unanswerable argument in some lands and among all classes of people. do not argue with the nurses; give your orders, see them carried out, and spare no pains to make the attention you prescribe easy in practice. why not take your share in it? with ordinary nurslings, where the body alone is thought of, nothing matters so long as the child lives and does not actually die, but with us, when education begins with life, the new-born child is already a disciple, not of his tutor, but of nature. the tutor merely studies under this master, and sees that his orders are not evaded. he watches over the infant, he observes it, he looks for the first feeble glimmering of intelligence, as the moslem looks for the moment of the moon's rising in her first quarter. we are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving nothing. the mind, bound up within imperfect and half grown organs, is not even aware of its own existence. the movements and cries of the new-born child are purely reflex, without knowledge or will. suppose a child born with the size and strength of manhood, entering upon life full grown like pallas from the brain of jupiter; such a child-man would be a perfect idiot, an automaton, a statue without motion and almost without feeling; he would see and hear nothing, he would recognise no one, he could not turn his eyes towards what he wanted to see; not only would he perceive no external object, he would not even be aware of sensation through the several sense-organs. his eye would not perceive colour, his ear sounds, his body would be unaware of contact with neighbouring bodies, he would not even know he had a body, what his hands handled would be in his brain alone; all his sensations would be united in one place, they would exist only in the common "sensorium," he would have only one idea, that of self, to which he would refer all his sensations; and this idea, or rather this feeling, would be the only thing in which he excelled an ordinary child. this man, full grown at birth, would also be unable to stand on his feet, he would need a long time to learn how to keep his balance; perhaps he would not even be able to try to do it, and you would see the big strong body left in one place like a stone, or creeping and crawling like a young puppy. he would feel the discomfort of bodily needs without knowing what was the matter and without knowing how to provide for these needs. there is no immediate connection between the muscles of the stomach and those of the arms and legs to make him take a step towards food, or stretch a hand to seize it, even were he surrounded with it; and as his body would be full grown and his limbs well developed he would be without the perpetual restlessness and movement of childhood, so that he might die of hunger without stirring to seek food. however little you may have thought about the order and development of our knowledge, you cannot deny that such a one would be in the state of almost primitive ignorance and stupidity natural to man before he has learnt anything from experience or from his fellows. we know then, or we may know, the point of departure from which we each start towards the usual level of understanding; but who knows the other extreme? each progresses more or less according to his genius, his taste, his needs, his talents, his zeal, and his opportunities for using them. no philosopher, so far as i know, has dared to say to man, "thus far shalt thou go and no further." we know not what nature allows us to be, none of us has measured the possible difference between man and man. is there a mind so dead that this thought has never kindled it, that has never said in his pride, "how much have i already done, how much more may i achieve? why should i lag behind my fellows?" as i said before, man's education begins at birth; before he can speak or understand he is learning. experience precedes instruction; when he recognises his nurse he has learnt much. the knowledge of the most ignorant man would surprise us if we had followed his course from birth to the present time. if all human knowledge were divided into two parts, one common to all, the other peculiar to the learned, the latter would seem very small compared with the former. but we scarcely heed this general experience, because it is acquired before the age of reason. moreover, knowledge only attracts attention by its rarity, as in algebraic equations common factors count for nothing. even animals learn much. they have senses and must learn to use them; they have needs, they must learn to satisfy them; they must learn to eat, walk, or fly. quadrupeds which can stand on their feet from the first cannot walk for all that; from their first attempts it is clear that they lack confidence. canaries who escape from their cage are unable to fly, having never used their wings. living and feeling creatures are always learning. if plants could walk they would need senses and knowledge, else their species would die out. the child's first mental experiences are purely affective, he is only aware of pleasure and pain; it takes him a long time to acquire the definite sensations which show him things outside himself, but before these things present and withdraw themselves, so to speak, from his sight, taking size and shape for him, the recurrence of emotional experiences is beginning to subject the child to the rule of habit. you see his eyes constantly follow the light, and if the light comes from the side the eyes turn towards it, so that one must be careful to turn his head towards the light lest he should squint. he must also be accustomed from the first to the dark, or he will cry if he misses the light. food and sleep, too, exactly measured, become necessary at regular intervals, and soon desire is no longer the effect of need, but of habit, or rather habit adds a fresh need to those of nature. you must be on your guard against this. the only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that of having no habits; let him be carried on either arm, let him be accustomed to offer either hand, to use one or other indifferently; let him not want to eat, sleep, or do anything at fixed hours, nor be unable to be left alone by day or night. prepare the way for his control of his liberty and the use of his strength by leaving his body its natural habit, by making him capable of lasting self-control, of doing all that he wills when his will is formed. as soon as the child begins to take notice, what is shown him must be carefully chosen. the natural man is interested in all new things. he feels so feeble that he fears the unknown: the habit of seeing fresh things without ill effects destroys this fear. children brought up in clean houses where there are no spiders are afraid of spiders, and this fear often lasts through life. i never saw peasants, man, woman, or child, afraid of spiders. since the mere choice of things shown him may make the child timid or brave, why should not his education begin before he can speak or understand? i would have him accustomed to see fresh things, ugly, repulsive, and strange beasts, but little by little, and far off till he is used to them, and till having seen others handle them he handles them himself. if in childhood he sees toads, snakes, and crayfish, he will not be afraid of any animal when he is grown up. those who are continually seeing terrible things think nothing of them. all children are afraid of masks. i begin by showing emile a mask with a pleasant face, then some one puts this mask before his face; i begin to laugh, they all laugh too, and the child with them. by degrees i accustom him to less pleasing masks, and at last hideous ones. if i have arranged my stages skilfully, far from being afraid of the last mask, he will laugh at it as he did at the first. after that i am not afraid of people frightening him with masks. when hector bids farewell to andromache, the young astyanax, startled by the nodding plumes on the helmet, does not know his father; he flings himself weeping upon his nurse's bosom and wins from his mother a smile mingled with tears. what must be done to stay this terror? just what hector did; put the helmet on the ground and caress the child. in a calmer moment one would do more; one would go up to the helmet, play with the plumes, let the child feel them; at last the nurse would take the helmet and place it laughingly on her own head, if indeed a woman's hand dare touch the armour of hector. if emile must get used to the sound of a gun, i first fire a pistol with a small charge. he is delighted with this sudden flash, this sort of lightning; i repeat the process with more powder; gradually i add a small charge without a wad, then a larger; in the end i accustom him to the sound of a gun, to fireworks, cannon, and the most terrible explosions. i have observed that children are rarely afraid of thunder unless the peals are really terrible and actually hurt the ear, otherwise this fear only comes to them when they know that thunder sometimes hurts or kills. when reason begins to cause fear, let us reassure them. by slow and careful stages man and child learn to fear nothing. in the dawn of life, when memory and imagination have not begun to function, the child only attends to what affects its senses. his sense experiences are the raw material of thought; they should, therefore, be presented to him in fitting order, so that memory may at a future time present them in the same order to his understanding; but as he only attends to his sensations it is enough, at first, to show him clearly the connection between these sensations and the things which cause them. he wants to touch and handle everything; do not check these movements which teach him invaluable lessons. thus he learns to perceive the heat, cold, hardness, softness, weight, or lightness of bodies, to judge their size and shape and all their physical properties, by looking, feeling, [footnote: of all the senses that of smell is the latest to develop in children up to two or three years of age they appear to be insensible of pleasant or unpleasant odours; in this respect they are as indifferent or rather as insensible as many animals.] listening, and, above all, by comparing sight and touch, by judging with the eye what sensation they would cause to his hand. it is only by movement that we learn the difference between self and not self; it is only by our own movements that we gain the idea of space. the child has not this idea, so he stretches out his hand to seize the object within his reach or that which is a hundred paces from him. you take this as a sign of tyranny, an attempt to bid the thing draw near, or to bid you bring it. nothing of the kind, it is merely that the object first seen in his brain, then before his eyes, now seems close to his arms, and he has no idea of space beyond his reach. be careful, therefore, to take him about, to move him from place to place, and to let him perceive the change in his surroundings, so as to teach him to judge of distances. when he begins to perceive distances then you must change your plan, and only carry him when you please, not when he pleases; for as soon as he is no longer deceived by his senses, there is another motive for his effort. this change is remarkable and calls for explanation. the discomfort caused by real needs is shown by signs, when the help of others is required. hence the cries of children; they often cry; it must be so. since they are only conscious of feelings, when those feelings are pleasant they enjoy them in silence; when they are painful they say so in their own way and demand relief. now when they are awake they can scarcely be in a state of indifference, either they are asleep or else they are feeling something. all our languages are the result of art. it has long been a subject of inquiry whether there ever was a natural language common to all; no doubt there is, and it is the language of children before they begin to speak. this language is inarticulate, but it has tone, stress, and meaning. the use of our own language has led us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. let us study children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. it is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. to the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. the child uses, not its weak hands, but its face. the amount of expression in these undeveloped faces is extraordinary; their features change from one moment to another with incredible speed. you see smiles, desires, terror, come and go like lightning; every time the face seems different. the muscles of the face are undoubtedly more mobile than our own. on the other hand the eyes are almost expressionless. such must be the sort of signs they use at an age when their only needs are those of the body. grimaces are the sign of sensation, the glance expresses sentiment. as man's first state is one of want and weakness, his first sounds are cries and tears. the child feels his needs and cannot satisfy them, he begs for help by his cries. is he hungry or thirsty? there are tears; is he too cold or too hot? more tears; he needs movement and is kept quiet, more tears; he wants to sleep and is disturbed, he weeps. the less comfortable he is, the more he demands change. he has only one language because he has, so to say, only one kind of discomfort. in the imperfect state of his sense organs he does not distinguish their several impressions; all ills produce one feeling of sorrow. these tears, which you think so little worthy of your attention, give rise to the first relation between man and his environment; here is forged the first link in the long chain of social order. when the child cries he is uneasy, he feels some need which he cannot satisfy; you watch him, seek this need, find it, and satisfy it. if you can neither find it nor satisfy it, the tears continue and become tiresome. the child is petted to quiet him, he is rocked or sung to sleep; if he is obstinate, the nurse becomes impatient and threatens him; cruel nurses sometimes strike him. what strange lessons for him at his first entrance into life! i shall never forget seeing one of these troublesome crying children thus beaten by his nurse. he was silent at once. i thought he was frightened, and said to myself, "this will be a servile being from whom nothing can be got but by harshness." i was wrong, the poor wretch was choking with rage, he could not breathe, he was black in the face. a moment later there were bitter cries, every sign of the anger, rage, and despair of this age was in his tones. i thought he would die. had i doubted the innate sense of justice and injustice in man's heart, this one instance would have convinced me. i am sure that a drop of boiling liquid falling by chance on that child's hand would have hurt him less than that blow, slight in itself, but clearly given with the intention of hurting him. this tendency to anger, vexation, and rage needs great care. boerhaave thinks that most of the diseases of children are of the nature of convulsions, because the head being larger in proportion and the nervous system more extensive than in adults, they are more liable to nervous irritation. take the greatest care to remove from them any servants who tease, annoy, or vex them. they are a hundredfold more dangerous and more fatal than fresh air and changing seasons. when children only experience resistance in things and never in the will of man, they do not become rebellious or passionate, and their health is better. this is one reason why the children of the poor, who are freer and more independent, are generally less frail and weakly, more vigorous than those who are supposed to be better brought up by being constantly thwarted; but you must always remember that it is one thing to refrain from thwarting them, but quite another to obey them. the child's first tears are prayers, beware lest they become commands; he begins by asking for aid, he ends by demanding service. thus from his own weakness, the source of his first consciousness of dependence, springs the later idea of rule and tyranny; but as this idea is aroused rather by his needs than by our services, we begin to see moral results whose causes are not in nature; thus we see how important it is, even at the earliest age, to discern the secret meaning of the gesture or cry. when the child tries to seize something without speaking, he thinks he can reach the object, for he does not rightly judge its distance; when he cries and stretches out his hands he no longer misjudges the distance, he bids the object approach, or orders you to bring it to him. in the first case bring it to him slowly; in the second do not even seem to hear his cries. the more he cries the less you should heed him. he must learn in good time not to give commands to men, for he is not their master, nor to things, for they cannot hear him. thus when the child wants something you mean to give him, it is better to carry him to it rather than to bring the thing to him. from this he will draw a conclusion suited to his age, and there is no other way of suggesting it to him. the abbe saint-pierre calls men big children; one might also call children little men. these statements are true, but they require explanation. but when hobbes calls the wicked a strong child, his statement is contradicted by facts. all wickedness comes from weakness. the child is only naughty because he is weak; make him strong and he will be good; if we could do everything we should never do wrong. of all the attributes of the almighty, goodness is that which it would be hardest to dissociate from our conception of him. all nations who have acknowledged a good and an evil power, have always regarded the evil as inferior to the good; otherwise their opinion would have been absurd. compare this with the creed of the savoyard clergyman later on in this book. reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. therefore conscience, which makes us love the one and hate the other, though it is independent of reason, cannot develop without it. before the age of reason we do good or ill without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions, although there is sometimes in our feeling with regard to other people's actions in relation to ourselves. a child wants to overturn everything he sees. he breaks and smashes everything he can reach; he seizes a bird as he seizes a stone, and strangles it without knowing what he is about. why so? in the first place philosophy will account for this by inbred sin, man's pride, love of power, selfishness, spite; perhaps it will say in addition to this that the child's consciousness of his own weakness makes him eager to use his strength, to convince himself of it. but watch that broken down old man reduced in the downward course of life to the weakness of a child; not only is he quiet and peaceful, he would have all about him quiet and peaceful too; the least change disturbs and troubles him, he would like to see universal calm. how is it possible that similar feebleness and similar passions should produce such different effects in age and in infancy, if the original cause were not different? and where can we find this difference in cause except in the bodily condition of the two. the active principle, common to both, is growing in one case and declining in the other; it is being formed in the one and destroyed in the other; one is moving towards life, the other towards death. the failing activity of the old man is centred in his heart, the child's overflowing activity spreads abroad. he feels, if we may say so, strong enough to give life to all about him. to make or to destroy, it is all one to him; change is what he seeks, and all change involves action. if he seems to enjoy destructive activity it is only that it takes time to make things and very little time to break them, so that the work of destruction accords better with his eagerness. while the author of nature has given children this activity, he takes care that it shall do little harm by giving them small power to use it. but as soon as they can think of people as tools to be used, they use them to carry out their wishes and to supplement their own weakness. this is how they become tiresome, masterful, imperious, naughty, and unmanageable; a development which does not spring from a natural love of power, but one which has been taught them, for it does not need much experience to realise how pleasant it is to set others to work and to move the world by a word. as the child grows it gains strength and becomes less restless and unquiet and more independent. soul and body become better balanced and nature no longer asks for more movement than is required for self-preservation. but the love of power does not die with the need that aroused it; power arouses and flatters self-love, and habit strengthens it; thus caprice follows upon need, and the first seeds of prejudice and obstinacy are sown. first maxim.--far from being too strong, children are not strong enough for all the claims of nature. give them full use of such strength as they have; they will not abuse it. second maxim.--help them and supply the experience and strength they lack whenever the need is of the body. third maxim.--in the help you give them confine yourself to what is really needful, without granting anything to caprice or unreason; for they will not be tormented by caprice if you do not call it into existence, seeing it is no part of nature. fourth maxim--study carefully their speech and gestures, so that at an age when they are incapable of deceit you may discriminate between those desires which come from nature and those which spring from perversity. the spirit of these rules is to give children more real liberty and less power, to let them do more for themselves and demand less of others; so that by teaching them from the first to confine their wishes within the limits of their powers they will scarcely feel the want of whatever is not in their power. this is another very important reason for leaving children's limbs and bodies perfectly free, only taking care that they do not fall, and keeping anything that might hurt them out of their way. the child whose body and arms are free will certainly cry much less than a child tied up in swaddling clothes. he who knows only bodily needs, only cries when in pain; and this is a great advantage, for then we know exactly when he needs help, and if possible we should not delay our help for an instant. but if you cannot relieve his pain, stay where you are and do not flatter him by way of soothing him; your caresses will not cure his colic, but he will remember what he must do to win them; and if he once finds out how to gain your attention at will, he is your master; the whole education is spoilt. their movements being less constrained, children will cry less; less wearied with their tears, people will not take so much trouble to check them. with fewer threats and promises, they will be less timid and less obstinate, and will remain more nearly in their natural state. ruptures are produced less by letting children cry than by the means taken to stop them, and my evidence for this is the fact that the most neglected children are less liable to them than others. i am very far from wishing that they should be neglected; on the contrary, it is of the utmost importance that their wants should be anticipated, so that they need not proclaim their wants by crying. but neither would i have unwise care bestowed on them. why should they think it wrong to cry when they find they can get so much by it? when they have learned the value of their silence they take good care not to waste it. in the end they will so exaggerate its importance that no one will be able to pay its price; then worn out with crying they become exhausted, and are at length silent. prolonged crying on the part of a child neither swaddled nor out of health, a child who lacks nothing, is merely the result of habit or obstinacy. such tears are no longer the work of nature, but the work of the child's nurse, who could not resist its importunity and so has increased it, without considering that while she quiets the child to-day she is teaching him to cry louder to-morrow. moreover, when caprice or obstinacy is the cause of their tears, there is a sure way of stopping them by distracting their attention by some pleasant or conspicuous object which makes them forget that they want to cry. most nurses excel in this art, and rightly used it is very useful; but it is of the utmost importance that the child should not perceive that you mean to distract his attention, and that he should be amused without suspecting you are thinking about him; now this is what most nurses cannot do. most children are weaned too soon. the time to wean them is when they cut their teeth. this generally causes pain and suffering. at this time the child instinctively carries everything he gets hold of to his mouth to chew it. to help forward this process he is given as a plaything some hard object such as ivory or a wolf's tooth. i think this is a mistake. hard bodies applied to the gums do not soften them; far from it, they make the process of cutting the teeth more difficult and painful. let us always take instinct as our guide; we never see puppies practising their budding teeth on pebbles, iron, or bones, but on wood, leather, rags, soft materials which yield to their jaws, and on which the tooth leaves its mark. we can do nothing simply, not even for our children. toys of silver, gold, coral, cut crystal, rattles of every price and kind; what vain and useless appliances. away with them all! let us have no corals or rattles; a small branch of a tree with its leaves and fruit, a stick of liquorice which he may suck and chew, will amuse him as well as these splendid trifles, and they will have this advantage at least, he will not be brought up to luxury from his birth. it is admitted that pap is not a very wholesome food. boiled milk and uncooked flour cause gravel and do not suit the stomach. in pap the flour is less thoroughly cooked than in bread and it has not fermented. i think bread and milk or rice-cream are better. if you will have pap, the flour should be lightly cooked beforehand. in my own country they make a very pleasant and wholesome soup from flour thus heated. meat-broth or soup is not a very suitable food and should be used as little as possible. the child must first get used to chewing his food; this is the right way to bring the teeth through, and when the child begins to swallow, the saliva mixed with the food helps digestion. i would have them first chew dried fruit or crusts. i should give them as playthings little bits of dry bread or biscuits, like the piedmont bread, known in the country as "grisses." by dint of softening this bread in the mouth some of it is eventually swallowed the teeth come through of themselves, and the child is weaned almost imperceptibly. peasants have usually very good digestions, and they are weaned with no more ado. from the very first children hear spoken language; we speak to them before they can understand or even imitate spoken sounds. the vocal organs are still stiff, and only gradually lend themselves to the reproduction of the sounds heard; it is even doubtful whether these sounds are heard distinctly as we hear them. the nurse may amuse the child with songs and with very merry and varied intonation, but i object to her bewildering the child with a multitude of vain words of which it understands nothing but her tone of voice. i would have the first words he hears few in number, distinctly and often repeated, while the words themselves should be related to things which can first be shown to the child. that fatal facility in the use of words we do not understand begins earlier than we think. in the schoolroom the scholar listens to the verbiage of his master as he listened in the cradle to the babble of his nurse. i think it would be a very useful education to leave him in ignorance of both. all sorts of ideas crowd in upon us when we try to consider the development of speech and the child's first words. whatever we do they all learn to talk in the same way, and all philosophical speculations are utterly useless. to begin with, they have, so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only objectionable because of their harshness or because they are not recognised by custom. i have just heard a child severely scolded by his father for saying, "mon pere, irai-je-t-y?" now we see that this child was following the analogy more closely than our grammarians, for as they say to him, "vas-y," why should he not say, "irai-je-t-y?" notice too the skilful way in which he avoids the hiatus in irai-je-y or y-irai-je? is it the poor child's fault that we have so unskilfully deprived the phrase of this determinative adverb "y," because we did not know what to do with it? it is an intolerable piece of pedantry and most superfluous attention to detail to make a point of correcting all children's little sins against the customary expression, for they always cure themselves with time. always speak correctly before them, let them never be so happy with any one as with you, and be sure that their speech will be imperceptibly modelled upon yours without any correction on your part. but a much greater evil, and one far less easy to guard against, is that they are urged to speak too much, as if people were afraid they would not learn to talk of themselves. this indiscreet zeal produces an effect directly opposite to what is meant. they speak later and more confusedly; the extreme attention paid to everything they say makes it unnecessary for them to speak distinctly, and as they will scarcely open their mouths, many of them contract a vicious pronunciation and a confused speech, which last all their life and make them almost unintelligible. i have lived much among peasants, and i never knew one of them lisp, man or woman, boy or girl. why is this? are their speech organs differently made from our own? no, but they are differently used. there is a hillock facing my window on which the children of the place assemble for their games. although they are far enough away, i can distinguish perfectly what they say, and often get good notes for this book. every day my ear deceives me as to their age. i hear the voices of children of ten; i look and see the height and features of children of three or four. this experience is not confined to me; the townspeople who come to see me, and whom i consult on this point, all fall into the same mistake. this results from the fact that, up to five or six, children in town, brought up in a room and under the care of a nursery governess, do not need to speak above a whisper to make themselves heard. as soon as their lips move people take pains to make out what they mean; they are taught words which they repeat inaccurately, and by paying great attention to them the people who are always with them rather guess what they meant to say than what they said. it is quite a different matter in the country. a peasant woman is not always with her child; he is obliged to learn to say very clearly and loudly what he wants, if he is to make himself understood. children scattered about the fields at a distance from their fathers, mothers and other children, gain practice in making themselves heard at a distance, and in adapting the loudness of the voice to the distance which separates them from those to whom they want to speak. this is the real way to learn pronunciation, not by stammering out a few vowels into the ear of an attentive governess. so when you question a peasant child, he may be too shy to answer, but what he says he says distinctly, while the nurse must serve as interpreter for the town child; without her one can understand nothing of what he is muttering between his teeth. [footnote: there are exceptions to this; and often those children who at first are most difficult to hear, become the noisiest when they begin to raise their voices. but if i were to enter into all these details i should never make an end; every sensible reader ought to see that defect and excess, caused by the same abuse, are both corrected by my method. i regard the two maxims as inseparable--always enough--never too much. when the first is well established, the latter necessarily follows on it.] as they grow older, the boys are supposed to be cured of this fault at college, the girls in the convent schools; and indeed both usually speak more clearly than children brought up entirely at home. but they are prevented from acquiring as clear a pronunciation as the peasants in this way--they are required to learn all sorts of things by heart, and to repeat aloud what they have learnt; for when they are studying they get into the way of gabbling and pronouncing carelessly and ill; it is still worse when they repeat their lessons; they cannot find the right words, they drag out their syllables. this is only possible when the memory hesitates, the tongue does not stammer of itself. thus they acquire or continue habits of bad pronunciation. later on you will see that emile does not acquire such habits or at least not from this cause. i grant you uneducated people and villagers often fall into the opposite extreme. they almost always speak too loud; their pronunciation is too exact, and leads to rough and coarse articulation; their accent is too pronounced, they choose their expressions badly, etc. but, to begin with, this extreme strikes me as much less dangerous than the other, for the first law of speech is to make oneself understood, and the chief fault is to fail to be understood. to pride ourselves on having no accent is to pride ourselves on ridding our phrases of strength and elegance. emphasis is the soul of speech, it gives it its feeling and truth. emphasis deceives less than words; perhaps that is why well-educated people are so afraid of it. from the custom of saying everything in the same tone has arisen that of poking fun at people without their knowing it. when emphasis is proscribed, its place is taken by all sorts of ridiculous, affected, and ephemeral pronunciations, such as one observes especially among the young people about court. it is this affectation of speech and manner which makes frenchmen disagreeable and repulsive to other nations on first acquaintance. emphasis is found, not in their speech, but in their bearing. that is not the way to make themselves attractive. all these little faults of speech, which you are so afraid the children will acquire, are mere trifles; they may be prevented or corrected with the greatest ease, but the faults which are taught them when you make them speak in a low, indistinct, and timid voice, when you are always criticising their tone and finding fault with their words, are never cured. a man who has only learnt to speak in society of fine ladies could not make himself heard at the head of his troops, and would make little impression on the rabble in a riot. first teach the child to speak to men; he will be able to speak to the women when required. brought up in all the rustic simplicity of the country, your children will gain a more sonorous voice; they will not acquire the hesitating stammer of town children, neither will they acquire the expressions nor the tone of the villagers, or if they do they will easily lose them; their master being with them from their earliest years, and more and more in their society the older they grow, will be able to prevent or efface by speaking correctly himself the impression of the peasants' talk. emile will speak the purest french i know, but he will speak it more distinctly and with a better articulation than myself. the child who is trying to speak should hear nothing but words he can understand, nor should he say words he cannot articulate; his efforts lead him to repeat the same syllable as if he were practising its clear pronunciation. when he begins to stammer, do not try to understand him. to expect to be always listened to is a form of tyranny which is not good for the child. see carefully to his real needs, and let him try to make you understand the rest. still less should you hurry him into speech; he will learn to talk when he feels the want of it. it has indeed been remarked that those who begin to speak very late never speak so distinctly as others; but it is not because they talked late that they are hesitating; on the contrary, they began to talk late because they hesitate; if not, why did they begin to talk so late? have they less need of speech, have they been less urged to it? on the contrary, the anxiety aroused with the first suspicion of this backwardness leads people to tease them much more to begin to talk than those who articulated earlier; and this mistaken zeal may do much to make their speech confused, when with less haste they might have had time to bring it to greater perfection. children who are forced to speak too soon have no time to learn either to pronounce correctly or to understand what they are made to say; while left to themselves they first practise the easiest syllables, and then, adding to them little by little some meaning which their gestures explain, they teach you their own words before they learn yours. by this means they do not acquire your words till they have understood them. being in no hurry to use them, they begin by carefully observing the sense in which you use them, and when they are sure of them they adopt them. the worst evil resulting from the precocious use of speech by young children is that we not only fail to understand the first words they use, we misunderstand them without knowing it; so that while they seem to answer us correctly, they fail to understand us and we them. this is the most frequent cause of our surprise at children's sayings; we attribute to them ideas which they did not attach to their words. this lack of attention on our part to the real meaning which words have for children seems to me the cause of their earliest misconceptions; and these misconceptions, even when corrected, colour their whole course of thought for the rest of their life. i shall have several opportunities of illustrating these by examples later on. let the child's vocabulary, therefore, be limited; it is very undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he should be able to say more than he thinks. one of the reasons why peasants are generally shrewder than townsfolk is, i think, that their vocabulary is smaller. they have few ideas, but those few are thoroughly grasped. the infant is progressing in several ways at once; he is learning to talk, eat, and walk about the same time. this is really the first phase of his life. up till now, he was little more than he was before birth; he had neither feeling nor thought, he was barely capable of sensation; he was unconscious of his own existence. "vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae."--ovid. book ii we have now reached the second phase of life; infancy, strictly so-called, is over; for the words infans and puer are not synonymous. the latter includes the former, which means literally "one who cannot speak;" thus valerius speaks of puerum infantem. but i shall continue to use the word child (french enfant) according to the custom of our language till an age for which there is another term. when children begin to talk they cry less. this progress is quite natural; one language supplants another. as soon as they can say "it hurts me," why should they cry, unless the pain is too sharp for words? if they still cry, those about them are to blame. when once emile has said, "it hurts me," it will take a very sharp pain to make him cry. if the child is delicate and sensitive, if by nature he begins to cry for nothing, i let him cry in vain and soon check his tears at their source. so long as he cries i will not go near him; i come at once when he leaves off crying. he will soon be quiet when he wants to call me, or rather he will utter a single cry. children learn the meaning of signs by their effects; they have no other meaning for them. however much a child hurts himself when he is alone, he rarely cries, unless he expects to be heard. should he fall or bump his head, or make his nose bleed, or cut his fingers, i shall show no alarm, nor shall i make any fuss over him; i shall take no notice, at any rate at first. the harm is done; he must bear it; all my zeal could only frighten him more and make him more nervous. indeed it is not the blow but the fear of it which distresses us when we are hurt. i shall spare him this suffering at least, for he will certainly regard the injury as he sees me regard it; if he finds that i hasten anxiously to him, if i pity him or comfort him, he will think he is badly hurt. if he finds i take no notice, he will soon recover himself, and will think the wound is healed when it ceases to hurt. this is the time for his first lesson in courage, and by bearing slight ills without fear we gradually learn to bear greater. i shall not take pains to prevent emile hurting himself; far from it, i should be vexed if he never hurt himself, if he grew up unacquainted with pain. to bear pain is his first and most useful lesson. it seems as if children were small and weak on purpose to teach them these valuable lessons without danger. the child has such a little way to fall he will not break his leg; if he knocks himself with a stick he will not break his arm; if he seizes a sharp knife he will not grasp it tight enough to make a deep wound. so far as i know, no child, left to himself, has ever been known to kill or maim itself, or even to do itself any serious harm, unless it has been foolishly left on a high place, or alone near the fire, or within reach of dangerous weapons. what is there to be said for all the paraphernalia with which the child is surrounded to shield him on every side so that he grows up at the mercy of pain, with neither courage nor experience, so that he thinks he is killed by a pin-prick and faints at the sight of blood? with our foolish and pedantic methods we are always preventing children from learning what they could learn much better by themselves, while we neglect what we alone can teach them. can anything be sillier than the pains taken to teach them to walk, as if there were any one who was unable to walk when he grows up through his nurse's neglect? how many we see walking badly all their life because they were ill taught? emile shall have no head-pads, no go-carts, no leading-strings; or at least as soon as he can put one foot before another he shall only be supported along pavements, and he shall be taken quickly across them. [footnote: there is nothing so absurd and hesitating as the gait of those who have been kept too long in leading-strings when they were little. this is one of the observations which are considered trivial because they are true.] instead of keeping him mewed up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow every day; let him run about, let him struggle and fall again and again, the oftener the better; he will learn all the sooner to pick himself up. the delights of liberty will make up for many bruises. my pupil will hurt himself oftener than yours, but he will always be merry; your pupils may receive fewer injuries, but they are always thwarted, constrained, and sad. i doubt whether they are any better off. as their strength increases, children have also less need for tears. they can do more for themselves, they need the help of others less frequently. with strength comes the sense to use it. it is with this second phase that the real personal life has its beginning; it is then that the child becomes conscious of himself. during every moment of his life memory calls up the feeling of self; he becomes really one person, always the same, and therefore capable of joy or sorrow. hence we must begin to consider him as a moral being. although we know approximately the limits of human life and our chances of attaining those limits, nothing is more uncertain than the length of the life of any one of us. very few reach old age. the chief risks occur at the beginning of life; the shorter our past life, the less we must hope to live. of all the children who are born scarcely one half reach adolescence, and it is very likely your pupil will not live to be a man. what is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy? even if i considered that education wise in its aims, how could i view without indignation those poor wretches subjected to an intolerable slavery and condemned like galley-slaves to endless toil, with no certainty that they will gain anything by it? the age of harmless mirth is spent in tears, punishments, threats, and slavery. you torment the poor thing for his good; you fail to see that you are calling death to snatch him from these gloomy surroundings. who can say how many children fall victims to the excessive care of their fathers and mothers? they are happy to escape from this cruelty; this is all that they gain from the ills they are forced to endure: they die without regretting, having known nothing of life but its sorrows. men, be kind to your fellow-men; this is your first duty, kind to every age and station, kind to all that is not foreign to humanity. what wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace? why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they cannot abuse? why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you? fathers, can you tell when death will call your children to him? do not lay up sorrow for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has allotted to them. as soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, go that whenever god calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life. how people will cry out against me! i hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without a pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other. now is the time, you say, to correct his evil tendencies; we must increase suffering in childhood, when it is less keenly felt, to lessen it in manhood. but how do you know that you can carry out all these fine schemes; how do you know that all this fine teaching with which you overwhelm the feeble mind of the child will not do him more harm than good in the future? how do you know that you can spare him anything by the vexations you heap upon him now? why inflict on him more ills than befit his present condition unless you are quite sure that these present ills will save him future ill? and what proof can you give me that those evil tendencies you profess to cure are not the result of your foolish precautions rather than of nature? what a poor sort of foresight, to make a child wretched in the present with the more or less doubtful hope of making him happy at some future day. if such blundering thinkers fail to distinguish between liberty and licence, between a merry child and a spoilt darling, let them learn to discriminate. let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. give each his place, and keep him there. control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. the rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control. absolute good and evil are unknown to us. in this life they are blended together; we never enjoy any perfectly pure feeling, nor do we remain for more than a moment in the same state. the feelings of our minds, like the changes in our bodies, are in a continual flux. good and ill are common to all, but in varying proportions. the happiest is he who suffers least; the most miserable is he who enjoys least. ever more sorrow than joy--this is the lot of all of us. man's happiness in this world is but a negative state; it must be reckoned by the fewness of his ills. every feeling of hardship is inseparable from the desire to escape from it; every idea of pleasure from the desire to enjoy it. all desire implies a want, and all wants are painful; hence our wretchedness consists in the disproportion between our desires and our powers. a conscious being whose powers were equal to his desires would be perfectly happy. what then is human wisdom? where is the path of true happiness? the mere limitation of our desires is not enough, for if they were less than our powers, part of our faculties would be idle, and we should not enjoy our whole being; neither is the mere extension of our powers enough, for if our desires were also increased we should only be the more miserable. true happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers, in establishing a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will. then only, when all its forces are employed, will the soul be at rest and man will find himself in his true position. in this condition, nature, who does everything for the best, has placed him from the first. to begin with, she gives him only such desires as are necessary for self-preservation and such powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction. all the rest she has stored in his mind as a sort of reserve, to be drawn upon at need. it is only in this primitive condition that we find the equilibrium between desire and power, and then alone man is not unhappy. as soon as his potential powers of mind begin to function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes, and precedes all the rest. it is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us, whether for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying them. but the object which seemed within our grasp flies quicker than we can follow; when we think we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead of us. we no longer perceive the country we have traversed, and we think nothing of it; that which lies before us becomes vaster and stretches still before us. thus we exhaust our strength, yet never reach our goal, and the nearer we are to pleasure, the further we are from happiness. on the other hand, the more nearly a man's condition approximates to this state of nature the less difference is there between his desires and his powers, and happiness is therefore less remote. lacking everything, he is never less miserable; for misery consists, not in the lack of things, but in the needs which they inspire. the world of reality has its bounds, the world of imagination is boundless; as we cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other; for all the sufferings which really make us miserable arise from the difference between the real and the imaginary. health, strength, and a good conscience excepted, all the good things of life are a matter of opinion; except bodily suffering and remorse, all our woes are imaginary. you will tell me this is a commonplace; i admit it, but its practical application is no commonplace, and it is with practice only that we are now concerned. what do you mean when you say, "man is weak"? the term weak implies a relation, a relation of the creature to whom it is applied. an insect or a worm whose strength exceeds its needs is strong; an elephant, a lion, a conqueror, a hero, a god himself, whose needs exceed his strength is weak. the rebellious angel who fought against his own nature was weaker than the happy mortal who is living at peace according to nature. when man is content to be himself he is strong indeed; when he strives to be more than man he is weak indeed. but do not imagine that you can increase your strength by increasing your powers. not so; if your pride increases more rapidly your strength is diminished. let us measure the extent of our sphere and remain in its centre like the spider in its web; we shall have strength sufficient for our needs, we shall have no cause to lament our weakness, for we shall never be aware of it. the other animals possess only such powers as are required for self-preservation; man alone has more. is it not very strange that this superfluity should make him miserable? in every land a man's labour yields more than a bare living. if he were wise enough to disregard this surplus he would always have enough, for he would never have too much. "great needs," said favorin, "spring from great wealth; and often the best way of getting what we want is to get rid of what we have." by striving to increase our happiness we change it into wretchedness. if a man were content to live, he would live happy; and he would therefore be good, for what would he have to gain by vice? if we were immortal we should all be miserable; no doubt it is hard to die, but it is sweet to think that we shall not live for ever, and that a better life will put an end to the sorrows of this world. if we had the offer of immortality here below, who would accept the sorrowful gift? [footnote: you understand i am speaking of those who think, and not of the crowd.] what resources, what hopes, what consolation would be left against the cruelties of fate and man's injustice? the ignorant man never looks before; he knows little of the value of life and does not fear to lose it; the wise man sees things of greater worth and prefers them to it. half knowledge and sham wisdom set us thinking about death and what lies beyond it; and they thus create the worst of our ills. the wise man bears life's ills all the better because he knows he must die. life would be too dearly bought did we not know that sooner or later death will end it. our moral ills are the result of prejudice, crime alone excepted, and that depends on ourselves; our bodily ills either put an end to themselves or to us. time or death will cure them, but the less we know how to bear it, the greater is our pain, and we suffer more in our efforts to cure our diseases than if we endured them. live according to nature; be patient, get rid of the doctors; you will not escape death, but you will only die once, while the doctors make you die daily through your diseased imagination; their lying art, instead of prolonging your days, robs you of all delight in them. i am always asking what real good this art has done to mankind. true, the doctors cure some who would have died, but they kill millions who would have lived. if you are wise you will decline to take part in this lottery when the odds are so great against you. suffer, die, or get better; but whatever you do, live while you are alive. human institutions are one mass of folly and contradiction. as our life loses its value we set a higher price upon it. the old regret life more than the young; they do not want to lose all they have spent in preparing for its enjoyment. at sixty it is cruel to die when one has not begun to live. man is credited with a strong desire for self-preservation, and this desire exists; but we fail to perceive that this desire, as felt by us, is largely the work of man. in a natural state man is only eager to preserve his life while he has the means for its preservation; when self-preservation is no longer possible, he resigns himself to his fate and dies without vain torments. nature teaches us the first law of resignation. savages, like wild beasts, make very little struggle against death, and meet it almost without a murmur. when this natural law is overthrown reason establishes another, but few discern it, and man's resignation is never so complete as nature's. prudence! prudence which is ever bidding us look forward into the future, a future which in many cases we shall never reach; here is the real source of all our troubles! how mad it is for so short-lived a creature as man to look forward into a future to which he rarely attains, while he neglects the present which is his? this madness is all the more fatal since it increases with years, and the old, always timid, prudent, and miserly, prefer to do without necessaries to-day that they may have luxuries at a hundred. thus we grasp everything, we cling to everything; we are anxious about time, place, people, things, all that is and will be; we ourselves are but the least part of ourselves. we spread ourselves, so to speak, over the whole world, and all this vast expanse becomes sensitive. no wonder our woes increase when we may be wounded on every side. how many princes make themselves miserable for the loss of lands they never saw, and how many merchants lament in paris over some misfortune in the indies! is it nature that carries men so far from their real selves? is it her will that each should learn his fate from others and even be the last to learn it; so that a man dies happy or miserable before he knows what he is about. there is a healthy, cheerful, strong, and vigorous man; it does me good to see him; his eyes tell of content and well-being; he is the picture of happiness. a letter comes by post; the happy man glances at it, it is addressed to him, he opens it and reads it. in a moment he is changed, he turns pale and falls into a swoon. when he comes to himself he weeps, laments, and groans, he tears his hair, and his shrieks re-echo through the air. you would say he was in convulsions. fool, what harm has this bit of paper done you? what limb has it torn away? what crime has it made you commit? what change has it wrought in you to reduce you to this state of misery? had the letter miscarried, had some kindly hand thrown it into the fire, it strikes me that the fate of this mortal, at once happy and unhappy, would have offered us a strange problem. his misfortunes, you say, were real enough. granted; but he did not feel them. what of that? his happiness was imaginary. i admit it; health, wealth, a contented spirit, are mere dreams. we no longer live in our own place, we live outside it. what does it profit us to live in such fear of death, when all that makes life worth living is our own? oh, man! live your own life and you will no longer be wretched. keep to your appointed place in the order of nature and nothing can tear you from it. do not kick against the stern law of necessity, nor waste in vain resistance the strength bestowed on you by heaven, not to prolong or extend your existence, but to preserve it so far and so long as heaven pleases. your freedom and your power extend as far and no further than your natural strength; anything more is but slavery, deceit, and trickery. power itself is servile when it depends upon public opinion; for you are dependent on the prejudices of others when you rule them by means of those prejudices. to lead them as you will, they must be led as they will. they have only to change their way of thinking and you are forced to change your course of action. those who approach you need only contrive to sway the opinions of those you rule, or of the favourite by whom you are ruled, or those of your own family or theirs. had you the genius of themistocles, [footnote: "you see that little boy," said themistocles to his friends, "the fate of greece is in his hands, for he rules his mother and his mother rules me, i rule the athenians and the athenians rule the greeks." what petty creatures we should often find controlling great empires if we traced the course of power from the prince to those who secretly put that power in motion.] viziers, courtiers, priests, soldiers, servants, babblers, the very children themselves, would lead you like a child in the midst of your legions. whatever you do, your actual authority can never extend beyond your own powers. as soon as you are obliged to see with another's eyes you must will what he wills. you say with pride, "my people are my subjects." granted, but what are you? the subject of your ministers. and your ministers, what are they? the subjects of their clerks, their mistresses, the servants of their servants. grasp all, usurp all, and then pour out your silver with both hands; set up your batteries, raise the gallows and the wheel; make laws, issue proclamations, multiply your spies, your soldiers, your hangmen, your prisons, and your chains. poor little men, what good does it do you? you will be no better served, you will be none the less robbed and deceived, you will be no nearer absolute power. you will say continually, "it is our will," and you will continually do the will of others. there is only one man who gets his own way--he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. that man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. this is my fundamental maxim. apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. this is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. if a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, i take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others. i have already given the reason for this state of weakness. parental affection is nature's provision against it; but parental affection may be carried to excess, it may be wanting, or it may be ill applied. parents who live under our ordinary social conditions bring their child into these conditions too soon. by increasing his needs they do not relieve his weakness; they rather increase it. they further increase it by demanding of him what nature does not demand, by subjecting to their will what little strength he has to further his own wishes, by making slaves of themselves or of him instead of recognising that mutual dependence which should result from his weakness or their affection. the wise man can keep his own place; but the child who does not know what his place is, is unable to keep it. there are a thousand ways out of it, and it is the business of those who have charge of the child to keep him in his place, and this is no easy task. he should be neither beast nor man, but a child. he must feel his weakness, but not suffer through it; he must be dependent, but he must not obey; he must ask, not command. he is only subject to others because of his needs, and because they see better than he what he really needs, what may help or hinder his existence. no one, not even his father, has the right to bid the child do what is of no use to him. when our natural tendencies have not been interfered with by human prejudice and human institutions, the happiness alike of children and of men consists in the enjoyment of their liberty. but the child's liberty is restricted by his lack of strength. he who does as he likes is happy provided he is self-sufficing; it is so with the man who is living in a state of nature. he who does what he likes is not happy if his desires exceed his strength; it is so with a child in like conditions. even in a state of nature children only enjoy an imperfect liberty, like that enjoyed by men in social life. each of us, unable to dispense with the help of others, becomes so far weak and wretched. we were meant to be men, laws and customs thrust us back into infancy. the rich and great, the very kings themselves are but children; they see that we are ready to relieve their misery; this makes them childishly vain, and they are quite proud of the care bestowed on them, a care which they would never get if they were grown men. these are weighty considerations, and they provide a solution for all the conflicting problems of our social system. there are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which is the work of nature; and dependence on men, which is the work of society. dependence on things, being non-moral, does no injury to liberty and begets no vices; dependence on men, being out of order, [footnote: in my principles of political law it is proved that no private will can be ordered in the social system.] gives rise to every kind of vice, and through this master and slave become mutually depraved. if there is any cure for this social evil, it is to be found in the substitution of law for the individual; in arming the general will with a real strength beyond the power of any individual will. if the laws of nations, like the laws of nature, could never be broken by any human power, dependence on men would become dependence on things; all the advantages of a state of nature would be combined with all the advantages of social life in the commonwealth. the liberty which preserves a man from vice would be united with the morality which raises him to virtue. keep the child dependent on things only. by this course of education you will have followed the order of nature. let his unreasonable wishes meet with physical obstacles only, or the punishment which results from his own actions, lessons which will be recalled when the same circumstances occur again. it is enough to prevent him from wrong doing without forbidding him to do wrong. experience or lack of power should take the place of law. give him, not what he wants, but what he needs. let there be no question of obedience for him or tyranny for you. supply the strength he lacks just so far as is required for freedom, not for power, so that he may receive your services with a sort of shame, and look forward to the time when he may dispense with them and may achieve the honour of self-help. nature provides for the child's growth in her own fashion, and this should never be thwarted. do not make him sit still when he wants to run about, nor run when he wants to be quiet. if we did not spoil our children's wills by our blunders their desires would be free from caprice. let them run, jump, and shout to their heart's content. all their own activities are instincts of the body for its growth in strength; but you should regard with suspicion those wishes which they cannot carry out for themselves, those which others must carry out for them. then you must distinguish carefully between natural and artificial needs, between the needs of budding caprice and the needs which spring from the overflowing life just described. i have already told you what you ought to do when a child cries for this thing or that. i will only add that as soon as he has words to ask for what he wants and accompanies his demands with tears, either to get his own way quicker or to over-ride a refusal, he should never have his way. if his words were prompted by a real need you should recognise it and satisfy it at once; but to yield to his tears is to encourage him to cry, to teach him to doubt your kindness, and to think that you are influenced more by his importunity than your own good-will. if he does not think you kind he will soon think you unkind; if he thinks you weak he will soon become obstinate; what you mean to give must be given at once. be chary of refusing, but, having refused, do not change your mind. above all, beware of teaching the child empty phrases of politeness, which serve as spells to subdue those around him to his will, and to get him what he wants at once. the artificial education of the rich never fails to make them politely imperious, by teaching them the words to use so that no one will dare to resist them. their children have neither the tone nor the manner of suppliants; they are as haughty or even more haughty in their entreaties than in their commands, as though they were more certain to be obeyed. you see at once that "if you please" means "it pleases me," and "i beg" means "i command." what a fine sort of politeness which only succeeds in changing the meaning of words so that every word is a command! for my own part, i would rather emile were rude than haughty, that he should say "do this" as a request, rather than "please" as a command. what concerns me is his meaning, not his words. there is such a thing as excessive severity as well as excessive indulgence, and both alike should be avoided. if you let children suffer you risk their health and life; you make them miserable now; if you take too much pains to spare them every kind of uneasiness you are laying up much misery for them in the future; you are making them delicate and over-sensitive; you are taking them out of their place among men, a place to which they must sooner or later return, in spite of all your pains. you will say i am falling into the same mistake as those bad fathers whom i blamed for sacrificing the present happiness of their children to a future which may never be theirs. not so; for the liberty i give my pupil makes up for the slight hardships to which he is exposed. i see little fellows playing in the snow, stiff and blue with cold, scarcely able to stir a finger. they could go and warm themselves if they chose, but they do not choose; if you forced them to come in they would feel the harshness of constraint a hundredfold more than the sharpness of the cold. then what becomes of your grievance? shall i make your child miserable by exposing him to hardships which he is perfectly ready to endure? i secure his present good by leaving him his freedom, and his future good by arming him against the evils he will have to bear. if he had his choice, would he hesitate for a moment between you and me? do you think any man can find true happiness elsewhere than in his natural state; and when you try to spare him all suffering, are you not taking him out of his natural state? indeed i maintain that to enjoy great happiness he must experience slight ills; such is his nature. too much bodily prosperity corrupts the morals. a man who knew nothing of suffering would be incapable of tenderness towards his fellow-creatures and ignorant of the joys of pity; he would be hard-hearted, unsocial, a very monster among men. do you know the surest way to make your child miserable? let him have everything he wants; for as his wants increase in proportion to the ease with which they are satisfied, you will be compelled, sooner or later, to refuse his demands, and this unlooked-for refusal will hurt him more than the lack of what he wants. he will want your stick first, then your watch, the bird that flies, or the star that shines above him. he will want all he sets eyes on, and unless you were god himself, how could you satisfy him? man naturally considers all that he can get as his own. in this sense hobbes' theory is true to a certain extent: multiply both our wishes and the means of satisfying them, and each will be master of all. thus the child, who has only to ask and have, thinks himself the master of the universe; he considers all men as his slaves; and when you are at last compelled to refuse, he takes your refusal as an act of rebellion, for he thinks he has only to command. all the reasons you give him, while he is still too young to reason, are so many pretences in his eyes; they seem to him only unkindness; the sense of injustice embitters his disposition; he hates every one. though he has never felt grateful for kindness, he resents all opposition. how should i suppose that such a child can ever be happy? he is the slave of anger, a prey to the fiercest passions. happy! he is a tyrant, at once the basest of slaves and the most wretched of creatures. i have known children brought up like this who expected you to knock the house down, to give them the weather-cock on the steeple, to stop a regiment on the march so that they might listen to the band; when they could not get their way they screamed and cried and would pay no attention to any one. in vain everybody strove to please them; as their desires were stimulated by the ease with which they got their own way, they set their hearts on impossibilities, and found themselves face to face with opposition and difficulty, pain and grief. scolding, sulking, or in a rage, they wept and cried all day. were they really so greatly favoured? weakness, combined with love of power, produces nothing but folly and suffering. one spoilt child beats the table; another whips the sea. they may beat and whip long enough before they find contentment. if their childhood is made wretched by these notions of power and tyranny, what of their manhood, when their relations with their fellow-men begin to grow and multiply? they are used to find everything give way to them; what a painful surprise to enter society and meet with opposition on every side, to be crushed beneath the weight of a universe which they expected to move at will. their insolent manners, their childish vanity, only draw down upon them mortification, scorn, and mockery; they swallow insults like water; sharp experience soon teaches them that they have realised neither their position nor their strength. as they cannot do everything, they think they can do nothing. they are daunted by unexpected obstacles, degraded by the scorn of men; they become base, cowardly, and deceitful, and fall as far below their true level as they formerly soared above it. let us come back to the primitive law. nature has made children helpless and in need of affection; did she make them to be obeyed and feared? has she given them an imposing manner, a stern eye, a loud and threatening voice with which to make themselves feared? i understand how the roaring of the lion strikes terror into the other beasts, so that they tremble when they behold his terrible mane, but of all unseemly, hateful, and ridiculous sights, was there ever anything like a body of statesmen in their robes of office with their chief at their head bowing down before a swaddled babe, addressing him in pompous phrases, while he cries and slavers in reply? if we consider childhood itself, is there anything so weak and wretched as a child, anything so utterly at the mercy of those about it, so dependent on their pity, their care, and their affection? does it not seem as if his gentle face and touching appearance were intended to interest every one on behalf of his weakness and to make them eager to help him? and what is there more offensive, more unsuitable, than the sight of a sulky or imperious child, who commands those about him, and impudently assumes the tones of a master towards those without whom he would perish? on the other hand, do you not see how children are fettered by the weakness of infancy? do you not see how cruel it is to increase this servitude by obedience to our caprices, by depriving them of such liberty as they have? a liberty which they can scarcely abuse, a liberty the loss of which will do so little good to them or us. if there is nothing more ridiculous than a haughty child, there is nothing that claims our pity like a timid child. with the age of reason the child becomes the slave of the community; then why forestall this by slavery in the home? let this brief hour of life be free from a yoke which nature has not laid upon it; leave the child the use of his natural liberty, which, for a time at least, secures him from the vices of the slave. bring me those harsh masters, and those fathers who are the slaves of their children, bring them both with their frivolous objections, and before they boast of their own methods let them for once learn the method of nature. i return to practical matters. i have already said your child must not get what he asks, but what he needs; [footnote: we must recognise that pain is often necessary, pleasure is sometimes needed. so there is only one of the child's desires which should never be complied with, the desire for power. hence, whenever they ask for anything we must pay special attention to their motive in asking. as far as possible give them everything they ask for, provided it can really give them pleasure; refuse everything they demand from mere caprice or love of power.] he must never act from obedience, but from necessity. the very words obey and command will be excluded from his vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation; but the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must have a large place in it. before the age of reason it is impossible to form any idea of moral beings or social relations; so avoid, as far as may be, the use of words which express these ideas, lest the child at an early age should attach wrong ideas to them, ideas which you cannot or will not destroy when he is older. the first mistaken idea he gets into his head is the germ of error and vice; it is the first step that needs watching. act in such a way that while he only notices external objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him. if not, you may be sure that either he will pay no heed to you at all, or he will form fantastic ideas of the moral world of which you prate, ideas which you will never efface as long as he lives. "reason with children" was locke's chief maxim; it is in the height of fashion at present, and i hardly think it is justified by its results; those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceedingly silly. of all man's faculties, reason, which is, so to speak, compounded of all the rest, is the last and choicest growth, and it is this you would use for the child's early training. to make a man reasonable is the coping stone of a good education, and yet you profess to train a child through his reason! you begin at the wrong end, you make the end the means. if children understood reason they would not need education, but by talking to them from their earliest age in a language they do not understand you accustom them to be satisfied with words, to question all that is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their teachers; you train them to be argumentative and rebellious; and whatever you think you gain from motives of reason, you really gain from greediness, fear, or vanity with which you are obliged to reinforce your reasoning. most of the moral lessons which are and can be given to children may be reduced to this formula; master. you must not do that. child. why not? master. because it is wrong. child. wrong! what is wrong? master. what is forbidden you. child. why is it wrong to do what is forbidden? master. you will be punished for disobedience. child. i will do it when no one is looking. master. we shall watch you. child. i will hide. master. we shall ask you what you were doing. child. i shall tell a lie. master. you must not tell lies. child. why must not i tell lies? master. because it is wrong, etc. that is the inevitable circle. go beyond it, and the child will not understand you. what sort of use is there in such teaching? i should greatly like to know what you would substitute for this dialogue. it would have puzzled locke himself. it is no part of a child's business to know right and wrong, to perceive the reason for a man's duties. nature would have them children before they are men. if we try to invert this order we shall produce a forced fruit immature and flavourless, fruit which will be rotten before it is ripe; we shall have young doctors and old children. childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways; and i should no more expect judgment in a ten-year-old child than i should expect him to be five feet high. indeed, what use would reason be to him at that age? it is the curb of strength, and the child does not need the curb. when you try to persuade your scholars of the duty of obedience, you add to this so-called persuasion compulsion and threats, or still worse, flattery and bribes. attracted by selfishness or constrained by force, they pretend to be convinced by reason. they see as soon as you do that obedience is to their advantage and disobedience to their disadvantage. but as you only demand disagreeable things of them, and as it is always disagreeable to do another's will, they hide themselves so that they may do as they please, persuaded that they are doing no wrong so long as they are not found out, but ready, if found out, to own themselves in the wrong for fear of worse evils. the reason for duty is beyond their age, and there is not a man in the world who could make them really aware of it; but the fear of punishment, the hope of forgiveness, importunity, the difficulty of answering, wrings from them as many confessions as you want; and you think you have convinced them when you have only wearied or frightened them. what does it all come to? in the first place, by imposing on them a duty which they fail to recognise, you make them disinclined to submit to your tyranny, and you turn away their love; you teach them deceit, falsehood, and lying as a way to gain rewards or escape punishment; then by accustoming them to conceal a secret motive under the cloak of an apparent one, you yourself put into their hands the means of deceiving you, of depriving you of a knowledge of their real character, of answering you and others with empty words whenever they have the chance. laws, you say, though binding on conscience, exercise the same constraint over grown-up men. that is so, but what are these men but children spoilt by education? this is just what you should avoid. use force with children and reasoning with men; this is the natural order; the wise man needs no laws. treat your scholar according to his age. put him in his place from the first, and keep him in it, so that he no longer tries to leave it. then before he knows what goodness is, he will be practising its chief lesson. give him no orders at all, absolutely none. do not even let him think that you claim any authority over him. let him only know that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned, and felt. let him early find upon his proud neck, the heavy yoke which nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which every finite being must bow. let him find this necessity in things, not in the caprices [footnote: you may be sure the child will regard as caprice any will which opposes his own or any will which he does not understand. now the child does not understand anything which interferes with his own fancies.] of man; let the curb be force, not authority. if there is something he should not do, do not forbid him, but prevent him without explanation or reasoning; what you give him, give it at his first word without prayers or entreaties, above all without conditions. give willingly, refuse unwillingly, but let your refusal be irrevocable; let no entreaties move you; let your "no," once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it. thus you will make him patient, equable, calm, and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants; for it is in man's nature to bear patiently with the nature of things, but not with the ill-will of another. a child never rebels against, "there is none left," unless he thinks the reply is false. moreover, there is no middle course; you must either make no demands on him at all, or else you must fashion him to perfect obedience. the worst education of all is to leave him hesitating between his own will and yours, constantly disputing whether you or he is master; i would rather a hundred times that he were master. it is very strange that ever since people began to think about education they should have hit upon no other way of guiding children than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, greediness, base cowardice, all the most dangerous passions, passions ever ready to ferment, ever prepared to corrupt the soul even before the body is full-grown. with every piece of precocious instruction which you try to force into their minds you plant a vice in the depths of their hearts; foolish teachers think they are doing wonders when they are making their scholars wicked in order to teach them what goodness is, and then they tell us seriously, "such is man." yes, such is man, as you have made him. every means has been tried except one, the very one which might succeed--well-regulated liberty. do not undertake to bring up a child if you cannot guide him merely by the laws of what can or cannot be. the limits of the possible and the impossible are alike unknown to him, so they can be extended or contracted around him at your will. without a murmur he is restrained, urged on, held back, by the hands of necessity alone; he is made adaptable and teachable by the mere force of things, without any chance for vice to spring up in him; for passions do not arise so long as they have accomplished nothing. give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone; never punish him, for he does not know what it is to do wrong; never make him say, "forgive me," for he does not know how to do you wrong. wholly unmoral in his actions, he can do nothing morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof. already i see the frightened reader comparing this child with those of our time; he is mistaken. the perpetual restraint imposed upon your scholars stimulates their activity; the more subdued they are in your presence, the more boisterous they are as soon as they are out of your sight. they must make amends to themselves in some way or other for the harsh constraint to which you subject them. two schoolboys from the town will do more damage in the country than all the children of the village. shut up a young gentleman and a young peasant in a room; the former will have upset and smashed everything before the latter has stirred from his place. why is that, unless that the one hastens to misuse a moment's licence, while the other, always sure of freedom, does not use it rashly. and yet the village children, often flattered or constrained, are still very far from the state in which i would have them kept. let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced. the only natural passion is self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense. this selfishness is good in itself and in relation to ourselves; and as the child has no necessary relations to other people he is naturally indifferent to them; his self-love only becomes good or bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means. until the time is ripe for the appearance of reason, that guide of selfishness, the main thing is that the child shall do nothing because you are watching him or listening to him; in a word, nothing because of other people, but only what nature asks of him; then he will never do wrong. i do not mean to say that he will never do any mischief, never hurt himself, never break a costly ornament if you leave it within his reach. he might do much damage without doing wrong, since wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention which will never be his. if once he meant to do harm, his whole education would be ruined; he would be almost hopelessly bad. greed considers some things wrong which are not wrong in the eyes of reason. when you leave free scope to a child's heedlessness, you must put anything he could spoil out of his way, and leave nothing fragile or costly within his reach. let the room be furnished with plain and solid furniture; no mirrors, china, or useless ornaments. my pupil emile, who is brought up in the country, shall have a room just like a peasant's. why take such pains to adorn it when he will be so little in it? i am mistaken, however; he will ornament it for himself, and we shall soon see how. but if, in spite of your precautions, the child contrives to do some damage, if he breaks some useful article, do not punish him for your carelessness, do not even scold him; let him hear no word of reproval, do not even let him see that he has vexed you; behave just as if the thing had come to pieces of itself; you may consider you have done great things if you have managed to hold your tongue. may i venture at this point to state the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of education? it is: do not save time, but lose it. i hope that every-day readers will excuse my paradoxes; you cannot avoid paradox if you think for yourself, and whatever you may say i would rather fall into paradox than into prejudice. the most dangerous period in human life lies between birth and the age of twelve. it is the time when errors and vices spring up, while as yet there is no means to destroy them; when the means of destruction are ready, the roots have gone too deep to be pulled up. if the infant sprang at one bound from its mother's breast to the age of reason, the present type of education would be quite suitable, but its natural growth calls for quite a different training. the mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed; for while it is blind it cannot see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast expanse of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the best eyes can scarcely follow it. therefore the education of the earliest years should be merely negative. it consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error. if only you could let well alone, and get others to follow your example; if you could bring your scholar to the age of twelve strong and healthy, but unable to tell his right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would be open to reason as soon as you began to teach him. free from prejudices and free from habits, there would be nothing in him to counteract the effects of your labours. in your hands he would soon become the wisest of men; by doing nothing to begin with, you would end with a prodigy of education. reverse the usual practice and you will almost always do right. fathers and teachers who want to make the child, not a child but a man of learning, think it never too soon to scold, correct, reprove, threaten, bribe, teach, and reason. do better than they; be reasonable, and do not reason with your pupil, more especially do not try to make him approve what he dislikes; for if reason is always connected with disagreeable matters, you make it distasteful to him, you discredit it at an early age in a mind not yet ready to understand it. exercise his body, his limbs, his senses, his strength, but keep his mind idle as long as you can. distrust all opinions which appear before the judgment to discriminate between them. restrain and ward off strange impressions; and to prevent the birth of evil do not hasten to do well, for goodness is only possible when enlightened by reason. regard all delays as so much time gained; you have achieved much, you approach the boundary without loss. leave childhood to ripen in your children. in a word, beware of giving anything they need to-day if it can be deferred without danger to to-morrow. there is another point to be considered which confirms the suitability of this method: it is the child's individual bent, which must be thoroughly known before we can choose the fittest moral training. every mind has its own form, in accordance with which it must be controlled; and the success of the pains taken depends largely on the fact that he is controlled in this way and no other. oh, wise man, take time to observe nature; watch your scholar well before you say a word to him; first leave the germ of his character free to show itself, do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is. do you think this time of liberty is wasted? on the contrary, your scholar will be the better employed, for this is the way you yourself will learn not to lose a single moment when time is of more value. if, however, you begin to act before you know what to do, you act at random; you may make mistakes, and must retrace your steps; your haste to reach your goal will only take you further from it. do not imitate the miser who loses much lest he should lose a little. sacrifice a little time in early childhood, and it will be repaid you with usury when your scholar is older. the wise physician does not hastily give prescriptions at first sight, but he studies the constitution of the sick man before he prescribes anything; the treatment is begun later, but the patient is cured, while the hasty doctor kills him. but where shall we find a place for our child so as to bring him up as a senseless being, an automaton? shall we keep him in the moon, or on a desert island? shall we remove him from human society? will he not always have around him the sight and the pattern of the passions of other people? will he never see children of his own age? will he not see his parents, his neighbours, his nurse, his governess, his man-servant, his tutor himself, who after all will not be an angel? here we have a real and serious objection. but did i tell you that an education according to nature would be an easy task? oh, men! is it my fault that you have made all good things difficult? i admit that i am aware of these difficulties; perhaps they are insuperable; but nevertheless it is certain that we do to some extent avoid them by trying to do so. i am showing what we should try to attain, i do not say we can attain it, but i do say that whoever comes nearest to it is nearest to success. remember you must be a man yourself before you try to train a man; you yourself must set the pattern he shall copy. while the child is still unconscious there is time to prepare his surroundings, so that nothing shall strike his eye but what is fit for his sight. gain the respect of every one, begin to win their hearts, so that they may try to please you. you will not be master of the child if you cannot control every one about him; and this authority will never suffice unless it rests upon respect for your goodness. there is no question of squandering one's means and giving money right and left; i never knew money win love. you must neither be harsh nor niggardly, nor must you merely pity misery when you can relieve it; but in vain will you open your purse if you do not open your heart along with it, the hearts of others will always be closed to you. you must give your own time, attention, affection, your very self; for whatever you do, people always perceive that your money is not you. there are proofs of kindly interest which produce more results and are really more useful than any gift; how many of the sick and wretched have more need of comfort than of charity; how many of the oppressed need protection rather than money? reconcile those who are at strife, prevent lawsuits; incline children to duty, fathers to kindness; promote happy marriages; prevent annoyances; freely use the credit of your pupil's parents on behalf of the weak who cannot obtain justice, the weak who are oppressed by the strong. be just, human, kindly. do not give alms alone, give charity; works of mercy do more than money for the relief of suffering; love others and they will love you; serve them and they will serve you; be their brother and they will be your children. this is one reason why i want to bring up emile in the country, far from those miserable lacqueys, the most degraded of men except their masters; far from the vile morals of the town, whose gilded surface makes them seductive and contagious to children; while the vices of peasants, unadorned and in their naked grossness, are more fitted to repel than to seduce, when there is no motive for imitating them. in the village a tutor will have much more control over the things he wishes to show the child; his reputation, his words, his example, will have a weight they would never have in the town; he is of use to every one, so every one is eager to oblige him, to win his esteem, to appeal before the disciple what the master would have him be; if vice is not corrected, public scandal is at least avoided, which is all that our present purpose requires. cease to blame others for your own faults; children are corrupted less by what they see than by your own teaching. with your endless preaching, moralising, and pedantry, for one idea you give your scholars, believing it to be good, you give them twenty more which are good for nothing; you are full of what is going on in your own minds, and you fail to see the effect you produce on theirs. in the continual flow of words with which you overwhelm them, do you think there is none which they get hold of in a wrong sense? do you suppose they do not make their own comments on your long-winded explanations, that they do not find material for the construction of a system they can understand--one which they will use against you when they get the chance? listen to a little fellow who has just been under instruction; let him chatter freely, ask questions, and talk at his ease, and you will be surprised to find the strange forms your arguments have assumed in his mind; he confuses everything, and turns everything topsy-turvy; you are vexed and grieved by his unforeseen objections; he reduces you to be silent yourself or to silence him: and what can he think of silence in one who is so fond of talking? if ever he gains this advantage and is aware of it, farewell education; from that moment all is lost; he is no longer trying to learn, he is trying to refute you. zealous teachers, be simple, sensible, and reticent; be in no hurry to act unless to prevent the actions of others. again and again i say, reject, if it may be, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one. beware of playing the tempter in this world, which nature intended as an earthly paradise for men, and do not attempt to give the innocent child the knowledge of good and evil; since you cannot prevent the child learning by what he sees outside himself, restrict your own efforts to impressing those examples on his mind in the form best suited for him. the explosive passions produce a great effect upon the child when he sees them; their outward expression is very marked; he is struck by this and his attention is arrested. anger especially is so noisy in its rage that it is impossible not to perceive it if you are within reach. you need not ask yourself whether this is an opportunity for a pedagogue to frame a fine disquisition. what! no fine disquisition, nothing, not a word! let the child come to you; impressed by what he has seen, he will not fail to ask you questions. the answer is easy; it is drawn from the very things which have appealed to his senses. he sees a flushed face, flashing eyes, a threatening gesture, he hears cries; everything shows that the body is ill at ease. tell him plainly, without affectation or mystery, "this poor man is ill, he is in a fever." you may take the opportunity of giving him in a few words some idea of disease and its effects; for that too belongs to nature, and is one of the bonds of necessity which he must recognise. by means of this idea, which is not false in itself, may he not early acquire a certain aversion to giving way to excessive passions, which he regards as diseases; and do you not think that such a notion, given at the right moment, will produce a more wholesome effect than the most tedious sermon? but consider the after effects of this idea; you have authority, if ever you find it necessary, to treat the rebellious child as a sick child; to keep him in his room, in bed if need be, to diet him, to make him afraid of his growing vices, to make him hate and dread them without ever regarding as a punishment the strict measures you will perhaps have to use for his recovery. if it happens that you yourself in a moment's heat depart from the calm and self-control which you should aim at, do not try to conceal your fault, but tell him frankly, with a gentle reproach, "my dear, you have hurt me." moreover, it is a matter of great importance that no notice should be taken in his presence of the quaint sayings which result from the simplicity of the ideas in which he is brought up, nor should they be quoted in a way he can understand. a foolish laugh may destroy six months' work and do irreparable damage for life. i cannot repeat too often that to control the child one must often control oneself. i picture my little emile at the height of a dispute between two neighbours going up to the fiercest of them and saying in a tone of pity, "you are ill, i am very sorry for you." this speech will no doubt have its effect on the spectators and perhaps on the disputants. without laughter, scolding, or praise i should take him away, willing or no, before he could see this result, or at least before he could think about it; and i should make haste to turn his thoughts to other things, so that he would soon forget all about it. i do not propose to enter into every detail, but only to explain general rules and to give illustrations in cases of difficulty. i think it is impossible to train a child up to the age of twelve in the midst of society, without giving him some idea of the relations between one man and another, and of the morality of human actions. it is enough to delay the development of these ideas as long as possible, and when they can no longer be avoided to limit them to present needs, so that he may neither think himself master of everything nor do harm to others without knowing or caring. there are calm and gentle characters which can be led a long way in their first innocence without any danger; but there are also stormy dispositions whose passions develop early; you must hasten to make men of them lest you should have to keep them in chains. our first duties are to ourselves; our first feelings are centred on self; all our instincts are at first directed to our own preservation and our own welfare. thus the first notion of justice springs not from what we owe to others, but from what is due to us. here is another error in popular methods of education. if you talk to children of their duties, and not of their rights, you are beginning at the wrong end, and telling them what they cannot understand, what cannot be of any interest to them. if i had to train a child such as i have just described, i should say to myself, "a child never attacks people, [footnote: a child should never be allowed to play with grown-up people as if they were his inferiors, nor even as if they were only his equals. if he ventured to strike any one in earnest, were it only the footman, were it the hangman himself, let the sufferer return his blows with interest, so that he will not want to do it again. i have seen silly women inciting children to rebellion, encouraging them to hit people, allowing themselves to be beaten, and laughing at the harmless blows, never thinking that those blows were in intention the blows of a murderer, and that the child who desires to beat people now will desire to kill them when he is grown up.] only things; and he soon learns by experience to respect those older and stronger than himself. things, however, do not defend themselves. therefore the first idea he needs is not that of liberty but of property, and that he may get this idea he must have something of his own." it is useless to enumerate his clothes, furniture, and playthings; although he uses these he knows not how or why he has come by them. to tell him they were given him is little better, for giving implies having; so here is property before his own, and it is the principle of property that you want to teach him; moreover, giving is a convention, and the child as yet has no idea of conventions. i hope my reader will note, in this and many other cases, how people think they have taught children thoroughly, when they have only thrust on them words which have no intelligible meaning to them. [footnote: this is why most children want to take back what they have given, and cry if they cannot get it. they do not do this when once they know what a gift is; only they are more careful about giving things away.] we must therefore go back to the origin of property, for that is where the first idea of it must begin. the child, living in the country, will have got some idea of field work; eyes and leisure suffice for that, and he will have both. in every age, and especially in childhood, we want to create, to copy, to produce, to give all the signs of power and activity. he will hardly have seen the gardener at work twice, sowing, planting, and growing vegetables, before he will want to garden himself. according to the principles i have already laid down, i shall not thwart him; on the contrary, i shall approve of his plan, share his hobby, and work with him, not for his pleasure but my own; at least, so he thinks; i shall be his under-gardener, and dig the ground for him till his arms are strong enough to do it; he will take possession of it by planting a bean, and this is surely a more sacred possession, and one more worthy of respect, than that of nunes balboa, who took possession of south america in the name of the king of spain, by planting his banner on the coast of the southern sea. we water the beans every day, we watch them coming up with the greatest delight. day by day i increase this delight by saying, "those belong to you." to explain what that word "belong" means, i show him how he has given his time, his labour, and his trouble, his very self to it; that in this ground there is a part of himself which he can claim against all the world, as he could withdraw his arm from the hand of another man who wanted to keep it against his will. one fine day he hurries up with his watering-can in his hand. what a scene of woe! alas! all the beans are pulled up, the soil is dug over, you can scarcely find the place. oh! what has become of my labour, my work, the beloved fruits of my care and effort? who has stolen my property! who has taken my beans? the young heart revolts; the first feeling of injustice brings its sorrow and bitterness; tears come in torrents, the unhappy child fills the air with cries and groans, i share his sorrow and anger; we look around us, we make inquiries. at last we discover that the gardener did it. we send for him. but we are greatly mistaken. the gardener, hearing our complaint, begins to complain louder than we: what, gentlemen, was it you who spoilt my work! i had sown some maltese melons; the seed was given me as something quite out of the common, and i meant to give you a treat when they were ripe; but you have planted your miserable beans and destroyed my melons, which were coming up so nicely, and i can never get any more. you have behaved very badly to me and you have deprived yourselves of the pleasure of eating most delicious melons. jean jacques. my poor robert, you must forgive us. you had given your labour and your pains to it. i see we were wrong to spoil your work, but we will send to malta for some more seed for you, and we will never dig the ground again without finding out if some one else has been beforehand with us. robert. well, gentlemen, you need not trouble yourselves, for there is no more waste ground. i dig what my father tilled; every one does the same, and all the land you see has been occupied time out of mind. emile. mr. robert, do people often lose the seed of maltese melons? robert. no indeed, sir; we do not often find such silly little gentlemen as you. no one meddles with his neighbour's garden; every one respects other people's work so that his own may be safe. emile. but i have not got a garden. robert. i don't care; if you spoil mine i won't let you walk in it, for you see i do not mean to lose my labour. jean jacques. could not we suggest an arrangement with this kind robert? let him give my young friend and myself a corner of his garden to cultivate, on condition that he has half the crop. robert. you may have it free. but remember i shall dig up your beans if you touch my melons. in this attempt to show how a child may be taught certain primitive ideas we see how the notion of property goes back naturally to the right of the first occupier to the results of his work. that is plain and simple, and quite within the child's grasp. from that to the rights of property and exchange there is but a step, after which you must stop short. you also see that an explanation which i can give in writing in a couple of pages may take a year in practice, for in the course of moral ideas we cannot advance too slowly, nor plant each step too firmly. young teacher, pray consider this example, and remember that your lessons should always be in deeds rather than words, for children soon forget what they say or what is said to them, but not what they have done nor what has been done to them. such teaching should be given, as i have said, sooner or later, as the scholar's disposition, gentle or turbulent, requires it. the way of using it is unmistakable; but to omit no matter of importance in a difficult business let us take another example. your ill-tempered child destroys everything he touches. do not vex yourself; put anything he can spoil out of his reach. he breaks the things he is using; do not be in a hurry to give him more; let him feel the want of them. he breaks the windows of his room; let the wind blow upon him night and day, and do not be afraid of his catching cold; it is better to catch cold than to be reckless. never complain of the inconvenience he causes you, but let him feel it first. at last you will have the windows mended without saying anything. he breaks them again; then change your plan; tell him dryly and without anger, "the windows are mine, i took pains to have them put in, and i mean to keep them safe." then you will shut him up in a dark place without a window. at this unexpected proceeding he cries and howls; no one heeds. soon he gets tired and changes his tone; he laments and sighs; a servant appears, the rebel begs to be let out. without seeking any excuse for refusing, the servant merely says, "i, too, have windows to keep," and goes away. at last, when the child has been there several hours, long enough to get very tired of it, long enough to make an impression on his memory, some one suggests to him that he should offer to make terms with you, so that you may set him free and he will never break windows again. that is just what he wants. he will send and ask you to come and see him; you will come, he will suggest his plan, and you will agree to it at once, saying, "that is a very good idea; it will suit us both; why didn't you think of it sooner?" then without asking for any affirmation or confirmation of his promise, you will embrace him joyfully and take him back at once to his own room, considering this agreement as sacred as if he had confirmed it by a formal oath. what idea do you think he will form from these proceedings, as to the fulfilment of a promise and its usefulness? if i am not greatly mistaken, there is not a child upon earth, unless he is utterly spoilt already, who could resist this treatment, or one who would ever dream of breaking windows again on purpose. follow out the whole train of thought. the naughty little fellow hardly thought when he was making a hole for his beans that he was hewing out a cell in which his own knowledge would soon imprison him. [footnote: moreover if the duty of keeping his word were not established in the child's mind by its own utility, the child's growing consciousness would soon impress it on him as a law of conscience, as an innate principle, only requiring suitable experiences for its development. this first outline is not sketched by man, it is engraved on the heart by the author of all justice. take away the primitive law of contract and the obligation imposed by contract and there is nothing left of human society but vanity and empty show. he who only keeps his word because it is to his own profit is hardly more pledged than if he had given no promise at all. this principle is of the utmost importance, and deserves to be thoroughly studied, for man is now beginning to be at war with himself.] we are now in the world of morals, the door to vice is open. deceit and falsehood are born along with conventions and duties. as soon as we can do what we ought not to do, we try to hide what we ought not to have done. as soon as self-interest makes us give a promise, a greater interest may make us break it; it is merely a question of doing it with impunity; we naturally take refuge in concealment and falsehood. as we have not been able to prevent vice, we must punish it. the sorrows of life begin with its mistakes. i have already said enough to show that children should never receive punishment merely as such; it should always come as the natural consequence of their fault. thus you will not exclaim against their falsehood, you will not exactly punish them for lying, but you will arrange that all the ill effects of lying, such as not being believed when we speak the truth, or being accused of what we have not done in spite of our protests, shall fall on their heads when they have told a lie. but let us explain what lying means to the child. there are two kinds of lies; one concerns an accomplished fact, the other concerns a future duty. the first occurs when we falsely deny or assert that we did or did not do something, or, to put it in general terms, when we knowingly say what is contrary to facts. the other occurs when we promise what we do not mean to perform, or, in general terms, when we profess an intention which we do not really mean to carry out. these two kinds of lie are sometimes found in combination, [footnote: thus the guilty person, accused of some evil deed, defends himself by asserting that he is a good man. his statement is false in itself and false in its application to the matter in hand.] but their differences are my present business. he who feels the need of help from others, he who is constantly experiencing their kindness, has nothing to gain by deceiving them; it is plainly to his advantage that they should see things as they are, lest they should mistake his interests. it is therefore plain that lying with regard to actual facts is not natural to children, but lying is made necessary by the law of obedience; since obedience is disagreeable, children disobey as far as they can in secret, and the present good of avoiding punishment or reproof outweighs the remoter good of speaking the truth. under a free and natural education why should your child lie? what has he to conceal from you? you do not thwart him, you do not punish him, you demand nothing from him. why should he not tell everything to you as simply as to his little playmate? he cannot see anything more risky in the one course than in the other. the lie concerning duty is even less natural, since promises to do or refrain from doing are conventional agreements which are outside the state of nature and detract from our liberty. moreover, all promises made by children are in themselves void; when they pledge themselves they do not know what they are doing, for their narrow vision cannot look beyond the present. a child can hardly lie when he makes a promise; for he is only thinking how he can get out of the present difficulty, any means which has not an immediate result is the same to him; when he promises for the future he promises nothing, and his imagination is as yet incapable of projecting him into the future while he lives in the present. if he could escape a whipping or get a packet of sweets by promising to throw himself out of the window to-morrow, he would promise on the spot. this is why the law disregards all promises made by minors, and when fathers and teachers are stricter and demand that promises shall be kept, it is only when the promise refers to something the child ought to do even if he had made no promise. the child cannot lie when he makes a promise, for he does not know what he is doing when he makes his promise. the case is different when he breaks his promise, which is a sort of retrospective falsehood; for he clearly remembers making the promise, but he fails to see the importance of keeping it. unable to look into the future, he cannot foresee the results of things, and when he breaks his promises he does nothing contrary to his stage of reasoning. children's lies are therefore entirely the work of their teachers, and to teach them to speak the truth is nothing less than to teach them the art of lying. in your zeal to rule, control, and teach them, you never find sufficient means at your disposal. you wish to gain fresh influence over their minds by baseless maxims, by unreasonable precepts; and you would rather they knew their lessons and told lies, than leave them ignorant and truthful. we, who only give our scholars lessons in practice, who prefer to have them good rather than clever, never demand the truth lest they should conceal it, and never claim any promise lest they should be tempted to break it. if some mischief has been done in my absence and i do not know who did it, i shall take care not to accuse emile, nor to say, "did you do it?" [footnote: nothing could be more indiscreet than such a question, especially if the child is guilty. then if he thinks you know what he has done, he will think you are setting a trap for him, and this idea can only set him against you. if he thinks you do not know, he will say to himself, "why should i make my fault known?" and here we have the first temptation to falsehood as the direct result of your foolish question.] for in so doing what should i do but teach him to deny it? if his difficult temperament compels me to make some agreement with him, i will take good care that the suggestion always comes from him, never from me; that when he undertakes anything he has always a present and effective interest in fulfilling his promise, and if he ever fails this lie will bring down on him all the unpleasant consequences which he sees arising from the natural order of things, and not from his tutor's vengeance. but far from having recourse to such cruel measures, i feel almost certain that emile will not know for many years what it is to lie, and that when he does find out, he will be astonished and unable to understand what can be the use of it. it is quite clear that the less i make his welfare dependent on the will or the opinions of others, the less is it to his interest to lie. when we are in no hurry to teach there is no hurry to demand, and we can take our time, so as to demand nothing except under fitting conditions. then the child is training himself, in so far as he is not being spoilt. but when a fool of a tutor, who does not know how to set about his business, is always making his pupil promise first this and then that, without discrimination, choice, or proportion, the child is puzzled and overburdened with all these promises, and neglects, forgets or even scorns them, and considering them as so many empty phrases he makes a game of making and breaking promises. would you have him keep his promise faithfully, be moderate in your claims upon him. the detailed treatment i have just given to lying may be applied in many respects to all the other duties imposed upon children, whereby these duties are made not only hateful but impracticable. for the sake of a show of preaching virtue you make them love every vice; you instil these vices by forbidding them. would you have them pious, you take them to church till they are sick of it; you teach them to gabble prayers until they long for the happy time when they will not have to pray to god. to teach them charity you make them give alms as if you scorned to give yourself. it is not the child, but the master, who should give; however much he loves his pupil he should vie with him for this honour; he should make him think that he is too young to deserve it. alms-giving is the deed of a man who can measure the worth of his gift and the needs of his fellow-men. the child, who knows nothing of these, can have no merit in giving; he gives without charity, without kindness; he is almost ashamed to give, for, to judge by your practice and his own, he thinks it is only children who give, and that there is no need for charity when we are grown up. observe that the only things children are set to give are things of which they do not know the value, bits of metal carried in their pockets for which they have no further use. a child would rather give a hundred coins than one cake. but get this prodigal giver to distribute what is dear to him, his toys, his sweets, his own lunch, and we shall soon see if you have made him really generous. people try yet another way; they soon restore what he gave to the child, so that he gets used to giving everything which he knows will come back to him. i have scarcely seen generosity in children except of these two types, giving what is of no use to them, or what they expect to get back again. "arrange things," says locke, "so that experience may convince them that the most generous giver gets the biggest share." that is to make the child superficially generous but really greedy. he adds that "children will thus form the habit of liberality." yes, a usurer's liberality, which expects cent. per cent. but when it is a question of real giving, good-bye to the habit; when they do not get things back, they will not give. it is the habit of the mind, not of the hands, that needs watching. all the other virtues taught to children are like this, and to preach these baseless virtues you waste their youth in sorrow. what a sensible sort of education! teachers, have done with these shams; be good and kind; let your example sink into your scholars' memories till they are old enough to take it to heart. rather than hasten to demand deeds of charity from my pupil i prefer to perform such deeds in his presence, even depriving him of the means of imitating me, as an honour beyond his years; for it is of the utmost importance that he should not regard a man's duties as merely those of a child. if when he sees me help the poor he asks me about it, and it is time to reply to his questions, [footnote: it must be understood that i do not answer his questions when he wants; that would be to subject myself to his will and to place myself in the most dangerous state of dependence that ever a tutor was in.] i shall say, "my dear boy, the rich only exist, through the good-will of the poor, so they have promised to feed those who have not enough to live on, either in goods or labour." "then you promised to do this?" "certainly; i am only master of the wealth that passes through my hands on the condition attached to its ownership." after this talk (and we have seen how a child may be brought to understand it) another than emile would be tempted to imitate me and behave like a rich man; in such a case i should at least take care that it was done without ostentation; i would rather he robbed me of my privilege and hid himself to give. it is a fraud suitable to his age, and the only one i could forgive in him. i know that all these imitative virtues are only the virtues of a monkey, and that a good action is only morally good when it is done as such and not because of others. but at an age when the heart does not yet feel anything, you must make children copy the deeds you wish to grow into habits, until they can do them with understanding and for the love of what is good. man imitates, as do the beasts. the love of imitating is well regulated by nature; in society it becomes a vice. the monkey imitates man, whom he fears, and not the other beasts, which he scorns; he thinks what is done by his betters must be good. among ourselves, our harlequins imitate all that is good to degrade it and bring it into ridicule; knowing their owners' baseness they try to equal what is better than they are, or they strive to imitate what they admire, and their bad taste appears in their choice of models, they would rather deceive others or win applause for their own talents than become wiser or better. imitation has its roots in our desire to escape from ourselves. if i succeed in my undertaking, emile will certainly have no such wish. so we must dispense with any seeming good that might arise from it. examine your rules of education; you will find them all topsy-turvy, especially in all that concerns virtue and morals. the only moral lesson which is suited for a child--the most important lesson for every time of life--is this: "never hurt anybody." the very rule of well-doing, if not subordinated to this rule, is dangerous, false, and contradictory. who is there who does no good? every one does some good, the wicked as well as the righteous; he makes one happy at the cost of the misery of a hundred, and hence spring all our misfortunes. the noblest virtues are negative, they are also the most difficult, for they make little show, and do not even make room for that pleasure so dear to the heart of man, the thought that some one is pleased with us. if there be a man who does no harm to his neighbours, what good must he have accomplished! what a bold heart, what a strong character it needs! it is not in talking about this maxim, but in trying to practise it, that we discover both its greatness and its difficulty. [footnote: the precept "never hurt anybody," implies the greatest possible independence of human society; for in the social state one man's good is another man's evil. this relation is part of the nature of things; it is inevitable. you may apply this test to man in society and to the hermit to discover which is best. a distinguished author says, "none but the wicked can live alone." i say, "none but the good can live alone." this proposition, if less sententious, is truer and more logical than the other. if the wicked were alone, what evil would he do? it is among his fellows that he lays his snares for others. if they wish to apply this argument to the man of property, my answer is to be found in the passage to which this note is appended.] this will give you some slight idea of the precautions i would have you take in giving children instruction which cannot always be refused without risk to themselves or others, or the far greater risk of the formation of bad habits, which would be difficult to correct later on; but be sure this necessity will not often arise with children who are properly brought up, for they cannot possibly become rebellious, spiteful, untruthful, or greedy, unless the seeds of these vices are sown in their hearts. what i have just said applies therefore rather to the exception than the rule. but the oftener children have the opportunity of quitting their proper condition, and contracting the vices of men, the oftener will these exceptions arise. those who are brought up in the world must receive more precocious instruction than those who are brought up in retirement. so this solitary education would be preferable, even if it did nothing more than leave childhood time to ripen. there is quite another class of exceptions: those so gifted by nature that they rise above the level of their age. as there are men who never get beyond infancy, so there are others who are never, so to speak, children, they are men almost from birth. the difficulty is that these cases are very rare, very difficult to distinguish; while every mother, who knows that a child may be a prodigy, is convinced that her child is that one. they go further; they mistake the common signs of growth for marks of exceptional talent. liveliness, sharp sayings, romping, amusing simplicity, these are the characteristic marks of this age, and show that the child is a child indeed. is it strange that a child who is encouraged to chatter and allowed to say anything, who is restrained neither by consideration nor convention, should chance to say something clever? were he never to hit the mark, his case would be stranger than that of the astrologer who, among a thousand errors, occasionally predicts the truth. "they lie so often," said henry iv., "that at last they say what is true." if you want to say something clever, you have only to talk long enough. may providence watch over those fine folk who have no other claim to social distinction. the finest thoughts may spring from a child's brain, or rather the best words may drop from his lips, just as diamonds of great worth may fall into his hands, while neither the thoughts nor the diamonds are his own; at that age neither can be really his. the child's sayings do not mean to him what they mean to us, the ideas he attaches to them are different. his ideas, if indeed he has any ideas at all, have neither order nor connection; there is nothing sure, nothing certain, in his thoughts. examine your so-called prodigy. now and again you will discover in him extreme activity of mind and extraordinary clearness of thought. more often this same mind will seem slack and spiritless, as if wrapped in mist. sometimes he goes before you, sometimes he will not stir. one moment you would call him a genius, another a fool. you would be mistaken in both; he is a child, an eaglet who soars aloft for a moment, only to drop back into the nest. treat him, therefore, according to his age, in spite of appearances, and beware of exhausting his strength by over-much exercise. if the young brain grows warm and begins to bubble, let it work freely, but do not heat it any further, lest it lose its goodness, and when the first gases have been given off, collect and compress the rest so that in after years they may turn to life-giving heat and real energy. if not, your time and your pains will be wasted, you will destroy your own work, and after foolishly intoxicating yourself with these heady fumes, you will have nothing left but an insipid and worthless wine. silly children grow into ordinary men. i know no generalisation more certain than this. it is the most difficult thing in the world to distinguish between genuine stupidity, and that apparent and deceitful stupidity which is the sign of a strong character. at first sight it seems strange that the two extremes should have the same outward signs; and yet it may well be so, for at an age when man has as yet no true ideas, the whole difference between the genius and the rest consists in this: the latter only take in false ideas, while the former, finding nothing but false ideas, receives no ideas at all. in this he resembles the fool; the one is fit for nothing, the other finds nothing fit for him. the only way of distinguishing between them depends upon chance, which may offer the genius some idea which he can understand, while the fool is always the same. as a child, the young cato was taken for an idiot by his parents; he was obstinate and silent, and that was all they perceived in him; it was only in sulla's ante-chamber that his uncle discovered what was in him. had he never found his way there, he might have passed for a fool till he reached the age of reason. had caesar never lived, perhaps this same cato, who discerned his fatal genius, and foretold his great schemes, would have passed for a dreamer all his days. those who judge children hastily are apt to be mistaken; they are often more childish than the child himself. i knew a middle-aged man, [footnote: the abbe de condillac] whose friendship i esteemed an honour, who was reckoned a fool by his family. all at once he made his name as a philosopher, and i have no doubt posterity will give him a high place among the greatest thinkers and the profoundest metaphysicians of his day. hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. you assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. you fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. you are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. what! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? he will never be so busy again all his life long. plato, in his republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. it seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and seneca, speaking of the roman lads in olden days, says, "they were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." were they any the worse for it in manhood? do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. what would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? you would say, "he is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. the apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. you fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. the child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations. an image when it is recalled may exist by itself in the mind, but every idea implies other ideas. when we image we merely perceive, when we reason we compare. our sensations are merely passive, our notions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges. the proof of this will be given later. i maintain, therefore, that as children are incapable of judging, they have no true memory. they retain sounds, form, sensation, but rarely ideas, and still more rarely relations. you tell me they acquire some rudiments of geometry, and you think you prove your case; not so, it is mine you prove; you show that far from being able to reason themselves, children are unable to retain the reasoning of others; for if you follow the method of these little geometricians you will see they only retain the exact impression of the figure and the terms of the demonstration. they cannot meet the slightest new objection; if the figure is reversed they can do nothing. all their knowledge is on the sensation-level, nothing has penetrated to their understanding. their memory is little better than their other powers, for they always have to learn over again, when they are grown up, what they learnt as children. i am far from thinking, however, that children have no sort of reason. [footnote: i have noticed again and again that it is impossible in writing a lengthy work to use the same words always in the same sense. there is no language rich enough to supply terms and expressions sufficient for the modifications of our ideas. the method of defining every term and constantly substituting the definition for the term defined looks well, but it is impracticable. for how can we escape from our vicious circle? definitions would be all very well if we did not use words in the making of them. in spite of this i am convinced that even in our poor language we can make our meaning clear, not by always using words in the same sense, but by taking care that every time we use a word the sense in which we use it is sufficiently indicated by the sense of the context, so that each sentence in which the word occurs acts as a sort of definition. sometimes i say children are incapable of reasoning. sometimes i say they reason cleverly. i must admit that my words are often contradictory, but i do not think there is any contradiction in my ideas.] on the contrary, i think they reason very well with regard to things that affect their actual and sensible well-being. but people are mistaken as to the extent of their information, and they attribute to them knowledge they do not possess, and make them reason about things they cannot understand. another mistake is to try to turn their attention to matters which do not concern them in the least, such as their future interest, their happiness when they are grown up, the opinion people will have of them when they are men--terms which are absolutely meaningless when addressed to creatures who are entirely without foresight. but all the forced studies of these poor little wretches are directed towards matters utterly remote from their minds. you may judge how much attention they can give to them. the pedagogues, who make a great display of the teaching they give their pupils, are paid to say just the opposite; yet their actions show that they think just as i do. for what do they teach? words! words! words! among the various sciences they boast of teaching their scholars, they take good care never to choose those which might be really useful to them, for then they would be compelled to deal with things and would fail utterly; the sciences they choose are those we seem to know when we know their technical terms--heraldry, geography, chronology, languages, etc., studies so remote from man, and even more remote from the child, that it is a wonder if he can ever make any use of any part of them. you will be surprised to find that i reckon the study of languages among the useless lumber of education; but you must remember that i am speaking of the studies of the earliest years, and whatever you may say, i do not believe any child under twelve or fifteen ever really acquired two languages. if the study of languages were merely the study of words, that is, of the symbols by which language expresses itself, then this might be a suitable study for children; but languages, as they change the symbols, also modify the ideas which the symbols express. minds are formed by language, thoughts take their colour from its ideas. reason alone is common to all. every language has its own form, a difference which may be partly cause and partly effect of differences in national character; this conjecture appears to be confirmed by the fact that in every nation under the sun speech follows the changes of manners, and is preserved or altered along with them. by use the child acquires one of these different forms, and it is the only language he retains till the age of reason. to acquire two languages he must be able to compare their ideas, and how can he compare ideas he can barely understand? everything may have a thousand meanings to him, but each idea can only have one form, so he can only learn one language. you assure me he learns several languages; i deny it. i have seen those little prodigies who are supposed to speak half a dozen languages. i have heard them speak first in german, then in latin, french, or italian; true, they used half a dozen different vocabularies, but they always spoke german. in a word, you may give children as many synonyms as you like; it is not their language but their words that you change; they will never have but one language. to conceal their deficiencies teachers choose the dead languages, in which we have no longer any judges whose authority is beyond dispute. the familiar use of these tongues disappeared long ago, so they are content to imitate what they find in books, and they call that talking. if the master's greek and latin is such poor stuff, what about the children? they have scarcely learnt their primer by heart, without understanding a word of it, when they are set to translate a french speech into latin words; then when they are more advanced they piece together a few phrases of cicero for prose or a few lines of vergil for verse. then they think they can speak latin, and who will contradict them? in any study whatsoever the symbols are of no value without the idea of the things symbolised. yet the education of the child in confined to those symbols, while no one ever succeeds in making him understand the thing signified. you think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is only learning the map; he is taught the names of towns, countries, rivers, which have no existence for him except on the paper before him. i remember seeing a geography somewhere which began with: "what is the world?"--"a sphere of cardboard." that is the child's geography. i maintain that after two years' work with the globe and cosmography, there is not a single ten-year-old child who could find his way from paris to saint denis by the help of the rules he has learnt. i maintain that not one of these children could find his way by the map about the paths on his father's estate without getting lost. these are the young doctors who can tell us the position of pekin, ispahan, mexico, and every country in the world. you tell me the child must be employed on studies which only need eyes. that may be; but if there are any such studies, they are unknown to me. it is a still more ridiculous error to set them to study history, which is considered within their grasp because it is merely a collection of facts. but what is meant by this word "fact"? do you think the relations which determine the facts of history are so easy to grasp that the corresponding ideas are easily developed in the child's mind! do you think that a real knowledge of events can exist apart from the knowledge of their causes and effects, and that history has so little relation to words that the one can be learnt without the other? if you perceive nothing in a man's actions beyond merely physical and external movements, what do you learn from history? absolutely nothing; while this study, robbed of all that makes it interesting, gives you neither pleasure nor information. if you want to judge actions by their moral bearings, try to make these moral bearings intelligible to your scholars. you will soon find out if they are old enough to learn history. remember, reader, that he who speaks to you is neither a scholar nor a philosopher, but a plain man and a lover of truth; a man who is pledged to no one party or system, a hermit, who mixes little with other men, and has less opportunity of imbibing their prejudices, and more time to reflect on the things that strike him in his intercourse with them. my arguments are based less on theories than on facts, and i think i can find no better way to bring the facts home to you than by quoting continually some example from the observations which suggested my arguments. i had gone to spend a few days in the country with a worthy mother of a family who took great pains with her children and their education. one morning i was present while the eldest boy had his lessons. his tutor, who had taken great pains to teach him ancient history, began upon the story of alexander and lighted on the well-known anecdote of philip the doctor. there is a picture of it, and the story is well worth study. the tutor, worthy man, made several reflections which i did not like with regard to alexander's courage, but i did not argue with him lest i should lower him in the eyes of his pupil. at dinner they did not fail to get the little fellow talking, french fashion. the eager spirit of a child of his age, and the confident expectation of applause, made him say a number of silly things, and among them from time to time there were things to the point, and these made people forget the rest. at last came the story of philip the doctor. he told it very distinctly and prettily. after the usual meed of praise, demanded by his mother and expected by the child himself, they discussed what he had said. most of them blamed alexander's rashness, some of them, following the tutor's example, praised his resolution, which showed me that none of those present really saw the beauty of the story. "for my own part," i said, "if there was any courage or any steadfastness at all in alexander's conduct i think it was only a piece of bravado." then every one agreed that it was a piece of bravado. i was getting angry, and would have replied, when a lady sitting beside me, who had not hitherto spoken, bent towards me and whispered in my ear. "jean jacques," said she, "say no more, they will never understand you." i looked at her, i recognised the wisdom of her advice, and i held my tongue. several things made me suspect that our young professor had not in the least understood the story he told so prettily. after dinner i took his hand in mine and we went for a walk in the park. when i had questioned him quietly, i discovered that he admired the vaunted courage of alexander more than any one. but in what do you suppose he thought this courage consisted? merely in swallowing a disagreeable drink at a single draught without hesitation and without any signs of dislike. not a fortnight before the poor child had been made to take some medicine which he could hardly swallow, and the taste of it was still in his mouth. death, and death by poisoning, were for him only disagreeable sensations, and senna was his only idea of poison. i must admit, however, that alexander's resolution had made a great impression on his young mind, and he was determined that next time he had to take medicine he would be an alexander. without entering upon explanations which were clearly beyond his grasp, i confirmed him in his praiseworthy intention, and returned home smiling to myself over the great wisdom of parents and teachers who expect to teach history to children. such words as king, emperor, war, conquest, law, and revolution are easily put into their mouths; but when it is a question of attaching clear ideas to these words the explanations are very different from our talk with robert the gardener. i feel sure some readers dissatisfied with that "say no more, jean jacques," will ask what i really saw to admire in the conduct of alexander. poor things! if you need telling, how can you comprehend it? alexander believed in virtue, he staked his head, he staked his own life on that faith, his great soul was fitted to hold such a faith. to swallow that draught was to make a noble profession of the faith that was in him. never did mortal man recite a finer creed. if there is an alexander in our own days, show me such deeds. if children have no knowledge of words, there is no study that is suitable for them. if they have no real ideas they have no real memory, for i do not call that a memory which only recalls sensations. what is the use of inscribing on their brains a list of symbols which mean nothing to them? they will learn the symbols when they learn the things signified; why give them the useless trouble of learning them twice over? and yet what dangerous prejudices are you implanting when you teach them to accept as knowledge words which have no meaning for them. the first meaningless phrase, the first thing taken for granted on the word of another person without seeing its use for himself, this is the beginning of the ruin of the child's judgment. he may dazzle the eyes of fools long enough before he recovers from such a loss. [footnote: the learning of most philosophers is like the learning of children. vast erudition results less in the multitude of ideas than in a multitude of images. dates, names, places, all objects isolated or unconnected with ideas are merely retained in the memory for symbols, and we rarely recall any of these without seeing the right or left page of the book in which we read it, or the form in which we first saw it. most science was of this kind till recently. the science of our times is another matter; study and observation are things of the past; we dream and the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. you will say i too am a dreamer; i admit it, but i do what the others fail to do, i give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.] no, if nature has given the child this plasticity of brain which fits him to receive every kind of impression, it was not that you should imprint on it the names and dates of kings, the jargon of heraldry, the globe and geography, all those words without present meaning or future use for the child, which flood of words overwhelms his sad and barren childhood. but by means of this plasticity all the ideas he can understand and use, all that concern his happiness and will some day throw light upon his duties, should be traced at an early age in indelible characters upon his brain, to guide him to live in such a way as befits his nature and his powers. without the study of books, such a memory as the child may possess is not left idle; everything he sees and hears makes an impression on him, he keeps a record of men's sayings and doings, and his whole environment is the book from which he unconsciously enriches his memory, till his judgment is able to profit by it. to select these objects, to take care to present him constantly with those he may know, to conceal from him those he ought not to know, this is the real way of training his early memory; and in this way you must try to provide him with a storehouse of knowledge which will serve for his education in youth and his conduct throughout life. true, this method does not produce infant prodigies, nor will it reflect glory upon their tutors and governesses, but it produces men, strong, right-thinking men, vigorous both in mind and body, men who do not win admiration as children, but honour as men. emile will not learn anything by heart, not even fables, not even the fables of la fontaine, simple and delightful as they are, for the words are no more the fable than the words of history are history. how can people be so blind as to call fables the child's system of morals, without considering that the child is not only amused by the apologue but misled by it? he is attracted by what is false and he misses the truth, and the means adopted to make the teaching pleasant prevent him profiting by it. men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth. all children learn la fontaine's fables, but not one of them understands them. it is just as well that they do not understand, for the morality of the fables is so mixed and so unsuitable for their age that it would be more likely to incline them to vice than to virtue. "more paradoxes!" you exclaim. paradoxes they may be; but let us see if there is not some truth in them. i maintain that the child does not understand the fables he is taught, for however you try to explain them, the teaching you wish to extract from them demands ideas which he cannot grasp, while the poetical form which makes it easier to remember makes it harder to understand, so that clearness is sacrificed to facility. without quoting the host of wholly unintelligible and useless fables which are taught to children because they happen to be in the same book as the others, let us keep to those which the author seems to have written specially for children. in the whole of la fontaine's works i only know five or six fables conspicuous for child-like simplicity; i will take the first of these as an example, for it is one whose moral is most suitable for all ages, one which children get hold of with the least difficulty, which they have most pleasure in learning, one which for this very reason the author has placed at the beginning of his book. if his object were really to delight and instruct children, this fable is his masterpiece. let us go through it and examine it briefly. the fox and the crow a fable "maitre corbeau, sur un arbre perche" (mr. crow perched on a tree).--"mr.!" what does that word really mean? what does it mean before a proper noun? what is its meaning here? what is a crow? what is "un arbre perche"? we do not say "on a tree perched," but perched on a tree. so we must speak of poetical inversions, we must distinguish between prose and verse. "tenait dans son bec un fromage" (held a cheese in his beak)--what sort of a cheese? swiss, brie, or dutch? if the child has never seen crows, what is the good of talking about them? if he has seen crows will he believe that they can hold a cheese in their beak? your illustrations should always be taken from nature. "maitre renard, par l'odeur alleche" (mr. fox, attracted by the smell).--another master! but the title suits the fox,--who is master of all the tricks of his trade. you must explain what a fox is, and distinguish between the real fox and the conventional fox of the fables. "alleche." the word is obsolete; you will have to explain it. you will say it is only used in verse. perhaps the child will ask why people talk differently in verse. how will you answer that question? "alleche, par l'odeur d'un fromage." the cheese was held in his beak by a crow perched on a tree; it must indeed have smelt strong if the fox, in his thicket or his earth, could smell it. this is the way you train your pupil in that spirit of right judgment, which rejects all but reasonable arguments, and is able to distinguish between truth and falsehood in other tales. "lui tient a peu pres ce langage" (spoke to him after this fashion).--"ce langage." so foxes talk, do they! they talk like crows! mind what you are about, oh, wise tutor; weigh your answer before you give it, it is more important than you suspect. "eh! bonjour, monsieur le corbeau!" ("good-day, mr. crow!")--mr.! the child sees this title laughed to scorn before he knows it is a title of honour. those who say "monsieur du corbeau" will find their work cut out for them to explain that "du." "que vous etes joli! que vous me semblez beau!" ("how handsome you are, how beautiful in my eyes!")--mere padding. the child, finding the same thing repeated twice over in different words, is learning to speak carelessly. if you say this redundance is a device of the author, a part of the fox's scheme to make his praise seem all the greater by his flow of words, that is a valid excuse for me, but not for my pupil. "sans mentir, si votre ramage" ("without lying, if your song").--"without lying." so people do tell lies sometimes. what will the child think of you if you tell him the fox only says "sans mentir" because he is lying? "se rapporte a votre plumage" ("answered to your fine feathers").--"answered!" what does that mean? try to make the child compare qualities so different as those of song and plumage; you will see how much he understands. "vous seriez le phenix des hotes de ces bois!" ("you would be the phoenix of all the inhabitants of this wood!")--the phoenix! what is a phoenix? all of a sudden we are floundering in the lies of antiquity--we are on the edge of mythology. "the inhabitants of this wood." what figurative language! the flatterer adopts the grand style to add dignity to his speech, to make it more attractive. will the child understand this cunning? does he know, how could he possibly know, what is meant by grand style and simple style? "a ces mots le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie" (at these words, the crow is beside himself with delight).--to realise the full force of this proverbial expression we must have experienced very strong feeling. "et, pour montrer sa belle voix" (and, to show his fine voice).--remember that the child, to understand this line and the whole fable, must know what is meant by the crow's fine voice. "il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie" (he opens his wide beak and drops his prey).--this is a splendid line; its very sound suggests a picture. i see the great big ugly gaping beak, i hear the cheese crashing through the branches; but this kind of beauty is thrown away upon children. "le renard s'en saisit, et dit, 'mon bon monsieur'" (the fox catches it, and says, "my dear sir").--so kindness is already folly. you certainly waste no time in teaching your children. "apprenez que tout flatteur" ("you must learn that every flatterer").--a general maxim. the child can make neither head nor tail of it. "vit au depens de celui qui l'ecoute" ("lives at the expense of the person who listens to his flattery").--no child of ten ever understood that. "ce lecon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute" ("no doubt this lesson is well worth a cheese").--this is intelligible and its meaning is very good. yet there are few children who could compare a cheese and a lesson, few who would not prefer the cheese. you will therefore have to make them understand that this is said in mockery. what subtlety for a child! "le corbeau, honteux et confus" (the crow, ashamed and confused).--a nothing pleonasm, and there is no excuse for it this time. "jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus" (swore, but rather too late, that he would not be caught in that way again).--"swore." what master will be such a fool as to try to explain to a child the meaning of an oath? what a host of details! but much more would be needed for the analysis of all the ideas in this fable and their reduction to the simple and elementary ideas of which each is composed. but who thinks this analysis necessary to make himself intelligible to children? who of us is philosopher enough to be able to put himself in the child's place? let us now proceed to the moral. should we teach a six-year-old child that there are people who flatter and lie for the sake of gain? one might perhaps teach them that there are people who make fools of little boys and laugh at their foolish vanity behind their backs. but the whole thing is spoilt by the cheese. you are teaching them how to make another drop his cheese rather than how to keep their own. this is my second paradox, and it is not less weighty than the former one. watch children learning their fables and you will see that when they have a chance of applying them they almost always use them exactly contrary to the author's meaning; instead of being on their guard against the fault which you would prevent or cure, they are disposed to like the vice by which one takes advantage of another's defects. in the above fable children laugh at the crow, but they all love the fox. in the next fable you expect them to follow the example of the grasshopper. not so, they will choose the ant. they do not care to abase themselves, they will always choose the principal part--this is the choice of self-love, a very natural choice. but what a dreadful lesson for children! there could be no monster more detestable than a harsh and avaricious child, who realised what he was asked to give and what he refused. the ant does more; she teaches him not merely to refuse but to revile. in all the fables where the lion plays a part, usually the chief part, the child pretends to be the lion, and when he has to preside over some distribution of good things, he takes care to keep everything for himself; but when the lion is overthrown by the gnat, the child is the gnat. he learns how to sting to death those whom he dare not attack openly. from the fable of the sleek dog and the starving wolf he learns a lesson of licence rather than the lesson of moderation which you profess to teach him. i shall never forget seeing a little girl weeping bitterly over this tale, which had been told her as a lesson in obedience. the poor child hated to be chained up; she felt the chain chafing her neck; she was crying because she was not a wolf. so from the first of these fables the child learns the basest flattery; from the second, cruelty; from the third, injustice; from the fourth, satire; from the fifth, insubordination. the last of these lessons is no more suitable for your pupils than for mine, though he has no use for it. what results do you expect to get from your teaching when it contradicts itself! but perhaps the same system of morals which furnishes me with objections against the fables supplies you with as many reasons for keeping to them. society requires a rule of morality in our words; it also requires a rule of morality in our deeds; and these two rules are quite different. the former is contained in the catechism and it is left there; the other is contained in la fontaine's fables for children and his tales for mothers. the same author does for both. let us make a bargain, m. de la fontaine. for my own part, i undertake to make your books my favourite study; i undertake to love you, and to learn from your fables, for i hope i shall not mistake their meaning. as to my pupil, permit me to prevent him studying any one of them till you have convinced me that it is good for him to learn things three-fourths of which are unintelligible to him, and until you can convince me that in those fables he can understand he will never reverse the order and imitate the villain instead of taking warning from his dupe. when i thus get rid of children's lessons, i get rid of the chief cause of their sorrows, namely their books. reading is the curse of childhood, yet it is almost the only occupation you can find for children. emile, at twelve years old, will hardly know what a book is. "but," you say, "he must, at least, know how to read." when reading is of use to him, i admit he must learn to read, but till then he will only find it a nuisance. if children are not to be required to do anything as a matter of obedience, it follows that they will only learn what they perceive to be of real and present value, either for use or enjoyment; what other motive could they have for learning? the art of speaking to our absent friends, of hearing their words; the art of letting them know at first hand our feelings, our desires, and our longings, is an art whose usefulness can be made plain at any age. how is it that this art, so useful and pleasant in itself, has become a terror to children? because the child is compelled to acquire it against his will, and to use it for purposes beyond his comprehension. a child has no great wish to perfect himself in the use of an instrument of torture, but make it a means to his pleasure, and soon you will not be able to keep him from it. people make a great fuss about discovering the beat way to teach children to read. they invent "bureaux" [footnote: translator's note.--the "bureau" was a sort of case containing letters to be put together to form words. it was a favourite device for the teaching of reading and gave its name to a special method, called the bureau-method, of learning to read.] and cards, they turn the nursery into a printer's shop. locke would have them taught to read by means of dice. what a fine idea! and the pity of it! there is a better way than any of those, and one which is generally overlooked--it consists in the desire to learn. arouse this desire in your scholar and have done with your "bureaux" and your dice--any method will serve. present interest, that is the motive power, the only motive power that takes us far and safely. sometimes emile receives notes of invitation from his father or mother, his relations or friends; he is invited to a dinner, a walk, a boating expedition, to see some public entertainment. these notes are short, clear, plain, and well written. some one must read them to him, and he cannot always find anybody when wanted; no more consideration is shown to him than he himself showed to you yesterday. time passes, the chance is lost. the note is read to him at last, but it is too late. oh! if only he had known how to read! he receives other notes, so short, so interesting, he would like to try to read them. sometimes he gets help, sometimes none. he does his best, and at last he makes out half the note; it is something about going to-morrow to drink cream--where? with whom? he cannot tell--how hard he tries to make out the rest! i do not think emile will need a "bureau." shall i proceed to the teaching of writing? no, i am ashamed to toy with these trifles in a treatise on education. i will just add a few words which contain a principle of great importance. it is this--what we are in no hurry to get is usually obtained with speed and certainty. i am pretty sure emile will learn to read and write before he is ten, just because i care very little whether he can do so before he is fifteen; but i would rather he never learnt to read at all, than that this art should be acquired at the price of all that makes reading useful. what is the use of reading to him if he always hates it? "id imprimis cavere oportebit, ne studia, qui amare nondum potest, oderit, et amaritudinem semel perceptam etiam ultra rudes annos reformidet."--quintil. the more i urge my method of letting well alone, the more objections i perceive against it. if your pupil learns nothing from you, he will learn from others. if you do not instil truth he will learn falsehoods; the prejudices you fear to teach him he will acquire from those about him, they will find their way through every one of his senses; they will either corrupt his reason before it is fully developed or his mind will become torpid through inaction, and will become engrossed in material things. if we do not form the habit of thinking as children, we shall lose the power of thinking for the rest of our life. i fancy i could easily answer that objection, but why should i answer every objection? if my method itself answers your objections, it is good; if not, it is good for nothing. i continue my explanation. if, in accordance with the plan i have sketched, you follow rules which are just the opposite of the established practice, if instead of taking your scholar far afield, instead of wandering with him in distant places, in far-off lands, in remote centuries, in the ends of the earth, and in the very heavens themselves, you try to keep him to himself, to his own concerns, you will then find him able to perceive, to remember, and even to reason; this is nature's order. as the sentient being becomes active his discernment develops along with his strength. not till his strength is in excess of what is needed for self-preservation, is the speculative faculty developed, the faculty adapted for using this superfluous strength for other purposes. would you cultivate your pupil's intelligence, cultivate the strength it is meant to control. give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy, in order to make him good and wise; let him work, let him do things, let him run and shout, let him be always on the go; make a man of him in strength, and he will soon be a man in reason. of course by this method you will make him stupid if you are always giving him directions, always saying come here, go there, stop, do this, don't do that. if your head always guides his hands, his own mind will become useless. but remember the conditions we laid down; if you are a mere pedant it is not worth your while to read my book. it is a lamentable mistake to imagine that bodily activity hinders the working of the mind, as if these two kinds of activity ought not to advance hand in hand, and as if the one were not intended to act as guide to the other. there are two classes of men who are constantly engaged in bodily activity, peasants and savages, and certainly neither of these pays the least attention to the cultivation of the mind. peasants are rough, coarse, and clumsy; savages are noted, not only for their keen senses, but for great subtility of mind. speaking generally, there is nothing duller than a peasant or sharper than a savage. what is the cause of this difference? the peasant has always done as he was told, what his father did before him, what he himself has always done; he is the creature of habit, he spends his life almost like an automaton on the same tasks; habit and obedience have taken the place of reason. the case of the savage is very different; he is tied to no one place, he has no prescribed task, no superior to obey, he knows no law but his own will; he is therefore forced to reason at every step he takes. he can neither move nor walk without considering the consequences. thus the more his body is exercised, the more alert is his mind; his strength and his reason increase together, and each helps to develop the other. oh, learned tutor, let us see which of our two scholars is most like the savage and which is most like the peasant. your scholar is subject to a power which is continually giving him instruction; he acts only at the word of command; he dare not eat when he is hungry, nor laugh when he is merry, nor weep when he is sad, nor offer one hand rather than the other, nor stir a foot unless he is told to do it; before long he will not venture to breathe without orders. what would you have him think about, when you do all the thinking for him? he rests securely on your foresight, why should he think for himself? he knows you have undertaken to take care of him, to secure his welfare, and he feels himself freed from this responsibility. his judgment relies on yours; what you have not forbidden that he does, knowing that he runs no risk. why should he learn the signs of rain? he knows you watch the clouds for him. why should he time his walk? he knows there is no fear of your letting him miss his dinner hour. he eats till you tell him to stop, he stops when you tell him to do so; he does not attend to the teaching of his own stomach, but yours. in vain do you make his body soft by inaction; his understanding does not become subtle. far from it, you complete your task of discrediting reason in his eyes, by making him use such reasoning power as he has on the things which seem of least importance to him. as he never finds his reason any use to him, he decides at last that it is useless. if he reasons badly he will be found fault with; nothing worse will happen to him; and he has been found fault with so often that he pays no attention to it, such a common danger no longer alarms him. yet you will find he has a mind. he is quick enough to chatter with the women in the way i spoke of further back; but if he is in danger, if he must come to a decision in difficult circumstances, you will find him a hundredfold more stupid and silly than the son of the roughest labourer. as for my pupil, or rather nature's pupil, he has been trained from the outset to be as self-reliant as possible, he has not formed the habit of constantly seeking help from others, still less of displaying his stores of learning. on the other hand, he exercises discrimination and forethought, he reasons about everything that concerns himself. he does not chatter, he acts. not a word does he know of what is going on in the world at large, but he knows very thoroughly what affects himself. as he is always stirring he is compelled to notice many things, to recognise many effects; he soon acquires a good deal of experience. nature, not man, is his schoolmaster, and he learns all the quicker because he is not aware that he has any lesson to learn. so mind and body work together. he is always carrying out his own ideas, not those of other people, and thus he unites thought and action; as he grows in health and strength he grows in wisdom and discernment. this is the way to attain later on to what is generally considered incompatible, though most great men have achieved it, strength of body and strength of mind, the reason of the philosopher and the vigour of the athlete. young teacher, i am setting before you a difficult task, the art of controlling without precepts, and doing everything without doing anything at all. this art is, i confess, beyond your years, it is not calculated to display your talents nor to make your value known to your scholar's parents; but it is the only road to success. you will never succeed in making wise men if you do not first make little imps of mischief. this was the education of the spartans; they were not taught to stick to their books, they were set to steal their dinners. were they any the worse for it in after life? ever ready for victory, they crushed their foes in every kind of warfare, and the prating athenians were as much afraid of their words as of their blows. when education is most carefully attended to, the teacher issues his orders and thinks himself master, but it is the child who is really master. he uses the tasks you set him to obtain what he wants from you, and he can always make you pay for an hour's industry by a week's complaisance. you must always be making bargains with him. these bargains, suggested in your fashion, but carried out in his, always follow the direction of his own fancies, especially when you are foolish enough to make the condition some advantage he is almost sure to obtain, whether he fulfils his part of the bargain or not. the child is usually much quicker to read the master's thoughts than the master to read the child's feelings. and that is as it should be, for all the sagacity which the child would have devoted to self-preservation, had he been left to himself, is now devoted to the rescue of his native freedom from the chains of his tyrant; while the latter, who has no such pressing need to understand the child, sometimes finds that it pays him better to leave him in idleness or vanity. take the opposite course with your pupil; let him always think he is master while you are really master. there is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will itself is taken captive. is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? cannot you make of him what you please? his work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell. then he can devote himself to the bodily exercises adapted to his age without brutalising his mind; instead of developing his cunning to evade an unwelcome control, you will then find him entirely occupied in getting the best he can out of his environment with a view to his present welfare, and you will be surprised by the subtlety of the means he devises to get for himself such things as he can obtain, and to really enjoy things without the aid of other people's ideas. you leave him master of his own wishes, but you do not multiply his caprices. when he only does what he wants, he will soon only do what he ought, and although his body is constantly in motion, so far as his sensible and present interests are concerned, you will find him developing all the reason of which he is capable, far better and in a manner much better fitted for him than in purely theoretical studies. thus when he does not find you continually thwarting him, when he no longer distrusts you, no longer has anything to conceal from you, he will neither tell you lies nor deceive you; he will show himself fearlessly as he really is, and you can study him at your ease, and surround him with all the lessons you would have him learn, without awaking his suspicions. neither will he keep a curious and jealous eye on your own conduct, nor take a secret delight in catching you at fault. it is a great thing to avoid this. one of the child's first objects is, as i have said, to find the weak spots in its rulers. though this leads to spitefulness, it does not arise from it, but from the desire to evade a disagreeable control. overburdened by the yoke laid upon him, he tries to shake it off, and the faults he finds in his master give him a good opportunity for this. still the habit of spying out faults and delighting in them grows upon people. clearly we have stopped another of the springs of vice in emile's heart. having nothing to gain from my faults, he will not be on the watch for them, nor will he be tempted to look out for the faults of others. all these methods seem difficult because they are new to us, but they ought not to be really difficult. i have a right to assume that you have the knowledge required for the business you have chosen; that you know the usual course of development of the human thought, that you can study mankind and man, that you know beforehand the effect on your pupil's will of the various objects suited to his age which you put before him. you have the tools and the art to use them; are you not master of your trade? you speak of childish caprice; you are mistaken. children's caprices are never the work of nature, but of bad discipline; they have either obeyed or given orders, and i have said again and again, they must do neither. your pupil will have the caprices you have taught him; it is fair you should bear the punishment of your own faults. "but how can i cure them?" do you say? that may still be done by better conduct on your own part and great patience. i once undertook the charge of a child for a few weeks; he was accustomed not only to have his own way, but to make every one else do as he pleased; he was therefore capricious. the very first day he wanted to get up at midnight, to try how far he could go with me. when i was sound asleep he jumped out of bed, got his dressing-gown, and waked me up. i got up and lighted the candle, which was all he wanted. after a quarter of an hour he became sleepy and went back to bed quite satisfied with his experiment. two days later he repeated it, with the same success and with no sign of impatience on my part. when he kissed me as he lay down, i said to him very quietly, "my little dear, this is all very well, but do not try it again." his curiosity was aroused by this, and the very next day he did not fail to get up at the same time and woke me to see whether i should dare to disobey him. i asked what he wanted, and he told me he could not sleep. "so much the worse for you," i replied, and i lay quiet. he seemed perplexed by this way of speaking. he felt his way to the flint and steel and tried to strike a light. i could not help laughing when i heard him strike his fingers. convinced at last that he could not manage it, he brought the steel to my bed; i told him i did not want it, and i turned my back to him. then he began to rush wildly about the room, shouting, singing, making a great noise, knocking against chairs and tables, but taking, however, good care not to hurt himself seriously, but screaming loudly in the hope of alarming me. all this had no effect, but i perceived that though he was prepared for scolding or anger, he was quite unprepared for indifference. however, he was determined to overcome my patience with his own obstinacy, and he continued his racket so successfully that at last i lost my temper. i foresaw that i should spoil the whole business by an unseemly outburst of passion. i determined on another course. i got up quietly, went to the tinder box, but could not find it; i asked him for it, and he gave it me, delighted to have won the victory over me. i struck a light, lighted the candle, took my young gentleman by the hand and led him quietly into an adjoining dressing-room with the shutters firmly fastened, and nothing he could break. i left him there without a light; then locking him in i went back to my bed without a word. what a noise there was! that was what i expected, and took no notice. at last the noise ceased; i listened, heard him settling down, and i was quite easy about him. next morning i entered the room at daybreak, and my little rebel was lying on a sofa enjoying a sound and much needed sleep after his exertions. the matter did not end there. his mother heard that the child had spent a great part of the night out of bed. that spoilt the whole thing; her child was as good as dead. finding a good chance for revenge, he pretended to be ill, not seeing that he would gain nothing by it. they sent for the doctor. unluckily for the mother, the doctor was a practical joker, and to amuse himself with her terrors he did his best to increase them. however, he whispered to me, "leave it to me, i promise to cure the child of wanting to be ill for some time to come." as a matter of fact he prescribed bed and dieting, and the child was handed over to the apothecary. i sighed to see the mother cheated on every hand except by me, whom she hated because i did not deceive her. after pretty severe reproaches, she told me her son was delicate, that he was the sole heir of the family, his life must be preserved at all costs, and she would not have him contradicted. in that i thoroughly agreed with her, but what she meant by contradicting was not obeying him in everything. i saw i should have to treat the mother as i had treated the son. "madam," i said coldly, "i do not know how to educate the heir to a fortune, and what is more, i do not mean to study that art. you can take that as settled." i was wanted for some days longer, and the father smoothed things over. the mother wrote to the tutor to hasten his return, and the child, finding he got nothing by disturbing my rest, nor yet by being ill, decided at last to get better and to go to sleep. you can form no idea of the number of similar caprices to which the little tyrant had subjected his unlucky tutor; for his education was carried on under his mother's eye, and she would not allow her son and heir to be disobeyed in anything. whenever he wanted to go out, you must be ready to take him, or rather to follow him, and he always took good care to choose the time when he knew his tutor was very busy. he wished to exercise the same power over me and to avenge himself by day for having to leave me in peace at night. i gladly agreed and began by showing plainly how pleased i was to give him pleasure; after that when it was a matter of curing him of his fancies i set about it differently. in the first place, he must be shown that he was in the wrong. this was not difficult; knowing that children think only of the present, i took the easy advantage which foresight gives; i took care to provide him with some indoor amusement of which he was very fond. just when he was most occupied with it, i went and suggested a short walk, and he sent me away. i insisted, but he paid no attention. i had to give in, and he took note of this sign of submission. the next day it was my turn. as i expected, he got tired of his occupation; i, however, pretended to be very busy. that was enough to decide him. he came to drag me from my work, to take him at once for a walk. i refused; he persisted. "no," i said, "when i did what you wanted, you taught me how to get my own way; i shall not go out." "very well," he replied eagerly, "i shall go out by myself." "as you please," and i returned to my work. he put on his things rather uneasily when he saw i did not follow his example. when he was ready he came and made his bow; i bowed too; he tried to frighten me with stories of the expeditions he was going to make; to hear him talk you would think he was going to the world's end. quite unmoved, i wished him a pleasant journey. he became more and more perplexed. however, he put a good face on it, and when he was ready to go out he told his foot man to follow him. the footman, who had his instructions, replied that he had no time, and that he was busy carrying out my orders, and he must obey me first. for the moment the child was taken aback. how could he think they would really let him go out alone, him, who, in his own eyes, was the most important person in the world, who thought that everything in heaven and earth was wrapped up in his welfare? however, he was beginning to feel his weakness, he perceived that he should find himself alone among people who knew nothing of him. he saw beforehand the risks he would run; obstinacy alone sustained him; very slowly and unwillingly he went downstairs. at last he went out into the street, consoling himself a little for the harm that might happen to himself, in the hope that i should be held responsible for it. this was just what i expected. all was arranged beforehand, and as it meant some sort of public scene i had got his father's consent. he had scarcely gone a few steps, when he heard, first on this side then on that, all sorts of remarks about himself. "what a pretty little gentleman, neighbour? where is he going all alone? he will get lost! i will ask him into our house." "take care you don't. don't you see he is a naughty little boy, who has been turned out of his own house because he is good for nothing? you must not stop naughty boys; let him go where he likes." "well, well; the good god take care of him. i should be sorry if anything happened to him." a little further on he met some young urchins of about his own age who teased him and made fun of him. the further he got the more difficulties he found. alone and unprotected he was at the mercy of everybody, and he found to his great surprise that his shoulder knot and his gold lace commanded no respect. however, i had got a friend of mine, who was a stranger to him, to keep an eye on him. unnoticed by him, this friend followed him step by step, and in due time he spoke to him. the role, like that of sbrigani in pourceaugnac, required an intelligent actor, and it was played to perfection. without making the child fearful and timid by inspiring excessive terror, he made him realise so thoroughly the folly of his exploit that in half an hour's time he brought him home to me, ashamed and humble, and afraid to look me in the face. to put the finishing touch to his discomfiture, just as he was coming in his father came down on his way out and met him on the stairs. he had to explain where he had been, and why i was not with him. [footnote: in a case like this there is no danger in asking a child to tell the truth, for he knows very well that it cannot be hid, and that if he ventured to tell a lie he would be found out at once.] the poor child would gladly have sunk into the earth. his father did not take the trouble to scold him at length, but said with more severity than i should have expected, "when you want to go out by yourself, you can do so, but i will not have a rebel in my house, so when you go, take good care that you never come back." as for me, i received him somewhat gravely, but without blame and without mockery, and for fear he should find out we had been playing with him, i declined to take him out walking that day. next day i was well pleased to find that he passed in triumph with me through the very same people who had mocked him the previous day, when they met him out by himself. you may be sure he never threatened to go out without me again. by these means and other like them i succeeded during the short time i was with him in getting him to do everything i wanted without bidding him or forbidding him to do anything, without preaching or exhortation, without wearying him with unnecessary lessons. so he was pleased when i spoke to him, but when i was silent he was frightened, for he knew there was something amiss, and he always got his lesson from the thing itself. but let us return to our subject. the body is strengthened by this constant exercise under the guidance of nature herself, and far from brutalising the mind, this exercise develops in it the only kind of reason of which young children are capable, the kind of reason most necessary at every age. it teaches us how to use our strength, to perceive the relations between our own and neighbouring bodies, to use the natural tools, which are within our reach and adapted to our senses. is there anything sillier than a child brought up indoors under his mother's eye, who, in his ignorance of weight and resistance, tries to uproot a tall tree or pick up a rock. the first time i found myself outside geneva i tried to catch a galloping horse, and i threw stones at mont saleve, two leagues away; i was the laughing stock of the whole village, and was supposed to be a regular idiot. at eighteen we are taught in our natural philosophy the use of the lever; every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy. the lessons the scholars learn from one another in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the class-room. watch a cat when she comes into a room for the first time; she goes from place to place, she sniffs about and examines everything, she is never still for a moment; she is suspicious of everything till she has examined it and found out what it is. it is the same with the child when he begins to walk, and enters, so to speak, the room of the world around him. the only difference is that, while both use sight, the child uses his hands and the cat that subtle sense of smell which nature has bestowed upon it. it is this instinct, rightly or wrongly educated, which makes children skilful or clumsy, quick or slow, wise or foolish. man's primary natural goals are, therefore, to measure himself against his environment, to discover in every object he sees those sensible qualities which may concern himself, so his first study is a kind of experimental physics for his own preservation. he is turned away from this and sent to speculative studies before he has found his proper place in the world. while his delicate and flexible limbs can adjust themselves to the bodies upon which they are intended to act, while his senses are keen and as yet free from illusions, then is the time to exercise both limbs and senses in their proper business. it is the time to learn to perceive the physical relations between ourselves and things. since everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense, man's first reason is a reason of sense-experience. it is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. to substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little. before you can practise an art you must first get your tools; and if you are to make good use of those tools, they must be fashioned sufficiently strong to stand use. to learn to think we must therefore exercise our limbs, our senses, and our bodily organs, which are the tools of the intellect; and to get the best use out of these tools, the body which supplies us with them must be strong and healthy. not only is it quite a mistake that true reason is developed apart from the body, but it is a good bodily constitution which makes the workings of the mind easy and correct. while i am showing how the child's long period of leisure should be spent, i am entering into details which may seem absurd. you will say, "this is a strange sort of education, and it is subject to your own criticism, for it only teaches what no one needs to learn. why spend your time in teaching what will come of itself without care or trouble? is there any child of twelve who is ignorant of all you wish to teach your pupil, while he also knows what his master has taught him." gentlemen, you are mistaken. i am teaching my pupil an art, the acquirement of which demands much time and trouble, an art which your scholars certainly do not possess; it is the art of being ignorant; for the knowledge of any one who only thinks he knows, what he really does know is a very small matter. you teach science; well and good; i am busy fashioning the necessary tools for its acquisition. once upon a time, they say the venetians were displaying the treasures of the cathedral of saint mark to the spanish ambassador; the only comment he made was, "qui non c'e la radice." when i see a tutor showing off his pupil's learning, i am always tempted to say the same to him. every one who has considered the manner of life among the ancients, attributes the strength of body and mind by which they are distinguished from the men of our own day to their gymnastic exercises. the stress laid by montaigne upon this opinion, shows that it had made a great impression on him; he returns to it again and again. speaking of a child's education he says, "to strengthen the mind you must harden the muscles; by training the child to labour you train him to suffering; he must be broken in to the hardships of gymnastic exercises to prepare him for the hardships of dislocations, colics, and other bodily ills." the philosopher locke, the worthy rollin, the learned fleury, the pedant de crouzas, differing as they do so widely from one another, are agreed in this one matter of sufficient bodily exercise for children. this is the wisest of their precepts, and the one which is certain to be neglected. i have already dwelt sufficiently on its importance, and as better reasons and more sensible rules cannot be found than those in locke's book, i will content myself with referring to it, after taking the liberty of adding a few remarks of my own. the limbs of a growing child should be free to move easily in his clothing; nothing should cramp their growth or movement; there should be nothing tight, nothing fitting closely to the body, no belts of any kind. the french style of dress, uncomfortable and unhealthy for a man, is especially bad for children. the stagnant humours, whose circulation is interrupted, putrify in a state of inaction, and this process proceeds more rapidly in an inactive and sedentary life; they become corrupt and give rise to scurvy; this disease, which is continually on the increase among us, was almost unknown to the ancients, whose way of dressing and living protected them from it. the hussar's dress, far from correcting this fault, increases it, and compresses the whole of the child's body, by way of dispensing with a few bands. the best plan is to keep children in frocks as long as possible and then to provide them with loose clothing, without trying to define the shape which is only another way of deforming it. their defects of body and mind may all be traced to the same source, the desire to make men of them before their time. there are bright colours and dull; children like the bright colours best, and they suit them better too. i see no reason why such natural suitability should not be taken into consideration; but as soon as they prefer a material because it is rich, their hearts are already given over to luxury, to every caprice of fashion, and this taste is certainly not their own. it is impossible to say how much education is influenced by this choice of clothes, and the motives for this choice. not only do short-sighted mothers offer ornaments as rewards to their children, but there are foolish tutors who threaten to make their pupils wear the plainest and coarsest clothes as a punishment. "if you do not do your lessons better, if you do not take more care of your clothes, you shall be dressed like that little peasant boy." this is like saying to them, "understand that clothes make the man." is it to be wondered at that our young people profit by such wise teaching, that they care for nothing but dress, and that they only judge of merit by its outside. if i had to bring such a spoilt child to his senses, i would take care that his smartest clothes were the most uncomfortable, that he was always cramped, constrained, and embarrassed in every way; freedom and mirth should flee before his splendour. if he wanted to take part in the games of children more simply dressed, they should cease their play and run away. before long i should make him so tired and sick of his magnificence, such a slave to his gold-laced coat, that it would become the plague of his life, and he would be less afraid to behold the darkest dungeon than to see the preparations for his adornment. before the child is enslaved by our prejudices his first wish is always to be free and comfortable. the plainest and most comfortable clothes, those which leave him most liberty, are what he always likes best. there are habits of body suited for an active life and others for a sedentary life. the latter leaves the humours an equable and uniform course, and the body should be protected from changes in temperature; the former is constantly passing from action to rest, from heat to cold, and the body should be inured to these changes. hence people, engaged in sedentary pursuits indoors, should always be warmly dressed, to keep their bodies as nearly as possible at the same temperature at all times and seasons. those, however, who come and go in sun, wind, and rain, who take much exercise, and spend most of their time out of doors, should always be lightly clad, so as to get used to the changes in the air and to every degree of temperature without suffering inconvenience. i would advise both never to change their clothes with the changing seasons, and that would be the invariable habit of my pupil emile. by this i do not mean that he should wear his winter clothes in summer like many people of sedentary habits, but that he should wear his summer clothes in winter like hard-working folk. sir isaac newton always did this, and he lived to be eighty. emile should wear little or nothing on his head all the year round. the ancient egyptians always went bareheaded; the persians used to wear heavy tiaras and still wear large turbans, which according to chardin are required by their climate. i have remarked elsewhere on the difference observed by herodotus on a battle-field between the skulls of the persians and those of the egyptians. since it is desirable that the bones of the skull should grow harder and more substantial, less fragile and porous, not only to protect the brain against injuries but against colds, fever, and every influence of the air, you should therefore accustom your children to go bare-headed winter and summer, day and night. if you make them wear a night-cap to keep their hair clean and tidy, let it be thin and transparent like the nets with which the basques cover their hair. i am aware that most mothers will be more impressed by chardin's observations than my arguments, and will think that all climates are the climate of persia, but i did not choose a european pupil to turn him into an asiatic. children are generally too much wrapped up, particularly in infancy. they should be accustomed to cold rather than heat; great cold never does them any harm, if they are exposed to it soon enough; but their skin is still too soft and tender and leaves too free a course for perspiration, so that they are inevitably exhausted by excessive heat. it has been observed that infant mortality is greatest in august. moreover, it seems certain from a comparison of northern and southern races that we become stronger by bearing extreme cold rather than excessive heat. but as the child's body grows bigger and his muscles get stronger, train him gradually to bear the rays of the sun. little by little you will harden him till he can face the burning heat of the tropics without danger. locke, in the midst of the manly and sensible advice he gives us, falls into inconsistencies one would hardly expect in such a careful thinker. the same man who would have children take an ice-cold bath summer and winter, will not let them drink cold water when they are hot, or lie on damp grass. but he would never have their shoes water-tight; and why should they let in more water when the child is hot than when he is cold, and may we not draw the same inference with regard to the feet and body that he draws with regard to the hands and feet and the body and face? if he would have a man all face, why blame me if i would have him all feet? to prevent children drinking when they are hot, he says they should be trained to eat a piece of bread first. it is a strange thing to make a child eat because he is thirsty; i would as soon give him a drink when he is hungry. you will never convince me that our first instincts are so ill-regulated that we cannot satisfy them without endangering our lives. were that so, the man would have perished over and over again before he had learned how to keep himself alive. whenever emile is thirsty let him have a drink, and let him drink fresh water just as it is, not even taking the chill off it in the depths of winter and when he is bathed in perspiration. the only precaution i advise is to take care what sort of water you give him. if the water comes from a river, give it him just as it is; if it is spring-water let it stand a little exposed to the air before he drinks it. in warm weather rivers are warm; it is not so with springs, whose water has not been in contact with the air. you must wait till the temperature of the water is the same as that of the air. in winter, on the other hand, spring water is safer than river water. it is, however, unusual and unnatural to perspire greatly in winter, especially in the open air, for the cold air constantly strikes the skin and drives the perspiration inwards, and prevents the pores opening enough to give it passage. now i do not intend emile to take his exercise by the fireside in winter, but in the open air and among the ice. if he only gets warm with making and throwing snowballs, let him drink when he is thirsty, and go on with his game after drinking, and you need not be afraid of any ill effects. and if any other exercise makes him perspire let him drink cold water even in winter provided he is thirsty. only take care to take him to get the water some little distance away. in such cold as i am supposing, he would have cooled down sufficiently when he got there to be able to drink without danger. above all, take care to conceal these precautions from him. i would rather he were ill now and then, than always thinking about his health. since children take such violent exercise they need a great deal of sleep. the one makes up for the other, and this shows that both are necessary. night is the time set apart by nature for rest. it is an established fact that sleep is quieter and calmer when the sun is below the horizon, and that our senses are less calm when the air is warmed by the rays of the sun. so it is certainly the healthiest plan to rise with the sun and go to bed with the sun. hence in our country man and all the other animals with him want more sleep in winter than in summer. but town life is so complex, so unnatural, so subject to chances and changes, that it is not wise to accustom a man to such uniformity that he cannot do without it. no doubt he must submit to rules; but the chief rule is this--be able to break the rule if necessary. so do not be so foolish as to soften your pupil by letting him always sleep his sleep out. leave him at first to the law of nature without any hindrance, but never forget that under our conditions he must rise above this law; he must be able to go to bed late and rise early, be awakened suddenly, or sit up all night without ill effects. begin early and proceed gently, a step at a time, and the constitution adapts itself to the very conditions which would destroy it if they were imposed for the first time on the grown man. in the next place he must be accustomed to sleep in an uncomfortable bed, which is the best way to find no bed uncomfortable. speaking generally, a hard life, when once we have become used to it, increases our pleasant experiences; an easy life prepares the way for innumerable unpleasant experiences. those who are too tenderly nurtured can only sleep on down; those who are used to sleep on bare boards can find them anywhere. there is no such thing as a hard bed for the man who falls asleep at once. the body is, so to speak, melted and dissolved in a soft bed where one sinks into feathers and eider-down. the reins when too warmly covered become inflamed. stone and other diseases are often due to this, and it invariably produces a delicate constitution, which is the seed-ground of every ailment. the best bed is that in which we get the best sleep. emile and i will prepare such a bed for ourselves during the daytime. we do not need persian slaves to make our beds; when we are digging the soil we are turning our mattresses. i know that a healthy child may be made to sleep or wake almost at will. when the child is put to bed and his nurse grows weary of his chatter, she says to him, "go to sleep." that is much like saying, "get well," when he is ill. the right way is to let him get tired of himself. talk so much that he is compelled to hold his tongue, and he will soon be asleep. here is at least one use for sermons, and you may as well preach to him as rock his cradle; but if you use this narcotic at night, do not use it by day. i shall sometimes rouse emile, not so much to prevent his sleeping too much, as to accustom him to anything--even to waking with a start. moreover, i should be unfit for my business if i could not make him wake himself, and get up, so to speak, at my will, without being called. if he wakes too soon, i shall let him look forward to a tedious morning, so that he will count as gain any time he can give to sleep. if he sleeps too late i shall show him some favourite toy when he wakes. if i want him to wake at a given hour i shall say, "to-morrow at six i am going fishing," or "i shall take a walk to such and such a place. would you like to come too?" he assents, and begs me to wake him. i promise, or do not promise, as the case requires. if he wakes too late, he finds me gone. there is something amiss if he does not soon learn to wake himself. moreover, should it happen, though it rarely does, that a sluggish child desires to stagnate in idleness, you must not give way to this tendency, which might stupefy him entirely, but you must apply some stimulus to wake him. you must understand that is no question of applying force, but of arousing some appetite which leads to action, and such an appetite, carefully selected on the lines laid down by nature, kills two birds with one stone. if one has any sort of skill, i can think of nothing for which a taste, a very passion, cannot be aroused in children, and that without vanity, emulation, or jealousy. their keenness, their spirit of imitation, is enough of itself; above all, there is their natural liveliness, of which no teacher so far has contrived to take advantage. in every game, when they are quite sure it is only play, they endure without complaint, or even with laughter, hardships which they would not submit to otherwise without floods of tears. the sports of the young savage involve long fasting, blows, burns, and fatigue of every kind, a proof that even pain has a charm of its own, which may remove its bitterness. it is not every master, however, who knows how to season this dish, nor can every scholar eat it without making faces. however, i must take care or i shall be wandering off again after exceptions. it is not to be endured that man should become the slave of pain, disease, accident, the perils of life, or even death itself; the more familiar he becomes with these ideas the sooner he will be cured of that over-sensitiveness which adds to the pain by impatience in bearing it; the sooner he becomes used to the sufferings which may overtake him, the sooner he shall, as montaigne has put it, rob those pains of the sting of unfamiliarity, and so make his soul strong and invulnerable; his body will be the coat of mail which stops all the darts which might otherwise find a vital part. even the approach of death, which is not death itself, will scarcely be felt as such; he will not die, he will be, so to speak, alive or dead and nothing more. montaigne might say of him as he did of a certain king of morocco, "no man ever prolonged his life so far into death." a child serves his apprenticeship in courage and endurance as well as in other virtues; but you cannot teach children these virtues by name alone; they must learn them unconsciously through experience. but speaking of death, what steps shall i take with regard to my pupil and the smallpox? shall he be inoculated in infancy, or shall i wait till he takes it in the natural course of things? the former plan is more in accordance with our practice, for it preserves his life at a time when it is of greater value, at the cost of some danger when his life is of less worth; if indeed we can use the word danger with regard to inoculation when properly performed. but the other plan is more in accordance with our general principles--to leave nature to take the precautions she delights in, precautions she abandons whenever man interferes. the natural man is always ready; let nature inoculate him herself, she will choose the fitting occasion better than we. do not think i am finding fault with inoculation, for my reasons for exempting my pupil from it do not in the least apply to yours. your training does not prepare them to escape catching smallpox as soon as they are exposed to infection. if you let them take it anyhow, they will probably die. i perceive that in different lands the resistance to inoculation is in proportion to the need for it; and the reason is plain. so i scarcely condescend to discuss this question with regard to emile. he will be inoculated or not according to time, place, and circumstances; it is almost a matter of indifference, as far as he is concerned. if it gives him smallpox, there will be the advantage of knowing what to expect, knowing what the disease is; that is a good thing, but if he catches it naturally it will have kept him out of the doctor's hands, which is better. an exclusive education, which merely tends to keep those who have received it apart from the mass of mankind, always selects such teaching as is costly rather than cheap, even when the latter is of more use. thus all carefully educated young men learn to ride, because it is costly, but scarcely any of them learn to swim, as it costs nothing, and an artisan can swim as well as any one. yet without passing through the riding school, the traveller learns to mount his horse, to stick on it, and to ride well enough for practical purposes; but in the water if you cannot swim you will drown, and we cannot swim unless we are taught. again, you are not forced to ride on pain of death, while no one is sure of escaping such a common danger as drowning. emile shall be as much at home in the water as on land. why should he not be able to live in every element? if he could learn to fly, he should be an eagle; i would make him a salamander, if he could bear the heat. people are afraid lest the child should be drowned while he is learning to swim; if he dies while he is learning, or if he dies because he has not learnt, it will be your own fault. foolhardiness is the result of vanity; we are not rash when no one is looking. emile will not be foolhardy, though all the world were watching him. as the exercise does not depend on its danger, he will learn to swim the hellespont by swimming, without any danger, a stream in his father's park; but he must get used to danger too, so as not to be flustered by it. this is an essential part of the apprenticeship i spoke of just now. moreover, i shall take care to proportion the danger to his strength, and i shall always share it myself, so that i need scarcely fear any imprudence if i take as much care for his life as for my own. a child is smaller than a man; he has not the man's strength or reason, but he sees and hears as well or nearly as well; his sense of taste is very good, though he is less fastidious, and he distinguishes scents as clearly though less sensuously. the senses are the first of our faculties to mature; they are those most frequently overlooked or neglected. to train the senses it is not enough merely to use them; we must learn to judge by their means, to learn to feel, so to speak; for we cannot touch, see, or hear, except as we have been taught. there is a mere natural and mechanical use of the senses which strengthens the body without improving the judgment. it is all very well to swim, run, jump, whip a top, throw stones; but have we nothing but arms and legs? have we not eyes and ears as well; and are not these organs necessary for the use of the rest? do not merely exercise the strength, exercise all the senses by which it is guided; make the best use of every one of them, and check the results of one by the other. measure, count, weigh, compare. do not use force till you have estimated the resistance; let the estimation of the effect always precede the application of the means. get the child interested in avoiding insufficient or superfluous efforts. if in this way you train him to calculate the effects of all his movements, and to correct his mistakes by experience, is it not clear that the more he does the wiser he will become? take the case of moving a heavy mass; if he takes too long a lever, he will waste his strength; if it is too short, he will not have strength enough; experience will teach him to use the very stick he needs. this knowledge is not beyond his years. take, for example, a load to be carried; if he wants to carry as much as he can, and not to take up more than he can carry, must he not calculate the weight by the appearance? does he know how to compare masses of like substance and different size, or to choose between masses of the same size and different substances? he must set to work to compare their specific weights. i have seen a young man, very highly educated, who could not be convinced, till he had tried it, that a bucket full of blocks of oak weighed less than the same bucket full of water. all our senses are not equally under our control. one of them, touch, is always busy during our waking hours; it is spread over the whole surface of the body, like a sentinel ever on the watch to warn us of anything which may do us harm. whether we will or not, we learn to use it first of all by experience, by constant practice, and therefore we have less need for special training for it. yet we know that the blind have a surer and more delicate sense of touch than we, for not being guided by the one sense, they are forced to get from the touch what we get from sight. why, then, are not we trained to walk as they do in the dark, to recognise what we touch, to distinguish things about us; in a word, to do at night and in the dark what they do in the daytime without sight? we are better off than they while the sun shines; in the dark it is their turn to be our guide. we are blind half our time, with this difference: the really blind always know what to do, while we are afraid to stir in the dark. we have lights, you say. what always artificial aids. who can insure that they will always be at hand when required. i had rather emil's eyes were in his finger tips, than in the chandler's shop. if you are shut up in a building at night, clap your hands, you will know from the sound whether the space is large or small, if you are in the middle or in one corner. half a foot from a wall the air, which is refracted and does not circulate freely, produces a different effect on your face. stand still in one place and turn this way and that; a slight draught will tell you if there is a door open. if you are on a boat you will perceive from the way the air strikes your face not merely the direction in which you are going, but whether the current is bearing you slow or fast. these observations and many others like them can only be properly made at night; however much attention we give to them by daylight, we are always helped or hindered by sight, so that the results escape us. yet here we use neither hand nor stick. how much may be learnt by touch, without ever touching anything! i would have plenty of games in the dark! this suggestion is more valuable than it seems at first sight. men are naturally afraid of the dark; so are some animals. [footnote: this terror is very noticeable during great eclipses of the sun.] only a few men are freed from this burden by knowledge, determination, and courage. i have seen thinkers, unbelievers, philosophers, exceedingly brave by daylight, tremble like women at the rustling of a leaf in the dark. this terror is put down to nurses' tales; this is a mistake; it has a natural cause. what is this cause? what makes the deaf suspicious and the lower classes superstitious? ignorance of the things about us, and of what is taking place around us. [footnote: another cause has been well explained by a philosopher, often quoted in this work, a philosopher to whose wide views i am very greatly indebted.] when under special conditions we cannot form a fair idea of distance, when we can only judge things by the size of the angle or rather of the image formed in our eyes, we cannot avoid being deceived as to the size of these objects. every one knows by experience how when we are travelling at night we take a bush near at hand for a great tree at a distance, and vice versa. in the same way, if the objects were of a shape unknown to us, so that we could not tell their size in that way, we should be equally mistaken with regard to it. if a fly flew quickly past a few inches from our eyes, we should think it was a distant bird; a horse standing still at a distance from us in the midst of open country, in a position somewhat like that of a sheep, would be taken for a large sheep, so long as we did not perceive that it was a horse; but as soon as we recognise what it is, it seems as large as a horse, and we at once correct our former judgment. whenever one finds oneself in unknown places at night where we cannot judge of distance, and where we cannot recognise objects by their shape on account of the darkness, we are in constant danger of forming mistaken judgments as to the objects which present themselves to our notice. hence that terror, that kind of inward fear experienced by most people on dark nights. this is foundation for the supposed appearances of spectres, or gigantic and terrible forms which so many people profess to have seen. they are generally told that they imagined these things, yet they may really have seen them, and it is quite possible they really saw what they say they did see; for it will always be the case that when we can only estimate the size of an object by the angle it forms in the eye, that object will swell and grow as we approach it; and if the spectator thought it several feet high when it was thirty or forty feet away, it will seem very large indeed when it is a few feet off; this must indeed astonish and alarm the spectator until he touches it and perceives what it is, for as soon as he perceives what it is, the object which seemed so gigantic will suddenly shrink and assume its real size, but if we run away or are afraid to approach, we shall certainly form no other idea of the thing than the image formed in the eye, and we shall have really seen a gigantic figure of alarming size and shape. there is, therefore, a natural ground for the tendency to see ghosts, and these appearances are not merely the creation of the imagination, as the men of science would have us think.--buffon, nat. hist. in the text i have tried to show that they are always partly the creation of the imagination, and with regard to the cause explained in this quotation, it is clear that the habit of walking by night should teach us to distinguish those appearances which similarity of form and diversity of distance lend to the objects seen in the dark. for if the air is light enough for us to see the outlines there must be more air between us and them when they are further off, so that we ought to see them less distinctly when further off, which should be enough, when we are used to it, to prevent the error described by m. buffon. [whichever explanation you prefer, my mode of procedure is still efficacious, and experience entirely confirms it.] accustomed to perceive things from a distance and to calculate their effects, how can i help supposing, when i cannot see, that there are hosts of creatures and all sorts of movements all about me which may do me harm, and against which i cannot protect myself? in vain do i know i am safe where i am; i am never so sure of it as when i can actually see it, so that i have always a cause for fear which did not exist in broad daylight. i know, indeed, that a foreign body can scarcely act upon me without some slight sound, and how intently i listen! at the least sound which i cannot explain, the desire of self-preservation makes me picture everything that would put me on my guard, and therefore everything most calculated to alarm me. i am just as uneasy if i hear no sound, for i might be taken unawares without a sound. i must picture things as they were before, as they ought to be; i must see what i do not see. thus driven to exercise my imagination, it soon becomes my master, and what i did to reassure myself only alarms me more. i hear a noise, it is a robber; i hear nothing, it is a ghost. the watchfulness inspired by the instinct of self-preservation only makes me more afraid. everything that ought to reassure me exists only for my reason, and the voice of instinct is louder than that of reason. what is the good of thinking there is nothing to be afraid of, since in that case there is nothing we can do? the cause indicates the cure. in everything habit overpowers imagination; it is only aroused by what is new. it is no longer imagination, but memory which is concerned with what we see every day, and that is the reason of the maxim, "ab assuetis non fit passio," for it is only at the flame of imagination that the passions are kindled. therefore do not argue with any one whom you want to cure of the fear of darkness; take him often into dark places and be assured this practice will be of more avail than all the arguments of philosophy. the tiler on the roof does not know what it is to be dizzy, and those who are used to the dark will not be afraid. there is another advantage to be gained from our games in the dark. but if these games are to be a success i cannot speak too strongly of the need for gaiety. nothing is so gloomy as the dark: do not shut your child up in a dungeon, let him laugh when he goes, into a dark place, let him laugh when he comes out, so that the thought of the game he is leaving and the games he will play next may protect him from the fantastic imagination which might lay hold on him. there comes a stage in life beyond which we progress backwards. i feel i have reached this stage. i am, so to speak, returning to a past career. the approach of age makes us recall the happy days of our childhood. as i grow old i become a child again, and i recall more readily what i did at ten than at thirty. reader, forgive me if i sometimes draw my examples from my own experience. if this book is to be well written, i must enjoy writing it. i was living in the country with a pastor called m. lambercier. my companion was a cousin richer than myself, who was regarded as the heir to some property, while i, far from my father, was but a poor orphan. my big cousin bernard was unusually timid, especially at night. i laughed at his fears, till m. lambercier was tired of my boasting, and determined to put my courage to the proof. one autumn evening, when it was very dark, he gave me the church key, and told me to go and fetch a bible he had left in the pulpit. to put me on my mettle he said something which made it impossible for me to refuse. i set out without a light; if i had had one, it would perhaps have been even worse. i had to pass through the graveyard; i crossed it bravely, for as long as i was in the open air i was never afraid of the dark. as i opened the door i heard a sort of echo in the roof; it sounded like voices and it began to shake my roman courage. having opened the door i tried to enter, but when i had gone a few steps i stopped. at the sight of the profound darkness in which the vast building lay i was seized with terror and my hair stood on end. i turned, i went out through the door, and took to my heels. in the yard i found a little dog, called sultan, whose caresses reassured me. ashamed of my fears, i retraced my steps, trying to take sultan with me, but he refused to follow. hurriedly i opened the door and entered the church. i was hardly inside when terror again got hold of me and so firmly that i lost my head, and though the pulpit was on the right, as i very well knew, i sought it on the left, and entangling myself among the benches i was completely lost. unable to find either pulpit or door, i fell into an indescribable state of mind. at last i found the door and managed to get out of the church and run away as i had done before, quite determined never to enter the church again except in broad daylight. i returned to the house; on the doorstep i heard m. lambercier laughing, laughing, as i supposed, at me. ashamed to face his laughter, i was hesitating to open the door, when i heard miss lambercier, who was anxious about me, tell the maid to get the lantern, and m. lambercier got ready to come and look for me, escorted by my gallant cousin, who would have got all the credit for the expedition. all at once my fears departed, and left me merely surprised at my terror. i ran, i fairly flew, to the church; without losing my way, without groping about, i reached the pulpit, took the bible, and ran down the steps. in three strides i was out of the church, leaving the door open. breathless, i entered the room and threw the bible on the table, frightened indeed, but throbbing with pride that i had done it without the proposed assistance. you will ask if i am giving this anecdote as an example, and as an illustration, of the mirth which i say should accompany these games. not so, but i give it as a proof that there is nothing so well calculated to reassure any one who is afraid in the dark as to hear sounds of laughter and talking in an adjoining room. instead of playing alone with your pupil in the evening, i would have you get together a number of merry children; do not send them alone to begin with, but several together, and do not venture to send any one quite alone, until you are quite certain beforehand that he will not be too frightened. i can picture nothing more amusing and more profitable than such games, considering how little skill is required to organise them. in a large room i should arrange a sort of labyrinth of tables, armchairs, chairs, and screens. in the inextricable windings of this labyrinth i should place some eight or ten sham boxes, and one real box almost exactly like them, but well filled with sweets. i should describe clearly and briefly the place where the right box would be found. i should give instructions sufficient to enable people more attentive and less excitable than children to find it. [footnote: to practise them in attention, only tell them things which it is clearly to their present interest that they should understand thoroughly; above all be brief, never say a word more than necessary. but neither let your speech be obscure nor of doubtful meaning.] then having made the little competitors draw lots, i should send first one and then another till the right box was found. i should increase the difficulty of the task in proportion to their skill. picture to yourself a youthful hercules returning, box in hand, quite proud of his expedition. the box is placed on the table and opened with great ceremony. i can hear the bursts of laughter and the shouts of the merry party when, instead of the looked-for sweets, he finds, neatly arranged on moss or cotton-wool, a beetle, a snail, a bit of coal, a few acorns, a turnip, or some such thing. another time in a newly whitewashed room, a toy or some small article of furniture would be hung on the wall and the children would have to fetch it without touching the wall. when the child who fetches it comes back, if he has failed ever so little to fulfil the conditions, a dab of white on the brim of his cap, the tip of his shoe, the flap of his coat or his sleeve, will betray his lack of skill. this is enough, or more than enough, to show the spirit of these games. do not read my book if you expect me to tell you everything. what great advantages would be possessed by a man so educated, when compared with others. his feet are accustomed to tread firmly in the dark, and his hands to touch lightly; they will guide him safely in the thickest darkness. his imagination is busy with the evening games of his childhood, and will find it difficult to turn towards objects of alarm. if he thinks he hears laughter, it will be the laughter of his former playfellows, not of frenzied spirits; if he thinks there is a host of people, it will not be the witches' sabbath, but the party in his tutor's study. night only recalls these cheerful memories, and it will never alarm him; it will inspire delight rather than fear. he will be ready for a military expedition at any hour, with or without his troop. he will enter the camp of saul, he will find his way, he will reach the king's tent without waking any one, and he will return unobserved. are the steeds of rhesus to be stolen, you may trust him. you will scarcely find a ulysses among men educated in any other fashion. i have known people who tried to train the children not to fear the dark by startling them. this is a very bad plan; its effects are just the opposite of those desired, and it only makes children more timid. neither reason nor habit can secure us from the fear of a present danger whose degree and kind are unknown, nor from the fear of surprises which we have often experienced. yet how will you make sure that you can preserve your pupil from such accidents? i consider this the best advice to give him beforehand. i should say to emile, "this is a matter of self-defence, for the aggressor does not let you know whether he means to hurt or frighten you, and as the advantage is on his side you cannot even take refuge in flight. therefore seize boldly anything, whether man or beast, which takes you unawares in the dark. grasp it, squeeze it with all your might; if it struggles, strike, and do not spare your blows; and whatever he may say or do, do not let him go till you know just who he is. the event will probably prove that you had little to be afraid of, but this way of treating practical jokers would naturally prevent their trying it again." although touch is the sense oftenest used, its discrimination remains, as i have already pointed out, coarser and more imperfect than that of any other sense, because we always use sight along with it; the eye perceives the thing first, and the mind almost always judges without the hand. on the other hand, discrimination by touch is the surest just because of its limitations; for extending only as far as our hands can reach, it corrects the hasty judgments of the other senses, which pounce upon objects scarcely perceived, while what we learn by touch is learnt thoroughly. moreover, touch, when required, unites the force of our muscles to the action of the nerves; we associate by simultaneous sensations our ideas of temperature, size, and shape, to those of weight and density. thus touch is the sense which best teaches us the action of foreign bodies upon ourselves, the sense which most directly supplies us with the knowledge required for self-preservation. as the trained touch takes the place of sight, why should it not, to some extent, take the place of hearing, since sounds set up, in sonorous bodies, vibrations perceptible by touch? by placing the hand on the body of a 'cello one can distinguish without the use of eye or ear, merely by the way in which the wood vibrates and trembles, whether the sound given out is sharp or flat, whether it is drawn from the treble string or the bass. if our touch were trained to note these differences, no doubt we might in time become so sensitive as to hear a whole tune by means of our fingers. but if we admit this, it is clear that one could easily speak to the deaf by means of music; for tone and measure are no less capable of regular combination than voice and articulation, so that they might be used as the elements of speech. there are exercises by which the sense of touch is blunted and deadened, and others which sharpen it and make it delicate and discriminating. the former, which employ much movement and force for the continued impression of hard bodies, make the skin hard and thick, and deprive it of its natural sensitiveness. the latter are those which give variety to this feeling, by slight and repeated contact, so that the mind is attentive to constantly recurring impressions, and readily learns to discern their variations. this difference is clear in the use of musical instruments. the harsh and painful touch of the 'cello, bass-viol, and even of the violin, hardens the finger-tips, although it gives flexibility to the fingers. the soft and smooth touch of the harpsichord makes the fingers both flexible and sensitive. in this respect the harpsichord is to be preferred. the skin protects the rest of the body, so it is very important to harden it to the effects of the air that it may be able to bear its changes. with regard to this i may say i would not have the hand roughened by too servile application to the same kind of work, nor should the skin of the hand become hardened so as to lose its delicate sense of touch which keeps the body informed of what is going on, and by the kind of contact sometimes makes us shudder in different ways even in the dark. why should my pupil be always compelled to wear the skin of an ox under his foot? what harm would come of it if his own skin could serve him at need as a sole. it is clear that a delicate skin could never be of any use in this way, and may often do harm. the genevese, aroused at midnight by their enemies in the depth of winter, seized their guns rather than their shoes. who can tell whether the town would have escaped capture if its citizens had not been able to go barefoot? let a man be always fore-armed against the unforeseen. let emile run about barefoot all the year round, upstairs, downstairs, and in the garden. far from scolding him, i shall follow his example; only i shall be careful to remove any broken glass. i shall soon proceed to speak of work and manual occupations. meanwhile, let him learn to perform every exercise which encourages agility of body; let him learn to hold himself easily and steadily in any position, let him practise jumping and leaping, climbing trees and walls. let him always find his balance, and let his every movement and gesture be regulated by the laws of weight, long before he learns to explain them by the science of statics. by the way his foot is planted on the ground, and his body supported on his leg, he ought to know if he is holding himself well or ill. an easy carriage is always graceful, and the steadiest positions are the most elegant. if i were a dancing master i would refuse to play the monkey tricks of marcel, which are only fit for the stage where they are performed; but instead of keeping my pupil busy with fancy steps, i would take him to the foot of a cliff. there i would show him how to hold himself, how to carry his body and head, how to place first a foot then a hand, to follow lightly the steep, toilsome, and rugged paths, to leap from point to point, either up or down. he should emulate the mountain-goat, not the ballet dancer. as touch confines its operations to the man's immediate surroundings, so sight extends its range beyond them; it is this which makes it misleading; man sees half his horizon at a glance. in the midst of this host of simultaneous impressions and the thoughts excited by them, how can he fail now and then to make mistakes? thus sight is the least reliable of our senses, just because it has the widest range; it functions long before our other senses, and its work is too hasty and on too large a scale to be corrected by the rest. moreover, the very illusions of perspective are necessary if we are to arrive at a knowledge of space and compare one part of space with another. without false appearances we should never see anything at a distance; without the gradations of size and tone we could not judge of distance, or rather distance would have no existence for us. if two trees, one of which was a hundred paces from us and the other ten, looked equally large and distinct, we should think they were side by side. if we perceived the real dimensions of things, we should know nothing of space; everything would seem close to our eyes. the angle formed between any objects and our eye is the only means by which our sight estimates their size and distance, and as this angle is the simple effect of complex causes, the judgment we form does not distinguish between the several causes; we are compelled to be inaccurate. for how can i tell, by sight alone, whether the angle at which an object appears to me smaller than another, indicates that it is really smaller or that it is further off. here we must just reverse our former plan. instead of simplifying the sensation, always reinforce it and verify it by means of another sense. subject the eye to the hand, and, so to speak, restrain the precipitation of the former sense by the slower and more reasoned pace of the latter. for want of this sort of practice our sight measurements are very imperfect. we cannot correctly, and at a glance, estimate height, length, breadth, and distance; and the fact that engineers, surveyors, architects, masons, and painters are generally quicker to see and better able to estimate distances correctly, proves that the fault is not in our eyes, but in our use of them. their occupations give them the training we lack, and they check the equivocal results of the angle of vision by its accompanying experiences, which determine the relations of the two causes of this angle for their eyes. children will always do anything that keeps them moving freely. there are countless ways of rousing their interest in measuring, perceiving, and estimating distance. there is a very tall cherry tree; how shall we gather the cherries? will the ladder in the barn be big enough? there is a wide stream; how shall we get to the other side? would one of the wooden planks in the yard reach from bank to bank? from our windows we want to fish in the moat; how many yards of line are required? i want to make a swing between two trees; will two fathoms of cord be enough? they tell me our room in the new house will be twenty-five feet square; do you think it will be big enough for us? will it be larger than this? we are very hungry; here are two villages, which can we get to first for our dinner? an idle, lazy child was to be taught to run. he had no liking for this or any other exercise, though he was intended for the army. somehow or other he had got it into his head that a man of his rank need know nothing and do nothing--that his birth would serve as a substitute for arms and legs, as well as for every kind of virtue. the skill of chiron himself would have failed to make a fleet-footed achilles of this young gentleman. the difficulty was increased by my determination to give him no kind of orders. i had renounced all right to direct him by preaching, promises, threats, emulation, or the desire to show off. how should i make him want to run without saying anything? i might run myself, but he might not follow my example, and this plan had other drawbacks. moreover, i must find some means of teaching him through this exercise, so as to train mind and body to work together. this is how i, or rather how the teacher who supplied me with this illustration, set about it. when i took him a walk of an afternoon i sometimes put in my pocket a couple of cakes, of a kind he was very fond of; we each ate one while we were out, and we came back well pleased with our outing. one day he noticed i had three cakes; he could have easily eaten six, so he ate his cake quickly and asked for the other. "no," said i, "i could eat it myself, or we might divide it, but i would rather see those two little boys run a race for it." i called them to us, showed them the cake, and suggested that they should race for it. they were delighted. the cake was placed on a large stone which was to be the goal; the course was marked out, we sat down, and at a given signal off flew the children! the victor seized the cake and ate it without pity in the sight of the spectators and of his defeated rival. the sport was better than the cake; but the lesson did not take effect all at once, and produced no result. i was not discouraged, nor did i hurry; teaching is a trade at which one must be able to lose time and save it. our walks were continued, sometimes we took three cakes, sometimes four, and from time to time there were one or two cakes for the racers. if the prize was not great, neither was the ambition of the competitors. the winner was praised and petted, and everything was done with much ceremony. to give room to run and to add interest to the race i marked out a longer course and admitted several fresh competitors. scarcely had they entered the lists than all the passers-by stopped to watch. they were encouraged by shouting, cheering, and clapping. i sometimes saw my little man trembling with excitement, jumping up and shouting when one was about to reach or overtake another--to him these were the olympian games. however, the competitors did not always play fair, they got in each other's way, or knocked one another down, or put stones on the track. that led us to separate them and make them start from different places at equal distances from the goal. you will soon see the reason for this, for i must describe this important affair at length. tired of seeing his favourite cakes devoured before his eyes, the young lord began to suspect that there was some use in being a quick runner, and seeing that he had two legs of his own, he began to practise running on the quiet. i took care to see nothing, but i knew my stratagem had taken effect. when he thought he was good enough (and i thought so too), he pretended to tease me to give him the other cake. i refused; he persisted, and at last he said angrily, "well, put it on the stone and mark out the course, and we shall see." "very good," said i, laughing, "you will get a good appetite, but you will not get the cake." stung by my mockery, he took heart, won the prize, all the more easily because i had marked out a very short course and taken care that the best runner was out of the way. it will be evident that, after the first step, i had no difficulty in keeping him in training. soon he took such a fancy for this form of exercise that without any favour he was almost certain to beat the little peasant boys at running, however long the course. the advantage thus obtained led unexpectedly to another. so long as he seldom won the prize, he ate it himself like his rivals, but as he got used to victory he grew generous, and often shared it with the defeated. that taught me a lesson in morals and i saw what was the real root of generosity. while i continued to mark out a different starting place for each competitor, he did not notice that i had made the distances unequal, so that one of them, having farther to run to reach the goal, was clearly at a disadvantage. but though i left the choice to my pupil he did not know how to take advantage of it. without thinking of the distance, he always chose the smoothest path, so that i could easily predict his choice, and could almost make him win or lose the cake at my pleasure. i had more than one end in view in this stratagem; but as my plan was to get him to notice the difference himself, i tried to make him aware of it. though he was generally lazy and easy going, he was so eager in his sports and trusted me so completely that i had great difficulty in making him see that i was cheating him. when at last i managed to make him see it in spite of his excitement, he was angry with me. "what have you to complain of?" said i. "in a gift which i propose to give of my own free will am not i master of the conditions? who makes you run? did i promise to make the courses equal? is not the choice yours? do not you see that i am favouring you, and that the inequality you complain of is all to your advantage, if you knew how to use it?" that was plain to him; and to choose he must observe more carefully. at first he wanted to count the paces, but a child measures paces slowly and inaccurately; moreover, i decided to have several races on one day; and the game having become a sort of passion with the child, he was sorry to waste in measuring the portion of time intended for running. such delays are not in accordance with a child's impatience; he tried therefore to see better and to reckon the distance more accurately at sight. it was now quite easy to extend and develop this power. at length, after some months' practice, and the correction of his errors, i so trained his power of judging at sight that i had only to place an imaginary cake on any distant object and his glance was nearly as accurate as the surveyor's chain. of all the senses, sight is that which we can least distinguish from the judgments of the mind; as it takes a long time to learn to see. it takes a long time to compare sight and touch, and to train the former sense to give a true report of shape and distance. without touch, without progressive motion, the sharpest eyes in the world could give us no idea of space. to the oyster the whole world must seem a point, and it would seem nothing more to it even if it had a human mind. it is only by walking, feeling, counting, measuring the dimensions of things, that we learn to judge them rightly; but, on the other hand, if we were always measuring, our senses would trust to the instrument and would never gain confidence. nor must the child pass abruptly from measurement to judgment; he must continue to compare the parts when he could not compare the whole; he must substitute his estimated aliquot parts for exact aliquot parts, and instead of always applying the measure by hand he must get used to applying it by eye alone. i would, however, have his first estimates tested by measurement, so that he may correct his errors, and if there is a false impression left upon the senses he may correct it by a better judgment. the same natural standards of measurement are in use almost everywhere, the man's foot, the extent of his outstretched arms, his height. when the child wants to measure the height of a room, his tutor may serve as a measuring rod; if he is estimating the height of a steeple let him measure it by the house; if he wants to know how many leagues of road there are, let him count the hours spent in walking along it. above all, do not do this for him; let him do it himself. one cannot learn to estimate the extent and size of bodies without at the same time learning to know and even to copy their shape; for at bottom this copying depends entirely on the laws of perspective, and one cannot estimate distance without some feeling for these laws. all children in the course of their endless imitation try to draw; and i would have emile cultivate this art; not so much for art's sake, as to give him exactness of eye and flexibility of hand. generally speaking, it matters little whether he is acquainted with this or that occupation, provided he gains clearness of sense--perception and the good bodily habits which belong to the exercise in question. so i shall take good care not to provide him with a drawing master, who would only set him to copy copies and draw from drawings. nature should be his only teacher, and things his only models. he should have the real thing before his eyes, not its copy on paper. let him draw a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man; so that he may train himself to observe objects and their appearance accurately and not to take false and conventional copies for truth. i would even train him to draw only from objects actually before him and not from memory, so that, by repeated observation, their exact form may be impressed on his imagination, for fear lest he should substitute absurd and fantastic forms for the real truth of things, and lose his sense of proportion and his taste for the beauties of nature. of course i know that in this way he will make any number of daubs before he produces anything recognisable, that it will be long before he attains to the graceful outline and light touch of the draughtsman; perhaps he will never have an eye for picturesque effect or a good taste in drawing. on the other hand, he will certainly get a truer eye, a surer hand, a knowledge of the real relations of form and size between animals, plants, and natural objects, together with a quicker sense of the effects of perspective. that is just what i wanted, and my purpose is rather that he should know things than copy them. i would rather he showed me a plant of acanthus even if he drew a capital with less accuracy. moreover, in this occupation as in others, i do not intend my pupil to play by himself; i mean to make it pleasanter for him by always sharing it with him. he shall have no other rival; but mine will be a continual rivalry, and there will be no risk attaching to it; it will give interest to his pursuits without awaking jealousy between us. i shall follow his example and take up a pencil; at first i shall use it as unskilfully as he. i should be an apelles if i did not set myself daubing. to begin with, i shall draw a man such as lads draw on walls, a line for each arm, another for each leg, with the fingers longer than the arm. long after, one or other of us will notice this lack of proportion; we shall observe that the leg is thick, that this thickness varies, that the length of the arm is proportionate to the body. in this improvement i shall either go side by side with my pupil, or so little in advance that he will always overtake me easily and sometimes get ahead of me. we shall get brushes and paints, we shall try to copy the colours of things and their whole appearance, not merely their shape. we shall colour prints, we shall paint, we shall daub; but in all our daubing we shall be searching out the secrets of nature, and whatever we do shall be done under the eye of that master. we badly needed ornaments for our room, and now we have them ready to our hand. i will have our drawings framed and covered with good glass, so that no one will touch them, and thus seeing them where we put them, each of us has a motive for taking care of his own. i arrange them in order round the room, each drawing repeated some twenty or thirty times, thus showing the author's progress in each specimen, from the time when the house is merely a rude square, till its front view, its side view, its proportions, its light and shade are all exactly portrayed. these graduations will certainly furnish us with pictures, a source of interest to ourselves and of curiosity to others, which will spur us on to further emulation. the first and roughest drawings i put in very smart gilt frames to show them off; but as the copy becomes more accurate and the drawing really good, i only give it a very plain dark frame; it needs no other ornament than itself, and it would be a pity if the frame distracted the attention which the picture itself deserves. thus we each aspire to a plain frame, and when we desire to pour scorn on each other's drawings, we condemn them to a gilded frame. some day perhaps "the gilt frame" will become a proverb among us, and we shall be surprised to find how many people show what they are really made of by demanding a gilt frame. i have said already that geometry is beyond the child's reach; but that is our own fault. we fail to perceive that their method is not ours, that what is for us the art of reasoning, should be for them the art of seeing. instead of teaching them our way, we should do better to adopt theirs, for our way of learning geometry is quite as much a matter of imagination as of reasoning. when a proposition is enunciated you must imagine the proof; that is, you must discover on what proposition already learnt it depends, and of all the possible deductions from that proposition you must choose just the one required. in this way the closest reasoner, if he is not inventive, may find himself at a loss. what is the result? instead of making us discover proofs, they are dictated to us; instead of teaching us to reason, our memory only is employed. draw accurate figures, combine them together, put them one upon another, examine their relations, and you will discover the whole of elementary geometry in passing from one observation to another, without a word of definitions, problems, or any other form of demonstration but super-position. i do not profess to teach emile geometry; he will teach me; i shall seek for relations, he will find them, for i shall seek in such a fashion as to make him find. for instance, instead of using a pair of compasses to draw a circle, i shall draw it with a pencil at the end of bit of string attached to a pivot. after that, when i want to compare the radii one with another, emile will laugh at me and show me that the same thread at full stretch cannot have given distances of unequal length. if i wish to measure an angle of degrees i describe from the apex of the angle, not an arc, but a complete circle, for with children nothing must be taken for granted. i find that the part of the circle contained between the two lines of the angle is the sixth part of a circle. then i describe another and larger circle from the same centre, and i find the second arc is again the sixth part of its circle. i describe a third concentric circle with a similar result, and i continue with more and more circles till emile, shocked at my stupidity, shows me that every arc, large or small, contained by the same angle will always be the sixth part of its circle. now we are ready to use the protractor. to prove that two adjacent angles are equal to two right angles people describe a circle. on the contrary i would have emile observe the fact in a circle, and then i should say, "if we took away the circle and left the straight lines, would the angles have changed their size, etc.?" exactness in the construction of figures is neglected; it is taken for granted and stress is laid on the proof. with us, on the other hand, there will be no question of proof. our chief business will be to draw very straight, accurate, and even lines, a perfect square, a really round circle. to verify the exactness of a figure we will test it by each of its sensible properties, and that will give us a chance to discover fresh properties day by day. we will fold the two semi-circles along the diameter, the two halves of the square by the diagonal; he will compare our two figures to see who has got the edges to fit most exactly, i.e., who has done it best; we should argue whether this equal division would always be possible in parallelograms, trapezes, etc. we shall sometimes try to forecast the result of an experiment, to find reasons, etc. geometry means to my scholar the successful use of the rule and compass; he must not confuse it with drawing, in which these instruments are not used. the rule and compass will be locked up, so that he will not get into the way of messing about with them, but we may sometimes take our figures with us when we go for a walk, and talk over what we have done, or what we mean to do. i shall never forget seeing a young man at turin, who had learnt as a child the relations of contours and surfaces by having to choose every day isoperimetric cakes among cakes of every geometrical figure. the greedy little fellow had exhausted the art of archimedes to find which were the biggest. when the child flies a kite he is training eye and hand to accuracy; when he whips a top, he is increasing his strength by using it, but without learning anything. i have sometimes asked why children are not given the same games of skill as men; tennis, mall, billiards, archery, football, and musical instruments. i was told that some of these are beyond their strength, that the child's senses are not sufficiently developed for others. these do not strike me as valid reasons; a child is not as tall as a man, but he wears the same sort of coat; i do not want him to play with our cues at a billiard-table three feet high; i do not want him knocking about among our games, nor carrying one of our racquets in his little hand; but let him play in a room whose windows have been protected; at first let him only use soft balls, let his first racquets be of wood, then of parchment, and lastly of gut, according to his progress. you prefer the kite because it is less tiring and there is no danger. you are doubly wrong. kite-flying is a sport for women, but every woman will run away from a swift ball. their white skins were not meant to be hardened by blows and their faces were not made for bruises. but we men are made for strength; do you think we can attain it without hardship, and what defence shall we be able to make if we are attacked? people always play carelessly in games where there is no danger. a falling kite hurts nobody, but nothing makes the arm so supple as protecting the head, nothing makes the sight so accurate as having to guard the eye. to dash from one end of the room to another, to judge the rebound of a ball before it touches the ground, to return it with strength and accuracy, such games are not so much sports fit for a man, as sports fit to make a man of him. the child's limbs, you say, are too tender. they are not so strong as those of a man, but they are more supple. his arm is weak, still it is an arm, and it should be used with due consideration as we use other tools. children have no skill in the use of their hands. that is just why i want them to acquire skill; a man with as little practice would be just as clumsy. we can only learn the use of our limbs by using them. it is only by long experience that we learn to make the best of ourselves, and this experience is the real object of study to which we cannot apply ourselves too early. what is done can be done. now there is nothing commoner than to find nimble and skilful children whose limbs are as active as those of a man. they may be seen at any fair, swinging, walking on their hands, jumping, dancing on the tight rope. for many years past, troops of children have attracted spectators to the ballets at the italian comedy house. who is there in germany and italy who has not heard of the famous pantomime company of nicolini? has it ever occurred to any one that the movements of these children were less finished, their postures less graceful, their ears less true, their dancing more clumsy than those of grown-up dancers? if at first the fingers are thick, short, and awkward, the dimpled hands unable to grasp anything, does this prevent many children from learning to read and write at an age when others cannot even hold a pen or pencil? all paris still recalls the little english girl of ten who did wonders on the harpsichord. i once saw a little fellow of eight, the son of a magistrate, who was set like a statuette on the table among the dishes, to play on a fiddle almost as big as himself, and even artists were surprised at his execution. to my mind, these and many more examples prove that the supposed incapacity of children for our games is imaginary, and that if they are unsuccessful in some of them, it is for want of practice. you will tell me that with regard to the body i am falling into the same mistake of precocious development which i found fault with for the mind. the cases are very different: in the one, progress is apparent only; in the other it is real. i have shown that children have not the mental development they appear to have, while they really do what they seem to do. besides, we must never forget that all this should be play, the easy and voluntary control of the movements which nature demands of them, the art of varying their games to make them pleasanter, without the least bit of constraint to transform them into work; for what games do they play in which i cannot find material for instruction for them? and even if i could not do so, so long as they are amusing themselves harmlessly and passing the time pleasantly, their progress in learning is not yet of such great importance. but if one must be teaching them this or that at every opportunity, it cannot be done without constraint, vexation, or tedium. what i have said about the use of the two senses whose use is most constant and most important, may serve as an example of how to train the rest. sight and touch are applied to bodies at rest and bodies in motion, but as hearing is only affected by vibrations of the air, only a body in motion can make a noise or sound; if everything were at rest we should never hear. at night, when we ourselves only move as we choose, we have nothing to fear but moving bodies; hence we need a quick ear, and power to judge from the sensations experienced whether the body which causes them is large or small, far off or near, whether its movements are gentle or violent. when once the air is set in motion, it is subject to repercussions which produce echoes, these renew the sensations and make us hear a loud or penetrating sound in another quarter. if you put your ear to the ground you may hear the sound of men's voices or horses' feet in a plain or valley much further off than when you stand upright. as we have made a comparison between sight and touch, it will be as well to do the same for hearing, and to find out which of the two impressions starting simultaneously from a given body first reaches the sense-organ. when you see the flash of a cannon, you have still time to take cover; but when you hear the sound it is too late, the ball is close to you. one can reckon the distance of a thunderstorm by the interval between the lightning and the thunder. let the child learn all these facts, let him learn those that are within his reach by experiment, and discover the rest by induction; but i would far rather he knew nothing at all about them, than that you should tell him. in the voice we have an organ answering to hearing; we have no such organ answering to sight, and we do not repeat colours as we repeat sounds. this supplies an additional means of cultivating the ear by practising the active and passive organs one with the other. man has three kinds of voice, the speaking or articulate voice, the singing or melodious voice, and the pathetic or expressive voice, which serves as the language of the passions, and gives life to song and speech. the child has these three voices, just as the man has them, but he does not know how to use them in combination. like us, he laughs, cries, laments, shrieks, and groans, but he does not know how to combine these inflexions with speech or song. these three voices find their best expression in perfect music. children are incapable of such music, and their singing lacks feeling. in the same way their spoken language lacks expression; they shout, but they do not speak with emphasis, and there is as little power in their voice as there is emphasis in their speech. our pupil's speech will be plainer and simpler still, for his passions are still asleep, and will not blend their tones with his. do not, therefore, set him to recite tragedy or comedy, nor try to teach declamation so-called. he will have too much sense to give voice to things he cannot understand, or expression to feelings he has never known. teach him to speak plainly and distinctly, to articulate clearly, to pronounce correctly and without affectation, to perceive and imitate the right accent in prose and verse, and always to speak loud enough to be heard, but without speaking too loud--a common fault with school-children. let there be no waste in anything. the same method applies to singing; make his voice smooth and true, flexible and full, his ear alive to time and tune, but nothing more. descriptive and theatrical music is not suitable at his age----i would rather he sang no words; if he must have words, i would try to compose songs on purpose for him, songs interesting to a child, and as simple as his own thoughts. you may perhaps suppose that as i am in no hurry to teach emile to read and write, i shall not want to teach him to read music. let us spare his brain the strain of excessive attention, and let us be in no hurry to turn his mind towards conventional signs. i grant you there seems to be a difficulty here, for if at first sight the knowledge of notes seems no more necessary for singing than the knowledge of letters for speaking, there is really this difference between them: when we speak, we are expressing our own thoughts; when we sing we are expressing the thoughts of others. now in order to express them we must read them. but at first we can listen to them instead of reading them, and a song is better learnt by ear than by eye. moreover, to learn music thoroughly we must make songs as well as sing them, and the two processes must be studied together, or we shall never have any real knowledge of music. first give your young musician practice in very regular, well-cadenced phrases; then let him connect these phrases with the very simplest modulations; then show him their relation one to another by correct accent, which can be done by a fit choice of cadences and rests. on no account give him anything unusual, or anything that requires pathos or expression. a simple, tuneful air, always based on the common chords of the key, with its bass so clearly indicated that it is easily felt and accompanied, for to train his voice and ear he should always sing with the harpsichord. we articulate the notes we sing the better to distinguish them; hence the custom of sol-faing with certain syllables. to tell the keys one from another they must have names and fixed intervals; hence the names of the intervals, and also the letters of the alphabet attached to the keys of the clavier and the notes of the scale. c and a indicate fixed sounds, invariable and always rendered by the same keys; ut and la are different. ut is always the dominant of a major scale, or the leading-note of a minor scale. la is always the dominant of a minor scale or the sixth of a major scale. thus the letters indicate fixed terms in our system of music, and the syllables indicate terms homologous to the similar relations in different keys. the letters show the keys on the piano, and the syllables the degrees in the scale. french musicians have made a strange muddle of this. they have confused the meaning of the syllables with that of the letters, and while they have unnecessarily given us two sets of symbols for the keys of the piano, they have left none for the chords of the scales; so that ut and c are always the same for them; this is not and ought not to be; if so, what is the use of c? their method of sol-faing is, therefore, extremely and needlessly difficult, neither does it give any clear idea to the mind; since, by this method, ut and me, for example, may mean either a major third, a minor third, an augmented third, or a diminished third. what a strange thing that the country which produces the finest books about music should be the very country where it is hardest to learn music! let us adopt a simpler and clearer plan with our pupil; let him have only two scales whose relations remain unchanged, and indicated by the same symbols. whether he sings or plays, let him learn to fix his scale on one of the twelve tones which may serve as a base, and whether he modulates in d, c, or g, let the close be always ut or la, according to the scale. in this way he will understand what you mean, and the essential relations for correct singing and playing will always be present in his mind; his execution will be better and his progress quicker. there is nothing funnier than what the french call "natural sol-faing;" it consists in removing the real meaning of things and putting in their place other meanings which only distract us. there is nothing more natural than sol-faing by transposition, when the scale is transposed. but i have said enough, and more than enough, about music; teach it as you please, so long as it is nothing but play. we are now thoroughly acquainted with the condition of foreign bodies in relation to our own, their weight, form, colour, density, size, distance, temperature, stability, or motion. we have learnt which of them to approach or avoid, how to set about overcoming their resistance or to resist them so as to prevent ourselves from injury; but this is not enough. our own body is constantly wasting and as constantly requires to be renewed. although we have the power of changing other substances into our own, our choice is not a matter of indifference. everything is not food for man, and what may be food for him is not all equally suitable; it depends on his racial constitution, the country he lives in, his individual temperament, and the way of living which his condition demands. if we had to wait till experience taught us to know and choose fit food for ourselves, we should die of hunger or poison; but a kindly providence which has made pleasure the means of self-preservation to sentient beings teaches us through our palate what is suitable for our stomach. in a state of nature there is no better doctor than a man's own appetite, and no doubt in a state of nature man could find the most palateable food the most wholesome. nor is this all. our maker provides, not only for those needs he has created, but for those we create for ourselves; and it is to keep the balance between our wants and our needs that he has caused our tastes to change and vary with our way of living. the further we are from a state of nature, the more we lose our natural tastes; or rather, habit becomes a second nature, and so completely replaces our real nature, that we have lost all knowledge of it. from this it follows that the most natural tastes should be the simplest, for those are more easily changed; but when they are sharpened and stimulated by our fancies they assume a form which is incapable of modification. the man who so far has not adapted himself to one country can learn the ways of any country whatsoever; but the man who has adopted the habits of one particular country can never shake them off. this seems to be true of all our senses, especially of taste. our first food is milk; we only become accustomed by degrees to strong flavours; at first we dislike them. fruit, vegetables, herbs, and then fried meat without salt or seasoning, formed the feasts of primitive man. when the savage tastes wine for the first time, he makes a grimace and spits it out; and even among ourselves a man who has not tasted fermented liquors before twenty cannot get used to them; we should all be sober if we did not have wine when we were children. indeed, the simpler our tastes are, the more general they are; made dishes are those most frequently disliked. did you ever meet with any one who disliked bread or water? here is the finger of nature, this then is our rule. preserve the child's primitive tastes as long as possible; let his food be plain and simple, let strong flavours be unknown to his palate, and do not let his diet be too uniform. i am not asking, for the present, whether this way of living is healthier or no; that is not what i have in view. it is enough for me to know that my choice is more in accordance with nature, and that it can be more readily adapted to other conditions. in my opinion, those who say children should be accustomed to the food they will have when they are grown up are mistaken. why should their food be the same when their way of living is so different? a man worn out by labour, anxiety, and pain needs tasty foods to give fresh vigour to his brain; a child fresh from his games, a child whose body is growing, needs plentiful food which will supply more chyle. moreover the grown man has already a settled profession, occupation, and home, but who can tell what fate holds in store for the child? let us not give him so fixed a bent in any direction that he cannot change it if required without hardship. do not bring him up so that he would die of hunger in a foreign land if he does not take a french cook about with him; do not let him say at some future time that france is the only country where the food is fit to eat. by the way, that is a strange way of praising one's country. on the other hand, i myself should say that the french are the only people who do not know what good food is, since they require such a special art to make their dishes eatable. of all our different senses, we are usually most affected by taste. thus it concerns us more nearly to judge aright of what will actually become part of ourselves, than of that which will merely form part of our environment. many things are matters of indifference to touch, hearing, and sight; but taste is affected by almost everything. moreover the activity of this sense is wholly physical and material; of all the senses, it alone makes no appeal to the imagination, or at least, imagination plays a smaller part in its sensations; while imitation and imagination often bring morality into the impressions of the other senses. thus, speaking generally, soft and pleasure-loving minds, passionate and truly sensitive dispositions, which are easily stirred by the other senses, are usually indifferent to this. from this very fact, which apparently places taste below our other senses and makes our inclination towards it the more despicable, i draw just the opposite conclusion--that the best way to lead children is by the mouth. greediness is a better motive than vanity; for the former is a natural appetite directly dependent on the senses, while the latter is the outcome of convention, it is the slave of human caprice and liable to every kind of abuse. believe me the child will cease to care about his food only too soon, and when his heart is too busy, his palate will be idle. when he is grown up greediness will be expelled by a host of stronger passions, while vanity will only be stimulated by them; for this latter passion feeds upon the rest till at length they are all swallowed up in it. i have sometimes studied those men who pay great attention to good eating, men whose first waking thought is--what shall we have to eat to-day? men who describe their dinner with as much detail as polybius describes a combat. i have found these so-called men were only children of forty, without strength or vigour--fruges consumere nati. gluttony is the vice of feeble minds. the gourmand has his brains in his palate, he can do nothing but eat; he is so stupid and incapable that the table is the only place for him, and dishes are the only things he knows anything about. let us leave him to this business without regret; it is better for him and for us. it is a small mind that fears lest greediness should take root in the child who is fit for something better. the child thinks of nothing but his food, the youth pays no heed to it at all; every kind of food is good, and we have other things to attend to. yet i would not have you use the low motive unwisely. i would not have you trust to dainties rather than to the honour which is the reward of a good deed. but childhood is, or ought to be, a time of play and merry sports, and i do not see why the rewards of purely bodily exercises should not be material and sensible rewards. if a little lad in majorca sees a basket on the tree-top and brings it down with his sling, is it not fair that he should get something by this, and a good breakfast should repair the strength spent in getting it. if a young spartan, facing the risk of a hundred stripes, slips skilfully into the kitchen, and steals a live fox cub, carries it off in his garment, and is scratched, bitten till the blood comes, and for shame lest he should be caught the child allows his bowels to be torn out without a movement or a cry, is it not fair that he should keep his spoils, that he should eat his prey after it has eaten him? a good meal should never be a reward; but why should it not be sometimes the result of efforts made to get it. emile does not consider the cake i put on the stone as a reward for good running; he knows that the only way to get the cake is to get there first. this does not contradict my previous rules about simple food; for to tempt a child's appetite you need not stimulate it, you need only satisfy it; and the commonest things will do this if you do not attempt to refine children's taste. their perpetual hunger, the result of their need for growth, will be the best sauce. fruit, milk, a piece of cake just a little better than ordinary bread, and above all the art of dispensing these things prudently, by these means you may lead a host of children to the world's end, without on the one hand giving them a taste for strong flavours, nor on the other hand letting them get tired of their food. the indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods, such as milk, pastry, fruit, etc. beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character; for how can one explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men; this has been recognised at all times and in all places. the english are noted for their cruelty [footnote: i am aware that the english make a boast of their humanity and of the kindly disposition of their race, which they call "good-natured people;" but in vain do they proclaim this fact; no one else says it of them.] while the gaures are the gentlest of men. [footnote: the banians, who abstain from flesh even more completely than the gaures, are almost as gentle as the gaures themselves, but as their morality is less pure and their form of worship less reasonable they are not such good men.] all savages are cruel, and it is not their customs that tend in this direction; their cruelty is the result of their food. they go to war as to the chase, and treat men as they would treat bears. indeed in england butchers are not allowed to give evidence in a court of law, no more can surgeons. [footnote: one of the english translators of my book has pointed out my mistake, and both of them have corrected it. butchers and surgeons are allowed to give evidence in the law courts, but butchers may not serve on juries in criminal cases, though surgeons are allowed to do so.] great criminals prepare themselves for murder by drinking blood. homer makes his flesh-eating cyclops a terrible man, while his lotus-eaters are so delightful that those who went to trade with them forgot even their own country to dwell among them. "you ask me," said plutarch, "why pythagoras abstained from eating the flesh of beasts, but i ask you, what courage must have been needed by the first man who raised to his lips the flesh of the slain, who broke with his teeth the bones of a dying beast, who had dead bodies, corpses, placed before him and swallowed down limbs which a few moments ago were bleating, bellowing, walking, and seeing? how could his hand plunge the knife into the heart of a sentient creature, how could his eyes look on murder, how could he behold a poor helpless animal bled to death, scorched, and dismembered? how can he bear the sight of this quivering flesh? does not the very smell of it turn his stomach? is he not repelled, disgusted, horror-struck, when he has to handle the blood from these wounds, and to cleanse his fingers from the dark and viscous bloodstains? "the scorched skins wriggled upon the ground, the shrinking flesh bellowed upon the spit. man cannot eat them without a shudder; he seems to hear their cries within his breast. "thus must he have felt the first time he did despite to nature and made this horrible meal; the first time he hungered for the living creature, and desired to feed upon the beast which was still grazing; when he bade them slay, dismember, and cut up the sheep which licked his hands. it is those who began these cruel feasts, not those who abandon them, who should cause surprise, and there were excuses for those primitive men, excuses which we have not, and the absence of such excuses multiplies our barbarity a hundredfold. "'mortals, beloved of the gods,' says this primitive man, 'compare our times with yours; see how happy you are, and how wretched were we. the earth, newly formed, the air heavy with moisture, were not yet subjected to the rule of the seasons. three-fourths of the surface of the globe was flooded by the ever-shifting channels of rivers uncertain of their course, and covered with pools, lakes, and bottomless morasses. the remaining quarter was covered with woods and barren forests. the earth yielded no good fruit, we had no instruments of tillage, we did not even know the use of them, and the time of harvest never came for those who had sown nothing. thus hunger was always in our midst. in winter, mosses and the bark of trees were our common food. a few green roots of dogs-bit or heather were a feast, and when men found beech-mast, nuts, or acorns, they danced for joy round the beech or oak, to the sound of some rude song, while they called the earth their mother and their nurse. this was their only festival, their only sport; all the rest of man's life was spent in sorrow, pain, and hunger. "'at length, when the bare and naked earth no longer offered us any food, we were compelled in self-defence to outrage nature, and to feed upon our companions in distress, rather than perish with them. but you, oh, cruel men! who forces you to shed blood? behold the wealth of good things about you, the fruits yielded by the earth, the wealth of field and vineyard; the animals give their milk for your drink and their fleece for your clothing. what more do you ask? what madness compels you to commit such murders, when you have already more than you can eat or drink? why do you slander our mother earth, and accuse her of denying you food? why do you sin against ceres, the inventor of the sacred laws, and against the gracious bacchus, the comforter of man, as if their lavish gifts were not enough to preserve mankind? have you the heart to mingle their sweet fruits with the bones upon your table, to eat with the milk the blood of the beasts which gave it? the lions and panthers, wild beasts as you call them, are driven to follow their natural instinct, and they kill other beasts that they may live. but, a hundredfold fiercer than they, you fight against your instincts without cause, and abandon yourselves to the most cruel pleasures. the animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. you only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service. "'o unnatural murderer! if you persist in the assertion that nature has made you to devour your fellow-creatures, beings of flesh and blood, living and feeling like yourself, stifle if you can that horror with which nature makes you regard these horrible feasts; slay the animals yourself, slay them, i say, with your own hands, without knife or mallet; tear them with your nails like the lion and the bear, take this ox and rend him in pieces, plunge your claws into his hide; eat this lamb while it is yet alive, devour its warm flesh, drink its soul with its blood. you shudder! you dare not feel the living throbbing flesh between your teeth? ruthless man; you begin by slaying the animal and then you devour it, as if to slay it twice. it is not enough. you turn against the dead flesh, it revolts you, it must be transformed by fire, boiled and roasted, seasoned and disguised with drugs; you must have butchers, cooks, turnspits, men who will rid the murder of its horrors, who will dress the dead bodies so that the taste deceived by these disguises will not reject what is strange to it, and will feast on corpses, the very sight of which would sicken you.'" although this quotation is irrelevant, i cannot resist the temptation to transcribe it, and i think few of my readers will resent it. in conclusion, whatever food you give your children, provided you accustom them to nothing but plain and simple dishes, let them eat and run and play as much as they want; you may be sure they will never eat too much and will never have indigestion; but if you keep them hungry half their time, when they do contrive to evade your vigilance, they will take advantage of it as far as they can; they will eat till they are sick, they will gorge themselves till they can eat no more. our appetite is only excessive because we try to impose on it rules other than those of nature, opposing, controlling, prescribing, adding, or substracting; the scales are always in our hands, but the scales are the measure of our caprices not of our stomachs. i return to my usual illustration; among peasants the cupboard and the apple-loft are always left open, and indigestion is unknown alike to children and grown-up people. if, however, it happened that a child were too great an eater, though, under my system, i think it is impossible, he is so easily distracted by his favourite games that one might easily starve him without his knowing it. how is it that teachers have failed to use such a safe and easy weapon. herodotus records that the lydians, [footnote: the ancient historians are full of opinions which may be useful, even if the facts which they present are false. but we do not know how to make any real use of history. criticism and erudition are our only care; as if it mattered more that a statement were true or false than that we should be able to get a useful lesson from it. a wise man should consider history a tissue of fables whose morals are well adapted to the human heart.] under the pressure of great scarcity, decided to invent sports and other amusements with which to cheat their hunger, and they passed whole days without thought of food. your learned teachers may have read this passage time after time without seeing how it might be applied to children. one of these teachers will probably tell me that a child does not like to leave his dinner for his lessons. you are right, sir--i was not thinking of that sort of sport. the sense of smell is to taste what sight is to touch; it goes before it and gives it warning that it will be affected by this or that substance; and it inclines it to seek or shun this experience according to the impressions received beforehand. i have been told that savages receive impressions quite different from ours, and that they have quite different ideas with regard to pleasant or unpleasant odours. i can well believe it. odours alone are slight sensations; they affect the imagination rather than the senses, and they work mainly through the anticipations they arouse. this being so, and the tastes of savages being so unlike the taste of civilised men, they should lead them to form very different ideas with regard to flavours and therefore with regard to the odours which announce them. a tartar must enjoy the smell of a haunch of putrid horseflesh, much as a sportsman enjoys a very high partridge. our idle sensations, such as the scents wafted from the flower beds, must pass unnoticed among men who walk too much to care for strolling in a garden, and do not work enough to find pleasure in repose. hungry men would find little pleasure in scents which did not proclaim the approach of food. smell is the sense of the imagination; as it gives tone to the nerves it must have a great effect on the brain; that is why it revives us for the time, but eventually causes exhaustion. its effects on love are pretty generally recognised. the sweet perfumes of a dressing-room are not so slight a snare as you may fancy them, and i hardly know whether to congratulate or condole with that wise and somewhat insensible person whose senses are never stirred by the scent of the flowers his mistress wears in her bosom. hence the sense of smell should not be over-active in early childhood; the imagination, as yet unstirred by changing passions, is scarcely susceptible of emotion, and we have not enough experience to discern beforehand from one sense the promise of another. this view is confirmed by observation, and it is certain that the sense of smell is dull and almost blunted in most children. not that their sensations are less acute than those of grown-up people, but that there is no idea associated with them; they do not easily experience pleasure or pain, and are not flattered or hurt as we are. without going beyond my system, and without recourse to comparative anatomy, i think we can easily see why women are generally fonder of perfumes than men. it is said that from early childhood the redskins of canada, train their sense of smell to such a degree of subtlety that, although they have dogs, they do not condescend to use them in hunting--they are their own dogs. indeed i believe that if children were trained to scent their dinner as a dog scents game, their sense of smell might be nearly as perfect; but i see no very real advantage to be derived from this sense, except by teaching the child to observe the relation between smell and taste. nature has taken care to compel us to learn these relations. she has made the exercise of the latter sense practically inseparable from that of the former, by placing their organs close together, and by providing, in the mouth, a direct pathway between them, so that we taste nothing without smelling it too. only i would not have these natural relations disturbed in order to deceive the child, e.g.; to conceal the taste of medicine with an aromatic odour, for the discord between the senses is too great for deception, the more active sense overpowers the other, the medicine is just as distasteful, and this disagreeable association extends to every sensation experienced at the time; so the slightest of these sensations recalls the rest to his imagination and a very pleasant perfume is for him only a nasty smell; thus our foolish precautions increase the sum total of his unpleasant sensations at the cost of his pleasant sensations. in the following books i have still to speak of the training of a sort of sixth sense, called common-sense, not so much because it is common to all men, but because it results from the well-regulated use of the other five, and teaches the nature of things by the sum-total of their external aspects. so this sixth sense has no special organ, it has its seat in the brain, and its sensations which are purely internal are called percepts or ideas. the number of these ideas is the measure of our knowledge; exactness of thought depends on their clearness and precision; the art of comparing them one with another is called human reason. thus what i call the reasoning of the senses, or the reasoning of the child, consists in the formation of simple ideas through the associated experience of several sensations; what i call the reasoning of the intellect, consists in the formation, of complex ideas through the association of several simple ideas. if my method is indeed that of nature, and if i am not mistaken in the application of that method, we have led our pupil through the region of sensation to the bounds of the child's reasoning; the first step we take beyond these bounds must be the step of a man. but before we make this fresh advance, let us glance back for a moment at the path we have hitherto followed. every age, every station in life, has a perfection, a ripeness, of its own. we have often heard the phrase "a grown man;" but we will consider "a grown child." this will be a new experience and none the less pleasing. the life of finite creatures is so poor and narrow that the mere sight of what is arouses no emotion. it is fancy which decks reality, and if imagination does not lend its charm to that which touches our senses, our barren pleasure is confined to the senses alone, while the heart remains cold. the earth adorned with the treasures of autumn displays a wealth of colour which the eye admires; but this admiration fails to move us, it springs rather from thought than from feeling. in spring the country is almost bare and leafless, the trees give no shade, the grass has hardly begun to grow, yet the heart is touched by the sight. in this new birth of nature, we feel the revival of our own life; the memories of past pleasures surround us; tears of delight, those companions of pleasure ever ready to accompany a pleasing sentiment, tremble on our eyelids. animated, lively, and delightful though the vintage may be, we behold it without a tear. and why is this? because imagination adds to the sight of spring the image of the seasons which are yet to come; the eye sees the tender shoot, the mind's eye beholds its flowers, fruit, and foliage, and even the mysteries they may conceal. it blends successive stages into one moment's experience; we see things, not so much as they will be, but as we would have them be, for imagination has only to take her choice. in autumn, on the other hand, we only behold the present; if we wish to look forward to spring, winter bars the way, and our shivering imagination dies away among its frost and snow. this is the source of the charm we find in beholding the beauties of childhood, rather than the perfection of manhood. when do we really delight in beholding a man? when the memory of his deeds leads us to look back over his life and his youth is renewed in our eyes. if we are reduced to viewing him as he is, or to picturing him as he will be in old age, the thought of declining years destroys all our pleasure. there is no pleasure in seeing a man hastening to his grave; the image of death makes all hideous. but when i think of a child of ten or twelve, strong, healthy, well-grown for his age, only pleasant thoughts are called up, whether of the present or the future. i see him keen, eager, and full of life, free from gnawing cares and painful forebodings, absorbed in this present state, and delighting in a fullness of life which seems to extend beyond himself. i look forward to a time when he will use his daily increasing sense, intelligence and vigour, those growing powers of which he continually gives fresh proof. i watch the child with delight, i picture to myself the man with even greater pleasure. his eager life seems to stir my own pulses, i seem to live his life and in his vigour i renew my own. the hour strikes, the scene is changed. all of a sudden his eye grows dim, his mirth has fled. farewell mirth, farewell untrammelled sports in which he delighted. a stern, angry man takes him by the hand, saying gravely, "come with me, sir," and he is led away. as they are entering the room, i catch a glimpse of books. books, what dull food for a child of his age! the poor child allows himself to be dragged away; he casts a sorrowful look on all about him, and departs in silence, his eyes swollen with the tears he dare not shed, and his heart bursting with the sighs he dare not utter. you who have no such cause for fear, you for whom no period of life is a time of weariness and tedium, you who welcome days without care and nights without impatience, you who only reckon time by your pleasures, come, my happy kindly pupil, and console us for the departure of that miserable creature. come! here he is and at his approach i feel a thrill of delight which i see he shares. it is his friend, his comrade, who meets him; when he sees me he knows very well that he will not be long without amusement; we are never dependent on each other, but we are always on good terms, and we are never so happy as when together. his face, his bearing, his expression, speak of confidence and contentment; health shines in his countenance, his firm step speaks of strength; his colour, delicate but not sickly, has nothing of softness or effeminacy. sun and wind have already set the honourable stamp of manhood on his countenance; his rounded muscles already begin to show some signs of growing individuality; his eyes, as yet unlighted by the flame of feeling, have at least all their native calm; they have not been darkened by prolonged sorrow, nor are his cheeks furrowed by ceaseless tears. behold in his quick and certain movements the natural vigour of his age and the confidence of independence. his manner is free and open, but without a trace of insolence or vanity; his head which has not been bent over books does not fall upon his breast; there is no need to say, "hold your head up," he will neither hang his head for shame or fear. make room for him, gentlemen, in your midst; question him boldly; have no fear of importunity, chatter, or impertinent questions. you need not be afraid that he will take possession of you and expect you to devote yourself entirely to him, so that you cannot get rid of him. neither need you look for compliments from him; nor will he tell you what i have taught him to say; expect nothing from him but the plain, simple truth, without addition or ornament and without vanity. he will tell you the wrong things he has done and thought as readily as the right, without troubling himself in the least as to the effect of his words upon you; he will use speech with all the simplicity of its first beginnings. we love to augur well of our children, and we are continually regretting the flood of folly which overwhelms the hopes we would fain have rested on some chance phrase. if my scholar rarely gives me cause for such prophecies, neither will he give me cause for such regrets, for he never says a useless word, and does not exhaust himself by chattering when he knows there is no one to listen to him. his ideas are few but precise, he knows nothing by rote but much by experience. if he reads our books worse than other children, he reads far better in the book of nature; his thoughts are not in his tongue but in his brain; he has less memory and more judgment; he can only speak one language, but he understands what he is saying, and if his speech is not so good as that of other children his deeds are better. he does not know the meaning of habit, routine, and custom; what he did yesterday has no control over what he is doing to-day; he follows no rule, submits to no authority, copies no pattern, and only acts or speaks as he pleases. so do not expect set speeches or studied manners from him, but just the faithful expression of his thoughts and the conduct that springs from his inclinations. [footnote: habit owes its charm to man's natural idleness, and this idleness grows upon us if indulged; it is easier to do what we have already done, there is a beaten path which is easily followed. thus we may observe that habit is very strong in the aged and in the indolent, and very weak in the young and active. the rule of habit is only good for feeble hearts, and it makes them more and more feeble day by day. the only useful habit for children is to be accustomed to submit without difficulty to necessity, and the only useful habit for man is to submit without difficulty to the rule of reason. every other habit is a vice.] you will find he has a few moral ideas concerning his present state and none concerning manhood; what use could he make of them, for the child is not, as yet, an active member of society. speak to him of freedom, of property, or even of what is usually done; he may understand you so far; he knows why his things are his own, and why other things are not his, and nothing more. speak to him of duty or obedience; he will not know what you are talking about; bid him do something and he will pay no attention; but say to him, "if you will give me this pleasure, i will repay it when required," and he will hasten to give you satisfaction, for he asks nothing better than to extend his domain, to acquire rights over you, which will, he knows, be respected. maybe he is not sorry to have a place of his own, to be reckoned of some account; but if he has formed this latter idea, he has already left the realms of nature, and you have failed to bar the gates of vanity. for his own part, should he need help, he will ask it readily of the first person he meets. he will ask it of a king as readily as of his servant; all men are equals in his eyes. from his way of asking you will see he knows you owe him nothing, that he is asking a favour. he knows too that humanity moves you to grant this favour; his words are few and simple. his voice, his look, his gesture are those of a being equally familiar with compliance and refusal. it is neither the crawling, servile submission of the slave, nor the imperious tone of the master, it is a modest confidence in mankind; it is the noble and touching gentleness of a creature, free, yet sensitive and feeble, who asks aid of a being, free, but strong and kindly. if you grant his request he will not thank you, but he will feel he has incurred a debt. if you refuse he will neither complain nor insist; he knows it is useless; he will not say, "they refused to help me," but "it was impossible," and as i have already said, we do not rebel against necessity when once we have perceived it. leave him to himself and watch his actions without speaking, consider what he is doing and how he sets about it. he does not require to convince himself that he is free, so he never acts thoughtlessly and merely to show that he can do what he likes; does he not know that he is always his own master? he is quick, alert, and ready; his movements are eager as befits his age, but you will not find one which has no end in view. whatever he wants, he will never attempt what is beyond his powers, for he has learnt by experience what those powers are; his means will always be adapted to the end in view, and he will rarely attempt anything without the certainty of success; his eye is keen and true; he will not be so stupid as to go and ask other people about what he sees; he will examine it on his own account, and before he asks he will try every means at his disposal to discover what he wants to know for himself. if he lights upon some unexpected difficulty, he will be less upset than others; if there is danger he will be less afraid. his imagination is still asleep and nothing has been done to arouse it; he only sees what is really there, and rates the danger at its true worth; so he never loses his head. he does not rebel against necessity, her hand is too heavy upon him; he has borne her yoke all his life long, he is well used to it; he is always ready for anything. work or play are all one to him, his games are his work; he knows no difference. he brings to everything the cheerfulness of interest, the charm of freedom, and he shows the bent of his own mind and the extent of his knowledge. is there anything better worth seeing, anything more touching or more delightful, than a pretty child, with merry, cheerful glance, easy contented manner, open smiling countenance, playing at the most important things, or working at the lightest amusements? would you now judge him by comparison? set him among other children and leave him to himself. you will soon see which has made most progress, which comes nearer to the perfection of childhood. among all the children in the town there is none more skilful and none so strong. among young peasants he is their equal in strength and their superior in skill. in everything within a child's grasp he judges, reasons, and shows a forethought beyond the rest. is it a matter of action, running, jumping, or shifting things, raising weights or estimating distance, inventing games, carrying off prizes; you might say, "nature obeys his word," so easily does he bend all things to his will. he is made to lead, to rule his fellows; talent and experience take the place of right and authority. in any garb, under any name, he will still be first; everywhere he will rule the rest, they will always feel his superiority, he will be master without knowing it, and they will serve him unawares. he has reached the perfection of childhood; he has lived the life of a child; his progress has not been bought at the price of his happiness, he has gained both. while he has acquired all the wisdom of a child, he has been as free and happy as his health permits. if the reaper death should cut him off and rob us of our hopes, we need not bewail alike his life and death, we shall not have the added grief of knowing that we caused him pain; we will say, "his childhood, at least, was happy; we have robbed him of nothing that nature gave him." the chief drawback to this early education is that it is only appreciated by the wise; to vulgar eyes the child so carefully educated is nothing but a rough little boy. a tutor thinks rather of the advantage to himself than to his pupil; he makes a point of showing that there has been no time wasted; he provides his pupil with goods which can be readily displayed in the shop window, accomplishments which can be shown off at will; no matter whether they are useful, provided they are easily seen. without choice or discrimination he loads his memory with a pack of rubbish. if the child is to be examined he is set to display his wares; he spreads them out, satisfies those who behold them, packs up his bundle and goes his way. my pupil is poorer, he has no bundle to display, he has only himself to show. now neither child nor man can be read at a glance. where are the observers who can at once discern the characteristics of this child? there are such people, but they are few and far between; among a thousand fathers you will scarcely find one. too many questions are tedious and revolting to most of us and especially to children. after a few minutes their attention flags, they cease to listen to your everlasting questions and reply at random. this way of testing them is pedantic and useless; a chance word will often show their sense and intelligence better than much talking, but take care that the answer is neither a matter of chance nor yet learnt by heart. a man must needs have a good judgment if he is to estimate the judgment of a child. i heard the late lord hyde tell the following story about one of his friends. he had returned from italy after a three years' absence, and was anxious to test the progress of his son, a child of nine or ten. one evening he took a walk with the child and his tutor across a level space where the schoolboys were flying their kites. as they went, the father said to his son, "where is the kite that casts this shadow?" without hesitating and without glancing upwards the child replied, "over the high road." "and indeed," said lord hyde, "the high road was between us and the sun." at these words, the father kissed his child, and having finished his examination he departed. the next day he sent the tutor the papers settling an annuity on him in addition to his salary. what a father! and what a promising child! the question is exactly adapted to the child's age, the answer is perfectly simple; but see what precision it implies in the child's judgment. thus did the pupil of aristotle master the famous steed which no squire had ever been able to tame. book iii the whole course of man's life up to adolescence is a period of weakness; yet there comes a time during these early years when the child's strength overtakes the demands upon it, when the growing creature, though absolutely weak, is relatively strong. his needs are not fully developed and his present strength is more than enough for them. he would be a very feeble man, but he is a strong child. what is the cause of man's weakness? it is to be found in the disproportion between his strength and his desires. it is our passions that make us weak, for our natural strength is not enough for their satisfaction. to limit our desires comes to the same thing, therefore, as to increase our strength. when we can do more than we want, we have strength enough and to spare, we are really strong. this is the third stage of childhood, the stage with which i am about to deal. i still speak of childhood for want of a better word; for our scholar is approaching adolescence, though he has not yet reached the age of puberty. about twelve or thirteen the child's strength increases far more rapidly than his needs. the strongest and fiercest of the passions is still unknown, his physical development is still imperfect and seems to await the call of the will. he is scarcely aware of extremes of heat and cold and braves them with impunity. he needs no coat, his blood is warm; no spices, hunger is his sauce, no food comes amiss at this age; if he is sleepy he stretches himself on the ground and goes to sleep; he finds all he needs within his reach; he is not tormented by any imaginary wants; he cares nothing what others think; his desires are not beyond his grasp; not only is he self-sufficing, but for the first and last time in his life he has more strength than he needs. i know beforehand what you will say. you will not assert that the child has more needs than i attribute to him, but you will deny his strength. you forget that i am speaking of my own pupil, not of those puppets who walk with difficulty from one room to another, who toil indoors and carry bundles of paper. manly strength, you say, appears only with manhood; the vital spirits, distilled in their proper vessels and spreading through the whole body, can alone make the muscles firm, sensitive, tense, and springy, can alone cause real strength. this is the philosophy of the study; i appeal to that of experience. in the country districts, i see big lads hoeing, digging, guiding the plough, filling the wine-cask, driving the cart, like their fathers; you would take them for grown men if their voices did not betray them. even in our towns, iron-workers', tool makers', and blacksmiths' lads are almost as strong as their masters and would be scarcely less skilful had their training begun earlier. if there is a difference, and i do not deny that there is, it is, i repeat, much less than the difference between the stormy passions of the man and the few wants of the child. moreover, it is not merely a question of bodily strength, but more especially of strength of mind, which reinforces and directs the bodily strength. this interval in which the strength of the individual is in excess of his wants is, as i have said, relatively though not absolutely the time of greatest strength. it is the most precious time in his life; it comes but once; it is very short, all too short, as you will see when you consider the importance of using it aright. he has, therefore, a surplus of strength and capacity which he will never have again. what use shall he make of it? he will strive to use it in tasks which will help at need. he will, so to speak, cast his present surplus into the storehouse of the future; the vigorous child will make provision for the feeble man; but he will not store his goods where thieves may break in, nor in barns which are not his own. to store them aright, they must be in the hands and the head, they must be stored within himself. this is the time for work, instruction, and inquiry. and note that this is no arbitrary choice of mine, it is the way of nature herself. human intelligence is finite, and not only can no man know everything, he cannot even acquire all the scanty knowledge of others. since the contrary of every false proposition is a truth, there are as many truths as falsehoods. we must, therefore, choose what to teach as well as when to teach it. some of the information within our reach is false, some is useless, some merely serves to puff up its possessor. the small store which really contributes to our welfare alone deserves the study of a wise man, and therefore of a child whom one would have wise. he must know not merely what is, but what is useful. from this small stock we must also deduct those truths which require a full grown mind for their understanding, those which suppose a knowledge of man's relations to his fellow-men--a knowledge which no child can acquire; these things, although in themselves true, lead an inexperienced mind into mistakes with regard to other matters. we are now confined to a circle, small indeed compared with the whole of human thought, but this circle is still a vast sphere when measured by the child's mind. dark places of the human understanding, what rash hand shall dare to raise your veil? what pitfalls does our so-called science prepare for the miserable child. would you guide him along this dangerous path and draw the veil from the face of nature? stay your hand. first make sure that neither he nor you will become dizzy. beware of the specious charms of error and the intoxicating fumes of pride. keep this truth ever before you--ignorance never did any one any harm, error alone is fatal, and we do not lose our way through ignorance but through self-confidence. his progress in geometry may serve as a test and a true measure of the growth of his intelligence, but as soon as he can distinguish between what is useful and what is useless, much skill and discretion are required to lead him towards theoretical studies. for example, would you have him find a mean proportional between two lines, contrive that he should require to find a square equal to a given rectangle; if two mean proportionals are required, you must first contrive to interest him in the doubling of the cube. see how we are gradually approaching the moral ideas which distinguish between good and evil. hitherto we have known no law but necessity, now we are considering what is useful; we shall soon come to what is fitting and right. man's diverse powers are stirred by the same instinct. the bodily activity, which seeks an outlet for its energies, is succeeded by the mental activity which seeks for knowledge. children are first restless, then curious; and this curiosity, rightly directed, is the means of development for the age with which we are dealing. always distinguish between natural and acquired tendencies. there is a zeal for learning which has no other foundation than a wish to appear learned, and there is another which springs from man's natural curiosity about all things far or near which may affect himself. the innate desire for comfort and the impossibility of its complete satisfaction impel him to the endless search for fresh means of contributing to its satisfaction. this is the first principle of curiosity; a principle natural to the human heart, though its growth is proportional to the development of our feeling and knowledge. if a man of science were left on a desert island with his books and instruments and knowing that he must spend the rest of his life there, he would scarcely trouble himself about the solar system, the laws of attraction, or the differential calculus. he might never even open a book again; but he would never rest till he had explored the furthest corner of his island, however large it might be. let us therefore omit from our early studies such knowledge as has no natural attraction for us, and confine ourselves to such things as instinct impels us to study. our island is this earth; and the most striking object we behold is the sun. as soon as we pass beyond our immediate surroundings, one or both of these must meet our eye. thus the philosophy of most savage races is mainly directed to imaginary divisions of the earth or to the divinity of the sun. what a sudden change you will say. just now we were concerned with what touches ourselves, with our immediate environment, and all at once we are exploring the round world and leaping to the bounds of the universe. this change is the result of our growing strength and of the natural bent of the mind. while we were weak and feeble, self-preservation concentrated our attention on ourselves; now that we are strong and powerful, the desire for a wider sphere carries us beyond ourselves as far as our eyes can reach. but as the intellectual world is still unknown to us, our thoughts are bounded by the visible horizon, and our understanding only develops within the limits of our vision. let us transform our sensations into ideas, but do not let us jump all at once from the objects of sense to objects of thought. the latter are attained by means of the former. let the senses be the only guide for the first workings of reason. no book but the world, no teaching but that of fact. the child who reads ceases to think, he only reads. he is acquiring words not knowledge. teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. let him not be taught science, let him discover it. if ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts. you wish to teach this child geography and you provide him with globes, spheres, and maps. what elaborate preparations! what is the use of all these symbols; why not begin by showing him the real thing so that he may at least know what you are talking about? one fine evening we are walking in a suitable place where the wide horizon gives us a full view of the setting sun, and we note the objects which mark the place where it sets. next morning we return to the same place for a breath of fresh air before sun-rise. we see the rays of light which announce the sun's approach; the glow increases, the east seems afire, and long before the sun appears the light leads us to expect its return. every moment you expect to see it. there it is at last! a shining point appears like a flash of lightning and soon fills the whole space; the veil of darkness rolls away, man perceives his dwelling place in fresh beauty. during the night the grass has assumed a fresher green; in the light of early dawn, and gilded by the first rays of the sun, it seems covered with a shining network of dew reflecting the light and colour. the birds raise their chorus of praise to greet the father of life, not one of them is mute; their gentle warbling is softer than by day, it expresses the langour of a peaceful waking. all these produce an impression of freshness which seems to reach the very soul. it is a brief hour of enchantment which no man can resist; a sight so grand, so fair, so delicious, that none can behold it unmoved. fired with this enthusiasm, the master wishes to impart it to the child. he expects to rouse his emotion by drawing attention to his own. mere folly! the splendour of nature lives in man's heart; to be seen, it must be felt. the child sees the objects themselves, but does not perceive their relations, and cannot hear their harmony. it needs knowledge he has not yet acquired, feelings he has not yet experienced, to receive the complex impression which results from all these separate sensations. if he has not wandered over arid plains, if his feet have not been scorched by the burning sands of the desert, if he has not breathed the hot and oppressive air reflected from the glowing rocks, how shall he delight in the fresh air of a fine morning. the scent of flowers, the beauty of foliage, the moistness of the dew, the soft turf beneath his feet, how shall all these delight his senses. how shall the song of the birds arouse voluptuous emotion if love and pleasure are still unknown to him? how shall he behold with rapture the birth of this fair day, if his imagination cannot paint the joys it may bring in its track? how can he feel the beauty of nature, while the hand that formed it is unknown? never tell the child what he cannot understand: no descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of speech, no poetry. the time has not come for feeling or taste. continue to be clear and cold; the time will come only too soon when you must adopt another tone. brought up in the spirit of our maxims, accustomed to make his own tools and not to appeal to others until he has tried and failed, he will examine everything he sees carefully and in silence. he thinks rather than questions. be content, therefore, to show him things at a fit season; then, when you see that his curiosity is thoroughly aroused, put some brief question which will set him trying to discover the answer. on the present occasion when you and he have carefully observed the rising sun, when you have called his attention to the mountains and other objects visible from the same spot, after he has chattered freely about them, keep quiet for a few minutes as if lost in thought and then say, "i think the sun set over there last night; it rose here this morning. how can that be?" say no more; if he asks questions, do not answer them; talk of something else. let him alone, and be sure he will think about it. to train a child to be really attentive so that he may be really impressed by any truth of experience, he must spend anxious days before he discovers that truth. if he does not learn enough in this way, there is another way of drawing his attention to the matter. turn the question about. if he does not know how the sun gets from the place where it sets to where it rises, he knows at least how it travels from sunrise to sunset, his eyes teach him that. use the second question to throw light on the first; either your pupil is a regular dunce or the analogy is too clear to be missed. this is his first lesson in cosmography. as we always advance slowly from one sensible idea to another, and as we give time enough to each for him to become really familiar with it before we go on to another, and lastly as we never force our scholar's attention, we are still a long way from a knowledge of the course of the sun or the shape of the earth; but as all the apparent movements of the celestial bodies depend on the same principle, and the first observation leads on to all the rest, less effort is needed, though more time, to proceed from the diurnal revolution to the calculation of eclipses, than to get a thorough understanding of day and night. since the sun revolves round the earth it describes a circle, and every circle must have a centre; that we know already. this centre is invisible, it is in the middle of the earth, but we can mark out two opposite points on the earth's surface which correspond to it. a skewer passed through the three points and prolonged to the sky at either end would represent the earth's axis and the sun's daily course. a round teetotum revolving on its point represents the sky turning on its axis, the two points of the teetotum are the two poles; the child will be delighted to find one of them, and i show him the tail of the little bear. here is a another game for the dark. little by little we get to know the stars, and from this comes a wish to know the planets and observe the constellations. we saw the sun rise at midsummer, we shall see it rise at christmas or some other fine winter's day; for you know we are no lie-a-beds and we enjoy the cold. i take care to make this second observation in the same place as the first, and if skilfully lead up to, one or other will certainly exclaim, "what a funny thing! the sun is not rising in the same place; here are our landmarks, but it is rising over there. so there is the summer east and the winter east, etc." young teacher, you are on the right track. these examples should show you how to teach the sphere without any difficulty, taking the earth for the earth and the sun for the sun. as a general rule--never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies. i consider the armillary sphere a clumsy disproportioned bit of apparatus. the confused circles and the strange figures described on it suggest witchcraft and frighten the child. the earth is too small, the circles too large and too numerous, some of them, the colures, for instance, are quite useless, and the thickness of the pasteboard gives them an appearance of solidity so that they are taken for circular masses having a real existence, and when you tell the child that these are imaginary circles, he does not know what he is looking at and is none the wiser. we are unable to put ourselves in the child's place, we fail to enter into his thoughts, we invest him with our own ideas, and while we are following our own chain of reasoning, we merely fill his head with errors and absurdities. should the method of studying science be analytic or synthetic? people dispute over this question, but it is not always necessary to choose between them. sometimes the same experiments allow one to use both analysis and synthesis, and thus to guide the child by the method of instruction when he fancies he is only analysing. then, by using both at once, each method confirms the results of the other. starting from opposite ends, without thinking of following the same road, he will unexpectedly reach their meeting place and this will be a delightful surprise. for example, i would begin geography at both ends and add to the study of the earth's revolution the measurement of its divisions, beginning at home. while the child is studying the sphere and is thus transported to the heavens, bring him back to the divisions of the globe and show him his own home. his geography will begin with the town he lives in and his father's country house, then the places between them, the rivers near them, and then the sun's aspect and how to find one's way by its aid. this is the meeting place. let him make his own map, a very simple map, at first containing only two places; others may be added from time to time, as he is able to estimate their distance and position. you see at once what a good start we have given him by making his eye his compass. no doubt he will require some guidance in spite of this, but very little, and that little without his knowing it. if he goes wrong let him alone, do not correct his mistakes; hold your tongue till he finds them out for himself and corrects them, or at most arrange something, as opportunity offers, which may show him his mistakes. if he never makes mistakes he will never learn anything thoroughly. moreover, what he needs is not an exact knowledge of local topography, but how to find out for himself. no matter whether he carries maps in his head provided he understands what they mean, and has a clear idea of the art of making them. see what a difference there is already between the knowledge of your scholars and the ignorance of mine. they learn maps, he makes them. here are fresh ornaments for his room. remember that this is the essential point in my method--do not teach the child many things, but never to let him form inaccurate or confused ideas. i care not if he knows nothing provided he is not mistaken, and i only acquaint him with truths to guard him against the errors he might put in their place. reason and judgment come slowly, prejudices flock to us in crowds, and from these he must be protected. but if you make science itself your object, you embark on an unfathomable and shoreless ocean, an ocean strewn with reefs from which you will never return. when i see a man in love with knowledge, yielding to its charms and flitting from one branch to another unable to stay his steps, he seems to me like a child gathering shells on the sea-shore, now picking them up, then throwing them aside for others which he sees beyond them, then taking them again, till overwhelmed by their number and unable to choose between them, he flings them all away and returns empty handed. time was long during early childhood; we only tried to pass our time for fear of using it ill; now it is the other way; we have not time enough for all that would be of use. the passions, remember, are drawing near, and when they knock at the door your scholar will have no ear for anything else. the peaceful age of intelligence is so short, it flies so swiftly, there is so much to be done, that it is madness to try to make your child learned. it is not your business to teach him the various sciences, but to give him a taste for them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature. that is assuredly a fundamental principle of all good education. this is also the time to train him gradually to prolonged attention to a given object; but this attention should never be the result of constraint, but of interest or desire; you must be very careful that it is not too much for his strength, and that it is not carried to the point of tedium. watch him, therefore, and whatever happens, stop before he is tired, for it matters little what he learns; it does matter that he should do nothing against his will. if he asks questions let your answers be enough to whet his curiosity but not enough to satisfy it; above all, when you find him talking at random and overwhelming you with silly questions instead of asking for information, at once refuse to answer; for it is clear that he no longer cares about the matter in hand, but wants to make you a slave to his questions. consider his motives rather than his words. this warning, which was scarcely needed before, becomes of supreme importance when the child begins to reason. there is a series of abstract truths by means of which all the sciences are related to common principles and are developed each in its turn. this relationship is the method of the philosophers. we are not concerned with it at present. there is quite another method by which every concrete example suggests another and always points to the next in the series. this succession, which stimulates the curiosity and so arouses the attention required by every object in turn, is the order followed by most men, and it is the right order for all children. to take our bearings so as to make our maps we must find meridians. two points of intersection between the equal shadows morning and evening supply an excellent meridian for a thirteen-year-old astronomer. but these meridians disappear, it takes time to trace them, and you are obliged to work in one place. so much trouble and attention will at last become irksome. we foresaw this and are ready for it. again i must enter into minute and detailed explanations. i hear my readers murmur, but i am prepared to meet their disapproval; i will not sacrifice the most important part of this book to your impatience. you may think me as long-winded as you please; i have my own opinion as to your complaints. long ago my pupil and i remarked that some substances such as amber, glass, and wax, when well rubbed, attracted straws, while others did not. we accidentally discover a substance which has a more unusual property, that of attracting filings or other small particles of iron from a distance and without rubbing. how much time do we devote to this game to the exclusion of everything else! at last we discover that this property is communicated to the iron itself, which is, so to speak, endowed with life. we go to the fair one day [footnote: i could not help laughing when i read an elaborate criticism of this little tale by m. de formy. "this conjuror," says he, "who is afraid of a child's competition and preaches to his tutor is the sort of person we meet with in the world in which emile and such as he are living." this witty m. de formy could not guess that this little scene was arranged beforehand, and that the juggler was taught his part in it; indeed i did not state this fact. but i have said again and again that i was not writing for people who expected to be told everything.] and a conjuror has a wax duck floating in a basin of water, and he makes it follow a bit of bread. we are greatly surprised, but we do not call him a wizard, never having heard of such persons. as we are continually observing effects whose causes are unknown to us, we are in no hurry to make up our minds, and we remain in ignorance till we find an opportunity of learning. when we get home we discuss the duck till we try to imitate it. we take a needle thoroughly magnetised, we imbed it in white wax, shaped as far as possible like a duck, with the needle running through the body, so that its eye forms the beak. we put the duck in water and put the end of a key near its beak, and you will readily understand our delight when we find that our duck follows the key just as the duck at the fair followed the bit of bread. another time we may note the direction assumed by the duck when left in the basin; for the present we are wholly occupied with our work and we want nothing more. the same evening we return to the fair with some bread specially prepared in our pockets, and as soon as the conjuror has performed his trick, my little doctor, who can scarcely sit still, exclaims, "the trick is quite easy; i can do it myself." "do it then." he at once takes the bread with a bit of iron hidden in it from his pocket; his heart throbs as he approaches the table and holds out the bread, his hand trembles with excitement. the duck approaches and follows his hand. the child cries out and jumps for joy. the applause, the shouts of the crowd, are too much for him, he is beside himself. the conjuror, though disappointed, embraces him, congratulates him, begs the honour of his company on the following day, and promises to collect a still greater crowd to applaud his skill. my young scientist is very proud of himself and is beginning to chatter, but i check him at once and take him home overwhelmed with praise. the child counts the minutes till to-morrow with absurd anxiety. he invites every one he meets, he wants all mankind to behold his glory; he can scarcely wait till the appointed hour. he hurries to the place; the hall is full already; as he enters his young heart swells with pride. other tricks are to come first. the conjuror surpasses himself and does the most surprising things. the child sees none of these; he wriggles, perspires, and hardly breathes; the time is spent in fingering with a trembling hand the bit of bread in his pocket. his turn comes at last; the master announces it to the audience with all ceremony; he goes up looking somewhat shamefaced and takes out his bit of bread. oh fleeting joys of human life! the duck, so tame yesterday, is quite wild to-day; instead of offering its beak it turns tail and swims away; it avoids the bread and the hand that holds it as carefully as it followed them yesterday. after many vain attempts accompanied by derisive shouts from the audience the child complains that he is being cheated, that is not the same duck, and he defies the conjuror to attract it. the conjuror, without further words, takes a bit of bread and offers it to the duck, which at once follows it and comes to the hand which holds it. the child takes the same bit of bread with no better success; the duck mocks his efforts and swims round the basin. overwhelmed with confusion he abandons the attempt, ashamed to face the crowd any longer. then the conjuror takes the bit of bread the child brought with him and uses it as successfully as his own. he takes out the bit of iron before the audience--another laugh at our expense--then with this same bread he attracts the duck as before. he repeats the experiment with a piece of bread cut by a third person in full view of the audience. he does it with his glove, with his finger-tip. finally he goes into the middle of the room and in the emphatic tones used by such persons he declares that his duck will obey his voice as readily as his hand; he speaks and the duck obeys; he bids him go to the right and he goes, to come back again and he comes. the movement is as ready as the command. the growing applause completes our discomfiture. we slip away unnoticed and shut ourselves up in our room, without relating our successes to everybody as we had expected. next day there is a knock at the door. when i open it there is the conjuror, who makes a modest complaint with regard to our conduct. what had he done that we should try to discredit his tricks and deprive him of his livelihood? what is there so wonderful in attracting a duck that we should purchase this honour at the price of an honest man's living? "my word, gentlemen! had i any other trade by which i could earn a living i would not pride myself on this. you may well believe that a man who has spent his life at this miserable trade knows more about it than you who only give your spare time to it. if i did not show you my best tricks at first, it was because one must not be so foolish as to display all one knows at once. i always take care to keep my best tricks for emergencies; and i have plenty more to prevent young folks from meddling. however, i have come, gentlemen, in all kindness, to show you the trick that gave you so much trouble; i only beg you not to use it to my hurt, and to be more discreet in future." he then shows us his apparatus, and to our great surprise we find it is merely a strong magnet in the hand of a boy concealed under the table. the man puts up his things, and after we have offered our thanks and apologies, we try to give him something. he refuses it. "no, gentlemen," says he, "i owe you no gratitude and i will not accept your gift. i leave you in my debt in spite of all, and that is my only revenge. generosity may be found among all sorts of people, and i earn my pay by doing my tricks not by teaching them." as he is going he blames me out-right. "i can make excuses for the child," he says, "he sinned in ignorance. but you, sir, should know better. why did you let him do it? as you are living together and you are older than he, you should look after him and give him good advice. your experience should be his guide. when he is grown up he will reproach, not only himself, but you, for the faults of his youth." when he is gone we are greatly downcast. i blame myself for my easy-going ways. i promise the child that another time i will put his interests first and warn him against faults before he falls into them, for the time is coming when our relations will be changed, when the severity of the master must give way to the friendliness of the comrade; this change must come gradually, you must look ahead, and very far ahead. we go to the fair again the next day to see the trick whose secret we know. we approach our socrates, the conjuror, with profound respect, we scarcely dare to look him in the face. he overwhelms us with politeness, gives us the best places, and heaps coals of fire on our heads. he goes through his performance as usual, but he lingers affectionately over the duck, and often glances proudly in our direction. we are in the secret, but we do not tell. if my pupil did but open his mouth he would be worthy of death. there is more meaning than you suspect in this detailed illustration. how many lessons in one! how mortifying are the results of a first impulse towards vanity! young tutor, watch this first impulse carefully. if you can use it to bring about shame and disgrace, you may be sure it will not recur for many a day. what a fuss you will say. just so; and all to provide a compass which will enable us to dispense with a meridian! having learnt that a magnet acts through other bodies, our next business is to construct a bit of apparatus similar to that shown us. a bare table, a shallow bowl placed on it and filled with water, a duck rather better finished than the first, and so on. we often watch the thing and at last we notice that the duck, when at rest, always turns the same way. we follow up this observation; we examine the direction, we find that it is from south to north. enough! we have found our compass or its equivalent; the study of physics is begun. there are various regions of the earth, and these regions differ in temperature. the variation is more evident as we approach the poles; all bodies expand with heat and contract with cold; this is best measured in liquids and best of all in spirits; hence the thermometer. the wind strikes the face, then the air is a body, a fluid; we feel it though we cannot see it. i invert a glass in water; the water will not fill it unless you leave a passage for the escape of the air; so air is capable of resistance. plunge the glass further in the water; the water will encroach on the air-space without filling it entirely; so air yields somewhat to pressure. a ball filled with compressed air bounces better than one filled with anything else; so air is elastic. raise your arm horizontally from the water when you are lying in your bath; you will feel a terrible weight on it; so air is a heavy body. by establishing an equilibrium between air and other fluids its weight can be measured, hence the barometer, the siphon, the air-gun, and the air-pump. all the laws of statics and hydrostatics are discovered by such rough experiments. for none of these would i take the child into a physical cabinet; i dislike that array of instruments and apparatus. the scientific atmosphere destroys science. either the child is frightened by these instruments or his attention, which should be fixed on their effects, is distracted by their appearance. we shall make all our apparatus ourselves, and i would not make it beforehand, but having caught a glimpse of the experiment by chance we mean to invent step by step an instrument for its verification. i would rather our apparatus was somewhat clumsy and imperfect, but our ideas clear as to what the apparatus ought to be, and the results to be obtained by means of it. for my first lesson in statics, instead of fetching a balance, i lay a stick across the back of a chair, i measure the two parts when it is balanced; add equal or unequal weights to either end; by pulling or pushing it as required, i find at last that equilibrium is the result of a reciprocal proportion between the amount of the weights and the length of the levers. thus my little physicist is ready to rectify a balance before ever he sees one. undoubtedly the notions of things thus acquired for oneself are clearer and much more convincing than those acquired from the teaching of others; and not only is our reason not accustomed to a slavish submission to authority, but we develop greater ingenuity in discovering relations, connecting ideas and inventing apparatus, than when we merely accept what is given us and allow our minds to be enfeebled by indifference, like the body of a man whose servants always wait on him, dress him and put on his shoes, whose horse carries him, till he loses the use of his limbs. boileau used to boast that he had taught racine the art of rhyming with difficulty. among the many short cuts to science, we badly need some one to teach us the art of learning with difficulty. the most obvious advantage of these slow and laborious inquiries is this: the scholar, while engaged in speculative studies, is actively using his body, gaining suppleness of limb, and training his hands to labour so that he will be able to make them useful when he is a man. too much apparatus, designed to guide us in our experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses. the theodolite makes it unnecessary to estimate the size of angles; the eye which used to judge distances with much precision, trusts to the chain for its measurements; the steel yard dispenses with the need of judging weight by the hand as i used to do. the more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskilful are our senses. we surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those with which nature has provided every one of us. but when we devote to the making of these instruments the skill which did instead of them, when for their construction we use the intelligence which enabled us to dispense with them, this is gain not loss, we add art to nature, we gain ingenuity without loss of skill. if instead of making a child stick to his books i employ him in a workshop, his hands work for the development of his mind. while he fancies himself a workman he is becoming a philosopher. moreover, this exercise has other advantages of which i shall speak later; and you will see how, through philosophy in sport, one may rise to the real duties of man. i have said already that purely theoretical science is hardly suitable for children, even for children approaching adolescence; but without going far into theoretical physics, take care that all their experiments are connected together by some chain of reasoning, so that they may follow an orderly sequence in the mind, and may be recalled at need; for it is very difficult to remember isolated facts or arguments, when there is no cue for their recall. in your inquiry into the laws of nature always begin with the commonest and most conspicuous phenomena, and train your scholar not to accept these phenomena as causes but as facts. i take a stone and pretend to place it in the air; i open my hand, the stone falls. i see emile watching my action and i say, "why does this stone fall?" what child will hesitate over this question? none, not even emile, unless i have taken great pains to teach him not to answer. every one will say, "the stone falls because it is heavy." "and what do you mean by heavy?" "that which falls." "so the stone falls because it falls?" here is a poser for my little philosopher. this is his first lesson in systematic physics, and whether he learns physics or no it is a good lesson in common-sense. as the child develops in intelligence other important considerations require us to be still more careful in our choice of his occupations. as soon as he has sufficient self-knowledge to understand what constitutes his well-being, as soon as he can grasp such far-reaching relations as to judge what is good for him and what is not, then he is able to discern the difference between work and play, and to consider the latter merely as relaxation. the objects of real utility may be introduced into his studies and may lead him to more prolonged attention than he gave to his games. the ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more. such is the use of foresight, and this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind. every one desires happiness, but to secure it he must know what happiness is. for the natural man happiness is as simple as his life; it consists in the absence of pain; health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements. the happiness of the moral man is another matter, but it does not concern us at present. i cannot repeat too often that it is only objects which can be perceived by the senses which can have any interest for children, especially children whose vanity has not been stimulated nor their minds corrupted by social conventions. as soon as they foresee their needs before they feel them, their intelligence has made a great step forward, they are beginning to know the value of time. they must then be trained to devote this time to useful purposes, but this usefulness should be such as they can readily perceive and should be within the reach of their age and experience. what concerns the moral order and the customs of society should not yet be given them, for they are not in a condition to understand it. it is folly to expect them to attend to things vaguely described as good for them, when they do not know what this good is, things which they are assured will be to their advantage when they are grown up, though for the present they take no interest in this so-called advantage, which they are unable to understand. let the child do nothing because he is told; nothing is good for him but what he recognises as good. when you are always urging him beyond his present understanding, you think you are exercising a foresight which you really lack. to provide him with useless tools which he may never require, you deprive him of man's most useful tool--common-sense. you would have him docile as a child; he will be a credulous dupe when he grows up. you are always saying, "what i ask is for your good, though you cannot understand it. what does it matter to me whether you do it or not; my efforts are entirely on your account." all these fine speeches with which you hope to make him good, are preparing the way, so that the visionary, the tempter, the charlatan, the rascal, and every kind of fool may catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly. a man must know many things which seem useless to a child, but need the child learn, or can he indeed learn, all that the man must know? try to teach the child what is of use to a child and you will find that it takes all his time. why urge him to the studies of an age he may never reach, to the neglect of those studies which meet his present needs? "but," you ask, "will it not be too late to learn what he ought to know when the time comes to use it?" i cannot tell; but this i do know, it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and emotion, and man will never learn what befits a man except under its own conditions. a child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man's estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his grasp. my whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education. as soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. this word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "what is the use of that?" in future this is the sacred formula, the formula by which he and i test every action of our lives. this is the question with which i invariably answer all his questions; it serves to check the stream of foolish and tiresome questions with which children weary those about them. these incessant questions produce no result, and their object is rather to get a hold over you than to gain any real advantage. a pupil, who has been really taught only to want to know what is useful, questions like socrates; he never asks a question without a reason for it, for he knows he will be required to give his reason before he gets an answer. see what a powerful instrument i have put into your hands for use with your pupil. as he does not know the reason for anything you can reduce him to silence almost at will; and what advantages do your knowledge and experience give you to show him the usefulness of what you suggest. for, make no mistake about it, when you put this question to him, you are teaching him to put it to you, and you must expect that whatever you suggest to him in the future he will follow your own example and ask, "what is the use of this?" perhaps this is the greatest of the tutor's difficulties. if you merely try to put the child off when he asks a question, and if you give him a single reason he is not able to understand, if he finds that you reason according to your own ideas, not his, he will think what you tell him is good for you but not for him; you will lose his confidence and all your labour is thrown away. but what master will stop short and confess his faults to his pupil? we all make it a rule never to own to the faults we really have. now i would make it a rule to admit even the faults i have not, if i could not make my reasons clear to him; as my conduct will always be intelligible to him, he will never doubt me and i shall gain more credit by confessing my imaginary faults than those who conceal their real defects. in the first place do not forget that it is rarely your business to suggest what he ought to learn; it is for him to want to learn, to seek and to find it. you should put it within his reach, you should skilfully awaken the desire and supply him with means for its satisfaction. so your questions should be few and well-chosen, and as he will always have more questions to put to you than you to him, you will always have the advantage and will be able to ask all the oftener, "what is the use of that question?" moreover, as it matters little what he learns provided he understands it and knows how to use it, as soon as you cannot give him a suitable explanation give him none at all. do not hesitate to say, "i have no good answer to give you; i was wrong, let us drop the subject." if your teaching was really ill-chosen there is no harm in dropping it altogether; if it was not, with a little care you will soon find an opportunity of making its use apparent to him. i do not like verbal explanations. young people pay little heed to them, nor do they remember them. things! things! i cannot repeat it too often. we lay too much stress upon words; we teachers babble, and our scholars follow our example. suppose we are studying the course of the sun and the way to find our bearings, when all at once emile interrupts me with the question, "what is the use of that?" what a fine lecture i might give, how many things i might take occasion to teach him in reply to his question, especially if there is any one there. i might speak of the advantages of travel, the value of commerce, the special products of different lands and the peculiar customs of different nations, the use of the calendar, the way to reckon the seasons for agriculture, the art of navigation, how to steer our course at sea, how to find our way without knowing exactly where we are. politics, natural history, astronomy, even morals and international law are involved in my explanation, so as to give my pupil some idea of all these sciences and a great wish to learn them. when i have finished i shall have shown myself a regular pedant, i shall have made a great display of learning, and not one single idea has he understood. he is longing to ask me again, "what is the use of taking one's bearings?" but he dare not for fear of vexing me. he finds it pays best to pretend to listen to what he is forced to hear. this is the practical result of our fine systems of education. but emile is educated in a simpler fashion. we take so much pains to teach him a difficult idea that he will have heard nothing of all this. at the first word he does not understand, he will run away, he will prance about the room, and leave me to speechify by myself. let us seek a more commonplace explanation; my scientific learning is of no use to him. we were observing the position of the forest to the north of montmorency when he interrupted me with the usual question, "what is the use of that?" "you are right," i said. "let us take time to think it over, and if we find it is no use we will drop it, for we only want useful games." we find something else to do and geography is put aside for the day. next morning i suggest a walk before breakfast; there is nothing he would like better; children are always ready to run about, and he is a good walker. we climb up to the forest, we wander through its clearings and lose ourselves; we have no idea where we are, and when we want to retrace our steps we cannot find the way. time passes, we are hot and hungry; hurrying vainly this way and that we find nothing but woods, quarries, plains, not a landmark to guide us. very hot, very tired, very hungry, we only get further astray. at last we sit down to rest and to consider our position. i assume that emile has been educated like an ordinary child. he does not think, he begins to cry; he has no idea we are close to montmorency, which is hidden from our view by a mere thicket; but this thicket is a forest to him, a man of his size is buried among bushes. after a few minutes' silence i begin anxiously---- jean jacques. my dear emile, what shall we do get out? emile. i am sure i do not know. i am tired, i am hungry, i am thirsty. i cannot go any further. jean jacques. do you suppose i am any better off? i would cry too if i could make my breakfast off tears. crying is no use, we must look about us. let us see your watch; what time is it? emile. it is noon and i am so hungry! jean jacques. just so; it is noon and i am so hungry too. emile. you must be very hungry indeed. jean jacques. unluckily my dinner won't come to find me. it is twelve o'clock. this time yesterday we were observing the position of the forest from montmorency. if only we could see the position of montmorency from the forest. emile. but yesterday we could see the forest, and here we cannot see the town. jean jacques. that is just it. if we could only find it without seeing it. emile. oh! my dear friend! jean jacques. did not we say the forest was... emile. north of montmorency. jean jacques. then montmorency must lie... emile. south of the forest. jean jacques. we know how to find the north at midday. emile. yes, by the direction of the shadows. jean jacques. but the south? emile. what shall we do? jean jacques. the south is opposite the north. emile. that is true; we need only find the opposite of the shadows. that is the south! that is the south! montmorency must be over there! let us look for it there! jean jacques. perhaps you are right; let us follow this path through the wood. emile. (clapping his hands.) oh, i can see montmorency! there it is, quite plain, just in front of us! come to luncheon, come to dinner, make haste! astronomy is some use after all. be sure that he thinks this if he does not say it; no matter which, provided i do not say it myself. he will certainly never forget this day's lesson as long as he lives, while if i had only led him to think of all this at home, my lecture would have been forgotten the next day. teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing is out of the question. the reader will not expect me to have such a poor opinion of him as to supply him with an example of every kind of study; but, whatever is taught, i cannot too strongly urge the tutor to adapt his instances to the capacity of his scholar; for once more i repeat the risk is not in what he does not know, but in what he thinks he knows. i remember how i once tried to give a child a taste for chemistry. after showing him several metallic precipitates, i explained how ink was made. i told him how its blackness was merely the result of fine particles of iron separated from the vitriol and precipitated by an alkaline solution. in the midst of my learned explanation the little rascal pulled me up short with the question i myself had taught him. i was greatly puzzled. after a few moments' thought i decided what to do. i sent for some wine from the cellar of our landlord, and some very cheap wine from a wine-merchant. i took a small [footnote: before giving any explanation to a child a little bit of apparatus serves to fix his attention.] flask of an alkaline solution, and placing two glasses before me filled with the two sorts of wine, i said. food and drink are adulterated to make them seem better than they really are. these adulterations deceive both the eye and the palate, but they are unwholesome and make the adulterated article even worse than before in spite of its fine appearance. all sorts of drinks are adulterated, and wine more than others; for the fraud is more difficult to detect, and more profitable to the fraudulent person. sour wine is adulterated with litharge; litharge is a preparation of lead. lead in combination with acids forms a sweet salt which corrects the harsh taste of the sour wine, but it is poisonous. so before we drink wine of doubtful quality we should be able to tell if there is lead in it. this is how i should do it. wine contains not merely an inflammable spirit as you have seen from the brandy made from it; it also contains an acid as you know from the vinegar made from it. this acid has an affinity for metals, it combines with them and forms salts, such as iron-rust, which is only iron dissolved by the acid in air or water, or such as verdegris, which is only copper dissolved in vinegar. but this acid has a still greater affinity for alkalis than for metals, so that when we add alkalis to the above-mentioned salts, the acid sets free the metal with which it had combined, and combines with the alkali. then the metal, set free by the acid which held it in solution, is precipitated and the liquid becomes opaque. if then there is litharge in either of these glasses of wine, the acid holds the litharge in solution. when i pour into it an alkaline solution, the acid will be forced to set the lead free in order to combine with the alkali. the lead, no longer held in solution, will reappear, the liquor will become thick, and after a time the lead will be deposited at the bottom of the glass. if there is no lead [footnote: the wine sold by retail dealers in paris is rarely free from lead, though some of it does not contain litharge, for the counters are covered with lead and when the wine is poured into the measures and some of it spilt upon the counter and the measures left standing on the counter, some of the lead is always dissolved. it is strange that so obvious and dangerous an abuse should be tolerated by the police. but indeed well-to-do people, who rarely drink these wines, are not likely to be poisoned by them.] nor other metal in the wine the alkali will slowly [footnote: the vegetable acid is very gentle in its action. if it were a mineral acid and less diluted, the combination would not take place without effervescence.] combine with the acid, all will remain clear and there will be no precipitate. then i poured my alkaline solution first into one glass and then into the other. the wine from our own house remained clear and unclouded, the other at once became turbid, and an hour later the lead might be plainly seen, precipitated at the bottom of the glass. "this," said i, "is a pure natural wine and fit to drink; the other is adulterated and poisonous. you wanted to know the use of knowing how to make ink. if you can make ink you can find out what wines are adulterated." i was very well pleased with my illustration, but i found it made little impression on my pupil. when i had time to think about it i saw i had been a fool, for not only was it impossible for a child of twelve to follow my explanations, but the usefulness of the experiment did not appeal to him; he had tasted both glasses of wine and found them both good, so he attached no meaning to the word "adulterated" which i thought i had explained so nicely. indeed, the other words, "unwholesome" and "poison," had no meaning whatever for him; he was in the same condition as the boy who told the story of philip and his doctor. it is the condition of all children. the relation of causes and effects whose connection is unknown to us, good and ill of which we have no idea, the needs we have never felt, have no existence for us. it is impossible to interest ourselves in them sufficiently to make us do anything connected with them. at fifteen we become aware of the happiness of a good man, as at thirty we become aware of the glory of paradise. if we had no clear idea of either we should make no effort for their attainment; and even if we had a clear idea of them, we should make little or no effort unless we desired them and unless we felt we were made for them. it is easy to convince a child that what you wish to teach him is useful, but it is useless to convince if you cannot also persuade. pure reason may lead us to approve or censure, but it is feeling which leads to action, and how shall we care about that which does not concern us? never show a child what he cannot see. since mankind is almost unknown to him, and since you cannot make a man of him, bring the man down to the level of the child. while you are thinking what will be useful to him when he is older, talk to him of what he knows he can use now. moreover, as soon as he begins to reason let there be no comparison with other children, no rivalry, no competition, not even in running races. i would far rather he did not learn anything than have him learn it through jealousy or self-conceit. year by year i shall just note the progress he had made, i shall compare the results with those of the following year, i shall say, "you have grown so much; that is the ditch you jumped, the weight you carried, the distance you flung a pebble, the race you ran without stopping to take breath, etc.; let us see what you can do now." in this way he is stimulated to further effort without jealousy. he wants to excel himself as he ought to do; i see no reason why he should not emulate his own performances. i hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. hermes, they say, engraved the elements of science on pillars lest a deluge should destroy them. had he imprinted them on men's hearts they would have been preserved by tradition. well-trained minds are the pillars on which human knowledge is most deeply engraved. is there no way of correlating so many lessons scattered through so many books, no way of focussing them on some common object, easy to see, interesting to follow, and stimulating even to a child? could we but discover a state in which all man's needs appear in such a way as to appeal to the child's mind, a state in which the ways of providing for these needs are as easily developed, the simple and stirring portrayal of this state should form the earliest training of the child's imagination. eager philosopher, i see your own imagination at work. spare yourself the trouble; this state is already known, it is described, with due respect to you, far better than you could describe it, at least with greater truth and simplicity. since we must have books, there is one book which, to my thinking, supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature. this is the first book emile will read; for a long time it will form his whole library, and it will always retain an honoured place. it will be the text to which all our talks about natural science are but the commentary. it will serve to test our progress towards a right judgment, and it will always be read with delight, so long as our taste is unspoilt. what is this wonderful book? is it aristotle? pliny? buffon? no; it is robinson crusoe. robinson crusoe on his island, deprived of the help of his fellow-men, without the means of carrying on the various arts, yet finding food, preserving his life, and procuring a certain amount of comfort; this is the thing to interest people of all ages, and it can be made attractive to children in all sorts of ways. we shall thus make a reality of that desert island which formerly served as an illustration. the condition, i confess, is not that of a social being, nor is it in all probability emile's own condition, but he should use it as a standard of comparison for all other conditions. the surest way to raise him above prejudice and to base his judgments on the true relations of things, is to put him in the place of a solitary man, and to judge all things as they would be judged by such a man in relation to their own utility. this novel, stripped of irrelevant matter, begins with robinson's shipwreck on his island, and ends with the coming of the ship which bears him from it, and it will furnish emile with material, both for work and play, during the whole period we are considering. his head should be full of it, he should always be busy with his castle, his goats, his plantations. let him learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. let him think he is robinson himself; let him see himself clad in skins, wearing a tall cap, a great cutlass, all the grotesque get-up of robinson crusoe, even to the umbrella which he will scarcely need. he should anxiously consider what steps to take; will this or that be wanting. he should examine his hero's conduct; has he omitted nothing; is there nothing he could have done better? he should carefully note his mistakes, so as not to fall into them himself in similar circumstances, for you may be sure he will plan out just such a settlement for himself. this is the genuine castle in the air of this happy age, when the child knows no other happiness but food and freedom. what a motive will this infatuation supply in the hands of a skilful teacher who has aroused it for the purpose of using it. the child who wants to build a storehouse on his desert island will be more eager to learn than the master to teach. he will want to know all sorts of useful things and nothing else; you will need the curb as well as the spur. make haste, therefore, to establish him on his island while this is all he needs to make him happy; for the day is at hand, when, if he must still live on his island, he will not be content to live alone, when even the companionship of man friday, who is almost disregarded now, will not long suffice. the exercise of the natural arts, which may be carried on by one man alone, leads on to the industrial arts which call for the cooperation of many hands. the former may be carried on by hermits, by savages, but the others can only arise in a society, and they make society necessary. so long as only bodily needs are recognised man is self-sufficing; with superfluity comes the need for division and distribution of labour, for though one man working alone can earn a man's living, one hundred men working together can earn the living of two hundred. as soon as some men are idle, others must work to make up for their idleness. your main object should be to keep out of your scholar's way all idea of such social relations as he cannot understand, but when the development of knowledge compels you to show him the mutual dependence of mankind, instead of showing him its moral side, turn all his attention at first towards industry and the mechanical arts which make men useful to one another. while you take him from one workshop to another, let him try his hand at every trade you show him, and do not let him leave it till he has thoroughly learnt why everything is done, or at least everything that has attracted his attention. with this aim you should take a share in his work and set him an example. be yourself the apprentice that he may become a master; you may expect him to learn more in one hour's work than he would retain after a whole day's explanation. the value set by the general public on the various arts is in inverse ratio to their real utility. they are even valued directly according to their uselessness. this might be expected. the most useful arts are the worst paid, for the number of workmen is regulated by the demand, and the work which everybody requires must necessarily be paid at a rate which puts it within the reach of the poor. on the other hand, those great people who are called artists, not artisans, who labour only for the rich and idle, put a fancy price on their trifles; and as the real value of this vain labour is purely imaginary, the price itself adds to their market value, and they are valued according to their costliness. the rich think so much of these things, not because they are useful, but because they are beyond the reach of the poor. nolo habere bona, nisi quibus populus inviderit. what will become of your pupils if you let them acquire this foolish prejudice, if you share it yourself? if, for instance, they see you show more politeness in a jeweller's shop than in a locksmith's. what idea will they form of the true worth of the arts and the real value of things when they see, on the one hand, a fancy price and, on the other, the price of real utility, and that the more a thing costs the less it is worth? as soon as you let them get hold of these ideas, you may give up all attempt at further education; in spite of you they will be like all the other scholars--you have wasted fourteen years. emile, bent on furnishing his island, will look at things from another point of view. robinson would have thought more of a toolmaker's shop than all saide's trifles put together. he would have reckoned the toolmaker a very worthy man, and saide little more than a charlatan. "my son will have to take the world as he finds it, he will not live among the wise but among fools; he must therefore be acquainted with their follies, since they must be led by this means. a real knowledge of things may be a good thing in itself, but the knowledge of men and their opinions is better, for in human society man is the chief tool of man, and the wisest man is he who best knows the use of this tool. what is the good of teaching children an imaginary system, just the opposite of the established order of things, among which they will have to live? first teach them wisdom, then show them the follies of mankind." these are the specious maxims by which fathers, who mistake them for prudence, strive to make their children the slaves of the prejudices in which they are educated, and the puppets of the senseless crowd, which they hope to make subservient to their passions. how much must be known before we attain to a knowledge of man. this is the final study of the philosopher, and you expect to make it the first lesson of the child! before teaching him our sentiments, first teach him to judge of their worth. do you perceive folly when you mistake it for wisdom? to be wise we must discern between good and evil. how can your child know men, when he can neither judge of their judgments nor unravel their mistakes? it is a misfortune to know what they think, without knowing whether their thoughts are true or false. first teach him things as they really are, afterwards you will teach him how they appear to us. he will then be able to make a comparison between popular ideas and truth, and be able to rise above the vulgar crowd; for you are unaware of the prejudices you adopt, and you do not lead a nation when you are like it. but if you begin to teach the opinions of other people before you teach how to judge of their worth, of one thing you may be sure, your pupil will adopt those opinions whatever you may do, and you will not succeed in uprooting them. i am therefore convinced that to make a young man judge rightly, you must form his judgment rather than teach him your own. so far you see i have not spoken to my pupil about men; he would have too much sense to listen to me. his relations to other people are as yet not sufficiently apparent to him to enable him to judge others by himself. the only person he knows is himself, and his knowledge of himself is very imperfect. but if he forms few opinions about others, those opinions are correct. he knows nothing of another's place, but he knows his own and keeps to it. i have bound him with the strong cord of necessity, instead of social laws, which are beyond his knowledge. he is still little more than a body; let us treat him as such. every substance in nature and every work of man must be judged in relation to his own use, his own safety, his own preservation, his own comfort. thus he should value iron far more than gold, and glass than diamonds; in the same way he has far more respect for a shoemaker or a mason than for a lempereur, a le blanc, or all the jewellers in europe. in his eyes a confectioner is a really great man, and he would give the whole academy of sciences for the smallest pastrycook in lombard street. goldsmiths, engravers, gilders, and embroiderers, he considers lazy people, who play at quite useless games. he does not even think much of a clockmaker. the happy child enjoys time without being a slave to it; he uses it, but he does not know its value. the freedom from passion which makes every day alike to him, makes any means of measuring time unnecessary. when i assumed that emile had a watch, [footnote: when our hearts are abandoned to the sway of passion, then it is that we need a measure of time. the wise man's watch is his equable temper and his peaceful heart. he is always punctual, and he always knows the time.] just as i assumed that he cried, it was a commonplace emile that i chose to serve my purpose and make myself understood. the real emile, a child so different from the rest, would not serve as an illustration for anything. there is an order no less natural and even more accurate, by which the arts are valued according to bonds of necessity which connect them; the highest class consists of the most independent, the lowest of those most dependent on others. this classification, which suggests important considerations on the order of society in general, is like the preceding one in that it is subject to the same inversion in popular estimation, so that the use of raw material is the work of the lowest and worst paid trades, while the oftener the material changes hands, the more the work rises in price and in honour. i do not ask whether industry is really greater and more deserving of reward when engaged in the delicate arts which give the final shape to these materials, than in the labour which first gave them to man's use; but this i say, that in everything the art which is most generally useful and necessary, is undoubtedly that which most deserves esteem, and that art which requires the least help from others, is more worthy of honour than those which are dependent on other arts, since it is freer and more nearly independent. these are the true laws of value in the arts; all others are arbitrary and dependent on popular prejudice. agriculture is the earliest and most honourable of arts; metal work i put next, then carpentry, and so on. this is the order in which the child will put them, if he has not been spoilt by vulgar prejudices. what valuable considerations emile will derive from his robinson in such matters. what will he think when he sees the arts only brought to perfection by sub-division, by the infinite multiplication of tools. he will say, "all those people are as silly as they are ingenious; one would think they were afraid to use their eyes and their hands, they invent so many tools instead. to carry on one trade they become the slaves of many others; every single workman needs a whole town. my friend and i try to gain skill; we only make tools we can take about with us; these people, who are so proud of their talents in paris, would be no use at all on our island; they would have to become apprentices." reader, do not stay to watch the bodily exercises and manual skill of our pupil, but consider the bent we are giving to his childish curiosity; consider his common-sense, his inventive spirit, his foresight; consider what a head he will have on his shoulders. he will want to know all about everything he sees or does, to learn the why and the wherefore of it; from tool to tool he will go back to the first beginning, taking nothing for granted; he will decline to learn anything that requires previous knowledge which he has not acquired. if he sees a spring made he will want to know how they got the steel from the mine; if he sees the pieces of a chest put together, he will want to know how the tree was out down; when at work he will say of each tool, "if i had not got this, how could i make one like it, or how could i get along without it?" it is, however, difficult to avoid another error. when the master is very fond of certain occupations, he is apt to assume that the child shares his tastes; beware lest you are carried away by the interest of your work, while the child is bored by it, but is afraid to show it. the child must come first, and you must devote yourself entirely to him. watch him, study him constantly, without his knowing it; consider his feelings beforehand, and provide against those which are undesirable, keep him occupied in such a way that he not only feels the usefulness of the thing, but takes a pleasure in understanding the purpose which his work will serve. the solidarity of the arts consists in the exchange of industry, that of commerce in the exchange of commodities, that of banks in the exchange of money or securities. all these ideas hang together, and their foundation has already been laid in early childhood with the help of robert the gardener. all we have now to do is to substitute general ideas for particular, and to enlarge these ideas by means of numerous examples, so as to make the child understand the game of business itself, brought home to him by means of particular instances of natural history with regard to the special products of each country, by particular instances of the arts and sciences which concern navigation and the difficulties of transport, greater or less in proportion to the distance between places, the position of land, seas, rivers, etc. there can be no society without exchange, no exchange without a common standard of measurement, no common standard of measurement without equality. hence the first law of every society is some conventional equality either in men or things. conventional equality between men, a very different thing from natural equality, leads to the necessity for positive law, i.e., government and kings. a child's political knowledge should be clear and restricted; he should know nothing of government in general, beyond what concerns the rights of property, of which he has already some idea. conventional equality between things has led to the invention of money, for money is only one term in a comparison between the values of different sorts of things; and in this sense money is the real bond of society; but anything may be money; in former days it was cattle; shells are used among many tribes at the present day; sparta used iron; sweden, leather; while we use gold and silver. metals, being easier to carry, have generally been chosen as the middle term of every exchange, and these metals have been made into coin to save the trouble of continual weighing and measuring, for the stamp on the coin is merely evidence that the coin is of given weight; and the sole right of coining money is vested in the ruler because he alone has the right to demand the recognition of his authority by the whole nation. the stupidest person can perceive the use of money when it is explained in this way. it is difficult to make a direct comparison between various things, for instance, between cloth and corn; but when we find a common measure, in money, it is easy for the manufacturer and the farmer to estimate the value of the goods they wish to exchange in terms of this common measure. if a given quantity of cloth is worth a given some of money, and a given quantity of corn is worth the same sum of money, then the seller, receiving the corn in exchange for his cloth, makes a fair bargain. thus by means of money it becomes possible to compare the values of goods of various kinds. be content with this, and do not touch upon the moral effects of this institution. in everything you must show clearly the use before the abuse. if you attempt to teach children how the sign has led to the neglect of the thing signified, how money is the source of all the false ideas of society, how countries rich in silver must be poor in everything else, you will be treating these children as philosophers, and not only as philosophers but as wise men, for you are professing to teach them what very few philosophers have grasped. what a wealth of interesting objects, towards which the curiosity of our pupil may be directed without ever quitting the real and material relations he can understand, and without permitting the formation of a single idea beyond his grasp! the teacher's art consists in this: to turn the child's attention from trivial details and to guide his thoughts continually towards relations of importance which he will one day need to know, that he may judge rightly of good and evil in human society. the teacher must be able to adapt the conversation with which he amuses his pupil to the turn already given to his mind. a problem which another child would never heed will torment emile half a year. we are going to dine with wealthy people; when we get there everything is ready for a feast, many guests, many servants, many dishes, dainty and elegant china. there is something intoxicating in all these preparations for pleasure and festivity when you are not used to them. i see how they will affect my young pupil. while dinner is going on, while course follows course, and conversation is loud around us, i whisper in his ear, "how many hands do you suppose the things on this table passed through before they got here?" what a crowd of ideas is called up by these few words. in a moment the mists of excitement have rolled away. he is thinking, considering, calculating, and anxious. the child is philosophising, while philosophers, excited by wine or perhaps by female society, are babbling like children. if he asks questions i decline to answer and put him off to another day. he becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and drink, he longs to get away from table and talk as he pleases. what an object of curiosity, what a text for instruction. nothing has so far succeeded in corrupting his healthy reason; what will he think of luxury when he finds that every quarter of the globe has been ransacked, that some , , men have laboured for years, that many lives have perhaps been sacrificed, and all to furnish him with fine clothes to be worn at midday and laid by in the wardrobe at night. be sure you observe what private conclusions he draws from all his observations. if you have watched him less carefully than i suppose, his thoughts may be tempted in another direction; he may consider himself a person of great importance in the world, when he sees so much labour concentrated on the preparation of his dinner. if you suspect his thoughts will take this direction you can easily prevent it, or at any rate promptly efface the false impression. as yet he can only appropriate things by personal enjoyment, he can only judge of their fitness or unfitness by their outward effects. compare a plain rustic meal, preceded by exercise, seasoned by hunger, freedom, and delight, with this magnificent but tedious repast. this will suffice to make him realise that he has got no real advantage from the splendour of the feast, that his stomach was as well satisfied when he left the table of the peasant, as when he left the table of the banker; from neither had he gained anything he could really call his own. just fancy what a tutor might say to him on such an occasion. consider the two dinners and decide for yourself which gave you most pleasure, which seemed the merriest, at which did you eat and drink most heartily, which was the least tedious and required least change of courses? yet note the difference--this black bread you so enjoy is made from the peasant's own harvest; his wine is dark in colour and of a common kind, but wholesome and refreshing; it was made in his own vineyard; the cloth is made of his own hemp, spun and woven in the winter by his wife and daughters and the maid; no hands but theirs have touched the food. his world is bounded by the nearest mill and the next market. how far did you enjoy all that the produce of distant lands and the service of many people had prepared for you at the other dinner? if you did not get a better meal, what good did this wealth do you? how much of it was made for you? had you been the master of the house, the tutor might say, it would have been of still less use to you; for the anxiety of displaying your enjoyment before the eyes of others would have robbed you of it; the pains would be yours, the pleasure theirs. this may be a very fine speech, but it would be thrown away upon emile, as he cannot understand it, and he does not accept second-hand opinions. speak more simply to him. after these two experiences, say to him some day, "where shall we have our dinner to-day? where that mountain of silver covered three quarters of the table and those beds of artificial flowers on looking glass were served with the dessert, where those smart ladies treated you as a toy and pretended you said what you did not mean; or in that village two leagues away, with those good people who were so pleased to see us and gave us such delicious cream?" emile will not hesitate; he is not vain and he is no chatterbox; he cannot endure constraint, and he does not care for fine dishes; but he is always ready for a run in the country and is very fond of good fruit and vegetables, sweet cream and kindly people. [footnote: this taste, which i assume my pupil to have acquired, is a natural result of his education. moreover, he has nothing foppish or affected about him, so that the ladies take little notice of him and he is less petted than other children; therefore he does not care for them, and is less spoilt by their company; he is not yet of an age to feel its charm. i have taken care not to teach him to kiss their hands, to pay them compliments, or even to be more polite to them than to men. it is my constant rule to ask nothing from him but what he can understand, and there is no good reason why a child should treat one sex differently from the other.] on our way, the thought will occur to him, "all those people who laboured to prepare that grand feast were either wasting their time or they have no idea how to enjoy themselves." my example may be right for one child and wrong for the rest. if you enter into their way of looking at things you will know how to vary your instances as required; the choice depends on the study of the individual temperament, and this study in turn depends on the opportunities which occur to show this temperament. you will not suppose that, in the three or four years at our disposal, even the most gifted child can get an idea of all the arts and sciences, sufficient to enable him to study them for himself when he is older; but by bringing before him what he needs to know, we enable him to develop his own tastes, his own talents, to take the first step towards the object which appeals to his individuality and to show us the road we must open up to aid the work of nature. there is another advantage of these trains of limited but exact bits of knowledge; he learns by their connection and interdependence how to rank them in his own estimation and to be on his guard against those prejudices, common to most men, which draw them towards the gifts they themselves cultivate and away from those they have neglected. the man who clearly sees the whole, sees where each part should be; the man who sees one part clearly and knows it thoroughly may be a learned man, but the former is a wise man, and you remember it is wisdom rather than knowledge that we hope to acquire. however that may be, my method does not depend on my examples; it depends on the amount of a man's powers at different ages, and the choice of occupations adapted to those powers. i think it would be easy to find a method which appeared to give better results, but if it were less suited to the type, sex, and age of the scholar, i doubt whether the results would really be as good. at the beginning of this second period we took advantage of the fact that our strength was more than enough for our needs, to enable us to get outside ourselves. we have ranged the heavens and measured the earth; we have sought out the laws of nature; we have explored the whole of our island. now let us return to ourselves, let us unconsciously approach our own dwelling. we are happy indeed if we do not find it already occupied by the dreaded foe, who is preparing to seize it. what remains to be done when we have observed all that lies around us? we must turn to our own use all that we can get, we must increase our comfort by means of our curiosity. hitherto we have provided ourselves with tools of all kinds, not knowing which we require. perhaps those we do not want will be useful to others, and perhaps we may need theirs. thus we discover the use of exchange; but for this we must know each other's needs, what tools other people use, what they can offer in exchange. given ten men, each of them has ten different requirements. to get what he needs for himself each must work at ten different trades; but considering our different talents, one will do better at this trade, another at that. each of them, fitted for one thing, will work at all, and will be badly served. let us form these ten men into a society, and let each devote himself to the trade for which he is best adapted, and let him work at it for himself and for the rest. each will reap the advantage of the others' talents, just as if they were his own; by practice each will perfect his own talent, and thus all the ten, well provided for, will still have something to spare for others. this is the plain foundation of all our institutions. it is not my aim to examine its results here; i have done so in another book (discours sur l'inegalite). according to this principle, any one who wanted to consider himself as an isolated individual, self-sufficing and independent of others, could only be utterly wretched. he could not even continue to exist, for finding the whole earth appropriated by others while he had only himself, how could he get the means of subsistence? when we leave the state of nature we compel others to do the same; no one can remain in a state of nature in spite of his fellow-creatures, and to try to remain in it when it is no longer practicable, would really be to leave it, for self-preservation is nature's first law. thus the idea of social relations is gradually developed in the child's mind, before he can really be an active member of human society. emile sees that to get tools for his own use, other people must have theirs, and that he can get in exchange what he needs and they possess. i easily bring him to feel the need of such exchange and to take advantage of it. "sir, i must live," said a miserable writer of lampoons to the minister who reproved him for his infamous trade. "i do not see the necessity," replied the great man coldly. this answer, excellent from the minister, would have been barbarous and untrue in any other mouth. every man must live; this argument, which appeals to every one with more or less force in proportion to his humanity, strikes me as unanswerable when applied to oneself. since our dislike of death is the strongest of those aversions nature has implanted in us, it follows that everything is permissible to the man who has no other means of living. the principles, which teach the good man to count his life a little thing and to sacrifice it at duty's call, are far removed from this primitive simplicity. happy are those nations where one can be good without effort, and just without conscious virtue. if in this world there is any condition so miserable that one cannot live without wrong-doing, where the citizen is driven into evil, you should hang, not the criminal, but those who drove him into crime. as soon as emile knows what life is, my first care will be to teach him to preserve his life. hitherto i have made no distinction of condition, rank, station, or fortune; nor shall i distinguish between them in the future, since man is the same in every station; the rich man's stomach is no bigger than the poor man's, nor is his digestion any better; the master's arm is neither longer nor stronger than the slave's; a great man is no taller than one of the people, and indeed the natural needs are the same to all, and the means of satisfying them should be equally within the reach of all. fit a man's education to his real self, not to what is no part of him. do you not see that in striving to fit him merely for one station, you are unfitting him for anything else, so that some caprice of fortune may make your work really harmful to him? what could be more absurd than a nobleman in rags, who carries with him into his poverty the prejudices of his birth? what is more despicable than a rich man fallen into poverty, who recalls the scorn with which he himself regarded the poor, and feels that he has sunk to the lowest depth of degradation? the one may become a professional thief, the other a cringing servant, with this fine saying, "i must live." you reckon on the present order of society, without considering that this order is itself subject to inscrutable changes, and that you can neither foresee nor provide against the revolution which may affect your children. the great become small, the rich poor, the king a commoner. does fate strike so seldom that you can count on immunity from her blows? the crisis is approaching, and we are on the edge of a revolution. [footnote: in my opinion it is impossible that the great kingdoms of europe should last much longer. each of them has had its period of splendour, after which it must inevitably decline. i have my own opinions as to the special applications of this general statement, but this is not the place to enter into details, and they are only too evident to everybody.] who can answer for your fate? what man has made, man may destroy. nature's characters alone are ineffaceable, and nature makes neither the prince, the rich man, nor the nobleman. this satrap whom you have educated for greatness, what will become of him in his degradation? this farmer of the taxes who can only live on gold, what will he do in poverty? this haughty fool who cannot use his own hands, who prides himself on what is not really his, what will he do when he is stripped of all? in that day, happy will he be who can give up the rank which is no longer his, and be still a man in fate's despite. let men praise as they will that conquered monarch who like a madman would be buried beneath the fragments of his throne; i behold him with scorn; to me he is merely a crown, and when that is gone he is nothing. but he who loses his crown and lives without it, is more than a king; from the rank of a king, which may be held by a coward, a villain, or madman, he rises to the rank of a man, a position few can fill. thus he triumphs over fortune, he dares to look her in the face; he depends on himself alone, and when he has nothing left to show but himself he is not a nonentity, he is somebody. better a thousandfold the king of corinth a schoolmaster at syracuse, than a wretched tarquin, unable to be anything but a king, or the heir of the ruler of three kingdoms, the sport of all who would scorn his poverty, wandering from court to court in search of help, and finding nothing but insults, for want of knowing any trade but one which he can no longer practise. the man and the citizen, whoever he may be, has no property to invest in society but himself, all his other goods belong to society in spite of himself, and when a man is rich, either he does not enjoy his wealth, or the public enjoys it too; in the first case he robs others as well as himself; in the second he gives them nothing. thus his debt to society is still unpaid, while he only pays with his property. "but my father was serving society while he was acquiring his wealth." just so; he paid his own debt, not yours. you owe more to others than if you had been born with nothing, since you were born under favourable conditions. it is not fair that what one man has done for society should pay another's debt, for since every man owes all that he is, he can only pay his own debt, and no father can transmit to his son any right to be of no use to mankind. "but," you say, "this is just what he does when he leaves me his wealth, the reward of his labour." the man who eats in idleness what he has not himself earned, is a thief, and in my eyes, the man who lives on an income paid him by the state for doing nothing, differs little from a highwayman who lives on those who travel his way. outside the pale of society, the solitary, owing nothing to any man, may live as he pleases, but in society either he lives at the cost of others, or he owes them in labour the cost of his keep; there is no exception to this rule. man in society is bound to work; rich or poor, weak or strong, every idler is a thief. now of all the pursuits by which a man may earn his living, the nearest to a state of nature is manual labour; of all stations that of the artisan is least dependent on fortune. the artisan depends on his labour alone, he is a free man while the ploughman is a slave; for the latter depends on his field where the crops may be destroyed by others. an enemy, a prince, a powerful neighbour, or a law-suit may deprive him of his field; through this field he may be harassed in all sorts of ways. but if the artisan is ill-treated his goods are soon packed and he takes himself off. yet agriculture is the earliest, the most honest of trades, and more useful than all the rest, and therefore more honourable for those who practise it. i do not say to emile, "study agriculture," he is already familiar with it. he is acquainted with every kind of rural labour, it was his first occupation, and he returns to it continually. so i say to him, "cultivate your father's lands, but if you lose this inheritance, or if you have none to lose, what will you do? learn a trade." "a trade for my son! my son a working man! what are you thinking of, sir?" madam, my thoughts are wiser than yours; you want to make him fit for nothing but a lord, a marquis, or a prince; and some day he may be less than nothing. i want to give him a rank which he cannot lose, a rank which will always do him honour; i want to raise him to the status of a man, and, whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals in that rank than in your own. the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life. learning a trade matters less than overcoming the prejudices he despises. you will never be reduced to earning your livelihood; so much the worse for you. no matter; work for honour, not for need: stoop to the position of a working man, to rise above your own. to conquer fortune and everything else, begin by independence. to rule through public opinion, begin by ruling over it. remember i demand no talent, only a trade, a genuine trade, a mere mechanical art, in which the hands work harder than the head, a trade which does not lead to fortune but makes you independent of her. in households far removed from all danger of want i have known fathers carry prudence to such a point as to provide their children not only with ordinary teaching but with knowledge by means of which they could get a living if anything happened. these far-sighted parents thought they were doing a great thing. it is nothing, for the resources they fancy they have secured depend on that very fortune of which they would make their children independent; so that unless they found themselves in circumstances fitted for the display of their talents, they would die of hunger as if they had none. as soon as it is a question of influence and intrigue you may as well use these means to keep yourself in plenty, as to acquire, in the depths of poverty, the means of returning to your former position. if you cultivate the arts which depend on the artist's reputation, if you fit yourself for posts which are only obtained by favour, how will that help you when, rightly disgusted with the world, you scorn the steps by which you must climb. you have studied politics and state-craft, so far so good; but how will you use this knowledge, if you cannot gain the ear of the ministers, the favourites, or the officials? if you have not the secret of winning their favour, if they fail to find you a rogue to their taste? you are an architect or a painter; well and good; but your talents must be displayed. do you suppose you can exhibit in the salon without further ado? that is not the way to set about it. lay aside the rule and the pencil, take a cab and drive from door to door; there is the road to fame. now you must know that the doors of the great are guarded by porters and flunkeys, who only understand one language, and their ears are in their palms. if you wish to teach what you have learned, geography, mathematics, languages, music, drawing, even to find pupils, you must have friends who will sing your praises. learning, remember, gains more credit than skill, and with no trade but your own none will believe in your skill. see how little you can depend on these fine "resources," and how many other resources are required before you can use what you have got. and what will become of you in your degradation? misfortune will make you worse rather than better. more than ever the sport of public opinion, how will you rise above the prejudices on which your fate depends? how will you despise the vices and the baseness from which you get your living? you were dependent on wealth, now you are dependent on the wealthy; you are still a slave and a poor man into the bargain. poverty without freedom, can a man sink lower than this! but if instead of this recondite learning adapted to feed the mind, not the body, you have recourse, at need, to your hands and your handiwork, there is no call for deceit, your trade is ready when required. honour and honesty will not stand in the way of your living. you need no longer cringe and lie to the great, nor creep and crawl before rogues, a despicable flatterer of both, a borrower or a thief, for there is little to choose between them when you are penniless. other people's opinions are no concern of yours, you need not pay court to any one, there is no fool to flatter, no flunkey to bribe, no woman to win over. let rogues conduct the affairs of state; in your lowly rank you can still be an honest man and yet get a living. you walk into the first workshop of your trade. "master, i want work." "comrade, take your place and work." before dinner-time you have earned your dinner. if you are sober and industrious, before the week is out you will have earned your keep for another week; you will have lived in freedom, health, truth, industry, and righteousness. time is not wasted when it brings these returns. emile shall learn a trade. "an honest trade, at least," you say. what do you mean by honest? is not every useful trade honest? i would not make an embroiderer, a gilder, a polisher of him, like locke's young gentleman. neither would i make him a musician, an actor, or an author.[footnote: you are an author yourself, you will reply. yes, for my sins; and my ill deeds, which i think i have fully expiated, are no reason why others should be like me. i do not write to excuse my faults, but to prevent my readers from copying them.] with the exception of these and others like them, let him choose his own trade, i do not mean to interfere with his choice. i would rather have him a shoemaker than a poet, i would rather he paved streets than painted flowers on china. "but," you will say, "policemen, spies, and hangmen are useful people." there would be no use for them if it were not for the government. but let that pass. i was wrong. it is not enough to choose an honest trade, it must be a trade which does not develop detestable qualities in the mind, qualities incompatible with humanity. to return to our original expression, "let us choose an honest trade," but let us remember there can be no honesty without usefulness. a famous writer of this century, whose books are full of great schemes and narrow views, was under a vow, like the other priests of his communion, not to take a wife. finding himself more scrupulous than others with regard to his neighbour's wife, he decided, so they say, to employ pretty servants, and so did his best to repair the wrong done to the race by his rash promise. he thought it the duty of a citizen to breed children for the state, and he made his children artisans. as soon as they were old enough they were taught whatever trade they chose; only idle or useless trades were excluded, such as that of the wigmaker who is never necessary, and may any day cease to be required, so long as nature does not get tired of providing us with hair. this spirit shall guide our choice of trade for emile, or rather, not our choice but his; for the maxims he has imbibed make him despise useless things, and he will never be content to waste his time on vain labours; his trade must be of use to robinson on his island. when we review with the child the productions of art and nature, when we stimulate his curiosity and follow its lead, we have great opportunities of studying his tastes and inclinations, and perceiving the first spark of genius, if he has any decided talent in any direction. you must, however, be on your guard against the common error which mistakes the effects of environment for the ardour of genius, or imagines there is a decided bent towards any one of the arts, when there is nothing more than that spirit of emulation, common to men and monkeys, which impels them instinctively to do what they see others doing, without knowing why. the world is full of artisans, and still fuller of artists, who have no native gift for their calling, into which they were driven in early childhood, either through the conventional ideas of other people, or because those about them were deceived by an appearance of zeal, which would have led them to take to any other art they saw practised. one hears a drum and fancies he is a general; another sees a building and wants to be an architect. every one is drawn towards the trade he sees before him if he thinks it is held in honour. i once knew a footman who watched his master drawing and painting and took it into his head to become a designer and artist. he seized a pencil which he only abandoned for a paint-brush, to which he stuck for the rest of his days. without teaching or rules of art he began to draw everything he saw. three whole years were devoted to these daubs, from which nothing but his duties could stir him, nor was he discouraged by the small progress resulting from his very mediocre talents. i have seen him spend the whole of a broiling summer in a little ante-room towards the south, a room where one was suffocated merely passing through it; there he was, seated or rather nailed all day to his chair, before a globe, drawing it again and again and yet again, with invincible obstinacy till he had reproduced the rounded surface to his own satisfaction. at last with his master's help and under the guidance of an artist he got so far as to abandon his livery and live by his brush. perseverance does instead of talent up to a certain point; he got so far, but no further. this honest lad's perseverance and ambition are praiseworthy; he will always be respected for his industry and steadfastness of purpose, but his paintings will always be third-rate. who would not have been deceived by his zeal and taken it for real talent! there is all the difference in the world between a liking and an aptitude. to make sure of real genius or real taste in a child calls for more accurate observations than is generally suspected, for the child displays his wishes not his capacity, and we judge by the former instead of considering the latter. i wish some trustworthy person would give us a treatise on the art of child-study. this art is well worth studying, but neither parents nor teachers have mastered its elements. perhaps we are laying too much stress on the choice of a trade; as it is a manual occupation, emile's choice is no great matter, and his apprenticeship is more than half accomplished already, through the exercises which have hitherto occupied him. what would you have him do? he is ready for anything. he can handle the spade and hoe, he can use the lathe, hammer, plane, or file; he is already familiar with these tools which are common to many trades. he only needs to acquire sufficient skill in the use of any one of them to rival the speed, the familiarity, and the diligence of good workmen, and he will have a great advantage over them in suppleness of body and limb, so that he can easily take any position and can continue any kind of movements without effort. moreover his senses are acute and well-practised, he knows the principles of the various trades; to work like a master of his craft he only needs experience, and experience comes with practice. to which of these trades which are open to us will he give sufficient time to make himself master of it? that is the whole question. give a man a trade befitting his sex, to a young man a trade befitting his age. sedentary indoor employments, which make the body tender and effeminate, are neither pleasing nor suitable. no lad ever wanted to be a tailor. it takes some art to attract a man to this woman's work.[footnote: there were no tailors among the ancients; men's clothes were made at home by the women.] the same hand cannot hold the needle and the sword. if i were king i would only allow needlework and dressmaking to be done by women and cripples who are obliged to work at such trades. if eunuchs were required i think the easterns were very foolish to make them on purpose. why not take those provided by nature, that crowd of base persons without natural feeling? there would be enough and to spare. the weak, feeble, timid man is condemned by nature to a sedentary life, he is fit to live among women or in their fashion. let him adopt one of their trades if he likes; and if there must be eunuchs let them take those men who dishonour their sex by adopting trades unworthy of it. their choice proclaims a blunder on the part of nature; correct it one way or other, you will do no harm. an unhealthy trade i forbid to my pupil, but not a difficult or dangerous one. he will exercise himself in strength and courage; such trades are for men not women, who claim no share in them. are not men ashamed to poach upon the women's trades? "luctantur paucae, comedunt coliphia paucae. vos lanam trahitis, calathisque peracta refertis vellera."--juven. sat. ii. v. . women are not seen in shops in italy, and to persons accustomed to the streets of england and france nothing could look gloomier. when i saw drapers selling ladies ribbons, pompons, net, and chenille, i thought these delicate ornaments very absurd in the coarse hands fit to blow the bellows and strike the anvil. i said to myself, "in this country women should set up as steel-polishers and armourers." let each make and sell the weapons of his or her own sex; knowledge is acquired through use. i know i have said too much for my agreeable contemporaries, but i sometimes let myself be carried away by my argument. if any one is ashamed to be seen wearing a leathern apron or handling a plane, i think him a mere slave of public opinion, ready to blush for what is right when people poke fun at it. but let us yield to parents' prejudices so long as they do not hurt the children. to honour trades we are not obliged to practise every one of them, so long as we do not think them beneath us. when the choice is ours and we are under no compulsion, why not choose the pleasanter, more attractive and more suitable trade. metal work is useful, more useful, perhaps, than the rest, but unless for some special reason emile shall not be a blacksmith, a locksmith nor an iron-worker. i do not want to see him a cyclops at the forge. neither would i have him a mason, still less a shoemaker. all trades must be carried on, but when the choice is ours, cleanliness should be taken into account; this is not a matter of class prejudice, our senses are our guides. in conclusion, i do not like those stupid trades in which the workmen mechanically perform the same action without pause and almost without mental effort. weaving, stocking-knitting, stone-cutting; why employ intelligent men on such work? it is merely one machine employed on another. all things considered, the trade i should choose for my pupil, among the trades he likes, is that of a carpenter. it is clean and useful; it may be carried on at home; it gives enough exercise; it calls for skill and industry, and while fashioning articles for everyday use, there is scope for elegance and taste. if your pupil's talents happened to take a scientific turn, i should not blame you if you gave him a trade in accordance with his tastes, for instance, he might learn to make mathematical instruments, glasses, telescopes, etc. when emile learns his trade i shall learn it too. i am convinced he will never learn anything thoroughly unless we learn it together. so we shall both serve our apprenticeship, and we do not mean to be treated as gentlemen, but as real apprentices who are not there for fun; why should not we actually be apprenticed? peter the great was a ship's carpenter and drummer to his own troops; was not that prince at least your equal in birth and merit? you understand this is addressed not to emile but to you--to you, whoever you may be. unluckily we cannot spend the whole of our time at the workshop. we are not only 'prentice-carpenters but 'prentice-men--a trade whose apprenticeship is longer and more exacting than the rest. what shall we do? shall we take a master to teach us the use of the plane and engage him by the hour like the dancing-master? in that case we should be not apprentices but students, and our ambition is not merely to learn carpentry but to be carpenters. once or twice a week i think we should spend the whole day at our master's; we should get up when he does, we should be at our work before him, we should take our meals with him, work under his orders, and after having had the honour of supping at his table we may if we please return to sleep upon our own hard beds. this is the way to learn several trades at once, to learn to do manual work without neglecting our apprenticeship to life. let us do what is right without ostentation; let us not fall into vanity through our efforts to resist it. to pride ourselves on our victory over prejudice is to succumb to prejudice. it is said that in accordance with an old custom of the ottomans, the sultan is obliged to work with his hands, and, as every one knows, the handiwork of a king is a masterpiece. so he royally distributes his masterpieces among the great lords of the porte and the price paid is in accordance with the rank of the workman. it is not this so-called abuse to which i object; on the contrary, it is an advantage, and by compelling the lords to share with him the spoils of the people it is so much the less necessary for the prince to plunder the people himself. despotism needs some such relaxation, and without it that hateful rule could not last. the real evil in such a custom is the idea it gives that poor man of his own worth. like king midas he sees all things turn to gold at his touch, but he does not see the ass' ears growing. let us keep emile's hands from money lest he should become an ass, let him take the work but not the wages. never let his work be judged by any standard but that of the work of a master. let it be judged as work, not because it is his. if anything is well done, i say, "that is a good piece of work," but do not ask who did it. if he is pleased and proud and says, "i did it," answer indifferently, "no matter who did it, it is well done." good mother, be on your guard against the deceptions prepared for you. if your son knows many things, distrust his knowledge; if he is unlucky enough to be rich and educated in paris he is ruined. as long as there are clever artists he will have every talent, but apart from his masters he will have none. in paris a rich man knows everything, it is the poor who are ignorant. our capital is full of amateurs, especially women, who do their work as m. gillaume invents his colours. among the men i know three striking exceptions, among the women i know no exceptions, and i doubt if there are any. in a general way a man becomes an artist and a judge of art as he becomes a doctor of laws and a magistrate. if then it is once admitted that it is a fine thing to have a trade, your children would soon have one without learning it. they would become postmasters like the councillors of zurich. let us have no such ceremonies for emile; let it be the real thing not the sham. do not say what he knows, let him learn in silence. let him make his masterpiece, but not be hailed as master; let him be a workman not in name but in deed. if i have made my meaning clear you ought to realise how bodily exercise and manual work unconsciously arouse thought and reflexion in my pupil, and counteract the idleness which might result from his indifference to men's judgments, and his freedom from passion. he must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher, if he is not to be as idle as a savage. the great secret of education is to use exercise of mind and body as relaxation one to the other. but beware of anticipating teaching which demands more maturity of mind. emile will not long be a workman before he discovers those social inequalities he had not previously observed. he will want to question me in turn on the maxims i have given him, maxims he is able to understand. when he derives everything from me, when he is so nearly in the position of the poor, he will want to know why i am so far removed from it. all of a sudden he may put scathing questions to me. "you are rich, you tell me, and i see you are. a rich man owes his work to the community like the rest because he is a man. what are you doing for the community?" what would a fine tutor say to that? i do not know. he would perhaps be foolish enough to talk to the child of the care he bestows upon him. the workshop will get me out of the difficulty. "my dear emile that is a very good question; i will undertake to answer for myself, when you can answer for yourself to your own satisfaction. meanwhile i will take care to give what i can spare to you and to the poor, and to make a table or a bench every week, so as not to be quite useless." we have come back to ourselves. having entered into possession of himself, our child is now ready to cease to be a child. he is more than ever conscious of the necessity which makes him dependent on things. after exercising his body and his senses you have exercised his mind and his judgment. finally we have joined together the use of his limbs and his faculties. we have made him a worker and a thinker; we have now to make him loving and tender-hearted, to perfect reason through feeling. but before we enter on this new order of things, let us cast an eye over the stage we are leaving behind us, and perceive as clearly as we can how far we have got. at first our pupil had merely sensations, now he has ideas; he could only feel, now he reasons. for from the comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations and the judgment arrived at with regard to them, there springs a sort of mixed or complex sensation which i call an idea. the way in which ideas are formed gives a character to the human mind. the mind which derives its ideas from real relations is thorough; the mind which relies on apparent relations is superficial. he who sees relations as they are has an exact mind; he who fails to estimate them aright has an inaccurate mind; he who concocts imaginary relations, which have no real existence, is a madman; he who does not perceive any relation at all is an imbecile. clever men are distinguished from others by their greater or less aptitude for the comparison of ideas and the discovery of relations between them. simple ideas consist merely of sensations compared one with another. simple sensations involve judgments, as do the complex sensations which i call simple ideas. in the sensation the judgment is purely passive; it affirms that i feel what i feel. in the percept or idea the judgment is active; it connects, compares, it discriminates between relations not perceived by the senses. that is the whole difference; but it is a great difference. nature never deceives us; we deceive ourselves. i see some one giving an ice-cream to an eight-year-old child; he does not know what it is and puts the spoon in his mouth. struck by the cold he cries out, "oh, it burns!" he feels a very keen sensation, and the heat of the fire is the keenest sensation he knows, so he thinks that is what he feels. yet he is mistaken; cold hurts, but it does not burn; and these two sensations are different, for persons with more experience do not confuse them. so it is not the sensation that is wrong, but the judgment formed with regard to it. it is just the same with those who see a mirror or some optical instrument for the first time, or enter a deep cellar in the depths of winter or at midsummer, or dip a very hot or cold hand into tepid water, or roll a little ball between two crossed fingers. if they are content to say what they really feel, their judgment, being purely passive, cannot go wrong; but when they judge according to appearances, their judgment is active; it compares and establishes by induction relations which are not really perceived. then these inductions may or may not be mistaken. experience is required to correct or prevent error. show your pupil the clouds at night passing between himself and the moon; he will think the moon is moving in the opposite direction and that the clouds are stationary. he will think this through a hasty induction, because he generally sees small objects moving and larger ones at rest, and the clouds seems larger than the moon, whose distance is beyond his reckoning. when he watches the shore from a moving boat he falls into the opposite mistake and thinks the earth is moving because he does not feel the motion of the boat and considers it along with the sea or river as one motionless whole, of which the shore, which appears to move, forms no part. the first time a child sees a stick half immersed in water he thinks he sees a broken stick; the sensation is true and would not cease to be true even if he knew the reason of this appearance. so if you ask him what he sees, he replies, "a broken stick," for he is quite sure he is experiencing this sensation. but when deceived by his judgment he goes further and, after saying he sees a broken stick, he affirms that it really is broken he says what is not true. why? because he becomes active and judges no longer by observation but by induction, he affirms what he does not perceive, i.e., that the judgment he receives through one of his senses would be confirmed by another. since all our errors arise in our judgment, it is clear, that had we no need for judgment, we should not need to learn; we should never be liable to mistakes, we should be happier in our ignorance than we can be in our knowledge. who can deny that a vast number of things are known to the learned, which the unlearned will never know? are the learned any nearer truth? not so, the further they go the further they get from truth, for their pride in their judgment increases faster than their progress in knowledge, so that for every truth they acquire they draw a hundred mistaken conclusions. every one knows that the learned societies of europe are mere schools of falsehood, and there are assuredly more mistaken notions in the academy of sciences than in a whole tribe of american indians. the more we know, the more mistakes we make; therefore ignorance is the only way to escape error. form no judgments and you will never be mistaken. this is the teaching both of nature and reason. we come into direct contact with very few things, and these are very readily perceived; the rest we regard with profound indifference. a savage will not turn his head to watch the working of the finest machinery or all the wonders of electricity. "what does that matter to me?" is the common saying of the ignorant; it is the fittest phrase for the wise. unluckily this phrase will no longer serve our turn. everything matters to us, as we are dependent on everything, and our curiosity naturally increases with our needs. this is why i attribute much curiosity to the man of science and none to the savage. the latter needs no help from anybody; the former requires every one, and admirers most of all. you will tell me i am going beyond nature. i think not. she chooses her instruments and orders them, not according to fancy, but necessity. now a man's needs vary with his circumstances. there is all the difference in the world between a natural man living in a state of nature, and a natural man living in society. emile is no savage to be banished to the desert, he is a savage who has to live in the town. he must know how to get his living in a town, how to use its inhabitants, and how to live among them, if not of them. in the midst of so many new relations and dependent on them, he must reason whether he wants to or no. let us therefore teach him to reason correctly. the best way of learning to reason aright is that which tends to simplify our experiences, or to enable us to dispense with them altogether without falling into error. hence it follows that we must learn to confirm the experiences of each sense by itself, without recourse to any other, though we have been in the habit of verifying the experience of one sense by that of another. then each of our sensations will become an idea, and this idea will always correspond to the truth. this is the sort of knowledge i have tried to accumulate during this third phase of man's life. this method of procedure demands a patience and circumspection which few teachers possess; without them the scholar will never learn to reason. for example, if you hasten to take the stick out of the water when the child is deceived by its appearance, you may perhaps undeceive him, but what have you taught him? nothing more than he would soon have learnt for himself. that is not the right thing to do. you have not got to teach him truths so much as to show him how to set about discovering them for himself. to teach him better you must not be in such a hurry to correct his mistakes. let us take emile and myself as an illustration. to begin with, any child educated in the usual way could not fail to answer the second of my imaginary questions in the affirmative. he will say, "that is certainly a broken stick." i very much doubt whether emile will give the same reply. he sees no reason for knowing everything or pretending to know it; he is never in a hurry to draw conclusions. he only reasons from evidence and on this occasion he has not got the evidence. he knows how appearances deceive us, if only through perspective. moreover, he knows by experience that there is always a reason for my slightest questions, though he may not see it at once; so he has not got into the habit of giving silly answers; on the contrary, he is on his guard, he considers things carefully and attentively before answering. he never gives me an answer unless he is satisfied with it himself, and he is hard to please. lastly we neither of us take any pride in merely knowing a thing, but only in avoiding mistakes. we should be more ashamed to deceive ourselves with bad reasoning, than to find no explanation at all. there is no phrase so appropriate to us, or so often on our lips, as, "i do not know;" neither of us are ashamed to use it. but whether he gives the silly answer or whether he avoids it by our convenient phrase "i do not know," my answer is the same. "let us examine it." this stick immersed half way in the water is fixed in an upright position. to know if it is broken, how many things must be done before we take it out of the water or even touch it. . first we walk round it, and we see that the broken part follows us. so it is only our eye that changes it; looks do not make things move. . we look straight down on that end of the stick which is above the water, the stick is no longer bent, [footnote: i have since found by more exact experiment that this is not the case. refraction acts in a circle, and the stick appears larger at the end which is in the water, but this makes no difference to the strength of the argument, and the conclusion is correct.] the end near our eye exactly hides the other end. has our eye set the stick straight? . we stir the surface of the water; we see the stick break into several pieces, it moves in zigzags and follows the ripples of the water. can the motion we gave the water suffice to break, soften, or melt the stick like this? . we draw the water off, and little by little we see the stick straightening itself as the water sinks. is not this more than enough to clear up the business and to discover refraction? so it is not true that our eyes deceive us, for nothing more has been required to correct the mistakes attributed to it. suppose the child were stupid enough not to perceive the result of these experiments, then you must call touch to the help of sight. instead of taking the stick out of the water, leave it where it is and let the child pass his hand along it from end to end; he will feel no angle, therefore the stick is not broken. you will tell me this is not mere judgment but formal reasoning. just so; but do not you see that as soon as the mind has got any ideas at all, every judgment is a process of reasoning? so that as soon as we compare one sensation with another, we are beginning to reason. the art of judging and the art of reasoning are one and the same. emile will never learn dioptrics unless he learns with this stick. he will not have dissected insects nor counted the spots on the sun; he will not know what you mean by a microscope or a telescope. your learned pupils will laugh at his ignorance and rightly, i intend him to invent these instruments before he uses them, and you will expect that to take some time. this is the spirit of my whole method at this stage. if the child rolls a little ball between two crossed fingers and thinks he feels two balls, i shall not let him look until he is convinced there is only one. this explanation will suffice, i hope, to show plainly the progress made by my pupil hitherto and the route followed by him. but perhaps the number of things i have brought to his notice alarms you. i shall crush his mind beneath this weight of knowledge. not so, i am rather teaching him to be ignorant of things than to know them. i am showing him the path of science, easy indeed, but long, far-reaching and slow to follow. i am taking him a few steps along this path, but i do not allow him to go far. compelled to learn for himself, he uses his own reason not that of others, for there must be no submission to authority if you would have no submission to convention. most of our errors are due to others more than ourselves. this continual exercise should develop a vigour of mind like that acquired by the body through labour and weariness. another advantage is that his progress is in proportion to his strength, neither mind nor body carries more than it can bear. when the understanding lays hold of things before they are stored in the memory, what is drawn from that store is his own; while we are in danger of never finding anything of our own in a memory over-burdened with undigested knowledge. emile knows little, but what he knows is really his own; he has no half-knowledge. among the few things he knows and knows thoroughly this is the most valuable, that there are many things he does not know now but may know some day, many more that other men know but he will never know, and an infinite number which nobody will ever know. he is large-minded, not through knowledge, but through the power of acquiring it; he is open-minded, intelligent, ready for anything, and, as montaigne says, capable of learning if not learned. i am content if he knows the "wherefore" of his actions and the "why" of his beliefs. for once more my object is not to supply him with exact knowledge, but the means of getting it when required, to teach him to value it at its true worth, and to love truth above all things. by this method progress is slow but sure, and we never need to retrace our steps. emile's knowledge is confined to nature and things. the very name of history is unknown to him, along with metaphysics and morals. he knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. he has little power of generalisation, he has no skill in abstraction. he perceives that certain qualities are common to certain things, without reasoning about these qualities themselves. he is acquainted with the abstract idea of space by the help of his geometrical figures; he is acquainted with the abstract idea of quantity by the help of his algebraical symbols. these figures and signs are the supports on which these ideas may be said to rest, the supports on which his senses repose. he does not attempt to know the nature of things, but only to know things in so far as they affect himself. he only judges what is outside himself in relation to himself, and his judgment is exact and certain. caprice and prejudice have no part in it. he values most the things which are of use to himself, and as he never departs from this standard of values, he owes nothing to prejudice. emile is industrious, temperate, patient, stedfast, and full of courage. his imagination is still asleep, so he has no exaggerated ideas of danger; the few ills he feels he knows how to endure in patience, because he has not learnt to rebel against fate. as to death, he knows not what it means; but accustomed as he is to submit without resistance to the law of necessity, he will die, if die he must, without a groan and without a struggle; that is as much as we can demand of nature, in that hour which we all abhor. to live in freedom, and to be independent of human affairs, is the best way to learn how to die. in a word emile is possessed of all that portion of virtue which concerns himself. to acquire the social virtues he only needs a knowledge of the relations which make those virtues necessary; he only lacks knowledge which he is quite ready to receive. he thinks not of others but of himself, and prefers that others should do the same. he makes no claim upon them, and acknowledges no debt to them. he is alone in the midst of human society, he depends on himself alone, for he is all that a boy can be at his age. he has no errors, or at least only such as are inevitable; he has no vices, or only those from which no man can escape. his body is healthy, his limbs are supple, his mind is accurate and unprejudiced, his heart is free and untroubled by passion. pride, the earliest and the most natural of passions, has scarcely shown itself. without disturbing the peace of others, he has passed his life contented, happy, and free, so far as nature allows. do you think that the earlier years of a child, who has reached his fifteenth year in this condition, have been wasted? book iv how swiftly life passes here below! the first quarter of it is gone before we know how to use it; the last quarter finds us incapable of enjoying life. at first we do not know how to live; and when we know how to live it is too late. in the interval between these two useless extremes we waste three-fourths of our time sleeping, working, sorrowing, enduring restraint and every kind of suffering. life is short, not so much because of the short time it lasts, but because we are allowed scarcely any time to enjoy it. in vain is there a long interval between the hour of death and that of birth; life is still too short, if this interval is not well spent. we are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man. those who regard woman as an imperfect man are no doubt mistaken, but they have external resemblance on their side. up to the age of puberty children of both sexes have little to distinguish them to the eye, the same face and form, the same complexion and voice, everything is the same; girls are children and boys are children; one name is enough for creatures so closely resembling one another. males whose development is arrested preserve this resemblance all their lives; they are always big children; and women who never lose this resemblance seem in many respects never to be more than children. but, speaking generally, man is not meant to remain a child. he leaves childhood behind him at the time ordained by nature; and this critical moment, short enough in itself, has far-reaching consequences. as the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions announces this tumultuous change; a suppressed excitement warns us of the approaching danger. a change of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind, make the child almost ungovernable. he becomes deaf to the voice he used to obey; he is a lion in a fever; he distrusts his keeper and refuses to be controlled. with the moral symptoms of a changing temper there are perceptible changes in appearance. his countenance develops and takes the stamp of his character; the soft and sparse down upon his cheeks becomes darker and stiffer. his voice grows hoarse or rather he loses it altogether. he is neither a child nor a man and cannot speak like either of them. his eyes, those organs of the soul which till now were dumb, find speech and meaning; a kindling fire illumines them, there is still a sacred innocence in their ever brightening glance, but they have lost their first meaningless expression; he is already aware that they can say too much; he is beginning to learn to lower his eyes and blush, he is becoming sensitive, though he does not know what it is that he feels; he is uneasy without knowing why. all this may happen gradually and give you time enough; but if his keenness becomes impatience, his eagerness madness, if he is angry and sorry all in a moment, if he weeps without cause, if in the presence of objects which are beginning to be a source of danger his pulse quickens and his eyes sparkle, if he trembles when a woman's hand touches his, if he is troubled or timid in her presence, o ulysses, wise ulysses! have a care! the passages you closed with so much pains are open; the winds are unloosed; keep your hand upon the helm or all is lost. this is the second birth i spoke of; then it is that man really enters upon life; henceforth no human passion is a stranger to him. our efforts so far have been child's play, now they are of the greatest importance. this period when education is usually finished is just the time to begin; but to explain this new plan properly, let us take up our story where we left it. our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape god's handiwork. if god bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, god would bid him be and not be; he would contradict himself. he has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what god will have a man do, he does not leave to the words of another man. he speaks himself; his words are written in the secret heart. now i consider those who would prevent the birth of the passions almost as foolish as those who would destroy them, and those who think this has been my object hitherto are greatly mistaken. but should we reason rightly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we inferred that all the passions we feel in ourselves and behold in others are natural? their source, indeed, is natural; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are a great river which is constantly growing, one in which we can scarcely find a single drop of the original stream. our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation. all those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them in her despite. the origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. in this sense, if you like, they are all natural. but most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. they change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself. self-love is always good, always in accordance with the order of nature. the preservation of our own life is specially entrusted to each one of us, and our first care is, and must be, to watch over our own life; and how can we continually watch over it, if we do not take the greatest interest in it? self-preservation requires, therefore, that we shall love ourselves; we must love ourselves above everything, and it follows directly from this that we love what contributes to our preservation. every child becomes fond of its nurse; romulus must have loved the she-wolf who suckled him. at first this attachment is quite unconscious; the individual is attracted to that which contributes to his welfare and repelled by that which is harmful; this is merely blind instinct. what transforms this instinct into feeling, the liking into love, the aversion into hatred, is the evident intention of helping or hurting us. we do not become passionately attached to objects without feeling, which only follow the direction given them; but those from which we expect benefit or injury from their internal disposition, from their will, those we see acting freely for or against us, inspire us with like feelings to those they exhibit towards us. something does us good, we seek after it; but we love the person who does us good; something harms us and we shrink from it, but we hate the person who tries to hurt us. the child's first sentiment is self-love, his second, which is derived from it, is love of those about him; for in his present state of weakness he is only aware of people through the help and attention received from them. at first his affection for his nurse and his governess is mere habit. he seeks them because he needs them and because he is happy when they are there; it is rather perception than kindly feeling. it takes a long time to discover not merely that they are useful to him, but that they desire to be useful to him, and then it is that he begins to love them. so a child is naturally disposed to kindly feeling because he sees that every one about him is inclined to help him, and from this experience he gets the habit of a kindly feeling towards his species; but with the expansion of his relations, his needs, his dependence, active or passive, the consciousness of his relations to others is awakened, and leads to the sense of duties and preferences. then the child becomes masterful, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive. if he is not compelled to obedience, when he does not see the usefulness of what he is told to do, he attributes it to caprice, to an intention of tormenting him, and he rebels. if people give in to him, as soon as anything opposes him he regards it as rebellion, as a determination to resist him; he beats the chair or table for disobeying him. self-love, which concerns itself only with ourselves, is content to satisfy our own needs; but selfishness, which is always comparing self with others, is never satisfied and never can be; for this feeling, which prefers ourselves to others, requires that they should prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. thus the tender and gentle passions spring from self-love, while the hateful and angry passions spring from selfishness. so it is the fewness of his needs, the narrow limits within which he can compare himself with others, that makes a man really good; what makes him really bad is a multiplicity of needs and dependence on the opinions of others. it is easy to see how we can apply this principle and guide every passion of children and men towards good or evil. true, man cannot always live alone, and it will be hard therefore to remain good; and this difficulty will increase of necessity as his relations with others are extended. for this reason, above all, the dangers of social life demand that the necessary skill and care shall be devoted to guarding the human heart against the depravity which springs from fresh needs. man's proper study is that of his relation to his environment. so long as he only knows that environment through his physical nature, he should study himself in relation to things; this is the business of his childhood; when he begins to be aware of his moral nature, he should study himself in relation to his fellow-men; this is the business of his whole life, and we have now reached the time when that study should be begun. as soon as a man needs a companion he is no longer an isolated creature, his heart is no longer alone. all his relations with his species, all the affections of his heart, come into being along with this. his first passion soon arouses the rest. the direction of the instinct is uncertain. one sex is attracted by the other; that is the impulse of nature. choice, preferences, individual likings, are the work of reason, prejudice, and habit; time and knowledge are required to make us capable of love; we do not love without reasoning or prefer without comparison. these judgments are none the less real, although they are formed unconsciously. true love, whatever you may say, will always be held in honour by mankind; for although its impulses lead us astray, although it does not bar the door of the heart to certain detestable qualities, although it even gives rise to these, yet it always presupposes certain worthy characteristics, without which we should be incapable of love. this choice, which is supposed to be contrary to reason, really springs from reason. we say love is blind because his eyes are better than ours, and he perceives relations which we cannot discern. all women would be alike to a man who had no idea of virtue or beauty, and the first comer would always be the most charming. love does not spring from nature, far from it; it is the curb and law of her desires; it is love that makes one sex indifferent to the other, the loved one alone excepted. we wish to inspire the preference we feel; love must be mutual. to be loved we must be worthy of love; to be preferred we must be more worthy than the rest, at least in the eyes of our beloved. hence we begin to look around among our fellows; we begin to compare ourselves with them, there is emulation, rivalry, and jealousy. a heart full to overflowing loves to make itself known; from the need of a mistress there soon springs the need of a friend. he who feels how sweet it is to be loved, desires to be loved by everybody; and there could be no preferences if there were not many that fail to find satisfaction. with love and friendship there begin dissensions, enmity, and hatred. i behold deference to other people's opinions enthroned among all these divers passions, and foolish mortals, enslaved by her power, base their very existence merely on what other people think. expand these ideas and you will see where we get that form of selfishness which we call natural selfishness, and how selfishness ceases to be a simple feeling and becomes pride in great minds, vanity in little ones, and in both feeds continually at our neighbour's cost. passions of this kind, not having any germ in the child's heart, cannot spring up in it of themselves; it is we who sow the seeds, and they never take root unless by our fault. not so with the young man; they will find an entrance in spite of us. it is therefore time to change our methods. let us begin with some considerations of importance with regard to the critical stage under discussion. the change from childhood to puberty is not so clearly determined by nature but that it varies according to individual temperament and racial conditions. everybody knows the differences which have been observed with regard to this between hot and cold countries, and every one sees that ardent temperaments mature earlier than others; but we may be mistaken as to the causes, and we may often attribute to physical causes what is really due to moral: this is one of the commonest errors in the philosophy of our times. the teaching of nature comes slowly; man's lessons are mostly premature. in the former case, the senses kindle the imagination, in the latter the imagination kindles the senses; it gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate the individual and, in the long run, the race. it is a more general and more trustworthy fact than that of climatic influences, that puberty and sexual power is always more precocious among educated and civilised races, than among the ignorant and barbarous. [footnote: "in towns," says m. buffon, "and among the well-to-do classes, children accustomed to plentiful and nourishing food sooner reach this state; in the country and among the poor, children are more backward, because of their poor and scanty food." i admit the fact but not the explanation, for in the districts where the food of the villagers is plentiful and good, as in the valais and even in some of the mountain districts of italy, such as friuli, the age of puberty for both sexes is quite as much later than in the heart of the towns, where, in order to gratify their vanity, people are often extremely parsimonious in the matter of food, and where most people, in the words of the proverb, have a velvet coat and an empty belly. it is astonishing to find in these mountainous regions big lads as strong as a man with shrill voices and smooth chins, and tall girls, well developed in other respects, without any trace of the periodic functions of their sex. this difference is, in my opinion, solely due to the fact that in the simplicity of their manners the imagination remains calm and peaceful, and does not stir the blood till much later, and thus their temperament is much less precocious.] children are preternaturally quick to discern immoral habits under the cloak of decency with which they are concealed. the prim speech imposed upon them, the lessons in good behaviour, the veil of mystery you profess to hang before their eyes, serve but to stimulate their curiosity. it is plain, from the way you set about it, that they are meant to learn what you profess to conceal; and of all you teach them this is most quickly assimilated. consult experience and you will find how far this foolish method hastens the work of nature and ruins the character. this is one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in our towns. the young people, prematurely exhausted, remain small, puny, and misshapen, they grow old instead of growing up, like a vine forced to bear fruit in spring, which fades and dies before autumn. to know how far a happy ignorance may prolong the innocence of children, you must live among rude and simple people. it is a sight both touching and amusing to see both sexes, left to the protection of their own hearts, continuing the sports of childhood in the flower of youth and beauty, showing by their very familiarity the purity of their pleasures. when at length those delightful young people marry, they bestow on each other the first fruits of their person, and are all the dearer therefore. swarms of strong and healthy children are the pledges of a union which nothing can change, and the fruit of the virtue of their early years. if the age at which a man becomes conscious of his sex is deferred as much by the effects of education as by the action of nature, it follows that this age may be hastened or retarded according to the way in which the child is brought up; and if the body gains or loses strength in proportion as its development is accelerated or retarded, it also follows that the more we try to retard it the stronger and more vigorous will the young man be. i am still speaking of purely physical consequences; you will soon see that this is not all. from these considerations i arrive at the solution of the question so often discussed--should we enlighten children at an early period as to the objects of their curiosity, or is it better to put them off with decent shams? i think we need do neither. in the first place, this curiosity will not arise unless we give it a chance. we must therefore take care not to give it an opportunity. in the next place, questions one is not obliged to answer do not compel us to deceive those who ask them; it is better to bid the child hold his tongue than to tell him a lie. he will not be greatly surprised at this treatment if you have already accustomed him to it in matters of no importance. lastly, if you decide to answer his questions, let it be with the greatest plainness, without mystery or confusion, without a smile. it is much less dangerous to satisfy a child's curiosity than to stimulate it. let your answers be always grave, brief, decided, and without trace of hesitation. i need not add that they should be true. we cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man's part, the danger of telling lies to children. a single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education. complete ignorance with regard to certain matters is perhaps the best thing for children; but let them learn very early what it is impossible to conceal from them permanently. either their curiosity must never be aroused, or it must be satisfied before the age when it becomes a source of danger. your conduct towards your pupil in this respect depends greatly on his individual circumstances, the society in which he moves, the position in which he may find himself, etc. nothing must be left to chance; and if you are not sure of keeping him in ignorance of the difference between the sexes till he is sixteen, take care you teach him before he is ten. i do not like people to be too fastidious in speaking with children, nor should they go out of their way to avoid calling a spade a spade; they are always found out if they do. good manners in this respect are always perfectly simple; but an imagination soiled by vice makes the ear over-sensitive and compels us to be constantly refining our expressions. plain words do not matter; it is lascivious ideas which must be avoided. although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil; and how should children without this knowledge of evil have the feeling which results from it? to give them lessons in modesty and good conduct is to teach them that there are things shameful and wicked, and to give them a secret wish to know what these things are. sooner or later they will find out, and the first spark which touches the imagination will certainly hasten the awakening of the senses. blushes are the sign of guilt; true innocence is ashamed of nothing. children have not the same desires as men; but they are subject like them to the same disagreeable needs which offend the senses, and by this means they may receive the same lessons in propriety. follow the mind of nature which has located in the same place the organs of secret pleasures and those of disgusting needs; she teaches us the same precautions at different ages, sometimes by means of one idea and sometimes by another; to the man through modesty, to the child through cleanliness. i can only find one satisfactory way of preserving the child's innocence, to surround him by those who respect and love him. without this all our efforts to keep him in ignorance fail sooner or later; a smile, a wink, a careless gesture tells him all we sought to hide; it is enough to teach him to perceive that there is something we want to hide from him. the delicate phrases and expressions employed by persons of politeness assume a knowledge which children ought not to possess, and they are quite out of place with them, but when we truly respect the child's innocence we easily find in talking to him the simple phrases which befit him. there is a certain directness of speech which is suitable and pleasing to innocence; this is the right tone to adopt in order to turn the child from dangerous curiosity. by speaking simply to him about everything you do not let him suspect there is anything left unsaid. by connecting coarse words with the unpleasant ideas which belong to them, you quench the first spark of imagination; you do not forbid the child to say these words or to form these ideas; but without his knowing it you make him unwilling to recall them. and how much confusion is spared to those who speaking from the heart always say the right thing, and say it as they themselves have felt it! "where do little children come from?" this is an embarrassing question, which occurs very naturally to children, one which foolishly or wisely answered may decide their health and their morals for life. the quickest way for a mother to escape from it without deceiving her son is to tell him to hold his tongue. that will serve its turn if he has always been accustomed to it in matters of no importance, and if he does not suspect some mystery from this new way of speaking. but the mother rarely stops there. "it is the married people's secret," she will say, "little boys should not be so curious." that is all very well so far as the mother is concerned, but she may be sure that the little boy, piqued by her scornful manner, will not rest till he has found out the married people's secret, which will very soon be the case. let me tell you a very different answer which i heard given to the same question, one which made all the more impression on me, coming, as it did, from a woman, modest in speech and behaviour, but one who was able on occasion, for the welfare of her child and for the cause of virtue, to cast aside the false fear of blame and the silly jests of the foolish. not long before the child had passed a small stone which had torn the passage, but the trouble was over and forgotten. "mamma," said the eager child, "where do little children come from?" "my child," replied his mother without hesitation, "women pass them with pains that sometimes cost their life." let fools laugh and silly people be shocked; but let the wise inquire if it is possible to find a wiser answer and one which would better serve its purpose. in the first place the thought of a need of nature with which the child is well acquainted turns his thoughts from the idea of a mysterious process. the accompanying ideas of pain and death cover it with a veil of sadness which deadens the imagination and suppresses curiosity; everything leads the mind to the results, not the causes, of child-birth. this is the information to which this answer leads. if the repugnance inspired by this answer should permit the child to inquire further, his thoughts are turned to the infirmities of human nature, disgusting things, images of pain. what chance is there for any stimulation of desire in such a conversation? and yet you see there is no departure from truth, no need to deceive the scholar in order to teach him. your children read; in the course of their reading they meet with things they would never have known without reading. are they students, their imagination is stimulated and quickened in the silence of the study. do they move in the world of society, they hear a strange jargon, they see conduct which makes a great impression on them; they have been told so continually that they are men that in everything men do in their presence they at once try to find how that will suit themselves; the conduct of others must indeed serve as their pattern when the opinions of others are their law. servants, dependent on them, and therefore anxious to please them, flatter them at the expense of their morals; giggling governesses say things to the four-year-old child which the most shameless woman would not dare to say to them at fifteen. they soon forget what they said, but the child has not forgotten what he heard. loose conversation prepares the way for licentious conduct; the child is debauched by the cunning lacquey, and the secret of the one guarantees the secret of the other. the child brought up in accordance with his age is alone. he knows no attachment but that of habit, he loves his sister like his watch, and his friend like his dog. he is unconscious of his sex and his species; men and women are alike unknown; he does not connect their sayings and doings with himself, he neither sees nor hears, or he pays no heed to them; he is no more concerned with their talk than their actions; he has nothing to do with it. this is no artificial error induced by our method, it is the ignorance of nature. the time is at hand when that same nature will take care to enlighten her pupil, and then only does she make him capable of profiting by the lessons without danger. this is our principle; the details of its rules are outside my subject; and the means i suggest with regard to other matters will still serve to illustrate this. do you wish to establish law and order among the rising passions, prolong the period of their development, so that they may have time to find their proper place as they arise. then they are controlled by nature herself, not by man; your task is merely to leave it in her hands. if your pupil were alone, you would have nothing to do; but everything about him enflames his imagination. he is swept along on the torrent of conventional ideas; to rescue him you must urge him in the opposite direction. imagination must be curbed by feeling and reason must silence the voice of conventionality. sensibility is the source of all the passions, imagination determines their course. every creature who is aware of his relations must be disturbed by changes in these relations and when he imagines or fancies he imagines others better adapted to his nature. it is the errors of the imagination which transmute into vices the passions of finite beings, of angels even, if indeed they have passions; for they must needs know the nature of every creature to realise what relations are best adapted to themselves. this is the sum of human wisdom with regard to the use of the passions. first, to be conscious of the true relations of man both in the species and the individual; second, to control all the affections in accordance with these relations. but is man in a position to control his affections according to such and such relations? no doubt he is, if he is able to fix his imagination on this or that object, or to form this or that habit. moreover, we are not so much concerned with what a man can do for himself, as with what we can do for our pupil through our choice of the circumstances in which he shall be placed. to show the means by which he may be kept in the path of nature is to show plainly enough how he might stray from that path. so long as his consciousness is confined to himself there is no morality in his actions; it is only when it begins to extend beyond himself that he forms first the sentiments and then the ideas of good and ill, which make him indeed a man, and an integral part of his species. to begin with we must therefore confine our observations to this point. these observations are difficult to make, for we must reject the examples before our eyes, and seek out those in which the successive developments follow the order of nature. a child sophisticated, polished, and civilised, who is only awaiting the power to put into practice the precocious instruction he has received, is never mistaken with regard to the time when this power is acquired. far from awaiting it, he accelerates it; he stirs his blood to a premature ferment; he knows what should be the object of his desires long before those desires are experienced. it is not nature which stimulates him; it is he who forces the hand of nature; she has nothing to teach him when he becomes a man; he was a man in thought long before he was a man in reality. the true course of nature is slower and more gradual. little by little the blood grows warmer, the faculties expand, the character is formed. the wise workman who directs the process is careful to perfect every tool before he puts it to use; the first desires are preceded by a long period of unrest, they are deceived by a prolonged ignorance, they know not what they want. the blood ferments and bubbles; overflowing vitality seeks to extend its sphere. the eye grows brighter and surveys others, we begin to be interested in those about us, we begin to feel that we are not meant to live alone; thus the heart is thrown open to human affection, and becomes capable of attachment. the first sentiment of which the well-trained youth is capable is not love but friendship. the first work of his rising imagination is to make known to him his fellows; the species affects him before the sex. here is another advantage to be gained from prolonged innocence; you may take advantage of his dawning sensibility to sow the first seeds of humanity in the heart of the young adolescent. this advantage is all the greater because this is the only time in his life when such efforts may be really successful. i have always observed that young men, corrupted in early youth and addicted to women and debauchery, are inhuman and cruel; their passionate temperament makes them impatient, vindictive, and angry; their imagination fixed on one object only, refuses all others; mercy and pity are alike unknown to them; they would have sacrificed father, mother, the whole world, to the least of their pleasures. a young man, on the other hand, brought up in happy innocence, is drawn by the first stirrings of nature to the tender and affectionate passions; his warm heart is touched by the sufferings of his fellow-creatures; he trembles with delight when he meets his comrade, his arms can embrace tenderly, his eyes can shed tears of pity; he learns to be sorry for offending others through his shame at causing annoyance. if the eager warmth of his blood makes him quick, hasty, and passionate, a moment later you see all his natural kindness of heart in the eagerness of his repentance; he weeps, he groans over the wound he has given; he would atone for the blood he has shed with his own; his anger dies away, his pride abases itself before the consciousness of his wrong-doing. is he the injured party, in the height of his fury an excuse, a word, disarms him; he forgives the wrongs of others as whole-heartedly as he repairs his own. adolescence is not the age of hatred or vengeance; it is the age of pity, mercy, and generosity. yes, i maintain, and i am not afraid of the testimony of experience, a youth of good birth, one who has preserved his innocence up to the age of twenty, is at that age the best, the most generous, the most loving, and the most lovable of men. you never heard such a thing; i can well believe that philosophers such as you, brought up among the corruption of the public schools, are unaware of it. man's weakness makes him sociable. our common sufferings draw our hearts to our fellow-creatures; we should have no duties to mankind if we were not men. every affection is a sign of insufficiency; if each of us had no need of others, we should hardly think of associating with them. so our frail happiness has its roots in our weakness. a really happy man is a hermit; god only enjoys absolute happiness; but which of us has any idea what that means? if any imperfect creature were self-sufficing, what would he have to enjoy? to our thinking he would be wretched and alone. i do not understand how one who has need of nothing could love anything, nor do i understand how he who loves nothing can be happy. hence it follows that we are drawn towards our fellow-creatures less by our feeling for their joys than for their sorrows; for in them we discern more plainly a nature like our own, and a pledge of their affection for us. if our common needs create a bond of interest our common sufferings create a bond of affection. the sight of a happy man arouses in others envy rather than love, we are ready to accuse him of usurping a right which is not his, of seeking happiness for himself alone, and our selfishness suffers an additional pang in the thought that this man has no need of us. but who does not pity the wretch when he beholds his sufferings? who would not deliver him from his woes if a wish could do it? imagination puts us more readily in the place of the miserable man than of the happy man; we feel that the one condition touches us more nearly than the other. pity is sweet, because, when we put ourselves in the place of one who suffers, we are aware, nevertheless, of the pleasure of not suffering like him. envy is bitter, because the sight of a happy man, far from putting the envious in his place, inspires him with regret that he is not there. the one seems to exempt us from the pains he suffers, the other seems to deprive us of the good things he enjoys. do you desire to stimulate and nourish the first stirrings of awakening sensibility in the heart of a young man, do you desire to incline his disposition towards kindly deed and thought, do not cause the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy to spring up in him through the misleading picture of the happiness of mankind; do not show him to begin with the pomp of courts, the pride of palaces, the delights of pageants; do not take him into society and into brilliant assemblies; do not show him the outside of society till you have made him capable of estimating it at its true worth. to show him the world before he is acquainted with men, is not to train him, but to corrupt him; not to teach, but to mislead. by nature men are neither kings, nobles, courtiers, nor millionaires. all men are born poor and naked, all are liable to the sorrows of life, its disappointments, its ills, its needs, its suffering of every kind; and all are condemned at length to die. this is what it really means to be a man, this is what no mortal can escape. begin then with the study of the essentials of humanity, that which really constitutes mankind. at sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he himself has suffered; but he scarcely realises that others suffer too; to see without feeling is not knowledge, and as i have said again and again the child who does not picture the feelings of others knows no ills but his own; but when his imagination is kindled by the first beginnings of growing sensibility, he begins to perceive himself in his fellow-creatures, to be touched by their cries, to suffer in their sufferings. it is at this time that the sorrowful picture of suffering humanity should stir his heart with the first touch of pity he has ever known. if it is not easy to discover this opportunity in your scholars, whose fault is it? you taught them so soon to play at feeling, you taught them so early its language, that speaking continually in the same strain they turn your lessons against yourself, and give you no chance of discovering when they cease to lie, and begin to feel what they say. but look at emile; i have led him up to this age, and he has neither felt nor pretended to feel. he has never said, "i love you dearly," till he knew what it was to love; he has never been taught what expression to assume when he enters the room of his father, his mother, or his sick tutor; he has not learnt the art of affecting a sorrow he does not feel. he has never pretended to weep for the death of any one, for he does not know what it is to die. there is the same insensibility in his heart as in his manners. indifferent, like every child, to every one but himself, he takes no interest in any one; his only peculiarity is that he will not pretend to take such an interest; he is less deceitful than others. emile having thought little about creatures of feeling will be a long time before he knows what is meant by pain and death. groans and cries will begin to stir his compassion, he will turn away his eyes at the sight of blood; the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him i know not what anguish before he knows the source of these impulses. if he were still stupid and barbarous he would not feel them; if he were more learned he would recognise their source; he has compared ideas too frequently already to be insensible, but not enough to know what he feels. so pity is born, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature. to become sensitive and pitiful the child must know that he has fellow-creatures who suffer as he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt, and others which he can form some idea of, being capable of feeling them himself. indeed, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves, and identify ourselves with the suffering animal, by leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his. we only suffer so far as we suppose he suffers; the suffering is not ours but his. so no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and begins to carry him outside himself. what should we do to stimulate and nourish this growing sensibility, to direct it, and to follow its natural bent? should we not present to the young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart may take effect, objects which dilate it, which extend it to other creatures, which take him outside himself? should we not carefully remove everything that narrows, concentrates, and strengthens the power of the human self? that is to say, in other words, we should arouse in him kindness, goodness, pity, and beneficence, all the gentle and attractive passions which are naturally pleasing to man; those passions prevent the growth of envy, covetousness, hatred, all the repulsive and cruel passions which make our sensibility not merely a cipher but a minus quantity, passions which are the curse of those who feel them. i think i can sum up the whole of the preceding reflections in two or three maxims, definite, straightforward, and easy to understand. first maxim.--it is not in human nature to put ourselves in the place of those who are happier than ourselves, but only in the place of those who can claim our pity. if you find exceptions to this rule, they are more apparent than real. thus we do not put ourselves in the place of the rich or great when we become fond of them; even when our affection is real, we only appropriate to ourselves a part of their welfare. sometimes we love the rich man in the midst of misfortunes; but so long as he prospers he has no real friend, except the man who is not deceived by appearances, who pities rather than envies him in spite of his prosperity. the happiness belonging to certain states of life appeals to us; take, for instance, the life of a shepherd in the country. the charm of seeing these good people so happy is not poisoned by envy; we are genuinely interested in them. why is this? because we feel we can descend into this state of peace and innocence and enjoy the same happiness; it is an alternative which only calls up pleasant thoughts, so long as the wish is as good as the deed. it is always pleasant to examine our stores, to contemplate our own wealth, even when we do not mean to spend it. from this we see that to incline a young man to humanity you must not make him admire the brilliant lot of others; you must show him life in its sorrowful aspects and arouse his fears. thus it becomes clear that he must force his own way to happiness, without interfering with the happiness of others. second maxim.--we never pity another's woes unless we know we may suffer in like manner ourselves. "non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."--virgil. i know nothing go fine, so full of meaning, so touching, so true as these words. why have kings no pity on their people? because they never expect to be ordinary men. why are the rich so hard on the poor? because they have no fear of becoming poor. why do the nobles look down upon the people? because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes. why are the turks generally kinder and more hospitable than ourselves? because, under their wholly arbitrary system of government, the rank and wealth of individuals are always uncertain and precarious, so that they do not regard poverty and degradation as conditions with which they have no concern; to-morrow, any one may himself be in the same position as those on whom he bestows alms to-day. this thought, which occurs again and again in eastern romances, lends them a certain tenderness which is not to be found in our pretentious and harsh morality. so do not train your pupil to look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate, the labours of the wretched, and do not hope to teach him to pity them while he considers them as far removed from himself. make him thoroughly aware of the fact that the fate of these unhappy persons may one day be his own, that his feet are standing on the edge of the abyss, into which he may be plunged at any moment by a thousand unexpected irresistible misfortunes. teach him to put no trust in birth, health, or riches; show him all the changes of fortune; find him examples--there are only too many of them--in which men of higher rank than himself have sunk below the condition of these wretched ones. whether by their own fault or another's is for the present no concern of ours; does he indeed know the meaning of the word fault? never interfere with the order in which he acquires knowledge, and teach him only through the means within his reach; it needs no great learning to perceive that all the prudence of mankind cannot make certain whether he will be alive or dead in an hour's time, whether before nightfall he will not be grinding his teeth in the pangs of nephritis, whether a month hence he will be rich or poor, whether in a year's time he may not be rowing an algerian galley under the lash of the slave-driver. above all do not teach him this, like his catechism, in cold blood; let him see and feel the calamities which overtake men; surprise and startle his imagination with the perils which lurk continually about a man's path; let him see the pitfalls all about him, and when he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "you will make him timid and cowardly," do you say? we shall see; let us make him kindly to begin with, that is what matters most. third maxim.--the pity we feel for others is proportionate, not to the amount of the evil, but to the feelings we attribute to the sufferers. we only pity the wretched so far as we think they feel the need of pity. the bodily effect of our sufferings is less than one would suppose; it is memory that prolongs the pain, imagination which projects it into the future, and makes us really to be pitied. this is, i think, one of the reasons why we are more callous to the sufferings of animals than of men, although a fellow-feeling ought to make us identify ourselves equally with either. we scarcely pity the cart-horse in his shed, for we do not suppose that while he is eating his hay he is thinking of the blows he has received and the labours in store for him. neither do we pity the sheep grazing in the field, though we know it is about to be slaughtered, for we believe it knows nothing of the fate in store for it. in this way we also become callous to the fate of our fellow-men, and the rich console themselves for the harm done by them to the poor, by the assumption that the poor are too stupid to feel. i usually judge of the value any one puts on the welfare of his fellow-creatures by what he seems to think of them. we naturally think lightly of the happiness of those we despise. it need not surprise you that politicians speak so scornfully of the people, and philosophers profess to think mankind so wicked. the people are mankind; those who do not belong to the people are so few in number that they are not worth counting. man is the same in every station of life; if that be so, those ranks to which most men belong deserve most honour. all distinctions of rank fade away before the eyes of a thoughtful person; he sees the same passions, the same feelings in the noble and the guttersnipe; there is merely a slight difference in speech, and more or less artificiality of tone; and if there is indeed any essential difference between them, the disadvantage is all on the side of those who are more sophisticated. the people show themselves as they are, and they are not attractive; but the fashionable world is compelled to adopt a disguise; we should be horrified if we saw it as it really is. there is, so our wiseacres tell us, the same amount of happiness and sorrow in every station. this saying is as deadly in its effects as it is incapable of proof; if all are equally happy why should i trouble myself about any one? let every one stay where he is; leave the slave to be ill-treated, the sick man to suffer, and the wretched to perish; they have nothing to gain by any change in their condition. you enumerate the sorrows of the rich, and show the vanity of his empty pleasures; what barefaced sophistry! the rich man's sufferings do not come from his position, but from himself alone when he abuses it. he is not to be pitied were he indeed more miserable than the poor, for his ills are of his own making, and he could be happy if he chose. but the sufferings of the poor man come from external things, from the hardships fate has imposed upon him. no amount of habit can accustom him to the bodily ills of fatigue, exhaustion, and hunger. neither head nor heart can serve to free him from the sufferings of his condition. how is epictetus the better for knowing beforehand that his master will break his leg for him; does he do it any the less? he has to endure not only the pain itself but the pains of anticipation. if the people were as wise as we assume them to be stupid, how could they be other than they are? observe persons of this class; you will see that, with a different way of speaking, they have as much intelligence and more common-sense than yourself. have respect then for your species; remember that it consists essentially of the people, that if all the kings and all the philosophers were removed they would scarcely be missed, and things would go on none the worse. in a word, teach your pupil to love all men, even those who fail to appreciate him; act in such way that he is not a member of any class, but takes his place in all alike: speak in his hearing of the human race with tenderness, and even with pity, but never with scorn. you are a man; do not dishonour mankind. it is by these ways and others like them--how different from the beaten paths--that we must reach the heart of the young adolescent, and stimulate in him the first impulses of nature; we must develop that heart and open its doors to his fellow-creatures, and there must be as little self-interest as possible mixed up with these impulses; above all, no vanity, no emulation, no boasting, none of those sentiments which force us to compare ourselves with others; for such comparisons are never made without arousing some measure of hatred against those who dispute our claim to the first place, were it only in our own estimation. then we must be either blind or angry, a bad man or a fool; let us try to avoid this dilemma. sooner or later these dangerous passions will appear, so you tell me, in spite of us. i do not deny it. there is a time and place for everything; i am only saying that we should not help to arouse these passions. this is the spirit of the method to be laid down. in this case examples and illustrations are useless, for here we find the beginning of the countless differences of character, and every example i gave would possibly apply to only one case in a hundred thousand. it is at this age that the clever teacher begins his real business, as a student and a philosopher who knows how to probe the heart and strives to guide it aright. while the young man has not learnt to pretend, while he does not even know the meaning of pretence, you see by his look, his manner, his gestures, the impression he has received from any object presented to him; you read in his countenance every impulse of his heart; by watching his expression you learn to protect his impulses and actually to control them. it has been commonly observed that blood, wounds, cries and groans, the preparations for painful operations, and everything which directs the senses towards things connected with suffering, are usually the first to make an impression on all men. the idea of destruction, a more complex matter, does not have so great an effect; the thought of death affects us later and less forcibly, for no one knows from his own experience what it is to die; you must have seen corpses to feel the agonies of the dying. but when once this idea is established in the mind, there is no spectacle more dreadful in our eyes, whether because of the idea of complete destruction which it arouses through our senses, or because we know that this moment must come for each one of us and we feel ourselves all the more keenly affected by a situation from which we know there is no escape. these various impressions differ in manner and in degree, according to the individual character of each one of us and his former habits, but they are universal and no one is altogether free from them. there are other impressions less universal and of a later growth, impressions most suited to sensitive souls, such impressions as we receive from moral suffering, inward grief, the sufferings of the mind, depression, and sadness. there are men who can be touched by nothing but groans and tears; the suppressed sobs of a heart labouring under sorrow would never win a sigh; the sight of a downcast visage, a pale and gloomy countenance, eyes which can weep no longer, would never draw a tear from them. the sufferings of the mind are as nothing to them; they weigh them, their own mind feels nothing; expect nothing from such persons but inflexible severity, harshness, cruelty. they may be just and upright, but not merciful, generous, or pitiful. they may, i say, be just, if a man can indeed be just without being merciful. but do not be in a hurry to judge young people by this standard, more especially those who have been educated rightly, who have no idea of the moral sufferings they have never had to endure; for once again they can only pity the ills they know, and this apparent insensibility is soon transformed into pity when they begin to feel that there are in human life a thousand ills of which they know nothing. as for emile, if in childhood he was distinguished by simplicity and good sense, in his youth he will show a warm and tender heart; for the reality of the feelings depends to a great extent on the accuracy of the ideas. but why call him hither? more than one reader will reproach me no doubt for departing from my first intention and forgetting the lasting happiness i promised my pupil. the sorrowful, the dying, such sights of pain and woe, what happiness, what delight is this for a young heart on the threshold of life? his gloomy tutor, who proposed to give him such a pleasant education, only introduces him to life that he may suffer. this is what they will say, but what care i? i promised to make him happy, not to make him seem happy. am i to blame if, deceived as usual by the outward appearances, you take them for the reality? let us take two young men at the close of their early education, and let them enter the world by opposite doors. the one mounts at once to olympus, and moves in the smartest society; he is taken to court, he is presented in the houses of the great, of the rich, of the pretty women. i assume that he is everywhere made much of, and i do not regard too closely the effect of this reception on his reason; i assume it can stand it. pleasures fly before him, every day provides him with fresh amusements; he flings himself into everything with an eagerness which carries you away. you find him busy, eager, and curious; his first wonder makes a great impression on you; you think him happy; but behold the state of his heart; you think he is rejoicing, i think he suffers. what does he see when first he opens his eyes? all sorts of so-called pleasures, hitherto unknown. most of these pleasures are only for a moment within his reach, and seem to show themselves only to inspire regret for their loss. does he wander through a palace; you see by his uneasy curiosity that he is asking why his father's house is not like it. every question shows you that he is comparing himself all the time with the owner of this grand place. and all the mortification arising from this comparison at once revolts and stimulates his vanity. if he meets a young man better dressed than himself, i find him secretly complaining of his parents' meanness. if he is better dressed than another, he suffers because the latter is his superior in birth or in intellect, and all his gold lace is put to shame by a plain cloth coat. does he shine unrivalled in some assembly, does he stand on tiptoe that they may see him better, who is there who does not secretly desire to humble the pride and vanity of the young fop? everybody is in league against him; the disquieting glances of a solemn man, the biting phrases of some satirical person, do not fail to reach him, and if it were only one man who despised him, the scorn of that one would poison in a moment the applause of the rest. let us grant him everything, let us not grudge him charm and worth; let him be well-made, witty, and attractive; the women will run after him; but by pursuing him before he is in love with them, they will inspire rage rather than love; he will have successes, but neither rapture nor passion to enjoy them. as his desires are always anticipated; they never have time to spring up among his pleasures, so he only feels the tedium of restraint. even before he knows it he is disgusted and satiated with the sex formed to be the delight of his own; if he continues its pursuit it is only through vanity, and even should he really be devoted to women, he will not be the only brilliant, the only attractive young man, nor will he always find his mistresses prodigies of fidelity. i say nothing of the vexation, the deceit, the crimes, and the remorse of all kinds, inseparable from such a life. we know that experience of the world disgusts us with it; i am speaking only of the drawbacks belonging to youthful illusions. hitherto the young man has lived in the bosom of his family and his friends, and has been the sole object of their care; what a change to enter all at once into a region where he counts for so little; to find himself plunged into another sphere, he who has been so long the centre of his own. what insults, what humiliation, must he endure, before he loses among strangers the ideas of his own importance which have been formed and nourished among his own people! as a child everything gave way to him, everybody flocked to him; as a young man he must give place to every one, or if he preserves ever so little of his former airs, what harsh lessons will bring him to himself! accustomed to get everything he wants without any difficulty, his wants are many, and he feels continual privations. he is tempted by everything that flatters him; what others have, he must have too; he covets everything, he envies every one, he would always be master. he is devoured by vanity, his young heart is enflamed by unbridled passions, jealousy and hatred among the rest; all these violent passions burst out at once; their sting rankles in him in the busy world, they return with him at night, he comes back dissatisfied with himself, with others; he falls asleep among a thousand foolish schemes disturbed by a thousand fancies, and his pride shows him even in his dreams those fancied pleasures; he is tormented by a desire which will never be satisfied. so much for your pupil; let us turn to mine. if the first thing to make an impression on him is something sorrowful his first return to himself is a feeling of pleasure. when he sees how many ills he has escaped he thinks he is happier than he fancied. he shares the suffering of his fellow-creatures, but he shares it of his own free will and finds pleasure in it. he enjoys at once the pity he feels for their woes and the joy of being exempt from them; he feels in himself that state of vigour which projects us beyond ourselves, and bids us carry elsewhere the superfluous activity of our well-being. to pity another's woes we must indeed know them, but we need not feel them. when we have suffered, when we are in fear of suffering, we pity those who suffer; but when we suffer ourselves, we pity none but ourselves. but if all of us, being subject ourselves to the ills of life, only bestow upon others the sensibility we do not actually require for ourselves, it follows that pity must be a very pleasant feeling, since it speaks on our behalf; and, on the other hand, a hard-hearted man is always unhappy, since the state of his heart leaves him no superfluous sensibility to bestow on the sufferings of others. we are too apt to judge of happiness by appearances; we suppose it is to be found in the most unlikely places, we seek for it where it cannot possibly be; mirth is a very doubtful indication of its presence. a merry man is often a wretch who is trying to deceive others and distract himself. the men who are jovial, friendly, and contented at their club are almost always gloomy grumblers at home, and their servants have to pay for the amusement they give among their friends. true contentment is neither merry nor noisy; we are jealous of so sweet a sentiment, when we enjoy it we think about it, we delight in it for fear it should escape us. a really happy man says little and laughs little; he hugs his happiness, so to speak, to his heart. noisy games, violent delight, conceal the disappointment of satiety. but melancholy is the friend of pleasure; tears and pity attend our sweetest enjoyment, and great joys call for tears rather than laughter. if at first the number and variety of our amusements seem to contribute to our happiness, if at first the even tenor of a quiet life seems tedious, when we look at it more closely we discover that the pleasantest habit of mind consists in a moderate enjoyment which leaves little scope for desire and aversion. the unrest of passion causes curiosity and fickleness; the emptiness of noisy pleasures causes weariness. we never weary of our state when we know none more delightful. savages suffer less than other men from curiosity and from tedium; everything is the same to them--themselves, not their possessions--and they are never weary. the man of the world almost always wears a mask. he is scarcely ever himself and is almost a stranger to himself; he is ill at ease when he is forced into his own company. not what he is, but what he seems, is all he cares for. i cannot help picturing in the countenance of the young man i have just spoken of an indefinable but unpleasant impertinence, smoothness, and affectation, which is repulsive to a plain man, and in the countenance of my own pupil a simple and interesting expression which indicates the real contentment and the calm of his mind; an expression which inspires respect and confidence, and seems only to await the establishment of friendly relations to bestow his own confidence in return. it is thought that the expression is merely the development of certain features designed by nature. for my own part i think that over and above this development a man's face is shaped, all unconsciously, by the frequent and habitual influence of certain affections of the heart. these affections are shown on the face, there is nothing more certain; and when they become habitual, they must surely leave lasting traces. this is why i think the expression shows the character, and that we can sometimes read one another without seeking mysterious explanations in powers we do not possess. a child has only two distinct feelings, joy and sorrow; he laughs or he cries; he knows no middle course, and he is constantly passing from one extreme to the other. on account of these perpetual changes there is no lasting impression on the face, and no expression; but when the child is older and more sensitive, his feelings are keener or more permanent, and these deeper impressions leave traces more difficult to erase; and the habitual state of the feelings has an effect on the features which in course of time becomes ineffaceable. still it is not uncommon to meet with men whose expression varies with their age. i have met with several, and i have always found that those whom i could observe and follow had also changed their habitual temper. this one observation thoroughly confirmed would seem to me decisive, and it is not out of place in a treatise on education, where it is a matter of importance, that we should learn to judge the feelings of the heart by external signs. i do not know whether my young man will be any the less amiable for not having learnt to copy conventional manners and to feign sentiments which are not his own; that does not concern me at present, i only know he will be more affectionate; and i find it difficult to believe that he, who cares for nobody but himself, can so far disguise his true feelings as to please as readily as he who finds fresh happiness for himself in his affection for others. but with regard to this feeling of happiness, i think i have said enough already for the guidance of any sensible reader, and to show that i have not contradicted myself. i return to my system, and i say, when the critical age approaches, present to young people spectacles which restrain rather than excite them; put off their dawning imagination with objects which, far from inflaming their senses, put a check to their activity. remove them from great cities, where the flaunting attire and the boldness of the women hasten and anticipate the teaching of nature, where everything presents to their view pleasures of which they should know nothing till they are of an age to choose for themselves. bring them back to their early home, where rural simplicity allows the passions of their age to develop more slowly; or if their taste for the arts keeps them in town, guard them by means of this very taste from a dangerous idleness. choose carefully their company, their occupations, and their pleasures; show them nothing but modest and pathetic pictures which are touching but not seductive, and nourish their sensibility without stimulating their senses. remember also, that the danger of excess is not confined to any one place, and that immoderate passions always do irreparable damage. you need not make your pupil a sick-nurse or a brother of pity; you need not distress him by the perpetual sight of pain and suffering; you need not take him from one hospital to another, from the gallows to the prison. he must be softened, not hardened, by the sight of human misery. when we have seen a sight it ceases to impress us, use is second nature, what is always before our eyes no longer appeals to the imagination, and it is only through the imagination that we can feel the sorrows of others; this is why priests and doctors who are always beholding death and suffering become so hardened. let your pupil therefore know something of the lot of man and the woes of his fellow-creatures, but let him not see them too often. a single thing, carefully selected and shown at the right time, will fill him with pity and set him thinking for a month. his opinion about anything depends not so much on what he sees, but on how it reacts on himself; and his lasting impression of any object depends less on the object itself than on the point of view from which he regards it. thus by a sparing use of examples, lessons, and pictures, you may blunt the sting of sense and delay nature while following her own lead. as he acquires knowledge, choose what ideas he shall attach to it; as his passions awake, select scenes calculated to repress them. a veteran, as distinguished for his character as for his courage, once told me that in early youth his father, a sensible man but extremely pious, observed that through his growing sensibility he was attracted by women, and spared no pains to restrain him; but at last when, in spite of all his care, his son was about to escape from his control, he decided to take him to a hospital, and, without telling him what to expect, he introduced him into a room where a number of wretched creatures were expiating, under a terrible treatment, the vices which had brought them into this plight. this hideous and revolting spectacle sickened the young man. "miserable libertine," said his father vehemently, "begone; follow your vile tastes; you will soon be only too glad to be admitted to this ward, and a victim to the most shameful sufferings, you will compel your father to thank god when you are dead." these few words, together with the striking spectacle he beheld, made an impression on the young man which could never be effaced. compelled by his profession to pass his youth in garrison, he preferred to face all the jests of his comrades rather than to share their evil ways. "i have been a man," he said to me, "i have had my weaknesses, but even to the present day the sight of a harlot inspires me with horror." say little to your pupil, but choose time, place, and people; then rely on concrete examples for your teaching, and be sure it will take effect. the way childhood is spent is no great matter; the evil which may find its way is not irremediable, and the good which may spring up might come later. but it is not so in those early years when a youth really begins to live. this time is never long enough for what there is to be done, and its importance demands unceasing attention; this is why i lay so much stress on the art of prolonging it. one of the best rules of good farming is to keep things back as much as possible. let your progress also be slow and sure; prevent the youth from becoming a man all at once. while the body is growing the spirits destined to give vigour to the blood and strength to the muscles are in process of formation and elaboration. if you turn them into another channel, and permit that strength which should have gone to the perfecting of one person to go to the making of another, both remain in a state of weakness and the work of nature is unfinished. the workings of the mind, in their turn, are affected by this change, and the mind, as sickly as the body, functions languidly and feebly. length and strength of limb are not the same thing as courage or genius, and i grant that strength of mind does not always accompany strength of body, when the means of connection between the two are otherwise faulty. but however well planned they may be, they will always work feebly if for motive power they depend upon an exhausted, impoverished supply of blood, deprived of the substance which gives strength and elasticity to all the springs of the machinery. there is generally more vigour of mind to be found among men whose early years have been preserved from precocious vice, than among those whose evil living has begun at the earliest opportunity; and this is no doubt the reason why nations whose morals are pure are generally superior in sense and courage to those whose morals are bad. the latter shine only through i know not what small and trifling qualities, which they call wit, sagacity, cunning; but those great and noble features of goodness and reason, by which a man is distinguished and honoured through good deeds, virtues, really useful efforts, are scarcely to be found except among the nations whose morals are pure. teachers complain that the energy of this age makes their pupils unruly; i see that it is so, but are not they themselves to blame? when once they have let this energy flow through the channel of the senses, do they not know that they cannot change its course? will the long and dreary sermons of the pedant efface from the mind of his scholar the thoughts of pleasure when once they have found an entrance; will they banish from his heart the desires by which it is tormented; will they chill the heat of a passion whose meaning the scholar realises? will not the pupil be roused to anger by the obstacles opposed to the only kind of happiness of which he has any notion? and in the harsh law imposed upon him before he can understand it, what will he see but the caprice and hatred of a man who is trying to torment him? is it strange that he rebels and hates you too? i know very well that if one is easy-going one may be tolerated, and one may keep up a show of authority. but i fail to see the use of an authority over the pupil which is only maintained by fomenting the vices it ought to repress; it is like attempting to soothe a fiery steed by making it leap over a precipice. far from being a hindrance to education, this enthusiasm of adolescence is its crown and coping-stone; this it is that gives you a hold on the youth's heart when he is no longer weaker than you. his first affections are the reins by which you control his movements; he was free, and now i behold him in your power. so long as he loved nothing, he was independent of everything but himself and his own necessities; as soon as he loves, he is dependent on his affections. thus the first ties which unite him to his species are already formed. when you direct his increasing sensibility in this direction, do not expect that it will at once include all men, and that the word "mankind" will have any meaning for him. not so; this sensibility will at first confine itself to those like himself, and these will not be strangers to him, but those he knows, those whom habit has made dear to him or necessary to him, those who are evidently thinking and feeling as he does, those whom he perceives to be exposed to the pains he has endured, those who enjoy the pleasures he has enjoyed; in a word, those who are so like himself that he is the more disposed to self-love. it is only after long training, after much consideration as to his own feelings and the feelings he observes in others, that he will be able to generalise his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity, and add to his individual affections those which may identify him with the race. when he becomes capable of affection, he becomes aware of the affection of others, [footnote: affection may be unrequited; not so friendship. friendship is a bargain, a contract like any other; though a bargain more sacred than the rest. the word "friend" has no other correlation. any man who is not the friend of his friend is undoubtedly a rascal; for one can only obtain friendship by giving it, or pretending to give it.] and he is on the lookout for the signs of that affection. do you not see how you will acquire a fresh hold on him? what bands have you bound about his heart while he was yet unaware of them! what will he feel, when he beholds himself and sees what you have done for him; when he can compare himself with other youths, and other tutors with you! i say, "when he sees it," but beware lest you tell him of it; if you tell him he will not perceive it. if you claim his obedience in return for the care bestowed upon him, he will think you have over-reached him; he will see that while you profess to have cared for him without reward, you meant to saddle him with a debt and to bind him to a bargain which he never made. in vain you will add that what you demand is for his own good; you demand it, and you demand it in virtue of what you have done without his consent. when a man down on his luck accepts the shilling which the sergeant professes to give him, and finds he has enlisted without knowing what he was about, you protest against the injustice; is it not still more unjust to demand from your pupil the price of care which he has not even accepted! ingratitude would be rarer if kindness were less often the investment of a usurer. we love those who have done us a kindness; what a natural feeling! ingratitude is not to be found in the heart of man, but self-interest is there; those who are ungrateful for benefits received are fewer than those who do a kindness for their own ends. if you sell me your gifts, i will haggle over the price; but if you pretend to give, in order to sell later on at your own price, you are guilty of fraud; it is the free gift which is beyond price. the heart is a law to itself; if you try to bind it, you lose it; give it its liberty, and you make it your own. when the fisherman baits his line, the fish come round him without suspicion; but when they are caught on the hook concealed in the bait, they feel the line tighten and they try to escape. is the fisherman a benefactor? is the fish ungrateful? do we find a man forgotten by his benefactor, unmindful of that benefactor? on the contrary, he delights to speak of him, he cannot think of him without emotion; if he gets a chance of showing him, by some unexpected service, that he remembers what he did for him, how delighted he is to satisfy his gratitude; what a pleasure it is to earn the gratitude of his benefactor. how delightful to say, "it is my turn now." this is indeed the teaching of nature; a good deed never caused ingratitude. if therefore gratitude is a natural feeling, and you do not destroy its effects by your blunders, be sure your pupil, as he begins to understand the value of your care for him, will be grateful for it, provided you have not put a price upon it; and this will give you an authority over his heart which nothing can overthrow. but beware of losing this advantage before it is really yours, beware of insisting on your own importance. boast of your services and they become intolerable; forget them and they will not be forgotten. until the time comes to treat him as a man let there be no question of his duty to you, but his duty to himself. let him have his freedom if you would make him docile; hide yourself so that he may seek you; raise his heart to the noble sentiment of gratitude by only speaking of his own interest. until he was able to understand i would not have him told that what was done was for his good; he would only have understood such words to mean that you were dependent on him and he would merely have made you his servant. but now that he is beginning to feel what love is, he also knows what a tender affection may bind a man to what he loves; and in the zeal which keeps you busy on his account, he now sees not the bonds of a slave, but the affection of a friend. now there is nothing which carries so much weight with the human heart as the voice of friendship recognised as such, for we know that it never speaks but for our good. we may think our friend is mistaken, but we never believe he is deceiving us. we may reject his advice now and then, but we never scorn it. we have reached the moral order at last; we have just taken the second step towards manhood. if this were the place for it, i would try to show how the first impulses of the heart give rise to the first stirrings of conscience, and how from the feelings of love and hatred spring the first notions of good and evil. i would show that justice and kindness are no mere abstract terms, no mere moral conceptions framed by the understanding, but true affections of the heart enlightened by reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, unaided by conscience, we cannot establish any natural law, and that all natural right is a vain dream if it does not rest upon some instinctive need of the human heart. [footnote: the precept "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" has no true foundation but that of conscience and feeling; for what valid reason is there why i, being myself, should do what i would do if i were some one else, especially when i am morally certain i never shall find myself in exactly the same case; and who will answer for it that if i faithfully follow out this maxim, i shall get others to follow it with regard to me? the wicked takes advantage both of the uprightness of the just and of his own injustice; he will gladly have everybody just but himself. this bargain, whatever you may say, is not greatly to the advantage of the just. but if the enthusiasm of an overflowing heart identifies me with my fellow-creature, if i feel, so to speak, that i will not let him suffer lest i should suffer too, i care for him because i care for myself, and the reason of the precept is found in nature herself, which inspires me with the desire for my own welfare wherever i may be. from this i conclude that it is false to say that the precepts of natural law are based on reason only; they have a firmer and more solid foundation. the love of others springing from self-love, is the source of human justice. the whole of morality is summed up in the gospel in this summary of the law.] but i do not think it is my business at present to prepare treatises on metaphysics and morals, nor courses of study of any kind whatsoever; it is enough if i indicate the order and development of our feelings and our knowledge in relation to our growth. others will perhaps work out what i have here merely indicated. hitherto my emile has thought only of himself, so his first glance at his equals leads him to compare himself with them; and the first feeling excited by this comparison is the desire to be first. it is here that self-love is transformed into selfishness, and this is the starting point of all the passions which spring from selfishness. but to determine whether the passions by which his life will be governed shall be humane and gentle or harsh and cruel, whether they shall be the passions of benevolence and pity or those of envy and covetousness, we must know what he believes his place among men to be, and what sort of obstacles he expects to have to overcome in order to attain to the position he seeks. to guide him in this inquiry, after we have shown him men by means of the accidents common to the species, we must now show him them by means of their differences. this is the time for estimating inequality natural and civil, and for the scheme of the whole social order. society must be studied in the individual and the individual in society; those who desire to treat politics and morals apart from one another will never understand either. by confining ourselves at first to the primitive relations, we see how men should be influenced by them and what passions should spring from them; we see that it is in proportion to the development of these passions that a man's relations with others expand or contract. it is not so much strength of arm as moderation of spirit which makes men free and independent. the man whose wants are few is dependent on but few people, but those who constantly confound our vain desires with our bodily needs, those who have made these needs the basis of human society, are continually mistaking effects for causes, and they have only confused themselves by their own reasoning. since it is impossible in the state of nature that the difference between man and man should be great enough to make one dependent on another, there is in fact in this state of nature an actual and indestructible equality. in the civil state there is a vain and chimerical equality of right; the means intended for its maintenance, themselves serve to destroy it; and the power of the community, added to the power of the strongest for the oppression of the weak, disturbs the sort of equilibrium which nature has established between them. [footnote: the universal spirit of the laws of every country is always to take the part of the strong against the weak, and the part of him who has against him who has not; this defect is inevitable, and there is no exception to it.] from this first contradiction spring all the other contradictions between the real and the apparent, which are to be found in the civil order. the many will always be sacrificed to the few, the common weal to private interest; those specious words--justice and subordination--will always serve as the tools of violence and the weapons of injustice; hence it follows that the higher classes which claim to be useful to the rest are really only seeking their own welfare at the expense of others; from this we may judge how much consideration is due to them according to right and justice. it remains to be seen if the rank to which they have attained is more favourable to their own happiness to know what opinion each one of us should form with regard to his own lot. this is the study with which we are now concerned; but to do it thoroughly we must begin with a knowledge of the human heart. if it were only a question of showing young people man in his mask, there would be no need to point him out, and he would always be before their eyes; but since the mask is not the man, and since they must not be led away by its specious appearance, when you paint men for your scholar, paint them as they are, not that he may hate them, but that he may pity them and have no wish to be like them. in my opinion that is the most reasonable view a man can hold with regard to his fellow-men. with this object in view we must take the opposite way from that hitherto followed, and instruct the youth rather through the experience of others than through his own. if men deceive him he will hate them; but, if, while they treat him with respect, he sees them deceiving each other, he will pity them. "the spectacle of the world," said pythagoras, "is like the olympic games; some are buying and selling and think only of their gains; others take an active part and strive for glory; others, and these not the worst, are content to be lookers-on." i would have you so choose the company of a youth that he should think well of those among whom he lives, and i would have you so teach him to know the world that he should think ill of all that takes place in it. let him know that man is by nature good, let him feel it, let him judge his neighbour by himself; but let him see how men are depraved and perverted by society; let him find the source of all their vices in their preconceived opinions; let him be disposed to respect the individual, but to despise the multitude; let him see that all men wear almost the same mask, but let him also know that some faces are fairer than the mask that conceals them. it must be admitted that this method has its drawbacks, and it is not easy to carry it out; for if he becomes too soon engrossed in watching other people, if you train him to mark too closely the actions of others, you will make him spiteful and satirical, quick and decided in his judgments of others; he will find a hateful pleasure in seeking bad motives, and will fail to see the good even in that which is really good. he will, at least, get used to the sight of vice, he will behold the wicked without horror, just as we get used to seeing the wretched without pity. soon the perversity of mankind will be not so much a warning as an excuse; he will say, "man is made so," and he will have no wish to be different from the rest. but if you wish to teach him theoretically to make him acquainted, not only with the heart of man, but also with the application of the external causes which turn our inclinations into vices; when you thus transport him all at once from the objects of sense to the objects of reason, you employ a system of metaphysics which he is not in a position to understand; you fall back into the error, so carefully avoided hitherto, of giving him lessons which are like lessons, of substituting in his mind the experience and the authority of the master for his own experience and the development of his own reason. to remove these two obstacles at once, and to bring the human heart within his reach without risk of spoiling his own, i would show him men from afar, in other times or in other places, so that he may behold the scene but cannot take part in it. this is the time for history; with its help he will read the hearts of men without any lessons in philosophy; with its help he will view them as a mere spectator, dispassionate and without prejudice; he will view them as their judge, not as their accomplice or their accuser. to know men you must behold their actions. in society we hear them talk; they show their words and hide their deeds; but in history the veil is drawn aside, and they are judged by their deeds. their sayings even help us to understand them; for comparing what they say and what they do, we see not only what they are but what they would appear; the more they disguise themselves the more thoroughly they stand revealed. unluckily this study has its dangers, its drawbacks of several kinds. it is difficult to adopt a point of view which will enable one to judge one's fellow-creatures fairly. it is one of the chief defects of history to paint men's evil deeds rather than their good ones; it is revolutions and catastrophes that make history interesting; so long as a nation grows and prospers quietly in the tranquillity of a peaceful government, history says nothing; she only begins to speak of nations when, no longer able to be self-sufficing, they interfere with their neighbours' business, or allow their neighbours to interfere with their own; history only makes them famous when they are on the downward path; all our histories begin where they ought to end. we have very accurate accounts of declining nations; what we lack is the history of those nations which are multiplying; they are so happy and so good that history has nothing to tell us of them; and we see indeed in our own times that the most successful governments are least talked of. we only hear what is bad; the good is scarcely mentioned. only the wicked become famous, the good are forgotten or laughed to scorn, and thus history, like philosophy, is for ever slandering mankind. moreover, it is inevitable that the facts described in history should not give an exact picture of what really happened; they are transformed in the brain of the historian, they are moulded by his interests and coloured by his prejudices. who can place the reader precisely in a position to see the event as it really happened? ignorance or partiality disguises everything. what a different impression may be given merely by expanding or contracting the circumstances of the case without altering a single historical incident. the same object may be seen from several points of view, and it will hardly seem the same thing, yet there has been no change except in the eye that beholds it. do you indeed do honour to truth when what you tell me is a genuine fact, but you make it appear something quite different? a tree more or less, a rock to the right or to the left, a cloud of dust raised by the wind, how often have these decided the result of a battle without any one knowing it? does that prevent history from telling you the cause of defeat or victory with as much assurance as if she had been on the spot? but what are the facts to me, while i am ignorant of their causes, and what lessons can i draw from an event, whose true cause is unknown to me? the historian indeed gives me a reason, but he invents it; and criticism itself, of which we hear so much, is only the art of guessing, the art of choosing from among several lies, the lie that is most like truth. have you ever read cleopatra or cassandra or any books of the kind? the author selects some well-known event, he then adapts it to his purpose, adorns it with details of his own invention, with people who never existed, with imaginary portraits; thus he piles fiction on fiction to lend a charm to his story. i see little difference between such romances and your histories, unless it is that the novelist draws more on his own imagination, while the historian slavishly copies what another has imagined; i will also admit, if you please, that the novelist has some moral purpose good or bad, about which the historian scarcely concerns himself. you will tell me that accuracy in history is of less interest than a true picture of men and manners; provided the human heart is truly portrayed, it matters little that events should be accurately recorded; for after all you say, what does it matter to us what happened two thousand years ago? you are right if the portraits are indeed truly given according to nature; but if the model is to be found for the most part in the historian's imagination, are you not falling into the very error you intended to avoid, and surrendering to the authority of the historian what you would not yield to the authority of the teacher? if my pupil is merely to see fancy pictures, i would rather draw them myself; they will, at least, be better suited to him. the worst historians for a youth are those who give their opinions. facts! facts! and let him decide for himself; this is how he will learn to know mankind. if he is always directed by the opinion of the author, he is only seeing through the eyes of another person, and when those ayes are no longer at his disposal he can see nothing. i leave modern history on one side, not only because it has no character and all our people are alike, but because our historians, wholly taken up with effect, think of nothing but highly coloured portraits, which often represent nothing. [footnote: take, for instance, guicciardini, streda, solis, machiavelli, and sometimes even de thou himself. vertot is almost the only one who knows how to describe without giving fancy portraits.] the old historians generally give fewer portraits and bring more intelligence and common-sense to their judgments; but even among them there is plenty of scope for choice, and you must not begin with the wisest but with the simplest. i would not put polybius or sallust into the hands of a youth; tacitus is the author of the old, young men cannot understand him; you must learn to see in human actions the simplest features of the heart of man before you try to sound its depths. you must be able to read facts clearly before you begin to study maxims. philosophy in the form of maxims is only fit for the experienced. youth should never deal with the general, all its teaching should deal with individual instances. to my mind thucydides is the true model of historians. he relates facts without giving his opinion; but he omits no circumstance adapted to make us judge for ourselves. he puts everything that he relates before his reader; far from interposing between the facts and the readers, he conceals himself; we seem not to read but to see. unfortunately he speaks of nothing but war, and in his stories we only see the least instructive part of the world, that is to say the battles. the virtues and defects of the retreat of the ten thousand and the commentaries of caesar are almost the same. the kindly herodotus, without portraits, without maxims, yet flowing, simple, full of details calculated to delight and interest in the highest degree, would be perhaps the best historian if these very details did not often degenerate into childish folly, better adapted to spoil the taste of youth than to form it; we need discretion before we can read him. i say nothing of livy, his turn will come; but he is a statesman, a rhetorician, he is everything which is unsuitable for a youth. history in general is lacking because it only takes note of striking and clearly marked facts which may be fixed by names, places, and dates; but the slow evolution of these facts, which cannot be definitely noted in this way, still remains unknown. we often find in some battle, lost or won, the ostensible cause of a revolution which was inevitable before this battle took place. war only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes, which few historians can perceive. the philosophic spirit has turned the thoughts of many of the historians of our times in this direction; but i doubt whether truth has profited by their labours. the rage for systems has got possession of all alike, no one seeks to see things as they are, but only as they agree with his system. add to all these considerations the fact that history shows us actions rather than men, because she only seizes men at certain chosen times in full dress; she only portrays the statesman when he is prepared to be seen; she does not follow him to his home, to his study, among his family and his friends; she only shows him in state; it is his clothes rather than himself that she describes. i would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with reading the lives of individuals; for then the man hides himself in vain, the historian follows him everywhere; he never gives him a moment's grace nor any corner where he can escape the piercing eye of the spectator; and when he thinks he is concealing himself, then it is that the writer shows him up most plainly. "those who write lives," says montaigne, "in so far as they delight more in ideas than in events, more in that which comes from within than in that which comes from without, these are the writers i prefer; for this reason plutarch is in every way the man for me." it is true that the genius of men in groups or nations is very different from the character of the individual man, and that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the human heart if we do not also examine it in crowds; but it is none the less true that to judge of men we must study the individual man, and that he who had a perfect knowledge of the inclinations of each individual might foresee all their combined effects in the body of the nation. we must go back again to the ancients, for the reasons already stated, and also because all the details common and familiar, but true and characteristic, are banished by modern stylists, so that men are as much tricked out by our modern authors in their private life as in public. propriety, no less strict in literature than in life, no longer permits us to say anything in public which we might not do in public; and as we may only show the man dressed up for his part, we never see a man in our books any more than we do on the stage. the lives of kings may be written a hundred times, but to no purpose; we shall never have another suetonius. the excellence of plutarch consists in these very details which we are no longer permitted to describe. with inimitable grace he paints the great man in little things; and he is so happy in the choice of his instances that a word, a smile, a gesture, will often suffice to indicate the nature of his hero. with a jest hannibal cheers his frightened soldiers, and leads them laughing to the battle which will lay italy at his feet; agesilaus riding on a stick makes me love the conqueror of the great king; caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his friends unconsciously betrays the traitor who professed that he only wished to be pompey's equal. alexander swallows a draught without a word--it is the finest moment in his life; aristides writes his own name on the shell and so justifies his title; philopoemen, his mantle laid aside, chops firewood in the kitchen of his host. this is the true art of portraiture. our disposition does not show itself in our features, nor our character in our great deeds; it is trifles that show what we really are. what is done in public is either too commonplace or too artificial, and our modern authors are almost too grand to tell us anything else. m. de turenne was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the last century. they have had the courage to make his life interesting by the little details which make us know and love him; but how many details have they felt obliged to omit which might have made us know and love him better still? i will only quote one which i have on good authority, one which plutarch would never have omitted, and one which ramsai would never have inserted had he been acquainted with it. on a hot summer's day viscount turenne in a little white vest and nightcap was standing at the window of his antechamber; one of his men came up and, misled by the dress, took him for one of the kitchen lads whom he knew. he crept up behind him and smacked him with no light hand. the man he struck turned round hastily. the valet saw it was his master and trembled at the sight of his face. he fell on his knees in desperation. "sir, i thought it was george." "well, even if it was george," exclaimed turenne rubbing the injured part, "you need not have struck so hard." you do not dare to say this, you miserable writers! remain for ever without humanity and without feeling; steel your hard hearts in your vile propriety, make yourselves contemptible through your high-mightiness. but as for you, dear youth, when you read this anecdote, when you are touched by all the kindliness displayed even on the impulse of the moment, read also the littleness of this great man when it was a question of his name and birth. remember it was this very turenne who always professed to yield precedence to his nephew, so that all men might see that this child was the head of a royal house. look on this picture and on that, love nature, despise popular prejudice, and know the man as he was. there are few people able to realise what an effect such reading, carefully directed, will have upon the unspoilt mind of a youth. weighed down by books from our earliest childhood, accustomed to read without thinking, what we read strikes us even less, because we already bear in ourselves the passions and prejudices with which history and the lives of men are filled; all that they do strikes us as only natural, for we ourselves are unnatural and we judge others by ourselves. but imagine my emile, who has been carefully guarded for eighteen years with the sole object of preserving a right judgment and a healthy heart, imagine him when the curtain goes up casting his eyes for the first time upon the world's stage; or rather picture him behind the scenes watching the actors don their costumes, and counting the cords and pulleys which deceive with their feigned shows the eyes of the spectators. his first surprise will soon give place to feelings of shame and scorn of his fellow-man; he will be indignant at the sight of the whole human race deceiving itself and stooping to this childish folly; he will grieve to see his brothers tearing each other limb from limb for a mere dream, and transforming themselves into wild beasts because they could not be content to be men. given the natural disposition of the pupil, there is no doubt that if the master exercises any sort of prudence or discretion in his choice of reading, however little he may put him in the way of reflecting on the subject-matter, this exercise will serve as a course in practical philosophy, a philosophy better understood and more thoroughly mastered than all the empty speculations with which the brains of lads are muddled in our schools. after following the romantic schemes of pyrrhus, cineas asks him what real good he would gain by the conquest of the world, which he can never enjoy without such great sufferings; this only arouses in us a passing interest as a smart saying; but emile will think it a very wise thought, one which had already occurred to himself, and one which he will never forget, because there is no hostile prejudice in his mind to prevent it sinking in. when he reads more of the life of this madman, he will find that all his great plans resulted in his death at the hands of a woman, and instead of admiring this pinchbeck heroism, what will he see in the exploits of this great captain and the schemes of this great statesman but so many steps towards that unlucky tile which was to bring life and schemes alike to a shameful death? all conquerors have not been killed; all usurpers have not failed in their plans; to minds imbued with vulgar prejudices many of them will seem happy, but he who looks below the surface and reckons men's happiness by the condition of their hearts will perceive their wretchedness even in the midst of their successes; he will see them panting after advancement and never attaining their prize, he will find them like those inexperienced travellers among the alps, who think that every height they see is the last, who reach its summit only to find to their disappointment there are loftier peaks beyond. augustus, when he had subdued his fellow-citizens and destroyed his rivals, reigned for forty years over the greatest empire that ever existed; but all this vast power could not hinder him from beating his head against the walls, and filling his palace with his groans as he cried to varus to restore his slaughtered legions. if he had conquered all his foes what good would his empty triumphs have done him, when troubles of every kind beset his path, when his life was threatened by his dearest friends, and when he had to mourn the disgrace or death of all near and dear to him? the wretched man desired to rule the world and failed to rule his own household. what was the result of this neglect? he beheld his nephew, his adopted child, his son-in-law, perish in the flower of youth, his grandson reduced to eat the stuffing of his mattress to prolong his wretched existence for a few hours; his daughter and his granddaughter, after they had covered him with infamy, died, the one of hunger and want on a desert island, the other in prison by the hand of a common archer. he himself, the last survivor of his unhappy house, found himself compelled by his own wife to acknowledge a monster as his heir. such was the fate of the master of the world, so famous for his glory and his good fortune. i cannot believe that any one of those who admire his glory and fortune would accept them at the same price. i have taken ambition as my example, but the play of every human passion offers similar lessons to any one who will study history to make himself wise and good at the expense of those who went before. the time is drawing near when the teaching of the life of anthony will appeal more forcibly to the youth than the life of augustus. emile will scarcely know where he is among the many strange sights in his new studies; but he will know beforehand how to avoid the illusion of passions before they arise, and seeing how in all ages they have blinded men's eyes, he will be forewarned of the way in which they may one day blind his own should he abandon himself to them. [footnote: it is always prejudice which stirs up passion in our heart. he who only sees what really exists and only values what he knows, rarely becomes angry. the errors of our judgment produce the warmth of our desires.] these lessons, i know, are unsuited to him, perhaps at need they may prove scanty and ill-timed; but remember they are not the lessons i wished to draw from this study. to begin with, i had quite another end in view; and indeed, if this purpose is unfulfilled, the teacher will be to blame. remember that, as soon as selfishness has developed, the self in its relations to others is always with us, and the youth never observes others without coming back to himself and comparing himself with them. from the way young men are taught to study history i see that they are transformed, so to speak, into the people they behold, that you strive to make a cicero, a trajan, or an alexander of them, to discourage them when they are themselves again, to make every one regret that he is merely himself. there are certain advantages in this plan which i do not deny; but, so far as emile is concerned, should it happen at any time when he is making these comparisons that he wishes to be any one but himself--were it socrates or cato--i have failed entirely; he who begins to regard himself as a stranger will soon forget himself altogether. it is not philosophers who know most about men; they only view them through the preconceived ideas of philosophy, and i know no one so prejudiced as philosophers. a savage would judge us more sanely. the philosopher is aware of his own vices, he is indignant at ours, and he says to himself, "we are all bad alike;" the savage beholds us unmoved and says, "you are mad." he is right, for no one does evil for evil's sake. my pupil is that savage, with this difference: emile has thought more, he has compared ideas, seen our errors at close quarters, he is more on his guard against himself, and only judges of what he knows. it is our own passions that excite us against the passions of others; it is our self-interest which makes us hate the wicked; if they did us no harm we should pity rather than hate them. we should readily forgive their vices if we could perceive how their own heart punishes those vices. we are aware of the offence, but we do not see the punishment; the advantages are plain, the penalty is hidden. the man who thinks he is enjoying the fruits of his vices is no less tormented by them than if they had not been successful; the object is different, the anxiety is the same; in vain he displays his good fortune and hides his heart; in spite of himself his conduct betrays him; but to discern this, our own heart must be utterly unlike his. we are led astray by those passions which we share; we are disgusted by those that militate against our own interests; and with a want of logic due to these very passions, we blame in others what we fain would imitate. aversion and self-deception are inevitable when we are forced to endure at another's hands what we ourselves would do in his place. what then is required for the proper study of men? a great wish to know men, great impartiality of judgment, a heart sufficiently sensitive to understand every human passion, and calm enough to be free from passion. if there is any time in our life when this study is likely to be appreciated, it is this that i have chosen for emile; before this time men would have been strangers to him; later on he would have been like them. convention, the effects of which he already perceives, has not yet made him its slave, the passions, whose consequences he realises, have not yet stirred his heart. he is a man; he takes an interest in his brethren; he is a just man and he judges his peers. now it is certain that if he judges them rightly he will not want to change places with any one of them, for the goal of all their anxious efforts is the result of prejudices which he does not share, and that goal seems to him a mere dream. for his own part, he has all he wants within his reach. how should he be dependent on any one when he is self-sufficing and free from prejudice? strong arms, good health, [footnote: i think i may fairly reckon health and strength among the advantages he has obtained by his education, or rather among the gifts of nature which his education has preserved for him.] moderation, few needs, together with the means to satisfy those needs, are his. he has been brought up in complete liberty and servitude is the greatest ill he understands. he pities these miserable kings, the slaves of all who obey them; he pities these false prophets fettered by their empty fame; he pities these rich fools, martyrs to their own pomp; he pities these ostentatious voluptuaries, who spend their life in deadly dullness that they may seem to enjoy its pleasures. he would pity the very foe who harmed him, for he would discern his wretchedness beneath his cloak of spite. he would say to himself, "this man has yielded to his desire to hurt me, and this need of his places him at my mercy." one step more and our goal is attained. selfishness is a dangerous tool though a useful one; it often wounds the hand that uses it, and it rarely does good unmixed with evil. when emile considers his place among men, when he finds himself so fortunately situated, he will be tempted to give credit to his own reason for the work of yours, and to attribute to his own deserts what is really the result of his good fortune. he will say to himself, "i am wise and other men are fools." he will pity and despise them and will congratulate himself all the more heartily; and as he knows he is happier than they, he will think his deserts are greater. this is the fault we have most to fear, for it is the most difficult to eradicate. if he remained in this state of mind, he would have profited little by all our care; and if i had to choose, i hardly know whether i would not rather choose the illusions of prejudice than those of pride. great men are under no illusion with respect to their superiority; they see it and know it, but they are none the less modest. the more they have, the better they know what they lack. they are less vain of their superiority over us than ashamed by the consciousness of their weakness, and among the good things they really possess, they are too wise to pride themselves on a gift which is none of their getting. the good man may be proud of his virtue for it is his own, but what cause for pride has the man of intellect? what has racine done that he is not pradon, and boileau that he is not cotin? the circumstances with which we are concerned are quite different. let us keep to the common level. i assumed that my pupil had neither surpassing genius nor a defective understanding. i chose him of an ordinary mind to show what education could do for man. exceptions defy all rules. if, therefore, as a result of my care, emile prefers his way of living, seeing, and feeling to that of others, he is right; but if he thinks because of this that he is nobler and better born than they, he is wrong; he is deceiving himself; he must be undeceived, or rather let us prevent the mistake, lest it be too late to correct it. provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of any folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all; when it first appears we can at least prevent its further growth. but do not on this account waste your breath on empty arguments to prove to the youth that he is like other men and subject to the same weaknesses. make him feel it or he will never know it. this is another instance of an exception to my own rules; i must voluntarily expose my pupil to every accident which may convince him that he is no wiser than we. the adventure with the conjurer will be repeated again and again in different ways; i shall let flatterers take advantage of him; if rash comrades draw him into some perilous adventure, i will let him run the risk; if he falls into the hands of sharpers at the card-table, i will abandon him to them as their dupe.[footnote: moreover our pupil will be little tempted by this snare; he has so many amusements about him, he has never been bored in his life, and he scarcely knows the use of money. as children have been led by these two motives, self-interest and vanity, rogues and courtesans use the same means to get hold of them later. when you see their greediness encouraged by prizes and rewards, when you find their public performances at ten years old applauded at school or college, you see too how at twenty they will be induced to leave their purse in a gambling hell and their health in a worse place. you may safely wager that the sharpest boy in the class will become the greatest gambler and debauchee. now the means which have not been employed in childhood have not the same effect in youth. but we must bear in mind my constant plan and take the thing at its worst. first i try to prevent the vice; then i assume its existence in order to correct it.] i will let them flatter him, pluck him, and rob him; and when having sucked him dry they turn and mock him, i will even thank them to his face for the lessons they have been good enough to give him. the only snares from which i will guard him with my utmost care are the wiles of wanton women. the only precaution i shall take will be to share all the dangers i let him run, and all the insults i let him receive. i will bear everything in silence, without a murmur or reproach, without a word to him, and be sure that if this wise conduct is faithfully adhered to, what he sees me endure on his account will make more impression on his heart than what he himself suffers. i cannot refrain at this point from drawing attention to the sham dignity of tutors, who foolishly pretend to be wise, who discourage their pupils by always professing to treat them as children, and by emphasising the difference between themselves and their scholars in everything they do. far from damping their youthful spirits in this fashion, spare no effort to stimulate their courage; that they may become your equals, treat them as such already, and if they cannot rise to your level, do not scruple to come down to theirs without being ashamed of it. remember that your honour is no longer in your own keeping but in your pupil's. share his faults that you may correct them, bear his disgrace that you may wipe it out; follow the example of that brave roman who, unable to rally his fleeing soldiers, placed himself at their head, exclaiming, "they do not flee, they follow their captain!" did this dishonour him? not so; by sacrificing his glory he increased it. the power of duty, the beauty of virtue, compel our respect in spite of all our foolish prejudices. if i received a blow in the course of my duties to emile, far from avenging it i would boast of it; and i doubt whether there is in the whole world a man so vile as to respect me any the less on this account. i do not intend the pupil to suppose his master to be as ignorant, or as liable to be led astray, as he is himself. this idea is all very well for a child who can neither see nor compare things, who thinks everything is within his reach, and only bestows his confidence on those who know how to come down to his level. but a youth of emile's age and sense is no longer so foolish as to make this mistake, and it would not be desirable that he should. the confidence he ought to have in his tutor is of another kind; it should rest on the authority of reason, and on superior knowledge, advantages which the young man is capable of appreciating while he perceives how useful they are to himself. long experience has convinced him that his tutor loves him, that he is a wise and good man who desires his happiness and knows how to procure it. he ought to know that it is to his own advantage to listen to his advice. but if the master lets himself be taken in like the disciple, he will lose his right to expect deference from him, and to give him instruction. still less should the pupil suppose that his master is purposely letting him fall into snares or preparing pitfalls for his inexperience. how can we avoid these two difficulties? choose the best and most natural means; be frank and straightforward like himself; warn him of the dangers to which he is exposed, point them out plainly and sensibly, without exaggeration, without temper, without pedantic display, and above all without giving your opinions in the form of orders, until they have become such, and until this imperious tone is absolutely necessary. should he still be obstinate as he often will be, leave him free to follow his own choice, follow him, copy his example, and that cheerfully and frankly; if possible fling yourself into things, amuse yourself as much as he does. if the consequences become too serious, you are at hand to prevent them; and yet when this young man has beheld your foresight and your kindliness, will he not be at once struck by the one and touched by the other? all his faults are but so many hands with which he himself provides you to restrain him at need. now under these circumstances the great art of the master consists in controlling events and directing his exhortations so that he may know beforehand when the youth will give in, and when he will refuse to do so, so that all around him he may encompass him with the lessons of experience, and yet never let him run too great a risk. warn him of his faults before he commits them; do not blame him when once they are committed; you would only stir his self-love to mutiny. we learn nothing from a lesson we detest. i know nothing more foolish than the phrase, "i told you so." the best way to make him remember what you told him is to seem to have forgotten it. go further than this, and when you find him ashamed of having refused to believe you, gently smooth away the shame with kindly words. he will indeed hold you dear when he sees how you forget yourself on his account, and how you console him instead of reproaching him. but if you increase his annoyance by your reproaches he will hate you, and will make it a rule never to heed you, as if to show you that he does not agree with you as to the value of your opinion. the turn you give to your consolation may itself be a lesson to him, and all the more because he does not suspect it. when you tell him, for example, that many other people have made the same mistakes, this is not what he was expecting; you are administering correction under the guise of pity; for when one thinks oneself better than other people it is a very mortifying excuse to console oneself by their example; it means that we must realise that the most we can say is that they are no better than we. the time of faults is the time for fables. when we blame the guilty under the cover of a story we instruct without offending him; and he then understands that the story is not untrue by means of the truth he finds in its application to himself. the child who has never been deceived by flattery understands nothing of the fable i recently examined; but the rash youth who has just become the dupe of a flatterer perceives only too readily that the crow was a fool. thus he acquires a maxim from the fact, and the experience he would soon have forgotten is engraved on his mind by means of the fable. there is no knowledge of morals which cannot be acquired through our own experience or that of others. when there is danger, instead of letting him try the experiment himself, we have recourse to history. when the risk is comparatively slight, it is just as well that the youth should be exposed to it; then by means of the apologue the special cases with which the young man is now acquainted are transformed into maxims. it is not, however, my intention that these maxims should be explained, nor even formulated. nothing is so foolish and unwise as the moral at the end of most of the fables; as if the moral was not, or ought not to be so clear in the fable itself that the reader cannot fail to perceive it. why then add the moral at the end, and go deprive him of the pleasure of discovering it for himself. the art of teaching consists in making the pupil wish to learn. but if the pupil is to wish to learn, his mind must not remain in such a passive state with regard to what you tell him that there is really nothing for him to do but listen to you. the master's vanity must always give way to the scholars; he must be able to say, i understand, i see it, i am getting at it, i am learning something. one of the things which makes the pantaloon in the italian comedies so wearisome is the pains taken by him to explain to the audience the platitudes they understand only too well already. we must always be intelligible, but we need not say all there is to be said. if you talk much you will say little, for at last no one will listen to you. what is the sense of the four lines at the end of la fontaine's fable of the frog who puffed herself up. is he afraid we should not understand it? does this great painter need to write the names beneath the things he has painted? his morals, far from generalising, restrict the lesson to some extent to the examples given, and prevent our applying them to others. before i put the fables of this inimitable author into the hands of a youth, i should like to cut out all the conclusions with which he strives to explain what he has just said so clearly and pleasantly. if your pupil does not understand the fable without the explanation, he will not understand it with it. moreover, the fables would require to be arranged in a more didactic order, one more in agreement with the feelings and knowledge of the young adolescent. can you imagine anything so foolish as to follow the mere numerical order of the book without regard to our requirements or our opportunities. first the grasshopper, then the crow, then the frog, then the two mules, etc. i am sick of these two mules; i remember seeing a child who was being educated for finance; they never let him alone, but were always insisting on the profession he was to follow; they made him read this fable, learn it, say it, repeat it again and again without finding in it the slightest argument against his future calling. not only have i never found children make any real use of the fables they learn, but i have never found anybody who took the trouble to see that they made such a use of them. the study claims to be instruction in morals; but the real aim of mother and child is nothing but to set a whole party watching the child while he recites his fables; when he is too old to recite them and old enough to make use of them, they are altogether forgotten. only men, i repeat, can learn from fables, and emile is now old enough to begin. i do not mean to tell you everything, so i only indicate the paths which diverge from the right way, so that you may know how to avoid them. if you follow the road i have marked out for you, i think your pupil will buy his knowledge of mankind and his knowledge of himself in the cheapest market; you will enable him to behold the tricks of fortune without envying the lot of her favourites, and to be content with himself without thinking himself better than others. you have begun by making him an actor that he may learn to be one of the audience; you must continue your task, for from the theatre things are what they seem, from the stage they seem what they are. for the general effect we must get a distant view, for the details we must observe more closely. but how can a young man take part in the business of life? what right has he to be initiated into its dark secrets? his interests are confined within the limits of his own pleasures, he has no power over others, it is much the same as if he had no power at all. man is the cheapest commodity on the market, and among all our important rights of property, the rights of the individual are always considered last of all. when i see the studies of young men at the period of their greatest activity confined to purely speculative matters, while later on they are suddenly plunged, without any sort of experience, into the world of men and affairs, it strikes me as contrary alike to reason and to nature, and i cease to be surprised that so few men know what to do. how strange a choice to teach us so many useless things, while the art of doing is never touched upon! they profess to fit us for society, and we are taught as if each of us were to live a life of contemplation in a solitary cell, or to discuss theories with persons whom they did not concern. you think you are teaching your scholars how to live, and you teach them certain bodily contortions and certain forms of words without meaning. i, too, have taught emile how to live; for i have taught him to enjoy his own society and, more than that, to earn his own bread. but this is not enough. to live in the world he must know how to get on with other people, he must know what forces move them, he must calculate the action and re-action of self-interest in civil society, he must estimate the results so accurately that he will rarely fail in his undertakings, or he will at least have tried in the best possible way. the law does not allow young people to manage their own affairs nor to dispose of their own property; but what would be the use of these precautions if they never gained any experience until they were of age. they would have gained nothing by the delay, and would have no more experience at five-and-twenty than at fifteen. no doubt we must take precautions, so that a youth, blinded by ignorance or misled by passion, may not hurt himself; but at any age there are opportunities when deeds of kindness and of care for the weak may be performed under the direction of a wise man, on behalf of the unfortunate who need help. mothers and nurses grow fond of children because of the care they lavish on them; the practice of social virtues touches the very heart with the love of humanity; by doing good we become good; and i know no surer way to this end. keep your pupil busy with the good deeds that are within his power, let the cause of the poor be his own, let him help them not merely with his money, but with his service; let him work for them, protect them, let his person and his time be at their disposal; let him be their agent; he will never all his life long have a more honourable office. how many of the oppressed, who have never got a hearing, will obtain justice when he demands it for them with that courage and firmness which the practice of virtue inspires; when he makes his way into the presence of the rich and great, when he goes, if need be, to the footstool of the king himself, to plead the cause of the wretched, the cause of those who find all doors closed to them by their poverty, those who are so afraid of being punished for their misfortunes that they do not dare to complain? but shall we make of emile a knight-errant, a redresser of wrongs, a paladin? shall he thrust himself into public life, play the sage and the defender of the laws before the great, before the magistrates, before the king? shall he lay petitions before the judges and plead in the law courts? that i cannot say. the nature of things is not changed by terms of mockery and scorn. he will do all that he knows to be useful and good. he will do nothing more, and he knows that nothing is useful and good for him which is unbefitting his age. he knows that his first duty is to himself; that young men should distrust themselves; that they should act circumspectly; that they should show respect to those older than themselves, reticence and discretion in talking without cause, modesty in things indifferent, but courage in well doing, and boldness to speak the truth. such were those illustrious romans who, having been admitted into public life, spent their days in bringing criminals to justice and in protecting the innocent, without any motives beyond those of learning, and of the furtherance of justice and of the protection of right conduct. emile is not fond of noise or quarrelling, not only among men, but among animals. [footnote: "but what will he do if any one seeks a quarrel with him?" my answer is that no one will ever quarrel with him, he will never lend himself to such a thing. but, indeed, you continue, who can be safe from a blow, or an insult from a bully, a drunkard, a bravo, who for the joy of killing his man begins by dishonouring him? that is another matter. the life and honour of the citizens should not be at the mercy of a bully, a drunkard, or a bravo, and one can no more insure oneself against such an accident than against a falling tile. a blow given, or a lie in the teeth, if he submit to them, have social consequences which no wisdom can prevent and no tribunal can avenge. the weakness of the laws, therefore, so far restores a man's independence; he is the sole magistrate and judge between the offender and himself, the sole interpreter and administrator of natural law. justice is his due, and he alone can obtain it, and in such a case there is no government on earth so foolish as to punish him for so doing. i do not say he must fight; that is absurd; i say justice is his due, and he alone can dispense it. if i were king, i promise you that in my kingdom no one would ever strike a man or call him a liar, and yet i would do without all those useless laws against duels; the means are simple and require no law courts. however that may be, emile knows what is due to himself in such a case, and the example due from him to the safety of men of honour. the strongest of men cannot prevent insult, but he can take good care that his adversary has no opportunity to boast of that insult.] he will never set two dogs to fight, he will never set a dog to chase a cat. this peaceful spirit is one of the results of his education, which has never stimulated self-love or a high opinion of himself, and so has not encouraged him to seek his pleasure in domination and in the sufferings of others. the sight of suffering makes him suffer too; this is a natural feeling. it is one of the after effects of vanity that hardens a young man and makes him take a delight in seeing the torments of a living and feeling creature; it makes him consider himself beyond the reach of similar sufferings through his superior wisdom or virtue. he who is beyond the reach of vanity cannot fall into the vice which results from vanity. so emile loves peace. he is delighted at the sight of happiness, and if he can help to bring it about, this is an additional reason for sharing it. i do not assume that when he sees the unhappy he will merely feel for them that barren and cruel pity which is content to pity the ills it can heal. his kindness is active and teaches him much he would have learnt far more slowly, or he would never have learnt at all, if his heart had been harder. if he finds his comrades at strife, he tries to reconcile them; if he sees the afflicted, he inquires as to the cause of their sufferings; if he meets two men who hate each other, he wants to know the reason of their enmity; if he finds one who is down-trodden groaning under the oppression of the rich and powerful, he tries to discover by what means he can counteract this oppression, and in the interest he takes with regard to all these unhappy persons, the means of removing their sufferings are never out of his sight. what use shall we make of this disposition so that it may re-act in a way suited to his age? let us direct his efforts and his knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them. i am never weary of repeating: let all the lessons of young people take the form of doing rather than talking; let them learn nothing from books which they can learn from experience. how absurd to attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing to say, to expect to make them feel, at their school desks, the vigour of the language of passion and all the force of the arts of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade! all the rules of rhetoric are mere waste of words to those who do not know how to use them for their own purposes. how does it concern a schoolboy to know how hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross the alps? if instead of these grand speeches you showed him how to induce his prefect to give him a holiday, you may be sure he would pay more attention to your rules. if i wanted to teach rhetoric to a youth whose passions were as yet undeveloped, i would draw his attention continually to things that would stir his passions, and i would discuss with him how he should talk to people so as to get them to regard his wishes favourably. but emile is not in a condition so favourable to the art of oratory. concerned mainly with his physical well-being, he has less need of others than they of him; and having nothing to ask of others on his own account, what he wants to persuade them to do does not affect him sufficiently to awake any very strong feeling. from this it follows that his language will be on the whole simple and literal. he usually speaks to the point and only to make himself understood. he is not sententious, for he has not learnt to generalise; he does not speak in figures, for he is rarely impassioned. yet this is not because he is altogether cold and phlegmatic, neither his age, his character, nor his tastes permit of this. in the fire of adolescence the life-giving spirits, retained in the blood and distilled again and again, inspire his young heart with a warmth which glows in his eye, a warmth which is felt in his words and perceived in his actions. the lofty feeling with which he is inspired gives him strength and nobility; imbued with tender love for mankind his words betray the thoughts of his heart; i know not how it is, but there is more charm in his open-hearted generosity than in the artificial eloquence of others; or rather this eloquence of his is the only true eloquence, for he has only to show what he feels to make others share his feelings. the more i think of it the more convinced i am that by thus translating our kindly impulses into action, by drawing from our good or ill success conclusions as to their cause, we shall find that there is little useful knowledge that cannot be imparted to a youth; and that together with such true learning as may be got at college he will learn a science of more importance than all the rest together, the application of what he has learned to the purposes of life. taking such an interest in his fellow-creatures, it is impossible that he should fail to learn very quickly how to note and weigh their actions, their tastes, their pleasures, and to estimate generally at their true value what may increase or diminish the happiness of men; he should do this better than those who care for nobody and never do anything for any one. the feelings of those who are always occupied with their own concerns are too keenly affected for them to judge wisely of things. they consider everything as it affects themselves, they form their ideas of good and ill solely on their own experience, their minds are filled with all sorts of absurd prejudices, and anything which affects their own advantage ever so little, seems an upheaval of the universe. extend self-love to others and it is transformed into virtue, a virtue which has its root in the heart of every one of us. the less the object of our care is directly dependent on ourselves, the less we have to fear from the illusion of self-interest; the more general this interest becomes, the juster it is; and the love of the human race is nothing but the love of justice within us. if therefore we desire emile to be a lover of truth, if we desire that he should indeed perceive it, let us keep him far from self-interest in all his business. the more care he bestows upon the happiness of others the wiser and better he is, and the fewer mistakes he will make between good and evil; but never allow him any blind preference founded merely on personal predilection or unfair prejudice. why should he harm one person to serve another? what does it matter to him who has the greater share of happiness, providing he promotes the happiness of all? apart from self-interest this care for the general well-being is the first concern of the wise man, for each of us forms part of the human race and not part of any individual member of that race. to prevent pity degenerating into weakness we must generalise it and extend it to mankind. then we only yield to it when it is in accordance with justice, since justice is of all the virtues that which contributes most to the common good. reason and self-love compel us to love mankind even more than our neighbour, and to pity the wicked is to be very cruel to other men. moreover, you must bear in mind that all these means employed to project my pupil beyond himself have also a distinct relation to himself; since they not only cause him inward delight, but i am also endeavouring to instruct him, while i am making him kindly disposed towards others. first i showed the means employed, now i will show the result. what wide prospects do i perceive unfolding themselves before his mind! what noble feelings stifle the lesser passions in his heart! what clearness of judgment, what accuracy in reasoning, do i see developing from the inclinations we have cultivated, from the experience which concentrates the desires of a great heart within the narrow bounds of possibility, so that a man superior to others can come down to their level if he cannot raise them to his own! true principles of justice, true types of beauty, all moral relations between man and man, all ideas of order, these are engraved on his understanding; he sees the right place for everything and the causes which drive it from that place; he sees what may do good, and what hinders it. without having felt the passions of mankind, he knows the illusions they produce and their mode of action. i proceed along the path which the force of circumstances compels me to tread, but i do not insist that my readers shall follow me. long ago they have made up their minds that i am wandering in the land of chimeras, while for my part i think they are dwelling in the country of prejudice. when i wander so far from popular beliefs i do not cease to bear them in mind; i examine them, i consider them, not that i may follow them or shun them, but that i may weigh them in the balance of reason. whenever reason compels me to abandon these popular beliefs, i know by experience that my readers will not follow my example; i know that they will persist in refusing to go beyond what they can see, and that they will take the youth i am describing for the creation of my fanciful imagination, merely because he is unlike the youths with whom they compare him; they forget that he must needs be different, because he has been brought up in a totally different fashion; he has been influenced by wholly different feelings, instructed in a wholly different manner, so that it would be far stranger if he were like your pupils than if he were what i have supposed. he is a man of nature's making, not man's. no wonder men find him strange. when i began this work i took for granted nothing but what could be observed as readily by others as by myself; for our starting-point, the birth of man, is the same for all; but the further we go, while i am seeking to cultivate nature and you are seeking to deprave it, the further apart we find ourselves. at six years old my pupil was not so very unlike yours, whom you had not yet had time to disfigure; now there is nothing in common between them; and when they reach the age of manhood, which is now approaching, they will show themselves utterly different from each other, unless all my pains have been thrown away. there may not be so very great a difference in the amount of knowledge they possess, but there is all the difference in the world in the kind of knowledge. you are amazed to find that the one has noble sentiments of which the others have not the smallest germ, but remember that the latter are already philosophers and theologians while emile does not even know what is meant by a philosopher and has scarcely heard the name of god. but if you come and tell me, "there are no such young men, young people are not made that way; they have this passion or that, they do this or that," it is as if you denied that a pear tree could ever be a tall tree because the pear trees in our gardens are all dwarfs. i beg these critics who are so ready with their blame to consider that i am as well acquainted as they are with everything they say, that i have probably given more thought to it, and that, as i have no private end to serve in getting them to agree with me, i have a right to demand that they should at least take time to find out where i am mistaken. let them thoroughly examine the nature of man, let them follow the earliest growth of the heart in any given circumstances, so as to see what a difference education may make in the individual; then let them compare my method of education with the results i ascribe to it; and let them tell me where my reasoning is unsound, and i shall have no answer to give them. it is this that makes me speak so strongly, and as i think with good excuse: i have not pledged myself to any system, i depend as little as possible on arguments, and i trust to what i myself have observed. i do not base my ideas on what i have imagined, but on what i have seen. it is true that i have not confined my observations within the walls of any one town, nor to a single class of people; but having compared men of every class and every nation which i have been able to observe in the course of a life spent in this pursuit, i have discarded as artificial what belonged to one nation and not to another, to one rank and not to another; and i have regarded as proper to mankind what was common to all, at any age, in any station, and in any nation whatsoever. now if in accordance with this method you follow from infancy the course of a youth who has not been shaped to any special mould, one who depends as little as possible on authority and the opinions of others, which will he most resemble, my pupil or yours? it seems to me that this is the question you must answer if you would know if i am mistaken. it is not easy for a man to begin to think; but when once he has begun he will never leave off. once a thinker, always a thinker, and the understanding once practised in reflection will never rest. you may therefore think that i do too much or too little; that the human mind is not by nature so quick to unfold; and that after having given it opportunities it has not got, i keep it too long confined within a circle of ideas which it ought to have outgrown. but remember, in the first place, that when i want to train a natural man, i do not want to make him a savage and to send him back to the woods, but that living in the whirl of social life it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by the passions and prejudices of men; let him see with his eyes and feel with his heart, let him own no sway but that of reason. under these conditions it is plain that many things will strike him; the oft-recurring feelings which affect him, the different ways of satisfying his real needs, must give him many ideas he would not otherwise have acquired or would only have acquired much later. the natural progress of the mind is quickened but not reversed. the same man who would remain stupid in the forests should become wise and reasonable in towns, if he were merely a spectator in them. nothing is better fitted to make one wise than the sight of follies we do not share, and even if we share them, we still learn, provided we are not the dupe of our follies and provided we do not bring to them the same mistakes as the others. consider also that while our faculties are confined to the things of sense, we offer scarcely any hold to the abstractions of philosophy or to purely intellectual ideas. to attain to these we require either to free ourselves from the body to which we are so strongly bound, or to proceed step by step in a slow and gradual course, or else to leap across the intervening space with a gigantic bound of which no child is capable, one for which grown men even require many steps hewn on purpose for them; but i find it very difficult to see how you propose to construct such steps. the incomprehensible embraces all, he gives its motion to the earth, and shapes the system of all creatures, but our eyes cannot see him nor can our hands search him out, he evades the efforts of our senses; we behold the work, but the workman is hidden from our eyes. it is no small matter to know that he exists, and when we have got so far, and when we ask. what is he? where is he? our mind is overwhelmed, we lose ourselves, we know not what to think. locke would have us begin with the study of spirits and go on to that of bodies. this is the method of superstition, prejudice, and error; it is not the method of nature, nor even that of well-ordered reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. we must have studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. the contrary practice merely puts materialism on a firmer footing. since our senses are the first instruments to our learning, corporeal and sensible bodies are the only bodies we directly apprehend. the word "spirit" has no meaning for any one who has not philosophised. to the unlearned and to the child a spirit is merely a body. do they not fancy that spirits groan, speak, fight, and make noises? now you must own that spirits with arms and voices are very like bodies. this is why every nation on the face of the earth, not even excepting the jews, have made to themselves idols. we, ourselves, with our words, spirit, trinity, persons, are for the most part quite anthropomorphic. i admit that we are taught that god is everywhere; but we also believe that there is air everywhere, at least in our atmosphere; and the word spirit meant originally nothing more than breath and wind. once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like. the perception of our action upon other bodies must have first induced us to suppose that their action upon us was effected in like manner. thus man began by thinking that all things whose action affected him were alive. he did not recognise the limits of their powers, and he therefore supposed that they were boundless; as soon as he had supplied them with bodies they became his gods. in the earliest times men went in terror of everything and everything in nature seemed alive. the idea of matter was developed as slowly as that of spirit, for the former is itself an abstraction. thus the universe was peopled with gods like themselves. the stars, the winds and the mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, their very dwellings, each had its soul, its god, its life. the teraphim of laban, the manitos of savages, the fetishes of the negroes, every work of nature and of man, were the first gods of mortals; polytheism was their first religion and idolatry their earliest form of worship. the idea of one god was beyond their grasp, till little by little they formed general ideas, and they rose to the idea of a first cause and gave meaning to the word "substance," which is at bottom the greatest of abstractions. so every child who believes in god is of necessity an idolater or at least he regards the deity as a man, and when once the imagination has perceived god, it is very seldom that the understanding conceives him. locke's order leads us into this same mistake. having arrived, i know not how, at the idea of substance, it is clear that to allow of a single substance it must be assumed that this substance is endowed with incompatible and mutually exclusive properties, such as thought and size, one of which is by its nature divisible and the other wholly incapable of division. moreover it is assumed that thought or, if you prefer it, feeling is a primitive quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs, that its relation to the substance is like the relation between substance and size. hence it is inferred that beings who lose one of these attributes lose the substance to which it belongs, and that death is, therefore, but a separation of substances, and that those beings in whom the two attributes are found are composed of the two substances to which those two qualities belong. but consider what a gulf there still is between the idea of two substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible idea of the influence of our soul upon our body and the idea of the influence of god upon every living creature. the ideas of creation, destruction, ubiquity, eternity, almighty power, those of the divine attributes--these are all ideas so confused and obscure that few men succeed in grasping them; yet there is nothing obscure about them to the common people, because they do not understand them in the least; how then should they present themselves in full force, that is to say in all their obscurity, to the young mind which is still occupied with the first working of the senses, and fails to realise anything but what it handles? in vain do the abysses of the infinite open around us, a child does not know the meaning of fear; his weak eyes cannot gauge their depths. to children everything is infinite, they cannot assign limits to anything; not that their measure is so large, but because their understanding is so small. i have even noticed that they place the infinite rather below than above the dimensions known to them. they judge a distance to be immense rather by their feet than by their eyes; infinity is bounded for them, not so much by what they can see, but how far they can go. if you talk to them of the power of god, they will think he is nearly as strong as their father. as their own knowledge is in everything the standard by which they judge of what is possible, they always picture what is described to them as rather smaller than what they know. such are the natural reasonings of an ignorant and feeble mind. ajax was afraid to measure his strength against achilles, yet he challenged jupiter to combat, for he knew achilles and did not know jupiter. a swiss peasant thought himself the richest man alive; when they tried to explain to him what a king was, he asked with pride, "has the king got a hundred cows on the high pastures?" i am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me tracing the course of my scholar through his early years without speaking to him of religion. at fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul, at eighteen even he may not be ready to learn about it. for if he learns about it too soon, there is the risk of his never really knowing anything about it. if i had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, i would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if i wanted to drive a child crazy i would set him to explain what he learned in his catechism. you will reply that as most of the christian doctrines are mysteries, you must wait, not merely till the child is a man, but till the man is dead, before the human mind will understand those doctrines. to that i reply, that there are mysteries which the heart of man can neither conceive nor believe, and i see no use in teaching them to children, unless you want to make liars of them. moreover, i assert that to admit that there are mysteries, you must at least realise that they are incomprehensible, and children are not even capable of this conception! at an age when everything is mysterious, there are no mysteries properly so-called. "we must believe in god if we would be saved." this doctrine wrongly understood is the root of bloodthirsty intolerance and the cause of all the futile teaching which strikes a deadly blow at human reason by training it to cheat itself with mere words. no doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we would deserve eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, i do not see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as well as with children. the obligation of faith assumes the possibility of belief. the philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths he rejects. but the child who professes the christian faith--what does he believe? just what he understands; and he understands so little of what he is made to repeat that if you tell him to say just the opposite he will be quite ready to do it. the faith of children and the faith of many men is a matter of geography. will they be rewarded for having been born in rome rather than in mecca? one is told that mahomet is the prophet of god and he says, "mahomet is the prophet of god." the other is told that mahomet is a rogue and he says, "mahomet is a rogue." either of them would have said just the opposite had he stood in the other's shoes. when they are so much alike to begin with, can the one be consigned to paradise and the other to hell? when a child says he believes in god, it is not god he believes in, but peter or james who told him that there is something called god, and he believes it after the fashion of euripides-- "o jupiter, of whom i know nothing but thy name." [footnote: plutarch. it is thus that the tragedy of menalippus originally began, but the clamour of the athenians compelled euripides to change these opening lines.] we hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of everlasting happiness; the catholics believe the same of all children who have been baptised, even though they have never heard of god. there are, therefore, circumstances in which one can be saved without belief in god, and these circumstances occur in the case of children or madmen when the human mind is incapable of the operations necessary to perceive the godhead. the only difference i see between you and me is that you profess that children of seven years old are able to do this and i do not think them ready for it at fifteen. whether i am right or wrong depends, not on an article of the creed, but on a simple observation in natural history. from the same principle it is plain that any man having reached old age without faith in god will not, therefore, be deprived of god's presence in another life if his blindness was not wilful; and i maintain that it is not always wilful. you admit that it is so in the case of lunatics deprived by disease of their spiritual faculties, but not of their manhood, and therefore still entitled to the goodness of their creator. why then should we not admit it in the case of those brought up from infancy in seclusion, those who have led the life of a savage and are without the knowledge that comes from intercourse with other men. [footnote: for the natural condition of the human mind and its slow development, cf. the first part of the discours sur inegalite.] for it is clearly impossible that such a savage could ever raise his thoughts to the knowledge of the true god. reason tells that man should only be punished for his wilful faults, and that invincible ignorance can never be imputed to him as a crime. hence it follows that in the sight of the eternal justice every man who would believe if he had the necessary knowledge is counted a believer, and that there will be no unbelievers to be punished except those who have closed their hearts against the truth. let us beware of proclaiming the truth to those who cannot as yet comprehend it, for to do so is to try to inculcate error. it would be better to have no idea at all of the divinity than to have mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy ideas; to fail to perceive the divine is a lesser evil than to insult it. the worthy plutarch says, "i would rather men said, 'there is no such person as plutarch,' than that they should say, 'plutarch is unjust, envious, jealous, and such a tyrant that he demands more than can be performed.'" the chief harm which results from the monstrous ideas of god which are instilled into the minds of children is that they last all their life long, and as men they understand no more of god than they did as children. in switzerland i once saw a good and pious mother who was so convinced of the truth of this maxim that she refused to teach her son religion when he was a little child for fear lest he should be satisfied with this crude teaching and neglect a better teaching when he reached the age of reason. this child never heard the name of god pronounced except with reverence and devotion, and as soon as he attempted to say the word he was told to hold his tongue, as if the subject were too sublime and great for him. this reticence aroused his curiosity and his self-love; he looked forward to the time when he would know this mystery so carefully hidden from him. the less they spoke of god to him, the less he was himself permitted to speak of god, the more he thought about him; this child beheld god everywhere. what i should most dread as the result of this unwise affectation of mystery is this: by over-stimulating the youth's imagination you may turn his head, and make him at the best a fanatic rather than a believer. but we need fear nothing of the sort for emile, who always declines to pay attention to what is beyond his reach, and listens with profound indifference to things he does not understand. there are so many things of which he is accustomed to say, "that is no concern of mine," that one more or less makes little difference to him; and when he does begin to perplex himself with these great matters, it is because the natural growth of his knowledge is turning his thoughts that way. we have seen the road by which the cultivated human mind approaches these mysteries, and i am ready to admit that it would not attain to them naturally, even in the bosom of society, till a much later age. but as there are in this same society inevitable causes which hasten the development of the passions, if we did not also hasten the development of the knowledge which controls these passions we should indeed depart from the path of nature and disturb her equilibrium. when we can no longer restrain a precocious development in one direction we must promote a corresponding development in another direction, so that the order of nature may not be inverted, and so that things should progress together, not separately, so that the man, complete at every moment of his life, may never find himself at one stage in one of his faculties and at another stage in another faculty. what a difficulty do i see before me! a difficulty all the greater because it depends less on actual facts than on the cowardice of those who dare not look the difficulty in the face. let us at least venture to state our problem. a child should always be brought up in his father's religion; he is always given plain proofs that this religion, whatever it may be, is the only true religion, that all others are ridiculous and absurd. the force of the argument depends entirely on the country in which it is put forward. let a turk, who thinks christianity so absurd at constantinople, come to paris and see what they think of mahomet. it is in matters of religion more than in anything else that prejudice is triumphant. but when we who profess to shake off its yoke entirely, we who refuse to yield any homage to authority, decline to teach emile anything which he could not learn for himself in any country, what religion shall we give him, to what sect shall this child of nature belong? the answer strikes me as quite easy. we will not attach him to any sect, but we will give him the means to choose for himself according to the right use of his own reason. incedo per ignes suppositos cineri doloso.--horace, lib. ii. ode i. no matter! thus far zeal and prudence have taken the place of caution. i hope that these guardians will not fail me now. reader, do not fear lest i should take precautions unworthy of a lover of truth; i shall never forget my motto, but i distrust my own judgment all too easily. instead of telling you what i think myself, i will tell you the thoughts of one whose opinions carry more weight than mine. i guarantee the truth of the facts i am about to relate; they actually happened to the author whose writings i am about to transcribe; it is for you to judge whether we can draw from them any considerations bearing on the matter in hand. i do not offer you my own idea or another's as your rule; i merely present them for your examination. thirty years ago there was a young man in an italian town; he was an exile from his native land and found himself reduced to the depths of poverty. he had been born a calvinist, but the consequences of his own folly had made him a fugitive in a strange land; he had no money and he changed his religion for a morsel of bread. there was a hostel for proselytes in that town to which he gained admission. the study of controversy inspired doubts he had never felt before, and he made acquaintance with evil hitherto unsuspected by him; he heard strange doctrines and he met with morals still stranger to him; he beheld this evil conduct and nearly fell a victim to it. he longed to escape, but he was locked up; he complained, but his complaints were unheeded; at the mercy of his tyrants, he found himself treated as a criminal because he would not share their crimes. the anger kindled in a young and untried heart by the first experience of violence and injustice may be realised by those who have themselves experienced it. tears of anger flowed from his eyes, he was wild with rage; he prayed to heaven and to man, and his prayers were unheard; he spoke to every one and no one listened to him. he saw no one but the vilest servants under the control of the wretch who insulted him, or accomplices in the same crime who laughed at his resistance and encouraged him to follow their example. he would have been ruined had not a worthy priest visited the hostel on some matter of business. he found an opportunity of consulting him secretly. the priest was poor and in need of help himself, but the victim had more need of his assistance, and he did not hesitate to help him to escape at the risk of making a dangerous enemy. having escaped from vice to return to poverty, the young man struggled vainly against fate: for a moment he thought he had gained the victory. at the first gleam of good fortune his woes and his protector were alike forgotten. he was soon punished for this ingratitude; all his hopes vanished; youth indeed was on his side, but his romantic ideas spoiled everything. he had neither talent nor skill to make his way easily, he could neither be commonplace nor wicked, he expected so much that he got nothing. when he had sunk to his former poverty, when he was without food or shelter and ready to die of hunger, he remembered his benefactor. he went back to him, found him, and was kindly welcomed; the sight of him reminded the priest of a good deed he had done; such a memory always rejoices the heart. this man was by nature humane and pitiful; he felt the sufferings of others through his own, and his heart had not been hardened by prosperity; in a word, the lessons of wisdom and an enlightened virtue had reinforced his natural kindness of heart. he welcomed the young man, found him a lodging, and recommended him; he shared with him his living which was barely enough for two. he did more, he instructed him, consoled him, and taught him the difficult art of bearing adversity in patience. you prejudiced people, would you have expected to find all this in a priest and in italy? this worthy priest was a poor savoyard clergyman who had offended his bishop by some youthful fault; he had crossed the alps to find a position which he could not obtain in his own country. he lacked neither wit nor learning, and with his interesting countenance he had met with patrons who found him a place in the household of one of the ministers, as tutor to his son. he preferred poverty to dependence, and he did not know how to get on with the great. he did not stay long with this minister, and when he departed he took with him his good opinion; and as he lived a good life and gained the hearts of everybody, he was glad to be forgiven by his bishop and to obtain from him a small parish among the mountains, where he might pass the rest of his life. this was the limit of his ambition. he was attracted by the young fugitive and he questioned him closely. he saw that ill-fortune had already seared his heart, that scorn and disgrace had overthrown his courage, and that his pride, transformed into bitterness and spite, led him to see nothing in the harshness and injustice of men but their evil disposition and the vanity of all virtue. he had seen that religion was but a mask for selfishness, and its holy services but a screen for hypocrisy; he had found in the subtleties of empty disputations heaven and hell awarded as prizes for mere words; he had seen the sublime and primitive idea of divinity disfigured by the vain fancies of men; and when, as he thought, faith in god required him to renounce the reason god himself had given him, he held in equal scorn our foolish imaginings and the object with which they are concerned. with no knowledge of things as they are, without any idea of their origins, he was immersed in his stubborn ignorance and utterly despised those who thought they knew more than himself. the neglect of all religion soon leads to the neglect of a man's duties. the heart of this young libertine was already far on this road. yet his was not a bad nature, though incredulity and misery were gradually stifling his natural disposition and dragging him down to ruin; they were leading him into the conduct of a rascal and the morals of an atheist. the almost inevitable evil was not actually consummated. the young man was not ignorant, his education had not been neglected. he was at that happy age when the pulse beats strongly and the heart is warm, but is not yet enslaved by the madness of the senses. his heart had not lost its elasticity. a native modesty, a timid disposition restrained him, and prolonged for him that period during which you watch your pupil so carefully. the hateful example of brutal depravity, of vice without any charm, had not merely failed to quicken his imagination, it had deadened it. for a long time disgust rather than virtue preserved his innocence, which would only succumb to more seductive charms. the priest saw the danger and the way of escape. he was not discouraged by difficulties, he took a pleasure in his task; he determined to complete it and to restore to virtue the victim he had snatched from vice. he set about it cautiously; the beauty of the motive gave him courage and inspired him with means worthy of his zeal. whatever might be the result, his pains would not be wasted. we are always successful when our sole aim is to do good. he began to win the confidence of the proselyte by not asking any price for his kindness, by not intruding himself upon him, by not preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and treating him as an equal. it was, so i think, a touching sight to see a serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp, and virtue putting up with the speech of licence in order to triumph over it more completely. when the young fool came to him with his silly confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest listened and set him at his ease; without giving his approval to what was bad, he took an interest in everything; no tactless reproof checked his chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure which he thought was given by his conversation increased his pleasure in telling everything; thus he made his general confession without knowing he was confessing anything. after he had made a thorough study of his feelings and disposition, the priest saw plainly that, although he was not ignorant for his age, he had forgotten everything that he most needed to know, and that the disgrace which fortune had brought upon him had stifled in him all real sense of good and evil. there is a stage of degradation which robs the soul of its life; and the inner voice cannot be heard by one whose whole mind is bent on getting food. to protect the unlucky youth from the moral death which threatened him, he began to revive his self-love and his good opinion of himself. he showed him a happier future in the right use of his talents; he revived the generous warmth of his heart by stories of the noble deeds of others; by rousing his admiration for the doers of these deeds he revived his desire to do like deeds himself. to draw him gradually from his idle and wandering life, he made him copy out extracts from well-chosen books; he pretended to want these extracts, and so nourished in him the noble feeling of gratitude. he taught him indirectly through these books, and thus he made him sufficiently regain his good opinion of himself so that he would no longer think himself good for nothing, and would not make himself despicable in his own eyes. a trifling incident will show how this kindly man tried, unknown to him, to raise the heart of his disciple out of its degradation, without seeming to think of teaching. the priest was so well known for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy of the town. one day some one had given him some money to distribute among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some of it on the score of poverty. "no," said he, "we are brothers, you belong to me and i must not touch the money entrusted to me." then he gave him the sum he had asked for out of his own pocket. lessons of this sort seldom fail to make an impression on the heart of young people who are not wholly corrupt. i am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution is unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that i myself was this unhappy fugitive; i think i am so far removed from the disorders of my youth that i may venture to confess them, and the hand which rescued me well deserves that i should at least do honour to its goodness at the cost of some slight shame. what struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with this speech. i never saw him trouble himself whether those whom he assisted went to vespers or confession, whether they fasted at the appointed seasons and went without meat; nor did he impose upon them any other like conditions, without which you might die of hunger before you could hope for any help from the devout. far from displaying before him the zeal of a new convert, i was encouraged by these observations and i made no secret of my way of thinking, nor did he seem to be shocked by it. sometimes i would say to myself, he overlooks my indifference to the religion i have adopted because he sees i am equally indifferent to the religion in which i was brought up; he knows that my scorn for religion is not confined to one sect. but what could i think when i sometimes heard him give his approval to doctrines contrary to those of the roman catholic church, and apparently having but a poor opinion of its ceremonies. i should have thought him a protestant in disguise if i had not beheld him so faithful to those very customs which he seemed to value so lightly; but i knew he fulfilled his priestly duties as carefully in private as in public, and i knew not what to think of these apparent contradictions. except for the fault which had formerly brought about his disgrace, a fault which he had only partially overcome, his life was exemplary, his conduct beyond reproach, his conversation honest and discreet. while i lived on very friendly terms with him, i learnt day by day to respect him more; and when he had completely won my heart by such great kindness, i awaited with eager curiosity the time when i should learn what was the principle on which the uniformity of this strange life was based. this opportunity was a long time coming. before taking his disciple into his confidence, he tried to get the seeds of reason and kindness which he had sown in my heart to germinate. the most difficult fault to overcome in me was a certain haughty misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and successful, as if their wealth and happiness had been gained at my own expense, and as if their supposed happiness had been unjustly taken from my own. the foolish vanity of youth, which kicks against the pricks of humiliation, made me only too much inclined to this angry temper; and the self-respect, which my mentor strove to revive, led to pride, which made men still more vile in my eyes, and only added scorn to my hatred. without directly attacking this pride, he prevented it from developing into hardness of heart; and without depriving me of my self-esteem, he made me less scornful of my neighbours. by continually drawing my attention from the empty show, and directing it to the genuine sufferings concealed by it, he taught me to deplore the faults of my fellows and feel for their sufferings, to pity rather than envy them. touched with compassion towards human weaknesses through the profound conviction of his own failings, he viewed all men as the victims of their own vices and those of others; he beheld the poor groaning under the tyranny of the rich, and the rich under the tyranny of their own prejudices. "believe me," said he, "our illusions, far from concealing our woes, only increase them by giving value to what is in itself valueless, in making us aware of all sorts of fancied privations which we should not otherwise feel. peace of heart consists in despising everything that might disturb that peace; the man who clings most closely to life is the man who can least enjoy it; and the man who most eagerly desires happiness is always most miserable." "what gloomy ideas!" i exclaimed bitterly. "if we must deny ourselves everything, we might as well never have been born; and if we must despise even happiness itself who can be happy?" "i am," replied the priest one day, in a tone which made a great impression on me. "you happy! so little favoured by fortune, so poor, an exile and persecuted, you are happy! how have you contrived to be happy?" "my child," he answered, "i will gladly tell you." thereupon he explained that, having heard my confessions, he would confess to me. "i will open my whole heart to yours," he said, embracing me. "you will see me, if not as i am, at least as i seem to myself. when you have heard my whole confession of faith, when you really know the condition of my heart, you will know why i think myself happy, and if you think as i do, you will know how to be happy too. but these explanations are not the affair of a moment, it will take time to show you all my ideas about the lot of man and the true value of life; let us choose a fitting time and a place where we may continue this conversation without interruption." i showed him how eager i was to hear him. the meeting was fixed for the very next morning. it was summer time; we rose at daybreak. he took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, and enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture which the human eye can see. you would have thought that nature was displaying all her splendour before our eyes to furnish a text for our conversation. after contemplating this scene for a space in silence, the man of peace spoke to me. the creed of a savoyard priest my child, do not look to me for learned speeches or profound arguments. i am no great philosopher, nor do i desire to be one. i have, however, a certain amount of common-sense and a constant devotion to truth. i have no wish to argue with you nor even to convince you; it is enough for me to show you, in all simplicity of heart, what i really think. consult your own heart while i speak; that is all i ask. if i am mistaken, i am honestly mistaken, and therefore my error will not be counted to me as a crime; if you, too, are honestly mistaken, there is no great harm done. if i am right, we are both endowed with reason, we have both the same motive for listening to the voice of reason. why should not you think as i do? by birth i was a peasant and poor; to till the ground was my portion; but my parents thought it a finer thing that i should learn to get my living as a priest and they found means to send me to college. i am quite sure that neither my parents nor i had any idea of seeking after what was good, useful, or true; we only sought what was wanted to get me ordained. i learned what was taught me, i said what i was told to say, i promised all that was required, and i became a priest. but i soon discovered that when i promised not to be a man, i had promised more than i could perform. conscience, they tell us, is the creature of prejudice, but i know from experience that conscience persists in following the order of nature in spite of all the laws of man. in vain is this or that forbidden; remorse makes her voice heard but feebly when what we do is permitted by well-ordered nature, and still more when we are doing her bidding. my good youth, nature has not yet appealed to your senses; may you long remain in this happy state when her voice is the voice of innocence. remember that to anticipate her teaching is to offend more deeply against her than to resist her teaching; you must first learn to resist, that you may know when to yield without wrong-doing. from my youth up i had reverenced the married state as the first and most sacred institution of nature. having renounced the right to marry, i was resolved not to profane the sanctity of marriage; for in spite of my education and reading i had always led a simple and regular life, and my mind had preserved the innocence of its natural instincts; these instincts had not been obscured by worldly wisdom, while my poverty kept me remote from the temptations dictated by the sophistry of vice. this very resolution proved my ruin. my respect for marriage led to the discovery of my misconduct. the scandal must be expiated; i was arrested, suspended, and dismissed; i was the victim of my scruples rather than of my incontinence, and i had reason to believe, from the reproaches which accompanied my disgrace, that one can often escape punishment by being guilty of a worse fault. a thoughtful mind soon learns from such experiences. i found my former ideas of justice, honesty, and every duty of man overturned by these painful events, and day by day i was losing my hold on one or another of the opinions i had accepted. what was left was not enough to form a body of ideas which could stand alone, and i felt that the evidence on which my principles rested was being weakened; at last i knew not what to think, and i came to the same conclusion as yourself, but with this difference: my lack of faith was the slow growth of manhood, attained with great difficulty, and all the harder to uproot. i was in that state of doubt and uncertainty which descartes considers essential to the search for truth. it is a state which cannot continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious tendencies and an idle heart can keep us in that state. my heart was not so corrupt as to delight in it, and there is nothing which so maintains the habit of thinking as being better pleased with oneself than with one's lot. i pondered, therefore, on the sad fate of mortals, adrift upon this sea of human opinions, without compass or rudder, and abandoned to their stormy passions with no guide but an inexperienced pilot who does not know whence he comes or whither he is going. i said to myself, "i love truth, i seek her, and cannot find her. show me truth and i will hold her fast; why does she hide her face from the eager heart that would fain worship her?" although i have often experienced worse sufferings, i have never led a life so uniformly distressing as this period of unrest and anxiety, when i wandered incessantly from one doubt to another, gaining nothing from my prolonged meditations but uncertainty, darkness, and contradiction with regard to the source of my being and the rule of my duties. i cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and on principle. either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing. my perplexity was increased by the fact that i had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith i was forced to reject the rest; as i could not accept absurd decisions, i was deprived of those which were not absurd. when i was told to believe everything, i could believe nothing, and i knew not where to stop. i consulted the philosophers, i searched their books and examined their various theories; i found them all alike proud, assertive, dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism, to know everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. this last trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only point in which they were right. braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in defence. weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count their voices, every one speaks for himself; they are only agreed in arguing with each other. i could find no way out of my uncertainty by listening to them. i suppose this prodigious diversity of opinion is caused, in the first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the second, by pride. we have no means of measuring this vast machine, we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable mysteries. these mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, but we fall back on our imagination. through this imagined world each forces a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path will lead him to the goal. yet we long to know and understand it all. the one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. we prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. a fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment abandoned by its creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regard to it. if the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so? every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own. there is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? if he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his rivals, what more does he want? among believers he is an atheist; among atheists he would be a believer. the first thing i learned from these considerations was to restrict my inquiries to what directly concerned myself, to rest in profound ignorance of everything else, and not even to trouble myself to doubt anything beyond what i required to know. i also realised that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. so i chose another guide and said, "let me follow the inner light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and i shall not go so far wrong if i follow my own illusions as if i trusted to their deceits." i then went over in my mind the various opinions which i had held in the course of my life, and i saw that although no one of them was plain enough to gain immediate belief, some were more probable than others, and my inward consent was given or withheld in proportion to this improbability. having discovered this, i made an unprejudiced comparison of all these different ideas, and i perceived that the first and most general of them was also the simplest and the most reasonable, and that it would have been accepted by every one if only it had been last instead of first. imagine all your philosophers, ancient and modern, having exhausted their strange systems of force, chance, fate, necessity, atoms, a living world, animated matter, and every variety of materialism. then comes the illustrious clarke who gives light to the world and proclaims the being of beings and the giver of things. what universal admiration, what unanimous applause would have greeted this new system--a system so great, so illuminating, and so simple. other systems are full of absurdities; this system seems to me to contain fewer things which are beyond the understanding of the human mind. i said to myself, "every system has its insoluble problems, for the finite mind of man is too small to deal with them; these difficulties are therefore no final arguments, against any system. but what a difference there is between the direct evidence on which these systems are based! should we not prefer that theory which alone explains all the facts, when it is no more difficult than the rest?" bearing thus within my heart the love of truth as my only philosophy, and as my only method a clear and simple rule which dispensed with the need for vain and subtle arguments, i returned with the help of this rule to the examination of such knowledge as concerned myself; i was resolved to admit as self-evident all that i could not honestly refuse to believe, and to admit as true all that seemed to follow directly from this; all the rest i determined to leave undecided, neither accepting nor rejecting it, nor yet troubling myself to clear up difficulties which did not lead to any practical ends. but who am i? what right have i to decide? what is it that determines my judgments? if they are inevitable, if they are the results of the impressions i receive, i am wasting my strength in such inquiries; they would be made or not without any interference of mine. i must therefore first turn my eyes upon myself to acquaint myself with the instrument i desire to use, and to discover how far it is reliable. i exist, and i have senses through which i receive impressions. this is the first truth that strikes me and i am forced to accept it. have i any independent knowledge of my existence, or am i only aware of it through my sensations? this is my first difficulty, and so far i cannot solve it. for i continually experience sensations, either directly or indirectly through memory, so how can i know if the feeling of self is something beyond these sensations or if it can exist independently of them? my sensations take place in myself, for they make me aware of my own existence; but their cause is outside me, for they affect me whether i have any reason for them or not, and they are produced or destroyed independently of me. so i clearly perceive that my sensation, which is within me, and its cause or its object, which is outside me, are different things. thus, not only do i exist, but other entities exist also, that is to say, the objects of my sensations; and even if these objects are merely ideas, still these ideas are not me. but everything outside myself, everything which acts upon my senses, i call matter, and all the particles of matter which i suppose to be united into separate entities i call bodies. thus all the disputes of the idealists and the realists have no meaning for me; their distinctions between the appearance and the reality of bodies are wholly fanciful. i am now as convinced of the existence of the universe as of my own. i next consider the objects of my sensations, and i find that i have the power of comparing them, so i perceive that i am endowed with an active force of which i was not previously aware. to perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; to judge and to feel are not the same. through sensation objects present themselves to me separately and singly as they are in nature; by comparing them i rearrange them, i shift them so to speak, i place one upon another to decide whether they are alike or different, or more generally to find out their relations. to my mind, the distinctive faculty of an active or intelligent being is the power of understanding this word "is." i seek in vain in the merely sensitive entity that intelligent force which compares and judges; i can find no trace of it in its nature. this passive entity will be aware of each object separately, it will even be aware of the whole formed by the two together, but having no power to place them side by side it can never compare them, it can never form a judgment with regard to them. to see two things at once is not to see their relations nor to judge of their differences; to perceive several objects, one beyond the other, is not to relate them. i may have at the same moment an idea of a big stick and a little stick without comparing them, without judging that one is less than the other, just as i can see my whole hand without counting my fingers. [footnote: m. de le cordamines' narratives tell of a people who only know how to count up to three. yet the men of this nation, having hands, have often seen their fingers without learning to count up to five.] these comparative ideas, 'greater', 'smaller', together with number ideas of 'one', 'two', etc. are certainly not sensations, although my mind only produces them when my sensations occur. we are told that a sensitive being distinguishes sensations from each other by the inherent differences in the sensations; this requires explanation. when the sensations are different, the sensitive being distinguishes them by their differences; when they are alike, he distinguishes them because he is aware of them one beyond the other. otherwise, how could he distinguish between two equal objects simultaneously experienced? he would necessarily confound the two objects and take them for one object, especially under a system which professed that the representative sensations of space have no extension. when we become aware of the two sensations to be compared, their impression is made, each object is perceived, both are perceived, but for all that their relation is not perceived. if the judgment of this relation were merely a sensation, and came to me solely from the object itself, my judgments would never be mistaken, for it is never untrue that i feel what i feel. why then am i mistaken as to the relation between these two sticks, especially when they are not parallel? why, for example, do i say the small stick is a third of the large, when it is only a quarter? why is the picture, which is the sensation, unlike its model which is the object? it is because i am active when i judge, because the operation of comparison is at fault; because my understanding, which judges of relations, mingles its errors with the truth of sensations, which only reveal to me things. add to this a consideration which will, i feel sure, appeal to you when you have thought about it: it is this--if we were purely passive in the use of our senses, there would be no communication between them; it would be impossible to know that the body we are touching and the thing we are looking at is the same. either we should never perceive anything outside ourselves, or there would be for us five substances perceptible by the senses, whose identity we should have no means of perceiving. this power of my mind which brings my sensations together and compares them may be called by any name; let it be called attention, meditation, reflection, or what you will; it is still true that it is in me and not in things, that it is i alone who produce it, though i only produce it when i receive an impression from things. though i am compelled to feel or not to feel, i am free to examine more or less what i feel. being now, so to speak, sure of myself, i begin to look at things outside myself, and i behold myself with a sort of shudder flung at random into this vast universe, plunged as it were into the vast number of entities, knowing nothing of what they are in themselves or in relation to me. i study them, i observe them; and the first object which suggests itself for comparison with them is myself. all that i perceive through the senses is matter, and i deduce all the essential properties of matter from the sensible qualities which make me perceive it, qualities which are inseparable from it. i see it sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest, [footnote: this repose is, if you prefer it, merely relative; but as we perceive more or less of motion, we may plainly conceive one of two extremes, which is rest; and we conceive it so clearly that we are even disposed to take for absolute rest what is only relative. but it is not true that motion is of the essence of matter, if matter may be conceived of as at rest.] hence i infer that neither motion nor rest is essential to it, but motion, being an action, is the result of a cause of which rest is only the absence. when, therefore, there is nothing acting upon matter it does not move, and for the very reason that rest and motion are indifferent to it, its natural state is a state of rest. i perceive two sorts of motions of bodies, acquired motion and spontaneous or voluntary motion. in the first the cause is external to the body moved, in the second it is within. i shall not conclude from that that the motion, say of a watch, is spontaneous, for if no external cause operated upon the spring it would run down and the watch would cease to go. for the same reason i should not admit that the movements of fluids are spontaneous, neither should i attribute spontaneous motion to fire which causes their fluidity. [footnote: chemists regard phlogiston or the element of fire as diffused, motionless, and stagnant in the compounds of which it forms part, until external forces set it free, collect it and set it in motion, and change it into fire.] you ask me if the movements of animals are spontaneous; my answer is, "i cannot tell," but analogy points that way. you ask me again, how do i know that there are spontaneous movements? i tell you, "i know it because i feel them." i want to move my arm and i move it without any other immediate cause of the movement but my own will. in vain would any one try to argue me out of this feeling, it is stronger than any proofs; you might as well try to convince me that i do not exist. if there were no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult to imagine a first cause for all motion. for my own part, i feel myself so thoroughly convinced that the natural state of matter is a state of rest, and that it has no power of action in itself, that when i see a body in motion i at once assume that it is either a living body or that this motion has been imparted to it. my mind declines to accept in any way the idea of inorganic matter moving of its own accord, or giving rise to any action. yet this visible universe consists of matter, matter diffused and dead, [footnote: i have tried hard to grasp the idea of a living molecule, but in vain. the idea of matter feeling without any senses seems to me unintelligible and self-contradictory. to accept or reject this idea one must first understand it, and i confess that so far i have not succeeded.] matter which has none of the cohesion, the organisation, the common feeling of the parts of a living body, for it is certain that we who are parts have no consciousness of the whole. this same universe is in motion, and in its movements, ordered, uniform, and subject to fixed laws, it has none of that freedom which appears in the spontaneous movements of men and animals. so the world is not some huge animal which moves of its own accord; its movements are therefore due to some external cause, a cause which i cannot perceive, but the inner voice makes this cause so apparent to me that i cannot watch the course of the sun without imagining a force which drives it, and when the earth revolves i think i see the hand that sets it in motion. if i must accept general laws whose essential relation to matter is unperceived by me, how much further have i got? these laws, not being real things, not being substances, have therefore some other basis unknown to me. experiment and observation have acquainted us with the laws of motion; these laws determine the results without showing their causes; they are quite inadequate to explain the system of the world and the course of the universe. with the help of dice descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set his dice in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force without the help of rotation. newton discovered the law of gravitation; but gravitation alone would soon reduce the universe to a motionless mass; he was compelled to add a projectile force to account for the elliptical course of the celestial bodies; let newton show us the hand that launched the planets in the tangent of their orbits. the first causes of motion are not to be found in matter; matter receives and transmits motion, but does not produce it. the more i observe the action and reaction of the forces of nature playing on one another, the more i see that we must always go back from one effect to another, till we arrive at a first cause in some will; for to assume an infinite succession of causes is to assume that there is no first cause. in a word, no motion which is not caused by another motion can take place, except by a spontaneous, voluntary action; inanimate bodies have no action but motion, and there is no real action without will. this is my first principle. i believe, therefore, that there is a will which sets the universe in motion and gives life to nature. this is my first dogma, or the first article of my creed. how does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? i cannot tell, but i perceive that it does so in myself; i will to do something and i do it; i will to move my body and it moves, but if an inanimate body, when at rest, should begin to move itself, the thing is incomprehensible and without precedent. the will is known to me in its action, not in its nature. i know this will as a cause of motion, but to conceive of matter as producing motion is clearly to conceive of an effect without a cause, which is not to conceive at all. it is no more possible for me to conceive how my will moves my body than to conceive how my sensations affect my mind. i do not even know why one of these mysteries has seemed less inexplicable than the other. for my own part, whether i am active or passive, the means of union of the two substances seem to me absolutely incomprehensible. it is very strange that people make this very incomprehensibility a step towards the compounding of the two substances, as if operations so different in kind were more easily explained in one case than in two. the doctrine i have just laid down is indeed obscure; but at least it suggests a meaning and there is nothing in it repugnant to reason or experience; can we say as much of materialism? is it not plain that if motion is essential to matter it would be inseparable from it, it would always be present in it in the same degree, always present in every particle of matter, always the same in each particle of matter, it would not be capable of transmission, it could neither increase nor diminish, nor could we ever conceive of matter at rest. when you tell me that motion is not essential to matter but necessary to it, you try to cheat me with words which would be easier to refute if there was a little more sense in them. for either the motion of matter arises from the matter itself and is therefore essential to it; or it arises from an external cause and is not necessary to the matter, because the motive cause acts upon it; we have got back to our original difficulty. the chief source of human error is to be found in general and abstract ideas; the jargon of metaphysics has never led to the discovery of any single truth, and it has filled philosophy with absurdities of which we are ashamed as soon as we strip them of their long words. tell me, my friend, when they talk to you of a blind force diffused throughout nature, do they present any real idea to your mind? they think they are saying something by these vague expressions--universal force, essential motion--but they are saying nothing at all. the idea of motion is nothing more than the idea of transference from place to place; there is no motion without direction; for no individual can move all ways at once. in what direction then does matter move of necessity? has the whole body of matter a uniform motion, or has each atom its own motion? according to the first idea the whole universe must form a solid and indivisible mass; according to the second it can only form a diffused and incoherent fluid, which would make the union of any two atoms impossible. what direction shall be taken by this motion common to all matter? shall it be in a straight line, in a circle, or from above downwards, to the right or to the left? if each molecule has its own direction, what are the causes of all these directions and all these differences? if every molecule or atom only revolved on its own axis, nothing would ever leave its place and there would be no transmitted motion, and even then this circular movement would require to follow some direction. to set matter in motion by an abstraction is to utter words without meaning, and to attribute to matter a given direction is to assume a determining cause. the more examples i take, the more causes i have to explain, without ever finding a common agent which controls them. far from being able to picture to myself an entire absence of order in the fortuitous concurrence of elements, i cannot even imagine such a strife, and the chaos of the universe is less conceivable to me than its harmony. i can understand that the mechanism of the universe may not be intelligible to the human mind, but when a man sets to work to explain it, he must say what men can understand. if matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second article of my creed. to act, to compare, to choose, are the operations of an active, thinking being; so this being exists. where do you find him existing, you will say? not merely in the revolving heavens, nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but in the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that falls, and the leaf blown by the wind. i judge of the order of the world, although i know nothing of its purpose, for to judge of this order it is enough for me to compare the parts one with another, to study their co-operation, their relations, and to observe their united action. i know not why the universe exists, but i see continually how it is changed; i never fail to perceive the close connection by which the entities of which it consists lend their aid one to another. i am like a man who sees the works of a watch for the first time; he is never weary of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know the use of the instrument and has never seen its face. i do not know what this is for, says he, but i see that each part of it is fitted to the rest, i admire the workman in the details of his work, and i am quite certain that all these wheels only work together in this fashion for some common end which i cannot perceive. let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling; what healthy mind can reject its evidence? unless the eyes are blinded by prejudices, can they fail to see that the visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence? what sophisms must be brought together before we fail to understand the harmony of existence and the wonderful co-operation of every part for the maintenance of the rest? say what you will of combinations and probabilities; what do you gain by reducing me to silence if you cannot gain my consent? and how can you rob me of the spontaneous feeling which, in spite of myself, continually gives you the lie? if organised bodies had come together fortuitously in all sorts of ways before assuming settled forms, if stomachs are made without mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of every kind which died because they could not preserve their life, why do none of these imperfect attempts now meet our eyes; why has nature at length prescribed laws to herself which she did not at first recognise? i must not be surprised if that which is possible should happen, and if the improbability of the event is compensated for by the number of the attempts. i grant this; yet if any one told me that printed characters scattered broadcast had produced the aeneid all complete, i would not condescend to take a single step to verify this falsehood. you will tell me i am forgetting the multitude of attempts. but how many such attempts must i assume to bring the combination within the bounds of probability? for my own part the only possible assumption is that the chances are infinity to one that the product is not the work of chance. in addition to this, chance combinations yield nothing but products of the same nature as the elements combined, so that life and organisation will not be produced by a flow of atoms, and a chemist when making his compounds will never give them thought and feeling in his crucible. [footnote: could one believe, if one had not seen it, that human absurdity could go so far? amatus lusitanus asserts that he saw a little man an inch long enclosed in a glass, which julius camillus, like a second prometheus, had made by alchemy. paracelsis (de natura rerum) teaches the method of making these tiny men, and he maintains that the pygmies, fauns, satyrs, and nymphs have been made by chemistry. indeed i cannot see that there is anything more to be done, to establish the possibility of these facts, unless it is to assert that organic matter resists the heat of fire and that its molecules can preserve their life in the hottest furnace.] i was surprised and almost shocked when i read neuwentit. how could this man desire to make a book out of the wonders of nature, wonders which show the wisdom of the author of nature? his book would have been as large as the world itself before he had exhausted his subject, and as soon as we attempt to give details, that greatest wonder of all, the concord and harmony of the whole, escapes us. the mere generation of living organic bodies is the despair of the human mind; the insurmountable barrier raised by nature between the various species, so that they should not mix with one another, is the clearest proof of her intention. she is not content to have established order, she has taken adequate measures to prevent the disturbance of that order. there is not a being in the universe which may not be regarded as in some respects the common centre of all, around which they are grouped, so that they are all reciprocally end and means in relation to each other. the mind is confused and lost amid these innumerable relations, not one of which is itself confused or lost in the crowd. what absurd assumptions are required to deduce all this harmony from the blind mechanism of matter set in motion by chance! in vain do those who deny the unity of intention manifested in the relations of all the parts of this great whole, in vain do they conceal their nonsense under abstractions, co-ordinations, general principles, symbolic expressions; whatever they do i find it impossible to conceive of a system of entities so firmly ordered unless i believe in an intelligence that orders them. it is not in my power to believe that passive and dead matter can have brought forth living and feeling beings, that blind chance has brought forth intelligent beings, that that which does not think has brought forth thinking beings. i believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and powerful will; i see it or rather i feel it, and it is a great thing to know this. but has this same world always existed, or has it been created? is there one source of all things? are there two or many? what is their nature? i know not; and what concern is it of mine? when these things become of importance to me i will try to learn them; till then i abjure these idle speculations, which may trouble my peace, but cannot affect my conduct nor be comprehended by my reason. recollect that i am not preaching my own opinion but explaining it. whether matter is eternal or created, whether its origin is passive or not, it is still certain that the whole is one, and that it proclaims a single intelligence; for i see nothing that is not part of the same ordered system, nothing which does not co-operate to the same end, namely, the conservation of all within the established order. this being who wills and can perform his will, this being active through his own power, this being, whoever he may be, who moves the universe and orders all things, is what i call god. to this name i add the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which i have brought together, and that of kindness which is their necessary consequence; but for all this i know no more of the being to which i ascribe them. he hides himself alike from my senses and my understanding; the more i think of him, the more perplexed i am; i know full well that he exists, and that he exists of himself alone; i know that my existence depends on his, and that everything i know depends upon him also. i see god everywhere in his works; i feel him within myself; i behold him all around me; but if i try to ponder him himself, if i try to find out where he is, what he is, what is his substance, he escapes me and my troubled spirit finds nothing. convinced of my unfitness, i shall never argue about the nature of god unless i am driven to it by the feeling of his relations with myself. such reasonings are always rash; a wise man should venture on them with trembling, he should be certain that he can never sound their abysses; for the most insolent attitude towards god is not to abstain from thinking of him, but to think evil of him. after the discovery of such of his attributes as enable me to conceive of his existence, i return to myself, and i try to discover what is my place in the order of things which he governs, and i can myself examine. at once, and beyond possibility of doubt, i discover my species; for by my own will and the instruments i can control to carry out my will, i have more power to act upon all bodies about me, either to make use of or to avoid their action at my pleasure, than any of them has power to act upon me against my will by mere physical impulsion; and through my intelligence i am the only one who can examine all the rest. what being here below, except man, can observe others, measure, calculate, forecast their motions, their effects, and unite, so to speak, the feeling of a common existence with that of his individual existence? what is there so absurd in the thought that all things are made for me, when i alone can relate all things to myself? it is true, therefore, that man is lord of the earth on which he dwells; for not only does he tame all the beasts, not only does he control its elements through his industry; but he alone knows how to control it; by contemplation he takes possession of the stars which he cannot approach. show me any other creature on earth who can make a fire and who can behold with admiration the sun. what! can i observe and know all creatures and their relations; can i feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue; can i consider the universe and raise myself towards the hand that guides it; can i love good and perform it; and should i then liken myself to the beasts? wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy which makes you like the beasts; or rather in vain do you seek to degrade yourself; your genius belies your principles, your kindly heart belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your powers proves their excellence in your own despite. for myself, i am not pledged to the support of any system. i am a plain and honest man, one who is not carried away by party spirit, one who has no ambition to be head of a sect; i am content with the place where god has set me; i see nothing, next to god himself, which is better than my species; and if i had to choose my place in the order of creation, what more could i choose than to be a man! i am not puffed up by this thought, i am deeply moved by it; for this state was no choice of mine, it was not due to the deserts of a creature who as yet did not exist. can i behold myself thus distinguished without congratulating myself on this post of honour, without blessing the hand which bestowed it? the first return to self has given birth to a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness to the author of my species, and this feeling calls forth my first homage to the beneficent godhead. i worship his almighty power and my heart acknowledges his mercies. is it not a natural consequence of our self-love to honour our protector and to love our benefactor? but when, in my desire to discover my own place within my species, i consider its different ranks and the men who fill them, where am i now? what a sight meets my eyes! where is now the order i perceived? nature showed me a scene of harmony and proportion; the human race shows me nothing but confusion and disorder. the elements agree together; men are in a state of chaos. the beasts are happy; their king alone is wretched. o wisdom, where are thy laws? o providence, is this thy rule over the world? merciful god, where is thy power? i behold the earth, and there is evil upon it. would you believe it, dear friend, from these gloomy thoughts and apparent contradictions, there was shaped in my mind the sublime idea of the soul, which all my seeking had hitherto failed to discover? while i meditated upon man's nature, i seemed to discover two distinct principles in it; one of them raised him to the study of the eternal truths, to the love of justice, and of true morality, to the regions of the world of thought, which the wise delight to contemplate; the other led him downwards to himself, made him the slave of his senses, of the passions which are their instruments, and thus opposed everything suggested to him by the former principle. when i felt myself carried away, distracted by these conflicting motives, i said, no; man is not one; i will and i will not; i feel myself at once a slave and a free man; i perceive what is right, i love it, and i do what is wrong; i am active when i listen to the voice of reason; i am passive when i am carried away by my passions; and when i yield, my worst suffering is the knowledge that i might have resisted. young man, hear me with confidence. i will always be honest with you. if conscience is the creature of prejudice, i am certainly wrong, and there is no such thing as a proof of morality; but if to put oneself first is an inclination natural to man, and if the first sentiment of justice is moreover inborn in the human heart, let those who say man is a simple creature remove these contradictions and i will grant that there is but one substance. you will note that by this term 'substance' i understand generally the being endowed with some primitive quality, apart from all special and secondary modifications. if then all the primitive qualities which are known to us can be united in one and the same being, we should only acknowledge one substance; but if there are qualities which are mutually exclusive, there are as many different substances as there are such exclusions. you will think this over; for my own part, whatever locke may say, it is enough for me to recognise matter as having merely extension and divisibility to convince myself that it cannot think, and if a philosopher tells me that trees feel and rocks think [footnote: it seems to me that modern philosophy, far from saying that rocks think, has discovered that men do not think. it perceives nothing more in nature than sensitive beings; and the only difference it finds between a man and a stone is that a man is a sensitive being which experiences sensations, and a stone is a sensitive being which does not experience sensations. but if it is true that all matter feels, where shall i find the sensitive unit, the individual ego? shall it be in each molecule of matter or in bodies as aggregates of molecules? shall i place this unity in fluids and solids alike, in compounds and in elements? you tell me nature consists of individuals. but what are these individuals? is that stone an individual or an aggregate of individuals? is it a single sensitive being, or are there as many beings in it as there are grains of sand? if every elementary atom is a sensitive being, how shall i conceive of that intimate communication by which one feels within the other, so that their two egos are blended in one? attraction may be a law of nature whose mystery is unknown to us; but at least we conceive that there is nothing in attraction acting in proportion to mass which is contrary to extension and divisibility. can you conceive of sensation in the same way? the sensitive parts have extension, but the sensitive being is one and indivisible; he cannot be cut in two, he is a whole or he is nothing; therefore the sensitive being is not a material body. i know not how our materialists understand it, but it seems to me that the same difficulties which have led them to reject thought, should have made them also reject feeling; and i see no reason why, when the first step has been taken, they should not take the second too; what more would it cost them? since they are certain they do not think, why do they dare to affirm that they feel?] in vain will he perplex me with his cunning arguments; i merely regard him as a dishonest sophist, who prefers to say that stones have feeling rather than that men have souls. suppose a deaf man denies the existence of sounds because he has never heard them. i put before his eyes a stringed instrument and cause it to sound in unison by means of another instrument concealed from him; the deaf man sees the chord vibrate. i tell him, "the sound makes it do that." "not at all," says he, "the string itself is the cause of the vibration; to vibrate in that way is a quality common to all bodies." "then show me this vibration in other bodies," i answer, "or at least show me its cause in this string." "i cannot," replies the deaf man; "but because i do not understand how that string vibrates why should i try to explain it by means of your sounds, of which i have not the least idea? it is explaining one obscure fact by means of a cause still more obscure. make me perceive your sounds; or i say there are no such things." the more i consider thought and the nature of the human mind, the more likeness i find between the arguments of the materialists and those of the deaf man. indeed, they are deaf to the inner voice which cries aloud to them, in a tone which can hardly be mistaken. a machine does not think, there is neither movement nor form which can produce reflection; something within thee tries to break the bands which confine it; space is not thy measure, the whole universe does not suffice to contain thee; thy sentiments, thy desires, thy anxiety, thy pride itself, have another origin than this small body in which thou art imprisoned. no material creature is in itself active, and i am active. in vain do you argue this point with me; i feel it, and it is this feeling which speaks to me more forcibly than the reason which disputes it. i have a body which is acted upon by other bodies, and it acts in turn upon them; there is no doubt about this reciprocal action; but my will is independent of my senses; i consent or i resist; i yield or i win the victory, and i know very well in myself when i have done what i wanted and when i have merely given way to my passions. i have always the power to will, but not always the strength to do what i will. when i yield to temptation i surrender myself to the action of external objects. when i blame myself for this weakness, i listen to my own will alone; i am a slave in my vices, a free man in my remorse; the feeling of freedom is never effaced in me but when i myself do wrong, and when i at length prevent the voice of the soul from protesting against the authority of the body. i am only aware of will through the consciousness of my own will, and intelligence is no better known to me. when you ask me what is the cause which determines my will, it is my turn to ask what cause determines my judgment; for it is plain that these two causes are but one; and if you understand clearly that man is active in his judgments, that his intelligence is only the power to compare and judge, you will see that his freedom is only a similar power or one derived from this; he chooses between good and evil as he judges between truth and falsehood; if his judgment is at fault, he chooses amiss. what then is the cause that determines his will? it is his judgment. and what is the cause that determines his judgment? it is his intelligence, his power of judging; the determining cause is in himself. beyond that, i understand nothing. no doubt i am not free not to desire my own welfare, i am not free to desire my own hurt; but my freedom consists in this very thing, that i can will what is for my own good, or what i esteem as such, without any external compulsion. does it follow that i am not my own master because i cannot be other than myself? the motive power of all action is in the will of a free creature; we can go no farther. it is not the word freedom that is meaningless, but the word necessity. to suppose some action which is not the effect of an active motive power is indeed to suppose effects without cause, to reason in a vicious circle. either there is no original impulse, or every original impulse has no antecedent cause, and there is no will properly so-called without freedom. man is therefore free to act, and as such he is animated by an immaterial substance; that is the third article of my creed. from these three you will easily deduce the rest, so that i need not enumerate them. if man is at once active and free, he acts of his own accord; what he does freely is no part of the system marked out by providence and it cannot be imputed to providence. providence does not will the evil that man does when he misuses the freedom given to him; neither does providence prevent him doing it, either because the wrong done by so feeble a creature is as nothing in its eyes, or because it could not prevent it without doing a greater wrong and degrading his nature. providence has made him free that he may choose the good and refuse the evil. it has made him capable of this choice if he uses rightly the faculties bestowed upon him, but it has so strictly limited his powers that the misuse of his freedom cannot disturb the general order. the evil that man does reacts upon himself without affecting the system of the world, without preventing the preservation of the human species in spite of itself. to complain that god does not prevent us from doing wrong is to complain because he has made man of so excellent a nature, that he has endowed his actions with that morality by which they are ennobled, that he has made virtue man's birthright. supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom, we are tempted by our passions and restrained by conscience. what more could divine power itself have done on our behalf? could it have made our nature a contradiction, and have given the prize of well-doing to one who was incapable of evil? to prevent a man from wickedness, should providence have restricted him to instinct and made him a fool? not so, o god of my soul, i will never reproach thee that thou hast created me in thine own image, that i may be free and good and happy like my maker! it is the abuse of our powers that makes us unhappy and wicked. our cares, our sorrows, our sufferings are of our own making. moral ills are undoubtedly the work of man, and physical ills would be nothing but for our vices which have made us liable to them. has not nature made us feel our needs as a means to our preservation! is not bodily suffering a sign that the machine is out of order and needs attention? death.... do not the wicked poison their own life and ours? who would wish to live for ever? death is the cure for the evils you bring upon yourself; nature would not have you suffer perpetually. how few sufferings are felt by man living in a state of primitive simplicity! his life is almost entirely free from suffering and from passion; he neither fears nor feels death; if he feels it, his sufferings make him desire it; henceforth it is no evil in his eyes. if we were but content to be ourselves we should have no cause to complain of our lot; but in the search for an imaginary good we find a thousand real ills. he who cannot bear a little pain must expect to suffer greatly. if a man injures his constitution by dissipation, you try to cure him with medicine; the ill he fears is added to the ill he feels; the thought of death makes it horrible and hastens its approach; the more we seek to escape from it, the more we are aware of it; and we go through life in the fear of death, blaming nature for the evils we have inflicted on ourselves by our neglect of her laws. o man! seek no further for the author of evil; thou art he. there is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both come from yourself. evil in general can only spring from disorder, and in the order of the world i find a never failing system. evil in particular cases exists only in the mind of those who experience it; and this feeling is not the gift of nature, but the work of man himself. pain has little power over those who, having thought little, look neither before nor after. take away our fatal progress, take away our faults and our vices, take away man's handiwork, and all is well. where all is well, there is no such thing as injustice. justice and goodness are inseparable; now goodness is the necessary result of boundless power and of that self-love which is innate in all sentient beings. the omnipotent projects himself, so to speak, into the being of his creatures. creation and preservation are the everlasting work of power; it does not act on that which has no existence; god is not the god of the dead; he could not harm and destroy without injury to himself. the omnipotent can only will what is good. [footnote: the ancients were right when they called the supreme god optimus maximus, but it would have been better to say maximus optimus, for his goodness springs from his power, he is good because he is great.] therefore he who is supremely good, because he is supremely powerful, must also be supremely just, otherwise he would contradict himself; for that love of order which creates order we call goodness and that love of order which preserves order we call justice. men say god owes nothing to his creatures. i think he owes them all he promised when he gave them their being. now to give them the idea of something good and to make them feel the need of it, is to promise it to them. the more closely i study myself, the more carefully i consider, the more plainly do i read these words, "be just and you will be happy." it is not so, however, in the present condition of things, the wicked prospers and the oppression of the righteous continues. observe how angry we are when this expectation is disappointed. conscience revolts and murmurs against her creator; she exclaims with cries and groans, "thou hast deceived me." "i have deceived thee, rash soul! who told thee this? is thy soul destroyed? hast thou ceased to exist? o brutus! o my son! let there be no stain upon the close of thy noble life; do not abandon thy hope and thy glory with thy corpse upon the plains of philippi. why dost thou say, 'virtue is naught,' when thou art about to enjoy the reward of virtue? thou art about to die! nay, thou shalt live, and thus my promise is fulfilled." one might judge from the complaints of impatient men that god owes them the reward before they have deserved it, that he is bound to pay for virtue in advance. oh! let us first be good and then we shall be happy. let us not claim the prize before we have won it, nor demand our wages before we have finished our work. "it is not in the lists that we crown the victors in the sacred games," says plutarch, "it is when they have finished their course." if the soul is immaterial, it may survive the body; and if it so survives, providence is justified. had i no other proof of the immaterial nature of the soul, the triumph of the wicked and the oppression of the righteous in this world would be enough to convince me. i should seek to resolve so appalling a discord in the universal harmony. i should say to myself, "all is not over with life, everything finds its place at death." i should still have to answer the question, "what becomes of man when all we know of him through our senses has vanished?" this question no longer presents any difficulty to me when i admit the two substances. it is easy to understand that what is imperceptible to those senses escapes me, during my bodily life, when i perceive through my senses only. when the union of soul and body is destroyed, i think one may be dissolved and the other may be preserved. why should the destruction of the one imply the destruction of the other? on the contrary, so unlike in their nature, they were during their union in a highly unstable condition, and when this union comes to an end they both return to their natural state; the active vital substance regains all the force which it expended to set in motion the passive dead substance. alas! my vices make me only too well aware that man is but half alive during this life; the life of the soul only begins with the death of the body. but what is that life? is the soul of man in its nature immortal? i know not. my finite understanding cannot hold the infinite; what is called eternity eludes my grasp. what can i assert or deny, how can i reason with regard to what i cannot conceive? i believe that the soul survives the body for the maintenance of order; who knows if this is enough to make it eternal? however, i know that the body is worn out and destroyed by the division of its parts, but i cannot conceive a similar destruction of the conscious nature, and as i cannot imagine how it can die, i presume that it does not die. as this assumption is consoling and in itself not unreasonable, why should i fear to accept it? i am aware of my soul; it is known to me in feeling and in thought; i know what it is without knowing its essence; i cannot reason about ideas which are unknown to me. what i do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory, and that to be indeed the same self i must remember that i have existed. now after death i could not recall what i was when alive unless i also remembered what i felt and therefore what i did; and i have no doubt that this remembrance will one day form the happiness of the good and the torment of the bad. in this world our inner consciousness is absorbed by the crowd of eager passions which cheat remorse. the humiliation and disgrace involved in the practice of virtue do not permit us to realise its charm. but when, freed from the illusions of the bodily senses, we behold with joy the supreme being and the eternal truths which flow from him; when all the powers of our soul are alive to the beauty of order and we are wholly occupied in comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done, then it is that the voice of conscience will regain its strength and sway; then it is that the pure delight which springs from self-content, and the sharp regret for our own degradation of that self, will decide by means of overpowering feeling what shall be the fate which each has prepared for himself. my good friend, do not ask me whether there are other sources of happiness or suffering; i cannot tell; that which my fancy pictures is enough to console me in this life and to bid me look for a life to come. i do not say the good will be rewarded, for what greater good can a truly good being expect than to exist in accordance with his nature? but i do assert that the good will be happy, because their maker, the author of all justice, who has made them capable of feeling, has not made them that they may suffer; moreover, they have not abused their freedom upon earth and they have not changed their fate through any fault of their own; yet they have suffered in this life and it will be made up to them in the life to come. this feeling relies not so much on man's deserts as on the idea of good which seems to me inseparable from the divine essence. i only assume that the laws of order are constant and that god is true to himself. do not ask me whether the torments of the wicked will endure for ever, whether the goodness of their creator can condemn them to the eternal suffering; again, i cannot tell, and i have no empty curiosity for the investigation of useless problems. how does the fate of the wicked concern me? i take little interest in it. all the same i find it hard to believe that they will be condemned to everlasting torments. if the supreme justice calls for vengeance, it claims it in this life. the nations of the world with their errors are its ministers. justice uses self-inflicted ills to punish the crimes which have deserved them. it is in your own insatiable souls, devoured by envy, greed, and ambition, it is in the midst of your false prosperity, that the avenging passions find the due reward of your crimes. what need to seek a hell in the future life? it is here in the breast of the wicked. when our fleeting needs are over, and our mad desires are at rest, there should also be an end of our passions and our crimes. can pure spirits be capable of any perversity? having need of nothing, why should they be wicked? if they are free from our gross senses, if their happiness consists in the contemplation of other beings, they can only desire what is good; and he who ceases to be bad can never be miserable. this is what i am inclined to think though i have not been at the pains to come to any decision. o god, merciful and good, whatever thy decrees may be i adore them; if thou shouldst commit the wicked to everlasting punishment, i abandon my feeble reason to thy justice; but if the remorse of these wretched beings should in the course of time be extinguished, if their sufferings should come to an end, and if the same peace shall one day be the lot of all mankind, i give thanks to thee for this. is not the wicked my brother? how often have i been tempted to be like him? let him be delivered from his misery and freed from the spirit of hatred that accompanied it; let him be as happy as i myself; his happiness, far from arousing my jealousy, will only increase my own. thus it is that, in the contemplation of god in his works, and in the study of such of his attributes as it concerned me to know, i have slowly grasped and developed the idea, at first partial and imperfect, which i have formed of this infinite being. but if this idea has become nobler and greater it is also more suited to the human reason. as i approach in spirit the eternal light, i am confused and dazzled by its glory, and compelled to abandon all the earthly notions which helped me to picture it to myself. god is no longer corporeal and sensible; the supreme mind which rules the world is no longer the world itself; in vain do i strive to grasp his inconceivable essence. when i think that it is he that gives life and movement to the living and moving substance which controls all living bodies; when i hear it said that my soul is spiritual and that god is a spirit, i revolt against this abasement of the divine essence; as if god and my soul were of one and the same nature! as if god were not the one and only absolute being, the only really active, feeling, thinking, willing being, from whom we derive our thought, feeling, motion, will, our freedom and our very existence! we are free because he wills our freedom, and his inexplicable substance is to our souls what our souls are to our bodies. i know not whether he has created matter, body, soul, the world itself. the idea of creation confounds me and eludes my grasp; so far as i can conceive of it i believe it; but i know that he has formed the universe and all that is, that he has made and ordered all things. no doubt god is eternal; but can my mind grasp the idea of eternity? why should i cheat myself with meaningless words? this is what i do understand; before things were--god was; he will be when they are no more, and if all things come to an end he will still endure. that a being beyond my comprehension should give life to other beings, this is merely difficult and beyond my understanding; but that being and nothing should be convertible terms, this is indeed a palpable contradiction, an evident absurdity. god is intelligent, but how? man is intelligent when he reasons, but the supreme intelligence does not need to reason; there is neither premise nor conclusion for him, there is not even a proposition. the supreme intelligence is wholly intuitive, it sees what is and what shall be; all truths are one for it, as all places are but one point and all time but one moment. man's power makes use of means, the divine power is self-active. god can because he wills; his will is his power. god is good; this is certain; but man finds his happiness in the welfare of his kind. god's happiness consists in the love of order; for it is through order that he maintains what is, and unites each part in the whole. god is just; of this i am sure, it is a consequence of his goodness; man's injustice is not god's work, but his own; that moral justice which seems to the philosophers a presumption against providence, is to me a proof of its existence. but man's justice consists in giving to each his due; god's justice consists in demanding from each of us an account of that which he has given us. if i have succeeded in discerning these attributes of which i have no absolute idea, it is in the form of unavoidable deductions, and by the right use of my reason; but i affirm them without understanding them, and at bottom that is no affirmation at all. in vain do i say, god is thus, i feel it, i experience it, none the more do i understand how god can be thus. in a word: the more i strive to envisage his infinite essence the less do i comprehend it; but it is, and that is enough for me; the less i understand, the more i adore. i abase myself, saying, "being of beings, i am because thou art; to fix my thoughts on thee is to ascend to the source of my being. the best use i can make of my reason is to resign it before thee; my mind delights, my weakness rejoices, to feel myself overwhelmed by thy greatness." having thus deduced from the perception of objects of sense and from my inner consciousness, which leads me to judge of causes by my native reason, the principal truths which i require to know, i must now seek such principles of conduct as i can draw from them, and such rules as i must lay down for my guidance in the fulfilment of my destiny in this world, according to the purpose of my maker. still following the same method, i do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, i find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. i need only consult myself with regard to what i wish to do; what i feel to be right is right, what i feel to be wrong is wrong; conscience is the best casuist; and it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument. our first duty is towards ourself; yet how often does the voice of others tell us that in seeking our good at the expense of others we are doing ill? we think we are following the guidance of nature, and we are resisting it; we listen to what she says to our senses, and we neglect what she says to our heart; the active being obeys, the passive commands. conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. it is strange that these voices often contradict each other? and then to which should we give heed? too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body, [footnote: modern philosophy, which only admits what it can understand, is careful not to admit this obscure power called instinct which seems to guide the animals to some end without any acquired experience. instinct, according to some of our wise philosophers, is only a secret habit of reflection, acquired by reflection; and from the way in which they explain this development one ought to suppose that children reflect more than grown-up people: a paradox strange enough to be worth examining. without entering upon this discussion i must ask what name i shall give to the eagerness with which my dog makes war on the moles he does not eat, or to the patience with which he sometimes watches them for hours and the skill with which he seizes them, throws them to a distance from their earth as soon as they emerge, and then kills them and leaves them. yet no one has trained him to this sport, nor even told him there were such things as moles. again, i ask, and this is a more important question, why, when i threatened this same dog for the first time, why did he throw himself on the ground with his paws folded, in such a suppliant attitude .....calculated to touch me, a position which he would have maintained if, without being touched by it, i had continued to beat him in that position? what! had my dog, little more than a puppy, acquired moral ideas? did he know the meaning of mercy and generosity? by what acquired knowledge did he seek to appease my wrath by yielding to my discretion? every dog in the world does almost the same thing in similar circumstances, and i am asserting nothing but what any one can verify for himself. will the philosophers, who so scornfully reject instinct, kindly explain this fact by the mere play of sensations and experience which they assume we have acquired? let them give an account of it which will satisfy any sensible man; in that case i have nothing further to urge, and i will say no more of instinct.] he who obeys his conscience is following nature and he need not fear that he will go astray. this is a matter of great importance, continued my benefactor, seeing that i was about to interrupt him; let me stop awhile to explain it more fully. the morality of our actions consists entirely in the judgments we ourselves form with regard to them. if good is good, it must be good in the depth of our heart as well as in our actions; and the first reward of justice is the consciousness that we are acting justly. if moral goodness is in accordance with our nature, man can only be healthy in mind and body when he is good. if it is not so, and if man is by nature evil, he cannot cease to be evil without corrupting his nature, and goodness in him is a crime against nature. if he is made to do harm to his fellow-creatures, as the wolf is made to devour his prey, a humane man would be as depraved a creature as a pitiful wolf; and virtue alone would cause remorse. my young friend, let us look within, let us set aside all personal prejudices and see whither our inclinations lead us. do we take more pleasure in the sight of the sufferings of others or their joys? is it pleasanter to do a kind action or an unkind action, and which leaves the more delightful memory behind it? why do you enjoy the theatre? do you delight in the crimes you behold? do you weep over the punishment which overtakes the criminal? they say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. if there is no such thing as morality in man's heart, what is the source of his rapturous admiration of noble deeds, his passionate devotion to great men? what connection is there between self-interest and this enthusiasm for virtue? why should i choose to be cato dying by his own hand, rather than caesar in his triumphs? take from our hearts this love of what is noble and you rob us of the joy of life. the mean-spirited man in whom these delicious feelings have been stifled among vile passions, who by thinking of no one but himself comes at last to love no one but himself, this man feels no raptures, his cold heart no longer throbs with joy, and his eyes no longer fill with the sweet tears of sympathy, he delights in nothing; the wretch has neither life nor feeling, he is already dead. there are many bad men in this world, but there are few of these dead souls, alive only to self-interest, and insensible to all that is right and good. we only delight in injustice so long as it is to our own advantage; in every other case we wish the innocent to be protected. if we see some act of violence or injustice in town or country, our hearts are at once stirred to their depths by an instinctive anger and wrath, which bids us go to the help of the oppressed; but we are restrained by a stronger duty, and the law deprives us of our right to protect the innocent. on the other hand, if some deed of mercy or generosity meets our eye, what reverence and love does it inspire! do we not say to ourselves, "i should like to have done that myself"? what does it matter to us that two thousand years ago a man was just or unjust? and yet we take the same interest in ancient history as if it happened yesterday. what are the crimes of cataline to me? i shall not be his victim. why then have i the same horror of his crimes as if he were living now? we do not hate the wicked merely because of the harm they do to ourselves, but because they are wicked. not only do we wish to be happy ourselves, we wish others to be happy too, and if this happiness does not interfere with our own happiness, it increases it. in conclusion, whether we will or not, we pity the unfortunate; when we see their suffering we suffer too. even the most depraved are not wholly without this instinct, and it often leads them to self-contradiction. the highwayman who robs the traveller, clothes the nakedness of the poor; the fiercest murderer supports a fainting man. men speak of the voice of remorse, the secret punishment of hidden crimes, by which such are often brought to light. alas! who does not know its unwelcome voice? we speak from experience, and we would gladly stifle this imperious feeling which causes us such agony. let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience. the wicked fears and flees from her; he delights to escape from himself; his anxious eyes look around him for some object of diversion; without bitter satire and rude mockery he would always be sorrowful; the scornful laugh is his one pleasure. not so the just man, who finds his peace within himself; there is joy not malice in his laughter, a joy which springs from his own heart; he is as cheerful alone as in company, his satisfaction does not depend on those who approach him; it includes them. cast your eyes over every nation of the world; peruse every volume of its history; in the midst of all these strange and cruel forms of worship, among this amazing variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same ideas of right and justice; everywhere the same principles of morality, the same ideas of good and evil. the old paganism gave birth to abominable gods who would have been punished as scoundrels here below, gods who merely offered, as a picture of supreme happiness, crimes to be committed and lust to be gratified. but in vain did vice descend from the abode of the gods armed with their sacred authority; the moral instinct refused to admit it into the heart of man. while the debaucheries of jupiter were celebrated, the continence of xenocrates was revered; the chaste lucrece adored the shameless venus; the bold roman offered sacrifices to fear; he invoked the god who mutilated his father, and he died without a murmur at the hand of his own father. the most unworthy gods were worshipped by the noblest men. the sacred voice of nature was stronger than the voice of the gods, and won reverence upon earth; it seemed to relegate guilt and the guilty alike to heaven. there is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil; and it is this principle that i call conscience. but at this word i hear the murmurs of all the wise men so-called. childish errors, prejudices of our upbringing, they exclaim in concert! there is nothing in the human mind but what it has gained by experience; and we judge everything solely by means of the ideas we have acquired. they go further; they even venture to reject the clear and universal agreement of all peoples, and to set against this striking unanimity in the judgment of mankind, they seek out some obscure exception known to themselves alone; as if the whole trend of nature were rendered null by the depravity of a single nation, and as if the existence of monstrosities made an end of species. but to what purpose does the sceptic montaigne strive himself to unearth in some obscure corner of the world a custom which is contrary to the ideas of justice? to what purpose does he credit the most untrustworthy travellers, while he refuses to believe the greatest writers? a few strange and doubtful customs, based on local causes, unknown to us; shall these destroy a general inference based on the agreement of all the nations of the earth, differing from each other in all else, but agreed in this? o montaigne, you pride yourself on your truth and honesty; be sincere and truthful, if a philosopher can be so, and tell me if there is any country upon earth where it is a crime to keep one's plighted word, to be merciful, helpful, and generous, where the good man is scorned, and the traitor is held in honour. self-interest, so they say, induces each of us to agree for the common good. but how is it that the good man consents to this to his own hurt? does a man go to death from self-interest? no doubt each man acts for his own good, but if there is no such thing as moral good to be taken into consideration, self-interest will only enable you to account for the deeds of the wicked; possibly you will not attempt to do more. a philosophy which could find no place for good deeds would be too detestable; you would find yourself compelled either to find some mean purpose, some wicked motive, or to abuse socrates and slander regulus. if such doctrines ever took root among us, the voice of nature, together with the voice of reason, would constantly protest against them, till no adherent of such teaching could plead an honest excuse for his partisanship. it is no part of my scheme to enter at present into metaphysical discussions which neither you nor i can understand, discussions which really lead nowhere. i have told you already that i do not wish to philosophise with you, but to help you to consult your own heart. if all the philosophers in the world should prove that i am wrong, and you feel that i am right, that is all i ask. for this purpose it is enough to lead you to distinguish between our acquired ideas and our natural feelings; for feeling precedes knowledge; and since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our self-love. the decrees of conscience are not judgments but feelings. although all our ideas come from without, the feelings by which they are weighed are within us, and it is by these feelings alone that we perceive fitness or unfitness of things in relation to ourselves, which leads us to seek or shun these things. to exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.[footnote: in some respects ideas are feelings and feelings are ideas. both terms are appropriate to any perception with which we are concerned, appropriate both to the object of that perception and to ourselves who are affected by it; it is merely the order in which we are affected which decides the appropriate term. when we are chiefly concerned with the object and only think of ourselves as it were by reflection, that is an idea; when, on the other hand, the impression received excites our chief attention and we only think in the second place of the object which caused it, it is a feeling.] whatever may be the cause of our being, it has provided for our preservation by giving us feelings suited to our nature; and no one can deny that these at least are innate. these feelings, so far as the individual is concerned, are self-love, fear, pain, the dread of death, the desire for comfort. again, if, as it is impossible to doubt, man is by nature sociable, or at least fitted to become sociable, he can only be so by means of other innate feelings, relative to his kind; for if only physical well-being were considered, men would certainly be scattered rather than brought together. but the motive power of conscience is derived from the moral system formed through this twofold relation to himself and to his fellow-men. to know good is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to perceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate. so i do not think, my young friend, that it is impossible to explain the immediate force of conscience as a result of our own nature, independent of reason itself. and even should it be impossible, it is unnecessary; for those who deny this principle, admitted and received by everybody else in the world, do not prove that there is no such thing; they are content to affirm, and when we affirm its existence we have quite as good grounds as they, while we have moreover the witness within us, the voice of conscience, which speaks on its own behalf. if the first beams of judgment dazzle us and confuse the objects we behold, let us wait till our feeble sight grows clear and strong, and in the light of reason we shall soon behold these very objects as nature has already showed them to us. or rather let us be simpler and less pretentious; let us be content with the first feelings we experience in ourselves, since science always brings us back to these, unless it has led us astray. conscience! conscience! divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to god! in thee consists the excellence of man's nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, i find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts--nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle. thank heaven we have now got rid of all that alarming show of philosophy; we may be men without being scholars; now that we need not spend our life in the study of morality, we have found a less costly and surer guide through this vast labyrinth of human thought. but it is not enough to be aware that there is such a guide; we must know her and follow her. if she speaks to all hearts, how is it that so few give heed to her voice? she speaks to us in the language of nature, and everything leads us to forget that tongue. conscience is timid, she loves peace and retirement; she is startled by noise and numbers; the prejudices from which she is said to arise are her worst enemies. she flees before them or she is silent; their noisy voices drown her words, so that she cannot get a hearing; fanaticism dares to counterfeit her voice and to inspire crimes in her name. she is discouraged by ill-treatment; she no longer speaks to us, no longer answers to our call; when she has been scorned so long, it is as hard to recall her as it was to banish her. how often in the course of my inquiries have i grown weary of my own coldness of heart! how often have grief and weariness poured their poison into my first meditations and made them hateful to me! my barren heart yielded nothing but a feeble zeal and a lukewarm love of truth. i said to myself: why should i strive to find what does not exist? moral good is a dream, the pleasures of sense are the only real good. when once we have lost the taste for the pleasures of the soul, how hard it is to recover it! how much more difficult to acquire it if we have never possessed it! if there were any man so wretched as never to have done anything all his life long which he could remember with pleasure, and which would make him glad to have lived, that man would be incapable of self-knowledge, and for want of knowledge of goodness, of which his nature is capable, he would be constrained to remain in his wickedness and would be for ever miserable. but do you think there is any one man upon earth so depraved that he has never yielded to the temptation of well-doing? this temptation is so natural, so pleasant, that it is impossible always to resist it; and the thought of the pleasure it has once afforded is enough to recall it constantly to our memory. unluckily it is hard at first to find satisfaction for it; we have any number of reasons for refusing to follow the inclinations of our heart; prudence, so called, restricts the heart within the limits of the self; a thousand efforts are needed to break these bonds. the joy of well-doing is the prize of having done well, and we must deserve the prize before we win it. there is nothing sweeter than virtue; but we do not know this till we have tried it. like proteus in the fable, she first assumes a thousand terrible shapes when we would embrace her, and only shows her true self to those who refuse to let her go. ever at strife between my natural feelings, which spoke of the common weal, and my reason, which spoke of self, i should have drifted through life in perpetual uncertainty, hating evil, loving good, and always at war with myself, if my heart had not received further light, if that truth which determined my opinions had not also settled my conduct, and set me at peace with myself. reason alone is not a sufficient foundation for virtue; what solid ground can be found? virtue we are told is love of order. but can this love prevail over my love for my own well-being, and ought it so to prevail? let them give me clear and sufficient reason for this preference. their so-called principle is in truth a mere playing with words; for i also say that vice is love of order, differently understood. wherever there is feeling and intelligence, there is some sort of moral order. the difference is this: the good man orders his life with regard to all men; the wicked orders it for self alone. the latter centres all things round himself; the other measures his radius and remains on the circumference. thus his place depends on the common centre, which is god, and on all the concentric circles which are his creatures. if there is no god, the wicked is right and the good man is nothing but a fool. my child! may you one day feel what a burden is removed when, having fathomed the vanity of human thoughts and tasted the bitterness of passion, you find at length near at hand the path of wisdom, the prize of this life's labours, the source of that happiness which you despaired of. every duty of natural law, which man's injustice had almost effaced from my heart, is engraven there, for the second time in the name of that eternal justice which lays these duties upon me and beholds my fulfilment of them. i feel myself merely the instrument of the omnipotent, who wills what is good, who performs it, who will bring about my own good through the co-operation of my will with his own, and by the right use of my liberty. i acquiesce in the order he establishes, certain that one day i shall enjoy that order and find my happiness in it; for what sweeter joy is there than this, to feel oneself a part of a system where all is good? a prey to pain, i bear it in patience, remembering that it will soon be over, and that it results from a body which is not mine. if i do a good deed in secret, i know that it is seen, and my conduct in this life is a pledge of the life to come. when i suffer injustice, i say to myself, the almighty who does all things well will reward me: my bodily needs, my poverty, make the idea of death less intolerable. there will be all the fewer bonds to be broken when my hour comes. why is my soul subjected to my senses, and imprisoned in this body by which it is enslaved and thwarted? i know not; have i entered into the counsels of the almighty? but i may, without rashness, venture on a modest conjecture. i say to myself: if man's soul had remained in a state of freedom and innocence, what merit would there have been in loving and obeying the order he found established, an order which it would not have been to his advantage to disturb? he would be happy, no doubt, but his happiness would not attain to the highest point, the pride of virtue, and the witness of a good conscience within him; he would be but as the angels are, and no doubt the good man will be more than they. bound to a mortal body, by bonds as strange as they are powerful, his care for the preservation of this body tempts the soul to think only of self, and gives it an interest opposed to the general order of things, which it is still capable of knowing and loving; then it is that the right use of his freedom becomes at once the merit and the reward; then it is that it prepares for itself unending happiness, by resisting its earthly passions and following its original direction. if even in the lowly position in which we are placed during our present life our first impulses are always good, if all our vices are of our own making, why should we complain that they are our masters? why should we blame the creator for the ills we have ourselves created, and the enemies we ourselves have armed against us? oh, let us leave man unspoilt; he will always find it easy to be good and he will always be happy without remorse. the guilty, who assert that they are driven to crime, are liars as well as evil-doers; how is it that they fail to perceive that the weakness they bewail is of their own making; that their earliest depravity was the result of their own will; that by dint of wishing to yield to temptations, they at length yield to them whether they will or no and make them irresistible? no doubt they can no longer avoid being weak and wicked, but they need not have become weak and wicked. oh, how easy would it be to preserve control of ourselves and of our passions, even in this life, if with habits still unformed, with a mind beginning to expand, we were able to keep to such things as we ought to know, in order to value rightly what is unknown; if we really wished to learn, not that we might shine before the eyes of others, but that we might be wise and good in accordance with our nature, that we might be happy in the performance of our duty. this study seems tedious and painful to us, for we do not attempt it till we are already corrupted by vice and enslaved by our passions. our judgments and our standards of worth are determined before we have the knowledge of good and evil; and then we measure all things by this false standard, and give nothing its true worth. there is an age when the heart is still free, but eager, unquiet, greedy of a happiness which is still unknown, a happiness which it seeks in curiosity and doubt; deceived by the senses it settles at length upon the empty show of happiness and thinks it has found it where it is not. in my own case these illusions endured for a long time. alas! too late did i become aware of them, and i have not succeeded in overcoming them altogether; they will last as long as this mortal body from which they arise. if they lead me astray, i am at least no longer deceived by them; i know them for what they are, and even when i give way to them, i despise myself; far from regarding them as the goal of my happiness, i behold in them an obstacle to it. i long for the time when, freed from the fetters of the body, i shall be myself, at one with myself, no longer torn in two, when i myself shall suffice for my own happiness. meanwhile i am happy even in this life, for i make small account of all its evils, in which i regard myself as having little or no part, while all the real good that i can get out of this life depends on myself alone. to raise myself so far as may be even now to this state of happiness, strength, and freedom, i exercise myself in lofty contemplation. i consider the order of the universe, not to explain it by any futile system, but to revere it without ceasing, to adore the wise author who reveals himself in it. i hold intercourse with him; i immerse all my powers in his divine essence; i am overwhelmed by his kindness, i bless him and his gifts, but i do not pray to him. what should i ask of him--to change the order of nature, to work miracles on my behalf? should i, who am bound to love above all things the order which he has established in his wisdom and maintained by his providence, should i desire the disturbance of that order on my own account? no, that rash prayer would deserve to be punished rather than to be granted. neither do i ask of him the power to do right; why should i ask what he has given me already? has he not given me conscience that i may love the right, reason that i may perceive it, and freedom that i may choose it? if i do evil, i have no excuse; i do it of my own free will; to ask him to change my will is to ask him to do what he asks of me; it is to want him to do the work while i get the wages; to be dissatisfied with my lot is to wish to be no longer a man, to wish to be other than what i am, to wish for disorder and evil. thou source of justice and truth, merciful and gracious god, in thee do i trust, and the desire of my heart is--thy will be done. when i unite my will with thine, i do what thou doest; i have a share in thy goodness; i believe that i enjoy beforehand the supreme happiness which is the reward of goodness. in my well-founded self-distrust the only thing that i ask of god, or rather expect from his justice, is to correct my error if i go astray, if that error is dangerous to me. to be honest i need not think myself infallible; my opinions, which seem to me true, may be so many lies; for what man is there who does not cling to his own beliefs; and how many men are agreed in everything? the illusion which deceives me may indeed have its source in myself, but it is god alone who can remove it. i have done all i can to attain to truth; but its source is beyond my reach; is it my fault if my strength fails me and i can go no further; it is for truth to draw near to me. the good priest had spoken with passion; he and i were overcome with emotion. it seemed to me as if i were listening to the divine orpheus when he sang the earliest hymns and taught men the worship of the gods. i saw any number of objections which might be raised; yet i raised none, for i perceived that they were more perplexing than serious, and that my inclination took his part. when he spoke to me according to his conscience, my own seemed to confirm what he said. "the novelty of the sentiments you have made known to me," said i, "strikes me all the more because of what you confess you do not know, than because of what you say you believe. they seem to be very like that theism or natural religion, which christians profess to confound with atheism or irreligion which is their exact opposite. but in the present state of my faith i should have to ascend rather than descend to accept your views, and i find it difficult to remain just where you are unless i were as wise as you. that i may be at least as honest, i want time to take counsel with myself. by your own showing, the inner voice must be my guide, and you have yourself told me that when it has long been silenced it cannot be recalled in a moment. i take what you have said to heart, and i must consider it. if after i have thought things out, i am as convinced as you are, you will be my final teacher, and i will be your disciple till death. continue your teaching however; you have only told me half what i must know. speak to me of revelation, of the scriptures, of those difficult doctrines among which i have strayed ever since i was a child, incapable either of understanding or believing them, unable to adopt or reject them." "yes, my child," said he, embracing me, "i will tell you all i think; i will not open my heart to you by halves; but the desire you express was necessary before i could cast aside all reserve. so far i have told you nothing but what i thought would be of service to you, nothing but what i was quite convinced of. the inquiry which remains to be made is very difficult. it seems to me full of perplexity, mystery, and darkness; i bring to it only doubt and distrust. i make up my mind with trembling, and i tell you my doubts rather than my convictions. if your own opinions were more settled i should hesitate to show you mine; but in your present condition, to think like me would be gain. [footnote: i think the worthy clergyman might say this at the present time to the general public.] moreover, give to my words only the authority of reason; i know not whether i am mistaken. it is difficult in discussion to avoid assuming sometimes a dogmatic tone; but remember in this respect that all my assertions are but reasons to doubt me. seek truth for yourself, for my own part i only promise you sincerity. "in my exposition you find nothing but natural religion; strange that we should need more! how shall i become aware of this need? what guilt can be mine so long as i serve god according to the knowledge he has given to my mind, and the feelings he has put into my heart? what purity of morals, what dogma useful to man and worthy of its author, can i derive from a positive doctrine which cannot be derived without the aid of this doctrine by the right use of my faculties? show me what you can add to the duties of the natural law, for the glory of god, for the good of mankind, and for my own welfare; and what virtue you will get from the new form of religion which does not result from mine. the grandest ideas of the divine nature come to us from reason only. behold the spectacle of nature; listen to the inner voice. has not god spoken it all to our eyes, to our conscience, to our reason? what more can man tell us? their revelations do but degrade god, by investing him with passions like our own. far from throwing light upon the ideas of the supreme being, special doctrines seem to me to confuse these ideas; far from ennobling them, they degrade them; to the inconceivable mysteries which surround the almighty, they add absurd contradictions, they make man proud, intolerant, and cruel; instead of bringing peace upon earth, they bring fire and sword. i ask myself what is the use of it all, and i find no answer. i see nothing but the crimes of men and the misery of mankind. "they tell me a revelation was required to teach men how god would be served; as a proof of this they point to the many strange rites which men have instituted, and they do not perceive that this very diversity springs from the fanciful nature of the revelations. as soon as the nations took to making god speak, every one made him speak in his own fashion, and made him say what he himself wanted. had they listened only to what god says in the heart of man, there would have been but one religion upon earth. "one form of worship was required; just so, but was this a matter of such importance as to require all the power of the godhead to establish it? do not let us confuse the outward forms of religion with religion itself. the service god requires is of the heart; and when the heart is sincere that is ever the same. it is a strange sort of conceit which fancies that god takes such an interest in the shape of the priest's vestments, the form of words he utters, the gestures he makes before the altar and all his genuflections. oh, my friend, stand upright, you will still be too near the earth. god desires to be worshipped in spirit and in truth; this duty belongs to every religion, every country, every individual. as to the form of worship, if order demands uniformity, that is only a matter of discipline and needs no revelation. "these thoughts did not come to me to begin with. carried away by the prejudices of my education, and by that dangerous vanity which always strives to lift man out of his proper sphere, when i could not raise my feeble thoughts up to the great being, i tried to bring him down to my own level. i tried to reduce the distance he has placed between his nature and mine. i desired more immediate relations, more individual instruction; not content to make god in the image of man that i might be favoured above my fellows, i desired supernatural knowledge; i required a special form of worship; i wanted god to tell me what he had not told others, or what others had not understood like myself. "considering the point i had now reached as the common centre from which all believers set out on the quest for a more enlightened form of religion, i merely found in natural religion the elements of all religion. i beheld the multitude of diverse sects which hold sway upon earth, each of which accuses the other of falsehood and error; which of these, i asked, is the right? every one replied, 'my own;' every one said, 'i alone and those who agree with me think rightly, all the others are mistaken.' and how do you know that your sect is in the right? because god said so. and how do you know god said so? [footnote: "all men," said a wise and good priest, "maintain that they hold and believe their religion (and all use the same jargon), not of man, nor of any creature, but of god. but to speak truly, without pretence or flattery, none of them do so; whatever they may say, religions are taught by human hands and means; take, for example, the way in which religions have been received by the world, the way in which they are still received every day by individuals; the nation, the country, the locality gives the religion; we belong to the religion of the place where we are born and brought up; we are baptised or circumcised, we are christians, jews, mohametans before we know that we are men; we do not pick and choose our religion for see how ill the life and conduct agree with the religion, see for what slight and human causes men go against the teaching of their religion."--charron, de la sagesse.--it seems clear that the honest creed of the holy theologian of condom would not have differed greatly from that of the savoyard priest.] and who told you that god said it? my pastor, who knows all about it. my pastor tells me what to believe and i believe it; he assures me that any one who says anything else is mistaken, and i give not heed to them. "what! thought i, is not truth one; can that which is true for me be false for you? if those who follow the right path and those who go astray have the same method, what merit or what blame can be assigned to one more than to the other? their choice is the result of chance; it is unjust to hold them responsible for it, to reward or punish them for being born in one country or another. to dare to say that god judges us in this manner is an outrage on his justice. "either all religions are good and pleasing to god, or if there is one which he prescribes for men, if they will be punished for despising it, he will have distinguished it by plain and certain signs by which it can be known as the only true religion; these signs are alike in every time and place, equally plain to all men, great or small, learned or unlearned, europeans, indians, africans, savages. if there were but one religion upon earth, and if all beyond its pale were condemned to eternal punishment, and if there were in any corner of the world one single honest man who was not convinced by this evidence, the god of that religion would be the most unjust and cruel of tyrants. "let us therefore seek honestly after truth; let us yield nothing to the claims of birth, to the authority of parents and pastors, but let us summon to the bar of conscience and of reason all that they have taught us from our childhood. in vain do they exclaim, 'submit your reason;' a deceiver might say as much; i must have reasons for submitting my reason. "all the theology i can get for myself by observation of the universe and by the use of my faculties is contained in what i have already told you. to know more one must have recourse to strange means. these means cannot be the authority of men, for every man is of the same species as myself, and all that a man knows by nature i am capable of knowing, and another may be deceived as much as i; when i believe what he says, it is not because he says it but because he proves its truth. the witness of man is therefore nothing more than the witness of my own reason, and it adds nothing to the natural means which god has given me for the knowledge of truth. "apostle of truth, what have you to tell me of which i am not the sole judge? god himself has spoken; give heed to his revelation. that is another matter. god has spoken, these are indeed words which demand attention. to whom has he spoken? he has spoken to men. why then have i heard nothing? he has instructed others to make known his words to you. i understand; it is men who come and tell me what god has said. i would rather have heard the words of god himself; it would have been as easy for him and i should have been secure from fraud. he protects you from fraud by showing that his envoys come from him. how does he show this? by miracles. where are these miracles? in the books. and who wrote the books? men. and who saw the miracles? the men who bear witness to them. what! nothing but human testimony! nothing but men who tell me what others told them! how many men between god and me! let us see, however, let us examine, compare, and verify. oh! if god had but deigned to free me from all this labour, i would have served him with all my heart. "consider, my friend, the terrible controversy in which i am now engaged; what vast learning is required to go back to the remotest antiquity, to examine, weigh, confront prophecies, revelations, facts, all the monuments of faith set forth throughout the world, to assign their date, place, authorship, and occasion. what exactness of critical judgment is needed to distinguish genuine documents from forgeries, to compare objections with their answers, translations with their originals; to decide as to the impartiality of witnesses, their common-sense, their knowledge; to make sure that nothing has been omitted, nothing added, nothing transposed, altered, or falsified; to point out any remaining contradictions, to determine what weight should be given to the silence of our adversaries with regard to the charges brought against them; how far were they aware of those charges; did they think them sufficiently serious to require an answer; were books sufficiently well known for our books to reach them; have we been honest enough to allow their books to circulate among ourselves and to leave their strongest objections unaltered? "when the authenticity of all these documents is accepted, we must now pass to the evidence of their authors' mission; we must know the laws of chance, and probability, to decide which prophecy cannot be fulfilled without a miracle; we must know the spirit of the original languages, to distinguish between prophecy and figures of speech; we must know what facts are in accordance with nature and what facts are not, so that we may say how far a clever man may deceive the eyes of the simple and may even astonish the learned; we must discover what are the characteristics of a prodigy and how its authenticity may be established, not only so far as to gain credence, but so that doubt may be deserving of punishment; we must compare the evidence for true and false miracles, and find sure tests to distinguish between them; lastly we must say why god chose as a witness to his words means which themselves require so much evidence on their behalf, as if he were playing with human credulity, and avoiding of set purpose the true means of persuasion. "assuming that the divine majesty condescends so far as to make a man the channel of his sacred will, is it reasonable, is it fair, to demand that the whole of mankind should obey the voice of this minister without making him known as such? is it just to give him as his sole credentials certain private signs, performed in the presence of a few obscure persons, signs which everybody else can only know by hearsay? if one were to believe all the miracles that the uneducated and credulous profess to have seen in every country upon earth, every sect would be in the right; there would be more miracles than ordinary events; and it would be the greatest miracle if there were no miracles wherever there were persecuted fanatics. the unchangeable order of nature is the chief witness to the wise hand that guides it; if there were many exceptions, i should hardly know what to think; for my own part i have too great a faith in god to believe in so many miracles which are so little worthy of him. "let a man come and say to us: mortals, i proclaim to you the will of the most highest; accept my words as those of him who has sent me; i bid the sun to change his course, the stars to range themselves in a fresh order, the high places to become smooth, the floods to rise up, the earth to change her face. by these miracles who will not recognise the master of nature? she does not obey impostors, their miracles are wrought in holes and corners, in deserts, within closed doors, where they find easy dupes among a small company of spectators already disposed to believe them. who will venture to tell me how many eye-witnesses are required to make a miracle credible! what use are your miracles, performed if proof of your doctrine, if they themselves require so much proof! you might as well have let them alone. "there still remains the most important inquiry of all with regard to the doctrine proclaimed; for since those who tell us god works miracles in this world, profess that the devil sometimes imitates them, when we have found the best attested miracles we have got very little further; and since the magicians of pharaoh dared in the presence of moses to counterfeit the very signs he wrought at god's command, why should they not, behind his back, claim a like authority? so when we have proved our doctrine by means of miracles, we must prove our miracles by means of doctrine, [footnote: this is expressly stated in many passages of scripture, among others in deuteronomy xiii., where it is said that when a prophet preaching strange gods confirms his words by means of miracles and what he foretells comes to pass, far from giving heed to him, this prophet must be put to death. if then the heathen put the apostles to death when they preached a strange god and confirmed their words by miracles which came to pass i cannot see what grounds we have for complaint which they could not at once turn against us. now, what should be done in such a case? there is only one course; to return to argument and let the miracles alone. it would have been better not to have had recourse to them at all. that is plain common-sense which can only be obscured by great subtlety of distinction. subtleties in christianity! so jesus christ was mistaken when he promised the kingdom of heaven to the simple, he was mistaken when he began his finest discourse with the praise of the poor in spirit, if so much wit is needed to understand his teaching and to get others to believe in him. when you have convinced me that submission is my duty, all will be well; but to convince me of this, come down to my level; adapt your arguments to a lowly mind, or i shall not recognise you as a true disciple of your master, and it is not his doctrine that you are teaching me.] for fear lest we should take the devil's doings for the handiwork of god. what think you of this dilemma? "this doctrine, if it comes from god, should bear the sacred stamp of the godhead; not only should it illumine the troubled thoughts which reason imprints on our minds, but it should also offer us a form of worship, a morality, and rules of conduct in accordance with the attributes by means of which we alone conceive of god's essence. if then it teaches us what is absurd and unreasonable, if it inspires us with feelings of aversion for our fellows and terror for ourselves, if it paints us a god, angry, jealous, revengeful, partial, hating men, a god of war and battles, ever ready to strike and to destroy, ever speaking of punishment and torment, boasting even of the punishment of the innocent, my heart would not be drawn towards this terrible god, i would take good care not to quit the realm of natural religion to embrace such a religion as that; for you see plainly i must choose between them. your god is not ours. he who begins by selecting a chosen people, and proscribing the rest of mankind, is not our common father; he who consigns to eternal punishment the greater part of his creatures, is not the merciful and gracious god revealed to me by my reason. "reason tells me that dogmas should be plain, clear, and striking in their simplicity. if there is something lacking in natural religion, it is with respect to the obscurity in which it leaves the great truths it teaches; revelation should teach us these truths in a way which the mind of man can understand; it should bring them within his reach, make him comprehend them, so that he may believe them. faith is confirmed and strengthened by understanding; the best religion is of necessity the simplest. he who hides beneath mysteries and contradictions the religion that he preaches to me, teaches me at the same time to distrust that religion. the god whom i adore is not the god of darkness, he has not given me understanding in order to forbid me to use it; to tell me to submit my reason is to insult the giver of reason. the minister of truth does not tyrannise over my reason, he enlightens it. "we have set aside all human authority, and without it i do not see how any man can convince another by preaching a doctrine contrary to reason. let them fight it out, and let us see what they have to say with that harshness of speech which is common to both. "inspiration: reason tells you that the whole is greater than the part; but i tell you, in god's name, that the part is greater than the whole. "reason: and who are you to dare to tell me that god contradicts himself? and which shall i choose to believe. god who teaches me, through my reason, the eternal truth, or you who, in his name, proclaim an absurdity? "inspiration: believe me, for my teaching is more positive; and i will prove to you beyond all manner of doubt that he has sent me. "reason: what! you will convince me that god has sent you to bear witness against himself? what sort of proofs will you adduce to convince me that god speaks more surely by your mouth than through the understanding he has given me? "inspiration: the understanding he has given you! petty, conceited creature! as if you were the first impious person who had been led astray through his reason corrupted by sin. "reason: man of god, you would not be the first scoundrel who asserts his arrogance as a proof of his mission. "inspiration: what! do even philosophers call names? "reason: sometimes, when the saints set them the example. "inspiration: oh, but i have a right to do it, for i am speaking on god's behalf. "reason: you would do well to show your credentials before you make use of your privileges. "inspiration: my credentials are authentic, earth and heaven will bear witness on my behalf. follow my arguments carefully, if you please. "reason: your arguments! you forget what you are saying. when you teach me that my reason misleads me, do you not refute what it might have said on your behalf? he who denies the right of reason, must convince me without recourse to her aid. for suppose you have convinced me by reason, how am i to know that it is not my reason, corrupted by sin, which makes me accept what you say? besides, what proof, what demonstration, can you advance, more self-evident than the axiom it is to destroy? it is more credible that a good syllogism is a lie, than that the part is greater than the whole. "inspiration: what a difference! there is no answer to my evidence; it is of a supernatural kind. "reason: supernatural! what do you mean by the word? i do not understand it. "inspiration: i mean changes in the order of nature, prophecies, signs, and wonders of every kind. "reason: signs and wonders! i have never seen anything of the kind. "inspiration: others have seen them for you. clouds of witnesses--the witness of whole nations.... "reason: is the witness of nations supernatural? "inspiration: no; but when it is unanimous, it is incontestable. "reason: there is nothing so incontestable as the principles of reason, and one cannot accept an absurdity on human evidence. once more, let us see your supernatural evidence, for the consent of mankind is not supernatural. "inspiration: oh, hardened heart, grace does not speak to you. "reason: that is not my fault; for by your own showing, one must have already received grace before one is able to ask for it. begin by speaking to me in its stead. "inspiration: but that is just what i am doing, and you will not listen. but what do you say to prophecy? "reason: in the first place, i say i have no more heard a prophet than i have seen a miracle. in the next, i say that no prophet could claim authority over me. "inspiration: follower of the devil! why should not the words of the prophets have authority over you? "reason: because three things are required, three things which will never happen: firstly, i must have heard the prophecy; secondly, i must have seen its fulfilment; and thirdly, it must be clearly proved that the fulfilment of the prophecy could not by any possibility have been a mere coincidence; for even if it was as precise, as plain, and clear as an axiom of geometry, since the clearness of a chance prediction does not make its fulfilment impossible, this fulfilment when it does take place does not, strictly speaking, prove what was foretold. "see what your so-called supernatural proofs, your miracles, your prophecies come to: believe all this upon the word of another. submit to the authority of men the authority of god which speaks to my reason. if the eternal truths which my mind conceives of could suffer any shock, there would be no sort of certainty for me; and far from being sure that you speak to me on god's behalf, i should not even be sure that there is a god. "my child, here are difficulties enough, but these are not all. among so many religions, mutually excluding and proscribing each other, one only is true, if indeed any one of them is true. to recognise the true religion we must inquire into, not one, but all; and in any question whatsoever we have no right to condemn unheard. [footnote: on the other hand, plutarch relates that the stoics maintained, among other strange paradoxes, that it was no use hearing both sides; for, said they, the first either proves his point or he does not prove it; if he has proved it, there is an end of it, and the other should be condemned: if he has not proved it, he himself is in the wrong and judgment should be given against him. i consider the method of those who accept an exclusive revelation very much like that of these stoics. when each of them claims to be the sole guardian of truth, we must hear them all before we can choose between them without injustice.] the objections must be compared with the evidence; we must know what accusation each brings against the other, and what answers they receive. the plainer any feeling appears to us, the more we must try to discover why so many other people refuse to accept it. we should be simple, indeed, if we thought it enough to hear the doctors on our own side, in order to acquaint ourselves with the arguments of the other. where can you find theologians who pride themselves on their honesty? where are those who, to refute the arguments of their opponents, do not begin by making out that they are of little importance? a man may make a good show among his own friends, and be very proud of his arguments, who would cut a very poor figure with those same arguments among those who are on the other side. would you find out for yourself from books? what learning you will need! what languages you must learn; what libraries you must ransack; what an amount of reading must be got through! who will guide me in such a choice? it will be hard to find the best books on the opposite side in any one country, and all the harder to find those on all sides; when found they would be easily answered. the absent are always in the wrong, and bad arguments boldly asserted easily efface good arguments put forward with scorn. besides books are often very misleading, and scarcely express the opinions of their authors. if you think you can judge the catholic faith from the writings of bossuet, you will find yourself greatly mistaken when you have lived among us. you will see that the doctrines with which protestants are answered are quite different from those of the pulpit. to judge a religion rightly, you must not study it in the books of its partisans, you must learn it in their lives; this is quite another matter. each religion has its own traditions, meaning, customs, prejudices, which form the spirit of its creed, and must be taken in connection with it. "how many great nations neither print books of their own nor read ours! how shall they judge of our opinions, or we of theirs? we laugh at them, they despise us; and if our travellers turn them into ridicule, they need only travel among us to pay us back in our own coin. are there not, in every country, men of common-sense, honesty, and good faith, lovers of truth, who only seek to know what truth is that they may profess it? yet every one finds truth in his own religion, and thinks the religion of other nations absurd; so all these foreign religions are not so absurd as they seem to us, or else the reason we find for our own proves nothing. "we have three principal forms of religion in europe. one accepts one revelation, another two, and another three. each hates the others, showers curses on them, accuses them of blindness, obstinacy, hardness of heart, and falsehood. what fair-minded man will dare to decide between them without first carefully weighing their evidence, without listening attentively to their arguments? that which accepts only one revelation is the oldest and seems the best established; that which accepts three is the newest and seems the most consistent; that which accepts two revelations and rejects the third may perhaps be the best, but prejudice is certainly against it; its inconsistency is glaring. "in all three revelations the sacred books are written in languages unknown to the people who believe in them. the jews no longer understand hebrew, the christians understand neither hebrew nor greek; the turks and persians do not understand arabic, and the arabs of our time do not speak the language of mahomet. is not it a very foolish way of teaching, to teach people in an unknown tongue? these books are translated, you say. what an answer! how am i to know that the translations are correct, or how am i to make sure that such a thing as a correct translation is possible? if god has gone so far as to speak to men, why should he require an interpreter? "i can never believe that every man is obliged to know what is contained in books, and that he who is out of reach of these books, and of those who understand them, will be punished for an ignorance which is no fault of his. books upon books! what madness! as all europe is full of books, europeans regard them as necessary, forgetting that they are unknown throughout three-quarters of the globe. were not all these books written by men? why then should a man need them to teach him his duty, and how did he learn his duty before these books were in existence? either he must have learnt his duties for himself, or his ignorance must have been excused. "our catholics talk loudly of the authority of the church; but what is the use of it all, if they also need just as great an array of proofs to establish that authority as the other seeks to establish their doctrine? the church decides that the church has a right to decide. what a well-founded authority! go beyond it, and you are back again in our discussions. "do you know many christians who have taken the trouble to inquire what the jews allege against them? if any one knows anything at all about it, it is from the writings of christians. what a way of ascertaining the arguments of our adversaries! but what is to be done? if any one dared to publish in our day books which were openly in favour of the jewish religion, we should punish the author, publisher, and bookseller. this regulation is a sure and certain plan for always being in the right. it is easy to refute those who dare not venture to speak. "those among us who have the opportunity of talking with jews are little better off. these unhappy people feel that they are in our power; the tyranny they have suffered makes them timid; they know that christian charity thinks nothing of injustice and cruelty; will they dare to run the risk of an outcry against blasphemy? our greed inspires us with zeal, and they are so rich that they must be in the wrong. the more learned, the more enlightened they are, the more cautious. you may convert some poor wretch whom you have paid to slander his religion; you get some wretched old-clothes-man to speak, and he says what you want; you may triumph over their ignorance and cowardice, while all the time their men of learning are laughing at your stupidity. but do you think you would get off so easily in any place where they knew they were safe! at the sorbonne it is plain that the messianic prophecies refer to jesus christ. among the rabbis of amsterdam it is just as clear that they have nothing to do with him. i do not think i have ever heard the arguments of the jews as to why they should not have a free state, schools and universities, where they can speak and argue without danger. then alone can we know what they have to say. "at constantinople the turks state their arguments, but we dare not give ours; then it is our turn to cringe. can we blame the turks if they require us to show the same respect for mahomet, in whom we do not believe, as we demand from the jews with regard to jesus christ in whom they do not believe? are we right? on what grounds of justice can we answer this question? "two-thirds of mankind are neither jews, mahometans, nor christians; and how many millions of men have never heard the name of moses, jesus christ, or mahomet? they deny it; they maintain that our missionaries go everywhere. that is easily said. but do they go into the heart of africa, still undiscovered, where as yet no european has ever ventured? do they go to eastern tartary to follow on horseback the wandering tribes, whom no stranger approaches, who not only know nothing of the pope, but have scarcely heard tell of the grand lama! do they penetrate into the vast continents of america, where there are still whole nations unaware that the people of another world have set foot on their shores? do they go to japan, where their intrigues have led to their perpetual banishment, where their predecessors are only known to the rising generation as skilful plotters who came with feigned zeal to take possession in secret of the empire? do they reach the harems of the asiatic princes to preach the gospel to those thousands of poor slaves? what have the women of those countries done that no missionary may preach the faith to them? will they all go to hell because of their seclusion? "if it were true that the gospel is preached throughout the world, what advantage would there be? the day before the first missionary set foot in any country, no doubt somebody died who could not hear him. now tell me what we shall do with him? if there were a single soul in the whole world, to whom jesus christ had never been preached, this objection would be as strong for that man as for a quarter of the human race. "if the ministers of the gospel have made themselves heard among far-off nations, what have they told them which might reasonably be accepted on their word, without further and more exact verification? you preach to me god, born and dying, two thousand years ago, at the other end of the world, in some small town i know not where; and you tell me that all who have not believed this mystery are damned. these are strange things to be believed so quickly on the authority of an unknown person. why did your god make these things happen so far off, if he would compel me to know about them? is it a crime to be unaware of what is happening half a world away? could i guess that in another hemisphere there was a hebrew nation and a town called jerusalem? you might as well expect me to know what was happening in the moon. you say you have come to teach me; but why did you not come and teach my father, or why do you consign that good old man to damnation because he knew nothing of all this? must he be punished everlastingly for your laziness, he who was so kind and helpful, he who sought only for truth? be honest; put yourself in my place; see if i ought to believe, on your word alone, all these incredible things which you have told me, and reconcile all this injustice with the just god you proclaim to me. at least allow me to go and see this distant land where such wonders, unheard of in my own country, took place; let me go and see why the inhabitants of jerusalem put their god to death as a robber. you tell me they did not know he was god. what then shall i do, i who have only heard of him from you? you say they have been punished, dispersed, oppressed, enslaved; that none of them dare approach that town. indeed they richly deserved it; but what do its present inhabitants say of their crime in slaying their god! they deny him; they too refuse to recognise god as god. they are no better than the children of the original inhabitants. "what! in the very town where god was put to death, neither the former nor the latter inhabitants knew him, and you expect that i should know him, i who was born two thousand years after his time, and two thousand leagues away? do you not see that before i can believe this book which you call sacred, but which i do not in the least understand, i must know from others than yourself when and by whom it was written, how it has been preserved, how it came into your possession, what they say about it in those lands where it is rejected, and what are their reasons for rejecting it, though they know as well as you what you are telling me? you perceive i must go to europe, asia, palestine, to examine these things for myself; it would be madness to listen to you before that. "not only does this seem reasonable to me, but i maintain that it is what every wise man ought to say in similar circumstances; that he ought to banish to a great distance the missionary who wants to instruct and baptise him all of a sudden before the evidence is verified. now i maintain that there is no revelation against which these or similar objections cannot be made, and with more force than against christianity. hence it follows that if there is but one true religion and if every man is bound to follow it under pain of damnation, he must spend his whole life in studying, testing, comparing all these religions, in travelling through the countries in which they are established. no man is free from a man's first duty; no one has a right to depend on another's judgment. the artisan who earns his bread by his daily toil, the ploughboy who cannot read, the delicate and timid maiden, the invalid who can scarcely leave his bed, all without exception must study, consider, argue, travel over the whole world; there will be no more fixed and settled nations; the whole earth will swarm with pilgrims on their way, at great cost of time and trouble, to verify, compare, and examine for themselves the various religions to be found. then farewell to the trades, the arts, the sciences of mankind, farewell to all peaceful occupations; there can be no study but that of religion, even the strongest, the most industrious, the most intelligent, the oldest, will hardly be able in his last years to know where he is; and it will be a wonder if he manages to find out what religion he ought to live by, before the hour of his death. "hard pressed by these arguments, some prefer to make god unjust and to punish the innocent for the sins of their fathers, rather than to renounce their barbarous dogmas. others get out of the difficulty by kindly sending an angel to instruct all those who in invincible ignorance have lived a righteous life. a good idea, that angel! not content to be the slaves of their own inventions they expect god to make use of them also! "behold, my son, the absurdities to which pride and intolerance bring us, when everybody wants others to think as he does, and everybody fancies that he has an exclusive claim upon the rest of mankind. i call to witness the god of peace whom i adore, and whom i proclaim to you, that my inquiries were honestly made; but when i discovered that they were and always would be unsuccessful, and that i was embarked upon a boundless ocean, i turned back, and restricted my faith within the limits of my primitive ideas. i could never convince myself that god would require such learning of me under pain of hell. so i closed all my books. there is one book which is open to every one--the book of nature. in this good and great volume i learn to serve and adore its author. there is no excuse for not reading this book, for it speaks to all in a language they can understand. suppose i had been born in a desert island, suppose i had never seen any man but myself, suppose i had never heard what took place in olden days in a remote corner of the world; yet if i use my reason, if i cultivate it, if i employ rightly the innate faculties which god bestows upon me, i shall learn by myself to know and love him, to love his works, to will what he wills, and to fulfil all my duties upon earth, that i may do his pleasure. what more can all human learning teach me? "with regard to revelation, if i were a more accomplished disputant, or a more learned person, perhaps i should feel its truth, its usefulness for those who are happy enough to perceive it; but if i find evidence for it which i cannot combat, i also find objections against it which i cannot overcome. there are so many weighty reasons for and against that i do not know what to decide, so that i neither accept nor reject it. i only reject all obligation to be convinced of its truth; for this so-called obligation is incompatible with god's justice, and far from removing objections in this way it would multiply them, and would make them insurmountable for the greater part of mankind. in this respect i maintain an attitude of reverent doubt. i do not presume to think myself infallible; other men may have been able to make up their minds though the matter seems doubtful to myself; i am speaking for myself, not for them; i neither blame them nor follow in their steps; their judgment may be superior to mine, but it is no fault of mine that my judgment does not agree with it. "i own also that the holiness of the gospel speaks to my heart, and that this is an argument which i should be sorry to refute. consider the books of the philosophers with all their outward show; how petty they are in comparison! can a book at once so grand and so simple be the work of men? is it possible that he whose history is contained in this book is no more than man? is the tone of this book, the tone of the enthusiast or the ambitious sectary? what gentleness and purity in his actions, what a touching grace in his teaching, how lofty are his sayings, how profoundly wise are his sermons, how ready, how discriminating, and how just are his answers! what man, what sage, can live, suffer, and die without weakness or ostentation? when plato describes his imaginary good man, overwhelmed with the disgrace of crime, and deserving of all the rewards of virtue, every feature of the portrait is that of christ; the resemblance is so striking that it has been noticed by all the fathers, and there can be no doubt about it. what prejudices and blindness must there be before we dare to compare the son of sophronisca with the son of mary. how far apart they are! socrates dies a painless death, he is not put to open shame, and he plays his part easily to the last; and if this easy death had not done honour to his life, we might have doubted whether socrates, with all his intellect, was more than a mere sophist. he invented morality, so they say; others before him had practised it; he only said what they had done, and made use of their example in his teaching. aristides was just before socrates defined justice; leonidas died for his country before socrates declared that patriotism was a virtue; sparta was sober before socrates extolled sobriety; there were plenty of virtuous men in greece before he defined virtue. but among the men of his own time where did jesus find that pure and lofty morality of which he is both the teacher and pattern? [footnote: cf. in the sermon on the mount the parallel he himself draws between the teaching of moses and his own.--matt. v.] the voice of loftiest wisdom arose among the fiercest fanaticism, the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honour to the most degraded of nations. one could wish no easier death than that of socrates, calmly discussing philosophy with his friends; one could fear nothing worse than that of jesus, dying in torment, among the insults, the mockery, the curses of the whole nation. in the midst of these terrible sufferings, jesus prays for his cruel murderers. yes, if the life and death of socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of christ are those of a god. shall we say that the gospel story is the work of the imagination? my friend, such things are not imagined; and the doings of socrates, which no one doubts, are less well attested than those of jesus christ. at best, you only put the difficulty from you; it would be still more incredible that several persons should have agreed together to invent such a book, than that there was one man who supplied its subject matter. the tone and morality of this story are not those of any jewish authors, and the gospel indeed contains characters so great, so striking, so entirely inimitable, that their invention would be more astonishing than their hero. with all this the same gospel is full of incredible things, things repugnant to reason, things which no natural man can understand or accept. what can you do among so many contradictions? you can be modest and wary, my child; respect in silence what you can neither reject nor understand, and humble yourself in the sight of the divine being who alone knows the truth. "this is the unwilling scepticism in which i rest; but this scepticism is in no way painful to me, for it does not extend to matters of practice, and i am well assured as to the principles underlying all my duties. i serve god in the simplicity of my heart; i only seek to know what affects my conduct. as to those dogmas which have no effect upon action or morality, dogmas about which so many men torment themselves, i give no heed to them. i regard all individual religions as so many wholesome institutions which prescribe a uniform method by which each country may do honour to god in public worship; institutions which may each have its reason in the country, the government, the genius of the people, or in other local causes which make one preferable to another in a given time or place. i think them all good alike, when god is served in a fitting manner. true worship is of the heart. god rejects no homage, however offered, provided it is sincere. called to the service of the church in my own religion, i fulfil as scrupulously as i can all the duties prescribed to me, and my conscience would reproach me if i were knowingly wanting with regard to any point. you are aware that after being suspended for a long time, i have, through the influence of m. mellarede, obtained permission to resume my priestly duties, as a means of livelihood. i used to say mass with the levity that comes from long experience even of the most serious matters when they are too familiar to us; with my new principles i now celebrate it with more reverence; i dwell upon the majesty of the supreme being, his presence, the insufficiency of the human mind, which so little realises what concerns its creator. when i consider how i present before him the prayers of all the people in a form laid down for me, i carry out the whole ritual exactly; i give heed to what i say, i am careful not to omit the least word, the least ceremony; when the moment of the consecration approaches, i collect my powers, that i may do all things as required by the church and by the greatness of this sacrament; i strive to annihilate my own reason before the supreme mind; i say to myself, who art thou to measure infinite power? i reverently pronounce the sacramental words, and i give to their effect all the faith i can bestow. whatever may be this mystery which passes understanding, i am not afraid that at the day of judgment i shall be punished for having profaned it in my heart." honoured with the sacred ministry, though in its lowest ranks, i will never do or say anything which may make me unworthy to fulfil these sublime duties. i will always preach virtue and exhort men to well-doing; and so far as i can i will set them a good example. it will be my business to make religion attractive; it will be my business to strengthen their faith in those doctrines which are really useful, those which every man must believe; but, please god, i shall never teach them to hate their neighbour, to say to other men, you will be damned; to say, no salvation outside the church. [footnote: the duty of following and loving the religion of our country does not go so far as to require us to accept doctrines contrary to good morals, such as intolerance. this horrible doctrine sets men in arms against their fellow-men, and makes them all enemies of mankind. the distinction between civil toleration and theological toleration is vain and childish. these two kinds of toleration are inseparable, and we cannot accept one without the other. even the angels could not live at peace with men whom they regarded as the enemies of god.] if i were in a more conspicuous position, this reticence might get me into trouble; but i am too obscure to have much to fear, and i could hardly sink lower than i am. come what may, i will never blaspheme the justice of god, nor lie against the holy ghost. "i have long desired to have a parish of my own; it is still my ambition, but i no longer hope to attain it. my dear friend, i think there is nothing so delightful as to be a parish priest. a good clergyman is a minister of mercy, as a good magistrate is a minister of justice. a clergyman is never called upon to do evil; if he cannot always do good himself, it is never out of place for him to beg for others, and he often gets what he asks if he knows how to gain respect. oh! if i should ever have some poor mountain parish where i might minister to kindly folk, i should be happy indeed; for it seems to me that i should make my parishioners happy. i should not bring them riches, but i should share their poverty; i should remove from them the scorn and opprobrium which are harder to bear than poverty. i should make them love peace and equality, which often remove poverty, and always make it tolerable. when they saw that i was in no way better off than themselves, and that yet i was content with my lot, they would learn to put up with their fate and to be content like me. in my sermons i would lay more stress on the spirit of the gospel than on the spirit of the church; its teaching is simple, its morality sublime; there is little in it about the practices of religion, but much about works of charity. before i teach them what they ought to do, i would try to practise it myself, that they might see that at least i think what i say. if there were protestants in the neighbourhood or in my parish, i would make no difference between them and my own congregation so far as concerns christian charity; i would get them to love one another, to consider themselves brethren, to respect all religions, and each to live peaceably in his own religion. to ask any one to abandon the religion in which he was born is, i consider, to ask him to do wrong, and therefore to do wrong oneself. while we await further knowledge, let us respect public order; in every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb the form of worship prescribed by law; let us not lead its citizens into disobedience; for we have no certain knowledge that it is good for them to abandon their own opinions for others, and on the other hand we are quite certain that it is a bad thing to disobey the law. "my young friend, i have now repeated to you my creed as god reads it in my heart; you are the first to whom i have told it; perhaps you will be the last. as long as there is any true faith left among men, we must not trouble quiet souls, nor scare the faith of the ignorant with problems they cannot solve, with difficulties which cause them uneasiness, but do not give them any guidance. but when once everything is shaken, the trunk must be preserved at the cost of the branches. consciences, restless, uncertain, and almost quenched like yours, require to be strengthened and aroused; to set the feet again upon the foundation of eternal truth, we must remove the trembling supports on which they think they rest. "you are at that critical age when the mind is open to conviction, when the heart receives its form and character, when we decide our own fate for life, either for good or evil. at a later date, the material has hardened and fresh impressions leave no trace. young man, take the stamp of truth upon your heart which is not yet hardened, if i were more certain of myself, i should have adopted a more decided and dogmatic tone; but i am a man ignorant and liable to error; what could i do? i have opened my heart fully to you; and i have told what i myself hold for certain and sure; i have told you my doubts as doubts, my opinions as opinions; i have given you my reasons both for faith and doubt. it is now your turn to judge; you have asked for time; that is a wise precaution and it makes me think well of you. begin by bringing your conscience into that state in which it desires to see clearly; be honest with yourself. take to yourself such of my opinions as convince you, reject the rest. you are not yet so depraved by vice as to run the risk of choosing amiss. i would offer to argue with you, but as soon as men dispute they lose their temper; pride and obstinacy come in, and there is an end of honesty. my friend, never argue; for by arguing we gain no light for ourselves or for others. so far as i myself am concerned, i have only made up my mind after many years of meditation; here i rest, my conscience is at peace, my heart is satisfied. if i wanted to begin afresh the examination of my feelings, i should not bring to the task a purer love of truth; and my mind, which is already less active, would be less able to perceive the truth. here i shall rest, lest the love of contemplation, developing step by step into an idle passion, should make me lukewarm in the performance of my duties, lest i should fall into my former scepticism without strength to struggle out of it. more than half my life is spent; i have barely time to make good use of what is left, to blot out my faults by my virtues. if i am mistaken, it is against my will. he who reads my inmost heart knows that i have no love for my blindness. as my own knowledge is powerless to free me from this blindness, my only way out of it is by a good life; and if god from the very stones can raise up children to abraham, every man has a right to hope that he may be taught the truth, if he makes himself worthy of it. "if my reflections lead you to think as i do, if you share my feelings, if we have the same creed, i give you this advice: do not continue to expose your life to the temptations of poverty and despair, nor waste it in degradation and at the mercy of strangers; no longer eat the shameful bread of charity. return to your own country, go back to the religion of your fathers, and follow it in sincerity of heart, and never forsake it; it is very simple and very holy; i think there is no other religion upon earth whose morality is purer, no other more satisfying to the reason. do not trouble about the cost of the journey, that will be provided for you. neither do you fear the false shame of a humiliating return; we should blush to commit a fault, not to repair it. you are still at an age when all is forgiven, but when we cannot go on sinning with impunity. if you desire to listen to your conscience, a thousand empty objections will disappear at her voice. you will feel that, in our present state of uncertainty, it is an inexcusable presumption to profess any faith but that we were born into, while it is treachery not to practise honestly the faith we profess. if we go astray, we deprive ourselves of a great excuse before the tribunal of the sovereign judge. will he not pardon the errors in which we were brought up, rather than those of our own choosing? "my son, keep your soul in such a state that you always desire that there should be a god and you will never doubt it. moreover, whatever decision you come to, remember that the real duties of religion are independent of human institutions; that a righteous heart is the true temple of the godhead; that in every land, in every sect, to love god above all things and to love our neighbour as ourself is the whole law; remember there is no religion which absolves us from our moral duties; that these alone are really essential, that the service of the heart is the first of these duties, and that without faith there is no such thing as true virtue. "shun those who, under the pretence of explaining nature, sow destructive doctrines in the heart of men, those whose apparent scepticism is a hundredfold more self-assertive and dogmatic than the firm tone of their opponents. under the arrogant claim, that they alone are enlightened, true, honest, they subject us imperiously to their far-reaching decisions, and profess to give us, as the true principles of all things, the unintelligible systems framed by their imagination. moreover, they overthrow, destroy, and trample under foot all that men reverence; they rob the afflicted of their last consolation in their misery; they deprive the rich and powerful of the sole bridle of their passions; they tear from the very depths of man's heart all remorse for crime, and all hope of virtue; and they boast, moreover, that they are the benefactors of the human race. truth, they say, can never do a man harm. i think so too, and to my mind that is strong evidence that what they teach is not true. [footnote: the rival parties attack each other with so many sophistries that it would be a rash and overwhelming enterprise to attempt to deal with all of them; it is difficult enough to note some of them as they occur. one of the commonest errors among the partisans of philosophy is to contrast a nation of good philosophers with a nation of bad christians; as if it were easier to make a nation of good philosophers than a nation of good christians. i know not whether in individual cases it is easier to discover one rather than the other; but i am quite certain that, as far as nations are concerned, we must assume that there will be those who misuse their philosophy without religion, just as our people misuse their religion without philosophy, and that seems to put quite a different face upon the matter.]--bayle has proved very satisfactorily that fanaticism is more harmful than atheism, and that cannot be denied; but what he has not taken the trouble to say, though it is none the less true, is this: fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society, for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it will never outweigh their opposing interests.--if atheism does not lead to bloodshed, it is less from love of peace than from indifference to what is good; as if it mattered little what happened to others, provided the sage remained undisturbed in his study. his principles do not kill men, but they prevent their birth, by destroying the morals by which they were multiplied, by detaching them from their fellows, by reducing all their affections to a secret selfishness, as fatal to population as to virtue. the indifference of the philosopher is like the peace in a despotic state; it is the repose of death; war itself is not more destructive.--thus fanaticism though its immediate results are more fatal than those of what is now called the philosophic mind, is much less fatal in its after effects. moreover, it is an easy matter to exhibit fine maxims in books; but the real question is--are they really in accordance with your teaching, are they the necessary consequences of it? and this has not been clearly proved so far. it remains to be seen whether philosophy, safely enthroned, could control successfully man's petty vanity, his self-interest, his ambition, all the lesser passions of mankind, and whether it would practise that sweet humanity which it boasts of, pen in hand.--in theory, there is no good which philosophy can bring about which is not equally secured by religion, while religion secures much that philosophy cannot secure.--in practice, it is another matter; but still we must put it to the proof. no man follows his religion in all things, even if his religion is true; most people have hardly any religion, and they do not in the least follow what they have; that is still more true; but still there are some people who have a religion and follow it, at least to some extent; and beyond doubt religious motives do prevent them from wrong-doing, and win from them virtues, praiseworthy actions, which would not have existed but for these motives.--a monk denies that money was entrusted to him; what of that? it only proves that the man who entrusted the money to him was a fool. if pascal had done the same, that would have proved that pascal was a hypocrite. but a monk! are those who make a trade of religion religious people? all the crimes committed by the clergy, as by other men, do not prove that religion is useless, but that very few people are religious.--most certainly our modern governments owe to christianity their more stable authority, their less frequent revolutions; it has made those governments less bloodthirsty; this can be shown by comparing them with the governments of former times. apart from fanaticism, the best known religion has given greater gentleness to christian conduct. this change is not the result of learning; for wherever learning has been most illustrious humanity has been no more respected on that account; the cruelties of the athenians, the egyptians, the roman emperors, the chinese bear witness to this. what works of mercy spring from the gospel! how many acts of restitution, reparation, confession does the gospel lead to among catholics! among ourselves, as the times of communion draw near, do they not lead us to reconciliation and to alms-giving? did not the hebrew jubilee make the grasping less greedy, did it not prevent much poverty? the brotherhood of the law made the nation one; no beggar was found among them. neither are there beggars among the turks, where there are countless pious institutions; from motives of religion they even show hospitality to the foes of their religion.--"the mahometans say, according to chardin, that after the interrogation which will follow the general resurrection, all bodies will traverse a bridge called poul-serrho, which is thrown across the eternal fires, a bridge which may be called the third and last test of the great judgment, because it is there that the good and bad will be separated, etc.--"the persians, continues chardin, make a great point of this bridge; and when any one suffers a wrong which he can never hope to wipe out by any means or at any time, he finds his last consolation in these words: 'by the living god, you will pay me double at the last day; you will never get across the poul-serrho if you do not first do me justice; i will hold the hem of your garment, i will cling about your knees.' i have seen many eminent men, of every profession, who for fear lest this hue and cry should be raised against them as they cross that fearful bridge, beg pardon of those who complained against them; it has happened to me myself on many occasions. men of rank, who had compelled me by their importunity to do what i did not wish to do, have come to me when they thought my anger had had time to cool, and have said to me; i pray you "halal becon antchisra," that is, "make this matter lawful and right." some of them have even sent gifts and done me service, so that i might forgive them and say i did it willingly; the cause of this is nothing else but this belief that they will not be able to get across the bridge of hell until they have paid the uttermost farthing to the oppressed."--must i think that the idea of this bridge where so many iniquities are made good is of no avail? if the persians were deprived of this idea, if they were persuaded that there was no poul-serrho, nor anything of the kind, where the oppressed were avenged of their tyrants after death, is it not clear that they would be very much at their ease, and they would be freed from the care of appeasing the wretched? but it is false to say that this doctrine is hurtful; yet it would not be true.--o philosopher, your moral laws are all very fine; but kindly show me their sanction. cease to shirk the question, and tell me plainly what you would put in the place of poul-serrho. "my good youth, be honest and humble; learn how to be ignorant, then you will never deceive yourself or others. if ever your talents are so far cultivated as to enable you to speak to other men, always speak according to your conscience, without caring for their applause. the abuse of knowledge causes incredulity. the learned always despise the opinions of the crowd; each of them must have his own opinion. a haughty philosophy leads to atheism just as blind devotion leads to fanaticism. avoid these extremes; keep steadfastly to the path of truth, or what seems to you truth, in simplicity of heart, and never let yourself be turned aside by pride or weakness. dare to confess god before the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant. it may be you will stand alone, but you will bear within you a witness which will make the witness of men of no account with you. let them love or hate, let them read your writings or despise them; no matter. speak the truth and do the right; the one thing that really matters is to do one's duty in this world; and when we forget ourselves we are really working for ourselves. my child, self-interest misleads us; the hope of the just is the only sure guide." i have transcribed this document not as a rule for the sentiments we should adopt in matters of religion, but as an example of the way in which we may reason with our pupil without forsaking the method i have tried to establish. so long as we yield nothing to human authority, nor to the prejudices of our native land, the light of reason alone, in a state of nature, can lead us no further than to natural religion; and this is as far as i should go with emile. if he must have any other religion, i have no right to be his guide; he must choose for himself. we are working in agreement with nature, and while she is shaping the physical man, we are striving to shape his moral being, but we do not make the same progress. the body is already strong and vigorous, the soul is still frail and delicate, and whatever can be done by human art, the body is always ahead of the mind. hitherto all our care has been devoted to restrain the one and stimulate the other, so that the man might be as far as possible at one with himself. by developing his individuality, we have kept his growing susceptibilities in check; we have controlled it by cultivating his reason. objects of thought moderate the influence of objects of sense. by going back to the causes of things, we have withdrawn him from the sway of the senses; it is an easy thing to raise him from the study of nature to the search for the author of nature. when we have reached this point, what a fresh hold we have got over our pupil; what fresh ways of speaking to his heart! then alone does he find a real motive for being good, for doing right when he is far from every human eye, and when he is not driven to it by law. to be just in his own eyes and in the sight of god, to do his duty, even at the cost of life itself, and to bear in his heart virtue, not only for the love of order which we all subordinate to the love of self, but for the love of the author of his being, a love which mingles with that self-love, so that he may at length enjoy the lasting happiness which the peace of a good conscience and the contemplation of that supreme being promise him in another life, after he has used this life aright. go beyond this, and i see nothing but injustice, hypocrisy, and falsehood among men; private interest, which in competition necessarily prevails over everything else, teaches all things to adorn vice with the outward show of virtue. let all men do what is good for me at the cost of what is good for themselves; let everything depend on me alone; let the whole human race perish, if needs be, in suffering and want, to spare me a moment's pain or hunger. yes, i shall always maintain that whoso says in his heart, "there is no god," while he takes the name of god upon his lips, is either a liar or a madman. reader, it is all in vain; i perceive that you and i shall never see emile with the same eyes; you will always fancy him like your own young people, hasty, impetuous, flighty, wandering from fete to fete, from amusement to amusement, never able to settle to anything. you smile when i expect to make a thinker, a philosopher, a young theologian, of an ardent, lively, eager, and fiery young man, at the most impulsive period of youth. this dreamer, you say, is always in pursuit of his fancy; when he gives us a pupil of his own making, he does not merely form him, he creates him, he makes him up out of his own head; and while he thinks he is treading in the steps of nature, he is getting further and further from her. as for me, when i compare my pupil with yours, i can scarcely find anything in common between them. so differently brought up, it is almost a miracle if they are alike in any respect. as his childhood was passed in the freedom they assume in youth, in his youth he begins to bear the yoke they bore as children; this yoke becomes hateful to them, they are sick of it, and they see in it nothing but their masters' tyranny; when they escape from childhood, they think they must shake off all control, they make up for the prolonged restraint imposed upon them, as a prisoner, freed from his fetters, moves and stretches and shakes his limbs. [footnote: there is no one who looks down upon childhood with such lofty scorn as those who are barely grown-up; just as there is no country where rank is more strictly regarded than that where there is little real inequality; everybody is afraid of being confounded with his inferiors.] emile, however, is proud to be a man, and to submit to the yoke of his growing reason; his body, already well grown, no longer needs so much action, and begins to control itself, while his half-fledged mind tries its wings on every occasion. thus the age of reason becomes for the one the age of licence; for the other, the age of reasoning. would you know which of the two is nearer to the order of nature! consider the differences between those who are more or less removed from a state of nature. observe young villagers and see if they are as undisciplined as your scholars. the sieur de beau says that savages in childhood are always active, and ever busy with sports that keep the body in motion; but scarcely do they reach adolescence than they become quiet and dreamy; they no longer devote themselves to games of skill or chance. emile, who has been brought up in full freedom like young peasants and savages, should behave like them and change as he grows up. the whole difference is in this, that instead of merely being active in sport or for food, he has, in the course of his sports, learned to think. having reached this stage, and by this road, he is quite ready to enter upon the next stage to which i introduce him; the subjects i suggest for his consideration rouse his curiosity, because they are fine in themselves, because they are quite new to him, and because he is able to understand them. your young people, on the other hand, are weary and overdone with your stupid lessons, your long sermons, and your tedious catechisms; why should they not refuse to devote their minds to what has made them sad, to the burdensome precepts which have been continually piled upon them, to the thought of the author of their being, who has been represented as the enemy of their pleasures? all this has only inspired in them aversion, disgust, and weariness; constraint has set them against it; why then should they devote themselves to it when they are beginning to choose for themselves? they require novelty, you must not repeat what they learned as children. just so with my own pupil, when he is a man i speak to him as a man, and only tell him what is new to him; it is just because they are tedious to your pupils that he will find them to his taste. this is how i doubly gain time for him by retarding nature to the advantage of reason. but have i indeed retarded the progress of nature? no, i have only prevented the imagination from hastening it; i have employed another sort of teaching to counterbalance the precocious instruction which the young man receives from other sources. when he is carried away by the flood of existing customs and i draw him in the opposite direction by means of other customs, this is not to remove him from his place, but to keep him in it. nature's due time comes at length, as come it must. since man must die, he must reproduce himself, so that the species may endure and the order of the world continue. when by the signs i have spoken of you perceive that the critical moment is at hand, at once abandon for ever your former tone. he is still your disciple, but not your scholar. he is a man and your friend; henceforth you must treat him as such. what! must i abdicate my authority when most i need it? must i abandon the adult to himself just when he least knows how to control himself, when he may fall into the gravest errors! must i renounce my rights when it matters most that i should use them on his behalf? who bids you renounce them; he is only just becoming conscious of them. hitherto all you have gained has been won by force or guile; authority, the law of duty, were unknown to him, you had to constrain or deceive him to gain his obedience. but see what fresh chains you have bound about his heart. reason, friendship, affection, gratitude, a thousand bonds of affection, speak to him in a voice he cannot fail to hear. his ears are not yet dulled by vice, he is still sensitive only to the passions of nature. self-love, the first of these, delivers him into your hands; habit confirms this. if a passing transport tears him from you, regret restores him to you without delay; the sentiment which attaches him to you is the only lasting sentiment, all the rest are fleeting and self-effacing. do not let him become corrupt, and he will always be docile; he will not begin to rebel till he is already perverted. i grant you, indeed, that if you directly oppose his growing desires and foolishly treat as crimes the fresh needs which are beginning to make themselves felt in him, he will not listen to you for long; but as soon as you abandon my method i cannot be answerable for the consequences. remember that you are nature's minister; you will never be her foe. but what shall we decide to do? you see no alternative but either to favour his inclinations or to resist them; to tyrannise or to wink at his misconduct; and both of these may lead to such dangerous results that one must indeed hesitate between them. the first way out of the difficulty is a very early marriage; this is undoubtedly the safest and most natural plan. i doubt, however, whether it is the best or the most useful. i will give my reasons later; meanwhile i admit that young men should marry when they reach a marriageable age. but this age comes too soon; we have made them precocious; marriage should be postponed to maturity. if it were merely a case of listening to their wishes and following their lead it would be an easy matter; but there are so many contradictions between the rights of nature and the laws of society that to conciliate them we must continually contradict ourselves. much art is required to prevent man in society from being altogether artificial. for the reasons just stated, i consider that by the means i have indicated and others like them the young man's desires may be kept in ignorance and his senses pure up to the age of twenty. this is so true that among the germans a young man who lost his virginity before that age was considered dishonoured; and the writers justly attribute the vigour of constitution and the number of children among the germans to the continence of these nations during youth. this period may be prolonged still further, and a few centuries ago nothing was more common even in france. among other well-known examples, montaigne's father, a man no less scrupulously truthful than strong and healthy, swore that his was a virgin marriage at three and thirty, and he had served for a long time in the italian wars. we may see in the writings of his son what strength and spirit were shown by the father when he was over sixty. certainly the contrary opinion depends rather on our own morals and our own prejudices than on the experience of the race as a whole. i may, therefore, leave on one side the experience of our young people; it proves nothing for those who have been educated in another fashion. considering that nature has fixed no exact limits which cannot be advanced or postponed, i think i may, without going beyond the law of nature, assume that under my care emil has so far remained in his first innocence, but i see that this happy period is drawing to a close. surrounded by ever-increasing perils, he will escape me at the first opportunity in spite of all my efforts, and this opportunity will not long be delayed; he will follow the blind instinct of his senses; the chances are a thousand to one on his ruin. i have considered the morals of mankind too profoundly not to be aware of the irrevocable influence of this first moment on all the rest of his life. if i dissimulate and pretend to see nothing, he will take advantage of my weakness; if he thinks he can deceive me, he will despise me, and i become an accomplice in his destruction. if i try to recall him, the time is past, he no longer heeds me, he finds me tiresome, hateful, intolerable; it will not be long before he is rid of me. there is therefore only one reasonable course open to me; i must make him accountable for his own actions, i must at least preserve him from being taken unawares, and i must show him plainly the dangers which beset his path. i have restrained him so far through his ignorance; henceforward his restraint must be his own knowledge. this new teaching is of great importance, and we will take up our story where we left it. this is the time to present my accounts, to show him how his time and mine have been spent, to make known to him what he is and what i am; what i have done, and what he has done; what we owe to each other; all his moral relations, all the undertakings to which he is pledged, all those to which others have pledged themselves in respect to him; the stage he has reached in the development of his faculties, the road that remains to be travelled, the difficulties he will meet, and the way to overcome them; how i can still help him and how he must henceforward help himself; in a word, the critical time which he has reached, the new dangers round about him, and all the valid reasons which should induce him to keep a close watch upon himself before giving heed to his growing desires. remember that to guide a grown man you must reverse all that you did to guide the child. do not hesitate to speak to him of those dangerous mysteries which you have so carefully concealed from him hitherto. since he must become aware of them, let him not learn them from another, nor from himself, but from you alone; since he must henceforth fight against them, let him know his enemy, that he may not be taken unawares. young people who are found to be aware of these matters, without our knowing how they obtained their knowledge, have not obtained it with impunity. this unwise teaching, which can have no honourable object, stains the imagination of those who receive it if it does nothing worse, and it inclines them to the vices of their instructors. this is not all; servants, by this means, ingratiate themselves with a child, gain his confidence, make him regard his tutor as a gloomy and tiresome person; and one of the favourite subjects of their secret colloquies is to slander him. when the pupil has got so far, the master may abandon his task; he can do no good. but why does the child choose special confidants? because of the tyranny of those who control him. why should he hide himself from them if he were not driven to it? why should he complain if he had nothing to complain of? naturally those who control him are his first confidants; you can see from his eagerness to tell them what he thinks that he feels he has only half thought till he has told his thoughts to them. you may be sure that when the child knows you will neither preach nor scold, he will always tell you everything, and that no one will dare to tell him anything he must conceal from you, for they will know very well that he will tell you everything. what makes me most confident in my method is this: when i follow it out as closely as possible, i find no situation in the life of my scholar which does not leave me some pleasing memory of him. even when he is carried away by his ardent temperament or when he revolts against the hand that guides him, when he struggles and is on the point of escaping from me, i still find his first simplicity in his agitation and his anger; his heart as pure as his body, he has no more knowledge of pretence than of vice; reproach and scorn have not made a coward of him; base fears have never taught him the art of concealment. he has all the indiscretion of innocence; he is absolutely out-spoken; he does not even know the use of deceit. every impulse of his heart is betrayed either by word or look, and i often know what he is feeling before he is aware of it himself. so long as his heart is thus freely opened to me, so long as he delights to tell me what he feels, i have nothing to fear; the danger is not yet at hand; but if he becomes more timid, more reserved, if i perceive in his conversation the first signs of confusion and shame, his instincts are beginning to develop, he is beginning to connect the idea of evil with these instincts, there is not a moment to lose, and if i do not hasten to instruct him, he will learn in spite of me. some of my readers, even of those who agree with me, will think that it is only a question of a conversation with the young man at any time. oh, this is not the way to control the human heart. what we say has no meaning unless the opportunity has been carefully chosen. before we sow we must till the ground; the seed of virtue is hard to grow; and a long period of preparation is required before it will take root. one reason why sermons have so little effect is that they are offered to everybody alike, without discrimination or choice. how can any one imagine that the same sermon could be suitable for so many hearers, with their different dispositions, so unlike in mind, temper, age, sex, station, and opinion. perhaps there are not two among those to whom what is addressed to all is really suitable; and all our affections are so transitory that perhaps there are not even two occasions in the life of any man when the same speech would have the same effect on him. judge for yourself whether the time when the eager senses disturb the understanding and tyrannise over the will, is the time to listen to the solemn lessons of wisdom. therefore never reason with young men, even when they have reached the age of reason, unless you have first prepared the way. most lectures miss their mark more through the master's fault than the disciple's. the pedant and the teacher say much the same; but the former says it at random, and the latter only when he is sure of its effect. as a somnambulist, wandering in his sleep, walks along the edge of a precipice, over which he would fall if he were awake, so my emile, in the sleep of ignorance, escapes the perils which he does not see; were i to wake him with a start, he might fall. let us first try to withdraw him from the edge of the precipice, and then we will awake him to show him it from a distance. reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. i divert his senses by other objects of sense; i trace another course for his spirits by which i distract them from the course they would have taken; it is by bodily exercise and hard work that i check the activity of the imagination, which was leading him astray. when the arms are hard at work, the imagination is quiet; when the body is very weary, the passions are not easily inflamed. the quickest and easiest precaution is to remove him from immediate danger. at once i take him away from towns, away from things which might lead him into temptation. but that is not enough; in what desert, in what wilds, shall he escape from the thoughts which pursue him? it is not enough to remove dangerous objects; if i fail to remove the memory of them, if i fail to find a way to detach him from everything, if i fail to distract him from himself, i might as well have left him where he was. emile has learned a trade, but we do not have recourse to it; he is fond of farming and understands it, but farming is not enough; the occupations he is acquainted with degenerate into routine; when he is engaged in them he is not really occupied; he is thinking of other things; head and hand are at work on different subjects. he must have some fresh occupation which has the interest of novelty--an occupation which keeps him busy, diligent, and hard at work, an occupation which he may become passionately fond of, one to which he will devote himself entirely. now the only one which seems to possess all these characteristics is the chase. if hunting is ever an innocent pleasure, if it is ever worthy of a man, now is the time to betake ourselves to it. emile is well-fitted to succeed in it. he is strong, skilful, patient, unwearied. he is sure to take a fancy to this sport; he will bring to it all the ardour of youth; in it he will lose, at least for a time, the dangerous inclinations which spring from softness. the chase hardens the heart a well as the body; we get used to the sight of blood and cruelty. diana is represented as the enemy of love; and the allegory is true to life; the languors of love are born of soft repose, and tender feelings are stifled by violent exercise. in the woods and fields, the lover and the sportsman are so diversely affected that they receive very different impressions. the fresh shade, the arbours, the pleasant resting-places of the one, to the other are but feeding grounds, or places where the quarry will hide or turn to bay. where the lover hears the flute and the nightingale, the hunter hears the horn and the hounds; one pictures to himself the nymphs and dryads, the other sees the horses, the huntsman, and the pack. take a country walk with one or other of these men; their different conversation will soon show you that they behold the earth with other eyes, and that the direction of their thoughts is as different as their favourite pursuit. i understand how these tastes may be combined, and that at last men find time for both. but the passions of youth cannot be divided in this way. give the youth a single occupation which he loves, and the rest will soon be forgotten. varied desires come with varied knowledge, and the first pleasures we know are the only ones we desire for long enough. i would not have the whole of emile's youth spent in killing creatures, and i do not even profess to justify this cruel passion; it is enough for me that it serves to delay a more dangerous passion, so that he may listen to me calmly when i speak of it, and give me time to describe it without stimulating it. there are moments in human life which can never be forgotten. such is the time when emile receives the instruction of which i have spoken; its influence should endure all his life through. let us try to engrave it on his memory so that it may never fade away. it is one of the faults of our age to rely too much on cold reason, as if men were all mind. by neglecting the language of expression we have lost the most forcible mode of speech. the spoken word is always weak, and we speak to the heart rather through the eyes than the ears. in our attempt to appeal to reason only, we have reduced our precepts to words, we have not embodied them in deed. mere reason is not active; occasionally she restrains, more rarely she stimulates, but she never does any great thing. small minds have a mania for reasoning. strong souls speak a very different language, and it is by this language that men are persuaded and driven to action. i observe that in modern times men only get a hold over others by force or self-interest, while the ancients did more by persuasion, by the affections of the heart; because they did not neglect the language; of symbolic expression. all agreements were drawn up solemnly, so that they might be more inviolable; before the reign of force, the gods were the judges of mankind; in their presence, individuals made their treaties and alliances, and pledged themselves to perform their promises; the face of the earth was the book in which the archives were preserved. the leaves of this book were rocks, trees, piles of stones, made sacred by these transactions, and regarded with reverence by barbarous men; and these pages were always open before their eyes. the well of the oath, the well of the living and seeing one; the ancient oak of mamre, the stones of witness, such were the simple but stately monuments of the sanctity of contracts; none dared to lay a sacrilegious hand on these monuments, and man's faith was more secure under the warrant of these dumb witnesses than it is to-day upon all the rigour of the law. in government the people were over-awed by the pomp and splendour of royal power. the symbols of greatness, a throne, a sceptre, a purple robe, a crown, a fillet, these were sacred in their sight. these symbols, and the respect which they inspired, led them to reverence the venerable man whom they beheld adorned with them; without soldiers and without threats, he spoke and was obeyed. [footnote: the roman catholic clergy have very wisely retained these symbols, and certain republics, such as venice, have followed their example. thus the venetian government, despite the fallen condition of the state, still enjoys, under the trappings of its former greatness, all the affection, all the reverence of the people; and next to the pope in his triple crown, there is perhaps no king, no potentate, no person in the world so much respected as the doge of venice; he has no power, no authority, but he is rendered sacred by his pomp, and he wears beneath his ducal coronet a woman's flowing locks. that ceremony of the bucentaurius, which stirs the laughter of fools, stirs the venetian populace to shed its life-blood for the maintenance of this tyrannical government.] in our own day men profess to do away with these symbols. what are the consequences of this contempt? the kingly majesty makes no impression on all hearts, kings can only gain obedience by the help of troops, and the respect of their subjects is based only on the fear of punishment. kings are spared the trouble of wearing their crowns, and our nobles escape from the outward signs of their station, but they must have a hundred thousand men at their command if their orders are to be obeyed. though this may seem a finer thing, it is easy to see that in the long run they will gain nothing. it is amazing what the ancients accomplished with the aid of eloquence; but this eloquence did not merely consist in fine speeches carefully prepared; and it was most effective when the orator said least. the most startling speeches were expressed not in words but in signs; they were not uttered but shown. a thing beheld by the eyes kindles the imagination, stirs the curiosity, and keeps the mind on the alert for what we are about to say, and often enough the thing tells the whole story. thrasybulus and tarquin cutting off the heads of the poppies, alexander placing his seal on the lips of his favourite, diogenes marching before zeno, do not these speak more plainly than if they had uttered long orations? what flow of words could have expressed the ideas as clearly? darius, in the course of the scythian war, received from the king of the scythians a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five arrows. the ambassador deposited this gift and retired without a word. in our days he would have been taken for a madman. this terrible speech was understood, and darius withdrew to his own country with what speed he could. substitute a letter for these symbols and the more threatening it was the less terror it would inspire; it would have been merely a piece of bluff, to which darius would have paid no attention. what heed the romans gave to the language of signs! different ages and different ranks had their appropriate garments, toga, tunic, patrician robes, fringes and borders, seats of honour, lictors, rods and axes, crowns of gold, crowns of leaves, crowns of flowers, ovations, triumphs, everything had its pomp, its observances, its ceremonial, and all these spoke to the heart of the citizens. the state regarded it as a matter of importance that the populace should assemble in one place rather than another, that they should or should not behold the capitol, that they should or should not turn towards the senate, that this day or that should be chosen for their deliberations. the accused wore a special dress, so did the candidates for election; warriors did not boast of their exploits, they showed their scars. i can fancy one of our orators at the death of caesar exhausting all the commonplaces of rhetoric to give a pathetic description of his wounds, his blood, his dead body; anthony was an orator, but he said none of this; he showed the murdered caesar. what rhetoric was this! but this digression, like many others, is drawing me unawares away from my subject; and my digressions are too frequent to be borne with patience. i therefore return to the point. do not reason coldly with youth. clothe your reason with a body, if you would make it felt. let the mind speak the language of the heart, that it may be understood. i say again our opinions, not our actions, may be influenced by cold argument; they set us thinking, not doing; they show us what we ought to think, not what we ought to do. if this is true of men, it is all the truer of young people who are still enwrapped in their senses and cannot think otherwise than they imagine. even after the preparations of which i have spoken, i shall take good care not to go all of a sudden to emile's room and preach a long and heavy sermon on the subject in which he is to be instructed. i shall begin by rousing his imagination; i shall choose the time, place, and surroundings most favourable to the impression i wish to make; i shall, so to speak, summon all nature as witness to our conversations; i shall call upon the eternal god, the creator of nature, to bear witness to the truth of what i say. he shall judge between emile and myself; i will make the rocks, the woods, the mountains round about us, the monuments of his promises and mine; eyes, voice, and gesture shall show the enthusiasm i desire to inspire. then i will speak and he will listen, and his emotion will be stirred by my own. the more impressed i am by the sanctity of my duties, the more sacred he will regard his own. i will enforce the voice of reason with images and figures, i will not give him long-winded speeches or cold precepts, but my overflowing feelings will break their bounds; my reason shall be grave and serious, but my heart cannot speak too warmly. then when i have shown him all that i have done for him, i will show him how he is made for me; he will see in my tender affection the cause of all my care. how greatly shall i surprise and disturb him when i change my tone. instead of shrivelling up his soul by always talking of his own interests, i shall henceforth speak of my own; he will be more deeply touched by this. i will kindle in his young heart all the sentiments of affection, generosity, and gratitude which i have already called into being, and it will indeed be sweet to watch their growth. i will press him to my bosom, and weep over him in my emotion; i will say to him: "you are my wealth, my child, my handiwork; my happiness is bound up in yours; if you frustrate my hopes, you rob me of twenty years of my life, and you bring my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave." this is the way to gain a hearing and to impress what is said upon the heart and memory of the young man. hitherto i have tried to give examples of the way in which a tutor should instruct his pupil in cases of difficulty. i have tried to do so in this instance; but after many attempts i have abandoned the task, convinced that the french language is too artificial to permit in print the plainness of speech required for the first lessons in certain subjects. they say french is more chaste than other languages; for my own part i think it more obscene; for it seems to me that the purity of a language does not consist in avoiding coarse expressions but in having none. indeed, if we are to avoid them, they must be in our thoughts, and there is no language in which it is so difficult to speak with purity on every subject than french. the reader is always quicker to detect than the author to avoid a gross meaning, and he is shocked and startled by everything. how can what is heard by impure ears avoid coarseness? on the other hand, a nation whose morals are pure has fit terms for everything, and these terms are always right because they are rightly used. one could not imagine more modest language than that of the bible, just because of its plainness of speech. the same things translated into french would become immodest. what i ought to say to emile will sound pure and honourable to him; but to make the same impression in print would demand a like purity of heart in the reader. i should even think that reflections on true purity of speech and the sham delicacy of vice might find a useful place in the conversations as to morality to which this subject brings us; for when he learns the language of plain-spoken goodness, he must also learn the language of decency, and he must know why the two are so different. however this may be, i maintain that if instead of the empty precepts which are prematurely dinned into the ears of children, only to be scoffed at when the time comes when they might prove useful, if instead of this we bide our time, if we prepare the way for a hearing, if we then show him the laws of nature in all their truth, if we show him the sanction of these laws in the physical and moral evils which overtake those who neglect them, if while we speak to him of this great mystery of generation, we join to the idea of the pleasure which the author of nature has given to this act the idea of the exclusive affection which makes it delightful, the idea of the duties of faithfulness and modesty which surround it, and redouble its charm while fulfilling its purpose; if we paint to him marriage, not only as the sweetest form of society, but also as the most sacred and inviolable of contracts, if we tell him plainly all the reasons which lead men to respect this sacred bond, and to pour hatred and curses upon him who dares to dishonour it; if we give him a true and terrible picture of the horrors of debauch, of its stupid brutality, of the downward road by which a first act of misconduct leads from bad to worse, and at last drags the sinner to his ruin; if, i say, we give him proofs that on a desire for chastity depends health, strength, courage, virtue, love itself, and all that is truly good for man--i maintain that this chastity will be so dear and so desirable in his eyes, that his mind will be ready to receive our teaching as to the way to preserve it; for so long as we are chaste we respect chastity; it is only when we have lost this virtue that we scorn it. it is not true that the inclination to evil is beyond our control, and that we cannot overcome it until we have acquired the habit of yielding to it. aurelius victor says that many men were mad enough to purchase a night with cleopatra at the price of their life, and this is not incredible in the madness of passion. but let us suppose the maddest of men, the man who has his senses least under control; let him see the preparations for his death, let him realise that he will certainly die in torment a quarter of an hour later; not only would that man, from that time forward, become able to resist temptation, he would even find it easy to do so; the terrible picture with which they are associated will soon distract his attention from these temptations, and when they are continually put aside they will cease to recur. the sole cause of our weakness is the feebleness of our will, and we have always strength to perform what we strongly desire. "volenti nihil difficile!" oh! if only we hated vice as much as we love life, we should abstain as easily from a pleasant sin as from a deadly poison in a delicious dish. how is it that you fail to perceive that if all the lessons given to a young man on this subject have no effect, it is because they are not adapted to his age, and that at every age reason must be presented in a shape which will win his affection? speak seriously to him if required, but let what you say to him always have a charm which will compel him to listen. do not coldly oppose his wishes; do not stifle his imagination, but direct it lest it should bring forth monsters. speak to him of love, of women, of pleasure; let him find in your conversation a charm which delights his youthful heart; spare no pains to make yourself his confidant; under this name alone will you really be his master. then you need not fear he will find your conversation tedious; he will make you talk more than you desire. if i have managed to take all the requisite precautions in accordance with these maxims, and have said the right things to emile at the age he has now reached, i am quite convinced that he will come of his own accord to the point to which i would lead him, and will eagerly confide himself to my care. when he sees the dangers by which he is surrounded, he will say to me with all the warmth of youth, "oh, my friend, my protector, my master! resume the authority you desire to lay aside at the very time when i most need it; hitherto my weakness has given you this power. i now place it in your hands of my own free-will, and it will be all the more sacred in my eyes. protect me from all the foes which are attacking me, and above all from the traitors within the citadel; watch over your work, that it may still be worthy of you. i mean to obey your laws, i shall ever do so, that is my steadfast purpose; if i ever disobey you, it will be against my will; make me free by guarding me against the passions which do me violence; do not let me become their slave; compel me to be my own master and to obey, not my senses, but my reason." when you have led your pupil so far (and it will be your own fault if you fail to do so), beware of taking him too readily at his word, lest your rule should seem too strict to him, and lest he should think he has a right to escape from it, by accusing you of taking him by surprise. this is the time for reserve and seriousness; and this attitude will have all the more effect upon him seeing that it is the first time you have adopted it towards him. you will say to him therefore: "young man, you readily make promises which are hard to keep; you must understand what they mean before you have a right to make them; you do not know how your fellows are drawn by their passions into the whirlpool of vice masquerading as pleasure. you are honourable, i know; you will never break your word, but how often will you repent of having given it? how often will you curse your friend, when, in order to guard you from the ills which threaten you, he finds himself compelled to do violence to your heart. like ulysses who, hearing the song of the sirens, cried aloud to his rowers to unbind him, you will break your chains at the call of pleasure; you will importune me with your lamentations, you will reproach me as a tyrant when i have your welfare most at heart; when i am trying to make you happy, i shall incur your hatred. oh, emile, i can never bear to be hateful in your eyes; this is too heavy a price to pay even for your happiness. my dear young man, do you not see that when you undertake to obey me, you compel me to promise to be your guide, to forget myself in my devotion to you, to refuse to listen to your murmurs and complaints, to wage unceasing war against your wishes and my own. before we either of us undertake such a task, let us count our resources; take your time, give me time to consider, and be sure that the slower we are to promise, the more faithfully will our promises be kept." you may be sure that the more difficulty he finds in getting your promise, the easier you will find it to carry it out. the young man must learn that he is promising a great deal, and that you are promising still more. when the time is come, when he has, so to say, signed the contract, then change your tone, and make your rule as gentle as you said it would be severe. say to him, "my young friend, it is experience that you lack; but i have taken care that you do not lack reason. you are ready to see the motives of my conduct in every respect; to do this you need only wait till you are free from excitement. always obey me first, and then ask the reasons for my commands; i am always ready to give my reasons so soon as you are ready to listen to them, and i shall never be afraid to make you the judge between us. you promise to follow my teaching, and i promise only to use your obedience to make you the happiest of men. for proof of this i have the life you have lived hitherto. show me any one of your age who has led as happy a life as yours, and i promise you nothing more." when my authority is firmly established, my first care will be to avoid the necessity of using it. i shall spare no pains to become more and more firmly established in his confidence, to make myself the confidant of his heart and the arbiter of his pleasures. far from combating his youthful tastes, i shall consult them that i may be their master; i will look at things from his point of view that i may be his guide; i will not seek a remote distant good at the cost of his present happiness. i would always have him happy always if that may be. those who desire to guide young people rightly and to preserve them from the snares of sense give them a disgust for love, and would willingly make the very thought of it a crime, as if love were for the old. all these mistaken lessons have no effect; the heart gives the lie to them. the young man, guided by a surer instinct, laughs to himself over the gloomy maxims which he pretends to accept, and only awaits the chance of disregarding them. all that is contrary to nature. by following the opposite course i reach the same end more safely. i am not afraid to encourage in him the tender feeling for which he is so eager, i shall paint it as the supreme joy of life, as indeed it is; when i picture it to him, i desire that he shall give himself up to it; by making him feel the charm which the union of hearts adds to the delights of sense, i shall inspire him with a disgust for debauchery; i shall make him a lover and a good man. how narrow-minded to see nothing in the rising desires of a young heart but obstacles to the teaching of reason. in my eyes, these are the right means to make him obedient to that very teaching. only through passion can we gain the mastery over passions; their tyranny must be controlled by their legitimate power, and nature herself must furnish us with the means to control her. emile is not made to live alone, he is a member of society, and must fulfil his duties as such. he is made to live among his fellow-men and he must get to know them. he knows mankind in general; he has still to learn to know individual men. he knows what goes on in the world; he has now to learn how men live in the world. it is time to show him the front of that vast stage, of which he already knows the hidden workings. it will not arouse in him the foolish admiration of a giddy youth, but the discrimination of an exact and upright spirit. he may no doubt be deceived by his passions; who is there who yields to his passions without being led astray by them? at least he will not be deceived by the passions of other people. if he sees them, he will regard them with the eye of the wise, and will neither be led away by their example nor seduced by their prejudices. as there is a fitting age for the study of the sciences, so there is a fitting age for the study of the ways of the world. those who learn these too soon, follow them throughout life, without choice or consideration, and although they follow them fairly well they never really know what they are about. but he who studies the ways of the world and sees the reason for them, follows them with more insight, and therefore more exactly and gracefully. give me a child of twelve who knows nothing at all; at fifteen i will restore him to you knowing as much as those who have been under instruction from infancy; with this difference, that your scholars only know things by heart, while mine knows how to use his knowledge. in the same way plunge a young man of twenty into society; under good guidance, in a year's time, he will be more charming and more truly polite than one brought up in society from childhood. for the former is able to perceive the reasons for all the proceedings relating to age, position, and sex, on which the customs of society depend, and can reduce them to general principles, and apply them to unforeseen emergencies; while the latter, who is guided solely by habit, is at a loss when habit fails him. young french ladies are all brought up in convents till they are married. do they seem to find any difficulty in acquiring the ways which are so new to them, and is it possible to accuse the ladies of paris of awkward and embarrassed manners or of ignorance of the ways of society, because they have not acquired them in infancy! this is the prejudice of men of the world, who know nothing of more importance than this trifling science, and wrongly imagine that you cannot begin to acquire it too soon. on the other hand, it is quite true that we must not wait too long. any one who has spent the whole of his youth far from the great world is all his life long awkward, constrained, out of place; his manners will be heavy and clumsy, no amount of practice will get rid of this, and he will only make himself more ridiculous by trying to do so. there is a time for every kind of teaching and we ought to recognise it, and each has its own dangers to be avoided. at this age there are more dangers than at any other; but i do not expose my pupil to them without safeguards. when my method succeeds completely in attaining one object, and when in avoiding one difficulty it also provides against another, i then consider that it is a good method, and that i am on the right track. this seems to be the case with regard to the expedient suggested by me in the present case. if i desire to be stern and cold towards my pupil, i shall lose his confidence, and he will soon conceal himself from me. if i wish to be easy and complaisant, to shut my eyes, what good does it do him to be under my care? i only give my authority to his excesses, and relieve his conscience at the expense of my own. if i introduce him into society with no object but to teach him, he will learn more than i want. if i keep him apart from society, what will he have learnt from me? everything perhaps, except the one art absolutely necessary to a civilised man, the art of living among his fellow-men. if i try to attend to this at a distance, it will be of no avail; he is only concerned with the present. if i am content to supply him with amusement, he will acquire habits of luxury and will learn nothing. we will have none of this. my plan provides for everything. your heart, i say to the young man, requires a companion; let us go in search of a fitting one; perhaps we shall not easily find such a one, true worth is always rare, but we will be in no hurry, nor will we be easily discouraged. no doubt there is such a one, and we shall find her at last, or at least we shall find some one like her. with an end so attractive to himself, i introduce him into society. what more need i say? have i not achieved my purpose? by describing to him his future mistress, you may imagine whether i shall gain a hearing, whether i shall succeed in making the qualities he ought to love pleasing and dear to him, whether i shall sway his feelings to seek or shun what is good or bad for him. i shall be the stupidest of men if i fail to make him in love with he knows not whom. no matter that the person i describe is imaginary, it is enough to disgust him with those who might have attracted him; it is enough if it is continually suggesting comparisons which make him prefer his fancy to the real people he sees; and is not love itself a fancy, a falsehood, an illusion? we are far more in love with our own fancy than with the object of it. if we saw the object of our affections as it is, there would be no such thing as love. when we cease to love, the person we used to love remains unchanged, but we no longer see with the same eyes; the magic veil is drawn aside, and love disappears. but when i supply the object of imagination, i have control over comparisons, and i am able easily to prevent illusion with regard to realities. for all that i would not mislead a young man by describing a model of perfection which could never exist; but i would so choose the faults of his mistress that they will suit him, that he will be pleased by them, and they may serve to correct his own. neither would i lie to him and affirm that there really is such a person; let him delight in the portrait, he will soon desire to find the original. from desire to belief the transition is easy; it is a matter of a little skilful description, which under more perceptible features will give to this imaginary object an air of greater reality. i would go so far as to give her a name; i would say, smiling. let us call your future mistress sophy; sophy is a name of good omen; if it is not the name of the lady of your choice at least she will be worthy of the name; we may honour her with it meanwhile. if after all these details, without affirming or denying, we excuse ourselves from giving an answer, his suspicions will become certainty; he will think that his destined bride is purposely concealed from him, and that he will see her in good time. if once he has arrived at this conclusion and if the characteristics to be shown to him have been well chosen, the rest is easy; there will be little risk in exposing him to the world; protect him from his senses, and his heart is safe. but whether or no he personifies the model i have contrived to make so attractive to him, this model, if well done, will attach him none the less to everything that resembles itself, and will give him as great a distaste for all that is unlike it as if sophy really existed. what a means to preserve his heart from the dangers to which his appearance would expose him, to repress his senses by means of his imagination, to rescue him from the hands of those women who profess to educate young men, and make them pay so dear for their teaching, and only teach a young man manners by making him utterly shameless. sophy is so modest? what would she think of their advances! sophy is so simple! how would she like their airs? they are too far from his thoughts and his observations to be dangerous. every one who deals with the control of children follows the same prejudices and the same maxima, for their observation is at fault, and their reflection still more so. a young man is led astray in the first place neither by temperament nor by the senses, but by popular opinion. if we were concerned with boys brought up in boarding schools or girls in convents, i would show that this applies even to them; for the first lessons they learn from each other, the only lessons that bear fruit, are those of vice; and it is not nature that corrupts them but example. but let us leave the boarders in schools and convents to their bad morals; there is no cure for them. i am dealing only with home training. take a young man carefully educated in his father's country house, and examine him when he reaches paris and makes his entrance into society; you will find him thinking clearly about honest matters, and you will find his will as wholesome as his reason. you will find scorn of vice and disgust for debauchery; his face will betray his innocent horror at the very mention of a prostitute. i maintain that no young man could make up his mind to enter the gloomy abodes of these unfortunates by himself, if indeed he were aware of their purpose and felt their necessity. see the same young man six months later, you will not know him; from his bold conversation, his fashionable maxims, his easy air, you would take him for another man, if his jests over his former simplicity and his shame when any one recalls it did not show that it is he indeed and that he is ashamed of himself. how greatly has he changed in so short a time! what has brought about so sudden and complete a change? his physical development? would not that have taken place in his father's house, and certainly he would not have acquired these maxims and this tone at home? the first charms of sense? on the contrary; those who are beginning to abandon themselves to these pleasures are timid and anxious, they shun the light and noise. the first pleasures are always mysterious, modesty gives them their savour, and modesty conceals them; the first mistress does not make a man bold but timid. wholly absorbed in a situation so novel to him, the young man retires into himself to enjoy it, and trembles for fear it should escape him. if he is noisy he knows neither passion nor love; however he may boast, he has not enjoyed. these changes are merely the result of changed ideas. his heart is the same, but his opinions have altered. his feelings, which change more slowly, will at length yield to his opinions and it is then that he is indeed corrupted. he has scarcely made his entrance into society before he receives a second education quite unlike the first, which teaches him to despise what he esteemed, and esteem what he despised; he learns to consider the teaching of his parents and masters as the jargon of pedants, and the duties they have instilled into him as a childish morality, to be scorned now that he is grown up. he thinks he is bound in honour to change his conduct; he becomes forward without desire, and he talks foolishly from false shame. he rails against morality before he has any taste for vice, and prides himself on debauchery without knowing how to set about it. i shall never forget the confession of a young officer in the swiss guards, who was utterly sick of the noisy pleasures of his comrades, but dared not refuse to take part in them lest he should be laughed at. "i am getting used to it," he said, "as i am getting used to taking snuff; the taste will come with practice; it will not do to be a child for ever." so a young man when he enters society must be preserved from vanity rather than from sensibility; he succumbs rather to the tastes of others than to his own, and self-love is responsible for more libertines than love. this being granted, i ask you. is there any one on earth better armed than my pupil against all that may attack his morals, his sentiments, his principles; is there any one more able to resist the flood? what seduction is there against which he is not forearmed? if his desires attract him towards women, he fails to find what he seeks, and his heart, already occupied, holds him back. if he is disturbed and urged onward by his senses, where will he find satisfaction? his horror of adultery and debauch keeps him at a distance from prostitutes and married women, and the disorders of youth may always be traced to one or other of these. a maiden may be a coquette, but she will not be shameless, she will not fling herself at the head of a young man who may marry her if he believes in her virtue; besides she is always under supervision. emile, too, will not be left entirely to himself; both of them will be under the guardianship of fear and shame, the constant companions of a first passion; they will not proceed at once to misconduct, and they will not have time to come to it gradually without hindrance. if he behaves otherwise, he must have taken lessons from his comrades, he must have learned from them to despise his self-control, and to imitate their boldness. but there is no one in the whole world so little given to imitation as emile. what man is there who is so little influenced by mockery as one who has no prejudices himself and yields nothing to the prejudices of others. i have laboured twenty years to arm him against mockery; they will not make him their dupe in a day; for in his eyes ridicule is the argument of fools, and nothing makes one less susceptible to raillery than to be beyond the influence of prejudice. instead of jests he must have arguments, and while he is in this frame of mind, i am not afraid that he will be carried away by young fools; conscience and truth are on my side. if prejudice is to enter into the matter at all, an affection of twenty years' standing counts for something; no one will ever convince him that i have wearied him with vain lessons; and in a heart so upright and so sensitive the voice of a tried and trusted friend will soon efface the shouts of twenty libertines. as it is therefore merely a question of showing him that he is deceived, that while they pretend to treat him as a man they are really treating him as a child, i shall choose to be always simple but serious and plain in my arguments, so that he may feel that i do indeed treat him as a man. i will say to him, you will see that your welfare, in which my own is bound up, compels me to speak; i can do nothing else. but why do these young men want to persuade you? because they desire to seduce you; they do not care for you, they take no real interest in you; their only motive is a secret spite because they see you are better than they; they want to drag you down to their own level, and they only reproach you with submitting to control that they may themselves control you. do you think you have anything to gain by this? are they so much wiser than i, is the affection of a day stronger than mine? to give any weight to their jests they must give weight to their authority; and by what experience do they support their maxima above ours? they have only followed the example of other giddy youths, as they would have you follow theirs. to escape from the so-called prejudices of their fathers, they yield to those of their comrades. i cannot see that they are any the better off; but i see that they lose two things of value--the affection of their parents, whose advice is that of tenderness and truth, and the wisdom of experience which teaches us to judge by what we know; for their fathers have once been young, but the young men have never been fathers. but you think they are at least sincere in their foolish precepts. not so, dear emile; they deceive themselves in order to deceive you; they are not in agreement with themselves; their heart continually revolts, and their very words often contradict themselves. this man who mocks at everything good would be in despair if his wife held the same views. another extends his indifference to good morals even to his future wife, or he sinks to such depths of infamy as to be indifferent to his wife's conduct; but go a step further; speak to him of his mother; is he willing to be treated as the child of an adulteress and the son of a woman of bad character, is he ready to assume the name of a family, to steal the patrimony of the true heir, in a word will he bear being treated as a bastard? which of them will permit his daughter to be dishonoured as he dishonours the daughter of another? there is not one of them who would not kill you if you adopted in your conduct towards him all the principles he tries to teach you. thus they prove their inconsistency, and we know they do not believe what they say. here are reasons, dear emile; weigh their arguments if they have any, and compare them with mine. if i wished to have recourse like them to scorn and mockery, you would see that they lend themselves to ridicule as much or more than myself. but i am not afraid of serious inquiry. the triumph of mockers is soon over; truth endures, and their foolish laughter dies away. you do not think that emile, at twenty, can possibly be docile. how differently we think! i cannot understand how he could be docile at ten, for what hold have i on him at that age? it took me fifteen years of careful preparation to secure that hold. i was not educating him, but preparing him for education. he is now sufficiently educated to be docile; he recognises the voice of friendship and he knows how to obey reason. it is true i allow him a show of freedom, but he was never more completely under control, because he obeys of his own free will. so long as i could not get the mastery over his will, i retained my control over his person; i never left him for a moment. now i sometimes leave him to himself because i control him continually. when i leave him i embrace him and i say with confidence: emile, i trust you to my friend, i leave you to his honour; he will answer for you. to corrupt healthy affections which have not been previously depraved, to efface principles which are directly derived from our own reasoning, is not the work of a moment. if any change takes place during my absence, that absence will not be long, he will never be able to conceal himself from me, so that i shall perceive the danger before any harm comes of it, and i shall be in time to provide a remedy. as we do not become depraved all at once, neither do we learn to deceive all at once; and if ever there was a man unskilled in the art of deception it is emile, who has never had any occasion for deceit. by means of these precautions and others like them, i expect to guard him so completely against strange sights and vulgar precepts that i would rather see him in the worst company in paris than alone in his room or in a park left to all the restlessness of his age. whatever we may do, a young man's worst enemy is himself, and this is an enemy we cannot avoid. yet this is an enemy of our own making, for, as i have said again and again, it is the imagination which stirs the senses. desire is not a physical need; it is not true that it is a need at all. if no lascivious object had met our eye, if no unclean thought had entered our mind, this so-called need might never have made itself felt, and we should have remained chaste, without temptation, effort, or merit. we do not know how the blood of youth is stirred by certain situations and certain sights, while the youth himself does not understand the cause of his uneasiness-an uneasiness difficult to subdue and certain to recur. for my own part, the more i consider this serious crisis and its causes, immediate and remote, the more convinced i am that a solitary brought up in some desert, apart from books, teaching, and women, would die a virgin, however long he lived. but we are not concerned with a savage of this sort. when we educate a man among his fellow-men and for social life, we cannot, and indeed we ought not to, bring him up in this wholesome ignorance, and half knowledge is worse than none. the memory of things we have observed, the ideas we have acquired, follow us into retirement and people it, against our will, with images more seductive than the things themselves, and these make solitude as fatal to those who bring such ideas with them as it is wholesome for those who have never left it. therefore, watch carefully over the young man; he can protect himself from all other foes, but it is for you to protect him against himself. never leave him night or day, or at least share his room; never let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he wakes. distrust instinct as soon as you cease to rely altogether upon it. instinct was good while he acted under its guidance only; now that he is in the midst of human institutions, instinct is not to be trusted; it must not be destroyed, it must be controlled, which is perhaps a more difficult matter. it would be a dangerous matter if instinct taught your pupil to abuse his senses; if once he acquires this dangerous habit he is ruined. from that time forward, body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal habit which a young man can acquire. if you cannot attain to the mastery of your passions, dear emile, i pity you; but i shall not hesitate for a moment, i will not permit the purposes of nature to be evaded. if you must be a slave, i prefer to surrender you to a tyrant from whom i may deliver you; whatever happens, i can free you more easily from the slavery of women than from yourself. up to the age of twenty, the body is still growing and requires all its strength; till that age continence is the law of nature, and this law is rarely violated without injury to the constitution. after twenty, continence is a moral duty; it is an important duty, for it teaches us to control ourselves, to be masters of our own appetites. but moral duties have their modifications, their exceptions, their rules. when human weakness makes an alternative inevitable, of two evils choose the least; in any case it is better to commit a misdeed than to contract a vicious habit. remember, i am not talking of my pupil now, but of yours. his passions, to which you have given way, are your master; yield to them openly and without concealing his victory. if you are able to show him it in its true light, he will be ashamed rather than proud of it, and you will secure the right to guide him in his wanderings, at least so as to avoid precipices. the disciple must do nothing, not even evil, without the knowledge and consent of his master; it is a hundredfold better that the tutor should approve of a misdeed than that he should deceive himself or be deceived by his pupil, and the wrong should be done without his knowledge. he who thinks he must shut his eyes to one thing, must soon shut them altogether; the first abuse which is permitted leads to others, and this chain of consequences only ends in the complete overthrow of all order and contempt for every law. there is another mistake which i have already dealt with, a mistake continually made by narrow-minded persons; they constantly affect the dignity of a master, and wish to be regarded by their disciples as perfect. this method is just the contrary of what should be done. how is it that they fail to perceive that when they try to strengthen their authority they are really destroying it; that to gain a hearing one must put oneself in the place of our hearers, and that to speak to the human heart, one must be a man. all these perfect people neither touch nor persuade; people always say, "it is easy for them to fight against passions they do not feel." show your pupil your own weaknesses if you want to cure his; let him see in you struggles like his own; let him learn by your example to master himself and let him not say like other young men, "these old people, who are vexed because they are no longer young, want to treat all young people as if they were old; and they make a crime of our passions because their own passions are dead." montaigne tells us that he once asked seigneur de langey how often, in his negotiations with germany, he had got drunk in his king's service. i would willingly ask the tutor of a certain young man how often he has entered a house of ill-fame for his pupil's sake. how often? i am wrong. if the first time has not cured the young libertine of all desire to go there again, if he does not return penitent and ashamed, if he does not shed torrents of tears upon your bosom, leave him on the spot; either he is a monster or you are a fool; you will never do him any good. but let us have done with these last expedients, which are as distressing as they are dangerous; our kind of education has no need of them. what precautions we must take with a young man of good birth before exposing him to the scandalous manners of our age! these precautions are painful but necessary; negligence in this matter is the ruin of all our young men; degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses which make men what they are. old and base in their vices, their hearts are shrivelled, because their worn-out bodies were corrupted at an early age; they have scarcely strength to stir. the subtlety of their thoughts betrays a mind lacking in substance; they are incapable of any great or noble feeling, they have neither simplicity nor vigour; altogether abject and meanly wicked, they are merely frivolous, deceitful, and false; they have not even courage enough to be distinguished criminals. such are the despicable men produced by early debauchery; if there were but one among them who knew how to be sober and temperate, to guard his heart, his body, his morals from the contagion of bad example, at the age of thirty he would crush all these insects, and would become their master with far less trouble than it cost him to become master of himself. however little emile owes to birth and fortune, he might be this man if he chose; but he despises such people too much to condescend to make them his slaves. let us now watch him in their midst, as he enters into society, not to claim the first place, but to acquaint himself with it and to seek a helpmeet worthy of himself. whatever his rank or birth, whatever the society into which he is introduced, his entrance into that society will be simple and unaffected; god grant he may not be unlucky enough to shine in society; the qualities which make a good impression at the first glance are not his, he neither possesses them, nor desires to possess them. he cares too little for the opinions of other people to value their prejudices, and he is indifferent whether people esteem him or not until they know him. his address is neither shy nor conceited, but natural and sincere, he knows nothing of constraint or concealment, and he is just the same among a group of people as he is when he is alone. will this make him rude, scornful, and careless of others? on the contrary; if he were not heedless of others when he lived alone, why should he be heedless of them now that he is living among them? he does not prefer them to himself in his manners, because he does not prefer them to himself in his heart, but neither does he show them an indifference which he is far from feeling; if he is unacquainted with the forms of politeness, he is not unacquainted with the attentions dictated by humanity. he cannot bear to see any one suffer; he will not give up his place to another from mere external politeness, but he will willingly yield it to him out of kindness if he sees that he is being neglected and that this neglect hurts him; for it will be less disagreeable to emile to remain standing of his own accord than to see another compelled to stand. although emile has no very high opinion of people in general, he does not show any scorn of them, because he pities them and is sorry for them. as he cannot give them a taste for what is truly good, he leaves them the imaginary good with which they are satisfied, lest by robbing them of this he should leave them worse off than before. so he neither argues nor contradicts; neither does he flatter nor agree; he states his opinion without arguing with others, because he loves liberty above all things, and freedom is one of the fairest gifts of liberty. he says little, for he is not anxious to attract attention; for the same reason he only says what is to the point; who could induce him to speak otherwise? emile is too well informed to be a chatter-box. a great flow of words comes either from a pretentious spirit, of which i shall speak presently, or from the value laid upon trifles which we foolishly think to be as important in the eyes of others as in our own. he who knows enough of things to value them at their true worth never says too much; for he can also judge of the attention bestowed on him and the interest aroused by what he says. people who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. it is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. but a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace. far from disregarding the ways of other people, emile conforms to them readily enough; not that he may appear to know all about them, nor yet to affect the airs of a man of fashion, but on the contrary for fear lest he should attract attention, and in order to pass unnoticed; he is most at his ease when no one pays any attention to him. although when he makes his entrance into society he knows nothing of its customs, this does not make him shy or timid; if he keeps in the background, it is not because he is embarrassed, but because, if you want to see, you must not be seen; for he scarcely troubles himself at all about what people think of him, and he is not the least afraid of ridicule. hence he is always quiet and self-possessed and is not troubled with shyness. all he has to do is done as well as he knows how to do it, whether people are looking at him or not; and as he is always on the alert to observe other people, he acquires their ways with an ease impossible to the slaves of other people's opinions. we might say that he acquires the ways of society just because he cares so little about them. but do not make any mistake as to his bearing; it is not to be compared with that of your young dandies. it is self-possessed, not conceited; his manners are easy, not haughty; an insolent look is the mark of a slave, there is nothing affected in independence. i never saw a man of lofty soul who showed it in his bearing; this affectation is more suited to vile and frivolous souls, who have no other means of asserting themselves. i read somewhere that a foreigner appeared one day in the presence of the famous marcel, who asked him what country he came from. "i am an englishman," replied the stranger. "you are an englishman!" replied the dancer, "you come from that island where the citizens have a share in the government, and form part of the sovereign power? [footnote: as if there were citizens who were not part of the city and had not, as such, a share in sovereign power! but the french, who have thought fit to usurp the honourable name of citizen which was formerly the right of the members of the gallic cities, have degraded the idea till it has no longer any sort of meaning. a man who recently wrote a number of silly criticisms on the "nouvelle heloise" added to his signature the title "citizen of paimboeuf," and he thought it a capital joke.] no, sir, that modest bearing, that timid glance, that hesitating manner, proclaim only a slave adorned with the title of an elector." i cannot say whether this saying shows much knowledge of the true relation between a man's character and his appearance. i have not the honour of being a dancing master, and i should have thought just the opposite. i should have said, "this englishman is no courtier; i never heard that courtiers have a timid bearing and a hesitating manner. a man whose appearance is timid in the presence of a dancer might not be timid in the house of commons." surely this m. marcel must take his fellow-countrymen for so many romans. he who loves desires to be loved, emile loves his fellows and desires to please them. even more does he wish to please the women; his age, his character, the object he has in view, all increase this desire. i say his character, for this has a great effect; men of good character are those who really adore women. they have not the mocking jargon of gallantry like the rest, but their eagerness is more genuinely tender, because it comes from the heart. in the presence of a young woman, i could pick out a young man of character and self-control from among a hundred thousand libertines. consider what emile must be, with all the eagerness of early youth and so many reasons for resistance! for in the presence of women i think he will sometimes be shy and timid; but this shyness will certainly not be displeasing, and the least foolish of them will only too often find a way to enjoy it and augment it. moreover, his eagerness will take a different shape according to those he has to do with. he will be more modest and respectful to married women, more eager and tender towards young girls. he never loses sight of his purpose, and it is always those who most recall it to him who receive the greater share of his attentions. no one could be more attentive to every consideration based upon the laws of nature, and even on the laws of good society; but the former are always preferred before the latter, and emile will show more respect to an elderly person in private life than to a young magistrate of his own age. as he is generally one of the youngest in the company, he will always be one of the most modest, not from the vanity which apes humility, but from a natural feeling founded upon reason. he will not have the effrontery of the young fop, who speaks louder than the wise and interrupts the old in order to amuse the company. he will never give any cause for the reply given to louis xv by an old gentleman who was asked whether he preferred this century or the last: "sire, i spent my youth in reverence towards the old; i find myself compelled to spend my old age in reverence towards the young." his heart is tender and sensitive, but he cares nothing for the weight of popular opinion, though he loves to give pleasure to others; so he will care little to be thought a person of importance. hence he will be affectionate rather than polite, he will never be pompous or affected, and he will be always more touched by a caress than by much praise. for the same reasons he will never be careless of his manners or his clothes; perhaps he will be rather particular about his dress, not that he may show himself a man of taste, but to make his appearance more pleasing; he will never require a gilt frame, and he will never spoil his style by a display of wealth. all this demands, as you see, no stock of precepts from me; it is all the result of his early education. people make a great mystery of the ways of society, as if, at the age when these ways are acquired, we did not take to them quite naturally, and as if the first laws of politeness were not to be found in a kindly heart. true politeness consists in showing our goodwill towards men; it shows its presence without any difficulty; those only who lack this goodwill are compelled to reduce the outward signs of it to an art. "the worst effect of artificial politeness is that it teaches us how to dispense with the virtues it imitates. if our education teaches us kindness and humanity, we shall be polite, or we shall have no need of politeness. "if we have not those qualities which display themselves gracefully we shall have those which proclaim the honest man and the citizen; we shall have no need for falsehood. "instead of seeking to please by artificiality, it will suffice that we are kindly; instead of flattering the weaknesses of others by falsehood, it will suffice to tolerate them. "those with whom we have to do will neither be puffed up nor corrupted by such intercourse; they will only be grateful and will be informed by it." [footnote: considerations sur les moeurs de ce siecle, par m. duclos.] it seems to me that if any education is calculated to produce the sort of politeness required by m. duclos in this passage, it is the education i have already described. yet i admit that with such different teaching emile will not be just like everybody else, and heaven preserve him from such a fate! but where he is unlike other people, he will neither cause annoyance nor will he be absurd; the difference will be perceptible but not unpleasant. emile will be, if you like, an agreeable foreigner. at first his peculiarities will be excused with the phrase, "he will learn." after a time people will get used to his ways, and seeing that he does not change they will still make excuses for him and say, "he is made that way." he will not be feted as a charming man, but every one will like him without knowing why; no one will praise his intellect, but every one will be ready to make him the judge between men of intellect; his own intelligence will be clear and limited, his mind will be accurate, and his judgment sane. as he never runs after new ideas, he cannot pride himself on his wit. i have convinced him that all wholesome ideas, ideas which are really useful to mankind, were among the earliest known, that in all times they have formed the true bonds of society, and that there is nothing left for ambitious minds but to seek distinction for themselves by means of ideas which are injurious and fatal to mankind. this way of winning admiration scarcely appeals to him; he knows how he ought to seek his own happiness in life, and how he can contribute to the happiness of others. the sphere of his knowledge is restricted to what is profitable. his path is narrow and clearly defined; as he has no temptation to leave it, he is lost in the crowd; he will neither distinguish himself nor will he lose his way. emile is a man of common sense and he has no desire to be anything more; you may try in vain to insult him by applying this phrase to him; he will always consider it a title of honour. although from his wish to please he is no longer wholly indifferent to the opinion of others, he only considers that opinion so far as he himself is directly concerned, without troubling himself about arbitrary values, which are subject to no law but that of fashion or conventionality. he will have pride enough to wish to do well in everything that he undertakes, and even to wish to do it better than others; he will want to be the swiftest runner, the strongest wrestler, the cleverest workman, the readiest in games of skill; but he will not seek advantages which are not in themselves clear gain, but need to be supported by the opinion of others, such as to be thought wittier than another, a better speaker, more learned, etc.; still less will he trouble himself with those which have nothing to do with the man himself, such as higher birth, a greater reputation for wealth, credit, or public estimation, or the impression created by a showy exterior. as he loves his fellows because they are like himself, he will prefer him who is most like himself, because he will feel that he is good; and as he will judge of this resemblance by similarity of taste in morals, in all that belongs to a good character, he will be delighted to win approval. he will not say to himself in so many words, "i am delighted to gain approval," but "i am delighted because they say i have done right; i am delighted because the men who honour me are worthy of honour; while they judge so wisely, it is a fine thing to win their respect." as he studies men in their conduct in society, just as he formerly studied them through their passions in history, he will often have occasion to consider what it is that pleases or offends the human heart. he is now busy with the philosophy of the principles of taste, and this is the most suitable subject for his present study. the further we seek our definitions of taste, the further we go astray; taste is merely the power of judging what is pleasing or displeasing to most people. go beyond this, and you cannot say what taste is. it does not follow that the men of taste are in the majority; for though the majority judges wisely with regard to each individual thing, there are few men who follow the judgment of the majority in everything; and though the most general agreement in taste constitutes good taste, there are few men of good taste just as there are few beautiful people, although beauty consists in the sum of the most usual features. it must be observed that we are not here concerned with what we like because it is serviceable, or hate because it is harmful to us. taste deals only with things that are indifferent to us, or which affect at most our amusements, not those which relate to our needs; taste is not required to judge of these, appetite only is sufficient. it is this which makes mere decisions of taste so difficult and as it seems so arbitrary; for beyond the instinct they follow there appears to be no reason whatever for them. we must also make a distinction between the laws of good taste in morals and its laws in physical matters. in the latter the laws of taste appear to be absolutely inexplicable. but it must be observed that there is a moral element in everything which involves imitation.[footnote: this is demonstrated in an "essay on the origin of languages" which will be found in my collected works.] this is the explanation of beauties which seem to be physical, but are not so in reality. i may add that taste has local rules which make it dependent in many respects on the country we are in, its manners, government, institutions; it has other rules which depend upon age, sex, and character, and it is in this sense that we must not dispute over matters of taste. taste is natural to men; but all do not possess it in the same degree, it is not developed to the same extent in every one; and in every one it is liable to be modified by a variety of causes. such taste as we may possess depends on our native sensibility; its cultivation and its form depend upon the society in which we have lived. in the first place we must live in societies of many different kinds, so as to compare much. in the next place, there must be societies for amusement and idleness, for in business relations, interest, not pleasure, is our rule. lastly, there must be societies in which people are fairly equal, where the tyranny of public opinion may be moderate, where pleasure rather than vanity is queen; where this is not so, fashion stifles taste, and we seek what gives distinction rather than delight. in the latter case it is no longer true that good taste is the taste of the majority. why is this? because the purpose is different. then the crowd has no longer any opinion of its own, it only follows the judgment of those who are supposed to know more about it; its approval is bestowed not on what is good, but on what they have already approved. at any time let every man have his own opinion, and what is most pleasing in itself will always secure most votes. every beauty that is to be found in the works of man is imitated. all the true models of taste are to be found in nature. the further we get from the master, the worse are our pictures. then it is that we find our models in what we ourselves like, and the beauty of fancy, subject to caprice and to authority, is nothing but what is pleasing to our leaders. those leaders are the artists, the wealthy, and the great, and they themselves follow the lead of self-interest or pride. some to display their wealth, others to profit by it, they seek eagerly for new ways of spending it. this is how luxury acquires its power and makes us love what is rare and costly; this so-called beauty consists, not in following nature, but in disobeying her. hence luxury and bad taste are inseparable. wherever taste is lavish, it is bad. taste, good or bad, takes its shape especially in the intercourse between the two sexes; the cultivation of taste is a necessary consequence of this form of society. but when enjoyment is easily obtained, and the desire to please becomes lukewarm, taste must degenerate; and this is, in my opinion, one of the best reasons why good taste implies good morals. consult the women's opinions in bodily matters, in all that concerns the senses; consult the men in matters of morality and all that concerns the understanding. when women are what they ought to be, they will keep to what they can understand, and their judgment will be right; but since they have set themselves up as judges of literature, since they have begun to criticise books and to make them with might and main, they are altogether astray. authors who take the advice of blue-stockings will always be ill-advised; gallants who consult them about their clothes will always be absurdly dressed. i shall presently have an opportunity of speaking of the real talents of the female sex, the way to cultivate these talents, and the matters in regard to which their decisions should receive attention. these are the elementary considerations which i shall lay down as principles when i discuss with emile this matter which is by no means indifferent to him in his present inquiries. and to whom should it be a matter of indifference? to know what people may find pleasant or unpleasant is not only necessary to any one who requires their help, it is still more necessary to any one who would help them; you must please them if you would do them service; and the art of writing is no idle pursuit if it is used to make men hear the truth. if in order to cultivate my pupil's taste, i were compelled to choose between a country where this form of culture has not yet arisen and those in which it has already degenerated, i would progress backwards; i would begin his survey with the latter and end with the former. my reason for this choice is, that taste becomes corrupted through excessive delicacy, which makes it sensitive to things which most men do not perceive; this delicacy leads to a spirit of discussion, for the more subtle is our discrimination of things the more things there are for us. this subtlety increases the delicacy and decreases the uniformity of our touch. so there are as many tastes as there are people. in disputes as to our preferences, philosophy and knowledge are enlarged, and thus we learn to think. it is only men accustomed to plenty of society who are capable of very delicate observations, for these observations do not occur to us till the last, and people who are unused to all sorts of society exhaust their attention in the consideration of the more conspicuous features. there is perhaps no civilised place upon earth where the common taste is so bad as in paris. yet it is in this capital that good taste is cultivated, and it seems that few books make any impression in europe whose authors have not studied in paris. those who think it is enough to read our books are mistaken; there is more to be learnt from the conversation of authors than from their books; and it is not from the authors that we learn most. it is the spirit of social life which develops a thinking mind, and carries the eye as far as it can reach. if you have a spark of genius, go and spend a year in paris; you will soon be all that you are capable of becoming, or you will never be good for anything at all. one may learn to think in places where bad taste rules supreme; but we must not think like those whose taste is bad, and it is very difficult to avoid this if we spend much time among them. we must use their efforts to perfect the machinery of judgment, but we must be careful not to make the same use of it. i shall take care not to polish emile's judgment so far as to transform it, and when he has acquired discernment enough to feel and compare the varied tastes of men, i shall lead him to fix his own taste upon simpler matters. i will go still further in order to keep his taste pure and wholesome. in the tumult of dissipation i shall find opportunities for useful conversation with him; and while these conversations are always about things in which he takes a delight, i shall take care to make them as amusing as they are instructive. now is the time to read pleasant books; now is the time to teach him to analyse speech and to appreciate all the beauties of eloquence and diction. it is a small matter to learn languages, they are less useful than people think; but the study of languages leads us on to that of grammar in general. we must learn latin if we would have a thorough knowledge of french; these two languages must be studied and compared if we would understand the rules of the art of speaking. there is, moreover, a certain simplicity of taste which goes straight to the heart; and this is only to be found in the classics. in oratory, poetry, and every kind of literature, emile will find the classical authors as he found them in history, full of matter and sober in their judgment. the authors of our own time, on the contrary, say little and talk much. to take their judgment as our constant law is not the way to form our own judgment. these differences of taste make themselves felt in all that is left of classical times and even on their tombs. our monuments are covered with praises, theirs recorded facts. "sta, viator; heroem calcas." if i had found this epitaph on an ancient monument, i should at once have guessed it was modern; for there is nothing so common among us as heroes, but among the ancients they were rare. instead of saying a man was a hero, they would have said what he had done to gain that name. with the epitaph of this hero compare that of the effeminate sardanapalus-- "tarsus and anchiales i built in a day, and now i am dead." which do you think says most? our inflated monumental style is only fit to trumpet forth the praises of pygmies. the ancients showed men as they were, and it was plain that they were men indeed. xenophon did honour to the memory of some warriors who were slain by treason during the retreat of the ten thousand. "they died," said he, "without stain in war and in love." that is all, but think how full was the heart of the author of this short and simple elegy. woe to him who fails to perceive its charm. the following words were engraved on a tomb at thermopylae-- "go, traveller, tell sparta that here we fell in obedience to her laws." it is pretty clear that this was not the work of the academy of inscriptions. if i am not mistaken, the attention of my pupil, who sets so small value upon words, will be directed in the first place to these differences, and they will affect his choice in his reading. he will be carried away by the manly eloquence of demosthenes, and will say, "this is an orator;" but when he reads cicero, he will say, "this is a lawyer." speaking generally emile will have more taste for the books of the ancients than for our own, just because they were the first, and therefore the ancients are nearer to nature and their genius is more distinct. whatever la motte and the abbe terrasson may say, there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigour of mind. our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves. fontenelle used to say that all these disputes as to the ancients and the moderns came to this--were the trees in former times taller than they are now. if agriculture had changed, it would be worth our while to ask this question. after i have led emile to the sources of pure literature, i will also show him the channels into the reservoirs of modern compilers; journals, translations, dictionaries, he shall cast a glance at them all, and then leave them for ever. to amuse him he shall hear the chatter of the academies; i will draw his attention to the fast that every member of them is worth more by himself than he is as a member of the society; he will then draw his own conclusions as to the utility of these fine institutions. i take him to the theatre to study taste, not morals; for in the theatre above all taste is revealed to those who can think. lay aside precepts and morality, i should say; this is not the place to study them. the stage is not made for truth; its object is to flatter and amuse: there is no place where one can learn so completely the art of pleasing and of interesting the human heart. the study of plays leads to the study of poetry; both have the same end in view. if he has the least glimmering of taste for poetry, how eagerly will he study the languages of the poets, greek, latin, and italian! these studies will afford him unlimited amusement and will be none the less valuable; they will be a delight to him at an age and in circumstances when the heart finds so great a charm in every kind of beauty which affects it. picture to yourself on the one hand emile, on the other some young rascal from college, reading the fourth book of the aeneid, or tibollus, or the banquet of plato: what a difference between them! what stirs the heart of emile to its depths, makes not the least impression on the other! oh, good youth, stay, make a pause in your reading, you are too deeply moved; i would have you find pleasure in the language of love, but i would not have you carried away by it; be a wise man, but be a good man too. if you are only one of these, you are nothing. after this let him win fame or not in dead languages, in literature, in poetry, i care little. he will be none the worse if he knows nothing of them, and his education is not concerned with these mere words. my main object in teaching him to feel and love beauty of every kind is to fix his affections and his taste on these, to prevent the corruption of his natural appetites, lest he should have to seek some day in the midst of his wealth for the means of happiness which should be found close at hand. i have said elsewhere that taste is only the art of being a connoisseur in matters of little importance, and this is quite true; but since the charm of life depends on a tissue of these matters of little importance, such efforts are no small thing; through their means we learn how to fill our life with the good things within our reach, with as much truth as they may hold for us. i do not refer to the morally good which depends on a good disposition of the heart, but only to that which depends on the body, on real delight, apart from the prejudices of public opinion. the better to unfold my idea, allow me for a moment to leave emile, whose pure and wholesome heart cannot be taken as a rule for others, and to seek in my own memory for an illustration better suited to the reader and more in accordance with his own manners. there are professions which seem to change a man's nature, to recast, either for better or worse, the men who adopt them. a coward becomes a brave man in the regiment of navarre. it is not only in the army that esprit de corps is acquired, and its effects are not always for good. i have thought again and again with terror that if i had the misfortune to fill a certain post i am thinking of in a certain country, before to-morrow i should certainly be a tyrant, an extortioner, a destroyer of the people, harmful to my king, and a professed enemy of mankind, a foe to justice and every kind of virtue. in the same way, if i were rich, i should have done all that is required to gain riches; i should therefore be insolent and degraded, sensitive and feeling only on my own behalf, harsh and pitiless to all besides, a scornful spectator of the sufferings of the lower classes; for that is what i should call the poor, to make people forget that i was once poor myself. lastly i should make my fortune a means to my own pleasures with which i should be wholly occupied; and so far i should be just like other people. but in one respect i should be very unlike them; i should be sensual and voluptuous rather than proud and vain, and i should give myself up to the luxury of comfort rather than to that of ostentation. i should even be somewhat ashamed to make too great a show of my wealth, and if i overwhelmed the envious with my pomp i should always fancy i heard him saying, "here is a rascal who is greatly afraid lest we should take him for anything but what he is." in the vast profusion of good things upon this earth i should seek what i like best, and what i can best appropriate to myself. to this end, the first use i should make of my wealth would be to purchase leisure and freedom, to which i would add health, if it were to be purchased; but health can only be bought by temperance, and as there is no real pleasure without health, i should be temperate from sensual motives. i should also keep as close as possible to nature, to gratify the senses given me by nature, being quite convinced that, the greater her share in my pleasures, the more real i shall find them. in the choice of models for imitation i shall always choose nature as my pattern; in my appetites i will give her the preference; in my tastes she shall always be consulted; in my food i will always choose what most owes its charm to her, and what has passed through the fewest possible hands on its way to table. i will be on my guard against fraudulent shams; i will go out to meet pleasure. no cook shall grow rich on my gross and foolish greediness; he shall not poison me with fish which cost its weight in gold, my table shall not be decked with fetid splendour or putrid flesh from far-off lands. i will take any amount of trouble to gratify my sensibility, since this trouble has a pleasure of its own, a pleasure more than we expect. if i wished to taste a food from the ends of the earth, i would go, like apicius, in search of it, rather than send for it; for the daintiest dishes always lack a charm which cannot be brought along with them, a flavour which no cook can give them--the air of the country where they are produced. for the same reason i would not follow the example of those who are never well off where they are, but are always setting the seasons at nought, and confusing countries and their seasons; those who seek winter in summer and summer in winter, and go to italy to be cold and to the north to be warm, do not consider that when they think they are escaping from the severity of the seasons, they are going to meet that severity in places where people are not prepared for it. i shall stay in one place, or i shall adopt just the opposite course; i should like to get all possible enjoyment out of one season to discover what is peculiar to any given country. i would have a variety of pleasures, and habits quite unlike one another, but each according to nature; i would spend the summer at naples and the winter in st. petersburg; sometimes i would breathe the soft zephyr lying in the cool grottoes of tarentum, and again i would enjoy the illuminations of an ice palace, breathless and wearied with the pleasures of the dance. in the service of my table and the adornment of my dwelling i would imitate in the simplest ornaments the variety of the seasons, and draw from each its charm without anticipating its successor. there is no taste but only difficulty to be found in thus disturbing the order of nature; to snatch from her unwilling gifts, which she yields regretfully, with her curse upon them; gifts which have neither strength nor flavour, which can neither nourish the body nor tickle the palate. nothing is more insipid than forced fruits. a wealthy man in paris, with all his stoves and hot-houses, only succeeds in getting all the year round poor fruit and poor vegetables for his table at a very high price. if i had cherries in frost, and golden melons in the depths of winter, what pleasure should i find in them when my palate did not need moisture or refreshment. would the heavy chestnut be very pleasant in the heat of the dog-days; should i prefer to have it hot from the stove, rather than the gooseberry, the strawberry, the refreshing fruits which the earth takes care to provide for me. a mantelpiece covered in january with forced vegetation, with pale and scentless flowers, is not winter adorned, but spring robbed of its beauty; we deprive ourselves of the pleasure of seeking the first violet in the woods, of noting the earliest buds, and exclaiming in a rapture of delight, "mortals, you are not forsaken, nature is living still." to be well served i would have few servants; this has been said before, but it is worth saying again. a tradesman gets more real service from his one man than a duke from the ten gentlemen round about him. it has often struck me when i am sitting at table with my glass beside me that i can drink whenever i please; whereas, if i were dining in state, twenty men would have to call for "wine" before i could quench my thirst. you may be sure that whatever is done for you by other people is ill done. i would not send to the shops, i would go myself; i would go so that my servants should not make their own terms with the shopkeepers, and to get a better choice and cheaper prices; i would go for the sake of pleasant exercise and to get a glimpse of what was going on out of doors; this is amusing and sometimes instructive; lastly i would go for the sake of the walk; there is always something in that. a sedentary life is the source of tedium; when we walk a good deal we are never dull. a porter and footmen are poor interpreters, i should never wish to have such people between the world and myself, nor would i travel with all the fuss of a coach, as if i were afraid people would speak to me. shanks' mare is always ready; if she is tired or ill, her owner is the first to know it; he need not be afraid of being kept at home while his coachman is on the spree; on the road he will not have to submit to all sorts of delays, nor will he be consumed with impatience, nor compelled to stay in one place a moment longer than he chooses. lastly, since no one serves us so well as we serve ourselves, had we the power of alexander and the wealth of croesus we should accept no services from others, except those we cannot perform for ourselves. i would not live in a palace; for even in a palace i should only occupy one room; every room which is common property belongs to nobody, and the rooms of each of my servants would be as strange to me as my neighbour's. the orientals, although very voluptuous, are lodged in plain and simply furnished dwellings. they consider life as a journey, and their house as an inn. this reason scarcely appeals to us rich people who propose to live for ever; but i should find another reason which would have the same effect. it would seem to me that if i settled myself in one place in the midst of such splendour, i should banish myself from every other place, and imprison myself, so to speak, in my palace. the world is a palace fair enough for any one; and is not everything at the disposal of the rich man when he seeks enjoyment? "ubi bene, ibi patria," that is his motto; his home is anywhere where money will carry him, his country is anywhere where there is room for his strong-box, as philip considered as his own any place where a mule laden with silver could enter. [footnote: a stranger, splendidly clad, was asked in athens what country he belonged to. "i am one of the rich," was his answer; and a very good answer in my opinion.] why then should we shut ourselves up within walls and gates as if we never meant to leave them? if pestilence, war, or rebellion drive me from one place, i go to another, and i find my hotel there before me. why should i build a mansion for myself when the world is already at my disposal? why should i be in such a hurry to live, to bring from afar delights which i can find on the spot? it is impossible to make a pleasant life for oneself when one is always at war with oneself. thus empedocles reproached the men of agrigentum with heaping up pleasures as if they had but one day to live, and building as if they would live for ever. and what use have i for so large a dwelling, as i have so few people to live in it, and still fewer goods to fill it? my furniture would be as simple as my tastes; i would have neither picture-gallery nor library, especially if i was fond of reading and knew something about pictures. i should then know that such collections are never complete, and that the lack of that which is wanting causes more annoyance than if one had nothing at all. in this respect abundance is the cause of want, as every collector knows to his cost. if you are an expert, do not make a collection; if you know how to use your cabinets, you will not have any to show. gambling is no sport for the rich, it is the resource of those who have nothing to do; i shall be so busy with my pleasures that i shall have no time to waste. i am poor and lonely and i never play, unless it is a game of chess now and then, and that is more than enough. if i were rich i would play even less, and for very low stakes, so that i should not be disappointed myself, nor see the disappointment of others. the wealthy man has no motive for play, and the love of play will not degenerate into the passion for gambling unless the disposition is evil. the rich man is always more keenly aware of his losses than his gains, and as in games where the stakes are not high the winnings are generally exhausted in the long run, he will usually lose more than he gains, so that if we reason rightly we shall scarcely take a great fancy to games where the odds are against us. he who flatters his vanity so far as to believe that fortune favours him can seek her favour in more exciting ways; and her favours are just as clearly shown when the stakes are low as when they are high. the taste for play, the result of greed and dullness, only lays hold of empty hearts and heads; and i think i should have enough feeling and knowledge to dispense with its help. thinkers are seldom gamblers; gambling interrupts the habit of thought and turns it towards barren combinations; thus one good result, perhaps the only good result of the taste for science, is that it deadens to some extent this vulgar passion; people will prefer to try to discover the uses of play rather than to devote themselves to it. i should argue with the gamblers against gambling, and i should find more delight in scoffing at their losses than in winning their money. i should be the same in private life as in my social intercourse. i should wish my fortune to bring comfort in its train, and never to make people conscious of inequalities of wealth. showy dress is inconvenient in many ways. to preserve as much freedom as possible among other men, i should like to be dressed in such a way that i should not seem out of place among all classes, and should not attract attention in any; so that without affectation or change i might mingle with the crowd at the inn or with the nobility at the palais royal. in this way i should be more than ever my own master, and should be free to enjoy the pleasures of all sorts and conditions of men. there are women, so they say, whose doors are closed to embroidered cuffs, women who will only receive guests who wear lace ruffles; i should spend my days elsewhere; though if these women were young and pretty i might sometimes put on lace ruffles to spend an evening or so in their company. mutual affection, similarity of tastes, suitability of character; these are the only bonds between my companions and myself; among them i would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. if my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, i would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but i should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not proteges; i should wish my friends to regard me as their host, not their patron. independence and equality would leave to my relations with my friends the sincerity of goodwill; while duty and self-seeking would have no place among us, and we should know no law but that of pleasure and friendship. neither a friend nor a mistress can be bought. women may be got for money, but that road will never lead to love. love is not only not for sale; money strikes it dead. if a man pays, were he indeed the most lovable of men, the mere fact of payment would prevent any lasting affection. he will soon be paying for some one else, or rather some one else will get his money; and in this double connection based on self-seeking and debauchery, without love, honour, or true pleasure, the woman is grasping, faithless, and unhappy, and she is treated by the wretch to whom she gives her money as she treats the fool who gives his money to her; she has no love for either. it would be sweet to lie generous towards one we love, if that did not make a bargain of love. i know only one way of gratifying this desire with the woman one loves without embittering love; it is to bestow our all upon her and to live at her expense. it remains to be seen whether there is any woman with regard to whom such conduct would not be unwise. he who said, "lais is mine, but i am not hers," was talking nonsense. possession which is not mutual is nothing at all; at most it is the possession of the sex not of the individual. but where there is no morality in love, why make such ado about the rest? nothing is so easy to find. a muleteer is in this respect as near to happiness as a millionaire. oh, if we could thus trace out the unreasonableness of vice, how often should we find that, when it has attained its object, it discovers it is not what it seemed! why is there this cruel haste to corrupt innocence, to make, a victim of a young creature whom we ought to protect, one who is dragged by this first false step into a gulf of misery from which only death can release her? brutality, vanity, folly, error, and nothing more. this pleasure itself is unnatural; it rests on popular opinion, and popular opinion at its worst, since it depends on scorn of self. he who knows he is the basest of men fears comparison with others, and would be the first that he may be less hateful. see if those who are most greedy in pursuit of such fancied pleasures are ever attractive young men--men worthy of pleasing, men who might have some excuse if they were hard to please. not so; any one with good looks, merit, and feeling has little fear of his mistress' experience; with well-placed confidence he says to her, "you know what pleasure is, what is that to me? my heart assures me that this is not so." but an aged satyr, worn out with debauchery, with no charm, no consideration, no thought for any but himself, with no shred of honour, incapable and unworthy of finding favour in the eyes of any woman who knows anything of men deserving of love, expects to make up for all this with an innocent girl by trading on her inexperience and stirring her emotions for the first time. his last hope is to find favour as a novelty; no doubt this is the secret motive of this desire; but he is mistaken, the horror he excites is just as natural as the desires he wishes to arouse. he is also mistaken in his foolish attempt; that very nature takes care to assert her rights; every girl who sells herself is no longer a maid; she has given herself to the man of her choice, and she is making the very comparison he dreads. the pleasure purchased is imaginary, but none the less hateful. for my own part, however riches may change me, there is one matter in which i shall never change. if i have neither morals nor virtue, i shall not be wholly without taste, without sense, without delicacy; and this will prevent me from spending my fortune in the pursuit of empty dreams, from wasting my money and my strength in teaching children to betray me and mock at me. if i were young, i would seek the pleasures of youth; and as i would have them at their best i would not seek them in the guise of a rich man. if i were at my present age, it would be another matter; i would wisely confine myself to the pleasures of my age; i would form tastes which i could enjoy, and i would stifle those which could only cause suffering. i would not go and offer my grey beard to the scornful jests of young girls; i could never bear to sicken them with my disgusting caresses, to furnish them at my expense with the most absurd stories, to imagine them describing the vile pleasures of the old ape, so as to avenge themselves for what they had endured. but if habits unresisted had changed my former desires into needs, i would perhaps satisfy those needs, but with shame and blushes. i would distinguish between passion and necessity, i would find a suitable mistress and would keep to her. i would not make a business of my weakness, and above all i would only have one person aware of it. life has other pleasures when these fail us; by hastening in vain after those that fly us, we deprive ourselves of those that remain. let our tastes change with our years, let us no more meddle with age than with the seasons. we should be ourselves at all times, instead of struggling against nature; such vain attempts exhaust our strength and prevent the right use of life. the lower classes are seldom dull, their life is full of activity; if there is little variety in their amusements they do not recur frequently; many days of labour teach them to enjoy their rare holidays. short intervals of leisure between long periods of labour give a spice to the pleasures of their station. the chief curse of the rich is dullness; in the midst of costly amusements, among so many men striving to give them pleasure, they are devoured and slain by dullness; their life is spent in fleeing from it and in being overtaken by it; they are overwhelmed by the intolerable burden; women more especially, who do not know how to work or play, are a prey to tedium under the name of the vapours; with them it takes the shape of a dreadful disease, which robs them of their reason and even of their life. for my own part i know no more terrible fate than that of a pretty woman in paris, unless it is that of the pretty manikin who devotes himself to her, who becomes idle and effeminate like her, and so deprives himself twice over of his manhood, while he prides himself on his successes and for their sake endures the longest and dullest days which human being ever put up with. proprieties, fashions, customs which depend on luxury and breeding, confine the course of life within the limits of the most miserable uniformity. the pleasure we desire to display to others is a pleasure lost; we neither enjoy it ourselves, nor do others enjoy it. [footnote: two ladies of fashion, who wished to seem to be enjoying themselves greatly, decided never to go to bed before five o'clock in the morning. in the depths of winter their servants spent the night in the street waiting for them, and with great difficulty kept themselves from freezing. one night, or rather one morning, some one entered the room where these merry people spent their hours without knowing how time passed. he found them quite alone; each of them was asleep in her arm-chair.] ridicule, which public opinion dreads more than anything, is ever at hand to tyrannise, and punish. it is only ceremony that makes us ridiculous; if we can vary our place and our pleasures, to-day's impressions can efface those of yesterday; in the mind of men they are as if they had never been; but we enjoy ourselves for we throw ourselves into every hour and everything. my only set rule would be this: wherever i was i would pay no heed to anything else. i would take each day as it came, as if there were neither yesterday nor to-morrow. as i should be a man of the people, with the populace, i should be a countryman in the fields; and if i spoke of farming, the peasant should not laugh at my expense. i would not go and build a town in the country nor erect the tuileries at the door of my lodgings. on some pleasant shady hill-side i would have a little cottage, a white house with green shutters, and though a thatched roof is the best all the year round, i would be grand enough to have, not those gloomy slates, but tiles, because they look brighter and more cheerful than thatch, and the houses in my own country are always roofed with them, and so they would recall to me something of the happy days of my youth. for my courtyard i would have a poultry-yard, and for my stables a cowshed for the sake of the milk which i love. my garden should be a kitchen-garden, and my park an orchard, like the one described further on. the fruit would be free to those who walked in the orchard, my gardener should neither count it nor gather it; i would not, with greedy show, display before your eyes superb espaliers which one scarcely dare touch. but this small extravagance would not be costly, for i would choose my abode in some remote province where silver is scarce and food plentiful, where plenty and poverty have their seat. there i would gather round me a company, select rather than numerous, a band of friends who know what pleasure is, and how to enjoy it, women who can leave their arm-chairs and betake themselves to outdoor sports, women who can exchange the shuttle or the cards for the fishing line or the bird-trap, the gleaner's rake or grape-gatherer's basket. there all the pretensions of the town will be forgotten, and we shall be villagers in a village; we shall find all sorts of different sports and we shall hardly know how to choose the morrow's occupation. exercise and an active life will improve our digestion and modify our tastes. every meal will be a feast, where plenty will be more pleasing than any delicacies. there are no such cooks in the world as mirth, rural pursuits, and merry games; and the finest made dishes are quite ridiculous in the eyes of people who have been on foot since early dawn. our meals will be served without regard to order or elegance; we shall make our dining-room anywhere, in the garden, on a boat, beneath a tree; sometimes at a distance from the house on the banks of a running stream, on the fresh green grass, among the clumps of willow and hazel; a long procession of guests will carry the material for the feast with laughter and singing; the turf will be our chairs and table, the banks of the stream our side-board, and our dessert is hanging on the trees; the dishes will be served in any order, appetite needs no ceremony; each one of us, openly putting himself first, would gladly see every one else do the same; from this warm-hearted and temperate familiarity there would arise, without coarseness, pretence, or constraint, a laughing conflict a hundredfold more delightful than politeness, and more likely to cement our friendship. no tedious flunkeys to listen to our words, to whisper criticisms on our behaviour, to count every mouthful with greedy eyes, to amuse themselves by keeping us waiting for our wine, to complain of the length of our dinner. we will be our own servants, in order to be our own masters. time will fly unheeded, our meal will be an interval of rest during the heat of the day. if some peasant comes our way, returning from his work with his tools over his shoulder, i will cheer his heart with kindly words, and a glass or two of good wine, which will help him to bear his poverty more cheerfully; and i too shall have the joy of feeling my heart stirred within me, and i should say to myself--i too am a man. if the inhabitants of the district assembled for some rustic feast, i and my friends would be there among the first; if there were marriages, more blessed than those of towns, celebrated near my home, every one would know how i love to see people happy, and i should be invited. i would take these good folks some gift as simple as themselves, a gift which would be my share of the feast; and in exchange i should obtain gifts beyond price, gifts so little known among my equals, the gifts of freedom and true pleasure. i should sup gaily at the head of their long table; i should join in the chorus of some rustic song and i should dance in the barn more merrily than at a ball in the opera house. "this is all very well so far," you will say, "but what about the shooting! one must have some sport in the country." just so; i only wanted a farm, but i was wrong. i assume i am rich, i must keep my pleasures to myself, i must be free to kill something; this is quite another matter. i must have estates, woods, keepers, rents, seignorial rights, particularly incense and holy water. well and good. but i shall have neighbours about my estate who are jealous of their rights and anxious to encroach on those of others; our keepers will quarrel, and possibly their masters will quarrel too; this means altercations, disputes, ill-will, or law-suits at the least; this in itself is not very pleasant. my tenants will not enjoy finding my hares at work upon their corn, or my wild boars among their beans. as they dare not kill the enemy, every one of them will try to drive him from their fields; when the day has been spent in cultivating the ground, they will be compelled to sit up at night to watch it; they will have watch-dogs, drums, horns, and bells; my sleep will be disturbed by their racket. do what i will, i cannot help thinking of the misery of these poor people, and i cannot help blaming myself for it. if i had the honour of being a prince, this would make little impression on me; but as i am a self-made man who has only just come into his property, i am still rather vulgar at heart. that is not all; abundance of game attracts trespassers; i shall soon have poachers to punish; i shall require prisons, gaolers, guards, and galleys; all this strikes me as cruel. the wives of those miserable creatures will besiege my door and disturb me with their crying; they must either be driven away or roughly handled. the poor people who are not poachers, whose harvest has been destroyed by my game, will come next with their complaints. some people will be put to death for killing the game, the rest will be punished for having spared it; what a choice of evils! on every side i shall find nothing but misery and hear nothing but groans. so far as i can see this must greatly disturb the pleasure of slaying at one's ease heaps of partridges and hares which are tame enough to run about one's feet. if you would have pleasure without pain let there be no monopoly; the more you leave it free to everybody, the purer will be your own enjoyment. therefore i should not do what i have just described, but without change of tastes i would follow those which seem likely to cause me least pain. i would fix my rustic abode in a district where game is not preserved, and where i can have my sport without hindrance. game will be less plentiful, but there will be more skill in finding it, and more pleasure in securing it. i remember the start of delight with which my father watched the rise of his first partridge and the rapture with which he found the hare he had sought all day long. yes, i declare, that alone with his dog, carrying his own gun, cartridges, and game bag together with his hare, he came home at nightfall, worn out with fatigue and torn to pieces by brambles, but better pleased with his day's sport than all your ordinary sportsmen, who on a good horse, with twenty guns ready for them, merely take one gun after another, and shoot and kill everything that comes their way, without skill, without glory, and almost without exercise. the pleasure is none the less, and the difficulties are removed; there is no estate to be preserved, no poacher to be punished, and no wretches to be tormented; here are solid grounds for preference. whatever you do, you cannot torment men for ever without experiencing some amount of discomfort; and sooner or later the muttered curses of the people will spoil the flavour of your game. again, monopoly destroys pleasure. real pleasures are those which we share with the crowd; we lose what we try to keep to ourselves alone. if the walls i build round my park transform it into a gloomy prison, i have only deprived myself, at great expense, of the pleasure of a walk; i must now seek that pleasure at a distance. the demon of property spoils everything he lays hands upon. a rich man wants to be master everywhere, and he is never happy where he is; he is continually driven to flee from himself. i shall therefore continue to do in my prosperity what i did in my poverty. henceforward, richer in the wealth of others than i ever shall be in my own wealth, i will take possession of everything in my neighbourhood that takes my fancy; no conqueror is so determined as i; i even usurp the rights of princes; i take possession of every open place that pleases me, i give them names; this is my park, chat is my terrace, and i am their owner; henceforward i wander among them at will; i often return to maintain my proprietary rights; i make what use i choose of the ground to walk upon, and you will never convince me that the nominal owner of the property which i have appropriated gets better value out of the money it yields him than i do out of his land. no matter if i am interrupted by hedges and ditches, i take my park on my back, and i carry it elsewhere; there will be space enough for it near at hand, and i may plunder my neighbours long enough before i outstay my welcome. this is an attempt to show what is meant by good taste in the choice of pleasant occupations for our leisure hours; this is the spirit of enjoyment; all else is illusion, fancy, and foolish pride. he who disobeys these rules, however rich he may be, will devour his gold on a dung-hill, and will never know what it is to live. you will say, no doubt, that such amusements lie within the reach of all, that we need not be rich to enjoy them. that is the very point i was coming to. pleasure is ours when we want it; it is only social prejudice which makes everything hard to obtain, and drives pleasure before us. to be happy is a hundredfold easier than it seems. if he really desires to enjoy himself the man of taste has no need of riches; all he wants is to be free and to be his own master. with health and daily bread we are rich enough, if we will but get rid of our prejudices; this is the "golden mean" of horace. you folks with your strong-boxes may find some other use for your wealth, for it cannot buy you pleasure. emile knows this as well as i, but his heart is purer and more healthy, so he will feel it more strongly, and all that he has beheld in society will only serve to confirm him in this opinion. while our time is thus employed, we are ever on the look-out for sophy, and we have not yet found her. it was not desirable that she should be found too easily, and i have taken care to look for her where i knew we should not find her. the time is come; we must now seek her in earnest, lest emile should mistake some one else for sophy, and only discover his error when it is too late. then farewell paris, far-famed paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased to believe in honour and the men in virtue. we are in search of love, happiness, innocence; the further we go from paris the better. book v we have reached the last act of youth's drama; we are approaching its closing scene. it is not good that man should be alone. emile is now a man, and we must give him his promised helpmeet. that helpmeet is sophy. where is her dwelling-place, where shall she be found? we must know beforehand what she is, and then we can decide where to look for her. and when she is found, our task is not ended. "since our young gentleman," says locke, "is about to marry, it is time to leave him with his mistress." and with these words he ends his book. as i have not the honour of educating "a young gentleman," i shall take care not to follow his example. sophy, or woman sophy should be as truly a woman as emile is a man, i.e., she must possess all those characters of her sex which are required to enable her to play her part in the physical and moral order. let us inquire to begin with in what respects her sex differs from our own. but for her sex, a woman is a man; she has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties. the machine is the same in its construction; its parts, its working, and its appearance are similar. regard it as you will the difference is only in degree. yet where sex is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the complement of the other; the difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex, and what is not. general differences present themselves to the comparative anatomist and even to the superficial observer; they seem not to be a matter of sex; yet they are really sex differences, though the connection eludes our observation. how far such differences may extend we cannot tell; all we know for certain is that where man and woman are alike we have to do with the characteristics of the species; where they are unlike, we have to do with the characteristics of sex. considered from these two standpoints, we find so many instances of likeness and unlikeness that it is perhaps one of the greatest of marvels how nature has contrived to make two beings so like and yet so different. these resemblances and differences must have an influence on the moral nature; this inference is obvious, and it is confirmed by experience; it shows the vanity of the disputes as to the superiority or the equality of the sexes; as if each sex, pursuing the path marked out for it by nature, were not more perfect in that very divergence than if it more closely resembled the other. a perfect man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind than in face, and perfection admits of neither less nor more. in the union of the sexes each alike contributes to the common end, but in different ways. from this diversity springs the first difference which may be observed between man and woman in their moral relations. the man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance. when this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially made for man's delight. if man in his turn ought to be pleasing in her eyes, the necessity is less urgent, his virtue is in his strength, he pleases because he is strong. i grant you this is not the law of love, but it is the law of nature, which is older than love itself. if woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him to anger; her strength is in her charms, by their means she should compel him to discover and use his strength. the surest way of arousing this strength is to make it necessary by resistance. thus pride comes to the help of desire and each exults in the other's victory. this is the origin of attack and defence, of the boldness of one sex and the timidity of the other, and even of the shame and modesty with which nature has armed the weak for the conquest of the strong. who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other, or that the first to feel desire should be the first to show it? what strange depravity of judgment! the consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should enter upon it with equal boldness? how can any one fail to see that when the share of each is so unequal, if the one were not controlled by modesty as the other is controlled by nature, the result would be the destruction of both, and the human race would perish through the very means ordained for its continuance? women so easily stir a man's senses and fan the ashes of a dying passion, that if philosophy ever succeeded in introducing this custom into any unlucky country, especially if it were a warm country where more women are born than men, the men, tyrannised over by the women, would at last become their victims, and would be dragged to their death without the least chance of escape. female animals are without this sense of shame, but what of that? are their desires as boundless as those of women, which are curbed by this shame? the desires of the animals are the result of necessity, and when the need is satisfied, the desire ceases; they no longer make a feint of repulsing the male, they do it in earnest. their seasons of complaisance are short and soon over. impulse and restraint are alike the work of nature. but what would take the place of this negative instinct in women if you rob them of their modesty? the most high has deigned to do honour to mankind; he has endowed man with boundless passions, together with a law to guide them, so that man may be alike free and self-controlled; though swayed by these passions man is endowed with reason by which to control them. woman is also endowed with boundless passions; god has given her modesty to restrain them. moreover, he has given to both a present reward for the right use of their powers, in the delight which springs from that right use of them, i.e., the taste for right conduct established as the law of our behaviour. to my mind this is far higher than the instinct of the beasts. whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success. if the siege is to be successful, the besieged must permit or direct the attack. how skilfully can she stimulate the efforts of the aggressor. the freest and most delightful of activities does not permit of any real violence; reason and nature are alike against it; nature, in that she has given the weaker party strength enough to resist if she chooses; reason, in that actual violence is not only most brutal in itself, but it defeats its own ends, not only because the man thus declares war against his companion and thus gives her a right to defend her person and her liberty even at the cost of the enemy's life, but also because the woman alone is the judge of her condition, and a child would have no father if any man might usurp a father's rights. thus the different constitution of the two sexes leads us to a third conclusion, that the stronger party seems to be master, but is as a matter of fact dependent on the weaker, and that, not by any foolish custom of gallantry, nor yet by the magnanimity of the protector, but by an inexorable law of nature. for nature has endowed woman with a power of stimulating man's passions in excess of man's power of satisfying those passions, and has thus made him dependent on her goodwill, and compelled him in his turn to endeavour to please her, so that she may be willing to yield to his superior strength. is it weakness which yields to force, or is it voluntary self-surrender? this uncertainty constitutes the chief charm of the man's victory, and the woman is usually cunning enough to leave him in doubt. in this respect the woman's mind exactly resembles her body; far from being ashamed of her weakness, she is proud of it; her soft muscles offer no resistance, she professes that she cannot lift the lightest weight; she would be ashamed to be strong. and why? not only to gain an appearance of refinement; she is too clever for that; she is providing herself beforehand with excuses, with the right to be weak if she chooses. the experience we have gained through our vices has considerably modified the views held in older times; we rarely hear of violence for which there is so little occasion that it would hardly be credited. yet such stories are common enough among the jews and ancient greeks; for such views belong to the simplicity of nature, and have only been uprooted by our profligacy. if fewer deeds of violence are quoted in our days, it is not that men are more temperate, but because they are less credulous, and a complaint which would have been believed among a simple people would only excite laughter among ourselves; therefore silence is the better course. there is a law in deuteronomy, under which the outraged maiden was punished, along with her assailant, if the crime were committed in a town; but if in the country or in a lonely place, the latter alone was punished. "for," says the law, "the maiden cried for help, and there was none to hear." from this merciful interpretation of the law, girls learnt not to let themselves be surprised in lonely places. this change in public opinion has had a perceptible effect on our morals. it has produced our modern gallantry. men have found that their pleasures depend, more than they expected, on the goodwill of the fair sex, and have secured this goodwill by attentions which have had their reward. see how we find ourselves led unconsciously from the physical to the moral constitution, how from the grosser union of the sexes spring the sweet laws of love. woman reigns, not by the will of man, but by the decrees of nature herself; she had the power long before she showed it. that same hercules who proposed to violate all the fifty daughters of thespis was compelled to spin at the feet of omphale, and samson, the strong man, was less strong than delilah. this power cannot be taken from woman; it is hers by right; she would have lost it long ago, were it possible. the consequences of sex are wholly unlike for man and woman. the male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female, or at least all her youth; everything reminds her of her sex; the performance of her functions requires a special constitution. she needs care during pregnancy and freedom from work when her child is born; she must have a quiet, easy life while she nurses her children; their education calls for patience and gentleness, for a zeal and love which nothing can dismay; she forms a bond between father and child, she alone can win the father's love for his children and convince him that they are indeed his own. what loving care is required to preserve a united family! and there should be no question of virtue in all this, it must be a labour of love, without which the human race would be doomed to extinction. the mutual duties of the two sexes are not, and cannot be, equally binding on both. women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man's making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. she to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself responsible for them to their father. no doubt every breach of faith is wrong, and every faithless husband, who robs his wife of the sole reward of the stern duties of her sex, is cruel and unjust; but the faithless wife is worse; she destroys the family and breaks the bonds of nature; when she gives her husband children who are not his own, she is false both to him and them, her crime is not infidelity but treason. to my mind, it is the source of dissension and of crime of every kind. can any position be more wretched than that of the unhappy father who, when he clasps his child to his breast, is haunted by the suspicion that this is the child of another, the badge of his own dishonour, a thief who is robbing his own children of their inheritance. under such circumstances the family is little more than a group of secret enemies, armed against each other by a guilty woman, who compels them to pretend to love one another. thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful; her husband, along with his friends and neighbours, must believe in her fidelity; she must be modest, devoted, retiring; she should have the witness not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation. in a word, if a father must love his children, he must be able to respect their mother. for these reasons it is not enough that the woman should be chaste, she must preserve her reputation and her good name. from these principles there arises not only a moral difference between the sexes, but also a fresh motive for duty and propriety, which prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention to their conduct, their manners, their behaviour. vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument. it is a poor sort of logic to quote isolated exceptions against laws so firmly established. women, you say, are not always bearing children. granted; yet that is their proper business. because there are a hundred or so of large towns in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? and what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? there are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. in conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? [footnote: without this the race would necessarily diminish; all things considered, for its preservation each woman ought to have about four children, for about half the children born die before they can become parents, and two must survive to replace the father and mother. see whether the towns will supply them?] is it any the less a woman's business to be a mother? and to not the general laws of nature and morality make provision for this state of things? even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life without danger? can she be a nursing mother to-day and a soldier to-morrow? will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon changes his colour? will she pass at once from the privacy of household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the winds, the toils, the labours, the perils of war? will she be now timid, [footnote: women's timidity is yet another instinct of nature against the double risk she runs during pregnancy.] now brave, now fragile, now robust? if the young men of paris find a soldier's life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has scarcely put a foot to the ground? will she make a good soldier at an age when even men are retiring from this arduous business? there are countries, i grant you, where women bear and rear children with little or no difficulty, but in those lands the men go half-naked in all weathers, they strike down the wild beasts, they carry a canoe as easily as a knapsack, they pursue the chase for or leagues, they sleep in the open on the bare ground, they bear incredible fatigues and go many days without food. when women become strong, men become still stronger; when men become soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio remains unaltered. i am quite aware that plato, in the republic, assigns the same gymnastics to women and men. having got rid of the family there is no place for women in his system of government, so he is forced to turn them into men. that great genius has worked out his plans in detail and has provided for every contingency; he has even provided against a difficulty which in all likelihood no one would ever have raised; but he has not succeeded in meeting the real difficulty. i am not speaking of the alleged community of wives which has often been laid to his charge; this assertion only shows that his detractors have never read his works. i refer to that political promiscuity under which the same occupations are assigned to both sexes alike, a scheme which could only lead to intolerable evils; i refer to that subversion of all the tenderest of our natural feelings, which he sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which can only exist by their aid. will the bonds of convention hold firm without some foundation in nature? can devotion to the state exist apart from the love of those near and dear to us? can patriotism thrive except in the soil of that miniature fatherland, the home? is it not the good son, the good husband, the good father, who makes the good citizen? when once it is proved that men and women are and ought to be unlike in constitution and in temperament, it follows that their education must be different. nature teaches us that they should work together, but that each has its own share of the work; the end is the same, but the means are different, as are also the feelings which direct them. we have attempted to paint a natural man, let us try to paint a helpmeet for him. you must follow nature's guidance if you would walk aright. the native characters of sex should be respected as nature's handiwork. you are always saying, "women have such and such faults, from which we are free." you are misled by your vanity; what would be faults in you are virtues in them; and things would go worse, if they were without these so-called faults. take care that they do not degenerate into evil, but beware of destroying them. on the other hand, women are always exclaiming that we educate them for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that we keep them amused with trifles that we may be their masters; we are responsible, so they say, for the faults we attribute to them. how silly! what have men to do with the education of girls? what is there to hinder their mothers educating them as they please? there are no colleges for girls; so much the better for them! would god there were none for the boys, their education would be more sensible and more wholesome. who is it that compels a girl to waste her time on foolish trifles? are they forced, against their will, to spend half their time over their toilet, following the example set them by you? who prevents you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever seems good in your eyes? is it our fault that we are charmed by their beauty and delighted by their airs and graces, if we are attracted and flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love to see them prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons by which we are subjugated? well then, educate them like men. the more women are like men, the less influence they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed. all the faculties common to both sexes are not equally shared between them, but taken as a whole they are fairly divided. woman is worth more as a woman and less as a man; when she makes a good use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to usurp our rights, she is our inferior. it is impossible to controvert this, except by quoting exceptions after the usual fashion of the partisans of the fair sex. to cultivate the masculine virtues in women and to neglect their own is evidently to do them an injury. women are too clear-sighted to be thus deceived; when they try to usurp our privileges they do not abandon their own; with this result: they are unable to make use of two incompatible things, so they fall below their own level as women, instead of rising to the level of men. if you are a sensible mother you will take my advice. do not try to make your daughter a good man in defiance of nature. make her a good woman, and be sure it will be better both for her and us. does this mean that she must be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework only? is she to be man's handmaid or his help-meet? will he dispense with her greatest charm, her companionship? to keep her a slave will he prevent her knowing and feeling? will he make an automaton of her? no, indeed, that is not the teaching of nature, who has given women such a pleasant easy wit. on the contrary, nature means them to think, to will, to love, to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. they should learn many things, but only such things as are suitable. when i consider the special purpose of woman, when i observe her inclinations or reckon up her duties, everything combines to indicate the mode of education she requires. men and women are made for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degree; man is dependent on woman through his desires; woman is dependent on man through her desires and also through her needs; he could do without her better than she can do without him. she cannot fulfil her purpose in life without his aid, without his goodwill, without his respect; she is dependent on our feelings, on the price we put upon her virtue, and the opinion we have of her charms and her deserts. nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man's judgment. worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected. a woman's honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile is really virtuous. a man has no one but himself to consider, and so long as he does right he may defy public opinion; but when a woman does right her task is only half finished, and what people think of her matters as much as what she really is. hence her education must, in this respect, be different from man's education. "what will people think" is the grave of a man's virtue and the throne of a woman's. the children's health depends in the first place on the mother's, and the early education of man is also in a woman's hands; his morals, his passions, his tastes, his pleasures, his happiness itself, depend on her. a woman's education must therefore be planned in relation to man. to be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young. the further we depart from this principle, the further we shall be from our goal, and all our precepts will fail to secure her happiness or our own. every woman desires to be pleasing in men's eyes, and this is right; but there is a great difference between wishing to please a man of worth, a really lovable man, and seeking to please those foppish manikins who are a disgrace to their own sex and to the sex which they imitate. neither nature nor reason can induce a woman to love an effeminate person, nor will she win love by imitating such a person. if a woman discards the quiet modest bearing of her sex, and adopts the airs of such foolish creatures, she is not following her vocation, she is forsaking it; she is robbing herself of the rights to which she lays claim. "if we were different," she says, "the men would not like us." she is mistaken. only a fool likes folly; to wish to attract such men only shows her own foolishness. if there were no frivolous men, women would soon make them, and women are more responsible for men's follies than men are for theirs. the woman who loves true manhood and seeks to find favour in its sight will adopt means adapted to her ends. woman is a coquette by profession, but her coquetry varies with her aims; let these aims be in accordance with those of nature, and a woman will receive a fitting education. even the tiniest little girls love finery; they are not content to be pretty, they must be admired; their little airs and graces show that their heads are full of this idea, and as soon as they can understand they are controlled by "what will people think of you?" if you are foolish enough to try this way with little boys, it will not have the same effect; give them their freedom and their sports, and they care very little what people think; it is a work of time to bring them under the control of this law. however acquired, this early education of little girls is an excellent thing in itself. as the birth of the body must precede the birth of the mind, so the training of the body must precede the cultivation of the mind. this is true of both sexes; but the aim of physical training for boys and girls is not the same; in the one case it is the development of strength, in the other of grace; not that these qualities should be peculiar to either sex, but that their relative values should be different. women should be strong enough to do anything gracefully; men should be skilful enough to do anything easily. the exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men. women should not be strong like men but for them, so that their sons may be strong. convents and boarding-schools, with their plain food and ample opportunities for amusements, races, and games in the open air and in the garden, are better in this respect than the home, where the little girl is fed on delicacies, continually encouraged or reproved, where she is kept sitting in a stuffy room, always under her mother's eye, afraid to stand or walk or speak or breathe, without a moment's freedom to play or jump or run or shout, or to be her natural, lively, little self; there is either harmful indulgence or misguided severity, and no trace of reason. in this fashion heart and body are alike destroyed. in sparta the girls used to take part in military sports just like the boys, not that they might go to war, but that they might bear sons who could endure hardship. that is not what i desire. to provide the state with soldiers it is not necessary that the mother should carry a musket and master the prussian drill. yet, on the whole, i think the greeks were very wise in this matter of physical training. young girls frequently appeared in public, not with the boys, but in groups apart. there was scarcely a festival, a sacrifice, or a procession without its bands of maidens, the daughters of the chief citizens. crowned with flowers, chanting hymns, forming the chorus of the dance, bearing baskets, vases, offerings, they presented a charming spectacle to the depraved senses of the greeks, a spectacle well fitted to efface the evil effects of their unseemly gymnastics. whatever this custom may have done for the greek men, it was well fitted to develop in the greek women a sound constitution by means of pleasant, moderate, and healthy exercise; while the desire to please would develop a keen and cultivated taste without risk to character. when the greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family. this is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason. these women gave birth to the healthiest, strongest, and best proportioned men who ever lived, and except in certain islands of ill repute, no women in the whole world, not even the roman matrons, were ever at once so wise and so charming, so beautiful and so virtuous, as the women of ancient greece. it is admitted that their flowing garments, which did not cramp the figure, preserved in men and women alike the fine proportions which are seen in their statues. these are still the models of art, although nature is so disfigured that they are no longer to be found among us. the gothic trammels, the innumerable bands which confine our limbs as in a press, were quite unknown. the greek women were wholly unacquainted with those frames of whalebone in which our women distort rather than display their figures. it seems to me that this abuse, which is carried to an incredible degree of folly in england, must sooner or later lead to the production of a degenerate race. moreover, i maintain that the charm which these corsets are supposed to produce is in the worst possible taste; it is not a pleasant thing to see a woman cut in two like a wasp--it offends both the eye and the imagination. a slender waist has its limits, like everything else, in proportion and suitability, and beyond these limits it becomes a defect. this defect would be a glaring one in the nude; why should it be beautiful under the costume? i will not venture upon the reasons which induce women to incase themselves in these coats of mail. a clumsy figure, a large waist, are no doubt very ugly at twenty, but at thirty they cease to offend the eye, and as we are bound to be what nature has made us at any given age, and as there is no deceiving the eye of man, such defects are less offensive at any age than the foolish affectations of a young thing of forty. everything which cramps and confines nature is in bad taste; this is as true of the adornments of the person as of the ornaments of the mind. life, health, common-sense, and comfort must come first; there is no grace in discomfort, languor is not refinement, there is no charm in ill-health; suffering may excite pity, but pleasure and delight demand the freshness of health. boys and girls have many games in common, and this is as it should be; do they not play together when they are grown up? they have also special tastes of their own. boys want movement and noise, drums, tops, toy-carts; girls prefer things which appeal to the eye, and can be used for dressing-up--mirrors, jewellery, finery, and specially dolls. the doll is the girl's special plaything; this shows her instinctive bent towards her life's work. the art of pleasing finds its physical basis in personal adornment, and this physical side of the art is the only one which the child can cultivate. here is a little girl busy all day with her doll; she is always changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it, trying new combinations of trimmings well or ill matched; her fingers are clumsy, her taste is crude, but there is no mistaking her bent; in this endless occupation time flies unheeded, the hours slip away unnoticed, even meals are forgotten. she is more eager for adornment than for food. "but she is dressing her doll, not herself," you will say. just so; she sees her doll, she cannot see herself; she cannot do anything for herself, she has neither the training, nor the talent, nor the strength; as yet she herself is nothing, she is engrossed in her doll and all her coquetry is devoted to it. this will not always be so; in due time she will be her own doll. we have here a very early and clearly-marked bent; you have only to follow it and train it. what the little girl most clearly desires is to dress her doll, to make its bows, its tippets, its sashes, and its tuckers; she is dependent on other people's kindness in all this, and it would be much pleasanter to be able to do it herself. here is a motive for her earliest lessons, they are not tasks prescribed, but favours bestowed. little girls always dislike learning to read and write, but they are always ready to learn to sew. they think they are grown up, and in imagination they are using their knowledge for their own adornment. the way is open and it is easy to follow it; cutting out, embroidery, lace-making follow naturally. tapestry is not popular; furniture is too remote from the child's interests, it has nothing to do with the person, it depends on conventional tastes. tapestry is a woman's amusement; young girls never care for it. this voluntary course is easily extended to include drawing, an art which is closely connected with taste in dress; but i would not have them taught landscape and still less figure painting. leaves, fruit, flowers, draperies, anything that will make an elegant trimming for the accessories of the toilet, and enable the girl to design her own embroidery if she cannot find a pattern to her taste; that will be quite enough. speaking generally, if it is desirable to restrict a man's studies to what is useful, this is even more necessary for women, whose life, though less laborious, should be even more industrious and more uniformly employed in a variety of duties, so that one talent should not be encouraged at the expense of others. whatever may be said by the scornful, good sense belongs to both sexes alike. girls are usually more docile than boys, and they should be subjected to more authority, as i shall show later on, but that is no reason why they should be required to do things in which they can see neither rhyme nor reason. the mother's art consists in showing the use of everything they are set to do, and this is all the easier as the girl's intelligence is more precocious than the boy's. this principle banishes, both for boys and girls, not only those pursuits which never lead to any appreciable results, not even increasing the charms of those who have pursued them, but also those studies whose utility is beyond the scholar's present age and can only be appreciated in later years. if i object to little boys being made to learn to read, still more do i object to it for little girls until they are able to see the use of reading; we generally think more of our own ideas than theirs in our attempts to convince them of the utility of this art. after all, why should a little girl know how to read and write! has she a house to manage? most of them make a bad use of this fatal knowledge, and girls are so full of curiosity that few of them will fail to learn without compulsion. possibly cyphering should come first; there is nothing so obviously useful, nothing which needs so much practice or gives so much opportunity for error as reckoning. if the little girl does not get the cherries for her lunch without an arithmetical exercise, she will soon learn to count. i once knew a little girl who learnt to write before she could read, and she began to write with her needle. to begin with, she would write nothing but o's; she was always making o's, large and small, of all kinds and one within another, but always drawn backwards. unluckily one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass while she was at this useful work, and thinking that the cramped attitude was not pretty, like another minerva she flung away her pen and declined to make any more o's. her brother was no fonder of writing, but what he disliked was the constraint, not the look of the thing. she was induced to go on with her writing in this way. the child was fastidious and vain; she could not bear her sisters to wear her clothes. her things had been marked, they declined to mark them any more, she must learn to mark them herself; there is no need to continue the story. show the sense of the tasks you set your little girls, but keep them busy. idleness and insubordination are two very dangerous faults, and very hard to cure when once established. girls should be attentive and industrious, but this is not enough by itself; they should early be accustomed to restraint. this misfortune, if such it be, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape from it, unless to endure more cruel sufferings. all their life long, they will have to submit to the strictest and most enduring restraints, those of propriety. they must be trained to bear the yoke from the first, so that they may not feel it, to master their own caprices and to submit themselves to the will of others. if they were always eager to be at work, they should sometimes be compelled to do nothing. their childish faults, unchecked and unheeded, may easily lead to dissipation, frivolity, and inconstancy. to guard against this, teach them above all things self-control. under our senseless conditions, the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against self; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills she has brought upon man. beware lest your girls become weary of their tasks and infatuated with their amusements; this often happens under our ordinary methods of education, where, as fenelon says, all the tedium is on one side and all the pleasure on the other. if the rules already laid down are followed, the first of these dangers will be avoided, unless the child dislikes those about her. a little girl who is fond of her mother or her friend will work by her side all day without getting tired; the chatter alone will make up for any loss of liberty. but if her companion is distasteful to her, everything done under her direction will be distasteful too. children who take no delight in their mother's company are not likely to turn out well; but to judge of their real feelings you must watch them and not trust to their words alone, for they are flatterers and deceitful and soon learn to conceal their thoughts. neither should they be told that they ought to love their mother. affection is not the result of duty, and in this respect constraint is out of place. continual intercourse, constant care, habit itself, all these will lead a child to love her mother, if the mother does nothing to deserve the child's ill-will. the very control she exercises over the child, if well directed, will increase rather than diminish the affection, for women being made for dependence, girls feel themselves made to obey. just because they have, or ought to have, little freedom, they are apt to indulge themselves too fully with regard to such freedom as they have; they carry everything to extremes, and they devote themselves to their games with an enthusiasm even greater than that of boys. this is the second difficulty to which i referred. this enthusiasm must be kept in check, for it is the source of several vices commonly found among women, caprice and that extravagant admiration which leads a woman to regard a thing with rapture to-day and to be quite indifferent to it to-morrow. this fickleness of taste is as dangerous as exaggeration; and both spring from the same cause. do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise, and romping games, but do not let them tire of one game and go off to another; do not leave them for a moment without restraint. train them to break off their games and return to their other occupations without a murmur. habit is all that is needed, as you have nature on your side. this habitual restraint produces a docility which woman requires all her life long, for she will always be in subjection to a man, or to man's judgment, and she will never be free to set her own opinion above his. what is most wanted in a woman is gentleness; formed to obey a creature so imperfect as man, a creature often vicious and always faulty, she should early learn to submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint; she must be gentle for her own sake, not his. bitterness and obstinacy only multiply the sufferings of the wife and the misdeeds of the husband; the man feels that these are not the weapons to be used against him. heaven did not make women attractive and persuasive that they might degenerate into bitterness, or meek that they should desire the mastery; their soft voice was not meant for hard words, nor their delicate features for the frowns of anger. when they lose their temper they forget themselves; often enough they have just cause of complaint; but when they scold they always put themselves in the wrong. we should each adopt the tone which befits our sex; a soft-hearted husband may make an overbearing wife, but a man, unless he is a perfect monster, will sooner or later yield to his wife's gentleness, and the victory will be hers. daughters must always be obedient, but mothers need not always be harsh. to make a girl docile you need not make her miserable; to make her modest you need not terrify her; on the contrary, i should not be sorry to see her allowed occasionally to exercise a little ingenuity, not to escape punishment for her disobedience, but to evade the necessity for obedience. her dependence need not be made unpleasant, it is enough that she should realise that she is dependent. cunning is a natural gift of woman, and so convinced am i that all our natural inclinations are right, that i would cultivate this among others, only guarding against its abuse. for the truth of this i appeal to every honest observer. i do not ask you to question women themselves, our cramping institutions may compel them to sharpen their wits; i would have you examine girls, little girls, newly-born so to speak; compare them with boys of the same age, and i am greatly mistaken if you do not find the little boys heavy, silly, and foolish, in comparison. let me give one illustration in all its childish simplicity. children are commonly forbidden to ask for anything at table, for people think they can do nothing better in the way of education than to burden them with useless precepts; as if a little bit of this or that were not readily given or refused without leaving a poor child dying of greediness intensified by hope. every one knows how cunningly a little boy brought up in this way asked for salt when he had been overlooked at table. i do not suppose any one will blame him for asking directly for salt and indirectly for meat; the neglect was so cruel that i hardly think he would have been punished had he broken the rule and said plainly that he was hungry. but this is what i saw done by a little girl of six; the circumstances were much more difficult, for not only was she strictly forbidden to ask for anything directly or indirectly, but disobedience would have been unpardonable, for she had eaten of every dish; one only had been overlooked, and on this she had set her heart. this is what she did to repair the omission without laying herself open to the charge of disobedience; she pointed to every dish in turn, saying, "i've had some of this; i've had some of this;" however she omitted the one dish so markedly that some one noticed it and said, "have not you had some of this?" "oh, no," replied the greedy little girl with soft voice and downcast eyes. these instances are typical of the cunning of the little boy and girl. what is, is good, and no general law can be bad. this special skill with which the female sex is endowed is a fair equivalent for its lack of strength; without it woman would be man's slave, not his helpmeet. by her superiority in this respect she maintains her equality with man, and rules in obedience. she has everything against her, our faults and her own weakness and timidity; her beauty and her wiles are all that she has. should she not cultivate both? yet beauty is not universal; it may be destroyed by all sorts of accidents, it will disappear with years, and habit will destroy its influence. a woman's real resource is her wit; not that foolish wit which is so greatly admired in society, a wit which does nothing to make life happier; but that wit which is adapted to her condition, the art of taking advantage of our position and controlling us through our own strength. words cannot tell how beneficial this is to man, what a charm it gives to the society of men and women, how it checks the petulant child and restrains the brutal husband; without it the home would be a scene of strife; with it, it is the abode of happiness. i know that this power is abused by the sly and the spiteful; but what is there that is not liable to abuse? do not destroy the means of happiness because the wicked use them to our hurt. the toilet may attract notice, but it is the person that wins our hearts. our finery is not us; its very artificiality often offends, and that which is least noticeable in itself often wins the most attention. the education of our girls is, in this respect, absolutely topsy-turvy. ornaments are promised them as rewards, and they are taught to delight in elaborate finery. "how lovely she is!" people say when she is most dressed up. on the contrary, they should be taught that so much finery is only required to hide their defects, and that beauty's real triumph is to shine alone. the love of fashion is contrary to good taste, for faces do not change with the fashion, and while the person remains unchanged, what suits it at one time will suit it always. if i saw a young girl decked out like a little peacock, i should show myself anxious about her figure so disguised, and anxious what people would think of her; i should say, "she is over-dressed with all those ornaments; what a pity! do you think she could do with something simpler? is she pretty enough to do without this or that?" possibly she herself would be the first to ask that her finery might be taken off and that we should see how she looked without it. in that case her beauty should receive such praise as it deserves. i should never praise her unless simply dressed. if she only regards fine clothes as an aid to personal beauty, and as a tacit confession that she needs their aid, she will not be proud of her finery, she will be humbled by it; and if she hears some one say, "how pretty she is," when she is smarter than usual, she will blush for shame. moreover, though there are figures that require adornment there are none that require expensive clothes. extravagance in dress is the folly of the class rather than the individual, it is merely conventional. genuine coquetry is sometimes carefully thought out, but never sumptuous, and juno dressed herself more magnificently than venus. "as you cannot make her beautiful you are making her fine," said apelles to an unskilful artist who was painting helen loaded with jewellery. i have also noticed that the smartest clothes proclaim the plainest women; no folly could be more misguided. if a young girl has good taste and a contempt for fashion, give her a few yards of ribbon, muslin, and gauze, and a handful of flowers, without any diamonds, fringes, or lace, and she will make herself a dress a hundredfold more becoming than all the smart clothes of la duchapt. good is always good, and as you should always look your best, the women who know what they are about select a good style and keep to it, and as they are not always changing their style they think less about dress than those who can never settle to any one style. a genuine desire to dress becomingly does not require an elaborate toilet. young girls rarely give much time to dress; needlework and lessons are the business of the day; yet, except for the rouge, they are generally as carefully dressed as older women and often in better taste. contrary to the usual opinion, the real cause of the abuse of the toilet is not vanity but lack of occupation. the woman who devotes six hours to her toilet is well aware that she is no better dressed than the woman who took half an hour, but she has got rid of so many of the tedious hours and it is better to amuse oneself with one's clothes than to be sick of everything. without the toilet how would she spend the time between dinner and supper. with a crowd of women about her, she can at least cause them annoyance, which is amusement of a kind; better still she avoids a tete-a-tete with the husband whom she never sees at any other time; then there are the tradespeople, the dealers in bric-a-brac, the fine gentlemen, the minor poets with their songs, their verses, and their pamphlets; how could you get them together but for the toilet. its only real advantage is the chance of a little more display than is permitted by full dress, and perhaps this is less than it seems and a woman gains less than she thinks. do not be afraid to educate your women as women; teach them a woman's business, that they be modest, that they may know how to manage their house and look after their family; the grand toilet will soon disappear, and they will be more tastefully dressed. growing girls perceive at once that all this outside adornment is not enough unless they have charms of their own. they cannot make themselves beautiful, they are too young for coquetry, but they are not too young to acquire graceful gestures, a pleasing voice, a self-possessed manner, a light step, a graceful bearing, to choose whatever advantages are within their reach. the voice extends its range, it grows stronger and more resonant, the arms become plumper, the bearing more assured, and they perceive that it is easy to attract attention however dressed. needlework and industry suffice no longer, fresh gifts are developing and their usefulness is already recognised. i know that stern teachers would have us refuse to teach little girls to sing or dance, or to acquire any of the pleasing arts. this strikes me as absurd. who should learn these arts--our boys? are these to be the favourite accomplishments of men or women? of neither, say they; profane songs are simply so many crimes, dancing is an invention of the evil one; her tasks and her prayers we all the amusement a young girl should have. what strange amusements for a child of ten! i fear that these little saints who have been forced to spend their childhood in prayers to god will pass their youth in another fashion; when they are married they will try to make up for lost time. i think we must consider age as well as sex; a young girl should not live like her grandmother; she should be lively, merry, and eager; she should sing and dance to her heart's content, and enjoy all the innocent pleasures of youth; the time will come, all too soon, when she must settle down and adopt a more serious tone. but is this change in itself really necessary? is it not merely another result of our own prejudices? by making good women the slaves of dismal duties, we have deprived marriage of its charm for men. can we wonder that the gloomy silence they find at home drives them elsewhere, or inspires little desire to enter a state which offers so few attractions? christianity, by exaggerating every duty, has made our duties impracticable and useless; by forbidding singing, dancing, and amusements of every kind, it renders women sulky, fault-finding, and intolerable at home. there is no religion which imposes such strict duties upon married life, and none in which such a sacred engagement is so often profaned. such pains has been taken to prevent wives being amiable, that their husbands have become indifferent to them. this should not be, i grant you, but it will be, since husbands are but men. i would have an english maiden cultivate the talents which will delight her husband as zealously as the circassian cultivates the accomplishments of an eastern harem. husbands, you say, care little for such accomplishments. so i should suppose, when they are employed, not for the husband, but to attract the young rakes who dishonour the home. but imagine a virtuous and charming wife, adorned with such accomplishments and devoting them to her husband's amusement; will she not add to his happiness? when he leaves his office worn out with the day's work, will she not prevent him seeking recreation elsewhere? have we not all beheld happy families gathered together, each contributing to the general amusement? are not the confidence and familiarity thus established, the innocence and the charm of the pleasures thus enjoyed, more than enough to make up for the more riotous pleasures of public entertainments? pleasant accomplishments have been made too formal an affair of rules and precepts, so that young people find them very tedious instead of a mere amusement or a merry game as they ought to be. nothing can be more absurd than an elderly singing or dancing master frowning upon young people, whose one desire is to laugh, and adopting a more pedantic and magisterial manner in teaching his frivolous art than if he were teaching the catechism. take the case of singing; does this art depend on reading music; cannot the voice be made true and flexible, can we not learn to sing with taste and even to play an accompaniment without knowing a note? does the same kind of singing suit all voices alike? is the same method adapted to every mind? you will never persuade me that the same attitudes, the same steps, the same movements, the same gestures, the same dances will suit a lively little brunette and a tall fair maiden with languishing eyes. so when i find a master giving the same lessons to all his pupils i say, "he has his own routine, but he knows nothing of his art!" should young girls have masters or mistresses? i cannot say; i wish they could dispense with both; i wish they could learn of their own accord what they are already so willing to learn. i wish there were fewer of these dressed-up old ballet masters promenading our streets. i fear our young people will get more harm from intercourse with such people than profit from their instruction, and that their jargon, their tone, their airs and graces, will instil a precocious taste for the frivolities which the teacher thinks so important, and to which the scholars are only too likely to devote themselves. where pleasure is the only end in view, any one may serve as teacher--father, mother, brother, sister, friend, governess, the girl's mirror, and above all her own taste. do not offer to teach, let her ask; do not make a task of what should be a reward, and in these studies above all remember that the wish to succeed is the first step. if formal instruction is required i leave it to you to choose between a master and a mistress. how can i tell whether a dancing master should take a young pupil by her soft white hand, make her lift her skirt and raise her eyes, open her arms and advance her throbbing bosom? but this i know, nothing on earth would induce me to be that master. taste is formed partly by industry and partly by talent, and by its means the mind is unconsciously opened to the idea of beauty of every kind, till at length it attains to those moral ideas which are so closely related to beauty. perhaps this is one reason why ideas of propriety and modesty are acquired earlier by girls than by boys, for to suppose that this early feeling is due to the teaching of the governesses would show little knowledge of their style of teaching and of the natural development of the human mind. the art of speaking stands first among the pleasing arts; it alone can add fresh charms to those which have been blunted by habit. it is the mind which not only gives life to the body, but renews, so to speak, its youth; the flow of feelings and ideas give life and variety to the countenance, and the conversation to which it gives rise arouses and sustains attention, and fixes it continuously on one object. i suppose this is why little girls so soon learn to prattle prettily, and why men enjoy listening to them even before the child can understand them; they are watching for the first gleam of intelligence and sentiment. women have ready tongues; they talk earlier, more easily, and more pleasantly than men. they are also said to talk more; this may be true, but i am prepared to reckon it to their credit; eyes and mouth are equally busy and for the same cause. a man says what he knows, a woman says what will please; the one needs knowledge, the other taste; utility should be the man's object; the woman speaks to give pleasure. there should be nothing in common but truth. you should not check a girl's prattle like a boy's by the harsh question, "what is the use of that?" but by another question at least as difficult to answer, "what effect will that have?" at this early age when they know neither good nor evil, and are incapable of judging others, they should make this their rule and never say anything which is unpleasant to those about them; this rule is all the more difficult to apply because it must always be subordinated to our first rule, "never tell a lie." i can see many other difficulties, but they belong to a later stage. for the present it is enough for your little girls to speak the truth without grossness, and as they are naturally averse to what is gross, education easily teaches them to avoid it. in social intercourse i observe that a man's politeness is usually more helpful and a woman's more caressing. this distinction is natural, not artificial. a man seeks to serve, a woman seeks to please. hence a woman's politeness is less insincere than ours, whatever we may think of her character; for she is only acting upon a fundamental instinct; but when a man professes to put my interests before his own, i detect the falsehood, however disguised. hence it is easy for women to be polite, and easy to teach little girls politeness. the first lessons come by nature; art only supplements them and determines the conventional form which politeness shall take. the courtesy of woman to woman is another matter; their manner is so constrained, their attentions so chilly, they find each other so wearisome, that they take little pains to conceal the fact, and seem sincere even in their falsehood, since they take so little pains to conceal it. still young girls do sometimes become sincerely attached to one another. at their age good spirits take the place of a good disposition, and they are so pleased with themselves that they are pleased with every one else. moreover, it is certain that they kiss each other more affectionately and caress each other more gracefully in the presence of men, for they are proud to be able to arouse their envy without danger to themselves by the sight of favours which they know will arouse that envy. if young boys must not be allowed to ask unsuitable questions, much more must they be forbidden to little girls; if their curiosity is satisfied or unskilfully evaded it is a much more serious matter, for they are so keen to guess the mysteries concealed from them and so skilful to discover them. but while i would not permit them to ask questions, i would have them questioned frequently, and pains should be taken to make them talk; let them be teased to make them speak freely, to make them answer readily, to loosen mind and tongue while it can be done without danger. such conversation always leading to merriment, yet skilfully controlled and directed, would form a delightful amusement at this age and might instil into these youthful hearts the first and perhaps the most helpful lessons in morals which they will ever receive, by teaching them in the guise of pleasure and fun what qualities are esteemed by men and what is the true glory and happiness of a good woman. if boys are incapable of forming any true idea of religion, much more is it beyond the grasp of girls; and for this reason i would speak of it all the sooner to little girls, for if we wait till they are ready for a serious discussion of these deep subjects we should be in danger of never speaking of religion at all. a woman's reason is practical, and therefore she soon arrives at a given conclusion, but she fails to discover it for herself. the social relation of the sexes is a wonderful thing. this relation produces a moral person of which woman is the eye and man the hand, but the two are so dependent on one another that the man teaches the woman what to see, while she teaches him what to do. if women could discover principles and if men had as good heads for detail, they would be mutually independent, they would live in perpetual strife, and there would be an end to all society. but in their mutual harmony each contributes to a common purpose; each follows the other's lead, each commands and each obeys. as a woman's conduct is controlled by public opinion, so is her religion ruled by authority. the daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of god. unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. while women unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. as a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism i cannot say, but i do know that they lead to one or other. in the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. let their prayers be short, as christ himself has taught us. let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say. it does not much matter that a girl should learn her religion young, but it does matter that she should learn it thoroughly, and still more that she should learn to love it. if you make religion a burden to her, if you always speak of god's anger, if in the name of religion you impose all sorts of disagreeable duties, duties which she never sees you perform, what can she suppose but that to learn one's catechism and to say one's prayers is only the duty of a little girl, and she will long to be grown-up to escape, like you, from these duties. example! example! without it you will never succeed in teaching children anything. when you explain the articles of faith let it be by direct teaching, not by question and answer. children should only answer what they think, not what has been drilled into them. all the answers in the catechism are the wrong way about; it is the scholar who instructs the teacher; in the child's mouth they are a downright lie, since they explain what he does not understand, and affirm what he cannot believe. find me, if you can, an intelligent man who could honestly say his catechism. the first question i find in our catechism is as follows: "who created you and brought you into the world?" to which the girl, who thinks it was her mother, replies without hesitation, "it was god." all she knows is that she is asked a question which she only half understands and she gives an answer she does not understand at all. i wish some one who really understands the development of children's minds would write a catechism for them. it might be the most useful book ever written, and, in my opinion, it would do its author no little honour. this at least is certain--if it were a good book it would be very unlike our catechisms. such a catechism will not be satisfactory unless the child can answer the questions of its own accord without having to learn the answers; indeed the child will often ask the questions itself. an example is required to make my meaning plain and i feel how ill equipped i am to furnish such an example. i will try to give some sort of outline of my meaning. to get to the first question in our catechism i suppose we must begin somewhat after the following fashion. nurse: do you remember when your mother was a little girl? child: no, nurse. nurse: why not, when you have such a good memory? child: i was not alive. nurse: then you were not always alive! child: no. nurse: will you live for ever! child: yes. nurse: are you young or old? child: i am young. nurse: is your grandmamma old or young? child: she is old. nurse: was she ever young? child: yes. nurse: why is she not young now? child: she has grown old. nurse: will you grow old too? child: i don't know. nurse: where are your last year's frocks? child: they have been unpicked. nurse: why! child: because they were too small for me. nurse: why were they too small? child: i have grown bigger. nurse: will you grow any more! child: oh, yes. nurse: and what becomes of big girls? child: they grow into women. nurse: and what becomes of women! child: they are mothers. nurse: and what becomes of mothers? child: they grow old. nurse: will you grow old? child: when i am a mother. nurse: and what becomes of old people? child: i don't know. nurse: what became of your grandfather? child: he died. [footnote: the child will say this because she has heard it said; but you must make sure she knows what death is, for the idea is not so simple and within the child's grasp as people think. in that little poem "abel" you will find an example of the way to teach them. this charming work breathes a delightful simplicity with which one should feed one's own mind so as to talk with children.] nurse: why did he die? child: because he was so old. nurse: what becomes of old people! child: they die. nurse: and when you are old----? child: oh nurse! i don't want to die! nurse: my dear, no one wants to die, and everybody dies. child: why, will mamma die too! nurse: yes, like everybody else. women grow old as well as men, and old age ends in death. child: what must i do to grow old very, very slowly? nurse: be good while you are little. child: i will always be good, nurse. nurse: so much the better. but do you suppose you will live for ever? child: when i am very, very old---- nurse: well? child: when we are so very old you say we must die? nurse: you must die some day. child: oh dear! i suppose i must. nurse: who lived before you? child: my father and mother. nurse: and before them? child: their father and mother. nurse: who will live after you? child: my children. nurse: who will live after them? child: their children. in this way, by concrete examples, you will find a beginning and end for the human race like everything else--that is to say, a father and mother who never had a father and mother, and children who will never have children of their own. it is only after a long course of similar questions that we are ready for the first question in the catechism; then alone can we put the question and the child may be able to understand it. but what a gap there is between the first and the second question which is concerned with the definitions of the divine nature. when will this chasm be bridged? "god is a spirit." "and what is a spirit?" shall i start the child upon this difficult question of metaphysics which grown men find so hard to understand? these are no questions for a little girl to answer; if she asks them, it is as much or more than we can expect. in that case i should tell her quite simply, "you ask me what god is; it is not easy to say; we can neither hear nor see nor handle god; we can only know him by his works. to learn what he is, you must wait till you know what he has done." if our dogmas are all equally true, they are not equally important. it makes little difference to the glory of god that we should perceive it everywhere, but it does make a difference to human society, and to every member of that society, that a man should know and do the duties which are laid upon him by the law of god, his duty to his neighbour and to himself. this is what we should always be teaching one another, and it is this which fathers and mothers are specially bound to teach their little ones. whether a virgin became the mother of her creator, whether she gave birth to god, or merely to a man into whom god has entered, whether the father and the son are of the same substance or of like substance only, whether the spirit proceeded from one or both of these who are but one, or from both together, however important these questions may seem, i cannot see that it is any more necessary for the human race to come to a decision with regard to them than to know what day to keep easter, or whether we should tell our beads, fast, and refuse to eat meat, speak latin or french in church, adorn the walls with statues, hear or say mass, and have no wife of our own. let each think as he pleases; i cannot see that it matters to any one but himself; for my own part it is no concern of mine. but what does concern my fellow-creatures and myself alike is to know that there is indeed a judge of human fate, that we are all his children, that he bids us all be just, he bids us love one another, he bids us be kindly and merciful, he bids us keep our word with all men, even with our own enemies and his; we must know that the apparent happiness of this world is naught; that there is another life to come, in which this supreme being will be the rewarder of the just and the judge of the unjust. children need to be taught these doctrines and others like them and all citizens require to be persuaded of their truth. whoever sets his face against these doctrines is indeed guilty; he is the disturber of the peace, the enemy of society. whoever goes beyond these doctrines and seeks to make us the slaves of his private opinions, reaches the same goal by another way; to establish his own kind of order he disturbs the peace; in his rash pride he makes himself the interpreter of the divine, and in his name demands the homage and the reverence of mankind; so far as may be, he sets himself in god's place; he should receive the punishment of sacrilege if he is not punished for his intolerance. give no heed, therefore, to all those mysterious doctrines which are words without ideas for us, all those strange teachings, the study of which is too often offered as a substitute for virtue, a study which more often makes men mad rather than good. keep your children ever within the little circle of dogmas which are related to morality. convince them that the only useful learning is that which teaches us to act rightly. do not make your daughters theologians and casuists; only teach them such things of heaven as conduce to human goodness; train them to feel that they are always in the presence of god, who sees their thoughts and deeds, their virtue and their pleasures; teach them to do good without ostentation and because they love it, to suffer evil without a murmur, because god will reward them; in a word to be all their life long what they will be glad to have been when they appear in his presence. this is true religion; this alone is incapable of abuse, impiety, or fanaticism. let those who will, teach a religion more sublime, but this is the only religion i know. moreover, it is as well to observe that, until the age when the reason becomes enlightened, when growing emotion gives a voice to conscience, what is wrong for young people is what those about have decided to be wrong. what they are told to do is good; what they are forbidden to do is bad; that is all they ought to know: this shows how important it is for girls, even more than for boys, that the right people should be chosen to be with them and to have authority over them. at last there comes a time when they begin to judge things for themselves, and that is the time to change your method of education. perhaps i have said too much already. to what shall we reduce the education of our women if we give them no law but that of conventional prejudice? let us not degrade so far the set which rules over us, and which does us honour when we have not made it vile. for all mankind there is a law anterior to that of public opinion. all other laws should bend before the inflexible control of this law; it is the judge of public opinion, and only in so far as the esteem of men is in accordance with this law has it any claim on our obedience. this law is our individual conscience. i will not repeat what has been said already; it is enough to point out that if these two laws clash, the education of women will always be imperfect. right feeling without respect for public opinion will not give them that delicacy of soul which lends to right conduct the charm of social approval; while respect for public opinion without right feeling will only make false and wicked women who put appearances in the place of virtue. it is, therefore, important to cultivate a faculty which serves as judge between the two guides, which does not permit conscience to go astray and corrects the errors of prejudice. that faculty is reason. but what a crowd of questions arise at this word. are women capable of solid reason; should they cultivate it, can they cultivate it successfully? is this culture useful in relation to the functions laid upon them? is it compatible with becoming simplicity? the different ways of envisaging and answering these questions lead to two extremes; some would have us keep women indoors sewing and spinning with their maids; thus they make them nothing more than the chief servant of their master. others, not content to secure their rights, lead them to usurp ours; for to make woman our superior in all the qualities proper to her sex, and to make her our equal in all the rest, what is this but to transfer to the woman the superiority which nature has given to her husband? the reason which teaches a man his duties is not very complex; the reason which teaches a woman hers is even simpler. the obedience and fidelity which she owes to her husband, the tenderness and care due to her children, are such natural and self-evident consequences of her position that she cannot honestly refuse her consent to the inner voice which is her guide, nor fail to discern her duty in her natural inclination. i would not altogether blame those who would restrict a woman to the labours of her sex and would leave her in profound ignorance of everything else; but that would require a standard of morality at once very simple and very healthy, or a life withdrawn from the world. in great towns, among immoral men, such a woman would be too easily led astray; her virtue would too often be at the mercy of circumstances; in this age of philosophy, virtue must be able to resist temptation; she must know beforehand what she may hear and what she should think of it. moreover, in submission to man's judgment she should deserve his esteem; above all she should obtain the esteem of her husband; she should not only make him love her person, she should make him approve her conduct; she should justify his choice before the world, and do honour to her husband through the honour given to the wife. but how can she set about this task if she is ignorant of our institutions, our customs, our notions of propriety, if she knows nothing of the source of man's judgment, nor the passions by which it is swayed! since she depends both on her own conscience and on public opinion, she must learn to know and reconcile these two laws, and to put her own conscience first only when the two are opposed to each other. she becomes the judge of her own judges, she decides when she should obey and when she should refuse her obedience. she weighs their prejudices before she accepts or rejects them; she learns to trace them to their source, to foresee what they will be, and to turn them in her own favour; she is careful never to give cause for blame if duty allows her to avoid it. this cannot be properly done without cultivating her mind and reason. i always come back to my first principle and it supplies the solution of all my difficulties. i study what is, i seek its cause, and i discover in the end that what is, is good. i go to houses where the master and mistress do the honours together. they are equally well educated, equally polite, equally well equipped with wit and good taste, both of them are inspired with the same desire to give their guests a good reception and to send every one away satisfied. the husband omits no pains to be attentive to every one; he comes and goes and sees to every one and takes all sorts of trouble; he is attention itself. the wife remains in her place; a little circle gathers round her and apparently conceals the rest of the company from her; yet she sees everything that goes on, no one goes without a word with her; she has omitted nothing which might interest anybody, she has said nothing unpleasant to any one, and without any fuss the least is no more overlooked than the greatest. dinner is announced, they take their places; the man knowing the assembled guests will place them according to his knowledge; the wife, without previous acquaintance, never makes a mistake; their looks and bearing have already shown her what is wanted and every one will find himself where he wishes to be. i do not assert that the servants forget no one. the master of the house may have omitted no one, but the mistress perceives what you like and sees that you get it; while she is talking to her neighbour she has one eye on the other end of the table; she sees who is not eating because he is not hungry and who is afraid to help himself because he is clumsy and timid. when the guests leave the table every one thinks she has had no thought but for him, everybody thinks she has had no time to eat anything, but she has really eaten more than anybody. when the guests are gone, husband and wife tails over the events of the evening. he relates what was said to him, what was said and done by those with whom he conversed. if the lady is not always quite exact in this respect, yet on the other hand she perceived what was whispered at the other end of the room; she knows what so-and-so thought, and what was the meaning of this speech or that gesture; there is scarcely a change of expression for which she has not an explanation in readiness, and she is almost always right. the same turn of mind which makes a woman of the world such an excellent hostess, enables a flirt to excel in the art of amusing a number of suitors. coquetry, cleverly carried out, demands an even finer discernment than courtesy; provided a polite lady is civil to everybody, she has done fairly well in any case; but the flirt would soon lose her hold by such clumsy uniformity; if she tries to be pleasant to all her lovers alike, she will disgust them all. in ordinary social intercourse the manners adopted towards everybody are good enough for all; no question is asked as to private likes or dislikes provided all are alike well received. but in love, a favour shared with others is an insult. a man of feeling would rather be singled out for ill-treatment than be caressed with the crowd, and the worst that can befall him is to be treated like every one else. so a woman who wants to keep several lovers at her feet must persuade every one of them that she prefers him, and she must contrive to do this in the sight of all the rest, each of whom is equally convinced that he is her favourite. if you want to see a man in a quandary, place him between two women with each of whom he has a secret understanding, and see what a fool he looks. but put a woman in similar circumstances between two men, and the results will be even more remarkable; you will be astonished at the skill with which she cheats them both, and makes them laugh at each other. now if that woman were to show the same confidence in both, if she were to be equally familiar with both, how could they be deceived for a moment? if she treated them alike, would she not show that they both had the same claims upon her? oh, she is far too clever for that; so far from treating them just alike, she makes a marked difference between them, and she does it so skilfully that the man she flatters thinks it is affection, and the man she ill uses think it is spite. so that each of them believes she is thinking of him, when she is thinking of no one but herself. a general desire to please suggests similar measures; people would be disgusted with a woman's whims if they were not skilfully managed, and when they are artistically distributed her servants are more than ever enslaved. "usa ogn'arte la donna, onde sia colto nella sua rete alcun novello amante; ne con tutti, ne sempre un stesso volto serba; ma cangia a tempo atto e sembiante." tasso, jerus. del., c. iv., v. . what is the secret of this art? is it not the result of a delicate and continuous observation which shows her what is taking place in a man's heart, so that she is able to encourage or to check every hidden impulse? can this art be acquired? no; it is born with women; it is common to them all, and men never show it to the same degree. it is one of the distinctive characters of the sex. self-possession, penetration, delicate observation, this is a woman's science; the skill to make use of it is her chief accomplishment. this is what is, and we have seen why it is so. it is said that women are false. they become false. they are really endowed with skill not duplicity; in the genuine inclinations of their sex they are not false even when they tell a lie. why do you consult their words when it is not their mouths that speak? consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. the lips always say "no," and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. must her modesty condemn her to misery? does she not require a means of indicating her inclinations without open expression? what skill is needed to hide from her lover what she would fain reveal! is it not of vital importance that she should learn to touch his heart without showing that she cares for him? it is a pretty story that tale of galatea with her apple and her clumsy flight. what more is needed? will she tell the shepherd who pursues her among the willows that she only flees that he may follow? if she did, it would be a lie; for she would no longer attract him. the more modest a woman is, the more art she needs, even with her husband. yes, i maintain that coquetry, kept within bounds, becomes modest and true, and out of it springs a law of right conduct. one of my opponents has very truly asserted that virtue is one; you cannot disintegrate it and choose this and reject the other. if you love virtue, you love it in its entirety, and you close your heart when you can, and you always close your lips to the feelings which you ought not to allow. moral truth is not only what is, but what is good; what is bad ought not to be, and ought not to be confessed, especially when that confession produces results which might have been avoided. if i were tempted to steal, and in confessing it i tempted another to become my accomplice, the very confession of my temptation would amount to a yielding to that temptation. why do you say that modesty makes women false? are those who lose their modesty more sincere than the rest? not so, they are a thousandfold more deceitful. this degree of depravity is due to many vices, none of which is rejected, vices which owe their power to intrigue and falsehood. [footnote: i know that women who have openly decided on a certain course of conduct profess that their lack of concealment is a virtue in itself, and swear that, with one exception, they are possessed of all the virtues; but i am sure they never persuaded any but fools to believe them. when the natural curb is removed from their sex, what is there left to restrain them? what honour will they prize when they have rejected the honour of their sex? having once given the rein to passion they have no longer any reason for self-control. "nec femina, amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit." no author ever understood more thoroughly the heart of both sexes than tacitus when he wrote those words.] on the other hand, those who are not utterly shameless, who take no pride in their faults, who are able to conceal their desires even from those who inspire them, those who confess their passion most reluctantly, these are the truest and most sincere, these are they on whose fidelity you may generally rely. the only example i know which might be quoted as a recognised exception to these remarks is mlle. de l'enclos; and she was considered a prodigy. in her scorn for the virtues of women, she practised, so they say, the virtues of a man. she is praised for her frankness and uprightness; she was a trustworthy acquaintance and a faithful friend. to complete the picture of her glory it is said that she became a man. that may be, but in spite of her high reputation i should no more desire that man as my friend than as my mistress. this is not so irrelevant as it seems. i am aware of the tendencies of our modern philosophy which make a jest of female modesty and its so-called insincerity; i also perceive that the most certain result of this philosophy will be to deprive the women of this century of such shreds of honour as they still possess. on these grounds i think we may decide in general terms what sort of education is suited to the female mind, and the objects to which we should turn its attention in early youth. as i have already said, the duties of their sex are more easily recognised than performed. they must learn in the first place to love those duties by considering the advantages to be derived from them--that is the only way to make duty easy. every age and condition has its own duties. we are quick to see our duty if we love it. honour your position as a woman, and in whatever station of life to which it shall please heaven to call you, you will be well off. the essential thing is to be what nature has made you; women are only too ready to be what men would have them. the search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in science, for all that tends to wide generalisation, is beyond a woman's grasp; their studies should be thoroughly practical. it is their business to apply the principles discovered by men, it is their place to make the observations which lead men to discover those principles. a woman's thoughts, beyond the range of her immediate duties, should be directed to the study of men, or the acquirement of that agreeable learning whose sole end is the formation of taste; for the works of genius are beyond her reach, and she has neither the accuracy nor the attention for success in the exact sciences; as for the physical sciences, to decide the relations between living creatures and the laws of nature is the task of that sex which is more active and enterprising, which sees more things, that sex which is possessed of greater strength and is more accustomed to the exercise of that strength. woman, weak as she is and limited in her range of observation, perceives and judges the forces at her disposal to supplement her weakness, and those forces are the passions of man. her own mechanism is more powerful than ours; she has many levers which may set the human heart in motion. she must find a way to make us desire what she cannot achieve unaided and what she considers necessary or pleasing; therefore she must have a thorough knowledge of man's mind; not an abstract knowledge of the mind of man in general, but the mind of those men who are about her, the mind of those men who have authority over her, either by law or custom. she must learn to divine their feelings from speech and action, look and gesture. by her own speech and action, look and gesture, she must be able to inspire them with the feelings she desires, without seeming to have any such purpose. the men will have a better philosophy of the human heart, but she will read more accurately in the heart of men. woman should discover, so to speak, an experimental morality, man should reduce it to a system. woman has more wit, man more genius; woman observes, man reasons; together they provide the clearest light and the profoundest knowledge which is possible to the unaided human mind; in a word, the surest knowledge of self and of others of which the human race is capable. in this way art may constantly tend to the perfection of the instrument which nature has given us. the world is woman's book; if she reads it ill, it is either her own fault or she is blinded by passion. yet the genuine mother of a family is no woman of the world, she is almost as much of a recluse as the nun in her convent. those who have marriageable daughters should do what is or ought to be done for those who are entering the cloisters: they should show them the pleasures they forsake before they are allowed to renounce them, lest the deceitful picture of unknown pleasures should creep in to disturb the happiness of their retreat. in france it is the girls who live in convents and the wives who flaunt in society. among the ancients it was quite otherwise; girls enjoyed, as i have said already, many games and public festivals; the married women lived in retirement. this was a more reasonable custom and more conducive to morality. a girl may be allowed a certain amount of coquetry, and she may be mainly occupied at amusement. a wife has other responsibilities at home, and she is no longer on the look-out for a husband; but women would not appreciate the change, and unluckily it is they who set the fashion. mothers, let your daughters be your companions. give them good sense and an honest heart, and then conceal from them nothing that a pure eye may behold. balls, assemblies, sports, the theatre itself; everything which viewed amiss delights imprudent youth may be safely displayed to a healthy mind. the more they know of these noisy pleasures, the sooner they will cease to desire them. i can fancy the outcry with which this will be received. what girl will resist such an example? their heads are turned by the first glimpse of the world; not one of them is ready to give it up. that may be; but before you showed them this deceitful prospect, did you prepare them to behold it without emotion? did you tell them plainly what it was they would see? did you show it in its true light? did you arm them against the illusions of vanity? did you inspire their young hearts with a taste for the true pleasures which are not to be met with in this tumult? what precautions, what steps, did you take to preserve them from the false taste which leads them astray? not only have you done nothing to preserve their minds from the tyranny of prejudice, you have fostered that prejudice; you have taught them to desire every foolish amusement they can get. your own example is their teacher. young people on their entrance into society have no guide but their mother, who is often just as silly as they are themselves, and quite unable to show them things except as she sees them herself. her example is stronger than reason; it justifies them in their own eyes, and the mother's authority is an unanswerable excuse for the daughter. if i ask a mother to bring her daughter into society, i assume that she will show it in its true light. the evil begins still earlier; the convents are regular schools of coquetry; not that honest coquetry which i have described, but a coquetry the source of every kind of misconduct, a coquetry which turns out girls who are the most ridiculous little madams. when they leave the convent to take their place in smart society, young women find themselves quite at home. they have been educated for such a life; is it strange that they like it? i am afraid what i am going to say may be based on prejudice rather than observation, but so far as i can see, one finds more family affection, more good wives and loving mothers in protestant than in catholic countries; if that is so, we cannot fail to suspect that the difference is partly due to the convent schools. the charms of a peaceful family life must be known to be enjoyed; their delights should be tasted in childhood. it is only in our father's home that we learn to love our own, and a woman whose mother did not educate her herself will not be willing to educate her own children. unfortunately, there is no such thing as home education in our large towns. society is so general and so mixed there is no place left for retirement, and even in the home we live in public. we live in company till we have no family, and we scarcely know our own relations, we see them as strangers; and the simplicity of home life disappears together with the sweet familiarity which was its charm. in this wise do we draw with our mother's milk a taste for the pleasures of the age and the maxims by which it is controlled. girls are compelled to assume an air of propriety so that men may be deceived into marrying them by their appearance. but watch these young people for a moment; under a pretence of coyness they barely conceal the passion which devours them, and already you may read in their eager eyes their desire to imitate their mothers. it is not a husband they want, but the licence of a married woman. what need of a husband when there are so many other resources; but a husband there must be to act as a screen. [footnote: the way of a man in his youth was one of the four things that the sage could not understand; the fifth was the shamelessness of an adulteress. "quae comedit, et tergens os suum dicit; non sum operata malum." prov. xxx. .] there is modesty on the brow, but vice in the heart; this sham modesty is one of its outward signs; they affect it that they may be rid of it once for all. women of paris and london, forgive me! there may be miracles everywhere, but i am not aware of them; and if there is even one among you who is really pure in heart, i know nothing of our institutions. all these different methods of education lead alike to a taste for the pleasures of the great world, and to the passions which this taste so soon kindles. in our great towns depravity begins at birth; in the smaller towns it begins with reason. young women brought up in the country are soon taught to despise the happy simplicity of their lives, and hasten to paris to share the corruption of ours. vices, cloaked under the fair name of accomplishments, are the sole object of their journey; ashamed to find themselves so much behind the noble licence of the parisian ladies, they hasten to become worthy of the name of parisian. which is responsible for the evil--the place where it begins, or the place where it is accomplished? i would not have a sensible mother bring her girl to paris to show her these sights so harmful to others; but i assert that if she did so, either the girl has been badly brought up, or such sights have little danger for her. with good taste, good sense, and a love of what is right, these things are less attractive than to those who abandon themselves to their charm. in paris you may see giddy young things hastening to adopt the tone and fashions of the town for some six months, so that they may spend the rest of their life in disgrace; but who gives any heed to those who, disgusted with the rout, return to their distant home and are contented with their lot when they have compared it with that which others desire. how many young wives have i seen whose good-natured husbands have taken them to paris where they might live if they pleased; but they have shrunk from it and returned home more willingly than they went, saying tenderly, "ah, let us go back to our cottage, life is happier there than in these palaces." we do not know how many there are who have not bowed the knee to baal, who scorn his senseless worship. fools make a stir; good women pass unnoticed. if so many women preserve a judgment which is proof against temptation, in spite of universal prejudice, in spite of the bad education of girls, what would their judgment have been, had it been strengthened by suitable instruction, or rather left unaffected by evil teaching, for to preserve or restore the natural feelings is our main business? you can do this without preaching endless sermons to your daughters, without crediting them with your harsh morality. the only effect of such teaching is to inspire a dislike for the teacher and the lessons. in talking to a young girl you need not make her afraid of her duties, nor need you increase the burden laid upon her by nature. when you explain her duties speak plainly and pleasantly; do not let her suppose that the performance of these duties is a dismal thing--away with every affectation of disgust or pride. every thought which we desire to arouse should find its expression in our pupils, their catechism of conduct should be as brief and plain as their catechism of religion, but it need not be so serious. show them that these same duties are the source of their pleasures and the basis of their rights. is it so hard to win love by love, happiness by an amiable disposition, obedience by worth, and honour by self-respect? how fair are these woman's rights, how worthy of reverence, how dear to the heart of man when a woman is able to show their worth! these rights are no privilege of years; a woman's empire begins with her virtues; her charms are only in the bud, yet she reigns already by the gentleness of her character and the dignity of her modesty. is there any man so hard-hearted and uncivilised that he does not abate his pride and take heed to his manners with a sweet and virtuous girl of sixteen, who listens but says little; her bearing is modest, her conversation honest, her beauty does not lead her to forget her sex and her youth, her very timidity arouses interest, while she wins for herself the respect which she shows to others? these external signs are not devoid of meaning; they do not rest entirely upon the charms of sense; they arise from that conviction that we all feel that women are the natural judges of a man's worth. who would be scorned by women? not even he who has ceased to desire their love. and do you suppose that i, who tell them such harsh truths, am indifferent to their verdict? reader, i care more for their approval than for yours; you are often more effeminate than they. while i scorn their morals, i will revere their justice; i care not though they hate me, if i can compel their esteem. what great things might be accomplished by their influence if only we could bring it to bear! alas for the age whose women lose their ascendancy, and fail to make men respect their judgment! this is the last stage of degradation. every virtuous nation has shown respect to women. consider sparta, germany, and rome; rome the throne of glory and virtue, if ever they were enthroned on earth. the roman women awarded honour to the deeds of great generals, they mourned in public for the fathers of the country, their awards and their tears were alike held sacred as the most solemn utterance of the republic. every great revolution began with the women. through a woman rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebeians won the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs was overthrown; it was the women who saved rome when besieged by coriolanus. what would you have said at the sight of this procession, you frenchmen who pride yourselves on your gallantry, would you not have followed it with shouts of laughter? you and i see things with such different eyes, and perhaps we are both right. such a procession formed of the fairest beauties of france would be an indecent spectacle; but let it consist of roman ladies, you will all gaze with the eyes of the volscians and feel with the heart of coriolanus. i will go further and maintain that virtue is no less favourable to love than to other rights of nature, and that it adds as much to the power of the beloved as to that of the wife or mother. there is no real love without enthusiasm, and no enthusiasm without an object of perfection real or supposed, but always present in the imagination. what is there to kindle the hearts of lovers for whom this perfection is nothing, for whom the loved one is merely the means to sensual pleasure? nay, not thus is the heart kindled, not thus does it abandon itself to those sublime transports which form the rapture of lovers and the charm of love. love is an illusion, i grant you, but its reality consists in the feelings it awakes, in the love of true beauty which it inspires. that beauty is not to be found in the object of our affections, it is the creation of our illusions. what matter! do we not still sacrifice all those baser feelings to the imaginary model? and we still feed our hearts on the virtues we attribute to the beloved, we still withdraw ourselves from the baseness of human nature. what lover is there who would not give his life for his mistress? what gross and sensual passion is there in a man who is willing to die? we scoff at the knights of old; they knew the meaning of love; we know nothing but debauchery. when the teachings of romance began to seem ridiculous, it was not so much the work of reason as of immorality. natural relations remain the same throughout the centuries, their good or evil effects are unchanged; prejudices, masquerading as reason, can but change their outward seeming; self-mastery, even at the behest of fantastic opinions, will not cease to be great and good. and the true motives of honour will not fail to appeal to the heart of every woman who is able to seek happiness in life in her woman's duties. to a high-souled woman chastity above all must be a delightful virtue. she sees all the kingdoms of the world before her and she triumphs over herself and them; she sits enthroned in her own soul and all men do her homage; a few passing struggles are crowned with perpetual glory; she secures the affection, or it may be the envy, she secures in any case the esteem of both sexes and the universal respect of her own. the loss is fleeting, the gain is permanent. what a joy for a noble heart--the pride of virtue combined with beauty. let her be a heroine of romance; she will taste delights more exquisite than those of lais and cleopatra; and when her beauty is fled, her glory and her joys remain; she alone can enjoy the past. the harder and more important the duties, the stronger and clearer must be the reasons on which they are based. there is a sort of pious talk about the most serious subjects which is dinned in vain into the ears of young people. this talk, quite unsuited to their ideas and the small importance they attach to it in secret, inclines them to yield readily to their inclinations, for lack of any reasons for resistance drawn from the facts themselves. no doubt a girl brought up to goodness and piety has strong weapons against temptation; but one whose heart, or rather her ears, are merely filled with the jargon of piety, will certainly fall a prey to the first skilful seducer who attacks her. a young and beautiful girl will never despise her body, she will never really deplore sins which her beauty leads men to commit, she will never lament earnestly in the sight of god that she is an object of desire, she will never be convinced that the tenderest feeling is an invention of the evil one. give her other and more pertinent reasons for her own sake, for these will have no effect. it will be worse to instil, as is often done, ideas which contradict each other, and after having humbled and degraded her person and her charms as the stain of sin, to bid her reverence that same vile body as the temple of jesus christ. ideas too sublime and too humble are equally ineffective and they cannot both be true. a reason adapted to her age and sex is what is needed. considerations of duty are of no effect unless they are combined with some motive for the performance of our duty. "quae quia non liceat non facit, illa facit." ovid, amor. i. iii. eleg. iv. one would not suspect ovid of such a harsh judgment. if you would inspire young people with a love of good conduct avoid saying, "be good;" make it their interest to be good; make them feel the value of goodness and they will love it. it is not enough to show this effect in the distant future, show it now, in the relations of the present, in the character of their lovers. describe a good man, a man of worth, teach them to recognise him when they see him, to love him for their own sake; convince them that such a man alone can make them happy as friend, wife, or mistress. let reason lead the way to virtue; make them feel that the empire of their sex and all the advantages derived from it depend not merely on the right conduct, the morality, of women, but also on that of men; that they have little hold over the vile and base, and that the lover is incapable of serving his mistress unless he can do homage to virtue. you may then be sure that when you describe the manners of our age you will inspire them with a genuine disgust; when you show them men of fashion they will despise them; you will give them a distaste for their maxims, an aversion to their sentiments, and a scorn for their empty gallantry; you will arouse a nobler ambition, to reign over great and strong souls, the ambition of the spartan women to rule over men. a bold, shameless, intriguing woman, who can only attract her lovers by coquetry and retain them by her favours, wins a servile obedience in common things; in weighty and important matters she has no influence over them. but the woman who is both virtuous, wise, and charming, she who, in a word, combines love and esteem, can send them at her bidding to the end of the world, to war, to glory, and to death at her behest. this is a fine kingdom and worth the winning. this is the spirit in which sophy has been educated, she has been trained carefully rather than strictly, and her taste has been followed rather than thwarted. let us say just a word about her person, according to the description i have given to emile and the picture he himself has formed of the wife in whom he hopes to find happiness. i cannot repeat too often that i am not dealing with prodigies. emile is no prodigy, neither is sophy. he is a man and she is a woman; this is all they have to boast of. in the present confusion between the sexes it is almost a miracle to belong to one's own sex. sophy is well born and she has a good disposition; she is very warm-hearted, and this warmth of heart sometimes makes her imagination run away with her. her mind is keen rather than accurate, her temper is pleasant but variable, her person pleasing though nothing out of the common, her countenance bespeaks a soul and it speaks true; you may meet her with indifference, but you will not leave her without emotion. others possess good qualities which she lacks; others possess her good qualities in a higher degree, but in no one are these qualities better blended to form a happy disposition. she knows how to make the best of her very faults, and if she were more perfect she would be less pleasing. sophy is not beautiful; but in her presence men forget the fairer women, and the latter are dissatisfied with themselves. at first sight she is hardly pretty; but the more we see her the prettier she is; she wins where so many lose, and what she wins she keeps. her eyes might be finer, her mouth more beautiful, her stature more imposing; but no one could have a more graceful figure, a finer complexion, a whiter hand, a daintier foot, a sweeter look, and a more expressive countenance. she does not dazzle; she arouses interest; she delights us, we know not why. sophy is fond of dress, and she knows how to dress; her mother has no other maid; she has taste enough to dress herself well; but she hates rich clothes; her own are always simple but elegant. she does not like showy but becoming things. she does not know what colours are fashionable, but she makes no mistake about those that suit her. no girl seems more simply dressed, but no one could take more pains over her toilet; no article is selected at random, and yet there is no trace of artificiality. her dress is very modest in appearance and very coquettish in reality; she does not display her charms, she conceals them, but in such a way as to enhance them. when you see her you say, "that is a good modest girl," but while you are with her, you cannot take your eyes or your thoughts off her and one might say that this very simple adornment is only put on to be removed bit by bit by the imagination. sophy has natural gifts; she is aware of them, and they have not been neglected; but never having had a chance of much training she is content to use her pretty voice to sing tastefully and truly; her little feet step lightly, easily, and gracefully, she can always make an easy graceful courtesy. she has had no singing master but her father, no dancing mistress but her mother; a neighbouring organist has given her a few lessons in playing accompaniments on the spinet, and she has improved herself by practice. at first she only wished to show off her hand on the dark keys; then she discovered that the thin clear tone of the spinet made her voice sound sweeter; little by little she recognised the charms of harmony; as she grew older she at last began to enjoy the charms of expression, to love music for its own sake. but she has taste rather than talent; she cannot read a simple air from notes. needlework is what sophy likes best; and the feminine arts have been taught her most carefully, even those you would not expect, such as cutting out and dressmaking. there is nothing she cannot do with her needle, and nothing that she does not take a delight in doing; but lace-making is her favourite occupation, because there is nothing which requires such a pleasing attitude, nothing which calls for such grace and dexterity of finger. she has also studied all the details of housekeeping; she understands cooking and cleaning; she knows the prices of food, and also how to choose it; she can keep accounts accurately, she is her mother's housekeeper. some day she will be the mother of a family; by managing her father's house she is preparing to manage her own; she can take the place of any of the servants and she is always ready to do so. you cannot give orders unless you can do the work yourself; that is why her mother sets her to do it. sophy does not think of that; her first duty is to be a good daughter, and that is all she thinks about for the present. her one idea is to help her mother and relieve her of some of her anxieties. however, she does not like them all equally well. for instance, she likes dainty food, but she does not like cooking; the details of cookery offend her, and things are never clean enough for her. she is extremely sensitive in this respect and carries her sensitiveness to a fault; she would let the whole dinner boil over into the fire rather than soil her cuffs. she has always disliked inspecting the kitchen-garden for the same reason. the soil is dirty, and as soon as she sees the manure heap she fancies there is a disagreeable smell. this defect is the result of her mother's teaching. according to her, cleanliness is one of the most necessary of a woman's duties, a special duty, of the highest importance and a duty imposed by nature. nothing could be more revolting than a dirty woman, and a husband who tires of her is not to blame. she insisted so strongly on this duty when sophy was little, she required such absolute cleanliness in her person, clothing, room, work, and toilet, that use has become habit, till it absorbs one half of her time and controls the other; so that she thinks less of how to do a thing than of how to do it without getting dirty. yet this has not degenerated into mere affectation and softness; there is none of the over refinement of luxury. nothing but clean water enters her room; she knows no perfumes but the scent of flowers, and her husband will never find anything sweeter than her breath. in conclusion, the attention she pays to the outside does not blind her to the fact that time and strength are meant for greater tasks; either she does not know or she despises that exaggerated cleanliness of body which degrades the soul. sophy is more than clean, she is pure. i said that sophy was fond of good things. she was so by nature; but she became temperate by habit and now she is temperate by virtue. little girls are not to be controlled, as little boys are, to some extent, through their greediness. this tendency may have ill effects on women and it is too dangerous to be left unchecked. when sophy was little, she did not always return empty handed if she was sent to her mother's cupboard, and she was not quite to be trusted with sweets and sugar-almonds. her mother caught her, took them from her, punished her, and made her go without her dinner. at last she managed to persuade her that sweets were bad for the teeth, and that over-eating spoiled the figure. thus sophy overcame her faults; and when she grew older other tastes distracted her from this low kind of self-indulgence. with awakening feeling greediness ceases to be the ruling passion, both with men and women. sophy has preserved her feminine tastes; she likes milk and sweets; she likes pastry and made-dishes, but not much meat. she has never tasted wine or spirits; moreover, she eats sparingly; women, who do not work so hard as men, have less waste to repair. in all things she likes what is good, and knows how to appreciate it; but she can also put up with what is not so good, or can go without it. sophy's mind is pleasing but not brilliant, and thorough but not deep; it is the sort of mind which calls for no remark, as she never seems cleverer or stupider than oneself. when people talk to her they always find what she says attractive, though it may not be highly ornamental according to modern ideas of an educated woman; her mind has been formed not only by reading, but by conversation with her father and mother, by her own reflections, and by her own observations in the little world in which she has lived. sophy is naturally merry; as a child she was even giddy; but her mother cured her of her silly ways, little by little, lest too sudden a change should make her self-conscious. thus she became modest and retiring while still a child, and now that she is a child no longer, she finds it easier to continue this conduct than it would have been to acquire it without knowing why. it is amusing to see her occasionally return to her old ways and indulge in childish mirth and then suddenly check herself, with silent lips, downcast eyes, and rosy blushes; neither child nor woman, she may well partake of both. sophy is too sensitive to be always good humoured, but too gentle to let this be really disagreeable to other people; it is only herself who suffers. if you say anything that hurts her she does not sulk, but her heart swells; she tries to run away and cry. in the midst of her tears, at a word from her father or mother she returns at once laughing and playing, secretly wiping her eyes and trying to stifle her sobs. yet she has her whims; if her temper is too much indulged it degenerates into rebellion, and then she forgets herself. but give her time to come round and her way of making you forget her wrong-doing is almost a virtue. if you punish her she is gentle and submissive, and you see that she is more ashamed of the fault than the punishment. if you say nothing, she never fails to make amends, and she does it so frankly and so readily that you cannot be angry with her. she would kiss the ground before the lowest servant and would make no fuss about it; and as soon as she is forgiven, you can see by her delight and her caresses that a load is taken off her heart. in a word, she endures patiently the wrong-doing of others, and she is eager to atone for her own. this amiability is natural to her sex when unspoiled. woman is made to submit to man and to endure even injustice at his hands. you will never bring young lads to this; their feelings rise in revolt against injustice; nature has not fitted them to put up with it. "gravem pelidae stomachum cedere nescii." horace, lib. i. ode vi. sophy's religion is reasonable and simple, with few doctrines and fewer observances; or rather as she knows no course of conduct but the right her whole life is devoted to the service of god and to doing good. in all her parents' teaching of religion she has been trained to a reverent submission; they have often said, "my little girl, this is too hard for you; your husband will teach you when you are grown up." instead of long sermons about piety, they have been content to preach by their example, and this example is engraved on her heart. sophy loves virtue; this love has come to be her ruling passion; she loves virtue because there is nothing fairer in itself, she loves it because it is a woman's glory and because a virtuous woman is little lower than the angels; she loves virtue as the only road to real happiness, because she sees nothing but poverty, neglect, unhappiness, shame, and disgrace in the life of a bad woman; she loves virtue because it is dear to her revered father and to her tender and worthy mother; they are not content to be happy in their own virtue, they desire hers; and she finds her chief happiness in the hope of making them happy. all these feelings inspire an enthusiasm which stirs her heart and keeps all its budding passions in subjection to this noble enthusiasm. sophy will be chaste and good till her dying day; she has vowed it in her secret heart, and not before she knew how hard it would be to keep her vow; she made this vow at a time when she would have revoked it had she been the slave of her senses. sophy is not so fortunate as to be a charming french woman, cold-hearted and vain, who would rather attract attention than give pleasure, who seeks amusement rather than delight. she suffers from a consuming desire for love; it even disturbs and troubles her heart in the midst of festivities; she has lost her former liveliness, and her taste for merry games; far from being afraid of the tedium of solitude she desires it. her thoughts go out to him who will make solitude sweet to her. she finds strangers tedious, she wants a lover, not a circle of admirers. she would rather give pleasure to one good man than be a general favourite, or win that applause of society which lasts but a day and to-morrow is turned to scorn. a woman's judgment develops sooner than a man's; being on the defensive from her childhood up, and intrusted with a treasure so hard to keep, she is earlier acquainted with good and evil. sophy is precocious by temperament in everything, and her judgment is more formed than that of most girls of her age. there is nothing strange in that, maturity is not always reached at the same age. sophy has been taught the duties and rights of her own sex and of ours. she knows men's faults and women's vices; she also knows their corresponding good qualities and virtues, and has them by heart. no one can have a higher ideal of a virtuous woman, but she would rather think of a virtuous man, a man of true worth; she knows that she is made for such a man, that she is worthy of him, that she can make him as happy as he will make her; she is sure she will know him when she sees him; the difficulty is to find him. women are by nature judges of a man's worth, as he is of theirs; this right is reciprocal, and it is recognised as such both by men and women. sophy recognises this right and exercises it, but with the modesty becoming her youth, her inexperience, and her position; she confines her judgment to what she knows, and she only forms an opinion when it may help to illustrate some useful precept. she is extremely careful what she says about those who are absent, particularly if they are women. she thinks that talking about each other makes women spiteful and satirical; so long as they only talk about men they are merely just. so sophy stops there. as to women she never says anything at all about them, except to tell the good she knows; she thinks this is only fair to her sex; and if she knows no good of any woman, she says nothing, and that is enough. sophy has little knowledge of society, but she is observant and obliging, and all that she does is full of grace. a happy disposition does more for her than much art. she has a certain courtesy of her own, which is not dependent on fashion, and does not change with its changes; it is not a matter of custom, but it arises from a feminine desire to please. she is unacquainted with the language of empty compliment, nor does she invent more elaborate compliments of her own; she does not say that she is greatly obliged, that you do her too much honour, that you should not take so much trouble, etc. still less does she try to make phrases of her own. she responds to an attention or a customary piece of politeness by a courtesy or a mere "thank you;" but this phrase in her mouth is quite enough. if you do her a real service, she lets her heart speak, and its words are no empty compliment. she has never allowed french manners to make her a slave to appearances; when she goes from one room to another she does not take the arm of an old gentleman, whom she would much rather help. when a scented fop offers her this empty attention, she leaves him on the staircase and rushes into the room saying that she is not lame. indeed, she will never wear high heels though she is not tall; her feet are small enough to dispense with them. not only does she adopt a silent and respectful attitude towards women, but also towards married men, or those who are much older than herself; she will never take her place above them, unless compelled to do so; and she will return to her own lower place as soon as she can; for she knows that the rights of age take precedence of those of sex, as age is presumably wiser than youth, and wisdom should be held in the greatest honour. with young folks of her own age it is another matter; she requires a different manner to gain their respect, and she knows how to adopt it without dropping the modest ways which become her. if they themselves are shy and modest, she will gladly preserve the friendly familiarity of youth; their innocent conversation will be merry but suitable; if they become serious they must say something useful; if they become silly, she soon puts a stop to it, for she has an utter contempt for the jargon of gallantry, which she considers an insult to her sex. she feels sure that the man she seeks does not speak that jargon, and she will never permit in another what would be displeasing to her in him whose character is engraved on her heart. her high opinion of the rights of women, her pride in the purity of her feelings, that active virtue which is the basis of her self-respect, make her indignant at the sentimental speeches intended for her amusement. she does not receive them with open anger, but with a disconcerting irony or an unexpected iciness. if a fair apollo displays his charms, and makes use of his wit in the praise of her wit, her beauty, and her grace; at the risk of offending him she is quite capable of saying politely, "sir, i am afraid i know that better than you; if we have nothing more interesting to talk about, i think we may put an end to this conversation." to say this with a deep courtesy, and then to withdraw to a considerable distance, is the work of a moment. ask your lady-killers if it is easy to continue to babble to such, an unsympathetic ear. it is not that she is not fond of praise if it is really sincere, and if she thinks you believe what you say. you must show that you appreciate her merit if you would have her believe you. her proud spirit may take pleasure in homage which is based upon esteem, but empty compliments are always rejected; sophy was not meant to practise the small arts of the dancing-girl. with a judgment so mature, and a mind like that of a woman of twenty, sophy, at fifteen, is no longer treated as a child by her parents. no sooner do they perceive the first signs of youthful disquiet than they hasten to anticipate its development, their conversations with her are wise and tender. these wise and tender conversations are in keeping with her age and disposition. if her disposition is what i fancy why should not her father speak to her somewhat after this fashion? "you are a big girl now, sophy, you will soon be a woman. we want you to be happy, for our own sakes as well as yours, for our happiness depends on yours. a good girl finds her own happiness in the happiness of a good man, so we must consider your marriage; we must think of it in good time, for marriage makes or mars our whole life, and we cannot have too much time to consider it. "there is nothing so hard to choose as a good husband, unless it is a good wife. you will be that rare creature, sophy, you will be the crown of our life and the blessing of our declining years; but however worthy you are, there are worthier people upon earth. there is no one who would not do himself honour by marriage with you; there are many who would do you even greater honour than themselves. among these we must try to find one who suits you, we must get to know him and introduce you to him. "the greatest possible happiness in marriage depends on so many points of agreement that it is folly to expect to secure them all. we must first consider the more important matters; if others are to be found along with them, so much the better; if not we must do without them. perfect happiness is not to be found in this world, but we can, at least, avoid the worst form of unhappiness, that for which ourselves are to blame. "there is a natural suitability, there is a suitability of established usage, and a suitability which is merely conventional. parents should decide as to the two latters, and the children themselves should decide as to the former. marriages arranged by parents only depend on a suitability of custom and convention; it is not two people who are united, but two positions and two properties; but these things may change, the people remain, they are always there; and in spite of fortune it is the personal relation that makes a happy or an unhappy marriage. "your mother had rank, i had wealth; this was all that our parents considered in arranging our marriage. i lost my money, she lost her position; forgotten by her family, what good did it do her to be a lady born? in the midst of our misfortunes, the union of our hearts has outweighed them all; the similarity of our tastes led us to choose this retreat; we live happily in our poverty, we are all in all to each other. sophy is a treasure we hold in common, and we thank heaven which has bestowed this treasure and deprived us of all others. you see, my child, whither we have been led by providence; the conventional motives which brought about our marriage no longer exist, our happiness consists in that natural suitability which was held of no account. "husband and wife should choose each other. a mutual liking should be the first bond between them. they should follow the guidance of their own eyes and hearts; when they are married their first duty will be to love one another, and as love and hatred do not depend on ourselves, this duty brings another with it, and they must begin to love each other before marriage. that is the law of nature, and no power can abrogate it; those who have fettered it by so many legal restrictions have given heed rather to the outward show of order than to the happiness of marriage or the morals of the citizen. you see, my dear sophy, we do not preach a harsh morality. it tends to make you your own mistress and to make us leave the choice of your husband to yourself. "when we have told you our reasons for giving you full liberty, it is only fair to speak of your reasons for making a wise use of that liberty. my child, you are good and sensible, upright and pious, you have the accomplishments of a good woman and you are not altogether without charms; but you are poor; you have the gifts most worthy of esteem, but not those which are most esteemed. do not seek what is beyond your reach, and let your ambition be controlled, not by your ideas or ours, but by the opinion of others. if it were merely a question of equal merits, i know not what limits to impose on your hopes; but do not let your ambitions outrun your fortune, and remember it is very small. although a man worthy of you would not consider this inequality an obstacle, you must do what he would not do; sophy must follow her mother's example and only enter a family which counts it an honour to receive her. you never saw our wealth, you were born in our poverty; you make it sweet for us, and you share it without hardship. believe me, sophy, do not seek those good things we indeed thank heaven for having taken from us; we did not know what happiness was till we lost our money. "you are so amiable that you will win affection, and you are not go poor as to be a burden. you will be sought in marriage, it may be by those who are unworthy of you. if they showed themselves in their true colours, you would rate them at their real value; all their outward show would not long deceive you; but though your judgment is good and you know what merit is when you see it, you are inexperienced and you do not know how people can conceal their real selves. a skilful knave might study your tastes in order to seduce you, and make a pretence of those virtues which he does not possess. you would be ruined, sophy, before you knew what you were doing, and you would only perceive your error when you had cause to lament it. the most dangerous snare, the only snare which reason cannot avoid, is that of the senses; if ever you have the misfortune to fall into its toils, you will perceive nothing but fancies and illusions; your eyes will be fascinated, your judgment troubled, your will corrupted, your very error will be dear to you, and even if you were able to perceive it you would not be willing to escape from it. my child, i trust you to sophy's own reason; i do not trust you to the fancies of your own heart. judge for yourself so long as your heart is untouched, but when you love betake yourself to your mother's care. "i propose a treaty between us which shows our esteem for you, and restores the order of nature between us. parents choose a husband for their daughter and she is only consulted as a matter of form; that is the custom. we shall do just the opposite; you will choose, and we shall be consulted. use your right, sophy, use it freely and wisely. the husband suitable for you should be chosen by you not us. but it is for us to judge whether he is really suitable, or whether, without knowing it, you are only following your own wishes. birth, wealth, position, conventional opinions will count for nothing with us. choose a good man whose person and character suit you; whatever he may be in other respects, we will accept him as our son-in-law. he will be rich enough if he has bodily strength, a good character, and family affection. his position will be good enough if it is ennobled by virtue. if everybody blames us, we do not care. we do not seek the approbation of men, but your happiness." i cannot tell my readers what effect such words would have upon girls brought up in their fashion. as for sophy, she will have no words to reply; shame and emotion will not permit her to express herself easily; but i am sure that what was said will remain engraved upon her heart as long as she lives, and that if any human resolution may be trusted, we may rely on her determination to deserve her parent's esteem. at worst let us suppose her endowed with an ardent disposition which will make her impatient of long delays; i maintain that her judgment, her knowledge, her taste, her refinement, and, above all, the sentiments in which she has been brought up from childhood, will outweigh the impetuosity of the senses, and enable her to offer a prolonged resistance, if not to overcome them altogether. she would rather die a virgin martyr than distress her parents by marrying a worthless man and exposing herself to the unhappiness of an ill-assorted marriage. ardent as an italian and sentimental as an englishwoman, she has a curb upon heart and sense in the pride of a spaniard, who even when she seeks a lover does not easily discover one worthy of her. not every one can realise the motive power to be found in a love of what is right, nor the inner strength which results from a genuine love of virtue. there are men who think that all greatness is a figment of the brain, men who with their vile and degraded reason will never recognise the power over human passions which is wielded by the very madness of virtue. you can only teach such men by examples; if they persist in denying their existence, so much the worse for them. if i told them that sophy is no imaginary person, that her name alone is my invention, that her education, her conduct, her character, her very features, really existed, and that her loss is still mourned by a very worthy family, they would, no doubt, refuse to believe me; but indeed why should i not venture to relate word for word the story of a girl so like sophy that this story might be hers without surprising any one. believe it or no, it is all the same to me; call my history fiction if you will; in any case i have explained my method and furthered my purpose. this young girl with the temperament which i have attributed to sophy was so like her in other respects that she was worthy of the name, and so we will continue to use it. after the conversation related above, her father and mother thought that suitable husbands would not be likely to offer themselves in the hamlet where they lived; so they decided to send her to spend the winter in town, under the care of an aunt who was privately acquainted with the object of the journey; for sophy's heart throbbed with noble pride at the thought of her self-control; and however much she might want to marry, she would rather have died a maid than have brought herself to go in search of a husband. in response to her parents' wishes her aunt introduced her to her friends, took her into company, both private and public, showed her society, or rather showed her in society, for sophy paid little heed to its bustle. yet it was plain that she did not shrink from young men of pleasing appearance and modest seemly behaviour. her very shyness had a charm of its own, which was very much like coquetry; but after talking to them once or twice she repulsed them. she soon exchanged that air of authority which seems to accept men's homage for a humbler bearing and a still more chilling politeness. always watchful over her conduct, she gave them no chance of doing her the least service; it was perfectly plain that she was determined not to accept any one of them. never did sensitive heart take pleasure in noisy amusements, the empty and barren delights of those who have no feelings, those who think that a merry life is a happy life. sophy did not find what she sought, and she felt sure she never would, so she got tired of the town. she loved her parents dearly and nothing made up for their absence, nothing could make her forget them; she went home long before the time fixed for the end of her visit. scarcely had she resumed her home duties when they perceived that her temper had changed though her conduct was unaltered, she was forgetful, impatient, sad, and dreamy; she wept in secret. at first they thought she was in love and was ashamed to own it; they spoke to her, but she repudiated the idea. she protested she had seen no one who could touch her heart, and sophy always spoke the truth. yet her languor steadily increased, and her health began to give way. her mother was anxious about her, and determined to know the reason for this change. she took her aside, and with the winning speech and the irresistible caresses which only a mother can employ, she said, "my child, whom i have borne beneath my heart, whom i bear ever in my affection, confide your secret to your mother's bosom. what secrets are these which a mother may not know? who pities your sufferings, who shares them, who would gladly relieve them, if not your father and myself? ah, my child! would you have me die of grief for your sorrow without letting me share it?" far from hiding her griefs from her mother, the young girl asked nothing better than to have her as friend and comforter; but she could not speak for shame, her modesty could find no words to describe a condition so unworthy of her, as the emotion which disturbed her senses in spite of all her efforts. at length her very shame gave her mother a clue to her difficulty, and she drew from her the humiliating confession. far from distressing her with reproaches or unjust blame, she consoled her, pitied her, wept over her; she was too wise to make a crime of an evil which virtue alone made so cruel. but why put up with such an evil when there was no necessity to do so, when the remedy was so easy and so legitimate? why did she not use the freedom they had granted her? why did she not take a husband? why did she not make her choice? did she not know that she was perfectly independent in this matter, that whatever her choice, it would be approved, for it was sure to be good? they had sent her to town, but she would not stay; many suitors had offered themselves, but she would have none of them. what did she expect? what did she want? what an inexplicable contradiction? the reply was simple. if it were only a question of the partner of her youth, her choice would soon be made; but a master for life is not so easily chosen; and since the two cannot be separated, people must often wait and sacrifice their youth before they find the man with whom they could spend their life. such was sophy's case; she wanted a lover, but this lover must be her husband; and to discover a heart such as she required, a lover and husband were equally difficult to find. all these dashing young men were only her equals in age, in everything else they were found lacking; their empty wit, their vanity, their affectations of speech, their ill-regulated conduct, their frivolous imitations alike disgusted her. she sought a man and she found monkeys; she sought a soul and there was none to be found. "how unhappy i am!" said she to her mother; "i am compelled to love and yet i am dissatisfied with every one. my heart rejects every one who appeals to my senses. every one of them stirs my passions and all alike revolt them; a liking unaccompanied by respect cannot last. that is not the sort of man for your sophy; the delightful image of her ideal is too deeply graven in her heart. she can love no other; she can make no one happy but him, and she cannot be happy without him. she would rather consume herself in ceaseless conflicts, she would rather die free and wretched, than driven desperate by the company of a man she did not love, a man she would make as unhappy as herself; she would rather die than live to suffer." amazed at these strange ideas, her mother found them so peculiar that she could not fail to suspect some mystery. sophy was neither affected nor absurd. how could such exaggerated delicacy exist in one who had been so carefully taught from her childhood to adapt herself to those with whom she must live, and to make a virtue of necessity? this ideal of the delightful man with which she was so enchanted, who appeared so often in her conversation, made her mother suspect that there was some foundation for her caprices which was still unknown to her, and that sophy had not told her all. the unhappy girl, overwhelmed with her secret grief, was only too eager to confide it to another. her mother urged her to speak; she hesitated, she yielded, and leaving the room without a word, she presently returned with a book in her hand. "have pity on your unhappy daughter, there is no remedy for her grief, her tears cannot be dried. you would know the cause: well, here it is," said she, flinging the book on the table. her mother took the book and opened it; it was the adventures of telemachus. at first she could make nothing of this riddle; by dint of questions and vague replies, she discovered to her great surprise that her daughter was the rival of eucharis. sophy was in love with telemachus, and loved him with a passion which nothing could cure. when her father and mother became aware of her infatuation, they laughed at it and tried to cure her by reasoning with her. they were mistaken, reason was not altogether on their side; sophy had her own reason and knew how to use it. many a time did she reduce them to silence by turning their own arguments against them, by showing them that it was all their own fault for not having trained her to suit the men of that century; that she would be compelled to adopt her husband's way of thinking or he must adopt hers, that they had made the former course impossible by the way she had been brought up, and that the latter was just what she wanted. "give me," said she, "a man who holds the same opinions as i do, or one who will be willing to learn them from me, and i will marry him; but until then, why do you scold me? pity me; i am miserable, but not mad. is the heart controlled by the will? did my father not ask that very question? is it my fault if i love what has no existence? i am no visionary; i desire no prince, i seek no telemachus, i know he is only an imaginary person; i seek some one like him. and why should there be no such person, since there is such a person as i, i who feel that my heart is like his? no, let us not wrong humanity so greatly, let us not think that an amiable and virtuous man is a figment of the imagination. he exists, he lives, perhaps he is seeking me; he is seeking a soul which is capable of love for him. but who is he, where is he? i know not; he is not among those i have seen; and no doubt i shall never see him. oh! mother, why did you make virtue too attractive? if i can love nothing less, you are more to blame than i." must i continue this sad story to its close? must i describe the long struggles which preceded it? must i show an impatient mother exchanging her former caresses for severity? must i paint an angry father forgetting his former promises, and treating the most virtuous of daughters as a mad woman? must i portray the unhappy girl, more than ever devoted to her imaginary hero, because of the persecution brought upon her by that devotion, drawing nearer step by step to her death, and descending into the grave when they were about to force her to the altar? no; i will not dwell upon these gloomy scenes; i have no need to go so far to show, by what i consider a sufficiently striking example, that in spite of the prejudices arising from the manners of our age, the enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful is no more foreign to women than to men, and that there is nothing which, under nature's guidance, cannot be obtained from them as well as from us. you stop me here to inquire whether it is nature which teaches us to take such pains to repress our immoderate desires. no, i reply, but neither is it nature who gives us these immoderate desires. now, all that is not from nature is contrary to nature, as i have proved again and again. let us give emile his sophy; let us restore this sweet girl to life and provide her with a less vivid imagination and a happier fate. i desired to paint an ordinary woman, but by endowing her with a great soul, i have disturbed her reason. i have gone astray. let us retrace our steps. sophy has only a good disposition and an ordinary heart; her education is responsible for everything in which she excels other women. in this book i intended to describe all that might be done and to leave every one free to choose what he could out of all the good things i described. i meant to train a helpmeet for emile, from the very first, and to educate them for each other and with each other. but on consideration i thought all these premature arrangements undesirable, for it was absurd to plan the marriage of two children before i could tell whether this union was in accordance with nature and whether they were really suited to each other. we must not confuse what is suitable in a state of savagery with what is suitable in civilised life. in the former, any woman will suit any man, for both are still in their primitive and undifferentiated condition; in the latter, all their characteristics have been developed by social institutions, and each mind, having taken its own settled form, not from education alone, but by the co-operation, more or less well-regulated, of natural disposition and education, we can only make a match by introducing them to each other to see if they suit each other in every respect, or at least we can let them make that choice which gives the most promise of mutual suitability. the difficulty is this: while social life develops character it differentiates classes, and these two classifications do not correspond, so that the greater the social distinctions, the greater the difficulty of finding the corresponding character. hence we have ill-assorted marriages and all their accompanying evils; and we find that it follows logically that the further we get from equality, the greater the change in our natural feelings; the wider the distance between great and small, the looser the marriage tie; the deeper the gulf between rich and poor the fewer husbands and fathers. neither master nor slave belongs to a family, but only to a class. if you would guard against these abuses, and secure happy marriages, you must stifle your prejudices, forget human institutions, and consult nature. do not join together those who are only alike in one given condition, those who will not suit one another if that condition is changed; but those who are adapted to one another in every situation, in every country, and in every rank in which they may be placed. i do not say that conventional considerations are of no importance in marriage, but i do say that the influence of natural relations is so much more important, that our fate in life is decided by them alone, and that there is such an agreement of taste, temper, feeling, and disposition as should induce a wise father, though he were a prince, to marry his son, without a moment's hesitation, to the woman so adapted to him, were she born in a bad home, were she even the hangman's daughter. i maintain indeed that every possible misfortune may overtake husband and wife if they are thus united, yet they will enjoy more real happiness while they mingle their tears, than if they possessed all the riches of the world, poisoned by divided hearts. instead of providing a wife for emile in childhood, i have waited till i knew what would suit him. it is not for me to decide, but for nature; my task is to discover the choice she has made. my business, mine i repeat, not his father's; for when he entrusted his son to my care, he gave up his place to me. he gave me his rights; it is i who am really emile's father; it is i who have made a man of him. i would have refused to educate him if i were not free to marry him according to his own choice, which is mine. nothing but the pleasure of bestowing happiness on a man can repay me for the cost of making him capable of happiness. do not suppose, however, that i have delayed to find a wife for emile till i sent him in search of her. this search is only a pretext for acquainting him with women, so that he may perceive the value of a suitable wife. sophy was discovered long since; emile may even have seen her already, but he will not recognise her till the time is come. although equality of rank is not essential in marriage, yet this equality along with other kinds of suitability increases their value; it is not to be weighed against any one of them, but, other things being equal, it turns the scale. a man, unless he is a king, cannot seek a wife in any and every class; if he himself is free from prejudices, he will find them in others; and this girl or that might perhaps suit him and yet she would be beyond his reach. a wise father will therefore restrict his inquiries within the bounds of prudence. he should not wish to marry his pupil into a family above his own, for that is not within his power. if he could do so he ought not desire it; for what difference does rank make to a young man, at least to my pupil? yet, if he rises he is exposed to all sorts of real evils which he will feel all his life long. i even say that he should not try to adjust the balance between different gifts, such as rank and money; for each of these adds less to the value of the other than the amount deducted from its own value in the process of adjustment; moreover, we can never agree as to a common denominator; and finally the preference, which each feels for his own surroundings, paves the way for discord between the two families and often to difficulties between husband and wife. it makes a considerable difference as to the suitability of a marriage whether a man marries above or beneath him. the former case is quite contrary to reason, the latter is more in conformity with reason. as the family is only connected with society through its head, it is the rank of that head which decides that of the family as a whole. when he marries into a lower rank, a man does not lower himself, he raises his wife; if, on the other hand, he marries above his position, he lowers his wife and does not raise himself. thus there is in the first case good unmixed with evil, in the other evil unmixed with good. moreover, the law of nature bids the woman obey the man. if he takes a wife from a lower class, natural and civil law are in accordance and all goes well. when he marries a woman of higher rank it is just the opposite case; the man must choose between diminished rights or imperfect gratitude; he must be ungrateful or despised. then the wife, laying claim to authority, makes herself a tyrant over her lawful head; and the master, who has become a slave, is the most ridiculous and miserable of creatures. such are the unhappy favourites whom the sovereigns of asia honour and torment with their alliance; people tell us that if they desire to sleep with their wife they must enter by the foot of the bed. i expect that many of my readers will remember that i think women have a natural gift for managing men, and will accuse me of contradicting myself; yet they are mistaken. there is a vast difference between claiming the right to command, and managing him who commands. woman's reign is a reign of gentleness, tact, and kindness; her commands are caresses, her threats are tears. she should reign in the home as a minister reigns in the state, by contriving to be ordered to do what she wants. in this sense, i grant you, that the best managed homes are those where the wife has most power. but when she despises the voice of her head, when she desires to usurp his rights and take the command upon herself, this inversion of the proper order of things leads only to misery, scandal, and dishonour. there remains the choice between our equals and our inferiors; and i think we ought also to make certain restrictions with regard to the latter; for it is hard to find in the lowest stratum of society a woman who is able to make a good man happy; not that the lower classes are more vicious than the higher, but because they have so little idea of what is good and beautiful, and because the injustice of other classes makes its very vices seem right in the eyes of this class. by nature man thinks but seldom. he learns to think as he acquires the other arts, but with even greater difficulty. in both sexes alike i am only aware of two really distinct classes, those who think and those who do not; and this difference is almost entirely one of education. a man who thinks should not ally himself with a woman who does not think, for he loses the chief delight of social life if he has a wife who cannot share his thoughts. people who spend their whole life in working for a living have no ideas beyond their work and their own interests, and their mind seems to reside in their arms. this ignorance is not necessarily unfavourable either to their honesty or their morals; it is often favourable; we often content ourselves with thinking about our duties, and in the end we substitute words for things. conscience is the most enlightened philosopher; to be an honest man we need not read cicero's de officiis, and the most virtuous woman in the world is probably she who knows least about virtue. but it is none the less true that a cultivated mind alone makes intercourse pleasant, and it is a sad thing for a father of a family, who delights in his home, to be forced to shut himself up in himself and to be unable to make himself understood. moreover, if a woman is quite unaccustomed to think, how can she bring up her children? how will she know what is good for them? how can she incline them to virtues of which she is ignorant, to merit of which she has no conception? she can only flatter or threaten, she can only make them insolent or timid; she will make them performing monkeys or noisy little rascals; she will never make them intelligent or pleasing children. therefore it is not fitting that a man of education should choose a wife who has none, or take her from a class where she cannot be expected to have any education. but i would a thousand times rather have a homely girl, simply brought up, than a learned lady and a wit who would make a literary circle of my house and install herself as its president. a female wit is a scourge to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, to everybody. from the lofty height of her genius she scorns every womanly duty, and she is always trying to make a man of herself after the fashion of mlle. de l'enclos. outside her home she always makes herself ridiculous and she is very rightly a butt for criticism, as we always are when we try to escape from our own position into one for which we are unfitted. these highly talented women only get a hold over fools. we can always tell what artist or friend holds the pen or pencil when they are at work; we know what discreet man of letters dictates their oracles in private. this trickery is unworthy of a decent woman. if she really had talents, her pretentiousness would degrade them. her honour is to be unknown; her glory is the respect of her husband; her joys the happiness of her family. i appeal to my readers to give me an honest answer; when you enter a woman's room what makes you think more highly of her, what makes you address her with more respect--to see her busy with feminine occupations, with her household duties, with her children's clothes about her, or to find her writing verses at her toilet table surrounded with pamphlets of every kind and with notes on tinted paper? if there were none but wise men upon earth such a woman would die an old maid. "quaeris cur nolim te ducere, galla? diserta es." martial xi. . looks must next be considered; they are the first thing that strikes us and they ought to be the last, still they should not count for nothing. i think that great beauty is rather to be shunned than sought after in marriage. possession soon exhausts our appreciation of beauty; in six weeks' time we think no more about it, but its dangers endure as long as life itself. unless a beautiful woman is an angel, her husband is the most miserable of men; and even if she were an angel he would still be the centre of a hostile crowd and she could not prevent it. if extreme ugliness were not repulsive i should prefer it to extreme beauty; for before very long the husband would cease to notice either, but beauty would still have its disadvantages and ugliness its advantages. but ugliness which is actually repulsive is the worst misfortune; repulsion increases rather than diminishes, and it turns to hatred. such a union is a hell upon earth; better death than such a marriage. desire mediocrity in all things, even in beauty. a pleasant attractive countenance, which inspires kindly feelings rather than love, is what we should prefer; the husband runs no risk, and the advantages are common to husband and wife; charm is less perishable than beauty; it is a living thing, which constantly renews itself, and after thirty years of married life, the charms of a good woman delight her husband even as they did on the wedding-day. such are the considerations which decided my choice of sophy. brought up, like emile, by nature, she is better suited to him than any other; she will be his true mate. she is his equal in birth and character, his inferior in fortune. she makes no great impression at first sight, but day by day reveals fresh charms. her chief influence only takes effect gradually, it is only discovered in friendly intercourse; and her husband will feel it more than any one. her education is neither showy nor neglected; she has taste without deep study, talent without art, judgment without learning. her mind knows little, but it is trained to learn; it is well-tilled soil ready for the sower. she has read no book but bareme and telemachus which happened to fall into her hands; but no girl who can feel so passionately towards telemachus can have a heart without feeling or a mind without discernment. what charming ignorance! happy is he who is destined to be her tutor. she will not be her husband's teacher but his scholar; far from seeking to control his tastes, she will share them. she will suit him far better than a blue-stocking and he will have the pleasure of teaching her everything. it is time they made acquaintance; let us try to plan a meeting. when we left paris we were sorrowful and wrapped in thought. this babel is not our home. emile casts a scornful glance towards the great city, saying angrily, "what a time we have wasted; the bride of my heart is not there. my friend, you knew it, but you think nothing of my time, and you pay no heed to my sufferings." with steady look and firm voice i reply, "emile, do you mean what you say?" at once he flings his arms round my neck and clasps me to his breast without speaking. that is his answer when he knows he is in the wrong. and now we are wandering through the country like true knights-errant; yet we are not seeking adventures when we leave paris; we are escaping from them; now fast now slow, we wander through the country like knights-errants. by following my usual practice the taste for it has become established; and i do not suppose any of my readers are such slaves of custom as to picture us dozing in a post-chaise with closed windows, travelling, yet seeing nothing, observing nothing, making the time between our start and our arrival a mere blank, and losing in the speed of our journey, the time we meant to save. men say life is short, and i see them doing their best to shorten it. as they do not know how to spend their time they lament the swiftness of its flight, and i perceive that for them it goes only too slowly. intent merely on the object of their pursuit, they behold unwillingly the space between them and it; one desires to-morrow, another looks a month ahead, another ten years beyond that. no one wants to live to-day, no one contents himself with the present hour, all complain that it passes slowly. when they complain that time flies, they lie; they would gladly purchase the power to hasten it; they would gladly spend their fortune to get rid of their whole life; and there is probably not a single one who would not have reduced his life to a few hours if he had been free to get rid of those hours he found tedious, and those which separated him from the desired moment. a man spends his whole life rushing from paris to versailles, from versailles to paris, from town to country, from country to town, from one district of the town to another; but he would not know what to do with his time if he had not discovered this way of wasting it, by leaving his business on purpose to find something to do in coming back to it; he thinks he is saving the time he spends, which would otherwise be unoccupied; or maybe he rushes for the sake of rushing, and travels post in order to return in the same fashion. when will mankind cease to slander nature? why do you complain that life is short when it is never short enough for you? if there were but one of you, able to moderate his desires, so that he did not desire the flight of time, he would never find life too short; for him life and the joy of life would be one and the same; should he die young, he would still die full of days. if this were the only advantage of my way of travelling it would be enough. i have brought emile up neither to desire nor to wait, but to enjoy; and when his desires are bent upon the future, their ardour is not so great as to make time seem tedious. he will not only enjoy the delights of longing, but the delights of approaching the object of his desires; and his passions are under such restraint that he lives to a great extent in the present. so we do not travel like couriers but like explorers. we do not merely consider the beginning and the end, but the space between. the journey itself is a delight. we do not travel sitting, dismally imprisoned, so to speak, in a tightly closed cage. we do not travel with the ease and comfort of ladies. we do not deprive ourselves of the fresh air, nor the sight of the things about us, nor the opportunity of examining them at our pleasure. emile will never enter a post-chaise, nor will he ride post unless in a great hurry. but what cause has emile for haste? none but the joy of life. shall i add to this the desire to do good when he can? no, for that is itself one of the joys of life. i can only think of one way of travelling pleasanter than travelling on horseback, and that is to travel on foot. you start at your own time, you stop when you will, you do as much or as little as you choose. you see the country, you turn off to the right or left; you examine anything which interests you, you stop to admire every view. do i see a stream, i wander by its banks; a leafy wood, i seek its shade; a cave, i enter it; a quarry, i study its geology. if i like a place, i stop there. as soon as i am weary of it, i go on. i am independent of horses and postillions; i need not stick to regular routes or good roads; i go anywhere where a man can go; i see all that a man can see; and as i am quite independent of everybody, i enjoy all the freedom man can enjoy. if i am stopped by bad weather and i find myself getting bored, then i take horses. if i am tired--but emile is hardly ever tired; he is strong; why should he get tired? there is no hurry? if he stops, why should he be bored? he always finds some amusement. he works at a trade; he uses his arms to rest his feet. to travel on foot is to travel in the fashion of thales, plato, and pythagoras. i find it hard to understand how a philosopher can bring himself to travel in any other way; how he can tear himself from the study of the wealth which lies before his eyes and beneath his feet. is there any one with an interest in agriculture, who does not want to know the special products of the district through which he is passing, and their method of cultivation? is there any one with a taste for natural history, who can pass a piece of ground without examining it, a rock without breaking off a piece of it, hills without looking for plants, and stones without seeking for fossils? your town-bred scientists study natural history in cabinets; they have small specimens; they know their names but nothing of their nature. emile's museum is richer than that of kings; it is the whole world. everything is in its right place; the naturalist who is its curator has taken care to arrange it in the fairest order; dauberton could do no better. what varied pleasures we enjoy in this delightful way of travelling, not to speak of increasing health and a cheerful spirit. i notice that those who ride in nice, well-padded carriages are always wrapped in thought, gloomy, fault-finding, or sick; while those who go on foot are always merry, light-hearted, and delighted with everything. how cheerful we are when we get near our lodging for the night! how savoury is the coarse food! how we linger at table enjoying our rest! how soundly we sleep on a hard bed! if you only want to get to a place you may ride in a post-chaise; if you want to travel you must go on foot. if sophy is not forgotten before we have gone fifty leagues in the way i propose, either i am a bungler or emile lacks curiosity; for with an elementary knowledge of so many things, it is hardly to be supposed that he will not be tempted to extend his knowledge. it is knowledge that makes us curious; and emile knows just enough to want to know more. one thing leads on to another, and we make our way forward. if i chose a distant object for the end of our first journey, it is not difficult to find an excuse for it; when we leave paris we must seek a wife at a distance. a few days later we had wandered further than usual among hills and valleys where no road was to be seen and we lost our way completely. no matter, all roads are alike if they bring you to your journey's end, but if you are hungry they must lead somewhere. luckily we came across a peasant who took up to his cottage; we enjoyed his poor dinner with a hearty appetite. when he saw how hungry and tired we were he said, "if the lord had led you to the other side of the hill you would have had a better welcome, you would have found a good resting place, such good, kindly people! they could not wish to do more for you than i, but they are richer, though folks say they used to be much better off. still they are not reduced to poverty, and the whole country-side is the better for what they have." when emile heard of these good people his heart warmed to them. "my friend," said he, looking at me, "let us visit this house, whose owners are a blessing to the district; i shall be very glad to see them; perhaps they will be pleased to see us too; i am sure we shall be welcome; we shall just suit each other." our host told us how to find our way to the house and we set off, but lost our way in the woods. we were caught in a heavy rainstorm, which delayed us further. at last we found the right path and in the evening we reached the house, which had been described to us. it was the only house among the cottages of the little hamlet, and though plain it had an air of dignity. we went up to the door and asked for hospitality. we were taken to the owner of the house, who questioned us courteously; without telling him the object of our journey, we told him why we had left our path. his former wealth enabled him to judge a man's position by his manners; those who have lived in society are rarely mistaken; with this passport we were admitted. the room we were shown into was very small, but clean and comfortable; a fire was lighted, and we found linen, clothes, and everything we needed. "why," said emile, in astonishment, "one would think they were expecting us. the peasant was quite right; how kind and attentive, how considerate, and for strangers too! i shall think i am living in the times of homer." "i am glad you feel this," said i, "but you need not be surprised; where strangers are scarce, they are welcome; nothing makes people more hospitable than the fact that calls upon their hospitality are rare; when guests are frequent there is an end to hospitality. in homer's time, people rarely travelled, and travellers were everywhere welcome. very likely we are the only people who have passed this way this year." "never mind," said he, "to know how to do without guests and yet to give them a kind welcome, is its own praise." having dried ourselves and changed our clothes, we rejoined the master of the house, who introduced us to his wife; she received us not merely with courtesy but with kindness. her glance rested on emile. a mother, in her position, rarely receives a young man into her house without some anxiety or some curiosity at least. supper was hurried forward on our account. when we went into the dining-room there were five places laid; we took our seats and the fifth chair remained empty. presently a young girl entered, made a deep courtesy, and modestly took her place without a word. emile was busy with his supper or considering how to reply to what was said to him; he bowed to her and continued talking and eating. the main object of his journey was as far from his thoughts as he believed himself to be from the end of his journey. the conversation turned upon our losing our way. "sir," said the master of the house to emile, "you seem to be a pleasant well-behaved young gentleman, and that reminds me that your tutor and you arrived wet and weary like telemachus and mentor in the island of calypso." "indeed," said emile, "we have found the hospitality of calypso." his mentor added, "and the charms of eucharis." but emile knew the odyssey and he had not read telemachus, so he knew nothing of eucharis. as for the young girl, i saw she blushed up to her eyebrows, fixed her eyes on her plate, and hardly dared to breathe. her mother, noticing her confusion, made a sign to her father to turn the conversation. when he talked of his lonely life, he unconsciously began to relate the circumstances which brought him into it; his misfortunes, his wife's fidelity, the consolations they found in their marriage, their quiet, peaceful life in their retirement, and all this without a word of the young girl; it is a pleasing and a touching story, which cannot fail to interest. emile, interested and sympathetic, leaves off eating and listens. when finally this best of men discourses with delight of the affection of the best of women, the young traveller, carried away by his feelings, stretches one hand to the husband, and taking the wife's hand with the other, he kisses it rapturously and bathes it with his tears. everybody is charmed with the simple enthusiasm of the young man; but the daughter, more deeply touched than the rest by this evidence of his kindly heart, is reminded of telemachus weeping for the woes of philoctetus. she looks at him shyly, the better to study his countenance; there is nothing in it to give the lie to her comparison. his easy bearing shows freedom without pride; his manners are lively but not boisterous; sympathy makes his glance softer and his expression more pleasing; the young girl, seeing him weep, is ready to mingle her tears with his. with so good an excuse for tears, she is restrained by a secret shame; she blames herself already for the tears which tremble on her eyelids, as though it were wrong to weep for one's family. her mother, who has been watching her ever since she sat down to supper, sees her distress, and to relieve it she sends her on some errand. the daughter returns directly, but so little recovered that her distress is apparent to all. her mother says gently, "sophy, control yourself; will you never cease to weep for the misfortunes of your parents? why should you, who are their chief comfort, be more sensitive than they are themselves?" at the name of sophy you would have seen emile give a start. his attention is arrested by this dear name, and he awakes all at once and looks eagerly at one who dares to bear it. sophy! are you the sophy whom my heart is seeking? is it you that i love? he looks at her; he watches her with a sort of fear and self-distrust. the face is not quite what he pictured; he cannot tell whether he likes it more or less. he studies every feature, he watches every movement, every gesture; he has a hundred fleeting interpretations for them all; he would give half his life if she would but speak. he looks at me anxiously and uneasily; his eyes are full of questions and reproaches. his every glance seems to say, "guide me while there is yet time; if my heart yields itself and is deceived, i shall never get over it." there is no one in the world less able to conceal his feelings than emile. how should he conceal them, in the midst of the greatest disturbance he has ever experienced, and under the eyes of four spectators who are all watching him, while she who seems to heed him least is really most occupied with him. his uneasiness does not escape the keen eyes of sophy; his own eyes tell her that she is its cause; she sees that this uneasiness is not yet love; what matter? he is thinking of her, and that is enough; she will be very unlucky if he thinks of her with impunity. mothers, like daughters, have eyes; and they have experience too. sophy's mother smiles at the success of our schemes. she reads the hearts of the young people; she sees that the time has come to secure the heart of this new telemachus; she makes her daughter speak. her daughter, with her native sweetness, replies in a timid tone which makes all the more impression. at the first sound of her voice, emile surrenders; it is sophy herself; there can be no doubt about it. if it were not so, it would be too late to deny it. the charms of this maiden enchantress rush like torrents through his heart, and he begins to drain the draughts of poison with which he is intoxicated. he says nothing; questions pass unheeded; he sees only sophy, he hears only sophy; if she says a word, he opens his mouth; if her eyes are cast down, so are his; if he sees her sigh, he sighs too; it is sophy's heart which seems to speak in his. what a change have these few moments wrought in her heart! it is no longer her turn to tremble, it is emile's. farewell liberty, simplicity, frankness. confused, embarrassed, fearful, he dare not look about him for fear he should see that we are watching him. ashamed that we should read his secret, he would fain become invisible to every one, that he might feed in secret on the sight of sophy. sophy, on the other hand, regains her confidence at the sight of emile's fear; she sees her triumph and rejoices in it. "no'l mostra gia, ben che in suo cor ne rida." tasso, jerus. del., c. iv. v. . her expression remains unchanged; but in spite of her modest look and downcast eyes, her tender heart is throbbing with joy, and it tells her that she has found telemachus. if i relate the plain and simple tale of their innocent affections you will accuse me of frivolity, but you will be mistaken. sufficient attention is not given to the effect which the first connection between man and woman is bound to produce on the future life of both. people do not see that a first impression so vivid as that of love, or the liking which takes the place of love, produces lasting effects whose influence continues till death. works on education are crammed with wordy and unnecessary accounts of the imaginary duties of children; but there is not a word about the most important and most difficult part of their education, the crisis which forms the bridge between the child and the man. if any part of this work is really useful, it will be because i have dwelt at great length on this matter, so essential in itself and so neglected by other authors, and because i have not allowed myself to be discouraged either by false delicacy or by the difficulties of expression. the story of human nature is a fair romance. am i to blame if it is not found elsewhere? i am trying to write the history of mankind. if my book is a romance, the fault lies with those who deprave mankind. this is supported by another reason; we are not dealing with a youth given over from childhood to fear, greed, envy, pride, and all those passions which are the common tools of the schoolmaster; we have to do with a youth who is not only in love for the first time, but with one who is also experiencing his first passion of any kind; very likely it will be the only strong passion he will ever know, and upon it depends the final formation of his character. his mode of thought, his feelings, his tastes, determined by a lasting passion, are about to become so fixed that they will be incapable of further change. you will easily understand that emile and i do not spend the whole of the night which follows after such an evening in sleep. why! do you mean to tell me that a wise man should be so much affected by a mere coincidence of name! is there only one sophy in the world? are they all alike in heart and in name? is every sophy he meets his sophy? is he mad to fall in love with a person of whom he knows so little, with whom he has scarcely exchanged a couple of words? wait, young man; examine, observe. you do not even know who our hosts may be, and to hear you talk one would think the house was your own. this is no time for teaching, and what i say will receive scant attention. it only serves to stimulate emile to further interest in sophy, through his desire to find reasons for his fancy. the unexpected coincidence in the name, the meeting which, so far as he knows, was quite accidental, my very caution itself, only serve as fuel to the fire. he is so convinced already of sophy's excellence, that he feels sure he can make me fond of her. next morning i have no doubt emile will make himself as smart as his old travelling suit permits. i am not mistaken; but i am amused to see how eager he is to wear the clean linen put out for us. i know his thoughts, and i am delighted to see that he is trying to establish a means of intercourse, through the return and exchange of the linen; so that he may have a right to return it and so pay another visit to the house. i expected to find sophy rather more carefully dressed too; but i was mistaken. such common coquetry is all very well for those who merely desire to please. the coquetry of true love is a more delicate matter; it has quite another end in view. sophy is dressed, if possible, more simply than last night, though as usual her frock is exquisitely clean. the only sign of coquetry is her self-consciousness. she knows that an elaborate toilet is a sign of love, but she does not know that a careless toilet is another of its signs; it shows a desire to be like not merely for one's clothes but for oneself. what does a lover care for her clothes if he knows she is thinking of him? sophy is already sure of her power over emile, and she is not content to delight his eyes if his heart is not hers also; he must not only perceive her charms, he must divine them; has he not seen enough to guess the rest? we may take it for granted that while emile and i were talking last night, sophy and her mother were not silent; a confession was made and instructions given. the morning's meeting is not unprepared. twelve hours ago our young people had never met; they have never said a word to each other; but it is clear that there is already an understanding between them. their greeting is formal, confused, timid; they say nothing, their downcast eyes seem to avoid each other, but that is in itself a sign that they understand, they avoid each other with one consent; they already feel the need of concealment, though not a word has been uttered. when we depart we ask leave to come again to return the borrowed clothes in person, emile's words are addressed to the father and mother, but his eyes seek sophy's, and his looks are more eloquent than his words. sophy says nothing by word or gesture; she seems deaf and blind, but she blushes, and that blush is an answer even plainer than that of her parents. we receive permission to come again, though we are not invited to stay. this is only fitting; you offer shelter to benighted travellers, but a lover does not sleep in the house of his mistress. we have hardly left the beloved abode before emile is thinking of taking rooms in the neighbourhood; the nearest cottage seems too far; he would like to sleep in the next ditch. "you young fool!" i said in a tone of pity, "are you already blinded by passion? have you no regard for manners or for reason? wretched youth, you call yourself a lover and you would bring disgrace upon her you love! what would people say of her if they knew that a young man who has been staying at her house was sleeping close by? you say you love her! would you ruin her reputation? is that the price you offer for her parents' hospitality? would you bring disgrace on her who will one day make you the happiest of men?" "why should we trouble ourselves about the empty words and unjust suspicions of other people?" said he eagerly. "have you not taught me yourself to make light of them? who knows better than i how greatly i honour sophy, what respect i desire to show her? my attachment will not cause her shame, it will be her glory, it shall be worthy of her. if my heart and my actions continually give her the homage she deserves, what harm can i do her?" "dear emile," i said, as i clasped him to my heart, "you are thinking of yourself alone; learn to think for her too. do not compare the honour of one sex with that of the other, they rest on different foundations. these foundations are equally firm and right, because they are both laid by nature, and that same virtue which makes you scorn what men say about yourself, binds you to respect what they say of her you love. your honour is in your own keeping, her honour depends on others. to neglect it is to wound your own honour, and you fail in what is due to yourself if you do not give her the respect she deserves." then while i explain the reasons for this difference, i make him realise how wrong it would be to pay no attention to it. who can say if he will really be sophy's husband? he does not know how she feels towards him; her own heart or her parents' will may already have formed other engagements; he knows nothing of her, perhaps there are none of those grounds of suitability which make a happy marriage. is he not aware that the least breath of scandal with regard to a young girl is an indelible stain, which not even marriage with him who has caused the scandal can efface? what man of feeling would ruin the woman he loves? what man of honour would desire that a miserable woman should for ever lament the misfortune of having found favour in his eyes? always prone to extremes, the youth takes alarm at the consequences which i have compelled him to consider, and now he thinks that he cannot be too far from sophy's home; he hastens his steps to get further from it; he glances round to make sure that no one is listening; he would sacrifice his own happiness a thousand times to the honour of her whom he loves; he would rather never see her again than cause her the least unpleasantness. this is the first result of the pains i have taken ever since he was a child to make him capable of affection. we must therefore seek a lodging at a distance, but not too far. we look about us, we make inquiries; we find that there is a town at least two leagues away. we try and find lodgings in this town, rather than in the nearer villages, where our presence might give rise to suspicion. it is there that the new lover takes up his abode, full of love, hope, joy, above all full of right feeling. in this way, i guide his rising passion towards all that is honourable and good, so that his inclinations unconsciously follow the same bent. my course is drawing to a close; the end is in view. all the chief difficulties are vanquished, the chief obstacles overcome; the hardest thing left to do is to refrain from spoiling my work by undue haste to complete it. amid the uncertainty of human life, let us shun that false prudence which seeks to sacrifice the present to the future; what is, is too often sacrificed to what will never be. let us make man happy at every age lest in spite of our care he should die without knowing the meaning of happiness. now if there is a time to enjoy life, it is undoubtedly the close of adolescence, when the powers of mind and body have reached their greatest strength, and when man in the midst of his course is furthest from those two extremes which tell him "life is short." if the imprudence of youth deceives itself it is not in its desire for enjoyment, but because it seeks enjoyment where it is not to be found, and lays up misery for the future, while unable to enjoy the present. consider my emile over twenty years of age, well formed, well developed in mind and body, strong, healthy, active, skilful, robust, full of sense, reason, kindness, humanity, possessed of good morals and good taste, loving what is beautiful, doing what is good, free from the sway of fierce passions, released from the tyranny of popular prejudices, but subject to the law of wisdom, and easily guided by the voice of a friend; gifted with so many useful and pleasant accomplishments, caring little for wealth, able to earn a living with his own hands, and not afraid of want, whatever may come. behold him in the intoxication of a growing passion; his heart opens to the first beams of love; its pleasant fancies reveal to him a whole world of new delights and enjoyments; he loves a sweet woman, whose character is even more delightful than her person; he hopes, he expects the reward which he deserves. their first attachment took its rise in mutual affection, in community of honourable feelings; therefore this affection is lasting. it abandons itself, with confidence, with reason, to the most delightful madness, without fear, regret, remorse, or any other disturbing thought, but that which is inseparable from all happiness. what lacks there yet? behold, inquire, imagine what still is lacking, that can be combined with present joys. every happiness which can exist in combination is already present; nothing could be added without taking away from what there is; he is as happy as man can be. shall i choose this time to cut short so sweet a period? shall i disturb such pure enjoyment? the happiness he enjoys is my life's reward. what could i give that could outweigh what i should take away? even if i set the crown to his happiness i should destroy its greatest charm. that supreme joy is a hundredfold greater in anticipation than in possession; its savour is greater while we wait for it than when it is ours. o worthy emile! love and be loved! prolong your enjoyment before it is yours; rejoice in your love and in your innocence, find your paradise upon earth, while you await your heaven. i shall not cut short this happy period of life. i will draw out its enchantments, i will prolong them as far as possible. alas! it must come to an end and that soon; but it shall at least linger in your memory, and you will never repent of its joys. emile has not forgotten that we have something to return. as soon as the things are ready, we take horse and set off at a great pace, for on this occasion he is anxious to get there. when the heart opens the door to passion, it becomes conscious of the slow flight of time. if my time has not been wasted he will not spend his life like this. unluckily the road is intricate and the country difficult. we lose our way; he is the first to notice it, and without losing his temper, and without grumbling, he devotes his whole attention to discovering the path; he wanders for a long time before he knows where he is and always with the same self-control. you think nothing of that; but i think it a matter of great importance, for i know how eager he is; i see the results of the care i have taken from his infancy to harden him to endure the blows of necessity. we are there at last! our reception is much simpler and more friendly than on the previous occasion; we are already old acquaintances. emile and sophy bow shyly and say nothing; what can they say in our presence? what they wish to say requires no spectators. we walk in the garden; a well-kept kitchen-garden takes the place of flower-beds, the park is an orchard full of fine tall fruit trees of every kind, divided by pretty streams and borders full of flowers. "what a lovely place!" exclaims emile, still thinking of his homer, and still full of enthusiasm, "i could fancy myself in the garden of alcinous." the daughter wishes she knew who alcinous was; her mother asks. "alcinous," i tell them, "was a king of coreyra. homer describes his garden and the critics think it too simple and unadorned. [footnote: "'when you leave the palace you enter a vast garden, four acres in extent, walled in on every side, planted with tall trees in blossom, and yielding pears, pomegranates, and other goodly fruits, fig-trees with their luscious burden and green olives. all the year round these fair trees are heavy with fruit; summer and winter the soft breath of the west wind sways the trees and ripens the fruit. pears and apples wither on the branches, the fig on the fig-tree, and the clusters of grapes on the vine. the inexhaustible stock bears fresh grapes, some are baked, some are spread out on the threshing floor to dry, others are made into wine, while flowers, sour grapes, and those which are beginning to wither are left upon the tree. at either end is a square garden filled with flowers which bloom throughout the year, these gardens are adorned by two fountains, one of these streams waters the garden, the other passes through the palace and is then taken to a lofty tower in the town to provide drinking water for its citizens.' such is the description of the royal garden of alcinous in the th book of the odyssey, a garden in which, to the lasting disgrace of that old dreamer homer and the princes of his day, there were neither trellises, statues, cascades, nor bowling-greens."] this alcinous had a charming daughter who dreamed the night before her father received a stranger at his board that she would soon have a husband." sophy, taken unawares, blushed, hung her head, and bit her lips; no one could be more confused. her father, who was enjoying her confusion, added that the young princess bent herself to wash the linen in the river. "do you think," said he, "she would have scorned to touch the dirty clothes, saying, that they smelt of grease?" sophy, touched to the quick, forgot her natural timidity and defended herself eagerly. her papa knew very well all the smaller things would have had no other laundress if she had been allowed to wash them, and she would gladly have done more had she been set to do it. [footnote: i own i feel grateful to sophy's mother for not letting her spoil such pretty hands with soap, hands which emile will kiss so often.] meanwhile she watched me secretly with such anxiety that i could not suppress a smile, while i read the terrors of her simple heart which urged her to speak. her father was cruel enough to continue this foolish sport, by asking her, in jest, why she spoke on her own behalf and what had she in common with the daughter of alcinous. trembling and ashamed she dared hardly breathe or look at us. charming girl! this is no time for feigning, you have shown your true feelings in spite of yourself. to all appearance this little scene is soon forgotten; luckily for sophy, emile, at least, is unaware of it. we continue our walk, the young people at first keeping close beside us; but they find it hard to adapt themselves to our slower pace, and presently they are a little in front of us, they are walking side by side, they begin to talk, and before long they are a good way ahead. sophy seems to be listening quietly, emile is talking and gesticulating vigorously; they seem to find their conversation interesting. when we turn homewards a full hour later, we call them to us and they return slowly enough now, and we can see they are making good use of their time. their conversation ceases suddenly before they come within earshot, and they hurry up to us. emile meets us with a frank affectionate expression; his eyes are sparkling with joy; yet he looks anxiously at sophy's mother to see how she takes it. sophy is not nearly so much at her ease; as she approaches us she seems covered with confusion at finding herself tete-a-tete with a young man, though she has met so many other young men frankly enough, and without being found fault with for it. she runs up to her mother, somewhat out of breath, and makes some trivial remark, as if to pretend she had been with her for some time. from the happy expression of these dear children we see that this conversation has taken a load off their hearts. they are no less reticent in their intercourse, but their reticence is less embarrassing, it is only due to emile's reverence and sophy's modesty, to the goodness of both. emile ventures to say a few words to her, she ventures to reply, but she always looks at her mother before she dares to answer. the most remarkable change is in her attitude towards me. she shows me the greatest respect, she watches me with interest, she takes pains to please me; i see that i am honoured with her esteem, and that she is not indifferent to mine. i understand that emile has been talking to her about me; you might say they have been scheming to win me over to their side; yet it is not so, and sophy herself is not so easily won. perhaps emile will have more need of my influence with her than of hers with me. what a charming pair! when i consider that the tender love of my young friend has brought my name so prominently into his first conversation with his lady-love, i enjoy the reward of all my trouble; his affection is a sufficient recompense. our visit is repeated. there are frequent conversations between the young people. emile is madly in love and thinks that his happiness is within his grasp. yet he does not succeed in winning any formal avowal from sophy; she listens to what he says and answers nothing. emile knows how modest she is, and is not surprised at her reticence; he feels sure that she likes him; he knows that parents decide whom their daughters shall marry; he supposes that sophy is awaiting her parents' commands; he asks her permission to speak to them, and she makes no objection. he talks to me and i speak on his behalf and in his presence. he is immensely surprised to hear that sophy is her own mistress, that his happiness depends on her alone. he begins to be puzzled by her conduct. he is less self-confident, he takes alarm, he sees that he has not made so much progress as he expected, and then it is that his love appeals to her in the tenderest and most moving language. emile is not the sort of man to guess what is the matter; if no one told him he would never discover it as long as he lived, and sophy is too proud to tell him. what she considers obstacles, others would call advantages. she has not forgotten her parents' teaching. she is poor; emile is rich; so much she knows. he must win her esteem; his deserts must be great indeed to remove this inequality. but how should he perceive these obstacles? is emile aware that he is rich? has he ever condescended to inquire? thank heaven, he has no need of riches, he can do good without their aid. the good he does comes from his heart, not his purse. he gives the wretched his time, his care, his affection, himself; and when he reckons up what he has done, he hardly dares to mention the money spent on the poor. as he does not know what to make of his disgrace, he thinks it is his own fault; for who would venture to accuse the adored one of caprice. the shame of humiliation adds to the pangs of disappointed love. he no longer approaches sophy with that pleasant confidence of his own worth; he is shy and timid in her presence. he no longer hopes to win her affections, but to gain her pity. sometimes he loses patience and is almost angry with her. sophy seems to guess his angry feelings and she looks at him. her glance is enough to disarm and terrify him; he is more submissive than he used to be. disturbed by this stubborn resistance, this invincible silence, he pours out his heart to his friend. he shares with him the pangs of a heart devoured by sorrow; he implores his help and counsel. "how mysterious it is, how hard to understand! she takes an interest in me, that i am sure; far from avoiding me she is pleased to see me; when i come she shows signs of pleasure, when i go she shows regret; she receives my attentions kindly, my services seem to give her pleasure, she condescends to give me her advice and even her commands. yet she rejects my requests and my prayers. when i venture to speak of marriage, she bids me be silent; if i say a word, she leaves me at once. why on earth should she wish me to be hers but refuse to be mine? she respects and loves you, and she will not dare to refuse to listen to you. speak to her, make her answer. come to your friend's help, and put the coping stone to all you have done for him; do not let him fall a victim to your care! if you fail to secure his happiness, your own teaching will have been the cause of his misery." i speak to sophy, and have no difficulty in getting her to confide her secret to me, a secret which was known to me already. it is not so easy to get permission to tell emile; but at last she gives me leave and i tell him what is the matter. he cannot get over his surprise at this explanation. he cannot understand this delicacy; he cannot see how a few pounds more or less can affect his character or his deserts. when i get him to see their effect on people's prejudices he begins to laugh; he is so wild with delight that he wants to be off at once to tear up his title deeds and renounce his money, so as to have the honour of being as poor as sophy, and to return worthy to be her husband. "why," said i, trying to check him, and laughing in my turn at his impetuosity, "will this young head never grow any older? having dabbled all your life in philosophy, will you never learn to reason? do not you see that your wild scheme would only make things worse, and sophy more obstinate? it is a small superiority to be rather richer than she, but to give up all for her would be a very great superiority; if her pride cannot bear to be under the small obligation, how will she make up her mind to the greater? if she cannot bear to think that her husband might taunt her with the fact that he has enriched her, would she permit him to blame her for having brought him to poverty? wretched boy, beware lest she suspects you of such a plan! on the contrary, be careful and economical for her sake, lest she should accuse you of trying to gain her by cunning, by sacrificing of your own free will what you are really wasting through carelessness. "do you really think that she is afraid of wealth, and that she is opposed to great possessions in themselves? no, dear emile; there are more serious and substantial grounds for her opinion, in the effect produced by wealth on its possessor. she knows that those who are possessed of fortune's gifts are apt to place them first. the rich always put wealth before merit. when services are reckoned against silver, the latter always outweighs the former, and those who have spent their life in their master's service are considered his debtors for the very bread they eat. what must you do, emile, to calm her fears? let her get to know you better; that is not done in a day. show her the treasures of your heart, to counterbalance the wealth which is unfortunately yours. time and constancy will overcome her resistance; let your great and noble feelings make her forget your wealth. love her, serve her, serve her worthy parents. convince her that these attentions are not the result of a foolish fleeting passion, but of settled principles engraved upon your heart. show them the honour deserved by worth when exposed to the buffets of fortune; that is the only way to reconcile it with that worth which basks in her smiles." the transports of joy experienced by the young man at these words may easily be imagined; they restore confidence and hope, his good heart rejoices to do something to please sophy, which he would have done if there had been no such person, or if he had not been in love with her. however little his character has been understood, anybody can see how he would behave under such circumstances. here am i, the confidant of these two young people and the mediator of their affection. what a fine task for a tutor! so fine that never in all my life have i stood so high in my own eyes, nor felt so pleased with myself. moreover, this duty is not without its charms. i am not unwelcome in the home; it is my business to see that the lovers behave themselves; emile, ever afraid of offending me, was never so docile. the little lady herself overwhelms me with a kindness which does not deceive me, and of which i only take my proper share. this is her way of making up for her severity towards emile. for his sake she bestows on me a hundred tender caresses, though she would die rather than bestow them on him; and he, knowing that i would never stand in his way, is delighted that i should get on so well with her. if she refuses his arm when we are out walking, he consoles himself with the thought that she has taken mine. he makes way for me without a murmur, he clasps my hand, and voice and look alike whisper, "my friend, plead for me!" and his eyes follow us with interest; he tries to read our feelings in our faces, and to interpret our conversation by our gestures; he knows that everything we are saying concerns him. dear sophy, how frank and easy you are when you can talk to mentor without being overheard by telemachus. how freely and delightfully you permit him to read what is passing in your tender little heart! how delighted you are to show him how you esteem his pupil! how cunningly and appealingly you allow him to divine still tenderer sentiments. with what a pretence of anger you dismiss emile when his impatience leads him to interrupt you? with what pretty vexation you reproach his indiscretion when he comes and prevents you saying something to his credit, or listening to what i say about him, or finding in my words some new excuse to love him! having got so far as to be tolerated as an acknowledged lover, emile takes full advantage of his position; he speaks, he urges, he implores, he demands. hard words or ill treatment make no difference, provided he gets a hearing. at length sophy is persuaded, though with some difficulty, to assume the authority of a betrothed, to decide what he shall do, to command instead of to ask, to accept instead of to thank, to control the frequency and the hours of his visits, to forbid him to come till such a day or to stay beyond such an hour. this is not done in play, but in earnest, and if it was hard to induce her to accept these rights, she uses them so sternly that emile is often ready to regret that he gave them to her. but whatever her commands, they are obeyed without question, and often when at her bidding he is about to leave her, he glances at me his eyes full of delight, as if to say, "you see she has taken possession of me." yet unknown to him, sophy, with all her pride, is observing him closely, and she is smiling to herself at the pride of her slave. oh that i had the brush of an alban or a raphael to paint their bliss, or the pen of the divine milton to describe the pleasures of love and innocence! not so; let such hollow arts shrink back before the sacred truth of nature. in tenderness and pureness of heart let your imagination freely trace the raptures of these young lovers, who under the eyes of parents and tutor, abandon themselves to their blissful illusions; in the intoxication of passion they are advancing step by step to its consummation; with flowers and garlands they are weaving the bonds which are to bind them till death do part. i am carried away by this succession of pictures, i am so happy that i cannot group them in any sort of order or scheme; any one with a heart in his breast can paint the charming picture for himself and realise the different experiences of father, mother, daughter, tutor, and pupil, and the part played by each and all in the union of the most delightful couple whom love and virtue have ever led to happiness. now that he is really eager to please, emile begins to feel the value of the accomplishments he has acquired. sophy is fond of singing, he sings with her; he does more, he teaches her music. she is lively and light of foot, she loves skipping; he dances with her, he perfects and develops her untrained movements into the steps of the dance. these lessons, enlivened by the gayest mirth, are quite delightful, they melt the timid respect of love; a lover may enjoy teaching his betrothed--he has a right to be her teacher. there is an old spinet quite out of order. emile mends and tunes it; he is a maker and mender of musical instruments as well as a carpenter; it has always been his rule to learn to do everything he can for himself. the house is picturesquely situated and he makes several sketches of it, in some of which sophy does her share, and she hangs them in her father's study. the frames are not gilded, nor do they require gilding. when she sees emile drawing, she draws too, and improves her own drawing; she cultivates all her talents, and her grace gives a charm to all she does. her father and mother recall the days of their wealth, when they find themselves surrounded by the works of art which alone gave value to wealth; the whole house is adorned by love; love alone has enthroned among them, without cost or effort, the very same pleasures which were gathered together in former days by dint of toil and money. as the idolater gives what he loves best to the shrine of the object of his worship, so the lover is not content to see perfection in his mistress, he must be ever trying to add to her adornment. she does not need it for his pleasure, it is he who needs the pleasure of giving, it is a fresh homage to be rendered to her, a fresh pleasure in the joy of beholding her. everything of beauty seems to find its place only as an accessory to the supreme beauty. it is both touching and amusing to see emile eager to teach sophy everything he knows, without asking whether she wants to learn it or whether it is suitable for her. he talks about all sorts of things and explains them to her with boyish eagerness; he thinks he has only to speak and she will understand; he looks forward to arguing, and discussing philosophy with her; everything he cannot display before her is so much useless learning; he is quite ashamed of knowing more than she. so he gives her lessons in philosophy, physics, mathematics, history, and everything else. sophy is delighted to share his enthusiasm and to try and profit by it. how pleased emile is when he can get leave to give these lessons on his knees before her! he thinks the heavens are open. yet this position, more trying to pupil than to teacher, is hardly favourable to study. it is not easy to know where to look, to avoid meeting the eyes which follow our own, and if they meet so much the worse for the lesson. women are no strangers to the art of thinking, but they should only skim the surface of logic and metaphysics. sophy understands readily, but she soon forgets. she makes most progress in the moral sciences and aesthetics; as to physical science she retains some vague idea of the general laws and order of this world. sometimes in the course of their walks, the spectacle of the wonders of nature bids them not fear to raise their pure and innocent hearts to nature's god; they are not afraid of his presence, and they pour out their hearts before him. what! two young lovers spending their time together talking of religion! have they nothing better to do than to say their catechism! what profit is there in the attempt to degrade what is noble? yes, no doubt they are saying their catechism in their delightful land of romance; they are perfect in each other's eyes; they love one another, they talk eagerly of all that makes virtue worth having. their sacrifices to virtue make her all the dearer to them. their struggles after self-control draw from them tears purer than the dew of heaven, and these sweet tears are the joy of life; no human heart has ever experienced a sweeter intoxication. their very renunciation adds to their happiness, and their sacrifices increase their self-respect. sensual men, bodies without souls, some day they will know your pleasures, and all their life long they will recall with regret the happy days when they refused the cup of pleasure. in spite of this good understanding, differences and even quarrels occur from time to time; the lady has her whims, the lover has a hot temper; but these passing showers are soon over and only serve to strengthen their union. emile learns by experience not to attach too much importance to them, he always gains more by the reconciliation than he lost by the quarrel. the results of the first difference made him expect a like result from all; he was mistaken, but even if he does not make any appreciable step forward, he has always the satisfaction of finding sophy's genuine concern for his affection more firmly established. "what advantage is this to him?" you would ask. i will gladly tell you; all the more gladly because it will give me an opportunity to establish clearly a very important principle, and to combat a very deadly one. emile is in love, but he is not presuming; and you will easily understand that the dignified sophy is not the sort of girl to allow any kind of familiarity. yet virtue has its bounds like everything else, and she is rather to be blamed for her severity than for indulgence; even her father himself is sometimes afraid lest her lofty pride should degenerate into a haughty spirit. when most alone, emile dare not ask for the slightest favour, he must not even seem to desire it; and if she is gracious enough to take his arm when they are out walking, a favour which she will never permit him to claim as a right, it is only occasionally that he dare venture with a sigh to press her hand to his heart. however, after a long period of self-restraint, he ventured secretly to kiss the hem of her dress, and several times he was lucky enough to find her willing at least to pretend she was not aware of it. one day he attempts to take the same privilege rather more openly, and sophy takes it into her head to be greatly offended. he persists, she gets angry and speaks sharply to him; emile will not put up with this without reply; the rest of the day is given over to sulks, and they part in a very ill temper. sophy is ill at ease; her mother is her confidant in all things, how can she keep this from her? it is their first misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding of an hour is such a serious business. she is sorry for what she has done, she has her mother's permission and her father's commands to make reparation. the next day emile returns somewhat earlier than usual and in a state of some anxiety. sophy is in her mother's dressing-room and her father is also present. emile enters respectfully but gloomily. scarcely have her parents greeted him than sophy turns round and holding out her hand asks him in an affectionate tone how he is. that pretty hand is clearly held out to be kissed; he takes it but does not kiss it. sophy, rather ashamed of herself, withdraws her hand as best she may. emile, who is not used to a woman's whims, and does not know how far caprice may be carried, does not forget so easily or make friends again all at once. sophy's father, seeing her confusion, completes her discomfiture by his jokes. the poor girl, confused and ashamed, does not know what to do with herself and would gladly have a good cry. the more she tries to control herself the worse she feels; at last a tear escapes in spite of all she can do to prevent it. emile, seeing this tear, rushes towards her, falls on his knees, takes her hand and kisses it again and again with the greatest devotion. "my word, you are too kind to her," says her father, laughing; "if i were you, i should deal more severely with these follies, i should punish the mouth that wronged me." emboldened by these words, emile turns a suppliant eye towards her mother, and thinking she is not unwilling, he tremblingly approaches sophy's face; she turns away her head, and to save her mouth she exposes a blushing cheek. the daring young man is not content with this; there is no great resistance. what a kiss, if it were not taken under her mother's eyes. have a care, sophy, in your severity; he will be ready enough to try to kiss your dress if only you will sometimes say "no." after this exemplary punishment, sophy's father goes about his business, and her mother makes some excuse for sending her out of the room; then she speaks to emile very seriously. "sir," she says, "i think a young man so well born and well bred as yourself, a man of feeling and character, would never reward with dishonour the confidence reposed in him by the friendship of this family. i am neither prudish nor over strict; i know how to make excuses for youthful folly, and what i have permitted in my own presence is sufficient proof of this. consult your friend as to your own duty, he will tell you there is all the difference in the world between the playful kisses sanctioned by the presence of father and mother, and the same freedom taken in their absence and in betrayal of their confidence, a freedom which makes a snare of the very favours which in the parents' presence were wholly innocent. he will tell you, sir, that my daughter is only to blame for not having perceived from the first what she ought never to have permitted; he will tell you that every favour, taken as such, is a favour, and that it is unworthy of a man of honour to take advantage of a young girl's innocence, to usurp in private the same freedom which she may permit in the presence of others. for good manners teach us what is permitted in public; but we do not know what a man will permit to himself in private, if he makes himself the sole judge of his conduct." after this well-deserved rebuke, addressed rather to me than to my pupil, the good mother leaves us, and i am amazed by her rare prudence, in thinking it a little thing that emile should kiss her daughter's lips in her presence, while fearing lest he should venture to kiss her dress when they are alone. when i consider the folly of worldly maxims, whereby real purity is continually sacrificed to a show of propriety, i understand why speech becomes more refined while the heart becomes more corrupt, and why etiquette is stricter while those who conform to it are most immoral. while i am trying to convince emile's heart with regard to these duties which i ought to have instilled into him sooner, a new idea occurs to me, an idea which perhaps does sophy all the more credit, though i shall take care not to tell her lover; this so-called pride, for which she has been censured, is clearly only a very wise precaution to protect her from herself. being aware that, unfortunately, her own temperament is inflammable, she dreads the least spark, and keeps out of reach so far as she can. her sternness is due not to pride but to humility. she assumes a control over emile because she doubts her control of herself; she turns the one against the other. if she had more confidence in herself she would be much less haughty. with this exception is there anywhere on earth a gentler, sweeter girl? is there any who endures an affront with greater patience, any who is more afraid of annoying others? is there any with less pretension, except in the matter of virtue? moreover, she is not proud of her virtue, she is only proud in order to preserve her virtue, and if she can follow the guidance of her heart without danger, she caresses her lover himself. but her wise mother does not confide all this even to her father; men should not hear everything. far from seeming proud of her conquest, sophy has grown more friendly and less exacting towards everybody, except perhaps the one person who has wrought this change. her noble heart no longer swells with the feeling of independence. she triumphs modestly over a victory gained at the price of her freedom. her bearing is more restrained, her speech more timid, since she has begun to blush at the word "lover"; but contentment may be seen beneath her outward confusion and this very shame is not painful. this change is most noticeable in her behaviour towards the young men she meets. now that she has ceased to be afraid of them, much of her extreme reserve has disappeared. now that her choice is made, she does not hesitate to be gracious to those to whom she is quite indifferent; taking no more interest in them, she is less difficult to please, and she always finds them pleasant enough for people who are of no importance to her. if true love were capable of coquetry, i should fancy i saw traces of it in the way sophy behaves towards other young men in her lover's presence. one would say that not content with the ardent passion she inspires by a mixture of shyness and caresses, she is not sorry to rouse this passion by a little anxiety; one would say that when she is purposely amusing her young guests she means to torment emile by the charms of a freedom she will not allow herself with him; but sophy is too considerate, too kindly, too wise to really torment him. love and honour take the place of prudence and control the use of this dangerous weapon. she can alarm and reassure him just as he needs it; and if she sometimes makes him uneasy she never really gives him pain. the anxiety she causes to her beloved may be forgiven because of her fear that he is not sufficiently her own. but what effect will this little performance have upon emile? will he be jealous or not? that is what we must discover; for such digressions form part of the purpose of my book, and they do not lead me far from my main subject. i have already shown how this passion of jealousy in matters of convention finds its way into the heart of man. in love it is another matter; then jealousy is so near akin to nature, that it is hard to believe that it is not her work; and the example of the very beasts, many of whom are madly jealous, seems to prove this point beyond reply. is it man's influence that has taught cooks to tear each other to pieces or bulls to fight to the death? no one can deny that the aversion to everything which may disturb or interfere with our pleasures is a natural impulse. up to a certain point the desire for the exclusive possession of that which ministers to our pleasure is in the same case. but when this desire has become a passion, when it is transformed into madness, or into a bitter and suspicious fancy known as jealousy, that is quite another matter; such a passion may be natural or it may not; we must distinguish between these different cases. i have already analysed the example of the animal world in my discourse on inequality, and on further consideration i think i may refer my readers to that analysis as sufficiently thorough. i will only add this further point to those already made in that work, that the jealousy which springs from nature depends greatly on sexual power, and that when sexual power is or appears to be boundless, that jealousy is at its height; for then the male, measuring his rights by his needs, can never see another male except as an unwelcome rival. in such species the females always submit to the first comer, they only belong to the male by right of conquest, and they are the cause of unending strife. among the monogamous species, where intercourse seems to give rise to some sort of moral bond, a kind of marriage, the female who belongs by choice to the male on whom she has bestowed herself usually denies herself to all others; and the male, having this preference of affection as a pledge of her fidelity, is less uneasy at the sight of other males and lives more peaceably with them. among these species the male shares the care of the little ones; and by one of those touching laws of nature it seems as if the female rewards the father for his love for his children. now consider the human species in its primitive simplicity; it is easy to see, from the limited powers of the male, and the moderation of his desires, that nature meant him to be content with one female; this is confirmed by the numerical equality of the two sexes, at any rate in our part of the world; an equality which does not exist in anything like the same degree among those species in which several females are collected around one male. though a man does not brood like a pigeon, and though he has no milk to suckle the young, and must in this respect be classed with the quadrupeds, his children are feeble and helpless for so long a time, that mother and children could ill dispense with the father's affection, and the care which results from it. all these observations combine to prove that the jealous fury of the males of certain animals proves nothing with regard to man; and the exceptional case of those southern regions were polygamy is the established custom, only confirms the rule, since it is the plurality of wives that gives rise to the tyrannical precautions of the husband, and the consciousness of his own weakness makes the man resort to constraint to evade the laws of nature. among ourselves where these same laws are less frequently evaded in this respect, but are more frequently evaded in another and even more detestable manner, jealousy finds its motives in the passions of society rather than in those of primitive instinct. in most irregular connections the hatred of the lover for his rivals far exceeds his love for his mistress; if he fears a rival in her affections it is the effect of that self-love whose origin i have already traced out, and he is moved by vanity rather than affection. moreover, our clumsy systems of education have made women so deceitful, [footnote: the kind of deceit referred to here is just the opposite of that deceit becoming in a woman, and taught her by nature; the latter consists in concealing her real feelings, the former in feigning what she does not feel. every society lady spends her life in boasting of her supposed sensibility, when in reality she cares for no one but herself.] and have so over-stimulated their appetites, that you cannot rely even on the most clearly proved affection; they can no longer display a preference which secures you against the fear of a rival. true love is another matter. i have shown, in the work already referred to, that this sentiment is not so natural as men think, and that there is a great difference between the gentle habit which binds a man with cords of love to his helpmeet, and the unbridled passion which is intoxicated by the fancied charms of an object which he no longer sees in its true light. this passion which is full of exclusions and preferences, only differs from vanity in this respect, that vanity demands all and gives nothing, so that it is always harmful, while love, bestowing as much as it demands, is in itself a sentiment full of equity. moreover, the more exacting it is, the more credulous; that very illusion which gave rise to it, makes it easy to persuade. if love is suspicious, esteem is trustful; and love will never exist in an honest heart without esteem, for every one loves in another the qualities which he himself holds in honour. when once this is clearly understood, we can predict with confidence the kind of jealousy which emile will be capable of experiencing; as there is only the smallest germ of this passion in the human heart, the form it takes must depend solely upon education: emile, full of love and jealousy, will not be angry, sullen, suspicious, but delicate, sensitive, and timid; he will be more alarmed than vexed; he will think more of securing his lady-love than of threatening his rival; he will treat him as an obstacle to be removed if possible from his path, rather than as a rival to be hated; if he hates him, it is not because he presumes to compete with him for sophy's affection, but because emile feels that there is a real danger of losing that affection; he will not be so unjust and foolish as to take offence at the rivalry itself; he understands that the law of preference rests upon merit only, and that honour depends upon success; he will redouble his efforts to make himself acceptable, and he will probably succeed. his generous sophy, though she has given alarm to his love, is well able to allay that fear, to atone for it; and the rivals who were only suffered to put him to the proof are speedily dismissed. but whither am i going? o emile! what art thou now? is this my pupil? how art thou fallen! where is that young man so sternly fashioned, who braved all weathers, who devoted his body to the hardest tasks and his soul to the laws of wisdom; untouched by prejudice or passion, a lover of truth, swayed by reason only, unheeding all that was not hers? living in softness and idleness he now lets himself be ruled by women; their amusements are the business of his life, their wishes are his laws; a young girl is the arbiter of his fate, he cringes and grovels before her; the earnest emile is the plaything of a child. so shift the scenes of life; each age is swayed by its own motives, but the man is the same. at ten his mind was set upon cakes, at twenty it is set upon his mistress; at thirty it will be set upon pleasure; at forty on ambition, at fifty on avarice; when will he seek after wisdom only? happy is he who is compelled to follow her against his will! what matter who is the guide, if the end is attained. heroes and sages have themselves paid tribute to this human weakness; and those who handled the distaff with clumsy fingers were none the less great men. if you would prolong the influence of a good education through life itself, the good habits acquired in childhood must be carried forward into adolescence, and when your pupil is what he ought to be you must manage to keep him what he ought to be. this is the coping-stone of your work. this is why it is of the first importance that the tutor should remain with young men; otherwise there is little doubt they will learn to make love without him. the great mistake of tutors and still more of fathers is to think that one way of living makes another impossible, and that as soon as the child is grown up, you must abandon everything you used to do when he was little. if that were so, why should we take such pains in childhood, since the good or bad use we make of it will vanish with childhood itself; if another way of life were necessarily accompanied by other ways of thinking? the stream of memory is only interrupted by great illnesses, and the stream of conduct, by great passions. our tastes and inclinations may change, but this change, though it may be sudden enough, is rendered less abrupt by our habits. the skilful artist, in a good colour scheme, contrives so to mingle and blend his tints that the transitions are imperceptible; and certain colour washes are spread over the whole picture so that there may be no sudden breaks. so should it be with our likings. unbalanced characters are always changing their affections, their tastes, their sentiments; the only constant factor is the habit of change; but the man of settled character always returns to his former habits and preserves to old age the tastes and the pleasures of his childhood. if you contrive that young people passing from one stage of life to another do not despise what has gone before, that when they form new habits, they do not forsake the old, and that they always love to do what is right, in things new and old; then only are the fruits of your toil secure, and you are sure of your scholars as long as they live; for the revolution most to be dreaded is that of the age over which you are now watching. as men always look back to this period with regret so the tastes carried forward into it from childhood are not easily destroyed; but if once interrupted they are never resumed. most of the habits you think you have instilled into children and young people are not really habits at all; they have only been acquired under compulsion, and being followed reluctantly they will be cast off at the first opportunity. however long you remain in prison you never get a taste for prison life; so aversion is increased rather than diminished by habit. not so with emile; as a child he only did what he could do willingly and with pleasure, and as a man he will do the same, and the force of habit will only lend its help to the joys of freedom. an active life, bodily labour, exercise, movement, have become so essential to him that he could not relinquish them without suffering. reduce him all at once to a soft and sedentary life and you condemn him to chains and imprisonment, you keep him in a condition of thraldom and constraint; he would suffer, no doubt, both in health and temper. he can scarcely breathe in a stuffy room, he requires open air, movement, fatigue. even at sophy's feet he cannot help casting a glance at the country and longing to explore it in her company. yet he remains if he must; but he is anxious and ill at ease; he seems to be struggling with himself; he remains because he is a captive. "yes," you will say, "these are necessities to which you have subjected him, a yoke which you have laid upon him." you speak truly, i have subjected him to the yoke of manhood. emile loves sophy; but what were the charms by which he was first attracted? sensibility, virtue, and love for things pure and honest. when he loves this love in sophy, will he cease to feel it himself? and what price did she put upon herself? she required all her lover's natural feelings--esteem of what is really good, frugality, simplicity, generous unselfishness, a scorn of pomp and riches. these virtues were emile's before love claimed them of him. is he really changed? he has all the more reason to be himself; that is the only difference. the careful reader will not suppose that all the circumstances in which he is placed are the work of chance. there were many charming girls in the town; is it chance that his choice is discovered in a distant retreat? is their meeting the work of chance? is it chance that makes them so suited to each other? is it chance that they cannot live in the same place, that he is compelled to find a lodging so far from her? is it chance that he can see her so seldom and must purchase the pleasure of seeing her at the price of such fatigue? you say he is becoming effeminate. not so, he is growing stronger; he must be fairly robust to stand the fatigue he endures on sophy's account. he lives more than two leagues away. that distance serves to temper the shafts of love. if they lived next door to each other, or if he could drive to see her in a comfortable carriage, he would love at his ease in the paris fashion. would leander have braved death for the sake of hero if the sea had not lain between them? need i say more; if my reader is able to take my meaning, he will be able to follow out my principles in detail. the first time we went to see sophy, we went on horseback, so as to get there more quickly. we continue this convenient plan until our fifth visit. we were expected; and more than half a league from the house we see people on the road. emile watches them, his pulse quickens as he gets nearer, he recognises sophy and dismounts quickly; he hastens to join the charming family. emile is fond of good horses; his horse is fresh, he feels he is free, and gallops off across the fields; i follow and with some difficulty i succeed in catching him and bringing him back. unluckily sophy is afraid of horses, and i dare not approach her. emile has not seen what happened, but sophy whispers to him that he is giving his friend a great deal of trouble. he hurries up quite ashamed of himself, takes the horses, and follows after the party. it is only fair that each should take his turn and he rides on to get rid of our mounts. he has to leave sophy behind him, and he no longer thinks riding a convenient mode of travelling. he returns out of breath and meets us half-way. the next time, emile will not hear of horses. "why," say i, "we need only take a servant to look after them." "shall we put our worthy friends to such expense?" he replies. "you see they would insist on feeding man and horse." "that is true," i reply; "theirs is the generous hospitality of the poor. the rich man in his niggardly pride only welcomes his friends, but the poor find room for their friends' horses." "let us go on foot," says he; "won't you venture on the walk, when you are always so ready to share the toilsome pleasures of your child?" "i will gladly go with you," i reply at once, "and it seems to me that love does not desire so much show." as we draw near, we meet the mother and daughter even further from home than on the last occasion. we have come at a great pace. emile is very warm; his beloved condescends to pass her handkerchief over his cheeks. it would take a good many horses to make us ride there after this. but it is rather hard never to be able to spend an evening together. midsummer is long past and the days are growing shorter. whatever we say, we are not allowed to return home in the dark, and unless we make a very early start, we have to go back almost as soon as we get there. the mother is sorry for us and uneasy on our account, and it occurs to her that, though it would not be proper for us to stay in the house, beds might be found for us in the village, if we liked to stay there occasionally. emile claps his hands at this idea and trembles with joy; sophy, unwittingly, kisses her mother rather oftener than usual on the day this idea occurs to her. little by little the charm of friendship and the familiarity of innocence take root and grow among us. i generally accompany my young friend on the days appointed by sophy or her mother, but sometimes i let him go alone. the heart thrives in the sunshine of confidence, and a man must not be treated as a child; and what have i accomplished so far, if my pupil is unworthy of my esteem? now and then i go without him; he is sorry, but he does not complain; what use would it be? and then he knows i shall not interfere with his interests. however, whether we go together or separately you will understand that we are not stopped by the weather; we are only too proud to arrive in a condition which calls for pity. unluckily sophy deprives us of this honour and forbids us to come in bad weather. this is the only occasion on which she rebels against the rules which i laid down for her in private. one day emile had gone alone and i did not expect him back till the following day, but he returned the same evening. "my dear emile," said i, "have you come back to your old friend already?" but instead of responding to my caresses he replied with some show of temper, "you need not suppose i came back so soon of my own accord; she insisted on it; it is for her sake not yours that i am here." touched by his frankness i renewed my caresses, saying, "truthful heart and faithful friend, do not conceal from me anything i ought to know. if you came back for her sake, you told me so for my own; your return is her doing, your frankness is mine. continue to preserve the noble candour of great souls; strangers may think what they will, but it is a crime to let our friends think us better than we are." i take care not to let him underrate the cost of his confession by assuming that there is more love than generosity in it, and by telling him that he would rather deprive himself of the honour of this return, than give it to sophy. but this is how he revealed to me, all unconsciously, what were his real feelings; if he had returned slowly and comfortably, dreaming of his sweetheart, i should know he was merely her lover; when he hurried back, even if he was a little out of temper, he was the friend of his mentor. you see that the young man is very far from spending his days with sophy, and seeing as much of her as he wants. one or two visits a week are all that is permitted, and these visits are often only for the afternoon and are rarely extended to the next day. he spends much more of his time in longing to see her, or in rejoicing that he has seen her, than he actually spends in her presence. even when he goes to see her, more time is spent in going and returning than by her side. his pleasures, genuine, pure, delicious, but more imaginary than real, serve to kindle his love but not to make him effeminate. on the days when he does not see sophy he is not sitting idle at home. he is emile himself and quite unchanged. he usually scours the country round in pursuit of its natural history; he observes and studies the soil, its products, and their mode of cultivation; he compares the methods he sees with those with which he is already familiar; he tries to find the reasons for any differences; if he thinks other methods better than those of the locality, he introduces them to the farmers' notice; if he suggests a better kind of plough, he has one made from his own drawings; if he finds a lime pit he teaches them how to use the lime on the land, a process new to them; he often lends a hand himself; they are surprised to find him handling all manner of tools more easily than they can themselves; his furrows are deeper and straighter than theirs, he is a more skilful sower, and his beds for early produce are more cleverly planned. they do not scoff at him as a fine talker, they see he knows what he is talking about. in a word, his zeal and attention are bestowed on everything that is really useful to everybody; nor does he stop there. he visits the peasants in their homes; inquires into their circumstances, their families, the number of their children, the extent of their holdings, the nature of their produce, their markets, their rights, their burdens, their debts, etc. he gives away very little money, for he knows it is usually ill spent; but he himself directs the use of his money, and makes it helpful to them without distributing it among them. he supplies them with labourers, and often pays them for work done by themselves, on tasks for their own benefit. for one he has the falling thatch repaired or renewed; for another he clears a piece of land which had gone out of cultivation for lack of means; to another he gives a cow, a horse, or stock of any kind to replace a loss; two neighbours are ready to go to law, he wins them over, and makes them friends again; a peasant falls ill, he has him cared for, he looks after him himself; [footnote: to look after a sick peasant is not merely to give him a pill, or medicine, or to send a surgeon to him. that is not what these poor folk require in sickness; what they want is more and better food. when you have fever, you will do well to fast, but when your peasants have it, give them meat and wine; illness, in their case, is nearly always due to poverty and exhaustion; your cellar will supply the best draught, your butchers will be the best apothecary.] another is harassed by a rich and powerful neighbor, he protects him and speaks on his behalf; young people are fond of one another, he helps forward their marriage; a good woman has lost her beloved child, he goes to see her, he speaks words of comfort and sits a while with her; he does not despise the poor, he is in no hurry to avoid the unfortunate; he often takes his dinner with some peasant he is helping, and he will even accept a meal from those who have no need of his help; though he is the benefactor of some and the friend of all, he is none the less their equal. in conclusion, he always does as much good by his personal efforts as by his money. sometimes his steps are turned in the direction of the happy abode; he may hope to see sophy without her knowing, to see her out walking without being seen. but emile is always quite open in everything he does; he neither can nor would deceive. his delicacy is of that pleasing type in which pride rests on the foundation of a good conscience. he keeps strictly within bounds, and never comes near enough to gain from chance what he only desires to win from sophy herself. on the other hand, he delights to roam about the neighbourhood, looking for the trace of sophy's steps, feeling what pains she has taken and what a distance she has walked to please him. the day before his visit, he will go to some neighbouring farm and order a little feast for the morrow. we shall take our walk in that direction without any special object, we shall turn in apparently by chance; fruit, cakes, and cream are waiting for us. sophy likes sweets, so is not insensible to these attentions, and she is quite ready to do honour to what we have provided; for i always have my share of the credit even if i have had no part in the trouble; it is a girl's way of returning thanks more easily. her father and i have cakes and wine; emile keeps the ladies company and is always on the look-out to secure a dish of cream in which sophy has dipped her spoon. the cakes lead me to talk of the races emile used to run. every one wants to hear about them; i explain amid much laughter; they ask him if he can run as well as ever. "better," says he; "i should be sorry to forget how to run." one member of the company is dying to see him run, but she dare not say so; some one else undertakes to suggest it; he agrees and we send for two or three young men of the neighbourhood; a prize is offered, and in imitation of our earlier games a cake is placed on the goal. every one is ready, sophy's father gives the signal by clapping his hands. the nimble emile flies like lightning and reaches the goal almost before the others have started. he receives his prize at sophy's hands, and no less generous than aeneas, he gives gifts to all the vanquished. in the midst of his triumph, sophy dares to challenge the victor, and to assert that she can run as fast as he. he does not refuse to enter the lists with her, and while she is getting ready to start, while she is tucking up her skirt at each side, more eager to show emile a pretty ankle than to vanquish him in the race, while she is seeing if her petticoats are short enough, he whispers a word to her mother who smiles and nods approval. then he takes his place by his competitor; no sooner is the signal given than she is off like a bird. women were not meant to run; they flee that they may be overtaken. running is not the only thing they do ill, but it is the only thing they do awkwardly; their elbows glued to their sides and pointed backwards look ridiculous, and the high heels on which they are perched make them look like so many grasshoppers trying to run instead of to jump. emile, supposing that sophy runs no better than other women, does not deign to stir from his place and watches her start with a smile of mockery. but sophy is light of foot and she wears low heels; she needs no pretence to make her foot look smaller; she runs so quickly that he has only just time to overtake this new atalanta when he sees her so far ahead. then he starts like an eagle dashing upon its prey; he pursues her, clutches her, grasps her at last quite out of breath, and gently placing his left arm about her, he lifts her like a feather, and pressing his sweet burden to his heart, he finishes the race, makes her touch the goal first, and then exclaiming, "sophy wins!" he sinks on one knee before her and owns himself beaten. along with such occupations there is also the trade we learnt. one day a week at least, and every day when the weather is too bad for country pursuits, emile and i go to work under a master-joiner. we do not work for show, like people above our trade; we work in earnest like regular workmen. once when sophy's father came to see us, he found us at work, and did not fail to report his wonder to his wife and daughter. "go and see that young man in the workshop," said he, "and you will soon see if he despises the condition of the poor." you may fancy how pleased sophy was at this! they talk it over, and they decide to surprise him at his work. they question me, apparently without any special object, and having made sure of the time, mother and daughter take a little carriage and come to town on that very day. on her arrival, sophy sees, at the other end of the shop, a young man in his shirt sleeves, with his hair all untidy, so hard at work that he does not see her; she makes a sign to her mother. emile, a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, is just finishing a mortise; then he saws a piece of wood and places it in the vice in order to polish it. the sight of this does not set sophy laughing; it affects her greatly; it wins her respect. woman, honour your master; he it is who works for you, he it is who gives you bread to eat; this is he! while they are busy watching him, i perceive them and pull emile by the sleeve; he turns round, drops his tools, and hastens to them with an exclamation of delight. after he has given way to his first raptures, he makes them take a seat and he goes back to his work. but sophy cannot keep quiet; she gets up hastily, runs about the workshop, looks at the tools, feels the polish of the boards, picks up shavings, looks at our hands, and says she likes this trade, it is so clean. the merry girl tries to copy emile. with her delicate white hand she passes a plane over a bit of wood; the plane slips and makes no impression. it seems to me that love himself is hovering over us and beating his wings; i think i can hear his joyous cries, "hercules is avenged." yet sophy's mother questions the master. "sir, how much do you pay these two men a day?" "i give them each tenpence a day and their food; but if that young fellow wanted he could earn much more, for he is the best workman in the country." "tenpence a day and their food," said she looking at us tenderly. "that is so, madam," replied the master. at these words she hurries up to emile, kisses him, and clasps him to her breast with tears; unable to say more she repeats again and again, "my son, my son!" when they had spent some time chatting with us, but without interrupting our work, "we must be going now," said the mother to her daughter, "it is getting late and we must not keep your father waiting." then approaching emile she tapped him playfully on the cheek, saying, "well, my good workman, won't you come with us?" he replied sadly, "i am at work, ask the master." the master is asked if he can spare us. he replies that he cannot. "i have work on hand," said he, "which is wanted the day after to-morrow, so there is not much time. counting on these gentlemen i refused other workmen who came; if they fail me i don't know how to replace them and i shall not be able to send the work home at the time promised." the mother said nothing, she was waiting to hear what emile would say. emile hung his head in silence. "sir," she said, somewhat surprised at this, "have you nothing to say to that?" emile looked tenderly at her daughter and merely said, "you see i am bound to stay." then the ladies left us. emile went with them to the door, gazed after them as long as they were in sight, and returned to his work without a word. on the way home, the mother, somewhat vexed at his conduct, spoke to her daughter of the strange way in which he had behaved. "why," said she, "was it so difficult to arrange matters with the master without being obliged to stay. the young man is generous enough and ready to spend money when there is no need for it, could not he spend a little on such a fitting occasion?" "oh, mamma," replied sophy, "i trust emile will never rely so much on money as to use it to break an engagement, to fail to keep his own word, and to make another break his! i know he could easily give the master a trifle to make up for the slight inconvenience caused by his absence; but his soul would become the slave of riches, he would become accustomed to place wealth before duty, and he would think that any duty might be neglected provided he was ready to pay. that is not emile's way of thinking, and i hope he will never change on my account. do you think it cost him nothing to stay? you are quite wrong, mamma; it was for my sake that he stayed; i saw it in his eyes." it is not that sophy is indifferent to genuine proofs of love; on the contrary she is imperious and exacting; she would rather not be loved at all than be loved half-heartedly. hers is the noble pride of worth, conscious of its own value, self-respecting and claiming a like honour from others. she would scorn a heart that did not recognise the full worth of her own; that did not love her for her virtues as much and more than for her charms; a heart which did not put duty first, and prefer it to everything. she did not desire a lover who knew no will but hers. she wished to reign over a man whom she had not spoilt. thus circe, having changed into swine the comrades of ulysses, bestowed herself on him over whom she had no power. except for this sacred and inviolable right, sophy is very jealous of her own rights; she observes how carefully emile respects them, how zealously he does her will; how cleverly he guesses her wishes, how exactly he arrives at the appointed time; she will have him neither late nor early; he must arrive to the moment. to come early is to think more of himself than of her; to come late is to neglect her. to neglect sophy, that could not happen twice. an unfounded suspicion on her part nearly ruined everything, but sophy is really just and knows how to atone for her faults. they were expecting us one evening; emile had received his orders. they came to meet us, but we were not there. what has become of us? what accident have we met with? no message from us! the evening is spent in expectation of our arrival. sophy thinks we are dead; she is miserable and in an agony of distress; she cries all the night through. in the course of the evening a messenger was despatched to inquire after us and bring back news in the morning. the messenger returns together with another messenger sent by us, who makes our excuses verbally and says we are quite well. then the scene is changed; sophy dries her tears, or if she still weeps it is for anger. it is small consolation to her proud spirit to know that we are alive; emile lives and he has kept her waiting. when we arrive she tries to escape to her own room; her parents desire her to remain, so she is obliged to do so; but deciding at once what course she will take she assumes a calm and contented expression which would deceive most people. her father comes forward to receive us saying, "you have made your friends very uneasy; there are people here who will not forgive you very readily." "who are they, papa," said sophy with the most gracious smile she could assume. "what business is that of yours," said her father, "if it is not you?" sophy bent over her work without reply. her mother received us coldly and formally. emile was so confused he dared not speak to sophy. she spoke first, inquired how he was, asked him to take a chair, and pretended so cleverly that the poor young fellow, who as yet knew nothing of the language of angry passions, was quite deceived by her apparent indifference, and ready to take offence on his own account. to undeceive him i was going to take sophy's hand and raise it to my lips as i sometimes did; she drew it back so hastily, with the word, "sir," uttered in such a strange manner that emile's eyes were opened at once by this involuntary movement. sophy herself, seeing that she had betrayed herself, exercised less control over herself. her apparent indifference was succeeded by scornful irony. she replied to everything he said in monosyllables uttered slowly and hesitatingly as if she were afraid her anger should show itself too plainly. emile half dead with terror stared at her full of sorrow, and tried to get her to look at him so that his eyes might read in hers her real feelings. sophy, still more angry at his boldness, gave him one look which removed all wish for another. luckily for himself, emile, trembling and dumbfounded, dared neither look at her nor speak to her again; for had he not been guilty, had he been able to endure her wrath, she would never have forgiven him. seeing that it was my turn now, and that the time was ripe for explanation, i returned to sophy. i took her hand and this time she did not snatch it away; she was ready to faint. i said gently, "dear sophy, we are the victims of misfortune; but you are just and reasonable; you will not judge us unheard; listen to what we have to say." she said nothing and i proceeded-- "we set out yesterday at four o'clock; we were told to be here at seven, and we always allow ourselves rather more time than we need, so as to rest a little before we get here. we were more than half way here when we heard lamentable groans, which came from a little valley in the hillside, some distance off. we hurried towards the place and found an unlucky peasant who had taken rather more wine than was good for him; on his way home he had fallen heavily from his horse and broken his leg. we shouted and called for help; there was no answer; we tried to lift the injured man on his horse, but without success; the least movement caused intense agony. we decided to tie up the horse in a quiet part of the wood; then we made a chair of our crossed arms and carried the man as gently as possible, following his directions till we got him home. the way was long, and we were constantly obliged to stop and rest. at last we got there, but thoroughly exhausted. we were surprised and sorry to find that it was a house we knew already and that the wretched creature we had carried with such difficulty was the very man who received us so kindly when first we came. we had all been so upset that until that moment we had not recognised each other. "there were only two little children. his wife was about to present him with another, and she was so overwhelmed at the sight of him brought home in such a condition, that she was taken ill and a few hours later gave birth to another little one. what was to be done under such circumstances in a lonely cottage far from any help? emile decided to fetch the horse we had left in the wood, to ride as fast as he could into the town and fetch a surgeon. he let the surgeon have the horse, and not succeeding in finding a nurse all at once, he returned on foot with a servant, after having sent a messenger to you; meanwhile i hardly knew what to do between a man with a broken leg and a woman in travail, but i got ready as well as i could such things in the house as i thought would be needed for the relief of both. "i will pass over the rest of the details; they are not to the point. it was two o'clock in the morning before we got a moment's rest. at last we returned before daybreak to our lodging close at hand, where we waited till you were up to let you know what had happened to us." that was all i said. but before any one could speak emile, approaching sophy, raised his voice and said with greater firmness than i expected, "sophy, my fate is in your hands, as you very well know. you may condemn me to die of grief; but do not hope to make me forget the rights of humanity; they are even more sacred in my eyes than your own rights; i will never renounce them for you." for all answer, sophy rose, put her arm round his neck, and kissed him on the cheek; then offering him her hand with inimitable grace she said to him, "emile, take this hand; it is yours. when you will, you shall be my husband and my master; i will try to be worthy of that honour." scarcely had she kissed him, when her delighted father clapped his hands calling, "encore, encore," and sophy without further ado, kissed him twice on the other cheek; but afraid of what she had done she took refuge at once in her mother's arms and hid her blushing face on the maternal bosom. i will not describe our happiness; everybody will feel with us. after dinner sophy asked if it were too far to go and see the poor invalids. it was her wish and it was a work of mercy. when we got there we found them both in bed--emile had sent for a second bedstead; there were people there to look after them--emile had seen to it. but in spite of this everything was so untidy that they suffered almost as much from discomfort as from their condition. sophy asked for one of the good wife's aprons and set to work to make her more comfortable in her bed; then she did as much for the man; her soft and gentle hand seemed to find out what was hurting them and how to settle them into less painful positions. her very presence seemed to make them more comfortable; she seemed to guess what was the matter. this fastidious girl was not disgusted by the dirt or smells, and she managed to get rid of both without disturbing the sick people. she who had always appeared so modest and sometimes so disdainful, she who would not for all the world have touched a man's bed with her little finger, lifted the sick man and changed his linen without any fuss, and placed him to rest in a more comfortable position. the zeal of charity is of more value than modesty. what she did was done so skilfully and with such a light touch that he felt better almost without knowing she had touched him. husband and wife mingled their blessings upon the kindly girl who tended, pitied, and consoled them. she was an angel from heaven come to visit them; she was an angel in face and manner, in gentleness and goodness. emile was greatly touched by all this and he watched her without speaking. o man, love thy helpmeet. god gave her to relieve thy sufferings, to comfort thee in thy troubles. this is she! the new-born baby was baptised. the two lovers were its god-parents, and as they held it at the font they were longing, at the bottom of their hearts, for the time when they should have a child of their own to be baptised. they longed for their wedding day; they thought it was close at hand; all sophy's scruples had vanished, but mine remained. they had not got so far as they expected; every one must have his turn. one morning when they had not seen each other for two whole days, i entered emile's room with a letter in my hands, and looking fixedly at him i said to him, "what would you do if some one told you sophy were dead?" he uttered a loud cry, got up and struck his hands together, and without saying a single word, he looked at me with eyes of desperation. "answer me," i continued with the same calmness. vexed at my composure, he then approached me with eyes blazing with anger; and checking himself in an almost threatening attitude, "what would i do? i know not; but this i do know, i would never set eyes again upon the person who brought me such news." "comfort yourself," said i, smiling, "she lives, she is well, and they are expecting us this evening. but let us go for a short walk and we can talk things over." the passion which engrosses him will no longer permit him to devote himself as in former days to discussions of pure reason; this very passion must be called to our aid if his attention is to be given to my teaching. that is why i made use of this terrible preface; i am quite sure he will listen to me now. "we must be happy, dear emile; it is the end of every feeling creature; it is the first desire taught us by nature, and the only one which never leaves us. but where is happiness? who knows? every one seeks it, and no one finds it. we spend our lives in the search and we die before the end is attained. my young friend, when i took you, a new-born infant, in my arms, and called god himself to witness to the vow i dared to make that i would devote my life to the happiness of your life, did i know myself what i was undertaking? no; i only knew that in making you happy, i was sure of my own happiness. by making this useful inquiry on your account, i made it for us both. "so long as we do not know what to do, wisdom consists in doing nothing. of all rules there is none so greatly needed by man, and none which he is less able to obey. in seeking happiness when we know not where it is, we are perhaps getting further and further from it, we are running as many risks as there are roads to choose from. but it is not every one that can keep still. our passion for our own well-being makes us so uneasy, that we would rather deceive ourselves in the search for happiness than sit still and do nothing; and when once we have left the place where we might have known happiness, we can never return. "in ignorance like this i tried to avoid a similar fault. when i took charge of you i decided to take no useless steps and to prevent you from doing so too. i kept to the path of nature, until she should show me the path of happiness. and lo! their paths were the same, and without knowing it this was the path i trod. "be at once my witness and my judge; i will never refuse to accept your decision. your early years have not been sacrificed to those that were to follow, you have enjoyed all the good gifts which nature bestowed upon you. of the ills to which you were by nature subject, and from which i could shelter you, you have only experienced such as would harden you to bear others. you have never suffered any evil, except to escape a greater. you have known neither hatred nor servitude. free and happy, you have remained just and kindly; for suffering and vice are inseparable, and no man ever became bad until he was unhappy. may the memory of your childhood remain with you to old age! i am not afraid that your kind heart will ever recall the hand that trained it without a blessing upon it. "when you reached the age of reason, i secured you from the influence of human prejudice; when your heart awoke i preserved you from the sway of passion. had i been able to prolong this inner tranquillity till your life's end, my work would have been secure, and you would have been as happy as man can be; but, my dear emile, in vain did i dip you in the waters of styx, i could not make you everywhere invulnerable; a fresh enemy has appeared, whom you have not yet learnt to conquer, and from whom i cannot save you. that enemy is yourself. nature and fortune had left you free. you could face poverty, you could bear bodily pain; the sufferings of the heart were unknown to you; you were then dependent on nothing but your position as a human being; now you depend on all the ties you have formed for yourself; you have learnt to desire, and you are now the slave of your desires. without any change in yourself, without any insult, any injury to yourself, what sorrows may attack your soul, what pains may you suffer without sickness, how many deaths may you die and yet live! a lie, an error, a suspicion, may plunge you in despair. "at the theatre you used to see heroes, abandoned to depths of woe, making the stage re-echo with their wild cries, lamenting like women, weeping like children, and thus securing the applause of the audience. do you remember how shocked you were by those lamentations, cries, and groans, in men from whom one would only expect deeds of constancy and heroism. 'why,' said you, 'are those the patterns we are to follow, the models set for our imitation! are they afraid man will not be small enough, unhappy enough, weak enough, if his weakness is not enshrined under a false show of virtue.' my young friend, henceforward you must be more merciful to the stage; you have become one of those heroes. "you know how to suffer and to die; you know how to bear the heavy yoke of necessity in ills of the body, but you have not yet learnt to give a law to the desires of your heart; and the difficulties of life arise rather from our affections than from our needs. our desires are vast, our strength is little better than nothing. in his wishes man is dependent on many things; in himself he is dependent on nothing, not even on his own life; the more his connections are multiplied, the greater his sufferings. everything upon earth has an end; sooner or later all that we love escapes from our fingers, and we behave as if it would last for ever. what was your terror at the mere suspicion of sophy's death? do you suppose she will live for ever? do not young people of her age die? she must die, my son, and perhaps before you. who knows if she is alive at this moment? nature meant you to die but once; you have prepared a second death for yourself. "a slave to your unbridled passions, how greatly are you to be pitied! ever privations, losses, alarms; you will not even enjoy what is left. you will possess nothing because of the fear of losing it; you will never be able to satisfy your passions, because you desired to follow them continually. you will ever be seeking that which will fly before you; you will be miserable and you will become wicked. how can you be otherwise, having no care but your unbridled passions! if you cannot put up with involuntary privations how will you voluntarily deprive yourself? how can you sacrifice desire to duty, and resist your heart in order to listen to your reason? you would never see that man again who dared to bring you word of the death of your mistress; how would you behold him who would deprive you of her living self, him who would dare to tell you, 'she is dead to you, virtue puts a gulf between you'? if you must live with her whatever happens, whether sophy is married or single, whether you are free or not, whether she loves or hates you, whether she is given or refused to you, no matter, it is your will and you must have her at any price. tell me then what crime will stop a man who has no law but his heart's desires, who knows not how to resist his own passions. "my son, there is no happiness without courage, nor virtue without a struggle. the word virtue is derived from a word signifying strength, and strength is the foundation of all virtue. virtue is the heritage of a creature weak by nature but strong by will; that is the whole merit of the righteous man; and though we call god good we do not call him virtuous, because he does good without effort. i waited to explain the meaning of this word, so often profaned, until you were ready to understand me. as long as virtue is quite easy to practise, there is little need to know it. this need arises with the awakening of the passions; your time has come. "when i brought you up in all the simplicity of nature, instead of preaching disagreeable duties, i secured for you immunity from the vices which make such duties disagreeable; i made lying not so much hateful as unnecessary in your sight; i taught you not so much to give others their due, as to care little about your own rights; i made you kindly rather than virtuous. but the kindly man is only kind so long as he finds it pleasant; kindness falls to pieces at the shook of human passions; the kindly man is only kind to himself. "what is meant by a virtuous man? he who can conquer his affections; for then he follows his reason, his conscience; he does his duty; he is his own master and nothing can turn him from the right way. so far you have had only the semblance of liberty, the precarious liberty of the slave who has not received his orders. now is the time for real freedom; learn to be your own master; control your heart, my emile, and you will be virtuous. "there is another apprenticeship before you, an apprenticeship more difficult than the former; for nature delivers us from the evils she lays upon us, or else she teaches us to submit to them; but she has no message for us with regard to our self-imposed evils; she leaves us to ourselves; she leaves us, victims of our own passions, to succumb to our vain sorrows, to pride ourselves on the tears of which we should be ashamed. "this is your first passion. perhaps it is the only passion worthy of you. if you can control it like a man, it will be the last; you will be master of all the rest, and you will obey nothing but the passion for virtue. "there is nothing criminal in this passion; i know it; it is as pure as the hearts which experience it. it was born of honour and nursed by innocence. happy lovers! for you the charms of virtue do but add to those of love; and the blessed union to which you are looking forward is less the reward of your goodness than of your affection. but tell me, o truthful man, though this passion is pure, is it any the less your master? are you the less its slave? and if to-morrow it should cease to be innocent, would you strangle it on the spot? now is the time to try your strength; there is no time for that in hours of danger. these perilous efforts should be made when danger is still afar. we do not practise the use of our weapons when we are face to face with the enemy, we do that before the war; we come to the battle-field ready prepared. "it is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. all alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. to feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. a man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love. "do not expect me to supply you with lengthy precepts of morality, i have only one rule to give you which sums up all the rest. be a man; restrain your heart within the limits of your manhood. study and know these limits; however narrow they may be, we are not unhappy within them; it is only when we wish to go beyond them that we are unhappy, only when, in our mad passions, we try to attain the impossible; we are unhappy when we forget our manhood to make an imaginary world for ourselves, from which we are always slipping back into our own. the only good things, whose loss really affects us, are those which we claim as our rights. if it is clear that we cannot obtain what we want, our mind turns away from it; wishes without hope cease to torture us. a beggar is not tormented by a desire to be a king; a king only wishes to be a god when he thinks himself more than man. "the illusions of pride are the source of our greatest ills; but the contemplation of human suffering keeps the wise humble. he keeps to his proper place and makes no attempt to depart from it; he does not waste his strength in getting what he cannot keep; and his whole strength being devoted to the right employment of what he has, he is in reality richer and more powerful in proportion as he desires less than we. a man, subject to death and change, shall i forge for myself lasting chains upon this earth, where everything changes and disappears, whence i myself shall shortly vanish! oh, emile! my son! if i were to lose you, what would be left of myself? and yet i must learn to lose you, for who knows when you may be taken from me? "would you live in wisdom and happiness, fix your heart on the beauty that is eternal; let your desires be limited by your position, let your duties take precedence of your wishes; extend the law of necessity into the region of morals; learn to lose what may be taken from you; learn to forsake all things at the command of virtue, to set yourself above the chances of life, to detach your heart before it is torn in pieces, to be brave in adversity so that you may never be wretched, to be steadfast in duty that you may never be guilty of a crime. then you will be happy in spite of fortune, and good in spite of your passions. you will find a pleasure that cannot be destroyed, even in the possession of the most fragile things; you will possess them, they will not possess you, and you will realise that the man who loses everything, only enjoys what he knows how to resign. it is true you will not enjoy the illusions of imaginary pleasures, neither will you feel the sufferings which are their result. you will profit greatly by this exchange, for the sufferings are real and frequent, the pleasures are rare and empty. victor over so many deceitful ideas, you will also vanquish the idea that attaches such an excessive value to life. you will spend your life in peace, and you will leave it without terror; you will detach yourself from life as from other things. let others, horror-struck, believe that when this life is ended they cease to be; conscious of the nothingness of life, you will think that you are but entering upon the true life. to the wicked, death is the close of life; to the just it is its dawn." emile heard me with attention not unmixed with anxiety. after such a startling preface he feared some gloomy conclusion. he foresaw that when i showed him how necessary it is to practise the strength of the soul, i desired to subject him to this stern discipline; he was like a wounded man who shrinks from the surgeon, and fancies he already feels the painful but healing touch which will cure the deadly wound. uncertain, anxious, eager to know what i am driving at, he does not answer, he questions me but timidly. "what must i do?" says he almost trembling, not daring to raise his eyes. "what must you do?" i reply firmly. "you must leave sophy." "what are you saying?" he exclaimed angrily. "leave sophy, leave sophy, deceive her, become a traitor, a villain, a perjurer!" "why!" i continue, interrupting him; "does emile suppose i shall teach him to deserve such titles?" "no," he continued with the same vigour. "neither you nor any one else; i am capable of preserving your work; i shall not deserve such reproaches." i was prepared for this first outburst; i let it pass unheeded. if i had not the moderation i preach it would not be much use preaching it! emile knows me too well to believe me capable of demanding any wrong action from him, and he knows that it would be wrong to leave sophy, in the sense he attaches to the phrase. so he waits for an explanation. then i resume my speech. "my dear emile, do you think any man whatsoever can be happier than you have been for the last three months? if you think so, undeceive yourself. before tasting the pleasures of life you have plumbed the depths of its happiness. there is nothing more than you have already experienced. the joys of sense are soon over; habit invariably destroys them. you have tasted greater joys through hope than you will ever enjoy in reality. the imagination which adorns what we long for, deserts its possession. with the exception of the one self-existing being, there is nothing beautiful except that which is not. if that state could have lasted for ever, you would have found perfect happiness. but all that is related to man shares his decline; all is finite, all is fleeting in human life, and even if the conditions which make us happy could be prolonged for ever, habit would deprive us of all taste for that happiness. if external circumstances remain unchanged, the heart changes; either happiness forsakes us, or we forsake her. "during your infatuation time has passed unheeded. summer is over, winter is at hand. even if our expeditions were possible, at such a time of year they would not be permitted. whether we wish it or no, we shall have to change our way of life; it cannot continue. i read in your eager eyes that this does not disturb you greatly; sophy's confession and your own wishes suggest a simple plan for avoiding the snow and escaping the journey. the plan has its advantages, no doubt; but when spring returns, the snow will melt and the marriage will remain; you must reckon for all seasons. "you wish to marry sophy and you have only known her five months! you wish to marry her, not because she is a fit wife for you, but because she pleases you; as if love were never mistaken as to fitness, as if those, who begin with love, never ended with hatred! i know she is virtuous; but is that enough? is fitness merely a matter of honour? it is not her virtue i misdoubt, it is her disposition. does a woman show her real character in a day? do you know how often you must have seen her and under what varying conditions to really know her temper? is four months of liking a sufficient pledge for the rest of your life? a couple of months hence you may have forgotten her; as soon as you are gone another may efface your image in her heart; on your return you may find her as indifferent as you have hitherto found her affectionate. sentiments are not a matter of principle; she may be perfectly virtuous and yet cease to love you. i am inclined to think she will be faithful and true; but who will answer for her, and who will answer for you if you are not put to the proof? will you postpone this trial till it is too late, will you wait to know your true selves till parting is no longer possible? "sophy is not eighteen, and you are barely twenty-two; this is the age for love, but not for marriage. what a father and mother for a family! if you want to know how to bring up children, you should at least wait till you yourselves are children no longer. do you not know that too early motherhood has weakened the constitution, destroyed the health, and shortened the life of many young women? do you not know that many children have always been weak and sickly because their mother was little more than a child herself? when mother and child are both growing, the strength required for their growth is divided, and neither gets all that nature intended; are not both sure to suffer? either i know very little of emile, or he would rather wait and have a healthy wife and children, than satisfy his impatience at the price of their life and health. "let us speak of yourself. you hope to be a husband and a father; have you seriously considered your duties? when you become the head of a family you will become a citizen of your country. and what is a citizen of the state? what do you know about it? you have studied your duties as a man, but what do you know of the duties of a citizen? do you know the meaning of such terms as government, laws, country? do you know the price you must pay for life, and for what you must be prepared to die? you think you know everything, when you really know nothing at all. before you take your place in the civil order, learn to perceive and know what is your proper place. "emile, you must leave sophy; i do not bid you forsake her; if you were capable of such conduct, she would be only too happy not to have married you; you must leave her in order to return worthy of her. do not be vain enough to think yourself already worthy. how much remains to be done! come and fulfil this splendid task; come and learn to submit to absence; come and earn the prize of fidelity, so that when you return you may indeed deserve some honour, and may ask her hand not as a favour but as a reward." unaccustomed to struggle with himself, untrained to desire one thing and to will another, the young man will not give way; he resists, he argues. why should he refuse the happiness which awaits him? would he not despise the hand which is offered him if he hesitated to accept it? why need he leave her to learn what he ought to know? and if it were necessary to leave her why not leave her as his wife with a certain pledge of his return? let him be her husband, and he is ready to follow me; let them be married and he will leave her without fear. "marry her in order to leave her, dear emile! what a contradiction! a lover who can leave his mistress shows himself capable of great things; a husband should never leave his wife unless through necessity. to cure your scruples, i see the delay must be involuntary on your part; you must be able to tell sophy you leave her against your will. very well, be content, and since you will not follow the commands of reason, you must submit to another master. you have not forgotten your promise. emile, you must leave sophy; i will have it." for a moment or two he was downcast, silent, and thoughtful, then looking me full in the face he said, "when do we start?" "in a week's time," i replied; "sophy must be prepared for our going. women are weaker than we are, and we must show consideration for them; and this parting is not a duty for her as it is for you, so she may be allowed to bear it less bravely." the temptation to continue the daily history of their love up to the time of their separation is very great; but i have already presumed too much upon the good nature of my readers; let us abridge the story so as to bring it to an end. will emile face the situation as bravely at his mistress' feet as he has done in conversation with his friend? i think he will; his confidence is rooted in the sincerity of his love. he would be more at a loss with her, if it cost him less to leave her; he would leave her feeling himself to blame, and that is a difficult part for a man of honour to play; but the greater the sacrifice, the more credit he demands for it in the sight of her who makes it so difficult. he has no fear that she will misunderstand his motives. every look seems to say, "oh, sophy, read my heart and be faithful to me; your lover is not without virtue." sophy tries to bear the unforeseen blow with her usual pride and dignity. she tries to seem as if she did not care, but as the honours of war are not hers, but emile's, her strength is less equal to the task. she weeps, she sighs against her will, and the fear of being forgotten embitters the pain of parting. she does not weep in her lover's sight, she does not let him see her terror; she would die rather than utter a sigh in his presence. i am the recipient of her lamentations, i behold her tears, it is i who am supposed to be her confidant. women are very clever and know how to conceal their cleverness; the more she frets in private, the more pains she takes to please me; she feels that her fate is in my hands. i console and comfort her; i make myself answerable for her lover, or rather for her husband; let her be as true to him as he to her and i promise they shall be married in two years' time. she respects me enough to believe that i do not want to deceive her. i am guarantor to each for the other. their hearts, their virtue, my honesty, the confidence of their parents, all combine to reassure them. but what can reason avail against weakness? they part as if they were never to meet again. then it is that sophy recalls the regrets of eucharis, and fancies herself in her place. do not let us revive that fantastic affection during his absence "sophy," say i one day, "exchange books with emile; let him have your telemachus that he may learn to be like him, and let him give you his spectator which you enjoy reading. study the duties of good wives in it, and remember that in two years' time you will undertake those duties." the exchange gave pleasure to both and inspired them with confidence. at last the sad day arrived and they must part. sophy's worthy father, with whom i had arranged the whole business, took affectionate leave of me, and taking me aside, he spoke seriously and somewhat emphatically, saying, "i have done everything to please you; i knew i had to do with a man of honour; i have only one word to say. remembering your pupil has signed his contract of marriage on my daughter's lips." what a difference in the behaviour of the two lovers! emile, impetuous, eager, excited, almost beside himself, cries aloud and sheds torrents of tears upon the hands of father, mother, and daughter; with sobs he embraces every one in the house and repeats the same thing over and over again in a way that would be ludicrous at any other time. sophy, pale, sorrowful, doleful, and heavy-eyed, remains quiet without a word or a tear, she sees no one, not even emile. in vain he takes her hand, and clasps her in his arms; she remains motionless, unheeding his tears, his caresses, and everything he does; so far as she is concerned, he is gone already. a sight more moving than the prolonged lamentations and noisy regrets of her lover! he sees, he feels, he is heartbroken. i drag him reluctantly away; if i left him another minute, he would never go. i am delighted that he should carry this touching picture with him. if he should ever be tempted to forget what is due to sophy, his heart must have strayed very far indeed if i cannot bring it back to her by recalling her as he saw her last. of travel is it good for young people to travel? the question is often asked and as often hotly disputed. if it were stated otherwise--are men the better for having travelled?--perhaps there would be less difference of opinion. the misuse of books is the death of sound learning. people think they know what they have read, and take no pains to learn. too much reading only produces a pretentious ignoramus. there was never so much reading in any age as the present, and never was there less learning; in no country of europe are so many histories and books of travel printed as in france, and nowhere is there less knowledge of the mind and manners of other nations. so many books lead us to neglect the book of the world; if we read it at all, we keep each to our own page. if the phrase, "can one become a persian," were unknown to me, i should suspect on hearing it that it came from the country where national prejudice is most prevalent and from the sex which does most to increase it. a parisian thinks he has a knowledge of men and he knows only frenchmen; his town is always full of foreigners, but he considers every foreigner as a strange phenomenon which has no equal in the universe. you must have a close acquaintance with the middle classes of that great city, you must have lived among them, before you can believe that people could be at once so witty and so stupid. the strangest thing about it is that probably every one of them has read a dozen times a description of the country whose inhabitants inspire him with such wonder. to discover the truth amidst our own prejudices and those of the authors is too hard a task. i have been reading books of travels all my life, but i never found two that gave me the same idea of the same nation. on comparing my own scanty observations with what i have read, i have decided to abandon the travellers and i regret the time wasted in trying to learn from their books; for i am quite convinced that for that sort of study, seeing not reading is required. that would be true enough if every traveller were honest, if he only said what he saw and believed, and if truth were not tinged with false colours from his own eyes. what must it be when we have to disentangle the truth from the web of lies and ill-faith? let us leave the boasted resources of books to those who are content to use them. like the art of raymond lully they are able to set people chattering about things they do not know. they are able to set fifteen-year-old platos discussing philosophy in the clubs, and teaching people the customs of egypt and the indies on the word of paul lucas or tavernier. i maintain that it is beyond dispute that any one who has only seen one nation does not know men; he only knows those men among whom he has lived. hence there is another way of stating the question about travel: "is it enough for a well-educated man to know his fellow-countrymen, or ought he to know mankind in general?" then there is no place for argument or uncertainty. see how greatly the solution of a difficult problem may depend on the way in which it is stated. but is it necessary to travel the whole globe to study mankind? need we go to japan to study europeans? need we know every individual before we know the species? no, there are men so much alike that it is not worth while to study them individually. when you have seen a dozen frenchmen you have seen them all. though one cannot say as much of the english and other nations, it is, however, certain that every nation has its own specific character, which is derived by induction from the study, not of one, but many of its members. he who has compared a dozen nations knows men, just he who has compared a dozen frenchmen knows the french. to acquire knowledge it is not enough to travel hastily through a country. observation demands eyes, and the power of directing them towards the object we desire to know. there are plenty of people who learn no more from their travels than from their books, because they do not know how to think; because in reading their mind is at least under the guidance of the author, and in their travels they do not know how to see for themselves. others learn nothing, because they have no desire to learn. their object is so entirely different, that this never occurs to them; it is very unlikely that you will see clearly what you take no trouble to look for. the french travel more than any other nation, but they are so taken up with their own customs, that everything else is confused together. there are frenchmen in every corner of the globe. in no country of the world do you find more people who have travelled than in france. and yet of all the nations of europe, that which has seen most, knows least. the english are also travellers, but they travel in another fashion; these two nations must always be at opposite extremes. the english nobility travels, the french stays at home; the french people travel, the english stay at home. this difference does credit, i think, to the english. the french almost always travel for their own ends; the english do not seek their fortune in other lands, unless in the way of commerce and with their hands full; when they travel it is to spend their money, not to live by their wits; they are too proud to cringe before strangers. this is why they learn more abroad than the french who have other fish to fry. yet the english have their national prejudices; but these prejudices are not so much the result of ignorance as of feeling. the englishman's prejudices are the result of pride, the frenchman's are due to vanity. just as the least cultivated nations are usually the best, so those travel best who travel least; they have made less progress than we in our frivolous pursuits, they are less concerned with the objects of our empty curiosity, so that they give their attention to what is really useful. i hardly know any but the spaniards who travel in this fashion. while the frenchman is running after all the artists of the country, while the englishman is getting a copy of some antique, while the german is taking his album to every man of science, the spaniard is silently studying the government, the manners of the country, its police, and he is the only one of the four who from all that he has seen will carry home any observation useful to his own country. the ancients travelled little, read little, and wrote few books; yet we see in those books that remain to us, that they observed each other more thoroughly than we observe our contemporaries. without going back to the days of homer, the only poet who transports us to the country he describes, we cannot deny to herodotus the glory of having painted manners in his history, though he does it rather by narrative than by comment; still he does it better than all our historians whose books are overladen with portraits and characters. tacitus has described the germans of his time better than any author has described the germans of to-day. there can be no doubt that those who have devoted themselves to ancient history know more about the greeks, carthaginians, romans, gauls, and persians than any nation of to-day knows about its neighbours. it must also be admitted that the original characteristics of different nations are changing day by day, and are therefore more difficult to grasp. as races blend and nations intermingle, those national differences which formerly struck the observer at first sight gradually disappear. before our time every nation remained more or less cut off from the rest; the means of communication were fewer; there was less travelling, less of mutual or conflicting interests, less political and civil intercourse between nation and nation; those intricate schemes of royalty, miscalled diplomacy, were less frequent; there were no permanent ambassadors resident at foreign courts; long voyages were rare, there was little foreign trade, and what little there was, was either the work of princes, who employed foreigners, or of people of no account who had no influence on others and did nothing to bring the nations together. the relations between europe and asia in the present century are a hundredfold more numerous than those between gaul and spain in the past; europe alone was less accessible than the whole world is now. moreover, the peoples of antiquity usually considered themselves as the original inhabitants of their country; they had dwelt there so long that all record was lost of the far-off times when their ancestors settled there; they had been there so long that the place had made a lasting impression on them; but in modern europe the invasions of the barbarians, following upon the roman conquests, have caused an extraordinary confusion. the frenchmen of to-day are no longer the big fair men of old; the greeks are no longer beautiful enough to serve as a sculptor's model; the very face of the romans has changed as well as their character; the persians, originally from tartary, are daily losing their native ugliness through the intermixture of circassian blood. europeans are no longer gauls, germans, iberians, allobroges; they are all scythians, more or less degenerate in countenance, and still more so in conduct. this is why the ancient distinctions of race, the effect of soil and climate, made a greater difference between nation and nation in respect of temperament, looks, manners, and character than can be distinguished in our own time, when the fickleness of europe leaves no time for natural causes to work, when the forests are cut down and the marshes drained, when the earth is more generally, though less thoroughly, tilled, so that the same differences between country and country can no longer be detected even in purely physical features. if they considered these facts perhaps people would not be in such a hurry to ridicule herodotus, ctesias, pliny for having described the inhabitants of different countries each with its own peculiarities and with striking differences which we no longer see. to recognise such types of face we should need to see the men themselves; no change must have passed over them, if they are to remain the same. if we could behold all the people who have ever lived, who can doubt that we should find greater variations between one century and another, than are now found between nation and nation. at the same time, while observation becomes more difficult, it is more carelessly and badly done; this is another reason for the small success of our researches into the natural history of the human race. the information acquired by travel depends upon the object of the journey. if this object is a system of philosophy, the traveller only sees what he desires to see; if it is self-interest, it engrosses the whole attention of those concerned. commerce and the arts which blend and mingle the nations at the same time prevent them from studying each other. if they know how to make a profit out of their neighbours, what more do they need to know? it is a good thing to know all the places where we might live, so as to choose those where we can live most comfortably. if every one lived by his own efforts, all he would need to know would be how much land would keep him in food. the savage, who has need of no one, and envies no one, neither knows nor seeks to know any other country but his own. if he requires more land for his subsistence he shuns inhabited places; he makes war upon the wild beasts and feeds on them. but for us, to whom civilised life has become a necessity, for us who must needs devour our fellow-creatures, self-interest prompts each one of us to frequent those districts where there are most people to be devoured. this is why we all flock to rome, paris, and london. human flesh and blood are always cheapest in the capital cities. thus we only know the great nations, which are just like one another. they say that men of learning travel to obtain information; not so, they travel like other people from interested motives. philosophers like plato and pythagoras are no longer to be found, or if they are, it must be in far-off lands. our men of learning only travel at the king's command; they are sent out, their expenses are paid, they receive a salary for seeing such and such things, and the object of that journey is certainly not the study of any question of morals. their whole time is required for the object of their journey, and they are too honest not to earn their pay. if in any country whatsoever there are people travelling at their own expense, you may be sure it is not to study men but to teach them. it is not knowledge they desire but ostentation. how should their travels teach them to shake off the yoke of prejudice? it is prejudice that sends them on their travels. to travel to see foreign lands or to see foreign nations are two very different things. the former is the usual aim of the curious, the latter is merely subordinate to it. if you wish to travel as a philosopher you should reverse this order. the child observes things till he is old enough to study men. man should begin by studying his fellows; he can study things later if time permits. it is therefore illogical to conclude that travel is useless because we travel ill. but granting the usefulness of travel, does it follow that it is good for all of us? far from it; there are very few people who are really fit to travel; it is only good for those who are strong enough in themselves to listen to the voice of error without being deceived, strong enough to see the example of vice without being led away by it. travelling accelerates the progress of nature, and completes the man for good or evil. when a man returns from travelling about the world, he is what he will be all his life; there are more who return bad than good, because there are more who start with an inclination towards evil. in the course of their travels, young people, ill-educated and ill-behaved, pick up all the vices of the nations among whom they have sojourned, and none of the virtues with which those vices are associated; but those who, happily for themselves, are well-born, those whose good disposition has been well cultivated, those who travel with a real desire to learn, all such return better and wiser than they went. emile will travel in this fashion; in this fashion there travelled another young man, worthy of a nobler age; one whose worth was the admiration of europe, one who died for his country in the flower of his manhood; he deserved to live, and his tomb, ennobled by his virtues only, received no honour till a stranger's hand adorned it with flowers. everything that is done in reason should have its rules. travel, undertaken as a part of education, should therefore have its rules. to travel for travelling's sake is to wander, to be a vagabond; to travel to learn is still too vague; learning without some definite aim is worthless. i would give a young man a personal interest in learning, and that interest, well-chosen, will also decide the nature of the instruction. this is merely the continuation of the method i have hitherto practised. now after he has considered himself in his physical relations to other creatures, in his moral relations with other men, there remains to be considered his civil relations with his fellow-citizens. to do this he must first study the nature of government in general, then the different forms of government, and lastly the particular government under which he was born, to know if it suits him to live under it; for by a right which nothing can abrogate, every man, when he comes of age, becomes his own master, free to renounce the contract by which he forms part of the community, by leaving the country in which that contract holds good. it is only by sojourning in that country, after he has come to years of discretion, that he is supposed to have tacitly confirmed the pledge given by his ancestors. he acquires the right to renounce his country, just as he has the right to renounce all claim to his father's lands; yet his place of birth was a gift of nature, and in renouncing it, he renounces what is his own. strictly speaking, every man remains in the land of his birth at his own risk unless he voluntarily submits to its laws in order to acquire a right to their protection. for example, i should say to emile, "hitherto you have lived under my guidance, you were unable to rule yourself. but now you are approaching the age when the law, giving you the control over your property, makes you master of your person. you are about to find yourself alone in society, dependent on everything, even on your patrimony. you mean to marry; that is a praiseworthy intention, it is one of the duties of man; but before you marry you must know what sort of man you want to be, how you wish to spend your life, what steps you mean to take to secure a living for your family and for yourself; for although we should not make this our main business, it must be definitely considered. do you wish to be dependent on men whom you despise? do you wish to establish your fortune and determine your position by means of civil relations which will make you always dependent on the choice of others, which will compel you, if you would escape from knaves, to become a knave yourself?" in the next place i would show him every possible way of using his money in trade, in the civil service, in finance, and i shall show him that in every one of these there are risks to be taken, every one of them places him in a precarious and dependent position, and compels him to adapt his morals, his sentiments, his conduct to the example and the prejudices of others. "there is yet another way of spending your time and money; you may join the army; that is to say, you may hire yourself out at very high wages to go and kill men who never did you any harm. this trade is held in great honour among men, and they cannot think too highly of those who are fit for nothing better. moreover, this profession, far from making you independent of other resources, makes them all the more necessary; for it is a point of honour in this profession to ruin those who have adopted it. it is true they are not all ruined; it is even becoming fashionable to grow rich in this as in other professions; but if i told you how people manage to do it, i doubt whether you would desire to follow their example. "moreover, you must know that, even in this trade, it is no longer a question of courage or valour, unless with regard to the ladies; on the contrary, the more cringing, mean, and degraded you are, the more honour you obtain; if you have decided to take your profession seriously, you will be despised, you will be hated, you will very possibly be driven out of the service, or at least you will fall a victim to favouritism and be supplanted by your comrades, because you have been doing your duty in the trenches, while they have been attending to their toilet." we can hardly suppose that any of these occupations will be much to emile's taste. "why," he will exclaim, "have i forgotten the amusements of my childhood? have i lost the use of my arms? is my strength failing me? do i not know how to work? what do i care about all your fine professions and all the silly prejudices of others? i know no other pride than to be kindly and just; no other happiness than to live in independence with her i love, gaining health and a good appetite by the day's work. all these difficulties you speak of do not concern me. the only property i desire is a little farm in some quiet corner. i will devote all my efforts after wealth to making it pay, and i will live without a care. give me sophy and my land, and i shall be rich." "yes, my dear friend, that is all a wise man requires, a wife and land of his own; but these treasures are scarcer than you think. the rarest you have found already; let us discuss the other. "a field of your own, dear emile! where will you find it, in what remote corner of the earth can you say, 'here am i master of myself and of this estate which belongs to me?' we know where a man may grow rich; who knows where he can do without riches? who knows where to live free and independent, without ill-treating others and without fear of being ill-treated himself! do you think it is so easy to find a place where you can always live like an honest man? if there is any safe and lawful way of living without intrigues, without lawsuits, without dependence on others, it is, i admit, to live by the labour of our hands, by the cultivation of our own land; but where is the state in which a man can say, 'the earth which i dig is my own?' before choosing this happy spot, be sure that you will find the peace you desire; beware lest an unjust government, a persecuting religion, and evil habits should disturb you in your home. secure yourself against the excessive taxes which devour the fruits of your labours, and the endless lawsuits which consume your capital. take care that you can live rightly without having to pay court to intendents, to their deputies, to judges, to priests, to powerful neighbours, and to knaves of every kind, who are always ready to annoy you if you neglect them. above all, secure yourself from annoyance on the part of the rich and great; remember that their estates may anywhere adjoin your naboth's vineyard. if unluckily for you some great man buys or builds a house near your cottage, make sure that he will not find a way, under some pretence or other, to encroach on your lands to round off his estate, or that you do not find him at once absorbing all your resources to make a wide highroad. if you keep sufficient credit to ward off all these disagreeables, you might as well keep your money, for it will cost you no more to keep it. riches and credit lean upon each other, the one can hardly stand without the other. "i have more experience than you, dear emile; i see more clearly the difficulties in the way of your scheme. yet it is a fine scheme and honourable; it would make you happy indeed. let us try to carry it out. i have a suggestion to make; let us devote the two years from now till the time of your return to choosing a place in europe where you could live happily with your family, secure from all the dangers i have just described. if we succeed, you will have discovered that true happiness, so often sought for in vain; and you will not have to regret the time spent in its search. if we fail, you will be cured of a mistaken idea; you will console yourself for an inevitable ill, and you will bow to the law of necessity." i do not know whether all my readers will see whither this suggested inquiry will lead us; but this i do know, if emile returns from his travels, begun and continued with this end in view, without a full knowledge of questions of government, public morality, and political philosophy of every kind, we are greatly lacking, he in intelligence and i in judgment. the science of politics is and probably always will be unknown. grotius, our leader in this branch of learning, is only a child, and what is worse an untruthful child. when i hear grotius praised to the skies and hobbes overwhelmed with abuse, i perceive how little sensible men have read or understood these authors. as a matter of fact, their principles are exactly alike, they only differ in their mode of expression. their methods are also different: hobbes relies on sophism; grotius relies on the poets; they are agreed in everything else. in modern times the only man who could have created this vast and useless science was the illustrious montesquieu. but he was not concerned with the principles of political law; he was content to deal with the positive laws of settled governments; and nothing could be more different than these two branches of study. yet he who would judge wisely in matters of actual government is forced to combine the two; he must know what ought to be in order to judge what is. the chief difficulty in the way of throwing light upon this important matter is to induce an individual to discuss and to answer these two questions. "how does it concern me; and what can i do?" emile is in a position to answer both. the next difficulty is due to the prejudices of childhood, the principles in which we were brought up; it is due above all to the partiality of authors, who are always talking about truth, though they care very little about it; it is only their own interests that they care for, and of these they say nothing. now the nation has neither professorships, nor pensions, nor membership of the academies to bestow. how then shall its rights be established by men of that type? the education i have given him has removed this difficulty also from emile's path. he scarcely knows what is meant by government; his business is to find the best; he does not want to write books; if ever he did so, it would not be to pay court to those in authority, but to establish the rights of humanity. there is a third difficulty, more specious than real; a difficulty which i neither desire to solve nor even to state; enough that i am not afraid of it; sure i am that in inquiries of this kind, great talents are less necessary than a genuine love of justice and a sincere reverence for truth. if matters of government can ever be fairly discussed, now or never is our chance. before beginning our observations we must lay down rules of procedure; we must find a scale with which to compare our measurements. our principles of political law are our scale. our actual measurements are the civil law of each country. our elementary notions are plain and simple, being taken directly from the nature of things. they will take the form of problems discussed between us, and they will not be formulated into principles, until we have found a satisfactory solution of our problems. for example, we shall begin with the state of nature, we shall see whether men are born slaves or free, in a community or independent; is their association the result of free will or of force? can the force which compels them to united action ever form a permanent law, by which this original force becomes binding, even when another has been imposed upon it, so that since the power of king nimrod, who is said to have been the first conqueror, every other power which has overthrown the original power is unjust and usurping, so that there are no lawful kings but the descendants of nimrod or their representatives; or if this original power has ceased, has the power which succeeded it any right over us, and does it destroy the binding force of the former power, so that we are not bound to obey except under compulsion, and we are free to rebel as soon as we are capable of resistance? such a right is not very different from might; it is little more than a play upon words. we shall inquire whether man might not say that all sickness comes from god, and that it is therefore a crime to send for the doctor. again, we shall inquire whether we are bound by our conscience to give our purse to a highwayman when we might conceal it from him, for the pistol in his hand is also a power. does this word power in this context mean something different from a power which is lawful and therefore subject to the laws to which it owes its being? suppose we reject this theory that might is right and admit the right of nature, or the authority of the father, as the foundation of society; we shall inquire into the extent of this authority; what is its foundation in nature? has it any other grounds but that of its usefulness to the child, his weakness, and the natural love which his father feels towards him? when the child is no longer feeble, when he is grown-up in mind as well as in body, does not he become the sole judge of what is necessary for his preservation? is he not therefore his own master, independent of all men, even of his father himself? for is it not still more certain that the son loves himself, than that the father loves the son? the father being dead, should the children obey the eldest brother, or some other person who has not the natural affection of a father? should there always be, from family to family, one single head to whom all the family owe obedience? if so, how has power ever come to be divided, and how is it that there is more than one head to govern the human race throughout the world? suppose the nations to have been formed each by its own choice; we shall then distinguish between right and fact; being thus subjected to their brothers, uncles, or other relations, not because they were obliged, but because they choose, we shall inquire whether this kind of society is not a sort of free and voluntary association? taking next the law of slavery, we shall inquire whether a man can make over to another his right to himself, without restriction, without reserve, without any kind of conditions; that is to say, can he renounce his person, his life, his reason, his very self, can he renounce all morality in his actions; in a word, can he cease to exist before his death, in spite of nature who places him directly in charge of his own preservation, in spite of reason and conscience which tell him what to do and what to leave undone? if there is any reservation or restriction in the deed of slavery, we shall discuss whether this deed does not then become a true contract, in which both the contracting powers, having in this respect no common master, [footnote: if they had such a common master, he would be no other than the sovereign, and then the right of slavery resting on the right of sovereignty would not be its origin.] remain their own judge as to the conditions of the contract, and therefore free to this extent, and able to break the contract as soon as it becomes hurtful. if then a slave cannot convey himself altogether to his master, how can a nation convey itself altogether to its head? if a slave is to judge whether his master is fulfilling his contract, is not the nation to judge whether its head is fulfilling his contract? thus we are compelled to retrace our steps, and when we consider the meaning of this collective nation we shall inquire whether some contract, a tacit contract at the least, is not required to make a nation, a contract anterior to that which we are assuming. since the nation was a nation before it chose a king, what made it a nation, except the social contract? therefore the social contract is the foundation of all civil society, and it is in the nature of this contract that we must seek the nature of the society formed by it. we will inquire into the meaning of this contract; may it not be fairly well expressed in this formula? as an individual every one of us contributes his goods, his person, his life, to the common stock, under the supreme direction of the general will; while as a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. assuming this, in order to define the terms we require, we shall observe that, instead of the individual person of each contracting party, this deed of association produces a moral and collective body, consisting of as many members as there are votes in the assembly. this public personality is usually called the body politic, which is called by its members the state when it is passive, and the sovereign when it is active, and a power when compared with its equals. with regard to the members themselves, collectively they are known as the nation, and individually as citizens as members of the city or partakers in the sovereign power, and subjects as obedient to the same authority. we shall note that this contract of association includes a mutual pledge on the part of the public and the individual; and that each individual, entering, so to speak, into a contract with himself, finds himself in a twofold capacity, i.e., as a member of the sovereign with regard to others, as member of the state with regard to the sovereign. we shall also note that while no one is bound by any engagement to which he was not himself a party, the general deliberation which may be binding on all the subjects with regard to the sovereign, because of the two different relations under which each of them is envisaged, cannot be binding on the state with regard to itself. hence we see that there is not, and cannot be, any other fundamental law, properly so called, except the social contract only. this does not mean that the body politic cannot, in certain respects, pledge itself to others; for in regard to the foreigner, it then becomes a simple creature, an individual. thus the two contracting parties, i.e., each individual and the public, have no common superior to decide their differences; so we will inquire if each of them remains free to break the contract at will, that is to repudiate it on his side as soon as he considers it hurtful. to clear up this difficulty, we shall observe that, according to the social pact, the sovereign power is only able to act through the common, general will; so its decrees can only have a general or common aim; hence it follows that a private individual cannot be directly injured by the sovereign, unless all are injured, which is impossible, for that would be to want to harm oneself. thus the social contract has no need of any warrant but the general power, for it can only be broken by individuals, and they are not therefore freed from their engagement, but punished for having broken it. to decide all such questions rightly, we must always bear in mind that the nature of the social pact is private and peculiar to itself, in that the nation only contracts with itself, i.e., the people as a whole as sovereign, with the individuals as subjects; this condition is essential to the construction and working of the political machine, it alone makes pledges lawful, reasonable, and secure, without which it would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the grossest abuse. individuals having only submitted themselves to the sovereign, and the sovereign power being only the general will, we shall see that every man in obeying the sovereign only obeys himself, and how much freer are we under the social part than in the state of nature. having compared natural and civil liberty with regard to persons, we will compare them as to property, the rights of ownership and the rights of sovereignty, the private and the common domain. if the sovereign power rests upon the right of ownership, there is no right more worthy of respect; it is inviolable and sacred for the sovereign power, so long as it remains a private individual right; as soon as it is viewed as common to all the citizens, it is subject to the common will, and this will may destroy it. thus the sovereign has no right to touch the property of one or many; but he may lawfully take possession of the property of all, as was done in sparta in the time of lycurgus; while the abolition of debts by solon was an unlawful deed. since nothing is binding on the subjects except the general will, let us inquire how this will is made manifest, by what signs we may recognise it with certainty, what is a law, and what are the true characters of the law? this is quite a fresh subject; we have still to define the term law. as soon as the nation considers one or more of its members, the nation is divided. a relation is established between the whole and its part which makes of them two separate entities, of which the part is one, and the whole, minus that part, is the other. but the whole minus the part is not the whole; as long as this relation exists, there is no longer a whole, but two unequal parts. on the other hand, if the whole nation makes a law for the whole nation, it is only considering itself; and if a relation is set up, it is between the whole community regarded from one point of view, and the whole community regarded from another point of view, without any division of that whole. then the object of the statute is general, and the will which makes that statute is general too. let us see if there is any other kind of decree which may bear the name of law. if the sovereign can only speak through laws, and if the law can never have any but a general purpose, concerning all the members of the state, it follows that the sovereign never has the power to make any law with regard to particular cases; and yet it is necessary for the preservation of the state that particular cases should also be dealt with; let us see how this can be done. the decrees of the sovereign can only be decrees of the general will, that is laws; there must also be determining decrees, decrees of power or government, for the execution of those laws; and these, on the other hand, can only have particular aims. thus the decrees by which the sovereign decides that a chief shall be elected is a law; the decree by which that chief is elected, in pursuance of the law, is only a decree of government. this is a third relation in which the assembled people may be considered, i.e., as magistrates or executors of the law which it has passed in its capacity as sovereign. [footnote: these problems and theorems are mostly taken from the treatise on the social contract, itself a summary of a larger work, undertaken without due consideration of my own powers, and long since abandoned.] we will now inquire whether it is possible for the nation to deprive itself of its right of sovereignty, to bestow it on one or more persons; for the decree of election not being a law, and the people in this decree not being themselves sovereign, we do not see how they can transfer a right which they do not possess. the essence of sovereignty consisting in the general will, it is equally hard to see how we can be certain that an individual will shall always be in agreement with the general will. we should rather assume that it will often be opposed to it; for individual interest always tends to privileges, while the common interest always tends to equality, and if such an agreement were possible, no sovereign right could exist, unless the agreement were either necessary or indestructible. we will inquire if, without violating the social pact, the heads of the nation, under whatever name they are chosen, can ever be more than the officers of the people, entrusted by them with the duty of carrying the law into execution. are not these chiefs themselves accountable for their administration, and are not they themselves subject to the laws which it is their business to see carried out? if the nation cannot alienate its supreme right, can it entrust it to others for a time? cannot it give itself a master, cannot it find representatives? this is an important question and deserves discussion. if the nation can have neither sovereign nor representatives we will inquire how it can pass its own laws; must there be many laws; must they be often altered; is it easy for a great nation to be its own lawgiver? was not the roman people a great nation? is it a good thing that there should be great nations? it follows from considerations already established that there is an intermediate body in the state between subjects and sovereign; and this intermediate body, consisting of one or more members, is entrusted with the public administration, the carrying out of the laws, and the maintenance of civil and political liberty. the members of this body are called magistrates or kings, that is to say, rulers. this body, as a whole, considered in relation to its members, is called the prince, and considered in its actions it is called the government. if we consider the action of the whole body upon itself, that is to say, the relation of the whole to the whole, of the sovereign to the state, we can compare this relation to that of the extremes in a proportion of which the government is the middle term. the magistrate receives from the sovereign the commands which he gives to the nation, and when it is reckoned up his product or his power is in the same degree as the product or power of the citizens who are subjects on one side of the proportion and sovereigns on the other. none of the three terms can be varied without at once destroying this proportion. if the sovereign tries to govern, and if the prince wants to make the laws, or if the subject refuses to obey them, disorder takes the place of order, and the state falls to pieces under despotism or anarchy. let us suppose that this state consists of ten thousand citizens. the sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body, but each individual, as a subject, has his private and independent existence. thus the sovereign is as ten thousand to one; that is to say, every member of the state has, as his own share, only one ten-thousandth part of the sovereign power, although he is subject to the whole. let the nation be composed of one hundred thousand men, the position of the subjects is unchanged, and each continues to bear the whole weight of the laws, while his vote, reduced to the one hundred-thousandth part, has ten times less influence in the making of the laws. thus the subject being always one, the sovereign is relatively greater as the number of the citizens is increased. hence it follows that the larger the state the less liberty. now the greater the disproportion between private wishes and the general will, i.e., between manners and laws, the greater must be the power of repression. on the other side, the greatness of the state gives the depositaries of public authority greater temptations and additional means of abusing that authority, so that the more power is required by the government to control the people, the more power should there be in the sovereign to control the government. from this twofold relation it follows that the continued proportion between the sovereign, the prince, and the people is not an arbitrary idea, but a consequence of the nature of the state. moreover, it follows that one of the extremes, i.e., the nation, being constant, every time the double ratio increases or decreases, the simple ratio increases or diminishes in its turn; which cannot be unless the middle term is as often changed. from this we may conclude that there is no single absolute form of government, but there must be as many different forms of government as there are states of different size. if the greater the numbers of the nation the less the ratio between its manners and its laws, by a fairly clear analogy, we may also say, the more numerous the magistrates, the weaker the government. to make this principle clearer we will distinguish three essentially different wills in the person of each magistrate; first, his own will as an individual, which looks to his own advantage only; secondly, the common will of the magistrates, which is concerned only with the advantage of the prince, a will which may be called corporate, and one which is general in relation to the government and particular in relation to the state of which the government forms part; thirdly, the will of the people, or the sovereign will, which is general, as much in relation to the state viewed as the whole as in relation to the government viewed as a part of the whole. in a perfect legislature the private individual will should be almost nothing; the corporate will belonging to the government should be quite subordinate, and therefore the general and sovereign will is the master of all the others. on the other hand, in the natural order, these different wills become more and more active in proportion as they become centralised; the general will is always weak, the corporate will takes the second place, the individual will is preferred to all; so that every one is himself first, then a magistrate, and then a citizen; a series just the opposite of that required by the social order. having laid down this principle, let us assume that the government is in the hands of one man. in this case the individual and the corporate will are absolutely one, and therefore this will has reached the greatest possible degree of intensity. now the use of power depends on the degree of this intensity, and as the absolute power of the government is always that of the people, and therefore invariable, it follows that the rule of one man is the most active form of government. if, on the other hand, we unite the government with the supreme power, and make the prince the sovereign and the citizens so many magistrates, then the corporate will is completely lost in the general will, and will have no more activity than the general will, and it will leave the individual will in full vigour. thus the government, though its absolute force is constant, will have the minimum of activity. these rules are incontestable in themselves, and other considerations only serve to confirm them. for example, we see the magistrates as a body far more active than the citizens as a body, so that the individual will always counts for more. for each magistrate usually has charge of some particular duty of government; while each citizen, in himself, has no particular duty of sovereignty. moreover, the greater the state the greater its real power, although its power does not increase because of the increase in territory; but the state remaining unchanged, the magistrates are multiplied in vain, the government acquires no further real strength, because it is the depositary of that of the state, which i have assumed to be constant. thus, this plurality of magistrates decreases the activity of the government without increasing its power. having found that the power of the government is relaxed in proportion as the number of magistrates is multiplied, and that the more numerous the people, the more the controlling power must be increased, we shall infer that the ratio between the magistrates and the government should be inverse to that between subjects and sovereign, that is to say, that the greater the state, the smaller the government, and that in like manner the number of chiefs should be diminished because of the increased numbers of the people. in order to make this diversity of forms clearer, and to assign them their different names, we shall observe in the first place that the sovereign may entrust the care of the government to the whole nation or to the greater part of the nation, so that there are more citizen magistrates than private citizens. this form of government is called democracy. or the sovereign may restrict the government in the hands of a lesser number, so that there are more plain citizens than magistrates; and this form of government is called aristocracy. finally, the sovereign may concentrate the whole government in the hands of one man. this is the third and commonest form of government, and is called monarchy or royal government. we shall observe that all these forms, or the first and second at least, may be less or more, and that within tolerably wide limits. for the democracy may include the whole nation, or may be confined to one half of it. the aristocracy, in its turn, may shrink from the half of the nation to the smallest number. even royalty may be shared, either between father and son, between two brothers, or in some other fashion. there were always two kings in sparta, and in the roman empire there were as many as eight emperors at once, and yet it cannot be said that the empire was divided. there is a point where each form of government blends with the next; and under the three specific forms there may be really as many forms of government as there are citizens in the state. nor is this all. in certain respects each of these governments is capable of subdivision into different parts, each administered in one of these three ways. from these forms in combination there may arise a multitude of mixed forms, since each may be multiplied by all the simple forms. in all ages there have been great disputes as to which is the best form of government, and people have failed to consider that each is the best in some cases and the worst in others. for ourselves, if the number of magistrates [footnote: you will remember that i mean, in this context, the supreme magistrates or heads of the nation, the others being only their deputies in this or that respect.] in the various states is to be in inverse ratio to the number of the citizens, we infer that generally a democratic government is adapted to small states, an aristocratic government to those of moderate size, and a monarchy to large states. these inquiries furnish us with a clue by which we may discover what are the duties and rights of citizens, and whether they can be separated one from the other; what is our country, in what does it really consist, and how can each of us ascertain whether he has a country or no? having thus considered every kind of civil society in itself, we shall compare them, so as to note their relations one with another; great and small, strong and weak, attacking one another, insulting one another, destroying one another; and in this perpetual action and reaction causing more misery and loss of life than if men had preserved their original freedom. we shall inquire whether too much or too little has not been accomplished in the matter of social institutions; whether individuals who are subject to law and to men, while societies preserve the independence of nature, are not exposed to the ills of both conditions without the advantages of either, and whether it would not be better to have no civil society in the world rather than to have many such societies. is it not that mixed condition which partakes of both and secures neither? "per quem neutrum licet, nec tanquam in bello paratum esse, nec tanquam in pace securum."--seneca de trang: animi, cap. i. is it not this partial and imperfect association which gives rise to tyranny and war? and are not tyranny and war the worst scourges of humanity? finally we will inquire how men seek to get rid of these difficulties by means of leagues and confederations, which leave each state its own master in internal affairs, while they arm it against any unjust aggression. we will inquire how a good federal association may be established, what can make it lasting, and how far the rights of the federation may be stretched without destroying the right of sovereignty. the abbe de saint-pierre suggested an association of all the states of europe to maintain perpetual peace among themselves. is this association practicable, and supposing that it were established, would it be likely to last? these inquiries lead us straight to all the questions of international law which may clear up the remaining difficulties of political law. finally we shall lay down the real principles of the laws of war, and we shall see why grotius and others have only stated false principles. i should not be surprised if my pupil, who is a sensible young man, should interrupt me saying, "one would think we were building our edifice of wood and not of men; we are putting everything so exactly in its place!" that is true; but remember that the law does not bow to the passions of men, and that we have first to establish the true principles of political law. now that our foundations are laid, come and see what men have built upon them; and you will see some strange sights! then i set him to read telemachus, and we pursue our journey; we are seeking that happy salentum and the good idomeneus made wise by misfortunes. by the way we find many like protesilas and no philocles, neither can adrastes, king of the daunians, be found. but let our readers picture our travels for themselves, or take the same journeys with telemachus in their hand; and let us not suggest to them painful applications which the author himself avoids or makes in spite of himself. moreover, emile is not a king, nor am i a god, so that we are not distressed that we cannot imitate telemachus and mentor in the good they did; none know better than we how to keep to our own place, none have less desire to leave it. we know that the same task is allotted to all; that whoever loves what is right with all his heart, and does the right so far as it is in his power, has fulfilled that task. we know that telemachus and mentor are creatures of the imagination. emile does not travel in idleness and he does more good than if he were a prince. if we were kings we should be no greater benefactors. if we were kings and benefactors we should cause any number of real evils for every apparent good we supposed we were doing. if we were kings and sages, the first good deed we should desire to perform, for ourselves and for others, would be to abdicate our kingship and return to our present position. i have said why travel does so little for every one. what makes it still more barren for the young is the way in which they are sent on their travels. tutors, more concerned to amuse than to instruct, take them from town to town, from palace to palace, where if they are men of learning and letters, they make them spend their time in libraries, or visiting antiquaries, or rummaging among old buildings transcribing ancient inscriptions. in every country they are busy over some other century, as if they were living in another country; so that after they have travelled all over europe at great expense, a prey to frivolity or tedium, they return, having seen nothing to interest them, and having learnt nothing that could be of any possible use to them. all capitals are just alike, they are a mixture of all nations and all ways of living; they are not the place in which to study the nations. paris and london seem to me the same town. their inhabitants have a few prejudices of their own, but each has as many as the other, and all their rules of conduct are the same. we know the kind of people who will throng the court. we know the way of living which the crowds of people and the unequal distribution of wealth will produce. as soon as any one tells me of a town with two hundred thousand people, i know its life already. what i do not know about it is not worth going there to learn. to study the genius and character of a nation you should go to the more remote provinces, where there is less stir, less commerce, where strangers seldom travel, where the inhabitants stay in one place, where there are fewer changes of wealth and position. take a look at the capital on your way, but go and study the country far away from that capital. the french are not in paris, but in touraine; the english are more english in mercia than in london, and the spaniards more spanish in galicia than in madrid. in these remoter provinces a nation assumes its true character and shows what it really is; there the good or ill effects of the government are best perceived, just as you can measure the arc more exactly at a greater radius. the necessary relations between character and government have been so clearly pointed out in the book of l'esprit des lois, that one cannot do better than have recourse to that work for the study of those relations. but speaking generally, there are two plain and simple standards by which to decide whether governments are good or bad. one is the population. every country in which the population is decreasing is on its way to ruin; and the countries in which the population increases most rapidly, even were they the poorest countries in the world, are certainly the best governed. [footnote: i only know one exception to this rule--it is china.] but this population must be the natural result of the government and the national character, for if it is caused by colonisation or any other temporary and accidental cause, then the remedy itself is evidence of the disease. when augustus passed laws against celibacy, those laws showed that the roman empire was already beginning to decline. citizens must be induced to marry by the goodness of the government, not compelled to marry by law; you must not examine the effects of force, for the law which strives against the constitution has little or no effect; you should study what is done by the influence of public morals and by the natural inclination of the government, for these alone produce a lasting effect. it was the policy of the worthy abbe de saint-pierre always to look for a little remedy for every individual ill, instead of tracing them to their common source and seeing if they could not all be cured together. you do not need to treat separately every sore on a rich man's body; you should purify the blood which produces them. they say that in england there are prizes for agriculture; that is enough for me; that is proof enough that agriculture will not flourish there much longer. the second sign of the goodness or badness of the government and the laws is also to be found in the population, but it is to be found not in its numbers but in its distribution. two states equal in size and population may be very unequal in strength; and the more powerful is always that in which the people are more evenly distributed over its territory; the country which has fewer large towns, and makes less show on this account, will always defeat the other. it is the great towns which exhaust the state and are the cause of its weakness; the wealth which they produce is a sham wealth, there is much money and few goods. they say the town of paris is worth a whole province to the king of france; for my own part i believe it costs him more than several provinces. i believe that paris is fed by the provinces in more senses than one, and that the greater part of their revenues is poured into that town and stays there, without ever returning to the people or to the king. it is inconceivable that in this age of calculators there is no one to see that france would be much more powerful if paris were destroyed. not only is this ill-distributed population not advantageous to the state, it is more ruinous than depopulation itself, because depopulation only gives as produce nought, and the ill-regulated addition of still more people gives a negative result. when i hear an englishman and a frenchman so proud of the size of their capitals, and disputing whether london or paris has more inhabitants, it seems to me that they are quarrelling as to which nation can claim the honour of being the worst governed. study the nation outside its towns; thus only will you really get to know it. it is nothing to see the apparent form of a government, overladen with the machinery of administration and the jargon of the administrators, if you have not also studied its nature as seen in the effects it has upon the people, and in every degree of administration. the difference of form is really shared by every degree of the administration, and it is only by including every degree that you really know the difference. in one country you begin to feel the spirit of the minister in the manoeuvres of his underlings; in another you must see the election of members of parliament to see if the nation is really free; in each and every country, he who has only seen the towns cannot possibly know what the government is like, as its spirit is never the same in town and country. now it is the agricultural districts which form the country, and the country people who make the nation. this study of different nations in their remoter provinces, and in the simplicity of their native genius, gives a general result which is very satisfactory, to my thinking, and very consoling to the human heart; it is this: all the nations, if you observe them in this fashion, seem much better worth observing; the nearer they are to nature, the more does kindness hold sway in their character; it is only when they are cooped up in towns, it is only when they are changed by cultivation, that they become depraved, that certain faults which were rather coarse than injurious are exchanged for pleasant but pernicious vices. from this observation we see another advantage in the mode of travel i suggest; for young men, sojourning less in the big towns which are horribly corrupt, are less likely to catch the infection of vice; among simpler people and less numerous company, they will preserve a surer judgment, a healthier taste, and better morals. besides this contagion of vice is hardly to be feared for emile; he has everything to protect him from it. among all the precautions i have taken, i reckon much on the love he bears in his heart. we do not know the power of true love over youthful desires, because we are ourselves as ignorant of it as they are, and those who have control over the young turn them from true love. yet a young man must either love or fall into bad ways. it is easy to be deceived by appearances. you will quote any number of young men who are said to live very chastely without love; but show me one grown man, a real man, who can truly say that his youth was thus spent? in all our virtues, all our duties, people are content with appearances; for my own part i want the reality, and i am much mistaken if there is any other way of securing it beyond the means i have suggested. the idea of letting emile fall in love before taking him on his travels is not my own. it was suggested to me by the following incident. i was in venice calling on the tutor of a young englishman. it was winter and we were sitting round the fire. the tutor's letters were brought from the post office. he glanced at them, and then read them aloud to his pupil. they were in english; i understood not a word, but while he was reading i saw the young man tear some fine point lace ruffles which he was wearing, and throw them in the fire one after another, as quietly as he could, so that no one should see it. surprised at this whim, i looked at his face and thought i perceived some emotion; but the external signs of passion, though much alike in all men, have national differences which may easily lead one astray. nations have a different language of facial expression as well as of speech. i waited till the letters were finished and then showing the tutor the bare wrists of his pupil, which he did his best to hide, i said, "may i ask the meaning of this?" the tutor seeing what had happened began to laugh; he embraced his pupil with an air of satisfaction and, with his consent, he gave me the desired explanation. "the ruffles," said he, "which mr. john has just torn to pieces, were a present from a lady in this town, who made them for him not long ago. now you must know that mr. john is engaged to a young lady in his own country, with whom he is greatly in love, and she well deserves it. this letter is from the lady's mother, and i will translate the passage which caused the destruction you beheld. "'lucy is always at work upon mr. john's ruffles. yesterday miss betty roldham came to spend the afternoon and insisted on doing some of her work. i knew that lucy was up very early this morning and i wanted to see what she was doing; i found her busy unpicking what miss betty had done. she would not have a single stitch in her present done by any hand but her own.'" mr. john went to fetch another pair of ruffles, and i said to his tutor: "your pupil has a very good disposition; but tell me is not the letter from miss lucy's mother a put up job? is it not an expedient of your designing against the lady of the ruffles?" "no," said he, "it is quite genuine; i am not so artful as that; i have made use of simplicity and zeal, and god has blessed my efforts." this incident with regard to the young man stuck in my mind; it was sure to set a dreamer like me thinking. but it is time we finished. let us take mr. john back to miss lucy, or rather emile to sophy. he brings her a heart as tender as ever, and a more enlightened mind, and he returns to his native land all the bettor for having made acquaintance with foreign governments through their vices and foreign nations through their virtues. i have even taken care that he should associate himself with some man of worth in every nation, by means of a treaty of hospitality after the fashion of the ancients, and i shall not be sorry if this acquaintance is kept up by means of letters. not only may this be useful, not only is it always pleasant to have a correspondent in foreign lands, it is also an excellent antidote against the sway of patriotic prejudices, to which we are liable all through our life, and to which sooner or later we are more or less enslaved. nothing is better calculated to lessen the hold of such prejudices than a friendly interchange of opinions with sensible people whom we respect; they are free from our prejudices and we find ourselves face to face with theirs, and so we can set the one set of prejudices against the other and be safe from both. it is not the same thing to have to do with strangers in our own country and in theirs. in the former case there is always a certain amount of politeness which either makes them conceal their real opinions, or makes them think more favourably of our country while they are with us; when they get home again this disappears, and they merely do us justice. i should be very glad if the foreigner i consult has seen my country, but i shall not ask what he thinks of it till he is at home again. when we have spent nearly two years travelling in a few of the great countries and many of the smaller countries of europe, when we have learnt two or three of the chief languages, when we have seen what is really interesting in natural history, government, arts, or men, emile, devoured by impatience, reminds me that our time is almost up. then i say, "well, my friend, you remember the main object of our journey; you have seen and observed; what is the final result of your observations? what decision have you come to?" either my method is wrong, or he will answer me somewhat after this fashion-- "what decision have i come to? i have decided to be what you made me; of my own free will i will add no fetters to those imposed upon me by nature and the laws. the more i study the works of men in their institutions, the more clearly i see that, in their efforts after independence, they become slaves, and that their very freedom is wasted in vain attempts to assure its continuance. that they may not be carried away by the flood of things, they form all sorts of attachments; then as soon as they wish to move forward they are surprised to find that everything drags them back. it seems to me that to set oneself free we need do nothing, we need only continue to desire freedom. my master, you have made me free by teaching me to yield to necessity. let her come when she will, i follow her without compulsion; i lay hold of nothing to keep me back. in our travels i have sought for some corner of the earth where i might be absolutely my own; but where can one dwell among men without being dependent on their passions? on further consideration i have discovered that my desire contradicted itself; for were i to hold to nothing else, i should at least hold to the spot on which i had settled; my life would be attached to that spot, as the dryads were attached to their trees. i have discovered that the words liberty and empire are incompatible; i can only be master of a cottage by ceasing to be master of myself. "'hoc erat in votis, modus agri non ita magnus.' horace, lib. ii., sat. vi. "i remember that my property was the origin of our inquiries. you argued very forcibly that i could not keep both my wealth and my liberty; but when you wished me to be free and at the same time without needs, you desired two incompatible things, for i could only be independent of men by returning to dependence on nature. what then shall i do with the fortune bequeathed to me by my parents? to begin with, i will not be dependent on it; i will cut myself loose from all the ties which bind me to it; if it is left in my hands, i shall keep it; if i am deprived of it, i shall not be dragged away with it. i shall not trouble myself to keep it, but i shall keep steadfastly to my own place. rich or poor, i shall be free. i shall be free not merely in this country or in that; i shall be free in any part of the world. all the chains of prejudice are broken; as far as i am concerned i know only the bonds of necessity. i have been trained to endure them from my childhood, and i shall endure them until death, for i am a man; and why should i not wear those chains as a free man, for i should have to wear them even if i were a slave, together with the additional fetters of slavery? "what matters my place in the world? what matters it where i am? wherever there are men, i am among my brethren; wherever there are none, i am in my own home. so long as i may be independent and rich, and have wherewithal to live, and i shall live. if my wealth makes a slave of me, i shall find it easy to renounce it. i have hands to work, and i shall get a living. if my hands fail me, i shall live if others will support me; if they forsake me i shall die; i shall die even if i am not forsaken, for death is not the penalty of poverty, it is a law of nature. whensoever death comes i defy it; it shall never find me making preparations for life; it shall never prevent me having lived. "my father, this is my decision. but for my passions, i should be in my manhood independent as god himself, for i only desire what is and i should never fight against fate. at least, there is only one chain, a chain which i shall ever wear, a chain of which i may be justly proud. come then, give me my sophy, and i am free." "dear emile, i am glad indeed to hear you speak like a man, and to behold the feelings of your heart. at your age this exaggerated unselfishness is not unpleasing. it will decrease when you have children of your own, and then you will be just what a good father and a wise man ought to be. i knew what the result would be before our travels; i knew that when you saw our institutions you would be far from reposing a confidence in them which they do not deserve. in vain do we seek freedom under the power of the laws. the laws! where is there any law? where is there any respect for law? under the name of law you have everywhere seen the rule of self-interest and human passion. but the eternal laws of nature and of order exist. for the wise man they take the place of positive law; they are written in the depths of his heart by conscience and reason; let him obey these laws and be free; for there is no slave but the evil-doer, for he always does evil against his will. liberty is not to be found in any form of government, she is in the heart of the free man, he bears her with him everywhere. the vile man bears his slavery in himself; the one would be a slave in geneva, the other free in paris. "if i spoke to you of the duties of a citizen, you would perhaps ask me, 'which is my country?' and you would think you had put me to confusion. yet you would be mistaken, dear emile, for he who has no country has, at least, the land in which he lives. there is always a government and certain so-called laws under which he has lived in peace. what matter though the social contract has not been observed, if he has been protected by private interest against the general will, if he has been secured by public violence against private aggressions, if the evil he has beheld has taught him to love the good, and if our institutions themselves have made him perceive and hate their own iniquities? oh, emile, where is the man who owes nothing to the land in which he lives? whatever that land may be, he owes to it the most precious thing possessed by man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue. born in the depths of a forest he would have lived in greater happiness and freedom; but being able to follow his inclinations without a struggle there would have been no merit in his goodness, he would not have been virtuous, as he may be now, in spite of his passions. the mere sight of order teaches him to know and love it. the public good, which to others is a mere pretext, is a real motive for him. he learns to fight against himself and to prevail, to sacrifice his own interest to the common weal. it is not true that he gains nothing from the laws; they give him courage to be just, even in the midst of the wicked. it is not true that they have failed to make him free; they have taught him to rule himself. "do not say therefore, 'what matter where i am?' it does matter that you should be where you can best do your duty; and one of these duties is to love your native land. your fellow-countrymen protected you in childhood; you should love them in your manhood. you should live among them, or at least you should live where you can serve them to the best of your power, and where they know where to find you if ever they are in need of you. there are circumstances in which a man may be of more use to his fellow-countrymen outside his country than within it. then he should listen only to his own zeal and should bear his exile without a murmur; that exile is one of his duties. but you, dear emile, you have not undertaken the painful task of telling men the truth, you must live in the midst of your fellow-creatures, cultivating their friendship in pleasant intercourse; you must be their benefactor, their pattern; your example will do more than all our books, and the good they see you do will touch them more deeply than all our empty words. "yet i do not exhort you to live in a town; on the contrary, one of the examples which the good should give to others is that of a patriarchal, rural life, the earliest life of man, the most peaceful, the most natural, and the most attractive to the uncorrupted heart. happy is the land, my young friend, where one need not seek peace in the wilderness! but where is that country? a man of good will finds it hard to satisfy his inclinations in the midst of towns, where he can find few but frauds and rogues to work for. the welcome given by the towns to those idlers who flock to them to seek their fortunes only completes the ruin of the country, when the country ought really to be repopulated at the cost of the towns. all the men who withdraw from high society are useful just because of their withdrawal, since its vices are the result of its numbers. they are also useful when they can bring with them into the desert places life, culture, and the love of their first condition. i like to think what benefits emile and sophy, in their simple home, may spread about them, what a stimulus they may give to the country, how they may revive the zeal of the unlucky villagers. "in fancy i see the population increasing, the land coming under cultivation, the earth clothed with fresh beauty. many workers and plenteous crops transform the labours of the fields into holidays; i see the young couple in the midst of the rustic sports which they have revived, and i hear the shouts of joy and the blessings of those about them. men say the golden age is a fable; it always will be for those whose feelings and taste are depraved. people do not really regret the golden age, for they do nothing to restore it. what is needed for its restoration? one thing only, and that is an impossibility; we must love the golden age. "already it seems to be reviving around sophy's home; together you will only complete what her worthy parents have begun. but, dear emile, you must not let so pleasant a life give you a distaste for sterner duties, if every they are laid upon you; remember that the romans sometimes left the plough to become consul. if the prince or the state calls you to the service of your country, leave all to fulfil the honourable duties of a citizen in the post assigned to you. if you find that duty onerous, there is a sure and honourable means of escaping from it; do your duty so honestly that it will not long be left in your hands. moreover, you need not fear the difficulties of such a test; while there are men of our own time, they will not summon you to serve the state." why may i not paint the return of emile to sophy and the end of their love, or rather the beginning of their wedded love! a love founded on esteem which will last with life itself, on virtues which will not fade with fading beauty, on fitness of character which gives a charm to intercourse, and prolongs to old age the delights of early love. but all such details would be pleasing but not useful, and so far i have not permitted myself to give attractive details unless i thought they would be useful. shall i abandon this rule when my task is nearly ended? no, i feel that my pen is weary. too feeble for such prolonged labours, i should abandon this if it were not so nearly completed; if it is not to be left imperfect it is time it were finished. at last i see the happy day approaching, the happiest day of emile's life and my own; i see the crown of my labours, i begin to appreciate their results. the noble pair are united till death do part; heart and lips confirm no empty vows; they are man and wife. when they return from the church, they follow where they are led; they know not where they are, whither they are going, or what is happening around them. they heed nothing, they answer at random; their eyes are troubled and they see nothing. oh, rapture! oh, human weakness! man is overwhelmed by the feeling of happiness, he is not strong enough to bear it. there are few people who know how to talk to the newly-married couple. the gloomy propriety of some and the light conversation of others seem to me equally out of place. i would rather their young hearts were left to themselves, to abandon themselves to an agitation which is not without its charm, rather than that they should be so cruelly distressed by a false modesty, or annoyed by coarse witticisms which, even if they appealed to them at other times, are surely out of place on such a day. i behold our young people, wrapped in a pleasant languor, giving no heed to what is said. shall i, who desire that they should enjoy all the days of their life, shall i let them lose this precious day? no, i desire that they shall taste its pleasures and enjoy them. i rescue them from the foolish crowd, and walk with them in some quiet place; i recall them to themselves by speaking of them i wish to speak, not merely to their ears, but to their hearts, and i know that there is only one subject of which they can think to-day. "my children," say i, taking a hand of each, "it is three years since i beheld the birth of the pure and vigorous passion which is your happiness to-day. it has gone on growing; your eyes tell me that it has reached its highest point; it must inevitably decline." my readers can fancy the raptures, the anger, the vows of emile, and the scornful air with which sophy withdraws her hand from mine; how their eyes protest that they will adore each other till their latest breath. i let them have their way; then i continue: "i have often thought that if the happiness of love could continue in marriage, we should find a paradise upon earth. so far this has never been. but if it were not quite impossible, you two are quite worthy to set an example you have not received, an example which few married couples could follow. my children, shall i tell you what i think is the way, and the only way, to do it?" they look at one another and smile at my simplicity. emile thanks me curtly for my prescription, saying that he thinks sophy has a better, at any rate it is good enough for him. sophy agrees with him and seems just as certain. yet in spite of her mockery, i think i see a trace of curiosity. i study emile; his eager eyes are fixed upon his wife's beauty; he has no curiosity for anything else; and he pays little heed to what i say. it is my turn to smile, and i say to myself, "i will soon get your attention." the almost imperceptible difference between these two hidden impulses is characteristic of a real difference between the two sexes; it is that men are generally less constant than women, and are sooner weary of success in love. a woman foresees man's future inconstancy, and is anxious; it is this which makes her more jealous. [footnote: in france it is the wives who first emancipate themselves; and necessarily so, for having very little heart, and only desiring attention, when a husband ceases to pay them attention they care very little for himself. in other countries it is not so; it is the husband who first emancipates himself; and necessarily so, for women, faithful, but foolish, importune men with their desires and only disgust them. there may be plenty of exceptions to these general truths; but i still think they are truths.] when his passion begins to cool she is compelled to pay him the attentions he used to bestow on her for her pleasure; she weeps, it is her turn to humiliate herself, and she is rarely successful. affection and kind deeds rarely win hearts, and they hardly ever win them back. i return to my prescription against the cooling of love in marriage. "it is plain and simple," i continue. "it consists in remaining lovers when you are husband and wife." "indeed," said emile, laughing at my secret, "we shall not find that hard." "perhaps you will find it harder than you think. pray give me time to explain. "cords too tightly stretched are soon broken. this is what happens when the marriage bond is subjected to too great a strain. the fidelity imposed by it upon husband and wife is the most sacred of all rights; but it gives to each too great a power over the other. constraint and love do not agree together, and pleasure is not to be had for the asking. do not blush, sophy, and do not try to run away. god forbid that i should offend your modesty! but your fate for life is at stake. for so great a cause, permit a conversation between your husband and your father which you would not permit elsewhere. "it is not so much possession as mastery of which people tire, and affection is often more prolonged with regard to a mistress than a wife. how can people make a duty of the tenderest caresses, and a right of the sweetest pledges of love? it is mutual desire which gives the right, and nature knows no other. the law may restrict this right, it cannot extend it. the pleasure is so sweet in itself! should it owe to sad constraint the power which it cannot gain from its own charms? no, my children, in marriage the hearts are bound, but the bodies are not enslaved. you owe one another fidelity, but not complaisance. neither of you may give yourself to another, but neither of you belongs to the other except at your own will. "if it is true, dear emile, that you would always be your wife's lover, that she should always be your mistress and her own, be a happy but respectful lover; obtain all from love and nothing from duty, and let the slightest favours never be of right but of grace. i know that modesty shuns formal confessions and requires to be overcome; but with delicacy and true love, will the lover ever be mistaken as to the real will? will not he know when heart and eyes grant what the lips refuse? let both for ever be master of their person and their caresses, let them have the right to bestow them only at their own will. remember that even in marriage this pleasure is only lawful when the desire is mutual. do not be afraid, my children, that this law will keep you apart; on the contrary, it will make both more eager to please, and will prevent satiety. true to one another, nature and love will draw you to each other." emile is angry and cries out against these and similar suggestions. sophy is ashamed, she hides her face behind her fan and says nothing. perhaps while she is saying nothing, she is the most annoyed. yet i insist, without mercy; i make emile blush for his lack of delicacy; i undertake to be surety for sophy that she will undertake her share of the treaty. i incite her to speak, you may guess she will not dare to say i am mistaken. emile anxiously consults the eyes of his young wife; he beholds them, through all her confusion, filled with a, voluptuous anxiety which reassures him against the dangers of trusting her. he flings himself at her feet, kisses with rapture the hand extended to him, and swears that beyond the fidelity he has already promised, he will renounce all other rights over her. "my dear wife," said he, "be the arbiter of my pleasures as you are already the arbiter of my life and fate. should your cruelty cost me life itself i would yield to you my most cherished rights. i will owe nothing to your complaisance, but all to your heart." dear emile, be comforted; sophy herself is too generous to let you fall a victim to your generosity. in the evening, when i am about to leave them, i say in the most solemn tone, "remember both of you, that you are free, that there is no question of marital rights; believe me, no false deference. emile will you come home with me? sophy permits it." emile is ready to strike me in his anger. "and you, sophy, what do you say? shall i take him away?" the little liar, blushing, answers, "yes." a tender and delightful falsehood, better than truth itself! the next day. ... men no longer delight in the picture of bliss; their taste is as much depraved by the corruption of vice as their hearts. they can no longer feel what is touching or perceive what is truly delightful. you who, as a picture of voluptuous joys, see only the happy lovers immersed in pleasure, your picture is very imperfect; you have only its grosser part, the sweetest charms of pleasure are not there. which of you has seen a young couple, happily married, on the morrow of their marriage? their chaste yet languid looks betray the intoxication of the bliss they have enjoyed, the blessed security of innocence, and the delightful certainty that they will spend the rest of their life together. the heart of man can behold no more rapturous sight; this is the real picture of happiness; you have beheld it a hundred times without heeding it; your hearts are so hard that you cannot love it. sophy, peaceful and happy, spends the day in the arms of her tender mother; a pleasant resting place, after a night spent in the arms of her husband. the day after i am aware of a slight change. emile tries to look somewhat vexed; but through this pretence i notice such a tender eagerness, and indeed so much submission, that i do not think there is much amiss. as for sophy she is merrier than she was yesterday; her eyes are sparkling and she looks very well pleased with herself; she is charming to emile; she ventures to tease him a little and vexes him still more. these changes are almost imperceptible, but they do not escape me; i am anxious and i question emile in private, and i learn that, to his great regret, and in spite of all entreaties, he was not permitted last night to share sophy's bed. that haughty lady had made haste to assert her right. an explanation takes place. emile complains bitterly, sophy laughs; but at last, seeing that emile is really getting angry, she looks at him with eyes full of tenderness and love, and pressing my hand, she only says these two words, but in a tone that goes to his heart, "ungrateful man!" emile is too stupid to understand. but i understand, and i send emile away and speak to sophy privately in her turn. "i see," said i, "the reason for this whim. no one could be more delicate, and no one could use that delicacy so ill. dear sophy, do not be anxious, i have given you a man; do not be afraid to treat him as such. you have had the first fruits of his youth; he has not squandered his manhood and it will endure for you. my dear child, i must explain to you why i said what i did in our conversation of the day before yesterday. perhaps you only understood it as a way of restraining your pleasures to secure their continuance. oh, sophy, there was another object, more worthy of my care. when emile became your husband, he became your head, it is yours to obey; this is the will of nature. when the wife is like sophy, it is, however, good for the man to be led by her; that is another of nature's laws, and it is to give you as much authority over his heart, as his sex gives him over your person, that i have made you the arbiter of his pleasures. it will be hard for you, but you will control him if you can control yourself, and what has already happened shows me that this difficult art is not beyond your courage. you will long rule him by love if you make your favours scarce and precious, if you know how to use them aright. if you want to have your husband always in your power, keep him at a distance. but let your sternness be the result of modesty not caprice; let him find you modest not capricious; beware lest in controlling his love you make him doubt your own. be all the dearer for your favours and all the more respected when you refuse them; let him honour his wife's chastity, without having to complain of her coldness. "thus, my child, he will give you his confidence, he will listen to your opinion, will consult you in his business, and will decide nothing without you. thus you may recall him to wisdom, if he strays, and bring him back by a gentle persuasion, you may make yourself lovable in order to be useful, you may employ coquetry on behalf of virtue, and love on behalf of reason. "do not think that with all this, your art will always serve your purpose. in spite of every precaution pleasures are destroyed by possession, and love above all others. but when love has lasted long enough, a gentle habit takes its place and the charm of confidence succeeds the raptures of passion. children form a bond between their parents, a bond no less tender and a bond which is sometimes stronger than love itself. when you cease to be emile's mistress you will be his friend and wife; you will be the mother of his children. then instead of your first reticence let there be the fullest intimacy between you; no more separate beds, no more refusals, no more caprices. become so truly his better half that he can no longer do without you, and if he must leave you, let him feel that he is far from himself. you have made the charms of home life so powerful in your father's home, let them prevail in your own. every man who is happy at home loves his wife. remember that if your husband is happy in his home, you will be a happy wife. "for the present, do not be too hard on your lover; he deserves more consideration; he will be offended by your fears; do not care for his health at the cost of his happiness, and enjoy your own happiness. you must neither wait for disgust nor repulse desire; you must not refuse for the sake of refusing, but only to add to the value of your favours." then, taking her back to emile, i say to her young husband, "one must bear the yoke voluntarily imposed upon oneself. let your deserts be such that the yoke may be lightened. above all, sacrifice to the graces, and do not think that sulkiness will make you more amiable." peace is soon made, and everybody can guess its terms. the treaty is signed with a kiss, after which i say to my pupil, "dear emile, all his life through a man needs a guide and counsellor. so far i have done my best to fulfil that duty; my lengthy task is now ended, and another will undertake this duty. to-day i abdicate the authority which you gave me; henceforward sophy is your guardian." little by little the first raptures subside and they can peacefully enjoy the delights of their new condition. happy lovers, worthy husband and wife! to do honour to their virtues, to paint their felicity, would require the history of their lives. how often does my heart throb with rapture when i behold in them the crown of my life's work! how often do i take their hands in mine blessing god with all my heart! how often do i kiss their clasped hands! how often do their tears of joy fall upon mine! they are touched by my joy and they share my raptures. their worthy parents see their own youth renewed in that of their children; they begin to live, as it were, afresh in them; or rather they perceive, for the first time, the true value of life; they curse their former wealth, which prevented them from enjoying so delightful a lot when they were young. if there is such a thing as happiness upon earth, you must seek it in our abode. one morning a few months later emile enters my room and embraces me, saying, "my master, congratulate your son; he hopes soon to have the honour of being a father. what a responsibility will be ours, how much we shall need you! yet god forbid that i should let you educate the son as you educated the father. god forbid that so sweet and holy a task should be fulfilled by any but myself, even though i should make as good a choice for my child as was made for me! but continue to be the teacher of the young teachers. advise and control us; we shall be easily led; as long as i live i shall need you. i need you more than ever now that i am taking up the duties of manhood. you have done your own duty; teach me to follow your example, while you enjoy your well-earned leisure." the end juliet sutherland, charles franks and the online distributed proofreading team. how to study and teaching how to study by f. m. mcmurry professor of elementary education in teachers college, columbia university to my friend orville t. bright this volume is dedicated, as a token of warm affection and professional indebtedness preface some seven or eight years ago the question, of how to teach children to study happened to be included in a list of topics that i hastily prepared for discussion with one of my classes. on my later examination of this problem i was much surprised, both at its difficulty and scope, and also at the extent to which it had been neglected by teachers. ever since that time the two questions, how adults should study, and how children should be taught to study, have together been my chief hobby. the following ideas are partly the result of reading; but since there is a meagre quantity of literature bearing on this general theme, they are largely the result of observation, experiment, and discussion with my students. many of the latter will recognize their own contributions in these pages, for i have endeavored to preserve and use every good suggestion that came from them; and i am glad to acknowledge here my indebtedness to them. in addition i must express my thanks for valuable criticisms to my colleague, dr. george d. strayer, and also to dr. lida b. earhart, whose suggestive monograph on the same general subject has just preceded this publication. the author. _teachers college_, may , . contents part i present methods of study; nature of study and its principal factors i. indications that young people do not learn to study properly; the seriousness of the evil ii. the nature of study, and its principal factors part ii nature of the principal factors in study, and their relation to children iii. provision for specific purposes, as one factor in study iv. the supplementing of thought, as a second factor in study v. the organization of ideas, as a third factor in study vi. judging of the soundness and general worth of statements, as a fourth factor in study vii. memorizing, as a fifth factor in study viii. the using of ideas, as a sixth factor in study iv. provision foe a tentative rather than a fixed attitude toward knowledge, as a seventh factor in study x. provision for individuality, as an eighth factor in study part iii conclusions xi. full meaning of study; relation of study to children and to the school index part i present methods of study; nature of study, and its principal factors chapter i indications that young people do not learn to study properly; the seriousness of the evil no doubt every one can recall peculiar methods of study that he or some one else has at some time followed. during my attendance at high school i often studied aloud at home, along with several other temporary or permanent members of the family. i remember becoming exasperated at times by one of my girl companions. she not only read her history aloud, but as she read she stopped to repeat each sentence five times with great vigor. although the din interfered with my own work, i could not help but admire her endurance; for the physical labor of mastering a lesson was certainly equal to that of a good farm hand, for the same period of time. this way of studying history seemed extremely ridiculous. but the method pursued by myself and several others in beginning algebra at about the same time was not greatly superior. our text-book contained several long sets of problems which were the terror of the class, and scarcely one of which we were able to solve alone. we had several friends, however, who could solve them, and, by calling upon them for help, we obtained the "statement" for each one. all these statements i memorized, and in that way i was able to "pass off" the subject. a few years later, when a school principal, i had a fifteen-year-old boy in my school who was intolerably lazy. his ambition was temporarily aroused, however, when he bought a new book and began the study of history. he happened to be the first one called upon, in the first recitation, and he started off finely. but soon he stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and sat down. when i asked him what was the matter, he simply replied that that was as far as he had got. then, on glancing at the book, i saw that he had been reproducing the text _verbatim_, and the last word that he had uttered was the last word on the first page. these few examples suggest the extremes to which young people may go in their methods of study. the first instance might illustrate the muscular method of learning history; the second, the memoriter method of reasoning in mathematics. i have never been able to imagine how the boy, in the third case, went about his task; hence, i can suggest no name for his method. while these methods of study are ridiculous, i am not at all sure that they are in a high degree exceptional. _collective examples of study_ the most extensive investigation of this subject has been made by dr. lida b. earhart,[footnote: _systematic study in the elementary schools._ a popular form of this thesis, entitled _teaching children to study_, is published in the riverside educational monographs.] and the facts that she has collected reveal a woeful ignorance of the whole subject of study. among other tests, she assigned to eleven- and twelve-year-old children a short selection from a text-book in geography, with the following directions: "here is a lesson from a book such as you use in class. do whatever you think you ought to do in studying this lesson thoroughly, and then tell (write down) the different things you have done in studying it. do not write anything else." [footnote: _ibid._, chapter .] out of children who took this test, only fourteen really found, or stated that they had found, the subject of the lesson. two others said that they _would_ find it. eighty-eight really found, or stated that they had found, the most important parts of the lesson; twenty-one others, that they _would_ find them. four verified the statements in the text, and three others said that they _would_ do that. nine children did nothing; "did not understand the requirements"; gave irrelevant answers; merely "thought," or "tried to understand the lesson," or "studied the lesson"; and simply wrote the facts of the lesson. in other words, out of the sixth- and seventh- grade pupils who took the test gave indefinite and unsatisfactory answers. this number showed that they had no clear knowledge of the principal things to be done in mastering an ordinary text-book lesson in geography. yet the schools to which they belonged were, beyond doubt, much above the average in the quality of their instruction. in a later and different test, in which the children were asked to find the subject of a certain lesson that was given to them, out of stated the subject fairly well. the remaining gave only partial, or indefinite, or irrelevant answers. only out of the were able to discover the most important fact in the lesson. yet determining the subject and the leading facts are among the main things that any one must do in mastering a topic. how they could have been intelligent in their study in the past, therefore, is difficult to comprehend. _teachers' and parents complaints about methods of study._ it is, perhaps, unnecessary to collect proofs that young people do not learn how to study, because teachers admit the fact very generally. indeed, it is one of the common subjects of complaint among teachers in the elementary school, in the high school, and in the college. all along the line teachers condole with one another over this evil, college professors placing the blame on the instructors in the high school, and the latter passing it down to teachers in the elementary school. parents who supervise their children's studies, or who otherwise know about their habits of work, observe the same fact with sorrow. it is at least refreshing to find one matter, in the much- disputed field of education, on which teachers and parents are well agreed. how about the methods of study among teachers themselves? unless they have learned to study properly, young people cannot, of course, be expected to acquire proper habits from them. _method of study among teachers._ the most enlightening single experience i have ever had on this question came several years ago in connection with a series of lectures on primary education. a course of such lectures had been arranged for me without my full knowledge, and i was unexpectedly called upon to begin it before a class of some seventy-five teachers. it was necessary to commence speaking without having definitely determined my first point. i had, however, a few notes which i was attempting to decipher and arrange, while talking as best i could, when i became conscious of a slight clatter from all parts of the room. on looking up i found that the noise came from the pencils of my audience, and they were writing down my first pointless remarks. evidently discrimination in values was not in their program. they call to mind a certain theological student who had been very unsuccessful in taking notes from lectures. in order to prepare himself, he spent one entire summer studying stenography. even after that, however, he was unsuccessful, because he could not write quite fast enough to take down _all_ that was said. even more mature students often reveal very meager knowledge of methods of study. i once had a class of some thirty persons, most of whom were men twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, who were college graduates and experienced teachers. one day i asked them, "when has a book been read properly?" the first reply came from a state university graduate and school superintendent, in the words, "one has read a book properly when one understands what is in it." most of the others assented to this answer. but when they were asked, "is a person under any obligations to judge the worth of the thought?" they divided, some saying yes, others no. then other questions arose, and the class as a whole soon appeared to be quite at sea as to the proper method of reading books. perhaps the most interesting thing was the fact that they seemed never to have thought seriously about the matter. fortunately dr. earhart has not overlooked teachers' methods of study in her investigations. in a _questionnaire_ that was filled out by teachers, the latter were requested to state the principal things that ought to be done in "thinking about a lesson." this was practically the same test as was given to the children before mentioned. while at least twenty different things were named by these teachers, the most frequent one was, "finding the most important points." [footnote: _ibid._, chapter .] yet only fifty-five out of the included even this. only twenty-five, as dr. earhart says, "felt, keenly enough to mention it, the necessity of finding the main thought or problem." forty admitted that they memorized more often than they did anything else in their studying. strange to say, a larger percentage of children than of teachers mentioned finding the main thought, and finding the more important facts, as two factors in mastering a lesson. water sometimes appears to rise higher than its source. about two-thirds of these teachers [footnote: _ibid._, chapter .] declared that they had never received any systematic instruction about how to study, and more than half of the remainder stated that they were taught to memorize in studying. the number who had given any careful instruction on proper methods of study to their own pupils was insignificant. yet these teachers had had unusual training on the whole, and most of them had taught several years in elementary schools. if teachers are so poorly informed, and if they are doing so little to instruct their pupils on this subject, how can the latter be expected to know how to study? _the prevailing definition of study._ the prevailing definition of study gives further proof of a very meager notion in regard to it. frequently during the last few years i have obtained from students in college, as well as from teachers, brief statements of their idea of study. fully nine out of every ten have given memorizing as its nearest synonym. it is true that teachers now and then insist that studying should consist of _thinking_. they even send children to their seats with the direction to "think, think hard." but that does not usually signify much. a certain college student, when urged to spend not less than an hour and a half on each lesson, replied, "what would i do after the first twenty minutes?" his idea evidently was that he could read each lesson through and memorize its substance in that time. what more remained to be done? very few teachers, i find, are fluent in answering his question. in practice, memorizing constitutes much the greater part of study. the very name recitation suggests this fact. if the school periods are to be spent in reciting, or reproducing, what has been learned, the work of preparation very naturally consists in storing the memory with the facts that are to be required. _thinking periods_, as a substitute name for recitation periods, suggests a radical change, both in our employment of school time and in our method of preparing lessons. we are not yet prepared for any such change of name. _the literature dealing with method of study._ consider finally the literature treating of study. certainly there has never been a period when there was a more general interest in education than during the last twenty years, and the progress that has been made in that time is remarkable. our study of the social view- point, of child nature, of apperception, interest, induction, deduction, correlation, etc., has been rapidly revolutionizing the school, securing a much more sympathetic government of young people, a new curriculum, and far more effective methods of instruction. in consequence, the injuries inflicted by the school are fewer and less often fatal than formerly, while the benefits are more numerous and more vital. but, in the vast quantity of valuable educational literature that has been published, careful searching reveals only two books in english, and none in german, on the "art of study." even these two are ordinary books on teaching, with an extraordinary title. the subject of memorizing has been well treated in some of our psychologies, and has received attention in a few of the more recent works on method. various other problems pertaining to study have also, of course, been considered more or less, in the past, in books on method, in rhetorics, and in discussions of selection of reading matter. in addition, there are a few short but notable essays on study. there have been practically, however, only two books that treat mainly of this subject,--the two small volumes by dr. earhart, already mentioned, which have been very recently published. in the main, the thoughts on this general subject that have got into print have found expression merely as incidents in the treatment of other themes--coming, strange to say, largely from men outside the teaching profession--and are contained in scattered and forgotten sources. thus it is evident not only that children and teachers are little acquainted with proper methods of study, but that even sources of information on the subject are strangely lacking. the seriousness of such neglect is not to be overestimated. wrong methods of study, involving much unnecessary friction, prevent enjoyment of school. this want of enjoyment results in much dawdling of time, a meager quantity of knowledge, and a desire to quit school at the first opportunity. the girl who adopted the muscular method of learning history was reasonably bright. but she had to study very "hard"; the results achieved in the way of marks often brought tears; and, although she attended the high school several years, she never finished the course. it should not be forgotten that most of those who stop school in the elementary grades leave simply because they want to, not because they must. want of enjoyment of school is likely to result, further, in distaste for intellectual employment in general. yet we know that any person who amounts to much must do considerable thinking, and must even take pleasure in it. bad methods of study, therefore, easily become a serious factor in adult life, acting as a great barrier to one's growth and general usefulness. chapter ii the nature of study, and its principal factors our physical movements ordinarily take place in response to a need of some sort. for instance, a person wishing to reach a certain point, to play a certain game, or to lay the foundations for a house, makes such movements as are necessary to accomplish the purpose desired. even mere physical exercise grows out of a more or less specific feeling of need. the mental activity called study is likewise called forth in response to specific needs. the eskimo, for example, compelled to find shelter and having only blocks of ice with which to build, ingeniously contrives an ice hut. for the sake of obtaining raw materials he studies the habits of the few wild animals about him, and out of these materials he manages by much invention to secure food, clothing, and implements. we ourselves, having a vastly greater variety of materials at hand, and also vastly more ideas and ideals, are much more dependent upon thinking and study. but, as in the case of the eskimo, this thinking and study arises out of actual conditions, and from specific wants. it may be that we must contrive ways of earning more money; or that the arguments for protective tariff seem too inconsistent for comfort; or that the reports about some of our friends alarm us. the occasions that call forth thought are infinite in number and kind. but the essential fact is that study does not normally take place except under the stimulus or spur of particular conditions, and of conditions, too, that are unsatisfactory. it does not take place even then unless we become conscious of the strained situation, of the want of harmony between what is and what might be. for ages malarial fever was accepted as a visitation by divine providence, or as a natural inconvenience, like bad weather. people were not disturbed by lack of harmony between what actually was and what might be, because they did not conceive the possibility of preventing the disease. accordingly they took it as a matter of course, and made no study of its cause. very recently, on the other hand, people have become conscious of the possibility of exterminating malaria. the imagined state has made the real one more and more intolerable; and, as this feeling of dissatisfaction has grown more acute, study of the cause of the disease has grown more intense, until it has finally been discovered. thus a lively consciousness of the unsatisfactoriness of a situation is the necessary prerequisite to its investigation; it furnishes the motive for it. it has ever been so in the history of evolution. study has not taken place without stimulus or motive. it has always had the practical task of lifting us out of our difficulties, either material or spiritual, and placing us on our feet. in this way it has been merely an instrument--though a most important one--in securing our proper adjustment or adaptation to our environment.[footnote: for discussion of this subject, see _studies in logical theory_, by john dewey. see, also, _systematic study in elementary schools_, by dr. lida b. earhart, chapters and .] _the variety of response to the demand for study_ after we have become acutely conscious of a misfit somewhere in our experience, the actual study done to right it varies indefinitely with the individual. the savage follows a hit-and-miss method of investigation, and really makes his advances by happy guesses rather than by close application. charles lamb's _dissertation on roast pig_ furnishes a typical example of such accidents. the average civilized man of the present does only a little better. how seldom, for instance, is the diet prescribed for a dyspeptic--whether by himself or by a physician--the result of any intelligent study! the true scientist, however, goes at his task in a careful and systematic way. recall, for instance, how the cause of yellow fever has been discovered. for years people had attributed the disease to invisible particles which they called "fomites." these were supposed to be given off by the sick, and spread by means of their clothing and other articles used by them. investigation caused this theory to be abandoned. then, since dr. j. c. nott of mobile had suggested, in , that the fever might be carried by the mosquito, and dr. c. j. finlay of havana had declared, in , that a mosquito of a certain kind would carry the fever from one patient to another, this variety of mosquito was assumed by dr. walter reed, in , to be the source of the disease, and was subjected to very close investigation by him. several men voluntarily received its bite and contracted the fever. soon, enough cases were collected to establish the probable correctness of the assumption. the remedy suggested--the utter destruction of this particular kind of mosquito, including its eggs and larvae--was so efficacious in combating the disease in havana in , and in new orleans in , that the theory is now considered established. thus systematic study has relieved us of one of the most dreaded diseases to which mankind has been subject. _the principal factors in study_ an extensive study, like this investigation, into the cause of yellow fever employs induction very plainly. it also employs deduction extensively, inasmuch as hypotheses that have been reached more or less inductively have to be widely applied and tested, and further conclusions have to be drawn from them. such a study, therefore, involving both induction and deduction and their numerous short cuts, contains the essential factors common to the investigation of other topics, or to study in general; for different subjects cannot vary greatly when it comes to the general method of their attack. an analysis, therefore, which reveals the principal factors in this study is likely to bring to light the main factors of study in general. _ . the finding of specific purposes, as one factor in study_ if the search for the cause of yellow fever were traced more fully, one striking feature discovered would be the fact that the investigation was never aimless. the need of unraveling the mystery was often very pressing, for we have had three great epidemics of yellow fever in our own country since , and scientists have been eager to apply themselves to the problem. yet a specific purpose, in the form of a definite hypothesis of some sort, was felt to be necessary before the study could proceed intelligently. thus, during the epidemic of , the contagiousness of the disease was debated. then the theory of "fomites" arose, and underwent investigation. finally, the spread of the disease through the mosquito was proposed for the solution. and while books of reference were examined and new observations were collected in great number, such work was not undertaken by the investigators primarily for the sake of increasing their general knowledge, but with reference to the particular issue at hand. the important question now is, is this, in general, the way in which the ordinary student should work? of course, he is much less mature than the scientist, and the results that he achieves may have no social value, in comparison. yet, should his method be the same? at least, should his study likewise be under the guidance of specific purposes, so that these would direct and limit his reading, observation, and independent thinking? or would that be too narrow, indeed, exactly the wrong way? and, instead of limiting himself to a collection of such facts as help to answer the few problems that he might be able to set up, should he be unmindful of particular problems? should he rather be a collector of facts at large, endeavoring to develop an interest in whatever is true, simply because it is true? here are two quite different methods of study suggested. probably the latter is by far the more common one among immature students. yet the former is the one that, in the main, will be advocated in this book as a factor of serious study. _ . the supplementing of thought as a second factor in study._ dr. reed in this case went far beyond the discoveries of previous investigators. not only did he conceive new tests for old hypotheses, but he posited new hypotheses, as well as collected the data that would prove or disprove them. thus, while he no doubt made much use of previous facts, he went far beyond that and succeeded in enlarging the confines of knowledge. that is a task that can be accomplished only by the most mature and gifted of men. the ordinary scholar must also be a collector of facts. but he must be content to be a receiver rather than a contributor of knowledge; that is, he must occupy himself mainly with the ideas of other persons, as presented in books or lectures or conversation. even when he takes up the study of nature, or any other field, at first hand, he is generally under the guidance of a teacher or some text. now, how much, if anything, must he add to what is directly presented to him by others? to what extent must he be a producer in that sense? are authors, at the best, capable only of suggesting their thought, leaving much that is incomplete and even hidden from view? and must the student do much supplementing, even much _digging_, or severe thinking of his own, in order to get at their meaning? or, do authors--at least the greatest of them--say most, or all, that they wish, and make their meaning plain? and is it, accordingly, the duty of the student merely to _follow_ their presentation without enlarging upon it greatly? the view will hereafter be maintained that any good author leaves much of such work for the student to do. any poor author certainly leaves much more. _ . the organization of facts collected, as a third factor in study._ the scientist would easily lose his way among the many facts that he gathers for examination, did he not carefully select and bring them into order. he arranges them in groups according to their relations, recognizing a few as having supreme importance, subordinating many others to these, and casting aside many more because of their insignificance. this all constitutes a large part of his study. what duty has the less mature student in regard to organization? should the statements that he receives be put into order by him? are some to be selected as vital, others to be grouped under these, and still others to be slighted or even entirely omitted from consideration, because of their insignificance? and is he to determine all this for himself, remembering that thorough study requires the neglect of some things as well as the emphasis of others? or do all facts have much the same value, so that they should receive about equal attention, as is the case with the multiplication tables? and, instead of being grouped according to relations and relative values, should they be studied, one at a time, in the order in which they are presented, with the idea that a topic is mastered when each single statement upon it is understood? or, if not this, has the reliable author at least already attended to this whole matter, making the various relations of facts to one another and their relative values so clear that the student has little work to do but to follow the printed statement? is it even highly unsafe for the latter to assume the responsibility of judging relative values? and would the neglect or skipping of many supposedly little things be more likely to result in careless, slipshod work than in thoroughness? _ . the judging of the worth of statements, as a fourth factor in study_ the scientist in charge of the above-mentioned investigation was, no doubt, a modest man. yet he saw fit to question the old assumption that yellow fever was spread by invisible particles called "fomites." indeed, he had the boldness to disprove it. then he disproved, also, the assumption that the fever was contagious by contact. after that he set out to test a hypothesis of his own. his attitude toward the results of former investigations was thus skeptically critical. every proposition was to be questioned, and the evidence of facts, rather than personal authority or the authority of time, was the sole final test of validity. what should be the attitude of the young student toward the authorities that he studies? certainly authors are, as a rule, more mature and far better informed upon the subjects that they discuss than he, otherwise he would not be pursuing them. are they still so prone to error that he should be critical toward them? at any rate, should he set himself up as their judge; at times condemning some of their statements outright, or accepting them only in part,--and thus maintain independent views? or would that be the height of presumption on his part? while it is true that all authors are liable to error, are they much less liable to it in their chosen fields than he, and can he more safely trust them than himself? and should he, therefore, being a learner, adopt a docile, passive attitude, and accept whatever statements are presented? or, finally, is neither of these attitudes correct? instead of either condemning or accepting authors, is it his duty merely to understand and remember what they say? _ . memorizing, as a fifth factor in study_ the scientist is greatly dependent upon his memory. so is every one else, including the young student. what suggestions, if any, can be made about the retaining of facts? in particular, how prominent in study should be the effort to memorize? should memorizing constitute the main part of study--as it so often does--or only a minor part? it is often contrasted with thinking. is such a contrast justified? if so, should the effort to memorize usually precede the thinking--as is often the order in learning poetry and bible verses--or should it follow the thinking? and why? can one greatly strengthen the memory by special exercises for that purpose? finally, since there are some astonishingly poor ways of memorizing--as was shown in chapter one--there must be some better ways. what, then, are the best, and why? _ . the using of ideas, as a sixth factor in study_ does all knowledge, like this of the scientist, require contact with the world as its endpoint or goal? and is it the duty of the student to pursue any topic, whether it be a principle of physics, or a moral idea, or a simple story, until it proves of benefit to some one? in that case, enough repetition might be necessary to approximate habits--habits of mind and habits of action--for the skill necessary for the successful use of some knowledge cannot otherwise be attained. how, then, can habits become best established? or is knowledge something apart from the active world, ending rather in self? would it be narrowly utilitarian and even foolish to expect that one's learning shall necessarily function in practical life? and should the student rather rest content to acquire knowledge for its own sake, not bothering--for the present, at any rate--about actually bringing it to account in any way? the use to which his ideas had to be put gave dr. reed an excellent test of their reliability. no doubt he passed through many stages of doubt as he investigated one theory after another. and he could not feel reasonably sure that he was right and had mastered his problem until his final hypothesis had been shown to hold good under varying actual conditions. what test has the ordinary student for knowing when he knows a thing well enough to leave it? he may set up specific purposes to be accomplished, as has been suggested. yet even these may be only ideas; what means has he for knowing when they have been attained? it is a long distance from the first approach to an important thought, to its final assimilation, and nothing is easier than to stop too soon. if there are any waymarks along the road, indicating the different stages reached; particularly, if there is a recognizable endpoint assuring mastery, one might avoid many dangerous headers by knowing the fact. or is that particularly what recitations and marks are for? and instead of expecting an independent way of determining when he has mastered a subject, should the student simply rely upon his teacher to acquaint him with that fact? _ . the tentative attitude as a seventh factor in study_ investigators of the source of yellow fever previous to dr. reed reached conclusions as well as he. but, in the light of later discovery, they appear hasty and foolish, to the extent that they were insisted upon as correct. a large percentage of the so-called discoveries that are made, even by laboratory experiment, are later disproved. even in regard to this very valuable work of dr. reed and his associates, one may feel too sure. it is quite possible that future study will materially supplement and modify our present knowledge of the subject. the scientist, therefore, may well assume an attitude of doubt toward all the results that he achieves. does the same hold for the young student? is all our knowledge more or less doubtful, so that we should hold ourselves ready to modify our ideas at any time? and, remembering the common tendency to become dogmatic and unprogressive on that account, should the young student, in particular, regard some degree of uncertainty about his facts as the ideal state of mind for him to reach? or would such uncertainty too easily undermine his self-confidence and render him vacillating in action? and should firmly fixed ideas, rather than those that are somewhat uncertain, be regarded as his goal, so that the extent to which he feels sure of his knowledge may be taken as one measure of his progress? or can it be that there are two kinds of knowledge? that some facts are true for all time, and can be learned as absolutely true; and that others are only probabilities and must be treated as such? in that case, which is of the former kind, and which is of the latter? _ . provision for individuality as an eighth factor in study_ the scientific investigator must determine upon his own hypotheses; he must collect and organize his data, must judge their soundness and trace their consequences; and he must finally decide for himself when he has finished a task. all this requires a high degree of intellectual independence, which is possible only through a healthy development of individuality, or of the native self. a normal self giving a certain degree of independence and even a touch of originality to all of his thoughts and actions is essential to the student's proper advance, as to the work of the scientist. should the student, therefore, be taught to believe in and trust himself, holding his own powers and tendencies in high esteem? should he learn even to ascribe whatever merit he may possess to the qualities that are peculiar to him? and should he, accordingly, look upon the ideas and influences of other persons merely as a means--though most valuable--for the development of this self that he holds so sacred? or should he learn to depreciate himself, to deplore those qualities that distinguish him from others? and should he, in consequence, regard the ideas and influences of others as a valuable means of suppressing, or escaping from, his native self and of making him like other persons? here are two very different directions in which one may develop. in which direction does human nature most tend? in which direction do educational institutions, in particular, exert their influence? does the average student, for example, subordinate his teachers and the ideas he acquires to himself? or does he become subordinated to these, even submerged by them? this is the most important of all the problems concerning study; indeed, it is the one in which all the others culminate. _the ability of children to study_ the above constitute the principal factors in study. but two other problems are of vital importance for the elementary school. studying is evidently a complex and taxing kind of work. even though the above discussions reveal the main factors in the study of adults, what light does it throw upon the work of children? is their study to contain these factors also? the first of these two questions, therefore, is, can children from six to fourteen years of age really be expected to study? it is not the custom in german elementary schools to include independent study periods in the daily program. more than that, the german language does not even permit children to be spoken of as studying. children are recognized as being able to learn (_lernen_); but the foreigner, who, in learning german, happens to use the word _studiren_ (study) in reference to them, is corrected with a smile and informed that "children can learn but they cannot study." _studiren_ is a term applicable only to a more mature kind of mental work. this may be only a peculiarity of language. but such suggestions should at least lead us to consider this question seriously. if children really cannot study, what an excuse their teachers have for innumerable failures in this direction! and what sins they have committed in demanding study! but, then, when is the proper age for study reached? certainly college students sometimes seem to have failed to attain it. if, however, children can study, to what extent can they do it, and at how early an age should they begin to try? _the method of teaching children how to study_ the second of these two questions relates to the method of teaching children how to study. granted that there are numerous very important factors in study, what should be done about them? particularly, assuming that children have some power to study, what definite instruction can teachers give to them in regard to any one or all of these factors? can it be that, on account of their youth, no direct instruction about method of study would be advisable, that teachers should set a good example of study by their treatment of lessons in class, and rely only upon the imitative tendency of children for some effect on their habits of work? or should extensive instruction be imparted to them, as well as to adults, on this subject? the leading problems in study that have been mentioned will be successively discussed in the chapters following. these two questions, however, can children study? and if so, how can they be taught to do it? will not be treated in chapters separate from the others. each will be dealt with in connection with the above factors, their consideration immediately following the discussion of each of those factors. while the proper method of study for adults will lead, much emphasis will fall, throughout, upon suggestions for teaching children how to study. _some limitations of the term study_ the nature of study cannot be known in full until the character of its component parts has been clearly shown. yet a working definition of the term and some further limitations of it may be in place here. study, in general, is the work that is necessary in the assimilation of ideas. much of this work consists in thinking. but study is not synonymous with thinking, for it also includes other activities, as mechanical drill, for example. such drill is often necessary in the mastery of thought. not just any thinking and any drill, however, may be counted as study. at least only such thinking and such drill are here included within the term as are integral parts of the mental work that is necessary in the accomplishment of valuable purposes. thinking that is done at random, and drills that have no object beyond acquaintance with dead facts, as those upon dates, lists of words, and location of places, for instance, are unworthy of being considered a part of study. day-dreaming, giving way to reverie and to casual fancy, too, is not to be regarded as study. not because it is not well to indulge in such activity at times, but because it is not serious enough to be called work. study is systematic work, and not play. reading for recreation, further, is not study. it is certainly very desirable and even necessary, just as play is. it even partakes of many of the characteristics of true study, and reaps many of its benefits. no doubt, too, the extensive reading that children and youth now do might well partake more fully of the nature of study. it would result in more good and less harm; for, beyond a doubt, much careless reading is injurious to habits of serious study. yet it would be intolerable to attempt to convert pleasure-reading fully into real study. that would mean that we had become too serious. on the whole, then, the term study as here used has largely the meaning that is given to it in ordinary speech. yet it is not entirely the same; the term signifies a purposive and systematic, and therefore a more limited, kind of work than much that goes under that name. part ii the nature of the principal factors in study, and their relation to children chapter iii provision for specific purposes, as one factor of study _the habit among eminent men of setting up specific purposes of study._ the scientific investigator habitually sets up hypotheses of some sort as guides in his investigations. many distinguished men who are not scientists follow and recommend a somewhat similar method of study. for example, john morley, m.p., in his _aspects of modern study_, [footnote: page .] says, "some great men,--gibbon was one and daniel webster was another and the great lord strafford was a third,--always, before reading a book, made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them. i have sometimes tried that way of studying, and guiding attention; i have never done so without advantage, and i commend it to you." says gibbon [footnote: dr. smith's gibbon, p. .], "after glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, i suspended the perusal until i had finished the task of self-examination; till i had resolved, in a solitary walk, all that i knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter; i was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and, if i was sometimes satisfied with the agreement, i was sometimes armed by the opposition of our ideas." president james angell emphasizes a similar thought in the following words:-- i would like to recommend to my young friends who desire to profit by the use of this library, the habit of reading with some system, and of making brief notes upon the contents of the books they read. if, for instance, you are studying the history of some period, ascertain what works you need to study, and find such parts of them as concern your theme. do not feel obliged to read the whole of a large treatise, but select such chapters as touch on the subject in hand and omit the rest for the time. young students often get swamped and lose their way in the serbonian bogs of learning, when they need to explore only a simple and plain pathway to a specific destination. have a purpose and a plan, and adhere to it in spite of alluring temptations to turn aside into attractive fields that are remote from your subject.[footnote: address at dedication of ryerson public library building, grand rapids, mich., oct. , .] noah porter expresses himself even more pointedly in these words:-- in reading we do well to propose to ourselves definite ends and purposes. the distinct consciousness of some object at present before us, imparts a manifold greater interest to the contents of any volume. it imparts to the reader an appropriative power, a force of affinity, by which he insensibly and unconsciously attracts to himself all that has a near or even a remote relation to the end for which he reads. anyone is conscious of this who reads a story with the purpose of repeating it to an absent friend; or an essay or a report, with the design of using the facts or arguments in a debate; or a poem, with the design of reviving its imagery and reciting its finest passages. indeed, one never learns to read effectively until he learns to read in such a spirit--not always, indeed, for a definite end, yet always with a mind attent to appropriate and retain and turn to the uses of culture, if not to a more direct application. the private history of every self-made man, from franklin onwards, attests that they all were uniformly, not only earnest but select, in their reading, and that they selected their books with distinct reference to the purposes for which they used them. indeed, the reason why self-trained men so often surpass men who are trained by others in the effectiveness and success of their reading, is that they know for what they read and study, and have definite aims and wishes in all their dealings with books. [footnote: noah porter, books and reading, pp. - .] _examples of specific purposes_ it is evident from the above that the practice of setting up specific aims for study is not uncommon. some actual examples of such purposes, however, may help to make their character plainer. following are a number of examples of a very simple kind: ( ) to examine the catalogues of several colleges to determine what college one will attend; ( ) to read a newspaper with the purpose of telling the news of the day to some friend; ( ) to study norse myths in order to relate them to children; ( ) to investigate the english sparrow to find out whether it is a nuisance, or a valuable friend, to man; ( ) to acquaint one's self with the art and geography of italy, so as to select the most desirable parts for a visit; ( ) to learn about paris in order to find whether it is fitly called the most beautiful of cities; ( ) to study psychology with the object of discovering how to improve one's memory, or how to overcome certain bad habits; ( ) to read pestalozzi's biography for the sake of finding what were the main factors that led to his greatness; ( ) to examine lincoln's gettysburg speech with the purpose of convincing others of its excellence. _the character of these aims_ well-selected ends of this sort have two characteristics that are worthy of special note. the first pertains to their _source_. their possible variety is without limit. some may be or an intellectual nature, as numbers , , and among those listed above; some may aim at utility for the individual, as numbers and ; and some may involve service to others, as numbers and . but however much they vary, they find their source _within_ the person concerned. they spring out of his own experience and appeal to him for that reason. one very important measure of their worth is the extent to which they represent an individual desire. the second characteristic pertains to their _narrowness_ and consequent _definiteness_. they call in each case for an investigation of a relatively small and definite topic. this can be further seen from the following topics in biology: what household plants are most desirable? how can these plants be raised? what are their principal enemies, and how can these best be overcome? whether we be working on one or more of such problems at a time, they are so specific that we need never be confused as to what we are attempting. the nature of these aims in study can be made still clearer by contrasting them with others that are very common. the "harmonious development of all the faculties," or mental discipline, for instance, has long been lauded by educators as one chief purpose in study. agassiz was one such educator, and in his desire to cultivate the power of observation, he is said to have set students at work upon the study of fishes without directions, to struggle as they might. many teachers of science before and since his time have followed a similar method. truth for truth's sake, or the idea that one should study merely for the sake of knowing, has often been associated with mental discipline as a worthy end. culture is a third common purpose. each of these aims, instead of originating in the particular interests of the individual, is reached by consideration of life as a whole, and of the final purposes of education. they are too general in nature to recognize individual preferences, and they are also too general to cause much discrimination in the selection of topics and of particular facts within topics. strange to say, however, they have discriminated against the one kind of knowledge that the aforementioned specific aims emphasize as especially desirable. under their exclusive influence, for example, students of biology have generally made an extensive study of wild plants and have paid little attention to house plants. such subjects as physics, fine art, and biology cannot help but impart much information that relates to man; but that relationship has generally been the last part reached in the treatment of each topic, and the part most neglected. under the influence of these general aims any useful purpose, whether involving service to the individual or to society at large, has somehow been eschewed or thought too sordid to be worthy of the scholar. _the relation of specific purposes to those that are more general_ nevertheless, these two kinds of aims are not necessarily opposed to each other. if a person can increase his mental power, or his love of knowledge, or his culture, at the same time that he is accomplishing specific purposes, why should he not do so? the gain is so much the greater. not only are the two kinds not mutually opposed, but they are really necessary to each other. general purposes when rightly conceived are of the greatest importance as the _final_ goals to be reached by study. but they are too remote of attainment to act as immediate guides. others more detailed must perform that office and mark off the minor steps to be taken in the accomplishment of the larger purposes. thus the narrower purposes are related to the larger ones as means to ends. _ways in which specific purposes are valuable . as a source of motive power_ specific purposes are necessary in the first place, because they help to supply motive power both for study and for life in general. proper study requires abundant energy, for it is hard work; and young people cannot be expected to engage in it heartily without good reason. in particular, it requires very close and sustained attention, which it is most difficult to give. threats and punishments can, at the best, secure it only in part; for young people who thus suffer habitually reserve a portion of their energy to imagine the full meanness of their persecutors and, not seldom, to devise ways of getting even. neither can direct exercise of will insure undivided attention. how often have all of us, conscious that we _ought_ fully to concentrate attention upon some task, determined to do so in vain. the best single guarantee of close and continuous attention is a deep, direct interest in the work in hand, an interest similar in kind to that which children have in play. such interest serves the same purpose with man as steam does in manufacturing,--it is motive power, and it is as necessary to provide for it in the one case as in the other. broad, general aims cannot generate this interest, for abstractions do not arouse enthusiasm. it is the concrete, the detailed, that arouses interest, particularly that detail that is closely related to life. we all remember how, in the midst of listless reading, we have sometimes awakened with a start, when we realized that what we were reading bore directly upon some vital interest. specific purposes of the kind described insure the interest, and therefore the energy, necessary for full and sustained attention. "for remember," says lowell, "that there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. but the moment you have a definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest." [footnote: lowell, books and libraries.] if eminent scholars thus value and actually make use of concrete purposes, certainly immature students, whose attention is much less "trained," can follow their example with profit. life in general, as well as study, requires motive power. energy to do many kinds of things is so important that one's worth depends as much upon it as upon knowledge. indeed, if there must be some lack in one of these two, it were probably better that it be in knowledge. a deep many-sided interest is a key also to this broader kind of energy. yet how often is such interest lacking! this lack of interest is seen among high-school students in the selection of subjects for commencement essays; good subjects are difficult to find because interests are so rare. it is seen among college students in their choice of elective courses; for they often seem to have no strong interest beyond that of avoiding hard work. it is seen in many college graduates who are roundly developed only in the sense that they are about equally indifferent toward all things. and, finally, it is seen in the great number of men and women who, without ambition, drift aimlessly through life. well-chosen specific purposes will help materially to remedy these evils, for there is no dividing line between good study-purposes and good life-purposes. the first must continually merge into the second; and the interest aroused by the former, with its consequent energy, gives assurance of interested and energetic pursuance of the latter. the importance of being rich in unsolved problems is not likely to be overestimated. most well-informed adults who have little "push" are not lazy by nature; they have merely failed to fall in love with worthy aims. that is often partly because education has been allowed to mean to them little more than the collecting of facts. if it had included the collection of interesting and valuable purposes as well, their devotion to proper aims in life might have grown as have their facts; then their energy might have kept pace with their knowledge. if students, therefore, regularly occupy a portion of their study time in thinking out live questions that they hope to have answered by their further study, and interesting uses that they intend to make of their knowledge, they are equipping themselves with motive power both for study and for the broader work of life. _ . as a basis for the selection and organization of facts_ one of the constant dangers in study is that facts will be collected without reference either to their values, as previously stated, or to their arrangement. nature study frequently illustrates this danger. for instance, i once witnessed a recitation in which each member of a class of eleven-year-old children was supplied with a dead oak leaf and asked to write a description of it in detail. the entire period was occupied with the task, and following is a copy of one of the papers, without its figures. the oak leaf. greatest length......... length of the stem.... greatest breadth........ color of the stem..... number of lobes......... color of the leaf..... number of indentations.. general shape......... the other papers closely resembled this one. consider the worth of such knowledge! this is one way in which time is wasted in school and college. probably the main reason for the choice of this topic was the fact that the leaves could be easily obtained. but if the teacher had been in the habit of setting up specific aims, and therefore of asking how such matter would prove valuable in life, she would have never given this lesson--unless higher authorities had required it. one of my classes of about seventy primary teachers in the study of education once undertook to plan subject-matter in nature study for six-year-old children in brooklyn. they agreed that the common house cat would be a fitting topic. and on being asked to state what facts they might teach, they gave the following sub-topics in almost exactly this order and wording: the ears; food and how obtained; the tongue; paws, including cushions; whiskers; teeth; action of tail; sounds; sharp hearing; sense of smell; cleanliness; eyes; looseness of the skin; quick waking; size of mouth; manner of catching prey; claws; care of young; locomotion; kinds of prey; enemies; protection by society for the prevention of cruelty to animals,--twenty-two topics in all. when i inquired if they would teach the length of the tail, or the shape of the head and ears, or the length and shape of the legs, or the number of claws or of teeth, most of them said "no" with some hesitation, and some made no reply. when asked what more needed to be done with this list before presenting the subject to the children, some suggested that those facts pertaining to the head should be grouped together, likewise those pertaining to the body and those in regard to the extremities. some rejected this suggestion, but offered no substitute. no general agreement to omit some of the topics in the list was reached, and most of the class saw no better plan than to present the subject, cat, under the twenty-two headings given. although there were college graduates present, and many capable women, it was evident that they carried no standard for judging the value of facts or for organizing them. the setting up of specific purposes seemed to offer them the aid that they needed. since this was in brooklyn, where the main relation of cats to children is that of pets, we took up the study of the animal with the purpose of finding to what extent cats as pets can provide for themselves, and to what extent, therefore, they need to be taken care of, and how. under these headings the sub-topics given, with a few omissions and additions, might be arranged as follows: under first aim:-- i. _food_ (chief thing necessary). /birds . kinds of prey...{ mice \moles, etc. /eyes, that see in dark; . how found..... { structure. { sense of smell; keenness. \ears; keenness. / approach; use of whiskers. | quietness of movements; | how so quiet (padded feet, | loose joints, manner of | walking). | action of tail. . how caught.....{ catching and holding; | ability to spring; strength of | hind legs. | fore paws; used like hands. | claws; shape, sharpness, \ and sheaths. ii. _shelter._ use of covering. finding of warm place in coldest weather. under second aim:-- i. _food_ (when prey is wanting). kinds and where obtained: milk; scraps from table; biscuit; catnip. observe method of drinking. ii. _shelter_. how provide shelter. iii. _cleanliness_. why washing unnecessary (cat's face washing; aversion to getting wet). danger from dampness. need of combing and brushing; method. iv. _enemies_. kinds of insects; remedies. dogs; boys and men. proper treatment. value of society for prevention of cruelty to animals; how to secure its aid. thus a definite purpose, that is simple, concrete, and close to the learner's experience, can be valuable as a basis for selecting and arranging subject-matter. facts that bear no important relation to this aim, such as the length of the cat's tail and the shape of its ears, fall out; and those that are left, drop into a series in place of a mere list. _as a promise of some practical outcome of study in conduct_ a manufacturer must do more than supply himself with motive power and manufacture a proper quality of goods; he must also provide for a market. again, if he makes money, he is under obligations not to let it lie idle; if he hoards it, he is condemned as a miser. he is responsible for turning whatever goods or money he collects to some account. the student, likewise, should not be merely a collector of knowledge. the object of study is not merely insight. as frederick harrison has said, "man's business here is to know for the sake of living, not to live for the sake of knowing." "religion that does not express itself in conduct socially useful is not true religion"; and, we may add, education that does not do the same is not true education. it is part of one's work as a student, therefore, to plan to turn one's knowledge to some account; to plan not alone to sell it for money, but to _use_ it in various ways in daily life. if, instead of this, one aims to do nothing but collect facts, no matter how ardently, he has the spirit of a bookworm at best and stands on the same plane as the miser. or if, notwithstanding good intentions, he leaves the effect of his knowledge on life mainly to accident, he is grossly careless in regard to the chief object of study. yet the average student regards himself as mainly a collector of facts, a storehouse of knowledge; and his teachers also regard him in that light. planning to turn knowledge to some account is not thought to be essential to scholarship. there are, no doubt, various reasons for this, but it is not because an effect on life is not finally desired. the explanation seems to be largely found in a very peculiar theory, namely, that the fewer bearings on life a student now concerns himself with, the more he will somehow ultimately realize; and if he aims at none in particular, he will very likely hit most of them. thus aimlessness, so far as relations of study to life are concerned, is put at a premium, and students are directly encouraged to be omnivorous absorbers without further responsibility. meanwhile, sensible people are convinced of the unsoundness of this theory. how often, after having read a book from no particular point of view, one feels it necessary to reexamine it in order to know how it treats some particular topic! the former reading was too defective to meet a special need, because the very general aim caused the attitude to be general or non-selective. how often do young people who have been taught to have no particular aim in their reading, have no aim at all, beyond intellectual dissipation, the momentary tickle of the thought. thus _all_ particular needs are in danger of being left unsatisfied when no particular need is fixed upon as the object. it is the growing consciousness of the great waste in such study that has changed botany in many places into horticulture and agriculture, chemistry into the chemistry of the kitchen, and that has caused portions of many other studies to be approached from the human view- point. this indicates the positive acceptance of specific purposes as guides in study. they are not by any means full guarantees of an outcome of knowledge in conduct, for they are only the plans by which the student hopes that his knowledge will function. since plans often fail of accomplishment, these purposes may never be realized. but they give promise of some outcome and form one important step in a series of steps necessary for the fruition of knowledge. _by whom and when such purposes should be conceived_ the aims set up by advanced scholars are necessarily an outgrowth of their individual experience and interests. such aims must, therefore, vary greatly. for this reason such men must conceive their purposes for themselves; there is no one who can do it for them. younger students are in much the same situation, for their aims should also be individual to a large extent. text-books might be of much help if their authors attempted this task with skill. but authors seldom attempt it at all; and, even if they do, they are under the disadvantage of writing for great numbers of persons living in widely different environments. any aims that they propose must necessarily be of a very general character. teachers might again be of much help; but many of them do not know how, and many more will not try. the task, therefore, falls mainly to the student himself. as to the time of forming in mind these aims, the experimental scientist necessarily posits some sort of hypothesis in advance of his experiments; the eminent men before mentioned conceive the questions that they hope to have answered, in advance of their reading. it is natural that one should fix an aim before doing the work that is necessary for its accomplishment. if these aims are to furnish the motive for close attention and the basis for the selection and organization of facts, they certainly ought to be determined upon early. the earlier they come, too, the greater the likelihood of some practical outcome in conduct; for the want of such an outcome is very often due to their postponement. on the other hand, the setting up of desirable ends requires mental vigor, as well as a wide and well-controlled experience. gibbon's "solitary walk" (p. ) would hardly be a pleasure walk for most young people, even if they had his rich fund of knowledge to draw upon. while it is desirable, therefore, to determine early upon one's purposes, young students will often find it impossible to do this. in such cases they will have to begin studying without such aids. they can at least keep a sharp lookout for suitable purposes, and can gradually fix upon them as they proceed. in general it should be remembered that the sooner good aims are selected, the sooner their benefits will be enjoyed. the fitness of children in the elementary school to select specific purposes of study according to custom, young people are expected to acquire knowledge now and find its uses later. the preceding argument would reverse that order by having them discover their wants first and then study to satisfy them. this is the way in which man has progressed from the beginning--outside of educational institutions--and it seems the normal order. to what extent shall this apply to children? if the fixing of aims is difficult for adult students, it can be expected to be even more difficult for children of the elementary school age. for their experience, from which the suggestions for specific purposes must be obtained, is narrow and their command of it slight. on the other hand, they are expected to have done a large amount of studying before entering the high school, much of it alone, too. and, after leaving the elementary school, people will take it for granted that they have already learned how to study. if, therefore, the finding of specific purposes is an important factor in proper study, responsibility for acquiring that ability will fall upon the elementary school. _do children need the help of specific aims?_ the first question to consider is, do children seriously need the help of such aims? they certainly do in one respect, for they resemble their elders in being afflicted with inattention and unwillingness to exert themselves in study. these are the offenses for which they are most often scolded at school, and these are their chief faults when they attempt to study alone. there is no doubt also but that the main reason why children improve very little in oral reading during the last three years in the elementary school is their lack of incentive to improve. they feel no great need of enunciating distinctly and of reading with pleasant tones loud enough to be heard by all, when all present have the same text before them. why should they? good aims make children alert, just as they do older persons. i remember hearing a new york teacher in a private school say to her thirteen-year-old children in composition, one spring day: "i expect to spend my vacation at some summer resort; but i have not yet decided what one it shall be. if you have a good place in mind, i should be glad to have you tell me why you like it. it may influence my choice." she was a very popular teacher, and each pupil longed to have her for a companion during the summer. i never saw a class undertake a composition with more eagerness. in a certain fifth-year class in geography a contest between the boys and girls for the best collection of articles manufactured out of flax resulted in the greatest enthusiasm. the reading or committing to memory of stories with the object of dramatizing them--such as _the children's hour_, in the second or third grade--seldom fails to arouse lively interest. for several years the members of the highest two classes in a certain school have collected many of the best cartoons and witticisms. they have also been in the habit of reading the magazines with the object of selecting such articles as might be of special interest to their own families at home, or to other classes in the school, or to their classmates, often defending their selections before the class. their most valuable articles have been classified and catalogued for use in the school; and their joke-books, formed out of humorous collections, have circulated through the school. the effect of the plan in interesting pupils in current literature has been excellent. a certain settlement worker in new york city in charge of a club of fourteen- to eighteen-year-old boys tried to arouse an interest in literature, using one plan after another without success. finally the class undertook to read _julius caesar_ with the object of selecting the best parts and acting them out in public. this plan succeeded; and while the acting was grotesque, this purpose led to what was probably the most earnest studying that those boys had ever done. the value of definite aims for the conduct of the recitation is now often discussed and much appreciated by teachers. if such aims are so important in class, with the teacher present, they are surely not less needed when the child is studying alone. the worth of specific aims for children as a source of energy in general is likewise great. it is a question whether children under three years of age are ever lazy. but certainly within a few years after that age--owing to the bad effect of civilization, rousseau might say--many of them make great progress toward laziness of both body and mind. the possibilities in this direction were once strikingly illustrated in an orphan asylum in new york city. the two hundred children in this asylum had been in the habit of marching to their meals in silence, eating in silence, and marching out in silence. they had been trained to the "lock step" discipline, until they were _quiet_ and _good_ to a high degree. the old superintendent having resigned on account of age, an experienced teacher, who was an enthusiast in education, succeeded him in that office. feeling depressed by the lack of life among the children, the latter concluded, after a few weeks, to break the routine by taking thirty of the older boys and girls to a circus. but shortly before the appointed day one of these girls proved so refractory that she was told that she could not be allowed to go. to the new superintendent's astonishment, however, she did not seem disappointed or angered; she merely remarked that she had never seen a circus and did not care much to go anyway. shortly afterward he fined several of the children for misconduct. many of them had a few dollars of their own, received from relatives and other friends. but the fines did not worry them. they were not in the habit of spending money, having no occasion for it; all that they needed was food, clothing, and shelter, and these the institution was bound to give. then he deprived certain unruly children of a share in the games. that again failed to cause acute sorrow. in the great city they had little room for play, and many had not become fond of games. it finally proved difficult to discover anything that they cared for greatly. their discipline had accomplished its object, until they were usually "good" simply because they were too dull, too wanting in ideas and interests to be mischievous. their energy in general was low. here was a demand for specific purposes without limit. one of the first aims that the new superintendent set up, after making this discovery, was to inculcate live interests in these children, a capacity to enjoy the circus, a love even of money, a love of games, of flowers, of reading, and of companionship. his means was the fixing of definite and interesting objects to be accomplished from day to day, and these gradually restored the children to their normal condition. thus all children need the help of specific aims, and some need it sadly. _is it normal to expect children to learn to set up specific aims for themselves?_ there remains the very important question, are children themselves capable of learning to set up such purposes? or at least would such attempts seem to be normal for them? this question cannot receive a final answer at present, because children have not been sufficiently tested in this respect. it has so long been the habit in school to collect facts and leave their bearings on life to future accident, that the force of habit makes it difficult to measure the probabilities in regard to a very different procedure. yet there are some facts that are very encouraging. a large number of the tasks that children undertake outside of school are self imposed, many of these including much intellectual work. largely as a result of such tasks, too, they probably learn at least as much outside of school as they learn in school, and they learn it better. further, when called upon in school to do this kind of thinking, they readily respond. a teacher one day remarked to her class, "i have a little girl friend living on the hudson river, near albany, who has been ill for many weeks. it occurred to me that you might like to write her some letters that would help her to pass the time more pleasantly. could you do it?" "yes, by all means," was the response. "then what will you choose to write about?" said the teacher. one girl soon inquired, "do you think that she would like to know how i am training my bird to sing?" several other interesting topics were suggested. the finding of desirable purposes is not beyond children's abilities. individual examples, however, can hardly furnish the best answer to the question at present; the general nature of children must determine it. if children are leading lives that are rich enough intellectually and morally to furnish numerous occasions to turn their acquisitions to account, then it would certainly be reasonable to expect them to discover some of these occasions. if, on the other hand, their lives are comparatively barren, it might be unnatural to make such a demand upon them. the feeling is rather common that human experience becomes rich only as the adult period is reached; that childhood is comparatively barren of needs, and valuable mainly as a period of storage of knowledge to meet wants that will arise later. yet is this true? by the time the adult state is reached, one has passed through the principal kinds of experience; the period of struggle is largely over, and the results have registered themselves in habits. the adult is to a great extent a bundle of habits. the child, and the youth in the adolescent age, on the other hand, are just going the round of experience for the first few times. they are just forming their judgments as to the values of things about them. their intellectual life is abundant, as is shown by their innumerable questions. their temptations--such as to become angry, to fight, to lie, to cheat, and to steal--are more numerous and probably more severe than they will usually be later; their opportunities to please and help others, or to offend and hinder, are without limit; and their joys and sorrows, though of briefer duration than later, are more numerous and often fully as acute. in other words, they are in the midst of growth, of habit formation, both intellectually and morally. theirs is the time of life when, to a peculiar degree, they are experimentally related to their environment. why, then, should they be taught to look past this period, to their distant future as the harvest time for their knowledge and powers? the occasions are abundant _now_ for turning facts and abilities to account, and it is normal to expect them to see many of these opportunities. proper development requires that they be trained to look for them, instead of looking past them. here is seen the need of one more reform in education. children used to be regarded as lacking value in themselves; their worth lay in their promise of being men and women; and if, owing to ill health, this promise was very doubtful, they were put aside. for education they were given that mental pabulum that was considered valuable to the adult; and their tastes, habits, and manners were judged from the same viewpoint. very recently one radical improvement has been effected in this program. as illustrated in the doctrine of apperception, we have grown to respect the natures of children, even to accept their instincts, their native tendencies, and their experiences as the proper _basis_ for their education. that is a wonderful advance. but we do not yet regard their present experience as furnishing the _motive_ for their education. we need to take one more step and recognize their present lives as the field wherein the knowledge that they acquire shall function. we do this to some extent; but we lack faith in the abundance of their present experience, and are always impatiently looking forward to a time when their lives will be rich. in feeding children we have our eyes primarily on the present; food is given them in order to be assimilated and used _now_ to satisfy _present_ needs; that is the best way of guaranteeing health for the future. likewise in giving them mental and spiritual food, our attention should be directed primarily to its present value. it should be given with the purpose of present nourishment, of satisfying present needs; other more distant needs will thereby be best served. a few years ago, when i was discussing this topic with a class at teachers college, i happened to observe a recitation in the horace mann school in which a class of children was reading _silas marner_. they were frequently reproved for their unnaturally harsh voices, for their monotones, indistinct enunciation, and poor grouping of words. in the speyer school, nine blocks north of this school, i had often observed the same defects. at about that time one of my students, interested in the early history of new york, happened to call upon an old woman living in a shanty midway between these two schools. she was an old inhabitant, and one of the early roadways that the student was hunting had passed near her house. in conversation with the woman he learned that she had had five children, all of whom had been taken from her some years before, within a fortnight, by scarlet fever; and that since then she had been living alone. when he remarked that she must feel lonesome at times, tears came to her eyes, and she replied, "sometimes." as he was leaving she thanked him for his call and remarked that she seldom had any visitors; she added that, if some one would drop in now and then, either to talk or to read to her, she would greatly appreciate it; her eyes had so failed that she could no longer read for herself. here was an excellent chance to improve the children's reading by enabling them to see that the better their reading the more pleasure could they give to those about them. this seems typical of the present relation between the school and its environing world. while the two need each other sadly, the school is isolated somewhat like the old- time monastery. the fixing of specific aims for study can aid materially in establishing the normal relation, and children can certainly contribute to this end by discovering some of these purposes themselves. that is one of the things that they should _learn_ to do. practical suggestions for teaching children to find specific aims for their study _ . elimination of subject-matter that has little bearing on life_ the elimination from the curriculum of such subject-matter as has no probable bearing on ordinary mortals is one important step to take in giving children definite aims in their study. there is much of this matter having little excuse for existence beyond the fact that it "exercises the mind"; for example: in arithmetic, the finding of the greatest common divisor as a separate topic, the tables for apothecaries' weight and troy measure, complex and compound fractions;[footnote: for a more complete list of such topics, see teachers college record, _mathematics in the elementary school_, march, , by david eugene smith and f. m. mcmurry.] in geography, the location of many unimportant capes, bays, capitals and other towns, rivers and boundaries; in nature study, many classifications, the detailed study of leaves, and the study of many uncommon wild plants. the teaching of facts that cannot function in the lives of pupils directly encourages the mere collecting habit, and thus tends to defeat the purpose here proposed. not that we do not wish children to collect facts; but while acquiring them we want children to carry the responsibility of discovering ways of turning them to account, and mere collecting tends to dull this sense of responsibility. _ . the example to be set by the teacher_ by her own method of instruction the teacher can set an example of what she desires from her pupils in the way of concrete aims. for instance: (a) during recitation she can occasionally suggest opportunities for the application of knowledge and ability. "this is a story that you might tell to other children," she might say; or, "here is something that you might dramatize." "you might talk with your father or mother about this." "could you read this aloud to your family?" again, (b) in the assignment of lessons she might set a definite problem that would bring the school work into direct touch with the outside world. in fine art, instead of having children make designs for borders, without any particular use for the design, she might suggest, "find some object or wall surface that needs a border, and see if you can design one that will be suitable." as a task in arithmetic for a fifth-year class in a small town, she might assign the problem, "to find out as accurately as possible whether or not it pays to keep a cow." finally, (c) as part of an examination, she can ask the class to recall purposes that they have kept in mind in the study of certain topics. by such means the teacher can make clear to a class what is meant by interesting or useful aims of study, and also impress them with the fact that she feels the need of studying under the guidance of such aims. _ . the responsibility the children should bear._ the teacher need not do a great amount of such work for her class. the children should _learn to do it themselves_, and they will not acquire the ability mainly by having some one else do it for them. therefore, after the children have come to understand the requirement fairly well, the teacher might occasionally assign a lesson by specifying only the quantity, as such and such pages, or such and such topics, in the geography or history, with the understanding that the class shall state in the next recitation one or more aims for the lesson; for example, if it is the geography of russia, how it happens that we hear so often of famines in russia, while we do not hear of them in other parts of europe; or, if it is the history of columbus, for what characteristic is columbus to be most admired? again, in what ways has his discovery of america proved of benefit to the world? the finding of such problems will then be a part of the study necessary in mastering the lesson. likewise, during the recitation and without any hint from the teacher, the children should show that they are carrying the responsibility of establishing relations of the subject-matter with life, by mentioning further bearings, or possible uses, that they discover. review lessons furnish excellent occasions for study of this kind. it is narrow to review lessons only from the point of view of the author. his view-point should be reviewed often enough to become well fixed, but there should be other view-points taken also. john fiske has admirably presented the history of the period immediately following the revolution. the title of his book, _the critical period of american history_, makes us curious from the beginning to know how the period was so critical. this is a fine example of a specific aim governing a whole book. but other aims in review might be, do we owe as much to washington during this period as during the war just preceding? or were other men equally or more prominent? how was the establishment of a firm union made especially difficult by the want of certain modern inventions? the pupils themselves should develop the power to suggest such questions. _ . the sources to which children should look for suggestions_ the teacher can teach the children _where to look for suggestions_ in their search for specific purposes. during meals, three times a day, interesting topics of conversation are welcome; indeed, the dearth of conversation at such times, owing to lack of "something to say," is often depressing. there is often need of something to unite the family of evenings, such as a magazine article read aloud, or a good narrative, or a discussion of some timely topic. there are social gatherings where the people "don't know what to do"; there are recesses at school where there is the same difficulty; there are neighbors, brothers and sisters, and other friends who are more than ready to be entertained, or instructed, or helped. yet children often dramatize stories at school, without ever thinking of doing the same for the entertainment of their family at home. they read good stories without expecting to tell them to any one. they collect good ideas about judging pictures, without planning to beautify their homes through them. thus the children can be made conscious that there are _wants_ on all sides of them, and by some study of their environment they can find many aims that will give purpose to their school work. again, by a review of their past studies, their reading, and their experience of various kinds, they can be reminded of objects that they are desirous of accomplishing. it is, perhaps, needless to say that the teacher herself must likewise make a careful study of the home, street, and school life of her pupils, of their study and reading, if she is to guide them most effectually in their own search for desirable aims. _ . stocking up with specific aims in advance_ finally, the teacher can lead her pupils to stock up with specific aims _even in advance of their immediate needs_. a teacher who visits another school with the desire of getting helpful suggestions would better write down beforehand the various things that she wishes to see. she can afford to spend considerable time and energy upon such a list of points. otherwise, she is likely to overlook half of the things she was anxious to inquire about. likewise, children can be taught to jot down in a notebook various problems that they hope to solve, various wants observed in their environment that they may help to satisfy. children who are much interested in reading, sometimes without outside suggestion make lists of good books that they have heard of and hope to read. and as they read some, they add others to their list. keeping this list in mind, they are on the lookout for any of these books, and improve the opportunity to read one of them whenever it offers. a similar habit in regard to things one would like to know and do can be cultivated, so that one will have a rich stock of aims on hand in advance, and these will help greatly to give purpose to the work later required in the school. _ . the importance of moderation in demands made upon children._ in conclusion, it may be of importance to add that this kind of instruction can be easily overdone, and it is better to proceed too slowly than too rapidly. it is a healthy and permanent development that is wanted, and the teacher should rest satisfied if it is slow. it is by no means feasible to attempt to subordinate all study to specific aims; we cannot see our way to accomplish that now. but we can do something in that direction. only occasional attempts with the younger children will be in place; more conscious efforts will be fitting among older pupils. by the time the elementary school is finished, a fair degree of success in discovering specific aims can be expected. yet, even if little more than a willingness to _take time to try_ is established, the gain will be appreciable. when children become interested in a topic, they are impatient to "go on" and "to keep going on." this continual hurrying forward crowds out reflection. if they learn no more than to pause now and then in order to find some bearings on life, and thus do some independent _thinking_, they are paving the way for the invaluable habit of reflection. chapter iv the supplementing of thought, as a second factor of study _the question here at issue_ in the preceding chapter the importance of studying under the influence of specific purposes was urged. these are such purposes as the student really desires to accomplish by the study of text or of other matter placed before him. since they are not usually included in such matter, but must be conceived by the student himself, they constitute a very important kind of supplement to whatever statements may be offered for study. the questions now arise, are other kinds of supplementing also generally necessary? if so, what is their nature? should they be prominent, or only a minor part of study? and is there any explanation of the fact that authors are not able to express themselves more fully and plainly? _answers to these questions-- . as suggested by bible study._ for answers to these questions, turn first to bible study. take for instance a minister's treatment of a bible text. selecting a verse or two as his answers to theme for a sermon, he recalls the conditions that called forth the words; builds the concrete picture by the addition of reasonable detail; makes comparisons with corresponding views or customs of the present time; states and answers queries that may arise; calls attention to the peculiar beauty or force of certain expressions; draws inferences or corollaries suggested in the text; and, finally, interprets the thought or draws the practical lessons. the words in his text may number less than a dozen, while those that he utters reach thousands; and the thoughts that he expresses may be a hundred times the number directly visible in the text. leaving the minister, take the layman's study of the parable of the prodigal son. this is the story as related in luke : - : . and he said, a certain man had two sons: . and the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. and he divided unto them his living. . and not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. . and when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. . and he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. . and he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat; and no man gave unto him . and when he came to himself, he said, how many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and i perish with hunger! . i will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, father, i have sinned against heaven, and before thee, . and am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants. . and he arose, and came to his father. but when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. . and the son said unto him, father, i have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. . but the father said to his servants, bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. . and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry. . for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. and they began to be merry. . now his elder son was in the field; and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. . and he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. . and he said unto him, thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. . and he was angry, and would not go in; therefore came his father out, and intreated him. . and he answering said to his father, lo, these many years do i serve thee, neither transgressed i at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that i might make merry with my friends; . but as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. . and he said unto him, son, thou art ever with me, and all that i have is thine. . it was meet that we should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. how simple the story! even a child can tell it after very few readings, and one could soon learn the words by heart. is one then through with it? or has the study then hardly begun? note some of the questions that need to be considered:-- . what various thoughts probably induced the young man to leave home? . what pictures of his former life does he call to mind when starving? why did he hesitate about returning? . what were his thoughts and actions as he approached his father; those also of his father? . what indication of the father's character is given in the fact that he saw his son while yet "a great way off"? . which is perhaps the most interesting scene? which is least pleasing? . how would the older son have had the father act? . did the father argue at length with the older son? was it in place to argue much about such a matter? . describe the character of the elder son. which of the two is the better? . is the father shown to be at fault in any respect in the training of his sons? if so, how? . how do people about us often resemble the elder son? . is this story told as a warning or as a comfort? how? these are only a few of the many questions that might well be considered. indeed, whole books could be, and probably have been, written upon this one parable. yet neither such questions nor their answers are included in the text. it seems strange that almost none of the great thoughts that should be gathered from the story are themselves included with the narrative. but the same is true in regard to other parts of the bible. the conversation between jesus and the samaritan woman at the well (john ) is, perhaps, the greatest conversation that was ever held. yet one must discover this fact "between the lines"; there is no such statement included in the account. evidently both to the minister and to the layman the bible contains only the raw materials for thought. it must be supplemented without limit, if one is to comprehend it and to be nourished by it properly. _ . as suggested by the study of other literature_ does this same hold with regard to other literature? for answer, recall to what extent shakespeare's dramas are "talked over" in class, both in high schools and colleges. but as a type--somewhat extreme, perhaps--take browning's my last duchess that's my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. i call that piece a wonder, now: fra pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. will't please you sit and look at her? i said "fra pandolf" by design, for never read stranger like you that pictured countenance, the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you, but i) and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, how such a glance came there; so, not the first are you to turn and ask thus. sir, 't was not her husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the duchess' cheek; perhaps fra pandolf chanced to say, "her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much," or "paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy. she had a heart--how shall i say--too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. sir, 't was all one! my favor at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the west, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. she thanked men,--good! but thanked somehow--i know not how--as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling? even had you skill in speech--(which i have not)--to make your will quite clear to such an one, and say, "just this or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, or there exceed the mark"--and if she let herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, --e'en then would be some stooping; and i choose never to stoop. oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene'er i passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? this grew; i gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. there she stands as if alive. will't please you rise? we'll meet the company below, then. i repeat, the count your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretense of mine for dowry will be disallowed; though his fair daughter's self, as i avowed at starting, is my object. nay, we'll go together down, sir. notice neptune, though, taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, which claus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me! how much the word last in the title of this poem suggests! note how many, and how different, are the topics in the last dozen lines. yet there is no paragraphing throughout. the page should show things as they exist in the duke's mind, and he runs from one thought to another as if they were all on the same plane, and closely related. was there ever a more vain, heartless, haughty, selfish, bartering gentleman-wretch? note how single short sentences even surprise one by the extent to which they reveal character. whole volumes are included between sentences. one can scarcely read the poem through rapidly; for it seems necessary to pause here and there to reflect upon and interject statements. there is no doubt about the need of extensive supplementing in the case of adult literature. is that true, however, of literature for children? is not this, on account of the immaturity of children, necessarily so written as to make such supplementing unnecessary? for a test let us examine longfellow's the children's hour, which is so popular with seven- and eight-year-old boys and girls. the children's hour between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower, comes a pause in the day's occupations, that is known as the children's hour. i hear in the chamber above me the patter of little feet, the sound of a door that is opened, and voices soft and sweet. from my study i see in the lamplight, descending the broad hall stair, grave alice, and laughing allegra, and edith with golden hair. a whisper, and then a silence: yet i know by their merry eyes, they are plotting and planning together to take me by surprise. a sudden rush from the stairway, a sudden raid from the hall! by three doors left unguarded they enter my castle wall! they climb up into my turret o'er the arms and back of my chair; if i try to escape, they surround me; they seem to be everywhere. they almost devour me with kisses their arms about me entwine, till i think of the bishop of bingen in his mouse-tower on the rhine! do you think, o blue-eyed banditti, because you have scaled the wall, such an old moustache as i am is not a match for you all! i have you fast in my fortress, and will not let you depart, but put you down into the dungeon, in the round tower of my heart. and there will i keep you forever, yes, for ever and a day, till the walls shall crumble to ruin, and molder in dust away! . how would we plan to dramatize this poem? in answering this question, we must consider how many persons are needed, what arrangement of rooms and doors, etc., will be fitting; are the last three stanzas to be spoken? etc. . it seems that here is a family in which an hour is set aside for play. what kind of home must that be? . was this the custom each day? or did it happen only once? . does the father seem to enjoy it? or was it rather an unpleasant time for him? . is there any proof that these were especially attractive children? ("voices soft and sweet.") . which is the best part of the last three stanzas, in which he tells how much he loves them? (meaning of "for ever and a day.") . do you know any other families that have a time set apart each day for playing together? why are there not more? . does such an arrangement depend on the parents wholly? or could the children help much to bring it about? how? . have you heard the story about the bishop of bingen in his mouse- tower on the rhine river? . meaning of strange words may be explained in various ways, perhaps some of them scarcely explained at all. these are some of the questions that could well be considered in this poem. it is true that this selection, like most adult literature, is capable of being enjoyed without much addition. but it is not mere enjoyment that is wanted. we are discussing what study is necessary in order to get the full profit. in the case of hawthorne's _wonder-book_ and _tanglewood tales_, numerous questions and suggestions need likewise to be interjected. one of the best books for five- to eight- year-old children on the life of christ bears the title _jesus the carpenter of nazareth_. it is an illustrated volume of five hundred pages, which makes it clear that the original bible text has been greatly supplemented. yet it is a pity to read even this book without frequent pausing for additional detail. thus literature, including even that for young children, fails to show on the surface all that the reader is expected to see. much of it states only a very small part of this. a piece of literature resembles a painting in this respect. corot's well-known painting, "dance of the wood nymphs," presents only a few objects, including a landscape with some trees and some dancing women. yet people love to sit and look at it, perhaps to examine its detail and enjoy its author's skill, but also to recall countless memories of the past, of beautiful woods and pastures, of happy parties, of joys, hopes, and resolves, and possibly, too, to renew resolves for the future. the very simple scene is thus a source of inspiration, a stimulus to think or study. a poem accomplishes the same thing. _ . as stated by ruskin_ a warning of the amount of hard work that the student of literature must expect is given by ruskin in the following forcible words: "and be sure, also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at once,--nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any wise. not that he does not say what he means, and in strong words, too; but he cannot say it all, and what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way, and in parables, in order that he may be sure you want it. i cannot quite see the reason of this, nor analyze the cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought. "they do not give it you by way of help, but of reward, and will make themselves sure that you deserve it, before they allow you to reach it. "but it is the same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. there seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know that all the gold they could get was there, and without any trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and coin as much as they needed. but nature does not manage it so. she puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where. you may dig long and find none; you must dig painfully to find any. "and it is just the same with men's best wisdom. when you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 'am i inclined to work as an australian miner would? are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am i in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?' and keeping the figure a little longer... the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. and your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools, and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiseling and patientest fussing before you can gather one grain of the metal."[footnote: _sesame and lilies_] _ . as suggested by an examination of text-books_ when we turn from literature to the text-books used in schools and colleges, we find the need of supplementing greatly increased. writers of literature are at liberty to choose any topic they please, and to treat it as fully as they will. but writers of text-books are free in neither of these respects. their subjects are determined for them; it is the history, for example, of a given period, the grammar of the english language, the geography of the earth. and these must be presented briefly enough to be covered by classes within a prescribed time. for these reasons text-books contain far less detail than literature, and in that sense are much more condensed. they are only the outlines of subjects, as their titles often directly acknowledge. green's _history of england_, for instance, which has been extensively used as a college text, barely touches many topics that are treated at great length elsewhere. it is natural, therefore, that in our more advanced schools the word text in connection with such books is used in much the same sense as in connection with the bible; a text is that which merely introduces topics by giving the bare outline of facts, or very condensed statements; it must be supplemented extensively, if the facts or thoughts are to be appreciated. how about the texts used in the elementary school? those used in the highest two grades need, perhaps, somewhat more supplementing than those in the high school. but in the middle grades this need is still greater. in the more prominent studies calling for text-books, such as history, geography, and english language or grammar, nearly the same topics are treated as in the higher grades, and in substantially the same manner. but since the younger children are not expected to take as long lessons,--and perhaps, too, because they cannot carry as large books,--their texts are made briefer. this is mainly accomplished by leaving out much of the detail that is necessary to make the facts clear and interesting. consequently, supplementing is an especially important factor of study in these grades. in general, the briefer the text, the more "filling in" is needed. as an illustration, take the following extract from the first page of mcmaster's _child's history of the united states_, often used with ten-year-old pupils. four hundred and fifty years ago the people of western europe were getting silks, perfumes, shawls, ivory, spices, and jewels from southeastern asia, then called the indies. but the turks were conquering the countries across which these goods were carried, and it seemed so likely that the trade would be stopped, that the merchants began to ask if somebody could not find a new way to the indies. the king of portugal thought he could, and began sending his sailors in search of a way around africa, which extended southward, nobody knew how far. year after year his ships sailed down the west coast, the last captain going further south than the one before him, till one of them at last reached the southern end of the continent and entered the indian ocean. observe a few of the thoughts "between the lines" that need to be considered:-- . six things are here mentioned as brought from the east indies. it seems odd that some of these should receive mention as among the most important imports. which are they? could any of them have been more important then than now? why? . what were the routes of travel, by land, to the indies? (map.) . where did the turks live; and what reasons had they for preventing this trade? . why could not the first portuguese captain sail directly to the southern end of africa? again, take the topic _desert_ in geography. the texts usually define a desert as a sandy waste, often a plain, that receives too little rain to support much vegetable or animal life. pictures are given showing the character of the plants, and perhaps the appearance of such a region. beyond that little is usually attempted. in the larger books the danger from sand storms and some other things are included. such treatment needs to be supplemented by numerous questions, such as the following:-- . what animals that are common here are seldom found there, or not at all? (horses, cows, etc., also birds, flies, bugs, etc.) . what plants that are common here are not found there? (trees, flowers, weeds, etc.) . is the weather particularly enjoyable there, or not? is it desirable to have sunshine all the time? . what about noises of various kinds? (silence so oppressive to some people that it becomes intolerable.) . what would be some of the pleasures of a walk in the desert? (coloring, change of seasons, trees along streams, appearance of any grass.) . what about the effect of strong winds on the sand? . imagining that some one has just crossed a desert, what dangers do you think he has encountered, and how may he have escaped from them? _the extent to which the supplementing should be carried_ from the preceding discussion it is clear not only that no important topic is ever completely presented, but also that there is scarcely any limit to the extent to which it may be supplemented. men get new thoughts from the same bible texts year after year, and even century after century. how far, then, should the supplementing be carried? the maximum limit cannot be fixed, and there is no need of attempting it. but there is great need of knowing and keeping in mind the minimum limit; for in the pressure to hurry forward there is grave danger that even this limit will not be reached. what is this minimum limit? briefly stated, it is this: there should be enough supplementing to render the thought really nourishing, _quickening_, to the learner. in the case of literature that will involve some supplementing; and in the case of ordinary text-books it will require a good deal more. is this standard met when the child understands and can reproduce in substance the definition of desert? far from it! that definition is as dry and barren as the desert itself; it tends to deaden rather than quicken. the pupil must go far beyond the mere cold understanding and reproduction of a topic. he must see the thing talked about, as though in its presence; he must not only see this vividly, but he must enter into its spirit, or _feel_ it; he must experience or live it. otherwise the desired effect is wanting. this standard furnishes the reason for such detailed questions as are suggested above. the frequency with which stirring events, grand scenery, and great thoughts are talked about in class with fair understanding, but without the least excitement, is a measure of the failure of the so- called better instruction to come up to this standard. no really good instruction, any more than good story books, will leave one cold toward the theme in hand. _reasons why authors fail to express their thought more completely_ it must be confessed that this standard calls for a large amount of supplementing. there are meanings of words and phrases to be studied, references to be looked up, details to be filled in for the sake of vivid pictures, illustrations to be furnished out of one's own experience, inferences or corollaries to be drawn, questions to be raised and answered, and finally the bearings on life to be traced. it might seem that authors could do their work better, and thereby relieve their readers of work. yet these omissions are not to be ascribed to the evil natures of authors, nor to the superabundance of their thought, alone. readers would be dissatisfied if all this work were done for them. any one has observed that small children are disappointed if they are not allowed to perform necessary little tasks that lie within their power. also, they enjoy those toys most that are not too complete, and that, therefore, leave some work for their own imaginations. this quality of childhood is characteristic of youth and of adults. an author would not be forgiven if he stopped in the midst of his discourse to explain a reference. eminent writers, like longfellow, for example, are even blamed for attaching the morals to their productions; and terseness is one of the qualities of literature that is most praised. in other words, older people, like children, love activity. although they at times hate to work, they do not want authors to presuppose that they are lazy or helpless; and they resent too much assistance. since, therefore, the many omissions in the presentation of thought are in accordance with our own desires, we would do well to undertake the necessary supplementing without complaint. the ability of children to supplement thought there are several facts indicating that children have the ability to undertake this kind of studying. _reasons for assuming that children have this kind of ability . their vivid imaginations_ one of the chief powers necessary is a vivid imagination by which concrete situations can be clearly pictured, and children possess such power to an unusual degree. they see so vividly that they become frightened by the products of their own imaginations. their dolls are so truly personified that mishaps to them easily cause tears, and their mistreatment by strangers is resented as though personal. adults hardly equal them in this imaginative quality. _ . their ability to imitate and think, as shown in conversation_ when children are left alone together they do not lack things to do and say. their minds are active enough to entertain one another as well as adults do, and not seldom better. in fact, if they remain natural, they are often more interesting to adults than other adults are. they reach even profound thoughts with peculiar directness. when i was attempting, one day, to throw a toy boomerang for some children, one of the little girls, observing my want of success, remarked, "i saw a picture of a man throwing one of these things. he stood at the door of his house, and the boomerang went clear around the house. but i suppose that people sometimes make pictures of things that they can't do; don't they?" _ . the success of development instruction_ the method of teaching called _development instruction_ is based on the desire and ability of children to contribute ideas. that instruction could not succeed as it has succeeded, if children did not readily conceive thoughts of their own. not only do they answer questions that teachers put in such teaching, but they also propose many of the questions that should be considered. that method flourishes even in the kindergarten. in the kindergarten circle children often interrupt the leader with germane remarks; and sometimes it is difficult even to suppress such self-expression. one reason the kindergartner tells her stories, rather than reads them, is that she may have her eyes on the children and thus take advantage of their desire to make contributions of thought. the same tendency is shown in the home, when children want to "talk over" what their parents or other persons read to them. they fail to respond in this way only when they are afraid, or when they have attended school long enough to have this tendency partly suppressed. _ . the character of children's literature_ finally, the fact that children's literature, like that for adults, presupposes much supplementing, is strong reason for presupposing that ability on their part. any moral lessons that belong to fairy tales must be reached by the children's own thought; the same usually applies to fables also. hawthorne understood the child mind as few persons have. yet it is astonishing how much ability to supplement seems to have been expected by him. it would be surprising if such experts were mistaken in their estimate of children. practical suggestions for teaching children to supplement thought _ . importance of using text-books_ teachers can make use of text-books at least enough to give much practice in supplementing text. text-books are so uncommon in some schools that one might conclude that they had gone out of fashion among good teachers. yet there is certainly nothing in modern educational theory that advises the neglect of books. some teachers may have imagined that development instruction, to which reference has just been made, leans that way. but development instruction is of importance rather in the first presentation of some topics. after a topic has been thus developed, it can well be reviewed and further studied in connection with books. many teachers are neglecting to use texts both to their own detriment and to the serious disadvantage of their pupils. _ . kind of text to be preferred_ teachers who have liberty in choosing their text-books should select those that contain abundant detail. that means a thick book, to be sure; and many teachers are afraid of such books on the ground that they mean long lessons. a thick book may be a poor text; but a thin one is almost bound to be. the reason is that books are usually made thin at the expense of detail; and detail is necessary in order to establish the relations between facts, by which the story form can be secured and a subject be made interesting. without plenty of detail the facts have to be run together, or listed, merely as so many things that are true; they then form only a skeleton, with all the repulsiveness of a skeleton. such a barren text is barren of suggestions to children for supplementing, because the ideas are too far apart to indicate what ought to fit in between. the understanding ought to be more common that long lessons are by no means synonymous with hard lessons. the hardest lessons to master are those brief, colorless presentations that fail to stimulate one to see vividly and to think. many a child who carries a geography text about with him learns most of his geography from his geographical readers, simply because the writer does not squeeze all the juice out of what he has to say in order to save space. a child can often master five pages in such a book more easily than he can one from the ordinary geography, and he will remember it longer. _ . character of the questions to be put_ whatever the text chosen, the recitation should be so conducted that the emphasis will fall on reflection rather than on mere reproduction. to this end one should avoid putting mainly memory questions, such as, who was it--? when was it--? why was it--? what is said about--? even the usual request, "close the books," at the beginning of the recitation can often be omitted to advantage. why should not the text- book in history and geography lie open in class, just as that in literature, if _thinking_ is the principal object? questions that require supplementing can be proposed by both teacher and pupils. now and then some topic can be assigned for review, with the understanding that the class, instead of reproducing the facts, shall occupy the time in "talking them over." the teacher can then listen, or act as critic. it is a harsh commentary on the quality of instruction if a lesson on italy, or on a presidential administration, or on a story, suggests no interesting conversation to a class. occasionally, as one feature of a lesson, a class might propose new points of view for the review of some subject. for example, if the western states have been studied in geography, some of the various ways in which they are of interest to man might be indicated by questions, thus: what about the indians in that region? what pleasure might a sportsman expect there? what sections would be of most interest to the sight-seer? how is the united states government reclaiming the arid lands, and in what sections? what classes of invalids resort to the west, and to what parts? how do the fruits raised there compare with those further east in quality and appearance? how is farming differently conducted there? in what respects, if any, is the west more promising than the east to a young man starting in life? these are such questions about the west as large classes of individuals must put to themselves in practical life; they are, then, fair questions for the pupil in school to put to himself and to answer. by thus considering the various phases of human interest in a subject, children can get many suggestions for supplementing the text. _ . different types of reproduction_ the habit of reproducing thought in different ways will also throw different lights on the subject-matter, and thus offer many supplementary ideas. for example, dramatizing is valuable in this way. the description, in the first person, of one's experiences in crossing the desert is an illustration. i once visited a sunday-school class that was studying the life of john paton, the noted missionary to the new hebrides islands. the text stated that one of the cannibal chiefs had been converted, and had asked permission to preach on sunday to the other savages. this permission was granted; but the text did not reproduce the sermon. thereupon several members of the class undertook, as a part of the next sunday's lesson, to deliver such a sermon as they thought the savage might have given. two of the boys brought hatchets on that sunday to represent tomahawks, which they used as aids in making gestures, and their five-minute speeches showed a careful study of the whole situation. likewise the experiences of columbus might be dramatized, as, when asking for help from the king, or when reasoning with the wise men of spain, or when conversing with his sailors on his first voyage to america.[footnote: see the story of columbus in stevenson's _children's classics in dramatic form_, a reader for the fourth grade.] additional suggestions will often be obtained by inquiring, "what part of this lesson, if any, would you like to represent by drawings? or by paintings? or by constructive work? also, how would you do it?" _ . the danger of the three r's and spelling to habits of reflection_ much of what has been said about supplementing ideas finds only slight application to beginning reading, writing, spelling, and number work. the reason is that these subjects, aiming so largely at mastery of symbols, call for memory and skill rather than reflection. for this very reason these subjects are in many ways dangerous to proper habits of study, and the teacher needs to be on her guard against their bad influence. they are so prominent during the first few years of school that children may form their idea of study from them alone, which they may retain and carry over to other branches. to avoid this danger, other subjects, such as literature and nature study, deserve prominent places in the curriculum from the beginning, and special care should be exercised to treat them in such a way that this easy kind of reflection is strongly encouraged. chapter v the organization of ideas, as a third factor in study _a. the different values of facts, and their grouping into "points"_ _extent to which teachers treat facts as equal in value_ in several branches of knowledge in the primary school it is customary for teachers to attach practically the same importance to different facts. this is the case, for instance, in spelling, where a mistake counts the same, no matter what word be misspelled. it is largely the case in writing. in beginning reading one word is treated as equal in value to any other, since in any review list every one is required. in beginning arithmetic this equality of values is emphasized by insistence upon the complete mastery of every one of the combinations in the four fundamental operations. throughout arithmetic, moreover, failure to solve any problem is the same as the failure to solve any other, judged in the light of the marking systems in use. the same tendency is less marked, but still evident, in many other subjects, some of them more advanced. in geography, teachers seldom recognize any inequality of value in the map questions, even though a question on the general directions of the principal mountain systems in north america be followed by a request to locate iceland. the facts, too, are very often strung along in the text in such a manner that it is next to impossible to distinguish values. here is an example from a well-known text: "worcester is a great railroad center, and is noted for the manufacture of engines and machinery. at cambridge is located harvard university, the oldest and one of the largest in the country. pall river, lowell, and new bedford are the great centers of cotton manufacture; lawrence, of both cotton and wool; lynn, brockton, and haverhill make millions of boots and shoes; and at springfield is a united states arsenal, where firearms are made. holyoke has large paper mills. gloucester is a great fishing port. salem has large tanneries." how does this differ from a spelling list, so far as equality of values is concerned? in nature study all have witnessed the typical lesson where some object, such as a flowering twig, for example, is placed in the hands of every pupil and each one is requested to tell something that he sees. anything that is offered is gratefully accepted. while this particular kind of study is fortunately disappearing, the common tendency to regard all facts alike is still clearly shown in the case of the topic, cat, discussed on page . in literature, failures are very often condemned alike, whether they pertain to the meanings of words, of sentences, of references, or of whole chapters. until very recently at least, even in universities, it has been common to assign lessons in history textbooks by pages, and to require that they be recited in the order of the text. the teacher, or professor even, in such cases has shown admirable ability to place the burden of the work upon the students by assigning to himself the single onerous task of announcing who shall "begin" and who shall "go on." what recognition is there of varying values of facts in such teaching? _the effect of such teaching on method of study_ not all of such instruction is avoidable or even undesirable; but it is so common that it has a very important effect on method of study. so long as facts are treated as approximately equal in worth, the learner is bound to picture the field of knowledge as a comparatively level plain composed of a vast aggregation of independent bits. in spelling, writing, and beginning reading it is so many hundreds or thousands of words; in beginning arithmetic it is the various combinations in the four fundamental operations; in geography it is a long list of statements; in history it is an endless lot of facts as they happen to come on the page; in literature it is sentence after sentence. one can get possession of this field, not by taking the strategic positions,--for under the assumption of equality there are none,--but rather by advancing over it slowly, mastering one bit at a time. thus the words in beginning reading, writing, and spelling are learned and reproduced in all orders, proving them to be independent little entities. in geography and history, when the facts are not wormed out of the pupil by questions, he sees the page before him by his mind's eye,--a fact frequently revealed by the movement of his eyes while reciting,--and attempts to recall each paragraph or statement in its order. in literature he masters his difficulties sentence by sentence, a method most clearly shown in the case of our greatest classic, the bible, which is almost universally studied and quoted by verses. thus the _unit of progress_ in study is made the single fact; the whole of any subject becomes the sum of its details; and a subject has been supposedly mastered when all these bits have been learned. this might well be called the method of study by driblets. it is probably safe to say that a majority of the young people in the united states, including college students, study largely in this way. while this method of study is bad in numerous ways, there are three of its faults in particular which need to be considered here. _respects in which this method of study is wrong . facts, as a rule, vary greatly in value_ in the first place, facts vary indefinitely in value. in parts of a few subjects they do have practically the same worth, which is, no doubt, a source of much misconception about proper methods of study. in spelling, for instance, _which_ is probably as important a word as _when_, and _sea_ as important as _flood_. in a list of three hundred carefully selected words for spelling for third-year pupils, any one word might properly be regarded as equal to any other in worth. this may be said also in regard to a list for writing. much the same is true in regard to a possible list of four hundred words for reading in the first year of school. in arithmetic one would scarcely assert that x was more or less important than x , or / , or - , or + . in other words, the various combinations in the four fundamental operations are, again, all of them essential to every person's knowledge, and therefore stand on the same plane of worth. to some extent, therefore, the three r's and spelling are exceptions to an important general rule. yet even in spelling and beginning reading not all words by any means have the same value. children in the third year of school who are reading whittier's _barefoot boy_ ought to be able to recognize and spell the word _robin;_ perhaps, also, _woodchuck_ and _tortoise;_ but _eschewing_ is not a part of their vocabulary and will not soon be, and probably the less said about that word by the teacher the better. the moment we turn to other subjects, facts are found to vary almost infinitely in value, just as metals do. judged by the space they occupy, they may appear to be equally important; but they are not to be judged in this way, any more than men are. according to their nature, thoughts or statements are large and small, or broad and narrow, or far-reaching and insignificant. a general of an army may be of more consequence to the welfare of a nation than a thousand common soldiers; so one idea like that of evolution may be worth a full ten thousand like the fact that "our neighbor's cat kittened yesterday." _ . they are dependent upon one another for their worth_ in the second place, facts can by no means be regarded as independent. as before, to be sure, the three r's and spelling afford some exception to this rule. in spelling, writing, and beginning reading it is important that any one of a large number of words be recognized or reproduced at any time, without reference to any others. all of these, together with the combinations in the fundamental operations in arithmetic, are often called for singly, and they must, therefore, be isolated from any possible series into which they might fall, and mastered separately. aside from these subjects, facts are generally dependent upon their relations to one another for their value. taken alone, they are ineffective fragments of knowledge, just as a common soldier or an officer in an army is ineffective in battle without definite relations to a multitude of other men. if the first sentences on twenty successive pages in a book were brought together, they would tell no story. they would be mere scattered fractions of thoughts, lacking that relation to one another that would give them significance and make them a unit. twenty closely related sentences might, however, express a very valuable thought. james anthony froude, impressed with this truth and at the same time recalling the prevalent tendency to ignore it, declares: "detached facts on miscellaneous subjects, as they are taught at a modern school, are like separate letters of endless alphabets. you may load the mechanical memory with them, till it becomes a marvel of retentiveness. your young prodigy may amaze examiners and delight inspectors. his achievements may be emblazoned in blue books, and furnish matter for flattering reports on the excellence of our educational system. and all this while you have been feeding him with chips of granite. but arrange your letters into words, and each word becomes a thought, a symbol waking in the mind an image of a real thing. group your words into sentences, and thought is married to thought, and the chips of granite become soft bread, wholesome, nutritious, and invigorating." [footnote: james anthony froude, _handwork before headwork._] a very simple illustration is found in the study of the dates for the entrance of our states into the union. taken one at a time, the list is dead. but interest is awakened the moment one discovers that for a long period each northern state was matched by one in the south, so that they entered in pairs. _ . the sum of the details does not equal the whole._ finally, the whole of a subject is not merely the sum of its little facts. you may study each day's history lesson faithfully, and may retain everything in memory till the book is "finished," and still not know the main things in the book. you may understand and memorize each verse of a chapter in the bible until you can almost reproduce the chapter in your sleep, and still fail to know what the chapter is about. probably some readers of this text who have repeated the lord's prayer from infancy, would still need to do some studying before they could tell the two or three leading thoughts in that prayer. an especially good illustration of this fact in my own experience as a teacher has been furnished in connection with the following paragraph, taken from dr. john dewey's _ethical principles underlying education._ "information is genuine or educative only in so far as it effects definite images and conceptions of material placed in social life. discipline is genuine and educative only as it represents a reaction of the information into the individual's own powers, so that he can bring them under control for social ends. culture, if it is to be genuine and educative, and not an external polish or factitious varnish, represents the vital union of information and discipline. it designates the socialization of the individual in his whole outlook upon life and mode of dealing with it." i have had a large number of graduate students who found it very difficult to state the point of this paragraph, although every sentence is reasonably clear and they are in close sequence. thus the larger thoughts, instead of being the sum of the details, are an outgrowth from them, an interpretation of them; they are separate and new ideas conceived through insight into the relations that the individual statements bear to one another. _the proper unit of progress in study_ from the foregoing we see that some facts are very large, while others are of little importance, and that any one statement, taken separately, lacks significance. the field of thought, therefore, instead of being pictured as a plain, is to be conceived as a very irregular surface, with elevations of various heights scattered over it. and just as hills and mountains rest upon and are approached by the lower land about them, so the larger thoughts are supported and approached by the details that relate to them. a general of an army, desiring to get possession of a disputed region, does not plan to take and hold the lower land without the higher points, nor the higher points without the lower land. on the contrary, each vantage point with its approaches constitutes, in his mind, one division of the field, one strategic section, which is to be seized and held. and these divisions or units all taken together constitute the region. so any portion of knowledge that is to be acquired should be divided into suitable units of attack; one large thought together with its supporting details should constitute one section, another large thought together with its associated details a second, etc.; all of these together composing the whole field. in other words, the student, instead of making progress in knowledge fact by fact, should advance by _groups of facts_. his smallest unit of progress should be a considerable number of ideas so related to one another that they make a whole; those that are alike in their support of some valuable thought making up a bundle, and the farther-reaching, controlling idea itself constituting the band that ties these bits together and preserves their unity. such a unit or, "point," as it is most often called, is the basal element in thinking, just as the family is the basal element in society. _the size of such units of advance._ such units of advance may vary indefinitely in size; but the danger is that they will be too small. a minister who reaches his thirteenthly is not likely to be a means of converting many sinners. a debater who makes fifteen points will hardly find his judges enthusiastic in his favor, no matter how weak his opponents may be. a chapter that contains twenty or thirty paragraphs should not be remembered as having an equal number of points. what is wanted is that the student shall _feel the force_ of the ideas presented, and a great lot of little points strung together cannot produce a forceful impression. any thought that is worth much must be supported by numerous facts and will require considerable time or space for presentation. a minister can hardly establish a half dozen valuable ideas in one sermon; he does well if he presents two or three with force; and he is most likely to make a lasting impression if he confines himself to one. drummond's _the greatest thing in the world_ is an example of the possibilities in this direction. accordingly the student, in reading a chapter or listening to a lecture, should find the relationships among the smaller portions of the thought that will unify the subject-matter under a very few heads. if several pages or a whole lecture can be reduced to a single point, it should be done. he should always remember that to the extent that the supporting details are numerous they will have a cumulative effect, thereby rendering the central thought strong enough to have a permanent influence. _the meaning of organization of knowledge, and its value._ such grouping of ideas as has thus far been considered, although of the greatest importance, is only the beginning of the organization of knowledge. for thus far only the minimum unit of advance has been under discussion. asone proceeds in the study of a subject these smaller units collect in large numbers, and they must themselves be subordinated to still broader central thoughts, according to their nature. this grouping of details, according to their relationships, into points, and of such points under still higher heads, and so on until a whole subject and even the whole field of knowledge is carefully ordered according to the relationships of its parts, is what is meant by organization of knowledge. sometimes an entire book is thus organized under a single idea, fiske's _critical period of american history_ being an excellent example. in this volume the conditions at the close of the revolutionary war are vividly described. it is shown that great debts remained unpaid, that different systems of money caused confusion, and that civil war was seriously threatened in various quarters. these and other dangers convinced sober men that a firm central government was indispensable. but then, it was no easy matter to bring such a government into existence; and it is shown how numerous heroic attempts in this direction barely escaped failure before the constitution was finally adopted. on the whole, it is safe to say that each paragraph or small number of paragraphs, while constituting a unit, is at the same time a necessary part of the chapter to which it belongs; likewise, each chapter, while constituting a unit, is an integral part of the book as a whole; and all these parts are so interrelated and complete that the whole book constitutes a unit. observe the advantage of such organization. the period of our history immediately following the revolution used to be one of the least interesting of topics. under the title "the period following the treaty of paris," or "the period from the close of the revolutionary war to the adoption of the constitution," the textbooks attempted nothing more than an enumeration or history of the chief difficulties and struggles of our youthful nation. in some cases, if i remember correctly, this was designated "the period of confusion," and its description left the reader in a thoroughly confused state of mind. fiske's book was a revelation. what had seemed very complex and confused became here extremely simple; what had been especially dull became here perhaps the most exciting topic in all our history. and the secret of the advance is found to a large extent in the organization. thus organization is a means of effectiveness in the presentation of knowledge, as in the use of a library or the conduct of a business. _the basis for the organization of knowledge in general._ all the facts in mr. fiske's book are organized about the stirring question expressed in his title, _i. e._, how our ship of state barely escaped being wrecked. because this idea is of intense interest to us, and the entire book bears upon it continually, the story is read with bated breath. drummond's _greatest thing in the world_ is another excellent example on a smaller scale of ideas centered about a vital human question. thus specific problems of various degrees of breadth, _that are intimately related to man_, can well be taken as the basis for the organization of knowledge in general. classical literature is organized on this basis, which is called the pedagogical or _psychological_ basis, and it seems desirable that other fields should also be. yet there are other kinds of organization in which the relation to man is not so plainly, or not at all, taken as the controlling idea. for example, biology is often organized on the basis of the growing complexity of the organism, the student beginning with the simple, microscopic cell, and advancing to the more and more complex forms. formerly, after the linnaean system, plants were classified according to their similarity of structure. now both plants and animals are often classified on the basis of their manner of adaptation to their environment. thus within the field of science there is what is called the _scientific_ basis of organization. there is also the _logical_ basis of organization of thought, according to which some most fundamental idea is taken as the beginning of a system, or the premise, and other ideas are evolved from this first principle. rousseau attempted to develop his educational doctrine in this way, starting with the assertion that everything was good as it came from the creator, but that everything degenerated in the hands of man. john calvin did the same in his system of theology; and he reasoned so succinctly from his few premises that any one granting these was almost compelled to accept his entire doctrine. attention is called to these facts here in order to suggest that, while the scientific and the logical bases of organization are in common use, neither of them is adequate as the main basis of organization for a young student who is studying a subject for the first time. the reason is that each of them secures a careful ordering of facts only with reference to the relations that those facts bear to one another, and not with reference to the relation that they bear to man; and in thus ignoring man they show grave faults. they are indifferent to interest on the part of the learner; they offer no standard for judging the relative worths of facts to man; and instead of exerting an influence in the direction of applying knowledge, they exert some influence in the opposite direction by their indifference to man's view-point. it must be admitted that they are of great assistance in securing thoroughness of comprehension by their revelation of the relations existing among facts, and also that they classify facts in a convenient way for finding them later; but they are of greatest use to the advanced student, who is already supplied with motive and with standards for judging worth, and who has proper habits of study already formed; they can well follow but they should not supplant the psychological basis. _the student's double task in the organization of ideas._ an author's organization of subject-matter is frequently poor. but whether it be poor or good, some hard work on the part of the student is necessary before the proper grouping of ideas can take place in his own mind. the danger is that there will be practically no arrangement of his thoughts, as is well illustrated in the following letter from an eight-year-old boy. dear uncle charlie: will you please buy some of my package of my bluine, if you will please buy one package it will help me a lot. one saturday we played ball against the east side and beat twelve to . i will get a baseball suit if i can sell packages of bluine. we had quite a blizzard here to-day. for one package it costs ten cents. when we played ball against the east side we only had boys and they had twelve. we have a base ball team, and i am captain, so you see i need a suit. gretchen and mother are playing backgammon with one dice. i catch sometimes when our real catcher is not there. when he is there i play first base. your loving nephew, james. there is one prominent idea in this letter, touching the sale of bluine, with reasons; and parts of two others, concerning the weather and the occupation of mother and sister. the first is the most fully treated; but, as might be expected from an eight-year-old child, no one idea is supported by sufficient detail to round it out and make it strong. in avoiding such defects two things are necessary: first, the student must decide what points he desires to make. they should be so definitely conceived that they can be easily distinguished from one another and can even be _counted_. then, in the second place, all the details that bear upon a central idea should be collected and presented together in sequence under the point concerned. by this massing of all supporting statements under their proper heads, overlapping or duplicating is avoided, and clearness is gained. also, force is secured by the cumulative effect of intimately related facts, just as it is secured by the concerted attack by the divisions of an army. even the better students often stop with finding the main thoughts alone. and the temptation to do no more is strong, since teachers seldom require a forceful presentation of ideas in recitation; they are thankful to get a halting statement of the principal facts. but the student should remember that he is studying for his own good, not merely to keep teachers contented; and he should not deceive himself by his own fluency of speech. he should form the habit of often asking himself, "what is my point?" also, "what facts have i offered for its support, and have i massed them all as i should?" he must thus form the habit of arranging his ideas into points if he wishes to be pointed. _precautions against inaccuracy in the grouping of facts into points._ the dangers of inaccuracy in this kind of study are numerous. first the individual statements must be carefully interpreted. a certain very intelligent ten-year-old girl studying arithmetic read the problem, "what is the interest on $ at six per cent for one year?" then, probably under the influence of some preceding problem, she found four per cent of the principal, and added the amount to the principal for her answer, thus showing two mistakes in reading. perhaps half of the mistakes that children make in the solution of problems is due to such careless reading. a certain fifth-year class in history read a very short paragraph about the three ships that were secured for columbus's first voyage, the paragraph ending with the statement, "on board the three [ships] were exactly ninety men." when they were asked later how many men accompanied columbus the common answer was, "two hundred and seventy, since there were ninety men on each ship." these mistakes are typical of those that are common, even among adults, as in the reading of examination questions, for instance. i have more than once asked graduate students in a university to state the _one principal_ thought obtained from the extended study of an article on education, and have received a paper with a threefold answer, (_a_), (_b_), (_c_). such responses are due to extreme carelessness in reading the questions asked, as well as to a desire to be obliging and allow an instructor some freedom of choice. thus the meaning of the individual statements that constitute the material out of which larger truths are derived, must be carefully watched if the final interpretation of an author's thought is to be accurate. the tendency toward error is greater still when it comes to finding the central thought for a portion of text. this was once amusingly illustrated by a class composed only of the principals and high-school teachers in a county institute, some seventy-five persons in all. the text under discussion was the first chapter of professor james's well- known book, _talks to teachers_. the title of the chapter is "psychology and the teaching art"; and professor james, fearing that teachers might be expecting too much from his field, sets to work to discourage the idea that psychology can be a panacea for all of a teacher's ills. the larger portion of the twelve pages is devoted to this object, although the explicit statement is made, on the third page, that "psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help." but so little space is given to this declaration that, in spite of its definiteness and positive character, the class as a whole reached the conclusion that he was advising teachers not to study psychology at all. in other words, they had failed to balance up one part of the chapter against the other; and their failure left them in the ridiculous position of assuming that an author of a book for teachers was dissuading teachers from reading his book. a third and perhaps the most common source of error is found in the particular wording given to the central thought. in order to be perfectly definite and accurate any thought should be expressed in the form of a full statement. it ordinarily takes at least a whole sentence to express a whole thought. but it is very common for students even, who have formed the habit of thinking by points, to allow brief headings, consisting of single words or short phrases, to represent entire thoughts. although such headings, on account of their brevity, may be useful, they are merely names for the thought, not statements of the thought itself; and it means the loosest kind of thinking to stop with them. a mere title, as a lecture "about russia," for instance, designates only the outside limits to which a person confines himself--provided he sticks to his theme. it often tells no more about the substance of the thought within those limits than a man's name tells about his character. it is usually easy to tell "what a page is about"; but it usually requires keen thinking to word its principal idea sharply in a full sentence. many students are inaccurate in the interpretation of authors and in their own thinking, not so much because they lack mental ability as because they lack the energy to continue their thinking to this point of wording the central idea accurately in a full sentence. the ability of children to group facts into points. the grouping of facts into points requires ability to perceive that some statements are more valuable than others, without reference to the space that they happen to occupy on the printed page; it presupposes, also, the power to rearrange a stranger's ideas. it is, therefore, an aggressive kind of work, in which even adults often fail to distinguish themselves. can children be expected to assume such responsibility? _proofs of such ability. . as shown by children ten years old and younger._ proof that any ten-year-old child has already assumed it in a simple way for some years is contained in the following facts:-- . long before the school age is reached a child has had much practice in picking out the logical subjects of sentences, inasmuch as he has learned to comprehend statements made to him. distinguishing the subject of a sentence is the same kind of work as distinguishing the subject of a paragraph or chapter, only it is simpler. . any six-year-old child has, likewise, had much practice in detecting the subject of short conversations, especially of those of interest to him. if he happens to overhear a conversation between his parent and teacher touching a possible punishment for himself, he can be trusted to sum it up and get the gist of it all, even though some of the words do not reach him. that is exactly the kind of thinking required in getting the point of a lecture. . in relating fairy tales and other stories, during the first years at school, children easily fall into the habit of relating a part, or a point, at a time. and, if the memory or the courage fails, the teacher gives help by asking, "what will you tell about first? and then? and then?" thus setting them right, and keeping them so, by having them divide the story into its principal sections. . in composition, in the lower and middle grades, the paragraphing of thought, first as presented on the printed page, then as called for in oral recitation and in conversation, and finally in the child's written form, is a prominent subject of instruction. no one maintains that such work is unnatural, or too difficult, for such young children. . development instruction, which has already been mentioned as peculiarly successful with young children, would be impossible if children were unable to appreciate the character of a principal thought, as the topic or point for discussion, and of other thoughts as subordinate to it. _ . as shown in the use of different texts and of reference books._ the use of several texts in one subject, as history, by one child, and the use of reference books,--both of which are common above the fifth year of school,--presuppose the ability to study by topics, and to bring together from various sources the facts that support a principal truth. _ . as shown by the rapid improvement they can make in such study._ finally, the progress that children can make, when direct instruction in this matter is given to them, is good proof of their ability in this direction. for example, in a geography class composed of ten- year-old children, i once assigned for a lesson the following section from the text-book:-- political divisions.--you will remember that spain was the nation that helped columbus make his discovery of america. the spaniards afterward settled in the southern part of the continent, and introduced the spanish language there. that is still the chief language spoken in mexico, in the southern part of north america. mexico became independent of spain many years ago. other nations also sent explorers and made settlements. among these were the english, who settled chiefly along the atlantic coast, and finally came to own the greater part of the continent north of mexico. in time the english, who lived in the central portion of eastern north america, waged war against england, and chose george washington as their leader. on the th of july, , they declared their independence of england, and finally won it completely. this part became known as the united states; but the region to the north, which england was able to keep, and which she still possesses, is called canada. find each of these countries on the map (fig. ). point toward canada and mexico. besides these three large nations, several smaller ones occupy central america, which lies south of mexico. after the children had had time to study it somewhat carefully, i requested them to tell briefly what the section was about. the first three replies were as follows, in the following order, and these were not improved on later, without suggestion: "it tells about discovery." "it tells about the language in mexico." "it tells about what are nations." this was their first attempt at such work, and it met with meager success. the heading in the text seemed to give them no aid whatever, which was sufficient proof of its unfitness for children. yet within one month, with some attention given to this matter every day, i found half of the class of twenty to be reasonably safe in picking out the central thought in a page of their text. from all these facts it seems that children are reasonably capable of receiving instruction in regard to the grouping of facts into points. it is evident, also, that they need such instruction badly, if they are to study properly the lessons that are assigned to them. practical suggestions for teaching children to group related facts into points _ . the teacher's example._ in the first place, the example of the teacher can be of great influence. any good teacher should do more than ask questions and explain difficult topics. she should now and then talk to her children. particularly general exercises she should give expression to other ideas than those immediately involved in instruction. if at such times her ideas are carefully grouped about one or more central thoughts, her pupils are likely to feel the roundness and the consequent clearness and force of her points, and to be ambitious to imitate her style. many an adult, no doubt, can recall both the pleasure he experienced in early youth when listening to some speaker who possessed this merit, and early attempts that he made to imitate such a style. _ . use of written outlines in development instruction._ in development instruction, in the lower and middle grades in particular, brief headings representing the main facts reached might be placed on the blackboard, or written down by each pupil as the facts are established. such writing is of great assistance in keeping the outline in mind. frequently, even in the lower grades, review outlines might be required without such visual help. _ . in connection with the use of text. (a) finding of the principal thought in paragraphs._ a terse statement of the principal thought in each paragraph of some story or other well-organized text is a valuable exercise in determining the relation that the different sentences in a paragraph bear to one another, and the gist of the whole. _(b) finding where a point begins and ends._ pupils might point to the place on the page where the treatment of a certain point begins; also where it ends. thus they would receive exercise in distinguishing not only the principal thought, but also the _turns_ in the thought, and therefore the most suitable stopping places for reflection. _(c) the making of marks, to indicate relative values._ the most valuable statements might well be _marked_ in the text, some system of marks--as, for instance, one, two, or three short vertical lines in the margin--being agreed upon to indicate different degrees of worth. it is very common for adults, particularly very careful students, thus to mark books that they read. unless one does so, it is difficult to find again, or review quickly, the main ideas. yet one of the especially important things to teach young people in the handling of a book is some way of reviewing quickly the most valuable parts. many persons who would gladly review the few most interesting portions of a book have no way of doing so except by reading the volume through again. that takes so much time that they omit the review altogether. in case the books belong to the school or library, all such marks may be objectionable. certainly the aimless marking of any book is to be condemned. but thoughtful marking, with the view of showing relative values, is likely to increase the amount of reflection on the part of the one who makes the marks. it is likely, also, to increase the amount of reflection on the part of the later reader, for he, seeing the marks, is inclined to weigh the thought long enough to decide whether he agrees or disagrees with the previous reader. if, however, the objections to such markings are insuperable, children can at least be encouraged to own some of the books that they use. they ought to be developing a pride in a library of their own, anyway. "if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying," says ruskin. "no book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read and reread, and loved and loved again, and _marked_, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store." [footnote: ruskin's _sesame and lilies._] it might be added, also, that all the writing thus suggested could be kept on note paper or in note books, if forbidden to appear in printed books. it should be borne in mind, however, that one important object in using books in school is to teach their proper use outside of school. to this end, books should be used in school in substantially the same way in which they are expected to be used outside. there is often a lack of correspondence between these two methods in various ways. wherever the markings indicating relative values happen to be placed, they can well be compared in class and the disagreements discussed. this would throw a class into the heart of the subject-matter of a text on their own initiative. if it resulted in spending a whole recitation in a discussion of relative values, as it frequently would, it should be remembered that that is the most valuable kind of study. _(d) the selection of marginal headings._ if the books used contain no marginal headings, the pupils might propose some. and if marginal headings are found in some, proposals for their improvement would be in place, since such headings are rarely good. for example, the heading "political divisions," quoted above, would be much more definite and significant if changed to "the countries in north america," and children could soon learn to make such improvements. headings of chapters, likewise, often need rewording in a simpler, more definite and restrictive way. _(e) the collecting of supports for leading thoughts._ choosing some one of the principal thoughts, the children should have practice in finding the data that support it, and in presenting such data in good sequence and in an otherwise forceful manner. _(f) stating the leading thoughts in close sequence._ as one way of summarizing review lessons the children might enumerate the leading thoughts in close sequence, giving a careful wording for each in a full statement. _ . as a preparation for the taking of notes._ pupils in the higher grades having to consult reference books frequently, and to take notes also from discussions and lectures, should receive careful instruction in note-taking. as preparation for such work, the teacher might read to the class, while the latter listen with the object of telling how many and what are the main points. sometimes they might call "halt" as they realize that a turn is being made and another point is beginning. they should be reminded that the relationships of ideas, which are indicated by punctuation and paragraphing on the printed page, are revealed by a reader's or speaker's manner, as when he makes short pauses between sentences, or emphasizes an idea by voice or gesture, or allows his voice to fall at the end of some minor thought, or turns around, stops to get a drink, walks across the floor, or waits for applause at the close of one of his principal flights. teacher and pupils might all take notes together, sometimes on principal points, sometimes only on the supporting data for one such point. then the results might be compared, and the small amount of writing necessary might be discussed. _b. the neglect of relatively unimportant facts or statements_ we have seen that the organization of ideas requires the recognition of some thoughts as central, and the grouping of various details about them. while it places peculiar emphasis on these controlling facts, it also recognizes details as an essential part of knowledge. _neglect as well as emphasis involved in relative values._ a question now arises about the relative values among these details. while they are an essential part of knowledge, do they themselves vary indefinitely in worth? and while many deserve much attention, are there many others that may be slighted and even ignored? the first part of this chapter has really dealt with the emphasis that is necessary for some ideas. but emphasis at one point suggests neglect at another point, for the two terms are correlative. some persons would even assert that neglect is as important an element in proper study as emphasis, and that the two terms should be in equally good repute. this part of the chapter deals with the neglect that is due in proper study. it is, perhaps, a more difficult topic to treat than the preceding. certainly many teachers are afraid to advise young people to neglect parts of their lessons, lest such suggestion might seem a direct recommendation to be careless. _why neglect is scarcely allowable in some subjects._ we have seen that, to a certain extent, the facts in the three r's and spelling have practically the same worth. all of the combinations of simple numbers must be mastered; likewise all the words in a well- selected list in spelling, etc. since differences in value are wanting here, there is no occasion for slighting any part. any neglect in such cases signifies an oversight or a mistake. _why neglect is necessary in most subjects._ but, as before, these subjects to some extent form an exception to the general rule. in most studies neglect of some parts is positively necessary. it has been already shown that no exact number of facts needs to be brought together in order to make up any particular topic or study. besides those directly expressed in print, there are others immediately suggested; and the number of possible ideas bearing on a given matter is legion. neglect, therefore, becomes not only necessary, but even prominent, as a factor in study. one might ask, "are not all the statements in a valuable book that one happens to be reading worthy of careful consideration?" not necessarily, by any means. the production of thought parallels the production of grain. an acre of ground, that yields thirty bushels or eighteen hundred pounds of wheat, may easily grow two whole tons of straw and chaff. these latter are absolutely necessary to the formation of the wheat kernel; yet the consumer usually has little use for them; he gets past them to the grain with the least possible delay, often throwing these other materials away. likewise, many things that are necessary in the production of thought are of little use to the consumer. for example, there are often introductory remarks that have lost their original significance; there are asides and pleasantries; there are careful transitions from one thought to another, to avoid abruptness; there are usually more or less irrelevant remarks due to the fact that even authors' minds wander now and then; and there are often some things that seemed important to the author which in no possible way can be of value to the reader. for these reasons, some things are to be omitted, if possible, without being read, because they are worthless. many details are unworthy of a second thought. many other statements should be cast aside after having been carefully enough examined to make sure that they will not be further needed. not only should some statements and paragraphs be slighted, but whole chapters as well. similar practice is familiar to all in connection with conversations and discussions; and books are of the same nature as these, having the same faults, though perhaps to a less degree. what the student wants to carry away is valuable thought, with the details that vitally concern it; and the space occupied by such thought and its supporting details, as in the case of the wheat, is small as compared with the space occupied by the chaff that accompanies them. "some books are to be tasted," says bacon, "others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in part; others to be read, but not curiously [attentively]; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention." [footnote: bacon's essays, _of studies._] if he had added that very many books should not be read at all, he would have covered the field. as a rule, therefore, it is a serious error for a student to distribute his time and energy somewhat equally over a lesson or a chapter or a book. there are times when he should advance rapidly and even skip, as well as other times when he should ponder carefully and review much. _how safety and skill in neglect may be developed. . by proceeding from principal thoughts to details._ how can one become safe and skillful in this phase of study? the student must, of course, read or listen to statements largely in the order of the author's presentation; but two opposite courses of procedure are possible, and much depends upon the choice that is made between them. on the one hand, one can proceed sentence by sentence, examining each statement carefully, looking up new words and references, supplementing, tracing the bearings on one's own life, and doing whatever else is necessary to assimilate each thought. the single sentences can be put together so as to reveal the thoughts of paragraphs; and the central ideas of paragraphs and chapters can likewise be brought together, so as to reveal the main thoughts of the work as a whole. thus the general movement may be from the details to the larger features, and the controlling ideas may be the last to be reached. the bible is very commonly studied in this manner, the verses of a chapter and the chapters of a book being taken one by one in the order given and thoroughly mastered, and the outline of the whole being the last thing considered. geography and history are also frequently studied in the same way. on the other hand, while the reader is still obliged to follow the author's order, he may at the start be mainly on the outlook for the general trend of the thought, for the principal issues that are raised, with the principal answers that are offered; and, if the work is at all difficult, he may for the time pass over many obscure little matters, such as new words, strange references, and meaningless statements, in the sole quest for these larger elements. then, having determined these tentatively, he can set to work to examine the details on which they depend, making the investigation as thorough as he wishes. thus the general movement may be from the principal to the minor thoughts, and the details may be carefully considered last of all. in accordance with this plan we hear it recommended that the book of job be read "at a sitting," or, in case one's spirit of devotion lacks that degree of endurance, at two or three sittings. likewise, gray's _elegy_ might be read through without pause, even several times, before any part is studied in detail; so, also, the drama of _william tell_; one act, and perhaps the whole of the drama, of _julius caesar;_ any one of browning's shorter poems; and ordinary lessons or chapters in history and geography. while these two courses may finally bring about the same result, the latter is much the more economical plan, for the following reason: the individual statements vary greatly in value, as we have seen, some requiring only slight attention, while others must be closely scrutinized. what determines their value is their relation to the leading ideas. the latter are the sole standards of worth, the sole guides, in discriminating among them. if, then, the student has not found out what the leading ideas are, what basis of selection has he? how, then, is he to know what are the important details and what are the unimportant? what can he do, then, more than merely to distribute his energies somewhat equally and blindly over the various statements offered, until the principal thoughts come to light? only after that will he be in a position to measure relative values and thus to deal with the details intelligently. the first plan, therefore, involves a great waste of time. for the same reason that it is economical to go sight-seeing with a guide, or at least to examine a guidebook before setting out, it is economical to determine the gist of the thought, the spirit and substance of the whole, before giving careful attention to the minor parts. _ . by keeping the standard of values ever in mind._ the student must not only find the central idea as early as possible, but he must hold it with a firm grip. both of these things require much tenacity of purpose. in following the order of an author's presentation, considerable detail may have to be traversed before the main thought begins to dawn in the student's mind, and temptations to forget about the main issue and to become absorbed in these details are ever present. it is on this account that teachers attending teachers' gatherings frequently fail to reach those topics for discussion that have been advertised; they even fail when printed reports are the avowed subject for conference. after having arrived at their destination with much sacrifice, they seem often to forget exactly what they came for, or to be diverted from it with surprising ease. however, they are not inferior to other adults in this respect. again, after having settled upon the main idea tentatively, one must _hold_ it with determination and _use_ it. children often fail to hold a question in mind long enough to give a relevant answer. i once asked a fifth-year class in history, "who discovered america?" when almost immediately came the response, "vespucci sailed along the coast of south america and named the whole country!" or they hold it in mind a moment, and then confuse it with other things, or let it go entirely. i asked the class, "what is the color of the indians?" and received an answer telling about their color and their clothing. at another time i inquired, "how long has it been since america was discovered?" one boy replied, "two hundred and fifty years," remembering, i suppose, that that number had recently been used in class. but the example in subtraction was solved on the blackboard before the class, and the correct answer, , was obtained. once more i said, "four hundred and thirteen years since what?" all were silent for a moment, having quite forgotten the original question. then came the reply, "since--since--columbus sailed the deep." such carelessness among children sometimes arouses the ire of teachers; but adults are little better. when a body of them meets for the discussion of a certain question, the probability is that, if the first speaker speaks directly to the point, the second will digress somewhat, the third will touch the subject only slightly, and the fourth will talk about a different matter. many a discussion that has started off well leads to much excitement without any one's knowing definitely what the subject of dispute is. it is rarely the case that every page of a paper that is read before teachers bears plainly upon the subject announced. only in parliamentary discussions, where there is always a definite "question before the house," is it customary for participants to remember the topic and stick to it. this happens then only because it is understood that any one may be "called to order" at any time, and for the sake of self-protection each person makes a special effort not to forget. this exceptional caution must become habitual with the student if he is to study effectively. he must look for the principal thought until he finds it; and, having found it, he must _nurse_ it by recalling it every few minutes, while using it as a basis for determination of values. _rapid reading and its method among scholars._ that various rates of reading are desirable, even to the point of skipping over much matter, is indicated by the way in which some eminent men have studied. for instance, joseph cook in his _hints for home reading_ remarks, "it is said that carlyle reads on an average a dozen books a day. of course he examines them chiefly with his fingers, and after long practice is able to find at once the jugular vein and carotid artery of any author." likewise, "john quincy adams was said to have 'a carnivorous instinct for the jugular vein' of an argument." [footnote: page .] "rapid reading," says koopman, [footnote: koopman, _the mastery of books_, p. .] "is the... difficult art of skipping needless words and sentences. to recognize them as needless without reading them, is a feat that would be thought impossible, if scholars everywhere did not daily perform it. with the turning of a few leaves to pluck out the heart of a book's mystery--this is the high art of reading, the crowning proof that the reader has attained the mastery of books." the fact that the first and last parts of both paragraphs and chapters very often reveal their leading thought, is of course a great aid in such rapid reading. _is the spirit of induction here opposed?_ it is pertinent to ask whether this method of study does not oppose the spirit of induction. men like carlyle seem to ignore that spirit when they turn quickly to the central ideas or a book and, after reading these, cast the work aside. it should be remembered, however, that the minds of such men are so well stocked with information that most, and sometimes all, of the author's details may be unnecessary to them; they are already prepared for the generalization. the ordinary student, proceeding more slowly, can also be on the watch at the start for the main issues, without offending against induction. in so doing he is not necessarily attempting to master the abstractions first; he may be merely trying to find out what the main questions are, in order to supply himself with a guide. many an author states his principal problem near the beginning of his treatment, and then it is easy for the reader or listener to view all the details in its light. but when this is not the case, the student must go in quest of it in order to _get the setting_ for all the statements, rather than in order to assimilate it. he must see the whole in some perspective before he can study the parts intelligently. the worth of specific purposes as discussed in pp. - is clearly seen in this connection. _relation of such neglect to thoroughness. . a common conception of thoroughness and its influence on practice._ it is of vital importance further to inquire what relation such neglect bears to thoroughness in study. the answer depends upon the meaning attached to the word _thorough_. we often hear it said that "trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle"; also that "thoroughness has to do with details." again, as a warning against carelessness in little matters, we are told that-- for the want of a nail the shoe was lost. for the want of a shoe the horse was lost. for the want of the horse the rider was lost. for the want of the rider the battle was lost. for the loss of the battle the kingdom was lost. there is certainly a valuable truth in these maxims, and some people, therefore, accept them at their face value. calling to mind that many of the greatest discoveries have hinged on seemingly insignificant facts, and that the world-renowned german scientists are distinguished by infinite pains in regard to details, they conceive that the student is primarily concerned with trifles. knowing that the dollars will take care of themselves if the dimes are carefully saved, they reason that knowledge is properly mastered if the little things receive close attention. it becomes their ambition, therefore, to let nothing that is little escape them. in this spirit the conscientious student, largely identifying conscientiousness with thoroughness, keeps a special watch for little things, feeling that the smaller an item is the more fully it tests his thoroughness, and the more meritorious he is if he attends to it. the influence of this notion of thoroughness upon practice has been marked in some schools. and since spelling furnishes excellent material for testing care for details, that subject has often been given high rank partly for that special reason. i have known one large training school for teachers in which for twenty years and more probably more time and energy on the part of both faculty and students were expended on spelling than on any other single subject. it was unpardonable not to cross the _t_ or dot the _i_, not to insert the hyphen or the period. having written a word in spelling, it was a heinous offense to change it after second thought, and a dozen misspelled words per term seriously endangered one's diploma at the end of the three-year course. no one can deny great merit to such strenuousness. so definite an aim, applied to all subjects and relentlessly pursued by a whole faculty,--as was the case in this school,--compelled students to work till they overworked, and the school was therefore regarded as excellent. yet this conception makes thoroughness a purely _quantitative_ matter; it accepts _thoroughness_ as meaning _throughness_ or completeness, signifying the inclusion of everything from "beginning to end," or from "cover to cover." _ . the correct notion of thoroughness._ this notion of thoroughness, however, is certainly wrong in opposing all neglect; and the above-quoted maxims show themselves, in their disregard for relative values, to be only half truths, in the school just mentioned there was small emphasis of relative worths and of the use of judgment in the choice of objects to receive one's attention. as thoroughness consisted in attention to details, little things became _per se_ worthy of study, and comparative worth was on that account overlooked. but, as we have seen, there is no hope of mastering _all_ the ideas connected with any topic, so that the student must be reconciled to the exercise of judgment in making selection. this choice must be exercised, too, among the details themselves; it is not confined to a selection of the large thoughts in distinction from the details. details vary infinitely among themselves in value; some, like the horseshoe nail, easily bear a vital relation to large results; others, like the use of a hyphen in a word, in all probability bear no important relation to anything. those that have this vital relation are essential and need careful attention; the others are non-essential and deserve for that reason to be neglected. in other words, thoroughness is a _qualitative_ rather than a quantitative matter; it is qualitative because it involves careful selection in accordance with the nature and relation of the details. the student, to whom thoroughness is a question of _allness_ needs mental endurance as a chief virtue; the real student, on the other hand, requires constant exercise of judgment. in brief, the proper kind of thoroughness calls for a good degree of good sense. the thoroughness that is here advocated implies no underestimate of little things; it only condemns want of discrimination among them. even the painstaking german scientist is no devotee to all things that are little. carrying on his investigation with reference to some definite problem, he is concerned only with such details as are closely related to it. if he is uncertain just what so-called little things do relate to it,--as has been the case, for instance, in the investigation of the cause of yellow fever,--he carefully investigates one thing after another. but in so doing he discriminates very sharply among details, throwing many aside without hesitation, briefly examining some, and finally settling on certain ones for exhaustive study. it is only those little things that are thus related to something of real value that deserve attention. the mathematician is a stickler for little things. he insists that figures should be plainly made, and that + should never be allowed to equal . he is wholly in the right, because the slightest error in reading a number, in placing a decimal point, or in finding a sum must vitiate the whole result. little things of that sort are called little, but they are in reality big. it is unfortunate that such matters are often called trifles, for a trifle is usually supposed to be something that is of very little account; the name thus misleads. such details are essential; other details are non-essential. it would be well if people would more generally divide details into these two classes, and apply the term trifles only to the latter sort. by neglecting non-essentials one could find more time for the details that are essential. neglect of some things, therefore, instead of being opposed to thoroughness, is a direct and necessary means to it. one cannot deny that this notion of thoroughness has its dangers, for it places the responsibility upon the student of using his own judgment. that is always dangerous. if the student lacks earnestness, or insight, or balance, he is bound to make mistakes. he is likely to make them anyway; and he may merely pick and choose according to comfort or whim, and do the most desultory, careless studying. it would be easier for him to "look out for all the little things" than to discriminate among them, for intelligent selection requires more real thinking. _the dangers in these conceptions, and the conclusion. . the danger in this conception of thoroughness._ on the other hand, it should be remembered that neglect of details in general has not been advocated; it is only a judicious selection among them. and such selection calls for no more energy or ability than selection among larger facts. if we can trust students at all to distinguish values among the larger thoughts--as every one knows that we must--there is the same reason for trusting them to distinguish the relative worths of details. _ . the danger in the alternative plan._ the dangers of the alternative plan should also be borne in mind. suppose that a capable student is taught to let no trifles escape him. the danger then is that, to the extent that he is earnest, he will fall in love with little things, until his vision for larger things becomes clouded. he may always be intending to pass beyond these to the larger issues; but he is in danger of failing so regularly that he will come in time to value details in themselves, not for what they lead to; the details become the large things, and the really large matters are forgotten. a former professor in a large normal school illustrated this tendency exactly. at sixty years of age he was an unusually well-informed, cultured man, but he had developed a mania for little things. he had charge of the practice department, and each fall term it was customary to receive applications from about two hundred students for the practice teaching for that term. each applicant filled out a blank, giving his name, age, preferred study to teach, preferred age of children, and experience in teaching. these papers had to be briefly examined; then at four o'clock in the afternoon of the same first day all these applicants were to be called together in one group for instructions about their teaching. by this arrangement the practice teaching could be started off very promptly. on one occasion in the writer's knowledge, however, this gentleman could not resist the temptation to blue-pencil every mistake in spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc., that he could find in this entire set of papers, which must have occupied nearly two hours. meanwhile, this task was so hugely absorbing, he entirely forgot to notify the two hundred applicants that they were wanted at four o'clock, and thus one day out of a year of less than two hundred was largely lost for the practice teaching. the main fault of half of the good teachers in the elementary schools to-day is over-conscientiousness about little things. believing that every mistake in written work should be corrected, that the blackboard should be kept thoroughly clean, that each day's lessons should be carefully planned, that, in short, every little duty should be well performed, they putter away at such tasks until there is no time left for much larger duties, such as physical exercise, sociability, and general reading. as a result they become habitually tired, unsympathetic, and narrow, and therefore _schoolish_. it is a strange commentary on education when conscientiousness means particular care for little things, as it very often does among teachers. it is desirable that a teacher prepare each day's lessons in full, and that she do a hundred other things each day, as well. but when she cannot do all these--and she never can--it is highly important that she apportion her time according to relative values; for instance, it is far better that she omit some of her preparation of lessons for the sake of recreation, if recreation would otherwise be omitted. people are unfitted for the work of life until they view it in fair perspective. one of the important objects of abundant and broad educational theory for teachers is to help them preserve the proper balance between large and small things; and, owing to the common tendency to neglect the larger things for the smaller, one of the prominent duties of school principals and supervisors is to remind both teachers and students of the larger values in life in general and in study in particular. _ . the conclusion._ it is evident that grave dangers are at hand, whether one slights some details or attempts to master them all. but no matter what the dangers are, there is one right thing for the student to do, that is, to develop the habit of weighing worths, of sensing the relative values of the facts that he meets. good judgment consists largely in the proper appreciation of relative values; and since that is one of the very prominent factors in successful living, as well as in study, it is one of the most important abilities for the student to cultivate. not only the equal valuation of all details, but the treatment of various rules and virtues as absolute, is likewise directly hostile to this habit of mind. young people who are taught to be always economical, or always punctual, or always regular, are thereby tempted to substitute thoughtless obedience for exercise of judgment. it is not always wise to be saving. a certain college boy owned three pairs of gloves; one pair was so old and soiled that it was suitable only for use in the care of the furnace; the other two pairs were quite new. however, having been taught to be always saving, he wore the old pair to college during much of his senior year, and saved the other two. he was true to his early teaching at the expense of good sense. there are few circumstances in life that can be properly treated by rule of thumb. good judgment is called for at every turn; and the habit of considering relative values in regard to all affairs is one that the student should constantly cultivate, no matter what dangers have to be encountered. ability of children to neglect unimportant details this ability is so intimately related to the ability that is necessary in grouping related facts that the one can hardly exist without the other. yet it is well to observe what a demand there is for neglect in ordinary school work, and how this demand is met by children. mistakes in beginning reading are very common, such as saying _a_ for _an_, _the_ for _thu_, not pausing for a comma, leaving out a word, putting in a word, etc. when fairy tales are related, slight omissions, mistakes in grammar, too frequent use of _and_, etc. are to be expected. in the pupil's board work, penmanship, and written composition minor errors are innumerable. what is to be done with all these? certainly many of them must be entirely passed over, or more important things will never be reached. in their literature and in their reference books many little difficulties are met with that must likewise be overlooked. take for instance the following typical paragraph from hawthorne's _gorgon's head:_ "well, then," continued the king, still with a _cunning_ smile on his lips, "i have a little _adventure_ to propose to you; and, as you are a brave and _enterprising_ youth, you will doubtless look upon it as a great piece of good luck to have so rare an opportunity of _distinguishing_ yourself. you must know, my good perseus, i think of getting married to the beautiful princess hippodamia; and it is _customary_, on these occasions, to make the bride a present of some _far-fetched_ and _elegant curiosity_. i have been a little _perplexed_, i must honestly confess, where to obtain anything likely to please a princess of her _exquisite_ taste. but, this morning, i _flatter_ myself, i have thought of _precisely_ the article." here is an adult's vocabulary, as well as an adult's ideas, with perhaps a dozen new words, and anything like mathematical thoroughness in the study of this paragraph would destroy its attractiveness. it is well for teachers to consider what would be a thorough treatment of such a section. encyclopedias and other reference works also present many strange words and difficult paragraphs that children cannot stop to examine with care. in their ordinary school work, therefore, children find many details that must be overlooked; the more important things cannot be accomplished unless these less important ones are ignored. it would be strange if children were quite incapable of doing what is so plainly required of them. it is true that they can be taught to reach the extreme of foolishness in the insignificance of the details that they mention. but it is also true that a fair amount of wise guidance will lead them to exercise good judgment in their selection. in other words, thoroughness as a relative and qualitative matter, rather than only quantitative, can be appreciated by them. any teacher who has tested them carefully in this respect is likely to agree to this assertion. it is as natural for a lot of children to condemn the mention of useless detail, because of its waste of time, as it is for them to condemn selfish or immoral conduct. practical suggestions for teaching children to neglect relatively unimportant details _ . placing responsibility upon children._ the responsibility of deciding what shall be neglected should very often be left with the children, no matter how many mistakes and how much loss of time it may temporarily cause. criticisms and suggestions from the teacher would be in place later. many parents as well as teachers refuse to place this responsibility upon children for fear of the mistakes that they will make. on account of this fear they make it as nearly as possible unnecessary for children to judge freely, by giving them arbitrary rules to follow, or by directing them exactly what they shall do each moment. this cultivates poor judgment by depriving children of the very practice that will make their judgments reliable; it prevents the school requirements from corresponding to those in life outside. confidence in the general and growing good sense of children is a presupposition in the sensible parent and teacher. having such confidence, their mission is to let these young people alone much of the time; to direct, not to control the selections that they make, assuming the role of advisers and critics but not dictators. this training toward independent judgment should begin even in the first year of school. if johnny raises his hand in beginning reading to state that mary said _a_ for _the_, the teacher need not either accept or reject the criticism. she may merely turn to the whole class and ask whether that is a helpful correction to make. a similar course may be pursued with many corrections and suggestions in later years. in this way a class sense of what is fitting or valuable in the way of neglect can be developed. it should be remembered, however, that children cannot judge the worth of details without a basis of some sort. unless, therefore, they helplessly rely upon the direction of the teacher in each case, they must be taught what the reading or other subject is for. they must gradually get a fair idea, for instance, of what good reading is, and realize that it includes pleasant tones, a careful grouping of words, much inflection of voice, and clear enunciation of final consonants. as they become acquainted with this standard in reading, they will readily learn to overlook such details as have little to do with its attainment. it is true that it saves much time for the teacher herself to determine what shall or shall not receive attention, or at least for her to accept or reject a child's suggestion dogmatically, rather than to allow him or the whole class to pass upon its worth. also, the constant demand for "more facts" tempts teachers to save time in this way. but again, it behooves the teacher as well as the pupil to use judgment, and not sacrifice one of the main objects of an education in order to save some time. _ . class study of printed articles._ children who use reference works might now and then study an encyclopedic article together merely to see what parts should be slighted. when looking for a certain fact they will discover, from the way the paragraphs begin, that one paragraph after another can be discarded without being read in full. in the same spirit newspapers might be studied by the older children, to determine from the headings what articles need not be read at all, what ones in a cursory manner, and what ones carefully, if any. similar study of some magazines might be in place. it is a duty of the school thus to accustom pupils to proper methods of reading common kinds of printed matter. _ . reduction of reproductions._ pupils might occasionally be asked to reproduce a story or any other line of thought as fully as they wish. suppose that it occupies six pages. then they might be requested to reduce it to three pages, and perhaps, finally, to one page, eliminating each time what is of least importance. such an exercise compels a very careful study of relative values. _ . holding and carrying a point._ having decided upon a definite problem for consideration, all grades of learners might be held responsible for detecting beginning wanderings of thought. they might accustom themselves to the responsibility of rising to a point of order at such times, stating the main question and asking the suspected person to show the relevancy of his remarks. there is no reason why the teacher should carry this responsibility alone; indeed, it is an imposition on the children, checking their growth in judgment and power of initiative. again, at times students in all grades might be allowed full freedom, in order to show how quickly they will engage in discussion, and even become excited, with no definite question before them. they may not realize their error, however, until asked to state what they are considering. it should be remembered that the question at issue may be as much neglected in the reading of books as in participation in discussion; on this account the method of reading might be tested in a similar manner. _ . encouragement of different rates of reading._ finally, varying rates of reading should be encouraged, according to the nature of the subject matter. while some books should be perused very slowly and thoughtfully, others should be covered as rapidly as possible. in the case of many novels, for instance, the ideas are so simple that they can be comprehended as rapidly as the words can be scanned. many persons, however, can read only as fast as they can pronounce the words. they follow an established series of associations: first, the word is observed; this image calls up its sound; the sound then recalls the meaning. thus the order is _sight, sound, meaning._ that is a roundabout way of arriving at the meaning of a page and is usually learned in childhood. it explains why many an educated adult can read very little faster silently than aloud. some adults read fast simply by skimming over the less important parts, which is often justified. some, however, save time by associating the form of a word directly with its meaning, leaving the sound out of consideration. then by running the eye along rapidly they double and treble the ordinary rate of advance. it is said that lord macaulay read silently about as rapidly as a person ordinarily thumbs the pages; and he must have seen the individual words, because his remarkable memory often enabled him to reproduce the text verbatim. the slow-reading adult can, by practice, learn to take in a whole line or more almost at a glance, in place of three or four words, and can thus increase his rate of advance. but habit is so powerful that the rapid eye-movement necessary in rapid reading, together with the direct association of the form of a word with its meaning, should be learned in childhood. to this end, children should often be timed in their reading, being allowed only a few seconds or minutes to cover a certain amount. some exercises might be given them, too, so as to accustom them to taking in a considerable number of words at a glance. meanwhile, however, pains should be taken to avoid the impression that rapid reading is always in place. matter that requires much reflection, like the bible for example, may well be read slowly. it is not merely rapid reading, but varying rates according to need, that the teacher should encourage. there is no expectation that children will learn to handle books as carlyle did. but they should be guided by the same general principles, and should form practical acquaintance with these principles while in school. ordinarily there is a striking contrast between the use of books in school and outside, and the different rates of reading in the two places afford a striking illustration. text in school is taken up in a gingerly fashion, scarcely enough of it being assigned for one lesson to get the child interested. then this is reviewed over and over until any interest that may originally have been excited is long since destroyed. thoroughness is aimed at, at the expense of life. in independent reading outside of school the opposite course is pursued. in the reaction from the school influence children revel in their freedom to do the things that their teachers forbid, and they accordingly go racing through their volumes. both methods are at fault. the school handling of books is intolerably slow; that outside is likely to be too rapid. in general, the method of using books in school should more closely resemble that desired elsewhere. the school method is the first to be reformed. it is seldom wise to be so thorough in the treatment of a text as to kill it for the learner. as a rule longer textbook lessons should be assigned in the elementary school, and less attention should be given to the minor facts. then, if necessary, the same general field should be covered from another point of view, through another text. this change of method is already largely realized in our beginning reading, and partly realized in several other subjects. chapter vi judging of the soundness and general worth of statements, as a fourth factor in study we have already seen that proper study places much responsibility upon the student. instead of allowing him to be an aimless collector of facts, it requires him to discover specific purposes that the facts may serve. with such purposes in mind he must supplement authors' statements in numerous ways, and also pass judgment on their relative values. this all requires much aggressiveness. _the problem here._ a problem now confronts us that suggests even greater aggressiveness. the statements that one hears or finds in print are often somewhat exaggerated, or distorted, or grossly incorrect, or they may be entirely true. who is to pass judgment upon their quality? has the young student any proper basis for carrying that responsibility? _pressing nature of this problem. . in reading newspapers and magazines._ this problem is forced upon one when reading newspapers, particularly during political campaigns. one paper lauds a candidate as a great administrator, while another condemns him as a doctrinaire. one advocates protective tariff and the gold standard, while another urges revenue tariff only and free silver. among the news columns one article predicts war, while another discerns signs of peace. russia is at one time pictured as moving fast toward complete anarchy, while at another time she is shown to be making important political advances. the japanese are praised for their high standards of life, and are again condemned for their immorality. magazine articles show disagreements just as striking. public men, political policies, corporations, and religious beliefs are approved or condemned according to the individual writer. what, then, is the proper attitude for the reader? is he to regard one authority as about as good as another, or is he himself to distinguish among them and judge each according to the evidence that is offered? _ . in the use of books._ d'aubigne's _history of the reformation_ is an extremely interesting work; but it treats the reformation from the protestant view-point, and is on that account unacceptable to catholics. the history of our civil war presents one series of facts when written by a northerner; a very different series when written by a southerner; and a still different one when written by an englishman. shall the student of either of these periods adopt the views of the author that he happens to be reading? or shall he assume a view-point of his own? or shall he do neither? carlyle and ruskin indulge in much exaggeration, relying on striking statements for increased effect. shakespeare possibly intended to present an exaggerated type of the jew in the character of shylock. shall the student recognize exaggeration as such? or shall he take all statements literally? or shall he avoid doing either, preserving an inactive mind? in his work on _education_, herbert spencer states that "acquirement of every kind has two values--value as knowledge and value as discipline. besides its use for guidance in conduct, the acquisition of each order of facts has also its use as mental exercise." many students of education would assert that one very important value of knowledge is here overlooked, _i. e._, its power to inspire and energize, a value that literature possesses to a high degree. assuming that they are correct, dare the young student pass such a criticism? or would such a critical attitude on his part toward a high authority be impertinent? the first paragraph in rousseau's _emile_ runs as follows: "coming from the hand of the author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man everything degenerates. man obliges one soil to nourish the productions of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another; he mingles and confounds climates, elements, seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. he overturns everything, disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he desires that nothing should be as nature made it, not even man himself. to please him man must be broken in like a horse; man must be adapted to man's own fashion, like a tree in his garden." at the bottom of the first page of the translation of _emile_ by miss worthington is a note by jules steeg, depute, paris, bearing on the above first paragraph and running as follows: "it is useless to enlarge upon the absurdity of this theory, and upon the flagrant contradiction into which rousseau allows himself to fall. if he is right, man ought to be left without education, and the earth without cultivation. this would not be even the savage state. but want of space forbids us to pause at each like statement of our author, who at once busies himself in nullifying it." opposing statements like these are certainly enough to place the student in a dilemma. _proper attitude of the student toward authorities._ here are contradictions in political and religious beliefs and news items; very different interpretations of historical events; exaggerations bordering on misrepresentations; and evident omissions and absurdities on the part of educational philosophers. the weather bureau represents old reliability herself, in comparison with authors. what attitude shall the adult student assume toward such contradictory and faulty statements? shall he regard himself as only a follower, taking each presentation of thought at its face value, sitting humbly at the feet of supposed specialists, and carefully preserving in memory as many of their principal opinions and conclusions as possible? shall he assume the position of a mere receiver and collector? that is manifestly impossible, for that would mean an ego divided a thousand times. it would prevent the final using of knowledge by the learner, instead of directing its use wisely; for the many opposing ideas and cross purposes would nullify one another. besides that, wise application requires far more than a good memory as a guide, since memory takes no account of the adaptations always required by new conditions. whether he likes it or not, the student cannot escape the responsibility of determining for himself the fairness and general reliability of the newspapers and magazines that he reads; he must expect bias in historians, and must measure the extent of it as well as he can by studying their biographies and by observing their care in regard to data and logic; he must scrutinize very critically the ideas of the world's greatest essayists and dramatists. if a philosopher, like rousseau, offers brilliant truths on one page, and equally brilliant perversions of truth on the next page, the student must ponder often and long in order to keep his bearings; and if footnotes attempt to point out some of these absurdities, he must decide for himself whether rousseau or the commentator shows the superior wisdom. "above all," says koopman, "he [the student] must make sure how far he can trust the author." [footnote: koopman, _the mastery of books_, p. .] "read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to _weigh_ and _consider_," says bacon. [footnote: bacon's _essays of studies_.] every book we read may be made a round in the ever-lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge and to that temperance and serenity of mind which, as it is the ripest fruit of wisdom, is also the sweetest. but this can only be if we read such books as make us think, and read them in such a way as helps them to do so, that is, _by endeavoring to judge them_, and thus to make them an exercise rather than a relaxation of the mind. desultory reading except as conscious pastime, hebetates the brain and slackens the bow string of will. [footnote: lowell, _books and libraries._] the student, therefore, must set himself up as judge of whatever ideas appear before him. they are up for trial on their soundness and worth; he must uncover their merits and defects, and pass judgment on their general value. if he is hasty and careless, he suffers the penalty of bad judgment; and if he refrains from judging at all, he becomes one who "does not know his own mind," a weakling. who reads incessantly, and to his reading brings not a spirit and judgment equal or superior uncertain and unsettled still remains, deep versed in books and shallow in himself. [footnote: milton, _paradise regained_, book , line .] _the necessity of this attitude in the acceptance as well as in the rejection of ideas._ the need of such an attitude may be granted when the rejection of ideas is necessary. but there are many works that have been tried for ages and found undoubtedly excellent. there are many men, also, who are acknowledged authorities in their specialties. in the case of such books and men, where little if any negative criticism is to be expected, cannot the student set out merely to enjoy the merits and not bother about the defects? can he not, therefore, abandon the critical attitude and accept outright what is offered? that depends on how much is involved in real acceptance. a wise young woman who rejects a suitor does so for reasons of some sort; her reasons should certainly not be less clear if she accepts him; on the contrary, they are more likely to have been investigated with care. the rejection of a lover is, then, no more positive thing, involves no more intelligence and emotion, than his acceptance. again, a competent supervisor of instruction who accepts as good some recitation that he has observed, does so on the basis of specific points of merit that he has seen. otherwise his acceptance is only flattery and is unacceptable to an earnest teacher. so, in general, the acceptance of any line of thought or action presupposes a consciousness of certain merits. intelligent acceptance is thoughtful or critical. there is a common idea that acceptance is far more easy and far less aggressive than negative criticism. the contrary, however, is probably true. the former idea is due to the fact that much acceptance, as of political and religious doctrine, for example, is only nominal or verbal; it is not intelligent or critical enough to be genuine. any one can find fault, it is often declared; but the recognition of merit requires special insight. rejection, therefore, is no more aggressive or positive than acceptance; and if one of these calls for a more critical attitude and more mental energy than the other, it is probably the latter. _relation of the critical attitude to sympathy and respect._ what is the relation of this critical attitude to sympathy for an author? one of the essential conditions in the proper study of a book is that it be approached with an open, sympathetic mind. one must look at the world through the author's eyes in order to understand and appreciate what he says, and that is possible only when one feels high respect for him and is in close sympathy with him. to this end, it may be well at times for the student to annihilate his own personality, as ruskin advises, so as to lose himself in another's thought. if the critical attitude were incompatible with such respect and sympathy, its value might well be questioned. but that is not the case. a sensible parent who is in closest sympathy with a child finds no great difficulty in seeing its defects and even in administering punishment for them. there are parents and teachers who cannot thus combine real sympathy with the critical attitude; but they are too weak and foolish to rear children. helpful friendships among adults, also, are not based upon blind admiration; they presuppose ability to discern faults and even courage now and then to mention them. one cannot be a true scholar without making a similar combination. the unquestioning frame of mind that allows a sympathetic approach to an author marks one stage in study; but this must be followed by the critical attitude before the study is complete. that the two attitudes are not incompatible is well stated by porter in the following words: "we should read with an independent judgment and a critical spirit. it does not follow, because we should treat an author with confidence and respect, that we are to accept all his opinions and may not revise his conclusions and arguments by our own. indeed, we shall best evince our respect for his thoughts by subjecting them to our own revision." [footnote: noah porter, _books and reading_, p. .] _how daily life requires similar independence of judgment._ while the demand thus made upon the scholar seems great, there is nothing surprising about it; for the scholar's relation to an author is substantially the same as that of any adult to other persons with whom he has dealings. if you go to a store to purchase a pair of rubbers, you cannot surrender yourself complacently to any clerk who happens to wait upon you. he is very likely to be satisfied to sell you rubbers that are too long or too short, too wide or too narrow, or at least not of the shape of your shoes. or he may want to sell you storm rubbers when you prefer low ones. unless, therefore, you carry a standard in mind and reject whatever fails to meet it, you are very likely to buy rubbers that won't be satisfactory. the same is true if you go to a tailor for clothing; unless you know him to be unusually reliable, it is not enough for him to tell you that a coat fits; you must test the statement by your own observation. some years ago a house that i occupied in new york city became infested with rats, and, wanting to reach the kitchen from the cellar, they gnawed an inch hole through a lead drain pipe from the laundry tubs, that lay in their way. the hole was behind a cupboard in the kitchen, very close to the wall, and not easy to reach. if clean clothing was to be had, the pipe had to be fixed; but when a plumber was called in, he stated that a carpenter would be needed to remove the cupboard, and again to replace it after the work was completed. the pipe having the hole, he added, would need to be taken out, and, as it was one arm of a larger pipe that had two other branches, the pipe with the three arms would have to be removed and another put in its place. the entire work was estimated to cost about fifteen dollars. as that seemed a large amount to invest in a rat hole, another plumber was consulted; but he made substantially the same report. still not being satisfied, i went to a hardware store and asked, "have you a man who can solder a thin metal plate over a small hole in a lead pipe? the hole is about an inch in diameter and somewhat difficult to reach; but the work can be done by any one who knows his business." the merchant said that he had such a man. the man was sent over; he did the work in a few minutes, and the bill was seventy-five cents. plumbers are probably as honest and capable in their lines as most classes of workmen; but many persons have learned to their sorrow not to place themselves as clay in their hands. a man who builds a house should keep more than half an eye on his architect, otherwise the house is likely to cause numerous lifelong regrets. even one's physician is not to be implicitly obeyed on all occasions. if a patient knows that quinine acts as a poison upon him, as it does upon some persons, he must refuse to take it. also, if a physician gives too much medicine, as physicians have been known to do, one must discover the fact for himself, or his alimentary canal may suffer. such men are merely types of the many persons who surround us and help us to live; we must be judges of the conduct of each of them toward us, if we wish to be healthy and happy. must we, then, pass upon everything; and is no person to be fully trusted? how can any one find time for the exercise of so much wisdom? and what are specialists for? certainly many, many things must be taken for granted. when you board a train, you cannot make sure that the trainmen are all qualified for their positions and that all parts of the train and of the track are in proper condition. if, however, you choose a poorly managed road, in place of a well-managed one, you are more likely to be killed on the journey. in other words, while many things must be assumed, the responsibility of determining what they shall be rests with you, and you suffer the penalty of any bad selection. your own judgment is still your guide. many persons must likewise be trusted. but who shall they be, and to what extent? the objects of choice have now been merely shifted from things to human beings, and independent judgment must still be exercised the same as before. the difficulty is fully as great, too. says holmes, "we have all to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of things or persons. a man who is willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one's self." [footnote: holmes, _autocrat of the breakfast table._] reasons for the use of independent judgment may be found in lack of knowledge on the part of others, or of skill, or of judgment, or of energy, or of honesty. but there is a more fundamental reason than either incompetence or dishonesty, and it is found in the peculiar circumstances of each person. the point of view of an architect is not the same as that of the owner of a house. every one hundred dollars added to the cost of a building rejoices the architect's heart because it increases his income. on the other hand, every hundred dollars thus added tends to produce depression in the owner's mind. similarly, the point of view of any specialist or friend is different from yours; it can never be fully your own. just because no one can look at your affairs from your own point of view, no one is fully qualified to judge them for you, and you must rely upon yourself. the people with whom we trade, therefore, the specialists and friends to whom we go, like the authors that the student consults, are all related to us merely as advisers. no one of them is fitted to tell us exactly what to do, and the proper attitude toward them all is that of friendly suspicion. _greatness of each person's responsibility for judging._ this conception of each person's relation to ideas and to the world at large places his judgment on a high plane. whether he will or not, every man is intellectually a sovereign whose own judgment in the decision of all his affairs is his court of last resort. this is a grave responsibility, indeed; and it is no wonder that many shrink from it. yet what better state can be conceived? this responsibility proves the dignity of manhood; it is the price of being a man. fairly good judgment, exercised independently of everybody, is one essential condition of self-direction and of leadership of others. the importance of good judgment is often emphasized; and the reason for it is here evident, since it must guide us at every turn. the reason for education of judgment is also evident. every person is bound to make many mistakes; but he will make far fewer when his ability to judge has been properly trained. the utter inadequacy of instruction that aims mainly at acquisition of facts is likewise evident; for the exercise of judgment involves the use or adaptation of knowledge to particular conditions, and the mere possession of facts bears little relation to this ability. _the basis that every student has for judging worth._ it may seem presumptuous for a young student of education to pass judgment upon the greatest writers on education that the world has produced, such as spencer and rousseau. certainly the opinions of such great men are far more valuable and reliable, on the whole, than those of an immature student. the architect's knowledge of building, likewise, is superior to that or a novice in that line. granted, therefore, that no one person is in a position to judge for another, what right, what basis has this other, particularly the inexperienced person, to judge any and every sort of affairs for himself? he has basis enough. speaking of the value of expert knowledge, aristotle says: "moreover, there are some artists whose works are judged of solely, or in the best manner, not by themselves but by those who do not possess the art; for example, the knowledge of the house is not limited to the builder; the user, or, in other words, the master of the house will even be a better judge than the builder, just as the pilot will judge better of a rudder than the carpenter, and the guest will judge better of a feast than the cook." [footnote: aristotle, _politics_ (jowett), p. .] the reason that the non-expert can thus sometimes even surpass the expert himself in judging of the latter's work is found in the fact that the non-expert as well as the specialist has had much valuable experience bearing on the specialist's line. a very important truth is here suggested concerning the student. nothing that one is fitted to study is wholly new or strange to him. any person must have had experiences that parallel an author's thought in order to understand that author. for, according to the principle of apperception, intimately related past experience is the sole basis for the comprehension of new facts. values are no newer or stranger to the student than other phases of experience. the student's related past, therefore, furnishes as good a basis for judging soundness or worth as it does for getting at meanings. when, for instance, he reads spencer's statement that "acquisition of every kind has two values,--value as knowledge and value as discipline"--he can verify each use out of his own life. he can determine for himself that the assertion holds. on the other hand, he can quite likely recall how he has sometimes been aroused and stirred to new effort by things that he has read; and he may, in consequence, question whether spencer has not here overlooked one great value of knowledge. again, when the student is told by rousseau that "in the hands of man everything degenerates," he can, no doubt, justify the assertion to some extent by recalling observed instances of such degeneration. but, in addition, when he recalls what he has observed and read about the wonderful advance made by man toward a higher civilization, and realizes that rousseau is denying that there has been an advance, he is in a position to consider whether rousseau is mainly in the right or mainly in the wrong. it is true that the student may be wrong in his conclusions; also that, even though he be often right, he may become a confirmed fault- finder. but that is not discouraging, for he is surrounded with dangers. the essential fact remains that, just as his past related experience furnishes a fair basis for understanding the meaning of what he hears and reads, so, also, it furnishes a fair basis for estimating its value. ability of children to judge values _a conception of child nature that denies such ability._ many persons who agree to the necessity of independent judgment on the part of adults may demur at the idea of placing similar responsibility upon children. are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. and if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "memory," says john henry newman, "is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business, when he goes to school, is to _learn_, that is, to store up things in his memory. for some years his intellect is little more than an instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing them; he welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on what is without; he has his eyes ever about him; he has a lively susceptibility of impressions; he imbibes information of every kind; and little does he make his own in the true sense of the word, living rather upon his neighbors all around him. he has opinions, religious, political, literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost _passive_ in the acquisition of knowledge. i say this is no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. geography, chronology, history, language, natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. it is the seven years of plenty with him; he gathers in by handfuls, like the egyptians, without counting; and though, as time goes on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the elements of mathematics, and for his taste in the poets and orators, still while at school, or at least till quite the last years of his time, he _acquires and little more;_ and when he is leaving for the university he is mainly the creature of foreign influences and circumstances, and made up of accidents, homogeneous or not as the case may be." [footnote: john henry newman, _scope and nature of university education,_ discourse v.] this view of childhood is somewhat common; and according to it children are almost exclusively _receptive,_ any active exercise of judgment scarcely beginning before college entrance. _extent of such ability. . as evidenced by individual examples of children's judgments._ let us see to what extent this view holds when examined in the light of children's actual conduct. a first-grade pupil who had attended the kindergarten the previous year remarked to his former kindergarten teacher, "i wish i was back in the kindergarten." "why?" said the kindergartner. "because," said he, "we did _hard_ things in the kindergarten last year." then he added confidentially, "you know our teacher was in the fourth grade last year. she used to come in to see us when we were playing, and she thinks we can't do anything else. why, the things she gives us to do are _dead easy._" his teacher herself afterward admitted that his criticism was just. a small boy, being asked if he went to sunday school, replied "yes." "have you a good teacher?" was the next question; to which came the response, "yes, pretty good; good for a sunday school. she would not be much good for day school." wasn't he probably right? a five-year-old boy was taken to sunday school for the first time by his nurse. there the chief topic of instruction happened to be eternal punishment. on the way home he was not altogether good, and the nurse, in the spirit of the day's lesson, assured him that he would go to the bad place when he died, and would burn there always. when he entered the house he hurried, sobbing, to his mother and declared vehemently: "nurse says i'll go to the bad place when i die, and that i'll burn there always. i _won't_ burn always; i know i won't! i may burn a little bit. but i'm bad only part of the time; i am good part of the time; and i _know_ i won't burn always." his reasoning on theology was as sound as that of many a preacher. i was standing near a second-year class in reading one day when i overheard a boy say "nonsense!" to himself, after reading a section. i agreed with him too fully to offer any reproof. an eight-year-old girl said to her mother, "may i iron my apron? i ironed a pillowcase." "did sarah [the maid] say that you ironed it well?" asked the mother. "no, she didn't say anything," was the response. "but i know that i ironed it well." is that an entirely passive attitude? rebecca had spent six years in the public schools of two large cities when she entered the seventh grade of the state normal school. she had been called a "quiet child," "nervous" and "timid," by different teachers. after a very few days in the new school, however, she volunteered this expression of her thoughts: "i didn't think the normal school would be anything like that. it's very different from the public schools. there only the teacher has opinions and she does all the talking; but in the normal school the children can have opinions, and they can express them, and i like it." any one who has had close contact with children knows that they have a remarkably keen sense of the justice or injustice of punishments inflicted upon them. as a rule, i would rather trust their judgment of their teachers than their parents' judgment, although it is true that parents form such judgment largely from hearing remarks from their children. children are reasonably reliable, also, in judging one another's conduct, which they are prone to do. such facts as these indicate that it is quite natural for children--even very young ones--to pass judgment of some kind on things about them, and that their judgments are fairly sound. they are hardly to be called merely passive receivers of ideas, mildly agreeing with the people about them. _ . as evidenced by the requirements of the school._ the school plainly assumes the presence of this ability by the requirements that it makes of children. one of the common questions in the combination of forms and colors, even in the kindergarten, is, "how do you like that?" in instruction in fine art throughout the grades their judgment as to what is most beautiful is continually appealed to. the judging of one another's compositions and other school products is a common task for pupils. in connection with fairy tales six-year-olds are frequently asked what they think of the story. many say, "it is beautiful"; but now and then a bold spirit declares, "i don't like it." children are expected to judge the quality of literature, distinguishing with ease between what is literal and what is imaginative, or figurative, or humorous. when they read that the rope with which the powerful fenris-wolf was bound was "made out of such things as the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath of a fish and the sinews of a bear, and nothing could break it," [footnote: hamilton mabie's _norse myths,_ p. .] they are not deceived; they only smile. now and then they make mistakes; but in general such stories as _through the looking-glass_ and the "uncle remus" stories do not overtax their power to interpret conditions. what literature or history is there for children that omits the passing of moral judgments? cinderella is approved of for her goodness, william tell for his independence, columbus for his boldness; cinderella's sisters are condemned for their selfishness, and gessler for his meanness. without such exercise of judgment these two studies would miss one of their main benefits. the data that must be collected in nature study and history for the proof of statements give much practice in the weighing of evidence; and the self- government that is now so common, in various degrees, in good schools is supposed to be based upon a reasonable ability to weigh out justice. thus the method both of instruction and of government in our better schools presupposes the ability on the part of pupils to judge worth; and the better teachers have considered it so important that they have constantly striven to develop it through instruction, just as sensible parents have placed upon their children some of the responsibility of buying their own clothing, doing the marketing, and planning work at home, in order to cultivate the power to make wise choice. if the ability to judge were really wanting in children, our supposedly best methods of teaching and governing them would need to be abandoned. _ . as evidenced by requirements of child life._ the best proof that children possess this ability is that they can scarcely get on without it. several years ago, when i reached indianapolis on a journey, i gave my bag to a boy ten or eleven years of age to carry to my hotel. while we were walking along together another boy stopped him and drew him to one side. i observed that they were having a serious conversation, and when we soon proceeded further i inquired what the trouble was. "that boy," said he, "wants me to divvy up with him." "what do you mean by that?" said i. "he wants me to give him half of the money that i am to get from you for carrying this bag," was the reply. "but," i responded indignantly, "he has not helped you at all. why, then, should he receive anything?" "he shouldn't," came the answer; "but he belongs to a crowd of fellows, and he told me that if i didn't divvy up with them they would pound the life out of me." i pondered for some time, but i gave no advice. what advice should have been given? this is a striking ease; but it only illustrates very forcibly that children are not merely sleeping, and eating what is given to them, like cattle and sheep. like adults they are surrounded with human beings and are leading moral lives. at home, in school, on the street, a hundred times a day they must "size up" people and situations and decide what is best to do. if they are weak in such decisions, they are regarded as weak in general; and if very weak, other persons must assume responsibility for them and "tote" them through life. on the other hand, if they are strong, they are classed as sensible persons, and they "get on" well. children distinguish themselves as balanced and sensible, just as adults do, simply because they are wise in measuring values. those persons who regard childhood as almost solely a period for receiving knowledge, seem to think that active life really begins only when one becomes of age. the fact is, it begins from eighteen to twenty-one years sooner than that; and throughout all those earlier years one has nearly as great a variety of trials, and trials usually of greater intensity for the moment, than adults have. in the midst of so much need, it would be strange, indeed, if one were endowed with no power, called judgment, to cope with difficult situations, if one had only the power to collect facts. that would leave us too helpless; it certainly would not be adaptation to environment, or normal evolution. in conclusion, therefore, those who deny a fair degree of sound judgment to children deny what seems a marked natural tendency of childhood; they pass a sweeping criticism upon what is now supposed to be the best method of instructing and governing children; and, finally, they deny to the child the one power that can make his knowledge usable and insure his adaptation to his environment. self- reliance, which parents and teachers strive for so much, becomes then impossible among children, for self-reliance is nothing more than independent direction of self, made possible by power to judge conditions. certainly most persons are unwilling to take this position in regard to the nature of childhood. they will agree that a twelve- year-old boy, sitting for an hour in the presence of the president of the united states and hearing him converse freely, without forming judgments about him, and many fairly accurate ones too, would be an abnormality. _danger of priggishness._ what about the threatened priggishness and related evils that may result when the responsibility for passing judgment frequently is laid upon children? certainly a modest sense of one's own merit and proper respect for others are highly desirable qualities. these qualities, however, are not greatly endangered by the exercise of intellectual independence, for it is little related to immodesty and impertinence. a few years ago when many distinguished scientists celebrated in berlin the discovery of the roentgen rays, mr. roentgen himself was not present. although he had possessed boldness enough to enlarge the confines of knowledge, he lacked the courage to face the men who had met to do him honor, and he telegraphed his regrets. st. paul, erasmus, and melanchthon were, intellectually, among the most independent of men; but st. paul possessed the humility of the true christian, and both erasmus and melanchthon were extremely modest. pestalozzi was once sent by his government as a member of a commission to interview napoleon. on his return from paris he was asked whether he saw napoleon. "no," said he, "i did not see napoleon, and napoleon did not see me." recognizing the greatness of a real educator, he took away the breath of his friends by ranking himself alongside napoleon as a truly great man. yet he was one of the most modest, childlike men that the world has ever known. these examples show that the keenest, boldest of analysts and critics may yet be the humblest of men. self-reliance is the more common name for similar independence among children; and it is no more nearly related to priggishness in their case than in the case of adults. the five-year-old child will often reject statements from his parents, even though he have the greatest respect and love for them. it is only natural for him to do so when assertions that he hears do not tally with his own experience; and he will retain such boldness throughout life unless made subservient by bad education. there is some danger, however, that the cultivation of this independence may make one a chronic fault-finder. it should not be forgotten, therefore, that judging means approving as well as condemning, and in case of children probably much more of the former than of the latter. in addition, care should be taken that children shall pass judgment only on matters lying fairly within their experience, and shall recognize the need, too, of giving good reasons for their conclusions. if these precautions be taken, the danger of priggishness is reduced to the minimum. what danger remains can afford to be risked; for independent judgment is the very basis of scholarship among adults, and mental submissiveness in childhood is not the best preparation for it. practical suggestions for the development of independent judgment among children _ . placing responsibility upon children at school._ responsibilities that require exercise of judgment should be placed upon children throughout the school, from the kindergarten on. scarcely a recitation need pass without opportunities of this kind. for example, children can determine the correctness of answers to questions put in class, can weigh the relative merits and the efficiency of tasks performed, can propose suitable ways of illustrating topics, such as lumbering, irrigation, mining, etc. the wisdom of plans for preserving order in the school, for decorating the building, and for improving the school in other respects can also be submitted to their judgment. it is by the exercise of judgment in many ways that young people will become judicious in numerous directions. it is not difficult for any teacher to do some work of this kind, but it is difficult to be consistent in it. many teachers who are zealous in cultivating independent judgment a part of the time, undermine this influence at other times by arbitrary decisions or by a personality so overpowering that it allows no free scope to the child's personality. _ . study of responsibilities borne at home._ some study of the responsibilities that different children bear at home may prove very profitable. while some carry much responsibility there, others are given no option as to when they shall start to school each day, or how they shall dress, or who shall buy their clothes, or how they shall spend money. thus they are allowed no opportunity to decide things for themselves or to develop independent judgment. interviews with individual parents, and parents' meetings, may prove very fruitful along this line. _ . consideration of the use to be made of advice._ in order to teach the nature of self-reliance and the scope of its exercise, the use to be made of the advice of friends should be a topic for occasional discussion. many a young man and woman hesitates to ask the advice of others for fear that they may be offended if the advice given is not followed. they are justified, too, for many persons are offended in this way. the propriety of rejecting advice should be far more generally understood than it is. then children, as well as young men and women, would seek it much oftener, to their lasting benefit. _ . examples of combinations of modesty with independence._ since modesty should be cultivated along with independent judgment, examples of distinguished men and women who have combined these two qualities should now and then be considered. _ . observation of habits of pupils in use of judgment._ it is well to mark out for special attention such pupils as seem to be untrue to their own experience in judging, or such as seem to lack the energy to use it as a basis of judgment. for example, many eleven- and twelve-year-old children in their study of _excelsior_ feel that the young man very rashly exposed himself and merited his death. yet some of these will suppress this judgment, and even praise him as a noble youth, in order to please their teacher, or because they think that that is what they _ought_ to say. they lack the boldness to be honest with themselves. again, very many young people fail to think far enough to "weigh and consider." they stop short with the concrete narrative, failing to judge whether the story is reasonable, whether the characters are representative, whether the moral is sound, etc. thus they omit a portion of the thinking that should be expected of them. whether they are wanting in mental energy or do not realize that this is one of the important parts of study, they should be taken in hand. right habits of mind are even more important than knowledge. _ . reports of merits of printed matter, with discussion._ as one means of overcoming the defect just mentioned, different children, or different committees of a class, might examine the same newspapers, magazines, articles in reference books, etc., and then report on their merits independently of one another, giving their reasons. the discussions that would be likely to follow as the result of disagreements would be of the highest value. chapter vii memorizing, as a fifth factor in study "all the intellectual value for us of a state of mind depends on our after-memory of it," says professor james. [footnote: william james's _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] _importance of memory._ in other words, there would be little object importance in reading, or reflection, or travel, or in experience in general, if such experience could not later be recalled so as to be further enjoyed and used. want of reference thus far to memory does not, therefore, signify any lack of appreciation of its worth. no time is likely to come when a low estimate will be placed upon memory. _usual prominence of memorizing as a factor in study, and the result._ how prominent memorizing should be, however, is a question of great importance. the four factors of study that have now been considered are the finding of specific aims, the supplementing of the thought of authors, the organizing of ideas, and the judging of their general worth. these four activities together constitute a large part of what is called _thinking._ memorizing--meaning thereby, in contrast to thinking, the conscious effort to impress ideas upon the mind so that they can be reproduced--has usually been a more prominent part of study than all these four combined. the jesuits, for example, who were leaders in education for two hundred years, made repetition "the mother of studies," and it is still so prominent, even among adults, that the average student regards memorizing as the nearest synonym for the term studying. repetition, or drill, however, is far from an inspiring kind of employment. it involves nothing new or refreshing; it is mere hammering, that makes no claim upon involuntary attention. when it is so prominent, therefore, it stultifies the mind, starving and discouraging the student and defeating the main purpose of study. _reasons for such prominence._ if the work of memorizing is so uninteresting and even injurious, why is it made so prominent? there are probably numerous reasons; but only three will here be considered. in the first place, memorizing is more superficial than real thinking, and people generally prefer to be somewhat superficial and mechanical. it takes energy to dig into things, and, being rather lazy, we are very often content to remain on the outside of them. children show in many little ways how natural it is to be mechanical. for instance, rather than think the ideas _adverb_ and _present active participle,_ they will recognize words ending in _ly_ as adverbs, and those ending in _ing_ as present active participles. they will class words as prepositions or conjunctions by memorizing the entire list of each, rather than by thinking the relations that these parts of speech express. young men and women, likewise, will memorize demonstrations in geometry rather than reason them out, and will memorize other people's opinions rather than attempt to think for themselves. even though it is often really easier to rely upon one's own power to think than upon memory, it takes some depth of nature to recognize the fact and act accordingly. teachers show this tendency as plainly as students. in preparing lesson plans, for example, very few will get beyond what is mechanical and formal. the reason that recitations are so largely memory tests, too, is that teachers put mere memory questions more easily than they put questions that provoke thought. it is, therefore, a well- established natural trait that is back of so much mechanical memorizing. a second reason for the prominence of memorizing is found in the desire to strengthen the memory through its exercise. we know that the arm may be developed by the lifting of weights, so that it will be stronger for lifting anything that comes in its way. so it has long been a common belief that memory, as a faculty of the mind, could be developed by any kind of exercise so as to be stronger for all kinds of recall. many words in spelling, many dates in history, many places in geography, many facts in grammar and even in the more advanced studies, have been learned rather because they were supposed to develop memory than for any other reason. thus the desire of strengthening memory has considerably increased the amount of memorizing. the belief that memorizing normally precedes thinking rather than follows it, is a third very important reason for the prominence of memorizing. "the most important part of every mussulman's training," says batzel, "is to learn the koran, by which must be understood learning it by heart, for it would be wrong to wish to _understand_ the koran till one knew it by heart." [footnote: batzel, _the history of mankind,_ vol. iii, p. .] we hold no conscientious scruples against understanding statements before attempting to memorize them; but one might think that we did, for our practice in memorizing scripture generally corresponds to that of the mussulman in learning the koran. i venture to affirm, also, that the average student habitually begins the study of his lessons by memorizing, with the expectation of doing whatever thinking is necessary later. the average teacher conducts recitations in the same manner. there is the defense for this practice, too, in the fact that it seems logical to get the raw materials for reflection into our possession before trying to reflect upon them. the result, however, is that a surprisingly small amount of thinking is done; for the memorizing requires so much time and energy that, in spite of good intentions, the thinking is postponed for a more convenient season until it constitutes an insignificant part of study, while memorizing, the drudgery of study becomes its main factor. _how this prominence may be reduced._ if it is possible to reduce the prominence of mechanical memorizing, it is highly desirable to do so, for it is unreasonable to defeat the ends of education in the attempt to educate. let us see how this may be accomplished. _ . by providing more motivation._ there is no complete cure for our tendency toward the superficial and mechanical, due to mental laziness; the defect is too deep. yet to the extent that we increase our motive for effort a cure is found. live purposes give force; they make one earnest enough to fix the whole attention upon a task, and to determine to get at the heart of it; they deepen one's nature. full concentration of attention, due to interest and exercise of will power, is one of the chief conditions of rapid memorizing. some of the ways in which such purposes may be supplied have already been discussed in chapter iii. _ . by abandoning attempts to strengthen the general power of memory._ in the second place, we can afford to abandon all attempts to develop the _general power_ of memory. the power of various crude materials to retain impressions that are made upon them varies greatly according to their nature. jelly, for instance, has little such power; sand has little more; clay possesses it in a higher degree, and stone in a far higher still. but whatever persistence of impressions a given lot of any one of these materials may possess, it can never be changed, it is a fixed quantity. the same holds in regard to the brain matter. some men have brains that retain almost everything. professor james tells, [footnote: _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] for instance, of a pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather at the time. he tells further of an acquaintance who remembered the old addresses of numerous new york city friends, addresses that the friends had long since moved from and forgotten; nothing that this man had ever heard or read seemed to escape him. other persons, on the other hand, possess little power to retain names, dates, quotations, and scattered facts; their desultory memory, as it is called, is very poor. but whatever native retentive power any particular brain happens to have, can never be altered. the general persistence of impressions of each person is a physiological or physical power depending on the nature of his brain matter, and it is invariable. "no amount of culture would seem capable of modifying a man's general retentiveness," [footnote: _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] says james. again, "there can be no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory." [footnote: _talks to teachers,_ p. .] our desultory memories, in other words, are given to us once for all. it is commonly supposed, on the contrary, that persons who memorize a great deal, such as actors, greatly strengthen their general memory in that way. "i have carefully questioned several mature actors on the point," says james, "and all have denied that the practice of learning parts has made any such difference as is alleged." [footnote: _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] actors certainly do increase their ability to memorize certain kinds of subject-matter. any one who has much practice in learning lists of names, even, is likely to increase his ability for that and similar tasks, just as one who learns to play tennis well is aided thereby in playing baseball. the reason for such improvement, however, is found largely, if not wholly, in improvement in one's method of work, as will be made clear later, rather than in any increase in general retentive power. while the question of improving the memory is somewhat in dispute, [footnote: see _educational review_ for june, .] and some psychologists assert that _any_ kind of memorizing will have _some_ effect on all other kinds, it is safe to say that mere exercise of memory is, for all practical purposes, useless as a means of strengthening general memory. only those things, therefore, should be memorized that are intrinsically worthy of being reproduced. _ . by improving the method of memorizing._ even though a person's native retentive power cannot be improved, the skill with which he uses whatever power he has can be increased. men who lift pianos find the work very difficult at first; but soon it becomes reasonably easy. the greater ease is not due to any marked increase in strength, but rather to increased skill in using strength. it is due to improvement in method; they learn how. so it may be with memorizing. a large portion of such work is usually awkward, consisting of repetitions that consume much time and energy. but it is possible so to improve the method that memory tasks will occupy comparatively little time. _how facts are recalled._ before discussing ways in which the method of memorizing can be improved, it is necessary to consider how facts are recalled. impressions are not stored away in the brain, and afterward recalled, in an isolated state, or independently of one another. on the contrary, they are more or less intimately related as they are learned, and recall always takes place through association of some sort. "whatever appears in the mind must be _introduced;_ and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something already there." [footnote: james's _talks to teachers,_ p. .] the breakfast i ate this morning recalls the persons who sat around the table; memory of one of those persons reminds me of a task that i was to attend to to-day; that task suggests the fact that i must also go to the bank to get some money, etc. thus every fact that is recalled is marshaled forth by the aid of some other that is connected with it, and which acts as the cue to it. this is so fully true that there is even the possibility of tracing our sequence of ideas backward step by step as far as we wish. "the laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations breaking on us from without," says james. [footnote: _ibid._] _how method of memorizing may be improved._ since any idea is recalled through its connection with other ideas, the greater the number and the closeness of such relations, the better chance it stands to be reproduced. improvement in one's method of memorizing, in other words, must consist mainly in increasing the number and closeness of associations among facts. a list of unrelated words is extremely difficult to remember; every additional relation furnishes a new approach to any fact; and, the closer this relation, the more likely it is to cause the reproduction. _ . by more of less mechanical association._ even the simplest associations, that are largely mechanical, may be important aids to memory. for example, it is much easier to learn the telephone number _ _ by remembering that the sum of the first three numbers forms the fourth than by memorizing each figure separately. _teacher_ is a word whose spelling often causes trouble; but when _teach_ is associated with _each_, which is seldom misspelled, the difficulty is removed. _there_ and _their_ are two words whose spelling is a source of much confusion; but it is overcome when _there_ is associated with _where_ and _here,_ and _their_ with _her, your, our,_ etc. _sight, site,_ and _cite_ are still worse stumbling-blocks in spelling; but the difficulty is largely overcome when _sight_ is firmly associated with _light_ and _night, site_ with _situation,_ and _cite_ with _recite._ the association of the sound of a word with its meaning is an important help in remembering the meanings of some words, as _rasping,_ for example. professor james, i believe, tells of some one who forgot his umbrella so often that he practiced associating _umbrella_ with _doorway_ until the two ideas were almost inseparable. then, whenever he passed through a doorway on his way out of doors, he was reminded to take his umbrella along. while there might be some disadvantages in this particular association, it forcibly suggests the value of association in general. the various mnemonic systems that have been so widely advertised have usually been nothing more than plans for the mechanical association of facts. sometimes, to be sure, it has been more difficult to remember the system than to memorize the facts themselves; yet they, too, give witness to the value of association. i once asked a thirteen-year-old girl, in a history class, when eli whitney lived. she gave the exact month and day, but failed to recall either the year or the part of the century, or even the century. her answer showed plainly that her method of study was doubly wrong; for she not only offended against relative values in learning the month and day while forgetting the century, but she revealed no tendency to associate whitney's invention with any particular period of history. even cross-questioning brought no such tendency to light. she was depending on mere retentiveness to hold dates in mind. the habit of memorizing facts in this disconnected way is common among adults as well as children, and as a remedy against it the student should form the habit of frequently asking himself the question, "with what am i associating this fact or idea?" in contrast with associations that are more or less mechanical, there are vital associations that are possible in all studies containing rich subject-matter. _ . by close thought association. ( ) through attention to the outline._ early association of the principal ideas, or early recognition of the outline of thought, is perhaps the most important of these. one can proceed sentence by sentence, or "bit by bit," in memorizing as in thinking, adding one such fragment after another until the whole is learned. but the early recognition of the main ideas in their proper sequence is far superior. these essentials give peculiar control over the details by grouping them in an orderly manner and furnishing their cue so that the whole is more easily memorized. this is true even in the case of verbal memorizing, as is evidenced by a certain minister quoted by professor james. "as for memory, mine has improved year by year, except when in ill-health, like a gymnast's muscle. before twenty it took three or four days to commit an hour-long sermon; after twenty, two days, one day, one-half day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesive reading does it. but memory seems to me the most physical of intellectual powers. bodily ease and freshness have much to do with it. then there is great difference <of facility in method. i used to commit _sentence_ by _sentence._ now i take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions, then its subdivisions, then its sentences." [footnote: james, _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] thus early attention to organization is a large factor in memorizing, as in study that aims principally at comprehension of the thought. where good organization is wanting,--as in tracing lessons in geography, and other mere tests of facts,--this aid to memorizing is lacking, and one must depend more upon brute memory power. on the other hand, where the portions of one's knowledge have become so closely interrelated and so well organized that they form a well-knit system of thought, one's ability to remember may be surprising. spencer and darwin were examples of men whose ideas were thus organized. neither of them possessed phenomenal memories to start with; but their observations so generally found a group of close relations to sustain them, and these groups were associated with one another in such a close and orderly way, that the outline of the whole could be easily surveyed, and any fact could be quickly reproduced, just as any book can be speedily found in a well-organized library. thus, as we grow older, if the organization of our knowledge is improving, the power of reproducing it will likewise be increasing. _( ) through comparisons._ comparisons are another means of establishing valuable thought connections. study by topics, also, furnishes special opportunity for comparisons. "it is generally better," says james baldwin, "to learn what different writers have thought and said concerning that matter of which you are making a special study. not many books are to be read hastily through." [footnote: james baldwin, _the book lover,_ p. .] koopman likewise declares, "a single trial will prove to any student the superiority, in interest, of the topical and comparative over the chronological and consecutive method of studying history." [footnote: koopman, _mastery of books,_ p. .] again, "the student who has not known the pleasure of reading _all_ the works of an author, as a study in personality, has a great source of enjoyment still before him." [footnote: _ibid.,_ p. .] many persons have the feeling that it is a moral duty, after having begun a book, to read it through. here is the recommendation that our reading for a time "converge to one point"; that we find, for example, what several psychologies have to say on one topic, such as memory, rather than read one psychology from cover to cover. the value of comparison for thoroughness has already been emphasized. its value from the view-point of memory is great, not only because it insures more lasting impressions due to increased interest, as just suggested, but also because each new comparison, while reviewing, also establishes new and closer associations among old ideas. _memorizing of kipling's "seal lullaby."_ according to the above, we can best memorize by establishing whatever associations seem interesting and reasonable. take, for instance, kipling's seal lullaby:-- oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us, and black are the waters that sparkled so green. the moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us at rest in the hollows that rustle between. where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow; ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease! the storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas. the music of the rhythm leads one to read it aloud from time to time. the first two lines are an announcement of bedtime; the next three tell where the resting place is, and the last three give assurance of safety--that is the outline. any one has often observed how black the waters become as night approaches, and the picture is vividly recalled as the first couplet is read. "combers" is almost a strange word, but its use makes its meaning reasonably clear. is there a cradle of some sort? and a good pillow, too? is there any tenderness indicated on the part of the mother? any pet names applied? what dangers might cause uneasiness? which is the most beautiful part? what lullabies of our childhood does this recall? how does this one compare in beauty with "rock-a-bye-baby"? let us sing each, in order to judge. what marked contrast is there between the two, in the latter part? i first ran across this lullaby in company with two friends, to each of whom it was entirely new. it appealed to us so strongly that we read it aloud several times and talked it over. we considered some questions such as the above, and compared it with "rock-a-bye-baby," disagreeing somewhat in our opinions. when we left it, each of us nearly or quite knew it by heart, although we had scarcely thought of trying to memorize it. in this way the association of ideas with one another, particularly with things that have been long cherished, is a very valuable aid to memory. _where the fault in cramming lies._ to some persons this method of memorizing through association of ideas will seem very slow. it must be acknowledged that there is a more rapid way, called _cramming._ every mature student has found that, under great pressure, he can commit to memory the substance of thought, and even the words, for an astonishing amount of matter. the difficulty is, however, that it will hold only up to a certain hour, the hour after examination, for example; then it goes so rapidly that one can fairly feel it slipping away. such rapid memorizing is a witness to the value of very close attention in study; but the rapid escape is testimony to the necessity of a closer association of facts. owing to undue haste the ideas are crowded into the memory without becoming intimately related, or tied together, in numerous ways. then, when some part is forgotten, as is sure to happen, the other parts, being unrelated to it, offer no cue for its reproduction. thus one part after another is lost; and, even though the ideas are closely related by nature, the lack of appreciation of such relationship on the part of the student allows the whole to escape as rapidly as mere lists of facts. to be firmly remembered, either a great amount of drill is necessary, or else the ideas must be _assimilated_, and assimilation cannot be hurried in this manner. _the principal means of making mechanical memorization less prominent._ the ordinary plan of study, by which memorizing precedes thinking, results, as we have seen, in crowding out thinking by leaving little time and energy for it. memorizing thus becomes a substitute for thinking, and makes study an extremely dull task. this is an inversion, however, of the true order. if thinking is made to precede conscious attempts to memorize, the nourishing character of study is assured, and direct attempts at memorizing become largely unnecessary, because most of the memorizing has already been accomplished unconsciously. in other words, _memorizing then becomes a by-product of thinking, instead of a substitute for it._ we often regret the prominence of memorizing in study, and here is probably the principal means of reducing it. there will be less of it, to the extent that we do more thinking; and there will be far more thinking if we put thinking first in time, thereby making it first in importance. i once saw kipling's _seal lullaby_ presented to seven-year-old children. the teacher read it aloud from the blackboard, then the class read it. then the class set to work to memorize it, a line or two at a time. this was a good example of bad method, for adults as well as for children. if they had planned first to _enjoy_ the poem by trying to read it several times aloud with expression, by talking it over, illustrating it and singing it, the memorizing would have taken care of itself. as it was, their teacher's haste to have it _learned,_ amounted to a direct advocacy of the principle of cramming; for they were attempting to memorize through force rather than through association of ideas. one reason older students practice cramming to such an extent is that they have never been fully taught a better method; the schools have never fully stood for a better method of memorizing. so long as memorizing is put first in time, and therefore in importance, those persons who have quick memories will be held up as the ideal students, whether they have higher abilities or not. quick memories, however, are poor educators indeed unless they are coupled with unusual earnestness and energy. with all classes of students, therefore, the thinking should habitually precede attempts to memorize. _examples of improvement in memory through closer attention and better method._ from all that has been said, it is plain that _how_ to memorize is closely bound up with the question _when_ to memorize. we are now ready to appreciate the statement that good memorizing is really good thinking, and that improvement in memory is mainly improvement in attention and in method of thinking. this is in general true, even in spite of some opinions to the contrary. thurlow weed, the journalist and politician, for example, greatly increased his ability to remember, and attributed the improvement to an increase in his general power of memory, due to its exercise. he relates his experience in the following words:-- my memory was a sieve. i could remember nothing. dates, names, appointments, faces--everything escaped me. i said to my wife, "catherine, i shall never make a successful politician, for i cannot remember, and that is a prime necessity of politicians." my wife told me i must train my memory. so, when i came home that night, i sat down and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall with accuracy the principal events of the day. i could remember but little at first; now i remember that i could not then recall what i had for breakfast. after a few days' practice i found i could recall more. events came back to me more minutely, more accurately, and more vividly than at first. after a fortnight or so of this, catherine said, "why don't you relate to me the events of the day, instead of recalling them to yourself? it would be interesting, and my interest in it would be a stimulus to you." having great respect for my wife's opinion, i began a habit of oral confession, as it were, which was continued for almost fifty years. every night, the last thing before retiring, i told her everything i could remember that had happened to me, or about me, during the day, i generally recalled the dishes i had had for breakfast, dinner, and tea; the people i had seen, and what they had said; the editorials i had written for my paper, giving her a brief abstract of them. i mentioned all the letters i had sent and received, and the very language used, as nearly as possible; when i had walked or ridden--i told her everything that had come within my observation. i found i could say my lessons better and better every year, and instead of the practice growing irksome, it became a pleasure to go over again the events of the day. i am indebted to this discipline for a memory of somewhat unusual tenacity, and i recommend the practice to all who wish to store up facts, or expect to have much to do with influencing men. [footnote: quoted by james, _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] professor james comments on this experience as follows:-- i do not doubt that mr. weed's practical command of his past experiences was much greater after fifty years of this heroic drill than it would have been without it. expecting to give his account in the evening, he _attended_ better to each incident of the day, named and conceived it differently, set his mind upon it, and in the evening went over it again. he did more _thinking_ about it, and it stayed with him in consequence. but i venture to affirm pretty confidently... that the same matter, casually attended to and not thought about, would have stuck in his memory no better at the end than at the beginning of his years of heroic self-discipline. he had acquired a better method of noting and recording his experiences, but his physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit improved. [footnote: james, _psychology,_ vol. i, p. .] again, as to the memorizing of facts by actors, professor james says:-- what it has done for them is to improve their power of _studying_ a part systematically. their mind is now full of precedents in the way of intonation, emphasis, gesticulation; the new words awaken distinct suggestions and decisions; are caught up, in fact, into a preexisting network, like the merchant's prices or the athlete's store of records, and are recollected easier, although the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved, and is usually, in fact, impaired by age. it is a case of better remembering by better thinking. similarly when schoolboys improve by practice in ease of learning by heart, the improvement will, i am sure, be always found to reside in the _mode of study of the particular piece_ (due to the greater interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity with other pieces, the more sustained attention, etc., etc.) and not at all to any enhancement of the brute retentive power. [footnote: _ibid._, p. .] _the prominence of drill._ it still remains to consider the extent to which mere repetition or drill should be prominent. some help toward an answer may be found in certain recent investigations into the value of drill, and in certain recent improvements in method. spelling, arithmetic, and language being the subjects that have required the largest amount of drill, these will be the principal studies here considered. dr. o. p. cornman in his _spelling in the elementary school_ recounts some very interesting investigations into the value of drill in that subject. in two schools, each containing the usual eight grades, the use of the spelling book and home lessons in the subject were abandoned for a period of three years. at the same time the period which had been devoted to studying and reciting in spelling in school was omitted from the school program, making the mastery of spelling entirely an incidental matter. the results thus obtained were then compared with the results previously obtained in spelling in those two schools, and also in a number of other schools that devoted from ten to fifty minutes daily to spelling. the conclusion reached was that "the spelling drill as at present administered throughout the country adds little or nothing to the effectiveness of the mere incidental teaching of spelling"; [footnote: cornman, _spelling in the elementary school,_ p. .] or, again, that it "is of so little importance as to be practically negligible." [footnote: _ibid.,_ p. .] this result may have been due to a considerable extent to poor texts in spelling and to the ineffective methods of drilling used. a large portion of the time spent on arithmetic in the first six grades is usually occupied with drill. some schools devote a full fifth of their time to this study, thus making the drill in arithmetic very prominent. it is commonly supposed that so much repetition greatly improves the results. yet, according to investigations undertaken by dr. c. w. stone, "a large amount of time spent on arithmetic is no guarantee of a high degree of efficiency. if one were to choose at random among the schools with more than the median time given to arithmetic, the chances are that he would get a school with an inferior product; and, conversely, if one were to choose among the schools with less than the median time cost, the chances are about equal that he would get a school with a superior product in arithmetic." [footnote: stone, _arithmetical abilities: some factors determining them,_ p. .] such conclusions as these give ground for suspicion of any very large amount of drill, even in these drill subjects; it involves too much waste. one important reason for the waste is the fact that drills usually are uninteresting or lack motive, and on that account attention lags, until one learns slowly or not at all. it is true that one can and ought to _will_ to do certain necessary things. but even adults are so made that an act of will insures close attention for only a moment at a time, then attention lags again; sustained attention is assured only when the work undertaken is subordinated to some real interest, so that attention is involuntary. recent advances in method of studying language offer further suggestions in regard to the advisable prominence of drill. in the study of modern languages, for example, it used to be the custom to depend largely upon drill for the mastery of a vocabulary, and of the forms of the verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. likewise in teaching children to read english it was customary for much drill on new words to precede the actual use of such words in reading. now much more rapid progress is effected both in modern languages and in our vernacular by greatly increasing the amount of matter read and decreasing, correspondingly, the quantity of drill. the suggestion, therefore, is here made that not only the extensive drills of former times involve much waste, but also that they are probably unnecessary. further than that, since a closer and more abundant association of facts has already eliminated a large amount of drill, it may be expected that the good work of elimination will go on much farther. very extensive drills in the future, therefore, do not promise to be a recommendation for the teacher who is responsible for employing them; they will be the resort of those persons who lack the energy or ability to do a higher kind of work, that is, to _think_. we need not congratulate ourselves, however, that drills will ever disappear entirely; some drill, like some punishments for children, will probably always be in place, and a considerable amount is still necessary. we must expect a fair amount because we shall probably never be bright enough to make the associations of ideas fully take the place of review by drill. in particular it must be remembered that those portions of our knowledge that we expect to use daily must become second nature to us, or be reduced to habit; that means that many facts must become familiar enough to be reproduced instantly without effort. that is the case, for example, with the multiplication table. thoughtful association is only a good beginning in the formation of habits; repetition also has a very important place, which must be continued until the knowledge stands at our command "without thinking." the ability of children to memorize by thinking _the crucial question._ no one doubts the ability of children to memorize; that is the one thing that they have always been known to be able to do. one argument for teaching them foreign languages as well as many things unintelligible to them now, but possibly useful later, is that they can learn them so easily. that is the ground also, on which much verbatim memorizing of literature and scripture, that they could not hope soon to appreciate, has been required of them. the crucial question in this connection, therefore, is not, "can children memorize?" but rather, "are they capable of more than mechanical memorizing, or learning by rote? can they think well enough to memorize largely through association of ideas, like older persons?" _children's ability to memorize by thinking._ the answer to this question has already been practically given. it has been shown that children can conceive specific purposes; can supplement the thought of authors; can measure the relative importance of facts well enough to establish fair organization among them; and can judge the soundness and general worth of statements. they not only _can_ do these things, but they normally do do them; their present daily lives constantly call for these several kinds of mental activity. these several factors, however, largely compose the activity of associating ideas with one another, or of thinking. children can, therefore, memorize through thinking, just as naturally as adults can. _the desirable prominence of such memorizing in childhood._ while very extensive drills are perhaps generally recognized as questionable in the case of adult students, there is a tendency to regard them as entirely proper in childhood. and the helplessness of children--in spite of frequent little rebellions on their part--prevents the establishment of a contrary conviction. we admit that a considerable amount of drill is guaranteed to children through the three r's and spelling, whether any one approves of it or not. but what about much beyond this minimum? shall the teacher willingly increase the amount by neglecting possible associations within those four subjects, and also by requiring much memorizing of literature and facts in other subjects that cannot be appreciated at the time? or shall she regard the close association of ideas as the normal activity of children and a great quantity of drill and rote learning as at least verging on the abnormal and the unhealthy? these are questions of great importance in the instruction of children. it seems safe to affirm that, in general, there are the same reasons for regarding drill and thoughtless memorizing as an evil--though to some extent a necessary one--in childhood as in adult life. indeed, if there be any difference, the evil is probably greater in childhood, for drill furnishes no nourishment to childhood, while that is peculiarly the period of growth, when abundance of nourishment is most important. granted that the ability of children to memorize things that do not brighten the eye is striking, it must be remembered that their mental and moral growth in numerous directions is also striking. it is far more important that their spiritual welfare as a whole be provided for--as live ideas lying within their sphere of experience can be made to provide for it--than that they starve themselves now for the sake of storing up material for the future. the latter plan shows a very low estimate of child-nature, and a misapprehension of the relation of the present to the future. aside from this, it is in the elementary school that children must mainly acquire their permanent habits of study; the methods of work there acquired will not be made over on entering the high school or college. if they there become accustomed to beginning their lessons by memorizing, and to memorizing words without appreciating their import, the chances are good that they will have the same habits later. why not, if there is anything in habit? at least, they will have much to overcome if they reform. on the other hand, if they there begin the mastery of lessons by studying the thought, and memorize largely through the association of ideas, they are likely to continue that plan later. by thus becoming thoughtful in regard to childish matters, they give best promise of being thoughtful on larger subjects later. in all these remarks there is no intention of making philosophers out of children; but there is a feeling of the necessity of preserving and developing their live-mindedness. opposition to this feeling indicates that children are not expected to do much thinking even in their own sphere of experience. practical suggestions for teaching children to memorize properly other things being equal, the depth and hence the permanence of impressions varies as the degree of attention varies. for example, if a child's whole attention is given to a name, or a date, or the spelling of a word, he may retain it in memory after having heard it only once; otherwise it may have to be repeated several times. _ . need of concentration of attention, and method of securing it._ children, however, easily fall into the securing it. habit of dividing their attention between work and play, so that half of their time is wasted; yet they labor under the impression that there is much virtue merely in _spending time_ on lessons. divided attention is not confined to children, either. it is frequently observed that announcements made before large schools are never understood rightly by _all,_ simply because there are always some who are thinking partly of something else. a certain professor of english in one of our large universities has for years been in the habit of dictating the following directions, with illustrations, to his students beginning composition: "fold the paper lengthwise from right to left, leaving the single edge to your right hand. endorse on the first three lines. do not use abbreviations in writing the date. omit all punctuation, or, if you punctuate, use commas at ends of lines and after date of month." in classes ranging from forty to seventy-five persons, as many as per cent have failed to follow these directions. what better proof is needed of common laxness of attention? to remedy this evil among children teachers would do well to refer much less to the _time_ spent in study and much more to the _kind_ of attention given. more than that can be done. children are often directed to "pay close attention," or to "concentrate their attention fully," sometimes without comprehending the meaning of the command, and more often without knowing what steps to take in order to obey. both difficulties can be partially overcome by fixing time limits to tasks, even in the lower grades. for example, two minutes can be announced as the limit for reading a half page in the second reader. under that stimulus the children will do their best; and when they have undergone several such tests successfully, reference to these tests will explain what is meant by close attention; reference to their successes also will instill confidence that they know how to give close attention, for they can do again what they have already frequently done. the dawdling that is so common among children is partly due to lack of an ideal, and such time limits should be resorted to somewhat frequently in order to keep the ideal fresh in mind, as well as to cultivate confidence that the ideal can be realized. military governments often obtain undivided attention to a remarkable degree, showing that attention is a thing that can be cultivated in some directions. similar determination to secure it should be exercised in the school, only the pressure applied should be of a different kind. _ . danger of cramming and its avoidance._ college students are not the only ones who gulp down facts, hold them undigested for a few hours, and then disgorge them. many children study largely in this way in preparation for their daily recitations, as is shown by the fact that they retain facts a very short time, even though they seem to know each day's lessons. it is true in spelling, for example, and in geography and history. it is true likewise in verbatim memorizing of poetry and bible verses on sunday mornings. the general remedy for this evil is found in the requirement that ideas be associated, and as far as possible enjoyed, before any special attempt is made to memorize. this is most difficult in spelling; but some associations are possible there, as suggested (p. ). it is comparatively easy in geography and history, after children have received some instruction as to method. it is impossible in verbatim memorizing of literature, if selections are made that are far beyond children's appreciation. but there is no need of such selections; there are plenty of poems and bible verses that can be at least partly understood and really enjoyed by very young people, and it is that kind that should be chosen. naturally the thinking that is thus required cannot be expected in large amount from the younger children, for they will feel and enjoy much more than they can analyze. also, it should, perhaps, be expected very little in memorizing that is entirely voluntary, as when a poem is learned by some child simply because he likes it. but memorizing that is a part of school work, and therefore a part of serious study, should be undertaken in this way, because it is the right way. the number of associations, too, is not so important as the method of study that the child gradually adopts. _ . ways of leading children to memorize through thinking in study periods._ how children study in preparation for the recitation will depend upon how the recitation itself is conducted, upon what is _first_ called for there and what is most emphasized. the reason that memorizing constitutes the main part of study, not only in the elementary school, but in the high school and the college, is that reproduction has been the principal thing required in the recitations all along the line. it is the character of the recitation, therefore, that must first be changed. the questions that are considered in the recitation are the factor of greatest influence. if the children find that the teacher's questions usually begin with what, or where, or when, thereby merely calling for direct reproduction of the substance of text, she may talk ever so much about right methods of study, but they will memorize before thinking and without thinking. very many of the questions should test not so much knowledge of the text as the pupil's way of treating the text. the spirit of the teacher's usual general question should be, how have you associated or related these facts? and some of her detailed questions might well be: what object do you see in studying this topic? what statements here need filling out, and how have you done it? what are the most important ideas here? or the most beautiful? how do these statements remind you of others that you already know? have you found any of these statements questionable? and, if so, how? thus the conduct of the recitation will show the kinds of questions that must be expected. gradually the teacher should refrain from putting the questions herself and leave that to the pupils. that becomes very important as they mature; for how otherwise will they learn to study alone? the questions should include higher forms of comparison far more than is customary. much of the study of geography, for example, should consist of the comparison of countries with one another. poems should be compared and grouped. _the children's hour, snow-bound, evangeline,_ and the parable of the prodigal son taken together reveal a conception of home life that is not obtained by the study of literary selections in an isolated way. so burke's three addresses, _on taxation,_ in , _on conciliation,_ in , and _letters to the sheriffs of bristol,_ in , throw light on one another and form a unit. such comparisons continually review original facts, and in that way eliminate much customary drill. preparation for such comparison in the study period properly puts mere memorizing far in the background. the cross lights that different studies throw upon one another through careful correlation--as when literature and history deal with the same topic--are valuable in a similar manner and should be included in the questions that are considered. finally, when the text is so intolerably dull that it discourages reflection, instead of stimulating it,--as is not seldom the case,--it very often lies within the teacher's power to accomplish her objects mainly by the use of other books that are supplementary and for reference. this she should do without hesitation. much routine drill on geography text, for instance, can be avoided by using geographical readers. pointed questions, of course, would be in control here as in other cases. these various thought questions, coming from teacher and pupils, should not be reserved until toward the close of the recitation, to be put then _if any time is left._ that defeats their object. they should occupy the time from the beginning of the period; it is the memory questions that should follow, if there is time and if they are needed. the order in time for the thinking and the special attempt to memorize is one of the most vital matters, and it is highly important that the recitation itself stand for the order that is expected in private study. _ . conditions for the best kind of drill._ while it is the sign of a weak mind to give great prominence to drill, some drill is unavoidable. there are two conditions that must be fulfilled in order to secure the best kind. one is that sufficient motive be provided to secure very close attention. the use of motor activity may be an important aid in this direction, as when children are allowed to walk about and point in locating places in geography, to dramatize in reproducing literature, and to use sand and clay in representation of various kinds. emulation is a powerful motive, but has so many dangers that it should be used sparingly. the cooperative spirit is the kind that the school should cultivate, and heated competition does not readily lead to cooperation. there is, however, much profit and no danger in making comparisons among one's own products. the teacher herself may be one of the most potent factors securing close attention. if she has force and has cultivated the friendship of her pupils until they are anxious to please her, her appeals to their own wills will not be in vain. if, in addition, her skill in handling a class inspires confidence, she can do much toward conducting her class through drills without waste of time. very many drills are failures mainly because the teacher is a poor manager, not knowing how to distribute materials quietly and quickly and to assign and supervise work so that all are kept busy. the strong personality, however, has its dangers, also, for it may _carry_ children through drills instead of letting them carry themselves. in the main, unless children furnish their own steam when they work with a teacher, they will have little steam to do work when left to themselves. the healthiest provision for motive in drills is found in the recognition of a given drill as a necessary step toward the accomplishment of some already greatly desired end. a child will willingly practice mixing colors in order to obtain a certain shade, if he is much interested in painting a certain kind of calendar. and he will gladly drill upon the rendering of a poem, if he is anxious to surprise his mother with it on her birthday. such subordination of uninteresting tasks to larger purposes is highly educative, and no one has found the limit to which it can be carried. the second condition of successful drills is that they be short. even under the most favorable circumstances children cannot long remain alert on subject-matter that lacks intrinsic interest. in brief, therefore, drills to be effective must be made sharp by the presence of motive, and must be short. chapter viii the using of ideas, as a sixth factor in study _the indefiniteness of the endpoint of study._ the student has accomplished much when he has discovered some of the closer relations that a topic bears to life; when he has supplemented the thought of the author; when he has determined the relative importance of different parts and given them a corresponding organization; when he has passed judgment on their soundness and general worth; and when, finally, he has gone through whatever drill is necessary to fix the ideas firmly in his memory. is he then through with a topic, or is more work to be done? digestion of food is likewise a long process, the food having to be acted upon in various ways in the mouth, the stomach, and the intestines. but with food there is always a certain end to be reached, called assimilation, which is the actual changing of its nutriment into the solids and liquids of our bodies. is there a similarly definite end to be reached in the study process? it must be admitted that while we can define this end somewhat sharply in words, it is very difficult to know when it has been actually reached. many a business man has felt convinced that he understood a certain business project perfectly, until the outcome has proved the contrary. business failures are largely due to such deception. even highly educated men are often surprised at their want of mastery of questions that they had supposed to be fully within their grasp. socrates spent much of his time bringing such surprises to the promising but overconfident young men of athens. robert y. hayne, the distinguished champion of nullification, no doubt experienced such a surprise when webster delivered his great speech on that subject. the actual mastery of subjects is perhaps never complete; it is only relative. even a child may have as good a grasp of one subject as a philosopher has of another, and each may be deceived in regard to the extent of his understanding. the common ignorance as to how much study is necessary for the mastery of knowledge is suggested by the common ignorance as to how much work is necessary for the assimilation of food. it takes from three to five hours for food that has been eaten to get beyond the stomach, and people ordinarily assume that the assimilative process is pretty well completed by that time. the fact is, however, that it is then only well begun; for it requires from ten to twelve hours to dispose fully of a meal, and most of the work of digestion takes place _after_ the food leaves the stomach. while the assimilation of knowledge is what the student is supposed to aim at, how much that involves is even less understood. _importance of as great definiteness in the endpoint as possible._ in the digestion of food our organisms provide for themselves, so that we do not need to worry greatly over some ignorance of the process. but our responsibility in the assimilation of knowledge is much greater, for that does not go on uninterruptedly even while we sleep; it will be carried only so far as we have the energy and insight to take it. that being the case, it is very easy for one to stop too soon in the study of a topic. for instance, when a lesson in history has been only memorized, the digestive process has been carried little further than physical digestion has been taken when food reaches the stomach. that is, it is barely begun. yet very many young people stop near this point, and they sometimes even take credit to themselves for getting so far. we might add comprehension of the thought to the work of memorizing and still be far from the end. we can have comprehended and memorized the beatitudes, for example, and be as free from any effect from them as the proverbial duck's back is from the effect of water. we can pass good examinations in psychology and logic with the same absence of influence. that certainly does not signify assimilation. assimilation means the spiritual nourishment that is received by making new thought homogeneous with one's own thought, by making it an integral part of one's self. remembering how young people generally study, it seems probable that many of them spend a large part of their time providing for nourishment that they never get. they do a lot of hard work collecting the raw materials of knowledge without working them over so as to reap either the pleasure or the profit intended. here is where some of the waste in education lies. it is highly important, therefore, that the student reach as definite as possible a conception of the endpoint to be attained in study. although the meaning of assimilation may not be perfectly clear, a few of its characteristics at least may be distinguished, so that we can feel some certainty as to how far we have got in the process, and have some notion as to how much more must be done in order to reach the approximate goal. _the endpoint accepted in mastery of the useful arts._ study of the useful arts, such as the various trades, consists of two distinct parts. on the one hand, facts must be mastered that pertain to the nature of materials, to methods of using implements or tools, and to plans tor construction. in cabinet-making, for example, the qualities of woods and paints, the rules for using the saw, plane, and chisel, and the various ideas governing designs for household furniture must all receive attention. in other words, a considerable body of theory must be acquired. on the other hand, this theory must find application under particular conditions; a table must be made out of certain materials, with certain tools, according to a certain design. this also involves much thinking; but, in addition to all that, there is execution of theory, called doing or practice. there is, further, a definite relation between these two parts, for the theory is merely a means to an end. what is wanted is a good product, and the theory is valuable to the extent that it affects the product. the useful arts, as studies, stand, therefore, both for theory and for the application or use of theory, and the latter is the goal. no one thinks of pursuing any one of the trades without including the use of his knowledge in practice as the culminating part of his work. to what extent should other branches of knowledge resemble the useful arts in their combination of knowledge with the use of knowledge? should the use of ideas be their goal? the answer must depend upon one's conception of the purpose of life in general and, therefore, of education. _the endpoint in the study of other subjects._ abilities of various kinds in the animal world find their purpose not in themselves but in adaptation to environment. fear on the part of the rabbit, for instance, increases its speed in running, and in that way protects its life. the bear's strength aids in repelling its enemies, and the intelligence of both animals finds its purpose both in protection against enemies and in finding food. living, in the case of animals, thus means _getting on,_ and any ability, whether physical or intellectual, is of importance to the extent that it makes such getting on successful. the endpoint among animals, then, is the _use_ of their powers in effecting adaptation to their environment. man's environment is far broader than that of animals, being moral and spiritual as well as physical. but his relation to it is substantially the same; for his success is likewise measured by the degree of adaptation accomplished. human abilities are not mainly valuable in themselves, but rather as means in securing fuller adaptation, "complete living"; that is, they are valuable for their use. the end to be attained in education is in full harmony with this idea. the object of education most emphasized in recent years is _efficiency,_ which means power to accomplish. it presupposes a good degree of intelligence, the more the better, but it goes beyond that; for an efficient person is one who _does_ things. knowledge without the ability to apply or _use_ it leaves one theoretical, which, is a term of reproach. the various subjects of instruction recognize the necessity of use very plainly. painting and music, for example, contain, each, a large body of theory. they also include an abundance of practice, a practice, too, that centers in the betterment of man's condition. literature deals largely with ideals, presenting the theory of living. but this theory is valuable chiefly as a guide to conduct. the student of literature who professes admiration for its ideas without applying them to himself has derived only a small part of the benefit from it that he should. literature is like religion in this respect. the latter emphasizes the worth of insight into divine truth and of faith in god; but both this insight and faith are to find their fruitage in conduct. "pure religion and undefiled before god and the father is this," says the apostle, "to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." [footnote: james , .] similarly, a study of philosophy that does not end in affecting our own philosophy of life, and thereby our conduct, has been unsuccessful, even though examinations have been successfully passed. pure science is knowledge that has been proved and properly organized; and it is highly desirable that specialists devote their lives to its further development. the main reason, however, is that its applications may finally be more abundant; and science used for the purpose of education must recognize the relation of such knowledge to man as one of its integral and prominent parts. so long as efficiency is the recognized purpose of education, there is little excuse for a young person's studying science apart from its applications, or pure science. there is some profit in it, but there is more profit in something better. that kind of study should be left to the specialist. much has been said in times past about art for art's sake, science for the sake of science, and knowledge for the sake of knowledge; but these are vague expressions that will excite little interest so long as the worth of a man is determined by what comes out of him, by the service he renders, rather than by what enters in. other branches of knowledge used for educative purposes, therefore, resemble the useful arts in the recognition of their bearings on man, their actual use as the goal in their study. _why the using of knowledge as an endpoint in study needs emphasis._ it might be unnecessary to emphasize this matter were it not that this conception of study has been reached only after long development and is still actively opposed. the old greeks stood for a very different idea. to plato, the use of the intellect for practical purposes was subordinate and almost disgraceful. the summation of existence was to be found in reflection, and the ambition of the educated man was to escape from the concrete world, in order to live in the world of abstract truth. many of the monks of the middle ages resembled the ancient greeks in this regard, desiring to separate themselves as completely as possible from society for the sake of the contemplation of spiritual matters. reflection, contemplation, was thus not a means to an end but an end in itself, and the thinker or dreamer, rather than the efficient man, was the ideally educated person. that goal is now condemned for its extreme selfishness; we want men and women as citizens who are glad to identify themselves with their fellow beings and ambitious for efficient service among them, not those who conscientiously ignore the world. yet there are still plain tendencies in this direction, as is seen in the fact that an education that is liberal and cultural is often contrasted with one that is useful as being of a higher order. "that alone is liberal education," says cardinal newman, "which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be _informed_ (as it is called) by any end or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation." [footnote: _scope and nature of university education,_ p. .] liberal education is something which "is desirable, though nothing come of it"; "worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does." art for art's sake, rather than art for man's sake, would thus represent the true spirit of a liberal college course, in the estimation of this author; the admission of service to mankind as a prominent purpose, particularly as its goal, would deprive it of its liberal character, and in the same degree expose it to condemnation. that is strange doctrine indeed. liberal is originally a term opposed to narrow and restricted, and a liberal education might properly be contrasted with the very narrow bread-and-butter kind that aims at the mastery of art without theory. but how the restriction caused by the presence of worthy specific purposes of a thousand kinds is inimical to the broadening effects of study and to its general value is difficult to comprehend. the hypothesis guiding a scientific investigation narrows the work only enough to give it point, and a well-chosen particular aim will have the same effect on any study. further than that, the consciousness in advance that any conclusions reached must be tested by actual conditions has only a good influence by nerving us to do our best; and the actual test is of value in informing us as to the degree of soundness of our ideas. all persons must be shocked by the misfit between what they supposed to be true and what they find by trial to be fact, before they will waken up and do their best thinking. the superabundance of advice that bachelor uncles and maiden aunts offer in regard to the rearing of children is due to the fact that their theory has not been refined by practice. it is the direct contact with the world in the _use_ of knowledge that reveals the latter's real significance and that converts it into experience; and it is only the knowledge that becomes experience that really counts in education. again, in arguing the question of allowing normal schools to grant degrees, a certain well-known educator declares: "where ability to exercise a practical art is concerned, degrees are or should be valueless. they should be restricted merely to the position of evidences of culture. for this reason normal schools should not grant degrees." [footnote: _year book of national society for scientific study of education,_ , p. .] our better normal schools--which are the only kind that might be expected to grant degrees--give instruction in literature, history, geography, fine art, etc., the same as the degree-conferring colleges. to these subjects the normal school adds the history of education and the principles of education, which are presumably harmless so long as they are not applied, and they usually are not. there remain then the subjects that involve practice, such as special method courses, applied psychology and practice teaching; these must be the baneful studies. the good four- year normal school course presumably requires as much thinking and other strenuous work as that of the college. but the presence of the last group of subjects signifies that this study is to culminate in the _use_ of knowledge; and there's the rub. it is this latter fact that vitiates the course and precludes the cultural effect that a college course insures. if this is a proper interpretation, it is, indeed, strange doctrine. one can understand how carpentry might not have as great a cultural effect as literature; but one would think that, if the untested and therefore half-digested thoughts of literature have a certain cultural effect, the same thoughts might have a fuller refining influence if their meaning and force were more fully realized in the way their use in life might secure their realization; and one would think that the same might hold in regard to any subject. the difficulty is that there are two opposing notions of culture. on the one hand there are persons who conceive culture to be a refinement that is directly endangered by contact with the realities of life, for instance by participation in local politics and other social contests, and by such practice of charity as must be accompanied by physical exertion and bad smells. culture is, to them, the name for that serenity and loftiness of mind that can be attained and preserved only by keeping a safe distance from the madding crowd; and the cultured man is pictured by them as sitting in a comfortable chair, preferably with a book in his hand, and rapt in meditation on lofty themes. on the other hand there are those who conceive that culture--if more than a veneer--is a refinement that can be attained only by direct participation in social life. such contact with the world may bring embarrassment, temptation, and failure, as well as their opposites; but all of these, instead of debasing, are the very experiences that purify and make gentle; they are the fire without which the refining process could not take place. culture means to these people the ennobling effect of such actual struggles upon a person's whole outlook on life and upon his way in general of conducting himself; and the cultured man is pictured by them as in action, even with his sleeves rolled up, engaged in the accomplishment of high purposes. culture is so valuable a quality that each person must determine for himself which of these two conceptions of it is sound, before he can decide whether the using of knowledge is worthy of being made the goal in study or not. _breadth of meaning of the term "use."_ in declaring that the _using_ of knowledge is the proper endpoint in study, it is important that the breadth of meaning of the term _use_ be held in mind. the application of knowledge in earning a livelihood covers only a small part of what is included. a man is using his knowledge when he is getting inspiration from poetry that he has memorized, or drawing new conclusions from previously acquired facts. he is using it, further, when he entertains his family with it, or by its means makes himself otherwise agreeable to them. he is using it when it is made to count in the rearing of children, or in the performance of the manifold duties of membership in a community, or in worshiping god. in short, it is being used when its content is turned to account in the accomplishment of purposes, whatever they be, or is made to function in one's daily adaptation to physical, moral, and religious environment. _states in the assimilation of knowledge._ the student should continually carry in mind the fact that facility in the use of knowledge is the end of his study, and the only reliable proof of mental assimilation. it is a long road, however, to this goal, and any clearly marked stages that must be passed through in reaching it should be well known, since they will help the student greatly to keep his bearings and preserve his courage. here are given a few such stages. _ . collection of crude materials._ first, under the influence of as full a sympathy with the author as possible, one obtains a fair comprehension of the thought. much supplementing may be necessary to this end, as well as careful consideration of relative values. this may require one or several perusals of the thought, according to the difficulty of the subject and to individual ability. proof of comprehension may be given by the expression of the thought in one's own words, either from memory or with the book open. such study is a comparatively passive kind of work, calling for subordination of the student to the author, and amounts to little more than a collection of the crude materials of knowledge. the corresponding stage in the assimilation of food would be, perhaps, its preparation and mastication. _ . selection and reorganization of the profitable portion of these materials._ "what am i getting from this author?" or "what profit is this material bringing me?" is the principal consideration in the second stage. with the thought of profit uppermost in mind, the student recalls or further defines any specific purposes of the study that may have occurred to him; under their guidance he casts aside as non-essential much of what is presented, and centers his attention on those ideas that seem to have real value for him. these he further re-words, in order to determine their very essence, and also carefully weighs. in addition he reorganizes them, unless their original organization appears to him peculiarly fitting. the self must enter so fully, in true assimilation, that neither the author's wording nor his organization is likely to prove satisfying. one will seldom quote another's words or follow his order of treatment when presenting a topic that has been really digested. not seldom the last point made by an author will become the first in the student's mind, showing how radical the reorganization may be. this step, requiring much discrimination and exercise of judgment from the learner's own view-point---thereby entirely subordinating the author to the student--requires a high degree of independence. it might be called the profit-drawing stage, or the stage in which the part that promises profit is extracted. the corresponding step in the assimilation of food is what is technically called digestion, which is the separation of the nutritious from the waste elements, or the conversion of food into chyme, preparatory to assimilation. _ . translation of this portion into experience._ even after a person has determined what portion of the crude materials can be of value to him and has reorganized it in a satisfactory manner, it may still seem somewhat strange to him,-another person's thought rather than his own. this is an indication that more work must be done, for assimilation of knowledge, like assimilation of food, requires the full identity of the nourishing matter with the self. "a thought is not a thought," says dr. dewey, "unless it is one's own." [footnote: _school and society,_ p. .] the student may thus far have reached nothing more than a consciousness of facts by themselves, while consciousness of them as a part of the self is a much more advanced stage. in order to reach this last point the student may find it necessary to review the thought a number of times in various ways, stating the pertinent questions and their answers. he may also practice making the main points with force, using them either under imagined or under actual conditions. in such a manner they are tossed about, overhauled, and restated, until a much closer and more abundant association of the ideas with one another and with the past experience of the learner is secured; he warms up to them until he welds them to himself. as a result a sense of ownership of the knowledge is finally established, a condition in which one largely loses consciousness of the original wording and, perhaps, even of the original source of the thought. the ideas now seem simple and their control easy, and one enjoys the feeling of increased strength due to real nourishment received. the feeling of ownership is fully justified, too, for, no matter where the thought may have originated, it has been worked over until it has been given a new color and has received one's own stamp, the stamp of self. this is the step in which the profitable matter extracted from the crude materials is translated into the learner's own experience; it corresponds to that part of food assimilation in which the nutritious portion of our food, secured through digestion, is made over into the bone, tissue, and muscle of the body. _ . formation of habit._ while these steps overlap more or less, each represents a distinct advance. study of many topics may be allowed to stop at this point, although it should be understood that assimilation is perhaps never complete, and that the appreciation of a great thought, together with the ability to use it, may continue to grow from year to year. on that account one should expect to review from time to time, by use and otherwise, the valuable experiences that have already been "mastered" through study. certain portions of knowledge, however, cannot be left as properly under our control when they have been translated into experience as described. study has thus far brought the student only to the ability to use his knowledge with fair ease _consciously,_ and extensive portions of knowledge have to be used quite _unconsciously;_ they must not only become truly ours but they must become second nature to us. in all the trades, for example, the many facts about the use of materials and tools, etc., must be applied "without thinking" before skill is attained. the same holds in the fine arts. in grammar, knowledge of the rules must be carried over into habit before one's speech is safely grammatical. knowledge of the political and moral truths contained in history and literature must likewise be converted into habit before proper conduct is assured. in learning how to study one must fall into the habit of associating ideas, weighing values, and carrying points, _unconsciously,_ before the subject is properly mastered. "ninety-nine hundredths, or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual," says professor james, "from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions." [footnote: james, _talks to teachers,_ p. .] professor james is here referring mainly to motor activity; but habit is evidently a large factor in all phases of life; and, while many of the valuable thoughts assimilated by study probably do not need to be applied unconsciously, it is safe to say that prominent portions of most branches of knowledge must be converted into habit, or become second nature, before we can be said to have reached the desirable endpoint in their pursuit. the extent of this last advance, in which experience becomes habit, is indicated by the wide difference that exists between using a correct form of speech consciously and using it unconsciously, for even years of trial may intervene between the two. repetition by use, under as nearly natural conditions as possible, must be the principal means of getting through this fourth step. but such practice should be influenced by certain very important precautions stated by professor james. he has in mind primarily the formation of moral habits in his suggestions, but they apply in large measure also to the formation of other habits. . "in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible._ accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know." . "_never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life._ each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again." . "_seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain._ it is not in the moment of their forming but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain." [footnote: james, _talks to teachers,_ pp. - . see also james, _psychology,_ vol. i, chapter iv, "habit."] _the time and labor necessary in real assimilation of knowledge._ it is evident that real assimilation of knowledge is a very complex process, requiring a great amount of time and labor. "and be assured, also," says ruskin, "if the author is worth anything, you will not get at his meaning all at once--nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive, in any wise." [footnote: ruskin, _sesame and lilies._] ruskin is here doubtless referring mainly to insight into the thought; but, as has been shown, a point is not assimilated when one merely sees it clearly; insight into an idea usually precedes experience or ownership of it by a long interval; and the latter generally precedes habit by another long period. we are familiar with these facts as applied to mechanical subject- matter, such as the multiplication tables and forms of discourse. we recognize that we must come back to these over and over again if we are to obtain automatic control over them. yet we act as though there was ground for assuming that the more fertile ideas, which are to be reduced to habits of thought and conduct, require less energy and patience. there is no justification for any such assumption; it would seem more reasonable to expect to devote more time to the latter, rather than less. probably not much knowledge acquired either in school or college is carried through the three or four stages named above; but it is also true that comparatively little of that knowledge becomes a source of power, and it is safe to assume that the one fact is at least part explanation of the other. it is highly important, therefore, that the student become early reconciled to the fact that the real mastery of knowledge is a long and laborious process. children's capacity to include the use of knowledge as a factor in their study _the natural tendency to carry ideas into execution._ one of the most attractive baits that can be offered to a discontented, restless child is to propose that he _do_ something; and having received such a proposal, his impatience over delay in its execution shows how closely his nature links doing with thinking and planning. the games of children call for comparatively little study; yet children's desire to be acting is so dominant that they can scarcely wait to learn the rules before beginning to play. an eight- year-old girl who had been studying at home with her mother complained to a friend, "mother doesn't have me _do_ anything! she has had me read and spell and learn arithmetic, and that's all." it is partly because we have come to appreciate, in recent years, this pressing need of doing, that we have been reforming the elementary school by introducing manual training, cooking, and sewing. one of the early surprises and disappointments of children produced by adults is the failure of the latter to carry into practice plans that they have been heard to make, and ideals that they have professed to admire. having set up specific aims, such as were suggested in chapter iii, children expect to realize them in practice, because instinct tells them that the value of theory is found in its application. that is the reason that they so often inquire, "what is the use of it?" in connection with their study at school, and that they disapprove so heartily of any project that won't work. _value of this tendency in education._ living means substantially the same thing with children as with adults. they have the same general environment as adults; they study the same large fields of knowledge; and they likewise find the object of education in efficiency. there are the same reasons, therefore, as in the case of more mature students, for making the using of knowledge the aim of their study. the prospect of applying knowledge is a source of motive for all grades of learners. i have never seen a class more attentive to every detail of its procedure than were a certain group of girls who felt under obligations to eat the strawberry jam that they were making at school. furthermore, the actual doing of the things imagined is a great clarifier of thought for children, as is shown in the very extensive use that the school makes of motor activity in numerous studies, and particularly of dramatizing in literature and history. it is also the most natural test of the practicability of the plans of children, and on that account a means of developing their soundness of judgment. this is well illustrated by a certain six-year-old girl who was making a doll's dress. after working in a very absorbed way for a time she impatiently exclaimed, "i won't have any lace in my sleeves!" "why not?" asked one of her playmates. "'cause i can't see any way to put it on," was the reply. one of the chief reasons why the experience of children outside of school is so educative is the fact that their ideas and plans are thus continually corrected by trial. briefly, therefore, it is normal for children to carry ideas into execution, and there is the same need of it as in the case of adults. it might be added that the peculiar ease with which children form habits furnishes a special reason why the conversion of ideas into habits should constitute a very important part of their study. practical suggestions for teaching children to make the using of knowledge a part of their study _ . special recognition of those facts that should be translated into habit._ while all of one's knowledge should become familiar enough to form experience, some of it should be worked over until it is translated into habit. facts of this latter kind should be clearly distinguished from others, in order that they may receive the special attention due them. the moral truths of literature and history belong plainly to this group. but there are many others, such, for instance, as the picturing of places upon the earth's surface rather than upon maps; the association of places with their latitudes; in the case of such a live problem as protective tariff, the association of the main facts in its history; the association of our leading transportation routes with the progress of our country; looking to the evidence in considering the value of statements; and the accurate and pointed wording of questions and answers. the habits that should be insisted upon in arithmetic are pretty well agreed upon, such as neatness of written work, accuracy of oral and written statements, the statement of a problem in one's own words, in case the meaning is at all doubtful, and the use of the approximate answer as a guide in finding the exact answer. but only when the great importance of such procedures is definitely recognized are they likely to receive the attention necessary to convert them into habits. if accuracy of statement were recognized as one of the very valuable habits to be acquired in literature and geography, as well as in arithmetic, much more effort would probably be put forth to establish that habit in those studies. rules for thinking and for the expression of thought that should result in habits, like the rules of grammar, pervade all the studies, but until this fact is better established, and until the principal habits to be expected from each study are more clearly defined, somewhat as in arithmetic, there will be much wasted effort in study because important parts of the work will not be carried to completion. _ . studying for one's own benefit._ the average "good" student scarcely gets beyond the first of the four stages of study outlined, _i. e.,_ the collection of the crude materials of knowledge. one very important reason tor this is that he fixes his eyes too intently upon his teacher in the preparation of his lessons; he studies to satisfy her rather than himself, as though somehow the school was established for her benefit. this subordination to the teacher is shown in the attitude toward marks; many a college student, even, waits helplessly until he can learn his mark before he knows whether or not he has done well; he seems to lack any conviction of his own about the matter. the student who feels responsibility primarily to himself, and therefore bothers little about marks, is rare. yet the selection of that portion of the subject-matter that promises profit, and its conversion into experience, presuppose the ability to subordinate both author and teacher to the self, indeed to forget about both. no teacher can direct a student just what to select, or inform him when it has become experience with him; the real student must have a self big enough to carry that responsibility alone. weakness in this respect manifests itself very early. many a child is so absorbed in his teacher as not to know when he knows a thing until the teacher's approval is given. in some schools probably half of the pupils ten to twelve years of age fall into such a halting, apologetic frame of mind, that they would scarcely risk a meal on the accuracy of any statement that they make. in comparison, the boy who won't study, who plays hookey on warm spring days in spite of his teacher's warnings, and who otherwise defies his teacher, is to be admired; he is preserving his individuality, his most important possession. it is largely the teacher's fault if children show no power to discriminate the values of facts to themselves, and to determine when they know a thing. they will not always show wisdom in their selections, and will not always be right when they feel _sure._ a good degree of reliability in these respects is something that has to be acquired by long training. but the spirit of self-reliance is a child's birthright, and if it is lacking in his study it is because his nature has been undermined. teachers, therefore, should take great pains to avoid a dogmatic manner toward children; they should impress upon them the fact that they are primarily responsible to themselves in their study, and that teachers are only advisers or assistants in intellectual matters, and not masters. no doubt many a college student finds it next to impossible to accomplish the second and third stages in study here outlined, simply because he finds no individual self within him to satisfy; it has been so long and so fully subordinated to others that it has become dwarfed, or has lost its native power to react; on that account independent selection is difficult and the sense of ownership is weak. _ . means of influencing pupils to use their knowledge. ( ). "the recitation."_ the principal means on which the teacher must rely for influencing children to include the using of knowledge as a part of their study, is the recitation. since at least most of the recitation period is necessarily spent in talking, it might at first seem that it could accomplish little in the way of applying what one learns. but when it is remembered that perhaps the main use of knowledge is found in conversation and discussion, the situation need not seem so hopeless. the great thing, then, is to see that the talk of the class room takes place under as natural conditions as serious conversation and discussion elsewhere, thus duplicating real life. we know that children may spell words correctly in lists that they will miss in writing letters, and that they can solve problems in arithmetic correctly in school that seem quite beyond them when accidentally met as actual problems outside. such facts emphasize the truth that only actual life secures a full and normal test of knowledge, and, therefore, that the recitation secures it only to the extent that it duplicates life. here is seen a fundamental weakness of the customary recitation. it tests only the presence of facts in the minds of pupils, while the outside world tests their ability to use these facts, which is another and far more difficult matter, requiring true assimilation. not merely that; but the customary recitation makes a sympathetic teacher the center of activity, she putting most of the questions, interpreting the answers, foreknowing what the children are trying to say, and deciding all issues. the children are not expected to offer ideas that are new to any one present, and they even acknowledge responsibility only to the teacher, looking toward her, addressing their statements to her, and usually endeavoring only to make her hear. all this holds largely in college recitations as well as elsewhere,--in case the students have the privilege of doing anything beyond listening to teachers there. this is an extremely unnatural situation and an inadequate test, as is indicated by the fact that the replies to the teacher's questions seldom convey clear meaning to strangers present. such recitations secure far less individuality of thought and far less directness and force in its expression than is acceptable anywhere outside of the academic atmosphere. the special importance of having the school periods duplicate life conditions is seen in the fact that the character of the recitation determines the character of the preparation for it. both the child and the more mature student will ordinarily go only so far in preparation as is necessary in order to meet the demands made upon them in class. if, therefore, the recitation does nothing more than give a weak test of the presence of facts, the preparation will include little selection and reorganization of facts and little effort to translate them into experience. how, then, should the customary recitation be modified? let the young people come together much of the time for the same purpose that they have in serious conversation outside; _i.e.,_ not to rehearse or recite, but to talk over earnestly points that are worth talking over. with an assigned topic for a lesson, and with a teacher present as adviser and critic, let them compare their conceptions of what seem to them the principal facts, supplementing, rejecting, and selecting what seems to them fit. the relationship that they would bear toward one another might be the same as in any social gathering; but since it would be real work and not entertainment that they were attempting, attention would be centered on a definite subject and remarks would be more pointed. while the teacher would preserve order in the usual fashion, and might often come to their aid by correcting and advising, responsibility for taking the initiative and for making fair progress would rest primarily upon the children, so that they would be adopting an attitude and a method that could be directly transferred to the home and elsewhere. this is the ideal that dr. dewey urges in his _school and society_ when he says: "the recitation becomes a social meeting place; it is to the school what the spontaneous conversation is at home, except that it is more organized, following definite lines. the recitation becomes the social clearing house, where experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of thought and inquiry are set up." [footnote: dr. john dewey, _school and society,_ p. .] the recitation then becomes a period where children talk before the teacher rather than to her; and in questioning and answering one another in a natural way they not only learn pointedness in thinking, but they increase and test their knowledge by using it. thus they give witness to the truth of bacon's words: "whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation....a man were better relate himself to a statue or picture, than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother." [footnote: bacon's essays, _of friendship._] when many of the school periods are occupied in this way, the lessons are not likely to be prepared with the teacher first in mind; what the others will say, what they will accept and reject and enjoy, as well as what one can one's self present and maintain, will chiefly occupy the attention. the child will then be selective in his study, having a view-point of his own; and he may even practice the forcible presentation of his ideas in the privacy of his study--before "a statue or picture" if need be. moreover, with the use of his knowledge in prospect, he will cease to rely weakly upon his teacher to tell him whether or not he knows, because he will carry his own standard. there is no reason for assuming that all recitations should be spent in this manner, nor, perhaps, half of them; and they would not prove highly successful without training on the part of both teachers and pupils. but such a method of procedure should be common, and it should be fundamental to other study. in fact, it has succeeded admirably where tried by intelligent teachers. _( ). the school and home life of the pupil._ while the recitation can furnish occasion, in the way described, for the first use of knowledge, its use must be carried much further before a fair degree of assimilation can be assured. for this purpose the community life of the school, including the conduct of the children toward one another in the schoolroom and on the playground, may be of great value. a teacher of six-year-old children can, by close observation, find many ways in which the morals contained in fairy tales that she tells will apply to their daily lives, and with skill she can draw their attention to the fact in a helpful manner. so, any teacher who is earnest and observant of the thought, speech, and general conduct of her pupils can find numerous needs for the ideas that have been presented in class. the community life of a school is not very much narrower than that of any ordinary social community, such as a village; and certainly in a village the uses of knowledge are without limit, if one will only find them. if, in addition to a close watch of the school life, the teacher finds energy to study the home life of her pupils, even to visit them in their homes, so as to become acquainted with their parents and their home conditions, she can gather many more suggestions for the application of school knowledge. if she then makes mention of such uses at fitting times, and also as a part of examinations calls upon pupils to report on uses actually made of facts learned, she can both secure much real use of knowledge acquired at school and at the same time cultivate responsibility for its further use. chapter ix. provision for a tentative rathee than a fixed attitude toward knowledge, as a seventh factor in study. a fixed attitude toward facts and conclusions is harmful in several ways. the following incidents suggest how greatly it interferes with the usefulness of knowledge. _reasons why a fixed attitude toward ideas is undesirable. . it interferes with the usefulness of knowledge._ a certain man living in one of the suburbs of greater new york was commissioned by his wife to buy some flannel for her at one of the large department stores in the city. she knew exactly what she wanted, for she had already purchased some of the goods at this store. so she gave her husband a sample, with the explicit directions, emphasized, that the new piece should be of exactly the same quality, with white edges, and one yard wide. on arriving at the right counter, the man delivered his sample and gave his order. but, after some searching, the clerk said, "the exact thing that you want has all been sold; but i have here just the right piece," throwing down a bolt, "except that it is slightly coarser. could you take that?" recalling his wife's instructions, the man replied, "no," somewhat doubtfully. after more searching the clerk said, "well, i have here a piece of just the desired quality, and one yard wide, only it has red edges. could you not use that?" and he threw another bolt down on the counter. again, remembering the emphasis on the directions received, the man responded weakly, "no, i think not." finally, after further search, the clerk produced a third bolt, with the remark, "this will probably suit you. it is the exact quality that you want, and has white edges. the only objection is that it is not quite a yard wide. can you not take it?" when for a third time the hesitating response came, "i think not," the clerk turned away with an expression of disgust for his customer, mingled with sorrow and pity. although the man had done his best, he did not feel sure of his wife's approval on his return home. when she asked for his purchase he stated that he had failed to make it, and explained the circumstances. "well," she replied, "but why didn't you use your own judgment and take one of the other pieces?" to which he responded, "i understood that i was not expected to use any judgment. you strongly emphasized the fact that you wanted material exactly like the sample, with white edges and just one yard wide. you told me nothing about what was to be made out of the goods. how, then, was i in a position to do anything more than to follow your exact directions?" that ended the discussion; but the need of less fixedness in instructions given was strongly impressed upon the husband, and a similar need in the following of instructions was equally impressed upon the wife. they were thus agreed as to the desirableness of some adaptability in one's ideas. a certain class of girls was learning to make french cream candy, and the recipe for the same, namely, cup of sugar, / cup of water, salt-spoon of cream of tartar. was placed on the board for them to follow. after reading the recipe and listening to some directions from the teacher, including special emphasis on accuracy of measurements, the class set to work and produced some candy that even the visitors were glad to eat. the recipe seemed so simple that one of the visitors a few days later proposed to his little daughter that they make some french cream candy at home. they measured out a cup of sugar and one-third of a cup of water; but there was a halt when it was discovered that there was no salt-spoon in the house. the man's wife came to their rescue, however, by giving them some idea of the size of such a spoon. then it was found that they had no cream of tartar. on further consultation with the wife it was learned for the first time that the object of cream of tartar was to prevent too quick granulation, and that probably some other acid-like substance, such as vinegar or lemon juice, might do just as well. so a small amount of vinegar was used instead, and reasonably good candy was produced. in a later attempt the exact amount of water necessary to a cup of sugar had been forgotten, and too much water was used; but by boiling the mixture longer, excellent candy was made. as a result of these experiments it was found that only enough water was needed to dissolve the sugar, and that any one of several other things would do as well as cream of tartar to prevent granulation. without this knowledge there would be many a family which, either on account of bad memory of proportions or of want of certain materials, could make no use of the recipe. such knowledge secured some adaptability or flexibility in the directions, thereby greatly extending their use. one of the common objections to preparing lesson plans for teaching is that they can seldom be followed. more than that, it is declared, children have such a disappointing way of doing and saying the unexpected, that a carefully memorized lesson plan is likely to hinder the teacher in adapting herself to her pupils, and on that account may do more harm than good. these objections contain much truth; and if preparing a lesson plan means mapping out only one fixed procedure, they may be entirely valid. that is not, however, what such preparation should signify. one of the principal objects of making one plan is to think out others, that may be followed or not as occasion demands. that kind of preparation, instead of tying a teacher's hands, keeps her superior to any fixed course and gives freedom to deal skillfully with almost any kind of response. these examples may be sufficient to show that a fixed attitude toward directions and plans, or toward knowledge in general, is a serious barrier to its application. the conditions are always changing, and one's ideas must be capable of corresponding modification if their full use is to be enjoyed. _ . it is opposed to progress._ our attitude toward knowledge is intimately related also to the progress that we make; a fixed state of mind precludes reflection about one's course by precluding a feeling of its need. men frequently show blindness to new truth. boss politicians count upon from eighty to eighty-five per cent of all voters "standing pat" and voting according to party, no matter what facts may be discovered against one candidate and in favor of another. this fact is what gives the bosses their security. it was thought to be a wonderful sign of progress a few years ago when sixty thousand out of six hundred thousand voters in a certain election in massachusetts ignored party lines and voted according to the merits of the candidate. one reason that we have so many mediaeval educational institutions is that persons in control have so many fixed ideas. there are few colleges and universities to- day, for instance, in which courses that prepare young women for home- keeping, such as domestic science and domestic art, receive credit toward a degree. progressive changes in any line are conditioned upon sensitiveness toward changing circumstances and new ideas, and a fixed attitude is directly opposed to such responsiveness. _ . it is opposed to peace and happiness._ history is full of instances of the extent to which intolerance resulting from fixed convictions may carry people. innumerable murders and many wars, entailing untold suffering, have found their principal cause in religious bigotry. educational and political bigotry are likewise sources of much bad feeling and unhappiness. family disputes, as between father and son, are in large measure due to too great fixedness of views and opinions; and much of the discontent of old age is found in the inability of old people to abandon their old-fashioned notions, so as to adjust themselves to new conditions and enjoy them. a fixed attitude toward ideas is, therefore, far from an unmixed virtue; it seriously limits the usefulness of knowledge; it greatly checks progress; and it strongly opposes peace and happiness. _ . it finds little justification in the nature of knowledge._ finally, a fixed attitude toward ideas finds little justification in the nature of knowledge. if supposed facts were always true, and if they were always truly understood, a fixed state of mind toward them might still find justification; but that is far from the case. probably some things are true for all time, such, for example, as the facts of the multiplication table, propositions in geometry, and some of the laws of physics. but perfect reliability is attached to very little of our knowledge. some of the fundamental propositions in the exact sciences of physics and chemistry are only hypotheses, that have undergone extensive modification in recent years. political opinions are subject to constant change. sixty years ago the secret ballot was feared as one of the worst of evils, lest voters might then wreak awful vengeance upon those in authority; now its desirability is unquestioned. so many new ideas have become established in recent years about the nature of childhood, the aims of the school, and even the use of school buildings, that education is a radically different field from what it was only twenty years ago. in the same way, facts in all lines are ever undergoing modification, and evolution prophesies such modification through all time to come. even our statements of scientific law, instead of being final, only express man's interpretation of unvarying phenomena of nature, and are subject to error, like all other work of man. huxley declares that "the day-fly has better grounds for calling a thunder storm supernatural than has man, with his experience of an infinitesimal fraction of duration, to say that the most astonishing event that can be imagined is beyond the scope of natural causes." [footnote: t. h. huxley, _life of hume,_ p. .] even within the field of science, therefore, we can never feel sure that the last word has been said, and the best established conclusions may have to submit to correction. turning from the better established fields of knowledge to such other facts as influence daily life, we find them to be remarkably uncertain. the facts about the weather, that guide the farmer, for instance, are only beginning to be fully known, and consequent miscalculations in the planning and the care of crops are without limit. in ordering goods only six months in advance, the merchant must be controlled by probabilities, many of which are only narrowly distinguishable from guesses. the facts that establish friendships are frequently still less tangible, blind feelings of affinity and faith alone being not seldom the basis of the attraction. thus our so-called knowledge ranges all the way from ideas that possess a very high degree of probability to those that are a product of faith and hope, the greater portion of them approaching the latter. more than that, even in cases where the statements of principles, as in physics and ethics, seem thoroughly reliable, the variety of their application is so great and any individual's horizon is so narrow, that errors in their application to concrete cases must be very common. correct theory about any matter by no means carries with it the correct application of that theory, as every one finds out sooner or later. it follows, then, that the highest wisdom represents only a rough approximation to the truth, and that ordinary facts are more nearly hypotheses than certainties. since, therefore, so few ideas are fully reliable and unalterably fixed, a settled attitude toward them is undesirable, not only because it is opposed to utility, growth, and happiness, but because it finds no warrant in the real nature of knowledge. _the proper attitude toward knowledge._ what, then, is the proper attitude toward knowledge? while one should not be ultra-conservative, as though everything were finally settled, neither should one be ultra-radical, as though nothing were established; bigotry and skepticism are alike to be condemned. the ideal state of mind is illustrated by leaders in industrial pursuits, like manufacturing. they confidently make the fullest possible use of existing knowledge pertaining to their business, including the latest inventions, while they keep a very careful lookout for further improvements. that is, they preserve an unprejudiced, open mind toward both the old and the new. it is just such a tentative attitude toward knowledge that all people should cultivate. so much of the old is defective, and so much new truth may come to light at any moment, that the fair, judicial mind is always in demand, a mind that is ever ready for new adjustments and that weighs and decides solely according to evidence. colonel f. w. parker used to declare that the grandest discovery of the nineteenth century was the _suspended judgment._ yet this attitude is one that has long been insisted upon as essential to the scientist; indeed, it is most generally called the scientific attitude. it is strange, however, that those fields in which facts are best established should be the ones in which the importance of a tentative attitude is most emphasized. one would think that its worth for the non-scientific man would be far greater, for the facts that he hears about people and things, which guide him daily, are far less reliable, and his consequent necessity of changing his views is much more frequent. _the relation of this attitude to energetic action._ while a tentative attitude toward knowledge may be of great importance for the scientist or theoretical student, may it not be even harmful to the ordinary person? force or energy is one of the chief requirements in the world of action; and if a person becomes much impressed with the unreliability of his ideas, as seems necessary in the cultivation of a tentative attitude, may he not come finally to lack decision and energy? certainly we now and then see examples of indecision and half-hearted action, due at least in part to appreciation of opposing points of view and to consequent uncertainty of conclusions. there may be such a danger; but it is, on the whole, to be courted rather than avoided; for, while examples of indecision are sometimes seen, examples of too decided convictions and of excessive energy in pushing them are far more common. it is not mere action that is wanted, but _safe_ action. force must be under the guidance of reason if it is to be free from danger, and reason is hardly possible without an interested but impartial attitude toward evidence. possibly the energy of educators would be at least temporarily increased if they formulated and subscribed to definite educational creeds; but the partiality that would thus be encouraged would soon lead to strife and wasted effort. a tentative attitude undoubtedly does limit activity somewhat, but only as good judgment limits it, for it is one of the leading factors in such judgment. it tends to eliminate misguided effort, and to check other action until its object is found to be worthy. each of these effects is highly desirable. on the other hand, there is no reason why it should be expected to diminish energy after favorable judgment on a project has been passed. it does not imply indifference or any lack of devotion; it merely favors the subordination of enthusiasm to insight, and delays expression of the former till the latter has given lief. the result is likely to be greater and better sustained effort than otherwise, because the tested excellence of the cause must be a source of inspiration and will help to carry one through discouraging intervals. washington and lincoln were both distinguished for freedom from blind prejudices and corresponding openness to the influence of new ideas; but they were also distinguished for uncommon energy and firmness in the pursuit of their main purposes. a tentative attitude toward ideas is, therefore, a real aid to energetic action in all but unworthy and doubtful causes; in these cases it is a very desirable hindrance. [footnote: for a valuable discussion of this general topic, see j. w, jenks' _citizenship and the schools,_ particularly chapter i.] how this matter concerns children a receptive state of mind is supposed to be one of the peculiar merits of children. indeed, they are so sympathetic with any view that the last presentation that they happen to hear in regard to a disputed matter is likely to be the one that they accept. it might seem, therefore, that there is no need of emphasizing the importance of open-mindedness as a factor in their education. that is far from the case, however. children are peculiarly open-minded toward many things; but it is mainly those that they have had no previous opportunity to learn about. it is hard to take sides on a matter that you have never heard of. but the test of an impartial mind is found in those matters that are already somewhat familiar, so that one has already had some temptation to choose a side. note how children act in such cases. how readily they declare allegiance to the political party of their fathers and shout with all the vehemence of stand-patters! how stubbornly they insist upon their teacher's method of solving problems in arithmetic when their parents undertake to assist them by showing a better way! they are nearly as intolerant as their parents on such occasions. how hastily they take sides in disputes among friends! and how very frequently their impatience with the statements and opinions of their companions gets them into quarrels and fights! when we recall the great variety of decisions that they reach in daily life, and the impulsiveness with which many of them are made and supported, it becomes evident that precautions against prejudice and intolerance are not at all out of place in their education. the need is emphasized, too, when we realize that many persons adopt inflexible views on so great a number of disputed questions, that they show signs of becoming old fogies quite early in life. "old fogyism begins at an earlier age than we think," says professor james. "i am almost afraid to say so, but i believe that in the majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five." [footnote: _talks to teachers,_ p. .] if instances of intolerance become numerous enough to begin to class a majority of us as old fogies at this age, certainly many tendencies toward a fixed state of mind must appear and need treatment at a much earlier age. the matter is of special importance with young children, owing to the nature of the school curriculum during the early years of school. beginning reading, writing, and spelling are systems of conventional signs, where authority and not reason decides what is right. arithmetic, also, consists of absolutely definite, indisputable facts. thus the facts in the three r's and spelling, which make up most of the curriculum in the majority of schools for the earlier years, show no flexibility whatever. they must be learned as fixed things, and they tend to give the impression that the definiteness and finality belonging to them are to be expected in all subjects. this impression is strengthened, too, rather than destroyed, by the behavior of average parents. the conditions are, therefore, very favorable for the development of snap judgments and fixed attitudes among children, unless such influences are counteracted by very careful training. specific suggestions fob cultivating a tentative attitude among both children and more mature students _ . acquaintance with a variety of views._ university students preparing for supervision of instruction often observe recitations together, with the object of discussing their merits and defects. no matter how carefully they may have analyzed a recitation, it is interesting, when they come to compare conclusions, to observe how their view-points vary, how many things each person has overlooked, and how widely their judgments at first differ. many a student who has pursued such a course of study has reached the conviction that no one person is capable of discovering all the important factors in thirty minutes of instruction, and that his own conclusions are probably faulty in numerous serious respects. this impression in regard to the fallibility of individual judgment has a wholesome effect on any tendency to be too positive and fixed, while it directly engenders respect for other people's opinions. frequent discussion of questions in class, even among younger children, can have a similar influence, as can also the use of reference works and different texts on a subject. the young student should come to regard acquaintance with varying views as necessary to the formation of a reliable opinion on any topic and of sound judgment in general. that conviction will compel him to keep on the lookout for new light. says john stuart mill: "the whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. in the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinion and conduct. because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and on occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. because he has felt that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every variety of mind. no wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner." [footnote: john stuart mill. _on liberty,_ chapter ii.] _ . slowness in passing judgment._ a second means by which a student may be kept from too positive and fixed an attitude is by being trained to feel satisfied that many a clearly stated problem that has arisen with him cannot be definitely and finally answered at the present time, and perhaps not at all. slowness in passing judgment may usually be urged with propriety. even the mere attempts to reply to a query should occasionally be checked in class when it is evident that they are hasty. some answers should be delayed even several days, the time meanwhile being occupied with the collection of data. too many difficult questions are answered "at a sitting," with meager reflection and investigation, as though final answers in general could be obtained easily and quickly. there are some problems also that should not be answered at all; not because they are not valuable, but because their solutions cannot yet be understood by the student, or are as yet impossible. the consciousness that knowledge is too difficult, or is positively wanting here and there, destroys overconfidence in the completeness of one's attainments and awakens the need of further study. one of the principal values of many a recitation, in any grade of work, should consist in the unsolved problems that have been worded. _ . cultivation of sympathy._ a good measure of kindly feeling in one's make-up is, perhaps, the greatest single remedy against a too static condition of ideas. feeling seems to have a double function in making one open and plastic. a kindly attitude toward new ideas is necessary before they can be viewed long enough to have their value tested. we must be positively friendly, or willing to see worth, before we can see it. sympathy thus secures a hearing for new ideas. it was because the jews lacked this feeling and consequent willingness, that jesus condemned them for seeing not, though they had eyes, and for hearing not, though they had ears. feeling is also a condition of the appreciation of new thought after it has once secured a hearing. by a sort of intuition the significance of a fact is often felt long before the intellect has furnished proof of its value, the power of feeling supplying motive in this way for the intellect to do its work. and, again, until the conclusions formed by the intellect have reached the feelings, they exert little influence upon one's ways of thinking and acting. cold sermons have little effect on most persons, even though, their logic forces assent to them. appreciation of worth thus greatly depends upon one's capacity of feeling. considerable warmth of heart or mellowness of nature due to sympathy is, therefore, an important factor in rendering one willing to listen to new ideas and to be influenced by them. without much feeling, a man is likely to be narrow and unyielding. gradgrind, in dickens's _hard times,_ is a shining example of this type. in his excessive devotion to "hard facts" his emotional nature atrophied, until the many valuable cues or suggestions about the conduct of his business and the training of his children that a kindlier nature would have caught from the events occurring about him, failed to affect him, and on that account he went to smash. he admirably illustrates in a negative way carlyle's striking statement that "never wise head yet was without warm heart," and he throws light on the profoundness of saint paul's meaning when he said, "love is...never conceited...but has full sympathy with truth." without an abundance of affection a man is self-centered, a selfish aristocrat. sympathy or love allows the ideas of others to be lifted to a plane on a level with his own and thus helps greatly toward his tolerance and receptiveness. it is true that the scientist urges the elimination of all personal feeling in his investigations. he wants to be as purely intellectual as possible, in order to see things as they are, while personal bias tends to color facts and to that extent to vitiate them. it is chiefly, however, prejudice of all sorts in testing and judging truth that he is anxious to avoid, rather than any feeling of unalloyed interest in it. a certain warmth of feeling is necessary for its comprehension as well as its evaluation. the biologist, for instance, must be in close sympathy with birds in order to understand them, just as a mother must be in close sympathy with her child in order to understand him. it would scarcely be worth while to include these thoughts were we not able to preserve and increase our capacity of feeling, in kind and degree, just as we can preserve and increase our knowledge. it is partly with this object that we have so broad a curriculum, even in the primary school, including music, painting, and literature, as well as other subjects. literature certainly possesses great value for developing broad sympathy; it is at least a question if literary men do not exhibit less prejudice toward new ideas than scientists, although so much emphasis is placed upon induction, and judgment according to evidence, in the training of the latter that they might be expected to be especially open-minded. in addition to broad study, we can take pains not to study too much, that is, not so much as to crowd out the emotional life. insight is only one of several large factors in a good education, and the ambitious student is always in danger of becoming too exclusively intellectual for the highest scholarship. the true relation of insight to feeling is well illustrated in lincoln's life, when in the midst of the most serious and pressing problems he took time for jesting and humorous tales. in spite of condemnation by his subordinates for levity, he had excellent grounds for such conduct; for not only was relaxation secured in this manner--which was important enough--but his own natural warmth of sympathy was also restored, which was of greatest value in weighing the worth of suggestions and events. humor is an important aid to any serious person in preserving balance; a good laugh restores perspective. while it is the duty of the more mature student to cultivate for himself a many-sided emotional life, even at the expense of some knowledge, it is the duty of teachers of children in particular to give them material help in this direction. there are few schools that do not emphasize learning to the neglect of feeling. the teacher can help first of all by avoiding setting a coldly intellectual example. in addition she can study the conduct of children with the object of correcting their narrowness. many a child who isolates himself from conversation and play at recess is growing one-sided, whether he spends the time in doing nothing or in studying. he should be influenced to enjoy play and social life, just as he should be influenced to study, and it is the teacher's task to single out such cases and restore them to their normal condition. _ . subordination of authority to reason._ young people can learn to distinguish between authority on the one hand and evidence or reason on the other, and to subordinate the former to the latter, thus allowing conclusions to be based chiefly on facts rather than on persons. the assertion of authority over children, requiring blind obedience on their part in matters of discipline, is very common. similar assertion of authority over both children and adults in intellectual matters is also common. the authority of custom, for instance, as represented in the teacher, is dominant in beginning reading, writing, spelling, and in language in general. in many advanced subjects, also, students are accustomed to accept many statements as true simply because the instructors declare them to be. _( ) the two bases of conclusions._ some subjects, however, to a peculiar degree eliminate authority, basing conclusions mainly on reason. mathematics affords an example. personal authority sinks so completely out of sight here that even a child can dare sometimes to correct the teacher. while the majority of studies lie between the extremes represented by literature and mathematics, it is safe to say that conclusions generally can be based upon reasons that are fairly within the understanding and the reach of young people, if it seems desirable. _( ) inferiority of authority to reason._ blind obedience is of doubtful value in the discipline of children, because it is so unintelligent; it is well called _blind._ blind submission to authority in intellectual matters, on the part of either children or adults, is no less objectionable. it is not any person's mere assertion that makes a thing true, but evidence of some sort; and evidence is likewise usually necessary to make it interesting and comprehensible. the artificiality of the authority of a teacher as the main support for conclusions is plainly seen in the fact that there is no substitute for it outside of and after school and college. its evil influence is also evident from the fact that persons accustomed to rely much upon it easily come to overlook evidence to the extent of blindly jumping to conclusions. and, having formed their opinions independently of reason, they cannot be easily influenced; for an attitude that has not been reached rationally is not likely to be modified rationally. submission to authority easily ends in the most extreme dogmatism. _( ) the tendency of authority to usurp the place of reason._ there is a strong tendency, however, for authority to usurp the place of reason. in penmanship, for example, the teacher often dictates the proper position of the body, instead of acquainting the child with the reasons for it. the rules for composition are usually dogmatically presented, in spite of the fact that there are plain reasons back of most of them. if, for instance, a sentence did not begin with some large mark, such as a capital, and end with some other plainly seen mark, it would be difficult to distinguish one sentence from another, so as to read. statements in geography were long based on authority, like those in grammar; in fact, only very recently has the causal idea become prominent in geography. high-school students of physics very generally want to know what the teacher wishes them to see in an experiment before feeling sure what they do see; and college students of politics, rather than depend upon the evidence itself, are inclined to learn the political views of their professors as the means of finding out what they themselves think. there are good reasons for this tendency to base conclusions upon authority. it takes much more knowledge of a subject and much greater skill in its presentation to make the reasons for facts clear. furthermore, it requires a good degree of energy and moral courage on the part of teachers to decline the compliment that young people confer upon them in preferring to trust them rather than evidence; and it also requires a good degree of energy on the part of students to rely upon their own study of facts. it is not surprising, therefore, if the average teacher makes himself the main authority for the statements that he makes in class, and if the average student readily accepts his authority. that is the easier way to get through a day. _( ) how this tendency may be combated._ as the first step in combating this tendency, both teachers and students must decide how highly they value a scientific method of arriving at conclusions. heretofore our interest in conclusions as valuable information has been so great that the method of reaching them has been neglected; it mattered little how much prejudice or blind acceptance of authority was connected with them, so long as they were understood and remembered. if such neglect has been wrong, and if a habit of basing opinions on carefully selected facts is approximately as important as knowledge itself,--as is probably true,--then we have found sufficient motive for serious effort toward reform. the next step is to make the words _premises, evidence, proof,_ as prominent in study as the word _conclusions._ "in reasoning," says ex- president eliot, "the selection of the premises is the all-important part of the process....the main reason for the painfully slow progress of the human race is to be found in the inability of the great mass of people to establish correctly the premises of an argument....every school ought to give direct instruction in fact- determining and truth-seeking; and the difficulties of these processes ought to be plainly and incessantly pointed out." [footnote: _atlantic monthly,_ "the school," november, , p. .] some college studies, as physics, for instance, might be taught primarily for the sake of method rather than subject-matter, and all college subjects, so far as possible, should emphasize the value of the right method of study. but scientifically trained college students, with their snap judgments in fields outside of their specialties, give convincing proof that emphasis on method in one or a few studies taken up so late in life cannot inculcate the general habit of mind desired. such training must begin much earlier, must in fact extend throughout the whole period of study, as dr. eliot suggests. teachers in the elementary school in particular must assume responsibility for developing a scientific habit of thinking, just as they assume responsibility for correct speech, and must insist upon the one in every subject as they do upon the other. _ . the referring of disagreements of view to large facts or principles._ the tendency to dogmatize can be further overcome if disagreements of view are habitually referred for decision to large facts or principles. suppose that a dispute has arisen as to when phonics should be introduced in beginning reading, and how prominent it should be made. a, wishing to teach children to read as soon and as rapidly as possible, would drill upon lists of phonetic words and upon sentences composed only of such words, no matter how artificial they might be. b, considering other things more important in beginning school life than learning to read, strongly opposes any extensive and systematic use of phonics. reiteration of views, and even the customary proofs of success by trial, may avail nothing. but reiteration may lead to derogatory remarks, when each becomes impressed with the stubbornness and meanness of the other. suppose, however, that b, remembering that details of method are determined by large principles, runs back to his largest controlling idea in beginning reading, the need of live minds or of lively thought on the part of the children. suppose that he shows that extensive use of phonics during the first year of school means the use of words without meaning, a tendency that is marked in prayers and greetings and that has to be actively combated throughout school and college life. suppose that he shows, further, that the main progress of the best primers and readers in the last twenty years has been in opposition to this tendency and in the direction of interesting thought, and that good expression of thought rather than the mere pronouncing of words is the chief element in good reading. a large principle thus brought to bear is likely to accomplish one of three things: (_a_) it may lead to full agreement; (_b_) or it may itself be agreed upon, while the details are still objects of dispute. but in that case the large thought, having put the details in proper perspective, prevents unpleasant conflict by revealing their comparative littleness. also, agreement on the large point convinces each disputant of the other's partial sanity, at least, and thus preserves harmony; (_c_) or, finally, the principle itself may become an object of dispute. even then the largeness of the idea places the discussion on a high plane, and the disputants, impressed with the dignified, impersonal character of the thought, are disinclined to personalities. this value of a principle is often illustrated in the work of criticising young teachers. let the critic condemn with authority one feature of a recitation after another, making free use of the pronoun _i_, and the young teacher criticised is likely to glare at him in rising wrath. but let the critic omit the show of authority entirely, even the use of _i_, merely offering the reasons for certain objections, particularly some broad principle of method whose relation to the matter in hand is perfectly plain, and harmony is almost bound to prevail, no matter how complete the condemnation may be. thus people will bear with one another, either agreeing or agreeing to disagree, so long as discussions center about principles; but without this condition intolerance and ill feeling easily manifest themselves. _ . the delaying of judgment till the evidence has been considered._ having granted the need of relying on reasons, and large ones, rather than on authority, the habit can be inculcated of delaying judgment until the evidence has been considered. it might seem superfluous to add this suggestion, did it not frequently happen that people get the cart before the horse in this manner. for example, it is common for debaters to choose sides as soon as a question is agreed upon, and to do their studying afterward. then, having committed themselves to one side, they study and argue in order to _win_ rather than to get light. it being regarded as ridiculous for partisans to be on both sides of a question at once,--even though one's convictions often place one there,--they ignore strong opposing arguments, bolster up their own weak assertions by fluency of speech and a bold manner, and try to substitute witticisms for thought, when thought is lacking. while such efforts increase knowledge, they pit personality against personality in such a way that the ego rather than truth becomes the main object of interest, and on that account their influence as a whole is extremely injurious. that kind of discussion is not honest, and its spirit is far removed from that of the true scientist. young people should avoid taking sides, at least at the beginning of their study of a problem, and probably discussion should take the place of debating. at any rate, the single point, rather than the whole question, might form the unit of debate. they should be taught to argue on both sides of a question, according to belief, just as frank persons do in conversation, to recognize the strength of opposing arguments, and to confess their own weak points. then they would be making truth their aim, rather than victory. such discussions are much more typical of life than ordinary debates; and if the latter seem necessary as a preparation for some professions--which is deplorable, if true--one should wait to acquire such ability until professional training begins. _ . avoidance of too positive forms of speech._ aside from debates, people are often tempted to commit themselves too positively in regard to facts by too positive forms of speech. we so often hear "i _know_" in place of "i suspect" or "i surmise"; and the speaker, having committed himself almost before he knows it, repeats the assertion to make himself more sure, meanwhile wondering how sure he is. benjamin franklin speaks in his autobiography of having acquired the habit of expressing himself in terms of modest diffidence, "never using," he says, "when i advance anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, 'i conceive or apprehend a thing to be so-or-so'; 'it appears to me,' or 'i should not think it so-or-so, for such-and-such reasons'; or 'i imagine it to be so'; or 'it is so, if i am not mistaken.' this habit, i believe, has been of great advantage to me, when i have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that i have been from time to time engaged in promoting. and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or be informed, to please or persuade, i wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given to us." [footnote:_autobiography,_ p. , of edition of cassell & co.] franklin is here considering intemperate forms of speech from the point of view of others. but they have a corresponding bad effect on the speaker, making him more dogmatic the more he indulges in them, until he loses the power to be tolerant of other persons. discussion and conversation should be conscientiously utilized by the student for the practice of intellectual honesty, of sincerity with himself, for such sincerity lies at the very foundation of true scholarship. chapter x provision for individuality, as an eighth factor in study _the change in appreciation of the self._ there was a time when people seemed to take pride in self- depreciation. believing in total depravity, they were suspicious of all natural tendencies, and the crushing out of strong desires seemed no evil. obedience to another's will was the one supreme virtue, and the killing of human nature, the annihilation of self, was the condition of its attainment. [footnote: see john stuart mill, _on liberty,_ chapter iii.] but the watchwords of modern education--self-activity, self- expression, self-development, self-reliance, self-control--indicate a very different attitude now. the emphasis here placed on _self_ recognizes it as the center of virtue; and the suffixes, _activity, expression,_ etc., declare the unfolding of instincts and other native powers, up to the point of independence, to be a great desideratum in education. these watchwords signify that the constitution of an infant, like that of a young plant, fixes a certain goal within broad limits for it to reach, the narrower limits being left to be determined by social ideals. they signify further that this goal can be reached only by the unfolding of inner powers, and that the purpose of the educator, like that of the gardener, is not to create but merely to furnish the food and environment most favorable to growth. in brief, the object of education must be attained by quickening to the utmost, rather than by annihilating, the self. this conception holds good, too, for every human being, in spite of the infinite variety of individuals. for, according to the doctrine of interest, which is a term ultimately related to these other terms and equally emphasized with them, only that spiritual food can be expected to be truly assimilated by any person which appeals to his peculiar nature; all else fails of real nourishment, no matter how much drill may be given to it. thus the sovereignty of every individual is recognized. psychologically speaking, there are no saints among us to set the standard for others. each person is worthy of exercising his own choice, of having his own way; indeed, he _must_ exercise this privilege if he is to act rightly. _causes of this change._ what respect we have come to have for ourselves! have we, then, put off corruption and become perfect? and is the millennium at hand? far from it. we have merely discovered the method by which we can become good; and, stated briefly, it is that every one must be true to himself, or must be himself. it is not strange that, in this age of scientific investigation, we have come to know more about our own natures than we did two hundred years ago. and the knowledge gained touches two great questions: first, the original character of the infant mind; and second, its method of advance. as to the former, we are now convinced that the child is originally endowed with certain impulses and instincts, or with certain instinctive tendencies, such as fear, love, curiosity, imitation, pride, constructiveness, appreciation of beauty, and conversational power, [footnote: see james, _talks to teachers,_ chapter vii; also dewey, _school and society,_ chapter ii.] and that these constitute the foundation or starting point for all educational endeavor. as to the latter, progress takes place by the unfolding of these instinctive tendencies, by their development rather than by their repression. further than that, since everybody is unlike everybody else in his native impulses, and since his environment likewise varies, every person must expect to differ from all others, more or less, in knowledge, desires, and actions. corruption may be as common as formerly, perhaps more so, requiring more vigorous restrictions than ever; but the proper way for any one to advance is to use the peculiar talents for good with which nature has endowed him, in the peculiar way fitting to himself. he may not do everything he likes; but whatever he does do must be an outgrowth of his own past, in harmony with himself and therefore an expression of himself, if it is to prove effective. _the value of individuality in english composition._ this truth is often illustrated in the government of children. a young teacher who attempts to govern a class "in just the same way as the principal does it," thus relying upon imitation, is doomed to failure. pupils quickly detect the lack of native force, of genuineness, in such a teacher, and lose respect on that account. but the vital character of this thought is best illustrated in english composition. it has long been recognized that merit in that field is present to the extent that one gives expression to one's own ideas, and is lacking to the extent that the ideas are borrowed. whatever is to be fresh and valuable must bear the peculiar stamp of the author presenting it. the reason for this is that only through self-expression is a natural product obtained. so long as i am consciously imitating another, or am unconsciously so warped by him as to ignore my own nature and experience, i am sounding a false note. what another thinks, no matter how good it may be, cannot properly represent me, and coming from me as mine, the want of harmony injures. i am in that case merely pretending, and the outcome is faulty because it is a sham. i might much better give expression to my own ideas, remembering wendell phillips's assertion that "any man who is thoroughly interested in himself is interesting to other people." real interest in self (which is a very different thing from egotism) implies honesty with self and consequent freedom from subjection to another. then naturalness, which borders closely on originality and is the first guarantee of excellence, is assured. naturalness is assured, too, in my expression of other people's ideas, provided these have become my own property by right of true assimilation. in that case they have received my own stamp, so that i am still offering something at first hand. the virility of even this kind of thought is well illustrated in the following composition by a twelve-year-old boy:-- the chinese and japanese may look alike in appearance; but they are not one bit alike. once upon a time they both were the most civilized people in the world. then confucius came in and told them that they should learn no more and do exactly what their ancestors did. both countries believed in this for a long time. then the united states butted in and told them of their danger; they said that they were going backward instead of forward, and would be conquered by another nation if they did not pick up. the chinese would not listen to this and said the united states had no right to interfere. but japan thought there was some truth in this, and so the united states sent over machines, built factories, laid railroad tracks, etc. the result is that japan is winning the war she is fighting with russia. _how composition typifies life in general._ english composition is perhaps the best single test of the general healthfulness of school instruction, and it typifies life in general. the pretended appreciation of an author, an affected manner, insincerity in the profession of friendship and religion, anything that admits a deceitful, artificial element is pernicious in composition as well as in life. whatever is good must be true. in consequence, no matter how extensively persons differ from one another, the first essential to the highest efficiency of each is fidelity to his own nature. we hear a great deal about self-made men, men who have wrested success from a stubborn world without the help of the schools. they are examples of those who are guided from within rather than from without. but every man, so far as he is a man, is self-made. he has had to use his own observation to see; his own reason and judgment to foresee; his own discrimination to decide; and his own firmness to stand by his decisions. [footnote: see john stuart mill, _on liberty,_ chapter iii.] his adaptation to his environment has been self-accomplished, and the first condition of its success has been a noble self-respect. trust in self is a prerequisite to ability to do,--we must believe that we can, before we can,--and obedience to inner promptings is a necessary antecedent to such trust. it was true wisdom that led polonius to close his blessing on laertes with the advice, "this above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." character itself is deeply involved. as mill says: "a person whose desires and impulses are his own--are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture--is said to have character. one whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam engine has a character." [footnote: _ibid._] _necessity of accepting the self as it is._ accordingly, it behooves every one to accept himself as he is. no doubt every one at times becomes dissatisfied with himself even to the point of despair. feeling his own weakness, and seeing the many superior qualities of persons about him, he thinks how much more successful he might be if only he were some other person, and envy takes possession of him. but "there is a time in every man's education," says emerson, "when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground (himself) which is given to him to till." [footnote: emerson, essay on _self-reliance._] and this conviction must not be accompanied with self-reproach. any one who habitually feels ashamed of himself is shorn of power to do his proper work in the world. the nature and rightfulness of the desired contentment with self and of proper self-confidence are suggested by emerson in the words: "what pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes....their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. so god has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself....the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner and would disdain, as much as a lord, to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature." [footnote: ibid.] _is such individuality conducive to social cooperation?_ but are such unconquered, unconciliatory minds desirable where social cooperation is a necessity, as in present society? are not those persons preferable as citizens who readily put by their claims and conform? not by any means! it might be that wisdom would declare the supposed claim unfounded, and that energy to combat it, rather than willingness to conform to it, is wanted. though yielding is often a virtue, unintelligent conformity is weakness. intelligent and vigorous reaction of the individual against all claims for conformity, sufficient to judge them, is a prerequisite even to actual conformity, and it is only a well-developed individuality that is capable of such reaction. even military discipline, which represents the extreme in its demand for slavish mass action, greatly values individual independence. soldiers often become isolated from their superiors in the midst of combat, and are left to act on their own initiative, sometimes deciding the fate of battles by their resourcefulness. it is partly appreciation of the worth of individuality in all walks of life that has spurred the european nations to educate the masses in recent years. ordinary social life makes a constant demand for individual judgment and self-reliance. a high average of ability and character is required for the maintenance of our democratic society; but that average can be attained only when the persons who compose society individually attain that average, that is, when their individuality is highly developed. _why it is necessary to emphasize the importance of individuality here._ summarizing the preceding discussion, we see that the ideal man is not one who is afraid, ashamed, and servile, but one who believes in himself and dares realize himself rather than imitate others, one, in short, who lives naturally and honestly. he possesses a personality commanding enough to produce self-respect, and an individuality bold enough to mark his thoughts and actions as his own. why is it necessary to emphasize this matter so much, particularly with reference to young people? in our country, where the children are so often charged with overboldness, and where commercial individualism seriously threatens society, is there real danger that the intellectual self may be neglected and that individuality may consequently be lacking? _ . vigor of the reaction required in proper study._ remembering that method of study is our theme, let us first recall the degree of vigor necessary in providing for the elements of study that have been named. then let us consider some of the ways in which students show unnaturalness and a tendency toward self-suppression. a person must stand somewhat firmly upon his own feet in order to set up for himself such specific aims, as guides for study, as have been urged in chapter iii. the supplementing of an author's statements is not so difficult, although one must be able to see around and beyond him, in order to realize what additions are advisable. the appreciation of relative worths, particularly the recognition of the organizing ideas in the treatment of a subject, is a task that requires a high degree of self-reliance. judging of the soundness and general worth of thoughts is certainly not any easier. any one can memorize; but to memorize in the proper way requires all the ability just referred to. the using of knowledge, involving the selection of the more promising part and its application until it becomes a part of the self and even habitual, is impossible without a high degree of mental vigor. finally, the precautions to be taken in order to preserve a tolerant attitude presuppose a personality moved by purposes far higher than those of the average person. altogether, therefore, proper study is impossible without a self that is energetic and firm. it should be noted, too, how little the mere quantity of knowledge that one has happened to collect counts. it is not so much learning as individuality that is required to meet these demands; on that account the child can study just as truly, within his sphere of experience, as can the adult. _ . failure to assert the simplest rights in class._ now let us consider the evidences of unnaturalness and of want of the boldness necessary for real study. in both school and college, when members of the class ignore their mates by addressing only the instructor, often speaking too low to be heard by others present, there is usually little complaint. although each person is a direct loser, he seems reconciled to such neglect. very many young people lack the courage to ask questions in order to understand a point; and even when asked if they understand and if they do not wish to put some questions, they still are too timid to respond; not seldom they declare that they understand when they know that they do not. teachers attending teachers' institutes are as bad as children in this respect. such conduct is not due to any desire to deceive, but to self-depreciation; it is more agreeable to prevaricate than to assert one's self. _ . subservience to authority._ the mere desire to please a teacher influences pupils of all ages to watch the teacher's expressions and gestures and to answer what is wanted, rather than what is sincerely thought. in sunday school, in particular, children can scarcely be got to give sincere answers; they are so eager to please that they say what they think they ought to think, rather than what they really think. undue respect for professors often has an overpowering influence on university students. the writer has known of several instances where students of good ability have almost lost the power to proceed with an argument, on the unexpected discovery that their view was opposed to that of some instructor. the subservience to books is as striking as that to teachers. the history lesson of a certain class of eleven-year-old children contained the following paragraph on the appearance of the indians: "when the first white men came to our shores, they found the country inhabited by the people columbus had named indians. they had copper- colored skin, coarse, jet-black hair, high cheek bones, thick lips, small eyes, and no whiskers." the children had considerable difficulty in reproducing the substance of this paragraph, attempting it several times. the writer, who was observing the class, remembered, however, having seen an indian exhibition only a few weeks before, which included indian men, squaws, boys and girls, and even papooses, and which this same class had visited in a body. after three rather unsuccessful attempts to relate the contents of the paragraph, the class were reminded of their visit to the indians, and were then asked to tell how they looked. forgetting about the text, they had no difficulty in doing this, for they were speaking out of their own experience. subjects like geography and grammar likewise frequently contain facts that pupils have long known; yet in school there is such an undue respect for print that many children dare not subordinate such matter to their own experience, and for that reason they have the same difficulty with it as though it were new. it is rare for even the college student to assert his independence of both teacher and book. one of the greatest surprises that the writer received in a two years' college course was produced in a rhetoric class. the students were ordinarily assigned about twenty pages of advance text per day, which was reproduced in the recitation. on one occasion a student who was called upon did very well until he was interrupted by the professor in charge on account of an omitted topic. the professor gave the cue, but obtained no response; then, since the student usually knew his lesson, the professor exercised a special degree of patience and tried twice more to start him off. failing, however, he impatiently asked, "why didn't you tell about so and so"? "why," replied the student, "i did remember something about that; but i didn't think that it was worth talking about." in the estimation of the entire class that man deserved a medal, and the writer still thinks so. there is subject-matter in most text-books that students are called upon to memorize which they feel is not worth reproduction, and they are often right; but most college students are as still as mice when it comes to declaring the fact. their timidity in purely intellectual matters is equaled only by their boldness in playing pranks that require mere physical courage. subservience to mere custom is as common as that to teacher and to print. if certain pictures or musical selections have come to be generally admired, few persons to whom they fail to appeal have the courage to acknowledge the fact. there is much pretended enjoyment in art galleries. the rate of progress acquiesced in by students is often greater than fidelity to self will allow. the amount of text and the number of references assigned frequently leave no possible time for reflection, although reflection is the sole means by which the self can react on ideas so as truly to assimilate them. not seldom both teachers and students are conscious of this fact and even lament it, yet they continue in the same course. the result is that the average student learns to disregard his own questions, doubts, and suggestions, and is smothered by his studies. only the exceptional nature rebels, as in case of the rhetoric, and follows his own gait, even in opposition to the teacher. _ . the abnormal lack of initiative in class._ in order to test the power of initiative of young people in study, the writer once selected a class of twenty children, ranging from ten to twelve years of age, who were doing the work of the fifth school year. they were only average pupils in home advantages and native ability. but the school to which they belonged, being the practice department of a training college for teachers, undoubtedly allowed a greater degree of freedom to the individual and possessed more merits than the ordinary public school. nine of the children had attended this particular school from the beginning, and several of the others had gone there one or more years; and every one of the five different teachers that the class had had, had been a graduate of a state normal school, or of a teachers' college, or of both. here, if anywhere, one might expect a good degree of independence on the part of the pupils. also, the writer had been personally acquainted with the class from the beginning, so that they felt reasonably at home with him when he took charge of them in geography and history. after spending two thirty-minute periods with them on successive days, considering various review questions in geography, the writer, acting as teacher, assigned them the following lesson of map questions in the text- book:-- here is a relief map of the continent on which we live. what great highland do you find in the west? in the east? in what direction does each extend? which is the broader and higher? where is the lowest land between these two highlands? trace the mississippi river. name some of its largest tributaries, etc. this lesson was to be studied in class _aloud;_ that is, the writer was not to do any teaching or give any help; he was to assume as nearly as possible the attitude of a listener, doing nothing more than call upon some one now and then to "go on" or to "do what ought to be done next." the children were to do all that was necessary to dispose of the questions properly, even to the extent of correcting one another freely. with this understanding a girl was called on to begin. she arose and read, "here is a relief map of the continent on which we live. what great highland do you find in the west? in the east?" then she stopped, and stood staring at the book. she may have needed to inquire the meaning of "relief"; or she may have been in doubt whether or not she should turn to the relief map opposite, which was small, or to the better map two pages further over; or to the wall map hanging, rolled up, in front of the class. but, although she was not noticeably embarrassed, she did none of these things. she waited to be told _just what to do,_ and she waited patiently--until aid from the teacher arrived. in response to the next question, "in what direction does each [highland] extend?" the two great highlands, the rockies and the appalachians, were described as parallel; and the pupil was passing to the next question without objections from any source, when the teacher again had to interfere. the boy who was called upon for the third question, "which is the broader and higher?" stepped to the wall map and pointed out the rockies. but, as no one asked why they were supposed to be broader and higher, the teacher suggested that question himself. some one gave the correct reason for considering them the broader; but by that time the entire class had forgotten that there was a second part to the question, and were passing on when they were reminded by the teacher of the omitted part. in response to the fourth question, calling for the location of the lowest land between these two highlands, four or five stepped to the map in succession, showing wide disagreement. yet no one asked any one else "why?" or proposed any way of settling the dispute, or even evinced any responsibility for finding one. they would have proceeded to the next question had they not again been halted by the teacher. in tracing the mississippi river, only about one-half of it was pointed out; _i.e._, from cairo southward. but no one entered complaint, and the next question was actually read before the teacher requested more accurate work. the girl called on to "name some of its largest tributaries" stood silent. possibly the word tributaries puzzled her; but she lacked the force necessary to make a request for help. she seemed to be waiting for the teacher to ask her if she didn't need to ask some one else for the definition. so the teacher complied and the definition was given. but then all failed for a time to answer the original question, apparently because they could not break it into its two parts, first tracing the principal tributaries on the map, then finding the names attached to them. these responses are representative of the writer's earlier experiences with these children. although they were not frightened, and plainly understood that they were to go anywhere in the room, and were to do or say anything that was necessary, they almost invariably waited to be told when to step to the board; when an answer was wrong; when something had been overlooked or forgotten; when the pointer should be taken up or laid aside; and when they were through with a question. between three and four recitation periods of thirty-five minutes each were consumed, before they were able to do all that was necessary in answering the extremely simple questions above, with a half-dozen more, without help. their frequent smiles of chagrin, too, proved beyond question that they were fully in earnest in their efforts. this helplessness was not exhibited on the first few days either. it was their custom to wait for assistance and directions--even to sit down--and it was a custom so well established that five weeks of daily work with them in history and geography, with the avowed object of breaking it up, only barely began a reform. other children, as a rule, would scarcely do better. but these are cases of children. would not a class in a normal school or a college show greater capacity for leadership? not often. of course they possess greater mental power; but the subject-matter with which they are struggling is more difficult. any teacher of such a class who unexpectedly eliminates himself from a recitation by silence, and who asks the students to provide a substitute from within themselves for his part of the work, is likely to feel disappointed over the result. who will assert that such lack of initiative is natural? _ . the evil effects of such suppression._ how docile young people are, after all, in intellectual matters! they lack the courage to resent neglect in class, to acknowledge that they do not understand, and to ask questions; they lose their initiative and even independent power to think, when in the presence of teachers; and they ignore their own experience in favor of print. they are so bent on satisfying others that they suppress their own inner promptings. in doing this they seem to confuse moral with intellectual qualities, acting as though the sacrifice of self in study was equally virtuous with its sacrifice in a moral way. yet listen to emerson's warning:-- "books" (and he might have said _teachers_) "are the best of things well used; abused, among the worst. what is the right use? they are for nothing but to inspire. i had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. this every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn....undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments." [footnote: _the american scholar._] the evil in a young student's being "subdued by his instruments" is that he is made artificial and dependent, and thereby ceases to be a whole unit. the artificiality is often shown in the voice. many schools, owing to the restraint that their pupils are allowed to feel, are guilty of establishing a special recitation voice, distinguished from that ordinarily used in conversation by its different pitch, and often amusingly distinguished, too, when some interruption during recitation causes a question about outside or home matters to be answered in the natural way. many educated adults have suffered so much in this respect that they cannot read in natural tones. the dependence, further, is shown in any attempt to produce thought. when a student has formed the habit of collecting and valuing the ideas of others, rather than his own, the self becomes dwarfed from neglect and buried under the mass of borrowed thought. he may then pass good examinations, but he cannot think. distrust of self has become so deep-rooted that he instinctively looks away from himself to books and friends for ideas; and anything that he produces cannot be good, because it is not a true expression of self. this is the class of people that mill describes in the words, "they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes; until, by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow; their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." [footnote: _on liberty,_ chapter iii] such people cannot perform the hard tasks required in study, because they have lost their native power to react on the ideas presented. the evil is most serious with young children because of their youth. many of them, while making good progress in the three r's, outgrow their tendency to ask questions and to raise objections, in other words lose their mental boldness or originality, by the time they have attended school four years. but all along, from the kindergarten to the college, there is almost a likelihood that the self will be undermined while acquiring knowledge, and that, in consequence, one will become permanently weakened while supposedly being educated. in this respect it is dangerous to attend a school of any grade. _why individuality is so difficult to preserve and develop._ "familiar as the voice of the mind is to each," says emerson, "the highest merit we ascribe to moses, plato, and milton is that they set at naught books and tradition, and spoke not what men, but what they, thought." [footnote: essay of _self-reliance._] it is evidently exceptional for one's thoughts and actions to be quite fully one's own. in matters of dress hosts of persons would rather be fashionable than comfortable; and in matters of the intellect subordination to others is even more common. one great reason for this is that people do not know how to be true to themselves; they do not comprehend themselves well enough for that. "know thyself" was a dictum of socrates that should precede the command "be true to thyself," because it is a prerequisite to it. but if it takes a literary genius to reveal our thoughts to us, as it often does, certainly the average person will not discover his own characteristics alone. even with firm intentions he will merely grope about, and from blindness and want of skill will stifle a good portion of his own nature. on the other hand, if he goes to school, whatever peculiarities he may possess are liable to suppression through the teacher and the curriculum, the two chief agencies of the school. for the average elementary teacher is not greatly concerned about preserving and developing individuality, and the average high-school teacher or college professor still less. indeed, many teachers are convinced that there is too much of it already, as shown in the discipline, and insist upon as much uniformity as possible, because it is less troublesome. when it comes to the curriculum, the commonly recognized purpose of instruction is acquisition of knowledge rather than development of self. but if a student sets out to amass as much information as possible, he is almost sure to be covered up by his collection; and, even if he proceeds slowly enough to admire and try to imitate the good that he finds in his spiritual inheritance and present environment, he is in no less danger of being mastered by his instruments. thus it happens that while self-expression should be one of the great purposes of the school, annihilation of self is a common outcome. _the positive character of provision for individuality as a factor in study._ it follows from the preceding that provision for individuality is a very positive factor in study, one requiring much time and energy and on which all the others that have been mentioned are dependent. a person must have the courage to assert his rights in intellectual matters, must believe in the worth of his own past, and must not allow his regard for others to weaken his trust in self. all this requires a high degree of self-respect, which can be attained only by careful cultivation. as he comes more and more in contact with the ideas, desires, deeds, and examples of other persons, and the demand for conformity grows more pressing, he must reserve special time and energy for studying his own powers and tastes and for discovering his own thoughts about the many subjects of study in which he engages. in the study of many a poem, for example, more time will be required to determine his own attitude toward it, to find himself in regard to it, than to understand its meaning. remembering that one purpose of education is development of the self, he must ever be on his guard against being warped out of shape by others, and must therefore offer a certain normal resistance to everything that is presented to him. to preserve and develop one's self thus normally, it is safe to say that any student should have as much esteem for himself, intellectually, as for others, and should spend at least as much time and energy upon himself in finding out what he himself thinks and feels, as upon others. practical suggestions fob preserving and developing individuality the value of tolerance on the part of teachers, as discussed in the preceding chapter, is plainly seen in this connection. unless a teacher's manner toward a pupil indicates a high degree of respect, the pupil's respect for himself is in danger of being weakened. a sarcastic attitude is even worse than a dogmatic one; beyond doubt, the proper self-esteem of many a young person has been permanently undermined by his teacher's sharp tongue; sarcasm is the extreme of intolerance. _ . the relation between teachers and students._ there should be a clearer understanding, too, about the function of teachers in general. many instructors give the impression that educational institutions exist for their benefit, rather than for the good of their students; and from the start the latter are forced into the position of suppliants. if questions are asked, impatience is shown; and if objections to statements are raised, impertinence is charged. such treatment tends to cow the average student and thus to limit his power to react upon ideas. while teachers may be real authorities in subject-matter, they can never be anything more than assistants in the self-development of their students. they should more openly assume this subordinate position, placing the primary responsibility upon the learner; they would then be less likely to subordinate the inner growth of the student, which it is their highest function to aid, to the mere acquisition of knowledge. if, however, teachers practically compel subservience by an arrogant manner, or by the assignment of lessons much too long for one's normal rate of advance, or by the assignment of subject-matter that seems to have no possible value, what should the student do? should he smother his own desires and opinions in the attempt to satisfy his teacher? rarely, if ever; he will not grow inwardly by suppressing the self. on the contrary, when he feels himself in serious restraint, he should frankly state his grievances, and the teacher, even though a college professor, should receive and ponder such statements seriously, remembering that one reason he is paid a salary is that he shall exercise skill in adapting himself to the psychological condition of his students. if these frank statements evoke no friendly response, then protest may be in place, and sometimes revolt, just as when political liberty is assailed. of course, a good degree of patience and tolerance should always be exercised toward one's teacher; but there is need of more moral courage among young people to meet the disapproval of teachers and their punishments in the form of scoldings and low marks. many a college student unresistingly submits to a sarcastic, dictatorial teacher when he ought to show resentment and stand on his rights. resistance to teaching authority may be just as vital a part of study as the rejection of the conclusions of an author. until such ideas are more generally practiced, a normal, vigorous self, which is the first factor in scholarship, is in danger. intellectual liberty is not less important than political liberty, and often worth a fight. it is odd that much blood has been shed for the attainment of political and religious freedom, while the tyranny of mind over mind, which is exceedingly common in the class room, has scarcely been recognized as a serious evil. it can be accounted for only by the fact that both teachers and parents have been more interested in the quantity of knowledge acquired than in the inner growth of learners. _ . recognition of individual characteristics._ every person has many peculiarities that are important factors in his study and that should be noted by all concerned with great care. for example, aside from the desirable rate of advance for each person, which has already been mentioned, a student maybe eye-minded, or ear- minded, or motor-minded. that is, he may be peculiarly dependent upon his eyes, needing to see a statement in print rather than to hear it read, and inclined to visualize or image even the most abstract thought. or he may learn best through the ear, wanting to hear statements read, rather than see them. or he may be peculiarly dependent on motor activity, preferring to write his spelling lesson, rather than to see the words only or to spell them orally; such a person will need to gesticulate freely, to imitate movements and act out scenes, rather than see or hear only verbal descriptions. some persons are naturally regular and systematic in their work, following a definite program each day and arranging facts as well as furniture in an orderly way. others are pained by regularity and system, and find it impossible to reform themselves. they can work well only when they feel like it, and therefore by spurts. some do their best thinking under the stimulus of discussion and opposition, others are disturbed by such conditions and can think best in private. some are especially devoted to facts, being scientifically minded and interested in the objects about them. others are idea-lovers, caring little for the concrete world of nature, but attracted to literature, history, and music. others, still, are particularly strong in execution, rarely considering theory apart from practice.[footnote: see president hadley's article in _harper's magazine,_ june, .] some of the peculiarities that we discover in ourselves are weaknesses that should be discouraged and combated to the utmost; others require more or less modification. but there is no choice concerning most of them; their sum constitutes our nature, and we must accept them. they are our original capital, our source of strength on which all increase of strength must be grafted. and we should become well acquainted with them, just as the engineer should know the properties of steam. full acquaintance is impossible, and even approximate knowledge of the extent of one's powers cannot be reached, until one has become deeply interested in some project and loaded with responsibility in regard to it. but by humbly and diligently observing one's better tendencies, and by giving full expression to them, one may attain a fair degree of self-knowledge. one of the special duties of teachers and parents is to come to the assistance of young people in such study, helping them to recognize their strong and weak points and to understand themselves without getting discouraged or excited. if we fail to enjoy a book or musical concert that arouses the enthusiasm of others, we may well admit the fact to ourselves, and perhaps to others, with neither pride nor shame, but as a fact. such facts reveal us to ourselves, and should be noted with the consciousness that, if strength is not found in one direction, it is likely to be discovered in some other. _ . responsibility for initiative._ it is obvious from preceding statements that both children and older students must become far more accustomed to taking the initiative during instruction, if they are to take it in private study. the way to prepare for leadership, whether of self or of others, is to undertake such leadership under wise guidance. there are two degrees of responsibility in recitation that are somewhat common. suppose, for example, that a class in manual training is to make a tile out of clay, to be placed under a coffee pot. after proposing this task the teacher ( ) might further state that the tile must be six inches square and one-half inch thick; that it must have a level surface; that a ball of clay of a certain size will be needed in order to make a tile of the desired size; that it must be pressed into shape mainly by the use of the thumbs; that careful measuring will be necessary to secure the proper dimensions; that square corners can be obtained by placing some square-cornered object directly over the corners of the tile, for comparison; and that a level surface can best be obtained by sighting carefully across the surface, so as to detect any irregularities. after these and perhaps other instructions have been given by the teacher, the children may be directed to begin work. or, after the task has been proposed, the teacher ( ) might simply ask the main questions that need to be considered, letting the pupils find the solutions for the same as far as possible. for example: how large should the tile be made? what should be its shape? what kind of surface must it have? how must the clay be worked into the desired shape? how make sure of the dimensions? of square corners? of a level surface? the first plan shows practically the lecture method in operation. the teacher presents all of the ideas, and the children have the position of listeners or followers. that method places the minimum degree of responsibility upon pupils, the responsibility for attention, and is quite common in the poorer schools and in colleges. the second plan allows the children to join actively with the teacher in producing the ideas involved in the solution of the problem. it shows the development method in operation, which places much more responsibility upon the class. but the teacher even here takes practically all of the initial steps. she is the one who breaks the large problem up into its parts; who determines the wording of the questions and the order in which they shall be considered. the children follow her cue; they are subject to her constant direction, and merely make response to her specific biddings. the reaching of new thought by them under such immediate stimulus and suggestion involves responsibility for thinking, to be sure, but very little responsibility for the initial thinking or for initiative. neither of these methods, therefore, plainly develops the power of self- direction. training in the exercise of initiative is provided, not when young people are following some other person's plan and answering some other person's questions, but when they are obliged to conceive their own plans and their own questions. here is the crux of the whole matter. some other method, therefore, is desirable, and it is not difficult to find. after the making of the tile has been proposed, the teacher might simply ask, "how will you plan this piece of work?" leaving the conception of the main questions, together with the answers, as far as possible to the children. they would know that a certain size would need to be determined upon, fixed by the size of a coffee pot; that the shape would have to be considered, the round or square form being chosen according to personal preference and ease of making; that the thickness would be a factor, it being important that the tile be thin enough to be reasonably light, but thick enough not to break easily or to let heat through; that a level surface is desirable, both for the sake of beauty and utility; and that some way must be found for pressing the clay into shape. all of these ideas lie within their personal experience and therefore call only for common knowledge and common sense. all or most of this part of the plan, including the correction of any misstatements, could be made by the children with little or no help from the teacher. where their knowledge is more limited, however, she should come to their aid, either telling or developing, as the case required. for instance, she might possibly tell outright how much clay each would probably need, also how the clay should be pressed into shape; and develop the method of making sure of proper dimensions, of square corners (or of roundness) and of a level surface. this task in manual training is typical of lessons in general. in their mastery there is always a procedure of some sort to be followed, and now and then, at least, this procedure lies in whole or in part so fully within the class experience that they should have the responsibility of mapping it out. sometimes in the lower grades such work might occupy a whole recitation period; again, only a few minutes. as the experience increases, this responsibility should increase, so that the higher grades should often show children stating the main questions to be considered in their lessons, without help, just as they have long been in the habit of stating the main steps to be taken in individual problems in arithmetic without aid. in very many recitations children should have responsibility for rejecting some of the answers and for accepting others. the writer is acquainted with one eighth-year class in which not only all this is done, but the children frequently determine their own lesson assignments, reporting in class what home work was attempted the previous evening and how it was done. these reports are then subjected to general criticism and suggestion. if such practices become successfully established in the elementary school, they will have to be adopted higher up, for very shame if for no other reason. _ . past experience as the principal source of new ideas. ( ) illustrations._ socrates was one of the most fertile thinkers that ever lived; yet he scarcely traveled beyond the walls of athens, and was accused of always talking about the most commonplace objects, such as "brass founders and leather cutters and skin dressers." he clearly illustrates the fact that fertility of thought bears little relation to one's quantity of learning, but depends rather upon the use made of such very simple raw material as any ordinary person possesses. _the children's hour_ as discussed on pages - show how one's past may be used in the production of thought. the poem tells of an hour set aside by the family for play. the fact that we know this to be a very rare thing prompts the questions, "was it customary in this family, or did it happen only once?" the fact that many fathers would be bored by such an hour suggests the query, "did this father really enjoy it?" the fact that the custom is so uncommon raises the further inquiry, "was there any special merit among these children that led to it?" also, "why is the custom not more common?" and, since some one must take the lead in establishing such an hour, the query follows, "can children themselves accomplish anything in this direction?" thus facts that are well known lead to new ideas. no matter what we hear or read, or what topic is given to us to ponder, thoughts additional to those directly presented are likely to be reached by reference to past related experience. that one should look to past experience as an almost unlimited source of new thought is one of the most important truths for any person to bear in mind who is endeavoring to learn to think. _( ) the common neglect of experience._ it is very common, however, for persons who are rich in experience touching some subject that they are studying to fail almost entirely to use it. this was once well illustrated by about twenty young women who were specializing in domestic science. at their own suggestion, they prepared written plans for teaching how to bake sweet potatoes; the writer was to correct these and discuss them with the class. but after carefully examining all the papers and finding remarkably few facts included, he asked the class what was really necessary, after all, in the baking of sweet potatoes, beyond putting them, clean, into a hot oven and taking them out when done. he requested them to enumerate the facts that really needed to be taught. after perhaps two minutes of meditation they sheepishly admitted that there was really very little to present on the topic, and that they had carefully written out plans only because "plans" were expected, and they wanted some practice. since it was subject-matter, rather than method, that was needed, the discussion was then directed to the facts involved in baking the potatoes. a dispute soon arose when one remarked, "you should never cut a sweet potato," others inquiring what should then be done with those that were partly unsound, and how potatoes of very different sizes could be baked together. numerous other questions were considered, as follows:-- what is the best way to clean them? is it best to allow them to lie long in water? should the oven be very hot, or is a slow heat preferable? should anything be done with them while baking? how can they be protected against burning? how much time is necessary for the baking? or will it vary? if so, why? how tell when they are done? is it necessary to take them out and strike them with the palm of the hand, breaking them slightly? how get them out without burning one's self? since one cookbook says that we want "dry and mealy" potatoes and another states that they should be "moist and sweet," which is right? also, what different steps should be taken to secure each kind? some persons parboil the potatoes before baking them. is that desirable? what about the advisability of baking them with butter, sugar, and salt? are there other ways of baking them? what changes does the heat effect in the potato? should they be served immediately? or, if guests are not prompt, is there any way of keeping them in good condition? most of these questions arose for the first time in the discussion, not having been referred to in any of the plans. yet, no doubt, all the members of the class had baked sweet potatoes many times, had read cookbooks as often as novels, and--since they were not altogether young--had scores of times been called upon to eat potatoes that were not clean, or were unsound, or not done, or were tasteless, or burnt, or soggy, or cold. therefore, probably not one of the questions was entirely new to any one of the students, so that the raw material for thought was present in abundance and even very close at hand. _( ) reasons for such neglect._ why, then, did they so neglect their past? above all, why should two minutes of reflection on the subject mark their limit? for, having given to themselves the signal tor all stray ideas on the baking of sweet potatoes to assemble, their manner indicated no hope of further returns after the expiration of that brief period. a partial answer is that they did not know where to look for ideas. but an additional answer is that they did not know _how_ to look to their past, and they accordingly lacked confidence. indeed, they knew that they could not think, so what was the use of wasting more than two minutes for the sake of appearances? it does require some knowledge and confidence to think out a subject in view of one's experience. when we are somewhat familiar with a subject, some ideas in regard to it may come very readily, so that the first few minutes of reflection may be easily spent and fairly rewarded. but the ability really to think is tested after this period. then we must know how to overhaul our past and must have faith that we will get something from it. we must search our experience through and through, viewing it from one point and then another in the keen lookout for suggestions. and we must know that many of the best thoughts, probably most of them, do not come, like a flash, fully into being, but find their beginnings in dim feelings, in faint intuitions, that need to be encouraged and coaxed before they can be surely felt and defined. the writer's experience in the observation of recitations with graduate students has often illustrated this fact. not seldom a recitation has been observed that has apparently pleased most of the observers, but that has produced only an uncomfortable feeling on his part. at the close of the recitation he had no more definite ideas about its merits than his students; but he was conscious of this feeling of discomfort produced, and knew that if he followed it up he would probably arrive at some important thoughts. occasionally his main points in an extended discussion of a recitation have been reached in this way. usually he has found afterward that his students have had the same feeling as he; but they were scarcely conscious of the fact, and, even if conscious, they failed to realize its worth as a source of suggestion. thus vague premonitions furnish the clew to much of the best thought. very often one of the chief differences between a thinker and one who cannot think lies in the attention given to premonitory feelings of pleasure, discomfort, doubt, suspicion, etc.; the latter ignores such, while the former, when he lacks clear ideas, or all ideas, even shakes himself to discover how he feels, and patiently labors to define his feelings and trace them to their source. _( ) how confidence in the value of one's past may be developed._ but how dependent such study is upon self-confidence! unless we have faith in the richness of our own experience, and belief that a careful inspection of it will be rewarded, we lack the courage and patience necessary for success. how can such confidence be cultivated? mainly by cultivating the habit of turning first to self when reflective thought is required. it is presupposed that we must consult the library and the world about us for raw facts of various kinds, for historical events, scientific data, views of men, descriptions, etc.; but when our own thought is wanted on a topic with which we are somewhat familiar, and on which we are supposed to have some ideas, let us form the habit of turning to ourselves _first;_ to others as helps later. if other authorities are consulted first, there is danger that the first impressions, the first thoughts, of the student will never come to light; the ideas of others will hide these and become their substitutes, thereby engendering distrust in self. but by giving attention first to self, by giving it the first chance, its contributions can be recognized; that encourages it to grow and attain vigor, so that, when outside helps are later consulted, it can react upon them and maintain itself. every young person should do enough thinking on a subject, before attempting to find what others think about it, to have something to oppose to these others, as a basis of judgment. that will keep the self upper-most and cultivate the confidence desired. if, on the contrary, we wait until we have found what others think, before attempting to find what we think, others will do our thinking for us, and we will ever be suffering from the timidity that emerson laments in the words:-- a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. they teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good- humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the tune, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. [footnote: emerson, essay on _self-reliance_.] part iii conclusions chapter xi full meaning of study: relation of study to children and to the school _the meaning of study._ true or logical study is not aimless mental activity or a passive reception of ideas only for the sake of having them. it is the vigorous application of the mind to a subject for the satisfaction of a felt need. instead of being aimless, every portion of effort put forth is an organic step toward the accomplishment of a specific purpose; instead of being passive, it requires the reaction of the self upon the ideas presented, until they are supplemented, organized, and tentatively judged, so that they are held well in memory. the study of a subject has not reached its end until the guiding purpose has been accomplished and the knowledge has been so assimilated that it has been used in a normal way and has become experience. and, finally, since the danger of submergence of self among so much foreign thought is so great, it is not complete--at least for young students--until precautions for the preservation of individuality have been included. the common notion that study should consist of thinking is, therefore, quite right. in _hints for home reading_ (p. ) henry ward beecher says of himself: "reading with me incites to reflection instantly. i cannot separate the origination of ideas from the reception of ideas; the consequence is, as i read i always begin to think in various directions, and that makes my reading slow; and that being the origin of it psychologically, it has grown into such a habit that, if i read a novel even, i read slowly." later he advises (p. ), "never give more time to reading a book than to reflecting upon its contents." in criticism of the customary haste in reading, on the other hand, mr. gorschen declares: "honestly, i must say, i believe that a vast number of readers do not allow what i may call the frenzied current of their eyes, as they read, to be stopped by even a moment of calm reflection or thought." [footnote: _aspects of modern study,_ by right honorable g.j. gorschen, d.c.l., m.p., p. .] real assimilation of ideas has to be slow; and while some reading, owing to the simplicity of subject- matter, should be as rapid as the eye can travel, the rate at which ground is usually covered is too great to make assimilation possible. the eight factors of study that have been treated are not to be regarded as separate stages of advance that must follow one another tandem fashion. the principal stages through which the learner passes are only four in number as outlined in chapter viii. yet some of the eight factors necessarily follow others. for example, the conception of the specific aim should, if possible, come first, while memorizing should usually come late, partly if not wholly as the by-product of thinking; and the actual using of knowledge should come last. on the other hand, provision for a tentative attitude and for individuality should be made frequently throughout one's study. several of these factors, therefore, may be in evidence in any one of the four chief stages of advance described. _the ability of children to learn to study._ we have seen that children possess the ability to undertake the kind of work required by each of the several factors of study. in fact, outside of school, they are continually applying their minds in the meeting of specific needs, as adults are, thereby employing most, if not all, these factors. there is, accordingly, no fundamental difference between their study and that of adults, although the relative prominence of the various phases may vary somewhat; in other words, these factors of study are general principles like the principles of teaching, and likewise applicable to all ages. no assertion is here made that children know intuitively how to do this systematic kind of studying; they merely have the qualities of mind and the experience prerequisite to rational study, and are therefore in a position to receive instruction on the subject with profit. _why young people have not been learning to study properly alone._ every one recognizes the fact that young people, as a rule, have not been learning to study properly alone. there are two reasons for this, which deserve very careful consideration. one is that the difference between studying with a teacher and studying alone has been overlooked. it has been assumed that the two were practically identical, so that the one was full preparation for the other, while in fact there is a very striking difference between them. consider what happens in class instruction, and then how independent study differs from it. when a young person sets to work to master a lesson with the aid of a teacher there is a question of how much two persons can accomplish together. one of the two is mature, more or less informed in general, more or less versed in the principles of study, and more or less skilled in their application. the other is immature, and only under favorable circumstances fully willing to apply himself. _ . the difference between studying alone and with a teach has been overlooked._ as they ordinarily work, their relation to each other is well defined. in case text has been assigned, the teacher asks various questions, pushes the pupil against difficulties, points out crucial thoughts, calls a halt here and there for review and drill, supplies motive for attention by reprimanding or praising or pummeling, as the case may be, and not seldom becomes flushed in the face from exertion. in the case of development instruction in which, without the help of a text, the thought is slowly unfolded by means of question and answer, the teacher is the recognized master of the discussion. she usually selects the general topic, breaks it into its parts, and then concentrates her abilities on her questions, endeavoring to make them short enough not to require too sustained attention, simple enough to be reasonably easy, and attractive enough to be sure bait. in short, she exerts herself to the utmost to conceive questions of just the right size and quality; and, if she is very skillful, her morsels of knowledge will prove so enticing that they will be swallowed and digested without pain, and perhaps without conscious effort. in case lecturing is the method followed, the teacher is still more plainly the sole producer of thought, it being the mission of the student to listen, comprehend, and retain. in each of these cases the teacher is the acknowledged leader. her personality, as represented by voice, gesture, and manner, is drawn upon for stimulus; she gives directions, puts the questions, and makes the corrections, or sees that they are made. if she is accounted a good teacher, she is probably more active than her pupils and grows tired first. now, suppose that the teacher drops out and leaves the young person to attack a similar lesson alone. how is the situation changed? the purpose in the former case was the assimilation of the facts in the lesson by the pupil. that is still the purpose. there is, therefore, no change in that respect. the method employed in the former case may be assumed to be as fully in accord with the laws of the pupil's mind as the teacher could make it. in short, the topic under consideration had to be carefully broken into its parts, and various keen questions touching the meaning and value of each had to be conceived in order that they might be considered and answered. the same mind is still present to be ministered to, so that, so far as possible, substantially the same method must be followed. there is, therefore, no important change in this respect. the purpose and the method in general being the same, it is clear that the two situations duplicate each other to a large extent. the same quantity of work must be done, and in practically the same way. but there is a very striking difference. when the two studied together, the teacher not only did a part of the work, but she was the leader; the pupil was a follower, doing only the subordinate part. now, being alone, he must do the principal part, in addition to the other. he must divide his topic into parts, and conceive all the questions that are worthy of attention; in brief, he must determine the course of procedure himself, or take the initiative. herein is found the great difference between studying with a teacher and studying alone, and it is a fundamental one. capacity for self- direction or initiation is not necessary in the usual class instruction; but it becomes indispensable the moment one undertakes independent study. _( ) the nature and importance of initiative by the pupil._ this capacity is not simply a matter of knowledge. one person may know much more than another about the factors involved in a proposed project, and still be inferior to the other in ability to plan its execution. it is not simply a matter of boldness, either, nor of energy, although both of these, as well as knowledge, are necessary elements. it signifies, in the main, rather a certain power of invention, or a resourcefulness in planning work, a resourcefulness that is sure to be exercised, however, only in case the other factors just mentioned are also present. power of initiative is the key to proper study. if different lessons were mastered in exactly the same manner, it might not be important. but that is not the case, for every new lesson brings a new situation. experienced teachers know that one year of instruction in a certain study does not free them from the necessity of extensive preparation, if required to teach the same subject a second year. the discovery of this fact is one of the serious disappointments of young teachers. the same holds in study. every new lesson, every new book, must be mastered in a way peculiar to itself; each affords a new test of resourcefulness. thus the exercise of initiative is a constant and very important factor in all independent study. _( ) why power of initiative cannot be acquired through imitation._ power of initiative might still prove no source of difficulty, if it were something that could be acquired mainly by imitation. but there is the rub the case of the geography class mentioned on page shows conclusively that the natural tendency of young people to imitate the example of initiative set by their teachers gives very little guarantee of the exercise of similar initiative on their part when studying alone. and there are plain reasons for this. in the first place, there is the widest difference between seeing and doing, between theory and practice in general, so that one may observe an action and still fail utterly to duplicate it. that is very common. but, in addition, the power of initiative, being really the "ability to originate or start," calls for a good degree of originality and, therefore, lies largely outside the field of imitation. in the second place, the long- continued following of a leader, instead of fitting one to lead, may directly unfit one for that responsibility. in the case of the geography class it had been the leader who had determined how each lesson should be attacked; who had exercised resourcefulness in meeting unexpected obstacles; who had assumed responsibility for deciding what the crucial questions were, and when the answers were correct and complete; and who had supplied the energy that made things "go." under these circumstances, could it be expected that these children, in their teacher's absence, would exhibit these same qualities? hardly. one does not learn to make an independent plan, to show resourcefulness, to carry responsibility, and to supply motive for effort--in brief, to take the initiative--by having some one else perform these tasks for one. in other words, dependence is not the preparation for independence. indeed, great skill on the part of a teacher in these respects almost precludes such skill on the part of pupils. if allowed prominence year after year, it so undermines self- reliance that one's helplessness when alone is greatly increased. the children of the geography class had had nearly five years of training in leaning on some one else, so that it was extremely difficult to make them stand alone. they were like common soldiers especially trained to obey their officers, yet expected to maintain their former efficiency when suddenly left without officers. they were even more helpless in the school-room, in the presence of a leader, than outside. by overlooking the difference between studying with a leader and alone, therefore, the teacher overlooks initiative, and in consequence she not only fails to develop that power, but she may easily undermine it by accustoming pupils to dependence upon her. here is one of the reasons why young people have not been learning to study properly by themselves. _ . some of the factors of study have also been overlooked by teachers. ( ) examples._ a second reason is that some of the factors of study themselves have long been neglected or overlooked by teachers, as was stated in a general way in chapter i. it is not customary, for example, for teachers to set up specific objects in their instruction, which shall furnish motive and be guides in study. indeed, it is rare except among some primary teachers. while the supplementing of text is somewhat common in some subjects, such as literature, any clear notion as to what should be understood by thoroughness is rare indeed; and consequently the whole matter of relative values and of organization is poorly comprehended. children, and even older students, are not infrequently reprimanded for presuming to judge the merits of subject- matter, a fact that plainly indicates how little the importance of passing on the general worth of ideas is appreciated. manual training and a few kindred branches recognize the actual using of ideas as their endpoint; but no one will assert that they are regarded as types of other subjects in that respect. any one will admit that special provision for the development of a tentative attitude toward facts is very exceptional; and students are so commonly submerged by their studies, that there is hardly need to affirm that conscious provision for the preservation and development of individuality is rare. memorizing is the only universally recognized factor in study; and the supplementing of the author ranks next to it. whether, aside from these two, any or all of the other factors receive attention, depends upon the individual teacher; as a rule they are sadly neglected, or omitted outright from consideration. this being true, it is uncommon for students to carry their study through the three or four stages necessary in the proper assimilation of knowledge (see p. ), because these stages are accomplished only by doing the work involved in these several factors. very little knowledge, for instance, is carried over into habit, the fourth stage. the four fundamental operations in arithmetic and a few facts in composition and grammar are shining exceptions. very few teachers have ever even asked themselves what portions of their different subjects of instruction should result in habits; whatever habits become actually established, therefore, are a matter of accident rather than of intelligent planning by teachers. every student reaches the third stage of assimilation with some of his knowledge; that is, he overhauls it until it is translated into his own experience. but what a small proportion of all that he learns becomes welded to him, by the warmth of his feeling for it, so that he forgets where it was obtained and feels it to be his own! almost any college student can name whole courses that he pursued, to which he never warmed up appreciably. how small this amount is, is suggested by the small quantity that is carried even through the second stage, where the pupil or student boldly subordinates both author and teacher to himself and asks what profit he is getting; where he casts aside as non-essential much of what is presented, and centers his attention on what seems of real value to him, to weigh and perhaps reorganize it. many a student never consciously reaches this stage, and might be afraid to let his teacher know the fact if he did. certainly many a teacher would regard any exercise of choice by the student, in the subject-matter assigned, as an act of impertinence. evidently most study does not carry assimilation beyond the first stage, in which the crude materials of knowledge are merely collected. and this not because young people are lazy and disobedient, but because they are practically taught to stop there by their teachers. they tell the truth when, recalling practice, they almost universally declare that studying is mainly memorizing; and helen keller's complaint that she had to study so much that she did not have time to think, expresses a very common experience. even if there were no difficulty in regard to initiative, therefore, proper methods of study could not be acquired through imitation, because instruction does not set up a model of study that is worthy of imitation. beyond doubt, the method of instruction would duplicate the method of study if each were right, and thus an example might be put before the student for him to follow. but there is no such example at present, and while students are upbraided for not studying properly, they are furnished no means of learning the right way. _( ) why the factors in study have been so neglected by teachers._ the reason for this strange neglect of the factors in study is probably due principally to the exaggerated importance of the teacher. believing in the maxim "as is the teacher, so is the school," we have placed the center of gravity of the school in the teacher. "the tendency of the (normal) training school," says president millis, "is to make the teacher self-conscious, concerned about her own performance, about whether she did this or that in the approved way, whether her voice was properly modulated, whether she utilized illustrative and supplementary material in due proportion, whether she followed copy faithfully, whether she got standardized results. the tendency of supervision is to produce the same attitude of the teacher. the success of the teacher is graded on her scholarship, her culture, her standardized attainments, her questioning, her care of the property, her attitude toward the community and the system, her sympathy with the supervisor's notions--in short, her pedagogical ability, which is now made a large factor in determining her ration of bread and butter, is measured by her performance and her personal charms." [footnote: president w.a. millis, _training pupils in the art of study,_ the educator-journal, oct., .] books dealing with education show the same trend. there are hundreds of volumes on method; but they almost invariably tell about what the teacher should do, that is, they center in the teacher, not in the pupil. no wonder that teachers come to regard themselves as "the whole thing," and sometimes act as though educational institutions existed principally for their benefit. this exaggeration of the teacher's function has led the teacher habitually to picture the learner in the presence of a helper; and with that thought, it has hardly seemed necessary to ask whether or not the learner should set up specific aims as guiding motives in study; the teacher would furnish those herself in class, and perhaps project her influence outside overnight by threats if required. it has hardly seemed necessary to inquire how the learner would know when his work was finished, or to what extent he should pass judgment on thoughts presented, for her questions and other tests would insure proper thoroughness, and her presence would check unfitting boldness in judging. it has hardly seemed necessary to consider how far he should proceed in the mastery of a topic, or how he should avoid being dogmatic, for she would let him know when the endpoint was reached--if he did not stop too soon of his own accord--and she would reprove too positive an attitude. finally, it has hardly seemed necessary to enumerate the various ways in which he might protect his individuality, because such protection has always been regarded as one of the teacher's prominent duties, and she would offer it as occasion demanded. thus, with aid for the pupil always near at hand, the need of careful investigation into the problems of private study and how they should be met has not been felt by teachers to be pressing. but the teacher herself has been at least something of a student while teaching; and she may have made an extensive study of the learning process as treated under apperception, attention, induction, and deduction, interest, etc. how, then, has she escaped a close acquaintance with the principal factors in study? the answer is that as a teacher she has always thought of herself as giving aid, and has never felt the need of examining into her own method of study. why should she, if she has never been conscious of any particular weakness in that respect? in short, she has been too much absorbed in herself to analyze the problems of independent study to be undertaken by her pupils, and yet not enough absorbed in herself to investigate her own study. her psychology and pedagogy have not been valueless by any means; but, lacking the imagination to picture her pupils at work alone, and the sympathy to feel their confusion at such times, she has not been prompted to make an examination of the requirements they should meet when separated from her. like many persons in other fields, she has been too much interested in the results to consider the process itself. "she" in this case represents high-school and college teachers even more than those in the grades. this, at least in part, explains why the method of individual study has been so neglected. _changes necessary before young people will learn how to study. . placing the center of gravity of the school in the learner._ the first change to be made, in order that young people may learn how to study, is to place the center of gravity of the school where it belongs--in the learner. the great question of method, then, becomes, how shall one learn? not, first of all, with the aid of the teacher, but alone. what are the main tasks that should be performed in private study, and how should they be accomplished? these questions give the right point of view by centering attention in the pupil, and for that reason they are the first questions that teachers and books on method should consider. every one will commend the insight of the mother who said to an instructor, "if you will teach my boy how to prepare his lessons, i will attend to his reciting." if lessons are properly prepared, the testing of knowledge will be simple. the problem of independent study having reached some solution, how to come to the aid of the independent student, or how to impart knowledge, follows as a narrower and subordinate question. if the former has been adequately treated, the latter will introduce few new psychological points, because a full treatment of method of study will require a careful consideration of apperception, induction and deduction, interest, association of ideas, attention, etc. above all, it will give a new conception of the meaning and scope of self- activity. teaching will then call mainly for a review of such topics, although from a different and very important view-point. _ . modifying the subject-matter of the recitation._ method of study will then become a large subject for regular instruction. even in the kindergarten and the first years of school it will receive some attention, for that is the time when children begin to acquire good mental habits or to fall into pernicious ones. without making so young pupils fully conscious that they are learning to study, the teacher will lead them to move their eyes rapidly over the printed page, so as to read simple stories quickly in silence, and with good expression orally. this is already done by good teachers. she will accustom them to responsibility for discovering the bearings of observations in nature-study, of stories, work in color, etc., on their home lives, and thus pave the way for collecting knowledge under guidance of definite aims. she will cultivate in them the power to fill out the author's picture, until situations are more vividly seen and felt than now. she will require them to think and talk more sharply by points, and to use judgment in neglecting really unimportant details, training their consciences to allow such neglect, if such training is needed. she will encourage them to pass judgment on the merits of facts that they learn, while influencing them not to feel too sure. she will see that they do whatever thinking is to be done on poems and other matter that is to be memorized before the memorizing itself is undertaken, so that the important habit of memorizing through thought, rather than without it, shall begin to be firmly fixed. she will lead them to understand that they are not through with the study of topics until the ideas have been used in some way, perhaps many times. and, particularly, she will put forth effort to keep them natural in whatever they do and say, reasonably contented with their abilities, and self-reliant. while most of such instruction will be incidental, a portion of many a recitation will be directly occupied in this way. by the time the fifth year of school has been reached the principal facts concerning each of the prominent factors of study can be talked about freely, as so much definitely understood knowledge, and the children can be expected to apply them in their various studies. many a whole recitation can be spent in supplementing authors' statements, in determining principal thoughts, and in doing many other things suggested in the preceding pages, the teacher directly emphasizing such things as essential parts of proper study, and requiring them in the preparation of lessons. many a whole recitation, also, may be occupied in discussing how lessons have been prepared, the teacher not seldom presenting her own way in detail and allowing her pupils to compare theirs with it. abstract theory about method of study will thus be avoided. perhaps, most of all, the teacher will fix upon the second stage of study (p. ) as the crucial point in method, in which the children select what seems of real value to them and let the rest go. of course they will often err, and then it will devolve upon the teacher to show the value of what they have rejected. if she cannot do that, either her mind or the curriculum will need to be improved. while this seems a grave responsibility to place upon pupils of the elementary school, it must be remembered that they should know how to study by the time they complete that course; and they cannot possibly learn how, without dealing boldly with values,--the values of facts in comparison with one another, or relative values, and their values to the self, or general values. we have long wanted young people to know how to study, without allowing them choice among ideas, that is, without placing them in the conditions that would permit it. the fact that during the later years of the elementary school children must choose almost daily outside of school between good and bad literature as presented in books, periodicals, and newspapers, and that they actually select and reject freely in their own reading, shows how normal it is to do such work in school, and how important it is to make it prominent. method of study will then have precedence over other aims of the school, even ranking above the acquisition of other knowledge. possibly as much as one-fourth of all the school time might be devoted primarily to this problem, although within that period much subject- matter in the studies would also be mastered. while children completing the curriculum of the elementary school might then be well enough acquainted with the general principles of study, in their practical applications, to stop the customary complaints of teachers and parents in that regard, method of study would still be far from mastered. for, besides the general principles, there are special principles peculiar to each branch of knowledge, just as there are both general and special methods of teaching. proper study of arithmetic, for example, does not fully include the method of studying algebra, to say nothing of grammar; neither does the method in algebra duplicate that in geometry; nor the method in english, that in latin; nor the method in latin that in french. as each new branch is begun, therefore, two or three weeks might need to be spent primarily in considering how it should be studied, and now and then, later, an hour should be occupied in the same way. topics in learning to study that are too broad for the limits of any particular branch would need to be taught from time to time. for instance, the use of the table of contents, or of the index of a book, of the library catalogue, of encyclopedias and other reference works, should become familiar in the elementary school, as well as some facts about taking and preserving notes. in high school and college further systematic instruction would be needed on the finding of articles and books treating of certain topics, on the keeping of notes, possibly to the extent of establishing a card catalogue for them, and on the general use of a library. some attention to methods of study would be in place, therefore, even in college. on the whole, the content of the regular school period would be considerably modified. study periods, both supervised and independent, devoted either to method of study or to subject-matter, would be far more common; and, while the reproduction of facts would still be necessary, it need not be the dominant feature of the school; for improved methods of study, or better thinking, would render much of the mere testing of the presence of facts, such as we now have, superfluous. study periods, or, preferably, thinking periods, as the name in the regular school program, would then be recognized as more fitting than recitation; the latter is a belittling name. _ . modifying the method of the recitation._ finally, in order that initiative, good judgment, and even skill, may be acquired in applying the principles of study, young people must do a much larger part of the work in class than has been customary. president millis's statements are again eminently sound, when he declares: "it is what the pupil can do, not what the teacher can do, that counts. he may be fascinated by the brilliant performances of his teacher, he may be pulled and pushed about under a skillful cross- examination, he may manipulate apparatus, he may see the wheels go round and round, and come out of it all with little actual gain of power to do things for himself or for others. there is more than a little danger that we have carried the refinements of teaching to the extreme of defeating its proper ends....a college professor of my acquaintance was criticised by a student for carrying the ball too much in class! no coach ever built up a winning team by carrying the ball himself. the pupil must be active. he must carry the ball. he must ask and answer questions. he must make as well as solve problems. he must be in the game himself, if he is to learn to play the game. he must be independently productive. he must learn to do things for himself, in a way which he has adopted for himself." [footnote: ibid] children and older students, therefore, must become accustomed to taking the initiative and doing the other work of study in class, if they are to do these things outside. one day when reading hawthorne's story of the gorgon's head with a fourth-year class, the writer stopped at an interesting point and asked, "do you ever stop to talk over what you read? or do you always 'go on' and 'keep going on'?" "we always go right on," replied several. "we sometimes stop," said a few, among whom was eddie. "very well," said i, "let us stop here a moment to talk. what have you to say, eddie?" "o, _we_ don't talk; the _teacher_ does the talking," said he, with a most nonchalant air. what likelihood was there that that class, after their four years of school training, would show a fair degree of independence in their study of literature, if their teacher were suddenly struck dumb? it is a matter of rather frequent remark that children accustomed to lively participation in class discussion under a skillful teacher too often experience a disappointing relapse the moment the teacher absents herself. the peculiar stimulus being gone, they not only fail to rise to the occasion by conceiving such questions as she might ask; but even after the questions are put, they are overcome by a strange mental lassitude and make little response. the stimulus to work must come from within rather than from without, if one's state is to be healthy. furthermore, just as the children must do a larger part of the work in class, the teacher must do less. one follows as a consequence of the other. the old-fashioned country school neglected its pupils so much that knowledge was poorly digested. the modern school very naturally proposes to correct that evil. accordingly, the "good teacher" of to- day lives very close to her children. in many a school she does not leave them to themselves five minutes in a whole day. with her keen eye she detects their very state of mind, and by the sharpest of questions reveals their slightest error. as a result, their knowledge is much more thorough than it used to be, more of it is acquired, and it is acquired with less effort. but, meanwhile, new evils have crept in. the teacher, in spite of her better preparation, is working harder than ever, much too hard. she does more thinking in class than any one of her pupils, and more talking than all of them put together. at the same time, she is undermining their independence. the old-fashioned school, by leaving the pupil alone a good share of the time, threw him upon his own resources enough to develop a fair degree of self-reliance. it possessed the merit at least of not preventing the exercise of independence. the modern school, by providing a helper close at hand every moment, tends in the opposite direction. the gain on the whole is questionable. the good of the old must be preserved while the added good of the new is realized. the wise teacher of the future, therefore, will do more for her children than lead them to learn rapidly and thoroughly; she will endeavor to develop their self-reliance and judgment in study and in other matters just as far as possible. for this end she will, more often than at present, plan to act merely as chairman of discussion, rather than as leader of it and an active participant in it. she will induce her pupils to study aloud before her, particularly to take such initial steps as lie plainly within their power. she will offer suggestions from time to time, but not to the extent of depriving them of responsibility for determining the main questions and answering them. the longer she instructs a class, the less talking she will do, because they, having grown more resourceful and independent, will be able to do it themselves, it being one of her objects to show them how they can get along without her. she will prove most useful when she is least needed. but her presence will still be necessary, for, while she will no longer have to prod them every moment by questions, her testing will always be important, and her greater maturity of knowledge will render her suggestions and criticisms always valuable. the art of teaching will then consist not only in ability to present ideas but also in ability to keep still. that is by no means a small task. under many circumstances it is not difficult to hold one's tongue. but when a teacher is confronted by a class in which every one has the duty of saying something, it is either painful or ridiculous if no one says anything. it is then that the poor teacher is obliged to talk much in order to "keep things going." the really good teacher is the one who understands the secret of delegating responsibility to her pupils, and not the least of her rewards is the fact that she is allowed to rest her voice. _home study_ the first condition to be met in regard to home study is to assign only such work as the pupils are known by the teacher to be able to do rightly, and without too great physical strain. with the attention to method of study that has been urged, this condition can be easily met. that means, however, that many a topic cannot be assigned for the home as it is approached, for it will first require some consideration at school. thus the home study of a lesson will very often follow rather than precede its study at school. the assignment of lessons merely by pages is now often decried, and justly, because it leaves the child so utterly without a guide as to method. but, when method of study has been properly taught, such an assignment would often be fitting. the responsibility would then fall upon the pupil of determining what it was good for, of selecting and reorganizing the principal parts, etc.; but he could meet that responsibility because he would understand what things he was to do and would know how to do them. parents should not be expected to take a hand in teaching their children how to study, for that is altogether too large a task, and involves too much special preparation. if they observe that a child does not know how, they would better leave him alone, directing him to apply to his teacher for instruction. parents are more bent upon obtaining results and getting rid of their children--so far as school work is concerned--than are teachers, so that the duties assigned to them should be few and of a simple character. there are some important things for parents to do, however. they should take pains to provide proper physical surroundings for home study, including quiet, proper light and temperature. they should exert an influence in the direction of regular hours, of a short period of relaxation immediately before and after meals and before bedtime, and of some variety of occupation during the longer periods of study, so that fatigue may be avoided. in addition, they should stimulate their children by bringing pressure to bear on the lazy ones, by "hearing lessons" now and then, and, above all, by asking questions that call for a review of facts as well as for their use in conversation. they may give some help; but, if they do, they should by all means avoid falling into disputes about method. the child is right in preferring to do a thing in the teacher's way, for it is to the teacher that he is finally responsible; and parents ought to be broad enough to try to follow the teacher's plan. they can help their children most by showing concern for them, really inspecting their written work instead of merely pretending to, and otherwise manifesting genuine interest in their tasks. _are children capable of the initiative necessary for independent study?_ two questions remain to be considered, the first of which pertains to initiative. if independent study requires that one practically duplicate the work of the teacher by teaching one's self, can children in the elementary school be expected to study alone, or can they even be trained to it? much power of initiative is rare even among adults. much of the instruction of teachers themselves is poor owing to a lack of independent thinking. what success, then, can come to children when they are sent off to study their lessons in private? in reply, it is safe to say that they can be so trained, provided they have some native capacity for self-reliance that can be used as a basis for such training. and that they have such capacity can scarcely be questioned. in their choice and leadership of games and other play; in their plans for constructive work; in their serious tasks set by themselves at home; in their selection of topics for conversation and even in the turns that their remarks take, children plainly show power of initiative. intelligent parents recognize this fact, and they not infrequently take successful measures to cultivate this power. kindergartners also recognize it. indeed, they expect children who are little more than infants to propose suitable tasks, together with the method of their execution, in the kindergarten, and to carry the responsibility of leadership in the conversation of the "circle" and in the games. the resourcefulness of a ten-year-old boy was recently suggested in a certain class in composition. the subject that they were writing on was mining in the far west, and spelling was a serious obstacle for one youth, as it was for most of his mates. finally, with apparent innocence, he asked his teacher if he might not describe his experiences as a miner in the miner's own dialect. on receiving her consent he gloried in his freedom by misspelling nearly every word that he used. evidently, latent power of self-direction is one of the "native tendencies" of childhood. the statement may be ventured, also, that while the field of experience of children is very different from that of adults, the exercise of initiative within that field is as common among children as it is among adults within their own field. there is, therefore, a good basis in children for assuming the initiative. but it is only a basis. unless this native tendency toward self-direction is carefully developed in connection with the studies in school, from year to year, it will of course prove inadequate to the demands of proper study. and that very often happens. in spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar "school helplessness"; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks. in its quest for knowledge the school may thus easily prove inferior to the street and the average home in the development of this extremely valuable power. on the other hand, if children's native capacity for taking initiative has been carefully developed, well-selected subjects of study need make no excessive demands upon them. the topics to be considered will be found so nearly within their experience that their ability to study alone will be taxed only to a normal degree. children, therefore, can be expected to exercise the initiative that is necessary for independent study from year to year, provided their teachers from year to year do their duty in developing that power. _is there time for teaching how to study?_ finally, even though children be capable of learning to study alone, is there time for such instruction, particularly if it is to be the primary object throughout possibly a quarter of the elementary-school time, and during a considerable time later? is not the curriculum already full enough, indeed full to completion? while it is true that it has begun to be reduced by the selection of only such matter as bears a plain relation to our lives, as can be understood by the learner, and as constitutes some part of a large topic, when such reduction has been completed there may still remain twice as much as ought to be taught. shall we, then, even while making these eliminations, make additions that may more than equal them? the addition here proposed is not so alarming. for a long time some of our university departments of physics have aimed rather to teach the scientific method in laboratory investigations than to impart a knowledge of the facts in physics; and some of our departments of practical politics have been more concerned about the method of investigating political problems than about the conclusions reached concerning them. in such cases the acceptance of proper method as the primary purpose has not precluded the acquisition of much subject- matter, for the method has been taught through the subject-matter. the same would hold in teaching proper method of study. but, aside from that, attention to proper method of study will result in greatly reducing, rather than in increasing, the work of both teacher and pupil, and in two ways. first, it will reduce the quantity of subject-matter. it is strange that, in spite of the hue and cry of teachers and superintendents against overcrowding in the elementary school, they are really the ones who make out the course of study, and there are no persons back of them requiring them to include a large amount. beyond a minimum portion of the three r's, spelling, and geography, which are required by society, almost anything and everything could be omitted if they greatly desired it. but they have forced young people to study in much the same way as they themselves visit european countries, straining to get a bird's-eye view of everything, and settling on nothing long enough to know it intimately and to enjoy it deeply. they justify herbert spencer's remark to the effect that he would have known no more than a great many other persons, if he had read as many books as they had. the difficulty has been that teachers, with the center of gravity of the school within themselves, have lacked a standard for determining their pupils' normal rate of advance. the curriculum that they have outlined has been merely the sum of those things that they have deemed good, that they would like to have the children know; and the children have been set to work to consume all these good things, just like gourmands. with the center of gravity in the child, however, and with the proper method of study in the lead, the learner's real power of assimilation becomes the standard for his rate of advance. and, since assimilation is a very slow process, including much discrimination among ideas as well as their use, comparatively few topics can be undertaken. appreciation of proper study then makes extensive eliminations so evidently necessary that they become compulsory. so long as we did not look closely at the minds of children, and they seemed to thrive physically, we have lacked proof that they were surfeiting; attention to study reveals the fact too plainly for it to be ignored. it is not merely the teacher, either, that will be emboldened to cast aside subject-matter. the pupil himself, under the influence of specific purposes, a clear notion of thoroughness, and his own conception of values, will quickly pass over many of the facts that are assigned in his lessons. if he pays little attention to a full half of any school text that possesses literary merit, he will probably not be far in the wrong. for perspective is essential in all presentation of thought, and there are usually as many things in the background, necessary and yet to be ignored, as there are in the foreground. besides reducing the amount of matter to be studied, proper method of studying will further relieve both teacher and pupil from overwork by eliminating much friction in the process of study. the want of axle grease on a wagon does not increase the actual weight of a ton of coal, but it makes the pulling a lot harder; likewise, awkward methods of study do not increase the curriculum in fact, but they do in effect, by making progress slower and more taxing. there are hosts of young people who are willing and are trying to be studious, who do not know how. they, as well as the lazy ones, have to be dragged along by their teachers, and it is this dragging more than the thinking that exhausts them all. it is the discouragement resulting from this condition that drives many pupils out of school and many teachers into matrimony. while numerous things compete with it as a source of waste in education, unnecessary friction in method of study is probably the greatest source of waste; and it is as foolish to ignore the fact longer as it would be for a manufacturer to refuse to oil and repair his machinery. there is no question, therefore, about the advisability of taking time to teach proper method of study. in spite of helpful reductions in the curriculum from other sources, we must look to proper method of study as the principal means by which work for both the teacher and the pupil will be made lighter, more effective, and more enjoyable. this etext was created by doug levy, _literra scripta manet_. art of the story-teller, by marie l. shedlock preface. some day we shall have a science of education comparable to the science of medicine; but even when that day arrives the art of education will still remain the inspiration and the guide of all wise teachers. the laws that regulate our physical and mental development will be reduced to order; but the impulses which lead each new generation to play its way into possession of all that is best in life will still have to be interpreted for us by the artists who, with the wisdom of years, have not lost the direct vision of children. some years ago i heard miss shedlock tell stories in england. her fine sense of literary and dramatic values, her power in sympathetic interpretation, always restrained within the limits of the art she was using, and her understanding of educational values, based on a wide experience of teaching, all marked her as an artist in story-telling. she was equally at home in interpreting the subtle blending of wit and wisdom in daudet, the folk lore philosophy of grimm, or the deeper world philosophy and poignant human appeal of hans christian andersen. then she came to america and for two or three years she taught us the difference between the nightingale that sings in the tree tops and the artificial bird that goes with a spring. cities like new york, boston, pittsburgh and chicago listened and heard, if sometimes indistinctly, the notes of universal appeal, and children saw the arabian nights come true. yielding to the appeals of her friends in america and england, miss shedlock has put together in this little book such observations and suggestions on story-telling as can be put in words. those who have the artist's spirit will find their sense of values quickened by her words, and they will be led to escape some of the errors into which even the greatest artists fall. and even those who tell stories with their minds will find in these papers wise generalizations and suggestions born of wide experience and extended study which well go far towards making even an artificial nightingale's song less mechanical. to those who know, the book is a revelation of the intimate relation between a child's instincts and the finished art of dramatic presentation. to those who do not know it will bring echoes of reality. earl barnes. contents. part i. the art of story-telling. chapter. i. the difficulties of the story. ii. the essentials of the story. iii. the artifices of story-telling. iv. elements to avoid in selection of material. v. elements to seek in the choice of material. vi. how to obtain and maintain the effect of the story. vii. questions asked by teachers. part ii. the stories. sturla, the historian. a saga. the legend of st. christopher. arthur in the cave. hafiz, the stone-cutter. to your good health. the proud cock. snegourka. the water nixie. the blue rose. the two frogs. the wise old shepherd. the folly of panic. the true spirit of a festival day. filial piety. three stories from hans christian andersen. the swineherd. the nightingale. the princess and the pea. part iii. list of stories. books suggested to the story-teller and books referred to in the list of stories. introduction. story-telling is almost the oldest art in the world--the first conscious form of literary communication. in the east it still survives, and it is not an uncommon thing to see a crowd at a street corner held by the simple narration of a story. there are signs in the west of a growing interest in this ancient art, and we may yet live to see the renaissance of the troubadours and the minstrels whose appeal will then rival that of the mob orator or itinerant politician. one of the surest signs of a belief in the educational power of the story is its introduction into the curriculum of the training-college and the classes of the elementary and secondary schools. it is just at the time when the imagination is most keen, the mind being unhampered by accumulation of facts, that stories appeal most vividly and are retained for all time. it is to be hoped that some day stories will be told to school groups only by experts who have devoted special time and preparation to the art of telling them. it is a great fallacy to suppose that the systematic study of story-telling destroys the spontaneity of narrative. after a long experience, i find the exact converse to be true, namely, that it is only when one has overcome the mechanical difficulties that one can "let one's self go" in the dramatic interest of the story. by the expert story-teller i do not mean the professional elocutionist. the name, wrongly enough, has become associated in the mind of the public with persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and declaim blood-curdling episodes. a decade or more ago, the drawing-room reciter was of this type, and was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social gatherings. the difference between the stilted reciter and the simple story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in hans christian andersen's immortal "story of the nightingale." the real nightingale and the artificial nightingale have been bidden by the emperor to unite their forces and to sing a duet at a court function. the duet turns out most disastrously, and while the artificial nightingale is singing his one solo for the thirty-third time, the real nightingale flies out of the window back to the green wood--a true artist, instinctively choosing his right atmosphere. but the bandmaster--symbol of the pompous pedagogue--in trying to soothe the outraged feelings of the courtiers, says, "because, you see, ladies and gentlemen, and above all, your imperial majesty, with the real nightingale you never can tell what you will hear, but in the artificial nightingale everything is decided beforehand. so it is, and so it must remain. it cannot be otherwise." and as in the case of the two nightingales, so it is with the stilted reciter and the simple narrator: one is busy displaying the machinery, showing "how the tunes go"; the other is anxious to conceal the art. simplicity should be the keynote of story-telling, but (and her the comparison with the nightingale breaks down) it is a simplicity which comes after much training in self-control, and much hard work in overcoming the difficulties which beset the presentation. i do not mean that there are not born story-tellers who _could_ hold an audience without preparation, but they are so rare in number that we can afford to neglect them in our general consideration, for this work is dedicated to the average story-tellers anxious to make the best use of their dramatic ability, and it is to them that i present my plea for special study and preparation before telling a story to a group of children--that is, if they wish for the far-reaching effects i shall speak of later on. only the preparation must be of a much less stereotyped nature than that by which the ordinary reciters are trained for their career. some years ago, when i was in america, i was asked to put into the form of lectures my views as to the educational value of telling stories. a sudden inspiration seized me. i began to cherish a dream of long hours to be spent in the british museum, the congressional library in washington and the public library in boston--and this is the only portion of the dream which has been realized. i planned an elaborate scheme of research work which was to result in a magnificent (if musty) philological treatise. i thought of trying to discover by long and patient researches what species of lullaby were crooned by egyptian mothers to their babes, and what were the elementary dramatic poems in vogue among assyrian nursemaids which were the prototypes of "little jack horner," "dickory, dickory dock" and other nursery classics. i intended to follow up the study of these ancient documents by making an appendix of modern variants, showing what progress we had made--if any--among modern nations. but there came to me suddenly one day the remembrance of a scene from racine's "plaideurs," in which the counsel for the defence, eager to show how fundamental his knowledge, begins his speech: "before the creation of the world"--and the judge (with a touch of weariness tempered by humor) suggests: "let us pass on to the deluge." and thus i, too, have passed on to the deluge. i have abandoned an account of the origin and past of stories which at best would only have displayed a little recently acquired book knowledge. when i thought of the number of scholars who could treat this part of the question infinitely better than myself, i realized how much wiser it would be--though the task is more humdrum--to deal with the present possibilities of story-telling for our generation of parents and teachers. my objects in urging the use of stories in the education of children are at least fivefold: first, to give them dramatic joy, for which they have a natural craving; to develop a sense of humor, which is really a sense of proportion; to correct certain tendencies by showing the consequences in the career of the hero in the story [of this motive the children must be quite unconscious and there should be no didactic emphasis]; to present by means of example, not precept, such ideals as will sooner or later be translated into action; and finally, to develop the imagination, which really includes all the other points. but the art of story-telling appeals not only to the educational world and to parents as parents, but also to a wider public interested in the subject from a purely human point of view. in contrast to the lofty scheme i had originally proposed to myself, i now simply place before all those who are interested in the art of story-telling in any form the practical experiences i have had in my travels in america and england. i hope that my readers may profit by my errors, improve on my methods, and thus help to bring about the revival of an almost lost art. in sir philip sydney's "defence of poesie: we find these words: "forsooth he cometh to you with a tale, which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste." marie l. shedlock, london. part i. the art of the story-teller. chapter i. the difficulties of the story. i propose to deal in this chapter with the difficulties or dangers which beset the path of the story-teller, because, until we have overcome these, we cannot hope to bring out the full value of the story. the difficulties are many, and yet they ought not to discourage the would-be narrators, but only show them how all-important is the preparation for the story, if it is to have the desired effect. i propose to illustrate by concrete examples, thereby serving a twofold purpose: one to fix the subject more clearly in the mind of the student, the other to use the art of story-telling to explain itself. i have chosen one or two instances from my own personal experience. the grave mistakes made in my own case may serve as a warning to others who will find, however, that experience is the best teacher. for positive work, in the long run, we generally find out our own method. on the negative side, however, it is useful to have certain pitfalls pointed out to us, in order that we may save time by avoiding them. it is for this reason that i sound a note of warning. . there is _the danger of side issues_. an inexperienced story-teller is exposed to the temptation of breaking off from the main dramatic interest in a short exciting story in order to introduce a side issue which is often interesting and helpful but which must be left for a longer and less dramatic story. if the interest turns on some dramatic moment, the action must be quick and uninterrupted, or it will lose half its effect. i had been telling a class of young children the story of polyphemus and ulysses, and just at the most dramatic moment in the story some impulse for which i cannot account prompted me to go off on a side issue to describe the personal appearance of ulysses. the children were visibly bored, but with polite indifference they listened to my elaborate description of the hero. if i had given them an actual description from homer, i believe that the strength of the language would have appealed to their imagination (all the more strongly because the might not have understood the individual words) and have lessened their disappointment at the dramatic issue being postponed; but i trusted to my own lame verbal efforts, and signally failed. attention flagged, fidgeting began, the atmosphere was rapidly becoming spoiled in spit of the patience and toleration still shown by the children. at last, however, one little girl in the front row, as spokeswoman for the class, suddenly said: "if you please, before you go on any further, do you mind telling us whether, after all, that poly . . . [slight pause] . . . that . . . [final attempt] . . . _polyanthus_ died?" now, the remembrance of this question has been of extreme use to me in my career as a story-teller. i have realized that in a short dramatic story the mind of the listeners must be set at ease with regard to the ultimate fate of the special polyanthus who takes the center of the stage. i remember, too, the despair of a little boy at a dramatic representation of "little red riding-hood," when that little person delayed the thrilling catastrophe with the wolf, by singing a pleasant song on her way through the wood. "oh, why," said the little boy, "does she not get on?" and i quite shared his impatience. this warning is necessary only in connection with the short dramatic narrative. there are occasions when we can well afford to offer short descriptions for the sake of literary style, and for the purpose of enlarging the vocabulary of the child. i have found, however, in these cases, it is well to take the children into your confidence, warning them that they are to expect nothing particularly exciting in the way of dramatic event. they will then settle down with a freer mind (though the mood may include a touch of resignation) to the description you are about to offer them. . _altering the story to suit special occasions_ is done sometimes from extreme conscientiousness, sometimes from sheer ignorance of the ways of children. it is the desire to protect them from knowledge which they already possess and with which they, equally conscientious, are apt to "turn and rend" the narrator. i remember once when i was telling the story of the siege of troy to very young children, i suddenly felt anxious lest there should be anything in the story of the rape of helen not altogether suitable for the average age of the class, namely, nine years. i threw, therefore, a domestic coloring over the whole subject and presented an imaginary conversation between paris and helen, in which paris tried to persuade helen that she was strong-minded woman thrown away on a limited society in sparta, and that she should come away and visit some of the institutions of the world with him, which would doubtless prove a mutually instructive journey.[ ] i then gave the children the view taken by herodotus that helen never went to troy, but was detained in egypt. the children were much thrilled by the story, and responded most eagerly when, in my inexperience, i invited them to reproduce in writing for the next day the story i had just told them. a small child presented _me_, as you will see, with the ethical problem from which i had so laboriously protected _her_. the essay ran: once upon a time the king of troy's son was called paris. and he went over to _greace_ to see what it was like. and here he saw the beautiful helen_er,_ and likewise her husband menela_yus_. and one day, menelayus went out hunting, and left paris and helener alone, and paris said: "do you not feel _dul_ in this _palis_?"_[ ] and helener said: "i feel very dull in this _pallice_," and paris said: "come away and see the world with me." so they _sliped_ off together, and they came to the king of egypt, and _he_ said: "who _is_ the young lady"? so paris told him. "but," said the king, "it is not _propper_ for you to go off with other people's _wifes_. so helener shall stop here." paris stamped his foot. when menelayus got home, _he_ stamped his foot. and he called round him all his soldiers, and they stood round troy for eleven years. at last they thought it was no use _standing_ any longer, so they built a wooden horse in memory of helener and the trojans and it was taken into the town. now, the mistake i made in my presentation was to lay any particular stress on the reason for elopement by my careful readjustment, which really called more attention to the episode than was necessary for the age of my audience; and evidently caused confusion in the minds of some of the children who knew the story in its more accurate original form. while traveling in america, i was provided with a delightful appendix to this story. i had been telling miss longfellow and her sister the little girl's version of the siege of troy, and mrs. thorpe made the following comment, with the american humor the dryness of which adds so much to its value: "i never realized before," she said, "how glad the greeks must have been to sit down even inside a horse, when they had been standing for eleven years." . _the danger of introducing unfamiliar words_ is the very opposite danger of the one to which i have just alluded; it is the taking for granted that children are acquainted with the meaning of certain words upon which turns some important point in the story. we must not introduce, without at least a passing explanation, words which, if not rightly understood, would entirely alter the picture we wish to present. i had once promised to tell stories to an audience of irish peasants, and i should like to state here that, though my travels have brought me in touch with almost every kind of audience, i have never found one where the atmosphere is so "self-prepared" as in that of a group of irish peasants. to speak to them, especially on the subject of fairy- tales, is like playing on a delicate harp: the response is so quick and the sympathy so keen. of course, the subject of fairy-tales is one which is completely familiar to them and comes into their everyday life. they have a feeling of awe with regard to fairies, which is very deep in some parts of ireland. on this particular occasion i had been warned by an artist friend who had kindly promised to sing songs between the stories, that my audience would be of varying age and almost entirely illiterate. many of the older men and women, who could neither read nor write, had never been beyond their native village. i was warned to be very simple in my language and to explain any difficult words which might occur in the particular indian story i had chosen for that night, namely, "the tiger, the jackal and the brahman."[ ]--at a proper distance, however, lest the audience should class him with the wild animals. i then went on with my story, in the course of which i mentioned a buffalo. in spite of the warning i had received, i found it impossible not to believe that the name of this animal would be familiar to any audience. i, therefore, went on with the sentence containing this word, and ended it thus: "and then the brahman went a little further and met an old buffalo turning a wheel." the next day, while walking down the village street, i entered into conversation with a thirteen-year-old girl who had been in my audience the night before and who began at once to repeat in her own words the indian story in questions. when she came to the particular sentence i have just quoted, i was greatly startled to hear _her_ version, which ran thus: "and the priest went on a little further, and he met another old gentleman pushing a wheelbarrow." i stopped her at once, and not being able to identify the sentence as part of the story i had told, i questioned her a little more closely. i found that the word "buffalo," had evidently conveyed to her mind an old "buffer" whose name was "lo," probably taken to be an indian form of appellation, to be treated with tolerance though it might not be irish in sound. then, not knowing of any wheel more familiarly than that attached to a barrow, the young narrator completed the picture in her own mind--but which, one must admit, had lost something of the indian atmosphere which i had intended to gather about. . _the danger of claiming cooperation of the class by means of questions_ is more serious for the teacher than the child, who rather enjoys the process and displays a fatal readiness to give any sort of answer if only he can play a part in the conversation. if we could in any way depend on the children giving the kind of answer we expect, all might go well and the danger would be lessened; but children have a perpetual way of frustrating our hopes in this direction, and of landing us in unexpected bypaths from which it is not always easy to return to the main road without a very violent reaction. as illustrative of this, i quote from the "the madness of philip," by josephine daskam bacon, a truly delightful essay on child psychology in the guise of the lightest of stories. the scene takes place in a kindergarten, where a bold and fearless visitor has undertaken to tell a story on the spur of the moment to a group of restless children. she opens thus: "yesterday, children, as i came out of my yard, what do you think i saw?" the elaborately concealed surprise in store was so obvious that marantha rose to the occasion and suggested, "an el'phunt." "why, no. why should i see an elephant in my yard? it was not _nearly_ so big as that--it was a little thing." "a fish," ventured eddy brown, whose eye fell upon the aquarium in the corner. the raconteuse smiled patiently. "now, how could a fish, a live fish, get into my front yard?" "a dead fish," says eddy. he had never been known to relinquish voluntarily an idea. "no; it was a little kitten," said the story-teller decidedly. "a little white kitten. she was standing right near a big puddle of water. now, what else do you think i saw?" "another kitten," suggests marantha, conservatively. "no; it was a big newfoundland dog. he saw the little kitten near the water. now, cats don't like water, do they? what do they like?" "mice," said joseph zukoffsky abruptly. "well, yes, they do; but there were no mice in my yard. i'm sure you know what i mean. if they don't like _water_, _what_ do they like?" "milk," cried sarah fuller confidently. "they like a dry place," said mrs. r. b. smith. "now, what do you suppose the dog did?" it may be that successive failures had disheartened the listeners. itmay be that the very range of choice presented to them and the dog alike dazzled their imagination. at all events, they made no answer. "nobody knows what the dog did?" repeated the story-teller encouragingly. "what would you do if you saw a little kitten like that?" and philip remarked gloomily: "i'd pull its tail." "and what do the rest of you think? i hope you are not as cruel as that little boy." a jealous desire to share philip's success prompted the quick response: "i'd pull it too." now, the reason of the total failure of this story was the inability to draw any real response from the children, partly because of the hopeless vagueness of the questions, partly because, there being no time for reflection, children say the first thing that comes into their heads without any reference to their real thoughts on the subject. i cannot imagine anything less like the enlightened methods of the best kindergarten teaching. had mrs. r. b. smith been a real, and not a fictional, person, it would certainly have been her last appearance as a raconteuse in this educational institution. . _the difficulty of gauging the effect of a story upon the audience_ rises from lack of observation and experience; it is the want of these qualities which leads to the adoption of such a method as i have just presented. we learn in time that want of expression on the faces of the audience and want of any kind of external response do not always mean either lack of interest or attention. there is often real interest deep down, but no power, or perhaps no wish, to display that interest, which is deliberately concealed at times so as to protect oneself from questions which may be put. . _the danger of overillustration_. after long experience, and after considering the effect produced on children when pictures are shown to them during the narration, i have come to the conclusion that the appeal to the eye and the ear at the same time is of doubtful value, and has, generally speaking, a distracting effect: the concentration on one channel of communication attracts and holds the attention more completely. i was confirmed in this theory when i addressed an audience of blind people[ ] for the first time, and noticed how closely they attended, and how much easier it seemed to them because they were so completely "undistracted by the sights around them." i have often suggested to young teachers two experiments in support of this theory. they are not practical experiments, nor could they be repeated often with the same audience, but they are intensely interesting, and they serve to show the _actual_ effect of appealing to one sense at a time. the first of these experiments is to take a small group of children and suggest that they should close their eyes while you tell them a story. you will then notice how much more attention is given to the intonation and inflection of the voice. the reason is obvious. with nothing to distract the attention, it is concentrated on the only thing offered the listeners, that is, sound, to enable them to seize the dramatic interest of the story. we find an example of the dramatic power of the voice in its appeal to the imagination in one of the tributes brought by an old pupil to thomas edward brown, master at clifton college: "my earliest recollection is that his was the most vivid teaching i ever received; great width of view and poetical, almost passionate, power of presentment. we were reading froude's history, and i shall never forget how it was brown's words, brown's voice, not the historian's, that made me feel the great democratic function which the monasteries performed in england; the view became alive in his mouth." and in another passage: "all set forth with such dramatic force and aided by such a splendid voice, left an indelible impression on my mind."[ ] a second experiment, and a much more subtle and difficult one, is to take the same group of children on another occasion, telling them a story in pantomime form, giving them first the briefest outline of the story. in this case it must be of the simplest construction, until the children are able, if you continue the experiment, to look for something more subtle. i have never forgotten the marvelous performance of a play given in london many years ago entirely in pantomime form. the play was called "l'enfant prodigue," and was presented by a company of french artists. it would be almost impossible to exaggerate the strength of that "silent appeal" to the public. one was so unaccustomed to reading meaning and development of character into gesture and facial expression that it was really a revelation to most of those present--certainly to all anglo-saxons. i cannot touch on this subject without admitting the enormous dramatic value connected with the cinematograph. though it can never take the place of an actual performance, whether in story form or on the stage, it has a real educational value in its possibilities of representation which it is difficult to overestimate, and i believe that its introduction into the school curriculum, under the strictest supervision, will be of extraordinary benefit. the movement, in its present chaotic condition, and in the hands of commercial management, is more likely to stifle than to awaken or stimulate the imagination, but the educational world is fully alive to the danger, and i am convinced that in the future of the movement good will predominate. the real value of the cinematograph in connection with stories is that it provides the background that is wanting to the inner vision of the average child, and does not prevent its imagination from filling in the details later. for instance, it would be quite impossible for the average child to get an idea from mere word-painting of the atmosphere of the polar regions as represented lately on the film in connection with captain scott's expedition, but any stories told later on about these regions would have an infinitely greater interest. there is, however, a real danger in using pictures to illustrate the story, especially if it be one which contains a direct appeal to the imagination of the child and one quite distinct from the stories which deal with facts, namely, that you force the whole audience of children to see the same picture, instead of giving each individual child the chance of making his own mental picture. that is of far greater joy, and of much great educational value, since by this process the child cooperates with you instead of having all the work done for him. queyrat, in his works on "la logique chez l'enfant," quotes madame necker de saussure:[ ] "to children and animals actual objects present themselves, not the terms of their manifestations. for them thinking is seeing over again, it is going through the sensations that the real object would have produced. everything which goes on within them is in the form of pictures, or rather, inanimate scenes in which life is partially reproduced. . . . since the child has, as yet, no capacity for abstraction, he finds a stimulating power in words and a suggestive inspiration which holds him enchanted. they awaken vividly colored images, pictures far more brilliant than would be called into being by the objects themselves." surely, if this be true, we are taking from children that rare power of mental visualization by offering to their outward vision an _actual_ picture. i was struck with the following note by a critic of the _outlook_, referring to a japanese play but which bears quite directly on the subject in hand. "first, we should be inclined to put insistence upon appeal by _imagination_. nothing is built up by lath and canvas; everything has to be created by the poet's speech." he alludes to the decoration of one of the scenes which consists of three pines, showing what can be conjured up in the mind of the spectator. ah, yes. unfolding now before my eyes the views i know: the forest, river, sea and mist--the scenes of ono now expand. i have often heard objections raised to this theory by teachers dealing with children whose knowledge of objects outside their own circle is so scanty that words we use without a suspicion that they are unfamiliar are really foreign expressions to them. such words as sea, woods, fields, mountains, would mean nothing to them, unless some explanation were offered. to these objections i have replied that where we are dealing with objects that can actually be seen with the bodily eyes, then it is quite legitimate to show pictures before you begin the story, so that the distraction between the actual and mental presentation may not cause confusion; but, as the foregoing example shows, we should endeavor to accustom the children to seeing much more than mere objects themselves, and in dealing with abstract qualities we must rely solely on the power and choice of words and dramatic qualities of presentation, and we need not feel anxious if the response is not immediate, nor even if it is not quick and eager.[ ] . _the danger of obscuring the point of the story with too many details_ is not peculiar to teachers, nor is it shown only in the narrative form. i have often heard really brilliant after-dinner stories marred by this defect. one remembers the attempt made by sancho panza to tell a story to don quixote. i have always felt a keen sympathy with the latter in his impatience over the recital. "in a village of estramadura there was a shepherd--no, i mean a goatherd--which shepherd or goatherd as my story says, was called lope ruiz--and this lope ruiz was in love with a shepherdess called torralva, who was daughter to a rich herdsman, and this rich herdsman---" "if this be thy story, sancho," said don quixote, "thou wilt not have done these two days. tell it concisely, like a man of sense, or else say no more." "i tell it in the manner they tell all stories in my country," answered sancho, "and i cannot tell it otherwise, nor ought your worship to require me to make new customs." "tell it as thou wilt, then," said don quixote, "since it is the will of fate that i should here it, go on." sancho continued: "he looked about him until he espied a fisherman with a boat near him, but so small that it could only hold one person and one goat. the fisherman got into the boat and carried over on goat; he returned and carried another; he came back again and carried another. pray, sir, keep an account of the goats which the fisherman is carrying over, for if you lose count of a single one, the story ends, and it will be impossible to tell a word more. . . . i go on, then. . . . he returned for another goat, and another, and another and another---" "_suppose_ them all carried over," said don quixote, "or thou wilt not have finished carrying them this twelve months!" "tell me, how many have passed already?" said sancho. "how should i know?" answered don quixote. "see there, now! did i not tell thee to keep an exact account? there is an end of the story. i can go no further." "how can this be?" said don quixote. "is it so essential to the story to know the exact number of goats that passed over, that if one error be made the story can proceed no further?" "even so," said sancho panza. . _the danger of overexplanation_ is fatal to the artistic success of any story, but it is even more serious in connection with stories told from an educational point of view, because it hampers the imagination of the listener, and since the development of that faculty is one of our chief aims in telling these stories, we must leave free play, we must not test the effect, as i have said before, by the material method of asking questions. my own experience is that the fewer explanations you offer, provided you have been careful with the choice of your material and artistic in the presentation, the more the child will supplement by his own thinking power what is necessary for the understanding of the story. queyrat says: "a child has no need of seizing on the exact meaning of words; on the contrary, a certain lack of precision seems to stimulate his imagination only the more vigorously, since it gives him a broader liberty and firmer independence."[ ] . _the danger of lowering the standard_ of the story in order to appeal to the undeveloped taste of the child is a special one. i am alluding here only to the story which is presented from the educational point of view. there are moments of relaxation in a child's life, as in that of an adult, when a lighter taste can be gratified. i allude now to the standard of story for school purposes. there is one development of story-telling which seems to have been very little considered, either in america or in our own country, namely, the telling of stories to _old_ people, and that not only in institutions or in quiet country villages, but in the heart of the busy cities and in the homes of these old people. how often, when the young people are able to enjoy outside amusements, the old people, necessarily confined to the chimney-corner and many unable to read much for themselves, might return to the joy of their childhood by hearing some of the old stories told them in dramatic form. here is a delightful occupation for those of the leisured class who have the gift, and a much more effective way of reading aloud. lady gregory, in talking to the workhouse folk in ireland, was moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendors of the tale. she says: "the stories they love are of quite visionary things; of swans that turn into kings' daughters, and of castles with crowns over the doors, and of lovers' flights on the backs of eagles, and music-loving witches, and journeys to the other world, and sleeps that last for seven hundred years." i fear it is only the celtic imagination that will glory in such romantic material; but i am sure the men and women of the poorhouse are much more interested than we are apt to think in stories outside the small circle of their lives. chapter ii. the essentials of the story. it would be a truism to suggest that dramatic instinct and dramatic power of expression are naturally the first essentials for success in the art of story-telling, and that, without these, no story-teller would go very far; but i maintain that, even with these gifts, no high standard of performance will be reached without certain other qualities, among the first of which i place _apparent_ simplicity, which is really the _art_ of concealing_ the art. i am speaking here of the public story-teller, or of the teacher with a group of children, not the spontaneous (and most rare) power of telling stories such as beranger gives us in his poem, "souvenirs du peuple": mes enfants, dans ce village, suivi de rois, il passa; voila; bien longtemps de cela! je venais d'entrer en menage, a pied grimpant le coteau, ou pour voir je m'tais mise. il avait petit chapeau et redingote grise. il me dit: bon jour, ma chere. il vous a parle, grand mere? il vous a parle? i am skeptical enough to think that it is not the spontaneity of the grandmother but the art of beranger which enhances the effect of the story told in the poem. this intimate form of narration, which is delightful in its special surroundings, would fail to _reach_, much less _hold_, a large audience, not because of its simplicity, but often because of the want of skill in arranging material and of the artistic sense of selection which brings the interest to a focus and arranges the side lights. in short, the simplicity we need for the ordinary purpose is that which comes from ease and produces a sense of being able to let ourselves go, because we have thought out our effects. it is when we translate our instinct into art that the story becomes finished and complete. i find it necessary to emphasize this point because people are apt to confuse simplicity of delivery with carelessness of utterance, loose stringing of sentences of which the only connections seem to be the ever-recurring use of "and" and "so," and "er . . .," this latter inarticulate sound having done more to ruin a story and distract the audience than many more glaring errors of dramatic form. real simplicity holds the audience because the lack of apparent effort in the artist has the most comforting effect upon the listener. it is like turning from the whirring machinery of process to the finished article, which bears no traces of the making except the harmony and beauty of the whole, which make one realize that the individual parts have received all proper attention. what really brings about this apparent simplicity which insures the success of the story? it has been admirably expressed in a passage from henry james' lecture on balzac: "the fault in the artist which amounts most completely to a failure of dignity is the absence of _saturation with his idea_. when saturation fails, no other real presence avails, as when, on the other hand, it operates, no failure of method fatally interferes." i now offer two illustrations of the effect of this saturation, one to show that the failure of method does not prevent successful effect, the other to show that when it is combined with the necessary secondary qualities the perfection of the art is reached. in illustration of the first point, i recall an experience in the north of england when the head mistress of an elementary school asked me to hear a young inexperienced girl tell a story to a group of very small children. when she began, i felt somewhat hopeless, because of the complete failure of method. she seemed to have all the faults most damaging to the success of a speaker. her voice was harsh, her gestures awkward, her manner was restless and melodramatic; but, as she went on i soon began to discount all these faults and, in truth, i soon forgot about them, for so absorbed was she in her story, so saturated with her subject, that she quickly communicated her own interest to her audience, and the children were absolutely spellbound. the other illustration is connected with a memorable peep behind the stage, when the late m. coquelin had invited me to see him in the greenroom between the first and second acts of "l'abbe constantin," one of the plays given during his last season in london, the year before his death. the last time i had met m. coquelin was at a dinner party, where i had been dazzled by the brilliant conversation of this great artist in the role of a man of the world. but on this occasion i met the simple, kindly priest, so absorbed in his role that he inspired me with the wish to offer a donation for his poor, and, on taking leave, to ask for his blessing for myself. while talking to him, i had felt puzzled. it was only when i had left him that i realized what had happened, namely, that he was too thoroughly saturated with his subject to be able to drop his role during the interval, in order to assume the more ordinary one of host and man of the world. now, it is this spirit i would wish to inculcate into the would-be story-tellers. if they would apply themselves in this manner to their work, it would bring about a revolution in the art of presentation, that is, in the art of teaching. the difficulty of the practical application of this theory is the constant plea, on the part of teachers, that there is not the time to work for such a standard in an art which is so apparently simple that the work expended on it would never be appreciated. my answer to this objection is that, though the counsel of perfection would be to devote a great deal of time to the story, so as to prepare the atmosphere quite as much as the mere action of the little drama (just as photographers use time exposure to obtain sky effects, as well as the more definite objects in the picture), yet it is not so much a question of time as concentration on the subject, which is one of the chief factors in the preparation of the story. so many story-tellers are satisfied with cheap results, and most audiences are not critical enough to encourage a high standard.[ ] the method of "showing the machinery" has more immediate results, and it is easy to become discouraged over the drudgery which is not necessary to secure the approbation of the largest number. but, since i am dealing with the essentials of really good story-telling, i may be pardoned for suggesting the highest standard and the means for reaching it. therefore, i maintain that capacity for work, and even drudgery, is among the essentials of story-telling. personally, i know of nothing more interesting than watching the story grow gradually from mere outline into a dramatic whole. it is the same pleasure, i imagine, which is felt over the gradual development of a beautiful design on a loom. i do not mean machine-made work, which has to be done under adverse conditions in a certain time and which is similar to thousands of other pieces of work; but that work, upon which we can bestow unlimited time and concentrated thought. the special joy in the slowly-prepared story comes in the exciting moment when the persons, or even the inanimate objects, become alive and move as of themselves. i remember spending two or three discouraging weeks with andersen's story of the "adventures of a beetle." i passed through times of great depression, because all the little creatures, beetles, ear-wigs, frogs, etc., behaved in such a conventional way, instead of displaying the strong individuality which andersen had bestowed upon them that i began to despair of presenting a live company at all. but one day, the _beetle_, so to speak, "took the stage," and at once there was life and animation among the minor characters. then the main work was done, and there remained only the comparatively easy task of guiding the movement of the little drama, suggesting side issues and polishing the details, always keeping a careful eye on the beetle, that he might "gang his ain gait" and preserve to the full his own individuality. there is a tendency in preparing stories to begin with detail work, often a gesture or side issue which one has remembered from hearing a story told, but if this is done before the contemplative period, only scrappy, jerky and ineffective results are obtained, on which one cannot count for dramatic effects. this kind of preparation reminds one of a young peasant woman who was taken to see a performance of "wilhelm tell," and when questioned as to the plot could only sum it up saying, "i know some fruit was shot at."[ ] i realize the extreme difficulty teachers have to devote the necessary time to perfecting the stories they tell in school, because this is only one of the subjects they have to teach in an already over-crowded curriculum. to them i would offer this practical advice: do not be afraid to repeat your stories.[ ] if you do not undertake more than seven stories a year, chosen with infinite care, and if you repeated these stories six times during the year of forty-two weeks, you would be able to do artistic and, therefore, lasting work; you would also be able to avoid the direct moral application, for each time a child hears a story artistically told, a little more of the meaning underlying the simple story will come to him without any explanation on your part. the habit of doing one's best instead of one's second- best means, in the long run, that one has no interest except in the preparation of the best, and the stories, few in number, polished and finished in style, will have an effect of which one can scarcely overstate the importance. in the story of the "swineherd," hans andersen says: "on the grave of the prince's father there grew a rose-tree. it only bloomed once in five years, and only bore one rose. but what a rose! its perfume was so exquisite that whoever smelt it forgot at once all his cares and sorrows." lafcadio hearn says: "time weeds out the errors and stupidities of cheap success, and presents the truth. it takes, like the aloe, a long time to flower, but the blossom is all the more precious when it appears." chapter iii. the artifices of story-telling. by this term i do not mean anything against the gospel of simplicity which i am so constantly preaching, but, for want of a better term, i use the word "artifice" to express the mechanical devices by which we endeavor to attract and hold the attention of the audience. the art of telling stories is, in truth, much more difficult than acting a part on the stage: first, because the narrator is responsible for the whole drama and the whole atmosphere which surrounds it. he has to live the life of each character and understand the relation which each bears to the whole. secondly, because the stage is a miniature one, gestures and movements must all be so adjusted as not to destroy the sense of proportion. i have often noticed that actors, accustomed to the more roomy public stage, are apt to be too broad in their gestures and movements when they tell a story. the special training for the story-teller should consist not only in the training of the voice and in choice of language, but above all in power of delicate suggestion, which cannot always be used on the stage because this is hampered by the presence of actual things. the story-teller has to present these things to the more delicate organism of the "inward eye." so deeply convinced am i of the miniature character of the story- telling art that i believe one never gets a perfectly artistic presentation of this kind in a very large hall or before a very large audience. i have made experiments along this line, having twice told a story to an audience in america[ ] exceeding five thousand, but on both occasions, though the dramatic reaction upon oneself from the response of so large an audience was both gratifying and stimulating, i was forced to sacrifice the delicacy of the story and to take from its artistic value by the necessity of emphasis, in order to be heard by all present. emphasis is the bane of all story-telling, for it destroys the delicacy, and the whole performance suggests a struggle in conveying the message. the indecision of the victory leaves the audience restless and unsatisfied. then, again, as compared with acting on the stage, in telling a story one misses the help of effective entrances and exits, the footlights, the costume, the facial expression of your fellow-actor which interprets so much of what you yourself say without further elaboration on your part; for, in the story, in case of a dialogue which necessitates great subtlety and quickness in facial expression and gesture, one has to be both speaker and listener. now, of what artifices can we make use to take the place of all the extraneous help offered to actors on the stage? first and foremost, as a means of suddenly pulling up the attention of the audience, is the judicious art of pausing. for those who have not actually had experience in the matter, this advice will seem trite and unnecessary, but those who have even a little experience will realize with me the extraordinary efficacy of this very simple means. it is really what coquelin spoke of as a "high light," where the interest is focused, as it were, to a point. i have tried this simple art of _pausing_ with every kind of audience, and i have rarely know it to fail. it is very difficult to offer a concrete example of this, unless one is giving a "live" representation, but i shall make an attempt, and at least i shall hope to make myself understood by those who have heard me tell stories. in hans andersen's "princess and the pea," the king goes down to open the door himself. now, one may make this point in two ways. one may either say: "and then the king went to the door, and at the door there stood a real princess," or, "and then the king went to the door, and at the door there stood--(pause)--a real princess." it is difficult to exaggerate the difference of effect produced by so slight a pause.[ ] with children it means an unconscious curiosity which expresses itself in a sudden muscular tension. there is just time during that instant's pause to _feel_, though not to _formulate, the question: "what is standing at the door?" by this means, half your work of holding the attention is accomplished. it is not necessary for me to enter into the psychological reason of this, but i strongly recommend those who are interested in the question to read the chapter in ribot's work on this subject, "essai sur l'imagination creatrice," as well as mr. keatinge's work on "suggestion." i would advise all teachers to revise their stories with a view to introducing the judicious pause, and to vary its use according to the age, the number, and, above all, the mood of the audience. experience alone can insure success in this matter. it has taken me many years to realize the importance of this artifice. among other means for holding the attention of the audience and helping to bring out the points of the story is the use of gesture. i consider, however, that it must be a sparing use, and not of a broad or definite character. we shall never improve on the advice given by hamlet to the actors on this subject: "see that ye o'erstep not the modesty of nature." and yet, perhaps it is not necessary to warn story-tellers against abuse of gesture. it is more helpful to encourage them in the use of it, especially in anglo-saxon countries, where we are fearful of expressing ourselves in this way, and when we do the gesture often lacks subtlety. the anglo-saxon, when he does move at all, moves in solid blocks--a whole arm, a whole leg, the whole body but if one watches a frenchman or an italian in conversation, one suddenly realizes how varied and subtle are the things which can be suggested by the mere turn of the wrist or the movement of a finger. the power of the hand has been so wonderfully summed up in a passage from quintillian that i am justified in offering it to all those who wish to realize what can be done by a gesture: "as to the hands, without the aid of which all delivery would be deficient and weak, it can scarcely be told of what a variety of motions they are susceptible, since they almost equal in expression the power of language itself. for other parts of the body assist the speaker, but these, i may almost say, speak themselves. with our hands we ask, promise, call persons to us and send them away, threaten, supplicate, intimate dislike or fear; with out hands we signify joy, grief, doubt, acknowledgement, penitence, and indicate measure, quantity, number and time. have not our hands the power of inciting, of restraining, or beseeching, of testifying approbation? . . . so that amidst the great diversity of tongues pervading all nations and people, the language of the hands appears to be a language common to all men."[ ] one of the most effective of artifices in telling stories to young children is the use of mimicry--the imitation of animals' voices and sound in general is of never-ending joy to the listeners. however, i should wish to introduce a note of grave warning in connection with this subject. this special artifice can only be used by such narrators as have special aptitude and gifts in this direction. there are many people with good imaginative power but who are wholly lacking in the power of mimicry, and their efforts in this direction, however painstaking, remain grotesque and therefore ineffective. when listening to such performances, of which children are strangely critical, one is reminded of the french story in which the amateur animal painter is showing her picture to an undiscriminating friend: "ah!" says the friend, "this is surely meant for a lion?" "no," says the artist (?), with some slight show of temper, "it is my little lap-dog." another artifice which is particularly successful with very small children is to insure their attention by inviting their cooperation before one actually begins the story. the following has proved quite effective as a short introduction to my stories when i was addressing large audiences of children: "do you know that last night i had a very strange dream, which i am going to tell you before i begin the stories? i dreamed that i was walking along the streets of---[here would follow the town in which i happened to be speaking], with a large bundle on my shoulders, and this bundle was full of stories which i had been collecting all over the world in different countries; and i was shouting at the top of my voice: 'stories! stories! stories! who will listen to my stories?' and the children came flocking round me in my dream, saying: 'tell _us_ your stories. _we_ will listen to your stories.' so i pulled out a story from my big bundle and i began in a most excited way, "once upon a time there lived a king and a queen who had no children, and they---' here a little boy, _very_ much like that little boy i see sitting in the front row, stopped me, saying: 'oh, i know _that_ old story: it's sleeping beauty.' "so i pulled out a second story, and began: 'once upon a time there was a little girl who was sent by her mother to visit her grandmother ---' then a little girl, _so_ much like the one sitting at the end of the second row, said: 'oh! everybody knows that story! it's---'" here i would like to make a judicious pause, and then the children in the audience would shout in chorus, with joyful superiority: "little red riding-hood!" before i had time to explain that the children in my dream had done the same. this method i repeated two or three times, being careful to choose very well-known stories. by this time the children were all encouraged and stimulated. i usually finished with congratulations on the number of stories they knew, expressing a hope that some of those i was going to tell that afternoon would be new to them. i have rarely found this plan to fail to establish a friendly relation between oneself and the juvenile audience. it is often a matter of great difficulty, not to _win_ the attention of an audience but to _keep_ it, and one of the most subtle artifices is to let the audience down (without their perceiving it) after a dramatic situation, so that the reaction may prepare them for the interest of the next situation. an excellent instance of this is to be found in rudyard kipling's story of "the cat that walked . . ." where the repetition of words acts as a sort of sedative until one realizes the beginning of a fresh situation. the great point is never to let the audience quite down, that is, in stories which depend on dramatic situations. it is just a question of shade and color in the language. if you are telling a story in sections, and one spread over two or three occasions, you should always stop at an exciting moment. it encourages speculation in the children's minds, which increases their interest when the story is taken up again. another very necessary quality in the mere artifice of story-telling is to watch your audience, so as to be able to know whether its mood is for action or reaction, and to alter your story accordingly. the moods of reaction are rarer, and you must use them for presenting a different kind of material. here is your opportunity for introducing a piece of poetic description, given in beautiful language, to which the children cannot listen when they are eager for action and dramatic excitement. perhaps one of the greatest artifices is to take a quick hold of your audience by a striking beginning which will enlist their attention from the start. you can then relax somewhat, but you must be careful also of the end because that is what remains most vivid to the children. if you question them as to which story they like best in a program, you will constantly find it to be the last one you have told, which has for the moment blurred out the others. here are a few specimens of beginnings which seldom fail to arrest the attention of the child: "there was once a giant ogre, and he lived in a cave by himself." from "the giant and jack-straws," david starr jordan. "there were once twenty-five tin soldiers, who were all brothers, for they had been made out of the same old tin spoon." from "the tin soldier," hans christian andersen. "there was once an emperor who had a horse shod with gold." from "the beetle," hans christian andersen. "there was once a merchant who was so rich that he could have paved the whole street with gold, and even then he would have had enough for a small alley." from the "the flying trunk," hans christian andersen. "there was once a shilling which came forth from the mint springing and shouting, 'hurrah! now i am going out into the wide world.'" from "the silver shilling," hans christian andersen. "in the high and far off times the elephant, o best beloved, had no trunk." from "the elephant's child": "just so stories," rudyard kipling. "not always was the kangaroo as now we behold him, but a different animal with four short legs." from "old man kangaroo": "just so stories," rudyard kipling. "whichever way i turn," said the weather-cock on a high steeple, "no one is satisfied." from "fire-side fables," edwin barrow. "a set of chessmen, left standing on their board, resolved to alter the rules of the game." from the same source. "the pink parasol had tender whalebone ribs and a slender stick of cherry-wood." from "very short stories," mrs. w. k. clifford. "there was once a poor little donkey on wheels: it had never wagged its tail, or tossed its head, or said 'hee-haw,' or tasted a tender thistle." from the same source. now, some of these beginnings are, of course, for very young children, but they all have the same advantage, that of plunging _in medias res_, and, therefore, arrest attention at once, contrary to the stories which open on a leisurely note of description. in the same way we must be careful about the endings of stories. they must impress themselves either in a very dramatic climax to which the whole story has worked up, as in the following: "then he goes out the wet wild woods, or up the wet wild trees, or on the wet wild roofs, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone." from "just so stories," rudyard kipling. or by an anti-climax for effect: "we have all this straight from the alderman's newspaper, but it is not to be depended on." from "jack the dullard," hans christian andersen. or by evading the point: "whoever does not believe this must buy shares in the tanner's yard." from "a great grief," hans christian andersen. or by some striking general comment: "he has never caught up with the three days he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never learnt how to behave." from "how the camel got his hump": "just so stories," rudyard kipling. i have only suggested in this chapter a few of the artifices which i have found useful in my own experience, but i am sure that many more might be added. chapter iv. elements to avoid in the selection of material. i am confronted in this portion of my work with a great difficulty, because i cannot afford to be as catholic as i could wish (this rejection or selection of material being primarily intended for those story-tellers dealing with normal children); but i do wish from the outset to distinguish between a story told to an individual child in the home circle or by a personal friend, and a story told to a group of children as part of the school curriculum. and if i seem to reiterate this difference, it is because i wish to show very clearly that the recital of parents and friends may be quite separate in content and manner from that offered by the teaching world. in the former case, almost any subject can be treated, because, knowing the individual temperament of the child, a wise parent or friend knows also what can be presented or not presented to the child; but in dealing with a group of normal children in school much has to be eliminated that could be given fearlessly to the abnormal child; i mean the child who, by circumstances or temperament, is developed beyond his years. i shall now mention some of the elements which experience has shown me to be unsuitable for class stories. i. _stories dealing with analysis of motive and feeling_. this warning is specially necessary today, because this is, above all, an age of introspection and analysis. we have only to glance at the principal novels and plays during the last quarter of a century, more especially during the last ten years, to see how this spirit has crept into our literature and life. now, this tendency to analyze is obviously more dangerous for children than for adults, because, from lack of experience and knowledge of psychology, the child's analysis is incomplete. it cannot see all the causes of the action, nor can it make that philosophical allowance for mood which brings the adult to truer conclusions. therefore, we should discourage the child who shows a tendency to analyze too closely the motives of its action, and refrain from presenting to them in our stories any example which might encourage them to persist in this course. i remember, on one occasion, when i went to say good night to a little girl of my acquaintance, i found her sitting up in bed, very wide- awake. her eyes were shining, her cheeks were flushed, and when i asked her what had excited her so much, she said: "i _know_ i have done something wrong today, but i cannot quite remember what it was." i said: "but, phyllis, if you put your hand, which is really quite small, in front of your eyes, you could not see the shape of anything else, however large it might be. now, what you have done today appears very large because it is so close, but when it is a little further off, you will be able to see better and know more about it. so let us wait till tomorrow morning." i am happy to say that she took my advice. she was soon fast asleep, and the next morning she had forgotten the wrong over which she had been unhealthily brooding the night before. . _stories dealing too much with sarcasm and satire_. these are weapons which are too sharply polished, and therefore too dangerous, to place in the hands of children. for here again, as in the case of analysis, they can only have a very incomplete conception of the case. they do not know the real cause which produces the apparently ridiculous appearance, and it is only the abnormally gifted child or grown-up person who discovers this by instinct. it takes a lifetime to arrive at the position described in sterne's words: "i would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of misery to be entitled to all the with which rabelais has ever scattered." i will hasten to add that i should not wish children to have their sympathy too much drawn out, of their emotions kindled too much to pity, because this would be neither healthy nor helpful to themselves or others. i only want to protect children from the dangerous critical attitude induced by the use of satire which sacrifices too much of the atmosphere of trust and belief in human beings which ought to be an essential of child life. by indulging in satire, the sense of kindness in children would become perverted, their sympathy cramped, and they themselves would be old before their time. we have an excellent example of this in hans christian andersen's "snow queen." when kay gets the piece of broken mirror into his eye, he no longer sees the world from the normal child's point of view; he can no longer see anything but the foibles of those about him, a condition usually reached by a course of pessimistic experience. andersen sums up the unnatural point of view in these words: "when kay tried to repeat the lord's prayer, he could only remember the multiplication table." now, without taking these words in any literal sense, we can admit that they represent the development of the head at the expense of the heart. an example of this kind of story to avoid is andersen's "story of the butterfly." the bitterness of the anemones, the sentimentality of the violets, the schoolgirlishness of the snowdrops, the domesticity of the sweetpeas--all this tickles the palate of the adult, but does not belong to the place of the normal child. again, i repeat, that the unusual child may take all this in and even preserve his kindly attitude towards the world, but it is dangerous atmosphere for the ordinary child. . _stories of a sentimental character_. strange to say, this element of sentimentality appeals more to the young teachers than to the children themselves. it is difficult to define the difference between real sentiment and sentimentality, but the healthy normal boy or girl of, let us say, ten or eleven years old, seems to feel it unconsciously, though the distinction is not so clear a few years later. mrs. elisabeth mccracken contributed an excellent article some years ago to the _outlook_ on the subject of literature for the young, in which we find a good illustration of this power of discrimination on the part of a child. a young teacher was telling her pupils the story of the emotional lady who, to put her lover to the test, bade him pick up the glove which she had thrown down into the arena between the tiger and the lion. the lover does her bidding in order to vindicate his character as a brave knight. one boy after hearing the story at once states his contempt for the knight's acquiescence, which he declares to be unworthy. "but," says the teacher, "you see he really did it to show the lady how foolish she was." the answer of the boy sums up what i have been trying to show: "there was no sense in _his_ being sillier than _she_ was, to show her _she_ was silly." if the boy had stopped there, we might have concluded that he was lacking in imagination or romance, but his next remark proves what a balanced and discriminating person he was, for he added: "now, if _she_ had fallen in, and he had leapt after her to rescue her, that would have been splendid and of some use." given the character of the lady, we might, as adults, question the last part of the boy's statement, but this is pure cynicism and fortunately does not enter into the child's calculations. in my own personal experience, and i have told this story often in the german ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in england, i have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the end by the dignified renunciation of the knight. chesterton defines sentimentality as "a tame, cold, or small and inadequate manner of speaking about certain matters which demand very large and beautiful expression." i would strongly urge upon young teachers to revise, by this definition, some of the stories they have included in their repertories, and see whether they would stand the test or not. . _stories containing strong sensational episodes_. the danger of this kind of story is all the greater because many children delight in it and some crave for it in the abstract, but fear it in the concrete.[ ] an affectionate aunt, on one occasion, anxious to curry favor with a four-year-old nephew, was taxing her imagination to find a story suitable for his tender years. she was greatly startled when he suddenly said, in a most imperative tone: "tell me the story of a bear eating a small boy." this was so remote from her own choice of subject that she hesitated at first, but coming to the conclusion that as the child had chosen the situation he would feel no terror in the working up of its details, she a most thrilling and blood-curdling story, leading up to the final catastrophe. but just as she reached the great dramatic moment, the child raised his hands in terror and said: "oh! auntie, don't let the bear really eat the boy!" "don't you know," said an impatient boy who had been listening to a mild adventure story considered suitable to his years, "that i don't take any interest in the story until the decks are dripping with gore?" here we have no opportunity of deciding whether or not the actual description demanded would be more alarming than the listener had realized. here is a poem of james stephens, showing a child's taste for sensational things: a man was sitting underneath a tree outside the village, and he asked me what name was upon this place, and said he was never here before. he told a lot of stories to me too. his nose was flat. i asked him how it happened, and he said, the first mate of the _mary ann_ done that with a marling-spike one day, but he was dead, and a jolly job too, but he'd have gone a long way to have killed him. a gold ring in one ear, and the other was bit off by a crocodile, bedad, that's what he said: he taught me how to chew. he was a real nice man. he liked me too. the taste that is fed by the sensational contents of the newspapers and the dramatic excitement of street life, and some of the lurid representations of the cinematograph, is so much stimulated that the interest in normal stories is difficult to rouse. i will not here dwell on the deleterious effects of over-dramatic stimulation, which has been known to lead to crime, since i am keener to prevent the telling of too many sensational stories than to suggest a cure when the mischief is done. kate douglas wiggin has said: "let us be realistic, by all means, but beware, o story-teller, of being too realistic. avoid the shuddering tale of 'the wicked boy who stoned the birds,' lest some hearer should be inspired to try the dreadful experiment and see if it really does kill." i must emphasize the fact, however, that it is only the excess of this dramatic element which i deplore. a certain amount of excitement is necessary, but this question belongs to the positive side of the subject, and i shall deal with it later on. . _stories presenting matters quite outside the plane of a child's interests, unless they are wrapped in mystery_. experience with children ought to teach us to avoid stories which contain too much _allusion_ to matters of which the hearers are entirely ignorant. but judging from the written stories of today, supposed to be for children, it is still a matter of difficulty to realize that this form of allusion to "foreign" matters, or making a joke, the appreciation of which depends solely on a special and "inside" knowledge, is always bewildering and fatal to sustained dramatic interest. it is a matter of intense regret that so very few people have sufficiently clear remembrance of their own childhood to help them to understand the taste and point of view of the _normal_ child. there is a passage in the "brownies," by mrs. ewing, which illustrates the confusion created in the child mind by a facetious allusion in a dramatic moment which needed a more direct treatment. when the nursery toys have all gone astray, one little child exclaims joyfully: "why, the old rocking-horse's nose has turned up in the oven!" "it couldn't," remarks a tiresome, facetious doctor, far more anxious to be funny than to sympathized with the child, "it was the purest grecian, modeled from the elgin marbles." now, for grownup people this is an excellent joke, but for a child has not yet become acquainted with these grecian masterpieces, the whole remark is pointless and hampering.[ ] . _stories which appeal to fear or priggishness_. this is a class of story which scarcely counts today and against which the teacher does not need a warning, but i wish to make a passing allusion to these stories, partly to round off my subject and partly to show that we have made some improvement in choice of subject. when i study the evolution of the story from the crude recitals offered to our children within the last hundred years, i feel that, though our progress may be slow, it is real and sure. one has only to take some examples from the chaps books of the beginning of last century to realize the difference of appeal. everything offered then was either an appeal to fear or to priggishness, and one wonders how it is that our grandparents and their parents every recovered from the effects of such stories as were offered to them. but there is the consoling thought that no lasting impression was made upon them, such as i believe _may_ be possible by the right kind of story. i offer a few examples of the old type of story: here is an encouraging address offered to children by a certain mr. janeway about the year : "dare you do anything which your parents forbid you, and neglect to do what they command? dare you to run up and down on the lord's day, or do you keep in to read your book, and learn what your good parents command?" such an address would have almost tempted children to envy the lot of orphans, except that the guardians and less close relations might have been equally, if not more, severe. from "the curious girl," published about : "oh! papa, i hope you will have no reason to be dissatisfied with me, for i love my studies very much, and i am never so happy at my play as when i have been assiduous at my lessons all day." "adolphus: how strange it is, papa, you should believe it possible for me to act so like a child, now that i am twelve years old!" here is a specimen taken from a chap book about : edward refuses hot bread at breakfast. his hostess asks whether he likes it. "yes, i am extremely fond of it." "why did you refuse it?" "because i know that my papa does not approve of my eating it. am i to disobey a father and mother i love so well, and forget my duty, because they are a long way off? i would not touch the cake, were i sure nobody would see me. i myself should know it, and that would be sufficient. "nobly replied!" exclaimed mrs. c. "act always thus, and you must be happy, for although the whole world should refuse the praise that is due, you must enjoy the approbation of your conscience, which is beyond anything else." here is a quotation of the same kind from mrs. sherwood: tender-souled little creatures, desolated by a sense of sin, if they did but eat a spoonful of cupboard jam without mamma's express permission. . . . would a modern lucy, jealous of her sister emily's doll, break out thus easily into tearful apology for her guilt: 'i know it is wicked in me to be sorry that emily is happy, but i feel that i cannot help it'? and would a modern mother retort with heartfelt joy: 'my dear child, i am glad you have confessed. now i shall tell you why you feel this wicked sorrow'?--proceeding to an account of the depravity of human nature so unredeemed by comfort for a childish mind of common intelligence that one can scarcely imagine the interview ending in anything less tragic than a fit of juvenile hysteria. description of a good boy: a good boy is dutiful to his father and mother, obedient to his master and loving to his playfellows. he is diligent in learning his book and takes a pleasure in improving himself in everything that is worthy of praise. he rises early in the morning, makes himself clean and decent, and says his prayers. he loves to hear good advice, is thankful to those who give it and always follows it. he never swears[ ] or calls names or uses ill words to companions. he is never peevish and fretful, always cheerful and good-tempered. . _stories of exaggerated and coarse fun_. in the chapter on the positive side of this subject i shall speak more in detail of the educational value of robust and virile representation of fun and of sheer nonsense, but as a preparation to these statements, i should like to strike a note of warning against the element of exaggerated and coarse fun being encouraged in our school stories, partly, because of the lack of humor in such presentations (a natural product of stifling imagination) and partly, because the strain of the abnormal has the same effect as the too frequent use of the melodramatic. in an article in _macmillans's magazine_, december, , miss yonge writes: "a taste for buffoonery is much to be discouraged, an exclusive taste for extravagance most unwholesome and even perverting. it becomes destructive of reverence and soon degenerates into coarseness. it permits nothing poetical or imaginative, nothing sweet or pathetic to exist, and there is a certain self-satisfaction and superiority in making game of what others regard with enthusiasm and sentiment which absolutely bars the way against a higher or softer tone." although these words were written nearly half a century ago, they are so specially applicable today that they seem quite "up-to-date." indeed, i think they will hold equally good fifty years hence. in spite of a strong taste on the part of children for what is ugly and brutal, i am sure that we ought to eliminate this element as far as possible from the school stories, especially among poor children. not because i think children should be protected from all knowledge of evil, but because so much of this knowledge comes into their life outside school that we can well afford to ignore it during school hours. at the same time, however, as i shall show by example when i come to the positive side, it would be well to show children by story illustration the difference between brutal ugliness without anything to redeem it and surface ugliness, which may be only a veil over the beauty that lies underneath. it might be possible, for instance, to show children the difference between the real ugliness in the priest's face of the "laocoon" group, because of the motive of courage and endurance behind the suffering. many stories in everyday life could be found to illustrate this. . _stories of infant piety and death-bed scenes_. the stories for children forty years ago contained much of this element, and the following examples will illustrate this point: notes from poems written by a child between six and eight years of age, by name philip freeman, afterwards archdeacon of exeter: poor robin, thou canst fly no more, thy joys and sorrows all are o'er. through life's tempestuous storms thou'st trod, but now art sunk beneath the sod. here lost and gone poor robin lies, he trembles, lingers, falls and dies. he's gone, he's gone, forever lost, no more of him they now can boast. poor robin's dangers all are past, he struggled to the very last. perhaps he spent a happy life, without much struggle and much strife.[ ] the prolonged gloom of the main theme is somewhat lightened by the speculative optimism of the last verse. life, transient life, is but a dream, like sleep which short doth lengthened seem till dawn of day, when the bird's lay doth charm the soul's first peeping gleam. then farewell to the parting year, another's come to nature dear. in every place, thy brightening face does welcome winter's snowy drear. alas! our time is much mis-spent. then we must haste and now repent. we have a book in which to look, for we on wisdom should be bent. should god, the almighty, king of all, before his judgment-seat now call us to that place of joy and grace prepared for us since adam's fall. i think there is no doubt that we have made considerable progress in this matter. not only do we refrain from telling these highly moral (_sic_) stories but we have reached the point of parodying them, in sign of ridicule, as, for instance, in such writing as belloc's "cautionary tales." these would be a trifle too grim for a timid child, but excellent fun for adults. it should be our study today to prove to children that the immediate importance to them is not to think of dying and going to heaven, but of living and--shall we say?--of going to college, which is a far better preparation for the life to come than the morbid dwelling upon the possibility of an early death. in an article signed "muriel harris," i think, from a copy of the _tribune_, appeared a delightful article on sunday books, from which i quote the following: "all very good little children died young in the storybooks, so that unusual goodness must have been the source of considerable anxiety to affectionate parents. i came across a little old book the other day called 'examples for youth.' on the yellow fly-leaf was written, in childish, carefully-sloping hand: 'presented to mary palmer junior, by her sister, to be read on sundays,' and was dated . the accounts are taken from a work on "piety promoted," and all of them begin with unusual piety in early youth and end with the death-bed of the little paragon, and his or her dying words." . _stories containing a mixture of fairy tale and science_. by this combination one loses what is essential to each, namely, the fantastic on the one side, and accuracy on the other. the true fairy tale should be unhampered by any compromise of probability even; the scientific representation should be sufficiently marvelous along its own lines to need no supernatural aid. both appeal to the imagination in different ways. as an exception to this kind of mixture, i should quote "the honey bee, and other stories," translated from the danish of evald by c. g. moore smith. there is a certain robustness in these stories dealing with the inexorable laws of nature. some of them will appear hard to the child but they will be of interest to all teachers. perhaps the worst element in the choice of stories is that which insists upon the moral detaching itself and explaining the story. in "alice in wonderland" the duchess says, "'and the moral of _that_ is: take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.' "how fond she is of finding morals in things," thought alice to herself." (this gives the point of view of the child.) the following is a case in point, found in a rare old print in the british museum: jane s. came home with her clothes soiled and hands badly torn. "where have you been?" asked her mother. "i fell down the bank near the mill," said jane, "and i should have been drowned, if mr. m. had not seen me and pulled me out." "why did you go so near the edge of the brink?" "there was a pretty flower there that i wanted, and i only meant to take one step, but i slipped and fell down." _moral_: young people often take but one step in sinful indulgence [poor jane!], but they fall into soul-destroying sins. they can do it by a single act of sin. [the heinous act of picking a flower!] they do it; but the act leads to another, and they fall into the gulf of perdition, unless god interposes. now, quite apart from the folly of this story we must condemn it on moral grounds. could we imagine a lower standard of a deity than that presented here to the child? today the teacher would commend jane for a laudable interest in botany, but might add a word of caution about choosing inclined planes in the close neighborhood of a body of running water as a hunting ground for specimens and a popular, lucid explanation of the inexorable law of gravity. here we have an instance of applying a moral when we have finished our story, but there are many stories where nothing is left to chance in this matter and where there is no means for the child to use ingenuity or imagination in making out the meaning for himself. henry morley has condemned the use of this method as applied to fairy stories. he says: "moralizing in a fairy story is like the snoring of _bottom_ in _titania's_ lap." but i think this applies to all stories, and most especially to those by which we do wish to teach something. john burroughs says in his article, "thou shalt not preach":[ ] "didactic fiction can never rank high. thou shalt not preach or teach; thou shalt portray and create, and have ends as universal as nature. . . . what art demands is that the artist's personal convictions and notions, his likes and dislikes, do not obtrude themselves at all; that good and evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. he does non hold a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative energy. . . . the great artist works in and _through_ and _from_ moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism of life. he is moral without having a moral. the moment a moral obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from grace as an artist. . . . the great distinction of art is that it aims to see life steadily and to see it whole. . . . it affords the one point of view whence the world appears harmonious and complete." it would seem, then, from this passage, that it is of _moral_ importance to put things dramatically. in froebel's "mother play" he demonstrates the educational value of stories, emphasizing that their highest use consists in their ability to enable the child, through _suggestion_, to form a pure and noble idea of what a man may be or do. the sensitiveness of a child's mind is offended if the moral is forced upon him, but if he absorbs it unconsciously, he has received its influence for all time. to me the idea of pointing out the moral of the story has always seemed as futile as tying a flower on a stalk instead of letting the flower grow out of the stalk, as nature has intended. in the first case, the flower, showy and bright for the moment, soon fades away. in the second instance, it develops slowly, coming to perfection in fullness of time because of the life within. lastly, the element to avoid is that which rouses emotions which cannot be translated into action. mr. earl barnes, to whom all teachers owe a debt of gratitude for the inspiration of his educational views, insists strongly on this point. the sole effect of such stories is to produce a form of hysteria, fortunately short-lived, but a waste of force which might be directed into a better channel.[ ] such stories are so easy to recognize that it would be useless to make a formal list, but i make further allusion to them, in dealing with stories from the lives of the saints. these, then, are the main elements to avoid in the selection of material suitable for normal children. much might be added in the way of detail, and the special tendency of the day may make it necessary to avoid one class of story more than another, but this care belongs to another generation of teachers and parents. chapter v. elements to seek in choice of material. in his "choice of books," frederic harrison has said: "the most useful help to reading is to know what we shall _not_ read, what we shall keep from that small, cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of information which we can call our ordered patch of fruit-bearing knowledge." now, the same statement applies to our stories, and, having busied myself during the last chapter with "clearing my small spot" by cutting away a mass of unfruitful growth, i am no going to suggest what would be the best kind of seed to sow in the patch which i have "reclaimed from the jungle." again, i repeat, i have no wish to be dogmatic and in offering suggestions as to the stories to be told, i am catering only for a group of normal school children. my list of subjects does not pretend to cover the whole ground of children's needs, and just as i exclude the abnormal or unusual child from the scope of my warning in subjects to avoid, so do i also exclude that child from the limitation in choice of subjects to be sought, because you can offer almost any subject to the unusual child, especially if you stand in close relation to him and know his powers of apprehension. in this matter, age has very little to say; it is a question of the stage of development. experience has taught me that for the group of normal children, irrespective of age, the first kind of story suitable for them will contain an appeal to conditions to which the child is accustomed. the reason for this is obvious: the child, having limited experience, can only be reached by this experience, until his imagination is awakened and he is enabled to grasp through this faculty what he has not actually passed through. before this awakening has taken place he enters the realm of fiction, represented in the story, by comparison with his personal experience. every story and every point in the story mean more as that experience widens, and the interest varies, of course, with temperament, quickness of perception, power of visualizing and of concentration. in "the marsh king's daughter," hans christian andersen says: "the storks have a great many stories which they tell their little ones, all about the bogs and marshes. they suit them to their age and capacity. the young ones are quite satisfied with _kribble, krabble_, or some such nonsense, and find it charming; but the elder ones want something with more meaning." one of the most interesting experiments to be made in connection with this subject is to tell the same story at intervals of a year or six months to an individual child.[ ] the different incidents in the story which appeal to him (and one must watch it closely, to be sure the interest is real and not artificially stimulated by any suggestion on one's own part) will mark his mental development and the gradual awakening of his imagination. this experiment is a very delicate one and will not be infallible, because children are secretive and the appreciation is often simulated (unconsciously) or concealed through shyness or want of articulation. but it is, in spite of this, a deeply interesting and helpful experiment. to take a concrete example: let us suppose the story andersen's "tin soldier" told to a child of five or six years. at the first recital, the point which will interest the child most will be the setting up of the tin soldiers on the table, because he can understand this by means of his own experience, in his own nursery. it is an appeal to conditions to which he is accustomed and for which no exercise of the imagination is needed, unless we take the effect of memory to be, according to queyrat, retrospective imagination. the next incident that appeals is the unfamiliar behavior of the toys, but still in familiar surroundings; that is to say, the _unusual_ activities are carried on in the safe precincts of the nursery--the _usual_ atmosphere of the child. i quote from the text: late in the evening the other soldiers were put in their box, and the people of the house went to bed. now was the time for the toys to play; they amused themselves with paying visits, fighting battles and giving balls. the tin soldiers rustled about in their box, for they wanted to join the games, but they could not get the lid off. the nut-crackers turned somersaults, and the pencil scribbled nonsense on the slate. now, from this point onwards in the story, the events will be quite outside the personal experience of the child and there will have to be a real stretch of imagination to appreciate the thrilling and blood- curdling adventures of the tin soldier, namely, the terrible sailing down the gutter under the bridge, the meeting with the fierce rat who demands the soldier's passport, the horrible sensation in the fish's body, etc. last of all, perhaps, will come the appreciation of the best qualities of the hero: his modesty, his dignity, his reticence, his courage and his constancy. he seems to combine all the qualities of the best soldier with those of the best civilian, without the more obvious qualities which generally attract first. as for the love story, we must _expect_ any child to see its tenderness and beauty, though the individual child may intuitively appreciate these qualities, but it is not what we wish for or work for at this period of child life. this method could be applied to various stories. i have chosen the "tin soldier" because of its dramatic qualities and because it is marked off, probably quite unconsciously on the part of andersen, into periods which correspond to the child's development. in eugene field's exquisite little poem of "the dinkey bird," we find the objects familiar to the child in _unusual_ places, so that some imagination is needed to realize that "big red sugar-plums are clinging to the cliffs beside the sea"; but the introduction of the fantastic bird and the soothing sound of amfalula tree are new and delightful sensations, quite out of the child's personal experience. another such instance is to be found in mrs. w. k. clifford's story of "master willie." the abnormal behavior of familiar objects, such as a doll, leads from the ordinary routine to the paths of adventure. this story is to be found in a little book called "very short stories," a most interesting collection for teachers and children. we now come to the second element we should seek in material, namely, the element of the unusual, which we have already anticipated in the story of the "tin soldier." this element is necessary in response to the demand of the child who expressed the needs of his fellow-playmates when he said: "i want to go to the place where the shadows are real." this is the true definition of "faerie" lands and is the first sign of real mental development in the child when he is no longer content with the stories of his own little deeds and experiences, when his ear begins to appreciate sounds different from the words in his own everyday language, and when he begins to separate his own personality from the action of the story. george goschen says: "what i want for the young are books and stories which do not simply deal with our daily life. i like the fancy even of little children to have some larger food than images of their own little lives, and i confess i am sorry for the children whose imaginations are not sometimes stimulated by beautiful fairy tales which carry them to worlds different from those in which their future will be passed. . . . i hold that what removes them more or less from their daily life is better than what reminds them of it at every step."[ ] it is because of the great value of leading children to something beyond the limited circle of their own lives that i deplore the twaddling boarding-school stories written for girls and the artificially prepared public school stories for boys. why not give them the dramatic interest of a larger stage? no account of a cricket match or a football triumph could present a finer appeal to boys and girls than the description of the peacestead in the "heroes of asgaard": "this was the playground of the aesir, where they practiced trials of skill one with another and held tournaments and sham fights. these last were always conducted in the gentlest and most honorable manner; for the strongest law of the peacestead was that no angry blow should be struck or spiteful word spoken upon the sacred field." for my part, i would unhesitatingly give to boys and girls an element of strong romance in the stories which are told them even before they are twelve. miss sewell says: "the system that keeps girls in the schoolroom reading simple stories, without reading scott and shakespeare and spenser, and then hands them over to the unexplored recesses of the circulating library, has been shown to be the most frivolizing that can be devised." she sets forth as the result of her experience that a good novel, especially a romantic one, read at twelve or fourteen, is really a beneficial thing. at present, so many of the children from the elementary schools get their first idea of love, if one can give it such a name from vulgar pictures displayed in the shop windows or jokes on marriage, culled from the lowest type of paper, or the proceedings of a divorce court. what an antidote to such representation might be found in the stories of hector and andromache, siegfried and brunnehilde, dido and aeneas, orpheus and eurydice, st. francis and st. clare! one of the strongest elements we should introduce into our stories for children of all ages is that which calls forth love of beauty. and the beauty should stand out, not only in the delineation of noble qualities in our heroes and heroines, but in the beauty and strength of language and form. in this latter respect, the bible stories are of such inestimable value; all the greater because a child is familiar with the subject and the stories gain fresh significance from the spoken or winged word as compared with the mere reading. as to whether we should keep to the actual text is a matter of individual experience. professor r. g. moulton, whose interpretations of the bible stories are so well known both in england and america, does not always confine himself to the actual text, but draws the dramatic elements together, rejecting what seems to him to break the narrative, but introducing the actual language where it is the most effective. those who have heard him will realize the success of his method. there is one bible story which can be told with scarcely any deviation from the text, if only a few hints are given beforehand, and that is the story of nebuchadnezzar and the golden image. thus, i think it wise, if the children are to succeed in partially visualizing the story, that they should have some idea of the dimensions of the golden image as it would stand out in a vast plain. it might be well to compare those dimension with some building with which the child is familiar. in london, the matter is easy as the height will compare, roughly speaking, with westminster abbey. the only change in text i should adopt is to avoid the constant enumeration of the list of rulers and the musical instruments. in doing this, i am aware that i am sacrificing something of beauty in the rhythm, but, on the other hand, for narrative purpose the interest is not broken. the first time the announcement is made, that is, by the herald, it should be in a perfectly loud, clear and toneless voice, such as you would naturally use when shouting through a trumpet to a vast concourse of people scattered over a wide plain, reserving all the dramatic tone of voice for the passage where nebuchadnezzar is making the announcement to the three men by themselves. i can remember professor moulton saying that all the dramatic interest of the story is summed up in the words "but if not . . ." this suggestion is a very helpful one, for it enables us to work up gradually to this point, and then, as it were, _unwind_, until we reach the words of nebuchadnezzar's dramatic recantation. in this connection, it is a good plan occasionally during the story hour to introduce really good poetry, which delivered in a dramatic manner (far removed, of course, from the melodramatic), might give children their first love of beautiful form in verse. and i do not think it necessary to wait for this. even the normal child of seven, though there is nothing arbitrary in the suggestion of this age, will appreciate the effect, if only on the ear, of beautiful lines well spoken. mahomet has said, in his teaching advice: "teach your children poetry: it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes heroic virtues hereditary." to begin with the youngest children of all, here is a poem which contains a thread of story, just enough to give a human interest: milking-time when the cows come home, the milk is coming; honey's made when the bees are humming. duck, drake on the rushy lake, and the deer live safe in the breezy brake, and timid, funny, pert little bunny winks his nose, and sits all sunny. christina rossetti. now, in comparing this poem with some of the doggerel verse offered to small children, one is struck with the literary superiority in the choice of words. here, in spite of the simplicity of the poem, there is not the ordinary limited vocabulary, nor the forced rhyme, nor the application of a moral, by which the artist falls from grace. again, eugene field's "hushaby lady," of which the language is most simple, yet the child is carried away by the beauty of the sound. i remember hearing some poetry repeated by the children in one of the elementary schools in sheffield which made me feel that they had realized romantic possibilities which would prevent their lives from ever becoming quite prosaic again, and i wish that this practice were more usual. there is little difficulty with the children. i can remember, in my own experience as a teacher in london, making the experiment of reading or repeating passages from milton and shakespeare to children from nine to eleven years of age, and the enthusiastic way they responded by learning those passages by heart. i have taken with several sets of children such passages from milton as the "echo song," "sabrina," "by the rushy-fringed bank," "back, shepherds, back," from "comus"; "may morning," "ode to shakespeare," "samson," "on his blindness," etc. i even ventured on several passage from "paradise lost," and found "now came still evening on" a particular favorite with the children. it seemed even easier to interest them in shakespeare, and they learned quite readily and easily many passages from "as you like it," "the merchant of venice," "julius caesar," "richard ii," "henry iv," and "henry v." the method i should recommend in the introduction of both poets occasionally into the story-hour would be threefold. first, to choose passages which appeal for beauty of sound or beauty of mental vision called up by those sounds; such as "tell me where is fancy bred," "titania's lullaby," "how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank." secondly, passages for sheer interest of content, such as the trial scene from "the merchant of venice," or the forest scene in "as you like it." thirdly, for dramatic and historical interest, such as, "men at some time are masters of their fates," the whole of mark antony's speech, and the scene with imogen and her foster brothers in the forest. it may not be wholly out of place to add here that the children learned and repeated these passages themselves, and that i offered them the same advice as i do to all story-tellers. i discussed quite openly with them the method i considered best, trying to make them see that simplicity of delivery was not only the most beautiful but the most effective means to use and, by the end of a few months, when they had been allowed to experiment and express themselves, they began to see that mere ranting was not force and that a sense of reserve power is infinitely more impressive and inspiring than mere external presentation. i encouraged them to criticize each other for the common good, and sometimes i read a few lines with overemphasis and too much gesture, which they were at liberty to point out that they might avoid the same error. excellent collections of poems for this purpose of narrative are: mrs. p. a. barnett's series of "song and story," published by adam black, and "the posy ring," chosen and classified by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith, published by doubleday. for older children, "the call of the homeland," selected and arranged by dr. r. p. scott and katharine t. wallas, published by houghton, mifflin, and "golden numbers," chosen and classified by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith, published by doubleday. i think it is well to have a goodly number of stories illustrating the importance of common-sense and resourcefulness. for this reason, i consider the stories treating of the ultimate success of the youngest son[ ] very admirable for the purpose, because the youngest child who begins by being considered inferior to the older ones triumphs in the end, either from resourcefulness or from common-sense or from some higher quality, such as kindness to animals, courage in overcoming difficulties, etc.[ ] thus, we have the story of cinderella. the cynic might imagine that it was the diminutive size of her foot that insured her success. the child does not realize any advantage in this, but, though the matter need not be pressed, the story leaves us with the impression that cinderella had been patient and industrious, and forbearing with her sisters. we know that she was strictly obedient to her godmother, and in order to be this she makes her dramatic exit from the ball which is the beginning of her triumph. there are many who might say that these qualities do not meet with reward in life and that they end in establishing a habit of drudgery, but, after all, we must have poetic justice in a fairy story, occasionally, at any rate, even if the child is confused by the apparent contradiction. such a story is "jesper and the hares." here, however, it is not at first resourcefulness that helps the hero, but sheer kindness of heart, which prompts him first to help the ants, and then to show civility to the old woman, without for a moment expecting any material benefit from such actions. at the end, he does win on his own ingenuity and resourcefulness, and if we regret that his trickery has such wonderful results, we must remember the aim was to win the princess for herself, and that there was little choice left him. i consider that the end of this story is one of the most remarkable i have found in my long years of browsing among fairy tales. i should suggest stopping at the words: "the tub is full," as any addition seems to destroy the subtlety of the story.[ ] another story of this kind, admirable for children from six years and upwards, is, "what the old man does is always right." here, perhaps, the entire lack of common-sense on the part of the hero would serve rather as a warning than a stimulating example, but the conduct of the wife in excusing the errors of her foolish husband is a model of resourcefulness. in the story of "hereafter-this,"[ ] we have just the converse: a perfectly foolish wife shielded by a most patient and forbearing husband, whose tolerance and common-sense save the situation. one of the most important elements to seek in our choice of stories is that which tends to develop, eventually, a fine sense of humor in a child. i purposely use the word, "eventually," because i realize, first, that humor has various stages, and that seldom, if ever, can one expect an appreciation of fine humor from a normal child, that is, from an elemental mind. it seems as if the rough-and-tumble element were almost a necessary stage through which children must pass, and which is a normal and healthy stage; but up to now we have quite unnecessarily extended the period of elephantine fun, and, though we cannot control the manner in which children are catered to along this line in their homes, we can restrict the folly of appealing too strongly or too long to this elemental faculty in our schools. of course, the temptation is strong because the appeal is so easy, but there is a tacit recognition that horseplay and practical jokes are no longer considered as an essential part of a child's education. we note this in the changed attitude in the schools, taken by more advanced educators, towards bullying, fagging, hazing, etc. as a reaction, then, from more obvious fun, there should be a certain number of stories which make appeal to a more subtle element, and in the chapter on the questions put to me by teachers on various occasions i speak more in detail as to the educational value of a finer humor in our stories. at some period there ought to be presented in our stories the superstitions connected with the primitive history of the race, dealing with the fairy proper, giants, dwarfs, gnomes, nixies, brownies and other elemental beings. andrew lang says: "without our savage ancestors we should have had no poetry. conceive the human race born into the world in its present advanced condition, weighing, analyzing, examining everything. such a race would have been destitute of poetry and flattened by common-sense. barbarians did the _dreaming_ of the world." but it is a question of much debate among educators as to what should be the period of the child's life in which these stories are to be presented. i, myself, was formerly of the opinion that they belonged to the very primitive age of the individual, just as they belong to the primitive age of the race, but experience in telling stories has taught me to compromise. some people maintain that little children, who take things with brutal logic, ought not to be allowed the fairy tale in its more limited form of the supernatural; whereas, if presented to older children, this material can be criticized, catalogued and (alas!) rejected as worthless, or retained with flippant toleration. while realizing a certain value in this point of view, i am bound to admit that if we regulate our stories entirely on this basis, we lose the real value of the fairy tale element. it is the one element which causes little children to _wonder_, simply because no scientific analysis of the story can be presented to them. it is somewhat heartrending to feel that "jack and the bean stalk" and stories of that ilk are to be handed over to the critical youth who will condemn the quick growth of the tree as being contrary to the order of nature, and wonder why _jack_ was not playing football on the school team instead of climbing trees in search of imaginary adventures. a wonderful plea for the telling of early superstitions to children is to be found in an old indian allegory called, "the blazing mansion." an old man owned a large rambling mansion. the pillars were rotten, the galleries tumbling down, the thatch dry and combustible, and there was only one door. suddenly, one day, there was a smell of fire: the old man rushed out. to his horror he saw that the thatch was aflame, the rotten pillars were catching fire one by one, and the rafters were burning like tinder. but, inside, the children went on amusing themselves quite happily. the distracted father said: "i will run in and save my children. i will seize them in my strong arms, i will bear them harmless through the falling rafters and the blazing beams." then the sad thought came to him that the children were romping and ignorant. "if i say the house is on fire, they will not understand me. if i try to seize them, they will romp about and try to escape. alas! not a moment to be lost!" suddenly a bright thought flashed across the old man's mind. "my children are ignorant," he said; "they love toys and glittering playthings. i will promise them playthings of unheard-of beauty. then they will listen." so the old man shouted: "children, come out of the house and see these beautiful toys! chariots with white oxen, all gold and tinsel. see these exquisite little antelopes. whoever saw such goats as these? children, children come quickly, or they will all be gone!" forth from the blazing ruin the children came in hot haste. the word, "plaything," was almost the only word they could understand. then the father, rejoiced that his offspring were freed from peril, procured for them one of the most beautiful chariots ever seen. the chariot had a canopy like a pagoda; it had tiny rails and balustrades and rows of jingling bells. milk-white oxen drew the chariot. the children were astonished when they were placed inside.[ ] perhaps, as a compromise, one might give the gentler superstitions to very small children, and leave such a blood-curdling story as "bluebeard" to a more robust age. there is one modern method which has always seemed to me much to be condemned, and that is the habit of changing the end of a story, for fear of alarming the child. this is quite indefensible. in doing this we are tampering with folklore and confusing stages of development. now, i know that there are individual children that, at a tender age, might be alarmed at such a story, for instance, as "little red riding- hood"; in which case, it is better to sacrifice the "wonder stage" and present the story later on. i live in dread of finding one day a bowdlerized form of "bluebeard," prepared for a junior standard, in which, to produce a satisfactory finale, all the wives come to life again, and "live happily ever after" with bluebeard and each other! and from this point it seems an easy transition to the subject of legends of different kinds. some of the old country legends in connection with flowers are very charming for children, and so long as we do not tread on the sacred ground of the nature students, we may indulge in a moderate use of such stories, of which a few will be found in the list of stories, given later. with regard to the introduction of legends connected with saints into the school curriculum, my chief plea is the element of the unusual which they contain and an appeal to a sense of mysticism and wonder which is a wise antidote to the prosaic and commercial tendencies of today. though many of the actions of the saints may be the result of a morbid strain of self-sacrifice, at least none of them was engaged in the sole occupation of becoming rich: their ideals were often lofty and unselfish; their courage high, and their deeds noble. we must be careful, in the choice of our legends, to show up the virile qualities rather than to dwell on the elements of horror in details of martyrdom, or on the too-constantly recurring miracles, lest we should defeat our own ends. for the children might think lightly of the dangers to which the saints were exposed if they found them too often preserved at the last moment from the punishment they were brave enough to undergo. for one or another of these reasons, i should avoid the detailed history of st. juliana, st. vincent, st. quintin, st. eustace, st. winifred, st. theodore, st. james the more, st. katharine, st. cuthbert, st. alphage, st. peter of milan, st. quirine and juliet, st. alban and others. the danger of telling stories connected with sudden conversions is that they are apt to place too much emphasis on the process, rather than on the goal to be reached. we should always insist on the splendid deeds performed after a real conversion, not the details of the conversion itself; as, for instance, the beautiful and poetical work done by st. christopher when he realized what work he could do most effectively. on the other hand, there are many stories of the saints dealing with actions and motives which would appeal to the imagination and are not only worthy of imitation, but are not wholly outside the life and experience even of the child.[ ] having protested against the elephantine joke and the too-frequent use of exaggerated fun, i now endeavor to restore the balance by suggesting the introduction into the school curriculum of a few purely grotesque stories which serve as an antidote to sentimentality or utilitarianism. but they must be presented as nonsense, so that the children may use them for what they are intended as--pure relaxation. such a story is that of "the wolf and the kids," which i present in my own version at the end of the book. i have had serious objections offered to this story by several educational people, because of the revenge taken by the goat on the wolf, but i am inclined to think that if the story is to be taken as anything but sheer nonsense, it is surely sentimental to extend our sympathy toward a caller who has devoured six of his hostess' children. with regard to the wolf being cut open, there is not the slightest need to accentuate the physical side. children accept the deed as they accept the cutting off of a giant's head, because they do not associate it with pain, especially if the deed is presented half humorously. the moment in the story where their sympathy is aroused is the swallowing of the kids, because the children do realize the possibility of being disposed of in the mother's absence. (needless to say, i never point out the moral of the kids' disobedience to the mother in opening the door.) i have always noticed a moment of breathlessness even in a grown-up audience when the wolf swallows the kids, and that the recovery of them "all safe and sound, all huddled together" is quite as much appreciated by the adult audience as by the children, and is worth the tremor caused by the wolf's summary action. i have not always been able to impress upon the teachers the fact that this story _must_ be taken lightly. a very earnest young student came to me once after the telling of this story and said in an awe- struck voice: "do you cor-relate?" having recovered from the effect of this word, which she carefully explained, i said that, as a rule, i preferred to keep the story quite apart from the other lessons, just an undivided whole, because it had effects of its own which were best brought about by not being connected with other lessons. she frowned her disapproval and said: "i am sorry, because i thought i would take the goat for my nature study lesson and then tell your story at the end." i thought of the terrible struggle in the child's mind between his conscientious wish to be accurate and his dramatic enjoyment of the abnormal habits of a goat who went out with scissors, needle and thread; but i have been most careful since to repudiate any connection with nature study in this and a few other stories in my repertoire. one might occasionally introduce one of edward lear's "nonsense rhymes." for instance: there was an old man of cape horn who wished he had never been born. so he sat in a chair till he died of despair, that dolorous old man of cape horn. now, except in case of very young children, this could not possibly be taken seriously. the least observant normal boy or girl would recognize the hollowness of the pessimism that prevents an old man from at least an attempt to rise from his chair. the following i have chosen as repeated with intense appreciation and much dramatic vigor by a little boy just five years old: there was an old man who said: "hush! i perceive a young bird in that bush." when they said: "is it small?" he replied, "not at all. it is four times as large as the bush."[ ] one of the most desirable of all elements to introduce into our stories is that which encourages kinship with animals. with very young children this is easy, because during those early years when the mind is not clogged with knowledge, the sympathetic imagination enables them to enter into the feeling of animals. andersen has an illustration of this point in his "ice maiden": "children who cannot talk yet can understand the language of fowls and ducks quite well, and cats and dogs speak to them quite as plainly as father and mother; but that is only when the children are very small, and then even grandpapa's stick will become a perfect horse to them that can neigh and, in their eyes, is furnished with legs and a tail. with some children this period ends later than with others, and of such we are accustomed to say that they are very backward, and that they have remained children for a long time. people are in the habit of saying strange things." felix adler says: "perhaps the chief attraction of fairy tales is due to their representing the child as living in brotherly friendship with nature and all creatures. trees, flowers, animals, wild and tame, even the stars are represented as comrades of children. that animals are only human beings in disguise is an axiom in the fairy tales. animals are humanized, that is, the kinship between animal and human life is still keenly felt, and this reminds us of those early animistic interpretations of nature which subsequently led to doctrines of metempsychosis."[ ] i think that beyond question the finest animal stories are to be found in the indian collections, of which i furnish a list in the last chapter. with regard to the development of the love of nature through the telling of stories, we are confronted with a great difficulty in the elementary schools because so many of the children have never been out of the towns, have never seen a daisy, a blade of grass and scarcely a tree, so that in giving, in the form of a story, a beautiful description of scenery, you can make no appeal to the retrospective imagination, and only the rarely gifted child well be able to make pictures while listening to a style which is beyond his everyday use. nevertheless, once in a while, when the children are in a quiet mood, not eager for action but able to give themselves up to the pure joy of sound, then it is possible to give them a beautiful piece of writing in praise of nature, such as the following, taken from "the divine adventure," by fiona macleod: then he remembered the ancient wisdom of the gael and came out of the forest chapel and went into the woods. he put his lip to the earth, and lifted a green leaf to his brow, and held a branch to his ear; and because he was no longer heavy with the sweet clay of mortality, though yet of human clan, he heard that which we do not hear, and saw that which we do not see, and knew that which we do not know. all the green life was his. in that new world he saw the lives of trees, now pale green, now of woodsmoke blue, now of amethyst; the gray lives of stone; breaths of the grass and reed, creatures of the air, delicate and wild as fawns, or swift and fierce and terrible tigers of that undiscovered wilderness, with birds almost invisible but for their luminous wings, and opalescent crests. the value of this particular passage is the mystery pervading the whole picture, which forms so beautiful an antidote to the eternal explaining of things. i think it of the highest importance for the children to realize that the best and most beautiful things cannot be expressed in everyday language and that they must content themselves with a flash here and there of the beauty which may come later. one does not enhance the beauty of the mountain by pulling to pieces some of the earthy clogs; one does not increase the impression of a vast ocean by analyzing the single drops of water. but at a reverent distance one gets a clear impression of the whole, and can afford to leave the details in the shadow. in presenting such passages (and it must be done very sparingly), experience has taught me that we should take the children into our confidence by telling them frankly that nothing exciting is going to happen, so that they well be free to listen to the mere words. a very interesting experiment might occasionally be made by asking the children some weeks afterwards to tell you in their own words what pictures were made on their minds. this is a very different thing from allowing the children to reproduce the passage at once, the danger of which proceeding i speak of later in detail.[ ] we now come to the question as to what proportion of _dramatic excitement_ we should present in the stories for a normal group of children. personally, i should like, while the child is very young, i mean in main, not in years, to exclude the element of dramatic excitement, but though this may be possible for the individual child, it is quite utopian to hope that we can keep the average child free from what is in the atmosphere. children crave for excitement, and unless we give it to them in legitimate form, they will take it in any riotous form it presents itself, and if from our experience we can control their mental digestion by a moderate supply of what they demand, we may save them from devouring too eagerly the raw material they can so easily find for themselves. there is a humorous passage bearing on this question in the story of the small scotch boy, when he asks leave of his parents to present the pious little book--a gift to himself from an aunt to a little sick friend, hoping probably that the friend's chastened condition will make him more lenient towards this mawkish form of literature. the parents expostulate, pointing out to their son how ungrateful he is, and how ungracious it would be to part with his aunt's gift. then the boy can contain himself no longer. he bursts out, unconsciously expressing the normal attitude of children at a certain stage of development: "it's a _daft_ book ony way: there's naebody gets kilt ent. i like stories about folk gettin' their heids cut off, or there's nae wile beasts. i i like stories about black men gettin' ate up, an' white men killin' lions and tigers an' bears an'---" then, again, we have the passage from george eliot's "mill on the floss": "oh, dear! i wish they would not fight at your school, tom. didn't it hurt you?" "hurt me? no," said tom, putting up the hooks again, taking out a large pocketknife, and slowly opening the largest blade, which he looked at meditatively as he rubbed his finger along it. then he added: "i gave spooner a black eye--that's what he got for wanting to leather me. i wasn't going to go halves because anybody leathered me." "oh! how brave you are, tom. i think you are like samson. if there came a lion roaring at men, i think you'd fight him, wouldn't you, tom?" "how can a lion come roaring at you, you silly thing? there's no lions only in the shows." "no, but if we were in the lion countries--i mean in africa where it's very hot, the lions eat people there. i can show it you in the book where i read it." "well, i should get a gun and shoot him." "but if you hadn't a gun?--we might have gone out, you know, not thinking, just as we go out fishing, and then a great lion might come towards us roaring, and we could not get away from him. what should you do, tom?" tom paused, and at last turned away contemptuously, saying: "but the lion _isn't_ coming. what's the use of talking?" this passage illustrates also the difference between the highly- developed imagination of the one and the stodgy prosaical temperament of the other. tom could enter into the elementary question of giving his schoolfellow a black eye, but could not possibly enter into the drama of the imaginary arrival of a lion. he was sorely in need of fairy stories. it is to this element we have to cater, and we cannot shirk our responsibilities. william james says: "living things, moving things or things that savor of danger or blood, that have a dramatic quality, these are the things natively interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else, and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with his pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these."[ ] of course the savor of danger and blood is only _one_ of the things to which we should appeal, but i give the whole passage to make the point clearer. this is one of the most difficult parts of our selection, namely, how to present enough excitement for the child and yet include enough constructive element which will satisfy him when the thirst for "blugginess" is slaked. and here i should like to say that, while wishing to encourage in children great admiration and reverence for the courage and other fine qualities which have been displayed in times of war and which have mitigated its horrors, i think we should show that some of the finest moments in these heroes' lives had nothing to do with their profession as soldiers. thus, we have the well-known story of sir philip sydney and the soldier; the wonderful scene where roland drags the bodies of his dead friends to receive the blessing of the archbishop after the battle of roncesvall;[ ] and of napoleon sending the sailor back to england. there is a moment in the story of gunnar when he pauses in the midst of the slaughter of his enemies, and says, "i wonder if i am less base than others, because i kill men less willingly than they." and in the "burning of njal,"[ ] we have the words of the boy, thord, when his grandmother, bergthora, urges him to go out of the burning house. "'you promised me when i was little, grandmother, that i should never go from you till i wished it of myself. and i would rather die with you than live after you.'" here the moral courage is so splendidly shown: none of these heroes feared to die in battle or in open single fight; but to face death by fire for higher considerations is a point of view worth presenting to the child. in spite of all the dramatic excitement roused by the conduct of our soldiers and sailors, should we not try to offer also in our stories the romance and excitement of saving as well as taking life? i would have quite a collection dealing with the thrilling adventures of the lifeboat and the fire brigade, of which i shall present examples in the final story list. finally, we ought to include a certain number of stories dealing with death, especially with children who are of an age to realize that it must come to all, and that this is not a calamity but a perfectly natural and simple thing. at present the child in the street invariably connects death with sordid accidents. i think they should have stories of death coming in heroic form, as when a man or woman dies for a great cause, in which he has opportunity of admiring courage, devotion and unselfishness; or of death coming as a result of treachery, such as we find in the death of baldur, the death of siegfried, and others, so that children may learn to abhor such deeds; but also a fair proportion of stories dealing with death that comes naturally, when our work is done, and our strength gone, which has no more tragedy than the falling of a leaf from the tree. in this way, we can give children the first idea that the individual is so much less than the whole. little children often take death very naturally. a boy of five met two of his older companions at the school door. they said sadly and solemnly: "we have just seen a dead man!" "well," said the little philosopher, "that's all right. we've _all_ got to die when our work is done." in one of the buddha stories which i reproduce at the end of this book, the little hare (who is, i think, a symbol of nervous individualism) constantly says: "suppose the earth were to fall in, what would become of me?" as an antidote to the ordinary attitude towards death, i commend an episode from a german folklore story which is called "unlucky john," and which is included in the list of stories recommended at the end of this book. the following sums up in poetic form some of the material necessary for the wants of a child. the child the little new soul has come to earth, he has taken his staff for the pilgrim's way. his sandals are girt on his tender feet, and he carries his scrip for what gifts he may. what will you give to him, fate divine? what for his scrip on the winding road? a crown for his head, or a laurel wreath? a sword to wield, or is gold his load? what will you give him for weal or woe? what for the journey through day and night? give or withhold from him power and fame, but give to him love of the earth's delight. let him be lover of wind and sun and of falling rain; and the friend of trees; with a singing heart for the pride of noon, and a tender heart for what twilight sees. let him be lover of you and yours-- the child and mary; but also pan and the sylvan gods of the woods and hills, and the god that is hid in his fellowman. love and a song and the joy of the earth, these be gifts for his scrip to keep till, the journey ended, he stands at last in the gathering dark, at the gate of sleep. ethel clifford and so our stories should contain all the essentials for the child's scrip on the road of life, providing the essentials and holding or withholding the non-essentials. but, above all, let us fill the scrip with gifts that the child need never reject, even when he passes through to "the gate of sleep." chapter v. how to obtain and maintain the effect of the story. we are now come to the most important part of the question of story- telling, to which all the foregoing remarks have been gradually leading, and that is the effect of these stories upon the child, quite apart from the dramatic joy he experiences in listening to them, which would in itself be quite enough to justify us in the telling. but, since i have urged the extreme importance of giving so much time to the manner of telling and of bestowing so much care in the selection of the material, it is right that we should expect some permanent results or else those who are not satisfied with the mere enjoyment of the children will seek other methods of appeal--it is to them that i most specially dedicate this chapter. i think we are of the threshold of the re-discovery of an old truth, that _dramatic presentation_ is the quickest and the surest method of appeal, because it is the only one with which memory plays no tricks. if a thing has appeared before us in a vital form nothing can really destroy it; it is because things are often given in a blurred, faint light that they gradually fade out of our memory. a very keen scientist was deploring to me, on one occasion, the fact that stories were told so much in the schools, to the detriment of science, for which he claimed the same indestructible element that i recognize in the best-told stories. being very much interested in her point of view, i asked her to tell me, looking back on her school days, what she could remember as standing out from other less clear information. after thinking some little time over the matter, she said with some embarrassment, but with candor that did her much honor: "well, now i come to think of it, it was the story of cinderella." now, i am not holding any brief for this story in particular. i think the reason it was remembered was because of the dramatic form in which it was presented to her, which fired her imagination and kept the memory alight. i quite realize that a scientific fact might also have been easily remembered if it had been presented in the form of a successful chemical experiment; but this also has something of the dramatic appeal and will be remembered on that account. sully says: "we cannot understand the fascination of a story for children save in remembering that for their young minds, quick to imagine, and unversed in abstract reflection, words are not dead things but _winged_, as the old greeks called them."[ ] the _red queen_, in "alice through the looking-glass," was more psychological than she was aware of when she made the memorable statement: "when once you've _said_ a thing, that _fixes_ it, and you must take the consequences." in curtin's "introduction to myths and folk tales of the russians", he says: "i remember well the feeling roused in my mind at the mention or sight of the name _lucifer_ during the early years of my life. it stood for me as the name of a being stupendous, dreadful in moral deformity, lurid, hideous and mighty. i remember the surprise with which, when i had grown somewhat older and began to study latin, i came upon the name in virgil where it means _light-bringer_--the herald of the sun." plato has said that "the end of education should be the training by suitable habits of the instincts of virtue in the child." about two thousand years later, sir philip sydney, in his "defence of poesy," says: "the final end of learning is to draw and lead us to so high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of." and yet it is neither the greek philosopher nor the elizabethan poet that makes the everyday application of these principles; but we have a hint of this application from the pueblo tribe of indians, of whom lummis tells us the following: "there is no duty to which a pueblo child is trained in which he has to be content with a bare command: do this. for each, he learns a fairy-tale designed to explain how children first came to know that it was right to 'do this,' and detailing the sad results that befall those who did otherwise. some tribes have regular story-tellers, men who have devoted a great deal of time to learning the myths and stories of their people and who possess, in addition to good memory, a vivid imagination. the mother sends for one of these, and having prepared a feast for him, she and her little brood, who are curled up near her, await the fairy stories of the dreamer who after his feast and smoke entertains the company for hours." in modern times, the nurse, who is now receiving such complete training for her duties with children, should be ready to imitate the "dreamer" of the indian tribe. i rejoice to find that regular instruction in story-telling is being given in many of the institutions where the nurses are trained. some years ago there appeared a book by dion calthrop called "king peter," which illustrates very fully the effect of story-telling. it is the account of the education of a young prince which is carried on at first by means of stories, and later he is taken out into the arena of life to show what is happening there--the dramatic appeal being always the means used to awaken his imagination. the fact that only _one_ story a year is told him prevents our seeing the effect from day to day, but the time matters little. we only need faith to believe that the growth, though slow, was sure. there is something of the same idea in the "adventures of telemachus," written by fenelon for his royal pupil, the young duke of burgundy, but whereas calthrop trusts to the results of indirect teaching by means of dramatic stories, fenelon, on the contrary, makes use of the somewhat heavy, didactic method, so that one would think the attention of the young prince must have wandered at times; and i imagine telemachus was in the same condition when he was addressed at such length by mentor, who, being minerva, though in disguise, should occasionally have displayed that sense of humor which must always temper true wisdom. take, for instance the heavy reproof conveyed in the following passage: "death and shipwreck are less dreadful than the pleasures that attack virtue. . . . youth is full of presumption and arrogance, though nothing in the world is so frail: it fears nothing, and vainly relies utmost levity and without any precaution." and on another occasion, when calypso hospitably provides clothes for the shipwrecked men, and telemachus is handling a tunic of the finest wool and white as snow, with a vest of purple embroidered with gold, and displaying much pleasure in the magnificence of the clothes, mentor addresses him in a severe voice, saying: "are these, o telemachus, the thoughts that ought to occupy the heart of the son of ulysses? a young man who loves to dress vainly, as a woman does, is unworthy of wisdom or glory." i remember, as a school girl of thirteen, having to commit to memory several books of these adventures, so as to become familiar with the style. far from being impressed by the wisdom of mentor, i was simply bored, and wondered why telemachus did not escape from him. the only part in the book that really interested me was calypso's unrequited love for telemachus, but this was always the point where we ceased to learn by heart, which surprised me greatly, for it was here that the real human interest seemed to begin. of all the effects which i hope for from the telling of stories in the schools, i, personally, place first the dramatic joy we bring to the children and to ourselves. but there are many who would consider this result as fantastic, if not frivolous, and not to be classed among the educational values connected with the introduction of stories into the school curriculum. i, therefore, propose to speak of other effects of story-telling which may seem of more practical value. the first, which is of a purely negative character, is that through means of a dramatic story we may counteract some of the sights and sounds of the street which appeal to the melodramatic instinct in children. i am sure that all teachers whose work lies in crowded cities must have realized the effect produced on children by what they see and hear on their way to and from school. if we merely consider the bill boards with their realistic representations, quite apart from the actual dramatic happenings in the street, we at once perceive that the ordinary school interests pale before such lurid appeals as these. how can we expect the child who has stood openmouthed before a poster representing a woman chloroformed by a burglar (while that hero escapes in safety with jewels) to display any interest in the arid monotony of the multiplication table? the illegitimate excitement created by the sight of the depraved burglar can only be counteracted by something equally exciting along the realistic but legitimate side of appeal; and this is where the story of the right kind becomes so valuable, and why the teacher who is artistic enough to undertake the task can find the short path to results which theorists seek for so long in vain. it is not even necessary to have an exceedingly exciting story; sometimes one which will bring about pure reaction may be just as suitable. i remember in my personal experience an instance of this kind. i had been reading with some children of about ten years old the story from "cymbeline" of _imogen_ in the forest scene, when the brothers strew flowers upon her, and sing the funeral dirge, fear no more the heat of the sun. just as we had all taken on this tender, gentle mood, the door opened and one of the prefects announced in a loud voice the news of the relief of mafeking. the children were on their feet at once, cheering lustily, and for the moment the joy over the relief of the brave garrison was the predominant feeling. then, i took advantage of a momentary reaction and said: "now, children, don't you think we can pay england the tribute of going back to england's greatest poet?" in a few minutes we were back in the heart of the forest, and i can still hear the delightful intonation of those subdued voices repeating, golden lads and girls all must like chimney-sweepers come to dust. it is interesting to note that the same problem that is exercising us today was a source of difficulty to people in remote times. the following is taken from an old chinese document, and has particular interest for us at this time: "the philosopher, mentius (born b. c.), was left fatherless at a very tender age and brought up by his mother, changsi. the care of this prudent and attentive mother has been cited as a model for all virtuous parents. the house she occupied was near that of a butcher; she observed at the first cry of the animals that were being slaughtered, the little mentius ran to be present at the sight, and that, on his return, he sought to imitate what he had seen. fearful lest his heart might become hardened, and accustomed to the sights of blood, she removed to another house which was in the neighborhood of a cemetery. the relations of those who were buried there came often to weep upon their graves, and make their customary libations. the lad soon took pleasure in their ceremonies and amused himself by imitating them. this was a new subject of uneasiness to his mother: she feared her son might come to consider as a jest what is of all things the most serious, and that he might acquire a habit of performing with levity, and as a matter of routine merely, ceremonies which demand the most exact attention and respect. again, therefore, she anxiously changed the dwelling, and went to live in the city, opposite a school, where her son found examples the most worthy of imitation, and began to profit by them. this anecdote has become incorporated by the chinese into a proverb, which they constantly quote: the mother of mentius seeks a neighborhood." another influence we have to counteract is that of newspaper headings and placards which catch the eye of children in the streets and appeal so powerfully to their imagination. shakespeare has said: tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart, or in the head? how begot, how nourished? it is engendered in the eyes with gazing fed, and fancy dies in the cradle where it lies. let us all ring fancy's knell. i'll begin it--ding, dong, bell. "merchant of venice." if this be true, it is of importance to decide what our children shall look upon as far as we can control the vision, so that we can form some idea of the effect upon their imagination. having alluded to the dangerous influence of the street, i should hasten to say that this influence is very far from being altogether bad. there are possibilities of romance in street life which may have just the same kind of effect on children as the telling of exciting stories. i am indebted to mrs. arnold glover, honorary secretary of the national organization of girls' clubs,[ ] one of the most widely informed people on this subject, for the two following experiences gathered from the streets and which bear indirectly on the subject of story-telling: mrs. glover was visiting a sick woman in a very poor neighborhood, and found, sitting on the door-step of the house, two little children, holding something tightly grasped in their little hands, and gazing with much expectancy towards the top of the street. she longed to know what they were doing, but not being one of those unimaginative and tactless folk who rush headlong into the mysteries of children's doings, she passed them at first in silence. it was only when she found them still in the same silent and expectant posture half an hour later that she said tentatively: "i wonder whether you would tell me what you are doing here?" after some hesitation, one of them said, in a shy voice: "we're waitin' for the barrer." it then transpired that, once a week, a vegetable-and-flower-cart was driven through this particular street, on its way to a more prosperous neighborhood, and on a few red-letter days, a flower, or a sprig, or even a root sometimes fell out of the back of the cart; and these two little children were sitting there in hope, with their hands full of soil, ready to plant anything which might by some golden chance fall that way, in their secret garden of oyster shells. this seems to me as charming a fairy tale as any that our books can supply. on another occasion, mrs. glover was collecting the pennies for the holiday fund savings bank from the children who came weekly to her house. she noticed on three consecutive mondays that one little lad deliberately helped himself to a new envelope from her table. not wishing to frighten or startle him, she allowed this to continue for some weeks, and then one day, having dismissed the other children, she asked him quite quietly why he was taking the envelopes. at first he was very sulky, and said: "i need them more than you do." she quite agreed this might be, but reminded him that, after all, they belonged to her. she promised, however, that if he would tell her for what purpose he wanted the envelopes, she would endeavor to help him in the matter. then came the astonishing announcement: "i am building a navy." after a little more gradual questioning, mrs. glover drew from the boy the information that the borough water carts passed through the side street once a week, flushing the gutter; that then the envelope ships were made to sail on the water and pass under the covered ways which formed bridges for wayfarers and tunnels for the "navy." great was the excitement when the ships passed out of sight and were recognized as they arrived safely at the other end. of course, the expenses in raw material were greatly diminished by the illicit acquisition of mrs. glover's property, and in this way she had unconsciously provided the neighborhood with a navy and a commander. her first instinct, after becoming acquainted with the whole story, was to present the boy with a real boat, but on second thought she collected and gave him a number of old envelopes with names and addresses upon them, which added greatly to the excitement of the sailing, because they could be more easily identified as they came out of the other end of the tunnel, and had their respective reputations as to speed. here is indeed food for romance, and i give both instances to prove that the advantages of street life are to be taken into consideration as well as the disadvantages, though i think we are bound to admit that the latter outweigh the former. one of the immediate results of dramatic stories is the escape from the commonplace, to which i have already alluded in quoting mr. goschen's words. the desire for this escape is a healthy one, common to adults and children. when we wish to get away from our own surroundings and interests, we do for ourselves what i maintain we ought to do for children: we step into the land of fiction. it has always been a source of astonishment to me that, in trying to escape from our own everyday surroundings, we do not step more boldly into the land of pure romance, which would form a real contrast to our everyday life, but, in nine cases out of ten, the fiction which is sought after deals with the subjects of our ordinary existence, namely, frenzied finance, sordid poverty, political corruption, fast society, and religious doubts. there is the same danger in the selection of fiction for children: namely, a tendency to choose very utilitarian stories, both in form and substance, so that we do not lift the children out of the commonplace. i remember once seeing the titles of two little books, the contents of which were being read or told to children; one was called, "tom the bootblack"; the other, "dan the newsboy." my chief objection to these stories was the fact that neither of the heroes rejoiced in his work for the work's sake. had _tom_ even invented a new kind of blacking, or if _dan_ had started a newspaper, it might have been encouraging for those among the listeners who were thinking of engaging in similar professions. it is true, both gentlemen amassed large fortunes, but surely the school age is not to be limited to such dreams and aspirations as these! one wearies of the tales of boys who arrive in a town with one cent in their pocket and leave it as millionaires, with the added importance of a mayoralty. it is undoubtedly true that the romantic prototype of these worthy youths is _dick whittingon_, for whom we unconsciously cherish the affection which we often bestow on a far-off personage. perhaps--who can say?--it is the picturesque adjunct of the cat, lacking to modern millionaires. i do not think it utopian to present to children a fair share of stories which deal with the importance of things "untouched by hand." they, too, can learn at an early age that "the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are spiritual." to those who wish to try the effect of such stories on children, i present for their encouragement the following lines from james whitcomb riley: the treasure of the wise man[ ] oh, the night was dark and the night was late, when the robbers came to rob him; and they picked the lock of his palace-gate, the robbers who came to rob him--; they picked the lock of the palace-gate, seized his jewels and gems of state, his coffers of gold and his priceless plate,-- the robbers that came to rob him. but loud laughed he in the morning red!-- for of what had the robbers robbed him? ho! hidden safe, as he slept in bed, when the robbers came to rob him,-- they robbed him not of a golden shred of the childish dreams in his wise old head- "and they're welcome to all things else," he said, when the robbers came to rob him. there is a great deal of this romantic spirit, combined with a delightful sense of irresponsibility, which i claim above all things for small children, to be found in our old nursery rhymes. i quote from the following article written by the rev. r. l. gales for the _nation_. after speaking on the subject of fairy stories being eliminated from the school curriculum, the writer adds: "this would be lessening the joy of the world and taking from generations yet unborn the capacity for wonder, the power to take a large unselfish interest in the spectacle of things, and putting them forever at the mercy of small private cares. "a nursery rhyme is the most sane, the most unselfish thing in the world. it calls up some delightful image--a little nut-tree with a silver walnut and a golden pear; some romantic adventure only for the child's delight and liberation from the bondage of unseeing dullness: it brings before the mind the quintessence of some good thing: "'the little dog laughed to see such sport'--there is the soul of good humor, of sanity, of health in the laughter of that innocently wicked little dog. it is the laughter of pure frolic without unkindness. to have laughed with the little dog as a child is the best preservative against mirthless laughter in later years--the horse laughter of brutality, the ugly laughter of spite, the acrid laughter of fanaticism. the world of nursery rhymes, the old world of mrs. slipper-slopper, is the world of natural things, of quick, healthy motion, of the joy of living. "in nursery rhymes the child is entertained with all the pageant of the world. it walks in fairy gardens, and for it the singing birds pass. all the king's horses and all the king's men pass before it in their glorious array. craftsmen of all sorts, bakers, confectioners, silversmiths, blacksmiths are busy for it with all their arts and mysteries, as at the court of an eastern king." in insisting upon the value of this escape from the commonplace, i cannot prove the importance of it more clearly than by showing what may happen to a child who is deprived of his birthright by having none of the fairy tale element presented to him. in "father and son," mr. edmund gosse says: "meanwhile, capable as i was of reading, i found my greatest pleasure in the pages of books. the range of these was limited, for storybooks of every description were sternly excluded. no fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the house. in this it was to my mother, not to my father, that the prohibition was due. she had a remarkable, i confess, to me somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story,' that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any king, was a sin. . . . nor would she read the chivalrous tales in the verse of sir walter scott, obstinately alleging that they were not true. she would nothing but lyrical and subjective poetry. as a child, however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and so considerable a skill in it, that she was constantly being begged to indulge others with its exercise. . . . 'when i was a very little child,' she says, 'i used to amuse myself and my brothers with inventing stories such as i had read. having, i suppose, a naturally restless mind and busy imagination, this soon became the chief pleasure of my life. unfortunately, my brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and i found in taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. i had not known there was any harm in it, until miss shore, a calvinistic governess, finding it out, lectured me severely and told me it was wicked. from that time forth, i considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin. . . . but the longing to do so grew with violence. . . . the simplicity of truth was not enough for me. i must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than i am able to express.' this [the author, her son, adds] is surely a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct." in contrast to the stifling of the imagination, it is good to recall the story of the great hermite who, having listened to the discussion of the monday sitting at the academie des sciences (insitut de france) as to the best way to teach the "young idea how to shoot" in the direction of mathematical genius, said: "_cultivez l'imagination, messieurs. tout est la. si vous voulez des mathematiciens, donnez a vos enfants a; lire--des contes de fees._" another important effect of the story is to develop at an early age sympathy for children of other countries where conditions are different from our own. i have so constantly to deal with the question of confusion between truth and fiction in the minds of children that it might be useful to offer here an example of the way they make the distinction for themselves. mrs. ewing says on this subject: "if there are young intellects so imperfect as to be incapable of distinguishing between fancy and falsehood, it is most desirable to develop in them the power to do so, but, as a rule, in childhood, we appreciate the distinction with a vivacity which as elders our care- clogged memories fail to recall." mr. p. a. barnett, in his book on the "common-sense of education," says, alluding to fairy-tales: "children will _act_ them but not act _upon_ them, and they will not accept the incidents as part of their effectual belief. they will imagine, to be sure, grotesque worlds, full of admirable and interesting personages to whom strange things might have happened. so much the better: this largeness of imagination is one of the possessions that distinguish the better nurtured child from others less fortunate." the following passage from stevenson's essay on _"child play"_[ ] will furnish an instance of children's aptitude for creating their own dramatic atmosphere: "when my cousin and i took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of a meal. he ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. i took mine with milk, and explained it to be country suffering gradual inundation. you can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. but perhaps the most exciting moments i ever had over a meal were in the case of calf's foot jelly. it was hardly possible not to believe--and you may be quite sure, so far from trying, i did all i could to favor the illusion--that some part of it was hollow and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of the golden rock. there, might some _red-beard_ await his hour; there might one find the treasures of the forty thieves. and so i quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savoring the interest. believe me, i had little palate left for the jelly; and though i preferred the taste when i tool cream with it, i used often to go without because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures." in his work on "imagination," ribot says: "the free initiative of children is always superior to the imitations we pretend to make for them." the passage from robert louis stevenson becomes more clear from a scientific point of view when taken in connection with one from karl groos' book on the "psychology of animal play": "the child is wholly absorbed in his play, and yet under the ebb and flow of thought and feeling like still water under wind-swept waves, he has the knowledge that it is pretense after all. behind the sham 'i' that takes part in the game, stands the unchanged 'i' which regards the sham 'i' with quiet superiority." queyrat speaks of play as one of the distinct phases of a child's imagination; it is "essentially a metamorphosis of reality, a transformation of places and things." now to return to the point which mrs. ewing makes, namely, that we should develop in normal children the power of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. i should suggest including two or three stories which would test that power in children, and if they fail to realize the difference between romancing and telling lies, then it is evident that they need special attention and help along this line. i give the titles of two stories of this kind in the collection at the end of the book.[ ] thus far we have dealt only with the negative results of stories, but there are more important effects, and i am persuaded that if we are careful in our choice of stories, and artistic in our presentation, so that the truth is framed, so to speak, in the memory, we can unconsciously correct evil tendencies in children which they recognize in themselves only when they have already criticized them in the characters of the story. i have sometimes been misunderstood on this point, and, therefore, i should like to make it quite clear. i do _not_ mean that stories should take the place entirely of moral or direct teaching, but that on many occasions they could supplement and strengthen moral teaching, because the dramatic appeal to the imagination is quicker than the moral appeal to the conscience. a child will often resist the latter lest it should make him uncomfortable or appeal to his personal sense of responsibility: it is often not in his power to resist the former, because it has taken possession of him before he is aware of it. as a concrete example, i offer three verses from a poem entitled, "a ballad for a boy," written some twelve years ago by w. cory, an eton master. the whole poem is to be found in a book of poems known as "ionica."[ ] the poem describes a fight between two ships, the french ship, _temeraire_, and the english ship, _quebec_. the english ship was destroyed by fire; farmer, the captain, was killed, and the officers take prisoners: they dealt with us as brethren, they mourned for farmer dead, and as the wounded captives passed each breton bowed the head. then spoke the french lieutenant: "'twas the fire that won, not we. you never struck your flag to _us_; you'll go to england free."[ ] 'twas the sixth day of october, seventeen hundred seventy-nine, a year when nations ventured against us to combine, _quebec_ was burned and farmer slain, by us remembered not; but thanks be to the french book wherein they're not forgot. and you, if you've got to fight the french, my youngster, bear in mind those seamen of king louis so chivalrous and kind; think of the breton gentlemen who took our lads to brest, and treat some rescued breton as a comrade and a guest. but in all our stories, in order to produce desired effects we must refrain from holding, as burroughs says, "a brief for either side," and we must let the people in the story be judged by their deeds and leave the decision of the children free in this matter.[ ] in a review of ladd's "psychology" in the _academy_, we find a passage which refers as much to the story as to the novel: "the psychological novelist girds up his loins and sets himself to write little essays on each of his characters. if he have the gift of the thing he may analyze motives with a subtlety which is more than their desert, and exhibit simple folk passing through the most dazzling rotations. if he be a novice, he is reduced to mere crude invention--the result in both cases is quite beyond the true purpose of art. art--when all is said and done--a suggestion, and it refuses to be explained. make it obvious, unfold it in detail, and you reduce it to a dead letter." again, there is a sentence by schopenhauer applied to novels which would apply equally well to stories: "skill consists in setting the inner life in motion with the smallest possible array of circumstances, for it is this inner life that excites our interest." in order to produce an encouraging and lasting effect by means of our stories, we should be careful to introduce a certain number from fiction where virtue is rewarded and vice punished, because to appreciate the fact that "virtue is its own reward" it takes a developed and philosophic mind, or a born saint, of whom there will not, i think, be many among normal children: a comforting fact, on the whole, as the normal teacher is apt to confuse them with prigs. a grande dame visiting an elementary school listened to the telling of an exciting story from fiction, and was impressed by the thrill of delight which passed through the children. but when the story was finished, she said: "but _oh!_ what a pity the story was not taken from actual history!" now, not only was this comment quite beside the mark, but the lady in question did not realize that pure fiction has one quality which history cannot have. the historian, bound by fact and accuracy, must often let his hero come to grief. the poet (or, in this case we may call him, in the greek sense, the "maker" of stories) strives to show _ideal_ justice. what encouragement to virtue, except for the abnormal child, can be offered by the stories of good men coming to grief, such as we find miltiades, phocion, socrates, severus, cicero, cato and caesar? sir philip sydney says in his "defence of poesy": "only the poet declining to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the _historian_, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, furies and such like so as he goeth hand- in-hand with nature, not inclosed in the narrow range of her gifts but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own art--_her_ world is brazen; the poet only delivers a golden one." the effect of the story need not stop at the negative task of correcting evil tendencies. there is the positive effect of translating the abstract ideal of the story into concrete action. i was told by lady henry somerset that when the first set of children came down from london for a fortnight's holiday in the country, she was much startled and shocked by the obscenity of the games they played amongst themselves. being a sound psychologist, lady henry wisely refrained from appearing surprised or from attempting any direct method of reproof. "i saw," she said, "that the 'goody' element would have no effect, so i changed the whole atmosphere by reading to them or telling them the most thrilling medieval tales without any commentary. by the end of the fortnight the activities had all changed. the boys were performing astonishing deeds of prowess, and the girls were allowing themselves to be rescued from burning towers and fetid dungeons." now, if these deeds of chivalry appear somewhat stilted to us, we can at least realize that, having changed the whole atmosphere of the filthy games, it is easier to translate the deeds into something a little more in accordance with the spirit of the age, and boys will more readily wish later on to save their sisters from dangers more sordid and commonplace than fiery towers and dark dungeons, if they have once performed the deeds in which they had to court danger and self-sacrifice for themselves. and now we come to the question as to how these effects are to be maintained. in what has already been stated as to the danger of introducing the dogmatic and direct appeal into the story, it is evident that the avoidance of this element is the first means of preserving the story in all its artistic force in the memory of the child. we must be careful, as i point out in the chapter on questions, not to interfere by comment or question with the atmosphere we have made round the story, or else, in the future, that story will become blurred and overlaid with the remembrance, not of the artistic whole, as presented by the teller of the story, but by some unimportant small side issue raised by an irrelevant question or a superfluous comment. many people think that the dramatization of the story by the children themselves helps to maintain the effect produced. personally, i fear there is the same danger as in the immediate reproduction of the story, but by some unimportant small side issue raised by an irrelevant question or a superfluous comment. many people think that the dramatization of the story by the children themselves helps to maintain the effect produced. personally, i fear there is the same danger as in the immediate reproduction of the story, namely, that the general dramatic effect may be weakened. if, however, there is to be dramatization (and i do not wish to dogmatize on the subject), i think it should be confined to facts and not fancies, and this is why i realize the futility of the dramatization of fairy tales. horace e. scudder says on this subject: "nothing has done more to vulgarize the fairy than its introduction on the stage. the charm of the fairy tale is its divorce from human experience: the charm of the stage is its realization in miniature of human life. if a frog is heard to speak, if a dog is changed before our eyes into a prince by having cold water dashed over it, the charm of the fairy tale has fled, and, in its place, we have the perplexing pleasure of _legerdemain_. since the real life of a fairy is in the imagination, a wrong is committed when it is dragged from its shadowy hiding-place and made to turn into ashes under the calcium light of the understanding."[ ] i am bound to admit that the teachers have a case when they plead for this reproducing of the story, and there are three arguments they use the validity of which i admit, but which have nevertheless not converted me, because the loss, to my mind, would exceed the gain. the first argument they put forward is that the reproduction of the story enables the child to enlarge and improve his vocabulary. now i greatly sympathize with this point of view, but, as i regard the story hour as a very precious and special one, which i think may have a lasting effect on the character of a child, i do not think it important that, during this hour, a child should be called upon to improve his vocabulary at the expense of the dramatic whole, and at the expense of the literary form in which the story has been presented. it would be like using the bible for parsing or paraphrase or pronunciation. so far, i believe, the line has been drawn here, though there are blasphemers who have laid impious hands on milton or shakespeare for this purpose. there are surely other lessons, as i have already said in dealing with the reproduction of the story quite apart from the dramatization, lessons more utilitarian in character, which can be used for this purpose: the facts of history (i mean the mere facts as compared with the deep truths), and those of geography. above all, the grammar lessons are those in which the vocabulary can be enlarged and improved. but i am anxious to keep the story hour apart as dedicated to something higher than these excellent but utilitarian considerations. the second argument used by the teachers is the joy felt by the children in being allowed to dramatize the stories. this, too, appeals very strongly to me, but there is a means of satisfying their desire and yet protecting the dramatic whole, and that is occasionally to allow children to act out their own dramatic inventions; this, to my mind, has great educational significance: it is original and creative work and, apart from the joy of the immediate performance, there is the interesting process of comparison which can be presented to the children, showing them the difference between their elementary attempts and the finished product of the experienced artist. this difference they can be led to recognize by their own powers of observation if the teachers are not in too great a hurry to point it out themselves. here is a short original story, quoted by the french psychologist, queyrat, in his "jeux de l'enfance," written by a child of five: "one day i went to sea in a life-boat--all at once i saw an enormous whale, and i jumped out of the boat to catch him, but he was so big that i climbed on his back and rode astride, and all the little fishes laughed to see." here is a complete and exciting drama, making a wonderful picture and teeming with adventure. we could scarcely offer anything to so small a child for reproduction that would be a greater stimulus to the imagination. here is another, offered by loti, but the age of the child is not given: "once upon a time a little girl out in the colonies cut open a huge melon, and out popped a green beast and stung her, and the little child died." loti adds: "the phrases 'out in the colonies' and 'a huge melon' were enough to plunge me suddenly into a dream. as by an apparition, i beheld tropical trees, forests alive with marvelous birds. oh! the simple magic of the words 'the colonies'! in my childhood they stood for a multitude of distant sun-scorched countries, with their palm-trees, their enormous flowers, their black natives, their wild beasts, their endless possibilities of adventure." i quote this in full because it shows so clearly the magic force of words to evoke pictures, without any material representation. it is just the opposite effect of the pictures presented to the bodily eye without the splendid educational opportunity for the child to form his own mental image. i am more and more convinced that the rare power of visualization is accounted for by the lack of mental practice afforded along these lines. the third argument used by teachers in favor of the dramatization of the stories is that it is a means of discovering how much the child has really learned from the story. now this argument makes absolutely no appeal to me. my experience, in the first place, has taught me that a child very seldom gives out any account of a deep impression made upon him: it is too sacred and personal. but he very soon learns to know what is expected of him, and he keeps a set of stock sentences which he has found out are acceptable to the teacher. how can we possibly gauge the deep effects of a story in this way, or how can a child, by acting out a story, describe the subtle elements which one has tried to introduce? one might as well try to show with a pint measure how the sun and rain have affected a plant, instead of rejoicing in the beauty of the sure, if slow, growth. then, again, why are we in such a hurry to find out what effects have been produced by our stories? does it matter whether we know today or tomorrow how much a child has understood? for my part, so sure do i feel of the effect that i am willing to wait indefinitely. only, i must make sure that the first presentation is truly dramatic and artistic. the teachers of general subjects have a much easier and more simple task. those who teach science, mathematics, even, to a certain extent, history and literature, are able to gauge with a fair amount of accuracy by means of examination what their pupils have learned. the teaching carried on by means of stories can never be gauged in the same manner. carlyle has said: "of this thing be certain: wouldst thou plant for eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart. wouldst thou plant for year and day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his self-love and arithmetical understanding, what will grow there."[ ] if we use this marvelous art of story-telling in the way i have tried to show, then the children who have been confided to our care will one day be able to bring _us_ the tribute which bjornson brought to hans christian andersen: wings you gave to my imagination, me uplifting to the strange and great; gave my heart the poet's revelation, glorifying things of low estate. when my child-soul hungered all-unknowing, with great truths its need you satisfied: now, a world-worn man, to you is owing that the child in me has never died. translated from the danish by emilie poulson. chapter vii. questions asked by teachers. the following questions have been put to me so often by teachers, in my own country and in america, that i have thought it might be useful to give in my book some of the attempts i have made to answer them; and i wish to record here an expression of gratitude to the teachers who have asked these questions at the close of my lectures. it has enabled me to formulate my views on the subject and to clear up, by means of research and thought, the reason for certain things which i had more or less taken for granted. it has also constantly modified my own point of view, and has prevented me from becoming too dogmatic in dealing with other people's methods. question i: _why do i consider it necessary to spend so many years on the art of story-telling, which takes in, after all, such a restricted portion of literature?_ just in the same way that an actor thinks it worth while to go through so many years' training to fit him for the stage, although dramatic literature is also only one branch of general literature. the region of storyland is the legitimate stage for children. they crave drama as we do, and because there are comparatively few good story-tellers, children do not have their dramatic needs satisfied. what is the result? we either take them to dramatic performances for grown-up people, or we have children's theaters where the pieces, charming as they may be, are of necessity deprived of the essential elements which constitute a drama--or they are shriveled up to suit the capacity of the child. therefore, it would seem wiser, while the children are quite young, to keep them to the simple presentation of stories, because with their imagination keener at that period, they have the delight of the inner vision and they do not need, as we do, the artificial stimulus provided by the machinery of the stage. question ii: _what is to be done if a child asks you: "is the story true?"_ i hope i shall be considered utopian in my ideas if a say that it is quite easy, even with small children, to teach them that the seeing of truth is a relative matter which depends on the eyes of the seer. if we were not afraid to tell our children that all through life there are grown-up people who do not see things that others see, their own difficulties would be helped. in his "imagination creatrice," queyrat says: "to get down into the recesses of a child's mind, one would have to become even as he is; we are reduced to interpreting that child in the terms of an adult. the children we observe live and grow in a civilized community, and the result of this is that the development of their imagination is rarely free or complete, for as soon as it rises beyond the average level, the rationalistic education of parents and schoolmasters at once endeavors to curb it. it is restrained in its flight by an antagonistic power which treats it as a kind of incipient madness." it is quite easy to show children that if one keeps things where they belong, they are true with regard to each other, but that if one drags these things out of the shadowy atmosphere of the "make-believe," and forces them into the land of actual facts, the whole thing is out of gear. to take a concrete example: the arrival of the coach made from a pumpkin and driven by mice is entirely in harmony with the _cinderella_ surroundings, and i have never heard one child raise any question of the difficulty of traveling in such a coach or of the uncertainty of mice in drawing it. but, suggest to the child that this diminutive vehicle could be driven among the cars of broadway, or amongst the motor omnibuses in the strand, and you would bring confusion at once into his mind. having once grasped this, the children will lose the idea that fairy stories are just for them, and not for their elders, and from this they will go on to see that it is the child-like mind of the poet and seer that continues to appreciate these things; that it is the dull, heavy person whose eyes so soon become dim and unable to see any more the visions which were once his own. in his essay on "poetry and life" (glasgow, ), professor bradley says: "it is the effect of poetry, not only by expressing emotion but in other ways also, to bring life into the dead mass of our experience, and to make the world significant." this applies to children as well as to adults. there may come to the child in the story hour, by some stirring poem or dramatic narration, a sudden flash of the possibilities of life which he had not hitherto realized in the even course of school experience. "poetry," says professor bradley, "is a way of representing truth; but there is in it, as its detractors have always insisted, a certain untruth or illusion. we need not deny this, so long as we remember that the illusion is conscious, that no one wishes to deceive, and that no one is deceived. but it would be better to say that poetry is false to literal fact for the sake of obtaining a higher truth. first, in order to represent the connection between a more significant part of experience and a less significant, poetry, instead of linking them together by a chain which touches one by one the intermediate objects that connect them, leaps from one to the other. it thus falls at once into conflict with common-sense." now, the whole of this passage bears as much on the question of the truth embodied in a fairy tale as a poem, and it would be interesting to take some of these tales and try to discover where they are false to actual fact for the sake of a higher truth. let us take, for instance, the story of cinderella: the coach and pumpkins to which i have alluded and all the magic part of the story, are false to actual facts as we meet them in our every life; but is it not a higher truth that _cinderella_ could escape from her chimney corner by thinking of the brightness outside? in this sense we all travel in pumpkin coaches. take the story of psyche, in any one of the many forms it is presented to us in folk-story. the magic transformation of the lover is false to actual fact; but is it not a higher truth that we are often transformed by circumstance, and that love and courage can overcome most difficulties? take the story of the three bears. it is not in accordance with established fact that bears should extend hospitality to children who invade their territory. is it not true in a higher sense that fearlessness often lessens or averts danger? take the story of jack and the bean stalk. the rapid growth of the bean stalk and the encounter with the giant are false to literal fact; but is it not a higher truth that the spirit of courage and high adventure leads us straight out of the commonplace and often sordid facts of life? now, all these considerations are too subtle for the child, and, if offered in explanation, would destroy the excitement and interest of the story; but they are good for those of us who are presenting such stories: they provide not only an argument against the objection raised by unimaginative people as to the futility, if not immorality, of presenting these primitive tales, but clear up our own doubt and justify us in the use of them, if we need such justification. for myself, i am perfectly satisfied that, being part of the history of primitive people, it would be foolish to ignore them from an evolutionary point of view, which constitutes their chief importance; and it is only from the point of view of expediency that i mention the potential truths they contain. question iii: _what are you to do if a child says he does not like fairy tales_? this is not an uncommon case. what we have first to determine, under these circumstances, is whether this dislike springs from a stolid, prosaic nature, whether it springs from a real inability to visualize such pictures as the fairy or marvelous element in the story present, or whether (and this is often the real reason) it is from a fear of being asked to believe what his judgment resents as untrue, or whether he thinks it is "grown-up" to reject such pleasure as unworthy of his years. in the first case, it is wise to persevere, in hopes of developing the dormant imagination. if the child resents the apparent want of truth we can teach him how many-sided truth is, as i suggested in my answer to the first question. in the other cases, we must try to make it clear that the delight he may venture to take now will increase, not decrease, with years; that the more one brings _to_ a thing, in the way of experience and knowledge, the more one will draw _out_ of it. let us take as a concrete example the question of santa claus. this joy has almost disappeared, for we have torn away the last shred of mystery about the personage by allowing him to be materialized in the christmas shops and bazaars. but the original myth need never have disappeared; the link could easily have been kept by gradually telling the child that the santa claus they worshiped as a mysterious and invisible power is nothing but the spirit of charity and kindness that makes us remember others, and that this spirit often takes the form of material gifts. we can also lead them a step higher and show them that this spirit of kindness can do more than provide material things; so that the old nursery tale has laid a beautiful foundation which need never be pulled up: we can build upon it and add to it all through our lives. is not _one_ of the reasons that children reject fairy tales this, that such very _poor_ material is offered them? there is a dreary flatness about all except the very best which revolts the child of literary appreciation and would fail to strike a spark in the more prosaic. question iv: _do i recommend learning a story by heart, or telling it in one's own words_? this would largely depend on the kind of story. if the style is classic or if the interest of the story is closely connected with the style, as in andersen, kipling or stevenson, then it is better to commit it absolutely to memory. but if this process should take too long (i mean for those who cannot afford the time to specialize), or if it produces a stilted effect, then it is wiser to read the story many times over, let it soak in, taking notes of certain passages which would add to the dramatic interest of the story, and not trouble about the word accuracy of the whole. for instance, for very young children the story of _pandora_, as told in the "wonder-book" could be shortened so as to leave principally the dramatic dialogue between the two children, which could be easily committed to memory by the narrator and would appeal most directly to the children. or for older children: in taking a beautiful medieval story such as "our lady's tumbler," retold by wickstead, the original text could hardly be presented so as to hold an audience; but while giving up a great deal of the elaborate material, we should try to present many of the characteristic passages which seem to sum up the situation. for instance, before his performance, the _tumbler_ cries: "what am i doing? for there is none here so caitiff but who vies with all the rest in serving god after his trade." and after his act of devotion: "lady, this is a choice performance. i do it for no other but for you; so aid me god, i do not--for you and for your son. and this i dare avouch and boast, that for me it is no play-work. but i am serving you, and that pays me." on the other hand, there are some very gifted narrators who can only tell the story in their own words. i consider that both methods are necessary to the all-round story-teller. question v: _how do i set about preparing a story_? here again the preparation depends a great deal on the kind of story: whether it has to be committed to memory or rearranged to suit a certain age of child, or told entirely in one's own words. but there is one kind of preparation which is the same for any story, that is, living with it for a long time, until one has really obtained the right atmosphere, especially in the case of inanimate objects. this is where hans christian andersen reigns supreme. horace scudder says of him: "by some transmigration, souls have passed into tin soldiers, balls, tops, money-pigs, coins, shoes and even such attenuated things as darning-needles, and when, informing these apparent dead and stupid bodies, they begin to make manifestations, it is always in perfect consistency with the ordinary conditions of the bodies they occupy, though the several objects become, by the endowment of souls, suddenly expanded in their capacity."[ ] now, my test of being ready with such stories is whether i have ceased to look upon such objects _as_ inanimate. let us take some of those quoted from andersen. first, the _tin soldier_. to me, since i have lived in the story, he is a real live hero, holding his own with some of the bravest fighting heroes in history or fiction. as for his being merely of tin, i entirely forget it, except when i realize against what odds he fights, or when i stop to admire the wonderful way andersen carries out his simile of the old tin spoon--the stiffness of the musket, and the tears of tin. take the _top_ and the _ball_, and, except for the delightful way they discuss the respective merits of cork and mahogany in their ancestors, you would completely forget that they are not real human beings with the live passions and frailties common to youth. as for the _beetle_--who ever thinks of him as a mere entomological specimen? is he not the symbol of the self-satisfied traveler who learns nothing en route but the importance of his own personality? and the _darning-needle_? it is impossible to divorce human interest from the ambition of this little piece of steel. and this same method applied to the preparation of any shows that one can sometimes rise from the role of mere interpreter to that of creator--that is to say, the objects live afresh for you in response to the appeal you make in recognizing their possibilities of vitality. as a mere practical suggestion, i would advise that, as soon as one has overcome the difficulties of the text (if actually learning by heart, there is nothing but the drudgery of constant repetition), and as one begins to work the story into true dramatic form, always say the words aloud, and many times aloud, before trying them even on one person. more suggestions come to one in the way of effects from hearing the sounds of the words, and more complete mental pictures, in this way than any other--it is a sort of testing period, the results of which may or may not have to be modified when produced in public. in case of committing to memory, i advise word perfection first, not trying dramatic effects before this is reached; but, on the other hand, if you are using your own words, you can think out the effects as you go along--i mean, during the preparation. gestures, pauses, facial expression often help to fix the choice of words one decides to use, though here again the public performance will often modify the result. i strongly advise that all gestures be studied before the glass, because this most faithfully recording friend, whose sincerity we dare not question, will prevent glaring errors, and also help by the correction of these to more satisfactory results along positive lines. if your gesture does not satisfy you (and practice will make one more and more critical), it is generally because you have not made sufficient allowance for the power of imagination in your audience. emphasis in gesture is just as inartistic--and therefore ineffective--as emphasis in tone or language. before deciding, however, either on the facial expression or gesture, we must consider the chief characters in the story, and study how we can best--_not_ present them, but allow them to present themselves, which is a very different thing. the greatest tribute which can be paid to a story-teller, as to an actor, is that his own personality is temporarily forgotten, because he has so completely identified himself with his role. when we have decided what the chief characters really mean to do, we can let ourselves go in the impersonation. i shall now take a story as a concrete example, namely, the buddhist legend of the "lion and the hare."[ ] we have here the _lion_ and the _hare_ as types--the other animals are less individual and therefore display less salient qualities. the little hare's chief characteristics are nervousness, fussiness, and misdirected imagination. we must bear this all in mind when she appears on the stage--fortunately these characteristics lend themselves easily to dramatic representation. the _lion_ is not only large-hearted but broad-minded. it is good to have an opportunity of presenting to the children a lion who has other qualities than physical beauty or extraordinary strength (here again there will lurk the danger of alarming the nature students). he is even more interesting than the magnanimous lion whom we have sometimes been privileged to meet in fiction. of course we grown-up people know that the _lion_ is the buddha in disguise. children will not be able to realize this, nor is it the least necessary that they should do so; but they will grasp the idea that he is a very unusual lion, not to be met with in paul du chaillu's adventures, still less in the quasi-domestic atmosphere of the zoological gardens. if our presentation is life-like and sincere, we shall convey all we intend to the child. this is part of what i call the atmosphere of the story, which, as in a photograph, can only be obtained by long exposure, that is to say, in the case of preparation we must bestow much reflection and sympathy. because these two animals are the chief characters, they must be painted in fainter colors--they should be suggested rather than presented in detail. it might be well to give a definite gesture to the _elephant_--say, a characteristic movement with his trunk--a scowl to the _tiger_, a supercilious and enigmatic smile to the _camel_ (suggested by kipling's wonderful creation). but if a gesture were given to each of the animals, the effect would become monotonous, and the minor characters would crowd the foreground of the picture, impeding the action and leaving little to the imagination of the audience. i personally have found it effective to repeat the gestures of these animals as they are leaving the stage, but less markedly, as it is only a form of reminder. now, what is the impression we wish to leave on the mind of the child, apart from the dramatic joy and interest we have endeavored to provide? surely it is that he may realize the danger of a panic. one method of doing this (alas! a favorite one still) is to say at the end of the story: "now, children, what do we learn from this?" of this method lord morley has said: "it is a commonplace to the wise, and an everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a method." if this direct method were really effective, we might as well put the little drama aside, and say plainly: "it is foolish to be nervous; it is dangerous to make loose statements. large-minded people understand things better than those who are narrow-minded." all these abstract statements would be as true and as tiresome as the multiplication table. the child might or might not fix them in his mind, but he would not act upon them. but, put all the artistic warmth of which you are capable into the presentation of the story, and, without one word of comment from you, the children will feel the dramatic intensity of that vast concourse of animals brought together by the feeble utterance of one irresponsible little hare. let them feel the dignity and calm of the _lion_, which accounts for his authority; his tender but firm treatment of the foolish little _hare_; and listen to the glorious finale when all the animals retire convinced of their folly; and you will find that you have adopted the same method as the _lion_ (who must have been an unconscious follower of froebel), and that there is nothing to add to the picture. question vi: _is it wise to talk over a story with children and to encourage them in the habit of asking questions about it_? at the time, no! the effect produced is to be by dramatic means, and this would be destroyed any attempt at analysis by means of questions. the medium that has been used in the telling of the story is (or ought to be) a purely artistic one which will reach the child through the medium of the emotions: the appeal to the intellect or the reason is a different method, which must be used at a different time. when you are enjoying the fragrance of a flower or the beauty of its color, it is not the moment to be reminded of its botanical classification, just as in the botany lesson it would be somewhat irrelevant to talk of the part that flowers play in the happiness of life. from a practical point of view, it is not wise to encourage questions on the part of the children, because they are apt to disturb the atmosphere by bringing in entirely irrelevant matter, so that in looking back on the telling of the story, the child often remembers the irrelevant conversation to the exclusion of the dramatic interest of the story itself.[ ] i remember once making what i considered at the time a most effective appeal to some children who had been listening to the story of the little tin soldier, and, unable to refrain from the cheap method of questioning, of which i have now recognized the futility, i asked: "don't you think it was nice of the little dancer to rush down into the fire to join the brave little soldier?" "well," said a prosaic little lad of six: "_i_ thought the draught carried her down." question vii: _is it wise to call upon children to repeat the story as soon as it has been told_? my answer here is decidedly in the negative. while fully appreciating the modern idea of children expressing themselves, i very much deprecate this so-called self-expression taking the form of mere reproduction. i have dealt with this matter in detail in another portion of my book. this is one of the occasions when children should be taking in, not giving out (even the most fanatic of moderns must agree that there _are_ such moments). when, after much careful preparation, an expert has told a story to the best of his ability, to encourage the children to reproduce this story with their imperfect vocabulary and with no special gift of speech (i am always alluding to the normal group of children) is as futile as if, after the performance of a musical piece by a great artist, some individual member of the audience were to be called upon to give _his_ rendering of the original rendering. the result would be that the musical joy of the audience would be completely destroyed and the performer himself would share in the loss.[ ] i have always maintained that five minutes of complete silence after the story would do more to fix the impression on the mind of the child than any amount of attempt at reproducing it. the general statement made in dr. montessor's wonderful chapter on "silence" would seem to me of special application to the moments following on the telling of a story. question viii: _should children be encouraged to illustrate the stories which they have heard_? as a dramatic interest to the teachers and the children, i think it is a very praiseworthy experiment, if used somewhat sparingly. but i seriously doubt whether these illustrations in any way indicate the impression made on the mind of the child. it is the same question that arises when that child is called upon, or expresses a wish, to reproduce the story in his own words: the unfamiliar medium in both instances makes it almost impossible for the child to convey his meaning, unless he is an artist in the one case or he has real literary power of expression in the other. my own impression, confirmed by many teachers who have made the experiment, is that a certain amount of disappointment is mixed up with the daring joy in the attempt, simply because the children can get nowhere near the ideal which has presented itself to the "inner eye." i remember a kindergarten teacher saying that on one occasion, when she had told to the class a thrilling story of a knight, one of the children immediately asked for permission to draw a picture of him on the blackboard. so spontaneous a request could not, of course, be refused, and, full of assurance, the would-be artist began to give his impression of the knight's appearance. when the picture was finished, the child stood back for a moment to judge for himself of the result. he put down the chalk and said sadly: "and i _thought_ he was so handsome." nevertheless, except for the drawback of the other children seeing a picture which might be inferior to their own mental vision, i should quite approve of such experiments, as long as they are not taken as literal data of what the children have really received. it would, however, be better not to have the picture drawn on a blackboard but at the child's private desk, to be seen by the teacher and not, unless the picture were exceptionally good, to be shown to the other children. one of the best effects of such an experiment would be to show a child how difficult it is to give the impression one wishes to record, and which would enable him later on to appreciate the beauty of such work in the hands of a finished artist. i can anticipate the jeers with which such remarks would be received by the futurist school, but, according to their own theory, i ought to be allowed to express the matter _as i see it_, however faulty the vision may appear to them.[ ] question ix: _in what way can the dramatic method of story-telling be used in ordinary class teaching_? this is too large a question to answer fully in so general a survey as this work, but i should like to give one or two examples as to how the element of story-telling could be introduced. i have always thought that the only way in which we could make either a history or literature lesson live, so as to take a real hold on the mind of the pupil at any age, would be that, instead of offering lists of events, crowded into the fictitious area of one reign, one should take a single event, say in one lesson out of five, and give it in the most splendid language and in the most dramatic manner. to come to a concrete example: supposing that one is talking to the class of greece, either in connection with its history, its geography or its literature, could any mere accumulation of facts give a clearer idea of the life of the people than a dramatically told story from homer, aeschylus, sophocles or euripides? what in the history of iceland could give any more graphic idea of the whole character of the life and customs of the inhabitants than one of the famous sagas, such as "the burning of njal" or "the death of gunnar"? in teaching the history of spain, what could make the pupils understand better the spirit of knight-errantry, its faults and its qualities, than a recital from "don quixote" or from the tale of "the cid"? in a word, the stories must appeal so vividly to the imagination that they will light up the whole period of history which we wish them to illustrate and keep it alive in the memory for all time. but quite apart from the dramatic presentation of history, there are very great possibilities for the short story introduced into the portrait of some great personage, insignificant in itself, but which throws a sudden sidelight on his character, showing the mind behind the actual deeds; this is what i mean by using the dramatic method. to take a concrete example: suppose, in giving an account of the life of napoleon, after enlarging upon his campaigns, his european policy, his indomitable will, one were suddenly to give an idea of his many- sidedness by relating how he actually found time to compile a catechism which was used for some years in the elementary schools of france. what sidelights might be thrown in this way on such characters as nero, caesar, henry viii, luther, goethe! to take one example from these: instead of making the whole career of henry viii center round the fact that he was a much-married man, could we not present his artistic side and speak of his charming contributions to music? so much for the history lessons. but could not the dramatic form and interest be introduced into our geography lessons? think of the romance of the panama canal, the position of constantinople, as affecting the history of europe, the shape of greece, england as an island, the position of thibet, the interior of africa--to what wonderful story-telling would these themes lend themselves! question x: _which should predominate in the story--the dramatic or the poetic element_? this is a much debated point. from experience i have come to the conclusion that, though both should be found in the whole range of stories, the dramatic element should prevail from the very nature of the presentation, and also because it reaches the larger number of children, at least of normal children. almost every child is dramatic, in the sense that it loves action (not necessarily an action in which it has to bear a part). it is the exceptional child who is reached by the poetic side, and just as on the stage the action must be quicker and more concentrated than in a poem--than even a dramatic poem--the poetical side, which must be painted in more delicate colors or presented in less obvious form, often escapes them. of course, the very reason why we must include the poetical element is that it is an unexpressed need of most children. their need of the dramatic is more loudly proclaimed and more easily satisfied. question xi: _what is the educational value of humor in the stories told to our children_? my answer to this is that humor means so much more than is usually understood by this term. so many people seem to think that to have a sense of humor is merely to be tickled by a funny element in a story. it surely means something much more subtle than this. it is thackeray who says: "if humor only meant laughter, but the humorist profess to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth and pretension, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy." so that, in our stories, the introduction of humor should not merely depend on the doubtful amusement that follows on a sense of incongruity. it should inculcate a sense of proportion brought about by an effort of imagination; it shows a child its real position in the universe and prevents hasty conclusions. it shortens the period of joy in horse-play and practical jokes. it brings about a clearer perception of all situations, enabling the child to get the point of view of another person. it is the first instilling of philosophy into the mind of a child and prevents much suffering later on when the blows of life fall upon him; for a sense of humor teaches us at an early age not to expect too much: and this philosophy can be developed with cynicism or pessimism, without even destroying the _joie de vivre_. one cannot, however, sufficiently emphasize the fact that these far- reaching results can be brought about only by humor quite distinct from the broader fun and hilarity which have also their use in an educational scheme. from my own experience, i have learned that development of humor is with most children extremely slow. it _is_ quite natural and quite right that at first pure fun, obvious situations and elementary jokes should please them, but we can very gradually appeal to something more subtle, and if i were asked what story would educate our children most thoroughly in appreciation of humor, i should say that "alice in wonderland" was the most effective. what better object lesson could be given in humorous form of taking somebody else's point of view than that given to _alice_ by the _mock turtle_ in speaking of the _whiting_-- "you know what they're like?" "i believe so," said alice. "they have their tails in their mouths-- and they're all over crumbs." "you're wrong about the crumbs," said the mock turtle. "crumbs would all wash off in the sea." or when _alice_ is speaking to the _mouse_ of her cat, and says: "she is such a dear quiet thing--and a capital one for catching mice---" and then suddenly realizes the point of view of the _mouse_, who was "trembling down to the end of its tail." then, as an instance of how a lack of humor leads to illogical conclusions (a condition common to most children), we have the conversation between _alice_ and the _pigeon_: alice: "but little girls eat quite as much as serpents, you know." pigeon: "i don't believe it. but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all i can say." then, as an instance of how a sense of humor would prevent too much self-importance: "i have a right to think," said alice sharply. "just about as much right," said the duchess, "as pigs have to fly." part ii. the stories. the following stories do not form a comprehensive selection; this i have endeavored to give in the list of stories. the stories given are chiefly taken from my own repertoire, and have been so constantly asked by teachers that i am glad of an opportunity of presenting them in full. i regret that i have been unable to furnish many of the stories i consider good for narration, but the difficulty of obtaining permission has deterred me from further efforts in this direction. sturla, the historian.[ ] then sturla got ready to sail away with the king, and his name was put on the list. he went on board before many men had come; he had a sleeping bag and a travelling chest, and took his place on the foredeck. a little later the king came on to the quay, and a company of men with him. sturla rose and bowed, and bade the king "hail," but the king answered nothing, and went aft along the ship to the quarter-deck. they sailed that day to go south along the coast. but in the evening when men unpacked their provisions sturla sat still, and no one invited him to mess. then a servant of the king's came and asked sturla if he had any meat and drink. sturla said "no." then the king's servant went to the king and spoke with him, out of hearing, and then went forward to sturla and said: "you shall go to mess with thorir mouth and erlend maw." they took him into their mess, but rather stiffly. when men were turning in to sleep, a sailor of the king's asked who should tell them stories. there was little answer. then said he: "sturla the icelander, will you tell stories?" "as you will," said sturla. so he told them the story of huld, better and fuller than any one there had ever heard it told before. then many men pushed forward to the fore-deck, wanting to hear as clearly as might be, and there was a great crowd. the queen asked: "what is that crowd on deck there?" a man answered: "the men are listening to the story that the icelander tells." "what story is that?" said she. he answers: "it is about a great troll-wife, and it is a good story and well told." the king bade her pay no heed to that, and go to sleep. she says: "i think this icelander must be a good fellow, and less to blame than he is reported." the king was silent. so the night passed, and the next morning there was no wind for them, and the king's ship lay in the same place. later in the day, when men sat at their drink, the king sent dishes from his table to sturla. sturla's messmates were pleased with this: "you bring better luck than we thought, if this sort of thing goes on." after dinner the queen sent for sturla and asked him to come to her and bring the troll-wife story along with him. so sturla went aft to the quarter- deck, and greeted the king and queen. the king answered little, the queen well and cheerfully. she asked him to tell the same story he had told overnight. he did so, for a great part of the day. when he finished, the queen thanked him, and many others besides, and made him out in their minds to be a learned man and sensible. but the king said nothing; only he smiled a little. sturla thought he saw that the king's whole frame of mind was brighter than the day before. so he said to the king that he had made a poem about him, and another about his father: "i would gladly get a hearing for them." the queen said: "let him recite his poem; i am told that he is the best of poets, and his poem will be excellent." the king bade him say on, if he would, and repeat the poem he professed to have made about him. sturla chanted it to the end. the queen said: "to my mind that is a good poem." the king said to her: "can you follow the poem so clearly?" "i would be fain to have you think so, sir," said the queen. the king said: "i have learned that sturla is good at verses." sturla took his leave of the king and queen and went to his place. there was no sailing for the king all that day. in the evening before he went to bed he sent for sturla. and when he came he greeted the king and said: "what will you have me to do, sir?" the king called for a silver goblet full of wine, and drank some and gave it to sturla and said: "a health to a friend in wine!" (_vin skal til vinar drekka_). sturla said: "god be praised for it!" "even so," says the king, "and now i wish you to say the poem you have made about my father." sturla repeated it: and when it was finished men praised it much and most of all the queen. the king said: "to my thinking, you are a better reciter than the pope." sturlunga saga, vol.ii, p. . a saga. in the grey beginnings of the world, or ever the flower of justice had rooted in the heart, there lived among the daughters of men two children, sisters, of one house. in childhood did they leap and climb and swim with the men children of their race, and were nurtured on the same stories of gods and heroes. in maidenhood they could do all that a maiden might and more--delve could they no less than spin, hunt no less than weave, brew pottage and helm ships, wake the harp and tell the stars, face all danger and laugh at all pain. joyous in toil-time and rest-time were they as the days and years of their youth came and went. death had spared their house, and unhappiness knew they none. yet often as at falling day they sat before sleep round the hearth of red fire, listening with the household to the brave songs of gods and heroes, there would surely creep into their hearts a shadow--the thought that whatever the years of their lives, and whatever the generous deeds, there would for them, as women, be no escape at the last from the dire mists of hela, the fogland beyond the grave for all such as die not in battle; no escape for them from hela, and no place for ever for them or for their kind among the glory-crowned, sword-shriven heroes of echoing valhalla. that shadow had first fallen in their lusty childhood, had slowly gathered darkness through the overflowing days of maidenhood, and now, in the strong tide of full womanhood, often lay upon their future as the moon odin's wrath lies upon the sun. but stout were they to face danger and laugh at pain, and for all the shadow upon their hope they lived brave and songful days--the one a homekeeper and in her turn a mother of men: the other unhusbanded, but gentle to ignorance and sickness and sorrow through the width and length of the land. and thus, facing life fearlessly and ever with a smile, those two women lived even unto extreme old age, unto the one's children's children's children, labouring truly unto the end and keeping strong hearts against the dread day of hela, and the fate-locked gates of valhalla. but at the end a wonder. as these sisters looked their last upon the sun, the one in the ancestral homestead under the eyes of love, the other in a distant land among strange faces, behold the wind of thor, and out of the deep of heaven the white horses of odin, all-father, bearing valkyrie, shining messengers of valhalla. and those two world-worn women, faithful in all their lives, were caught up in death in divine arms and borne far from the fogs of hela to golden thrones among the battle heroes, upon which the nornir, sitting at the loom of life, had from all eternity graven their names. and from that hour have the gates of valhalla been thrown wide to all faithful endeavour whether of man or woman. john russell headmaster of the king alfred school. the legend of st. christopher. christopher was of the lineage of the canaaneans and he was of a right great stature, and had a terrible and fearful cheer and countenance. and he was twelve cubits of length. and, as it is read in some histories, when he served and dwelled with the king of canaaneans, it came in his mind that he would seek the greatest prince that was in the world and him he would serve and obey. and so far he went that he came to a right great king, of whom the renown generally was that he was the greatest of the world. and when the king saw him received him into his service and made him to dwell in his court. upon a time a minstrel sung tofore him a song in which he named oft the devil. and the king which was a christian man, when he heard him name the devil, made anon the sign of the cross in his visage. and when christopher saw that, he had great marvel what sign it was and wherefore the king made it. and he demanded it of him. and because the king would not say, he said, "if thou tell me not, i shall no longer dwell with thee." and then the king told to him saying, "alway when i hear the devil named, i fear that he should have power over me, and i garnish me with this sign that he grieve not nor annoy me." then christopher said to him, "thou doubtest the devil that he hurt thee not? then is the devil more mighty and greater than thou art. i am then deceived of my hope and purpose; for i supposed that i had found the most mighty and the most greatest lord of the world. but i commend thee to god, for i will go seek him to be my lord and i his servant." and then he departed from this king and hasted him to seek the devil. and as he went by a great desert he saw a great company of knights. of which a knight cruel and horrible came to him and demanded whither he went. and christopher answered to him and said, "i go to seek the devil for to be my master." and he said, "i am he that thou seekest." and then christopher was glad and bound himself to be his servant perpetual, and took him for his master and lord. and as they went together by a common way, they found there a cross erect and standing. and anon as the devil saw the cross, he was afeard and fled, and left the right way and brought christopher about by a sharp desert, and after, when they were past the cross, he brought him to the highway that they had left. and when christopher saw that, he marvelled and demanded whereof he doubted that he had left high and fair way and had gone so far about by so hard desert. and the devil would not tell him in no wise. then christopher said to him, "if thou wilt not tell me i shall anon depart from thee and shall serve thee no more." therefore the devil was constrained to tell him, and said "there was a man called christ which was hanged on the cross, and when i see his sign, i am sore afeard and flee from it wheresomever i find it." to whom christopher said, "then he is greater and more mightier than thou, when thou art afraid of his sign. and i see well that i have laboured in vain since i have not founden the greatest lord of all the earth. and i will serve thee no longer. go thy way then: for i will go seek jesus christ." and when he had long sought and demanded where he should find christ, at last he came into a great desert to an hermit that dwelled there. and this hermit preached to him of jesus christ and informed him in the faith diligently. and he said to him, "this king whom thou desirest to serve, requireth this service that thou must oft fast." and christopher said to him, "require of me some other thing and i shall do it. for that which thou requirest i may not do." and the hermit said, "thou must then wake and make many prayers." and christopher said to him, "i wot not what it is. i may do no such thing." and then the hermit said unto him, "knowest thou such a river in which many be perished and lost?" to whom christopher said, "i know it well." then said the hermit, "because thou art noble and high of stature and strong in thy members, thou shalt be resident by that river and shalt bear over all them that shall pass there. which shall be a thing right convenable to our lord jesus christ, whom thou desirest to serve, and i hope he shall shew himself to thee." then said christopher, "certes, this service may i well do, and i promise to him for to do it." then went christopher to this river, and made there his habitation for him. and he bare a great pole in his hand instead of a staff, by which he sustained him in the water; and bare over all manner of people without ceasing. and there he abode, thus doing, many days. and on a time, as he slept in his lodge, he heard the voice of a child which called him and said, "christopher, come out and bear me over." then he awoke and went out; but he found no man. and when he was again in his house, he heard the same voice, and he ran out and found no body. the third time he was called, and came thither, and found a child beside the rivage of the river: which prayed him goodly to bear him over the water. and then christopher lift up the child on his shoulders and took his staff and entered in to the river for to pass. and the water of the river arose and swelled more and more. and the child was heavy as lead. and always as he went further the water increased and grew more, and the child more and more waxed heavy: in so much that christopher had great anguish and feared to be drowned. and when he was escaped with great pain and passed the water, and set the child aground, he said to the child, "child, thou hast put me in great peril. thou weighest almost as i had had all the world upon me. i might bear no greater burden." and the child answered, "christopher, marvel thou no thing. for thou hast not only borne all the world upon thee; but thou hast borne him that created and made the world upon thy shoulders. i am jesus christ, the king to whom thou servest in this work. and that thou mayest know that i say to thee truth, set thy staff in the earth by the house, and thou shalt see to-morrow that it shall bear flowers and fruit." and anon he vanished from his eyes. and then christopher set his staff in the earth and when he arose on the morrow, he found his staff like a palm-tree bearing flowers, leaves and dates. from the legenda aurea temple classics. arthur in the cave. once upon a time a welshman was walking on london bridge, staring at the traffic and wondering why there were so many kites hovering about. he had come to london, after many adventures with thieves and highwaymen, which need not be related here, in charge of a herd of black welsh cattle. he had sold them with much profit, and with jingling gold in his pocket he was going about to see the sights of the city. he was carrying a hazel staff in his hand, for you must know that a good staff is as necessary to a drover as teeth are to his dogs. he stood still to gaze at some wares in a shop (for at that time london bridge was shops from beginning to end), when he noticed that a man was looking at his stick with a long fixed look. the man after a while came to him and asked him where he came from. "i come from my own country," said the welshman, rather surlily, for he could not see what business the man had to ask such a question. "do not take it amiss," said the stranger: "if you will only answer my questions, and take my advice, it will be of greater benefit to you than you imagine. do you remember where you cut that stick?" the welshman was still suspicious, and said: "what does it matter where i cut it?" "it matters," said the questioner, "because there is a treasure hidden near the spot where you cut that stick. if you can remember the place and conduct me to it, i will put you in possession of great riches." the welshman now understood he had to deal with a sorcerer, and he was greatly perplexed as to what to do. on the one hand, he was tempted by the prospect of wealth; on the other hand, he knew that the sorcerer must have derived his knowledge from devils, and he feared to have anything to do with the powers of darkness. the cunning man strove hard to persuade him, and at length made him promise to shew the place where he cut his hazel staff. the welshman and the magician journeyed together to wales. they went to craig y dinas, the rock of the fortress, at the head of the neath valley, near pont nedd fechan, and the welshman, pointing to the stock or root of an old hazel, said: "this is where i cut my stick." "let us dig," said the sorcerer. they digged until they came to a broad, flat stone. prying this up, they found some steps leading downwards. they went down the steps and along a narrow passage until they came to a door. "are you brave?" asked the sorcerer; "will you come in with me?" "i will," said the welshman, his curiosity getting the better of his fear. they opened the door, and a great cave opened out before them. there was a faint red light in the cave, and they could see everything. the first thing they came to was a bell. "do not touch that bell," said the sorcerer, "or it will be all over with us both." as they went further in, the welshman saw that the place was not empty. there were soldiers lying down asleep, thousands of them, as far as ever the eye could see. each one was clad in bright armour, the steel helmet of each was on his head, the shining shield of each was on his arm, the sword of each was near his hand, each had his spear stuck in the ground near him, and each and all were asleep. in the midst of the cave was a great round table at which sat warriors whose noble features and richly-dight armour proclaimed that they were not as the roll of common men. each of these, too, had his head bent down in sleep. on a golden throne on the further side of the round table was a king of gigantic stature and august presence. in his hand, held below the hilt, was a mighty sword with scabbard and haft of gold studded with gleaming gems; on his head was a crown set with precious stones which flashed and glinted like so many points of fire. sleep had set its seal on his eyelids also. "are they asleep?" asked the welshman, hardly believing his own eyes. "yes, each and all of them," answered the sorcerer. "but, if you touch yonder bell, they will all awake." "how long have they been asleep?" "for over a thousand years." "who are they?" "arthur's warriors, waiting for the time to come when they shall destroy all the enemy of the cymry and re-possess the strand of britain, establishing their own king once more at caer lleon." "who are these sitting at the round table?" "these are arthur's knights--owain, the son of urien; cai, the son of cynyr; gnalchmai, the son of gwyar; peredir, the son of efrawe; geraint, the son of erbin; ciernay, the son of celhddon; edeyrn, the son of nudd; cymri, the son of clydno." "and on the golden throne?" broke in the welshman. "is arthur himself, with his sword excalibur in his hand," replied the sorcerer. impatient by this time at the welshman's questions, the sorcerer hastened to a great heap of yellow gold on the floor of the cave. he took up as much as he could carry, and bade his companion do the same. "it is time for us to go," he then said, and he led the way towards the door by which they had entered. but the welshman was fascinated by the sight of the countless soldiers in their glittering arms--all asleep. "how i should like to see them all awaking!" he said to himself. "i will touch the bell--i _must_ see them all arising from their sleep." when they came to the bell, he struck it until it rang through the whole place. as soon as it rang, lo! the thousands of warriors leapt to their feet and the ground beneath them shook with the sound of the steel arms. and a great voice came from their midst: "who rang the bell? has the day come?" the sorcerer was so much frightened that he shook like an aspen leaf. he shouted in answer: "no, the day has not come. sleep on." the mighty host was all in motion, and the welshman's eyes were dazzled as he looked at the bright steel arms which illumined the cave as with the light of myriad flames of fire. "arthur," said the voice again, "awake; the bell has rung, the day is breaking. awake, arthur the great." "no," shouted the sorcerer, "it is still night. sleep on, arthur the great." a sound came from the throne. arthur was standing, and the jewels in his crown shone like bright stars above the countless throng. his voice was strong and sweet like the sound of many waters, and he said: "my warriors, the day has not come when the black eagle and the golden eagle shall go to war. it is only a seeker after gold who has rung the bell. sleep on, my warriors; the morn of wales has not yet dawned." a peaceful sound like the distant sigh of the sea came over the cave, and in a trice the soldiers were all asleep again. the sorcerer hurried the welshman out of the cave, moved the stone back to its place and vanished. many a time did the welshman try to find his way into the cave again, but though he dug over every inch of the hill, he has never again found the entrance to arthur's cave. from "the welsh fairy book," by w. jenkyn thomas. published by fisher unwin. hafiz, the stone-cutter. there was once a stone-cutter whose name was hafiz, and all day long he chipped, chipped, chipped at his block. and often he grew very weary of his task and he would say to himself impatiently, "why should i not have pleasure and amusement as other folk have?" one day, when the sun was very hot and when he felt specially weary, he suddenly heard the sound of many feet, and, looking up from his work, he saw a great procession coming his way. it was the king, mounted on a splendid charger, all his soldiers to the right, in their shining armour, and the servants to the left, dressed in gorgeous clothing, ready to do his behests. and hafiz said: "how splendid to be a king! if only i could be a king, if only for ten minutes, so that i might know what it feels like!" and then, even as he spoke, he seemed to be dreaming, and in his dream he sang this little song: "ah me! ah me! if hafiz only the king could be!"[ ] and then a voice from the air around seemed to answer him and to say: "be thou the king." and hafiz became the king, and he it was that sat on the splendid charger, and they were his soldiers to the right and his servants to the left. and hafiz said: "i am king, and there is no one stronger in the whole world than i." but soon, in spite of the golden canopy over his head, hafiz began to feel the terrible heat of the rays of the sun, and soon he noticed that the soldiers and servants were weary, that his horse drooped, and that he, hafiz, was overcome, and he said angrily: "what! is there something stronger in the world than a king?" and, almost without knowing it, he again sang his song more boldly than the first time: "ah me! ah me! if hafiz only the sun could be!" and the voice answered: "be thou the sun." and hafiz became the sun, and shone down upon the earth, but, because he did not know how to shine very wisely, he shone very fiercely, so that the crops dried up, and folk grew sick and died. and then there arose from the east a little cloud which slipped between hafiz and the earth, so that he could no longer shine down upon it, and he said: "is there something stronger in the world than the sun?" "ah me! ah me! if hafiz only the cloud could be!" "be thou the cloud. and hafiz became the cloud, and rained down water upon the earth, but, because he did not know how to do so wisely, there fell so much rain that all the little rivulets became great rivers, and all the great rivers overflowed their banks, and carried everything before them in swift torrent--all except one great rock which stood unmoved. and hafiz said: "is there something stronger than the cloud?" "ah me! ah me! if hafiz only the rock could be!" and the voice said: "be thou the rock." and hafiz became the rock, and the cloud disappeared and the waters went down. and hafiz the rock, saw coming towards him a man--he could not see the face. as the man approached he suddenly raised a hammer and struck hafiz, so that he felt it through all his stony body. and hafiz said: "is there something stronger in the world than the rock? "ah me! ah me! if hafiz only that man might be!" and the voice said: "be thou---thyself." and hafiz seized the hammer and said: "the sun was stronger than the king, the cloud was stronger than the sun, the rock was stronger then the cloud, but i, hafiz, was stronger than all." adapted and arranged by the author. to your good health. (from the russian) long long ago there lived a king who was such a mighty monarch that whenever he sneezed everyone in the whole country had to say, "to your good health!" everyone said it except the shepherd with the bright blue eyes, and he would not say it. the king heard of this and was very angry, and sent for the shepherd to appear before him. the shepherd came and stood before the throne, where the king sat looking very grand and powerful. but however grand or powerful he might be, the shepherd did not feel a bit afraid of him. "say at once 'to my good health'!" cried the king. "to my good health," replied the shepherd. "to mine--to _mine_, you rascal, you vagabond!" stormed the king. "to mine, to mine, your majesty," was the answer. "but to _mine_--to my own!" roared the king, and beat on his breast in a rage. "well, yes; to mine, of course, to my own," cried the shepherd, and gently tapped his breast. the king was beside himself with fury and did not know what to do, when the lord chamberlain interfered: "say at once--say this very moment, 'to your health, your majesty,' for if you don't say it you will lose your life," he whispered. "no, i won't say it tell i get the princess for my wife," was the shepherd's answer. now the princess was sitting on a little throne beside the king, her father, and she look as sweet and lovely as a little golden dove. when she heard what the shepherd said, she could not help laughing, for there is no denying the fact that this young shepherd with the blue eyes pleased her very much; indeed, he pleased her better than any king's son she had yet seen. but the king was not as pleasant as his daughter, and gave orders to throw the shepherd into the white bear's pit. the guards led him away and thrust him into the pit with the white bear, who had had nothing to eat for two days and was very hungry. the door of the pit was hardly closed when the bear rushed at the shepherd; but when it saw his eyes it was so frightened that it was ready to eat itself. it shrank away into a corner and gazed at him from there, and in spite of being so famished, did not dare to touch him, but sucked its own paws from sheer hunger. the shepherd felt that if he once removed his eyes off the beast he was a dead man, and in order to keep himself awake he made songs and sang them, and so the night went by. next morning the lord chamberlain came to see the shepherd's bones, and was amazed to find him alive and well. he led him to the king, who fell into a furious passion, and said: "well, you have learned what it is to be very near death, and now will you say, 'to my very good health'?" but the shepherd answered: "i am not afraid of ten deaths! i will only say it if i may have the princess for my wife." "then go to your death," cried the king, and ordered him to be thrown into the den with the wild boars. the wild boars had not been fed for a week, and when the shepherd was thrust into their den they rushed at him to tear him to pieces. but the shepherd took a little flute out of the sleeve of his jacket, and began to play a merry tune, on which the wild boars first of all shrank shyly away, and then got up on their hind legs and danced gaily. the shepherd would have given anything to be able to laugh, they looked so funny; but he dared not stop playing, for he knew well enough that the moment he stopped they would fall upon him and tear him to pieces. his eyes were of no use to him here, for he could not have stared ten wild boars in the face at once; so he kept playing, and the wild boars danced very slowly, as if in a minuet; then by degrees he played faster and faster, till they could hardly twist and turn quickly enough, and ended by all falling over each other in a heap, quite exhausted and out of breath. then the shepherd ventured to laugh at last; and he laughed so long and so loud that when the lord chamberlain came early in the morning, expecting to find only his bones, the tears were still running down his cheeks from laughter. as soon as the king was dressed the shepherd was again brought before him; but he was more angry than ever to think the wild boars had not torn the man to bits, and he said: "well, you have learned what it feels to be near ten deaths, _now_ say 'to my good health'!" but the shepherd broke in with: "i do not fear a hundred deaths; and i will only say it if i may have the princess for my wife." "then go to a hundred deaths!" roared the king, and ordered the shepherd to be thrown down the deep vault of scythes. the guards dragged him away to a dark dungeon, in the middle of which was a deep well with sharp scythes all round it. at the bottom of the well was a little light by which one could see, if anyone was thrown in, whether he had fallen to the bottom. when the shepherd was dragged to the dungeon he begged the guards to leave him alone a little while that he might look down into the pit of scythes; perhaps he might after all make up his mind to say, "to your good health" to the king. so the guards left him alone, and he stuck up his long stick near the wall, hung his cloak round the stick and put his hat on the top. he also hung his knapsack up beside the cloak, so that it might seem to have some body within it. when this was done, he called out to the guards and said that he had considered the matter, but after all he could not make up his mind to say what the king wished. the guards came in, threw the hat and cloak, knapsack and stick all down in the well together, watched to see how they put out the light at the bottom, and came away, thinking that now there was really an end to the shepherd. but he had hidden in a dark corner, and was now laughing to himself all the time. quite early next morning came the lord chamberlain with a lamp, and he nearly fell backwards with surprise when he saw the shepherd alive and well. he brought him to the king, whose fury was greater than ever, but who cried: "well, now you have been near a hundred deaths; will you say, 'to your good health'?" but the shepherd only gave the answer: "i won't say it till the princess is my wife." "perhaps, after all, you may do it for less," said the king, who saw that there was no chance of making away with the shepherd; and he ordered the state coach to be got ready; then he made the shepherd get in with him and sit beside him, and ordered the coachman to drive to the silver wood. when they reached it, he said: "do you see this silver wood? well, if you will say 'to your good health,' i will give it to you." the shepherd turned hot and cold by turns, but he still persisted: "i will not say it till the princess is my wife." the king was much vexed; he drove further on till they came to a splendid castle, all of gold, and then he said: "do you see this golden castle? well, i will give you that too, the silver wood and the gold castle, if only you will say one thing to me: 'to your good health.'" the shepherd gaped and wondered, and was quite dazzled but he still said: "no, i will not say it till i have the princess for my wife." this time the king was overwhelmed with grief, and gave orders to drive on to the diamond pond and there he tried once more: "you shall have the all--all, if you will but say 'to your good health.'" the shepherd had to shut his staring eyes tight not to be dazzled with the brilliant pond, but still he said: "no, no; i will not say it till i have the princess for my wife." then the king saw that all his efforts were useless, and that he might as well give in; so he said: "well, well, it is all the same to me--i will give you my daughter to wife; but then you really must say to me, 'to your good health.'" "of course i'll say it; why should i not say it? it stands to reason that i shall say it then." at this the king was more delighted than anyone could have believed. he made it known all through the country that there were going to be great rejoicings, as the princess was going to be married. and everyone rejoiced to think that the princess who had refused so many royal suitors, should have ended by falling in love with the staring- eyed shepherd. there was such a wedding as had never been seen. everyone ate and drank and danced. even the sick were feasted, and quite tiny new-born children had presents given them. but the greatest merrymaking was in the king's palace; there the best bands played and the best food was cooked. a crowd of people sat down to table, and all was fun and merrymaking. and when the groomsman, according to custom, brought in the great boar's head on a big dish and placed it before the king, so that he might carve it and give everyone a share, the savoury smell was so strong that the king began to sneeze with all his might. "to your very good health!" cried the shepherd before anyone else, and the king was so delighted that he did not regret having given him his daughter. in time, when the old king died, the shepherd succeeded him. he made a very good king, and never expected his people to wish him well against their wills: but, all the same, everyone did wish him well, because they loved him. the proud cock. there was once a cock who grew so dreadfully proud that he would have nothing to say to anybody. he left his house, it being far beneath his dignity to have any trammel of that sort in his life, and as for his former acquaintance, he cut them all. one day, whilst walking about, he came to a few little sparks of fire which were nearly dead. they cried out to him: "please fan us with your wings, and we shall come to the full vigour of life again." but he did not deign to answer, and as he was going away one of the sparks said; "ah well! we shall die, but our big brother, the fire will pay you out for this one day." on another day he was airing himself in a meadow, showing himself off in a very superb set of clothes. a voice calling from somewhere said: "please be so good as to drop us into the water again." he looked about and saw a few drops of water: they had got separated from their friends in the river, and were pining away with grief. "oh! please be so good as to drop us into the water again," they said; but, without any answer, he drank up the drops. he was too proud and a great deal too big to talk to a poor little puddle of water; but the drops said: "our big brother, the water, will one day take you in hand, you proud and senseless creature." some days afterwards, during a great storm of rain, thunder and lightning, the cock took shelter in a little empty cottage, and shut to the door; and he thought: "i am clever; i am in comfort. what fools people are to top out in a storm like this! what's that?" thought he. "i never heard a sound like that before." in a little while it grew much louder, and when a few minutes had passed, it was a perfect howl. "oh!" thought he, "this will never do. i must stop it somehow. but what is it i have to stop?" he soon found it was the wind, shouting through the keyhole, so he plugged up the keyhole with a bit of clay, and then the wind was able to rest. he was very tired with whistling so long through the keyhole, and he said: "now, if ever i have at any time a chance of doing a good turn to that princely domestic fowl, i well do it." weeks afterwards, the cock looked in at a house door: he seldom went there, because the miser to whom the house belonged almost starved himself, and so, of course, there was nothing over for anybody else. to his amazement the cock saw the miser bending over a pot on the fire. at last the old fellow turned round to get a spoon with which to stir his pot, and then the cock, waking up, looked in and saw that the miser was making oyster-soup, for he had found some oyster-shells in an ash-pit, and to give the mixture a colour he had put in a few halfpence in the pot. the miser chanced to turn quickly round, while the cock was peering into the saucepan, and, chuckling to himself, he said: "i shall have chicken broth after all." he tripped up the cock into the pot and shut the lid on. the bird, feeling warm, said: "water, water, don't boil!" but the water only said: "you drank up my young brothers once: don't ask a favour of _me_." then he called out to the fire: "oh! kind fire, don't boil the water." but the fire replied: "you once let my young sisters die: you cannot expect any mercy from me." so he flared up and boiled the water all the faster. at last, when the cock got unpleasantly warm, he thought of the wind, and called out: "oh, wind, come to my help!" and the wind said: "why, there is that noble domestic bird in trouble. i will help him." so he came down the chimney, blew out the fire, blew the lid off the pot, and blew the cock far away into the air, and at last settled him on a steeple, where the cock remained ever since. and people say that the halfpence which were in the pot when it was boiling have given him the queer brown colour he still wears. from the spanish. snegourka. there lived once, in russia, a peasant and his wife who would have been as happy as the day is long, if only god had given them a little child. one day, as they were watching the children playing in the snow, the man said to the woman: "wife, shall we go out and help the children make a snowball?" but the wife answered, smiling: "nay, husband, but since god has given us no little child, let us go and fashion one from the snow." and she put on her long blue cloak, and he put on his long brown coat, and they went out onto the crisp snow, and began to fashion the little child. first, they made the feet and the legs and the little body, and then they took a ball of snow for the head. and at that moment a stranger in a long cloak, with his hat well drawn over his face, passed that way, and said: "heaven help your undertaking!" and the peasants crossed themselves and said: "it is well to ask help from heaven in all we do." then they went on fashioning the little child. and they made two holes for the eyes and formed the nose and the mouth. and then-- wonder of wonders--the little child came alive, and breath came from its nostrils and parted lips. and the man was feared, and said to his wife: "what have we done?" and the wife said: "this is the little girl child god has sent us." and she gathered it into her arms, and the loose snow fell away from the little creature. her hair became golden and her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots--but there was no colour in her cheeks, because there was no blood in her veins. in a few days she was like a child of three or four, and in a few weeks she seemed to be the age of nine or ten, and ran about gaily and prattled with the other children, who loved her so dearly, though she was so different from them. only, happy as she was, and dearly as her parents loved her, there was one terror in her life, and that was the sun. and during the day she would run and hide herself in cool, damp places away from the sunshine, and this the other children could not understand. as the spring advanced and the days grew longer and warmed, little snegourka (for this was the name by which she was known) grew paler and thinner, and her mother would often ask her: "what ails you, my darling?" and snegourka would say: "nothing, mother but i wish the sun were not so bright." one day, on st. john's day, the children of the village came to fetch her for a day in the woods, and they gathered flowers for her and did all they to make her happy, but it was only when the great red sun went down that snegourka drew a deep breath of relief and spread her little hands out to the cool evening air. and the boys, glad at her gladness, said: "let us do something for snegourka. let us light a bonfire." and snegourka not knowing what a bonfire was, she clapped her hands and was as merry and eager as they. and she helped them gather the sticks, and then they all stood round the pile and the boys set fire to the wood. snegourka stood watching the flames and listening to the crackle of the wood: and then suddenly they heard a tiny sound and looking at the place where snegourka had been standing, they saw nothing but a little snow-drift fast melting. and they called and called, "snegourka! snegourka!" thinking she had run into the forest. but there was no answer. snegourka had disappeared from this life as mysteriously as she had come into it. adapted by the author. the water nixie. the river was so clear because it was the home of a very beautiful water nixie who lived in it, and who sometimes could emerge from her home and sit in woman's form upon the bank. she had a dark green smock upon her, the colour of the water-weed that waves as the water wills it, deep, deep down. and in her long wet hair were the white flowers of the water-violet, and she held a reed mace in her hand. her face was very sad because she had lived a long life, and known so many adventures, ever since she was a baby, which was nearly a hundred years ago. for creatures of the streams and trees live a long, long time, and when they die they lose themselves in nature. that means that they are forever clouds, or trees, or rivers, and never have the form of men and women again. all water creatures would live, if they might choose it, in the sea, where they are born. it is in the sea they float hand-in-hand upon the crested billows, and sink deep in the great troughs of the strong waves, that are as green as jade. they follow the foam and lose themselves in the wide ocean-- "where great whales come sailing by, sail and sail with unshut eye;" and they store in the sea king's palace the golden phosphor of the sea. but this water nixie had lost her happiness through not being good. she had forgotten many things that had been told her, and she had done many things that grieved others. she had stolen somebody else's property--quite a large bundle of happiness--which belonged elsewhere and not to her. happiness is generally made to fit the person who owns it, just as do your shoes, or clothes; so that when you take someone else's it's very little good to you, for it fits badly, and you can never forget it isn't yours. so what with one thing and another, this water nixie had to be punished, and the queen of the sea had banished her from the waves.[ ] "you shall live for a long time in little places where you will weary of yourself. you will learn to know yourself so well that everything you want will seem too good for you, and you will cease to claim it. and so, in time, you shall get free." then the nixie had to rise up and go away, and be shut into the fastness of a very small space, according to the words of the queen. and this small space was--a tear. at first she could hardly express her misery, and by thinking so continuously of the wideness and savour of the sea, she brought a dash of the brine with her, that makes the saltness of our tears. she became many times smaller than her own stature; even then, by standing upright and spreading wide her arms, she touched with her finger-tips the walls of her tiny crystal home. how she longed that this tear might be wept, and the walls of her prison shattered! but the owner of this tear was of a very proud nature, and she was so sad that tears seemed to her in no wise to express her grief. she was a princess who lived in a country that was not her home. what were tears to her? if she could have stood on the top of the very highest hill and with both hands caught the great winds of heaven, strong as they, and striven with them, perhaps she might have felt as if she expressed all she knew. or, if she could have torn down the stars from the heavens, or cast her mantle over the sun. but tears! would they have helped to tell her sorrow? you cry if you soil your copybook, don't you? or pinch your hand? so you may imagine the nixie's home was a safe one, and she turned round and round in the captivity of that tear. for twenty years she dwelt in that strong heart, till she grew to be accustomed to her cell. at last, in this wise came her release. an old gipsy came one morning to the castle and begged to see the princess. she must see her, she cried. and the princess came down the steps to meet her, and the gipsy gave her a small roll of paper, but in the midst of the page was a picture, small as the picture reflected in the iris of an eye. the picture shewed a hill, with one tree on the sky-line, and a long road wound round the hill. and suddenly in the princess' memory a voice spoke to her. many sounds she heard, gathered up into one great silence, like the quiet there is in forest spaces, when it is summer and the green is deep:-- "blessed are they that have the home longing, for they shall go home." then the princess gave the gipsy two golden pieces, and went up to her chamber, and long that night she sat, looking out upon the sky. she had no need to look upon the honeyed scroll, though she held it closely. clearly before her did she see that small picture: the hill, and the tree, and the winding road, imaged as if mirrored in the iris of an eye. and in her memory she was upon that road, and the hill rose beside her, and the little tree was outlined, every twig of it, against the sky. and as she saw all this, an overwhelming love of the place arose in her, a love of that certain bit of country that was so sharp and strong, that it stung and swayed her, as she leaned on the window-sill. and because the love of a country is one of the deepest loves you may feel, the band of her control was loosened, and the tears came welling to her eyes. up they brimmed and over in salty rush and follow, dimming her eyes, magnifying everything, speared for a moment on her eyelashes, then shimmering to their fall. and at last came the tear that held the disobedient nixie. splish! it fell. and she was free. if you could have seen how pretty she looked standing there, about the height of a grass-blade, wringing out her long wet hair. every bit of moisture she wrung out of it, she was so glad to be quit of that tear. then she raised her two arms above her in one delicious stretch, and if you had been the size of a mustard-seed perhaps you might have heard her laughing. then she grew a little, and grew and grew, till she was about the height of a bluebell, and as slender to see. she stood looking at the splash on the window-sill that had been her prison so long, and then with three steps of her bare feet, she reached the jessamine that was growing by the window, and by this she swung herself to the ground. away she sped over the dew-drenched meadows till she came to the running brook, and with all her longing in her outstretched hands, she kneeled down by the crooked willows among all the comfry and the loosestrife, and the yellow irises and the reeds. then she slid into the wide, cool stream. from "the children and the pictures." pamela tennant (lady glenconner). the blue rose. there lived once upon a time in china a wise emperor who had one daughter. his daughter was remarkable for her perfect beauty. her feet were the smallest in the world; her eyes were long and slanting and bright as brown onyxes, and when you heard her laugh it was like the listening to a tinkling stream or to the chimes of a silver bell. moreover, the emperor's daughter was as wise as she was beautiful, and she chanted the verse of the great poets better than anyone in the land. the emperor was old in years; his son was married and had begotten a son; he was, therefore, quite happy with regard to the succession to the throne, but he wished before he died to see his daughter wedded to someone who should be worthy of her. many suitors presented themselves to the palace as soon as it became know that the emperor desired a son-in-law, but when they reached the palace they were met by the lord chamberlain, who told them that the emperor had decided that only the man who found and brought back the blue rose should marry his daughter. the suitors were much puzzled by this order. what was the blue rose and where was it to be found? in all, a hundred and fifty at once put away from them all thought of winning the hand of the emperor's daughter, since they considered the condition imposed to be absurd. the other hundred set about trying to find the blue rose. one of them-- his name was ti-fun-ti--he was a merchant and was immensely rich, at once went to the largest shop in the town and said to the shopkeeper, "i want a blue rose, the best you have." the shopkeeper, with many apologies, explained that he did not stock blue roses. he had red roses in profusion, white, pink and yellow roses, but no blue roses. there had hitherto been no demand for the article. "well," said ti-fun-ti, "you must get one for me. i do not mind how much money it costs, but i must have a blue rose." the shopkeeper said he would do his best, but he feared it would be an expensive article and difficult to procure. another of the suitors, whose name i have forgotten, was a warrior, and extremely brave; he mounted his horse, and taking with him a hundred archers and a thousand horsemen, he marched into the territory of the king of the five rivers, whom he knew to be the richest king in the world and the possessor of the rarest treasures, and demanded of him the blue rose, threatening him with a terrible doom should he be reluctant to give it up. the king of the five rivers, who disliked soldiers, and had a horror of noise, physical violence, and every kind of fuss (his bodyguard was armed solely with fans and sunshades), rose from the cushions on which he was lying when the demand was made, and, tinkling a small bell, said to the servant who straightway appeared, "fetch me the blue rose." the servant retired and returned presently bearing on a silken cushion a large sapphire which was carved so as to imitate a full-blown rose with all its petals. "this," said the king of the five rivers, "is the blue rose. you are welcome to it." the warrior took it, and after making brief, soldier-like thanks, he went straight back to the emperor's palace, saying that he had lost no time in finding the blue rose. he was ushered into the presence of the emperor, who as soon as he heard the warrior's story and saw the blue rose which had been brought sent for his daughter and said to her: "this intrepid warrior has brought you what he claims to be the blue rose. has he accomplished the quest?" the princess took the precious object in her hands, and after examining it for a moment, said: "this is not a rose at all. it is a sapphire; i have no need of precious stones." and the warrior went away in discomfiture. the merchant, hearing of the warrior's failure, was all the more anxious to win the prize. he sought the shopkeeper and said to him: "have you got me the blue rose?" i trust you have; because, if not, i shall most assuredly be the means of your death. my brother-in-law is chief magistrate, and i am allied by marriage to all the chief officials in the kingdom." the shopkeeper turned pale and said: "sir, give me three days and i will procure you the rose without fail." the merchant granted him the three days and went away. now the shopkeeper was at his wit's end as to what to do, for he knew well there was no such thing as a blue rose. for two days he did nothing but moan and wring his hands, and on the third day he went to his wife and said, "wife, we are ruined." but his wife, who was a sensible woman, said: "nonsense. if there is no such thing as a blue rose we must make one. go to the chemist and ask him for a strong dye which well change a white rose into a blue one." so the shopkeeper went to the chemist and asked him for a dye, and the chemist gave him a bottle of red liquid, telling him to pick a white rose and to dip its stalk into the liquid and the rose would turn blue. the shopkeeper did as he was told; the rose turned into a beautiful blue and the shopkeeper took it to the merchant, who at once went with it to the palace saying that he had found the blue rose. he was ushered into the presence of the emperor, who as soon as he saw the blue rose sent for his daughter and said to her: "this wealthy merchant has brought you what he claims to be the blue rose. has he accomplished the quest?" the princess took the flower in her hands and after examining it for a moment said: "this is a white rose, its stalk has been dipped in a poisonous dye and it has turned blue. were a butterfly to settle upon it it would die of the potent fume. take it back. i have no need of a dyed rose." and she returned it to the merchant with many elegantly expressed thanks. the other ninety-eight suitors all sought in various ways for the blue rose. some of them traveled all over the world seeking it; some of them sought the aid of wizards and astrologers, and one did not hesitate to invoke the help of the dwarfs that live underground; but all of them, whether they traveled in far countries or took counsel with wizards and demons or sat pondering in lonely places, failed to find the blue rose. at last they all abandoned the quest except the lord chief justice, who was the most skillful lawyer and statesman in the country. after thinking over the matter for several months he sent for the most famous artist in the country and said to him: "make me a china cup. let it be milk-white in colour and perfect in shape, and paint on it a rose, a blue rose." the artist made obeisance and withdrew, and worked for two months at the lord chief justice's cup. in two months' time it was finished, and the world has never seen such a beautiful cup, so perfect in symmetry, so delicate in texture, and the rose on it, the blue rose, was a living flower, picked in fairyland and floating on the rare milky surface of the porcelain. when the lord chief justice saw it he gasped with surprise and pleasure, for he was a great lover of porcelain, and never in his life had he seen such a piece. he said to himself, "without doubt the blue rose is here on this cup and nowhere else." so, after handsomely rewarding the artist, he went to the emperor's palace and said that he had brought the blue rose. he was ushered into the emperor's presence, who as he saw the cup sent for his daughter and said to her: "this eminent lawyer has brought you what he claims to be the blue rose. has he accomplished the quest?" the princess took the bowl in her hands, and after examining it for a moment said: "this bowl is the most beautiful piece of china i have ever seen. if you are kind enough to let me keep it i will put it aside until i receive the blue rose. for so beautiful is it that no other flower is worthy to be put in it except the blue rose." the lord chief justice thanked the princess for accepting the bowl with many elegantly turned phrases, and he went away in discomfiture. after this there was no one in the whole country who ventured on the quest of the blue rose. it happened that not long after the lord chief justice's attempt a strolling minstrel visited the kingdom of the emperor. one evening he was playing his one-stringed instrument outside a dark wall. it was a summer's evening, and the sun had sunk in a glory of dusty gold, and in the violet twilight one or two stars were twinkling like spearheads. there was an incessant noise made by the croaking of frogs and the chatter of grasshoppers. the minstrel was singing a short song over and over again to a monotonous tune. the sense of it was something like this: i watched beside the willow trees the river, as the evening fell, the twilight came and brought no breeze, nor dew, nor water for the well. when from the tangled banks of grass a bird across the water flew, and in the river's hard grey glass i saw a flash of azure blue. as he sang he heard a rustle on the wall, and looking up he saw a slight figure white against the twilight, beckoning him. he walked along under the wall until he came to a gate, and there someone was waiting for him, and he was gently led into the shadow of a dark cedar tree. in the dim twilight he saw two bright eyes looking at him, and he understood their message. in the twilight a thousand meaningless nothings were whispered in the light of the stars, and the hours fled swiftly. when the east began to grow light, the princess (for it was she) said it was time to go. "but," said the minstrel, "to-morrow i shall come to the palace and ask for your hand." "alas!" said the princess, "i would that were possible, but my father has made a foolish condition that only he may wed me who finds the blue rose." "that is simple," said the minstrel. "i will find it." and they said good night to each other. the next morning the minstrel went to the palace, and on his way he picked a common white rose from a wayside garden. he was ushered into the emperor's presence, who sent for his daughter and said to her: "this penniless minstrel has brought you what he claims to be the blue rose. has he accomplished the quest?" the princess took the rose in her hands and said: "yes, this is without doubt the blue rose." but the lord chief justice and all who were present respectfully pointed out that the rose was a common white rose and not a blue one, and the objection was with many forms and phrases conveyed to the princess. "i think the rose is blue," said the princess. "perhaps you are all colour blind." the emperor, with whom the decision rested, decided that if the princess thought the rose was blue it was blue, for it was well known that her perception was more acute than that of any one else in the kingdom. so the minstrel married the princess, and they settled on the sea coast in a little seen house with a garden full of white roses, and they lived happily ever afterwards. and the emperor, knowing that his daughter had made a good match, died in peace. maurice baring. the two frogs. once upon a time in the country of japan there lived two frogs, one of whom made his home in a ditch near the town of osaka, on the sea coast, while the other dwelt in a clear little stream which ran through the city of kioto. at such a great distance apart, they had never even heard of each other; but, funnily enough, the idea came into both their heads at once that they should like to see a little of the world, and the frog who lived at kioto wanted to visit osaka, and the frog who lived at osaka wished to go to kioto, where the great mikado had his palace. so one fine morning in the spring, they both set out along the road that led from kioto to osaka, one from one end and the other from the other. the journey was more tiring than they expected, for they did not know much about travelling, and half-way between the two towns there rose a mountain which had to be climbed. it took them a long time and a great many hops to reach the top, but there they were at last, and what was the surprise of each to see another frog before him! they looked at each other for a moment without speaking, and then fell into conversation, and explained the cause of their meeting so far from their homes. it was delightful to find that they both felt the same wish--to learn a little more of their native country--and as there was no sort of hurry they stretched themselves out in a cool, damp place, and agreed that they would have a good rest before they parted to go their ways. "what a pity we are not bigger," said the osaka frog, "and then we could see both towns from here and tell if it worth our while going on." "oh, that is easily manage," returned the kioto frog. "we have only got to stand up on our hind legs, and hold on to each other, and then we can each look at the town he is travelling to." this idea pleased the osaka frog so much that he at once jumped up and put his front paws on the shoulder of his friend, who had risen also. there they both stood, stretching themselves as high as they could, and holding each other tightly, so that they might not fall down. the kioto frog turned his nose towards osaka, and the osaka frog turned his nose toward kioto; but the foolish thing forgot that when the stood up their great eyes lay in the backs of their heads, and that though their noses might point to the places to which they wanted to go, their eyes beheld the places from which they had come. "dear me!" cried the osaka frog; "kioto is exactly like osaka. it is certainly not worth such a long journey. i shall go home." "if i had had any idea that osaka was only a copy of kioto i should never have travelled all this way," exclaimed the frog from kioto, and as he spoke, he took his hands from his friend's shoulders and they both fell down to the grass. then they took a polite farewell of each other, and set off for home, again, and to the end of their lives they believed that osaka and kioto, which are as different to look at as two towns can be, were as like as two peas. the violet loving book. the wise old shepherd. once upon a time a snake went out of his hole to take an airing. he crawled about, greatly enjoying the scenery and the fresh whiff of the breeze, until, seeing an open door, he went in. now this door was the door of the palace of the king, and inside was the king himself, with all his courtiers. imagine their horror at seeing a huge snake crawling in at the door. they all ran away except the king, who felt that his rank forbade him to be a coward, and the king's son. the king called out for somebody to come and kill the snake; but this horrified them still more, because in that country the people believed it to be wicked to kill any living thing, even snakes and scorpion and wasps. so the courtiers did nothing, but the young prince obeyed his father, and killed the snake with his stick. after a while the snake's wife became anxious and set out in search of her husband. she too saw the open door of the palace, and in she went. o horror! there on the floor lay the body of her husband all covered with blood and quite dead. no one saw the snake's wife crawl in; she inquired of a white ant what had happened, and when she found that the young prince had killed her husband, she made a vow that, as he had made her a widow, so she would make his wife a widow. that night, when all the world was asleep, the snake crept into the prince's bedroom, and coiled round his neck. the prince slept on, and when he awoke in the morning, he was surprised to find his neck encircled with the coils of a snake. he was afraid to stir, so there he remained, until the prince's mother became anxious and went to see what was the matter. when she entered his room, and saw him in this plight, she gave a loud shriek, and ran off to tell the king. "call the archers," said the king. the archers came in a row, fitted the arrows to the bows, the bows were raised and ready to shoot, when, on a sudden, from the snake there issued a voice which spoke as follows: "o archers, wait, wait and hear me before you shoot. it is not fair to carry out the sentence before you have heard the case. is not this a good law: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth? is it not so, o king?" "yes," replied the king, "that is our law." "then," said the snake, "i plead the law. your son has made me a widow, so it is fair and right that i should make his wife a widow." "that sounds right enough," said the king, "but right and law are not always the same thing. we had better ask somebody who knows." they asked all the judges, but none of them could tell the law of the matter. they shook their heads, and said they would look up all their law-books, and see whether anything of the sort had ever happened before, and if so, how it had been decided. that is the way judges used to decide cases in that country, though i dare say it sounds to you a very funny way. it looked as if they had not much sense in their own heads, and perhaps that was true. the upshot of it all was that not a judge would give an opinion; so the king sent messengers all over the countryside, to see if they could find somebody somewhere who knew something. one of these messengers found a party of five shepherds, who were sitting upon a hill and trying to decide a quarrel of their own. they gave their opinions so freely, and in language so very strong, that the king's messenger said to himself, "here are the men for us. here are five men, each with an opinion of his own, and all different." posthaste he scurried back to the king, and told him that he had found at last some one ready to judge the knotty point. so the king and the queen, and the prince and princess, and all the courtiers, got on horseback, and away they galloped to the hill whereupon the five shepherds were sitting, and the snake too went with them, coiled around the neck of the prince. when they got to the shepherds' hill, the shepherds were dreadfully frightened. at first they thought the strangers were a gang of robbers, and when they saw it was the king their next thought was that one of their misdeeds had been found out; and each of them began thinking what was the last thing he had done, and wondering, was it that? but the king and the courtiers got off their horses, and said good day, in the most civil way. so the shepherds felt their minds set at ease again. then the king said: "worthy shepherds, we have a question to put to you, which not all the judges in all the courts of my city have been able to solve. here is my son, and here, as you see, is a snake coiled round his neck. now, the husband of this snake came creeping into my palace hall, and my son the prince killed him; so this snake, who is the wife of the other, says that, as my son has made her a widow, so she has a right to widow my son's wife. what do you think about it?" the first shepherd said: "i think she is quite right, my lord the king. if anyone made my wife a widow, i would pretty soon do the same to him." this was brave language, and the other shepherds shook their heads and looked fierce. but the king was puzzled, and could not quite understand it. you see, in the first place, if the man's wife were a widow, the man would be dead; and then it is hard to see that he could do anything. so to make sure, the king asked the second shepherd whether that was his opinion too. "yes," said the second shepherd; "now the prince has killed the snake, the snake has a right to kill the prince if he can." but that was not of much use either, as the snake was as dead as a doornail. so the king passed on to the third. "i agree with my mates," said the third shepherd. "because, you see, a prince is a prince, but then a snake is a snake." that was quite true, they all admitted, but it did not seem to help the matter much. then the king asked the fourth shepherd to say what he thought. the fourth shepherd said: "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; so i think a widow should be a widow, if so be she don't marry again." by this time the poor king was so puzzled that he hardly knew whether he stood on his head or his heels. but there was still the fifth shepherd left; the oldest and wisest of them all; and the fifth shepherd said: "king, i should like to ask two questions." "ask twenty, if you like," said the king. he did not promise to answer them, so he could afford to be generous. "first. i ask the princess how many sons she has." "four," said the princess. "and how many sons has mistress snake here?" seven," said the snake. "then," said the old shepherd, "it will be quite fair for mistress snake to kill his highness the prince when her highness the princess has had three sons more." "i never thought of that," said the snake. "good-bye, king, and all you good people. send a message when the princess has had three more sons, and you may count upon me--i will not fail you." so saying, she uncoiled from the prince's neck and slid away among the grass. the king and the prince and everybody shook hands with the wise old shepherd, and went home again. and the princess never had any more sons at all. she and the prince lived happily for many years; and if they are not dead they are living still. from "the talking thrush." the folly of panic. and it came to pass that the buddha (to be) was born again as a lion. just as he had helped his fellow-men, he now began to help his fellow- animals, and there was a great deal to be done. for instance, there was a little nervous hare who was always afraid that something dreadful was going to happen to her. she was always saying: "suppose the earth were to fall in, what would happen to me?" and she said this so often that at last she thought it really was about to happen. one day, when she had been saying over and over again, "suppose the earth were to fall in, what would happen to me?" she heard a slight noise: it really was only a heavy fruit which had fallen upon a rustling leaf, but the little hare was so nervous she was ready to believe anything, and she said in a frightened tone: "the earth is falling in." she ran away as fast as she could go, and presently she met an old brother hare, who said: "where are you running to mistress hare?" and the little hare said: "i have no time to stop and tell you anything. the earth is falling in, and i am running away." "the earth is falling in, is it?" said the old brother hare, in a tone of much astonishment; and he repeated this to _his_ brother hare, and _he_ to _his_ brother hare, and he to his brother hare, until at last there were a hundred thousand brother hares, all shouting: "the earth is falling in." now presently the bigger animals began to take the cry up. first the deer, and then the sheep, and then the wild boar, and then the buffalo, and then the camel, and then the tiger, and then the elephant. now the wise lion heard all this noise and wondered at it. "there are no signs," he said, "of the earth falling in. they must have heard something." and then he stopped them all short and said: "what is this you are saying?" and the elephant said: "i remarked that the earth was falling in." "how do you know this?" asked the lion. "why, now i come to think of it, it was the tiger that remarked it to me." and the tiger said: "i had it from the camel," and the camel said: "i had it from the buffalo." and the buffalo from the wild boar, and the wild boar from the sheep, and the sheep from the deer, and the deer from the hares, and the hares said: "oh! _we_ heard it from _that_ little hare." and the lion said: "little hare, _what_ made you say that the earth was falling in?" and the little hare said: "i _saw_ it." "you saw it?" said the lion. "where?" "yonder, by that tree." "well," said the lion, "come with me and i will show you how---" "no, no," said the hare, "i would not go near that tree for anything, i'm _so_ nervous." "but," said the lion, "i am going to take you on my back." and he took her on his back, and begged the animals to stay where they were until they returned. then he showed the little hare how the fruit had fallen upon the leaf, making the noise that had frightened her, and she said: "yes, i see--the earth is _not_ falling in." and the lion said: "shall we go back and tell the other animals?" and they went back. the little hare stood before the animals and said: "the earth is _not_ falling in." and all the animals began to repeat this to one another, and they dispersed gradually, and you heard the words more and more softly: "the earth is _not_ falling in," etc., etc., etc., until the sound died away altogether. from "eastern stories and legends." [note:--this story i have told in my own words, using the language i have found most effective for very young children.] the true spirit of a festival day. and it came to pass that the buddha was born a hare and lived in a wood; on one side was the foot of a mountain, on another a river, on the third side a border village. and with him lived three friends: a monkey, a jackal and an otter; each of these creatures got food on his own hunting ground. in the evening they met together, and the hare taught his companions many wise things: that the moral law should be observed, that alms should be given to the poor, and that holy days should be kept. one day the buddha said: "to-morrow is a fast day. feed any beggars that come to you by giving food from your own table." they all consented. the next day the otter went down to the bank of the ganges to seek his prey. now a fisherman had landed seven red fish and had buried them in the sand on the river's bank while he went down the stream catching more fish. the otter scented the buried fish, dug up the sand till he came upon them, and he called aloud: "does any one own these fish?" and, not seeing the owner, he laid the fish in the jungle where he dwelt, intending to eat them at a fitting time. then he lay down, thinking how virtuous he was. the jackal also went off in search of food, and found in the hut of a field watcher a lizard, two spits, and a pot of milk-curd. and, after thrice crying aloud, "to whom do these belong?" and not finding an owner, he put on his neck the rope for lifting the pot, and grasping the spits and lizard with his teeth, he laid them in his own lair, thinking, "in due season i will devour them," and then he lay down, thinking how virtuous he had been. but the hare (who was the buddha-to-be) in due time came out, thinking to lie (in contemplation) on the kuca grass. "it is impossible for me to offer _grass_ to any beggars who may chance to come by, and i have no oil or rice or fish. if any beggar comes to me, i will give him (of) my own flesh to eat." now when sakka, the king of the gods, heard this thing, he determined to put the royal hare to the test. so he came in disguise of a brahmin to the otter and said: "wise sir, if i could get something to eat, i would perform _all_ my priestly duties." the otter said: "i will give you food. seven red fish have i safely brought to land from the sacred river of the ganges. eat thy fill, o brahmin, and stay in this wood." and the brahmin said: "let it be until to-morrow, and i will see to it then." then he went to the jackal, who confessed that he had stolen the food, but he begged the brahmin to accept it and remain in the wood: but the brahmin said: "let it be until the morrow, and then i well see to it." then the brahmin went to the wise hare, and the hare said: "behold, i will give you of my flesh to eat. but you must not take life on this holy day. when you have piled up the logs i will sacrifice myself by falling into the midst of the flames, and when my body is roasted you shall eat my flesh and perform all your priestly duties." now when sakka heard these words he caused a heap of burning coals to appear, and the wisdom being, rising from the grass, came to the place, but before casting himself into the flames he shook himself, lest perchance there should be any insects in his coat who might suffer death. then, offering his body as a free gift, he sprang up, and like a royal swan, lighting on a bed of lotus in an ecstasy of joy, he fell on the heap of live coals. but the flame failed even to heat the pores or the hair on the body of the wisdom being, and it was as if he had entered a region of frost. then he addressed the brahmin in these words: "brahmin, the fire that you have kindled is icy cold; it fails to heat the pores of the hair on my body. what is the meaning of this?" "o most wise hare! i am sakka, and have come to put your virtue to the test." and the buddha in a sweet voice said: "no god or man could find in me an unwillingness to die." then sakka said: "o wise hare, be thy virtue known to all the ages to come." and seizing the mountain he squeezed out the juice and daubed on the moon the signs of the young hare. then he placed him back on the grass that he might continue his sabbath meditation, and returned to heaven. and the four creatures lived together and kept the moral law. from "eastern stories and legends." filial piety now it came to pass that the buddha was reborn in the shape of a parrot, and he greatly excelled all other parrots in his strength and beauty. and when he was full grown his father, who had long been the leader of the flock in their flights to other climes, said to him: "my son, behold, thou shalt rest. i will lead the birds." and the parrots rejoiced in the strength of their new leader, and willingly did they follow him. now from that day on, the buddha undertook to feed his parents, and would not consent that they should do any more work. each day he led his flock to the himalaya hills, and when he had eaten his fill of the clumps of rice that grew there, he filled his beak with food for the dear parents who were waiting his return. now there was a man appointed to watch the rice-fields, and he did his best to drive the parrots away, but there seemed to be some secret power in the leader of this flock which the keeper could not overcome. he noticed that the parrots ate their fill and then flew away, but that the parrot-king not only satisfied his hunger, but carried away rice in his beak. now he feared there would be no rice left, and he went to his master, the brahmin, to tell him what had happened; and even as the master listened there came to him the thought that the parrot-king was something higher than he seemed, and he loved him even before he saw him. but he said nothing of this, and only warned the keeper that he should set a snare and catch the dangerous bird. so the man did as he was bidden: he made a small cage and set the snare, and sat down in his hut waiting for the birds to come. and soon he saw the parrot-king amidst his flock, who, because he had no greed, sought no richer spot, but flew down to the same place in which he had fed the day before. now, no sooner had he touched the ground than he felt his feet caught in the noose. then fear crept into his bird heart, but a stronger feeling was there to crush it down, for he thought: "if i cry out the cry of the captured, my kinsfolk will be terrified, and they will fly away foodless. but if i lie still, then their hunger will be satisfied, and may they safely come to my aid." thus, was the parrot both brave and prudent. but alas! he did not know that his kinsfolk had nought of his brave spirit. when _they_ had eaten their fill, though they heard the thrice-uttered cry of the captured, they flew away, nor heed the sad plight of their leader. then was the heart of the parrot-king sore within him, and he said: "all these my kith and kin, and not one to look back on me. alas! what sin have i done?" the watchman now heard the cry if the parrot-king, and the sound of the other parrots flying through the air. "what is that?" he cried, and leaving his hut he came to the place where he had laid the snare. there he found the captive parrot; he tied his feet together and brought him to the brahmin, his master. now, when the brahmin saw the parrot-king, he felt his strong power, and his heart was full of love to him, but he hid his feelings, and said in a voice of anger: "is thy greed greater than that of all other birds? they eat their fill, but thou canst takest away each day more food than thou canst eat. doest thou this out of hatred for me, or dost thou store up the food in same granary for selfish greed?" and the great being made answer in a sweet human voice: "i hate thee not, o brahmin. nor do i store the rice in a granary for selfish greed. but this thing i do. each day i pay a debt which is due--each day i grant a loan, and each day i store up a treasure." now the brahmin could not understand the words of the buddha (because true wisdom had not entered his heart) and he said: "i pray thee, o wondrous bird, to make these words clear unto me." and then the parrot-king made answer: "i carry food to my ancient parents who can no longer seek that food for themselves: thus i pay my daily debt. i carry food to my callow chicks whose wings are yet ungrown. when i am old they will care for me--this my loan to them. and for other birds, weak and helpless of wing, who need the aid of the strong, for them i lay up a store; to these i give in charity." then was the brahmin much moved and showed the love that was in his heart. "eat thy fill, o righteous bird, and let thy kinsfolk eat, too, for thy sake." and he wished to bestow a thousand acres of land upon him, but the great being would only take a tiny portion round which were set boundary stores. and the parrot returned with a head of rice, and said: "arise, dear parents, that i may take you to a place of plenty." and he told them the story of his deliverance. from "eastern stories and legends." three stories from hans christian andersen.[ ] the swineherd. there was once a poor prince. he owned a kingdom--a very small one, but it was big enough to allow him to marry, and he was determined to marry. now, it was really very bold on his part to say to a king's daughter: "will you marry me?" but he dared to do so, for his name was known far and wide, and there were hundreds of princesses who would willingly have said: "yes, thank you." but, would _she_? we shall hear what happened. on the grave of the prince's father, there grew a rose-tree--such a wonderful rose-tree! it bloomed only once in five years, and then it bore only one rose--but what a rose! its perfume was so sweet that whoever smelt it forgot all his cares and sorrows. the prince had also a nightingale which could sing as if all the delicious melodies in the world were contained in its little throat. the rose and the nightingale were both to be given to the princess, and were therefore placed in two great silver caskets and sent to her. the emperor had them carried before him into the great hall where the princess was playing at "visiting" with her ladies-in-waiting--they had nothing else to do. when she saw the caskets with the presents in them, she clapped her hands with joy. "if it were only a little pussy-cat," she cried. but out came a beautiful rose. "how elegantly it is made," said all the ladies of the court. "it is more than elegant," said the emperor, "it is _neat_. "fie, papa," she said, "it is not made at all; it is a _natural_ rose." "let us see what the other casket contains before we lose our temper," said the emperor, and then out came the little nightingale and sang so sweetly that at first nobody could think of anything to say against it." "_superbe, superbe_," cried the ladies of the court, for they all chattered french, one worse than the other. "how the bird reminds me of the late empress' musical-box!" said an old lord-in-waiting. "ah, me! the same tone, the same execution." "the very same," said the emperor, and he cried like a little child. "i hope it is not a real bird," said the princess. oh, yes! it is a real bird," said those who had brought it. "then let the bird fly away," she said, and she would on no account allow the prince to come in. but he was not to be disheartened; he smeared his face with black and brown, drew his cap over his forehead, and knocked at the palace door. the emperor opened it. "good day, emperor," he said. "could i get work at the palace?" "well, there are so many wanting places," said the emperor; "but let me see!--i need a swineherd. i have a good many pigs to keep." so the prince was made imperial swineherd. he had a wretched little room near the pig-sty and here he was obliged to stay. but the whole day he sat and worked, and by the evening he had made a neat little pipkin, and round it was a set of bells, and as soon as the pot began to boil, the bells fell to jingling most sweetly and played the old melody: "ach du lieber augustin, alles is weg, weg, weg!"[ ] but the most wonderful thing was that when you held your finger in the steam of the pipkin, you could immediately smell what dinner was cooking on every hearth in the town. that was something very different from a rose. the princess was walking out with her ladies-in-waiting, and when she heard the melody, she stopped short, and looked pleased, for she could play "ach du lieber augustin" herself; it was the only tune she knew, and that she played with one finger. "why, that is the tune i play," she said. "what a cultivated swineherd he must be. go down and ask him how much his instrument costs." so one of the ladies-in-waiting was obliged to go down, but she put on pattens first. "how much do you want for your pipkin?" asked the lady-in-waiting. "i will have ten kisses from the princess," said the swineherd. "good gracious!" said the lady-in-waiting. "i will not take less," said the swineherd. "well, what did he say?" asked the princess. "i really cannot tell you," said the lady-in-waiting. "it is too dreadful." "then you must whisper it," said the princess. so she whispered it. "he is very rude," said the princess, and she walked away. but she had gone only a few steps when the bells sounded so sweetly: "ach du lieber augustin alles ist weg, weg, weg!" "listen," said the princess, "ask him whether he will have his kisses from my ladies-in-waiting." "no, thank you," said the swineherd. "i will have ten kisses from the princess, or, i will keep my pipkin." "how tiresome!" said the princess; "but you must stand round me, so that nobody shall see." so the ladies-in-waiting stood round her and they spread out their skirts. the swineherd got the kisses, and she got the pipkin. how delighted she was. all the evening and the whole of the next day, that pot was made to boil. and you might have known what everybody was cooking on every hearth in town, from the chamberlain's to the shoemaker's. the court ladies danced and clapped their hands. "we know who is to have fruit-soup and pancakes, and we know who is going to have porridge, and cutlets. how very interesting it is!" "most interesting, indeed," said the first lady-of-honor. "yes, but hold your tongues, for i am the emperor's daughter." "of course we will," they cried in one breath. the swineherd, or the prince, nobody knew that he was not a real swineherd, did not let the day pass without doing something, and he made a rattle which could play all the waltzes, and the polkas and the hop-dances which had been know since the creation of the world. "but this is _superbe_!" said the princess, who was just passing: "i have never heard more beautiful composition. go and as him what the instrument costs. but i will give no more kisses." "he insists on a hundred kisses from the princess," said the ladies- in-waiting who had been down to ask. "i think he must be quite mad," said the princess, and she walked away. but when she had taken a few steps, she stopped short, and said: "one must encourage the fine arts, and i am the emperor's daughter. tell him he may have ten kisses, as before, and the rest he can take from my ladies-in-waiting." "yes, but we object to that," said the ladies-in-waiting. "that is nonsense," said the princess. "if i can kiss him, surely you can do the same. go down at once. don't i give you board and wages?" so the ladies-in-waiting were obliged to go down to the swineherd again. "a hundred kisses from the princess, or each keeps his own." "stand round me," she said. and all the ladies-in-waiting stood round her, and the swineherd began to kiss her. "what can all the crowd be down by the pig-sty?" said the emperor, stepping out onto the balcony. he rubbed his eyes and put on his spectacles. "it is the court ladies up to some of their tricks. i must go down and look after them." he pulled up his slippers, for they were shoes which he had trodden down at heel. gracious goodness, how he hurried! as soon as he came into the garden, he walked very softly, and the ladies-in-waiting had so much to do counting the kisses, so that everything could be done fairly, and that the swineherd should get neither too many nor too few, that they never noticed the emperor at all. he stood on tip-toe. "what is this all about?" he said, when he saw the kissing that was going on, and he hit them on the head with his slipper, just as the swineherd was getting the eighty-sixth kiss. "heraus!" said the emperor, for he was angry, and both the princess and the swineherd were turned out of his kingdom. the princess wept, the swineherd scolded, and the rain streamed down. "oh! wretched creature that i am," said the princess. "if i had only taken the handsome prince! oh, how unhappy i am!" then the swineherd went behind a tree, washed the black and brown off his face, threw of his ragged clothes, and stood forth in his royal apparel, looking so handsome that she was obliged to curtsey. "i have learned to despise you," he said. "you would not have an honorable prince. you could not appreciate a rose or a nightingale, but for a musical toy, you kissed the swineherd. now you have your reward." so he went into his kingdom, shut the door and bolted it, and she had to stand outside singing: "ach, du lieber augustin, alles is weg, weg, weg!" the nightingale. in china, you must know, the emperor is a chinaman, and all those around him are chinamen, too. it is many years since all this happened, and for that very reason it is worth hearing, before it is forgotten. the emperor's palace was the most beautiful in the world; built all of fine porcelain and very costly, but so fragile that it was very difficult to touch, and you had to be very careful in doing so. the most wonderful flowers were to be seen in the garden, and to the most beautiful silver bells, tinkling bells were tied, for fear people should pass by without noticing them. how well everything had been thought out in the emperor's garden! this was so big, that the gardener himself did not know where it ended. if you walked on and on you came to the most beautiful forest, with tall trees and big lakes. the wood stretched right down to the sea which was blue and deep; great ships could pass underneath the branches, and here a nightingale had made its home, and its singing was so entrancing that the poor fisherman, though he had so many other things to do, would lie still and listen when he was out at night drawing in his nets. "how beautiful it is!" he said; but then he was forced to think about his own affairs, and the nightingale was forgotten. the next day, when it sang again, the fisherman said the same thing: "how beautiful it is!" travellers from all the countries of the world came to the emperor's town, and expressed their admiration of the palace and the garden, but when they heard the nightingale, they all said: "this is the best of all!" now, when these travellers came home, they told of what they had seen. and scholars wrote many books about the town, the palace and the garden, but nobody left out the nightingale; it was always spoken of as the most wonderful of all they had seen. and those who had the gift of the poet, wrote the most delightful poems all about the nightingale in the wood near the deep lake. the books went round the world, and in the course of time some of them reached the emperor. he sat in his golden chair, and read and read, nodding his head every minute; for it pleased him to read the beautiful descriptions of the town, the palace and the garden. "but the nightingale is the best of all," he read. "what is this?" said the emperor. "the nightingale! i now nothing whatever about it. to think of there being such a bird in my kingdom-- nay in my very garden--and i have never heard it. and to think one should learn such a thing for the first time from a book!" then he summoned his lord-in-waiting, who was such a grand personage that if anyone inferior in rank ventured to speak to him, or ask him about anything, he merely answered "p," which meant nothing whatever. "there is said to be a most wonderful bird, called the nightingale," said the emperor; "they say it is the best thing in my great kingdom. why have i been told nothing about it?" "i have never heard it mentioned before," said the lord-in-waiting. "it has certainly never been presented at court." "it is my good pleasure that it shall appear to-night and sing before me!" said the emperor. "the whole world knows what is mine, and i myself do not know it." "i have never heard it mentioned before," said the lord-in-waiting. "i will seek it, and i shall find it." but where was it to be found? the lord-in-waiting ran up and down all the stairs, through halls and passages, but not one of all those whom he met had ever heard a word about the nightingale; so the lord-in- waiting ran back to the emperor and told him that it must certainly be a fable invented by writers of books. "your majesty must not believe all that is written in books. it is pure invention, something which is called the black art." "but," said the emperor, "the book in which i have read this was sent to me by his majesty, the emperor of japan, and therefore this cannot be a falsehood. i will hear the nightingale. it must appear this evening! it has my imperial favor, and if it fails to appear the court shall be trampled upon after the court has supped." "tsing-pe!" said the lord-in-waiting, and again he ran up and down all the stairs, through all the passages, and half the court ran with him, for they had no wish to be trampled upon. and many questions were asked about the wonderful nightingale, of whom all had heard except those who lived at court. at last, they met a poor little girl in the kitchen. she said: "oh, yes! the nightingale! i know it well. how it can sing! every evening i have permission to take the broken pieces from the table to my poor sick mother who lives near the sea-shore, and on my way back, when i feel tired, and rest a while in the wood, then i hear the nightingale sing, and my eyes are filled with tears; it is as if my mother kissed me." "little kitchen-maid," said the lord-in-waiting, "i will get a permanent place for you in the court kitchen and permission to see the emperor dine, if you can lead us to the nightingale; for it has been commanded to appear at court to-night." so they started off all together where the bird used to sing; half the court went, too. they were going along at a good pace, when suddenly they heard a cow lowing. "oh," said a court-page. "there it is! what a wonderful power for so small a creature! i have certainly heard it before." "no, those are the cows lowing," said the little kitchen-maid. "we are a long way from the place yet." then the frogs began to croak in the marsh. "glorious," said the court- preacher. "now, i hear it--it is just like little church-bells." "no, those are the frogs," said the little kitchen-maid. "but now i think we shall soon hear it." and then the nightingale began to sing. "there it is," said the little girl. "listen, listen--there it sits!" and she pointed to a little gray bird in the branches. "is it possible!" said the lord-in-waiting. "i had never supposed it would look like that. how very plain it looks! it has certainly lost its color from seeing so many grand folk here." "little nightingale," called out the little kitchen-maid, "our gracious emperor wishes you to sing for him." "with the greatest pleasure," said the nightingale, and it sang, and it was a joy to hear it. "it sounds like little glass bells," said the lord-in-waiting; "and just look at its little throat, how it moves! it is astonishing to think we have never heard it before! it will have a real _success_ at court." "shall i sing for the emperor again?" asked the nightingale, who thought that the emperor was there in person. "mine excellent little nightingale," said the lord-in-waiting, "i have the great pleasure of bidding you to a court-festival this night, when you will enchant his imperial majesty with your delightful warbling." "my voice sounds better among the green trees," said the nightingale. but it came willingly when it knew the emperor wished it. there was a great deal of furbishing up at the palace. the walls and ceiling which were of porcelain, shone with the light of a thousand golden lamps. the most beautiful flowers of the tinkling kind were placed in the passages. there was a running to and fro and a great draught, but that is just what made the bells ring, and one could not hear oneself speak. in the middle of the great hall where the emperor sat, a golden rod had been set up on which the nightingale was to perch. the whole court was present, and the little kitchen-maid was allowed to stand behind the door, for she had now the actual title of court kitchen-maid. all were there in their smartest clothes, and they all looked toward the little gray bird to which the emperor nodded. and then the nightingale sang, so gloriously that tears sprang into the emperor's eyes and rolled down his cheeks, and the nightingale sang even more sweetly. the song went straight to the heart, and the emperor was so delighted that he declared that the nightingale should have his golden slipper to hang round its neck. but the nightingale declined. it had already had its reward. "i have seen tears in the emperor's eyes. that is my greatest reward. an emperor's tears have a wonderful power. god knows i am sufficiently rewarded," and again its sweet, glorious voice was heard. "that is the most delightful coquetting i have ever known," said the ladies sitting round, and they took water into their mouths, in order to gurgle when anyone spoke to them, and they really thought they were like the nightingale. even the footmen and the chambermaids sent word that they were satisfied, and that means a great deal, for they are always the most difficult people to please. yes, indeed, there was no doubt as to the nightingale's success. it was to stay at court, and have its own cage, with liberty to go out twice in the daytime, and once at night. twelve footmen went out with it, and each held a silk ribbon which was tied to the bird's leg, and which they held very tightly. there was not much pleasure in an outing of that sort. the whole town was talking about the wonderful bird, and when two people met, one said: "nightin--" and the other said "gale," and they sighed and understood one another. eleven cheese-mongers' children were called after the bird, though none of them could sing a note. one day a large parcel came for the emperor. outside was written the word: "nightingale." "here we have a new book about our wonderful bird," said the emperor. but it was not a book; it was a little work of art which lay in a box-- an artificial nightingale, which looked exactly like the real one, but it was studded all over with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. as soon as you wound it up, it could sing one of the songs which the real bird sang, and its tail moved up and down and glittered with silver and gold. round its neck was a ribbon on which was written: "the emperor of japan's nightingale is poor indeed, compared with the emperor of china's." "that is delightful," they all said, and on the messenger who had brought the artificial bird, they bestowed the title of "imperial nightingale-bringer-in-chief." "let them sing together, and _what_ a duet that will be!" and so they had to sing, but the thing would not work, because the real nightingale could only sing in its own way, and the artificial nightingale went by clockwork. "that is not its fault," said the band-master. "time is its strong point and it has quite my method." then the artificial nightingale had to sing alone. it had just as much success as the real bird, and it was so much handsomer to look at; it glittered like bracelets and breast-pins. it sang the same tune three and thirty times, and still it was not tired; the people would willingly listen to the whole performance over again from the start, but the emperor suggested that the real nightingale should sing for a while--where was it? nobody had noticed it had flown out of the open window back to its green woods. "but what is the meaning of all this?" said the emperor. all the courtiers railed at the nightingale and said it was a most ungrateful creature. "we have the better of the two," they said, and the artificial nightingale had to sing again, and this was the thirty-fourth time they had heard the same tune. but they did not know it properly event then because it was so difficult, and the band-master praised the wonderful bird in the highest terms and even asserted that it was superior to the real bird, not only as regarded the outside, with the many lovely diamonds, but the inside as well. "you see, ladies and gentlemen, and above all your imperial majesty, that with the real nightingale, you can never predict what may happen, but with the artificial bird, everything is settled beforehand; so it remains and it cannot be changed. one can account for it. one can rip it open, and show the human ingenuity, explaining how the cylinders lie, how they work, and how one thing is the result of another." "that is just what we think," they all exclaimed, and the bandmaster received permission to exhibit the bird to the people on the following sunday. the emperor said they would hear it sing. they listened and were as much delighted as if they had been drunk with tea, which is chinese, you know, and they all said: "oh!" and stuck their forefingers in the air, and nodded their heads. but the poor fisherman who had heard the real nightingale, said: "it sounds quite well, and a little like it, but there is something wanting, i do not know what." the real nightingale was banished from the kingdom. the artificial bird had its place on a silken cushion close to the emperor's bed. all the presents it had received, the gold and precious stones, lay all round it, and it had been honored with the title of high-imperial-bed-room-singer--in the first rank, on the left side, for even the emperor considered that side the grander on which the heart is placed, and even an emperor has his heart on the left side. the band-master wrote twenty-five volumes about the wonderful artificial bird. the book was very learned and very long, filled with the most difficult words in the chinese language, and everybody said they had read and understood it, for otherwise they would have been considered stupid, and would have been trampled upon. and thus a whole year passed away. the emperor, the court, and all the chinamen knew every little gurgle in the artificial bird's song, and just for this reason, they were all the better pleased with it. they could sing it themselves--which they did. the boys in the street sang "iodizing," and, "cluck, cluck," and even the emperor sang it. yes, it was certainly beautiful! but one evening, while the bird was singing, and the emperor lay in bed listening to it, there was a whirring sound inside the bird, and something whizzed; all the wheels ran round, and the music stopped. the emperor sprang out of bed and sent for the court physician, but what could he do? then they sent for the watch-maker, and after much talk and examination, he patched the bird up, but he said it must be spared as much as possible, because the hammers were so worn out--and he could not put new ones in so that the music could be counted on. this was a great grief. the bird could only be allowed to sing once a year, and even that was risky, but on these occasions, the band-master would make a little speech, full of difficult words, saying the bird was just as good as ever--and that was true. five years passed away, and a great sorrow had come to the country. the people all really cared for their emperor, and now he was ill and it was said he could not live. a new emperor had been chosen, and the people stood about the streets, and questioned the lord-in-waiting about their emperor's condition. "p!" he said, and shook his head. the emperor lay pale and cold on his great, gorgeous bed; the whole court believed that he was dead, and they all hastened to pay homage to the new emperor. the footmen hurried off to discuss matters, and the chambermaids gave a great coffee-party. cloth had been laid down in all the rooms and passages, so that not even a footstep should be heard and it was all so very quiet. but the emperor was not yet dead. he lay stiff and pale in the sumptuous bed, with its long velvet curtains and heavy gold tassels; high above was an open window, and the moon shone in upon the emperor and the artificial bird. the poor emperor could hardly breathe; he felt as if someone were sitting on his chest; he opened his eyes and saw that it was death sitting on his chest, wearing his golden crown, holding in one hand his golden sword, and in the other his splendid banner. and from the folds of the velvet curtains strange faces peered forth; some terrible to look on, others mild and friendly--these were the emperor's good and bad deeds, which gazed upon him now that death sat upon his heart. "do you remember this?" whispered one after the other. "do you remember that?" they told him so much that the sweat poured down his face. "i never knew that," said the emperor. "music! music! beat the great chinese drum!" he called out, "so that i may not hear what they are saying!" but they kept on, and death nodded his head, like a chinaman, at everything they said. "music, music," cried the emperor. "you precious little golden bird! sing to me, ah! sing to me! i have given you gold and costly treasure. i have hung my golden slipper about your neck. sing to me. sing to me!" but the bird was silent; there was no one to wind him up, and therefore he could not sing. death went on, staring at the emperor with his great hollow eyes, and it was terribly still. then suddenly, close to the window, came the sound of a lovely song. it was the little live nightingale perched on a branch outside. it had heard of its emperor's need, and had therefore flown hither to bring him comfort and hope, and as he sang, the faces became paler and the blood coursed more freely through the emperor's veins. even death himself listened and said: "go on, little nightingale. go on." "yes, if you will give me the splendid sword. yes, if you will give me the imperial banner! yes, if you will give me the emperor's crown!" and death gave back all these treasures for a song. and still the nightingale sang on. he sang of the quiet churchyard, where the white roses grow, where the elder flowers bloom, and where the grass is kept moist by the tears of those left behind, and there came to death such a longing to see his garden, that he floated out of the window, like a could white mist. "thank you, thank you," said the emperor. "you heavenly little bird, i know you well! i banished you from the land, and you have charmed away the evil spirits from my bed and you have driven death from my heart. how shall i reward you?" "you have rewarded me," said the nightingale. "i brought tears to your eyes the first time i sang, and i shall never forget that. those are the jewels which touched the heart of the singer; but sleep now, that you may wake fresh and strong. i will sing to you." then it sang again, and the emperor fell into a sweet sleep. the sun shone in upon him through the window, when he woke the next morning feeling strong and well. none of his servants had come back, because they thought he was dead, but the nightingale was still singing. you will always stay with me," said the emperor. "you shall only sing when it pleases you, and i will break the artificial nightingale into a thousand pieces." "do not do that," said the nightingale. "it has done the best it could. keep it with you. i cannot build my nest in a palace, but let me come just as i please. i well sit on the branch near the window, and sing to you that you may both joyful and thoughtful. i will sing to you of the happy folk, and of those that suffer; i will sing of the evil and of the good, which is being hidden from you. the little singing bird flies hither and thither, to the poor fisherman, to the peasant's hut, to many who live far from your court. your heart is dearer to me than your crown, and yet the crown has a breath of sanctity, too. i will come, i will sing to you! but one thing you must promise me!" "all that you ask," said the emperor, and stood there in his imperial robes which he had put on himself, and held the heavy golden sword on his heart. "i beg you, let no one know that you have a little bird who tells you everything. it will be far better so!" then the nightingale flew away. the servants came to look upon their dead emperor. yes, there they stood; and the emperor said: "good morning!" the princess and the pea. there was once a prince who wished to marry a princess, but she must be a _real_ princess. he travelled all over the world to find one, but there was always something wrong. there were plenty of princesses, but whether they were _real_ or not he could not be sure. there was always something that was not quite right. so he came home again, feeling very sad, for he was so anxious to have a real princess. one evening there was a terrible storm; it lightened and thundered, and the rain came down in torrents; it was a fearful night. in the midst of the storm there came a knocking at the town-gate, and the old king himself went down to open it. there, outside stood a princess. but what a state she was in from the rain and the storm! the water was running out of her hair on to her clothes, into he shoes and out at the heels; and yet she said she was a _real_ princess. "we shall soon find out about that," thought the old queen. but she said never a word. she went into the bedroom, took off all the bedclothes and put a pea on the bedstead. then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea and twenty eider-down quilts on the mattresses. and the princess was to sleep on the top of all. in the morning they came to her and asked her how she had slept. "oh! wretchedly," said the princess. "i scarcely closed my eyes the whole night long. heaven knows what could have been in the bed! i have lain upon something hard, so that my whole body is black and blue. it is quite dreadful." they could see now that she was a _real_ princess, because she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down quilts. nobody but a real princess could be so sensitive. so the prince married her, for now he knew that he had found a _real_ princess, and the pea was sent to an art museum, where it can still be seen, if nobody has taken it away. now, mark you: this is a true story. part iii. list of stories. books suggested to the story-teller and books referred to in the list of stories. author's note:-- i had intended, in this section, to offer an appendix of titles of stories and books which should cover all the ground of possible narrative in schools; but i have found so many lists containing standard books and stories, that i have decided that this original plan would be a work of supererogation. what is really needed is a supplementary list to those already published--a specialized list which is the result of private research and personal experience. i have for many years spent considerable time in the british museum and some of the principal libraries in america. i now offer the fruit of my labor. list of stories. classical stories. the story of theseus. from kingsley's "heroes." how theseus lifted the stone. how theseus slew the corynetes. how theseus slew sinis. how theseus slew kerkyon and procrustes. how theseus slew the medea and was acknowledged the son of aegeus. how theseus slew the minotaur. to be told in six parts as a series. the story of croesus. the conspiracy of the magi. arion and the dolphin. from "wonder tales from herodotus," by n. barrington d'almeida. these stories are intended for reading, but could be shortened for effective narration. coriolanus. julius caesar. aristides. alexander. from "plutarch's lives for boys and girls," by w. h. weston. these stories must be shortened and adapted for narration. the god of the spears: the story of romulus. his father's crown: the story of alcibiades. from "tales from plutarch," by f. j. rowbotham. these stories may be shortened and told in sections. east indian stories. the wise old shepherd. the religious camel. from "the talking thrush," by w. h. d. rouse. less inequality than men deem. from "old deccan days," by mary frere. the brahman, the tiger and the six judges. this story may be found in "the fairy ring," edited by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith; also in "tales of the punjab," by f. a. steel, under the title of "the tiger, the brahman and the jackal." tit for tat. from "old deccan days," by mary frere. this story may be found in "the fairy ring," edited by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith. "pride goeth before a fall." harisarman. from "indian fairy tales," by joseph jacobs. the bear's bad bargain. little anklebone. peasie and beansie. from "tales of the punjab," by f. a. steel. the weaver and the watermelon. the tiger and the hare. from "indian nights entertainment," by synnerton. the virtuous animals. this story should be abridged for narration. the ass as singer. the wolf and the sheep. from "tibetan tales," by f. a. schiefner. a story about robbers. from "out of the east," by lafcadio hearn. dripping. from "indian fairy tales," by mark thornhill. the buddha as tree-spirit. the buddha as parrot. the buddha as king. from "a collection of eastern stories and legends," by m. l. shedlock. rakshas and bakshas. this story may be found in "tales of laughter," edited by kate douglas wiggin and nora archibald smith, under the title of "the blind man, the deaf man and the donkey." the bread of discontent. from "legendary lore of all nations." a germ destroyer. namgary doola. a good story for boys, to be given in shortened form. from "the kipling reader," by rudyard kipling. a stupid boy. the clever jackal. one of the few stories wherein the jackal shows skill combined with gratitude. from "folk tales of kashmir," by j. h. knowles. why the fish laughed. from "folk tales of kashmir," by j. h. knowles. myths, legends, and fairy tales. how the herring became king. joe moore's story. the mermaid of gob ny ooyl. king magnus barefoot. from "manx tales," by sophia morrison. the greedy man. from "contes populaires malgaches," by gariel ferrand. arbutus. basil. briony. dandelion. from "myths and legends of flowers, trees, fruits, and plants," by c. m. skinner. the magic picture. the stone monkey. stealing peaches. the country of gentlemen. football on a lake. from "chinese fairy tales", by h. a. giles. the lime tree. intelligence and luck. the frost, the sun and wind. from "sixty folk tales from slavonic sources," by o. h. wratislaw. the boy who slept. the gods know. from "chinese fairy stories," by n. a. pitnam. this story must be shortened and adapted for narration. the imp tree. the pixy flower. tom tit tot. the princess of colchester. from "fairy gold," by ernest rhys. the origin of the mole. from "cossack fairy tales," by r. n. bain. dolls and butterflies. from "myths and legends of japan," by f. h. davis. the child of the forest. the sparrow's wedding. the moon maiden. from "old world japan," by frank rinder. the story of merlin. from "stories of early british heroes," by c. g. hartley. the isle of the mystic lake. from "the voyage of maildun," in "old celtic romances," by p. w. joyce. the story of baldur. from "heroes of asgard," by m. r. earle. in three parts for young children. adalhero. from "evenings with the old story tellers." martin the peasant's son. from "russian wonder tales," by post wheeler. this is more suitable for reading. the legend of rip van winkle. from "rip van winkle," by washington irving. urashima. from "myths and legends of japan," by f. h. davis. the monk and the bird. from "the book of legends told over again," by h. e. scudder. carob. from "myths and legends of flowers, trees, fruit and plants," by c. m. skinner. a talmud legend. the land of eternal youth. from "child-lore." catskin. guy of gisborne. king henry and the miller. from "a book of ballad stories," by mary macleod. the legend of the black prince. why the wolves no longer devour the lambs of christmas night. from "au pays des legendes," by eugene herepin. the coyote and the locust. the coyote and the ravens who raced their eyes. from "zuni folk tales," by f. h. cushing. the peacemaker. from "legends of the iroquois," by w. v. canfield. the story of the great chief of the animals. the story of lion and little jackal. from "kaffir folk tales," by g. m. theal. the legend of the great st. nicholas. the three counsels. from "bulletin de folk lore, liege." the tale of the peasant demyar. the monkey and the pomegranate tree. the ant and the snow. the value of an egg. the padre and the negro. papranka. from "tales of old lusitania," by coelho. kojata. the lost spear. (to be shortened.) the hermit. (by voltaire.) the blue cat. (from the french.) the silver penny. the three sisters. the slippers of abou-karem. from "the golden fairy book." the fairy baby. from "uncle remus in hansaland," by mary and newman tremearne. why the sole of a man's foot is uneven. the wonderful hair. the emperor trojan's goat ears. the language of animals. handicraft above everything. just earnings are never lost. the maiden who was swifter than a horse. from "servian stories and legends." the couple silencieux. le mort parlant. la sotte fiancee. le cornacon. persin au pot. from "contes populaires du pays wallon," by august gittee. the rat and the cat. the two thieves. the two rats. the dog and the rat. from "contes populaires malgaches," by gabriel ferrand. rua and toka. from "the maori tales," by baroness orczy and montagu marstow. this story is given for the same purpose as "a long bow story" from andrew lang's "olive fairy book." lady clare. the wolf-child. from "tales from the land of grapes and nuts," by charles sellers. the ungrateful man. the faithful servant. (in part.) jovinian, the proud emperor. the knight and the king of hungary. the wicked priest. the emperor and conrad and the count's son. from the "gesta romanorum." virgil, the emperor and the truffles. from "unpublished legends of virgil," collected by c. g. leland. seeing that all was right. (a good story for boys.) la fortuna. the lanterns of the stozzi palace. from "legends of florence," by c. g. leland. the three kingdoms. yelena the wise. seven simeons. ivan, the bird and the wolf. the pig, the deer and the steed. waters of youth. the useless wagoner. from "myths and folk tales of the russians, western slavs and magyars," by jeremiah curtin. these stories need shortening and adapting. the comical history of the king and the cobbler. this story should be shortened to add to the dramatic power. [from a chap book.] the fisherman and his wife. from "fairy tales," by hans christian andersen. hereafter this. from "more english fairy tales," by joseph jacobs. this story and "the fisherman and his wife" are great favorites and could be told one after the other, one to illustrate the patient life, and the other the patient husband. how a man found his wife in the land of the dead. this is a very dramatic and pagan story, to be used with discretion. the man without hands and feet. the cockerel. from "papuan fairy tales." by annie ker. the story of sir tristram and la belle iseult. from "cornwall's wonderland," by mabel quiller-couch. to be told in shortened form. the cat that went to the doctor. the wood anemone. sweeter than sugar. the raspberry caterpillar. from "fairy tales from finland," by zachris topelius. dinevan, the emu. goomble gubbon, the bustard. from "australian legendary tales," by mrs. k. l. parker. the tulip bed. from "the english fairy book," by ernest rhys. i have been asked so often for this particular story i am glad to be able to provide it in very poetical language. stories from grimm and andersen. the fisherman and his wife. the wolf and the kids. the adventures of chanticleer and partlet. the old man and his grandson. rumpelstiltskin. the queen bee. the wolf and the man. the golden goose. from grimm's fairy tales, edited by mrs. edgar lucas. ole-luk-oie. series of seven stories. what the old man does is always right. the princess and the pea. thumbelina. for younger children. from andersen's fairy tales. it's quite true. five out of one pod. great claus and little claus. jack the dullard. the buckwheat. the fir-tree. the little tin soldier. the nightingale. the ugly duckling. the swineherd. the sea serpent. the little match girl. the gardener and his family. for older children. from andersen's fairy tales. the two best editions of hans christian andersen's fairy tales are the translation by mrs. edgar lucas and the only complete english edition by w. a. and j. k. craigie. stories from the fairy book series. edited by andrew lang. the serpent's gifts. unlucky john. from "all sorts of stories book," by mrs. l. b. lang. makoma. from "the orange fairy book." a story for boys. the lady of solace. how the ass became a man again. amys and amile. the burning of njal. ogier the dane. from "the red romance book." the heart of a donkey. the wonderful tune. a french puck. a fish story. from "the lilac fairy book." east of the sun and west of the moon. as a preparation for cupid and psyche. from "the blue fairy book." the half chick. the story of hok lee and the dwarfs. from "the green fairy book". how to find a true friend. from "the crimson fairy book." to be given in shorter form. a long-bow story. from "the olive fairy book." this story makes children learn to distinguish between falsehood and romance. kanny, the kangaroo. the story of tom the bear. from "the animal story book." the story of the fisherman. aladdin and the lamp. this story should be divided and told in two sections. the story of ali cogia. from "the arabian nights entertainment," edited by andrew lang. stories illustrating common-sense resourcefulness and humor. the thief and the cocoanut tree. the woman and the lizard. sada sada. the shop-keeper and the robber. the reciter. rich man's potsherd. the singer and the donkey. child and milk. rich man giving a feast. king solomon and the mosquitoes. the king who promised to look after tennal ranan's family. vikadakavi. horse and complainant. the woman and the stolen fruit. from "an indian tale or two," by william swinton. stories dealing with the success of the younger child. [this is sometimes due to a kind action shown to some humble person or to an animal.] the three sons. from "the kiltartan wonder book," by lady gregory. the flying ship. from "russian fairy tales," by f. b. bain. how jesper herded the hares. from "the violet fairy book," by andrew lang. youth, life and death. from "myths and folk tales of the russians, western slavs and magyars," by jeremiah curtin. jack the dullard. from "fairy tales," by hans christian andersen. the enchanted whistle. from "the golden fairy book." the king's three sons. hunchback and brothers. from "legends of the french provinces." the little humpbacked horse. from "russian wonder tales," by post wheeler. this story is more suitable for reading than telling. the queen bee. from grimm's fairy tales, edited by mrs. edgar lucas. the wonderful bird. from "roumanian fairy tales," by j. m. percival. stories from the lives of the saints. the story of saint brandons. vol. , page . the story of saint francis. vol. , page . the story of santa clara and the roses. saint elizabeth of hungary. vol. , page . saint martin and the cloak. vol. , page . from the "legenda aurea." the legend of saint marjory. from "tales facetiae." melangell's lambs. from "the welsh fairy book," by w. j. thomas. our lady's tumbler. twelfth century legend done out of old french into english, by j. h. wickstead. this story may be shortened and adapted without sacrificing too much of the beauty of the style. the song of the minister. from "a child's book of saints," by william canton. this should be shortened and somewhat simplified for narration, especially in the technical, ecclesiastical terms. the story of saint kenelm, the little king. the story of king alfred and saint cuthbert. the story if aedburg, the daughter of edward. the story of king harold's sickness and recovery. from "old english history for children," by e. a. freeman. i commend all those who tell these stories to read the comments made on them by e. a. freeman himself. modern stories. the summer princess. from "the enchanted garden," by mrs. m. l. molesworth. this may be shortened and arranged for narration. thomas and the princess. from "twenty-six ideal stories for girls," by helena m. conrad. a fairy tale for grown-ups, for pure relaxation. the truce of god. from "all-fellows seven legends of lower redemption," by laurence housman. the selfish giant. from "fairy tales," by oscar wilde. the ligend of the tortoise. from "windlestraw, legends in rhyme of plants and animals," by pamela glenconner. from the provencal. fairy grumblesnooks. a bit of laughter's smile. from "tales for little people," nos. and , by maud symonds. the fairy who judged her neighbors. from "the little wonder box," in "stories told to a child," by jean ingelow. le courage. le'ecole. le jour de catherine. jacqueline et mirant. from "nos enfants," by anatole france. the giant and the jackstraw. from "the book of knight and barbara," by david starr jordan. for very small children. the musician. the legend of the christmas rose. from "the girl from the marshcroft," by selma lagerlof. both stories should be shortened and adapted for narration. i trust that the grouping of my stories in this section may not be misleading. under "myths, legends and fairy tales" i have included many stories which contain valuable ethical teaching, deep philosophy and stimulating examples for conduct in life. i regret that i have been unable to find a good collection of stories from history for narrative purposes. i have made a careful and lengthy search, but the stories are all written from the _reading_ point of view rather than the _telling_. books suggested to the story-teller and books referred to in the list of stories. andersen, hans christian fairy tales; translated by mrs. edgar lucas. dutton. fairy tales; edited by w. a. and j. k. craigie. oxford university press. babbitt, e. c. jataka tales. century. bain, r. n. cossack fairy tales. burt. russian fairy tales. burt. briant, egbert history of english balladry. badger. buddha the jataka; or stories of the buddha's former births; translated from the pali by various hands. in six volumes. university press. buckley, e. f. children of the dawn. stokes. bulletin, of folk lore. liege. calthorpe, dion c. king peter. duckworth. canfield, w. w. the legends of the iroquois. wessels. canton, william a child's book of saints. dutton. a child's book of warriors. dutton. child lore. nimmo. chodzko, a. e. b. slav fairy tales; translated by e. j. harding. burt. clark, k. m. maori tales. nutt. coelho, tales of old lusitania. swan sonnenschein. conrad, joseph twenty-six ideal stories for girls. hutchinson. couch, mabel quiller- cornwall's wonderland. dutton. curtin, jeremiah myths and folk tales of the russians, western slavs and magyars. little. cushing, f. h. zuni folk tales. putnam. darton, e. j. h. pilgrim tales; from tales of the canterbury pilgrims. dodge. wonder book of old romance. stokes. dasent, sir, g. w. norse fairy tales. putnam. davids, t. w. rhys buddhist birth stories. trubner. davis, f. h. myths and legends of japan. crowell. earle, m. r. heroes of asgard. macmillan. evenings with the old story tellers. leavitt and allen. ewald, carl the queen bee and other nature tales; translated by c. c. moore-smith. nelson. ferrand, gabriel contes populaires malgaches. leroux. fielde, adele chinese nights' entertainment. putnam france, anatole nos enfants. hachette. freeman, e. a. old english history for children. dutton. frere, mary old deccan days. murray. froissart stories from froissart; edited by henry nebolt. macmillan. gesta romanorum. swan sonnenschein. giles, h. a. chinese fairy tales. gowans. gittee, august contes populaires du pays wallon. vanderpooten. glenconner, lady (pamela tennant) windlestraw, legends in rhyme of plants and animals. chiswick press. golden fairy book. hutchinson. gregory, lady augusta the kiltartan wonder book. dutton. grimm, j. l. k. and w. k. grimm fairy tales; translated by mrs. edgar lucas. leppincott. harris, joel chandler uncle remus; his songs and his sayings. appleton. hartley, c. g. stories of early british heroes. dent. hearn, lafcadio out of the east. houghton. herodotus wonder storied from herodotus; edited by n. barrington d'almeida. harper. herpin, eugene au pays du legendes. calliere. higgins, m. m. stories from the history of ceylon for children. capper. housman, laurence all-fellows seven legends of lower redemption. kegan paul. ingelow, jean the little wonder box. griffeths, farren and company. stories told to a child. little. irving, washington rip van winkle. macmillan. jacobs, joseph indian fairy tales. putnam. more english fairy tales. putnam. jordan, david starr the book of knight and barbara. appleton. joyce, p. w. old celtic romances. longmans. keary, annie and eliza heroes of asgard. macmillan. ker, annie papuan fairy tales. macmillan. kingsley, charles heroes. macmillan. kipling, rudyard the jungle book. macmillan. the kipling reader. appleton. the second jungle book. macmillan. knowles, j. h. folk tales of kashmir. trubner. lagerlof, selma the girl from marshcroft. little. lang, andrew arabian nights' entertainment. longmans. the blue fairy book. longmans. the crimson fairy book longmans. the green fairy book. longmans. the lilac fairy book. longmans. the olive fairy book. longmans. the orange fairy book. longmans. the red fairy book. longmans. the violet fairy book. longmans. lang. l. b. all sorts of stories book. longmans. legenda aurea. leland, c. g. legends of florence. macmillan unpublished legends of virgil. stock. mackenzie indian myths and legends. gresham publishing house. macleod, mary a book of ballad stories. stokes. molesworth, mrs. m. l. the enchanted garden. unwin. moncrieff, a. h. hope classic myths and legends. gresham publishing house. morrison, sophia manx fairy tales. nutt. naake, j. t. slavonic fairy tales. king. noble, m. e. and k. coomaraswamy myths of the hindus and buddhists. holt. orczy, baroness and montagu barstow old hungarian fairy tales. dean. parker, mrs. k. l. australian legendary tales. nutt. pearse, w. g. the children's library of the saints. jackson. percival, j. m. roumanian fairy tales. holt. perrault, charles fairy tales. dutton. pitman, n. h. chinese fairy stories. crowell. plutarch plutarch's lives for boys and girls; retold by w. h. weston. stokes tales from plutarch, by f. j. rowbotham. crowell. ragozin, z. a. tales of the heroic ages; frithjof, viking of norway, and roland, paladin of france. putnam. tales of the heroic ages; siegfried, hero of the north, and beowulf, hero of anglo-saxons. putnam. rattray, r. s. hansa folk lore, customs, proverbs, etc. clarendon press. rhys, ernest the english fairy book. stokes. fairy gold. dutton. the garden of romance. kegan paul. rinder, frank old world japan. allen. robinson, t. h. tales and talks from history. caldwell. rouse, w. h. d. the talking thrush. dutton. schiefner, f. a. tibetan tales. trubner. scudder, h. e. the book of legends told over again. houghton. sellers, charles tales from the land of grapes and nuts. field and tuer. servian stories and legends. shedlock, m. l. a collection of eastern stories and legends. dutton. skinner, c. m. myths and legends of flowers, fruits and plants. lippincott. smith, j. c. and g. soutar book of ballads for boys and girls. oxford university press. steel, mrs. f. a. tales of the punjab. macmillan. strickland, w. w. northwest slav legends and fairy stories. erben. swinton an indian tale or two; reprinted from blackheath local guide. swinton and cathcart legendary lore of all nations. ivison, taylor & company. synnerton indian nights' entertainment. stock. tales facetlae. tennant, pamela (lady glenconner) the children and the pictures. macmillan. theal, g. m. kaffir folk lore. swan sonnenschein. thomas, w. j. the welsh fairy book. stokes. thornhill, mark indian fairy tales. hatchard. topelius, zachris fairy tales from finland. unwin. tremearne, mary and newman uncle remus in hansaland. wheeler, post russian wonder tales. century. wickstead, j. h. our lady's tumbler; twelfth century legend done out of old french into english. mosher. wiggin, kate douglas and nora archibald smith the fairy ring. doubleday. tales of laughter. doubleday. wilde, oscar fairy tales. putnam. wilson, richard the indian story book. macmillan. wratislaw, a. h. sixty folk tales from exclusively slavonic sources. stock. footnotes. . i venture to hope (at this long distance of years) that my language in telling the story was more simple than appears from this account. . this difference of spelling in the same essay will be much appreciated by those who know how gladly children offer an orthographical alternative, in hopes that one if not the other may satisfy the exigency of the situation. . see "list of stories." . at the congressional library in washington. . letters of t. e. brown, page . . page . . in further illustration of this point see "when burbage played," austen dobson, and "in the nursery," hans andersen. . "les jeux des enfants," page . . a noted greek gymnast struck his pupil, though he was applauded by the whole assembly. "you did it clumsily, and not as you ought, for these people would never have praised you for anything really artistic." . for further details on the question of preparation of the story, see chapter on "questions asked by teachers." . sully says that children love exact repetition because of the intense enjoyment bound up with the process of imaginative realization. . at the summer school at chautauqua, new york, and at lincoln park, chicago. . there must be no more emphasis in the second manner than the first. . from "education of an orator," book ii, chapter . . one child's favorite book bore the exciting title of "birth, life and death of crazy jane." . this does not imply that the child would not appreciate in the right context the thrilling and romantic story in connection with the finding of the elgin marbles. . one is almost inclined to prefer marjorie fleming's little innocent oaths. "but she was more than usual calm, she did not give a single dam." . published by john loder, bookseller, woodbridge, in . . from "literary values." . a story is told of confucius, who, having attended a funeral, presented his horse to the chief mourner. when asked why he bestowed this gift, he replied: "i wept with the man, so i felt i ought to _do_ something for him." . this experiment cannot be made with a group of children for obvious reasons. . from an address on "the cultivation of the imagination." . "the house in the wood" (grimm), is another instance of triumph for the youngest child. . see list of stories under this heading. . to be found in andrew lang's "the violet fairy book." . to be found in jacob's "more english fairy tales." . from the "thabagata." . for selection of suitable stories among legends of the saints, see list of stories under the heading, "stories from the lives of the saints." . these words have been set most effectively to music by miss margaret ruthven lang. . from "the use of fairy tales," in "moral instruction of children". . see chapter on questions asked by teachers. . from "talks to teachers," page . . an excellent account of this is to be found in "the song of roland," by arthur way and frederic spender. . njal's burning, from "the red book of romance," by andrew lang. . from "studies of childhood." . england. . from "the lockerbie book," by james whitcomb riley, copyright, . used by special permission of the publishers, the bobbs-merril company. . from "virginibus puerisque." . see "long bow story;" "john and the pig." . published by george allen & co. . this is even a higher spirit than that shown in the advice given in the "agamemnon" (speaking of the victor's attitude after the taking of troy): "yea, let no craving for forbidden gain bid conquerors yield before the darts of greed." . it is curious to find that the story of puss-in-boots in its variants is sometimes presented with a moral, sometimes without. in the valley of the ganges it has _none_. in cashmere it has one moral, in zanzibar another. . from hans christian andersen, in "childhood in literature and art." . "sartor resartus," book iii, page . . from "childhood in literature and art." . see "eastern stories and fables," published by routledge. . see chapter i. . in this matter i have, in england, the support of dr. kimmins, chief inspector of education in the london county council, who is strongly opposed to the immediate reproduction of stories. . these remarks refer only to the illustrations of stories told. whether children should be encouraged to self-expression in drawing (quite apart form reproducing in one medium what has been conveyed to them in another), is too large a question to deal with in this special work on story-telling. . i give the following story, quoted by professor ker in his romanes lecture, , as an encouragement to those who develop the art of story-telling. . the melody to be crooned at first and to grow louder at each incident. . "the punishment that can most affect merfolk is to restrict their freedom. and this is how the queen of the sea punished the nixie of our tale." . the three stories from hans christian andersen have for so long formed part of my repertoire that i have been requested to include them. i am offering a free translation of my own from the danish version. . alas! dear augustin, all is lost, lost! note of acknowledgment my thanks are due to: mrs. josephine dodge daskam bacon, for permission to use an extract from "the madness of philip," and to her publishers. to messrs. houghton mifflin, for permission to use extract from "thou shalt not preach," by mr. john burroughs. to messrs. macmillan and co., for permission to use, "milking time," of miss rossetti. to mrs. william sharp, for permission to use passage from "the divine adventure," by fiona macleod. to miss ethel clifford, for permission to use the poem of "the child." to mr. james whitcomb riley and the bobbs merrill co., for permission to use "the treasure of the wise man." to professor ker, for permission to quote from "sturla the historian." to mr. john russell, for permission to print in full, "a saga." to messrs. longmans, green, and co., for permission to use "the two frogs," from the violate fairy book, and "to your good health," from the crimson fairy book. to mr. heinemann and lady glenconner, for permission to reprint "the water nixie," by pamela tennant, from "the children and the pictures." to mr. maurice baring and the editor of _the morning post_, for permission to reprint "the blue rose" from _the morning post_. to dr. walter rouse and mr. j. m. dent, for permission to reprint from "the talking thrush" the story of "the wise old shepherd." to rev. r. l. gales, for permission to use the article on "nursery rhymes" from the _nation_. to mr. edmund gosse, for permission to use extracts from "father and son." to messrs. chatto & windus, for permission to use "essay on child's play" (from _virginibus puerisque_) and other papers. to mr. george allen & co., for permission to use "ballad for a boy," by w. cory, from "ionica." to professor bradley, for permission to quote from his essay on "poetry and life." to mr. p. a. barnett, for permission to quote from "the commonsense of education." to mr. james stephens, for permission to reprint "the man and the boy." to mr. harold barnes, for permission to use version of the "the proud cock." to mrs. arnold glover, for permission to print two of her stories. to miss emilie poulson, for permission to use her translation of bjornsen's poem. to george routledge & son, for permission to use stories from "eastern stories and fables." to mrs. w. k. clifford, for permission to quote from "very short stories." to mr. w. jenkyn thomas and mr. fisher unwin, for permission to use "arthur in the cave" from the welsh fairy book. how to use your mind a psychology of study being a manual for the use of students and teachers in the administration of supervised study by harry d. kitson, ph.d. professor of psychology, indiana university preface to the second edition the kindly reception accorded to the first edition of this book has confirmed the author in his conviction that such a book was needed, and has tempted him to bestow additional labor upon it. the chief changes consist in the addition of two new chapters, "active imagination," and "how to develop interest in a subject"; the division into two parts of the unwieldy chapter on memory; the addition of readings and exercises at the end of each chapter; the preparation of an analytical table of contents; the correction of the bibliography to date; the addition of an index; and some recasting of phraseology in the interest of clearness and emphasis. the author gratefully acknowledges the constructive suggestions of reviewers and others who have used the book, and hopes that he has profited by them in this revision. h.d.k. april , . preface to the first edition educational leaders are seeing with increasing clearness the necessity of teaching students not only the subject-matter of study but also methods of study. teachers are beginning to see that students waste a vast amount of time and form many harmful habits because they do not know how to use their minds. the recognition of this condition is taking the form of the movement toward "supervised study," which attempts to acquaint the student with principles of economy and directness in using his mind. it is generally agreed that there are certain "tricks" which make for mental efficiency, consisting of methods of apperceiving facts, methods of review, devices for arranging work. some are the fruits of psychological experimentation; others are derived from experience. many of them can be imparted by instruction, and it is for the purpose of systematizing these and making them available for students that this book is prepared. the evils of unintelligent and unsupervised study are evident to all who have any connection with modern education. they pervade the entire educational structure from kindergarten through college. in college they are especially apparent in the case of freshmen, who, in addition to the numerous difficulties incident to entrance into the college world, suffer peculiarly because they do not know how to attack the difficult subjects of the curriculum. in recognition of these conditions, special attention is given at the university of chicago toward supervision of study. all freshmen in the school of commerce and administration of the university are given a course in methods of study, in which practical discussions and demonstrations are given regarding the ways of studying the freshman subjects. in addition to the group-work, cases presenting special features are given individual attention, for it must be admitted that while certain difficulties are common to all students, there are individual cases that present peculiar phases and these can be served only by personal consultations. these personal consultations are expensive both in time and patience, for it frequently happens that the mental habits of a student must be thoroughly reconstructed, and this requires much time and attention, but the results well repay the effort. a valuable accessory to such individual supervision over students has been found in the use of psychological tests which have been described by the author in a monograph entitled, "the scientific study of the college student."[ ] [footnote : princeton university press.] but the college is not the most strategic point at which to administer guidance in methods of study. such training is even more acceptably given in the high school and grades. here habits of mental application are largely set, and it is of the utmost importance that they be set right, for the sake of the welfare of the individuals and of the institutions of higher education that receive them later. another reason for incorporating training in methods of study into secondary and elementary schools is that more individuals will be helped, inasmuch as the eliminative process has not yet reached its culmination. in high schools where systematic supervision of study is a feature, classes are usually conducted in methods of study, and it is hoped that this book will meet the demand for a text-book for such classes, the material being well within the reach of high school students. in high schools where instruction in methods of study is given as part of a course in elementary psychology, the book should also prove useful, inasmuch as it gives a summary of psychological principles relating to the cognitive processes. in the grades the book cannot be put into the hands of the pupils, but it should be mastered by the teacher and applied in her supervising and teaching activities. embodying, as it does, the results of researches in educational psychology, it should prove especially suitable for use in teachers' reading circles where a concise presentation of the facts regarding the psychology of the learning process is desired. there is another group of students who need training in methods of study. brain workers in business and industry feel deeply the need of greater mental efficiency and seek eagerly for means to attain it. their earnestness in this search is evidenced by the success of various systems for the training of memory, will, and other mental traits. further evidence is found in the efforts of many corporations to maintain schools and classes for the intellectual improvement of their employees. to all such the author offers the work with the hope that it may be useful in directing them toward greater mental efficiency. in courses in methods of study in which the book is used as a class-text, the instructor should lay emphasis not upon memorization of the facts in the book, but upon the application of them in study. he should expect to see parallel with progress through the book, improvement in the mental ability of the students. specific problems may well be arranged on the basis of the subjects of the curriculum, and students should be urged to utilize the suggestions immediately. the subjects treated in the book are those which the author has found in his experience with college students to constitute the most frequent sources of difficulty, and under these conditions, the sequence of topics followed in the book has seemed most favorable for presentation. with other groups of students, however, another sequence of topics may be found desirable; if so, the order of topics may be changed. for example, in case the chapter on brain action is found to presuppose more physiological knowledge than that possessed by the students, it may be omitted or may be used merely for reference when enlightenment is desired upon some of the physiological descriptions in later chapters. likewise, the chapter dealing with intellectual difficulties of college students may be omitted with non-collegiate groups. the heavy obligation of the author to a number of writers will be apparent to one familiar with the literature of theoretical and educational psychology. no attempt is made to render specific acknowledgments, but special mention should be made of the large draughts made upon the two books by professor stiles which treat so helpfully of the bodily relations of the student. these books contain so much good sense and scientific information that they should receive a prominent place among the books recommended to students. thanks are due to professor edgar james swift and charles scribner's sons for permission to use a figure from "mind in the making"; and to j.b. lippincott company for adaptation of cuts from villiger's "brain and spinal cord." the author gratefully acknowledges helpful suggestions from professors james r. angell, charles h. judd and c. judson herrick, who have read the greater part of the manuscript and have commented upon it to its betterment. the obligation refers, however, not only to the immediate preparation of this work but also to the encouragement which, for several years, the author has received from these scientists, first as student, later as colleague. the author. chicago, september , . contents chapter i. intellectual problems of the college freshman number. variety. lecture method. note taking. amount of library work. high quality demanded. necessity for making schedule. a college course consists in the formation of habits. requires active effort on part of student. importance of good form. ii. note taking uses of notes. lecture notes--avoid verbatim reports. maintain attitude of mental activity. seek outline chiefly. use notes in preparing next lesson. reading notes--summarize rather than copy. read with questions in mind. how to read. how to make bibliographies. laboratory notes--content. form. miscellaneous hints. iii. brain action during study the organ of mind. gross structure. microscopic structure. the neurone. the nervous impulse. the synapse. properties of nervous tissue --impressibility, conductivity, modifiability. pathways used in study--sensory, motor, association. study is a process of making pathways in brain. iv. formation of study-habits definition of habit. examples. inevitableness of habits in brain and nervous system. how to insure useful habits--choose what shall enter; choose mode of entrance; choose mode of egress; go slowly at first; observe four maxims. advantages and disadvantages of habit. ethical consequences. v. active imagination nature of the image. its use in imagination. necessity for number, variety, sharpness. source of "imaginative" productions. method of developing active imaginative powers: cultivate images in great number, variety, sharpness; actively combine the elements of past experience. vi. first aids to memory--impression four phases. conditions of impression: care, clearness, choice of favorable sense avenue, repetition, overlearning, primacy, distribution of repetitions, (inferences bearing upon theme-writing), "whole" vs. "part" method, "rote" vs. "logical" method, intention. vii. second aids to memory--retention, recall and recognition retention. recall. recall contrasted with impression. practise recall in impression. recognition. advantages of review. memory works according to law. possibility of improvement. connection with other mental processes. viii. concentration of attention importance in mental life. analysis of concrete attentive state. cross-section of mental stream. focal object, clear; marginal objects, dim. fluctuation. ease of concentration requires ( ) removal of all marginal distractions possible, ( ) ignoring others. conditions favorable for concentration. relation to other mental processes. ix. how we reason reasoning contrasted with simpler mental operations. illustrated by method of studying geometry. analysis of reasoning act: recognition of problem, efforts to solve it, solution. study in problems. requirements for effective reasoning: many ideas, accessible, clear. how to clarify ideas: define, classify. relation between habit and reasoning. summary. x. expression as an aid in study expression an inevitable accompaniment of nervous activity. extent of expressive movements. relation between ideas and expressive acts. ethical considerations. methods of expression chiefly used in study: speech, writing, drawing. effects of expression: ( ) on brain, ( ) on ideas. hints on development of freedom of expression. xi. how to become interested in a subject nature of interest. intellectual interests gained through experience. many possible fields of interest. laws of interest. xii. the plateau of despond measurement of mental progress. analysis of the "learning curve." irregularity. rapid progress at beginning. the plateau. causes. remedies. xiii. mental second-wind description: ( ) physical, ( ) mental. hidden sources of energy. retarding effect of fatigue. analysis of fatigue. how to reduce fatigue in study. xiv. examinations purposes. continuous effort and cramming. effective methods of reviewing. immediate preparation for an examination conduct in examination-room. attitude of activity. attitude of confidence. xv. bodily conditions fob effective study food: quantity, quality, surroundings. sleep: amount, conditions, avoidance of insomnia. exercise: regularity, emphasis. suggestions fob further reading index how to use your mind chapter i intellectual problems of the college freshman in entering upon a college course you are taking a step that may completely revolutionize your life. you are facing new situations vastly different from any you have previously met. they are also of great variety, such as finding a place to eat and sleep, regulating your own finances, inaugurating a new social life, forming new friendships, and developing in body and mind. the problems connected with mental development will engage your chief attention. you are now going to use your mind more actively than ever before and should survey some of the intellectual difficulties before plunging into the fight. perhaps the first difficulty you will encounter is the substitution of the lecture for the class recitation to which you were accustomed in high school. this substitution requires that you develop a new technic of learning, for the mental processes involved in an oral recitation are different from those used in listening to a lecture. the lecture system implies that the lecturer has a fund of knowledge about a certain field and has organized this knowledge in a form that is not duplicated in the literature of the subject. the manner of presentation, then, is unique and is the only means of securing the knowledge in just that form. as soon as the words have left the mouth of the lecturer they cease to be accessible to you. such conditions require a unique mental attitude and unique mental habits. you will be obliged, in the first place, to maintain sustained attention over long periods of time. the situation is not like that in reading, in which a temporary lapse of attention may be remedied by turning back and rereading. in listening to a lecture, you are obliged to catch the words "on the fly." accordingly you must develop new habits of paying attention. you will also need to develop a new technic for memorizing, especially for memorizing things heard. as a partial aid in this, and also for purposes of organizing material received in lectures, you will need to develop ability to take notes. this is a process with which you have heretofore had little to do. it is a most important phase of college life, however, and will repay earnest study. another characteristic of college study is the vast amount of reading required. instead of using a single text-book for each course, you may use several. they may cover great historical periods and represent the ideas of many men. in view of the amount of reading assigned, you will also be obliged to learn to read faster. no longer will you have time to dawdle sleepily through the pages of easy texts; you will have to cover perhaps fifty or a hundred pages of knotty reading every day. accordingly you must learn to handle books expeditiously and to comprehend quickly. in fact, economy must be your watchword throughout. a german lesson in high school may cover thirty or forty lines a day, requiring an hour's preparation. a german assignment in college, however, may cover four or five or a dozen pages, requiring hard work for two or three hours. you should be warned also that college demands not only a greater quantity but also a higher quality of work. when you were a high school student the world expected only a high school student's accomplishments of you. now you are a college student, however, and your intellectual responsibilities have increased. the world regards you now as a person of considerable scholastic attainment and expects more of you than before. in academic terms this means that in order to attain a grade of in college you will have to work much harder than you did for that grade in high school, for here you have not only more difficult subject-matter, but also keener competition for the first place. in high school you may have been the brightest student in your class. in college, however, you encounter the brightest students from many schools. if your merits are going to stand out prominently, therefore, you must work much harder. your work from now on must be of better quality. not the least of the perplexities of your life as a college student will arise from the fact that no daily schedule is arranged for you. the only time definitely assigned for your work is the fifteen hours a week, more or less, spent in the class-room. the rest of your schedule must be arranged by yourself. this is a real task and will require care and thought if your work is to be done with greatest economy of time and effort. this brief survey completes the catalogue of problems of mental development that will vex you most in adjusting your methods of study to college conditions. in order to make this adjustment you will be obliged to form a number of new habits. indeed, as you become more and more expert as a student, you will see that the whole process resolves itself into one of habit-formation, for while a college education has two phases--the acquisition of facts and the formation of habits--it is the latter which is the more important. many of the facts that you learn will be forgotten; many will be outlawed by time; but the habits of study you form will be permanent possessions. they will consist of such things as methods of grasping facts, methods of reasoning about facts, and of concentrating attention. in acquiring these habits you must have some material upon which you may concentrate your attention, and it will be supplied by the subjects of the curriculum. you will be asked, for instance, to write innumerable themes in courses in english composition; not for the purpose of enriching the world's literature, nor for the delectation of your english instructor, but for the sake of helping you to form habits of forceful expression. you will be asked to enter the laboratory and perform numerous experiments, not to discover hitherto unknown facts, but to obtain practice in scientific procedure and to learn how to seek knowledge by yourself. the curriculum and the faculty are the means, but you yourself are the agent in the educational process. no matter how good the curriculum or how renowned the faculty, you cannot be educated without the most vigorous efforts on your part. banish the thought that you are here to have knowledge "pumped into" you. to acquire an education you must establish and maintain not a passive attitude but an active attitude. when you go to the gymnasium to build up a good physique, the physical director does not tell you to hold yourself limp and passive while he pumps your arms and legs up and down. rather he urges you to put forth effort, to exert yourself until you are tired. only by so doing can you develop physical power. this principle holds true of mental development. learning is not a process of passive "soaking-in." it is a matter of vigorous effort, and the harder you work the more powerful you become. in securing a college education you are your own master. in the development of physical prowess you are well aware of the importance of doing everything in "good form." in such sports as swimming and hurdling, speed and grace depend primarily upon it. the same principle holds true in the development of the mind. the most serviceable mind is that which accomplishes results in the shortest time and with least waste motion. take every precaution, therefore, to rid yourself of all superfluous and impeding methods. strive for the development of good form in study. especially is this necessary at the start. now is the time when you are laying the foundations for your mental achievements in college. keep a sharp lookout, then, at every point, to see that you build into the foundation only those materials and that workmanship which will support a masterly structure. readings and exercises note.--numbers in parentheses refer to complete citations in bibliography at end of book. readings: fulton ( ) lockwood ( ) exercise . list concrete problems that have newly come to you since your arrival upon the campus. exercise . list in order the difficulties that confront you in preparing your daily lessons. exercise . prepare a work schedule similar to that provided by the form in chart i. specify the subject with which you will be occupied at each period. exercise . try to devise some way of registering the effectiveness with which you carry out your schedule. suggestions are contained in the summary: disposition of ( ) as planned; ( ) as spent. to divide the number of hours wasted by will give a partial "index of efficiency." chapter ii note-taking most educated people find occasion, at some time or other, to take notes. although this is especially true of college students, they have little success, as any college instructor will testify. students, as a rule, do not realize that there is any skill involved in taking notes. not until examination time arrives and they try vainly to labor through a maze of scribbling, do they realize that there must be some system in note-taking. a careful examination of note-taking shows that there are rules or principles, which, when followed, have much to do with increasing ability in study. one criterion that should guide in the preparation of notes is the use to which they will be put. if this is kept in mind, many blunders will be saved. notes may be used in three ways: as material for directing each day's study, for cramming, and for permanent, professional use. thus a note-book may be a thing of far-reaching value. notes you take now as a student may be valuable years hence in professional life. recognition of this will help you in the preparation of your notes and will determine many times how they should be prepared. the chief situations in college which require note-taking are lectures, library reading and laboratory work. accordingly the subject will be considered under these three heads. lecture notes.--when taking notes on a lecture, there are two extremes that present themselves, to take exceedingly full notes or to take almost no notes. one can err in either direction. true, on first thought, entire stenographic reports of lectures appear desirable, but second thought will show that they may be dispensed with, not only without loss, but with much gain. the most obvious objection is that too much time would be consumed in transcribing short-hand notes. another is that much of the material in a lecture is undesirable for permanent possession. the instructor repeats much for the sake of emphasis; he multiplies illustrations, not important in themselves, but important for the sake of stressing his point. you do not need these illustrations in written form, however, for once the point is made you rarely need to depend upon the illustrations for its retention. a still more cogent objection is that if you occupy your attention with the task of copying the lecture verbatim, you do not have time to think, but become merely an automatic recording machine. experienced stenographers say that they form the habit of recording so automatically that they fail utterly to comprehend the meaning of what is said. you as a student cannot afford to have your attention so distracted from the meaning of the lecture, therefore reduce your classroom writing to a minimum. probably the chief reason why students are so eager to secure full lecture notes is that they fear to trust their memory. such fears should be put at rest, for your mind will retain facts if you pay close attention and make logical associations during the time of impression. keep your mind free, then, to work upon the subject-matter of the lecture. debate mentally with the speaker. question his statements, comparing them with your own experience or with the results of your study. ask yourself frequently, "is that true?" the essential thing is to maintain an attitude of mental activity, and to avoid anything that will reduce this and make you passive. do not think of yourself as a vat into which the instructor pumps knowledge. regard yourself rather as an active force, quick to perceive and to comprehend meaning, deliberate in acceptance and firm in retention. after observing the stress laid, throughout this book, upon the necessity for logical associations, you will readily see that the key-note to note-taking is, let your notes represent the logical progression of thought in the lecture. strive above all else to secure the skeleton--the framework upon which the lecture is hung. a lecture is a logical structure, and the form in which it is presented is the outline. this outline, then, is your chief concern. in the case of some lectures it is an easy matter. the lecturer may place the outline in your hands beforehand, may present it on the black-board, or may give it orally. some lecturers, too, present their material in such clear-cut divisions that the outline is easily followed. others, however, are very difficult to follow in this regard. in arranging an outline you will find it wise to adopt some device by which the parts will stand out prominently, and the progression of thought will be indicated with proper subordination of titles. adopt some system at the beginning of your college course, and use it in all your notes. the system here given may serve as a model, using first the roman numerals, then capitals, then arabic numerals: i. ii. a. b. . . a. b. ( ) ( ) (a) (b) in concluding this discussion of lecture notes, you should be urged to make good use of your notes after they are taken. first, glance over them as soon as possible after the lecture. inasmuch as they will then be fresh in your mind, you will be able to recall almost the entire lecture; you will also be able to supply missing parts from memory. some students make it a rule to reduce all class-notes to typewritten form soon after the lecture. this is an excellent practice, but is rather expensive in time. in addition to this after-class review, you should make a second review of your notes as the first step in the preparation of the next day's lesson. this will connect up the lessons with each other and will make the course a unified whole instead of a series of disconnected parts. too often a course exists in a student's mind as a series of separate discussions and he sees only the horizon of a single day. this condition might be represented by a series of disconnected links: o o o o o a summary of each day's lesson, however, preceding the preparation for the next day, forges new links and welds them all together into an unbroken chain: oooooooooo a method that has been found helpful is to use a double-page system of notetaking, using the left-hand page for the bare outline, with largest divisions, and the right-hand page for the details. this device makes the note-book readily available for hasty review or for more extended study. reading notes.--the question of full or scanty notes arises in reading notes as in lecture notes. in general, your notes should represent a summary, in your own words, of the author's discussion, not a duplication of it. students sometimes acquire the habit of reading single sentences at a time, then of writing them down, thinking that by making an exact copy of the book, they are playing safe. this is a pernicious practice; it spoils continuity of thought and application. furthermore, isolated sentences mean little, and fail grossly to represent the real thought of the author. a better way is to read through an entire paragraph or section, then close the book and reproduce in your own words what you have read. next, take your summary and compare with the original text to see that you have really grasped the point. this procedure will be beneficial in several ways. it will encourage continuous concentration of attention to an entire argument; it will help you to preserve relative emphasis of parts; it will lead you to regard thought and not words. (you are undoubtedly familiar with the state of mind wherein you find yourself reading merely words and not following the thought.) lastly, material studied in this way is remembered longer than material read scrappily. in short, such a method of reading makes not only for good memory, but for good mental habits of all kinds. in all your reading, hold to the conception of yourself as a thinker, not a sponge. remember, you do not need to accept unqualifiedly everything you read. a worthy ideal for every student to follow is expressed in the motto carved on the wall of the great reading-room of the harper memorial library at the university of chicago: "read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider." ibsen bluntly states the same thought: "don't read to swallow; read to choose, for 'tis but to see what one has use for." ask yourself, when beginning a printed discussion, what am i looking for? what is the author going to talk about? often this will be indicated in topical headings. keep it in the background of your mind while reading, and search for the answer. then, when you have read the necessary portion, close the book and summarize, to see if the author furnished what you sought. in short, always read for a purpose. formulate problems and seek their solutions. in this way will there be direction in your reading and your thought. this discussion of reading notes has turned into an essay on "how to read," and you must be convinced by this time that there is much to learn in this respect, so much that we may profitably spend more time in discussing it. every book you take up should be opened with some preliminary ceremony. this does not refer to the physical operation of opening a new book, but to the mental operation. in general, take the following steps: . observe the title. see exactly what field the book attempts to cover. . observe the author's name. if you are to use his book frequently, discover his position in the field. remember, you are going to accept him as authority, and you should know his status. you may be told this on the title-page, or you may have to consult who's who, or the biographical dictionary. . glance over the preface. under some circumstances you should read it carefully. if you are going to refer to the book very often, make friends with the author; let him introduce himself to you; this he will do in the preface. observe the date of publication, also, in order to get an idea as to the recency of the material. . glance over the table of contents. if you are very familiar with the field, and the table of contents is outlined in detail, you might advantageously study it and dispense with reading the book. on the other hand, if you are going to consult the book only briefly, you might find it necessary to study the table of contents in order to see the relation of the part you read to the entire work. . use the index intelligently; it may save you much time. you will have much to do throughout your college course with the making of bibliographies, that is, with the compilation of lists of books bearing upon special topics. you may have bibliographies given you in some of your courses, or you may be asked to compile your own. under all circumstances, prepare them with the greatest care. be scrupulous in giving references. there is a standard form for referring to books and periodicals, as follows: c.r. henderson, industrial insurance ( d ed.; chicago: the university of chicago press, ), p. . s.i. curtis, "the place of sacrifice," biblical world, vol. xxi ( ), p. _ff_. laboratory notes.--the form for laboratory notes varies with the science and is usually prescribed by the instructor. reports of experiments are usually written up in the order: object, apparatus, method, results, conclusions. when detailed instructions are given by the instructor, follow them accurately. pay special attention to neatness. instructors say that the greatest fault with laboratory note-books is lack of neatness. this reacts upon the instructor, causing him much trouble in correcting the note-book. the resulting annoyance frequently prejudices him, against his will, against the student. it is safe to assert that you will materially increase your chances of a good grade in a laboratory course by the preparation of a neat note-book. the key-note of the twentieth century is economy, the tendency in all lines being toward the elimination of waste. college students should adopt this aim in the regulation of their study affairs, and there is much opportunity for applying it in note-taking. so far, the discussion has had to do with the _content_ of the note-book, but _its form_ is equally important. much may be done by utilization of mechanical devices to save time and energy. first, write in ink. pencil marks blur badly and become illegible in a few months. remember, you may be using the notebook twenty years hence, therefore make it durable. second, write plainly. this injunction ought to be superfluous, for common sense tells us that writing which is illegible cannot be read even by the writer, once it has "grown cold." third, take care in forming sentences. do not make your notes consist simply of separate, scrappy jottings. true, it is difficult, under stress, to form complete sentences. the great temptation is to jot down a word here and there and trust to luck or an indulgent memory to supply the context at some later time. a little experience, however, will quickly demonstrate the futility of such hopes; therefore strive to form sensible phrases, and to make the parts of the outline cohere. apply the principles of english composition to the preparation of your note-book. a fourth question concerns size and shape of the note-book. these features depend partly upon the nature of the course and partly upon individual taste. it is often convenient and practicable to keep the notes for all courses in a single note-book. men find it advantageous to use a small note-book of a size that can be carried in the coat pocket and studied at odd moments. a fifth question of a mechanical nature is, which is preferable, bound or loose-leaf note-books? generally the latter will be found more desirable. leaves are easily inserted and the sections are easily filed on completion of a course. it goes without saying that the manner in which notes, are to be taken will be determined by many factors, such as the nature of individual courses, the wishes of instructors, personal tastes and habits. nevertheless, there are certain principles and practices which are adaptable to nearly all conditions, and it is these that we have discussed. remember, note-taking is one of the habits you are to form in college. see that the habit is started rightly. adopt a good plan at the start and adhere to it. you may be encouraged, too, with the thought that facility in note-taking will come with practice. note-taking is an art and as you practise you will develop skill. we have noted some of the most obvious and immediate benefits derived from well-prepared notes, consisting of economy of time, ease of review, ease of permanent retention. there are other benefits, however, which, though less obvious, are of far greater importance. these are the permanent effects upon the mind. habits of correct thinking are the chief result of correct note-taking. as you develop in this particular ability, you will find corresponding improvement in your ability to comprehend and assimilate ideas, to retain and reproduce facts, and to reason with thoroughness and independence. readings and exercises readings: adams ( ) chapter viii. dearborn ( ) chapter ii. kerfoot ( ) seward ( ) exercise . contrast the taking of notes from reading and from lectures. exercise . make an outline of this chapter. exercise . make an outline of some lecture. chapter iii brain action during study though most people understand more or less vaguely that the brain acts in some way during study, exact knowledge of the nature of this action is not general. as you will be greatly assisted in understanding mental processes by such knowledge, we shall briefly examine the brain and its connections. it will be manifestly impossible to inquire into its nature very minutely, but by means of a description you will be able to secure some conception of it and thus will be able better to control the mental processes which it underlies. to the naked eye the brain is a large jelly-like mass enclosed in a bony covering, about one-fourth of an inch thick, called the skull. inside the skull it is protected by a thick membrane. at its base emerges the spinal cord, a long strand of nerve fibers extending down the spine. for most of its length, the cord is about as large around as your little finger, but it tapers at the lower end. from it at right angles throughout its length branch out thirty-one pairs of fibrous nerves which radiate to all parts of the body. the brain and spinal cord, with all its ramifications, are known as the nervous system. you see now that, though we started with the statement that the mind is intimately connected with the brain, we must now enlarge our statement and say it is connected with the entire nervous system. it is therefore to the nervous system that we must turn our attention. although to the naked eye the nervous system is apparently made up of a number of different kinds of material, still we see, when we turn our microscopes upon it, that its parts are structurally the same. reduced to lowest terms, the nervous system is found to be composed of minute units of structure called nerve-cells or neurones. each of these looks like a string frayed out at both ends, with a bulge somewhere along its length. the nervous system is made up of millions of these little cells packed together in various combinations and distributed throughout the body. some of the neurones are as long as three feet; others measure but a fraction of an inch in length. we do not know exactly how the mind, that part of us which feels, reasons and wills, is connected with this mass of cells called the nervous system. we do know, however, that every time anything occurs in the mind, there is a change in some part of the nervous system. applying this fact to study, it is obvious that when you are performing any of the operations of study, memorizing foreign vocabularies, making arithmetical calculations, reasoning out problems in geometry, you are making changes in your nervous system. the question before us, then, is, what is the nature of these changes? according to present knowledge, the action of the nervous system is best conceived as a form of chemical change that spreads among the nerve-cells. we call this commotion the nervous current. it is very rapid, moving faster than one hundred feet a second, and runs along the cells in much the same way as a "spark runs along a train of gunpowder." it is important to note that neurones never act singly; they always act in groups, the nervous current passing from neurone to neurone. it is thought that the most important changes in the nervous system do not occur within the individual neurones, but at the points where they join with each other. this point of connection is called the synapse and although we do not understand its exact nature, it may well be pictured as a valve that governs the passage of the nervous current from neurone to neurone. at time of birth, most of the valves are closed. only a few are open, mainly those connected with the vegetative processes such as breathing and digestion. but as the individual is played upon by the objects of the environment, the valves open to the passage of the nervous current. with increased use they become more and more permeable, and thus learning is the process of making easier the passage of the nervous current from one neurone to another. we shall secure further light upon the action of the nervous system if we examine some of the properties belonging to nerve-cells. the first one is _impressibility_. nerve-cells are very sensitive to impressions from the outside. if you have ever had the dentist touch an exposed nerve, you know how extreme this sensitivity is. naturally such a property is very important in education, for had we not the power to receive impressions from the outside world we should not be able to acquire knowledge. we should not even be able to perceive danger and remove ourselves from harm. "if we compare a man's body to a building, calling the steel frame-work his skeleton and the furnace and power station his digestive organs and lungs, the nervous system would include, with other things, the thermometers, heat regulators, electric buttons, door-bells, valve-openers,--the parts of the building, in short, which are specifically designed to respond to influences of the environment." the second property of nerve-cells which is important in study is _conductivity_. as soon as a neurone is stimulated at one end, it communicates its excitement, by means of the nervous current, to the next neurone or to neighboring neurones. just as an electric current might pass along one wire, thence to another, and along it to a third, so the nervous current passes from neurone to neurone. as might be expected, the two functions of impressibility and conductivity are aided by such an arrangement of the nerve-cells that the nervous current may pass over definitely laid pathways. these systems of pathways will be described in a later paragraph. the third property of nerve-cells which is important in study is _modifiability_. that is, impressions made upon the nerve-cells are retained. most living tissue is modifiable to some extent. the features of the face are modifiable, and if one habitually assumes a peevish expression, it becomes, after a time, permanently fixed. the nervous system, however, possesses the power of modifiability to a marked degree, even a single impression sufficing to make striking modification. this is very important in study, being the basis for the retentive powers of the mind. having examined the action of the nervous system in its simplicity, we have now to examine the ways in which the parts of the nervous system are combined. we shall be helped if we keep to the conception of it as an aggregation of systems or groups of pathways. some of these we shall attempt to trace out. beginning with those at the outermost parts of the body, we find them located in the sense-organs, not only within the traditional five, but also within the muscles, tendons, joints, and internal organs of the body such as the heart, and digestive organs. in all these places we find ends of neurones which converge at the spinal cord and travel to the brain. they are called sensory neurones and their function is to carry messages inward to the brain. thus, the brain represents, in great part, a central receiving station for impressions from the outside world. the nerve-cells carrying messages from the various parts of the body terminate in particular areas. thus an area in the back part of the brain receives messages from the eyes; another area near the top of the brain receives messages from the skin. these areas are quite clearly marked out and may be studied in detail by means of the accompanying diagram. there is another large group of nerve-cells which, when traced out, are found to have one terminal in the brain and the other in the muscles throughout the body. the area in the brain, where these neurones emerge, is near the top of the brain in the area marked _motor_ on the diagram. from here the fibers travel down through the spinal cord and out to the muscles. the nerve-cells in this group are called motor neurones and their function is to carry messages from the brain out to the muscles, for a muscle ordinarily does not act without a nervous current to set it off. so far we have seen that the brain has the two functions of receiving impressions from the sense-organs and of sending out orders to the muscles. there is a further mechanism that must now be described. when messages are received in the sensory areas, it is necessary that there be some means within the brain of transmitting them over to the motor area so that they may be acted upon. such an arrangement is provided by another group of nerve-cells in the brain, having as their function the transmission of the nervous current from one area to another. they are called association neurones and transmit the nervous current from sensory areas to motor areas or from one sensory area to another. for example, suppose you see a brick falling from above and you dodge quickly back. the neural action accompanying this occurrence consists of an impression upon the nerve-cells in the eye, the conduction of the nervous current back to the visual area of the brain, the transmission of the current over association neurones to the motor area, then its transmission over the motor neurones, down the spinal cord, to the muscles that enable you to dodge the missile. the association neurones have the further function of connecting one sensory area in the brain with another. for example, when you see, smell, taste and touch an orange, the corresponding areas in the brain act in conjunction and are associated by means of the association neurones connecting them. the association neurones play a large part in the securing and organizing of knowledge. they are very important in study, for all learning consists in building up associations. from the foregoing description we see that the nervous system consists merely of a mechanism for the reception and transmission of incoming messages and their transformation into outgoing messages which produce movement. the brain is the center where such transformations are made, being a sort of central switchboard which permits the sense-organs to come into communication with muscles. it is also the instrument by means of which the impressions from the various senses can be united and experience can be unified. the brain serves further as the medium whereby impressions once made can be retained. that is, it is the great organ of memory. hence we see that it is to this organ we must look for the performance of the activities necessary to study. everything that enters it produces some modification within it. education consists in a process of undergoing a selected group of experiences of such a nature as to leave beneficial results in the brain. by means of the changes made there, the individual is able better to adjust himself to new situations. for when the individual enters the world, he is not prepared to meet many situations; only a few of the neural connections are made and he is able to perform only a meagre number of simple acts, such as breathing, crying, digestion. the pathways for complex acts, such as speaking english or french, or writing, are not formed at birth but must be built up within the life-time of the individual. it is the process of building them up that we call education. this process is a physical feat involving the production of changes in physical material in the brain. study involves the overcoming of resistance in the nervous system. that is why it is so hard. in your early school-days, when you set about laboriously learning the multiplication table, your unwilling protests were wrung because you were being compelled to force the nervous current through new pathways, and to overcome the inertia of physical matter. today, when you begin a train of reasoning, the task is difficult because you are opening hitherto untravelled pathways. there is a comforting thought, however, which is derived from the factor of modifiability, in that with each succeeding repetition, the task becomes easier, because the path becomes worn smoothly and the nervous current seeks it of its own accord; in other words, each act and each thought tends to become habitualized. education is then a process of forming habits, and the rest of the book will be devoted to the description and discussion of habits which a student should form. reading and exercise reading: herrick ( ) exercise . draw a picture of the brain, showing roughly what takes place there (a) when you read a book, ( ) listen to a lecture, (c) take notes. chapter iv formation of study-habits as already intimated, this book adopts the view that education is a process of forming habits in the brain. in the formation of habits there are several principles that must be observed. accordingly we shall devote a chapter to the consideration of habits in general before discussing the specific habits involved in various kinds of study. habit may be defined roughly as the tendency to act time after time in the same way. thus defined, you see that the force of habit extends throughout the entire universe. it is a habit for the earth to revolve on its axis once every twenty-four hours and to encircle the sun once every year. when a pencil falls from your hand it has a habit of dropping to the floor. a piece of paper once folded tends to crease in the same place. these are examples of the force of habit in nonliving matter. living matter shows its power even more clearly. if you assume a petulant expression for some time, it gets fixed and the expression becomes habitual. the hair may be trained to lie this way or that. these are examples of habit in living tissue. but there is one particular form of living tissue which is most susceptible to habit; that is nerve tissue. let us review briefly the facts which underlie this characteristic. in nerve tissue, impressibility, conductivity and modifiability are developed to a marked degree. the nerve-cells in the sense organs are impressed by stimulations from the outside world. the nervous current thus generated is conducted over long nerve fibers, through the spinal cord to the brain where it is received and we experience a sensation. thence it pushes on, over association neurones in the brain to motor neurones, over which it passes down the spinal cord again to muscles, and ends in some movement. in the pathway which it traverses it leaves its impression, and, thereafter, when the first neurone is excited, the nervous current tends to take the same pathway and to end in the same movement. it should be emphasized that the nervous current, once started, always tends to seek outlet in movement. this is an extremely important feature of neural action, and, as will be shown in another chapter, is a vital factor in study. movement may be started by the stimulation of a sense organ or by an idea. in the latter case it starts from regions in the brain without the immediately preceding stimulation of a sense organ. howsoever it starts you may be sure that it seeks a way out, and prefers pathways already traversed. hence you see you are bound to have habits. they will develop whether you wish them or not. already you are "a bundle of habits"; they manifest themselves in two ways--as habits of action and habits of thought. you illustrate the first every time you tie your shoes or sign your name. to illustrate the second, i need only ask you to supply the end of this sentence: columbus discovered america in----. speech reveals many of these habits of thought. certain phrases persist in the mind as habits so that when the phrase is once begun, you proceed habitually with the rest of it. when some one starts "in spite," your mind goes on to think "of"; "more or" calls up "less." when i ask you what word is called up by "black," you reply "white" according to the principles of mental habit. your mind is arranged in such habitual patterns, and from these examples you readily see that a large part of what you do and think during the course of twenty-four hours is habitual. twenty years hence you will be even more bound by this overpowering despot. our acts our angels are, or good, or ill, our constant shadows that walk with us still. since you cannot avoid forming habits, how important it is that you seek to form those that are useful and desirable. in acquiring them, there are several general principles deducible from the facts of nervous action. the first is: guard the pathways leading to the brain. nerve tissue is impressible and everything that touches it leaves an ineradicable trace. you can control your habits to some extent, then, by observing caution in permitting things to impress you. many unfortunate habits of study arise from neglect of this. the habit of using a "pony," for example, arises when one permits oneself to depend upon a group of english words in translating from a foreign language. nerve pathways should then be guarded with respect to _what_ enters. they should also be guarded with respect to the _way_ things enter. remember, as the first pathway is cut, subsequent nervous currents will be directed. consequently if you make a wrong pathway, you will have trouble undoing it. another maxim which will obviously prevent undesirable pathways is, go slowly at first. this is an important principle in all learning. if, when trying to learn the date , you carelessly impress it first as , you are likely to have trouble ever after in remembering which is right, or . as you value your intellectual salvation, then, go slowly in making the first impression and be sure it is right. the next rule is: guard the exits of the nervous currents. that is, watch the movements you make in response to impressions and ideas. this is necessary because the nervous current pushes on past obstructions, through areas in the brain, until it ends in some form of movement, and in finding the way out, it seeks those pathways that have been most frequently travelled. in study, it usually takes the form of movements of speech or writing. you will need to guard this part of the process just as you did the incoming pathway you must see that the movement is made which you wish to build into a habit. in learning the pronunciation of a foreign word, for example, see that your first pronunciation of it is absolutely right. when learning to typewrite see that you always hit the right key during the early trials. the point of exit of a nervous current is the point also where precautions are to be taken in developing good form. the path should be the shortest possible, involving only those muscles that are absolutely necessary. this makes for economy of effort. the third general principle to be kept in mind is that habits are most easily formed in youth, for this is the period when nerve tissue is most easily impressed and modified. with respect to habit formation, then, you see that youth is the time when emphasis should be laid upon the formation of as many useful habits as possible. the world recognizes this to some extent and society is so organized that the youth of the race are given leisure and protection so that they may form useful habits. the world asks nothing of you during the next four years except that you develop yourself and form useful habits which will enable you in later life to take your place as a useful and stable member of society. in addition to the principles just discussed, there are a number of other maxims which have been laid down as guides in the formation of new habits. the first is, _make an assertion of will_. vow to yourself that you will form the habit, and keep that resolve ever before you. the second maxim is, _make an emphatic start._ surround yourself with every aid possible. make it easy at first to perform the act and difficult not to perform it. for example, if you desire to form the habit of arising at six every morning, surround yourself with a number of aids. buy an alarm clock, and tell some one of your decision. such efforts at the start "will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all." man has discovered the value of such devices during the course of his long history, and has evolved customs accordingly. when men decide to swear off smoking, they choose the opening of a new year when many other new things are being started; they make solemn promises to themselves, to each other, and finally to their friends. such customs are precautions which help to bolster up the determination at the time when extraordinary effort and determination are required. in forming the habits incidental to college life, take pains from the start to surround yourself with as many aids as possible. this will not constitute a confession of weakness. it is only a wise and natural precaution which the whole experience of the race has justified. the third maxim is, _never permit an exception to occur_. suppose you have a habit of saying "aint" which you wish to replace with a habit of saying "isn't." if the habit is deeply rooted, you have worn a pathway in the brain to a considerable depth, represented in the accompanying diagram by the line _a x b_. a | x / \ b c let us suppose that you have already started the new habit, and have said the correct word ten times. that means you have worn another pathway _a x c_ to a considerable depth. during all this time, however, the old pathway is still open and at the slightest provocation will attract the nervous current. your task is to deepen the new path so that the nervous current will flow into it instead of the old. now suppose you make an exception on some occasion and allow the nervous current to travel over the old path. this unfortunate exception breaks down the bridge which you had constructed at _x_ from _a_ to _c_. but this is not the only result. the nervous current, as it revisits the old path, deepens it more than it was before, so the next time a similar situation arises, the current seeks the old path with much greater readiness than before, and vastly more effort is required to overcome it. some one has likened the effect of these exceptions to that produced when one drops a ball of string that is partially wound. by a single slip, more is undone than can be accomplished in a dozen windings. the fourth maxim is, _seize every opportunity to act upon your resolution_. the reason for this will be understood better if you keep in mind the fact, stated before, that nervous currents once started, whether from a sense-organ or from a brain-center, always tend to seek egress in movement. these outgoing nervous currents leave an imprint upon the modifiable nerve tissues as inevitably as do incoming impressions. therefore, if you wish your resolves to be firmly fixed, you should act upon them speedily and often. "it is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing _motor effects_, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain." "no matter how full a reservoir of _maxims_ one may possess, and no matter how good one's _sentiments_ may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to _act_, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better." particularly at time of emotional excitement one makes resolves that are very good, and a glow of fine feeling is present. beware that these resolves do not evaporate in mere feeling. they should be crystallized in some form of action as soon as possible. "let the expression be the least thing in the world--speaking genially to one's grandmother, or giving up one's seat in a ... car, if nothing more heroic offers--but let it not fail to take place." strictly speaking you have not really completed a resolve until you have acted upon it. you may determine to go without lunch, but you have not consummated that resolve until you have permitted it to express itself by carrying you past the door of the dining-room. that is the crucial test which determines the strength of your resolve. many repetitions will be required before a pathway is worn deep enough to be settled. seize the very earliest opportunity to begin grooving it out, and seize every other opportunity for deepening it. after this view of the place in your life occupied by habit, you readily see its far-reaching possibilities for welfare of body and mind. its most obvious, because most annoying, effects are on the side of its disadvantages. bad habits secure a grip upon us that we are sometimes powerless to shake off. true, this ineradicableness need have no terrors if we have formed good habits. indeed, as will be pointed out in the next paragraph, habit may be a great asset. nevertheless, it may work positive harm, or at best, may lead to stagnation. the fixedness of habit tends to make us move in ruts unless we exert continuous effort to learn new things. if we permit ourselves to move in old grooves we cease to progress and become "old fogy." but the advantages of habit far outweigh its disadvantages. habit helps the individual to be consistent and helps people to know what to expect from one. it helps society to be stable, to incorporate within itself modes of action conducive to the common good. for example, the respect which we all have for the property of others is a habit, and is so firmly intrenched that we should find ourselves unable to steal if we wished to. habit is thus a very desirable asset and is truly called the "enormous fly-wheel of society." a second advantage of habit is that it makes for accuracy. acts that have become habitualized are performed more accurately than those not habitualized. movements such as those made in typewriting and piano-playing, when measured in the psychological laboratory, are found to copy each other with extreme fidelity. the human body is a machine which may be adjusted to a high degree of nicety, and habit is the mechanism by which this adjustment is made. a third advantage is that a stock of habits makes life easier. "there is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all." have you ever reflected how miserable you would be and what a task living would be if you had to learn to write anew every morning when you go to class; or if you had to relearn how to tie your necktie every day? the burden of living would be intolerable. the last advantage to be discerned in habit is economy. habitual acts do not have to be actively directed by consciousness. while they are being performed, consciousness may be otherwise engaged. "the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." while you are brushing your hair or tying your shoes, your mind may be engaged in memorizing poetry or calculating arithmetical problems. habit is thus a great economizer. the ethical consequences of habit are so striking that before leaving the subject we must give them acknowledgment. we can do no better than to turn to the statement by professor james, whose wise remarks upon the subject have not been improved upon: "the physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. the hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. the drunken rip van winkle, in jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'i won't count this time!' well! he may not count it and a kind heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering it, and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. of course this has its good side as well as its bad one. as we become permanent drunkards by so many drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific, spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. but let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. if he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. he can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he has singled out. silently, between all the details of his business, the _power of judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. young people should know the truth of this in advance. the ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faintheartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together." exercise exercise . point out an undesirable habit that you are determined to eradicate. describe the desirable habit which you will adopt in its place. give the concrete steps you will take in forming the new habit. how long a time do you estimate will be required for the formation of the new habit? mark down the date and refer back to it when you have formed the habit, to see how accurately you estimated. chapter v active imagination a very large part of the mental life of a student consists in the manipulation of images. by images we mean the revivals of things that have been impressed upon the senses. call to mind for the moment your house-number as it appears upon the door of your home. in so doing you mentally reinstate something which has been impressed upon your senses many times; and you see it almost as clearly as if it were actually before you. the mental thing thus revived is called an image. the word image is somewhat ill-chosen; for it usually signifies something connected with the eye, and implies that the stuff of mental images is entirely visual. the true fact of the matter is, we can image practically anything that we can sense. we may have tactual images of things touched; auditory images of things heard; gustatory images of things tasted; olfactory images of things smelled. how these behave in general and how they interact in study will engage our attention in this chapter. the most highly dramatic use of images is in connection with that mental process known as imagination. as we study the writings of jack london, poe, defoe, bunyan, we move in a realm almost wholly imaginary. and as we take a cross-section of our minds when thus engaged, we find them filled with images. furthermore, they are of great variety--images of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, touches, even of sensations from our own internal organs, such as the palpitations of the heart that accompany feelings of pride, indignation, remorse, exaltation. a further characteristic is that they are sharp, clean-cut, vivid. note in the balcony scene from romeo and juliet, the number, variety and vividness of the images: "but, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? it is the east, and juliet is the sun. arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. be not her maid, since she is envious; her vestal livery is but sick and green.... two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. what if her eyes were there, they in her head? the brightness in her cheek would shame those stars, as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy regions stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night. see, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! o, that i were a glove upon that hand, that i might touch that cheek!" we may conclude, then, that three of the desirable attributes of great works of the imagination are _number, variety_ and _vividness_ of mental images. one question that frequently arises concerning works of the imagination is, what is their source? superficial thinkers have loosely answered, "inspiration," implying, (according to the literal meaning of the word, "to breathe in"), that some mysterious external force (called by the ancients, "a muse") enters into the mind of the author with a special revelation. psychological analysis of these imaginative works shows that this explanation is untrue. that the bizarre and apparently novel products arise from the experiences of the author, revived in imagination and combined in new ways. the horrendous incidents depicted in dante's "divine comedy" never occurred within the lifetime experience of the author as such. their separate elements did, however, and furnished the basis for dante's clever combinations. the oft-heard saying that there is nothing new under the sun is psychologically true. in the light of this brief analysis of products of the imagination we are ready to develop a program which we may follow in cultivating an active imagination. recognizing that images have their source in sensory experience, we see that the first step to take is to seek a multitude of experiences. make intimate acquaintance with the objects of your environment. handle them, tear them apart, put them together, place them next to other objects, noting the likenesses and differences. thus you will acquire the stuff out of which images are made and will stock your mind with a number of images. then when you wish to convey your ideas you will have a number of terms in which to do it--one of the characteristics of a free-flowing imagination. the second characteristic we found to be variety. to secure this, seek a variety of sensational experiences. perceive the objects of your experience through several senses--touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste. by means of this variety in sensations you will secure corresponding variety in your images. to revive them easily sometimes requires practice. for it has been discovered that all people do not naturally call up images related to the various senses with equal ease. most people use visual and auditory images more freely than they do other kinds. in order to develop skill in evoking the others, practise recalling them. sit down for an hour of practice, as you would sit down for an hour of piano practice. try to recall the taste of raisins, english walnuts; the smell of hyacinths, of witch-hazel; the rough touch of an orange-skin. though you may at first have difficulty you will develop, with practice, a gratifying facility in recalling all varieties of images. the third characteristic which we observed in works of the imagination is vividness. to achieve this, pay close attention to the details of your sensory experiences. observe sharply the minute but characteristic items--the accent mark on _après_; the coarse stubby beard of the typical alley tough. stock your mind with a wealth of such detailed impressions. keep them alive by the kind of practice recommended in the preceding paragraph. then describe the objects of your experience in terms of these significant details. we discovered, in discussing the source of imaginative works, that the men whom we are accustomed to call imaginative geniuses do not have unique communication with heaven or with any external reservoir of ideas. instead, we found their wonder-evoking creations to be merely new combinations of old images. the true secret of their success is their industrious utilization of past experiences according to the program outlined above. they select certain elements from their experiences and combine them in novel ways. this is the explanation of their strange, beautiful and bizarre productions. this is what carlyle meant when he characterized genius as "the transcendent capacity for taking trouble" this is what hogarth meant when he said, "genius is nothing but labor and diligence." for concrete exemplification of this truth we need only turn to the autobiographies of great writers. in this passage from "john barleycorn," jack london describes his methods: "early and late i was at it--writing, typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all forms of writing, and studying the writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded. i managed on five hours' sleep in the twenty-four, and came pretty close to working the nineteen waking hours left to me." by saying that the novel effects of imagination come by way of industry, we do not mean to imply that one should strain after novelty and eccentricity. unusual and happy combinations will come of themselves and naturally if one only makes a sufficient number. there are laws of combination, known as the psychological laws of association, by which images will unite naturally. the number of possible combinations is infinite. by industriously making a large number, you will by the very laws of chance, stumble upon some that are especially happy and striking. in summarizing this discussion, we may conclude that an active fertile imagination comes from crowding into one's life a large number of varied and vivid experiences; storing them up in the mind in the form of images; and industriously recalling and combining them in novel relationships. mental images occur in other mental processes besides imagination. they bulk importantly in memorizing, as we shall see in chapters vi and vii; and in reasoning, as we shall see in chapter ix. throughout the book we shall find that as we develop ability to manipulate mental images, we shall increase the adaptability of all the mental processes. reading and exercises reading: dearborn ( ) chapter iii. exercise . call up in imagination the sound of your french instructor's voice as he says _étudiant_. call up the appearance on the page of the conjugation of _être_, present tense. exercise . choose some word which you have had difficulty in learning. look at it attentively, securing a perfectly clear impression of it; then practise calling up the visual image of it, until you secure perfect reproduction. exercise . list the different images called up by the passage from _romeo and juliet_. chapter vi first aids to memory; impression of all the mental operations employed by the student, memory is probably the one in which the greatest inefficiency is manifested. though we often fail to realize it, much of our life is taken up with memorizing. every time we make use of past experience, we rely upon this function of the mind, but in no occupation is it quite so practically important as in study. we shall begin our investigation of memory by dividing it into four phases or stages--impression, retention, recall and recognition. any act of memory involves them all. there is first a stage when the material is being impressed; second, a stage when it is being retained so that it may be revived in the future; third, a stage of recall when the retained material is revived to meet present needs; fourth, a feeling of recognition, through which the material is recognized as having previously been in the mind. impression is accomplished through the sense organs; and in the foregoing chapter we laid down the rule: guard the avenues of impression and admit only such things as you wish to retain. this necessitates that you go slowly at first. this is a principle of all habit formation, but is especially important in habits of memorizing. much of the poor memory that people complain about is due to the fact that they make first impressions carelessly. one reason why people fail to remember names is that they do not get a clear impression of the name at the start. they are introduced in a hurry or the introducer mumbles; consequently no clear impression is secured. under such circumstances how could one expect to retain and recall the name? go slowly, then, in impressing material for the first time. as you look up the words of a foreign language in the lexicon, trying to memorize their english equivalents, take plenty of time. obtain a clear impression of the sound and appearance of the words. inasmuch as impressions may be made through any of the sense organs, one problem in the improvement of memory concerns the choice of sense avenues. as an infant you used all senses impartially in your eager search after information. you voraciously put things into your mouth and discovered that some things were sweet, some sour. you bumped your head against things and learned that some were hard and some soft. in your insatiable curiosity you pulled things apart and peered into them; in short, utilized all the sense organs. in adult life, however, and in education as it takes place through the agency of books and instructors, most learning depends upon the eye and ear. even yet, however, you learn many things through the sense of touch and through muscle movement, though you may be unaware of it. you probably have better success retaining impressions made upon one sense than another. the majority of people retain better things that are visually impressed. such persons think often in terms of visual images. when thinking of water running from a faucet, they can see the water fall, see it splash, but have no trace of the sound. the whole event is noiseless in memory. when they think of their instructor, they can see him standing at his desk but cannot imagine the sound of his voice. when striving to think of the causes leading to the civil war, they picture them as they are listed on the page of the text-book or note-book. other people have not this ability to recall in visual terms, but depend to greater extent upon sounds. when asked to think about their instructor, they do it in terms of his voice. when asked to conjugate a french verb, they hear it pronounced mentally but do not see it on the page. these are extremes of imagery type, but they illustrate preferences as they are found in many persons. some persons use all senses with ease; others unconsciously work out combinations, preferring one sense for some kinds of material and another for other kinds. for example, one might prefer visual impression for remembering dates in history but auditory impression for conjugating french verbs. you will find it profitable to examine yourself and discover your preferences. if you find that you have greater difficulty in remembering material impressed through the ear than through the eye, reduce things to visual terms as much as possible. make your lecture notes more complete or tabulate things that you wish to remember, thus securing impression from the written form. the writer has difficulty in remembering names that are only heard. so he asks that the name be spelled, then projects the letters on an imaginary background, thus forming visual stuff which can easily be recalled. if, on the contrary, you remember best the things that you hear, you may find it a good plan to read your lessons aloud. many a student, upon the discovery of such a preference, has increased his memory ability many fold by adopting the simple expedient of reading his lessons aloud. it might be pointed out that while you are reading aloud, you are making more than auditory impressions. by the use of the vocal organs you are making muscular impressions, which also aid in learning, as will be pointed out in chapter x. after this discussion do not jump to the conclusion that just because you find some difficulty in using one sense avenue for impression, it is therefore impossible to develop it. facility in using particular senses can be gained by practice. to improve ability to form visual images of things, practise calling up visions of things. try to picture a page of your history textbook. can you see the headlines of the sections and the paragraphs? to develop auditory imagery, practise calling up sounds. try to image your french instructor's voice in saying _élève_. the development of these sense fields is a slow and laborious process and one questions whether it is worth while for a student to undertake the labor involved when another sense is already very efficient. probably it is most economical to arrange impressions so as to favor the sense that is already well developed and reliable. another important condition of impression is repetition. it is well known that material which is repeated several times is remembered more easily than that impressed but once. if two repetitions induce a given liability to recall, four or eight will secure still greater liability of recall. your knowledge of brain action makes this rule intelligible, because you know the pathway is deepened every time the nervous current passes over it. experiments in the psychological laboratory have shown that it is best in making impressions to make more than enough impressions to insure recall. "if material is to be retained for any length of time, a simple mastery of it for immediate recall is not sufficient. it should be learned far beyond the point of immediate reproduction if time and energy are to be saved." this principle of learning points out the fact that there are two kinds of memory--immediate and deferred. the first kind involves recall immediately after impression is made; the second involves recall at some later time. it is a well-known fact that things learned a long time before they are to be recalled fade away. if you are not going to recall material until a long time after the impression, store up enough impressions so that you can afford to lose a few and still retain enough until time for recall. another reason for "overlearning" is that when the time comes for recall you are likely to be disturbed. if it is a time of public performance, you may be embarrassed; or you may be hurried or under distractions. accordingly you should have the material exceedingly well memorized so that these distractions will not prove detrimental. the mere statement made above, that repetition is necessary in impression, is not sufficient. it is important to know how to distribute the repetitions. suppose you are memorizing "psalm of life" to be recited a month from to-day, and that you require thirty repetitions of the poem to learn it. shall you make these thirty repetitions at one sitting? or shall you distribute them among several sittings? in general, it is better to spread the repetitions over a period of time. the question then arises, what is the most effective distribution? various combinations are possible. you might rehearse the poem once a day during the month, or twice a day for the first fifteen days, or the last fifteen days, four times every fourth day, _ad infinitum_. in the face of these possibilities is there anything that will guide us in distributing the repetitions? we shall get some light on the question from an examination of the curve of forgetting--a curve that has been plotted showing the rate at which the mind tends to forget. forgetting proceeds according to law, the curve descending rapidly at first and then more slowly. "the larger proportion of the material learned is forgotten the first day or so. after that a constantly decreasing amount is forgotten on each succeeding day for perhaps a week, when the amount remains practically stationary." this gives us some indication that the early repetitions should be closer together than those at the end of the period. so long as you are forgetting rapidly you will need more repetitions in order to counterbalance the tendency to forget. you might well make five repetitions; then rest. in about an hour, five more; within the next twenty-four hours, five more. by this time you should have the poem memorized, and all within two days. you would still have fifteen repetitions of the thirty, and these might be used in keeping the poem fresh in the mind by a repetition every other day. as intimated above, one important principle in memorizing is to make the first impressions as early as possible, for older impressions have many chances of being retained. this is evidenced by the vividness of childhood scenes in the minds of our grandparents. an old soldier recalls with great vividness events that happened during the civil war, but forgets events of yesterday. there is involved here a principle of nervous action that you have already encountered; namely, that impressions are more easily made and retained in youth. it should also be observed that pathways made early have more chances of being used than those made recently. still another peculiarity of nervous action is revealed in these extended periods of memorizing. it has been discovered that if a rest is taken between impressions, the impressions become more firmly fixed. this points to the presence of a surprising power, by which we are able to learn, as it were, while we sleep. we shall understand this better if we try to imagine what is happening in the nervous system. processes of nutrition are constantly going on. the blood brings in particles to repair the nerve cells, rebuilding them according to the pattern left by the last impression. indeed, the entrance of this new material makes the impression even more fixed. the nutritional processes seem to set the impression much as a hypo bath fixes or sets an impression on a photographic plate. this peculiarity of memory led professor james to suggest, paradoxically, that we learn to skate in summer and to swim in winter. and, indeed, one usually finds, in beginning the skating season, that after the initial stiffness of muscles wears off, one glides along with surprising agility. you see then that if you plan things rightly, nature will do much of your learning for you. it might be suggested that perhaps things impressed just before going to sleep have a better chance to "set" than things impressed at other times for the reason that sleep is the time when the reparative processes of the body are most active. since the brain pattern requires time to "set," it is important that after the first impression you refrain from introducing anything immediately into the mind that might disturb it. after you have impressed the poem you are memorizing, do not immediately follow it by another poem. let the brain rest for three or four minutes until after the first impressions have had a chance to "set." now that we have regarded this "unconscious memorizing" from the neurological standpoint, let us consider it from the psychological standpoint. how are the ideas being modified during the intervals between impressions? modern psychology has discovered that much memorizing goes on without our knowing it, paradoxical as that may seem. the processes may be described in terms of the doctrine of association, which is that whenever two things have once been associated together in the mind, there is a tendency thereafter "if the first of them recurs, for the other to come with it." after the poem of our illustration has once been repeated, there is a tendency for events in everyday experience that are like it to associate themselves with it. for example, in the course of a day or week many things might arise and recall to you the line, "life is real, life is earnest", and it would become, by that fact, more firmly fixed in the mind. this valuable semi-conscious recall requires that you must make the first impression as early as possible before the time for ultimate recall. this persistence of ideas in the mind means "that the process of learning does not cease with the actual work of learning, but that, if not disturbed, this process runs on of itself for a time, and adds a little to the result of our labors. it also means that, if it is to our advantage to stand in readiness with some word or thought, we shall be able to do so, if only this word or thought recur to us but once, some time before the critical moment. so we remember to keep a promise to pay a call, to make a remark at the proper time, even though we turn our mind to other work or talk for some hours between. we can do this because, if not vigorously prevented, ideas and words keep on reappearing in the mind." you may utilize this principle in theme-writing to good advantage. as soon as the instructor announces the subject for a theme, begin to think about it. gather together all the ideas you have about the subject and start your mind to work upon it. suppose you take as a theme-subject the value of training in public speaking for a business man. the first time this is suggested to you, a few thoughts, at least, will come to you. write them down, even though they are disconnected and heterogeneous. then as you go about your other work you will find a number of occasions that will arouse ideas bearing upon this subject. you may read in a newspaper of a brilliant speech made before the chamber of commerce by a leading business man, which will serve as an illustration to support your affirmative position; or you may attend a banquet where a prominent business man disappoints his audience with a wretched speech. such experiences, and many others, bearing more or less directly upon the subject, will come to you, and will call up the theme-subject, with which they will unite themselves. write down these ideas as they occur, and you will find that when you start to compose the theme formally, it almost writes itself, requiring for the most part only expansion and arrangement of ideas. while thus organizing the theme you will reap even more benefits from your early start, for, as you are composing it, you will find new ideas crowding in upon you which you did not know you possessed, but which had been associating themselves in your mind with this topic even when you were unaware of the fact. in writing themes, the principle of distribution of time may also be profitably employed. after you have once written a theme, lay it aside for a while--perhaps a week. then when you take it up, read it in a detached manner and you will note many places where it may be improved. these benefits are to be enjoyed only when a theme is planned a long time ahead. hence the rule to start as early as possible. before leaving the subject of theme-writing, which was called up by the discussion of unconscious memory, another suggestion will be given that may be of service to you. when correcting a theme, employ more than one sense avenue. do not simply glance over it with your eye. read it aloud, either to yourself or, better still, to someone else. when you do this you will be amazed to discover how different it sounds and what a new view you secure of it. when you thus change your method of composition, you will find a new group of ideas thronging into your mind. in the auditory rendition of a theme you will discover faults of syntax which escaped you in silent reading. you will note duplication of words, split infinitives, mixed tenses, poorly balanced sentences. moreover, if your mind has certain peculiarities, you may find even more advantages accruing from such a practice. the author, for example, has a slightly different set of ideas at his disposal according to the medium of expression employed. when writing with a pencil, one set of ideas comes to mind; with a typewriter slightly different ideas arise; when talking to an audience, still different ideas. three sets of ideas and three vocabularies are thus available for use on any subject. in adopting this device of composing through several mediums, you should combine with it the principle of distributing time already discussed in connection with repetition of impressions. write a theme one day, then lay it aside for a few days and go back to it with a fresh mind. the rests will be found very beneficial in helping you to get a new viewpoint of the subject. reverting to our discussion of memory, we come upon another question: in memorizing material like the poem of our example, should one impress the entire poem at once, or break it up into parts, impressing a stanza each day? most people would respond, without thought, the latter, and, as a matter of fact, most memorizing takes place in this way. experimental psychology, however, has discovered that this is uneconomical. the selection, if of moderate length, should be impressed as a whole. if too long for this, it should be broken up as little as possible. in order to see the necessity for this let us examine your experiences with the memorization of poems in your early school days. you probably proceeded as follows: after school one day, you learned the first stanza, then went out to play. the next day you learned the second one, and so on. you thought at the end of a week that you had memorized it because, at the end of each day's sitting, you were able to recite perfectly the stanza learned that day. on "speaking day" you started out bravely and recited the first stanza without mishap. when you started to think of the second one, however, it would not come. the memory balked. now what was the matter? how can we explain this distressing blank? in psychological terms, we ascribe the difficulty to the failure to make proper associations between stanzas. association was made effectively between the lines of the single stanzas, but not between the separate stanzas. after you finished impressing the first stanza, you went about something else; playing ball, perhaps. when you approached the poem the next day you started in with the second stanza. there was then no bridge between the two. there was nothing to link the last line of the first stanza, "and things are not what they seem," with the first line of the next stanza, "life is real, life is earnest." this makes clear the necessity of impressing the poem as a whole instead of by parts. according to another classification, there are two ways of memorizing--by rote and by logical associations. rote memorizing involves the repetition of material just as it stands, and usually requires such long and laborious drill that it is seldom economical. true, some matter must be memorized this way; such as the days of the week and the names of the months; but there is another and gentler method which is usually more effective and economical than that of brutal repetition. that is the method of logical association, by which one links up a new fact with something already in the mind. if, for example, you wish to remember the date of the world's fair in chicago, you might proceed as follows: ask yourself, what did the fair commemorate? the discovery of america in , the four hundredth anniversary occurring in . the fair could not be made ready in that year, however, so was postponed a year. such a process of memorizing the date is less laborious than the method of rote memory, and is usually more likely to lead to ready recall. the old fact already in mind acts as a magnet which at some later time may call up other facts that had once been associated with it. you can easily see that this new fact might have been associated with several old facts, thus securing more chances of being called up. from this it may be inferred that the more facts you have in your mind about a subject the more chances you have of retaining new facts. it is sometimes thought that if a person stores so much in his memory it will soon be so full that he cannot memorize any more. this is a false notion, involving a conception of the brain as a hopper into which impressions are poured until it runs over. on the contrary, it should be regarded as an interlacing of fibers with infinite possibilities of inter-connection, and no one ever exhausts the number of associations that can be made. the method of logical association may be employed with telling effect in the study of foreign languages. when you meet a new word scrutinize it carefully for some trace of a word already familiar to you either in that language or in another. this independent discovery of meanings is a very great aid in saving time and in fixing the meaning of new words. opportunities for this method are especially frequent in the german language, since so many german words are formed by compounding other words. "rathausmarkt" is a long and apparently difficult german word, and one's first temptation is to look it up in the lexicon and promptly forget it. let us analyze it, however, and we shall see that it is only a compound of already familiar words. "_rat_" is already familiar as the word for counsel ("_raten"_ to give advice); "_haus_" is equally familiar. so we see that the first part of the word means council-house; the council-house of a city is called a city hall. "_markt_" is equally familiar as market-square, so the significance of the entire word stands, city-hall-square. by such a method of utilizing facts already known, you may make yourself much more independent of the lexicon and may make your memory for foreign words much more tenacious. we approach a phase of impression the importance of which is often unsuspected; namely, the intention with which memorizing is done. the fidelity of memory is greatly affected by the intention. if, at the time of impression, you intend to retain only until the time of recall, the material tends to slip away after that time. if, however, you impress with the intention to retain permanently the material stays by you better. students make a great mistake when they study for the purpose merely of retaining until after examination time. intend to retain facts permanently, and there will be greater likelihood of their permanence. readings and exercises readings: adams ( ) chapter iii. seashore ( ) chapter ii. swift ( ) chapter vii. watt ( ). exercise i. cite examples from your own experience showing the effects of the following faults in making impressions. _a_. first impression not clear. _b_. insufficient number of repetitions. _c_. use of rote method instead of method of logical association. _d_. impressions not distributed. _e_. improper use of "part" method. exercise . after experimentation, state what is your most effective sense avenue for the impression of foreign words, facts in history, the pronunciation of english words. exercise . make a preliminary draft of your next theme; lay it aside for a day or two; then write another on the same subject; combine the two, using the best parts of each; lay this aside for a day or two; then read it aloud, making such changes as are prompted by the auditory presentation. can you find elements of worth in this method, which will warrant you in adopting it, at least, in part? chapter vii second aids to memory: retention, recall and recognition our discussion up to this point has centred around the phase of memory called impression. we have described some of the conditions favorable to impression and have seen that certain and accurate memory depends upon adherence to them. the next phase of memory--retention--cannot be described in psychological terms. we know we retain facts after they are once impressed, but as to their status in the mind we can say nothing. if you were asked when the declaration of independence was signed, you would reply instantly. when asked, however, where that fact was five minutes ago, you could not answer. somewhere in the recesses of the mind, perhaps, but as to immediate awareness of it, there was none. we may try to think of retention in terms of nerve cells and say that at the time when the material was first impressed there was some modification made in certain nerve cells which persisted. this trait of nerve modifiability is one factor which accounts for greater retentive power in some persons than in others. it must not be concluded, however, that all good memory is due to the inheritance of this trait. it is due partly to observance of proper conditions of impression, and much can be done to overcome or offset innate difficulty of modification by such observance. we are now ready to examine the third phase of memory--recall. this is the stage at which material that has been impressed and retained is recalled to serve the purpose for which it was memorized. recall is thus the goal of memory, and all the devices so far discussed have it for their object. can we facilitate recall by any other means than by faithful and intelligent impressions? for answer let us examine the state of mind at time of recall. we find that it is a unique mental state. it differs from impression in being a period of more active search for facts in the mind accompanied by expression, instead of a concentration upon the external impression. it is also usually accompanied by motor expressions, either talking or writing. since recall is a unique mental state, you ought to prepare for it by means of a rehearsal. when you are memorizing anything to be recalled, make part of your memorizing a rehearsal of it, if possible, under same conditions as final recall. in memorizing from a book, first make impression, then close the book and practise recall. when memorizing a selection to be given in a public speaking class, intersperse the periods of impression with periods of recall. this is especially necessary in preparation for public speaking, for facing an audience gives rise to a vastly different psychic attitude from that of impression. the sight of an audience may be embarrassing or exciting. furthermore, unforeseen distractions may arise. accordingly, create those conditions as nearly as possible in your preparation. imagine yourself facing the audience. practise aloud so that you will become accustomed to the sound of your own voice. the importance of the practice of recall as a part of the memory process can hardly be overestimated. one psychologist has advised that in memorizing significant material more than half the time should be spent in practising recall. there still remains a fourth phase of memory--recognition. whenever a remembered fact is recalled, it is accompanied by a characteristic feeling which we call the feeling of recognition. it has been described as a feeling of familiarity, a glow of warmth, a sense of ownership, a feeling of intimacy. as you walk down the street of a great city you pass hundreds of faces, all of them strange. suddenly in the crowd you catch sight of some one you know and are instantly suffused with a glow of feeling that is markedly different from your feeling toward the others. that glow represents the feeling of recognition. it is always present during recall and may be used in great advantage in studying. it derives its virtue for our purpose from the fact that it is a feeling, and at the time of feeling the bodily activities in general are affected. changes occur in heart beat, breathing; various glandular secretions are affected, the digestive organs respond. in this general quickening of bodily activity we have reason to believe that the nervous system partakes, and things become impressed more readily. thus the feeling of recognition that accompanies recall is responsible for one of the benefits of reviews. at such a time material once memorized becomes tinged with a feelingful color different from that which accompanied it when new. review, then, not merely to produce additional impressions, but also to take advantage of the feeling of recognition. we have now discussed memory in its four phases and have seen clearly that it operates not in a blind, chaotic manner, but according to law. certain conditions are required and when they are met memory is good. after providing proper conditions for memory, then, trust your memory. an attitude of confidence is very necessary. if, when you are memorizing, you continually tremble for fear that you will not recall at the desired moment, the fixedness of the impression will be greatly hindered. therefore, after utilizing all your knowledge about the conditions of memorizing, rest content and trust to the laws of nature. they will not fail you. by this time you have seen that memory is not a mysterious mental faculty with which some people are generously endowed, and of which others are deprived. all people of normal intelligence can remember and can improve their ability if they desire. the improvement does not take the form that some people expect, however. no magic wand can transform you into a good memorizes you must work the transformation yourself. furthermore, it is not an instantaneous process to be accomplished overnight. it will come about only after you have built up a set of habits, according to our conception of study as a process of habit formation. a final word of caution should be added. some people think of memory as a separate division or compartment of the mind which can be controlled and improved by exercising it alone. such a conception is fallacious. improvement in memory will involve improvement in other mental abilities, and you will find that as you improve your ability to remember, you will develop at the same time better powers to concentrate attention, to image, to associate facts and to reason. reading and exercise reading: see readings for chapter vi. exercise i. compare the mental conditions of impression with those of recall. chapter viii concentration of attention nearly everyone has difficulty in the concentration of attention. brain workers in business and industry, students in high school and college, and even professors in universities, complain of the same difficulty. attention seems in some way to be at the very core of mental activity, for no matter from what aspect we view the mind, its excellence seems to depend upon the power to concentrate attention. when we examine a growing infant, one of the first signs by which we judge the awakening of intelligence is the power to pay attention or to "notice things." when we examine the intellectual ability of normal adults we do so by means of tests that require close concentration of attention. in judging the intelligence of people with whom we associate every day, we regard one who is able to maintain close attention for long periods of time as a person of strong mind. we rate thomas edison as a powerful thinker when we read that he becomes so absorbed in work that he neither eats nor sleeps. finally, when we examine the insane and the feeble-minded, we find that one form which their derangements take is an inability to control the attention. this evidence, added to our own experience, shows us the importance of concentration of attention in study and we become even more desirous of investigating attention to see how we may develop it. we shall be better able to discuss attention if we select for analysis a concrete situation when the mind is in a state of concentrated attention. concentrate for a moment upon the letter o. although you are ostensibly focussing all your powers of attention upon the letter, nevertheless you are really aware of a number of things besides: of other words on the page; of other objects in the field of vision; of sounds in the room and on the street; of sensations from your clothing; and of sensations from your bodily organs, such as the heart and lungs. in addition to these sensations, you will find, if you introspect carefully enough, that your mind also contains a number of ideas and imaginings; thoughts about the paragraph you just read or about one of your lessons. thus we see that at a time when we apparently focus our attention upon but one thing, we really have a large number of things in our mind, and they are of a great variety. the mental field might be represented by a circle, at the centre of which is the object of attention. it may be an object in the external world perceived through one of the senses, or it may be an idea we are thinking about, such, for example, as the idea of infinity. but whether the thing attended to is a perception or an idea, we may properly speak of it as the object of attention or the "focal" object. in addition to this, we must recognize the presence of a large number of other objects, both sensory and ideational. these are nearer the margin of the mental field, so we call them "marginal." the distinctive thing about a state of mind such as that just described is that the focal object is much clearer than the marginal objects. for example, when you fixated the letter o, it was only in the vaguest sort of fashion that you were aware of the contact of your clothing or the lurking ideas of other lessons. as we examine these marginal objects further, we find that they are continually seeking to crowd into the centre of attention and to become clear. you may be helped in forming a vivid picture of conditions if you think of the mind as a stream ever in motion, and as it flows on, the objects in it continually shift their positions. a cross-section of the stream at any moment may show the contents of the mind arranged in a particular pattern, but at the very next moment they may be arranged in a different pattern, another object occupying the focus, while the previous tenant is pushed to the margin. thus we see that it is a tendency of the mind to be forever changing. if left to itself, it would be in ceaseless fluctuation, the whim of every passing fancy. this tendency to fluctuate comes with more or less regularity, some psychologists say every second or two. true, we do not always yield to the fluctuating tendency, nevertheless we are recurrently tempted, and we must exercise continuous effort to keep a particular object at the focus. the power to exert effort and to regulate the arrangement of our states of mind is the peculiar gift of man, and is a prime function of education. viewed in this light, then, we see that the voluntary focusing of our attention consists in the selecting of certain objects to be attended to, and the ignoring of other objects which act as distractions. we may conveniently classify the latter as external sensations, bodily sensations and irrelevant ideas. let us take an actual situation that may arise in study and see how this applies. suppose you are in your room studying about charlemagne, a page of your history text occupying the centre of your attention. the marginal distractions in such a case would consist, first, in external sensations, such as the glare from your study-lamp, the hissing of the radiator, the practising of a neighboring vocalist, the rattle of passing street-cars. the bodily distractions might consist of sensations of weariness referred to the back, the arms and the eyes, and fainter sensations from the digestive organs, heart and lungs. the irrelevant ideas might consist of thoughts about a german lesson which you are going to study, visions of a face, or thoughts about some social engagement. these marginal objects are in the mind even when you conscientiously focus your mind upon the history lesson, and, though vague, they try to force their way into the focus and become clear. the task of paying attention, then, consists in maintaining the desired object at the centre of the mental field and keeping the distractions away. with this definition of attention, we see that in order to increase the effectiveness of attention during study, we must devise means for overcoming the distractions peculiar to study. obviously the first thing is to eliminate every distraction possible. such a plan of elimination may require a radical rearrangement of study conditions, for students often fail to realize how wretched their conditions of study are from a psychological standpoint. they attempt to study in rooms with two or three others who talk and move about continually; they drop down in any spot in the library and expose themselves needlessly to a great number of distractions. if you wish to become a good student, you must prepare conditions as favorable as possible for study. choose a quiet room to live in, free from distracting sounds and sights. have your room at a temperature neither too hot nor too cold; ° f. is usually considered favorable for study. when reading in the library, sit down in a quiet spot, with your back to the door, so you will not be tempted to look up as people enter the room. do not sit near a group of gossipers or near a creaking door. having made the external conditions favorable for study, you should next address yourself to the task of eliminating bodily distractions. the most disturbing of these in study are sensations of fatigue, for, contrary to the opinion of many people, study is very fatiguing work and involves continual strain upon the muscles in holding the body still, particularly those of the back, neck, arms, hands and, above all, the eyes. how many movements are made by your eyes in the course of an hour's study! they sweep back and forth across the page incessantly, being moved by six muscles which are bound to become fatigued. still more fatigue comes from the contractions of delicate muscles within the eyeball, where adjustments are made for far and near vision and for varying amounts of light. the eyes, then, give rise to much fatigue, and, altogether, are the source of a great many bodily distractions in study. other distractions may consist of sensations from the clothing. we are always vaguely aware of pressure of our clothing. usually it is not sufficiently noticeable to cause much annoyance, but occasionally it is, as is demonstrated at night when we take off a shoe with such a sigh of relief that we realize in retrospect it had been vaguely troubling us all day. in trying to create conditions for efficient study, many bodily distractions can be eliminated. the study chair should be easy to sit in so as to reduce fatigue of the muscles supporting the body; the book-rest should be arranged so as to require little effort to hold the book; the light should come over the left shoulder. this is especially necessary in writing, so that the writing hand will not cast a shadow upon the work. the muscles of the eyes will be rested and fatigue will be retarded if you close the eyes occasionally. then in order to lessen the general fatigue of the body, you may find it advantageous to rise and walk about occasionally. lastly, the clothing should be loose and unconfining; especially should there be plenty of room for circulation. in the overcoming of distractions, we have seen that much may be done by way of eliminating distractions, and we have pointed out the way to accomplish this to a certain extent. but in spite of our most careful provisions, there will still be distractions that cannot be eliminated. you cannot, for example, chloroform the vocalist in the neighboring apartment, nor stop the street-cars while you study; you cannot rule out fatigue sensations entirely, and you cannot build a fence around the focus of your mind so as to keep out unwelcome and irrelevant ideas. the only thing to do then is to accept as inevitable the presence of some distractions, and to realise that to pay attention, it is necessary to habituate yourself to the ignoring of distractions. in the accomplishment of this end it will be necessary to apply the principles of habit formation already described. start out by making a strong determination to ignore all distractions. practise ignoring them, and do not let a slip occur. try to develop interest in the object of attention, because we pay attention to those things in which we are most interested. a final point that may help you is to use the first lapse of attention as a reminder of the object you desire to fixate upon. this may be illustrated by the following example: suppose, in studying a history lesson, you come upon a reference to the royal apparel of charlemagne. the word "royal" might call up purple, a northwestern university pennant, the person who gave it to you, and before you know it you are off in a long day-dream leading far from the history lesson. such migrations as these are very likely to occur in study, and constitute one of the most treacherous pitfalls of student life. in trying to avoid them, you must form habits of disregarding irrelevant ideas when they try to obtrude themselves. and the way to do this is to school yourself so that the first lapse of attention will remind you of the lesson in hand. it can be done if you keep yourself sensitive to wanderings of attention, and let the first slip from the topic with which you are engaged remind you to pull yourself back. do this before you have taken the step that will carry you far away, for with each step in the series of associations it becomes harder to draw yourself back into the correct channel. in reading, one frequent cause for lapses of attention and for the intrusion of unwelcome ideas is obscurity in the material being read. if you trace back your lapses of attention, you will often find that they first occur when the thought becomes difficult to follow, the sentence ambiguous, or a single word unusual. as a result, the meaning grows hazy in your mind and you fail to comprehend it. naturally, then, you drift into a channel of thought that is easier to follow. this happens because the mental stream tends to seek channels of least resistance. if you introspect carefully, you will undoubtedly discover that many of your annoying lapses of attention can be traced to such conditions. the obvious remedy is to make sure that you understand everything as you read. as soon as you feel the thought growing difficult to follow, begin to exert more effort; consult the dictionary for the meanings of words you do not understand. probably the ordinary freshman in college ought to look up the meaning of as many as twenty words daily. again, the thought may be difficult to follow because your previous knowledge is deficient; perhaps the discussion involves some fact which you never did comprehend clearly, and you will naturally fail to understand something built upon it. if deficiency of knowledge is the cause of your lapses of attention, the obvious remedy is to turn back and study the fundamental facts; to lay a firm foundation in your subjects of study. this discussion shows that the conditions at time of concentrated attention are very complex; that the mind is full of a number of things; that your object as a student is to keep some one thing at the focus of your mind, and that in doing so you must continuously ignore other mental contents. in our psychological descriptions we have implied that the mind stands still at times, permitting us to take a cross-section and examine it minutely. as a matter of fact, the mind never stands still. it continually moves along, and at no two moments is it exactly the same. this results in a condition whereby an idea which is at one moment at the centre cannot remain there unless it takes on a slightly different appearance from moment to moment. when you attempted to fix your attention upon the letter o, you found a constant tendency to shift the attention, perhaps to a variation in the intensity of the type or to a flaw in the type or in the paper. in view of the inevitable nature of these changes, you see that in spite of your best efforts you cannot expect to maintain any object of study inflexibly at the centre of attention. the way to do is to manipulate the object so that it will appear from moment to moment in a slightly different light. if, for example, you are trying to concentrate upon a rule of english grammar long enough to memorize it, do not read it over and over again, depending solely upon repetition. a better way, after thoroughly comprehending it, is to think about it in several relations; compare it with other rules, noting points of likeness and difference; apply it to the construction of a sentence. the essential thing is to do something with it. only thus can you keep it in the focus of attention. this is equivalent to the restatement of another fact stressed in a previous chapter, namely, that the mind is not a passive thing that stands still, but an active thing. when you give attention, you actively select from a number of possible objects one to be clearer than the rest. this selection requires effort under most conditions of study, but you may be cheered by the thought that as you develop interest in the fields of study, and as you develop habits of ignoring distractions, you will be able to fixate your attention with less and less effort. a further important fact is that as you develop power to select objects for the consideration of attention, you develop simultaneously other mental processes--the ability to memorize, to economize time and effort and to control future thoughts and actions. in short, power to concentrate attention means power in all the mental processes. exercises exercise i. "watch a small dot so far away that it can just be seen. can you see it all the time? how many times a minute does it come and go?" make what inference you can from this regarding the fluctuation of attention during study. exercise . what concrete steps will you take in order to accommodate your study to the fluctuations of attention? exercise . the next time you have a lapse of attention during study, retrace your steps of thought, write down the ideas from the last one in your mind to the one which started the digression. represent the digression graphically if you can. exercise . make a list of the things that most persistently distract your attention during study. what specific steps will you take to eliminate them; to ignore the unavoidable ones? chapter ix how we reason if you were asked to describe the most embarrassing of your class-room experiences, you would probably cite the occasions when the instructor asks you a series of questions demanding close reasoning. as he pins you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. either you find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in contradictions. in short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. and when the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation which you thought you had been perfectly prepared for, you complain that "if the instructor had followed the book," or "if he had asked straight questions," you would have answered every one perfectly, having memorized the lesson "word for word." this complaint, so often voiced by students, reveals the fundamental characteristic which distinguishes the mental operation of reasoning from the others we have studied. in reasoning we face a new kind of situation presenting difficulties not encountered in the simpler processes of sensation, memory, and imagery, and when we attempt to substitute these simple processes for reasoning, we fail miserably, for the two kinds of processes are essentially different, and cannot be substituted one for the other. broadly speaking, the mental activities of study may be divided into two groups, which, for want of better names, we shall call processes of acquisition and processes of construction. the mental attitude of the first is that of acquirement. "sometimes our main business seems to be to acquire knowledge; certain matters are placed before us in books or by our teachers, and we are required to master them, to make them part of our stock of knowledge. at other times we are called upon to use the knowledge we already possess in order to attain some end that is set before us." "in geography, for example, so long as we are merely learning the bare facts of the subject, the size and contours of the different continents, the political divisions, the natural features, we are at the acquisitive stage." "but when we go on to try to find out the reasons why certain facts that we have learned should be as they are and not otherwise, we pass to the constructive stage. we are working constructively when we seek to discover why it is that great cities are so often found on the banks of rivers, why peninsulas more frequently turn southward than northward." you readily see that this constructive method of study involves the setting and solving of problems as its distinguishing feature, and that in the solution of these problems we make use of reason. a little reflection will show that though there is a distinct difference between processes of acquisition and of construction, nevertheless the two must not be regarded as entirely separate from each other. "in acquiring new facts we must always use a little reason, while in constructive work, we cannot always rely upon having all the necessary matter ready to hand. we have frequently to stop our constructive work for a little in order to acquire some new facts that we find to be necessary. thus we acquire a certain number of new facts while we are reasoning about things, and while we are engaged in acquiring new matter we must use our reason at least to some small extent." the two overlap, then. but there is a difference between them from the standpoint of the student, and the terms denote two fundamentally different attitudes which students take in study. the two attitudes may be illustrated by contrasting the two methods often used in studying geometry. some students memorize the theorem and the steps in the demonstration, reciting them verbatim at class-hour. others do not memorize, but reason out each step to see its relation to the preceding step, and when they see it must necessarily follow, they pass on to the next and do the same. these two types of students apparently arrive at the same conclusions, but the mental operations leading up to the q.e.d. of each are vastly different. the one student does his studying by the rote memory method, the other by the road of reasoning. the former road is usually considered the easier, and so we find it most frequently followed. to memorize a table, a definition, or a series of dates is relatively easy. one knows exactly where one is, and can keep track of one's progress and test one's success. some people are attracted by such a task and are perfectly happy to follow this plan of study. the kind of mind that contents itself with such phonographic records, however, must be acknowledged to be a commonplace sort of affair. we recognize its limitations in ordinary life, invariably rating it lower than the mind that can reason to new conclusions and work independently. accordingly, if we wish to possess minds of superior quality, we see that we must develop the reasoning processes. when we examine the mental processes by which we think constructively, or, in other words, reason, we find first of all that there is recognition of a problem to be solved. when we start to reason, we do it because we find ourselves in a situation from which we must extricate ourselves. the situation may be physical, as when our automobile stops suddenly on a country road; or it may be mental, as when we are deciding what college to attend. in both cases, we recognize that we are facing a problem which must be solved. after recognition of the problem, our next step is to start vigorous efforts to solve it. in doing this, we cast about for means; we summon all the powers at our disposal. in the case of the automobile, we call to mind other accidents and the causes of them; we remember that once the spark-plug played out, so we test this hypothesis. at another time some dust got into the carburetor, so we test this. so we go on, calling up possible causes and applying appropriate remedies until the right one is found and the engine is started. in bringing to bear upon the problem facts from our past experience, we form a series of judgments. in the case of the problem as to what college to attend, we might form these judgments: this college is nearer home; that one has a celebrated faculty; this one has good laboratories; that one is my father's alma mater. so we might go on, bringing up all the facts regarding the problem and fitting each one mentally to see how it works. note that this utilization of ideas should not consist merely of fumbling about in a vague hope of hitting upon some solution. it must be a systematic search, guided by carefully chosen ideas. for example, "if the clock on the mantle-piece has stopped, and we have no idea how to make it go again, but mildly shake it in the hope that something will happen to set it going, we are merely fumbling. but if, on moving the clock gently so as to set the pendulum in motion, we hear it wobbling about irregularly, and at the same time observe that there is no ticking of any kind, we come to the conclusion that the pendulum has somehow or other escaped the little catch that connects it with the mechanism, we have been really thinking. from the fact that the pendulum wobbles irregularly, we infer that it has lost its proper catch. from the fact that there is no ticking, we infer the same thing, for even when there is something wrong with the clock that will prevent it from going permanently, if the pendulum is set in motion by force from without it will tick for a few seconds before it comes to rest again. the important point to observe is that there must be inference. this is always indicated by the word _therefore_ or its equivalent. if you reach a conclusion without having to use or at any rate to imply a _therefore_, you may take it for granted that you have not been really thinking, but only jumping to conclusions." this process of putting facts in the form of judgments and drawing inferences, may be likened to a court-room scene where arguments are presented to the judge. as each bit of evidence is submitted, it is subjected to the test of its applicability to the situation or to similar situations in the past. it is rigidly examined and nothing is accepted as a candidate for the solution until it is found by trial (of course, in imagination) to be pertinent to the situation. the third stage of the reasoning process comes when some plan which has been suggested as a possible solution of the difficulty proves effective, and we make the decision; the arguments support or overthrow each other, adding to and eliminating various considerations until finally only one course appears possible. as we said before, the solution comes inevitably, as represented by the word _therefore_. little active work on our part is necessary, for if we have gone through these other phases properly the decision will make itself. you cannot make a wrong decision if you have the facts before you and have given each the proper weight. when the solution comes, it is recognized as right, for it comes tinged with a feeling that we call belief. now that we have found the reasoning process to be one of problem-solving, of which the first step is to acknowledge and recognize the difficulty, the second, to call up various methods of solution, and the third, to decide on the basis of one of the solutions that comes tinged with certainty, we are ready to apply this schema to study in the hope that we may discover the causes and remedies for the reasoning difficulties of students. in view of the fact that reasoning starts out with a problem, you see at once that to make your study effective you must study in problems. avoid an habitual attitude of mere acquisition. do not memorize facts in the same pattern as they are handed out to you. in history, in general literature, in science, do not read facts merely as they come in the text, but seek the relations between them. voluntarily set before yourself intellectual problems. ask yourself, _why_ is this so? in other words, in your study do not merely acquire, but also _construct_. the former makes use mostly of memory and though your memorizing be done ever so conscientiously, if it comprise the main part of your study, you fail to utilize your mind to its fullest extent. let us now consider the second stage of the reasoning process as found in study. at this stage the facts in the mind are brought forward for the purpose of being fitted into the present situation, and the essential thing is that you have a large number of facts at your disposal. if you are going to reason effectively about problems in history, mathematics, geography, it is absolutely indispensable that you know many facts about the subjects. one reason why you experience difficulty in reasoning about certain subjects is that you do not know enough about them. particularly is this true in such subjects as political economy, sociology and psychology. the results of such ignorance are often demonstrated in political and social movements. why do the masses so easily fall victims to doubtful reforms in national and municipal policies? because they do not know enough about these matters to reason intelligently. watch ignorant people listening to a demagogue and see what unreasonable things they accept. the speaker propounds a question and then proceeds to answer it in his own way. he makes it appear plausible, assuring his hearers it is the only way, and they agree because they do not have enough other facts at their command to refute it. they are unable, as we say, to see the situation in several aspects. the mistakes in reasoning which children make have a similar basis. the child reaches for the moon, reasoning--"here is something bright; i can touch most bright things; therefore, i can touch this." his reasoning is fallacious because he does not have all the facts. this condition is paralleled in the class-room when students make what are shamefacedly looked back upon as miserable blunders. when one of these fiascos occurs the cause can many times be referred to the fact that the student did not have enough facts at his command. speaking broadly, the most effective reasoning in a field can be done by one who has had the most extensive experiences in that field. if one had complete acquaintance with all facts, one would have perfect conditions for reasoning. thus we see that effectiveness in reasoning demands an extensive array of facts. accordingly, in your courses of study you must read with avidity. when you are given a list of readings in a course, some of which are required and some optional, read both sets, and every new fact thus secured will make you better able to reason in the field. but good reasoning demands more than mere quantity of ideas. the ideas must conform to certain qualitative standards before they may be effectively employed in reasoning. they must arise with promptness, in an orderly manner, pertinent to the matter in hand, and they must be clear. in securing promptness of association on the part of your ideas, employ the methods described in the chapter on memory. make many logical associations with clearness and repetition. in order to insure the rise of ideas in an orderly manner, pay attention to the manner in which you acquire them. remember, things will be recalled as they were impressed, so the value of your ideas in reasoning will depend upon the manner in which you make original impressions. a further characteristic of serviceable ideas is clarity. ideas are sometimes described as "clear" in opposition to "muddy." you know what is meant by these distinctions, and you may be assured that one cause for your failures in reasoning is that your ideas are not clear. this manifests itself in inability to make clear statements and to comprehend clearly. the latter condition is easily illustrated. when you began the study of geometry you faced a multitude of new terms; we call them technical terms, such as projection, scalene, theory of limits. these had to be clearly understood before you could reason in the subject. and when, in the progress of your study, you experienced difficulty in reasoning out problems, it was very likely due to the fact that you did not master the technical terms, and as soon as you encountered the difficulties of the course, you failed because your foundation laying did not involve the acquisition of clear ideas. examine your difficulties in reasoning subjects and if you find them traceable to vagueness of ideas, take steps to clarify them. ideas may be clarified in two ways: by definition and by classification. definition is a familiar device, for you have had much to do with it in learning. the memorization of definitions is an excellent practice, not as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of effective reasoning. throughout your study, then, pay much attention to definitions. some you will find in your texts, but others you will have to make for yourself. in order to get practice in this, undertake the manufacture of a few definitions, using terms such as charity, benevolence, natural selection. this exercise will reveal what an exacting mental operation definition is and will prove how vague most of your thinking really is. a large stock of definitions will help you to think rapidly. standing as they do for a large group of experiences, definitions are a means of mental economy. for illustration of their service in reasoning, suppose you were asked to compare the serf, the peon and the american slave. if you have a clean-cut definition of each of these terms, you can readily differentiate between them, but if you cannot define them, you will hardly be able to reason concerning them. the second means of clarifying ideas is classification. by this is meant the process of grouping similar ideas or similar points of ideas. for example, your ideas of serf, peon and slave have some points in common. group the ideas, then, with reference to these points. then in reasoning you can quickly place an idea in its proper group. the third stage of the reasoning process is decision, based on belief, and it comes inevitably, provided the other two processes have been performed rightly. accordingly, we need say little about its place in study. one caution should be pointed out in making decisions. do not make them hastily on the basis of only one or two facts. wait until you have canvassed all the ideas that bear importantly upon the case. the masses that listen top eagerly to the demagogue do not err merely from lack of ideas, but partly because they do not utilize all the facts at their disposal. this fault is frequently discernible in impulsive people, who notoriously make snap-judgments, which means that they decide before canvassing all the evidence. this trait marks the fundamental difference between superficial and profound thinkers. the former accept surface facts and decide immediately, while the latter refuse to decide until after canvassing many facts. in the improvement of reasoning ability your task is mainly one of habit formation. it is necessary, first, to form the habit of stating things in the form of problems; second, to form habits by which ideas arise promptly and profusely; third, to form habits of reserving decisions until the important facts are in. these are all specific habits that must be built up if the reasoning processes of the mind are to be effective. already you have formed some habits, if not habits of careful looking into things, then habits of hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over the surface. apply the principles of habit formation already enunciated, and remember that with every act of reasoning you perform, you are moulding yourself into a careless reasoner or an accurate reasoner, into a clear thinker or a muddy thinker. this chapter shows that reasoning is one of the highest powers of man. it is a mark of originality and intelligence, and stamps its possessor not a copier but an originator, not a follower but a leader, not a slave, to have his thinking foisted upon him by others, but a free and independent intellect, unshackled by the bonds of ignorance and convention. the man who employs reason in acquiring knowledge, finds delights in study that are denied to a rote memorizer. when one looks at the world through glasses of reason, inquiring into the eternal _why_, then facts take on a new meaning, knowledge comes with new power, the facts of experience glow with vitality, and one's own relations with them appear in a new light. readings and exercises readings: adams ( ) chapter iv. dearborn ( ) chapter v. dewey ( ) chapters iii and vi. exercise i. illustrate the steps of the reasoning process, by describing the way in which you studied this chapter. exercise . try to define the following words without the assistance of a dictionary: college, university, grammatical, town-meeting. exercise . prepare a set of maxims designed to help a student change from the "rote memory" method of study to the "reason-why" (or "problem") method. chapter x expression as an aid in study in our discussion of the nervous basis underlying study we observed that nerve pathways are affected not only by what enters over the sensory pathways, but also by what flows out over the motor pathways. as the nerve currents travel out from the motor centres in the brain to the muscles, they leave traces which modify future thoughts and actions. this being so, it is easy to see that what we give out is fully as important as what we take in; in other words, our _expressions_ are just as important as our _impressions_. by expressions we mean the motor consequences of our thoughts, and in study they usually take the form of speech and writing of a kind to be specified later. the far-reaching effects of motor expressions are too infrequently emphasized, but psychology forces us to give them prime consideration. we are first apprised of their importance when we study the nervous system, and find that every incoming sensory message pushes on and on until it finds a motor pathway over which it may travel and produce movement. this is inevitable. the very structure and arrangement of the neurones is such that we are obliged to make some movement in response to objects affecting our sense organs. the extent of movement may vary from the wide-spread tremors that occur when we are frightened by a thunderstorm to the merest flicker of an eye-lash. but whatever be its extent, movement invariably occurs when we are stimulated by some object. this has been demonstrated in startling ways in the psychological laboratory, where even so simple a thing as a piece of figured wall-paper has been shown to produce measurable bodily disturbances. ordinarily we do not notice these because they are so slight, sometimes being merely twitches of deep-seated muscles or slight enlargements or contractions of arteries which are very responsive to nerve currents. but no matter how large or how small, we may be sure that movements always occur on the excitation of a sense organ. this led us to assert in an earlier chapter that the function of the nervous system is to convert incoming sensory currents into outgoing motor currents. so ingrained is this tendency toward movement that we do not need even a sensory cue to start it off; an idea will do as well. in other words, the nervous current need not start at a sense organ, but may start in the brain and still produce movement. this fact is embodied in the law of ideo-motor action (distinguished from sensory-motor action), "every idea in the mind tends to express itself in movement." this motor character of ideas is manifested in a most thorough-going way and renders our muscular system a faithful mirror of our thoughts. we have in the psychological laboratory delicate apparatus which enables us to measure many of these slight movements. for example, we fasten a recording device to the top of a person's head, so that his slightest movements will be recorded, then we ask him while standing perfectly still to think of an object at his right side. after several moments the record shows that he involuntarily leans in the direction of the object about which he is thinking. we find further illustration of this law when we examine people as they read, for they involuntarily accompany the reading with movements of speech, measurable in the muscles of the throat, the tongue and the lips. these facts, and many others, constitute good evidence for the statement that ideas seek expression in movement. the ethical consequences of this are so momentous that we must remark upon them in passing. we now see the force of the biblical statement, "not that which entereth into the mouth defileth the man; but that which proceedeth out of the mouth, this defileth the man." think what it means to one's character that every thought harbored in the mind is bound to come out. it may not manifest itself at once in overt action, but it affects the motor pathways and either weakens or strengthens connections so that when the opportunity comes, some act will be furthered or hindered. in view of the proneness to permit base thoughts to enter the mind, human beings might sometimes fear even to think. a more optimistic idea, however, is that noble thoughts lead to noble acts. therefore, keep in your mind the kind of thoughts that you wish to see actualized in your character and the appropriate acts will follow of their own accord. but it is with the significance of expressions in study that we are at present concerned, and here we find them of supreme importance. we ordinarily regard learning as a process of taking things into the mind, and regard expression as a thing apart from acquisition of knowledge. we shall find in this discussion, however, that there is no such sharp demarcation between acquiring knowledge and expressing knowledge, but that the two are intimately bound together, expressions being properly a part of wise and economical learning. when we survey the modes of expression that may be used in study, we find them to be of several kinds. speech is one. this is the form of expression for which the class-recitation is provided. if you wish to grow as a student, utilize the recitation period and welcome every chance to recite orally, for things about which you recite in class are more effectively learned. talking about a subject under all circumstances will help you learn. when studying subjects like political economy, sociology or psychology, seize every opportunity to talk over the questions involved. hold frequent conferences with your instructor; voice your difficulties freely, and the very effort to state them will help to clarify them. it is a good plan for two students in the same course to come together and talk over the problems; the debates thus stimulated and the questions aroused by mental interaction are very helpful in impressing facts more vividly upon the mind. writing is a form of expression and is one thing that gives value to note-taking and examinations. its value is further recognized by the requirements of themes and term-papers. these are all mediums by which you may develop yourself, and they merit your earnest cooperation. another medium of expression that students may profitably employ is drawing. this is especially valuable in such subjects as geology, physiology and botany. students in botany are compelled to do much drawing of the plant-forms which they study, and this is a wise requirement, for it makes them observe more carefully, report more faithfully and recall with greater ease. you may secure the same advantages by employing the graphic method in other studies. for example, when reading in a geology text-book about the stratification of the earth in a certain region, draw the parts described and label them according to the description. you will be surprised to see how clear the description becomes and how easily it is later recalled. let us examine the effects of the expressive movements of speech, writing and the like, and see the mechanism by which they facilitate the study process. we may describe their effects in two ways: neurologically and psychologically. as may be expected from our preliminary study of the nervous system, we see their first effects upon the motor pathways leading out to the muscles. each passage of the nerve current from brain to muscle leaves traces so that the resulting act is performed with greater ease upon each repetition. this fact has already been emphasized by the warning, guard the avenues of expression. especially is it important at the first performance of an act, because this determines the path of later performances. in such studies as piano-playing, vocalizing and pronunciation of foreign words, see that your first performance is absolutely right, then as the expressive movements are repeated, they will be more firmly ingrained because of the deepening of the motor pathways. the next effect of acts of expression is to be found in the modifications made in the sensory areas of the brain. you will recall that every movement of a muscle produces nervous currents which go back to the brain and register there in the form of kinaesthetic sensations. to demonstrate kinaesthetic sensations, close your eyes and move your index finger up and down. you can feel the muscles contracting and the tendons moving back and forth, even into the back of the hand. these sensations ordinarily escape our attention, but they occupy a prominent place in the control of our actions. for example, when ascending familiar stairs in the dark, they notify us when we have reached the top. we are still further impressed with their importance when we are deprived of them; when we try to walk upon a foot or a leg that has gone "to sleep"; that is, when the kinaesthetic nerves are temporarily paralyzed we find it difficult to walk. but besides being used to control muscular actions, they may be used in study, for they may be made the source of impressions, and impressions, as we learned in the chapter on memory, are a prime requisite for learning. each expression becomes, then, through its kinaesthetic results, the source of new impressions, when, for example, you pronounce the german word, _anwenden_, with the english word "to employ," in addition to the impressions made through the ear, you make impressions through the muscles of speech (kinaesthetic impressions), and these kinaesthetic impressions enter into the body of your knowledge and later may serve as the means by which the word may be revived. when you write the word, you make kinaesthetic impressions which may later serve as forms of revival. so the movements of expression produce sensory material that may serve as tentacles by means of which you can later reach back into your memory and recall facts. we shall now consider another service of expressions which, though little regarded, nevertheless is of much moment. when we make expressive movements, much nervous energy is generated; much more than during passive impression. energy is sent back to the brain over the kinaesthetic nerve cells, and the greater the extent of the movement, the greater is the amount of new energy sent to the brain. it pours into the brain and diffuses itself especially throughout the association areas. here it excites regions which could not be excited by a more limited amount of energy. this means, in psychical terms, that new ideas are being aroused. the obvious inference from this fact is that you may, by starting movements of expression, actually summon to your assistance added powers of mind. for example, when you are called upon to recite in class, your mind seems to be a complete blank--in a state of "deadlock." you may break this "deadlock" and start brain-action by some kind of movement. it may be only to clear your throat, to ejaculate "well," or to squirm about in the seat, but whatever form the movement takes, it will usually be effective in creating the desired nervous energy, and after the inertia is once overcome the mental stream will flow freely. the unconscious application of this device is seen when a man is called on suddenly to make a speech for which he has not prepared. he usually starts out by telling a story, thus liberating nervous energy to pour back into the brain and start thinking processes. with increasing vehemence of expression, the ideas come more and more freely, and the result is a speech which surpasses the expectations of the speaker himself. the gesticulations of many speakers have this same function, being frequently of great service in arousing more nervous energy, which goes back to the brain and arouses more ideas. the device of stimulating ideas by expressive movements may be utilized in theme- or letter-writing. it is generally recognized that the difficult thing in such writing is to get a start, and the too common practice is to sit listlessly gazing into space waiting for "inspiration." this is usually a futile procedure. the better way is to begin to write anything about the topic in hand. what you write may have little merit, either of substance or form. nevertheless, if you persist in keeping up the activity of writing, making more and more movements, you will find that the ideas will begin to come in greater profusion until they come so fast you can hardly write them down. having tried to picture the neural effect of expression, we may now translate them into psychological terms, asking what service the expressions render to the conscious side of our study. first of all, we note that the expressions help to make the acts and ideas in study habitual. we find ourselves, with each expression, better able to perform such acts as the pronunciation of foreign words. second, they furnish new impressions through the kinaesthetic sense, thus being a source of sense-impression. third, they give rise to a greater number of ideas and link them up with the idea dominant at the moment. there is a further psychological effect of expression in the clarification of ideas. it is a well-attested fact that when we attempt to explain a thing to someone else, it becomes clearer in our own minds. you can demonstrate this for yourself by attempting to explain to someone an intricate conception such as the nebular hypothesis. the effort involved in making the explanation makes the fact more vivid to you. the habit of thus utilizing your knowledge in conversation is an excellent one to acquire. indeed, expression is the only objective test of knowledge and we cannot say that we really know until we can express our knowledge. expression is thus the great clarification agency and the test of knowledge. before leaving this discussion, it might be well to remark upon one phase of expression that is sometimes a source of difficulty. this is the embarrassment incident to some forms of expression, notably oral. many people are deterred from utilizing this form of expression because of shyness and embarrassment in the presence of others. if you have this difficulty in such excess that it hinders you from free expression, resolve at once to overcome it. begin at the very outset of your academic career to form habits of disregarding your impulses to act in frightened manner. take a course in public speaking. the practice thus secured will be a great aid in developing habits of fearless and free oral expression. this discussion has shown that expression is a powerful aid in learning, and is a most important feature of mental life. cultivate your powers of expression, for your college education should consist not only in the development of habits of impression, but also in the development of habits of expression. grasp eagerly every opportunity for the development of skill in clear and forceful expression. devote assiduous attention to themes and all written work, and make serious efforts to speak well. remember you are forming habits that will persist throughout your life. emphasize, therefore, at every step, methods of expression, for it is this phase of learning in which you will find greatest growth. exercise exercise i. give an example from your own experience, showing how expression (a) stimulates ideas, (b) clarifies ideas. chapter xi how to become interested in a subject "i can't get interested in mediaeval history." this illustrates a kind of complaint frequently made by college students. it is our purpose in this chapter to show the fallacy of this; to prove that interest may be developed in an "uninteresting" subject; and to show how. in order to lay a firm foundation for our psychologizing, let us examine into the nature of interest and see what it really is. it has been defined as: "the recognition of a thing which has been vitally connected with experience before--a thing recognized as old"; "impulse to attend"; "interest naturally arouses tendencies to act"; "the root idea of the term seems to be that of being engaged, engrossed, or entirely taken up with some activity because of its recognized worth"; "interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the sign of their organic union." in addition to the characteristics just mentioned should be noted the pleasurableness that usually attends any activity in which we are "interested." a growing feeling of pleasure is the sign which notifies us that we are growing interested in a subject. and it is such an aid in the performance of work that we should seek earnestly to acquire it in connection with any work we have to do. the persons who make the complaint at the head of this chapter notice that they take interest easily in certain things: a jack london story, a dish of ice cream, a foot-ball game. and they take interest in them so spontaneously and effortlessly that they think these interests must be born within them. when we examine carefully the interests of man, and trace their sources, we see that the above view is fallacious. we acquire most of our interests in the course of our experience. professor james asserts: "an adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely artificial; they have been slowly built up. the objects of professional interest are most of them in their original nature, repulsive; but by their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal fortune, one's social responsibilities and especially by the force of inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle life a man profoundly cares." since interests are largely products of experience, then, it follows that if we wish to have an interest in a given subject, we must consciously and purposefully develop it. there is wide choice open to us. we may develop interest in early victorian literature, prize-fight promoting, social theory, lignitic rocks, history of siam, the collection of scarabs, mediaeval history. we should not be deceived by the glibness of the above statements into assuming that the development of interest is an easy matter. it requires adherence to certain definite psychological laws which we may call the laws of interest. the first may be stated as follows: _in order to develop interest in a subject, secure information about it_. the force of this law will be apparent as soon as we analyze one of our already-developed interests. let us take one that is quite common--the interest which a typical young girl takes in a movie star. her interest in him comes largely from what she has been able to learn about him; the names of the productions in which he has appeared, his age, the color of his automobile, his favorite novel. her interest may be said actually to consist, at least in part, of these facts. the astute press agent knows the force of this law, and at well-timed intervals he lets slip through bits of information about the star, which fan the interest of the fair devotee to a still whiter heat. the relation of information to interest is still further illustrated by the case of the typical university professor or scientist. he is interested in certain objects of research--infusoria, electrons, plant ecology,--because he knows so much about them. his interest may be said to _consist_ partly of the body of knowledge that he possesses. he was not always interested in the specific, obscure field, but by saturating himself in facts about it, he has developed an interest in it amounting to passionate absorption, which manifests itself in "absent-mindedness" of such profundity as to make him often an object of wonder and ridicule. let us demonstrate the application of the law again showing how interest may be developed in a specific college subject. let us choose one that is generally regarded as so "difficult" and "abstract" that not many people are interested in it--philology, the study of language as a science. let us imagine that we are trying to interest a student of law in this. as a first step we shall select some legal term and show what philology can tell about it. a term frequently encountered in law is indenture--a certain form of contract. philological researches have uncovered an interesting history regarding this word. it seems that in olden days when two persons made an agreement they wrote it on two pieces of paper, then notched the edges so that when placed together, the notches on the edge of one paper would just match those of the other. this protected both parties against substitution of a fraudulent contract at time of fulfillment. still earlier in man's development, before he could write, it was customary to record such agreements by breaking a stick in two pieces and leaving the jagged ends to be fitted together at time of fulfillment. sometimes a bone was used this way. because its critical feature was the saw-toothed edge, this kind of contract was called indenture (derived from the root _dent_--tooth, the same one from which we derive our word dentist). the formal, legal-looking document which we today call an indenture gives us no hint of its humble origin, but the word when analyzed by the technique of philology tells the whole story, and throws much light upon the legal practices of our forbears. having discovered one such valuable fact in philology, the student of law may be led to investigate the science still further and find many more. as a result still he will become interested in philology. by this illustration we have demonstrated the first psychological law of interest, and also its corollary which is: _state the new in terms of the old_. for we not only gave our lawyer new information culled from philological sources; we also introduced our fact in terms of an old fact which was already "interesting" to the lawyer. this is recognized as such an important principle in education that it has become embodied in a maxim: proceed from the known to the unknown. a classic example of good educational practice in this connection is the way in which francis w. parker, a progressive educator of a former generation, taught geography. when he desired to show how water running over hard rocky soil produced a niagara, he took his class down to the creek behind the school house, built a dam and allowed the water to flow over it. when he wished to show how water flowing over soft ground resulted in a deltoid nile, he took the class to a low, flat portion of the creek bed and pointed out the effect. the creek bed constituted an old familiar element in the children's experience. niagara and the nile described in terms of it were intelligible. naturally in modern educational practice it is not always possible to have miniature waterfalls and river bottoms at hand, still it is possible to follow this principle. when, in studying mediaeval history, you read a description of the guilds, do not regard them as distant, cold, inert institutions devoid of significance in your life. rather, think of them in terms of things you already know: modern labor unions, technical schools, in so far as the comparison holds good. then trace their industrial descendants down to the present time. by thus thinking about the guilds, hitherto distant and uninteresting, you will begin to see them suffused with meaning, alight with significance, a real part of yourself. in short, you will have achieved interest. there is still another psychological law of interest: _in order to develop interest in a subject, exert activity toward it_. we see the force of this law when we observe a man in the process of developing an interest in golf. at the start he may have no interest in it whatever; he may even deride it. yielding to the importunities of his friends, however, he takes his stick in hand and samples the game. then he begins to relent; admits that perhaps there may be something interesting about the game after all. as he practises with greater frequency he begins to develop a warmer and still warmer interest until finally he thinks of little else; neglecting social and professional obligations and boring his friends _ad nauseum_ with recitals of golfing incidents. the methods by which the new-fledged golfer develops an interest in golf will apply with equal effectiveness in the case of a student. in trying to become interested in mediaeval history, keep actively engaged in it. read book after book dealing with the subject. apply it to your studies in political economy, english, and american history. choose sub-topics in mediaeval history as the subjects for themes in english composition courses. try to help some other student in the class. take part in class discussions and talk informally with the instructor outside of the classroom. use your ingenuity to devise methods of keeping active toward the subject. presently you will discover that the subject no longer appears cold and forbidding; but that it glows warm with virility; that it has become interesting. it will readily be noticed that the two laws of interest here set forth are closely interrelated. one can hardly seek information about a subject without exerting activity toward it; conversely, one cannot maintain activity on behalf of a subject without at the same time acquiring information about it. these two easily-remembered and easily-applied rules of study will go far toward solving some of the most trying conditions of student life. memorize them, apply them, and you will find yourself in possession of a power which will stay with you long after you quit college walls; one which you may apply with profit in many different situations of life. we have shown in this chapter the fallacy of the assumption that a student cannot become genuinely interested in a subject which at first seems uninteresting. we have shown that he may develop interest in any subject if he but employs the proper psychological methods. that he must obey the two-fold law--secure information about the subject (stating the new in terms of the old) and exert activity toward it. that when he has thus lighted the flame of interest, he will find his entire intellectual life illuminated, glowing with purpose, resplendent with success. in concluding this discussion we should note the wide difference between the quality of study which is done with interest and that done without it. under the latter condition the student is a slave, a drudge; under the former, a god, a creator. touched by the galvanic spark he sees new significance in every page, in every line. as his vision enlarges, he perceives new relations between his study and his future aims, indeed, between his study and the progress of the universe. and he goes to his educational tasks not as a prisoner weighted down by ball and chain, but as an eager prospector infatuated by the lust for gold. encouraged by the continual stores of new things he uncovers, intoxicated by the ozone of mental activity, he delves continually deeper until finally he emerges rich with knowledge and full of power--the intellectual power that signifies mastery over a subject. readings and exercises readings: james ( ) chapters x and xi. dewey ( ) exercise i. show how your interest in some subject, for example, the game of foot-ball, has grown in proportion to the number of facts you have discovered about it and the activity you have exerted toward it. exercise . choose some subject in which you are not at present interested. make the statement:--"i am determined to develop an interest in--. i will take the following specific steps toward this end." chapter xii the plateau of despond in our investigation of the psychology of study we have so far directed our attention chiefly toward the subjective side of the question, seeking to discover the _contents_ of mind during study. we shall now take an objective view of study, examining not the contents of mind nor methods of study, but the objective results of study. in doing this, we choose certain units of measurement, the number of minutes required for learning a given amount or the amount learned in a stated period of time. we may do this for the learning of any material, whether it be greek verbs or typewriting. all that is necessary is to decide upon some method by which progress can be noted and expressed in numerical units. this, you will observe, constitutes a statistical approach to the processes of study, such as is employed in science; and just as the statistical method has been useful in science, so it may be of value in education, and by means of statistical investigations of learning we may hope to discover some of the factors operative in good learning. progress in learning is best observable when we represent our measurements graphically, when they take the form of a curve, variously called "the curve of efficiency," "practice curve," "learning curve." we shall take a sample curve for the basis of our discussion, showing the progress of a beginner in the russian language for sixty-five days (indicated in the figure by horizontal divisions). the student studied industriously for thirty minutes each day and then translated as rapidly as possible for fifteen minutes, the number of words translated being represented by the vertical spaces on the chart. thus, on the tenth day, twenty-five words were translated, on the twentieth day, forty-five words. [illustration (graph): study of russian] in making an analysis of this typical curve, we note immediately an exceeding irregularity. at one time there is extraordinary improvement, but a later measurement registers pronounced loss. this irregularity is very common in learning. some days we do a great amount of work and do it well, but perhaps the very next day shows marked diminution in our work. the second characteristic we note is that there is extremely rapid progress at the beginning, the curve slanting up quite sharply. this is common in learning, and may be accounted for in several ways. in the first place, the easiest things come first. for example, when you are beginning the study of german, you are given mostly monosyllabic words to learn. these are easily remembered, hence progress is rapid. a second reason is that at the beginning there are many different respects in which progress can be made. for example, the beginner in german must learn nouns, case endings, declension of adjectives, days of the week; in short, a vast number of new things all at once. at a later period however, the number of new things to be learned is much smaller and improvement cannot be so rapid. a third reason why learning proceeds more rapidly at first is that the interest is greater at this time. you have doubtless many times experienced this fact, and you know that when a thing has the interest of novelty you work harder upon it. if you will examine the learning curve closely, you will note that after the initial spurt, there is a slowing up. the curve at this point resembles a plateau and indicates cessation of progress if not retrogression. this period of no progress is regarded as a characteristic of the learning curve and is a time of great discouragement to the conscientious student, so distressing that we may designate it "the plateau of despond." most people describe it as a time when they feel unable to learn more about a subject; the mind seems to be sated; new ideas cannot be assimilated, and old ones seem to be forgotten. the plateau may extend for a long or a short time, depending upon the nature of the subject-matter and the length of time over which the learning extends. in the case of professional training, it may extend over a year or more. in the case of growing children in school, it sometimes happens that an entire year elapses during which the learning of an apparently bright student is retarded. in a course of study in high school or college, it may come on about the third week and extend a month or more. something akin to the plateau may come in the course of a day, when we realize that our efficiency is greatly diminished and we seem, for an hour or more, to make no progress. inasmuch as the plateau is such a common occurrence in human activity, we should analyze it and see what factors operate to influence it. it is interesting to note that the plateau generally occurs just before an abrupt rise in efficiency. this is significant, for it may mean that the plateau is necessary in learning, especially just before reaching the really advanced stages of proficiency. accordingly, when you are experiencing a plateau in the mastery of some accomplishment, you may perhaps derive some comfort from the prospect of an approaching rise in efficiency. on the theory that it is a necessary part of learning, it has been regarded as a resting place. we are so constituted by nature that we cannot run on indefinitely; nature sometimes must call a halt. consequently, the plateau may be a warning that we cannot learn more for the present and that the proper remedy is to refrain for a little while from further efforts in that line. we have possible justification for this interpretation when we reflect that a vacation does us much good, and though we begin it feeling stale, we end it feeling much fresher and more efficient. but to stop work temporarily is not the only way to meet a plateau, and fatigue or ennui is probably not the sole or most compelling explanation. it may be that we should not regard the objective results as the true measure of learning; perhaps learning is going on even though the results are not apparent. we discovered something in the nature of unconscious learning in our discussion of memory, and it may be that a period of little objective progress marks a period of active unconscious learning. another meaning which the plateau may have is simply to mark places of greater difficulty. as already remarked, the early period is a stage of comparative ease, but as the work becomes more difficult, progress is slower. it is also quite likely that the plateau may indicate that some of the factors operative at the start are operative no longer. thus, although the learning was rapid at the beginning because the material learned at that time was easy, the plateau may come because the things to be learned have become difficult. or, whereas the beginning was attacked with considerable interest, the plateau may mean that the interest is dying down, and that less effort is being exerted. if these theories are the true explanation of the plateau, we see that it is not to be regarded as a time of reduction in learning, to be contemplated with despair. the appropriate attitude may be one of resignation, with the determination to make it as slightly disturbing as possible. but though the reasons just described may have something to do with the production of the plateau, as yet we have no evidence that the plateau cannot be dispensed with. it is practically certain that the plateau is not caused entirely by necessity for rest or unconscious learning. it frequently is due, we must regretfully admit, to poor early preparation. if at the beginning of a period of learning an insecure foundation is laid, it cannot be expected to support the burden of more difficult subject-matter. we have enumerated a number of the explanations that have been advanced to account for the plateau, and have seen that it may have several causes, among which are necessity for rest, increased difficulty of subject-matter, loss of interest and insufficient preparation. in trying to eliminate the plateau, our remedy should be adapted to the cause. in recognition of the fact that learning proceeds irregularly, we see that it is rational to expect the amount of effort to be exerted throughout a period of learning, to vary. it will vary partly with the difficulty of subject-matter and partly with fluctuations in bodily and mental efficiency which are bound to occur from day to day. since this irregularity is bound to occur, you may well make your effort vary from one extreme to the other. at times, perhaps your most profitable move may be to take a complete vacation. the vacation might cover several weeks, a week-end, or if the plateau is merely a low period in the day's work, then ten minutes may suffice for a vacation. as an adjunct to such rest periods, some form of recreation should usually be planned, for the essential thing is to permit the mind to rest from the tiresome activity. if your plateau represents greater difficulty of subject-matter and loss of interest, your duty is plainly to work harder. in exerting more effort, make some changes in your methods of study. for example, if you have been accustomed to study a certain subject by silent reading, begin to read your lessons aloud. change your method of taking notes, or change the hour of day in which you prepare your lesson. in short, try any of the methods described in this book, and use your own ingenuity, and the change in method may overcome the plateau. if a plateau is due to our last-mentioned cause, insufficient preparation, the remedy must be drastic. to make new resolutions and to put forth additional effort is not enough; you must go back and relay the foundation. make a thorough review of the work which you covered slightingly, making sure that every step is clear. this process was described in an earlier chapter as the clarification of ideas and is absolutely essential in building up a structure of knowledge that will stand. indeed, as you take various courses you will find that your study will be much improved by periodical reviews. the benefits cannot all be enumerated here, but we may reasonably claim that a review will be very likely to remove a plateau, and used with the other remedies herein suggested, will help you to rid yourself of one of the most discouraging features of student life. reading and exercise reading: swift ( ) chapter iv. exercise i. describe one or more plateaus that you have observed in your own experience. what do you regard as the causes? chapter xiii mental second-wind did you ever engage in any exhausting physical work for a long period of time? if so, you probably remember that as you proceeded, you became more and more fatigued, finally reaching a point when it seemed that you could not endure the strain another minute. you had just decided to give up, when suddenly the fatigue seemed to diminish and new energy seemed to come from some source. this curious thing, which happens frequently in athletic activities, is known as second-wind, and is described, by those who have experienced it, as a time of increased power, when the work is done with greater ease and effectiveness and with a freshness and vigor in great contrast to the staleness that preceded it. it is as though one "tapped a level of new energy," revealing hidden stores of unexpected power. and it is commonly reported that with persistence in pushing one's self farther and farther, a third and fourth wind may be uncovered, each one leading to greater heights of achievement. this phenomenon occurs not alone on the physical plane; it is discernible in mental exertion as well. true, we seldom experience it because we are mentally lazy and have the habit of stopping our work at the first signs of fatigue. did we persist, however, disregarding fatigue and ennui, we should find ourselves tapping vast reserves of mental power and accomplishing mental feats of astonishing brilliancy. the occasional occurrence of the phenomenon of second-wind gives ground for the statement that we possess more energy than we ordinarily use. there are several lines of evidence for this statement. one is to be found in the energizing effects of emotional excitement. under the impetus of anger, a man shows far greater strength than he ordinarily uses. similarly, a mother manifests the strength of a tigress when her young is endangered. a second line of evidence is furnished by the effect of stimulants. alcohol brings to the fore surprising reserves of physical and psychic energy. lastly, we have innumerable instances of accession of strength under the stimulus of an idea. under the domination of an all-absorbing idea, one performs feats of extraordinary strength, utilizing stores of energy otherwise out of reach. we have only to read of the heroic achievements of little joan of arc for an example of such manifestation of reserve power. when we examine this accession of energy we find it to be describable in several ways--physiologically, neurologically and psychologically. the physiological effects consist in a heightening of the bodily functions in general. the muscles become more ready to act, the circulation is accelerated, the breathing more rapid. curious things take place in various glands throughout the body. one, the adrenal gland, has been the object of special study and has been shown, upon the arousal of these reserves of energy, to produce a secretion of the utmost importance in providing for sudden emergencies. this little gland is located above the kidney, and is aroused to intense activity at times, pouring out into the blood a fluid that goes all over the body. some of its effects are to furnish the blood with chemicals that act as fuel to the muscles, assisting them to contract more vigorously, to make the lungs more active in introducing oxygen into the system, to make the heart more active in distributing the blood throughout the body. such glandular activity is an important physiological condition of these higher levels of energy. in neurological terms, the increase in energy consists in the flow of more nervous energy into the brain, particularly into those areas where it is needed for certain kinds of controlled thought and action. an abundance of nervous energy is very advantageous, for, as has been intimated in a former chapter, nervous energy is diffused and spread over all the pathways that are easily permeable to its distribution. this results in the use of considerable areas of brain surface, and knits up many associations, so that one idea calls up many other ideas. this leads us to recognize the psychological conditions of increased energy, which are, first, the presence of more ideas, second, the more facile flow of ideas; the whole accompanied by a state of marked pleasurableness. pleasure is a notable effect of increased energy. when work progresses rapidly and satisfactorily, it is accomplished with great zest and a feeling almost akin to exaltation. these conditions describe to some degree the conditions when we are doing efficient work. since we are endowed with the energy requisite for such efficient work, the obvious question is, why do we not more frequently use it? the answer is to be found in the fact that we have formed the habit of giving up before we create conditions of high efficiency. you will note that the conditions require long-continued exertion and resolute persistence. this is difficult, and we indulgently succumb to the first symptoms of fatigue, before we have more than scratched the surface of our real potentialities. because of the prominent place occupied by fatigue in thus being responsible for our diminished output, we shall briefly consider its place in study. everyone who has studied will agree that fatigue is an almost invariable attendant of continuous mental exertion. we shall lay down the proposition at the start, however, that the awareness of fatigue is not the same as the objective fatigue in the organs of the body. fatigue should be regarded as a twofold thing--a state of mind, designated its subjective aspect, and a condition of various parts of the body, designated its objective aspect. the former is observable by introspection, the latter by analysis of bodily secretions and by measurement of the diminution of work, entirely without reference to the way the mind regards the work. fatigue subjectively, or fatigue as we _feel_ it, is not at all the same as fatigue as manifested in the body. if we were to make two curves, the one showing the advancement of the _feeling_ of fatigue, and the other showing the advancement of impotence on the part of the bodily processes, the two curves would not at all coincide. stated another way, fatigue is a complex thing, a product of ideas, feelings and sensations, and sometimes the ideas overbalance the sensations and we think we are more tired then we are objectively. it is this fact that accounts for our too rapid giving up when we are engaged in hard work. a psychological analysis of the subjective side of fatigue will make its true nature more apparent. probably the first thing we find in the mind when fatigued is a large mass of sensations. they are referred to various parts of the body, mostly the part where muscular activity has been most violent and prolonged. not all of the sensations, however, are intense enough to be localizable, some being so vague that we merely say we are "tired all over." these vague sensations are often overlooked; nevertheless, as will be shown later, they may be exceedingly important. but sensations are not the only contents of the mind at time of fatigue. feelings are present also, usually of a very unpleasant kind. they are related partly to the sensations mentioned above, which are essentially painful, and they are feelings of boredom and ennui. we have yet to examine the ideas in mind and their behavior at time of fatigue. they come sluggishly, associations being made slowly and inaccurately, and we make many mistakes. but constriction of ideas is not the sole effect of fatigue. at such a time there are usually other ideas in the mind not relevant to the fatiguing task of the moment, and exceedingly distracting. often they are so insistent in forcing themselves upon our attention that we throw up the work without further effort. it is practically certain that much of our fatigue is due, not to real weariness and inability to work, but to the presence of ideas that appear so attractive in contrast with the work in hand that we say we are tired of the latter. what we really mean is that we would rather do something else. these obtruding ideas are often introduced into our minds by other people who tell us that we have worked long enough and ought to come and play, and though we may not have felt tired up to this point, still the suggestion is so strong that we immediately begin to feel tired. various social situations can arouse the same suggestion. for example, as the clock nears quitting time, we feel that we ought to be tired, so we allow ourselves to think we are. let us now examine the bodily conditions to see what fatigue is objectively. "physiologically it has been demonstrated that fatigue is accompanied by three sorts of changes. first, poisons accumulate in the blood and affect the action of the nervous system, as has been shown by direct analysis. mosso ... selected two dogs as nearly alike as possible. one he kept tied all day; the other, he exercised until by night it was thoroughly tired. then he transfused the blood of the tired animal into the veins of the rested one and produced in him all the signs of fatigue that were shown by the other. there can be no doubt that the waste products of the body accumulate in the blood and interfere with the action of the nerve cells and muscles. it is probable that these accumulations come as a result of mental as well as of physical work. "a second change in fatigue has been found in the cell body of the neurone. hodge showed that the size of the nucleus of the cell in the spinal cord of a bee diminished nearly per cent, as a result of the day's activity, and that the nucleus became much less solid. a third change that has been demonstrated as a result of muscular work is the accumulation of waste products in the muscle tissue. fatigued muscles contain considerable percentages of these products. that they are important factors in the fatigue process has been shown by washing them from a fatigued muscle. as a result the muscle gains new capacity for work. the experiments are performed on the muscles of a frog that have been cut from the body and fatigued by electrical stimulation. when they will no longer respond, their sensitivity may be renewed by washing them in dilute alcohol or in a weak salt solution that will dissolve the products of fatigue. it is probable that these products stimulate the sense-organs in the muscles and thus give some of the sensations of fatigue. of these physical effects of fatigue, the accumulation of waste products in the blood and the effects upon the nerve cells are probably common both to mental and physical fatigue. the effect upon the muscles plays a part in mental fatigue only so far as all mental work involves some muscular activity." by this time you must be convinced that the subject of fatigue is exceedingly complicated; that its effects are manifested differently in mind and body. in relieving fatigue the first step to be taken is to rest properly. man cannot work incessantly; he must rest sometimes, and it is just as important to know how to rest efficiently as to know how to work efficiently. by this is not meant that one should rest as soon as fatigue begins to be felt. quite the reverse. keep on working all the harder if you wish the second-wind to appear. perhaps two hours will exhaust your first supply of energy and will leave you greatly fatigued. do not give up at this time, however. push yourself farther in order to uncover the second layer of energy. before entering upon this, however, it will be possible to secure some advantage by resting for about fifteen minutes. do not rest longer than this, or you may lose the momentum already secured and your two hours will have gone for naught. if one indulges in too long a rest, the energy seems to run down and more effort is required to work it up again than was originally expended. it is also important to observe the proper mental conditions during rest. do not spend the fifteen minutes in getting interested in some other object; for that will leave distracting ideas in the mind which will persist when you resume work. make the rest a time of physical and mental relief. move cramped muscles, rest your eyes and let your thoughts idly wander; then come back to work in ten or fifteen minutes and you will be amazed at the refreshed feeling with which you do your work and at the accession of new energy that will come to you. keep on at this new plane and your work will take on all the attributes of the second-wind level of efficiency. besides planning intelligent rests, you may also adjust yourself to fatigue by arranging your daily program so as to do your hardest work when you are fresh, and your easiest when your efficiency is low. in other words, you are a human dynamo, and should adjust yourself to the different loads you carry. when carrying a heavy load, employ your best energies, but when carrying only a light load, exert a proportionate amount of energy. every student has tasks of a routine nature which do not require a high degree of energy, such as copying material. plan to perform such work when your stock of energy is lowest. one of the best ways to insure the attainment of a higher plane of mental efficiency is to assume an attitude of interestedness. this is an emotional state and we have seen that emotion calls forth great energy. a final aid in promoting increase of energy is that gained through stimulating ideas. other things being equal, the student who is animated by a stimulating idea works more diligently and effectively than one without. the idea may be a lofty professional ideal; it may be a desire to please one's family, a sense of duty, or a wish to excel. whatever it is, an idea may stimulate to extraordinary achievements. adopt some compelling aim if you have none. a vocational aim often serves as a powerful incentive throughout one's student life. an idea may operate for even more transient purposes; it may make one oblivious to present discomfort to a remarkable degree. this is accomplished through the aid of suggestion. when feelings of fatigue approach, you may ward them off by resolutely suggesting to yourself that you are feeling fresh. above all, the will is effective in lifting one to higher levels of efficiency. it is notorious that a single effort of the will, "such as saying 'no' to some habitual temptation or performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power. 'in the act of uncorking the whiskey bottle which i had brought home to get drunk upon,' said a man to me, 'i suddenly found myself running out into the garden, where i smashed it on the ground. i felt so happy and uplifted after this act, that for two months i wasn't tempted to touch a drop.'" but the results of exertions of the will are not usually so immediate, and you may accept it as a fact that in raising yourself to a higher level of energy you cannot do it by a single effort. continuous effort is required until the higher levels of energy have _formed the habit_ of responding when work is to be done. in laying the burden upon nature's mechanism of habit, you see you are again face to face with the proposition laid down at the beginning of the book--that education consists in the process of forming habits of mind. the particular habit most important to cultivate in connection with the production of second-wind is the habit of resisting fatigue. form the habit of persisting in spite of apparent obstacles and limitations. though they seem almost unsurmountable, they are really only superficial. buried deep within you are stores of energy that you yourself are unaware of. they will assist you in accomplishing feats far greater than you think yourself capable of. draw upon these resources and you will find yourself gradually living and working upon a higher plane of efficiency, improving the quality of your work, increasing the quantity of your work and enhancing your enjoyment in work. readings and exercise readings: james ( ) seashore ( ) chapter iii. swift ( ) chapter v. exercise i. describe conditions you have observed at time of second-wind in connection with prolonged (a) physical exertion, (b) intellectual exertion. chapter xiv examinations one of the most vexatious periods of student life is examination time. this is almost universally a time of great distress, giving rise in extreme cases to conditions of nervous collapse. the reason for this is not far to seek, for upon the results of examinations frequently depend momentous consequences, such as valuable appointments, diplomas, degrees and other important events in the life of a student. in view of the importance of examinations, then, it is natural that they be regarded with considerable fear and trepidation, and it is important that we devise what rules we can for meeting their exactious demands with greatest ease and effectiveness. examinations serve several purposes, the foremost of which is to inform the examiner regarding the amount of knowledge possessed by the student. in discovering this, two methods may be employed; first, to test whether or not the student knows certain things, plainly a reproductive exercise; second, to see how well the student can apply his knowledge. but this is not the only function of an examination. it also shows the student how much he knows or does not know. again the examination often serves as an incentive to harder work on the part of the student, for if one knows there will be an examination in a subject, one usually studies with greater zeal than when an examination is not expected. lastly, an examination may help the student to link up facts in new ways, and to see them in new relationships. in this aspect, you readily see that examinations constitute a valuable device in learning. but students are not very patient in philosophizing about the purpose of examinations, declaring that if examinations are a necessary part of the educational process, they wish some advice that will enable them to pass examinations easily and with credit to themselves. so we shall turn our attention to the practical problems of passing examinations. our first duty in giving advice is to call attention to the necessity for faithful work throughout the course of study. some students seem to think that they can slight their work throughout a course, and by vigorous cramming at the end make up for slighted work and pass the examination. this is an extremely dangerous attitude to take. it might work with certain kinds of subject-matter, a certain type of student-mind and a certain kind of examiner, but as a general practice it is a most treacherous method of passing a course. the greatest objection from a psychological standpoint is that we have reason to believe that learning thus concentrated is not so permanently effective as that extended over a long period of time. for instance, a german course extending over a year has much to commend it over a course with the same number of recitation-hours crowded into two months. we already discussed the reasons for this in chapter vi, when we showed the beneficial results coming from the distribution of impressions over a period of time. against cramming it may further be urged that the hasty impression of a mass of new material is not likely to be lasting; particularly is this true when the cramming is made specifically for a certain examination. as we saw in the chapter on memory, the intention to remember affects the firmness of retention, and if the cramming is done merely with reference to the examination, the facts learned may be forgotten and never be available for future use. so we may lay it down as a rule that feverish exertions at the end of a course cannot replace conscientious work throughout the course. in spite of these objections, however, we must admit that cramming has some value, if it does not take the form of new acquisition of facts, but consists more of a manipulation of facts already learned. as a method of review, it has an eminently proper place and may well be regarded as indispensable. some students, it is true, assert that they derive little benefit from a pre-examination review, but one is inclined to question their methods. we have already found that learning is characteristically aided by reviews, and that recall is facilitated by recency of impression. reviewing just before examination serves the memory by providing repetition and recency, which, as we learned in the chapter on memory, are conditions for favorable impression. a further value of cramming is that by means of such a summarizing review one is able to see facts in a greater number of relations than before. it too often happens that when facts are taken up in a course they come in a more or less detached form, but at the conclusion of the course a review will show the facts in perspective and will disclose many new relations between them. another advantage of cramming is that at such a time, one usually works at a high plane of efficiency; the task of reviewing in a few hours the work of an entire course is so huge that the attention is closely concentrated, impressions are made vividly, and the entire mentality is tuned up so that facts are well impressed, coordinated and retained. these advantages are not all present in the more leisurely learning of a course, so we see that cramming may be regarded as a useful device in learning. we must not forget that many of the advantages secured by cramming are dependent upon the methods pursued. there are good methods and poor methods of cramming. one of the most reprehensible of the latter is to get into a flurry and scramble madly through a mass of facts without regard to their relation to each other. this method is characterized by breathless haste and an anxious fear lest something be missed or forgotten. perhaps its most serious evil is its formlessness and lack of plan. in other words the facts should not be seized upon singly but should be regarded in the light of their different relations with each other. suppose, for example, you are reviewing for an examination in mediaeval history. the important events may be studied according to countries, studying one country at a time, but that is not sufficient; the events occurring during one period in one country should be correlated with those occurring in another country at the same time. likewise the movements in the field of science and discovery should be correlated with movements in the fields of literature, religion and political control. tabulate the events in chronological order and compare the different series of events with each other. in this way the facts will be seen in new relations and will be more firmly impressed so that you can use them in answering a great variety of questions. having made preparation of the subject-matter of the examination, the next step is to prepare yourself physically for the trying ordeal, for it is well known that the mind acts more ably under physically healthful conditions. go to the examination-room with your body rested after a good night's sleep. eat sparingly before the examination, for mental processes are likely to be clogged if too heavy food is taken. having reached the examination-room, there are a number of considerations that are requisite for success. some of the advice here given may seem to be superfluous but if you had ever corrected examination papers you would see the need of it all. let your first step consist of a preliminary survey of the examination questions; read them all over slowly and thoughtfully in order to discover the extent of the task set before you. a striking thing is accomplished by this preliminary reading of the questions. it seems as though during the examination period the knowledge relating to the different questions assembles itself, and while you are focusing your attention upon the answer to one question, the answers to the other questions are formulating themselves in your mind. it is a semi-conscious operation, akin to the "unconscious learning" discussed in the chapter on memory. in order to take advantage of it, it is necessary to have the questions in mind as soon as possible; then it will be found that relevant associations will form and will come to the surface when you reach the particular questions. during the examination when some of these associations come into consciousness ahead of time, it is often wise to digress from the question in hand long enough to jot them down. by all means preserve them, for if you do not write them down they may leave you and be lost. sometimes very brilliant ideas come in flashes, and inasmuch as they are so fleeting, it is wise to grasp them and fix them while they are fresh. in writing the examination, be sure you read every question carefully. each question has a definite point; look for it, and do not start answering until you are sure you have found it. discover the implications of each question; canvass its possible interpretations, and if it is at all ambiguous seek light from the instructor if he is willing to make any further comment. it is well to have scratch paper handy and make outlines for your answers to long questions. it is a good plan, also, when dealing with long questions, to watch the time carefully, for there is danger that you will spend too much time upon some question to the detriment of others equally important, though shorter. one error which students often commit in taking examinations is to waste time in dreaming. as they come upon a difficult question they sit back and wait for the answer to come to them. this is the wrong plan. the secret of freedom of ideas lies in activity. therefore, at such times, keep active, so that the associative processes will operate freely. stimulate brain activity by the method suggested in chapter x, namely, by means of muscular activity. instead of idly waiting for flashes of inspiration, begin to write. you may not be able to write directly upon the point at issue, but you can write something about it, and as you begin to explore and to express your meagre fund of knowledge, one idea will call up another and soon the correct answer will appear. after you have prepared yourself to the extent of your ability, you should maintain toward the examination an attitude of confidence. believe firmly that you will pass the examination. make strong suggestions to yourself, affirming positively that you have the requisite amount of information and the ability to express it coherently and forcefully. fortified by the consciousness of faithful application throughout the work of a course, reinforced by a thorough, well-planned review, and with a firm conviction in the strength of your own powers, you may approach your examinations with comparative ease and with good chances of passing them creditably. readings and exercise readings: adams ( ) chapter x. dearborn ( ) chapter ii. exercise i. make a schedule of your examinations for the next examination week. show exactly what preparatory steps you will take (a) before coming to the examination room, ( ) after entering it. chapter xv bodily conditions for effective study it is a truism to say that mental ability is affected by bodily conditions. a common complaint of students is that they cannot study because of a headache, or they fail in class because of loss of sleep. so patent is the interrelation between bodily condition and study that we cannot consider our discussion of study problems complete without recognition of the topic. we shall group our discussions about three of the most important physical activities, eating, sleeping and exercising. these make up the greater part of our daily activities and if they are properly regulated our study is likely to be effective. food.--it is generally agreed that the main function of food is to repair the tissues of the body. other effects are present, such as pleasure and sociability, but its chief benefit is reparative, so we may well regard the subject from a strictly utilitarian standpoint and inquire how we may produce the highest efficiency from our eating. some of the important questions about eating are, how much to eat, what kind of food to eat, when to eat, what are the most favorable conditions for eating? the quantity of food to be taken varies with the demands of the individual appetite and the individual powers of absorption. in general, one who is engaged in physical labor needs more, because of increased appetite and increased waste of tissues. so a farm-hand needs more food than a college student, whose work is mostly indoors and sedentary. much has been said recently about the ills of overeating. one of the most enthusiastic defenders of a decreased diet is mr. horace fletcher, who, by the practice of protracted mastication, "contrives to satisfy the appetite while taking an exceptionally small amount of food. salivary digestion is favored and the mechanical subdivision of the food is carried to an extreme point. remarkably complete digestion and absorption follow. by faithfully pursuing this system mr. fletcher has vastly bettered his general health, and is a rare example of muscular and mental power for a man above sixty years of age. he is a vigorous pedestrian and mountain-climber and holds surprising records for endurance tests in the gymnasium. "the chief gain observed in his case, as in others which are more or less parallel, is the acquiring of immunity to fatigue, both muscular and central. it is not claimed that the sparing diet confers great strength for momentary efforts--'explosive strength,' as the term goes--but that moderate muscular contractions may be repeated many times with far less discomfort than before. the inference appears to be that the subject who eats more than is best has in his circulation and his tissues by-products which act like the muscular waste which is normally responsible for fatigue. according to this conception he is never really fresh for his task, but is obliged to start with a handicap. when he reduces his diet the cells and fluids of his body free themselves of these by-products and he realizes a capacity quite unguessed in the past. "the same assumption explains the fact mentioned by mr. fletcher, that the hours of sleep can be reduced decidedly when the diet is cut down. it would seem as though a part of our sleep might often be due to avoidable auto-intoxication. if one can shorten his nightly sleep without feeling the worse for it this is an important gain." but the amount of food is probably not so important as the kind. foods containing much starch, as potatoes and rice, may ordinarily be taken in greater quantities than foods containing much protein, such as meats and nuts. so our problem is not so much concerned with quantity as with the choice of kinds of food. probably the most favorable distribution of foods for students is a predominance of fruits, coarse cereals, starch and sugar and less prominence to meats. do not begin the day's study on a breakfast of cakes. they are a heavy tax upon the digestive powers and their nutritive value is low. the mid-day meal is also a crucial factor in determining the efficiency of afternoon study, and many students almost completely incapacitate themselves for afternoon work by a too-heavy noon meal. frequently an afternoon course is rendered quite valueless because the student drowses through the lecture soddened by a heavy lunch. one way of overcoming this difficulty is by dispensing with the mid-day meal; another way is to drink a small amount of coffee, which frequently keeps people awake; but these devices are not to be universally recommended. the heavy meal of a student may well come at evening. it should consist of a varied assortment of foods with some liquids, preferably clear soup, milk and water. meat also forms a substantial part of this meal, though ordinarily it should not be taken more than once a day. much is heard nowadays about the dangers of excessive meat-eating and the objections are well-founded in the case of brain-workers. the undesirable effects are "an unprofitable spurring of the metabolism-- more particularly objectionable in warm weather--and the menace of auto-intoxication." too much protein, found in meat, lays a burden upon the liver and kidneys and when the burden is too great, wastes, which cannot be taken care of, gather and poison the blood, giving rise to that feeling of being "tired all over" which is so inimical to mental and physical exertion. when meat is eaten, care should be taken to choose right kinds. "some kinds of meat are well known to occasion indigestion. pork and veal are particularly feared. while we may not know the reason why these foods so often disagree with people, it seems probable that texture is an important consideration. in both these meats the fibre is fine, and fat is intimately mingled with the lean. a close blending of fat with nitrogenous matter appears to give a fabric which is hard to digest. the same principle is illustrated by fat-soaked fried foods. under the cover of the fat, thorough-going bacterial decomposition of the proteins may be accomplished with the final release of highly poisonous products. attacks of acute indigestion resulting from this cause are much like the so-called ptomaine poisoning." much of the benefit of meat may be secured from other foods. fat, for example, may be obtained from milk and butter freed from the objectionable qualities of the meat-fibre. in this connection it is important to call attention to the use of fried fat. avoid fat that is mixed with starch particles in such foods as fried potatoes and pie-crust. the conditions during meals should always be as pleasant as possible. this refers both to physical surroundings and mental condition. "the processes occurring in the alimentary canal are greatly subject to influences radiating from the brain. it is especially striking that both the movements of the stomach and the secretion of the gastric juice may be inhibited as a result of disturbing circumstances. intestinal movements may be modified in similar fashion." "cannon has collected various instances of the suspension of digestion in consequence of disagreeable experiences, and it would be easy for almost anyone to add to his list. he tells us, for example, of the case of a woman whose stomach was emptied under the direction of a specialist in order to ascertain the degree of digestion undergone by a prescribed breakfast. the dinner of the night before was recovered and was found almost unaltered. inquiry led to the fact that the woman had passed a night of intense agitation as the result of misconduct on the part of her husband. people who are seasick some hours after a meal vomit undigested food. apprehension of being sick has probably inhibited the gastric activities. "just as a single occasion of painful emotion may lead to a passing digestive disturbance, so continued mental depression, worry, or grief may permanently impair the working of the (alimentary) tract and undermine the vigor and capacity of the sufferer. homesickness is not to be regarded lightly as a cause of malnutrition. companionship is a powerful promoter of assimilation. the attractive serving of food, a pleasant room, and good ventilation are of high importance. the lack of these, so commonly faced by the lonely student or the young man making a start in a strange city, may be to some extent counteracted by the cultivation of optimism and the mental discipline which makes it possible to detach one's self from sordid surroundings." almost as important as eating is drinking, for liquids constitute the "largest item in the income" of the body. free drinking is recommended by physiologists, the beneficial results being, "the avoidance of constipation, and the promotion of the elimination of dissolved waste by the kidneys and possibly the liver." in regard to the use of water with meals, a point upon which emphatic cautions were formerly offered, recent experiments have failed to show any bad effects from this, and the advice is now given to drink "all the water that one chooses with meals." caution should be observed, however, about introducing hot and cold liquids into the stomach in quick succession. other liquids have been much discussed by dietitians, especially tea and coffee. "these beverages owe what limited food value they have to the cream and sugar usually mixed with them. they give pleasure by their aroma, but they are given a peculiar position among articles of diet by the presence in them of the compound caffein, which is distinctly a drug. it is a stimulant to the heart, the kidneys, and the central nervous system." "individual susceptibility to the action of caffein varies greatly. where one person notices little or no reaction after a cup of coffee, another is exhilarated to a marked degree and hours later may find himself lying sleepless with tense or trembling muscles, a dry, burning skin, and a mind feverishly active. often it is found that a more protracted disturbance follows the taking of coffee with cream than is caused by black coffee. "it is too much to claim that the use of tea and coffee is altogether to be condemned. many people, nevertheless, are better without them. for all who find themselves strongly stimulated it is the part of wisdom to limit the enjoyment of these decoctions to real emergencies when uncommon demands are made upon the endurance and when for a time hygienic considerations have to be ignored. if young people will postpone the formation of the habit they will have one more resource when the pressure of mature life becomes severe." before concluding this discussion a word might be added concerning the relation between fasting and mental activity. prolonged abstinence from food frequently results in highly sharpened intellectual powers. numerous examples of this are found in the literature of history and biography; many actors, speakers and singers habitually fast before public performances. there are some disadvantages to fasting, especially loss of weight and weakness, but when done under the direction of a physician, fasting has been known to produce very beneficial effects. it is mentioned here because it has such marked effects in speeding up the mental processes and clearing the mind; and the well-nourished student may find the practice a source of mental strength during times of stress such as examinations. sleep.--"about one-third of an average human life is passed in the familiar and yet mysterious state which we call sleep. from one point of view this seems a large inroad upon the period in which our consciousness has its exercise; a subtraction of twenty-five years from the life of one who lives to be seventy-five. yet we know that the efficiency and comfort of the individual demand the surrender of all this precious time. it has often been said that sleep is a more imperative necessity than food, and the claim seems to be well founded." it is quite likely that some students indulge in too much sleep. this may sometimes be due to laziness, but frequently it is due to actual intoxication, from an excess of food which results in the presence of poisonous "narcotizing substances absorbed from the burdened intestine". this theory is rendered tenable by the fact that when the diet is reduced the hours of sleep may be reduced. if one is in good health, it seems right to expect that one should be able to arise gladly and briskly upon awaking. by all means do not indulge yourself in long periods of lying in bed after a good night's rest. if we examine the physical and physiological conditions of sleep we shall better understand its hygiene. sleep is a state in which the tissues of the body which have been used up may be restored. of course some restoration of broken-down tissue takes place as soon as it begins to wear out, but so long as the body keeps working, the one process can never quite compensate for the other, so there must be a periodic cessation of activity so that the energies of the body may be devoted to restoration. viewing sleep as a time when broken-down bodily cells are restored, we see that we tax the energies of the body less if we go to sleep each day before the cells are entirely depleted. that is the significance of the old teaching that sleep before midnight is more efficacious than sleep after midnight. it is not that there is any mystic virtue in the hours before twelve, but that in the early part of the evening the cells are not so nearly exhausted as they are later in the evening, and it is much easier to repair them in the partially exhausted stage than it is in the completely exhausted stage. for this reason, a mid-day nap is often effective, or a short nap after the evening dinner. by thus catching the cells at an early stage of their exhaustion, they can be restored with comparative ease, and more energy will be available for use during the remainder of the working hours. a problem that may occasionally trouble a student is sleeplessness and we may properly consider here some of the ways of avoiding it. one prime cause of sleeplessness is external disturbance. the disturbance may be visual. although it is ordinarily thought that if the eyes are closed, no visual disturbances can be sensed, nevertheless, as a matter of fact the eye-lids are not wholly opaque. sight may be obtained through them, as you may prove by closing your eyes and moving your fingers before them. the lids transmit light to the retina and it is quite likely that you are frequently awakened by a beam of light falling upon your closed eye-lids. for this reason, one who is inclined to be wakeful should shut out from the bed-room all avenues whereby light may enter as a distraction. the temperature sense is also a source of distraction in sleep, and it is a common experience to be awakened by extreme cold. the ears, too, may be the source of disturbance in sleep; for even though we are asleep, the tympanic membrane is always exposed to vibrations of air. in fact, stimuli are continually playing upon the sense-organs and are arousing nervous currents which try to break over the boundaries of sleep and impress themselves upon the brain. for this reason, one who wishes to have untroubled sleep should remove all possible distractions. but apart from external distractions, wakefulness may still be caused by distractions from within. troublesome ideas may be present and persist in keeping one awake. this means that brain activity has been started and needs suppression. various devices have been suggested. one is to eat something very light, just enough to draw the surplus blood, which excites the brain, away from the brain to the digestive tract. this advice should be taken with caution, however, for eating just before retiring may use up in digestion much of the energy needed in repairing the body, and may leave one greatly fatigued in the morning. one way to relieve the mind of mental distractions is to fill it with non-worrisome, restful thoughts. read something light, a restful essay or a non-exciting story, or poetry. another device is to bathe the head in cold water so as to relieve congestion of blood in the brain. a tepid or warm bath is said to have a similar effect. dreams constitute one source of annoyance to many, and while they are not necessarily to be avoided, still they may disturb the night's rest. we may avoid them in some measure by creating conditions free from sensory distractions, for many of our dreams are direct reflections of sensations we are experiencing at the moment. a dream with an arctic setting may be the result of becoming uncovered on a cold night. to use an illustration from ellis: "a man dreams that he enlists in the army, goes to the front, and is shot. he is awakened by the slamming of a door. it seems probable that the enlistment and the march to the field are theories to account for the report which really caused the whole train of thought, though it seemed to be its latest item." such dreams may be partially eliminated by care in arranging conditions so that there will be few distractions. especially should they be guarded against in the later hours of the sleep, for we do not sleep so soundly after the first two hours as we do before, and stimuli can more easily impress themselves and affect the brain. before leaving the subject of sleep, we should note the benefit to be derived from regularity in sleep. all nature seems to move rhythmically and sleep is no exception. insomnia may be treated by means of habituating one's self to get sleepy at a certain time, and there is no question that the rising process may be made easier if one forms the habit of arising at the same time every morning. to rhythmize this important function is a long step towards the efficient life. exercise.--brain workers do not ordinarily get all the exercise they should. particularly is this true of some conscientious students who feel they must not take any time from their study. but this denotes a false conception of mental action. the human organism needs exercise. man is not a disembodied spirit; he must pay attention to the claims of the body. indeed it will be found that time spent in exercise will result in a higher grade of mental work. this is recognized by colleges and universities by the requirement of gymnasium work, and the opportunity should be welcomed by the student. inasmuch as institutions generally give instruction in this subject, we need not go specifically into the matter of exercises. perhaps the only caution that need be urged is that against the excessive participation in such exhausting games as foot-ball. it is seriously to be questioned whether the strenuous grilling that a foot-ball player must undergo does not actually impair his ability to concentrate upon his studies. if you undertake a course of exercise, by all means have it regular. little is gained by sporadic exercising. adopt the principle of regularity and rhythmize this important phase of bodily activity as well as all other phases. in concluding our discussion of physical hygiene for the student, we cannot stress too much the value of relaxation. the life of a student is a trying one. it exercises chiefly the higher brain centres and keeps the organism keyed up to a high pitch. these centres become fatigued easily and ought to be rested occasionally. therefore, the student should relax at intervals, and engage in something remote from study. to forget books for an entire week-end is often wisdom; to have a hobby or an avocation is also wise. a student must not forget that he is something more than an intellectual being. he is a physical organism and a social being, and the well-rounded life demands that all phases receive expression. we grant that it is wrong to exalt the physical and stunt the mental, but it is also wrong to develop the intellectual and neglect the physical. we must recognize with browning that, all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul. readings and exercise readings: patrick ( ) chapters i, ii and vii. stiles ( ) and ( ). swift ( ) chapter x. exercise . with the help of a book on dietetics prepare an ideal day's bill of fare for a student. suggestions for further reading besides the standard texts in general and educational psychology, the following books bear with especial intimacy upon the topics treated in this book: . adams, john, making the most of one's mind, new york: george h. doran co., . . dearborn, george v., how to learn easily, boston: little, brown & co., . . dewey, john, how we think, boston: d.c. heath & co., . . dewey, john, interest and effort in education, boston: houghton, mifflin co., . . fulton, maurice (ed.), college life, its conditions and problems, the macmillan co., . . hall-quest, alfred l., supervised study, new york: the macmillan co., . . herrick, c. judson, an introduction to neurology, philadelphia: w.b. saunders co., . . james, william, talks to teachers on psychology, and to students on some of life's ideals, new york. . . james, william, the energies of men, new york: moffatt, yard & co., . . kerfoot, john b., how to read, boston: houghton, mifflin & co., . . lockwood, francis (comp.), the freshman and his college, boston: d.c. heath & co., . . lowe, john adams, books and libraries, boston: the boston book co., . . mcmurry, frank m., how to study, boston: houghton, mifflin & co., . . patrick, george t. w., the psychology of relaxation, boston: houghton, mifflin & co., . . sandwick, richard l., how to study and what to study, boston: d.c. heath & co., . . seashore, carl e., psychology in daily life, new york: d. appleton & co., . . seward, s., note-taking, boston: allyn & bacon, . . stiles, percy g., nutritional physiology philadelphia: w. b. saunders co., . . stiles, percy g., the nervous system and its conservation, philadelphia: w.b. saunders co., . . swift, edgar j., psychology and the day's work, new york: c. scribner's sons, . . watt, henry j., the economy and training of memory, new york: longmans, green & co., . . whipple, guy m., how to study effectively, bloomington, ill.: public school publishing co., . index acquisition, vs. "construction" activity, mental association, laws of; in memory; in reasoning; in examination attention; fluctuation of; resistance of distractions; lapses of bibliographies bodily activities, in recognition; distractions in attention brain, description of; elementary cells; tissue, properties of; tracts; areas charlemagne clarification of ideas, through definition and classification; through expression classification of ideas class room college, difficulties; demands of constructive study cramming day dreaming decision, in reasoning definition distractions, in attention; in sleep dreams drinking ennui ethical, consequences, of habit; of expression examinations, importance; purposes of; preparation for exercise expression; neural basis fasting fatigue feelings, pleasurable; unpleasant fletcher, horace food geometry golf graphic methods; in measuring learning habit, defined; maxims for forming; advantages of; disadvantages of; in reasoning; of resisting fatigue ideas in reasoning how to clarify in fatigue stimulus of idea-motor action law of image defined kinds of imagination made of images works of sources how to develop visual, auditory, etc. impression guard avenues of clearness essential through various senses vs. expression indenture intention in memorizing insomnia see sleeplessness inspiration interest defined sources development of laws of judgment kinaesthetic impressions lecture method notes logical associations in memorizing in reasoning mediaeval history memory importance in study stages of "unconscious" "whole" vs. "part" works according to law "rote" vs. "logical" intention mental second wind see second wind nervous current energy system in expression neurone note-taking lecture laboratory reading full vs. scanty form of notebook a habit obscurity in meaning outlines overlearning parker, francis w. philology plateau remedies for pleasure in interest practice of recall curve of problem solving psalm of life public speaking overcoming embarrassment _rathausmarkt_ read how to reason contrasted with rote learning as problem solving stages purposive thinking requirements for and habit recall recognition repetition, distribution of retention review, from notes romeo and juliet schedule, daily second wind, physical mental sources of sensation, as impression bodily external in fatigue sleep sleeplessness stream of thought suggestion synapse theme writing "unconscious" learning see memory will writing a form of expression the modern educator's library _general editor_.--prof. a.a. cock. the child under eight by e.r. murray vice-principal maria grey training college author of "froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology," etc. and henrietta brown smith lecturer in education, university of london, goldsmiths' college editor of "education by life" "is it not marvellous that an infant should be the heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold? i knew by intuition those things which since my apostasy i collected again by highest reason." thomas traherne. the modern educator's library _the following volumes are now ready, and others are in preparation_:-- education: its data and first principles. by t.p. nunn, m.a., d.sc., professor of education in the university of london. moral and religious education. by sophie bryant, d.sc., litt.d., late headmistress, north london collegiate school for girls. the teaching of modern foreign languages in school and university. by h.g. atkins, professor of german in king's college, london; and h.l. hutton, senior modern language master at merchant taylors' school. the child under eight. by e.r. murray, vice-principal, maria grey training college, brondesbury; and henrietta brown smith, l.l.a., lecturer in education, goldsmiths' college, university of london. the organisation and curricula of schools. by w.g. sleight, m.a., d.lit, lecturer at greystoke place training college, london. editor's preface the _modern educator's library_ has been designed to give considered expositions of the best theory and practice in english education of to-day. it is planned to cover the principal problems of educational theory in general, of curriculum and organisation, of some unexhausted aspects of the history of education, and of special branches of applied education. the editor and his colleagues have had in view the needs of young teachers and of those training to be teachers, but since the school and the schoolmaster are not the sole factors in the educative process, it is hoped that educators in general (and which of us is not in some sense or other an educator?) as well as the professional schoolmaster may find in the series some help in understanding precept and practice in education of to-day and to-morrow. for we have borne in mind not only what is but what ought to be. to exhibit the educator's work as a vocation requiring the best possible preparation is the spirit in which these volumes have been written. no artificial uniformity has been sought or imposed, and while the editor is responsible for the series in general, the responsibility for the opinions expressed in each volume rests solely with its author. albert a. cook. university of london, king's college. authors' preface we have made this book between us, but we have not collaborated. we know that we agree in all essentials, though our experience has differed. we both desire to see the best conditions for development provided for all children, irrespective of class. we both look forward to the time when the conditions of the public elementary school, from the nursery school up, will be such--in point of numbers, in freedom from pressure, in situation of building, in space both within and without, and in beauty of surroundings--that parents of any class will gladly let their children attend it. we are teachers and we have dealt mainly with the mental or, as we prefer to call it, the spiritual requirements of children. it is from the medical profession that we must all accept facts about food values, hours of sleep, etc., and the importance of cleanliness and fresh air are now fully recognised. we do, however, feel that there is room for fresh discussion of ultimate aims and of daily procedure. mr. clutton brock has said that the great weakness of english education is the want of a definite aim to put before our children, the want of a philosophy for ourselves. without some understanding of life and its purpose or meaning, the teacher is at the mercy of every fad and is apt to exalt method above principle. this book is an attempt to gather together certain recognised principles, and to show in the light of actual experience how these may be applied to existing circumstances. the day is coming when all teachers will seek to understand the true value of play, of spontaneous activity in all directions. its importance is emphasised in nearly all the educational writings of the day, as well in the senior as in the junior departments of the school, but we need a full and deep understanding of the saying, "man is man only when he plays." it is easy to say we believe it, but it needs strong faith, courage, and wide intelligence to weave such belief into the warp of daily life in school. e.r. murray. h. brown smith. contents part i the child in the nursery and kindergarten by e. r. murray chap. i. "what's in a name?" ii. the biologist educator iii. learning born of play iv. from to v. "the world's mine oyster" vi. "all the world's a stage" vii. joy in making viii. stories ix. in grassy places x. a way to god xi. rhythm xii. from fancy to fact xiii. new needs and new helps part ii the child in the state school by h. brown smith i. things as they are xiv. certain characteristics of growth xv. the infant school of to-day xvi. some vital principles ii. practical application of vital principles xvii. the need for experience xviii. gaining experience by play xix. the unity of experience xx. gaining experience through freedom iii. consideration of the aspects of experience xxi. experiences of human conduct. xxii. experiences of the natural world xxiii. experiences of mathematical truths xxiv. experiences by means of doing. xxv. experiences of the life of man xxvi. experiences recorded and passed on xxvii. the things that really matter. bibliography index part i the child in the nursery and kindergarten chapter i "what's in a name?" it is an appropriate time to produce a book on english schools for little children, now that nursery schools have been specially selected for notice and encouragement by an enlightened minister for education. it was madame michaelis, who in originally and most appropriately used the term nursery school as the english equivalent of a title suggested by froebel[ ] for his new institution, before he invented the word kindergarten, a title which, literally translated, ran "institution for the care of little children." [footnote : froebel's _letters_, trans. michaelis and moore, p. .] in england the word nursery, which implies the idea of nurture, belongs properly to children, though it has been borrowed by the gardener for his young plants. in germany it was the other way round; froebel had to invent the term _child garden_ to express his idea of the nurture, as opposed to the repression, of the essential nature of the child. unfortunately the word kindergarten while being naturalised in england had two distinct meanings attached to it. well-to-do people began to send their children to a new institution, a child garden or play school. the children of the people, however, already attended infant schools, of which the chief feature was what mr. caldwell cook calls "sit-stillery," and here the word kindergarten, really equivalent to nursery school, became identified with certain occupations, childlike in origin it is true, but formalised out of all recognition. how a real kindergarten strikes a child is illustrated by the recent remark from a little new boy who had been with us for perhaps three mornings. "shall i go up to the nursery now?" he asked. the first attempt at a kindergarten was made in , and by germany possessed sixteen. in that eventful year came the revolution in berlin, which created such high hopes, doomed, alas! to disappointment. "instead of the rosy dawn of freedom," writes ebers,[ ] himself an old keilhau boy, "in the state the exercise of a boundless arbitrary power, in the church dark intolerance." it must have been an easy matter to bring charges of revolutionary doctrines against the man who said so innocently, "but i,--i only wanted to train up free-thinking, independent men." [footnote : author of _an egyptian princess_, etc.] it was from "stony berlin," as froebel calls it, that the edict went forth in the name of the minister of education entirely prohibiting kindergartens in prussia, and the prohibition soon spread. at the present time it seems to us quite fitting that the bitter attack upon kindergartens should have been launched by folsung, a schoolmaster, "who began life as an artilleryman." nor is it less interesting to read that it was under the protection of von moltke himself that oberlin schools were opened to counteract the attractions of the "godless" kindergarten. little wonder that the same man who in had so gladly taken up arms to resist the invasion of napoleon, and who had rejoiced with such enthusiasm in the prospect of a free and united fatherland, should write in : "wherefore i have made a firm resolve that if the conditions of german life will not allow room for the development of honest efforts for the good of humanity; if this indifference to all higher things continues--then it is my purpose next spring to seek in the land of union and independence a soil where my idea of education may strike deep root." and to america he might have gone had he lived, but he died three months later, his end hastened by grief at the edict which closed the kindergartens. the prussian minister announced, in this edict, that "it is evident that kindergartens form a part of the froebelian socialistic system, the aim of which is to teach the children atheism," and the suggestion that he was anti-christian cut the old man to the heart. there had been some confusion between froebel and one of his nephews, who had democratic leanings, and no doubt anything at all democratic did mean atheism to "stony berlin" and its intolerant autocracy. for a time, at least in bavaria, a curious compromise was allowed. if the teacher were a member of the orthodox church, she might have her kindergarten, but if she belonged to one of the free churches, it was permissible to open an infant school, but she must not use the term kindergarten. froebel was by no means of the opinion that, if only the teacher had the right spirit, the name did not matter. rather did he hold with confucius, whose answer to the question of a disciple, "how shall i convert the world?" was, "call things by their right names." he refused to use the word school, because "little children, especially those under six, do not need to be schooled and taught, what they need is opportunity for development." he had great difficulty in selecting a name. those originally suggested were somewhat cumbrous, e.g. _institution for the promotion of spontaneous activity in children_; another was _self-teaching institution_, and there was also the one which madame michaelis translated "_nursery school for little children_." but the name kindergarten expressed just what he wanted: "as in a garden, under god's favour, and by the care of a skilled intelligent gardener, growing plants are cultivated in accordance with nature's laws, so here in our child garden shall the noblest of all growing things, men (that is, children), be cultivated in accordance with the laws of their own being, of god and of nature." to one of his students he writes: "you remember well enough how hard we worked and how we had to fight that we might elevate the darmstadt crèche, or rather infant school, by improved methods and organisation until it became a true kindergarten.... now what was the outcome of all this, even during my own stay at darmstadt? why, the fetters which always cripple a crèche or an infant school, and which seem to cling round its very name--these fetters were allowed to remain unbroken. every one was pleased with so faithful a mistress as yourself,... yet they withheld from you the main condition of unimpeded development, that of the freedom necessary to every young healthy and vigorous plant.... is there really such importance underlying the mere name of a system?--some one might ask. yes, there is.... it is true that any one watching your teaching would observe _a new spirit_ infused into it, _expressing and fulfilling the child's own wants and desires._ you would strike him as personally capable, but you would fail to strike him as priestess of the idea which god has now called to life within man's bosom, and of the struggle towards the realisation of that idea--_education by development--the destined means of raising the whole human race...._ no man can acquire fresh knowledge, even at a school, beyond the measure which his own stage of development fits him to receive.... infant schools are nothing but a contradiction of child-nature. little children especially those under school age, ought not to be schooled and taught, what they need is opportunity for development. this idea lies in the very name of a kindergarten.... and the name is absolutely necessary to describe the first education of children." for an actual definition of what froebel meant by his nursery school for little children or kindergarten, it is only fair to go to the founder himself. he has left us two definitions or descriptions, one announced shortly before the first kindergarten was opened, which runs: "an institution for the fostering of human life, through the cultivation of the human instincts of activity, of investigation and of construction in the child, as a member of the family, of the nation and of humanity; an institution for the self-instruction, self-education and self-cultivation of mankind, as well as for all-sided development of the individual through play, through creative self-activity and spontaneous self-instruction." a second definition is given in froebel's reply to a proposal that he should establish "my system of education--education by development"--in london, paris or the united states: "we also need establishments for training quite young children in their first stage of educational development, where their training and instruction shall be based upon their own free action or spontaneity acting under proper rules, these rules not being arbitrarily decreed, but such as must arise by logical necessity from the child's mental and bodily nature, regarding him as a member of the great human family; such rules as are, in fact, discovered by the actual observation of children when associated together in companies. these establishments bear the name of kindergartens." unfortunately there are but few pictures of froebel's own kindergarten, but there seems to have been little formality in its earliest development. an oft-told story is that of madame von marenholz in going to watch the proceedings of "an old fool," as the villagers called him, who played games with the village children. a less well-known account is given by col. von arnswald, again a keilhau boy, who visited blankenberg in , when froebel had just opened his first kindergarten. "arriving at the place, i found my middendorf[ ] seated by the pump in the market-place, surrounded by a crowd of little children. going near them i saw that he was engaged in mending the jacket of a boy. by his side sat a little girl busy with thread and needle upon another piece of clothing; one boy had his feet in a bucket of water washing them carefully; other girls and boys were standing round attentively looking upon the strange pictures of real life before them, and waiting for something to turn up to interest them personally. our meeting was of the most cordial kind, but middendorf did not interrupt the business in which he was engaged. 'come, children,' he cried, 'let us go into the garden!' and with loud cries of joy the little folk with willing feet followed the splendid-looking, tall man, running all round him. [footnote : one of froebel's most devoted helpers.] "the garden was not a garden, however, but a barn, with a small room and an entrance hall. in the entrance middendorf welcomed the children and played a round game with them, ending with the flight of the little ones into the room, where each of them sat down in his place on the bench and took his box of building blocks. for half an hour they were all busy with their blocks, and then came 'come, children, let us play "spring and spring."' and when the game was finished they went away full of joy and life, every one giving his little hand for a grateful good-bye." here in this earliest of free kindergartens are certain essentials. washing and mending, the alternation of constructive play with active exercise, rhythmic game and song, and last but not least human kindliness and courtesy. the shelter was but a barn, but there are things more important than premises. froebel died too soon to see his ideals realised, but he had sown the seed in the heart of at least one woman with brain to grasp and will to execute. as early as the froebelians had established something more than the equivalent of the montessori children's houses under the name of free kindergartens or people's kindergartens. it will bring this out more clearly if, without referring here to any modern experiments in america, in england and scotland, or in the dominions, we quote the description of an actual people's kindergarten or nursery school as it was established nearly fifty years ago. the moving spirit of this institution was henrietta schroder, froebel's own grand-niece, trained by him, and of whom he said that she, more than any other, had most truly understood his views. the whole institution was called the pestalozzi-froebel house. the prussian edict, which abolished the kindergarten almost before it had started, was now rescinded, and our own princess royal[ ] gave warm support to this new institution. the description here quoted was actually written in , when the institution had been in existence for fourteen years: [footnote : the crown princess of prussia, afterwards the empress frederick.] "the purpose of the national kindergarten is to provide the necessary and natural help which poor mothers require, who have to leave their children to themselves. "the establishment contains:-- "( ) the kindergarten proper, a national kindergarten with four classes for children from - / to years old. "( ) the transition class, only held in the morning for children about or - / years old. "( ) the preparatory school, for children from to or - / years old. "( ) the school of handwork, for children from to or older. "dinners are provided for those children whose parents work all day away from home at a trifling charge of a halfpenny and a penny. also, for a trifle, poor children may receive assistance of various kinds in illness, or may have milk or baths through the kindness of the kindred 'association for the promotion of health in the household.' "in the institution we are describing there is a complete and well-furnished kitchen, a bathroom, a courtyard with sand for digging, with pebbles and pine-cones, moss, shells and straw, etc., a garden, and a series of rooms and halls suitably furnished and arranged for games, occupations, handwork and instruction. "the occupations pursued in the kindergarten are the following: free play of a child by itself; free play of several children by themselves; associated play under the guidance of a teacher; gymnastic exercises; several sorts of handwork suited to little children; going for walks; learning music, both instrumental (on the method of madame wiseneder[ ]) and vocal; learning and repetition of poetry; story-telling; looking at really good pictures; aiding in domestic occupations; gardening; and the usual systematic ordered occupations of froebel. madame schrader is steadfastly opposed to that conception of the kindergarten which insists upon mathematically shaped materials for the froebelian occupations. her own words are: 'the children find in our institution every encouragement to develop their capabilities and powers by use; not by their selfish use to their own personal advantage, but by their use in the loving service of others. the longing to help people and to accomplish little pieces of work proportioned to their feeble powers is constant in children; and lies alongside of their need for that free and unrestrained play which is the business of their life." [footnote : from certain old photographs, i suppose this to have been what we now call a kindergarten band.] "the elder children are expected to employ themselves in cleaning, taking care of, arranging, keeping in order, and using the many various things belonging to the housekeeping department of the kindergarten; for example, they set out and clear away the materials required for the games and handicrafts; they help in cleaning the rooms, furniture and utensils; they keep all things in order and cleanliness; they paste together torn wallpapers or pictures, they cover books, and they help in the cooking and in preparations for it; in laying the tables, in washing up the plates and dishes, etc. the children gain in this manner the simple but most important foundations of their later duties as housekeepers and householders, and at the same time learn to regard these duties as things done in the service of others." it is worth while to notice the order in which the necessities of this place are described. first comes a kitchen and next a bathroom, then an out-of-doors playground with abundant material for gaining ideas through action--sand, pebbles, pine-cones, moss, shells and straw. then comes the garden, and only after all these, the rooms and halls for indoors games, handwork and instruction. it is worth while also to note the prominence given to play, music, poetry and story-telling pictures, domestic occupations and gardening, all preceding the "systematic and ordered occupations" which to some have seemed so all-important. if we compare this with the current ideas about nursery schools, we do not find that it falls much below the present ideal. there has been a time when some of us feared that only the bodily needs of the little child were to be considered, but the "regulations for nursery schools" have banished such fear. in these the child is regarded as a human being, with spiritual as well as bodily requirements. to put it shortly, the physical requirements of a child are food, fresh air and exercise, cleanliness and rest. it is not so easy to sum up the requirements of a human soul. the first is sympathy, and though this may spring from parental instinct, it should be nourished by true understanding. next perhaps comes the need for material, material for investigation, for admiration, for imitation and for construction or creation. power of sense-discrimination is important enough, but in this case if we take care of the pounds of admiration and investigation, the pence of sense-discrimination will take care of themselves. besides these the child has the essentially human need for social intercourse, for speech, for games, for songs and stories, for pictures and poetry. he must have opportunity both to imitate and to share in the work and life around him; he must be an individual among other individuals, a necessary part of a whole, allowed to give as well as to receive service. in the national kindergarten of no one of these requirements is overlooked except the provision for sleep, and from old photographs we know that this, too, was considered. nursery schools are needed for children of all classes. it is not only the children of the poor who require sympathy and guidance from those specially qualified by real grasp of the facts of child-development. well-to-do mothers, too, often leave their children to ignorant and untrained servants, or to the equally untrained and hardly less ignorant nursery governess. mothers in small houses have much to do; making beds and washing dishes, sweeping and dusting, baking and cooking, making and mending, not to mention tending an infant or tending the sick, leave little leisure for sympathy with the adventuring and investigating propensities natural and desirable in a healthy child between three and five. there are innumerable kindergartens open only in the morning for the children of those who can afford to pay, and these could well be multiplied and assisted just as far as is necessary. in towns, at least, mothers with but small incomes would gladly pay a moderate fee to have their little ones, especially their sturdy little boys, guarded from danger and trained to good habits, yet allowed freedom for happy activity. kindergartens and nursery schools ought to be as much as possible fresh-air schools. they should never be large or the home atmosphere must disappear. they should always have grassy spaces and common flowers, and they ought to be within easy reach of the children's homes. there must for the present be certain differences between the free kindergarten or nursery school for the poor and for those whose parents are fairly well-to-do. in both cases we must supply what the children need. if the mother must go out to work, the child requires a home for the day, and the nursery school must make arrangements for feeding the children. all little children are the better for rest and if possible for sleep during the day; but for those who live in overcrowded rooms, where quiet and restful sleep in good air is impossible, the need for daily sleep is very great. all free kindergartens arrange for this. most important also is the training to cleanliness. this is not invariably the lot even of those who come from apparently comfortable homes to attend fee-paying kindergartens, and among the poor, differences in respect of cleanliness are very great. but soap and hot water do cost money and washing takes time, and the modern habit of brushing teeth has not yet been acquired by all classes of the community. the free kindergartens provide for necessary washing, each child is provided with its own tooth-brush; and tooth-brush drill is a daily practice, somewhat amusing to witness. the best baby rooms in our infant schools carry out the same practices, and these are likely to be turned into nursery schools. it cannot yet be accepted as conclusively proved that a completely open-air life is the best in our climate. we have not yet sufficient statistics. no doubt children do improve enormously in open-air camps, but so they do in ordinary nursery schools, where they are clean, happy and well fed, and where they live a regular life with daily sleep. housing conditions complicate the problem, and all children must suffer who sleep in crowded, noisy, unventilated rooms. up to the present time nursery schools have been provided by voluntary effort entirely, and far too little encouragement has been given to those enlightened headmistresses of infant schools who have tried to give to their lowest classes nursery school conditions. since the passing of mr. fisher's education bill, however, we are entitled to hope that soon, for all children in the land, there may be the opportunity of a fair start under the care of "a person with breadth of outlook and imagination," the equivalent of froebel's "skilled intelligent gardener." in the following chapter an attempt is made to explain how it is that so many years ago froebel reached his vision of what a child is, and of what a child needs, and the considerations on which he based his "nursery school for little children" or "self-teaching institution." chapter ii the biologist educator progress, man's distinctive mark alone, not god's, and not the beasts': god is, they are, man partly is and wholly hopes to be. "a large bright room, ... a sandheap in one corner, a low tub or bath of water in another, a rope ladder, a swing, steps to run up and down and such like, a line of black or green board low down round the wall, little rough carts and trolleys, boxes which can be turned into houses, or shops, or pretence ships, etc., a cooking stove of a very simple nature, dolls of all kinds, wooden animals, growing plants in boxes, an aquarium." any froebelian would recognise this as the description of a more or less ideal kindergarten or nursery school, and yet the writer had probably never read a page that froebel wrote. on the contrary, she shows her entire ignorance of the real kindergarten by calling it "pretty employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority." the description is taken from a very able address on "child nature and education" delivered some years ago by miss hoskyns abrahall. it is quoted here, because, for her conception of right surroundings for young children, the speaker has gone to the very source from which froebel took his ideas--she has gone to what froebel indeed called "the only true source, life itself," and she writes from the point of view of the biologist. there exists at present, in certain quarters, a belief that the kindergarten is old-fashioned, out of date, more especially that it has no scientific basis. it is partly on this account that the ideas of dr. maria montessori, who has approached the question of the education of young children from the point of view of medical science, have been warmly welcomed by so large a circle. but neither in england nor in america does that circle include the froebelians, and this for several reasons. for one thing, much that the general public has accepted as new--and in this general public must be included weighty names, men of science, educational authorities, and others who have never troubled to inquire into the meaning of the kindergarten--are already matters of everyday life to the froebelian. among these comes the idea of training to service for the community, and the provision of suitable furniture, little chairs and tables, which the children can move about, and low cupboards for materials, all of which tend to independence and self-control. it is a more serious stumbling-block to the froebelian that dr. montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in sense-discrimination. this material, which is an adaptation and enlargement of that provided by séguin for his mentally deficient children, is certainly open to the reproach of having been "devised by adults." it is formal, and the child is not permitted to use it for his own purposes. before everything else, however, comes the fact that in no place has dr. montessori shown that she has made any study of play, or that she attaches special importance to the play activities, or natural activities of childhood, on which the kindergarten is founded. this is probably accounted for in that her first observations were made on deficient children who are notably wanting in initiative. among these "play activities" we should include the child's perpetual imitation or pretence, a matter which dr. montessori entirely fails to understand, as shown in her more recent book, where she treats of imagination. here she maintains that only the children of the comparatively poor ride upon their fathers' walking-sticks or construct coaches of chairs, that this "is not a proof of imagination but of an unsatisfied desire," and that rich children who own ponies and who drive out in motor-cars "would be astonished to see the delight of children who imagine themselves to be drawn along by stationary armchairs." imitative play has, of course, nothing to do with poverty or riches, but is, as froebel said long since, the outcome of an initiative impulse, sadly wanting in deficient children, an impulse which prompts the child of all lands, of all time and of all classes to imitate or dramatise, and so to gain some understanding of everything and of every person he sees around. the work of dr. montessori has helped enormously in the movement, begun long since, for greater freedom in our infant schools; freedom, not from judicious guidance and authority, but from rigid time-tables and formal lessons, and from arbitrary restrictions, as well as freedom for the individual as apart from the class. the best kindergartens and infant schools had already discarded time-tables, and kindergarten classes have always been small enough to give the individual a fair chance. froebel himself constantly urged that the child should become familiar with "both the strongly opposed elements of his life, the individual determining and directing side, and the general ordered and subordinated side." he urged the early development of the social consciousness as well as insisting on expansion of individuality, but it is always difficult to combine the two, and most kindergarten teachers will benefit by learning from dr. montessori to apply the method of individual learning to a greater extent. we are, however, fully prepared to maintain that froebel; even in , had a wider and a deeper realisation of the needs of the child than has as yet been attained by the dottoressa.[ ] in order to make this clear, it is proposed to compare the theories of froebel with the conclusions of a biologist. for biology has a wider and a saner outlook than medical science; it does not start from the abnormal, but with life under normal conditions. [footnote : her latest publication regarding the instruction--for it is not education--of older children makes this even more plain. for here is no discussion of what children at this stage require, but a mere plunge into "subjects" in which formal grammar takes a foremost place.] in the address, from which the opening words of this chapter are quoted, it is suggested that a capable biologist be set to deal with education, but he is to be freed "from all preconceived ideas derived from accepted tradition." after such fundamentals as food and warmth, light, air and sleep, the first problems considered by this biologist educator are stages of growth, their appropriate activities, and the stimuli necessary to evoke them. always he bears in mind that "interference with a growing creature is a hazardous business," and takes as his motto "when in doubt, refrain." to discover the natural activities of the child, the biologist relies upon, first, observation of the child himself, secondly, upon his knowledge of the nervous system, and thirdly, upon his knowledge of the past history of the race. from these he comes to a very pertinent conclusion, viz. "the general outcome of this is that the safe way of educating children is by means of play," play being defined as "the natural manifestation of the child's activities; systematic in that it follows the lines of physiological development, but without the hard and fast routine of the time-table."[ ] [footnote : it is in this connection that the kindergarten is stigmatised as "pretty employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority," an opinion evidently gained from the way in which the term has been misused in a type of infant school now fast disappearing.] it is easy to show that although froebel was pre-darwinian, he had been in close touch with scientists who were working at theories of development, and that he was largely influenced by krause, who applied the idea of organic development to all departments of social science. it was because froebel was himself, even in , the biologist educator desiring to break with preconceived ideas and traditions that he wished one of his pupils had been able to "call your work by its proper name, and so make evident the real nature of the new spirit you have introduced."[ ] [footnote : see p. .] but froebel was more than a biologist, he was a philosopher and an idealist. such words have sometimes been used as terms of reproach, but wisdom can only be justified of her children. at the back of all froebel has to say about "the education of the human being" lies his conception of what the human being is. and it is impossible fully to understand why froebel laid so much stress on spontaneous play unless we go deeper than the province of the biologist without in the least minimising the importance of biological knowledge to educational theory. as the biologist defines play as "the natural manifestation of the child's activities," so froedel says "play at first is just natural life." but to him the true inwardness of spontaneous play lies in the fact that it is spontaneous--so far as anything in the universe can be spontaneous. for spontaneous response to environment is self-expression, and out of self-expression comes selfhood, consciousness of self. if we are to understand froebel at all, we must begin with the answer he found, or accepted, from krause and others for his first question, what is that self? before reaching the question of how to educate, it seemed to him necessary to consider not only the purpose or aim of education, but the purpose or aim of human existence, the purpose of all and any existence, even whether there is any purpose in anything; and that brings us to what he calls "the groundwork of all," of which a summary is given in the following paragraphs. in the universe we can perceive plan, purpose or law, and behind this there must be some great mind, "a living, all-pervading, energising, self-conscious and hence eternal unity" whom we call god. nature and all existing things are a revelation of god. as bergson speaks of the _élan vital_ which expresses itself from infinity to infinity, so froebel says that behind everything there is force, and that we cannot conceive of force without matter on which it can exercise itself. neither can we think of matter without any force to work upon it, so that "force and matter mutually condition one another," we cannot think one without the other. this force expresses itself in all ways, the whole universe is the expression of the divine, but "man is the highest and most perfect earthly being in whom the primordial force is spiritualised so that man feels, understands and knows his own power." conscious development of one's own power is the triumph of spirit over matter, therefore human development is spiritual development. so while man is the most perfect earthly being, yet, with regard to spiritual development he has returned to a first stage and "must raise himself through ascending degrees of consciousness" to heights as yet unknown, "for who has measured the limits of god-born mankind?" self-consciousness is the special characteristic of man. no other animal has the power to become conscious of himself because man alone has the chance of failure. the lower animals have definite instincts and cannot fail, _i.e._ cannot learn.[ ] man wants to do much, but his instincts are less definite and most actions have to be learned; it is by striving and failing that he learns to know not only his limitations but the power that is within him--his self. [footnote : this would nowadays be considered too sweeping an assertion.] according to froebel, "the aim of education is the steady progressive development of mankind, there is and can be no other"; and, except as regards physiological knowledge inaccessible in his day, he is at one with the biologist as to how we are to find out the course of this development. first, by looking into our own past; secondly, by the observation of children as individuals as well as when associated together, and by comparison of the results of observation; thirdly, by comparison of these with race history and race development. froebel makes much of observation of children. he writes to a cousin begging her to "record in writing the most important facts about each separate child," and adds that it seems to him "most necessary for the comprehension of child-nature that such observations should be made public,... of the greatest importance that we should interchange the observations we make so that little by little we may come to know the grounds and conditions of what we observe, that we may formulate their laws." he protests that even in his day "the observation, development and guidance of children in the first years of life up to the proper age of school" is not up to the existing level of "the stage of human knowledge or the advance of science and art"; and he states that it is "an essential part" of his undertaking "to call into life _an institution for the preparation of teachers trained for the care of children through observation of their life_." in speaking of the stages of development of the individual, froebel says that "there is no order of importance in the stages of human development except the order of succession, in which the earlier is always the more important," and from that point of view we ought "to consider childhood as the most important stage, ... a stage in the development of the godlike in the earthly and human." he also emphasises that "the vigorous and complete development and cultivation of each successive stage depends on the vigorous, complete and characteristic development of each and all preceding stages." so the duty of the parent is to "look as deeply as possible into the life of the child to see what he requires for his present stage of development," and then to "scrutinise the environment to see what it offers ... to utilise all possibilities of meeting normal needs," to remove what is hurtful, or at least to "admit its defects" if they cannot give the child what his nature requires. "if parents offer what the child does not need," he says, "they will destroy the child's faith in their sympathetic understanding." the educator is to "bring the child into relations and surroundings in all respects adapted to him" but affording a minimum of opportunity of injury, "guarding and protecting" but not interfering, unless he is certain that healthy development has already been interrupted. it is somewhat remarkable that froebel anticipated even the conclusions of modern psycho-analysis in his views about childish faults. "the sources of these," he says, are "neglect to develop certain sides of human life and, secondly, early distortion of originally good human powers by arbitrary interference with the orderly course of human development ... a suppressed or perverted good quality--a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood or misguided--lies at the bottom of every shortcoming." hence the only remedy even for wickedness is to find and foster, build up and guide what has been repressed. it may be necessary to interfere and even to use severity, but only when the educator is sure of unhealthy growth. the motto of the biologist on the subject of interference--"when in doubt, refrain"--exactly expresses froebel's doctrine of "passive or following" education, following, that is, the nature of the child, and "passive" as opposed to arbitrary interference. free from this, the child will follow his natural impulses, which are to be trusted as much as those of any other young animal; in other words, he will play, he will manifest his natural activities. "the young human being--still, as it were, in process of creation--would seek, though unconsciously yet decidedly and surely, as a product of nature that which is in itself best, and in a form adapted to his condition, his disposition, his powers and his means. thus the duckling hastens to the pond and into the water, while the chicken scratches the ground and the young swallow catches its food upon the wing. we grant space and time to young plants and animals because we know that, in accordance with the laws that live in them, they will develop properly and grow well; arbitrary interference with their growth is avoided because it would hinder their development; but the young human being is looked upon as a piece of wax, a lump of clay, which man can mould into what he pleases. o man, who roamest through garden and field, through meadow and grove, why dost thou close thy mind to the silent teaching of nature? behold the weed; grown among hindrances and constraint, how it scarcely yields an indication of inner law; behold it in nature, in field or garden, how perfectly it conforms to law--a beautiful sun, a radiant star, it has burst from the earth! thus, o parents, could your children, on whom you force in tender years forms and aims against their nature, and who, therefore, walk with you in morbid and unnatural deformity--thus could your children, too, unfold in beauty and develop in harmony." at first play is activity for the sake of activity, not for the sake of results, "of which the child has as yet no idea." very soon, however, having man's special capacity of learning through experience, the child does gather ideas. by this time he has passed through the stage of infancy, and now his play becomes to the philosopher the highest stage of human development at this stage, because now it is self-expression. when froebel wrote in , there had been but little thought expended on the subject of play, and probably none on human instincts, which were supposed to be nonexistent. the hope he expressed that some philosopher would take up these subjects has now been fulfilled, and we ought now to turn to what has been said on a subject all-important to those who desire to help in the education of young children. chapter iii learning born of play play, which is the business of their lives. there may be nothing new under the sun, but it does seem to be a fair claim to make for froebel that no one before or since his time has more fully realised the value to humanity of what in childhood goes by the name of play. froebel had distinct theories about play, and he put his theories into actual practice, not only when he founded the kindergarten, but in his original school for older children at keilhau. before going into its full meaning, it may be well first to meet the most common misconception about play. it is not surprising that those who have given the subject no special consideration should regard play from the ordinary adult standpoint, and think of it as entirely opposed to work, as relaxation of effort. but the play of a child covers so much that it is startling to find a real psychologist writing that "education through play" is "a pernicious proposition."[ ] statements of this kind spring from the mistaken idea, certainly not derived from observation, that play involves no effort, that it runs in the line of least resistance, and that education through play means therefore education without effort, without training in self-control, education without moral training. the case for the kindergarten is the opposite of this. education through play is advocated just because of the effort it calls forth, just because of the way in which the child, and later the boy or girl, throws his whole energy into it. what froebel admired, what he called "the most beautiful expression of childlife," was "the child that plays thoroughly, with spontaneous determination, perseveringly, until physical fatigue forbids--a child wholly absorbed in his play--a child that has fallen asleep while so absorbed." that child, he said, would be "a thorough determined man, capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion of the welfare of himself and others." it is because "play is not trivial, but highly serious and of deep significance," that he appeals to mothers to cultivate and foster it, and to fathers to protect and guard it. [footnote : _the educative process_, p. (bagley).] the kindergarten position can be summed up in a sentence from dr. clouston's _hygiene of mind_: "play is the real work of children." froebel calls activity of sense and limb "the first germ," and "play-building and modelling the tender blossoms of the constructive impulse"; and this, he says, is "the moment when man is to be prepared for future industry, diligence and productive activity." he points out, too, the importance of noticing the habits which come from spontaneous self-employment, which may be habits of indolent ease if the child is not allowed to be as active as his nature requires. there were no theories of play in froebel's day, but he had certainly read _levana_, and in all probability he knew what schiller had said in his _letters on aesthetic education_. the play theories are now too well known to require more than a brief recapitulation. it will generally be allowed that the distinctive feature of play as opposed to work is that of spontaneity. the action itself is of no consequence, one man's play is another man's work. nor does it seem to matter whence comes the feeling of compulsion in work, whether from pressure of outer necessity, or from an inner necessity like the compelling force of duty. where there is joy in creation or in discovery the work and play of the genius approach the standpoint of the child, indulging every instinct of the soul, there, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing. in the play of early childhood there may be freedom, not only from adult authority, but even from the restrictions of nature or of circumstances since "let's pretend" annihilates time and space and all material considerations. among theories of play first comes what is known as the schiller-spencer theory, in which play is attributed to the accumulation of surplus energy. when the human being has more energy than he requires in order to supply the bodily needs of himself and his family, then he feels impelled to use it. as the activities of his daily life are the only ones known to him, he fights his battles over again, he simulates the serious business of life, and transfers, for instance, the incidents of the chase into a dance. in this way he reaches artistic creation, so that "play is the first poetry of the human being." as an opposite of this we get a re-creation theory, where play, if not too strenuous, understood as a change of occupation, rests and re-creates. another theory is that of recapitulation, which has been emphasised by stanley hall, according to which children play hunting and chasing games, or find a fascination in making tents, because they are passing through that stage of development in which their primitive ancestors lived by hunting or dwelt in tents. lastly, a most interesting theory is that which is associated with the name of groos, and which is best expressed in the sentence: "animals do not play because they are young, but they have their youth because they must play," play being regarded as the preparation for future life activities. the kitten therefore practises chasing a cork, the puppy worries boots and gloves, the kid practises jumping, and so on. a full account of play will probably embrace all these theories, and though they were not formulated in his day, froebel overlooked none, though he may have laid special stress on the preparation side. yet another value of play emphasised by professor royce, viz. its enormous importance from the point of view of mental initiative, is strongly urged by froebel. professor royce argues that "in the mere persistence of the playful child one has a factor whose value for mental initiative it is hard to overestimate." without this "passionately persistent repetition," and without also the constant varying of apparently useless activities, the organism, says professor royce, "would remain the prey of the environment." to froebel, as we have seen, the human being is the climax of animal evolution and the starting-point of psychical development. the lower animal, he maintained, as all will now agree, is hindered by his definite instincts, but the instincts or instinctive tendencies of the human being are so undefined that there is room for spontaneity, for new forms of conduct. professor royce says that "a general view of the place which beings with minds occupy in the physical world strongly suggests that their organisms may especially have significance as places for the initiation of more or less novel types of activity." and to froebel the chief significance of play lies in this spontaneity. "play is the highest phase of human development at this stage, because it is spontaneous expression of what is within produced by an inner necessity and impulse. play is the most characteristic, most spiritual manifestation of man at this stage, and, at the same time, is typical of human life as a whole." these various theories seem to reinforce rather than to contradict each other, and it is more important to avoid running any to an extreme than to differentiate between them. in the case of recapitulation, we must certainly bear in mind froebel's warning that the child "should be treated as having in himself the present, past and future." so, as dr. drummond says: "if we feel constrained to present him with a tent because abraham lived in one, he no doubt enters into the spirit of the thing and accepts it joyfully. but he also annexes the ball of string and the coffee canister to fit up telephonic communication with the nursery." he may play robbers and hide and seek because he has reached a "hunting and capture" stage, but the physiologist points out that violent exercise is a necessity for his circulation and nutrition, and to practise swift flight to safety is useful even in modern times.[ ] gardening may take us back to an agricultural stage, but digging is most useful as a muscular exercise, and "watering" is scientific experiment and adds to the feeling of power, while the flowers themselves appeal to the aesthetic side of the sense-play, which is not limited to any age, though conspicuous so soon. [footnote : an up-to-date riddle asks the difference between the quick and the dead, and answers, "the quick are those who get out of the way of a motor-bus and the dead are those who do not."] froebel recognised many kinds of play. he realised that much of the play of boyhood is exercise of physical power, and that it must be of a competitive nature because the boy wants to measure his power. even in he urges the importance not only of town playgrounds but of play leaders, that the play may be full of life. among games for boys he noted some still involving sense-play, as hiding games, colour games and shooting at a mark, which need quick hearing and sight, intellectual plays exercising thought and judgement, _e.g._ draughts and dramatic games. one form of play which seemed to him most important was constructive play, where there is expression of ideas as well as expression of power. this side of play covers a great deal, and will be dealt with later; its importance in froebel's eyes lies in the fact that through construction, however simple, the child gains knowledge of his own power and learns "to master himself." froebel wanted particularly to deepen this feeling of power, and says that the little one who has already made some experiments takes pleasure in the use of sand and clay, "impelled by the previously acquired sense of power he seeks to master the material." in order to gain real knowledge of himself, of his power, a child needs to compare his power with that of others. this is one reason for the child's ready imitation of all he sees done by others. another reason for this is that only through real experience or action can a child gain the ideas which he will express later, therefore he must reproduce all he sees or hears. "in the family the child sees parents and others at work, producing, doing something; consequently he, at this stage, would like to represent what he sees. be cautious, parents. you can at one blow destroy, at least for a long time, the impulse to activity and to formation if you repel their help as childish, useless or even as a hindrance.... strengthen and develop this instinct; give to your child the highest he now needs, let him add his power to your work, that he may gain the consciousness of his power and also learn to appreciate its limitations." as the child's sense of power and his self-consciousness deepen he requires possessions of his "very own." says froebel: "the feeling of his own power implies and demands also the possession of his own space and his own material belonging exclusively to him. be his realm, his province, a corner of the house or courtyard, be it the space of a box or of a closet, be it a grotto, a hut or a garden, the boy at this age needs an external point, chosen and prepared by himself, to which he refers all his activity." as ideas widen the child's purposes enlarge, and he finds the need for that co-operation which binds human beings together. and so by play enjoyed in common, the feeling of community which is present in the little child is raised to recognition of the rights of others; not only is a sense of justice developed, but also forbearance, consideration and sympathy. "when the room to be filled is extensive, when the realm to be controlled is large, when the whole to be produced is complex, then brotherly union of similar-minded persons is in place." and we are invited to enter an "education room," where boys of seven to ten are using building blocks, sand, sawdust and green moss brought in from the forest. "each one has finished his work and he examines it and that of others, and in each rises the desire to unite all in one whole," so roads are made from the village of one boy to the castle of another: the boy who has made a cardboard house unites with another who has made miniature ships from nut-shells, the house as a castle crowns the hill, and the ships float in the lake below, while the youngest brings his shepherd and sheep to graze between the mountain and the lake, and all stand and behold with pleasure and satisfaction the result of their hands. the educative value of such play has been brought forward in modern times in _floor games_ by mr. wells, _magic cities_ by mrs. nesbit, and notably in mr. caldwell cook's play city in _the play way_. joining together for a common purpose does not only belong to younger boys. "what busy tumult among those older boys at the brook! they have built canals, sluices, bridges, etc.... at each step one trespasses on the limits of another realm. each one claims his right as lord and maker, while he recognises the claims of others, and like states, they bind themselves by strict treaties." "every town should have its own common playground for the boys. glorious results would come from this for the entire community. for, at this period, games, whenever possible, are in common, and develop the feeling and desire for community, and the laws and requirements of community. the boy tries to see himself in his companions, to weigh and measure himself by them, to know and find himself by their help." "it is the sense of sure and reliable power, the sense of its increase, both as an individual and as a member of the group, that fills the boy with joy during these games.... justice, self-control, loyalty, impartiality, who could fail to catch their fragrance and that of still more delicate blossoms, forbearance, consideration, sympathy and encouragement for the weaker.... thus the games educate the boy for life and awaken and cultivate many social and moral virtues." in england we have always had respect for boys' games and more and more, especially in america, people are realising the need for play places and play leaders. but all this was written in , when for ten years froebel had been experimenting with boys of all ages. at keilhau play of all kinds had an honoured place. we read of excursions for all kinds of purposes, of indian games out of fenimore cooper, and of "homeric battles." it was "part of froebel's plan to have us work with spade and pick-axe," and every boy had his own piece of ground where he might do what he pleased. ebers, being literary, constructed in his plot a bed of heather on which he lay and read or made verses. the boys built their own stage, painted their own scenery, and in winter once a week they acted classic dramas. besides this, there was a large and complete puppet theatre belonging to the school. bookbinding and carpentry were taught, and at christmas "the embryo cabinet-maker made boxes with locks and hinges, finished, veneered and polished." in england in we have given to us _the play way_, in which one who has tried it gives the results of his own experiments in education through play. mr. caldwell cook was not satisfied with the condition of affairs when "school above the kindergarten is a nuisance because there is no play." his dream is that of a play school commonwealth, where education, which is the training of youth, shall be filled with the spirit of youth, namely, "freshness, zeal, happiness, enthusiasm." the next chapter will show that it has taken us exactly a hundred years to reach as far as public recognition of the nursery school where play is the only possible motive. it is for the coming generation of teachers to act so that the dream of the play school commonwealth shall be realised more quickly. it is a significant fact that the lines quoted as heading for the next chapter are written by a modern schoolmaster. chapter iv from to poor mites; you stiffen on a bench and stoop your curls to dusty laws; your petal fingers curve and clench in slavery to parchment saws; you suit your hearts to sallow faces in sullen places: but no pen nor pedantry can make you men. yours are the morning and the day: you should be taught of wind and light; your learning should be born of play. (_caged:_ george winthrop young.) had england but honoured her own prophets, we should have had nursery schools a hundred years ago. in , the year in which froebel founded his school for older boys at keilhau, robert owen, the socialist, "following the plan prescribed by nature," opened a school where children, from two to six, were to dance and sing, to be out-of-doors as much as possible, to learn "when their curiosity induced them to ask questions," and not to be "annoyed with books." they were to be prevented from acquiring bad habits, to be taught what they could understand, and their dispositions were to be trained "to mutual kindness and a sincere desire to contribute all in their power to benefit each other." they "were trained and educated without punishment or the fear of it.... a child who acted improperly was not considered an object of blame but of pity, and no unnecessary restraint was imposed on the children." but the world was not ready. owen's "rational infant school" attracted much notice, and an infant school society was founded. but even the enlightened were incapable of understanding that any education was possible without books, and the promoters rightly, though quite unconsciously, condemned themselves when they kept the title infant school but dropped the qualifying "rational." still, infant schools had been started and interest had been aroused. when the edict abolishing kindergartens was promulgated in germany, some of froebel's disciples passed to other lands, and madame von marenholz came to england in . already one kindergarten had been opened by a madame ronge, to which rowland hill sent his children, and to which dickens paid frequent visits. in the same year there was held in london an "international educational exposition and congress," and to this madame von marenholz sent an exhibit, which was explained by madame ronge, and by a mr. hoffmann. dickens, who had watched the actual working of a kindergarten, gave warm support to the new ideas, and wrote an excellent article on "infant gardens" for _household words_, urging "that since children are by infinite wisdom so created as to find happiness in the active exercise and development of all their faculties, we, who have children round about us, shall no longer repress their energies, tie up their bodies, shut their mouths.... the frolic of childhood is not pure exuberance and waste. 'there is often a high meaning in childish play,' said froebel. let us study it, and act upon the hints--or more than hints--that nature gives." dr. henry barnard represented connecticut at this congress, and he took the kindergarten to america, in whose virgin soil the seed took root, and quickly brought forth abundantly. but the soil was virgin and the fields were ready for planting, for america in these days had nothing corresponding to our infant schools. the kindergarten was welcomed by people of influence. dr. barnard found his first ally in miss peabody, one of whose sisters was married to nathaniel hawthorne, while another was the wife of horace mann. miss peabody began to teach in , but eight years later, after a visit to europe, she gave up teaching for propaganda work. owing to her efforts the first free kindergarten was opened in boston in . philanthropists soon recognised its importance as a social agency, and by one lady alone supported thirty-one such institutions in boston and its surroundings. in new york, dr. felix adler established a free kindergarten in , and teachers' college was influential in helping to form an association which supports several. another name well known in this country is that of miss kate douglas wiggin,[ ] who was a kindergarten teacher for many years before she became known as a novelist. it is miss wiggin who tells of a quaint translation of kindergarten heard by a san francisco teacher making friendly visits to the mothers of her children. while she stood on a door-step sympathising with one poor woman she heard a "loud, but not unfriendly" voice from an upper window. "clear things from under foot!" it pealed in stentorian accents. "the teacher o' the _kids' guards_ is comin' down the street." [footnote : writer of _penelope in england_, etc., and of a capital collection of essays entitled _children's rights_.] in england things were very different, because of the infant schools which had already been established, but which had fallen far below the ideal set up by robert owen. as every one knows, the education given in those days to teachers of elementary schools was but meagre, and the results were often so bad that, to justify the expenditure of public money, "payment by results" was introduced. in came the education act, and the year saw a good deal of movement. miss caroline bishop was appointed to lecture to the infants' teachers under the london school board; miss heerwart took charge of a training college for kindergarten teachers in connection with the british and foreign school society; the froehel society was founded, and madame michaelis took the kindergarten into the newly established high schools for girls. for the children of the well-to-do kindergartens spread rapidly, but for the children of the poor there was no such happiness; the infant school was too firmly established as a place where children learned to read, write and count, and above all to sit still. infants' teachers received no special training for their work; their course of study, in which professional training played but a small part, was the same as that prescribed for the teachers of older children. some colleges, notably the home and colonial, stockwell, and saffron walden, did try to give their students some special training, but it was not of much avail, and the word kindergarten came to mean not nursery school, as was the idea of its founder, but dictated exercises with kindergarten material, a kind of manual drill supposed to give "hand and eye training," and with this meaning it made its appearance on the time-table. visitors from america were shocked to find no kindergartens in england, but only large classes of poor little automatons sitting erect with "hands behind" or worse still "hands on heads," and moving only to the word of command. one lady who ultimately found her way to our own kindergarten told me that she had been informed at the l.c.c. offices that there were no kindergartens in london. it was partly the scandalised expressions of these american teachers that stimulated miss adelaide wragge to take her courage into her hands, and in the year to open the first mission kindergarten in england. she called it a mission, not a free kindergarten, partly because the parents paid the trifling fee of one penny per week, and partly because it was connected with the parish work of holy trinity, woolwich, of which her brother was vicar. the first report says: "the neighbourhood was suitable for the experiment; little children, needing just the kind of training we proposed to give them, abounded everywhere.... the woolwich children were typical slum babies, varying in ages from three to six years; very poor, very dirty, totally untrained in good habits. at first we only admitted a few, and when these began to improve, gradually increased the numbers to thirty-five. they needed great patience and care, but they responded wonderfully to the love given them, and before long they were real kindergarten children, full of vigour, merriment and self-activity." as is done in connection with all free kindergartens, parents' evenings were instituted from the first, and the mothers were helped to understand their children by simple talks. sesame house for home life training had been opened six months before this mission kindergarten. it was founded by the sesame club, and at its head was miss schepel, who for twenty years had been at the head of the pestalozzi froebel house. the idea of home life training attracted students who were not obliged by stern necessity to earn their daily bread. though the methods were not quite in line with progressive thought, the atmosphere created by miss schepel, warmly seconded by miss buckton,[ ] was one of enthusiasm in the service of children. the second nursery school in london had its origin in this enthusiasm. miss maufe left sesame house early in , and started a free child garden in west london. four years later she moved to westminster to a block of workmen's dwellings erected on the site of the old millbank prison. this "child garden" has a special interest from the fact that it was carried on actually in a block of workmen's dwellings like the children's houses of a later date. the effort was voluntary and the rooms were small, but, if the experiment had been supported by the authorities, it would have been easy to take down dividing walls to get sufficient space. miss maufe gave herself and her income for about twelve years, but difficulties created by the war, the impossibility of finding efficient help and consequent drain upon her own strength have forced her to close her little school, to the grief of the mothers in ruskin buildings. another sesame house student, miss l. hardy, in her charming _diary of a free kindergarten_, takes us from london to edinburgh, but the first free kindergarten in edinburgh began in and had a different origin. miss howden was an infants' mistress in one of the slums, and knew well the needs of little children in that wide street, once decked with lordly mansions, which leads from the castle to holyrood palace. some of the fine houses are left, but the inhabitants are of the poorest, and miss howden left her savings to start a free kindergarten in the canongate. the sum was not large, but it was seed sown in faith, and its harvest has been abundant, for edinburgh with its population of under , has five free kindergartens, in all of which the children are washed and fed and given restful sleep, as well as taught and trained with intelligence and love. london with its population of , , had but eight up to the time of the outbreak of the war. [footnote : author of the beautiful mystery play of _eager heart_.] in the froebel society took part in a joint conference at bradford, where one sitting was devoted to "the need for nursery schools for children from three to five years at present attending the public elementary schools." the speakers were mrs. miall of leeds, and miss k. phillips, who had wide opportunities for knowledge of the unsuitable conditions generally provided for these little children. among those who joined in this discussion was miss margaret m'millan, so well known for her pioneer work in connection with school clinics, and more recently for her now famous camp school. miss m'millan had already done yeoman service on the bradford education committee, but was now resident in london, and she had been warmly welcomed on the council of the froebel society. it was from the date of this conference that the name nursery school became general, though it had been used by madame michaelis as early as . in the following year, , the board of education published its "reports on children under five years of age," with its prefatory memorandum stating that "a new form of school is necessary for poor children," and that parents who must send their little ones to school "should send them to nursery schools rather than to schools of instruction," to schools where there should be "more play, more sleep, more free conversation, story-telling and observation." it would seem that the recommendations of may begin to be carried out in , a consummation devoutly to be wished. in the meantime voluntary effort has done what it could. birmingham had good reason to be in the forefront, since many of its public-spirited citizens had in their own childhood the benefit of the excellent works of miss caroline bishop, a disciple of frau schrader. the birmingham people's kindergarten association opened its first people's kindergarten at greet, in , and a second, the settlement kindergarten, in . sir oliver lodge spoke strongly in favour of these institutions, calling them a protest against the idea of the comparative unimportance of childhood. miss hardy opened her child garden in , and that work has grown so that the children are now kept till they are eight years old. the edinburgh provincial council for the training of teachers opened another free kindergarten as a demonstration school for froebelian methods, a practising school for students, and also as an experimental school, where attempts might be made to solve problems as to the education of neglected children under school age. it was the headmistress of this school, miss hodsman, who invented the net beds now in general use. she wanted something hygienic and light enough to be carried easily into the garden, that in fine weather the children might sleep out of doors. another sesame house student, miss priestman, opened a free kindergarten in the pretty village of thornton-le-dale, where the children have a sand-heap in a little enclosure allowed them by the blacksmith, and sail their boats at a quiet place by the side of the beck that runs through the village. it was in that miss esther lawrence of the froebel institute inspired her old students to help her to open the michaelis free kindergarten. since the war, the name has been altered to the michaelis nursery school, which is in netting dale, on the edge of a very poor neighbourhood, where large families often occupy a single room. as in the edinburgh free kindergartens, dinner is provided, for which the parents pay one penny. the first report tells how necessary are nursery schools in such surroundings. "the little child who was formerly tied to the leg of the bed, and left all day while his mother was out at work, is now enjoying the happy freedom of the kindergarten. the child whose clothes were formerly sewn on to him, to save his mother the periodical labour of sewing on buttons, is now undressed and bathed regularly. the attacks on children by drunken parents are less frequent. when the kindergarten was first opened, many of the children were quite listless, they did not know how to play, did not care to play. now they play with pleasure and with vigour, and one can hardly believe they are the listless, spiritless children of a year ago." in miss lawrence succeeded in opening what was called from the first the "somers town nursery school," where the same kind of work is done. one of the reports says: "it is interesting to see the children sweeping or dusting a room, washing their dusters and dolls' clothes, polishing the furniture, their shoes, and anything which needs polishing. on friday morning the 'silver' is cleaned, and the brilliant results give great pleasure and satisfaction to the little polishers. 'have you done your work?' was the question addressed to a visitor by a three-year-old child, and the visitor beat a hasty retreat, ashamed perhaps of being the only drone in the busy hive. at dinner time four children wait on the rest, and very well and quickly the food is handed round and the plates removed." there are other free kindergartens at work. one is in charge of miss rowland, and is in connection with the bermondsey settlement. it is miss rowland who tells of the "candid mother" she met one saturday who remarked, "i told the children to wash their faces in case they met you." the phoenix park kindergarten in glasgow is interesting because the site was granted by an enlightened corporation and the parks committee laid out the garden, while the real start came from the pupils of a school for girls of well-to-do families. by this time other social agencies have been grouped round the kindergarten as a centre. the caldecott nursery school was opened in and has grown into the caldecott community, which has now taken its children to live altogether in the country. this nursery school was never intended to be a kindergarten; it was started as an interesting experiment, "chiefly perhaps in the hope that the children might enjoy that instruction which is usually absorbed by the children of the wealthy in their own nurseries by virtue of their happier surroundings." and in the very year in which we were plunged into war miss margaret m'millan put into actual shape what she had long thought of, and opened her "baby camp" and nursery school, with a place for "toddlers" in between, the full story of which is told in _the, camp school_. in the camp itself the things which impress the visitor most are first the space and the fresh air, the sky above and the brown earth below, and next the family feeling which is so plain in spite of the numbers. the camp existed long before it was a baby camp and nursery school, for miss m'millan began with a school clinic and went on to open-air camps for girls and for boys, before going to the "preventive and constructive" work of the baby camp. clean and healthy bodies come first, but to miss m'millan's enthusiasm everything in life is educative. the war has increased the supply of nursery schools, because the need for them has become glaringly apparent. many experiments are going on now, and it seems as if experimental work would be encouraged, not hampered by unyielding regulations. the nursery school should cover the ages for which the kindergarten was instituted, roughly from three to six years old. already there are excellent baby rooms in some parts of london, and no doubt in other towns, and the only reason for disturbing these is to provide the children with more space and more fresh air, or with something resembling a garden rather than a bare yard. one school in london has a creche or day nursery, not exactly a part of it, but in closest touch, established owing to the efforts of an enthusiastic headmistress working along with the norland place nurses. its space is at present insufficient, but the neighbouring buildings are condemned, and will come down after the war. they need not go up again. then the space could be used in the same way as in the camp school. that would be to the benefit of the whole neighbourhood, and there could be at least one experiment where from creche to standard vii. might be in close connection. miss m'millan's ideal is to have a large space in the centre of a district with covered passages radiating from it so that mothers from a large area could bring their little ones and leave them in safety. it would be safety, it would be salvation. but, as the scots proverb has it, "it is a far cry to loch awe." another question much debated is, who is to be in charge of these children. the day nursery or crèche must undoubtedly be staffed with nurses, but with nurses trained to care for children, not merely sick nurses. there are, however, certain people who believe that the "trained nurse" is the right person to be in charge of children up to five, while others think that young girls or uneducated women will suffice. we are thankful that the board of education takes up the position that a well-educated and specially trained teacher is to be the person responsible. we certainly want the help both of the trained nurse and of the motherly woman. the trained nurse will be far more use in detecting and attending to the ailments of children than the teacher can be, and the motherly woman can give far more efficient help in training children to decent habits than any young probationer, useful though these may be. but there is always the fear that the nurses may think that good food and cleanliness are all a child requires, and, as miss m'millan says, "the sight of the toddlers' empty hands and mute lips does not trouble them at all." but every man to his trade, and though the teacher in charge must know something about ailing children, it is very doubtful if a few months in a hospital will advantage her much. here she trenches on the province of the real nurse, whose training is thorough, and the little knowledge, as every one knows, is sometimes dangerous. one nursery school teacher, with years of experience, says that what she learned in hospital has been of no use to her, and it is probable that attendance at a clinic for children would be really more useful. certainly the main concern of the nursery school teacher is sympathetic understanding of children. there must be no more of _punch's_ "go and see what tommy is doing in the next room and tell him not to," but "go and see what tommy is trying to accomplish, and make it possible for him to carry on his self-education through that 'fostering of the human instincts of activity, investigation and construction' which constitutes a kindergarten." chapter v "the world's mine oyster" a box of counters and a red-veined stone, a piece of glass abraded by the beach, and six or seven shells. if early education, consist in fostering natural activities, there can be no doubt that froebel hit upon the activity most prominent of all in the case of young children, viz. the impulse to investigate. for his crest, the little child should share in the "motto given to the mongoose family, in kipling's _rikki-tikki_, 'run and find out.'" most writers on the education of young children have emphasised the importance of what is most inadequately called sense training, and it is here that dr. montessori takes her stand with her "didactic apparatus." froebel's ideas seem wider; he realises that the sword with which the child opens his oyster is a two-edged sword, that he uses not only his sense organs as tools for investigation, but his whole body. his pathway to knowledge, and to power over himself and his surroundings, is action, and action of all kinds is as necessary to him as the use of his senses. "the child's first utterance is force," says froebel, and his first discovery is the resistance of matter, when he "pushes with his feet against what resists them." his first experiments are with his body, "his first toys are his own limbs," and his first play is the use of "body, senses and limbs" for the sake of use, not for result. one use of his body is the imitation of any moving object, and froebel tells the mother: if your child's to understand action in the world without, you must let his tiny hand imitative move about. this is the reason why baby will, never still, imitate whatever's by. at this stage the child is "to move freely, and be active, to grasp and hold with his own hands." he is to stand "when he can sit erect and draw himself up," not to walk till he "can creep, rise freely, maintain his balance and proceed by his own effort." he is _not_ to be hindered by swaddling bands--such as are in use in continental countries--nor, later on, to be "_spoiled by too much assistance_," words which every mother and teacher should write upon her phylacteries. but as soon as he can move himself the surroundings speak to the child, "outer objects _invite_ him to seize and grasp them, and if they are distant, they invite him who would bring them nearer to move towards them." this use of the word "invite" is worthy of notice, and calls to mind a sentence used by a writer on freud,[ ] that "the activity of a human being is a constant function of his environment." we adults, who are so ready with our "don't touch," must endeavour to remember how everything is shouting to a child: "look at me, listen to me, come and fetch me, and find out all you can about me by every means in your power." [footnote : _the freudian wish_, edwin holt.] if we have anything to do with little children, we must face the fact that the child is, if not quite a robinson crusoe on his island, at least an explorer in a strange country, and a scientist in his laboratory. but there is nothing narrow in his outlook: the name of this chapter is deliberately chosen, the whole world is the child's oyster, his interests are all-embracing. from his first walk he is the geographer. "each little walk is a tour of discovery; each object--the chair, the wall--is an america, a new world, which he either goes around to see if it be an island, or whose coast he follows to discover if it be a continent. each new phenomenon is a discovery in the child's small and yet rich world, _e.g._ one may go round the chair; one may stand before it, behind it, but one cannot go behind the bench or the wall." then comes an inquiry into the physical properties of surrounding objects. "the effort to reach a particular object may have its source in the child's desire to hold himself firm and upright by it, but we also observe that it gives him pleasure to touch, to feel, to grasp, and perhaps also--which is a new phase of activity--to be able to move it.... the chair is hard or soft; the seat is smooth; the corner is pointed; the edge is sharp." the business of the adult, froebel goes on to say, is to supply these names, "not primarily to develop the child's power of speech," but "to define his sense impressions." next, the scientist must stock his laboratory with material for experiment. "the child is attracted by the bright round smooth pebble, by the gaily fluttering bit of paper, by the smooth bit of board, by the rectangular block, by the brilliant quaint leaf. look at the child that can scarcely keep himself erect, that can walk only with the greatest care--he sees a twig, a bit of straw; painfully he secures it, and like the bird carries it to his nest. see him again, laboriously stooping and slowly going forward on the ground, under the eaves of the roof (the deep eaves of the thuringian peasant house). the force of the rain has washed out of the sand smooth bright pebbles, and the ever-observing child gathers them as building stones as it were, as material for future building. and is he wrong? is he not in truth collecting material for his future life building?" the "box of counters, and the red-veined stone," the brilliant quaint leaf, the twig, the bit of straw, all the child's treasures--these are the stimuli which, according to the biologist educator, must be supplied if the activities appropriate to each stage are to be called forth. every one knows for how long a period a child can occupy himself examining, comparing and experimenting. "like things," says froebel, "must be ranged together, unlike things separated.... the child loves all things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. to him the least thing is a new discovery, but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein, lest it obscure the small horizon and crush the little world. therefore the child would know why he loves this thing, he would know all its properties. for this reason he examines the object on all sides; for this reason he tears and breaks it; for this reason he puts it in his mouth and bites it. we reprove the child for naughtiness and foolishness; and yet he is wiser than we who reprove him." this experimenting is one side of a child's play, and the things with which he thus experiments are his toys, or, as froebel puts it, "play material." much of this is and ought to be self found, and where the child can find his own toys he asks for little more. the seaside supplies him with sand and water, stones, shells, rock pools, seaweed, and he asks us for nothing but a spade, which digs deeper than his naked hands, and a pail to carry water, which hands alone cannot convey. the vista of the sand is the child's free land; where the grown-ups seem half afraid; even nurse forgets to sniff and to call "come here" as she sits very near to the far up cliff and you venture alone with your spade.... even indoors, a child could probably find for himself all the material for investigation, all the stimuli he requires, if it were not that his investigations interfere with adult purposes. even in very primitive times the child probably experimented upon the revolving qualities of his mother's spindle till she found it more convenient to let him have one for himself, and it became a toy or top. froebel, who made so much of play, to whom it was spontaneous education and self realisation, was bound to see that toys were important. "the man advanced in insight," he said, "even when he gives his child a plaything, must make clear to himself its purpose and the purpose of playthings and occupation material in general. this purpose is to aid the child freely to express what lies within him, and to bring the outer world nearer to him, and thus to serve as mediator between the mind and the world." froebel's "gifts" were an attempt to supply right play material. true to his faith in natural impulse, froebel watched children to see what playthings they found for themselves, or which, among those presented by adults, were most appreciated. soft little coloured balls seemed right material for a baby's tender hand, and it was clear that when the child could crawl about he was ready for something which he could roll on the floor and pursue on all fours. as early as two years old he loves to take things out of boxes and to move objects about, so boxes of bricks were supplied, graded in number and in variety of form. not for a moment did froebel suggest that the child was to be limited to these selected playthings, he expressly stated the contrary, and he frequently said that spontaneity was not to be checked. but from what has followed, from the way in which these little toys have been misused, we are tempted to speculate on whether these "gifts" supplied that definite foundation without which, in these days, no notice would have been taken of the new ideas, or whether they have proved the sunken rock on which much that was valuable has perished. the world was not ready to believe in the educational value of play, just pure play. nor is it yet. for the new system in its "didactic" apparatus out-froebels froebel in his mistake of trying to systematise the material for spontaneous education. carefully planned, as were froebel's own "gifts," the new apparatus presents a series of exercises in sense discrimination, satisfying no doubt while unfamiliar, but suffering from the defect of the "too finished and complex plaything," in which froebel saw a danger "which slumbers like a viper under the roses." the danger is that "the child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough variety by its means; his power of creative imagination, his power of giving outward form to his own ideas are thus actually deadened." "to realise his aims, man, and more particularly the child, requires material, though it be only a bit of wood or a pebble, with which he makes something or which he makes into something. in order to lead the child to the handling of material we give him the ball, the cube and other bodies, the kindergarten gifts. each of these gifts incites the child to free spontaneous activity, to independent movement." froebel would have sympathised deeply with the views of peter as expressed by mr. wells in regard to ideals, which he, however, called toys: "the theory of ideals played almost as important a part in the early philosophy of peter as it did in the philosophy of plato. but peter did not call them ideals, he called them 'toys.' toys were the simplified essences of things, pure, perfect and manageable. real things were troublesome, uncontrollable, over-complicated and largely irrelevant. a real train, for example, was a poor, big, clumsy, limited thing that was obliged to go to redhill, or croydon, or london, that was full of unnecessary strangers, usually sitting firmly in the window seats, that you could do nothing with at all. a toy train was your very own; it took you wherever you wanted, to fairyland, or russia, or anywhere, at whatever pace you chose."[ ] [footnote : _joan and peter_, p. .] froebel asks what presents are most prized by the child and by mankind in general, and answers, "those which afford him a means of developing his mind, of giving it freest activity, of expressing it clearly." for her ideas as to educative material dr. montessori went, not to normal life, not even to children, but to what may he called curative appliances, to the material invented by séguin to develop the dormant powers of defective children. she herself came to the study of education from the medical side, the curative. froebel, with his belief in human instinct, naturally went to what he called the mother's room, which we should call the nursery, and to the garden where the child finds his "bright round smooth pebble" and his "brilliant quaint leaf." no one would seek to under-value the importance of sense discrimination, but it can be exercised without formalism, and it need not be mere discrimination. it is in connection with the taste and smell games that froebel tells the mother that "the higher is rooted in the lower, morality in instinct, the spiritual in the material." the baby enjoys the scent, thanks the kind spirit that put it there, and must let mother smell it too, so from the beginning there is a touch of aesthetic pleasure and a recognition of "what the dear god is saying outside." as to how sense discrimination may be exercised without formality, there is a charming picture in _the camp school_: "and then that sense of _smell_, which got so little exercise and attention that it went to sleep altogether, so that millions get no warning and no joy through it. we met the need for its education in the baby camp by having a herb garden. back from the shelters and open ground, in a shady place, we have planted fennel, mint, lavender, sage, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, herb gerrard and rue. and over and above these pungently smelling things there are little fields of mignonette. we have balm, indeed, everywhere in our garden. the toddlers go round the beds of herbs, pinching the leaves with their tiny fingers and then putting their fingers to their noses. there are two little couples going the rounds just now. one is a pair of new comers, very much astonished, the other couple old inhabitants, delighted to show the wonders of the place! coming back with odorous hands, they perhaps want to tell us about the journey. their eyes are bright, their mouths open." in chapter ii. we quoted the biologist educator's ideal conception of the surroundings best suited to bring about right development. let us now visit one or two actual kindergartens and see if these conditions are in any way realised by the followers of froebel. the first one we enter is certainly a large bright room, for one side is open to light, with two large windows, and between them glass doors opening into the playground. there is no heap of sand in a corner, nor is there a tub of water; for the practical teacher knows how little hands, if not little feet, with their vigorous but as yet uncontrolled movements would splash the water and scatter the sand with dire effects as to the floor, which the theorist fondly imagines would always be clean enough to sit upon. but there is a sand-tray big enough and deep enough for six to eight children to use individually or together. as spontaneous activity, with its ceaseless efforts at experimenting, ceaselessly spills the sand, within easy reach are little brushes and dustpans to remedy such mishaps. the sand-tray is lined with zinc so that the sand can be replaced by water for boats and ducks, etc., when desired. the low wall blackboard is there ready for use. bright pictures are on the walls, well drawn and well coloured, some from nursery rhymes, some of caldecott's, a frieze of hen and chickens, etc. boxes for houses and shops are not in evidence, but their place is taken by bricks of such size and quantity that houses, shops, motors, engines and anything else may be built large enough for the children themselves to be shopkeepers or drivers, and there are also pieces of wood to use for various purposes of construction. there is no cooking stove, but simple cooking can be carried out on an open fire, and when a baking oven is required, an eager procession makes its way to the kitchen, where a kindly housekeeper permits the use of her oven. there is a doll's cot with a few dolls of various sizes. there are flowers and growing bulbs. there are light low tables and chairs, a family of guinea pigs in a large cage, and there is a cupboard which the children can reach. water is to be found in a passage room, between the kindergarten and the rooms for children above that stage, and here, so placed that the children themselves can find and reach everything, are the sawdust, bran and oats for the guinea pigs, with a few carrots and a knife to cut them, some tiny scrubbing-brushes and a wiping-up cloth. here also are stored the empty boxes, corrugated paper and odds and ends in constant demand for constructions. in the cupboard there are certain shelves from which anything may be taken, and some from which nothing may be taken without leave. for the teacher here is of opinion that children of even three and four are not too young to begin to learn the lesson of _meum_ and _tuum_, and she also thinks it is good to have some treasures which do not come out every day, and which may require more delicate handling than the ordinary toy ought to need. for this ought to be strong enough to bear unskilled handling and vigorous movements, for a broken toy ought to be a tragedy. at the same time it is part of a child's training to learn to use dainty objects with delicate handling, and such things form the children's art gems, showing beauty of construction and of colour. children as well as grown-ups have their bad days, when something out of the usual is very welcome. "do you know there's nothing in this world that i'm not tired of?" was said one day by a boy of six usually quite contented. "give me something out of the cupboard that i've never seen before," said another whose digestion was troublesome. the open shelves contain pencils and paper, crayons, paint-boxes, boxes of building blocks, interlocking blocks, wooden animals, jigsaw and other puzzles, coloured tablets for pattern laying, toy scales, beads to thread, dominoes, etc., the only rule being that what is taken out must be tidily replaced. this kindergarten is part of a large institution, and the playground, to which it has direct access, is of considerable extent. there is a big stretch of grass and another of asphalt, so that in suitable weather the tables and chairs, the sand-tray, the bricks and anything else that is wanted can be carried outside so that the children can live in the open, which of course is better than any room. in the playground there is a bank where the children can run up and down, and there are a few planks and a builder's trestle,[ ] on which they can be poised for seesaws or slides, and these are a constant source of pleasure. [footnote : see p. .] in another kindergarten we find the walls enlivened with cecil aldin's fascinating friezes: here is noah with all the animals walking in cheerful procession, and in the next room is an attractive procession of children with push-carts, hoops and toy motor cars. when we make our visit the day is fine and the room is empty, the children are all outside. the garden is not large, but there is some space, and under the shade of two big trees we find rugs spread, on which the children are sitting, standing, kneeling and lying, according to their occupation. one is building with large blocks, and must stand up to complete her erection; another is lying flat putting together a jigsaw; another, a boy, is threading beads; while another has built railway arches, and with much whistling and the greatest carefulness is guiding his train through the tunnels. the play is almost entirely individual, but very often you hear, "o miss x, _do_ come and see what i've done!" after about an hour, during which a few of the children have changed their occupations, those who wish to do so join some older children who are playing games involving movement. this may be a traditional game like looby loo, or round and round the village, or it may be one of the best of the old kindergarten games. after lunch the washing up is to be done in a beautiful new white sink which is displayed with pride. our next visit is to a free kindergarten. the rooms are quite as attractive, as rich in charming friezes as in the others, and the furnishing in some ways is much the same. but here we see what we have not seen before, for here is a large room filled with tiny hammock beds. the windows are wide open, but the blinds are down, for the children are having their afternoon sleep. here, as in all free kindergartens, the children are provided with simple but pretty overalls which the parents are pleased to wash. house shoes are also provided, partly to minimise the noise from active little feet, but principally because the poor little boots are often a painfully inadequate protection from wet pavements. the children are trained to tidy ways and to independence. they cannot read, but by picture cards they recognise their own beds, pegs and other properties. they take out and put away their own things, and give all reasonable help in laying tables and serving food, in washing, dusting and sweeping up crumbs, as is done in any true kindergarten. in the garden of this free kindergarten there is a large sand-pit, surrounded by a low wooden framework, and having a pole across the middle so that it resembles a cucumber frame and a cover can be thrown over the sand to keep it clean when not in use. froebel's own list of playthings contains, besides balls and building blocks, coloured beads, coloured tablets for laying patterns, coloured papers for cutting, folding and plaiting; pencils, paints and brushes; modelling clay and sand; coloured wool for sewing patterns and pictures; and such little sticks and laths as children living in a forest region find for themselves. considered in themselves, apart from the traditions of formality, these are quite good play material or stimuli, and froebel meant the time to come "when we shall speak of the doll and the hobby horse as the first plays of the awakening life of the girl and the boy," but he died before he had done so. in the _mother songs_, too, we find quite a good list of toys which are now to be found in most kindergartens. toys for the playground should be provided--a sand-heap, a seesaw, a substantial wheel-barrow, hoops, balls, reins and perhaps skipping-ropes. something on which the child can balance, logs or planks which they can move about, and a trestle on which these can be supported, are invaluable. it was while an addition was being made to our place that we realised the importance of such things, and, as in froebel's case, "our teachers were the children themselves." they were so supremely happy running up and down the plank roads laid by the builders for their wheel-barrows, seesawing or balancing and sliding on others, that we could not face the desolation of emptiness which would come when the workmen removed their things. so, for a few pounds, all that the children needed was secured, ordinary planks for seesawing, narrower for balancing and a couple of trestles. one exercise the children had specially enjoyed was jumping up and down on yielding planks, and this the workmen had forbidden because the planks might crack. but a sympathetic foreman told us what was needed: two planks of special springy wood were fastened together by cross pieces at each end, and besides making excellent slides, these made most exciting springboards. for representations of real life the children require dolls and the simplest of furniture--a bed, which need only be a box, some means of carrying out the doll's washing, her personal requirements as well as her clothes; some little tea-things and pots and pans. a doll's house is not necessary, and can only be used by two or three children, but will be welcomed if provided, and its appointments give practice in dainty handling. trains and signals of some kind, home-made or otherwise; animals for farm or zoo; a pair of scales for a shop, and some sort of delivery van, which, of course, may be home-made. there must also be provision for increase of skill and possibility of creation. if the kindergarten can afford it, some of the montessori material may be provided; there is no reason, except expense, why it should not be used if the children like it, and if it does not take up too much room. but it has no creative possibilities, and even at three years old this is required. scissors are an important tool, and an old book of sample wall-papers is most useful; old match-boxes and used matches, paste and brushes and some old magazines to cut. blackboard chalks and crayons, paint-boxes with four to six important colours, some kindergarten folding papers, all these supply colour. certain toys seem specially suited to give hand control, _e.g._ a noah's ark, where the small animals are to be set out carefully, tops or teetotums and tiddlywinks, at which some little children become proficient. the puzzle interest must not be forgotten, and simple jigsaw pictures give great pleasure. it is interesting to note here that the youngest children fit these puzzles not by the picture but by form, though they know they are making a picture and are pleased when it is finished. the puzzle with six pictures on the sides of cubes is much more difficult than a simple jigsaw. all sorts of odds and ends come in useful, and especially for the poorer children these should be provided. any one who remembers the pleasure derived from coloured envelope bands, from transparent paper from crackers, and from certain advertisements, will save these for children to whose homes such treasures never come. a box containing scraps of soft cloth, possibly a bit of velvet, some bits of smooth and shining coloured silk give the pleasure of sense discrimination without the formality of the montessori graded boxes, and are easier to replace. some substitute for "mother's button box," a box of shells or coloured seeds, a box of feathers, all these things will be played with, which means observation and discrimination, comparison and contrast, and in addition, where colour is involved, there is aesthetic pleasure, and this also enters into the touching of smooth or soft surfaces. softness is a joy to children, as is shown in the woolly lambs, etc., provided for babies. a little one of my acquaintance had a bit of blanket which comforted many woes, and when once i offered her a feather boa as a substitute she sobbed out: "it isn't so soft as the blanket!" in one of miss mcmillan's early books she wrote: "very early the child begins more or less consciously to exercise the basal sense--the sense of touch. on waking from sleep he puts his tiny hands to grasp something, or turns his head on the firm soft pillow. he _touches_ rather than looks, at first (for his hands and fingers perform a great many movements long before he learns to turn his eyeballs in various directions or follow the passage even of a light), and through touching many things he begins his education. if he is the nursling of wealthy parents, it is possible that his first exercises are rather restricted. he touches silk, ivory, muslin and fine linen. that is all, and that is not much. but the child of the cottager is often better off, for his mother gives him a great variety of objects to keep him quiet. the ridiculous command, 'do not touch,' cannot be imposed on him while he is screaming in his cradle or protesting in his dinner chair; and so all manner of things--reels, rings, boxes, tins, that is to say a variety of surfaces--is offered to him, to his great delight and advantage. and lest he should not get the full benefit of such privilege he carries everything to his mouth, where the sense of touch is very keen."[ ] [footnote : _early childhood_: swan sonnenschein, published .] among the treasures kept for special occasions there may be pipes for soap-bubbles, a prism of some kind with which to make rainbows, a tiny mirror to make "light-birds" on the wall and ceiling, and a magnet with the time-honoured ducks and fish, if these are still to be bought, along with other articles, delicately made or coloured, which require care. pictures and picture-books should also be considered; some being in constant use, some only brought out occasionally. for the very smallest children some may be rag books, but always children should be taught to treat books carefully. the pictures on the walls ought to be changed, sometimes with the children's help, sometimes as a surprise and discovery. for that purpose it is convenient to have series of pictures in frames with movable backs, but brown-paper frames will do quite well. the pictures belonging to the stories which have been told to the children ought to have a prominent place, and if the little ones desire to have one retold they will ask for it. it is of course not at all either necessary or even desirable for any one school to have everything, and children should not have too much within the range of their attention at one time. individual teachers will make their own selections, but in all cases there must be sufficient variety of material for each child to carry out his natural desire for observation, experiment and construction. chapter vi "all the world's a stage" a wedding or a festival, a mourning or a funeral... as if his whole vocation were endless imitation. in every country and in every age those who have eyes to see have watched the same little dramas. what wordsworth saw was seen nineteen hundred years ago in the syrian market-place, where the children complained of their unresponsive companions: "we have piped the glad chaunt of the marriage, but ye have not danced, we have wailed our lamentation, but ye have not joined our mourning procession." since the very name kindergarten is to imply a teaching which fulfils the child's own wants and desires, it must supply abundant provision for the dramatic representation of life. adults have always been ready to use for their own purposes the strong tendency to imitate, which is a characteristic of all normal children, but few even now realise to what extent a child profits by his imitative play. the explanation that froebel found for this will now be generally accepted, viz. that only by acting it out can a child fully grasp an idea, "for what he tries to represent or do, he begins to understand." he thinks in action, or as one writer put it, he "apperceives with his muscles." this explanation seems to cover imitative play, from the little child's imitative wave of the hand up to such elaborate imitations as are described in stanley hall's _story of a sand pile,_[ ] or in dewey's _schools of to-morrow._ but when we think of the joy of such imaginative play as that of red indians, shipwrecks and desert islands, we feel that these show a craving for experience, for life, such a craving as causes the adult to lose himself in a book of travels or in a dramatic performance, and which explains the phenomenal success of the cinema, poor stuff as it is. [footnote : or that delightful "play town" in _the play way_.] we thirst for experiences, even for those which are unpleasant; we wonder "how it feels" to be up in an aeroplane or down in a submarine. we are far indeed from desiring air-raids, but if such things must be, there is a curious satisfaction in being "in it." and though the experiences they desire may be matters of everyday occurrence to us, children probably feel the craving even more keenly. "you may write what you like," said a teacher, and a somewhat inarticulate child wrote, "i was out last night, it was late." "why, jack," said another, "you've painted your cow green; did you ever see a green cow?" "no," said jack, "but i'd like to." in early kindergarten days this imitative and dramatic tendency was chiefly met in games, and the children were by turns butterflies and bees, bakers and carpenters, clocks and windmills. the programme was suggested by froebel's _mother songs_, in which he deals with the child's nearest environment. too often, indeed, the realities to which froebel referred were not realities to english children, but that was recognised as a defect, and the ideas themselves were suitable. chickens, pigeons and farmyard animals; the homely pussy cat or canary bird; the workers to whom the child is indebted, farmer, baker, miner, builder or carpenter; the sun, the rain, the rainbow and the "light-bird"--such ideas were chosen as suitable centres, and stories and songs, games and handwork clustered round. what was the reason for this binding of things together? why did froebel constantly plead for "unity" even for the tiny child, and tell us to link together his baby finger-games or his first weak efforts at building with his blocks chairs, tables, beds, walls and ladders? looking back over the years, it seems as if this idea of joining together has been trying to assert itself under various forms, each of which has reigned for its day, has been carried to extremes and been discarded, only to come up again in a somewhat different form. it has always seemed to aim at extending and ordering the mind content of children. for the froebelian it was expressed in such words as "unity," "connectedness" and "continuity," while the herbartians called it "correlation." under these terms much work has been, and is still being, carried out, some very good and some very foolish. ideas catch on, however, because of the truth that is in them, not because of the error which is likely to be mixed with it, and even the weakest effort after connection embodies an important truth. when we smile over absurd stories of forced "correlation," we seldom stop to think of what went on before the kindergarten existed, for instance the still more absurd and totally disconnected lists of object lessons. one actual list for children of four years old ran: soda, elephant, tea, pig, wax, cow, sugar, spider, potatoes, sheep, salt, mouse, bread, camel. kindergarten practice was far ahead of this, for here the teacher was expected to choose her material according to ( ) time of year; ( ) local conditions, such as the pursuits of the people; ( ) social customs. when it was possible the children went to see the real blacksmith or the real cow, and to let game or handwork be an expression, and a re-ordering of ideas gained was natural and right. connectedness, however, meant more than this, it meant that the material itself was to be treated so that the children would be helped to that real understanding which comes from seeing things in their relations to each other. as lloyd morgan puts it, "we are mainly at work upon the mental background. it is our object to make this background as rich and full and orderly as possible, so that whatever is brought to the focus of consciousness shall be set in a relational background, which shall give it meaning; and so that our pupils may be able to feel the truth which browning puts into the mouth of fra lippo lippi: this world's no blot for us nor blank; it means intensely and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink." according to professor dewey, some such linking or joining is necessary "to foster that sense which is at the basis of attention and of all intellectual growth, the sense of continuity." the herbartian correlation was designed to further that well-connected circle of thought out of which would come the firm will, guided by right insight, inspired by true feeling, which is their aim in education. froebelian unity and connectedness have, like the others, an intellectual and a moral aspect. intellectually "the essential characteristic of instruction is the treatment of individual things in their relationships"; morally, the idea of unity is that we are all members one of another. the child who, through unhindered activity, has reached the stage of self-consciousness is to go on to feel himself a part, a member of an ever-increasing whole--family, school, township, country, humanity--the all; to be "one with nature, man and god." every one has heard something of the new teaching--which, by the way, sheds clearer light over froebel's warning against arbitrary interference--viz. that a great part of the nervous instability which affects our generation is due to the thwarting and checking of the natural impulses of early years. but this new school also gives us something positive, and reinforces older doctrines by telling us to integrate behaviour. "this matter of the unthwarted lifelong progress of behaviour integration is of profound importance, for it is the transition from behaviour to conduct. the more integrated behaviour is harmonious and consistent behaviour toward a larger and more comprehensive situation, toward a bigger section of the universe; it is lucidity and breadth of purpose. the child playing with fire is only wrong conduct because it is behaviour that does not take into account consequences; it is not adjusted to enough of the environment; it will be made right by an enlargement of its scope and reach."[ ] all selfish conduct, all rudeness and roughness come from ignorance; we are all more or less self-centred, and the child's consciousness of self has to be widened, his scope has to be enlarged to sympathy with the thoughts, feelings and desires of other selves. "the sane man is the man who (however limited the scope of his behaviour) has no such suppression incorporated in him. the wise man must be sane and must have scope as well."[ ] [footnote : _the freudian wish_, edwin holt.] [footnote : _the freudian wish_, edwin holt.] professor earl barnes always used to describe the child mind as "scrappy." how can we best aid development into the wholeness or healthiness and the scope of sanity and wisdom? for it may well be that this widening and ordering of experience, of consciousness, of behaviour into moral behaviour is our most important task as teachers. froebel emphasised the "crying need" for connection of school and life, pointing out how the little child desires to imitate and the older to share in all that, as professor dewey puts it, is "surcharged with a sense of the mysterious values that attach to whatever their elders are concerned with." this is one of the points to which professor dewey called attention in his summing up of froebel's educational principles, this letting the child reproduce on his own plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer society into which he is finally to go forth. it is in this connection that he says the kindergarten teacher has the opportunity to foster that most important "sense of continuity." in simple reproduction of the home life while there is abundant variety, since daily life may bring us into contact with all the life of the city or of the country, yet, because the work is within a whole, "there is opportunity to foster that sense which is at the basis of attention and of all intellectual growth, a sense of continuity." since professor dewey gave to the world the results of his experimental school, all the kindergartens and most of the infant schools in england have tried to carry out their accustomed reproduction of home surroundings, more or less on the lines of the primary department of his experimental school. they have extended their scope, and in addition to the material already taken from workman and shop, from garden and farm, have also with much profit to older children used his suggestions about primitive industries. reproduction of home surroundings can be done in many ways, one of which is to help the children to furnish and to play with a doll's house. but the play must be play. it is not enough to use the drama as merely offering suggestions for handwork, and one small doll's house does not allow of real play for more than one or two children. our own children used to settle this by taking out the furniture, etc., and arranging different homes around the room. i can remember the never-ending pleasure given by similar play in my own nursery days, when the actors were the men and boys supplied by tailors' advertisements. many and varied were the experiences of these paper families, families, it may be noted, none of whom demeaned themselves so far as to possess any womankind. for that nursery party of five had lost its mother sadly early and was ruled by two boys, who evidently thought little of the other sex. professor dewey tells us that "nothing is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his unguided fancies, or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions." it is the teacher's business to know what is striving for utterance and to supply the needed stimulus and materials. to show how under the inspiration of a thoroughly capable teacher this continuity may be secured and prolonged for quite a long period, an example may be taken from the work of miss janet payne, who is remarkably successful in meeting and stimulating, without in any way forcing the "striving for utterance" mentioned by dewey. on this occasion miss payne produced a doll about ten inches high, dressed to resemble the children's fathers, and suggested that a home should be made for him. the children adopted him with zeal, named him mr. bird, and his career lasted for two years. mr. bird required a family, so mrs. bird had to be produced with her little girl winnie, and later a baby was added to the family. beds, tables and chairs, including a high chair for winnie, were made of scraps from the wood box, and for a long time mr. bird was most domesticated. miss payne had used ordinary dolls' heads, but had constructed the bodies herself in such a way that the dolls could sit and stand, and use their arms to wield a broom or hold the baby. after some time, one child said, "mr. bird ought to go to business," and after much deliberation he became a grocer. his shop was made and stocked, and he attended it every day, going home to dinner regularly. one day he appeared to be having a meal on the shop counter, and it was explained that he had been "rather in a hurry" in the morning, so mrs. bird had given him his breakfast to take with him. the bird family had various adventures, they had spring cleanings, removals, visited the zoo and went to the seaside. one morning a little fellow sat in a trolley with the bird family beside him for three-quarters of an hour evidently "imagining." i did inquire in passing if it was a drive or a picnic, but the answer was so brief, that i knew i was an interruption and retired. but a younger and bolder inquirer, who wanted to conduct an experiment in modelling, ventured to ask if mr. bird wanted anything that could be made "at clay modelling." "yes, he wants some ink-pots for his post-office shop," was the answer, with the slightly irate addition, "but i _wish_ you'd call it the china factory." when these children moved to an upper class, mr. bird was laid away, but the children requested his presence. so he entered the new room and became a farmer. he had now to write letters, to arrange rents, etc., and the money had to be made and counted. the letters served for writing and reading lessons, and miss payne was careful to send the answers through the real post, properly addressed to mr. bird with the name of class and school. mr. bird hired labourers, the children grew corn, and thrashed it and sent it to the mill. a miller had to be produced, and the children, now his assistants, ground the wheat, and mr. bird came in his cart to fetch the sacks of flour, which ultimately became the birds' christmas pudding and was eaten by the labourers, now guests at the feast. in spring, after careful provision for their comfort, mr. bird went to the cattle market and bought cows. though the milking had to be pretence, the butter and cheese were really made. the first question of the summer term was, "what's mr. bird going to do this term?" like other teachers inspired by professor dewey, we have found our children most responsive to the suggestion of playing out primitive man. but with some, not of course with the brightest, it is too great a stretch to go at one step from the present to the most primitive times, and we often spend a term over something of the nature of robinson crusoe, where the situation presents characters accustomed to modern civilisation and deprived of all its conveniences. miss payne is careful to give the children full opportunity for suggestions--one dull little boy puzzled his mother by telling her "i made a very good 'gestion' to-day"--so though she had not contemplated the renewed appearance of mr. bird she said, "what do you want him to do?" "let him go out and shoot bears," cried an embryo sportsman. somewhat taken aback, miss payne temporised with, "he wouldn't find them in this country." "then let him go to india," cried one child, but another called out, "no, no, let him go to a desert island!" and that was carried with acclamation. mr. bird's various homes were on a miniature scale, and were contained in a series of zinc trays, which we have had made to fit the available tables and cupboard tops. we find these trays convenient, as a new one can be added when more scope is required to carry out new ideas. the following accounts taken from the notes of miss hilda beer, while a student in training, show another kind of play where the children themselves act the drama. the notes only cover a short period, but they show how the play may arise quite incidentally. _mon., june ._--as the ground is too damp for out-of-doors work, if the children were not ready with plans, i meant to suggest building a railway station, tunnel, etc., and later, i thought perhaps we might paint advertisements of seaside resorts for our station. but the children brought several things with them, and dorothy brought her own doll. marie had left the baby doll from the other room in the cot, so dorothy and sylvia said they must look after the babies. so cecil, josie and i swept and dusted. then we began to play house. cecil and dorothy were mr. and mrs. harry, sylvia was mrs. loo (husband at the war). josie was nurse and i was aunt lizzie. the dolls were winnie harry, and jack and doreen loo. mr. and mrs. harry built themselves a house and so did we. cecil said, "but what is the name of the road?" mrs. harry chose brookfield avenue, and mr. harry victoria street, but he gave in and mrs. loo took his name for her house. we had to put numbers on the houses; sylvia could make , but the others could not make , so i put it on the board and they copied it. josie having also made a wanted to use it, but mrs. loo objected, and said, "the mother is more important than the nurse," so josie fixed her on the house opposite. after lunch we bathed the babies and put them to sleep, and as it was time for the children's own rest, we all went to bed. when rest was over, we washed and dressed, and then mrs. harry asked for clay to make a water-tap for her house. that made all the children want to make things in clay, so we made cups and saucers, plates, and a baby's bottle, then scones and sponge-cakes, bread and a bread-board, and one of the children said we must put a b on that. then mrs. loo said, "but we haven't any shelves." i had to leave my class in miss payne's charge, and they spent the rest of the time fitting in shelves, water-taps, and sinks. _june ._--after sweeping, dusting, and washing and dressing the dolls, i read to the children "how the house was built." then we all pretended to bake, making rolls and cakes as next day was to be the doll winnie's birthday. we baked our cakes on a piece of wood on the empty fireplace. the other children were invited to winnie's party, so we went out to shop. the children wanted lettuces from their own garden, but the grass was too wet, so we pretended. the shop was on the edge of the grass and we talked to imaginary shopmen, cecil often exclaiming, "eightpence! why, it's not worth it!" as neither of the houses would hold all the guests invited to the party, we had to have a picnic instead. _june_ .--i must see that sylvia and dorothy do the sweeping to-morrow, and let josie bath the doll; she is very good-natured, and i see that they give her the less attractive occupation. i think too that the food question has played too large a part, so if the children suggest more cooking i shall look in the larder and say that really we must not buy or bake as food goes bad in hot weather, and we must not waste in war time. the children have suggested making cushions, painting pictures, and making knives and forks, but we have not had time. _report_.--dorothy and sylvia swept, cecil mended the wall of the house, josie took the children down to the beach (the sand tray), and i dusted. we looked into the larder and found that yesterday's greens were going bad, so decided not to buy more. then we took the babies for a walk. we noticed how many nasturtiums were out, how the blackberry bushes were in flower and in bud, and the runner-bean was in flower, and the red flowers looked so pretty in the green leaves. we looked at the hollyhocks, because i have told the children that they will grow taller than i am, and they are always wondering how soon this will be. the children found some cherries which had fallen, and dorothy said how pretty they were on the tree. i called attention to one branch that was laden with fruit, and looked particularly pretty with the sun shining on it. we also looked at the pear tree and the almond. everything has come on so fast, and the children were ready to say it was because of the rain. after rest, we went to the hall to see the chickens. to-day they were much bigger, and sylvia said had "bigger wings." we were able to watch them drinking, how they hold up their heads to let the water run down. the rest of the morning we made curtains, and the children loved it. there was much discussion and at first the children suggested making them all different, but they agreed that curtains at windows were usually alike. mr. and mrs. harry nearly quarrelled, as one wanted green and the other pink. i suggested trimming the green with a strip of pink, and they were quite pleased. mrs. loo and nurse chose green which was to be sewn with red silk. sylvia said, "a pattern," and i said, "you saw something red and green to-day," and she called out, "oh! cherries." she cut out a round of paper and tried to sew round it, holding it in place with her other hand. i suggested putting in a stitch to hold the paper. cecil was absorbed in sewing, and it seemed quieting for such an excitable boy and good for his weak hands. one child said, "fancy a boy sewing," so i told how soldiers and sailors sewed. they sewed just as they liked. these notes are continued in chapter ix., where they are used to show children's attitude towards nature. though separated here for a special purpose it is clear that there neither is nor ought to be any real separation in the lives of the children. their lives are wholes and they continually pass from one "subject" to another, because life and its circumstances are making new demands. if it rains and you cannot gather the lettuces you have grown from seed, you take refuge in happy pretence; if it clears and the sun calls you out of doors, you take your doll-babies for their walk. chapter vii joy in making i, too, will something make, and joy in the making. robert bridges. built by that only law, that use be suggester of beauty. arthur clough. there has always been _making_ in the kindergarten, since to froebel the impulse to create was a characteristic of self-conscious humanity. stopford brooke points out that browning's caliban, though almost brute, shows himself human, in that, besides thinking out his natural religion, he also dramatises and creates, "falls to make something." 'tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport. tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world than trying what to do with wit and strength-- what does a child gain from his ceaseless attempts at making? froebel's answer was that intellectually, through making he gains ideas, which, received in words, remain mere words. "to learn through life and action is more developing than to learn through words: expression in plastic material, united with thought and speech, is far more developing than mere repetition of words." morally, it is through impressing himself on his surroundings, that the child reaches the human attributes of self-consciousness and self-control. one of the most important passages froebel ever wrote is this: "the deepest craving of the child's life is to see itself mirrored in some external object. through such reflection, he learns to know his own activity, its essence, direction and aim, and learns to determine his activity in accordance with outer things. such mirroring of the inner life is essential, for through it the child comes to self-consciousness, and learns to order, determine and master himself." it is from the point of view of expression alone that froebel regards art, and drawing, he takes to be "the first revelation of the creative power within the child." the very earliest drawing to which he refers is what he calls "sketching the object on itself," that is, the tracing round the outlines of things, whereby the child learns form by co-ordinating sight and motor perceptions, a stage on which dr. montessori has also laid much stress. besides noting how children draw "round scissors and boxes, leaves and twigs, their own hands, and even shadows," he sees that from experimentation with any pointed stick or scrap of red stone or chalk, may come what mr. e. cooke called a language of line, and now "the horse of lines, the man of lines" will give much pleasure. after this it is true that "whatever a child knows he will put into his drawing," and the teacher's business is to see that he has abundant perceptions and images to express. another kind of drawing which children seem to find for themselves is what they call making patterns. out of this came the old-fashioned chequer drawing, now condemned as injurious to eyesight and of little value. when children see anything rich in colour the general cry is "let's paint it," which is their way of taking in the beauty. we should not, says froebel, give them paints and brushes inconsiderately, to throw about, but give them the help they need, and he describes quite a sensible lesson given to boys "whose own painting did not seem to paint them long." teachers who want real help in the art training of children should read the excellent papers by miss findlay in _school and life_, where we are told that we must rescue the term "design" from the limited uses to which it is often condemned in the drawing class, viz. the construction of pleasing arrangements of colour and form for surface decoration. "we shall use it in its full popular significance in constructive work.... the term will cover building houses, making kettles, laying out streets, planning rooms, dressing hair, as well as making patterns for cushion covers and cathedral windows.... in thus widening our art studies, we shall be harking back in a slight degree to the kind of training that in past ages produced the great masters.... giotto designed his campanile primarily for the bells that were to summon the florentines to their cathedral; the venetians wanted façades for their palaces, and made façades to delight their eyes; the japanese have wanted small furniture for their small rooms, and have developed wonderful skill and taste in designing it. neither art nor science can remain long afloat in high abstract regions above the needs and interests of human life. to quote a.h. clough: 'a cathedral pure and perfect. built by that only law, that use be suggester of beauty; nothing concealed that is, done, but all things done to adornment; meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish.'" if this is true of the interests of the professional artist, much more must it be true of the art training of the child. we must not then despise the rough and ready productions of a child, nor force upon him a standard for which he is not ready. before any other construction is possible to him, a child can _make_ with sand, and this is a constant joy, from the endless puddings that are turned out of patty pans, up to such models as that of the whole "isle of wight" with its tunnelled cliffs and system of railways, made by an ex-kindergarten boy as yet innocent of geography lessons. the child then who is making, especially making for use, is to a certain extent developing himself as an artist. the little boys at keilhau were well provided with sand, moss, etc., to use with their building blocks, and it was a former keilhau boy who suggested to his old master that some kind of sand-box would make a good plaything for the children in his new kindergarten. miss wiggin tells us that indirectly we owe the children's sand-heaps in the public parks to froebel, since these were the result of a suggestion made by frau schrader to the empress frederick, and the idea was carried out during her husband's too brief reign. another very early "making" is the arranging of furniture for shops, carriages, trains, and the "ships upon the stairs," which made bright pictures in stevenson's memory. building blocks are truly, as froebel puts it, "the finest and most variable material that can be offered a boy for purposes of representation." the little boxes associated with the kindergarten were originally planned for the use of nursery children two to three years of age, and in most if not in all kindergartens these have been replaced by larger bricks. it is many years now since, at miss payne's suggestion, we bought some hundreds of road paving blocks, and these are such a source of pleasure that the children often dream about them. living out the life around presents much opportunity for making, which may be done with blocks, but which even in the kindergarten can be done with tools. care must be exercised, but children have quite a strong instinct for self-preservation, and if shown how real workmen handle their tools, they are often more careful than at a much later stage. to make a workable railway signal is more interesting and much more educative than to use one that came from a shop. the teacher may make illuminating discoveries in the process, as when one set of children desired to make a counter for a shop, and arranged their piece of wood vertically so that the counter had no top. it was found that to these very little people the most important part was the high front against which they were accustomed to stand, not the flat top which they seldom saw. another set of children made a cart on which the farmer was to carry his corn, and exemplified dewey's "concrete logic of action." at first they only wanted a board on wheels, but the corn fell off, so they nailed on sides, but the cart never had either back or front and resembled some seen in early english pictures. any kind of cooking that can be done is a most important kind of making; even the very little ones can help, and they thoroughly enjoy watching. "her hands were in the dough from three years old," said a north-country mother, "so i taught her how to bake, and now (at seven) she can bake as well as i can." children delight in carrying out the processes involved in the making of flour, and they can easily thrash a little wheat, then winnow, grind between stones and sift it. their best efforts produce but a tiny quantity of flour, but the experience is real, interest is great, and a new significance attaches to the shop flour from which bread is ultimately produced. butter and cheese can easily be made, also jam, and even a christmas pudding. in very early kindergartens we read of the growing, digging and cooking of potatoes, and of the extraction of starch to be used as paste. special anniversaries require special making. we possess a doll of to whom her old mother bequeathed her birthday. the doll's birthday is a great event, and on the previous day each class in turn bakes tiny loaves, or cakes or pastry for the party. christmas creates a need for decorations, christmas cards and presents, and empire day and trafalgar day for flags, while in many places there is an annual sale on behalf of a charity. it does not do to be too modern and to despise all the old-fashioned "makings," which gave such pleasure some years ago. kindergarten paper-folding has fallen into an undeserved oblivion. the making of boats or cocked-hats from old newspaper is a great achievement for a child, and to make pigs and purses, corner cupboards and chairs for paper dolls is still a delight, and calls forth real concentration and effort. making in connection with some whole, such as the continuous representation of life around us, and, at a later stage, the re-inventing of primitive industries, or making which arises out of some special interest may have a higher educational value, but apart from this, children want to make for making's sake. "can't i make something in wood like boy does?" asked a little girl. there is joy in the making, joy in being a cause, and for this the children need opportunity, space and time. there is a lesson to many of us in some verses by miss f. sharpley, lately published (_educational handwork_), which should be entitled, "when can i make my little ship?" i'd like to cut, and cut, and cut, and over the bare floor to strew my papers all about, and then to cut some more. i'd sweep them up so neatly, too, but mother says, "oh no! there is no time, it's seven o'clock; to bed you quickly go!" in school, i'd just begun to make a pretty little ship, but i was slow, and all the rest stood up to dance and skip. when shall i make my little ship? at home there is no gloy, and father builds it by himself or goes to buy a toy. chapter viii stories let me tell the stories and i care not who makes the textbooks. stanley hall. "is it bible story to-day or any _kind_ of a story?" was the greeting of an eager child one morning. "usually they were persuading him to tell stories," writes ebers, from his recollections of froebel as an old man at keilhau. "he was never seen crossing the courtyard without a group of the younger pupils hanging to his coat tails and clasping his arms. usually they were persuading him to tell stories, and when he condescended to do so, the older ones flocked around him, too, and they were never disappointed. what fire, what animation the old man had retained!" so froebel could write with feeling of "the joyful faces, the sparkling eyes, the merry shouts that welcome the genuine story-teller"; he had a right to pronounce that "the child's desire and craving for tales, for legends, for all kinds of stories, and later on for historical accounts, is very intense." surely there was never a little one who did not crave for stories, though here and there may be found an older child, who got none at the right time, and who, therefore, lost that most healthy of appetites. most of us will agree that there is something wrong with the child who does not like stories, but it may be that the something wrong belonged to the mother. one such said to the abbé klein one day, "my children have never asked for stories." "but, madame," was the reply, "neither would they ask for cake if they had never eaten it, or even seen it." it is easy for us to find reasons why we should tell stories. we can brush aside minor aims such as increasing the child's vocabulary. undoubtedly his vocabulary does increase enormously from listening to stories, but it is difficult to imagine that any one could rise to real heights in story-telling with this as an aim or end. that the narrator should clothe his living story in words expressive of its atmosphere, and that the listener should in this way gain such power over language, that he, too, can fitly express himself is quite another matter. first, then, we tell stories because we love to tell them and because the children love to listen. we choose stories that appeal to our audience. it is something beautiful, humorous, heroic or witty that we have found, and being social animals we want to share it. as educators with an aim before us, we deliberately tell stories in order to place before our children ideals of unselfishness, courage and truth. we know from our own experience, not only in childhood, but all through life how the story reaches our feelings as no sermon or moralising ever does, and we have learned that "out of the heart are the issues of life." unguided feelings may be a danger, but the story does more than rouse feelings--it gives opportunity for the exercise of moral judgement, for the exercise of judgement upon questions of right and wrong. feeling is aroused, but it is not usually a personal feeling, so judgement is likely to be unbiassed. it may, however, be biassed by the tone absorbed from the environment even in childhood, as when the mother makes more of table etiquette than of kindness, and the child, instead of condemning jacob's refusal to feed his hungry brother with the red pottage, as all natural children do condemn, says: "no, esau shouldn't have got it, 'cause he asked for it." as a rule, the children's standard is correct enough, and approval or condemnation is justly bestowed, provided that the story has been chosen to suit the child's stage of development. one little girl objected strongly to macaulay's ideal roman, who "in rome's quarrel, spared neither land nor gold, nor son nor wife." "that wasn't right," she said stoutly, "he ought to think of his own wife and children first." she was satisfied, however, when it was explained to her that horatius might be able to save many fathers to many wives and children. in my earliest teaching days, having found certain history stories successful with children of seven, i tried the same with children of six, but only once. edmund of east anglia dying for his faith fell very flat. "what was the good of that?" said one little fellow, "'cause if you're dead you can't do anything! but if you're alive, you can get more soldiers and win a victory." the majority of the class, however, seemed to feel with another who asked, "why didn't he promise while the danes were there? he needn't have kept it when they went away." another way of stating our aim in telling stories to children is that a story presents morality in the concrete. virtues and vices _per se_ neither attract nor repel, they simply mean nothing to a child, until they are presented as the deeds of man or woman, boy or girl, living and acting in a world recognised as real. one telling story is that of the boy who got hold of miss edgeworth's _parent's assistant_ and who said to his mother, "mother, i've been reading 'the little merchants' and i know now how horrid it is to cheat and tell lies." "i have been telling you that ever since you could speak," said his mother, to which the boy answered, "yes, i know, but that didn't interest me." our children had been told the story of how the countess of buchan crowned the bruce, a duty which should have been performed by her brother the earl of fife, who, however, was too much afraid of the wrath of english edward. a few days after, an argument arose and one little girl was heard to say, "i don't want to be brave," and a boy rejoined, "girls don't need to be brave." i said, "which would you rather be, the countess who put the crown on the king's head, or the brother who ran away?" and quickly came the answer, "oh! the brave countess," from the very child who didn't want to be brave! froebel sums up the teacher's aim in the words: "the telling of stories is a truly strengthening spirit-bath, it gives opportunity for the exercise of all mental powers, opportunity for testing individual judgement and individual feelings." but why is it that children crave for stories? "education," says miss blow, a veteran froebelian, "is a series of responses to indicated needs," and undoubtedly the need for stories is as pressing as the need to explore, to experiment and to construct. what is the unconscious need that is expressed in this craving, why is this desire so deeply implanted by nature? so far, no one seems to have given a better answer than froebel has done, when he says that the desire for stories comes out of the need to understand life, that it is in fact rooted in the instinct of investigation. "only the study of the life of others can furnish points of comparison with the life the boy himself has experienced. the story concerns other men, other circumstances, other times and places, yet the hearer seeks his own image, he beholds it and no one knows that he sees it." man cannot be master of his surroundings till he investigates and so gathers knowledge. but he has to adapt himself not only to the physical but to the human environment in which he lives. in stories of all kinds, children study human life in all kinds of circumstances, nay, if the story is sufficiently graphic they almost go through the experiences narrated, almost live the new life. with very young children the most popular of all stories is the "the three bears" and it is worth a little analysis. a little girl runs away, and running away is a great temptation to little girls and boys, as great an adventure as running off to sea will be at a later stage. she goes into a wood and meets bears: what else could you expect! the story then deals with really interesting things, porridge, basins, chairs and beds. the strong contrast of the bears' voices fascinates children, and just when retribution might descend upon her, the heroine escapes and gets safe home. children revel in the familiar details, but these alone would not suffice, there must be adventure, excitement, romance. one feels that southey had the assistance of a child in making his story so complete, and we can hear the questions: "how did the big bear know that the little girl had tasted his porridge? oh, because she had left the spoon. how did he know that she had sat in his chair? because she left the cushion untidy, and as for the little bear's chair, why, she sat that right out." that quite little children desire fresh experiences or adventures and really exciting ones, is shown by the following stories made by children. the first two are by a little girl of two-and-a-half, the third is taken from lady glenconner's recently published _the sayings of the children_. "once upon a time there was a giant and a little girl, and he told a little girl not to kiss a bear acos he would bite her, and the little girl climbed right on his back and she jumped right down the stairs and the bear came walking after the little girl and kissing her, and she called it a little bear and it was a big bear! (immense amusement). "once upon a time there was a little piggy and he was right in a big green and white fire and he didn't hurt hisself, and (told as a tremendous secret) he touched a fire with his handie. 'what a naughty piggy,' said auntie, 'and what next?' he jumped right out of a fire. auntie, can you smile? (for aunties cannot smile when people are naughty.)" the third story is said to have been filled with pauses due to a certain slowness of speech, but the pauses are "lit by the lightning flash of a flying eyebrow, and the impressive nodding of a silken head." "once, you know, there was a fight between a little pony and a lion, and the lion sprang against the pony and the pony put his back against a stack and bited towards the lion, and the lion rolled over and the pony jumped up, and he ran up ... and the pony turned round and the lion ..." his mother felt she had lost the thread. "which won?" she asked. "which won!" he repeated and after a moment's pause he said, "oh! the little bear." this surprising conclusion points to a stage when it is difficult for a child to hold the thread of a narrative, and at this stage, along with simple stories of little ones like themselves, repetition or "accumulation" stories seem to give most pleasure. "henny penny" and "billy bobtail"--told by jacobs as "how jack went to seek his fortune"--are prime favourites. repetition of rhythmic phrases has a great attraction, as in "three little pigs," with its delightful repetition of "little pig, little pig, let me come in," "no, no, by the hair of my chinny chin chin," "then i'll huff and i'll puff and i'll blow your house in." very soon, however, the children are ready for the time-honoured fairy-tale or folk-tale. the orthodox beginning, "once upon a time, in a certain country there lived ...," fits the stage when neither time nor place is of any consequence. animals speak, well why not, we can! the fairies accomplish wonders, again why not? wonderful things do happen and they must have a wonderful cause, and, as one child said, if there never had been any fairies, how could people have written stories about them? goodness is rewarded and wickedness is punished, as is only right in the child's eyes, and goodness usually means kindness, the virtue best understood of children. obedience is no doubt the nursery virtue in the eyes of authority, but kindness is much more human and attractive. "both child and man," says froebel, "desire to know the significance of what happens around them; this is the foundation of greek choruses, especially in tragedy, and of many productions in the realm of legends and fairy-tales. it is the result of the deep-rooted consciousness, the slumbering premonition of being surrounded by that which is higher and more conscious than ourselves." the fairy tale is the child's mystery land, his recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy or in our science. dr. montessori protests against the idea that fairy-tales have anything to do with the religious sense, saying that "faith and fable are as the poles apart." she does not understand that it is for their truth that we value fairy-tales. the truths they teach are such as that courage and intelligence can conquer brute strength, that love can brave and can overcome all dangers and always finds the lost, that kindness begets kindness and always wins in the end. the good and the faithful marries the princess--or the prince--and lives happy ever after. and assuredly if he does not marry his princess, he will not live happy, and if she does not marry the prince, she will live in no beautiful palace. and there is more. take for instance, the story of "toads and diamonds." the courteous maiden who goes down the well, who gives help where it is needed, and who works faithfully for mother holle,[ ] comes home again dropping gold and diamonds when she speaks. her silence may be silver, but her speech is golden, and her words give light in dark places. the selfish and lazy girl, who refuses help and whose work is unfaithful and only done for reward, has her reward. henceforth, when she speaks, down fall toads and snakes her words are cold as she is, they may glitter but they sting. [footnote : this version is probably a mixture of the versions of perrault and grimm but mother holle shaking her feathers is worth bringing in.] fairy- and folk-tales give wholesome food to the desire for adventure, whereas in what we may call realistic stories, adventure is chiefly confined to the naughty child, who is therefore more attractive than the good and stodgy. even among fairy-tales we may select. "beauty and the beast" and "the sleeping beauty" and "snow-white and rose-red" are distinctly preferable to "jack the giant killer" or "puss in boots," while "bluebeard" cannot be told. it seems to me that children can often safely read for themselves stories the adult cannot well tell. the child's notion of justice is crude, bad is bad, and whether embodied in an ogre or in pharaoh of egypt, it must be got rid of, put out of the story. no child is sorry for the giant when jack's axe cleaves the beanstalk, and as for pharaoh, "well, it's a good thing he's drowned, for he was a bad man, wasn't he?" death means nothing to children, as a rule, except disappearance. when children can read for themselves, they will take from their stories what suits their stage of development, their standard of judgement, and we need not interfere, even though they regard with perfect calm what seems gruesome to the adult. as a valuable addition to the best-known fairy-tales, we may mention one or two others: _grannie's wonderful chair_ is a delightful set of stories, full of charming pictures, though the writer, frances brown, was born blind. mrs. ewing's stories for children, _the brownies_, with _amelia and the dwarfs_ and _timothy's shoes_, are inimitable, and her _old-fashioned fairy tales_ are very good, but not for very young children. her other stories are certainly about children, but are, as a rule, written for adults. george macdonald's stories are all too well known and too universally beloved to need recommendation. but in telling them, _e.g._ "the princess and the goblins" or "at the back of the north wind," the young teacher must remember that they are beautiful allegories. before she ventures to tell them, the beginner should ponder well what the poet--for these are prose poems--means, and who is represented by the beautiful great-great-grandmother always old and always young, or "north wind" who must sink the ship but is able to bear the cry from it, because of the sound of a far-off song, which seems to swallow up all fear and pain and to set the suffering "singing it with the rest." _water-babies_ is a bridge between the fairy-tale of a child and equally wonderful and beautiful fairy-tales of nature, and it, too, is full of meaning. if the teacher has gained this, the children will not lag behind. it was a child of backward development, who, when she heard of mother carey, "who made things make themselves," said, "oh! i know who that was, that was god." such stories must be spread out over many days of telling, but they gain rather than lose from that, though for quite young children the stories do require to be short and simple, and often repeated. if children get plenty of these, the stage for longer stories is reached wonderfully soon. pseudo-scientific stories, in which, for example, a drop of water discusses evaporation and condensation, are not stories at all, but a kind of mental meat lozenge, most unsatisfying and probably not even fulfilling their task of supplying nourishment in form of facts. fables usually deal with the faults and failings of grown-ups, and may be left for children to read for themselves, to extract what suits them. illustrations are not always necessary, but if well chosen they are always a help. warne has published some delightfully illustrated stories for little children, "the three pigs," "hop o' my thumb," "beauty and the beast," etc. they are illustrated by h.m. brock and by leslie brooke, and they really are illustrated. the artists have enjoyed the stories and children equally enjoy the pictures. the teacher must consider what ideas she is presenting and whether words alone can convey them properly. we must remember that most children visualise and that they can only do so from what they have seen. so, without illustrations, a castle may be a suburban house with nottingham lace curtains and an aspidistra, while perseus or moses may differ little from the child's own father or brothers. again, town children cannot visualise hill and valley, forest and moor, brook and river, not to mention jungles and snowfields and the trackless ocean. it is not easy to find pictures to give any idea of such scenes, but it is worth while to look for them, and it is also worth while for the teacher to visualise, and to practise vivid describing of what she sees. children, of course, only want description when it is really a part of the story, as when tom crosses the moor, descends lewthwaite crag, or travels from brook to river and from river to sea. as to how a story should be told, opinions differ. it must be well told with a well-modulated voice and with slight but effective gesture. but the model should be the story as told in the home, not the story told from a platform. the children need not be spellbound all the time, but should be free to ask sensible questions and to make childlike comments in moderation. the language should fit the subject; beautiful thoughts need beauty of expression, high and noble deeds must be told in noble language. a teacher who wishes to be a really good teller of stories must herself read good literature, and she will do well not only to prepare her stories with care, but to consider the language she uses in daily life. there is a happy medium between pedantry and the latest variety of slang, and if daily speech is careless and slipshod, it is difficult to change it for special occasions. our stories should not only prepare for literature, they should be literature, and those who realise what the story may do for children will not grudge time spent in preparation. if the story is to present an ideal, let us see that we present a worthy one; if it is to lead the children to judge of right and wrong, let us see that we give them time and opportunity to judge and that we do not force their judgement. lastly, if the story is to make the children feel, let us see that the feeling is on the right side, that they shrink from all that is mean, selfish, cruel and cowardly, and sympathise with whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report. chapter ix in grassy places my heart leaps up when i behold a rainbow in the sky, so was it when my life began so be it when i shall grow old, or let me die. what is the real aim of what we call nature-lessons, nature-teaching, nature-work? it is surely to foster delight in beauty, so that our hearts shall leap up at sight of the rainbow until we die. for, indeed, if we lose that uplift of the heart, some part of us has died already. yet even wordsworth mourns that nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower! in its answer to the question "what is the chief end of man?" the old shorter catechism has a grand beginning: "man's chief end is to glorify god and to enjoy him for ever." do we lose the vision because we are not bold enough to take that enjoyment as our chief end? to enjoy good is to enjoy god. our ends or aims are our desires, and mr. clutton brock, in his _ultimate belief_, urges teachers to recognise that the spirit of man has three desires, three ends, and that it cannot be satisfied till it attains all three. man desires to do right, so far as he sees it, for the sake of doing right; he desires to gain knowledge or to know for the sake of knowing, for the sake of truth; and he desires beauty. "we do not value that which we call beautiful because it is true, or because it is good, but because it is beautiful. there is a glory of the universe which we call truth which we discover and apprehend, and a glory of the universe which we call beauty and which we discover or apprehend." froebel begins his _education of man_ by an inquiry into the reason for our existence and his answer is that _all_ things exist to make manifest the spirit, the _élan vital_, which brought them into being. "_sursum corda_," says stevenson, lift up your hearts art and blue heaven april and god's larks green reeds and sky scattering river a stately music enter god. and browning? "if you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing god invents." to let children get that beauty should be our aim, and they must get it in their own way. "life in and with nature and with the fair silent things of nature, should be fostered by parents and others," froebel tells us, "as a chief fulcrum of child-life, and this is accomplished chiefly in play, which is at first simply natural life." let us surmount the ruts of our teaching experience and climb high enough to look back upon our own childhood, to see where beauty called to us, where we attained to beauty. among my own earliest recollections come a first view of the starry sky and the discovery of heaven. no one called attention to the stars, they spoke themselves to a child of four or five and declared "the glory of god." heaven was not on high among these glorious stars, however. it was a grassy place with flowers and sunshine. it had to be heaven because you went through the cemetery to reach it, and because it was so bright and flowery and there were no graves in it. i never found it again, because i had forgotten how to get there. another very early memory is one of grief, to see from the window how the gardener was mowing down all the daisies, and there were so many, in the grass; and yet another is of a high, grassy, sunny field with a little stream running far down below. it was not really far and there was nothing particularly beautiful in the place to grown-up eyes, but the beholder was very small and loved it dearly. to his art and blue heaven stevenson might have added sun and green grass. for he knew what grassy places are to the child, and that "happy play in grassy places" might well be heaven to the little one. a most interesting little book called _what is a kindergarten?_[ ] was published some years ago in america. it is written by a landscape gardener, and contains most valuable suggestions as to how best to use for a kindergarten or nursery school plots of ground which may be secured for that purpose. naturally the writer has much to say on the laying out and stocking the available space to the best advantage, choosing the most suitable positions for the house, where the teacher must live, he says, to supply the atmosphere of a home; for animal hutches, for sand-heaps and seesaws; for the necessary shelter, for the children's gardens, and for the lawn, for even on his smallest plan, a "twenty-five-foot lot," we find "room for a spot of green." later he explains that for this green one must use what will grow, and if grass will not perhaps clover will. the way in which the trees and plants are chosen is most suggestive. beauty and suitability are always considered, but he remembers his own youth, and also considers the special joys of childhood. for it is not nature lessons that come into his calculations but "the mere association of plants and children." so the birch tree is chosen, partly for its grace and beauty, but also because of its bark, for one can scribble on its papery surface; the hazel, because children delight in the catkins with their showers of golden dust, and the nut "hidden in its cap of frills and tucks." and he adds: "how much more alluring than the naked fruit from the grocer's sack are these nuts, especially when dots for eyes and mouth are added, and a whole little face is tucked within this natural bonnet." [footnote : g. hansen, pub. elder, morgan & shepherd, san francisco, .] in addition to the flowers chosen for beauty of colour, this lover of children and of gardens wants canterbury bells to ring, forget-me-nots because they can stand so much watering, and "flowers with faces," pansies, sweet-peas, lupins, snapdragons, monkey flowers, red and white dead nettles, and red clover to bring the bees. some of these are chosen because the child can do something with them, can find their own uses for them, can play with them. and, speaking generally, playing with them is the child's way of appreciating both plant and animal. picking feathery grasses, red-tipped daisies, sweet-smelling clover and golden dandelions; feeding snapdragons with fallen petals, finding what's o'clock by blowing dandelion fruits, paying for dock tea out of a fairy purse, shading poppy dolls with woodruff parasols, that is how a child enjoys the beauty of colour, scent and form. he gets not more but less beauty when he must sit in a class and answer formal questions. "must we talk about them before we take the flowers home?" asked a child one day; "they are so pretty." clearly, the "talk" was going to lessen, not to deepen the beauty. and animals? the child plays with cat and dog, he feeds the chickens, the horse and the donkey, he watches with the utmost interest caterpillar, snail and spider, but he does not want to be asked questions about them--he does want to talk and perhaps to ask the questions himself--nor does he always want even to draw, paint or model them. mostly he wants to watch, and perhaps just to stir them up a little if they do not perform to his satisfaction. he does not necessarily mean to tease, only why should he watch an animal that does nothing? "the animals haven't any habits when i watch them," a little girl once said to professor arthur thomson. all children should live in the country at least for part of the year. they should know fields and gardens, and have intercourse with hens and chickens, cows and calves, sheep and lambs; should make hay and see the corn cut. they would still want the wisely sympathetic teacher, not to arouse interest--that is not necessary, but to keep it alive by keeping pace with the child's natural development. it is not merely living in the country that develops the little child's interest in shape and colour and scent into something deeper. people still "spend all their time in the fields and forests and see and feel nothing of the beauties of nature, and of their influence on the human heart"; and this, said froebel--and it is just what mr. clutton brock is saying now--is because the child "fails to find the same feelings among adults." two effects follow: the child feels the want of sympathy and loses some respect for the elder, and also he loses his original joy in nature. "there is in every human being the passionate desire for this self-forgetfulness--to which it attains when it is aware of beauty--and a passionate delight in it when it comes. the child feels that delight among spring flowers; we can all remember how we felt it in the first apprehension of some new beauty of the universe, when we ceased to be little animals and became aware that there was this beauty outside us to be loved. and most of us must remember, too, the strange indifference of our elders. they were not considering the lilies of the field; they did not want us to get our feet wet among them. we might be forgetting ourselves, but they were remembering us; and we became suddenly aware of the bitterness of life and the tyranny of facts. now parents and nurses (and teachers) have, of course, to remember children when they forget themselves. but they ought to be aware that the child, when he forgets himself in the beauty of the world, is passing through a sacred experience which will enrich and glorify the whole of his life. children, because they are not engaged in the struggle for life, are more capable of this aesthetic self-forgetfulness than they will afterwards be; and they need all of it that they can get, so that they may remember it and prize it in later years. in these heaven-sent moments they know what disinterestedness is. they have a test by which they can value all future experience and know the dullness and staleness of worldly success. therefore it is a sin to check, more than need be, their aesthetic delight" (_the ultimate belief_). we cannot all give to our children the experiences we should like to supply, but if we are clear that we are aiming at enjoyment of nature, and not at supplying information, we shall come nearer to what is desirable. for years, almost since it opened in , miss reed of the michaelis free kindergarten has taken her children to the country. it means a great deal of work and responsibility, it means collecting funds and giving up one's scanty leisure, it means devoted service, but it has been done, and it has been kept up even during war time, though with great difficulty as to funds, because of the inestimable benefit to the children. miss stokes of the somers town nursery school secured a country holiday for her little ones in various ways, partly through the children's country holiday fund, but since the war she has been unable to secure help of that kind, and has managed to take the children away to a country cottage. a paragraph in the report says: "the children in the country had a delightful time, and what was seen and done during their holiday is still talked about continually. these joys entered into all the work of the nursery school and helped the children for months to retain a breath of the country in their london surroundings. they realised much from that visit. cows now have horns, wasps have wings and fly--alas they sting also. hens sit on eggs, an almost unbelievable thing. fishes, newts, tadpoles, were all met with and greeted as friends. children and helpers alike returned home full of health and vigour and longing for the next time. one little maid wept bitterly, and there seemed no joy in life at home until she came across the school rabbit, which was tenderly caressed, and consoled her with memories of the country and hopes for future visits." in the days when teachers argued about the differences between object-lessons and nature-lessons, one point insisted upon was that the nature-lesson far surpassed the object-lesson because it dealt with life. we have learned now that we should as much as we can surround our children with life and growth. even indoors it is easy to give the joy of growing seeds and bulbs and of opening chestnut branches: without any cruelty we can let them enjoy watching snails and worms and we can keep caterpillars or silkworms and so let them drink their fill of the miracle of development. but beauty comes to children in very different ways, and always it is nature, though it may not be life. children revel in colour, colour for its own sake, and should be allowed to create it. in a modern novel there is a description of a mother doing her washing in the open air and "at her feet sat a baby intent upon the assimilation of a gingerbread elephant, but now and then tugging at her skirts and holding up a fat hand. each time he was rewarded by a dab of soapsuds, which she deposited good-naturedly in his palm. he received it with solemn delight; watching the roseate play of colour as the bubbles shrank and broke, and the lovely iridescent treasure vanished in a smear of dirty wetness while he looked. then he would beat his fists delightedly against his mother's dress and presently demand another handful." the following notes from another student's report show how this may spring naturally out of the children's life:[ ] [footnote : miss edith jones.] "we were spinning the teetotum yesterday and it did not spin well so we made new ones. while the children were painting their tops, oliver grew very eager when he found he could fill in all the spaces in different colours, but betty made her colours very insipid. i want them to get the feeling of beautiful colour, so i shall show them a book with the colours graded in it, and we shall each have a paper and paint on it all the rich colours we can think of. the colours will probably run into each other, and so the children will get ideas about the blending of colours, but i will watch to see that they do not get the colour too wet. if they are not tired of painting i want to show them a painted circle to turn on a string and they can make these for themselves, using the colours they have already used. "i want the children to do some group work, and i thought we might make a village with shops and houses under the trees in the garden and have little men and women to represent ourselves. the suggestion will probably have to come from the teacher, but the children will probably have the desire when it is suggested, and i hope we shall be able to go on enlarging our town on the pattern of the towns the children know. if they want bricks for their houses they can dig clay in the garden. "_report_.--the children wanted to make a tea-set, so we carried our clay outside. they began discussing why their china would not be so fine as the china at home, and i said the clay might be different. then bernard asked what sort of china we should get from the clay in the garden, and i told him that kind of clay was generally made into bricks, and suggested making bricks. from that we went on to the use of bricks, and to-morrow we are going to dig, and make bricks to build a town. bernard is anxious to know how we shall make mortar. just then it started to rain, and bernard said that if the sun kept shining and it rained hard enough we should have a rainbow, and he wished it would come so as to see the beautiful colours. i thought this rather a coincidence, and told him i had a book with all the rainbow colours in it. they asked to see it, so i showed it and suggested painting the colours ourselves. those who had finished their dishes started, and we talked about the richness of the colours. one or two children started with very watery colour, so i showed them the book and began to paint myself. they all enjoyed it very much, especially the different colours made where the colours ran into each other. the results pleased them and they are to be used as wall-papers to sell in our town, but sybil wants to have a toy shop, and she is going to make a painted circle for it like the one i showed." this is clearly the time to show a glass prism and to let these children make rainbows for themselves, to tell the story of iris, and to use any colour material, milton bradley spectrum papers, montessori silks, colour top, and anything else so long as the children keep up their interest. the interest in colour need never die out; it will probably show itself now in finer discrimination, and more careful reproduction of the colours of flowers and leaves, and the sympathy given will heighten interest and increase enjoyment. here are some notes showing children's numerous activities in a suburban garden where they were allowed to visit a hen and chickens. "_monday_[ ]--to-day the children took up their mustard and cress, dug and raked the ground ready for transplanting the lettuces. after their rest we went to see the chickens at the hall (the students' hostel), and the hall garden seemed to them a wonderful place. they watched the trains go in and out of the station at the foot of the garden, and explored all the side doors, going up and down all the steps and into the cycle shed. they helped miss s. to stir the soot water, then they went to the grassy bank and ran down it, slid down it, and rolled down it. they peeped over the wall into the next garden, they peeped through holes in the fences and finished up with a swing in the hammock. each child had twenty swings, and they enjoyed counting in time with the swaying of the hammock, and swayed their own bodies as they pushed. [footnote : these notes are part of those already given on pp. - .] "another example of love and rhythm was when they went to say good-bye to the hen and chickens, and kept on repeating 'good-bye, good-bye' all together, nodding their heads at the same time. "i did not know if i should have let them do so much, but i was not sure that we should be allowed to come back and i wanted them to enjoy the garden. "_wednesday_.--first we watered the lettuces we had transplanted, and transplanted more. then, as we had permission to come again, we took some of our lettuces to the chickens. we saw the mother hen with one wing spread right out, and the children were much surprised to see how large it was. we looked at the roses, and saw how the bud of yesterday was full blown to-day. the children again ran down and rolled down the bank, and had turns in the hammock, this time to the rhythm of "margery daw" sung twice through, and then counting up to twenty. very often they went to watch the trains. cecil is particularly interested in them, and wanted to know how long was the time between. he said three minutes, i guessed nine, but we found they were irregular. in the intervals while waiting for a train to pass, we played a 'listening' game, listening to what sounds we could hear. a thrush came and sang right over our heads, so the listening was concentrated on his song, and we tried to say what we thought he meant to say. one child said, 'he says, "come here, come here,"' but they found this too difficult. we also watched a boy cleaning the station windows, and dorothy said, 'miss beer, isn't it wonderful that you can see through glass?' i agreed, but made no other remark because i did not know what to say. "we rested outside to-day under an almond tree. i pointed out how pretty the sky looked when you only saw it peeping through the leaves. after rest the children noticed feathery grasses, and spent the rest of the morning gathering them. i suggested that they should see how many kinds they could find. they found three, but were not enthusiastic about it, being content just to pluck, but they were delighted when they found specially long and beautiful grasses hidden deep under a leafy bush. they also found clover leaves, and i told them its name and sang to them the verse from 'the bee,' with 'the sweet-smelling clover, he, humming, hangs over.' "_thursday._--brushed and dusted the room, gave fresh water to the flowers, and then went to gardening. the children were delighted to find ladybirds on the lettuces they were transplanting, and we also noticed how the cherries were ripening. "they joined the transition class for games. later, while playing with the sand, cecil made a discovery. he said, 'miss beer, do you know, i know what sand is, it's little tiny tiny stones.'" it may be worth while to notice some things in these notes. first the pleasure in exploring the new surroundings and then the variety of delights. our landscape gardener mentions that "any slope to our grounds should be welcomed.... for as we leave the level land and flee to the mountains to spend our vacation, so will a child avoid the street and seek the gutter and the bank on the unimproved lot to enjoy its pastime." our own children have been fortunate enough to have a bank for their play, and though, unfortunately, extension of buildings has taken away much of this, we have had abundant opportunity to see the value of sloping ground. then there are the discoveries, the feathery grasses, especially those which were hidden, the ladybirds, that sand is really "tiny tiny stones"--has every adult noticed that, or is sand "just sand"?--and the "wonder" that we can see through glass, a wonder realised by a little girl of four years old. also we can notice what the children did not desire. they liked listening to the thrush, but to make out what the thrush was "saying" was beyond them. they liked gathering feathery grasses, but to sort these into different kinds gave no pleasure, though older children would have enjoyed trying to find many varieties. perhaps teachers with a fair amount of experience might have felt like the beginner who frankly says, "i didn't say anything more because i didn't know what to say," when dorothy discovered the wonderfulness of glass. perhaps we are silent because the child has gone ahead of us. it is wonderful, but we have never thought about it. in such cases we must, as froebel says, "become a learner with the child" and humbly, with real sympathy and earnestness, ask, "is it wonderful, i suppose it is, but i never thought about it, why do _you_ call it wonderful?" if the child answers, it is well, if not the teacher can go on thinking aloud, thinking with the child. "let's think what other things we can see through." we can never understand it, we can only reach the fact of "transparency" as a wonderful property of certain substances and consider which possess this magic quality. there is water of course, and there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones as glass seems to be. the child will be pleased too to see a crystal or a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, "oh, that's just because it's transparent," but that we realise, and reinforce and deepen the child's sense of wonderfulness. so teacher and child enter into the thoughts of him who endlessly was teaching above my spirits utmost reaching, what love can do in the leaf or stone, so that to master this alone, this done in the stone or leaf for me, i must go on learning endlessly. chapter x a way to god wonders chiefly at himself who can tell him what he is or how meet in human elf coming and past eternities. emerson. it is of set purpose that this short chapter, referring to what we specially call religion, is placed immediately after that on the child's attitude to nature. the actual word religion, which, to him, expressed being bound, did not appeal to froebel so much as one which expressed one-ness with god. as a son can share the aspirations of his father, so man "a thought of god" can aspire from earth's level where blindly creep things perfected more or less to the heaven's height far and steep. but we begin at earth's level, and a child's religion must be largely a natural religion. how to introduce a child to religion is a problem which must have many solutions. in froebel's original training course, his kindergarten teachers were to be "trained to the observation and care of the earliest germs of the religious instinct in man." these earliest beginnings he found in different sources. first come the relations between the child and the family, beginning with the mother; fatherhood and motherhood must be realised before the child can reach up to the father of all. then there is the atmosphere of the home, the real reverence for higher things, if it exists, affects even a little child more than is usually supposed, but children are quick to distinguish reality from mere conventionality though the distinction is only half conscious. reality impresses, while conventionality is apt to bore. even to quite young children froebel's ideal mother would begin to show god in nature. some one put into the flowers the scent and colour that delight the child--some one whom he cannot see. the sun, moon and stars give light and beauty, and "love is what they mean to show." this mother teaches her little one some sort of prayer, and the gesture of reverence, the folded hands, affects the child even if the words mean little or nothing. akin to the "feeling of community" between the child and his family is the joining in religious worship in church, "the entrance in a common life," and the emotional effect of the deep tones of the organ. then there is the interdependence of the universe: the baby is to thank jenny for his bread and milk, peter for mowing the grass for the cow, "until you come to the last ring of all, god's father love for all." next to this comes the child's service; others work for him and he also must serve. "every age has its duties, and duties are not burdens," and it is necessary that feeling should have expression, "for even a child's love unfostered (by action in form of service) droops and dies away." there is also the desire for approbation. the child "must be roused to good by inclination, love, and respect, through the opinion of others about him," and this should be guided until he learns to care chiefly for the approval of the god within. right ideals must be provided: religion is "a continually advancing endeavour," and its reward must not be a material reward. we ought to lift and strengthen human nature, but we degrade and weaken it when we seek to lead it to good conduct by a bait, even if this bait beckons to a future world. the consciousness of having lived worthily should be our highest reward. froebel goes so far as to say that instead of teaching "the good will be happy," and leaving children to imagine that this means an outer or material happiness, we ought rather to teach that in seeking the highest we may lose the lower. "renunciation, the abandonment of the outer for the sake of securing the inner, is the condition for attaining highest development. dogmatic religious instruction should rather show that whoever truly and earnestly seeks the good, must needs expose himself to a life of outer oppression, pain and want, anxiety and care." even a child, though not a baby, can be led to see that to do good for outer reward is but enlightened selfishness. these suggestions are taken for the most part from the _mother songs_, some from _the education of man_. each parent or teacher must use what seems to her or to him most valuable. some may from the beginning desire to teach the child a baby prayer, or at least to let him hear "god bless you." others may prefer to wait for a more intelligent stage, perhaps when the child begins to ask the invariable questions--who made the flowers, the animals; who made me? if so, we must remember that children see, and hear, and think, that often in thoughtless ejaculations, or in those of heartfelt thankfulness, children may hear the name of god; that a simple story may have something that stirs thought; that churches are much in evidence; and that the conversation of little playfellows may take an unexpected turn. to me it seems a great mistake to put before young children ideas which are really beyond the conception of an adult. there are many stories told of how children receive teaching about the omniscience or omnipotence of god. the stories sound irreverent, and are often repeated as highly amusing, but they are really more pathetic. miss shinn tells of one poor mite who resented being constantly watched and said, "i will not be so tagged," and another said, "then i think he's a very rude man," when, in reply to her puzzled questions, she was told that god could see her even in her bath. and the boy who said, "if i had done a thing, could god make it that i hadn't?" must have made his instructor feel somewhat foolish. it never does harm for us honestly to confess our own limitations and our ignorance, and that is better than weak materialistic explanations, which after all explain nothing. to tell a child that the great father is always grieved when we are unkind or cowardly, always ready to help us and to put kindness and bravery into our hearts, that we know he has power to do that if we will let him, but that his power is beyond our understanding: to say that he is able to keep us in all danger, and that even if we are killed we are safe in his keeping, surely that is enough. he who blessed the children uttered strong words against him who caused the little ones to stumble. "from every point, from every object of nature and life there is a way to god.... the things of nature form a more beautiful ladder between heaven and earth than that seen by jacob.... it is decked with flowers, and angels with children's eyes beckon us toward it." this is true, but it does not mean that we are always to be trying to make things sacred, but that we are to realise that all beauty and all knowledge and all sympathy are already sacred, and that to love such things is to love something whereby the creator makes himself known to us, that to enjoy them is to enjoy god. religion is not always explained as implying the idea of being bound, but sometimes as being set free from the bonds of the lower or animal nature. in this sense mr. clutton brock may well call it "a sacred experience" for the child, when he forgets himself in the beauty of the world. if we could all rise to a wider conception of the meaning of the word religion, we should know that it comes into all the work of the day, that it does not depend alone upon that special scripture lesson which may become mere routine. the greatest teacher of all taught by stories, and when any story deepens our feelings for human nature and our recognition of the heights to which it can rise, when it makes us long for faith, courage, and love to go and do likewise, who shall say that this is not religious teaching, teaching which helps to deliver us from the bonds that hamper spiritual ascent. many of us will feel with froebel that the fairy-tale, with its slumbering premonition of being surrounded by that which is higher and more "conscious than ourselves,"[ ] has its place, and an important place, in religious development. [footnote : p. .] the "fairy sense," says dr. greville macdonald, "is innate as the religious sense itself ... the fairy stories best beloved are those steeped in meaning--the unfathomable meaning of life ... such stories teach--even though no lesson was intended--the wisdom of the book of job: wisdom that by this time surely should have made religious teaching saner, and therefore more acceptable."[ ] [footnote : "the fairy-tale in education," by greville macdonald, m.d., _child life_, dec. .] fairies, like angels, may be god's messengers. a child who had heard of st. cuthbert as a shepherd boy being carried home from the hillside when hurt, by a man on a white horse, repeated the story in her own words, "and he thought it was a fairy of god's sent to help him." there is, however, nothing the children love more than the bible story, the story which shows, so simply, humanity struggling as the children struggle, failing as the children fail, and believing and trusting as the children believe, and as we at least strive to do, in the ultimate victory of right over wrong, of good over evil. but just because the stories are often so beautiful and so inspiring, the teacher should have freedom to deal with them as the spirit moves her. what experience has taught me in this way has already been passed on to younger teachers in _education by life_, and there seems little more to add. wonders chiefly at himself who can tell him what he is. it is for us to tell the child what he is, that he, too, like all the things he loves, is a manifestation of god. "i am a being alive and conscious upon this earth; a descendant of ancestors who rose by gradual processes from lower forms of animal life, and with struggle and suffering became man."[ ] [footnote : _the substance of faith allied with science_, sir oliver lodge (methuen).] "the colossal remains of shattered mountain chains speak of the greatness of god; and man is encouraged and lifts himself up by them, feeling within himself the same spirit and power."[ ] [footnote : _the education of man_.] chapter xi rhythm lo with the ancient roots of man's nature twines the eternal passion of song. the very existence of lullabies, not to mention their abundance in all countries, the very rockers on the cradles testify to the rhythmic nature of man in infancy. in his _mother songs_, froebel couples rhythm with harmony of all kinds, not only musical harmony but harmony of proportion and colour, and in urging the very early training of "the germs of all this," he gives perhaps the chief reason for training. "if these germs do not develop and take shape as independent formations in each individual, they at least teach how to understand and to recognise those of other people. this is life-gain enough, it makes one's life richer, richer by the lives of others." it is to the genius of m. jacques dalcroze that the world of to-day owes some idea of what may be effected by rhythmic training, and m. dalcroze started his work with the same aim that froebel set before the mother, that of making the child capable of appreciation, capable of being made "richer by the lives of others." but froebel prophesied that far more than appreciation would come from proper rhythmic training, and this m. dalcroze has amply proved. "through movement the mother tries to lead the child to consciousness of his own life. by regular rhythmic movement--this is of special importance--she brings this power within the child's own conscious control when she dandles him in her arms in rhythmic movements and to rhythmic sounds, cautiously following the slowly developing life in the child, arousing it to greater activity, and so developing it. those who regard the child as empty, who wish to fill his mind from without, neglect the means of cultivation in word and tone which should lead to a sense of rhythm and obedience to law in all human expression. but an early development of rhythmic movement would prove most wholesome, and would remove much wilfulness, impropriety and coarseness from his life, movements, and action, and would secure for him harmony and moderation, and, later on, a higher appreciation of nature, music, poetry, and art" _(education of man_). here, then, is an aim most plainly stated, "higher appreciation of nature, music, poetry and art," and if we adopt it, we must make sure that we start on a road leading to that end. to kindergarten children, apart from movement, rhythm comes first in nursery rhymes, and if we honestly follow the methods of the mother we shall not teach these, but say or sing them over and over again, letting the children select their favourites and join in when and where they like. this is the true _babies' opera_, as walter crane justly names an illustrated collection. froebel's _mother songs_, though containing a deal of sound wisdom in its mottoes and explanations, is an annotated, expurgated, and decidedly pedantic version of the nursery rhymes of his own country. that these should ever have been introduced to our children arose from the fact that the first kindergarten teachers, being foreigners, did not know our own home-grown productions. long since we have shaken off the foreign product, in favour of our own "sing a song of sixpence," "baa, baa, black sheep" and their refreshingly cheerful compeers. froebel's book suggests songs to suit all subjects and all frames of mind--the wind, the moon, and stars, the farm with its cows and sheep, its hens and chickens, the baker and carpenter, fish in the brook and birds in nests, the garden and the christmas fair. we can supply good verses for all these if we take pains to search, and if we eschew ignorant and unpoetic modern doggerel as we eschew poison. besides the nursery rhymes, we have stevenson, with his "wind," "shadow," and "swing," christina rossetti's "wrens and robins," her "rainbow verses" and "brownie, brownie, let down your milk, white as swansdown, smooth as silk." there are many others, and a recent charming addition to our stock is "chimneys and fairies," by rose fyleman. one thing we should not neglect, and that is the child's sense of humour. for the very young this is probably satisfied by the cow that jumps over the moon, the dish that runs after the spoon, jill tumbling after jack, and miss muffet running away from the spider. but older children much enjoy nonsense verses by lewis carroll or by lear, and "john gilpin" is another favourite. it is a mistake to keep strictly within the limits of a child's understanding of the words. what we want here, as in the realm of nature, is joy and delight, the delight that comes from musical words and rhythm, as well as from the pictures that may be called up. even a child of four can enjoy the poetry of the psalms without asking for much understanding. the mother repeats her rhymes and verses solely to give pleasure, and if our aim is the deepening of appreciation, there is no reason for leaving the green and grassy path that nature has showed to the mother for the hard and beaten track of "recitation." in our own kindergarten there has never been either rote learning or recitation. the older children learn the words of their songs, but not to a word-perfect stage, because words and music suggest each other. except for that we just enjoy our verses, the children asking for their favourites and getting new ones sometimes by request sometimes not. anything not enjoyed is laid aside. we need variety, but everything must be good of its kind, and verses about children are seldom for children. because children love babies, they love "where did you come from, baby dear?" but nothing like tennyson's "baby, wait a little longer," and especially nothing of the "toddlekins" type has any place in the collection of a self-respecting child. it is doubtful if eugene field's verses are really good enough for children. all children enjoy singing, but here, as in everything, we must keep pace with development, or the older ones, especially the boys, may get bored by what suits the less adventurous. in all cases the music should be good and tuneful, modelled not on the modern drawing-room inanity, but on the healthy and vigorous nursery rhyme or folk song. children also enjoy instrumental music, and will listen to piano or violin while quietly occupied, for example if they are drawing. one nursery school teacher plays soft music to get her babies to sleep, and our little ones fidget less if some one sings softly during their compulsory rest. "the kindergarten band" is another way in which children can join in rhythm. it came to us from miss bishop and is probably the music referred to in the description of the pestalozzi-froebel house. the children are provided with drums, cymbals, tambourines, and triangles, and keep time to music played on the piano. they can do some analysis in choosing which instruments are most suitable to accompany different melodies or changes from grave to gay, etc. a full account was given in _child life_ for may . several years ago, knowing nothing of m. dalcroze, miss marie salt began an experiment, the results of which are likely to be far-spreading and of great benefit. desiring to help children to appreciation of good music, miss salt experimented deliberately with the froebelian "learn through action," and her success has been remarkable. because of its freedom from any kind of formality, this system is perhaps better suited to little children than the dalcroze work, unless that is in the hands of an exceptionally gifted teacher. m. dalcroze himself is delightfully sympathetic with little ones. miss salt tells her own story in an appendix to mr. stewart macpherson's _aural culture based on musical appreciation._ good music is played and the children listen and move freely in time to it, sometimes marching or dancing in circles, sometimes quite freely "expressing" whatever feeling the music calls forth in them. the stress is laid on listening; if you see a picture you reproduce it, if the music makes you think of trees or wind, thunder or goblins, you become what you think of. it is astonishing to see how little children learn in this way to care for music by schumann, mendelssohn, grieg, dvorák, brahms, chopin, and beethoven. the music is of course selected with skill, and care is taken that the "expression" shall not make the children foolishly self-conscious. emphasis is always placed on listening, and the children's appreciation is apparent. such appreciation must enrich their lives. chapter xii from fancy to fact creeps ever on from fancy to the fact. fairy tales suit little children because their knowledge is so limited, that "the fairies must have done it" is regarded as a satisfactory answer to early problems, just as it satisfied childlike man. things that to us are wonderful, children accept as commonplace, while others commonplace to us are marvels to the child. but fairy tales do not continue to satisfy all needs. as knowledge grows the child begins to distinguish between what may and what may not happen, though there will always be individual differences, and the more poetic souls are apt to suffer when the outrush of their imagination is checked by a barbed wire of fact. the question "is it true?" and the desire for true stories arise in the average child of seven to eight years, and at that age history stories are enjoyed. real history is of course impossible to young children, whose idea of time is still very vague, and whose understanding of the motives and actions of those immediately around them is but embryonic. they still crave for adventure and romance, and they thrill to deeds of bravery. bravery in the fight appeals to all boys and to most girls, and it is a question for serious consideration how this admiration is to be guided, it certainly cannot be ignored. it is legitimate to admire knights who ride about "redressing human wrongs," fighting dragons and rescuing fair ladies from wicked giants, and at this stage there is no need to draw a hard and fast line between history and legendary literature. it is good to introduce children, especially boys, to some of the arthurian legends if only to impress the ideal, "live pure, speak true, right wrong, else wherefore born?" stories should always help children to understand human beings, men and women with desires and feelings like our own. but in history and geography stories we deal particularly with people who are different from ourselves, and we should help children to understand, and to sympathise with those whose surroundings and customs are not ours. they may have lived centuries ago, or they may be living now but afar off, they may be far from us in time or space, but our stories should show the reasons for their customs and actions, and should tend to lessen the natural tendency to feel superior to those who have fewer advantages, and gradually to substitute for that a sense of responsibility. but the narration of stories is not the only way in which we can treat history. our present minister of education says that history teaching ought to give "discipline in practical reasoning" and "help in forming judgements," not merely in remembering facts. indeed he went so far as to say "eliminate dates and facts" by which, of course, he only meant that the power of reasoning, the power of forming judgements is of far more consequence than the mere possession of any quantity of facts and dates. training in reasoning, however, must involve training in verification of facts before pronouncing judgement. training in practical reasoning takes a prominent place in that form of history teaching introduced by professor dewey. according to him, history is worth nothing unless it is "an indirect sociology," an account of how human beings have learned, so far as the world has yet learned the lesson, to co-operate with one another, a study of the growth of society and what helps and hinders. so he finds his beginnings in primitive life, and although there is much in this that will appeal to any age, there is no doubt that children of seven to ten or eleven revel in this material. if used at all it should be used as thinking material--here is man without tools, without knowledge, everything must be thought out. it does not do much good to hand over the material as a story, as some teachers use the dopp series of books. these books do all the children's thinking for them. every set of children must work things out for themselves, using their own environments and their own advantages. the teacher must read to be ready with help if the children fail, and also to be ready with the actual problems. it is astonishing how keen the children are, and how often they suggest just what has really happened. where there is space out-of-doors and the children can find branches for huts, clay for pots, etc., the work is much easier for the teacher and more satisfactory. but even where that is impossible and where one has sometimes to be content with miniature reproductions, the interest is most keen. children under eight cannot really produce fire from flints or rubbing sticks, nor can they make useable woollen threads with which to do much weaving. but even they can get sparks from flint, make a little thread from wool, invent looms and weave enough to get the ideas. the romance of "long ago" ought to be taken advantage of to deepen respect for the dignity of labour. our lives are so very short that we are apt to get out of perspective in the ages. reading and writing are so new--it is only about four hundred years since the first book was printed in england, the roman occupation lasted as long, and who thinks of that as a long period? perhaps it is because we are in the reading and writing age that our boys and girls must become "braw, braw clerks," instead of living on and by the land. history, particularly primitive history, should help us all to be "grateful to those unknown pioneers of the human race to whose struggles and suffering, discoveries and energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due. the more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it: the more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in the struggle upward and falling back toward a brute condition; and the more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the recent period which we speak of as antiquity."[ ] [footnote : _the substance of faith_, p. .] professor dewey urges that "the industrial history of man is not a materialistic or merely utilitarian affair," but a matter of intelligence, a record of how men learned to think, and also an ethical record, "the account of the conditions which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends." this interest in how human beings have created themselves and their surroundings ought to be deeply interesting to any and every age. young children can reach so little that one hopes the interest aroused will be lasting and lead to fruitful work later. but it certainly makes a good foundation for the study of history and geography, if history is treated as sociology and if geography is recognised as the study of man in his environment. coming now to practical details, in our own work we have followed fairly closely the suggestions made by professor dewey, but everything must vary from year to year according to the suggestions of the children or their apparent needs. one extra step we have found necessary, and that is to spend some time over a desert island or robinson crusoe stage. some children can do without it, but all enjoy it, and the duller children find it difficult to imagine a time when "you could buy it in a shop" does not fit all difficulties. they can easily grasp the idea of sailing away to a land "where no man had ever been before," and playing at desert island has always been a joy. the starting-points for primitive life have been various; sometimes the work has found its beginning in chance conversation, as when a child asked, "are men animals?" and the class took to the suggestion that man meant thinking animal, and began to consider what he had thought. often after robinson crusoe there has been a direct question, "how did robinson crusoe know how to make his things; had any one taught him? who made the things he had seen; who made the very first and how did he know?" one answer invariably comes, "god taught them," which can be met by saying this is true, but that god "teaches" by putting things into the world and giving men power to think. this leads to a discussion about things natural, "what god makes" and what man makes, which is sometimes illuminating on the limited conceptions of town children. years ago we named primitive man "the long-ago people," and the title has seemed to give satisfaction, though once we had the suggestion of "old-time men." we always start with the need for food, and the children suggest all the wild fruits they know, often leaving out nuts till asked if there is anything that can be stored for winter. roots are not always given, but buds of trees is a frequent answer. children in the country ought to explore and to dig, and in our own playground we find at least wild barley, blackberries of a sort, cherries, hard pears, almonds and cherry gum. killing animals for food is suggested, and the children have to be told that the animals were fierce and to realise that in these times man was hunted, not hunter. little heads are quite ready to tackle the problem of defence and attack. they could throw stones, use sticks that the wind blew down, pull up a young tree, or "a lot of people could hang on to a branch and get it down." when one child suggested finding a dead animal and using it for food, some were disgusted, but a little girl said, "i don't suppose they would mind, they wouldn't be very particular." the idea of throwing stones starts the examination of different kinds, which have to be provided for the purpose. flint is invariably selected, and for months the children keep bringing "lovely sharp flints," but there is much careful observation, observation which has a motive. "i would put a stone in a stick and chuck it at them" is followed by much experiment at fixing. string is of course taboo, but bass is allowed because it grows, also strips of skin. we very often get the suggestion "they might find a stone with a hole in it," which leads to renewed searching and to the endeavour to make holes. to make a hole in flint is beyond us, but in a softer stone it can be done. then may come the question of safety and tree-climbing, and how to manage with the babies. children generally know that tiny babies can hold very tight, and have various ideas for the mother. how to keep the baby from falling brings the idea of twisting in extra branches, which is recognised as a cradle in the tree, and the children delight in this as a meaning for "rock-a-bye, baby, in the tree-top." the possibility of tree-shelters comes in, and various experiments are made, sometimes in miniature, sometimes in the garden. out of this comes the discussion of clothes. animals' skins is an invariable suggestion, though all children do not realise that what they call "fur" means skin. skin is provided, and much time is taken in experimenting to see if it can be cut with bits of flint. how could the long-ago people fasten on the skins, brings the answers "by thorns," "tie with narrow pieces," and the children are pleased to see that their own leather belts are strips or straps. sometimes much time is taken up in cutting out "skins to wear" from paper or cheap calico, the children working in pairs, one kneeling down while the other fits on the calico to see where the head and legs come. the skins are painted or chalked, and pictures are consulted to see whether the chosen animals are striped or spotted. it may be stated here that we are not very rigid about periods or climates, and that our long-ago people are of a generalised type. our business is not to supply correct information on anthropological questions, but to call forth thought and originality, to present opportunities for closer observation than was ever evoked by observation lessons, and for experiments full of meaning and full of zest. naturally we do not despise correct information, but these children are very young and all this work is tentative. we are never dogmatic, it is all "do you think they might have ..." or "well, i know what i should have done; i should have ..." and the teacher's reply is usually "suppose we try." children are apt of course to make startling remarks, but it is only the teacher who is startled by: "was all this before god's birthday?" "i don't think god had learned to be very clever then." it is a curious fact, but orthodox opinion has only twice in the course of many years brought up adam and eve. probably this is because we never talk about the first man, but about how things were discovered. the first time the question did come up miss payne was taking the subject, and she suggested that adam and eve were never in this country, which disposed of difficulties so well that i gave the same answer the only time i ever had to deal with the question. when we come to the problem of fire, we always use parts of miss dopp's story of _the tree-dwellers_. if the children are asked if they ever heard of fire that comes by itself, or of things being burned by fire that no human being had anything to do with, one or two are sure to suggest lightning. they will tell that lightning sometimes sets trees on fire, that thunderstorms generally come after hot dry weather, and that if lightning struck a tree with dry stuff about the fire would spread, and the long-ago people would run away. a question from the teacher as to what these people might think about it may bring the suggestion of a monster; if not, one only has to say that it must have seemed as if it was eating the trees to get "they would think it was a dreadful animal." then the story can be told of how the boy called bodo stopped to look and saw the monster grow smaller, so he went closer, fed it on wood, and liked to feel its warm breath after the heavy rain that follows thunder--why had the monster grown smaller?--found that no animal would come near it and so on. we never tell of the "fire country," though sometimes the children read the book for themselves a little later. we have never succeeded in making flames, but it is thrilling to get sparks from flint. once a child brought an old tinder box with steel and flint, but even then we were not skilful enough to get up a flame. still it is something to have tried, and we are left with a respectful admiration for those who could so easily do without matches. what made these long-ago people think of using their fire to cook food? our children have suggested that a bit of raw meat fell into the fire by accident, and we have also worked it out in this way. we were pretending to warm ourselves by the fire, and i said my frozen meat was so cold that it hurt my teeth. "hold it to the fire then." we burned our fingers, and sticks were suggested, but we sucked the burnt fingers, and i said, "it tastes good," and the children shouted with glee "because the meat's roasted really." then something was supposed to drop, and the cry was "gravy! catch it in a shell, dip your finger in and let your baby suck it." a small shell was suggested, and the boy who said "and put a stick in for a handle" was dubbed "the spoon-maker." at that time we were earning names for ourselves by suggestions; we started with fair hair, curly hair, big teeth, long legs, and arrived at quick runner, climber, and even thinker. we have got at pottery in a similar way. the meat was supposed to be tough. "soak it" came at once, and "could you get hot water?" then came suggestions: a stone saucepan, scoop out a stone and put it on the fire, build a stone pan and fix the stones with cherry gum, dig a hole in the ground and put fire under; "_that_ would be a kind of oven." when asked if water would stay in the hole, and if any kind of earth would hold water, the answer may be, "no, nothing but clay, and you'd have to make that." "no! you get clay round a well. my cousin has a well, and there's clay round it." "why, there's clay in the playground." "you could put the meat into a skin bag or a basket." asked if the skin or basket could be set on the fire, or if anything could be done to keep the basket from catching fire, the answer comes, "yes, dab clay round it. then," joyfully, "it would hold water and you _could_ boil." "what would happen to the clay when it was put on the fire?" this has to be discovered by a quick experiment, but the children readily guess that when the hot water is taken off the fire there would be "a sort of clay basin. then they could make more! and plates and cups!" experiments depend upon circumstances and upon the age of the children. a thick and tiny basin put into a hot part of an ordinary fire does harden and hold water to a certain extent even without glazing. but elaborate baking may also be done. i have found it convenient to take weaving as a bridge to history stories, by using sir frederick leighton's picture of the phoenicians bartering cloth for skins with the early britons. the children are told that the people dressed in cloth come from near the bible-story country, and those dressed in skins are the long-ago people of this very country. what would these people think of the cloth? "they would think it was animals' skins." and what would they do? "they'd feel it and look at it." so cloth is produced and we pull it to pieces, first into threads and then into hairs, and the children say the hairs are like "fur." then sheep's wool is produced and we try to make thread. attempts at thread-making and then at weaving last a long time, and along with this come some history stories, probably arising out of the question, "how did people know about all this?" the children are told about the writings of julius caesar, and pictures of roman ships and houses are shown, beside pictures of coracles and bee-hive dwellings, etc. old coins, a flint battle-axe, some roman pottery are also shown, along with descriptions and pictures of the roman villa at brading and other roman remains. the children are thus helped to realise that other countries exist where the people were far ahead of those in this country, and they can begin to understand how social conditions vary, and how nations act upon each other. the work varies considerably from year to year, according to how it takes hold upon the children's interest. but children of eight to nine are usually considered ready for broad ideas of the world as a whole, and the inquiry into where julius caesar came from, and why he came, gives a fair start. chapter xiii new needs and new helps i am old, so old, i can write a letter. writing and reading have no place in the actual kindergarten, much less arithmetic. the stories are told to the child; drawing, modelling and such-like will express all he wants to express in any permanent form, and speech, as froebel says, is "the element in which he lives." his counting is of the simplest, and the main thing is to see that he does not merely repeat a series while he handles material, but that the series corresponds with the objects. even this can be left alone if it seems to annoy the little one. in the school he is on a very different level, he has attained to the abstract, he can use signs: he can express thoughts which he could not draw, and can communicate with those who are absent. he can read any letter received and he is no longer dependent on grown-ups for stories. he can count his own money and can get correct change in small transactions, and he can probably do a variety of sums which are of no use to him at all. between these two comes what froebel called the transition or connecting class, in which the child learns the meaning of the signs which stand for speech, and those which make calculation less arduous for weak memories. much has been written as to when and how children are to be taught to read. some great authorities would put it off till eight or even ten. stanley hall says between six and eight, while dr. montessori teaches children of five and even of four. froebel would have supported stanley hall and would wait till the age of six. the strongest reason for keeping children back from books is a physiological one. in the _psychology and physiology of reading_[ ] strong arguments are adduced against early reading as very injurious to eyesight, so it is surprising that dr. montessori begins so soon. it has been said that her children only learn to write, not to read, but it is to be supposed that they can read what they write, and therefore can read other material. [footnote : macmillan.] if we agree not to begin until six years old, the next question is the method. the alphabetic, whereby children were taught the letter names and then memorised the spelling of each single word, has no supporters. but controversy still goes on as to whether children shall begin with word wholes or with the phonic sounds. it is not a matter of vital importance, for the children who begin with words come to phonics later, and so far as english is concerned, the children who begin with phonics cannot go far without meeting irregularities, unless indeed they are limited to books like those of miss dale. in other languages which are phonic the difficulties are minimised. children in the ordinary elementary schools in italy, though taught in large classes, can write long sentences to dictation in four or five months.[ ] but in italian each letter has its definite sound and every letter is sounded. it is true that these children appear to spend most of their time in formal work. [footnote : a class of children who began in the middle of october wrote correctly to dictation on march , "patria e lavoro siamo, miei cari bambini, parole sante per voi. amate la nostra cara e bella italia, crescete onesti e laboriosi e sarete degni di lei."] the froebelian who believes in learning by action will, of course, expect the children to make or write from the beginning as a method of learning, whether she begins with words or with sounds. but in english, unless simplified spelling is introduced, the time must soon come when reproduction must lag behind recognition. one child said with pathos one day, "may we spell as we like to-day, for i've got such a lot to say?" the phonic method dates back to about . the variety used in the pestalozzi-froebel house is said to have originated with jacotot ( - ). it is called the "observing-speaking-writing and reading method." froebel's own adaptation was simpler; it was his principle to begin with a desire on the part of the child, and he gives his method in story form, "how lina learned to write and read." lina is six, she has left the kindergarten and is presently to attend the primary school. she notices with what pleasure her father, perhaps a somewhat exceptional parent, receives and answers letters. she desires to write and her mother makes her say her own name carefully, noticing first the "open" or vowel sounds and then by noting the position of her tongue she finds the closed sounds. as she hears the sound she is shown how to make it. her father leaves home at the right moment, lina writes to him, receives and is able to read his answer, printed like her own in roman capitals. he sends her a picture book and she is helped to see how the letters resemble those she has learned and the reading is accomplished. in england the phonic method best known is probably miss dale's. it is very ingenious, the analysis is thorough and the books are prettily got up, but to those who feel that reading, though a most valuable tool, still is but a tool and one not needed for children under seven, the method seems over-elaborate. much depends upon the teacher but to see fifty children sitting still while one child places the letters in their places on the board suggests a great deal of lost time. the system is also so rigidly phonic that it is a long time before a child can pick up an ordinary book with any profit. stanley hall holds that it is best to combine methods, and probably most of us do this. "the growing agreement" is, he says, "that there is no one and only orthodox way of teaching and learning this greatest and hardest of all the arts, in which ear, mouth, eye and hand must each in turn train the others to automatic perfection, in ways hard and easy, by devices old and new, mechanically and consciously, actively and passively ... this is a great gain and seems now secure. while a good pedagogic method is one of the most economic--both of labour and of money--of all inventions, we should never forget that the brightest children, and indeed most children, if taught individually or at home, need but very few refinements of method. idiots, as mr. seguin first showed, need and profit greatly by very elaborated methods in learning how to walk, feed and dress themselves, which would only retard a normal child. above all it should be borne in mind that the stated use of any method does not preclude the incidental use of any and perhaps of _all_ others." an adaptation of phonic combined with the word method can be found in _education by life_. it is simpler than miss dale's, and being combined with the word method, children get much more quickly to real stories. stanley hall advocates the individual teaching of reading, and since dr. montessori called every one's attention to this we have used it much more freely, and have found that once the children know some sounds, there is a great advantage in a certain amount of individual learning, but class teaching has its own advantages and it seems best to have a combination. long since we taught a boy who was mentally deficient and incapable of intelligent analysis, by whole words and corresponding pictures. miss payne has developed this to a great extent. it is practically an appeal to the interest in solving puzzles. the children choose their own pictures and are supplied with envelopes containing either single sounds, or whole words corresponding with the picture. they lay _h_ on the house, _g_ on the girl, _p_ on the pond, and later do the same with words. they certainly enjoy it, and no one is ever kept waiting. sometimes the puzzle is to set in order the words of a nursery rhyme which they already know, sometimes it is to read and draw everything mentioned. it is not only how children learn to read that is important: even more so is what they read. much unintelligent reading in later life is due to the reading primer in which there was nothing to understand. children should read books, as adults do, to get something out of them. the time often wasted in teaching reading too soon would be far better employed in cultivating a taste for good reading by telling or reading to the children good stories and verses.[ ] [footnote : it is difficult to find easy material that is worth giving to intelligent children, and we have been glad to find brown's _young artists' readers_, series a.] a revolution is going on just now in the method of teaching writing. it is now generally recognised that much time and effort have been wasted in teaching children to join letters which are easier to read unjoined. a very interesting article appeared in the fielden school demonstration record no. ii., and mr. graily hewitt has brought the subject of writing as it was done before copperplate was invented very much to the fore. the child study society has published a little monograph on the subject giving the experience of different teachers and specimens of the writing. little marjorie fleming was a voracious reader with a remarkable capacity for writing. her spelling was unconventional at times, but there was never any doubt about her meaning. she expressed herself strongly on many subjects, and one of these was arithmetic. "i am now going to tell you the horrible and wretched plaege (plague) that my multiplication gives me you cant conceive it the most devilish thing is times and times it is what nature itself cant endure." yet "if you speak with the tongues of men and angels and make not mention of arithmetic it profiteth you nothing," says miss wiggin. there are a few little children who are really fond of number work. there are not many of them, and they would probably learn more if they were left to themselves. there are even a few mathematical geniuses who hardly want teaching, but who are worthy of being taught by a professor of mathematics, always supposing that he is worthy of them. but the majority of children would probably be farther advanced at ten or twelve if they had no teaching till they were seven. they ought to learn through actual number games, through keeping score for other games, and through any kind of calculation that is needed for construction or in real life. there are but few true number games, but dominoes and card games introduce the number groups. in "old maid" the children pair the groups and so learn to recognise them; in dominoes they use this knowledge, while "snap" involves quick recognition. any one can make up a game in which scoring is necessary. ninepins or skittles is a number game, and one can score by using number groups, or by fetching counters, shells, beads, etc., as reminders. the number groups are important; they form what miss punnett calls "a scheme" for those who have no great visualising power, and they combine the smallest groups into large ones. it ought to be remembered that the repetition of a group is an easier thing to deal with than the combination of two groups, that is, six is a name for two threes and eight for two fours, but five and seven have not so definite a meaning.[ ] [footnote : this very morning a child cutting out brown paper pennies for a shop said, 'look! there are two sixes; that _would_ be a big number!'] the tillich bricks are good playthings, and so is cardboard money--shillings, sixpences, threepences, pence and halfpence. when the names have a meaning the children will want signs, i.e. figures. clock figures (roman) can be used first as simplest, showing the closed fingers and the thumb for v; the only difficulty is ix. the arabic figures can be made by drawing round the number groups, or by laying out their shapes in little sticks. and show very plainly how to arrange five and eight sticks; for two and three they are placed horizontally, the curves merely joining the lines. in teaching children to count, the decimal system should be kept well in mind, and the teacher should see that thirteen means three-ten, and that the children can touch the three and the ten as they speak the word. eleven and twelve ought to be called oneteen and twoteen, half in joke. the idea of grouping should never be lost sight of, and larger numbers should at first be names for so many threes, fours, fives, etc. in order to keep the meaning clear the children should say threety, fourty and fivety, but there should be no need to write these numbers. the kindergarten sticks tied in bundles of ten are quite convenient counting material when any counting is necessary. tram tickets and cigarette pictures can be used in the same way. the decimal notation is a great thing to learn, how great any one will discover who will take the trouble to work a simple addition sum, involving hundreds, in roman figures. children are always taught the number of the house they live in, which makes a starting-point. if, for instance, is compared with xxxv a meaning is given to the . many teachers make formal sums of numbers which could quite well be added without any writing at all. by using any kind of material by which ten can be made plain as a higher unit--bundles of sticks or tickets, sonnenschein's apparatus, miss punnett's number scheme, or the new montessori apparatus with its chains of beads: the material used is of no great consequence--children should be able to deal as easily with tens as with ones, and there is no need for little formal sums which have no meaning. everything in daily life should be used before formal work is attempted. "measure, reckon, weigh, compare," said rousseau. children love to measure, whether by lineal or liquid measure, or by learning to tell the time or to use a pair of scales. there are a few occasions when interest is in actual number relations, as when a child for himself discovers that two sixes is six twos. one boy on his own account compared a shilling and an hour, and said that he could set out a shilling in five parts by the clock. he looked at the clock and chose out a sixpence, a threepence, and pennies. but usually what is abstract belongs to a stage farther on. so we can end where we began, by letting froebel once more define the kindergarten. "crèches and infant schools must be raised into kindergartens wherein the child is treated and trained according to his whole nature, so that the claims of his body, his heart and his head, his active, moral and intellectual powers, are all satisfied and developed. "not the training of the memory, not learning by rote, not familiarity with the appearances of things, but culture by means of action, realities and life itself, bring a blessing upon the individual, and thereby a blessing upon the whole community; since each one, be he the highest or the humblest, is a member of the community." part ii the child in the state school i. things as they are chapter xiv certain characteristics of growth early in the nineteenth century two men, moved by very different impulses, founded what might be considered the beginnings of the infant school. for nearly fifty years their work grew separately, but now they are merged together into something that seems to be permanent. in a bleak lanarkshire factory village in the south of scotland, robert owen, millowner, socialist and welshman, found that unless he could provide for the education of the children of his factory hands, no parents would consent to settle in the district and he would be without workers in his mill. as a consequence owen found himself in the position of education authority, privy purse and organiser, and he did not flinch from the situation; he imposed no cheap makeshift, because he believed in education as an end and not as an economic means; a twofold institution was therefore established by him in , one part for the children of recognised school age, presumably over six, and one for those under school age, whose only entrance test was their ability to walk. it is with the latter that we are concerned. the instructions given by owen to the man and the women he chose for his infant school may serve to show his general aim; the babies under their care were above all to be happy, to lead a natural life, outdoor or indoor as weather permitted; learning their surroundings, playing, singing, dancing, "not annoyed with books," not shadowed by the needs of the upper school, but living the life their age demanded. in the light of the education bill this seems almost prophetic. their guardians were selected solely on the grounds of personality, and expected to work in the spirit in which owen conceived the school. they were gentle, without personal ambition, fond of children, caring only for their welfare; but the sole guiding principle was owen, and this was at once the success and doom of the school, for the personality of owen was thus made the pivot round which the school revolved; without him there was nothing to take hold of. very soon the experiment became known: persons with the stamp of authority came to see it, and even official hearts were moved by the reality of the children's happiness and their consequent development. the visitors felt, rather than knew, that the thing was right. arrangements were made to establish similar institutions in london, and after one or two experiments, a permanent one was founded which was under the control of a man named wilderspin. wilderspin's contribution to education is difficult to estimate; certainly he never caught owen's spirit, or realised his simple purpose: he had ambitions reaching beyond the happiness of the children; and far from trying to make their education suit their stage of growth, he sought to produce the "infant prodigy," just as a contemporary of his sought to produce the "infant saint." from what we can see, his aim was what he honestly believed to be right, as far as his light went; but he sought for no light beyond his own; and his outlook was not so narrow as his application was unintelligent. owen was still in lanarkshire to be consulted; rousseau had already written _Émile_, pestalozzi's work was by this time fairly well known in england, the children were there to be studied, but wilderspin pursued his limited and unenlightened work, until the infant school was almost a dead thing in his hands and in the hands of those who followed. the following is birchenough's account: "the school was in charge of a master and a female assistant, presumably his wife. much attention was given to training children in good personal habits, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, etc., and to moral training. great stress was laid on information.... the curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, lessons on common objects, geography, singing and religion, and an effort was made to make the work interesting and 'concrete.' to this end much importance was attached to object-lessons, to the use of illustrations, to questioning and exposition, while the memory was aided by means of didactic verse.... the real teaching devolved upon the master and mistress. this was of two kinds: class teaching to a section of the children of approximately equal attainments either on the floor or in the class-room, and collective teaching to the whole school, regardless of age, on the gallery." it is a curious coincidence that in , the year of owen's experiment, a humble educational experiment was begun by frederick froebel in a very small village in the heart of the thuringian forest. like owen, his aim was education solely for its own sake, and he had a simple faith in the human goodness of the older germany. but he came to education as a philosopher rather than a social reformer, with a strong belief in its power to improve humanity. this belief remained with him; it is embodied in his aim, and leavened all his work. the first twenty years of his experience convinced froebel that the neglect or mismanagement of the earliest years of a child's life rendered useless all that was done later. what came to owen as an inspiration grew in froebel to be a reasoned truth, and like owen he put it into practice. in the little kindergarten at blankenburg was begun, with the village children as pupils; the beautiful surroundings of forest-covered hills and green slopes made a very different background from the bleak little lanarkshire village, overshadowed by the factory, where owen's school stood, but the spirit was the same; the children were in surroundings suitable for their growth, and the very name of kindergarten does more to make froebel's aim clear than any explanation. he lived to see other kindergartens established in different parts of thuringia, and about the middle of the nineteenth century some of his teachers came to england, and did similar work in london, croydon and manchester. the private kindergarten became an established thing, and educationalists came to understand something of its meaning. in the london school board suggested that the kindergarten system should be introduced into their infant schools, and in doing so they were unconsciously the factors in bringing together the work initiated by owen and by froebel. the infant school of wilderspin, already briefly described, was almost a dead thing, with its galleries and its mechanical prodigies, its object-lessons and its theology; now it was breathed upon by the spirit of the man who said: "play is the highest phase of child development, of human development at this period: for it is the spontaneous representation of the inner, from inner necessity and impulse." "play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man." "the plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life." "if the child is injured at this period, if the germinal leaves of the future tree of his life are marred at this time, he will only with the greatest difficulty and the utmost effort grow into strong manhood." it is perhaps not altogether to be wondered at that teachers at first seized the apparatus rather than the spirit of the kindergarten when we remember that we have not accepted in anything like its fulness the teaching of froebel. formalism and materialism always die slowly: play in the board school was interpreted as something that had to be dictated and taught: the gifts, occupations and games were organised, and appeared on the time-table as subjects side by side with wilderspin's theology and object-lessons. the combination must have been curious, but even with its formalism the change was welcome to the children: at least they could use their hands and do something; at least they could leave their back-breaking galleries and dance and skip, even though the doing and the dancing were according to strict rule. the change was not welcome to all teachers. as late as a headmistress who was a product of the training of that time remarked: "we have kindergarten on wednesday afternoons and then it is over for the week." but there were teachers who saw beneath the bricks and sticks and pretty movements, who felt the spiritual side and kept themselves alive till greater opportunities came. what was imperishable has remained; the system of prescribed activities is nearly dead, but the spirit of the true kindergarten is more alive than ever. the change from the early 'eighties till now is difficult to describe, because it is a growth of spirit, a gradual change of values, rather than a change in outward form; there has been no definite throwing off, and no definite adoption, of any one system or theory; but the difference between the best infant schools of and the best infant schools of to-day is chiefly a difference in outlook. the older schools aimed at copying a method, while the schools of to-day are more concerned with realising the spirit. at present we are trying to reconstruct education for the new world after the war, and so it is convenient to regard the intervening period of nearly half a century as a transition period: during that time the education of the child under eight has changed much more than the education of older children, at least in the elementary school; and there have been certain marked phases that, though apparently insignificant in themselves, have marked stages of progress in thought. perhaps the most significant and most important of these was the effect of the child-study movement on the formal and external side of kindergarten work. it is first of all to america that we owe this, to the pioneer stanley hall, and more especially here to mr. earl barnes. very slowly, but surely, it was evident to the more enlightened teachers that children had their own way of learning and doing, and the adult-imposed system meant working against nature. for the logical method of presenting material from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, from the concrete to the abstract, was substituted the psychological method of watching the children's way of learning and developing. teachers found that what they considered to be "the simple" was not the simple to children; what they took to be "the known" was the unfamiliar to children. for instance, the "simple" in geography, in the adult sense, was the definition of an island, with which most of us began that study, and in geometry it was the point. to children of the ordinary type, both are far-away ideas, and not related to everyday experiences; "the known" in arithmetic, for example, was to teachers the previous lesson, quite regardless of the fact that arithmetic enters into many problems of life outside school. the life in school and the life outside school were, in these early days of infant teaching, two separate things, and only occasionally did a teacher stoop to take an example from everyday life. a little girl in one of the poorest schools brought her baby to show her teacher, and proudly displayed the baby's powers of speech--"say a pint of 'alf-an-'alf for teacher," said the little girl to the baby by way of encouragement to both. this is the kind of rude awakening teachers get, from time to time, when they realise how much of the real child eludes them. psychology has made it clear that life is a unity and must be so regarded. part of this child-study movement has resulted in the slow but sure death of formalism: large classes, material results, and a lack of psychology made formalism the path of least resistance. painting became "blobbing," constructive work was interpreted as "courses" of paper folding, cutting, tearing; books of these courses were published with minute directions for a graduated sequence. the aim was obedient imitation on the part of the child, and the imagined virtues accruing to him in consequence were good habits, patience, accuracy and technical skill. self-expression and creativeness were still only theories. a second interesting phase of the transition period was the method adopted for the training of the senses. from the days of comenius till now the importance of this has held its place firmly, but the means have greatly changed. pestalozzi's object-lesson was adopted by wilderspin and thoroughly sterilised; many teachers still remember the lessons on the orange, leather, camphor, paper, sugar, in which the teacher's senses were trained, for only she came in contact with the object, and the children from their galleries answered questions on an object remote from most of their senses, and only dimly visible to their eyes. similar lessons were given after on froebel's gift ii. in which the ball, cylinder and cube were treated in the same manner: progress was slow, but sometimes the children followed nature's promptings and played with their specimens; this was followed by books of "gift-plays," where organised play took the place of organised observation. about or thereabouts the nature study movement swept over the schools, and "nature specimens" then became the material for sense training: as far as possible each child had a specimen, and by the minute examination of these, stimulated their senses and stifled their appreciation of all that was beautiful. question and answer still dominated the activity; the poor little withered snowdrop took the place of the dead camphor or leather. but underlying all the paralysing organisation the truth was slowly growing, and the children were being brought nearer to real things. a third phase in this transition period is that known as "correlation"; most teachers remember the elaborate programmes of work that drove them to extremes in finding "connections." the following, taken from a reputable book of the time, will exemplify the principle: a week's programme object lesson the horse. phonetics the foal, _oa_ sound. number problems on the work of horses. story the bell of atri [story of a horse ringing a bell]. song busy blacksmith [shoeing a horse]. game the blacksmith's shop. reading on the horse. poetry kindness to animals. paper cutting the bell of atri. paper folding a trough. free-arm drawing a horseshoe. clay modelling a carrot for the horse. brushwork a turnip for the horse. brown paper drawing a stable. underneath it all the truth was growing, namely, the need of making associations and so unifying the children's lines. but the process of finding the truth was slow and cumbersome. a fourth phase of the early infant school was the strong belief of both teachers and inspectors in uniformity of work and of results. it is difficult to disentangle this from the paralysing influences of payment by results and large classes: it was probably the teachers' unconscious expression of the instinct of self-preservation, when working against the heaviest odds. but it was constantly evident to the teacher that any attempt on a child's part to be an individual, either in work or in conduct, had to be arrested: and the theory of individual development was regarded as so utopian that the idea itself was lost. goodness was synonymous with uniform obedience and silence; naughtiness with individuality, spontaneity and desire to investigate. a frequently-heard admonition on the part of the teacher was, "teacher didn't tell you to do it that way--that's a naughty way"; but such an attitude of mind was doubtless generated by the report of the inspector when he commended a class by saying: "the work of the class showed a satisfactory uniformity." to obtain uniform results practice had to come before actual performance, and many weary hours were spent over drill in reading, drill in number, drill in handwork, drill in needlework. the extreme point was reached when babies of three had thimble and needle drill long before they began needlework. there were also conduct drills; miss grant, of devons road school, remembers a school where the babies "practised" their conduct before the visit of the "spectre," as they called him, he being represented as a stick set up on a chair. there is a curious symbolism in the whole occasion. it is difficult to see the good underlying this phase, but it was there. there is undoubtedly a place for practice, though not before performance, and uniformity was undoubtedly the germ of an ideal. all these phases stand for both progress and arrest. the average person is readier to accept methods than investigate principles; but we must recognise that all struggles and searchings after truth have made the road of progress shorter for us by many a mile. perhaps the chief cause of stumbling lay in the fact that there was no clearly realised aim or policy except that of material results. there were many fine-sounding principles in the air, but they were unrelated to each other; and the conditions of teaching were likely to crush the finest endeavours, and to make impossible a teaching that could be called educative. chapter xv the infant school of to-day taking neither the best nor the worst, but the average school of to-day, it will be profitable to review shortly where it stands, to consider how far it has learnt the lessons of experience, and what kind of ideal it has set before itself. in externals there have been many improvements. modern buildings are better in many ways; there is more space and light, and the surroundings are more attractive. most of the galleries have disappeared, but the furniture consists chiefly of dual desks, fixed and heavy, so that the arrangement of the room cannot be changed. the impression given to a visitor is that it is planned for listening and answering, except in the baby room, where there are generally light tables and chairs, and consequently no monotonous rows of children, unless a teacher arranges them thus from sheer habit. in each room is a high narrow cupboard about one quarter of the necessary size for all that education demands; most education authorities provide some good pictures, but the best are usually hung on the class-room wall behind the children, and all are above the children's eye level. "oh, teacher, my neck do ache!" was the only appreciative remark made by a child after a tour made of the school pictures, which were really beautiful. as a rule the windows are too high for the children to see from, and the lower part is generally frosted. in a new school which had a view up one of the loveliest valleys in great britain, the windows were of this description; the head of the school explained that it was a precaution in case the children might see what was outside; in other words, they might make the mistake of seeing a real river valley instead of listening to a description of it. in country schools of the older type the accommodation is not so good, but the newer ones are often very attractive in appearance, and have both space and light. the school garden is a common feature in the country, and it is to be regretted so few even of the plot description are to be found in town schools. of late years the apparatus has improved, though there is still much to be done in this direction. instead of the original tiny boxes of gifts we have frequently real nursery bricks of a larger and more varied character, and many other nursery toys. one of the best signs of a progressive policy is that large numbers of _little_ toys have taken the place of the big expensive ones that only an occasional child could use. it is a pity that the use of toys comes to so sudden an end, and that learning by this method does not follow the babies after they have officially ceased to be babies, as is the custom in real life. one of the most striking changes for the better is the evidence of care of the children's health, of which some of the external signs are doctor, nurse and care committee. a sense of responsibility in this respect is gradually growing in the schools; a fair number provide for sleep, a few try to train the children to eat lunch slowly and carefully, and some try to arrange for milk or cod-liver oil in the case of very delicate children. though these instances are very much in the minority, they represent a change of spirit. this is one of the striking characteristics of the new education bill. a legacy from the old formalism lies in the fact that every room has a highly organised time-table, except perhaps in the babies' room, where the children's actual needs are sometimes considered first. the morning in most classes is occupied with scripture, reading, arithmetic, writing, and some less formal work, such as nature lesson or recitation; some form of physical exercise is always taken. the afternoons are mostly devoted to games, stories, handwork and singing: this order is not universal, but the general principle holds, of taking the more difficult and formal subjects in the morning. in the babies' room some preparation for reading is still too frequent. the lessons are short and the order varied, but in one single morning or afternoon there is a bewildering number of changes. some years ago the unfortunate principle was laid down in the code, that fifteen minutes was sufficient time for a lesson in an infant school, and though this is not strictly followed the lessons are short and numerous, giving an unsettled character to the work; children appear to be swung at a moment's notice from topic to topic without an apparent link or reason: for example, the day's work may begin with the story of a little boy sent by train to the country, settled at a farm and taken out to see the _cow_ and the _sow_: soon this is found to be a reading lesson on words ending in "ow," but after a short time the whole class is told quite suddenly, that one shilling is to be spent at a shop in town, and while they are still interested in calculating the change, paints are distributed, and the children are painting the bluebell. the whole day is apt to be of this broken character, which certainly does not make for training in mental concentration, or for a realisation of the unity of life. some teachers still aim at correlation, but in a rather half-hearted way: others have entirely discarded it because of its strained applications, but nothing very definite has taken its place. the curriculum which has been given is varied in character, and sometimes includes a "free period." except in the babies' class the three r's occupy a prominent place, and children under six spend relatively a great deal of time in formal subjects, while children between six and seven, if they are still in the infant school, are taught to put down sums on paper, which they could nearly always calculate without such help. as soon as a child can read well, and work a fair number of sums on paper, he is considered fit for promotion, and the question of whether he understands the method of working such sums, is not considered so important as accuracy and quickness. the test of so-called intelligence for promotion is reading and number, but it is really the test of convenience, so that large numbers of children may be taught together and brought, against the laws of nature, to a uniform standard. this poison of the promotion and uniformity test works down through the infant school: it can be seen when the babies are diverted from their natural activities to learn reading, or when they are "examined": it can be seen when a teacher yields up her "bright" children to fill a few empty desks, it can be seen in the grind at reading and formal arithmetic of the children under six, when weary and useless hours are spent in working against nature, and precious time is wasted that will never come back. yet we _say_ we believe that "children have their youth that they may play," and that "play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage" [childhood]. the lack of any clear aim shows itself in the fluid nature of the term "results"; to some teachers it signifies readiness for promotion, or a piece of work that presents a satisfactory external appearance, such as good writing, neat handwork, an orderly game, fluent reading. to others it means something deeper, which they discover in some chance remark of a child's that marks the growth of the spirit, or the awakening of the interest of a child whose development is late, or the quickened power of a child to express; or evidence of independent thought and the power to use it, in some piece of handwork, or appreciation of music or literature. according to the meaning attached to the term "results" so the method of the teacher must vary; but one gets the general impression that in this respect matters are in a transitional state; the first kind of teacher is always a little uncertain of her ground and a little fearful that she is not quite "up-to-date," while the second class of teacher is sometimes a little timid, and not quite sure that she is prepared to account for the rather subtle and intangible outcome of her work. the same transitional character holds in the case of discipline: while what is known as "military" discipline still prevails in many schools, there are a very fair number with whom the grip has relaxed; but it is a courageous teacher that will admit the term "free discipline" which has nearly as bad a reputation as "free thought" used to have, and few are prepared to go all the way. probably the reason lies in the vagueness of the meaning of the term, and the fact that its value is not clearly realised because it is not clearly understood. teachers have not faced the question squarely: "what am i aiming at in promoting free discipline." taking a general view of the present school, one gets the impression of a constant change of activity on the part of the children, but very little change of position, a good deal of provision for general class interest, but little for individual interest; of less demand than formerly for uniformity of results, but the existence of a good deal of uniformity of method, arresting the teacher's own initiative; of very constant teaching on the part of the teacher and a good deal of listening and oral expression on the part of the children, of many lessons and little independent individual work. below all this there is evident a very friendly relationship between the teacher and the children, a good deal of personal knowledge of the children on the part of the teacher, and a good deal of affection on both sides. there is less fear and more love than in the earlier days, less government and more training, less restraint and more freedom. and the children are greatly attached to their school. from consideration of the foregoing summary it will be seen that education in the infant school is a thing of curious patches, of strength and weakness, of light and shade; perhaps the greatest weakness is its lack of cohesion, of unification: on the one hand we find much provision for the children's real needs, much singleness of purpose in the teacher's work, such a genuine spirit of whole-hearted desire for their education: on the other hand, an unreasoning sense of haste, of pushing on, of introducing prematurely work for which the children admittedly are unready; an acceptance of new things on popular report, without scientific basis, and a lack of courage to maintain the truth for its own sake, in the face of so-called authority, and a craving to be modern. at the root of all this inconsistency and possibly its cause, is the lack of a guiding policy or aim, the lack of belief in the scientific or psychological basis of education, and consequently the want of that strong belief in absolute truth which helps the teacher to pass all barriers. chapter xvi some vital principles if it be true that the infant school of to-day suffers from lack of a clear basis for its general policy, it will be profitable to have clearly before us such principles as great educators have found to be most vital to the education of young children. we all believe that we have an aim and a high aim before us: it has been variously expressed by past educationalists, but in the main they all agree that the aim of education is conduct. in actual practice, however, we act too often as if we only cared for economic values. if we are to live up to our educational profession, we must look our aim in the face and honestly practise what we believe. while training of character and conduct is the accepted aim for education in general, to make this useful and practical each teacher must fix her attention on how this ultimate aim affects her own special part of the whole work. by watching the free child she will discover how best she can help him: he knows his own business, and when unfettered by advice or command shows plainly that he is chiefly concerned with _gaining experience_. he finds himself in what is to him a new and complex world of people and things; actual experience is the foundation for complete living, and the stronger the foundation the better the result of later building. _the first vital principle then is that the teacher of young children must provide life in miniature; that is, she must provide abundant raw material and opportunities for experience_. the next question is that of the best method of gaining this actual experience. the child is unaware that he is laying foundations, he is only vaguely conscious that he finds great pleasure in certain activities, and that something impels him in certain directions. he realises no definite future, he is content with the present; he cannot work for a purpose other than the pleasure of the moment; without this stimulus concentration is impossible. in the activities of this stage he probably assimilates more actual matter than at any other period of his life, and it is the same with his acquirements of skill. in happy unconsciousness he gains knowledge of his own body and of its power, of the external world, of his mother tongue and of his relations to other people: he makes mistakes and commits faults, but these do not necessarily cripple or incriminate him. he is not considered a social outcast because he once kicked or bit, or because he threw his milk over the table; he learns to balance and adjust his muscles on a seesaw, when a fall on soft grass is a matter of little importance, and this is better than waiting till he is compelled hastily to cross a river on a narrow plank. it is all a kind of joyous rehearsal of life which we call play. we can force a child to passivity, to formal repetitions of second-hand knowledge, to the acquisition of that for which he has no apparent need, but we can never _educate_ him by these things. "children do not play because they are young, they have their youth that they may play," as surely as they have their legs that they may walk. _the second principle is therefore that the method of gaining experience lies through play, and that by this road we can best reach work_. the third principle is the nature of the experience that a child seeks to gain--the life he desires to live. how can we he sure that the surroundings we provide and the activities we encourage are in accord with children's needs? let us imagine a child of about five to six years of age, one of a family, living in a small house to which a garden is attached; inside he has the run of the house, but keeps his own toys, picture books and collections of treasures. we will suppose that not being at school he is free to arrange his own day, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other children, or with his parents. what does he do? he is interested in inanimate things, especially in using them, and so he plays with his toys. he builds bricks, runs engines, solves simple puzzle pictures, asks to work with his father's gardening tools, or his mother's cooking utensils. he is interested in the life of the garden, in the growing things, in the snail or spider he finds, in the cat, dog or rabbit of the family; he wants to dig, water and feed these various things, but he declines regular responsibility; his interest is in spurts. he is interested in sounds, both in those he can produce and in those produced by others: soon he is interested in music, he will listen to it for considerable periods, and may join in it: at first more especially on the rhythmical side. so, too, he likes the rhythm of poetry and the melody sounds of words. he is interested in making things; on a wet day he will ask for scissors and paste, or bring out his paint box or chalks; on a fine day he mixes sand or mud with water, or builds a shelter with poles and shawls; at any time when he has an opportunity he shuts himself into the bathroom and experiments with the taps, sails boats, colours water, blows bubbles, tries to mix things, wet and dry. he is interested in the doings of other people, in their conduct and in his own; he is more interested in their badness than in their goodness: "tell me more of the bad things your children do," said a little boy to his teacher aunt, and the request is significant and general; we learn so little by mere uncontrasted goodness. he is interested in the words that clothe narrations and in their style, he is impatient of a change in form of an accepted piece of prose or poetry. he is hungry for the sounds of telling words and phrases. he is interested in reproducing the doings of other people so that he may experience them more fully, and this involves minute observation, careful and intelligent imitation, and vivid imagination. his own word for it is pretence. there are other things that he grasps at more vaguely and later; he is dimly aware that people have lived before, and he is less dimly aware that people live in places different from his own surroundings. he realises that some of the stories, such as the fairy stories, are true in one sense, a sense that responds to something within himself; that some are true in another more material, and external sense, one concerned with things that really happen. he hears of "black men," and of "ships that carry people across the sea," and of "things that come back in those ships." he is interested in the immaterial world suggested by the mysteries of woods and gardens, he has a dim conception that there is some life beyond the visible, he feels a power behind life and he reveals this in his early questions. he is keenly interested in questions of birth and death, and sometimes comes into close contact with them. he feels that other wonders must be accounted for--the snow, thunder and lightning, the colours of summer, the changeful sea. at first the world of fairy lore may satisfy him, later comes the life of the undying spirit, but the two are continuous. he may attend "religious observances," and these may help or they may hinder. he is keenly interested in games, whether they are games of physical skill, of mental skill, or games of pretence. here most especially he comes into contact with other people, and here he realises some of the experiences of social life. such are the most usual sides of life sought by the ordinary child, and on such must we base the surroundings we provide for our children in school, and the aspects of life to which we introduce them, commonly called subjects of the curriculum. _our third principle is therefore, evident: we find, in the child's spontaneous choice, the nature of the surroundings and of the activities that he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum and selects his own subject matter_. the next consideration is the atmosphere in which a child can best develop character by means of these experiences. a young child is a stranger in an unknown, untried country: he has many strange promptings that seek for satisfaction; he has strong emotions arising from his instincts, he feels crudely and fiercely and he must act without delay, as a result of these emotions. he is like a tourist in a new strange country, fresh and eager, and with a similar holiday spirit of adventure: the stimulation of the new arouses a desire to interpret, to investigate and to ask questions: it arouses strong emotions to like or dislike, to fear, to be curious; it leads to certain modes of conduct, as a result of these emotions. picture such a young tourist buttonholed by a blasé guide, who had forgotten what first impressions meant, who insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, regulating his procedure by telling him just what should be observed and how to do so, pouring out information so premature as to be obnoxious, correcting his taste, subduing his enthusiasm, and modifying even his behaviour. the tourist would presumably pay off the unwelcome guide, but the children cannot pay off the teacher: they can and do rebel, but docility and adaptability seem to play a large part in self-preservation. for the young child freedom must precede docility, because the only reasonable and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs help. the world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual, emotional and moral freedom. in the school with the rigidly organised time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly repeated reproach: "we are not talking of that just now," where the apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are doing, there is no intellectual freedom. where passion and excitement are instantly arrested, where appreciation for strong colours, fierce punishments, loud noises, is killed, where fear is ridiculed, where primitive likes and dislikes are interpreted as coarseness, there is no emotional freedom. a child must have these experiences if he is to come to his own later: this is not the time to stamp out but only to deflect and guide; otherwise he becomes a weak and pale reflection of his elders, with little resource or enthusiasm. where it is almost impossible to be openly naughty, where there is no opportunity for choice or for making mistakes, where control is all from the teacher and self-control has no place, there is no moral freedom. the school is not for the righteous but for the so-called sinner, who is only a child learning self-control by experience. self-control is a habit gained through habits; a child must acquire the habit of arresting desire, of holding the physical side in check, the habit of reflection, of choice, and most of all the habit of either acting or holding back, as a result of all this. if in the earliest years his will is in the hands of others, and he has the habit of obedience to the exclusion of all other habits, then his development as a self-reliant individual is arrested, and may be permanently weakened. there is no other way to learn life, and build up an ideal from the raw material he has gained in other ways. in the rehearsal of life at school he can do this without serious harm; but every time a mode of conduct is imposed upon him when he might have chosen, every time he is externally controlled when he might have controlled himself, every time he is balked in making a mistake that would have been experience to him, he will be proportionally less fit to choose, to exercise self-control, to learn by experience, and these are the chief lessons at this impressionable period. _the fourth principle therefore is that the atmosphere of freedom is the only atmosphere in which a child can gain experiences that will help to develop character and control conduct._ these four vital principles will be applied to practical work in the following chapters. ii. practical application of vital principles before applying these principles it is necessary for practical considerations to set out clearly the various stages of this period. during the first eight years of life, development is very rapid and not always relatively continuous. sometimes it takes leaps, and sometimes appears for a time to be quiescent. but roughly the first stage, of a child's developing life ends when he can walk, eat more or less ordinary food, and is independent of his mother. at this point the nursery school stage begins: the child is learning for himself his world by experience, and through play he chooses his raw material in an atmosphere of freedom. when the period of play pure and simple begins to grow into a desire to do things better, to learn and practise for a more remote end--in other words, when the child begins to be willing to be taught, the transitional period from play to work begins. it can never be said to end, but the relative amount of play to work gradually defines the life of the school: and so the transitional period merges into the school period. thus we are concerned first with the nursery school period which corresponds to what froebel meant by his kindergarten and owen by his infant school; secondly, with the transitional period which has been far too long neglected or rushed over, and which roughly corresponds to the standard i. of the elementary school; and thirdly, we have the beginnings of the junior school where work is the predominant factor. in spite of shakespeare's assertion, there is much in a name, and if these names were definitely adopted, teachers would realise better the nature of their business. the following chapters seek to apply practically the four vital principles to these periods of a child's life, but in many cases the transition classes and the junior school are considered together. chapter xvii the need for experience "the first vital principle is that the teacher of young children must provide for them life in miniature, i.e. she must provide abundant raw material and opportunities for acquiring experience." the practical translation of this in the words of the teacher of to-day is, "i must choose furniture, and requisition apparatus." the teacher of to-morrow will say to her children, "i will bring the world into the school for you to learn." the local education authority of to-day says, "we must build a school for instruction." the local education authority of to-morrow will say, "we must make a miniature world for our children." the world of the nursery school child probably requires the most careful thought in this respect: a large room with sunlight and air, low clear windows, a door leading to a garden and playground, low cupboards full of toys, low-hung pictures, light chairs and tables that can be pushed into a corner, stretcher beds equally disposable, a dresser with pretty utensils for food; these are the chief requirements for satisfying physical needs, apparent in the actual room. physical habits will be considered later, under another heading. outside, in the playground, there should be opportunities for physical development, for its own sake: swings, giant strides, ladders laid flat, slightly sloping planks, and a seesaw should all be available for constant use; if the children are not warned or given constant advice about their own safety, there is little fear of accidents. thus the purely physical side of the children is provided for, the side that they are, if healthy, quite unconscious of; what else does experience demand at this stage? roughly classified, the raw experience of this stage may be divided into the experience of the natural world of living things, the world of inanimate things, and the social world. for the natural world there should be the garden outside, with its trees, grass and flower beds; with its dovecot and rabbit hutch, and possibly a cat sunning herself on its paths; inside there will be plants and flowers to care for; the elements, especially water, earth and air, are very dear to a young child, and it is quite possible to satisfy his cravings with a large sand-heap of _dry_ and _wet_ sand; a large flat bath for sailing boats and testing the theory of sinking and floating; a bin of clay; a pair of bellows and several fans to set the air in motion. there is always the fire to gaze at on the right side of the fire-guard, and appreciation of the beauty of this element should be encouraged. the world of inanimate things includes most of the toys that stimulate activity and give ideas. the chief that should be found in the cupboards, round the walls, or scattered about the room, are bricks of all sizes and shapes, skittles, balls and bats or rackets, hoops, reins, spades and other garden tools; pails and patty pans for the sand-heap; pipes for bubbles, shells, fir-cones, buttons, acorns, and any collection of small articles for handling; all kinds of vehicles that can be pushed, such as carts, barrows, prams, engines; drums and other musical instruments; materials for construction and expression, such as chalks, boards, paints and paper. for experiences of the social world, which is not very real at this individualistic period, come the dolls and doll's house, horses and stables, tea-things, cooking utensils, noah's ark, scales for a shop, boats, soldiers and forts: a very important item in this connection is the collection of picture-books: they must be chosen with the greatest care, and only pictures of such merit as those of caldecott, leslie brooke and jessie wilcox smith should be selected. pictures form one of the richest sources of experience at this stage, as indeed at any stage of life, and truth, beauty and suggestiveness must be their chief factors. the toys should be above all things durable, and if possible washable. broken and dirty toys make immoral children. besides the material surroundings there are opportunities, the seizing of which gives valuable experiences. these belong to the social world, and lie chiefly in the training in life's social observances and the development of good habits. this side of life is one of the most important in the nursery school, and needs material help. the lavatories and cloakrooms should be constructed so that there is every chance for a child to become self-reliant and fastidious. the cloakrooms should be provided with low pegs, boot holes, clothes brushes and shoe brushes: there should be low basins with hot and cold water, enamel mugs and tooth brushes _for each child,_ nail brushes, plenty of towels, and where the district needs it, baths. the type provided by the middlesex education authority at greenford avenue school, hanwell, gives a shower bath to a whole group of children at once, thus making a more frequent bath possible. perhaps for very small children of the nursery school age separate baths are more suitable. this is a question for future experience on the part of teachers. there should be plenty of time for the children to learn to wash and dress themselves. in the school-room there should either be tablecloths, or the tables should be capable of being scrubbed by the children after each meal. their almost inevitable lack of manners at table gives an invaluable opportunity for training, and again in such a case there should be no question of haste. the meals should be laid, waited on and cleared away, and the dishes washed by the children themselves, and they should be responsible for the general tidiness of the room. this involves tea-cloths, mops, dusters, washing bowls, brushes and dustpans. in the transition classes and junior school the furniture and apparatus can be to a great extent very much the same, their difference lying chiefly in degree. it is a pity to bring the age of toys to an abrupt conclusion; in real life the older children still borrow the toys of the younger ones while there are some definitely their own: such are, jigsaw and other puzzles, dominoes, articles for dramatic representation, playing cards, toys for games of physical skill, such as tops, kites, skipping ropes, etc. such prepared constructive materials as meccano--and a great mass of raw material for construction, generally termed "waste." there should be a series of boxes or shelves where such waste products of the home, or of the woods, or of the seashore, or of the shop, might be stored in some classified order: the collective instinct is stronger than the more civilised habit of orderliness: here is an opportunity for developing a habit from an instinct. there should also be materials for expression, such as clay, paper, chalk, pencil, paints, weaving materials, cardboard, and scenery materials; and such tools as scissors, cardboard knives, needlework tools, paste brushes, and others that may be necessary and suitable. the rooms should be large and suitable for much moving about: the most usual conditions should be a scattered class and not a seated listening class. this means light chairs and tables or benches where handwork can be done; low cupboards and lockers so that each child can get at his own things; broad window-sills for plants and flowers and a bookcase for reading and picture books. here again good picture-books are as essential as, even more essential than, readers in the transition class. they will be a little more advanced than in the nursery school, and will be of the type of the pied piper illustrated, or pictures of children of other lands and times. some of rackham's, of harold copping's, of the publications by black in _peeps at many lands_, are suitable for this stage. readers should be chosen for their literary value from the recognised children's classics, such as the peter rabbit type, _alice in wonderland, water-babies,_ and not made up for the sake of reading practice. the pictures on the walls should be hung at the right eye-level, and the windows low enough for looking at the outside world--whatever it may be. the teacher's desk should be in a corner, not in the central part of the room, for she must remember that the children are still in the main seeking experience, not listening to the experience of another. they should have access to the garden and playground, and all the incitements to activity should be there--similar to those of the nursery school, or those provided by the london county council in parks. the bare wilderness of playground now so familiar, where there is neither time nor opportunity for children to be other than primitive savages, does not represent the outside world of beauty and of adventure. the lower classes of junior school should differ very little in their miniature world. life is still activity to the child of eight, and consequently should contain no immovable furniture. there will be more books, and the children may be in their seats for longer periods; the atmosphere of guided but still spontaneous work is more definite, but the aim in choice of both furniture and apparatus is still the gaining of experience of life, by direct contact in the main. such is the requisition sheet to be presented to the stores superintendent of the local education authority in the future, with an explanatory note stating that in a general way what is actually required is the world in miniature! chapter xviii gaining experience by play "the second principle is that the method of gaining experience lies through play and that by this road we can best reach work." play is marked off from work chiefly by the absence of any outside pressure, and pleasure in the activity is the characteristic of play pure and simple: if a child has forced upon him a hint of any ulterior motive that may be in the mind of his teacher, the pleasure is spoilt for him and the intrinsic value of the play is lost. in bringing children into school during their play period, probably the most important formative period of their lives, and in utilising their play consciously, we are interfering with one of their most precious possessions when they are still too helpless to resent it directly. too many of us make play a means of concealing the wholesome but unwelcome morsel of information in jam, and we try to force it on the children prematurely and surreptitiously, but nature generally defeats us. the only sound thing to do is to _play the game_ for all it is worth, and recognise that in doing so education will look after itself. to understand the nature of play, and to have the courage to follow it, is the business of every teacher of young children. the nursery school, especially if it consists chiefly of children under five, presents at first very hard problems to the teacher; however strong her belief in play may be, it receives severe tests. so much of the play at first seems to be aimless running and shouting, or throwing about of toys and breaking them if possible, so much quarrelling and fighting and weeping seem involved with any attempts at social life on the part of the children; there seems very little desire to co-operate, and very little desire to construct; as a rule, a child roams from one thing to another with apparently only a fleeting attempt to play with it; yet on the other hand, to make the problem more baffling, a child will spend a whole morning at one thing: quite lately one child announced that he meant to play with water all day, and he did; another never left the sand-heap, and apparently repeated the same kind of activity during a complete morning; visitors said in a rather disappointed tone, "they just play all the time by themselves." one teacher brought out an attractive picture and when a group of children gathered round it she proceeded to tell the story; they listened politely for a few minutes, and then the group gradually melted away; they were not ready for concentrated effort. if those children had been in the ordinary baby room of a school they would have been quite docile, sitting in their places apparently listening to the story, amiably "using" their bricks or other materials according to the teacher's directions, but they would not, in the real sense, have been playing. this is an example of the need for both principle and courage. it is into this chaotic method of gaining experience that the teacher comes with her interpretive power--she sees in it the beginnings of all the big things of life--and like a bigger child she joins, and like a bigger child she improves. she sees in the apparent chaos an attempt to get experience of the different aspects of life, in the apparently aimless activity an attempt to realise and develop the bodily powers, in the fighting and quarrelling an attempt to establish a place in social life. it is all unconscious on the part of a child, but a necessary phase of real development. gradually the little primitive man begins to yield to civilisation. he is interested in things for longer and asks for stories, music and rhymes, and what does this mean? as he develops a child learns much about life in his care of the garden, about language in his games, about human conduct from stories; but he does these things because he wants to do them, and because there is a play need behind it all, which for him is a life need; in order to build a straight wall he must classify his bricks, in order to be a real shopman he must know his weights, in order to be a good workman he must measure his paper; all the ideas gained from these things come to him _along with sense activity_; they are associated with the needs and interests of daily life; and because of this he puts into the activity all the effort of which he is capable, or as dewey has expressed it, "the maximum of consciousness" into the experience which is his play. this is real sense training, differing in this respect from the training given by the montessori material, which has no appeal to life interest, aims at exercising the senses separately, and discourages _play_ with the apparatus. it is activity without a body, practice without an end, and nothing develops from it of a constructive or expressive nature. in the nursery class therefore our curriculum is life, our apparatus all that a child's world includes, and our method the one of joyful investigation, by means of which ideas and skill are being acquired. the teacher is player in chief, ready to suggest, co-operate, supply information, lead or follow as circumstances demand: responsibility must still belong to the children, for while most of them know quite naturally how to play, there are many who will never get beyond a rather narrow limit, through lack of experience or of initiative. it is quite safe to let experience take its chance through play, but there are certain things that must be dealt with quite definitely, when the teacher is not there as a playmate, but as something more in the capacity of a mother. it is impossible to train all the habits necessary at this time, through the spontaneous play, although incidentally many will be greatly helped and made significant by it. if the children come from poor homes where speech is imperfect, probably mere imitation of the teacher, which is the chief factor in ordinary language training, will be insufficient. it will be necessary to invent ways, chiefly games, by which the vocal organs may be used; this may be considered play, but it is more artificial and less spontaneous than the informal activity already described. it is well to be clear as to the kind of exercises best suited to make the vocal organs supple, and then to make these the basis of a game: for example, little children constantly imitate the cries of ordinary life; town children could dramatise a railway station where the sounds produced by engines and by porters give a valuable training; they could imitate street cries, the sound of the wind, of motor hooters, sirens, or of church bells. country children could use the sounds of the farm-yard, the birds, or the wind. in the recognition of sound, which is as necessary as its production, such a guessing game could be taught as "i sent my son to be a grocer and the first thing he sold began with _s_ and ended with _p_," using the _sounds_, not names of the letters. for the acquisition of a vocabulary, such a game as the family coach might be played and turned into many other vehicles or objects about which many stories could be told. all the time the game must be played with the same fidelity to the spirit of play as previously, but the introduction must be recognised as more artificial and forced, and this can be justified because so many children are not normal with regard to speech, and only where this is the case should language training be forced upon them. habits of courtesy, of behaviour at table, of position, of dressing and undressing, of washing hands and brushing teeth, and many others, must all be _taught_, but taught at the time when the need comes. occasions will certainly occur during play, but the chances of repetition are not sufficient to count on. thus we summarise the chief business of the nursery school teacher when we say that it is concerned chiefly with habits and play and right surroundings. play in the transition class is less informal. after the age of six certain ambitions grow and must be satisfied. the aspects of life are more separated, and concentration on individual ones is commoner; this means more separation into subjects, and thus a child is more willing to be organised, and to have his day to _some_ extent arranged for him. while in the nursery class only what was absolutely necessary was fixed, in the transition class it is convenient to fix rather more, for the sake of establishing certain regular habits, and because it is necessary to give the freshest hours to the work that requires most concentration. we must remember, however, that it _is_ a transition class, and not set up a completely fashioned time-table for the whole day. reading and arithmetic must be acquired both as knowledge and skill, the mother tongue requires definite practice, there must be a time for physical activity, and living things must not be attended to spasmodically. therefore it seems best that these things be taken in the morning hours, while the afternoon is still a time for free choice of activity. the following is a plan for the transition class, showing the bridge between absolute freedom and a fully organised time-table-- morning. afternoon. monday |nature |reading |stories from |organised games and |work. |and number.|scripture or other |handwork. ---------|care |-----------|literature, and |----------------------- tuesday |of the |reading |stories of social |music and handwork. |room. |and number.|life; music and | ---------|nature |-----------|singing; industrial|----------------------- wednesday|chart |reading |activities such as |excursion or handwork. |and |and number.|solving puzzles, | ---------|general|-----------|playing games of |----------------------- thursday |talk. |reading |skill, looking at |dramatic representation | |and number.|pictures, arranging|including preparations. ---------| |-----------|collections. |----------------------- friday | |reading | |gardening or handwork. | |and number.| | granting this arrangement we must be clear how play as a method can still hold. it does not hold in the informal incidental sense of the nursery school: there are periods in the transition class when the children know that they are working for a definite purpose which is not direct play--as in reading; and there are times when they are dissatisfied with their performances of skill and ask to be shown a better way, and voluntarily practise to secure the end, as in handwork, arithmetic and some kinds of physical games. the remainder is probably still pursued for its own sake. how then can this play spirit be maintained side by side with work? first of all, the children should not be required to do anything without having behind it a purpose that appeals to them; it may not be the ultimate purpose of "their good," but a secondary reason may be given to which they will respond readily, generally the pretence reason. arithmetic to the ordinary person is a thing of real life; we count chiefly in connection with money, with making things, with distributing things, or with arranging things, and we count carefully when we keep scores in games; in adult life we seldom or never count or perform arithmetical operations for sheer pleasure in the activity, but there are many children who do so in the same spirit as we play patience or chess. and all this is our basis. the arithmetical activities in the transition class should therefore be based on such everyday experiences as have been mentioned, else there will be no associations made between the experiences of school and those of life outside. the two must merge. there is no such thing as arithmetic pure and simple for children unless they seek it; they must play at real life, and the real life that they are now capable of appreciating. skill in calculation, accuracy and quickness can be acquired by a kind of practice that children are quite ready for, if it comes when they realise the need; most children feel that their power to score for games is often too slow and inaccurate; as store clerks they are uncertain in their calculations; they will be willing to practise quick additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, in pure arithmetical form, if the pretence purpose is clearly in view, which to them is a real purpose; the same thing occurs in writing which should be considered a side issue of reading; meaningless words or sentences are written wearily and without pains, but to write the name of a picture you have painted, at the bottom of it, or to write something that cinderella's godmother said, or bit by bit to write a letter, will be having a purpose that gives life to an apparently meaningless act, and thoroughness to the effort. in handwork, too, at this stage, practice takes an important place: a child is willing to hem, to try certain brush strokes, to cut evenly, and later on to use his cardboard knife to effect for the sake of a future result if he has already experimented freely. this is in full harmony with the spirit of play, when we think of the practiced "strokes" and "throws" of the later games, but it is a more advanced quality of play, because there is the beginning of a purpose which is separated from immediate pleasure in the activity, there is the hint of an end in view though it is a child's end, and not the adult or economic one. the training of the mother tongue can be made very effective by means of games: in the days when children's parties were simple, and family life was united, language games in the long dark evenings gave to many a grip of words and expressions. children learnt to describe accurately, to be very fastidious in choice of words, to ask direct questions, to give verbal form to thought, all through the stress of such games--man and his shadow, clumps, subject and object, russian scandal, the minister's cat, i see a light, charades, and acting of all kinds. no number of picture talks, oral compositions, or observations can compete in real value with these games, because behind them was a purpose or need for language that compelled the greatest efforts. physical development and its adjustment to mental control owes its greatest stimulus to games. when physical strength, speed, or nimble adjustability is the pivot upon which the game depends, special muscles are made subservient to will: behind the game there is the stimulus of strong emotion, and here is the greatest factor in establishing permanent associations between body and mind; psychologists see in many of these games of physical activity the evolution of the race: drill pure and simple has its place partly in the same sense as "practice" in number or handwork, and partly as a corrective to our fallacious system of education by listening, instead of by activity: and we cannot in a lifetime acquire the powers of the race except by concentrated practice. but no amount of drill can give the all-round experience necessary for physical readiness for an emergency, physical and mental power to endure, active co-operation, where self-control holds in check ambitious personal impulses: and no drill seems to give grace and beauty of motion that the natural activity of dancing can give. it is through the games that british children inherit, and by means of which they have unconsciously rehearsed many of the situations of life, that they have been able to take their place readily in the life of the nation and even to help to save it. again, as in other directions, children must be made to play the game in its thoroughness, for a well-played game gives the right balance to the activities: drill is more specialised, and has specialisation for its end: a game calls on the whole of an individual: he must be alert mentally and physically; and at the same time the sense of fairness cannot be too strongly insisted on; no game can be tolerated as part of education where there is looseness in this direction, from the skittles of the nursery class to the cricket and hockey of the seventh standard, and nothing will so entirely outrage the children's feelings as a teacher's careless arbitration. in physical games, too, the social side is strongly developed: leadership, self-effacement and co-operation are more valuable lessons of experience than fluent reading or neat writing or accurate additions: but they have not counted as such in our economic system of education; they have taken their chance: few inspectors ask to see whether children know how to "play the game," and yet they are so soon to play the independent game of life. but the individual output of reading and sums of a sneaking and cowardly, or assertive and selfish child, is as good probably as that of a child that has the makings of a hero in him. and then we wonder at the propensities of the "lower classes." it is because we have never made sure that they can play the game. to summarise: play in the nursery school stage is unorganised, informal, and pursued with no motive but pleasure in the activity itself; it is mainly individual. play in the transition class is more definitely in the form of games, _i.e._ organised play, efforts of skill, mental or physical; it becomes social. play in the junior school is almost an occasional method, because the work motive is by this time getting stronger. chapter xix the unity of experience "we find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own subject matter." the next problem we have to solve is how to unify the bewildering variety of ideas and activities that a child seeks contact with during a day. we found that the curriculum of the infant school of to-day presented a rather confusing variety of ideas, not necessarily arranged as the children would have chosen; they would certainly not have chosen to break off some intense interest, because an arbitrary timetable hurried them to something else, and they would have been right. if we asked the children their reasons for choosing, we would find no clue except that they chose what they wanted to, neither could they tell us why they spent so much more time over one thing than another. if a similar study were to be made of a child from a slum also free to arrange his day, we should find that while certain general features were the same others would be different: he would ask for different stories, probably play different games, or the same games in a different way, his back-yard would present different aspects, the things he made would be different. it is evident that the old correlation method has little or nothing to do with the matter; a child may or may not draw the rabbit he feeds, he certainly does not play a rabbit game because of the rabbit he has fed, nor does he build a rabbit-hutch with his bricks. he might try to make a real one if the rabbit really needed it, but that arises out of an obvious necessity. if he could put his unconscious promptings into words, he would say he did the things because he wanted to, because somebody else did them, or because of something he saw yesterday, and so on; but he would always refer back to _himself_. the central link in each case is in the child, with his special store of experiences derived from his own particular surroundings; he brings to new experiences his store of present experiences, his interests not always satisfied, his powers variously used, he interprets the new by these, and seeks for more in the line of the old. it is life he has experienced, and he seeks for more life. how then can we secure for him that the new experiences presented to him in school will be in line with the old? we will take three typical cases of children to illustrate the real nature of this problem. the first is the case of a child living in a very poor district of london or of any large town. the school is presumably situated in a narrow street running off the high street of the district, the street where all the shopping is done; at the corner is a hide factory with an evil smell. most of the dwelling-houses abut on the pavement, some with a very small yard behind, some without any. several families live in one house, and often one room is all a family can afford; as that has to be paid for in advance the family address may change frequently. the father may be a dock labourer with uncertain pay, a coster, a rag and bone merchant, or he may follow some unskilled occupation of a similarly precarious nature; in consequence the mother has frequently to do daily work, the home is locked up till evening, and she often leaves before the children start for morning school. it is a curious but very common fact that, free though these children are, they know only a very small radius around their own homes. they are accustomed to be sent shopping into high street, where household stores are bought in pennyworths or twopennyworths, owing to uncertain finance and no storage accommodation. generally there is one tap and one sink in the basement for the needs of all the families in the house. there is usually a park somewhere within reach, but it may be a mile away; in it would, at least, be trees, a pond, grass, flowers. but an excursion there, unless it is undertaken by the school, can only be hoped for on a fine bank holiday; there is neither time nor money to go on a saturday, and sunday cannot be said to begin till dinner-time, about p.m., when the public-houses close, and the father comes home to dinner. it is difficult to imagine the conversation of such a household; family life exists only on sunday at dinner-time; the child's background of family life is a room which is at once a bedroom, living room and laundry. there is nearly always some part of a meal on the table, and some washing hanging up. outside there are the dingy street, the crowded shops, the pavement to play on, and both outside and in, the bleaker and more sordid aspects of life, sometimes miserable, sometimes exciting. on saturday night the lights are brilliant and life is at least intense. bed is a very crowded affair, in which many half-undressed children sleep covered with the remainder of the day's wardrobe. what store of experiences does a child from such a neighbourhood bring to school, to be assimilated with the new experiences provided there? what do such terms as home, dinner, bed, bath, birth, death, country, mean to him? they mean _something_.[ ] [footnote : see _child life_, october .] not a mile away we may come to a very respectable suburb of the average type; and what is said of it may apply in some degree to a provincial or country town or, at least, the application can easily be made. the school probably stands at the top corner of a road of houses rented, at £ to £ per annum, with gardens in front and behind. the road generally runs into a main road with shops and traffic. here and there in the residential road are little oases of shops, patronised by the neighbourhood, and some of the children may live over these. the home life is more ordinary and needs less descriptive detail, but there are some features that must be considered. the decencies, not to say refinements of eating, sleeping and washing are taken for granted: there is often a bath-room and always a kitchen. the father's occupation may be local, but a good many fathers will go to town; there is generally a family holiday to the sea, or less often to the country. in the house the degree of refinement varies; there are nearly always pictures of a sort, books of a sort, and the children are supplied with toys of a sort. they visit each other's houses, and the observances of social life are kept variously. often the horizon is very narrow; the mother's interest is very local and timid; the father's business life may be absolutely apart from his home life and never mentioned there. the family conversation while quite amiable and agreeable may be round very few topics, and the vocabulary, while quite respectable, may be most limited. children's questions may be put aside as either trivial or unsuitable. in one sense the slum child may be said to have a broader background, the realities of life are bare to him on their most sordid side, there is neither mystery nor beauty around life, or death, or the natural affections. the suburban child may on the contrary be balked and restricted so that unnecessary mystery gives an unwholesome interest to these things and conventionality a dishonest reserve. a suburb of this type is described by beresford in _housemates_:--"in such districts (as gospel oak) i am depressed by the flatness of an awful monotony. the slums vex me far less. there i find adventure and jest whatever the squalor; the marks of the primitive struggle through dirt and darkness towards release. those horrible lines of moody, complacent streets represent not struggle, but the achievement of a worthless aspiration. the houses, with their deadly similarity, their smug, false exteriors, their conformity to an ideal which is typified by their poor imitative decoration, could only be inhabited by people who have no thought or desire for expression.... the dwellers in such districts are cramped into the vice of their environment. their homes represent the dull concession to a state rule; and their lives take tone from the grey, smoke-grimed repetition of one endlessly repeated design. the same foolish ornamentation on every house reiterates the same suggestion. their places of worship, the blank chapels and pseudo-gothic churches rear themselves head and shoulders above the dull level, only to repeat the same threat of obedience to a gloomy law.... the thought of gospel oak and its like is the thought of imitation, of imitation falling back and becoming stereotyped, until the meaning of the thing so persistently copied has been lost and forgotten." a third case is that of the country child, the child who attends the village school. many villages lie several miles from a railway station, so that the younger children may not see a railway train more than once or twice a year. the fathers may be engaged in village trades, such as a shoemaker, carpenter, gardener, general shop merchant, farm labourer, or farmer. the village houses are often cramped and small, but there is wholesome space outside, and generally a good garden which supplies some of the family food; milk and eggs are easily obtainable, and conditions of living are seldom as crowded as in a town. the country children see more of life in complete miniature than the slum or the suburban child can do, for the whole life of the village lies before him. the school is generally in the centre, with a good playground, and of late years a good school garden is frequent. the village church, generally old, is another centre of life, and there is at least the vicarage to give a type of life under different social conditions. the home intellectual background may vary, but on the whole cannot be reckoned on very much; though in some ways it is more narrow than the suburban one, it is often less superficial. in a different way from the slum child, but none the less definitely, the country child comes face to face with the realities of life, in a more natural and desirable way than either of the others. it is difficult to estimate some of the effects of living in the midst of real nature on children; unconsciously, they acquire much deep knowledge impossible to learn through nature study, however good, a kind of knowledge that is part of their being; but how far it affects them emotionally or enters into their scheme of life, is hard to say. as they grow up much of it is merely economic acquirement: if they are to work on the land, or rear cattle, or drive a van through the country, it is all to the good; but one thing is noticeable, that they take very quickly to such allurements of town life as a cinema, or a picture paper or gramophone, and this points to unsatisfied cravings of some sort, not necessarily so unworthy or superficial as the means sought to satisfy them. from these rather extreme cases we get near the solution of the problem; it is quite evident that each of these children brings to school very different contributions of experience on which to build, though their general needs and interests are similar. therefore the curriculum of the school will depend on the general surroundings and circumstances of the children, and all programmes of work and many questions of organisation will be built on this. the model programme so dear to some teachers must be banished, as a doctor would banish a general prescription; no honest teacher can allow this part of her work to be done for her by any one else. therefore the central point is the child's previous experience, and on this the experience provided by school, _i.e._ curriculum and subject matter, depends. one or two examples of the working out of this might make the application clearer. probably the realities of life in relation to money differ greatly. the kind of problem presented to the poor town child will deal with shopping in pennyworths or ounces, with getting coals in pound bagfuls. clothes are generally second-hand, and so ordinary standard prices are out of the question. bread is bought stale and therefore cheaper, early in the morning. preserved milk only is bought, and that in halfpenny quantities. only problems based on these will be real to this child at first. the suburban child's economic experience may be based on his pocket-money, money in the bank, and the normal shopping of ordinary life. the country child is frequently very ignorant of money values; probably it will be necessary to take the country general shop as the basis. he could also begin to estimate the produce of the school garden. the nursery school programme it is quite obvious from the nature of play at this stage that a time-table is out of the question and in fact an outrage against nature. only for social convenience and for the establishment of certain physical habits can there be fixed hours. there must be approximate limits as to the times of arrival and departure, but nothing of the nature of marking registers to record exact minutes. little children sometimes sleep late, or, on the other hand, the mothers may have to leave home very early; all this must be allowed for. there should be fixed times for meals and for sleep, and these should be rigidly observed, and there should be regular times for the children to go to the lavatories; all these establish regularity and self-control, as well as improving general health. but anything in the nature of story periods, games periods, handwork periods, only impedes the variously developing children in their hunger for experiences. their curriculum is life as the teacher has spread it out before them; there are no subjects at this stage; the various aspects ought to be of the nature of a glorious feast to these young children. traherne says in the seventeenth century:-- "will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? those pure and virgin apprehensions i had in my infancy, and that divine light wherewith i was born, are the best unto this day wherein i can see the universe.... verily they form the greatest gift his wisdom can bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. they are unattainable by books and therefore will i teach them by experience.... certainly adam in paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than i when i was a child. "all appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. i was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.... i knew by intuition those things which since my apostasy i collected again by the highest reason.... all things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious.... i saw in all the peace of eden.... is it not that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold? "the corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. i thought it stood from everlasting to everlasting. the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. the green trees when i saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me: ... the skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine: and i the only spectator and enjoyer of it.... so that with much ado i was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which i now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that i may enter into the kingdom of heaven." if this is what life means to the young child, and traherne only records what many of us have forgotten there is little need for interference: we can only spread the feast and stand aside to watch for opportunities. the following extract is given from a teacher's note-book: it shows how many possibilities open out to a teacher, and how impossible it is to keep to a time-table, or even to try to name the activities. the children concerned were about five years old, newly admitted to a poor school in s.e. london. the records are selected from a continuous period, and do not apply to one day:-- plans for the day what actually happened _number occupations._--this will the children played, freely be entirely free and the children chalking most of the time; those will choose their own toys and threading beads were most put them away. interested. again i noticed the lack of idea of colour; i found one new boy placing his sticks according to colour, without knowing the names of the colours. the boys thought the soldiers belonged to them, and laughed at a little girl for choosing them. _language training._--i have i realised this was a failure, discovered that they love to for i asked the children to use imitate sounds, so we will play their boards and chalks for a at this. they could draw a cat definite drawing, and they should and say "miauw," and a duck and have had the time to use them say "quack." they could also freely and discover their use. i imitate the wind. got very little information about their vocabulary. _language training_ (_another i found that many children day_).--i shall try to induce the pronounced words so strangely children to speak to me about their that i could only with difficulty homes, in order to discover any recognise them. one said she difficulties of pronunciation and had a "bresser" with "clates" to make them more fluent. on it and "knies" others spoke of "manckle," "firebrace," "forts." one child speaking of curly hair called it "killeyer." we had no time for the story. _playing with toys._--the noah's arks, dolls, and bricks children will choose their own toys, were used, and i found that the and as far as possible i will put girls who had no dolls at home a child who knows how to use them were delighted to be able to dress next to one who desires to sit and undress them and put them still. to bed. one little girl walked backwards and forwards before the class getting her doll to sleep; the boys were making a noise with their arks and she remarked on this, so we induced them to be silent while the dolls were put to sleep. the boys arranged their animals in long lines. the bricks were much more carefully put away to-day. the transition and the junior school programme even after the nursery school period much of the curriculum and subject matter is in the hands of the children themselves, though the relative proportions will vary according to the children's experiences. it is pretty evident to the honest-minded teacher that the subjects are, in school terms, nature work and elementary science, mathematics, constructive and expressive work, literature, music, language, physical exercise and religion. the business of the younger child is with real things and activity, not with symbols and passivity, therefore he is not really in need of reading, writing, or arithmetic. we hear arguments from ambitious teachers that children are fond of reading lessons because they enjoy the fantasies in which these lessons are wrapped, or the efforts made by the teacher to create interest; we hear that children ask to be taught to read; they also ask to be taught to drive a tram or to cook a dinner; but it is all part of the pretence game of playing at being grown up. they do not need to read while stories and poetry can be told or read to them; they are not ready to make the effort of working for a remote economic end, where there is no real pleasure in the activity, and no opportunity of putting their powers to use. no child under six wants to sit down and read, and it would be very harmful if he did; his business is with real things and with his vocabulary, which is not nearly ready to put into symbols yet. if reading is delayed, hours of weary drudgery will be saved and energy stored for more precious attainments. therefore in the transition class (_i.e._ children over six at lowest) the only addition to the curriculum already set out for the nursery class, would be arithmetic and reading, including writing. the other differences would be in degree only. in the junior class (with children over seven at lowest) a desire to know something of the doings of people in other countries, to hear about other parts of our own land, will lead to the beginnings of geography; while with this less imaginative and more literal period comes the request for stories that are more verbally true, and questions about origins, leading to the beginnings of history. it is very much easier to give the general curriculum than to deal with the choice of actual material, because that is involved largely with the principle of the unity of experience, and, as we know, experiences vary. the normal town and country child, and the abnormal child of poverty have all certain human cravings in common, and these are provided for in the aspects of life or subjects that have been named--but this is far too general an application to be the end of the matter; each subject has many sides to offer. there may be for example the pottery town, the weaving town, the country town, the fishing town, the colliery town: in the country there is the district of the dairy farmer, of the sheep farmer, of the grain grower and miller, of the fruit farmer, of the hop grower, and many districts may partake of more than one characteristic. perhaps the most curious anomaly of experience is that of the child of the london slums who goes "hopping" into some of the loveliest parts of kent, in early autumn. and so in a general way at least the concentrated experience of school must fill gaps and supply experiences that life has not provided for. one of the pottery towns in staffordshire is built on very unfertile clay; there are several potteries in the town belching out smoke, and, in addition, rows of monotonous smoke-blackened houses; almost always a yellow pall of smoke hangs over the whole district, and even where the edge of the country might begin, the grass and trees are poor and blackened, and distant views are seen through a haze. there are almost no gardens in the town, and very little attempt has been made to beautify it, because the results are so disappointing. beauty, therefore, in various forms must be a large part of the curriculum: already design is a common interest in the pottery museums of the district, and this could be made a motive for the older children; but in the junior and nursery school pictures of natural beauty, wild flowers if it is possible to get them, music, painting and drawing, and literature should bulk largely enough to make a permanent impression on the children. in a very remote country village where life seems to go slowly, and days are long, children should be encouraged, by means of the school influence, to make things that absorb thought and interest, to tell and hear stories. storytelling in the evening round the fire is a habit of the past, and might well supply some of the cravings that have to be satisfied by the "pictures." most of us have to keep ourselves well in hand when we listen to a recitation in much the same way as when a slate pencil used to creak; it would be very much better if the art of storytelling were cultivated at school, encouraged at home, and applied to entertainments. indeed the entertainments of a village school, instead of being the unnatural and feverish production of hours of overtime, might well be the ordinary outcome of work both at school and at home--and thus a motive for leisure is naturally supplied and probably a hobby initiated. it is profitable sometimes to group the subjects of experience in order to preserve balance. all getting of experience is active, but some kinds more obviously than others. undoubtedly in hearing stories and poetry, in watching a snail or a bee, in listening to music, the activity is mental rather than physical and assimilation of ideas is more direct; in discovering experiences by means of construction, expression, experiment or imitation, assimilation is less direct but often more permanent and secure. froebel discriminates between impression and expression, or taking in and giving out, and although he constantly emphasised that the child takes in by giving, it is convenient to recognise this distinction. another helpful grouping is the more objective one. some subjects refer more particularly to human conduct, the enlargement of experiences of human beings, and the building up of the ideal: these are literature, music, history and geography; others refer to life other than that of human beings, commonly known as nature study and science; others to the properties of inanimate things, and to questions throughout all life of measurement, size and force--this is known as mathematics; others of the life behind the material and the spiritual world--this is known as religion. chapter xx gaining experience through freedom "the atmosphere of freedom is the only atmosphere in which a child can gain experiences that will help to develop character." the principle of freedom underlies all the activities of the school and does not refer to conduct simply; intellectual and emotional aspects of discipline are too often ignored and we have as a product the commonplace, narrow, imitative person, too timid or too indolent to think a new thought, or to feel strongly enough to stand for a cause. self-control is the goal of discipline, but independent thinking, enthusiasm and initiative are all included in the term. it will be well to discriminate between the occasions, both in the nursery school and in the transition and junior classes, when a child should be free to learn by experience and when he should be controlled from without. we shall probably find occasions which partake of the nature of each. the nursery school is a collection of individuals presumably from - / to - / years of age. they know no social life beyond the family life, and family experience is relative to the size of the family. in any case they have not yet measured themselves against their peers, with the exception of the occasional twin. a few months ago about twenty children of this description formed the nucleus of a new nursery school where, as far as possible, the world in miniature was spread out before them, and they were guided in their entrance to it by an experienced teacher and a young helper. for the first few weeks the chief characteristic was noise; the children rushed up and down the large room, shouting, and pushing any portable toys they could find. one little boy of - / employed himself in what can only be called "punching" the other children, snatching their possessions away from them and responding to the teacher by the law of contra-suggestion. he was the most intelligent child in the school. he generally left a line of weeping children behind him, and several began to imitate him. the pugnacious instinct requires little encouragement. lunch was a period of snatching, spilling, and making plans to get the best. many of the toys provided were carelessly trampled upon and broken: requests to put away things at the end of the day were almost unavailing. when the time for sleeping came in the afternoon many of the children refused to lie down: some consented but only to sing and talk as they lay. only one, a child of - / , slept, because he cried himself to sleep from sheer strangeness. this apparently unbeautiful picture is only the first battle of the individual on his entrance to the life of the community. on the other hand, there were intervals of keen joy: water, sand and clay chiefly absorbed the younger children: the older ones wanted to wash up and scrub, and many spent a good deal of time looking at picture-books. this was the raw material for the teacher to begin with: the children came from comfortable suburban homes: none were really poor, and many had known no privation. they were keen for experiences and disposed to be very friendly to her. after five months there is a marked difference in spirit. the noise is modified because the children found other absorbing interests, though at times nature still demands voice production. during lunch time and sleeping time there is quiet, but the teacher has never _asked_ for silence unless there was some such evident reason. there is no silence game. the difference has come from within the children. all now lie down in the afternoon quietly, and the greater number sleep; but there has been no command or any kind of general plan: again the desire has gradually come to individuals from suggestion and imitation. lunch is quite orderly, but not yet without an occasional accident or struggle. there is much less fighting, but primitive man is still there. the most marked development is in the growth of the idea of "taking turns"; the children have begun to master this all-important lesson of life. the strong pugnacious habit in the little punching boy reached a point that showed he was unable to conquer it from within: about two months after his arrival the teacher consulted his mother, who confirmed all that the teacher had experienced: her prescription was smacking. after a good deal of thought and many ineffectual talks and experiments with the boy, the teacher came to the conclusion that the mother was right: she took him to the cloakroom after the next outbreak and smacked his hands: he was surprised and a little hurt, but very soon forgot and continued his practices: on the next occasion the teacher repeated the punishment and it was never again necessary. for a few days he was at a loss for an occupation because punching had become a confirmed habit, but soon other interests appealed to him: he has never changed in his trust in his teacher of whom he is noticeably very fond, and he has now realised that he must control a bad habit. this example has been given at length to illustrate the relation of government to freedom. if these children had been in the ordinary baby room, subject to a time-table, to constant plans by the teacher for their activities, few or none of these occasions would have occurred: the incipient so-called naughtiness would have been displayed only outside, in the playground or at home: there would have been little chance of chaos, of fighting, of punching, of trying to get the best thing and foremost place, there would have been little opportunity for choice and less real absorption, because of the time-table. the children would have been happy enough, but they would not have been trained to live as individuals. outward docility is a fatal trait and very common in young children; probably it is a form of self-preservation. but the real child only lies in wait to make opportunities out of school. the school is therefore not preparing him for life. * * * * * freedom in the transition and the junior school must be differently applied: individual life begins to merge into community life, and the children begin to learn that things right for individuals may be wrong for the community. but the problem of freedom is not as easy as the problem of authority: standards must be greatly altered and outward docility no longer mistaken for training in self-control. individual training cannot suddenly become class discipline, neither can children be switched from the nursery school to a full-blown class system. the idea of class teaching must be postponed, for out of it come most of the difficulties of discipline, and it is not the natural arrangement at this transitional period. a teacher is imposing on a number of very different individuals a system that says their difficulties are alike, that they must all work at one rate and in one way: and so we have the weary "reading round" class, when the slow ones struggle and the quick ones find other and unlawful occupation: we have the number lessons broken by the teacher's breathless attempts to see that all the class follows: we have the handwork that imposes an average standard of work that fits nobody exactly. intellectual freedom can only come by individual or group work, while class teaching is only for such occasions as a literature or a singing lesson, or the presentation of an occasional new idea in number. individual and group work need much organisation, but while classes consist of over forty children there is no other way to permit intellectual and moral freedom. of course the furniture of the room will greatly help to make this more possible, and it is hoped that an enlightened authority will not continue to supply heavy iron-framed desks for the junior school, those described as "desks for listening." the prevailing atmosphere should be a busy noise and not silence--it should be the noise of children working, oftener than of the teacher teaching, _i.e._ teaching the whole class. the teacher should be more frequently among the children than at her desk, and the children's voices should be heard more often than hers. such children will inevitably become intellectually independent and morally self-controlled. most of the order should be taken in hand by children in office, and they should be distinguished by a badge: most questions of punishment should be referred to them. this means a constant appeal to the law that is behind both teacher and children and which they learn to reach apart from the teacher's control. "where 'thou shalt' of the law becomes 'i will' of the doer, then we are free." iii. consideration of the aspects of experience the aim of the following chapters is to show how principles may be applied to what are usually known as subjects of the curriculum, and what place these subjects take in the acquisition of experience. an exhaustive or detailed treatment of method is not intended, but merely the establishment of a point of view and method of application. chapter xxi experiences of human conduct it is always difficult to see the beginnings of things: we know that stories form the raw material of morality, it is not easy to trace morality in _little black sambo, the three bears, alice in wonderland,_ or _the sleeping beauty,_ but nevertheless morality is there if we recognise morality in everyday things. it is not too much to say that everybody should have an ideal, even a burglar: his ideal is to be a good and thorough burglar, and probably if he is a burglar of the finer sort, it is to play fair to the whole gang. it is better to be a burglar with an ideal than a blameless person with very little soul or personality, who just slides through life accepting things: it is better to have a coster's ideal of a holiday than to be too indifferent or stupid to care or to know what you want. now ideals are supposed to be the essence of morality and morality comes to us through experience, and only experience tests its truth. the story with a moral is generally neither literature nor morality, except such unique examples as _the pilgrim's progress _or _everyman_. the kind of experience with which morality is concerned is experience of human life in various circumstances, and the way people behave under those circumstances. the beginning of such experience is our own behaviour and the behaviour of other people we know, but this is too limited an experience to produce a satisfactory ideal; so we crave for something wider. it is curious how strong is the craving for this kind of experience in all normal children, in whom one would suppose sense experiences and especially muscular experiences to be enough. the need to know about people other than ourselves, and yet not too unlike, in circumstances other than our own, and yet not too strange, seems to be a necessary part of our education, and we interpret it in the light of our own personal conduct. out of this, as well as out of our direct experience, we build our ideal. when one realises how an ideal may colour the whole outlook of a person, one begins to realise what literature means to a child. the early ideal is crude; it may be jack the giant-killer, or an engine-driver, cinderella, or the step-cleaner; this may grow into hiawatha or robinson crusoe, for boys, and a fairy tale princess or one of the "little women" for girls. in every hero a child half-unconsciously sees himself, and the ideal stimulates all that hidden life which is probably the most important part of his growth. as indirect experiences grow, or in other words as he hears or reads more stories, his ideal widens, and his knowledge of the problems of life is enlarged. this is the raw material of morality, for out of his answers to these problems he builds up standards of conduct and of judgement. he projects himself into his own ideal, and he projects himself into the experiences of other people: he lives in both: this is imagination of the highest kind, it is often called sympathy, but the term is too limited, it is rather imaginative understanding. there is another side of life grasped by means of this new world of experience, and that is, the spiritual side that lies between conduct and ideals; children have always accepted the supernatural quite readily and it is not to be wondered at, for all the world is new and therefore supernatural to them. magic is done daily in children's eyes, and there is no line between what is understandable and what is not, until adults try to interpret it for them. they are curious about birth and death and all origins: thunder is terrifying, the sea is enthralling, the wind is mysterious, the sky is immense, and all suggest a power beyond: in this the children are reproducing the race experience as expressed in myths, when power was embodied in a god or goddess. therefore the fairy world or the giant world, or the wood full of dwarfs and witches' houses, is as real to them, and as acceptable, as any part of life. it is their recognition of a world of spirits which later on mingles itself with the spiritual life of religion. that life is behind all matter, is the main truth they hold, and while it is difficult here to disentangle morality from religion, it is supremely evident that a very great and significant side of a child's education is before us. it is by means of the divine gift of imagination, probably the most spiritual of a child's gifts, that he can lay hold of all that the world of literature has to offer him. because of imagination he is independent of poverty, monotony, and the indifference of other people; he has a world of his own in which nothing is impossible. edwin pugh says of a child of the slums who was passionately fond of reading cheap literature:--"it was by means of this penny passport to heaven that she escaped from the hell of her surroundings. it was in the maudlin fancies of some poor besotted literary hack maybe, that she found surcease from the pains of weariness, the carks and cares of her miserable estate." a teacher realising this, should feel an almost unspeakable sense of responsibility in having to select and present matter: but the problem should be solved on the one hand by her own high standard of story material, and on the other by her knowledge of the child's needs. according to his experiences of life the interpretation of the story will differ: for example, it was found that the children of a low slum neighbourhood translated _jack the giant-killer_ into terms of a street fight: to children living by a river or the sea, the _water-babies_ would mean very much, while _jan of the windmill_ would be more familiar ground for country children. fairy stories of the best kind have a universal appeal. in choosing a story a teacher should be aware of the imperishable part of it, the truth around which it grew; sometimes the truth may seem a very commonplace one, sometimes a curious one. for example, very young children generally prefer stories of home life because round the family their experience gathers: the subject seems homely, but it is really one of the fundamental things of life and the teacher should realise this in such a way that the telling or reading of the story makes the kernel its central point. to some children the ideal home life comes only through literature: daily experiences rather contradict it. humour is an important factor in morality; unless a person is capable of seeing the humor of a situation he is likely to be wanting in a sense of balance; the humor of a situation is often caused by the wrong proportion or wrong balance of things: for example the humour of _the mad tea-party_ lies, partly at least, in the absurd gravity with which the animals regarded the whole situation, the extreme literal-mindedness of alice, and the exaggerated imitation of human beings: a really moral person must have balance as well as sympathy, else he sees things out of proportion. these examples make evident that we are not to seek for anything very patently high-flown in the stories for children; it is life in all its phases that gives the material, but it must be true life: not false or sentimental or trivial life: this will rule out the "pretty" stories for children written by trivial people in teachers' papers, or the pseudo-nature story, or the artificial myth of the "how did" type, or the would-be childish story where the language is rather that of the grown-up imitating children than that of real children. of late years, with the discovery of children, children's literature has grown, and there is a good deal to choose from past and present writers. there is no recognised or stereotyped method of telling a story to children: it is something much deeper than merely an acquired art, it is the teacher giving something of her personality to the children, something that is most precious. one of the finest of our english kindergarten teachers once said, "i feel almost as if i ought to prepare my soul before telling a story to young children," and this is the sense in which the story should be chosen and told. there are, of course, certain external qualifications which must be so fully acquired as to be used unconsciously, such as a good vocabulary, power over one's voice, a recognition of certain literary phases in a story, such as the working up to the dramatic crisis, the working down to the end so that it shall not fall flat, and the dramatic touches that give life; these are certainly most necessary, and should be studied and cultivated; but a teacher should not be hampered in her telling by being too conscious of them. rather she should feel such respect and even reverence for this side of a child's education that the framework and setting can only be of the best, always remembering at the same time what is framework and setting, and what is essence. much that has been said about the method and aim of stories might apply to those taken from the bible, but they need certain additional considerations. here religion and morality come very closely together: the recognition of a definite personality behind all circumstances of life, to whom our conduct matters, gives a soul to morality. the old testament is a record of the growth of a nation more fully conscious of god than is the record of any other nation, and because of this children can understand god in human life when they read such stories as the childhood of moses and of samuel. children resemble the young jewish nation in this respect: they accept the direct intervention of god in the life of every day. their primitive sense of justice, which is an eye for an eye, will make them welcome joyfully the plagues of egypt and the crossing of the red sea. it would be premature to force on them the more mature idea of mercy, which would probably lead to confusion of judgement: they must be clear about the balance of things before they readjust it for themselves. much of the material in the old testament is hardly suitable for very young children, but the most should be made of what there is: the lives of eastern people are interesting to children and help to make the phraseology of the psalms and even of the narratives clear to them. wonder stories such as the creation, the flood, the burning bush, elijah's experiences, appeal to them on another side, the side that is eager to wonder: the accounts of the childhood of ishmael, isaac, joseph, moses, david and samuel, and the little syrian maid, come very close to them. such stories should be given to young children so that they form part of the enchanted memory of childhood--which is permanent. with the new testament the problem is more difficult: one hesitates to bring the life of christ before children until they are ready to understand, even in some degree, its significance; the subject is apt to be dealt with either too familiarly, and made too commonplace and everyday a matter, or as something so far removed from human affairs as to be mysterious and remote to a child. to mix old and new testament indiscriminately, as, for example, by taking them on alternate days, is unforgivable, and no teacher who has studied the bible seriously could do so, if she cared about the religious training of her children, and understood the bible. if the children can realise something of the sense in which christ helped human beings, then some of the incidents in his life might be given, such as his birth, his work of healing, feeding and helping the poor, and some of his stories, such as the lost sheep, the lost son, the sower, the good samaritan. it is difficult to speak strongly enough of the mistreatment of scripture, under the name of religion: it has been spoilt more than any other subject in the curriculum, chiefly by being taken too often and too slightly, by teachers who may be in themselves deeply religious, but who have not applied intelligence to this matter. the religious life of a young child is very direct: there is only a little in the religious experiences of the jews that can help him, and much that can puzzle and hinder him; their interpretation of god as revengeful, cruel and one-sided in his dealings with their enemies must greatly puzzle him, when he hears on the other hand that god is the father of all the nations on the earth. what is suitable should be taken and taken well, but there is no virtue in the bible misunderstood. poetry is a form of literature which appeals to children _if they are not made to learn it by rote_. unconsciously they learn it very quickly and easily, if they understand in a general way the meaning, and if they like the sound of the words. rhythm is an early inheritance and can be encouraged by poetry, music and movement. the sound of words appeals strongly to young children, and rhyming is almost a game. the kind of poetry preferred varies a good deal but on the whole narrative or nonsense verses seem most popular; few children are ready for sentiment or reflection even about themselves, and this is why some of stevenson's most charming poems about children are not appreciated by them as much as by grown-up people. and for the same reason only a few nature poems are really liked. without doubt, the only aim in giving poetry to children is to help them to appreciate it, and the only method to secure this is to read it to them appreciatively and often. besides such anthologies as _the golden staircase,_ e.v. lucas's _book of verses for children,_ and others, we must go to the bible for poems like the song of miriam, or of deborah, and the psalms; to shakespeare for such songs as "where the bee sucks," "i know a bank," "ye spotted snakes," either with or without music; to longfellow's _hiawatha_ for descriptive pieces, and to scott and tennyson for ballads and songs, and to many other simple classic sources outside the ordinary collections. in both prose and poetry, probably the ultimate aim is appreciation of beauty in human conduct. clutton brock says, "the value of art is the value of the aesthetic activity of the spirit, and we must all value that before we can value works of art rightly: and ultimately we must value this glory of the universe, to which we give the name of beauty when we apprehend it." again he says, "parents, nurses and teachers ought to be aware that the child when he forgets himself in the beauty of the world is passing through a sacred experience which will enrich and glorify the whole of his life." if all this is what literature means in a child's experiences of life, then it must be given a worthy place in the time-table and curriculum and in the serious preparation by the teacher for her work. chapter xxii experiences of the natural world the first experiences the child gains from the world of nature are those of beauty, of sound, colour and smell. flowers at first are just lovely and sweet-smelling; the keen senses of a child are more deeply satisfied with colour and scent than we have any idea of, unless some faint memory of what it meant remains with us. but he begins to grasp real scientific truth from his experiences with the elements which have for him such a mysterious attraction; by the very contact with water something in the child responds to its stimulus. mud and sand have their charms, quite intangible, but universal, from prince to coster; a bonfire is something that arouses a kind of primeval joy. again, race experience reproducing itself may account for all this, and it must be satisfied. the demand for contact with the rest of nature is a strong and fierce part of human nature, and it means the growth of something in life that we cannot do without. we induce children to come into our schools when this hunger is at its fiercest, and very often we do nothing to satisfy it, but set them in rooms to look at things inanimate when their very being is crying out for life. "i want something and i don't know what to want" is the expression of a state very frequent in children, and not infrequent in grown-up people, because they have been balked of something. how, then, can we provide for their experience of this side of life? we have tried to do so in the past by object and nature lessons, but we must admit that they are not the means by which young children seek to know life, or by which they appreciate its beauty. we have been trying to kill too many birds with one stone in our economic way; "to train the powers of observation," "to teach a child to express himself," "to help a child to gain useful knowledge about living things," have been the most usual aims. and the method has been that of minute examination of a specimen from the plant or animal world, utterly detached from its surroundings, considered by the docile child in parts, such as leaves, stem, roots, petals, and uses; or head, wings, legs, tail, and habits. the innocent listener might frequently think with reason that a number lesson rather than a nature lesson was being given. the day of the object lesson is past, and to young children the nature lesson must become nature work. it is in the term "nature lesson" that the root of the mischief lies: nature is not a lesson to the young child, it is an interest from which he seeks to gain more pleasure, by means of his own activity: plants encourage him to garden, animals stir his desire to watch, feed and protect; water, earth and fire arouse his craving to investigate and experiment: there is no motive for passive study at this juncture, and without a motive or purpose all study leads to nothing. adults compare, and count the various parts of a living thing for purposes of classification connected with the subdivisions of life which we call botany and zoology; but such things are far removed from the young child's world--only gradually does it begin to dawn on him that there are interesting likenesses, and that in this world, as in his own, there are relationships; when he realises this, the time for a nature lesson has come. but much direct experience must come first. in setting out the furnishing of the school the need for this activity is implied. no school worthy of the name can do without a garden, any more than it can do without reading books, or blackboards, indeed the former need is greater: if it is possible, and possibilities gradually merge into acceptances, a pond should be in the middle of the garden, and trees should also be considered as part of the whole. it is not difficult for the ordinary person to make a pond, or even to begin a garden. in a school situated in s.e. london in the midst of rows of monotonous little houses, and close to a busy railway junction, a miracle was performed: the playground was not very large, and of the usual uncompromising concrete. the children, most of whose fathers worked on the railway, lived in the surrounding streets, and most of them had a back-yard of sorts; they had little or no idea of a garden. one of the teachers had, however, a vision which became a reality. she asked her children to help to make a garden, and for weeks every child brought from his back-yard his little paper bag of soil which was deposited over some clinkers that were spread out in a narrow border against the outside wall; in a few months there was a border of two yards in which flowers were planted: the caretaker, inspired by the sight, did his share of fixing a wooden strip as a kind of supporting border to the whole: in two years the garden had spread all round the outside wall of the playground, and belonged to several classes. an even greater miracle was performed in a dock-side school, where to most of the children a back-yard was a luxury beyond all possibility. the school playground was very small, and evening classes made a school garden quite impossible. but the head mistress was one who saw life full of possibilities, and so she saw a garden even in the sordidness. round the parish church was a graveyard long disused, and near one of the gates a small piece of ground that had never been used for any graveyard purpose: it was near enough to the school to be possible, and in a short time the miracle happened--the entrance to the graveyard became a children's flowering garden. inside the school where plants and flowers in pots are numerous, a part of the morning should be spent in the care of these: few people know how to arrange flowers, and fewer how to feed and wash them; if there are an aquarium or chrysalis boxes, they have to be attended to: all this should be a regular duty with a strong sense of responsibility attached to it; it is curious how many people are content to live in an atmosphere of decaying matter. if the children enjoy so intensely the colour of the leaves and flowers they will be glad to have the opportunity of painting them; this is as much a part of nature work as any other, and it should be used as such, because it emphasises so strongly the side of appreciation of beauty, a side very often neglected. it is here that the individual paint box is so important. if children are to have any sense of colour they must learn to match very truthfully; there is a great difference between the blue of the forget-me-not and of the bluebell, but only by experiment can children discover that the difference lies in the amount of red in the latter. by means of discoveries of this kind they will see new colours in life around them, and a new depth of meaning will come to their everyday observations. this is true observation, not the "look and say" of the oral lesson, which has no purpose in it, and leads to no natural activity, or to appreciation. it is difficult to satisfy the interest in animals. in connection with the nursery school the most suitable have been mentioned. the transition and junior school children may see others when they go for excursions. at this stage, too, children have a great desire to learn about wild animals, and the need often arises out of their literature: the camel that brought rebecca to isaac, the wolf that adopted mowgli, the reindeer that carried kay and gerda, the fox that tried to eat the seven little kids, androcles' lion, and black sambo's tiger, might form an interesting series, helped by pictures of the creature _in its own home_. it is difficult to say whether this may be termed literature, geography, or nature study. the difficulty serves to show the unity of life at this period. books such as seton thompson's, long's, and kearton's, and many others, supply living experiences of animal life impossible to get from less direct sources. as children get older, and have the power to look back, they will feel the necessity of keeping records; and thus the nature calendar, forerunner of geography, will be adopted naturally. another important feature in nature experiences is the excursion. froebel says: "not only children and boys, but indeed many adults, fare with nature and her character as ordinary men fare with the air. they live in it and yet scarcely know it as something distinct ... therefore these children and boys who spend all their time in the fields and forests see and feel nothing of the beauties of nature and their influence on the human heart. they are like people who have grown up in a very beautiful country and who have no idea of its beauty and its spirit ... therefore it is so important that boys and adults should go into the fields and forests, together striving to receive into their hearts and minds the life and spirit of nature." it is evident from this that excursions are as necessary in the country as in the town, where instead of the "fields and forests" perhaps only a park is possible, but there is no virtue in an excursion taken without preparation. the teacher must first of all visit the place and see what it is likely to give the children. she must tell them something of it, give them some aim in going there, such as collecting leaves or fruits, or recording different shapes of bare trees, or collecting things that grow in the grass. these are examples of what a town park might yield. within one group of children there might be many with different aims. during the days following the excursion time should be spent in using these experiences, either by means of painting and modelling, or making classified collections of things found, or compiling records, oral or written. otherwise the excursion degenerates into a school treat without its natural enjoyment. with regard to the inevitable gaps in the children's minds in connection with the world of living things, such pictures as the following should be in every town school: a pine wood, a rabbit warren, a natural pond, a ditch and hedge, a hayfield in june, a wild daffodil patch, a sheet of bluebells, a cornfield at different stages, an orchard in spring and in autumn, and many others. these must be constantly used when they are needed, and not misused in the artificial method known as "picture talks." there is another side to nature work. froebel says: "the things of nature form a more beautiful ladder between heaven and earth than that seen by jacob; not a one-sided ladder leading in one direction, but an all-sided one leading in all directions. not in dreams is it seen; it is permanent, it surrounds us on all sides." froebel believed that contact with nature helps a child's realisation of god, and any one who believes in early religious experience must agree; a child's early questions and difficulties, as well as his early awe and fear show it--he is probably nearer to god in his nature work than in many of the _daily_ scripture lessons. all his education should be permeated by spiritual feeling, but there are some aspects in which the realisation is clearer, and possibly his contact with nature stands out as the highest in this respect. there is no conscious method or art in bringing this about; the teacher must feel it and be convinced of it. thus we come to the conclusion that the nursery school nature work can be safely left to look after itself, provided the surroundings are satisfying and the children are free. in the transition and the junior school there should be no nature lessons of the object lesson type, but plenty of nature work, leading to talks, handwork, and poetry. the aim is not economic or informational at this stage, but the development of pure appreciation and interest. there can hardly be a regular place on the time-table for such irregular work, comprising excursions, gardening, handwork, and literature at least, and depending on the weather and the seasons. there should always be a regular morning time for attending to plants and animals and for the nature calendar, but no "living" teacher will be a slave to mere time-table thraldom. chapter xxiii experiences of mathematical truths by means of toys, handwork and games, as well as various private individual experiments, a child touches on most sides of mathematics in the nursery class. in experimenting with bricks he must of necessity have considered relative size, balance and adjustment, form and symmetry; in fitting them back into their boxes some of the most difficult problems of cubic content; in weighing out "pretence" sugar and butter by means of sand and clay new problems are there for consideration; in making a paper-house questions of measurement evolve. this is all in the incidental play of the nursery school, and yet we might say that a child thus occupied is learning mathematics more than anything else. here, if he remained till six, he did a certain amount of necessary counting, and he may have acquired skill in recognising groups, he may have unconsciously and incidentally performed achievements in the four rules, but never, of course, in any shortened or technical form. probably he knows some figures. it is best to give these to a child when he asks for or needs them, as in the case of records of games. on the other hand he may be content with strokes. various mathematical relationships are made clear in his games or trials of strength, such as distance in relation to time or strength, weight in relation to power and to balance, length and breadth in relation to materials, value of material in relation to money or work. by means of many of his toys the properties of solids have become working knowledge to him. here, then, is our starting-point for the transition period. after the nursery stage undoubtedly the aim of the transition class is partly to continue by means of games and dramatic play the kind of knowledge gained in the nursery school; but it has also the task of beginning to organise such knowledge, as the grouping into tens and hundreds. this organisation of raw material and the presenting of shortened processes, as occur in the first four rules, forms the work also of the junior school. to give to a child shortened processes which he would be very unlikely to discover in less than a lifetime, is simply giving him the experience of the race, as primitive man did to his son. but the important point is to decide when a child's discovery should end and the teacher's demonstration begin. this is the period when we are accustomed to speak of beginning "abstract" work; it is well to be clear what it means, and how it stands related to a child's need for experience. when we leave the problems of life, such as shopping, keeping records of games and making measurements for construction; and when we begin to work with pure number, we are said to be dealing with the abstract. formerly dealing with pure number was called "simple," and dealing with actual things, such as money and measures, "compound," and they were taken in this order. but experience has reversed the process, and a child comes to see the need of abstract practice when he finds he is not quick enough or accurate enough, or his setting out seems clumsy, in actual problems. this was discussed at greater length in the chapter on play. for instance, he might set down the points of a game by strokes, each line representing a different opponent: john |||||||||||||||| henry ||||||||||| tom ||| he will see how difficult it is to estimate at a glance the exact score, and how easy it is to be inaccurate. it seems the moment to show him that the idea of grouping or enclosing a certain number, and always keeping to the same grouping, is helpful: john |||||||||| |||||| = ten and singles. henry |||||||||| | = ten and single. tom ||| = singles. after doing this a good many times he could be told that this is a universal method, and he would doubtless enjoy the purely puzzle pleasure in working long sums to perfect practice. this pleasure is very common in children at this stage, but too often it comes to them merely through being shown the "trick" of carrying tens. they have reached a purely abstract point, but they cannot get through it without some more material help. the following is an example of the kind of help that can be given in getting clear the concept of the ten grouping and the processes it involves: [illustration: board with hooks, in ranks of nine, and rings] the whole apparatus is a rectangular piece of wood about / of an inch thick, and about x - / feet of surface. it is painted white, and the horizontal bars are green, so that the divisions may be apparent at a distance; it has perpendicular divisions breaking it up into three columns, each of which contains rows of nine small dresser hooks. it can be hung on an easel or supported by its own hinge on a table. each of the divisions represents a numerical grouping, the one on the right is for singles or units, the central one for tens, and the left side one for hundreds: the counters used are button moulds, dipped in red ink, with small loops of string to hang on the hooks: it is easily seen by a child that, after nine is reached, the units can no longer remain in their division or "house," but must be gathered together into a bunch (fastened by a safety pin) and fixed on one of the hooks of the middle division. sums of two or three lines can thus be set out on the horizontal bars, and in processes of addition the answer can be on the bottom line. it is very easy, by this concrete means, to see the process in subtraction, and indeed the whole difficulty of dealing with ten is made concrete. the whole of a sum can be gone through on this board with the button-moulds, and on boards and chalk with figures, side by side, thus interpreting symbol by material; but the whole process is abstract. the piece of apparatus is less abstract only in degree than the figures on the blackboard, because neither represents real life or its problems: in abstract working we are merely going off at a side issue for the sake of practice, to make us more competent to deal with the economic affairs of life. there is a place for sticks and counters, and there is a place for money and measures, but they are not the same: the former represents the abstract and the latter the concrete problem if used as in real life: the bridge between the abstract and the concrete is largely the work of the transition class and junior school, in respect of the foundations of arithmetic known as the first four rules. games of skill, very thorough shopping or keeping a bankbook, or selling tickets for tram or train, represent the kind of everyday problem that should be the centre of the arithmetic work at this transition stage; and out of the necessities of these problems the abstract and semi-abstract work should come, but it should _never_ precede the real work. a real purpose should underlie it all, a purpose that is apparent and stimulating enough to produce willing practice. a child will do much to be a good shopkeeper, a good tram conductor, a good banker; he will always play the game for all it is worth. chapter xxiv experiences by means of doing in the nursery school activity is the chief characteristic: one of its most usual forms is experimenting with tools and materials, such as chalk, paints, scissors, paper, sand, clay and other things. the desire to experiment, to change the material in some way, to gratify the senses, especially the muscular one, may be stronger than the desire to construct. the handwork play of the nursery school is therefore chiefly by means of imitation and experiment, and direct help is usually quite unwelcome to the child under six. there is little more to be said in the way of direction than, "provide suitable material, give freedom, and help, if the child wants it." but the case is rather different in the transitional stage. as the race learnt to think by doing, so children seem to approach thought in that way; they have a natural inclination to do in the first case; they try, do wrongly, consider, examine, observe, and do again: for example, a girl wants to make a doll's bonnet like the baby's; she begins impulsively to cut out the stuff, finds it too small, tries to visualise the right size, examines the real bonnet, and makes another attempt. at some apparently odd moment she stumbles on a truth, perhaps the relation of one form to another in the mazes of bonnet-making; it is at these odd moments that we learn. or a boy may be painting a christmas card, and in another odd moment he may _feel_ something of the beauty of colour, if, for example, he is copying holly-berries. no purposeless looking at them would have stirred appreciation. whether the end is doing, or whether it is thinking, the two are inextricably connected; in the earlier stages the way to know and feel is very often by action, and here is the basis of the maxim that handwork is a method. this idea has often been only half digested, and consequently it has led to a very trivial kind of application; a nature lesson of the "look and say" description has been followed by a painting lesson; a geography lesson, by the making of a model. if the method of learning by doing was the accepted aim of the teacher then it was not carried out, for this is learning and then doing, not learning for the purpose of doing, but doing for the purpose of testing the learning, which is quite another matter, and not a very natural procedure with young children. many people have tried to make things from printed directions, a woman may try to make a blouse and a man to make a knife-box; their procedure is not to separate the doing and the learning process; probably they have first tried to do, found need for help, and gone to the printed directions, which they followed side by side with the doing; and in the light of former failures or in the course of looking or of experimenting, they stumbled upon knowledge: this is learning by doing. therefore the making of a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way; there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very careful discrimination in selection of knowledge, and to pains taken to retain it. if this is fully understood by a teacher and she is content to take nature's way, and abide for nature's time to see results, then her methods will be appropriately applied: she will see that she is not training a race of box-makers, but that she is guiding children to discover things that they need to know in a natural way, and ensuring that as these facts are discovered they shall be used. consequently neither haste nor perfection of finish must cloud the aim; it is not the output that matters but the method by which the children arrive at the finished object, not forty good boxes, but forty good thinkers. dewey has put it most clearly when he says that the right test of an occupation consists "in putting the maximum of consciousness into whatever is done." froebel says, "what man tries to represent or do he begins to understand." this is what we should mean by saying that handwork is a method of learning. but handwork has its own absolute place as well. a child wants to acquire skill in this direction even more consciously than he wants to learn: if he has been free, in the nursery class, to experiment with materials, and if he knows some of his limitations, he is now, in the transition class, ready for help, and he should get it as he needs it. this may run side by side with the more didactic side of handwork which has been described, but it is more likely that in practice the two are inextricably mixed up; and this does not matter if the two ends are clear in the teacher's mind; both sides have to be reckoned with. the important thing to know is the kind of help that should be given, and when and how it is needed. it is well to remember that in this connection a child's limitations are not final, but only mark stages: for example, in his early attempts to use thick cardboard he cannot discover the neat hinge that is made by the process known as a "half-cut"; he tries in vain to bend the cardboard, so as to secure the same result. there are two ways of helping him: either he can be quite definitely shown and made to imitate, or he can be set to think about it; he is given a cardboard knife and allowed to experiment: if he fails, it may be suggested that a clean edge can only be got by some form of cutting; probably he will find out the rest of the process. the second method is the better one, because it promotes thinking, while the first only promotes pure imitation and the habit of reckoning on this easy solution of difficulties. a dull child may have to be shown, but there are few such children, unless they have been trained to dulness. imitation is not, however, always a medicine for dulness, nor does it always produce dulness. there is a time for imitation and there is a kind of imitation that is very intelligent. for example, a child may come across a toy aeroplane and wish to make one; he will examine it carefully, think over the uses of parts and proceed to make one as like it as possible: here again is the maximum of consciousness, the essence of thinking. or the imitation may consist in following verbal directions: this is far from easy if the teacher is at all vague, and promotes valuable effort if she is clear but not diffuse: the putting of words into action necessitates a considerable amount of imagining, and the establishment of very important associations in brain centres. such cases might occur in connection with weaving, cardboard and paper work, or the more technical processes of drawing and painting, where race experience is actually _given_ to a child, by means of which he leaps over the experiences of centuries. this is progress. if a teacher is to take handwork seriously, and not as a pretty recreation with pleasing results, she should be fully conscious of all that it means, and apply this definitely in her work: it is so easy to be trivial while appearing to be thorough by having well-finished work produced, which has necessitated little hard thinking on the child's part. construction gives a sense of power, a strengthening of the will, ability to concentrate on a purpose in learning, a social sense of serviceableness, a deepened individuality: but this can only be looked for if a child is allowed to approach it in the right way, first as an experimenter and investigator, or as an artist, and afterwards as a learner, who is also an individual, and learns in his own way and at his own rate: but if the teacher's ambition is external and economic then the child is a tool in her hands, and will remain a tool. we cannot expect the fruits of the spirit if our goal is a material one. one of the lessons of the war is economy. in handwork this has come to us through the quest for materials, but it has been a blessing, if now and then in disguise. in the more formal period of handwork only prepared, almost patented material was used; everything was "requisitioned" and eager manufacturers supplied very highly finished stuff. not very many years ago, the keeper of a "kindergarten" stall at an exhibition said, while pointing to cards cut and printed with outlines for sewing and pricking, "we have so many orders for these that we can afford to lay down considerable plant for their production." an example in another direction is that of a little girl who attended one of the best so-called kindergartens of the time: she was afflicted, while at home, with the "don't know what to do" malady; her mother suggested that she might make some of the things she made at school, but she negatived that at once with the remark, "i couldn't do that, you see, because we have none of the right kind of stuff to make them of here." it is quite unnecessary to give more direct details as to the kind of work suitable and the method of doing it; more than enough books of help have been published on every kind of material, and it might perhaps be well if we made less use of such terms as "clay-modelling," "cardboard-work," "raffia," and took handwork more in the sense of constructive or expressive work, letting the children select one or several media for their purpose; they ought to have access to a variety of material; and except when they waste, they should use it freely. it is limiting and unenlightened to put down a special time for the use of special material, if the end might be better answered by something else: if modelling is at . on monday and children are anxious to make christmas presents, what law in heaven or earth are we obeying if we stick to modelling except the law of red tape. chapter xxv experiences of the life of man this aspect of experience comes in two forms, the life of man in the past, with the memorials and legacies he has left, and the life of man in the present under the varying conditions of climate and all that it involves. in other words these experiences are commonly known as history and geography, though in the earlier stages of their appearance in school it is perhaps better to call the work--preparation for history and geography. they would naturally appear in the transition or the junior class, preferably in the latter, but they need not be wholly new subjects to a child; his literature has prepared him for both; to some extent his experiments in handwork have prepared him for history, while his nature work, especially his excursions and records, have prepared him for geography. that he needs this extension of experience can be seen in his growing demands for true stories, true in the more literal sense which he is coming fast to appreciate; undoubtedly most children pass through a stage of extreme literalism between early childhood and what is generally recognised as boyhood and girlhood. they begin to ask questions regarding the past, they are interested in things from "abroad," however vague that term may be to them. perhaps it will be best to treat the two subjects separately, though like all the child's curriculum at this stage they are inextricably confused and mingled both with each other, and with literature, as experiences of man's life and conduct. the beginnings of geography lie in the child's foundations of experience. probably the first real contact, unconscious though it may be, that any child has in this connection is through the production of food and clothing. a country child sees some of the beginnings of both, but it is doubtful how much of it is really interpreted by him; the village shop with its inexhaustible stores probably means much more in the way of origins, and he may never go behind its contents in his speculations. it is true he sees milking, harvesting, sheep-shearing, and many other operations, but he often misses the stage between the actual beginning and the finished product--between the wool on the sheep's back and his sunday clothes, between the wheat in the field and his loaf of bread. the town child has many links if he can use them: the goods train, the docks, the grocer's, green-grocer's or draper's shop, foreigners in the street, the vans that come through the silent streets in the early morning; in big towns, such markets as covent garden or leadenhall or smithfield; such a river as the thames, humber or mersey--from any one of these beginnings he can reach out from his own small environment to the world. a town child has very confused notions of what a farm really means to national life, and a country child of what a big railway station or dock involves. all children need to know what other parts of their own land look like, and what is produced; they ought to trace the products within reach to their origin, and this will involve descriptions of such things as fisheries at hull or aberdeen, the coal mines of wales or lanarkshire, pottery districts of stafford, woollen and cotton factories of yorkshire and lancashire, mills driven by steam, wind and water, lighthouses, the sheep-rearing districts of cumberland and midlothian, the flax-growing of northern ireland, and much else, and the means of transit and communication between all these. the children will gradually realise that many of the things they are familiar with, such as tea, oranges, silk and sugar, have not been accounted for, and this will take them to the lives of people in other countries, the means of getting there, the time taken and mode of travelling. they will also come to see that we do not produce enough of the things that are possible to grow, such as wheat, apples, wool and many other common necessaries, and that we can spare much that is manufactured to countries that do not make them, such as boots, clothes, china and cutlery. there will come a time when the need for a map is apparent: that is the time to branch off from the main theme and make one; it will have to be of the very immediate surroundings first, but it is not difficult to make the leap soon to countries beyond. previous to the need for it, map-making is useless. this working outwards from actual experiences, from the home country to the foreign, from actual contact with real things to things of travellers' tales, is the only way to bring geography to the very door of the school, to make it part of the actual life. the beginning of history, as of geography, lies in the child's foundations of experience. in the country village he sees the church, possibly some old cottages, or an elizabethan or jacobean house near; in the churchyard or in the church the tombstones have quaint inscriptions with reference possibly to past wars or to early colonisation. the slum child on the other hand sees much that is worn out, but little that is antiquated, unless the slum happen to be in such places as edinburgh or deptford, situated among the remains of really fine houses: but he realises more of the technicalities and officialism of a social system than does the country child; the suburban child has probably the scantiest store of all; his district is presumably made up of rows of respectable but monotonous houses, and the social life is similarly respectable and monotonous. there are certain cravings, interests and needs, common to all children, which come regardless of surroundings. all children want to know certain things about people who lived before them, not so much their great doings as their smaller ones; they want to know what these people were like, what they worked at, and learnt, how they travelled, what they bought and sold: and there is undoubtedly a primitive strain in all children that comes out in their love of building shelters, playing at savages, and making things out of natural material. one of the most intense moments in _peter pan_ to many children is the building of the little house in the wood, and later on, of the other on the top of the trees: that is the little house of their dreams. they are not interested in constitutions or the making of laws; wars and invasions have much the same kind of interest for them as the adventures of una and the red cross knight. how are these cravings usually satisfied in the early stages of history teaching of to-day? as a rule a series of biographies of notable people is given, regardless of chronology, or the children's previous experiences, and equally careless of the history lessons of the future; joan of arc, alfred and the cakes, gordon of khartoum, boadicea, christopher columbus, julius caesar, form a list which is not at all uncommon; there is no leading thread, no developing idea, and the old test, "the children like it," excuses indolent thinking. on the other hand, the desire to know more of the robinson crusoe mode of life has been apparent to many teachers for some time, but the material at their disposal has been scanty and uncertain. it is to prof. dewey that we owe the right organisation of this part of history. he has shown that it is on the side of industry, the early modes of weaving, cooking, lighting and heating, making implements for war and for hunting, and making of shelters, that prehistoric man has a real contribution to give: but for the beginnings of social life, for realisation of such imperishable virtues as courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice, children must go to the lives of real people and gradually acquire the idea that certain things are, so to speak, from "everlasting to everlasting," while others change with changing and growing circumstances. the prehistoric history should be largely concerned with doing and experimenting, with making weapons, or firing clay, or weaving rushes, or with visits to such museums as horniman's at forest hill. the early social history may well take the form best suited to the child, and not appeal merely to surface interest. and the spirit in which the lives of other people are presented to children must not be the narrow, prejudiced, insular one, so long associated with the people of great britain, which calls other customs, dress, modes of: living, "funny" or "absurd" or "extraordinary," but rather the scientific spirit that interprets life according to its conditions and so builds up one of its greatest laws, the law of environment. the geography syllabus, even more than the history one, depends for its beginnings at least on the surroundings of the school--out of the mass of possible materials a very rich and comprehensive syllabus can be made, beginning with any one of the central points already suggested. above all there should be plenty of pictures, not as amplification, but as material, by means of which a child may interpret more fully; a picture should be of the nature of a problem or of a map--and picture reading should be in the junior school what map reading is in the upper school. in both history and geography the method is partly that of discovery; especially is this the case in that part of history which deals with primitive industries, and in almost the whole of the geography of this period. the teacher is the guide or leader in discovery, not the story-teller merely, though this may be part of his function. the following is a small part of a syllabus to show how geography and history material may grow naturally out of the children's experiences. it is meant in this case for children in a london suburb, with no particular characteristics:-- geography it grows out of the shops of the neighbourhood and the adjoining railway system. _home-produced goods_-- a. the green-grocer's shop. tracing of fruit to its own home source, or to a foreign country. home-grown fruit. the fruit farm, garden, orchard, and wood. the packing and sending of fruit.--railway lines. covent garden; the docks; fruit stalls; jam factories. b. a grocer's or corn-chandler's shop. flour and oatmeal traced to their sources. the farm. a wheat and grain farm at different seasons. a dairy farm and a sheep farm. a mill and its processes. woollen factories. a dairy. making of butter and cheese distribution of these goods. c. a china shop, leading to the pottery district and making of pottery. _foreign goods_-- furs--red indians and canada. dates--the arabs and the sahara. cotton--the negroes and equatorial regions. cocoa--the west indies. the transit of these, their arrival and distribution. [the need for a map will come early in the first part of the course, and the need for a globe in the second.] history this grows naturally out of the geography syllabus and might be taken side by side or afterwards. the development of industries. the growth of spinning and weaving from the simplest processes, bringing in the distaff, spinning-wheel, and loom. the making of garments from the joining together of furs. the growth of pottery and the development of cooking. the growth of roads and means of transit. [this will involve a good deal of experimental and constructive handwork.] chapter xxvi experiences recorded and passed on reading and writing are held to have lifted man above the brute; they are the means by which we can discover and record human experience and progress, and as such their value is incalculable. but in themselves they are artificial conventions, symbols invented for the convenience of mankind, and to acquire them we need exercise no great mental power. a good eye and ear memory, and a certain superficial quickness to recognise and apply previous knowledge, is all that is needed for reading and spelling; while for writing, the development of a specialised muscular skill is all that is necessary. in themselves they do not as a rule hold any great interest for a child: sometimes they have the same puzzle interest as a long addition sum, and to children of a certain type, mechanical work such as writing gives relief; one of the most docile and uninteresting of little boys said that writing was his favourite subject, and it was easy to understand: he did not want to be stirred out of his commonplaceness; unconsciously he had assimilated the atmosphere and adopted the standards of his surroundings, which were monotonous and commonplace in the extreme, and so he desired no more adventurous method of expression than the process of writing, which he could do well. imitation is often a strong incentive to reading, it is part of the craving for grown-upness to many children; they desire to do what their brothers and sisters can do. but _during the first stage of childhood, roughly up to the age of six or even later, no child needs to learn to read or write, taking "need" in the psychological sense:_ that period is concerned with laying the foundation of real things and with learning surroundings;--any records of experience that come to a child can come as they did to his earliest forefathers--by word of mouth. when he wants to read stories for himself, or write his own letters, then he is impelled by a sufficiently strong aim or incentive to make concentration possible, without resorting to any of the fantastic devices and apparatus so dear to so many teachers. indeed it is safe to say of many of these devices that they prove the fact that children are not ready for reading. when a child is ready to read and write the process need not be a long one: by wise delay many tedious hours are saved, tedious to both teacher and children; they have already learnt to talk in those precious hours, to discriminate sounds as part of language training, but without any resort to symbols--merely as something natural. it has been amply proved that if a child is not prematurely forced into reading he can do as much in one year as he would have done in three, under more strained conditions. with regard to methods a great deal has been written on the subject; it is pretty safe to leave a teacher to choose her own--for much of the elaboration is unnecessary if reading is rightly delayed, and if a child can read reasonably well at seven and a half there can be no grounds for complaint. if his phonetic training has been good in the earlier stages of language, then this may be combined with the "look and say" method, or method of reading by whole words. the "cat on the mat" type of book is disappearing, and its place is being taken by books where the subject matter is interesting and suitable to the child's age; but as in other subjects the book chosen should be considered in reference to the child's surroundings, either to amplify or to extend. writing is, in the first instance, a part of reading: when words are being learnt they must be written, or in the earliest stages printed, but only those interesting to the children and written for some definite purpose should be selected: a great aid to spelling is transcription, and children are always willing to copy something they like, such as a verse of poetry, or their name and address. as in arithmetic and in handwork, they will come to recognise the need for practice, and be willing to undergo such exercise for the sake of improvement, as well as for the pleasure in the activity--which actual writing gives to some children. we must be quite clear about relative values. reading and writing are necessities, and the means of opening up to us things of great value; but the art of acquiring them is of little intrinsic value, and the recognition of the need is not an early one; nothing is gained by beginning too early, and much valuable time is taken from other activities, notably language. the incentive should be the need that the child feels, and when this is evident time and pains should be given to the subject so that it maybe quickly acquired. but the art of reading is no test of intelligence, and the art of writing is no test of original skill. _the claims of the upper departments must be resisted._ chapter xxvii the things that really matter the _first_ thing that matters is what is commonly called the personality of the teacher; she must be a person, unmistakable from other persons, and not a type; what she has as an individual, of gifts or goodness, she should give freely, and give in her own way; that she should be trained is, of course, as indisputable as the training of a doctor, but her training should have deepened her personality. pestalozzi's curriculum and organisation left much to be desired; what he has handed down to us came from himself and his own experience, not from anything superimposed: records of his pupils constantly emphasise this: it was his goodness assimilated with his outlook on life and readiness to learn by experience, that mattered, and it was this that remained with his pupils. the teacher's own personality must dominate her choice of principles else she is a dead method, a machine, and not a living teacher. she must not keep her interests and gifts for out-of-school use; if she has a sense of humour she must use it, if she is fond of pretty clothes she must wear them in school, if she appreciates music she must help her class to do the same, if she has dramatic gifts she must act to them. her standard of goodness must be high, and she must be strong enough to adopt it practically, so that she is unconscious of it: goodness and righteousness are as essential as health to a teacher: for something intangible passes from the teacher to her children, however young and unconscious they may be, and nothing can awaken goodness but goodness. part of her personality is her attitude towards religion. it is difficult to think of a teacher of young children who is not religious, _i.e._ whose conduct is not definitely permeated by her spiritual life: young children are essentially religious, and the life of the spirit must find a response in the same kind of intangible assumption of its existence as goodness. no form of creed or dogma is meant, only the life of the spirit common to all. but of course there may be people who refuse to admit this as a necessity. the _next_ thing that matters is that all children must be regarded as individuals: there has been much more talk of this lately, but practical difficulties are often raised as a bar. if teachers and parents continue to accept the conditions which make it difficult, such as large classes, and a need to hasten, there will always be a bar: if individuality is held as one of the greatest things in education, authorities cannot continue to economise so as to make it impossible. it is the individual part of each child that is his most precious possession, his immortal side: froebel calls it his "divine essence," and makes the cultivation of it the aim of education; he is right, and any more general aim will lead only to half-developed human beings. if we accept the principle that only goodness is fundamental and evil a distortion of nature, we need have no fear about cultivating individuals. every doctor assures us that all normal babies are naturally healthy; they are also naturally good, but evil is easily aroused by arbitrary interference or by mismanagement. the _third_ thing that matters belongs more especially to the intellectual life; it might be described as the making of right associations. more than any other side of training, the making of associations means the making of the intelligent person. to see life in patches is to see pieces of a great picture by the square inch, and never to see the relationship of these to each other--never to see the whole. the _fourth_ thing that matters is the making of good and serviceable habits: much has been said on this, in connection with the nursery class, and it is at that stage that the process is most important, but it should never cease. if a child is to have time and opportunity to develop his individuality he must not be hampered by having to be conscious of things that belong to the subconscious region. to start a child with a foundation of good habits is better than riches. the _fifth_ thing that matters is the realisation by teachers that _opportunities_ matter more than results; opportunities to discover, to learn, to comprehend all sides of life, to be an individual, to appreciate beauty, to go at one's own rate; some are material in their nature, such as the actual surroundings of the child in school; others are rather in the atmosphere, such as refraining from interference, encouragement, suggestion, spirituality. the teacher has the making of opportunities largely in her own hands. the _sixth_ thing, that matters is the cultivation of the divine gift of imagination; both morality and spirituality spring from this; meanness, cowardice, lack of sympathy, sensuality, materialism, quickly grow where there is no imagination. it refines and intensifies personality, it opens a door to things beyond the senses. it makes possible appreciation of the things of the spirit, and appreciation is a thousand times more important than knowledge. the _last_ thing that matters is the need for freedom from bondage, of the body and of the soul. only from a free atmosphere can come the best things--personality, imagination and opportunity; and all are great needs, but the greatest of all is freedom. bibliography froebel. the education of man. (appleton.) macdougall. social psychology. (methuen.) groos. the play of man. (heinemann.) drummond. an introduction to child study. (arnold.) kirkpatrick. fundamentals of child study. (macmillan.) dewey. the school and the child. (blackie.) the dewey school. (the froebel society.) stanley hall. aspects of education. findlay. school and life. (g. philip & son.) sully. children's ways. (longmans.) caldwell cook. the play way. (heinemann.) e.r. murray. froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology. (g. philip & son.) edited by h. brown smith. education by life. (g. philip & son.) margaret drummond. the dawn of mind. (arnold.) boyd. from locke to montessori. (harrap.) kilpatrick. montessori examined. (constable.) wiggin. children's rights. (gay & hancock.) birchenough. history of elementary education. (univ. tutorial press.) macmillan. the camp school. (allen & unwin.) hardy. the diary of a free kindergarten. (gay & hancock.) scott. social education. (ginn.) tylor. anthropology. (macmillan.) kingston quiggin. primeval man. (macdonald & evans.) solomon. an infant school. (the froebel society.) felix klein. mon filleul au jardin d'enfants. i. comment il s'élève. ii. comment il s'instruit. (armand colin, paris.) e. nesbit. wings and the child. (hodder and stoughton.) wells. floor games. (palmer.) ruskin. the two paths. dopp. the place of industries in industrial education. (univ. of chicago press.) pritchard and ashford. an english primary school. (harrap.) hall. days before history. (harrap.) hall. the threshold of history. (harrap.) spalding. piers plowman histories. junior. bk. ii. (g. philip & son.) shedlock. the art of story-telling. bryant. how to tell stories. (harrap.) klein. de ce qu'il faut raconter aux petits. (blond et gay.) the eurhythmics of jaques-dalcroze. (constable.) findlay. eurhythmics. (dalcroze society.) white. a course in music. (camb. univ. press.) stanley hall. how to teach reading. (heath.) benchara branford. a study of mathematical education. fielden demonstration school record ii. (manchester univ. press.) punnett. the groundwork of arithmetic. (longmans.) ashford. sense plays and number plays. (longmans.) index abrahall, miss h., adam and eve question, adler, dr. felix, aim of education and of human life, america, kindergartens in, anderson, professor a., animals and nature study, apparatus. _see_ equipment arithmetic, transition class, arnswald, colonel von, art training, drawing, etc., _see also_ colour, rhythm, etc., assistance, warning, "baby camp", barnard, dr. h., barnes, prof. earl, beauty, conduct, appreciation of beauty in, _see also_ colour, rhythm, etc. beer, miss h., notes of, beresford's _housemates_, description of a suburb, bergson, bermondsey settlement free kindergarten, biological view of education, birchenough, bird, mr., and his family, birmingham kindergartens, bishop, miss caroline, blankenberg kindergarten, blow, miss, bradford joint conference, brock, mr. clutton, quotations, etc., brooke, stopford, brown, frances, _grannie's wonderful chair_, browning, brown's _young artists' headers_, buckton, miss, buildings. _see_ equipment and surroundings caldecott nursery school, camp school, child study, class discipline, cleanliness and order, clough, a.h., clouston, dr., colour, comenius, conduct-- aim of education, experiences of--_see also_ moral teaching connectedness, continuity. _see_ unity constructive play, varieties of _making_--_see also_ handwork cook, mr. caldwell, _the play way_, etc., cooke, mr. e., cooking, co-operation in play, correlation, infant school programme in transition period, present-day infant schools, country child, country life for the child, crane, walter, creation. _see_ constructive play crèche. _see_ nursery school curriculum-- principle guiding selection, transition class, daleroze, m. jacques, rhythmic training, dale, miss, phonic reading books, decimal system, definition of education, desert island play, dewey, prof., quotations, etc., dickens on "infant gardens," discipline, docility _v_. self-control, dopp series, dramatic play, drawing, drill _v_. games, drummond, dr., ebers, edinburgh, free kindergartens, education act of , of , _education by life,_ _education of man,_ environment-- school equipment, etc. _see_ equipment source of child's experience, equipment and surroundings, miniature world, montessori didactic apparatus, transition classes and junior school, ewing, mrs., stories of, experience, education by means of, child's desires and needs, grouping subjects of experience, material and opportunities, morality and indirect experiences, passing on experience, fairy tales, field, eugene, verses of, findlay, miss, fisher, mr., fleming, marjorie, _floor games_, flowers and plants, , . _see also_ garden, nature work folsung, formalism, freedom-- apparent result at first, definition, froebel on, montessori, dr., work of, vital principle, warning against interference, freud, froebel and froebelian principles-- aim of education, beauty, biologist educator and froebel, definitions of kindergarten, excursions, impression and expression, montessori and froebelian systems, society, furniture, _see also_ equipment fyleman, rose, _chimney sand fairies,_ games, garden, activities in a suburban garden, best use of ground, possibilities in difficult places, geography, illustrative syllabus, glasgow, phoenix park kindergarten, glenconner, lady, grant, miss, greenford avenue school, hanwell, groos, habits, training in, physical habits and fixed hours, hall, stanley, references to, handwork, hansen, g., hardy, miss l., heerwart, miss, herb garden and sense training, herbartian "correlation", hewit, mr. graily, high schools for girls, kindergartens in, history, discipline in practical reasoning, illustrative syllabus, indirect sociology, industrial, practical details, prehistoric, stories, hodsman, miss, hoffman, mr., home surroundings, reproduction in school, source of child's experience, howden, miss, humour, factor in morality, _hygiene of mind_, imagination and literature, imitative play, individual, child as, _see also_ freedom infant schools, early infant schools, formalism, causes, etc., kindergarten system, perversion of, present-day schools, buildings, furniture, etc., change in spirit since the 'eighties, effect of child study movement, etc., curriculum, lack of clear aim and continuity, discipline, formalism, promotion and uniformity, health, care of, teachers, training of, transition period, instinct, interests of a child, interference, warning, international educational exposition and congress of , investigation impulse, junior school. _see_ transition classes and junior school keilhau, kindergarten band, kindergartens, america, first english, froebelian principles _see_ froebel, germany, _kids' guards_, london school board infant schools, proposed introduction, perversion of system in infant schools, schrader, henrietta, work of, klein, abbé, krause, language training, games for, lawrence, miss esther, _levana_, literature _see also_ stories and poetry lodge, sir o., macdonald, george, stories of, macdonald, dr. greville, m'millan, miss margaret, macpherson, mr. stewart, _magic cities_, marenholz, madame von, mathematics, transition class, maufe, miss, medical view of education, dr. montessori, meum and tuum training, miall, mrs., michaelis, madame, michaelis nursery school, notting dale, middendorf, mission kindergarten, moltke, von, montessori, dr. maria-- froebelian views of, medical view of education, play activities, failure to understand, moral teaching-- humour as factor in morality, _see also_ religion, service for the community, stories morgan, lloyd, _mother songs_, music, kindergarten band, name of school for little children and its importance, nature work, experiences of the natural world, activities in a suburban garden, aim of, animals, excursions, movement _c._ , nature calendar, object lesson and nature lesson, pictures, use of, plants and flowers, religion and nature work, necessities of the nursery school, _see also_ equipment and principles nesbit, mrs., _magic cities_, net beds, number work. _see_ mathematics nursery rhymes and nonsense verses, nursery school-- name question, requirements of, obedience _v._ self-control, oberlin schools, object lessons, observation of children, odds and ends, use of, open-air question, owen, robert, "rational infant school", paper-folding, parents' evenings, payne, miss janet, peabody, miss, periods of a young child's life, pestalozzi, pestalozzi-froebel house, phillips, miss k., phonic method of teaching reading, physical requirements, picture books, pictures, play-- biologist educator's view, constructive, co-operation in, courage in the teacher, definitions, distinction from work, froebel's theory of, practice at keilhau, imitative, material, froebel's "gifts," etc., self-expression in, theories of, transition class, _play way, the_, playground, equipment, etc., garden essential, transition class, poetry, poor and well-to-do children, different requirements, possession, child's need of, meum and tuum training, preparation theory of play, priestman, miss, principles, vital principles, pugh, edwin, punnett, miss, reading and writing, age for, matter and methods, phonic method, etc., recapitulation theory of play, recreation theory of play, reed, miss, religion, age for first teaching, _see also_ stories reproducing, _see_ imitative play results, payment by, rhythm and rhythmic training, robinson crusoe stage of history teaching, ronge, madame, rossetti, christina, verses for children, rousseau, rowland, miss, royee, prof., st. cuthbert, story of, salt, miss marie, _sayings of the children_, schepel, miss, schiller, _letters on aesthetic education_, schiller-spencer theory of play, _school and life_, _schools of to-morrow_, schrader, henrietta, séguin, self-consciousness, self-control and external control, sense-training, herb garden, service for the community, training to-- froebel and montessori system, games, social side, idea of unity, religion, part of, sesame house for home-life training, sharpley, miss f., shinn, miss, sleep, provision for, slum child's experience, somers town nursery school, speech and vocabulary, spiritual life and stories, spontaneity in play, staff question, training, etc., _see also_ teachers stevenson, nursery songs, stokes, miss, stories and story-telling, fairy tales, how to tell, illustrations, made by children, moral teaching, religious teaching, repetition or "accumulation" stories, selection, "true" stories--history, legend, geography, _story of a sand pile_, suburban child's experience, supernatural, the child's acceptance of, surroundings. _see_ equipment and surroundings table manners, teacher-- function, personality question, religion, training, thornton-le-dale kindergarten, time-table thraldom, instance from a teacher's note-book, tools, touch, sense of, toys, transition classes and junior school, wells, mr., on, traherne, transition classes and junior school, bridge between freedom and timetable, curriculum, discipline, equipment, etc., freedom and class teaching, handwork, help, methods of, imitation, nature work, play spirit, _ultimate belief_, uniformity in infant schools, unity of aim and unity in experience, cases illustrating problem, previous experience of the child, basing curriculum on, war, effect on nursery school movement, warne, illustrated stories for children, water, attraction of, _water-babies_, wells, mr., _what is a kindergarten?_, "when can i make my little ship?", wiggin, miss k.d., wilderspin's infant school, windows, wordsworth, wragge, miss adelaide, writing. _see_ reading and writing the end [illustration: authority.] gentle measures in the management and training of the young; or, the principles on which a firm parental authority may be established and maintained, without violence or anger, and the right development of the moral and mental capacities be promoted by methods in harmony with the structure and the characteristics of the juvenile mind. by jacob abbott, author of "science for the young," "harper's story books," "franconia stories," "abbott's illustrated histories," etc. _numerous illustrations_. entered according to act of congress, in the year , in the office of the librarian of congress, at washington. contents. chapter i. three modes of management chapter ii. what are gentle measures? chapter iii. there must be authority chapter iv. gentle punishment of disobedience chapter v. the philosophy of punishment chapter vi. rewarding obedience chapter vii. the art of training chapter viii. methods exemplified chapter ix. della and the dolls chapter x. sympathy:--i. the child with the parent chapter xi. sympathy:--ii. the parent with the child chapter xii. commendation and encouragement chapter xiii. faults of immaturity chapter xiv. the activity of children chapter xv. the imagination in children chapter xvi. truth and falsehood chapter xvii. judgment and reasoning chapter xviii. wishes and requests chapter xix. children's questions chapter xx. the use of money chapter xxi. corporal punishment chapter xxii. gratitude in children chapter xxiii. religious training chapter xxiv. conclusion illustrations authority indulgence "it is not safe" the lesson in obedience roundabout instruction afraid of the cow the intention good the imaginative faculty story of the horse "mother, what makes it snow?" the runaway the first instinct gentle measures. chapter i. the three modes of management. it is not impossible that in the minds of some persons the idea of employing gentle measures in the management and training of children may seem to imply the abandonment of the principle of _authority_, as the basis of the parental government, and the substitution of some weak and inefficient system of artifice and manoeuvring in its place. to suppose that the object of this work is to aid in effecting such a substitution as that, is entirely to mistake its nature and design. the only government of the parent over the child that is worthy of the name is one of authority--complete, absolute, unquestioned _authority_. the object of this work is, accordingly, not to show how the gentle methods which will be brought to view can be employed as a substitute for such authority, but how they can be made to aid in establishing and maintaining it. _three methods_. there are three different modes of management customarily employed by parents as means of inducing their children to comply with their requirements. they are, . government by manoeuvring and artifice. . by reason and affection. . by authority. _manoeuvring and artifice_. . many mothers manage their children by means of tricks and contrivances, more or less adroit, designed to avoid direct issues with them, and to beguile them, as it were, into compliance with their wishes. as, for example, where a mother, recovering from sickness, is going out to take the air with her husband for the first time, and--as she is still feeble--wishes for a very quiet drive, and so concludes not to take little mary with her, as she usually does on such occasions; but knowing that if mary sees the chaise at the door, and discovers that her father and mother are going in it, she will be very eager to go too, she adopts a system of manoeuvres to conceal her design. she brings down her bonnet and shawl by stealth, and before the chaise comes to the door she sends mary out into the garden with her sister, under pretense of showing her a bird's nest which is not there, trusting to her sister's skill in diverting the child's mind, and amusing her with something else in the garden, until the chaise has gone. and if, either from hearing the sound of the wheels, or from any other cause, mary's suspicions are awakened--and children habitually managed on these principles soon learn to be extremely distrustful and suspicious--and she insists on going into the house, and thus discovers the stratagem, then, perhaps, her mother tells her that they are only going to the doctor's, and that if mary goes with them, the doctor will give her some dreadful medicine, and compel her to take it, thinking thus to deter her from insisting on going with them to ride. as the chaise drives away, mary stands bewildered and perplexed on the door-step, her mind in a tumult of excitement, in which hatred of the doctor, distrust and suspicion of her mother, disappointment, vexation, and ill humor, surge and swell among those delicate organizations on which the structure and development of the soul so closely depend--doing perhaps an irreparable injury. the mother, as soon as the chaise is so far turned that mary can no longer watch the expression of her countenance, goes away from the door with a smile of complacency and satisfaction upon her face at the ingenuity and success of her little artifice. in respect to her statement that she was going to the doctor's, it may, or may not, have been true. most likely not; for mothers who manage their children on this system find the line of demarkation between deceit and falsehood so vague and ill defined that they soon fall into the habit of disregarding it altogether, and of saying, without hesitation, any thing which will serve the purpose in view. _governing by reason and affection_. . the theory of many mothers is that they must govern their children by the influence of reason and affection. their method may be exemplified by supposing that, under circumstances similar to those described under the preceding head, the mother calls mary to her side, and, smoothing her hair caressingly with her hand while she speaks, says to her, "mary, your father and i are going out to ride this afternoon, and i am going to explain it all to you why you can not go too. you see, i have been sick, and am getting well, and i am going out to ride, so that i may get well faster. you love mamma, i am sure, and wish to have her get well soon. so you will be a good girl, i know, and not make any trouble, but will stay at home contentedly--won't you? then i shall love you, and your papa will love you, and after i get well we will take you to ride with us some day." the mother, in managing the case in this way, relies partly on convincing the reason of the child, and partly on an appeal to her affection. _governing by authority_. . by the third method the mother secures the compliance of the child by a direct exercise of authority. she says to her--the circumstances of the case being still supposed to be the same-- "mary, your father and i are going out to ride this afternoon, and i am sorry, for your sake, that we can not take you with us." "why can't you take me?" asks mary. "i can not tell you why, now," replies the mother, "but perhaps i will explain it to you after i come home. i think there _is_ a good reason, and, at any rate, i have decided that you are not to go. if you are a good girl, and do not make any difficulty, you can have your little chair out upon the front door-step, and can see the chaise come to the door, and see your father and me get in and drive away; and you can wave your handkerchief to us for a good-bye." then, if she observes any expression of discontent or insubmission in mary's countenance, the mother would add, "if you should _not_ be a good girl, but should show signs of making us any trouble, i shall have to send you out somewhere to the back part of the house until we are gone." but this last supposition is almost always unnecessary; for if mary has been habitually managed on this principle she will _not_ make any trouble. she will perceive at once that the question is settled--settled irrevocably--and especially that it is entirely beyond the power of any demonstrations of insubmission or rebellion that she can make to change it. she will acquiesce at once.[a] she may be sorry that she can not go, but she will make no resistance. those children only attempt to carry their points by noisy and violent demonstrations who find, by experience, that such measures are usually successful. a child, even, who has become once accustomed to them, will soon drop them if she finds, owing to a change in the system of management, that they now never succeed. and a child who never, from the beginning, finds any efficiency in them, never learns to employ them at all. _conclusion_. of the three methods of managing children exemplified in this chapter, the last is the only one which can be followed either with comfort to the parent or safety to the child; and to show how this method can be brought effectually into operation by gentle measures is the object of this book. it is, indeed, true that the importance of tact and skill in the training of the young, and of cultivating their reason, and securing their affection, can not be overrated. but the influences secured by these means form, at the best, but a sandy foundation for filial obedience to rest upon. the child is not to be made to comply with the requirements of his parents by being artfully inveigled into compliance, nor is his obedience to rest on his love for father and mother, and his unwillingness to displease them, nor on his conviction of the rightfulness and reasonableness of their commands, but on simple _submission to authority_--that absolute and almost unlimited authority which all parents are commissioned by god and nature to exercise over their offspring during the period while the offspring remain dependent upon their care. chapter ii. what are gentle measures? it being thus distinctly understood that the gentle measures in the training of children herein recommended are not to be resorted to as a _substitute_ for parental authority, but as the easiest and most effectual means of establishing and maintaining that authority in its most absolute form, we have now to consider what the nature of these gentle measures is, and by what characteristics they are distinguished, in their action and influence, from such as may be considered more or less violent and harsh. gentle measures are those which tend to exert a calming, quieting, and soothing influence on the mind, or to produce only such excitements as are pleasurable in their character, as means of repressing wrong and encouraging right action. ungentle measures are those which tend to inflame and irritate the mind, or to agitate it with _painful_ excitements. _three degrees of violence_. there seem to be three grades or forms of violence to which a mother may resort in controlling her children, or, perhaps, rather three classes of measures which are more or less violent in their effects. to illustrate these we will take an example. _case supposed_. one day louisa, four years old, asked her mother for an apple. "have you had any already?" asked her mother. "only one," replied louisa. "then bridget may give you another," said the mother. what louisa said was not true. she had already eaten two apples. bridget heard the falsehood, but she did not consider it her duty to betray the child, so she said nothing. the mother, however, afterwards, in the course of the day, accidentally ascertained the truth. now, as we have said, there are three grades in the kind and character of the measures which may be considered violent that a mother may resort to in a case like this. _bodily punishment_. . first, there is the infliction of bodily pain. the child may be whipped, or tied to the bed-post, and kept in a constrained and uncomfortable position for a long time, or shut up in solitude and darkness, or punished by the infliction of bodily suffering in other ways. and there is no doubt that there is a tendency in such treatment to correct or cure the fault. but measures like these, whether successful or not, are certainly violent measures. they shock the whole nervous system, sometimes with the excitement of pain and terror, and always, probably, with that of resentment and anger. in some cases this excitement is extreme. the excessively delicate organization of the brain, through which such agitations reach the sensorium, and which, in children of an early age, is in its most tender and sensitive state of development, is subjected to a most intense and violent agitation. _evil effects of violence in this form_. the evil effects of this excessive cerebral action may _perhaps_ entirely pass away in a few hours, and leave no trace of injury behind; but then, on the other hand, there is certainly reason to fear that such commotions, especially if often repeated, tend to impede the regular and healthful development of the organs, and that they may become the origin of derangements, or of actual disorganizations, resulting very seriously in future years. it is impossible, perhaps, to know with certainty whether permanent ill effects follow in such cases or not. at any rate, such a remedy is a violent one. _the frightening system_. . there is a second grade of violence in the treatment of such a case, which consists in exciting pain or terror, or other painful or disagreeable emotions, through the imagination, by presenting to the fancy of the child images of phantoms, hobgoblins, and other frightful monsters, whose ire, it is pretended, is greatly excited by the misdeeds of children, and who come in the night-time to take them away, or otherwise visit them with terrible retribution. domestic servants are very prone to adopt this mode of discipline. being forbidden to resort to personal violence as a means of exciting pain and terror, they attempt to accomplish the same end by other means, which, however, in many respects, are still more injurious in their action. _management of nurses and servants_. nurses and attendants upon children from certain nationalities in europe are peculiarly disposed to employ this method of governing children placed under their care. one reason is that they are accustomed to this mode of management at home; and another is that many of them are brought up under an idea, which prevails extensively in some of those countries, that it is right to tell falsehoods where the honest object is to accomplish a charitable or useful end. accordingly, inasmuch as the restraining of the children from wrong is a good and useful object, they can declare the existence of giants and hobgoblins, to carry away and devour bad girls and boys, with an air of positiveness and seeming honesty, and with a calm and persistent assurance, which aids them very much in producing on the minds of the children a conviction of the truth of what they say; while, on the other hand, those who, in theory at least, occupy the position that the direct falsifying of one's word is _never_ justifiable, act at a disadvantage in attempting this method. for although, in practice, they are often inclined to make an exception to their principles in regard to truth in the case of what is said to young children, they can not, after all, tell children what they know to be not true with that bold and confident air necessary to carry full conviction to the children's minds. they are embarrassed by a kind of half guilty feeling, which, partially at least, betrays them, and the children do not really and fully believe what they say. they can not suppose that their mother would really tell them what she knew was false, and yet they can not help perceiving that she does not speak and look as if what she was saying was actually true. _monsieur and madame croquemitaine_. in all countries there are many, among even the most refined and highly cultivated classes, who are not at all embarrassed by any moral delicacy of this kind. this is especially the case in those countries in europe, particularly on the continent, where the idea above referred to, of the allowableness of falsehood in certain cases as a means for the attainment of a good end, is generally entertained. the french have two terrible bugbears, under the names of monsieur and madame croquemitaine, who are as familiar to the imaginations of french children as santa claus is, in a much more agreeable way, to the juvenile fancy at our firesides. monsieur and madame croquemitaine are frightful monsters, who come down the chimney, or through the roof, at night, and carry off bad children. they learn from their _little fingers_--which whisper in their ears when they hold them near--who the bad children are, where they live, and what they have done. the instinctive faith of young children in their mother's truthfulness is so strong that no absurdity seems gross enough to overcome it. _the black man and the policeman_. there are many mothers among us who--though not quite prepared to call in the aid of ghosts, giants, and hobgoblins, or of monsieur and madame croquemitaine, in managing their children--still, sometimes, try to eke out their failing authority by threatening them with the "black man," or the "policeman," or some other less, supernatural terror. they seem to imagine that inasmuch as, while there is no such thing in existence as a hobgoblin, there really are policemen and prisons, they only half tell an untruth by saying to the recalcitrant little one that a policeman is coming to carry him off to jail. _injurious effects_. although, by these various modes of exciting imaginary fears, there is no direct and outward infliction of bodily suffering, the effect produced on the delicate organization of the brain by such excitements is violent in the extreme. the paroxysms of agitation and terror which they sometimes excite, and which are often spontaneously renewed by darkness and solitude, and by other exciting causes, are of the nature of temporary insanity. indeed, the extreme nervous excitability which they produce sometimes becomes a real insanity, which, though it may, in many cases, be finally outgrown, may probably in many others lead to lasting and most deplorable results. _harsh reproofs and threatenings_. . there is a third mode of treatment, more common, perhaps, among _us_ than either of the preceding, which, though much milder in its character than they, we still class among the violent measures, on account of its operation and effects. it consists of stern and harsh rebukes, denunciations of the heinousness of the sin of falsehood, with solemn premonitions of the awful consequences of it, in this life and in that to come, intended to awaken feelings of alarm and distress in the mind of the child, as a means of promoting repentance and reformation. these are not violent measures, it is true, so far as outward physical action is concerned; but the effects which they produce are sometimes of quite a violent nature, in their operation on the delicate nervous and mental susceptibilities which are excited and agitated by them. if the mother is successful in making the impression which such a mode of treatment is designed to produce, the child, especially if a girl, is agitated and distressed. her nervous system is greatly disturbed. if calmed for a time, the paroxysm is very liable to return. she wakes in the night, perhaps, with an indefinable feeling of anxiety and terror, and comes to her mother's bedside, to seek, in her presence, and in the sense of protection which it affords, a relief from her distress. the conscientious mother, supremely anxious to secure the best interests of her child, may say that, after all, it is better that she should endure this temporary suffering than not be saved from the sin. this is true. but if she can be saved just as effectually without it, it is better still. _the gentle method of treatment_. . we now come to the gentle measures which may be adopted in a case of discipline like this. they are endlessly varied in form, but, to illustrate the nature and operation of them, and the spirit and temper of mind with which they should be enforced, with a view of communicating; to the mind of the reader some general idea of the characteristics of that gentleness of treatment which it is the object of this work to commend, we will describe an actual case, substantially as it really occurred, where a child, whom we will still call louisa, told her mother a falsehood about the apple, as already related. _choosing the right time_. her mother--though louisa's manner, at the time of giving her answer, led her to feel somewhat suspicious--did not express her suspicions, but gave her the additional apple. nor did she afterwards, when she ascertained the facts, say any thing on the subject. the day passed away as if nothing unusual had occurred. when bed-time came she undressed the child and laid her in her bed, playing with her, and talking with her in an amusing manner all the time, so as to bring her into a contented and happy frame of mind, and to establish as close a connection as possible of affection and sympathy between them. then, finally, when the child's prayer had been said, and she was about to be left for the night, her mother, sitting in a chair at the head of her little bed, and putting her hand lovingly upon her, said: _the story_. "but first i must tell you one more little story. "once there was a boy, and his name was ernest. he was a pretty large boy, for he was five years old." louisa, it must be recollected, was only four. "he was a very pretty boy. he had bright blue eyes and curling hair. he was a very good boy, too. he did not like to do any thing wrong. he always found that it made him feel uncomfortable and unhappy afterwards when he did any thing wrong. a good many children, especially good children, find that it makes them feel uncomfortable and unhappy when they do wrong. perhaps you do." "yes, mamma, i do," said louisa. "i am glad of that," replied her mother; "that is a good sign." "ernest went one day," added the mother, continuing her story, "with his little cousin anna to their uncle's, in hopes that he would give them some apples. their uncle had a beautiful garden, and in it there was an apple-tree which bore most excellent apples. they were large, and rosy, and mellow, and sweet. the children liked the apples from that tree very much, and ernest and anna went that day in hopes that their uncle would give them some of them. he said he would. he would give them three apiece. he told them to go into the garden and wait there until he came. they must not take any apples off the tree, he said, but if they found any _under_ the tree they might take them, provided that there were not more than three apiece; and when he came he would take enough off the tree, he said, to make up the number to three. "so the children went into the garden and looked under the tree. they found _two_ apples there, and they took them up and ate them--one apiece. then they sat down and began to wait for their uncle to come. while they were waiting anna proposed that they should not tell their uncle that they had found the two apples, and so he would give them three more, which he would take from the tree; whereas, if he knew that they had already had one apiece, then he would only give them two more. ernest said that his uncle would ask them about it. anna said, 'no matter, we can tell him that we did not find any.' "ernest seemed to be thinking about it for a moment, and then, shaking his head, said, 'no, i think we had better not tell him a lie!' "so when he saw their uncle coming he said, 'come, anna, let us go and tell him about it, just how it was. so they ran together to meet their uncle, and told him that they had found two apples under the tree, one apiece, and had eaten them. then he gave them two more apiece, according to his promise, and they went home feeling contented and happy. "they might have had one more apple apiece, probably, by combining together to tell a falsehood; but in that case they would have gone home feeling guilty and unhappy." _the effect_. louisa's mother paused a moment, after finishing her story, to give louisa time to think about it a little. "i think," she added at length, after a suitable pause, "that it was a great deal better for them to tell the truth, as they did." "i think so too, mamma," said louisa, at the same time casting down her eyes and looking a little confused. "but you know," added her mother, speaking in a very kind and gentle tone, "that you did not tell me the truth to-day about the apple that bridget gave you." louisa paused a moment, looked in her mother's face, and then, reaching up to put her arms around her mother's neck, she said, "mamma, i am determined never to tell you another wrong story as long as i live." _only a single lesson, after all_. now it is not at all probable that if the case had ended here, louisa would have kept her promise. this was one good lesson, it is true, but it was only _one_. and the lesson was given by a method so gentle, that no nervous, cerebral, or mental function was in any degree irritated or morbidly excited by it. moreover, no one who knows any thing of the workings of the infantile mind can doubt that the impulse in the right direction given by this conversation was not only better in character, but was greater in amount, than could have been effected by either of the other methods of management previously described. _how gentle measures operate_. by the gentle measures, then, which are to be here discussed and recommended, are meant such as do not react in a violent and irritating manner, in any way, upon the extremely delicate, and almost embryonic condition of the cerebral and nervous organization, in which the gradual development of the mental and moral faculties are so intimately involved. they do not imply any, the least, relaxation of the force of parental authority, or any lowering whatever of the standards of moral obligation, but are, on the contrary, the most effectual, the surest and the safest way of establishing the one and of enforcing the other. chapter iii. there must be authority. the first duty which devolves upon the mother in the training of her child is the establishment of her _authority_ over him--that is, the forming in him the habit of immediate, implicit, and unquestioning obedience to all her commands. and the first step to be taken, or, rather, perhaps the first essential condition required for the performance of this duty, is the fixing of the conviction in her own mind that it _is_ a duty. unfortunately, however, there are not only vast numbers of mothers who do not in any degree perform this duty, but a large proportion of them have not even a theoretical idea of the obligation of it. _an objection_. "i wish my child to be governed by reason and reflection," says one. "i wish him to see the _necessity_ and _propriety_ of what i require of him, so that he may render a ready and willing compliance with my wishes, instead of being obliged blindly to submit to arbitrary and despotic power." she forgets that the faculties of reason and reflection, and the power of appreciating "the necessity and propriety of things," and of bringing considerations of future, remote, and perhaps contingent good and evil to restrain and subdue the impetuousness of appetites and passions eager for present pleasure, are qualities that appear late, and are very slowly developed, in the infantile mind; that no real reliance whatever can be placed upon them in the early years of life; and that, moreover, one of the chief and expressly intended objects of the establishment of the parental relation is to provide, in the mature reason and reflection of the father and mother, the means of guidance which the embryo reason and reflection of the child could not afford during the period of his immaturity. _the two great elements of parental obligation_. indeed, the chief end and aim of the parental relation, as designed by the author of nature, may be considered as comprised, it would seem, in these two objects, namely: first, the _support_ of the child by the _strength_ of his parents during the period necessary for the development of _his_ strength, and, secondly, his guidance and direction by their _reason_ during the development of his reason. the second of these obligations is no less imperious than the first. to expect him to provide the means of his support from the resources of his own embryo strength, would imply no greater misapprehension on the part of his father and mother than to look for the exercise of any really controlling influence over his conduct by his embryo reason. the expectation in the two cases would be equally vain. the only difference would be that, in the failure which would inevitably result from the trial, it would be in the one case the body that would suffer, and in the other the soul. _the judgment more slowly developed than the strength_. indeed, the necessity that the conduct of the child should be controlled by the reason of the parents is in one point of view greater, or at least more protracted, than that his wants should be supplied by their power; for the development of the thinking and reasoning powers is late and slow in comparison with the advancement toward maturity of the physical powers. it is considered that a boy attains, in this country, to a sufficient degree of strength at the age of from _seven to ten_ years to earn his living; but his reason is not sufficiently mature to make it safe to intrust him with the care of himself and of his affairs, in the judgment of the law, till he is of more than twice that age. the parents can actually thus sooner look to the _strength_ of the child for his support than they can to his _reason_ for his guidance. _what parents have to do in respect to the reasoning powers of children_. to aid in the development and cultivation of the thinking and reasoning powers is doubtless a very important part of a parent's duty. but to cultivate these faculties is one thing, while to make any control which may be procured for them over the mind of the child the basis of government, is another. to explain the reasons of our commands is excellent, if it is done in the right time and manner. the wrong time is when the question of obedience is pending, and the wrong manner is when they are offered as inducements to obey. we may offer reasons for _recommendations_, when we leave the child to judge of their force, and to act according to our recommendations or not, as his judgment shall dictate. but reasons should never be given as inducements to obey a command. the more completely the obedience to a command rests on the principle of simple submission to authority, the easier and better it will be both for parent and child. _manner of exercising authority_. let no reader fall into the error of supposing that the mother's making her authority the basis of her government renders it necessary for her to assume a stern and severe aspect towards her children, in her intercourse with them; or to issue her commands in a harsh, abrupt, and imperious manner; or always to refrain from explaining, at the time, the reasons for a command or a prohibition. the more gentle the manner, and the more kind and courteous the tones in which the mother's wishes are expressed, the better, provided only that the wishes, however expressed, are really the mandates of an authority which is to be yielded to at once without question or delay. she may say, "mary, will you please to leave your doll and take this letter for me into the library to your father?" or, "johnny, in five minutes it will be time for you to put your blocks away to go to bed; i will tell you when the time is out;" or, "james, look at the clock"--to call his attention to the fact that the time is arrived for him to go to school. no matter, in a word, under how mild and gentle a form the mother's commands are given, provided only that the children are trained to understand that they are at once to be obeyed. _a second objection_. another large class of mothers are deterred from making any efficient effort to establish their authority over their children for fear of thereby alienating their affections. "i wish my child to love me," says a mother of this class. "that is the supreme and never-ceasing wish of my heart; and if i am continually thwarting and constraining her by my authority, she will soon learn to consider me an obstacle to her happiness, and i shall become an object of her aversion and dislike." there is some truth, no doubt, in this statement thus expressed, but it is not applicable to the case, for the reason that there is no need whatever for a mother's "continually thwarting and constraining" her children in her efforts to establish her authority over them. the love which they will feel for her will depend in a great measure upon the degree in which she sympathizes and takes part with them in their occupations, their enjoyments, their disappointments, and their sorrows, and in which she indulges their child-like desires. the love, however, awakened by these means will be not weakened nor endangered, but immensely strengthened and confirmed, by the exercise on her part of a just and equable, but firm and absolute, authority. this must always be true so long as a feeling of respect for the object of affection tends to strengthen, and not to weaken, the sentiment of love. the mother who does not govern her children is bringing them up not to love her, but to despise her. _effect of authority._ if, besides being their playmate, their companion, and friend, indulgent in respect to all their harmless fancies, and patient and forbearing with their childish faults and foolishness, she also exercises in cases requiring it an authority over them which, though just and gentle, is yet absolute and supreme, she rises to a very exalted position in their view. their affection for her has infused into it an element which greatly aggrandizes and ennobles it--an element somewhat analogous to that sentiment of lofty devotion which a loyal subject feels for his queen. _effect of the want of authority._ on the other hand, if she is inconsiderate enough to attempt to win a place in her children's hearts by the sacrifice of her maternal authority, she will never succeed in securing a place there that is worth possessing. the children will all, girls and boys alike, see and understand her weakness, and they will soon learn to look down upon her, instead of looking up to her, as they ought. as they grow older they will all become more and more unmanageable. the insubordination of the girls must generally be endured, but that of the boys will in time grow to be intolerable, and it will become necessary to send them away to school, or to adopt some other plan for ridding the house of their turbulence, and relieving the poor mother's heart of the insupportable burden she has to bear in finding herself contemned and trampled upon by her own children. in the earlier years of life the feeling entertained for their mother in such a case by the children is simply that of contempt; for the sentiment of gratitude which will modify it in time is very late to be developed, and has not yet begun to act. in later years, however, when the boys have become young men, this sentiment of gratitude begins to come in, but it only changes the contempt into pity. and when years have passed away, and the mother is perhaps in her grave, her sons think of her with a mingled feeling excited by the conjoined remembrance of her helpless imbecility and of her true maternal love, and say to each other, with a smile, "poor dear mother! what a time she had of it trying to govern us boys!" if a mother is willing to have her children thus regard her with contempt pure and simple while they are children, and with contempt transformed into pity by the infusion of a tardy sentiment of gratitude, when they are grown, she may try the plan of endeavoring to secure their love by _indulging_ them without _governing_ them. but if she sets her heart on being the object through life of their respectful love, she may indulge them as much as she pleases; but she _must govern_ them. _indulgence_. a great deal is said sometimes about the evils of indulgence in the management of children; and so far as the condemnation refers only to indulgence in what is injurious or evil, it is doubtless very just. but the harm is not in the indulgence itself--that is, in the act of affording gratification to the child--but in the injurious or dangerous nature of the things indulged in. it seems to me that children are not generally indulged enough. they are thwarted and restrained in respect to the gratification of their harmless wishes a great deal too much. indeed, as a general rule, the more that children are gratified in respect to their childish fancies and impulses, and even their caprices, when no evil or danger is to be apprehended, the better. when, therefore, a child asks, "may i do this?" or, "may i do that?" the question for the mother to consider is not whether the thing proposed is a wise or a foolish thing to do--that is, whether it would be wise or foolish for _her_, if she, with her ideas and feelings, were in the place of the child--but only whether there is any harm or danger in it; and if not, she should give her ready and cordial consent. _antagonism between free indulgence and absolute control_. there is no necessary antagonism, nor even any inconsistency, between the freest indulgence of children and the maintenance of the most absolute authority over them. indeed, the authority can be most easily established in connection with great liberality of indulgence. at any rate, it will be very evident, on reflection, that the two principles do not stand at all in opposition to each other, as is often vaguely supposed. children may be greatly indulged, and yet perfectly governed. on the other hand, they may be continually checked and thwarted, and their lives made miserable by a continued succession of vexations, restrictions, and refusals, and yet not be governed at all. an example will, however, best illustrate this. _mode of management with louisa_. a mother, going to the village by a path across the fields, proposed to her little daughter louisa to go with her for a walk. louisa asked if she might invite her cousin mary to go too. "yes," said her mother; "i _think_ she is not at home; but you can go and see, if you like." louisa went to see, and returned in a few minutes, saying that mary was _not_ at home. "never mind," replied her mother; "it was polite in you to wish to invite her." they set out upon the walk. louisa runs hither and thither over the grass, returning continually to her mother to bring her flowers and curiosities. her mother looks at them all, seems to approve of, and to sympathize in, louisa's wonder and delight, and even points out new charms in the objects which she brings to her, that louisa had not observed. at length louisa spied a butterfly. "mother," said she, "here's a butterfly. may i run and catch him?" "you may try," said her mother. louisa ran till she was tired, and then came back to her mother, looking a little disappointed. "i could not catch him, mother." "never mind," said her mother, "you had a good time trying, at any rate. perhaps you will see another by-and-by. you may possibly see a bird, and you can try and see if you can catch _him_." so louisa ran off to play again, satisfied and happy. a little farther on a pretty tree was growing, not far from the path on one side. a short, half-decayed log lay at the foot of the tree, overtopped and nearly concealed by a growth of raspberry-bushes, grass, and wild flowers. "louisa," said the mother, "do you see that tree with the pretty flowers at the foot of it?" "yes, mother." "i would rather not have you go near that tree. come over to this side of the path, and keep on this side till you get by." louisa began immediately to obey, but as she was crossing the path she looked up to her mother and asked why she must not go near the tree. "i am glad you would like to know why," replied her mother, "and i will tell you the reason as soon as we get past." louisa kept on the other side of the path until the tree was left well behind, and then came back to her mother to ask for the promised reason. "it was because i heard that there was a wasp's nest under that tree," said her mother. "a wasp's nest!" repeated louisa, with a look of alarm. "yes," rejoined her mother, "and i was afraid that the wasps might sting you." louisa paused a moment, and then, looking back towards the tree, said, "i am glad i did not go near it." "and i am glad that you obeyed me so readily," said her mother. "i knew you would obey me at once, without my giving any reason. i did not wish to tell you the reason, for fear of frightening you while you were passing by the tree. but i knew that you would obey me without any reason. you always do, and that is why i always like to have you go with me when i take a walk." [illustration: indulgence.] louisa is much gratified by this commendation, and the effect of it, and of the whole incident, in confirming and strengthening the principle of obedience in her heart, is very much greater than rebukes or punishments for any overt act of disobedience could possibly be. "but, mother," asked louisa, "how did you know that there was a wasp's nest under that tree?" "one of the boys told me so," replied her mother. "and do you really think there is one there?" asked louisa. "no," replied her mother, "i do not really think there is. boys are very apt to imagine such things." "then why would you not let me go there?" asked louisa. "because there _might be_ one there, and so i thought it safer for you not to go near." louisa now left her mother's side and resumed her excursions, running this way and that, in every direction, over the fields, until at length, her strength beginning to fail, she came back to her mother, out of breath, and with a languid air, saying that she was too tired to go any farther. "i am tired, too," said her mother; "we had better find a place to sit down to rest." "where shall we find one?" asked louisa. "i see a large stone out there before us a little way," said her mother. "how will that do?" "i mean to go and try it," said louisa; and, having seemingly recovered her breath, she ran forward to try the stone. by the time that her mother reached the spot she was ready to go on. these and similar incidents marked the whole progress of the walk. we see that in such a case as this firm government and free indulgence are conjoined; and that, far from there being any antagonism between them, they may work together in perfect harmony. _mode of management with hannah_. on the other hand, there may be an extreme limitation in respect to a mother's indulgence of her children, while yet she has no government over them at all. we shall see how this might be by the case of little hannah. hannah was asked by her mother to go with her across the fields to the village under circumstances similar to those of louisa's invitation, except that the real motive of hannah's mother, in proposing that hannah should accompany her, was to have the child's help in bringing home her parcels. "yes, mother," said hannah, in reply to her mother's invitation, "i should like to go; and i will go and ask cousin sarah to go too." "oh no," rejoined her mother, "why do you wish sarah to go? she will only be a trouble to us." "she won't be any trouble at all, mother, and i mean to go and ask her," said hannah; and, putting on her bonnet, she set off towards the gate. "no, hannah," insisted her mother, "you _must not_ go. i don't wish to have sarah go with us to-day." hannah paid no attention to this prohibition, but ran off to find sarah. after a few minutes she returned, saying that sarah was not at home. "i am glad of it," said her mother; "i told you not to go to ask her, and you did very wrong to disobey me. i have a great mind not to let you go yourself." hannah ran off in the direction of the path, not caring for the censure or for the threat, knowing well that they would result in nothing. her mother followed. when they reached the pastures hannah began running here and there over the grass. "hannah!" said her mother, speaking in a stern and reproachful tone; "what do you keep running about so for all the time, hannah? you'll get tired out before we get to the village, and then you'll be teasing me to let you stop and rest. come and walk along quietly with me." but hannah paid no attention whatever to this injunction. she ran to and fro among the rocks and clumps of bushes, and once or twice she brought to her mother flowers or other curious things that she found. "those things are not good for any thing, child," said her mother. "they are nothing but common weeds and trash. besides, i told you not to run about so much. why can't you come and walk quietly along the path, like a sensible person?" hannah paid no attention to this reiteration of her mother's command, but continued to run about as before. "hannah," repeated her mother, "come back into the path. i have told you again and again that you must come and walk with me, and you don't pay the least heed to what i say. by-and-by you will fall into some hole, or tear your clothes against the bushes, or get pricked with the briers. you must not, at any rate, go a step farther from the path than you are now." hannah walked on, looking for flowers and curiosities, and receding farther and farther from the path, for a time, and then returning towards it again, according to her own fancy or caprice, without paying any regard to her mother's directions. "hannah," said her mother, "you _must not_ go so far away from the path. then, besides, you are coming to a tree where there is a wasps' nest. you must not go near that tree; if you do, you will get stung." hannah went on, looking for flowers, and gradually drawing nearer to the tree. "hannah!" exclaimed her mother, "i tell you that you must not go near that tree. you will _certainly_ get stung." hannah went on--somewhat hesitatingly and cautiously, it is true--towards the foot of the tree, and, seeing no signs of wasps there, she began gathering the flowers that grew at the foot of it. "hannah! hannah!" exclaimed her mother; "i told you not to go near that tree! get your flowers quick, if you must get them, and come away." hannah went on gathering the flowers at her leisure. "you will _certainly_ get stung," said her mother. "i don't believe there is any hornets' nest here," replied hannah. "wasps' nest," said her mother; "it was a wasps' nest." "or wasps' nest either," said hannah. "yes," rejoined her mother, "the boys said there was." "that's nothing," said hannah; "the boys think there are wasps' nests in a great many places where there are not any." after a time hannah, having gathered all the flowers she wished for, came back at her leisure towards her mother. "i told you not to go to that tree," said her mother, reproachfully. "you told me i should certainly get stung if i went there," rejoined hannah, "and i didn't." "well, you _might_ have got stung," said her mother, and so walked on. pretty soon after this hannah said that she was tired of walking so far, and wished to stop and rest. "no," replied her mother, "i told you that you would get tired if you ran about so much; but you would do it, and so now i shall not stop for you at all." hannah said that _she_ should stop, at any rate; so she sat down upon a log by the way-side. her mother said that _she_ should go on and leave her. so her mother walked on, looking back now and then, and calling hannah to come. but finding that hannah did not come, she finally found a place to sit down herself and wait for her. _the principle illustrated by this case_. many a mother will see the image of her own management of her children reflected without exaggeration or distortion in this glass; and, as the former story shows how the freest indulgence is compatible with the maintenance of the most absolute authority, this enables us to see how a perpetual resistance to the impulses and desires of children may co-exist with no government over them at all. let no mother fear, then, that the measures necessary to establish for her the most absolute authority over her children will at all curtail her power to promote their happiness. the maintenance of the best possible government over them will not in any way prevent her yielding to them all the harmless gratifications they may desire. she may indulge them in all their childish impulses, fancies, and even caprices, to their heart's content, without at all weakening her authority over them. indeed, she may make these very indulgences the means of strengthening her authority. but without the authority she can never develop in the hearts of her children the only kind of love that is worth possessing--namely, that in which the feeling of affection is dignified and ennobled by the sentiment of respect. _one more consideration_. there is one consideration which, if properly appreciated, would have an overpowering influence on the mind of every mother in inducing her to establish and maintain a firm authority over her child during the early years of his life, and that is the possibility that he may not live to reach maturity. should the terrible calamity befall her of being compelled to follow her boy, yet young, to his grave, the character of her grief, and the degree of distress and anguish which it will occasion her, will depend very much upon the memories which his life and his relations to her have left in her soul. when she returns to her home, bowed down by the terrible burden of her bereavement, and wanders over the now desolated rooms which were the scenes of his infantile occupations and joys, and sees the now useless playthings and books, and the various objects of curiosity and interest with which he was so often and so busily engaged, there can, of course, be nothing which can really assuage her overwhelming grief; but it will make a vital difference in the character of this grief, whether the image of her boy, as it takes its fixed and final position in her memory and in her heart, is associated with recollections of docility, respectful regard for his mother's wishes, and of ready and unquestioning submission to her authority and obedience to her commands; or whether, on the other hand, the picture of his past life, which is to remain forever in her heart, is to be distorted and marred by memories of outbreaks, acts of ungovernable impulse and insubordination, habitual disregard of all authority, and disrespectful, if not contemptuous, treatment of his mother. there is a sweetness as well as a bitterness of grief; and something like a feeling of joy and gladness will spring up in the mother's heart, and mingle with and soothe her sorrow, if she can think of her boy, when he is gone, as always docile, tractable, submissive to her authority, and obedient to her commands. such recollections, it is true, can not avail to remove her grief--perhaps not even to diminish its intensity; but they will greatly assuage the bitterness of it, and wholly take away its _sting_. chapter iv. gentle punishment of disobedience. children have no natural instinct of obedience to their parents, though they have other instincts by means of which the habit of obedience, as an acquisition, can easily be formed. the true state of the case is well illustrated by what we observe among the lower animals. the hen can call her chickens when she has food for them, or when any danger threatens, and they come to her. they come, however, simply under the impulse of a desire for food or fear of danger, not from any instinctive desire to conform their action to their mother's will; or, in other words, with no idea of submission to parental authority. it is so, substantially, with many other animals whose habits in respect to the relation between parents and offspring come under human observation. the colt and the calf follow and keep near the mother, not from any instinct of desire to conform their conduct to her will, but solely from love of food, or fear of danger. these last are strictly instinctive. they act spontaneously, and require no training of any sort to establish or to maintain them. the case is substantially the same with children. they run to their mother by instinct, when want, fear, or pain impels them. they require no teaching or training for this. but for them to come simply because their mother wishes them to come--to be controlled, in other words, by her will, instead of by their own impulses, is a different thing altogether. they have no instinct for that. they have only a _capacity for its development_. _instincts and capacities_. it may, perhaps, be maintained that there is no real difference between instincts and capacities, and it certainly is possible that they may pass into each other by insensible gradations. still, practically, and in reference to our treatment of any intelligent nature which is in course of gradual development under our influence, the difference is wide. the dog has an instinct impelling him to attach himself to and follow his master; but he has no instinct leading him to draw his master's cart. he requires no teaching for the one. it comes, of course, from the connate impulses of his nature. for the other he requires a skillful and careful training. if we find a dog who evinces no disposition to seek the society of man, but roams off into woods and solitudes alone, he is useless, and we attribute the fault to his own wolfish nature. but if he will not fetch and carry at command, or bring home a basket in his mouth from market, the fault, if there be any fault, is in his master, in not having taken the proper time and pains to train him, or in not knowing how to do it. he has an instinct leading him to attach himself to a human master, and to follow his master wherever he goes. but he has no instinct leading him to fetch and carry, or to draw carts for any body. if he shows no affection for man, it is his own fault--that is, the fault of his nature. but if he does not fetch and carry well, or go out of the room when he is ordered out, or draw steadily in a cart, it is his teacher's fault. he has not been properly trained. _who is responsible?_ so with the child. if he does not seem to know how to take his food, or shows no disposition to run to his mother when he is hurt or when he is frightened, we have reason to suspect something wrong, or, at least, something abnormal, in his mental or physical constitution. but if he does not obey his mother's commands--no matter how insubordinate or unmanageable he may be--the fault does not, certainly, indicate any thing at all wrong in _him_. the fault is in his training. in witnessing his disobedience, our reflection should be, not "what a bad boy!" but "what an unfaithful or incompetent mother!" i have dwelt the longer on this point because it is fundamental as long as a mother imagines, as so many mothers seem to do, that obedience on the part of the child is, or ought to be, a matter of course, she will never properly undertake the work of training him. but when she thoroughly understands and feels that her children are not to be expected to submit their will to hers, _except so far as she forms in them the habit of doing this by special training_, the battle is half won. _actual instincts of children_. the natural instinct which impels her children to come at once to her for refuge and protection in all their troubles and fears, is a great source of happiness to every mother. this instinct shows itself in a thousand ways. "a mother, one morning"--i quote the anecdote from a newspaper[b] which came to hand while i was writing this chapter--"gave her two little ones books and toys to amuse them, while she went to attend to some work in an upper room. half an hour passed quietly, and then a timid voice at the foot of the stairs called out: "'mamma, are you there?' "'yes, darling.' "'all right, then!' and the child went back to its play. "by-and-by the little voice was heard again, repeating, "'mamma, are you there?' "'yes.' "'all right, then;' and the little ones returned again, satisfied and reassured, to their toys." the sense of their mother's presence, or at least the certainty of her being near at hand, was necessary to their security and contentment in their plays. but this feeling was not the result of any teachings that they had received from their mother, or upon her having inculcated upon their minds in any way the necessity of their keeping always within reach of maternal protection; nor had it been acquired by their own observation or experience of dangers or difficulties which had befallen them when too far away. it was a native instinct of the soul--the same that leads the lamb and the calf to keep close to their mother's side, and causes the unweaned babe to cling to its mother's bosom, and to shrink from being put away into the crib or cradle alone. _the responsibility rests upon the mother_. the mother is thus to understand that the principle of obedience is not to be expected to come by nature into the heart of her child, but to be implanted by education. she must understand this so fully as to feel that if she finds that her children are disobedient to her commands--leaving out of view cases of peculiar and extraordinary temptation--it is _her_ fault, not theirs. perhaps i ought not to say her _fault_ exactly, for she may have done as well as she knows how; but, at any rate, her failure. instead, therefore, of being angry with them, or fretting and complaining about the trouble they give her, she should leave them, as it were, out of the case, and turn her thoughts to herself, and to her own management, with a view to the discovery and the correcting of her own derelictions and errors. in a word, she must set regularly and systematically about the work of _teaching_ her children to subject their will to hers. _three methods_. i shall give three principles of management, or rather three different classes of measures, by means of which children may certainly be made obedient. the most perfect success will be attained by employing them all. but they require very different degrees of skill and tact on the part of the mother. the first requires very little skill. it demands only steadiness, calmness, and perseverance. the second draws much more upon the mother's mental resources, and the last, most of all. indeed, as will presently be seen, there is no limit to the amount of tact and ingenuity, not to say genius, which may be advantageously exercised in the last method. the first is the most essential; and it will alone, if faithfully carried out, accomplish the end. the second, if the mother has the tact and skill to carry it into effect, will aid very much in accomplishing the result, and in a manner altogether more agreeable to both parties. the third will make the work of forming the habit of obedience on the part of the mother, and of acquiring it on the part of the child, a source of the highest enjoyment to both. but then, unfortunately, it requires more skill and dexterity, more gentleness of touch, so to speak, and a more delicate constitution of soul, than most mothers can be expected to possess. but let us see what the three methods are. _first method_. . the first principle is that the mother should so regulate her management of her child, that he should _never_ gain any desired end by any act of insubmission, but _always_ incur some small trouble, inconvenience, or privation, by disobeying or neglecting to obey his mother's command. the important words in this statement of the principle are _never_ and _always_. it is the absolute certainty that disobedience will hurt him, and not help him, in which the whole efficacy of the rule consists. it is very surprising how small a punishment will prove efficacious if it is only _certain_ to follow the transgression. you may set apart a certain place for a prison--a corner of the sofa, a certain ottoman, a chair, a stool, any thing will answer; and the more entirely every thing like an air of displeasure or severity is excluded, in the manner of making the preliminary arrangements, the better. a mother without any tact, or any proper understanding of the way in which the hearts and minds of young children are influenced, will begin, very likely, with a scolding. "children, you are getting very disobedient. i have to speak three or four times before you move to do what i say. now, i am going to have a prison. the prison is to be that dark closet, and i am going to shut you up in it for half an hour every time you disobey. now, remember! the very next time!" _empty threatening_. mothers who govern by threatening seldom do any thing but threaten. accordingly, the first time the children disobey her, after such an announcement, she says nothing, if the case happens to be one in which the disobedience occasions her no particular trouble. the next time, when the transgression is a little more serious, she thinks, very rightly perhaps, that to be shut up half an hour in a dark closet would be a disproportionate punishment. then, when at length some very willful and grave act of insubordination occurs, she happens to be in particularly good-humor, for some reason, and has not the heart to shut "the poor thing" in the closet; or, perhaps, there is company present, and she does not wish to make a scene. so the penalty announced with so much emphasis turns out to be a dead letter, as the children knew it would from the beginning. _how discipline may be both gentle and efficient_. with a little dexterity and tact on the mother's part, the case may be managed very differently, and with a very different result. let us suppose that some day, while she is engaged with her sewing or her other household duties, and her children are playing around her, she tells them that in some great schools in europe, when the boys are disobedient, or violate the rules, they are shut up for punishment in a kind of prison; and perhaps she entertains them with invented examples of boys that would not go to prison, and had to be taken there by force, and kept there longer on account of their contumacy; and also of other noble boys, tall and handsome, and the best players on the grounds, who went readily when they had done wrong and were ordered into confinement, and bore their punishment like men, and who were accordingly set free all the sooner on that account. then she proposes to them the idea of adopting that plan herself, and asks them to look all about the room and find a good seat which they can have for their prison--one end of the sofa, perhaps, a stool in a corner, or a box used as a house for a kitten. i once knew an instance where a step before a door leading to a staircase served as penitentiary, and sitting upon it for a minute or less was the severest punishment required to maintain most perfect discipline in a family of young children for a long time. when any one of the children violated any rule or direction which had been enjoined upon them--as, for example, when they left the door open in coming in or going out, in the winter; or interrupted their mother when she was reading, instead of standing quietly by her side and waiting until she looked up from her book and gave them leave to speak to her; or used any violence towards each other, by pushing, or pulling, or struggling for a plaything or a place; or did not come promptly to her when called; or did not obey at once the first command in any case, the mother would say simply, "mary!" or "james! prison!" she would pronounce this sentence without any appearance of displeasure, and often with a smile, as if they were only playing prison, and then, in a very few minutes after they had taken the penitential seat, she would say _free_! which word set them at liberty again. _must begin at the beginning_. i have no doubt that some mothers, in reading this, will say that such management as this is mere trifling and play; and that real and actual children, with all their natural turbulence, insubordination, and obstinacy, can never be really governed by any such means. i answer that whether it proves on trial to be merely trifling and play or not depends upon the firmness, steadiness, and decision with which the mother carries it into execution. every method of management requires firmness, perseverance, and decision on the part of the mother to make it successful, but, with these qualities duly exercised, it is astonishing what slight and gentle penalties will suffice for the most complete establishment of her authority. i knew a mother whose children were trained to habits of almost perfect obedience, and whose only method of punishment, so far as i know, was to require the offender to stand on one foot and count five, ten, or twenty, according to the nature and aggravation of the offense. such a mother, of course, begins early with her children. she trains them from their earliest years to this constant subjection of their will to hers. such penalties, moreover, owe their efficiency not to the degree of pain or inconvenience that they impose upon the offender, but mainly upon their _calling his attention, distinctly_, after every offense, to the fact that he has done wrong. slight as this is, it will prove to be sufficient if it _always_ comes--if no case of disobedience or of willful wrong-doing of any kind is allowed to pass unnoticed, or is not followed by the infliction of the proper penalty. it is in all cases the certainty, and not the severity, of punishment which constitutes its power. _suppose one is not at the beginning_. what has been said thus far relates obviously to cases where the mother is at the commencement of her work of training. this is the way to _begin_; but you can not begin unless you are at the beginning. if your children are partly grown, and you find that they are not under your command, the difficulty is much greater. the principles which should govern the management are the same, but they can not be applied by means so gentle. the prison, it may be, must now be somewhat more real, the terms of imprisonment somewhat longer, and there may be cases of insubordination so decided as to require the offender to be carried to it by force, on account of his refusal to go of his own accord, and perhaps to be held there, or even to be tied. cases requiring treatment so decisive as this must be very rare with children under ten years of age; and when they occur, the mother has reason to feel great self-condemnation--or at least great self-abasement--at finding that she has failed so entirely in the first great moral duty of the mother, which is to train her children to complete submission to her authority from the beginning. _children coming under new control_. sometimes, however, it happens that children are transferred from one charge to another, so that the one upon whom the duty of government devolves, perhaps only for a time, finds that the child or children put under his or her charge have been trained by previous mismanagement to habits of utter insubordination. i say, trained to such habits, for the practice of allowing children to gain their ends by any particular means is really training them to the use of those means. thus multitudes of children are taught to disobey, and trained to habits of insubmission and insubordination, by the means most effectually adapted to that end. _difficulties_. when under these circumstances the children come under a new charge, whether permanently or temporarily, the task of re-form in or their characters is more delicate and difficult than where one can begin at the beginning; but the principles are the same, and the success is equally certain. the difficulty is somewhat increased by the fact that the person thus provisionally in charge has often no natural authority over the child, and the circumstances may moreover be such as to make it necessary to abstain carefully from any measures that would lead to difficulty or collision, to cries, complaints to the mother, or any of those other forms of commotion or annoyance, which ungoverned children know so well how to employ in gaining their ends. the mother may be one of those weak-minded women who can never see any thing unreasonable in the crying complaints made by their children against other people. or she may be sick, and it may be very important to avoid every thing that could agitate or disturb her. _george and egbert_. this last was the case of george, a young man of seventeen, who came to spend some time at home after an absence of two years in the city. he found his mother sick, and his little brother, egbert, utterly insubordinate and unmanageable. "the first thing i have to do," said george to himself, when he observed how things were, "is to get command of egbert;" and as the first lesson which he gave his little brother illustrates well the principle of gentle but efficient punishment, i will give it here. egbert was ten years of age. he was very fond of going a-fishing, but he was not allowed to go alone. his mother, very weak and vacillating about some things, was extremely decided about this. so egbert had learned to submit to this restriction, as he would have done to all others if his mother had been equally decided in respect to all. the first thing that egbert thought of the next morning after his brother's return was that george might go a-fishing with him. "i don't know," replied george, in a hesitating and doubtful tone. "i don't know whether it will do for me to go a-fishing with you. i don't know whether i can depend upon your always obeying me and doing as i say." egbert made very positive promises, and so it was decided to go. george took great interest in helping egbert about his fishing-tackle, and did all in his power in other ways to establish friendly relations with him, and at length they set out. they walked a little distance down what was in the winter a wood road, and then came to a place where two paths led into a wood. either of them led to the river. but there was a brook to cross, and for one of these paths there was a bridge. there was none for the other. george said that they would take the former. egbert, however, paid no regard to this direction, but saying simply "no, i'd rather go this way," walked off in the other path. "i was afraid you would not obey me," said george, and then turned and followed egbert into the forbidden path, without making any further objection. egbert concluded at once that he should find george as easily to be managed as he had found other people. _the disobedience_. when they came in sight of the brook, george saw that there was a narrow log across it, in guise of a bridge. he called out to egbert, who had gone on before him, not to go over the log until _he_ came. but egbert called back in reply that there was no danger, that he could go across alone, and so went boldly over. george, on arriving at the brook, and finding that the log was firm and strong, followed egbert over it. "i told you i could go across it," said egbert. "yes," replied george, "and you were right in that. you did cross it. the log is very steady. i think it makes quite a good bridge." egbert said he could hop across it on one foot, and george gave him leave to try, while he, george, held his fishing-pole for him. george followed him over the log, and then told him that he was very sorry to say it, but that he found that they could not go a-fishing that day. egbert wished to know the reason. george said it was a private reason and he could not tell him then, but that he would tell him that evening after he had gone to bed. there was a story about it, too, he said, that he would tell him at the same time. egbert was curious to know what the reason could be for changing the plan, and also to hear the story. still he was extremely disappointed in having to lose his fishing, and very much disposed to be angry with george for not going on. it was, however, difficult to get very angry without knowing george's reason, and george, though he said that the reason was a good one--that it was a serious difficulty in the way of going a-fishing that day, which had only come to his knowledge since they left home, steadily persisted in declining to explain what the difficulty was until the evening, and began slowly to walk back toward the house. _egbert becomes sullen_. egbert then declared that, at any rate, he would not go home. if he could not go a-fishing he would stay there in the woods. george readily fell in with this idea. "here is a nice place for me to sit down on this flat rock under the trees," said he, "and i have got a book in my pocket. you can play about in the woods as long as you please. perhaps you will see a squirrel; if you do, tell me, and i will come and help you catch him." so saying, he took out his book and sat down under the trees and began to read. egbert, after loitering about sullenly a few minutes, began to walk up the path, and said that he was going home. george, however, soon succeeded in putting him in good-humor again by talking with him in a friendly manner, and without manifesting any signs of displeasure, and also by playing with him on the way. he took care to keep on friendly terms with him all the afternoon, aiding him in his various undertakings, and contributing to his amusement in every way as much as he could, while he made no complaint, and expressed no dissatisfaction with him in any way whatever. _final disposition of the case_. after egbert had gone to bed, and before he went to sleep, george made him a visit at his bedside, and, after a little playful frolic with him, to put him in special good-humor, said he would make his explanation. "the reason why i had to give up the fishing expedition," he said, "was, i found that i could not depend upon your obeying me." egbert, after a moment's pause, said that he did not disobey him; and when george reminded him of his taking the path that he was forbidden to take, and of his crossing the log bridge against orders, he said that that path led to the river by the shortest way, and that he knew that the log was firm and steady, and that he could go over it without falling in. "and so you thought you had good reasons for disobeying me," rejoined george. "yes," said egbert, triumphantly. "that is just it," said george. "you are willing to obey, except when you think you have good reasons for disobeying, and then you disobey. that's the way a great many boys do, and that reminds me of the story i was going to tell you. it is about some soldiers." george then told egbert a long story about a colonel who sent a captain with a company of men on a secret expedition with specific orders, and the captain disobeyed the orders and crossed a stream with his force, when he had been directed to remain on the hither side of it, thinking himself that it would be better to cross, and in consequence of it he and all his force were captured by the enemy, who were lying in ambush near by, as the colonel knew, though the captain did not know it. george concluded his story with some very forcible remarks, showing, in a manner adapted to egbert's state of mental development, how essential it was to the character of a good soldier that he should obey implicitly all the commands of his superior, without ever presuming to disregard them on the ground of his seeing good reason for doing so. he then went on to relate another story of an officer on whom the general could rely for implicit and unhesitating obedience to all his commands, and who was sent on an important expedition with orders, the reasons for which he did not understand, but all of which he promptly obeyed, and thus brought the expedition to a successful conclusion. he made the story interesting to egbert by narrating many details of a character adapted to egbert's comprehension, and at the end drew a moral from it for his instruction. _the moral_. this moral was not, as some readers might perhaps anticipate, and as, indeed, many persons of less tact might have made it, that egbert ought himself, as a boy, to obey those in authority over him. instead of this he closed by saying: "and i advise you, if you grow up to be a man and ever become the general of an army, never to trust any captain or colonel with the charge of an important enterprise, unless they are men that know how to obey." egbert answered very gravely that he was "determined that he wouldn't." soon after this george bade him good-night and went away. the next day he told egbert not to be discouraged at his not having yet learned to obey. "there are a great many boys older than you," he said, "who have not learned this lesson; but you will learn in time. i can't go a-fishing with you, or undertake any other great expeditions, till i find i can trust you entirely to do exactly as i say in cases where i have a right to decide; but you will learn before long, and then we can do a great many things together which we can not do now." _the principles illustrated_. any one who has any proper understanding of the workings of the juvenile mind will see that george, by managing egbert on these principles, would in a short time acquire complete ascendency over him, while the boy would very probably remain, in relation to his mother, as disobedient and insubordinate as ever. if the penalty annexed to the transgression is made as much as possible the necessary and natural consequence of it, and is insisted upon calmly, deliberately, and with inflexible decision, but without irritation, without reproaches, almost without any indications even of displeasure, but is, on the contrary, lightened as much as possible by sympathy and kindness, and by taking the most indulgent views, and admitting the most palliating considerations in respect to the nature of the offense, the result will certainly be the establishment of the authority of the parent or guardian on a firm and permanent basis. there are a great many cases of this kind, where a child with confirmed habits of insubordination comes under the charge of a person who is not responsible for the formation of these habits. even the mother herself sometimes finds herself in substantially this position with her own children; as, for example, when after some years of lax and inefficient government she becomes convinced that her management has been wrong, and that it threatens to bring forth bitter fruits unless it is reformed. in these cases, although the work is somewhat more difficult, the principles on which success depends are the same. slight penalties, firmly, decisively, and invariably enforced--without violence, without scolding, without any manifestation of resentment or anger, and, except in extreme cases, without even expressions of displeasure--constitute a system which, if carried out calmly, but with firmness and decision, will assuredly succeed. _the real difficulty_. the case would thus seem to be very simple, and success very easy. but, alas! this is far from being the case. nothing is required, it is true, but firmness, steadiness, and decision; but, unfortunately, these are the very requisites which, of all others, it seems most difficult for mothers to command. they can not govern their children because they can not govern themselves. still, if the mother possess these qualities in any tolerable degree, or is able to acquire them, this method of training her children to the habit of submitting implicitly to her authority, by calmly and good-naturedly, but firmly and invariably, affixing some slight privation or penalty to every act of resistance to her will, is the easiest to practice, and will certainly be successful. it requires no ingenuity, no skill, no contrivance, no thought--nothing but steady persistence in a simple routine. this was the first of the three modes of action enumerated at the commencement of this discussion. there were two others named, which, though requiring higher qualities in the mother than simple steadiness of purpose, will make the work far more easy and agreeable, where these qualities are possessed. some further consideration of the subject of punishment, with special reference to the light in which it is to be regarded in respect to its nature and its true mode of action, will occupy the next chapter. chapter v. the philosophy of punishment. it is very desirable that every parent and teacher should have a distinct and clear conception of the true nature of punishment, and of the precise manner in which it is designed to act in repressing offenses. this is necessary in order that the punitive measures which he may employ may accomplish the desired good, and avoid the evils which so often follow in their train. _nature and design of punishment_. the first question which is to be considered in determining upon the principles to be adopted and the course to be pursued with children in respect to punishment, is, which of the two views in respect to the nature and design of punishment which prevail in the minds of men we will adopt in shaping our system. for, . punishment may be considered in the light of a vindictive retribution for sin--a penalty demanded by the eternal principles of justice as the natural and proper sequel and complement of the past act of transgression, with or without regard to any salutary effects that may result from it in respect to future acts. or, . it may be considered as a remedial measure, adopted solely with reference to its influence as a means of deterring the subject of it, or others, from transgression in time to come. according to the first view, punishment is a _penalty_ which _justice_ demands as a satisfaction for the past. according to the other it is a _remedy_ which _goodness_ devises for the benefit of the future. theologians have lost themselves in endless speculations on the question how far, in the government of god, punishment is to be considered as possessing one or the other of these two characters, or both combined. there seems to be also some uncertainty in the minds of men in relation to the precise light in which the penalties of violated law are to be regarded by civil governments, and the spirit in which they are to be administered--they being apparently, as prescribed and employed by most governments, in some respects, and to some extent, retributive and vindictive, and in other respects remedial and curative. it would seem, however, that in respect to school and family government there could be no question on this point. the punishment of a child by a parent, or of a pupil by a teacher, ought certainly, one would think, to exclude the element of vindictive retribution altogether, and to be employed solely with reference to the salutary influences that may be expected from it in time to come. if the injunction "vengeance is mine, i will repay it, saith the lord" is to be recognized at all, it certainly ought to be acknowledged here. this principle, once fully and cordially admitted, simplifies the subject of punishment, as administered by parents and teachers, very much. one extremely important and very striking result of it will appear from a moment's reflection. it is this, namely: it excludes completely and effectually all manifestations of irritation or excitement in the infliction of punishment--all harsh tones of voice, all scowling or angry looks, all violent or threatening gesticulations, and every other mode, in fact, of expressing indignation or passion. such indications as these are wholly out of place in punishment considered as the _application of a remedy_ devised beneficently with the sole view of accomplishing a future good. they comport only with punishment considered as vengeance, or a vindictive retribution for the past sin. this idea is fundamental. the mother who is made angry by the misconduct of her children, and punishes them in a passion, acts under the influence of a brute instinct. her family government is in principle the same as that of the lower animals over their young. it is, however, at any rate, a _government_; and such government is certainly better than none. but human parents, in the training of their human offspring, ought surely to aim at something higher and nobler. they who do so, who possess themselves fully with the idea that punishment, as they are to administer it, is wholly remedial in its character--that is to say, is to be considered solely with reference to the future good to be attained by it, will have established in their minds a principle that will surely guide them into right ways, and bring them out successfully in the end. they will soon acquire the habit of never threatening, of never punishing in anger, and of calmly considering, in the case of the faults which they observe in their children, what course of procedure will be most effectual in correcting them. parents seem sometimes to have an idea that a manifestation of something like anger--or, at least, very serious displeasure on their part--is necessary in order to make a proper impression in respect to its fault on the mind of the child. this, however, i think, is a mistake. the impression is made by what we _do_, and not by the indications of irritation or displeasure which we manifest in doing it. to illustrate this, i will state a case, narrating all its essential points just as it occurred. the case is very analogous, in many particulars, to that of egbert and george related in the last chapter. _mary's walk_. "mary," said mary's aunt, jane, who had come to make a visit at mary's mother's in the country, "i am going to the village this afternoon, and if you would like you may go with me." mary was, of course, much pleased with this invitation. "a part of the way," continued her aunt, "is by a path across the fields. while we are there you must keep in the path all the time, for it rained a little this morning, and i am afraid that the grass may not be quite dry." "yes, aunt jane; i'll keep in the path," said mary. so they set out on the walk together. when they came to the gate which led to the path across the fields, aunt jane said, "remember, mary, you must keep in the path." mary said nothing, but ran forward. pretty soon she began to walk a little on the margin of the grass, and, before long, observing a place where the grass was short and where the sun shone, she ran out boldly upon it, and then, looking down at her shoes, she observed that they were not wet. she held up one of her feet to her aunt as she came opposite to the place, saying, "see, aunt, the grass is not wet at all." "i see it is not," said her aunt. "i _thought_ it would not be wet; though i was not sure but that it might be. but come," she added, holding out her hand, "i have concluded not to go to the village, after all. we are going back home." "oh, aunt jane!" said mary, following her aunt as she began retracing her steps along the path. "what is that for?" "i have altered my mind," said her aunt. "what makes you alter your mind?" by this time aunt jane had taken hold of mary's hand, and they were walking together along the path towards home. "because you don't obey me," she said. "why, auntie," said mary, "the grass was not wet at all where i went." "no," said her aunt, "it was perfectly dry." "and it did not do any harm at all for me to walk upon it," said mary. "not a bit of harm," said her aunt. "then why are you going home?" asked mary. "because you don't obey me," replied her aunt. "you see," said her aunt, "there is one thing about this that you don't understand, because you are such a little girl. you will understand it by-and-by, when you grow older; and i don't blame you for not knowing it now, because you are so young." "what is it that i don't know?" asked mary. "i am afraid you would not understand it very well if i were to explain it," replied her aunt. "try me," said mary. "well, you see," replied her aunt, "i don't feel safe with any child that does not obey me. this time no harm was done, because the grass happened to be dry; but farther on there was a brook. i might have told you not to go near the brink of the brook for fear of your falling in. then you might have gone, notwithstanding, if you thought there was no danger, just as you went out upon the grass because you thought it was not wet, notwithstanding my saying that you must keep in the path. so you see i never feel safe in taking walks in places where there is any danger with children that i can not always depend upon to do exactly what i say." mary was, of course, now ready to make profuse promises that she would obey her aunt in future on all occasions and began to beg that she would continue her walk to the village. "no," said her aunt, "i don't think it would be quite safe for me to trust to your promises, though i have no doubt you honestly mean to keep them. but you remember you promised me that you would keep in the path when we planned this walk; and yet when the time of temptation came you could not keep the promise; but you will learn. when i am going on some perfectly safe walk i will take you with me again; and if i stay here some time you will learn to obey me so perfectly that i can take you with me to any place, no matter how dangerous it may be." aunt jane thus gently, but firmly, persisted in abandoning the walk to the village, and returning home; but she immediately turned the conversation away from the subject of mary's fault, and amused her with stories and aided her in gathering flowers, just as if nothing had happened; and when she arrived at home she said nothing to any one of mary's disobedience. here now was punishment calculated to make a very strong impression--but still without scolding, without anger, almost, in fact, without even any manifestations of displeasure. and yet how long can any reasonable person suppose it would be before mary would learn, if her aunt acted invariably on the same principles, to submit implicitly to her will? _a different management_. compare the probable result of this mode of management with the scolding and threatening policy. suppose aunt jane had called to mary angrily, "mary! mary! come directly back into the path. i told you not to go out of the path, and you are a very naughty child to disobey me. the next time you disobey me in that way i will send you directly home." mary would have been vexed and irritated, perhaps, and would have said to herself, "how cross aunt jane is to-day!" but the "next time" she would have been as disobedient as ever. if mothers, instead of scowling, scolding, and threatening now, and putting off doing the thing that ought to be done to the "next time," would do that thing at once, and give up the scowling, scolding, and threatening altogether, they would find all parties immensely benefited by the change. it is evident, moreover, that by this mode of management the punishment is employed not in the way of retribution, but as a remedy. mary loses her walk not on the ground that she deserved to lose it, but because it was not safe to continue it. _an objection_. some mother may perhaps say, in reference to the case of mary and her aunt, that it may be all very well in theory, but that practically mothers have not the leisure and the means for adopting such moderate measures. we can not stop, she may say, every time we are going to the village, on important business perhaps, and turn back and lose the afternoon on account of the waywardness of a disobedient child. my answer is that it will not have to be done _every time,_ but only very seldom. the effect of acting once or twice on this principle, with the certainty on the part of the child that the mother or the aunt will always act so when the occasion calls for it, very soon puts an end to all necessity for such action. indeed, if mary, in the instance above given, had been managed in this way from infancy, she would not have thought of leaving the path when forbidden to do so. it is only in some such case as that of an aunt who knows how to manage right, coming as a visitor into the family of a mother who manages wrong, that such an incident as this could occur. still it must be admitted that the gentle methods of discipline, which reason and common sense indicate as the true ones for permanently influencing the minds of children and forming their characters, do, in each individual case, require more time and care than the cuffs and slaps dictated by passion. a box on the ear, such as a cat gives to a rebellious kitten, is certainly the _quickest_ application that can be made. the measures that are calculated to reach and affect the heart can not vie with blows and scoldings in respect to the promptness of their action. still, the parent or the teacher who will begin to act on the principles here recommended with children while they are young will find that such methods are far more prompt in their action and more effectual in immediate results than they would suppose, and that they will be the means of establishing the only kind of authority that is really worthy of the name more rapidly than any other. the special point, however, with a view to which these illustrations are introduced, is, as has been already remarked, that penalties of this nature, and imposed in this spirit, are not vindictive, but simply remedial and reformatory. they are not intended to satisfy the sense of justice for what is past, but only to secure greater safety and happiness in time to come. _the element of invariableness_. punishments may be very light and gentle in their character, provided they are certain to follow the offense. it is in their _certainty_, and not in their _severity_, that the efficiency of them lies. very few children are ever severely burnt by putting their fingers into the flame of a candle. they are effectually taught not to put them in by very slight burnings, on account of the _absolute invariableness_ of the result produced by the contact. mothers often do not understand this. they attempt to cure some habitual fault by scoldings and threats, and declarations of what they will certainly do "next time," and perhaps by occasional acts of real severity in cases of peculiar aggravation, instead of a quiet, gentle, and comparatively trifling infliction in _every instance_ of the fault, which would be altogether more effectual. a child, for example, has acquired the habit of leaving the door open. now occasionally scolding him, when it is specially cold, and now and then shutting him up in a closet for half an hour, will never cure him of the fault. but if there were an automaton figure standing by the side of the door, to say to him _every time_ that he came through without shutting it, _door_! which call should be a signal to him to go back and shut the door, and then sit down in a chair near by and count ten; and if this slight penalty was _invariably_ enforced, he would be most effectually cured of the fault in a very short time. now, the mother can not be exactly this automaton, for she can not always be there; but she can recognize the principle, and carry it into effect as far as possible--that is, _invariably, when she is there_. and though she will not thus cure the boy of the fault so soon as the automaton would do it, she will still do it very soon. _irritation and anger_. avoid, as much as possible, every thing of an irritating character in the punishments inflicted, for to irritate frequently the mind of a child tends, of course, to form within him an irritable and unamiable temper. it is true, perhaps, that it is not possible absolutely to avoid this effect of punishment in all cases; but a great deal may be done to diminish the evil by the exercise of a little tact and ingenuity on the part of the mother whose attention is once particularly directed to the subject. the first and most important measure of precaution on this point is the absolute exclusion of every thing like angry looks and words as accompaniments of punishment. if you find that any wrong which your child commits awakens irritation or anger in your mind, suspend your judgment of the case and postpone all action until the irritation and anger have subsided, and you can consider calmly and deliberately what to do, with a view, not of satisfying your own resentment, but of doing good to the child. then, when you have decided what to do, carry your decision into effect in a good-natured manner--firmly and inflexibly--but still without any violence, or even harshness, of manner. _co-operation of the offender_. there are many cases in which, by the exercise of a little tact and ingenuity, the parent can actually secure the _co-operation_ of the child in the infliction of the punishment prescribed for the curing of a fault. there are many advantages in this, when it can be done. it gives the child an interest in curing himself of the fault; it makes the punishment more effectual; and it removes almost all possibility of its producing any irritation or resentment in his mind. to illustrate this we will give a case. it is of no consequence, for the purpose of this article, whether it is a real or an imaginary one. little egbert, seven years old, had formed the habit so common among children of wasting a great deal of time in dressing himself, so as not to be ready for breakfast when the second bell rang. his mother offered him a reward if he would himself devise any plan that would cure him of the fault. "i don't know what to do, exactly, to cure you," she said; "but if you will think of any plan that will really succeed, i will give you an excursion in a carriage." "how far?" asked egbert. "ten miles," said his mother. "i will take you in a carriage on an excursion anywhere you say, for ten miles, if you will find out some way to cure yourself of this fault." "i think you ought to punish me," said egbert, speaking in rather a timid tone. "that's just it," said his mother, "it is for you to think of some kind of punishment that won't be too disagreeable for me to inflict, and which will yet be successful in curing you of the fault. i will allow you a fortnight to get cured. if you are not cured in a fortnight i shall think the punishment is not enough, or that it is not of a good kind; but if it works so well as to cure you in a fortnight, then you shall have the ride." egbert wished to know whether he must think of the punishment himself, or whether his sister mary might help him. his mother gave him leave to ask any body to help him that he pleased. mary, after some reflection, recommended that, whenever he was not dressed in time, he was to have only one lump of sugar, instead of four, in his tumbler of water for breakfast. his usual drink at breakfast was a tumbler of water, with four lumps of sugar in it. the first bell was rung at half-past six, and breakfast was at half-past seven. his sister recommended that, as half an hour was ample time for the work of dressing, egbert should go down every morning and report himself ready before the clock struck seven. if he failed of this, he was to have only one lump of sugar, instead of four, in his glass of water. there was some question about the necessity of requiring him to be ready before seven; egbert being inclined to argue that if he was ready by breakfast-time, that would be enough. but mary said no. "to allow you a full hour to dress," she said, "when half an hour is enough, may answer very well in respect to having you ready for breakfast, but it is no way to cure you of the fault. that would enable you to play half of the time while you are dressing, without incurring the punishment; but the way to cure you is to make it sure that you will have the punishment to bear if you play at all." so it was decided to allow only half an hour for the dressing-time. egbert's mother said she was a little afraid about the one lump of sugar that was left to him when he failed. "the plan _may_ succeed," she said; "i am very willing that you should try it; but i am afraid that when you are tempted to stop and play in the midst of your dressing, you will say, i shall have _one_ lump of sugar, at any rate, and so will yield to the temptation. so perhaps it would be safer for you to make the rule that you are not to have any sugar at all when you fail. still, _perhaps_ your plan will succeed. you can try it and see. i should wish myself to have the punishment as slight as possible to produce the effect." by such management as this, it is plain that egbert is brought into actual co-operation with his mother in the infliction of a punishment to cure him of a fault. it is true, that making such an arrangement as this, and then leaving it to its own working, would lead to no result. as in the case of all other plans and methods, it must be strictly, firmly, and perseveringly followed up by the watchful efficiency of the mother. we can not _substitute_ the action of the child for that of the parent in the work of early training, but we can often derive very great advantage by securing his cooperation. _playful punishments_. so true is it that the efficacy of any mode of punishment consists in the _certainty of its infliction_, that even playful punishments are in many cases sufficient to accomplish the cure of a fault. george, for example, was in the habit of continually getting into disputes and mild quarrels with his sister amelia, a year or two younger than himself. "i know it is very foolish," he said to his mother, when she was talking with him on the subject one evening after he had gone to bed, and she had been telling him a story, and his mind was in a calm and tranquil state. "it is very foolish, but somehow i can't help it. i forget." "then you must have some punishment to make you remember," said his mother. "but sometimes _she_ is the one to blame," said george, "and then she must have the punishment." "no," replied his mother. "when a lady and a gentleman become involved in a dispute in polite society, it is always the gentleman that must be considered to be to blame." "but amelia and i are not polite society," said george. "you ought to be," said his mother. "at any rate, when you, an older brother, get into disputes with your sister, it is because you have not sense enough to manage so as to avoid them. if you were a little older and wiser you would have sense enough." "well, mother, what shall the punishment be?" said george. "would you really like to have a punishment, so as to cure yourself of the fault?" asked his mother. george said that he _would_ like one. "then," said his mother, "i propose that every time you get into a dispute with amelia, you turn your jacket wrong side out, and wear it so a little while as a symbol of folly." george laughed heartily at this idea, and said he should like such a punishment as that very much. it would only be fun, he said. his mother explained to him that it would be fun, perhaps, two or three times, but after that it would only be a trouble; but still, if they decided upon that as a punishment, he must submit to it in every case. every time he found himself getting into any dispute or difficulty with his sister, he must stop at once and turn his jacket inside out; and if he did not himself think to do this, she herself, if she was within hearing, would simply say, "jacket!" and then he must do it. "no matter which of us is most to blame?" asked george. "you will always be the one that is most to blame," replied his mother, "or, at least, almost always. when a boy is playing with a sister younger than himself, _he_ is the one that is most to blame for the quarrelling. his sister may be to blame by doing something wrong in the first instance; but he is the one to blame for allowing it to lead to a quarrel. if it is a little thing, he ought to yield to her, and not to mind it; and if it is a great thing, he ought to go away and leave her, rather than to stop and quarrel about it. so you see you will be the one to blame for the quarrel in almost all cases. there may possibly be some cases where you will not be to blame at all, and then you will have to be punished when you don't deserve it, and you must bear it like a man. this is a liability that happens under all systems." "we will try the plan for one fortnight," she continued. "so now remember, every single time that i hear you disputing or quarrelling with amelia, you must take off your jacket and put it on again wrong side out--no matter whether you think you were to blame or not--and wear it so a few minutes. you can wear it so for a longer or shorter time, just as you think is best to make the punishment effectual in curing you of the fault. by the end of the fortnight we shall be able to see whether the plan is working well and doing any good." "so now," continued his mother, "shut up your eyes and go to sleep. you are a good boy to wish to cure yourself of such faults, and to be willing to help me in contriving ways to do it. and i have no doubt that you will submit to this punishment good-naturedly every time, and not make me any trouble about it." let it be remembered, now, that the efficacy of such management as this consists not in the devising of it, nor in holding such a conversation as the above with the boy--salutary as this might be--but in the _faithfulness and strictness with which it is followed up_ during the fortnight of trial. in the case in question, the progress which george made in diminishing his tendency to get into disputes with his sister was so great that his mother told him, at the end of the first fortnight, that their plan had succeeded "admirably"--so much so, she said, that she thought the punishment of taking off his jacket and turning it inside out would be for the future unnecessarily severe, and she proposed to substitute for it taking off his cap, and putting it on wrong side before. the reader will, of course, understand that the object of such an illustration as this is not to recommend the particular measure here described for adoption in other cases, but to illustrate the spirit and temper of mind in which all measures adopted by the mother in the training of her children should be carried into effect. measures that involve no threats, no scolding, no angry manifestations of displeasure, but are even playful in their character, may be very efficient in action if they are firmly and perseveringly maintained. _punishments that are the natural consequence of the offense_. there is great advantage in adapting the character of the punishment to that of the fault--making it, as far as possible, the natural and proper consequence of it. for instance, if the boys of a school do not come in promptly at the close of the twenty minutes' recess, but waste five minutes by their dilatoriness in obeying the summons of the bell, and the teacher keeps them for _five minutes beyond the usual hour of dismissal_, to make up for the lost time, the punishment may be felt by them to be deserved, and it may have a good effect in diminishing the evil it is intended to remedy; but it will probably excite a considerable degree of mental irritation, if not of resentment, on the part of the children, which will diminish the good effect, or is, at any rate, an evil which is to be avoided if possible. if now, on the other hand, he assigns precisely the same penalty in another form, the whole of the good effect may be secured without the evil. suppose he addresses the boys just before they are to go out at the next recess, as follows: "i think, boys, that twenty minutes is about the right length of time for the recess, all told--that is, from the time you go out to the time when you are _all_ back in your seats again, quiet and ready to resume your studies. i found yesterday that it took five minutes for you all to come in--that is, that it was five minutes from the time the bell was rung before all were in their seats; and to-day i shall ring the bell after _fifteen_ minutes, so as to give you time to come in. if i find to-day that it takes ten minutes, then i will give you more time to come in to-morrow, by ringing the bell after you have been out _ten_ minutes." "i am sorry to have you lose so much of your recess, and if you can make the time for coming in shorter, then, of course, your recess can be longer. i should not wonder if, after a few trials, you should find that you could all come in and get into your places in _one_ minute; and if so, i shall be very glad, for then you can have an uninterrupted recess of _nineteen_ minutes, which will be a great gain." every one who has had any considerable experience in the management of boys will readily understand how different the effect of this measure will be from that of the other, while yet the penalty is in both cases precisely the same--namely, the loss, for the boys, of five minutes of their play. _the little runaway_. in the same manner, where a child three or four years old was in the habit, when allowed to go out by himself in the yard to play, of running off into the street, a very appropriate punishment would be to require him, for the remainder of the day, to stay in the house and keep in sight of his mother, on the ground that it was not safe to trust him by himself in the yard. this would be much better than sending him to bed an hour earlier, or subjecting him to any other inconvenience or privation having no obvious connection with the fault. for it is of the greatest importance to avoid, by every means, the exciting of feelings of irritation and resentment in the mind of the child, so far as it is possible to do this without impairing the efficiency of the punishment. it is not always possible to do this. the efficiency of the punishment is, of course, the essential thing; but parents and teachers who turn their attention to the point will find that it is much less difficult than one would suppose to secure this end completely without producing the too frequent accompaniments of punishment--anger, ill-temper, and ill-will. [illustration: "it is not safe"] in the case, for example, of the child not allowed to go out into the yard, but required to remain in the house in sight of his mother, the mother should not try to make the punishment _more heavy_ by speaking again and again of his fault, and evincing her displeasure by trying to make the confinement as irksome to the child as possible; but, on the other hand, should do all in her power to alleviate it. "i am very sorry," she might say, "to have to keep you in the house. it would be much pleasanter for you to go out and play in the yard, if it was only safe. i don't blame you very much for running away. it is what foolish little children, as little as you, very often do. i suppose you thought it would be good fun to run out a little way in the street. and it is good fun; but it is not safe. by-and-by, when you grow a little larger, you won't be so foolish, and then i can trust you in the yard at any time without having to watch you at all. and now what can i get for you to amuse you while you stay in the house with me?" punishment coming in this way, and administered in this spirit, will irritate the mind and injure the temper comparatively little; and, instead of being less; will be much more effective in accomplishing the _right kind_ of cure for the fault, than any stern, severe, and vindictive retribution can possibly be. _the question of corporal punishment_. the question of resorting to corporal punishment in the training of the young has been much, very much, argued and discussed on both sides by writers on education; but it seems to me to be mainly a question of competency and skill. if the parent or teacher has tact or skill enough, and practical knowledge enough of the workings of the youthful mind, he can gain all the necessary ascendency over it without resort to the violent infliction of bodily pain in any form. if he has not these qualities, then he must turn to the next best means at his disposal; for it is better that a child should be trained and governed by the rod than not trained and governed at all. i do not suppose that savages could possibly control their children without blows; while, on the other hand, maria edgeworth would have brought under complete submission to her will a family of the most ardent and impulsive juveniles, perhaps without even a harsh word or a frown. if a mother begins with children at the beginning, is just and true in all her dealings with them, gentle in manner, but inflexibly firm in act, and looks constantly for divine guidance and aid in her conscientious efforts to do her duty, i feel quite confident that it will never be necessary for her to strike them. the necessity may, however, sooner or later come, for aught i know, in the case of those who act on the contrary principle. under such management, the rod may come to be the only alternative to absolute unmanageableness and anarchy. there will be occasion, however, to refer to this subject more fully in a future chapter. chapter vi. rewarding obedience. the mode of action described in the last two chapters for training children to habits of obedience consisted in discouraging disobedience by connecting some certain, though mild and gentle disadvantage, inconvenience, or penalty, with every transgression. in this chapter is to be considered another mode, which is in some respects the converse of the first, inasmuch as it consists in the encouragement of obedience, by often--not necessarily always--connecting with it some advantage, or gain, or pleasure; or, as it may be stated summarily, the cautious encouragement of obedience by rewards. this method of action is more difficult than the other in the sense that it requires more skill, tact, and delicacy of perception and discrimination to carry it successfully into effect. the other demands only firm, but gentle and steady persistence. if the penalty, however slight it may be, _always comes,_ the effect will take care of itself. but judiciously to administer a system of rewards, or even of commendations, requires tact, discrimination, and skill. it requires some observation of the peculiar characteristics of the different minds acted upon, and of the effects produced, and often some intelligent modification of the measures is required, to fit them to varying circumstances and times. _obedience must not be bought_. if the bestowing of commendation and rewards is made a matter of mere blind routine, as the assigning of gentle penalties may be, the result will become a mere system of _bribing_, or rather paying children to be good; and goodness that is bought, if it deserves the name of virtue at all, is certainly virtue of a very inferior quality. whether a reward conferred for obedience shall operate as a bribe, or rather as a price paid--for a _bribe_, strictly speaking, is a price paid, not for doing right, but for doing wrong--depends sometimes on very slight differences in the management of the particular case--differences which an undiscriminating mother will not be very ready to appreciate. a mother, for example, going into the village on a summer afternoon, leaves her children playing in the yard, under the general charge of susan, who is at work in the kitchen, whence she can observe them from time to time through the open window. she thinks the children will be safe, provided they remain in the yard. the only thing to be guarded against is the danger that they may go out through the gate into the road. _two different modes of management_. under some circumstances, as, for example, where the danger to which they would be exposed in going into the road was very great, or where the mother can not rely upon her power to control her children's conduct by moral means in any way, the only safe method would be to fasten the gate. but if she prefers to depend for their safety on their voluntary obedience to her commands, and wishes, moreover, to promote the spirit of obedience by rewarding rather than punishing, she can make her rewards of the nature of hire or not, according to her mode of management. if she wishes to _hire_ obedience, she has only to say to the children that she is going into the village for a little time, and that they may play in the yard while she is gone, but must not go out of the gate; adding, that she is going to bring home some oranges or candies, which she will give them if she finds that they have obeyed her, but which she will not give them if they have disobeyed. such a promise, provided the children have the double confidence in their mother which such a method requires--namely, first, a full belief that she will really bring home the promised rewards, if they obey her; and secondly--and this is a confidence much less frequently felt by children, and much less frequently deserved by their mothers--a conviction that, in case they disobey, no importunities on their part or promises for the next time will induce their mother to give them the good things, but that the rewards will certainly be lost to them unless they are deserved, according to the conditions of the promise--in such a case--that is, when this double confidence exists, the promise will have great influence upon the children. still, it is, in its nature, _hiring_ them to obey. i do not say that this is necessarily a bad plan, though i think there is a better. children may, perhaps, be trained gradually to habits of obedience by a system of direct rewards, and in a manner, too, far more agreeable to the parent and better for the child than by a system of compulsion through threats and punishment. _the method of indirect rewarding_. but there is another way of connecting pleasurable ideas and associations with submission to parental authority in the minds of children, as a means of alluring them to the habit of obedience--one that is both more efficient in its results and more healthful and salutary in its action than the practice of bestowing direct recompenses and rewards. suppose, for example, in the case above described, the mother, on leaving the children, simply gives them the command that they are not to leave the yard, but makes no promises, and then, on returning from the village with the bonbons in her bag, simply asks susan, when she comes in, whether the children have obeyed her injunction not to leave the yard. if susan says yes, she nods to them, with a look of satisfaction and pleasure, and adds: "i thought they would obey me. i am very glad. now i can trust them again." then, by-and-by, towards the close of the day, perhaps, and when the children suppose that the affair is forgotten, she takes an opportunity to call them to her, saying that she has something to tell them. "you remember when i went to the village to-day, i left you in the yard and said that you must not go out of the gate, and you obeyed. perhaps you would have liked to go out into the road and play there, but you would not go because i had forbidden it. i am very glad that you obeyed. i thought of you when i was in the village, and i thought you would obey me. i felt quite safe about you. if you had been disobedient children, i should have felt uneasy and anxious. but i felt safe. when i had finished my shopping, i thought i would buy you some bonbons, and here they are. you can go and sit down together on the carpet and divide them. mary can choose one, and then jane; then mary, and then jane again; and so on until they are all chosen." _difference in the character of the effects_. it may, perhaps, be said by the reader that this is substantially the same as giving a direct reward for the obedience. i admit that it is in some sense _substantially_ the same thing, but it is not the same in form. and this is one of those cases where the effect is modified very greatly by the form. where children are directly promised a reward if they do so and so, they naturally regard the transaction as of the nature of a contract or a bargain, such that when they have fulfilled the conditions on their part the reward is their due, as, indeed, it really is; and they come and demand it as such. the tendency, then, is, to divest their minds of all sense of obligation in respect to doing right, and to make them feel that it is in some sense optional with them whether to do right and earn the reward, or not to do right and lose it. in the case, however, last described, which seems at first view to differ only in form from the preceding one, the commendation and the bonbons would be so connected with the act of obedience as to associate very agreeable ideas with it in the children's minds, and thus to make doing right appear attractive to them on future occasions, while, at the same time, they would not in any degree deprive the act itself of its spontaneous character, as resulting from a sense of duty on their part, or produce the impression on their minds that their remaining within the gate was of the nature of a service rendered to their mother for hire, and afterwards duly paid for. the lesson which we deduce from this illustration and the considerations connected with it may be stated as follows: _the general principle_. that the rewards conferred upon children with a view of connecting pleasurable ideas and associations with good conduct should not take the form of compensations stipulated for beforehand, and then conferred according to agreement, as if they were of the nature of payment for a service rendered, but should come as the natural expression of the satisfaction and happiness felt by the mother in the good conduct of her child--expressions as free and spontaneous on her part as the good conduct was on the part of the child. the mother who understands the full import of this principle, and whose mind becomes fully possessed of it, will find it constantly coming into practical use in a thousand ways. she has undertaken, for example, to teach her little son to read. of course learning to read is irksome to him. he dislikes extremely to leave his play and come to take his lesson. sometimes a mother is inconsiderate enough to be pained at this. she is troubled to find that her boy takes so little interest in so useful a work, and even, perhaps, scolds him, and threatens him for not loving study. "if you don't learn to read," she says to him, in a tone of irritation and displeasure, "you will grow up a dunce, and every body will laugh at you, and you will be ashamed to be seen." _children's difficulties_. but let her imagine that she herself was to be called away two or three times a day, for half an hour, to study chinese, with a very exacting teacher, always more or less impatient and dissatisfied with her progress; and yet the irksomeness and difficulty for the mother, in learning to decipher chinese, would be as nothing compared with that of the child in learning to read. the only thing that could make the work even tolerable to the mother would be a pretty near, distinct, and certain prospect of going to china under circumstances that would make the knowledge of great advantage to her. but the child has no such near, distinct, and certain prospect of the advantages of knowing how to read. he has scarcely any idea of these advantages at all. you can describe them to him, but the description will have no perceptible effect upon his mind. those faculties by which we bring the future vividly before us so as to influence our present action, are not yet developed. his cerebral organization has not yet advanced to that condition, any more than his bones have advanced to the hardness, rigidness, and strength of manhood. his mind is only capable of being influenced strongly by what is present, or, at least, very near. it is the design of divine providence that this should be so. the child is not made to look forward much yet, and the mother who is pained and distressed because he will not look forward, shows a great ignorance of the nature of the infantile mind, and of the manner of its development. if she finds fault with her boy for not feeling distinctly enough the future advantages of learning to lead him to love study now, she is simply finding fault with a boy for not being possessed of the most slowly developed faculties of a man. the way, then, to induce children to attend to such duties as learning to read, is not to reason with them on the advantages of it, but to put it simply on the ground of authority. "it is very irksome, i know, but you must do it. when you are at play, and having a very pleasant time, i know very well that it is hard for you to be called away to puzzle over your letters and your reading. it was very hard for me when i was a child. it is very hard for all children; but then it must be done." the way in this, as in all other similar cases, to reduce the irksomeness of disagreeable duties to a minimum is not to attempt to convince or persuade the child, but to put the performance of them simply on the ground of submission to authority. the child must leave his play and come to take his lesson, not because he sees that it is better for him to learn to read than to play all the time, nor because he is to receive a reward in the form of compensation, but because his mother requires him to do it. _indirect rewarding_. if, therefore, she concludes, in order to connect agreeable ideas with the hard work of learning to read, that she will often, at the close of the lessons, tell him a little story, or show him a picture, or have a frolic with him, or give him a piece of candy or a lump of sugar, or bestow upon him any other little gratification, it is better not to promise these things beforehand, so as to give to the coming of the child, when called, the character of a service rendered for hire. let him come simply because he is called; and then let the gratifications be bestowed as the expressions of his mother's satisfaction and happiness, in view of her boy's ready obedience to her commands and faithful performance of his duty. _obedience, though implicit, need not be blind_. it must not be supposed from what has been said that because a mother is not to _rely upon_ the reason and forecast of the child in respect to future advantages to accrue from efforts or sacrifices as motives of present action, that she is not to employ the influence of these motives at all. it is true that those faculties of the mind by which we apprehend distant things and govern our conduct by them are not yet developed in the child; but they are _to be_ developed, and the aid of the parent will be of the greatest service in promoting the development of them. at proper times, then, the pleasures and advantages of knowing how to read should be described to the child, and presented moreover in the most attractive form. the proper time for doing this would be when no lesson is in question-- during a ride or a walk, or in the midst of a story, or while looking at a book of pictures. a most improper time would be when a command had been given and was disregarded, or was reluctantly obeyed; for then such representations would only tend to enfeeble the principle of authority by bringing in the influence of reasonings and persuasions to make up for its acknowledged inefficiency. it is one of those cases where a force is weakened by reinforcement--as a plant, by being long held up by a stake, comes in the end not to be able to stand alone. so a mother can not in any way more effectually undermine her authority, as _authority_, than by attempting to eke out its force by arguments and coaxings. _authority not to be made oppressive_. while the parent must thus take care to establish the _principle of authority_ as the ground of obedience on the part of his children, and must not make their doing what he requires any the less acts of _obedience_, through vainly attempting to diminish the hardship of obeying a command by mingling the influence of reasonings and persuasions with it, he may in other ways do all in his power--and that will be a great deal--to make the acts of obedience easy, or, at least, to diminish the difficulty of them and the severity of the trial which they often bring to the child. one mode by which this may be done is by not springing disagreeable obligations upon a child suddenly, but by giving his mind a little time to form itself to the idea of what is to come. when johnny and mary are playing together happily with their blocks upon the floor, and are, perhaps, just completing a tower which they have been building, if their mother comes suddenly into the room, announces to them abruptly that it is time for them to go to bed, throws down the tower and brushes the blocks into the basket, and then hurries the children away to the undressing, she gives a sudden and painful shock to their whole nervous system, and greatly increases the disappointment and pain which they experience in being obliged to give up their play. the delay of a single minute would be sufficient to bring their minds round easily and gently into submission to the necessity of the case. if she comes to them with a smile, looks upon their work a moment with an expression of interest and pleasure upon her countenance, and then says, "it is bed-time, children, but i would like to see you finish your tower." one minute of delay like this, to soften the suddenness of the transition, will make the act of submission to the necessity of giving up play and going to bed, in obedience to the mother's command, comparatively easy, instead of being, as it very likely would otherwise have been, extremely vexatious and painful. _give a little time_. in the same way, in bringing to a close an evening party of children at play, if the lady of the house comes a little before the time and says to them that after "one more play," or "two more plays," as the case may be," the party must come to an end," the closing of it would be made easy; while by waiting till the hour had come, and then suddenly interrupting the gayety, perhaps in the middle of a game, by the abrupt announcement to the children that the clock has struck, and they must stop their plays and begin to get ready to go home, she brings upon them a sudden shock of painful surprise, disappointment, and, perhaps, irritation. so, if children are to be called away from their play for any purpose whatever, it is always best to give them a little notice, if it be only a moment's notice, beforehand. "john, in a minute or two i shall wish you to go and get some wood. you can be getting your things ready to be left." "mary, it is almost time for your lesson. you had better put dolly to sleep and lay her in the cradle." "boys, in ten minutes it will be time for you to go to school. so do not begin any new whistles, but only finish what you have begun." on the same principle, if boys are at play in the open air--at ball, or skating, or flying kites--and are to be recalled by a bell, obedience to the call will be made much more easy to them by a preliminary signal, as a warning, given five minutes before the time. of course, it will not always be convenient to give these signals and these times of preparation. nor will it be always necessary to give them. to determine how and in what cases it is best to apply the principle here explained will require some tact and good judgment on the part of the parent. it would be folly to lay down a rigid rule of this kind to be considered as always obligatory. all that is desirable is that the mother should understand the principle, and that she should apply it as far as she conveniently and easily can do so. she will find in practice that when she once appreciates the value of it, and observes its kind and beneficent working, she will find it convenient and easy to apply it far more generally than she would suppose. _no weakening of authority in this_. it is very plain that softening thus the hardship for the child of any act of obedience required of him by giving him a little time implies no abatement of the authority of the parent, nor does it detract at all from the implicitness of the obedience on the part of the child. the submission to authority is as complete in doing a thing in five minutes if the order was to do it in five minutes, as in doing it at once if the order was to do it at once. and the mother must take great care, when thus trying to make obedience more easy by allowing time, that it should be prompt and absolute when the time has expired. the idea is, that though the parent is bound fully to maintain his authority over his children, in all its force, he is also bound to make the exercise of it as little irksome and painful to them as possible, and to prevent as much as possible the pressure of it from encroaching upon their juvenile joys. he must insist inexorably on being obeyed; but he is bound to do all in his power to make the yoke of obedience light and easily to be borne. _influence on the healthful development of the brain_. indeed, besides the bearing of these views on the happiness of the children, it is not at all improbable that the question of health may be seriously involved in them. for, however certain we may be of the immateriality of the soul in its essence, it is a perfectly well established fact that all its operations and functions, as an animating spirit in the human body, are fulfilled through the workings of material organs in the brain; that these organs are in childhood in an exceedingly immature, tender, and delicate condition; and that all sudden, sharp, and, especially, painful emotions, greatly excite, and sometimes cruelly irritate them. when we consider how seriously the action of the digestive organs, in persons in an ordinary state of health, is often interfered with by mental anxiety or distress; how frequently, in persons subject to headaches, the paroxysm is brought on by worryings or perplexities endured incidentally on the preceding day; and especially how often violent and painful emotions, when they are extreme, result in decided and sometimes in permanent and hopeless insanity--that is, in an irreparable damage to some delicate mechanism in the brain--we shall see that there is every reason for supposing that all sudden shocks to the nervous system of children, all violent and painful excitements, all vexations and irritations, and ebullitions of ill-temper and anger, have a tendency to disturb the healthy development of the cerebral organs, and may, in many cases, seriously affect the future health and welfare, as well as the present happiness, of the child. it is true that mental disturbances and agitations of this kind can not be wholly avoided. but they should be avoided as far as possible; and the most efficient means for avoiding them is a firm, though calm and gentle, establishment and maintenance of parental authority, and not, as many mothers very mistakingly imagine, by unreasonable indulgences, and by endeavors to manage their children by persuasions, bribings, and manoeuvrings, instead of by commands. the most indulged children, and the least governed, are always the most petulant and irritable; while a strong government, if regular, uniform, and just, and if administered by gentle measures, is the most effectual of all possible instrumentalities for surrounding childhood with an atmosphere of calmness and peace. in a word, while the mother is bound to do all in her power to render submission to her authority easy and agreeable to her children, by softening as much as possible the disappointment and hardship which her commands sometimes occasion, and by connecting pleasurable ideas and sensations with acts of obedience on the part of the child, she must not at all relax the authority itself, but must maintain it under all circumstances in its full force, with a very firm and decided, though still gentle hand. chapter vii. the art of training. it is very clear that the most simple and the most obvious of the modes by which a parent may establish among his children the habit of submission to his authority, are those which have been already described, namely, punishments and rewards--punishments, gentle in their character, but invariably enforced, as the sure results of acts of insubordination; and rewards for obedience, occasionally and cautiously bestowed, in such a manner that they may be regarded as recognitions simply, on the part of the parent, of the good conduct of his children, and expressions of his gratification, and not in the light of payment or hire. these are obviously the most simple modes, and the ones most ready at hand. they require no exalted or unusual qualities on the part of father or mother, unless, indeed, we consider gentleness, combined with firmness and good sense, as an assemblage of rare and exalted qualities. to assign, and firmly and uniformly to enforce, just but gentle penalties for disobedience, and to recognize, and sometimes reward, special acts of obedience and submission, are measures fully within the reach of every parent, however humble may be the condition of his intelligence or his attainments of knowledge. _another class of influences_. there is, however, another class of influences to be adopted, not as a substitute for these simple measures, but in connection and co-operation with them, which will be far more deep, powerful, and permanent in their results, though they require much higher qualities in the parent for carrying them successfully into effect. this higher method consists in a _systematic effort to develop in the mind of the child a love of the principle of obedience_, by express and appropriate training. _parents not aware of the extent of their responsibility_. many parents, perhaps indeed nearly all, seem, as we have already shown, to act as if they considered the duty of obedience on the part of their children as a matter of course. they do not expect their children to read or to write without being taught; they do not expect a dog to fetch and carry, or a horse to draw and to understand commands and signals, without being _trained_. in all these cases they perceive the necessity of training and instruction, and understand that the initiative is with _them_. if a horse, endowed by nature with average good qualities, does not work well, the fault is attributed at once to the man who undertook to train him. but what mother, when her child, grown large and strong, becomes the trial and sorrow of her life by his ungovernable disobedience and insubordination, takes the blame to herself in reflecting that he was placed in her hands when all the powers and faculties of his soul were in embryo, tender, pliant, and unresisting, to be formed and fashioned at her will? _the spirit of filial obedience not instinctive_. children, as has already been remarked, do not require to be taught and trained to eat and drink, to resent injuries, to cling to their possessions, or to run to their mother in danger or pain. they have natural instincts which provide for all these things. but to speak, to read, to write, and to calculate; to tell the truth, and to obey their parents; to forgive injuries, to face bravely fancied dangers and bear patiently unavoidable pain, are attainments for which no natural instincts can adequately provide. there are instincts that will aid in the work, but none that can of themselves be relied upon without instruction and training. in actual fact, children usually receive their instruction and training in respect to some of these things incidentally--as it happens--by the rough knocks and frictions, and various painful experiences which they encounter in the early years of life. in respect to others, the guidance and aid afforded them is more direct and systematic. unfortunately the establishment in their minds of the principle of obedience comes ordinarily under the former category. no systematic and appropriate efforts are made by the parent to implant it. it is left to the uncertain and fitful influences of accident--to remonstrances, reproaches, and injunctions called forth under sudden excitement in the various emergencies of domestic discipline, and to other means, vague, capricious, and uncertain, and having no wise adaptedness to the attainment of the end in view. _requires appropriate training_. how much better and more successfully the object would be accomplished if the mother were to understand distinctly at the outset that the work of training her children to the habit of submission to her authority is a duty, the responsibility of which devolves not upon her children, but upon her; that it is a duty, moreover, of the highest importance, and one that demands careful consideration, much forethought, and the wise adaptation of means to the end. _methods_. the first thought of some parents may possibly be, that they do not know of any other measures to take in order to teach their children submission to their authority, than to reward them when they obey and punish them when they disobey. to show that there are other methods, we will consider a particular case. mary, a young lady of seventeen, came to make a visit to her sister. she soon perceived that her sister's children, adolphus and lucia, were entirely ungoverned. their mother coaxed, remonstrated, advised, gave reasons, said "i wouldn't do this," or "i wouldn't do that,"--did every thing, in fact, except simply to command; and the children, consequently, did pretty much what they pleased. their mother wondered at their disobedience and insubordination, and in cases where these faults resulted in special inconvenience for herself she bitterly reproached the children for their undutiful behavior. but the reproaches produced no effect. "the first thing that i have to do," said mary to herself, in observing this state of things, "is to teach the children to obey--at least to obey _me_. i will give them their first lesson at once." _mary makes a beginning_. so she proposed to them to go out with her into the garden and show her the flowers, adding that if they would do so she would make each of them a bouquet. she could make them some very pretty bouquets, she said, provided they would help her, and would follow her directions and obey her implicitly while gathering and arranging the flowers. this the children promised to do, and mary went with them into the garden. there, as she passed about from border to border, she gave them a great many different directions in respect to things which they were to do, or which they were not to do. she gathered flowers, and gave some to one child, and some to the other, to be held and carried--with special instructions in respect to many details, such as directing some flowers to be put together, and others to be kept separate, and specifying in what manner they were to be held or carried. then she led them to a bower where there was a long seat, and explained to them how they were to lay the flowers in order upon the seat, and directed them to be very careful not to touch them after they were once laid down. they were, moreover, to leave a place in the middle of the seat entirely clear. they asked what that was for. mary said that they would see by-and-by. "you must always do just as i say," she added, "and perhaps i shall explain the reason afterwards, or perhaps you will see what the reason is yourselves." after going on in this way until a sufficient number and variety of flowers were collected, mary took her seat in the vacant place which had been left, and assigned the two portions of the seat upon which the flowers had been placed to the children, giving each the charge of the flowers upon one portion, with instructions to select and give to her such as she should call for. from the flowers thus brought she formed two bouquets, one for each of the children. then she set them both at work to make bouquets for themselves, giving them minute and special directions in regard to every step. if her object had been to cultivate their taste and judgment, then it would have been better to allow them to choose the flowers and determine the arrangement for themselves; but she was teaching them _obedience_, or, rather, beginning to form in them the _habit_ of obedience; and so, the more numerous and minute the commands the better, provided that they were not in them selves unreasonable, nor so numerous and minute as to be vexatious, so as to incur any serious danger of their not being readily and good-humoredly obeyed. [illustration: the lesson in obedience.] _the art of training_. when the bouquets were finished mary gave the children, severally, the two which had been made for them; and the two which they had made for themselves she took into the house and placed them in glasses upon the parlor mantel-piece, and then stood back with the children in the middle of the room to admire them. "see how pretty they look! and how nicely the work went on while we were making them! that was because you obeyed me so well while we were doing it. you did exactly as i said in every thing." _a beginning only_. now this was an excellent _first lesson_ in training the children to the habit of obedience. it is true that it was _only_ a first lesson. it was a beginning, but it was a very good beginning. if, on the following day, mary had given the children a command which it would be irksome to them to obey, or one which would have called for any special sacrifice or self-denial on their part, they would have disregarded it. still they would have been a little less inclined to disregard it than if they had not received their first lesson; and there can be no doubt that if mary were to continue her training in the same spirit in which she commenced it she would, before many weeks, acquire a complete ascendency over them, and make them entirely submissive to her will. and yet this is a species of training the efficacy of which depends on influences in which the hope of reward or the fear of punishment does not enter. the bouquets were not promised to the children at the outset, nor were they given to them at last as rewards. it is true that they saw the advantages resulting from due subordination of the inferiors to the superior in concerted action, and at the end they felt a satisfaction in having acted right; but these advantages did not come in the form of rewards. the efficacy of the lesson depended on a different principle altogether. _the philosophy of it_. the philosophy of it was this: mary, knowing that the principle of obedience in the children was extremely weak, and that it could not stand any serious test, contrived to bring it into exercise a great many times under the lightest possible pressure. she called upon them to do a great many different things, each of which was very easy to do, and gave them many little prohibitions which it required a very slight effort of self-denial on their part to regard; and she connected agreeable associations in their minds with the idea of submission to authority, through the interest which she knew they would feel in seeing the work of gathering the flowers and making the bouquets go systematically and prosperously on, and through the commendation of their conduct which she expressed at the end. such persons as mary do not analyze distinctly, in their thoughts, nor could they express in words, the principles which underlie their management; but they have an instinctive mental perception of the adaptation of such means to the end in view. other people, who observe how easily and quietly they seem to obtain an ascendency over all children coming within their influence, and how absolute this ascendency often becomes, are frequently surprised at it. they think there is some mystery about it; they say it is "a knack that some people have;" but there is no mystery about it at all, and nothing unusual or strange, except so far as practical good sense, considerate judgment, and intelligent observation and appreciation of the characteristics of childhood are unusual and strange. mary was aware that, although the principle of obedience is seldom or never entirely obliterated from the hearts of children--that is, that the impression upon their minds, which, though it may not be absolutely instinctive, is very early acquired, that it is incumbent on them to obey those set in authority over them, is seldom wholly effaced, the sentiment had become extremely feeble in the minds of adolphus and lucia; and that it was like a frail and dying plant, which required very delicate and careful nurture to quicken it to life and give it its normal health and vigor. her management was precisely of this character. it called the weak and feeble principle into gentle exercise, without putting it to any severe test, and thus commenced the formation of a _habit of action_. any one will see that a course of training on these principles, patiently and perseveringly continued for the proper time, could not fail of securing the desired end, except in cases of children characterized by unusual and entirely abnormal perversity. we can not here follow in detail the various modes in which such a manager as mary would adapt her principle to the changing incidents of each day, and to the different stages of progress made by her pupils in learning to obey, but can only enumerate certain points worthy of the attention of parents who may feel desirous to undertake such a work of training. _three practical directions_. . relinquish entirely the idea of expecting children to be _spontaneously_ docile and obedient, and the practice of scolding or punishing them vindictively when they are not so. instead of so doing, understand that docility and obedience on their part is to be the result of wise, careful, and persevering, though gentle training on the part of the parent. . if the children have already formed habits of disobedience and insubordination, do not expect that the desirable change can be effected by sudden, spasmodic, and violent efforts, accompanied by denunciations and threats, and declarations that you are going to "turn over a new leaf." the attempt to change perverted tendencies in children by such means is like trying to straighten a bend in the stem of a growing tree by blows with a hammer. . instead of this, begin without saying at all what you are going to do, or finding any fault with the past, and, with a distinct recognition of the fact that whatever is bad in the _native tendencies_ of your children's minds is probably inherited from their parents, and, perhaps, specially from yourself, and that whatever is wrong in their _habits of action_ is certainly the result of bad training, proceed cautiously and gently, but perseveringly and firmly, in bringing the bent stem gradually up to the right position. in doing this, there is no amount of ingenuity and skill, however great, that may not be usefully employed; nor is there, on the other hand, except in very rare and exceptional cases, any parent who has an allotment so small as not to be sufficient to accomplish the end, if conscientiously and faithfully employed. chapter viii. methods exemplified. in order to give a more clear idea of what i mean by forming habits of obedience in children by methods other than those connected with a system of rewards and punishments, i will specify some such methods, introducing them, however, only as illustrations of what is intended. for, while in respect to rewards and punishments something like special and definite rules and directions may be given, these other methods, as they depend on the tact, ingenuity, and inventive powers of the parents for their success, depend also in great measure upon these same qualities for the discovery of them. the only help that can be received from without must consist of suggestions and illustrations, which can only serve to communicate to the mind some general ideas in respect to them. _recognizing the right._ . a very excellent effect is produced in forming habits of obedience in children, by simply _noticing_ their good conduct when they do right, and letting them see that you notice it. when children are at play upon the carpet, and their mother from time to time calls one of them--mary, we will say--to come to her to render some little service, it is very often the case that she is accustomed, when mary obeys the call at once, leaving her play immediately and coming directly, to say nothing about the prompt obedience, but to treat it as a matter of course. it is only in the cases of failure that she seems to notice the action. when mary, greatly interested in what for the moment she is doing, delays her coming, she says, "you ought to come at once, mary, when i call you, and not make me wait in this way." in the cases when mary did come at once, she had said nothing. mary goes back to her play after the reproof, a little disturbed in mind, at any rate, and perhaps considerably out of humor. now mary may, perhaps, be in time induced to obey more promptly under this management, but she will have no heart in making the improvement, and she will advance reluctantly and slowly, if at all. but if, at the first time that she comes promptly, and then, after doing the errand, is ready to go back to her play, her mother says, "you left your play and came at once when i called you. that was right. it pleases me very much to find that i can depend upon your being so prompt, even when you are at play," mary will go back to her play pleased and happy; and the tendency of the incident will be to cause her to feel a spontaneous and cordial interest in the principle of prompt obedience in time to come. johnny is taking a walk through the fields with his mother. he sees a butterfly and sets off in chase of it. when he has gone away from the path among the rocks and bushes as far as his mother thinks is safe, she calls him to come back. in many cases, if the boy does not come at once in obedience to such a call, he would perhaps receive a scolding. if he does come back at once, nothing is said. in either case no decided effect would be produced upon him. but if his mother says, "johnny, you obeyed me at once when i called you. it must be hard, when you are after a butterfly and think you have almost caught him, to stop immediately and come back to your mother when she calls you; but you did it," johnny will be led by this treatment to feel a desire to come back more promptly still the next time. _a caution._ of course there is an endless variety of ways by which you can show your children that you notice and appreciate the efforts they make to do right. doubtless there is a danger to be guarded against. to adopt the practice of noticing and commending what is right, and paying _no attention whatever_ to what is wrong, would be a great perversion of this counsel. there is a danger more insidious than this, but still very serious and real, of fostering a feeling of vanity and self-conceit by constant and inconsiderate praise. these things must be guarded against; and to secure the good aimed at, and at the same time to avoid the evil, requires the exercise of the tact and ingenuity which has before been referred to. but with proper skill and proper care the habit of noticing and commending, or even noticing alone, when children do right, and of even being more quick to notice and to be pleased with the right than to detect and be dissatisfied with the wrong, will be found to be a very powerful means of training children in the right way. children will act with a great deal more readiness and alacrity to preserve a good character which people already attribute to them, than to relieve themselves of the opprobrium of a bad one with which they are charged. in other words, it is much easier to allure them to what is right than to drive them from what is wrong. _giving advice._ . there is, perhaps, nothing more irksome to children than to listen to advice given to them in a direct and simple form, and perhaps there is nothing that has less influence upon them in the formation of their characters than advice so given. and there is good reason for this; for either the advice must be general, and of course more or less abstract, when it is necessarily in a great measure lost upon them, since their powers of generalization and abstraction are not yet developed; or else, if it is practical and particular at all, it must be so with reference to their own daily experience in life--in which case it becomes more irksome still, as they necessarily regard it as an indirect mode of fault-finding. indeed, this kind of advice is almost certain to assume the form of half-concealed fault-finding, for the subject of the counsel given would be, in almost all cases, suggested by the errors, or shortcomings, or failures which had been recently observed in the conduct of the children. the art, then, of giving to children general advice and instruction in respect to their conduct and behavior, consists in making it definite and practical, and at the same time contriving some way of divesting it entirely of all direct application to themselves in respect to their _past_ conduct. of course, the more we make it practically applicable to them in respect to the future the better. there are various ways of giving advice of this character. it requires some ingenuity to invent them, and some degree of tact and skill to apply them successfully. but the necessary tact and skill would be easily acquired by any mother whose heart is really set upon finding gentle modes of leading her child into the path of duty. _james and his cousins_. james, going to spend one of his college vacations at his uncle's, was taken by his two cousins, walter and ann--eight and six years old--into their room. the room was all in confusion. there was a set of book-shelves upon one side, the books upon them lying tumbled about in all directions. there was a case containing playthings in another place, the playthings broken and in disorder; and two tables, one against the wall, and the other in the middle of the room, both covered with litter. now if james had commenced his conversation by giving the children a lecture on the disorder of their room, and on the duty, on their part, of taking better care of their things, the chief effect would very probably have been simply to prevent their wishing to have him come to their room again. but james managed the case differently. after going about the room for a few minutes with the children, and looking with them at their various treasures, and admiring what they seemed to admire, but without finding any fault, he sat down before the fire and took the children upon his lap--one upon each knee--and began to talk to them. ann had one of her picture-books in her hand, some of the leaves torn, and the rest defaced with dog's-ears. "now, walter," said james, "i'm going to give you some advice. i am going to advise you what to do and how to act when you go to college. by-and-by you will grow to be a young man, and will then, perhaps, go to college." the idea of growing to be a young man and going to college was very pleasing to walter's imagination, and brought his mind into what may be called a receptive condition--that is, into a state to receive readily, and entertain with favor, the thoughts which james was prepared to present. james then went on to draw a very agreeable picture of walter's leaving home and going to college, with many details calculated to be pleasing to his cousin's fancy, and came at length to his room, and to the circumstances under which he would take possession of it. then he told him of the condition in which different scholars kept their respective rooms--how some were always in disorder, and every thing in them topsy-turvy, so that they had no pleasant or home-like aspect at all; while in others every thing was well arranged, and kept continually in that condition, so as to give the whole room, to every one who entered it, a very charming appearance. "the books on their shelves were all properly arranged," he said, "all standing up in order--those of a like size together. jump down, ann, and go to your shelves, and arrange the books on the middle shelf in that way, to show him what i mean." ann jumped down, and ran with great alacrity to arrange the books according to the directions. when she had arranged one shelf, she was proceeding to do the same with the next, but james said she need not do any more then. she could arrange the others, if she pleased, at another time, he said. "but come back now," he added, "and hear the rest of the advice." "i advise you to keep your book-shelves in nice order at college," he continued; "and so with your apparatus and your cabinet. for at college, you see, you will perhaps have articles of philosophical apparatus, and a cabinet of specimens, instead of playthings. i advise you, if you should have such things, to keep them all nicely arranged upon their shelves." here james turned his chair a little, so that he and the children could look towards the cabinet of playthings. walter climbed down from his cousin's lap and ran off to that side of the room, and there began hastily to arrange the playthings. "yes," said james, "that is the way. but never mind that now. i think you will know how to arrange your philosophical instruments and your cabinet very nicely when you are in college; and you can keep your playthings in order in your room here, while you are a boy, if you please. but come back now and hear the rest of the advice." so walter came back and took his place again upon james's knee. "and i advise you," continued james, "to take good care of your books when you are in college. it is pleasanter, at the time, to use books that are clean and nice, and then, besides, you will like to take your college books with you, after you leave college, and keep them as long as you live, as memorials of your early days, and you will value them a great deal more if they are in good order." here ann opened the book which was in her hand, and began to fold back the dog's-ears and to smooth down the leaves. _the principle involved_. in a word, by the simple expedient of shifting the time, in the imagination of the children, when the advice which he was giving them would come to its practical application, he divested it of all appearance of fault-finding in respect to their present conduct, and so secured not merely its ready admission, but a cordial welcome for it, in their minds. any mother who sees and clearly apprehends the principle here illustrated, and has ingenuity enough to avail herself of it, will find an endless variety of modes by which she can make use of it, to gain easy access to the hearts of her children, for instructions and counsels which, when they come in the form of fault-finding advice, make no impression whatever. _expectations of results must be reasonable_. some persons, however, who read without much reflection, and who do not clearly see the principle involved in the case above described, and do not understand it as it is intended--that is, as a single specimen or example of a mode of action capable of an endless variety of applications, will perhaps say, "oh, that was all very well. james's talk was very good for the purpose of amusing the children for a few minutes while he was visiting them, but it is idle to suppose that such a conversation could produce any permanent or even lasting impression upon them; still less, that it could work any effectual change in respect to their habits of order." that is very true. in the work of forming the hearts and minds of children it is "line upon line, and precept upon precept" that is required; and it can not be claimed that one such conversation as that of james is any thing more than _one line_. but it certainly is that. it would be as unreasonable to expect that one single lesson like that could effectually and completely accomplish the end in view, as that one single watering of a plant will suffice to enable it to attain completely its growth, and enable it to produce in perfection its fruits or its flowers. but if a mother often clothes thus the advice or instruction which she has to give to her children in some imaginative guise like this, advising them what to do when they are on a journey, for example, or when they are making a visit at the house of a friend in the country; or, in the case of a boy, what she would counsel him to do in case he were a young man employed by a farmer to help him on his farm, or a clerk in a store, or a sea-captain in charge of a ship, or a general commanding a force in the field; or, if a girl, what dangers or what undesirable habits or actions she should avoid when travelling in europe, or when, as a young lady, she joins in picnics or goes on excursions, or attends concerts or evening parties, or in any of the countless other situations which it is pleasant for young persons to picture to their minds, introducing into all, so far as her ingenuity and skill enable her to do it, interesting incidents and details, she will find that she is opening to herself an avenue to her children's hearts for the sound moral principles that she wishes to inculcate upon them, which she can often employ easily, pleasantly, and very advantageously, both to herself and to them. when a child is sick, it may be of little consequence whether the medicine which is required is agreeable or disagreeable to the taste. but with moral remedies the case is different. sometimes the whole efficiency of the treatment administered as a corrective for a moral disorder depends upon the readiness and willingness with which it is taken. to make it disagreeable, consequently, in such cases, is to neutralize the intended action of it--a result which the methods described in this chapter greatly tend to avoid. chapter ix. della and the dolls. this book may, perhaps, sometimes fall into the hands of persons who have, temporarily or otherwise, the charge of young children without any absolute authority over them, or any means, or even any right, to enforce their commands, as was the case, in fact, with the older brothers or sister referred to in the preceding illustrations. to such persons, these indirect modes of training children in habits of subordination to their will, or rather of yielding to their influence, are specially useful. such persons may be interested in the manner in which delia made use of the children's dolls as a means of guiding and governing their little mothers. _della_. della had a young sister named maria, and a cousin whose name was jane. jane used often to come to make maria a visit, and when together the children were accustomed to spend a great deal of time in playing with their dolls. besides dressing and undressing them, and playing take them out to excursions and visits, they used to talk with them a great deal, and give them much useful and valuable information and instruction. [illustration: roundabout instruction.] now delia contrived to obtain a great influence and ascendency over the minds of the children by means of these dolls. she fell at once into the idea of the children in regard to them, and treated them always as if they were real persons; often speaking of them and to them, in the presence of the other children, in the most serious manner. this not only pleased the children very much, but enabled della, under pretense of talking to the dolls, to communicate a great deal of useful instruction to the children, and sometimes to make very salutary and lasting impressions upon their minds. _lectures to the dolls_. for instance, sometimes when jane was making maria a visit, and the two children came into her room with their dolls in their arms, she would speak to them as if they were real persons, and then taking them in her hands would set them before her on her knee, and give them a very grave lecture in respect to the proper behavior which they were to observe during the afternoon. if delia had attempted to give precisely the same lecture to the children themselves, they would very soon have become restless and uneasy, and it would have made very little impression upon them. but being addressed to the dolls, they would be greatly interested in it, and would listen with the utmost attention; and there is no doubt that the counsels and instructions which she gave made a much stronger impression upon their minds than if they had been addressed directly to the children themselves. to give an idea of these conversations i will report one of them in full. "how do you do, my children?" she said, on one such occasion. "i am very glad to see you. how nice you look! you have come, andella (andella was the name of jane's doll), to make rosalie a visit. i am very glad. you will have a very pleasant time, i am sure; because you never quarrel. i observe that, when you both wish for the same thing, you don't quarrel for it and try to pull it away from one another; but one waits like a lady until the other has done with it. i expect you have been a very good girl, andella, since you were here last." then, turning to jane, she asked, in a somewhat altered tone, "has she been a good girl, jane?" "she has been a _pretty_ good girl," said jane, "but she has been sick." "ah!" said della in a tone of great concern, and looking again at andella, "i heard that you had been sick. i heard that you had an attack of aurora borealis, or something like that. and you don't look very well now. you must take good care of yourself, and if you don't feel well, you must ask your mother to bring you in to me and i will give you a dose of my medicine--my _aqua saccharina_. i know you always take your medicine like a little heroine when you are sick, without making any difficulty or trouble at all." _aqua saccharina_ was the latin name which delia gave to a preparation of which she kept a supply in a small phial on her table, ready to make-believe give to the dolls when they were sick. maria and jane were very fond of playing that their dolls were sick and bringing them to della for medicine, especially as della always recommended to them to taste the medicine themselves from a spoon first, in order to set their children a good example of taking it well. sometimes della would let the children take the phial away, so as to have it always at hand in case the dolls should be taken suddenly worse. but in such cases as this the attacks were usually so frequent, and the mothers were obliged to do so much tasting to encourage the patients, that the phial was soon brought back nearly or quite empty, when delia used to replenish it by filling it nearly full of water, and then pouring a sufficient quantity of the saccharine powder into the mouth of it from the sugar-bowl with a spoon. nothing more was necessary except to shake up the mixture in order to facilitate the process of solution, and the medicine was ready. _a medium of reproof._ delia was accustomed to use the dolls not only for the purpose of instruction, but sometimes for reproof, in many ingenious ways. for instance, one day the children had been playing upon the piazza with blocks and other playthings, and finally had gone into the house, leaving all the things on the floor of the piazza, instead of putting them away in their places, as they ought to have done. they were now playing with their dolls in the parlor. delia came to the parlor, and with an air of great mystery beckoned the children aside, and said to them, in a whisper, "leave andella and rosalie here, and don't say a word to them. i want you to come with me. there is a secret--something i would not have them know on any account." so saying, she led the way on tiptoe, followed by the children out of the room, and round by a circuitous route to the piazza. "there!" said she, pointing to the playthings; "see! all your playthings left out! put them away quick before andella and rosalie see them. i would not have them know that their mothers leave their playthings about in that way for any consideration. they would think that they might do so too, and that would make you a great deal of trouble. you teach them, i have no doubt, that they must always put their playthings away, and they must see that you set them a good example. put these playthings all away quick, and carefully, and we will not let them know any thing about your leaving them out." so the children went to work with great alacrity, and put the playthings all away. and this method of treating the case was much more effectual in making them disposed to avoid committing a similar fault another time than any direct rebukes or expressions of displeasure addressed personally to them would have been. besides, a scolding would have made them unhappy, and this did not make them unhappy at all; it amused and entertained them. if you can lead children to cure themselves of their faults in such a way that they shall have a good time in doing it, there is a double gain. in due time, by this kind of management, and by other modes conceived and executed in the same spirit, bella gained so great an ascendency over the children that they were far more ready to conform to her will, and to obey all her directions, than they would have been to submit to the most legitimate authority that was maintained, as such authority too often is, by fault-finding and threats, and without any sympathy with the fancies and feelings which reign over the hearts of the children in the little world in which they live. chapter x. sympathy:-- . the child with the parent. the subject of sympathy between children and parents is to be considered in two aspects: first, that of the child with the parent; and secondly, that of the parent with the child. that is to say, an emotion may be awakened in the child by its existence and manifestation in the parent, and secondly, it may be awakened in the parent by its existence in the child. we are all ready to acknowledge in words the great power and influence of sympathy, but very few are aware how very vast this power is, and how inconceivably great is the function which this principle fulfills in the formation of the human character, and in regulating the conduct of men. _mysterious action of the principle of sympathy_. there is a great mystery in the nature of it, and in the manner of its action. this we see very clearly in the simplest and most striking material form of it--the act of gaping. why and how does the witnessing of the act of gaping in one person, or even the thought of it, produce a tendency to the same action in the nerves and muscles of another person? when we attempt to trace the chain of connection through the eye, the brain, and the thoughts--through which line of agencies the chain of cause and effect must necessarily run--we are lost and bewildered. other states and conditions in which the mental element is more apparent are communicated from one to another in the same or, at least, in some analogous way. being simply in the presence of one who is amused, or happy, or sad, causes us to feel amused, or happy, or sad ourselves--or, at least, has that tendency--even if we do not know from what cause the emotion which is communicated to us proceeds. a person of a joyous and happy disposition often brightens up at once any little circle into which he enters, while a morose and melancholy man carries gloom with him wherever he goes. eloquence, which, if we were to hear it addressed to us personally and individually, in private conversation, would move us very little, will excite us to a pitch of the highest enthusiasm if we hear it in the midst of a vast audience; even though the words, and the gestures, and the inflections of the voice, and the force with which it reaches our ears, were to be precisely the same in the two cases. and so a joke, which would produce only a quiet smile if we read it by ourselves at the fireside alone, will evoke convulsions of laughter when heard in a crowded theatre, where the hilarity is shared by thousands. a new element, indeed, seems to come into action in these last two cases; for the mental condition of one mind is not only communicated to another, but it appears to be increased and intensified by the communication. each does not feel _merely_ the enthusiasm or the mirth which would naturally be felt by the other, but the general emotion is vastly heightened by its being so largely shared. it is like the case of the live coal, which does not merely set the dead coal on fire by being placed in contact with it, but the two together, when together, burn far more brightly than when apart. _wonderful power of sympathy_. so much for the reality of this principle; and it is almost impossible to exaggerate the extent and the magnitude of the influence it exerts in forming the character and shaping the ideas and opinions of men, and in regulating all their ordinary habits of thought and feeling. people's opinions are not generally formed or controlled by arguments or reasonings, as they fondly suppose. they are imbibed by sympathy from those whom they like or love, and who are, or have been, their associates. thus people, when they arrive at maturity, adhere in the main to the associations, both in religion and in politics, in which they have been brought up, from the influence of sympathy with those whom they love. they believe in this or that doctrine or system, not because they have been convinced by proof, but chiefly because those whom they love believe in them. on religious questions the arguments are presented to them, it is true, while they are young, in catechisms and in other forms of religious instruction, and in politics by the conversations which they overhear; but it is a mistake to suppose that arguments thus offered have any material effect as processes of ratiocination in producing any logical conviction upon their minds. an english boy is whig or tory because his father, and his brothers, and his uncles are whigs or tories. he may, indeed, have many arguments at his command with which to maintain his opinions, but it is not the force of the arguments that has convinced him, nor do they have any force as a means of convincing the other boys to whom he offers them. _they_ are controlled by their sympathies, as he is by his. but if he is a popular boy, and makes himself a favorite among his companions, the very fact that he is of this or that party will have more effect upon the other boys than the most logical and conclusive trains of reasoning that can be conceived. so it is with the religious and political differences in this and in every other country. every one's opinions--or rather the opinion of people in general, for of course there are many individual exceptions--are formed from sympathy with those with whom in mind and heart they have been in friendly communication during their years of childhood and youth. and even in those cases where persons change their religious opinions in adult age, the explanation of the mystery is generally to be found, not in seeking for the _argument that convinced them_, but for the _person that led them_, in the accomplishment of the change. for such changes can very often, and perhaps generally, be traced to some person or persons whose influence over them, if carefully scrutinized, would be found to consist really not in the force of the arguments they offered, but in the magic power of a silent and perhaps unconscious sympathy. the way, therefore, to convert people to our ideas and opinions is to make them like us or love us, and then to avoid arguing with them, but simply let them perceive what our ideas and opinions are. the well-known proverb, "example is better than precept," is only another form of expressing the predominating power of sympathy; for example can have little influence except so far as a sympathetic feeling in the observer leads him to imitate it. so that, example is better than precept means only that sympathy has more influence in the human heart than reasoning. _the power of sympathy in childhood_. this principle, so powerful at every period of life, is at its maximum in childhood. it is the origin, in a very great degree, of the spirit of imitation which forms so remarkable a characteristic of the first years of life. the child's thoughts and feelings being spontaneously drawn into harmony with the thoughts and feelings of those around him whom he loves, leads, of course, to a reproduction of their actions, and the prevalence and universality of the effect shows how constant and how powerful is the cause. so the great secret of success for a mother, in the formation of the character of her children, is to make her children respect and love her, and then simply to _be_ herself what she wishes them to be. and to make them respect and love her, is to control them by a firm government where control is required, and to indulge them almost without limit where indulgence will do no harm. _special application of the principle_. but besides this general effect of the principle of sympathy in aiding parents in forming the minds and hearts of their children, there are a great many cases in which a father or mother who understands the secret of its wonderful and almost magic power can avail themselves of it to produce special effects. one or two examples will show more clearly what i mean. william's aunt maria came to pay his mother a visit in the village where william's mother lived. on the same day she went to take a walk with william--who is about nine years old--to see the village. as they went along together upon the sidewalk, they came to two small boys who were trying to fly a kite. one of the boys was standing upon the sidewalk, embarrassed a little by some entanglement of the string. "here, you fellow!" said william, as he and his aunt approached the spot, "get out of the way with your kite, and let us go by." the boy hurried out of the way, and, in so doing, got his kite-string more entangled still in the branches of a tree which grew at the margin of the sidewalk. now william's aunt might have taken the occasion, as she and her nephew walked along, to give him some kind and friendly instruction or counsel about the duty of being kind to every body in any difficulty, trouble, or perplexity, whether they are young or old; showing him how we increase the general sum of happiness in so doing, and how we feel happier ourselves when we have done good to any one, than when we have increased in any way, or even slighted or disregarded, their troubles. how william would receive such a lecture would depend a great deal upon his disposition and state of mind. but in most cases such counsels, given at such a time, involving, as they would, some covert though very gentle censure, would cause the heart of the boy to close itself in a greater or less degree against them, like the leaves of a sensitive-plant shrinking from the touch. the reply would very probably be, "well, he had no business to be on the sidewalk, right in our way." william and his aunt walked on a few steps. his aunt then stopped, hesitatingly, and said, "how would it do to go back and help that boy disentangle his kite-string? he's a little fellow, and does not know so much about kites and kite-strings as you do." here the suggestion of giving help to perplexity and distress came associated with a compliment instead of what implied censure, and the leaves of the sensitive-plant expanded at once, and widely, to the genial influence. "yes," said william; "let's go." so his aunt turned and went back a step or two, and then said, "you can go and do it without me. i'll wait here till you come back. i don't suppose you want any help from me. if you do, i'll come." "no," aid william, "i can do it alone." so william ran on with great alacrity to help the boys clear the string, and then came back with a beaming face to his aunt, and they walked on. william's aunt made no further allusion to the affair until the end of the walk, and then, on entering the gate, she said, "we have had a very pleasant walk, and you have taken very good care of me. and i am glad we helped those boys out of their trouble with the kite." "so am i," said william. _analysis of the incident_. now it is possible that some one may say that william was wrong in his harsh treatment of the boys, or at least in his want of consideration for their perplexity; and that his aunt, by her mode of treating the case, covered up the wrong, when it ought to have been brought distinctly to view and openly amended. but when we come to analyze the case, we shall find that it is not at all certain that there was any thing wrong on william's part in the transaction, so far as the state of his heart, in a moral point of view, is concerned. all such incidents are very complicated in their nature, and in their bearings and relations. they present many aspects which vary according to the point of view from which they are regarded. even grown people do not always see all the different aspects of an affair in respect to which they are called upon to act or to form an opinion, and children, perhaps, never; and in judging their conduct, we must always consider the aspect in which the action is presented to their minds. in this case, william was thinking only of his aunt. he wished to make her walk convenient and agreeable to her. the boy disentangling his string on the sidewalk was to him, at that time, simply an obstacle in his aunt's way, and he dealt with it as such, sending the boy off as an act of kindness and attention to his aunt solely. the idea of a sentient being suffering distress which he might either increase by harshness or relieve by help was not present in his mind at all. we may say that he ought to have thought of this. but a youthful mind, still imperfect in its development, can not be expected to take cognizance at once of all the aspects of a transaction which tends in different directions to different results. it is true, that he ought to have thought of the distress of the boys, if we mean that he ought to be taught or trained to think of such distress when he witnessed it; and that was exactly what his aunt was endeavoring to do. we ourselves have learned, by long experience of life, to perceive at once the many different aspects which an affair may present, and the many different results which may flow in various directions from the same action; and we often inconsiderately blame children, simply because their minds are yet so imperfectly developed that they can not take simultaneous cognizance of more than one or two of them. this is the true philosophy of most of what is called heedlessness in children, and for which, poor things, they receive so many harsh reprimands and so much punishment. a little girl, for example, undertakes to water her sister's plants. in her praiseworthy desire to do her work well and thoroughly, she fills the mug too full, and spills the water upon some books that are lying upon the table. the explanation of the misfortune is simply that her mind was filled, completely filled, with the thoughts of helping her sister. the thought of the possibility of spilling the water did not come into it at all. there was no room for it while the other thought, so engrossing, was there; and to say that she _ought_ to have thought of both the results which might follow her action, is only to say that she ought to be older. _sympathy as the origin of childish fears_. the power of sympathy in the mind of a child--that is, its tendency to imbibe the opinions or sentiments manifested by others in their presence--may be made very effectual, not only in inculcating principles of right and wrong, but in relation to every other idea or emotion. children are afraid of thunder and lightning, or of robbers at night, or of ghosts, because they perceive that their parents, or older brothers or sisters, are afraid of them. where the parents do not believe in ghosts, the children are not afraid of them; unless, indeed, there are domestics in the house, or playmates at school, or other companions from whom they take the contagion. so, what they see that their parents value they prize themselves. they imbibe from their playmates at school a very large proportion of their tastes, their opinions, and their ideas, not through arguments or reasoning, but from sympathy; and most of the wrong or foolish notions of any kind that they have acquired have not been established in their minds by false reasoning, but have been taken by sympathy, as a disease is communicated by infection; and the remedy is in most cases, not reasoning, but a countervailing sympathy. _afraid of a kitten_. little jane was very much afraid of a kitten which her brother brought home--the first that she had known. she had, however, seen a picture of a tiger or some other feline animal devouring a man in a forest, and had been frightened by it; and she had heard too, perhaps, of children being scratched by cats or kittens. so, when the kitten was brought in and put down on the floor, she ran to her sister in great terror, and began to cry. now her sister might have attempted to reason with her by explaining the difference between the kitten and the wild animals of the same class in the woods, and by assuring her that thousands of children have kittens to play with and are never scratched by them so long as they treat them kindly--and all without producing any sensible effect. but, instead of this, she adopted a different plan. she took the child up into her lap, and after quieting her fears, began to talk to the kitten. "poor little pussy," said she, "i am glad you have come. you never scratch any body, i am sure, if they are kind to you. jennie will give you some milk some day, and she and i will like to see you lap it up with your pretty little tongue. and we will give you a ball to play with some day upon the carpet. see, jennie, see! she is going to lie down upon the rug. she is glad that she has come to such a nice home. now she is putting her head down, but she has not any pillow to lay it upon. wouldn't you like a pillow, kitty? jennie will make you a pillow some day, i am sure, if you would like one. jennie is beginning to learn to sew, and she could make you a nice pillow, and stuff it with cotton wool. then we can see you lying down upon the rug, with the pillow under your head that jennie will have made for you--all comfortable." such a talk as this, though it could not be expected entirely and at once to dispel jennie's unfounded fears, would be far more effectual towards beginning the desired change than any arguments or reasoning could possibly be. any mother who will reflect upon the principle here explained will at once recall to mind many examples and illustrations of its power over the hearts and minds of children which her own experience has afforded. and if she begins practically and systematically to appeal to it, she will find herself in possession of a new element of power--new, at least, to her realization--the exercise of which will be as easy and agreeable to herself as it will be effective in its influence over her children. chapter xi. sympathy:--ii. the parent with the child. i think there can be no doubt that the most effectual way of securing the confidence and love of children, and of acquiring an ascendency over them, is by sympathizing with them in their child-like hopes and fears, and joys and sorrows--in their ideas, their fancies, and even in their caprices, in all cases where duty is not concerned. indeed, the more child-like, that is, the more peculiar to the children themselves, the feelings are that we enter into with them, the closer is the bond of kindness and affection that is formed. _an example_. if a gentleman coming to reside in a new town concludes that it is desirable that he should be on good terms with the boys in the streets, there are various ways by which he can seek to accomplish the end. fortunately for him, the simplest and easiest mode is the most effectual. on going into the village one day, we will suppose he sees two small boys playing horse. one boy is horse, and the other driver. as they draw near, they check the play a little, to be more decorous in passing by the stranger. he stops to look at them with a pleased expression of countenance, and then says, addressing the driver, with a face of much seriousness, "that's a first-rate horse of yours. would you like to sell him? he seems to be very spirited." the horse immediately begins to prance and caper. "you must have paid a high price for him. you must take good care of him. give him plenty of oats, and don't drive him hard when it is hot weather. and if ever you conclude to sell him, i wish you would let me know." so saying, the gentleman walks on, and the horse, followed by his driver, goes galloping forward in high glee. now, by simply manifesting thus a fellow-feeling with the boys in their childish play, the stranger not only gives a fresh impulse to their enjoyment at the time, but establishes a friendly relationship between them and him which, without his doing any thing to strengthen or perpetuate it, will of itself endure for a long time. if he does not speak to the boys again for months, every time they meet him they will be ready to greet him with a smile. the incident will go much farther towards establishing friendly relations between him and them than any presents that he could make them--except so far as his presents were of such a kind, and were given in such a way, as to be expressions of kindly feeling towards them--that is to say, such as to constitute of themselves a manifestation of sympathy. the uncle who gives his nephews and nieces presents, let them be ever so costly or beautiful, and takes no interest in their affairs, never inspires them with any feeling of personal affection. they like him as they like the apple-tree which bears them sweet and juicy apples, or the cow that gives them milk--which is on their part a very different sentiment from that which they feel for the kitten that plays with them and shares their joys--or even for their dolls, which are only pictured in their imagination as sharing them. _sophronia and aurelia_. miss sophronia calls at a house to make a visit. a child of seven or eight years of age is playing upon the floor. after a little time, at a pause in the conversation, she calls the child--addressing her as "my little girl"--to come to her. the child--a shade being cast over her mind by being thus unnecessarily reminded of her littleness--hesitates to come. the mother says, "come and shake hands with the lady, my dear!" the child comes reluctantly. miss sophronia asks what her name is, how old she is, whether she goes to school, what she studies there, and whether she likes to go to school, and at length releases her. the child, only too glad to be free from such a tiresome visitor, goes back to her play, and afterwards the only ideas she has associated with the person of her visitor are those relating to her school and her lessons, which may or may not be of an agreeable character. presently, after miss sophronia has gone, miss aurelia comes in. after some conversation with the mother, she goes to see what the child is building with her blocks. after looking on for a moment with an expression of interest in her countenance, she asks her if she has a doll. the child says she has four. miss aurelia then asks which she likes best, and expresses a desire to see that one. the child, much pleased, runs away to bring it, and presently comes back with all four. miss aurelia takes them in her hands, examines them, talks about them, and talks to them; and when at last the child goes back to her play, she goes with the feeling in her heart that she has found a new friend. thus, to bring ourselves near to the hearts of children, we must go to them by entering into _their world_. they can not come to us by entering ours. they have no experience of it, and can not understand it. but we have had experience of theirs, and can enter it if we choose; and in that way we bring ourselves very near to them. _sympathy must be sincere_. but the sympathy which we thus express with children, in order to be effectual, must be sincere and genuine, and not pretended. we must renew our own childish ideas and imaginations, and become for the moment, in feeling, one with them, so that the interest which we express in what they are saying or doing may be real, and not merely assumed. they seem to have a natural instinct to distinguish between an honest and actual sharing of their thoughts and emotions, and all mere condescension and pretense, however adroitly it may be disguised. _want of time_. some mothers may perhaps say that they have not time thus to enter into the ideas and occupations of their children. they are engrossed with the serious cares of life, or busy with its various occupations. but it does not require time. it is not a question of time, but of manner. the farmer's wife, for example, is busy ironing, or sewing, or preparing breakfast for her husband and sons, who are expected every moment to come in hungry from their work. her little daughter, ten years old, comes to show her a shawl she has been making from a piece of calico for her doll. the busy mother thinks she must say, "yes; but run away now, mary; i am very busy!"--because that is the easiest and quickest thing to say; but it is just as easy and just as quick to say, "what a pretty shawl! play now that you are going to take minette out for a walk in it!" the one mode sends the child away repulsed and a little disappointed; the other pleases her and makes her happy, and tends, moreover, to form a new bond of union and sympathy between her mother's heart and her own. a merchant, engrossed all day in his business, comes home to his house at dinner-time, and meets his boy of fifteen on the steps returning from his school. "well, james," he says, as they walk together up stairs, "i hope you have been a good boy at school to-day." james, not knowing what to say, makes some inaudible or unmeaning reply. his father then goes on to say that he hopes his boy will be diligent and attentive to his studies, and improve his time well, as his future success in life will depend upon the use which he makes of his advantages while he is young; and then leaves him at the head of the stairs, each to go to his room. all this is very well. advice given under such circumstances and in such a way produces, undoubtedly, a certain good effect, but it does not tend at all to bring the father and son together. but if, instead of giving this common-place advice, the father asks--supposing it to be winter at the time--"which kind of skates are the most popular among the boys nowadays, james?" then, after hearing his reply, he asks him what _his_ opinion is, and whether any great improvement has been made within a short time, and whether the patent inventions are any of them of much consequence. the tendency of such a conversation as this, equally brief with the other, will be to draw the father and son more together. even in a moral point of view, the influence would be, indirectly, very salutary; for although no moral counsel or instruction was given at the time, the effect of such a participation in the thoughts with which the boy's mind is occupied is to strengthen the bond of union between the heart of the boy and that of his father, and thus to make the boy far more ready to receive and be guided by the advice or admonitions of his father on other occasions. let no one suppose, from these illustrations, that they are intended to inculcate the idea that a father is to lay aside the parental counsels and instructions that he has been accustomed to give to his children, and replace them by talks about skates! they are only intended to show one aspect of the difference of effect produced by the two kinds of conversation, and that the father, if he wishes to gain and retain an influence over the hearts of his boys, must descend sometimes into the world in which they live, and with which their thoughts are occupied, and must enter it, not merely as a spectator, or a fault-finder, or a counsellor, but as a sharer, to some extent, in the ideas and feelings which are appropriate to it. _ascendency over the minds of children_. sympathizing with children in their own pleasures and enjoyments, however childish they may seem to us when we do not regard them, as it were, with children's eyes, is, perhaps, the most powerful of all the means at our command for gaining a powerful ascendency over them. this will lead us not to interfere with their own plans and ideas, but to be willing that they should be happy in their own way. in respect to their duties, those connected, for example, with their studies, their serious employments, and their compliance with directions of any kind emanating from superior authority, of course their will must be under absolute subjection to that of those who are older and wiser than they. in all such things they must bring their thoughts and actions into accord with ours. in these things they must come to us, not we to them. but in every thing that relates to their child-like pleasures and joys, their modes of recreation and amusement, their playful explorations of the mysteries of things, and the various novelties around them in the strange world into which they find themselves ushered--in all these things we must not attempt to bring them to us, but must go to them. in this, their own sphere, the more perfectly they are at liberty, the better; and if we join them in it at all, we must do so by bringing our ideas and wishes into accord with theirs. _foolish fears_. the effect of our sympathy with children in winning their confidence and love, is all the more powerful when it is exercised in cases where they are naturally inclined not to expect sympathy--that is, in relation to feelings which they would suppose that older persons would be inclined to condemn. perhaps the most striking example of this is in what is commonly called foolish fears. now a fear is foolish or otherwise, not according to the absolute facts involving the supposed danger, but according to the means which the person in question has of knowing the facts. a lady, for example, in passing along the sidewalk of a great city comes to a place where workmen are raising an immense and ponderous iron safe, which, slowly rising, hangs suspended twenty feet above the walk. she is afraid to pass under it. the foreman, however, who is engaged in directing the operation, passing freely to and fro under the impending weight, as he has occasion, and without the least concern, smiles, perhaps, at the lady's "foolish fears." but the fears which might, perhaps, be foolish in him, are not so in her, since he _knows_ the nature and the strength of the machinery and securities above, and she does not. she only knows that accidents do sometimes happen from want of due precaution in raising heavy weights, and she does not know, and has no means of knowing, whether or not the due precautions have been taken in this case. so she manifests good sense, and not folly, in going out of her way to avoid all possibility of danger. this is really the proper explanation of a large class of what are usually termed foolish fears. viewed in the light of the individual's knowledge of the facts in the case, they are sensible fears, and not foolish ones at all. a girl of twelve, from the city, spending the summer in the country, wishes to go down to the river to join her brothers there, but is stopped by observing a cow in a field which she has to cross. she comes back to the house, and is there laughed at for her foolishness in being; "afraid of a cow!" but why should she not be afraid of a cow? she has heard stories of people being gored by bulls, and sometimes by cows, and she has no means whatever of estimating the reality or the extent of the danger in any particular case. the farmer's daughters, however, who laugh at her, know the cow in question perfectly well. they have milked her, and fed her, and tied her up to her manger a hundred times; so, while it would be a very foolish thing for them to be afraid to cross a field where the cow was feeding, it is a very sensible thing for the stranger-girl from the city to be so. nor would it certainly change the case much for the child, if the farmer's girls were to assure her that the cow was perfectly peaceable, and that there was no danger; for she does not know the girls any better than she does the cow, and can not judge how far their statements or opinions are to be relied upon. it may possibly not be the cow they think it is. they are very positive, it is true; but very positive people are often mistaken. besides, the cow may be peaceable with them, and yet be disposed to attack a stranger. what a child requires in such a case is sympathy and help, not ridicule. [illustration: afraid of the cow.] this, in the case supposed, she meets in the form of the farmer's son, a young man browned in face and plain in attire, who comes along while she stands loitering at the fence looking at the cow, and not daring after all, notwithstanding the assurances she has received at the house, to cross the field. his name is joseph, and he is a natural gentleman--a class of persons of whom a much larger number is found in this humble guise, and a much smaller number in proportion among the fashionables in elegant life, than is often supposed. "yes," says joseph, after hearing the child's statement of the case, "you are right. cows are sometimes vicious, i know; and you are perfectly right to be on your guard against such as you do not know when you meet them in the country. this one, as it happens, is very kind; but still, i will go through the field with you." so he goes with her through the field, stopping on the way to talk a little to the cow, and to feed her with an apple which he has in his pocket. it is in this spirit that the fears, and antipathies, and false imaginations of children are generally to be dealt with; though, of course, there may be many exceptions to the general rule. _when children are in the wrong_. there is a certain sense in which we should feel a sympathy with children in the wrong that they do. it would seem paradoxical to say that in any sense there should be sympathy with sin, and yet there is a sense in which this is true, though perhaps, strictly speaking, it is sympathy with the trial and temptation which led to the sin, rather than with the act of transgression itself. in whatever light a nice metaphysical analysis would lead us to regard it, it is certain that the most successful efforts that have been made by philanthropists for reaching the hearts and reforming the conduct of criminals and malefactors have been prompted by a feeling of compassion for them, not merely for the sorrows and sufferings which they have brought upon themselves by their wrongdoing, but for the mental conflicts which they endured, the fierce impulses of appetite and passion, more or less connected with and dependent upon the material condition of the bodily organs, under the onset of which their feeble moral sense, never really brought into a condition of health and vigor, was over-borne. these merciful views of the diseased condition and action of the soul in the commission of crime are not only in themselves right views for man to take of the crimes and sins of his fellow-man, but they lie at the foundation of all effort that can afford any serious hope of promoting reformation. this principle is eminently true in its application to children. they need the influence of a kind and considerate sympathy when they have done wrong, more, perhaps, than at any other time; and the effects of the proper manifestation of this sympathy on the part of the mother will, perhaps, be greater and more salutary in this case than in any other. of course the sympathy must be of the right kind, and must be expressed in the right way, so as not to allow the tenderness or compassion for the wrong-doer to be mistaken for approval or justification of the wrong. _case supposed_. a boy, for instance, comes home from school in a state of great distress, and perhaps of indignation and resentment, on account of having been punished. mothers sometimes say at once, in such a case, "i don't pity you at all. i have no doubt you deserved it." this only increases the tumult of commotion in the boy's mind, without at all tending to help him to feel a sense of his guilt. his mind, still imperfectly developed, can not take cognizance simultaneously of all the parts and all the aspects of a complicated transaction. the sense of his wrong-doing, which forms in his teacher's and in his mother's mind so essential a part of the transaction, is not present in his conceptions at all. there is no room for it, so totally engrossed are all his faculties with the stinging recollections of suffering, the tumultuous emotions of anger and resentment, and now with the additional thought that even his mother has taken part against him. the mother's conception of the transaction is equally limited and imperfect, though in a different way. she thinks only that if she were to treat the child with kindness and sympathy, she would be taking the part of a bad boy against his teacher; whereas, in reality, she might do it in such a way as only to be taking the part of a suffering boy against his pain. it would seem that the true and proper course for a mother to take with a child in such a case would be to soothe and calm his agitation, and to listen, if need be, to his account of the affair, without questioning or controverting it at all, however plainly she may see that, under the blinding and distorting influence of his excitement, he is misrepresenting the facts. let him tell his story. listen to it patiently to the end. it is not necessary to express or even to form an opinion on the merits of it. the ready and willing hearing of one side of a case does not commit the tribunal to a decision in favor of that side. on the other hand, it is the only way to give weight and a sense of impartiality to a decision against it. thus the mother may sympathize with her boy in his troubles, appreciate fully the force of the circumstances which led him into the wrong, and help to soothe and calm his agitation, and thus take his part, and place herself closely to him in respect to his suffering, without committing herself at all in regard to the original cause of it; and then, at a subsequent time, when the tumult of his soul has subsided, she can, if she thinks best, far more easily and effectually lead him to see wherein he was wrong. chapter xii. commendation and encouragement. we are very apt to imagine that the disposition to do right is, or ought to be, the natural and normal condition of childhood, and that doing wrong is something unnatural and exceptional with children. as a consequence, when they do right we think there is nothing to be said. that is, or ought to be, a matter of course. it is only when they do wrong that we notice their conduct, and then, of course, with censure and reproaches. thus our discipline consists mainly, not in gently leading and encouraging them in the right way, but in deterring them, by fault-finding and punishment, from going wrong. now we ought not to forget that in respect to moral conduct as well as to mental attainments children know nothing when they come into the world, but have every thing to learn, either from the instructions or from the example of those around them. we do not propose to enter at all into the consideration of the various theological and metaphysical theories held by different classes of philosophers in respect to the native constitution and original tendencies of the human soul, but to look at the phenomena of mental and moral action in a plain and practical way, as they present themselves to the observation of mothers in the every-day walks of life. and in order the better to avoid any complication with these theories, we will take first an extremely simple case, namely, the fault of making too much noise in opening and shutting the door in going in and out of a room. georgie and charlie are two boys, both about five years old, and both prone to the same fault. we will suppose that their mothers take opposite methods to correct them; georgie's mother depending upon the influence of commendation and encouragement when he does right, and charlie's, upon the efficacy of reproaches and punishments when he does wrong. _one method_. georgie, eager to ask his mother some question, or to obtain some permission in respect to his play, bursts into her room some morning with great noise, opening and shutting the door violently, and making much disturbance. in a certain sense he is not to blame for this, for he is wholly unconscious of the disturbance he makes. the entire cognizant capacity of his mind is occupied with the object of his request. he not only had no intention of doing any harm, but has no idea of his having done any. his mother takes no notice of the noise he made, but answers his question, and he goes away making almost as much noise in going out as he did in coming in. the next time he comes in it happens--entirely by accident, we will suppose--that he makes a little less noise than before. this furnishes his mother with her opportunity. "georgie," she says, "i see you are improving." "improving?" repeats georgie, not knowing to what his mother refers. "yes," said his mother; "you are improving, in coming into the room without making a noise by opening and shutting the door. you did not make nearly as much noise this time as you did before when you came in. some boys, whenever they come into a room, make so much noise in opening and shutting the door that it is very disagreeable. if you go on improving as you have begun, you will soon come in as still as any gentleman." the next time that georgie comes in, he takes the utmost pains to open and shut the door as silently as possible. he makes his request. his mother shows herself unusually ready to grant it. "you opened and shut the door like a gentleman," she says. "i ought to do every thing for you that i can, when you take so much pains not to disturb or trouble me." _another method_. charlie's mother, on the other hand, acts on a different principle. charlie comes in sometimes, we will suppose, in a quiet and proper manner. his mother takes no notice of this. she considers it a matter of course. by-and-by, however, under the influence of some special eagerness, he makes a great noise. then his mother interposes. she breaks out upon him with, "charlie, what a noise you make! don't you know better than to slam the doer in that way when you come in? if you can't learn to make less noise in going in and out, i shall not let you go in and out at all." charlie knows very well that this is an empty threat. still, the utterance of it, and the scolding that accompanies it, irritate him a little, and the only possible good effect that can be expected to result from it is to make him try, the next time he comes in, to see how small an abatement of the noise he usually makes will do, as a kind of make-believe obedience to his mother's command. he might, indeed, honestly answer his mother's angry question by saying that he does _not_ know better than to make such a noise. he does not know why the noise of the door should be disagreeable to his mother. it is not disagreeable to _him_. on the contrary, it is agreeable. children always like noise, especially if they make it themselves. and although charlie has often been told that he must not make any noise, the reason for this--namely, that though noise is a source of pleasure, generally, to children, especially when they make it themselves, it is almost always a source of annoyance and pain to grown persons--has never really entered his mind so as to be actually comprehended us a practical reality. his ideas in respect to the philosophy of the transaction are, of course, exceedingly vague; but so far as he forms any idea, it is that his mother's words are the expression of some mysterious but unreasonable sensitiveness on her part, which awakens in her a spirit of fault-finding and ill-humor that vents itself upon him in blaming him for nothing at all; or, as he would express it more tersely, if not so elegantly, that she is "very cross." in other words, the impression made by the transaction upon his moral sense is that of wrong-doing on his _mother's part_, and not at all on his own. it is evident, when we thus look into the secret workings of this method of curing children of their faults, that even when it is successful in restraining certain kinds of outward misconduct, and is thus the means of effecting some small amount of good, the injury which it does by its reaction on the spirit of the child may be vastly greater, through the irritation and ill-humor which it occasions, and the impairing of his confidence in the justice and goodness of his mother. before leaving this illustration, it must be carefully observed that in the first-mentioned case--namely, that of georgie--the work of curing the fault in question is not to be at all considered as _effected_ by the step taken by his mother which has been already described. that was only a beginning--a _right_ beginning, it is true, but still only a beginning. it produced in him a cordial willingness to do right, in one instance. that is a great thing, but it is, after all, only one single step. the work is not complete until a _habit_ of doing right is formed, which is another thing altogether, and requires special and continual measures directed to this particular end. children have to be _trained_ in the way they should go--not merely shown the way, and induced to make a beginning of entering it. we will now try to show how the influence of commendation and encouragement may be brought into action in this more essential part of the process. _habit to be formed_. having taken the first step already described, georgie's mother finds some proper opportunity, when she can have the undisturbed and undivided attention of her boy--perhaps at night, after he has gone to his crib or his trundle-bed, and just before she leaves him; or, perhaps, at some time while she is at work, and he is sitting by her side, with his mind calm, quiet, and unoccupied. "georgie," she says, "i have a plan to propose to you." georgie is eager to know what it is. "you know how pleased i was when you came in so still to-day." georgie remembers it very well. "it is very curious," continued his mother, "that there is a great difference between grown people and children about noise. children _like_ almost all kinds of noises very much, especially, if they make the noises themselves; but grown people dislike them even more, i think, than children like them. if there were a number of boys in the house, and i should tell them that they might run back and forth through the rooms, and rattle and slam all the doors as they went as loud as they could, they would like it very much. they would think it excellent fun." "yes," says georgie, "indeed, they would. i wish you would let us do it some day." "but grown people," continues his mother, "would not like such an amusement at all. on the contrary, such a racket would be excessively disagreeable to them, whether they made it themselves or whether somebody else made it. so, when children come into a room where grown people are sitting, and make a noise in opening and shutting the door, it is very disagreeable. of course, grown people always like those children the best that come into a room quietly, and in a gentlemanly and lady-like manner." as this explanation comes in connection with georgia's having done right, and with the commendation which he has received for it, his mind and heart are open to receive it, instead of being disposed to resist and exclude it, as he would have been if the same things exactly had been said to him in connection with censure and reproaches for having acted in violation of the principle. "yes, mother," says he, "and i mean always to open and shut the door as still as i can." "yes, i know you _mean_ to do so," rejoined his mother, "but you will forget, unless you have some plan to make you remember it until the _habit is formed_. now i have a plan to propose to help you form the habit. when you get the habit once formed there will be no more difficulty. "the plan is this: whenever you come into a room making a noise, i will simply say, _noise_. then you will step back again softly and shut the door, and then come in again in a quiet and proper way. you will not go back for punishment, for you would not have made the noise on purpose, and so would not deserve any punishment. it is only to help you remember, and so to form the habit of coming into a room in a quiet and gentlemanly manner." now georgie, especially if all his mother's management of him is conducted in this spirit, will enter into this plan with great cordiality. "i should not propose this plan," continued his mother, "if i thought that when i say _noise_, and you have to go out and come in again, it would put you out of humor, and make you cross or sullen. i am sure you will be good-natured about it, and even if you consider it a kind of punishment, that you will go out willingly, and take the punishment like a man; and when you come in again you will come in still, and look pleased and happy to find that you are carrying out the plan honorably." then if, on the first occasion when he is sent back, he _does_ take it good-naturedly, this must be noticed and commended. now, unless we are entirely wrong in all our ideas of the nature and tendencies of the infantile mind, it is as certain that a course of procedure like this will be successful in curing the fault which is the subject of treatment, as that water will extinguish fire. it cures it, too, without occasioning any irritation, annoyance, or ill-humor in the mind either of mother or child. on the contrary, it is a source of real satisfaction and pleasure to them both, and increases and strengthens the bond of sympathy by which their hearts are united to each other. _the principle involved_. it must be understood distinctly that this case is given only as an illustration of a principle which is applicable to all cases. the act of opening and shutting a door in a noisy manner is altogether too insignificant a fault to deserve this long discussion of the method of curing it, were it not that methods founded on the same principles, and conducted in the same spirit, are applicable universally in all that pertains to the domestic management of children. and it is a method, too, directly the opposite of that which is often--i will not say generally, but certainly very often--pursued. the child tells the truth many times, and in some cases, perhaps, when the inducement was very strong to tell an untruth. we take no notice of these cases, considering it a matter of course that he should tell the truth. we reserve our action altogether for the first case when, overcome by a sudden temptation, he tells a lie, and then interpose with reproaches and punishment. nineteen times he gives up what belongs to his little brother or sister of his own accord, perhaps after a severe internal struggle. the twentieth time the result of the struggle goes the wrong way, and he attempts to retain by violence what does not belong to him. we take no notice of the nineteen cases when the little fellow did right, but come and box his ears in the one case when he does wrong. _origin of the error_. the idea on which this mode of treatment is founded--namely, that it is a _matter of course_ that children should do right, so that when they do right there is nothing to be said, and that doing wrong is the abnormal condition and exceptional action which alone requires the parent to interfere--is, to a great extent, a mistake. indeed, the _matter of course_ is all the other way. a babe will seize the plaything of another babe without the least compunction long after it is keenly alive to the injustice and wrongfulness of having its own playthings taken by any other child. so in regard to truth. the first impulse of all children, when they have just acquired the use of language, is to use it in such a way as to effect their object for the time being, without any sense of the sacred obligation of making the words always correspond truly with the facts. the principles of doing justice to the rights of others to one's own damage, and of speaking the truth when falsehood would serve the present purpose better, are principles that are developed or acquired by slow degrees, and at a later period. i say developed _or_ acquired--for different classes of metaphysicians and theologians entertain different theories in respect to the way by which the ideas of right and of duty enter into the human mind. but all will agree in this, that whatever may be the origin of the moral sense in man, it does not appear as a _practical element of control for the conduct_ till some time after the animal appetites and passions have begun to exercise their power. whether we regard this sense as arising from a development within of a latent principle of the soul, or as an essential element of the inherited and native constitution of man, though remaining for a time embryonic and inert, or as a habit acquired under the influence of instruction and example, all will admit that the period of its appearance as a perceptible motive of action is so delayed, and the time required for its attaining sufficient strength to exercise any real and effectual control over the conduct extends over so many of the earlier years of life, that no very material help in governing the appetites and passions and impulses can be reasonably expected from it at a very early period. indeed, conscience, so far as its existence is manifested at all in childhood, seems to show itself chiefly in the form of the simple _fear of detection_ in what there is reason to suppose will lead, if discovered, to reproaches or punishment. at any rate, the moral sense in childhood, whatever may be our philosophy in respect to the origin and the nature of it, can not be regarded as a strong and settled principle on which we can throw the responsibility of regulating the conduct, and holding it sternly to its obligations. it is, on the contrary, a very tender plant, slowly coming forward to the development of its beauty and its power, and requiring the most gentle fostering and care on the part of those intrusted with the training of the infant mind; and the influence of commendation and encouragement when the embryo monitor succeeds in its incipient and feeble efforts, will be far more effectual in promoting its development, than that of censure and punishment when it fails. _important caution_. for every good thing there seems to be something in its form and semblance that is spurious and bad. the principle brought to view in this chapter has its counterfeit in the indiscriminate praise and flattery of children by their parents, which only makes them self-conceited and vain, without at all promoting any good end. the distinction between the two might be easily pointed out, if time and space permitted; but the intelligent parent, who has rightly comprehended the method of management here described, and the spirit in which the process of applying it is to be made, will be in no danger of confounding one with the other. this principle of noticing and commending, within proper limits and restrictions, what is right, rather than finding fault with what is wrong, will be found to be as important in the work of instruction as in the regulation of conduct. we have, in fact, a very good opportunity of comparing the two systems, as it is a curious fact that in certain things it is almost the universal custom to adopt one method, and in certain others, the other. _the two methods exemplified_. there are, for example, two arts which children have to learn, in the process of their mental and physical development, in which their faults, errors, and deficiencies are never pointed out, but in the dealings of their parents with them all is commendation and encouragement. they are the arts of walking and talking. the first time that a child attempts to walk alone, what a feeble, staggering, and awkward exhibition it makes. and yet its mother shows, by the excitement of her countenance, and the delight expressed by her exclamations, how pleased she is with the performance; and she, perhaps, even calls in persons from the next room to see how well the baby can walk! not a word about imperfections and failings, not a word about the tottering, the awkward reaching out of arms to preserve the balance, the crookedness of the way, the anxious expression of the countenance, or any other faults. these are left to correct themselves by the continued practice which encouragement is sure to lead to. it is true that words would not be available in such a case for fault-finding; for a child when learning to walk would be too young to understand them. but the parent's sense of the imperfections of the performance might be expressed in looks and gestures which the child would understand; but he sees, on the contrary, nothing but indications of satisfaction and pleasure, and it is very manifest how much he is encouraged by them. seeing the pleasure which his efforts give to the spectators, he is made proud and happy by his success, and goes on making efforts to improve with alacrity and delight. it is the same with learning to talk. the mistakes, deficiencies, and errors of the first rude attempts are seldom noticed, and still more seldom pointed out by the parent. on the contrary, the child takes the impression, from the readiness with which its words are understood and the delight it evidently gives its mother to hear them, that it is going on triumphantly in its work of learning to talk, instead of feeling that its attempts are only tolerated because they are made by such a little child, and that they require a vast amount of correction, alteration, and improvement, before they will be at all satisfactory. indeed, so far from criticising and pointing out the errors and faults, the mother very frequently meets the child half way in its progress, by actually adopting the faults and errors herself in her replies. so that when the little beginner in the use of language, as he wakes up in his crib, and stretching out his hands to his mother says, "i want _to get up_" she comes to take him, and replies, her face beaming with delight, "my little darling! you shall _get up_;" thus filling his mind with happiness at the idea that his mother is not only pleased that he attempts to speak, but is fully satisfied, and more than satisfied, with his success. the result is, that in learning to walk and to talk, children always go forward with alacrity and ardor. they practise continually and spontaneously, requiring no promises of reward to allure them to effort, and no threats of punishment to overcome repugnance or aversion. it might be too much to say that the rapidity of their progress and the pleasure which they experience in making it, are owing wholly to the commendation and encouragement they receive--for other causes may co-operate with these. but it is certain that these influences contribute very essentially to the result. there can be no doubt at all that if it were possible for a mother to stop her child in its efforts to learn to walk and to talk, and explain to it, no matter how kindly, all its shortcomings, failures, and mistakes, and were to make this her daily and habitual practice, the consequence would be, not only a great diminution of the ardor and animation of the little pupil, in pressing forward in its work, but also a great retardation in its progress. _example of the other method_. let us now, for the more full understanding of the subject, go to the other extreme, and consider a case in which the management is as far as possible removed from that above referred to. we can not have a better example than the method often adopted in schools and seminaries for teaching composition; in other words, the art of expressing one's thoughts in written language--an art which one would suppose to be so analogous to that of learning to talk--that is, to express one's thoughts in _oral_ language--that the method which was found so eminently successful in the one would be naturally resorted to in the other. instead of that, the method often pursued is exactly the reverse. the pupil having with infinite difficulty, and with many forebodings and anxious fears, made his first attempt, brings it to his teacher. the teacher, if he is a kind-hearted and considerate man, perhaps briefly commends the effort with some such dubious and equivocal praise as it is "very well for a beginner," or "as good a composition as could be expected at the first attempt," and then proceeds to go over the exercise in a cool and deliberate manner, with a view of discovering and bringing out clearly and conspicuously to the view, not only of the little author himself, but often of all his classmates and friends, every imperfection, failure, mistake, omission, or other fault which a rigid scrutiny can detect in the performance. however kindly he may do this, and however gentle the tones of his voice, still the work is criticism and fault-finding from beginning to end. the boy sits on thorns and nettles while submitting to the operation, and when he takes his marked and corrected manuscript to his seat, he feels mortified and ashamed, and is often hopelessly discouraged. _how faults are to be corrected_. some one may, perhaps, say that pointing out the errors and faults of pupils is absolutely essential to their progress, inasmuch as, unless they are made to see what their faults are, they can not be expected to correct them. i admit that this is true to a certain extent, but by no means to so great an extent as is often supposed. there are a great many ways of teaching pupils to do better what they are going to do, besides showing them the faults in what they have already done. thus, without pointing out the errors and faults which he observes, the teacher may only refer to and commend what is right, while he at the same time observes and remembers the prevailing faults, with a view of adapting his future instructions to the removal of them. these instructions, when given, will take the form, of course, of general information on the art of expressing one's thoughts in writing, and on the faults and errors to be avoided, perhaps without any, or, at least, very little allusion to those which the pupils themselves had committed. instruction thus given, while it will have at least an equal tendency with the other mode to form the pupils to habits of correctness and accuracy, will not have the effect upon their mind of disparagement of what they have already done, but rather of aid and encouragement for them in regard to what they are next to do. in following the instructions thus given them, the pupils will, as it were, leave the faults previously committed behind them, being even, in many instances, unconscious, perhaps, of their having themselves ever committed them. the ingenious mother will find various modes analogous to this, of leading her children forward into what is right, without at all disturbing their minds by censure of what is wrong--a course which it is perfectly safe to pursue in the case of all errors and faults which result from inadvertence or immaturity. there is, doubtless, another class of faults--those of willful carelessness or neglect--which must be specially pointed out to the attention of the delinquents, and a degree of discredit attached to the commission of them, and perhaps, in special cases, some kind of punishment imposed, as the most proper corrective of the evil. and yet, even in cases of carelessness and neglect of duty, it will generally be found much more easy to awaken ambition, and a desire to improve, in a child, by discovering, if possible, something good in his work, and commending that, as an encouragement to him to make greater exertion the next time, than to attempt to cure him of his negligence by calling his attention to the faults which he has committed, as subjects of censure, however obvious the faults may be, and however deserving of blame. the advice, however, made in this chapter, to employ commendation and encouragement to a great extent, rather than criticism and fault-finding, in the management and instruction of children, must, like all other general counsels of the kind, be held subject to all proper limitations and restrictions. some mother may, perhaps, object to what is here advanced, saying, "if i am always indiscriminately praising my child's doings, he will become self-conceited and vain, and he will cease to make progress, being satisfied with what he has already attained." of course he will, and therefore you must take care not to be always and indiscriminately praising him. you must exercise tact and good judgment, or at any rate, common sense, in properly proportioning your criticism and your praise. there are no principles of management, however sound, which may not be so exaggerated, or followed with so blind a disregard of attendant circumstances, as to produce more harm than good. it must be especially borne in mind that the counsels here given in relation to curing the faults of children by dealing more with what is good in them than what is bad, are intended to apply to faults of ignorance, inadvertence, or habit only, and not to acts of known and willful wrong. when we come to cases of deliberate and intentional disobedience to a parent's commands, or open resistance to his authority, something different, or at least something more, is required. _the principle of universal application._ in conclusion, it is proper to add that the principle of influencing human character and action by noticing and commending what is right, rather than finding fault with what is wrong, is of universal application, with the mature as well as with the young. the susceptibility to this influence is in full operation in the minds of all men everywhere, and acting upon it will lead to the same results in all the relations of society. the way to awaken a penurious man to the performance of generous deeds is not by remonstrating with him, however kindly, on his penuriousness, but by watching his conduct till we find some act that bears some semblance of liberality, and commending him for that. if you have a neighbor who is surly and troublesome--tell him that he is so, and you make him worse than ever. but watch for some occasion in which he shows you some little kindness, and thank him cordially for such a good neighborly act, and he will feel a strong desire to repeat it. if mankind universally understood this principle, and would generally act upon it in their dealings with others--of course, with such limitations and restrictions as good sense and sound judgment would impose--the world would not only go on much more smoothly and harmoniously than it does now, but the progress of improvement would, i think, in all respects be infinitely more rapid. chapter xiii. faults of immaturity. a great portion of the errors and mistakes, and of what we call the follies, of children arise from simple ignorance. principles of philosophy, whether pertaining to external nature or to mental action, are involved which have never come home to their minds. they may have been presented, but they have not been understood and appreciated. it requires some tact, and sometimes delicate observation, on the part of the mother to determine whether a mode of action which she sees ought to be corrected results from childish ignorance and inexperience, or from willful wrong-doing. whatever may be the proper treatment in the latter case, it is evident that in the former what is required is not censure, but instruction. _boasting_. a mother came into the room one day and found johnny disputing earnestly with his cousin jane on the question which was the tallest--johnny very strenuously maintaining that he was the tallest, _because he was a boy_. his older brother, james, who was present at the time, measured them, and found that johnny in reality was the tallest. now there was nothing wrong in his feeling a pride and pleasure in the thought that he was physically superior to his cousin, and though it was foolish for him to insist himself on this superiority in a boasting way, it was the foolishness of ignorance only. he had not learned the principle--which half mankind do not seem ever to learn during the whole course of their lives--that it is far wiser and better to let our good qualities appear naturally of themselves, than to claim credit for them beforehand by boasting. it would have been much wiser for johnny to have admitted at the outset that jane might possibly be taller than he, and then to have awaited quietly the result of the measuring. but we can not blame him much for not having learned this particular wisdom at five years of age, when so many full-grown men and women never learn it at all. nor was there any thing blameworthy in him in respect to the false logic involved in his argument, that his being a boy made him necessarily taller than his cousin, a girl of the same age. there was a _semblance_ of proof in that fact--what the logicians term a presumption. but the reasoning powers are very slowly developed in childhood. they are very seldom aided by any instruction really adapted to the improvement of them; and we ought not to expect that such children can at all clearly distinguish a semblance from a reality in ideas so extremely abstruse as those relating to the logical connection between the premises and the conclusion in a process of ratiocination. in this case as in the other we expect them to understand at once, without instruction, what we find it extremely difficult to learn ourselves; for a large portion of mankind prove themselves utterly unable ever to discriminate between sound arguments and those which are utterly inconsequent and absurd. in a word, what johnny requires in such a case as this is, not ridicule to shame him out of his false reasoning, nor censure or punishment to cure him of his boasting, but simply instruction. and this instruction it is much better to give _not_ in direct connection with the occurrence which indicated the want of it. if you attempt to explain to your boy the folly of boasting in immediate connection with some act of boasting of his own, he feels that you are really finding fault with him; his mind instinctively puts itself into a position of defense, and the truth which you wish to impart to it finds a much less easy admission. if, for example, in this case johnny's mother attempts on the spot to explain to him the folly of boasting, and to show how much wiser it is for us to let our good qualities, if we have any, speak for themselves, without any direct agency of ours in claiming the merit of them, he listens reluctantly and nervously as to a scolding in disguise. if he is a boy well managed, he waits, perhaps, to hear what his mother has to say, but it makes no impression. if he is badly trained, he will probably interrupt his mother in the midst of what she is saying, or break away from her to go on with his play. _a right mode of treatment._ if now, instead of this, the mother waits until the dispute and the transaction of measuring have passed by and been forgotten, and then takes some favorable opportunity to give the required _instruction_, the result will be far more favorable. at some time, when tired of his play, he comes to stand by her to observe her at her work, or perhaps to ask her for a story; or, after she has put him to bed and is about to leave him for the night, she says to him as follows: "i'll tell you a story about two boys, jack and henry, and you shall tell me which of them came off best. they both went to the same school and were in the same class, and there was nobody else in the class but those two. henry, who was the most diligent scholar, was at the head of the class, and jack was below him, and, of course, as there were only two, he was at the foot. "one day there was company at the house, and one of the ladies asked the boys how they got along at school. jack immediately said, 'very well. i'm next to the head of my class.' the lady then praised him, and said that he must be a very good scholar to be so high in his class. then she asked henry how high he was in his class. he said he was next to the foot. "the lady was somewhat surprised, for she, as well as the others present, supposed that henry was the best scholar; they were all a little puzzled too, for henry looked a little roguish and sly when he said it. but just then the teacher came in, and she explained the case; for she said that the boys were in the same class, and they were all that were in it; so that henry, who was really at the head, was next but one to the foot, while jack, who was at the foot, was next but one to the head. on having this explanation made to the company, jack felt very much confused and ashamed, while henry, though he said nothing, could not help feeling pleased. "and now," asks the mother, in conclusion, "which of these boys do you think came off the best?" johnny answers that henry came out best. "yes," adds his mother, "and it is always better that people's merits, if they have any, should come out in other ways than by their own boasting of them." it is true that this case of henry and jack does not correspond exactly--not even nearly, in fact--with that of johnny and his cousin. nor is it necessary that the instruction given in these ways should logically conform to the incident which calls them forth. it is sufficient that there should be such a degree of analogy between them, that the interest and turn of thought produced by the incident may prepare the mind for appreciating and receiving the lesson. but the mother may bring the lesson nearer if she pleases. "i will tell you another story," she says. "there were two men at a fair. their names were thomas and philip. "thomas was boasting of his strength. he said he was a great deal stronger than philip. 'perhaps you are,' said philip. then thomas pointed to a big stone which was lying upon the ground, and dared philip to try which could throw it the farthest. 'very well,' said philip, 'i will try, but i think it very likely you will beat me, for i know you are very strong.' so they tried, and it proved that philip could throw it a great deal farther than thomas could. then thomas went away looking very much incensed and very much ashamed, while philip's triumph was altogether greater for his not having boasted." "yes," says johnny, "i think so." the mother may, if she pleases, come still nearer than this, if she wishes to suit johnny's individual case, without exciting any resistance in his heart to the reception of her lesson. she may bring his exact case into consideration, provided she changes the names of the actors, so that johnny's mind may be relieved from the uneasy sensitiveness which it is so natural for a child to feel when his own conduct is directly the object of unfavorable comment. it is surprising how slight a change in the mere outward incidents of an affair will suffice to divert the thoughts of the child from himself in such a case, and enable him to look at the lesson to be imparted without personal feeling, and so to receive it more readily. johnny's mother may say, "there might be a story in a book about two boys that were disputing a little about which was the tallest. what do you think would be good names for the boys, if you were making up such a story?" when johnny has proposed the names, his mother could go on and give an almost exact narrative of what took place between johnny and his cousin, offering just such instructions and such advice as she would like to offer; and she will find, if she manages the conversation with ordinary tact and discretion, that the lessons which she desires to impart will find a ready admission to the mind of her child, simply from the fact that, by divesting them of all direct personal application, she has eliminated from them the element of covert censure which they would otherwise have contained. very slight disguises will, in all such cases, be found to be sufficient to veil the personal applicability of the instruction, so far as to divest it of all that is painful or disagreeable to the child. he may have a vague feeling that you mean him, but the feeling will not produce any effect of irritation or repellency. now, the object of these illustrations is to show that those errors and faults which, when we look at their real and intrinsic character, we see to be results of ignorance and inexperience, and not instances of willful and intentional wrong-doing, are not to be dealt with harshly, and made occasions of censure and punishment. the child does not deserve censure or punishment in such cases; what he requires is instruction. it is the bringing in of light to illuminate the path that is before him which he has yet to tread, and not the infliction of pain, to impress upon him the evil of the missteps he made, in consequence of the obscurity, in the path behind him. indeed, in such cases as this, it is the influence of pleasure rather than pain that the parent will find the most efficient means of aiding him; that is, in these cases, the more pleasant and agreeable the modes by which he can impart the needed knowledge to the child--in other words, the more attractive he can make the paths by which he can lead his little charge onward in its progress towards maturity--the more successful he will be. _ignorance of material properties and laws._ in the example already given, the mental immaturity consisted in imperfect acquaintance with the qualities and the action of the mind, and the principles of sound reasoning; but a far larger portion of the mistakes and failures into which children fall, and for which they incur undeserved censure, are due to their ignorance of the laws of external nature, and of the properties and qualities of material objects. a boy, for example, seven or eight years old, receives from his father a present of a knife, with a special injunction to be careful of it. he is, accordingly, very careful of it in respect to such dangers as he understands, but in attempting to bore a hole with it in a piece of wood, out of which he is trying to make a windmill, he breaks the small blade. the accident, in such a case, is not to be attributed to any censurable carelessness, but to want of instruction in respect to the strength of such a material as steel, and the nature and effects of the degree of tempering given to knife-blades. the boy had seen his father bore holes with a gimlet, and the knife-blade was larger--in one direction at least, that is, in breadth--than the gimlet, and it was very natural for him to suppose that it was stronger. what a boy needs in such a case, therefore, is not a scolding, or punishment, but simply information. a girl of about the same age--a farmer's daughter, we will suppose--under the influence of a dutiful desire to aid her mother in preparing the table for breakfast, attempts to carry across the room a pitcher of milk which is too full, and she spills a portion of it upon the floor. _the intention good_. [illustration: the intention good.] the mother, forgetting the good intention which prompted the act, and thinking only of the inconvenience which it occasions her, administers at once a sharp rebuke. the cause of the trouble was, simply, that the child was not old enough to understand the laws of momentum and of oscillation that affect the condition of a fluid when subjected to movements more or less irregular. she has had no theoretical instruction on the subject, and is too young to have acquired the necessary knowledge practically, by experience or observation. it is so with a very large portion of the accidents which befall children. they arise not from any evil design, nor even any thing that can properly be called carelessness, on their part, but simply from the immaturity of their knowledge in respect to the properties and qualities of the material objects with which they have to deal. it is true that children may be, and often, doubtless, are, in fault for these accidents. the boy may have been warned by his father not to attempt to bore with his knife-blade, or the girl forbidden to attempt to carry the milk-pitcher. the fault, however, would be, even in these cases, in the disobedience, and not in the damage that accidentally resulted from it. and it would be far more reasonable and proper to reprove and punish the fault when no evil followed than when a damage was the result; for in the latter case the damage itself acts, ordinarily, as a more than sufficient punishment. _misfortunes befalling men_. these cases are exactly analogous to a large class of accidents and calamities that happen among men. a ship-master sails from port at a time when there are causes existing in the condition of the atmosphere, and in the agencies in readiness to act upon it, that must certainly, in a few hours, result in a violent storm. he is consequently caught in the gale, and his topmasts and upper rigging are carried away. the owners do not censure him for the loss which they incur, if they are only assured that the meteorological knowledge at the captain's command at the time of leaving port was not such as to give him warning of the danger; and provided, also, that his knowledge was as advanced as could reasonably be expected from the opportunities which he had enjoyed. but we are very much inclined to hold children responsible for as much knowledge of the sources of danger around them as we ourselves, with all our experience, have been able to acquire, and are accustomed to condemn and sometimes even to punish them, for want of this knowledge. indeed, in many cases, both with children and with men, the means of knowledge in respect to the danger may be fully within reach, and yet the situation may be so novel, and the combination of circumstances so peculiar, that the connection between the causes and the possible evil effects does not occur to the minds of the persons engaged. an accident which has just occurred at the time of this present writing will illustrate this. a company of workmen constructing a tunnel for a railway, when they had reached the distance of some miles from the entrance, prepared a number of charges for blasting the rock, and accidentally laid the wires connected with the powder in too close proximity to the temporary railway-track already laid in the tunnel. the charges were intended to be fired from an electric battery provided for the purpose; but a thunder-cloud came up, and the electric force from it was conveyed by the rails into the tunnel and exploded the charges, and several men were killed. no one was inclined to censure the unfortunate men for carelessness in not guarding against a contingency so utterly unforeseen by them, though it is plain that, as is often said to children in precisely analogous cases, they _might have known_. _children's studies_.--_spelling_. there is, perhaps, no department of the management of children in which they incur more undeserved censure, and even punishment, and are treated with so little consideration for faults arising solely from the immaturity of their minds, than in the direction of what may be called school studies. few people have any proper appreciation of the enormous difficulties which a child has to encounter in learning to read and spell. how many parents become discouraged, and manifest their discouragement and dissatisfaction to the child in reproving and complaints, at what they consider his slow progress in learning to spell--forgetting that in the english language there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the sound. we have ourselves become so accustomed to seeing the word _bear_, for example, when denoting the animal, spelt _b e a r_, that we are very prone to imagine that there is something naturally appropriate in those letters and in that collocation of them, to represent that sound when used to denote that idea. but what is there in the nature and power of the letters to aid the child in perceiving--or, when told, in remembering--whether, when referring to the animal, he is to write _bear_, or _bare_, or _bair_, or _bayr_, or _bere_, as in _where_. so with the word _you._ it seems to us the most natural thing in the world to spell it _y o u_. and when the little pupil, judging by the sound, writes it _y u_, we mortify him by our ridicule, as if he had done something in itself absurd. but how is he to know, except by the hardest, most meaningless, and distasteful toil of the memory, whether he is to write _you_, or _yu_, or _yoo,_ or _ewe_, or _yew_, or _yue_, as in _flue_, or even _yo_ as in _do_, and to determine when and in what cases respectively he is to use those different forms? the truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable to guide him in the spelling of it. we ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling--which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one--that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it; and a mode of representing the same sound, which in one case seems natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd. we smile to see _laugh_ spelled _larf,_ just as we should to see _scarf_ spelled _scaugh_, or _scalf_, as in _half_; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us, and has no natural foundation, and that children can not be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever. they learn, in learning to talk, what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning is denoted, but they can have no clue whatever to guide them in determining which of the various modes by which precisely that sound is represented in different words, as _dew, do, due, du, doo_, and _dou_, is to be employed in this case, and they become involved in hopeless perplexity if they attempt to imagine "_how it ought to be spelled_;" and we think them stupid because they can not extricate themselves from the difficulty on our calling upon them to "think!" no doubt there is a reason for the particular mode of spelling each particular word in the language--but that reason is hidden in the past history of the word and in facts connected with its origin and derivation from some barbarous or dead language, and is as utterly beyond the reach of each generation of spellers as if there were no such reasons in existence. there can not be the slightest help in any way from the exercise of the thinking or the reasoning powers. it is true that the variety of the modes by which a given sound may be represented is not so great in all words as it is in these examples, though with respect to a vast number of the words in common use the above are fair specimens. they were not specially selected, but were taken almost at random. and there are very few words in the language the sound of which might not be represented by several different modes. take, for example, the three last words of the last sentence, which, as the words were written without any thought of using them for this purpose, may be considered, perhaps, as a fair specimen of words taken actually at random. the sound of the word _several_ might be expressed in perfect accordance with the usage of english spelling, as _ceveral, severul, sevaral, cevural_, and in many other different modes. the combinations _dipherant, diferunt, dyfferent, diffurunt_, and many others, would as well represent the sound of the second word as the usual mode. and so with _modes_, which, according to the analogy of the language, might as well be expressed by _moads, mowdes, moades, mohdes_, or even _mhodes_, as in _rhodes_. an exceptionally precise speaker might doubtless make some slight difference in the sounds indicated by the different modes of representing the same syllable as given above; but to the ordinary appreciation of childhood the distinction in sound between such combinations, for example, as _a n t_ in _constant_ and _e n t_ in _different_ would not be perceptible. now, when we consider the obvious fact that the child has to learn mechanically, without any principles whatever to guide him in discovering which, out of the many different forms, equally probable, judging simply from analogy, by which the sound of the word is to be expressed, is the right one; and considering how small a portion of his time each day is or can be devoted to this work, and that the number of words in common use, all of which he is expected to know how to spell correctly by the time that he is twelve or fifteen years of age, is probably ten or twelve thousand (there are in webster's dictionary considerably over a hundred thousand); when we take these considerations into account, it would seem that a parent, on finding that a letter written by his daughter, twelve or fourteen years of age, has all but three or four words spelled right, ought to be pleased and satisfied, and to express his satisfaction for the encouragement of the learner, instead of appearing to think only of the few words that are wrong, and disheartening and discouraging the child by attempts to make her ashamed of her spelling. the case is substantially the same with the enormous difficulties to be encountered in learning to read and to write. the names of the letters, as the child pronounces them individually, give very little clue to the sound that is to be given to the word formed by them. thus, the letters _h i t_, as the child pronounces them individually--_aitch, eye, tee_--would naturally spell to him some such word as _achite_, not _hit_ at all. and as for the labor and difficulty of writing, a mother who is impatient at the slow progress of her children in the attainment of the art would be aided very much in obtaining a just idea of the difficulties which they experience by sitting upon a chair and at a table both much too high for her, and trying to copy chinese characters by means of a hair-pencil, and with her left hand--the work to be closely inspected every day by a stern chinaman of whom she stands in awe, and all the minutest deviations from the copy pointed out to her attention with an air of dissatisfaction and reproval! _effect of ridicule_. there is, perhaps, no one cause which exerts a greater influence in chilling the interest that children naturally feel in the acquisition of knowledge, than the depression and discouragement which result from having their mistakes and errors--for a large portion of which they are in no sense to blame--made subjects of censure or ridicule. the effect is still more decided in the case of girls than in that of boys, the gentler sex being naturally so much more sensitive. i have found in many cases, especially in respect to girls who are far enough advanced to have had a tolerably full experience of the usual influences of schools, that the fear of making mistakes, and of being "thought stupid," has had more effect in hindering and retarding progress, by repressing the natural ardor of the pupil, and destroying all alacrity and courage in the efforts to advance, than all other causes combined. _stupidity_. how ungenerous, and even cruel, it is to reproach or ridicule a child for stupidity, is evident when we reflect that any supposed inferiority in his mental organization can not, by any possibility, be _his_ fault. the question what degree of natural intelligence he shall be endowed with, in comparison with other children, is determined, not by himself, but by his creator, and depends, probably, upon conditions of organization in his cerebral system as much beyond his control as any thing abnormal in the features of his face, or blindness, or deafness, or any other physical disadvantage. the child who shows any indications of inferiority to others in any of these respects should be the object of his parent's or his teacher's special tenderness and care. if he is near-sighted, give him, at school, a seat as convenient as possible to the blackboard or the map. if he is hard of hearing, place him near the teacher; and for reasons precisely analogous, if you suspect him to be of inferior capacity, help him gently and tenderly in every possible way. do every thing in your power to encourage him, and to conceal his deficiencies both from others and from himself, so far as these objects can be attained consistently with the general good of the family or of the school. and, at all events, let those who have in any way the charge of children keep the distinction well defined in their minds between the faults which result from evil intentions, or deliberate and willful neglect of known duty, and those which, whatever the inconvenience they may occasion, are in part or in whole the results of mental or physical immaturity. in all our dealings, whether with plants, or animals, or with the human soul, we ought, in our training, to act very gently in respect to all that pertains to the embryo condition. chapter xiv. the activity of children. in order rightly to understand the true nature of that extraordinary activity which is so noticeable in all children that are in a state of health, so as to be able to deal with it on the right principles and in a proper manner, it is necessary to turn our attention somewhat carefully to certain scientific truths in respect to the nature and action of force in general which are now abundantly established, and which throw great light on the true character of that peculiar form of it which is so characteristic of childhood, and is, indeed, so abundantly developed by the vital functions of almost all young animals. one of the fundamental principles of this system of scientific truth is that which is called the persistence of force. _the persistence of force_. by the persistence of force is meant the principle--one now established with so much certainty as to command the assent of every thinking man who examines the subject--that in the ordinary course of nature no force is either ever originated or ever destroyed, but only changed in form. in other words, that all existing forces are but the continuation or prolongation of other forces preceding them, either of the same or other forms, but precisely equivalent in amount; and that no force can terminate its action in any other way than by being transmuted into some other force, either of the same or of some other form; but still, again, precisely equivalent in amount. it was formerly believed that a force might under certain circumstances be _originated_--created, as it were--and hence the attempts to contrive machines for perpetual motion--that is, machines for the _production_ of force. this idea is now wholly renounced by all well-informed men as utterly impossible in the nature of things. all that human mechanism can do is to provide modes for using advantageously a force previously existing, without the possibility of either increasing or diminishing it. no existing force can be destroyed. the only changes possible are changes of direction, changes in the relation of intensity to quantity, and changes of form. the cases in which a force is apparently increased or diminished, as well as those in which it seems to disappear, are all found, on examination, to be illusive. for example, the apparent increase of a man's power by the use of a lever is really no increase at all. it is true that, by pressing upon the outer arm with his own weight, he can cause the much greater weight of the stone to rise; but then it will rise only a very little way in comparison with the distance through which his own weight descends. his own weight must, in fact, descend through a distance as much greater than that by which the stone ascends, as the weight of the stone is greater than his weight. in other words, so far as the balance of the forces is concerned, the whole amount of the _downward motion_ consists of the smaller weight descending through a greater distance, which will be equal to the whole amount of that of the larger one ascending through a smaller distance; and, to produce a preponderance, the whole amount of the downward force must be somewhat greater. thus the lever only _gathers_ or _concentrates_ force, as it were, but does not at all increase it. it is so with all the other contrivances for managing force for the accomplishment of particular purposes. none of them, increase the force, but only alter its form and character, with a view to its better adaptation to the purpose in view. nor can any force be extinguished. when a bullet strikes against a solid wall, the force of its movement, which seems to disappear, is not lost; it is converted into heat--the temperature of both the bullet and of that part of the wall on which it impinges being raised by the concussion. and it is found that the amount of the heat which is thus produced is always in exact proportion to the quantity of mechanical motion which is stopped; this quantity depending on the weight of the bullet, and on the velocity with which it was moving. and it has been ascertained, moreover, by the most careful, patient, and many times repeated experiments and calculations, that the quantity of this heat is exactly the same with that which, through the medium of steam, or by any other mode of applying it, may be made to produce the same quantity of mechanical motion that was extinguished in the bullet. thus the force was not destroyed, but only converted into another form. and if we should follow out the natural effects of this heat into which the motion of the bullet was transferred, we should find it rarefying the air around the place of concussion, and thus lifting the whole mass of the atmosphere above it, and producing currents of the nature of wind, and through these producing other effects, thus going on forever; the force changing its form, but neither increasing or diminishing its quantity through a series of changes without end. _the arrest and temporary reservation of force_. now, although it is thus impossible that any force should be destroyed, or in any way cease to exist in one form without setting in action a precisely equal amount in some other form, it may, as it were, pass into a condition of _restraint_, and remain thus suspended and latent for an indefinite period--ready, however, to break into action again the moment that the restraint is removed. thus a perfectly elastic spring may be bent by a certain force, and retained in the bent position a long time. but the moment that it is released it will unbend itself, exercising in so doing precisely the degree of force expended in bending it. in the same manner air may be compressed in an air-gun, and held thus, with the force, as it were, imprisoned, for any length of time, until at last, when the detent is released by the trigger, the elastic force comes into action, exercising in its action a power precisely the same as that with which it was compressed. force or power may be thus, as it were, stored up in a countless variety of ways, and reserved for future action; and, when finally released, the whole amount may be set free at once, so as to expend itself in a single impulse, as in case of the arrow or the bullet; or it may be partially restrained, so as to expend itself gradually, as in the case of a clock or watch. in either case the total amount expended will be precisely the same--namely, the exact equivalent of that which was placed in store. _vegetable and animal life_. there are a vast number of mechanical contrivances in use among men for thus putting force in store, as it were, and then using it more or less gradually, as may be required. and nature, moreover, does this on a scale so stupendous as to render all human contrivances for this purpose utterly insignificant in comparison. the great agent which nature employs in this work is vegetation. indeed, it may truly be said that the great function of vegetable life, in all the infinitude of forms and characters which it assumes, is to _receive and store up force_ derived from the emanations of the sun. animal life, on the other hand, exists and fulfills its functions by the _expenditure_ of this force. animals receive vegetable productions containing these reserves of force into their systems, which systems contain arrangements for liberating the force, and employing it for the purposes it is intended to subserve in the animal economy. the manner in which these processes are performed is in general terms as follows: the vegetable absorbs from the earth and from the air substances existing in their natural condition--that is, united according to their strongest affinities. these substances are chiefly water, containing various mineral salts in solution, from the ground, and carbonic acid from the air. these substances, after undergoing certain changes in the vessels of the plant, are exposed to the influence of the rays of the sun in the leaves. by the power of these rays--including the calorific, the luminous, and the actinic--the natural affinities by which the above-mentioned substances were united are overcome, and they are formed into new combinations, in which they are united by very weak affinities. of course, they have a strong tendency to break away from the new unions, and fall back into the old. but, by some mysterious and incomprehensible means, the sun has power to lock them, so to speak, in their new forms, so as to require a special condition of things for the releasing of them. thus they form a reserve of force, which can be held in restraint until the conditions required for their release are realized. the process can be illustrated more particularly by a single case. water, one of the substances absorbed by plants, is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, which are united by an affinity of prodigious force. it is the same with carbon and oxygen, in a compound called carbonic acid, which is also one of the principal substances absorbed by plants from the air. now the heat and other emanations from the sun, acting upon these substances in the leaves, forces the hydrogen and the carbon away from their strong bond of union with oxygen, and sets the oxygen free, and then combines the carbon and hydrogen into a sort of unwilling union with each other--a union from which they are always ready and eager to break away, that they may return to their union with the object of their former and much stronger attachment--namely, oxygen; though they are so locked, by some mysterious means, that they can not break away except when certain conditions necessary to their release are realized. _hydrocarbons_. the substances thus formed by a weak union of carbon with hydrogen are called hydrocarbons. they comprise nearly all the highly inflammable vegetable substances. their being combustible means simply that they have a great disposition to resume their union with oxygen--combustion being nothing other than a more or less violent return of a substance to a union with oxygen or some other such substance, usually one from which it had formerly been separated by force--giving out again by its return, in the form of heat, the force by which the original separation had been effected. a compound formed thus of substances united by very weak affinities, so that they are always ready to separate from each other and form new unions under the influence of stronger affinities, is said to be in a state of _unstable equilibrium._ it is the function of vegetable life to create these unstable combinations by means of the force derived from the sun; and the combinations, when formed, of course hold the force which formed them in reserve, ready to make itself manifest whenever it is released. animals receive these substances into their systems in their food. a portion of them they retain, re-arranging the components in some cases so as to form new compounds, but still unstable. these they use in constructing the tissues of the animal system, and some they reserve for future use. as fast as they require the heat and the force which are stored in them they expend, them, thus recovering the force which was absorbed in the formation of them, and which now, on being released, re-appears in the three forms of _animal heat, muscular motion_, and _cerebral_ or _nervous energy_. there are other modes besides the processes of animal life by which the reserved force laid up by the vegetable process in these unstable compounds may be released. in many cases it releases itself under ordinary exposures to the oxygen of the atmosphere. a log of wood--which is composed chiefly of carbon and hydrogen in an unstable union--lying upon the ground will gradually _decay_, as we term it--that is, its elements will separate from each other, and form new unions with the elements of the surrounding air, thus returning to their normal condition. they give out, in so doing, a low degree of heat, which, being protracted through a course of years, makes up, in the end, the precise equivalent of that expended by the sun in forming the wood--that is, the power expended in the formation of the wood is all released in the dissolution of it. this process may be greatly accelerated by heat. if a portion of the wood is raised in temperature to a certain point, the elements begin to combine with the oxygen near, with so much violence as to release the reserved power with great rapidity. and as this force re-appears in the form of heat, the next portions of the wood are at once raised to the right temperature to allow the process of reoxidation to go on rapidly with them. this is the process of combustion. observations and experiments on decaying wood have been made, showing that the amount of heat developed by the combustion of a mass of wood, though much more intense for a time, is the same in _amount_ as that which is set free by the slower process of re-oxidation by gradual decay; both being the equivalent of the amount absorbed by the leaves from the sun, in the process of deoxidizing the carbon and hydrogen when the wood was formed. the force imprisoned in these unstable compounds may be held in reserve for an unlimited period, so long as all opportunity is denied them of returning the elements that compose them to their original combinations. such a case occurs when large beds of vegetable substances are buried under layers of sediment which subsequently become stone, and thus shut the hydrocarbonaceous compounds beneath them from all access to oxygen. the beds of coal thus formed retain their reserved force for periods of immense duration; and when at length the material thus protected is brought to the surface, and made to give up its treasured power, it manifests its efficiency in driving machinery, propelling trains, heating furnaces, or diffusing warmth and comfort around the family fireside. in all these cases the heat and power developed from the coal is heat and power derived originally from the sun, and now set free, after having lain dormant thousands and perhaps millions of years. this simple case of the formation of hydrocarbons from the elements furnished by carbonic acid and water is only adduced as an illustration of the general principle. the modes by which the power of the sun actually takes effect in the decomposition of stable compounds, and the formation of unstable ones from the elements thus obtained, are innumerable, and the processes as well as the combinations that result are extremely complicated. these processes include not only the first formation of the unstable compounds in the leaf, but also an endless series of modifications and re-arrangements which they subsequently undergo, as well in the other organs of the plant as in those of the animal when they are finally introduced into an animal system. in all, however, the general result is substantially the same--namely, the forcing of elements into unnatural combinations, so to speak, by the power of the sun acting through the instrumentality of vegetation, in order that they may subsequently, in the animal system, give out that power again by the effort they make to release themselves from the coercion imposed upon them, and to return to the natural unions in which they can find again stability and repose. one of the chief elements employed in the formation of these weakly-combined substances is _nitrogen_--its compounds being designated as nitrogenous substances, and noted, as a class, for the facility with which they are decomposed. nitrogen is, in fact, the great _weak-holder_ of nature. young students in chemistry, when they learn that nitrogen is distinguished by the weakness of its affinities for other elements, and its consequent great _inertness_ as a chemical agent, are often astonished to find that its compounds--such as nitric acid, nitre, which gives its explosive character to gunpowder, nitro-glycerine, gun-cotton, and various other explosive substances which it helps to form--are among the most remarkable in nature for the violence and intensity of their action, and for the extent to which the principle of vitality avails itself of them as magazines of _force_, upon which to draw in the fulfillment of its various functions. _gentle measures_. but this is really just what should be expected. it is the very _weakness of the hold_ which nitrogen maintains upon the elements combined with it that facilitates their release, and affords them the opportunity to seize with so much avidity and violence on those for which they have a strong attraction. it is as if a huntsman should conduct a pack of ferocious dogs into a field occupied by a flock of sheep, quietly grazing, holding the dogs securely by very strong leashes. the quiet and repose of the field might not be seriously disturbed; but if, on the other hand, a child comes in, leading the dogs by threads which they can easily sunder, a scene of the greatest violence and confusion would ensue. in the same manner, when nitrogen, holding the particles of oxygen with which it is combined in the compounds above named by a very feeble control, brings them into the presence of other substances for which they have a very strong affinity, they release themselves at once from their weak custodian, and rush into the combinations which their nature demands with so much avidity as to produce combustions, deflagrations, and explosions of the most violent character. the force which the elements display in these reunions is always--and this is one aspect of the great discovery of modern times in respect to the _persistence_ or _constancy_ of force which has already been referred to--precisely the same in amount as that which was required for dissevering them from their original combinations with such substances at some previous time. the _processes of vegetation_ are the chief means employed for effecting the original separations, by the power of the sun, and for forming the unstable compounds by which this power is held in reserve. the _animal system_, on the other hand, takes in these compounds, remodels them so far as is required to adapt them to its structure, assimilates them, and then, as occasion requires quires, it releases the concealed force, which then manifests itself in the forms of _animal heat_, of _muscular motion_, and of _cerebral and nervous power_. in what way, and to what extent, the knowledge of these truths should influence us in the management and training of children in respect to their extraordinary activity, is the question we have next to consider. _practical applications of these principles_. if we watch a bird for a little while hopping along upon the ground, and up and down between the ground and the branches of a tree, we shall at first be surprised at his incessant activity, and next, if we reflect a little, at the utter aimlessness and uselessness of it. he runs a little way along the path; then he hops up upon a twig, then down again upon the ground; then "makes believe" peck at something which he imagines or pretends that he sees in the grass; then, canting his head to one side and upward, the branch of a tree there happens to strike his eye, upon which he at once flies up to it. perching himself upon it for the moment, he utters a burst of joyous song, and then, instantly afterwards, down he comes upon the ground again, runs along, stops, runs along a little farther, stops again, looks around him a moment, as if wondering what to do next, and then flies off out of our field of view. if we could follow, and had patience to watch him so long, we should find him continuing this incessantly changing but never-ceasing activity all the day long. we sometimes imagine that the bird's movements are to be explained by supposing that he is engaged in the search for food in these evolutions. but when we reflect how small a quantity of food his little crop will contain, we shall be at once convinced that a large proportion of his apparent pecking for food is only make-believe, and that he moves thus incessantly not so much on account of the end he seeks to attain by it, as on account of the very pleasure of the motion. he hops about and pecks, not for the love of any thing he expects to find, but just for the love of hopping and pecking. the real explanation is that the food which he has taken is delivering up, within his system, the force stored in it that was received originally from the beams of the sun, while the plant which produced it was growing. this force must have an outlet, and it finds this outlet in the incessant activity of the bird's muscles and brain. the various objects which attract his attention without, _invite_ the force to expend itself in _certain special directions_; but the impelling cause is within, and not without; and were there nothing without to serve as objects for its action, the necessity of its action would be none the less imperious. the lion, when imprisoned in his cage, walks to and fro continuously, if there is room for him to take two steps and turn; and if there is not room for this, he moves his head incessantly from side to side. the force within him, which his vital organs are setting at liberty from its imprisonment in his food, must in some way find issue. mothers do not often stop to speculate upon, and may even, perhaps, seldom observe the restless and incessant activity of birds, but that of their children forces itself upon their attention by its effects in disturbing their own quiet avocations and pleasures; and they often wonder what can be the inducement which leads to such a perpetual succession of movements made apparently without motive or end. and, not perceiving any possible inducement to account for it, they are apt to consider this restless activity so causeless and unreasonable as to make it a fault for which the child is to be censured or punished, or which they are to attempt to cure by means of artificial restraints. they would not attempt such repressions as this if they were aware that all this muscular and mental energy of action in the child is only the outward manifestation of an inward force developed in a manner wholly independent of its will--a force, too, which must spend itself in some way or other, and that, if not allowed to do this in its own way, by impelling the limbs and members to outward action, it will do so by destroying the delicate mechanism within. we see this in the case of men who are doomed for long periods to solitary confinement. the force derived from their food, and released within their systems by the vital processes, being cut off by the silence and solitude of the dungeon from all usual and natural outlets, begins to work mischief within, by disorganizing the cerebral and other vital organs, and producing insanity and death. _common mistake_. we make a great mistake when we imagine that children are influenced in their activity mainly by a desire for the objects which they attain by it. it is not the ends attained, but the pleasurable feeling which the action of the internal force, issuing by its natural channels, affords them, and the sense of power which accompanies the action. an end which presents itself to be attained invites this force to act in one direction rather than another, but it is the action, and not the end, in which the charm resides. give a child a bow and arrow, and send him out into the yard to try it, and if he does not happen to see any thing to shoot at, he will shoot at random into the air. but if there is any object which will serve as a mark in sight, it seems to have the effect of drawing his aim towards it. he shoots at the vane on the barn, at an apple on a tree, a knot in a fence--any thing which will serve the purpose of a mark. this is not because he has any end to accomplish in hitting the vane, the apple, or the knot, but only because there is an impulse within him leading him to shoot, and if there happens to be any thing to shoot at, it gives that impulse a direction. it is precisely the same with the incessant muscular activity of a child. he comes into a room and sits down in the first seat that he sees. then he jumps up and runs to another, then to another, until he has tried all the seats in the room. this is not because he particularly wishes to try the seats. he wishes to _move_, and the seats happen to be at hand, and they simply give direction to the impulse. if he were out of doors, the same office would be fulfilled by a fence which he might climb over, instead of going through an open gate close by; or a wall that he could walk upon with difficulty, instead of going, without difficulty, along a path at the foot of it; or a pole which he could try to climb, when there was no motive for climbing it but a desire to make muscular exertion; or a steep bank where he can scramble up, when there is nothing that he wishes for on the top of it. in other words, the things that children do are not done for the sake of the things, but for the sake of the _doing_. parents very often do not understand this, and are accordingly continually asking such foolish questions as, "george, what do you wish to climb over that fence for, when there is a gate all open close by?" "james, what good do you expect to get by climbing up that tree, when you know there is nothing on it, not even a bird's nest?" and, "lucy, what makes you keep jumping up all the time and running about to different places? why can't you, when you get a good seat, sit still in it?" the children, if they understood the philosophy of the case, might answer, "we don't climb over the fence at all because we wish to be on the other side of it; or scramble up the bank for the sake of any thing that is on the top of it; or run about to different places because we wish to be in the places particularly. it is the internal force that is in us working itself off, and it works itself off in the ways that come most readily to hand." _various modes in which the reserved force reappears_. the force thus stored in the food and liberated within the system by the vital processes, finds scope for action in several different ways, prominent among which are, first, in the production of animal heat; secondly, in muscular contractions and the motions of the limbs and members resulting from them; and thirdly, in mental phenomena connected with the action of the brain and the nerves. this last branch of the subject is yet enveloped in great mystery; but the proof seems to be decisive that the nervous system of man comprises organs which are actively exercised in the performance of mental operations, and that in this exercise they consume important portions of the vital force. if, for example, a child is actually engaged at play, and we direct him to take a seat and sit still, he will find it very difficult to do so. the inward force will soon begin to struggle within him to find an issue. but if, while he is so sitting, we begin to relate to him some very surprising or exciting story, to occupy his _mind_, he will become motionless, and very likely remain so until the story is ended. it is supposed that in such cases the force is drawn off, so to speak, through the cerebral organs which it is employed in keeping in play, as the instruments by which the emotions and ideas which the story awakens in the mind are evolved. this part of the subject, as has already been remarked, is full of mystery; but the general fact that a portion of the force derived from the food is expended in actions of the brain and nervous system seems well established. indeed, the whole subject of the reception and the storing up of force from the sun by the processes of vegetable and animal life, and the subsequent liberation of it in the fulfillment of the various functions of the animal system, is full of difficulties and mysteries. it is only a very simple view of the _general principle_ which is presented in these articles. in nature the operations are not simple at all. they are involved in endless complications which are yet only to a very limited extent unravelled. the general principle is, however, well established; and if understood, even as a general principle, by parents and teachers, it will greatly modify their action in dealing with the incessant restlessness and activity of the young. it will teach them, among other things, the following practical rules: _practical rules_. . never find fault with children for their incapacity to keep still. you may stop the supply of force, if you will, by refusing to give them food; but if you continue the supply, you must not complain of its manifesting itself in action. after giving your boy his breakfast, to find fault with him for being incessantly in motion when his system has absorbed it, is simply to find fault with him for being healthy and happy. to give children food and then to restrain the resulting activity, is conduct very analogous to that of the engineer who should lock the action of his engine, turn all the stop-cocks, and shut down the safety-valve, while he still went on all the time putting in coal under the boiler. the least that he could expect would be a great hissing and fizzling at all the joints of his machine; and it would be only by means of such a degree of looseness in the joints as would allow of the escape of the imprisoned force in this way that could prevent the repression ending in a frightful catastrophe. now, nine-tenths of the whispering and playing of children in school, and of the noise, the rudeness, and the petty mischief of children at home, is just this hissing and fizzling of an imprisoned power, and nothing more. in a word, we must favor and promote, by every means in our power, the activity of children, not censure and repress it. we may endeavor to turn it aside from wrong channels--that is, to prevent its manifesting itself in ways injurious to them or annoying to others. we must not, however, attempt to divert it from these channels by damming it up, but by opening other channels that will draw it away in better directions. . in encouraging the activity of children, and in guiding the direction of it in their hours of play, we must not expect to make it available for useful results, other than that of promoting their own physical development and health. at least, we can do this only in a very limited degree. almost all useful results require for their attainment a long continuance of efforts of the same kind--that is, expenditure of the vital force by the continued action of the same organs. now, it is a principle of nature that while the organs of an animal system are in process of formation and growth, they can exercise their power only for a very brief period at a time without exhaustion. this necessitates on the part of all young animals incessant changes of action, or alternations of action and repose. a farmer of forty years of age, whose organs are well developed and mature, will chop wood all day without excessive fatigue. then, when he comes home at night, he will sit for three hours in the evening upon the settle by his fireside, _thinking_--his mind occupied, perhaps, upon the details of the management of his farm, or upon his plans for the following day. the vital force thus expends itself for many successive hours through his muscles, and then, while his muscles are at rest, it finds its egress for several other hours through the brain. but in the _child_ the mode of action must change every few minutes. he is made tired with five minutes' labor. he is satisfied with five minutes' rest. he will ride his rocking-horse, if alone, a short time, and then he comes to you to ask you to tell him a story. while listening to the story, his muscles are resting, and the force is spending its strength in working the mechanism of the brain. if you make your story too long, the brain, in turn, becomes fatigued, and he feels instinctively impelled to divert the vital force again into muscular action. if, instead of being alone with his rocking-horse, he has company there, he will _seem_ to continue his bodily effort a long time; but he does not really do so, for he stops continually, to talk with his companion, thus allowing his muscles to rest for a brief period, during which the vital force expends its strength in carrying on trains of thought and emotion through the brain. he is not to be blamed for this seeming capriciousness. these frequent changes in the mode of action are a necessity, and this necessity evidently unfits him for any kind of monotonous or continued exertion--the only kind which, in ordinary cases, can be made conducive to any useful results. . parents at home and teachers at school must recognize these physiological laws, relating to the action of the young, and make their plans and arrangements conform to them. the periods of confinement to any one mode of action in the very young, and especially mental action, must be short; and they must alternate frequently with other modes. that rapid succession of bodily movements and of mental ideas, and the emotions mingling and alternating with them, which constitutes what children call play, must be regarded not simply as an indulgence, but as a necessity for them. the play must be considered as essential as the study, and that not merely for the very young but for all, up to the age of maturity. for older pupils, in the best institutions of the country, some suitable provision is made for this want; but the mothers of young children at home are often at a loss by what means to effect this purpose, and many are very imperfectly aware of the desirableness, and even the necessity, of doing this. as for the means of accomplishing the object--that is, providing channels for the complete expenditure of this force in the safest and most agreeable manner for the child, and the least inconvenient and troublesome for others, much must depend upon the tact, the ingenuity, and the discretion of the mother. it will, however, be a great point gained for her when she once fully comprehends that the _tendency_ to incessant activity, and even to turbulence and noise, on the part of her child, only shows that he is all right in his vital machinery, and that this exuberance of energy is something to be pleased with and directed, not denounced and restrained. chapter xv. the imagination in children. the reader may, perhaps, recollect that in the last chapter there was an intimation that a portion of the force which was produced, or rather liberated and brought into action, by the consumption of food in the vital system, expended itself in the development of thoughts, emotions, and other forms of mental action, through the organization of the brain and of the nerves. _expenditure of force through the brain._ the whole subject of the expenditure of material force in maintaining those forms of mental action which are carried on through the medium of bodily organs, it must be admitted, is involved in great obscurity; for it is only a glimmering of light which science has yet been able to throw into this field. it is, however, becoming the settled opinion, among all well-informed persons, that the soul, during the time of its connection with a material system in this life, performs many of those functions which we class as mental, through the medium, or instrumentality, in some mysterious way, of material organs, just as we all know is the case with the sensations--that is, the impressions made through the organs of sense; and that the maintaining of these mental organs, so to speak, in action, involves a certain expenditure of some form of physical force, the source of this force being in the food that is consumed in the nourishment of the body. there is certainly no apparent reason why there should be any antecedent presumption against the supposition that the soul performs the act of remembering or of conceiving an imaginary scene through the instrumentality of a bodily organ, more than that it should receive a sensation of light or of sound through such a channel. the question of the independent existence and the immateriality of the thinking and feeling principle, which takes cognizance of these thoughts and sensations, is not at all affected by any inquiries into the nature of the instrumentality by means of which, in a particular stage of its existence, it performs these functions. _phenomena explained by this principle_. this truth, if it be indeed a truth, throws great light on what would be otherwise quite inexplicable in the playful activity of the mental faculties of children. the curious fantasies, imaginings, and make-believes--the pleasure of listening to marvellous and impossible tales, and of hearing odd and unpronounceable words or combination of words --the love of acting, and of disguises--of the impersonation of inanimate objects--of seeing things as they are not, and of creating and giving reality to what has no existence except in their own minds--are all the gambollings and frolics, so to speak, of the embryo faculties just becoming conscious of their existence, and affording, like the muscles of motion, so many different issues for the internal force derived from the food. thus the action of the mind of a child, in holding an imaginary conversation with a doll, or in inventing or in relating an impossible fairy story, or in converting a switch on which he pretends to be riding into a prancing horse, is precisely analogous to that of the muscles of the lamb, or the calf, or any other young animal in its gambols--that is, it is the result of the force which the vital functions are continually developing within the system, and which flows and must flow continually out through whatever channels are open to it; and in thus flowing, sets all the various systems of machinery into play, each in its own appropriate manner. in any other view of the subject than this, many of the phenomena of childhood would be still more wonderful and inexplicable than they are. one would have supposed, for example, that the imagination--being, as is commonly thought, one of the most exalted and refined of the mental faculties of man--would be one of the latest, in the order of time, to manifest itself in the development of the mind; instead of which it is, in fact, one of the earliest. children live, in a great measure, from the earliest age in an ideal world--their pains and their pleasures, their joys and their fears being, to a vast extent, the concomitants of phantasms and illusions having often the slightest bond of connection with the realities around them. the realities themselves, moreover, often have far greater influence over them by what they suggest than by what they are. indeed, the younger the child is, within reasonable limits, the more susceptible he seems to be to the power of the imagination, and the more easily his mind and heart are reached and influenced through this avenue. at a very early period the realities of actual existence and the phantasms of the mind seem inseparably mingled, and it is only after much experience and a considerable development of his powers, that the line of distinction between them becomes defined. the power of investing an elongated bag of bran with the attributes and qualities of a thinking being, so as to make it an object of solicitude and affection, which would seem to imply a high exercise of one of the most refined and exalted of the human faculties, does not come, as we might have expected, at the end of a long period of progress and development, but springs into existence, as it were, at once, in the very earliest years. the progress and development are required to enable the child to perceive that the rude and shapeless doll is _not_ a living and lovable thing. this mingling of the real and imaginary worlds shows itself to the close observer in a thousand curious ways. the true explanation of the phenomenon seems to be that the various embryo faculties are brought into action by the vital force at first in a very irregular, intermingled, and capricious manner, just as the muscles are in the endless and objectless play of the limbs and members. they develop themselves and grow by this very action, and we ought not only to indulge, but to cherish the action in all its beautiful manifestations by every means in our power. these mental organs, so to speak--that is, the organs of the brain, through which, while its connection with the body continues, the mind performs its mental functions--grow and thrive, as the muscles do, by being reasonably kept in exercise. it is evident, from these facts, that the parent should be pleased with, and should encourage the exercise of these embryo powers in his children; and both father and mother may be greatly aided in their efforts to devise means for reaching and influencing their hearts by means of them, and especially through the action of the imagination, which will be found, when properly employed, to be capable of exercising an almost magical power of imparting great attractiveness and giving great effect to lessons of instruction which, in their simple form, would be dull, tiresome, and ineffective. precisely what is meant by this will be shown more clearly by some examples. _methods exemplified_. one of the simplest and easiest modes by which a mother can avail herself of the vivid imagination of the child in amusing and entertaining him, is by holding conversations with representations of persons, or even of animals, in the pictures which she shows him. thus, in the case, for example, of a picture which she is showing to her child sitting in her lap--the picture containing, we will suppose, a representation of a little girl with books under her arm--she may say, "my little girl, where are you going?--i am going" (speaking now in a somewhat altered voice, to represent the voice of the little girl) "to school.--ah! you are going to school. you don't look quite old enough to go to school. who sits next to you at school?--george williams.--george williams? is he a good boy?--yes, he's a very good boy.--i am glad you have a good boy, and one that is kind to you, to sit by you. that must be very pleasant." and so on, as long as the child is interested in listening. or, "what is your name, my little girl?--my name is lucy.--that's a pretty name! and where do you live?--i live in that house under the trees.--ah! i see the house. and where is your room in that house?--my room is the one where you see the window open.--i see it. what have you got in your room?--i have a bed, and a table by the window; and i keep my doll there. i have got a cradle for my doll, and a little trunk to keep her clothes in. and i have got--" the mother may go on in this way, and describe a great number and variety of objects in the room, such as are calculated to interest and please the little listener. it is the pleasurable exercise of some dawning faculty or faculties acting through embryo organs of the brain, by which the mind can picture to itself, more or less vividly, unreal scenes, which is the source of the enjoyment in such cases as this. a child may be still more interested, perhaps, by imaginary conversations of this kind with pictures of animals, and by varying the form of them in such a way as to call a new set of mental faculties into play; as, for example, "here is a picture of a squirrel. i'll ask him where he lives. 'bunny! bunny! stop a minute; i want to speak to you. i want you to tell me where you live.--i live in my hole.--where is your hole?--it is under that big log that you see back in the woods.' yes" (speaking now to the child), "i see the log. do you see it? touch it with your finger. yes, that must be it. but i don't see any hole. 'bunny' (assuming now the tone of speaking again to the squirrel), 'i don't see your hole.--no, i did not mean that any body should see it. i made it in a hidden place in the ground, so as to have it out of sight.--i wish i could see it, and i wish more that i could look down into it and see what is there. what is there _in_ your hole, bunny?--my nest is there, and my little bunnies.--how many little bunnies have you got?'"--and so on, to any extent that you desire. it is obvious that conversations of this kind may be made the means of conveying, indirectly, a great deal of instruction to young children on a great variety of subjects; and lessons of duty may be inculcated thus in a very effective manner, and by a method which is at the same time easy and agreeable for the mother, and extremely attractive to the child. this may seem a very simple thing, and it is really very simple; but any mother who has never resorted to this method of amusing and instructing her child will be surprised to find what an easy and inexhaustible resource for her it may become. children are always coming to ask for stories, and the mother often has no story at hand, and her mind is too much preoccupied to invent one. here is a ready resort in every such emergency. "very well," replies the mother to such a request, "i'll tell you a story; but i must have a picture to my story. find me a picture in some book." the child brings a picture, no matter what. there is no possible picture that will not suggest to a person possessed of ordinary ingenuity an endless number of talks to interest and amuse the child. to take an extreme case, suppose the picture is a rude pencil drawing of a post, and nothing besides. you can imagine a boy hidden behind the post, and you can call to him, and finally obtain an answer from him, and have a long talk with him about his play and who he is hiding from, and what other way he has of playing with his friend. or you can talk with the post directly. ask him where he came from, who put him in the ground, and what he was put in the ground for, and what kind of a tree he was when he was a part of a tree growing in the woods; and, following the subject out, the conversation may be the means of not only amusing the child for the moment, but also of gratifying his curiosity, and imparting a great amount of useful information to him which will materially aid in the development of his powers. or you may ask the post whether he has any relatives, and he may reply that he has a great many cousins. he has some cousins that live in the city, and they are called lamp-posts, and their business is to hold lamps to light people along the streets; and he has some other cousins who stand in a long row and hold up the telegraph-wire to carry messages from one part of the world to another; and so on without end. if all this may done by means of a rude representation of a simple post, it may easily be seen that no picture which the child can possibly bring can fail to serve as a subject for such conversations. some mothers may, perhaps, think it must require a great deal of ingenuity and skill to carry out these ideas effectively in practice, and that is true; or rather, it is true that there is in it scope for the exercise of a great deal of ingenuity and skill, and even of genius, for those who possess these qualities; but the degree of ingenuity required for a commencement in this method is very small, and that necessary for complete success in it is very easily acquired. _personification of inanimate objects_. it will at once occur to the mother that any inanimate object may be personified in this way and addressed as a living and intelligent being. your child is sick, i will suppose, and is somewhat feverish and fretful. in adjusting his dress you prick him a little with a pin, and the pain and annoyance acting on his morbid sensibilities bring out expressions of irritation and ill-humor. now you may, if you please, tell him that he must not be so impatient, that you did not mean to hurt him, that he must not mind a little prick, and the like, and you will meet with the ordinary success that attends such admonitions. or, in the spirit of the foregoing suggestions, you may say, "did the pin prick you? i'll catch the little rogue, and hear what he has to say for himself. ah, here he is--i've caught him! i'll hold him fast. lie still in my lap, and we will hear what he has to say. "'look up here, my little prickler, and tell me what your name is.--my name is pin.--ah, your name is pin, is it? how bright you are! how came you to be so bright?--oh, they brightened me when they made me.--indeed! and how did they make you?--they made me in a machine.--in a machine? that's very curious! how did they make you in the machine? tell us all about it!--they made me out of wire. first the machine cut off a piece of the wire long enough to make me, and then i was carried around to different parts of the machine to have different things done to me. i went first to one part to get straightened. don't you see how straight i am?--yes, you are very straight indeed.--then i went to another part of the machine and had my head put on; and then i went to another part and had my point sharpened; and then i was polished, and covered all over with a beautiful silvering, to make me bright and white.'" and so on indefinitely. the mother may continue the talk as long as the child is interested, by letting the pin give an account of the various adventures that happened to it in the course of its life, and finally call it to account for pricking a poor little sick child. any mother can judge whether such a mode of treating the case, or the more usual one of gravely exhorting the child to patience and good-humor, when sick, is likely to be most effectual in soothing the nervous irritation of the little patient, and restoring its mind to a condition of calmness and repose. the mother who reads these suggestions in a cursory manner, and contents herself with saying that they are very good, but makes no resolute and persevering effort to acquire for herself the ability to avail herself of them, will have no idea of the immense practical value of them as a means of aiding her in her work, and in promoting the happiness of her children. but if she will make the attempt, she will most certainly find enough encouragement in her first effort to induce her to persevere. [illustration: the imaginative faculty.] she must, moreover, not only originate, herself, modes of amusing the imagination of her children, but must fall in with and aid those which _they_ originate. if your little daughter is playing with her doll, look up from your work and say a few words to the doll or the child in a grave and serious manner, assuming that the doll is a living and sentient being. if your boy is playing horses in the garden while you are there attending to your flowers, ask him with all gravity what he values his horse at, and whether he wishes to sell him. ask him whether he ever bites, or breaks out of his pasture; and give him some advice about not driving him too fast up hill, and not giving him oats when he is warm. he will at once enter into such a conversation in the most serious manner, and the pleasure of his play will be greatly increased by your joining with him in maintaining the illusion. there is a still more important advantage than the temporary increase to your children's happiness by acting on this principle. by thus joining with them, even for a few moments, in their play, you establish a closer bond of sympathy between your own heart and theirs, and attach them to you more strongly than you can do by any other means. indeed, in many cases the most important moral lessons can be conveyed in connection with these illusions of children, and in a way not only more agreeable but far more effective than by any other method. _influence without claim to authority_. acting through the imagination of children--if the art of doing so is once understood--will prove at once an invaluable and an inexhaustible resource for all those classes of persons who are placed in situations requiring them to exercise an influence over children without having any proper authority over them; such, for example, as uncles and aunts, older brothers and sisters, and even visitors residing more or less permanently in a family, and desirous, from a wish to do good, of promoting the welfare and the improvement of the younger members of it. it often happens that such a visitor, without any actual right of authority, acquires a greater influence over the minds of the children than the parents themselves; and many a mother, who, with all her threatenings and scoldings, and even punishments, can not make herself obeyed, is surprised at the absolute ascendency which some inmate residing in the family acquires over them by means so silent, gentle, and unpretending, that they seem mysterious and almost magical. "what is the secret of it?" asks the mother sometimes in such a case. "you never punish the children, and you never scold them, and yet they obey you a great deal more readily and certainly than they do me." there are a great many different means which may be employed in combination with each other for acquiring this kind of ascendency, and among them the use which may be made of the power of the imagination in the young is one of the most important. _the intermediation of the dolls again_. a young teacher, for example, in returning from school some day, finds the children of the family in which she resides, who have been playing with their dolls in the yard, engaged in some angry dispute. the first impulse with many persons in such a case might be to sit down with the children upon the seat where they were playing, and remonstrate with them, though in a very kind and gentle manner, on the wrongfulness and folly of such disputings, to show them that the thing in question is not worth disputing about, that angry feelings are uncomfortable and unhappy feelings, and that it is, consequently, not only a sin, but a folly to indulge in them. now such a remonstrance, if given in a kind and gentle manner, will undoubtedly do good. the children will be somewhat less likely to become involved in such a dispute immediately after it than before, and in process of time, and through many repetitions of such counsels, the fault may be gradually cured. still, at the time, it will make the children uncomfortable, by producing in their minds a certain degree of irritation. they will be very apt to listen in silence, and with a morose and sullen air; and if they do not call the admonition a scolding, on account of the kind and gentle tones in which it is delivered, they will be very apt to consider it much in that light. suppose, however, that, instead of dealing with the case in this matter-of-fact and naked way, the teacher calls the imagination of the children to her aid, and administers her admonition and reproof indirectly, through the dolls. she takes the dolls in her hand, asks their names, and inquires which of the two girls is the mother of each. the dolls' names are bella and araminta, and the mothers' are lucy and mary. "but i might have asked araminta herself," she adds; and, so saying, she holds the doll before her, and enters into a long imaginary conversation with her, more or less spirited and original, according to the talent and ingenuity of the young lady, but, in any conceivable case, enough so to completely absorb the attention of the children and fully to occupy their minds. she asks each of them her name, and inquires of each which of the girls is her mother, and makes first one of them, and then the other, point to her mother in giving her answer. by this time the illusion is completely established in the children's minds of regarding their dolls as living beings, responsible to mothers for their conduct and behavior; and the young lady can go on and give her admonitions and instructions in respect to the sin and folly of quarrelling to them--the children listening. and it will be found that by this management the impression upon the minds of the children will be far greater and more effective than if the counsels were addressed directly to them; while, at the same time, though they may even take the form of very severe reproof, they will produce no sullenness or vexation in the minds of those for whom they are really intended. indeed, the very reason why the admonition thus given will be so much more effective is the fact that it does _not_ tend in any degree to awaken resentment and vexation, but associates the lesson which the teacher wishes to convey with amusement and pleasure. "you are very pretty"--she says, we will suppose, addressing the dolls--"and you look very amiable. i suppose you _are_ very amiable." then, turning to the children, she asks, in a confidential undertone, "do they ever get into disputes and quarrels?" "_sometimes,_" says one of the children, entering at once into the idea of the teacher. "ah!" the teacher exclaims, turning again to the dolls. "i hear that you dispute and quarrel sometimes, and i am very sorry for it. that is very foolish. it is only silly little children that we expect will dispute and quarrel. i should not have supposed it possible in the case of such young ladies as you. it is a great deal better to be yielding and kind. if one of you says something that the other thinks is not true, let it pass without contradiction; it is foolish to dispute about it. and so if one has any thing that the other wants, it is generally much better to wait for it than to quarrel. it is hateful to quarrel. besides, it spoils your beauty. when children are quarrelling they look like little furies." the teacher may go on in this way, and give a long moral lecture to the dolls in a tone of mock gravity, and the children will listen to it with the most profound attention; and it will have a far greater influence upon them than the same admonitions addressed directly to _them_. so effectually, in fact, will this element of play in the transaction open their hearts to the reception of good counsel, that even direct admonitions to _them_ will be admitted with it, if the same guise is maintained; for the teacher may add, in conclusion, addressing now the children themselves with the same mock solemnity: "that is a very bad fault of your children--very bad, indeed. and it is one that you will find very hard to correct. you must give them a great deal of good counsel on the subject, and, above all, you must be careful to set them a good example yourselves. children always imitate what they see in their mothers, whether it is good or bad. if you are always amiable and kind to one another, they will be so too." the thoughtful mother, in following out the suggestions here given, will see at once how the interest which the children take in their dolls, and the sense of reality which they feel in respect to all their dealings with them, opens before her a boundless field in respect to modes of reaching and influencing their minds and hearts. _the ball itself made to teach carefulness_. there is literally no end to the modes by which persons having the charge of young children can avail themselves of their vivid imaginative powers in inculcating moral lessons or influencing their conduct. a boy, we will suppose, has a new ball. just as he is going out to play with it his father takes it from him to examine it, and, after turning it round and looking at it attentively on every side, holds it up to his ear. the boy asks what his father is doing. "i am listening to hear what he says." "and what does he say, father?" "he says that you won't have him to play with long." "why not?" "i will ask him, why not?" (holding the ball again to his ear). "what does he say, father?" "he says he is going to run away from you and hide. he says you will go to play near some building, and he means, when you throw him or knock him, to fly against the windows and break the glass, and then people will take your ball away from you." "but i won't play near any windows." "he says, at any rate you will play near some building, and when you knock him he means to fly up to the roof and get behind a chimney, or roll down into the gutter where you can't get him." "but, father, i am not going to play near any building at all." "then you will play in some place where there are holes in the ground, or thickets of bushes near, where he can hide." "no, father, i mean to look well over the ground, and not play in any place where there is any danger at all." "well, we shall see; but the little rogue is determined to hide somewhere." the boy takes his ball and goes out to play with it, far more effectually cautioned than he could have been by any direct admonition. _the teacher and the tough logs_ a teacher who was engaged in a district school in the country, where the arrangement was for the older boys to saw and split the wood for the fire, on coming one day, at the recess, to see how the work was going on, found that the boys had laid one rather hard-looking log aside. they could not split that log, they said. "yes," said the teacher, looking at the log, "i don't wonder. i know that log. i saw him before. his name is old gnarly. he says he has no idea of coming open for a parcel of boys, even if they _have_ got beetle and wedges. it takes a man, he says, to split _him_." the boys stood looking at the log with a very grave expression of countenance as they heard these words. "is that what he says?" asked one of them. "let's try him again, joe." "it will do no good," said the teacher, "for he won't come open, if he can possibly help it. and _there's_ another fellow (pointing). his name is slivertwist. if you get a crack in him, you will find him full of twisted splinters that he holds himself together with. the only way is to cut them through with a sharp axe. but he holds on so tight with them that i don't believe you can get him open. he says he never gives up to boys." so saying, the teacher went away. it is scarcely necessary to say to any one who knows boys that the teacher was called out not long afterwards to see that old gnarly and old slivertwist were both split up fine--the boys standing around the heaps of well-prepared fire-wood which they had afforded, and regarding them with an air of exultation and triumph. _muscles reinvigorated through the action of the mind_. an older sister has been taking a walk, with little johnny, four years old, as her companion. on their return, when within half a mile of home, johnny, tired of gathering flowers and chasing butterflies, comes to his sister, with a fatigued and languid air, and says he can not walk any farther, and wants to be carried. "i can't carry you very well," she says, "but i will tell you what we will do; we will stop at the first tavern we come to and rest. do you see that large flat stone out there at the turn of the road? that is the tavern, and you shall be my courier. a courier is a man that goes forward as fast as he can on his horse, and tells the tavern-keeper that the traveller is coming, and orders supper. so you may gallop on as fast as you can go, and, when you get to the tavern, tell the tavern-keeper that the princess is coming--i am the princess--and that he must get ready an excellent supper." the boy will gallop on and wait at the stone. when his sister arrives she may sit and rest with him a moment, entertaining him by imagining conversations with the inn-keeper, and then resume their walk. "now," she may say, "i must send my courier to the post-office with a letter. do you see that fence away forward? that fence is the post-office. we will play that one of the cracks between the boards is the letter-box. take this letter (handing him any little scrap of paper which she has taken from her pocket and folded to represent a letter) and put it in the letter-box, and speak to the postmaster through the crack, and tell him to send the letter as soon as he can." under such management as this, unless the child's exhaustion is very great, his sense of it will disappear, and he will accomplish the walk not only without any more complaining, but with a great feeling of pleasure. the nature of the action in such a case seems to be that the vital force, when, in its direct and ordinary passage to the muscles through the nerves, it has exhausted the resources of that mode of transmission, receives in some mysterious way a reinforcement to its strength in passing round, by a new channel, through the organs of intelligence and imagination. these trivial instances are only given as examples to show how infinitely varied are the applications which may be made of this principle of appealing to the imagination of children, and what a variety of effects may be produced through its instrumentality by a parent or teacher who once takes pains to make himself possessed of it. but each one must make himself possessed of it by his own practice and experience. no general instructions can do any thing more than to offer the suggestion, and to show how a beginning is to be made. chapter xvi. truth and falsehood. the duty of telling the truth seems to us, until we have devoted special consideration to the subject, the most simple thing in the world, both to understand and to perform; and when we find young children disregarding it we are surprised and shocked, and often imagine that it indicates something peculiar and abnormal in the moral sense of the offender. a little reflection, however, will show us how very different the state of the case really is. what do we mean by the obligation resting upon us to tell the truth? it is simply, in general terms, that it is our duty to make our statements correspond with the realities which they purport to express. this is, no doubt, our duty, as a general rule, but there are so many exceptions to this rule, and the principles on which the admissibility of the exceptions depend are so complicated and so abstruse, that it is wonderful that children learn to make the necessary distinctions as soon as they do. _natural guidance to the duty of telling the truth_. the child, when he first acquires the art of using and understanding language, is filled with wonder and pleasure to find that he can represent external objects that he observes, and also ideas passing through his mind, by means of sounds formed by his organs of speech. such sounds, he finds, have both these powers--that is, they can represent realities or fancies. thus, when he utters the sounds _i see a bird_, they may denote either a mere conception in his mind, or an outward actuality. how is he possibly to know, by any instinct, or intuition, or moral sense when it is right for him to use them as representations of a mere idea, and when it is wrong for him to use them, unless they correspond with some actual reality? the fact that vivid images or conceptions may be awakened in his mind by the mere hearing of certain sounds made by himself or another is something strange and wonderful to him; and though he comes to his consciousness of this susceptibility by degrees, it is still, while he is acquiring it, and extending the scope and range of it, a source of continual pleasure to him. the necessity of any correspondence of these words, and of the images which they excite, with actual realities, is a necessity which arises from the relations of man to man in the social state, and he has no means whatever of knowing any thing about it except by instruction. there is not only no ground for expecting that children should perceive any such necessity either by any kind of instinct, or intuition, or embryo moral sense, or by any reasoning process of which his incipient powers are capable; but even if he should by either of these means be inclined to entertain such an idea, his mind would soon be utterly confused in regard to it by what he observes constantly taking place around him in respect to the use of language by others whose conduct, much more than their precepts, he is accustomed to follow as his guide. _a very nice distinction_. a mother, for example, takes her little son, four or five years old, into her lap to amuse him with a story. she begins: "when i was a little boy i lived by myself. all the bread and cheese i got i laid upon the shelf," and so on to the end. the mother's object is accomplished. the boy is amused. he is greatly interested and pleased by the wonderful phenomenon taking place within him of curious images awakened in his mind by means of sounds entering his ear--images of a little boy living alone, of his reaching up to put bread and cheese upon a shelf, and finally of his attempting to wheel a little wife home--the story ending with the breaking and downfall of the wheelbarrow, wife and all. he does not reflect philosophically upon the subject, but the principal element of the pleasure afforded him is the wonderful phenomenon of the formation of such vivid and strange images in his mind by means of the mere sound of his mother's voice. he knows at once, if any half-formed reflections arise in his mind at all, that what his mother has told him is not true--that is, that the words and images which they awaken in his mind had no actual realities corresponding with them. he knows, in the first place, that his mother never was a boy, and does not suppose that she ever lived by herself, and laid up her bread and cheese upon a shelf. the whole story, he understands, if he exercises any thought about it whatever--wheelbarrow catastrophe and all--consists only of words which his mother speaks to him to give him pleasure. by-and-by his mother gives him a piece of cake, and he goes out into the garden to play. his sister is there and asks him to give her a piece of his cake. he hesitates. he thinks of the request long enough to form a distinct image in his mind of giving her half of it, but finally concludes not to do so, and eats it all himself. when at length he comes in, his mother accidentally asks him some question about the cake, and he says he gave half of it to his sister. his mother seems much pleased. he knew that she would be pleased. he said it, in fact, on purpose to please her. the words represented no actual reality, but only a thought passing through his mind, and he spoke, in a certain sense, for the purpose of giving his mother pleasure. the case corresponds in all these particulars with that of his mother's statement in respect to her being once a little boy and living by herself. those words were spoken by her to give him pleasure, and he said what he did to give her pleasure. to give her pleasure! the reader will perhaps say, with some surprise, thinking that to assign such a motive as that is not, by any means, putting a fair and proper construction upon the boy's act. his design was, it will be said, to shield himself from censure, or to procure undeserved praise. and it is, no doubt, true that, on a nice analysis of the motives of the act, such as we, in our maturity, can easily make, we shall find that design obscurely mingled with them. but the child does not analyze. he can not. he does not look forward to ultimate ends, or look for the hidden springs that lie concealed among the complicated combinations of impulses which animate him. in the case that we are supposing, all that we can reasonably believe to be present to his mind is a kind of instinctive feeling that for him to say that he ate the cake all himself would bring a frown, or at least a look of pain and distress, to his mother's face, and perhaps words of displeasure for him; while, if he says that he gave half to his sister, she will look pleased and happy. this is as far as he sees. and he may be of such an age, and his mental organs may be in so embryonic a condition, that it is as far as he ought to be expected to look; so that, as the case presents itself to his mind in respect to the impulse which at the moment prompts him to act, he said what he did from a desire to give his mother pleasure, and not pain. as to the secret motive, which might have been his ultimate end, _that_ lay too deeply concealed for him to be conscious of it. and we ourselves too often act from the influence of hidden impulses of selfishness, the existence of which we are wholly unconscious of, to judge him too harshly for his blindness. at length, by-and-by, when his sister conies in, and the untruth is discovered, the boy is astonished and bewildered by being called to account in a very solemn manner by his mother on account of the awful wickedness of having told a lie! _how the child sees it_. now i am very ready to admit that, notwithstanding the apparent resemblance between these two cases, this resemblance is only apparent and superficial; but the question is, whether it is not sufficient to cause such a child to confound them, and to be excusable, until he has been enlightened by appropriate instruction, for not clearly distinguishing the cases where words must be held strictly to conform to actual realities, from those where it is perfectly right and proper that they should only represent images or conceptions of the mind. a father, playing with his children, says, "now i am a bear, and am going to growl." so he growls. then he says, "now i am a dog, and am going to bark." he is not a bear, and he is not a dog, and the children know it. his words, therefore, even to the apprehension of the children, express an untruth, in the sense that they do not correspond with any actual reality. it is not a wrongful untruth. the children understand perfectly well that in such a case as this it is not in any sense wrong to say what is not true. but how are they to know what kind of untruths are right, and what kind are wrong, until they are taught what the distinction is and upon what it depends. unfortunately many parents confuse the ideas, or rather the moral sense of their children, in a much more vital manner by untruths of a different kind from this--as, for example, when a mother, in the presence of her children, expresses a feeling of vexation and annoyance at seeing a certain visitor coming to make a call, and then, when the visitor enters the room, receives her with pretended pleasure, and says, out of politeness, that she is very glad to see her. sometimes a father will join with his children, when peculiar circumstances seem, as he thinks, to require it, in concealing something from their mother, or deceiving her in regard to it by misrepresentations or positive untruths. sometimes even the mother will do this in reference to the father. of course such management as this must necessarily have the effect of bringing up the children to the idea that deceiving by untruths is a justifiable resort in certain cases--a doctrine which, though entertained by many well-meaning persons, strikes a fatal blow at all confidence in the veracity of men; for whenever we know of any persons that they entertain this idea, it is never afterwards safe to trust in what they say, since we never can know that the case in hand is not, for some reason unknown to us, one of those which justify a resort to falsehood. but to return to the case of the children that are under the training of parents who will not themselves, under any circumstances, falsify their word--that is, will never utter words that do not represent actual reality in any of the wrongful ways. such children can not be expected to know of themselves, or to learn without instruction, what the wrongful ways are, and they never do learn until they have made many failures. many, it is true, learn when they are very young. many evince a remarkable tenderness of conscience in respect to this as well as to all their other duties, so fast as they are taught them. and some become so faithful and scrupulous in respect to truth, at so early an age, that their parents quite forget the progressive steps by which they advanced at the beginning. we find many a mother who will say of her boy that he never told an untruth, but we do not find any man who will say of himself, that when he was a boy he never told one. _imaginings and rememberings easily mistaken for each other_. but besides the complicated character of the general subject, as it presents itself to the minds of children--that is, the intricacy to them of the question when there must be a strict correspondence between the words spoken and an actual reality, and when they may rightly represent mere images or fancies of the mind--there is another great difficulty in their way, one that is very little considered and often, indeed, not at all understood by parents--and that is, that in the earliest years the distinction between realities and mere fancies of the mind is very indistinctly drawn. even in our minds the two things are often confounded. we often have to pause and think in order to decide whether a mental perception of which we are conscious is a remembrance of a reality, or a revival of some image formed at some previous time, perhaps remote, by a vivid description which we have read or heard, or even by our own fancy. "is that really so, or did i dream it?" how often is such a question heard. and persons have been known to certify honestly, in courts of justice, to facts which they think they personally witnessed, but which were really pictured in their minds in other ways. the picture was so distinct and vivid that they lost, in time, the power of distinguishing it from other and, perhaps, similar pictures which had been made by their witnessing the corresponding realities. indeed, instead of being surprised that these different origins of present mental images are sometimes confounded, it is actually wonderful that they can generally be so clearly distinguished; and we can not explain, even to ourselves, what the difference is by which we do distinguish them. for example, we can call up to our minds the picture of a house burning and a fireman going up by a ladder to rescue some person appearing at the window. now the image, in such a case, may have had several different modes of origin. . we may have actually witnessed such a scene the evening before. . some one may have given us a vivid description of it. . we may have fancied it in writing a tale, and . we may have dreamed it. here are four different prototypes of a picture which is now renewed, and there is something in the present copy which enables us, in most cases, to determine at once what the real prototype was. that is, there is something in the picture which now arises in our mind as a renewal or repetition of the picture made the day before, which makes us immediately cognizant of the cause of the original picture--that is, whether it came from a reality that we witnessed, or from a verbal or written description by another person, or whether it was a fanciful creation of our own mind while awake, or a dream. and it is extremely difficult for us to discover precisely what it is, in the present mental picture, which gives us this information in respect to the origin of its prototype. it is very easy to say, "oh, we _remember_." but remember is only a word. we can only mean by it, in such a case as this, that there is some _latent difference_ between the several images made upon our minds to-day of things seen, heard of, fancied, or dreamed yesterday, by which we distinguish each from all the others. but the most acute metaphysicians--men who are accustomed to the closest scrutiny of the movements and the mode of action of their minds--find it very difficult to discover what this difference is. _the result in the case of children_. now, in the case of young children, the faculties of perception and consciousness and the power of recognizing the distinguishing characteristics of the different perceptions and sensations of their minds are all immature, and distinctions which even to mature minds are not so clear but that they are often confounded, for them form a bewildering maze. their minds are occupied with a mingled and blended though beautiful combination of sensations, conceptions, fancies, and remembrances, which they do not attempt to separate from each other, and their vocal organs are animated by a constant impulse to exercise themselves with any utterances which the incessant and playful gambollings of their faculties frame. in other words, the vital force liberated by the digestion of the food seeks an issue now in this way and now in that, through every variety of mental and bodily action. of course, to arrange and systematize these actions, to establish the true relations between all these various faculties and powers, and to regulate the obligations and duties by which the exercise of them should be limited and controlled, is a work of time, and is to be effected, not by the operation of any instinct or early intuition, but by a course of development--effected mainly by the progress of growth and experience, though it is to be aided and guided by assiduous but gentle training and instruction. if these views are correct, we can safely draw from them the following conclusions. _practical conclusions_. . we must not expect from children that they will from the beginning understand and feel the obligation to speak the truth, any more than we look for a recognition, on their part, of the various other principles of duty which arise from the relations of man to man in the social state. we do not expect that two babies creeping upon the floor towards the same plaything should each feel instinctively impelled to grant the other the use of it half of the time. children must be taught to tell the truth, just as they must be taught the principles of justice and equal rights. they generally get taught by experience--that is, by the rough treatment and hard knocks which they bring upon themselves by their violation of these principles. but the faithful parent can aid them in acquiring the necessary knowledge in a far easier and more agreeable manner by appropriate instruction. . the mother must not be distressed or too much troubled when she finds that her children, while very young are prone to fall into deviations from the truth, but only to be made to feel more impressed with the necessity of renewing her own efforts to teach them the duty, and to train them to the performance of it. . she must not be too stern or severe in punishing the deviations from truth in very young children, or in expressing the displeasure which they awaken in her mind. it is instruction, not expressions of anger or vindictive punishment, that is required in most cases. explain to them the evils that would result if we could not believe what people say, and tell them stories of truth-loving children on the one hand, and of false and deceitful children on the other. and, above all, notice, with indications of approval and pleasure, when the child speaks the truth under circumstances which might have tempted him to deviate from it. one instance of this kind, in which you show that you observe and are pleased by his truthfulness, will do more to awaken in his heart a genuine love for the truth than ten reprovals, or even punishments, incurred by the violation of it. and in the same spirit we must make use of the religious considerations which are appropriate to this subject--that is, we must encourage the child with the approval of his heavenly father, when he resists the temptation to deviate from the truth, instead of frightening him, when he falls, by terrible denunciations of the anger of god against liars; denunciations which, however well-deserved in the cases to which they are intended to apply, are not designed for children in whose minds the necessary discriminations, as pointed out in this chapter, are yet scarcely formed. _danger of confounding deceitfulness and falsehood_. . do not confound the criminality of deceitfulness by acts with falsehood by words, by telling the child, when he resorts to any artifice or deception in order to gain his ends, that it is as bad to deceive as to lie. it is not as bad, by any means. there is a marked line of distinction to be drawn between falsifying one's word and all other forms of deception, for there is such a sacredness in the spoken word, that the violation of it is in general far more reprehensible than the attempt to accomplish the same end by mere action. if a man has lost a leg, it may be perfectly right for him to wear a wooden one which is so perfectly made as to deceive people--and even to wear it, too, with the _intent_ to deceive people by leading them to suppose that both his legs are genuine--while it would be wrong; for him to assert in words that this limb was not an artificial one. it is right to put a chalk egg in a hen's nest to deceive the hen, when, if the hen could understand language, and if we were to suppose hens "to have any rights that we are bound to respect," it would be wrong to _tell_ her that it was a real egg. it would be right for a person, when his house was entered by a robber at night, to point an empty gun at the robber to frighten him away by leading him to think that the gun was loaded; but it would be wrong, as i think--though i am aware that many persons would think differently--for him to say in words that the gun was loaded, and that he would fire unless the robber went away. these cases show that there is a great difference between deceiving by false appearances, which is sometimes right, and doing it by false statements, which, as i think, is always wrong. there is a special and inviolable sacredness, which every lover of the truth should attach to his spoken word. . we must not allow the leniency with which, according to the views here presented, we are to regard the violations of truth by young persons, while their mental faculties and their powers of discrimination are yet imperfectly developed, to lead us to lower the standard of right in their minds, so as to allow them to imbibe the idea that we think that falsehood is, after all, no great sin, and still less, to suppose that we consider it sometimes, in extreme cases, allowable. we may, indeed, say, "the truth is not to be spoken at all times," but to make the aphorism complete we must add, that _falsehood_ is to be spoken _never_. there is no other possible ground for absolute confidence in the word of any man except the conviction that his principle is, that it is _never, under any circumstances, or to accomplish any purpose whatever,_ right for him to falsify it. a different opinion, i am aware, prevails very extensively among mankind, and especially among the continental nations of europe, where it seems to be very generally believed that in those cases in which falsehood will on the whole be conducive of greater good than the truth it is allowable to employ it. but it is easy to see that, so far as we know that those around us hold to this philosophy, all reasonable ground for confidence in their statements is taken away; for we never can know, in respect to any statement which they make, that the case is not one of those in which, for reasons not manifest to us, they think it is expedient--that is, conducive in some way to good--to state what is not true. while, therefore, we must allow children a reasonable time to bring their minds to a full sense of the obligation of making their words always conform to what is true, instead of shaping them so as best to attain their purposes for the time being--which is the course to which their earliest natural instincts prompt them--and must deal gently and leniently with their incipient failures, we must do all in our power to bring them forward as fast as possible to the adoption of the very highest standard as their rule of duty in this respect; inculcating it upon them, by example as well as by precept, that we can not innocently, under any circumstances, to escape any evil, or to gain any end, falsify our word. for there is no evil so great, and no end to be attained so valuable, as to justify the adoption of a principle which destroys all foundation for confidence between man and man. chapter xvii. judgment and reasoning. it is a very unreasonable thing for parents to expect young children to be reasonable. being reasonable in one's conduct or wishes implies the taking into account of those bearings and relations of an act which are more remote and less obvious, in contradistinction from being governed exclusively by those which are immediate and near. now, it is not reasonable to expect children to be influenced by these remote considerations, simply because in them the faculties by which they are brought forward into the mind and invested with the attributes of reality are not yet developed. these faculties are all in a nascent or formative state, and it is as idle to expect them, while thus immature, to fulfill their functions for any practical purpose, as it would be to expect a baby to expend the strength of its little arms in performing any useful labor. _progress of mental development_. the mother sometimes, when she looks upon her infant lying in her arms, and observes the intentness with which he seems to gaze upon objects in the room--upon the bright light of the window or of the lamp, or upon the pictures on the wall--wonders what he is thinking of. the truth probably is that he is not thinking at all; he is simply _seeing_--that is to say, the light from external objects is entering his eyes and producing images upon his sensorium, and that is all. he _sees_ only. there might have been a similar image of the light in his mind the day before, but the reproduction of the former image which constitutes memory does not probably take place at all in his case if he is very young, so that there is not present to his mind, in connection with the present image, any reproduction of the former one. still less does he make any mental comparison between the two. the mother, as she sees the light of to-day, may remember the one of yesterday, and mentally compare the two; may have many _thoughts_ awakened in her mind by the sensation and the recollection--such as, this is from a new kind of oil, and gives a brighter light than the other; that she will use this kind of oil in all her lamps, and will recommend it to her friends, and so on indefinitely. but the child has none of these thoughts and can have none; for neither have the faculties been developed within him by which they are conceived, nor has he had the experience of the previous sensations to form the materials for framing them. he is conscious of the present sensations, and that is all. as he advances, however, in his experience of sensations, and as his mental powers gradually begin to be unfolded, what may be called _thoughts_ arise, consisting at first, probably, of recollections of past sensations entering into his consciousness in connection with the present ones. these combinations, and the mental acts of various kinds which are excited by them, multiply as he advances towards maturity; but the images produced by present realities are infinitely more vivid and have a very much greater power over him than those which memory brings up from the past, or that his fancy can anticipate in the future. this state of things, though there is, of course, a gradual advancement in the relative influence of what the mind can conceive, as compared with that which the senses make real, continues substantially the same through all the period of childhood and youth. in other words, the organs of sense and of those mental faculties which are directly occupied with the sensations, are the earliest to be developed, as we might naturally suppose would be the case; and, by consequence, the sensible properties of objects and the direct and immediate effects of any action, are those which have a controlling influence over the volitions of the mind during all the earlier periods of its development. the _reason_, on the other hand, which, as applied to the practical affairs of life, has for its function the bringing in of the more remote bearings and relations of a fact, or the indirect and less obvious results of an action, is very slowly developed. it is precisely on this account that the period of immaturity in the human species is so long protracted in comparison with that of the inferior animals. the lives of these animals are regulated by the cognizance simply of the sensible properties of objects, and by the immediate results of their acts, and they accordingly become mature as soon as their senses and their bodily organs are brought completely into action. but man, who is to be governed by his reason--that is, by much more far-reaching and comprehensive views of what concerns him--requires a much longer period to fit him for independent action, since he must wait for the development of those higher faculties which are necessary for the attainment of these extended views; and during this period he must depend upon the reason of his parents instead of being governed by his own. _practical effect of these truths_. the true course, then, for parents to pursue is not to expect too much from the ability of their children to see what is right and proper for them, but to decide all important questions themselves, using their own experience and their own power of foresight as their guide. they are, indeed, to cultivate and train the reasoning and reflective powers of their children, but are not to expect them in early life to be sufficiently developed and strengthened to bear any heavy strain, or to justify the placing of any serious reliance upon them. they must, in a word, treat the reason and the judgment of their children as the farmer treats the strength of his colt, which he exercises and, to a certain extent, employs, but never puts upon it any serious burden. it results from this view of the case that it is not wise for a parent to resort to arguing or reasoning with a child, as a substitute for authority, or even as an aid to make up for a deficiency of authority, in regard to what it is necessary that the child should do. no doubt it is a good plan sometimes to let the child decide for himself, but when you pretend to allow him to decide let him do it really. when you go out with him to take a walk, if it is so nearly immaterial which way you go that you are willing that he should determine the question, then lay the case before him, giving him the advantages and disadvantages of the different ways, and let him decide; and then act according to his decision. but if you have determined in your own mind which way to go, simply announce your determination; and if you give reasons at all, do not give them in such a way as to convey the idea to his mind that his obligation to submit is to rest partly on his seeing the force of them. for every parent will find that this principle is a sound one and one of fundamental importance in the successful management of children--namely, that it is much easier for a child to do what he does not like to do as an act of simple submission to superior authority, than for him to bring himself to an accordance with the decision by hearing and considering the reasons. in other words, it is much easier for him to obey your decision than to bring himself to the same decision against his own will. _in serious cases no reliance to be placed on the reason of the child_. in all those cases, therefore, in which the parent can not safely allow the children really to decide, such as the question of going to school, going to church, taking medicine, remaining indoors on account of indisposition or of the weather, making visits, choice of playmates and companions, and a great many others which it would not be safe actually to allow them to decide, it is true kindness to them to spare their minds the painful perplexity of a conflict. decide for them. do not say, "oh, i would not do this or that"--whatever it may be--"because"--and then go on to assign reasons thought of perhaps at the moment to meet the emergency, and indeed generally false; but, "yes, i don't wonder that you would like to do it. i should like it if i were you. but it can not be done." when there is medicine to be taken, do not put the child in misery for half an hour while you resort to all sorts of arguments, and perhaps artifices, to bring him to a willingness to take it; but simply present it to him, saying, "it is something very disagreeable, i know, but it must be taken;" and if it is refused, allow of no delay, but at once, though without any appearance of displeasure, and in the gentlest-manner possible, force it down. then, after the excitement of the affair has passed away, and you have your little patient in your lap, and he is in good-humor--this is all, of course, on the supposition that he is not very sick--say to him, "you would not take your medicine a little while ago, and we had to force it down: i hope it did not hurt you much." the child will probably make some fretful answer. [illustration: story of the horse.] "it is not surprising that you did not like to take it. all children, while they are too young to be reasonable, and all animals, such as horses and cows, when they are sick, are very unwilling to take their medicine, and we often have to force it down. you will, perhaps, refuse to take yours a good many times yet before you are old enough to see that it is a great deal easier to take it willingly than it is to have it forced down." and then go on and tell him some amusing story of the difficulty some people had in forcing medicine down the throat of a sick horse, who did not know enough to take it like a man. the idea is--for this case is only meant as an illustration of a general principle--that the comfort and enjoyment of children, as well as the easy and successful working of parental government, is greatly promoted by deciding for the children at once, and placing their action on the simple ground of obedience to authority in all those cases where the _decision can not really and honestly be_ left to the children themselves. to listen reluctantly to the persistent arguments of children in favor of their being allowed to do what we are sure that we shall decide in the end that it is not best for them to do, and to meet them with counter arguments which, if they are not actually false, as they are very apt to be in such a case, are utterly powerless, from the incapacity of the children to appreciate them, on account of their being blinded by their wishes, is not to strengthen the reasoning powers, but to confuse and bewilder them, and impede their development. _mode of dealing with the reason of a child_. the effect, however, will be excellent of calling into exercise the reason and the judgment of the child in cases where the conclusion which he arrives at can be safely allowed to determine his action. you can help him in such cases by giving him any information that he desires, but do not embarrass him, and interfere with his exercising his own judgment by obtruding advice. allow him in this way to lay out his own garden, to plan the course of a walk or a ride, and to decide upon the expenditure of his own pocket-money, within certain restrictions in respect to such things as would be dangerous or hurtful to himself, or annoying to others. as he grows older you can give him the charge of the minor arrangements on a journey, such as taking care of a certain number of the parcels carried in the hand, choosing a seat in the car, selecting and engaging a hand on arriving at the place of destination. commit such things to his charge only so fast as you can really intrust him with power to act, and then, with slight and not obtrusive supervision on your part, leave the responsibility with him, noticing encouragingly whatever of fidelity and success you observe, and taking little notice--generally in fact, none at all--of such errors and failures as result simply from inexperience and immaturity. in a word, make no attempt to seek support from his judgment, or by convincing his reason, in important cases, where his feelings or wishes are involved, but in all such cases rest your decisions solely upon your own authority. but then, on the other hand, in unimportant cases, where no serious evil can result whichever of the various possible courses are taken, call his judgment into exercise, and abide by its decisions. give him the responsibility if he likes to take it, but with the responsibility give him the power. substantially the same principles as explained above, in their application to the exercise of the judgment, apply to the cultivation of the reasoning powers--that is to say, in the act of arguing, or drawing conclusions from premises. nothing can be more unprofitable and useless, to say nothing of its irritating and vexatious effect, than maintaining an argument with a child--or with any body else, in fact--to convince him against his will. arguing very soon degenerates, in such a case, into an irritating and utterly useless dispute. the difference of opinion which gives occasion for such discussions arises generally from the fact that the child sees only certain of the more obvious and immediate relations and bearings of the subject in question, which is, in fact, all that can be reasonably expected of him, and forms his opinion from these alone. the parent, on the other hand, takes a wider view, and includes among the premises on which his conclusion is founded considerations which have never been brought to the attention of the child. the proper course, therefore, for him to pursue in order to bring the child's mind into harmony with his own, is not to ridicule the boy's reasoning, or chide him for taking so short-sighted a view of the subject, or to tell him it is very foolish for him to talk as he does, or silence him by a dogmatic decision, delivered in a dictatorial and overbearing manner, all of which is too often found to characterize the discussions between parents and children, but calmly and quietly to present to him the considerations bearing upon the question which he has not yet seen. to this end, and to bring the mind of the child into that listening and willing state without which all arguments and even all attempts at instruction are wasted, we must listen candidly to what he says himself, put the best construction upon it, give it its full force; see it, in a word, as nearly as possible as _he_ sees it, and let him know that we do so. then he will be much more ready to receive any additional considerations which we may present to his mind, as things that must also be taken into account in forming a final judgment on the question. a boy, for example, who is full of health and increasing vigor, and in whom, of course, those organs on which the consciousness of strength and the impulses of courage depend are in the course of rapid and healthy development, in reading to his mother a story in which a thief that came into a back store-room of a house in the evening, with a bag, to steal meal, was detected by the owner and frightened away, looks up from his book and says, in a very valiant manner, "if i had been there, and had a gun, i would have shot him on the spot." _the rough mode of treatment_. now, if the mother wishes to confuse and bewilder, and to crush down, so to speak, the reasoning faculties of her child, she may say, "nonsense, george! it is of no use for you to talk big in that way. you would not dare to fire a gun in such a case, still less, to shoot a man. the first thing you would do would be to run away and hide. and then, besides, it would be very wicked for you to kill a man in that way. you would be very likely to get yourself hung for murder. besides, the bible says that we must not resist evil; so you should not talk so coolly about shooting a man." the poor boy would be overpowered by such a rebuke as this, and perhaps silenced. the incipient and half-formed ideas in his mind in respect to the right of self-defense, the virtue of courage, the sanctity of life, the nature and the limits of the doctrine of non-resistance, would be all thrown together into a jumble of hopeless confusion in his mind, and the only result would be his muttering to himself, after a moment of bewilderment and vexation, "i _would_ shoot him, anyhow." such treatment would not only fail to convince him that his idea was wrong, but would effectually close his heart against any such conviction. _the gentle mode of treatment_. but let the mother first see and recognize those bearings and relations of the question which the boy sees--that is, those which are the most direct and immediate--and allow them their full force, and she establishes a sympathy between his mind and hers, and prepares the way for his being led by her to taking into the account other considerations which, though of greater importance, are not so obvious, and which it would be wholly unreasonable to expect that the boy would see himself, since they do not come within the range of observation that could be reached spontaneously by the unaided faculties of such a child. suppose the mother says, in reply to her boy's boastful declaration that he would shoot the robber, "there would be a certain degree of justice in that, no doubt." "yes," rejoins the boy, "it would be no more than he deserved." "when a man engages in the commission of a crime," adds the mother, "he runs the risk of all the perils that he exposes himself to, from the efforts of people to defend their property, and perhaps their lives; so that, perhaps, _he_ would have no right to complain if people did shoot at him." "not a bit of right," says the boy. "but then there are some other things to be considered," says the mother, "which, though they do not show that it would be unjust towards him, might make it bad for _us_ to shoot him." "what things?" asks the boy. the mother having candidly admitted whatever there was of truth in the boy's view of the subject, and thus placed herself, as it were, side by side with him, he is prepared to see and admit what she is going to point out to his observation--not as something directly antagonistic to what he has said, but as something additional, something which is _also_ to be taken into the account. "in the first place," continues the mother, "there would be the body to be disposed of, if you were to shoot him. how should we manage about that?" it would make a great difference in such a case in respect to the danger of putting the boy's mind into a state of antagonism against his mother's presentation of the case, whether she says, "how shall _we_ manage about that?" or, "how will _you_ manage about that?" "oh," replies the boy, "we would send to where he lives, and let his people come and take him away; or, if he was in a city, we would call in the police." "that would be a good plan," says his mother. "we would call in the police, if there were any police at hand. but then there would be the blood all over the carpet and the floor." "there would not be any carpet on the floor in a store-room," says the boy. "true," replies the mother; "you are right there; so that there would not be, after all, any great trouble about the blood. but the man might not be killed outright, and it might be some time before the policemen would come, and we should see him all that time writhing and struggling in dreadful convulsions, which would fix horrid impressions upon our minds, that would haunt us for a long time afterwards." the mother could then go on to explain that, if the man had a wife and children, any one who had killed the husband and father would pity them as long as he lived, and could never see them or hear them spoken of without feeling pain, and even some degree of self-reproach; although, so far as the man himself was concerned, it might be that no injustice had been done. after the excitement was over, too, he would begin to make excuses for the man, thinking that perhaps he was poor, and his children were suffering for bread, and it was on their account that he was tempted to steal, and this, though it would not justify, might in some degree palliate the act for which he was slain; or that he had been badly brought up, having never received any proper instruction, but had been trained and taught from his boyhood to pilfer and steal. these and many analogous considerations might be presented to the child, going to show that, whatever the rule of strict justice in respect to the criminal may enjoin, it is not right to take the life of a wrong-doer merely to prevent the commission of a minor offense. the law of the land recognizes this principle, and does not justify the taking of life except in extreme cases, such as those of imminent personal danger. a friendly conversation of this kind, carried on, not in a spirit of antagonism to what the boy has said, but in the form of presenting information novel to him in respect to considerations which were to be taken into the account in addition to those which he had himself perceived, will have a great effect not only in modifying his opinion in this case, but also in impressing him with the general idea that, before adopting a decisive opinion on any subject, we must take care to acquaint ourselves not merely with the most direct and obvious relations of it, but must look farther into its bearings and results, so that our conclusion may have a solid foundation by reposing upon as many as possible of the considerations which ought really to affect it. thus, by avoiding all appearance of antagonism, we secure a ready reception for the truths we offer, and cultivate the reasoning powers at the same time. _general principles_. the principles, then, which are meant to be illustrated and enforced in this chapter are these: . that the mental faculties of children on which the exercise of judgment and of the power of reasoning depend are not among those which are the earliest developed, and they do not attain, in the first years of life, to such a degree of strength or maturity as to justify placing any serious reliance upon them for the conduct of life. . parents should, accordingly, not put them to any serious test, or impose any heavy burden upon them; but should rely solely on their own authority, as the expression of their own judgment, and not upon their ability to convince the judgment of the child, in important cases, or in those where its inclinations or its feelings are concerned. . but they may greatly promote the healthy development of these faculties on the part of their children, by bringing to their view the less obvious bearings and relations of various acts and occurrences on which judgment is to be passed, in cases where their feelings and inclinations are not specially concerned--doing this either in the form of explaining their own parental principles of management, or practically, by intrusting them with responsibility, and giving them a degree of actual power commensurate with it, in cases where it is safe to do so; and, . they may enlarge the range of the children's ideas, and accustom them to take wider views of the various subjects which occupy their attention, by discussing with them the principles involved in the several cases; but such discussions must be conducted in a calm, gentle, and considerate manner, the parent looking always upon what the child says in the most favorable light, putting the best construction upon it, and admitting its force, and then presenting such additional views as ought also to be taken into account, with moderate earnestness, and in an unobtrusive manner, thus taking short and easy steps himself in order to accommodate his own rate of progress to the still imperfectly developed capabilities of the child. in a word, it is with the unfolding of the mental faculties of the young as it is with the development of their muscles and the improvement of their bodily powers; and just as the way to teach a child to walk is not to drag him along hurriedly and forcibly by the arm faster than he can himself form the necessary steps, but to go slowly, accommodating your movements to those which are natural to him, and encouraging him by letting him perceive that his own efforts produce appreciable and useful results--so, in cultivating any of their thinking and reasoning powers, we must not put at the outset too heavy a burden upon them, but must call them gently into action, within the limits prescribed by the degree of maturity to which they have attained, standing a little aside, as it were, in doing so, and encouraging them to do the work themselves, instead of taking it out of their hands and doing it for them. chapter xviii. wishes and requests. in respect to the course to be pursued in relation to the requests and wishes of children, the following general rules result from the principles inculcated in the chapter on judgment and reasoning, or, at least, are in perfect accordance with them--namely: _absolute authority in cases of vital importance_. . in respect to all those questions in the decision of which their permanent and essential welfare are involved, such as those relating to their health, the company they keep, the formation of their characters, the progress of their education, and the like, the parent should establish and maintain in the minds of the children from their earliest years, a distinct understanding that the decision of all such questions is reserved for his own or her own exclusive jurisdiction. while on any of the details connected with these questions the feelings and wishes of the child ought to be ascertained, and, so far as possible, taken into the account, the course to be pursued should not, in general, be discussed with the child, nor should their objections be replied to in any form. the parent should simply take such objections as the judge takes the papers in a case which has been tried before him, and reserve his decision. the principles by which the parent is governed in the course which he pursues, and the reasons for them, may be made the subject of very free conversation, and may be fully explained, provided that care is taken that this is never done when any practical question is pending, such as would give the explanations of the parent the aspect of persuasions, employed to supply the deficiency of authority too weak to enforce obedience to a command. it is an excellent thing to have children see and appreciate the reasonableness of their parents' commands, provided that this reasonableness is shown to them in such a way that they are not led to imagine that their being able to see it is in any sense a condition precedent of obedience. _great indulgence in cases not of vital importance_. . the authority of the parent being thus fully established in regard to all those things which, being of paramount importance in respect to the child's present and future welfare, ought to be regulated by the comparative far-seeing wisdom of the parent, with little regard to the evanescent fancies of the child, it is on every account best, in respect to all other things, to allow to the children the largest possible indulgence. the largest indulgence for them in their occupations, their plays, and even in their caprices and the freaks of their fancy, means _freedom of action_ for their unfolding powers of body and mind; and freedom of action for these powers means the most rapid and healthy development of them. the rule is, in a word, that, after all that is essential for their health, the formation of their characters, and their progress in study is secured, by being brought under the dominion of absolute parental authority, in respect to what remains the children are to be indulged and allowed to have their own way as much as possible. when, in their plays, they come to you for permission to do a particular thing, do not consider whether or not it seems to you that you would like to do it yourself, but only whether there is any _real and substantial objection to their doing it_. _the hearing to come before the decision, not after it_. the courts of justice adopt what seems to be a very sensible and a very excellent mode of proceeding, though it is exactly the contrary to the one which many parents pursue, and that is, they hear the case _first_, and decide afterwards. a great many parents seem to prefer to decide first, and then hear--that is to say, when the children come to them with any request or proposal, they answer at once with a refusal more or less decided, and then allow themselves to be led into a long discussion on the subject, if discussion that may be called which consists chiefly of simple persistence and importunity on one side, and a gradually relaxing resistance on the other, until a reluctant consent is finally obtained. now, just as it is an excellent way to develop and strengthen the muscles of a child's arms, for his father to hold the two ends of his cane in his hands while the child grasps it by the middle, and then for them to pull against each other, about the yard, until, finally, the child is allowed to get the cane away; so the way to cherish and confirm the habit of "teasing" in children is to maintain a discussion with them for a time in respect to some request which is at first denied, and then finally, after a protracted and gradually weakening resistance, to allow them to gain the victory and carry their point. on the other hand, an absolutely certain way of preventing any such habit from being formed, and of effectually breaking it up when it is formed, is the simple process of hearing first, and deciding afterwards. when, therefore, children come with any request, or express any wish, in cases where no serious interests are involved, in deciding upon the answer to be given, the mother should, in general, simply ask herself, not is it wise? will they succeed in it? will they enjoy it? would i like to do it if i were they?--but simply, is there any harm or danger in it? if not, readily and cordially consent. but do not announce your decision till _after_ you have heard all that they have to say, if you intend to hear what they have to say at all. if there are any objections to what the children propose which affect the question in relation to it as a means of _amusement for them_, you may state them in the way of information for them, _after_ you have given your consent. in that way you present the difficulties as subjects for their consideration, and not as objections on your part to their plan. but, however serious the difficulties may be in the way of the children's accomplishing the object which they have in view, they constitute no objection to their making the attempt, provided that their plans involve no serious harm or damage to themselves, or to any other person or interest. _the wrong way_. two boys, for example, william and james, who have been playing in the yard with their little sister lucy, come in to their mother with a plan for a fish-pond. they wish for permission to dig a hole in a corner of the yard and fill it with water, and then to get some fish out of the brook to put into it. the mother, on hearing the proposal, says at once, without waiting for any explanations, "oh no, i would not do that. it is a very foolish plan. you will only get yourselves all muddy. besides, you can't catch any fishes to put into it, and if you do, they won't live. and then the grass is so thick that you could not get it up to make your hole." but william says that they can dig the grass up with their little spades. they had tried it, and found that they could do so. and james says that they have already tried catching the fishes, and found that they could do it by means of a long-handled dipper; and lucy says that they will all be very careful not to get themselves wet and muddy. "but you'll get your feet wet standing on the edge of the brook," says the mother. "you can't help it." "no, mother," replies james, "there is a large flat stone that we can stand upon, and so keep our feet perfectly dry. see!" so saying, he shows his own feet, which are quite dry. thus the discussion goes on; the objections made--being, as usual in such cases, half of them imaginary ones, brought forward only for effect--are one after another disposed of, or at least set aside, until at length the mother, as if beaten off her ground after a contest, gives a reluctant and hesitating consent, and the children go away to commence their work only half pleased, and separated in heart and affection, for the time being, from their mother by not finding in her, as they think, any sympathy with them, or disposition to aid them in their pleasures. they have, however, by their mother's management of the case, received an excellent lesson in arguing and teasing. they have found by it, what they have undoubtedly often found on similar occasions before, that their mother's first decision is not at all to be taken as a final one; that they have only to persevere in replying to her objections and answering her arguments, and especially in persisting in their importunity, and they will be pretty sure to gain their end at last. this mode of management, also, has the effect of fixing the position of their mother in their minds as one of antagonism to them in respect to their childish pleasures. _the right way_. if in such a case as this the mother wishes to avoid these evils, the way is plain. she must first consider the proposal herself, and come to her own decision in regard to it. before coming to a decision, she may, if she has leisure and opportunity, make additional inquiries in respect to the details of the plan; or, if she is otherwise occupied, she may consider them for a moment in her own mind. if the objections are decisive, she should not state them at the time, unless she specially wishes them not to have a fair hearing; for when children have a plan in mind which they are eager to carry out, their very eagerness entirely incapacitates them for properly appreciating any objections which may be offered to it. it is on every account better, therefore--as a general rule--not to offer any such objections at the time, but simply to give your decision. on the other hand, if there is no serious evil to be apprehended in allowing children to attempt to carry any particular plan they form into effect, the foolishness of it, in a practical point of view, or even the impossibility of success in accomplishing the object proposed, constitute no valid objection to it; for children amuse themselves as much, and sometimes learn as much, and promote as effectually the development of their powers and faculties, by their failures as by their successes. in the case supposed, then, the mother, in order to manage it right, would first consider for a moment whether there was any decisive objection to the plan. this would depend, perhaps, upon the manner in which the children were dressed at the time, or upon the amount of injury that would be done to the yard; and this question would in its turn depend, in many cases, on the comparative value set by the mother upon the beauty of her yard, and the health, development, and happiness of her children. but supposing that she sees--which she can do in most instances at a glance--that there can no serious harm be done by the experiment, but only that it is a foolish plan so far as the attainment of the object is concerned, and utterly hopeless of success, which, considering that the real end to be attained is the healthy development of the children's powers by the agreeable exercise of them in useless as well as in useful labors, is no objection at all, then she should answer at once, "yes, you can do that if you like; and perhaps i can help you about planning the work." after saying this, any pointing out of obstacles and difficulties on her part does not present itself to their minds in the light of opposition to their plan, but of aid in helping it forward, and so places her, in their view, _on their side_, instead of in antagonism to them. "what do you propose to do with the earth that you take out of the hole?" she asks. the children had, perhaps, not thought of that. "how would it do," continues the mother, "to put it in your wheelbarrow and let it stay there, so that in case your plan should not succeed--and men, in any thing that they undertake, always consider it wise to take into account the possibility that they may not succeed--you can easily bring it all back and fill up the hole again." the children think that would be a very good plan. "and how are you going to fill your hole with water when you get it dug out?" asks the mother. they were going to carry the water from the pump in a pail. "and how are you going to prevent spilling the water over upon your trousers and into your shoes while carrying it?" "oh, we will be very careful," replied william. "how would it do only to fill the pail half full each time," suggests the mother. "you would have to go more times, it is true, but that would be better than getting splashed with water." the boys think that that would be a very good plan. in this manner the various difficulties to be anticipated may be brought to the notice of the children, while, they and their mother being in harmony and sympathy with each other--and not in opposition--in the consideration of them, she can bring them forward without any difficulty, and make them the means of teaching the children many useful lessons of prudence and precaution. _capriciousness in play_. the mother, then, after warning the children that they must expect to encounter many unexpected difficulties in their undertaking, and telling them that they must not be too much disappointed if they should find that they could not succeed, dismisses them to their work. they proceed to dig the hole, putting the materials in the wheelbarrow, and then fill up the hole with water brought in half pailfuls at a time from the pump; but are somewhat disappointed to find that the water soaks away pretty rapidly into the ground, and that, moreover, it is so turbid, and the surface is so covered with little leaves, sticks, and dust, as to make it appear very doubtful whether they would be able to see the fishes if they were to succeed in catching any to put in. however, they take their long-handled dipper and proceed towards the brook. on the way they stop to gather some flowers that grow near the path that leads through the field, when the idea suddenly enters lucy's head that it would be better to make a garden than a fish-pond; flowers, as she says, being so much prettier than fishes. so they all go back to their mother and explain the change of their plan. they ask for leave to dig up a place which they had found where the ground was loose and sandy, and easy to dig, and to set out flowers in it which they had found in the field already in bloom. "we are going to give up the fish-pond," they say in conclusion, "because flowers are so much prettier than fishes." the mother, instead of finding fault with them for being so capricious and changeable in their plans, says, "i think you are right. fishes look pretty enough when they are swimming in the brook, but flowers are much prettier to transport and take care of. but first go and fill up the hole you made for the pond with the earth that is in the wheelbarrow; and when you have made your garden and moved the flowers into it, i advise you to get the watering-pot and give them a good watering." it may be said that children ought to be brought up in habits of steadiness and perseverance in what they undertake, and that this kind of indulgence in their capriciousness would have a very bad tendency in this respect. the answer is, that there are times and seasons for all the different kinds of lessons which children have to learn, and that when in their hours of recreation they are amusing themselves in play, lessons in perseverance and system are out of place. the object to be sought for _then_ is the exercise and growth of their bodily organs and members, the development of their fancy and imagination, and their powers of observation of nature. the work of training them to habits of system and of steady perseverance in serious pursuits, which, though it is a work that ought by no means to be neglected, is not the appropriate work of such a time. _summary of results_. the general rules for the government of the parent in his treatment of his children's requests and wishes are these: in all matters of essential importance he is to decide himself and simply announce his decision, without giving any reasons _for the purpose of justifying it_, or for _inducing submission to it_. and in all matters not of essential importance he is to allow the children the greatest possible freedom of action. and the rule for children is that they are always to obey the command the first time it is given, without question, and to take the first answer to any request without any objection or demurring whatever. it is very easy to see how smoothly and happily the affairs of domestic government would go on if these rules were established and obeyed. all that is required on the part of parents for their complete establishment is, first, a clear comprehension of them, and then a calm, quiet, and gentle, but still inflexible firmness in maintaining them. unfortunately, however, such qualities as these, simple as they seem, are the most rare. if, instead of gentle but firm consistency and steadiness of action, ardent, impulsive, and capricious energy and violence were required, it would be comparatively easy to find them. how seldom do we see a mother's management of her children regulated by a calm, quiet, gentle, and considerate decision that thinks before it speaks in all important matters, and when it speaks, is firm; and yet, which readily and gladly accords to the children every liberty and indulgence which can do themselves or others no harm. and on the other hand, how often do we see foolish laxity and indulgence in yielding to importunity in cases of vital importance, alternating with vexatious thwartings, rebuffs, and refusals in respect to desires and wishes the gratification of which could do no injury at all. chapter xix. children's questions. the disposition to ask questions, which is so universal and so strong a characteristic of childhood, is the open door which presents to the mother the readiest and most easy access possible to the mind and heart of her child. the opportunities and facilities thus afforded to her would be the source of the greatest pleasure to herself, and of the greatest benefit to her child, if she understood better how to avail herself of them. i propose, in this chapter, to give some explanations and general directions for the guidance of mothers, of older brothers and sisters, and of teachers--of all persons, in fact, who may, from time to time, have young children under their care or in their society. i have no doubt that some of my rules will strike parents, at first view, as paradoxical and, perhaps, almost absurd; but i hope that on more mature reflection they will be found to be reasonable and just. _the curiosity of children not a fault_. . the curiosity of children is not a fault, and therefore we must never censure them for asking questions, or lead them to think that we consider the disposition to do so a fault on their part; but, on the other hand, this disposition is to be encouraged as much as possible. we must remember that a child, when his powers of observation begin to be developed, finds every thing around him full of mystery and wonder. why some things are hard and some are soft--why some things will roll and some will not--why he is not hurt when he falls on the sofa, and is hurt when he falls on the floor--why a chair will tumble over when he climbs up by the rounds of it, while yet the steps of the stairs remain firm and can be ascended without danger--why one thing is black, and another red, and another green--why water will all go away of itself from his hands or his dress, while mud will not--why he can dig in the ground, but can not dig in a floor--all is a mystery, and the little adventurer is in a continual state of curiosity and wonder, not only to learn the meaning of all these things, but also of desire to extend his observations, and find out more and more of the astonishing phenomena that are exhibited around him. the good feeling of the mother, or of any intelligent friend who is willing to aid him in his efforts, is, of course, invaluable to him as a means of promoting his advancement in knowledge and of developing his powers. remember, therefore, that the disposition of a child to ask questions is not a fault, but only an indication of his increasing mental activity, and of his desire to avail himself of the only means within his reach of advancing his knowledge and of enlarging the scope of his intelligence in respect to the strange and wonderful phenomena constantly observable around him. _sometimes, perhaps, a source of inconvenience_. of course there will be times when it is inconvenient for the parent to attend to the questions of the child, and when he must, consequently, be debarred of the pleasure and privilege of asking them; but even at such times as these the disposition to ask them must not be attributed to him as a fault. never tell him that he is "a little tease"--that "you are tired to death of answering his questions"--that he is "a chatter-box that would weary the patience of job;" or that, if he will "sit still for half an hour, without speaking a word, you will give him a reward." if you are going to be engaged, and so can not attend to him, say to him that you _wish_ you could talk with him, and answer the questions, but that you are going to be busy and can not do it; and then, after providing him with some other means of occupation, require him to be silent: though even then you ought to relieve the tedium of silence for him by stopping every ten or fifteen minutes from your reading, or your letter-writing, or the planning of your work, or whatever your employment may be, and giving your attention to him for a minute or two, and affording him an opportunity to relieve the pressure on his mind by a little conversation. _answers to be short and simple_. . give generally to children's questions the shortest and simplest answers possible. one reason why parents find the questions of children so fatiguing to them, is that _they attempt too much_ in their answers. if they would give the right kind of answers, they would find the work of replying very easy, and in most of their avocations it would occasion them very little interruption. these short and simple answers are all that a child requires. a full and detailed explanation of any thing they ask about is as tiresome for them to listen to as it is for the mother to frame and give; while a short and simple reply which advances them one step in their knowledge of the subject is perfectly easy for the mother to give, and is, at the same time, all that they wish to receive. for example, let us suppose that the father and mother are taking a ride on a summer afternoon after a shower, with little johnny sitting upon the seat between them in the chaise. the parents are engaged in conversation with each other, we will suppose, and would not like to be interrupted. johnny presently spies a rainbow on a cloud in the east, and, after uttering an exclamation of delight, asks his mother what made the rainbow. she hears the question, and her mind, glancing for a moment at the difficulty of giving an intelligible explanation of so grand a phenomenon to such a child, experiences an obscure sensation of perplexity and annoyance, but not quite enough to take off her attention from her conversation; so she goes on and takes no notice of johnny's inquiry. johnny, accordingly, soon repeats it, "mother! mother! what makes the rainbow?" at length her attention is forced to the subject, and she either tells johnny that she can't explain it to him--that he is not old enough to understand it; or, perhaps, scolds him for interrupting her with so many teasing questions. in another such case, the mother, on hearing the question, pauses long enough to look kindly and with a smile of encouragement upon her face towards johnny, and to say simply, "the sun," and then goes on with her conversation. johnny says "oh!" in a tone of satisfaction. it is a new and grand idea to him that the sun makes the rainbow, and it is enough to fill his mind with contemplation for several minutes, during which his parents go on without interruption in their talk. presently johnny asks again, "mother, _how_ does the sun make the rainbow?" his mother answers in the same way as before, "by shining on the cloud:" and, leaving that additional idea for johnny to reflect upon and receive fully into his mind, turns again to her husband and resumes her conversation with him after a scarcely perceptible interruption. johnny, after having reflected in silence some minutes, during which he has looked at the sun and at the rainbow, and observed that the cloud on which the arch is formed is exactly opposite to the sun, and fully exposed to his beams, is prepared for another step, and asks, "mother, how does the sun make a rainbow by shining on the cloud?" his mother replies that it shines on millions of little drops of rain in the cloud, and makes them of all colors, like drops of dew on the ground, and all the colors together make the rainbow. here are images presented to johnny's mind enough to occupy his thoughts for a considerable interval, when perhaps he will have another question still, to be answered by an equally short and simple reply; though, probably, by this time his curiosity will have become satisfied in respect to his subject of inquiry, and his attention will have been arrested by some other object. to answer the child's questions in this way is so easy, and the pauses which the answers lead to on the part of the questioner are usually so long, that very little serious interruption is occasioned by them to any of the ordinary pursuits in which a mother is engaged; and the little interruption which is caused is greatly overbalanced by the pleasure which the mother will experience in witnessing the gratification and improvement of the child, if she really loves him, and is seriously interested in the development of his thinking and reasoning powers. _answers should attempt to communicate but little instruction_. . the answers which are given to children should not only be short and simple in form, but each one should be studiously designed to communicate as small an amount of information as possible. [illustration: "mother, what makes it snow?"] this may seem, at first view, a strange idea, but the import of it simply is that, in giving the child his intellectual nourishment, you must act as you do in respect to his bodily food--that is, divide what he is to receive into small portions, and administer a little at a time. if you give him too much at once in either case, you are in danger of choking him. for example, johnny asks some morning in the early winter, when the first snow is falling, and he has been watching it for some time from the window in wonder and delight, "mother, what makes it snow?" now, if the mother imagines that she must give any thing like a full answer to the question, her attention must be distracted from her work to enable her to frame it; and if she does not give up the attempt altogether, and rebuke the boy for teasing her with "so many silly questions," she perhaps suspends her work, and, after a moment's perplexing thought, she says the vapor of the water from the rivers and seas and damp ground rises into the air, and there at last congeals into flakes of snow, and these fall through the air to the ground. the boy listens and attempts to understand the explanation, but he is bewildered and lost in the endeavor to take in at once this extended and complicated process--one which is, moreover, not only extended and complicated, but which is composed of elements all of which are entirely new to him. if the mother, however, should act on the principle of communicating as small a portion of the information required as it is possible to give in one answer, johnny's inquiry would lead, probably, to a conversation somewhat like the following, the answers on the part of the mother being so short and simple as to require no perceptible thought on her part, and so occasioning no serious interruption to her work, unless it should be something requiring special attention. "mother," asks johnny, "what makes it snow?" "it is the snow-flakes coming down out of the sky," says his mother. "watch them!" "oh!" says johnny, uttering the child's little exclamation of satisfaction. he looks at the flakes as they fall, catching one after another with his eye, and following it in its meandering descent. he will, perhaps, occupy himself several minutes in silence and profound attention, in bringing fully to his mind the idea that a snow-storm consists of a mass of descending flakes of snow falling through the air. to us, who are familiar with this fact, it seems nothing to observe this, but to him the analyzing of the phenomenon, which before he had looked upon as one grand spectacle filling the whole sky, and only making an impression on his mind by its general effect, and resolving it into its elemental parts of individual flakes fluttering down through the air, is a great step. it is a step which exercises his nascent powers of observation and reflection very deeply, and gives him full occupation for quite a little interval of time. at length, when he has familiarized himself with this idea, he asks again, perhaps, "where do the flakes come from, mother?" "out of the sky." "oh!" says johnny again, for the moment entirely satisfied. one might at first think that these words would be almost unmeaning, or, at least, that they would give the little questioner no real information. but they do give him information that is both important and novel. they advance him one step in his inquiry. out of the sky means, to him, from a great height. the words give him to understand that the flakes are not formed where they first come into his view, but that they descend from a higher region. after reflecting on this idea a moment, he asks, we will suppose, "how high in the sky, mother?" now, perhaps, a mother might think that there was no possible answer to be given to such a question as this except that "she does not know;" inasmuch as few persons have any accurate ideas of the elevation in the atmosphere at which snow-clouds usually form. but this accurate information is not what the child requires. if the mother possessed it, it would be useless for her to attempt to communicate it to him. in the sense in which he asks the question she _does_ understand it, and can give him a perfectly satisfactory answer. "how high is it in the sky, mother, to where the snow comes from?" asks the child. "oh, _very_ high--higher than the top of the house," replies the mother. "as high as the top of the chimney?" "yes, higher than that." "as high as the moon?" "no, not so high as the moon." "how high is it then, mother?" "about as high as birds can fly." "oh!" says johnny, perfectly satisfied. the answer is somewhat indefinite, it is true, but its indefiniteness is the chief element in the value of it. a definite and precise answer, even if one of that character were ready at hand, would be utterly inappropriate to the occasion. _an answer may even be good which gives no information at all_. . it is not even always necessary that an answer to a child's question should convey _any information at all_. a little conversation on the subject of the inquiry, giving the child an opportunity _to hear and to use language_ in respect to it, is often all that is required. it must be remembered that the power to express thoughts, or to represent external objects by language, is a new power to young children, and, like all other new powers, the mere exercise of it gives great pleasure. if a person in full health and vigor were suddenly to acquire the art of flying, he would take great pleasure in moving, by means of his wings, through the air from one high point to another, not because he had any object in visiting those high points, but because it would give him pleasure to find that he could do so, and to exercise his newly acquired power. so with children in their talk. they talk often, perhaps generally, for the sake of the _pleasure of talking_, not for the sake of what they have to say. so, if you will only talk with them and allow them to talk to you about any thing that interests them, they are pleased, whether you communicate to them any new information or not. this single thought, once fully understood by a mother, will save her a great deal of trouble in answering the incessant questions of her children. the only essential thing in many cases is to _say something_ in reply to the question, no matter whether what you say communicates any information or not. if a child asks, for instance, what makes the stars shine so, and his mother answers, "because they are so bright," he will be very likely to be as well satisfied as if she attempted to give a philosophical explanation of the phenomenon. so, if he asks what makes him see himself in the looking-glass, she may answer, "you see an _image_ of yourself there. they call it an image. hold up a book and see if you can see an image of that in the glass too." he is pleased and satisfied. nor are such answers useless, as might at first be supposed. they give the child practice in the use of language, and, if properly managed, they may be made the means of greatly extending his knowledge of language and, by necessary consequence, of the ideas and realities which language represents. "father," says mary, as she is walking with her father in the garden, "what makes some roses white and some red?" "it is very curious, is it not?" says her father. "yes, father, it is very curious indeed. what makes it so?" "there must be _some_ cause for it" says her father. "and the apples that grow on some trees are sweet, and on others they are sour. that is curious too." "yes, very curious indeed," says mary. "the _leaves_ of trees seem to be always green," continues her father, "though the flowers are of various colors." "yes, father," says mary. "except," adds her father, "when they turn yellow, and red, and brown, in the fall of the year." a conversation like this, without attempting any thing like an answer to the question with which it commenced, is as satisfactory to the child, and perhaps as useful in developing its powers and increasing its knowledge of language, as any attempt to explain the phenomenon would be; and the knowledge of this will make it easy for the mother to dispose of many a question which might seriously interrupt her if she conceived it necessary either to attempt a satisfactory explanation of the difficulty, or not to answer it at all. _be always ready to say "i don't know_." . the mother should be always ready and willing to say "i don't know," in answer to children's questions. parents and teachers are very often somewhat averse to this, lest, by often confessing their own ignorance, they should lower themselves in the estimation of their pupils or their children. so they feel bound to give some kind of an explanation to every difficulty, in hopes that it may satisfy the inquirer, though it does not satisfy themselves. but this is a great mistake. the sooner that pupils and children understand that the field of knowledge is utterly boundless, and that it is only a very small portion of it that their superiors in age and attainment have yet explored, the better for all concerned. the kind of superiority, in the estimation of children, which it is chiefly desirable to attain, consists in their always finding that the explanation which we give, whenever we attempt any, is _clear, fair_, and _satisfactory_, not in our being always ready to offer an explanation, whether satisfactory or not. _questions on religious subjects._ the considerations presented in this chapter relate chiefly to the questions which children ask in respect to what they observe taking place around them in external nature. there is another class of questions and difficulties which they raise--namely, those that relate to religious and moral subjects; and to these i have not intended now to refer. the inquiries which children make on these subjects arise, in a great measure, from the false and puerile conceptions which they are so apt to form in respect to spiritual things, and from which they deduce all sorts of absurdities. the false conceptions in which their difficulties originate are due partly to errors and imperfections in our modes of teaching them on these subjects, and partly to the immaturity of their powers, which incapacitates them from clearly comprehending any elements of thought that lie beyond the direct cognizance of the senses. we shall, however, have occasion to refer to this subject in another chapter. in respect, however, to all that class of questions which children ask in relation to the visible world around them, the principles here explained may render the mother some aid in her intercourse with the little learners under her charge, if she clearly understands and intelligently applies them. and she will find the practice of holding frequent conversations with them, in these ways, a source of great pleasure to her, as well as of unspeakable advantage to them. indeed, the conversation of a kind and intelligent mother is far the most valuable and important means of education for a child during many years of its early life. a boy whose mother is pleased to have him near her, who likes to hear and answer his questions, to watch the gradual development of his thinking and reasoning powers, and to enlarge and extend his knowledge of language--thus necessarily and of course expanding the range and scope of his ideas--will find that though his studies, strictly so called--that is, his learning to read, and the committing to memory lessons from books--may be deferred, yet, when he finally commences them he will go at once to the head of his classes at school, through the superior strength and ampler development which his mental powers will have attained. chapter xx. the use of money. the money question in the management and training of children has a distinct bearing on the subjects of some of the preceding chapters. it is extremely important, first, in respect to opportunities which are afforded in connection with the use of money for cultivating and developing the qualities of sound judgment and of practical wisdom; and then, in the second place, the true course to be pursued with them in respect to money forms a special point to be considered in its bearing upon the subject of the proper mode of dealing with their wishes and requests. _evil results of a very common method_. if a parent wishes to eradicate from the mind of his boy all feelings of delicacy and manly pride, to train him to the habit of obtaining what he wants by importunity or servility, and to prevent his having any means of acquiring any practical knowledge of the right use of money, any principles of economy, or any of that forethought and thrift so essential to sure prosperity in future life, the best way to accomplish these ends would seem to be to have no system in supplying him with money in his boyish days, but to give it to him only when he asks for it, and in quantities determined only by the frequency and importunity of his calls. of course under such a system the boy has no inducement to take care of his money, to form any plans of expenditure, to make any calculations, to practise self-denial to-day for the sake of a greater good to-morrow. the source of supply from which he draws money, fitful and uncertain as it may be in what it yields to him, he considers unlimited; and as the amount which he can draw from it does not depend at all upon his frugality, his foresight, or upon any incipient financial skill that he may exercise, but solely upon his adroitness in coaxing, or his persistence in importunity, it is the group of bad qualities, and not the good, which such management tends to foster. the effect of such a system is, in other words, not to encourage the development and growth of those qualities on which thrift and forehandedness in the management of his affairs in future life, and, in consequence, his success and prosperity, depend; but, on the contrary, to cherish the growth of all the mean and ignoble propensities of human nature by accustoming him, so far as relates to this subject, to gain his ends by the arts of a sycophant, or by rude pertinacity. not that this system always produces these results. it may be, and perhaps generally is, greatly modified by other influences acting upon the mind of the child at the same time, as well as by the natural tendencies of the boy's character, and by the character and general influence upon him of his father and mother in other respects. it can not be denied, however, that the above is the tendency of a system which makes a boy's income of spending-money a matter of mere chance, on which no calculations can be founded, except so far as he can increase it by adroit manoeuvring or by asking for it directly, with more or less of urgency or persistence, as the case may require; that is to say, by precisely those means which are the most ignoble and most generally despised by honorably-minded men as means for the attainment of any human end. now one of the most important parts of the education of both girls and boys, whether they are to inherit riches, or to enjoy a moderate income from the fruits of their own industry, or to spend their lives in extreme poverty, is to teach them the proper management and use of money. and this may be very effectually done by giving them a fixed and definite income to manage, and then throwing upon them the responsibility of the management of it, with such a degree of guidance, encouragement, and aid as a parent can easily render. _objection to the plan of a regular allowance_. there are no parents among those who will be likely to read this book of resources so limited that they will not, from time to time, allow their children _some_ amount of spending-money in a year. all that is necessary, therefore, is to appropriate to them this amount and pay it to them, or credit them with it, in a business-like and regular manner. it is true that by this system the children will soon begin to regard their monthly or weekly allowance as their due; and the parent will lose the pleasure, if it is any pleasure to him or her, of having the money which they give them regarded in each case as a present, and received with a sense of obligation. this is sometimes considered an objection to this plan. "when i furnish my children with money," says the parent, "as a gratification, i wish to have the pleasure of _giving_ it to them. whereas, on this proposed plan of paying it to them regularly at stated intervals, they will come to consider each payment as simply the payment of a debt. i wish them to consider it as a gratuity on my part, so that it may awaken gratitude and renew their love for me." there is some seeming force in this objection, though it is true that the adoption of the plan of a systematic appropriation, as here recommended, does not prevent the making of presents of money, or of any thing else, to the children, whenever either parent desires to do so. still the plan will not generally be adopted, except by parents in whose minds the laying of permanent foundations for their children's welfare and happiness through life, by training them from their earliest years to habits of forecast and thrift, and the exercise of judgment and skill in the management of money, is entirely paramount to any petty sentimental gratification to themselves, while the children are young. _two methods_. in case the parent--it may be either the father or the mother--decides to adopt the plan of appropriating systematically and regularly a certain sum to be at the disposal of the child, there are two modes by which the business may be transacted--one by paying over the money itself in the amounts and at the stated periods determined upon, and the other by opening an account with the child, and giving him credit from time to time for the amount due, charging on the other side the amounts which he draws. . _paying the money_. this is the simplest plan. if it is adopted, the money must be ready and be paid at the appointed time with the utmost exactitude and certainty. having made the arrangement with a child that he is to have a certain sum--six cents, twelve cents, twenty-five cents, or more, as the case may be--every saturday night, the mother--if it is the mother who has charge of the execution of the plan--must consider it a sacred debt, and must be _always_ ready. she can not expect that her children will learn regularity, punctuality, and system in the management of their money affairs, if she sets them the example of laxity and forgetfulness in fulfilling her engagements, and offering excuses for non-payment when the time comes, instead of having the money ready when it is due. the money, when paid, should not, in general, be carried by the children about the person, but they should be provided with a purse or other safe receptacle, which, however, should be entirely in their custody, and so exposed to all the accidents to which any carelessness in the custody would expose it. the mother must remember that the very object of the plan is to have the children learn by experience to take care of money themselves, and that she defeats that object by virtually relieving them of this care. it should, therefore, be paid to them with the greatest punctuality, especially at the first introduction of the system, and with the distinct understanding that the charge and care of keeping it devolves entirely upon them from the time of its passing into their hands. . _opening an account_. the second plan, and one that will prove much the most satisfactory in its working--though many mothers will shrink from it on the ground that it would make them a great deal of trouble--is to keep an account. for this purpose a small book should be made, with as many leaves as there are children, so that for each account there can be two pages. the book should be ruled for accounts, and the name of each child should be entered at the head of the two pages appropriated to his account. then, from time to time, the amount of his allowance that has fallen due should be entered on the credit side, and any payment made to him on the other. the plan of keeping an account in this way obviates the necessity of paying money at stated times, for the account will show at any time how much is due. there are some advantages in each of these modes. much depends on the age of the children, and still more upon the facilities which the father or mother have at hand for making entries in writing. to a man of business, accustomed to accounts, who could have a book made small enough to go into his wallet, or to a mother who is systematic in her habits, and has in her work-table or her secretary facilities for writing at any time, the plan of opening an account will be found much the best. it will afford an opportunity of giving the children a great deal of useful knowledge in respect to account-keeping--or, rather, by habituating them from an early age to the management of their affairs in this systematic manner, will train them from the beginning to habits of system and exactness. a very perceptible effect in this direction will be produced on the minds of children, even while they have not yet learned to read, and so can not understand at all the written record made of their pecuniary transactions. they will, at any rate, understand that a written record is made; they will take a certain pride and pleasure in it, and impressions will be produced which may have an effect upon their habits of accuracy and system in their pecuniary transactions through all future life. _interest on balances_. one great advantage of the plan of having an account over that of paying cash at stated times is, that it affords an opportunity for the father or mother to allow interest for any balances left from time to time in their hands, so as to initiate the children into a knowledge of the nature and the advantages of productive investments, and familiarize them with the idea that money reserved has within it a principle of increase. the interest allowed should be altogether greater than the regular rate, so as to make the advantage of it in the case of such small sums appreciable to the children--but not too great. some judgment and discretion must be exercised on this as on all other points connected with the system. the arrangements for the keeping of an account being made, and the account opened, there is, of course, no necessity, as in the case of payments made simply in cash, that the business should be transacted at stated times. at any time when convenient, the entry may be made of the amount which has become due since the time of the last entry. and when, from time to time, the child wishes for money, the parent will look at his account and see if there is a balance to his credit. if there is, the child will be entitled to receive whatever he desires up to the amount of the balance. once in a month, or at any other times when convenient, the account can be settled, and the balance, with the accrued interest, carried to a new account. all this, instead of being a trouble, will only be a source of interest and pleasure to the parent, as well as to the children themselves, and, without occupying any sensible portion of time, will be the means of gradually communicating a great deal of very useful instruction. _employment of the money_. it will have a great effect in "training up children in the way in which they should go," in respect to the employment of money, if a rule is made for them that a certain portion, one-quarter or one-half, for example, of all the money which comes into their possession, both from their regular allowance and from gratuities, is to be laid aside as a permanent investment, and an account at some savings bank be opened, or some other formal mode of placing it be adopted--the bank-book or other documentary evidence of the amount so laid up to be deposited among the child's treasures. in respect to the other portion of the money--namely, that which is to be employed by the children themselves as spending-money, the disbursement of it should be left _entirely at their discretion_, subject only to the restriction that they are not to buy any thing that will be injurious or dangerous to themselves, or a means of disturbance or annoyance to others. the mother may give them any information or any counsel in regard to the employment of their money, provided she does not do it in the form of expressing any _wish_, on her part, in regard to it. for the very object of the whole plan is to bring out into action, and thus to develop and strengthen, the judgment and discretion of the child; and just as children can not learn to walk by always being carried, so they can not learn to be good managers without having the responsibility of actual management, on a scale adapted to their years, thrown really upon them. if a boy wishes to buy a bow and arrow, it may in some cases be right not to give him permission to do it, on account of the danger accompanying the use of such a plaything. but if he wishes to buy a kite which the mother is satisfied is too large for him to manage, or if she thinks there are so many trees about the house that he can not prevent its getting entangled in them, she must not object to it on that account. she can explain these dangers to the boy, if he is inclined to listen, but not in a way to show that she herself wishes him not to buy the kite. "those are the difficulties which you may meet with," she may say, "but you may buy the kite if you think best." then when he meets with the difficulties, when he finds that he can not manage the kite, or that he loses it among the trees, she must not triumph over him, and say, "i told you how it would be. you would not take my advice, and now you see how it is." on the contrary, she must help him, and try to alleviate his disappointment, saying, "never mind. it is a loss, certainly. but you did what you thought was best at the time, and we all meet with losses sometimes, even when we have done what we thought was best. you will make a great many other mistakes, probably, hereafter in spending money, and meet with losses; and this one will give you an opportunity of learning to bear them like a man." _the most implicit faith to be kept with children in money transactions_. i will not say that a father, if he is a man of business, ought to be as jealous of his credit with his children as he is of his credit at the bank; but i think, if he takes a right view of the subject, he will be extremely sensitive in respect to both. if he is a man of high and honorable sentiments, and especially if he looks forward to future years when his children shall have arrived at maturity, or shall be approaching towards it, and sees how important and how delicate the pecuniary relations between himself and them may be at that time, he will feel the importance of beginning by establishing, at the very commencement, not only by means of precept, but by example, a habit of precise, systematic, and scrupulous exactitude in the fulfillment of every pecuniary obligation. it is not necessary that he should do any thing mean or small in his dealings with them in order to accomplish this end. he may be as liberal and as generous with them in many ways as he pleases, but he must keep his accounts with them correctly. he must always, without any demurring or any excuse, be ready to fulfill his engagements, and teach them to fulfill theirs. _possible range of transactions between parents and children_. the parent, after having initiated his children into the regular transaction of business by his mode of managing their allowance-fund, may very advantageously extend the benefits of the system by engaging with them from time to time in other affairs, to be regulated in a business-like and systematic manner. for example, if one of his boys has been reserving a portion of his spending-money as a watch-fund, and has already half enough for the purchase, the father may offer to lend him the balance and take a mortgage of the watch, to stand until the boy shall have taken it up out of future savings; and he can make out a mortgage-deed expressing in a few and simple words the fact that the watch is pledged to him as security for the sum advanced, and is not to become the absolute property of the boy till the money for which it is pledged is paid. in the course of years, a great number of transactions in this way may take place between the father or mother and their boy, each of which will not only be a source of interest and enjoyment to both parties, but will afford the best possible means of imparting, not only to the child directly interested in them, but to the other children, a practical knowledge of financial transactions, and of forming in them the habit of conducting all their affairs in a systematic and business-like manner. the number and variety of such transactions in which the modes of doing business among men may be imitated with children, greatly to their enjoyment and interest, is endless. i could cite an instance when what was called a bank was in operation for many years among a certain number of children, with excellent effect. one was appointed president, another cashier, another paying-teller. there was a ledger under the charge of the cashier, with a list of stockholders, and the number of shares held by each, which was in proportion to the respective ages of the children. the bank building was a little toy secretary, something in the form of a safe, into which there mysteriously appeared, from time to time, small sums of money; the stockholders being as ignorant of the source from which the profits of the bank were derived as most stockholders probably are in the case of larger and more serious institutions. once in six months, or at other periods, the money was counted, a dividend was declared, and the stockholders were paid in a regular and business-like manner. the effect of such methods as these is not only to make the years of childhood pass more pleasantly, but also to prepare them to enter, when the time comes, upon the serious business of life with some considerable portion of that practical wisdom in the management of money which is often, when it is deferred to a later period, acquired only by bitter experience and through much suffering. indeed, any parent who appreciates and fully enters into the views presented in this chapter will find, in ordinary cases, that his children make so much progress in business capacity that he can extend the system so as to embrace subjects of real and serious importance before the children arrive at maturity. a boy, for instance, who has been trained in this way will be found competent, by the time that he is ten or twelve years old, to take the contract for furnishing himself with caps, or boots and shoes, and, a few years later, with all his clothing, at a specified annual sum. the sum fixed upon in the case of caps, for example, should be intermediate between that which the caps of a boy of ordinary heedlessness would cost, and that which would be sufficient with special care, so that both the father and the son could make money, as it were, by the transaction. of course, to manage such a system successfully, so that it could afterwards be extended to other classes of expenses, requires tact, skill, system, patience, and steadiness on the part of the father or mother who should attempt it; but when the parent possesses these qualities, the time and attention that would be required would be as nothing compared with the trouble, the vexation, the endless dissatisfaction on both sides, that attend upon the ordinary methods of supplying children's wants--to say nothing of the incalculable benefit to the boy himself of such a training, as a part of his preparation for future life. _evil results to be feared_. nor is it merely upon the children themselves, and that after they enter upon the responsibilities of active life, that the evils resulting from their having had no practical training in youth in respect to pecuniary responsibilities and obligations, that evil consequences will fall. the great cities are full of wealthy men whose lives are rendered miserable by the recklessness in respect to money which is displayed by their sons and daughters as they advance towards maturity, and by the utter want, on their part, of all sense of delicacy, and of obligation or of responsibility of any kind towards their parents in respect to their pecuniary transactions. of course this must, in a vast number of cases, be the result when the boy is brought up from infancy with the idea that the only limit to his supply of money is his ingenuity in devising modes of putting a pressure upon his father. fifteen or twenty years spent in managing his affairs on this principle must, of course, produce the fruit naturally to be expected from such seed. _the great difficulty_. it would seem, perhaps, at first view, from what has been said in this chapter, that it would be a very simple and easy thing to train up children thus to correct ideas and habits in respect to the use of money; and it would be so--for the principles involved seem to be very plain and simple--were it not that the _qualities which it requires in the parent_ are just those which are most rare. deliberateness in forming the plan, calmness and quietness in proposing it, inflexible but mild and gentle firmness in carrying it out, perfect honesty in allowing the children to exercise the power and responsibility promised them, and an indulgent spirit in relation to the faults and errors into which they fall in the exercise of it--these and other such qualities are not very easily found. to make an arrangement with a child that he is to receive a certain sum every saturday, and then after two or three weeks to forget it, and when the boy comes to call for it, to say, petulantly, "oh, don't come to bother me about that now--i am busy; and besides, i have not got the money now;" or, when a boy has spent all his allowance on the first two or three days of the week, and comes to beg importunately for more, to say, "it was very wrong in you to spend all your money at once, and i have a great mind not to give you any more. i will, however, do it just this time, but i shall not again, you may depend;" or, to borrow money in some sudden emergency out of the fund which a child has accumulated for a special purpose, and then to forget or neglect to repay it--to manage loosely and capriciously in any such ways as these will be sure to make the attempt a total failure; that is to say, such management will be sure to be a failure in respect to teaching the boy to act on right principles in the management of money, and training him to habits of exactness and faithfulness in the fulfillment of his obligations. but in making him a thoughtless, wasteful, teasing, and selfish boy while he remains a boy, and fixing him, when he comes to manhood, in the class of those who are utterly untrustworthy, faithless in the performance of their promises, and wholly unscrupulous in respect to the means by which they obtain money, it may very probably turn out to be a splendid success. chapter xxi. corporal punishment. it might, perhaps, be thought that, in a book which professes to show how an efficient government can be established and maintained by _gentle measures_, the subject of corporal punishment could have no place. it seems important, however, that there should be here introduced a brief though distinct presentation of the light in which, in a philosophical point of view, this instrumentality is to be regarded. _the teachings of scripture_. the resort to corporal punishment in the training of children seems to be spoken of in many passages contained in the scriptures as of fundamental necessity. but there can be no doubt that the word _rod_, as used in those passages, is used simply as the emblem of parental authority. this is in accordance with the ordinary custom of hebrew writers in those days, and with the idiom of their language, by which a single visible or tangible object was employed as the representative or expression of a general idea--as, for example, the sword is used as the emblem of magisterial authority, and the sun and the rain, which are spoken of as being sent with their genial and fertilizing power upon the evil and the good, denote not specially and exclusively those agencies, but all the beneficent influences of nature which they are employed to represent. the injunctions, therefore, of solomon in respect to the use of the rod are undoubtedly to be understood as simply enjoining upon parents the necessity of bringing up their children _in complete subjection_ to their authority. no one can imagine that he could wish the rod to be used when complete subjection to the parental authority could be secured by more gentle means. and how this is to be done it is the object precisely of this book to show. in this sense, therefore--and it is undoubtedly the true sense--namely, that children must be _governed by the authority of the parent_, the passages in question express a great and most essential truth. it is sometimes said that children must be governed by reason, and this is true, but it is the reason of their parents, and not their own which must hold the control. if children were endowed with the capacity of seeing what is best for them, and with sufficient self-control to pursue what is best against the counter-influences of their animal instincts and propensities, there would be no necessity that the period of subjection to parental authority should be extended over so many years. but so long as their powers are yet too immature to be safely relied upon, they must, of necessity, be subject to the parental will; and the sooner and the more perfectly they are made to understand this, and to yield a willing submission to the necessity, the better it will be, not only for their parents, but also for themselves. the parental authority must, therefore, be established--by gentle means, if possible--but it must by all means be established, and be firmly maintained. if you can not govern your child without corporal punishment, it is better to resort to it than not to govern him at all. taking a wide view of the field, i think there may be several cases in which a resort to the infliction of physical pain as the only available means of establishing authority may be the only alternative. there are three cases of this kind that are to be specially considered. [illustration: the runaway] _possible cases in which it is the only alternative.--savages_. . in savage or half-civilized life, and even, perhaps, in so rude a state of society as must have existed in some parts of judea when the proverbs of solomon were written, it is conceivable that many parents, owing to their own ignorance, and low animal condition, would have no other means at their command for establishing their authority over their children than scoldings and blows. it must be so among savages. and it is certainly better, if the mother knows no other way of inducing her boy to keep within her sight, that she should whip him when he runs away, than that he should be bitten by serpents or devoured by bears. she _must_ establish her authority in some way, and if this is the best that she is capable of pursuing, she must use it. _teachers whose tasks surpass their skill_. . a teacher, in entering upon the charge of a large school of boys made unruly by previous mismanagement, may, perhaps, possibly find himself unable to establish submission to his authority without this resource. it is true that if it is so, it is due, in a certain sense, to want of skill on the teacher's part; for there are men, and women too, who will take any company of boys that you can give them, and, by a certain skill, or tact, or knowledge of human nature, or other qualities which seem sometimes to other persons almost magical, will have them all completely under subjection in a week, and that without violence, without scolding, almost without even a frown. the time may, perhaps, come when every teacher, to be considered qualified for his work, must possess this skill. indeed, the world is evidently making great and rapid progress in this direction. the methods of instruction and the modes by which the teacher gains and holds his influence over his pupils have been wonderfully improved in recent times, so that where there was one teacher, fifty years ago, who was really beloved by his pupils, we have fifty now. in dr. johnson's time, which was about a hundred and fifty years ago, it would seem that there was no other mode but that of violent coercion recognized as worthy to be relied upon in imparting instruction, for he said that he knew of no way by which latin could be taught to boys in his day but "by having it flogged into them." from such a state of things to that which prevails at the present day there has been an astonishing change. and now, whether a teacher is able to manage an average school of boys without physical force is simply a question of tact, knowledge of the right principles, and skill in applying them on his part. it is, perhaps, yet too soon to expect that all teachers can possess, or can acquire, these qualifications to such a degree as to make it safe to forbid the infliction of bodily pain in any case, but the time for it is rapidly approaching, and in some parts of the country it has, perhaps, already arrived. until that time comes, every teacher who finds himself under the necessity of beating a boy's body in order to attain certain moral or intellectual ends ought to understand that the reason is the incompleteness of his understanding and skill in dealing directly with his mind; though for this incompleteness he may not himself be personally at all to blame. _children spoiled by neglect and mismanagement_. . i am even willing to admit that one or more boys in a family may reach such a condition of rudeness and insubordination, in consequence of neglect or mismanagement on the part of their parents in their early years, and the present clumsiness and incapacity of the father in dealing with the susceptibilities and impulses of the human soul, that the question will lie between keeping them within some kind of subordination by bodily punishment or not controlling them at all. if a father has been so engrossed in his business that he has neglected his children, has never established any common bond of sympathy between himself and them, has taken no interest in their enjoyments, nor brought them by moral means to an habitual subjection to his will; and if their mother is a weak, irresolute woman, occupying herself with the pursuits and pleasures of fashionable society, and leaving her children to the management of servants, the children will, of course, in general, grow up exacting, turbulent, and ungovernable; and when, with advancing maturity, their increasing strength and vigor makes this turbulence and disorder intolerable in the house, and there is, as of course there usually will be in such a case, no proper knowledge and skill in the management of the young on the part of either parent to remedy the evil by gentle measures, the only alternative in many cases may be either a resort to violent punishment, or the sending away of the unmanageable subjects to school. the latter part of the alternative is the best, and, fortunately, it is the one generally adopted. but where it can not be adopted, it is certainly better that the boys should be governed by the rod than to grow up under no government at all. _gentle measures effectual where rightfully and faithfully employed_. however it may be with respect to the exceptional cases above enumerated, and perhaps some others, there can, i think, be no doubt that parents who should train their children from the beginning on the principles explained in this volume, and upon others analogous to them, would never, in any case, have to strike a blow. they would accomplish the end enjoined by the precepts of solomon, namely, the complete subjection of their children to their authority, by improved methods not known in his day, or, at least, not so fully developed that they could then be relied upon. they who imagine that parents are bound to use the rod as the instrumentality, because the scriptures speak of the rod as the means of establishing parental authority best known in those days, instead of employing the more effective methods which the progress of improvement has developed and made available at the present day, ought, in order to be consistent, to insist on the retention of the harp in religious worship, because david enjoins it upon believers to "praise the lord with harp:" to "sing unto him with psaltery, and an instrument of ten strings." the truth is, that what we are to look at in such injunctions is the end that is to be attained, which is, in this last case, the impressive and reverential exaltation of almighty god in our minds by the acts of public worship; and if, with the improvements in musical instruments which have been made in modern times, we can do this more satisfactorily by employing in the place of a psaltery or a harp of ten strings an organ of ten or a hundred stops, we are bound to make the substitution. in a word, we must look at the end and not at the means, remembering that in questions of scripture interpretation the "letter killeth, the spirit maketh alive." _protracted contests with obstinacy_. it seems to me, though i am aware that many excellent persons think differently, that it is never wise for the parent to allow himself to be drawn into a contest with a child in attempting to compel him to do something that from ill-temper or obstinacy he refuses to do. if the attempt is successful, and the child yields under a moderate severity of coercion, it is all very well. but there is something mysterious and unaccountable in the strength of the obstinacy sometimes manifested in such cases, and the degree of endurance which it will often inspire, even in children of the most tender age. we observe the same inexplicable fixedness sometimes in the lower animals--in the horse, for example; which is the more unaccountable from the fact that we can not suppose, in his case, that peculiar combination of intelligence and ill-temper which we generally consider the sustaining power of the protracted obstinacy on the part of the child. the degree of persistence which is manifested by children in contests of this kind is something wonderful, and can not easily be explained by any of the ordinary theories in respect to the influence of motives on the human mind. a state of cerebral excitement and exaltation is not unfrequently produced which seems akin to insanity, and instances have been known in which a child has suffered itself to be beaten to death rather than yield obedience to a very simple command. and in vast numbers of instances, the parent, after a protracted contest, gives up in despair, and is compelled to invent some plausible pretext for bringing it to an end. indeed, when we reflect upon the subject, we see what a difficult task we undertake in such contests--it being nothing less than that of _forcing the formation of a volition_ in a human mind. we can easily control the bodily movements and actions of another person by means of an external coercion that we can apply, and we have various indirect means of _inducing_ volitions; but in these contests we seem to come up squarely to the work of attempting, by outward force, to compel the _forming of a volition_ in the mind; and it is not surprising that this should, at least sometimes, prove a very difficult undertaking. _no necessity for these contests_. there seems to be no necessity that a parent or teacher should ever become involved in struggles of this kind in maintaining his authority. the way to avoid them, as it seems to me, is, when a child refuses out of obstinacy to do what is required of him, to impose the proper punishment or penalty for the refusal, and let that close the transaction. do not attempt to enforce his compliance by continuing the punishment until he yields. a child, for example, going out to play, wishes for his blue cap. his mother chooses that he shall wear his gray one. she hangs the blue cap up in its place, and gives him the gray one. he declares that he will not wear it, and throws it down upon the floor. the temptation now is for the mother, indignant, to punish him, and then to order him to take up the cap which he had thrown down, and to feel that it is her duty, in case he refuses, to persist in the punishment until she conquers his will, and compels him to take it up and put it upon his head. but instead of this, a safer and a better course, it seems to me, is to avoid a contest altogether by considering the offense complete, and the transaction on his part finished by the single act of rebellion against her authority. she may take the cap up from the floor herself and put it in its place, and then simply consider what punishment is proper for the wrong already done. perhaps she forbids the boy to go out at all. perhaps she reserves the punishment, and sends him to bed an hour earlier that night. the age of the boy, or some other circumstances connected with the case, may be such as to demand a severer treatment still. at any rate, she limits the transaction to the single act of disobedience and rebellion already committed, without giving an opportunity for a repetition of it by renewing the command, and inflicts for it the proper punishment, and that is the end of the affair. and so a boy in reciting a lesson will not repeat certain words after his mother. she enters into no controversy with him, but shuts the book and puts it away. he, knowing his mother's usual mode of management in such cases, and being sure that some penalty, privation, or punishment will sooner or later follow, relents, and tells his mother that he will say the words if she will try him again. "no, my son," she should reply, "the opportunity is past. you should have done your duty at the right time. you have disobeyed me, and i must take time to consider what to do." if, at the proper time, in such a case, when all the excitement of the affair is over, a penalty or punishment apportioned to the fault, or some other appropriate measures in relation to it, are _certain to come_, and if this method is always pursued in a calm and quiet manner but with inflexible firmness in act, the spirit of rebellion will be much more effectually subdued than by any protracted struggles at the time, though ending in victory however complete. but all this is a digression, though it seemed proper to allude to the subject of these contests here, since it is on these occasions, perhaps, that parents are most frequently led, or, as they think, irresistibly impelled, to the infliction of bodily punishments as the last resort, when they would, in general, be strongly inclined to avoid them. _the infliction of pain sometimes the speediest remedy_. there are, moreover, some cases, perhaps, in the ordinary exigencies of domestic life, as the world goes, when some personal infliction is the _shortest_ way of disposing of a case of discipline, and may appear, for the time being, to be the most effectual. a slap is very quickly given, and a mother may often think that she has not time for a more gentle mode of managing the case, even though she may admit that if she had the time at her command the gentle mode would be the best. and it is, indeed, doubtless true that the principles of management advocated in this work are such as require that the parents should devote some time and attention, and, still more essentially, some _heart_ to the work; and they who do not consider the welfare and happiness of their children in future life, and their own happiness in connection with them as they advance towards their declining years, as of sufficient importance to call for the bestowment of this time and attention, will doubtless often resort to more summary methods in their discipline than those here recommended. _the sting that it leaves behind_. indeed, the great objection, after all, to the occasional resort to the infliction of bodily pain in extreme cases is, as it seems to me, the sting which it leaves behind; not that, which it leaves in the heart of the child who may suffer it--for that soon passes away--but in the heart of the parent who inflicts it. the one is, or may be, very evanescent; the other may very long remain; and what is worse, the anguish of it may be revived and made very poignant in future years. this consideration makes it specially imperative on every parent never, for any cause, to inflict punishment by violence when himself under the influence of any irritation or anger awakened by the offense. for though the anger which the fault of the child naturally awakens in you carries you through the act of punishing well enough, it soon afterwards passes away, while the memory of it remains, and in after years, like any other sin, it may come back to exact a painful retribution. when the little loved one who now puts you out of patience with her heedlessness, her inconsiderateness, and, perhaps, by worse faults and failings--all, however, faults which may very possibly, in part or in whole, be the result of the immature and undeveloped condition of her mental or bodily powers--falls sick and dies, and you follow her as she is borne away, and with a bursting heart see her laid in her little grave, it will be a great comfort to you then to reflect that you did all in your power, by means of the gentlest measures at your command, to train her to truth and duty, that you never lost patience with her, and that she never felt from your hand any thing but gentle assistance or a loving caress. and your boy--now so ardent and impulsive, and often, perhaps, noisy, troublesome, and rude, from the exuberant action of his growing powers--when these powers shall have received their full development, and he has passed from your control to his place in the world as a man, and he comes back from time to time to the maternal home in grateful remembrance of his obligations to his mother, bringing with him tokens of his affection and love, you will think with pain of the occasions when you subjected him to the torture of the rod under the impulse of irritation or anger, or to accomplish the ends of discipline which might have been attained in other ways. time, as you then look back over the long interval of years which have elapsed, will greatly soften the recollection of the fault, but it will greatly aggravate that of the pain which was made the retribution of it. you will say to yourself, it is true, i did it for the best. if i had not done it, my son would perhaps not be what he is. he, if he remembers the transaction, will doubtless say so too; but there will be none the less for both a certain sting in the recollection, and you will wish that the same end could have been accomplished by gentler means. the substance of it is that children must, at all events, be governed. the proper authority over them _must be_ maintained; but it is a great deal better to secure this end by gentle measures, if the parent have or can acquire the skill to employ them. chapter xxii. gratitude in children. mothers are very often pained at what seems to them the ingratitude of their children. they long, above all things, for their love. they do every thing in their power--i mean, of course, that some mothers do--to win it. they make every sacrifice, and give every possible evidence of affection; but they seem to fail entirely of bringing out any of those evidences of gratitude and affection in return which, if they could only witness them, would fill their hearts with gladness and joy. but the only feeling which their children manifest towards them seems to be a selfish one. they come to them when in trouble, they even fly to them eagerly when in danger, and they consider their parents the chief resource for procuring nearly all their means of gratification. but they think little, as it often seems, of the mother's comfort and enjoyment in return, and seldom or never do any thing voluntarily to give her pleasure. it would be a great exaggeration to say that this is always the feeling of the mother in respect to her children. i only mean that this is sometimes, and i might probably say very often, the case. _two forms of love._ now there are two distinct forms which the feeling of love may assume in the mature mind, both of which are gratifying to the object of it, though they are very different, and indeed in some sense exactly the opposite of each other. there is the _receiving_ and the _bestowing_ love. it is true that the two forms are often conjoined, or rather they often exist in intimate combination with each other; but in their nature they are essentially distinct. a young lady, for example, may feel a strong attachment for the gentleman to whom she is engaged--or a wife for her husband--in the sense of liking to receive kindness and attention from him more than from any other man. she may be specially pleased when he invites her to ride with him, or makes her presents, or shows in any way that he thinks of her and seeks her happiness--more so than she would be to receive the same attentions from any other person. this is love. it may be very genuine love; but it is love in the form of taking special pleasure in the kindness and favor bestowed by the object of it. yet it is none the less true, as most persons have had occasion to learn from their own experience, that this kind of love may be very strong without being accompanied by any corresponding desire on the part of the person manifesting it to make sacrifices of her own ease and comfort in order to give happiness to the object of her love in return. in the same manner a gentleman may feel a strong sentiment of love for a lady, which shall take the form of enjoying her society, of being happy when he is near her, and greatly pleased at her making sacrifices for his sake, or manifesting in any way a strong attachment for him. there _may be_ also united with this the other form of love--namely, that which would lead him to deny himself and make sacrifices _for her_. but the two, though they may often--perhaps generally--exist together, are in their nature so essentially different that they may be entirely separated, and we may have one in its full strength while there is very little of the other. you may love a person in the sense of taking greater pleasure in receiving attentions and favors from him than from all the world beside, while yet you seldom think of making efforts to promote his comfort and happiness in any thing in which you are not yourself personally concerned. on the other hand, you may love him with the kind of affection which renders it the greatest pleasure of your life to make sacrifices and endure self-denial to promote his welfare in any way. in some cases these two forms are in fact entirely separated, and one or the other can exist entirely distinct from the other--as in the case of the kind feelings of a good man towards the poor and miserable. it is quite possible to feel a very strong interest in such objects, and to be willing to put ourselves to considerable inconvenience to make them comfortable and happy, and to take great pleasure in learning that our efforts have been effectual, without feeling any love for them at all in the other form--that is, any desire to have them with us, to receive attentions and kindness from them, and to enjoy their society. on the other hand, in the love of a young child for his mother the case is reversed. the love of the child consists chiefly in liking to be with his mother, in going to her rather than to any one else for relief from pain or for comfort in sorrow, and is accompanied with very few and very faint desires to make efforts, or to submit to privations, or to make sacrifices, for the promotion of her good. _order of their development_. now the qualities and characteristics of the soul on which the capacity for these two forms of love depend seem to be very different, and they advance in development and come to maturity at different periods of life; so that the mother, in feeling dejected and sad because she can not awaken in the mind of her child the gratitude and the consideration for her comfort and happiness which she desires, is simply looking for a certain kind of fruit at the wrong time. you have one of the forms of love for you on the part of the child now while he is young. in due time, when he arrives at maturity, if you will wait patiently, you will assuredly have the other. now he runs to you in every emergency. he asks you for every thing that he wants. he can find comfort nowhere else but in your arms, when he is in distress or in suffering from pain, disappointment, or sorrow. but he will not make any effort to be still when you are sick, or to avoid interrupting you when you are busy; and insists, perhaps, on your carrying him when he is tired, without seeming to think or care whether you may not be tired too. but in due time all this will be changed. twenty years hence he will conceal all his troubles from you instead of coming with them to you for comfort. he will be off in the world engaged in his pursuits, no longer bound closely to your side. but he will think all the time of your comfort and happiness. he will bring you presents, and pay you innumerable attentions to cheer your heart in your declining years. he will not run to you when he has hurt himself; but if any thing happens to _you_, he will leave every thing to hasten to your relief, and bring with him all the comforts and means of enjoyment for you that his resources can command. the time will thus come when you will have his love to your heart's content, in the second form. you must be satisfied, while he is so young, with the first form of it, which is all that his powers and faculties in their present stage are capable of developing. the truth of the case seems to be that the faculties of the human mind--or i should perhaps rather say, the susceptibilities of the soul--like the instincts of animals, are developed in the order in which they are required for the good of the subject of them. indeed, it is very interesting and curious to observe how striking the analogy in the order of development, in respect to the nature of the bond of attachment which binds the offspring to the parent, runs through all those ranks of the animal creation in which the young for a time depend upon the mother for food or for protection. the chickens in any moment of alarm run to the hen; and the lamb, the calf, and the colt to their respective mothers; but none of them would feel the least inclination to come to the rescue of the parent if the parent was in danger. with the mother herself it is exactly the reverse. her heart--if we can speak of the seat of the maternal affections of such creatures as a heart--is filled with desires to bestow good upon her offspring, without a desire, or even a thought, of receiving any good from them in return. there is this difference, however, between the race of man and those of the inferior animals--namely, that in his case the instinct, or at least a natural desire which is in some respects analogous to an instinct, prompting him to repay to his parents the benefits which he received from them in youth, comes in due time; while in that of the lower animals it seems never to come at all. the little birds, after opening their mouths so wide every time the mother comes to the nest during all the weeks while their wings are growing, fly away when they are grown, without the least care or concern for the anxiety and distress of the mother occasioned by their imprudent flights; and once away and free, never come back, so far as we know, to make any return to their mother for watching over them, sheltering them with her body, and working so indefatigably to provide them with food during the helpless period of their infancy--and still less to seek and protect and feed her in her old age. but the boy, reckless as he sometimes seems in his boyhood, insensible apparently to his obligations to his mother, and little mindful of her wishes or of her feelings--his affection for her showing itself mainly in his readiness to go to her with all his wants, and in all his troubles and sorrows--will begin, when he has arrived at maturity and no longer needs her aid, to remember with gratitude the past aid that she has rendered him. the current of affection in his heart will turn and flow the other way. instead of wishing to receive, he will now only wish to give. if she is in want, he will do all he can to supply her. if she is in sorrow, he will be happy if he can do any thing to comfort her. he will send her memorials of his gratitude, and objects of comfort and embellishment for her home, and will watch with solicitude and sincere affection over her declining years. and all this change, if not the result of a new instinct which reaches its development only when the period of maturity arrives, is the unfolding of a sentiment of the heart belonging essentially to the nature of the subject of it as man. it is true that this capacity may, under certain circumstances, be very feebly developed. in some cases, indeed, it would seem that it was scarcely developed at all; but there is a provision for it in the nature of man, while there is no provision for it at all in the sentient principles of the lower animals. _advancing the development of the sentiment of gratitude._ now, although parents must not be impatient at the slow appearance of this feeling in their children, and must not be troubled in its not appearing before its time, they can do much by proper efforts to cultivate its growth, and give it an earlier and a more powerful influence over them than it would otherwise manifest. the mode of doing this is the same as in all other cases of the cultivation of moral sentiments in children, and that is by the influence over them of sympathy with those they love. just as the way to cultivate in the minds of children a feeling of pity for those who are in distress is not to preach it as a duty, but to make them love you, and then show such pity yourself; and the way to make them angry and revengeful in character--if we can conceive of your being actuated by so unnatural a desire--would be often to express violent resentment yourself, with scowling looks and fierce denunciations against those who have offended you; so, to awaken them to sentiments of gratitude for the favors they receive, you must gently lead them to sympathize with you in the gratitude which _you_ feel for the favors that _you_ receive. when a child shows some special unwillingness to comply with her mother's desires, her mother may address to her a kind but direct and plain expostulation on the obligations of children to their parents, and the duty incumbent on them of being grateful for their kindness, and to be willing to do what they can in return. such an address would probably do no good at all. the child would receive it simply as a scolding, no matter how mildly and gently the reproof might be expressed, and would shut her heart against it. it is something which she must stand still and endure, and that is all. but let the mother say the same things precisely when the child has shown a willingness to make some little sacrifice to aid or to gratify her mother, so that the sentiment expressed may enter her mind in the form of approval and not of condemnation, and the effect will be very different. the sentiments will, at any rate, now not be rejected from the mind, but the way will be open for them to enter, and the conversation will have a good effect, so far as didactic teaching can have effect in such a case. but now to bring in the element of sympathy as a means of reaching and influencing the mind of the child: the mother, we will suppose, standing at the door some morning before breakfast in spring, with her little daughter, seven or eight years old, by her side, hears a bird singing on a tree near by. she points to the tree, and says, in a half-whisper, "hark!" when the sound ceases, she looks to the child with an expression of pleasure upon her countenance, and says, "suppose we give that bird some crumbs because he has been singing us such a pretty song." "well!" says the child. "would you?" asks the mother. "yes, mother, i should like to give him some very much. do you suppose he sang the song for us?" "i don't _know_ that he did," replies the mother. "we don't know exactly what the birds mean by all their singing. they take some pleasure in seeing us, i think, or else they would not come so much around our house; and i don't know but that this bird's song may come from some kind of joy or gladness he felt in seeing us come to the door. at any rate, it will be a pleasure to us to give him some crumbs to pay him for his song." the child will think so too, and will run off joyfully to bring a piece of bread to form crumbs to be scattered upon the path. and the whole transaction will have the effect of awakening and cherishing the sentiment of gratitude in her heart. the effect will not be great, it is true, but it will be of the right kind. it will be a drop of water upon the unfolding cotyledons of a seed just peeping up out of the ground, which will percolate below after you have gone away, and give the little roots a new impulse of growth. for when you have left the child seated upon the door-step, occupied in throwing out the crumbs to the bird, her heart will be occupied with the thoughts you have put into it, and the sentiment of gratitude for kindness received will commence its course of development, if it had not commenced it before. _the case of older children_. of course the employment of such an occasion as this of the singing of a little bird and such a conversation in respect to it for cultivating the sentiment of gratitude in the heart, is adapted only to the case of quite a young child. for older children, while the principle is the same, the circumstances and the manner of treating the case must be adapted to a maturer age. robert, for example--twelve years of age--had been sick, and during his convalescence his sister mary, two years older than himself, had been very assiduous in her attendance upon him. she had waited upon him at his meals, and brought him books and playthings, from time to time, to amuse him. after he had fully recovered his health, he was sitting in the garden, one sunny morning in the spring, with his mother, and she said, "how kind mary was to you while you were sick!" "yes," said robert, "she was very kind indeed." "if you would like to do something for her in return," continued his mother, "i'll tell you what would be a good plan." robert, who, perhaps, without this conversation would not have thought particularly of making any return, said he should like to do something for her very much. "then," said his mother, "you might make her a garden. i can mark off a place for a bed for her large enough to hold a number of kinds of flowers, and then you can dig it up, and rake it over, and lay it off into little beds, and sow the seeds. i'll buy the seeds for you. i should like to do something towards making the garden for her, for she helped me a great deal, as well as you, in the care she took of you." "well," said robert, "i'll do it." "you are well and strong now, so you can do it pretty easily," added the mother; "but still, unless you would like to do it yourself for her sake, i can get the man to do it. but if you would like to do it yourself, i think it would please her very much as an expression of your gratitude and love for her." "yes," said robert, "i should a great deal rather do it myself, and i will begin this very day." and yet, if his mother had not made the suggestion, he would probably not have thought of making any such return, or even any return at all, for his sister's devoted kindness to him when he was sick. in other words, the sentiment of gratitude was in his heart, or, rather, the capacity for it was there, but it needed a little fostering care to bring it out into action. and the thing to be observed is, that by this fostering care it was not only brought out at the time, but, by being thus brought out and drawn into action, it was strengthened and made-to grow, so as to be ready to come out itself without being called, on the next occasion.-it was like a little plant just coming out of the ground under influences not altogether favorable. it needs a little help and encouragement; and the aid that is given by a few drops of water at the right time will bring it forward and help it to attain soon such a degree of strength and vigor as will make it independent of all external aid. but there must be consideration, tact, a proper regard to circumstances, and, above all, there must be no secret and selfish ends concealed, on the part of the mother in such cases. you may deluge and destroy your little plant by throwing on the water roughly or rudely; or, in the case of a boy upon whose mind you seem to be endeavoring to produce some moral result, you may really have in view some object of your own--your interest in the moral result being only a pretense. for instance, egbert, under circumstances similar to those recited above--in respect to the sickness of the boy, and the kind attentions of his sister--came to his mother one afternoon for permission to go a-fishing with some other boys who had called for him. he was full of excitement and enthusiasm at the idea. but his mother was not willing to allow him to go. the weather was lowering. she thought that he had not yet fully recovered his health; and she was afraid of other dangers. instead of saying calmly, after a moment's reflection, to show that her answer was a deliberate one, that he could not go, and then quietly and firmly, but without assigning any reasons, adhering to her decision--a course which, though it could not have saved the boy from emotions of disappointment, would be the best for making those feelings as light and as brief in duration as possible--began to argue the case thus; "oh no, egbert, i would not go a-fishing this afternoon, if i were you. i think it is going to rain. besides, it is a nice cool day to work in the garden, and lucy would like to have her garden made very much. you know that she was very kind to you when you were sick--how many things she did for you; and preparing her garden for her would be such a nice way of making her a return. i am sure you would not wish to show yourself ungrateful for so much kindness." then follows a discussion of some minutes, in which egbert, in a fretful and teasing tone, persists in urging his desire to go a-fishing. he can make the garden, he says, some other day. his mother finally yields, though with great unwillingness, doing all she can to extract all graciousness and sweetness from her consent, and to spoil the pleasure of the excursion to the boy, by saying as he goes away, that she is sure he ought not to go, and that she shall be uneasy about him all the time that he is gone. now it is plain that such management as this, though it takes ostensibly the form of a plea on the part of the mother in favor of a sentiment of gratitude in the heart of the boy, can have no effect in cherishing and bringing forward into life any such sentiment, even if it should be already existent there in a nascent state; but can only tend to make the object of it more selfish and heartless than ever. thus the art of cultivating the sentiment of gratitude, as is the case in all other departments of moral training, can not be taught by definite lessons or learned by rote. it demands tact and skill, and, above all, an honest and guileless sincerity. the mother must really look to, and aim for the actual moral effect in the heart of the child, and not merely make formal efforts ostensibly for this end, but really to accomplish some temporary object of her own. children easily see through all covert intentions of any kind. they sometimes play the hypocrite themselves, but they are always great detectors of hypocrisy in others. but gentle and cautious efforts of the right kind--such as require no high attainments on the part of the mother, but only the right spirit--will in time work wonderful effects; and the mother who perseveres in them, and who does not expect the fruits too soon, will watch with great interest for the time to arrive when her boy will spontaneously, from the promptings of his own heart, take some real trouble, or submit to some real privation or self-denial, to give pleasure to her. she will then enjoy the double gratification, first, of receiving the pleasure, whatever it may be, that her boy has procured for her, and also the joy of finding that the tender plant which she has watched and watered so long, and which for a time seemed so frail that she almost despaired of its ever coming to any good, is really advanced to the stage of beginning to bear fruit, and giving her an earnest of the abundant fruits which she may confidently expect from it in future years. chapter xxiii. religious training. it has been my aim in this volume to avoid, as far as possible, all topics involving controversy, and only to present such truths, and to elucidate such principles, as can be easily made to commend themselves to the good sense and the favorable appreciation of all the classes of minds likely to be found among the readers of the work. there are certain very important aspects of the religious question which may be presented, i think, without any serious deviation from this policy. _in what true piety consists_. indeed; i think there is far more real than seeming agreement among parents in respect to this subject, or rather a large portion of the apparent difference consists in different modes of expressing in words thoughts and conceptions connected with spiritual things, which from their very nature can not any of them be adequately expressed in language at all; and thus it happens that what are substantially the same ideas are customarily clothed by different classes of persons in very different phraseology, while, on the other hand, the same set of phrases actually represent in different minds very different sets of ideas. for instance, there is perhaps universal agreement in the idea that some kind of change--a change, too, of a very important character--is implied in the implanting or developing of the spirit of piety in the heart of a child. there is also universal agreement in the fact--often very emphatically asserted in the new testament--that the essential principles in which true piety consists are those of entire submission in all things to the will of god, and cordial kind feeling towards every man. there is endless disagreement, and much earnest contention among different denominations of christians, in respect to the means by which the implanting of these principles is to be secured, and to the modes in which, when implanted, they will manifest themselves; but there is not, so far as would appear, any dissent whatever anywhere from the opinion that the end to be aimed at is the implanting of these principles--that is that it consists in bringing the heart to a state of complete and cordial submission to the authority and to the will of god, and to a sincere regard for the welfare and happiness of every human being. _a question of words_ there seems, at first view, to be a special difference of opinion in respect to the nature of the process by which these principles come to be implanted or developed in the minds of the young; for all must admit that in early infancy they are not there, or, at least, that they do not appear. _no_ one would expect to find in two infants--twin-brothers, we will suppose--creeping on the floor, with one apple between them, that there could be, at that age, any principles of right or justice, or of brotherly love existing in their hearts that could prevent their both crying and quarrelling for it. "true," says one; "but there are germs of those principles which, in time, will be developed." "no," rejoins another," there are no _germs_ of them, there are only _capacities_ for them, through which, by divine power, the germs may hereafter be introduced." but when we reflect upon the difficulty of forming any clear and practical idea of the difference between a _germ_--in a bud upon an apple-tree, for instance--which may ultimately produce fruit, and a _capacity_ for producing it which may subsequently be developed, and still more, how difficult is it to picture to our minds what is represented by these words in the case of a human soul, it would seem as if the apparent difference in people's opinions on such a point must be less a difference in respect to facts than in respect to the phraseology by which the facts should be represented. and there would seem to be confirmation of this view in the fact that the great apparent difference among men in regard to their theoretical views of human nature does not seem to produce any marked difference in their action in practically dealing with it. some parents, it is true, habitually treat their children with gentleness, kindness, and love; others are harsh and severe in all their intercourse with them. but we should find, on investigation, that such differences have very slight connection with the theoretical views of the nature of the human soul which the parents respectively entertain. parents who in their theories seem to think the worst of the native tendencies of the human heart are often as kind and considerate and loving in their dealings with it as any; while no one would be at all surprised to find another, who is very firm in his belief in the native tendency of childhood to good, showing himself, in practically dealing with the actual conduct of children, fretful, impatient, complaining, and very ready to recognize, in fact, tendencies which in theory he seems to deny. and so, two bank directors, or members of the board of management of any industrial undertaking, when they meet in the street on sunday, in returning from their respective places of public worship, if they fall into conversation on the moral nature of man, may find, or think they find, that they differ extremely in their views, and may even think each other bigoted or heretical, as the case may be; but yet the next day, when they meet at a session of their board, and come to the work of actually dealing with the conduct and the motives of men, they may find that there is _practically_ no difference between them whatever. or, if there should be any difference, such as would show itself in a greater readiness in one than in the other to place confidence in the promises or to confide in the integrity of men, the difference would, in general, have no perceptible relation whatever to the difference in the theological phraseology which they have been accustomed to hear and to assent to in their respective churches. all which seems to indicate, as has already been said, that the difference in question is rather apparent than real, and that it implies less actual disagreement about the facts of human nature than diversity in the phraseology by which the facts are represented. _agency of the divine spirit_. it may, however, be said that in this respect, if not in any other, there is a radical difference among parents in respect to human nature, in relation to the religious education of children--namely, that some think that the implanting of the right principles of repentance for all wrong-doing, and sincere desires for the future to conform in all things to the will of god, and seek the happiness and welfare of men, can not come except by a special act of divine intervention, and is utterly beyond the reach--in respect to any actual efficiency--of all human instrumentalities. this is no doubt true; but it is also no less true in respect to all the powers and capacities of the human soul, as well as to those pertaining to moral and religious duty. if the soul itself is the product of the creative agency of god, _all_ its powers and faculties must be so, and, consequently, the development of them all--and there certainly can be no reason for making the sentiment of true and genuine piety an exception--must be the work of the same creative power. but some one may say. there is, however, after all, a difference; for while we all admit that both the original entrance of the embryo soul into existence, and every step of its subsequent progress and development, including the coming into being and into action of all its various faculties and powers, are the work of the supreme creative power, the commencement of the divine life in the soul is, in a _special and peculiar sense_, the work of the divine hand. and this also is doubtless true; at least, there is a certain important truth expressed in that statement. and yet when we attempt to picture to our minds two modes of divine action, one of which is special and peculiar, and the other is not so, we are very likely to find ourselves bewildered and confused, and we soon perceive that in making such inquiries we are going out of our depth--or, in other words, are attempting to pass beyond the limits which mark the present boundaries of human knowledge. in view of these thoughts and suggestions, in the truth of which it would seem that all reasonable persons must concur, we may reasonably conclude that all parents who are willing to look simply at the facts, and who are not too much trammelled by the forms of phraseology to which they are accustomed, must agree in admitting the substantial soundness of the following principles relating to the religious education of children. _order of development in respect to different propensities and powers_. [illustration: the first instinct.] . we must not expect any perceptible awakening of the moral and religious sentiments too soon, nor feel discouraged and disheartened because they do not earlier appear; for, like all the other higher attributes of the soul, they pertain to a portion of the mental structure which is not early developed. it is the group of purely animal instincts that first show themselves in the young, and those even, as we see in the young of the lower animals, generally appear somewhat in the order in which they are required for the individual's good. birds just hatched from the egg seem to have, for the first few days, only one instinct ready for action--that of opening their mouths wide at the approach of any thing towards their nest. even this instinct is so imperfect and immature that it can not distinguish between the coming of their mother and the appearance of the face of a boy peering down upon them, or even the rustling of the leaves around them by a stick. in process of time, as their wings become formed, another instinct begins to appear--that of desiring to use the wings and come forth into the air. the development of this instinct and the growth of the wings advance together. later still, when the proper period of maturity arrives, other instincts appear as they are required--such as the love of a mate, the desire to construct a nest, and the principle of maternal affection. now there is something analogous to this in the order of development to be observed in the progress of the human being through the period of infancy to that of maturity, and we must not look for the development of any power or susceptibility before its time, nor be too much troubled if we find that, in the first two or three years of life, the animal propensities--which are more advanced in respect to the organization which they depend upon--seem sometimes to overpower the higher sentiments and principles, which, so far as the capacity for them exists at all, must be yet in embryo. we must be willing to wait for each to be developed in its own appointed time. _dependence upon divine aid_. . any one who is ready to feel and to acknowledge his dependence upon divine aid for any thing whatever in the growth and preservation of his child, will surely be ready to do so in respect to the work of developing or awakening in his heart the principles of piety, since it must be admitted by all that the human soul is the highest of all the manifestations of divine power, and that that portion of its structure on which the existence and exercise of the moral and religious sentiments depend is the crowning glory of it. it is right, therefore--i mean right, in the sense of being truly philosophical--that if the parent feels and acknowledges his dependence upon divine power in any thing, he should specially feel and acknowledge it here; while there is nothing so well adapted as a deep sense of this dependence, and a devout and habitual recognition of it, and reliance upon it, to give earnestness and efficiency to his efforts, and to furnish a solid ground of hope that they will be crowded with success. _the christian paradox_. . the great principle so plainly taught in the sacred scriptures--namely, that while we depend upon the exercise of divine power for the success of all our efforts for our own spiritual improvement or that of others, just as if we could do nothing ourselves, we must do every thing that is possible ourselves, just us if nothing was to be expected from divine power--may be called the christian paradox. "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is god that worketh in you both to will and to do." it would seem, it might be thought, much more logical to say, "work out your own salvation, for there is nobody to help you;" or, "it is not necessary to make any effort yourselves, for it is god that worketh in you." it seems strange and paradoxical to say, "_work out your own_ salvation, _for_ it is _god that worketh in you_ both to will and to do." but in this, as in all other paradoxes, the difficulty is in the explanation of the theory, and not in the practical working of it. there is in natural philosophy what is called the hydrostatic paradox, which consists in the fact that a small quantity of any liquid--as, for example, the coffee in the nose of the coffee-pot--will balance and sustain a very much larger quantity--as that contained in the body of it--so as to keep the surface of each at the same level. young students involve themselves sometimes in hopeless entanglements among the steps of the mathematical demonstration showing how this can be, but no housekeeper ever meets with any practical difficulty in making her coffee rest quietly in its place on account of it. the christian paradox, in the same way, gives rise to a great deal of metaphysical floundering and bewilderment among young theologians in their attempts to vindicate and explain it, but the humble-minded christian parent finds no difficulty in practice. it comes very easy to him to do all he can, just as if every thing depended upon his efforts, and at the same time to cast all his care upon god, just as if there was nothing at all that he himself could do. _means must be right means_. . we are apt to imagine--or, at least, to act sometimes as if we imagined--that our dependence upon the divine aid for what our saviour, jesus, designated as the new birth, makes some difference in the obligation on our part to employ such means as are naturally adapted to the end in view. if a gardener, for example, were to pour sand from his watering-pot upon his flowers, in time of drought, instead of water, he might make something like a plausible defense of his action, in reply to a remonstrance, thus: "_i_ have no power to make the flowers grow and bloom. the secret processes on which the successful result depends are altogether beyond my reach, and in the hands of god, and he can just as easily bless one kind of instrumentality as another. i am bound to do something, it is true, for i must not be idle and inert; but god, if he chooses to do so, can easily bring out the flowers into beauty and bloom, however imperfect and ill-adapted the instrumentalities i use may be. he can as easily make use, for this purpose, of sand as of water." now, although there may be a certain plausibility in this reasoning, such conduct would appear to every one perfectly absurd; and yet many parents seem to act on a similar principle. a mother who is from time to time, during the week, fretful and impatient, evincing no sincere and hearty consideration for the feelings, still less for the substantial welfare and happiness, of those dependent upon her; who shows her insubmission to the will of god, by complaints and repinings at any thing untoward that befalls her; and who evinces a selfish love for her own gratification--her dresses, her personal pleasures, and her fashionable standing; and then, as a means of securing the salvation of her children, is very strict, when sunday comes, in enforcing upon them the study of their sunday lessons, or in requiring them to read good books, or in repressing on that day any undue exuberance of their spirits--relying upon the blessing of god upon her endeavors--will be very apt to find, in the end, that she has been watering her delicate flowers with sand. the means which we use to awaken or impart the feelings of sorrow for sin, submission to god, and cordial good-will to man, in which all true piety consists, must be means that are _appropriate in themselves_ to the accomplishment of the end intended. the appliance must be water, and not sand--or rather water _or_ sand, with judgment, discrimination, and tact; for the gardener often finds that a judicious mixture of sand with the clayey and clammy soil about the roots of his plants is just what is required. the principle is, that the appliance must be an appropriate one--that is, one indicated by a wise consideration of the circumstances of the case, and of the natural characteristics of the infantile mind. _power of sympathy_. . in respect to religious influence over the minds of children, as in all other departments of early training, the tendency to sympathetic action between the heart of the child and the parent is the great source of the parental influence and power. the principle, "make a young person love you, and then simply _be_ in his presence what you wish him to be," is the secret of success. the tendency of young children to become what they see those around them whom they love are, seems to be altogether the most universally acting and the most powerful of the influences on which the formation of the character depends; and yet it is remarkable that we have no really appropriate name for it. we call it sometimes sympathy; but the word sympathy is associated more frequently in our minds with the idea of compassionate participation in the sufferings of those we love. sometimes we term it a spirit of imitation, but that phrase implies rather a conscious effort to _act_ like those whom we love, than that involuntary tendency to _become_ like them, which is the real character of the principle in question. the principle is in some respects like what is called _induction_ in physical science, which denotes the tendency of a body, which is in any particular magnetic or electric condition, to produce the same condition, and the same direction of polarity, in any similar body placed near it. there is a sort of _moral induction_, which is not exactly sympathy, in the ordinary sense of that word, nor a desire of imitation, nor the power of example, but an immediate, spontaneous, and even unconscious tendency to _become what those around us are_. this tendency is very strong in the young while the opening faculties are in the course of formation and development, and it is immensely strengthened by the influence of love. whatever, therefore, a mother wishes her child to be--whether a sincere, honest christian, submissive to god's will and conscientious in the discharge of every duty, or proud, vain, deceitful, hypocritical, and pharisaical--she has only to be either the one or the other herself, and without any special teaching her child will be pretty sure to be a good copy of the model. _theological instruction._ . if the principle above stated is correct, it helps to explain why so little good effect is ordinarily produced by what may be called instruction in theological truth on the minds of the young. any system of theological truth consists of grand generalizations, which, like all other generalizations, are very interesting, and often very profitable, to mature minds, especially to minds of a certain class; but they are not appreciable by children, and can only in general be received by them as words to be fixed in the memory by rote. particulars first, generalizations afterwards, is, or ought to be, the order of progress in all acquisition of knowledge. this certainly has been the course pursued by the divine spirit in the moral training of the human race. there is very little systematic theology in the old testament, and it requires a considerable degree of ingenuity to make out as much as the theologians desire to find even in the teachings of jesus christ. it is very well to exercise this ingenuity, and the systematic results which are to be obtained by it may be very interesting, and very beneficial, to those whose minds are mature enough to enter into and appreciate them. but they are not adapted to the spiritual wants of children, and can only be received by them, if they are received at all, in a dry, formal, mechanical manner. read, therefore, the stories in the old testament, or the parables and discourses of jesus in the new, without attempting to draw many inferences from them in the way of theoretical belief, but simply to bring out to the mind and heart of the child the moral point intended in each particular case, and the heart of the child will be touched, and he will receive an _element_ of instruction which he can arrange and group with others in theological generalization by-and-by, when his faculties have advanced to the generalizing stage. _no repulsive personal applications_. . in reading the scriptures, and, indeed, in all forms of giving religious counsel or instruction, we must generally beware of presenting the thoughts that we communicate in the form of reproachful personal application. there may be exceptions to this rule, but it is undoubtedly, in general, a sound one. for the work which we have to do, is not to attempt to drive the heart from the wrong to the right by any repellent action which the wrong may be made to exert, but to allure it by an attractive action with which the right may be invested. we must, therefore, present the incidents and instructions of the word in their alluring aspect--assuming, in a great measure, that our little pupil will feel pleasure with us in the manifestations of the right, and will sympathize with us in disapproval of the wrong. to secure them to our side, in the views which we take, we must show a disposition to _take_ them to it by an affectionate sympathy. our saviour set us an excellent example of relying on the superior efficiency of the bond of sympathy and love in its power over the hearts of children, as compared with that of formal theological instruction, in the few glimpses which we have of his mode of dealing with them. when they brought little children to him, he did not begin to expound to them the principles of the government of god, or the theoretical aspects of the way of salvation; but took them _up in his arms and blessed them_, and called the attention of the by standers at the same time to qualities and characteristics which they possessed that he seemed to regard with special affection, and which others must imitate to be fit for the kingdom of god. of course the children went away pleased and happy from such an interview, and would be made ready by it to receive gladly to their hearts any truths or sentiments which they might subsequently hear attributed to one who was so kind a friend to them. if, however, instead of this, he had told them--no matter in what kind and gentle tones--that they had very wicked hearts, which must be changed before either god or any good man could truly love them, and that this change could only be produced by a power which they could only understand to be one external to themselves, and that they must earnestly pray for it every day, how different would have been the effect. they would have listened in mute distress, would have been glad to make their escape when the conversation was ended, and would shrink from ever seeing or hearing again one who placed himself in an attitude so uncongenial to them. and yet all that might be true. they might have had yet only such appetites and propensities developed within them as would, if they continued to hold paramount control over them all their lives, make them selfish, unfeeling, and wicked men; and that they were, in a special though mysterious manner, dependent on the divine power for bringing into action within them other and nobler principles. and so, if a physician were called in to see a sick child, he might see that it was in desperate danger, and that unless something could be done, and that speedily, to arrest the disease, his little patient would be dead in a few hours; and yet to say that to the poor child, and overwhelm it with terror and distress, would not be a very suitable course of procedure for averting the apprehended result. _judge not, that ye be not judged_. . and this leads us to reflect, in the eighth place, that we ought to be very careful, in our conversations with children, and especially in addresses made to them in the sunday-school, or on any other occasion, not to say any thing to imply that we consider them yet unconverted sinners. no one can possibly know at how early an age that great change which consists in the first faint enkindling of the divine life in the soul may begin to take place, nor with what faults, and failings, and yieldings to the influence of the mere animal appetites and passions of childhood it may, for a time, co-exist. we should never, therefore, say any thing to children to imply that, in the great question of their relations to god and the saviour, we take it for granted that they are on the wrong side. we can not possibly know on which side they really are, and we only dishearten and discourage them, and alienate their hearts from us, and tend to alienate them from all good, by seeming to take it for granted that, while _we_ are on the right side, _they_ are still upon the wrong. we should, in a word, say _we_, and not _you_, in addressing children on religious subjects, so as to imply that the truths and sentiments which we express are equally important and equally applicable to us as to them, and thus avoid creating that feeling of being judged and condemned beforehand, and without evidence, which is so apt to produce a broad though often invisible gulf of separation in heart between children, on the one hand, and ministers and members of the church, on the other. _promised rewards and threatened punishments_. . it is necessary to be extremely moderate and cautious in employing the influence of promised rewards or threatened punishments as a means of promoting early piety. in a religious point of view, as in every other, goodness that is bought is only a pretense of goodness--that is, in reality it is no goodness at all; and as it is true that love casteth out fear, so it is also true that fear casteth out love. suppose--though it is almost too violent a supposition to be made even for illustration's sake--that the whole christian world could be suddenly led to believe that there was to be no happiness or suffering at all for them beyond the grave, and that the inducement to be grateful to god for his goodness and submissive to his will, and to be warmly interested in the welfare and happiness of man, were henceforth to rest on the intrinsic excellence of those principles, and to their constituting essentially the highest and noblest development of the moral and spiritual nature of man--how many of the professed disciples of jesus would abandon their present devotion to the cause of love to god and love to man? not one, except the hypocrites and pretenders! the truth is, that as piety that is genuine and sincere must rest on very different foundations from hope of future reward or fear of future punishment, so this hope and this fear are very unsuitable instrumentalities to be relied on for awakening it. the kind of gratitude to god which we wish to cherish in the mind of a child is not such as would be awakened towards an earthly benefactor by saying--in the case of a present made by an uncle, for instance--"your uncle has made you a beautiful present. go and thank him very cordially, and perhaps you will get another." it is rather of a kind which might be induced by saying, "your uncle, who has been so kind to you in past years, is poor and sick, and can never do any thing more for you now. would you like to go and sit in his sick-room to show your love for him, and to be ready to help him if he wants any thing?" true piety, in a word, which consists in entering into and steadily maintaining the right moral and spiritual relations with god and man, marks the highest condition which the possibilities of human nature allow, and must rest in the soul which attains to it on a very different foundation from any thing like hope or fear. that there is a function which it is the province of these motives to fulfill, is abundantly proved by the use that is sometimes made of them in the scriptures. but the more we reflect upon the subject, the more we shall be convinced, i think, that all such considerations ought to be kept very much in the back-ground in our dealings with children. if a child is sick, and is even likely to die, it is a very serious question whether any warning given to him of his danger will not operate as a hindrance rather than a help, in awakening those feelings which will constitute the best state of preparation for the change. for a sense of gratitude to god for his goodness, and to the saviour for the sacrifice which he made for his sake, penitence for his sins, and trust in the forgiving mercy of his maker, are the feelings to be awakened in his bosom; and these, so far as they exist, will lead him to lie quietly, calmly, and submissively in god's hands, without anxiety in respect to what is before him. it is a serious question whether an entire uncertainty as to the time when his death is to come is not more favorable to the awakening of these feelings, than the state of alarm and distress which would be excited by the thought that it was near. _the reasonableness of gentle measures in religious training_. the mother may sometimes derive from certain religious considerations the idea that she is bound to look upon the moral delinquencies and dangers which she observes in her children, under an aspect more stern and severe than seems to be here recommended. but a little reflection must convince us that the way to true repentance of, and turning from sin, is not necessarily through the suffering of terror and distress. the gospel is not an instrumentality for producing terror and distress, even as means to an end. it is an instrumentality for saving us from these ills; and the divine spirit, in the hidden and mysterious influence which it exercises in forming, or transforming, the human soul into the image of god, must be as ready, it would seem, to sanction and bless efforts made by a mother to allure her child away from its sins by loving and gentle invitations and encouragements, as any attempts to drive her from them by the agency of terror or pain. it would seem that no one who remembers the way in which jesus christ dealt with the children that were brought to him could possibly have any doubt of this. chapter xxiv. conclusion. any person who has acquired the art of examining and analyzing his own thoughts will generally find that the mental pictures which he forms of the landscapes, or the interiors, in which the scenes are laid of the events or incidents related in any work of fiction which interests him, are modelled more or less closely from prototypes previously existing in his own mind, and generally upon those furnished by the experiences of his childhood. if, for example, he reads an account of transactions represented as taking place in an english palace or castle, he will usually, on a careful scrutiny, find that the basis of his conception of the scene is derived from the arrangement of the rooms of some fine house with which he was familiar in early life. thus, a great many things which attract our attention, and impress themselves upon our memories in childhood, become the models and prototypes--more or less aggrandized and improved, perhaps--of the conceptions and images which we form in later years. _nature of the effect produced by early impressions_. few persons who have not specially reflected on this subject, or examined closely the operations of their own minds, are aware what an extended influence the images thus stored in the mind in childhood have in forming the basis, or furnishing the elements of the mental structures of future life. but the truth, when once understood, shows of what vast importance it is with what images the youthful mind is to be stored. a child who ascends a lofty mountain, under favorable circumstances in his childhood, has his conceptions of all the mountain scenery that he reads of, or hears of through life, modified and aggrandized by the impression made upon his sensorium at this early stage. take your daughter, who has always, we will suppose, lived in the country, on an excursion with you to the sea-shore, and allow her to witness for an hour, as she sits in silence on the cliff, the surf rolling in incessantly upon the beach, and infinitely the smallest part of the effect is the day's gratification which you have given her. that is comparatively nothing. you have made a life-long change, if not in the very structure, at least in the permanent furnishing of her mind, and performed a work that can never by any possibility be undone. the images which have been awakened in her mind, the emotions connected with them, and the effect of these images and emotions upon her faculties of imagination and conception, will infuse a life into them which will make her, in respect to this aspect of her spiritual nature, a different being as long as she lives. _the nature and origin of general ideas_. it is the same substantially in respect to all those abstract and general ideas on moral or other kindred subjects which constitute the mental furnishing of the adult man, and have so great an influence in the formation of his habits of thought and of his character. they are chiefly formed from combinations of the impressions made in childhood. a person's idea of justice, for instance, or of goodness, is a generalization of the various instances of justice or goodness which ever came to his knowledge; and of course, among the materials of this generalization those instances that were brought to his mind during the impressible years of childhood must have taken a very prominent part. every story, therefore, which you relate to a child to exemplify the principles of justice or goodness takes its place, or, rather, the impression which it makes takes its place, as one of the elements out of which the ideas that are to govern his future life are formed. _vast importance and influence of this mental furnishing,_ for the ideas and generalizations thus mainly formed from the images and impressions received in childhood become, in later years, the elements of the machinery, so to speak, by which all his mental operations are performed. thus they seem to constitute more than the mere furniture of the mind; they form, as it were, almost a part of the structure itself. so true, indeed, is this, and so engrossing a part does what remains in the mind of former impressions play in its subsequent action, that some philosophers have maintained that the whole of the actual consciousness of man consists only in the _resultant_ of all these impressions preserved more or less imperfectly by the memory, and made to mingle together in one infinitely complicated but harmonious whole. without going to any such extreme as this, we can easily see, on reflection, how vast an influence on the ideas and conceptions, as well as on the principles of action in mature years, must be exerted by the nature and character of the images which the period of infancy and childhood impresses upon the mind. all parents should, therefore, feel that it is not merely the present welfare and happiness of their child that is concerned in their securing to him a tranquil and happy childhood, but that his capacity for enjoyment through life is greatly dependent upon it. they are, in a very important sense, intrusted with the work of building up the structure of his soul for all time, and it is incumbent upon them, with reference to the future as well as to the present, to be very careful what materials they allow to go into the work, as well as in what manner they lay them. among the other bearings of this thought, it gives great weight to the importance of employing gentle measures in the management and training of the young, provided that such measures can be made effectual in the accomplishment of the end. the pain produced by an act of hasty and angry violence to which a father subjects his son may soon pass away, but the memory of it does not pass away with the pain. even the remembrance of it may at length fade from the mind, but there is still an _effect_ which does not pass away with the remembrance. every strong impression which you make upon his perceptive powers must have a very lasting influence, and even the impression itself may, in some cases, be forever indelible. let us, then, take care that these impressions shall be, as far as possible, such as shall be sources of enjoyment for them in future years. it is true that we _must_ govern them. they are committed to our charge during the long time which is required for the gradual unfolding of their embryo powers for the express purpose that during that interval they may be guided by our reason, and not by their own. we can not surrender this trust. but there is a way of faithfully fulfilling the duties of it--if we have discernment to see it, and skill to follow it--which will make the years of their childhood years of tranquillity and happiness, both to ourselves and to them. the end. [footnote a: see frontispiece.] [endnote b: the "boston congregationalist."] proofreading team. [illustration] the infant system, for developing the intellectual and moral powers of all children, from one to seven years of age by samuel wilderspin, inventor of the system of infant training. "whoso shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me." _matt_. xviii. . "take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones." _matt_. xvii. . eighth edition, carefully revised. . preface in again presenting this volume to the world, i trust i feel thankful to god for the favour with which the infant system has been received, and for all the aid i have enjoyed in my course of labour. had the measures i originated for the development of the infant mind, and the improvement of the moral character, been sanctioned at first, as many now think they should have been, their progress would, undoubtedly, have been far greater; but when i consider what has been accomplished under the divine benediction, and amid greater difficulties than ever beset the path of an individual similarly occupied, i know not how to express the gratitude of which i am conscious. it seems proper and even necessary to remark, that the system explained in this volume, is the result of many years of labour. thousands of children have been attentively observed, and for the necessities that arose in their instruction, provision has been made. others have doubtless reached some of the conclusions at which i have arrived, but this is only another instance of the coincidence in judgment and effort, often discoverable in persons far apart, whose attention has been directed to similiar subjects; but with the exception of the elliptical plan, devised by dr. gilchrist, i am not aware that i owe an idea or contrivance to any individual whatever. upwards of twenty-five thousand children have been now under my own care, in various parts of the united kingdom, whose age has not exceeded six years; myself, my daughters, and my agents, have organized many score of schools, and thus i have had opportunities of studying the infant mind and heart, such as none of my contemporaries have ever possessed. still i am aware i have much to learn. i am far less satisfied with the extent of my knowledge, and far less confident of its perfection and completeness now than i was in the earlier part of my course. the whole energies of my mind, however, having been thrown upon the subject, and the whole of my time for the third of a century having been zealously devoted to it, i trust the volume will contain knowledge of a more plain, simple, and practical character than is elsewhere to be found:--perhaps it may not be presumption to say than _can_ elsewhere be found. should i have the pleasure to labour for years to come, i trust i shall have much more to communicate on the subject. two editions of this work in its former state have been printed in german; and it has also been reprinted in america. i have, however, felt it due to the friends of education, to make this volume as complete as possible, and though still occasionally engaged in superintending and organizing schools, i have felt it necessary to revise this eighth edition very carefully throughout, and commence it with a new and additional chapter. _moor cottage, westgate common, wakefield, nov. _. a few testimonials to the infant system. it is said that we are aiming at carrying education too far; that we are drawing it out to an extravagant length, and that, not satisfied with dispensing education to children also have attained what in former times was thought a proper age, we are now anxious to educate mere infants, incapable of receiving benefit from such instruction. this objection may be answered in two ways. in the first place, it should be observed, that the objection comes from those very persons who object to education being given to children when they arrive at a more advanced period, on the ground that their parents then begin to find them useful in labour, and consequently cannot spare so much of their time as might be requisite: surely, that, the education of the children should commence at that time when their labour can be of value to their parents. but the other answer, in my opinion, is still more decisive: it is found even at the early age of seven or eight, that children are not void of those propensities, which are the forerunners of vice, and i can give no better illustration of this, than the fact of a child only eight years old, being convicted of a capital offence at our tribunals of justice; when, therefore, i find that at this early period of life, these habits of vice are formed, it seems to me that we ought to begin still earlier to store their minds with such tastes, and to instruct them in such a manner as to exclude the admission of those practises that lead to such early crime and depravity. a noble friend has most justly stated, that it is not with the experiences of yesterday that we come armed to the contest: it is not a speculation that we are bringing forward to your notice, but an experiment.'--_the lord chancellor_. "in leaving poor children to the care of their parents, neglect is the least that happens; it too frequently occurs that they are turned over to delegates, where they meet with the worst treatment; so that we do not in fact come so much into contact with the parents themselves as with those delegates, who are so utterly unfit for the office they undertake. infant schools, however, have completely succeeded, not only in the negative plan they had in view, of keeping the children out of vice and mischief, but even to the extent of engrafting in their minds at an early age those principles of virtue, which capacitated them for receiving a further stage of instruction at a more advanced school, and finally, as they approached manhood, to be ripened into the noblest sentiments of probity and integrity."--_the marquis of lansdowne_. "i am a zealous friend, upon conviction, to infant schools for the children of the poor. no person who has not himself watched them, can form an adequate action of what these institutions, when judiciously conducted, may effect in forming the tempers and habits of young children; in giving them, not so much actual knowledge, as that which at their age is more important, the habit and faculty of acquiring it; and it correcting those moral defects which neglect or injudicious treatment would soon confirm and render incurable. the early age at which children are taken out of our national schools, is an additional reason for commencing a regular and systematic discipline of their minds and wills, as soon as they are capable of profiting by it; and that is at the very earliest opening of the understanding, and at the first manifestation of a corrupt nature in the shape of a childish petulance and waywardness."--_the bishop of london_. "the claims of this institution were of such a nature, that they required no recommendation but a full statement of them. the foundation of its happy results had been pointed out to exist in the principles of policy, and of religion paramount to all policy--a religion that appealed to every feeling of human nature. he would recommend this charity, as one less attended with perplexity in its operations or doubt as to its utility, than many, which, though established with the best possible motives, frequently failed in effecting the good proposed; but in this the most acute opponent could not discover any mischief that would arise from its success."--_sir james mackintosh_. "i have always thought that that man that would be the greatest benefactor to his country who did most for the suppression of crime; this i am sorry to say, our legislature have neglected in a great degree, while they have readily employed themselves in providing for its punishment. those acquainted with our prisons must know that those found to have sunk deepest into vice and crime were persons who had never received any education, moral or religious. in the refuge for the destitute, an exact account was kept, and it was found that of the great mass of culprits sent there by the magistrates on account of their youth, two-thirds were the children of parents who had no opportunity of educating them. by this institution they would at once promote virtue and prevent vice."--_dr. lushington_. "the real fact is, that the character of all mankind is formed very early--much earlier than might be supposed: at the age of two or three years, dispositions were found in children of a description the most objectionable. in these schools the principles of mutual kindness and assistance were carried as far as could well be conceived, and it was most delightful to regard the conduct of the children towards each other. instead of opposition, they displayed mutual good-will, inculcated to the greatest degree, so as to destroy in the minds of the children that selfishness which was the bane of our nature. such effects appeared almost to realize the golden age, for the children appeared always happy, and never so happy as when attending the schools."--_w. smith, esq. m.p_. "i feel, having witnessed the happy effects produced by these schools, a warm zeal in support of such institutions. we cannot begin too soon to impress religions principles on the minds of the young; it is an affecting consideration, that while great statesmen have been busied in their closets on some fine scheme or speculation, they have neglected these salutary principles which the almighty has given to mankind. it is remarkable how eagerly the young mind receives the histories of the bible, and how well they are fitted to work on their dispositions; and when i consider the miserable state of the poor, i cannot but feel that the rich are in some degree, the authors of it, in having neglected to afford them the means of education."--_w. wilberforce, esq_. "i am much delighted with what i have seen and heard. i confess i entertained doubts of the practicability of the infant school system, but these doubts have this day been removed. if in _one month_ so much can be done, what might not be expected from further training? i now doubt no longer, and anticipate from the extension of such schools a vast improvement in the morals and religion of the humble classes. i conclude with moving a vote of thanks to mr. wilderspin."--_lord chief justice clerk_. "sir john sinclair, rose, and in addressing mr. wilderspin, said, that he was astonished with the results of five weeks training in these perfect infants. he had never seen a greater prodigy. he too had had his prejudices--his doubts of the possibility of infant education; but these doubts had now vanished, and for ever. the arrangements for bodily exercise, connected with mental and moral improvement, especially delighted him. he was amused as well as instructed by the well-applied admixture of diverting expedients to keep the children alive and alert. it was 'seria mixta jocis,' but there was practical sense in the seemingly most frivolous part of the plan. he trusted that the time was not far distant when there should be many such institutions. he called on all present to join him in returning cordial thanks to mr. wilderspin."--_scotsman_. "the grand secret of the improvement found to be derived from these establishments, is their constant tendency to remove evil example and misery from the little creatures during almost the whole of their waking hours. consider how a child belonging to one of these passes his day. as soon as he is up, the indispensable condition, and the only one of his admission to the school, that of clean face and hands, is enforced, and the mother, in order to be relieved of the care of him during the, day, is obliged to have him washed. he then leaves the abode of filth and intemperance, and squalid poverty, and ill-temper, for a clean, airy place, pleasant in summer, warm and dry in winter; and where he sees not a face that is not lighted up with the smile of kindness towards him. his whole day is passed in amusing exercises, or interesting instruction; and he returns at evening-tide fatigued and ready for his bed, so that the scenes passing at his comfortless home make a slight impression on his mind or on his spirits."--_edinburgh review_. contents. chapter i. retrospect of my career. _days and scenes of childhood--parental care--power of early impressions--school experience--commencements in business--sunday school teaching and its results--experiment on a large scale--development of means and invention of implements--heavy bereavement--propagation of the system of education in the neighbourhood of london, and ultimately in most of the principal places in england, wales, ireland, and scotland--misapprehension and perversion of the principles of infant education--signs of advancement--hope for the future_ chapter ii. juvenile delinquency. _teachers of theft--children the dupes of the profligate--an effort at detection--afflicting cases of early depravity--progress of a young delinquent--children employed in theft by their parents--ingenuity of juvenile thieves--results of an early tuition in crime--the juvenile thief incorrigible--facility of disposing of stolen property--a hardened child--parents robbed by their children--a youthful suicide--a youthful murderer_ chapter iii. causes of early crime. _degraded condition of parents--dreadful effects of drunkenness--neglect of children inevitable and wilful--the tutorship of wicked companions--tricks of pantomines injurious--mischiefs arising from sending children to pawnbrokers--fairs demoralizing--all kinds of begging to be repressed_ chapter iv. remedy for existing evils. _means long in operation important--prisons awfully corrupting--deplorable condition of those released from jail--education of the infant poor--its beneficial results--cases of inviolable honesty--appeal of mr. serjeant bosanquet--the infant school an asylum from accident and a prevention of various evils--obstacles in the way of married persons obtaining employment--arguments for the plan of infant training--prevalence of profane swearing--the example often shewn by parents--anecdote in illustration--parents ill used by their young children--christian-like wish of george iii.--education for poor children still objected to--folly of such objection illustrated--lectures on the subject of infant training_ chapter v. principles of infant education. _moral treatment--importance of exercise--play-ground indispensable--the education of nature and human education should be joined--mental development--children should think for themselves--intellectual food adapted for children--a spirit of enquiry should be excited--gradual development of the young mind--neglect of moral treatment--inefficacy of maxims learned by rote--influence of love--the play-ground a field of observation--respect of private property inculcated--force of conscience on the alert--anecdote--advantages of a strict regard for truth--the simple truths of the bible fit for children_ chapter vi. requisites for an infant school. _the master and mistress should reside on the premises--interior arrangements--a school and its furniture--lesson-posts and lessons--the younger children should not be separated from the older--play-ground arrangements--rotary swing--its management and advantages_ chapter vii. qualifications for teachers. _teachers should practice what they teach--necessity of patience--mere automatons will not do for infant teachers--disadvantage of using excessive restraint--a master and mistress more efficient than two mistresses--objections to the sole government of females--too frequent use of the divine names should be avoided--general observations_ chapter viii. hints for conducting an infant school. _classification--getting the children into order--language--lessons on objects--rules to be observed by parents--daily routine of instruction--opening prayer and hymn--object or developing lessons--synopsis of a week's instruction--cleanliness--never frighten children--guard against forgetfulness--observe punctuality--be strictly accurate in your expressions--guard against the entrance of disease--maxims for teachers--resolutions_ chapter ix. gallery teaching.--moral and religious instruction. _original intention of the gallery--what lessons are adapted for it--its misapplication--selection of teachers--observations--gallery lessons--on a feather--a spider--a piece of bog turf--a piece of coal--observations on the preceding lessons--scripture lessons in the gallery--the finding of moses--christ with the doctors--moral training--its neglect in most schools--should be commenced in infancy--beneficial effects of real moral culture--ignorance of teachers--the gallery most useful in moral training--specimen of a moral lesson--illustrations of moral culture--anecdotes--simpson on moral education--observations--hints to teachers_ chapter x. rewards and punishments. _necessity of some punishment--rewards to monitors--trial by jury--illustrative case--necessity of firmness--anecdotes--playing the truant--its evils--means for prevention--devices for punishment--sympathy encouraged--evil of expelling children--case of hartley--difficulty of legislating for rewards and punishments--badges of distinction not necessary_ chapter xi. language. _means for conveying instruction--method of teaching the alphabet in connection with objects--spelling--reading--developing lessons--reading lessons in natural history--the arithmeticon--brass letters--their uses_ chapter xxi. arithmetic. _the arithmeticon--how applied--numeration--addition--subtraction --multiplication--division--fractions--arithmetical tables--arithmetical songs--observations_ chapter xiii. form, position, and size. _method of instruction--geometrical song--anecdotes--size--long measure--observations_ chapter xiv. geography. _its attraction for children--sacred geography--geographical song--lessons on geography_ chapter xv. pictures and conversations. _pictures--religious instruction--specimens of picture lessons on scripture and natural history--other means of religious instruction--effects of religious instruction--observations_ chapter xvi. on teaching by objects. _object boards--utility of this method_ chapter xvii. physical education. _exercise--various positions--exercise blended with instruction arithmetical and geometrical amusements_ chapter xviii. music. _infant ditties--songs on natural history--moral lessons in verse--influence of music in softening the feelings--illustrative anecdote_ chapter xix. grammar. _method of instruction--grammatical rhymes_ chapter xx. the elliptical plan. _method explained--its success_ chapter xxi. remarks on schools. _national schools--british and foreign societies--sunday schools--observations_ chapter xxii. hints on nursery education. _introduction to botany--first lessons in natural history--first truths of astronomy--geographical instruction--conclusion_ the infant system. * * * * * chapter i. retrospect of my career. _days and scenes of childhood--parental care--power of early impressions--school experience--commencement in business--sunday-school teaching and its results--experiment on a large scale--development of plans and invention of implements--heavy bereavement--propagation of the system of education, in the neighborhood of london, and ultimately in most of the principal places in england, wales, ireland, and scotland--misapprehension and perversion of the principles of infant education--signs of advancement--hope for the future_. * * * * * be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, we love the play-place of our early days; the scene is touching."--_cowper_ "what profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?"--_ecclesiastes i. _. * * * * * how came you to think of the infant school system of teaching?--is a question that i have often been asked; and my friends think it advisable that it should, in part at least, be answered. i proceed therefore, in compliance with their wishes, to give some little of the required information in this place, as perhaps it may throw light upon, or explain more clearly, the fundamental principles laid down and advocated throughout this volume. in few words, then, i would reply,--_circumstances_ forced me to it. born an only child, under peculiar circumstances, and living in an isolated neighbourhood, i had no childish companions from infancy; i was, consequently, thrown much on my own resources, and early became a _thinker_, and in some measure a contriver too. i beheld a beautiful world around me, full of everything to admire and to win attention. as soon as i could think at all, i saw that there must be a maker, governor, and protector of this world. such things as had life won my admiration, and thus i became very fond of animals. flowers and fruits, stones and minerals, i also soon learned to observe and to mark their differences. this led to enquiries as to how they came--where from--who made them? my mother told me they came from god, that he made them and all things that i saw; and also that he made herself and me. from that moment i never doubted his wonderful existence. i could not, nor did i have, at that age, any correct idea of god; but i soon learned to have elevated notions of his works, and through them i was led to adore something invisible--something i was convinced of within, but could not see. my mother, to my knowledge, never deceived me, or told me an untruth: therefore, i believed her implicitly; and to this day i never doubted. so much for the implanting an early _faith_ in the unseen. but the beautiful world and the things in it which i saw, and with which i came in contact, oh! how wonderful they appeared to me! they were my companions! other children were strange to me, and they were not nigh either to help or to thwart me. my mother was my oracle during the first six years of childhood, resolving my difficulties and answering my questions. i was happy--very happy! and still look back to those days with indescribable pleasure and satisfaction. i had no tasks. i was not pestered with _a.b. c_., nor _ab. eb. ib_. from _things_ my parents chiefly taught me my first lessons, and they have been as durable as life. for days and weeks did i study such lessons. my parents waited till i asked for information, and when it was required it was never denied. the world and the wonders in it formed as it were a heaven to me. i am told i gave but little trouble at this age. in the beautiful fields and wild coppices about hornsey, as yet unencroached upon by suburban extension; and by the side of the then solitary banks of the new river, i was always to be found. in cold and wet weather i had a stock of similar lessons in my home. small live animals were my constant companions; they taught me that love begets love. i did love and delight in them, and when they died i mourned their loss. every day brought me new information, which my parents perfected. at length the alphabet was mastered, and afterwards spelling, reading, and so forth. my mind _being thus previously filled with ideas_, the acquirement of words and abstract terms became less irksome, and i cannot remember that thus far it cost me any trouble, much less pain. information of every kind fit for childhood then really gave me pleasure. no doubt i am greatly indebted to my parents for their judicious management. my father always in the evening, took great pains to explain things to me; he nurtured but never crammed; he knew when to teach and when to let alone. unfortunately, through very peculiar circumstances, i was removed from the immediate care and superintendence of both parents rather early in life; and, at an age the most dangerous, was left to grapple nearly alone with the wide world and the beings in it, with little of either parental guidance. it was then i saw the immense importance and advantage of early impressions. to me they were of incalculable benefit, and no doubt led, when i became a man, to the thoughts which ended in the development and practical working of the infant system and method of education. schools for infants then existed, but what were they? simply dame-schools, with the hornbook for boys and girls, and perhaps a little sewing for the latter. their sign was--"children taught to read and work here," and their furniture the cap and bells, the rod in pickle, and a corner for dunces. the finishing stroke was seen in the parlour of the inn, or the farm-house, in the shape of needlework as a samplar;--"lydia languish, her work, done at ---- school, in the year of our lord, ." such were the schools in country places then in existence, the little ones doing nothing. in after-life, i thought a remedy was required and might be found, and therefore set about working it out. how it was done shall be hereafter explained. i knew my own infant state had been a happy one, and i wondered to see children crying to go to school, when learning had been such a delight to me. but i soon ceased to wonder when i was sent there myself. at my first school i can truly say i learnt nothing, except it be that i had especially the sense of feeling. i often had raps with the cane on the head, across the shoulders, and on the hand, and i found it was mainly for not learning what the teacher had _forgotten to teach me_. the terms used were "master" and "mistress," and they were tolerably appropriate as far as i was concerned, for to me both became objects of terror, so much so, that for the first time in my life, i really fretted when the hour of teaching came. my parents were not long in perceiving this although i did not complain. they told me it was for my good that i should go to school, and i thoroughly believed them. yet i could not understand why it should be associated with so much dislike and pain on my part, when my first school,--the beautiful world of nature, had been so lovely, and my first teachers had always increased the delight by removing my difficulties, and this so much so that i now longed for evening to come to have fresh light and instruction given. my father now decided that i should not go to school, and he became my teacher as before, the world being my great book. i was delighted with robinson crusoe, and this work became my companion, and to which was added the pilgrim's progress. after these, my great favourite was buffon's natural history. i used to go alone, taking a volume at a time, to read amidst the pleasant country around, but most frequently in the quiet nooks and retreats of hornsey wood. it seems, however, that i was always watched and superintended by my mother during these readings and rural rambles, for whenever danger was near she generally appeared, but seldom otherwise, so that i had perfect freedom in these matters. i have every reason to believe that the first seven years of my life laid the basis of all i know that is worth knowing, and led to the formation of my character and future career in life. of my schooling afterwards it is unnecessary to say much, as it was the usual routine such as others had, but it never satisfied me, and i even then saw errors throughout the whole, and this strengthened my first impressions, and tended to mature the after-thought in me, that something wanted doing and _must be done_. it is not my intention in this introductory chapter to write an auto-biography; but my object is simply to show, how one impression followed another in my case, and what led to it; to point out briefly the various plans and inventions i had recourse to in carrying out my views and intentions; and, finally, to allude to their propagation through the country personally by myself, on purpose to show, in conclusion, that although infant education has been extensively adopted, and many of its principles, being based on nature, have been applied with great success to older children, yet especially in the case of infants, that strict adherence to nature and simplicity which is so fundamental and so requisite, has been often overlooked, and in some cases totally discarded. it will, i trust, appear from what has been already said, that even from early childhood i both saw and felt that there was a period in human life, and that the most important period, as experience has proved to my full satisfaction, not legislated for, that is, not duly provided with suitable and appropriate methods of education. to see this was one thing, to provide a remedy for it and to _invent plans_ for carrying out that remedy, was another. the systems of bell and of lancaster were then commencing operations, but were quite unsuitable for children under seven years of age at least, and therefore took little or no cognizance of that early period, which i had been inwardly convinced was of such eminent importance. i was destined for business, and served the usual apprenticeship to become qualified for it, and also continued in it for a short period on my own account. even at this time the thought ever haunted me as to what should be done for young children. at length the germ was developed at one of the sunday schools, which were then rising into general notice. for years i attended one of these in london, and here circumstances again befriended me, regarding the matter so frequently in my thoughts. the teachers mostly preferred having a class to superintend that knew something, and i being then a junior, it fell to my lot to have a class that knew little or nothing. i mean nothing that it was the object of the sunday-school to teach. it soon appeared clear to me, that such a class required different treatment to those more advanced, and especially the _young_ children. nobody wanted this class, it was always "to let," if i did not take it. the result was, i always had it. others looked to the post of honour, the bible-class. i soon found that to talk to such children as i had to teach, in the manner the others did to the older and more advanced children, was useless, and thus i was forced to simplify my mode of teaching to suit their state of apprehension, and now and then even to amuse them. this succeeded so well, that in the end my class became the popular class, and i became still further convinced of the desirableness of an _especial plan for teaching the very young_. i, however, still thought that the alphabet should be taught first, with the usual things in their order. at length, shortly after my marriage, which was rather early in life, an opportunity presented itself for trying an experiment on a larger scale; from having explained my views on early education to a friend, i was solicited to take the superintendence of an asylum for young children, about to be formed in a populous part of london. having thus an opportunity of carrying out my wishes, thoughts, and feelings, in a way that i could not have anticipated, i gave up my connexion with business, and devoted myself to the object. great and unforseen difficulties however had to be encountered. the first week was dreadful. i began with too many children, and we had six whom the mothers afterwards confessed they sent to _wean_. these not only cried themselves, but set all the others crying also, and we regretted having begun the experiment. at length, driven almost to despair, it became evident that something new must be done to still the tumult. as an expedient, i elevated a cap on a pole, which immediately attracted their attention and occasioned silence. thus i obtained a clue to guide me, and my mind instantly perceived one of the most fundamental principles in infant teaching, in fact of most teaching, and which long experience has proved true, and that is, to appeal to the senses of the children. after this, every day developed something new to me, the children became happy beyond my expectations, and my course onward was gradually progressive. children and teachers became happy together; difficulties vanished as we proceeded, and at length my wife and i made up our minds to devote our whole lives to the perfecting of our plans, and the carrying them out extensively. the novelty of the thing drew numbers of visitors to a district, where the carriages of the nobility and gentry had not been seen before; but the labour to us was so greatly increased by this, that my wife sunk under it, and i was left with four young children, to prosecute my plans alone in the world. from the day i caught the idea, that a great secret in teaching the young was to teach through the _senses_, the various implements now in such general use in infant schools, were step by step invented by me. objects of all kinds were introduced, and oral lessons given upon them, to teach their qualities and properties, and amongst the various visitors most frequently present at such times, was the gentleman who has acquired fame by publishing "lessons on objects," which little work has elsewhere been highly commended by me, albeit it came forth into the world several years after the period i now speak of. to give such lessons i found it requisite to have the children altogether, so as better to attract their attention simultaneously. this was first attempted by placing them at one end of the room, but it was found inconvenient; then parallel lines were chalked across the floor, and they sat down in order on these; but though attention was gained, the posture was unsuitable. cords were then stretched across to keep them in proper rank, and various experiments tried with seats, until they ended in the construction of a permanently fixed gallery of regularly ascending seats. this implement or structure has now come into almost universal use in infant schools, and, in fact, they are considered incomplete without one; and also they are in much request in schools for children of every age. to give an idea of number through the eye, i had recourse at first to buttons strung on strings across a frame, and this led to the substitution of wooden balls on wires, and other improvements through experience, until the arithmeticon, hereafter described, was fully formed. it having been found a useful instrument, the credit of contriving it has been impugned, by liking it to the roman abacus and chinese swanpan; but were those instruments like in structure, or designed especially to teach the multiplication table? if not, they are no more similar than "a hawk to a hand-saw." the former i have never seen, and the first time i saw one of the chinese instruments was some five or six years ago in the museum at hull. the clapping of hands, the moving of arms, marching in order, and various other motions, all of which are now become the especial characteristics of an infant-school, were gradually introduced as circumstances or nature dictated, partly to obtain simultaneous action and obedience, and partly to provide that physical exercise which beings so young perpetually require, and which they are constantly taking when left free and unrestrained. it is not requisite to make mention here of the swing--the play grounds--the flower borders--and various other matters which are fully treated of in the following portions of this work, further than to add, that they are now generally adopted in schools, and especially in some of the principal training establishments in the british empire. as these plans and instruments are used by a certain religious infant-school society, which professes to have imported its system from switzerland, where such things never had their origin, i feel it necessary most emphatically to repeat, that they are entirely of my own invention. after the severe bereavement mentioned above, i still persevered in my favourite study, and learned more from my own children than i did before, having to act in the double capacity of father and mother. i am well aware of the loss my children sustained by the above calamity. in the matter of training, nothing can replace a good mother,--and such indeed she eminently was! i felt the heavy stroke more severely, and my children did also; but i consoled myself with the reflection, that my loss was her gain, and that she had lived to witness fruits of her unparalleled labours, to the thorough abandonment of self, and the glory of her maker. "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these little ones, ye have done it unto me." night and day, when i had time to think, such promises as these cheered and sustained me in doing what i could for my own motherless children, and more and more cemented my affections on the children of others, and, finally, enabled me to mature my plans, and gave me strength and courage to carry them out, first in the villages and places near london, and, ultimately, single-handed and alone, through more than a quarter of a century, in many of the chief cities, towns, and villages of the united kingdom. simply to state this fact is all that is requisite here to answer my present purpose, and to enlarge more upon it is needless, as a full detail of the whole career is given in my "early discipline illustrated; or, the infant system progressing and successful," third edition, published in , and to which much more would require adding to bring it down to the present time, if a further edition should be called for. that prejudice should assail me, and objections be started as i came more out into the world, was to be expected. i knew my own intentions, but the world did not, and i came in for a full share of obloquy and persecution. this did me much good, and was a preparatory discipline, to make me careless of the opinion of mankind in the matter, so long as i felt that i was in the right, and had the approval of my own conscience. the more i was opposed, the more were my energies lighted up and strengthened; opposition always sharpened my faculties, instead of overcoming and depressing me. the whole gradually prospered from the first, under every disadvantage and notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of the short-sighted and bigoted. these things laid my first patrons prostrate, and the society of great names which followed, was soon dissolved. every effort was made by the enemies of true training and education, to crush the thing in the bud, and not only the thing, but also the man who developed it and worked it out. thank god, these inimical aims did not succeed. though worldly patrons failed, i had one patron who never deserted me, but who upheld and encouraged me from first to last, until the end was gained. not, however, all that was aimed at, but much of it, and the rest will follow or i am greatly mistaken. i have in various places seen things that i earnestly contended for, but which were rejected at the time, at length established and their value seen. look at the schools in existence now, bad as some of them are, and compare them with those which existed a third of a century ago, and it will be found that they have progressed, and it may safely be anticipated that they will still further progress, for there is much need of it. the system pourtrayed in this book is intended to act on all the faculties of a child, especially the highest, and to strengthen them at the time the mere animal part of his nature is weak. the existing schools were not found fit to take our children when they left us. the dull, monotonous, sleepy, heavy system pursued, was quite unadapted to advance such pupils. at this point of the history much damage was done to our plans. the essence or kernel was omitted and the mere shell retained, to make infant schools harmonise with the existing ones, instead of the contrary. there were and are however two great exceptions to this rule. the model schools at dublin under the government board of education, and the glasgow training schools for scotland. at dublin all is progression. the infant department is the best in europe,--i believe the best in the world. the other departments are equally good in most things, and are well managed, as far as regards a good secular education being given, and better i think than any similar institution in england. at glasgow the same master whom i taught still exists. i have not seen the schools for many years, but i hear from those who have been trained there, that nothing can work better. the glasgow committee, with mr. stow at their head, deserve the thanks of the whole community for having applied the principles on which the infant school system is based, to juveniles, and carried out and proved the practicability of it for the public good. i told them this in lectures at glasgow long ago, and exhibited before them children to prove the truths i promulgated, both there and in other parts of scotland, to convince a doubting and cautious public that my views were practicable. i may add, in passing, that i found the scotch took nothing on trust. they would listen to my lectures, but it always ended in my being obliged to prove it with children. to david stow much credit is due, for having written useful books and performed useful works. i am not the man to deprive him of this his just due, but i have such faith in the honour of his countrymen in general, that i believe the time is not far distant when some one of them will give to me that credit which is fairly and justly due to me with respect to the educational movements in scotland. no class of men are better able to appreciate and understand the principles on which a system of true education should be based than scotchmen, and hence, though cautious in taking up new things, or new views of things, they can do justice to, and appreciate, that which is worthy of their attention. at the time i have been speaking of there were no lessons published suitable for us. i searched the print shops in the metropolis, and with the aid of drawings from friends, supplied this deficiency. next i had suitable lessons printed to accompany them, and also spelling lessons of such words as could be _acted_ and _explained_. then followed suitable reading lessons, prints of objects, and the simple forms of geometry. when a demand was created for all these, the publishing trade took them up, and thus the numerous excellent plates and lessons now published for the purposes of teaching, had their first origin. i ant thoroughly convinced that the first seven years of a child's life is the _golden period_, and if i can induce mankind generally to think with me, and to act on the principles humbly laid open in the succeeding chapters of this book, i may feel some consolation that i have not lived in vain. sure i am that if the world will only give man a fair chance, and train him from the beginning with care, with prudence, with caution, with circumspection, with freedom, and above all with _love_, he will bear such fruit, under the blessing of god, as will make even this world as a paradise. from childhood up to age has this truth been perfecting and strengthening in me, and i have no more doubt that it is a truth, than i have of my own existence. who can look upon a child without admiring it, without loving it? with my feelings it is impossible! when i compare the revealed will of god,--the scriptures, with his other great book, the book of nature, which i read so early in life, and read with delight to this present hour, i see the one illustrates the other. i see that the _best_ ground produces the _rankest weeds_--but not if cultivated. what does not care do for all things in nature, why not then for man? let him run wild through neglect, and undoubtedly he produces weeds; but this, to my mind, is an argument in his favour, and shews the ground is capable of producing rich fruits. when we study the true nature of his mind, with the same assiduity as we now do study the nature of his body, then will mankind see it in this light, begin at the right end, and cultivate from the first the beautiful faculties of his own species. i say beautiful! and are not the budding faculties of childhood both beautiful and lovely? "feed my lambs," saith the lord jesus. but, reader, are they all duly fed in this rich, wealthy, and christian country? how many, on the contrary, are fed with evil influences, street associations, and are thus poisoned at every pore, until their being is thoroughly contaminated through neglect, public and private, and, when not orphans, even parental neglect also; and then after having increased our county rates, enlarged our prisons, and built union workhouses (with respect to morals and training for the young, i say pest-houses) we add ragged schools. we allow them to become contaminated, and when that is accomplished, we go to work to undo what has been done. if this does not succeed we punish by law the poor neglected beings for taking the poisons we really offered them! oh, rare consistency in this boasted age of light, and science, and learning! let us, therefore, first seek an education worthy of the name, and then find the best means of carrying it out. what exists at present is fundamentally defective, especially by beginning too late, and as regards the plans and principles laid down for infants in many cases, much has been merely travestied, and many of the most essential parts entirely set aside or overlooked. the amount of solid information that may be given to an infant by a wise and judicious mother, during the first two years only, would appear to many persons astonishing. i have as clear a recollection of what my mother taught me at two years old, as i have of that which she taught me at the age of six. the facts crowd upon me so fast that i scarcely know where to stop. those lessons were the germs of the inventions and babyisms--the hand-clapping, arm-twisting, and the like--with which the infants are so delighted in their schools, and which, at the time they were developed, about a third of a century since, were scouted, and the inventor looked upon as a good natured simpleton, or a well-meaning fool. i have a rather vivid recollection of this fact, but in the end, as we proceeded, many who came to sneer, went away with very different feelings. the plans were for infants, for infants they answered well, but i wish i could say that no excresences had grown upon them. now the ends to be answered in infant education, as intended by me, are as follows. first, to feed the child's faculties with suitable food; second,--to simplify and explain everything, so as to adapt it properly to those faculties; third, not to overdo anything, either by giving too much instruction, or instruction beyond their years, and thus over-excite the brain, and injure the faculties; and, fourth, ever to blend both exercise and amusement with instruction at due intervals, which is readily effected by a moderate amount of singing, alternating with the usual motions and evolutions in the schoolroom, and the unfettered freedom of the play-ground. if these rules be attended to, the following results are certain,--a higher state of physical, mental, and moral health. physical health is essential to mental vigour if it is to come to manhood. if the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual constitution be properly acted upon, fed, and trained, it adds to the happiness of the child; but if this is not done, it becomes miserable, and as a consequence restless, troublesome, and mischievous. such facts were made very evident to me by the infants under my care in the earlier part of my career, and also have been fully confirmed throughout it, and they have forced me as it were to that more lively, interesting, and amusing mode of instruction, which i have through life endeavoured to propagate. i found children to be highly delighted with pictures and object-lessons; hence their value and high importance is so strongly insisted on in all my books, and the best methods of using them distinctly laid down. the trouble of rightly using such lessons has caused them to be almost entirely laid aside in very many existing infant schools, and in too many instances the mere learning and repeating of sounds by rote, or what may very properly be called the "parrot system," has been introduced in their place. but i yet hope that the good sense of the public will in the end remedy such defects. in such cases the memory is the only faculty exercised, and that at the expense of those that are higher. where this is persisted in, the infant system is rendered nugatory, and my labours are in vain. it therefore cannot be too strongly insisted on, and too frequently repeated, that one of its most fundamental principles, as regards the unfolding, properly and easily, of the intellectual faculties, is to communicate _notions_ and _ideas_ rather than words and sounds, or at least to let them be done together. as before stated, the gallery had its origin in my desire to teach the children simultaneously. it enables a teacher more readily to secure their full attention in all oral lessons, and establishes a sympathy between them. more real facts may be taught children simultaneously by the master, than can be taught by all the monitors in a school. the little infants should always sit at the bottom, and by no means be confined to another room. they can see and hear all that is going on, and understand it far more than you would suppose, though they cannot yet tell all they learn and know; but when the power of speech comes, they will surprise you with what they have learned. it is therefore a great error to separate children and cut them off from the advantage of all object-lessons, and gallery-teaching, because they are the youngest. they learn more through sympathy and communion with their five or six year elders, than the most clever adult can teach them. an infant-school, is, in many respects, a community in a state of nature. what one does, the other almost involuntarily learns. the merest infants are not an exception to this rule, and therefore the separation in many infant-schools of the children, invariably into two classes, sometimes in two rooms, is a great mistake, and can only arise from ignorance of the laws under which the young mind unfolds itself, and a misunderstanding of the first principles of infant-teaching. perhaps one reason that infant-school teaching has not been kept up to its proper point and true standing, is, the desire to make a striking shew before the visitors in a school. i fear the grounds for this opinion are not slight. perhaps nothing has lead more to the multiplication of singing, even to the injury of the children. the ease with which they learn a metrical piece by _rote_, and the readiness with which they acquire a tune to it, is surprising, and as the exhibition of such attainments forms a striking sinew, in many cases little else is taught them. but to a sensible and thinking mind, one single piece _understood_, that is, one where clear ideas are annexed to the words in the minds of the children, is worth a hundred where this is not the case. intellectual improvement, and moral training, are not thus easily exhibited, especially, the latter; but on dilligent attention to these, the real and permanent utility of the schools depends. many things have been taught most unsuitable for young children, and that simplicity which is so absolutely requisite, both as regards matter and language, seriously departed from. let but the great principle of teaching through the senses be borne distinctly in mind, and of giving ideas in preference to sounds, and it will have a strong tendency to put an end to the evil complained of. how much may be taught by the simplest object, such as a stone? form--weight--hardness, colour, sound, and numerous other qualities and properties, all of which must be clearly understood, because they are demonstrated by the sight and other senses. once give to the mind a store of clear ideas in regular and natural order, and a series of words that are distinct and definite in meaning, and you have laid a firm foundation whereon to exercise the higher faculties of reflection and reasoning. still more is it of paramount importance to educate and bring out the moral faculties, to cultivate the sense of right and wrong, to enlighten and strengthen the young conscience, to teach the love of good, and the hatred of evil, and to strive to bring the whole being under the new commandment of christ, "that ye love one another." the golden rule, "to do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," is one of the most powerful precepts that can be applied to awaken just moral feelings; and innumerable instances must occur, in the varied events which happen in a school, to bring it home powerfully to the heart, and illustrate it appropriately. perhaps in nothing has that simplicity of teaching so requisite for the young, and so earnestly contended for by me throughout, been so much disregarded, neglected, and preverted as in the matter of religion. i taught from the first, by means of pictures properly selected, scriptural truths and facts, histories and parables; and also suitable texts, and simple hymns and prayers were added. this surely was enough for _infants_. i thought so then, and i think so still, for an overdoing always ends in an undoing, and the mind of a child should never be crammed with that which it cannot understand, to the neglect of that which it may. i have opened schools for many sects and parties, and have been sorry to find them so prone to bind the "grevious burdens" of their own peculiar dogmas on the feeble minds of little children, to the neglect of the "weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and the love of god." i hope a time will come when the distinct precepts of christ, in this respect, will be more faithfully regarded. the religion for infants should be a simple trust in "the love and kindness of god our saviour," a desire of grace and strength from him, and an aim to live thereby in love and duty to their parents and teachers, and in kindness and affection with their brothers, sisters, and schoolfellows. such things as these, their young minds may apprehend, feel, and apply, and thus be strengthened and benefitted, but scholastic subtelties, and controverted dogmas, such as the grey-headed are perpetually disputing about, surely should never be taught to infants by any one who has carefully considered the subject, and properly studied the nature of the infant mind. in all probability advancing years will prevent me in future from personally labouring much in the cause, and from personally overcoming objections, by presenting publicly, facts that cannot be refuted. it is out of my power now to employ agents and pay them. i cannot take infants by sea and land to convince unbelievers, and silence gainsayers. neither circumstances nor remaining strength, will allow me to repeat these things. i must trust then to my pen, to the thinkers amongst us, and above all to the good providence of god, for further success in behalf of the rising generation. those who doubt what i assert about children should recollect one fact--twenty-seven thousand have passed through my hands, and were for a short time under my training, and have then been examined by me to convince a doubting public, on the spot where they happened to be in each town and country, all this for the period of one-third of a century. ought not this to entitle me, as respects the education of children, to say such a thing is right, or even such a thing is wrong? the abuse of a plan is no argument against its use. that it has been abused i am well aware,--that the _parrot-system_ has been revived and also applied in infant-schools. it was never intended to injure the young brain by over-exciting it, or to fill the memory with useless rubbish; yet this is done. i cannot help it. i have done and will do my best to prevent such a violation of the very first principles of infant teaching. to conclude, there is much to be thankful for! since the infant-system was evolved, a very great improvement has taken place in the character of school-books, and also in prints. the graphic illustrations and the simplicity of style, on a variety of subjects, is admirable. the same may be said with respect to nursery books; i see a great improvement in all these. this is comforting to one situated as i am, and leads me to hope much from the future. i trust the intellectual character of the age will advance, and not only the intellectual but also the moral and spiritual, and "that truth and justice, religion and piety may be established amongst us for all generations." chapter ii. juvenile delinquency. _teachers of theft--children the dupes of the profligate--an effort at detection--affecting cases of early depravity--progress of a young delinquent--children employed in theft by their parents--ingenuity of juvenile thieves--results of an early tuition in crime--the juvenile thief incorrigible--facility of disposing of stolen property--a hardened child--parents robbed by their children--a youthful suicide--a youthful murderer_. * * * * * "an uneducated, unemployed poor, not only must be liable to fall into a variety of temptations, but they will, at times, unavoidably prove restless, dissatisfied, perverse, and seditious: nor is this all, even their most useful and valuable qualities, for want of regular and good habits, and a proper bias and direction from early religious instruction, frequently became dangerous and hurtful to society; their patience degenerates into sullenness, their perseverance into obstinacy, their strength and courage into brutal ferocity."--_the bishop of norwich_. * * * * * it has long been a subject of regret as well as of astonishment to the reflecting and benevolent, that notwithstanding the numerous institutions which exist in this country for the education and improvement of the poor, and in defiance of the endeavours of our magistracy and police establishment, crime should rather increase than diminish. many persons have been induced to conclude from this fact that our sunday, parochial, and national schools, as well as our bible societies, and institutions of a similar nature, are of little or no use. absurd as the inference is, i have known more than one or two persons draw it; not considering, that although these means may be insufficient to counteract the cause of crime, or to prevent all its evil effects, yet, nevertheless, they must certainly check its progress;--that if there be many offenders, despite of these institutions, there would, doubtless, be many more were they not in existence; and hence to revile or neglect them is unworthy of good sense or good feeling. it is not my purpose in the present chapter to dwell on the commission of crime generally, but on juvenile delinquency in particular; and on this only so far as regards the case of young children. i will, therefore, make public a collection of facts, some of which were obtained at considerable personal hazard and inconvenience, which will place it in a clear yet painful light. it is said, that in the year , the number of boys, in london alone, who procured a considerable part of their subsistence by pocket-picking and thieving in every possible form, was estimated at from eleven to fifteen hundred. one man who lived in wentworth-street, near spitalfields, had forty boys in training to steal and pick pockets, who were paid for their exertions with a part of the plunder; fortunately, however, for the public, this notable tutor of thieves was himself convicted of theft, and transported. this system of tutorage is by no means uncommon, nor is it confined to the male sex. i remember reading some time back, in the police reports, of a woman who had entrapped _eight or ten children_ from their parents, had trained them up, and sent them out thieving; nor was it until one of these infantile depredators was taken in the act of stealing, that this was made known, and the children restored to their homes. here we see eight or ten children, probably from the neglect of their parents, enticed away, no doubt by the promise of a few cakes, or of some other trifling reward, and in imminent danger of becoming confirmed thieves, from which they were rescued by this providential discovery of their situation; and we know not how many children may have been led to evil practices in like manner. i will give another instance which occurred at the office at queen square.--a female, apparently no more than nineteen years of age, named jane smith, and a child just turned of five years old, named mary ann ranniford, were put to the bar, before edward markland, esq., the magistrate, charged with circulating counterfeit coin in westminster and the county of surrey, to a vast extent. it appeared that the elder prisoner had long been known to be a common utterer of base coin, in which she dealt very largely with those individuals who are agents in london to the manufacturers of the spurious commodity in birmingham. she had been once or twice before charged with the offence, and therefore she became so notorious that she was necessitated to leave off putting the bad money away herself; but so determined was she to keep up the traffic, that she was in the habit of employing children of tender years to pass the counterfeit money. on one occasion two bow street officers observed her at her old trade, in company with the child ranniford. the officers kept a strict eye upon her movements, and saw her several times pass something to the little girl; and she, by the direction of her instructor, went into different shops (such as hosiers, where she purchased balls of worsted, pastry-cooks, tobacconists, and fruiterers), where she passed the bad money, and received in return goods and change. on the other side of the bridge, the patroles saw the prisoner smith deliver something to the child, and point out the shop of mr. isaacs, a fruiterer, in bridge street, westminster. the child went in, and asked for a juicy lemon, and gave a counterfeit shilling in payment. mrs. isaacs had no suspicion from the tender age of the utterer, and its respectable appearance, that the money was bad, and was about to give change, when one of the officers entered, and took the deluded child into custody, whilst his companion secured the elder prisoner (smith), and on searching her pockets he found twelve bad shillings, some parcels of snuff, several balls of cotton and worsted, and other trifling articles, which the child had purchased in the course of the day. the officers who had secured them, learned from the child that her parents lived in cross street, east lane, walworth, and that smith had taken her out for a walk. the patrol instantly communicated the circumstance to the child's parents, who were hard-working honest people, and their feelings on hearing that their infant had been seduced into the commission of such a crime, can be more easily conceived than described. they stated that the woman smith had formerly lived in the same street, and was frequently giving half-pence and cakes to the child, who would, in consequence, follow her anywhere. some time since, she removed to lock's square, lock's fields, and they (the parents) had not seen her for some time. on the day referred to the child was playing in the street, and not finding her come home they became alarmed, and went everywhere, broken hearted, in quest of her, but they could hear no tidings of her till the sad news was brought them by the officers. the poor mother was now in attendance, and her feelings were dreadfully affected, and excited the commiseration of all present. the prisoner smith made no defence, and held her head down during the examination. the child stood by her, and took no notice of the proceedings, and they were both fully committed for trial. the mother, on seeing her infant consigned to prison, became quite frantic, and wept hysterically, and had it it not been for the gaoler, she would have inflicted some violence upon the woman smith, for seducing her infant. facts of this kind are sufficient to shew the utility, indeed i may say, the most absolute necessity of providing some means, far, very far more efficient than those at present in existence, for the protection and improvement of the infant poor; that they may not thus fall into the hands of evil and designing wretches, who make a living by encouraging the children of the poor to commit crimes, of the produce of which they themselves take the greatest part. the younger the children are, the better they suit the purposes of such miscreants; because, if children are detected in any dishonest act, they know well, that few persons will do more than give the child or children a tap on the head, and send them about their business. the tenth part of the crimes committed by these juvenile offenders never comes under public view, because should any person be robbed by a child, and detect him in the act, he is silenced by the by-standers with this remark,--oh! he is but a child, let him go this time, perhaps the poor thing has done it from necessity, being in want of bread. thus the delinquent is almost sure to escape, and, instead of being punished, is not unfrequently rewarded for the adventure, as was the case in the following instance. having had occasion to walk through shoreditch some time since, i saw a number of persons collected together round a little boy, who, it appeared, had stolen a brass weight from the shop of a grocer. the shopman stated that three boys came into the shop for half-an-ounce of candied horehound, and that while he was getting down the glass which contained it, one of them contrived to purloin the weight in question. having some suspicion of the boys, from the circumstance of having recently lost a number of brass weights, he kept his eyes on them, when he saw one put his hand into a box that was on the counter, take out the largest weight, and then run out of the shop, followed by the other two. the boy who stole it, slipped the weight into the hand of one of the others; but the shopman, having observed this manoeuvre, followed the boy who had the weight, who, being the youngest of the three, could not run very fast; he, finding himself closely pursued, threw the weight into the road, and when he was taken, declared that it was not he who took it. the man wished to take the child back to the shop, in order that his master might do with him as he thought proper, but the by-standers, with a charitable _zeal_ which evinced little _knowledge_, prevented him; one man in particular seemed to interest himself much in the boy's behalf, stating that he knew the child very well, and that he had neither father nor mother. the child immediately took up this plea, and added that he had had no victuals all day. the individual before mentioned then gave him a penny, and his example was followed by many more, till i think the boy had obtained nearly a shilling. i put several questions to him, but was checked by this fellow, who told me, that as i had given the child nothing, i had no right to ask so much? and, after a great deal of abuse, he ended by telling me, that if i did not "take myself off" he would "give me something for myself." feeling, however, a great desire to sift further into the matter, i feigned to withdraw, but kept my eye upon the boy, and followed him for nearly two hours, until i saw him join two other boys, one of whom i had not seen before, and who had a bag with something very heavy in it, which, i have every reason to believe, were weights, or something which they had obtained in a similar manner. wishing to ascertain the fact, i approached them, but they no sooner perceived me, than the little fellow who had been the principal actor in the affair, called out "_nose, nose_,"--a signal-word, no doubt, agreed upon amongst them,--when they all ran down some obscure alleys. i followed, but was knocked down, as if by accident, by two ill-looking fellows, who continued to detain me with apologies till the boys had got safely away. i have little doubt that this was an instance of that organized system of depredation of which i have before spoken, and that the man who took so active a part at the first, was at the bottom of the business; and, in fact, the tutor and employer of the predatory urchins. his activity in preventing the boy from being taken back to the shop--his anxiety to promote a subscription for the boy,--and, lastly, his threat of personal violence if i interfered in the matter, by continuing to question the child,--all these circumstances confirm me in the opinion. it is only by the knowledge of this fact--the association of infant offenders with those of maturer and hardened habits--that we can account for such cases as the following.--on the th of july, , a child _only seven years old_, was brought before the magistrate at lambeth street office, charged with frequently robbing his mother, and was ordered to be locked up all night in the gaol-room. in the evening, however, when his mother returned, he forced his way out of the room, and behaved with such violence that the attendants were obliged to iron both his hands and legs! there can be no doubt that this child had been for a long time under the instruction and evil influence of some old and hardened offender; he must, indeed, have undergone much training before he could have arrived at such a pitch of hardihood, as to make it necessary to handcuff and fetter a child of so tender an age; and to enable him to hold even the magistrates, officers, and his own parent, at defiance. the following cases afford further proof of the same lamentable truth; the first is extracted from a morning paper of the th of september, . "a little boy, not more than _six years of age_, was brought before the lord mayor at the mansion house, on saturday, the th instant, having been found in a warehouse, where he had secreted himself for the purpose of thieving. at a late hour on friday night, a watchman was going his round, when, on trying a warehouse in which there was much valuable property, to see whether it was safe, he heard the little prisoner cry. the persons who had the care of the warehouse were roused, and he was taken out. in his fright he acknowledged that a man had taken him from his mother, and induced him, upon a promise of reward, to steal into the warehouse; upon a concerted signal, he was to act as directed by the fellow on the outside; but becoming terrified at being confined so long in the dark, he had cried out and discovered himself. his mother came forward, and received a good character as the wife of a hard-working man. the lord mayor gave her son up to her, with an injunction to act carefully and strictly with him. there was reason to believe, he said, that several considerable robberies had been recently committed by means of children like the prisoner, who stole in and remained concealed until midnight, when they gave admission to the robbers. the police should have their eyes upon him." the other instance is from a report of one of the sessions in london:-- "william hart, an urchin _seven years of age_, was indicted for stealing twenty-two shillings in money, numbered, from the person of mary conner. the prosecutrix stated, that on the day named in the indictment, she took twenty-five shillings to get something out of pledge, but as there was a crowd in mary-le-bone, assembled to witness a fight, she was induced to join the mob. while standing there she felt something move in her pocket, and putting her hand outside her clothes, she laid hold of what proved to be the hand of the prisoner, which she held until she had given him a slap on the face, and then she let him go; but on feeling in her pocket she discovered that the theft had actually been committed, and that only three shillings were left. a constable took the urchin into custody, and accused him of robbing her of twenty-two shillings. the prisoner said, 'i have twenty-two shillings in my pocket, but it is my mother's money; she gets so drunk she gives me her money to take care of.' the officer stated to the same effect as the prosecutrix, and added, that _in a secret pocket in his jacket he found fourteen shilling and sixpence. it was the practice of gangs of pickpockets to have a child like this to commit the robbery, and hand the plunder to them_. witness went to his parents, who said he had been absent seven weeks, and they would have nothing to do with him. mr. baron garrow, in feeling terms, lamented that a child of such tender years should be so depraved. he added, 'i suppose, gentlemen, i need only to ask you to deliver your verdict.' his lordship then observed, that he would consult with his learned brother as to the best manner of disposing of the prisoner. they at length decided, that although it might seem harsh, the court would record against him fourteen years' transportation, and, no doubt, government would place him in some school; if he behaved well there, the sentence might not be carried into full effect." i remember a query being once put to me by a person who visited the spitalfields infant school at the time it was under my management: "how can you account for the fact, that notwithstanding there are so many old and experienced thieves detected, convicted, and sent out of the country every session, we cannot perceive any dimunition of the numbers of such characters; but that others seem always to supply their places?" the foregoing instance of the systematized instruction of young delinquents by old adepts in the art of pilfering, affords, i think, a satisfactory answer the interrogatory. the dexterity of experienced thieves shews, that no small degree of care and attention is bestowed on their tuition. the first task of novices, i have been informed, is to go in companies of threes or fours, through the respectable streets and squares of the metropolis, and with an old knife, or a similar instrument, to wrench off the brass-work usually placed over the key-holes of the area-gates, &c., which they sell at the marine store-shops; and they are said sometimes to realize three or four shillings a day, by this means. wishing to be satisfied on the point, i have walked round many of the squares in town, and in more than a solitary experiment, have found that _not one gate in ten_ had any brass-work over the key-hole; it had moreover been evidently wrenched off,--a small piece of the brass still remaining on many of the gates. having practised this branch of the profession a considerable time, and become adepts in its execution, the next step, i have been informed, is to steal the handles and brass knockers from doors, which is done by taking out the screw with a small screw-driver: these are disposed of in the same manner as the former things, till the young pilferers are progressively qualified for stealing brass weights, &c., and at length, become expert thieves. the following fact will shew what extensive depredations young children are capable of committing. i have inserted the whole as it appeared in the public papers:--"_union hall_; _shop lifting_.--yesterday, two little girls, sisters, very neatly dressed, _one nine_, and the _other seven, years of age_, were put to the bar, charged by mr. cornell, linen-draper, of high street, newington; with having stolen a piece of printed calico, from the corner of his shop. "mr. cornell stated, that the children came to his shop, yesterday morning; and while he was engaged with his customers at the further end of the shop, he happened to cast his eyes where the prisoners were, and observed the oldest roll up a large piece of printed calico, and put it into a basket, which her little sister carried: the witness immediately advanced to her, and asked if she had taken any thing from off the counter; but she positively asserted that she had not. however, on searching her basket, the calico was found; together with a piece of muslin, which mr. cornell identified as belonging to him, and to have been taken in the above way. mr. allen questioned the eldest girl about the robbery, but she positively denied any knowledge as to how, or in what manner, the calico and muslin had got into her basket, frequently appealing to her little sister to confirm the truth of what she declared. when asked if she had ever been charged with any offence, she replied, 'o yes, sir, some time back i was accused of stealing a watch from a house, but i did not do it.' the magistrate observed, that the father should be made acquainted with the circumstance, and, in the mean time, gave the gaoler instructions that the two little delinquents should be taken care of. "hall, the officer, stated that he had information that there was a quantity of goods, which had been stolen by the prisoners, concealed in a certain desk in the house of the father; and that a great deal of stolen property would, in all probability, be found there, if a search warrant were granted, as the two unfortunate children were believed to be most extensive depredators. "mr. allen immediately granted the warrant; and hall, accompanied by mr. cornell, proceeded to the residence of the father of the children, who is an auctioneer and appraiser, at , lyon street, newington. "hall returned in half an hour with the father in his custody, and produced a great quantity of black silk handkerchiefs, which he had found on the premises; but the desk, which had been spoken of by his informers as containing stolen property, he had found quite empty. the father, when questioned by the witness as to whether he had any duplicates of property in his possession, positively denied that fact. at the office he was searched, and about fifty duplicates were found in his pockets, most of which were for silk handkerchiefs and shawls. there were also a few rings, for the possession of which the prisoner could not satisfactorily account. he was asked why he had assured the officer he had no duplicates? he replied, that he had not said so; but mr. cornell, who was present during the search, averred that the prisoner had most positively declared that he had not a pawnbroker's duplicate in his possession. "mr. watt, a linen-draper, of harper street, kent road, stated that he attended in consequence of seeing the police reports in the newspapers, describing the two children; he immediately recognised the two little girls as having frequently called at his shop for trifling articles; and added, that he had been robbed of a variety of silk handkerchiefs and shawls, and he had no doubt but that the prisoners were the thieves. it was their practice, he said, to go into a shop, and call for a quarter of a yard of muslin, and while the shopkeeper was engaged, the eldest would very dexterously slip whatever article was nearest, to her little sister, who was trained to the business, and would thrust the stolen property into a basket which she always carried for that purpose. mr. watt identified the silk handkerchiefs as his property, and said that they had been stolen in the above manner by the prisoners. "the father was asked where he had got the handkerchiefs? he replied, that he had bought them from a pedlar for half-a-crown a piece at his door. however, his eldest daughter contradicted him by acknowledging that her sister had stolen them from the shop of mr. watt. he became dreadfully agitated, and then said--'what could i say? surely i was not to criminate my own children!' "mr. allen observed, that there was a clear case against the two children, but after consulting with the other magistrates, he was of opinion that the youngest child should be given up into the charge of the parish officers of newington, as she was too young to go into a prison, and desired that the other girl should be remanded, in order to have some of the pledged goods produced. the father was committed in default of bail for receiving stolen goods. the child has since been found guilty. the prosecutor stated that the family consisted of five children, _not one of whom could read or write_!" another very cruel practice of these young delinquents is, to go into some chandlers shop as slily as possible, and take the first opportunity of stealing the till with its contents, there being always some older thief ready to take charge of it, as soon as the child removes it from the shop.[a] many a poor woman has had to lament the loss of her till, with its contents, taken by a child, perhaps, scarcely six years of age. there is always a plan laid down for the child to act upon. should he be unable to obtain possession of the till himself, he is instructed to pretend that he has missed his way, and to inquire for some street near the spot; or, he will address her with, "please, ma'am, can you tell me what it is o'clock?" the unsuspecting woman, with the greatest kindness possible, shews the child the street he inquires for, or leaves the shop to ascertain the hour, and for her civility, she is sure to find herself robbed, when she returns, by some of the child's companions. should he be detected in actual possession of the property, he is instructed to act his part in the most artful manner, by pretending that some man sent him into the shop to take it, who told him that he would give him sixpence to buy cakes. [footnote a: so complete is the science of pilfering rendered by its perpetrators, that they have even a peculiar vocabulary of their own, rendering their conversation, to those who may chance to overhear them, as mysterious and incomprehensible as though they were conversing in a foreign tongue; for instance, the scutcheons they steal from the key holes are called _porcupines_; brass weights, _lueys_; while purloining the contents of a till, is called _taking the ding_. in short, they have a peculiar name for almost every thing.] it is not uncommon for these young offenders to stop children, whom they may meet in the street unprotected, and either by artifice or violence, take from them their hats, necklaces, &c., thus initiating themselves, as it were, into the desperate crime of assault and highway robbery. young as the subjects of the foregoing narrations mostly were, i have little doubt their pupilage commenced at a much earlier age; they could not otherwise have attained so much proficiency in the practice of crime, and hardihood on detection. however possible it maybe thought to reclaim children of so tender an age, i am convinced that thieves of more advanced years become so thoroughly perverted in their wills and understandings, as to be incapable of perceiving the disgrace of their conduct, or the enormity of the offence. i was once told by an old thief that thieving was his profession, and he had therefore a right to follow it; and i could plainly discover from further conversation with him, that he had established in himself an opinion that thieving was no harm, provided he used no violence to the person; he seemed, indeed, to have no other idea of the rights of property, than that described as the maxim of a celebrated scottish outlaw,--that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can." when this most lamentable state is reached, it is to be feared all modes of punishment, as correctives, are useless; and the only thing left is to prevent further depredation by banishment. the incorrigibility which a child may attain, who has once associated with thieves at an early age, is apparent from the following fact. "richard leworthy, aged fourteen, was indicted for stealing five sovereigns, the property of william newling, his master. the prosecutor stated, that he resided in the commercial road, and is by business a tailor; the prisoner had been his apprentice for four months, up to the th of august, when he committed the robbery. on that day he gave him five pounds to take to mr. wells, of bishopsgate street, to discharge a bill; he never went, nor did he return home; he did not hear of him for three weeks, when he found him at windsor, and apprehended him. the prisoner admitted having applied the money to his own use. he was found at a public house, and said he had spent all his money except one shilling and six pence. a shopman in the service of mr. wells, stated that in august last the witness owed his master a sum of money; he knew the prisoner; he did not bring money to their shop, either on or since the th of august. the prisoner made no defence, but called his master, who said he received him from the refuge for the destitute, and had a good character with him. he would not take him back again. mr. wontner stated, that he had received two communications from the rev. mr. crosby, the chaplain of the institution, stating they would not interfere on his behalf. the jury returned a verdict of _guilty_. mr. justice park observed, that the best course would be to send him out of the country." here we see, that notwithstanding the discipline he had undergone, and the instructions he had received during his confinement in the establishment of the refuge for the destitute, he had not been more than four months from that place before he fell into his old habits. it is moreover to be remarked, that such had been his conduct during his confinement, that the directors of the establishment thought themselves war ranted in giving a good character with him. they were probably little surprised on hearing of this relapse on the part of the boy,--experience had doubtless taught them it was no uncommon thing, and we plainly see they were convinced that all further attempts at reclaiming him were useless. the facility with which property maybe disposed of, should be mentioned as a powerful inducement to crime. the following case suggests it to the mind: thomas jackson, a mere child, not more than nine years of age, was charged some time ago at the town hall, with committing a burglary on the premises of mr. james whitelock, a master builder, griffith's rents, st. thomas's, southwark. mr. whitelock, it appears, resided in an old mansion, formerly an inn, which he had divided into two separate tenements, occupying one part himself, and letting the other to the parents of the prisoner. in this division he had deposited building materials to a considerable amount, one hundred weight of which, in iron holdfasts, hinges, nails, clamps, &c., he missed one day on entering the room, the door of which had been blocked by a large copper, and the partition door forced. the character of the prisoner being of the worst description, he was apprehended, when he confessed he had taken all the property, and disposed of it to a woman, named priscilla fletcher, the keeper of a marine store, , james street. the receiver, who is _the last of the family that has not been either hanged or transported_, refused to swear to the prisoner, though she admitted she believed he was the person she bought the property produced from, at the rate of one penny for each three pounds. it was proved to be worth three half-pence per pound. alderman j.j. smith regretted that the deficiency of evidence prevented him sending the young delinquent for trial, and thereby rescuing him from an ignominious death, and told mrs. priscilla, who was all modesty, that he was convinced she had perjured herself,--and not to exult at her own escape from transportation, a reward he could not help considering she richly merited, and which in due season she would doubtless receive. the hardened child laughed during the hearing, and on being sentenced, by the oath of the officers, as a reputed thief, spit at his accuser, and exclaimed, as he was taken from the bar to be conveyed to brixton,--"is this all? i'll torment you yet!" to add one more case, i may state that, at the exeter sessions, some time since, two children were convicted, who, it is believed, were not above ten years of age. previously to this they had been convicted of felony, and had suffered six months imprisonment at bodmin; and it appears that two years before, they started alone from bristol on this circuit of youthful depredation. having collected the foregoing instances of juvenile delinquency, and presented them to the public, i cannot refrain from adducing a few other cases which came under my own observation. whilst conducting the spitalfields' infant school, several instances of dishonesty in the children occurred. on one occasion the mother herself came to complain of a little boy, not more than four years old, on the following grounds. she stated, that being obliged to be out at work all day, as well as her husband, she was under the necessity of leaving the children by themselves. she had three besides the little boy of whom she was complaining. having to pay her rent, she put eighteen-pence for that purpose in a cup at the top of a cupboard. on stepping home to give the children their dinners, she found the boy at the cupboard, mounted on a chair, which again was placed on the top of a table. on looking for the money, she found four-pence already gone; one penny of this she found in his pocket, the rest he had divided amongst the other children, that they might not tell of him. after this relation i kept a strict watch on the child, and three or four days afterwards the children detected him opening my desk, and taking half-pence out of it. they informed me of this, and while they were bringing him up to me the half-pence dropped out of his hand. i detected him in many other very bad actions, but have reason to hope, that, by suitable discipline and instruction, he was effectually cured of his sad propensities. about the same time, i observed two little children very near the school-house in close conversation, and from their frequently looking at a fruit-stall that was near, i felt inclined to watch them; having previously heard from some of the pupils, that they had frequently seen children in the neighbourhood steal oysters and other things. i accordingly placed myself in a convenient situation, and had not long to wait, for the moment they saw there was no one passing, they went up to the stall, the eldest walking alongside the other, apparently to prevent his being seen, whilst the little one snatched an orange, and conveyed it under his pinafore, with all the dexterity of an experienced thief. the youngest of these children was not four years old, and the eldest, apparently, not above five. there was reason to believe this was not the first time they had been guilty of stealing, though, perhaps, unknown to their parents, as i have found to be the case in other instances. another little boy in the school, whose mother kept a little shop, frequently brought money with him,--as much as three-pence at a time. on questioning the child how he came by it, he always said that his mother gave it to him, and i thought there was no reason to doubt his word, for there was something so prepossessing in his appearance, that, at the time, i could not doubt the truth of his story. but finding that the child spent a great deal of money in fruit, cakes, &c., and still had some remaining, i found it advisable to see the mother, and to my astonishment found it all a fiction, for she had not given him any, and we were both at a loss to conceive how he obtained it. the child told _me_ his mother gave it to him; and he told his _mother_ that it was given to him at school; but when he was confronted with us both, not a word would he say. it was evident, therefore, that he had obtained it by some unfair means, and we both determined to suspend our judgment, and to keep a strict eye on him in future. nothing, however, transpired for some time;--i followed him home several times, but saw nothing amiss. at length i received notice from the mother, that she had detected taking money out of the till, in her little shop. it then came out that there was some boy in the neighbourhood who acted as banker to him, and for every two pence which he received, he was allowed one penny for taking care of it. it seems that the child was afraid to bring any more money to school, on account of being so closely questioned as to where he obtained it, and this, probably, induced him to give more to the boy than he otherwise would have done. suffice it, however, to say, that both children at length were found out, and the mother declared that the child conducted her to some old boards in the wash-house, and underneath them there was upwards of a shilling, which he had pilfered at various times. the reader may remember too, that during the autumn of , a boy of _fourteen committed suicide_, and that another of the same age was convicted of the dreadful crime of _murder_. it appears he knew a boy a little younger than himself, who was going to a distance with some money, and having taken a pocket-knife with him, he way-laid him and threatened to murder him. the poor little victim kneeled down,--offered him his money, his knife, and all he had, and said he would love him all the days of his life if he would spare him, and never tell what had happened; but the pathetic and forcible appeal, which would have melted many a ruffian-heart, was vain:--the little monster stabbed him in the throat, and then robbed him. on his trial he discovered no feeling, and he even heard his sentence with the utmost indifference, and without a tear. it would have been easy to multiply cases of juvenile delinquency, both those which have been brought under the cognizance of the law, and those which have come to my own knowledge, but i think enough has been related to shew how early children may, and do become depraved. i have purposely given most of them with as few remarks of my own as possible, that they may plead their own cause with the reader, and excite a desire in his bosom to enter with me, in the next chapter, on an inquiry into the causes of such early depravity. since the above incidents and facts were observed, and reports from the public prints were recorded, general attention has been drawn more fully to the very great increase of ignorance, demoralization, and crime, amongst the lower classes, both old and young. these things call on us most loudly for active effort and exertion; and it becomes the patriot and philanthropist, but especially the christian, to look around, to think and to consider what effectual means may be found, and what efficient plans may be adopted to strike the evil fatally at its roots, and cause it to wither away. if these things be not done, the moral pestilence must increase, and eventually deprive us of all that is dear to us as men, and citizens. chapter iii. causes of early crime. _degraded condition of parents--dreadful effects of drunkenness--neglect of children inevitable and wilful--the tutorship of wicked companions--tricks of pantomimes injurious--mischiefs arising from sending children to pawnbrokers--fairs demoralizing--all kinds of begging to be repressed_. * * * * * "why thus surprised to see the infant race treading the paths of vice? their eyes can trace their _parents_' footsteps in the way they go: what shame, what fear, then, can their young hearts know?" * * * * * appalling as the _effects_ of juvenile delinquency are, i think we may discover a principal cause of them in the present condition and habits of the adult part of the labouring classes. we shall find, very frequently, that infant crime is the only natural produce of evil, by the infallible means of precept and example. i do not intend to assert, that the majority of parents amongst the poor, actually encourage their children in the commission of theft; we may, indeed, fear that some do; as in the instance of the two little girls detected in shop-lifting, whose case was detailed in the preceding chapter; but still, i should hope that such facts are not frequent. if, however, they do not give them positive encouragement in pilfering, the example they set is often calculated to deprave the heart of the child, and, amongst other evil consequences, to induce dishonesty; whilst in other cases we find, that from peculiar circumstances the child is deprived, during the whole day, of the controling presence of a parent, and is exposed to all the poisonous contamination which the streets of large cities afford; and hence appears another cause of evil. here children come in contact with maturer vice, and are often drawn by its influence from the paths of innocence; as we have already seen in many instances. what resistance can the infant make to the insidious serpents, which thus, as it, were, steal into its cradle, and infuse their poison into its soul? the guardians of its helplessness are heedless or unconscious of its danger, and, alas! it has not the fabled strength of the infant hercules to crush its venomous assailants. surely such a view of the frequent origin of crime must awaken our commiseration for its miserable victims, and excite in us a desire to become the defenders of the unprotected. it will, however, be said by some, "where are the natural guardians of the child? where are its parents? are we to encourage their neglect of duty, by becoming their substitutes? it is their business to look after their children, and not ours." frequently have i heard such sentiments put forth, and sometimes by persons in whom i knew they were rather owing to a want of reflection than of philanthropy. but a want of thought, or of feeling, it must certainly be; because, on no principle of reason or humanity can we make the unnatural conduct of fathers and mothers, a plea for withholding our protection and assistance from the helpless objects of their cruelty and neglect. if we do so, we not only neglect our duty towards such children, but permit the growth and extension of the evil. we must recollect that they will not merely play their own wicked parts during their lives, but will also become models to the next generation. it should be remembered here, that i am treating of an evil which extends itself to all classes of society; i am appealing to the prudence of men, that they may, for their own sakes, investigate its cause; i shall hereafter appeal to them as philanthropists, and, still more urgently, as christians, that they may examine the merits of the remedy i shall propose. the culpability of many parents is beyond dispute. they not only omit to set their children good examples, and give them good advice, but, on the contrary, instil into their minds the first rudiments of wickedness, and lead them into the paths of vice. their homes present scenes which human nature shudders at, and which it is impossible truly to describe. there are parents who, working at home, have every opportunity of training up their children "in the way they should go," if they were inclined so to do. instead of this, we often find, in the case of the fathers, that they are so lost to every principle of humanity, that as soon as they receive their wages, they leave their homes, and hasten with eager steps to the public house; nor do they re-pass its accursed threshold, till the vice-fattening landlord has received the greater part of the money which should support their half-fed, half-clothed wives and children; and till they have qualified themselves, by intoxication, to act worse than brutes on their return home. to men of this description it matters not whether or not their children are proving themselves skilful imitators of their evil example,--they may curse and swear, lie and steal,--so long as they can enjoy the society of their pot companions, it is to them a matter of total indifference. during my superintendence of the first school, i had a painful facility of examining these matters. frequently, when i have inquired the cause of the wretched plight in which some of the children were sent to the school,--perhaps with scarcely a shoe to their feet, sometimes altogether without,--i have heard from their mothers the most heart-rending recitals of the husband's misconduct. one family in particular i remember, consisting of seven children, two of whom were in the school; four of them were supported entirely by the exertions of the mother, who declared to me, that she did not receive a shilling from their father for a month together; all the money he got he kept to spend at the public-house; and his family, for what he cared, might go naked, or starve. he was not only a great drunkard, but a reprobate into the bargain; beating and abusing the poor woman, who thus endeavoured to support his children by her labour. the evil does not always stop here. driven to the extreme of wretchedness by her husband's conduct, the woman sometimes takes to drinking likewise, and the poor babes are ten thousand times more pitiable than orphans. i have witnessed the revolting sight of a child leading home both father and mother from the public-house, in a disgusting state of intoxication. with tears and entreaties i have seen the poor infant vainly endeavouring to restrain them from increasing their drunkenness, by going into the houses on their way home; they have shaken off the clinging child, who, in the greatest anxiety, waited without to resume its painful task; knowing, all the time, perhaps, that whilst its parents were thus throwing away their money, there was not so much as a crust of bread to appease its hunger at home. let it not be thought that this is an overcharged picture of facts; it is but a faint, a very faint and imperfect sketch of reality which defies exaggeration. cases of such depravity, on the part of mothers, i with much pleasure confess to be comparatively rare. maternal affection is the preventive. but what, let me ask, can be hoped of the children of such parents? what are their characters likely to become under such tuition? with such examples before their eyes, need they leave their homes to seek contamination, or to learn to do evil. and here i must say, if i were asked to point out, in the metropolis, or any large city, the greatest nuisance, the worst bane of society, the most successful promoter of vice,--i should, without a moment's hesitation, point to the first public-house or spirit dealer's that met my view. nor can i, in speaking of the causes of juvenile delinquency, omit to say, i think these houses, indirectly, a very great cause of it. why i think so, my readers will readily conceive from what i have already said. i am sure that satan has no temple in which he is so devoutly worshiped, or so highly honoured, as the ale-house,--no priest is so devoted as its landlord,--no followers are so zealous in his behalf as its frequenters. let any one in the evening visit the homes of the labouring class in a poor neighbourhood, and he will find, in many cases, a barely-furnished room, a numerous family of small children,--perhaps forgetting the pangs of hunger in the obliviousness of sleep,--a wife, with care-worn features, sitting in solitary wretchedness, ruminating on wants she knows not how to supply--namely, clothes and food for her children on the morrow, and on debts which she has no means of discharging. but where is he who should be sharing her cares, bidding her be of good cheer, and devising with her some means of alleviating their mutual distress? where is the father of the sleeping babes, the husband of the watchful wife? go to the public-house; you will see him there with a host of his companions, of like character and circumstances, smoking, drinking, singing, blaspheming, gambling--ruining his health, spending his money; as jovial as though he had no wretched wife, no starving babes at home! and as lavish of money which should procure them food, as the man who is thriving on his excesses could wish him to be. i never look on a public-house without considering it as the abode of the evil genius of the neighbourhood; the despoiler of industry, the destroyer of domestic comfort; and heartily do i wish, that some means could be devised for abolishing these resorts of wickedness; that some legislative enactment may render it unlawful for any one to keep such places. with respect to a peculiar sort of beverage, it has been declared to be illegal to afford its purchasers accommodation for drinking it on the premises. why not extend it to other liquors? i know this would be pronounced an infringement on english liberty! the worst of men would raise this outcry against the measure. but surely it should rather be called a preventive of english licentiousness. all good men would consider it as such. i would not rob the labourer of his daily allowance of a beverage which is believed by many to be of essential service, when taken in moderation; but i would have him drink it at home, that his wife and children may participate in his enjoyment. perhaps, it will be said, a man closely confined to labour all day, needs some relaxation from domestic cares--that this can only be found in change of scene, and in social company. i will concede this. the plea of health, though often speciously advanced, cannot be denied. but is it necessary for his health, that this change of scene should be found in a close tap-room, within a few yards of his home, where he drinks to a ruinous excess till a late hour,--breathing all the while a hot atmosphere of tobacco-smoke? is it not possible to obtain the change of scene, and the relaxation of social converse, by mutual visits amongst friends similarly situated,--by a ramble to the suburbs,--or, in cases where the daily occupation affords too little opportunity for exercise, are there not places established for gymnastic exercises,--and might not others be formed for the like purposes? certain i am that the abolition of public-houses, in large cities, as places of daily resort for the adult labouring poor, would be attended with the most salutary consequences. i know of nothing that must so certainly tend to their improvement both in character and circumstances. no man can witness the scenes, and doings, of many persons who attend the new beer-houses, without pain and regret, that ever an act of parliament was passed to legalize such places. i have visited some hundreds of such, throughout the country, and can positively assert that the demoralising tendency of too many is awful! our magistrates must be more careful in granting licences, or the efforts of the wise and good will be neutralized, by the evils concocted at such places. the old inkeepers had a character, and capital at stake. the new beerhouse-keepers, i should say, a majority of them at least, have neither, and consequently are less cautious, having less to lose. whatever the end of the legislature might have been in enabling the poor to procure a good and cheap article more easily, to be drunk on or off the premises, the thing has not answered the end, and no one can deny, who will take the trouble to visit such places in different counties, that the _act_ has been a miserable failure, and has been the fruitful source of crime and immorality. what a lesson is this for speculative, short sighted legislators? another measure should then be adopted, i would say--destroy the facility of spirit-drinking, by laying on a heavy duty. it is in vain that interested sophistry would plead its benefits in particular cases--such, for instance, as the ludicrous plea of the needfulness of drams for market-women on wet and frosty mornings.[a] set these specious benefits against the dreadful results to men's health and pockets, from the present low price of spirits, and their consequent enormous consumption; and then let common sense and honesty deliver its judgment. i have spoken thus candidly and at length upon the subject in the present chapter, though somewhat out of place, because my feelings would not allow me to be less plain or more brief, or to postpone the matter to "a more convenient season." perhaps in talking of legislative alterations i have been wandering upon forbidden ground; if so, in returning to my proper path, i will comfort myself with this thought:--the progress of improvement, however slow, is sure, and it is certainly advancing in this country; i require no other assurance than the establishment of infant schools and mechanic's. [footnote a: some conception of the fearful height which drunkenness has attained, may be gathered from the fact, that in , the quantity of distilled spirits on which the duty was paid in the three kingdoms, amounted to , , of gallons. to form a due estimate, however, of the actual consumption, an immense quantity must be added, obtained by smuggling. of the rum imported for home consumption, allowing for that re-exported, the quantity was , , of gallons. of brandy and other articles imported, , , gallons; making a total, with the omission of all on which the duty was evaded, of , , of gallons of ardent spirits consumed in the year. five millions of revenue grew out of this, but it cost the people , , _l_. sterling, a which would have paid half-a-year's interest of the national debt.] "no person," says sir astley cooper "has greater hostility to dram drinking than myself, insomuch that i never suffer any ardent spirits in my house--thinking _them evil spirits!_--and if the poor could witness the white livers, the dropsies, the shattered nervous systems which i love seen as the consequence of drinking, they would be aware that _spirits_ and _poisons_ were synonymous terms." institutions; it _will_ advance, and what the legislature may never be able to accomplish, the spirit of improvement eventually will. but having considered those cases, in which wilful neglect and bad example may be charged upon the parents, we should not forget to tell those who object to our interference in the duty of a child's natural protectors, that it is not, in every instance, from _wilful_ neglect on their part, that their children are left unprotected in the streets. the circumstances of the labouring classes are such, in many cases, that they are compelled to leave their children either wholly unprotected, or in the charge of some one who frequently becomes a betrayer instead of a defender. the father, perhaps, goes to his daily labour in the morning, before the children are out of bed, and does not return till they are in bed again at night. the mother goes out in like manner, the earnings of the husband being insufficient for the maintenance of the family, and the children are intrusted throughout the day to the care of some girl, whose parents are as poor as themselves, and are glad to let her earn something towards her support. numbers of little girls thus go out before they are twelve years old, and teach the little children all they know,--commonly to be deceitful, and not unfrequently to be dishonest. the parents, careless or unsuspecting, only make inquiry when they return home if the children have been good and quiet, and of course receive an answer in the affirmative. in the course of a few years the evil consequences begin to show themselves, and then the good folks wonder how or when the seeds of such depravity could have been sown. many i know will be inclined to smile at the insignificancy of the cause pointed out. i can only say, it is from such springs, however regarded, that the great stream of vice is supplied; and what we laugh at now, for its insignificant origin, will hereafter, in its maturity, laugh at us for our impotence, in vainly endeavouring to stem it. what are parents to do with their children, situated as those are of whom we have just spoken? and very many are so situated. is it possible for them to perform their duty, as protectors of their children? it requires all their time to labour for their support, and they therefore leave them, unavoidably, either in such hands as we have described, or to take care of themselves; to range the streets, and form such associations as may there happen to fall in their way. they get into company with older delinquents, and become first their instruments, and then their associates; till at length they find their way into a gaol. this is no delusive way of accounting for the matter,--it is a solution which experience and observation have taught and established. i have traced the progress of delinquency, in actual life, from its earliest stages,--from the little trembling pilferer of the apple-stall, not more than four or five years old, to the confirmed thief of nine or ten years--who had been in gaol three or four times, and was as proud of his dexterity in thieving, and hardihood under punishment, as he could have been of the most virtuous accomplishment, or the most becoming fortitude. the infant thief, conscious of shame, and trembling with fear, will tell you on detection, that "tommy," or "billy," some older associate, set him to do it; you let him go: he joins his companions, who laugh at the story he tells, ridicule him for his fears, praise him for his dexterity, and rejoice in his escape. it will be very easy to imagine how, under a course of such treatment, the young offender so soon dismisses both shame and fear; and learns to forget everything but the gain and glory of his crimes. it is no small matter of credit with older thieves--(by older thieves i still mean boys of nine or ten years old)--to have under their tuition two or three pupils. i have seen in my walks as many as seven or eight sallying forth from the alleys in the neighbourhood of spitalfields, under the command, as it were, of a leader, a boy perhaps not more than nine or ten years old. i have watched their plans, and have noticed that it was usual to send first the youngest boy to attempt the theft--perhaps the object to be obtained was only a bun from the open window of a pastry-cook's shop; if he failed, another was sent, whilst the rest were lurking at the corner of some court, ready to flee in case their companion was detected; and i have sometimes seen, that after all the rest had failed, either from want of skill, or the too great vigilance of the shop-keeper, the boy who acted as leader has started out, and by a display of superior dexterity, would have carried off the prize, had it not happened that some one was thus purposely watching his conduct. when detected, if an old offender, he will either look you in tire face with the greatest effrontery and an expression of defiance, or he will feign to cry, and tell you he was hungry, has no father nor mother, &c.; though frequently, on further inquiry, i have found the whole story to be false. alas! there is _one_ class of children, with whom i know not how to deal, i mean those without the natural protectors. the man can for a more trifle get rid of all responsibility, though in general, most able to bear it, the woman has the dead weight, which often proves the destruction of her offspring, and herself, suicide and murder are the first-fruits frequently to her, but she loves her offspring, and perhaps he who deceived her, and for both their sakes fights the battle against fearful odds; for a few years at least, she will not last long, at length she sinks! she dies! where, oh! where! is the guardian for her child! reader, there are many thousands of such! what becomes of them? but there are other mothers of this class, more ignorant, have less of feeling, no education, no training, they advance from bad to worse, until they have five or six children, here are circumstances for children to come into the world grievously against them. what becomes of these? to avoid painful details i will answer the question, they become a pest to society, each a demoralizer of others, living upon the public--as tramps, begging impostors, thieves, teachers of thieves, and _cost the country more than five times their number born under other and better circumstances_. god grant that spiritual light, philosophical light, and scientific light united, may enable us to find the remedy! the two grand causes of juvenile delinquency, we have seen then, to be the evil example of parents themselves; and the bad associations which children form at an early age, when, through neglect, they are suffered to be in the streets. in the first instance, the parents of the children are wholly without excuse; in the second, though in some cases we may blame them, in others we cannot justly do so; but must admit, as an exculpation, the unfortunate circumstances of their condition in life. it would be easy to shew, by a multitude of instances, the evil effects produced on children of a tender age by street associations. but i think enough has been said to convince every reflecting mind that it is highly necessary that we should interfere in behalf of children so situated; and i shall conclude the present chapter by some remarks on the various habits and practices of the poor classes, which have at least an injurious tendency on the character of the rising generation. as children are such imitative beings, i cannot help making a few observations on the tricks which are usually introduced into our _pantomimes_. it is well known that those of the clown form a principal part of the entertainment. it is also equally well known, that the pantomimes are particularly designed to amuse children, for which reason they are generally represented during the christmas holidays, if, however, they were merely intended to _amuse_ them, they who have introduced them have, perhaps, gained their object; but what kind of _instruction_ they afford, i shall here attempt to shew. i do not recollect to have seen a pantomime myself without _pilfering_ being introduced under every possible form, such as shop lifting, picking pockets, &c. &c. can it then be for a moment supposed improbable that children, after having witnessed these exhibitions, should endeavour to put the thing into practice, whenever an opportunity offers, and try whether they cannot take a handkerchief from a gentleman's pocket with the same ease and dexterity as the clown in the play did; or, if unsuccessful in this part of the business, that they should try their prowess in carrying off a shoulder of mutton from a butcher's shop,--a loaf from a baker,--or lighter articles from the pastry-cools, fruiterer, or linen-draper? for, having seen the dexterity of the clown, in these cases, they will not be at a loss for methods to accomplish, by sleight of hand, their several purposes. in my humble opinion, children cannot go to a better place for instruction in these matters, or to a place more calculated to teach them the art of pilfering to perfection, than to the theatre, when pantomimes are performed. to say that the persons who write and introduce these pieces are in want of _sense_, may not be true; but i must charge them with a want of sufficient thought, right feeling and principle, in not calculating on their baneful effects on the rising generation, for whose amusement it appears they are chiefly produced. many unfortunate persons, who have heard sentence of death passed upon them, or who are now suffering under the law, in various ways, have had to lament that the _first seeds of vice were sown in their minds while viewing the pilfering tricks of clowns in pantomimes_. alas! too little do we calculate on the direful effects of this species of amusement on the future character of the young. we first permit their minds to be poisoned, by offering them the draught, and then punish them by law for taking it. does not the wide world afford a variety of materials sufficient for virtuous imitation, without descending to that which is vicious? it is much easier to make a pail of pure water foul, than it is to make a pail of foul water pure. it must not be supposed that i wish to sweep off every kind of amusement from the juvenile part of society, but i do wish to sweep off all that has a pernicious tendency. the limits which i have prescribed to myself will not allow me to enter more at large into this subject; otherwise i could produce a number of facts which would prove, most unquestionably, the propriety of discontinuing these exhibitions. a conversation which i once heard between some boys who were playing at what is called _pitch-in-the-hole_, will prove the truth of my assertions. "bill," said one of the boys to the other, "when did you go to the play last?" "on monday night," was the reply. "did you see the new pantomime?"--"yes." "well, did you see any fun?"--"yes, i believe i did too. i saw the clown _bone_ a whole _hank_ of sausages, and put them into his pocket, and then pour the gravy in after them. you would have split your sides with laughing, had you been there. a.b. and c.d. were with me, and they laughed as much as i did. and what do you think a.b. did the next night?"--"how should i know."--"why," replied the other, "he and c.d. _boned_ about two pounds of sausages from a pork shop, and we had them for supper." this conversation i heard from a window, which looked into a ruinous place where boys assembled to toss up for money, and other games. this fact alone, without recording any more, is sufficient to show the evil of which i have been speaking. and i do most sincerely hope that those persons who have any influence over the stage, will use their utmost endeavours, speedily, to expunge every thing thus calculated to promote evil inclinations in the minds of children, and vicious habits in the lives of men. it is not impossible that scenic exhibitions might be made a most powerful means of instruction to the young, and tend to promote virtue and happiness, as well as be a means of rational amusement, but as they now exist, their extirpation is desirable. as i have had much experience from being brought up in london, i am perfectly aware of the evil impressions and dangerous temptations that the children of the poor are liable to fall into; and therefore most solemnly affirm that nothing in my view would give so much happiness to the community at large, as the taking care of the affections of the infant children of the poor. there is, moreover, a practice very prevalent among the poor, which does greater mischief than the people are generally aware of, and that is, sending their children to the _pawnbrokers_. it is well known that many persons send children, scarcely seven years of age, to these people, with pledges of various sorts, a thing that cannot be too severely condemned. i know an instance of a little boy finding a shawl in the street; and being in the habit of going to the pawnbroker's for his mother, instead of taking the shawl home to his parents, he actually pawned it and spent all the money, which might never have been known by his parents, had not the mother found the duplicate in his pocket. it is evident, then, that many parents have no one but themselves to blame for the misconduct of their children; for had this child not been accustomed to go to such a place _for his parents_, he would never have thought of going there _for himself_; and the shawl most likely would have been carried home to _them_. indeed, there is no knowing where such a system will end, for if the children are suffered to go to such places, they may in time pledge that which does not belong to them; and so easy is the way of turning any article into money, that we find most young thieves, of both sexes, when apprehended, have some duplicates about them. those persons, therefore, who take pledges of children (contrary to the act of parliament, whether they know it or not,) ought to be severely reprimanded; for i am persuaded, that such conduct is productive of very great mischief indeed. taking children to _fairs_, is another thing which is also productive of much harm. at the commencement of the first school, seventy or eighty children were frequently absent whenever there was a fair near london; but the parents were afterwards cured of this, and we seldom had above twenty absentees at fair-time. several of the children have told me that their parents wished to take them, but they requested to be permitted to come to school instead. indeed the parents, finding that they can enjoy themselves better without their children, are very willing to leave them at school. it is a difficult matter to persuade grown persons of the impropriety of attending fairs, who have been accustomed to it when children; but children are easily persuaded from it; for if they are properly entertained at school, they will not have the least desire to go to such places. i cannot quit this subject without relating one or two more very bad habits to which children are addicted, and which are, perhaps, fit subjects for the consideration of the _mendicity society_. as it is the object of that society to clear the streets of beggars, it would be well if they would put a stop to those juvenile beggars, many of whom are children of respectable parents, who assemble together to build what they call a grotto; to the great annoyance of all passengers in the street. however desirous persons may be of encouraging ingenuity in children, i think it is doing them much harm to give them money when they ask for it in this way. indeed it would appear, that some of the children have learned the art of begging so well, that they are able to vie with the most experienced mendicants. ladies in particular are very much annoyed by children getting before them and asking for money; nor will they take the answer given them, but put their hats up to the ladies' faces, saying, "please, ma'am, remember the grotto;" and when told by the parties that they have no money to give, they will still continue to follow, and be as importunate as any common beggar. however innocent and trifling this may appear to some, i am inclined to believe that such practices tend to evil, for they teach children to be mean, and may cause some of them to choose begging rather than work. i think that the best way to stop this species of begging is, never to give them any thing. a fact which came under my own observation will shew that the practice may be productive of mischief. a foreign gentleman walking up old street road, was surrounded by three or four boys, saying, "please, sir, remember the grotto."--"go away," was the reply, "i will give you none." to this followed, "do, pray sir, remember the grotto." "no, i tell you, i will give you nothing." "do, sir, only once a-year." at length, i believe, he put something into one of their hats, and thus got rid of them; but he had scarcely gone yards, before he came to another grotto, and out sallied three more boys, with the same importunate request: he replied, "i will give you nothing; plague have you and your grotto." the boys however persevered, till the gentleman, having lost all patience, gave one of them a gentle tap to get out of the way, but the boy being on the side of the foot-path fell into the mud, which had been scraped off the road, and in this pickle followed the gentleman, bellowing out, "that man knocked me down in the mud, and i had done nothing to him." in consequence, a number of persons soon collected, who insulted the gentleman very much, and he would certainly have been roughly handled, had he not given the boy something as a recompence. he then called a coach, declaring he could not walk the streets of london in safety. those who know what mischief has arisen from very trifling causes, will, of course, perceive the necessity of checking this growing evil; for this man went away with very unfavourable impressions concerning our country, and would, no doubt, prejudice many against us, and make them suppose we are worse than we are. nearly allied to this is, "pray remember poor guy faux;" which not only teaches children the art of begging, but is frequently the means of their becoming dishonest, for i have known children break down fences, and water-spouts, and, in short, any thing that they could lay their hands upon, in order to make a bonfire, to the great danger of the inhabitants near it, without producing one good effect. yet how easily might this practice be put down. the ill effects of it are so self-evident, that there can be no need for further enlargement. i also disapprove of children going about begging at christmas; this practice is calculated to instil into the children's minds a principle of meanness not becoming the english character, and the money they get, seldom, if ever, does them any good. if persons choose to give children any thing at this time of the year, there can be no objection to it, but i dislike children going about to ask for money like common beggars; it cannot be proper, and should be generally discountenanced. all these things, to some men, may appear trifling, but to me and others they are of consequence; for if we mean to improve the general character of the labouring population, there is nothing like beginning in time; and we should, amongst other things, get rid of all mean and improper customs. before concluding this chapter i would hint to travellers not to give children money for running after a coach. i have seen children of both sexes run until their breath failed, and, completely exhausted, drop down on the grass; merely because some injudicious persons had thrown halfpence to them. i have also seen little boys turn over and over before the horses, for the purpose of getting money, to the danger of their own lives and of the passengers; and i recollect an instance of one boy being, in consequence, killed on the spot. in some counties children will, in spring and summer, run after a carriage with flowers upon a long stick, thrusting it in the coach or the faces of the travellers, begging halfpence, which habit had been taught them by the same injudicious means. the most virtuous and pious of men, on looking back to their early lives, have almost invariably confessed that they owe the first seeds of what is excellent in them, to the blessing of god, on the instruction and example of their parents, and those around them in the years of their childhood. reflections like these ought to make us humble and thankful for the advantages we have enjoyed, and cause us to look with an eye of pity, charity, and commiseration on the vices and delinquencies of the poor, rather than to judge them with harsh and cruel severity. had we been in their places, might not--would not--our character and conduct have been as theirs?--still further, ought not such thoughts as these to touch our hearts with deep compassion for them, and excite us to strenuous endeavours to remedy these lamentable evils, by the most powerful and effective measures that can be found; and more especially to strive if possible to rescue the rising generation from the contamination of surrounding vice and misery. chapter iv. remedy for existing evils. _means long in operation important--prisons awfully corrupting--deplorable condition of those released from jail--education of the infant poor--its beneficial results--cases of inviolable honesty--appeal of mr. serjeant bosanquet--the infant school, an asylum from accidents, and a prevention of various evils--obstacles in the way of married persons obtaining employment--arguments for the plan of infant training--prevalence of profane swearing--the example often shewn by parents--anecdote in illustration--parents ill used by their young children--christian-like wish of george iii.--education for poor children still objected to--folly of such objections illustrated--lectures on the subject of infant training_. * * * * * "the most likely and hopeful reformation of the road must begin with children. wholesome laws and good sermons are but slow and late ways; the timely and most compendious way is a good education."--_archbishop tillotson_. * * * * * having brought the prevalency of juvenile delinquency immediately before the eyes of my readers, by various examples in the second chapter, and in the third exhibited a few of the causes of it, i shall now proceed to point out what, in my humble opinion appears to be the only efficient remedy, namely, the education of the infant poor. it may not be amiss, however, to glance at the means which have heretofore been employed, and found, though productive of some good, inefficient for the end proposed. as preventives, i may notice the numerous national and sunday schools, tract societies, &c., established throughout the kingdom. these have doubtless much good effect, and deserve the zealous support of every one who has at heart the welfare of society in general, and the improvement of the labouring classes in particular. many have been plucked, "as brands from the burning," by these institutions; which are a blessing to the objects of their benevolence, and an honour to their conductors and supporters. that sunday schools are not wholly efficient, in conjunction with other institutions, to accomplish the end desired, is to be attributed, on the one hand, to the small portion of time in which their salutary influence is exerted; and, on the other, to their not admitting children at a sufficiently early age. at the period usually assigned for their entrance, they have not only acquired many evil habits, but their affections have become so thoroughly perverted, as to offer great, and, in some cases, insuperable obstacles to the corrective efforts of their teachers. each child brings into the school some portion of acquired evil, making, when united, a formidable aggregate, and affording every facility for mutual contamination. add to this, the counteracting effect which the bad examples they meet with in the course of six days must have upon the good they hear on the seventh, and it will be seen how little comparatively is really practicable. i do not say this to dishearten those who are engaged in this labour of love, or to abate the zeal of its promoters. at the same time that their experience confirms the truth of my observations--and i know they would candidly confess that it does so--they must have many gratifying instances of a contrary nature, in children, who from evil habits have been won to a love of goodness and religion, shewn not merely in a punctual attendance at their school, but in that good-will toward their fellow-scholars, and grateful love to their teachers, which are the only infallible signs of a change in the affections. these things encourage them, in spite of many difficulties and mortifications, to persevere in well doing; and may the god of love bless their labours with an increase of fruitfulness! it is only my purpose here to state, that the most likely human means to produce such an increase, is the establishment of infant schools;--schools designed, particularly, for the cultivation of the affections,--for preparing the heart to receive that wisdom which teaches us to love god supremely, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. as to the system of instruction pursued in sunday schools, as well as other free schools, it is, indeed, my opinion, that some alteration for the better might be made, but as i intend to speak of this matter in a future place, i shall say no more on the subject at present, but pass on to notice prison discipline--which is, i fear, entitled to any term but that of a _remedy_. that the end of punishment should be the prevention of future crime, rather than the gratification of vindictive feelings--whether those of states or of injured individuals--but few will venture to deny; and yet how little calculated is the punishment usually inflicted on young offenders in this country, to answer that end! they are shut up in a prison, in company with other thieves, perhaps older and more experienced than themselves, and all that was wanting to complete their education in dishonesty is here attained. previously to their confinement within the walls of one of these places, in spite of the assertions of their hardened associates, that it was nothing to fear, it is probable, dread or apprehension hung over their minds; the last vestige of shame had not been banished by a public appearance as criminals--and this, properly taken advantage of, might have made their reformation possible! but, having encountered the object of their fears, and endured the shame of a trial--shame and fear are alike gone for ever; and when once they find their way into those sinks of iniquity, there is very little hope of amendment. from that period a prison has not the least terror for them. being a place of idleness while there, it calls forth the evil inclinations of its inmates, and as they have opportunities of indulging those inclinations, it not only loses all its utility, but becomes incalculably injurious. i heard a boy who had been confined in newgate say, that he did not care any thing about it; that his companions supplied him with plenty of victuals, that there was some good fun to be seen there, and that most likely he should soon be there again; which proved too true, for he was shortly after taken up again for stealing two pieces of printed calico, and transported. this, with a multitude of similar facts, will shew that there are few who do not become more depraved, and leave such places worse than when they entered them. a gentleman who visited newgate informed me that he had been very much surprised at finding so many children there; some of whom were ironed; and on his inquiring the cause of such severity towards children so young, he was told by one of the turnkeys, that _he had snuck more trouble with them than he had with old offenders_. this fact has been verified by the chief officers of the wakefield model prison,--the boys give most trouble. in the matter of treating juveniles as delinquents, i am sure we are wrong. i have seen both the magistrates and the judges insulted on the bench by juveniles brought before them, and taunted with the following: "you can do no more, you with the big wig! i wish you may sit there until i come out!" and in the month of may, , the magistrates of wakefield were insulted by a boy years old, who had been taken up as an impostor, with his arm doubled in a sling, and shamming to be deaf and dumb,--a healthy strong youth, able and fit for work--and when asked why he did not work, answered, because he could get more by his own method! hear! this ye indiscriminate alms-givers! and, further, when expostulated with by the magistrates for the sin and wickedness of pretending to be lame, &c., he laughed at them outright for being so silly as to suppose that he should not _live well if he could?_ when told he should be committed for three months, he had the impudence to tell the court that he would do the same again, when he came out, clapped his hat on in open defiance, and shouted, "that's all you can do!" the chairman expressed sorrow that he could not order a whipping, but the prisoner laughed at him, and said, "i am too old for that." such things were not known in my younger days. i am afraid we have erred in this matter. a little wholesome correction did wonders. in such matters, it, at least, made the parties civil, and, i think, deterred from crime. i am fearful that in this age mankind aim in some things to be more perfect than the great ruler of the universe! to the bad habits of a prison, and the association with guilt, must be added the deplorably unprovided state, in which, at the termination of their period of imprisonment, they are sent forth into society. what friends have they but their former companions? what habitations, but their former resorts of iniquity? what means of procuring a livelihood, but their former evil practices? we accordingly find, that it is not unfrequently the case, with these young offenders, that scarcely a day elapses after their liberation, before they find themselves again in custody, and within the walls of a prison. one cannot, indeed, view the exertions made by the "society for the improvement of prison discipline" in this respect, without feelings of gratitude to those who take an active part in it[a]; neither should we forget to return thanks to the author of all good, that he should have encouraged the hearts of persons to venture even their lives, to improve the condition of the prisoners in newgate and elsewhere;--that even females are found, who, conquering the timidity and diffidence of their sex, have visited these abodes of vice and misery, for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of their inhabitants. there have been men, claiming to be considered wise men, who have ridiculed the exertions of these daughters of philanthropy, and have made them objects of ridicule, but, happily, they are impervious to the shafts of folly; and as heedless of the unjust censures, as they are undesirous of the applause of man. their aim is, the good of their fellow-creatures,--their reward, the pleasure of doing good, and the approbation of him who is goodness itself. that their well-meant and praiseworthy exertions are not more successful can only be accounted for by the awfully depraved affections which habitual vice produces; when every principle of action, which should be subservient to virtue, becomes actively employed in the cause of wickedness; for, whatever may be the impulse which first induces offenders to do wrong, they become, in course of time, so totally lost to all sense of what is good as to "glory in their shame." whether it maybe possible to devise any plan of prison discipline sufficient to remedy the evil, i cannot pretend to say; and i shall only repeat the burthen of my song--_educate and protect the infant poor_; and it will be found that _to prevent_ is not only better, but easier, than to _cure_. [footnote a: i will make a short extract from one of its reports, to shew, that the chief end they have in view, is the prevention of crime. they state, that "in the course of their visit, to the gaols in the metropolis, the committee very frequently meet with destitute boys, who, on their discharge from confinement, literally know not where to lay their heads. to assist such friendless outcasts has been the practice of the society; and to render this relief more efficacious, a temporary refuge has been established for such as are disposed to abandon their vicious courses. this asylum has been instrumental in affording assistance to a considerable number of distressed youths, who, but for this seasonable aid, must have resorted to criminal practices for support. on admission into this establishment, the boys are instructed in moral and religious duty, subjected to habits of order and industry, and after a time are placed in situations which afford a reasonable prospect of their becoming honest and useful members of society. to extend these objects, and to render its exertions more widely beneficial, the society solicits the aid of public benevolence. its expenses are unavoidably serious, and its funds are at present very low; but it is trusted that pecuniary support will not be withheld, when it is considered, that on the liberality with which this appeal is answered, depends, in a great measure, the success of the society's objects--the reformation of the vicious, and the prevention of crime."] that this remedy is effectual, experience has taught me and many others; and experience is a guide on whom we may safely rely. it has shown me that by taking children at an early age out of the reach of contamination in the streets, and removing them in a great measure from the no less baneful influence of evil example at home, we may lay such a foundation of virtue, as is not likely to be shaken. nor do i think it difficult to show the reason of this. it is confessed on all hands that our first impressions are the most powerful, both as to their immediate effects and future influence; that they not only form the character of our childhood, but that of our maturer years. as the mind of a child expands, it searches for new objects of employment or gratification; and this is the time when the young fall an easy prey to those who make a business of entrapping them into the paths of dishonesty, and then of urging them to crimes of deeper dye. what, then, but a most salutary result can ensue from placing a child in a situation, where its first impressions will be those of the beauty of goodness,--where its first feelings of happiness will consist in the receiving and cherishing kind ness towards its little neighbours? in after years, and in schools for older children, it is reckoned an unavoidable evil, that they should be congregated together in numbers; not so in the infant school; it is there made use of as a means of developing and exercising those kindly feelings, which must conduce to the individual and general comfort, not only there, but in society generally. it is not merely by instructing them in _maxims_ of honesty that we seek to provide against the evil; but by the surer way of exciting that feeling of love towards each other--towards every one--which, when found in activity, must not only prevent dishonesty, but every other species of selfishness. consider the difference of the cases. in the one case we behold a child associated, in happy communion, with a society--a little world--of its own age and feelings,--continually proving the possibility of giving and imparting happiness by receiving and exercising kindness to its companions--secured from every danger--supplied with a constant variety of amusement, which is at the same time instruction; and all this under the care of a master or mistress; acting the part, not of a petulant school-dame, or a stern pedagogue, but of a kind and judicious parent. in the case of the child not thus befriended, we see it, either exposed to the dangerous associations of the street, or to the bad examples of its parents; to their unkindness and severity, or misguided indulgence; and presented, moreover, with every facility, as well as every temptation, to do wrong. now, is it to be wondered at, that, in the former case, kind, obedient, honest characters should be the result; and in the latter, such as we have, in our preceding examples, exhibited? reason tells us such a consequence is likely, and experience has shewn us that it really happens. i could enumerate a thousand cases of honest principle in the infants who have been under my own care; but i can only mention one or two circumstances illustrative of the matter. i once had, for example, two little boys to travel with me; their assistance was extremely valuable in organizing schools. they were often invited to accompany me at dinner; the guests generally gave them presents. i have watched them under many tempting circumstances, and never found them steal. it is my firm conviction that dishonesty is chiefly the effect of neglect. no child can be _born_ a _thief_, in the strict sense of the term. in many schools, too, there are fruit-trees planted in the play-ground, to which the children will not do the least injury, nor will they touch the fruit. flowers in pots, such as geraniums, auriculas, and other plants, are placed in the middle of the play-ground, without the least danger of being injured. such is their respect to private property. another instance particularly excited my notice amongst the children in the first establishments in london. they were permitted to bring their dinners with them, and there were boxes in the school to put them in. every child in the school had access to these boxes, for they were never locked, and yet i never knew a child to lose his dinner, or any part of it, notwithstanding many of the children, to my knowledge, had been kept extremely short of food. i have known an instance of a slice of bread and butter being left in the box for several weeks, by some child that could not eat it, but none of the other children would dare to touch it. i have found in the boxes two or three pieces of bread, as hard as possible, and as a proof that many were hungry, and that it did not remain there because they could not eat it, but out of pure honesty, i have offered it to some of the children, and they have eaten it in that state. cold potatoes, pieces of fat, &c., were not unacceptable to them when given; but sooner than take any thing without leave, they have actually left it to spoil. these are facts which shew, that notwithstanding all the disadvantages to which the poor children are exposed, their character may be so far formed as to produce the effects above described. "would you take a piece of bread out of this box that did not belong to you?" said i to the children one day. "no, sir," replied a little girl of four years old. "why not?" "because," said the child, "it would be thieving." "well, but suppose no one saw you?" before i could speak another word, a number of the children answered, "god can see everything that we do." "yes," added another little boy, "if you steal a cherry, or a piece of pencil, it is wicked." "to be sure," added another, "it is wicked to steal any thing." i cannot do better than introduce in this place the opinion of judge bosanquet, on the subject of the education of the infant poor; and some valuable hints will likewise be found in his remarks on prison discipline. it is an extract from a charge to the jury delivered at the gloucester assizes for april, . "gentlemen, i have reason to believe, that the offences for trial on this occasion, are rather less than usual at this season, and, to whatever the diminution of crime may be ascribed, i cannot forbear earnestly to press upon your attention, a constant perseverance in two things, _which, above all others, are calculated to diminish crime_,--the first is an unremitted attention to the education of the children of the poor, and of all classes of society, in the principles of true morality and sound religion; the next is the constant and regular employment of such persons as may be sentenced to imprisonment, in such labour as may be adapted to their respective ages and conditions. i believe that these observations may be considered as quite superfluous in this county, and therefore i have taken the liberty of using the word perseverance, because i believe your attention is already strongly drawn to that subject, and it requires no exhortation of mine to induce your attention to it. i am not quite sure whether in the gaol for this city, the same means are provided for the employment of those persons sentenced to terms of imprisonment, which are provided in the gaol for the county. the magistrates for the city are equally desirous of promoting the education of all the poor under their care, i have no doubt; and i do hope and trust, if the means of labour have not been provided in their gaol, that no time will be lost in providing those means by which imprisonment may be made a real punishment, by which offenders may be reformed during their imprisonment, and by which the idle and dissolute may be prevented from any inclination to return there."[a] [footnote a: from the time the judge referred to made the above remarks, other judges, down to the present time, have added similar sentiments. from , until , proof upon proof, has been added, to show us the advantage of early training; and though much has been cramming, and not training, still the results have been good. what would they have been had the schooling given, really been _training?_ and what, if the training of children had been studied as _art_, if the public looked on the teachers as artists, and treated them with the consideration they deserve? anticipations cannot be too sanguine in estimating the results that must accrue to society from a system of spiritual, intellectual, and moral culture, becoming universal, and worked out by minds who will, i am sure hereafter, be able fully to develope, from study, and practice of the _art_ of teaching, the great principles of spiritual truths, intellectual vigour, and the moral strength of the coming generations, which have been allowed to remain in a state of torpor in the present.] i have hitherto only being considering the _prudential_ motives which should induce us to promote the education of the poor. i have shown, that it will be for the benefit of society, inasmuch as it is likely to decrease the number of those who transgress its laws--that it will prove a greater security to our persons and property than laws or prisons afford. but there are other motives which, if these selfish ones were wholly wanting, might be sufficient to advocate, in every humane heart, the same course of conduct. if the duty of promoting honesty amongst the labouring classes did not exist, that of increasing happiness and piety amongst them would not be the less imperative. that there is much room for an augmentation of both, few, i think, will be inclined to deny; the less so in proportion as they have had the greater opportunity of ascertaining their actual condition. let us now for a few moments consider how great a blessing an infant school is, even when regarded as a mere asylum to take charge of the child's bodily welfare. i have mentioned before, that the poor are unable to take that care of their children which their tender age requires, on account of their occupations; and have shewn, that it is almost certain, that the children of such persons will learn every species of vice. but there are other kinds of dangers which more immediately affect the body, and are the cause of more accidents than people in general imagine. i shall here notice some of the most prominent, and hope to be able to convince the unprejudiced mind, that it would be a charity to take charge of the infant poor, even leaving the idea of their learning any thing good at school entirely out of the question; and surely those persons, who disapprove of educating the poor at all, will see the propriety of keeping, if possible, their children safe from accidents, and preserving the lives of many little ones, who would otherwise be lost to their country, from their falling a prey to surrounding dangers. it is well known that many poor people are obliged to live in garrets, three or four stories high, with a family of six or seven children; and it will not appear improbable that, when the children are left by themselves, they should frequently meet with accidents by tumbling down stairs; some breaking their backs, others their legs or arms; and to this cause alone, perhaps, may be traced a vast number of the cripples that daily appear as mendicants in our streets. when the poor parents return from their daily labour, they sometimes have the mortification of finding that one, or probably two, of their children, are gone to an hospital; which of course makes them unhappy, and unfits them for going through their daily labour. this dead weight, which is continually on the minds of parents, is frequently the cause of their being unable to please their employers, and the consequence sometimes is, they are thrown out of work altogether; whereas, if they were certain that their children were taken care of, they would proceed with their daily labour cheerfully, and be enabled to give more satisfaction to their employers than they otherwise can do. other parents i have known, who, when obliged to go out, have locked their children in a room to prevent them from getting into the street, or falling down stairs, and who have taken every precaution, as they imagined, to protect their children; but the little creatures, perhaps, after fretting and crying for hours at being thus confined, have ventured to get up to the window, in order to see what was passing in the street, when one, over-reaching itself, has fallen out and been killed on the spot. a gentleman said, at a public meeting at exeter, when referring to this subject, "i have myself, twice in my life, nearly occasioned the death of children. in one instance, a child left to itself, ran out of the hedge by the road-side; i was fortunately able to stop, and found the child, unconscious of its escape, raising its hands to the reins of the horse. and on another occasion, my horse threw a child down, and i had but just time to pull up, and prevent the wheels from passing over the infant's head." and it was stated in a bristol paper, that in the short space of _one fortnight, seven_ children were taken to the infirmary of that city so dreadfully burnt that four of them died. numerous cases of this kind are to be found in the public prints, and hundreds of such accidents occur which are not noticed in the papers at all. many children, again, strolling into the fields, fall into ponds and ditches, and are drowned. so numerous, indeed, are the dangers which surround the infant poor, as to make a forcible appeal to the hearts of the pious and humane, and to call loudly on them to unite in rescuing this hitherto neglected part of the rising generation from the evils to which they are exposed. it is much to be regretted that those persons who most need employment should be the last to procure it; but such is the fact, for there are so many obstacles thrown in the way of married persons, and especially, those with a family, that many are tempted to deny that they have any children, for fear they should lose their situations, though it is certainly an additional stimulus to a servant to behave orderly, when he knows that he has others to look to him for support. shall i close this appeal for the necessity of educating the infant poor by another and weightier argument? they are _responsible_ and _immortal_ beings. it may be thought that i should have given this plea the precedence of every other. i did not, because i felt more anxious to make good my ground with the prudent and the philanthropic--to show them that self-interest and humanity demand our exertions in this cause. i knew that when i came to urge such efforts upon the attention of the christian, i could not possibly fail. no one who is a sincere follower of him who said "suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom;" no one who professes to abide by the maxims of him whose commandment was, "love thy neighbour as thyself," can turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of those who are necessitous and suffering. thousands there are among those of whom we have been speaking, who are brought up in as great ignorance of god and religion, as though they had been born in a country where the light of revelation had never shone--where the glad tidings of salvation have never been proclaimed. with examples of evil continually before their eyes, both at home and abroad, we see and hear its consequences daily in the wickedness with which our streets abound, and in the lisped blasphemy and profanity of those who learn to curse and swear before they can well walk. whilst i was at lincoln, i was shocked beyond measure by the horrid language of the boys; to such a pitch had the evil come, that the magistrates were determined to fine all the men who were brought before them for profane swearing; and i had the satisfaction of hearing that four men had been fined whilst i was there. what a blessing it would be if other magistrates throughout the kingdom would follow their example! any person who has been accustomed to walk the streets of london, must have heard how frequently children take the name of the almighty in vain; seldom or ever mentioning it but to confirm some oath. i have seen boys playing at marbles, tops, and other games, and who, on a dispute arising about some frivolous thing, would call upon the supreme being to strike them deaf, dumb, or blind, nay, even dead, if what they said were not true; when, nevertheless, i have been satisfied from having observed the origin of the dispute, that the party using the expressions has been telling a falsehood. indeed so common is this kind of language in the streets, that it often passes without notice. i am inclined to think, that children accustomed to use such expressions on every trifling occasion, will, when they grow to riper years, pay very little respect to the sanctity of an oath. it is, perhaps, one of the reasons why we hear of so much perjury in the present day. at all events, little children cannot avoid hearing such expressions, not only from those who are rather older than themselves, but, i am sorry to say, even from their parents. i have known repeated instances of this kind. many little ones, when they first come to our schools, make use of dreadful expressions, and when told that it is wrong, will say that they did not know it was so; others, with the greatest simplicity, have declared, that they had heard their fathers or mothers say the same words. hence i have had much difficulty in persuading them that it was wrong, for they very naturally thought, that if their parents made use of such language, they might do the same. how great is the necessity of good example; and did parents generally consider how apt children are to receive impressions, and to become imitators, both in their words and actions, they would be more cautious than they are. there are many parents who make use of very bad expressions themselves, who would correct their children for using the same;--as a proof of this, i will mention one circumstance, out of many others, that took place in the school i superintended many years since. we had a little girl there, five years old, who was so fond of the school, that she frequently stopped after the usual hours to play with my children and some others who chose to stay in the play-ground. many of them would stop till eight or nine o'clock at night, to which i had no objection, provided their parents approved of it, and they did not get into mischief; it being desirable to keep them out of the streets as much as possible. it happened, however, one day, that some of the children, offended this child, and she called them by dreadful names, such as i cannot repeat; and, of course, the others were terrified, and told me of them immediately. i was soon satisfied that the child was ignorant of the meaning of what she said, for, as an excuse for her conduct, she declared that she heard her father and mother use the same words. i told the child, that notwithstanding her parents might have done so, it was very wicked, and that i could not let her stay another time to play, if ever she did so again. having sent for the mother, i informed her of the expressions the child had used, but did not tell her what she had mentioned relative to her parents, for if i had, she would have beaten her most unmercifully. the mother, after having heard me relate the circumstance, immediately flew into a passion with the child, and declared, that she would "skin her alive," (this was her expression,) and i had much difficulty to restrain her from correcting the child in the school. having pacified her a little, i inquired where the child could have heard such wicked expressions. she said she could not tell. i then told her, i hoped the child did not learn them of her, or her father. to this she made no answer, but i could perceive that she stood self-convicted, and having said what i conceived necessary upon the occasion, i dismissed her, observing that it was useless for ladies and gentlemen to establish schools for the education of the infant poor, if the parents did not assist by setting them a good example. i am happy to state, that the advice i gave her was not thrown away, as i never knew the child guilty of saying a bad word afterwards; and the mother soon brought me another child, of two years and a half old, and said she should be very glad if i would take it into the school, and that she wished a blessing might always attend the gentlemen who supported the institution. she also requested me to take an opportunity of speaking a few words to her husband, for she was thankful for what had been said to her. and here i would observe, that although it is most undoubtedly true, that the good taught to children in our infant schools is greatly counteracted by the conduct they witness on their return home, yet we occasionally see, that these little children, by the blessing of god, are made the means of reforming their own parents. what a gratifying fact it is, that the adult and hardened sinner, may be turned from his evil ways--from death unto life--by an infant's precept or example! nor is it only in profane expressions that we see the influence of evil. some children i have known, in the same neighbourhood, who even beat their parents. there was a poor widow, very near the school, who was frequently to be seen with her face dreadfully bruised by blows from her own son. he had been taken before a magistrate, and imprisoned for three months, but it did him no good, for he afterwards beat his mother as much as ever, and the poor woman had it in contemplation to get the miscreant sent out of the country. one sunday, i remember to have seen a boy, under twelve years of age, take up a large stone to throw at his mother: he had done something wrong in the house, and the mother followed him into the street with a small cane, to correct him for it; but he told his mother, that if she dared to approach him, he would knock her down. the mother retired, and the boy went where he pleased. these and many similar scenes i have witnessed; and i am afraid that many such characters have been so completely formed as to be past reformation. so essential is it, to embrace the first opportunity of impressing on the infant mind the principles of duty and virtue. i am aware that many excellent institutions are in existence for the spread of the gospel amongst the ignorant and depraved at home as well as abroad; but i must here again advert to the readier reception of religious truths in infancy, than by the adult and confirmed sinner. i would not say to those who are engaged in the painful task--painful because so often unsuccessful--forego your labours; but i would call upon all who have at heart the everlasting welfare of the souls of men, to exert themselves, that the rising generation may not likewise grow up into that state of perverseness--that they may not in future years prove themselves to be a generation, which, "like the adder, turneth a deaf ear to the charmer, charm he ever so wisely." i am satisfied, from the experience i have had, that an amount of good is attainable from early and judicious culture, which far, very far surpasses all that has heretofore been accomplished; and on which not a few are even unprepared to calculate. it was a christian-like wish expressed by king george iii., that every child in his dominions should be able to read the bible; and from the increased facility of doing so from gratuitous education, the number of those who cannot is much less than formerly; but in many cases the necessitous circumstances of the parents prevent them from allowing their children, except during their infant years, the advantage of instruction, even though it cost them nothing. the time for the children of the poor to receive instruction, is between the ages of two and eight; after that period many are sent out to work, or detained at home, for they then become useful to their parents, and cannot be sent to school. there are many little girls who, having left the infant school, go out to work for a shilling a week, and the mothers have declared to me, when i have endeavoured to persuade them to send them to the national school, for at least one year, that they could not do it, for they were so poor, that every shilling was a great help; they have, however, promised me that they would send them to the sunday school. this may account, in some measure, for there being so many more boys than girls in almost every school in london, and chews that great good has been done, and is doing, by those valuable institutions.[a] [footnote a: it is to be observed here, that the children do not come to or schools on sundays, but many of them, between five and six years old, who have brothers and sisters in the national school, go with them to church, and others of the same age go to a sunday school in the neighbourhood. in short, i may venture to say, that almost all the children that are able, go either to a sunday school or to church: but to take them all in a body, at the early age that they are admitted into an infant school, to any place of worship, and to keep them there for two or three hours, with a hope to profit them, and not to disturb the congregation, is, according to my view, injurious if not impracticable.] many of my readers, who have been in the habit of noticing and pitying the poor, may think the detail into which i have entered superfluous, but i can assure them the want of information on the subject is but too general, and is sufficient to account for the indifference which has so long been exhibited. the objection, that education is altogether improper for poor people is not quite obsolete. there are not wanting persons who still entertain the most dreadful apprehensions of the _"march of intellect,"_ as it has been termed; who see no alternative but that it must over-turn every thing that is established, and subvert the whole order of society. i would willingly impart comfort to the minds of those who are afflicted with such nervous tremours, but i fear, if the demonstration of experience has not quieted them, the voice of reason never will. it cannot fail to remind us of the apprehensions of the popish clergy in former times, who decried the art of printing, then recently introduced, as a branch of the black art, which, if encouraged, must eventually demolish the social fabric, and introduce civil wars and discord into every country. time, that test of truth, has shewn us how groundless their apprehensions were. instead of injuring that fabric, it has strengthened its foundation so that it cannot be shaken, and has surrounded it with defences, which bid defiance to assaults. oh! that the time were come when every heart, being imbued with truly christian principles, would see that the noblest and highest object that could be set before us, would be to rear up the minds of the young in knowledge, virtue, and piety; to train them to intelligence and usefulness in this life, and for happiness and immortality in the life to come. on such labours the blessing of god would inevitably rest, and his promise of their success is positive and unconditional. "train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." to the furtherance of the infant system i have devoted for many years my utmost energies and resources, and to it i purpose to give them, so long as i am permitted by the gracious providence of god. i shall be happy to render it any aid, either by supplying information to those who need it, or by personal exertions, the expenses of so doing being defrayed; on application to my publisher, , portugal street, lincoln's inn, london, or to myself', at moor cottage, wakefield. in order to urge the necessity, and explain the design of infant schools, i have for some years been accustomed to deliver a course of lectures, of which the following is an outline:-- first lecture.--affecting state of the children of the poor--lamentable condition of young delinquents--what are the causes?--the question answered--bodily and mental injuries now sustained by children of all ranks, described and prevented--what is the best remedy for existing evils?--answer given--origin and history of the infant system--its progress in scotland, where it might least have been expected--what are the objections to the system?--practical refutation of them--modes of instruction: the alphabet, spelling, reading, arithmetic--moral cultivation enforced, and the means explained. second lecture.--a play-ground made not only delightful, but _mentally and morally_ improving--the class-room adapted to produce and confirm religious impressions--music, its application to improve the feelings and memory--representations of natural objects and scriptural subjects--variety and extent of information attainable--lying, dishonesty, injustice, and cruelty corrected. third lecture.--new plans of reward and punishment--influence of fear and love--great difference in the result--infant system more fully explained--appeals to conscience--emulation unnecessary--elliptical plan of teaching described--trials by jury--effect of sympathy--infants the instruments of improving one another. fourth lecture.--methods of teaching the elements of grammar, geography, and geometry--gallery described, and its application to many useful purposes--qualifications of instructors--injury sustained from their deficiencies and errors--the system contrasted with former methods--ultimate effects of its diffusion--servants prepared to become blessings to families--hints to parents, and the application of the whole system to children of every grade. these lectures i am ready to deliver wherever it may be deemed desirable, and to follow up the effect by the organization of schools. the necessary apparatus may be obtained of myself. chapter v. principles of infant education. _moral treatment--importance of exercise--play-ground indispensable--the education of nature and human education should be joined--mental development, children should think for themselves--intellectual food adapted for children--a spirit of inquiry should be excited--gradual development of the young mind--neglect of moral treatment--inefficacy of maxims learned by wrote--influence of love--the play-ground a field of observation--the natural propensities there shew themselves--respect of private property inculcated--force of conscience on the alert--anecdote--advantages of a strict regard for truth--the simple truths of the bible fit for children_. * * * * * "the business of education, in respect of knowledge, is not, as i think to perfect a learner in all or any one of the sciences, but to give his mind that disposition, and those habits, that may enable him to attain any part of knowledge he shall stand in need of in the future coarse of his life."--_locke_. "when the obligations of morality are taught, let the sanctions of christianity, never be forgotten; by which it will be shewn not that they give lustre and strength to each other: religion will appear to be the voice of reason, and morality the will of god."--_johnson_. * * * * * when agesilaus, king of sparta, was asked, "what should boys be taught?" he answered, "what they ought to do when they become men." such a declaration was worthy of later times, since the most intelligent now admit that the great end of all education is the formation of solid, useful, and virtuous character. this work should be, doubtless, commenced at the earliest possible period, to it the system explained in this volume is considered to be adapted, and the principles on which it proceeds are now to be illustrated. and here it ought to be particularly observed that nothing is admissible, except what is appropriate to the state of infancy, calculated to exercise the physical energies, and likely, by their invigoration, to lay the basis of a sound and powerful intellect. and yet all this is too often forgotten. look at the infant, the very embodying of vivacity and activity, and its confinement to a particular posture, or the requirement of a peculiar expression of countenance, is manifestly unnatural. an inactive and healthy child under six years of age is never seen. whatever compels it to be otherwise consequently produces what is artificial in character. a parent or a teacher may keep his children quiet, and in what he terms order; but it does not follow that this is a good preparation for after years. on the contrary, bondage may issue in excess. the feelings and propensities which, instead of being corrected, are unduly restrained, will be manifested in some other ways, and under less favourable circumstances, and frequently the reaction will be violent in maturity. hence the system now recommended is expressly one for _infants_, adapted to them just as they are, and wholly designed to repress what is evil, and to cherish what is good. accordingly, the utmost attention is given to the cheerfulness and happiness of those on whom it acts. instruction in reading, arithmetic, geometry, and various other things is made exceedingly amusing; smiling countenances and sparkling eyes are observable all around when it is communicated; and what was dull and soporific, according to the old plan, is now insinuated so agreeably, that the child, while literally at play, is acquiring a large amount of valuable knowledge. at play he sees nature's book, that world of beauties: he loves to look into it, there is no flogging to induce him to do it. all is enquiry and anxiety on his part. "what is this?" "what is that?" "what is it for?" "how did it come?" with numerous other questions of similar import. oh, that we had teachers to teach more out of this divine book! oh, that we had a public who would encourage and cherish them for so doing! what blessed results even have i seen, by one's being able to answer such enquiries! the absurd notion that children can only be taught in a room, must be exploded. i have done more in one hour in the garden, in the lanes, and in the fields, to cherish and satisfy the budding faculties of childhood, than could have been done in a room for months. oh, mankind have yet something to learn about teaching children! see how they catch at truths through the medium of living things! see how it germinates in them, by so doing; the teacher may forget, they do not, this i have proved hundreds of times. music has proved a most important auxiliary for this purpose, and a stranger would be astonished at the hilarity and delight with which much is rehearsed, with a full perception of its meaning, when in any other way it would be irksome and unintelligible. these attainments, moreover, are accompanied by various movements and evolutions which exercise the limbs, the joints, the muscles; in addition to which, set times are appointed every morning and afternoon for its exclusive enjoyment. the conduct of inferior animals, when young, shows the propriety of giving exercise to children. every other creature makes use of its organs of motion as soon as possible, and many of them, when under no necessity of moving in quest of food, cannot be restrained without force. such is the case with the calf, the lamb, and many more. if these creatures were not permitted to frisk about at pleasure, they would soon die, or become diseased. the same inclination appears very early in the human species; but as they are not able to take exercise themselves, it is the business of their parents and nurses to give it them. this may be done in various ways, and the methods included in the system are shewn in other parts of this work. it is to be regretted that men should be so inattentive to this matter; their negligence is one reason why females know so little of it. women will always be desirous to excel in such accomplishments as recommend them to the other sex; but men generally avoid even the slightest acquaintance with the affairs of the nursery, and many would reckon it an affront were they supposed to know any thing of them. not so, however, with the kennel or the stables; a gentleman of the first rank, who is not ashamed to give directions concerning the management of his dogs or horses, would blush were he surprised in performing the same office for that being who is to be the heir of his fortunes, and, perhaps, the future hope of his country. arguments to show the importance of exercise, might be drawn from every part of the animal economy. without it, the circulation of the blood cannot be properly carried on, nor the different secretions duly performed; neither can the fluids be properly prepared, nor the solids rendered firm or strong. the action of the heart, the motion of the lungs, and all the vital functions, are greatly assisted by exercise. but to point out the manner in which these effects are produced, would lead us beyond the present subject. we shall, therefore, only add, that when exercise is neglected, none of the animal functions can be duly performed; and when this is the case, the whole constitution must go to wreck. healthy parents, wholesome food, and suitable clothing will avail little where it is disregarded. sufficient exercise will supply many defects in nursing, but nothing can compensate for its want. a good constitution ought certainly to be our first object in the management of children. it lays a foundation for their being useful and happy in life; and whoever neglects it, not only fails in his duty to his offspring, but to society. while this is forgotten, let us not complain of weak and thoughtless children, or of weak and thoughtless servants; for the former are so from the neglect of their parents and the public; and the latter from not having been taught to think at all--and yet the very persons that object to the education of the poor are the first to complain of their servants. a notion that habits of industry must be established, has, however, been the means, i regret to state, of a sad perversion of the system in these respects. the time allowed for amusement and exercise has been in some cases, very much abridged that the children might learn and practise sewing, knitting, plaiting, &c. now, no one can be more disposed to the encouragement of industrious habits than myself, but i would say not at the expense of health; which i am certain, in these cases it must be. deprive the children of their amusement, and they will soon cease to be the lively, happy beings, we have hitherto seen them, and will become the sickly, inanimate creatures, we have been accustomed to behold and pity, under the confinement and restraint of the dame's schools. i do not scruple to affirm, that if the _play-grounds_ of infant schools are cut off from the system,--they will from that moment cease to be a blessing to the country. nothing has given me greater pain than to witness the thorough neglect of play-ground attendance on the part of teachers and the public; the former leave the children to themselves at the very time their attendance is most desirable; and when, if duly watched, the children will give them _lessons_. yes! such lessons as no book can give, and such lessons as every efficient teacher _must_ learn, or efficiency is out of the question. the public are too fond of hearing tasks and memory work, and such book-learning as is taught in school, with the singing, and the amusing indoor work, to the detriment and neglect of the moral and physical outdoor work. again and again, i say, the outdoor training tells most upon the morals and the formation of character. the first faculties which develop themselves in childhood, are those of observation. the infant, who is two months old, will notice a lighted candle; immediately that sense is gratified, it seeks to please another, that of _touch_, and every mother knows, if not prevented, it will put its hand in the flame. the next effort is to examine other objects: these it will seize if it can, and after having examined one, it will put it aside to observe another. on its being able to move about, it seeks objects within its reach, and wishing to gratify the sense of taste, applies every thing to the mouth; by this it distinguishes the bitter from the sweet, and on seeing what is sweet a second time, will point to it and wish to obtain it, whilst what is bitter will not be desired. the _mental_ part of the system should now be adverted to. hence it has been well remarked, "from the time that children begin to use their hands, nature directs them to handle every thing over and over, to look at it while they handle it, and to put it into various positions, and at various distances from the eye. we are apt to excuse this as a childish diversion, because they must be doing something, and have not reason to entertain themselves in a more manly way. but if we think more justly, we shall find that they are engaged in the most serious and important study; and if they had all the reason of a philosopher, they could not be more properly employed. for it is this childish employment that enables them to make the proper use of their eyes. they are thereby every day acquiring habits of perception, which are of greater importance than any thing we can teach them. the original perceptions which nature gave them are few, and insufficient for the purposes of life; and, therefore, she made them capable of many more perceptions by habit. and to complete her work, she has given them an unwearied assiduity in applying to the exercise by which those perceptions are acquired." such is the education which nature gives her children, and we may add that another part of her discipline is, that by the course of things, children must exert all their muscular force, and employ all their ingenuity, in order to gratify their curiosity and satisfy their little appetites. what they desire is only to be obtained at the cost of labour, patience, and many disappointments. by the exercise of the body and mind necessary for satisfying their desires, they acquire agility, strength, and dexterity in their motions, as well as constitutional health and vigour; they learn to bear pain without dejection, and disappointment without despondency. the education of nature is most perfect in savages, who have no other tutor; and we see that in the quickness of all their senses, in the agility of their motions, in the hardiness of their constitutions, and in their ability to bear hunger, thirst, pain, and disappointment, they commonly far exceed civilized nations. on this account, a most ingenious writer seems to prefer savage to social life. but it is the intention of nature, that human education should assist to form the man, and she has fitted us for it, by the natural principles of imitation and belief, which discover themselves almost in infancy, as well as by others which are of later growth. when the education which we receive from men does not give scope to that of nature, it is erroneous in its means and its tendency, and enervates both the body and the mind. nature has her way of rearing men, as she has of healing their maladies. the art of education is to follow her dictates, and the art of education is equally to obey her laws. the ancient inhabitants of the baleares followed nature in their manner of teaching their children to be good archers, when they hung their dinner aloft by a thread, and left them to bring it down: by their skill in the use of the bow. the education of nature, without any more human care than is necessary to preserve life, makes a savage. human education joined to that of nature, may make a good citizen, a skilful artizan, or a well-bred man; but a higher power is wanting in order to produce a bacon or a newton. the error of the _past_ system (for such i hope i may venture to call it) as to _mental development_ was, that the inferior powers of the mind were called into activity, in preference to its higher faculties. the effort was to exercise the memory, and store it with information, which, owing to the inactivity of the understanding and the judgment, was seldom or never of use. to adopt the opinions of others was thought quite enough, without the child being troubled to think for itself, and to form an opinion of its own. but this is not as it should be. such a system is neither likely to produce great nor wise men; and is much better adapted to parrots than children. hence, the first thing attempted in an infant school is, to set the children thinking,--to induce them to examine, compare, and judge, in reference to all those matters which their dawning intellects are capable of mastering. it is of no use to tell a child, in the first place, _what it should think_,--this is at once inducing mental indolence, which is but too generally prevalent among adults; owing to this erroneous method having been adopted by those who had the charge of their early years. were a child left to its own resources, to discover and judge of things exclusively by itself, though the opposite evil would be the consequence, namely, a state of comparative ignorance, yet i am doubtful whether it would be greater or more lamentable than that issuing from the injudicious system of giving children dogmas instead of problems, the opinions of others instead of eliciting their own. in the one case we should find a mind, uninformed and uncultivated, but of a vigorous and masculine character, grasping the little knowledge it possessed, with the power and right of a conqueror; in the other, a memory occupied by a useless heap of notions,--without a single opinion or idea it could call its own,--and an understanding indolent and narrow, and, from long-indulged inactivity, almost incapable of exertion. as the fundamental principle of the system, i would therefore say, let the _children think for themselves_. if they arrive at erroneous conclusions, assist them in attaining the truth; but let them, with such assistance, arrive at it by their own exertions. little good will be done, if you say to a child,--_that_ is wrong, _this_ is right, unless you enable it to perceive the error of the one and the truth of the other. it is not only due to the child as a rational being that you should act so, but it is essentially necessary to the development of its intellectual faculties. it were not more ridiculous for a master, in teaching arithmetic, to give his pupil the problem and answer, without instructing him in the method of working the question, than it is for a person to give a child results of reasoning, without showing how the truth is arrived at. but some, perhaps, will be ready to exclaim, "surely the teacher should not withhold the benefit of his knowledge and experience,--the child will have time enough to examine the merits of his information when he grows older and be more competent to do so!" to this i answer: in the first place, nothing should be submitted to the child which it is not fully competent to understand. to give the child tasks or subjects too difficult for its mental powers, is a violation of nature; and as foolish and detrimental as though you were to place a hundred pounds weight on its shoulders when it is incapable of supporting ten. the teacher's experience can only be of service to the child so far as it is applicable to its own state; and as to postponing the period when it is to think for itself, there is certainly no occasion for it. nature has provided food adapted to the powers of the infant's stomach, and those who would rightly conduct the work of education, should imitate her in providing its intellectual food. that this may be done, i am attempting to shew in theory in the pages of this work; and, that it answers equally well in practice, any one who has a doubt, may assure himself by visiting any school conducted upon the plan here laid down. the charge has been brought against the system, that we are not sufficiently anxious to teach the children to read. now, though i may venture to say, that under no other plan, do the children acquire a knowledge of alphabetical characters, and the formation of words, so soon as under the present, yet i am quite ready to concede that i consider their learning to read a secondary object, to that of teaching them to examine and find out the nature and properties of things, of which words are but the _signs_. it is with _things_, and not _words_ merely, we wish to make our children acquainted. if they first learn the nature and properties of an object, there is no fear of their afterwards inquiring its name; but we too frequently find, that having acquired _names_, they are indifferent to, and forgetful of, the objects represented. let children see and observe an object, and be taught the name of it at the same time, and then both are indelibly fixed on the memory. an infant at home is perpetually running around and looking at all things, and hearing persons speaking about them; it soon becomes acquainted with their names and properties, and then from time to time speaks about them. "ah!" exclaims papa or mama, "what an old-fashioned child that is; one would wonder where it got such notions." a little thought and reflection would soon tell where, and this thought properly carried out would display an important fundamental principle in teaching the young mind. our first endeavour is, therefore, to excite a spirit of inquiry,--to foster that curiosity which is so natural to young children: till this is properly done, your information will not be well received, and it is most likely soon to be forgotten; but having once made them inquisitive, you are more likely to tire of communicating than they are of receiving. the skilful teacher will, indeed, rather leave them with an appetite still craving, than satiate them by repletion. i have frequently found the most beneficial results arise from the sudden cessation of a lesson or a lecture on an interesting topic. the children have looked for its renewal with the utmost impatience, pondering over what they had already heard, and anticipating what was yet to come with the greatest interest. give a child a _task_, and you impose a burthen on him,--permit him to learn something, and you confer a favour. having excited a spirit of inquiry, the next endeavour is to direct it to proper objects. these, of course, will be things which relate to the senses of the child; the nature and properties of bodies, which may be ascertained by the application of those senses, &c. having induced it to examine for itself, you are now to elicit its ideas of each object respectively; and having taught it to use its reason and judgment freely, and to express its own notions fearlessly and candidly,--you are to attempt the correction of what is erroneous, by putting forth your own views in as simple a way as possible: not so as to induce the child to give up its own opinions and adopt yours, but in such a way as to direct it to the attainment of truth; to induce a comparison between its thoughts and yours, and thus to discover its own error. the powers of observation will speedily be improved under such a course of instruction, and in all the subsequent stages of existence, will not fail to constitute an independent and shrewd observer. but some may think we are straining the child's faculties by the plan recommended,--overstepping nature's laws,--and that the result must be detrimental to the child, both in mind and body. so far, however, is this from being true, that we have taken nature for our guide. we deprecate strongly, most strongly, that unnatural system, which gives children tasks so far beyond their powers, and for which their infantile faculties are not qualified;--we would lead them on in the path which nature has marked out--step by step--taking care that one thing should be thoroughly mastered before another is attempted. the mental powers of children are far stronger than is generally supposed. no one who looks back to his early childhood, can fail of recollecting, that, at times, his thoughts would even then reach the very limits of human thought. all the powers of mind that are exercised in after-life display themselves in infancy, and therefore they all ought to be quietly and easily brought into exercise. this maybe done by any object,--even a toy. were we to tie up several of our members so as to prevent their use, and at the same time exercise strongly those at liberty, bodily distortion must result. if we, in teaching, exercise the memory alone, and that merely with a knowledge of words and not of things, an absolute mental distortion must result, and the higher powers of reflection, judgment, and reason will remain weak, feeble, and deficient from want of exercise. when all the powers of the mind are brought out into harmonious action, the acquirement of knowledge be comes pleasurable. knowledge is the proper aliment to expand and enlarge the mind, as natural food is for the growth of the body; and when such as is proper to the age and character of the recipient is selected, the one will be received with as much pleasure as the other. as the due exercise of every bodily power causes it to become strong, healthy, and vigorous, so the right and proper use of every mental faculty will, in the end, occasion it to become active, free, and powerful. as soon as the child enters the school he is under command. he is required to occupy certain places, to go through various motions, and to attend to diversified instruction, at the sound of a foot, or the raising of a hand. from this course no departure is allowed. at first it is the work of sympathy and imitation, but afterwards it becomes a matter of principle. thus, then, the native reluctance of the infant mind to obey, is overcome, and a solid basis laid for future efforts. so far, however, the discipline is general; to be particular, the individual character must be minutely observed. the movements of the child, when unrestrained, must be diligently watched, its predominant qualities ascertained, and such a mode of treatment adopted as sound judgment of character may dictate. wherever this is forgotten, some evils will arise. the orders which are given to any other power than those of sympathy and imitation, are not likely to be obeyed by the untrained babe; the fact is, that as yet it has no other means of obedience, and for this on higher principles we must wait till nature furnishes instruments and opportunities for their exercise. when, however, success is gained thus far, the way is prepared for further development and culture, and the powers of observation and discrimination, then gradually tasked, will accomplish all that is desired. thus the infant sits or rises, repeats or is silent, at first, because those about him do so; afterwards he perceives a reason for doing so: for example, that, when in the gallery, he can see what he could not any where else, and, therefore, that he must march thither, and then he judges that one thing is wrong because the doing it was forbidden, and that another is right because it was commanded, or because the one makes him happy and the other the contrary. under the old system of education, i must candidly say, _moral_ treatment has been often altogether omitted, and still more frequently has it been erroneous, and consequently inefficient. let me ask,--would it promote a child's health to teach it to repeat certain maxims on the benefits resulting from exercise? the answer is obvious. neither can it be of any service to the moral health of the child, to teach it to repeat the best maxims of virtue, unless we have taken care to urge the practical observance of those precepts. and yet this has rarely been the case. how frequently do we hear persons remark on the ill conduct of children, "it is surprising they should do so;--they have been taught better things!" very likely; and they may have all the golden rules of virtue alluded to, carefully stored up in their memories; but they are like the hoarded treasures of the miser, the disposition to use them is wanted. it is this which we must strive to produce and promote in the child. indeed, if we can but be the instruments of exciting a love of goodness, it will not err, nor lack the knowledge how to do good, even though we were to forget to give it any rules or maxims. it is to the heart we must turn our attention in the moral treatment of children. we must carefully endeavour to elicit and train out the moral feelings implanted within; and to awaken the conscience to the approval of good, and the dislike and detestation of evil. another grand object of the master or mistress of an infant school, is, therefore, to win their love, by banishing all slavish fear. they are to be invited to regard their teacher, as one who is desirous of promoting their happiness, by the most affectionate means--not only by kind words, but by kind actions; one of which influences a child more than a volume of words. words appeal only to the understanding, and frequently pass away as empty sounds; but kind actions operate on the heart, and, like the genial light and warmth of spring, that dispels the gloom which has covered the face of nature during the chilly season of winter, they disperse the mists which cold and severe treatment has engendered in the moral atmosphere. the fundamental principle of the infant school system is _love_; nor should any other be substituted for it, except when absolutely necessary. let the children see that you love them, and _love_ will beget love, both toward their teacher and each other. without the aid of example nothing can be done; it is by this magnetic power alone that sympathetic feelings can be awakened. it acts as a talisman on the inmost feelings of the soul, and excites them to activity; which should be the constant aim of all persons engaged in the important work of education. as we find that vicious principles are strengthened by habit, and good principles proportionally weakened, so, on the contrary, immoral dispositions are weakened by the better feelings being brought into action. the great defect in the human character is _selfishness_, and to remove or lessen this is the great desideratum of moral culture. how happy were mankind, if, instead of each one living for himself, they lived really for one another! the perfection of moral excellence cannot be better described than as the attainment of that state in which we should "love our neighbour as ourselves." the prevalence of self-love will be very obvious to the observant master or mistress, in the conduct of the children under their care, and it is this feeling that they must be ever striving to check or eradicate. nor need they despair of meeting with some degree of success. the children may be brought to feel, that to impart happiness is to receive it,--that being kind to their little schoolfellows, they not only secure a return of kindness, but actually receive a personal gratification from so doing; and that there is more pleasure in forgiving an injury than in resenting it. some i know will be apt to say,--that after all, thus is nothing but _selfishness_ or _self-love_. it is an old matter of dispute, and i leave those to quarrel over it who please. every one knows and feels the difference between that which we call _selfishness_, and that which is comprehensively termed by the lips of divine truth, the "_love of our neighbour_." if it must be called self-love, i can only say that it is the proper direction of the feeling which is to be sought. in the work of moral culture, it will be necessary not only to observe the child's conduct under the restraint of school observation and discipline; but at those times when it thinks itself at liberty to indulge its feelings unnoticed. the evil propensities of our nature have all the wiliness of the serpent, and lurk in their secret places, watching for a favourable opportunity of exercise and display. for the purpose of observation, the _play-ground_ will afford every facility, and is on this account, as well as because it affords exercise and amusement to the children, an indispensable appendage to an infant school. here the child will show its character in its true light. here may be seen what effects the education of children has produced; for if they are fond of fighting and quarrelling, here it will be apparent; if they are artful, here they will seek to practice their cunning; and this will give the master an opportunity of applying the proper remedy; whereas, if they are kept in school (which they must be, if there be no play-ground), these evil inclinations will not manifest themselves until they go into the street, and consequently, the antidote will not be applied. i have seen many children behave very orderly in the school, but the moment they entered the play-ground they manifested their selfishness to such a degree, that they would wish all the rest of the children to be subservient to them; and, on their refusing to let them bear rule, they would begin to use force, in order to compel their compliance. this is conduct that ought to be checked,--and what time so proper as the first stages of infancy? to take another case, a quarrel like this may arise: a boy has six gooseberries; another boy comes and asks for one; by a little solicitation he obtains it:--he wishes another;--but the boy who has them says he cannot spare any more; he has only five, and cannot part with another. the second boy, however, duns him. he even acts the hypocrite, and puts into play many of the worst artifices of human nature, which we so often see in daily practice, and he gains his end. but he is not yet satisfied; he wishes another. the first boy, however, will on no account give him more. he again tries all his arts, but in vain. seeing he cannot by art or entreaty gain another, he has recourse to violence. he snatches one out of his companion's hand and runs off with it. the first boy is irritated at such conduct, he pursues the fugitive, overtakes him, and gives him a blow on the face. the second boy is as great a coward as he is a thief. he comes up and makes his complaint to the master. the master then has a trial by jury. he does not knock one head against the other according to the old custom, but he hears both plaintiff and defendant, and having got the facts, he submits to the children themselves whether it was right in the one boy to take with violence what was not his own, and shews them which is the more to blame. then they decide on the sentence; perhaps some one suggests that it should be the utmost infliction allowable, a slight pat on the hand; while a tender-hearted girl says, "please, sir, give it him very softly;" but the issue is, a marked distinction between right and wrong;--appropriate expressions of pleasure and disapprobation:--and on the spot, "a kissing and being friends." i am, indeed, so firmly convinced, from the experience i have had, of the utility of a play-ground, from the above reasons, and others, elsewhere mentioned, that i scruple not to say, an infant school is of little, if any, service without one. where the play-ground is ornamented with flowers, fruit-trees, &c. (and i would recommend this plan to be invariably adopted,) it not only affords the teacher an opportunity of communicating much knowledge to the children, and of tracing every thing up to the great first cause, but it becomes the means of establishing principles of honesty. they should not on any account be allowed to pluck the fruit or flowers; every thing should be considered as sacred; and being thus early accustomed to honesty, temptations in after-life will be deprived of their power. it is distressing to all lovers of children, to see what havoc is made by them in plantations near london; and even grown persons are not entirely free from this fault, for, not content with a proper foot-path, they must walk on a man's plantations, pull up that which can be of no use, and thereby injure the property of their neighbour. these things ought not to be, nor do i think they would be so common, if they were noticed a little more in the education of children. it has been too much the practice with many, to consider that the business of a school consists merely in teaching children their letters; but i am of opinion, that the formation of character while there, is of the greatest importance, not only to the children, but to society at large. how can we account for the strict honesty of the laplanders, who can leave their property in the woods, and in their huts, without the least fear of its being stolen or injured, while we, with ten times the advantages, cannot consider our property safe, with the aid of locks and bolts, brick walls, and even watchmen and police-officers besides? there must be some cause for all this, and perhaps the principal one is defective education, and the total neglect of the morals of the infant poor, at a time when their first impressions should be taken especial care of; _for conscience, if not lulled to sleep, but called into vigorous action, will prove stronger than brick walls, bolts, or locks; and i am satisfied, that i could have taken the whole of the children under my care in the first infants' school, into any gentleman's plantation, without their doing the least injury whatever; and this i could now do in any similar circumstances_. i will mention, however, one fact. one day, while i was walking in the play-ground, i saw at one end of it about twenty children, apparently arguing a subject, _pro_ and _con_; from the attitude of several of the orators, i judged it was about something that appeared to them of considerable importance. i wished to know the subject of debate, but was satisfied that if i approached the children it might put an end to the matter altogether. some of the bystanders saw me looking very attentively at the principal actor, and, as i suppose, suggested to the party the propriety of retiring to some other spot, for immediately afterwards they all went behind a partition, which afforded me an opportunity of distinctly hearing all that passed, without being observed by them. i soon found that the subject of debate was a _song_. it seems that one of the children had brought a song to the school, which some of the monitors had read, and having decided that it was an improper thing for the child to have in his possession, one of them had taken it from the owner, and destroyed it. the aggrieved party had complained to some of the other children, who said that it was _thieving_ for one child to take any thing from another child, without his consent. the boy, nettled at being called a thief, defended himself, by saying that he, as a monitor, had a right to take away from any of his class any thing that was calculated to do them harm; and was, it seems, backed in this opinion by many others. on the other hand, it was contended that no such right existed; and it was doubtful to me for a considerable time, on which side the strength of the argument lay. at last one of the children observed to the following effect:--"you should have taken it to _master_, because he would know if it was bad better than you." this was a convincing argument, and to my great delight, the boy replied--"how much did the song cost?" the reply was, "a half-penny." "here, then, take it," says the child, "i had one given me to-day; so now remember i have paid you for it, but if you bring any more songs to school i will tell master." this seemed to give general satisfaction to the whole party, who immediately dispersed to their several amusements. a struggle like this, between the principles of _duty and honesty_, among children so very young, must prove highly interesting to all who love them, and exemplifies, beyond a doubt, the immense advantage of early instruction. another thing to be noticed is, a regard for _truth_. nothing is so delightful as this. there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any design to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive; and this admitted, we should strive to the utmost to induce children to remember it. but our success, in a great measure, will depend on the means we employ. many children are frightened into falsehood by the injudicious methods of those who have the care of them. i have known a mother promise a child forgiveness if it would speak the truth, and, after having obtained confession, she has broken her engagement. a child, once treated in this manner, will naturally be guarded against a similar deception. i have known others who would pretend not to punish the child for confession, but for first denying it, and afterwards confessing. i think that children should not be punished, on any account, after having been promised forgiveness, truth being of too great importance to be thus trifled with; and we cannot wonder if it is lightly esteemed by children, after the example is set by their parents. having had several thousand children under my care, i have had favourable opportunities of observing the bias of the infant mind, and i must say, that i have not found them so inclined to evil and falsehood as i had previously imagined. when morality is adverted to in this volume, let it never be forgotten, that by it is meant the pure and perfect morality of the sacred scriptures. from this source alone the great truths and precepts can be derived, for regulating the conscience and improving the heart. the infant system, however, would aim to steer perfectly clear of the more remote theological opinions entertained by christians of different denominations. with these, little children can have nothing to do, and institutions for their express benefit should receive the support of all. what kind of religious doctrine and faith infants ought to be taught, i will not here determine, but leave it for consideration in a future chapter devoted more expressly to that subject. it must be the wish of all true christians that they should be taught the fundamental truths of the everlasting gospel. but it is much to be lamented that what are the fundamental truths of the gospel is so frequently a debatable point. with such controversial topics infants have nothing to do, and to teach such matters would rather be sowing seeds for future scepticism than laying a solid basis for pure and undefiled religion. in all things, but more especially in religion, as being the subject of the highest importance, the purest, simplest, and most unadulterated truths should be taught. the bible contains ample and abundant stores of such simple truth, most admirably suited to infant capacity in texts, precepts, parables, and histories. the pious and judicious mother or teacher can be at no loss for a proper selection. many beautiful and simple prayers are to be found in the church of england prayer-book, which i think cannot be mended, and which i have found quite suitable to the infant mind. several of the collects, for simplicity of language and rich fulness of divine truth, cannot be surpassed. simple hymns for instruction and devotion are also requisite, and i have endeavoured to provide such as these in a _manual_, recently published in connexion with a friend, and which may be bad through the publisher of this work. chapter vi. requisites for an infant school. _the master and mistress should reside on the premises--interior arrangements--a school and its furniture--lesson-posts and lessons--the younger children should not be separated from the older--play-ground arrangements--rotatory swing--its management and advantages_. * * * * * "wisdom seeks the most desirable ends in the use of the most appropriate means." * * * * * i shall now lay before my readers an account of the things necessary for the establishment of an infant school; previously to presenting them with the detail of the plan to be pursued in it. in the first place, it is necessary to provide an airy and spacious apartment, with a dry, and, if possible, a large play-ground attached to it. the plot of ground, i conceive, should not be less than feet wide, and feet long; but if the ground were , or feet long, it would be so much the better, as this would allow or feet for a play-ground; which is of such importance, that i consider the system would be very defective without it, for reasons which will be spoken of hereafter. there should likewise be a room about fifteen feet square, for the purpose of teaching the children in classes, which may be formed at one end of the large room: this is absolutely necessary. as the master and mistress should live on the premises, a small house, containing three or four rooms, should be provided for them. the reason for their living on the premises is, that the children should be allowed to bring their dinners with them, as this will keep them out of the streets; and, indeed, of those who do go home to dinner, many will return in a very short time; and if there be no person on the premises to take care of them, they will be lost; and not only so, but strange boys will come in from the streets, and do a great deal of mischief, if no one be there to prevent it. the portion of sitting-room that i have allowed for each child is twelve inches. the scholars should sit all round the school room, with their backs against the wall; double seats should be round the sides of the school, like the two first seats in the gallery. a school according to the engraved plan, will be found large enough for all the purposes of an infant school; but if it is wished to be more commodious, it may be of the same length as the plan, and instead of twenty-two feet, may be made thirty feet wide; this will hold as many children as ought to be collected together in one place, and as many as any man and woman can possibly do justice to if it be any longer, it will be difficult for all the children to hear the master. an oblong building is the cheapest, on account of the roof. economy has been studied in the plan given, without any thing being added that is unnecessary. this, of course, is a matter of opinion, and may be acted upon or not, just as it suits those who may choose to build. the master's house in the plan, it will be seen, projects a little into the play-ground, to afford him the opportunity of seeing the children at play while he is at dinner, that he may notice any improper conduct on the part of the children, and mention it when the accounts of the day are made up. as children are very apt to get into danger, even when at school, it becomes expedient to exercise the utmost vigilance, in order to prevent the possibility of accident; for where two hundred children are assembled together, the eldest not seven years of age, it is most certain that if there be danger, some will get into. for this reason, all the doors on the premises should be so secured, that the children cannot swing them backwards and forwards; if they are not, they will get their fingers pinched, or greater accidents may occur. the forms also should be so placed that the children may not be likely to fall over them. every thing, in short, should be put out of the way, that will be likely to occasion any danger. the seats should not be more than nine inches high; and for the smaller children six inches; and should be eleven or twelve inches wide; and fixed all round to the walls. the master's desk should be placed at the end of the school, where the class-room is. by this means he will be able to see the faces of all the children, and they can see him, which is absolutely necessary. they may then be governed by a motion of his hand. the _furniture_ necessary for the school consists of a desk for the master; seats for the children; lesson-stands; stools for the monitors; slates and pencils; pictures and lessons on scriptural subjects; pictures and lessons on natural history; alphabets and spelling lessons; brass letters and figures, with boards for them; geometrical figures, &c.; and the transposition-frame, or arithmeticon, as it has been called. to these may added little books, &c. the particular use of these articles will be shewn in the succeeding pages. the following is a representation of a lesson-post. the _lessons_, pasted on wood, to render them sufficiently stiff, are put into the grooves of the lesson-post; and can then be placed in any position which is most convenient, and adjusted to any height, as the master may see proper. [illustration: _a b_, is a slip of wood with a groove in it, fixed to the post by means of the screws _c_ and _d_, on which slip are two blocks _e_ and _f_; the bottom one, _f_, is fixed with a groove in the upper side, for the lower edge of the board _g h_ to rest in; the upper block, _e_, has a groove in the lower side, for the upper edge of the board _g h_ to rest in, and rises and falls according to the width of the board on the slip _a b_.--instead of being made with feet, the lesson post is generally, and perhaps better, fixed into the floor of the school-room, and should be very slight, and feet inches in height.] the following lesson-post has been found to answer better than the preceding one; and is fixed in a socket, which prevents the necessity of the cross-bar feet at bottom, and possesses this advantage, that it may be taken out when done with, and hung up by the side of the wall, so as to allow the area of the room to be quite clear of any incumbrance, and to be used for any other purpose. no. , is the socket which should be let into the floor and screwed fast to the side of a joist, so as to keep it perfectly steady; the socket is to be open at bottom so as to let the dust pass through: and no. , is a plate, to fit over the socket, to come flush with the floor, to be put over it when the lesson-post is taken out, to prevent too much dust from getting into the socket. the little nich represented in plate one, is too small for the pupils to get their fingers into, so as to pull up the plate, but wide enough to allow the teacher to put a very narrow key in, when he desires to pull up the plate to put the lesson-post in the socket. no. , is a front view of the lesson-post, containing the slides nipping the lessons between them; the other figure represents a side view of the lesson post, and the small figure at the left hand side represents the groove of the two sliders to receive the lesson, and the back part of it the dovetails to clip, which come down behind the post; these are placed parallel in double rows down the school, at equal distances, exactly opposite each other; and flattened brass or iron is to be let into the floor, opposite to the front of them, as shewn in one of the engravings representing the area of the school, and the children at their object lessons. i have found by experience that this invention possesses a decided advantage over the other, as they always remain perpendicular and parallel to each other, take up less room, and are more easily put out of the way, and the children cannot knock them down; they should be numbered in front as represented in the figure, so that the teacher may always put the proper post in its own place. [illustration] the arithmeticon, of which a description will be given in a subsequent chapter, is simple in its construction, but, as will be seen hereafter, may be variously and beneficially applied. it is indeed indispensable in an infant school, as it is useful for teaching the first principles of grammar, arithmetic, and geometry. the expense of furnishing a large school is about £ .; that of a smaller one about £ . i must here protest against a violation of the freedom of the infant mind. a fold, as it is called, is erected in some schools for the youngest of the children; and thus they are cut off from the society of the rest, from whom they would learn much more than they could from any teacher. the monitors having charge of this class, are also cooped up in the same cage, and therefore suffer the same privation. the result of my own experience, as well as that of others, is, that a child is decidedly incompetent to the duties of a monitor, if he cannot keep the youngest class in order without any such means. i would therefore deprecate, in the strongest terms, the separation referred to, as not only altogether unnecessary, but exceedingly injurious. to have one hundred children, or upwards, in a room, however convenient in other respects, and not to allow the children proper relaxation and exercise, which they could not have without a play-ground, would materially injure their health, which is a thing, in my humble opinion, of the first importance. i would rather see a school where they charged two-pence or three-pence per week for each child, having a play-ground, than one where the children had free admission without one; for i think the former institution would do the most good. the play ground, likewise, is one of the most useful parts of the system. it is there the child shews itself in its true character, and thereby gives the master an opportunity of nipping in the bud its evil propensities. i am, therefore, most anxious to recommend that this necessary appendage to an infant school should not be dispensed with. i moreover observe, that where there is a play-ground attached to the school, instead of playing in the streets, where scarcely anything but evil is before their eyes, the children will hasten to the school, with their bread and butter in their hands, in less than a quarter of an hour after they have left it, knowing that they have an opportunity of playing there the remainder of their dinner-time, so that they love the school, and but rarely wish to be anywhere else. the play-grounds of some schools are paved with bricks, which i have found to answer very well, as they absorb the rain so quickly, that ten minutes after a shower, the place is dry enough for the children to play in; which, perhaps, would not be the case with any other kind of paving. they are commonly placed flat on the ground, but i should prefer them being put edge-ways, as they would last many years longer, yet it would take nearly double the number of bricks were they so placed.[a] if it be not paved, the ground will be soft, and the children will make themselves dirty. it should be so managed that the water may be carried off, for, if there are any puddles, the children will get into them. some persons have recommended a few cart-loads of good iron-mould gravel, there being a sort which will bind almost like a rock, if well rolled; but the children are liable to dig holes if it is only gravel. if this is noticed in time it may be prevented; but if they are suffered to proceed, and no notice be taken of it, it will be very difficult to prevent them from continuing the practice. if money can be saved by any plan, perhaps it is as well to notice it; but after having weighed the advantages and disadvantages of gravelling, i am of opinion, that bricks are preferable. i should also recommend that fruit-trees be planted in the centre of the play-ground, and likewise round the walls; which will delight the children, and teach them to respect private property. if any person doubts the propriety of this plan, i can only say we leave many play-grounds thus ornamented: and instead of proving a temptation to the children, it has so far become the means of confirming principles of honesty in them, that they never touch a single flower or even a leaf in the garden. there should also be a border of flowers round the play-ground, of such sorts as will yield the most fragrance, which will tend to counteract any disagreeable smell that may proceed from the children, and thereby be conducive to their health, as well as to that of those who have the charge of them. they will, besides, afford the teacher an opportunity of giving the children many useful lessons; for the more he teaches by things, and the less he teaches by signs, the better. these things need be no expense to the establishment, except the purchase in the first instance, for they will afford an agreeable occupation for the master before and after school-hours, prepare him in some measure for the duties of the day, and afford him an ample opportunity of instilling a variety of ideas into the minds of the children, and of tracing every thing up to the great first cause. i have witnessed the good effects of these things, which makes me desirous of humbly but earnestly recommending them to others. [footnote a: in lancashire, and other places where flagging is cheap, it has been found decidedly better than any other plan alluded to above, the children will not hurt themselves more by falling on flags than they would on bricks or pebbles.] with regard to the expense: if children pay two-pence each per week[a], which is now the usual charge, the annual receipts will be, deducting four weeks for holidays, about £ , and if the deficiency be made up by subscriptions and donations from the friends of the system, it may be easily adopted, and all its advantages secured. a village school might be furnished for half the money, and supported at less than half the expense. i question whether it does not cost the country as much for every individual that is transported out of it, as would support three infant schools annually, and secure good pay to the teachers, with infants in each school. [footnote a: in some parts of st. giles's, wapping, &c., &c., many of the parents are not able to pay, and many that are, would sooner let their children run the streets than pay a penny; yet the children of the latter persons are the greater objects of charity; and it is the children of such persons that chiefly fill our prisons. we want three classes of infant schools: one for the middle class, who will pay; for skilled mechanics, who will pay _d_. or _d_. per week; and for the poor and illiterate who will pay nothing.] every year increases my conviction of the great importance of the play-ground, and of the folly of some of my early views respecting it. finding a great variety of lessons and objects necessary to arrest the attention of children, diversified as they are in disposition and taste, it was supposed that an equal variety of toys was required for the play-ground. a good supply of balls, battledores, shuttlecocks, tops, whips, skipping-ropes, hoops, sticks, and wheelbarrows, was, therefore, obtained, and we flattered ourselves that this must produce universal happiness. in thus, however, we were most grievously disappointed; for the balls frequently bounced over the wall,--the players, not being able to throw them with the precision of spartan children, sometimes struck their comrades, perhaps, in the eye: if we could succeed in quieting the sufferer, by a kiss and a sugar-plum, the ear was as immediately afterwards saluted with the cry of, "o, my chin, my chin," from some hapless wight having been star-gazing, and another, anxious for as many strokes as possible, mistaking that part for the bottom of his shuttlecock; while this would be followed by, "o, my leg," from the untoward movement of a stick or a barrow. in short, such scenes were insupportable; and what with the accidents that arose, and the tops without strings, and the strings without tops, the hoops without sticks, and the sticks without hoops, the seizure of the favourite toy by one, and the inability of another to get any thing, it was evident that we were wrong, but not so clear how we could do otherwise. it then occurred that we might provide some wood-bricks, about four inches long, an inch and a half thick, and two inches and a half wide, and of these a thousand were obtained. with these children are exceedingly amused from the variety of forms in which they may be placed, and of buildings which may be erected with them. the play-ground should always be at the rear of the premises, and as private as possible, that both teachers and pupils be secure from annoyance of any kind. the entrance should be only through the school, and no other way; this secures the flowers, the fruits, and the moral training of the children. [illustration] in addition to these, all that is required is a rotatory swing, of which the above is a representation. to make one, a pole eighteen or twenty feet long should be firmly fixed in the ground: three feet of the but-end should be sunk, secured by sleepers to keep it steady: it should be at least three quarters of a yard in girth at bottom, and taper gradually to the top to half that size. an iron rim is to be driven on the head of the pole to keep it from splitting, and then a spindle at least an inch in diameter, with a shoulder, is to be fixed in it; an iron wheel with four spokes turned up at the end like a hook, to which four ropes are to be fastened, must then be made to revolve on the spindle. as the ropes reach the ground, four children may take hold of them and run round until they bear the whole weight of the body on the arms; and this exercise will be found to strengthen the muscles, and give vigour to the whole frame. in a large school there should be two swings of this kind,--one for the girls, and the other for the boys. the teachers must, however, be careful the first few weeks, to train the children to look about them: this they are but little disposed to do, hence the most impressive manner should be adopted, and i will venture to say, should any injury be sustained by the children, the fault _will not be theirs_. the effect of the instruction thus urged will be valuable in other cases; for a child, thus taught to watch against accident, will be careful in passing crossings, and going through crowded streets, and thus be likely to escape many dangers into which others fall. this exercise may also be accompanied by instruction, as the children may repeat "the cow," or "the sheep," or any other lesson, as the measure of the time during which four may have the swing. it will, moreover, afford an opportunity for detecting the selfishness of some children, by their wishing to keep the ropes too long, and the passion of others, from the vehemence with which they will insist on their rights; but, as on such occasion, both are to be forbidden to swing any more that day, they will soon learn to bear and forbear. in the event of a child being thrown down from standing in the way, all the children should be placed in the gallery, and this one shewn them. if it appear hurt, all will pity it; let then the question be put, how did this happen? and the answer will be, perhaps, "please, sir, because he did not make use of his eyes." here, then, is full opportunity to inculcate caution, and to inform and benefit the whole. for example: the master may say, how many senses have we? the children will answer, five. _master_.--name them. _children_.--hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. _m_. where are the organs of sight? _c_. here (pointing to the eyes). _m_. look at this child, and see if he has them. (here an inspection will take place, the sufferer will look sheepish, and begin to perceive he has not made the best use of the sense of seeing, whilst the singular observations of the children will sharpen his faculties, and make such an impression as to cause him to be more cautious in future; and many a scholar who is sitting in judgment will profit by the circumstance.) i have known the lives of several children saved by such simple lessons, and they are of as much importance as any that are taught, though i am not quite sure that all the teachers will think so. too many, to save trouble, will find fault with the swing; and i have known several instances where the swing had been taken down in consequence. we have found the swing answer in all three countries; it strengthens the muscles, which, in physical education, is a matter of the highest importance. it has been introduced into juvenile schools with similar success; and, also, in ladies' boarding-schools i have personally inspected tine effects produced. under all these circumstances, and in every instance, i have found the most beneficial effects produced, provided the exercise was properly regulated and superintended. it will not do, therefore, to have this important part of the system dispensed with. the teachers must be present at all the exercises in the play-ground, or, more properly speaking, the training-ground. non-attention to this is a capital error; and, if persisted in, must be followed with dismissal. chapter vii. qualifications of teachers. _teachers should practice what they teach--necessity of patience--mere automatons will not do for infant teachers--disadvantage of using excessive restraint--a master and mistress more efficient than two mistresses--objections to the sole government of females--two frequent use of divine names should be avoided--general observations._ * * * * * --"such authority, in shew, when most severe and minist'ring all its force, is but the graver countenance of love, whose favour, like the clouds of spring may lower, and utter now and then an awful voice, but has a blessing in its darkest frown, threat'ning at once and nourishing the plant."--_thomson_. * * * * * i enter on this chapter with a full recollection of the painful sense of incompetency i endured on becoming "a teacher of babes;" and this, i trust, will enable me to offer any remarks on the present subject with the humility that is desirable, blended with the confidence of experience. it is a very common idea, that almost any person can educate little children, and that it requires little or no ability; but it will be found, on an enlightened and correct estimate of the work, that this is a very great mistake: and i regret that this mistake has been made by those who professed to understand the system, and who have written upon it. but there is just this slight difference between theory and practice: theory supposes such and such things to be correct, which was my own case; but twelve months only of practical effort very soon convinced me i was wrong. how frequently, for instance, may we find children, ten or twelve years of age, who cannot answer the most simple question, and who, nevertheless, have been to school for several years. to give the children correct notions, is a part of education seldom thought of: but if we really wish to form the character of the rising generation, and to improve the condition of society generally, the utmost attention must be given to this object. little, i should think, need be said to prove, that few ideas are given in dame-schools. there may be a few as to which an exception should be made; but, generally speaking, where the children of mechanics are usually sent before the age of seven years, no such thing is thought of. the mind of a child is compared by mr. locke to a sheet of blank paper, and if it be the business of a tutor to inscribe valuable lessons on the mind, it will require much patience, gentleness, perseverance, self-possession, energy, knowledge of human nature, and, above all, piety,--simple, sincere, and practical piety,--to accomplish so great a work with propriety and success. whoever is in possession of these requisites, with the addition of a lively temper, pleasing countenance, and some knowledge of music, may be considered as a proper person to manage an infant school; and whoever has charge of such an institution will find numerous opportunities of displaying each and all of these qualifications. it would be almost useless to attempt to cure the bad tempers of children, if the master should encourage and manifest such evil tempers in his own conduct; for children are not indifferent to what they see in others: they certainly take notice of all our movements, and consequently the greatest caution is necessary. it will be of little purpose to endeavour to inculcate suitable precepts in the minds of the children, unless they see them shine forth in the conduct of the teacher. how strangely it would sound, if, when a teacher was explaining to his pupils the sin of swearing, a child should say, "please, sir, i heard you swear;" and it is just the same as to those faults which some may consider of minor importance,--such as the indulgence of angry passions,--in the presence of children. it must always be understood, that the essence of the plan is to allow the children to speak,--not what they do not feel and think, which has been but too general,--but what they do think and feel. this children will always do if rightly trained. yes, with modesty and decorum, but with power! what will the old class of pedagogues say to this? what! allow pupils to tell you of your faults! certainly; they know them; at least, those committed in their presence. they talk of them to themselves, why not to us? some of the best _lessons_ i ever got were under similar circumstances. persons, in such circumstances, cannot be too circumspect, as every trifling fault will be magnified, both by parents and children. indeed, character is of so much importance, that the designs of benevolent individuals are very often frustrated by appointing improper persons to fill such situations. i have seen, more than once, the interests of two hundred babes sacrificed to serve one individual; and persons have been chosen merely because they had been unfortunate, and to serve them they have been placed in a situation disagreeable to themselves, and unprofitable to the children. it is one thing to possess certain information, but it is another to be able to communicate that information to infants. patience is a virtue absolutely indispensable, as it will frequently take the master or mistress a whole hour to investigate a subject that may appear of little or no importance: such as one child accusing another of stealing a trifle,--as a plum, a cherry, a button, or any other thing of little value. the complainant and defendant will expect justice done to them by the master or mistress; and in order to do this, much time and trouble will, in some cases, be necessary. should a hasty conclusion be formed, and the accused be punished for what he has not been guilty of, the child will be sensible that an injury has been done him, feel dissatisfied with his tutors, and, consequently, will not pay them the respect they ought to have. besides, it will frequently be found, on examination, that the accuser is really the most in fault, and i think i have convinced many children that this has been the case, and they have retired satisfied with my decision. for when a child is convinced that justice will be done him, he will open his case freely and boldly; but if he has any idea that it will be otherwise, he will keep one half of the facts in his own mind, and will not reveal them. i once formed a hasty conclusion in the case of two children, and happened to decide directly contrary to what i ought to have done; the consequence was, that the injured child endeavoured to do that for himself which he found i had not done for him, and pleaded his own cause with the opposite party in the play-ground; but finding that he could not prevail on him, and being sensible that he had been wronged, he was so much hurt, that he brought his father the next day, and we re-considered the case; when it was found that the child was correct, and that i was wrong. here i found how necessary it was to exercise the utmost patience, in order to enable me to judge rightly, and to convince my little pupils, that i had the greatest desire to do them justice. i compare an infant school to a little commonwealth, the head or governor of which is naturally the master. an infant school master or mistress is not to consider anything relating to the rights of his little community, as trifling or unimportant. however justly it might be considered such in itself, yet, comparatively, it is a matter of moment to the parties concerned, and such therefore it should be esteemed by him who is the arbitrator of their rights and the legislator and judge of the infant state. he will have, indeed, to act the part of counsel, judge, and jury; and although the children cannot find words to plead their own cause, yet by their looks and gestures, they will convince you that they know when you have rightly decided; and it appears to me, that the future conduct of the children in the world, will depend, in a great measure, upon the correctness of the master's decisions. one would suppose, to hear the observations of some persons, that mere automatons would do for masters and mistresses. by them the system is considered as every thing, while the persons who are to teach it, have been considered as secondary objects; but a system, however perfect in itself, will be productive of little good, unless it be committed to persons possessed of some degree of skill; as the best watch will go wrong, if not properly attended to. we cannot, therefore, be too circumspect in the choice of the persons to whom we commit the care and education of the rising generation. there is something so powerful in correctness of deportment, that even infants respect it; and this will operate more on their minds than many imagine. it does not appear necessary to me, that children should be kept under excessive restraint by their tutors; they should rather be encouraged to make their teacher their confidant, for by this means he will become acquainted with many things, the knowledge of which it is essential he should possess, both as it regards himself; and the welfare of his pupils. if the child be enthralled, he will seek some other persons to whom he may open his little mind, and should that person be ill-disposed, the most serious consequences will not unfrequently follow. i know the source from whence all assistance is derived, and i am taught to believe, that such assistance will not be withheld from those who diligently seek it. i am well aware that i shall have to render an account of my stewardship to the almighty, for every child that may have been placed under my care, and i feel that to do so unblameably, requires much assistance from above. let not those, then, who are similarly circumstanced with myself; think that i address them in the spirit of arrogance, with a pre-conceived opinion of my own sufficiency. i wish that all who teach may be more fit for the situation than i am. i know many who are an honour to their profession, as well as the situation they fill; but, i am sorry to say, i think they do not all meet with the encouragement they merit. it is not always those who do their duty the best that are most valued; but if a man's conscience do not upbraid him, he has in its approval a high reward. and now, as to a matter on which there is some difference of opinion, _viz_., whether women are or are not as fit for conductors of infant schools as men; my decided opinion is, that _alone_ they are not. there should be in every school a master and a mistress. in the first place, in an infant school, the presence of the man, as of a father in a family, will insure a far greater degree of respect and attention on the part of the children. this does not arise from the exercise of any greater degree of harshness or severity than a mother would be capable of using; nor is it to be attributed, as some suppose, to the less frequent presence of the father in the case of many families, but is rather to be accounted for by an intuitive perception of the greater firmness and determination of the character of the man. to those who deny this, i would give as a problem for solution, a case by no means unfrequent, and which most of my readers will have witnessed,--a family in which the mother--by no means incurring the charge of spoiling the child, by sparing the rod--is less heeded, less promptly obeyed in her commands, than a father who seldom or never makes use of any such means. the mother scolds, threatens, scourges, and is at last reluctantly and imperfectly obeyed; the father, either with reference to his own commands, or seconding those of the mother, _speaks_, and is instantly regarded. the idea of disputing his authority, or neglecting or disobeying his laws, never once enters the minds of his children. exactly the same is it in an infant school,--the presence of a man insures attention and gains respect from the children, not only at first, whilst the novelty of such control might be supposed to operate, but permanently; as i am sure all who have candidly examined the schools where two women preside, and those conducted by a man and a woman, must have seen. another objection to the sole government of females (i mean the class of females who are likely to accept such situations) in these schools, is, they have not the physical strength, nor, at present, intellectual powers, sufficient for the task. in saying thus, i trust i shall not be suspected of wishing to offend my fair countrywomen. that they have not sufficient physical strength is the intention of nature; that they are deficient in mental energy is the defect of education. i trust, therefore, that no offence will be assumed where no blame is attached. it has been a point much disputed, whether there be really an original and intrinsic difference in the mental powers of the two sexes, and it has been of course differently decided by the respective disputants. with this i shall have nothing to do; but these things are certain; that the minds of _both_ are capable of much greater activity and more important results than have been generally supposed; and that whilst education has not done what it ought for man, it has done far less for woman. this it is, then, which affords an additional argument in my mind for a master and a mistress. for let it not be imagined, that i would dismiss women altogether from the system--that i think them useless or even dispensable in an infant school. if, indeed, one or the other _must_ be done without, and i had my choice, i should certainly give my voice for a woman; but to carry the system into full effect requires _both_. there is ample opportunity for the offices of maternal love, of which man is at best but a poor imitator; neither can it be denied, that an active intelligent woman is a useful auxiliary to the labours of the man in the duties of the school. the authoritative presence of the man is the more necessary in the infant system, because one grand object is, to rule without harshness, and by that principle of love which is in no degree incompatible with the respect felt for a kind but judicious schoolmaster. some children, indeed, so far as regards authority, might be very well managed by a mistress only, but then it must be recollected that an infant school exhibits every variety of temper and disposition; and even were it otherwise, the objection as to intellectual incompetence and physical strength, before adverted to, would still hold good. such, indeed, is the opinion of the unfitness of females for the occupation of teaching, in scotland, that in many places the very idea of it is scouted. the people of that country have scarcely heard of a _school-mistress_, even for the youngest children; and certain it is, that education is much better conducted in scotland than in most other places. if the minds of children are to be cultivated, and a firm and decided tone given to their characters, say they, what can be the use of sending them to a school conducted by a woman only? and i must candidly admit, that i perfectly agree with them on this head, and have therefore deemed it my duty to be thus explicit on the matter.[a] [footnote a: i am sorry to say that, at this time, the people of scotland have been led into the same error, of which i have complained. i did hope they would never have allowed themselves to be led away from their old, judicious, and workable plans, far the sake of party, or fashion; but so it is, and it is much to be regretted: however, it is a consolation to know that it is not universal.] one thing i must add, by way of conclusion: to render any man or woman competent to discharge the duties of the situation efficiently, the _heart_ of the teacher must be in the school. if there be not the zeal of the amateur, the skill of the professor will be of little avail. the maxim will apply to every species of occupation, but it is peculiarly true as to that of an infant school teacher. to those who can feel no other interest than that which the profit gives to the employment, it will soon become not only irksome, but exceedingly distasteful. but certain i am that it is possible to feel it to be what it is--an employment not only most important, but likewise most interesting. it is one which a philosopher might choose for the study of the human character, and a philanthropist for its improvement. one word more, and i have done. i have seen what i could have wished had been otherwise, viz., not sufficient discrimination used in giving _religious instruction_; improper times have been chosen, too much _shew_ has been made of it, too much freedom has been used with _the divine names_; and i have sometimes been so shocked at the levity displayed, as to have considered it little less than _profanation_. i wish to lay the utmost stress on what has been stated, as a failure on the part of a master and mistress is most grievous and lamentable. i have seen schools, where little or nothing has been done, because of the inefficiency of the teachers. moral and religious qualifications are confessedly of the first importance, but those which are mental are to be highly estimated. i differ with a gentleman who has written on this subject, when he says, that any clever boy who has been educated in a national school, will accomplish the end; because the system through which he has passed neither gives a sufficient knowledge of _things_ nor of _words_, nor does it sufficiently develop the faculties to prepare him for such a service. one cause of failure in these respects has been undoubtedly the paltry remuneration which some receive, and i would earnestly recommend the supporters and conductors of infant schools to try the effect of liberality by all the means they can command. persons of talent ought to be found for this work, and then they should be appropriately paid; but if _any_ are to be deemed suitable, and if the having them at a low rate be a special reason for their engagement, it would be better at once to revert to the old system, than to destroy, by such means, the public confidence in the plans now suggested. i entertain a full conviction that the infant system will flourish most where i once least expected its adoption: i mean in scotland, because of the high importance attached to the essential qualifications of teachers, and because of the attention and kindness which they continually receive. it is to be lamented that most of the schools connected with the established church are managed by women only, whilst the schools connected with the dissenters are generally conducted by a man and woman; the consequence is, that the children educated under the dissenters will be better taught than those connected with the established church, which is an error i should be glad to see remedied as soon as possible. i have no need to speak in favour of infant school masters, as many of them have been the greatest enemies i ever had, whilst on the contrary, the mistresses have generally been very friendly to me, and not been subject to those petty jealousies which the masters have too frequently evinced; nevertheless, the subject treated of in this place involves a principle which cannot be conceded without doing great injury to the infant system, and on those grounds i advocate the necessity of a master in conjunction with the mistress. many teachers, and other persons who have written on the subject, have talked largely of making improvements, whilst the hints given in this book have been entirely neglected; as this was the first book that ever was written on the subject, and the writer of it the first man that ever brought the thing practically to bear, it sounds a little odd, that people should talk about improvements before they have pointed out the errors of the original inventor. others again have borrowed largely from me, and have neither had the good manners nor the common honesty to say from whence they got their information. societies have been formed at the eleventh hour, after the infant system had been twenty years in practice, who puff off books written by some of their own members, which do not contain the original idea, whilst my books, for some cause best known to themselves, have never been recommended, or indeed ever mentioned, though i could take page after page from those modern writers on the subject, and justly claim them as my own. this is not what one ought to expect amongst people who call themselves christians: a truly good man is delighted to do justice to his fellow-men, because in doing so, he never fails to obtain justice himself; but there are some persons whose minds are so truly selfish that they cannot see how good can accrue to themselves, if they do what is right to others: and i regret to say i have met with not a few, who have been engaged in the art of teaching, who have been guilty of the mean and contemptible conduct i have hinted at above, and it is to deter others from falling into the same errors that i have ventured to allude to this subject at all. it would be invidious to mention names, which i could very easily do, and should this be persisted in, if i am spared, i shall most certainly mention the parties by name. i would not be understood to say that no improvements can be made in the infant system: far from it. no doubt it will be improved, and that to a great extent; but that will only be in process of time, and by practical people, who understand more of the nature of the infant mind than i do, and may hereafter have greater experience than i have had; but they must work hard for it, as i have done, and be doers as well as talkers: and when i see such improvements made, i trust the almighty will enable me to be the first to acknowledge them. at present, however, though i have travelled over a large space, and visited many hundred schools, and also opened many hundred, and have not yet seen the mighty improvements of which i have read so much, and i do beg that those teachers who may be engaged in the system will be kind enough to try my plans, prior to introducing so many crotchets of their own. they are to recollect we never intended to make prodigies of the little children; it never was our object to teach them things that were only fit for men and women: the fact must never be lost sight of that they are infants, and that as infants they must be treated. it is very easy for any one to theorise, and form schemes for the education of children, and to introduce changes which may appear beneficial. fancy is very prolific, and a number of books may easily be read, and yet the right knowledge not be gained. the chief book to be studied is the infant mind itself, considered as a great and wonderful work of the creator, with a sincere desire to know all its faculties and powers, and the various simple laws by which its operations are governed. the teacher ought also to turn his thoughts within himself, to study his own mind, especially in his recollections of very early childhood, and the modes by which knowledge is gradually acquired. these things, carefully and dilligently done, will give more information on the proper method of educating and developing the young mind than the perusal of a hundred volumes. this i have endeavoured all my life to do, and have had to deal with many thousands of children who have been to me a book for constant study. from this extensive observation and experience, all my plans have been formed, and my opinions derived. if any one has done the same, or more, to him i will gladly concede; but i am not aware that any one individual, not even pestalozzi, has run a similar career. chapter viii. hints for conducting an infant school. _classification--getting the children into order--language--lessons on objects--rules to be observed by parents--daily routine of instruction--opening prayer and hymn--object or developing lessons--synopsis of a week's instruction--cleanliness--never frighten children--guard against forgetfulness--observe punctuality--be strictly accurate in your expressions--guard against the entrance of disease--maxims for teachers--resolutions_. * * * * * "whate'er is best administer'd is best."--_pope_. * * * * * having had considerable practice in teaching children in the various parts of england, scotland, ireland, and wales, it may be necessary to give a few hints on the subject of organizing an infant school. i have generally found on opening one, that the children had no idea of acting together. in order, therefore, to gain this object, it will be found necessary to have recourse to what we call _manual lessons_, which consist in the children holding up their hands all at one time, and putting them down in the same manner; throwing the right or the left foot out; putting their hands together, or behind them; or rising from their seats all at one time; clapping hands, which is a very good exercise; holding up their hands and twirling the fingers; holding up the forefinger and bringing it down on the palm, in time to some tune; imitating the action of sawing wood, and the sound produced by the action of the saw; doing this both ways, as it is done in the saw-pit, with both hands, and by the carpenter with the right; imitating the cobbler mending shoes, the carpenter plaining wood, the tailor sewing, and any other trade which is familiar and pleasing to children. this we do in the first instance, because it is calculated to please the infants, and is one grand step towards order. after the first day or two, the children will begin to act together, and to know each other; but until this is the case, they will be frequently peevish, and want to go home; any method, therefore, that can be taken at first to gratify them, should be adopted; for unless this can be done, you may be sure they will cry. having proceeded thus far, we have then to class them according to their capacity and age, and according as they shew an aptitude in obeying your several commands. those who obey them with the greatest readiness may be classed together. i have found it difficult, at all times, to keep up the attention of infants, without giving them something to do; so that when they are saying the tables in arithmetic, we always cause them to move either their hands or feet, and sometimes to march round the school. the best way we have yet discovered is the putting their hands one on the other every time they speak a sentence. if they are marching they may count one, two, three, four, five, six, &c. having classed them, and found that each child knows its own place in the school, you may select one of the cleverest of each class for a monitor. some of the children will learn many of the tables sooner than the others; in this case, the teacher may avail himself of their assistance, by causing each child to repeat what he knows in an audible manner, the other children repeating after him, and performing the same evolutions that he does; and by this means the rest will soon learn. then the master may go on with something else, taking care to obtain as much assistance from the children as he can, for he will find that unless he does so, he will injure his lungs, and render himself unfit to keep up their attention, and to carry on the business of the school. when the children have learned to repeat several of the tables, and the monitors to excite their several classes, and keep them in tolerable order, they may go on with the other parts of the plan, such as the spelling and reading, picture lessons, &c., which will presently be described. but care must be taken that in the beginning too much be not attempted. the first week may be spent in getting them in order, without thinking of anything else; and i should advise that not more than sixty children be then admitted, that they may be reduced to order, in some measure, before any more are received, as all that come after will quickly imitate them. i should, moreover, advise visitors not to come for some time after a school is opened, for several reasons; first, because the children must be allowed time to learn, and there will be nothing worth seeing; secondly, they take off the children's attention, and interfere with the master: and, lastly, they may go away dissatisfied, and thereby injure the cause which they intend to promote. in teaching infants to sing, i have found it the best way to sing the psalm or hymn several times in the hearing of the children, without their attempting to do so until they have some idea of the tune; because, if all the children are allowed to attempt, and none of them know it, it prevents those who really wish to learn from catching the sounds. nothing, however, can be more ridiculous or absurd than the attempts at singing i have heard in some schools. and here, i would caution teachers against too much singing; and also against introducing it at improper times. singing takes much _out_ of the teacher, which will soon be felt in the chest, and cause pain and weakness there; and, if persevered in, premature _death_; and with women much sooner than men. this is another reason why one of each sex should be employed in the work. singing is an exhilarating and exciting lesson; the children always like it: but even they are injured by the injudicious management of it, and by having too much of it each day; or the having two or even three exciting lessons at the same time. for example: i have seen children singing, marching, and clapping hands at the same time; and they are prompted and led by the teachers to do so. here are three exciting lessons together, which ought to be separate: the result is, a waste of energy and strength, on the part of teacher and children, which is sometimes fatal to both. the exciting lessons were intended to be judiciously blended with the drier, yet necessary, studies. if the latter are neglected, and the former only retained, no greater perversion of the plans could occur, and a more fatal error could not be committed. you must not expect order until your little officers are well drilled, which may be done by collecting them together after the other children are gone, and instructing them in what they are to do. every monitor should know his work, and when you have taught him this, you must require it to be done. to get good order, you must make every monitor answerable for the conduct of his class. it is astonishing how some of the little fellows will strut about, big with the importance of office. and here i must remark, it will require some caution to prevent them from taking too much upon themselves; so prone are we, even in our earliest years, to abuse the possession of power. the way by which we teach the children hymns, is to let one child stand in a place where he may be seen by the rest, with the book in his hand; he then reads one line, and stops until all the children in the school have repeated it, which they do simultaneously; he then repeats another, and so on, successively, until the hymn is finished. this method is adopted with every thing that is to be committed to memory, so that every child in the school has an equal chance of learning. i have mentioned that the children should be classed: in order to facilitate this, there should be a board fastened to the wall perpendicularly, the same width as the seats, every fifteen feet, all round the school; this will separate one class from another, and be the cause of the children knowing their class the sooner. make every child hang his hat over where he sits, in his own class, as this will save much trouble. "have a place for every thing, and every thing in its place." this will bring the children into habits of order. never do any thing for a child that he is able to do for himself; but teach him to put his own hat and coat on, and hang them up again when he comes to school. teach every child to help himself as soon as possible. if one falls down, and you know that he is able to get up himself, never lift him up; if you do, he will always lie till you can give him your aid. have a slate, or a piece of paper, properly ruled, hanging over every class; let every child's name that is in the class be written on it, with the name of the monitor; teach the monitor the names as soon as you can, and then he will tell you who is absent. have a semicircle before every lesson, and make the children keep their toes to the mark; brass nails driven in the floor are the best, or flat brass or iron let into the floor. when a monitor is asking the children questions, let him place his stool in the centre of the semicircle, and the children stand around him. let the monitors ask what questions they please, they will soon get fond of the process, and their pupils will soon be equally fond of answering them. suppose the monitor ask. what do i sit on? where are your toes? what do you stand on? what is before you? what behind you? let the monitors be instructed in giving simple object lessons on any familiar substance, such as a piece of wood, of stone, of iron, of paper, of bone, of linen, &c. let them question their class as to the qualities first, and then the various uses to which the object is applied. these lessons will be of incalculable benefit to the children, and give them an early desire to inquire into the nature, qualities, and uses of every natural object they come into contact with. we will suppose the monitor holds in his hand a piece of leather; he first asks, "what is this?" the children will simultaneously exclaim, "a piece of leather." this being answered, he will proceed to the qualities, and will have either from his class, or by his own help, the following answers: "it is dry, it is smooth, it is hard, it is tough, it is pliable, it is opaque," &c. he will then question them as to its uses, and will ask, "what is made from leather?" a. boots and shoes. q. what use is it of else? a. books are bound with it; and so on through all its uses. he will then ask them how leather is made, and give them information which he has himself previously received from the teacher as to the mode of tanning leather, and the various processes which it goes through. indeed, there is no end to the varied information which children may thus receive from simple natural objects. at first they will have no idea of this mode of exercising the thinking powers. but the teacher must encourage them in it, and they will very speedily get fond of it, and be able to give an answer immediately. it is very pleasing to witness this. i have been much delighted at the questions put, and still more so at the answers given. assemble all the very small children together as soon as you can: the first day or two they will want to sit with their brothers or sisters, who are a little older than themselves. but the sooner you can separate them the better, as the elder children frequently plague the younger ones; and i have always found that the youngest ones are the happiest by themselves. in all cases let teachers be careful to avoid the "parrot system," and to remember that while it is necessary to infuse a certain amount of information into the child's mind, it can only be made its own by drawing it back again and getting its own ideas upon it--this is called development, which is a thing universally disregarded in almost every school i have seen; and it is a general complaint made by almost every modern writer on education; and many have objected to the infant system on this account, because the teachers of it were not acquainted with its end and essence. the true infant system is a system of development; no other system can be of lasting benefit to the country in general, nor to the pupils in particular; the genuine infant system is not subject to the fundamental errors so much complained of; it has been invented for the purpose of operating upon all the faculties, and the machine must not be condemned merely because the teachers do not know how to work it; but every committee, and each individual in a committee, appear to lose sight of these principles, in order to try how much originality may be displayed, and thus utility is sacrificed to novelty; thus we may find as many infant systems as there are days in the year; and i have been made chargeable by certain writers for the errors of others; but these writers have not condescended to examine into the merits of the system for which i have been so many years an advocate. but enough of this: we will now suppose that the little flock are brought by thus time into something like order; we are next to consider the means of securing other objects. although the following rules for this purpose are given, it must not be supposed, that they are presented as a model not to be departed from. if they can be improved so much the better, but some such will be found indispensable. * * * * * rules _to be observed by the parents of children admitted into the ---- infant school_. . parents are to send their children clean washed, with their hair cut short and combed, and their clothes well mended, by half-past eight o'clock in the morning, to remain till twelve. . if any child be later in attendance than nine o'clock in the morning, that child must be sent back until the afternoon; and in case of being later than two in the afternoon, it will be sent back for the day. . parents may send their children's dinners with them in the morning, so that the children may be taken care of the whole day, to enable the mother to go out to work. this can only be done where the teachers reside on the premises. . if a child be absent for a length of time, without a notice being sent to the master or mistress, assigning a satisfactory reason for the absence, such child will not be permitted to return again to the school. saturday is a holyday.[a] [footnote a: in ireland the schools do not commence business till ten in the morning, and the children remain till three, and do not go home in the interval. in scotland the rules are nearly similar.] *** it is earnestly hoped that parents will see their own interest, as well as that of their children, in strictly observing these rules; and they are exhorted to submit to their children being governed by the master and mistress; to give them good instruction and advice; to accustom them to family prayer; but particularly to see that they repeat the lord's prayer, when they rise in the morning, and when they retire to rest, and assist in their learning the commandments; and to set before them a good example; for in so doing, they may humbly hope that the blessing of almighty god will rest upon them and their families; for we are assured in the holy scriptures, that if we train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it, prov. xxii. . therefore parents may be instrumental in the promotion of the welfare of their children in this life, and of their eternal happiness in the world to come. * * * * * on each of these rules i will make a few remarks. _first rule_. some parents are so habitually dirty, that they would not wash their children from one week's end to another, unless required so to do; and if it be done for them, they will not be so thankful as when compelled to do it themselves. this i have found from experience. _second rule_. this has its advantages; for it would not be right to punish the children when the fault rests with their parents; consequently, by sending them home, the real authors of the evil are punished. many parents have told me, that when their children were at home, they employed themselves in singing the alphabet, counting, patting their hands, &c. &c.; that it was impossible to keep an infant asleep, that they were glad to get them out of the way, and that they would take care that they should not be late again. but there is no rule without an exception. i have found that this has its disadvantages; for some of the elder children, when they wanted a half-holiday, would take care to be late, in order to find the door shut, although they were sent in proper time by their parents; this, when detected, subjects them to a pat on the hand, which is the only corporeal punishment we have. if this rule were not strictly enforced, the children would be coming at all hours of the day, which would put the school into such disorder, that we should never know when all the children had said their lessons. _third rule_. this is of great service to those parents who go out to work; for by sending their children's dinners with them, they are enabled to attend to their employment in comfort, and the children, when properly disciplined, will be no additional trouble to the teacher, for they will play about the play-ground, while he takes his dinner, without doing any mischief. _fourth rule_. many persons will keep their children away for a month or two when nothing is the matter with them, consequently the children will lose almost all they have learned at school. besides this, children are kept out, who perhaps would attend regularly, and we should never know how many children were in the establishment. if, therefore, a parent does not attend to this rule, the child's name is struck off the book. on the admission of every child, the parents should be supplied with a copy of the preceding rules, as this will prevent them from pleading any excuse; it should be fastened on pasteboard, otherwise they will double it up and put it into their pockets, and forget all about it; but being on pasteboard, they may hang it up in their dwellings. the short exhortation that follows, it is hoped, may have its use, by reminding the parents of their duty to co-operate with those persons who have the welfare both of themselves and their children at heart. the reasons for the holiday of saturday are, first, that the teacher requires a rest, the infant system being so laborious. second, that the school-room requires to be thoroughly cleaned; and, thirdly, that many of the mothers are obliged to wash the children's clothes on a saturday because they have not a sufficient change, and if they do not have the saturday, they will break the sabbath by washing them on sunday. i shall next speak of the _daily routine_ of instruction. if we would be successful in our labours, we most ask for help,--we must solicit aid from that being who never yet denied it when sincerely and fervently implored. a minister who desires to instruct his flock with effect, never fails to commence his work with supplication; and certainly every teacher must ask for help, and instruct his pupils to do so too, if he really wish to be successful. if the wisest and best of men ask assistance from god to teach their fellow-men, and feel and know it to be necessary so to do, who would not ask assistance to instruct infants? "to lead them into virtue's path, and up to truth divine." if we had only to educate the _head_, prayer might be less necessary. but the promoters of _infant schools_ want to affect the _heart_; to operate upon the will and the conscience, as well as on the understanding; to make good men rather than learned men--men of _wisdom_, rather than men of _knowledge_: and he who has this work to accomplish, should remember the saviour's declaration, "without me ye can do nothing." whilst therefore i would avoid too frequent repetition of the divine names in tire presence of the children, and never fail to let them know the difference between talking religion and doing religion, and in every case avoid the very appearance of the form without the essence, i would in such case, avoid long prayers, and take care that what was said in their presence should be short, and to the point, keeping in mind the scripture maxim, to avoid long repetitions as the heathen do, who think they shall be heard for their much speaking; and little children cannot have the simple truths of the word pourtrayed to them in too simple a manner. to use prayers with little children composed of hard words taken from scholastic theology, is contrary to common sense. how is it possible that they can either understand or feel them? to utter prayer before them in dull and melancholy tones, and with grimaces of countenance, is calculated to give a false and gloomy impression of religion, and has often done so. i have known little children alarmed and frightened at such things; for sounds and appearances speak more strongly to them than words.--christ said of the pharisees, "they disfigure their faces." our saviour's direction is, after this manner, pray ye--"our father," thus directing us to draw near to the most high god as a heavenly father, rich in mercy to all them that call upon him. true, indeed, it is that "all have sinned," but a "new and living way" is provided whereby we may "draw near with boldness to a throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need." cowper never penned a truer line than this; "true piety is cheerful as the day;" and such an impression of it should ever be given to the young. the best prayer of a master for his children, is the perpetual and strong desire of his heart for god's blessing upon them, which, when genuine and sincere, will without doubt be recorded on high, and will also urge him on to a faithful and unceasing discharge of his duties towards them. to possess this is indeed to "pray without ceasing," and will prevent an unnecessary multiplication of "long prayers," "vain repetitions," and "much speaking." but to proceed. the children being assembled, should be desired to stand up, and immediately afterwards to kneel down, all close to their seats, and as silently as possible: those who are not strong enough to kneel, may be allowed to sit down. this being done, a child is to be placed in the centre of the school, and to repeat the following prayer:-- "o god, our heavenly father, thou art good to us: we would serve thee; we have sinned and done wrong many times. jesus christ died on the cross for us. forgive our sins for jesus' sake; may the holy spirit change our hearts, and make us to love god; help us to-day to be good children and to do what is right. keep us from wicked thoughts and bad tempers; make us try to learn all that we are taught; keep us in health all the day. we would always think of god, and when we die may we go to heaven. god bless our fathers and mothers, and sisters and brothers, and our teachers, and make us obedient and kind, for jesus christ's sake. amen." perhaps it would be better under all the circumstances, to use a simple prayer out of the book of common prayer. the children afterwards repeat the lord's prayer, and then sing a hymn; for instance, the following: when first the morning light we see, and from our beds arise, we to our god should thankful be, who every want supplies. 'twas god who made the brilliant sun, that gives all day its light; and it was god who made the moon and stars, which shine at night. the fish that in the water swim, the beasts upon the land, were all created first by him, and shew his mighty hand. the food we eat, the clothes we wear, 'tis god alone can give; and only by his love and care, can little children live. then let us ever caution take, his holy laws to keep; and praise him from the time we wake, until again we sleep. immediately after this they proceed to their lessons; which are fixed to what are called lesson-posts. to each of these posts there is a monitor, who is provided with a piece of cane for a pointer. this post is placed opposite to his class; and every class has one, up to which the monitor brings the children three or four at a time, according to the number he has in his class. we have fourteen classes, and sometimes more, which are regularly numbered, so that we have one hundred children moving and saying their lessons at one time. when these are gone through, the children are supplied with pictures, which they put on the post, the same as the spelling and reading lessons, but say them in a different manner. we find that if a class always goes through its lessons at one post, it soon loses its attraction; and consequently, although we cannot change them from post to post in the spelling and reading lessons, because it would be useless to put a child to a reading post that did not know its letters, yet we can do so in the picture lessons, as the children are all alike in learning the objects. one child can learn an object as quick as another, so that we may have many children that can tell the name of different subjects, and even the names of all the geometrical figures, who do not know all the letters in the alphabet; and i have had children, whom one might think were complete blockheads, on account of their not being able to learn the alphabet so quickly as some of the other children, and yet those very children would learn things which appeared to me ten times more difficult. this proves the necessity of variety, and how difficult it is to legislate for children. instead, therefore, of the children standing opposite their own post, they go round from one to another, repeating whatever they find at each post, until they have been all round the school. for instance, at no. post there may be the following objects; the horse, the ass, the zebra, the cow, the sheep, the goat, the springing antelope, the cameleopard, the camel, the wild boar, the rhinoceros, the elephant, the hippopotamus, the lion, the tiger, the leopard, the civet, the weazel, the great white bear, the hyena, the fox, the greenland dog, the hare, the mole, the squirrel, the kangaroo, the porcupine, and the racoon. before commencing these lessons, two boys are selected by the master, who perhaps are not monitors. these two boys bring the children up to a chalk line that is made near no. post, eight at a time; one of the boys gets eight children standing up ready, always beginning at one end of the school, and takes them to this chalk line, whilst the other boy takes them to no. post, and delivers them up to the charge of no. monitor. no. monitor then points to the different animals with a pointer, until the name of every one that is on his plate has been repeated; this done, he delivers them to no. monitor, who has a different picture at his post; perhaps the following: the fishmonger, mason, hatter, cooper, butcher, blacksmith, fruiterer, distiller, grocer, turner, carpenter, tallow-chandler, milliner, dyer, druggist, wheelwright, shoemaker, printer, coach-maker, bookseller, bricklayer, linen-draper, cabinet-maker, brewer, painter, bookbinder. this done, no. monitor delivers them over to no. monitor, who may have a representation of the following african costumes: viz. egyptian bey, ashantee, algerine, copts woman, mameluke, native of morocco, tibboo woman, egyptian woman, fellah, bedouin arab, turkish foot soldier, maltese, rosettan, native of cairo, turkish gentleman, bosjesman, native of coronna, native of namacqua, caffree, native of tamaha, native of ebo. having repeated these, no. monitor hands them over to no. , who perhaps has an engraved clock face, with hands composed of two pieces of wood, over which paper in the shape of clock hands has been pasted; he gives the children a lesson from this object, explains to them the difference between the minute and second-hand, shews them their uses, and points out the dots which mark the minutes, and the figures which divide it into hours, makes them count the seconds, and soon tell the hour. no. then gives the class to no. monitor, who has at his post a representation of the mariner's compass; he explains its uses, shews them the cardinal points, tells them how it was discovered, and then he will move the hands around, beginning at the north, and making the children repeat as he moves the hands, north, north-north-east, north-east, east-north-east, east, east-south-east, south-east, south-south-east, south, south-south west, south-west, west-south-west, west, west-north-west, north-west, north-north-west, north. the degrees, &c., may be considered as going too far for infants; we therefore reserve them until we treat of juvenile schools. we have not thought it necessary to name all the points of the compass, but have confined ourselves to the principal ones. no. then hands the class to no. , who has on his post representations of the following fishes, viz., whale, sword fish, white shark, sturgeon, skate, john dorey, salmon, grayling, porpoise, electrical eel, horned silure, pilot fish, mackerel, trout, red char, smelt, carp, bream, road goldfish, pike, garfish, perch, sprat, chub, telescope carp, cod, whiting, turbot, flounder, flying scorpion, sole, sea porcupine, sea cock, flying fish, trumpet fish, common eel, turtle, lobster, crab, shrimp, star fish, streaked gilt head, remora, lump fish, holocenter, torpedo. no. , then gives the class to no. ; and as variety is the life and soul of the plan, his post may be supplied with a botanic plate, containing representations of the following flowers:--daffodil, fox-glove, hyacinth, bilberry, wild tulip, red poppy, plantain, winter green, flower de luce, common daisy, crab-tree blossom, cowslip, primrose, lords and ladies, pellitory of the wall, mallow, lily of the valley, bramble, strawberry, flowering rush, wood spurge, wild germander, dandelion, arrow-head. no. monitor has on his post a set of geometrical figures, illustrated by the representation of objects either natural or artificial of the same shape; thus a triangle illustrated by one side of a pyramid, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, a heptagon, an octagon, a nonagon, a decagon. no. monitor has another set of geometrical definitions on the same principle, as a perpendicular line, a horizontal line, an oblique line, parallel lines, curved lines, diverging or converging lines, an obtuse angle, a circle. no. a different set of geometrical shapes, viz. sociles-triangles, scolene-triangles, rectangle, rhomb, rhomboid, trapezoid, trapeziums, ellipse or oval. having arrived at no. , the class find here the european costumes, viz. englishman, frenchman, russian, swiss, italian, german, scotchman, welchman, irishman, turk, norwegian, spaniard, prussian, icelander, dutchman, dane, swede, portugese, corsican, saxon, pole. no. monitor delivers them to no. , and there they may find pictures representing negroes, otaheiteans, highlanders, american indians, east indians, laplanders, greeks, persians, sandwich islanders, turks, english, chinese, dutch, tartars. to enter into a thorough explanation of the uses to which such lessons as these may be applied would make a volume of itself, which at present i have no time to write[a]; but it may be necessary, for the sake of teachers generally, to shew the uses to which a few of them may be applied, and leave it to their own ingenuity to go on is a similar manner with the great variety of lessons we have of this description, and which infants are quite competent to learn. take the european costumes as an example. when the children are thoroughly acquainted with each of the representations, and can name them themselves, or if too young to name them, can point them out if they are named by the teacher, they may then be told that the englishman is born in a country called england, and that london is the capital, and that capital means the greatest town or city. care must be taken that every thing is thoroughly explained, and that the pupils understand the meaning of the terms used. you then windup this much by telling the pupils that englishman means the man, england the country, and london the chief city; that england is the country they live in, if you are teaching english children. that frenchman means a man that lives in a country called france, which is separated from england by a part of the sea called the english channel; that paris is the chief town or capital. the teacher may here mention some remarkable events connected with the history of france, and tell the children that france and england have been often fighting against each other, but that they are now at peace, and that we should be as kind and good to frenchmen as to any other men, because god likes to see all men live friendly with each other. the children are then told that russian means a man living and born in russia; that russia is a country where there is much ice and snow, and which is very cold; that petersburgh is the chief town, and that the people of russia drive over the ice and snow in sledges, which are carriages without wheels. that swiss means an inhabitant of a country named switzerland, which is almost in the centre of europe, and has no sea near it; that it is a very pretty country, full of beautiful lakes and mountains; that a lake is a very great pond of water, and that mountains are very high rocky places, and that the tops of the mountains in switzerland are always covered with snow; that the swiss people are very brave, and fought very hard for their freedom, that is, that no other people should be masters over them; that the capital or chief town of switzerland is berne. when the teacher comes to the italian, he will say that he is an inhabitant of a country called italy, which is a very beautiful place; that rome is the capital, and was once the greatest city in the world. in speaking of the scotchman, the teacher may tell the children that scotland is not separated from england by any sea, but the three countries called england, scotland, and wales, all form one island, which is entirely surrounded by the sea; that the people who live in the north, and cold parts of scotland, are called highlanders, and are very brave and hardy; that edinburgh is the capital. when the welchman is under the children's notice, the teacher will tell them that he lives in a pretty country called wales, which is joined to england, that is, no sea divides them, that the chief town is london, although london is in england and not wales, because wales has been governed by the same king as england for many hundred years, and the eldest son of the king of england is called prince of wales. when the teacher points out the irishman, he may tell his class that he lives in an island near england, separated or divided from it by a part of the sea called the irish channel; that dublin is the chief city, and that ireland is governed by the same queen as england is. speaking of the german, he may say that he lives in a country of which the chief town is vienna. he may tell the children that the turk lives in a country called turkey; that it is a very warm place, and its chief town is constantinople; that the norwegian lives in a cold country called norway, whose chief town is christiana; that the spaniard lives in a country called spain, the chief town of which is madrid; that many of the oranges we eat come from spain; that the prussian lives in a country called prussia, the chief town of which is berlin; that the icelander lives in a very cold place, called iceland, which is an island; that it is a place surrounded by water on every side; that there is a great mountain in iceland which is called a burning mountain, because flames of fire often come out from the top of it. that the dutchman lives in a country called holland; that the people of that country are remarkable for being very clean, and that most of the dolls which little english girls play with, are made by children in holland; that amsterdam is the chief town or capital. the children are told that the dane lives in a country called denmark. the teacher may state that many hundred years back the danes conquered england, but that a brave english king, called alfred, drove them all away again; that copenhagen is the capital or chief town; that the swede lives in a country called sweden, and that stockholm is the chief town; that the portuguese live in a country called portugal, the capital of which is lisbon; that the corsican lives in an island called corsica, the capital of which is bastia; that the saxon lives in a country called saxony, the chief town of which is dresden. in telling the children that the pole lives in a country called poland, the chief town of which was warsaw, the teacher should explain to them that poland has been conquered by the russians, and taken from the poles, and shew how unjust this was of the russians, and also how the poles fought very bravely to defend their country, but that the russians being stronger, and having larger armies, they were at last overcome. [footnote a: i have since written a volume for juvenile schools; where the principles are carried out. this can be had of the publisher.] having in this manner told the children as simply as possible, a little about each country, the teacher should then tell the principal rivers; thus: the principal rivers of england are, the thames, the severn, the trent, the mersey. london, the capital of england, is is built on the banks of the river thames; and ships from all parts of the world sail up this river, to bring us various things which we could not get without sending to other countries for them; such as tea and coffee and sugar. the principal rivers of france are, the seine and the rhone; the seine is the river on which the capital of france, paris, is built. the principal rivers of russia are, the wolga, the don, the nieper, the dwina, and the vistula. the wolga is a very great river, being three thousand miles long. the rhine, which is one of the largest rivers in europe, rises in switzerland. the principal rivers of italy are, the po, the arno, and the tiber; the chief town of italy, rome, is built on the banks of the tiber. rome was once the greatest city in the world. the principal rivers of germany are, the danube, the rhine, and the elbe; of scotland, the clyde and tweed; of ireland, the shannon, barrow, boyne, suire, and nore. the capital of ireland, dublin, is built on a small river called the liffey. the principal rivers of turkey are, the danube and the don; of spain, the guidalquiver; of portugal, the tagus, on which the chief town, lisbon, is built; and of saxony, the iser. in the same manner the children may receive instruction fitted for their tender understanding, concerning the other parts of the globe, always keeping in mind that, unless they are made to comprehend thoroughly what is given to them, it is quite useless to attempt to give them the lessons at all. when giving the lessons on african costumes, the teacher should explain in the simplest manner, that the egyptian bey is the chief governor of a country in africa called egypt; that africa is one of the four great parts into which our earth is divided; that the nile is a great river flowing through egypt, which, at certain times of the year, overflows its banks, and that this fertilizes the ground, and causes the corn to grow, which, but for this, would be withered with the sun, because but very little rain ever falls in egypt; that the cause of the nile overflowing its banks is, the great rains which fall in the countries from whence the nile flows: that the ashantee is an inhabitant of another country of africa, where the people are very ignorant, and do not know as much as the little children of an infant school: that the algerine lives in a part of africa called algiers: the people there are very wicked and cruel, and used at one time to take the ships of every other country that they met on the seas, and make slaves of the people they found in them; but they cannot do so now, because the french have conquered them, and taken all their ships from them: that the bedouin arabs are people who rove about from place to place, amongst the great sandy deserts of africa, and rob travellers who are passing over those deserts: the teacher should explain that these deserts are very large places, covered with sand, and the sun is so hot that no tree or shrub, or grass, will grow there, and there is no water to be had, so that travellers carry water in leathern bottles on the backs of camels; that camels are large animals, much larger than a horse, which are very useful in those warm countries, because they can carry very heavy loads on their backs, and go a great time without water. the copts woman should be pointed out to the children, and notice should be taken of the large veil before her face. the mameluke should be pointed out as belonging to a fierce tribe of soldiers. when speaking of the natives of morocco, it should be mentioned that the moors at one time had possession of spain; that the maltese is a native of an island called malta; that cairo (a picture of a native of which is in the lesson) is the chief city of egypt. that the bosjesman, native of coronna, native of namacqua, caffree, native of tamaka and of ebo, belong to the savage nations of africa, of which but little is known, who are of a black colour, and go with very little clothes on them, because the country is so warm. from the lesson supposed to be at no. lesson-post, a good deal of information may be given. the teacher may be thus supposed to address the children, pointing to each picture, as he describes it. little children, this is a picture of negroes: they live in africa, but are often stolen from their own country to be made slaves of. africa is a very hot part of the world, and the poor negroes are black, and have short black woolly hair, something like the hair on a black sheep; but we must not laugh at them for this; it was god who made them as well as he made you; and those poor negroes are very mild and quiet people, and like to amuse themselves by singing and dancing. you see the negroes in this picture; they are carrying a black lady in a kind of basket, called a palanquin: a pole goes through this, and they hold it on their shoulders. the next picture represents some of the people who live in a country called otaheite; they are strong, stout people, and very mild and friendly. they are not black like the negroes; their complexion is of a pale brown, with black eyes and very handsome white teeth. the next picture represents scotch highlanders: they live in the cold parts of scotland; they are very strong and healthy, and able to bear cold and hanger very well. they are fond of playing on the bagpipes. this is a picture of american indians: they live in america, and are of a reddish colour; they build their huts in the thickest forests, as far from the white men as they can. the next is a picture of east indians: their country is in the warmest part of asia, and from it comes a great many beautiful things, such as ladies wear for shawls and dresses; there are a great many people in the east indies, and twenty-five millions are subject to the queen of england. the laplanders live in a very cold country, called lapland, in which the ground is covered with snow all the year round; they are very happy notwithstanding, for god gives every people means to be happy, if they are good and love him; they have nice little huts to live in, and sledges to travel with, which are drawn by rein-deer--we will read about the rein-deer by and by. the laplanders are kind to strangers, and are very brave, although they are the smallest people in the world. this is a picture of greeks: they were once a very great and powerful people, but afterwards the turks conquered them; they have now, however, a king of their own. the persians, of whom this is a picture, live in a country of asia called persia, from whence the most beautiful silks, carpets, leather, gold and silver lace, and pearls, are brought. the persian women are very handsome, and wear the most beautiful clothes of any women in the world--we should not like them the better for this, for handsome faces and fine clothes will not make people good or happy, unless they try to be so themselves. this is a picture of the natives of the sandwich islands: they are a very friendly people, and live together without fighting or quarrelling; they make mats and canoes, and the women make cloth. the turks (this is a picture of some of them) are very fine handsome people; they wear very long beards; and they shave their heads and wear white turbans instead of hair; they are very fond of drinking coffee and smoking from great long pipes. the english are represented in this picture: you are english children--england is a very great country, and the queen of england has many ships in every part of the world; and a great many places, many thousand miles away, belong to england. this picture represents the swiss: they are a very brave, honest, good people, and their country is very beautiful; a great many clocks and watches are made in switzerland. this is a picture of the chinese: they wear very curious dresses; and the ladies in china squeeze their feet very much, in order to make them small, which they think a great beauty. tea comes from china, and is the leaf of a small plant. this picture represents the dutch: they are a very clean and industrious people, and the little children there are never idle. the last picture represents the tartars: they live in asia, and wander about without any fixed dwelling, not staying in one place longer than while it gives them food for themselves and their horses, of which they have a great many. horses are wild in tartary. the reader will at once perceive what a feast is afforded to the young mind in these object lessons; the objects are accurately copied from nature, and the costumes from the best sources, so that the infant mind is expanded by viewing a proper representation of the real thing through the fit organ, the eye. it is astonishing what infants will learn through the sense of seeing, and it is remarkable that our systems of education for young and old, should not have been founded on a knowledge of the high importance of this medium for communication and information; the youngest child may learn to distinguish one object from another to an endless variety, and i could produce children who could point me out a thousand objects, if i called them by their proper names, who perhaps could not themselves name twenty of the objects out of the thousand; by this it will be seen we first give them the object, and language itself follows in due course. whenever a clear idea or notion is given to the mind by a picture or object, it is then easy to impart the information that is naturally connected with it; and this will then be most strongly retained, according to the law of association, which is one of the most important principles to be kept in view in imparting instruction to both young and old. lead on from _something known_ to _something unknown_, is a golden rule,--a most valuable axiom that all teachers should ever bear constantly in mind. what important lessons may be given in a field, wood, or forest! how much better is the thing itself for a lesson, than the representation of it! and what a class of teachers are wanted for this work? yet sure i am that in due time the great god will raise such up from amongst his people, to the glory of his name, and the benefit of succeeding generations. may greater minds than the humble writer of this, be called to work in this blessed vineyard for the good of the species, and for the diminution of crime; and, oh! may they be able to dive into the recesses of the wonderful works of god, to grapple with the difficulties therein found, and bring to light some of the hidden mysteries, for the instruction of mankind! when this book was first written, thirty-two years ago, some of the ideas were universally scouted, yet i have lived to see the day that the very men who sneered at the views first made known in this book, adopt precisely the same principles, and even go much further that i ever intended, or even thought suitable for infant minds, and quietly puff this off as a new discovery in infant training; so much the better, portions of the public will hear them, and they would not listen to me; and if the end is answered, it is of little consequence through what means that end is gained. it is satisfactory to know that the principles first developed in the infant plan are found equally applicable to older children, and i have had the pleasure of seeing those principles carried out in many schools throughout the country, too numerous to mention individually. it will be seen from what has been said that the plan of the children marching from one post to the other, is the very thing for infants, as exercising and developing their locomotive powers, a thing exceedingly desirable for young children. the great error of the old infant system, or in other words, the dame-school plan, was the keeping the pupils rivetted to their seats; here they are marching from one place to another, and get ting food for every sense. take as another example the picture of the trades; the monitor says to his little pupils as they come up. what does a fishmonger sell, the answer is, fishes of many sorts, such as salmon, cod, herring, and mackerel. q. what does a mason do? a. cut stones into their proper shapes, polish some sorts, and cut ornaments on others. q. what does a hatter sell? a. hats, for men, women, and little children. q. what does a cooper do? a. mend casks and make them. q. what does a butcher mean? a. one that sells beef, mutton, pork, &c. q. what do they call butchers in scotland? a. fleshers. q. what does a blacksmith mean? a. one that makes different things from iron, and sometimes shoes horses. q. what does a fruiterer mean? a. a person that sells all sorts of fruits, such as apples, pears, plums, cherries, gooseberries, strawberries, &c. q. what does a distiller mean? a. a man that makes rum, brandy, whiskey, and other liquors. q. what does a grocer mean? a. a man that sells tea, coffee, sugar, spices, and many other things. q. what does a carpenter mean? a. a man that cuts up wood, makes benches; it was a carpenter made our gallery. q. what does a turner mean? a. a man who makes snuff-boxes, bed-posts; it was a turner who made the balls on our arithmeticon. q. what does a tallow-chandler mean? a. a man that buys and sells candles of different sorts. q. what does milliner mean? a. a person that makes ladies' caps, tippets, and things for little children. q. what does a dyer mean? a. a man that dyes cloths of different colours. q. what does a druggist mean? a. one that sells drugs of different kinds, such as nutgalls, alum, bark, &c. q. what does wheelwright mean? a. a man that makes carts, wheelbarrows, &c. q. what does a shoe-maker do? a. makes shoes for men and women and little boys and girls. q. what does a printer do? a. print lessons for little children to read; newspapers and books for men to read. q. what does a coach-maker make? a. coaches, gigs, omnibuses, cabs, and things of that sort. q. what does a bookseller do? a. sells books of different sorts, pictures, paper, sealing-wax, &c. q. what does a bricklayer do? a. builds walls, the brick part of houses, &c. q. what does a linen-draper do? a. sells linen to make shirts, printed calico to make frocks, and many other things of that kind. q. what does a cabinet-maker do? a. makes tables, chairs, and presses, and other things to furnish houses with. q. what does a brewer do? a. makes ale and porter. q. what does a painter mean? a. one who paints insides of houses, doors, window shutters, and such things. q. what does a bookbinder do? a. puts covers on books. these lessons being all supplied by me, more explanation in this place may be unnecessary, but as a further guide to teachers of infant schools, i subjoin a synopsis of a week's course of instruction which has been adopted in many schools. * * * * * synopsis of a week's instruction. time.--_mornings_. school to assemble at nine o'clock, and to leave at twelve. _afternoons_. school to assemble at two o'clock, and to leave at four in winter, and five in summer. monday. _morning_. when assembled, to offer the appointed prayer, after which a hymn is to be sung; then slates and pencils are to be delivered to the children; after which they are to proceed with their letters and spelling. at half-past ten o'clock to play, and at eleven o'clock to assemble in the gallery, and repeat the picture lessons on natural history after the monitor in the rostrum. _afternoon_. begin with prayer and hymn as in the morning; picture lessons on scripture history to be repeated from the lesson-post, and to be questioned on them afterwards in the gallery. tuesday. _morning_. usual prayer and hymn. letters and spelling from the lesson-posts. play. gallery; repeat the addition and subtraction tables. _afternoon_. prayer and hymn. multiplication table; the monitor asking the question, and the children answering. reading lessons. play. gallery; numeration and spelling with brass figures and letters. wednesday. _morning_. prayer and hymn. letters and spelling. play. gallery; master to teach geometrical figures and musical characters. _afternoon_. prayer and hymn. practice pence and shilling tables. play. gallery; master to give lessons on arithmetic. extempore teaching on men and things, &c. &c. thursday. _morning_. prayer and hymn. letters and spelling. division, weights, measures, and time, from the rostrum. play. gallery; same lessons as monday morning. _afternoon_. prayer and hymn. from the lesson-posts epitome of geometry and natural history. gallery; brass letters and figures. extempore teaching on men and things, taking care that all such teaching shall be illustrated by substances. friday. _morning_. prayer and hymn. letters and spelling. tables in arithmetic, at the master's discretion. play. gallery; lessons on geography, maps, globes, &c. _afternoon_. prayer and hymn. scripture pictures on the lesson-posts, and questions on them in the gallery. saturday. _morning_. prayer and hymn. letters and spelling. tables of arithmetic from the rostrum. play. gallery; lessons on the transposition frame, and on geometry from the brass instrument. religious instruction should have a prominent part in the business of every day, and especially so every saturday morning. n.b. if visitors wish any particular lessons to be gone through, and the children appear disposed, the master is not bound to adhere to the above rules, neither at any other time, if the children appear particularly disinclined. * * * * * there are a few other matters, on which, before concluding this chapter, i must speak, as claiming the attention of infant school conductors. first attend to cleanliness. although we have referred to this before, yet, as it is of considerable importance not only to the children but to those around them, it may not be amiss to take up a little more of the reader's time, and to state the different plans that have been devised, in order to make the children as clean as possible. in one case, a trough was erected, and a pipe provided to convey the water into it; but before it had been up a month, it was found, that instead of answering the end intended, it had quite a contrary effect; for the children dabbled in the trough, and made themselves ten times worse than they were, by wetting themselves from head to foot; besides which, it frequently caused them to take cold, of which the parents complained. some took their children away without notice; others came and gave the master what they called "_a good set down_." it was, therefore, thought necessary to forbid the children washing themselves, and to wash all that came dirty. but it was soon found that the dirty children increased so fast, that it required one person's time to attend to them; besides which, it had another bad effect, it encouraged the parents in laziness; and they told me, when i complained of their sending the children to school dirty, "that indeed they had no time to wash their children; there was a trough in the school for that purpose, and the persons who had charge of the school were paid for it, and ought to do it." in consequence of this, the trough was taken away, and it was represented to the parents, that it was their duty to keep their children clean; that unless they did so, they would be sent home to be washed; and if they persisted in sending them without being washed, there would be no alternative left but to dismiss them from the school altogether. this offended some of the parents, and they took their children out of the school, but many afterwards petitioned to have them readmitted. i mention this merely to prevent others, who may be concerned in the establishment of infant schools, from incurring an unnecessary expense, and to shew that the parents will value the school equally as well if you make them wash their children, as if you did it for them. the plan that we have acted upon to enforce cleanliness, is as follows: as soon as the children are assembled in the school, the monitors cause them to hold out their hands, with their heads up; they then inspect their hands and their faces, and all those who are dirty are desired to stand out, to be examined by the master, who will easily perceive whether they have been washed that morning; if not, they are sent home to be washed, and if the mother has any sense of propriety, she will take care that it shall not often occur. but it may be found, that some have been washed, and been playing with the dirt, when coming to school, which some children are very apt to do; in this case they have a pat on the hand, which generally cures them. there is much trouble at first, to keep the children quite clean; some of their parents are habitually dirty, and in such cases the children will be like them; these will, therefore, require more trouble than others, but they will soon acquire cleanly habits, and, with proper management, become as cleanly as any of the other children. as soon as a child is taken into the school the monitor shows him a certain place, and explains to him, that when he wants to go into the yard, he is to ask him, and he will accompany him there. of course there are separate accommodations for each sex, and such prudential arrangements made as the case requires, but which it is unnecessary further to particularize.[a] [footnote a: this is a subject of the highest importance in moral training, and deserve the serious attention of committees as well as teachers: inattention to these matters, may demoralize every child that enters the school. in many schools throughout the country i have seen great want of attention to this subject, the seats were too high, the circular holes too large, causing fear on the part of the infants, and also bad habits. the seats should be the same height as the seats in the school--six inches, and nine inches high, the diameter of the holes seven inches and nine inches--the teachers should constantly visit these places, inculcate habits of delicacy and cleanliness. such habits formed in childhood are never forgotten. superfine dressy teachers, will be too proud, and too high, to attend to these things--but the judicious mother or matron will at once see their importance and act accordingly--"as the twig is bent the tree's inclined."] . never frighten children. it is common for many persons to threaten to put children into the black hole, or to call the sweep to take them away in his bag, when they do not behave as they ought; but the ill effects of this mode of proceeding may be perceived from the following fact. i knew a child, who had been to one of those schools where the children of mechanics are usually sent, called dames' schools, which was kept by an elderly woman, who, it seems, had put this child into the coal-hole, and told him, that unless he was a good boy, the black man would come and take him away; this so frightened the child, that he fell into a violent fit, and never afterwards could bear the sight of this woman. on the mother getting the child admitted into our school, she desired me to be very gentle with him, relating to me all the above story, except that the child had had a fit. about a fortnight after the admission of the child, he came running one day into the school, exclaiming, "i'll be a good boy, master! master! i'll be a good boy." as soon as he caught sight of me, he clung round, and grasped me with such violence, that i really thought the child was mad; in a few minutes after this he went into strong convulsions, and was such a dreadful spectacle, that i thought the child would die in my arms. in this state he remained for about twenty minutes, and i fully expected he would be carried out of the school a corpse. i sent for the mother, but on her arrival i perceived she was less alarmed than myself; she immediately said, the child was in a fit, and that i had frightened him into it. i told her that she was mistaken; that the child had only just entered the school, and i was ignorant of the cause of his fright; but several of my little scholars soon set the matter to rest, by stating the particulars of the fright, which they observed when coming to school. it seems that a man was in the street, who sweeps chimneys with a machine, and just as the little fellow passed him, he called out, "sweep;" this so alarmed the child, that he thought the man was going to take him, and was affected by his fears in the way i have stated. the child, however, getting better, and the mother hearing what the children said, begged my pardon for having accused me wrongfully, and then told me the whole particulars of his first fright and the woman and the coal-hole. i had the greatest difficulty imaginable to persuade him, that a sweep was a human being, and that he loved little children as much as other persons. after some time, the child got somewhat the better of his fears, but not wholly so. he had but one fit afterwards. this shews how improper it is to confine children by themselves, or to threaten them in the manner described. many persons continue nervous all their lives through such treatment, and are so materially injured, that they are frightened at their own shadow. it is also productive of much mischief to talk of mysteries, ghosts, and hobgoblins, before children, which many persons are too apt to do. some deal so much in the marvellous, that i really believe they frighten many children out of their senses. i recollect, when i was a child, hearing such stories, till i have actually been afraid to look behind me. how many persons are frightened at such a little creature as a mouse, because the nature of that little creature has not been explained to them in their infancy. indeed, children should have all things shewn them, if possible, that they are likely to meet with: and above all, it should be impressed upon their minds, that if they meet with no injury from the living, it is most certain the dead will never hurt them, and that he who fears god, need have no other fear. it is also common with many persons, to put a disobedient child into a room by itself. i cannot approve of this method, as the child is frequently frightened into quietness without improving his temper in the least; if it be day time it is not so bad, but if it be dark, the consequences are often serious, and materially injure the constitution of the child. the more i reflect upon this subject, the more do i see its impropriety. i would rather use the rod, in moderation, and mercy. i am sure it is better for the disobedient and unruly child, and more according to the dealings of the creator with us all. i can truly say my punishments, which have not been slight, have done me good. as children we cannot see these things; as men and thinkers, we can. yea! and kiss the rod. . guard against forgetfulness. the circumstance i am about to mention, shews how necessary it is to teach by example as well as precept. many of the children were in the habit of bringing marbles, tops, whistles, and other toys, to the school, which often caused much disturbance; for they would play with them instead of attending to their lessons, and i found it necessary to forbid the children from bringing anything of the kind. after giving notice, therefore, two or three times in the school, i told them that if any of them brought such things, they would be taken away from them. in consequence of this, several things fell into my hands, which i did not always think of returning, and, among other things, a whistle belonging to a little boy. the child asked me for it as he was going home, but having several visitors at the time, put him off, telling him not to plague me, and he went home. i had forgotten the circumstance altogether, but it appears the child had not; for some time after, while i was lecturing the children upon the necessity of telling truth, and on the wickedness of stealing, the little fellow approached me, and said, "_please, sir, you stole my whistle_." "stole your whistle!" said i; "did i not give it you again?" "no, teacher, i asked you for it, and you would not give it to me." i stood self-convicted, being accused in the middle of my lecture, before all the children, and really at a loss to know what excuse to make, for i had mislaid the whistle, and could not return it to the child. i immediately gave the child a halfpenny, and said all i could to persuade the children that it was not my intention to keep it. however, i am satisfied that this trifling mistake of mine did more harm than i was able to repair during some time; for if we wish to teach children to be honest, we should never take anything from them without returning it again. indeed, persons having charge of children can never be too cautious, and should not, on any account whatever, break a promise; for experience has taught me that most children have good memories, and if you once promise a thing and do not perform it, they will pay very little attention to what you say afterwards. . observe punctuality. a little girl, whose mother was dead, was often absent from school. she was never at a loss for excuses, but from their frequency i was at last induced to suspect their truth. none of the children knew where she resided; so i was obliged to send the eldest boy in the school home with her, to ascertain whether or not her stories were true. i gave the boy positive directions to make haste back; but, much to my surprise, i saw no more of him for six hours. when he returned, he told me that the little girl refused to shew him where she lived; and had taken him so far, that he at last determined to leave her, but could not find his way back sooner. in the evening i went myself, according to the direction i had entered in the admission-book, but found that the family were removed, and the persons in the house could not tell me where they had gone to reside. i saw nothing of the child for the five following days, when a woman who had the care of her and her little brother in arms, came to inquire the reason why the girl came home at such irregular hours, stating, that sometimes she came home at half-past eleven, at other times not till two, and sometimes at three in the afternoon: in short, often an hour after school was over. i told her that the child was frequently absent, and that it was five days since i had seen her. the woman appeared quite surprised, and told me, that she had always sent the child to school at the regular time; that when she came home before the usual hour, she said her governess had sent all the children home a little sooner; and if she came home after the time, then she said that there had been some ladies visiting the school, and that the children had been kept for their inspection. here i must acknowledge, that i have frequently detained children a little while after school-hours, when we have had visitors, but since it furnishes the children with an excuse for going home late, i think it would be better to discontinue the practice; and would hint to those ladies and gentlemen who feel inclined to visit such schools, that they should come between the hours of nine and twelve in the forenoon, or two and four in the afternoon. i have only to observe, that the child i have been speaking of came to the school very regularly afterwards. there is another subject too important to be passed without notice; i mean the punctual attendance of the pupils. if the teachers are firm, and determined, to secure this, _it can be done_. in ireland, where the value of time and punctuality is least understood, the thing was accomplished,--whilst no better lesson can be given to those who have to work for their daily bread, than punctuality. if a child cannot attend school at nine, how can it attend work at six in the morning? be firm, and the object is gained. . be strictly accurate in your expressions. one day when the children were assembled in the gallery, having none of their usual lessons at hand, i took from my pocket a piece of paper, and promised them that if they would answer me every question i put concerning the paper, i would at last make a paper boat. i proceeded in the following manner: "what is this?" "what colour?" "what is its use?" "how made!" "what made of?" &c. these questions being answered according to their different views, and having folded the paper into a variety of forms, and obtained their ideas upon such forms, i proceeded to fulfil my promise of forming it into the shape of a boat; but the children, seeing me at a loss, exclaimed, "please, sir, you can't do it;" which proved the fact, as i had forgotten the plan, and was obliged to make the confession. "then, sir," rejoined one of the boys, "you should not have promised." in the course of my observations i had frequently enjoined the children to make every possible use of their thinking powers, but it appears i had at the same time forgotten to make use of my own, and consequently had been betrayed into a promise which i was not able to perform. i remember some other instances: one of the children happened to kick another. the injured party complained to the person who then had the charge of the school, saying, "please, sir, this boy kicked me." it being time for the children to leave school, the master waved his hand towards the gate through which the children pass, thoughtlessly saying, at the same time, "kick away;" meaning that the complainant was to take no more notice of the affair, but go home. the complainant, however, returning to the other child, began kicking him, and received some kicks himself. a friend was present, and seeing two children kicking each other, he very naturally inquired the reason. "please, sir," replied the children, "master told us!" "master told you," says the gentleman, "that cannot be; i'll ask him." he accordingly inquired into the truth of the affair, and received for answer, "certainly not." "yes," said the child, "you did, sir; did not i tell you just now that a boy kicked me?" "yes," says the master, "you did." "then, please sir," says the child, "you told me to go and kick away!" the master immediately recollected that he had said so. this fact shews how improper it is to say one thing to a child and mean another. these children were under the influence of obedience, _and in the light of truth_, and being in that light, they could see from no other, and very naturally concluded the master meant what he had said. one day some visitors requested i would call out a class of the children to be examined. having done so, i asked the visitors in what they would wish the children to be examined; at the same time stating that they might hear the children examined in natural history, scriptural history, arithmetic, spelling, geography, or geometry. they choose the latter, and i proceded to examine the children accordingly; beginning with straight lines. having continued this examination for about half an hour, we proceeded to enter into particulars respecting triangles; and having discoursed on the difference between isosceles triangles and scalene triangles, i observed that an acute isosceles triangle had all its angles acute, and proceeded to observe that a right-angled scalene triangle had all its angles acute. the children immediately began to laugh, for which i was at a loss to account, and told them of the impropriety of laughing at me. one of the children immediately replied, "please, sir, do you know what we were laughing at?" i replied in the negative. "then, sir," says the boy, "i will tell you. please, sir, you have made a blunder." i, thinking i had not, proceeded to defend myself, when the children replied, "please, sir, you convict yourself." i replied, "how so?" "why," says the children, "you said a right-angled triangle had one right angle, and that all its angles are acute. if it has one right angle, how can all its angles be acute?" i soon perceived the children were right, and that i was wrong. here, then, the reader may perceive the fruits of teaching the children to think, inasmuch as it is shewn that children of six years of age and under were able to refute their tutor. if children had been taught to think many years ago, error would have been much more easily detected, and its baneful influence would not have had that effect upon society which at this day unfortunately we are obliged to witness. at another time i was lecturing the children in the gallery on the subject of cruelty to animals; when one of the little children observed, "please, sir, my big brother catches the poor flies, and then sticks a pin through them, and makes them draw the pin along the table." this afforded me an excellent opportunity of appealing to their feelings on the enormity of this offence, and, among other things, i observed, that if the poor fly had been gifted with the powers of speech like their own, it probably would have exclaimed, _while dead_, as follows:--"you naughty child, how can you think of torturing me so? is there not room in the world for you and me? did i ever do you any harm? does it do you any good to put me in such pain? why do you do it, you are big enough to know better? how would you like a man to run a piece of wire through your body, and make you draw things about? would you not cry at the pain? go, then, you wicked boy, and learn to leave off such cruel actions." having finished, one of the children replied, "how can any thing speak if it is dead?" "why," said i, "supposing it could speak." "you meant to say, sir," was the rejoinder, "_dying_ instead of _dead_." it will, of course be understood that in this case i purposely misused a word, and the children being taught to think, easily detected it. . watch against the entrance of disease. it may, probably, be considered presumption in me, to speak of the diseases of children, as this more properly belongs to the faculty; but let it be observed, that my pretension is not to cure the diseases that children are subject to, but only to prevent those which are infectious from spreading. i have found that children between the ages of two and seven years, are subject to the measles, hooping cough, fever, ophthalmia, ringworm, scald-head, and in very poor neighbourhoods, the itch--and small-pox. this last is very rare, owing to the great encouragement given to vaccination; and were it not for the obstinacy of many of the poor, i believe it would be totally extirpated. during the whole of the time i superintended a school, i heard of only three children dying of it, and those had never been vaccinated. i always made a point of inquiring, on the admission of a child, whether this operation had been performed, and, if not, i strongly recommended that it should be. if parents spoke the truth, i had but few children in the school who had not been vaccinated: this accounts, therefore, for having lost but three children through the small-pox. the measles, however, i consider a very dangerous disorder, and we lost a great many children by it, besides two of my own. it is preceded by a violent cough, the child's eyes appear watery, and it will also be sick. as soon as these symptoms are perceived, i would immediately send the child home, and desire the parents to keep it there for a few days, in order to ascertain if it have the measles, and if so, it must be prohibited from returning to school until well. this caution is absolutely necessary; as some parents are so careless, that they will send their children when the measles are thick out upon them. the same may be said with respect to other diseases, for unless the persons who have charge of the school attend to these things, the parents will be glad to get their children out of the way, and will send them, though much afflicted, without considering the ill-effects that may be produced in the school. whether such conduct in the parents proceeds from ignorance or not, i am not able to say, but this i know, that i have had many parents offer children for admission, with all the diseases i have mentioned, and who manifested no disposition to inform me of it. the number of children who may be sick, from time to time, may be averaged at from twenty to thirty-five, out of two hundred, we have never had less than twenty absent on account of illness, and once or twice we had as many as fifty. soon after i first took charge of the establishment, i found that there were five or six children in the school who had the measles; the consequence was, that it contaminated the whole school, and about eight children died, one of my own being of that number. this induced me to be very cautious in future, and i made a point of walking round the school twice every day, in order to inspect the children; and after the adoption of this plan, we did not have the measles in the school. the hooping-cough is known, of course, by the child hooping; but i consider it the safest plan to send all children home that have any kind of cough; this will cause the mother to come and inquire the reason why the child is sent home; and it can be ascertained from her whether the child has had the hooping-cough or not. with respect to fever, i generally find the children appear chilly and cold, and not unfrequently they are sick. i do not, however, feel myself competent to describe the early symptoms of this disorder, but the best way to prevent its gaining ground in the school is to send all the children home who appear the least indisposed. as to the ophthalmia, i can describe the symptoms of that disease, having had it myself, together with the whole of my family. it generally comes in the left eye first, and causes a sensation as if something was in the eye, which pricks and shoots, and produces great pain: the white of the eye will appear red, or what is usually called blood-shot; this, if not speedily attended to, will cause blindness; i have had several children that have been blind with it for several days. in the morning, the patients are not able to unclose their eyes for some time after they are awake. as soon as i observe these appearances, i immediately send the child home; for i have ascertained, beyond a doubt, that the disease is contagious, and if a child be suffered to remain with it in the school, the infection will speedily spread among the children. as children are frequently apt to burn or scald themselves, i will here insert a method for adoption in such cases. it is very simple, yet infallible; at least, i have never known it to fail. it is no other than the application of common writing ink. one of my own children burnt its hand dreadfully, and was cured by immediately washing it all over with that liquid. several children burnt their hands against the pipe that was connected with the stove in the school-room, and were cured by the same means. one boy, in particular, took hold of a hot cinder that fell from the fire, and it quite singed his hand; i applied ink to it, and it was cured in a very short time. let any one, therefore, who may happen to receive a burn, apply ink to it immediately, and he will soon witness the good effects of the application. thirty-three years' experience has proved to me that _stoves_ in any school are a nuisance: the common fire place is better than heating with hot air, hot water, or stoves of any description that i have yet seen. the grate being low, as at railway stations, is an improvement and answers well. had theorists seen the white faced dull eyed children that i have seen, where stoves are used, and felt the head aches which i have felt, they would soon banish them from every school. . never correct a child in anger. . never overlook a fault. . in all things set before the children an example worthy of imitation. * * * * * i should recommend the adoption of the following resolutions of an intelligent and zealous committee, and that a copy of them be sent to each master and mistress. "that as this infant school is established for the express purpose of carrying into the fullest effect the system of mr. wilderspin, which the committee are convinced is practicable and excellent, the master be desired to make himself perfectly acquainted with it, in its physical, mental, and moral bearings, by a study of mr. wilderspin's works on the subject, and particularly of the last and most complete edition. "that the rules as printed be strictly adhered to by the master. that children who are ill, having hooping-cough, ringworm, or other contagious disease, be refused admission until perfectly restored. that the business of the school begin precisely at the time appointed, and that during the shortest days the signals for leaving school be not given till four o'clock precisely. "that except during the time given, according to the system, to play, the whole be occupied by the mistress as well as the master in the instruction of the children, and that the plan laid down in mr. wilderspin's book, be followed as nearly as possible, so that the apparatus already provided may be gradually brought into action, and the children have all the advantages of the system; the master and mistress so dividing their labour that all the children may be occupied. "that the master and mistress pay the utmost attention to the children learning to read. "that when a child is absent a week, the master state the cause to the treasurer, to prevent mistakes as to the payments, and that when a child declines attending or is excluded, immediate notice be given to the secretary of the ladies' committee. "that the master be desired to go on with the business of the school when visitors who are members of the committee are present, and only to pay particular attention to those who may be strangers, and who require information. "that all applications from the master be made to the committee through the secretary. "that all orders from the committee to the teachers be conveyed through the same channel." chapter ix. gallery teaching--moral and religious instruction. _original intention of the gallery--what lessons are adapted for it--its misapplication--selection of teachers--observations--gallery lessons an a feather--a spider--a piece of bog-turf--a piece of coal--observations on the preceding lessons--scripture lessons in the gallery--the finding of moses--christ with the doctors--moral training--its neglect in most schools--should be commenced in infancy--beneficial effects of real moral culture--ignorance of teachers--the gallery most useful in moral training--specimen of a moral lesson--illustrations of moral culture--anecdotes--simpson on moral education--observations--hints to teachers_. there is no part of the infant system which has been more misunderstood, than the system of giving lessons in the gallery; and hence i have thought it necessary to devote a larger space to the subject, than i did in the former editions of this work. the gallery was originally intended by me, to give the children such lessons as appealed directly to the senses, either orally or by representative objects: thus the teaching arithmetic by the frame and balls, inasmuch as it appealed to the eye as well as to the understanding, was suitable for a gallery lesson. the same observations hold good with respect to a scripture picture, or the representation of an animal, a tree, or any object that can be presented to the eye. we have also found it very useful in teaching the catechism, or anything that is to be committed to memory, and this part of our plan has proved so useful and successful, that it has been adopted in many schools for older children of both sexes, i mean in the normal schools of glasgow and edinburgh, the corporation schools of liverpool, and the government model schools at dublin. in the two latter the arrangements, both in the fittings up of the play-grounds, galleries, and school-rooms, were made under my especial inspection, and i have no doubt that the use of the gallery, when it becomes more generally known in large schools, will become universal. the taught should see the face of the teacher in these lessons, and the teacher should see the face of the taught: it establishes a sympathy between both to the advantage of each. the face is the index to the mind, and at times shews the intention, even without words. some animals can read this index: the horse, the dog, the elephant, and many of the higher order of animals. children can always read the countenance of the sincere, the wise, and the good. yea! mere infants can. reader! don't smile! were this the time and place, i could demonstrate these opinions by _facts_. this is not a book for controversy and metaphysical disquisition; but for use to teachers. when the children and teachers see each other, as in the gallery, the effect is highly beneficial. this may be proved by any teacher. as to the cause for this effect, it would be out of place to argue it here. i therefore simply state it is true. sympathy is a power destined to be of use in teaching, and hereafter will be better understood. many friends to infant education, and casual visitors, having found these erections in infant schools, have concluded that the children should always be sitting on them, which is a fatal error, and deprives the children of that part of the system which legislates for the exercise of their locomotive powers, such as the spelling and reading lessons, and the method of teaching object lessons, as described in another part of this work: the consequence has been, that the schools have become mere parrot-schools, and the children are restless and inattentive. and this has not been the only evil that has attended a misapplication of the gallery; for the teachers, for want of knowing the system properly, have been at a loss how to occupy the time of the children, and scores of teachers have ruined their own constitutions, and also the constitutions of some of the children, by the perpetual talking and singing, which, i am sorry to say, too many consider to be the sum total of the system: and i may state here, that the children should never be more than one hour at a time, or, at most two hours, during the day, in the gallery. all beyond this is injurious to the teacher, and doubly so to the little pupils. the forenoon is always the best time for gallery lessons; the teacher's mind is more clear, and the minds of the children are more receptive. after the children have taken their dinner they should be entertained with the object lessons, a small portion of spelling and reading, and the rest of the afternoon should be devoted to moral and physical teaching in the play-ground, if the weather will at all permit it. the more you rob your children of their physical education to shew off their intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of precocity, instead of a rational infants' school for the training and educating infants. i have been blamed, by writers on the infant system, for that which i never did, and never recommended; i have been made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions of others, who have not troubled themselves to read my writings; and, in their anxiety to produce something new and original, have strayed from the very essential parts of the plan, and on this account i am charged by several writers with being unacquainted with the philosophy of my own system. i thought three-and-thirty years ago that if i could arrest public attention to the subject, it was as much as could be expected. i knew very well at that time that a dry philosophical detail would neither be received or read. my object was to appeal to the senses of the public by doing the thing in every town where practicable. by this method i succeeded, where the other would have failed, but it by no means followed that i was unacquainted with the philosophy of my own plans, merely because i preferred the doing of the thing to the writing about it. believing, however, that the time has now arrived, and that the public mind is better prepared than it was then, i have thought i might venture to go a little more into detail, in order to remove some well founded objections, which, but for this reason, would not have existed. the infant mind, like a tender plant, requires to be handled and dealt with carefully, for if it be forced and injudiciously treated during the first seven years of its existence, it will affect its whole constitution as long as it lives afterwards. there are hundreds of persons who will not believe this, and those persons will employ mere boys and girls to teach infants. let them do so if they please; i simply protest against it, and merely give it as my opinion that it is highly improper to do so. if ever infant schools are to become real blessings to the country, they must be placed under the care of wise, discreet, and experienced persons, for no others will be fit or able to develop and cultivate the infant faculties aright. i have felt it necessary to make these remarks, because in different parts of the country i have found mere children employed as school-masters and school-mistresses, to the great detriment of the young committed to their charge, and the dishonour of the country that permits it. no wise man would put a mere child to break his colts; none but a foolish one would employ an inexperienced boy to break in his dogs; even the poultry and pigs would be attended by a person who knew something about them; but almost any creature who can read and write, and is acquainted with the first rules of arithmetic, is too frequently thought a fit and proper person to superintend infants. i know many instances of discarded servants totally unfit, made teachers of infants, merely to put them in place; to the destruction of the highest and most noble of god's creatures! which i contend infants are. to expect that such persons can give gallery lessons as they ought to be given, is expecting what will never, nor can take place. the public must possess different views of the subject; more rational ideas on the art of teaching must be entertained, and greater remuneration must be given to teachers, and greater efforts made to train and educate them, to fit them for the office, before any very beneficial results can be seen; and it is to produce such results, and a better tone of feeling on the subject, that i have thus ventured to give my opinion more in detail. efficient gallery lessons--efficient teachers must be made. they do not at present exist in large numbers, and can only be made by a suitable reward being held out to them, and by their being placed under the superintendence of experienced persons acquainted with the art. the art of teaching is no mean art, and must, sooner or later, take its proper rank amongst the other sciences. it is a science which requires deep study and knowledge of human character, and is only to be learned like all other sciences, by much perseverance and practice. in another work, on the education of older children, i have given some specimens of gallery lessons; in this i shall endeavour to give a few specimens of what i think useful lessons for infants, and shall also try to clothe them in language suited to the infant apprehensions; and i sincerely hope they may shew in a plain manner the method of giving this species of instruction to the children, and that teachers who were before ignorant of it, may be benefitted thereby. i shall not pretend to give my opinion as to whether i have succeeded, but will leave this point entirely to the judgment and candour of my readers; for i know by experience that it is a very difficult thing to put practice into theory; and although this may seem paradoxical, yet i have no doubt that many have experienced the very same results when trying to explain theoretically on paper what they have with ease practised a thousand times. these oral lessons on real objects ought to be given in pure, simple, and plain language, level to the understanding and capacity of children. it may be well at times to use words of a more difficult or scientific character; but these should always have the proper explanation given; the words used most frequently in common life, in ordinary and proper conversation, ought to be most strongly impressed on their memories. it may, perhaps, be retorted on me--why then teach the difficult and scientific names of geometrical figures. the answer is very simple. most of them have no other, and where they have i always give them also, as sloping, slanting, inclined, for oblique. the geometrical figures are the elements of all forms, and the simplest objects which can be presented to the young. i have found them always learned with the greatest ease and pleasure. pestalozzi, i have understood, was led to the use of them by observing the wants of the young mind, in a similar manner that i was myself. this is, therefore, one of the many coincidences in thought and discovery by minds wholly independent of each other, which have been directed to the same subjects. this is an evitable result. if two men look at the moon, both must see that it is round, bright, and mottled; and if two minds far apart, turn their attention to similar subjects, the probability is that their views will coincide. the most powerful mind will of course make the deepest and simplest discovery. object lessons should be given chiefly on such things as fall under more constant observation and are daily coming before the sight, and then useful knowledge will be accumulated, and frequently reimpressed upon the memory by the seeing of the objects. gallery lessons on a feather. we will suppose the children all properly seated, the little girls on one side of the gallery and the little boys on the other, as represented on the plan-plate. if the morning is fine and clear, a lesson may be given on an object that the children are not frequently in the habit of seeing; but should the weather be hazy, and the atmosphere heavy, then a lesson must be given on some object which they all frequently see, say, for example, a feather. the feather must be held up in the hand, or placed in a small niche on the top of a pointer, so that every child will see it, and it must be moved about in various directions to arrest their attention. the first lesson should be pure development, which is to get every idea from the children relative to the object before you. explain to them yours; as for example, "what is this?" the universal shout will be, "a feather." you may then ask them, what are its uses? some little creatures will say, to blow about; others will say, to cover birds; others will say, to stuff pillows and beds to sleep upon. having got all the information out of them you can in their own simple language, you have acted according to nature's law, and it is now your turn to infuse additional information into their minds, and, give them the benefit of your superior knowledge; which may be done as follows:--you have told me that feathers are useful to cover birds, it was for this that they were made by god; they keep the birds warm just in the same way as your clothes keep you from being cold; and as the poor birds cannot make themselves clothes as men can, god has given them feathers that they may not be cold when the bad weather comes. the feathers are useful to the birds also in flying; the long feathers in a bird's wing keep him in the air, which he could not fly through if he was covered with any thing else, because feathers are very light. seven of the large feathers out of the great eagle's wing would not weigh more than two halfpennies. the wings of a bird make him able to fly, and the tail guides him through the air, just as you may see the men steer boats with the rudder; and if you pulled the feathers off his tail, he would not be able to fly near so straight or fast as when they are on. when the rain falls on the feathers, they are never soaked through with it as a piece of rag would be if you threw water on it, because they are covered with a sort of oil which does not let in the water. if you ever look at a duck dive into the water, you can see it when it comes up quite dry; but if you dipped you head into the water it would wet it all over. when little birds, such as the sparrow and canary, come out of the egg, they have no feathers on, but the old ones cover them with their wings to keep the cold away, and the feathers soon grow, and then they can fly away and find food and make nests for themselves; but large birds, such as the goose, turkey, hen, and duck, have a sort of soft down on them when they come out of the shell, and little ducks will go and swim as soon as they are hatched, as i suppose some of you have seen. some birds' feathers are much prettier than others: the goose has not such pretty feathers as the swan, nor the swan as the peacock; but we must not think ill of the goose for this, for its flesh is better to eat than either the peacock or swan. i am sure many of you little children like roast goose. the peacock has very pretty feathers indeed, and so has the pheasant, and the drake, and the cock; but some birds that live in countries many hundred miles away from this, have much prettier than any bird that lives in this country. this feather that we have for our lesson is the feather of a goose; it is not very pretty, but if we examine it well we shall find it is very curious, and all the men in the world could not make one like it. goose feathers are the most useful; the small ones make stuffing for pillows and beds, and the large ones make pens to write with. birds change their feathers often; they drop off and they get new ones; this is called moulting. having thus given the children as much information on the subject as they will be likely to be able to digest properly, you may then get it back from them by question and answer; as for instance q. what have we been talking about? a. birds' feathers. q. do they do the birds any good? a. yes, keep them warm. q. what more good? a. make them able to fly. q. who gives the birds feathers to make them warm? a. god. q. are feathers very heavy? a. no, very light. q. what is the reason that they are very light? a. that they may fly easily. q. what part of the body does a bird fly with? a. its wings. q. is no other part useful in flying? a. yes. q. do you remember what part? a. its tail. q. of what use is its tail? a. to guide it. q. what do you mean by guiding it? a. turning it any way it wants to go. q. what is the reason that birds' feathers do not get all full of wet when the rain falls on them? a. because there is an oily juice that makes the rain fall off. q. when little birds, such as sparrows and robins, come out of the eggs, have they got feathers? a. no, they are naked. q. are they very long naked? a. no, in a few days the feathers grow. q. is it not curious that the cold does not kill the little birds while they are naked? a. so it would, only the old ones sit over them and keep them warm. q. are ducks and turkeys and hens naked when the come out of the shell? a. no. q. what are they covered with? a. a sort of down. q. do you know of any bird that has very pretty feathers? a. yes, the peacock. q. is it prettier than the goose? a. yes. q. is it so useful? a. no. q. what do the goose feathers make? a. the feathers in the quill make pelts? q. what do the small ones make? a. they make stuffing for pillows and beds. q. where do the prettiest birds live? a. in very warm places, far away from this. q. do the same feathers always remain on a bird? a. no, they drop off, and new ones come. q. what is this called? a. moulting. such lessons as this will never be forgotten by the little ones. they will learn to adore the great god at the sight of any thing he has made. it is hoped they learn to love to read nature's book when they grow older, as every correct notion obtained by a child, through a natural object, which it is frequently accustomed to meet with, can never be entirely effaced; and what is more, it prepares the way, at some future time, for a larger amount of knowledge as to god's revealed will. a spider, a living specimen of which may be easily procured, may be made a very instructive gallery lesson; it may prevent the fears and foolish prejudices against ugly yet harmless insects, which often remain through life. part of a bush may be procured with a real web and spider upon it, so that its beautiful and highly curious web may be also exhibited to the children, its uses may be also pointed out, and a short history of the little animal's habits may be given, but not before their opinions have been taken on the object, which may be done in a similar manner as that which we pointed out in the former lesson, and then the teacher may proceed thus: you have told me that this little creature is called a spider, and some of you think it very ugly, and say you are afraid of it, but sensible children will not be frightened at a spider, because they will remember that they are very harmless little things, and have not got a sting as the wasp and bee have. they are very ugly, to be sure, but every ugly insect is not to be called a nasty creature, for some are very useful, notwithstanding their not being as handsome as others; and spiders are very useful too, although very few people know how to make use of them; but they little think that the poor little insect which they brush off the wall, and trample under their feet, can tell them what weather they are going to have, as sure, and surer than a weather-glass. when the weather is going to be fine it peeps its head out of its hole, and stretches out its legs; and the farther its legs and head are out, the longer will the fine weather stay. when the weather is going to be very bad it goes farther back; and when very dreadful and stormy weather is going to come, it turns its back to the door of its hole and its head inside. in winter, when frost and snow is going to commence, they make their webs very fast, and by this you may know the frosty weather is coming; so you see, children, that spiders may be useful to know what kind of weather we shall have. spiders are very cunning; they live on flies; but they could never catch them, only they are able to weave a strong web, which they do in a place where the flies often come; and when a poor fly gets into the web, the spider runs out and soon kills it, and then drags it up to his den, where he eats it at his ease, and hides the wings and skin, that the other flies may not see them; but if an enemy stronger than itself comes to his web, the spider remains in his hole till the danger is all over. some spiders that live in countries far away are a great deal larger and uglier than our spiders; but we need not be ever afraid of a spider, because they can neither bite nor sting us, and are very curious insects. q. what have i been telling you about? a. the spider. q. are you afraid of it? a. no, you told us it would do us no harm. q. are spiders very ugly? a. they are. q. should we think badly of them for this? a. no. q. who made the spider? a. god. q. does he not make every animal, whether handsome or ugly? a. yes. q. can spiders be of use? a. they will tell us what weather we are going to have. q. when it is going to be fine what do they do? a. they put their legs and head out of their hole. q. when it is going to be bad weather what do they do? a. they turn their heads round and go into their holes. q. when the weather is going to be very cold and frosty what do they do? a. they build their webs very fast. q. what do they live upon? a. flies. q. how do they catch them? a. by making webs. q. when a fly gets into their web what do they do? a. they kill it and eat it. q. are the spiders in other countries larger than ours? a. yes, in some places they are much larger and uglier. q. who teaches the spider to make its web? a. god. q. could any man in the world make a spider's web? a. no, no one could do it. the teacher may then add thus:--thus you see, little children, that every living thing has some merit of its own, and can do many things which we cannot do, although god has given us the means to become so much wiser than they; and be sure you are not frightened at them, nor put them to unnecessary pain. some other day i will tell you what is the shape of the spider's web, and shew you what a number of regular figures the spider's web is composed of. almost every object, however simple it may be, will form an instructive gallery lesson; thus for example, you may take a piece of bog-turf, and after submitting it to the inspection of the infants, you may inquire, what is this? if it be in a country where turf is used, a general exclamation will inform you of its name; if not, you may find a better and more familiar object for your lesson. when you have got the name, you may then ask its uses, and will soon find that the children are well acquainted with them. you may then proceed to give your own information on the subject in something like the following words, taking care that you use no word that the children do not themselves understand, or that you have not explained to them. little children, look at what i hold. you have told me it is a piece of bog-turf, and it is used to make fires. in ireland turf is more used to make fires than coal, because it is very plentiful there, and many of the poor people in ireland build their houses of it, and when they keep them well mended and covered, they are very warm and comfortable, and they burn good turf fires in their turf houses; but some of them are lazy, and do not keep their turf houses mended, so the rain comes in, and they are very miserable, and so will all idle lazy people be. i hope no little child here will be lazy, now i will tell you where they get all this turf, they dig it out of the bogs. there are bogs in england; they call them mosses or fens, and in scotland there are bogs, but the bogs in ireland are much more plentiful. some of them are so very large that you cannot see across them, and a great many birds live amongst them, such as wild ducks, and geese, and cranes, and herons, and snipe, all of which i will tell you about some other time. those great bogs are very wild, lonesome, dreary places; no person can live on them, because they are so wet and soft, and they are full of great deep holes with water in them, which are called bog holes, and if any person fell in they would be drowned. sometimes in the middle of this great bog you will see a pretty green island, where the land is firm and strong, and the grass is nice and sweet, so that the poor people make a dry path across the wet bog to these islands, that they may drive their cows, and goats, and horses to feed there; and some of these islands are very pretty places, and look so green in the centre of the black bog. those bogs which are now such wet, black, nasty places, were once forests of great trees, as large as any you children ever saw, and pretty bright rivers ran through those forests, and nice birds sang in the branches, and great stags eat the grass underneath; we will read about the stag at some other time. this was many hundred years ago, and there were very few people living then in ireland, and by degrees, when the trees got very old, they began to fall down into the rivers and stopped them up, so that the water could not flow on, and the rivers overflowed all the nice forests, and the trees all fell, so that when some hundred years passed they were all down, and the branches rotted, and the grass and clay became wet, like sponge, and the whole of the nice shady forests of great trees became what we call bogs, and the remains of those pretty branches and leaves, where the birds used to sing so sweetly, has become turf, like this piece which we have for a lesson; and when men are cutting this turf out, they often find the great trunks of those trees, that many hundred years ago were so green and beautiful, quite black and ugly, but still so hard that they can scarcely be cut, and these old trees are called bog-oak, and the cabinet-maker buys them and makes them into beautiful chairs, and tables, and presses, and many other things, and they are quite black, and when polished you little children might see your faces in them. thus you see, my little children, that there is nothing which god has made which is not very wonderful and curious, even this piece of bog-turf, which you would not have heard about if you did not come to the infant school to learn about so many useful and curious things. this will perhaps be enough of information for one lesson; and having thus infused it in an agreeable form into their minds, you may proceed in the manner before mentioned to get it back from them, in order to impress it more firmly on their understandings; and if this be always done in the proper manner, they will become as familiar with the subject, and learn it as quickly as they would the tissue of nonsense contained in the common nursery tales of "jack and jill," or, "the old woman and her silver penny," whose only usefulness consists in their ability to amuse, but from which no instruction can be possibly drawn; beside which, they form in the child's mind the germ of that passion for light reading which afterwards, in many instances, prevents an application to any thing solid or instructive. being in themselves the foundation stone on which a huge and useless mass of fiction is piled in after years, the philosophical mind will at once perceive the advantage of our system of amusement mingled with instruction, and perceive that upon its simple basis a noble structure may be afterwards raised; and minds well stored with useful lore, and capable of discerning evil in whatever shape it presents itself, and extracting honey from every object, will be farmed, which, when they become numerous, will cause a glorious change in the moral world, the first germ of which will be traced to the properly managed gallery lessons of an infant school. having asked the children if they are tired, the teacher, if he receives an answer in the negative, may thus proceed:-- q. what have we been hearing about? a. turf. q. what is the use of turf? a. to make fires. q. what other use is sometimes made of it? a. to build houses. q. where do they build turf houses? a. in ireland. q. are they not very cold? q. no; if they are kept mended, they are not. q. what do you call people, when they like to sleep in the cold rather than mend their houses? a. lazy. q. is it bad to be lazy? a. yes; very bad. q. what do we call it besides being lazy? q. being idle. q. are idle people very happy? a. no; they are always miserable. q. right; and i hope no little children will be ever idle; they should always try to be useful, and do all they can to help their friends. now tell me, where is the turf got from? a. from bogs. q. what are they called in england? a. mosses and fens. q. are the bogs in england larger than in ireland? a. no; the irish bogs are the largest. q. what animals live in the bogs? a. some sorts of birds. q. do men and women live in them? a. no. q. why not? a. they are too wet and soft. q. what very dangerous places are in some parts of them? a. bog-holes. q. what are they? a. deep holes full of water. q. what did i tell you were in some parts of these bogs? a. nice green islands. q. are they of any use? a. yes; the people put cows and horses to feed on them. q. how do they get across the bog? a. they make a kind of rough road over to them. q. what do they cut the turf with? a. a sort of spade with two sides. q. what is this called? a. a slane. q. when the turf is cut, what do they do next? a. put it in heaps to dry. q. what were those great bogs many hundred years ago? a. beautiful forests of fine large trees. q. what flowed through those forests? a. nice bright rivers. q. what sang in the trees? a. pretty birds. q. what eat the grass? a. fine large stags and deer. q. how did those beautiful places become ugly black wet bogs? a. the trees, when they got old, fell into the rivers and stopped them up. q. what did this cause? a. the water flowed over the banks. q. what harm did this do? a. it made all the nice grass wet and marshy. q. what more? a. it rotted the roots of the trees. q. what happened then? a. they all fell down. q. in some hundred years, what did all those forests become? a. great bogs. q. are any of the trunks or bodies of those old trees ever found? a. yes; many hundreds are yet far under the bogs. q. are they of any use? a. yes; they are useful to make chairs, tables, and presses. q. what colour are they? a. as black as a piece of coal. q. when they are polished, do they look nice? a. yes; so bright you can see your face in them. q. what is this wood called? a. bog-oak. q. will you all try to remember this lesson? a. we will. teacher. that is right; for little children should always remember the pretty things that their teacher takes such trouble to tell them. in places where coal is most burned, a piece of it may be made the medium of a very useful and instructive lesson, being so familiar an object, their attention will be arrested by its being made the subject of a lesson; and their curiosity aroused to know every thing about it. when the teacher asks what is this, the simultaneous shout, of "a piece of coal," will convince him that he has arrested their attention; and a few questions will exhaust their stock of information on the subject--they will tell him its uses are to make fires to boil up their dinners, &c. &c. he may then proceed as follows:--you see, little children, this piece of coal; look at it attentively; it is black and shining; and you all know will burn very quickly. the places from whence all coal is brought are called _coal mines_; the men who dig it out of the ground, and the ships that carry it over the sea, are called colliers, and the place where the coals are got is called a colliery. the coal mines are deep holes made very far under the ground, in order to get at the coal; some of them go under the sea. the colliers live a great part of their life, in those dark holes, in order to get us coal to make us fires to dress our food, and very often are killed, either by the falling in of the roof from above, or from a sort of air called fire-damp, which, if touched with any fire, will blow up like gunpowder, and will kill any person that is near it; the poor colliers are also often smothered by the bad air that is in those damp, dark holes; so you see, little children, what dangers they go through, in order to get us coal, which we could very badly do without. how very good god is to us; he made this coal under the earth that we might have nice fires to dress our food, and warm ourselves by in cold weather; we should be very thankful to him for all his great blessings, and should never do anything to make him angry with us; he is very sorry when he sees a little child naughty, because he has done every thing to make us happy, and we never can be so if we are naughty and bad. bad boys and girls are never happy, and god does not love them when they are so, and it is very sad to make god angry with us. coal is very useful for other things besides making fires to dress our food, and to warm us. many things that are very useful could not be made without it. the gas that lights the streets is made from coal, and when the gas is taken from it what is left is called coke, which makes a very bright warm fire. the teacher that properly enters into the spirit of these lessons, may find in the simplest objects, a never-ending source of pleasure and instruction for his infant pupils. no person who is not qualified to give proper and really useful gallery lessons is by any means fit for a teacher of infants; to learn the mere routine of an infant school is not very difficult, but this will be of no avail if the teacher have not qualifications of a much higher order, which will enable him continually to pour instruction clothed in simple language, into the minds of his pupils; simplicity is the life and soul of gallery teaching; without this, the breath is wasted, and time is spent in vain. to teach infants we must reduce our language to their tender capacities, and become, in idea and words, one of themselves. having given the children your information on a piece of coal, you now proceed to get it back, as follows q. little children, what have we been speaking about? a. about coal. q. what colour is it? a. black. q. is it anything besides? a. yes; shining. q. what are the places called from whence coal is got? a. coal-mines. q. what are the men that dig it out of the ground and the ships that carry it over the sea called? a. colliers. q. what is the place called where the coal pits are made? a. a colliery. q. what are coal pits? a. deep holes dug to get at the coal. q. are the colliers in danger down in these deep pits? a. they are. q. from what? a. from fire-damp? q. what is it? a. a sort of air that blows up like gun-powder. q. from what more are they in danger? a. the roofs falling in. q. from what more? a. from bad air which often smothers them. q. what is made from coal to light the streets? a. gas. q. what is coal called after the gas has been taken from it? a. coke. q. does coke make a good fire? a. yes; very bright and strong. q. who made the coal? a. god. q. what should we be to him for it? a. very thankful. q. how can we shew we are thankful? a. by being very good. q. is god glad to see a child naughty? a. no; he is very sorry. q. does he love naughty children? a. no; he does not. q. are naughty children happy? a. no; very unhappy. thus every lesson may be made not only a vehicle for conveying instruction, but also of instilling into the infant mind a reverence, a sense of gratitude and love towards that great being who called us all into existence; this should be never lost sight of, in giving the child those primary sentiments, reverence and gratitude towards its god, you lay a basis on which doctrinal religion may be afterwards built with more advantage. the child thus early trained in such feelings, conveyed in a manner so admirably adapted to its tender mind, can scarcely fail, unless it possesses a heart of great natural depravity, of becoming a good man, and it is thus that infant schools may become a great and lasting blessing to the country. but where this is overlooked--where the vital principle of the infant system is rejected, and the mere mechanical parts alone retained, as to any great and lasting benefit, it will be a complete and unhappy failure. that the grand object of the infant system may be accomplished, namely, of raising up a generation superior to the last, both in religious, moral, and intellectual acquirements, an immense caution and great experience in the selection of teachers is required; till proper teachers are universally provided the infant system will never be really successful: success does not merely consist in universal adoption and extension, if it did it would be now really so. but another thing is wanting before it can be called successful, that is, it must be understood. none can understand it but thinkers, and deep thinkers, and thinkers in the right direction. merely to glance around and gather scraps of knowledge from the various, "ologies" in existence, which the "march of intellect" has brought into being, and which were unknown to our forefathers; and then to force them on the young memory at random, may be to teach what was not before taught, but it is not to display any _new method of teaching; any more efficient way of communicating knowledge_. those who would truly understand the infant system, must think for themselves, and observe the workings of the young mind, mark the intellectual principles which first develope themselves, strive to understand the simple laws of mental action; and all this that they may know how to teach in accordance with them. when this is fairly done, perhaps the whole that is recorded in this book, may be thought more valuable than it is at present, and be found a not unworthy subject to devote a whole life to become acquainted with and elucidate both practically and theoretically. others then will, perhaps, not be quite so audacious in unjust plagiarisms. when columbus had made the egg stand on an end all others could then do it. when he had discovered america, every one said they might have done it also. all great and important truths are simple, and when presented to the mind, although unknown before, seem as if they had been well known, there is such an accurate consistency between the mind and them. this leads me to suppose that there is simple and useful truths in my volumes, as every one seems to take them for their own. i can only say that they have cost _me_ many and many an hour of close observation, and deep and independent thinking. i have devoted my whole life for the good of others, and have injured myself and family, that i might do so. to rescue little children from vice and misery, and to have them placed under physical, intellectual, moral, and religious discipline, has been the delight of my heart, and the object of my life. after this labour, to have my inventions pirated, my plans made use of in part, and in the rest spoken against; to have others to reap the fields that i have sown, and at the same time traduce and injure me; to be thus thrust out as it were from my rightful employment, and left in comparative obscurity as old age begins to draw on; requires a spirit stronger than that of man, and a heart more than human, not to feel it, and feel it deeply. i care little for myself, but regret most to see spurious systems of infant education palmed upon the public by ignorant persons, and thus deprive them of a great benefit which they might possess. facts recorded in scripture may be given orally as gallery lessons, taking care to exhibit some picture representing the subject proposed for the lesson--take, for example, the finding of moses--which represents the daughter of pharaoh coming down to bathe with her maidens, and also the infant moses in the ark, cradle, or boat, which was made for the purpose. the subject is then to be propounded to the children as follows, and the teacher is to take care to repeat it clearly and distinctly in short sentences, and to be careful that all the pupils repeat it as distinctly after him; by thus means the essence of the story is infused into the minds of the children, with the addition of their being taught to repeat all the words distinctly and properly, which will assist their pronunciation very much when they begin to read the lesson described in another part of this work. "and the daughter of pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river, and her maidens walked along by the river's side, and when she saw the ark among the flags she sent her maid to fetch it, and when she had opened it she saw the child, and behold the babe wept. and she had compassion on him; and said, this is one of the hebrews' children. then said his sister to pharaoh's daughter, shall i go and call to thee a nurse of the hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? and pharaoh's daughter said to her, go; and the maid went and called the child's mother. and pharaoh's daughter said unto her, take this child away and nurse it for me, and i will give thee thy wages; and the woman took the child and nursed it, and the child grew, and she brought hum unto pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son, and she called his name moses: and she said, because i drew him out of the water."--_exodus_ ii. q. what does this picture represent? a. the finding of moses. q. who came down to wash herself at the river? a. pharaoh's daughter. q. who was pharaoh? a. the king of egypt. q. what is egypt? a. a country in africa. q. what is africa? a. a part of the earth on which we live. q. where did her maidens walk? a. they walked along by the river's side. q. when pharaoh's daughter saw the ark amongst the flags, what did she do? a. she sent her maid to fetch it. q. and when she opened it, what did she see. a. she saw the child. q. what was the ark? a. a sort of boat made of rushes, such as grow in the river. q. would not the water get into this? a. no; it was kept dry inside by pitch and slime. q. what were the flags that the ark was among? a. a sort of plant that grows in rivers. q. did the child laugh? a. no; it wept, and she had compassion on him. q. and what did she say? a. this is one of the hebrews' children. q. what did his sister say to pharaoh's daughter? a. shall i go and call to thee a nurse of the hebrew women? q. what is meant by his sister? a. the sister of moses who stood to watch what would become of him. q. what did she ask to call a nurse for? a. to nurse the child. q. what did pharaoh's daughter say? a. go. q. who did the maid fetch? a. the child's mother. q. when she came what did pharaoh's daughter say to her? a. take this child away and nurse it for me. q. and what did she say she would give her? a. her wages. q. did the woman take the child? a. yes; and nursed it. q. what became of the child? a. it grew, and she brought it unto pharaoh's daughter, and it became her son. q. what name did she give him? a. she called his name moses. q. what for? a. because she drew hum out of the water. q. look at this picture, what is the girl holding over pharaoh's daughter's head? a. a sort of umbrella. q. what is she holding it up for? a. to keep away the heat of the sun. q. were there slaves in those days? a. yes. q. is the little girl holding the umbrella meant to represent a slave? a. yes. q. do you know what a slave is? a. a person who is taken from his home and made to work for nothing and against his wills. christ with the doctors in the temple, forms, when given as explained, a good gallery lesson--thus: "and it came to pass that after those days she found him in the temple sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions; and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. and when they saw him they were amazed, and his mother said unto him, son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and i have sought thee sorrowing. and he said unto them, how is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that i must be about my father's business. and they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. and he went down with them and came to nazareth, and was subject unto them; but his mother kept all these sayings in _her heart_: and jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with god and man."--_luke_ ii. - . q. where did they find him? a. in the temple. q. sitting in the midst of whom? a. of the doctors. q. what was he doing there? a. hearing and asking them questions. q. and they were astonished at his, what? a. understanding and answers. q. what did jesus' mother say unto him? a. son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? q. what more did she say? a. thy father and i have sought thee sorrowing. q. what did jesus say unto her? a. he said, how is it that ye sought me? q. did he say anything more? a. yes; wist ye not that i must be about my father's business. q. what is the meaning of wist ye not? a. know ye not. q. when jesus went with them, where did they come to? a. to nazareth? q. what is nazareth? a. a town in asia. q. his mother kept those sayings, where? a. in her heart. q. in what did jesus increase? a. in wisdom and stature. q. what do you mean by increasing in stature? a. growing larger. many books of scripture stories have been written for children, but it is far best to select simple and suitable passages from the sacred volume, and have them properly illustrated by coloured plates. by this method the children become acquainted with the very letter of scripture. written stories often leave very wrong impressions; and the history of david and goliah has been given in an infant school, so that it would make an excellent counterpart to jack, the giant killer. surely such things ought never to be! abundance of historical portions, full of moral and religious instruction, and such as are calculated from their simplicity and beauty, to deeply impress the minds of children, can be selected from both testaments; but the miracles and parables of our saviour constitute the richest store. moral training. one of the grand aims of the infant system was intended to improve the system of moral training. the great deficiency in our systems of education, with respect to moral training, is truly lamentable, from the highest down to the lowest schools in the land. there is room for immense improvement in this matter, it is hardly possible to visit a school and witness proper efforts made on this important subject; and never will education produce the glorious effects anticipated from it, until this subject is legislated for and well understood by the public; and i pray to god that he will enable me to use arguments in this chapter to prove effective in the minds of my readers, so as to induce them to co-operate with me to produce another state of things. in these days there is much said about education; it has at last arrested the attention of parliament; and through them, the government, and, as it should be, through the government, the sovereign. thus is truly encouraging and will act as a stimulus to practical men to develop a system workable in all its parts, and thus carry out the views and benevolent intentions of the legislature. infant education, however, must be the basis, this is beginning at the right end; if errors are committed here the superstructure is of little avail. the foundation of moral training must be laid in infancy, it cannot be begun too soon, and is almost always commenced too late. mere infants can understand the doing as they would be done by; no child likes to be deprived of its play-things, his little toys, or any thing which he considers his property; he will always punish the aggressor if he can, and if he cannot he will cry, or put himself in a passion, or seek aid from his parents, or any other source where he thinks he may get justice done to him. little children have beautiful ideas on this subject, and would have, if properly trained, correct notions as to the rights of property; to teach them to respect the property of others, and even to respect themselves, is far preferable to cramming their memories with good rules in theory; this was the old plan; we have proof that it has not worked well. the new plan must operate upon the will, it must influence the heart of the child; this is the scripture plan, which continually refers to the heart, and not so much to the head. every opportunity must be allowed the child to develop its character; to do this it must be associated with its fellows; if the child is a solitary being, his faculties cannot be drawn out, it is in society only they can be beneficially acted upon, and it is in the company of its fellows, that it will shew its true character and disposition; hence the necessity of moral training. there should be temptations placed within reach of the children, such as fruits, flowers, and shrubs. the child taught to respect these will set due bounds to his desire, gardens will cease to be robbed, hedges will not be broken down, turnips and potatoes will not be stolen to the extent which is but too prevalent in the present day. and i am perfectly convinced that every pound the country spends in promoting a rightly directed education, will be saved in the punishment of crime, which in a political point of view, is quite sufficient to induce the country to call for a properly directed system of national education, which must ultimately be based on the oracles of eternal truth. if these ends could be obtained by theory, we have plenty of that in these days. all the writers on education tell us that such and such things should be done, but most of them that i have read, forget to tell us how to do it. they complain of the schools already in existence, they complain of the teachers, they complain of the apathy upon the subject; all of which is very easy. and i regret to say there is but too much cause for all these complaints; but this will not remedy the evil, we must have new plans for moral training; teachers must have greater encouragements held out to them; they must take their proper rank in society, which i contend is next to the clergy; and, until these things take place, we may go on complaining, as talented men will sooner devote themselves to any profession rather than to the art of teaching. we will now endeavour to show how these things are to be remedied, so far as moral training is applicable to infants from twelve months old to six or seven years. in another part of this work, we have shewn what may and ought to be done in the play-ground; in this chapter we will endeavour to shew what may be done to this end in the school-room. in the pages on gallery teaching we have given specimens of lessons on natural objects and scriptural subjects. moral training may receive considerable aid from gallery teaching also; the children must not only be continually told what they ought to do, but as often what they ought not to do; they must be told that they are not to fight, and the reasons must be given; they must be told that they are not to throw stones, and also told the consequences; they must be told not to strike each other with sticks; they must be told not to play in the dirt; they must be trained in cleanly and delicate habits; they must not only be told all these things; but they must be watched in their private hours, they must be encouraged to assist and love each other, and it must _be proved_ to them that this is the way to advance their own individual happiness. it is self-love that is the cause of half our miseries. children cannot be told this too soon; it must be explained _and proved_ to them that evil, sooner or latter, brings its own punishment, and that goodness as assuredly brings its own reward. opportunities will be continually developing themselves for giving moral training to the children, the judicious teacher will seize these as they occur, and always make the best of them for the good of the children. a school is a family upon a large scale; nay, 'tis a commonwealth, and no day will pass without facts shewing themselves, to enable the teacher to give sound moral instruction. it is true we want a better race of teachers, but we must have a better sort of schools first; for it is only from these that a better race of teachers can be supplied. the well trained infants of this generation, will make the efficient teachers of the next. we will suppose the children to be seated in the gallery, the doors of the school closed, and every thing snug and quiet; _the teacher must be alone_, and there must be nothing to distract the children's attention. he must then bring out his store of facts which he has noted down as they occurred; he makes his selection according to circumstances, according to the state of his own mind; not forgetting the state of mind that the children may be in, and especially the state of the weather. the following little ditty may then be repeated, the subject being on cruelty to animals. i'll never hurt my little dog, but stroke and pat his head; i love to see him wag his tail, i like to see him fed. poor little thing, how very good and very useful too; and do you know? that he will mind what he is bid to do. then i will never hurt my dog, nor ever give him pain, but i will always treat him kind, and he will love again. if the children do not appear so bright as the teacher should desire, the before-mentioned ditty, after it has been repeated, may be sung. but the tune must be such as would be likely to operate upon the moral feelings; great caution and circumspection is necessary in selecting proper times for children, and this must be guided by the subject treated of. if the subject is exhilarating, a lively tune must be selected; if the subject is serious, a corresponding tune must also be chosen; but if the subject is intended to operate upon the feelings, what is usually called "_a love tune_" will be the most desirable. the tune having been sung, and the feelings operated upon as desired, the teacher may entertain the little pupils with some one of the numerous stories written about the dog. but before he does this, he must exhaust so much of the subject as appears in the before-mentioned ditty, by question and answer, similar to the other lessons mentioned before, something like the following:-- little children; you have just sung that you would never hurt a little dog, can you tell me why not? some of the children will be sure to say, please, sir, because he has got the sense of feeling. teacher. right, a little dog has got the same sense of feeling as you little children have, and when it is hurt, how does it shew that it has got the sense of feeling? children. please, sir, it will cry out. teacher. yes, it can only tell us it is hurt by doing so. a poor dog cannot speak, and so we should never hurt it. has a little fly the sense of feeling? children. yes, sir. teacher. right again, and so has every creature that god gave life to, and we should never give any of them unnecessary pain. in the song that we have just sung, you said you would stroke and pat the little dog's head. what would you do this for? children. please, sir, the little dog likes it, and he is not afraid of us when we do it, but loves us. teacher. so he does, and will always love those that are kind to him; no one but a very bad boy would be unkind to a dog. you told me, little children, that a poor little dog cries out when it is hurt. now when he is pleased, what does he do? please, sir, he wags his tail, and his eyes look very bright. teacher. so he does, which is the same as if he said, how happy i am to be with such good children who do not beat me as some wicked boys and girls would, but love me and pat my head, and feed me; for you, little children, you have said you liked to see your little dog fed, and remember, any of you that have a little dog, or who may have one when you get older and larger, that it is very cruel not to see it fed every day; the poor dog cannot ask for its dinner as a little child can, and that is the, very reason why we should always remember to give it to him. will you all remember this? children. yes, sir, we will. teacher. you sung in your song that the dog was very useful, tell me how? children, please, sir, he will mind the house, and bark when any one comes to steal anything. teacher. yes, you see how sensible the little dog is, he knows what a wicked thing it is to be a thief, and so he barks when he sees one. how else is a little dog useful? children. please, sir, they often lead poor blind people about. teacher. so they do, and good faithful guides they are. when they see any danger they will lead their master out of it, and they will bring him safely through the crowded streets; and when they go home the poor blind man divides his bit of bread with his good dog; and dogs are useful in other ways, they catch hares and rabbits for their masters, and do many other things. you said also that the dog minded what he was bid to do, did you not? children. yes, sir, and they will often go back a long way for any thing they are bid, or stay all day minding their master's coat while he is at work. teacher. right, and little children when they will not do as they are desired are not so good as a little dog, and should take example by one. do you remember what you said the dog would do if you treated him kindly? children. please, sir, that he would love us again. teacher. right. when we love any thing, a dog, or a horse, or a little lamb, it will love us again; for you know, little children, that love makes love, and if you all love one another, and are kind to one another, and never beat or strike each other with any thing, then you will all be very happy, no little children in the world will be more happy, or have prettier smiling faces than you will have; for when we look kind and pleasant we always look pretty, but when we look cross and angry, then we look ugly and frightful. remember then, never be cruel to a dog, or any thing else, but think of this lesson, and the pretty song we sung. now, little children, shall i tell you a story, a real true story about a very cruel boy? if the children say, yes, the following may be related. a poor little dog was once going along the streets of a town, and a carriage which was coming up the street very fast, ran over it, and the poor thing was very nearly killed, but it had still strength to crawl over to a house where a boy was standing at the door, and it began to whine and looked up in the boy's face, as if to say, you see how much i am hurt, so please take me in and try and cure me; but the boy was a very cruel boy, and had no pity on the poor dog, but took a large pot of boiling water and threw it over the poor wounded little dog, so that it died soon after in very dreadful pain. but the chief governor of the place, that is, the person whom the king had put there to punish wicked people, heard of what a cruel thing this bad boy had done. so he brought him up to the market place, and he made a man take off this cruel boy's clothes, and lash him on the bare back before all the people of the town, in order that he might know a little of the pain that the poor dog had felt. from this story, little children, you may learn, that you must not begin to be cruel, if you do, the habit will grow up with you as it did with this bigger boy, and will never leave you, even when you are men. such lessons as these, given at proper times and when the infant mind is in a fit state to receive them, will do more to prevent what you wish to avoid, than any thing which could be possibly done at a more advanced age; this is indeed moral training, and when such is given generally in infant schools, we may look forward to a generation very superior to the present, in the genuine parts of christianity, and in every moral and social virtue. the beneficial results of moral training have been practically shown in every infant school where the subject has been properly understood and carried out, and numerous anecdotes illustrative of its beneficial effects might be here introduced, which would convince those who have any doubt on the subject, of the good effects of exercising kindness and consideration for others, in opposition to reckless mischief, hardheartedness, and cruelty, vices which render the lower orders dangerous and formidable; but as a complete collection of such anecdotes would form in themselves a volume, we will for the present lay before our readers a few taken at random, to illustrate the subject; they are from the appendix of the first report of the edinburgh infant school society, the model school of which was organized by the author of this book. "two of the children, brothers, about five and four years of age, coming one morning late into school, were to go to their seats without censure, if they could give an account of what they had been doing, which should be declared satisfactory by the whole school, who should decide; they stated separately that they had been contemplating the proceedings of a large caterpillar, and noticing the different positions of its body as it crossed their path, that it was now horizontal, and now perpendicular, and presently curved, and finally inclined, when it escaped into a tree. the master then asked them abruptly, why did you not kill it? the children stared. _could_ you have killed it? asked the teacher. yes, but that would have been cruel and naughty, and a sin against god. the little moralists were acquitted by acclamation; having, infants as they were, manifested a character which, were it universal in the juvenile population, would in another generation reduce our moral code to a mass of waste paper, in one grand department of its bulk. "this anecdote illustrates the good effect of inculcating into the infant mind an abhorrence of cruelty to animals, which is too often a seed sown in the young heart, which goes on increasing daily with the growth of the child, until a fearful career of crime is ended by murder, and its necessary expiation on the scaffold. how many men who have suffered death for murder, could date their first steps towards it, from the time when in infancy they tortured a fly, or spun a cock-chaffer. "the teacher mentioned to the children one day, that he had been occupied about a boy and a girl who had no father or mother, and whose grandfather and grandmother, who took care of them, were bed-rid and in great poverty. the boy was seven years of age, too old for the infant school, but some gentlemen, he said, were exerting themselves to get the boy into one of the hospitals. here he purposely stopped to try the sympathies of his audience for the girl. he was not disappointed, several little voices called out at once, '_oh! master!_ what for no the lassie too?' he assured them the girl was to come to the infant school, and to be boarded there; which intelligence was received with loud plaudits." here we see the seeds of philanthropy sown in the young mind, beginning, even in infancy, to burst and blossom forth, giving promise in after years of a glorious and abundant harvest. the germ of love and mercy is in every breast, and cannot fail to be developed, if early called into action; and by the blessing of almighty god, who is the great first cause of all good results, the day is fast approaching, yea, is now at hand, when the fierce passions, the love of self, the long catalogues of debasing crimes, which have so long disgraced human nature, will give way before a golden age of true christianity; when man will not be arrayed against his fellow-men, but all will go hand in hand together in the bond of love, seeking to do good, and to accomplish the purposes for which they were created by an all-wise and all-benevolent god. the following anecdote illustrates the subject still further:-- "one day, when the children were in the play-ground, four boys occupied the boys' circular swing, while a stranger gentleman was looking on with the teacher. conscious of being looked at, the little fellows were wheeling round with more than usual swiftness and dexterity, when a little creature of two or three years made a sudden dart forward into their very orbit, and in an instant must have been knocked down with great force. with a presence of mind and consideration, and with a mechanical skill,--which to admire most we knew not, one of the boys, about five years old, used the instant of time in which the singular movement was practicable, threw his whole body into a horizontal position, and went clear over the infant's head. but this was not all; in the same well employed instant it occurred to him that that movement was not enough to save the little intruder, as he himself was to be followed as quick as thought by the next swinger; for this he provided, by dropping his own feet to the ground, and stopping the whole machine the instant he had cleared the child's head. the spectator of this admirable specimen of intellect and good feeling, which was all necessarily the thought and act of a moment, had his hand instinctively in his pocket for a shilling, but was stopped by the teacher, who disowns all inferior motives for acts of kindness and justice. the little hero, however, had his reward, for the incident was related by the teacher in a full school, in the presence of the strangers, and was received with several rounds of hearty applause." we will quote another anecdote illustrative of the good effects of exercising the kindly feelings. j.j. accused h.s. of having eaten up j.j.'s dinner. it was proved by several witnesses that h.s. not only appropriated the dinner, but used force: the charge being proved to the satisfaction of the _jury_ (the whole school), the same tribunal were requested by the teacher to decide what should be the consequence to the convict. one orator rose, and suggested that as h.s. had not yet eat his own dinner, he ought to give it to j.j. this motion, for the children always welcome any reasonable substitute for corporal punishment, was carried by acclamation. when one o'clock came, and the dinner was handed over, "_coram publico_," to j.j., h.s. was observed by him to be in tears, and lingering near his _own_ dinner. they were by this time nearly done, but the teacher was watching the result. the tears were too much for j.j., who went to h.s., threw his arms round his neck, told him not to cry, but to sit down and take half. this invitation was of course accepted by h.s., who manifested a great inferiority of character to the other, and furnished an example of the blindness of the unjust to the justice of retribution, which they always feel to mere revenge and cruelty. he could not bear to see j.j. even sharing _his_ dinner, and told him with bitterness that he would tell his mother. "weel, weel!" said the generous child, "i'll gin y'd a' back again." of course the teacher interfered to prevent this gross injustice, and in the afternoon made their school-fellows perfectly aware of the part each had acted. it is not easy to render a character like h.s. liberal, but a long course of such practice, for precept is impotent in such cases, might modify what in after life would have turned out a selfish, unjust, and unsocial character. this selfish principle it is the great object of moral training to combat against. we may trace almost all the misery in the world to it; and until it ceases to exist to the extent which it now does, little can be done to accomplish any good or great purpose. but lessons like the above, and received into the infant mind when in a receptive state, will, if proper advantage be taken of their occurrence, prove in the hands of the almighty a powerful engine for the removal of selfishness; and we know of no method so effectual to accomplish this object as the drawing infants into societies, which is done only in infant schools. the following anecdote, bearing on the same subject, came under the observation of the author of this work, very early in his labour for the extension of his system. he gives it here in the same words as he communicated it to a friend at the time of its occurrence. a few days since i went to the boston street school; the children were in the gallery, and the moment i entered, they rose to receive me. when the school was over, the children came around me, as they usually do, saying, when will you come again? and so on. i told them i could not tell, but that i would come as soon as i could. this answer would not satisfy them, and i talked to them until near six o'clock in the evening. one little girl, about four years old, kept looking stedfastly at me the whole time, not letting a single word or gesture escape her notice. at last i finished my observations, and desired the children to go. the infant in question immediately took hold of my hand, and said, "we shall never see you any more, you must come home with me." i replied, "what do you want me to go home for?" the child answered, "i have nothing to give you, but if you will come home mother will give you some tea." i patted the child on the head, telling it i could not go. the child went home, as i thought, and i remained some time talking to one of the ladies of the committee. on walking down the street i saw the same child crying bitterly, and surrounded by many other children. on inquiring the cause, i received for answer, "_you would not come home to tea_." if only one half the invitations that are given amongst _men_ were given with as much sincerity and disinterestedness as was manifested by this _infant_, i am much mistaken if we should not see a very different state of _society_. "moral education," writes mr. simpson in his "philosophy of education," "embraces both the animal and moral impulses. it regulates the former, and strengthens the latter, whenever gluttony, indelicacy, violence, cruelty, greediness, cowardice, pride, insolence, vanity, or any mode of selfishness shew themselves in the individual under training, one and all must be repressed with the most watchful solicitude, and the most skilful treatment. repression may at first fail to be accomplished, unless by severity; but the instructor sufficiently enlightened in the faculties, will, in the first practicable moment, drop the coercive system, and awaken and appeal powerfully to the higher faculties of conscience and benevolence, and to the powers of reflection: this, done with kindness, in other words, with a marked manifestation of benevolence itself, will operate with a power, the extent of which in education is yet, to a very limited extent, estimated. in the very exercise of the superior faculties the inferior are indirectly acquiring a habit of restraint and regulation; for it is morally impossible to cultivate the superior faculties without a simultaneous though indirect regulation of the inferior." it is indeed a melancholy truth, that moral training is yet, to a very limited extent, estimated, and this is mainly owing to its not being understood by the generality of those selected for the office of teachers of infants, nor can it be expected that persons of sufficient intellect and talent to comprehend and carry out this great object, can be procured, until a sufficient remuneration is held out to them, to make it worth their while to devote their whole energies to the subject. it is a fatal error to suppose that mere girls, taken perhaps from some laborious occupation, and whose sum total of education consists of reading and writing, can carry out views which it requires a philosophical mind, well stored with liberal ideas and general knowledge, to effect. they may be able to instruct the children in the mere mechanical part of the system; and as long as they confine themselves to this, they will go on capitally, but no further than this can they go; and though the children may appear to a casual visitor, to be very nicely instructed, and very wonderful little creatures, on a closer examination they will be found mere automatons; and then, without a thought on the subject, the system will be blamed, without once considering that the most perfect figure of mechanism will not work properly in any hands, except those that thoroughly understand it. enough may have now been said on this subject, and my earnest prayer is, that by god's help, these remarks may produce beneficial results; and if my endeavours to make the subject of moral instruction more easily understood, and to demonstrate its importance as clearly as possible are successful, the results will soon shew me that the hard labour of three-and-thirty years has not been entirely in vain, and this will be to me a greater reward than all the praise, distinction, and honour that it is in man's power to confer. whenever an infant is detected in any of those animal impulses, to regulate which is the great end of moral training, a gallery lesson should be immediately given, having a tendency to excite an abhorrence of the fault on the minds of all the children. an opportunity of this description should never be let pass. these are the very best times to implant virtuous and moral sentiments in the minds of the young pupils. these are the golden opportunities of bringing into action the higher faculties of conscience and benevolence, and the powers of reflection. if an instance of the too prevalent cruelty of the young to animals be detected, which often occurs from mere thoughtlessness, it may be prevented from again occurring by a few lessons like the one which we have given as a specimen. the same means may be taken for crushing the rudiments of gluttony, violence, pride, deceit, or any other vice. the gallery is the proper place for these lessons; and after the matter has been thoroughly _sifted_ in the play-ground, or wherever else it has occurred, the children should then be marched to the gallery, to receive a proper instruction on the subject. cruelty, on the part of boys, is too prevalent; it is energy, enterprise, and high animal spirit, not legislated for on the part of parents and teachers, which descends to cruelty, first to animals, then to all which has life, that cannot defend itself. children soon learn to distinguish those children and animals, who can, and will, resent cruelty, from those who will not; and therefore, speculate on the results accordingly, and become self-taught up to this point. a child should never be without a kind and wise guide at this period; that which in itself descends to evil, for the want of a moral guide, may be turned to good. the faculties mentioned, cannot be extinguished, but can be regulated. this is the office of the teacher. too frequently we try to crush the powers that early want training and regulating. the same powers which run to vice, may be trained to virtue, but the activities cannot, and ought not, to be kept too much in abeyance. children are not naturally cruel, although they differ much in the propensity to annoy and reduce animals and each other under their individual control; the passive submit at once, but the energetic will not; it is then that the active assailant learns an important lesson, which can only be learned in society, and which to him, is of great importance. the difficulty on the part of the teacher, is to know when to interfere, and when to let alone. i have often erred by interference, of this i am quite satisfied; the anxiety to prevent evil, has caused me to interfere too soon, by not giving time to the pupil fully to develops his act. i hope others will profit from this; it requires much practice and long study of different temperaments, in children, to know when to let alone and when to interfere; but certain it is, that the moral faculties can and must be developed, in any system worthy of the name of education. other vices beside cruelty are to be found in children. moral training applies to these, and none are left to run their own course. why should they? what are schools for? but to form the virtuous character--the being who can command self control--the orderly character, the good citizen, and, the being who fears and loves god. ends less than these, cannot be worthy of the efforts of the philanthropist and the truly religious man. there is another idea which has long been in my mind, and which i hope some day to see carried into practice, viz., a religious service adapted for children, in our various places of worship. no accurate observer of the young in churches during divine service, can have failed to witness the inattention of the numbers of children who are assembled on such occasions. the service is too long and inappropriate for them, as is also the sermon. it is addressed to adults, and sometimes the terms used by the preacher, is greek to half the adults, in agricultural districts. men cannot be too simple with the young and illiterate; there is much room for improvement in these things, and with regard to the young, i can answer for them that, if they are addressed in proper language, which they can understand, and are supplied with proper religious food for the understanding, suitable to its state of receptivity, and, if i may say, digestive powers; they, as a body, will shew us an example which will surprise many. with regard to the church, there might be taken from the prayer book, a simple service adapted to the purpose. i am certain i could do it with ease, as i know what is adapted for children, or at least i ought to do. the next point, all the preachers should be men of peculiar temperament and great simplicity of manner. i do not care how learned they are; the more learned, the better; but it, need not be in languages but in spiritual things. there are thousands of passages in the holy word which are adapted, and i think, intended for the purpose, and there are many men now living who are able to do the thing, and more will be raised up. one thing, however, must not be forgotten, they must be _men advanced_ in life, not _lads_. to teach natural things properly to children, requires more knowledge than the generality of the public suppose. the younger the children are, the more knowledge it requires on the part of the instructor. but to teach spiritual things properly to children, men cannot know too much, provided they have the power to simplify that knowledge and reduce it to practice. an evening service will not do for children, it must be either in the morning or the middle of the day. so fully am i impressed with the importance of this idea, that i am determined shortly to take means to carry it out. chapter x. rewards and punishments. _necessity of some punishment--rewards to monitors--trial by jury--illustrative case--necessity of firmness--anecdotes--playing the truant--its evils--means for prevention--devices for punishment--sympathy encouraged--evil of expelling children--case of hartly--difficulty of legislating for rewards and punishments--badge of distinction not necessary_. * * * * * how does the deity deal with his creatures, on this momentous question? this is the question which every thinker--and every religious man, must ask himself; and then, act accordingly. * * * * * as man comes into the world with a propensity to do that which is forbidden, it has been found necessary at all times, to enact laws to govern and even to punish him, when he acts contrary to them; and who will deny the man a just reward who has done any act whereby his fellow-men have been benefitted? "the hope of reward sweetens labour." if, then, rewards and punishments are necessary to make _men_ active, and to keep them in order, how can it be expected that children can be governed without some kind of punishment? i am aware that i am taking the unpopular side of the question, by becoming an advocate for punishment, but notwithstanding this, i must say, that i think no school in england has ever been governed without it; and that the many theories ushered into the world, on this subject, have not been exactly acted upon. and since this was written i am in a position to state the same with regard to both scotland and ireland. indeed, it appears to me, that while men continue to be imperfect beings, it is not possible that either they or their offspring, can be governed without some degree of punishment. i admit that it should be administered with great prudence, and never employed but as a last resource; and i am sorry to say, that it has descended to brutality in some schools, which, perhaps, is one reason why so many persons set their faces against it altogether. i might write as others have done, by stating that i had brought up a family of my own without ever having struck even once any of my children, but then this is no argument for the general conducting of a school; in school, children are spoiled before they come to you, in a family the judicious parent begins at the beginning, the cases therefore entirely differ. the first thing that appears to me necessary, is to find out, if possible, the real disposition and temper of a child, in order to be able to manage it with good effect. i will allow that it is possible to govern some children without corporal punishment, for i have had some under my charge whom i never had occasion to punish, to whom a word was quite sufficient, and who, if i only looked displeased, would burst into tears. but i have had others quite the reverse; you might talk to them till you were tired, and it would produce no more effect half an hour afterwards, than if they had not been spoken to at all. indeed, children's dispositions are as various as their faces; no two are alike; consequently, what will do for one child will not do for another; and hence the impropriety of having an invariable mode of punishment. what should we think of a medical man who was to prescribe for every constitution in the same manner? the first thing a skilful physician does, is to ascertain the constitution of the patient, and then he prescribes accordingly; and nothing is more necessary for those who have charge of little children, than to ascertain their real character. raving done this, they will be able, should a child offend, to apply some appropriate antidote. to begin with rewards: to the monitors i have generally allowed one penny a week each, as i found much difficulty in procuring monitors; for, whatever honours were attached to the office, children of five years old could not exactly comprehend them. they could much more easily perceive the use of a penny; and as a proof how much they valued the penny a week above all the honours that could be bestowed, i always had a good supply of monitors after this remuneration was adopted. before this time, they used to say, "please, sir, may i sit down? i do not like to be a monitor." perhaps i might prevail on some to hold the office a little longer, by explaining to them what an honourable office it was: but after all, i found that the penny a week spoke more powerfully than i did, and the children would say to each other, "i like to be a monitor now, for i had a penny last saturday; and master says, we are to have a penny every week; don't you wish you were a monitor?" "yes, i do; and master says, if i am a good boy, i shall be a monitor by and bye, and then i shall have a penny." i think they richly deserve it. some kind of reward i consider necessary, but what kind of reward, must, of course, rest entirely with the promoters of the different schools.[a] [footnote a: in many of the infant schools i hull visited, i found the spelling and reading very much neglected, that neither the monitors nor children look at the lessons, but merely say them by rote; if the monitors are punished for inattention they wish to give up the office, because there is no reward attached to it; but if there is a reward attached to it of any kind, the children have sense enough to see that the thing is fairly balanced, for if they are rewarded for doing their duty they see no injustice in being punished for neglecting it.] perhaps nothing would tend more to the order and efficient conducting of an infant school, than the plan of giving rewards to the monitors. from the part they take in teaching and superintending others, it seems due to them,--for the labourer is worthy of his hire. if we are to make use of monitors at all, i am now convinced that they _must_ be rewarded; parents do not like their children to work for nothing, and when they become useful, they are taken away entirely, unless rewarded. the training system uses monitors only in that which is purely mechanical; or, to infuse into the external memory that which is to be learned by rote, singly or simultaneously, by the pupils, such as chapters out of the scriptures, catechisms, creeds, poetry, psalms, hymns, prayers, and commandments, and whatever is (as it is called) to be learned by heart, but to develope the faculties of the pupils--to really teach religion, morals, intellectuals, or anything which applies to the interior of the pupils, they are useless. a most important means of discipline appears in what we term "trial by jury," which is composed of all the children in the school. it has been already stated that the play-ground is the scene for the full development of character, and, consequently, the spot where circumstances occur which demand this peculiar treatment. it should also be particularly observed, that it is next to prayer in solemnity, and should only be adopted on extraordinary occasions. any levity manifested either by the teacher or the pupils will be fatal to the effect. but to illustrate it, i will state a fact. in the play-ground of an infant school there was an early dwarf cherry-tree, which, from its situation, had fruit, while other trees had only flowers. it became, therefore, an object of general attention, and ordinarily called forth a variety of important observations. now it happened that two children, one five years of age, and the other not quite three, entered the school in the autumn, and on the return of spring, they, having had only a winter's training, were charmed by this object, and in consequence fell into temptation. accustomed to watch new scholars narrowly, i particularly observed them; when i marked the elder one anxiously, intently, and wishfully gazing on the fruit, and especially on one amazingly large cherry pendent from a single shoot. while thus absorbed, the younger child was attracted to the spot, and imitated his example. the former then asked if he did not think it a large one, and the reply was of course, in the affirmative. having thus addressed the powers of observation, the next appeal was to the taste, by the inquiry, "is not it a nice one?" the answer to which was, "yes." then followed the observation, "it is quite soft," when the young one, being thus excited by the touch of the other, touched it also. this act, he subsequently repeated, by desire of the elder, who, having charged him to hold it tight, struck his hand, and thus detached the cherry. i now withdrew to some distance, and it was evident that the little one was distressed by what he had done, as he did not eat it, but began to cry faintly, on which the elder took the cherry out of his hand, and ate it. this increased the crying, when, on approaching, he ran up to me, saying that the other took my cherry. the little one continuing to cry, the other stated that he saw him take it; to which i replied, "we will try him by and bye." as soon, therefore, as the proper time arrived, the bell was rung; prior to which, however, i was apprised of the loss by several children, and when all were seated in the gallery, i proceeded as follows "now, little children, i want you to use all your faculties, to look at me attentively, and to think of what i am about to say, for i am going to tell you a tale of two little boys. once on a time they were amusing themselves with a great many other children in a play-ground, where there was a great many flowers and some fruit trees. but before i go on, let me ask you is it right to take the flowers or fruit which belong to others?" to which the general reply was "no," with the exception of the culprits. i then described their age, stated that one boy was five years old, and the other three; that the former was looking at one of his master's fine cherries, which was growing against the wall, and that the latter approached, and looked at it too; on which several exclaimed, "please, sir, your big cherry is gone;" which caused an inspection of each others' countenances. to this, i replied, "i am sorry for it, but let me finish my tale. now, children, while they were both looking at the cherry, the older one asked the younger if it were not large, to which he replied, 'yes;' he then inquired, whether it were not nice, when he again answered, 'yes;' afterwards, be told him, having touched it himself first, to touch it because it was soft, and the little boy unfortunately did so, on which the big one pulled his arm, and the cherry came off in his hand." while this was proceeding, the two delinquents sat very demurely, conscious that they were pourtrayed, though all the rest were ignorant of the fact. i then said, "which do you think the worst of these boys?" when several answered, "the biggest was the worst." on inquiring, "why?" the reply was, "because he told the little one to take it;" while others said, "because he pulled his arm." i added, "i have not told you the whole tale yet, but i am glad to see that you know right from wrong, and presently you will be still better prepared to judge. when the big boy had told the little one to take the cherry, he then robbed him of it, and immediately betrayed him by telling the master. now which do you think was the worst?" when a great number of voices vociferated, "the big one." i then inquired, if they thought we had such children in our school? the general reply was 'no;' but the scrutiny among themselves was redoubled. to this i rejoined, "i am sorry to say such children are now sitting among you in the gallery." at this crisis the little one burst into tears, on which the children said, "please, sir, that's one of them, for his face is so red, and he cries." i answered, "i am sorry it is so," and called the culprit down with "come here, my dear, and sit by the side of me until we examine into it." this was followed by the outcry, "please, sir, we have found the other, he hangs his head down, and his face looks so white." this child was then called down in the same mild manner to sit on the other side of me. i then told them, that they would find, when they became men and women, that in our courts of law, witnesses of what was done were called, and as the elder boy had seen the young one take the cherry, it was necessary and desireable to hear what he had to say. on being desired to stand up, i therefore said, "did you see him take the cherry?" to which he promptly replied, "yes." the next inquiry was, "what did he do with it?" to this he was silent, on which the little one, not being able to contain himself, called out, "he took it from me, and ate it." all eyes were now turned to the big one, and all felt convinced that he was the most guilty, whilst the confidence of the little one increased by the prospect of having justice done him, as he previously feared that being accused by the elder one, he should be condemned without ceremony. finding that the elder one had no more to say, it only remained to hear the defence of the young one, who, sensible of having done what was wrong, said, in broken accents, "he told me to take it,--he hit my hand,--and he ate the cherry." to which it was necessary to give the admonition, that he never ought to do wrong, though required to do so by others; and that such a defence would avail him nothing were he a man. both the children were now exceedingly distressed, and hence this was the time to appeal to the rest, as to the measure of the punishment that was due. the general opinion was, that the eldest should be punished, but no one mentioned that the young one should even have a pat on the hand; the next thing was to appeal to the higher faculties of the little culprit, who, seeing that he had thus far got off, required to be softened down in reference to the other, though he had betrayed him, while the best way of operating on the elder was a display of love on the part of the younger; he was therefore asked if he would forgive the other, and shake hands with him, which he immediately did, to the evident delight and satisfaction of all the children, while the countenance of the elder showed that he felt himself unworthy of the treatment he received. i then inflicted the sentence which had been pronounced,--two pats of the hand, which the girls asked might be soft ones, and sent him to his seat, while i concluded the whole with some appropriate exhortations. it is pleasing to add that the elder proved one of the most useful monitors i ever had.[a] [footnote a: this mode of treatment has succeeded in a number of instances, several first-rate writers on education have tried it, and have found it work well; it is one of the most effective methods to operate upon the minds of young children that i have been able to discover: i have tried the plan with older children with great success. reader! can teachers, who are mere boys and girls, act thus, in such a case?] should any person be disposed to object to such a process, they may be reminded that the infant system deals with children as rational creatures, and is designed to prepare them for future life. i have seen numerous instances of its beneficial effects? these have induced me to pursue the plan, and in the strongest terms to recommend it to others. in all cases, the matter should be stated to the children simply, calmly, and slowly, and they will seldom, if ever, come to a wrong conclusion. a manual trade, or a business, which requires dexterity can never be learnt from books alone, or properly understood from mere precepts. all must be acquired by practice, and then the knowledge of it becomes, as it were, a part of our very selves. the same applies to the precepts of morality. if they be merely committed to memory by rote, they will often lie there cold and inactive, and not unfrequently tend even to harden the feelings. but when they are brought out into actual practice, and made to bear upon the conscience of the culprit, and on the moral feelings of all the children through him, they are seen in a new and convincing light, and learnt with a power that will impress them indelibly on the memory. "nathan said unto david, thou art the man." the most effectual teaching of a christian parent is not at the time of the mere infusion of moral truth into a child's mind, but in the example he gives in his life, and the direction he gives according to it to his child when he "walks by the way" and when he "sits in the house." such should be the teaching aimed at in every infant school. how wise are the dealings of the creator with us on the subject of reward. what being ever yet did good, who did not feel within a certain reward? who felt most of the influence of the holy spirit? the passers by,--or the good samaritan? nay! who felt the greatest reward in his own breast, the samaritan himself, or the man who fell amongst thieves? i think the samaritan. throughout all creation we see rewards; for assiduity, "the early crow gets the worms; the cautious animal escapes his enemies; the good man enjoys the most happiness; out of goodness happiness cannot be found;--virtue brings its own reward;" obedience to the natural laws does the same, so does obedience to the spiritual laws bring such rewards as my pen cannot describe, but, i doubt not, many have felt them. the whole system of society appears to me to depend upon this stimulant. who would wish to be the heads of the church and take the additional responsibilites and labours attached to them without reward? who would accept the office, the weighty office of being her majesty's ministers without reward? i might go on in this strain of reasoning and prove that rewards are founded in knowledge of human nature; but i am content to skew we have some ground for them, they are useful, if not essential, in the right management of the young, but, like every thing else, require to be managed judiciously. it appears to me that the argument to the contrary would be untenable. i should like to see the man who would invest his capital in railways--electric telegraphs, steam ships, and in business of any kind, without hope of reward, pooh! it is the mainspring of human action, the incentive to public service, it rests not in this world but follows us to the next, "well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy lord." ah! but this refers to men, not to children. what are children but men in embryo? why be unjust to them, and just to man. i say rewards are necessary in a sound system of education to little children; if judiciously selected and properly applied, they will be found incentives to action, and add greatly to the pleasure of learning. in my other work for the education of older children, this subject is treated of more at length as applicable to them. with regard to punishments, they are various, and must be adapted to the disposition of the child. the only corporal punishment that we inflict is a pat on the hand, which is very of great service in flagrant cases of misconduct. for instance, i have seen one child bite another's arm, until it has almost made its teeth meet. i should suppose few persons are prepared to say, such a child should not be punished for it. i have seen others who, when they first came to school, would begin to scream as if they were being punished, as soon as their mother brought them to the door, while the mother continued to threaten the child without ever putting one threat into execution. the origin of all this noise, has been, perhaps, because the child has demanded a half-penny, as the condition of coming to school, and the mother probably has not had one to give him, but has actually been obliged to borrow one in order to induce him to come in at the school door. thus the child has come off conqueror, and set it down as a maxim, that, for the future, he may do just as he pleases with his mother. i have sometimes made my appearance at this time, to know what all the noise was about, when the mother has entered into a lamentable tale, telling me what trouble she has had with the child, and that he would not come to school without having a half-penny each time. but the moment the child has seen me, all has been as quiet as possible. i have desired him to give me the half-penny, which he has done directly, i have returned it to the mother, and the child has gone into school, as quietly as any child could do. i have had others who would throw their victuals into the dirt, and then lie down in it themselves, and refuse to rise up, crying, "i will go home; i want to go into the fields; i will have a half-penny." the mother has answered, "well, my dear, you shall have a half-penny, if you will stay at school." "no, i want to go and play with billy or tommy;" and the mother at length has taken the churl home again, and thus fed his vanity and nursed his pride, till he has completely mastered her, so that she has been glad to apply to the school again, and beg that i would take him in hand. at another time a girl came with a pillow; she had insisted on having it for a doll; but, so far from contributing to her happiness, it had a contrary effect. nevertheless, the parent, for want of that firmness so necessary in the management of children, had allowed her to bring it to school, and on her journey she cried all the way, to the amusement of the lookers on. when i remonstrated with the mother, she replied, "what could i do? she would not come without it" the child, however, gave it up to me without any trouble, and the over _indulgent mother_ took it back with her. numerous have been the instances of a similar kind; and all far the want of firmness. the master of an infant school, whenever opportunity occurs, should feel it incumbent upon him to urge the parents to make a due use of judicious parental authority. this is the very foundation of all social order, rule, and government, and to relax it is to loosen the very keystone of society. he ought also perpetually to inculcate obedience to their parents upon the children, as being one of their first and most important duties. some have objected to our schools, that they are calculated to loosen the ties and the authority between parent and child; but if these precepts are carefully attended to, the result will be precisely the reverse. it is, however, necessary to state, in the three cases just noticed, that in each, the children had been previously conquered by me, and young as they were, they knew quite well that, although such conduct as they exhibited gained the end they had in view with the parent, similar conduct would not succeed with me. it is little short of cruelty to let any child have its own way in such matters. they will always try hard to get the tipper hand, not knowing but that such conduct adds to their own happiness. when once conquered, and proof is afforded that it does not, then the children are always thankful for the discipline. at all events, i have never found it otherwise. many, i may say numerous cases, have occurred of worse kinds than the above, such as children insisting on bringing something from home, as the bellows, tongs, poker, the mother's bonnet, father's hat, &c., as the condition of coming to school, which the simple parent has complied with rather than adopt the required firmness, which is essential in matters of this kind. more infants know quite well the weak and the strong points of a parent's character, they all are excellent judges on this subject. i found it necessary, under such circumstances, to enter into a kind of agreement with the mother, that she should not interfere in any respect whatever: that on such conditions, and such only, could the child be admitted; observing, that i should act towards it as if it were my own, but that it must and should be obedient to me; to which the mother has consented, and the child has been taken in again; and, strange to say, in less than a fortnight, has been as good, and has behaved as orderly as any child in the school. but i should deem myself guilty of duplicity and deceit, were i to say that such children, in all cases could be managed without corporal punishment, as it appears to me, that this, in moderation, has been the mode of correcting refractory children, from the earliest ages; for it is expressly said in the scriptures, "_he that spareth his rod, hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes_;" and again, "_he that knoweth his lord's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes_." there is certainly something very pleasing in the sound, that several hundred infant children may be well managed, kept in good order, and corrected of their bad habits, without _any sort_ of punishment. but as i have not been able to attain to that state of perfection in the art of teaching, i shall lay before the reader what modes of punishment i have adopted, and the success that attended them. if punishments be judiciously and justly applied, when offences require them, from the earliest periods of life, they will soon cease to be wanted. we cannot form a more important association in the young mind than one between pain and moral evil, and this judicious correction will effect. it should not be given in anger, or it will have the appearance of revenge; but if administered calmly and with feelings of sorrow and regret, it will soon exercise a mighty moral influence. the providence of god applies to us the correction of sickness, pain, and sorrow, to withdraw us from evil; and thus in his moral government, as well as in his word, he commands us to use the rod; but always for good, and never in anger or cruelty. recent events have proved to me that there is a mawkish sentimentality but too prevalent on this subject abroad, which interferes greatly with moral training, the proper freedom of the school-master, and even with the administration of public justice. the first offence deserving punishment which i shall notice, is playing the truant; and i trust i may be permitted to state, that notwithstanding the children are so very young, they frequently, at first, stay away from the school, unknown to their parents; nor is this to be wondered at, when we consider how they have been permitted to range the streets, and get acquainted with other children in similar circumstances. when this is the case, they cannot be brought into order in a moment; it is a work of time, and requires much patience and perseverance to accomplish it effectually. it is well known that when we accustom ourselves to particular company, and form acquaintances, it is no easy matter to give them up; and it is a maxim, that a man is either better or worse for the company he keeps. just so it is with children; they form very early attachments, and frequently with children whose parents will not send them to school, and care not where they are, so long as they keep out of their way. hence such children will persuade others to accompany them, and of course they will be absent from school; but as night approaches, the child will begin to think of the consequences, and mention it to his companions; who will instruct him how to deceive both his teachers and his parents, and perhaps bring him through his trouble. this will give him fresh confidence, and finding himself successful, there will be little difficulty in persuading him to accompany them a second time. i have had children absent from school two or three half-days in a week, and sometimes whole days, who have brought me such rational and plausible excuses as completely to put me off my guard, but who have been found out by their parents from having stayed out till seven or eight o'clock at night. the parents have applied at the school to know why they kept the children so late, add have then in formed me that they have been absent all day. thus the whole plot has been developed; it has been found that the children were sent to school at eight o'clock in the morning, and had their dinners given them to eat at school, but instead of coming they have got into company with their older companions, who, in many cases, i have found were training them up for every species of vice. some of them have been cured of truant playing by corporal punishment, when all other means i could devise have failed, others by means the most simple, such as causing the child to hold a broom for a given time. the most powerful punishment i have yet discovered is to insist on the child sitting still, without moving hand or foot for a given time, say half an hour at most. long punishment always has the tendency to harden the child; he soon gets contented in his situation, and you defeat your own object. by keeping a strict eye upon them it will be remarked, they soon begin to form an attachment with some of their own school-fellows, and ultimately become as fond of their new companions, their books, and their school, as they were before of their old companions and the streets. i need scarcely observe, how strong our attachments, formed in early years at school, are, and i doubt not but many who read this have found a valuable and real friend in a school-fellow for whom they would do any thing within their power. there were several children in the school who had contracted some very bad habits, entirely by their being accustomed to run about the streets; and one boy in particular, only five years of age, was so frequently absent, and brought such reasonable excuses for his being so, that it was some time before i detected him. i thought it best to see his mother, and therefore sent the boy to tell her that i wished her to come. the boy soon returned, saying his mother was not at home. the following morning he was absent again, and i sent another boy to know the reason, when the mother waited on me immediately, and assured me that she had sent the child to school. i then produced the slate which i kept for that purpose, and informed her how many days and half-days her child had been absent during the last month, when she again assured me that she had never kept the child at home for a single half-day, nor had he ever told her that i wanted to see her; at the same time observing that be must have been decoyed away by some of the children in the neighbourhood. she regretted that she could not afford to send him to school before, adding, _that the infant school was a blessed institution, and one, she thought, much wanted in the neighbourhood_. i need scarcely add, that both the father and mother lost no time in searching for their child, and after several hours, they found him in the nearest fruit-market with several children, pretty well stored with apples, &c., which they had, no doubt, stolen from the fruit-baskets continually placed there. they brought him to the school, and informed me they had given him a good flogging, which i found to be correct from the marks that were on the child. this, they said, they had no doubt would cure him; but he was not so soon conquered, for the very next day he was absent again; and after the parents had tried every experiment they could think of, in vain, they delivered him over to me, telling me i might do what i thought proper. i tried every means i could devise with as little success, except keeping him at school after school hours; for i had a great disinclination to convert the school into a prison, as my object was, if possible, to cause the children to love the school, and i knew i could not take a more effectual method of causing them to dislike it than by keeping them there against their will. at last i tried this experiment, but to as little purpose as the others, and i was about to exclude the child altogether as incorrigible; but unwilling that it should be said a child five years old had mastered us, i at last hit upon an expedient which had the desired effect. the plan i adopted was to put him on an elevated situation within sight of all the children, so secured that he could not hurt himself. i believe it was the force of _ridicule_ that effected the cure. this i had never tried before, and i must say i was extremely glad to witness it. i never knew him absent without leave afterwards, and, what is more surprising, he appeared to be very fond of the school, and became a very good child. was not this, then, a brand plucked from the fire? i have been advised to dismiss twenty such children, rather than retain them by the above means; but if there be more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance, ought not such a feeling to be encouraged on earth, particularly when it can be done by means that are not injurious to the orderly, but, on the contrary, productive of the best effects? the child just mentioned afterwards went into the national school, with several others who had been nearly as bad as himself, but they scarcely ever failed to come and see me when they had a half holiday, and the master of the school told me that not one of them had ever been absent without leave, and that he had no fault to find with them. i have further to observe that the moment i perceived a bad effect produced by any method of punishment, it was relinquished. but i feel it my duty here to caution the reader against the too frequent practice of many to object. it may cost a man many years to find out what may be desirable and workable; but to become an objector requires no thought, accordingly the most thoughtless are generally the greatest objectors. i believe that there was not a child in the school who would not have been delighted _to carry the broom_, if i had called it play; the other children might have laughed as long as they pleased, for he would have laughed as heartily as any of them, and as soon as he had done, i should have had a dozen applicants, with "please, sir, may i? please, sir, may i?" but it was called a _punishment_, and hence i had no applications whatever; they all dreaded it as much as they would a flogging. i am aware that this plan of punishment may appear ridiculous, and perhaps it would be so to use it for older children; but with such young children i have found it to answer well, and therefore i have no wish to dispense with it. i would, however, have care taken not to encourage the children to ridicule each other while undergoing this or any other punishment, except in extraordinary cases, such as the one i have mentioned; on the contrary, we should encourage them to sympathize with and comfort a child, as soon as the punishment is over, and i can truly add, that i do not recollect a single instance when any child has been undergoing the broom punishment, but some of the others have come, and attempted to beg him off, with "please, sir, may he sit down now?" and when asked the reason why they wished the little delinquent to be forgiven, they have answered, "may be, sir, he will be a good boy." their request has been complied with, and the culprit forgiven; and what have i seen follow? why, that which has taught me an important lesson, and convinced me that _children can operate on each other's minds, and be the means of producing very often better effects than adult people can_. i have seen them clasp the child round the neck, take him by the hand, lead him about the play-ground, comfort him in every possible way, wipe his eyes with their pinafores, and ask him if he was not sorry for what he had done. the answer has been, "yes;" and they have flown to me with, "master, he says he is sorry for it, and that he will not do it again." in short, they have done that which i could not do--they have so won the child over by kindness, that it has caused the offender not only to be fond of them, but equally as fond of his master and the school. to these things i attribute the reclaiming of the children i have mentioned, and so far from punishment being productive of the "_worst effects_," i have found it productive of the best. the ill effects of expelling children as incorrigible may be seen in the case of hartley, who was executed some years back. he confessed before his execution that he had been concerned in several murders, and upwards of two hundred burglaries; and by the newspaper account we learn that he was dismissed from school at nine years of age, there being no school master who would be troubled with him, when, finding himself at liberty, he immediately became a robber. "hartley's father" (the account proceeds), "formerly kept the sir john falstaff inn at hull in yorkshire; he was put to school in that neighbourhood, but his conduct at school was so marked with depravity, and so continually did he play the truant, that he was dismissed as unmanageable. he then, although only nine years of age, began with pilfering and robbing gardens and orchards, till his friends were obliged to send him to sea. he soon contrived to run away from the ship in which he had been placed, and having regained the land, pursued his old habits, and got connected with many of the principal thieves in london, with whom he commenced business regularly as a house-breaker, which was almost always his line of robbery." should not every means have been resorted to with this child before proceeding to the dangerous mode of expulsion? for it is not the whole who need a physician, but those who are sick; and i strongly suspect that if judicious punishment had been resorted to, it would have had the desired effect. i can only say that there never was a child expelled from the infant school under my care as incorrigible. in conclusion, i have to observe, that the broom punishment is only for extraordinary occasions, and i think we are justified in having recourse to any means that are consistent with duty and humanity, in preference to turning a child out into the wide world. of all the difficulties i ever had to encounter, to legislate for rewards and punishments, gave me the most trouble. how often have i seen one child laugh at that which would make another child cry. if any department in teaching requires knowledge of character more than another it is this. many a fine child's spirits are broken through the ignorance of teachers and parents in this particular; but for me to lay down _invariable rules_ to manage _every child_, would be like a person undertaking to describe a voyage to the moon. every person's own good sense must decide for them according to character and circumstances; and as to rewards, the same discrimination must be used. one child will set much value on a little book, whilst another will destroy it in a day; and though the book might be worth the sixpence, a half-penny worth of what _they_ call good stuff would be much more valuable. i have had more business done sometimes for a plum than for a sixpenny book. it is never necessary to give the child badges of _distinction_, and to allow it as many orders and degrees as an austrian field-marshal. crosses at the button holes, and bits of ribbon on the shoulders are unnecessary; they throw an apple of discord between the young creatures, who have sense enough to see that these things are frequently given away with a wonderous lack of discrimination, and sometimes to please parents more than reward merit. a carraway comfit put into the mouth of an infant will do more good than all the badges of distinction that i have mentioned, as a reward; but with respect to punishment, more will be said on it in my larger work, when we come to treat of national education. each creation of the most high is truly wonderful, and worthy of our constant study. we may learn lessons of the truest wisdom from the meanest leaf or insect, if we would regard it as one of his works. but how much more may be learnt, and what an amount of useful instruction may be gained, by a study of the finite mind, the highest work in creation. many have turned their attention to minerals, plants, and animals, and thus added to our stores of knowledge. if equal attention had been paid to the young mind, to mark the gradual germination of its intellectual and moral powers, how much more accurate would our knowledge be of the proper methods of dealing with it both in instruction, direction, and punishment. thus to study it has been the aim of my life, and i have made observations on thousands of children. when this great and living book is more constantly read, the contents of this humble volume may have a better chance of being appreciated; and the utter absurdity of many things palmed upon the public for the education of infants made glaringly manifest. chapter xi. language. _means for conveying instruction--method of teaching the alphabet in connection with objects--spelling--reading--developing lessons--reading lessons in natural history--the arithmeticon--brass letters--their uses_. * * * * * "without things, words, accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag out a miserable existence in the dark. without words, theirs stay and support, things unaccountably disappear out of the storehouse, and may be lost for ever; but bind _a thing with a word_, a strong link, stronger than any steel, and softer than any silk, and the captive remains for ever happy in its bright prison-house."--_wilson_. * * * * * the senses of children having revealed every object in its true light, they next desire to know its name, and then express their perceptions in words. this you have to gratify, and from the time you tell them the name of an object, it is the representative of the thing in the mind of the child; if the object be not present, but you mention the name, this suggests it to the infant mind. had this been more frequently thought of by instructors, we should have found them less eager to make the child acquainted with the names of things of which it has no knowledge or perception. sounds and signs which give rise to no idea in the mind, because the child has never seen or known the things represented, are of no use, and can only burden the memory. it is, therefore, the object of our system to give the children a knowledge of things, and then a knowledge of the words which represent those things. these remarks not only apply to the names of visible things, but more particularly to those which are abstract. if i would say, shew a child _a horse_, before you tell it the name of the animal, still more would i urge it on the teacher to let a child see what love, kindness, religion, &c. are, before it is told what names to designate those principles by. if our ignorance as to material things be the result of instructing the children in names, instead of enabling them to become acquainted with things, so, on the other hand, i believe we may account, in the same way to some extent, for _virtue_ being so frequently a mere word, an empty sound, amongst men, instead of an active principle. our next endeavour is to teach the children to express their thoughts upon things; and if they are not checked by injudicious treatment, they will have some on every subject. we first teach them to express _their notions_, we then tell them ours, and truth will prevail even in the minds of children. on this plan, it will operate by its own strength, not by the power of coercion, which renders even truth disagreeable and repulsive; the children will adopt it from choice in preference to error, and it will be firmly established in their minds. it will no doubt be perceived, that for the promotion of the course here recommended, it will be advisable to connect with our _alphabetical and reading lessons_, as much information as we possibly can. by so doing, the tedium of the task to the child will be considerably lessened, as well as much knowledge attained. the means of doing this in a variety of ways will, no doubt, suggest themselves to the intelligent teacher; but as an illustration of what we mean, the following conversational plan may not be useless. we have twenty-six cards, and each card has on it one letter of the alphabet, and some object in nature; the first, for instance, has the letter a on the top, and an apple painted on the bottom. the children are desired to go into the gallery, which is formed of seats, one above the other, at one end of the school. the master places himself before the children, so that they can see him, and he them, and being thus situated, proceeds in the following manner:-- a. q. where am i? a. opposite to us. q. what is on the right side of me? a. a lady. q. what is on the left side of me? a. a chair. q. what is before me? a. a desk. q. who is before me? a. we, children. q. what do i hold up in my hand? a. a letter a.q. what word begins with a? a. apple. q. which hand do i hold it up with? a. with the right hand. q. spell apple.[a] a. a-p-p-l-e. q. how is an apple produced? a. it grows on a tree. q. what part of the tree is in the ground? a. the root. q. what is that which comes out of the ground? a. the stem. q. when the stem grows up straight, what would you call its position? a. perpendicular. q. what are on the stem? a. branches. q. what are on the branches? a. leaves. q. of what colour are they? a. green. q. is there any thing else beside leaves on the branches? a. yes, apples. q. what was it before it became an apple? a. blossom. q. what part of the blossom becomes fruit? a. the inside. q. what becomes of the leaves of the blossom? a. they fall off the tree. q. what was it before it became a blossom? a. a bud. q. what caused the buds to become larger, and produce leaves and blossom? a. the sap. q. what is sap? a. a juice. q. how can the sap make the buds larger? a. it comes out of the root, and goes up the stem. q. what next? a. through the branches into the buds. q. what do the buds produce? a. some buds produce leaves, some blossoms, and some a shoot. q. what do you mean by a shoot? a. a young branch, which is green at first, but becomes hard by age. q. what part becomes hard first? a. the bottom. [footnote a: it is not supposed that all or many of the children will be able to spell this or many of the subsequent words, or give such answers as we have put down. but _some_ among the older or more acute of them will soon be able to do so, and thus become instructors to the rest. it may be proper to mention also that the information in natural history, &c. &c., displayed in some of the answers, is the result of the instructions in natural history which the children simultaneously receive, and which is spoken of in a subsequent chapter. mr. golt's simple arrangement of the alphabet i much approve of, and no doubt it will come into general use.] b. q. what is this? a. the letter b--the first letter in baker, butter, bacon, brewer, button, bell, &c., &e. [the teacher can take any of these names he pleases, for instance, the first:] children, let me hear you spell baker. a. b-a-k-e-r. q. what is a baker? a. a man who makes bread. q. what is bread made of? a. it is made of flour, water, yeast, and a little salt. q. what is flour made of? a. wheat. q. how is it made? a. ground to powder in a mill. q. what makes the mill go round? a. the wind, if it is a windmill. q. are there any other kinds of mills? a. yes; mills that go by water, mills that are drawn round by horses, and mills that go by steam. q. when the flour and water and yeast are mixed together, what does the baker do? a. bake them in an oven. q. what is the use of bread? a. for children to eat. q. who causes the corn to grow? a. almighty god. c. q. what is this? a. it is letter c, the first letter in cow, c-o-w, and cat, &c. q. what is the use of the cow? a. the cow gives us milk to put into the tea. q. is milk used for any other purpose besides putting it into tea? a. yes; it is used to put into puddings, and for many other things. q. name some of the other things? a. it is used to make butter and cheese. q. what part of it is made into butter? a. the cream which swims at the top of the milk. q. how is it made into butter? a. it is put into a thing called a churn, in the shape of a barrel. q. what is done next? a. the churn is turned round by means of a handle, and the motion turns the cream into butter. q. what is the use of butter? a. to put on bread, and to put into pie-crust, and many other nice things. q. of what colour is butter? a. it is generally yellow. a. are there any other things made of milk? a. yes, many things; but the principal one is cheese. q. how is cheese made? a. the milk is turned into curds and whey, which is done by putting a liquid into it called rennet. q. what part of the curd and whey is made into cheese? a. the curd, which is put into a press; and when it has been in the press a few days it becomes cheese. q. is the flesh of the cow useful? a. yes; it is eaten, and is called beef; and the flesh of the young calf is called veal. q. is the skin of the cow or calf of any use? a. yes; the skin of the cow or calf of any use? a. yes; the skin of the cow is manufactured into leather for the soles of shoes. q. what is made with the calf skin? a. the top of the shoe, which is called the upper-leather. q. are there any other parts of the cow that are useful? a. yes; the horns, which are made into combs, handles of knives, forks, and other things. q. what is made of the hoofs that come off the cow's feet? a. glue, to join boards together. q. who made the cow? a. almighty god. d. q. what is this? a. letter d, the first letter it dog, dove, draper, &c. q. what is the use of the dog, a. to guard the house and keep thieves away. q. how can a dog guard the house and keep thieves away? a. by barking to wake the persons who live in the house. q. is the dog of any other use? a. yes; to draw under a truck. d. does he do as his master bids him? a. yes; and knows his master from any other person. q. is the dog a faithful animal? a. yes, very faithful; he has been known to die of grief for the loss of his master. q. can you mention an instance of the dog's faithfulness? a. yes; a dog waited at the gates of the fleet prison for hours every day for nearly two years, because his master was confined in the prison. q. can you mention another instance of the dog's faithfulness? a. yes; a dog lay down on his master's grave in a churchyard in london for many weeks. q. how did the dog get food? a. the people who lived near noticed him, and brought him victuals. q. did the people do any thing besides giving him victuals a. yes; they made a house for him for fear he should die with wet and cold. q. how long did he stay there? a. until the people took him away, because he howled dreadfully when the organ played on sundays. q. is it right to beat a dog? a. no; it is very wrong to use any animal ill, because we do not like to be beaten ourselves. q. did almighty god make the dog? a. yes; and every thing else that has life. e. q. what letter is this? a. e, the first letter in egg. q. what is the use of an egg? a. it is useful for many purposes; to put into puddings, and to eat by itself. q. should country children keep an egg if they find it in the hedge? a. no, it is thieving; they should find out the owner and take it home. q. do children ever throw stones at the fowls? a. yes; but they are mischievous children, and perhaps do not go to school. q. what ought children to learn by going to school? a. to be kind and good to every body, and every thing that has life. f. q. what letter is this? a. letter f, the first letter in frying-pan, father, &c. q. let me hear you spell frying-pan. a. f-r-y-i-n-g-p-a-n. q. what is the use of the frying-pan? a. to fry meat and pan-cakes. q. spell me the names of the different kinds of meat. a. b-e-e-f, p-o-r-k, m-u-t-t-o-n, l-a-m-b, h-a-m, &c. q. of what shape are frying-pans? a. some circular, and some are like an ellipsis.[a] q. are there any other utensils into which meat is put that are circular? a. yes, please, sir, my mother has some circular plates; and, please, sir, my mother has some elliptical dishes. q. any thing besides? a. yes, please, sir, my mother has a circular table; and, please, sir, my mother has a rectangular one, and it is made of deal. [footnote a: it may possibly strike some of my readers as strange that a geometrical question should be put in a conversation on the alphabet, but it should be remembered that, according to the infant school system, _language_ is not taught exclusively, but in connection with _number_ and _form_;--questions like the above, therefore are calculated to excite their memories, and induce an application of their geometrical knowledge.] g. q. what letter is this? a. letter g, the first letter in goat, good, girl, &c. q. spell goat. a. g-o-a-t. q. what is the use of the goat'? a. in some countries people drink the goat's milk; and the skin is useful to make the upper-leather of shoes. q. are goats fond of going into the valleys and low places? a. no; they are fond of going up hills and high places. q. if a goat is coming down a hill which has only one narrow path merely wide enough for one goat to walk on without falling down, and another goat is coming up the same path, what do they do? a. the goat that is coming up lies down and lets the other goat walk over him. q. why does not one of the goats turn round and go back again? a. because there would not be room, and the one which should try to turn round would fall down and be killed. q. what letter is this? a. letter h, the first letter in horse, house, &c. q. what is the use of the horse? a. to draw carts, coaches, stages, waggons, fire-engines, &c. q. spell horse, and cart, and coach. a. h-o-r-s-e, c-a-r-t, c-o-a-c-h. q. what is the difference between a cart and coach? a. a cart has two wheels, and a coach has four. q. tell me some other difference. a. the horses in a cart go before each other, but the horses in a coach go side by side. q. what is the use of a fire-engine? a. to put the fire out when the house is on fire. q. is it right for children to play with the fire? a. no, very wrong; as many children are burnt to death, and many houses burnt down from it. q. should the horse be cruelly used? a. no; he should be kindly treated, as he is the most useful animal we have. q. who created him? a. almighty god. i. q. what letter is this? a. letter i, the first letter in iron, idleness, &c. q. spell iron. a. i-r-o-n. q. what is the use of an iron? a. to iron the clothes after they are washed, and to make them smooth. q. how do they iron the clothes? a. make the iron hot, and then work it backwards and forwards on the clothes. q. should little children come with clean clothes to school? a. yes; and clean hands and faces too. q. is not iron used for other purposes? a. oh, yes; for a great many things, as knives, forks, &c. j. q. what is this letter? a. j, the first letter in jug, john, &c. q. what is the use of the jug? a. to hold water, or beer, or any other liquid. q. what is a jug made of? a. of clay, which is worked round into the shape of a jug, and then burnt, and that hardens it. q. should children be careful when they are carrying a jug? a. yes; or else they will let it fall and break it. q. then it is necessary for children to be careful? a. yes, every body should be careful. k. q. what letter is this? a. letter k, the first letter in kite, &c. q. what is the use of the kite? a. for little children to fly. please, sir, my big brother has got a kite. q. what does your brother do with his kite? a. please, sir, he goes into the fields when he has got time, and flies it. q. how does he fly it? a. please, sir, he has got a long string, which he fixes to another called a loop, and then he unwinds the string, and gets some boy to hold it up. q. what then? a. please, sir, then he runs against the wind, and the kite goes up. q. what is the use of the tail of the kite? a. please, sir, it will not fly without a tail. q. why not? a. please, sir, it goes round and round without a tail, and comes down. q. then what do you suppose is the use of the tail? please, sir, i don't know. another child will probably supply the answer. please, sir, to balance it. l. q. what letter is this? a. letter l, the first letter in lion, &c. q. spell lion. a. l-i-o-n. q. what is the size of a full grown lion? a. a full grown lion stands four feet and a half high, and is eight feet long. q. how high do you stand? a. please, sir, some of us stand two feet, and none of us above three. q. has the lion any particular character among beasts? a. yes, he is called the king of beasts on account of his great strength. q. when he seizes his prey, how far can he leap? a. to the distance of twenty feet. q. describe some other particulars concerning the lion. a. the lion has a shaggy mane, which the lioness has not. q. what other particulars? a. the lion's roar is so loud that other animals run away when they hear it. q. where are lions found? a. in most hot countries: the largest are found in asia and africa. m. q. what letter is this? a. letter m, the first letter in monday, mouse, &c. q. what is the use of the mouse? a. to make the servants diligent and put the things out of the way. q. how can mice make servants diligent? a. if people do not put their candles in a proper place the mice will gnaw them. q. are mice of any other service? a. please, sir, if the mice did not make a smell, some people would never clean their cupboards out.[a] [footnote a: this answer was given by a child four years old; and immediately afterwards another child called out, "please, sir, if it were not for bugs, some people would not clean their bedsteads."] n. q. what letter is this? a. letter n, the first letter in nut, &c. q. what is a nut? a. a thing that is hard, and it grows on a tree. q. what shape is it? a. something in the shape of a marble. q. how can it be eaten, if it is like a marble? a. please, air, it is the kernel that we eat. q. flow are nuts produced? a. they grow on trees. o. q. what letter is this? a. letter o, the first letter in orange. q. of what colour is an orange? a. an orange is green at first, but afterwards becomes of a colour called orange-red. q. do they grow in the ground like potatoes? a. no, they grow on trees like apples. q. can you tell me anything in the shape of an orange? a. yes, the earth on which we live is nearly of that shape. q. on what part of the earth do we live? a. the surface. q. what do you mean by the surface? a. the outside. q. who formed the earth, and preserves it in its proper motions? a. almighty god. p. q. what letter is this? a. letter p, the first letter in pig, plum-pudding, &c. q. what is the use of the pig? a. its flesh is eaten, and is called pork. q. what is the use of the hair or bristles? a. to make brushes or brooms. q. what is the use of a brush? a. some brushes are to brush the clothes, and others to brush the dirt out of the corners of the room. q. does a good servant ever leave the dirt in the corners? a. no, never; a good servant or any clean little girl would be ashamed of it. q. q. what letter is this? a. letter q, the first letter in quill, &c. q. how are quills produced? a. from the wings of geese and other large birds. q. what is the use of the quill? a. to form into pens and many other things. q. what is the use of the pen? a. to dip into ink and write with it. q. what do you write upon? a. paper. q. what is paper made of? a. rags. r. q. what letter is this? a. letter r, the first letter in rabbit, &c. q. what is the use of the rabbit? a. the flesh of the rabbit is eaten, and is very nice. q. what does the rabbit eat? a. corn, grass, cabbage-leaves, and many different herbs. q. what is the use of the skin? a. to make hats, and to trim boys' caps. q. are they very numerous? a. they are to be found in almost all countries. s. q. what is this? a. letter s, the first letter in shoe, &c. q. what is the use of shoes? a. to keep the feet warm and dry. q. should children walk in the mud or in the kennel? a. no, because that would spoil the shoes, and wear them out too soon. q. and why should little children be careful not to wear them out any more than they can help? a. because our parents must work harder to buy us more. t. q. what letter is this? a. letter t, the first letter in tea-kettle. q. what are tea-kettles made of? a. some are made of tin, and some of copper, and some of iron. q. why are they not made of wood? a. because the wood would burn. q. what thing is that at the top? a. the handle. q. what is underneath the handle? a. the lid. q. what is in the front of it? a. the spout. q. what is the use of the spout? a. for the water to come out. q. what is the use of the handle? a. to take hold of. q. why do they not take hold of the spout? a. because it is the wrong way. u. q. what letter is this? a. letter u, the first letter in umbrella, &c. q. is letter u a vowel or consonant? a. a vowel. q. what is the use of the umbrella? a. to keep the rain off any body. q. what are umbrellas made of? a. some of silk and some of cotton. q. which are the best? a. those that are made of silk. q. is there any thing else in an umbrella? a. yes; whalebone. q. where does whalebone come from? a. out of a large fish called a whale. q. who made the whale? a. almighty god. v. q. what letter is this? a. letter v, the first letter in vine, &c. q. what is a vine? a. a thing that grows against the wall and produces grapes. q. why does it not grow like another tree, and support its own weight? a. because it is not strong enough. q. then it cannot grow and become fruitful in this country without man's assistance? a. no; and, please, sir, we cannot grow and become fruitful without the assistance of almighty god.[a] [footnote a: this answer was given by a child five-years of age.] w. q. what letter is this? a. it is letter w, the first letter in wheel. q. spell wheel. a. w-h-e-e-l. q. what is the use of wheels? a. to make it easier for horses to draw. q. how do you know that? a. please, sir, i had a little cart full of stones, and the wheel came off; and, please, sir, i found it much harder to draw. q. then if it was not for wheels, the horses could not draw so great a weight? a. no, and, please, sir, people could not go into the country so quick as they do. q. what trade do they call the persons that make wheels? a. wheel-wrights. x. q. what letter is this? a. letter x, the first letter in xenophon, a man's name. q. what was the particular character of xenophon? a. he was very courageous. q. what does courageous mean? a. to be afraid to do harm, but not to be afraid to do good, or anything that is right. q. what is the greatest courage? a. to conquer our own bad passions and bad inclinations. q. is he a courageous man that can conquer his bad passions? a. yes; because they are the most difficult to conquer. y. q. what letter is this? a. letter y, the first letter in yoke, &c. q. is it a vowel or consonant? a. when it begins a word it is called a consonant, but if not, a vowel. q. what is a yoke? a. please, sir, what the milk people carry the milk pails on. q. what is the use of the yoke? a. to enable the people to carry the milk easier. z. q. what letter is this? a. letter z, the first letter in zealander. q. what is a zealander? a. a man that lives on an island in the southern ocean, called zealand. q. how do they live? a. principally by hunting and fishing. q. what is hunting? a. following animals to catch them. q. who made all the animals? a. almighty god. * * * * * the method above described is adapted to the large room, where the children may be taught all together; but it is necessary to change the scene even in this; for however novel and pleasing a thing may be at first, if it be not managed with prudence it will soon lose its effect. it is here to be observed, that the mode of teaching described, is not practised every day, but only twice or thrice a week. the children will take care that the teacher does not altogether forget to teach them in any way that they have been accustomed to. after letting the above plan lie by for a day or two, some of the children will come to the teacher, and say, "please, sir, may we say the picture alphabet up in the gallery?" if the other children overhear the question, it will go through the school like lightning: "oh yes--yes--yes, sir, if you please, do let us say the letters in the gallery." thus a desire is created in the children's minds, and it is then especially that they may be taught with good effect. _another plan_ which we adopt, is in practice almost every day; but it is better adapted to what is called the class-room: we have the alphabet printed in large letters, both in roman and italic characters, on one sheet of paper: this paper is pasted on a board, or on pasteboard, and placed against the wall; the whole class then stand around it, but instead of one of the monitors pointing to the letters, the master or mistress does it; so that the children not only obtain instruction from each other, but every child has a lesson from the master or mistress twice every day. before they go to the reading lessons, they have the sounds of all the words in spelling: thus the sound of a--ball, call, fall, wall; then the reading-lesson is full of words of the same sound. in like manner they proceed with other letters, as i--the sound of which they learn from such words as five, drive, strive, until, by a series of lessons, they become acquainted with all the sounds; and are able to read any common book. i have observed in some instances the most deplorable laxity in this particular. cases have occurred in which children have been for two years at school, and yet scarcely knew the whole alphabet; and i have known others to be four years in an infant school, without being able to read. i hesitate not to say that the fault rests exclusively with the teachers, who, finding this department of their work more troublesome than others which are attractive to visitors, have sometimes neglected it, and even thrown it entirely aside, affirming that reading is not a part of the infant system at all! such a declaration is, however, only to be accounted for from the most lamentable ignorance, preverseness, or both. had it been true, we should not have had a single infant school in scotland, and throughout that country the children read delightfully. the great importance of full instruction in reading will be apparent from the following considerations. . if the parents do not find the children learn to read, they will discontinue sending them. this they consider essential, and nothing else will be deemed by them an adequate substitute. . children cannot make desirable progress in other schools which they may enter, unless they obtain an ability to read at least simple lessons. . neglect in this respect impedes the progress of the infant system. such an obstacle ought not to exist, and should at once be removed. . in manufacturing districts children go to work very soon; and if they are not able to read before, there is reason to fear they will not afterwards acquire the power; but if they have this, sunday schools may supply other deficiencies. . want of ability to read prevents, of course, a knowledge of the word of god. to prevent this evil, i have arranged a series, denominated "developing lessons," the great object of which is to induce children to think and reflect on what they see. they are thus formed: at the top is a coloured picture, or series of coloured pictures of insects, quadrupeds, and general objects. for instance, there is one containing the poplar, hawk-moth, and wasp. the lesson is as follows: "the wasp can sting, and fly as well as the moth, which does not sting. i hope no wasp will sting me; he is small, but the hawk-moth is large. the moth eats leaves, but the wasp loves sweet things, and makes a round nest. if boys take the nest they may be stung: the fish like the wasp-grubs." on this, questions are proposed: which stings? which is small and which large? which eats leaves? which makes a round nest? &c. &c. to take another instance. there is a figure of an italian, to which is appended the following: "the italian has got a flask of oil and a fish in his hand, and something else in his hand which the little child who reads this must find out. any child can tell who makes use of the sense of seeing. in italy they make a good deal of wine; big grapes grow there that they make it with. italians can sing very well, and so can little children when they are taught." questions are likewise proposed on this, as before. of these lessons, however, there is a great variety. all schools should possess them: they will effectually prevent the evil alluded to, by checking the apathy of children in learning to read, and calling the teacher's powers into full exercise. they are equally adapted to spelling and reading. i will give several specimens of reading lessons in natural history, each of which has a large, well-engraved and coloured plate at the top, copied from nature. the eagle. how glad some poor children would be if they could read about the eagle. he is a big strong bird, and has such great wings, and such long sharp claws, that he can dig them into the lamb, hare, rabbit, and other animals, and thus fly away with them to feed his young ones, and to eat them himself. eagles make such a large nest on the side of some high rock, where nobody can get at it. there used to be eagles in wales, and there are some now in scotland, but very few in england, for they do not like to be where there are many people. _the almighty gave man dominion over the birds of the air_, as well as over the other animals, and as he gave man power to _think_, if the eagles become troublesome, men catch them, though they can fly so high; and as the eagle knows this, he likes to keep out of our way, and go into parts of the world where there are not so many people. there are many sorts of eagles: the black eagle, the sea eagle, the bald eagle, and others. they have all strong bills bent down in front, and strong claws. this bird is mentioned in the bible. questions are proposed after this is read, and thus the examination proceeds:--q. what is that? a. an eagle. q. what sort of a bird is he? a. he is big and strong. q. what are those? a. his feathers. q. what else are they called? a. his plumage. q. is the eagle a small bird? a. no, very large. q. are his claws long and sharp? a. yes. q. what animals could he carry away? a. a lamb, a hare, a rabbit, or other small animals. q. what does he do with those? a. feed his young ones. q. where does the eagle make his nest? a. on the side of some rock. q. why does he make it there? a. that no one may get at it. q. used there to be eagles in wales? a. yes. q. where are there a few still? a. in england, scotland, and ireland. q. why are they not as plentiful as they were? a. because they do not like to be where many men live. q. did the almighty give man dominion over the birds of the air? a. yes. q. what other power did he give man? a. power to think. q. as men can think, when the eagles became troublesome, what did they do? a. they caught them. q. and what did the eagles that were not caught do? a. they went to places where men were not so plenty. q. are, there many different kinds of eagles? a. yes. q. name some. a. the black eagle, the bald eagle, the sea eagle, and others. the vulture. the vulture is like the eagle in size, and some of its habits; but it is so very different from it in many ways, that there is little danger of confusing the two together: the greatest distinction between them is, that the head of the vulture is either quite naked, or covered only with a short down, while the eagle's is well feathered. this is the chief difference in appearance, but in their habits there is a much greater. instead of flying over hills and valleys in pursuit of living game, the vultures only search for dead carcasses, which they prefer, although they may have been a long time dead, and therefore very bad, and smelling very offensively. they generally live in very warm countries, and are useful in clearing away those dead carcasses which, but for them, would cause many dreadful diseases. in some countries, indeed, on account of this, the inhabitants will not allow any one to injure them, and they are called for this reason scavengers, which means that they do the business for which scavengers are employed. vultures are very greedy and ravenous; they will often eat so much that they are not able to move or fly, but sit quite stupidly and insensible. one of them will often, at a single meal, devour the entire body of an albatross (bones and all), which is a bird nearly as large as the vulture itself. they will smell a dead carcass at a very great distance, and will soon surround and devour it. vultures lay two eggs at a time and only once a year: they build their nests on the same kind of places as eagles do, so that it is very hard to find them. what does the vulture resemble the eagle in? a. in size and in some of its habits. q. in what does it differ from the eagle? a. in having a neck and head either naked or covered with short down. q. what is the difference in the manner in which they feed? a. the eagle seeks its food over hill and valley, and lives entirely on prey which he takes alive, while the vulture seeks out dead and putrid carcasses. q. for what reason do you suppose is the vulture's neck not covered with feathers as the eagle's is? a. if they had feathers on their necks, like eagles and hawks, they would soon become clotted with blood. q. why would this happen? a. because they are continually plunging their necks into decayed flesh and bloody carcasses. q. how do vultures sit? a. in a dull, mopeing manner. q. where do they generally sit? a. on tall dead trees. q. do they continue thus long? a. yes, for several hours. q. what is the cause of their thus sitting so dull and inactive? a. the great quantity of food they have eaten. q. is there any description of vulture forming an exception to the general character of those birds? a. yes, that particular kind called the snake eater. q. where is this bird a native of? a. of africa. q. why is it called the snake eater? a. on account of its singular manner of destroying serpents, on which it feeds. q. describe the manner in which this bird kills its prey. a. he waits until the serpent raises its head, and then strikes him with his wing, and repeats the blow until the serpent is killed. q. what do the natives of asia and africa call the vulture? a. the scavenger. q. why? a. because they are so useful in eating dead carcasses. q. how is this useful? a. it clears the ground of them; otherwise, in those warm places, they would be the cause of much disease. q. what does this shew us? a. that the good god has created nothing without its use. q. what is the largest bird of the vulture kind? a. the great condor of south america. q. what does its wing often measure from tip to tip? a. twelve feet when spread out. q. how do the natives of south america often catch the vulture? a. the dead carcass of a cow or horse is set for a bait, on which they feed so ravenously that they become stupid, and are easily taken. the crocodile. i hope you will not put your dirty hands on this picture of the crocodile. the live ones have hard scales on their backs, and such a many teeth, that they could bite a man's leg off; but there are none in our land, only young ones that sailors bring home with them. the crocodile can run fast; those are best off who are out of his way. he lives by the water; he goes much in it; and he can swim well. young ones come out of eggs, which the old ones lay in the sand. some beasts eat the eggs, or else there would be too many crocodiles. the crocodile can run fast if he runs straight, and those who wish to get out of his way run zigzag, and he takes some time to turn; the poor black men know this, and can get out of his way; but some of them can fight and kill him on the land or in the water. i think the crocodile is mentioned in _scripture_. ask your teacher what scripture means. when you learn geography you will know where many of the places are that are mentioned in the bible, and you will see where the river nile is. there are such a many crocodiles on the banks of that river that the people are afraid to go alone. what a many wonderful animals our great creator has made! how humble and thankful we should be to see so many great wonders! q. what have crocodiles on their backs? a. hard scales. q. have they many teeth? a. yes, a great many. q. could they bite off a man's leg? a. they could. q. are there any in our country? a. none wild, but a few that sailors bring in ships. q. can the crocodile run fast? a. yes. q. where does he live? a. in the water. q. what do their young ones come out of? a. out of eggs, which the old one lays in the sand. q. how do people run that wish to get out of the crocodile's way? a. zigzag, like the waved line in our lesson. q. what do some men do? a. fight and kill them in the water. q. where do most of those animals live? a. in the river nile. q. where is this river? a. in egypt. the spelling lessons contain words capable of explanation, such as white, black, round, square; others are classed as fleet, ship, brig, sloop, &c.; and others are in contrast, as hot, cold, dark, light, wet, dry, &c. in this department we use the tablet placed beneath the arithmeticon, the invention and improvement of which are described in the volume entitled "early discipline illustrated, or the infant system successful and progressing." a clear idea of the whole apparatus is given by the wood-cut on the next page, and it ought certainly to be found in every infant school. the sense of sight is then brought into full action to aid the mind, and that with results which would not easily be conceived. we shall take another opportunity of explaining the use of the upper part of the apparatus, the lower demanding our present attention. [illustration] to use the _tablet_, let the followings things be observed. it is supposed the children know well there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet; that twenty are called consonants, and that six are vowels. we take first one perpendicular row of letters in the figure. now point to d, and say, what is that'? and the answer will be, d. ask, is it a vowel or consonant, and they will reply, a consonant; but ask, why do you know it is d, and the answer will probably be, it is so because it is. hide the circular part of the letter, and ask, what is the position of the other part, and they will say, having previously learnt the elements of form which will shortly be explained, a perpendicular line; hide that, and ask them what the other part is, telling them to bend one of their fore-fingers in the same form, and they will say, a curved line. if they are then asked how they may know it is d, they will say, because it is made of a perpendicular line and has a curved line behind. further information may then be given. turn the d letter up thus [illustration: the character d turned on its side], and say, i want to teach you the difference between concave and convex: the under part of the curve is concave and the upper part of it is convex. then say, i shall now take the letter away, and wish you to shew me concave and convex on one of your fingers; when they will bend the forefinger and point them both out on it. go on with the other letters in the same way: shew them the vowels after the consonants and analyze each one. for example, a is formed of two inclined lines and a horizontal line to join them in the centre; and the top of that letter is an acute angle, and were a line placed at the bottom it would be a triangle. a brass letter may be moreover shewn to be a substance: its properties may be described as hard, smooth, bright, &c., and its coming from the mineral kingdom may be noticed, and thus the instruction may be indefinitely varied. the _power_ of letters may then be pointed out. ask them to spell m r, and they will give you the sound of r, or something like it, and so in reference to other letters. but place the a against the m as it appears in the figure, and you may teach them to say a, m, am; and thus all the way down the left side of the row of consonants. if then you carry the vowel down on the other side of them, you will change the lesson, and by such means go on almost _ad infinitum_. double rows of consonants may be placed with a vowel between them, and when well practiced in this, they will ask for the vowel to be omitted that they may supply it, which they will do very readily and with great pleasure, while there is a tasking of the mind which cannot but prove beneficial. again, turn the frame with the balls round, so that the wires are perpendicular instead of horizontal, raise a ball gently, and say, to ascend, ascending, ascended; let it fall gently, saying, to descend, descending, descended; with a little explanation these words will then be understood, and others may be taught in the same way. to fall, falling, fallen; to rise, rising, risen; to go, going, gone, will readily occur, and others will easily be supplied by the ingenuity of the instructor. the frame may also be applied to _grammar_. it is to be used as follows:--move one of the balls to a part of the frame distinct from the rest. the children will then repeat, "there _it_ is, there _it_ is." apply your finger to the ball, and set it running round. the children will immediately change from saying, "there _it_ is," to "there _it_ goes, there _it_ goes." when they have repeated "there it goes" long enough to impress it on their memory, stop the ball; the children will probably say, "now _it_ stops, now _it_ stops." when that is the case, move another ball to it, and then explain to the children the difference between singular and plural, desiring them to call out, "there _they_ are, there _they_ are;" and when they have done that as long as may be proper, set both balls moving, and it is likely they will call out, "there _they_ go, there _they_ go." i do not particularize further, because i know that good teachers will at once see the principle aimed at, and supply the other requisite lessons: the object of this book being rather to shew the principle of the thing, than to go into detail. chapter xii. arithmetic. _the arithmeticon--how applied--numeration--addition--subtraction-- multiplication--division--fraction--arithmetical tables--arithmetical songs--observations_. * * * * * "in arithmetic, as in every other branch of education, the principal object should be to preserve the understanding from implicit belief, to invigorate its powers, and to induce the laudable ambition of progressive improvement."--_edgeworth_ * * * * * the advantage of a knowledge of arithmetic has never been disputed. its universal application to the business of life renders it an important acquisition to all ranks and conditions of men. the practicability of imparting the rudiments of arithmetic to very young children has been satisfactorily shewn by the infant-school system; and it has been found, likewise, that it is the readiest and surest way of developing the thinking faculties of the infant mind. since the most complicated and difficult questions of arithmetic, as well as the most simple, are all solvable by the same rules, and on the same principles, it is of the utmost importance to give children a clear insight into the primary principles of number. for this purpose we take care to shew them, by visible objects, that all numbers are combinations of unity; and that all changes of number must arise either from adding to or taking from a certain stated number. after this, or rather, perhaps i should say, in conjunction with this instruction, we exhibit to the children the _signs_ of number, and make them acquainted with their various combinations; and lastly, we bring them to the abstract consideration of number; or what may be termed _mental arithmetic_. if you reverse this, which has generally been the system of instruction pursued--if you set a child to learn its multiplication, pence, and other tables, before you have shewn it by _realities_, the combinations of unity which these tables express in words--you are rendering the whole abstruse, difficult, and uninteresting; and, in short, are giving it knowledge which it is unable to apply. as far as regards the general principles of numerical tuition, it may be sufficient to state, that we should begin with unity, and proceed very gradually, by slow and sure steps, through the simplest forms of combinations to the more comprehensive. trace and retrace your first steps--the children can never be too thoroughly familiar with the first principles or facts of number. we have various ways of teaching arithmetic, in use in the schools; i shall speak of them all, beginning with a description of the arithmeticon, which is of great utility. [illustration] i have thought it necessary in this edition to give the original woodcut of the arithmeticon, which it will be seen contains twelve wires, with one ball on the first wire, two on the second, and so progressing up to twelve. the improvement is, that each wire should contain twelve balls, so that the whole of the multiplication table may be done by it, up to times are . the next step was having the balls painted black and white alternately, to assist the sense of seeing, it being certain that an uneducated eye cannot distinguish the combinations of colour, any more than an uneducated ear can distinguish the combinations of sounds. so far the thing succeeded with respect to the sense of seeing; but there was yet another thing to be legislated for, and that was to prevent the children's attention being drawn off from the objects to which it was to be directed, viz. the smaller number of balls as separated from the greater. this object could only be attained by inventing a board to slide in and hide the greater number from their view, and so far we succeeded in gaining their undivided attention to the balls we thought necessary to move out. time and experience only could shew that there was another thing wanting, and that was a tablet, as represented in the second woodcut, which had a tendency to teach the children the difference between real numbers and representative characters, therefore the necessity of brass figures, as represented on the tablet; hence the children would call figure seven no. , it being but one object, and each figure they would only count as one, thus making , which are the representative characters, only three, which is the real fact, there being only three objects. it was therefore found necessary to teach the children that the figure seven would represent ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions, according to where it might be placed in connection with the other figures; and as this has already been described, i feel it unnecessary to enlarge upon the subject. [illustration] the arithmeticon. it will be seen that on the twelve parallel wires there are balls, alternately black and white. by these the elements of arithmetic may be taught as follows:-- _numeration_.--take one ball from the lowest wire, and say units, _one_, two from the next, and say tens, _two_; three from the third, and say hundreds, _three_; four from the fourth, and say thousands, _four_; five from the fifth, and say tens of thousands, _five_; six from the sixth, and say hundreds of thousands, _six_; seven from the seventh, and say millions, _seven_; eight from the eighth, and say tens of millions, _eight_; nine from the ninth, and say hundreds of millions, _nine_; ten from the tenth, and say thousands of millions, _ten_; eleven from the eleventh, and say tens of thousands of millions, _eleven_; twelve from the twelfth, and say hundreds of thousands of millions, _twelve_. the tablet beneath the balls has six spaces for the insertion of brass letters and figures, a box of which accompanies the frame. suppose then the only figure inserted is the in the second space from the top: now were the children asked what it was, they would all say, without instruction, "it is one." if, however, you tell them that an object of such a form stands instead of seven ones, and place seven balls together on a wire, they will at once see the use and power of the number. place a next the seven, merely ask what it is, and they will reply, "we don't know;" but if you put out three balls on a wire, they will say instantly, "o it is three ones, or three;" and that they may have the proper name they may be told that they have before them _figure _ and _figure _. put a to these figures, and their attention will be arrested: say, do you think you can tell me what this is? and, while you are speaking, move the balls gently out, and, as soon as they see them, they will immediately cry out "nine;" and in this way they may acquire a knowledge of all the figures separately. then you may proceed thus: units , tens ; place three balls on the top wire and seven on the second, and say, thirty-seven, as you point to the figures, and thirty-seven as you point to the balls. then go on, units , tens, , hundreds , place nine balls on the top wire, three on the second, and seven on the third, and say, pointing to each, nine hundred and thirty-seven. and so onwards. to assist the understanding and exercise the judgment, slide a figure in the frame, and say, figure . q. what is this? a. no. . q. if no. be put on the left side of the , what will it be? a. . q. if the be put on the right side, then what will it be? a. . q. if the figure be put before the , then what will the number be? a. . q. shift the figure , and put it on the left side of the , then ask the children to tell the number, the answer is . the teacher can keep adding and shifting as he pleases, according to the capacity of his pupils, taking care to explain as he goes on, and to satisfy himself that his little flock perfectly understand him. suppose figures are in the frame; then let the children begin at the left hand, saying, units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, thousands of millions. after which, begin at the right side, and they will say, five thousand four hundred and seventy-six million, nine hundred and fifty-three thousand, eight hundred and twenty-one. if the children are practised in this way, they will soon learn numeration. the frame was employed for this purpose long before its application to others was perceived; but at length i found we might proceed to _addition_.--we proceed as follows:-- and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are . then the master may exercise them backwards, saying, and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and are , and is , and so on in great variety. again: place seven balls on one wire, and two on the next, and ask them how many and are; to this they will soon answer, nine: then put the brass figure on the tablet beneath, and they will see how the amount is marked: then take eight balls and three, when they will see that eight and three are eleven. explain to them that they cannot put underneath two figure ones which mean , but they must put under the , and carry to the , when you must place one ball under the four, and, asking them what that makes, they will say, five. proceed by saying, how much are five and nine? put out the proper number of balls, and they will say, five and nine are fourteen. put a four underneath, and tell them, as there is no figure to put the under, it must be placed next to it: hence they see that added to , make a total of . _subtraction_ may be taught in as many ways by this instrument. thus: take from , nothing remains; moving the first ball at the same time to the other end of the frame. then remove one from the second wire, and say, take one from , the children will instantly perceive that only remains; then from , and remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain. then the balls may be worked backwards, beginning at the wire containing balls, saying, take from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remain; from , remains. the brass figure should be used for the remainder in each case. say, then, can you take from as you point to the figures, and they will say "yes;" but skew them balls on a wire and ask them to deduct from them, when they will perceive their error. explain that in such a case they must _borrow_ one; then say take from , placing balls on the top wire, borrow one from the second, and take away eight and they will see the remainder is five; and so on through the sum, and others of the same kind. in _multiplication_, the lessons are performed as follows. the teacher moves the first ball, and immediately after the two balls on the second wire, placing them underneath the first, saying at the same time, twice one are two, which the children will readily perceive. we next remove the two balls on the second wire for a multiplier, and then remove two balls from the third wire, placing them exactly under the first two, which forms a square, and then say twice two are four, which every child will discern for himself, as he plainly perceives there are no more. we then move three on the third wire, and place three from the fourth wire underneath them saying, twice three are six. remove the four on the fourth wire, and four on the fifth, place them as before and say, twice four are eight. remove five from the fifth wire, and five from the sixth wire underneath them, saying twice five are ten. remove six from the sixth wire, and six from the seventh wire underneath them and say, twice six are twelve. remove seven from the seventh wire, and seven from the eighth wire underneath them, saying, twice seven are fourteen. remove eight from the eighth wire, and eight from the ninth, saying, twice eight are sixteen. remove nine on the ninth wire, and nine on the tenth wire, saying twice nine are eighteen. remove ten on the tenth wire, and ten on the eleventh underneath them, saying, twice ten are twenty. remove eleven on the eleventh wire, and eleven on the twelfth, saying, twice eleven are twenty-two. remove one from the tenth wire to add to the eleven on the eleventh wire, afterwards the remaining ball on the twelfth wire, saying, twice twelve are twenty-four. next proceed backwards, saying, times are , times are , times are , &c. for _division_, suppose you take from the balls gathered together at one end, one from each row, and place the at the other end, thus making a perpendicular row of ones: then make four perpendicular rows of three each and the children will see there are 's in . divide the into six parcels, and they will see there are. 's in . leave only two out, and they will see, at your direction, that is the sixth part of . take away one of these and they will see one is the twelfth part of , and that 's are twelve. to explain the state of the frame as it appears in the cut, we must first suppose that the twenty-four balls which appear in four lots, are gathered together at the _figured side_: when the children will see there are three perpendicular 's, and as easily that there are horizontal 's. if then the teacher wishes them to tell how many 's there are in twenty-four, he moves them out as they appear in the cut, and they see there are four; and the same principle is acted on throughout. the only remaining branch of numerical knowledge, which consists in an ability to comprehend the powers of numbers, without either visible objects or signs--is imparted as follows: _addition_. one of the children is placed before the gallery, and repeats aloud, in a kind of chaunt, the whole of the school repeating after him; one and one are two; two and one are three; three and one are four, &c. up to twelve. two and two are four; four and two are six; six and two are eight, &c. to twenty-four. three and three are six; six and three are nine; nine and three are twelve, &c. to thirty-six. _subtraction_. one from twelve leaves eleven; one from eleven leaves ten, &c. two from twenty-four leave twenty-two; two from twenty-two leave twenty, &c. _multiplication_. twice one are two; twice two are four, &c. &c. three times three are nine, three times four are twelve, &c. &c. twelve times two are twenty-four; eleven times two are twenty-two, &c. &c. twelve times three are thirty-six; eleven times three are thirty-three, &c. &c. until the whole of the multiplication table is gone through. _division_. there are twelve twos in twenty-four.--there are eleven twos in twenty-two, &c. &c. there are twelve threes in thirty-six, &c. there are twelve fours in forty-eight, &c. &c. _fractions_. two are the half ( / ) of four. " " " third ( / ) of six. " " " fourth ( / ) of eight. " " " fifth ( / ) of ten. " " " sixth ( / ) of twelve. " " " seventh ( / ) of fourteen. " " " twelfth ( / ) of twenty-four; two are the eleventh ( / ) of twenty-two, &c. &c. three are the half ( / ) of six. " " " third ( / ) of nine. " " " fourth ( / ) of twelve. three are the twelfth ( / ) of thirty-six; three are the eleventh ( / ) of thirty-three, &c. &c. four are the half ( / ) of eight, &c. in twenty-three are four times five, and three-fifths ( / ) of five; in thirty-five are four times eight, and three-eighths ( / ) of eight. in twenty-two are seven times three, and one-third ( / ) of three. in thirty-four are four times eight, and one-fourth ( / ) of eight. the tables subjoined are repeated by the same method, each section being a distinct lesson. to give an idea to the reader, the boy in the rostrum says ten shillings the half ( / ) of a pound; six shillings and eightpence one-third ( / ) of a pound, &c. sixpence the half ( / ) of a shilling, &c. always remembering, that whatever the boy says in the rostrum, the other children must repeat after him, but not till the monitor has ended his sentence; and before the monitor delivers the second sentence, he waits till the children have concluded the first, they waiting for him, and he for them; this prevents confusion, and is the means of enabling persons to understand perfectly what is going on in the school. in a book lately published, which is a compilation by two london masters, it is stated, in the preface, that they were at a loss for proper lessons: had they used those in existence i cannot help thinking they were enough for the capacity of children under six years of age. arithmetical tables. numeration, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and pence tables. ------------------------------------------------------------------- | addition and subtraction table | | & | & | & | & | & | & | | are | are | are | are | are | are | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- l | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- l | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | l -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | l -- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | & | & | & | & | & | & | | are | are | are | are | are | are | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- l | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | l -- | -- | -- | =================================================================== | multiplication and division table. || numeration table. | |------------------------------------||---------------------------| | -- are | -- are | -- are || units. | | -- | -- | -- -- || tens. | | -- | -- | -- || hundreds | | -- | -- | -- || , thousands. | | -- | -- | -- || , x of thousands.| | -- | -- | -- || , c of thousands.| | -- | -- | -- || , , millions. | | -- | -- | -- -- || , , x of millions. | | -- | -- -- | -- || , , c of millions. | | -- | -- | -- ||===========================| | -- | -- | -- || | | -- -- | -- | -- || pence table | | -- | -- | -- -- || | | -- | -- | -- ||---------------------------| | -- | -- | -- || _d_. _s. d._|_d._ _s. d._| | -- | -- | -- || is | is | | -- | -- -- | -- -- || -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- || -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- || -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- -- || -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- || -- | -- | | -- -- | -- | -- -- || -- | -- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- _tables of weights and measures_. _shilling tables_ _s. l. s_. are ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- are --- --- --- --- --- --- --- * * * * * _practice tables_. * * * * * of a pound. _s. d_. are half --- third --- fourth --- fifth --- sixth --- eighth --- twelfth --- twentieth of a shilling. _d_. are half --- third --- fourth --- sixth --- twelfth * * * * * _time_. seconds minute minutes hour hours day days week weeks lunar month cal. mon. year lunar months, day, hours, or days, hours, year. thirty days hath september, april, june, and november; all the rest have thirty-one, save february, which alone hath twenty-eigth, except leap year, and twenty-nine is then its share. * * * * * _troy weight_. grains pennywt. pennywhts. ounce ounces pound * * * * * _avoirdupoise weight_. drams ounce ounces pound pounds quarter quarters hund. wt. hund. wt. ton * * * * * _ apothecaries weight._ grains scruple scruples dram drams ounce ounces pound * * * * * _wool weight_. pounds clove cloves stone stones tod ½ tods wey weys sack sacks last * * * * * _wine measure_. pints quart quarts gallon gallons ank. brandy gallons tierce gallons hogshead gallons puncheon hogsheads pipe pipes ton * * * * * _ale and beer measure_. pints quart quarts gallon gallons firkin of ale gallons firk. of beer firkins kilderkin kilderkins barrel barrel hogshead barrels puncheon barrels butt * * * * * _coal measure_. pecks bushel bushels vat or strike bushels sack sacks chaldron chaldron score * * * * * _dry measure_. pints quart quarts pottle pottles gallon gallons peck pecks bushel bushels strike bushels sack flour bushels quarter quarters wey or load pecks bushl. water measure bushels coom cooms wey weys last corn * * * * * _solid or cubic measure_. inches foot feet yard or load * * * * * _long measure_. barleycorns inch inches foot feet yard feet fathom ½ yards pole or rod poles furlong furlongs mile miles league leagues degree * * * * * _cloth measure_. inches nail nails quarter quarters yard quarters english ell quarters flemish ell quarters french ell * * * * * _land or square measure_. inches foot feet yard ¾ yards pole poles rood roods acre acres mile this includes length and breadth. * * * * * _hay_. pounds truss of straw pounds do. of old hay pounds do. of new hey trusses load money. two farthings one halfpenny make, a penny four of such will take; and to allow i am most willing that twelve pence always make a shilling; and that five shillings make a crown, twenty a sovereign, the same as pound. some have no cash, some have to spare-- some who have wealth for none will care. some through misfortune's hand brought low, their money gone, are filled with woe, but i know better than to grieve; if i have none i will not thieve; i'll be content whate'er's my lot, nor for misfortunes care a _groat_. there is a providence whose care and sovereign love i crave to share; his love is _gold without alloy_; those who possess't have _endless joy_. time or chronology. sixty seconds make a minute; time enough to tie my shoe sixty minutes make an hour; shall it pass and nought to do? twenty-four hours will make a day too much time to spend in sleep, too much time to spend in play, for seven days will end the week, fifty and two such weeks will put near an end to every year; days three hundred sixty-five are the whole that it can share. saving leap year, when one day added is to gain lost time; may it not be spent in play, nor in any evil crime. time is short, we often say; let us, then, improve it well; that eternally we may live where happy angels dwell. avoirdupoise weight. sixteen drachms are just an ounce, as you'll find at any shop; sixteen ounces make a pound, should you want a mutton chop. twenty-eight pounds are the fourth of an hundred weight call'd gross; four such quarters are the whole of an hundred weight at most. oh! how delightful, oh! how delightful, oh! how delightful, _to sing this rule_. twenty hundreds make a ton; by this rule all things are sold that have any waste or dross and are bought so, too, i'm told. when we buy and when we sell, may we always use just weight; may we justice love so well to do always what is right. oh! how delightful, &c., &c., &c. apothecaries' weight. twenty grains make a scruple,--some scruple to take; though at times it is needful, just for our health's sake; three scruples one drachm, eight drachms make one ounce, twelve ounces one pound, for the pestle to pounce. by this rule is all medicine mix'd, though i'm told by avoirdupoise weight 'tis bought and 'tis sold. but the best of all physic, if i may advise, is temperate living and good exercise. dry measure. two pints will make one quart of barley, oats, or rye; two quarts one pottle are, of wheat or any thing that's dry. two pottles do one gallon make, two gallons one peck fair, four pecks one bushel, heap or brim, eight bushels one quarter are. if, when you sell, you give good measure shaken down, through motives good, you will receive an everlasting crown. ale and beer measure. two pints will make one quart, four quarts one gallon, strong:-- some drink but little, some too much,-- to drink too much is wrong. eight gallons one firkin make, of liquor that's call'd ale nine gallons one firkin of beer, whether 'tis mild or stale. with gallons fifty-four a hogshead i can fill: but hope i never shall drink much, drink much whoever will. wine, oil, and spirit measure. two pints will make one quart of any wine, i'm told: four quarts one gallon are of port or claret, new or old. forty-two gallons will a tierce fill to the bung: and sixty-three's a hogshead full of brandy, oil, or rum. eighty-four gallons make one puncheon fill'd to brim, two hogsheads make one pipe or butt, two pipes will make one tun. a little wine within oft cheers the mind that's sad; but too much brandy, rum, or gin, no doubt is very bad. from all excess beware, which sorrow must attend; drunkards a life of woe must share,-- when time with them shall end. the arithmeticon, i would just remark, may be applied to _geometry_. round, square, oblong, &c. &c., may be easily taught. it may also be used in teaching _geography_. the shape of the earth may be shewn by a ball, the surface by the outside, its revolution on its axis by turning it round, and the idea of day and night may be given by a ball and a candle in a dark-room. as the construction and application of this instrument is the result of personal, long-continued, and anxious effort, and as i have rarely seen a pirated one made properly or understood, i may express a hope that whenever it is wanted either for schools or nurseries, application will be made for it to my depot. i have only to add, that a board is placed at the back to keep the children from seeing the balls, except as they are put out; and that the brass figures at the side are intended to assist the master when he is called away, so that he may see, on returning to the frame, where he left off. the slightest glance at the wood-cut will shew how unjust the observations of the writer of "schools for the industrious classes, or the present state of education amongst the working people of england," published under the superintendance of the central society of education, are, where he says, "we are willing to assume that mr. wilderspin has originated some improvements in the system of infant school education; but mr. wilderspin claims so much that many persons have been led to refuse him that degree of credit to which he is fairly entitled. for example, he claims a beneficial interest in an instrument called the arithmeticon, of which he says he was the inventor. this instrument was described in a work on arithmetic, published by mr. friend forty years ago. the instrument is, however, of much older date; it is the same in principle as the abacus of the romans, and in its form resembles as nearly as possible the swanpan of the chinese, of which there is a drawing in the encyclopaedia brittanica. mr. wilderspin merely invented the name." now, i defy the writer of this to prove that the arithmeticon existed before i invented it. i claim no more than what is my due. the abacus of the romans is entirely different; still more so is the chinese swanpan; if any person will take the trouble to look into the encyclopaedia britannica, they will see the difference at once, although i never heard of either until they were mentioned in the pamphlet referred to. there are balls on mine, and it is properly simplified for infants with the addition of the tablet, which explains the representative characters as well as the real ones, which are the balls. i have not yet heard what the central society have invented; probably we shall soon hear of the mighty wonders performed by them, from one end of the three kingdoms to the other. their whole account of the origin of the infant system is as partial and unjust as it possibly can be. mr. simpson, whom they quote, can tell them so, as can also some of the committee of management, whose names i see at the commencement of the work. the central society seem to wish to pull me down, as also does the other society to whom reference is made is the same page of which i complain; and i distinctly charge both societies with doing me great injustice; the society complains of my plans without knowing them, the other adopts them without acknowledgment, and both have sprung up fungus-like, after the infant system had been in existence many years, and i had served three apprenticeships to extend and promote it, without receiving subscriptions or any public aid whatever. it is hard, after a man has expended the essence of his constitution, and spent his children's property for the public good, in inducing people to establish schools in the principal towns in the three kingdoms,--struck at the root of domestic happiness, by personally visiting each town, doing the thing instead of writing about it--that societies of his own countrymen should be so anxious to give the credit to foreigners. verily it is most true that a prophet has no honour in his own country. the first public honour i ever received was at inverness, in the highlands of scotland, the last was by the jews in london, and i think there was a space of about twenty years between each. chapter xiii. form, position, and size. _method of instruction, geometrical song--anecdotes--size--song measure--observations_. * * * * * "geometry is eminently serviceable to improve and strengthen the intellectual faculties."--_jones_. * * * * * among the novel features of the infant school system, that of geometrical lessons is the most peculiar. how it happened that a mode of instruction so evidently calculated for the infant mind was so long overlooked, i cannot imagine; and it is still more surprising that, having been once thought of, there should be any doubt as to its utility. certain it is that the various forms of bodies is one of the first items of natural education, and we cannot err when treading in the steps of nature. it is undeniable that geometrical knowledge is of great service in many of the mechanic arts, and, therefore, proper to be taught children who are likely to be employed in some of those arts; but, independently of this, we cannot adopt a better method of exciting and strengthening their powers of observation. i have seen a thousand instances, moreover, in the conduct of the children, which have assured me, that it is a very pleasing as well as useful branch of instruction. the children, being taught the first elements of form, and the terms used to express the various figures of bodies, find in its application to objects around them an inexhaustible source of amusement. streets, houses, rooms, fields, ponds, plates, dishes, tables; in short, every thing they see calls for observation, and affords an opportunity for the application of their geometrical knowledge. let it not, then, be said that it is beyond their capacity, for it is the simplest and most comprehensible to them of all knowledge;--let it not be said that it is useless, since its application to the useful arts is great and indisputable; nor is it to be asserted that it is unpleasing to them, since it has been shewn to add greatly to their happiness. it is essential in this, as in every other branch of education, to begin with the first principles, and proceed _slowly_ to their application, and the complicated forms arising therefrom. the next thing is to promote that application of which we have before spoken, to the various objects around them. it is this, and this alone, which forms the distinction between a school lesson and practical knowledge; and so far will the children be found from being averse from this exertion, that it makes the acquirement of knowledge a pleasure instead of a task. with these prefatory remarks i shall introduce a description of the method i have pursued, and a few examples of geometrical lessons. we will suppose that the whole of the children are seated in the gallery, and that the teacher (provided with a brass instrument formed for the purpose, which is merely a series of joints like those to a counting-house candlestick, from which i borrowed the idea,[a] and which may be altered as required, in a moment,) points to a straight line, asking, what is this? a. a straight line. q. why did you not call it a crooked line? a. because it is not crooked, but straight. q. what are these? a. curved lines. q. what do curved lines mean? a. when they are bent or crooked. q. what are these? a. parallel straight lines. q. what does parallel mean? a. parallel means when they are equally distant from each other in every part. q. if any of you children were reading a book. that gave an account of some town which had twelve streets, and it is said that the streets were parallel, would you understand what it meant? a. yes; it would mean that the streets were all the same way, side by side, like the lines which we now see. q. what are those? a. diverging or converging straight lines. q. what is the difference between diverging and converging lines and parallel lines? a. diverging or converging lines are not at an equal distance from each other, in every part, but parallel lines are. q. what does diverge mean? a. diverge means when they go from each other, and they diverge at one end and converge at the other.[b] q. what does converge mean? a. converge means when they come towards each other. q. suppose the lines were longer, what would be the consequence? a. please, sir, if they were longer, they would meet together at the end they converge. q. what would they form by meeting together? a. by meeting together they would form an angle. q. what kind of an angle? a. an acute angle? q. would they form an angle at the other end? a. no; they would go further from each other. q. what is this? a. a perpendicular line. q. what does perpendicular mean? a. a line up straight, like the stem of some trees. q. if you look, you will see that one end of the line comes on the middle of another line; what does it form? a. the one which we now see forms two right angles. q. i will make a straight line, and one end of it shall lean on another straight line, but instead of being upright like the perpendicular line, you see that it is sloping. what does it form? a. one side of it is an acute angle, and the other side is an obtuse angle. q. which side is the obtuse angle? a. that which is the most open. q. and which is the acute angle? a. that which is the least open. q. what does acute mean? a. when the angle is sharp. q. what does obtuse mean? a. when the angle is less sharp than the right angle. q. if i were to call any one of you an acute child, would you know what i meant? a. yes, sir; one that looks out sharp, and tries to think, and pays attention to what is said to him; and then you would say he was an acute child. [footnote b: mr. chambers has been good enough to call the instrument referred to, a gonograph; to that name i have no objection.] [footnote b: desire the children to hold up two fingers, keeping them apart, and they will perceive they diverge at top and converge at bottom.] _equi-lateral triangle_. q. what is this? a. an equi-lateral triangle. q. why is it called equi-lateral? a. because its sides are all equal. q. how many sides has it? a. three sides. q. how many angles has it? a. three angles. q. what do you mean by angles? a. the space between two right lines, drawn gradually nearer to each other, till they meet in a point. q. and what do you call the point where the two lines meet? a. the angular point. q. tell me why you call it a tri-angle. a. we call it a tri-angle because it has three angles. q. what do you mean by equal? a. when the three sides are of the same length. q. have you any thing else to observe upon this? a. yes, all its angles are acute. _isoceles triangle_. q. what is this? a. an acute-angled isoceles triangle. q. what does acute mean? a. when the angles are sharp. q. why is it called an isoceles triangle? a. because only two of its sides are equal. q. how many sides has it? a. three, the same as the other. q. are there any other kind of isoceles triangles? a. yes, there are right-angled and obtuse-angled. [here the other triangles are to be shewn, and the master must explain to the children the meaning of right-angled and obtuse-angled.] _scalene triangle_. q. what is this? a. an acute-angled scalene triangle. q. why is it called an acute-angled scalene triangle? a. because all its angles are acute, and its sides are not equal. q. why is it called scalene? a. because it has all its sides _unequal_. q. are there any other kind of scalene triangles? a. yes, there is a right-angled scalene triangle, which has one right angle. q. what else? a. an obtuse-angled scalene triangle, which has one obtuse angle. q. can an acute triangle be an equi-lateral triangle? a. yes, it may be equilateral, isoceles, or scalene. q. can a right-angled triangle, or an obtuse-angled triangle, be an equilateral? a. no; it must be either an isoceles or a scalene triangle. _square_. q. what is this? a. a square. q. why is it called a square? a. because all its angles are right angles, and its sides are equal. q. how many angles has it? a. four angles. q. what would it make if we draw a line from one angle to the opposite one? a. two right-angled isoceles triangles. q. what would you call the line that we drew from one angle to the other? a. a diagonal. q. suppose we draw another line from the other two angles. a. then it would make four triangles. _pent-agon_. q. what is this? a. a regular pentagon. q. why is it called a pentagon? a. because it has five sides and five angles. q. why is it called regular? a. because its sides and angles are equal. q. what does pentagon mean? a. a five-sided figure. q. are there any other kinds of pentagons? a. yes, irregular pentagons? q. what does irregular mean? a. when the sides and angles are not equal. _hex-agon_. q. what is this? a. a hexagon. q. why is it called a hexagon? a. because it has six sides and six angles. q. what does hexagon mean? a. a six-sided figure. q. are there more than one sort of hexagons? a. yes, there are regular and irregular. q. what is a regular hexagon? a. when the sides and angles are all equal. q. what is an irregular hexagon? a. when the sides and angles are not equal. _hept-agon_. q. what is this? a. a regular heptagon. q. why is it called a heptagon? a. because it has seven sides and seven angles. q. why is it called a regular heptagon? a. because its sides and angles are equal. q. what does a heptagon mean? a. a seven-sided figure. q. what is an irregular heptagon? a. a seven-sided figure, whose sides are not equal. _oct-agon_. q. what is this? a. a regular octagon. q. why is it called a regular octagon? a. because it has eight sides and eight angles, and they are all equal. q. what does an octagon mean? a. an eight-sided figure. q. what is an irregular octagon? a. an eight-sided figure, whose sides and angles are not all equal. q. what does an octave mean? a. eight notes in music. _non-agon_. q. what is this? a. a nonagon. q. why is it called a nonagon? a. because it has nine sides and nine angles. q. what does a nonagon mean? a. a nine-sided figure. q. what is an irregular nonagon? a. a nine-sided figure whose sides and angles are not equal. _dec-agon_. q. what is this? a. a regular decagon. q. what does a decagon mean? a. a ten-sided figure. q. why is it called a decagon? a. because it has ten sides and ten angles, and there are both regular and irregular decagons. _rect-angle or oblong_. q. what is this? a. a rectangle or oblong. q. how many sides and angles has it? a. four, the same as a square. q. what is the difference between a rectangle and a square? a. a rectangle has two long sides, and the other two are much shorter, but a square has its sides equal. _rhomb_. q. what is this? a. a rhomb. q. what is the difference between a rhomb and a rectangle? a. the sides of the rhomb are equal, but the sides of the rectangle are not all equal. q. is there any other difference? a. yes, the angles of the rectangle are equal, but the rhomb has only its opposite angles equal. _rhomboid_. q. what is this? a. a rhomboid. q. what is the difference between a rhomb and a rhomboid? a. the sides of the rhomboid are not equal, nor yet its angles, but the sides of the rhomb are equal. _trapezoid_. q. what is this. a. a trapezoid. q. how many sides has it? a. four sides and four angles, it has only two of its angles equal, which are opposite to each other. _tetragon_. q. what do we call these figures that have four sides. a. tetragons, _tetra_ meaning four. q. are they called by another name? a. yes, they are called quadrilaterals, or quadrangles. q. how many regular tetragons are among those we have mentioned? a. one, that is the square, all the others are irregular tetragons, because their sides and angles are not all equal. q. by what name would you call the whole of the figures on this board? a. polygons; those that have their sides and angles equal we would call regular polygons. q. what would you call those angles whose sides were not equal? a. irregular polygons, and the smallest number of sides a polygon can have is three, and the number of corners are always equal to the number of sides. _ellipse or oval_. q. what is this? a. an ellipse or an oval. q. what shape is the top or crown of my bat? a. circular. q. what shape is that part which comes on my forehead and the back part of my head? a. oval. the other polygons are taught the children in rotation, in the same simple manner, all tending to please and edify them. the following is sung:-- horizontal, perpendicular, horizontal, perpendicular, parallel, parallel, parallel, lines, diverging, converging, diverging lines, diverging, converging, diverging lines. spreading wider, or expansion, drawing nearer, or contraction, falling, rising, slanting, crossing, convex, concave, curved lines, convex, concave, curved lines. here's a wave line, there's an angle, here's a wave line, there's an angle; an ellipsis, or an oval, a semicircle half way round, then a circle wheeling round. some amusing circumstances have occured from the knowledge of form thus acquired. "d'ye ken, mr. wilderspin," said a child at glasgow one day, "that we have an oblong table: it's made o' deal; four sides, four corners, twa lang sides, and twa short anes; corners mean angles, and angles mean corners. my brother ga'ed himsel sic a clink o' the eye against ane at hame; but ye ken there was nane that could tell the shape o' the thing that did it!" a little boy was watching his mother making pan-cakes and wishing they were all done; when, after various observations as to their comparative goodness with and without sugar, he exclaimed, "i wonder which are best, _elliptical_ pan-cakes or _circular_ ones!" as this was greek to the mother she turned round with "what d'ye say?" when the child repeated the observation. "bless the child!" said the astonished parent, "what odd things ye are always saying; what can you mean by liptical pancakes? why, you little fool, don't you know they are made of flour and eggs, and did you not see me put the milk into the large pan and stir all up together?" "yes," said the little fellow, "i know what they are made of, and i know what bread is made of, but that is'nt the shape; indeed, indeed, mother, they are _elliptical pan-cakes_, because they are made in an _elliptical frying-pan_." an old soldier who lodged in the house, was now called down by the mother, and he decided that the child was right, and far from being what, in her surprize and alarm, she took him to be. on another occasion a little girl had been taken to market by her mother, where she was struck by the sight of the carcasses of six sheep recently killed, and said, "mother, what are these?" the reply was, "dead sheep, dead sheep, don't bother." "they are suspended, perpendicular, and parallels," rejoined the child. "what? what?" was then the question. "why, mother," was the child's answer, "don't you see they hang up, that's suspended; they are straight up, that's perpendicular; and they are at equal distances, that's parallel." on another occasion a child came crying to school, at having been beaten for contradicting his father, and begged of me to go to his father and explain; which i did. the man received me kindly, and told me that he had beaten the child for insisting that the table which he pointed out was not _round_, which he repeated was against all evidence of the senses; that the child told him that if it was round, nothing would stand upon it, which so enraged him, that he thrashed him, as he deserved, and sent him off to school, adding, to be thus contradicted by a child so young, was too bad. the poor little fellow stood between us looking the picture of innocence combined with oppression, which his countenance fully developed, but said not a word. under the said table there happened to be a ball left by a younger child. i took it up and kindly asked the man the shape of it? he instantly replied, "_round_." "then," said i, "is that table the same shape as the ball?" the man thought for a minute, and then said, "it is _round-flat_." i then explained the difference to him between the one and the other, more accurately, of course, than the infant could; and told him, as he himself saw a distinction, it was evident they were not both alike, and told him that the table was circular. "ah!" said be, "that is just what the little one said! but i did not understand what circular meant; but now i see he is right." the little fellow was so pleased, that he ran to his father directly with delight. the other could not resist the parental impulse, but seized the boy and kissed him heartily. the idea of _size_ is necessary to a correct apprehension of objects. to talk of yards, feet, or inches, to a child, unless they are shown, is just as intelligible as miles, leagues, or degrees. let there then be two five-feet rods, a black foot and a white foot alternately, the bottom foot marked in inches, and let there be a horizontal piece to slide up and down to make various heights. thus, when the height of a lion, or elephant, &c. &c., is mentioned, it may be shown by the rod; while the girth may be exhibited by a piece of _cord_, which should always be ready. long measure is taught as follows: take barley-corns of mod'rate length, and three you'll find will make an inch; twelve inches make a foot;--if strength permit; i'll leap it and not flinch. three feet's a yard, as understood by those possess'd with sense and soul; five feet and half will make a rood, and also make a perch or pole. oh how pretty, wond'rously pretty, every rule we learn at school is wondrously pretty. forty such poles a furlong make, and eight such furlongs make a mile, o'er hedge, or ditch, or seas, or lake; o'er railing, fence, or gate, or stile. three miles a league, by sea or land, and twenty leagues are one degree; just four times ninety degrees a band will make to girt the earth and sea. oh how pretty, &c. but what's the girth of hell or heaven? (no natural thought or eye can see,) to neither girth or length is given; 'tis without space--immensity. still shall the good and truly wise, the seat of heaven with safety find; because 'tis seen with inward eyes, the first resides within their mind. oh how pretty, &c. whatever can be shewn by the rod should be, and i entreat teachers not to neglect this part of their duty. if the tables be merely learnt, the children will be no wiser than before. another anecdote may be added here, to shew that children even under punishment may think of their position with advantage. doctor j., of manchester, sent two of his children to an infant school, for the upper classes, and one of his little daughters had broken some rule in conjunction with two other little ladies in the same school; two of the little folks were placed, one in each corner of the room, and miss j. was placed in the centre, when the child came home in the evening, doctor j. enquired, "well, mary, how have you got on at school to day?" the reply was "oh, papa, little miss ---- and fanny ----, and i, were put out, they were put in the corners and i in the middle of the room, and there we all stood, papa, a complete _triangle_ of dunces." the worthy doctor took great pleasure in mentioning this anecdote in company, as shewing the effect of a judicious cultivation of the thinking faculties. in my peregrinations by sea and land, with infants, we have had some odd and amusing scenes. i sometimes have had infants at sea for several days and nights to the great amusement of the sailors: i have seen some of these fine fellows at times in fits of laughter at the odd words, as they called them, which the children used; at other times i have seen some of them in tears, at the want of knowledge, they saw in themselves; and when they heard the infants sing on deck, and explain the odd words by things in the ship, the sailors were delighted to have the youngsters in their berths, and no nurse could take better care of them than these noble fellows did. i could relate anecdote after anecdote to prove the utility of this part of our system, but as it is now more generally in the training juvenile schools, and becoming better known, it may not be necessary, especially as the prejudice against it is giving way, and the public mind is better informed than it was on the subject, and moreover it must be given more in detail in the larger work on juvenile training or national education. chapter xiv. geography. _its attraction for children--sacred geography-geographical song--and lesson on geography_. * * * * * "from sea to sea, from realm to realm i rove."--_tickell_. * * * * * geography is to children a delightful study. we give some idea of it at an early period in infant schools, by singing, "london is the capital, the capital, the capital, london is the capital, the capital of england," and other capitals in the same way; and also by pictures of the costumes of the various people of the world. to teach the four quarters of the globe, we tell children the different points of the play-ground, and then send them to the eastern, western, northern, or southern quarters, as we please. a weathercock should also be placed at the top of the school, and every favourable day opportunities should be seized by the teachers to give practical instructions upon it.[a] [footnote a: if the lesson is on objects it will shew how children are taught the points of the compass, with which we find they are very much delighted, the best proof that can be given that it is not injurious to the faculties.] sacred geography is of great importance, and children are much pleased at finding out the spots visited by our saviour, or the route of the apostle paul. the earth. the earth, on which we all now live, is called a globe--its shape i'll give; if in your pocket you've a ball, you have it's shape,--but that's not all; for land and water it contains, and presently i'll give their names. the quarters are called, africa, europe, asia, and america; these contain straits, oceans, seas, continents, promontories, islands, rivers, gulfs, or bays, isthmusses, peninsulas,-- each divides or separates nations, kingdoms, cities, states,-- mountains, forests, hills, and dales, dreary deserts, rocks, and vales. in forests, deserts, bills, and plains, where feet have never trod, there still in mighty power, he reigns, an ever-present god. the cardinal points. the _east_ is where the sun does rise each morning, in the glorious skies; full _west_ he sets, or hides his head, and points to us the time for bed; he's in the _south_ at dinner time; the _north_ is facing to a line. the above can be given as a gallery lesson, and it will at once be seen that it requires explanation: the explanation is given by the teacher in the same way as we have hinted at in former lessons, though for the sake of those teachers who may not be competent to do it, we subjoin the following: q. little children what have we been singing about? a. the earth on which we live. q. what is the earth called? a. a globe. q. what is the shape of a globe? a. round, like an orange. q. is the earth round, like an orange? a. yes. q. does it always stand still? a. no, it goes round the sun. q. how often does it go round the sun in a year? a. once. q. does it go round anything else but the sun? a. yes, round its own axis, in the same way as you turn the balls round on the wires of the arithmeticon. q. what are these motions called? a. its motion round the sun is called its annual or yearly motion. q. what is its other motion called? a. its diurnal or daily motion. q. what is caused by its motion round the sun? a. the succession of summer, winter, spring, and autumn, which are called the four seasons, is caused by this. q. what is caused by its daily motion round its own axis? a. day and night. q. into what two principal things is this earth on which we live divided? a. into land and water. q. into how many great parts is the globe divided? a. into five. q. which are they? a. europe, asia, africa, america, and australia. q. which part do you live in? a. in europe. q. we sung that those great parts contained straits, oceans, seas, continents, promontories, islands, rivers, gulfs, or bays, isthmusses, peninsulas. q. what is a strait? a. a narrow part of the sea joining one great sea to another. q. what is an ocean? a. a very large sea. q. what is a gulf or bay? a. a part of the sea running a long way into the land. q. what is a continent? a. a very large tract of land. q. what does a continent contain? a. nations and kingdoms, such as england. q. what more? a. many cities and towns. q. what more? a. mountains. q what are mountains? a. very high steep places. q. what more does a continent contain? a. forests, hills, deserts, and valleys. q. what is a forest? a. many large trees growing over a great deal of the land is a forest. q. what are hills? a. parts of the ground which rise higher than the rest. q. what is a desert? a. a part of the earth where nothing will grow, and which is covered with hot sand. q. what is a valley? a. a part of the earth which is lower than the rest, with hills at each side. q. who made all that we have been speaking of? a. almighty god. i can remember the time when no national school in england possessed a _map_. it was thought dangerous to teach geography, as in fact anything but cramming the memory, and reading and writing. with regard to the reading i will say nothing as to how much was understood, explaining then, was out of the question. what a change have i lived to see! chapter xv. pictures and conversation. _pictures--religious instruction--specimens of picture lessons on scripture and natural history--other means of religious instruction--effects of religious instruction--observation_. * * * * * "the parents of dr. doddridge brought him up in the early knowledge of religion. before he could read, his mother taught him the histories of the old and new testament, by the assistance of some dutch tiles in the chimney of the room where they usually sat; and accompanied her instructions with such wise and pious reflections, as make strong and lasting impressions upon his heart"--_see his life_.[a] [footnote a: this gave me the idea of introducing scripture pictures for the infants; and that they are successful can be vouched for by hundreds of teachers besides myself.] * * * * * to give the children general information, it has been found advisable to have recourse to pictures of natural history, such as of birds, beasts, fishes, flowers, insects, &c., all of which tend to shew the glory of god; and as colours attract the attention of children as soon as any thing, they eagerly inquire what such a thing is, and this gives the teacher an opportunity of instructing them to great advantage; for when a child of his own free will eagerly desires to be informed, he is sure to profit by the information then imparted. we use also pictures of public buildings, and of the different trades; by the former, the children acquire much information, from the explanations which are given to them of the use of buildings, in what year they were built, &c.; whilst by the latter, we are enabled to find out the bias of a child's inclination. some would like to be shoemakers, others builders, others weavers, others brewers, &c.; in short it is both pleasing and edifying to hear the children give answers to the different questions. i remember one little boy, who said he should like to be a doctor; and when asked why he made choice of that profession in preference to any other, his answer was, "because he should like to cure all the sick people." if parents did but study the inclinations of their children a little more, i humbly conceive, that there would be more eminent men in every profession than there are. it is great imprudence to determine what business children shall be of before their tempers and inclinations are well known. every one is best in his own profession--and this should not be determined on rashly and carelessly. but as it is possible that a person may be very clever in his business or profession, and yet not be a christian, it has been thought necessary to direct the children's attention particularly to the scriptures. many difficulties lie in our way; the principal one arises not from their inability to read the bible, nor from their inability to comprehend it, but from the apathy of the heart to its divine principles and precepts. some parents, indeed, are quite delighted if their children can read a chapter or two in the bible, and think that when they can do this, they have arrived at the summit of knowledge, without once considering whether they understand a single sentence of what they read, or whether, if they understand it, they _feel_ its truth and importance. and how can it be expected that they should do either, when no ground-work has been laid at the time when they received their first impressions and imbibed their first ideas? every one comes into the world without ideas, yet with a capacity to receive knowledge of every kind, and is therefore capable, to a certain extent, of becoming intelligent and wise. an infant would take hold of the most poisonous reptile, that might sting him to death in an instant; or attempt to stroke the lion with as little fear as he would the lamb; in short, he is incapable of distinguishing a friend from a foe. and yet so wonderfully is man formed by his adorable creator, that he is capable of increasing his knowledge, and advancing towards perfection to all eternity, without ever being able to arrive at the summit. i am the ardent friend of _religious_ education, but what i thus denominate i must proceed to explain; because of the errors that abound on this subject. much that bears the name is altogether unworthy of it. moral and religious sentiments may be written as copies; summaries of truth, admirable in themselves, may be deposited in the memory; chapter after chapter too may be repeated by rote, and yet, after all, the slightest salutary influence may not be exerted on the mind or the heart. these may resemble "the way-side" in the parable, on which the fowls of the air devoured the corn as soon as it was sown; and hence those plans should be devised and pursued from which we may anticipate a harvest of real good. on these, however, my limits will only allow a few hints. as soon as possible, i would have a distinction made between the form and power of religion; between the grimaces and long-facedness so injurious to multitudes, and that principle of supreme love to god which he alone can implant in the heart. i would exhibit too that "good will to man" which the gospel urges and inspires, which regards the human race apart from all the circumstances of clime, colour, or grade; and which has a special reference to those who are most necessitous. and how can this be done more hopefully than by inculcating, in dependence on the divine blessing, the history, sermons, and parables of our lord jesus christ; and by the simple, affectionate, and faithful illustration and enforcement of other parts of holy writ? the infant system, therefore, includes a considerable number of scripture lessons, of which the following are specimens: joseph and his brethren. the following method is adopted:--the picture being suspended against the wall, and one class of the children standing opposite to it, the master repeats the following passages: "and joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethren; and they hated him yet the more. and he said unto them, hear, i pray you, the dream which i have dreamed; for behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and lo! my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves stood round abort, and made obeisance to my sheaf." the teacher being provided with a pointer will point to the picture, and put the following questions, or such as he may think better, to the children: q. what is this? a. joseph's first dream. q. what is a dream? a. when you dream, you see things during the time of sleep. q. did any of you ever dream any thing? here the children will repeat what they have dreamed; perhaps something like the following:--please, sir, once i dreamed i was in a garden. q. what did you see? a. i saw flowers and such nice apples. q. how do you know it was a dream? a. because, when i awoke, i found i was in bed. during this recital the children will listen very attentively, for they are highly pleased to hear each other's relations. the master having satisfied himself that the children, in some measure, understand the nature of a dream, he may proceed as follows:-- q. what did joseph dream about first? a. he dreamed that his brother's sheaves made obeisance to his sheaf. q. what is a sheaf? a. a bundle of corn. q. what do you understand by making obeisance? a. to bend your body, which we call making a bow. q. what is binding sheaves? a. to bind them, which they do with a band of twisted straw. q. how many brothers had joseph? a. eleven. q. what was joseph's father's name? a. jacob, he is also sometimes called israel. master.--and it is further written concerning joseph, that he dreamed yet another dream, and told it to his brethren, and said, behold, i have dreamed a dream more; and behold the sun and moon and eleven stars made obeisance to me. q. what do you understand by the sun? a. the sun is that bright object in the sky which shines in the day-time, and which gives us heat and light. q. who made the sun? a. almighty god. q. for what purpose did god make the sun? a. to warm and nourish the earth and every thing upon it. q. what do you mean by the earth? a. the ground on which we walk, and on which the corn, trees, and flowers grow. q. what is it that makes them grow? a. the heat and light of the sun. q. does it require any thing else to make them grow? a. yes; rain, and the assistance of almighty god. q. what is the moon? a. that object which is placed in the sky, and shines in the night, and appears larger than the stars. q. what do you mean by the stars? a. those bright objects that appear in the sky at night. q. what are they? a. some of them are worlds, and others are suns to give them light. q. who placed them there? a. almighty god. q. should we fear and love him for his goodness? a. yes; and for his mercy towards us. q. do you think it wonderful that god should make all these things? a. yes. q. are there any more things that are wonderful to you? a. yes;-- where'er we turn our wondering eyes, his power and skill we see; wonders on wonders grandly rise, and speak the deity. q. who is the deity? a. almighty god. nothing can be a greater error than to allow the children to use the name of god on every trifling occasion. whenever it is necessary, it should, in my opinion, be commenced with almighty, first, both by teacher and scholars. i am convinced, from what i have seen in many places, that the frequent repetition of his holy name has a very injurious effect. solomon's wise judgment. q. what is this? a. a picture of solomon's wise judgment. q. describe what you mean? a. two women stood before king solomon. q. did the women say any thing to the king when they came before him? a. yes; one woman said, o my lord, i and this woman dwell in one house, and i had a child there, and this woman had a child also, and this woman's child died in the night. q. to whom did the women speak when they said, o my lord? a. to king solomon. q. what did the woman mean when she said, we dwell in one house? a. she meant that they both lived in it. q. did the woman say any thing more to the king? a. yes; she said the other woman rose at midnight, and took her son from her. q. what is meant by midnight? a. twelve o'clock, or the middle of the night. q. what did the other woman say in her defence? a. she said the live child was hers, and the other said it is mine; this they spake before the king. q. when the king heard what the women had to say, what did he do? a. he said bring me a sword; and they brought a sword before the king. q. did the king do any thing with the sword? a. no; he said, divide the child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. q. what did the women say to that? a. one said, o my lord, give her the living child, and in nowise slay it; but the other said, let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. q. what took place next? a. the king answered and said, give her the living child, and in nowise slay it, she is the mother thereof. q. what is meant by slaying? a. to kill any thing. q. to which woman was the child given? a. to the woman that said do not hurt it. q. what is the reason that it was called a wise judgment? a. because solomon took a wise method to find it out. q. did the people hear of it? a. yes, all israel heard of it, and they feared the king, for they saw that the wisdom of god was in him to do judgment. q. what is meant by all israel? a. all the people over whom solomon was king? q. if we want to know any more about solomon where can we find it? a. in the third chapter of the first book of kings. _incidental conversation_. q. now my little children, as we have been talking about king solomon, suppose we talk about our own king; so let me ask you his name? a. king william the fourth.[a] q. why is he called king? a. because he is the head man, and the governor of the nation. q. what does governor mean? a. one that governs the people, the same as you govern and manage us. q. why does the king wear a crown on his head? a. to denote that he governs from a principle of wisdom, proceeding from love. q. why does he hold a sceptre in his hand? a. to denote that he is powerful, and that he governs from a principle of truth. q. what is a crown? a. a thing made of gold overlaid with a number of diamonds and precious stones, which are very scarce? q. what is a sceptre? a. a thing made of gold, and something like an officer's staff. q. what is an officer? a. a person who acts in the king's name; and there are various sorts of officers, naval officers, military officers, and civil officers. q. what is a naval officer? a. a person who governs the sailors, and tells them what to do. q. what is a military officer? a. a person who governs the soldiers, and tells them what to do. q. what does a naval officer and his sailors do? a. defend us from our enemies on the sea. q. what does a military officer and his soldiers do? a. defend us from our enemies on land. q. who do you call enemies? a. persons that wish to hurt us and do us harm. q. what does a civil officer do? a. defend us from our enemies at home. q. what do you mean by enemies at home? a. thieves, and all bad men and women. q. have we any other enemies besides these? a. yes, the enemies of our own household, as we may read in the bible, and they are the worst of all. q. what do you mean by the enemies of our own household? a. our bad thoughts and bad inclinations. q. who protects and defends us from these? a. almighty god. q. are there any other kind of officers besides these we have mentioned? a. yes, a great many more, such as the king's ministers, the noblemen and gentlemen in both houses of parliament, and the judges of the land. q. what do the king's ministers do? a. give the king advice when he wants it. q. and what do the noblemen and gentlemen do in both houses of parliament? a. make laws to govern us, protect us, and make us happy. q. after they have made the laws, who do they take them to? a. to the king. q. what do they take them to the king for? a. to ask him if he will be pleased to approve of them. q. what are laws? a. good rules for the people to go by, the same as we have rules in our school to go by. q. suppose the people break these good rules, what is the consequence? a. they are taken before the judges, and afterwards sent to prison. q. who takes them before the judge? a. a constable, and afterwards he takes them to prison, and there they are locked up and punished. q. ought we to love the king? a. yes, and respect his officers. q. do you suppose the king ever prays to god? a. yes, every day. q. what does he pray for? a. that god would be pleased to make him a wise and good man, so that he may make all his people happy. q. what do the scriptures say about the king? a. they say that we are to fear god and honour the king. q. who was the wisest king? a. king solomon. q. how did he become the wisest king? a. he asked god to give him wisdom to govern his kingdom well; and god granted his request. q. will god give our king wisdom? a. yes, he will give him what is best for him. it says in the bible, if any man lack wisdom let him ask of god, for he giveth all men liberally, and upbraideth not. q. what is the best book to learn wisdom from? a. the bible. q. is the queen mentioned in the bible? a. yes; it is said queens shall be thy nursing mothers. q. who came to solomon besides the two women? a. the queen of sheba, she came to ask him questions. q. when he answered her questions what happened? a. the queen was so much delighted with his wisdom, that she gave him a hundred and twenty talents of gold, and spices in abundance. q. how much is one talent of gold worth? a. five thousand, four hundred, and seventy-five sovereigns. q. did she give him anything more? a. yes, she gave him precious stones. q. what are precious stones? a. diamonds, jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprasus, jacinth, amethyst. q. did king solomon give the queen of sheba anything? a. yes, he gave her whatsoever she desired, besides that which she brought with her. q. where did she go? a. she went away to her own land. q. what part of the bible is this? a. the ninth chapter of the second book of chronicles, master. the queen is mentioned in other places in the bible, and another day i will tell in what parts. [footnote a: this lesson was written in the life time of our late sovereign. it can easily be applied by the judicious teacher, and made to bear upon present circumstances, and i earnestly hope that her present gracious majesty may become patroness of infant education. not infant education travestied, but the thing itself.] the nativity of jesus christ. the picture being suspended as the others, and a whole class being in the class-room, put the pointer into one of the children's hands, and desire the child to find out the nativity of jesus christ. the other children will be on the tip-toe of expectation, to see whether the child makes a mistake; for, should this be the case, they know that one of them will have the same privilege of trying to find it; should the child happen to touch the wrong picture, the teacher will have at least a dozen applicants, saying, "please, sir, may i? please, sir, may i?" the teacher having selected the child to make the next trial, say one of the youngest of the applicants, the child walks round the room with the pointer, and puts it on the right picture; which will be always known by the other children calling out, "that is the right, that is the right." to view the child's sparkling eyes, who has found the picture, and to see the pleasure beaming forth in his countenance, you might imagine that be conceived he had performed one of the greatest wonders of the age. the children will then proceed to read what is printed on the picture, which is as follows: "the nativity of our lord and saviour jesus christ;" which is printed at the top of the picture. at the bottom are the following words: "and she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn."--we then proceed to question them in the following manner:-- q. what do you mean by the nativity of jesus christ? a. the time he was born. q. where was he born? a. in bethlehem of judea. q. where did they lay him? a. in a manger. q. what is a manger? a. a thing that horses feed out of. q. what was the reason they put him there? a. because there was no room in the inn. q. what is an inn? a. a place where persons lodge who are travelling, and it is like a public house. q. what do you mean by travelling? when you go from one place to another; from london into the country, or from the country into london. q. is any thing else to be understood by travelling? a. yes, we are all travelling. q. what do you mean by all travelling? a. we are all going in a good road or else in a bad one. q. what do you mean by a good road? a. that which leads to heaven. q. what will lead us to heaven? a. praying to god and endeavouring to keep his commandments, and trying all we can to be good children. q. can we make ourselves good? a. no; we can receive nothing, except it be given us from heaven. q. what is travelling in a bad road? a. being naughty children, and not minding what is said to us; and when we say bad words, or steal any thing, or take god's name in vain. q. where will this road lead to? a. to eternal misery. here we usually give a little advice according to circumstances, taking care always to avoid long speeches, that will tend to stupify the children. if they appear tired, we stop, but if not, they repeat the following hymn, which i shall insert in full, as i believe there is nothing in it that any christian would object to. hark! the skies with music sound! heavenly glory beams around; christ is born! the angels sing, glory to the new-born king. peace is come, good-will appears, sinners, wipe away your tears; god in human flesh to-day humbly in the manger lay. shepherds tending flocks by night, heard the song, and saw the light; took their reeds, and softest strains echo'd through the happy plains. mortals, hail the glorious king richest incense cheerful bring; praise and love emanuel's name, and his boundless grace proclaim. the hymn being concluded, we put the following questions to the children: q. who was the new-born king? a. jesus christ. q. who are sinners? a. we, and all men. q. what are flocks? a. a number of sheep. q. what are shepherds? a. those who take care of the sheep. q. what are plains? a. where the sheep feed. q. who are mortals? a. we are mortals. q. who is the glorious king? a. jesus christ. q. what is meant by emanuel's name? a. jesus christ. here the teacher can inform the children, that jesus christ is called by a variety of names in the bible, and can repeat them to the children if he thinks proper; for every correct idea respecting the saviour which he can instil into their minds will serve as a foundation for other ideas, and he will find that the more ideas the children have, the more ready they will be in answering his questions; for man is a progressive being; his capacity for progression is his grand distinction above the brutes. lazarus raised from the dead. the picture being suspended as before described, we proceed thus:-- q. what is this? a. jesus christ raising lazarus from the dead. q. who was lazarus? a. a man who lived in a town called bethany, and a friend of christ's. q. what is a town? a. a place where there are a great number of houses, and persons living in them. q. what do you mean by a friend? a. a person that loves you, and does all the good he can for you, to whom you ought to do the same in return. q. did jesus love lazarus? a. yes, and his sisters, martha and mary. q. who was it that sent unto jesus christ, and told him that lazarus was sick? a. martha and mary. q. what did they say? a. they said, lord, behold he whom thou lovest is sick. q. what answer did jesus make unto them? a. he said, this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of god. q. what did he mean by saying so? a. he meant that lazarus should be raised again by the power of god, and that the people that stood by should see it, and believe on him. q. how many days did jesus stop where he was when he found lazarus was sick? a. two days. q. when jesus christ wanted to leave the place, what did he say to his disciples? a. he said, let us go into judea again. q. what do you mean by judea? a. a country where the jews lived. q. did the disciples say any thing to jesus christ, when he expressed a wish to go into judea again? a. yes, they said, master, the jews of late sought to stone thee, and goest thou thither again? q. what did jesus christ tell them? a. he told them a great many things, and at last told them plainly that lazarus was dead. q. how many days had lazarus lain in the grave before he was raised up? a. four. q. who went to meet jesus christ, when she heard that he was coming? a. martha; but mary sat still in the house. q. did martha say anything to jesus when she met him? a. yes, she said, lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died. q. did martha tell her sister that jesus christ was come? a. yes; she said, the master is come, and calleth for thee. q. did mary go to meet jesus christ? a. yes; and when she saw him, she fell down at his feet, and said, lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. q. did mary weep? a. yes, and the jews that were with her. q. what is weeping? a. to cry. q. did jesus weep? a. yes; and the jews said, behold, how he loved him. q. did the jews say any thing else? a. yes; they said, could not this man that opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? q. what took place next? a. he went to the grave, and told the persons that stood by to take away the stone. q. and when they took away the stone, what did jesus christ do? a. he cried, with a loud voice, lazarus, come forth; and he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot, with grave clothes, and his face was bound about with a napkin.--jesus saith unto them, loose him, and let him go; and many of the jews which came to mary, and had seen these things which jesus did, believed on him. q. if we wanted any more information about lazarus and his sisters, where should we find it? a. in the bible. q. what part? a. the eleventh and twelfth chapters of john. i have had children at the early age of four years, ask me questions that i could not possibly answer; and among other things, the children have said, when being examined at this picture, "that if jesus christ had cried, softly, lazarus, come forth, he would have come."--and when asked, why they thought so, they have answered, "because god can do anything;" which is a convincing proof that children, at a very early age, have an idea of the omnipotence of the supreme being. oh, that men would praise the lord for his goodness to the children of men! picture of the last supper. q. what is this? a. a picture of the last supper. q. what do you mean by the last supper? a. a sacrament instituted by jesus christ himself. q. what do you understand by a sacrament? a. there are two sacraments, baptism and the holy supper, and they are both observed by true christians. q. we will speak about baptism presently, but as we have the picture of the holy supper before as, let me ask if it is called by any other name? a. yes; it is said that jesus kept the passover with his disciples, and when the even was come he sat down with them, and as they did eat, jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave to his disciples, saying, take, eat, this is my body. q. what took place next? a. he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it them, saying, this is my blood, the blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. q. did jesus command this ordinance to be observed by his people? a. yes; he said in another place, this do in remembrance of me (luke xxii. ). q. what ought those persons to remember who do this? a. they should remember that jesus christ died on the cross to save sinners. q. is any thing else to be understood by the sacrament of the lord's supper? a. yes, a great deal more. q. explain some of it. a. when they drink the wine, they should recollect that they ought to receive the truth of god into their understandings. q. what will be the effect of receiving the truth of god into our understandings? a. it will expel or drive out all falsehood. q. what ought they to recollect when they eat the bread? a. they should recollect that they receive the love of god into their wills and affections. q. what will be the effect of this? a. it will drive out all bad passions and evil desires; for it is said, he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and i in him (john vi. ). q. is any thing more to be understood by these things? a. much more, which we must endeavour to learn when we get older. q. how will you learn this? a. by reading the bible and going to a place of worship.[a] [footnote a: there are many more of similar lessons, and, if any thing, more simple, which accompany the pictures and apparatus which i supply for infant schools; the profits from which will assist to enable me, if i am blessed with health and strength, still further to extend the system.] allow such things as these to be brought before the infant mind: let the feelings of the heart, as well as the powers of the understanding, be called into exercise; let babes have "the pure milk of the word" before "the strong meat;" let as little stress as possible be laid on "the mere letter," and as much as possible on "the spirit" of "the truth;" let it be shewn that piety is not merely rational, but in the highest degree practicable; let this be done with diligence, faith, and prayer, and i hesitate not to say, that we shall have an increase of the religion of the _heart_. religious instruction may be given in other ways. let the teacher take a flower or an insect, and ask the, children if they could make such a one; and i never found one who would answer, "yes." a microscope will increase the knowledge of its wonders. the teacher may then make a needle the subject of remark; the children will admit that it is smooth, very smooth; let him tell them it is the work of man, and as such will appear imperfect in proportion as it is examined; and shewing them it through the microscope, they will perceive it is rough and full of holes. as a contrast, let him take a bee, obtain their observations on it as it is, give them a short history of it, and they will acknowledge its superiority over the needle. but on viewing it through the microscope, astonishment will be increased, and i have heard many say at such a time, "o sir, how good (meaning _great_) god must be!" the sting may then be pointed out, as _unlike_ the needle, and perfectly smooth; and thus truth may be imparted in a manner the most interesting and delightful. the influence of such considerations on _character_ is obvious. when the _greatness_ of god is spoken of, allusion may be made to our pride, and to the importance of humility; his _goodness_ may suggest the evil of unkindness, and the importance of benevolence; and his _truth_ may lead to remarks on its necessity, and the sin of falsehood. a small plot of ground may moreover be appropriated to the children; some grains of wheat, barley, or rye may be sown, and they may be told that, at a certain time, they will spring forth. often will they go, and anxiously watch for this; and at length they will say perhaps, "please, sir, such a thing has come up; we know it is so, for it is just what you said it would be." week after week the progress of vegetation will be observed, and the fulfilment of the master's promise will greatly tend to increase _his_ influence. so great will _he_ appear, that his words and commands will be more regarded; while it will be his object to trace the wonders which he predicted to their divine source. i have frequently observed, on such occasions, what i should term an act of infant worship. often has the question been put to me, "please, sir, is it wicked to play?" as if the spirit were awed, and transgression against god were regarded with dread. caution has been also discovered in the use of the divine name; and i have listened with delight to such remarks as these: "please, sir, when we sing a hymn, we may say gad, or if we talk about the sun, we may say god made it; and it isn't taking his name in vain, is it? but when we talk of god as boys do in the street, that is very wicked!" the following facts will illustrate the benefit of scriptural instruction. a little boy, about four years and a half old, belonging to an infant school, went to see his cousin, a little girl about his own age. at bed-time, the little boy, to his great surprise, saw her get into bed without having said her prayers. the little fellow immediately went up to the side of the bed, and put this question to her: "which would you rather go to, heaven or hell?" the little girl said, "i don't know!" "not know!" said the boy; "why, wicked people go to hell, and the good go to heaven, a happy place." the little girl then said, "why, i should like to go to heaven." "ah!" but replied the little fellow again, "you did not say your prayers; and all that go heaven pray to god." she then said, "will you teach me to pray your prayer?" "if i lived with you," said he, "i would; but if you go to the infant school, they will teach you to say your prayers, and sing hymns too." one day, while the teacher of an infant school was speaking to his little children, from the conversation of our lord with the woman of samaria at the well, a gentleman present asked the following questions: "where should we go to worship god?" when a little boy answered, "to a throne of grace." "and where is a throne of grace?" "any where," answered the boy; "for where we kneel down, and pray to god with our hearts, we are _then_ at a throne of grace." there are times when the children are in a better state to receive religious instruction than others. a teacher of observation will soon perceive this, and act accordingly; if, however, the thing is overdone, which it may be, and which i have seen, then the effect is fatal. hypocrisy will take the place of sincerity, and the heart will remain unaffected and unimproved. a little boy, the subject of the following anecdote, being six years of age, and forward in his learning, i considered him fit to be sent to another school; and informed the parents accordingly. the father came immediately, and said, he hoped i would keep him till he was seven years of age; adding, that he had many reasons for making the request. i told him, that it was the design of the institution to take such children as no other school would admit; and as his child had arrived at the age of six, he would be received into the national school; moreover, as we had a number of applications for the admission of children much younger, i could not grant his request. he then said, "i understand that you make use of pictures in the school, and i have good reason to approve of them; for," said he, "you must know that i have a large bible in the house, matthew henry's, which was left me by my deceased mother; like many more, i never looked into it, but kept it merely for show. the child, of course, was forbidden to open it, for fear of its being spoiled: but still he was continually asking me to read in it, and i as continually denied him; indeed, i had imbibed many unfavourable impressions concerning this book, and had no inclination to read it, and was not very anxious that the child should. however, the child was not to be put off, although several times i gave him a box on the ear for worrying me; for, notwithstanding this usage, the child would frequently ask me to read it, when he thought i was in a good humour; and at last i complied with his wishes; 'please, father,' said the child, 'will you read about solomon's wise judgment' 'i don't know where to find it,' was the reply. 'then,' says the child, 'i will tell you; it is in the third chapter of the first book of kings.' i looked as the child directed, and, finding it, i read it to him. having done so, i was about to shut up the book; which the child perceiving, said, 'now, please, father, will you read about lazarus raised from the dead?' which was done; and, in short," said the father, "he kept me at it for at least two hours that night, and completely tired me out, for there was no getting rid of him. the next night be renewed the application, with 'please, father, will you read about joseph and his brethren?' and he could always tell me where these stories were to be found. indeed, he was not contented with my reading it, but would get me into many difficulties, by asking me to explain that which i knew nothing about; and if i said i could not tell him, he would tell me that i ought to go to church, for his master had told him, that that was the place to learn more about it; adding, 'and i will go with you, father.' in short, he told me every picture you had in your school, and kept me so well at it, that i at last got into the habit of _reading for myself_, with some degree of delight; this, therefore, is one reason why i wish the child to remain in the school." a short time afterwards, the mother called on me, and told me, that no one could be happier than she was, for there was so much alteration in her husband for the better, that she could scarcely believe him to be the same man. instead of being in the skittle-ground, in the evening, spending his money and getting tipsy, he was reading at home to her and his children; and the money that used to go for gambling, was now going to buy books, with which, in conjunction with the bible, they were greatly delighted, and afforded both him and them a great deal of pleasure and profit. here we see a whole family were made comfortable, and called to a sense of religion and duty, by the instrumentality of a child of six years of age. i subsequently made inquiries, and found that the whole family attended a place of worship, and that their character would bear the strictest investigation. the following anecdote will also shew how early impressions are made on the infant mind, and the effects such impressions may have in the dying moments of a child. a little boy, between the age of five and six years, being extremely ill, prevailed on his mother to ask me to come and see him. the mother called, and stated, that her little boy said be wanted to see his master so bad, that he would give any thing if he could see him. the mother likewise said, she should herself be very much obliged to me if i would come; conceiving that the child would get better after he had seen me. i accordingly went; and on seeing the child considered that he could not recover. the moment i entered the room, the child attempted to rise, but could not. "well, my little man," said i, "did you want to see me?" "yes, sir, i wanted to see you very much," answered the child. "tell me what you wanted me for." "i wanted to tell you that i cannot come to school again, because i shall die." "don't say that," said the mother, "you will get better, and then you can go to school again." "no," answered the child, "i shall not get better, i am sure; and i wanted to ask master to let my class sing a hymn over my body, when they put it in the pit-hole." the child, having made me promise that this should be done, observed, "you told me, master, when we used to say the pictures, that the souls of children never die; and do you think i shall go to god?" "you ask me a difficult question, my little boy," said i. "is it, sir?" said the child, "i am not afraid to die, and i know i shall die." "well, child, i should not be afraid to change states with you; for if such as you do not go to god, i do not know what will become of such as myself; and from what i know of you, i firmly believe that you will, and all like you; but you know what i used to tell you at school." "yes, sir, i do; you used to tell me that i should pray to god to assist me to do to others as i would that they should do to me, as the hymn says; and mother knows that i always said my prayers, night and morning; and i used to pray for father and mother, master and governess, and every body else." "yes, my little man, this is part of our duty; we should pray for every one; and, i think, if god sees it needful, he will answer our prayers, especially when they come from the heart." here the child attempted to speak, but could not, but waved his hand, in token of gratitude for my having called; and i can truly say, that i never saw so much confidence, resignation, and true dependence on the divine will, manifested by any grown person, on a death-bed, much less by a child under the tender age of seven years. i bade the child adieu, and was much impressed with what i had seen. the next day the mother called on me, and informed me that the child had quitted his tenement of clay; and that just before his departure had said to her, and those around him, that the souls of children never die; it was only the body that died; that he had been told at school, while they were saying the pictures, that the soul went to god, who gave it. the mother said that these were the last words the child was known to utter. she then repeated the request about the children singing a hymn over his grave, and named the hymn she wished to have sung. the time arrived for the funeral, and the parents of the children who were to sing the hymn made them very neat and clean, and sent them to school. i sent them to the house whence the funeral was to proceed, and the undertaker sent word that he could not be troubled with such little creatures, and that unless i attended myself the children could not go. i told him that i was confident that the children would be no trouble to him, if he only told them to follow the mourners two and two, and that it was unnecessary for any one to interfere with them further than shewing them the way back to the school. i thought, however, that i would attend to see how the children behaved, but did not let them see me, until the corpse was arrived at the ground. as soon as i had got to the ground, some of the children saw me, and whispered, "there's master;" when several of them stepped out of the ranks to favour me with a bow. when the corpse was put into the ground, the children were arranged round the grave, not one of whom was more than six years of age. one of them gave out the hymn, in the usual way, and then it was sung by the whole of them; and, according to the opinions of the by-standers, very well. the novelty of the thing caused a great number of persons to collect together; and yet, to their credit, while the children were singing, there was not a whisper to be heard; and when they had finished the hymn, the poor people made a collection for the children on the ground. the minister himself rewarded one or two of them, and they returned well stored with money, cakes, &c. this simple thing was the means of making the school more known; for i could hear persons inquiring, "where do these children come from?" "why, don't you know?" replied others, "from the infant school." "well," answered a third, "i will try to get my children into it; for i should like them to be there of all things. when do they take them in, and how do they get them in?" "why, you must apply on monday mornings," answered another; and the following monday i had no less than forty-nine applications, all of which i was obliged to refuse, because the school was full.[a] [footnote a: this circumstance took place in the heart of london, and some of the chief actors in it are now men and women; and should this meet the eye of any of them, i am sure they will not forget the circumstances, nor entirely forget their old teacher.] natural history. when teachers are conversing with their children, they should always take care to watch their countenances, and the moment they appear tired, to stop. an hour's instruction when the children's minds and hearts are engaged, is better than many hours effort, when they are thinking of something else. in addition to thirty-four pictures of scripture history, we have sixty of natural history, each picture having a variety of quadrupeds, birds, fishes, and flowers. the first thing we do is to teach the children the names of the different things; then to distinguish them by their forms; and, lastly, they are questioned on them as follows: if the animal is a horse, we put the pointer to it, and say-- what is this? a. a picture of a horse. q. what is the use of the horse? a. to draw carts, coaches, waggons, drays, fire-engines, caravans, the plough and harrow, boats on the canal, and any thing that their masters want them. q. will they carry as well as draw? a. yes, they will carry a lady or gentleman on their backs, a sack of corn, or paniers, or even little children, but they must not hit them hard, if they do, they will fall off their backs; besides, it is very cruel to beat them. q. what is the difference between carrying and drawing? a. to carry is when they have the whole weight on their backs, but to draw is when they pull any thing along. q. is there any difference between those horses that carry, and those horses that draw? a. yes; the horses that draw carts, drays, coal-waggons, stage waggons, and other heavy things, are stouter and much larger, and stronger than those that carry on the saddle, and are called draught horses. q. where do the draught horses come from? a. the largest comes from leicestershire, and some come from suffolk, which are very strong, and are called suffolk punches. q. where do the best saddle-horses come from? a. they came at first from arabia, the place in which the camel is so useful; but now it is considered that those are as good which are bred in england? q. what do they call a horse when he is young? a. a foal, or a young colt. q. will he carry or draw while he is young? a. not until he is taught, which is called breaking of him in. q. and when he is broke in, is he very, useful? a. yes; and please, sir, we hope to be more useful when we are properly taught. q. what do you mean by being properly taught? a. when we have as much trouble taken with us as the horses and dogs have taken with them. q. why, you give me a great deal of trouble, and yet i endeavour to teach you. a. yes, sir, but before infant schools were established, little children, like us, were running the streets.[a] q. but you ought to be good children if you do run the streets. a. please, sir, there is nobody to tell us how[b], and if the man did not teach the horse, he would not know how to do his work. [footnote a: this answer was given by a child five years of age.] [footnote b: this answer was given by a child six years of age.] here we observe to the children, that as this animal is so useful to mankind, it should be treated with kindness. and having questioned them as to the difference between a cart and a coach, and satisfied ourselves that they understand the things that are mentioned, we close, by asking them what is the use of the horse after he is dead, to which the children reply, that its flesh is eaten by other animals (naming them), and that its skin is put into pits with oak bark, which is called tanning; and that when it is tanned it is called leather; and leather is made into shoes to keep the feet warm and dry, and that we are indebted to the animals for many things that we both eat and wear, and above all to the great god for every thing that we possess. i cannot help thinking that if this plan were more generally adopted, in all schools, we should not have so many persons ascribing everything to blind chance, when all nature exhibits a god, who guides, protects, and continually preserves the whole. we also examine the children concerning that ill-treated animal, the ass, and contrast it with the beautiful external appearance of the zebra; taking care to warn the children not to judge of things by their outward appearance, which the world in general are too apt to do, but to judge of things by their uses, and of men by their general character and conduct. after having examined the children concerning the animals that are most familiar to us, such as the sheep, the cow, the dog, and others of a similar kind, we proceed to foreign animals, such as the camel, the elephant, the tiger, the lion, &c. &c. in describing the use of the camel and the elephant, there is a fine field to open the understandings of the children, by stating how useful the camel is in the deserts of arabia; how much it can carry; how long it can go without water; and the reason it can go without water longer than most other animals; how much the elephant can carry; what use it makes of its trunk, &c. all these things will assist the thinking powers of children, and enlarge their understandings, if managed carefully. we also contrast the beautiful appearance of the tiger with its cruel and blood-thirsty disposition, and endeavour to shew these men and women in miniature, that it is a dangerous plan to judge of things by outward appearances, but that there is a more correct way of judging, which forms a part of the business of education to explain. the children are highly delighted with these pictures, and, of their own accord, require an explanation of the subjects. nay, they will even ask questions that will puzzle the teacher to answer; and although there is in some minds such a natural barrenness, that, like the sands of arabia, they are never to be cultivated or improved, yet i can safely say, that i never knew a child who did not like the pictures; and as soon as i had done explaining one, it was always, "please, sir, may we learn this?" "please, teacher, may we learn that?" in short, i find that i am generally tired before the children; instead of having to apply any magisterial severity, they are petitioning to learn; and this mode of teaching possesses an advantage over every other, because it does not interfere with any religious opinion, there being no body of christians that i know, or ever heard of, who would object to the facts recorded in the bible, being thus elucidated by pictures. thus a ground-work may be laid, not only of natural history, but of sacred history also; for the objects being before the children's eyes, they can, in some degree, comprehend them, and store them in their memories. indeed, there is such attraction in pictures, that you can scarcely pass a picture-shop in london, without seeing a number of grown persons around the windows gazing at them. when pictures were first introduced into the school, the children told their parents; many of whom came and asked permission to see them; and although the plates are very common, i observed a degree of attention and reverence in the parents, scarcely to be expected, and especially from those who could not read. it is generally the case, that what we have always with us, becomes so familiar, that we set little store by it; but on being deprived of it for a time, we then set a greater value on it: and i have found this to be the case with the children. if the pictures we make use of in the schools be exposed all at once, and at all times, then there would be such a multiplicity of objects before the eyes of the children, that their attention would not be fixed by any of them; they would look at them all, at first, with wonder and surprise, but in a short time the pictures would cease to attract notice, and, consequently, the children would think no more of them than they would of the paper that covers the room. to prevent this, and to excite a desire for information, it is always necessary to keep some behind, and to let very few objects appear at one time. when the children understand, in some measure, the subjects before them, these may be replaced by others, and so on successively, until the whole have been seen. some persons have objected to the picture of christ being represented in the human form, alleging that it is calculated to make the children think he was a mere man only, and have thought it better that be should not be represented at all; the man that undertakes to please all will soon find out his mistake, and, therefore, be must do the best he can, and leave the objectors to please themselves; yet it is a great pity little children should suffer from the ill-grounded objections of those who cannot do better. on visiting a school, take notice of the pictures hanging about, if they are dusty, and have not the appearance of being well-used, be sure that the committee have never seen a good infant school, or that the teacher has never been properly trained, and, therefore, does not know how to use them. chapter xvi. on teaching by objects. _object boards--utility of this method_. * * * * * "the eyes will greatly aid the ears." * * * * * as i have before said that it is our object to teach the children from objects in preference to books, i will mention a method we adopt for the accomplishment of this purpose. it consists of a number of boards, of which, and of their use, the following description will convey an accurate idea. the boards are about sixteen inches square, and a quarter of an inch thick: wainscot is the best, as it does not warp. these will go into the groove of the lesson post: there should be about twenty articles on each board, or twenty-five, just as it suits the conductors of the school; there should be the same quantity of things on each board, in order that all the children may finish at one time; this will not be the case, if there be more objects on one board than another. i will give an account of a few of our boards, and that must suffice, or i shall exceed the limits i have prescribed to myself. the first board contains a small piece of gold in its rough state, a piece of gold in its manufactured state, a piece of silver in both states, a piece of copper in both states, a piece of brass in both states, a piece of iron in both states, a piece of steel in both states, a piece of tinfoil, a piece of solder, a screw, a clasp nail, a clout nail, a hob nail, a spike nail, a sparable, and a tack. these articles are all on one board, and the monitor puts his pointer to each article, and tells his little pupils their names, and encourages them to repeat the names after him. when they finish at one post they go to the next. the next board may contain a piece of hemp, a piece of rope, a piece of string, a piece of bagging, a piece of sacking, a piece of canvass, a piece of hessian, a piece of scotch sheeting, a piece of unbleached linen, a piece of bleached linen, a piece of diaper linen, a piece of dyed linen, a piece of flax, a piece of thread, a piece of yarn, a piece of ticking, a piece of raw silk, a piece of twisted silk, a piece of wove silk, figured, a piece of white plain sills, and a piece of dyed silk, a piece of ribbon, a piece of silk cord, a piece of silk velvet, &c. the next may contain raw cotton, cotton yarn, sewing cotton, unbleached calico, bleached calico, dimity, jean, fustian, velveteen, gause, nankeen, gingham, bed furniture, printed calico, marseilles, flannel, baise, stuff; woollen cloth and wool, worsted, white, black, and mixed. the next may contain milled board, paste board, bristol card, brown paper, white paper of various sorts, white sheep skin, yellow sheep, tanned sheep, purple sheep, glazed sheep, red sheep, calf skin, cow hide, goat skin, kid, seal, pig leather, seal skin, wash leather, beaver, &c. the next may contain about twenty-five of those wood animals which are imported into this country, and are to be had at the foreign toy warehouses; some of them are carved exceedingly well, and appear very like the real animals. the next may contain mahogany, and the various kinds of wood. the next may contain prunings of the various fruit trees, all about an inch long, or an inch square. the next may contain the different small articles of ironmongery, needles, pins, cutlery, small tools, and every other object that can be obtained small enough for the purpose. the lessons are to be put in the lesson-post the same as the picture lessons; and the articles are either glued, or fastened on the boards with screws or waxed thread. i would have dried leaves provided, such as an oak leaf, an elm leaf, an ash leaf, &c. &c. the leaves of ever-greens should be kept separate. these will enable a judicious instructor to communicate a great variety of valuable information. on some things connected with such instruction i find i arrived at the same conclusions as pestalozzi, though i have never read his works, and for some years after my first efforts, did not know that such a person existed. i mean, however, to give my views on teaching by objects more fully in a work i hope soon to prepare, to be entitled "the infant teacher in the nursery and the school." the utility of this mode of teaching must be obvious, for if the children meet with any of those terms in a book which they are reading, they _understand them immediately_, which would not be the case unless they had seen the _object_. the most intellectual person would not be able to call things by their _proper names_, much less describe them, unless he had been taught, or heard some other person call them by their right names; and we generally learn more by mixing with society, than ever we could do at school: these sorts of lessons persons can make themselves, and they will last for many years, and help to lay a foundation for things of more importance. i am convinced the day is not far distant when a museum will be considered necessary to be attached to every first rate school for the instruction of children. sight is the most direct inlet for knowledge. whatever we have seen makes a much stronger impression upon us. perception is the first power of mind which is brought into action, and the one made use of with most ease and pleasure. for this reason object lessons are indispensable in an infant school, consisting both of real substances and of pictures. the first lesson in paradise was of this kind, and we ought therefore to draw instruction from it. "and out of the ground the lord god formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them to adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever adam called every living creature, that was the name of it." chapter xvii physical education. _exercise--various positions--exercise blended with instruction--arithmetical and geometrical amusements_. * * * * * "would you make infants happy, give them variety, for novelty has charms that our minds can hardly withstand." * * * * * as an infant school may be regarded in the light of a combination of the school and nursery, the _art of pleasing_, forms a prominent part in the system; and as little children are very apt to be fretful, it becomes expedient to divert as well as teach there. if children of two years old and under are not diverted, they will naturally cry for their mothers: and to have ten or twelve children crying in the school, it is very obvious would put every thing into confusion. but it is possible to have two hundred, or even three hundred children assembled together, the eldest not more than six years of age, and yet not to hear one of them crying for a whole day. indeed i may appeal to the numerous and respectable persons who have visited infant schools, for the truth of this assertion; many of whom have declared, in my hearing, that they could not have conceived it possible that such a number of little children could be assembled together, and all be so happy as they had found them, the greater part of them being so very young. i can assure the reader, that many of the children who have cried heartily on being sent to school the first day or two, have cried as much on being kept at home, after they have been in the school but a very short time: and i am of opinion that when children are absent, it is generally the fault of the parents. i have had children come to school without their breakfast, because it has not been ready; others have come to school without shoes, because they would not be kept at home while their shoes were mending; and i have had others come to school half dressed, whose parents have been either at work or gossipping; and who, when they have returned home, have thought that their children were lost; but to their great surprise and joy, when they have applied at the school, they have found them there. need any thing more be advanced than these facts, to prove, that it is not school, or the acquirement of knowledge, that is disagreeable to children, but the system of injudicious instruction there pursued. children are anxious to acquire knowledge, and nothing can be more congenial to their taste than association with those of their own age; but we ought not to wonder that little children should dislike to go to school, when, as in most of the dames' schools, forty or fifty, or perhaps more, are assembled together in one room, scarcely large enough for one-third of that number, and are not allowed to speak to, or scarcely look at each other. in those places, i firmly believe, many, for the want of proper exercise become cripples, or have their health much injured, by being kept sitting so many hours; but as children's health is of the greatest consequence, it becomes necessary to remedy this evil by letting them have proper exercise, combined as much as possible, with instruction; to accomplish which many measures have been tried, but i have found the following to be the most successful. the children are desired to sit on their seats, with their feet out straight, and to shut each hand; and then ordered to count a hundred, or as many as may be thought proper, lifting up each hand every time they count one, and bringing each hand down again on their knees when they count another. the children have given this the name of blacksmith, and when asked why they called it blacksmith, they answered, because they hammered their knees with their fists, in the same way as the blacksmith hammers his irons with a hammer. when they have arrived at hundred (which they never fail to let you know by giving an extra shout), they may be ordered to stand up, and bring into action the joints of the knees and thighs. they are desired to add up one hundred, two at a time, which they do by lifting up each foot alternately, all the children counting at one time, saying, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, and so on. by this means, every part of the body is put in motion; and it likewise has this advantage that by lifting up each foot every time, they keep good time, a thing very necessary, as unless this was the case, all must be confusion. they also add up three at a time, by the same method, thus, three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and so on; but care must be taken not to keep them too long at one thing, or too long in one position, thus exercising the elbow joints, by pushing them out and drawing them back as far as possible. come here, my dear boy, look at baby's two hands, and his two little feet upon which baby stands; two thumbs and eight fingers together make ten; five toes on each foot the same number again. two arms and two shoulders, two elbows, two wrists, now bind up your knuckles, make two little fists; two legs and two ancles, two knees, and two hips. his fingers and toes have all nails on their tips. with his hands and his feet he can run, jump, and crawl, he can dance, walk, or caper, or play with his ball; take your hoop or your cart, and have a good race, and that will soon give you a fine rosy face. oh! what would my boy do without his two hands; and his two little feet upon which baby stands! they're the gift of kind heaven for you to enjoy, then be thankful to heaven, my dear little boy. having done a lesson or two this way, they are desired to put their arms out straight, and to say, one and one are two, two and one are three, three and one are four, four and one are five, five and one are six, six and two are eight; and in this way they go on until they are desired to stop. it should be observed, that all _graceful_ actions may be adopted. i am sorry to find, from visits to various schools, that the movements of the children have degenerated into buffoonery; they have been allowed to put themselves into the most ridiculous postures, and have thus raised objections which would not otherwise have been urged. as, however, the whole infant system is designed to make the _children think_, i would urge the _teachers_ to guard against their being automatons. let them mark every impropriety with promptitude, and correct it with judgment. i have specified these methods not as being the only ones practicable, or fit to be adopted, but merely, as hints to the judicious teacher, who will doubtless think of many others, conducive to the same end: and the more he can diversify them the better. it is the combination of amusement with instruction, which, in my opinion, renders the system so successful; and unimportant or improper even as it may appear to some, is of more real service in the management of young children, than all the methods of restraint and coercion, which have been hitherto but too generally pursued. the children may also learn the pence and multiplication tables, by forming themselves into circles around a number of young trees, where such are planted in the play-ground. for the sake of order, each class should have its own particular tree; that when they are ordered to the trees, every child may know which tree to go to; as soon as they are assembled around the trees, they are to join hands and walk round, every child saying the multiplication table, until they have finished it; they then let go hands, and put them behind, and for variety's sake, sing the pence table, the alphabet, hymns, &c. &c.; thus the children are gradually improved and delighted, for they call it play, and it is of little consequence what they call it, so long as they are edified, exercised, and made happy. this plan is calculated to impress the lessons on their memories, and is adapted for fine weather, when they can go out to play, as it is called. but as in wet or snowy weather, they cannot go out of the school, we then have recourse to the mode previously mentioned. besides it is necessary that children should have exercise in winter as well as in summer, in wet as well as in dry weather; for this purpose we have several swings in the school-room, made of cord only, on which the children are allowed to swing, two at a time. the time that they are permitted to be on the swing, is according to what they have to repeat. if it is the pence table, they say-- twenty pence are one and eightpence, that we can't afford to lose; thirty pence are two and sixpence, that will buy a pair of shoes. forty pence are three and fourpence, that is paid for certain fees; fifty pence are four and twopence, that will buy five pounds of cheese. sixty pence will make, five shillings, which, we learn is just a crown; seventy pence are five and tenpence, this is known throughout the town. eighty pence are six and eightpence, i'll always try to think of that; ninety pence are seven and sixpence, this will buy a beaver hat. a hundred pence are eight and fourpence, which is taught in th' infant school; eight pence more make just nine shillings, so we end this pretty rule.[a] [footnote a: a covered play-ground is desirable where practicable.] as soon as the table is thus gone through, the children who are on the swings get off, and others supply their places, until, probably, the pence table has been said twenty times; then we go on with the multiplication table, until the children have repeated as far as six times six are thirty-six; when the children on the swings get off and are succeeded by two more on each swing; they then commence the other part of the table, beginning at six times seven are forty-two, until they have finished the table. during this time it should be borne in mind, that all the children are learning, not only those on the swings, but those who are sitting in the school; and it is surprising to see with what alacrity the children will dispatch their other lessons, when it is a wet day, in order to get to the swings. in addition to the knowledge acquired by this method, it is admirably calculated to try their courage. many little boys and girls, who at first are afraid to get on the swings, will soon swing standing on one leg, and perform other feats with the greatest dexterity, at once showing their increased courage and greater activity. we generally let four or five children come to a swing, and those that can seat themselves first, are entitled to the first turn, for they are never lifted on. in the anxiety to get on the swing, some of them will perhaps get out of temper, especially those who are not disciplined; but when this is detected they are not allowed to swing that day, which soon makes them good-natured to each other, and very cautious not to get into a passion. thus, in some degree, their bad tempers are corrected, which is very desirable. it is a current remark, that bad workmen find fault with the tools; and lazy teachers find fault with the swings, because they must perpetually watch the children. we are so tinctured with the old plan of _rivetting_ the children to _seats_, that i despair of ever seeing the opposite plan become general in my time. as soon as two children are seated on each swing, to preserve order, the others retire (generally speaking) in the greatest good humour to their seats. some will, i know, be apt to exclaim, surely this is encouraging and fostering bad feelings--creating enmity and ill-will amongst the children; but i say, no, it is teaching them to feel a spirit of generous emulation, as distinguishable from that of ill-nature or envy. beside the swings, in many schools they have a very useful addition to the play-ground. i mean the gymnastic pole. although it is most proper for the master in the play-ground to relax altogether the brow of magisterial severity, yet there is no occasion for him to withdraw the influence of love. he will not prove a check to the enjoyment of the children, if, entering into the spirit of their innocent pastimes, he endeavours to heighten their pleasures by a judicious direction of their sports. among other amusements, which his ingenuity may suggest, i would mention a geometrical amusement, which is very practicable. first, let a certain number of children stand in a row. opposite to these let one or more children be placed as directors to order the change of figure. a straight line, we will suppose, is the first thing shown by the position of the children; the next thing to be formed is a _curve_, by the advancement of each end; then a half-circle,--a circle, by joining hands in a ring;--two equal parallel lines, by the division of the number in action; next a square,--triangle, &c. &c. these changes may either be made at the command of the master, or, as we before proposed, of one or more children acting as officers to direct these geometrical movements. had it been constantly borne in memory that god is the creator of the body of a child as well as of its mind; and that the healthy action of both is requisite for happiness and usefulness, more attention would have been paid to the due and proper exercise of children than has hitherto been done. he has implanted an instinctive impulse to activity in every young child, which displays itself in almost incessant motion, where there is perfect health, and when there is opportunity. to restrain this unnecessarily, is therefore to act in opposition to the laws of nature; and the end must be a certain injury to the child. to prevent this evil, and to act in obedience to these laws, the various actions of clapping the hands, folding the arms, twisting the fists, and various other motions have been introduced. by these means a spirit of restlessness, which would undoubtedly show itself under unnecessary restraints, is converted into a motive of obedience, and thus even a moral influence is produced, by what would appear a mere childish play. they may all be gone through with elegance and propriety: and no rude or indelicate action should be allowed. many masters are too free in making a show of these exercises to visitors, who are perhaps amused with them, but this is to divert them from their proper use. they were only invented to be introduced at intervals, when the children's attention began to flag, or to give them that proper exercise which their tender age required. how has everything connected with the infant system been burlesqued! and thus sensible persons have been led to despise infant education, which if rightly understood by them, would be seen to be one of the most powerful moral engines that can be put into action for the welfare of our fellow-creatures, especially of the poorer classes. chapter viii. music. _infant ditties--songs on natural history--moral lessons in verse--influence of music in softening of the feelings--illustrative anecdote_. * * * * * "music hath charms" * * * * * music has been found a most important means of _mental_ and _moral_ improvement. its application took place from my finding a great difficulty in teaching some children, especially the younger ones, to sound their letters; and hence i determined to set the alphabet to a simple tune. i sang it frequently to the children when they were low or dispirited, and although none attempted the same sounds at first, i had the satisfaction of observing unusual attention. my next effort was very injudicious; for i urged on them the imitation of these sounds before they were actually capable of so doing; and hence, as more reflection would have shewn, only discordance arose. having told them then to listen _only_, as they did at first, i soon discovered that having learned the tune through the proper organ--the ear, they were able to imitate it with the voice. we then by the same means marked the distinction between vowels and consonants with a tune that was longer and rather more difficult. as the monitor always pointed out the letters in succession while the children were singing, attention was excited and secured, and error effectually prevented, as correct time and tune could not be kept unless every child sung the right letter. success as to the alphabet led to the adoption of music in the teaching of arithmetic. this was available in two ways, first by combining with it physical exercise, and then by tasking the faculties of observation. the former was effected as follows: the children sang, one is the half of two, two is the half of four, three is the half of six, &c. &c., and then brought one hand down on the other alternately, without however making too much noise, so as to interrupt the time; the latter was accomplished by the arithmeticon, which has already been explained. a few specimens of the ditties thus used shall now be given; and several others, both hymns and moral songs are to be found in the manual, recently published by myself in conjunction with a friend. four seasons for human life. our days four seasons are at most, and infancy's the time of spring; oh! with what trouble, care, and cost, must we be taught to pray and sing. in summer as our growth proceeds, good fruit should hang on every branch; our roots be clear'd from evil weeds, as into knowledge we advance. our autumn is the season, when temptations do our minds assail. our fruits are proved in manhood; then let not sin, death, and hell prevail. for winter brings old age and death, if we've good fruits laid up in store; soon as we gasp our latest _breath_, we land on a _triumphant shore_. four seasons of the year. on march the twenty-first is spring, when little birds begin to sing; begin to build and hatch their brood, and carefully provide them food. summer's the twenty-first of june, the cuckoo changes then his tune; all nature smiles, the fields look gay, the weather's fair to make the hay. september, on the twenty-third, when sportsmen mark at ev'ry bird, autumn comes in; the fields are shorn, the fruits are ripe; so is the corn. winter's cold frosts and northern blasts, the season is we mention last; the date of which in _truth_ we must fix for december--twenty-first. five senses. all human beings must (with birds and beasts) to be complete, five senses have at least: the sense of hearing to the ear's confined; the eye, we know, for seeing is design'd; the nose to smell an odour sweet or ill; the tongue to taste what will the belly fill. the sense of feeling is in every part while life gives motion to a beating heart. the master's daily advice to his school. if you'd in wisdom's ways proceed, you intellectual knowledge need. let science be your guiding star, or from its path you'll wander far. 'tis science that directs the mind, the path of happiness to find. if _goodness_ added is to _truth_, 'twill bring reward to every youth. the good children's money-box. all pence by the generous deposited here, when holidays come i will equally share. among all good children attending this school, i should wish not to find a dunce or a fool. then listen, all you, who a prize hope to gain, attend to your books, and you'll not hope in vain. the master. the cow. come, children, listen to me now, and you shall hear about the cow; you'll find her useful, live or dead, whether she's black, or white, or red. when milk-maids milk her morn and night, she gives them milk so fresh and white; and this, we little children think, is very nice for us to drink. the curdled milk they press and squeeze, and so they make it into cheese; the cream they skim and shake in churns, and then it soon to butter turns. and when she's dead, her flesh is good, for _beef_ is our true english food; but though 'twill make us brave and strong, to eat too much we know is wrong. her skin, with lime and bark together, the tanner tans, and makes it leather; and without _that_ what should we do for soles to every boot or shoe? the shoemaker cuts it with his knife, and bound the tops are by his wife, and then he nails it to the last. and after sews it tight and fast. the hair that grows upon her back is taken, whether white or black, and mix'd with mortar, short or long, which makes it very firm and strong. the plast'rer spreads it with a tool, and this you'll find is just the rule, and when he's spread it tight and fast, i'm sure it many years will last. and last of all, if cut with care, her horns make combs to comb our hair; and so we learn--thanks to our teachers, that cows are good and useful creatures. the sheep. hark now to me, and silence keep, and we will talk about the sheep; for sheep are harmless, and we know that on their backs the wool does grow. the sheep are taken once a year, and plunged in water clean and clear; and there they swim, but never bite, while men do wash them clean and white. and then they take them, fat or lean, clip off the wool, both short and clean, and this is call'd, we understand, shearing the sheep, throughout the land. and then they take the wool so white, and pack it up in bags quite tight; and then they take those bags so full, and sell to men that deal in wool. the wool is wash'd and comb'd with hand, then it is spun with wheel and band; and then with shuttle very soon, wove into cloth within the loom. the cloth is first sent to be dyed; then it is wash'd, and press'd and dried; the tailor then cuts out with care the clothes that men and boys do wear. the horse. come, children, let us now discourse about the pretty noble horse; and then you soon will plainly see how very useful he must be. he draws the coach so fine and smart, and likewise drags the loaded cart, along the road or up the hill, though then his task is harder still. upon his back men ride with ease, he carries them just where they please; and though it should be many a mile, he gets there in a little while. with saddle on his back they sit, and manage him with reins and bit, the whip and spur they use also, when they would have him faster go. and be the weather cold or hot, as they may wish he'll walk or trot; or if to make more haste they need, will gallop with the greatest speed. when dead his shining skin they use, as leather for our boots and shoes; alive or dead, then, thus we see how useful still the horse must be. the dog. the cow, the sheep, the horse, have long, been made the subject of our song; but there are many creatures yet, whose merits we must not forget. and first the dog, so good to guard his master's cottage, house, or yard,-- dishonest men away to keep, and guard us safely while we sleep. for if at midnight, still and dark, strange steps he hears, with angry bark, he bids his master wake and see, if thieves or honest folks they be. at home, abroad, obedient still, his only guide his master's will; before his steps, or by his side, he runs or walks with joy and pride. he runs to fetch the stick or ball, returns obedient to the call; content and pleased if he but gains a single pat for all his pains. but whilst his merits thus we praise, pleased with his character and ways, this let us learn, as well we may, to love our teachers and obey. moral lesson.[a] [footnote a: the following tale, though not adapted for the younger children of an infant school, and too long to be committed to memory by the elder ones, might be read to such by the master, and would serve as an admirable theme for conversation. it is likewise well adapted as a tale for family circles.] the two halves. "what nice plum-cakes," said james to john, "our mother sends! is your's all gone?" "it is," john answered; "is not thine?" "no, john, i've saved one half of mine; "it was so large, as well as nice, i thought that it should serve for twice, had i eat all to-day, to-morrow i might have mourn'd such haste in sorrow; so half my cake i wisely took, and, seated in my favourite nook, enjoyed alone, the _double pleasure_, of present and of future treasure." "i, too," said john, "made up my mind this morning, when our mother kind sent down the cakes so nice and sweet, that i but half to-day would eat, and half i ate; the other half--" james stopp'd his brother with a laugh; "i know what you're about to say,-- the other half you gave away. now, brother, pray explain to me, the charms which you in _giving_ see. shew me how _feasting_ foes or friends can for your _fasting_ make amends." "a poor old man," said john, "came by, whose looks implored for charity. his eyes, bedimm'd with starting tears, his body bowed by length of years, his feeble limbs, his hoary hairs, were to my heart as silent prayers. i saw, too, he was hungry, though his lips had not informed me so. to this poor creature, james, i gave the half which i had meant to save. the lingering tears, with sudden start, ran down the furrows of his cheek, i knew he thank'd me in his heart, although he strove in vain to speak. the joy that from such acts we gain i'll try for your sake to explain. first, god is pleased, who, as you know, marks every action that we do; that god 'from whom all blessings flow,' so many james to me and you. _our mother_, next, had she but seen her gifts of kindness so employ'd, would _she_ not james, well pleased have been; and all my feelings then enjoy'd? _the poor old man_, was _he_ not pleased? must not his load of sorrow be, though but for one short moment, eased, to think, 'then some one feels for me.' but still you ask, of all this pleasure, how much will to _the giver_ fall? the whole, rich, undiminish'd treasure,-- _he_ feels, _he_ shares the joy of _all_. we eat the cake, and it is gone; what have we left to think upon? who's pleased by what we then have done? how many pray, james, more than one? the joys by sympathy supplied are many, great, and dignified. but do not on my word rely, whilst you, dear james, the fact may try; and if you do not find it true, i'll next time eat _both halves_ with you!" * * * * * it is desirable that the master should add instrumental to vocal music. he should be able to play on the violin, flute, or clarionet, but, as he must speak much, the former is to be preferred. such is the influence of the weather, that children are almost always dull on dull days, and then a little music is of great advantage. on wet days, when they cannot go into the play-ground, it assists them in keeping the step when they march, it cheers and animates their spirits, and, in some measure, compensates for their privations. it will also aid various evolutions. music may be employed, moreover, to soften the feelings, curb the passions, and improve the temper, and it is strange that it should not have been employed till the operation of the infant system, to which it is absolutely indispensable. when, for instance, after a trial by jury, as explained in a former page, the children have been disposed to harshness and severity, a soft and plaintive melody has produced a different decision. to recite one case; when i was organizing the dry-gate school in glasgow[a], a little girl in the gallery had lost of her ear-rings (which, by the way, like beads, is a very improper appendage, and ought by all means to be discouraged), and on discovering the fact, commenced a most piteous lamentation. i made inquiry for it immediately, while the children were seated in the gallery, but in vain; and i subsequently found it in the hands of a little girl at the bottom, who was attentively examining it, and who gave it me the moment it was demanded. on asking the children what was to be done in this case, they said she should have a pat of the hand. i then showed, that had she intended to steal it, she would have secreted it, which she did not, and that her attention was so absorbed by it, that she had not heard my inquiry; but one little boy was not satisfied; he said, "she kenned right weel it was nae her ain;" but after singing a simple and touching air, i was pleased to find his opinion changed. "perhaps, sir," he said, "ye may as weel forgie her this ance, as she is but a wee thing." [footnote a: this school has since become a very important normal school, from which many others have emanated, the head master being the one i originally instructed: mr. stowe, also, one of the directors, has applied the principles of the infant school system to the instruction of older children, which is called stowe's training system; being applied to juveniles, with great success. i know of no school, except the dublin normal schools, equal to those, and of no masters superior to those i have seen who have been taught there.] the music chosen for children should be easy and simple, fluent and varied. hymn tunes should be of a rather lively character, as the more dull and sombrous are not well adapted to the infant ear. airs for the tables or exercising songs are required to be very cheerful and inspiring, and then they tend to excite pleasure and liveliness, which should often be aimed at in an infant school. as children take much interest in singing, and readily learn verses by heart, so as to sing them, although not properly instructed in their meaning or rightly understanding them, singing has been considered by many persons the "soul of the system." this is a grievous error as regards the intellectual advancement of the children, and still worse as regards their health and that of the teacher. i have at times entered schools as a visitor when the mistress has immediately made the children show off by singing in succession a dozen pieces, as if they were a musical box. thus to sing without bounds is a very likely way to bring the mistress to an early grave, and injure the lungs of the dear little children. use as not abusing is the proper rule, tar all the new modes of teaching and amusing children that i have introduced; but it has often appeared to me that abuse it as much as possible was the rule acted upon. call upon the first singers of the day to sing in this manner, and where would they soon be? chapter xix. grammar. _method of instruction--grammatical rhymes_. * * * * * "a few months ago, mr. ---- gave his little daughter, h----, a child of five years old, her first lesson in english grammar; but no alarming book of grammar was produced on the occasion, nor did the father put on an unpropitious gravity of countenance. he explained to the smiling child the nature of a verb, a pronoun, and a substantive."--_edgeworth_. * * * * * it has been well observed, "that grammar is the first thing taught, and the last learnt." now, though it is not my purpose to pretend that i can so far simplify grammar, as to make all its rules comprehensible to children so young as those found in infant schools, i do think that enough may be imparted to them to render the matter more comprehensible, than it is usually found to be in after years. the great mystery of grammar results, in my opinion, from not making the children acquainted with the things of which the words used are the signs, and moreover, from the use of a number of hard words, which the children repeat without understanding. for instance, in the classification of words, or the parts of speech, as they are called, _nouns, substantives_, and _adjectives_, convey, as terms, no idea to the minds of children; and, in spite of the definitions by which their import is explained, remain to them as unintelligible as the language of magical incantation. that the children can easily comprehend the difference between words which express the names of things, and those which express their qualities, and between words which express actions, and those which express the nature of those actions, is undeniable; and this is just what should be taught in an infant school. in the first place, let the children be accustomed to repeat the names of things, not of any certain number of things set down on a lesson card, or in a book, but of any thing, and every thing, in the school-room, play-ground, &c.: next let them be exercised in telling something relating to those things--_their qualities_; as for instance, the school-room is _large, clean_, &c.,--the children are _quiet, good, attentive_, &c.--the pictures are _pretty_: the play-ground is _pleasant_, &c. having accustomed the children, in this manner, first to give you the _names_ of things, and then to observe and repeat something respecting them--you have gained two ends; you have, first, taught the children to be observant and discriminative; and, secondly, you have taught them to distinguish two distinct classes of words, or _names_ and _qualities_; and you may now, if you please, give them terms by which to distinguish these respective classes, viz. _substantives_ and _adjectives_. they will no longer be mysterious words, "signifying nothing," but recognized signs, by which the children will understand and express definite ideas. the next thing you have to teach them is, the distinction betwixt singular and plural, and, if you think proper, masculine and feminine; but before you talk to the children about _plural number_ and _masculine gender_, &c., let them be made acquainted with the realities of which these hard-sounding words are the signs. having made the classification of words clear and comprehensible, you next proceed to the second grand class of words, the verbs, and their adjuncts, the _adverbs_. with these you will proceed as with the former; let action be distinguished by words;--the children _walk, play, read, eat, run_; master _laughs, frowns, speaks, sings_; and so on; letting the children find their own examples; then comes the demand from the master for words expressing the manner of action. how do the children _walk?--slowly, quickly, orderly_. how do they _read, eat run!_ how does the master _laugh, speak, sing?_ the children now find you adverbs, and it will be quite time enough to give them terms for the classification they thus intuitively make, when they have a clear idea of what they are doing. when this end is attained, your children have some ideas of grammar, and those clear ones. there is no occasion to stop here. proceed, but slowly, and in the same method. the tenses of the verbs, and the subdivision into active, passive, and neuter, will require the greatest care and attention which the teacher can use, to simplify them sufficiently for the children's comprehension; as it will likewise enable them to understand the nature and office of the other classes of words. as, however, it is not my intention to write a grammar here, but merely to throw out a few hints on the subject, i shall leave the further development of the plan to the ingenuity of those who may think fit to adopt its principles, as above laid down. english grammar doth us teach, that it hath nine parts of speech;-- article, adjective, and noun, verb, conjunction, and pronoun, with preposition, and adverb, and interjection, as i've heard. the letters are just twenty-six, these form all words when rightly mix'd. the vowels are a, e, o, i, with u, and sometimes w and y. without the little vowels' aid, no word or syllable is made; but consonants the rest we call, and so of these we've mention'd all. three little words we often see, are articles,--_a, an_, and _the_. a noun's the name of any thing-- as _school_, or _garden, hoop,_ or _swing_. adjectives tell the kind of noun-- as _great, small, pretty, white,_ or _brown_. instead of nouns the pronouns stand, john's head, _his_ face, _my_ arm, _your_ hand. verbs tell of something being done-- to _read, write, count, sing, jump_, or _run_. how things are done the adverbs tell-- as _slowly, quickly, ill_, or _well_. conjunctions join the nouns together-- as men _and_ children, wind _or_ weather. a preposition stands before a noun, as _in_ or _through_ a door. the interjection shows surprise-- as, _oh!_ how pretty, _ah!_ how wise. the whole are called nine parts of speech, which, reading, writing, speaking teach. the articles. three little words we hear and see in frequent use, _a, an_, and _the_; these words so useful, though so small, are those which articles we call. the first two, _a_ and _an_, we use when speaking of one thing alone; for instance, we might wish to say an _oak_, a _man_, a _dog_, a _bone_. _the_ speaks of either one or more,-- the cow, the cows, the pig, the pigs, the plum, the plums (you like a score), the pear, the pears, the fig, the figs. an oak, a man; means _any_ oak, or _any_ man of all mankind; a dog, a bone, means _any_ dog, or _any_ bone a dog may find. this article we only use whenever it may be our wish to speak of some determined thing, as thus;--_the_ bird, _the_ ox, _the_ fish. by which we mean not _any_ bird, that flying in the air may be, or _any_ ox amongst the herd, or _any_ fish in stream or sea. but some one certain bird or ox, or fish (let it be which it may) of which we're speaking, or of which we something mean to write or say. remember these things when you see the little words, a, an, and the. these words so useful, though so small are those which articles we call. nothing can be more absurd than to compel young children to commit to memory mere abstract rules expressed in difficult and technical language. such requires a painful effort of the mind, and one calculated to give a disgust against learning. _grammar was formed on language and not language by grammar_, and from this it necessarily follows, that children should acquire a considerable store of words from a knowledge of reading and of things, before their minds are taxed by abstract rules. to be thoroughly understood they require words to be compared with words, and one word to be compared with another; and how can this be done without the memory being amply supplied with them previously. such simple instruction as this chapter directs may easily be given; but to attempt much more would be like endeavouring to build an elegant and ornamental structure before you had collected materials to build with. chapter xx. the elliptical plan of teaching. _method explained--its success_. * * * * * "he tried each art."--_goldsmith_. * * * * * all persons acquainted with children are aware of the torpor of some minds, and of the occasional apathy of others, and to this it is necessary to provide some counteraction. this is done effectually by what is called the elliptical plan, according to which, words are omitted in a narrative or poem repeated by the teacher, for the purpose of being supplied by the children. these exercises are very agreeable to the children, and by them some features of the mental character become conspicuous. children are usually sensible of their need of instruction, but if they can make it appear that any of their statements are original, their delight is especially manifest. there seems, too, a dislike at first, to take any trouble to arrive at the truth; careless children will therefore guess several times; but an observant teacher will at once perceive that there is no effort of the understanding, point it out to the child, and thus prevent its recurrence. dr. gilchrist observes, in a letter sent to me, "you have now the whole method before you, and i shall boldly stake all my hard-earned fame, as a practical orientalist, on the salutary consequences that will spring from the adoption of short elliptical tales at your interesting institution." my usual practice with respect to the elliptical method of teaching, is, to deliver some appropriate, simple, extemporaneous tale, leaving out but few words at first, and those such as must obviously strike the children; as they get used to the plan, i make the omissions more frequent, and of words less obvious. the following specimens will render the whole plain to the understandings of my readers. a gardener's youngest[a] ---- was walking among the fruit[b] ---- of his father's[c] ----, he saw a little[d] ---- fly up and sit on one of the[e]---- of the trees; the[f] ---- lifted a stone, and was going to[g]---- it at the poor[h]---- which seemed to[i]---- most sweetly thus: my[k] ---- is[l] ---- of moss and hair, the[m] ---- are[n]---- and sheltered there; when[o]---- soon shall my young[p] ---- fly far from the[q]---- school[r]---- eye." the[s]---- eldest[t]---- who understood the[u]---- of birds came up at that moment, and[v]---- out, throw down the[w] ----, you hard-hearted[x] ---- and don't[y] ---- the innocent[z] ---- in the middle of his song; are you not[aa]---- with his swelling red-breast, his beautiful sharp eye, and above all with the[bb] ---- of his notes, and the familiar[cc] ---- he assumes, even in the[dd] ---- of a[ee]---- like you? ask your youngest[ff] ---- here if she remembers the[gg]---- which her good[hh] ---- read to her yesterday of a very[ii]---- boy, who was very[kk]---- to a harmless green[ll] ---- which he caught[mm] ---- for hunger, among the[nn]---- in the[oo] ---- of winter. [footnote a: son] [footnote b: trees] [footnote c: garden] [footnote d: bird] [footnote e: branches] [footnote f: boy] [footnote g: throw] [footnote h: bird] [footnote i: sing] [footnote k: nest] [footnote l: built] [footnote m: eggs] [footnote n: laid] [footnote o: hatched] [footnote p: ones] [footnote q: roaming] [footnote r: boy's] [footnote s: gardener's] [footnote t: son] [footnote u: notes] [footnote v: called] [footnote w: stone] [footnote x: rogue or boy] [footnote y: disturb or hurt] [footnote z: bird] [footnote aa: pleased or delighted] [footnote bb: sweetness or melody] [footnote cc: air] [footnote dd: presence] [footnote ee: naughty boy] [footnote ff: sister] [footnote gg: story] [footnote hh: mother, aunt &c.] [footnote ii: naughty or good] [footnote kk: cruel or kind] [footnote ll: finch or linnet] [footnote mm: perishing or dying] [footnote nn: snow] [footnote oo: depth or middle.] the following little verses upon the same principle have been found to answer extremely well, by putting one child in the rostrum, and desiring him purposely to leave out those words that are marked, the other children will fill them up as he goes. i must pray both ---- and day. before ---- eat i must entreat, that ---- would bless to me ---- meat. i must not play on god's own day, but i must hear his word with fear. it is a sin to steal a pin much more to steal a greater thing. i must work, and i must pray, that god will feed me day by day. all honest labour, god will bless; let me not live in idleness. i will not be or rude or wild, i must not be a naughty child. i will not speak of others ill, but ever bear to all good-will. i'd rather die than tell a lie, lest i be lost eternally. i'll ---- my bread from ---- to door, rather ---- steal my neighbour's store. i must not kill a little fly; it is an act of cruelty. i must not lie, i must not feign, i must not take god's name in vain. nor may my tongue say what is wrong; i will not sin a world to win, in my bible i am to read, and trust in god in all my need. for christ alone my soul can save, and raise my body from the grave. oh! blessed saviour, take my heart and let not me from thee depart. lord, grant that i in faith may die, and live with thee above the sky. creation. god made the ---- that looks so blue, god made the ---- so green, god made the ---- that smell so sweet, in ---- colours seen. god made the ---- that shines so bright, and gladdens all i see; it comes to give us ---- and light, how ---- should we be! god made the ---- bird to fly, how ---- has she sung; and though she ---- so very high, she won't ---- her young. god made the ---- to give nice milk, the horse for ---- to use; i'll treat them ---- for his sake, nor dare his gifts abuse. god made the ---- for my drink, god made the ---- to swim, god made the ---- to bear nice fruit, which does my ---- so nicely suit; o how should i ---- him! "o lord, how manifest are thy works; in wisdom hast thou made them all!"--psalm civ. . * * * * * i subjoin, as an exercise for teachers themselves, the following hymn, as one calculated to induce reflections on the scenes of nature, and direct the mind to that being who is the source of all excellence! hast ---- beheld ---- glorious through all ---- skies his circuit run, at rising morn, ---- closing day, and when he beam'd his noontide say, didst ---- e'er attentive the evening cloud, ---- morning dew? or, after ----, the watery bow rise in the ---- a beauteous ----? when darkness had o'erspread the ---- hast thou e'er seen the ---- arise, and with a mild and placid ---- shed lustre o'er the face of night? hast ---- e'er wander'd o'er the plain, and view'd the fields and waving ----, the flowery mead, ---- leafy grove, where all ---- harmony ---- love. hast thou e'er trod the sandy ---- and ---- the restless ---- roar, when roused by some tremendous ---- it's billows rose ---- dreadful form? hast thou beheld the ---- stream thro' nights dark gloom, ---- sudden gleam, while the bellowing thunder's ---- roll'd rattling ---- the heaven's profound? hast thou e'er ---- the cutting gale, the sleeting shower, ---- the biting hail; beheld ---- snow o'erspread the the water bound ---- icy chains? hast thou the various beings ---- that sport ---- the valley green, that ---- warble on the spray, or wanton in the sunny ----? that shoot along ---- briny deep, or ---- ground their dwellings keep; that thro' the ---- forest range, or frightful wilds ---- deserts strange? hast ---- the wondrous scenes survey'd that all around thee ---- display'd? and hast ---- never raised thine to him ---- bade these scenes arise? 'twas god who form'd the concave ---- and all the glorious orbs ---- high; ---- gave the various beings birth, that people all the spacious ----. 'tis ---- that bids the tempests and rolls the ---- thro' ---- skies: his voice the elements ---- thro' all the ---- extends his sway. his goodness ---- his creatures share, but man is his peculiar ----. then, while they all proclaim ---- praise, let ---- his ---- the loudest ----. the elliptical plan has been found to be most successful, and has been applied with equal success in schools for older children, and also children of another grade. messrs. chambers, i believe, are the only persons, as far as i know, who have the honesty to acknowledge the source from whence this plan was taken. chapter xxi. remarks on schools. _national schools--british and foreign societies--sunday schools--observations_. * * * * * "is it then fitting that one soul should pine for want of culture in this favour'd land? that spirits of capacity divine perish, like seeds upon the desert sand? that needful knowledge, in this age of light, should not by birth be every briton's right?" _southey_. * * * * * although it has been the special design of the present work to speak of the first efforts of _art_ in assisting the proper development of the mental and moral faculties, i shall take the liberty of indulging in a few remarks on the methods at present adopted in the more advanced stages of education, as seen in our national and sunday schools. i need, i am sure, offer no other apology for so doing, than the fact that it is in these institutions the infant poor must complete their education; it is in these schools, the budding faculties must either ripen or perish; and the moral principles become confirmed or weakened. certain i am, that it is the wish of all concerned in these praiseworthy institutions _to do their best_ for the attainment of this object--the welfare and improvement of the rising generation of the poor classes; and therefore i the less reluctantly offer a few thoughts on the subject, which it is my humble opinion may not be altogether useless. with regard to national schools, i must say, there is too much form, and too little of the spirit of instruction to be found in their management: the minor faculties are attended to in preference to the higher ones; it is the memory alone which is called into action; the understanding is suffered to lie in a state of torpid inactivity. their lessons, their plan of using them, and their discipline altogether, are of that monotonous nature, that the children always seem to me to be dosing over them. i know it will be pleaded that the number to be taught at once, renders this defect unavoidable; that it is impossible to teach a large body of children, in such a way as to secure the attention and activity of the whole. and it is so far true, as to its being impossible to detect and reform every idle pupil, who finds an opportunity of indulging his idleness in the divided attention of his teacher; but i do think, if it be impossible to cure the evil, it may be in a great degree prevented. make your system interesting, lively, and inspiriting, and your scholars will neither be able nor willing to slumber over it. every one knows what an effect is produced on the physical faculties by a succession of the same sound; for instance, by the long continued chiming of a single bell; it induces a drowsiness which we find it impossible to resist, except by turning our attention to another thing; but let a number of bells strike out into a merry peal, how quickly we are aroused, how lively we become, whilst their various _changes_ secure the attention and interest which their pleasing and spirited tones first excited. and just so it is with the mind in the matters of education; you must give a variety of tones, a newness of aspect to your lessons, or you will never be able to keep up a lively attention in your scholars. for this purpose i would particularly recommend to the attention of all concerned, the chapters in this volume on geometry, conversation, pictures, and likewise that on the elliptical method. by adopting the plan recommended in these chapters, the children will have something to do, and to do that something they must be _active_. the first object of the teacher is to excite a thirst for knowledge; not to pour unwelcome information into the mind. it will probably be said, that however well adapted the plan recommended may be for the infantine scholars for whom it was designed, yet, it does not follow that it may be equally advantageous for those of a more advanced age; and if by this it is meant, that the very same lessons, &c., are not equally applicable in both cases, i perfectly agree with the truth of the objection; but it is the _principle_ of education that i recommend, and would affirm to be as applicable to children of the most advanced age, as to those of the youngest. and i may further add that unless this is done, these schools will not be in a proper state to receive our children, so as to carry on the cultivation of all the faculties, instead of the memory only. it is not sufficient to store the memory, we must give employment to the understanding. it is not sufficient to talk to the children of piety and of goodness; we must present them with a living example of both, and secure, as far as possible, an imitation of such example. as applicable to sunday schools, i would particularly recommend the use of picture lessons on scripture subjects, for the use of the junior classes, to be used as a sort of text for conversation, suited to the state of their mental faculties. i am convinced that the knowledge acquired by this method is likely to make a deeper and more lasting impression, than that imparted in a less interesting mode. nor should the lessons on natural history be neglected, in my humble opinion, in the system of sunday school instruction; inasmuch as the more the children know of the wonders of creation, the greater must be their reverence of the almighty creator; in addition to which it will enable the teachers to supply variety, a thing so agreeable, and, indeed, indispensable, in the instruction of children. for these reasons, i think it could not justly be considered as either a misemployment or profanation of the sabbath-day. for the elder children, moreover, it would be advisable to have occasional class lectures, simplified for the purpose, on astronomy, natural history, &c.; and although it might be unadvisable to occupy the hours of the sabbath-day with the delivery of them, they might be given, on some week-day evening, and should be made the medium of reward to good behaviour; such children as had misbehaved themselves being proscribed from attending. when thus seen in the light of a privilege, they would not fail to be interesting to the little auditors, as well as conducive to good behaviour. sunday schools should not be too large, nor should children remain in them too long. i have observed some instances, when this has been neglected, of choices being made, and connections formed, which must be often very prejudicial. it is with some degree of reluctance and apprehension, i touch upon another topic--that of religious doctrine. as schools for gratuitous instruction have been established by most of the religious sects extant, it is obvious that some dissimilarity of sentiment on religions subjects must exist, as imparted in such schools. let it not be supposed, that i would cast a censure on any religious body, for establishing a school devoted to such a blessed purpose. on the contrary, i rejoice to see, that however various their theories may be, their opinion of christian practice, as evinced in such actions, is the same. but one thing i would say, to each and to all, let a prominence be given to those fundamental truths of love and goodness which christianity inculcates. let the first sounds of religion which salute the ears of infancy, be that heavenly proclamation which astonished and enraptured the ears of the wakeful shepherds, "peace on earth and good-will towards men." it was the herald-cry by which salvation was ushered into the world, and surely no other can be so proper for introducing it into the minds of children. i must candidly own, that i have occasionally witnessed a greater desire to teach particular doctrines, than the simple and beautiful truths which form the spirit of religion; and it is against this practice i have presumed to raise a dissentient voice. the conductors of schools, in connexion with the british and foreign school society, have generally spoken more highly of the infant system than others, and this is certainly to be attributed to more congeniality, since in them the mental powers are more fully exercised, and there is a greater variety in the instruction given. the only objection i can discover to them, is one that lies equally against the national schools--i mean the opportunities afforded for monitorial oppression; but this may be obviated in both cases by the judgment and vigilance of the teachers. it should be added, that schools of both kinds demand occasional inspection from those intimately acquainted with the systems avowedly adopted, as they appear very different in different places. i will only mention further on this topic, that many schools are too large. no infant school, i conceive, should exceed , nor should a national or british and foreign school exceed , when under the care of one master. one half of these numbers would be much better than the whole, and tend greatly to the success of the schools; but funds are so difficult to raise, from the apathy shown by persons in general to the instruction of the poor, and therefore the schools are so few in number, that it is absolutely requisite to place as great a number of children as possible under one master, that expense may be saved. when will this sad state of things be changed, and the country at large see that the noblest object it can ever attempt is, to rear up its whole population to intelligence, virtue, and piety? in conclusion, i would observe, that as the foregoing remarks have been kindly made, in such a manner, it is my hope, they will all be received. it is most gratifying to me to be able to add, that since the above remarks were written, great improvements have been made in national schools, a large portion of the public attention has been lately drawn to the subject, and it is almost universally admitted that the present system is capable of considerable improvement. this must be gratifying to those persons who have borne the heat and burthen of the day. the national society are taking measures to improve their systems, and also by forming diocesan societies to establish normal schools for the instruction of teachers on improved principles throughout the country. i would to god the church of england had done this long ago; she would have had fewer enemies, and could now have put on a bolder front. i trust in god that even now it is not too late, and that circumstances may transpire to render her efforts in this sacred cause doubly effective. she has lately made a noble stand in defence of principle; this will have its proper effect; but she must not stop there, for the enemy is in the field; and though he is quiet for a time, the many-headed dragon is not crushed. the utmost vigilance will be necessary to counteract the wiliness of the serpent; real improvements in education must be adopted; the books used in her schools must be revised and improved; a larger amount of knowledge must be given to the poorer portion of her sons, and then a beneficial reaction will not be far distant. she has done much, but she has much more to do. if she does not pre-occupy the ground, there are others that will. dependence upon the divine will, sound discretion, and christian principle, must be her guide; goodness must be her fortress, and truth her finger post, and then i for one perceive that she will not fail, for the bulk of her people are still favourable to her, and will rise up in her defence, when their assistance is required; and if i mistake not the signs of the times, there will be work for the thinking portion of the laity soon cut out, work which i fear the clergy cannot, or will not do, but which, nevertheless, must be done. god grant that it may be done well, whoever may be the instruments. chapter xxii. hints on nursery education. _introduction to botany--first lessons in natural history--first truths of astronomy--geographical instruction--conclusion_. * * * * * "'tis on his mother's bosom the babe learns his first lessons; from her smile he catches the glow of affection; and by her frown, or her gentle sighs he persuaded to give up what his ignorance or selfishness prompt him with pertinacity to retain. happy where this sweet, this powerful influence is well directed,--where the mother's judgment guides her affectionate feelings."--_taylor_ * * * * * many persons, eminent by their charitable acts, and who express themselves generally desirous of aiding in any plan which may contribute to the improvement and happiness of the poorer classes, have, nevertheless, been unwilling to assist in the establishment of infant schools, fearful that the superior method pursued in these schools should render the children educated therein, much better informed than the children of the richer classes, who might thus be supplanted in numerous lucrative and honourable situations in after-life. from this circumstance one of the two following conclusions must be drawn; either that the system of education pursued in the higher schools is very faulty and imperfect, or that the fears of those persons are entire groundless. if the first be true, then it cannot be denied that the consequences feared by the richer classes must necessarily take place, if, either from prejudice or apathy, they continue the same faulty and imperfect method of education, which, by the expression of these fears, they positively declare is usually pursued in the higher schools; but the remedy is easy. let the same good principles of tuition be introduced into nurseries, and into those schools to which the children of the rich are sent, and the latter will not fail to maintain their patrimonial ranks in society. they need then have no fear least the poorer classes should become too intellectual, but, on the contrary, they will soon find that their own welfare, security, and happiness will not only be insured, but will increase in proportion as the poorer classes gain knowledge; for by the method of instruction pursued in the _infant schools_, the knowledge there acquired is necessarily accompanied by the practice of industry, sobriety, honesty, benevolence, and mutual kindness; in fine, by all the moral and religious virtues. that the system of instruction recommended in the foregoing pages is equally applicable to the children of the rich as to those of the poor, there can be no doubt; and it might be adopted either in schools established on its principles or in the nursery. it is, indeed, obvious that it might be carried to a much greater extent, where the means of so doing would not be wanting. many things might be taught, which it is neither advisable nor practicable to teach in the schools established for the instruction of poor children. whilst the elements of number, form, and language, may be taught by the means and after the manner recommended in the preceding chapters on the respective subjects, there are other branches of knowledge which might enter into the scope of nursery instruction with great advantage to the children. as an introduction to _botany_, i would make the children acquainted with the progress of vegetation, _not from words, but from observation_. i would have three or four garden-pots filled with mould, introduced into the nursery at a proper season of the year; the children should be asked, what is in the pots.--"dirt," or "mould," will of course be the reply. they should then be shewn the seeds which are to be deposited in the mould, and assuming in the eyes of the children a prophetic character, the mother or governess should inform them of the process of vegetation, and that about a certain time a pretty flower will make its appearance in the pots: the seeds should then be deposited in the mould, and the pots placed in a proper situation. it would not be improper to let the children themselves sow the seed; thus convincing them of their power of being useful, and becoming the instrument of so great a wonder, as the transformation of a seed into a flower. during the time the seed is lying unperceived beneath the mould, the children should frequently be sent to look "if the pretty flower has come up," or questioned as to what they were told concerning it. at length the green shoot will make its appearance, just peeping above the mould, to the no small surprise and gratification of the little observers. they will mark with attentive eagerness the progress of its growth, the appearance of the bud, and the gradual development of "the pretty flower," till they are fully convinced of the wisdom of the parent or teacher who foretold all which has happened, and made acquainted with the process of vegetation, not from words, but from observation. certain it is, that such a lesson could not be wholly useless. in the first place it might be made the means of impressing them with ideas of the almighty power, highly conducive to piety; secondly, it would beget a habit of observation; thirdly, it would be likely to produce a love of flowers and the vegetable world, favourable to their future pursuits in the science of botany; and, lastly, it would inspire their little breasts with a love and respect for the parents or teachers who were wise and kind enough to teach them so many true and wonderful things. as an efficient and amusing introduction to _natural history_, i would have every nursery provided with a microscope, by means of which the minds of the children might be excited to wonder and admiration at the amazing beauty and perfection of the insect world, and the astonishing construction of various substances, as seen through this instrument. so far would this be from begetting habits of cruelty, that it would be very likely to check them. many children who would be loath to torture a large animal, such as a cat, a dog, or a bird, feel no compunction at ill-using a fly, because it appears to them so insignificant an animal; but had they once witnessed, by means of a microscope, the wonderful and perfect conformation of the insect, i am persuaded they would be less inclined to make the distinction. various devices might be made use of to teach the first truths of _astronomy_. so simple a device as an apple, with a wire run through its centre, turned round before a candle, might serve to explain the phenomena of day and night; whilst the orrery, with the accompaniment of a simple and familiar lecture--(it should be much more so, indeed, than any i have heard or read)--would make them acquainted with those stupendous facts which strike us with as astonishment and awe. it has been well observed by dr. young, with respect to the wonders of astronomy-- "in little things we search out god--in great he seizes us." one thing i would here notice--that it should be a constant practice to remind the children, that in the apple and the orrery, they see only a resemblance to the earth and the heavenly bodies, that _they_ are vast in size and distance, beyond their comprehension; at the same time leading them to an actual observation of the heavens by means of a telescope. this would be a high treat to the children, and productive of correct notions, which are but too apt to be lost where we are under the necessity of teaching by signs so infinitely unlike, in size and nature, as the candle and the apple, and the brass balls and wires of the orrery, to the earth and the heavenly orbs. for giving the children their first lessons in _geography_, i would have a floor-cloth in every nursery, painted like a map, but of course not filled up so perfectly as maps for adults necessarily are. it should contain a correct delineation of the position of a certain space of the globe, we will say, for instance, of england; let the children then be told to proceed from a certain spot, to go through certain counties, towns, &c., and to fetch a piece of cloth from yorkshire, or a knife from sheffield, cheese from cheshire, butter from dorset, or lace from huntingdonshire, &c., &c. the lessons thus given would be at once amusing and instructive both to the governess and children. if preferred, these maps might be painted of a less size, to cover a table. no difficulty would be found to get a set of such table-covers or floor-cloths painted, if the public would once encourage the plan. there are now large skeleton maps published, which have merely the principal cities, towns, and rivers, &c., marked down, so as not to present too many objects to confuse the young eye. there are also picture maps in which the chief productions of a country, both vegetable and animal, are delineated in their proper places. these would form a great aid in nursery instruction, and also for an infant school. let the great truth be ever borne in mind, that what is seen by the eye is more quickly understood and more certainly remembered, than what is merely described or made known in words. i would also have an oblong tray made to hold water, large enough to cover a table. in this i would fasten pieces of cork, cut out in the shape of land, according to the best maps, while other small bits of cork should represent the mountains and hills on the surface of the respective islands. by application to the toy-makers, a sufficient number of animals might be got to stock the respective islands, &c., with their appropriate inhabitants; whilst the manufactures, and many of the natural products of the different places, might be readily supplied by the ingenuity of the parent or governess. a little boat should then be provided, and a voyage to a given part undertaken; various islands might be touched at, and various commodities taken on board or exchanged, according to the mercantile instructions the children should receive; whilst brief accounts might at first be read or given of the climate, productions, and inhabitants of the respective places, till the little scholar should be able to conduct the voyage, purchase or exchange commodities, and give an account of the various countries and their inhabitants, &c., by himself. certain i am that more might be acquired, by this toothed, of geographical knowledge, in one week, than by the old method in a twelvemonth: and what the children did learn they would always remember. i might extend these suggestions to the size of a small volume, had i space to do so; but the limits of the present one forbid; at a future period, should my active employments permit, i may resume the subject of _nursery hints_ in an extended and separate form. there are, indeed, many excellent works already published on the subject; but as by the suggestions and contributions of many, every plan is likely to be perfected, no one is justified in withholding any thing likely to promote the desired object. a due improvement of these advantages will make the progress of the higher classes more than commensurate with that of the lower. it is obvious, that the former have resources which cannot be obtained by the latter. they have the means, too, of availing themselves of all improvements in education, of engaging the most intelligent and efficient instructors, and of frequently changing the scene for their children, and consequently the objects which come under their observation. which, i ask, is the more honourable course,--to object, as some do, to the education of the infant poor, lest they should learn too much, or to improve, then, the opportunities they have, by which they and their children they surpass all others? a few words ought to be added on discipline at home. it is not uncommon to hear parents, in all classes of society say, "that child is too much for me. i cannot manage him at all." we should think him a most unpatriotic englishman who should say the french are too strong for us, we cannot beat them; but very far more absurd and truly unparental it is to confess that a mere child is master of its parents. a grown person and an infant, what a contrast! true it is, that many a child has become very unmanageable, but this may always be traced to early neglect. if from the earliest infancy the young mind is trained to little acts of obedience, they will soon become habitual and pleasant to perform; but if improper indulgence and foolish kindness be practised towards children, they must, of course, grow up peevish, fretful, and ill-tempered, obstinate, saucy, and unmanageable. "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap." let this truth be ever engraved upon the minds of all parents. a constant exercise of parental love in allowing all that is fit and proper, and a firm and judicious use of parental authority, in strictly refusing and forbidding all that is unsuitable or wrong, should harmoniously unite their power in training up the young. punishments, as a last resource, ought to be used; but never in a spirit of anger, wrath, or revenge. if administered calmly and mildly they will have a double power. every wilful offence of a child seems to say, "correct me, but with judgment." it may be painful to a parent to put on the "graver countenance of love," but _true parental love_ will always do it. oh that all parents in every rank of life saw and acted upon the great truth, that the noblest object that they can present to themselves, and the greatest obligation that is laid upon them, is to rear up their children to intelligence, virtue, and piety; to make them good rather than great, for if they are the former, they will assuredly be the latter in its highest and truest sense.[a] [footnote a: should the reader be pleased with this volume, i may refer to another work of mine just published, entitled "a system for the education of the young."] * * * * * having now finished all that i have to say on infant schools, i would, in conclusion, breathe forth a sincere petition to the throne of divine truth and goodness, for the prosperity and spread of the system; in which i am sure i shall be joined by all who have been convinced of its beneficial effects in promoting the present and everlasting welfare of human beings. mysterious are thy ways, o god; yet who was ever disappointed that asked of thee in a right spirit? prosper, then, thy work which is begun in the world, we beseech thee, o lord; may thy gracious providence so encircle and protect the rising generation, that there may be no more complaining in our streets. protect them, o lord, from the many dangers that surround them, as soon as they draw their breath in this vale of tears, and put into the hearts of those who have the means to consider the state of the infant poor, to give them the assistance they need. grant that thy blessed example may be followed by many, for thou didst desire that children should come unto thee, and not be forbidden, and thou didst take them up in thine arms and bless them, declaring, that of such is the kingdom of heaven. may thy creatures, therefore, not be ashamed to notice little children, but co-operate, hand and heart with each other, and endeavour to teach them all good. may difference of sentiment and opinion be laid aside and forgotten; and may all join hand and heart in endeavouring to rescue the infant race from danger; and so these tender plants may be nurtured with the dew of thy divine blessing, and be thus made fit subjects for thy heavenly kingdom, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. may thy divine influence descend abundantly upon all those who have hitherto turned their attention to infant children; may they feel great pleasure in doing good; may they receive thy grace and protection abundantly; and when their days of probation are ended, may they find a place in thy heavenly mansions, and there glorify thee throughout the boundless ages of eternity. amen.[a] [footnote a: this prayer written more than thirty years ago. the reader will see a great portion of the prayer has been answered; the subject has been mooted in parliament; the government have mooted the question of education; and even the sovereign has recommended attention to it in a speech from the throne. this feeling only wants a right direction given to it, and all will be well.] the teacher. * * * * * moral influences employed in the instruction and government of the young. a new and revised edition. by jacob abbott. with engravings. . entered, according to act of congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six, by harper & brothers, in the clerk's office of the district court of the southern district of new york. preface. this book is intended to detail, in a familiar and practical manner, a system of arrangements for the organization and management of a school, based on the employment, so far as is practicable, of _moral influences_, as a means of effecting the objects in view. its design is, not to bring forward new theories or new plans, but to develop and explain, and to carry out to their practical applications such principles as, among all skillful and experienced teachers, are generally admitted and acted upon. of course it is not designed for the skillful and experienced themselves, but it is intended to embody what they already know, and to present it in a practical form for the use of those who are beginning the work, and who wish to avail themselves of the experience which others have acquired. although moral influences are the chief foundations on which the power of the teacher over the minds and hearts of his pupils is, according to this treatise, to rest, still it must not be imagined that the system here recommended is one of persuasion. it is a system of authority--supreme and unlimited authority--a point essential in all plans for the supervision of the young; but it is authority secured and maintained as far as possible by moral measures. there will be no dispute about the propriety of making the most of this class of means. whatever difference of opinion there may be on the question whether physical force is necessary at all, every one will agree that, if ever employed, it must be only as a last resort, and that no teacher ought to make war upon the body, unless it is proved that he can not conquer through the medium of the mind. in regard to the anecdotes and narratives which are very freely introduced to illustrate principles in this work, the writer ought to state that, though they are all substantially true--that is, all except those which are expressly introduced as mere suppositions, he has not hesitated to alter very freely, for obvious reasons, the unimportant circumstances connected with them. he has endeavored thus to destroy the personality of the narratives without injuring or altering their moral effect. from the very nature of our employment, and of the circumstances under which the preparation for it must be made, it is plain that, of the many thousands who are in the united states annually entering the work, a very large majority must depend for all their knowledge of the art, except what they acquire from their own observation and experience, on what they can obtain from books. it is desirable that the class of works from which such knowledge can be obtained should be increased. some excellent and highly useful specimens have already appeared, and very many more would be eagerly read by teachers, if properly prepared. it is essential, however, that they should be written by experienced teachers, who have for some years been actively engaged and specially interested in the work; that they should be written in a very practical and familiar style, and that they should exhibit principles which are unquestionably true, and generally admitted by good teachers, and not the new theories peculiar to the writer himself. in a word, utility and practical effect should be the only aim. contents. chapter i. interest in teaching. source of enjoyment in teaching.--the boy and the steam-engine.--his contrivance.--his pleasure, and the source of it.--firing at the mark.--plan of clearing the galleries in the british house of commons.--pleasure of experimenting, and exercising intellectual and moral power.--the indifferent and inactive teacher.--his subsequent experiments; means of awakening interest.--offenses of pupils. --different ways of regarding them. teaching really attended with peculiar trials and difficulties.-- . moral responsibility for the conduct of pupils.-- . multiplicity of the objects of attention. chapter ii. general arrangements. objects to be aimed at in the general arrangements.--systematizing the teacher's work.--necessity of having only one thing to attend to at a time. . whispering and leaving seats.--an experiment.--method of regulating this.--introduction of the new plan.--difficulties.--dialogue with pupils.--study-card.--construction and use. . mending pens.--unnecessary trouble from this source.--degree of importance to be attached to good pens.--plan for providing them. . answering questions.--evils.--each pupil's fair proportion of time.--questions about lessons.--when the teacher should refuse to answer them.--rendering assistance.--when to be refused. . hearing recitations.--regular arrangement of them.--punctuality.--plan and schedule.--general exercises.--subjects to be attended to at them. general arrangements of government.--power to be delegated to pupils.--gardiner lyceum.--its government.--the trial.--real republican government impracticable in schools.--delegated power.--experiment with the writing-books.--quarrel about the nail.--offices for pupils.--cautions.--danger of insubordination.--new plans to be introduced gradually. chapter iii. instruction. the three important branches.--the objects which are really most important.--advanced scholars.--examination of school and scholars at the outset.--acting on numbers.--extent to which it may be carried.--recitation and instruction. . recitation.--its object.--importance of a thorough examination of the class.--various modes.--perfect regularity and order necessary. --example.--story of the pencils.--time wasted by too minute an attention to individuals.--example.--answers given simultaneously to save time.--excuses.--dangers in simultaneous recitation.--means of avoiding them.--advantages of this mode.--examples.--written answers. . instruction.--means of exciting interest.--variety.--examples.--showing the connection between the studies of school and the business of life.--example from the controversy between general and state governments.--mode of illustrating it.--proper way of meeting difficulties.--leading pupils to surmount them.--true way to encourage the young to meet difficulties.--the boy and the wheel-barrow.--difficult examples in arithmetic. proper way of rendering assistance.--( .) simply analyzing intricate subjects.--dialogue on longitude.--( .) making previous truths perfectly familiar.--experiment with the multiplication table.--latin grammar lesson.--geometry. . general cautions.--doing work _for_ the scholar.--dullness.--interest in _all_ the pupils.--making all alike.--faults of pupils.--the teacher's own mental habits.--false pretensions. chapter iv. moral discipline. first impressions.--story.--danger of devoting too much attention to individual instances.--the profane boy.--case described.--confession of the boys.--success.--the untidy desk.--measures in consequence. --interesting the scholars in the good order of the school.--securing a majority.--example.--reports about the desks.--the new college building.--modes of interesting the boys.--the irregular class.--two ways of remedying the evil.--boys' love of system and regularity. --object of securing a majority, and particular means of doing it.--making school pleasant.--discipline should generally be private.--in all cases that are brought before the school, public opinion in the teacher's favor should be secured.--story of the rescue.--feelings of displeasure against what is wrong.--the teacher under moral obligation, and governed, himself, by law.--description of the _moral exercise_.--prejudice.--the scholars' written remarks, and the teacher's comments.--the spider.--list of subjects.--anonymous writing.--specimens.--marks of a bad scholar.--consequences of being behindhand.--new scholars.--a satirical spirit.--variety. treatment of individual offenders.--ascertaining who they are.--studying their characters.--securing their personal attachment.--asking assistance.--the whistle.--open, frank dealing.--example.--dialogue with james.--communications in writing. chapter v. religious influence. the american mechanic at paris.--a congregational teacher among quakers.--parents have the ultimate right to decide how their children shall be educated. agreement in religious opinion in this country.--principle which is to guide the teacher on this subject.--limits and restrictions to religious influence in school.--religious truths which are generally admitted in this country.--the existence of god.--human responsibility.--immortality of the soul.--a revelation.--nature of piety.--salvation by christ.--teacher to do nothing on this subject but what he may do by the common consent of his employers.--reasons for explaining distinctly these limits. particular measures proposed.--opening exercises.--prayer.--singing. --direct instruction.--mode of giving it.--example; arrangement of the epistles in the new testament.--dialogue.--another example; scene in the woods.--cautions.--affected simplicity of language.--evils of it.--minute details.--example; motives to study.--dialogue.--mingling religious influence with the direct discipline of the school.--fallacious indications of piety.--sincerity of the teacher. chapter vi. mount vernon school. reason for inserting the description.--advantage of visiting schools, and of reading descriptions of them.--addressed to a new scholar.--her personal duty.--study-card.--rule.--but one rule.--cases when this rule maybe waived.-- . at the direction of teachers.-- . on extraordinary emergencies.--reasons for the rule.--anecdote.--punishments.--incidents described.--confession. . order of daily exercises.--opening of the school.--schedules.--hours of study and recess.--general exercises.--business.--examples.--sections. . instruction and supervision of pupils.--classes.--organization.--sections.--duties of superintendents. . officers.--design in appointing them.--their names and duties.--example of the operation of the system. . the court.--its plan and design.--a trial described. . religious instruction.--principles inculcated.--measures.--religious exercises in school.--meeting on saturday afternoon.--concluding remarks. chapter vii. scheming. time lost upon fruitless schemes.--proper province of ingenuity and enterprise.--cautions.--case supposed.--the spelling class; an experiment with it; its success and its consequences.--system of literary institutions in this country.--directions to a young teacher on the subject of forming new plans.--new institutions; new schoolbooks.--ingenuity and enterprise very useful, within proper limits.--ways of making known new plans.--periodicals.--family newspapers.--teachers' meetings. rights of committees, trustees, or patrons, in the control of the school.--principle which ought to govern.--case supposed.--extent to which the teacher is bound by the wishes of his employers. chapter viii. reports of cases. plan of the chapter.--hats and bonnets.--injury to clothes.--mistakes which are not censurable.--tardiness; plan for punishing it.--helen's lesson.--firmness in measures united with mildness of manner.--insincere confession: scene in a class.--court.--trial of a case.--teacher's personal character.--the way to elevate the character of the employment.--six hours only to be devoted to school.--the chestnut burr.--scene in the wood.--dialogue in school.--an experiment.--series of lessons in writing.--the correspondence.--two kinds of management.--plan of weekly reports.--the shopping exercise. --example.--artifices in recitations.--keeping resolution notes of teacher's lecture.--topics.--plan and illustration of the exercise. --introduction of music.--tabu.--mental analysis.--scene in a class. chapter ix. the teacher's first day. embarrassments of young teachers in first entering upon their duties.--preliminary information to be acquired in respect to the school.--visits to the parents.--making acquaintance with the scholars.--opening the school.--mode of setting the scholars at work on the first day.--no sudden changes to be made.--misconduct.--mode of disposing of the cases of it.--conclusion. the teacher. chapter i. interest in teaching. a most singular contrariety of opinion prevails in the community in regard to the _pleasantness_ of the business of teaching. some teachers go to their daily task merely upon compulsion; they regard it as intolerable drudgery. others love the work: they hover around the school-room as long as they can, and never cease to think, and seldom to talk, of their delightful labors. unfortunately, there are too many of the former class, and the first object which, in this work, i shall attempt to accomplish, is to show my readers, especially those who have been accustomed to look upon the business of teaching as a weary and heartless toil, how it happens that it is, in any case, so pleasant. the human mind is always essentially the same. that which is tedious and joyless to one, will be so to another, if pursued in the same way, and under the same circumstances. and teaching, if it is pleasant, animating, and exciting to one, may be so to all. i am met, however, at the outset, in my effort to show why it is that teaching is ever a pleasant work, by the want of a name for a certain faculty or capacity of the human mind, through which most of the enjoyment of teaching finds its avenue. every mind is so constituted as to take a positive pleasure in the exercise of ingenuity in adapting means to an end, and in watching the operation of them--in accomplishing by the intervention of instruments what we could not accomplish without--in devising (when we see an object to be effected which is too great for our _direct_ and _immediate_ power) and setting at work some _instrumentality_ which may be sufficient to accomplish it. [illustration: steam engine] it is said that when the steam-engine was first put into operation, such was the imperfection of the machinery, that a boy was necessarily stationed at it to open and shut alternately the cock by which the steam was now admitted and now shut out from the cylinder. one such boy, after patiently doing his work for many days, contrived to connect this stop-cock with some of the moving parts of the engine by a wire, in such a manner that the engine itself did the work which had been intrusted to him; and after seeing that the whole business would go regularly forward, he left the wire in charge, and went away to play. such is the story. now if it is true, how much pleasure the boy must have experienced in devising and witnessing the successful operation of his scheme. i do not mean the pleasure of relieving himself from a dull and wearisome duty; i do not mean the pleasure of anticipated play; but i mean the strong interest he must have taken in _contriving and executing his plan_. when, wearied out with his dull, monotonous work, he first noticed those movements of the machinery which he thought adapted to his purpose, and the plan flashed into his mind, how must his eye have brightened, and how quick must the weary listlessness of his employment have vanished. while he was maturing his plan and carrying it into execution--while adjusting his wires, fitting them to the exact length and to the exact position--and especially when, at last, he began to watch the first successful operation of his contrivance, he must have enjoyed a pleasure which very few even of the joyous sports of childhood could have supplied. it is not, however, exactly the pleasure of exercising _ingenuity in contrivance_ that i refer to here; for the teacher has not, after all, a great deal of absolute _contriving_ to do, or, rather, his _principal business_ is not contriving. the greatest and most permanent source of pleasure to the boy, in such a case as i have described, is his feeling that he is accomplishing a great effect by a slight effort of his own; the feeling of _power_; acting through the _intervention of instrumentality_, so as to multiply his power. so great would be this satisfaction, that he would almost wish to have some other similar work assigned him, that he might have another opportunity to contrive some plan for its easy accomplishment. looking at an object to be accomplished, or an evil to be remedied, then studying its nature and extent, and devising and executing some means for effecting the purpose desired, is, in all cases, a source of pleasure; especially when, by the process, we bring to view or into operation new powers, or powers heretofore hidden, whether they are our own powers, or those of objects upon which we act. experimenting has a sort of magical fascination for all. some do not like the trouble of making preparations, but all are eager to see the results. contrive a new machine, and every body will be interested to witness or to hear of its operation. develop any heretofore unknown properties of matter, or secure some new useful effect from laws which men have not hitherto employed for their purposes, and the interest of all around you will be excited to observe your results; and, especially, you will yourself take a deep and permanent pleasure in guiding and controlling the power you have thus obtained. this is peculiarly the case with experiments upon mind, or experiments for producing effects through the medium of voluntary acts of others, making it necessary that the contriver should take into consideration the laws of mind in forming his plans. to illustrate this by rather a childish case: i once knew a boy who was employed by his father to remove all the loose small stones, which, from the peculiar nature of the ground, had accumulated in the road before the house. the boy was set at work by his father to take them up, and throw them over into the pasture across the way. he soon got tired of picking up the stones one by one, and so he sat down upon the bank to try to devise some better means of accomplishing his work. he at length conceived and adopted the following plan: he set up in the pasture a narrow board for a target, or, as boys would call it, a mark, and then, collecting all the boys of the neighborhood, he proposed to them an amusement which boys are always ready for--firing at a mark. the stones in the road furnished the ammunition, and, of course, in a very short time the road was cleared; the boys working for the accomplishment of their leader's task, when they supposed they were only finding amusement for themselves. here, now, is experimenting upon the mind--the production of useful effect with rapidity and ease by the intervention of proper instrumentality--the conversion, by means of a little knowledge of human nature, of that which would have otherwise been dull and fatiguing labor into a most animating sport, giving pleasure to twenty instead of tedious labor to one. now the contrivance and execution of such plans is a source of positive pleasure. it is always pleasant to bring even the properties and powers of matter into requisition to promote our designs; but there is a far higher pleasure in controlling, and guiding, and moulding to our purpose the movements of mind. it is this which gives interest to the plans and operation of human governments. governments can, in fact, do little by actual force. nearly all the power that is held, even by the most despotic executive, must be based on an adroit management of the principles of human nature, so as to lead men voluntarily to co-operate with the leader in his plans. even an army could not be got into battle, in many cases, without a most ingenious arrangement, by means of which half a dozen men can drive, literally drive, as many thousands into the very face of danger and death. the difficulty of leading men to battle must have been, for a long time, a very perplexing one to generals. it was at last removed by the very simple expedient of creating a greater danger behind than there is before. without ingenuity of contrivance like this, turning one principle of human nature against another, and making it for the momentary interest of men to act in a given way, no government could stand. i know of nothing which illustrates more perfectly the way by which a knowledge of human nature is to be turned to account in managing human minds than a plan which was adopted for clearing the galleries of the british house of commons many years ago, before the present houses of parliament were built. there was then, as now, a gallery appropriated to spectators, and it was customary to require these visitors to retire when a vote was to be taken or private business was to be transacted. when the officer in attendance was ordered to clear the gallery, it was sometimes found to be a very troublesome and slow operation; for those who first went out remained obstinately as close to the doors as possible, so as to secure the opportunity to come in again first when the doors should be re-opened. the consequence was, there was so great an accumulation around the doors outside, that it was almost impossible for the crowd to get out. the whole difficulty arose from the eager desire of every one to remain as near as possible to the door, _through which they were to come back again_. notwithstanding the utmost efforts of the officers, fifteen minutes were sometimes consumed in effecting the object, when the order was given that the spectators should retire. the whole difficulty was removed by a very simple plan. one door only was opened when the crowd was to retire, and they were then admitted, when the gallery was opened again, through _the other_. the consequence was, that as soon as the order was given to clear the galleries, every one fled as fast as possible through the open door around to the one which was closed, so as to be ready to enter first, when that, in its turn, should be opened. this was usually in a few minutes, as the purpose for which the spectators were ordered to retire was in most cases simply to allow time for taking a vote. here it will be seen that, by the operation of a very simple plan, the very eagerness of the crowd to get back as soon as possible, which had been the _sole cause of the difficulty_, was turned to account most effectually to the removal of it. before, the first that went out were so eager to return, that they crowded around the door of egress in such a manner as to prevent others going out; but by this simple plan of ejecting them by one door and admitting them by another, that very eagerness made them clear the passage at once, and caused every one to hurry away into the lobby the moment the command was given. the planner of this scheme must have taken great pleasure in witnessing its successful operation; though the officer who should go steadily on, endeavoring to remove the reluctant throng by dint of mere driving, might well have found his task unpleasant. but the exercise of ingenuity in studying the nature of the difficulty with which a man has to contend, and bringing in some antagonist principle of human nature to remove it, or, if not an antagonist principle, a similar principle, operating, by a peculiar arrangement of circumstances, in an antagonist manner, is always pleasant. from this source a large share of the enjoyment which men find in the active pursuits of life has its origin. the teacher has the whole field which this subject opens fully before him. he has human nature to deal with most directly. his whole work is one of experimenting upon mind; and the mind which is before him to be the subject of his operation is exactly in the state to be most easily and pleasantly operated upon. the reason now why some teachers find their work delightful, and some find it wearisomeness and tedium itself, is that some do and some do not take this view of the nature of it. one instructor is like the engine-boy, turning, without cessation or change, his everlasting stop-cock, in the same ceaseless, mechanical, and monotonous routine. another is like the little workman in his brighter moments, arranging his invention, and watching with delight the successful and easy accomplishment of his wishes by means of it. one is like the officer, driving by vociferations, and threats, and demonstrations of violence, the spectators from the galleries. the other like the shrewd contriver, who converts the very desire to return, which was the sole cause of the difficulty, to a most successful and efficient means of its removal. these principles show how teaching may, in some cases, be a delightful employment, while in others its tasteless dullness is interrupted by nothing but its perplexities and cares. the school-room is in reality a little empire of mind. if the one who presides in it sees it in its true light; studies the nature and tendency of the minds which he has to control; adapts his plans and his measures to the laws of human nature, and endeavors to accomplish his purposes for them, not by mere labor and force, but by ingenuity and enterprise, he will take pleasure in administering his little government. he will watch, with care and interest, the operation of the moral and intellectual causes which he sets in operation, and find, as he accomplishes his various objects with increasing facility and power, that he will derive a greater and greater pleasure from his work. now when a teacher thus looks upon his school as a field in which he is to exercise skill, and ingenuity, and enterprise; when he studies the laws of human nature, and the character of those minds upon which he has to act; when he explores deliberately the nature of the field which he has to cultivate, and of the objects which he wishes to accomplish, and applies means judiciously and skillfully adapted to the object, he must necessarily take a strong interest in his work. but when, on the other hand, he goes to his employment only to perform a certain regular round of daily toil, undertaking nothing and anticipating nothing but this dull and unchangeable routine, and when he looks upon his pupils merely as passive objects of his labors, whom he is to treat with simple indifference while they obey his commands, and to whom he is only to apply reproaches and punishment when they do wrong, such a teacher never can take pleasure in the school. weariness and dullness must reign in both master and scholars when things, as he imagines, are going right, and mutual anger and crimination when they go wrong. [illustration: school master] scholars never can be successfully instructed by the power of any dull mechanical routine, nor can they be properly governed by the blind, naked strength of the master; such means must fail of the accomplishment of the purposes designed, and consequently the teacher who tries such a course must have constantly upon his mind the discouraging, disheartening burden of unsuccessful and almost useless labor. he is continually uneasy, dissatisfied, and filled with anxious cares, and sources of vexation and perplexity continually arise. he attempts to remove evils by waging against them a useless and most vexatious warfare of threatening and punishment; and he is trying continually _to drive_, when he might know that neither the intellect nor the heart are capable of being driven. i will simply state one case, to illustrate what i mean by the difference between blind force and active ingenuity and enterprise in the management of school. i once knew the teacher of a school who made it his custom to have writing attended to in the afternoon. the school was in the country, and it was the old times when quills, instead of steel pens, were universally used. the boys were accustomed to take their places at the appointed hour, and each one would set up his pen in the front of his desk for the teacher to come and mend them. the teacher would accordingly pass around the school-room, mending the pens, from desk to desk, thus enabling the boys, in succession, to begin their task. of course, each boy, before the teacher came to his desk, was necessarily idle, and, almost necessarily, in mischief. day after day the teacher went through this regular routine. he sauntered slowly and listlessly through the aisles, and among the benches of the room, wherever he saw the signal of a pen. he paid, of course, very little attention to the writing, now and then reproving, with an impatient tone, some extraordinary instance of carelessness, or leaving his work to suppress some rising disorder. ordinarily, however, he seemed to be lost in vacancy of thought, dreaming, perhaps, of other scenes, or inwardly repining at the eternal monotony and tedium of a teacher's life. his boys took no interest in their work, and of course made no progress. they were sometimes unnecessarily idle, and sometimes mischievous, but never usefully or pleasantly employed, for the whole hour was passed before the pens could all be brought down. wasted time, blotted books, and fretted tempers were all the results which the system produced. the same teacher afterward acted on a very different principle. he looked over the field, and said to himself, "what are the objects which i wish to accomplish in this writing exercise, and how can i best accomplish them? i wish to obtain the greatest possible amount of industrious and careful practice in writing. the first thing evidently is to save the wasted time." he accordingly made preparation for mending the pens at a previous hour, so that all should be ready, at the appointed time, to commence the work together. this could be done quite as conveniently when the boys were engaged in studying, by requesting them to put out their pens at an appointed and _previous_ time. he sat at his table, and the pens of a whole bench were brought to him, and, after being carefully mended, were returned, to be in readiness for the writing hour. thus the first difficulty, the loss of time, was obviated. "i must make them _industrious_ while they write," was his next thought. after thinking of a variety of methods, he determined to try the following: he required all to begin together at the top of the page, and write the same line, in a hand of the same size. they were all required to begin together, he himself beginning at the same time, and writing about as fast as he thought they ought to write in order to secure the highest improvement. when he had finished his line, he ascertained how many had preceded him and how many were behind. he requested the first to write slower, and the others faster; and by this means, after a few trials, he secured uniform, regular, systematic, and industrious employment throughout the school. probably there were, at first, difficulties in the operation of the plan, which he had to devise ways and means to surmount; but what i mean to present particularly to the reader is, that he was _interested in his experiments_. while sitting in his desk, giving his command to _begin_ line after line, and noticing the unbroken silence, and attention, and interest which prevailed (for each boy was interested to see how nearly with the master he could finish his work), while presiding over such a scene he must have been interested. he must have been pleased with the exercise of his almost military command, and to witness how effectually order and industry, and excited and pleased attention, had taken the place of listless idleness and mutual dissatisfaction. after a few days, he appointed one of the older and more judicious scholars to give the word for beginning and ending the lines, and he sat surveying the scene, or walking from desk to desk, noticing faults, and considering what plans he could form for securing more and more fully the end he had in view. he found that the great object of interest and attention among the boys was to come out right, and that less pains were taken with the formation of the letters than there ought to be to secure the most rapid improvement. but how shall he secure greater pains? by stern commands and threats? by going from desk to desk, scolding one, rapping the knuckles of another, and holding up to ridicule a third, making examples of such individuals as may chance to attract his special attention? no; he has learned that he is operating upon a little empire of mind, and that he is not to endeavor to drive them as a man drives a herd, by mere peremptory command or half angry blows. he must study the nature of the effect that he is to produce, and of the materials upon which he is to work, and adopt, after mature deliberation, a plan to accomplish his purpose founded upon the principles which ought always to regulate the action of mind upon mind, and adapted to produce the _intellectual effect_ which he wishes to accomplish. in the case supposed, the teacher concluded to appeal to emulation. while i describe the measure he adopted, let it be remembered that i am now only approving of the resort to ingenuity and invention, and the employment of moral and intellectual means for the accomplishment of his purposes, and not of the measures themselves. i am not sure the plan i am going to describe is a wise one; but i am sure that the teacher, while trying it, must _have been interested in his intellectual experiment._ his business, while pursued in such a way, could not have been a mere dull and uninteresting routine. he purchased, for three cents apiece, two long lead pencils--an article of great value in the opinion of the boys of country schools--and he offered them, as prizes, to the boy who would write most carefully; not to the one who should write _best_, but to the one whose book should exhibit most appearance of _effort_ and _care_ for a week. after announcing his plan, he watched with strong interest its operation. he walked round the room while the writing was in progress, to observe the effect of his measure. he did not reprove those who were writing carelessly; he simply noticed who and how many they were. he did not commend those who were evidently making effort; he noticed who and how many they were, that he might understand how far, and upon what sort of minds, his experiment was successful, and where it failed. he was taking a lesson in human nature--human nature as it exhibits itself in boys--and was preparing to operate more and more powerfully by future plans. the lesson which he learned by the experiment was this, that one or two prizes will not influence the majority of a large school. a few of the boys seemed to think that the pencils were possibly within their reach, and _they_ made vigorous efforts to secure them; but the rest wrote on as before. thinking it certain that they should be surpassed by the others, they gave up the contest at once in despair. the obvious remedy was to _multiply_ his prizes, so as to bring one of them within the reach of all. he reflected, too, that the real prize, in such a case, is not the value of the pencil, but the _honor of the victory_; and as the honor of the victory might as well be coupled with an object of less, as well as with one of greater value, the next week he divided his two pencils into quarters, and offered to his pupils eight prizes instead of two. he offered one to every five scholars, as they sat on their benches, and every boy then saw that a reward would certainly come within five of him. his chance, accordingly, instead of being one in twenty, became one in five. now is it possible for a teacher, after having philosophized upon the nature of the minds upon which he is operating, and surveyed the field, and ingeniously formed a plan, which plan he hopes will, through his own intrinsic power, produce certain effects--is it possible for him, when he comes, for the first day, to witness its operations, to come without feeling a strong interest in the result? it is not possible. after having formed such a plan, and made such arrangements, he will look forward almost with impatience to the next writing-hour. he wishes to see whether he has estimated the mental capacities and tendencies of his little community aright; and when the time comes, and he surveys the scene, and observes the operation of his measure, and sees many more are reached by it than were influenced before, he feels a strong gratification, and it is a gratification which is founded upon the noblest principles of our nature. he is tracing, on a most interesting field, the operation of cause and effect. from being the mere drudge, who drives, without intelligence or thought, a score or two of boys to their daily tasks, he rises to the rank of an intellectual philosopher, exploring the laws and successfully controlling the tendencies of mind. it will be observed, too, that all the time this teacher was performing these experiments, and watching with intense interest the results, his pupils were going on undisturbed in their pursuits. the exercises in writing were not interrupted or deranged. this is a point of fundamental importance; for, if what i should say on the subject of exercising ingenuity and contrivance in teaching should be the means, in any case, of leading a teacher to break in upon the regular duties of his school, and destroy the steady uniformity with which the great objects of such an institution should be pursued, my remarks had better never have been written. there may be variety in methods and plan, but, through all this variety, the school, and every individual pupil of it, must go steadily forward in the acquisition of that knowledge which is of greatest importance in the business of future life. in other words, the variations and changes admitted by the teacher ought to be mainly confined to the modes of accomplishing those permanent objects to which all the exercises and arrangements of the school ought steadily to aim. more on this subject, however, in another chapter. i will mention one other circumstance, which will help to explain the difference in interest and pleasure with which teachers engage in their work. i mean the different views they take _of the offenses of their pupils_. one class of teachers seem never to make it a part of their calculation that their pupils will do wrong, and when, any misconduct occurs they are discontented and irritated, and look and act as if some unexpected occurrence had broken in upon their plans. others understand and consider all this beforehand. they seem to think a little, before they go into their school, what sort of beings boys and girls are, and any ordinary case of youthful delinquency or dullness does not surprise them. i do not mean that they treat such cases with indifference or neglect, but that they _expect_ them, and _are prepared for them_. such a teacher knows that boys and girls are the _materials_ he has to work upon, and he takes care to make himself acquainted with these materials, _just as they are_. the other class, however, do not seem to know at all what sort of beings they have to deal with, or, if they know, do not _consider_. they expect from them what is not to be obtained, and then are disappointed and vexed at the failure. it is as if a carpenter should attempt to support an entablature by pillars of wood too small and weak for the weight, and then go on, from week to week, suffering anxiety and irritation as he sees them swelling and splitting under the burden, and finding fault _with the wood_ instead of taking it to himself; or as if a plowman were to attempt to work a hard and stony piece of ground with a poor team and a small plow, and then, when overcome by the difficulties of the task, should vent his vexation and anger in laying the blame on the ground instead of on the inadequate and insufficient instrumentality which he had provided for subduing it. [illustration] it is, of course, one essential part of a man's duty, in engaging in any undertaking, whether it will lead him to act upon matter or upon mind, to become first well acquainted with the circumstances of the case, the materials he is to act upon, and the means which he may reasonably expect to have at his command. if he underrates his difficulties, or overrates the power of his means of overcoming them, it is his mistake--a mistake for which _he_ is fully responsible. whatever may be the nature of the effect which he aims at accomplishing, he ought fully to understand it, and to appreciate justly the difficulties which lie in the way. teachers, however, very often overlook this. a man comes home from his school at night perplexed and irritated by the petty misconduct which he has witnessed, and been trying to check. he does not, however, look forward and endeavor to prevent the occasions of such misconduct, adapting his measures to the nature of the material upon which he has to operate, but he stands, like the carpenter at his columns, making himself miserable in looking at it after it occurs, and wondering what to do. "sir," we might say to him, "what is the matter?" "why, i have such boys i can do nothing with them. were it not for _their misconduct_, i might have a very good school." "were it not for their misconduct? why, is there any peculiar depravity in them which you could not have foreseen?" "no; i suppose they are pretty much like all other boys," he replies, despairingly; "they are all hair-brained and unmanageable. the plans i have formed for my school would be excellent if my boys would only behave properly." "excellent plans," might we not reply, "and yet not adapted to the materials upon which they are to operate! no. it is your business to know what sort of beings boys are, and to make your calculations accordingly." two teachers may therefore manage their schools in totally different ways, so that one of them may necessarily find the business a dull, mechanical routine, except as it is occasionally varied by perplexity and irritation, and the other a prosperous and happy employment. the one goes on mechanically the same, and depends for his power on violence, or on threats and demonstrations of violence. the other brings all his ingenuity and enterprise into the field to accomplish a steady purpose by means ever varying, and depends for his power on his knowledge of human nature, and on the adroit adaptation of plans to her fixed and uniform tendencies. i am very sorry, however, to be obliged to say that probably the latter class of teachers are decidedly in the minority. to practice the art in such a way as to make it an agreeable employment is difficult, and it requires much knowledge of human nature, much attention and skill. and, after all, there are some circumstances necessarily attending the work which constitute a heavy drawback on the pleasures which it might otherwise afford. the almost universal impression that the business of teaching is attended with peculiar trials and difficulties proves this. there must be some cause for an impression so general. it is not right to call it a prejudice, for, although a single individual may conceive a prejudice, whole communities very seldom do, unless in some case which is presented at once to the whole, so that, looking at it through a common medium, all judge wrong together. but the general opinion in regard to teaching is composed of a vast number of _separate_ and _independent_ judgments, and there must be some good ground for the universal result. it is best, therefore, if there are any real and peculiar sources of trial and difficulty in this pursuit, that they should be distinctly known and acknowledged at the outset. count the cost before going to war. it is even better policy to overrate than to underrate it. let us see, then, what the real difficulties of teaching are. it is not, however, as is generally supposed, _the confinement._ a teacher is confined, it is true, but not more than men of other professions and employments; not more than a merchant, and probably not as much. a physician is confined in a different way, but more closely than a teacher: he can never leave home: he knows generally no vacation, and nothing but accidental rest. the lawyer is confined as much. it is true there are not throughout the year exact hours which he must keep, but, considering the imperious demands of his business, his personal liberty is probably restrained as much by it as that of the teacher. so with all the other professions. although the nature of the confinement may vary, it amounts to about the same in all. on the other hand, the teacher enjoys, in reference to this subject of confinement, an advantage which scarcely any other class of men does or can enjoy. i mean vacations. a man in any other business may _force_ himself away from it for a time, but the cares and anxieties of his business will follow him wherever he goes. it seems to be reserved for the teacher to enjoy alone the periodical luxury of a _real and entire release from business and care_. on the whole, as to confinement, it seems to me that the teacher has little ground of complaint. there are, however, some real and serious difficulties which always have, and, it is to be feared, always will, cluster around this employment; and which must, for a long time, at least, lead most men to desire some other employment for the business of life. there may perhaps be some who, by their peculiar skill, can overcome or avoid them, and perhaps the science of teaching may, at some future day, be so far improved that all may avoid them. as i describe them, however, now, most of the teachers into whose hands this treatise may fall will probably find that their own experience corresponds, in this respect, with mine. . the first great difficulty which the teacher feels is a sort of _moral responsibility for the conduct of others_. if his pupils do wrong, he feels almost personal responsibility for it. as he walks out some afternoon, wearied with his labors, and endeavoring to forget, for a little time, all his cares, he comes upon a group of boys in rude and noisy quarrels, or engaged in mischief of some sort, and his heart sinks within him. it is hard enough for any one to witness their bad conduct with a spirit unruffled and undisturbed, but for their teacher it is perhaps impossible. he feels _responsible_; in fact, he is responsible. if his scholars are disorderly, or negligent, or idle, or quarrelsome, he feels _condemned himself_ almost as if he were himself the actual transgressor. this difficulty is, in a great degree, peculiar to a teacher. a physician is called upon to prescribe for a patient; he examines the case, and writes his prescription. when this is done his duty is ended; and whether the patient obeys the prescription and lives, or neglects it and dies, the physician feels exonerated from all responsibility. he may, and in some cases does, feel _anxious concern_, and may regret the infatuation by which, in some unhappy case, a valuable life may be hazarded or destroyed. but he feels no _moral responsibility_ for another's guilt. it is so with all the other employments in life. they do, indeed, often bring men into collision with other men. but, though sometimes vexed and irritated by the conduct of a neighbor, a client, or a patient, they feel not half the bitterness of the solicitude and anxiety which come to the teacher through the criminality of his pupil. in ordinary cases he not only feels responsible for efforts, but for their results; and when, notwithstanding all his efforts, his pupils will do wrong, his spirit sinks with an intensity of anxious despondency which none but a teacher can understand. this feeling of something very like _moral accountability for the guilt of other persons_ is a continual burden. the teacher in the presence of the pupil never is free from it. it links him to them by a bond which perhaps he ought not to sunder, and which he can not sunder if he would. and sometimes, when those committed to his charge are idle, or faithless, or unprincipled, it wears away his spirits and his health together. i think there is nothing analogous to this moral connection between teacher and pupil unless it be in the case of a parent and child. and here, on account of the comparative smallness of the number under the parent's care, the evil is so much diminished that it is easily borne. . the second great difficulty of the teacher's employments is _the immense multiplicity of the objects of his attention and care_ during the time he is employed in his business. his scholars are individuals, and notwithstanding all that the most systematic can do in the way of classification, they must be attended to in a great measure as individuals. a merchant keeps his commodities together, and looks upon a cargo composed of ten thousand articles, and worth a hundred thousand dollars, as one; he speaks of it as one; and there is, in many cases, no more perplexity in planning its destination than if it were a single box of raisins. a lawyer may have a great many important cases, but he has only one at a time; that is, he _attends_ to but one at a time. the one may be intricate, involving many facts, and requiring to be examined in many aspects and relations. but he looks at but few of these facts and regards but few of these relations at a time. the points which demand his attention come one after another in regular succession. his mind may thus be kept calm. he avoids confusion and perplexity. but no skill or classification will turn the poor teacher's hundred scholars into one, or enable him, except to a very limited extent, and for a very limited purpose, to regard them as one. he has a distinct and, in many respects, a different work to do for every one of the crowd before him. difficulties must be explained in detail, questions must be answered one by one, and each scholar's own conduct must be considered by itself. his work is thus made up of a thousand minute particulars, which are all crowding upon his attention at once, and which he can not group together, or combine, or simplify. he must, by some means or other, attend to them in all their distracting individuality. and, in a large and complicated school, the endless multiplicity and variety of objects of attention and care impose a task under which few intellects can long stand. i have said that this endless multiplicity and variety can not be reduced and simplified by classification. i mean, of course, that this can be done only to a very limited extent compared with what may be effected in the other pursuits of mankind. were it not for the art of classification and system, no school could have more than ten scholars, as i intend hereafter to show. the great reliance of the teacher is upon this art, to reduce to some tolerable order what would otherwise be the inextricable confusion of his business. he _must be systematic_. he must classify and arrange; but, after he has done all that he can, he must still expect that his daily business will continue to consist of a vast multitude of minute particulars, from one to another of which the mind must turn with a rapidity which few of the other employments of life ever demand. these are the essential sources of difficulty with which the teacher has to contend; but, as i shall endeavor to show in succeeding chapters, though they can not be entirely removed, they can be so far mitigated by the appropriate means as to render the employment a happy one. i have thought it best, however, as this work will doubtless be read by many who, when they read it, are yet to begin their labors, to describe frankly and fully to them the difficulties which beset the path they are about to enter. "the wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way." it is often wisdom to understand it beforehand. chapter ii. general arrangements. the distraction and perplexity of the teacher's life are, as was explained in the last chapter, almost proverbial. there are other pressing and exhausting pursuits, which wear away the spirit by the ceaseless care which they impose, or perplex and bewilder the intellect by the multiplicity and intricacy of their details; but the business of teaching, by a pre-eminence not very enviable, stands, almost by common consent, at the head of the catalogue. i have already alluded to this subject in the preceding chapter, and probably the majority of actual teachers will admit the truth of the view there presented. some will, however, doubtless say that they do not find the business of teaching so perplexing and exhausting an employment. they take things calmly. they do one thing at a time, and that without useless solicitude and anxiety. so that teaching, with them, though it has, indeed, its solicitudes and cares, as every other responsible employment must necessarily have, is, after all, a calm and quiet pursuit, which they follow from month to month, and from year to year, without any extraordinary agitations, or any unusual burdens of anxiety and care. there are, indeed, such cases, but they are exceptions, and unquestionably a considerable majority, especially of those who are beginners in the work, find it such as i have described. i think it need not be so, or, rather, i think the evil may be avoided to _a very great degree_. in this chapter i shall endeavor to show how order may be produced out of that almost inextricable mass of confusion into which so many teachers, on commencing their labors, find themselves plunged. the objects, then, to be aimed at in the general arrangements of schools are twofold: . that the teacher may be left uninterrupted, to attend to one thing at a time. . that the individual scholars may have constant employment, and such an amount and such kinds of study as shall be suited to the circumstances and capacities of each. i shall examine each in their order. . the following are the principal things which, in a vast number of schools, are all the time pressing upon the teacher; or, rather, they are the things which must every where press upon the teacher, except so far as, by the skill of his arrangements, he contrives to remove them. . giving leave to whisper or to leave seats. . distributing and changing pens. . answering questions in regard to studies. . hearing recitations. . watching the behavior of the scholars. . administering reproof and punishment for offenses as they occur. a pretty large number of objects of attention and care, one would say, to be pressing upon the mind of the teacher at one and the same time--and _all the time_ too! hundreds and hundreds of teachers in every part of our country, there is no doubt, have all these crowding upon them from morning to night, with no cessation, except perhaps some accidental and momentary respite. during the winter months, while the principal common schools in our country are in operation, it is sad to reflect how many teachers come home every evening with bewildered and aching heads, having been vainly trying all the day to do six things at a time, while he who made the human mind has determined that it shall do but one. how many become discouraged and disheartened by what they consider the unavoidable trials of a teacher's life, and give up in despair, just because their faculties will not sustain a six-fold task. there are multitudes who, in early life, attempted teaching, and, after having been worried, almost to distraction, by the simultaneous pressure of these multifarious cares, gave up the employment in disgust, and now unceasingly wonder how any body can like teaching. i know multitudes of persons to whom the above description will exactly apply. i once heard a teacher who had been very successful, even in large schools, say that he could hear two classes recite, mend pens, and watch his school all at the same time, and that without any distraction of mind or any unusual fatigue. of course the recitations in such a case must be from memory. there are very few minds, however, which can thus perform triple or quadruple work, and probably none which can safely be tasked so severely. for my part, i can do but one thing at a time; and i have no question that the true policy for all is to learn not _to do every thing at once_, but so to classify and arrange their work that _they shall have but one thing at once to do_. instead of vainly attempting to attend simultaneously to a dozen things, they should so plan their work that only _one_ will demand attention. let us, then, examine the various particulars above mentioned in succession, and see how each can be disposed of, so as not to be a constant source of interruption and derangement. . _whispering_ and _leaving seats_. in regard to this subject there are very different methods now in practice in different schools. in some, especially in very small schools, the teacher allows the pupils to act according to their own discretion. they whisper and leave their seats whenever they think it necessary. this plan may possibly be admissible in a very small school, that is, in one of ten or twelve pupils. i am convinced, however, that it is a very bad plan even here. no vigilant watch which it is possible for any teacher to exert will prevent a vast amount of mere talk entirely foreign to the business of the school. i tried this plan very thoroughly, with high ideas of the dependence which might be placed upon conscience and a sense of duty, if these principles are properly brought out to action in an effort to sustain the system. i was told by distinguished teachers that it would not be found to answer. but predictions of failure in such cases only prompt to greater exertions, and i persevered. but i was forced at last to give up the point, and adopt another plan. my pupils would make resolutions enough; they understood their duty well enough. they were allowed to leave their seats and whisper to their companions whenever, _in their honest judgment, it was necessary for the prosecution of their studies_. i knew that it sometimes would be necessary, and i was desirous to adopt this plan to save myself the constant interruption of hearing and replying to requests. but it would not do. whenever, from time to time, i called them to account, i found that a large majority, according to their own confession, were in the habit of holding daily and deliberate communication with each other on subjects entirely foreign to the business of the school. a more experienced teacher would have predicted this result; but i had very high ideas of the power of cultivated conscience, and, in fact, still have. but then, like most other persons who become possessed of a good idea, i could not be satisfied without carrying it to an extreme. still it is necessary, in ordinary schools, to give pupils sometimes the opportunity to whisper and leave seats.[ ] cases occur where this is unavoidable. it can not, therefore, be forbidden altogether. how, then, you will ask, can the teacher regulate this practice, so as to prevent the evils which will otherwise flow from it, without being continually interrupted by the request for permission? [footnote : there are some large and peculiarly-organized schools in cities and large towns to which this remark may perhaps not apply.] by a very simple method. _appropriate particular times at which all this business is to be done_, and _forbid it altogether_ at every other time. it is well, on other accounts, to give the pupils of a school a little respite, at least every hour; and if this is done, an intermission of study for two minutes each time will be sufficient. during this time _general_ permission should be given for the pupils to speak to each other, or to leave their seats, provided they do nothing at such a time to disturb the studies of others. this plan i have myself very thoroughly tested, and no arrangement which i ever made operated for so long a time so uninterruptedly and so entirely to my satisfaction as this. it of course will require some little time, and no little firmness, to establish the new order of things where a school has been accustomed to another course; but where this is once done, i know no one plan so simple and so easily put into execution which will do so much toward relieving the teacher of the distraction and perplexity of his pursuits. in making the change, however, it is of fundamental importance that the pupils should themselves be interested in it. their co-operation, or, rather, the co-operation of the majority, which it is very easy to obtain, is absolutely essential to success. i say this is very easily obtained. let us suppose that some teacher, who has been accustomed to require his pupils to ask and obtain permission every time they wish to speak to a companion, is induced by these remarks to introduce this plan. he says, accordingly, to his school, "you know that you are now accustomed to ask me whenever you wish to obtain permission to whisper to a companion or to leave your seats; now i have been thinking of a plan which will be better for both you and me. by our present plan you are sometimes obliged to wait before i can attend to your request. sometimes i think it is unnecessary, and deny you, when perhaps i was mistaken, and it was really necessary. at other times, i think it very probable that when it is quite desirable for you to leave your seat you do not ask, because you think you may not obtain permission, and you do not wish to ask and be refused. do you, or not, experience these inconveniences from our present plans?" the pupils would undoubtedly answer in the affirmative. "i myself experience great inconvenience too. i am very frequently interrupted when busily engaged, and it also occupies a great portion of my time and attention to consider and answer your requests for permission to speak to one another and to leave your seats. it requires as much mental effort to consider and decide whether i ought to allow a pupil to leave his seat, as it would to determine a much more important question; therefore i do not like our present plan, and i have another to propose." the pupils are now all attention to know what the new plan is. it will always be of great advantage to the school for the teacher to propose his new plans from time to time to his pupils in such a way as this. it interests them in the improvement of the school, exercises their judgment, establishes a common feeling between teacher and pupil, and in many other ways assists very much in promoting the welfare of the school. "my plan," continues the teacher, "is this: to allow you all, besides the recess, a short time, two or three minutes perhaps, every hour" (or every half hour, according to the character of the school, the age of the pupils, or other circumstances, to be judged of by the teacher), "during which you may all whisper or leave your seats _without_ asking permission." instead of deciding the question of the _frequency_ of this general permission, the teacher may, if he pleases, leave it to the pupils to decide. it is often useful to leave the decision of such a question to them. on this subject, however, i shall speak in another place. it is only necessary here to say that _this_ point may be safely left to them, since the time is so small which is to be thus appropriated. even if they vote to have the general permission to whisper every half hour, it will make but eight minutes in the forenoon. there being six half hours in the forenoon, and one of them ending at the close of school, and another at the recess, only _four_ of these _rests_, as a military man would call them, would be necessary; and four, of two minutes each, would make eight minutes. if the teacher thinks that evil would result from the interruption of the studies so often, he may offer the pupils _three_ minutes rest every _hour_ instead of _two_ minutes every _half hour_, and let them take their choice; or he may decide the case altogether himself. such a change, from _particular permission on individual requests_ to _general permission_ at _stated times_, would unquestionably be popular in every school, if the teacher managed the business properly. and by presenting it as an object of common interest, an arrangement proposed for the common convenience of teacher and pupils, the latter may be much interested in carrying the plan into effect. we must not rely, however, entirely upon their _interest in it_. all that we can expect from such an effort to interest them, as i have described and recommended, is to get a majority on our side, so that we may have only a small minority to deal with by other measures. still, _we must calculate on having this minority, and form our plans accordingly_, or we shall be greatly disappointed. i shall, however, in another place, speak of this principle of interesting the pupils in our plans for the purpose of securing a majority in our favor, and explain the methods by which the minority is then to be governed. i only mean here to say that, by such means, the teacher may easily interest a large proportion of the scholars in carrying his plans into effect, and that he must expect to be prepared with other measures for those who will not be governed by these. you can not reasonably expect, however, that, immediately after having explained your plan, it will at once go into full and complete operation. even those who are firmly determined to keep the rule will, from inadvertence, for a day or two, make communication with each other. they must be _trained_, not by threatening and punishment, but by your good-humored assistance, to their new duties. when i first adopted this plan in my school, something like the following proceedings took place. "do you suppose that you will perfectly keep this rule from this time?" "no, sir," was the answer. "i suppose you will not. some, i am afraid, may not really be determined to keep it, and others will forget. now i wish that every one of you would keep an exact account to-day of all the instances in which you speak to another person, or leave your seat, out of the regular times, and be prepared to report them at the close of the school. of course, there will be no punishment; but it will very much assist you to watch yourselves, if you expect to make a report at the end of the forenoon. do you like this plan?" "yes, sir," was the answer; and all seemed to enter into it with spirit. in order to mark more definitely the times for communication, i wrote, in large letters, on a piece of pasteboard, "study hours," and making a hole over the centre of it, i hung it upon a nail over my desk. at the close of each half hour a little bell was to be struck, and this card was to be taken down. when it was up, they were, on no occasion whatever (except some such extraordinary occurrence as sickness, or my sending one of them on a message to another, or something clearly out of the common course) to speak to each other; but were to wait, whatever they wanted, until the _study card_, as they called it, was taken down. "suppose now," said i, "that a young lady has come into school, and has accidentally left her book in the entry--the book from which she is to study during the first half hour of the school. she sits near the door, and she might, in a moment, slip out and obtain it. if she does not, she must spend the half hour in idleness, and be unprepared in her lesson. what is it her duty to do?" "to go," "not to go," answered the scholars, simultaneously. "it would be her duty _not_ to go; but i suppose it will be very difficult for me to convince you of it. "the reason is this," i continued; "if the one case i have supposed were the _only_ one which would be likely to occur, it would undoubtedly be better for her to go; but if it is understood that in such cases the rule may be dispensed with, that understanding will tend very much to cause such cases to occur. scholars will differ in regard to the degree of inconvenience which they must submit to rather than break the rule. they will gradually do it on slighter and slighter occasions, until at last the rule will be disregarded entirely. we must therefore draw a _precise line_, and individuals must submit to a little inconvenience sometimes to promote the general good." at the close of the day i requested all in the school to rise. while they were standing, i called them to account in the following manner: "now it is very probable that some have, from inadvertence or from design, omitted to keep an account of the number of transgressions of the rule which they have committed during the day; others, perhaps, do not wish to make a report of themselves. now as this is a common and voluntary effort, i wish to have none render assistance who do not, of their own accord, desire to do so. all those, therefore, who are not able to make a report, from not having been correct in keeping it, and all those who are unwilling to report themselves, may sit." a very small number hesitatingly took their seats. "i am afraid that all do not sit who really wish not to report themselves. now i am honest in saying i wish you to do just as you please. if a great majority of the school really wish to assist me in accomplishing the object, why, of course, i am glad; still, i shall not call upon any for such assistance unless it is freely and voluntarily rendered." one or two more took their seats while these things were saying. among such there would generally be some who would refuse to have any thing to do with the measure simply from a desire to thwart and impede the plans of the teacher. if so, it is best to take no notice of them. if the teacher can contrive to obtain a great majority upon his side, so as to let them see that any opposition which they can raise is of no consequence and is not even noticed, they will soon be ashamed of it. the reports, then, of those who remained standing were called for; first, those who had whispered only once were requested to sit, then those who had whispered more than once and less than five times, and so on, until at last all were down. in such a case the pupils might, if thought expedient, again be requested to rise for the purpose of asking some other questions with reference to ascertaining whether they had spoken most in the former or latter part of the forenoon. the number who had spoken inadvertently, and the number who had done it by design, might be ascertained. these inquiries accustom the pupils to render honest and faithful accounts themselves. they become, by such means, familiarized to the practice, and by means of it the teacher can many times receive most important assistance. in all this, however, the teacher should speak in a pleasant tone, and maintain a pleasant and cheerful air. the acknowledgments should be considered by the pupils not as confessions of guilt for which they are to be rebuked or punished, but as voluntary and free reports of the result of _an experiment_ in which all were interested. some will have been dishonest in their reports: to diminish the number of these, the teacher may say, after the report is concluded, "we will drop the subject here to-day. to-morrow we will make another effort, when we shall be more successful. i have taken your reports as you have offered them without any inquiry, because i had no doubt that a great majority of this school would be honest at all hazards. they would not, i am confident, make a false report even if, by a true one, they were to bring upon themselves punishment; so that i think i may have confidence that nearly all these reports have been faithful. still it is very probable that among so large a number some may have made a report which, they are now aware, was not perfectly fair and honest. i do not wish to know who they are; if there are any such cases, i only wish to say to the rest how much pleasanter it is for you that you have been honest and open. the business is now all ended; you have done your duty; and, though you reported a little larger number than you would if you had been disposed to conceal your faults, yet you go away from school with a quiet conscience. on the other hand, how miserable must any boy feel, if he has any nobleness of mind whatever, to go away from school to-day thinking that he has not been honest; that he has been trying to conceal his faults, and thus to obtain a credit which he did not justly deserve. always be honest, let the consequence be what it may." the reader will understand that the object of such measures is simply _to secure as large a majority as possible_ to make _voluntary_ efforts to observe the rule. i do not expect that by such measures _universal_ obedience can be exacted. the teacher must follow up the plan after a few days by other measures for those pupils who will not yield to such inducements as these. upon this subject, however, i shall speak more particularly at a future time. in my own school it required two or three weeks to exclude whispering and communication by signs. the period necessary to effect the revolution will be longer or shorter, according to the circumstances of the school and the dexterity of the teacher; and, after all, the teacher must not hope _entirely_ to exclude it. approximation to excellence is all that we can expect; for unprincipled and deceiving characters will perhaps always be found, and no system whatever can prevent their existence. proper treatment may indeed be the means of their reformation, but before this process has arrived at a successful result, others similar in character will have entered the school, so that the teacher can never expect perfection in the operation of any of his plans. i found so much relief from the change which this plan introduced, that i soon took measures for rendering it permanent; and though i am not much in favor of efforts to bring all teachers and all schools to the same plans, this principle of _whispering at limited and prescribed times alone_ seems to me well suited to universal adoption. the following simple apparatus has been used in several schools where this principle has been adopted. a drawing and description of it is inserted here, as by this means some teachers, who may like to try the course here recommended, may be saved the time and trouble of contriving something of the kind themselves. the figure _a a a a_ on the next page is a board about inches by , to which the other parts of the apparatus are to be attached, and which is to be secured to the wall at the height of about feet, and _b c d c_ is a plate of tin or brass, inches by , of the form represented in the drawing. at _c c_, the lower extremities of the parts at the sides, the metal is bent round, so as to clasp a wire which runs from _c_ to _c_, the ends of which wire are bent at right angles, and run into the board. the plate will consequently turn on this axis as on a hinge. at the top of the plate, _d_, a small projection of the tin turns inward, and to this one end of the cord, _m m_, is attached. this cord passes back from _d_ to a small pulley at the upper part of the board, and at the lower end of it a tassel, loaded so as to be an exact counterpoise to the card, is attached. by raising the tassel, the plate will of course fall over forward till it is stopped by the part _b_ striking the board, when it will be in a horizontal position. on the other hand, by pulling down the tassel, the plate will be raised and drawn upward against the board, so as to present its convex surface, with the words study hours upon it, distinctly to the school. in the drawing it is represented in an inclined position, being not quite drawn up, that the parts might more easily be seen. at _d_ there is a small projection of the tin upward, which touches the clapper of the bell suspended above every time the plate passes up or down, and thus gives notice of its motions. [illustration] of course the construction may be varied very much, and it may be more or less expensive, according to the wishes of the teacher. in the first apparatus of this kind which i used, the plate was simply a card of pasteboard, from which the machine took its name. this was cut out with a penknife, and, after being covered with marble-paper, a strip of white paper was pasted along the middle with the inscription upon it. the wire _c c_, and a similar one at the top of the plate, were passed through a perforation in the pasteboard, and then passed into the board. instead of a pulley, the cord, which was a piece of twine, was passed through a little staple made of wire and driven into the board. the whole was made in one or two recesses in school, with such tools and materials as i could then command. the bell was a common table bell, with a wire passing through the handle. the whole was attached to such a piece of pine board as i could get on the occasion. this coarse contrivance was, for more than a year, the grand regulator of all the movements of the school. i afterward caused one to be made in a better manner. the plate was of tin, gilded, the border and the letters of the inscription being black. a parlor bell-rope was carried over a brass pulley, and then passed downward in a groove made in the mahogany board to which the card was attached. a little reflection will, however, show the teacher that the form and construction of the apparatus for marking the times of study and of rest may be greatly varied. the chief point is simply to secure the _principle_ of whispering at definite and limited times, and at those alone. if such an arrangement is adopted, and carried faithfully into effect, it will be found to relieve the teacher of more than half of the confusion and perplexity which would otherwise be his hourly lot. i have detailed thus particularly the method to be pursued in carrying this principle into effect, because i am convinced of its importance, and the incalculable assistance which such an arrangement will afford to the teacher in all his plans. of course, i would not be understood to recommend its adoption in those cases where teachers, from their own experience, have devised and adopted _other_ plans which accomplish as effectually the same purpose. all that i mean is to insist upon the absolute necessity of _some_ plan, to remove this very common source of interruption and confusion, and i recommend this mode where a better is not known. . the second of the sources of interruption, as i have enumerated them, is the distribution of pens and of stationery. this business ought, if possible, to have a specific time assigned to it. scholars are, in general, far too particular in regard to their pens. the teacher ought to explain to them that, in the transaction of the ordinary business of life, they can not always have exactly such a pen as they would like. they must learn to write with various kinds of pens, and when furnished with one that the teacher himself would consider suitable to write a letter to a friend with, he must be content. they should understand that the _form_ of the letters is what is important in learning to write, not the smoothness and clearness of the hair lines; and that though writing looks better when executed with a perfect pen, a person may _learn_ to write nearly as well with one which is not absolutely perfect. so certain is this, though often overlooked, that a person would perhaps learn faster with chalk, upon a black board, than with the best goose-quill ever sharpened. i do not make these remarks to show that it is of no consequence whether scholars have good or bad pens, but only that this subject deserves very much less of the time and attention of the teacher than it usually receives. when the scholars are allowed, as they very often are, to come when they please to change their pens, breaking in upon any business--interrupting any classes--perplexing and embarrassing the teacher, however he may be employed, there is a very serious obstruction to the progress of the scholars, which is by no means repaid by the improvement in this branch. to guard against these evils, a regular and well-considered system should be adopted for the distribution of pens and stationary, and when adopted it should be strictly and steadily adhered to. . answering questions about studies. a teacher who does not adopt some system in regard to this subject will be always at the mercy of his scholars. one boy will want to know how to parse a word, another where the lesson is, another to have a sum explained, and a fourth will wish to show his work to see if it is right. the teacher does not like to discourage such inquiries. each one, as it comes up, seems necessary; each one, too, is answered in a moment; but the endless number and the continual repetition of them consume his time and exhaust his patience. there is another view of the subject which ought to be taken. perhaps it would not be far from the truth to estimate the average number of scholars in the schools in our country at fifty. at any rate, this will be near enough for our present purpose. there are three hours in each session, according to the usual arrangement, making one hundred and eighty minutes, which, divided among fifty, give about three minutes and a half to each individual. if the reader has, in his own school, a greater or a less number, he can easily correct the above calculation, so as to adapt it to his own case, and ascertain the portion which may justly be appropriated to each pupil. it will probably vary from two to four minutes. now a period of four minutes slips away very fast while a man is looking over perplexing figures on a slate, and if he exceeds that time at all in individual attention to any one scholar, he is doing injustice to his other pupils. i do not mean that a man is to confine himself rigidly to the principle suggested by this calculation of cautiously appropriating no more time to any one of his pupils than such a calculation would assign to each, but simply that this is a point which should be kept in view, and should have a very strong influence in deciding how far it is right to devote attention exclusively to individuals. it seems to me that it shows very clearly that one ought to teach his pupils, as much as possible, _in masses_, and as little as possible by private attention to individual cases. the following directions will help the teacher to carry these principles into effect. when you assign a lesson, glance over it yourself, and consider what difficulties are likely to arise. you know the progress which your pupils have made, and can easily anticipate their difficulties. tell them all together, in the class, what their difficulties will be, and how they may surmount them. give them directions how they are to act in the emergencies which will be likely to occur. this simple step will remove a vast number of the questions which would otherwise become occasions for interrupting you. with regard to other difficulties, which can not be foreseen and guarded against, direct the pupils to bring them to the class at the next recitation. half a dozen of the class might, and very probably would, meet with the same difficulty. if they bring this difficulty to you one by one, you have to explain it over and over again, whereas, when it is brought to the class, one explanation answers for all. as to all questions about the lesson--where it is, what it is, and how long it is--never answer them. require each pupil to remember for himself, and if he was absent when the lesson was assigned, let him ask his class-mate in a rest. you _may_ refuse to give particular individuals the private assistance they ask for in such a way as to discourage and irritate them, but this is by no means necessary. it can be done in such a manner that the pupil will see the propriety of it, and acquiesce pleasantly in it. a child comes to you, for example, and says, "will you tell me, sir, where the next lesson is?" "were you not in the class at the time?" "yes, sir; but i have forgotten." "well, i have forgotten too. i have a great many classes to hear, and, of course, great many lessons to assign, and i never remember them. it is not necessary for me to remember." "may i speak to one of the class to ask about it?" "you can not speak, you know, till the study card is down; you may then." "but i want to get my lesson now." "i don't know what you will do, then. i am sorry you don't remember. "besides," continues the teacher, looking pleasantly, however, while he says it, "if i knew, i think i ought not to tell you." "why, sir?" "because, you know, i have said i wish the scholars to remember where the lessons are, and not come to me. you know it would be very unwise for me, after assigning a lesson once for all in the class, to spend my time here at my desk in assigning it over again to each individual one by one. now if i should tell _you_ where the lesson is now, i should have to tell others, and thus should adopt a practice which i have condemned." take another case. you assign to a class of little girls a subject of composition, requesting them to copy their writing upon a sheet of paper, leaving a margin an inch wide at the top, and one of half an inch at the sides and bottom. the class take their seats, and, after a short time, one of them comes to you, saying she does not know how long an inch is. "don't you know any thing about it?" "no, sir, not much." "should you think _that_ is more or less than an inch?" (pointing to a space on a piece of paper much too large). "more." "then you know something about it. now i did not tell you to make the margins _exactly_ an inch and half an inch, but only as near as you could judge?" "would _that_ be about right?" asks the girl, showing a distance. "i must not tell you, because, you know, i never in such cases help individuals; if that is as near as you can get it, you may make it so." it may be well, after assigning a lesson to a class, to say that all those who do not distinctly understand what they have to do may remain after the class have taken their seats, and ask: the task may then be distinctly assigned again, and the difficulties, so far as they can be foreseen, explained. by such means these sources of interruption and difficulty may, like the others, be almost entirely removed. perhaps not altogether, for many cases may occur where the teacher may choose to give a particular class permission to come to him for help. such permission, however, ought never to be given unless it is absolutely necessary, and should never be allowed to be taken unless it is distinctly given. . hearing recitations. i am aware that many attempt to do something else at the same time that they are hearing a recitation, and there may perhaps be some individuals who can succeed in this. if the exercise to which the teacher is attending consists merely in listening to the reciting word for word some passage committed to memory, it can be done. i hope, however, to show in a future chapter that there are other and far higher objects which every teacher ought to have in view in his recitations, and he who understands these objects, and aims at accomplishing them--who endeavors to _instruct_ his class, to enlarge and elevate their ideas, to awaken a deep and paramount interest in the subject which they are examining, will find that his time must be his own, and his attention uninterrupted while he is presiding at a class. all the other exercises and arrangements of the school are, in fact, preparatory and subsidiary to this. here, that is, in the classes, the real business of teaching is to be done. here the teacher comes in contact with his scholars mind with mind, and here, consequently, he must be uninterrupted and undisturbed. i shall speak more particularly on this subject hereafter under the head of instruction; all i wish to secure in this place is that the teacher should make such arrangements that he can devote his exclusive attention to his classes while he is actually engaged with them. each recitation, too, should have its specified time, which should be adhered to with rigid accuracy. if any thing like the plan i have suggested for allowing rests of a minute or two every half hour should be adopted, it will mark off the forenoon into parts which ought to be precisely and carefully observed. i was formerly accustomed to think that i could not limit the time for my recitations without great inconvenience, and occasionally allowed one exercise to encroach upon the succeeding, and this upon the next, and thus sometimes the last was excluded altogether. but such a lax and irregular method of procedure is ruinous to the discipline of a school. on perceiving it at last, i put the bell into the hands of a pupil, commissioning her to ring regularly, having myself fixed the times, saying that i would show my pupils that i could be confined myself to system as well as they. at first i experienced a little inconvenience; but this soon disappeared, and at last the hours and half hours of our artificial division entirely superseded, in the school-room, the divisions of the clock face. i found, too, that it exerted an extremely favorable influence upon the scholars in respect to their willingness to submit readily to the necessary restrictions imposed upon them in school, to show them that the teacher was subject to law as well as they. but, in order that i may be specific and definite, i will draw up a plan for the regular division of time, for a common school, not to be _adopted_, but to be _imitated_; that is, i do not recommend exactly this plan, but that some plan, precise and specific, should be determined upon, and exhibited to the school by a diagram like the following: forenoon. ix. x. xi. xii. +---------+---------+---+---+------------+ |reading. |writing. |r. |g. |arithmetic. | +----+----+----+----+---+---+-----+------+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----+----+----+----+---+---+-----+------+ afternoon. ii. iii. iv. v. +-----------+---------+---+---+----------+ |geography. |writing. |r. |g. |grammar. | +-----+-----+----+----+---+---+----+-----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-----+-----+----+----+---+---+----+-----+ a drawing on a large sheet, made by some of the older scholars (for a teacher should never do any thing of this kind which his scholars can do for him), should be made and pasted up to view, the names of the classes being inserted in the columns under their respective heads. at the double lines at ten and three, there might be a rest of two minutes, an officer appointed for the purpose ringing a bell at each of the periods marked on the plan, and making the signal for the _rest_, whatever signal might be determined upon. it is a good plan to have the bell _touched_ five minutes before each half hour expires, and then exactly at its close. the first bell would notify the teacher or teachers, if there are more than one in the school, that the time for their respective recitations is drawing to a close. at the second bell the new classes should take their places without waiting to be called for. the scholars will thus see that the arrangements of the school are based upon system, to which the teacher himself conforms, and not subjected to his own varying will. they will thus not only go on more regularly, but they will themselves yield more easily and pleasantly to the necessary arrangements. the fact is, children love system and regularity. each one is sometimes a little uneasy under the restraint which it imposes upon him individually, but they all love to see its operation upon others, and they are generally very willing to submit to its laws, if the rest of the community are required to submit too. they show this in their love of military parade; what allures them is chiefly the _order_ of it; and even a little child creeping upon the floor will be pleased when he gets his playthings in a row. a teacher may turn this principle to most useful account in forming his plans for his school, in observing that the teacher is governed by them too as well as they. it will be seen by reference to the foregoing plan that i have marked the time for the recesses by the letter r. at the top. immediately after them, both in the forenoon and in the afternoon, twenty minutes are left, marked g., the initial standing for general exercise. they are intended to denote periods during which all the scholars are in their seats, with their work laid aside, ready to attend to whatever the teacher may desire to bring before the whole school. there are so many occasions on which it is necessary to address the whole school, that it is very desirable to appropriate a particular time for it. in most of the best schools i believe this plan is adopted. i will mention some of the subjects which would come up at such a time. . there are some studies which can be advantageously attended to by the whole school together, such as punctuation, and, to some extent, spelling. . cases of discipline which it is necessary to bring before the whole school ought to come up at a regularly-appointed time. by attending to them here, there will be a greater importance attached to them. whatever the teacher does will seem to be more deliberate, and, in fact, _will be_ more deliberate. . general remarks, bringing up classes of faults which prevail; also general directions, which may at any time be needed; and, in fact, any business relating to the general arrangements of the school. . familiar lectures from the teacher on various subjects. these lectures, though necessarily brief and quite familiar in their form, may still be very exact and thorough in respect to the knowledge conveyed. when they are upon scientific subjects they may sometimes be illustrated by experiments, more or less imposing, according to the ingenuity of the teacher, the capacity of the older scholars to assist him in the preparations, or the means and facilities at his command.[ ] [illustration] [footnote : in some of the larger institutions of the country the teacher will have convenient apparatus at his disposal, and a room specially adapted to the purpose of experiments. the engraving represents a room at the spingler institute at new york. but let not the teacher suppose that these special facilities are essential to enable him to give instruction to his pupils in such a way. i have known a much larger balloon than the one represented in the engraving to be constructed by the teacher and pupils of a common country school from directions in rees's cyclopedia, and sent up in the open air. the aeronaut that accompanied it was a hen--poor thing!] the design of such lectures should be to extend the _general knowledge_ of the pupils in regard to those subjects on which they will need information in their progress through life. in regard to each of these particulars i shall speak more particularly hereafter, in the chapters to which they respectively belong. my only object here is to show, in the general arrangements of the school, how a place is to be found for them. my practice has been to have two periods of short duration, each day, appropriated to these objects: the first to the _business of the school_, and the second to such studies or lectures as could be most profitably attended to at such a time. we come now to one of the most important subjects which present themselves to the teacher's attention in settling the principles upon which he shall govern his school. i mean the degree of influence which the boys themselves shall have in the management of its affairs. shall the government of school be a _monarchy_ or a _republic?_ to this question, after much inquiry and many experiments, i answer, a monarchy; an absolute, unlimited monarchy; the teacher possessing exclusive power as far as the pupils are concerned, though strictly responsible to the committee or to the trustees under whom he holds his office. while, however, it is thus distinctly understood that the power of the teacher is supreme, that all the power rests in him, and that he alone is responsible for its exercise, there ought to be a very free and continual _delegation_ of power to the pupils. as much business as is possible should be committed to them. they should be interested as much as possible in the affairs of the school, and led to take an active part in carrying them forward; though they should, all the time, distinctly understand that it is only _delegated_ power which they exercise, and that the teacher can, at any time, revoke what he has granted, and alter or annul at pleasure any of their decisions. by this plan we have the responsibility resting where it ought to rest, and yet the boys are trained to business, and led to take an active interest in the welfare of the school. trust is reposed in them, which may be greater or less, as they are able to bear. all the good effects of reposing trust and confidence, and committing the management of important business to the pupils will be secured, without the dangers which would result from the entire surrender of the management of the institution into their hands. there have been, in several cases, experiments made with reference to ascertaining how far a government strictly republican would be admissible in a school. a very fair experiment of this kind was made some years since at the gardiner lyceum, in maine. at the time of its establishment, nothing was said of the mode of government which it was intended to adopt. for some time the attention of the instructors was occupied in arranging the course of study, and attending to the other concerns of the institution; and, in the infant state of the lyceum, few cases of discipline occurred, and no regular system of government was necessary. before long, however, complaints were made that the students at the lyceum were guilty of breaking windows in an old building used as a town-house. the principal called the students together, mentioned the reports, and said that he did not know, and did not wish to know who were the guilty individuals. it was necessary, however, that the thing should be examined into, and that restitution should be made, and, relying on their faithfulness and ability, he should leave them to manage the business alone. for this purpose, he nominated one of the students as judge, some others as jurymen, and appointed the other officers necessary in the same manner. he told them that, in order to give them time to make a thorough investigation, they were excused from farther exercises during the day. the principal then left them, and they entered on the trial. the result was that they discovered the guilty individuals, ascertained the amount of mischief done by each, and sent to the selectmen a message, by which they agreed to pay a sum equal to three times the value of the injury sustained. the students were soon after informed that this mode of bringing offenders to justice would hereafter be always pursued, and arrangements were made for organizing a _regular republican government_ among the young men. by this government all laws which related to the internal police of the institution were to be made, all officers were appointed, and all criminal cases were to be tried. the students finding the part of a judge too difficult for them to sustain, one of the professors was appointed to hold that office, and, for similar reasons, another of the professors was made president of the legislative assembly. the principal was the executive, with power to _pardon_, but not to _sentence_, or even _accuse_. some time after this a student was indicted for profane swearing; he was tried, convicted, and punished. after this he evinced a strong hostility to the government. he made great exertions to bring it into contempt, and when the next trial came on, he endeavored to persuade the witnesses that giving evidence was dishonorable, and he so far succeeded that the defendant was acquitted for want of evidence, when it was generally understood that there was proof of his guilt, which would have been satisfactory if it could have been brought forward. for some time after this the prospect was rather unfavorable, though many of the students themselves opposed with great earnestness these efforts, and were much alarmed lest they should lose their free government through the perverseness of one of their number. the attorney general, at this juncture, conceived the idea of indicting the individual alluded to for an attempt to overturn the government. he obtained the approbation of the principal, and the grand jury found a bill. the court, as the case was so important, invited some of the trustees, who were in town, to attend the trial. the parent of the defendant was also informed of the circumstances and requested to be present, and he accordingly attended. the prisoner was tried, found guilty, and sentenced, if i mistake not, to expulsion. at his earnest request, however, to be permitted to remain in the lyceum and redeem his character, he was pardoned and restored, and from that time he became perfectly exemplary in his conduct and character. after this occurrence the system went on in successful operation for some time. the legislative power was vested in the hands of a general committee, consisting of eight or ten, chosen by the students from their own number. they met about once a week to transact such business as appointing officers, making and repealing regulations, and inquiring into the state of the lyceum. the instructors had a negative upon all their proceedings, but no direct and positive power. they could pardon, but they could assign no punishments, nor make laws inflicting any. now such a plan as this may succeed for a short time, and under very favorable circumstances; and the circumstance which it is chiefly important should be favorable is, that the man who is called to preside over such an association should possess such talents of _generalship_ that he can really manage the institution _himself_, while the power is _nominally_ and _apparently_ in the hands of the boys. should this not be the case, or should the teacher, from any cause, lose his personal influence in the school, so that the institution should really be surrendered into the hands of the pupils, things must be on a very unstable footing. and, accordingly, where such a plan has been adopted, it has, i believe, in every instance, been ultimately abandoned. _real self-government_ is an experiment sufficiently hazardous among men, though providence, in making a daily supply of food necessary for every human being, has imposed a most powerful check upon the tendency to anarchy and confusion. let the populace of paris or of london materially interrupt the order and break in upon the arrangements of the community, and in eight-and-forty hours nearly the whole of the mighty mass will be in the hands of the devourer, hunger, and they will be soon brought to submission. on the other hand, a month's anarchy and confusion in a college or an academy would be delight to half the students, or else times have greatly changed since i was within college walls. although it is thus evident that the important concerns of a literary institution can not be safely committed into the hands of the students, very great benefits will result from calling upon them to act upon and to decide questions relative to the school within such limits and under such restrictions as are safe and proper. such a practice will assist the teacher very much if he manages it with any degree of dexterity; for it will interest his pupils in the success of the school, and secure, to a very considerable extent, their co-operation in the government of it. it will teach them self-control and self-government, and will accustom them to submit to the majority--that lesson which, of all others, it is important for a republican to learn. in endeavoring to interest the pupils of a school in the work of co-operating with the teacher in its administration, no little dexterity will be necessary at the outset. in all probability, the formal announcement of this principle, and the endeavor to introduce it by a sudden revolution, would totally fail. boys, like men, must be gradually prepared for; power, and they must exercise it only so far as they are prepared. this, however, can very easily be done. the teacher should say nothing of his general design, but, when some suitable opportunity presents, he should endeavor to lead his pupils to co-operate with him in some particular instance. for example, let us suppose that he has been accustomed to distribute the writing-books with his own hand when the writing-hour arrives, and that he concludes to delegate this simple business first to his scholars. he accordingly states to them, just before the writing exercise of the day on which he proposes the experiment, as follows: "i have thought that time will be saved if you will help me distribute the books, and i will accordingly appoint four distributors, one for each division of the seats, who may come to me and receive the books, and distribute them each to his own division. are you willing to adopt this plan?" the boys answer "yes, sir," and the teacher then looks carefully around the room, and selects four pleasant and popular boys--boys who he knows would gladly assist him, and who would, at the same time, be agreeable to their school-mates. this latter point is necessary in order to secure the popularity and success of the plan. unless the boys are very different from any i have ever met with, they will be pleased with the duty thus assigned them. they will learn system and regularity by being taught to perform this simple duty in a proper manner. after a week, the teacher may consider their term of service as having expired, and thanking them in public for the assistance they have rendered him, he may ask the scholars if they are willing to continue the plan, and if the vote is in favor of it, as it unquestionably would be, each boy probably hoping that he should be appointed to the office, the teacher may nominate four others, including, perhaps, upon the list, some boy popular among his companions, but whom he has suspected to be not very friendly to himself or the school. i think the most scrupulous statesman would not object to securing influence by conferring office in such a case. if difficulties arise from the operation of such a measure, the plan can easily be modified to avoid or correct them. if it is successful, it may be continued, and the principle may be extended, so as in the end to affect very considerably all the arrangements and the whole management of the school. or, let us imagine the following scene to have been the commencement of the introduction of the principle of limited self-government into a school. the preceptor of an academy was sitting at his desk, at the close of school, while the pupils were putting up their books and leaving the room. a boy came in with angry looks, and, with his hat in his hands bruised and dusty, advanced to the master's desk, and complained that one of his companions had thrown down his hat upon the floor, and had almost spoiled it. the teacher looked calmly at the mischief, and then asked how it happened. "i don't know, sir. i hung it on my nail, and he pulled it down." "i wish you would ask him to come here," said the teacher. "ask him pleasantly." the accused soon came in, and the two boys stood together before the master. "there seems to be some difficulty between you boys about a nail to hang your hats upon. i suppose each of you think it is your own nail." "yes, sir," said both the boys. "it will be more convenient for me to talk with you about this to-morrow than to-night, if you are willing to wait. besides, we can examine it more calmly then. but if we put it off till then, you must not talk about it in the mean time, blaming one another, and keeping up the irritation that you feel. are you both willing to leave it just where it is till to-morrow, and try to forget all about it till then? i expect i shall find you both a little to blame." the boys rather reluctantly consented. the next day the master heard the case, and settled it so far as it related to the two boys. it was easily settled in the morning, for they had had time to get calm, and were, after sleeping away their anger, rather ashamed of the whole affair, and very desirous to have it forgotten. that day, when the hour for the transaction of general business came, the teacher stated to the school that it was necessary to take some measures to provide each boy with a nail for his hat. in order to show that it was necessary, he related the circumstances of the quarrel which had occurred the day before. he did this, not with such an air and manner as to convey the impression that his object was to find fault with the boys, or to expose their misconduct, but to show the necessity of doing something to remedy the evil which had been the cause of so unpleasant an occurrence. still, though he said nothing in the way of reproof or reprehension, and did not name the boys, but merely gave a cool and impartial narrative of the facts, the effect, very evidently, was to bring such quarrels into discredit. a calm review of misconduct, after the excitement has gone by, will do more to bring it into disgrace than the most violent invectives and reproaches directed against the individuals guilty of it at the time. "now, boys," continued the master, "will you assist me in making arrangements to prevent the recurrence of all temptations of this kind hereafter? it is plain that every boy ought to have a nail appropriated expressly to his use. the first thing to be done is to ascertain whether there are enough for all. i should like, therefore, to have two committees appointed: one to count and report the number of nails in the entry, and also how much room there is for more; the other to ascertain the number of scholars in school. they can count all who are here, and, by observing the vacant desks, they can ascertain the number absent. when this investigation is made, i will tell you what to do next." the boys seemed pleased with the plan, and the committees were appointed, two members on each. the master took care to give the quarrelers some share in the work, apparently forgetting, from this time, the unpleasant occurrence which had brought up the subject. when the boys came to inform him of the result of their inquiries, he asked them to make a little memorandum of it in writing, as he might forget the numbers, he said, before the time came for reading them. the boys brought him, presently, a rough scrap of paper, with the figures marked upon it. he told them he should forget which was the number of nails, and which the number of scholars, unless they wrote it down. "it is the custom among men," said he, "to make out their report, in such a case, fully, so that it would explain itself; and i should like to have you, if you are willing, make out yours a little more distinctly." accordingly, after a little additional explanation, the boys made another attempt, and presently returned with something like the following: "the committee for counting the nails report as follows: number of nails. . . . room for more . . . . ." the other report was very similar, though somewhat rudely written and expressed, and both were perfectly satisfactory to the preceptor, as he plainly showed by the manner in which he received them. i need not finish the description of this case by narrating particularly the reading of the reports, the appointment of a committee to assign the nails, and to paste up the names of the scholars, one to each. the work, in such a case, might be done in recesses, and out of school hours; and though, at first, the teacher will find that it is as much trouble to accomplish business in this way as it would be to attend to it directly himself, yet, after a very little experience, he will find that his pupils will acquire dexterity and readiness, and will be able to render him very material assistance in the accomplishment of his plans. this, however--the assistance rendered to the teacher--is not the main object of the adoption of such measures as this. the main design is to interest the pupils in the management and the welfare of the school--to identify them, as it were, with it. and such measures as the above will accomplish this object; and every teacher who will try the experiment, and carry it into effect with any tolerable degree of skill, will find that it will, in a short time, change the whole aspect of the school in regard to the feelings subsisting between himself and his pupils. each teacher who tries such an experiment will find himself insensibly repeating it, and after a time he may have quite a number of officers and committees who are intrusted with various departments of business. he will have a secretary, chosen by ballot by the scholars, to keep a record of all the important transactions in the school for each day. at first he will dictate to the secretary, thus directing him precisely what to say, or even writing it for him, and then merely requiring him to copy it into the book provided for the purpose. afterward he will give the pupil less and less assistance, till he can keep the record properly himself. the record of each day will be read on the succeeding day at the hour for business. the teacher will perhaps have a committee to take care of the fire, and another to see that the room is constantly in good order. he will have distributors for each division of seats, to distribute books, and compositions, and pens, and to collect votes. and thus, in a short time, his school will become _regularly organized as a society or legislative assembly_. the boys will learn submission to the majority in such unimportant things as may be committed to them; they will learn system and regularity, and every thing else, indeed, that belongs to the science of political self-government. there are dangers, however. what useful practice has not its dangers? one of these is, that the teacher will allow these arrangements to take up too much time. he must guard against this. i have found from experience that fifteen minutes each day, with a school of , is enough. this ought never to be exceeded. another danger is, that the boys will be so engaged in the duties of their _offices_ as to neglect their _studies_. this would be, and ought to be, fatal to the whole plan. this danger may be avoided in the following manner. state publicly that you will not appoint any to office who are not good scholars, always punctual, and always prepared; and when any boy who holds an office is going behindhand in his studies, say to him kindly, "you have not time to get your lessons, and i am afraid it is owing to the fact that you spend so much time in helping me. now if you wish to resign your office, so as to have more time for your lessons, you can. in fact, i think you ought to do it. you may try it for a day or two, and i will notice how you recite, and then we can decide." such a communication will generally be found to have a powerful effect. if it does not remedy the evil, the resignation must be insisted on. a few decided cases of this kind will effectually remove the evil i am considering. another difficulty which is likely to attend the plan of allowing the pupils of a school to take some part in this way in the administration of it is that it may tend to make them insubordinate, so that they will, in many instances, submit with less good humor to such decisions as you may consider necessary. i do not mean that this will be the case with all, but that there will be a few who will be ungenerous enough, if you allow them to decide sometimes what shall be done, to endeavor to make trouble, or at least to show symptoms of impatience and vexation because you do not allow them always to decide. sometimes this feeling may show itself by the discontented looks, or gestures, or even words with which some unwelcome regulation or order on the part of the teacher will be received. such a spirit should be immediately and decidedly checked whenever it appears. it will not be difficult to check, and even entirely to remove it. on one occasion when, after learning the wish of the scholars on some subject which had been brought before them, i decided contrary to it, there arose a murmur of discontent all over the room. this was the more distinct, because i have always accustomed my pupils to answer questions asked, and to express their wishes and feelings on any subject i may present to them with great freedom. i asked all those who had expressed their dissatisfaction to rise. about one third of the scholars arose. "perhaps you understood that when i put the question to vote i meant to abide by your decision, and that, consequently, i ought not to have reversed it, as i did afterward?" "yes, sir," "yes, sir," they replied. do you suppose it would be safe to leave the decision of important questions to the scholars in this school?" "yes, sir;" "no, sir." the majority were, however, in the affirmative. thus far, only those who were standing had answered. i told them that, as they were divided in opinion, they might sit, and i would put the question to the whole school. "you know," i continued, addressing the whole, "what sort of persons the girls who compose this school are. you know about how many are governed habitually by steady principle, and how many by impulse and feeling. you know, too, what proportion have judgment and foresight necessary to consider and decide independently such questions as continually arise in the management of a school. now suppose i should resign the school into your own hands as to its management, and only come in to give instruction to the classes, leaving all general control of its arrangements with you, would it go on safely or not?" as might have been foreseen, there was, when the question was fairly proposed, scarcely a solitary vote in favor of government by scholars. they seemed to see clearly the absurdity of such a scheme. "besides," i continued, "the trustees of this school have committed it to my charge; they hold me responsible; the public hold _me_ responsible, not you. now if i should surrender it into your hands, and you, from any cause, should manage the trust unfaithfully or unskillfully, i should necessarily be held accountable. i could never shift the responsibility upon you. now it plainly is not just or right that one party should hold the power, and another be held accountable for its exercise. it is clear, therefore, in every view of the subject, that i should retain the management of this school in my own hands. are you not satisfied that it is?" the scholars universally answered "yes, sir." they seemed satisfied, and doubtless were. it was then stated to them that the object in asking them to vote was, in some cases, to obtain an expression of their opinion or their wishes in order to help _me_ decide, and only in those cases where it was expressly stated did i mean to give the final decision to them. still, however, if cases are often referred to them, the feeling will gradually creep in that the school is managed on republican principles, as they call it, and they will, unless this point is specially guarded, gradually lose that spirit of entire and cordial subordination so necessary for the success of any school. it should often be distinctly explained to them that a republican government is one where the power essentially resides in the community, and is exercised by a ruler only so far as the community delegates it to him, whereas in the school the government is based on the principle that the power, primarily and essentially, resides in the teacher, the scholars exercising only such as _he_ may delegate to _them_. with these limitations and restrictions, and with this express understanding in regard to what is, in all cases, the ultimate authority, i think there will be no danger in throwing a very large share of the business which will, from time to time, come up in the school, upon the scholars themselves for decision. in my own experience this plan has been adopted with the happiest results. in the mount vernon school a small red morocco wrapper lies constantly on a little shelf, accessible to all. by its side is a little pile of papers, about one inch by six, on which any one may write her motion, or her _proposition_, as the scholars call it, whatever it may be, and when written it is inclosed in the wrapper, to be brought to me at the appointed time for attending to the general business of the school. through this wrapper all questions are asked, all complaints entered, all proposals made. is there discontent in the school? it shows itself by "_propositions_" in the wrapper. is any body aggrieved or injured? i learn it through the wrapper. in fact, it is a little safety-valve, which lets off what, if confined, might threaten explosion---an index--a thermometer, which reveals to me, from day to day, more of the state of public opinion in the little community than any thing beside. these propositions are generally read aloud. some cases are referred to the scholars for decision; some i decide myself; others are laid aside without notice of any kind; others still, merely suggest remarks on the subjects to which they allude. the principles, then, which this chapter has been intended to establish, are simply these: in making your general arrangements, look carefully over your ground, consider all the objects which you have to accomplish, and the proper degree of time and attention which each deserves. then act upon system. let the mass of particulars which would otherwise crowd upon you in promiscuous confusion be arranged and classified. let each be assigned to its proper time and place, so that your time may be your own, under your own command, and not, as is too often the case, at the mercy of the thousand accidental circumstances which may occur. in a word, be, in the government of your school, yourself supreme, and let your supremacy be that of _authority_; but delegate power, as freely as possible, to those under your care. show them that you are desirous of reposing trust in them just so far as they show themselves capable of exercising it. thus interest them in your plans, and make them feel that they participate in the honor or the disgrace of success or failure. i have gone much into detail in this chapter, proposing definite measures by which the principles i have recommended may be carried into effect. i wish, however, that it may be distinctly understood that all i contend for is the _principles_ themselves, no matter what the particular measures are by which they are secured. every good school must be systematic, but all need not be on precisely the same system. as this work is intended almost exclusively for beginners, much detail has been admitted, and many of the specific measures here proposed may perhaps be safely adopted where no others are established. there may also, perhaps, be cases where teachers, whose schools are already in successful operation, may ingraft upon their own plans some things which are here proposed. if they should attempt it, it must be done cautiously and gradually. there is no other way by which they can be safely introduced, or even introduced at all. this is a point of so much importance, that i must devote a paragraph to it before closing the chapter. let a teacher propose to his pupils, formally, from his desk, the plan of writing propositions, for example, as explained above, and procure his wrapper, and put it in its place, and what would be the result? why, not a single paper, probably, could he get, from one end of the week to the other. but let him, on the other hand, when a boy comes to him to ask some question, the answer to which many in the school would equally wish to hear, say to the inquirer, "will you be so good as to write that question, and put it on my desk, and then, at the regular time, i will answer it to all the school." when he reads it, let him state that it was written at his request, and give the other boys permission to leave their proposals or questions on his desk in the same way. in a few days he will have another, and thus the plan may be gently and gradually introduced. so with officers. they should be appointed among the scholars only _as fast as they are actually needed_, and the plan should thus be cautiously carried only so far as it proves good on trial. be always cautious about innovations and changes. make no rash experiments on a large scale, but always test your principle in the small way, and then, if it proves good, gradually extend its operation as circumstances seem to require. by thus cautiously and slowly introducing plans, founded on the systematic principles here brought to view, a very considerable degree of quiet, and order, and regularity may be introduced into the largest and most miscellaneous schools. and this order and quiet are absolutely necessary to enable the teacher to find that interest and enjoyment in his work which were exhibited in the last chapter; the pleasure of _directing and controlling mind_, and doing it, not by useless and anxious complaints, or stern threats and painful punishments, but by regarding the scene of labor in its true light, as a community of intellectual and moral beings, and governing it by moral and intellectual power. it is, in fact, the pleasure of exercising _power_. i do not mean arbitrary, personal authority, but the power to produce, by successful but quiet contrivance, extensive and happy results; the pleasure of calmly considering every difficulty, and, without irritation or anger, devising the proper moral means to remedy the moral evil; and then the interest and pleasure of witnessing its effects. chapter iii. instruction. [illustration] we come now to consider the subject of instruction. there are three kinds of human knowledge which stand strikingly distinct from all the rest. they lie at the foundation. they constitute the roots of the tree. in other words, they are the _means_ by which all other knowledge is attained. i need not say that i mean reading, writing, and calculation. teachers do not perhaps always consider how entirely and essentially distinct these three branches of learning are from all the rest. they are arts; the acquisition of them is not to be considered as knowledge, so much as the means by which knowledge may be obtained. a child who is studying geography, or history, or natural science, is learning _facts_--gaining information; on the other hand, the one who is learning to write, or to read, or to calculate, may be adding little or nothing to his stock of knowledge. he is acquiring _skill_, which, at some future time, he may make the means of increasing his knowledge to any extent. this distinction ought to be kept constantly in view, and the teacher should feel that these three fundamental branches stand by themselves, and stand first in importance. i do not mean to undervalue the others, but only to insist upon the superior value and importance of these. teaching a pupil to read before he enters upon the active business of life is like giving a new settler an axe as he goes to seek his new home in the forest. teaching him a lesson in history is, on the other hand, only cutting down a tree or two for him. a knowledge of natural history is like a few bushels of grain gratuitously placed in his barn; but the art of ready reckoning is the plow which will remain by him for years, and help him to draw out from the soil a new treasure every year of his life. the great object, then, of the common schools in our country is to teach the whole population to read, to write, and to calculate. in fact, so essential is it that the accomplishment of these objects should be secured, that it is even a question whether common schools should not be confined to them. i say it is a _question_, for it is sometimes made so, though public opinion has decided that some portion of attention, at least, should be paid to the acquisition of additional knowledge. but, after all, the amount of _knowledge_ which is actually acquired at schools is very small. it must be very small. the true policy is to aim at making all the pupils good readers, writers, and calculators, and to consider the other studies of the school important chiefly as practice in turning these arts to useful account. in other words, the scholars should be taught these arts thoroughly first of all, and in the other studies the main design should be to show them how to use, and interest them in using, the arts they have thus acquired. a great many teachers feel a much stronger interest in the one or two scholars they may have in surveying or in latin than they do in the large classes in the elementary branches which fill the school. but a moment's reflection will show that such a preference is founded on a very mistaken view. leading forward one or two minds from step to step in an advanced study is certainly far inferior in real dignity and importance to opening all the stores of written knowledge to fifty or a hundred. the man who neglects the interests of his school in these great branches to devote his time to two or three, or half a dozen older scholars, is unjust both to his employers and to himself. it is the duty, therefore, of every teacher who commences a common district school for a single season to make, when he commences, an estimate of the state of his pupils in reference to these three branches. how do they all write? how do they all read? how do they calculate? it would be well if he would make a careful examination of the school in this respect. let them all write a specimen. let all read, and let him make a memorandum of the manner, noticing how many read fluently, how many with difficulty, how many know only their letters, and how many are to be taught these. let him ascertain, also, what progress they have made in arithmetic--how many can readily perform the elementary processes, and what number need instruction in these. after thus surveying the ground, let him form his plan, and lay out his whole strength in carrying forward as rapidly as possible the _whole school_ in these studies. by this means he is acting most directly and powerfully on the intelligence of the whole future community in that place. he is opening to fifty or a hundred minds stores of knowledge which they will go on exploring for years to come. what a descent now from such a work as this to the mere hearing of the recitation of two or three boys in trigonometry! i repeat it, that a thorough and enlightened survey of the whole school should be taken, and plans formed for elevating the whole mass in those great branches of knowledge which are to be of immediate practical use to them in future life. if the school is one more advanced in respect to the age and studies of the pupils, the teacher should, in the same manner, before he forms his plans, consider well what are the great objects which he has to accomplish. he should ascertain what is the existing state of his school both as to knowledge and character; how long, generally, his pupils are to remain under his care; what are to be their future stations and conditions in life, and what objects he can reasonably hope to effect for them while they remain under his influence. by means of this forethought and consideration he will be enabled to work understandingly. it is desirable, too, that what i have recommended in reference to the whole school should be done in respect to the case of each individual. when a new pupil comes under your charge, ascertain (by other means, however, than formal examination) to what stage his education has advanced, and deliberately consider what objects you can reasonably expect to effect for him while he remains under your care. you can not, indeed, always form your plans to suit so exactly your general views in regard to the school and to individuals as you could wish. but these general views will, in a thousand cases, modify your plans, or affect in a greater or less degree all your arrangements. they will keep you to a steady purpose, and your work will go on far more systematically and regularly than it would do if, as in fact many teachers do, you were to come headlong into your school, take things just as you find them, and carry them forward at random without end or aim. this survey of your field being made, you are prepared to commence definite operations, and the great difficulty in carrying your plans into effect is how to act more efficiently on _the greatest numbers at a time._ the whole business of public instruction, if it goes on at all, must go on by the teacher's skill in multiplying his power, by acting on _numbers at once._ in most books on education we are taught, almost exclusively, how to operate on the _individual_. it is the error into which theoretic writers almost always fall. we meet in every periodical, and in every treatise, and, in fact, in almost every conversation on the subject, with remarks which sound very well by the fireside, but they are totally inefficient and useless in school, from their being apparently based upon the supposition that the teacher has but _one_ pupil to attend to at a time. the great question in the management of schools is not how you can take _one_ scholar, and lead him forward most rapidly in a prescribed course, but how you can classify and arrange _numbers_, comprising every possible variety both as to knowledge and capacity, so as to carry them all forward effectually together. the extent to which a teacher may multiply his power by acting on numbers at a time is very great. in order to estimate it, we must consider carefully what it is when carried to the greatest extent to which it is capable of being carried under the most favorable circumstances. now it is possible for a teacher to speak so as to be easily heard by three hundred persons, and three hundred pupils can be easily so seated as to see his illustrations or diagrams. now suppose that three hundred pupils, all ignorant of the method of reducing fractions to a common denominator, and yet all old enough to learn, are collected in one room. suppose they are all attentive and desirous of learning, it is very plain that the process may be explained to the whole at once, so that half an hour spent in that exercise would enable a very large proportion of them to understand the subject. so, if a teacher is explaining to a class in grammar the difference between a noun and verb, the explanation would do as well for several hundred as for the dozen who constitute the class, if arrangements could only be made to have the hundreds hear it; but there are, perhaps, only a hundred pupils in the school, and of these a large part understand already the point to be explained, and another large part are too young to attend to it. i wish the object of these remarks not to be misunderstood. i do not recommend the attempt to teach on so extensive a scale; i admit that it is impracticable; i only mean to show in what the impracticability consists, namely, in the difficulty of making such arrangements as to derive the full benefit from the instructions rendered. the instructions of the teacher are, _in the nature of things,_ available to the extent i have represented, but in actual practice the full benefit can not be derived. now, so far as we thus fall short of this full benefit, so far there is, of course, waste; and it is difficult or impossible to make such arrangements as will avoid the waste, in this manner, of a large portion of every effort which the teacher makes. a very small class instructed by an able teacher is like a factory of a hundred spindles, with a water-wheel of power sufficient for a thousand. in such a case, even if the owner, from want of capital or any other cause, can not add the other nine hundred, he ought to know how much of his power is in fact unemployed, and make arrangements to bring it into useful exercise as soon as he can. the teacher, in the same manner, should understand what is the full beneficial effect which it is possible, _in theory_, to derive from his instructions. he should understand, too, that just so far as he falls short of this full effect there is waste. it may be unavoidable; part of it unquestionably is, like the friction of machinery, unavoidable. still, it is waste; and it ought to be so understood, that, by the gradual perfection of the machinery, it may be more and more fully prevented. always bear in mind, then, when you are devoting your time to two or three individuals in a class, that your are losing a large part of your labor. your instructions are conducive to good effect only to the one tenth or one twentieth of the extent to which, under more favorable circumstances, they might be made available. and though you can not always avoid this loss, you ought to be aware of it, and so to shape your measures as to diminish it as much as possible. we come now to consider the particular measures to be adopted in giving instruction. the objects which are to be secured in the management of the classes are twofold: . recitation. . instruction. these two objects are, it is plain, entirely distinct. under the latter is included all the explanation, and assistance, and additional information which the teacher may give his pupils, and under the former, such an _examination_ of individuals as is necessary to secure their careful attention to their lessons. it is unsafe to neglect either of these points. if the class meetings are mere _recitations_, they soon become dull and mechanical; the pupils generally take little interest in their studies, and imbibe no literary spirit. their intellectual progress will, accordingly, suddenly cease the moment they leave school, and so cease to be called upon to recite lessons. on the other hand, if _instruction_ is all that is aimed at, and _recitation_ (by which i mean, as above explained, such an examination of individuals as is necessary to ascertain that they have faithfully performed the tasks assigned) is neglected, the exercise soon becomes not much more than a lecture, to which those, and those only, will attend who please. the business, therefore, of a thorough examination of the class must not be omitted. i do not mean that each individual scholar must every day be examined, but simply that the teacher must, in some way or other, satisfy himself by reasonable evidence that the whole class are really prepared. a great deal of ingenuity may be exercised in contriving means for effecting this object in the shortest possible time. i know of no part of the field of a teacher's labors which may be more facilitated by a little ingenuity than this. one teacher, for instance, has a spelling lesson to hear. he begins at the head of the line, and putting one word to each boy, goes regularly down, each successive pupil calculating the chances whether a word which he can accidentally spell will or will not come to him. if he spells it, the teacher can not tell whether he is prepared or not. that word is only one among fifty constituting the lesson. if he misses it, the teacher can not decide that he was unprepared. it might have been a single accidental error. another teacher, hearing the same lesson, requests the boys to bring their slates, and, as he dictates the words one after another, requires all to write them. after they are all written, he calls upon the pupils to spell them aloud as they have written them, simultaneously, pausing a moment after each, to give those who are wrong an opportunity to indicate it by some mark opposite the word misspelled. they all count the number of errors and report them. he passes down the class, glancing his eye at the work of each one to see that all is right, noticing particularly those slates which, from the character of the boys, need a more careful inspection. a teacher who had never tried this experiment would be surprised at the rapidity with which such work will be performed by a class after a little practice. now how different are these two methods in their actual results! in the latter case the whole class are thoroughly examined. in the former not a single member of it is. let me not be understood to recommend exactly this method of teaching spelling as the best one to be adopted in all cases. i only bring it forward as an illustration of the idea that a little machinery, a little ingenuity in contriving ways of acting on the _whole_ rather than on individuals, will very much promote the teacher's designs. in order to facilitate such plans, it is highly desirable that the classes should be trained to military precision and exactness in these manipulations. what i mean by this may perhaps be best illustrated by describing a case: it will show, in another branch, how much will be gained by acting upon numbers at once instead of upon each individual in succession. imagine, then, that a teacher requested all the pupils of his school who could write to take out their slates at the hour for a general exercise. as soon as the first bustle of opening and shutting the desks was over, he looked around the room, and saw some ruling lines across their slates, others wiping them all over on both sides with sponges, others scribbling, or writing, or making figures. "all those," says he, speaking, however, with a pleasant tone and with a pleasant look, "who have taken out any thing besides slates, may rise." several, in various parts of the room, stood up. "all those who have written any thing since they took out their slates may rise too, and those who have wiped their slates." "when all were up, he said to them, though not with a frown or a scowl, as if they had committed a great offense, "suppose a company of soldiers should be ordered to _form a line_, and instead of simply obeying that order they should all set at work, each in his own way, doing something else. one man at one end of the line begins to load and fire his gun; another takes out his knapsack and begins to eat his luncheon; a third amuses himself by going as fast as possible through the exercise; and another still, begins to march about hither and thither, facing to the right and left, and performing all the evolutions he can think of. what should you say to such a company as that?" the boys laughed. "it is better," said the teacher, "when numbers are acting under the direction of one, that they should all act _exactly together_. in this way we advance much faster than we otherwise should. be careful, therefore, to do exactly what i command, and nothing more. "_provide a place on your slates large enough to write a single line_," added the teacher, in a distinct voice. i print his orders in italics, and his remarks and explanations in roman letters. "_prepare to write_. "i mean by this," he continued, "that you place your slates before you with your pencils at the place where you are to begin, so that all may commence precisely at the same instant." the teacher who tries such an experiment as this will find at such a juncture an expression of fixed and pleasant attention upon every countenance in school. all will be intent, all will be interested. boys love order, and system, and acting in concert, and they will obey with great alacrity such commands as these if they are good-humoredly, though decidedly expressed. the teacher observed in one part of the room a hand raised, indicating that the boy wished to speak to him. he gave him liberty by pronouncing his name. "i have no pencil," said the boy. a dozen hands all around him were immediately seen fumbling in pockets and desks, and in a few minutes several pencils were reached out for his acceptance. the boy looked at the pencils and then at the teacher; he did not exactly know whether he was to take one or not. "all those boys," said the teacher, pleasantly, "who have taken out pencils, may rise. "have these boys done right or wrong?" "right;" "wrong;" "right," answered their companions, variously. "their motive was to help their class-mate out of his difficulties; that is a good feeling, certainly." "yes, sir, right;" "right." "but i thought you promised me a moment ago," replied the teacher, "not to do any thing unless i commanded it. did i ask for pencils?" a pause. "i do not blame these boys at all in this case; still, it is better to adhere rigidly to the principle of _exact obedience _ when numbers are acting together. i thank them, therefore, for being so ready to assist a companion, but they must put their pencils away, as they were taken out without orders." now such a dialogue as this, if the teacher speaks in a good-humored, though decided manner, would be universally well received in any school. whenever strictness of discipline is unpopular, it is rendered so simply by the ill-humored and ill-judged means by which it is attempted to be introduced. but all children will love strict discipline if it is pleasantly, though firmly maintained. it is a great, though very prevalent mistake, to imagine that boys and girls like a lax and inefficient government, and dislike the pressure of steady control. what they dislike is sour looks and irritating language, and they therefore very naturally dislike every thing introduced or sustained by means of them. if, however, exactness and precision in all the operations of a class and of the school are introduced and enforced in the proper manner, that is, by a firm, but mild and good-humored authority, scholars will universally be pleased with them. they like to see the uniform appearance, the straight line, the simultaneous movement. they like to feel the operation of system, and to realize, while they are at the school-room, that they form a community, governed by fixed and steady laws, firmly but kindly administered. on the other hand, laxity of discipline, and the disorder which will result from it, will only lead the pupils to contemn their teacher and to hate their school. by introducing and maintaining such a discipline as i have described, great facilities will be secured for examining the classes. for example, to take a case different from the one before described, let us suppose that a class have been performing a number of examples in addition. they come together to the recitation, and, under one mode of managing classes, the teacher is immediately beset by a number of the pupils with excuses. one had no slate; another was absent when the lesson was assigned; a third performed the work, but it got rubbed out, and a fourth did not know what was to be done. the teacher stops to hear all these, and to talk about them, fretting himself, and fretting the delinquents by his impatient remarks. the rest of the class are waiting, and, having nothing good to do, the temptation is almost irresistible to do something bad. one boy is drawing pictures on his slate to make his neighbors laugh, another is whispering, and two more are at play. the disorder continues while the teacher goes round examining slate after slate, his whole attention being engrossed by each individual, as the pupils come to him successively, while the rest are left to themselves, interrupted only by an occasional harsh, or even angry, but utterly useless rebuke from him. but, under another mode of managing classes and schools, a very different result would be produced. a boy approaches the teacher to render an excuse; the teacher replies, addressing himself, however, to the whole class, "i shall give all an opportunity to offer their excuses presently. no one must come till he is called." the class then regularly take their places in the recitation seats, the prepared and unprepared together. the following commands are given and obeyed promptly. they are spoken pleasantly, but still in the tone of command. "the class may rise. "all those that are not fully prepared with this lesson may sit." a number sit; and others, doubtful whether they are prepared or not, or thinking that there is something peculiar in their cases, which they wish to state, raise their hands, or make any other signal which is customary to indicate a wish to speak. such a signal ought always to be agreed upon, and understood in school. the teacher shakes his head, saying, "i will hear you presently. if there is, on any account whatever, any doubt whether you are prepared, you must sit. "those that are standing may read their answers to no. . unit figure?" _boys._ "five." _teacher._ "tens?" _b._ "six." _t._ "hundreds?" _b._ "seven." while these numbers are thus reading, the teacher looks at the boys, and can easily see whether any are not reading their own answers, but only following the rest. if they have been trained to speak exactly together, his ear will also at once detect any erroneous answer which any one may give. he takes down the figures given by the majority on his own slate, and reads them aloud. "this is the answer obtained by the majority; it is undoubtedly right. those who have different answers may sit." these directions, if understood and obeyed, would divide the class evidently into two portions. those standing have their work done, and done correctly, and those sitting have some excuse or error to be examined. a new lesson may now be assigned, and the first portion may be dismissed, which in a well-regulated school will be two thirds of the class. their slates may be slightly examined as they pass by the teacher on their way to their seats to see that all is fair; but it will be safe to take it for granted that a result in which a majority agree will be right. truth is consistent with itself, but error, in such a case, never is. this the teacher can at any time show by comparing the answers that are wrong; they will always be found, not only to differ from the correct result, but to contradict each other. the teacher may now, if he pleases, after the majority of the class have gone, hear the reasons of those who were unprepared, and look for the errors of those whose work was incorrect; but it is better to spend as little time as possible in such a way. if a scholar is not prepared, it is not of much consequence whether it is because he forgot his book or mistook the lesson; or if it is ascertained that his answer is incorrect, it is ordinarily a mere waste of time to search for the particular error. "i have looked over my work, sir," says the boy, perhaps, "and i can not find where it is wrong." he means by it that he does not believe that it is wrong. "it is no matter if you can not," would be the proper reply, "since it certainly is wrong; you have made a mistake in adding somewhere, but it is not worth while for me to spend two or three minutes apiece with all of you to ascertain where. try to be careful next time." indeed the teacher should understand and remember what many teachers are very prone to forget, namely, that the mere fact of finding an arithmetical error in a pupil's work on the slate, and pointing it out to him, has very little effect in correcting the false habit in his mind from which it arose. the cases of those who are unprepared at a recitation ought by no means to be passed by unnoticed, although it would be unwise to spend much time in examining each in detail. "it is not of much consequence," the teacher might say, "whether you have good excuses or bad, so long as you are not prepared. in future life you will certainly be unsuccessful if you fail, no matter for what reason, to discharge the duties which devolve upon you. a carpenter, for instance, would certainly lose his custom if he should not perform his work faithfully and in season. excuses, no matter how reasonable, will do him little good. it is just so in respect to punctuality in time as well as in respect to performance of duty. what we want is that every boy should be in his place at the proper moment; not that he should be late, and have good excuses for it. when you come to be men, tardiness will always be punished. excuses will not help the matter at all. suppose, hereafter, when you are about to take a journey, you reach the pier five minutes after the steamer has gone, what good will excuses do you? there you are, left hopelessly behind, no matter if your excuses are the best in the world. so in this school. i want good punctuality and good recitations, not good excuses. i hope every one will be prepared to-morrow." [illustration] it is not probable, however, that every one would be prepared the next day in such a case, but by acting steadily on these principles the number of delinquencies would be so much diminished that the very few which should be left could easily be examined in detail, and the remedies applied. simultaneous recitation, by which i mean the practice of addressing a question to all the class to be answered by all together, is a practice which has been for some years rapidly extending in our schools, and, if adopted with proper limits and restrictions, is attended with great advantage. the teacher must guard against some dangers, however, which will be likely to attend it. . some will answer very eagerly, instantly after the question is completed. they wish to show their superior readiness. let the teacher mention this, expose kindly the motive which leads to it, and tell them it is as irregular to answer before the rest as after them. . some will defer their answers until they can catch those of their comrades for a guide. let the teacher mention this fault, expose the motive which leads to it, and tell them that if they do not answer independently and at once, they had better not answer at all. . some will not answer at all. the teacher can see by looking around the room who do not, for they can not counterfeit the proper motion of the lips with promptness and decision unless they know what the answer is to be. he ought occasionally to say to such a one, "i perceive you do not answer," and ask him questions individually. . in some cases there is danger of confusion in the answers, from the fact that the question may be of such a nature that the answer is long, and may by different individuals be differently expressed. this evil must be guarded against by so shaping the question as to admit of a reply in a single word. in reading large numbers, for example, each figure may be called for by itself, or they may be given one after another, the pupils keeping exact time. when it is desirable to ask a question to which the answer is necessarily long it may be addressed to an individual, or the whole class may write their replies, which may then be read in succession. in a great many cases where simultaneous answering is practiced, after a short time the evils above specified are allowed to grow, until at last some half a dozen bright members of a class answer for all, the rest dragging after them, echoing their replies, or ceasing to take any interest in an exercise which brings no personal and individual responsibility upon them. to prevent this, the teacher should exercise double vigilance at such a time. he should often address questions to individuals alone, especially to those most likely to be inattentive and careless, and guard against the ingress of every abuse which might, without close vigilance, appear. with these cautions, the method here alluded to will be found to be of very great advantage in many studies; for example, all the arithmetical tables may be recited in this way; words may be spelled, answers to sums given, columns of figures added, or numbers multiplied, and many questions in history, geography, and other miscellaneous studies answered, especially the general questions asked for the purpose of a review. but, besides being useful as a mode of examination, this plan of answering questions simultaneously is a very important means of fixing in the mind any facts which the teacher may communicate to his pupils. if, for instance, he says some day to a class that vasco de gama was the discoverer of the passage round the cape of good hope, and leaves it here, in a few days not one in twenty will recollect the name. but let him call upon them all to spell it simultaneously, and then to pronounce it distinctly three or four times in concert, and the word will be very strongly impressed upon their minds. the reflecting teacher will find a thousand cases in the instruction of his classes, and in his general exercises in the school, in which this principle will be of great utility. it is universal in its application. what we _say_ we fix, by the very act of saying it, in the mind. hence, reading aloud, though a slower, is a far more thorough method of acquiring knowledge than reading silently, and it is better, in almost all cases, whether in the family, or in sabbath or common schools, when general instructions are given, to have the leading points fixed in the mind by questions answered simultaneously. but we are wandering a little from our subject, which is, in this part of our chapter, the methods of _examining_ a class, not of giving or fixing instructions. another mode of examining classes, which it is important to describe, consists in requiring _written answers_ to the questions asked. the form and manner in which this plan may be adopted is various. the class may bring their slates to the recitation, and the teacher may propose questions successively, the answers to which all the class may write, numbering them carefully. after a dozen answers are written, the teacher may call at random for them, or he may repeat a question, and ask each pupil to read the answer he had written, or he may examine the slates. perhaps this method may be very successfully employed in reviews by dictating to the class a list of questions relating to the ground they have gone over for a week, and then instructing them to prepare answers written out at length, and to bring them in at the next exercise. this method may be made more formal still by requiring a class to write a full and regular abstract of all they have learned during a specified time. the practice of thus reducing to writing what has been learned will be attended with many advantages so obvious that they need not be described. it will be perceived that three methods of examining classes have now been named, and these will afford the teacher the means of introducing a very great variety in his mode of conducting his recitations, while he still carries his class forward steadily in their prescribed course. each is attended with its peculiar advantages. the _single replies,_ coming from individuals specially addressed, are more rigid, and more to be relied upon, but they consume a great deal of time, and, while one is questioned, it requires much skill to keep up interest in the rest. the _simultaneous answers_ of a class awaken more general interest, but it is difficult, without special care, to secure by this means a special examination of all. the _written replies_ are more thorough, but they require more time and attention, and while they habituate the pupil to express himself in writing, they would, if exclusively adopted, fail to accustom him to an equally important practice, that of the oral communication of his thoughts. a constant variety, of which these three methods should be the elements, is unquestionably the best mode. we not only, by this means, secure in a great degree the advantages which each is fitted to produce, but we gain also the additional advantage and interest of variety. by these, and perhaps by other means, it is the duty of the teacher to satisfy himself that his pupils are really attentive to their duties. it is not perhaps necessary that every individual should be every day minutely examined; this is, in many cases, impossible; but the system of examination should be so framed and so administered as to be daily felt by all, and to bring upon every one a daily responsibility. * * * * * we come now to consider the second general head which was to be discussed in this chapter. the study of books alone is insufficient to give knowledge to the young. in the first stage, learning to read a book is of no use whatever without the voice of the living teacher. the child can not take a step alone. as the pupil, however, advances in his course, his dependence upon his teacher for guidance and help continually diminishes, until at last the scholar sits in his solitary study, with no companion but his books, and desiring, for a solution of every difficulty, nothing but a larger library. in schools, however, the pupils have made so little progress in this course, that they all need more or less of the oral assistance of a teacher. difficulties must be explained; questions must be answered; the path must be smoothed, and the way pointed out by a guide who has traveled it before, or it will be impossible for the pupil to go on. this is the part of our subject which we now approach. the great principle which is to guide the teacher in this part of his duty is this: _assist your pupils in such a way as to lead them, as soon as possible, to do without assistance._ this is fundamental. in a short time they will be away from your reach; they will have no teacher to consult; and unless you teach them how to understand books themselves, they must necessarily stop suddenly in their course the moment you cease to help them forward. i shall proceed, therefore, to consider the subject in the following plan: . means of exciting interest in study. . the kind and decree of assistance to be rendered. . miscellaneous suggestions. . interesting the pupils in their studies. there are various principles of human nature which may be of great avail in accomplishing this object. making intellectual effort and acquiring knowledge are always pleasant to the human mind, unless some peculiar circumstances render them otherwise. the teacher has, therefore, only to remove obstructions and sources of pain, and the employment of his pupils will be of itself a pleasure. "i am going to give you a new exercise to-day," said a teacher to a class of boys in latin. "i am going to have you parse your whole lesson in writing. it will be difficult, but i think you may be able to accomplish it." the class looked surprised. they did not know _what parsing in writing_ could be. "you may first, when you take your seats, and are ready to prepare the lesson, write upon your slates a list of the ten first nouns that you find in the lesson, arranging them in a column. do you understand so far?" "yes, sir." "then rule lines for another column, just beyond this. in parsing nouns, what is the first particular to be named?" "what the noun is from." "yes; that is, its nominative. now you may write, at the head of the first column, the word _nouns_, and at the head of the second, _nom._, for nominative. then rule a line for the third column. what shall this contain!" "the declension." "yes; and the fourth?" "gender." "the fifth?" "number." in the same manner the other columns were designated. the sixth was to contain case; the seventh, the word with which the noun was connected in construction; and the eighth, a reference to the rule. "now i wish you," continued the teacher, "to fill up such a table as this with _ten_ nouns. do you understand how i mean?" "yes, sir;" "no, sir," they answered, variously. "all who do understand may take their seats, as i wish to give as little explanation as possible. the more you can depend upon yourselves, the better." those who saw clearly what was to be done left the class, and the teacher continued his explanation to those who were left behind. he made the plan perfectly clear to them by taking a particular noun and running it through the table, showing what should be written opposite to the word in all the columns, and then dismissed them. the class separated, as every class would, in such a case, with a strong feeling of interest in the work before them. it was not so difficult as to perplex them, and yet it required attention and care. they were interested and pleased--pleased with the effort which it required them to make, and they anticipated, with interest and pleasure, the time of coming again to the class to report and compare their work. when the time for the class came, the teacher addressed them somewhat as follows: "before looking at your slates, i am going to predict what the faults are. i have not seen any of your work, but shall judge altogether from my general knowledge of school-boys, and the difficulties i know they meet with. do you think i shall succeed?" the scholars made no reply, and an unskillful teacher would imagine that time spent in such remarks would be wholly wasted. by no means. the influence of them was to awaken universal interest in the approaching examination of the slates. every scholar would be intent, watching, with eager interest, to see whether the imagined faults would be found upon his work. the class was, by that single pleasant remark, put into the best possible state for receiving the criticisms of the teacher. "the first fault which i suppose will be found is that some are unfinished." the scholars looked surprised. they did not expect to have that called a fault. "how many plead guilty to it?" a few raised their hands, and the teacher continued: "i suppose that some will be found partly effaced. the slates were not laid away carefully, or they were not clean, so that the writing is not distinct. how many find this the case with their work?" "i suppose that, in some cases, the lines will not be perpendicular, but will slant, probably toward the left, like writing. "i suppose, also, that, in some cases, the writing will be careless, so that i can not easily read it. how many plead guilty to this?" after mentioning such other faults as occurred to him, relating chiefly to the form of the table, and the mere mechanical execution of the work, he said, "i think i shall not look at your slates to-day. you can all see, i have no doubt, how you can considerably improve them in mechanical execution in your next lesson; and i suppose you would a little prefer that i should not see your first imperfect efforts. in fact, i should rather not see them. at the next recitation they probably will be much better." one important means by which the teacher may make his scholars careful of their reputation is to show them, thus, that he is careful of it himself. now in such a case as this, for it is, except in the principles which it is intended to illustrate, imaginary, a very strong interest would be awakened in the class in the work assigned them. intellectual effort in new and constantly varied modes is in itself a pleasure, and this pleasure the teacher may deepen and increase very easily by a little dexterous management, designed to awaken curiosity and concentrate attention. it ought, however, to be constantly borne in mind that this variety should be confined to the modes of pursuing an object--the object itself being permanent, and constant, and steadily pursued. for instance, if a little class are to be taught simple addition, after the process is once explained, which may be done, perhaps, in two or three lessons, they will need many days of patient practice to render it familiar, to impress it firmly in their recollection, and to enable them to work with rapidity. now this object must be steadily pursued. it would be very unwise for the teacher to say to himself, my class are tired of addition; i must carry them on to subtraction, or give them some other study. it would be equally unwise to keep them many days performing example after example in monotonous succession, each lesson a mere repetition of the last. he must steadily pursue his object of familiarizing them fully with this elementary process, but he may give variety and spirit to the work by changing occasionally the modes. one week he may dictate examples to them, and let them come together to compare their results, one of the class being appointed to keep a list of all who are correct each day. at another time each one may write an example, which he may read aloud to all the others, to be performed and brought in at the next time. again, he may let them work on paper with pen and ink, that he may see how few mistakes they make, as mistakes in ink can not be easily removed. he may excite interest by devising ingenious examples, such as finding out how much all the numbers from one to fifty will make when added together, or the amount of the ages of the whole class, or any such investigation, the result of which they might feel an interest in learning. thus the object is steadily pursued, though the means of pursuing it are constantly changing. we have the advantage of regular progress in the acquisition of knowledge truly valuable, while this progress is made with all the spirit and interest which variety can give. the necessity of making such efforts as this, however, to keep up the interest of the class in their work, and to make it pleasant to them, will depend altogether upon circumstances; or, rather, it will vary much with circumstances. a class of pupils somewhat advanced in their studies, and understanding and feeling the value of knowledge, will need very little of such effort as this; while young and giddy children, who have been accustomed to dislike books and school, and every thing connected with them, will need more. it ought, however, in all cases, to be made a means, not an end--the means to lead on a pupil to an _interest in progress in knowledge itself,_ which is, after all, the great motive which ought to be brought as soon and as extensively as possible to operate in the school-room. another way to awaken interest in the studies of the school is to bring out, as frequently and as distinctly as possible, the connection between these studies and the practical business of life. the events which are occurring around you, and which interest the community in which you are placed, may, by a little ingenuity, be connected in a thousand ways with the studies of the school. if the practice, which has been already repeatedly recommended, of appropriating a quarter of an hour each day to a general exercise, should be adopted, it will afford great facilities for doing this. there is no branch of study attended to in school which may, by judicious efforts, be made more effectual in accomplishing this object, leading the pupils to see the practical utility and the value of knowledge, than composition. if such subjects as are suitable themes for _moral essays_ are assigned, the scholars will indeed dislike the work of writing, and derive little benefit from it. the mass of pupils in our schools are not to be writers of moral essays or orations, and they do not need to form that style of empty, florid, verbose declamation which the practice of writing composition in our schools, as it is too frequently managed, tends to form. assign practical subjects--subjects relating to the business of the school, or the events taking place around you. is there a question before the community on the subject of the location of a new school-house? assign it to your pupils as a question for discussion, and direct them not to write empty declamation, but to obtain from their parents the real arguments in the case, and to present them distinctly and clearly, and in simple language, to their companions. was a building burned by lightning in the neighborhood? let those who saw the scene describe it, their productions to be read by the teacher aloud, and let them see that clear descriptions please, and that good legible writing can be read fluently, and that correct spelling, and punctuation, and grammar make the article go smoothly and pleasantly, and enable it to produce its full effect. is the erection of a public building going forward in the neighborhood of your school? you can make it a very fruitful source of subjects and questions to give interest and impulse to the studies of the school-room. your classes in geometry may measure, your arithmeticians may calculate and make estimates, your writers may describe its progress from week to week, and anticipate the scenes which it will in future years exhibit. by such means the practical bearings and relations of the studies of the school-room may be constantly kept in view; but i ought to guard the teacher, while on this subject, most distinctly against the danger of making the school-room a scene of literary amusement instead of study. these means of awakening interest and relieving the tedium of the uninterrupted and monotonous study of text-books must not encroach on the regular duties of the school. they must be brought forward with judgment and moderation, and made subordinate and subservient to these regular duties. their design is to give spirit and interest, and a feeling of practical utility to what the pupils are doing; and if resorted to with these restrictions and within these limits, they will produce powerful, but safe results. another way to excite interest, and that of the right kind, in school, is not to _remove_ difficulties, but to teach the pupils how to _surmount_ them. a text-book so contrived as to make study mere play, and to dispense with thought and effort, is the worst text-book that can be made, and the surest to be, in the end, a dull one. the great source of literary enjoyment, which is the successful exercise of intellectual power, is, by such a mode of presenting a subject, cut off. secure, therefore, severe study. let the pupil see that you are aiming to secure it, and that the pleasure which you expect that they will receive is that of firmly and patiently encountering and overcoming difficulty; of penetrating, by steady and persevering effort, into regions from which the idle and the inefficient are debarred, and that it is your province to lead them forward, not to carry them. they will soon understand this, and like it. never underrate the difficulties which your pupils will have to encounter, or try to persuade them that what you assign is _easy_. doing easy things is generally dull work, and it is especially discouraging and disheartening for a pupil to spend his strength in doing what is really difficult for him when his instructor, by calling his work easy, gives him no credit for what may have been severe and protracted labor. if a thing is really hard for the pupil, his teacher ought to know it and admit it. the child then feels that he has some sympathy. it is astonishing how great an influence may be exerted over a child by his simply knowing that his efforts are observed and appreciated. you pass a boy in the street wheeling a heavy load in a barrow; now simply stop to look at him, with a countenance which says, "that is a heavy load; i should not think that boy could wheel it;" and how quick will your look give fresh strength and vigor to his efforts. on the other hand, when, in such a case, the boy is faltering under his load, try the effect of telling him, "why, that is not heavy; you can wheel it easily enough; trundle it along." the poor boy will drop his load, disheartened and discouraged, and sit down upon it in despair. it is so in respect to the action of the young in all cases. they are animated and incited by being told _in the right way_ that they have something difficult to do. a boy is performing some service for you. he is watering your horse, perhaps, at a well by the road-side as you are traveling. say to him, "hold up the pail high, so that the horse can drink; it is not heavy." [illustration] he will be discouraged, and will be ready to set the pail down. say to him, on the other hand, "i had better dismount myself. i don't think you can hold the pail up. it is very heavy;" and his eye will brighten up at once. "oh no, sir," he will reply, "i can hold it very easily." hence, even if the work you are assigning to a class _is_ easy, do not tell them so unless you wish to destroy all their spirit and interest in doing it; and if you wish to excite their spirit and interest, make your work difficult, and let them see that you know it is so; not so difficult as to tax their powers too heavily, but enough so to require a vigorous and persevering effort. let them distinctly understand, too, that you know it is difficult, that you mean to make it so, but that they have your sympathy and encouragement in the efforts which it calls them to make. you may satisfy yourself that human nature is, in this respect, what i have described by some such experiment as the following. select two classes not very familiar with elementary arithmetic, and offer to each of them the following example in addition: etc., etc. the numbers may be continued, according to the obvious law regulating the above, until each one of the nine digits has commenced the line. or, if you choose multiplication, let the example be this: multiply by --------- now, when you bring the example to one of the classes, address the pupils as follows: "i have contrived for you a very difficult sum. it is the most difficult one that can be made with the number of figures contained in it, and i do not think that any of you can do it, but you may try. i shall not be surprised if every answer should contain mistakes." to the other class say as follows: "i have prepared an example for you, which i wish you to be very careful to perform correctly. it is a little longer than those you have had heretofore, but it is to be performed upon the same principles, and you can all do it correctly, if you really try." now under such circumstances the first class will go to their seats with ardor and alacrity, determined to show you that they can do work, even if it is difficult; and if they succeed, they come to the class the next day with pride and pleasure. they have accomplished something which you admit it was not easy to accomplish. on the other hand, the second class will go to their seats with murmuring looks and words, and with a hearty dislike of the task you have assigned them. they know that they have something to do, which, however easy it may be to the teacher, is really difficult for them; and they have to be perplexed and wearied with the work, without having, at last, even the little satisfaction of knowing that the teacher appreciates the difficulties with which they had to contend. . we now come to consider the subject of rendering assistance to the pupil, which is one of the most important and delicate parts of a teacher's work. the great difference which exists among teachers in regard to the skill they possess in this part of their duty, is so striking that it is very often noticed by others; and perhaps skill here is of more avail in deciding the question of success or failure than any thing besides. the first great principle is, however, simple and effectual. _( .) divide and subdivide a difficult process, until your steps are so short that the pupil can easily take them._ most teachers forget the difference between the pupil's capacity and their own, and they pass rapidly forward, through a difficult train of thought, in their own ordinary gait, their unfortunate followers vainly trying to keep up with them. the case is precisely analogous to that of the father, who walks with the step of a man, while his little son is by his side, wearying and exhausting himself with fruitless efforts to reach his feet as far, and to move them as rapidly as a full-grown man. but to show what i mean by subdividing a difficult process so as to make each step simple, i will take a case which may serve as an example. i will suppose that the teacher of a common school undertakes to show his boys, who, we will suppose, are acquainted with nothing but elementary arithmetic, how longitude is determined by means of the eclipses of jupiter's satellites; not a very simple question, but still one which, like all others, may be, merely by the power of the subdivision alluded to, easily explained. i will suppose that the subject has come up at a general exercise; perhaps the question was asked in writing by one of the older boys. i will present the explanation chiefly in the form of question and answer, that it may be seen that the steps are so short that the boys may take them themselves. "which way," asks the teacher, "are the rocky mountains from us?" "west," answer two or three of the boys. in such cases as this, it is very desirable that the answers should be general, so that throughout the school there should be a spirited interest in the questions and replies. this will never be the case if a small number of the boys only take part in the answers, and many teachers complain that when they try this experiment they can seldom induce many of the pupils to take a part. the reason ordinarily is that they say that _any_ of the boys may answer instead of that _all_ of them may. the boys do not get the idea that it is wished that a universal reply should come from all parts of the room, in which every one's voice should be heard. if the answers were feeble in the instance we are supposing, the teacher would perhaps say, "i only heard one or two answers; do not more of you know where the rocky mountains are? will you all think and answer together? which way are they from us?" "west," answer a large number of boys. "you do not answer fully enough yet; i do not think more than forty answered, and there are about sixty here. i should like to have _every one in the room_ answer, and all precisely together." he then repeats the question, and obtains a full response. a similar effort will always succeed. "now does the sun, in going round the earth, pass over the rocky mountains, or over us, first?" to this question the teacher hears a confused answer. some do not reply; some say, "over the rocky mountains;" others, "over us;" and others still, "the sun does not move at all." "it is true that the sun, strictly speaking, does not move; the earth turns round, presenting the various countries in succession to the sun, but the effect is precisely the same as it would be if the sun moved, and, accordingly, i use that language. now how long does it take the sun to pass round the earth?" "twenty-four hours." "does he go toward the west or toward the east from us?" "toward the west." but it is not necessary to give the replies; the questions alone will be sufficient. the reader will observe that they inevitably lead the pupil, by short and simple steps, to a clear understanding of the point to be explained. "will the sun go toward or from the rocky mountains after leaving us?" "how long did you say it takes the sun to go round the globe and come to us again?" "how long to go half round?" "quarter round?" "how long will it take him to go to the rocky mountains?" no answer. "you can not tell. it would depend upon the distance. suppose, then, the rocky mountains were half round the globe, how long would it take the sun to go to them?" "suppose they were quarter round?" "the whole distance is divided into portions called degrees-- in all. how many will the sun pass in going half round?" "in going quarter round?" "ninety degrees, then, make one quarter of the circumference of the globe. this, you have already said, will take six hours. in one hour, then, how many degrees will the sun pass over?" perhaps no answer. if so, the teacher will subdivide the question on the principle we are explaining, so as to make the steps such that the pupils _can_ take them. "how many degrees will the sun pass over in three hours?" "forty-five." "how large a part of that, then, will he pass in one hour?" "one third of it." "and what is one third of forty-five?" the boys would readily answer fifteen, and the teacher would then dwell for a moment on the general truth thus deduced, that the sun, in passing round the earth, passes over fifteen degrees every hour. "suppose, then, it takes the sun one hour to go from us to the river mississippi, how many degrees west of us would the river be?" having thus familiarized the pupils to the fact that the motion of the sun is a proper measure of the difference of longitude between two places, the teacher must dismiss the subject for a day, and when the next opportunity of bringing it forward occurs, he would, perhaps, take up the subject of the sun's motion as a measure _of time._ "is the sun ever exactly over our heads?" "is he ever exactly south of us?" "when he is exactly south of us, or, in other words, exactly opposite to us in his course round the earth, he is said to be in our meridian; for the word meridian means a line drawn exactly north or south from any place." there is no limit to the simplicity which may be imparted, even to the most difficult subjects, by subdividing the steps. this point, for instance, the meaning of meridian, may be the subject, if it were necessary, of many questions, which would render it simple to the youngest child. the teacher may point to the various articles in the room, or buildings, or other objects without, and ask if they are or are not in his meridian. but to proceed: "when the sun is exactly opposite to us, in the south, at the highest point to which he rises, what o'clock is it?" "when the sun is exactly opposite to us, can he be opposite to the rocky mountains?" "does he get opposite to the rocky mountains before or after he is opposite to us?" "when he is opposite to the rocky mountains, what o'clock is it there?" "is it twelve o'clock here, then, before or after it is twelve o'clock there?" "suppose the river mississippi is fifteen degrees from us, how long is it twelve o'clock here before it is twelve o'clock there?" "when it is twelve o'clock here, then, what time will it be there?" some will probably answer "one," and some "eleven." if so, the step is too long, and may be subdivided thus: "when it is noon here, is the sun going toward the mississippi, or has he passed it?" "then has noon gone by at that river, or has it not yet come?" "then will it be one hour before or one hour after noon?" "then will it be eleven or one?" such minuteness and simplicity would, in ordinary cases, not be necessary. i go into it here merely to show how, by simply subdividing the steps, a subject ordinarily perplexing may be made plain. the reader will observe that in the above there are no explanations by the teacher--there are not even leading questions; that is, there are no questions the form of which suggests the answers desired. the pupil goes on from step to step simply because he has but one short step to take at a time. "can it be noon, then," continues the teacher, "here and at a place fifteen degrees west of us at the same time?" "can it be noon here and at a place ten miles west of us at the same time?" it is unnecessary to continue the illustration, for it will be very evident to every reader that, by going forward in this way, the whole subject may be laid out before the pupils so that they shall perfectly understand it. they can, by a series of questions like the above, be led to see, by their own reasoning, that time, as denoted by the clock, must differ in every two places not upon the same meridian, and that the difference must be exactly proportional to the difference of longitude. so that a watch which is right in one place can not, strictly speaking, be right in any other place east or west of the first; and that, if the time of day at two places can be compared, either by taking a chronometer from one to another, or by observing some celestial phenomenon, like the eclipses of jupiter's satellites, and ascertaining precisely the time of their occurrence, according to the reckoning at both, the distance east or west by degrees may be determined. the reader will observe, too, that the method by which this explanation is made is strictly in accordance with the principle i am illustrating, which is by simply _dividing the process into short steps._ there is no ingenious reasoning on the part of the teacher, no happy illustrations, no apparatus, no diagrams. it is a pure process of mathematical reasoning, made clear and easy by _simple analysis._ in applying this method, however, the teacher should be very careful not to subdivide too much. it is best that the pupils should walk as fast as they can. the object of the teacher should be to smooth the path not much more than barely enough to enable the pupil to go on. he should not endeavor to make it very easy. ( .) truths must not only be taught to the pupils, but they must _fixed_, and _made familiar._ this is a point which seems to be very generally overlooked. "can you say the multiplication table?" said a teacher to a boy who was standing before him in his class. "yes, sir." "well, i should like to have you say the line beginning nine times one." the boy repeated it slowly, but correctly. "now i should like to have you try again, and i will, at the same time, say another line, to see if i can put you out." the boy looked surprised. the idea of his teacher's trying to perplex and embarrass him was entirely new. "you must not be afraid," said the teacher. "you will undoubtedly not succeed in getting through, but you will not be to blame for the failure. i only try it as a sort of intellectual experiment." the boy accordingly began again, but was soon completely confused by the teacher's accompaniment. he stopped in the middle of his line, saying, "i could say it, only you put me out." "well, now try to say the alphabet, and let me see if i can put you out there." as might have been expected, the teacher failed. the boy went regularly onward to the end. "you see, now," said the teacher to the class who had witnessed the experiment, "that this boy knows his alphabet in a different sense from that in which he knows his multiplication table. in the latter, his knowledge is only imperfectly his own; he can make use of it only under favorable circumstances. in the former it is entirely his own; circumstances have no control over him." a child has a lesson in latin grammar to recite. she hesitates and stammers, miscalls the cases, and then corrects herself, and, if she gets through at last, she considers herself as having recited well, and very many teachers would consider it well too. if she hesitates a little longer than usual in trying to summon to her recollection a particular word, she says, perhaps, "don't tell me," and if she happens at last to guess right, she takes her book with a countenance beaming with satisfaction. "suppose you had the care of an infant school," might the instructor say to such a scholar, "and were endeavoring to teach a little child to count, and she should recite her lesson to you in this way, 'one, two, four--no, three--one, two, three----stop, don't tell me--five--no, four--four--five--------i shall think in a minute--six--is that right? five, six,' &c. should you call that reciting well?" nothing is more common than for pupils to say, when they fail of reciting their lesson, that they could say it at their seats, but that they can not now say it before the class. when such a thing is said for the first time it should not be severely reproved, because nine children in ten honestly think that if the lesson were learned so that it could be recited any where, their duty is discharged. but it should be kindly, though distinctly explained to them, that in the business of life they must have their knowledge so much at command that they can use it at all times and in all circumstances, or it will do them little good. one of the most common cases of difficulty in pursuing mathematical studies, or studies of any kind where the succeeding lessons depend upon those which precede, is the fact that the pupil, though he may understand what precedes, is not _familiar_ with it. this is very strikingly the case with geometry. the class study the definitions, and the teacher supposes they fully understand them; in fact, they do _understand_ them, but the name and the thing are so feebly connected in their minds that a direct effort and a short pause are necessary to recall the idea when they hear or see the word. when they come on, therefore, to the demonstrations, which in themselves would be difficult enough, they have double duty to perform. the words used do not readily suggest the idea, and the connection of the ideas requires careful study. under this double burden many a young geometrician sinks discouraged. a class should go on slowly, and dwell on details so long as to fix firmly and make perfectly familiar whatever they undertake to learn. in this manner the knowledge they acquire will become their own. it will be incorporated, as it were, into their very minds, and they can not afterward be deprived of it. the exercises which have for their object this rendering familiar what has been learned may be so varied as to interest the pupil very much, instead of being tiresome, as it might at first be supposed. suppose, for instance, a teacher has explained to a large class in grammar the difference between an adjective and an adverb; if he leave it here, in a fortnight one half of the pupils would have forgotten the distinction, but by dwelling upon it a few lessons he may fix it forever. the first lesson might be to require the pupils to write twenty short sentences containing only adjectives. the second to write twenty containing only adverbs. the third to write sentences in two forms, one containing the adjective, and the other expressing the same idea by means of the adverb, arranging them in two columns, thus: he writes well. | his writing is good. again, they may make out a list of adjectives, with the adverbs derived from each in another column. then they may classify adverbs on the principle of their meaning, or according to their termination. the exercise may be infinitely varied, and yet the object of the whole may be to make _perfectly familiar_, and to fix forever in the mind the distinction explained. these two points seem to me to be fundamental, so far as assisting pupils through the difficulties which lie in their way is concerned. diminish the difficulties as far as is necessary by shortening and simplifying the steps, and make thorough work as you go on. these principles, carried steadily into practice, will be effectual in leading any mind through any difficulties which may occur. and though they can not, perhaps, be fully applied to every mind in a large school, yet they can be so far acted upon in reference to the whole mass as to accomplish the object for a very large majority. . _general cautions_. a few miscellaneous suggestions, which we shall include under this head, will conclude this chapter. ( .) never do any thing _for_ a scholar, but teach him to do it for himself. how many cases occur in the schools of our country where the boy brings his slate to the teacher, saying he can not do a certain sum. the teacher takes the slate and pencil, performs the work in silence, brings the result, and returns the slate to the hands of his pupil, who walks off to his seat, and goes to work on the next example, perfectly satisfied with the manner in which he is passing on. a man who has not done this a hundred times himself will hardly believe it possible that such a practice can prevail, it is so evidently a mere waste of time both for master and scholar. ( .) never get out of patience with dullness. perhaps i ought to say, never get out of patience with any thing. that would, perhaps, be the wisest rule. but, above all things, remember that dullness and stupidity--and you will certainly find them in every school--are the very last things to get out of patience with. if the creator has so formed the mind of a boy that he must go through life slowly and with difficulty, impeded by obstructions which others do not feel, and depressed by discouragements which others never know, his lot is surely hard enough without having you to add to it the trials and suffering which sarcasm and reproach from you can heap upon him. look over your school-room, therefore, and wherever you find one whom you perceive the creator to have endued with less intellectual power than others, fix your eye upon him with an expression of kindness and sympathy. such a boy will have suffering enough from the selfish tyranny of his companions; he ought to find in you a protector and friend. one of the greatest enjoyments which a teacher's life affords is the interest of seeking out such a one, bowed down with burdens of depression and discouragement, unaccustomed to sympathy and kindness, and expecting nothing for the future but a weary continuation of the cheerless toils which have imbittered the past; and the pleasure of taking off the burden, of surprising the timid, disheartened sufferer by kind words and cheering looks, and of seeing in his countenance the expression of ease and even of happiness gradually returning. ( .) the teacher should be interested in _all_ his scholars, and aim equally to secure the progress of all. let there be no neglected ones in the school-room. we should always remember that, however unpleasant in countenance and manners that bashful boy in the corner may be, or however repulsive in appearance, or unhappy in disposition, that girl, seeming to be interested in nobody, and nobody appearing interested in her, they still have, each of them, a mother, who loves her own child, and takes a deep and constant interest in its history. those mothers have a right, too, that their children should receive their full share of attention in a school which has been established for the common and equal benefit of all. ( .) do not hope or attempt to make all your pupils alike. providence has determined that human minds should differ from each other for the very purpose of giving variety and interest to this busy scene of life. now if it were possible for a teacher so to plan his operations as to send his pupils forth upon the community formed on the same model, as if they were made by machinery, he would do so much toward spoiling one of the wisest of the plans which the almighty has formed for making this world a happy scene. let it be the teacher's aim to co-operate with, not vainly to attempt to thwart, the designs of providence. we should bring out those powers with which the creator has endued the minds placed under our control. we must open our garden to such influences as shall bring forward all the plants, each in a way corresponding to its own nature. it is impossible if it were wise, and it would be foolish if it were possible, to stimulate, by artificial means, the rose, in hope of its reaching the size and magnitude of the apple-tree, or to try to cultivate the fig and the orange where wheat only will grow. no; it should be the teacher's main design to shelter his pupils from every deleterious influence, and to bring every thing to bear upon the community of minds before him which will encourage in each one the development of its own native powers. for the rest, he must remember that his province is to cultivate, not to create. error on this point is very common. many teachers, even among those who have taken high rank through the success with which they have labored in the field, have wasted much time in attempting to do what never can be done, to form the character of those brought under their influence after a certain uniform model, which they have conceived as the standard of excellence. their pupils must write just such a hand, they must compose in just such a style, they must be similar in sentiment and feeling, and their manners must be formed according to a fixed and uniform model; and when, in such a case, a pupil comes under their charge whom providence has designed to be entirely different from the beau ideal adopted as the standard, more time, and pains, and anxious solicitude is wasted in vain attempts to produce the desired conformity than half the school require beside. ( .) do not allow the faults or obliquities of character, or the intellectual or moral wants of any individual of your pupils to engross a disproportionate share of your time. i have already said that those who are peculiarly in need of sympathy or help should receive the special attention they seem to require; what i mean to say now is, do not carry this to an extreme. when a parent sends you a pupil who, in consequence of neglect or mismanagement at home, has become wild and ungovernable, and full of all sorts of wickedness, he has no right to expect that you shall turn your attention away from the wide field which, in your whole school-room, lies before you, to spend your time, and exhaust your spirits and strength in endeavoring to repair the injuries which his own neglect has occasioned. when you open a school, you do not engage, either openly or tacitly, to make every pupil who may be sent to you a learned or a virtuous man. you do engage to give them all faithful instruction, and to bestow upon each such a degree of attention as is consistent with the claims of the rest. but it is both unwise and unjust to neglect the many trees in your nursery which, by ordinary attention, may be made to grow straight and tall, and to bear good fruit, that you may waste your labor upon a crooked stick, from which all your toil can secure very little beauty or fruitfulness. let no one now understand me to say that such cases are to be neglected. i admit the propriety, and, in fact, have urged the duty, of paying to them a little more than their due share of attention. what i now condemn is the practice, of which all teachers are in danger, of devoting such a disproportionate and unreasonable degree of attention to them as to encroach upon their duties to others. the school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation _of the mass_ in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dullness or precocity, should draw you away from its steady pursuit. ( .) the teacher should guard against unnecessarily imbibing those faulty mental habits to which his station and employment expose him. accustomed to command, and to hold intercourse with minds which are immature and feeble compared with our own, we gradually acquire habits that the rough collisions and the friction of active life prevent from gathering around other men. narrow-minded prejudices and prepossessions are imbibed through the facility with which, in our own little community, we adopt and maintain opinions. a too strong confidence in our own views on every subject almost inevitably comes from never hearing our opinions contradicted or called in question, and we express those opinions in a tone of authority, and even sometimes of arrogance, which we acquire in the school-room, for there, when we speak, nobody can reply. these peculiarities show themselves first, and, in fact, most commonly, in the school-room; and the opinions thus formed very often relate to the studies and management of the school. one has a peculiar mode of teaching spelling, which is successful almost entirely through the magic influence of his interest in it, and he thinks no other mode of teaching this branch is even tolerable. another must have all his pupils write on the angular system, or the anti-angular system, and he enters with all the zeal into a controversy on the subject, as if the destiny of the whole rising generation depended upon its decision. tell him that all that is of any consequence in any handwriting is that it should be legible, rapid, and uniform, and that, for the rest, it would be better that every human being should write a different hand, and he looks upon you with astonishment, wondering that you can not see the vital importance of the question whether the vertex of an _o_ should, be pointed or round. so in every thing. he has _his way_ in every minute particular--a way from which he can not deviate, and to which he wishes every one else to conform. this set, formal mannerism is entirely inconsistent with that commanding intellectual influence which the teacher should exert in the administration of his school. he should work with what an artist calls boldness and freedom of touch. activity and enterprise of mind should characterize all his measures if he wishes to make bold, original, and efficient men. ( .) assume no false appearances in your school either as to knowledge or character. perhaps it may justly be said to be the common practice of teachers in this country to affect a dignity of deportment in the presence of their pupils which in other cases is laid aside, and to pretend to superiority in knowledge and an infallibility of judgment which no sensible man would claim before other sensible men, but which an absurd fashion seems to require of the teacher. it can, however, scarcely be said to be a fashion, for the temptation is almost exclusively confined to the young and the ignorant, who think they must make up by appearance what they want in reality. very few of the older, and more experienced, and successful instructors in our country fall into it at all; but some young beginner, whose knowledge is very limited, and who, in manner and habits, has only just ceased to be a boy, walks into his school-room with a countenance of forced gravity, and with a dignified and solemn step, which is ludicrous even to himself. i describe accurately, for i describe from recollection. this unnatural, and forced, and ludicrous dignity cleaves to him like a disease through the whole period of his duty. in the presence of his scholars he is always under restraint, assuming a stiff and formal dignity which is as ridiculous as it is unnatural. he is also obliged to resort to arts which are certainly not very honorable to conceal his ignorance. a scholar, for example, brings him a sum in arithmetic which he does not know how to perform. this may be the case with a most excellent teacher, and one well qualified for his business. in order to be successful as a teacher, it is not necessary to understand every thing. instead, however, of saying frankly, "i do not understand that example; i will examine it," he looks at it embarrassed and perplexed, not knowing how he shall escape the exposure of his ignorance. his first thought is to give some general directions to the pupil, and send him to his seat to make a new experiment, hoping that in some way or other, he scarcely knows how, he will get through; and, at any rate, if he should not, the teacher thinks that he himself at least gains time by the manoeuvre, and he is glad to postpone his trouble, though he knows it must soon return. all efforts to conceal ignorance, and all affectation of knowledge not possessed, are as unwise as they are dishonest. if a scholar asks a question which you can not answer, or brings you a difficulty which you can not solve, say frankly, "i do not know." it is the only way to avoid continual anxiety and irritation, and the surest means of securing real respect. let the scholars understand that the superiority of the teacher does not consist in his infallibility, or in his universal acquisitions, but in a well-balanced mind, where the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is distinctly marked; in a strong desire to go forward in mental improvement, and in fixed principles of action and systematic habits. you may even take up in school a study entirely new to you, and have it understood at the outset that you know no more of it than the class commencing, but that you can be their guide on account of the superior maturity and discipline of your powers, and the comparative ease with which you can meet and overcome difficulties. this is the understanding which ought always to exist between master and scholars. the fact that the teacher does not know every thing can not long be concealed if he tries to conceal it, and in this, as in every other case, honesty is the best policy. chapter iv. moral discipline. under the title which i have placed at the head of this chapter i intend to discuss the methods by which the teacher is to secure a moral ascendency over his pupils, so that he may lead them to do what is right, and bring them back to duty when they do what is wrong. i shall use, in what i have to say, a very plain and familiar style; and as very much depends not only on the general principles by which the teacher is actuated, but also on the tone and manner in which, in cases of discipline, he addresses his pupils, i shall describe particular cases, real and imaginary, because by this method i can better illustrate the course to be pursued. i shall also present and illustrate the various principles which i consider important, and in the order in which they occur to my mind. . the first duty, then, of the teacher when he enters his school is to beware of the danger of making an unfavorable impression at first upon his pupils. many years ago, when i was a child, the teacher of the school where my early studies were performed closed his connection with the establishment, and after a short vacation another was expected. on the appointed day the boys began to collect, some from curiosity, at an early hour, and many speculations were started as to the character of the new instructor. we were standing near a table with our hats on--and our position, and the exact appearance of the group, is indelibly fixed on my memory--when a small and youthful-looking man entered the room, and walked up toward us. supposing him to be some stranger, or, rather, not making any supposition at all, we stood looking at him as he approached, and were thunder-struck at hearing him accost us with a stern voice and sterner brow, "take off your hats. take off your hats and go to your seats." the conviction immediately rushed upon our minds that this must be our new teacher. the first emotion was that of surprise, and the second was that of the ludicrous, though i believe we contrived to smother the laugh until we got out into the open air. so long since was this little occurrence that i have entirely forgotten the name of the teacher, and have not the slightest recollection of any other act in his administration of the school. but this recollection of his first greeting of his pupils, and the expression of his countenance at the moment, will go with me to the end of life. so strong are first impressions. be careful, then, when you first see your pupils, that you meet them with a smile. i do not mean a pretended cordiality, which has no existence in the heart, but think of the relation which you are to sustain to them, and think of the very interesting circumstances under which, for some months at least, your destinies are to be united to theirs, until you can not help feeling a strong interest in them. shut your eyes for a day or two to their faults, if possible, and take an interest in all their pleasures and pursuits, that the first attitude in which you exhibit yourself before them may be one which shall allure, not repel. . in endeavoring to correct the faults of your pupils, do not, as many teachers do, seize only upon _those particular cases_ of transgression which may happen to come under your notice. these individual instances are very few, probably, compared with the whole number of faults against which you ought to exert an influence. and though you perhaps ought not to neglect those which may accidentally come under your notice, yet the observing and punishing such cases is a very small part of your duty. you accidentally hear, i will suppose, as you are walking home from school, two of your boys in earnest conversation, and one of them uses profane language. now the course to be pursued in such a case is, most evidently, not to call the boy to you the next day and punish him, and there let the matter rest. this would, perhaps, be better than nothing. but the chief impression which it would make upon the individual and upon the other scholars would be, "i must take care how i _let the master hear me_ use such language again." a wise teacher, who takes enlarged and extended views of his duty in regard to the moral progress of his pupils, would act very differently. he would look at the whole subject. "does this fault," he would say to himself, "prevail among my pupils? if so, how extensively? it is comparatively of little consequence to punish the particular transgression. the great point is to devise some plan to reach the whole evil, and to correct it if possible." in one case where such a circumstance occurred, the teacher managed it most successfully in the following manner. he said nothing to the boy, and, in fact, the boy did not know that he was overheard. he allowed a day or two to elapse, so that the conversation might be forgotten, and then took an opportunity one day, after school, when all things had gone on pleasantly, and the school was about to be closed, to bring forward the whole subject. he told the boys that he had something to say to them after they had laid by their books and were ready to go home. the desks were soon closed, and every face in the room was turned toward the master with a look of fixed attention. it was almost evening. the sun had gone down. the boys' labors were over. their duties for the day were over; their minds were at rest, and every thing was favorable for making a deep and permanent impression. "a few days ago," says the teacher, when all was still, "i accidentally overheard some conversation between two of the boys of this school, and one of them swore." there was a pause. "perhaps you expect that i am now going to call the boy out and punish him. is that what i ought to do?" there was no answer. "i think a boy who uses bad language of any kind does what he knows is wrong. he breaks god's commands. he does what he knows would be displeasing to his parents, and he sets a bad example. he does wrong, therefore, and justly deserves punishment." there were, of course, many boys who felt that they were in danger. every one who had used profane language was aware that he might be the one who had been overheard, and, of course, all were deeply interested in what the teacher was saying. "he might, i say," continued the teacher, "justly be punished; but i am not going to punish him; for if i should, i am afraid that it would only make him a little more careful hereafter not to commit this sin when i could possibly be within hearing, instead of persuading him, as i wish to, to avoid such a sin in future altogether. i am satisfied that that boy would be far happier, even in this world, if he would make it a principle always to do his duty, and never, in any case, to do wrong. and then, when i think how soon he and all of us will be in another world, where we shall all be judged for what we do here, i feel strongly desirous of persuading him to abandon entirely this practice. i am afraid that punishing him now would not do that. "besides," continues the teacher, "i think it very probable that there are many other boys in this school who are sometimes guilty of this fault, and i have thought that it would be a great deal better and happier for us all if, instead of punishing this particular boy whom i have accidentally overheard, and who probably is not more to blame than many other boys in school, i should bring up the whole subject, and endeavor to persuade all the boys to reform." i am aware that there are, unfortunately, in our country a great many teachers from whose lips such an appeal as this would be wholly in vain. the man who is accustomed to scold, and storm, and punish with unsparing severity every transgression, under the influence of irritation and anger, must not expect that he can win over his pupils to confidence in him and to the principles of duty by a word. but such an appeal will not be lost when it comes from a man whose daily and habitual management corresponds with it. but to return to the story: the teacher made some farther remarks, explaining the nature of the sin, not in the language of execration and affected abhorrence, but calmly, temperately, and without any disposition to make the worst of the occurrence which had taken place. in concluding what he said, he addressed the boys as follows: "now, boys, the question is, do you wish to abandon this habit or not? if you do, all is well. i shall immediately forget all the past, and will do all i can to help you resist and overcome temptation in future. but all i can do is only to help you; and the first thing to be done, if you wish to engage in this work of reform, is to acknowledge your fault; and i should like to know how many are willing to do this." "i wish all those who are willing to tell me whether they use profane language would rise." every individual but one rose. "i am very glad to see so large a number," said the teacher; "and i hope you will find that the work of confessing and forsaking your faults is, on the whole, pleasant, not painful business. now those who can truly and honestly say that they never do use profane language of any kind may take their seats." three only of the whole number, which consisted of not far from twenty, sat down. it was in a sea-port town, where the temptation to yield to this vice is even greater than would be, in the interior of our country, supposed possible. "those who are now standing," pursued the teacher, "admit that they do, sometimes at least, commit this sin. i suppose all, however, are determined to reform; for i do not know what else should induce you to rise and acknowledge it here, unless it is a desire hereafter to break yourselves of the habit. but do you suppose that it will be enough for you merely to resolve here that you will reform?" "no, sir," said the boys. "why not? if you now sincerely determine never more to use a profane word, will you not easily avoid it?" the boys were silent. some said faintly, "no, sir." "it will not be easy for you to avoid the sin hereafter," continued the teacher, "even if you do now sincerely and resolutely determine to do so. you have formed the habit of sin, and the habit will not be easily overcome. but i have detained you long enough now. i will try to devise some method by which you may carry your plan into effect, and to-morrow i will tell you what it is." so the boys were dismissed for the day; the pleasant countenance and cheerful tone of the teacher conveying to them the impression that they were engaging in the common effort to accomplish a most desirable purpose, in which they were to receive the teacher's help, not that he was pursuing them, with threatening and punishment, into the forbidden practice into which they had wickedly strayed. great caution is, however, in such a case, necessary to guard against the danger that the teacher, in attempting to avoid the tones of irritation and anger, should so speak of the sin as to blunt his pupils' sense of its guilt, and lull their consciences into a slumber. at the appointed time on the following day the subject was again brought before the school, and some plans proposed by which the resolutions now formed might be more certainly kept. these plans were readily and cheerfully adopted by the boys, and in a short time the vice of profaneness was, in a great degree, banished from the school. i hope the reader will keep in mind the object of the above illustration, which is to show that it is the true policy of the teacher not to waste his time and strength in contending against _such accidental instances_ of transgression as may chance to fall under his notice, but to take an enlarged and extended view of the whole ground, endeavoring to remove _whole classes of faults_--to elevate and improve _multitudes together_. by these means, his labors will not only be more effectual, but far more pleasant. you can not come into collision with an individual scholar, to punish him for a mischievous spirit, or even to rebuke him for some single act by which he has given you trouble, without an uncomfortable and uneasy feeling, which makes, in ordinary cases, the discipline of a school the most unpleasant part of a teacher's duty. but you can plan a campaign against a whole class of faults, and put into operation a system of measures to correct them, and watch from day to day the operation of that system with all the spirit and interest of a game. it is, in fact, a game where your ingenuity and moral power are brought into the field, in opposition to the evil tendencies of the hearts which are under your influence. you will notice the success or the failure of the means you may put into operation with all the interest with which the experimental philosopher observes the curious processes he guides, though your interest may be much purer and higher, for he works upon matter, but you are experimenting upon mind. remember, then, as for the first time you take your new station at the head of your school, that it is not your duty simply to watch with an eagle eye for those accidental instances of transgression which may chance to fall under your notice. you are to look over the whole ground. you are to make yourself acquainted, as soon as possible, with the classes of character and classes of faults which may prevail in your dominions, and to form deliberate and well-digested plans for improving the one and correcting the other. and this is to be the course pursued not only with great delinquencies, such as those to which i have already alluded, but to every little transgression against the rules of order and propriety. you can correct them far more easily and pleasantly in the mass than in detail. to illustrate this principle by another case. a teacher, who takes the course i am condemning, approaches the seat of one of his pupils, and asks to see one of his books. as the boy opens his desk, the teacher observes that it is in complete disorder. books, maps, papers, play-things, are there in promiscuous confusion, and, from the impulse of the moment, the displeased teacher pours out upon the poor boy a torrent of reproach. "what a looking desk! why, john, i am really ashamed of you! look!" continues he, holding up the lid, so that the boys in the neighborhood can look in; "see what a mass of disorder and confusion. if ever i see your desk in such a state again, i shall most certainly punish you." the boys around laugh, very equivocally, however, for, with the feeling of amusement, there is mingled the fear that the angry master may take it into his head to inspect their domains. the boy accidentally exposed looks sullen, and begins to throw his books into some sort of arrangement, just enough to shield himself from the charge of absolutely disobeying the injunction that he has received, and there the matter ends. another teacher takes no apparent notice of the confusion which he thus accidentally witnesses. "i must take up," thinks he to himself, "the subject of order before the whole school. i have not yet spoken of it." he thanks the boy for the book he borrowed, and goes away. he makes a memorandum of the subject, and the boy does not know that the condition of his desk was noticed; perhaps he does not even know that there was any thing amiss. a day or two after, at a time regularly appropriated to such subjects, he addresses the boys as follows: "in our efforts to improve the school as much as possible, there is one subject which we must not forget. i mean the order of the desks." the boys all begin to open their desk lids. "you may stop a moment," says the teacher. "i shall give you all an opportunity to examine your desks presently. "i do not know what the condition of your desks is. i have not examined them, and have not, in fact, seen the inside of more than one or two. as i have not brought up this subject before, i presume that there are a great many which can be arranged better than they are. will you all now look into your desks, and see whether you consider them in good order? stop a moment, however. let me tell you what good order is. all those things which are alike should be arranged together. books should be in one place, papers in another, and thus every thing should be classified. again, every thing should be so placed that it can be taken out without disturbing other things. there is another principle, also, which i will mention: the various articles should have _constant_ places, that is, they should not be changed from day to day. by this means you soon remember where every thing belongs, and you can put away your things much more easily every night than if you had every night to arrange them in a new way. now will you look into your desks, and tell me whether they are, on these three principles, well arranged?" the boys of most schools, where this subject had not been regularly attended to, would nearly all answer in the negative. "i will allow you, then, some time to-day, fifteen minutes to arrange your desks, and i hope you will try to keep them in good order hereafter. a few days hence i shall examine them. if any of you wish for assistance or advice from me in putting them in order, i shall be happy to render it." by such a plan, which will occupy but little more time than the irritating and useless scolding which i supposed in the other case, how much more will be accomplished. such an address would of itself, probably, be the means of putting in order, and keeping in order, at least one half of the desks in the room, and following up the plan in the same manner and in the same spirit with which it was begun would secure the rest. i repeat it, therefore, make it a principle in all cases to aim as much as possible at the correction of those faults which are likely to be general by _general measures_. you avoid by this means a vast amount of irritation and impatience, both on your own part and on the part of your scholars, and you produce twenty times the useful effect. . the next principle which occurs to me as deserving the teacher's attention in the outset of his course is this: interest your scholars in doing something themselves to elevate the moral character of the school, so as to secure a _decided majority who will, of their own accord, co-operate with you._ let your pupils understand, not by any formal speech which you make to that effect, but by the manner in which, from time to time, you incidentally allude to the subject, that you consider the school, when you commence it, as _at par_, so to speak--that is, on a level with other schools, and that your various plans for improving and amending it are not to be considered in the light of finding fault, and punishing transgressions, and controlling evil propensities, so as just to keep things in a tolerable state, but as efforts to improve and carry forward the institution to a still higher state of excellence. such is the tone and manner of some teachers that they never appear to be more than merely satisfied. when the scholars do right, nothing is said about it. the teacher seems to consider that a matter of course. it does not appear to interest or please him at all. nothing arouses him but when they do wrong, and that only excites him to anger and frowns. now in such a case there can, of course, be no stimulus to effort on the part of the pupils but the cold and heartless stimulus of fear. now it is wrong for the teacher to expect that things will go right in his school as a matter of course. all that he can expect _as a matter of course_ is, that things should go on as well as they do ordinarily in schools--the ordinary amount of idleness, the ordinary amount of misconduct. this is the most that he can expect to come as a matter of course. he should feel this, and then all he can gain which will be better than this will be a source of positive pleasure; a pleasure which his pupils have procured for him, and which, consequently, they should share. they should understand that the teacher is engaged in various plans for improving the school, in which they should be invited to engage, not from the selfish desire of thereby saving him trouble, but because it will really be happy employment for them to engage in such an enterprise, and because, by such efforts, their own moral powers will be exerted and strengthened in the best possible way. in another chapter i have explained to what extent, and in what manner, the assistance of the pupils may be usefully and successfully employed in carrying forward the general arrangements of the school. the same _principles_ will apply here, though perhaps a little more careful and delicate management is necessary in interesting them in subjects which relate to moral discipline. one important method of accomplishing this end is to present these plans before the minds of the scholars as experiments--moral experiments, whose commencement, progress, and results they may take a great interest in witnessing. let us take, for example, the case alluded to under the last head--the plan of effecting a reform in regard to keeping desks in order. suppose the teacher were to say, when the time had arrived at which he had promised to give them an opportunity to put the desks in order, "i think it would be a good plan to keep some account of our efforts for improving the school in this respect. we might make a record of what we do to-day, noting the day of the month and the number of desks which may be found to be disorderly. then, at the end of any time you may propose, we will have the desks examined again, and see how many are disorderly then. we can thus see how much improvement has been made in that time. should you like to adopt the plan?" if the boys should appear not much interested in the proposal, the teacher might, at his own discretion, waive it. in all probability, however, they would like it, and would indicate their interest by their countenances, or perhaps by a response. if so, the teacher might proceed. "you may all examine your desks, then, and decide whether they are in order or not. i do not know, however, but that we ought to appoint a committee to examine them; for perhaps all the boys would not be honest, and report their desks as they really are." "yes, sir;" "yes, sir," say the boys. "do you mean that you will be honest, or that you would like to have a committee appointed?" there was a confused murmur. some answer one, and some the other. "i think," proceeds the teacher, "the boys will be honest, and report their desks just as they are. at any rate, the number of dishonest boys in this school can not be so large as materially to affect the result. i think we had better take your own statements. as soon as the desks are all examined, those who have found theirs in a condition which does not satisfy them are requested to rise and be counted." the teacher then looks around the room, and selecting some intelligent boy who has influence among his companions, and whose influence he is particularly desirous of enlisting on the side of good order, says, "shall i nominate some one to keep an account of the number?" "yes, sir," say the boys. "well, i nominate william jones. how many are in favor of requesting william jones to perform this duty?" "it is a vote. william, i will thank you to write upon a piece of paper that on the th of december the subject of order in the desks was brought up, and that the boys resolved on making an effort to improve the school in this respect. then say that the boys reported all their desks which they thought were disorderly, and that the number was thirty-five; and that after a week or two, the desks are to be examined again, and the disorderly ones counted, that we may see how much we have improved. after you have written it you may bring it to me, and i will tell you whether it is right." "how many desks do you think will be found to be disorderly when we come to make the examination?" the boys hesitate. the teacher names successively several numbers, and asks whether they think the real number will be greater or less. he notices their votes upon them, and at last fixes upon one which seems to be about the general sense of the school. then the teacher himself mentions the number which he supposes will be found to be disorderly. his estimate will ordinarily be larger than that of the scholars, because he knows better how easily resolutions are broken. this number, too, is recorded, and then the whole subject is dismissed. now, of course, no reader of these remarks will understand me to be recommending, by this imaginary dialogue, a particular course to be taken in regard to this subject, far less the particular language to be used. all i mean is to show by a familiar illustration how the teacher is to endeavor to enlist the interest and to excite the curiosity of his pupils in his plans for the improvement of his school, by presenting them as moral experiments, which they are to assist him in trying--experiments whose progress they are to watch, and whose results they are to predict. if the precise steps which i have described should actually be taken, although it would occupy but a few minutes, and would cause no thought and no perplexing care, yet it would undoubtedly be the means of awakening a very general interest in the subject of order throughout the school. all would be interested in the work of arrangement. all would watch, too, with interest the progress and the result of the experiment; and if, a few days afterward, the teacher should accidentally, in recess, see a disorderly desk, a good-humored remark made with a smile to the by-standers, "i suspect my prediction will turn out the correct one," would have far more effect than the most severe reproaches, or the tingling of a rap over the knuckles with a ratan. i know from experience that scholars of every kind can be led by such measures as these, or rather by such a spirit as this, to take an active interest, and to exert a most powerful influence in regard to the whole condition of the institution. i have seen the experiment successful in boys' schools and in girls' schools, among very little children, and among the seniors and juniors at college. in one of the colleges of new england a new and beautiful edifice was erected. the lecture-rooms were fitted up in handsome style, and the officers, when the time for the occupation of the building approached, were anticipating with regret what seemed to be the unavoidable defacing, and cutting, and marking of the seats and walls. it was, however, thought that if the subject was properly presented to the students, they would take an interest in preserving the property from injury. they were accordingly addressed somewhat as follows: "it seems, young gentlemen, to be generally the custom in colleges for the students to ornament the walls and benches of their recitation-rooms with various inscriptions and caricatures, so that after the premises have been for a short time in the possession of a class, every thing within reach, which will take an impression from a penknife or a trace from a pencil, is covered with names, and dates, and heads, and inscriptions of every kind. the faculty do not know what you wish in this respect in regard to the new accommodations which the trustees have now provided for you, and which you are soon to enter. they have had them fitted up for you handsomely, and if you wish to have them kept in good order, we will assist you. if the students think proper to express by a vote, or in any other way, their wish to keep them in good order, we will engage to have such incidental injuries as may from time to time occur immediately repaired. such injuries will, of course, be done; for, whatever may be the wish and general opinion of the whole, it is not to be expected that every individual in so large a community will be careful. if, however, as a body, you wish to have the building preserved in its present state, and will, as a body, take the necessary precautions, we will do our part." [illustration] the students responded to this appeal most heartily. they passed a vote expressing a desire to preserve the premises in order, and for many years, and, for aught i know, to the present hour, the whole is kept as a room occupied by gentlemen should be kept. at some other colleges, and those, too, sustaining the very highest rank among the institutions of the country, the doors of the public buildings are sometimes _studded with nails as thick as they can possibly be driven, and then covered with a thick coat of sand dried into the paint, as a protection from the knives of the students!!_ the particular methods by which the teacher is to interest his pupils in his various plans for their improvement can not be fully described here. in fact, it does not depend so much on the methods he adopts as upon the view which he himself takes of these plans, and the _tone and manner in which he speaks of them to his pupils_. a teacher, for example, perhaps on the first day of his labors in a new school, calls a class to read. they pretend to form a line, but it crooks in every direction. one boy is leaning back against a desk; another comes forward as far as possible, to get near the fire; the rest lounge in every position and in every attitude. john is holding up his book high before his face to conceal an apple from which he is endeavoring to secure an enormous bite. james is, by the same sagacious device, concealing a whisper which he is addressing to his next neighbor, and moses is seeking amusement by crowding and elbowing the little boy who is unluckily standing next him. "what a spectacle!" says the master to himself, as he looks at this sad display. "what shall i do?" the first impulse is to break forth upon them at once with all the artillery of reproof, and threatening, and punishment. i have seen, in such a case, a scolding and frowning master walk up and down before such a class with a stern and angry air, commanding this one to stand back, and that one to come forward, ordering one boy to put down his book, and scolding at a second for having lost his place, and knocking the knees of another with his ruler because he was out of the line. the boys scowl at their teacher, and, with ill-natured reluctance, they obey just enough to escape punishment. another teacher looks calmly at the scene, and says to himself, "what shall i do to remove effectually these evils? if i can but interest the boys in reform, it will be far more easy to effect it than if i attempt to accomplish it by the mere exercise of my authority." in the mean time things go on during the reading in their own way. the teacher simply _observes_. he is in no haste to commence his operations. he looks for the faults; watches, without seeming to watch, the movements which he is attempting to control. he studies the materials with which he is to work, and lets their true character develop itself. he tries to find something to approve in the exercise as it proceeds, and endeavors to interest the class by narrating some fact connected with the reading, or making some explanation which interests the boys. at the end of the exercise he addresses them, perhaps, as follows: "i have observed, boys, in some military companies, that the officers are very strict, requiring implicit and precise obedience. the men are required to form a precise line." (here there is a sort of involuntary movement all along the line, by which it is very sensibly straightened.) "they make all the men stand erect" (at this word heads go up, and straggling feet draw in all along the class), "in the true military posture. they allow nothing to be done in the ranks but to attend to the exercise" (john hastily crowds his apple into his pocket), "and thus they regulate every thing in exact and steady discipline, so that all things go on in a most systematic and scientific manner. this discipline is so admirable in some countries, especially in europe, where much greater attention is paid to military tactics than in our country, that i have heard it said by travelers that some of the soldiers who mount guard at public places look as much like statues as they do like living men. "other commanders act differently. they let the men do pretty much as they please. so you will see such a company lounging into a line when the drum beats, as if they took little interest in what was going on. while the captain is giving his commands, one is eating his luncheon, another is talking with his next neighbor. part are out of the line; part lounge on one foot; they hold their guns in every position; and, on the whole, present a very disorderly and unsoldier-like appearance. "i have observed, too, that boys very generally prefer to _see_ the strict companies, but perhaps they would prefer to _belong_ to the lax ones." "no, sir;" "no, sir," say the boys. "suppose you all had your choice either to belong to a company like the first one i described, where the captain was strict in all his requirements, or to one like the latter, where you could do pretty much as you pleased, which should you prefer?" unless i am entirely mistaken in my idea of the inclinations of boys, it would be very difficult to get a single honest expression of preference for the latter. they would say with one voice, "the first." "i suppose it would be so. you would be put to some inconvenience by the strict commands of the captain, but then you would be more than paid by the beauty of regularity and order which you would all witness. there is nothing so pleasant as regularity, and nobody likes regularity more than boys do. to show this, i should like to have you now form a line as exact as you can." after some unnecessary shoving and pushing, increased by the disorderly conduct of a few bad boys, a line is formed. most of the class are pleased with the experiment, and the teacher takes no notice of the few exceptions. the time to attend to _them_ will come by-and-by. "hands down." the boys obey. "shoulders back." "there; there is a very perfect line." "do you stand easily in that position?" "yes, sir." "i believe your position is the military one now, pretty nearly; and military men study the postures of the human body for the sake of finding the one most easy; for they wish to preserve as much as possible of the soldiers' strength for the time of battle. i should like to try the experiment of your standing thus at the next lesson. it is a very great improvement upon your common mode. are you willing to do it?" "yes, sir," say the boys. "you will get tired, i have no doubt; for the military position, though most convenient and easy in the end, is not to be learned and fixed in practice without effort. in fact, i do not expect you will succeed the first day very well. you will probably become restless and uneasy before the end of the lesson, especially the smaller boys. i must excuse it, i suppose, if you do, as it will be the first time." by such methods as these the teacher will certainly secure a majority in favor of all his plans. but perhaps some experienced teacher, who knows from his own repeated difficulties with bad boys what sort of spirits the teacher of district schools has sometimes to deal with, may ask, as he reads this, "do you expect that such a method as this will succeed in keeping your school in order? why there are boys in almost every school whom you would no more coax into obedience and order in this way than you would persuade the northeast wind to change its course by reasoning." i know there are. and my readers are requested to bear in mind that my object is not to show how the whole government of the school may be secured, but how one important advantage may be gained, which will assist in accomplishing the object. all i should expect or hope for, by such measures as these, is _to interest and gain over to our side the majority_. what is to be done with those who can not be reached by such kinds of influence i shall endeavor presently to show. the object now is simply to gain the _majority_--to awaken a general interest, which you can make effectual in promoting your plans, and thus to narrow the field of discipline by getting those right who can be got right by such measures. thus securing a majority to be on your side in the general administration of the school is absolutely indispensable to success. a teacher may, indeed, by the force of mere authority, so control his pupils as to preserve order in the schoolroom, and secure a tolerable progress in study, but the progress will be slow, and the cultivation of moral principle must be, in such a case, entirely neglected. the principles of duty can not be inculcated by fear; and though pain and terror must in many instances be called in to coerce an individual offender, whom milder measures will not reach, yet these agents, and others like them, can never be successfully employed as the ordinary motives to action. they can not produce any thing but mere external and heartless obedience in the presence of the teacher, with an inclination to throw off all restraint when the pressure of stern authority is removed. we should all remember that our pupils are but for a very short time under our direct control. even when they are in school the most untiring vigilance will not enable us to watch, except for a very small portion of the time, any one individual. many hours of the day, too, they are entirely removed from our inspection, and a few months will take them away from us altogether. subjecting them, then, to mere external restraint is a very inadequate remedy for the moral evil to which they are exposed. what we aim at is to bring forward and strengthen an internal principle which will act when both parent and teacher are away, and control where external circumstances are all unfavorable. i have thus far, under this head, been endeavoring to show the importance of securing, by gentle measures, a majority of the scholars to cooperate with the teacher in his plans. the particular methods of doing this demand a little attention. ( .) the teacher should study human nature as it exhibits itself in the school-room by taking an interest in the sports and enjoyments of the pupils, and connecting, as much as possible, what is interesting and agreeable with the pursuits of the school, so as to lead the scholars to like the place. an attachment to the institution, and to the duties of it, will give the teacher a very strong hold upon the community of mind which exists there. ( .) every thing which is unpleasant in the discipline of the school should be attended to, as far as possible, privately. sometimes it is necessary to bring a case forward in public for reproof or punishment, but this is seldom required. in some schools it is the custom to postpone cases of discipline till the close of the day, and then, just before the boys are dismissed at night, all the difficulties are settled. thus, day after day, the impression which is last made upon their minds is received from a season of suffering, and terror, and tears. now such a practice may be attended with many advantages, but it seems to be, on the whole, unwise. awing the pupils, by showing them the painful consequences of doing wrong, should be very seldom resorted to. it is far better to allure them by showing them the pleasures of doing right. doing right is pleasant to every body, and no persons are so easily convinced of this, or, rather, so easily led to see it, as children. now the true policy is to let them experience the pleasure of doing their duty, and they will easily be allured to it. in many cases, where a fault has been publicly committed, it seems, at first view, to be necessary that it should be publicly punished; but the end will, in most cases, be answered if it is _noticed_ publicly, so that the pupils may know that it received attention, and then the ultimate disposal of the case may be made a private affair between the teacher and the individual concerned. if, however, every case of disobedience, or idleness, or disorder, is brought out publicly before the school, so that all witness the teacher's displeasure and feel the effects of it (for to witness it is to feel its most unpleasant effects), the school becomes, in a short time, hardened to such scenes. unpleasant associations become connected with the management of the school, and the scholars are prepared to do wrong with less reluctance, since the consequence is only a repetition of what they are obliged to see every day. besides, if a boy does something wrong, and you severely reprove him in the presence of his class, you punish the class almost as much as you do him. in fact, in many cases you punish them more; for i believe it is almost invariably more unpleasant for a good boy to stand by and listen to rebukes, than for a bad boy to take them. keep these things, therefore, as much as possible out of sight. never bring forward cases of discipline except on mature deliberation, and for a distinct and well-defined purpose. ( .) never bring forward a case of discipline of this kind unless you are sure that public opinion will go in your favor. if a case comes up in which the sympathy of the scholars is excited for the criminal in such a way as to be against yourself, the punishment will always do more harm than good. now this, unless there is great caution, will often happen. in fact, it is probable that a very large proportion of the punishments which are ordinarily inflicted in schools only prepare the way for more offenses. it is, however, possible to bring forward individual cases in such a way as to produce a very strong moral effect of the right kind. this is to be done by seizing upon those peculiar emergencies which will arise in the course of the administration of a school, and which each teacher must watch for and discover himself. they can not be pointed out. i may, however, give a clearer idea of what is meant by such emergencies by an example. it is a case which actually occurred as here narrated. in a school where nearly all the pupils were faithful and docile, there were one or two boys who were determined to find amusement in those mischievous tricks so common in schools and colleges. there was one boy, in particular, who was the life and soul of all these plans. devoid of principle, idle as a scholar, morose and sullen in his manners, he was, in every respect, a true specimen of the whole class of mischief-makers, wherever they are to be found. his mischief consisted, as usual, in such exploits as stopping up the keyhole of the door, upsetting the teacher's inkstand, or fixing something to his desk to make a noise and interrupt the school. it so happened that there was a standing feud between the boys of his neighborhood and those of another situated a mile or two from it. by his malicious activity he had stimulated this quarrel to a high pitch, and was very obnoxious to the boys of the other party. one day, when taking a walk, the teacher observed a number of boys with excited looks, and armed with sticks and stones, standing around a shoemaker's shop, to which his poor pupil had gone for refuge from them. they had got him completely within their power, and were going to wait until he should be wearied with his confinement and come out, when they were going to inflict upon him the punishment they thought he deserved. the teacher interfered, and by the united influence of authority, management, and persuasion, succeeded in effecting a rescue. the boy would probably have preferred to owe his safety to any one else than to the teacher whom he had so often tried to tease, but he was glad to escape in any way. the teacher said nothing about the subject, and the boy soon supposed it was entirely forgotten. but it was not forgotten. the teacher knew perfectly well that the boy would before long be at his old tricks again, and was reserving this story as the means of turning the whole current of public opinion against such tricks, should they again occur. one day he came to school in the afternoon, and found the room filled with smoke; the doors and windows were all closed, though, as soon as he came in, some of the boys opened them. he knew by this circumstance that it was roguery, not accident, which caused the smoke. he appeared not to notice it, however, said he was sorry it smoked, and asked the mischievous boy--for he was sure to be always near in such a case--to assist him in putting up the wood of the fire more compactly. the boy supposed that the smoke was understood to be accidental, and perhaps secretly laughed at the dullness of his master. in the course of the afternoon, the teacher ascertained by private inquiries that his suspicions were correct as to the author of the mischief. at the close of school, when the studies were ended, and the books laid away, he said to the scholars that he wanted to tell them a story. he then, with a pleasant tone and manner, gave a very minute, and, to the boys, a very interesting narrative of his adventure two or three weeks before, when he rescued this boy from his danger. he called him, however, simply _a boy_, without mentioning his name, or even hinting that he was a member of the school. no narrative could excite a stronger interest among an audience of school-boys than such a one as this, and no act of kindness from a teacher would make as vivid an impression as interfering to rescue a trembling captive from such a situation as the one this boy had been in. the scholars listened with profound interest and attention, and though the teacher said little about his share in the affair, and spoke of what he did as if it were a matter of course that he should thus befriend a boy in distress, an impression very favorable to himself must have been made. after he had finished his narrative, he said, "now should you like to know who this boy was?" "yes, sir," "yes, sir," said they, eagerly. "it was a boy that you all know." the boys looked around upon one another. who could it be? "he is a member of this school." there was an expression of fixed, and eager, and increasing interest on every face in the room. "he is here now," said the teacher, winding up the interest and curiosity of the scholars, by these words, to the highest pitch. "but i can not tell you his name; for what return do you think he made to me? to be sure it was no very great favor that i did him; i should have been unworthy the name of teacher if i had not done it for him, or for any boy in my school. but, at any rate, it showed my good wishes for him; it showed that i was his friend; and what return do you think he made me for it? why, to-day he spent his time between schools in filling the room with smoke, that he might torment his companions here, and give me trouble, and anxiety, and suffering when i should come. if i should tell you his name, the whole school would turn against him for his ingratitude." the business ended here, and it put a stop, a final stop, to all malicious tricks in the school. now it is not very often that so fine an opportunity occurs to kill, by a single blow, the disposition to do willful, wanton injury, as this circumstance afforded; but the principle illustrated by it, bringing forward individual cases of transgression in a public manner, only for the sake of the general effect, and so arranging what is said and done as to produce the desired effect upon the public mind in the highest degree, may very frequently be acted upon. cases are continually occurring, and if the teacher will keep it constantly in mind, that when a particular case comes before the whole school, the object is an influence upon the whole, and not the punishment or reform of the guilty individual, he will insensibly so shape his measures as to produce the desired result. ( .) there should be a great difference made between the _measures which you take_ to prevent wrong, and the _feelings of displeasure which you express_ against the wrong when it is done. the former should be strict, authoritative, unbending; the latter should be mild and gentle. your measures, if uniform and systematic, will never give offense, however powerfully you may restrain and control those subject to them. it is the morose look, the harsh expression, the tone of irritation and fretfulness, which is so unpopular in school. the sins of childhood are by nine tenths of mankind enormously overrated, and perhaps none overrate them more extravagantly than teachers. we confound the trouble they give us with their real moral turpitude, and measure the one by the other. now if a fault prevails in school, one teacher will scold and fret himself about it day after day, until his scholars are tired both of school and of him; and yet he will _do_ nothing effectual to remove it. another will take efficient and decided measures, and yet say very little on the subject, and the whole evil will be removed without suspending for a moment the good-humor and pleasant feeling which should prevail in school. the expression of your displeasure on account of any thing that is wrong will seldom or never do any good. the scholars consider it scolding; it is scolding; and though it may, in many cases, contain many sound arguments and eloquent expostulations, it operates simply as a punishment. it is unpleasant to hear it. general instruction must indeed be given, but not general reproof. ( .) feel that in the management of the school _you_ are under obligation as well as the scholars, and let this feeling appear in all that you do. your scholars wish you to dismiss school earlier than usual on some particular occasion, or to allow them an extra holiday. show by the manner in which you consider and speak of the question that your main inquiry is what is _your duty_. speak often of your responsibility to your employers--not formally, but incidentally and naturally, as you will speak if you feel this responsibility. it will assist very much, too, in securing cheerful, good-humored obedience to the regulations of the school, if you extend their authority over yourself. not that the teacher is to have no liberty from which the scholars are debarred; this would be impossible. but the teacher should submit, himself, to every thing which he requires of his scholars, unless it is in cases where a different course is necessary. suppose, for instance, a study-card, like the one described in a preceding chapter, is made so as to mark the time of recess and of study. the teacher, near the close of recess, is sitting with a group of his pupils around him, telling them some story. they are all interested, and they see he is interested. he looks at his watch, and shows by his manner that he is desirous of finishing what he is saying, but that he knows that the striking of the bell will cut short his story. perhaps he says not a word about it, but his pupils see that he is submitting to the control which is placed over them; and when the card goes up, and he stops instantly in the middle of his sentence and rises with the rest, each one to go to his own place, to engage at once in their several duties, he teaches them a most important lesson, and in the most effectual way. such a lesson of fidelity and obedience, and such an example of it, will have more influence than half an hour's scolding about whispering without leave, or a dozen public punishments. at least so i found it, for i have tried both. show then continually that you see and enjoy the beauty of system and strict discipline, and that you submit to law yourself as well as require submission of others. ( .) lead your pupils to see that they must share with you the credit or the disgrace which success or failure in the management of the school may bring. lead them to feel this, not by telling them so, for there are very few things which can be impressed upon children by direct efforts to impress them, but by so speaking of the subject, from time to time, as to lead them to see that you understand it so. repeat, with judicious caution, what is said of the school, both for and against it, and thus endeavor to interest the scholars in its public reputation. this feeling of interest in the institution may very easily be awakened. it sometimes springs up spontaneously, and, where it is not guided aright by the teacher, sometimes produces very bad effects upon the minds of the pupils in rival institutions. when two schools are situated near each other, evil consequences will result from this feeling, unless the teacher manages it so as to deduce good consequences. i recollect that in my boyish days there was a standing quarrel between the boys of a town school and an academy which were in the same village. we were all ready at any time, when out of school, to fight for the honor of our respective institutions, each for his own, but very few were ready to be diligent and faithful when in it, though it would seem that that might have been rather a more effectual means of establishing the point. if the scholars are led to understand that the school is to a great extent their institution, that they must assist to sustain its character, and that they share the honor of its excellence, if any honor is acquired, a feeling will prevail in the school which may be turned to a most useful account. ( .) in giving instruction on moral duty, the subject should generally be taken up in reference to imaginary cases, or cases which are unknown to most of the scholars. if this is done, the pupils feel that the object of bringing up the subject is to do good; whereas, if questions of moral duty are only introduced from time to time, when some prevailing or accidental fault in school calls for reproof, the feeling will be that the teacher is only endeavoring to remove from his own path a source of inconvenience and trouble. the most successful mode of giving general moral instruction that i have known, and which has been adopted in many schools with occasional variations of form, is the following: when the time has arrived, a subject is assigned, and small papers are distributed to the whole school, that all may write something concerning it. these are then read and commented on by the teacher, and become the occasion of any remarks which he may wish to make. the interest of the pupils is strongly excited to hear the papers read, and the instruction which the teacher may give produces a deeper effect when ingrafted thus upon something which originates in the minds of the pupils. to take a particular case. a teacher addresses his scholars thus: "the subject for the moral exercise to-day is _prejudice_. each one may take one of the papers which have been distributed, and you may write upon them any thing you please relating to the subject. as many as have thought of any thing to write may raise their hands." one or two only of the older scholars gave the signal. "i will mention the kinds of communications you can make, and perhaps what i say will suggest something to you. as fast as you think of any thing, you may raise your hands, and as soon as i see a sufficient number up, i will give directions to begin. "you can describe any case in which you have been prejudiced yourselves either against persons or things." here a number of the hands went up. "you can mention any facts relating to antipathies of any kind, or any cases where you know other persons to be prejudiced. you can ask any questions in regard to the subject--questions about the nature of prejudice, or the causes of it, or the remedy for it." as he said this, many hands were successively raised, and at last directions were given for all to begin to write. five minutes were allowed, and at the end of that time the papers were collected and read. the following specimens, transcribed verbatim from the originals, with the remarks made as nearly as could be remembered immediately after the exercise, will give an idea of the ordinary operation of this plan. "i am very much prejudiced against spiders and every insect in the known world with scarcely an exception. there is a horrid sensation created by their ugly forms that makes me wish them all to jericho. the butterfly's wings are pretty, but he is dreadful ugly. the is no affectation in this, for my pride will not permit me to show this prejudice to any great degree when i can help it. i do not fear the little wretches, but i do hate them. anti-spider-sparer." "this is not expressed very well; the phrases '_to jericho?_' and '_dreadful ugly_' are vulgar, and not in good taste. such a dislike, too, is more commonly called an antipathy than a prejudice, though perhaps it comes under the general head of prejudices." "how may we overcome prejudice? i think that when we are prejudiced against a person, it is the hardest thing in the world to overcome it." a prejudice is usually founded on some unpleasant association connected with the subject of it. the best way to overcome the prejudice, therefore, is to connect some pleasant association with it. for example (to take the case of the antipathy to the spider, alluded to in the last article), the reason why that young lady dislikes spiders is undoubtedly because she has some unpleasant idea associated with the thought of that animal, perhaps, for example, the idea of their crawling upon her, which is certainly not a very pleasant one for any body. now the way to correct such a prejudice is to try to connect some pleasant thoughts with the sight of the animal. i once found a spider in an empty apartment hanging in its web on the wall, with a large ball of eggs which it had suspended by its side. my companion and myself cautiously brought up a tumbler under the web, and pressed it suddenly against the wall, so as to inclose both spider and eggs within it. we then contrived to run in a pair of shears, so as to cut off the web, and let both the animal and its treasure fall down into the tumbler. we put a book over the top, and walked off with our prize to a table to see what the spider would do. at first it tried to climb up the side of the tumbler, but its feet slipped on account of the smoothness of the glass. we then inclined the glass so as to favor its climbing, and to enable it to reach the book at the top. as soon as it touched the book, it was safe. it could cling to the book easily, and we placed the tumbler again upright to watch its motions. it attached a thread to the book, and let itself down by it to the bottom of the tumbler, and walked round and round the ball of eggs, apparently in great trouble. presently it ascended by its thread, and then came down again. it attached a new thread to the ball, and then went up, drawing the ball with it. it hung the ball at a proper distance from the book, and bound it firmly in its place by threads running from it in every direction to the parts of the book which were near, and then the animal took its place quietly by its side. now i do not say that if any body had a strong antipathy to a spider, seeing one perform such a work as this would entirely remove it, but it would certainly soften it. it would _tend_ to remove it. it would connect an interesting and pleasant association with the object. so if she should watch a spider in the fields making his web. you have all seen those beautiful regular webs in the morning dew ("yes, sir;" "yes, sir"), composed of concentric circles, and radii diverging in every direction. ("yes, sir.") well, watch a spider when making one of these, or observe his artful ingenuity and vigilance when he is lying in wait for a fly. by thus connecting pleasant ideas with the sight of the animal, you will destroy the unpleasant association which constitutes the prejudice. in the same manner, if i wished to create an antipathy to a spider in a child, it would be very easily done. i would tie her hands behind her, and put three or four upon her to crawl over her face. [illustration] "thus you must destroy prejudices in all cases by connecting pleasant thoughts and associations with the objects of them." "i am very often prejudiced against new scholars without knowing why." "we sometimes hear a person talk in this way: 'i do not like such or such a person at all.' "'why?' "'oh, i don't know; i do not like her at all. i can't bear her.' "'but why not? what is your objection to her?' "'oh, i don't know; i have not any particular reason, but i never did like her.' "now, whenever you hear any person talk so, you may be sure that her opinion on any subject is worth nothing at all. she forms opinions in one case without grounds, and it depends merely upon accident whether she does or not in other cases." "why is it that so many of our countrymen _are_, or seem to be, prejudiced against the unfortunate children of africa? almost every _large white_ boy who meets a _small black_ boy insults him in some way or other." "it is so hard to _overcome_ prejudices, that we ought to be careful how we _form_ them." "when i see a new scholar enter this school, and she does not happen to suit me exactly in her ways and manners, i very often get prejudiced against her; though sometimes i find her a valuable friend after i get acquainted with her." "there is an inquiry i should like very much to make, though i suppose it would not be quite right to make it. i should like to ask all those who have some particular friend in school, and who can recollect the impression which the individual made upon them when they first saw her, to rise, and then i should like to inquire in how many cases the first impression was favorable, and in how many unfavorable." "yes, sir;" "yes, sir." "do you mean you would like to have the inquiry made?" "yes, sir." "all, then, who have intimate friends, and can recollect the impression which they first made upon them, may rise." [about thirty rose; more than two thirds of whom voted that the first impression made by the persons who had since become their particular friends was unfavorable.] "this shows how much dependence you can justly place on first impressions." "it was the next monday morning after i had attained the wise age of four years that i was called up into my mother's room, and told that i was the next day going to school. "i called forth all my reasoning powers, and with all the ability of a child of four years, i reasoned with my mother, but to no purpose. i told her that i _hated_ the school-mistress then, though i had never seen her. the very first day i tottered under the weight of the mighty fool's-cap. i only attended her school two quarters; with prejudice i went, and with prejudice i came away. "the old school-house is now torn down, and a large brick house takes the place of it. but i never pass by without remembering my teacher. i am prejudiced to [against] the very spot." "is it not right to allow prejudice to have influence over our minds as far as this? if any thing comes to our knowledge with which wrong _seems_ to be connected, and one in whom we have always felt confidence is engaged in it, is it not right to allow our prejudice in favor of this individual to have so much influence over us as to cause us to believe that all is really right, though every circumstance which has come to our knowledge is against such a conclusion? i felt this influence, not many weeks since, in a very great degree." "the disposition to judge favorably of a fraud in such a case would not be prejudice; or, at least, if it were so, it would not be a sufficient ground to justify us in withholding blame. well-grounded confidence in such a person, if there was reason for it, ought to have such an effect, but not prejudice." the above may be considered as a fair specimen of the ordinary operation of such an exercise. it is taken as an illustration, not by selection, from the large number of similar exercises which i have witnessed, but simply because it was an exercise occurring at the time when a description was to be written. besides the articles quoted above, there were thirty or forty others which were read and commented on. the above will, however, be sufficient to give the reader a clear idea of the exercise, and to show what is the nature of the moral effect it is calculated to produce. the subjects which may be advantageously brought forward in such a way are, of course, very numerous. they are such as the following: . duties to parents.--anecdotes of good or bad conduct at home. questions. cases where it is most difficult to obey. dialogues between parents and children. excuses which are often made for disobedience. . selfishness.--cases of selfishness any of the pupils have observed. dialogues they have heard exhibiting it. questions about its nature. indications of selfishness. . faults of the school.--any bad practices the scholars may have observed in regard to general deportment, recitations, habits of study, or the scholars' treatment of one another. each scholar may write what is his own greatest trouble in school, and whether he thinks any thing can be done to remove it. any thing they think can be improved in the management of the school by the teacher. unfavorable things they have heard said about it out of school, though without names. . excellences of the school.--good practices which ought to be persevered in. any little incidents the scholars may have noticed illustrating good character. cases which have occurred in which scholars have done right in temptation, or when others around were doing wrong. favorable reports in regard to the school in the community around. . the sabbath.--any thing the scholars may have known to be done on the sabbath which they doubt whether right or wrong. questions in regard to the subject. various opinions they have heard expressed. difficulties they have in regard to proper ways of spending the sabbath. ( .) we have one other method to describe by which a favorable moral influence may be exerted in school. the method can, however, go into full effect only where there are several pupils who have made considerable advances in mental cultivation. it is to provide a way by which teachers and pupils may write anonymously for the school. this may be done by having a place of deposit for such articles as may be written, where any person may leave what he wishes to have read, nominating by a memorandum upon the article itself the reader. if a proper feeling on the subject of good discipline and the formation of good character prevails in school, many articles, which will have a great deal of effect upon the pupils, will find their way through such an avenue once opened. the teacher can himself often bring forward in this way his suggestions with more effect than he otherwise could do. such a plan is, in fact, like the plan of a newspaper for an ordinary community, where sentiments and opinions stand on their own basis, and influence the community just in proportion to their intrinsic merits, unassisted by the authority of the writer's name, and unimpeded by any prejudice which may exist against him. the following articles, which were really offered for such a purpose in the mount vernon school, will serve as specimens to illustrate the actual operation of the plan. one or two of them were written by teachers. i do not know the authors of the others. i do not offer them as remarkable compositions: every teacher will see that they are not so. the design of inserting them is merely to show that the ordinary literary ability to be found in every school may be turned to useful account by simply opening a channel for it, and to furnish such teachers as may be inclined to try the experiment the means of making the plan clearly understood by their pupils. marks of a bad scholar. "at the time when she should be ready to take her seat at school, she commences preparation for leaving home. to the extreme annoyance of those about her, all is now hurry, and bustle, and ill-humor. thorough search is to be made for every book or paper for which she has occasion; some are found in one place, some in another, and others are forgotten altogether. being finally equipped, she casts her eye at the clock, hopes to be in tolerable good season (notwithstanding that the hour for opening the school has already arrived), and sets out in the most violent hurry. "after so much haste, she is unfitted for attending properly to the duties of the school until a considerable time after her arrival. if present at the devotional exercises, she finds it difficult to command her attention even when desirous of so doing, and her deportment at this hour is, accordingly, marked with an unbecoming listlessness and abstraction. "when called to recitations, she recollects that some task was assigned, which, till that moment, she had forgotten; of others she had mistaken the extent, most commonly thinking them to be shorter than her companions suppose. in her answers to questions with which she should be familiar, she always manifests more or less of hesitation, and what she ventures to express is very commonly in the form of a question. in these, as in all exercises, there is an inattention to general instructions. unless what is said be addressed particularly to herself, her eyes are directed toward another part of the room; it may be, her thoughts are employed about something not at all connected with the school. if reproved by her teacher for negligence in any respects, she is generally provided with an abundance of excuses, and however mild the reproof, she receives it as a piece of extreme severity. "throughout her whole deportment there is an air of indolence and a want of interest in those exercises which should engage her attention. in her seat, she most commonly sits in some lazy posture--either with her elbows upon her desk, her head leaning upon her hands, or with her seat tipped forward or backward. when she has occasion to leave her seat, it is in a sauntering, lingering gait--perhaps some trick is contrived on the way for exciting the mirth of her companions. "about every thing in which it is possible to be so, she is untidy. her books are carelessly used, and placed in her desk without order. if she has a piece of waste paper to dispose of, she finds it much more convenient to tear it into small pieces and scatter it about her desk, than to put it in a proper place. her hands and clothes are usually covered with ink. her written exercises are blotted and full of mistakes." the consequences of being behindhand. "the following incident, which i witnessed on a late journey, illustrates an important principle, and i will relate it. "when our steam-boat started from the wharf, all our passengers had not come. after we had proceeded a few yards, there appeared among the crowd on the wharf a man with his trunk under his arm, out of breath, and with a most disappointed and disconsolate air. the captain determined to stop for him; but stopping an immense steam-boat, moving swiftly through the water, is not to be done in a moment; so we took a grand sweep, wheeling majestically around an english ship which was at anchor in the harbor. as we came toward the wharf again, we saw the man in a small boat coming off from it. as the steam-boat swept round, they barely succeeded in catching a rope from the stern, and then immediately the steam-engine began its work again, and we pressed forward, the little boat following us so swiftly that the water around her was all in a foam. "they pulled upon the rope attached to the little boat until they drew it alongside. they then let down a rope, with a hook in the end of it, from an iron crane which projected over the side of the steam-boat, and hooked it into a staple in the front of the small boat. '_hoist away_!' said the captain. the sailors hoisted, and the front part of the little boat began to rise, the stern plowing and foaming through the water, and the man still in it, with his trunk under his arm. they 'hoisted away' until i began to think that the poor man would actually tumble out behind. he clung to the seat, and looked as though he was saying to himself, 'i will take care how i am tardy the next time.' however, after a while, they hoisted up the stern of the boat, and he got safely on board. "_moral_--though coming to school a few minutes earlier or later may not in itself be a matter of much consequence, yet the habit of being five minutes too late, if once formed, will, in actual life, be a source of great inconvenience, and sometimes of lasting injury." new scholars. there is at ------ a young ladies' school, taught by mr. ------. * * * * * "but, with all these excellences, there is one fault, which i considered a great one, and which does not comport with the general character of the school for kindness and good feeling. it is the little effort made by the scholars to become acquainted with the new ones who enter. whoever goes there must push herself forward, or she will never feel at home. the young ladies seem to forget that the new-comer must feel rather unpleasantly in the midst of a hundred persons to whom she is wholly a stranger, and with no one to speak to. two or three will stand together, and instead of deciding upon some plan by which the individual may be made to feel at ease, something like the following conversation takes place: "_miss x._ how do you like the looks of miss a., who entered school to-day? "_miss y._ i don't think she is very pretty, but she looks as if she might be a good scholar. "_miss x._ she does not strike me very pleasantly. did you ever see such a face? and her complexion is so dark, i should think she had always lived in the open air; and what a queer voice she has! "_miss y._ i wonder if she has a taste for arithmetic? "_miss x._ she does not look as if she had much taste for any thing. see how strangely she arranges her hair! "_miss s._ whether she has much taste or not, some one of us ought to go and get acquainted with her. see how unpleasantly she feels! "_miss x._ i don't want to get acquainted with her until i know whether i shall like her or not. "thus nothing is done to relieve her. when she does become acquainted, all her first strange appearance is forgotten; but this is sometimes not the case for several weeks. it depends entirely on the character of the individual herself. if she is forward, and willing to make the necessary effort, she can find many friends; but if she is diffident, she has much to suffer. this arises principally from thoughtlessness. the young ladies do not seem to realize that there is any thing for them to do. they feel enough at home themselves, and the remembrance of the time when they entered school does not seem to arise in their minds." a satirical spirit. i witnessed, a short time since, a meeting between two friends, who had had but little intercourse before for a long while. i thought a part of their conversation might be useful, and i shall therefore relate it, as nearly as i can recollect, leaving each individual to draw her own inferences. for some time i sat silent, but not uninterested, while the days of 'auld lang syne' came up to the remembrance of the two friends. after speaking of several individuals who were among their former acquaintances, one asked, 'do you remember miss w.? 'yes,' replied the former, i remember her as the fear, terror, and abhorrence of all who knew her.' _i_ knew the lady by report, and asked why she was so regarded. the reply was, 'because she was so severe, so satirical in her remarks upon others. she spared neither friend nor foe.' "the friends resumed their conversation. 'did you know,' said the one who had first spoken of miss w., 'that she sometimes had seasons of bitter repentance for indulging in this unhappy propensity of hers? she would, at such times, resolve to be more on her guard, but, after all her good resolutions, she would yield to the slightest temptations. when she was expressing, and apparently really _feeling_ sorrow for having wounded the feelings of others, those who knew her would not venture to express any sympathy, for, very likely, the next moment _that_ would be turned into ridicule. no confidence could be placed in her.' "a few more facts will be stated respecting the same individual, which i believe are strictly true. miss w. possessed a fine and well-cultivated mind, great penetration, and a tact at discriminating character rarely equaled. she could, if she chose, impart a charm to her conversation that would interest and even fascinate those who listened to it; still, she was not beloved. weaknesses and foibles met with unmerciful severity, and well-meaning intentions and kind actions did not always escape without the keen sarcasm which it is so difficult for the best regulated mind to bear unmoved. the mild and gentle seemed to shrink from her; and thus she, who might have been the bright and beloved ornament of the circle in which she moved, was regarded with distrust, fear, and even hatred. this dangerous habit of making satirical remarks was evinced in childhood; it was cherished; it 'grew with her growth, and strengthened with her strength,' until she became what i have described. laura." though such a satirical spirit is justly condemned, a little good-humored raillery may sometimes be allowed as a mode of attacking faults in school which can not be reached by graver methods. the teacher must not be surprised if some things connected with his own administration come in sometimes for a share. variety. "i was walking out a few days since, and not being particularly in haste, i concluded to visit a certain school for an hour or two. in a few minutes after i had seated myself on the sofa, the '_study card_' was dropped, and the general noise and confusion indicated that recess had arrived. a line of military characters, bearing the title of the 'freedom's band,' was soon called out, headed by one of their own number. the tune chosen to guide them was kendall's march. "'please to form a regular line,' said the lady commander. 'remember that there is to be no speaking in the ranks. do not begin to step until i strike the bell. miss b., i requested you not to step until i gave the signal.' "presently the command was given, and the whole line _stepped_ for a few minutes to all intents and purposes. again the bell sounded. 'some of you have lost the step,' said the general. 'look at me, and begin again. left! right! left! right!' the line was once more in order, and i observed a new army on the opposite side of the room, performing the same manoeuvres, always to the tune of 'kendall's march.' after a time the recess closed, and order was again restored. in about half an hour i approached a class which was reciting behind the railing. 'miss a.,' said a teacher, 'how many kinds of magnitude are there?' _miss a._ (answer inaudible.) _several voices._ 'we can't hear.' _teacher._ 'will you try to speak a little louder, miss a.?" "some of the class at length seemed _to guess_ the meaning of the young lady, but _i_ was unable to do even that until the answer was repeated by the teacher. finding that i should derive little instruction from the recitation, i returned to the sofa. "in a short time the _propositions_ were read. 'proposed, that the committee be impeached for not providing suitable pens.' 'lost, a pencil, with a piece of india-rubber attached to it by a blue ribbon,' &c., &c. "recess was again announced, and the lines commenced their evolutions to the tune of 'kendall's march.' thought i, 'oh that there were a new tune under the sun!' "before the close of school some compositions were read. one was entitled 'the magic king,' and commenced, 'as i was sitting alone last evening, i heard a gentle tap on the door, and immediately a beautiful fairy appeared before me. she placed a ring on my finger, and left me.' the next began, 'it is my week to write composition, but i do not know what to say. however, i must write something, so it shall be a dialogue.' another was entitled the 'magical shoe,' and contained a marvelous narration of adventures made in a pair of shoes more valuable than the far-famed 'seven-league boots.' a fourth began, 'are you acquainted with that new scholar?' 'no; but i don't believe i shall like her.' and soon the 'magical thimble,' the 'magical eye-glass,' &c., were read in succession, until i could not but exclaim, 'how pleasing is variety!' school was at length closed, and the young ladies again attacked the piano. 'oh,' repeated i to myself, '_how pleasing is variety!_ as i left the room to the tune of kendall's march." by means like these, and others similar to them, it will not be difficult for any teacher to obtain so far an ascendency over the minds of his pupils as to secure an overwhelming majority in favor of good order and co-operation with him in his plans for elevating the character of the school. but let it be distinctly understood that this, and this only, has been the object of this chapter thus far. the first point brought up was the desirableness of making at first a favorable impression; the second, the necessity of taking general views of the condition of the school, and aiming to improve it in the mass, and not merely to rebuke or punish accidental faults; and the third, the importance and the means of gaining a general influence and ascendency over the minds of the pupils. but, though an overwhelming majority can be reached by such methods as these, all can not. we must have the majority secured, however, in order to enable us to reach and to reduce the others. but to this work we must come at last. . i am, therefore, now to consider, under a fourth general head, what course is to be taken with _individual_ offenders whom the general influences of the school-room will not control. the teacher must always expect that there will be such cases. they are always to be found in the best and most skillfully-managed schools. the following suggestions will perhaps assist the teacher in dealing with them. ( .) the first point to be attended to is to ascertain who they are. not by appearing suspiciously to watch any individuals, for this would be almost sufficient to make them bad, if they were not so before. observe, however; notice, from day to day, the conduct of individuals, not for the purpose of reproving or punishing their faults, but to enable you to understand their characters. this work will often require great adroitness and very close scrutiny, and you will find, as the results of it, a considerable variety of character, which the general influences above described will not be sufficient to control. the number of individuals will not be great, but the diversity of character comprised in it will be such as to call into exercise all your powers of vigilance and discrimination. on one seat you will find a coarse, rough-looking boy, who openly disobeys your commands and opposes your wishes while in school, and makes himself a continual source of trouble and annoyance during play-hours by bullying and hectoring every gentle and timid schoolmate. on another sits a more sly rogue, whose demure and submissive look is assumed to conceal a mischief-making disposition. here is one whose giddy spirit is always leading him into difficulty, but who is of so open and frank a disposition that you will most easily lead him back to duty; but there is another who, when reproved, will fly into a passion; and then a third, who will stand sullen and silent before you when he has done wrong, and is not to be touched by kindness nor awed by authority. [illustration] now all these characters must be studied. it is true that the caution given in a preceding part of this chapter, against devoting undue and disproportionate attention to such persons, must not be forgotten. still, these individuals will require, and it is right that they should receive, a far greater degree of attention, so far as the moral administration of the school is concerned, than their mere numbers would appear to justify. this is the field in which the teacher is to study human nature, for here it shows itself without disguise. it is through this class, too, that a very powerful moral influence is to be exerted upon the rest of the school. the manner in which such individuals are managed, the tone the teacher assumes toward them, the gentleness with which he speaks of their faults, and the unbending decision with which he restrains them from wrong, will have a most powerful effect upon the rest of the school. that he may occupy this field, therefore, to the best advantage, it is necessary that he should first thoroughly explore it. by understanding the dispositions and characters of such a class of pupils as i have described, i do not mean merely watching them with vigilance in school, so that none of their transgressions shall go unobserved and unpunished. i intend a far deeper and more thorough examination of character. every boy has something or other which is good in his disposition and character which he is aware of, and on which he prides himself; find out what it is, for it may often be made the foundation on which you may build the superstructure of reform. every one has his peculiar sources of enjoyment and objects of pursuit, which are before his mind from day to day. find out what they are, that by taking an interest in what interests him, and perhaps sometimes assisting him in his plans, you can bind him to you. every boy is, from the circumstances in which he is placed at home, exposed to temptations which have perhaps had far greater influence in the formation of his character than any deliberate and intentional depravity of his own; ascertain what these temptations are, that you may know where to pity him and where to blame. the knowledge which such an examination of character will give you, will not be confined to making you acquainted with the individual. it will be the most valuable knowledge which a man can possess, both to assist him in the general administration of the school and in his intercourse among mankind in the business of life. men are but boys, only with somewhat loftier objects of pursuit. their principles, motives, and ruling passions are essentially the same. extended commercial speculations are, so far as the human heart is concerned, substantially what trading in jack-knives and toys is at school, and building a snow fort, to its own architects, the same as erecting a monument of marble. ( .) after exploring the ground, the first thing to be done as a preparation for reforming individual character in school is to secure the personal attachment of the individuals to be reformed. this must not be attempted by professions and affected smiles, and still less by that sort of obsequiousness, common in such cases, which produces no effect but to make the bad boy suppose that his teacher is afraid of him; which, by the way, is, in fact, in such cases, usually true. approach the pupil in a bold and manly, but frank and pleasant manner. approach him as his superior, but still as his friend; desirous to make him happy, not merely to obtain his good-will. and the best way to secure these appearances is just to secure the reality. actually be the boy's friend. really desire to make him happy--happy, too, in his own way, not in yours. feel that you are his superior, and that you must and will enforce obedience; but with this, feel that probably obedience will be rendered without any contest. if these are really the feelings which reign within you, the boy will see it, and they will exert a strong influence over him; but you can not counterfeit appearances. a most effectual way to secure the good-will of a scholar is to ask him to assist you. the creator has so formed the human heart that doing good must be a source of pleasure, and he who tastes this pleasure once will almost always wish to taste it again. to do good to any individual creates or increases the desire to do it. there is a boy in your school who is famous for his skill in making whistles from the green branches of the poplar. he is a bad boy, and likes to turn his ingenuity to purposes of mischief. you observe him some day in school, when he thinks your attention is engaged in another way, blowing softly upon one which he has concealed in his desk for the purpose of amusing his neighbors without attracting the attention of the teacher. now there are two remedies. will you try the physical one? then call him out into the floor, inflict painful punishment, and send him smarting to his seat, with his heart full of anger and revenge, to plot some new and less dangerous scheme of annoyance. will you try the moral one? then wait till the recess, and while he is out at his play, send a message out by another boy, saying that you have heard he is very skillful in making whistles, and asking him to make one for you to carry home to a little child at your boarding-house. what would, in ordinary cases, be the effect? it would certainly be a very simple application, but its effect would be to open an entirely new train of thought and feeling for the boy. "what!" he would say to himself, while at work on his task, "give the master _pleasure_ by making whistles! who would have conceived of it? i never thought of any thing but giving him trouble and pain. i wonder who told him i could make whistles?" he would find, too, that the new enjoyment was far higher and purer than the old, and would have little disposition to return to the latter. i do not mean by this illustration that such a measure as this would be the only notice that ought to be taken of such an act of willful disturbance in school. probably it would not. what measures in direct reference to the fault committed would be necessary would depend upon the circumstances of the case. it is not necessary to our purpose that they should be described here. the teacher can awaken in the hearts of his pupils a personal attachment for him by asking in various ways their assistance in school, and then appearing honestly gratified with the assistance rendered. boys and girls are delighted to have what powers and attainments they possess brought out into action, especially where they can lead to useful results. they love to be of some consequence in the world, and will be especially gratified to be able to assist their teacher. even if the studies of a turbulent boy are occasionally interrupted for half an hour, that he might help you arrange papers, or rule books, or distribute exercises, it will be time well spent. get him to co-operate with you in any thing, and he will feel how much more pleasant it is to co-operate than to thwart and oppose; and, by judicious measures of this kind, almost any boy may be brought over to your side. another means of securing the personal attachment of boys is to notice them, to take an interest in their pursuits, and the qualities and powers which they value in one another. it is astonishing what an influence is exerted by such little circumstances as stopping at a play-ground a moment to notice with interest, though perhaps without saying a word, speed of running, or exactness of aim, the force with which a ball is struck, or the dexterity with which it is caught or thrown. the teacher must, indeed, in all his intercourse with his pupils, never forget his station, nor allow them to lay aside the respect, without which authority can not be maintained. but he may be, notwithstanding this, on the most intimate and familiar footing with them all. he may take a strong and open interest in all their enjoyments, and thus awaken on their part a personal attachment to himself, which will exert over them a constant and powerful control. ( .) the efforts described under the last head for gaining a personal influence over those who, from their disposition and character, are most in danger of doing wrong, will not be sufficient entirely to prevent transgression. cases of deliberate, intentional wrong will occur, and the question will rise, what is the duty of the teacher in such an emergency? when such cases occur, the course to be taken is, first of all, to come to a distinct understanding on the subject with the guilty individual. think of the case calmly, until you have obtained just and clear ideas of it. endeavor to understand precisely in what the guilt of it consists. notice every palliating circumstance, and take as favorable a view of the thing as you can, while, at the same time, you fix most firmly in your mind the determination to put a stop to it. then go to the individual, and lay the subject before him, for the purpose of understanding distinctly from his own lips what he intends to do. i can, however, as usual, explain more fully what i mean by describing a particular case, substantially true. the teacher of a school observed himself, and learned from several quarters, that a certain boy was in the habit of causing disturbance during time of prayer, at the opening and close of school, by whispering, playing, making gestures to the other boys, and throwing things about from seat to seat. the teacher's first step was to speak of the subject generally before the whole school, not alluding, however, to any particular instance which had come under his notice. these general remarks produced, as he expected, but little effect. he waited for some days, and the difficulty still continued. had the irregularity been very great, it would have been necessary to have taken more immediate measures, but he thought the case admitted of a little delay. in the mean time, he took pains to cultivate the acquaintance of the boy, to discover, and to show that he noticed, what was good in his character and conduct, occasionally to ask some assistance from him, and thus to gain some personal ascendency over him. one day, when every thing had gone smoothly and prosperously, the teacher told the boy, at the close of the school, that he wished to talk with him a little, and asked him to walk home with him. it was not uncommon for the teacher to associate thus with his pupils out of school, and this request, accordingly, attracted no special attention. on the walk the teacher thus accosted the criminal: "do you like frank, open dealing, james?" james hesitated a moment, and then answered, faintly, "yes, sir." "most boys do, and i do, and i supposed that you would prefer being treated in that way. do you?" "yes, sir." "well, i am going to tell you of one of your faults. i have asked you to walk with me, because i supposed it would be more agreeable for you to have me see you privately than to bring it up in school." james said it would be more agreeable. "well, the fault is being disorderly at prayer-time. now, if you like frank and open dealing, and are willing to deal so with me, i should like to talk with you a little about it, but if you are not willing, i will dismiss the subject. i do not wish to talk with you now about it unless you yourself desire it; but if we talk at all, we must both be open, and honest, and sincere. now, should you rather have me talk with you or not?" "yes, sir, i should rather have you talk with me now than in school." the teacher then described his conduct in a mild manner, using the style of simple narration, admitting no harsh epithets, no terms of reproach. the boy was surprised, for he supposed that he had not been noticed. he thought, perhaps, that he should have been punished if he had been observed. the teacher said, in conclusion, "now, james, i do not suppose you have done this from any designed irreverence toward god, or deliberate intention of giving me trouble and pain. you have several times lately assisted me in various ways, and i know, from the cheerful manner with which you comply with my wishes, that your prevailing desire is to give me pleasure, not pain. you have fallen into this practice through thoughtlessness, but that does not alter the character of the sin. to do so is a great sin against god, and a great offense against good order in school. you see, yourself, that my duty to the school will require me to adopt the most decided measures to prevent the continuance and the spread of such a practice. i should be imperiously bound to do it, even if the individual was the very best friend i had in school, and if the measures necessary should bring upon him great disgrace and suffering. do you not think it would be so?" "yes, sir," said james, seriously, "i suppose it would." "i wish to remove the evil, however, in the pleasantest way. do you remember my speaking on this subject in school the other day?" "yes, sir." "well, my object in what i said then was almost entirely to persuade you to reform without having to speak to you directly. i thought it would be pleasanter to you to be reminded of your duty in that way. but i do not think it did you much good. did it?" "i don't think i have played _so much_ since then." "nor i. you have improved a little, but you have not decidedly and thoroughly reformed. so i was obliged to take the next step which would be least unpleasant to you, that is, talking with you alone. now you told me when we began that you would deal honestly and sincerely with me, if i would with you. i have been honest and open. i have told you all about it so far as i am concerned. now i wish you to be honest, and tell me what you are going to do. if you think, from this conversation, that you have done wrong, and if you are fully determined to do so no more, and to break off at once, and forever, from this practice, i should like to have you tell me, and then the whole thing will be settled. on the other hand, if you feel about it pretty much as you have done, i should like to have you tell me that too, honestly and frankly, that we may have a distinct understanding, and that i may be considering what to do next. i shall not be offended with you for giving me either of these answers, but be sure that you are honest; you promised to be so." the boy looked up in his master's face, and said, with great earnestness, "mr t. i _will_ do better. i _will not_ trouble you any more." i have detailed this case thus particularly because it exhibits clearly what i mean by going directly and frankly to the individual, and coming at once to a full understanding. in nine cases out of ten this course will be effectual. for four years, with a very large school, i found this sufficient in every case of discipline which occurred, except in three or four instances, where something more was required. to make it successful, however, the work must be done properly. several things are necessary. it must be deliberate; generally better after a little delay. it must be indulgent, so far as the view which the teacher takes of the guilt of the pupil is concerned; every palliating consideration must be felt. it must be firm and decided in regard to the necessity of a change, and the determination of the teacher to effect it. it must also be open and frank; no insinuations, no hints, no surmises, but plain, honest, open dealing. in many cases the communication may be made most delicately and most successfully in writing. the more delicately you touch the feelings of your pupils, the more tender these feelings will become. many a teacher hardens and stupefies the moral sense of his pupils by the harsh and rough exposures to which he drags out the private feelings of the heart. a man may easily produce such a state of feeling in his schoolroom, that to address even the gentlest reproof to any individual, in the hearing of the next, would be a most severe punishment; and, on the other hand, he may so destroy that sensitiveness that his vociferated reproaches will be as unheeded as the idle wind. if, now, the teacher has taken the course recommended in this chapter--if he has, by his general influence in the school, done all in his power to bring the majority of his pupils to the side of order and discipline--if he has then studied, attentively and impartially, the characters of those who can not thus be led--if he has endeavored to make them his friends, and to acquire, by every means, a personal influence over them--if, finally, when they do wrong, he goes plainly, but in a gentle and delicate manner, to them, and lays before them the whole case--if he has done all this, he has gone as far as moral influence will carry him. my opinion is, that this course, faithfully and judiciously pursued, will, in almost all instances, succeed; but it will not in all; and where it fails, there must be other, and more vigorous and decided measures. what these measures of restraint or punishment shall be must depend upon the circumstances of the case; but in resorting to them, the teacher must be decided and unbending. the course above recommended is not trying lax and inefficient measures for a long time in hopes of their being ultimately successful, and then, when they are found not to be so, changing the policy. there should be, through the whole, the tone and manner of _authority_, not of _persuasion_. the teacher must be a _monarch_, and, while he is gentle and forbearing, always looking on the favorable side of conduct so far as guilt is concerned; he must have an eagle eye and an efficient hand, so far as relates to arresting the evil and stopping the consequences. he may slowly and cautiously, and even tenderly, approach a delinquent. he may be several days in gathering around him the circumstances of which he is ultimately to avail himself in bringing him to submission; but, while he proceeds thus slowly and tenderly, he must come with the air of authority and power. the fact that the teacher bases all his plans on the idea of his ultimate authority in every case may be perfectly evident to all the pupils, while he proceeds with moderation and gentleness in all his specific measures. let it be seen, then, that the constitution of your school is a monarchy, absolute and unlimited; but let it also be seen that the one who holds the power is himself under the control of moral principle in all that he does, and that he endeavors to make the same moral principle which guides him go as far as it is possible to make it go in the government of his subjects. chapter v. religious influence. [illustration] in consequence of the unexampled religious freedom possessed in this country, for which it is happily distinguished above all other countries on the face of the earth, there necessarily results a vast variety of religious sentiment and action. we can not enjoy the blessings without the inconveniences of freedom. where every man is allowed to believe as he pleases, some will, undoubtedly, believe wrong, and others will be divided, by embracing views of a subject which are different, though perhaps equally consistent with truth. hence we have among us every shade and every variety of religious opinion, and, in many cases, contention and strife, resulting from hopeless efforts to produce uniformity. a stranger who should come among us would suppose, from the tone of our religious journals, and from the general aspect of society on the subject of religion, that the whole community was divided into a thousand contending sects, who hold nothing in common, and whose sole objects are the annoyance and destruction of each other. but if we leave out of view some hundreds, or, if you please, some thousands of theological controversialists who manage the public discussions, and say and do all that really comes before the public on this subject, it will be found that there is vastly more religious truth admitted by common consent among the people of new england than is generally supposed. this common ground i shall endeavor briefly to describe; for it is very plain that the teacher must, in ordinary cases, confine himself to it. by common consent, however, i do not mean the consent of every body; i mean that of the great majority of serious, thinking men. but let us examine first, for a moment, what right any member of the community has to express and to disseminate his opinions with a view to the inquiry whether the teacher is really bound to confine himself to what he can do on this subject with the common consent of his employers. the various monarchical nations of europe have been for many years, as is well known, strongly agitated with questions of politics. it is with difficulty that public tranquillity is preserved. every man takes sides. now, in this state of things, a wealthy gentleman residing in one of these countries is opposed to the revolutionary projects so constantly growing up there, and being, both from principle and feeling, strongly attached to monarchical government, wishes to bring up his children with the same feelings which he himself cherishes. he has a right to do so. no matter if his opinions are wrong. he ought, it will be generally supposed in this country, to be republican. i suppose him to adopt opinions which will generally, by my readers, be considered wrong, that i may bring more distinctly to view the right he has to educate his children as _he thinks_ it proper that they should be educated. he may be wrong to _form_ such opinions; but the opinions once formed, he has a right, with which no human power can justly interfere, to educate his children in conformity with those opinions. it is alike the law of god and nature that the father should control, as he alone is responsible, the education of his child. now, under these circumstances, he employs an american mechanic, who is residing in paris, to come to his house and teach his children the use of the lathe. after some time he comes into their little work-shop, and is astonished to find the lathe standing still, and the boys gathered round the republican turner, who is relating to them stories of the tyranny of kings, the happiness of republicans, and the glory of war. the parent remonstrates. the mechanic defends himself. "i am a republican," he says, "upon principle, and wherever i go i must exert all the influence in my power to promote free principles, and to expose the usurpations and the tyranny of kings." to this the monarchist might very properly reply, "in your efforts to promote your principles, you are limited, or you ought to be limited, to modes that are proper and honorable. i employ you for a distinct and specific purpose, which has nothing to do with questions of government, and you ought not to allow your love of republican principles to lead you to take advantage of the position in which i place you, and interfere with my plans for the political education of my children." now for the parallel case. a member of a congregational society is employed to teach a school in a district occupied exclusively by friends--a case not uncommon. he is employed there, not as a religious teacher, but for another specific and well-defined object. it is for the purpose of teaching the children of that district _reading, writing,_ and _calculation_, and for such other purposes analogous to this as the law providing for the establishment of district schools contemplated. now, when he is placed in such a situation, with such a trust confided to him, and such duties to discharge, it is not right for him to make use of the influence which this official station gives him over the minds of the children committed to his care for the accomplishment of _any other purposes whatever_ which the parents would disapprove. it would not be considered right by men of the world to attempt to accomplish any other purposes in such a case; and are the pure and holy principles of piety to be extended by methods more exceptionable than those by which political and party contests are managed? there is a very great and obvious distinction between the general influence which the teacher exerts as a member of the community and that which he can employ in his school-room as teacher. he has unquestionably a right to exert _upon the community, by such means as he shares in common with every other citizen_, as much influence as he can command for the dissemination of his own political, or religious, or scientific opinions. but the strong ascendency which, in consequence of his official station, he has obtained over the minds of his pupils, is sacred. he has no right to use it for any purpose _foreign to the specific objects_ for which he is employed, unless _by the consent, expressed or implied_, of those by whom he is intrusted with his charge. the parents who send their children to him to be taught to read, to write, and to calculate, may have erroneous views of their duty as parents in other respects. he _may know_ that their views are erroneous. they may be taking a, course which the teacher _knows_ is wrong. but he has not, on this account, a right to step in between the parent and child, to guide the latter according to his own opinions, and to violate the wishes and thwart the plans of the former. god has constituted the relation between the parent and the child, and according to any view which a rational man can take of this relation, the parent is alone responsible for the guidance he gives to that mind, so entirely in his power. he is responsible to god; and where our opinions in regard to the manner in which any of the duties arising from the relation are to be performed, differ from his, we have no right to interfere, without his consent, to rectify what we thus imagine to be wrong. i know of but one exception which any man whatever would be inclined to make to this principle, and that is where the parent would, if left to himself, take such a course as would ultimately make his children _unsafe members of society._ the _community_ have a right to interfere in such a case, as they in fact do by requiring every man to provide for the instruction of his children, and in some other ways which need not now be specified. beyond this, however, no interference contrary to the parent's consent is justifiable. where parents will do wrong, notwithstanding any persuasions which we can address to them, we must not violate the principles of an arrangement which god has himself made, but must submit patiently to the awful consequences which will in some cases occur, reflecting that the responsibility for these consequences is on the head of those who neglect their duty, and that the being who makes them liable will settle the account. whatever, then, the teacher attempts to do beyond the _specific_ and _defined_ duties which are included among the objects for which he is employed, must be done _by permission_--by the voluntary consent, whether tacit or openly expressed, of those by whom he is employed. this, of course, confines him to what is generally common ground among his particular employers. in a republican country, where all his patrons are republican, he may, without impropriety, explain and commend to his pupils, as occasion may occur, the principles of free governments, and the blessings which may be expected to flow from them. but it would not be justifiable for him to do this under a monarchy, or in a community divided in regard to this subject, because this question does not come within the objects for the promotion of which his patrons have associated and employed him, and consequently he has no right, while continuing their teacher, to go into it without their consent. in the same manner, an episcopal teacher, in a private school formed and supported by episcopalians, may use and commend forms of prayer, and explain the various usages of that church, exhibiting their excellence, and their adaptation to the purposes for which they are intended. he may properly do this, because, in the case supposed, the patrons of the school are _united_ on this subject, and their _tacit consent_ may be supposed to be given. but place the same teacher over a school of friends, whose parents dislike forms and ceremonies of every kind in religion, and his duty would be changed altogether. so, if a roman catholic is intrusted with the instruction of a common district school in a community composed of many protestant denominations, it would be plainly his duty to avoid all influence, direct or indirect, over the minds of his pupils, except in those religious sentiments and opinions which are common to himself and all his employers. i repeat the principle. _he is employed for a specific purpose, and he has no right to wander from that purpose, except as far as he can go with the common consent of his employers._ now the common ground on religious subjects in this country is very broad. there are, indeed, many principles which are, in my view, essential parts of christianity, which are subjects of active discussion among us. but, setting these aside, there are other principles equally essential, in regard to which the whole community are agreed; or, at least, if there is a dissenting minority, it is so small that it is hardly to be considered. let us look at some of these principles. . our community is agreed that _there is a god._ there is probably not a school in our country where the parents of the scholars would not wish to have the teacher, in his conversation with his pupils, take this for granted, and allude reverently to that great being, with the design of leading them to realize his existence and to feel his authority. . our community are agreed that _we are responsible to god for all our conduct._ though some persons absurdly pretend to believe that the being who formed this world, if, indeed, they think there is any such being, has left it and its inhabitants to themselves, not inspecting their conduct, and never intending to call them to account, they are too few among us to need consideration. a difference of opinion on this subject might embarrass the teacher in france, and in other countries in europe, but not here. however negligent men may be in _obeying_ god's commands, they do almost universally in our country admit in theory the authority from which they come, and believing this, the parent, even if he is aware that he himself does not obey these commands, chooses to have his children taught to respect them. the teacher will thus be acting with the consent of his employers, in almost any part of our country, in endeavoring to influence his pupils to perform moral duties, not merely from worldly motives, nor from mere abstract principles of right and wrong, but _from regard to the authority of god._ . the community are agreed, too, in the belief of _the immortality of the soul._ they believe, almost without exception, that there is a future state of being to which this is introductory and preparatory, and almost every father and mother in our country wish to have their children keep this in mind, and to be influenced by it in all their conduct. . the community are agreed that _we have a revelation from heaven._ i believe there are very few instances where the parents would not be glad to have the bible read from time to time, its geographical and historical meanings illustrated, and its moral lessons brought to bear upon the hearts and lives of their children. of course, if the teacher is so unwise as to make such a privilege, if it were allowed him, the occasion of exerting an influence upon one side or the other of some question which divides the community around him, he must expect to excite jealousy and distrust, and to be excluded from a privilege which he might otherwise have been permitted freely to enjoy. there may, alas! be some cases where the use of the scriptures is altogether forbidden in school; but probably in almost every such case it would be found that it is from fear of its perversion to sect or party purposes, and not from any unwillingness to have the bible used in the way i have described. . the community are agreed, in theory, that _personal attachment to the supreme being is the duty of every human soul;_ and every parent, with exceptions so few that they are not worth naming, wishes that his children should cherish that affection, and yield their hearts to its influence. he is willing, therefore, that the teacher, of course without interfering with the regular duties for the performance of which he holds his office, should, from time to time, so speak of this duty, of god's goodness to men, of his daily protection and his promised favors, as to awaken, if possible, this attachment in the hearts of his children. of course, it is very easy for the teacher, if he is so disposed, to abuse this privilege also. he can, under pretense of awakening and cherishing the spirit of piety in the hearts of his pupils, present the subject in such aspects and relations as to arouse the sectarian or denominational feelings of some of his employers; but i believe, if this was honestly and fully avoided, there are few, if any parents in our country who would not be gratified to have the great principle of love to god manifest itself in the instructions of the school-room, and showing itself, by its genuine indications, in the hearts and conduct of their children. . the community are agreed not only in believing that piety consists primarily in love to god, but that _the life of piety is to be commenced by penitence for past sins, and forgiveness, in some way or other, through a savior._ i am aware that one class of theological writers, in the heat of controversy, charge the other with believing that jesus christ was nothing more nor less than a teacher of religion, and there are unquestionably individuals who take this view. but these individuals are few. there are very few in our community who do not in some sense look upon jesus christ as our _savior_--our redeemer; who do not feel themselves _in some way_ indebted to him for the offer of pardon. there may be here and there a theological student, or a contributor to the columns of a polemical magazine, who ranks jesus christ with moses and with paul. but the great mass of the fathers and mothers, of every name and denomination through all the ranks of society, look up to the savior of sinners with something at least of the feeling that he is the object of extraordinary affection and reverence. i am aware, however, that i am approaching the limit which, in many parts of our country, ought to bound the religious influence of the teacher in a public school, and on this subject, as on every other, he ought to do nothing directly or indirectly which would be displeasing to those who have intrusted children to his care. so much ground, it seems, the teacher may occupy, by common consent, in this country, and it certainly is a great deal. it may be doubted whether, after all our disputes, there is a country in the world whose inhabitants have so much in common in regard to religious belief. there is, perhaps, no country in the world where the teacher may be allowed to do so much toward leading his pupils to fear god and to obey his commands, with the cordial consent of parents, as he can here.[ ] [footnote : in speaking of this common ground, and in commenting upon it, i wish not to be understood that i consider these truths as comprising all that is essential in christianity. very far from it. a full expression of the christian faith would go far in advance of all here presented. we must not confound, however, what is essential to prepare the way for the forgiveness of sin with what is essential that a child should understand in order to secure his penitence and forgiveness. the former is a great deal, the latter very little.] the ground which i have been laying out is common all over our country; in particular places there will be even much more that is common. of course the teacher, in such cases, will be at much greater liberty. if a roman catholic community establish a school, and appoint a roman catholic teacher, he may properly, in his intercourse with his scholars, allude, with commendation, to the opinions and practices of that church. if a college is established by the methodist denomination, the teacher of that institution may, of course, explain and enforce there the views of that society. each teacher is confined only to _those views which are common to the founders and supporters of the particular institution to which he is attached._ i trust the principle which i have been attempting to enforce is fully before the reader's mind, namely, that moral and religious instruction in a school being in a great degree extra-official in its nature, must be carried no farther than the teacher can go with the common consent, either expressed or implied, of those who have founded, and who support his school. of course, if those founders forbid it altogether, they have a right to do so, and the teacher must submit. the only question that can justly arise is whether he will remain in such a situation, or go and seek employment where a door of usefulness, here closed against him, will be opened. while he remains, he must honestly and fully submit to the wishes of those in whose hands providence has placed the ultimate responsibility of training up the children of his school. it is only for a partial and specific purpose that they are placed under his care. the religious reader may inquire why i am so anxious to restrain, rather than to urge on, the exercise of religious influence in schools. "there is far too little," some one will say, "instead of too much, and teachers need to be encouraged and led on in this duty, not to be restrained from it." there is, indeed, far too little religious influence exerted in common schools. what i have said has been intended to prepare the way for an increase of it. my view of it is this: if teachers do universally confine themselves to the limits which i have been attempting to define, they may accomplish within these limits a vast amount of good. by attempting, however, to exceed them, the confidence of parents is destroyed or weakened, and the door is closed. in this way, injury to a very great extent has been done in many parts of our country. parents are led to associate with the very idea of religion, indirect and perhaps secret efforts to influence their children in a way which they themselves would disapprove. they transfer to the cause of piety itself the dislike which was first awakened by exceptionable means to promote it; and other teachers, seeing these evil effects, are deterred from attempting what they might easily have accomplished. before, therefore, attempting to enforce the duty and to explain the methods of exerting religious influence in school, i thought proper distinctly to state with what restrictions and within what limits the work is to be done. there are many teachers who profess to cherish the spirit and to entertain the hopes of piety, who yet make no effort whatever to extend its influence to the hearts of their pupils. others appeal sometimes to religious truth merely to assist them in the government of the school. they perhaps bring it before the minds of disobedient pupils in a vain effort to make an impression upon the conscience of one who has done wrong, and who can not by other means be brought to submission. but the pupil in such cases understands, or at least he believes, that the teacher applies to religious truth only to eke out his own authority, and of course it produces no effect. another teacher thinks he must, to discharge his duty, give a certain amount, weekly, of what he considers religious instruction. pie accordingly appropriates a regular portion of time to a formal lecture or exhortation, which he delivers without regard to the mental habits of thought and feeling which prevail among his charge. he forgets that the heart must be led, not driven to piety, and that unless his efforts are adapted to the nature of the minds he is acting upon, and suited to influence them, he must as certainly fail of success as when there is a want of adaptedness between the means and the end in any other undertaking whatever. the arrangement which seems to me as well calculated as any for the religious exercises of a school is this: . in the morning, open the school with a very short prayer, resembling in its object and length the opening prayer in the morning at congregational churches. the posture which, from some considerable experience, i would recommend at this exercise, is sitting with the head reclined upon the desk. the prayer, besides being short, should be simple in its language and specific in its petitions. a degree of particularity and familiarity which would be improper elsewhere is not only allowable here, but necessary to the production of the proper effect. that the reader may understand to what extent i mean to be understood to recommend this, i will subjoin a form, such as in spirit i suppose such a prayer ought to be. "our father in heaven, who hast kindly preserved the pupils and the teacher of this school during the past night, come and grant us a continuance of thy protection and blessing during this day. we can not spend the day prosperously and happily without thee. come, then, and, be in this school-room during this day, and help us all to be faithful and successful in duty. "guide the teacher in all that he may do. give him wisdom, and patience, and faithfulness. may he treat all his pupils with kindness; and if any of them should do any thing that is wrong, wilt thou help him, gently but firmly, to endeavor to bring him back to duty. may he sympathize with the difficulties and trials of all, and promote the present happiness as well as the intellectual progress of all who are committed to his care. "take care of the pupils too. may they spend the day pleasantly and happily together. wilt thou, who didst originally give us all our powers, direct and assist us all, this day, in the use and improvement of them. remove difficulties from our path, and give us all fidelity and patience in every duty. let no one of us destroy our peace and happiness this day by breaking any of thy commands, or encouraging our companions in sins, or neglecting, in any respect, our duty. we ask all in the name of our great redeemer. amen." of course the prayer of each day will be varied, unless in special cases the teacher prefers to read some form like the above. but let every one be _minute and particular,_ relating especially to school--to school temptations, and trials, and difficulties. let every one be filled with expressions relating to school, so that it will bear upon every sentence the impression that it is the petition of a teacher and his pupils at the throne of grace. . if the pupils can sing, there may be a single verse, or sometimes two verses, of some well-known hymn sung after the prayer at the opening of the school. teachers will find it much easier to introduce this practice than it would at first be supposed. in almost every school there are enough who can sing to begin, especially if the first experiment is made in a recess, or before or after school; and the beginning once made, the difficulty is over. if but few tunes are sung, a very large proportion of the scholars will soon learn them. . let there be no other regular exercise until the close of the afternoon school. when that hour has arrived, let the teacher devote a very short period, five minutes perhaps, to religious _instruction_, given in various ways. at one time he may explain and illustrate some important truth. at another, read and comment upon a very short portion of scripture. at another, relate an anecdote or fact which will tend to interest the scholars in the performance of duty. the teacher should be very careful not to imitate on these occasions the formal style of exhortation from the pulpit. let him use no cant and hackneyed phrases, and never approach the subject of personal piety, or speak of such feelings as penitence for sin, trust in god, and love for the savior, unless his own heart is really at the time warmed by the emotions which he wishes to awaken in others. children very easily detect hypocrisy. they know very well when a parent or teacher is talking to them on religious subjects merely as a matter of course for the sake of effect, and such constrained and formal efforts never do any good. let, then, every thing which you do in reference to this subject be done with proper regard to the character and condition of the youthful mind, and in such a way as shall be calculated to _interest_ as well as to _instruct_. a cold and formal exhortation, or even an apparently earnest one, delivered in a tone of affected solemnity, will produce no good effect. perhaps i ought not to say it will produce _no_ good effect, for good does sometimes result as a sort of accidental consequence from almost any thing. i mean it will have no effectual _tendency_ to do good. you must vary your method, too, in order to interest your pupils. watch their countenances when you are addressing them, and see if they look interested. if they do not, be assured that there is something wrong, or at least something ill-judged or inefficient in your manner of explaining the truths which you wish to have produce an effect upon their minds. that you may be prepared to bring moral and religious truths before their minds in the way i have described, your own mind must take a strong interest in this class of truths. you must habituate yourself to look at the moral and religious aspects and relations of all that you see and hear. when you are reading, notice such facts and remember such narratives as you can turn to good account in this way. in the same way, treasure up in your mind such occurrences as may come under your own personal observation when traveling, or when mixing with society. that the spirit and manner of these religious exercises may be the more distinctly understood, i will give some examples. let us suppose, then, that the hour for closing school has come. the books are laid aside; the room is still; the boys expect the few words which the teacher is accustomed to address to them, and, looking up to him, they listen to hear what he has to say. "you may take your bibles." the boys, by a simultaneous movement, open their desks, and take from them their copies of the sacred volume. "what is the first book of the new testament?" "matthew," they all answer at once. "the second?" "mark." "the third?" "luke." "the next?" "john." "the next?" "the acts." "the next?" many answer, "romans." "the next?" a few voices say faintly, and with hesitation, "first of corinthians." "i perceive your answers become fainter and fainter. do you know what is the last book of the new testament?" the boys answer promptly, "revelations." "do you know what books are between the acts and the book of revelation?" some say "no, sir;" some begin to enumerate such books as occur to them, and some, perhaps, begin to name them promptly and in their regular order. "i do not mean," interrupts the teacher, "the _names_ of the books, but the _kinds_ of books." the boys hesitate. "they are epistles or letters. do you know who wrote the letters?" "paul," "peter," answer many voices at once. "yes, there were several writers. now the point which i wish to bring before you is this; do you know in what order, i mean on what principles, the books are arranged?" "no, sir," is the universal reply. i will tell you. first come all paul's epistles. if you turn over the leaves of the testament, you will see that paul's letters are all put together after the book of the acts; and what i wish you to notice is, that they are arranged in the _order_ of _their length_. the longest comes first, and then the next, and so on to the shortest, which is the epistle to philemon. this, of course, comes last--no, i am wrong in saying it is the last of paul's epistles; there is one more to the hebrews; and this comes after all the others, for there has been a good deal of dispute whether it was really written by paul. you will see that his name is not at the beginning of it, as it is in his other epistles: so it was put last. then comes the epistle of james. will you see whether it is longer than any that come after it? the boys, after a minute's examination, answer, "yes, sir;" "yes, sir." "what comes next?" "the epistles of peter." "yes; and you will see that the longest of peter's epistles is next in length to that of james's; and, indeed, all his are arranged in the order of their length." "yes, sir." "what comes next?" "john's." "yes; and they are arranged in the order of their length. do you now understand the principle of the arrangement of the epistles?" "yes, sir." "i should like to have any of you who are interested in it to try to express this principle in a few sentences, on paper, and lay it on my desk to-morrow, and i will read what you write. you will find it very difficult to express it. now you may lay aside your books. it will be pleasanter for you if you do it silently." intelligent children will be interested even in so simple a point as this--much more interested than a maturer mind, unacquainted with the peculiarities of children, would suppose. by bringing up from time to time some such literary inquiry as this, they will be led insensibly to regard the bible as opening a field for interesting intellectual research, and will more easily be led to study it. at another time the teacher spends his five minutes in aiming to accomplish a very different object. i will suppose it to be one of those afternoons when all has gone smoothly and pleasantly in school. there has been nothing to excite strong interest or emotion; and there has been (as every teacher knows there sometimes will be), without any assignable cause which he can perceive, a calm, and quiet, and happy spirit diffused over the minds and countenances of the little assembly. his evening communication should accord with this feeling, and he should make it the occasion to promote those pure and hallowed emotions in which every immortal mind must find its happiness, if it is to enjoy any worth possessing. when all is still, the teacher addresses his pupils as follows: "i have nothing but a simple story to tell you to-night. it is true, and the fact interested me very much when i witnessed it, but i do not know that it will interest you now merely to hear it repeated. it is this: "last vacation, i was traveling in a remote and thinly-settled country, among the mountains, in another state. i was riding with a gentleman on an almost unfrequented road. forests were all around us, and the houses were small and very few. "at length, as we were passing an humble and solitary dwelling, the gentleman said to me, 'there is a young woman sick in this house; should you like to go in and see her?' 'yes, sir,' said i, 'very much. she can have very few visitors, i think, in this lonely place, and if you think she would like to see us, i should like to go.' "we turned our horses toward the door, and as we were riding up, i asked what was the matter with the young woman. "'consumption,' the gentleman replied; 'and i suppose she will not live long.' "at that moment we dismounted and entered the house. it was a very pleasant summer afternoon, and the door was open. we entered, and were received by an elderly lady, who seemed glad to see us. in one corner of the room was a bed, on which was lying the patient whom we had come to visit. she was pale and thin in her countenance, but there was a very calm and happy expression beaming in her eye. i went up to her bedside, and asked her how she did. "i talked with her some time, and found that she was a christian. she did not seem to know whether she would get well again or not, and, in fact, she did not appear to care much about it. she was evidently happy then, and she believed that she should continue so. she had been penitent for her sins, and had sought and obtained forgiveness, and enjoyed, in her loneliness, not only the protection of god, but also his presence in her heart, diffusing peace and happiness there. when i came into the house, i said to myself, 'i pity, i am sure, a person who is confined by sickness in this lonely place, with nothing to interest or amuse her;' but when i came out, i said to myself, 'i do not pity her at all.'" never destroy the effect of such a communication as this by attempting to follow it up with an exhortation, or with general remarks, vainly attempting to strengthen the impression. _never_, do i say? perhaps there may be some exceptions. but children are not reached by formal exhortations; their hearts are touched and affected in other ways. sometimes you must reprove, sometimes you must condemn; but indiscriminate and perpetual harangues about the guilt of impenitence, and earnest entreaties to begin a life of piety, only harden the hearts they are intended to soften, and consequently confirm those who hear them in the habits of sin. in the same way a multitude of other subjects, infinite in number and variety, may be brought before your pupils at stated seasons for religious instruction. it is unnecessary to give any more particular examples, but still it may not be amiss to suggest a few general principles, which ought to guide those who are addressing the young on every subject, and especially on the subject of religion. . _make no effort to simplify language when addressing the young._ children always observe this, and are always displeased with it, unless they are very young; and it is not necessary. they can understand ordinary language well enough, if the _subject_ is within their comprehension, and treated in a manner adapted to their powers. if you doubt whether children can understand language, tell such a story as this, with ardor of tone and proper gesticulation, to a child only two or three years old: "i saw an enormous dog in the street the other day. he was sauntering along slowly, until he saw a huge piece of meat lying down on the ground. he grasped it instantly between his teeth, and ran away with all speed, until he disappeared around a corner so that i could see him no more." in such a description there is a large number of words which such a child would not understand if they stood alone, but the whole description would be perfectly intelligible. the reason is, the _subject_ is simple; the facts are such as a very little child would be interested in; and the connection of each new word, in almost every instance, explains its meaning. that is the way by which children learn all language. they learn the meaning of words, not by definitions, but by their connection in the sentences in which they hear them; and, by long practice, they acquire an astonishing facility of doing this. it is true they sometimes mistake, but not often, and the teacher of children of almost any age need not be afraid that he shall not be understood. there is no danger from his using the _language_ of men, if his subject, and the manner in which he treats it, and the form and structure of his sentences, are what they ought to be. of course there may be cases, in fact there often will be cases, where particular words will require special explanation, but they will be comparatively few, and instead of making efforts to avoid them, it will be better to let them come. the pupils will be interested and profited by the explanation. perhaps some may ask what harm it will do to simplify language when talking to children. "it certainly can do no injury," they may say, "and it diminishes all possibility of being misunderstood." it does injury in at least three ways: ( .) it disgusts the young persons to whom it is addressed, and prevents their being interested in what is said. i once met two children, twelve years of age, who had just returned from hearing a very able discourse, delivered before a number of sabbath-schools assembled on some public occasion. "how did you like the discourse?" said i. "very well indeed," they replied; "only," said one of them, smiling, "he talked to us as if we were all little children." girls and boys, however young, never consider themselves little children, for they can always look down upon some younger than themselves. they are mortified when treated as though they could not understand what is really within the reach of their faculties. they do not like to have their powers underrated, and they are right in this feeling. it is common to all, old and young. ( .) children are kept back in learning language if their teacher makes effort to _come down,_ as it is called, to their comprehension in the use of words. notice that i say _in the use of words;_ for, as i shall show presently, it is absolutely necessary to come down to the comprehension of children in some other respects. if, however, in the use of words, those who address children confine themselves to such words as children already understand, how are they to make progress in that most important of all studies, the knowledge of language? many a mother keeps back her child, in this way, to a degree that is hardly conceivable, thus doing all in her power to perpetuate in the child an ignorance of its mother tongue. teachers ought to make constant efforts to increase their scholars' stock of words by using new ones from time to time, taking care to explain them when the connection does not do it for them; so that, instead of _coming down_ to the language of childhood, they ought rather to go as far away from it as they can, without leaving their pupils behind them. ( .) but perhaps the greatest evil of this practice is, it satisfies the teacher. he thinks he addresses his pupils in the right manner, and overlooks altogether the real peculiarities in which the power to interest the young depends. he talks to them in simple language, and wonders why they are not interested. he certainly is _plain_ enough. he is vexed with them for not attending to what he says, attributing it to their dullness or regardlessness of all that is useful or good, instead of perceiving that the great difficulty is his own want of skill. these three evils are sufficient to deter the teacher from the practice. . present your subject, not in its _general views_, but in its _minute details_. this is the great secret of interesting the young. present it in its details and in its practical exemplifications; do this with any subject whatever, and children will always be interested. to illustrate this, let us suppose two teachers wishing to explain to their pupils the same subject, and taking the following opposite methods of doing it. one, at the close of school, addresses his charge as follows: "the moral character of any action, that is, whether it is right or wrong, depends upon the _motives_ with which it is performed. men look only at the outward conduct, but god looks at the heart. in order, now, that any action should be pleasing to god, it is necessary it should be performed from the motive of a desire to please him. "now there are a great many other motives of action which prevail among mankind besides this right one. there is love of praise, love of money, affection for friends, and many others." by the time the teacher has proceeded thus far, he finds, as he looks around the room, that the countenances of his pupils are assuming a listless and inattentive air. one is restless in his seat, evidently paying no attention. another has reclined his head upon his desk, lost in a reverie, and others are looking round the room at one another, or at the door, restless and impatient, hoping that the dull lecture will soon be over. the other teacher says: "i have thought of an experiment i might try, which would illustrate to you a very important subject. suppose i should call one of the boys, a, to me, and should say to him, 'i wish you to go to your seat, and transcribe a piece of poetry as handsomely as you can. if it is written as well as you can possibly write it, i will give you a quarter of a dollar. suppose i say this to him privately, so that none of the rest of the boys can hear, and he goes to take his seat and begins to work. you perceive that i have presented to him a motive to exertion." "yes, sir," say the boys, all looking with interest at the teacher, wondering how this experiment is going to end. "well, what would that motive be?" "money." "the quarter of a dollar." "love of money," or perhaps other answers, are heard from the various parts of the room. "yes, love of money it is called. now suppose i should call another boy, one with whom i was particularly acquainted, and who i should know would make an effort to please me, and should say to him, 'for a particular reason, i want you to copy this poetry'--giving him the same--'i wish you to copy it handsomely, for i wish to send it away, and have not time to copy it myself. can you do it for me?' "suppose the boy should say he could, and should take it to his seat and begin, neither of the boys knowing what the other was doing. i should now have offered to this second boy a motive. would it be the same with the other?" "no, sir." "what was the other?" "love of money." "what is this?" the boys hesitate. "it might be called," continues the teacher, "friendship. it is the motive of a vast number of the actions which are performed in this world. "do you think of any other common motive of action besides love of money and friendship?" "love of honor," says one; "fear," says another. "yes," continues the teacher, "both these are common motives. i might, to exhibit them, call two more boys, one after the other, and say to the one, 'i will thank you to go and copy this piece of poetry as well as you can. i want to send it to the school committee as a specimen of improvement made in this school.' "to the other i might say, 'you have been a careless boy to-day; you have not got your lessons well. now take your seat and copy this poetry. do it carefully. unless you take pains, and do it as well as you possibly can, i shall punish you severely before you go home.' "how many motives have i got now? four, i believe." "yes, sir," say the boys. "love of money, friendship, love of honor, and fear. we called the first boy a; let us call the others b, c, and d; no, we shall remember better to call them by the name of their motives. we will call the first m, for money; the second, f, for friendship; the third, h, for honor; and the last, f--we have got an f already; what shall we do? on the whole, it is of no consequence; we will have two f's, but we will take care not to confound them. "but there are a great many other motives entirely distinct from these. for example, suppose i should say to a fifth boy, 'will you copy this piece of poetry? it belongs to one of the little boys in school: he wants a copy of it, and i told him i would try to get some one to copy it for him.' this motive, now, would be benevolence; that is, if the boy who was asked to copy it was not particularly acquainted with the other, and did it chiefly to oblige him. we will call this boy b, for benevolence. "now suppose i call a sixth boy, and say to him, 'i have set four or five boys to work copying this piece of poetry; now i wish you to sit down, and see if you can not do it better than any of them. after all are done, i will compare them, and see if yours is not the best.' this would be trying to excite emulation. we must call this boy, then, e. but the time i intended to devote to talking with you on this subject for to-day is expired. perhaps to-morrow i will take up the subject again." the reader now will observe that the grand peculiarity of the instructions given by this last teacher, as distinguished from those of the first, consists in this, that the parts of the subject are presented _in detail_, and _in particular exemplification._ in the first case, the whole subject was dispatched in a single, general, and comprehensive description; in the latter, it is examined minutely, one point being brought forward at a time. the discussions are enlivened, too, by meeting and removing such little difficulties as will naturally come up in such an investigation. boys and girls will take an interest in such a lecture; they will regret to have it come to a conclusion, and will give their attention when the subject is again brought forward on the following day. let us suppose the time for continuing the exercise to have arrived. the teacher resumes the discussion thus: "i was talking to you yesterday about the motives of action. how many had i made?" some say "four," some "five," some "six." "can you name any of them?" the boys attempt to recollect them, and they give the names in the order in which they accidentally occur to the various individuals. of course the words fear, emulation, honor, friendship, and others, come in confused and irregular sounds from every part of the school-room. "you do not recollect the order," says the teacher, "and it is of no consequence, for the order i named was only accidental. now to go on with my account: suppose all these boys to sit down and go to writing, each one acting under the impulse of the motive which had been presented to him individually. but, in order to make the supposition answer my purpose, i must add two other cases. i will imagine that one of these boys is called away a few minutes, and leaves his paper on his desk, and that another boy, of an ill-natured and morose disposition, happening to pass by and see his paper, thinks he will sit down and write upon it a few lines, just to tease and vex the one who was called away. we will also suppose that i call another boy to me, who i have reason to believe is a sincere christian, and say to him, 'here is a new duty for you to perform this afternoon. this piece of poetry is to be copied; now do it carefully and faithfully. you know that this morning you committed yourself to god's care during the day; now remember that he has been watching you all the time thus far, and that he will be noticing you all the time you are doing this; he will be pleased if you do your duty faithfully.' "the boys thus all go to writing. now suppose a stranger should come in, and, seeing them all busy, should say to me, "'what are all these boys doing?' "'they are writing.' "'what are they writing?' "'they are writing a piece of poetry.' "'they seem to be very busy; they are very industrious, good boys.' "'oh no! it is not by any means certain that they are _good_ boys.' "'i mean that they are good boys _now_; that they are doing right at _this time_." '_that_ is not certain; some of them are doing right and some are doing very wrong, though they are all writing the same piece of poetry.' the stranger would perhaps look surprised while i said this, and would ask an explanation, and i might properly reply as follows: 'whether the boys are at this moment doing right or wrong depends not so much upon what they are doing as upon the feelings of the heart with which they are doing it. i acknowledge that they are all doing the same thing outwardly; they are all writing the same extract, and they are all doing it attentively and carefully, but they are thinking of very different things.' 'what are they thinking of?' 'do you see that boy?' i might say, pointing to one of them. 'his name is m. he is writing for money. he is saying to himself all the time, "i hope i shall get the quarter of a dollar." he is calculating what he shall buy with it, and every good or bad letter that he makes, he is considering the chance whether he shall succeed or fail in obtaining it.' 'what is the next boy to him thinking of?' 'his name is b. he is copying to oblige a little fellow whom he scarcely knows, and is trying to make his copy handsome, so as to give him pleasure. he is thinking how gratified his schoolmate will be when he receives it, and is forming plans to get acquainted with him. "'do you see that boy in the back seat? he has maliciously taken another boy's place just to spoil his work. he knows, too, that he is breaking the rules of the school in being out of his place, but he stays notwithstanding, and is delighting himself with thinking how disappointed and sad his schoolmate will be when he comes in and finds his work spoiled by having another handwriting in it, when he was depending on doing it all himself.' "'i see,' the stranger might say by this time, 'that there is a great difference among these boys; have you told me about them all?' "'no,' i might reply, 'there are several others. i will only mention one more. he sits in the middle of the second desk. he is writing carefully, simply because he wishes to do his duty and please god. he thinks that god is present, and loves him, and takes care of him, and he is obedient and grateful in return. i do not mean that he is all the time thinking of god, but love to him is his motive of effort.' "do you see now, boys, what i mean to teach you by this long supposition?" "yes, sir." "i presume you do. perhaps it would be difficult for you to express it in words; i can express it in general terms thus: "_our characters depend, not on what we do, but on the spirit and motive with which we do it._ what i have been saying throws light upon one important verse in the bible, which i should like to have read. james, have you a bible in your desk?" "yes, sir." "will you turn to samuel, xvi., , and then rise and read it? read it loud, so that all the school can hear." james read as follows: "man looketh on the outward appearance, but god looketh on the heart." this is the way to reach the intellect and the heart of the young. go _into detail._ explain truth and duty, not in an abstract form, but exhibit it _in actual and living examples._ ( .) be very cautious how you bring in the awful sanctions of religion to assist you directly in the discipline of your school. you will derive a most powerful indirect assistance from the influence of religion in the little community which you govern, but this will be through the prevalence of its spirit in the hearts of your pupils, and not from any assistance which you can usually derive from it in managing particular cases of transgression. many teachers make great mistakes in this respect. a bad boy, who has done something openly and directly subversive of the good order of the school, or the rights of his companions, is called before the master, who thinks that the most powerful weapon to wield against him is the bible. so, while the trembling culprit stands before him, he administers to him a reproof, which consists of an almost ludicrous mixture of scolding, entreaty, religious instruction, and threatening of punishment. but such an occasion as this is no time to touch a bad boy's heart. he is steeled at such a moment against any thing but mortification and the desire to get out of the hands of the master, and he has an impression that the teacher appeals to religious principles only to assist him to sustain his own authority. of course, religious truth, at such a time, can make no good impression. there may be exceptions to this rule. there doubtless are. i have found some; and every successful teacher who reads this will probably call to mind some which have occurred in the course of his own experience. i am only speaking of what ought to be the general rule, which is to reserve religious truths for moments of a different character altogether. bring the principles of the bible forward when the mind is calm, when the emotions are quieted, and all within is at rest; and in exhibiting them, be actuated, not by a desire to make your duties of government easier, but to promote the real and permanent happiness of your charge. ( .) do not be eager to draw from your pupils an expression of their personal interest in religious truth. lay before them, and enforce, by all the means in your power, the principles of christian duty, but do not converse with them for the purpose of gratifying your curiosity in regard to their piety, or your spiritual pride by counting up the numbers of those who have been led to piety by your influence. beginning to act from christian principle is the beginning of a new life, and it may be an interesting subject of inquiry to you to ascertain how many of your pupils have experienced the change; but, in many cases, it would merely gratify curiosity to know. there is no question, too, that, in very many instances, the faint glimmering of religious interest, which would have kindled into a bright flame, is extinguished at once, and perhaps forever, by the rough inquiries of a religious friend. besides, if you make inquiries, and form a definite opinion of your pupils, they will know that this is your practice, and many a one will repose in the belief that you consider him or her a christian, and you will thus increase the number, already unfortunately too large, of those who maintain the form and pretenses of piety without its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. they trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. the best way--in fact, the only way--to guard against this danger, especially with the young, is to show, by your manner of speaking and acting on this subject at all times, that you regard a truly religious life as the only evidence of piety, and that, consequently, however much interest your pupils may apparently take in religious instruction, they can not know, and you can not know, whether christian principle reigns within them in any other way than by following them through life, and observing how, and with what spirit, the various duties which devolve upon them are performed. there are very many fallacious indications of piety, so fallacious and so plausible that there are very few, even among intelligent christians, who are not often greatly deceived. "by their fruits ye shall know them," said the savior; a direction sufficiently plain, one would think, and pointing to a test sufficiently easy to be applied. but it is slow and tedious work to wait for fruits, and we accordingly seek a criterion which will help us quicker to a result. you see your pupil serious and thoughtful. it is well; but it is not proof of piety. you see him deeply interested when you speak of his obligations to his maker, and the duties he owes to him. this is well, but it is no proof of piety. you know he reads his bible daily, and offers his morning and evening prayers. when you speak to him of god's goodness, and of his past ingratitude, his bosom heaves with emotion, and the tear stands in his eye. it is all well. you may hope that he is going to devote his life to the service of god; but you can not know, you can not even believe with any great confidence. these appearances are not piety. they are not conclusive evidences of it. they are only, in the young, faint grounds of hope that the genuine fruits of piety will appear. i am aware that there are many persons so habituated to judging with confidence of the piety of others from some such indications as i have described, that they will think i carry my cautions to the extreme. perhaps i do; but the savior said, "by their fruits ye shall know them," and it is safest to follow his direction. by the word "fruits," however, our savior unquestionably does not mean the mere moral virtues of this life. the fruits to be looked at are the fruits of _piety_, that is, indications of permanent attachment to the creator, and a desire to obey his commands. we must look for these. there is no objection to your giving particular individuals special instruction adapted to their wants and circumstances. you may do this by writing or in other ways, but do not lead them to make up their minds fully that they are christians in such a sense as to induce them to feel that the work is done. let them understand that becoming a christian is _beginning_ a work, not _finishing_ it. be cautious how you form an opinion even yourself on the question of the genuineness of their piety. be content not to know. you will be more faithful and watchful if you consider it uncertain, and they will be more faithful and watchful too. ( .) bring very fully and frequently before your pupils the practical duties of religion in all their details, especially their duties at home, to their parents, and to their brothers and sisters. do not, however, allow them to mistake morality for religion. show them clearly what piety is in its essence, and this you can do most successfully by exhibiting its effects. ( .) finally, let me insert as the keystone of all that i have been saying in this chapter, be sincere, and ardent, and consistent in your own piety. the whole structure which i have been attempting to build will tumble into ruins without this. be constantly watchful and careful, not only to maintain intimate communion with god, and to renew it daily in your seasons of retirement, but to guard your conduct. let piety control and regulate it. show your pupils that it makes you amiable, patient, forbearing, benevolent in little things as well as in great things, and your example will co-operate with your instructions, and allure your pupils to walk in the paths which you tread. but no clearness and faithfulness in religious teaching will atone for the injury which a bad example will effect. conduct speaks louder than words, and no persons are more shrewd than the young to discover the hollowness of empty professions, and the heartlessness of mere pretended interest in their good. i am aware that this book may fall into the hands of some who may take little interest in the subject of this chapter. to such i may perhaps owe an apology for having thus fully discussed a topic in which only a part of my readers can be supposed to be interested. my apology is this: it is obvious and unquestionable that we all owe allegiance to the supreme. it is so obvious and unquestionable as to be entirely beyond the necessity of proof, for it is plain that nothing but such a bond of union can keep the peace among the millions of distinct intelligences with which the creation is filled. it is therefore the plain duty of every man to establish that connection himself and his maker which the bible requires, and to do what he can to bring others to the peace and happiness of piety. these truths are so plain that they admit of no discussion and no denial, and it seems to me highly unsafe for any man to neglect or to postpone the performance of the duty which arises from them. a still greater hazard is incurred when such a man, having forty or fifty fellow-beings almost entirely under his influence, leads them, by his example, away from their maker, and so far that he must, in many cases, hopelessly confirm the separation. with these views, i could not, when writing on the duties of a teacher of the young, refrain from bringing distinctly to view this which has so imperious a claim. chapter vi. the mount vernon school. perhaps there is no way by which teachers can, in a given time, do more to acquire a knowledge of their art, and an interest in it, than by visiting each others' schools. it is not always the case that any thing is observed by the visitor which he can directly and wholly introduce into his own school, but what he sees suggests to him modifications or changes, and it gives him, at any rate, renewed strength and resolution in his work to see how similar objects are accomplished, or similar difficulties removed by others. i have often thought that there ought, on this account, to be far greater freedom and frequency in the inter-change of visits than there is. next, however, to a visit to a school, comes the reading of a vivid description of it. i do not mean a cold, theoretical exposition of the general principles of its management and instruction, for these are essentially the same in all good schools. i mean a minute account of the plans and arrangements by which these general principles are applied. suppose twenty of the most successful teachers in new england would write such a description, each of his own school, how valuable would be the volume which should contain them! with these views, i have concluded to devote one chapter to the description of a school which was for several years under my care.[ ] the account was originally prepared and _printed_, but not published, for the purpose of distribution among the scholars, simply because this seemed to be the easiest and surest method of making them, on their admission to the school, acquainted with its arrangements and plans. it is addressed, therefore, throughout to a pupil, and i preserve its original form, as, by its being addressed to pupils, and intended to influence them, it is an example of the mode of address and the kind of influence recommended in this work. it was chiefly designed for new scholars; a copy of it was presented to each on the day of her admission to the school, and it was made her first duty to read it attentively. [footnote : the author was still connected with this school at the time when this work was written.] the system which it describes is one which gradually grew up in the institution under the writer's care. the school was commenced with a small number of pupils, and without any system or plan whatever, and the one here described was formed insensibly and by slow degrees, through the influence of various and accidental circumstances. i have no idea that it is superior to the plans of government and instruction adopted in many other schools. it is true that there must necessarily be _some_ system in every large institution; but various instructors will fall upon different principles of organization, which will naturally be such as are adapted to the habits of thought and manner of instruction of their respective authors, and consequently each will be best for its own place. while, therefore, some system--some methodical arrangement is necessary in all schools, it is not necessary that it should be the same in all. it is not even desirable that it should be. i consider this plan as only one among a multitude of others, each of which will be successful, not by the power of its intrinsic qualities, but just in proportion to the ability and faithfulness with which it is carried into effect. there may be features of this plan which teachers who may read it may be inclined to adopt. in other cases, suggestions may occur to the mind of the reader, which may modify in some degree his present plans. others may merely be interested in seeing how others effect what they, by other methods, are equally successful in effecting. it is in these and similar ways that i have often myself been highly benefited in visiting schools and, in reading descriptions of them, and it is for such purposes that i insert the account here. to a new scholar on her admission to the mount vernon school. as a large school is necessarily somewhat complicated in its plan, and as new scholars usually find that it requires some time and gives them no little trouble to understand the arrangements they find in operation here, i have concluded to write a brief description of these arrangements, by help of which you will, i hope, the sooner feel at home in your new place of duty. that i may be more distinct and specific, i shall class what i have to say under separate heads. i. your personal duty. your first anxiety as you come into the school-room, and take your seat among the busy multitude, if you are conscientiously desirous of doing your duty, will be, lest, ignorant as you are of the whole plan and of all the regulations of the institution, you should inadvertently do what will be considered wrong. i wish first, then, to put you at rest on this score. there is but one rule of this school. that you can easily keep. you will observe on one side of my desk a clock upon the wall, and not far from it a piece of apparatus that is probably new to you. it is a metallic plate, upon which are marked, in gilded letters, the words "_study hours."_ this is upright, but it is so attached by its lower edge to its support by means of a hinge that it can fall over from above, and thus be in a _horizontal_ position; or it will rest in an _inclined_ position--_half down,_ as it is called. it is drawn up and let down by a cord passing over a pulley. when it passes either way, its upper part touches a bell, which gives all in the room notice of its motion. now when this "_study card"_ [ ] as the scholars call it, is _up_, so that the words "study hours" are presented to the view of the school, it is the signal for silence and study. there is then to be no communication and no leaving of seats except at the direction of teachers. when it is _half down,_ each scholar may leave her seat and whisper, but she must do nothing which will disturb others. when it is _down_, all the duties of school are suspended, and scholars are left entirely to their liberty. [footnote : this apparatus has been previously described. see p. .] as this is the only rule of the school, it deserves a little more full explanation; for not only your progress in study, but your influence in promoting the welfare of the school, and, consequently, your peace and happiness while you are a member of it, will depend upon the strictness with which you observe it. whenever, then, the study card goes up, and you hear the sound of its little bell, immediately and instantaneously stop, whatever you are saying. if you are away from your seat, go directly to it and there remain, and forget in your own silent and solitary studies, so far as you can, all that are around you. you will remember that all _communication_ is forbidden. whispering, making signs, writing upon paper or a slate, bowing to any one, and, in fact, _every_ possible way by which one person may have any sort of mental intercourse with another, is wrong. a large number of the scholars take a pride and pleasure in carrying this rule into as perfect an observance as possible. they say that as this is the only rule with which i trouble them, they ought certainly to observe this faithfully. i myself, however, put it upon other ground. i am satisfied that it is better and pleasanter for you to observe it most rigidly, if it is attempted to be enforced at all. you will ask, "can not we obtain permission of you or of the teachers to leave our seats or to whisper if it is necessary?" the answer is "no." you must never ask permission of me or of the teachers. you can leave seats or speak at the _direction_ of the teachers, that is, when they of their own accord ask you to do it, but you are never to ask their permission. if you should, and if any teachers should give you permission, it would be of no avail. i have never given them authority to grant any permissions of the kind. you will then say, "are we never, on any occasion whatever, to leave our seats in study hours?" yes, you are. there are two ways: . _at the direction of teachers._--going to and from recitations is considered as at the _direction_ of teachers. so, if a person is requested by a teacher to transact any business, or is elected to a public office, or appointed upon a committee, leaving seats or speaking, so far as is really necessary for the accomplishing such a purpose, is considered as at the direction of teachers, and is consequently right. in the same manner, if a teacher should ask you individually, or give general notice to the members of a class, to come to her seat for private instruction, or to go to any part of the school-room for her, it would be right to do it. the distinction, you observe, is this: the teacher may, _of her own accord,_ direct any leaving of seats which she may think necessary to accomplish the objects of the school. she must not, however, _at the request of an individual,_ for the sake of her mere private convenience, give her permission to speak or to leave her seat. if, for example, a teacher should say to you in your class, "as soon as you have performed a certain work you may bring it to me," you would, in bringing it, be acting under her _direction_, and would consequently do right. if, however, you should want a pencil, and should ask her to give you leave to borrow it, even if she should give you leave you would do wrong to go, for you would not be acting at her _direction,_ but simply by her _consent_, and she has no authority to grant consent. . the second case in which you may leave your seat is when some very uncommon occurrence takes place, which is sufficient reason for suspending all rules. if your neighbor is faint, you may speak to her, and, if necessary, lead her out. if your mother or some other friend should come into the school-room, you can go and sit with her upon the sofa, and talk about the school.[ ] and so in many other similar cases. be very careful not to abuse this privilege, and make slight causes the grounds of your exceptions. it ought to be a very clear case. if a young lady is unwell in a trifling degree, so as to need no assistance, you would evidently do wrong to talk to her. the rule, in fact, is very similar to that which all well-bred people observe at church. they never speak or leave their seats unless some really important cause, such as sickness, requires them to break over all rules and go out. you have, in the same manner, in really important cases, such as serious sickness in your own case or in that of your companions, or the coming in of a stranger, or any thing else equally extraordinary, power to lay aside any rule, and to act as the emergency may require. in using this discretion, however, be sure to be on the safe side. in such cases, never ask permission. you must act on your own responsibility. [footnote : a sofa was placed against the wall, by the side of the teachers' for the accommodation of visitors.] _reasons for this rule._--when the school was first established, there was no absolute prohibition of whispering. each scholar was allowed to whisper in relation to her studies. they were often, very often, enjoined to be conscientious and faithful, but, as might have been anticipated, the experiment failed. it was almost universally the practice to whisper more or less about subjects entirely foreign to the business of the school. this all the scholars repeatedly acknowledged; and they almost unanimously admitted that the good of the school required the prohibition of all communication during certain hours. i gave them their choice, either always to ask permission when they wished to speak, or to have a certain time allowed for the purpose, during which free intercommunication might be allowed to all the school, with the understanding, however, that, out of this time, no permission should ever be asked or granted. they very wisely chose the latter plan, and the study card was constructed and put up, to mark the times of free communication and of silent study. the card was at first down every half hour for one or two minutes. the scholars afterward thinking that their intellectual habits would be improved and the welfare of the school promoted by their having a longer time for uninterrupted study, of their own accord, without any influence from me, proposed that the card should be down only once an hour. this plan was adopted by them by vote. i wish it to be understood that it was not _my_ plan, but _theirs_; and that i am at any time willing to have the study card down once in half an hour, whenever a majority of the scholars, voting by ballot, desire it. you will find that this system of having a distinct time for whispering, when all may whisper freely, all communication being entirely excluded at other times, will at first give you some trouble. it will be hard for you, if you are not accustomed to it, to learn conscientiously and faithfully to comply. besides, at first you will often need some little information or desire to ask for an article which you might obtain in a moment, but which you can not innocently ask for till the card is down, and this might keep you waiting an hour. you will, however, after a few such instances, soon learn to make your preparations beforehand, and if you are a girl of enlarged views and elevated feelings, you will good-humoredly acquiesce in suffering a little inconvenience yourself for the sake of helping to preserve those _distinct_ and well _defined_ lines by which all boundaries must be marked in a large establishment, if order and system are to be preserved at all. though at first you may experience a little inconvenience, you will soon take pleasure in the scientific strictness of the plan. it will gratify you to observe the profound stillness of the room where a hundred are studying. you will take pleasure in observing the sudden transition from the silence of study hours to the joyful sounds and the animating activity of recess when the study card goes down; and then when it rises again at the close of the recess, you will be gratified to observe how suddenly the sounds which have filled the air, and made the room so lively a scene, are hushed into silence by the single and almost inaudible touch of that little bell. you will take pleasure in this; for young and old always take pleasure in the strict and rigid operation of _system_ rather than in laxity and disorder. i am convinced, also, that the scholars do like the operation of this plan, for i do not have to make any efforts to sustain it. with the exception that occasionally, usually not oftener than once in several months, i allude to the subject, and that chiefly on account of a few careless and unfaithful individuals, i have little to say or to do to maintain the authority of the study card. most of the scholars obey it of their own accord, implicitly and cordially. and i believe they consider this faithful monitor not only one of the most useful, but one of the most agreeable friends they have. we should not only regret its services, but miss its company if it should be taken away. this regulation then, namely, to abstain from all communication with one another, and from all leaving of seats, at certain times which are marked by the position of the study card, is the only one which can properly be called a _rule_ of the school. there are a great many arrangements and plans relating to the _instruction_ of the pupils, but no other specific _rules_ relating to _their conduct._ you are, of course, while in the school, under the same moral obligations which rest upon you elsewhere. you must be kind to one another, respectful to superiors, and quiet and orderly in your deportment. you must do nothing to encroach upon another's rights, or to interrupt and disturb your companions in their pursuits. you must not produce disorder, or be wasteful of the public property, or do any thing else which you might know is in itself wrong. but you are to avoid these things, not because there are any rules in this school against them, for there are none, but because they are in _themselves wrong_--in all places and under all circumstances, wrong. the universal and unchangeable principles of duty are the same here as elsewhere. i do not make rules pointing them out, but expect that you will, through your own conscience and moral principle, discover and obey them. it is wrong, for instance, for you to speak harshly or unkindly to your companions, or to do any thing to wound their feelings unnecessarily, in any way. but this is a universal principle of duty, not a rule of school. so it is wrong for you to be rude and noisy, and thus disturb others who are studying, or to brush by them carelessly, so as to jostle them at their writing or derange their books. but to be careful not to do injury to others in the reckless pursuit of our own pleasures is a universal principle of duty, not a rule of school. such a case as this, for example, once occurred. a number of little girls began to amuse themselves in recess with running about among the desks in pursuit of one another, and they told me, in excuse for it, when i called them to account, that they did not know that it was "_against the rule"_. [illustration] "it is not against the rule," said i; "i have never made any rule against running about among the desks." "then," asked they, "did we do wrong?" "do you think it would be a good plan," i inquired, "to have it a common amusement in the recess for the girls to hunt each other among the desks?" "no, sir," they replied, simultaneously. "why not? there are some reasons. i do not know, however, whether you will have the ingenuity to think of them." "we may start the desks from their places," said one. "yes," said i, "they are fastened down very slightly, so that i may easily alter their position." "we might upset the inkstands," said another. "sometimes," added a third, "we run against the scholars who are sitting in their seats." "it seems, then, you have ingenuity enough to discover the reasons. why did not these reasons prevent your doing it?" "we did not think of them before." "true; that is the exact state of the case. now, when persons are so eager to promote their own enjoyment as to forget the rights and the comforts of others, it is _selfishness. _ now is there any rule in this school against selfishness?" "no, sir." "you are right. there is not. but selfishness is wrong, very wrong, in whatever form it appears, here and every where else, and that whether i make any rules against it or not." you will see, from this anecdote, that, though there is but one rule of the school, i by no means intend to say that there is only _one way of doing wrong here._ that would be very absurd. you _must not do any thing which you may know, by proper reflection, to be in itself wrong._ this, however, is a universal principle of duty, not a _rule_ of the mount vernon school. if i should attempt to make rules which would specify and prohibit every possible way by which you might do wrong, my laws would be innumerable, and even then i should fail of securing my object, unless you had the disposition to do your duty. no legislation can enact laws as fast as a perverted ingenuity can find means to evade them. you will perhaps ask what will be the consequence if we transgress either the single rule of the school or any of the great principles of duty. in other words, what are the punishments which are resorted to in the mount vernon school? the answer is, there are no punishments. i do not say that i should not, in case all other means should fail, resort to the most decisive measures to secure obedience and subordination. most certainly i should do so, as it would plainly be my duty to do it. if you should at any time be so unhappy as to violate your obligations to yourself, to your companions, or to me--should you misimprove your time, or exhibit an unkind or a selfish spirit, or be disrespectful or insubordinate to your teachers, i should go frankly and openly, but kindly to you, and endeavor to convince you of your fault. i should very probably do this by addressing a note to you, as i suppose this would be less unpleasant to you than a conversation. in such a case, i shall hope that you will as frankly and openly reply, telling me whether you admit your fault and are determined to amend, or else informing me of the contrary. i shall wish you to be _sincere_, and then i shall know what course to take next. but as to the consequences which may result to you if you should persist in what is wrong, it is not necessary that you should know them beforehand. they who wander from duty always plunge themselves into troubles which they do not anticipate; and if you do what, at the time you are doing it, you know to be wrong, it will not be unjust that you should suffer the consequences, even if they were not beforehand understood and expected. this will be the case with you all through life, and it will be the case here. i say it _will_ be the case here; i ought rather to say that it will be the case should you be so unhappy as to do wrong and to persist in it. such persistance, however, never occurs--at least it occurs so seldom, and at intervals so great, that every thing of the nature of punishment, that is, the depriving a pupil of any enjoyment, or subjecting her to any disgrace, or giving her pain in any way in consequence of her faults, except the simple pain of awakening conscience in her bosom, is almost entirely unknown. i hope that you will always be ready to confess and forsake your faults, and endeavor, while you remain in school, to improve in character, and attain, as far as possible, every moral excellence. i ought to remark, before dismissing this topic, that i place very great confidence in the scholars in regard to their moral conduct and deportment, and they fully deserve it. i have no care and no trouble in what is commonly called _the government of the school._ neither myself nor any one else is employed in any way in watching the scholars, or keeping any sort of account of them. i should not at any time hesitate to call all the teachers into an adjoining room, leaving the school alone for half an hour, and i should be confident that, at such a time, order, and stillness, and attention to study would prevail as much as ever. the scholars would not look to see whether i was in my desk, but whether the study card was up. the school was left in this way, half an hour every day, during a quarter, that we might have a teachers' meeting, and the studies went on generally quite as well, to say the least, as when the teachers were present. one or two instances of irregular conduct occurred. i do not now recollect precisely what they were. they were, however, fully acknowledged and not repeated, and i believe the scholars were generally more scrupulous and faithful then than at other times. they would not betray the confidence reposed in them. this plan was continued until it was found more convenient to have the teachers' meetings in the afternoons. when any thing wrong is done in school, i generally state the case, and request the individuals who have done it to let me know who they are. they inform me sometimes by notes and sometimes in conversation; but they always inform me. the plan _always_ succeeds. the scholars all know that there is nothing to be feared from confessing faults to me; but that, on the other hand, it is a most direct and certain way to secure returning peace and happiness. i can illustrate this by describing a case which actually occurred, though the description is not to be considered so much an accurate account of what took place in a particular instance as an illustration of the _general spirit and manner_ in which such cases are disposed of. i accidentally understood that some of the younger scholars were in the habit, during recesses and after school, of ringing the door-bell and then running away, to amuse themselves with the perplexity of their companions who should go to the door and find no one there. i explained in a few words, one day, to the school, that this was wrong. "how many," i then asked, "have ever been put to the trouble to go to the door when the bell has thus been rung? they may rise." a very large number of scholars stood up. those who had done the mischief were evidently surprised at the extent of the trouble they had occasioned. "now," i continued, "i think all will be convinced that the trouble which this practice has occasioned to the fifty or sixty young ladies, who can not be expected to find amusement in such a way, is far greater than the pleasure it can have given to the few who are young enough to have enjoyed it. therefore it was wrong. do you think that the girls who rang the bell might have known this by proper reflection?" "yes, sir," the school generally answered. "i do not mean," said i, "if they had set themselves formally at work to think about the subject, but with such a degree of reflection as ought reasonably to be expected of little girls in the hilarity of recess and of play." "yes, sir," was still the reply, but fainter than before. "there is one way by which i might ascertain whether you were old enough to know that this was wrong, and that is by asking those who have refrained from doing this, because they supposed it would be wrong, to rise. then, if some of the youngest scholars in school should stand up, as i have no doubt they would, it would prove that all might have known, if they had been equally conscientious. but if i ask those to rise who have _not_ rung the bell, i shall make known to the whole school who they are that have done it, and i wish that the exposure of faults should be private, unless it is _necessary_ that it should be public. i will, therefore, not do it. i have myself, however, no doubt that all might have known that it was wrong. "there is," continued i, "another injury which must grow out of such a practice. this i should not have expected the little girls could think of. in fact, i doubt whether any in school will think of it. can any one tell me what it is?" no one replied. "i should suppose that it would lead you to disregard the bell when it rings, and that consequently a gentleman or lady might sometimes ring in vain, the scholars near the door saying, 'oh, it is only the little girls.'" "yes, sir," was heard from all parts of the room. i found, from farther inquiry, that this had been the case, and i closed by saying, "i am satisfied that those who have inadvertently fallen into this practice are sorry for it, and that if i should leave it here, no more cases of it would occur, and this is all i wish. at the same time, they who have done this will feel more effectually relieved from the pain which having done wrong must necessarily give them, if they individually acknowledge it to me. i wish, therefore, that all who have thus rung the bell in play would write me notes stating the facts. if any one does not do it, she will punish herself severely, for she will feel for many days to come that while her companions were willing to acknowledge their faults, she wished to conceal and cover hers. conscience will reproach her bitterly for her insincerity, and, whenever she hears the sound of the door-bell, it will remind her not only of her fault, but of what is far worse, _her willingness to appear innocent when she was really guilty."_ before the close of the school i had eight or ten notes acknowledging the fault, describing the circumstances of each case, and expressing promises to do so no more. it is by such methods as this, rather than by threatening and punishment, that i manage the cases of discipline which from time to time occur; but even such as this, slight as it is, occur very seldom. weeks and weeks sometimes elapse without one. when they do occur, they are always easily settled by confession and reform. sometimes i am asked to _forgive_ the offense. but i have no power to forgive. god must forgive you when you do wrong, or the burden must remain. my duty is to take measures to prevent future transgression, and to lead those who have been guilty of it to god for pardon. if they do not go to him, though they may satisfy me, as principal of a school, by not repeating the offence, they must remain _unforgiven_. i can _forget_, and i do forget. for example, in this last case i have not the slightest recollection of any individual who was engaged in it. the evil was entirely removed, and had it not afforded me a convenient illustration here, perhaps i should never have thought of it again; still, it may not yet be _forgiven._ it may seem strange that i should speak so seriously of god's forgiveness for such a trifle as that. does he notice a child's ringing a door-bell in play? he notices when a child is willing to yield to temptation to do what she knows to be wrong, and to act even in the slightest trifle from a selfish disregard for the convenience of others. this spirit he always notices, and though i may stop any particular form of its exhibition, it is for him alone to forgive it and to purify the heart from its power. but i shall speak more particularly on this subject under the head of religious instruction. ii. order of daily exercises. there will be given you, when you enter the school, a blank schedule, in which the divisions of each forenoon for one week are marked, and in which your own employments for every half hour are to be written. (a copy of this is inserted on page .) this schedule, when filled up, forms a sort of a map for the week, in which you can readily find what are your duties for any particular time. the following description will enable you better to understand it. _opening of the school._ the first thing which will call your attention as the hour for the commencement of the school approaches in the morning is the ringing of a bell five minutes before the time arrives by the regulator, who sits at the curtained desk before the study card. one minute before the time the bell is rung again, which is the signal for all to take their seats and prepare for the opening of the school. when the precise moment arrives, the study card is drawn up, and at the sound of its little bell, all the scholars recline their heads upon their desks, and unite with me in a very short prayer for god's protection and blessing during the day. i adopted the plan of allowing the scholars to sit, because i thought it would be pleasanter for them, and they have, in return, been generally, so far as i know, faithful in complying with my wish that they would all assume the posture proposed, so that the school may present the uniform and serious aspect which is proper when we are engaged in so solemn a duty. if you move your chair back a little, you will find the posture not inconvenient; but the only reward you will have for faithfully complying with the general custom is the pleasure of doing your duty, for no one watches you, and you would not be called to account should you neglect to conform to the usage of the school. i hope, however, that you will conform to it. indeed, all truly refined and well-bred people make it a universal rule of life to conform to the innocent religious usages of those around them, wherever they may be. after the prayer we sing one or two verses of a hymn. the music is led by a piano, and we wish all to join in it who can sing. the exercises which follow are exhibited to the eye by the diagram on the next page. mount vernon school schedule of studies. . _miss_ +---------+---------------+-----------+-----+-----------+-----+-----------+ | |first hour. |second hour| |third hour | |fourth hour| | +---------------+-----------+--+--+-----------+--+--+-----------+ | |evening lessons|languages. |g.|r.|mathematics|g.|r.|sections. | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+--+-----+-----+--+--+-----------+ |monday | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+ +-----+-----+--+ +-----------+ |tuesday | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+ +-----+-----+--+ +-----------+ |wednesday| | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+ +-----+-----+--+ +-----------+ |thursday | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+ +-----+-----+--+ +-----------+ |friday | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+ +-----+-----+--+ +-----------+ |saturday | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------+--------+------+-----+-----+--+--+-----+-----+--+--+-----------+ i now proceed to describe in detail the several hours, as represented in the diagram. _first hour._--_evening lessons._ the first hour of the day, as you will see by the schedule, is marked evening lessons, because most, though not all, of the studies assigned to it are intended to be prepared out of school. these studies are miscellaneous in their character, comprising geography, history, natural and intellectual philosophy, and natural history. this hour, like all the other hours for study, is divided into two equal parts, some classes reciting in the first part, and others in the second. a bell is always rung _five minutes before_ the time for closing the recitation, to give the teachers notice that their time is nearly expired, and then again _at the time,_ to give notice to new classes to take their places. thus you will observe that five minutes before the half hour expires the bell will ring, soon after which the classes in recitation will take their seats. precisely at the end of the half hour it will ring again, when new classes will take their places. in the same manner, notice is given five minutes before the second half of the hour expires, and so in all the other three hours. at the end of the first hour the study card will be let half down five minutes, and you will perceive that the sound of its bell will immediately produce a decided change in the whole aspect of the room. it is the signal, as has been before explained, for universal permission to whisper and to leave seats, though not for loud talking or play, so that those who wish to continue their studies may do so without interruption. when the five-minute period has expired the card goes up again, and its sound immediately restores silence and order. _second hour._--_languages._ we then commence the second hour of the school. this is devoted to the study of the languages. the latin, french, and english classes recite at this time. by english classes i mean those studying the english _as a language,_ that is, classes in grammar, rhetoric, and composition. the hour is divided as the first hour is, and the bell is rung in the same way, that is, at the close of each half hour, and also five minutes before the close, to give the classes notice that the time for recitation is about to expire. _first general exercise._ you will observe, then, that there follows upon the schedule a quarter of an hour marked g. that initial stands for general exercise, and when it arrives each pupil is to lay aside her work, and attend to any exercise which may be proposed. this quarter of an hour is appropriated to a great variety of purposes. sometimes i give a short and familiar lecture on some useful subject connected with science or art, or the principles of duty. sometimes we have a general reading lesson. sometimes we turn the school into a bible class. again, the time is occupied in attending to some _general_ business of the school. the bell is rung one minute before the close of the time, and when the period appropriated to this purpose has actually expired, the study card, for the first time in the morning, is let entirely down, and the room is at once suddenly transformed into a scene of life, and motion, and gayety. _first recess._ the time for the recess is a quarter of an hour, and, as you will see, it is marked r. on the schedule. we have various modes of amusing ourselves, and finding exercise and recreation in recesses. sometimes the girls bring their battledores to school. sometimes they have a large number of soft balls with which they amuse themselves. a more common amusement is marching to the music of the piano. for this purpose a set of signals by the whistle has been devised, by which commands are communicated to the school. in these and similar amusements the recesses pass away, and one minute before it expires the bell is rung to give notice of the approach of study hours. at this signal the scholars begin to prepare for a return to the ordinary duties of school, and when, at the full expiration of the recess, the study card again goes up, silence, and attention, and order is immediately restored. _third hour.--mathematics_. there follows next, as you will see by reference to the schedule, an hour marked mathematics. it is time for studying and reciting arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and similar studies. it is divided, as the previous hours were, into two equal parts, and the bell is rung, as has been described, five minutes before the close, and also precisely at the close of each half hour. _second general exercise.--business_. then follow two quarter hours, appropriated like those heretofore described, the first to a general exercise, the second to a recess. at the first of these the general business of the school is transacted. as this business will probably appear new to you, and will attract your attention, i will describe its nature and design. at first you will observe a young lady rise at the secretary's desk to read a journal of what was done the day before. the notices which i gave, the arrangements i made, the subjects discussed and decided, and, in fact, every thing important and interesting in the business or occurrences of the preceding day, is recorded by the secretary of the school, and read at this time. this journal ought not to be a mere dry record of votes and business, but, as far as possible, an interesting description, in a narrative style, of the occurrences of the day. the secretary must keep a memorandum, and ascertain that every thing important really finds a place in the record, but she may employ any good writer in school to prepare, from her minutes, the full account. after the record is read, you will observe me take from a little red morocco wrapper which has been brought to my desk a number of narrow slips of paper, which i am to read aloud. in most assemblies, it is customary for any person wishing it to rise in his place and propose any plan, or, as it is called, "make any motion" that he pleases. it would be unpleasant for a young lady to do this in presence of a hundred companions, and we have consequently resorted to another plan. the red wrapper is placed in a part of the room accessible to all, and any one who pleases writes upon a narrow slip of paper any thing she wishes to lay before the school, and deposits it there, and at the appointed time the whole are brought to me. these propositions are of various kinds. i can, perhaps, best give you an idea of them by such specimens as occur to me. "a.b. resigns her office of copyist, as she is about to leave school." "proposed that a class in botany be formed. there are many who would like to join it." "when will vacation commence?" "proposed that a music committee be appointed, so that we can have some marching in recess." "proposed that school begin at nine o'clock." "mr. abbott, will you have the goodness to explain to us what is meant by the veto message?" "proposed that we have locks upon our desks." you see that the variety is very great, and there are usually from four or five to ten or fifteen of such papers daily. you will be at liberty to make in this way any suggestion or inquiry, or to propose any change you please in any part of the instruction or administration of the school. if any thing dissatisfies you, you ought not to murmur at it in private, or complain of it to your companions, thus injuring to no purpose both your own peace and happiness and theirs, but you ought immediately to bring up the subject in the way above described, that the evil may be removed. i receive some of the most valuable suggestions in this way from the older and most reflecting pupils. these suggestions are read. sometimes i decide the question that arises myself. sometimes i say that the pupils may decide it. sometimes i ask their opinion and wishes, and then, after taking them into consideration, come to a conclusion. for example, i will insert a few of these propositions, as these papers are called, describing the way in which they would be disposed of. most of them are real cases. "mr. abbott, the first class in geography is so large that we have not room in the recitation seats. can not we have another place?" after reading this, i should perhaps say, "the class in geography may rise and be counted." they rise. those in each division are counted by the proper officer, as will hereafter be explained, and the numbers are reported aloud to me. it is all done in a moment. "how many of you think you need better accommodations?" if a majority of hands are raised, i say, "i wish the teacher of that class would ascertain whether any other place of recitation is vacant, or occupied by a smaller class at that time, and report the case to me." "proposed that we be allowed to walk upon the common in the recesses." "i should like to have some plan formed by which you can walk on the common in recesses, but there are difficulties. if all should go out together, it is probable that some would be rude and noisy, and that others would come back tardy and out of breath. besides, as the recess is short, so many would be in haste to prepare to go out, that there would be a great crowd and much confusion in the ante-room and passage-ways. i do not mention these as insuperable objections, but only as difficulties which there must be some plan to avoid. perhaps, however, they can not be avoided. do any of you think of any plan?" i see, perhaps, two or three hands raised, and call upon the individuals by name, and they express their opinions. one says that a part can go out at a time. another proposes that those who are tardy one day should not go out again, &c. "i think it possible that a plan can be formed on these or some such principles. if you will appoint a committee who will prepare a plan, and mature its details, and take charge of the execution of it, you may try the experiment. i will allow it to go on as long as you avoid the evils i have above alluded to." a committee is then raised, to report in writing at the business hour of the following day. "proposed that the study card be down every half hour." "you may decide this question yourselves. that you may vote more freely, i wish you to vote by ballot. the boxes will be open during the next recess. the vote-receivers will write the question and place it upon the boxes. all who feel interested in the subject may carry in their votes, aye or nay. when the result is reported to me i will read it to the school." in this and similar ways the various business brought up is disposed of. this custom is useful to the scholars, for it exercises and strengthens their judgment and their reflecting powers more than almost any thing besides; so that, if interesting them in this way in the management of the school were of no benefit to me, i should retain the practice as most valuable to them. but it is most useful to me and to the school. i think that nothing has contributed more to its prosperity than the active interest which the scholars have always taken in its concerns, and the assistance they have rendered me in carrying my plans into effect. you will observe that in transacting this business very little is actually done by myself, except making the ultimate decision. all the details of business are assigned to teachers, or to officers and committees appointed for the purpose. by this means we dispatch business very rapidly. the system of offices will be explained in another place; but i may say here that all appointments and elections are made in this quarter hour, and by means of the assistance of these officers the transaction of business is so facilitated that much more can sometimes be accomplished than you would suppose possible. i consider this period as one of the most important in the whole morning. _second recess._ after the expiration of the quarter hour above described, the study card is dropped, and a recess succeeds. _fourth hour._--_sections_. in all the former part of the day the scholars are divided into _classes_, according to their proficiency in particular branches of study, and they resort to their _recitations_ for _instruction. _ they now are divided into six _sections_, as we call them, and placed under the care of _superintendents_, not for instruction, but for what may be called supervision. _teaching_ a pupil is not all that is necessary to be done for her in school. there are many other things to be attended to, such as supplying her with the various articles necessary for her use, seeing that her desk is convenient, that her time is well arranged, that she has not too much to do nor too little, and that no difficulty which can be removed obstructs her progress in study or her happiness in school. the last hour is appropriated to this purpose, with the understanding, however, that such a portion of it as is not wanted by the superintendent is to be spent in study. you will see, then, when the last hour arrives, that all the scholars go in various directions to the meetings of their respective sections. here they remain as long as the superintendent retains them. sometimes they adjourn almost immediately, perhaps after having simply attended to the distribution of pens for the next day; at other times they remain during the hour, attending to such exercises as the superintendent may plan. the design, however, and nature of this whole arrangement i shall explain more fully in another place. _close of the school._ as the end of the hour approaches, five minutes' notice is given by the bell, and when the time arrives the study card is half dropped for a moment before the closing exercises. when it rises again the room is restored to silence and order. we then sing a verse or two of a hymn, and commend ourselves to god's protection in a short prayer. as the scholars raise their heads from the posture of reverence which they have assumed, they pause a moment till the regulator lets down the study card, and the sound of its bell is the signal that our duties at school are ended for the day. iii. instruction and supervision of pupils. for the instruction of the pupils the school is divided into _classes_, and for their general supervision into _sections_, as has been intimated under the preceding caption. the head of a _class_ is called a _teacher_, and the head of a _section_ a _superintendent_. the same individual may be both the teacher of a class and the superintendent of a section. the two offices are, however, entirely distinct in their nature and design. as you will perceive by recalling to mind the daily order of exercises, the classes meet and recite during the first three hours of the school, and the sections assemble on the fourth and last. we shall give each a separate description. . classes. the object of the division into classes is _instruction_. whenever it is desirable that several individuals should pursue a particular study, a list of their names is made out, a book selected, a time for recitation assigned, a teacher appointed, and the exercises begin. in this way a large number of classes have been formed, and the wishes of parents, or the opinion of the principal, and, in many cases, that of the pupil, determines how many and what shall be assigned to each individual. a list of these classes, with the average age of the members, the name of the teacher, and the time of recitation, is posted in a conspicuous place, and public notice is given whenever a new class is formed. you will therefore have the opportunity to know all the arrangements of school in this respect, and i wish you to exercise your own judgment and discretion a great deal in regard to your studies. i do not mean i expect you to _decide_, but to _reflect_ upon them. look at the list, and consider what are most useful for you. propose to me or to your parents changes, whenever you think they are necessary; and when you finish one study, reflect carefully, yourself, on the question what you shall next commence. the scholars prepare their lessons when they please. they are expected to be present and prepared at the time of recitation, but they make the preparation when it is most convenient. the more methodical and systematic of the young ladies mark the times of _study_ as well as of _recitation_ upon their schedules, so that the employment of their whole time at school is regulated by a systematic plan. you will observe, too, that by this plan of having a great many classes reciting through the first three hours of the morning, every pupil can be employed as much or as little as her parents desire. in a case of ill health, she may, as has often been done in such cases at the request of parents, join one or two classes only, and occupy the whole forenoon in preparing for them, and be entirely free from school duties at home. or she may, as is much more frequently the case, choose to join a great many classes, so as to fill up, perhaps, her whole schedule with recitations, in which case she must prepare all her lessons at home. it is the duty of teachers to take care, however, when a pupil pleads want of time as a reason for being unprepared in any lesson, that the case is fully examined, in order that it may be ascertained whether the individual has joined too many classes, in which case some one should be dropped, and thus the time and the employments of each individual should be so adjusted as to give her constant occupation _in school,_ and as much more as her parents may desire. by this plan of the classes, each scholar advances just as rapidly in her studies as her time, and talents, and health will allow. no one is kept back by the rest. each class goes on regularly and systematically, all its members keeping exactly together in that study; but the various members of it will have joined a greater or less number of other classes, according to their age, or abilities, or progress in study, so that all will or may have full employment for their time. when you first enter the school, you will, for a day or two, be assigned to but few classes, for your mind will be distracted by the excitement of new scenes and pursuits, and the intellectual effort necessary for _joining_ a class is greater than that requisite for _going on_ with it after being once under way. after a few days you will come to me and say, perhaps (for this is ordinarily the process), "mr. abbott, i think i have time for some more studies." "i will thank you to bring me your schedule," i say in reply, "so that i can see what you have now to do." by glancing my eye over the schedule in such a case, i see in a moment what duties have been already assigned you, and from my general schedule, containing all the studies of the school, i select what would be most suitable for you after conferring with you about your past pursuits, and your own wishes or those of your parents in regard to your future course. additions are thus made until your time is fully occupied. the manner of recitation in the classes is almost boundlessly varied. the design is not to have you commit to memory what the book contains, but to understand and digest it--to incorporate it fully into your own mind, that it may come up in future life in such a form as you wish it for use. do not then, in ordinary cases, endeavor to fix _words_, but _ideas_ in your minds. conceive clearly--paint distinctly to your imagination what is described--contemplate facts in all their bearings and relations, and thus endeavor to exercise the judgment, and the thinking and reasoning powers, rather than the mere memory, upon the subjects which will come before you. . sections. in describing the order of daily exercises, i alluded to the _sections_ which assemble in the last hour of the school. it is necessary that i should fully describe the system of sections, as it constitutes a very important part of the plan of the school. besides giving the scholars the necessary intellectual instruction, there are, as i have already remarked, a great many other points which must receive attention in order to promote their progress, and to secure the regular operation and general welfare of the school. these various points have something common in their nature, but it is difficult to give them a common name. they are such as supplying the pupils with pens and paper, and stationery of other kinds; becoming acquainted with each individual; ascertaining that she has enough and not too much to do; arranging her work so that no one of her duties shall interfere with another; assisting her to discover and correct her faults, and removing any sources of difficulty or causes of discontent which may gradually come in her way. these, and a multitude of similar points, constituting what may be called the general _administration_ of the school, become, when the number of pupils is large, a most important branch of the teacher's duty. to accomplish these objects more effectually, the school is divided into six sections, arranged, not according to proficiency in particular studies, as the several classes are, but according to _age and general maturity of mind._ each one of these sections is assigned to the care of a superintendent. these superintendents, it is true, during most of school hours, are also teachers. their duties, however, as _teachers_ and as _superintendents_, are entirely distinct. i shall briefly enumerate the duties which devolve upon her in the latter capacity. . a superintendent ought to prepare an exact list of the members of her section, and to become intimately acquainted with them, so as to be as far as possible their friend and confidante, and to feel a stronger interest in their progress in study and their happiness in school, and a greater personal attachment to them than to any other scholars. . she is to superintend the preparation of their schedules; to see that each one has enough and not too much to do, by making known to me the necessity of a change, where such necessity exists; to see that the schedules are submitted to the parents, and that their opinion or suggestions, if they wish to make any, are reported to me. . she is to take care that all the daily wants of her section are supplied--that all have pens and paper, and desks of suitable height. if any are new scholars, she ought to interest herself in assisting them to become acquainted in school; if they are friendless and alone, to find companions for them, and to endeavor in every way to make their time pass pleasantly and happily. . to watch the characters of the members of her section. to inquire of their several teachers as to the progress they make in study, and the faithfulness and punctuality with which they prepare their lessons. she ought to ascertain whether they are punctual at school and regular in their habits--whether their desks are neat and well arranged, and their exercises carefully executed. she ought to correct, through her own influence, any evils of this kind she may find, or else immediately to refer the cases where this can not be done to me. the better and the more pleasantly to accomplish the object of exerting a favorable influence upon the characters of the members of their section, the superintendents ought often to bring up subjects connected with moral and religious duty in section meetings. this may be done in the form of subjects assigned for composition, or proposed for free discussion in writing or conversation, or the superintendents may write themselves, and read to the section the instructions they wish to give. when subjects for written composition are thus assigned, they should be so presented to the pupils as to lead their minds to a very practical mode of regarding them. for example, instead of simply assigning the subject _truth_ as the theme of an abstract moral essay, bring up definite points of a practical character, such especially as are connected with the trials and temptations of early life. "i wish you would all give me your opinions," the teacher might say in such a case, "on the question, what is the most frequent inducement that leads children to tell falsehoods? also, do you think it is right to tell untruths to very little children, as many persons do, or to people who are sick? also, whether it would be right to tell a falsehood to an insane man in order to manage him?" sometimes, instead of assigning a subject of composition _verbally_, the superintendent exhibits an engraving, and the several members of the class then write any thing they please which is suggested to them by the engraving. for example, suppose the picture thus exhibited were to represent a girl sewing in an attic. the compositions to which it would give rise might be very various. one pupil would perhaps simply give an account of the picture itself, describing the arrangements of the room, and specifying the particular articles of furniture contained in it. another would give a soliloquy supposed to be spoken by the sewing-girl as she sits at her work. another would narrate the history of her life, of course an imaginary one. another would write an essay on the advantages of industry and independence. this is a very good way of assigning subjects of composition, and, if well managed, it may be the means of awakening a great interest in writing among almost all the pupils of a school. . though the superintendents, as such, have, necessarily speaking, no _teaching_ to do, still they ought particularly to secure the progress of every pupil in what may be called the _essential_ studies, such as reading, writing, and spelling. for this purpose, they either see that their pupils are going on successfully in classes in school in these branches, or they may attend to them in the section, provided that they never allow such instruction to interfere with their more appropriate and important duties. in a word, the superintendents are to consider the members of their sections as pupils confided to their care, and they are not merely to discharge mechanically any mere routine of duty, such as can be here pointed out, but to exert all their powers, their ingenuity, their knowledge of human character, their judgment and discretion, in every way, to secure for each of those committed to their care the highest benefits which the institution to which they belong can afford. they are to keep a careful and faithful record of their plans and of the history of their respective sections, and to endeavor as faithfully and as diligently to advance the interests of the members of them as if the sections were separate and independent schools of their own. a great responsibility is thus evidently intrusted to them, but not a great deal of _power_. they ought not to make changes, except in very plain cases, without referring the subject to me. they ought not to make rash experiments, or even to try many new plans, without first obtaining my approval of them. they ought to refer all cases which they can not easily manage to my care. they ought to understand the distinction between _seeing that a thing is done_ and _doing it_. for example, if a superintendent thinks that one of her section is in too high a class in arithmetic, her duty is not to undertake, by her own authority, to remove her to a lower one, for, as superintendent, she has no authority over arithmetic classes, nor should she go to the opposite extreme of saying, "i have no authority over arithmetic classes, and therefore i have nothing to do with this case." she ought to go to the teacher of the class to which her pupil had been unwisely assigned, converse with her, obtain her opinion, then find some other class more suited to her attainments, and after fully ascertaining all the facts in the case, bring them to me, that i may make the change. this is _superintendence--looking over_ the condition and progress of the scholar. the superintendents have thus great responsibility, and yet, comparatively, little power. they accomplish a great deal of good, and, in its ordinary course, it is by their direct personal efforts; but in making changes, and remedying defects and evils, they act generally in a different way. the last hour of school is devoted to the sections. no classes recite then, but the sections meet, if the superintendents wish, and attend to such exercises as they provide. each section has its own organization, its own officers and plans. these arrangements of course vary in their character according to the ingenuity and enterprise of the superintendents, and more especially according to the talents and intellectual ardor of the members of the section. the two upper sections are called senior, the next two middle, and the two younger junior. the senior sections are distinguished by using paper for section purposes with a light blue tinge. to the middle sections is assigned a light straw color; and to the junior, pink. these colors are used for the schedules of the members, and for the records and other documents of the section. this account, though it is brief, will be sufficient to explain to you the general principles of the plan. you will soon become acquainted with the exercises and arrangements of the particular section to which you will be assigned, and by taking an active interest in them, and endeavoring to cooperate with the superintendent in all her measures and to comply with her wishes, you will very materially add to her happiness, and do your part toward elevating the character of the circle to which you will belong. iv. officers. in consequence of the disposition early manifested by the scholars to render me every assistance in their power in carrying into effect the plans of the school and promoting its prosperity, i gradually adopted the plan of assigning to various officers and committees, a number of specific duties relating to the general business of the school. these officers have gradually multiplied as the school has increased and as business has accumulated. the system has, from time to time, been revised, condensed, and simplified, and at the present time it is thus arranged. the particular duties of each officer are minutely described to the individuals themselves at the time of their election; all i intend here is to give a general view of the plan, such as is necessary for the scholars at large. there are, then, _five departments_ of business intrusted to officers of the school. the names of the officers, and a brief exposition of their duties, are as follows: [i omit the particular explanation of the duties of the officers, as the arrangement must vary in different schools, and the details of any one plan can only be useful in the school-room to which it belongs. it will be sufficient to name the officers of each department, with their duties, in general terms.] . regulators.--to assist in the ordinary routine of business in school: ringing the bells; managing the study card; distributing and collecting papers; counting votes, &c. . secretaries.--keeping the records, and executing writing of various kinds. . accountants.--keeping a register of the scholars, and various other duties connected with the accounts. . librarians.--to take charge of books and stationery. . curators.--to secure neatness and good order in the apartments. the secretaries and accountants are appointed by the principal, and will generally be chosen from the teachers. the first in each of the other departments are chosen by ballot, by the scholars. each one thus chosen nominates the second in her department, and they two the assistants. these nominations must be approved at a teachers' meeting; for, if a scholar is inattentive to her studies, disorderly in her desk, or careless and troublesome in her manners, she evidently ought not to be appointed to public office. no person can hold an office in two of these departments. she can, if she pleases, however, resign one to accept another. each of these departments ought often to assemble and consult together, and form plans for carrying into effect with greater efficiency the objects intrusted to them. they are to keep a record of all their proceedings, the head of the department acting as secretary for this purpose. the following may be given as an example of the manner in which business is transacted by means of these officers. on the day that the above description of their duties was written, i wished for a sort of directory to assist the collector employed to receive payments for the bills, and, to obtain it, i took the following steps: at the business quarter hour i issued the following order: "before the close of school, i wish the distributors to leave upon each of the desks a piece of paper" (the size i described). "it is for a purpose which i shall then explain." accordingly, at some leisure moment before the close of school, each one of the regulators went with her box to the stationery shelves, which you will see in the corners of the room, where a supply of paper of all the various sizes used in school is kept, and, taking out a sufficient number, they supplied all the desks in their respective divisions. when the time for closing school arrived, i requested each young lady to write the name of her parent or guardian upon the paper, and opposite to it his place of business. this was done in a minute or two. "all those whose parent's or guardian's name begins with a letter above _m_ may rise." they rose. "the distributors may collect the papers." the officers then passed round in regular order, each through her own division, and collected the papers. "deliver them at the accountants' desk." they were accordingly carried there, and received by the accountants. in the same manner, the others were collected and received by the accountants, but kept separate. "i wish now the second accountant would copy these in a little book i have prepared for the purpose, arranging them alphabetically, referring all doubtful cases again to me." the second accountant then arranged the papers, and prepared them to go into the book, and the writer who belongs to the department copied them fairly. i describe this case, because it was one which occurred at the time i was writing the above description, and not because there is any thing otherwise peculiar in it. such cases are continually taking place, and by the division of labor above illustrated, i am very much assisted in a great many of the duties which would otherwise consume a great portion of my time. any of the scholars may at any time make suggestions in writing to any of these officers or to the whole school; and if an officer should be partial, or unfaithful, or negligent in her duty, any scholar may propose her impeachment. after hearing what she chooses to write in her defense, a vote is taken on sustaining the impeachment. if it is sustained, she is deprived of the office, and another appointed to fill her place. v. the court. i have already described how all serious cases of doing wrong or neglect of duty are managed in the school. i manage them myself, by coming as directly and as openly as i can to the heart and conscience of the offender. there are, however, a number of little transgressions, too small to be individually worthy of serious attention, but which are yet troublesome to the community when frequently repeated. these relate chiefly to _order in the school-rooms_. these misdemeanors are tried, half in jest and half in earnest, by a sort of _court_, whose forms of process might make a legal gentleman smile. they, however, fully answer our purpose. i can best give you an idea of the court by describing an actual trial. i ought, however, first to say that any young lady who chooses to be free from the jurisdiction of the court can signify that wish to me, and she is safe from it. this, however, is never done. they all see the useful influence of it, and wish to sustain it. near the close of school, i find, perhaps, on my desk a paper, of which the following may be considered a copy. it is called the indictment. we accuse miss a.b. of having waste papers in the aisle opposite her desk, at o'clock, on friday, oct. . c.d.} e.f.} witnesses. i give notice after school that a case is to be tried. those interested, twenty or thirty perhaps, gather around my desk, while the sheriff goes to summon the accused and the witnesses. a certain space is marked off as the precincts of the court, within which no one must enter in the slightest degree, on pain of imprisonment, that is, confinement to her seat until court adjourns. "miss a.b., you are accused of having an untidy floor about your desk. have you any objection to the indictment?" while she is looking over the indictment to discover a misspelled word, or an error in the date, or some other latent flaw, i appoint any two of the by-standers jury. the jury come forward to listen to the cause. the accused returns the indictment, saying she has no objection, and the witnesses are called upon to present their testimony. perhaps the prisoner alleges in defense that the papers were out _in the aisle_, not _under her desk_, or that she did not put them there, or that they were too few or too small to deserve attention. my charge to the jury would be somewhat as follows: "you are to consider and decide whether she was guilty of disorder, taking into view the testimony of the witnesses and also her defense. it is considered here that each young lady is responsible not only for the appearance of the carpet _under her desk_, but also for _the aisle opposite to it_, so that her first ground of defense must be abandoned. so, also, with the second, that she did not put them there. she ought not to _have_ them there. each scholar must keep her own place in a proper condition; so that if disorder is found there, no matter who made it, she is responsible if she only had time to remove it. as to the third, you must judge whether enough has been proved by the witnesses to make out real disorder." the jury write _guilty_ or _not guilty_ upon the paper, and it is returned to me. if sentence is pronounced, it is usually confinement to the seat during a recess, or part of a recess, or something that requires a slight effort or sacrifice for the public good. the sentence is always something _real_, though always _slight_, and the court has a great deal of influence in a double way--making amusement and preserving order. the cases tried are very various, but none of the serious business of the school is intrusted to it. its sessions are always held out of school hours, and, in fact, it is hardly considered by the scholars as a constituent part of the arrangements of the school; so much so, that i hesitated much about inserting an account of it in this description. vi. religious instruction. in giving you this account, brief as it is, i ought not to omit to speak of one feature of our plan, which we have always intended should be one of the most prominent and distinctive characteristics of the school. the gentlemen who originally interested themselves in its establishment had mainly in view the exertion, by the principal, of a decided moral and religious influence over the hearts of the pupils. knowing, as they did, how much more dutiful and affectionate at home you would be, how much more successful in your studies at school, how much happier in your intercourse with each other, and in your prospects for the future both here and hereafter, if your hearts could be brought under the influence of christian principle, they were strongly desirous that the school should be so conducted that its religious influence, though gentle and alluring in its character, should be frank, and open, and decided. i need not say that i myself entered very cordially into these views. it has been my constant effort, and one of the greatest sources of my enjoyment, to try to win my pupils to piety, and to create such an atmosphere in school that conscience, and moral principle, and affection for the unseen jehovah should reign here. you can easily see how much pleasanter it is for me to have the school controlled by such influence, than if it were necessary for me to hire you to diligence in duty by prizes or rewards, or to deter you from neglect or from transgression by reproaches, and threatenings, and punishments. the influence which the school has thus exerted has always been cordially welcomed by my pupils, and approved, so far as i have known, by their parents, though four or five denominations, and fifteen or twenty different congregations, have been from time to time represented in the school. there are few parents who would not like to have their children _christians_--sincerely and practically so; for everything which a parent can desire in a child is promoted just in proportion as she opens her heart to the influence of the spirit of piety. but that you may understand what course is taken, i shall describe, first, what i wish to effect in the hearts of my pupils, and then what means i take to accomplish the object. . a large number of young persons of your age, and in circumstances similar to those in which you are placed, perform with some fidelity their various outward duties, _but maintain no habitual and daily communion with god_. it is very wrong for them to live thus without god, but they do not see, or, rather, do not feel the guilt of it. they only think of their accountability to _human beings_ like themselves; for example, their parents, teachers, brothers and sisters, and friends. consequently, they think most of their _external_ conduct, which is all that human beings can see. their i>hearts_ are neglected, and become very impure, full of evil thoughts, and desires, and passions, which are not repented of, and consequently not forgiven. now what i wish to accomplish in regard to all my pupils is, that they should begin to _feel their accountability to god_, and to act according to it; that they should explore their _hearts_, and ask god's forgiveness for all their past sins, through jesus christ, who died for them that they might be forgiven; and that they should from this time try to live _near to god_, feel his presence, and enjoy that solid peace and happiness which flows from a sense of his protection. when such a change takes place, it relieves the mind from that constant and irritating uneasiness which the great mass of mankind feel as a constant burden; the ceaseless forebodings of a troubled conscience reproaching them for their past accumulated guilt, and warning them of a judgment to come. the change which i endeavor to promote relieves the heart both of the present suffering and of the future danger. after endeavoring to induce you to begin to act from christian principle, i wish to explain to you your various duties to yourselves, your parents, and to god. . the measures to which i resort to accomplish these objects are three: first, _religious exercises in school_.--we open and close the school with a very short prayer and one or two verses of a hymn. sometimes i occupy ten or fifteen minutes at one of the general exercises, or at the close of the school, in giving instruction upon practical religious duty. the subjects are sometimes suggested by a passage of scripture read for the purpose, but more commonly in another way. you will observe often, at the close of the school or at an appointed general exercise, that a scholar will bring to my desk a dark-colored morocco wrapper containing several small strips of paper, upon which questions relating to moral or religious duty, or subjects for remarks from me, or anecdotes, or short statements of facts, giving rise to inquiries of various kinds, are written. this wrapper is deposited in a place accessible to all the scholars, and any one who pleases deposits in it any question or suggestion on religious subjects which may occur to her. you can at any time do this yourself, thus presenting any doubt, or difficulty, or inquiry which may at any time occur to you. secondly, _religious exercise on saturday afternoon_.--in order to bring up more distinctly and systematically the subject of religious duty, i established, a long time ago, a religious meeting on saturday afternoon. it is intended for those who feel interested in receiving such instruction, and who can conveniently attend at that time. if you have no other engagements, and if your parents approve of it, i should be happy to have you attend. there will be very little to interest you except the subject itself, for i make all the instructions which i give there as plain, direct, and practical as is in my power. a considerable number of the scholars usually attend, and frequently bring with them many of their female friends. you can at any time invite any one whom you please to come to the meeting. it commences at half past three, and continues about half an hour. thirdly, _personal religious instruction._--in consequence of the large number of my pupils, and the constant occupation of my time in school, i have scarcely any opportunity of religious conversation with them, even with those who particularly desire it. the practice has therefore arisen, and gradually extended itself almost universally in school, of writing to me on the subject. these communications are usually brief notes, expressing the writer's interest in the duties of piety, or bringing forward her own peculiar practical difficulties, or making specific inquiries, or asking particular instruction in regard to some branch of religious duty. i answer in a similar way, very briefly and concisely, however, for the number of notes of this kind which i receive is very large, and the time which i can devote to such a correspondence necessarily limited. i should like to receive such communications from all my pupils; for advice or instruction communicated in reply, being directly personal, is far more likely to produce effect. besides, my remarks, being in writing, can be read a second time, and be more attentively considered and reconsidered than when words are merely spoken. these communications must always be begun by the pupil. i never (unless there may be occasional exceptions in some few very peculiar cases) commence. i am prevented from doing this both by my unwillingness to obtrude such a subject personally upon those who might not welcome it, and by want of time. i have scarcely time to write to all those who are willing first to write to me. many cases have occurred where individuals have strongly desired some private communication with me, but have hesitated long, and shrunk reluctantly from the first step. i hope it will not be so with you. should you ever wish to receive from me any direct religious instruction, i hope you will write immediately and freely. i shall very probably not even notice that it is the first time i have received such a communication from you. so numerous and so frequent are these communications, that i seldom observe, when i receive one from any individual for the first time, that it comes from one who has not written me before. such are the means to which i resort in endeavoring to lead my pupils to god and to duty, and you will observe that the whole design of them is to win and to allure, not to compel. the regular devotional exercises of school are all which you will _necessarily_ witness. these are very short, occupying much less time than many of the pupils think desirable. the rest is all private and voluntary. i never make any effort to urge any one to attend the saturday meeting, nor do i, except in a few rare and peculiar cases, ever address any one personally, unless she desires to be so addressed. you will be left, therefore, in this school, unmolested, to choose your own way. if you should choose to neglect religious duty, and to wander away from god, i shall still do all in my power to make you happy in school, and to secure for you in future life such a measure of enjoyment as can fall to the share of one over whose prospects in another world there hangs so gloomy a cloud. i shall never reproach you, and perhaps may not even know what your choice is. should you, on the other hand, prefer the peace and happiness of piety, and be willing to begin to walk in its paths, you will find many, both among the teachers and pupils of the mount vernon school, to sympathize with you, and to encourage and help you on your way. chapter vii. scheming. [illustration] some of the best teachers in our country, or, rather, of those who might be the best, lose a great deal of their time, and endanger, or perhaps entirely destroy, their hopes of success by a scheming spirit, which is always reaching forward to something new. one has in his mind some new school-book by which arithmetic, grammar, or geography are to be taught with unexampled rapidity, and his own purse to be filled in a much more easy way than by waiting for the rewards of patient industry. another has the plan of a school, bringing into operation new principles of management or instruction, which he is to establish on some favored spot, and which is to become, in a few years, a second hofwyl. another has some royal road to learning, and, though he is trammeled and held down by what he calls the ignorance and stupidity of his trustees or his school committee, yet, if he could fairly put his principles and methods to the test, he is certain of advancing the science of education half a century at least at a single leap. ingenuity in devising new ways, and enterprise in following them, are among the happiest characteristics of a new country rapidly filling with a thriving population. without these qualities there could be no advance; society must be stationary; and from a stationary to a retrograde condition, the progress is inevitable. the disposition to make improvements and changes may, however, be too great. if so, it must be checked. on the other hand, a slavish attachment to old established practices may prevail. then the spirit of enterprise and experiment must be awakened and encouraged. which of these two is to be the duty of a writer at any time will of course depend upon the situation of the community at the time when he writes, and of the class of readers for which he takes his pen. now, at the present time, it is undoubtedly true, that while among the great mass of teachers there may be too little originality and enterprise, there is still among many a spirit of innovation and change to which a caution ought to be addressed. but, before i proceed, let me protect myself from misconception by one or two remarks. . there are a few individuals in various parts of our country who, by ingenuity and enterprise, have made real and important improvements in many departments of our science, and are still making them. the science is to be carried forward by such men. let them not, therefore, understand that any thing which i shall say applies at all to those real improvements which are from time to time brought before the public. as examples of this, there might easily be mentioned, were it necessary, several new modes of study, and new text-books, and literary institutions on new plans, which have been brought forward within a few years, and have proved, on actual trial, to be of real and permanent value. these are, or rather they were, when first conceived by the original projectors, new schemes, and the result has proved that they were good ones. every teacher, too, must hope that such improvements will continue to be made. let nothing, therefore, which shall be said on the subject of scheming in this chapter be interpreted as intended to condemn real improvements of this kind, or to check those which may now be in progress by men of age or experience, or of sound judgment, who are capable of distinguishing between a real improvement and a whimsical innovation which can never live any longer than it is sustained by the enthusiasm of the original inventor. . there are a great many teachers in our country who make their business a mere dull and formal routine, through which they plod on, month after month, and year after year, without variety or change, and who are inclined to stigmatize with the appellation of idle scheming all plans, of whatever kind, to give variety or interest to the exercises of the school. now whatever may be said in this chapter against unnecessary innovation and change does not apply to efforts to secure variety in the details of daily study, while the great leading objects are steadily pursued. this subject has already been discussed in the chapter on instruction, where it has been shown that every wise teacher, while he pursues the same great object, and adopts in substance the same leading measures at all times, will exercise all the ingenuity he possesses, and bring all his inventive powers into requisition to give variety and interest to the minute details. to explain now what is meant by such scheming as is to be condemned, let us suppose a case which is riot very uncommon. a young man, while preparing for college, takes a school. when he first enters upon the duties of his office, he is diffident and timid, and walks cautiously in the steps which precedent has marked out for him. distrusting himself, he seeks guidance in the example which others have set for him, and, very probably, he imitates precisely, though it may be insensibly and involuntarily, the manners and the plans of his own last teacher. this servitude soon, however, if he is a man of natural abilities, passes away; he learns to try one experiment after another, until he insensibly finds that a plan may succeed, even if it was not pursued by his former teacher. so far it is well. he throws greater interest into his school, and into all its exercises, by the spirit with which he conducts them. he is successful. after the period of his services has expired, he returns to the pursuit of his studies, encouraged by his success, and anticipating farther triumphs in his subsequent attempts. he goes on through college, we will suppose, teaching from time to time in the vacations, as opportunity occurs, taking more and more interest in the employment, and meeting with greater and greater success. this success is owing in a very great degree to the _freedom_ of his practice, that is, to his escape from the thraldom of imitation. so long as he leaves the great objects of the school untouched, and the great features of its organization unchanged, his many plans for accomplishing these objects in new and various ways awaken interest and spirit both in himself and in his scholars, and all goes on well. now in such a case as this, a young teacher, philosophizing upon his success and the causes of it, will almost invariably make this mistake, namely, he will attribute to something essentially excellent in his plans the success which, in fact, results from the novelty of them. when he proposes something new to a class, they all take an interest in it because it is _new_. he takes, too, a special interest in it because it is an experiment which he is trying, and he feels a sort of pride and pleasure in securing its success. the new method which he adopts may not be, _in itself,_ in the least degree better than old methods, yet it may succeed vastly better in his hands than any old method he had tried before. and why? why, because it is new. it awakens interest in his class, because it offers them variety; and it awakens interest in him, because it is a plan which he has devised, and for whose success, therefore, he feels that his credit is at stake. either of these circumstances is abundantly sufficient to account for its success. either of these would secure success, unless the plan was a very bad one indeed. this may easily be illustrated by supposing a particular case. the teacher has, we will imagine, been accustomed to teach spelling in the usual way, by assigning a lesson in the spelling-book, which the scholars, after studying it in their seats, recite by having the words put to them individually in the class. after some time, he finds that one class has lost its interest in this study. he can compel them to study the lesson, it is true, but he perceives, perhaps, that it is a weary task to them. of course, they proceed with less alacrity, and consequently with less rapidity and success. he thinks, very justly, that it is highly desirable to secure cheerful, not forced, reluctant efforts from his pupils, and he thinks of trying some new plan. accordingly, he says to them, "boys, i am going to try a new plan for this class." the mere annunciation of a new plan awakens universal attention. the boys all look up, wondering what it is to be. "instead of having you study your lessons in your seats, as heretofore, i am going to let you all go together into one corner of the room, and choose some one to read the lesson to you, spelling all the words aloud. you will all listen, and endeavor to remember how the difficult ones are spelled. do you think you can remember?" "yes, sir," say the boys. children always think they _can_ do every thing which is proposed to them as a new plan or experiment, though they are very often inclined to think they _can not_ do what is required of them as a task. "you may have," continues the teacher, "the words read to you once or twice, just as you please. only, if you have them read but once, you must take a shorter lesson." he pauses and looks round upon the class. some say "once," some "twice." "i am willing that you should decide this question. how many are in favor of having shorter lessons, and having them read but once? how many prefer longer lessons, and having them read twice?" after comparing the numbers, it is decided according to the majority, and the teacher assigns or allows them to assign a lesson. "now," he proceeds, "i am not only going to have you study in a different way, but recite in a different way too. you may take your slates with you, and after you have had time to hear the lesson read slowly and carefully twice, i shall come and dictate to you the words aloud, and you will all write them from my dictation. then i shall examine your slates, and see how many mistakes are made." any class of boys, now, would be exceedingly interested in such a proposal as this, especially if the master's ordinary principles of government and instruction had been such as to interest the pupils in the welfare of the school and in their own progress in study. they will come together in the place assigned, and listen to the one who is appointed to read the words to them, with every faculty aroused, and their whole souls engrossed in the new duties assigned them. the teacher, too, feels a special interest in his experiment. whatever else he may be employed about, his eye turns instinctively to this group with an intensity of interest which an experienced teacher who has long been in the field, and who has tried experiments of this sort a hundred times, can scarcely conceive; for let it be remembered that i am describing the acts and feelings of a new beginner, of one who is commencing his work with a feeble and trembling step, and perhaps this is his first step away from the beaten path in which he has been accustomed to walk. this new plan is continued, we will suppose, for a week, during which time the interest of the pupils continues. they get longer lessons and make fewer mistakes than they did by the old method. now, in speculating on this subject, the teacher reasons very justly that it is of no consequence whether the pupil receives his knowledge through the eye or through the ear; whether they study in solitude or in company. the point is to secure their progress in learning to spell the words of the english language, and as this point is secured far more rapidly and effectually by his new method, the inference is to his mind very obvious, that he has made a great improvement--one of real and permanent value. perhaps he will consider it an extraordinary discovery. but the truth is, that in almost all such cases as this, the secret of the success is not that the teacher has discovered a _better_ method than the ordinary ones, but that he has discovered a _new_ one. the experiment will succeed in producing more successful results just as long as the novelty of it continues to excite unusual interest and attention in the class, or the thought that it is a plan of the teacher's own invention leads him to take a peculiar interest in it. and this may be a month, or perhaps a quarter; and precisely the same effects would have been produced if the whole had been reversed, that is, if the plan of dictation had been the old one, which in process of time had, in this supposed school, lost its interest, and the teacher, by his ingenuity and enterprise, had discovered and introduced what is now the common mode. "very well," perhaps my reader will reply, "it is surely something gained to awaken and continue interest in a dull study for a quarter, or even a month. the experiment is worth something as a pleasant and useful change, even if it is not permanently superior to the other." it is indeed worth something. it is worth a great deal; and the teacher who can devise and execute such plans, _understanding their real place and value, and adhering steadily through them all to the great object which ought to engage his attention,_ is in the almost certain road to success as an instructor. what i wish is not to discourage such efforts; they ought to be encouraged to the utmost; but to have their real nature and design, and the real secret of their success fully understood, and to have the teacher, above all, take good care that all his new plans are made, not the substitutes for the great objects which he ought to keep steadily in view, but only the means by which he may carry them into more full and complete effect. in the case we are supposing, however, we will imagine that the teacher does not do this. he fancies that he has made an important discovery, and begins to inquire whether _the principle,_ as he calls it, can not be applied to some other studies. he goes to philosophizing upon it, and can find many reasons why knowledge received through the ear makes a more ready and lasting impression than when it comes through the eye. he attempts to apply the method to arithmetic and geography, and in a short time is forming plans for the complete metamorphosis of his school. when engaged in hearing a recitation, his mind is distracted with his schemes and plans, and instead of devoting his attention fully to the work he may have in hand, his thoughts are wandering continually to new schemes and fancied improvements, which agitate and perplex him, and which elude his efforts to give them a distinct and definite form. he thinks he must, however, carry out his _principle_. he thinks of its applicability to a thousand other cases. he revolves over and over again in his mind plans for changing the whole arrangement of his school. he is again and again lost in perplexity, his mind is engrossed and distracted, and his present duties are performed with no interest, and consequently with little spirit or success. now his error is in allowing a new idea, which ought only to have suggested to him an agreeable change for a time in one of his classes, to swell itself into undue and exaggerated importance, and to draw off his mind from what ought to be the objects of his steady pursuit. perhaps some teacher of steady intellectual habits and a well-balanced mind may think that this picture is fanciful, and that there is little danger that such consequences will ever actually result from such a cause. but, far from having exasperated the results. i am of opinion that i might have gone much farther. there is no doubt that a great many instances have occurred in which some simple idea like the one i have alluded to has led the unlucky conceiver of it, in his eager pursuit, far deeper into the difficulty than i have here supposed. he gets into a contention with the school committee, that formidable foe to the projects of all scheming teachers; and it would not be very difficult to find many actual cases where the individual has, in consequence of some such idea, quietly planned and taken measures to establish some new institution, where he can carry on unmolested his plans, and let the world see the full results of his wonderful discoveries. we have in our country a very complete system of literary institutions, so far as external organization will go, and the prospect of success is far more favorable in efforts to carry these institutions into more complete and prosperous operation, than in plans for changing them, or substituting others in their stead. were it not that such a course would be unjust to individuals, a long and melancholy catalogue might easily be made out of abortive plans which have sprung up in the minds of young men in the manner i have described, and which, after perhaps temporary success, have resulted in partial or total failure. these failures are of every kind. some are school-books on a new plan, which succeeds in the inventor's hand chiefly on account of the spirit which carried it into effect, but which in ordinary hands, and under ordinary circumstances, and especially after long-continued use, have failed of exhibiting any superiority. others are institutions, commenced with great zeal by the projectors, and which prosper just as long as that zeal continues. zeal will make any thing succeed for a time. others are new plans of instruction or government, generally founded on some good principle carried to an extreme, or made to grow into exaggerated and disproportionate importance. examples almost innumerable of these things might be particularized, if it were proper, and it would be found, upon examination, that the amount of ingenuity and labor wasted upon such attempts would have been sufficient, if properly expended, to have elevated very considerably the standard of education, and to have placed existing institutions in a far more prosperous and thriving state than they now exhibit. the reader will perhaps ask, shall we make no efforts at improvement? must every thing in education go on in a uniform and monotonous manner, and, while all else is advancing, shall our cause alone stand still? by no means. it must advance; but let it advance mainly by the industry and fidelity of those who are employed in it; by changes slowly and cautiously made; not by great efforts to reach forward to brilliant discoveries, which will draw off the attention from essential duties, and, after leading the projector through perplexities and difficulties without number, end in mortification and failure. were i to give a few concise and summary directions in regard to this subject to a young teacher, they would be the following: . examine thoroughly the system of public and private schools as now constituted in most of the states of this union, until you fully understand it and appreciate its excellences and its completeness; see how fully it provides for the wants of the various classes of our population. by this i mean to refer only to the completeness of the _system_ as a system of organization. i do not refer at all to the internal management of these institutions; this last is, of course, a field for immediate and universal effort at progress and improvement. . if, after fully understanding this system as it now exists, you are of opinion that something more is necessary; if you think some classes of the community are not fully provided for, or that some of our institutions may be advantageously exchanged for others, the plan of which you have in mind, consider whether your age, and experience, and standing as an instructor are such as to enable you to place confidence in your opinion. i do not mean by this that a young man may not make a useful discovery, but only that he may be led away by the ardor of early life to fancy that essential and important which is really not so. it is important that each one should determine whether this is not the case with himself, if his mind is revolving some new plan. . perhaps you are contemplating only a single new institution, which is to depend for its success on yourself and some coadjutors whom you have in mind and whom you well know. if this is the case, consider whether the establishment you are contemplating can be carried on, after you shall have left it, by such men as can ordinarily be obtained. if the plan is founded on some peculiar notions of your own, which would enable you to succeed in it when others, who might also be interested in such a scheme, would probably fail, consider whether there may not be danger that your plan may be imitated by others who can not carry it into successful operation, so that it may be the indirect means of doing injury. a man is, in some degree, responsible for his example and for the consequences which may indirectly flow from his course, as well as for the immediate results which he produces. the fellenberg school at hofwyl was perhaps, by its direct results, as successful for a time as any other institution in the world; but there is a great offset to the good which it has thus done to be found in the history of the thousand wretched imitations of it which have been started only to linger a little while and die, and in which a vast amount of time, and talent, and money have been wasted. [illustration] . consider the influence you may have upon the other institutions of our country, by attaching yourself to some one under the existing organization. if you take an academy or a private school, constituted and organized like other similar institutions, success in your own will give you influence over others. a successful teacher of an academy raises the general standard of academic instruction. a college professor, if he brings extraordinary talents to bear upon the regular duties of that office, throws light, universally, upon the whole science of college discipline and instruction, and thus aids in infusing a continually renewed life and vigor into those venerable seats of learning that might otherwise sink into decrepitude and decay. by going, however, to some new field, establishing some new and fanciful institution, you take yourself from such a sphere; you exert no influence over others, except upon feeble imitators, who fail in their attempts, and bring discredit upon your plans by the awkwardness with which they attempt to adopt them. how much more service, then, to the cause of education will a man of genius render, by falling in with the regularly organized institutions of the country and elevating them, than if in early life he were to devote his powers to some magnificent project of an establishment to which his talents would unquestionably have given temporary success, but which would have taken him away from the community of teachers, and confined the results of his labors to the more immediate effects which his daily duties might produce. . perhaps, however, your plan is not the establishment of some new institution, but the introduction of some new study or pursuit into the one with which you are connected. before, however, you interrupt the regular arrangements of your school to make such a change, consider carefully what is the real and appropriate object of your institution. every thing is not to be done in school. the principles of division of labor apply with peculiar force to this employment; so that you must not only consider whether the branch which you are now disposed to introduce is important, but whether it is really such an one as it is on the whole best to include among the objects to be pursued in such an institution. many teachers seem to imagine that if any thing is in itself important, and especially if it is an important branch of education, the question is settled of its being a proper object of attention in school. but this is very far from being the case. the whole work of education can never be intrusted to the teacher. much must of course remain in the hands of the parent; it ought so to remain. the object of a school is not to take children out of the parental hands, substituting the watch and guardianship of a stranger for the natural care of father and mother. far from it. it is only the association of the children for those purposes which can be more successfully accomplished by association. it is a union for few, specific, and limited objects, for the accomplishment of that part (and it is comparatively a small part of the general objects of education) which can be most successfully effected by public institutions and in assemblies of the young. . if the branch which you are desiring to introduce appears to you to be an important part of education, and if it seems to you that it can be most successfully attended to in schools, then consider whether the introduction of it, _and of all the other branches having equal claims_, will or will not give to the common schools too great a complexity. consider whether it will succeed in the hands of ordinary teachers. consider whether it will require so much time and effort as will draw off in any considerable degree, the attention of the teacher from the more essential parts of his duty. all will admit that it is highly important that every school should be simple in its plan--as simple as its size and general circumstances will permit, and especially that the public schools in every town and village of our country should never lose sight of what is and must be, after all, their great design--_teaching the whole population to ready write, and calculate._ . if it is a school-book which you are wishing to introduce, consider well before you waste your time in preparing it, and your spirits in the vexatious work of getting it through the press; whether it is, _for general use_, so superior to those already published as to induce teachers to make a change in favor of yours. i have italicized the words _for general use_, for no delusion is more common than for a teacher to suppose that because a text-book which he has prepared and uses in manuscript is better for _him_ than any other work which he can obtain, it will therefore be better for _general circulation_. every man, if he has any originality of mind, has of course some peculiar method of his own, and he can of course prepare a text-book which will be better adapted to this method than those ordinarily in use. the history of a vast number of text-books, arithmetics, geographies, and grammars, is this: a man of somewhat ingenious mind, adopts some peculiar mode of instruction in one of these branches, and is quite successful, not because the method has any very peculiar excellence, but simply because he takes a greater interest in it, both on account of its novelty and also from the fact that it is his own invention. he conceives the plan of writing a text-book to develop and illustrate this method. he hurries through the work. by some means or other he gets it printed. in due time it is regularly advertised. the journals of education give notice of it; the author sends a few copies to his friends, and that is the end of it. perhaps a few schools may make a trial of it, and if, for any reason, the teachers who try it are interested in the work, probably in their hands it succeeds. but it does not succeed so well as to attract general attention, and consequently does not get into general circulation. the author loses his time and his patience. the publisher, unless, unfortunately, it was published on the author's account, loses his paper, and in a few months scarcely any body knows that such a book ever saw the light. it is in this way that the great multitude of school-books which are now constantly issuing from the press take their origin. far be it from me to discourage the preparation of good school-books. this department of our literature offers a fine field for the efforts of learning and genius. what i contend against is the endless multiplicity of useless works, hastily conceived and carelessly executed, and which serve no purpose but to employ uselessly talents which, if properly applied, might greatly benefit both the community and the possessor. . if, however, after mature deliberation, you conclude that you have the plan of a school-book which you ought to try to mature and execute, be slow and cautious about it. remember that so great is now the competition in this branch, nothing but superior excellence or very extraordinary exertions will secure the favorable reception of a work. examine all that your predecessors have done before you. obtain, whatever may be the trouble and expense, all other text-books on the subject, and examine them thoroughly. if you see that you can make a very decided advance on all that has been done, and that the public will probably submit to the inconvenience and expense of a change to secure the result of your labors, go forward slowly and carefully in your work, no matter how much investigation, how much time and labor it may require. the more difficulty you may find in gaining the eminence, the less likely will you be to be followed by successful competitors. . consider, in forming your text-book, not merely the whole subject on which you are to write, but also look extensively and thoroughly at the institutions throughout the country, and consider carefully the character of the teachers by whom you expect it to be used. sometimes a man publishes a text-book, and when it fails on trial, he says "it is because they did not know how to use it. the book in itself was good. the whole fault was in the awkwardness and ignorance of the teacher." how absurd! as if, to make a good text-book, it was not as necessary to adapt it to teachers as to scholars. a _good text-book, which the teachers for whom it was intended did not know how to use!!_ in other words, a good contrivance, but entirely unfit for the purpose for which it was intended. . lastly, in every new plan, consider carefully whether its success in your hands, after you have tried it and found it successful, be owing to its novelty and to your own special interest in it, or to its own innate and intrinsic superiority. if the former, use it so long as it will last, simply to give variety and interest to your plans. recommend it in conversation or in other ways to teachers with whom you are acquainted, not as a wonderful discovery, which is going to change the whole science of education, but as one method among others which may be introduced from time to time to relieve the monotony of the teacher's labors. in a word, do not go away from the established institutions of our country, or deviate from the great objects which are at present, and ought continually to be pursued by them, without great caution, circumspection, and deliberate inquiry. but, within these limits, exercise ingenuity and invention as much as you will. pursue steadily the great objects which demand the teacher's attention. they are simple and few. never lose sight of them, nor turn to the right or to the left to follow any ignis fatuus which may arise to allure you away, but exercise as much ingenuity and enterprise as you please in giving variety and interest to the modes by which these objects are pursued. if planning and scheming are confined within these limits, and conducted on these principles, the teacher will save all the agitating perplexity and care which will otherwise be his continual portion. he can go forward peaceably and quietly, and while his own success is greatly increased, he may be of essential service to the cause in which he is engaged, by making known his various experiments and plans to others. for this purpose, it seems to me highly desirable that every teacher should keep a journal of all his plans. in these should be carefully entered all his experiments; the new methods he adopts; the course he takes in regard to difficulties which may arise, and any interesting incidents which may occur which it would be useful for him to refer to at some future time. these, or the most interesting of them, should be made known to other teachers. this may be done in several ways: ( .) by publishing them in periodicals devoted to education. such contributions, furnished by judicious men, would be among the most valuable articles in such a work. they would be far more valuable than any general speculations, however well conceived or expressed. ( .) in newspapers intended for general circulation. there are very few editors whose papers circulate in families who would not gladly receive articles of this kind to fill a teacher's department in their columns. if properly written, they would be read with interest and profit by multitudes of parents, and would throw much light on family government and instruction. ( .) by reading them in teachers' meetings. if half a dozen teachers who are associated in the same vicinity would meet once a fortnight, simply to hear each other's journals, they would be amply repaid for their time and labor. teachers' meetings will be interesting and useful, when those who come forward in them will give up the prevailing practice of delivering orations, and come down at once to the scenes and to the business of the school-room. there is one topic connected with the subject of this chapter which deserves a few paragraphs. i refer to the rights of the committee, or the trustees, or patrons in the control of the school. the right to such control, when claimed at all, is usually claimed in reference to the teacher's new plans, which renders it proper to allude to the subject here; and it ought not to be omitted, for a great many cases occur in which teachers have difficulties with the trustees or committee of their school. sometimes these difficulties result at last in an open rupture; at other times in only a slight and temporary misunderstanding, arising from what the teacher calls an unwise and unwarrantable interference on the part of the committee or the trustees in the arrangements of the school. difficulties of some sort very often arise. in fact, a right understanding of this subject is, in most cases, absolutely essential to the harmony and co-operation of the teacher and the representatives of his patrons. there are then, it must be recollected, three different parties connected with every establishment for education: the parents of the scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves. sometimes, as, for example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and whatever influence they exert they must exert in their individual capacity. at other times, as in a common district or town school, they are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose are their legal representatives. in other instances, a board of trustees are constituted by the appointment of the founders of the institution, or by the legislature of a state, to whom is committed the oversight of its concerns, and who are consequently the representatives of the founders and patrons of the school. there are differences between these various modes of organization which i shall not now stop to examine, as it will be sufficiently correct for my purpose to consider them all as only various ways of organizing the _employers_ in the contract by which the teacher is employed. the teacher is the agent; the patrons represented in these several ways are the principals. when, therefore, in the following paragraphs i use the word _employers_, i mean to be understood to speak of the committee, or the trustees, or the visitors, or the parents themselves, as the case in each particular institution may be; that is, the persons for whose purpose and at whose expense the institution is maintained, or their representatives. now there is a very reasonable and almost universally established rule, which teachers are very frequently prone to forget, namely, _the employed ought always to be responsible to the employers, and to be under their direction._ so obviously reasonable is this rule, and, in fact, so absolutely indispensable in the transaction of all the business of life, that it would be idle to attempt to establish and illustrate it here. it has, however, limitations, and it is applicable to a much greater extent, in some departments of human labor than in others. it is _applicable_ to the business of teaching, and though i confess that it is somewhat less absolute and imperious here, still it is obligatory, i believe, to a far greater extent than teachers have been generally willing to admit. a young lady, i will imagine, wishes to introduce the study of botany into her school. the parents or the committee object; they say that they wish the children to confine their attention exclusively to the elementary branches of education. "it will do them no good," says the chairman of the committee, "to learn by heart some dozen or two of learned names. we want them to read well, to write well, and to calculate well, and not to waste their time in studying about pistils, and stamens, and nonsense." now what is the duty of the teacher in such a case? why, very plainly her duty is the same as that of the governor of a state, where the people, through their representatives, regularly chosen, negative a proposal which he considers calculated to promote the public good. it is his duty to submit to the public will; and, though he may properly do all in his power to present the subject to his employers in such a light as to lead them to regard it as he does, he must still, until they do so regard it, bow to their authority; and every magistrate who takes an enlarged and comprehensive view of his duties as the executive of a republican community, will do this without any humiliating feelings of submission to unauthorized interference with his plans. he will, on the other hand, enjoy the satisfaction of feeling that he confines himself to his proper sphere, and leave to others the full possession of rights which properly pertain to them. it is so with every case where the relation of employer and employed subsists. you engage a carpenter to erect a house for you, and you present your plan; instead of going to work and executing your orders according to your wishes, he falls to criticising and condemning it; he finds fault with this, and ridicules that, and tells you you ought to make such and such an alteration in it. it is perfectly right for him to give his opinion, in the tone and spirit of _recommendation or suggestion_, with a distinct understanding that with his employer rests the power and the right to decide. but how many teachers take possession of their school-room as though it was an empire in which they are supreme, who resist every interference of their employers as they would an attack upon their personal freedom, and who feel that in regard to every thing connected with school they have really no actual responsibility. in most cases, the employers, knowing how sensitive teachers very frequently are on this point, acquiesce in it, and leave them to themselves. whenever, in any case, they think that the state of the school requires their interference, they come cautiously and fearfully to the teacher, as if they were encroaching upon his rights, instead of advancing with the confidence and directness with which employers have always a right to approach the employed; and the teacher, with the view he has insensibly taken of the subject, being perhaps confirmed by the tone and manner which his employers use, makes the conversation quite as often an occasion of resentment and offense as of improvement. he is silent, perhaps, but in his heart he accuses his committee or his trustees of improper interference in _his_ concerns, as though it was no part of _their_ business to look after work which is going forward for their advantage, and for which they pay. perhaps some individuals who have had some collision with their trustees or committee will ask me if i mean that a teacher ought to be entirely and immediately under the supervision and control of the trustees, just as a mechanic is when employed by another man. by no means. there are various circumstances connected with the nature of this employment, such as the impossibility of the employers fully understanding it in all its details, and the character and the standing of the teacher himself, which always will, in matter of fact, prevent this. the employers always will, in a great many respects, place more confidence in the teacher and in his views than they will in their own. but still, the ultimate power is theirs. even if they err, if they wish to have a course pursued which is manifestly inexpedient and wrong, _they still have a right to decide._ it is their work; it is going on at their instance and at their expense, and the power of ultimate decision on all disputed questions must, from the very nature of the case, rest with them. the teacher may, it is true, have his option either to comply with their wishes or to seek employment in another sphere; but while he remains in the employ of any persons, whether in teaching or in any other service, he is bound to yield to the wishes of his employers when they insist upon it, and to submit good-humoredly to their direction when they shall claim their undoubted right to direct. this is to be done, it must be remembered, when they are wrong as well as when they are right. the obligation of the teacher is not founded upon _the superior wisdom_ of his employers in reference to the business for which they have engaged him, for they are very probably his inferiors in this respect, but _upon their right as employers_ to determine _how their own work shall be done._ a gardener, we will suppose, is engaged by a gentleman to lay out his grounds. the gardener goes to work, and, after a few hours, the gentleman comes out to see how he goes on and to give directions. he proposes something which the gardener, who, to make the case stronger, we will suppose knows better than the proprietor of the grounds, considers ridiculous and absurd; nay, we will suppose _it is_ ridiculous and absurd. now what can the gardener do? there are obviously two courses. he can say to the proprietor, after a vain attempt to convince him he is wrong, "well, sir, i will do just as you say. the grounds are yours: i have no interest in it or responsibility, except to accomplish your wishes." this would be right. or he might say, "sir, you have a right to direct upon your own grounds, and i do not wish to interfere with your plans; but i must ask you to obtain another gardener. i have a reputation at stake, and this work, if i do it even at your direction, will be considered as a specimen of my taste and of my planning, so that i must, in justice to myself, decline remaining in your employment." this, too, would be right, though probably, both in the business of gardening and of teaching, the case ought to be a strong one to render it expedient. but it would not be right for him, after his employer should have gone away, to say to himself, with a feeling of resentment at the imaginary _interference_, "i shall not follow any such directions; i understand my own trade, and shall receive no instructions in it from him," and then, disobeying all directions, go on and do the work contrary to the orders of his employer, who alone has a right to decide. and yet a great many teachers take a course as absurd and unjustifiable as this would be. whenever the parents, or the committee, or the trustees express, however mildly and properly, their wishes in regard to the manner in which they desire to have their own work performed, their pride is at once aroused. they seem to feel it an indignity to act in any other way than just in accordance with their own will and pleasure; and they absolutely refuse to comply, resenting the interference as an insult; or else, if they apparently yield, it is with mere cold civility, and entirely without any honest desire to carry the wishes thus expressed into actual effect. parents may, indeed, often misjudge. a good teacher will, however, soon secure their confidence, and they may acquiesce in his opinion. but they ought to be watchful, and the teacher ought to feel and acknowledge their authority on all questions connected with the education of their children. they have originally entire power in regard to the course which is to be pursued with them. providence has made the parents responsible, and wholly responsible, for the manner in which their children are prepared for the duties of this life, and it is interesting to observe how very cautious the laws of society are about interfering with the parent's wishes in regard to the education of the child. there are many cases in which enlightened governments might make arrangements which would be better than those made by the parents if they are left to themselves. but they will not do it; they ought not to do it. god has placed the responsibility in the hands of the father and mother, and unless the manner in which it is exercised is calculated to endanger or to injure the community, there can rightfully be no interference except that of argument and persuasion. it ought also to be considered that upon the parents will come the consequences of the good or bad education of their children, and not upon the teacher, and consequently it is right that they should direct. the teacher remains, perhaps, a few months with his charge, and then goes to other places, and perhaps hears of them no more. he has thus very little at stake. the parent has every thing at stake; and it is manifestly unjust to give one man the power of deciding, while he escapes all the consequences of his mistakes, if he makes any, and to take away all the _power_ from those upon whose heads all the suffering which will follow an abuse of the power must descend. chapter viii. reports of cases. there is, perhaps, no way by which a writer can more effectually explain his views on the subject of education than by presenting a great variety of actual cases, whether real or imaginary, and describing particularly the course of treatment which he would recommend in each. this method of communicating knowledge is very extensively resorted to in the medical profession, where writers detail particular cases, and report the symptoms and the treatment for each succeeding day, so that the reader may almost fancy himself actually a visitor at the sick-bed, and the nature and effects of the various prescriptions become fixed in the mind with almost as much distinctness and permanency as actual experience would give. this principle has been kept in view, the reader may perhaps think, too closely in all the chapters of this volume, almost every point brought up having been illustrated by anecdotes and narratives. i propose, however, devoting one chapter now to presenting a number of miscellaneous cases, without any attempt to arrange them. sometimes the case will be merely stated, the reader being left to draw the inference; at others, such remarks will be added as the case suggests. all will, however, be intended to answer some useful purpose, either to exhibit good or bad management and its consequences, or to bring to view some trait of human nature, as it exhibits itself in children, which it may be desirable for the teacher to know. let it be understood, however, that these cases are not selected with reference to their being strange or extraordinary. they are rather chosen because they are common; that is, they, or cases similar, will be constantly occurring to the teacher, and reading such a chapter will be the best substitute for experience which the teacher can have. some are descriptions of literary exercises or plans which the reader can adopt in classes or with a whole school; others are cases of discipline, good or bad management, which the teacher can imitate or avoid. the stories are from various sources, and are the results of the experience of several individuals. . hats and bonnets.--the master of a district school was accidentally looking out of the window one day, and he saw one of the boys throwing stones at a hat, which was put up for that purpose upon the fence. he said nothing about it at the time, but made a memorandum of the occurrence, that he might bring it before the school at the proper time. when the hour set apart for attending to the general business of the school had arrived, and all were still, he said, "i saw one of the boys throwing stones at a hat to-day: did he do right or wrong?" there were one or two faint murmurs which sounded like "_wrong_" but the boys generally made no answer. "perhaps it depends a little upon the question whose hat it was. do you think it does depend upon that?" "yes, sir." "well, suppose then it was not his own hat, and he was throwing stones at it without the owner's consent, would it be plain in that case whether he was doing right or wrong?" "yes, sir; wrong," was the universal reply. "suppose it was his own hat, would he have been right? has a boy a right to do what he pleases with his own hat?" "yes, sir," "yes, sir;" "no, sir," "no, sir," answered the boys, confusedly. "i do not know whose hat it was. if the boy who did it is willing to rise and tell me, it will help us to decide this question." the boy, knowing that a severe punishment was not in such a case to be anticipated, and, in fact, apparently pleased with the idea of exonerating himself from the blame of willfully injuring the property of another, rose and said, "i suppose it was i, sir, who did it, and it was my own hat." "well," said the master, "i am glad that you are willing to tell frankly how it was; but let us look at this case. there are two senses in which a hat may be said to belong to any person. it may belong to him because he bought it and paid for it, or it may belong to him because it fits him and he wears it. in other words, a person may have a hat as his property, or he may have it only as a part of his dress. now you see that, according to the first of these senses, all the hats in this school belong to your fathers. there is not, in fact, a single boy in this school who has a hat of his own." the boys laughed. "is not this the fact?" "yes, sir." it certainly is so, though i suppose james did not consider it. your fathers bought your hats. they worked for them and paid for them. you are only the wearers, and consequently every generous boy, and, in fact, every honest boy, will be careful of the property which is intrusted to him, but which, strictly speaking, is not his own. . mistakes.--a wide difference must always be made between mistakes arising from carelessness, and those resulting from circumstances beyond control, such as want of sufficient data, and the like. the former are always censurable; the latter never; for they may be the result of correct reasoning from insufficient data, and it is the reasoning only for which the child is responsible. "what do you suppose a prophet is?" said a teacher to a class of little boys. the word occurred in their reading lesson. the scholars all hesitated; at last one ventured to reply: "if a man should sell a yoke of oxen, and get more for them than they are worth, he would be a prophet." "yes," said the instructor, "that is right; that is one kind of _profit_, but this is another and a little different," and he proceeded to explain the word, and the difference of the spelling. this child had, without doubt, heard of some transaction of the kind which he described, and had observed that the word _profit_ was applied to it. now the care which he had exercised in attending to it at the time, and remembering it when the same word (for the difference in the spelling he of course knew nothing about) occurred again, was really commendable. the fact, which is a mere accident, that we affix very different significations to the same sound, was unknown to him. the fault, if any where, was in the language and not in him, for he reasoned correctly from the data he possessed, and he deserved credit for it. the teacher should always discriminate carefully between errors of this kind, and those that result from culpable carelessness. . tardiness.--"my duty to this school," said a teacher to his pupils, "demands, as i suppose you all admit, that i should require you all to be here punctually at the time appointed for the commencement of the school. i have done nothing on this subject yet, for i wished to see whether you would not come early on principle. i wish now, however, to inquire in regard to this subject, and to ascertain how many have been tardy, and to consider what must be done hereafter." he made the inquiries, and ascertained pretty nearly how many had been tardy, and how often within a week. the number was found to be so great that the scholars admitted that something ought to be done. "what shall i do?" asked he. "can any one propose a plan which will remedy the difficulty?" there was no answer. "the easiest and pleasantest way to secure punctuality is for the scholars to come early of their own accord, upon principle. it is evident, from the reports, that many of you do so, but some do not. now there is no other plan which will not be attended with very serious difficulty, but i am willing to adopt the one which will be most agreeable to yourselves, if it will be likely to accomplish the object. has any one any plan to propose?" there was a pause. "it would evidently," continued the teacher, "be the easiest for me to leave this subject, and do nothing about it. it is of no personal consequence to me whether you come early or not, but as long as i hold this office i must be faithful, and i have no doubt the school committee, if they knew how many of you were tardy, would think i ought to do something to diminish the evil. "the best plan that i can think of is that all who are tardy should lose their recess." the boys looked rather anxiously at one another, but continued silent. "there is a great objection to this plan from the fact that a boy is sometimes necessarily absent, and by this rule he will lose his recess with the rest, so that the innocent will be punished with the guilty." "i should think, sir," said william, "that those who are _necessarily_ tardy might be excused." "yes, i should be very glad to excuse them, if i could find out who they are." the boys seemed to be surprised at this remark, as if they thought it would not be a difficult matter to decide. "how can i tell?" asked the master. "you can hear their excuses, and then decide." "yes," said the teacher: "but here are fifteen or twenty boys tardy this morning; now how long would it take me to hear their excuses, and understand each case thoroughly, so that i could really tell whether they were tardy from good reasons or not?" no answer. "should you not think it would take a minute apiece?" "yes, sir." "it would, undoubtedly, and even then i could not in many cases tell. it would take fifteen minutes, at least. i can not do this in school hours, for i have not time, and if i do it in recess it will consume the whole of every recess. now i need the _rest_ of a recess as well as you, and it does not seem to me to be just that i should lose the whole of mine every day, and spend it in a most unpleasant business, when i take pains myself to come punctually every morning. would it be just?" "no, sir." "i think it would be less unjust to deprive all those of their recess who are tardy; for then the loss of a recess by a boy who had not been to blame would not be very common, and the evil would be divided among the whole; but in the plan of my hearing the excuses it would all come upon one." after a short pause one of the boys said that they might be required to bring written excuses. "yes, that is another plan," said the teacher; "but there are objections to it. can any of you think what they are? i suppose you have all been, either at this school or at some other, required to bring written excuses, so that you have seen the plan tried. now have you never noticed any objection to it?" one boy said that it gave the parents a great deal of trouble at home. "yes," said the teacher, "this is a great objection; it is often very inconvenient to write. but that is not the greatest difficulty; can any of you think of any other?" there was a pause. "do you think that these written excuses are, after all, a fair test of the real reasons for tardiness? i understand that sometimes boys will tease their fathers or mothers for an excuse when they do not deserve it, 'yes, sir,' and sometimes they will loiter about when sent of an errand before school, knowing that they can get a written excuse, when they might easily have been punctual." "yes, sir," "yes, sir," said the boys. "well, now, if we adopt this plan, some unprincipled boy would always contrive to have an excuse, whether necessarily tardy or not; and, besides, each parent would have a different principle and a different opinion as to what was a reasonable excuse, so that there would be no uniformity, and, consequently, no justice in the operation of the system." the boys admitted the truth of this, and, as no other plan was presented, the rule was adopted of requiring all those who were tardy to remain in their seats during the recess, whether they were necessarily tardy or not. the plan very soon diminished the number of loiterers. . helen's lesson.--the possibility of being inflexibly firm in measures, and, at the same time, gentle and mild in manners and language, is happily illustrated in the following description, which is based on an incident narrated by mrs. sherwood: "mrs. m. had observed, even during the few days that helen had been under her care, that she was totally unaccustomed to habits of diligence and application. after making all due allowance for long-indulged habits of indolence and inattention, she one morning assigned an easy lesson to her pupil, informing her at the same time that she should hear it immediately before dinner. helen made no objections to the plan, but she silently resolved not to perform the required task. being in some measure a stranger, she thought her aunt would not insist upon perfect obedience, and besides, in her estimation, she was too old to be treated like a child. "during the whole morning helen exerted herself to be mild and obliging; her conduct toward her aunt was uncommonly affectionate. by these and various other artifices she endeavored to gain her first victory. meanwhile mrs. m. quietly pursued her various avocations, without apparently noticing helen's conduct. at length dinner-hour arrived; the lesson was called for, but helen was unprepared. mrs. m. told helen she was sorry that she had not learned the lesson, and concluded by saying that she hoped she would be prepared before tea-time. "helen, finding she was not to come to the table, began to be a little alarmed. she was acquainted in some measure with the character of her aunt, still she hoped to be allowed to partake of the dessert, as she had been accustomed to on similar occasions at home, and soon regained her wonted composure. but the dinner-cloth was removed, and there sat helen, suffering not a little from hunger; still she would not complain; she meant to convince her aunt that she was not moved by trifles. "a walk had been proposed for the afternoon, and as the hour drew near, helen made preparations to accompany the party. mrs. m. reminded her of her lesson, but she just noticed the remark by a toss of the head, and was soon in the green fields, apparently the gayest of the gay. after her return from the excursion she complained of a head-ache, which in fact she had. she threw herself languidly on the sofa, sighed deeply, and took up her history. "tea was now on the table, and most tempting looked the white loaf. mrs. m. again heard the pupil recite, but was sorry to find the lesson still imperfectly prepared. she left her, saying she thought half an hour's additional study would conquer all the difficulties she found in the lesson. "during all this time mrs. m. appeared so perfectly calm, composed, and even kind, and so regardless of sighs and doleful exclamations, that helen entirely lost her equanimity, and let her tears flow freely and abundantly. her mother was always moved by her tears, and would not her aunt relent? no. mrs. m. quietly performed the duties of the table, and ordered the tea-equipage to be removed. this latter movement brought helen to reflection. it is useless to resist, thought she; indeed, why should i wish to? nothing too much has been required of me. how ridiculous i have made myself appear in the eyes of my aunt, and even of the domestics! "in less than an hour she had the satisfaction of reciting her lesson perfectly; her aunt made no comments on the occasion, but assigned her the next lesson, and went on sewing. helen did not expect this; she had anticipated a refreshing cup of tea after the long siege. she had expected that even something nicer than usual would be necessary to compensate her for her past sufferings. at length, worn out by long-continued watching and fasting, she went to the closet, provided herself with a cracker, and retired to bed to muse deliberately on the strange character of her aunt. "teachers not unfrequently threaten their pupils with some proper punishment, but, when obliged to put the threat into execution, contrive in some indirect way to abate its rigor, and thus destroy all its effects. for example, a mother was in the habit, when her little boy ran beyond his prescribed play-ground, of putting him into solitary confinement. on such occasions, she was very careful to have some amusing book or diverting plaything in a conspicuous part of the room, and not unfrequently a piece of gingerbread was given to solace the runaway. the mother thought it very strange her little boy should so often transgress, when he knew what to expect from such a course of conduct. the boy was wiser than the mother; he knew perfectly well how to manage the business. he could play with the boys beyond the garden gate, and if detected, to be sure he was obliged to spend a quiet hour in the pleasant parlor. but this was not intolerable as long as he could expect a paper of sugar-plums, a cake, or at least something amply to compensate him for the loss of a game at marbles." . complaints or long lessons.--a college officer assigned lessons which the idle and ignorant members of the class thought too long. they murmured for a time, and at last openly complained. the other members of the class could say nothing in behalf of the professor, awed by the greatest of all fears to a collegian, the fear of being called a "_fisher_" or a "_blueskin_" the professor paid no attention to the petitions and complaints which were poured in upon him, and which, though originated by the idle, all were compelled to vote for. he coldly, and with uncompromising dignity, went on; the excitement in the class increased, and what is called a college rebellion, with all its disastrous consequences to the infatuated rebels, ensued. another professor had the dexterity to manage the case in a different way. after hearing that there was dissatisfaction, he brought up the subject as follows: "i understand, gentlemen, that you consider your lessons too long. perhaps i have overrated the abilities of the class, but i have not intended to assign you more than you can accomplish. i feel no other interest in the subject than the pride and pleasure it would give me to have my class stand high, in respect to the amount of ground it has gone over, when you come to examination. i propose, therefore, that you appoint a committee, in whose abilities and judgment you can confide, and let them examine this subject and report. they might ascertain how much other classes have done, and how much is expedient for this class to attempt; and then, by estimating the number of recitations assigned to this study, they can easily determine what should be the length of the lessons." the plan was adopted, and the report put an end to the difficulty. . english composition.--the great prevailing fault of writers in this country is an affectation of eloquence. it is almost universally the fashion to aim, not at striking thoughts, simply and clearly expressed, but at splendid language, glowing imagery, and magnificent periods. it arises, perhaps, from the fact that public speaking is the almost universal object of ambition, and, consequently, both at school and at college, nothing is thought of but oratory. vain attempts at oratory result, in nine cases out of ten, in grandiloquence and empty verbiage--common thoughts expressed in pompous periods. the teacher should guard against this, and assign to children such subjects as are within the field of childish observation. a little skill on his part will soon determine the question which kind of writing shall prevail in his school. the following specimens, both written with some skill, will illustrate the two kinds of writing alluded to. both were written by pupils of the same age, twelve; one a boy, the other a girl. the subjects were assigned by the teacher. i need not say that the following was the writer's first attempt at composition, and that it is printed without alteration. the pains of a sailor's life. the joyful sailor embarks on board of his ship, the sails are spread to catch the playful gale, swift as an arrow he cuts the rolling wave. a few days thus sporting on the briny wave, when suddenly the sky is overspread with clouds, the rain descends in torrents, the sails are lowered, the gale begins, the vessel is carried with great velocity, and the shrouds, unable to support the tottering mast, gives way to the furious tempest; the vessel is drove among the rocks, is sprung aleak; the sailor works at the pumps till, faint and weary, is heard from below, six feet of water in the hold; the boats are got ready, but, before they are into them, the vessel is dashed against a reef of rocks; some, in despair, throw themselves into the sea; others get on the rocks without any clothes or provisions, and linger a few days, perhaps weeks or months, living on shell fish, or perhaps taken up by some ship; others get on pieces of the wreck, and perhaps be cast on some foreign country, where perhaps he may be taken by the natives, and sold into slavery where he never more returns. in regard to the following specimen, it should be stated that when the subject was assigned, the pupil was directed to see how precisely she could imitate the language and conversation which two little children really lost in the woods would use. while writing, therefore, her mind was in pursuit of the natural and the simple, not of the eloquent. two children lost in the woods. _emily_. look here! see how many berries i've got. i don't believe you've got so many. _charles_. yes, i'm sure i have. my basket's almost full; and if we hurry, we shall get ever so many before we go home. so pick away as fast as you can, emily. _emily_. there, mine is full. now we'll go and find some flowers for mother. you know somebody told us there were some red ones close to that rock. _charles_. well, so we will. we'll leave our baskets here, and come back and get them. _emily_. but if we can't find our way back, what shall we do? _charles_. poh! i can find the way back. i only want a quarter to seven years old, and i sha'n't lose myself, i know. _emily_. well, we've got flowers enough, and now i'm tired and want to go home. _charles. i_ don't; but, if you are tired, we'll go and find our baskets. _emily_. where do you think they are? we've been looking a great while for them. i know we are lost, for when we went after the flowers we only turned once, and coming back we have turned three times. _charles_. have we? well, never mind, i guess we shall find them. _emily_. i'm afraid we sha'n't. do let's run. _charles_. well, so do. oh, emily! here's a brook, and i am sure we didn't pass any brook going. _emily_. oh dear! we must be lost. hark! charles, didn't you hear that dreadful noise just now? wasn't it a bear? _charles_. poh! i should love to see a bear here. i guess, if he should come near me, i would give him one good slap that would make him feel pretty bad. i could kill him at the first hit. _emily_. i should like to see you taking hold of a bear. why, didn't you know bears were stronger than men? but only see how dark it grows; we sha'n't see ma to-night, i'm afraid. _charles_. so am i: do let's run some more. _emily_. oh, charles, do you believe we shall ever find the way out of this dreadful long wood? _charles_. let's scream, and see if somebody won't come. _emily_. well (screaming), ma! ma! _charles_ (screaming also). pa! pa! _emily_. oh dear! there's the sun setting. it will be dreadfully dark by-and-by, won't it? we have given enough for a specimen. the composition, though faulty in many respects, illustrates the point we had in view. . insincere confession.--an assistant in a school informed the principal that she had some difficulty in preserving order in a certain class composed of small children. the principal accordingly went into the class, and something like the following dialogue ensued: "your teacher informs me," said the principal, "that there is not perfect order in the class. now if you are satisfied that there has not been order, and wish to help me discover and correct the fault, we can do it very easily. if, on the other hand, you do not wish to co-operate with me, it will be a little more difficult for me to correct it, and i must take a different course. now i wish to know, at the outset, whether you do or do not wish to help me?" a faint "yes, sir," was murmured through the class. "i do not wish you to assist me unless you really and honestly desire it yourselves; and if you undertake to do it, you must do it honestly. the first thing which will be necessary will be an open and thorough exposure of all which has been wrong, and this, you know, will be unpleasant. but i will put the question to vote by asking how many are willing that i should know, entirely and fully, all that they have done in this class that has been wrong?" very nearly all the hands were raised at once, promptly, and the others were gradually brought up, though with more or less of hesitation. "are you willing not only to tell me yourselves what you have done, but also, in case any one has forgotten something which she has done, that others should tell me of it?" the hands were all raised. after obtaining thus from the class a distinct and universal expression of willingness that all the facts should be made known, the principal called upon all those who had any thing to state to raise their hands, and those who raised them had opportunity to say what they wished. a great number of very trifling incidents were mentioned, such as could not have produced any difficulty in the class, and, consequently, could not have been the real instances of disorder alluded to. or at least it was evident, if they were, that in the statement they must have been so palliated and softened that a really honest confession had not been made. this result might, in such a case, have been expected. such is human nature, that in nine cases out of ten, unless such a result had been particularly guarded against, it would have inevitably followed. not only will such a result follow in individual cases like this, but, unless the teacher watches and guards against it, it will grow into a habit. i mean, boys will get a sort of an idea that it is a fine thing to confess their faults, and by a show of humility and frankness will deceive their teacher, and perhaps themselves, by a sort of acknowledgment, which in fact exposes nothing of the guilt which the transgressor professes to expose. a great many cases occur where teachers are pleased with the confession of faults, and scholars perceive it, and the latter get into the habit of coming to the teacher when they have done something which they think may get them into difficulty, and make a sort of half confession, which, by bringing forward every palliating circumstance, and suppressing every thing of different character, keeps entirely out of view all the real guilt of the transgression. the criminal is praised by the teacher for the frankness and honesty of the confession, and his fault is freely forgiven. he goes away, therefore, well satisfied with himself, when, in fact, he has been only submitting to a little mortification, voluntarily, to avoid the danger of a greater; much in the same spirit with that which leads a man to receive the small-pox by inoculation, to avoid the danger of taking it in the natural way. the teacher who accustoms his pupils to confess their faults voluntarily ought to guard carefully against this danger. when such a case as the one just described occurs, it will afford a favorable opportunity of showing distinctly to pupils the difference between an honest and a hypocritical confession. in this instance the teacher proceeded thus: "now there is one more question which i wish you all to answer by your votes honestly. it is this. do you think that the real disorder which has been in this class--that is, the real cases which you referred to when you stated to me that you thought that the class was not in good order--have been now really exposed, so that i honestly and fully understand the case? how many suppose so?" not a single hand was raised. "how many of you think, and are willing to avow your opinion, that i have _not_ been fully informed of the case?" a large proportion held up their hands. "now it seems the class pretended to be willing that i should know all the affair. you pretended to be willing to tell me the whole, but when i call upon you for the information, instead of telling me honestly, you attempt to amuse me by little trifles, which in reality made no disturbance, and you omit the things which you know were the real objects of my inquiries. am i right in my supposition?" they were silent. after a moment's pause, one perhaps raised her hand, and began now to confess something which she had before concealed. the teacher, however, interrupted her by saying, "i do not wish to have the confession made now. i gave you all time to do that, and now i should rather not hear any more about the disorder. i gave an opportunity to have it acknowledged, but it was not honestly improved, and now i should rather not hear. i shall probably never know. "i wished to see whether this class would be honest--really honest, or whether they would have the insincerity to pretend to be confessing when they were not doing so honestly, so as to get the credit of being frank and sincere, when in reality they are not so. now am i not compelled to conclude that this latter is the case?" such an example will make a deep and lasting impression. it will show that the teacher is upon his guard; and there are very few so hardened in deception that they would not wish that they had been really sincere rather than rest under such an imputation. . court.--a pupil, quite young (says a teacher), came to me one day with a complaint that one of her companions had got her seat. there had been some changes in the seats by my permission, and probably, from some inconsistency in the promises which i had made, there were two claimants for the same desk. the complainant came to me, and appealed to my recollection of the circumstance. "i do not recollect any thing about it," said i. "why, mr. b.!" replied she, with astonishment. "no," said i; "you forget that i have, every day, arrangements, almost without number, of such a kind to make, and as soon as i have made one i immediately forget all about it." "why, don't you remember that you got me a new baize?" "no; i ordered a dozen new baizes at that time, but i do not remember who they were for." there was a pause; the disappointed complainant seemed not to know what to do. "i will tell you what to do. bring the case into court, and i will try it regularly." "why, mr. b., i do not like to do any thing like that about it; besides, i do not know how to write an indictment." "oh," i answered, "the scholars will like to have a good trial, and this will make a new sort of case. all our cases thus far have been for _offenses_--that is what they call criminal cases--and this will be only an examination of the conflicting claims of two individuals to the same property, and it will excite a good deal of interest. i think you had better bring it into court." she went slowly and thoughtfully to her seat, and presently returned with an indictment. "mr. b., is this right?" it was as follows: i accuse miss a.b. of coming to take away my seat--the one mr. b. gave me. witnesses, { c.d. { e.t. "why--yes--that will do; and yet it is not exactly right. you see this is what they call a _civil_ case." "i don't think it is very _civil_." "no, i don't mean it was civil to take your seat, but this is not a case where a person is prosecuted for having done any thing wrong." the plaintiff looked a little perplexed, as if she could not understand how it could be otherwise than wrong for a girl to usurp her seat. "i mean, you do not bring it into court as a case of wrong. you do not want her to be punished, do you?" "no, i only want her to give me up my seat; i don't want her to be punished." "well, then, you see that, although she may have done wrong to take your seat, it is not in that point of view that you bring it into court. it is a question about the right of property, and the lawyers call such cases _civil_ cases, to distinguish them from cases where persons are tried for the purpose of being punished for doing wrong. these last are called criminal cases." the aggrieved party still looked perplexed. "well, mr. b.," she continued, "what shall i do? how shall i write it? i can not say any thing about _civil_ in it, can i?" a form was given her which would be proper for the purpose, and the case was brought forward, and the evidence on both sides examined. the irritation of the quarrel was soon dissipated in the amusement of a semi-serious trial, and both parties good-humoredly acquiesced in the decision. . teachers' personal character.--much has been said within a few years, by writers on the subject of education in this country, on the desirableness of raising the business of teaching to the rank of a learned profession. there is but one way of doing this, and that is raising the personal characters and attainments of the teachers themselves. whether an employment is elevated or otherwise in public estimation, depends altogether on the associations, connected with it in the public mind, and these depend altogether on the characters of the individuals who are engaged in it. franklin, by the simple fact that he was a printer himself, has done more toward giving dignity and respectability to the employment of printing, than a hundred orations on the intrinsic excellence of the art. in fact, all mechanical employments have, within a few years, risen in rank in this country, not through the influence of efforts to impress the community directly with a sense of their importance, but simply because mechanics themselves have risen in intellectual and moral character. in the same manner, the employment of the teacher will be raised most effectually in the estimation of the public, not by the individual who writes the most eloquent oration on the intrinsic dignity of the art, but by the one who goes forward most successfully in the exercise of it, and who, by his general attainments and public character, stands out most fully to the view of the public as a well-informed, liberal-minded, and useful man. if this is so--and it can not well be denied--it furnishes to every teacher a strong motive to exertion for the improvement of his own personal character. but there is a stronger motive still in the results which flow directly to himself from such efforts. no man ought to engage in any business which, as mere business, will engross all his time and attention. the creator has bestowed upon every one a mind, upon the cultivation of which our rank among intelligent beings, our happiness, our moral and intellectual power, every thing valuable to us, depend; and after all the cultivation which we can bestow, in this life, upon this mysterious principle, it will still be in embryo. the progress which it is capable of making is entirely indefinite. if by ten years of cultivation we can secure a certain degree of knowledge and power, by ten more we can double, or more than double it, and every succeeding year of effort is attended with equal success. there is no point of attainment where we must stop, or beyond which effort will bring in a less valuable return. look at that teacher, and consider for a moment his condition. he began to teach when he was twenty years of age, and now he is forty. between the ages of fifteen and twenty he made a vigorous effort to acquire such an education as would fit him for these duties. he succeeded, and by these efforts he raised himself from being a mere laborer, receiving for his daily toil a mere daily subsistence, to the respectability and the comforts of an intellectual pursuit. but this change once produced, he stops short in his progress. once seated in his desk, he is satisfied, and for twenty years he has been going through the same routine, without any effort to advance or to improve. he does not reflect that the same efforts, which so essentially altered his condition and prospects at twenty, would have carried him forward to higher and higher sources of influence and enjoyment as long as he should continue them. his efforts ceased when he obtained a situation as teacher at fifty dollars a month, and, though twenty years have glided away, he is now exactly what he was then. there is probably no employment whatever which affords so favorable an opportunity for personal improvement--for steady intellectual and moral progress, as that of teaching. there are two reasons for this: first, there is time for it. with an ordinary degree of health and strength, the mind can be vigorously employed at least ten hours a day. as much as this is required of students in many literary institutions. in fact, ten hours to study, seven to sleep, and seven to food, exercise, and recreation, is perhaps as good an arrangement as can be made; at any rate, very few persons will suppose that such a plan allows too little under the latter head. now six hours is as much as is expected of a teacher under ordinary circumstances, and it is as much as ought ever to be bestowed; for, though he may labor four hours out of school in some new field, his health and spirits will soon sink under the burden, if, after his weary labors during the day in school, he gives up his evenings to the same perplexities and cares. and it is not necessary. no one who knows any thing of the nature of the human mind, and who will reflect a moment on the subject, can doubt that a man can make a better school by expending six hours labor upon it with alacrity and ardor, than he can by driving himself on to ten. every teacher, therefore, who is commencing his work, should begin with the firm determination of devoting only six hours daily to the pursuit. make as good a school, and accomplish as much for it as you can in six hours, and let the rest go. when you come from your school-room at night, leave all your perplexities and cares behind you. no matter what unfinished business or unsettled difficulties remain, dismiss them till another sun shall rise, and the hour of duty for another day shall come. carry no school-work home with you, and do not even talk of your school-work at home. you will then get refreshment and rest. your mind, during the evening, will be in a different world from that in which you have moved during the day. at first this will be difficult. it will be hard for you, unless your mind is uncommonly well disciplined, to dismiss all your cares; and you will think, each evening, that some peculiar emergency demands your attention _just at that time,_ and that as soon as you have passed the crisis you will confine yourself to what you admit are generally reasonable limits; but if you once allow school, with its perplexities and cares, to get possession of the rest of the day, it will keep possession. it will intrude itself into all your waking thoughts, and trouble you in your dreams. you will lose all command of your powers, and, besides cutting off from yourself all hope of general intellectual progress, you will, in fact, destroy your success as a teacher. exhaustion, weariness, and anxiety will be your continual portion, and in such a state no business can be successfully prosecuted. there need be no fear that employers will be dissatisfied if the teacher acts upon this principle. if he is faithful, and enters with all his heart into the discharge of his duties during six hours, there will be something in the ardor, and alacrity, and spirit with which his duties will be performed which parents and scholars will both be very glad to receive in exchange for the languid, and dull, and heartless toil in which the other method must sooner or later result. * * * * * if the teacher, then, will confine himself to such a portion of time as is, in fact, all he can advantageously employ, there will be much left which can be devoted to his own private employment--more than is usual in the other avocations of life. in most of these other avocations there is not the same necessity for limiting the hours which a man may devote to his business. a merchant, for example, may be employed nearly all the day at his counting-room, and so may a mechanic. a physician may spend all his waking hours in visiting patients, and feel little more than healthy fatigue. the reason is, that in all these employments, and, in fact, in most of the employments of life, there is so much to diversify, so many little incidents constantly occurring to animate and relieve, and so much bodily exercise, which alternates with and suspends the fatigues of the mind, that the labors may be much longer continued, and with less cessation, and yet the health not suffer. but the teacher, while engaged in his work, has his mind continually on the stretch. there is little relief, little respite, and he is almost entirely deprived of bodily exercise. he must, consequently, limit his hours of attending to his business, or his health will soon sink under labors which providence never intended the human mind to bear. there is another circumstance which facilitates the progress of the teacher. it is a fact that all this general progress has a direct and immediate bearing upon his pursuits. a lawyer may read in an evening an interesting book of travels, and find nothing to help him with his case, the next day, in court; but almost every fact which the teacher thus learns will come _at once into use_ in some of his recitations at school. we do not mean to imply by this that the members of the legal profession have not need of a great variety and extent of knowledge; they doubtless have. it is simply in the _directness_ and _certainty_ with which the teacher's knowledge may be applied to his purpose that the business of teaching has the advantage over every other pursuit. this fact, now, has a very important influence in encouraging and leading forward the teacher to make constant intellectual progress, for every step brings at once a direct reward. . the chestnut burr.--_a story for school-boys._--one fine saturday afternoon, in the fall of the year, the master was taking a walk in the woods, and he came to a place where a number of boys were gathering chestnuts. one of the boys was sitting upon a bank trying to open some chestnut burrs which he had knocked off from the tree. the burrs were green, and he was attempting to open them by pounding them with a stone. [illustration] he was a very impatient boy, and was scolding in a loud, angry, tone against the burrs. he did not see, he said, what in the world chestnuts were made to grow so for. they ought to grow right out in the open air, like apples, and not have such vile porcupine skins on them, just to plague the boys. so saying, he struck with all his might a fine large burr, crushed it to pieces, and then jumped up, using at the same time profane and wicked words. as soon as he turned round he saw the master standing very near him. he felt very much ashamed and afraid, and hung down his head. "roger," said the master (for this boy's name was roger), "can you get me a chestnut burr?" roger looked up for a moment to see whether the master was in earnest, and then began to look around for a burr. a boy who was standing near the tree, with a red cap full of burrs in his hand, held out one of them. roger took the burr and handed it to the master, who quietly put it into his pocket, and walked away without saying a word. as soon as he was gone, the boy with the red cap said to roger, "i expected that the master would have given you a good scolding for talking so." "the master never scolds," said another boy, who was sitting on a log pretty near, with a green satchel in his hand, "but you see if he does not remember it." roger looked as if he did not know what to think about it. "i wish," said he, "i knew what he is going to do with that burr." that afternoon, when the lessons had been all recited, and it was about time to dismiss the school, the boys put away their books, and the master read a few verses in the bible, and then offered a prayer, in which he asked god to forgive all the sins which any of them had committed that day, and to take care of them during the night. after this he asked the boys all to sit down. he then took his handkerchief out of his pocket and laid it on the desk, and afterward he put his hand into his pocket again, and took out the chestnut burr, and all the boys looked at it. "boys," said he, "do you know what this is?" one of the boys in the back seat said, in a half whisper, "it is nothing but a chestnut burr." "lucy," said the master to a bright-eyed little girl near him, "what is this?" "it is a chestnut burr, sir," said she. "do you know what it is for?" "i suppose there are chestnuts in it." "but what is this rough, prickly covering for?" lucy did not know. "does any body here know?" said the master. one of the boys said that he supposed it was to hold the chestnuts together, and keep them up on the tree. "but i heard a boy say," replied the master, "that they ought not to be made to grow so. the nut itself, he thought, ought to hang alone on the branches, without any prickly covering, just as apples do." "but the nuts themselves have no stems to be fastened by," answered the same boy. "that is true; but i suppose this boy thought that god could have made them grow with stems, and that this would have been better than to have them in burrs." after a little pause the master said that he would explain to them what the chestnut burr was for, and wished them all to listen attentively. "how much of the chestnut is good to eat, william?" asked he, looking at a boy before him. "only the meat." "how long does it take the meat to grow?" "all summer, i suppose, it is growing." "yes; it begins early in the summer, and gradually swells and grows until it has become of full size, and is ripe, in the fall. now suppose there was a tree out here near the school-house, and the chestnut meats should grow upon it without any shell or covering; suppose, too, that they should taste like good ripe chestnuts at first, when they were very small. do you think they would be safe?" william said "no; the boys would pick and eat them before they had time to grow." "well, what harm would there be in that? would it not be as well to have the chestnuts early in the summer as to have them in the fall?" william hesitated. another boy who sat next to him said, "there would not be so much meat in the chestnuts if they were eaten before they had time to grow." "right," said the master; "but would not the boys know this, and so all agree to let the little chestnuts stay, and not eat them while they were small?" william said he thought they would not. if the chestnuts were good, he was afraid they would pick them off and eat them if they were small. all the rest of the boys in the school thought so too. "here, then," said the master, "is one reason for having prickles around the chestnuts when they are small. but then it is not necessary to have all chestnuts guarded from boys in this way; a great many of the trees are in the woods, which the boys do not see; what good do the burrs do in these trees?" the boys hesitated. presently the boy who had the green satchel under the tree with roger, who was sitting in one corner of the room, said, "i should think they would keep the squirrels from eating them. "and besides," continued he, after thinking a moment, "i should suppose, if the meat of the chestnut had no covering, the rain would wet it and make it rot, or the sun might dry and wither it." "yes," said the master, "these are very good reasons why the nut should be carefully guarded. first the meats are packed away in a hard brown shell, which the water can not get through; this keeps it dry, and away from dust and other things which might injure it. then several nuts thus protected grow closely together inside this green, prickly covering, which spreads over them and guards them from the larger animals and the boys. where the chestnut gets its full growth and is ripe, this covering, you know, splits open, and the nuts drop out, and then any body can get them and eat them." the boys were then all satisfied that it was better that chestnuts should grow in burrs. "but why," asked one of the boys, "do not apples grow so?" "can any body answer that question?" asked the master. the boy with the green satchel said that apples had a smooth, tight skin, which kept out the wet, but he did not see how they were guarded from animals. the master said it was by their taste. "they are hard and sour before they are full grown, and so the taste is not pleasant, and nobody wishes to eat them, except sometimes a few foolish boys, and these are punished by being made sick. when the apples are full grown, they change from sour to sweet, and become mellow--then they can be eaten. can you tell me of any other fruits which are preserved in this way?" one boy answered, "strawberries and blackberries;" and another said, "peaches and pears." another boy asked why the peach-stone was not outside the peach, so as to keep it from being eaten; but the master said that he would explain this another time. then he dismissed the scholars, after asking roger to wait until the rest had gone, as he wished to see him alone. several of the articles which follow were communicated for this work by different teachers, at the request of the author. . the series of writing lessons.--very many pupils soon become weary of the dull and monotonous business of writing, unless some plans are devised to give interest and variety to the exercise; and, on this account, this branch of education, in which improvement may be most rapid, is often the last and most tedious to be acquired. a teacher, by adopting the following plan, succeeded in awakening a great degree of interest on the subject, and, consequently, of promoting rapid improvement. the plan was this: he prepared, on a large sheet of paper, a series of lessons in coarse-hand, beginning with straight lines, and proceeding to the elementary parts of the various letters, and finally to the letters themselves. this paper was posted up in a part of the room accessible to all. the writing-books were made of three sheets of foolscap paper, folded into a convenient size, making twenty-four pages in the book. the books were to be ruled by the pupil, for it was thought important that each should learn this art. every pupil in school, then, being furnished with one of these writing-books, was required to commence this series, and to practice each lesson until he could write it well; then, and not till then, he was permitted to pass to the next. a few brief directions were given under each lesson on the large sheet. for example, under the line of straight marks, which constituted the first lesson, was written as follows: _straight, equidistant, parallel, smooth, well-terminated._ these directions were to call the attention of the pupil to the excellences which he must aim at, and when he supposed he had secured them, his book was to be presented to the teacher for examination. if approved, the word _passed_, or, afterward, simply _p_., was written under the line, and he could then proceed to the next lesson. other requisites were necessary, besides the correct formation of the letters, to enable one to pass; for example, the page must not be soiled or blotted, no paper must be wasted, and, in no case, a leaf torn out. as soon as _one line_ was written in the manner required, the scholar was allowed to pass. in a majority of cases, however, not less than a page would be practiced, and in many instances a sheet would be covered, before one line could be produced which would be approved. one peculiar excellency of this method was, that although the whole school were working under a regular and systematic plan, individuals could go on independently; that is, the progress of no scholar was retarded by that of his companion; the one more advanced might easily pass the earlier lessons in a few days, while the others would require weeks of practice to acquire the same degree of skill. during the writing-hour the scholars would practice each at the lesson where he left off before, and at a particular time each day the books were brought from the regular place of deposit and laid before the teacher for examination. without some arrangement for an examination of all the books together, the teacher would be liable to interruption at any time from individual questions and requests, which would consume much time, and benefit only a few. when a page of writing could not pass, a brief remark, calling the attention of the pupil to the faults which prevented it, was sometimes made in pencil at the bottom of the page. in other cases, the fault was of such a character as to require full and minute oral directions to the pupil. at last, to facilitate the criticism of the writing, a set of arbitrary marks, indicative of the various faults, was devised and applied, as occasion might require, to the writing-books, by means of red ink. these marks, which were very simple in their character, were easily remembered, for there was generally some connection between the sign and the thing signified. for example, the mark denoting that letters were too short was simply lengthening them in red ink; a faulty curve was denoted by making a new curve over the old one, &c. the following are the principal criticisms and directions for which marks were contrived: strokes rough. too tall or too short. curve wrong. stems not straight. bad termination careless work. too slanting, and the reverse. paper wasted. too broad, and the reverse. almost well enough to pass. not parallel. bring your book to the teacher. form of the letter bad. former fault not corrected. large stroke made too fine, and the reverse. a catalogue of these marks, with an explanation, was made out and placed where it was accessible to all, and by means of them the books could be very easily and rapidly, but thoroughly criticised. after the plan had gone on for some time, and its operation was fully understood, the teacher gave up the business of examining the books into the hands of a committee, appointed by him from among the older and more advanced pupils. that the committee might be unbiased in their judgment, they were required to examine and decide upon the books without knowing the names of the writers. each scholar was, indeed, required to place her name on the right hand upper corner of every page of her writing-book, for the convenience of the distributors; but this corner was turned down when the book was brought in, that it might not be seen by the committee. this committee was invested with plenary powers, and there was no appeal from their decision. in case they exercised their authority in an improper way, or failed on any account to give satisfaction, they were liable to impeachment, but while they continued in office they were to be strictly obeyed. this plan went on successfully for three months, and with very little diminution of interest. the whole school went regularly through the lessons in coarse-hand, and afterward through a similar series in fine-hand, and improvement in this branch was thought to be greater than at any former period in the same length of time. the same principle of arranging the several steps of an art or a study into a series of lessons, and requiring the pupil to pass regularly from one to the other, might easily be applied to other studies, and would afford an agreeable variety. . the correspondence.--a master of a district school was walking through the room with a large rule in his hands, and as he came up behind two small boys, he observed that they were playing with some papers. he struck them once or twice, though not very severely, on the head with the rule which he had in his hand. tears started from the eyes of one. they were called forth by a mingled feeling of grief, mortification, and pain. the other, who was of "sterner stuff," looked steadily into the master's face, and when his back was turned, shook his fist at him and laughed in defiance. another teacher, seeing a similar case, did nothing. the boys, when they saw him, hastily gathered up their playthings and put them away. an hour or two after, a little boy, who sat near the master, brought them a note addressed to them both. they opened it, and read as follows: "to edward and john,--i observed, when i passed you to-day, from your concerned looks, and your hurried manner of putting something into your desk, that you were doing something that you knew was wrong. when you attempt to do any thing whatever which conscience tells you is wrong, you only make yourself uneasy and anxious while you do it, and then you are forced to resort to concealment and deception when you see me coming. you would be a great deal happier if you would always be doing your duty, and then you would never be afraid. your affectionate teacher,----." as the teacher was arranging his papers in his desk at the close of school, he found a small piece of paper neatly folded up in the form of a note, and addressed to him. he read as follows: "dear teacher,--we are very much obliged to you for writing us a note. we were making a paper box. we know it was wrong, and are determined not to do so any more. we hope you will forgive us. "your pupils, edward, john." which of these teachers understood human nature best? . weekly reports.--the plan described by the following article, which was furnished by a teacher for insertion here, was originally adopted, so far as i know, in a school on the kennebec. i have adopted it with great advantage. a teacher had one day been speaking to her scholars of certain cases of slight disorder in the school, which, she remarked, had been gradually creeping in, and which, as she thought, it devolved upon the scholars, by systematic efforts, to repress. she enumerated instances of disorder in the arrangement of the rooms, leaving the benches out of their places, throwing waste papers upon the floor, having the desk in disorder inside, spilling water upon the entry floor, irregular deportment, such as too loud talking or laughing in recess, or in the intermission at noon, or when coming to school, and making unnecessary noise in going to or returning from recitations. "i have a plan to propose," said the teacher, "which i think may be the pleasantest way of promoting a reform in things of this kind. it is this. let several of your number be chosen a committee to prepare statedly--perhaps as often as once a week--a written report of the state of the school. the report might be read before the school at the close of each week. the committee might consist, in the whole, of seven or eight, or even of eleven or twelve individuals, who should take the whole business into their hands. this committee might appoint individuals of their number to write in turn each week. by this arrangement, it would not be known to the school generally who are the writers of any particular report, if the individuals wish to be anonymous. two individuals might be appointed at the beginning of the week, who should feel it their business to observe particularly the course of things from day to day with reference to the report. individuals not members of the committee can render assistance by any suggestions they may present to this committee. these should, however, generally be made in writing. "subjects for such a report will be found to suggest themselves very abundantly, though you may not perhaps think so at first. the committee may be empowered not only to state the particulars in which things are going wrong, but the methods by which they may be made right. let them present us with any suggestions they please. if we do not like them, we are not obliged to adopt them. for instance, it is generally the case, whenever a recitation is attended in the corner yonder, that an end of one of the benches is put against the door, so as to occasion a serious interruption to the exercises when a person wishes to come in or go out. it would come within the province of the committee to attend to such a case as this, that is, to bring it up in the report. the remedy in such a case is a very simple one. suppose, however, that instead of the _simple_ remedy, our committee should propose that the classes reciting in the said corner should be dissolved and the studies abolished? we should know the proposal was an absurd one, but then it would do no hurt; we should have only to reject it. "again, besides our faults, let our committee notice the respects in which we are doing particularly well, that we may be encouraged to go on doing well, or even to do better. if they think, for example, that we are deserving of credit for the neatness with which books are kept--for their freedom from blots, or scribblings, or dog's-ears, by which school-books are so commonly defaced, let them tell us so. and the same of any other excellence." with the plan as thus presented, the scholars were very much pleased. it was proposed by one individual that such a committee should be appointed immediately, and a report prepared for the ensuing week. this was done. the committee were chosen by ballot. the following may be taken as a specimen of their reports: weekly report. "the committee appointed to write the weekly report have noticed several things which they think wrong. in the first place, there have been a greater number of tardy scholars during the past week than usual. much of this tardiness, we suppose, is owing to the interest felt in building the bower; but we think this business ought to be attended to only in play-hours. if only one or two come in late when we are reading in the morning, or after we have composed ourselves to study at the close of the recess, every scholar must look up from her book--we do not say they ought to do so, but only that they will do so. however, we anticipate an improvement in this respect, as we know 'a word to the wise is sufficient.' "in the two back rows we are sorry to say that we have noticed whispering. we know that this fact will very much distress our teacher, as she expects assistance, and not trouble, from our older scholars. it is not our business to reprove any one's misconduct, but it is our duty to mention it, however disagreeable it may be. we think the younger scholars, during the past week, have much improved in this respect. only three cases of whispering among them have occurred to our knowledge. "we remember some remarks made a few weeks ago by our teacher on the practice of prompting each other in the classes. we wish she would repeat them, for we fear that, by some, they are forgotten. in the class in geography, particularly in the questions on the map, we have noticed sly whispers, which, we suppose, were the hints of some kind friend designed to refresh the memory of her less attentive companion. we propose that the following question be now put to vote. shall the practice of prompting in the classes be any longer continued? "we would propose that we have a composition exercise _this_ week similar to the one on thursday last. it was very interesting, and we think all would be willing to try their thinking powers once more. we would propose, also, that the readers of the compositions should sit near the centre of the room, as last week many fine sentences escaped the ears of those seated in the remote corners. "we were requested by a very public-spirited individual to mention once more the want of three nails, for bonnets, in the entry. also, to say that the air from the broken pane of glass on the east side of the room is very unpleasant to those who sit near. "proposed that the girls who exhibited so much taste and ingenuity in the arrangement of the festoons of evergreen, and tumblers of flowers around the teacher's desk, be now requested to remove the faded roses and drooping violets. we have gazed on these sad emblems long enough. "finally, proposed that greater care be taken by those who stay at noon to place their dinner-baskets in proper places. the contents of more than one were partly strewed upon the entry floor this morning." if such a measure as this is adopted, it should not be continued uninterrupted for a very long time. every thing of this sort should be occasionally changed, or it sooner or later becomes only a form. . the shopping exercise.--i have often, when going a shopping, found difficulty and trouble in making change. i could never calculate very readily, and in the hurry and perplexity of the moment i was always making mistakes. i have heard others often make the same complaint, and i resolved to try the experiment of regularly teaching children to make change. i had a bright little class in arithmetic, the members of which were always ready to engage with interest in any thing new, and to them i proposed my plan. it was to be called the shopping exercise. i first requested each individual to write something upon her slate which she would like to buy, if she was going a shopping, stating the quantity she wished and the price of it. to make the first lesson as simple as possible, i requested no one to go above ten, either in the quantity or price. when all were ready, i called upon some to read what she had written. her next neighbor was then requested to tell us how much the purchase would amount to. then the first one named a bill, which she supposed to be offered in payment, and the second showed what change was needed. a short specimen of the exercise will probably make it clearer than mere description. _mary_. eight ounces of candy at seven cents. _susan_. fifty-six cents. _mary_. one dollar. _susan_. forty-four cents. * * * * * _susan_. nine yards of lace at eight cents. _anna_. seventy-two cents. _susan_. two dollars. _anna_. one dollar and twenty-eight cents. * * * * * _anna_. three pieces of tape at five cents. _jane_. fifteen cents. _anna_. three dollars. _jane_. eighty-five cents. _several voices_. wrong. _jane_. two dollars and eighty-five cents. * * * * * _jane_. six pictures at eight cents. _sarah_. forty-two cents. _several voices_. wrong. _sarah_. forty-eight cents. _jane_. one dollar. _sarah_. sixty-two cents. _several voices_. wrong. _sarah_. fifty-two cents. * * * * * it will be perceived that the same individual who names the article and the price names also the bill which she would give in payment; and the one who sits next her, who calculated the amount, calculated also the change to be returned. she then proposed _her_ example to the one next in the line, with whom the same course was pursued, and thus it passed down the class. the exercise went on for some time in this way, till the pupils had become so familiar with it that i thought it best to allow them to take higher numbers. they were always interested in it, and made great improvement in a short time, and i myself derived great advantage from listening to them. there is one more circumstance i will add which may contribute to the interest of this account. while the class were confined, in what they purchased, to the number ten, they were sometimes inclined to turn the exercise into a frolic. the variety of articles which they could find costing less than ten cents was so small, that, for the sake of getting something new, they would propose examples really ludicrous, such as these: three meeting-houses at two cents; four pianos at nine cents. but i soon found that if i allowed this at all, their attention was diverted from the main object, and occupied in seeking the most diverting and curious examples. . artifices in recitations.--the teacher of a small newly-established school had all of his scholars classed together in some of their studies. at recitations he usually sat in the middle of the room, while the scholars occupied the usual places at their desks, which were arranged around the sides. in the recitation in rhetoric, the teacher, after a time, observed that one or two of the class seldom answered appropriately the questions which came to them, but yet were always ready with some kind of answer--generally an exact quotation of the words of the book. upon noticing these individuals more particularly, he was convinced that their books were open before them in some concealed situation. another practice not uncommon in the class was that of _prompting_ each other, either by whispers or writing. the teacher took no notice publicly of these practices for some time, until, at the close of an uncommonly good recitation, he remarked, "i think we have had a fine recitation to-day. it is one of the most agreeable things that i ever do to hear a lesson that is learned as well as this. do you think it would be possible for us to have as good an exercise every day?" "yes, sir," answered several, faintly. "do you think it would be reasonable for me to expect of every member of the class that she should always be able to recite all her lessons without ever missing a single question?" "no, sir," answered all. "i do not expect it," said the teacher. "all i wish is that each of you should be faithful in your efforts to prepare your lessons. i wish you to study from a sense of duty, and for the sake of your own improvement. you know i do not punish you for failures. i have no going up or down, no system of marking. your only reward, when you have made faithful preparation for a recitation, is the feeling of satisfaction which you will always experience; and when you have been negligent, your only punishment is a sort of uneasy feeling of self-reproach. i do not expect you all to be invariably prepared with every question of your lessons. sometimes you will be unavoidably prevented from studying them, and at other times, when you have studied them very carefully, you may have forgotten, or you may fail from some misapprehension of the meaning in some cases. do not, in such a case, feel troubled because you may not have appeared as well as some individual who has not been half as faithful as yourself. if you have done your duty, that is enough. on the other hand, you ought to feel no better satisfied with yourselves when your lesson has not been studied well, because you may have happened to know the parts which came to you. have i _done_ well? should always be the question, not, have i managed to _appear_ well? "i will say a word here," continued the teacher, "upon a practice which i have known to be very common in some schools, and which i have been sorry to notice occasionally in this. i mean that of prompting, or helping each other along in some way at recitations. now where a severe punishment is the consequence of a failure, there might seem to be some reasonableness in helping your companions out of difficulty, though even then such tricks are departures from honorable dealing. but, especially where there is no purpose to be served but that of appearing to know more than you do, it certainly must be considered a very mean kind of artifice. i think i have sometimes observed an individual to be prompted where evidently the assistance was not desired, and even where it was not needed. to whisper to an individual the answer to a question is sometimes to pay her rather a poor compliment at least, for it is the same as saying 'i am a better scholar than you are; let me help you along a little.' "let us then, hereafter, have only fair, open, honest dealings with each other; no attempts to appear to advantage by little artful manoeuvring; no prompting; no peeping into books. be faithful and conscientious, and then banish anxiety for your success. do you not think you will find this the best course?" "yes, sir," answered every scholar. "are you willing to pledge yourselves to adopt it?" "yes, sir." "those who are may raise their hands," said the teacher. every hand was raised; and the pledge, there was evidence to believe, was honorably sustained. . keeping resolutions.--the following are notes of a familiar lecture on this subject, given by a teacher at some general exercise in the school. the practice of thus reducing to writing what the teacher may say on such subjects will be attended with excellent effects. this is a subject upon which young persons find much difficulty. the question is asked a thousand times, "how shall i ever learn to keep my resolutions?" perhaps the great cause of your failures is this. you are not sufficiently _definite_ in forming your purposes. you will resolve to do a thing without knowing with certainty whether it is even possible to do it. again, you make resolutions which are to run on indefinitely, so that, of course, they can never be fully kept. for instance, one of you will resolve to _rise earlier in the morning._ you fix upon no definite hour, on any definite number of mornings, only you are going to "_rise earlier_." morning comes, and finds you sleepy and disinclined to rise. you remember your resolution of rising earlier. "but then it is _very_ early," you say. you resolved to rise earlier, but you didn't resolve to rise just then. and this, it may be, is the last of your resolution. or perhaps you are, for a few mornings, a little earlier; but then, at the end of a week or fortnight, you do not know exactly whether your resolution has been broken or kept, for you had not decided whether to rise earlier for ten days or for ten years. in the same vague and general manner, a person will resolve to be _more studious_ or more diligent. in the case of an individual of a mature and well-disciplined mind, of acquired firmness of character, such a resolution might have effect. the individual will really devote more time and attention to his pursuits. but for one of you to make such a resolution would do no sort of good. it would only be a source of trouble and disquiet. you perceive there is nothing definite--nothing fixed about it. you have not decided what amount of additional time or attention to give to your studies, or when you will begin, or when you will end. there is no one time when you will feel that you are breaking your resolution, because there were no particular times when you were to study more. you waste one opportunity and another, and then, with a feeling of discouragement and self-reproach, conclude to abandon your resolution. "oh! it does no good to make resolutions," you say; "i never shall keep them." now, if you would have the business of making resolutions a pleasant and interesting instead of a discouraging, disquieting one, you must proceed in a different manner. be definite and distinct in your plan; decide exactly what you will do, and how you will do it--when you will begin, and when you will end. instead of resolving to "rise earlier," resolve to rise at the ringing of the sunrise bells, or at some other definite time. resolve to try this, as an experiment, for one morning, or for one week, or fortnight. decide positively, if you decide at all, and then rise when the time comes, sleepy or not sleepy. do not stop to repent of your resolution, or to consider the wisdom or folly of it, when the time for acting under it has once arrived. in all cases, little and great, make this a principle--to consider well before you begin to act, but after you have begun to act, never stop to consider. resolve as deliberately as you please, but be sure to keep your resolution, whether a wise one or an unwise one, after it is once made. never allow yourself to reconsider the question of getting up, after the morning has come, except it be for some unforeseen circumstance. get up for that time, and be more careful how you make resolutions again. . topics.--the plan of the topic exercise, as we called it, is this. six or seven topics are given out, information upon which is to be obtained from any source, and communicated verbally before the whole school, or sometimes before a class formed for this purpose the next day. the subjects are proposed both by teacher and scholars, and if approved, adopted. the exercise is intended to be voluntary, but ought to be managed in a way sufficiently interesting to induce all to join. at the commencement of the exercise the teacher calls upon all who have any information in regard to the topic assigned--suppose, for example, it is _alabaster_--to rise. perhaps twenty individuals out of forty rise. the teacher may perhaps say to those in their seats, "do you not know any thing of this subject? have you neither seen nor heard of alabaster, and had no means of ascertaining any thing in regard to it? if you have, you ought to rise. it is not necessary that you should state a fact altogether new and unheard-of, but if you tell me its color, or some of the uses to which it is applied, you will be complying with my request." after these remarks, perhaps a few more rise, and possibly the whole school. individuals are then called upon at random, each to state only one particular in regard to the topic in question. this arrangement is made so as to give all an opportunity to speak. if any scholar, after having mentioned one fact, has something still farther to communicate, she remains standing till called upon again. as soon as an individual has exhausted her stock of information, or if the facts that she intended to mention are stated by another, she takes her seat. the topics at first most usually selected are the common objects by which we are surrounded--for example, glass, iron, mahogany, and the like. the list will gradually extend itself, until it will embrace a large number of subjects. the object of this exercise is to induce pupils to seek for general information in an easy and pleasant manner, as by the perusal of books, newspapers, periodicals, and conversation with friends. it induces care and attention in reading, and discrimination in selecting the most useful and important facts from the mass of information. as individuals are called upon, also, to express their ideas _verbally_, they soon acquire by practice the power of expressing them with clearness and force, and communicating with ease and confidence the knowledge they possess. . music.--the girls of our school often amused themselves in recess by collecting into little groups for singing. as there seemed to be a sufficient power of voice, and a respectable number who were willing to join in the performance, it was proposed one day that singing should be introduced as a part of the devotional exercises of the school. the first attempt nearly resulted in a failure; only a few trembling voices succeeded in singing old hundred to the words "be thou," etc. on the second day peterborough was sung with much greater confidence on the part of the increased number of singers. the experiment was tried with greater and greater success for several days, when the teacher proposed that a systematic plan should be formed, by which there might be singing regularly at the close of school. it was then proposed that a number of singing-books be obtained, and one of the scholars, who was well acquainted with common tunes, be appointed as chorister. her duty should be to decide what particular tune may be sung each day, inform the teacher of the metre of the hymn, and take the lead in the exercise. this plan, being approved of by the scholars, was adopted, and put into immediate execution. several brought copies of the sabbath school hymn-book, which they had in their possession, and the plan succeeded beyond all expectation. the greatest difficulty in the way was to get some one to lead. the chorister, however, was somewhat relieved from the embarrassment which she would naturally feel in making a beginning by the appointment of one or two individuals with herself, who were to act as her assistants. these constituted the _leading_ committee, or, as it was afterward termed, _singing committee_. singing now became a regular and interesting exercise of the school, and the committee succeeded in managing the business themselves. . tabu.--an article was one day read in a school relating to the "tabu" of the sandwich islanders. tabu is a term with them which signifies consecrated--not to be touched--to be let alone--not to be violated. thus, according to their religious observances, a certain day will be proclaimed _tabu_; that is, one upon which there is to be no work or no going out. a few days after this article was read, the scholars observed one morning a flower stuck up in a conspicuous place against the wall, with the word tabu in large characters above it. this excited considerable curiosity. the teacher informed them, in explanation, that the flower was a very rare and beautiful specimen, brought by one of the scholars, which he wished all to examine. "you would naturally feel a disposition to examine it by the touch," said he, "but you will all see that, by the time it was touched by sixty individuals, it would be likely to be injured, if not destroyed. so i concluded to label it _tabu_. and it has occurred to me that this will be a convenient mode of apprising you generally that any article must not be handled. you know we sometimes have some apparatus exposed, which would be liable to injury from disturbance, where there are so many persons to touch it. i shall, in such a case, just mention that an article is tabu, and you will understand that it is not only not to be _injured_, but not even _touched_." a little delicate management of this sort will often have more influence over young persons than the most vehement scolding, or the most watchful and jealous precautions. the tabu was always most scrupulously regarded, after this, whenever employed. . mental analysis.--scene, a class in arithmetic at recitation. the teacher gives them an example in addition, requesting them, when they have performed it, to rise. some finish it very soon, others are very slow in accomplishing the work. "i should like to ascertain," says the teacher, "how great is the difference of rapidity with which different members of the class work in addition. i will give you another example, and then notice by my watch the shortest and longest time required to do it." the result of the experiment was that some members of the class were two or three times as long in doing it as others. "perhaps you think," said the teacher, "that this difference is altogether owing to difference of skill; but it is not. it is mainly owing to the different methods adopted by various individuals. i am going to describe some of these, and, as i describe them, i wish you would notice them carefully, and tell me which you practice." there are, then, three modes of adding up a column of figures, which i shall describe. . i shall call the first _counting_. you take the first figure, and then add the next to it by counting up regularly. there are three distinct ways of doing this. (a.) "counting by your fingers." ("yes, sir.") "you take the first figure--suppose it is seven--and the one above it, eight. now you recollect that to add eight, you must count all the fingers of one hand, and all but two again. so you say 'seven--eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.'" "yes, sir, yes, sir," said the scholars. (b.) the next mode of counting is to do it mentally, without using your fingers at all; but, as it is necessary for you to have some plan to secure your adding the right number, you divide the units into sets of two each. thus you remember that eight consists of four twos, and you accordingly say, when adding eight to seven, 'seven; eight, nine; ten, eleven; twelve, thirteen,' &c. (c.) "the third mode is to add by threes in the same way. you recollect that eight consists of two threes and a two; so you say, 'seven; eight, nine, ten; eleven, twelve, thirteen; fourteen, fifteen.'" the teacher here stops to ascertain how many of the class are accustomed to add in either of these modes. it is a majority. . the next general method is _calculating_; that is, you do not unite one number to another by the dull and tedious method of applying the units, one by one, as in the ways described under the preceding head, but you come to a result more rapidly by some mode of calculating. these modes are several. (a.) "doubling a number, and then adding or subtracting, as the case may require. for instance, in the example already specified, in order to add seven and eight, you say, 'twice seven are fourteen, and one are fifteen'" ("yes, sir, yes, sir"); "or, 'twice eight are sixteen, and taking one off leaves fifteen." ("yes, sir.") (b.) another way of calculating is to skip about the column, adding those numbers which you can combine most easily, and then bringing in the rest as you best can. thus, if you see three eights in one column, you say, 'three times eight are twenty-four,' and then you try to bring in the other numbers. often, in such cases, you forget what you have added and what you have not, and get confused ("yes, sir"), or you omit something in your work, and consequently it is incorrect. (c.) if nines occur, you sometimes add ten, and then take off one, for it is very easy to add ten. (d.) another method of calculating, which is, however, not very common, is this: to take our old case, adding eight to seven, you take as much from the eight to add to the seven as will be sufficient to make ten, and then it will be easy to add the rest. thus you think in a minute that three from the eight will make the seven a ten, and then there will be five more to add, which will make fifteen. if the next number was seven, you would say five of it will make twenty, and then there will be two left, which will make twenty-two.' this mode, though it may seem more intricate than any of the others, is, in fact, more rapid than any of them, when one is a little accustomed to it. "these are the four principal modes of calculating which occur to me. pupils do not generally practice any of them exclusively, but occasionally resort to each, according to the circumstances of the particular case." the teacher here stopped to inquire how many of the class were accustomed to add by calculating in either of these ways or in any simpler ways. . "there is one more mode which i shall describe: it is by _memory_. before i explain this mode, i wish to ask you some questions, which i should like to have you answer as quick as you can. "how much is four times five? four _and_ five? "how much is seven times nine? seven _and_ nine? "eight times six? eight _and_ six? "nine times seven? nine _and_ seven?" after asking a few questions of this kind, it was perceived that the pupils could tell much more readily what was the result when the numbers were to be multiplied than when they were to be added. "the reason is," said the teacher, "because you committed the multiplication table to memory, and have not committed the addition table. now many persons have committed the addition table, so that it is perfectly familiar to them, and when they see any two numbers, the amount which is produced when they are added together comes to mind in an instant. adding in this way is the last of the three modes i was to describe. "now of these three methods the last is undoubtedly the best. if you once commit the addition table thoroughly, you have it fixed for life; whereas if you do not, you have to make the calculation over again every time, and thus lose a vast amount of labor. i have no doubt that there are some in this class who are in the habit of _counting_, who have ascertained that seven and eight, for instance, make fifteen, by counting up from seven to fifteen _hundreds of times_. now how much better it would be to spend a little time in fixing the fact in the mind once for all, and then, when you come to the case, seven and eight are--say at once 'fifteen,' instead of mumbling over and over again, hundreds of times, 'seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.' "the reason, then, that some of the class add so slowly, is not, probably, because they want skill and rapidity of execution, but because they work to a great disadvantage by working in the wrong way. i have often been surprised at the dexterity and speed with which some scholars can count with their fingers when adding, and yet they could not get through the sum very quick--at least they would have done it in half the time if the same effort had been made in traveling on a shorter road. we will therefore study the addition table now, in the class, before we go any farther." . tardiness.--when only a few scholars in a school are tardy, it may be their fault; but if a great many are so, it is the fault of the teacher or of the school. if a school is prosperous, and the children are going on well and happily in their studies, they will like their work in it; but we all come reluctantly to work which we are conscious we are not successfully performing. there may be two boys in a school, both good boys; one, may be going on well in his classes, while the other, from the concurrence of some accidental train of circumstances, may be behindhand in his work, or wrongly classed, or so situated in other respects that his school duties perplex and harass him day by day. now how different will be the feelings of these two boys in respect to coming to school. the one will be eager and prompt to reach his place and commence his duties, while the other will love much better to loiter in idleness and liberty in the open air. nor is he, under the circumstances of the case, to blame for this preference. there is no one, old or young, who likes or can like to do what he himself and all around him think that he does not do well. it is true the teacher can not rely wholly on the interest which his scholars take in their studies to make them punctual at school; but if he finds among them any very general disposition to be tardy, he ought to seek for the fault mainly in himself and not in them. the foregoing narratives and examples, it is hoped, may induce some of the readers of this book to keep journals of their own experiments, and of the incidents which may, from time to time, come under their notice, illustrating the principles of education, or simply the characteristics and tendencies of the youthful mind. the business of teaching will excite interest and afford pleasure just in proportion to the degree in which it is conducted by operations of mind upon mind, and the means of making it most fully so are careful practice, based upon and regulated by the results of careful observation. every teacher, then, should make observations and experiments upon mind a part of his daily duty, and nothing will more facilitate this than keeping a record of results. there can be no opportunity for studying human nature more favorable than the teacher enjoys. the materials are all before him; his very business, from day to day, brings him to act directly upon them; and the study of the powers and tendencies of the human mind is not only the most interesting and the noblest that can engage human attention, but every step of progress he makes in it imparts an interest and charm to what would otherwise be a weary toil. it at once relieves his labors, while it doubles their efficiency and success. chapter ix. the teacher's first day. [illustration] the teacher enters upon the duties of his office by a much more sudden transition than is common in the other avocations and employments of life. in ordinary cases, business comes at first by slow degrees, and the beginner is introduced to the labors and responsibilities of his employment in a very gradual manner. the young teacher, however, enters by a single step into the very midst of his labors. having, perhaps, never even heard a class recite before, he takes a short walk some winter morning, and suddenly finds himself instated at the desk, his fifty scholars around him, all looking him in the face, and waiting to be employed. every thing comes upon him at once. he can do nothing until the day and the hour for opening the school arrives--then he has every thing to do. under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the young teacher should look forward with unusual solicitude to his first day in school, and he desires, ordinarily, special instructions in respect to this occasion. some such special instructions we propose to give in this chapter. the experienced teacher may think some of them too minute and trivial. but he must remember that they are intended for the youngest beginner in the humblest school; and if he recalls to mind his own feverish solicitude on the morning when he went to take his first command in the district school, he will pardon the seeming minuteness of detail. . it will be well for the young teacher to take opportunity, between the time of his engaging his school and that of his commencing it, to acquire as much information in respect to it beforehand as possible, so as to be somewhat acquainted with the scene of his labors before entering upon it. ascertain the names and the characters of the principal families in the district, their ideas and wishes in respect to the government of the school, the kind of management adopted by one or two of the last teachers, the difficulties they fell into, the nature of the complaints made against them, if any, and the families with whom difficulty has usually arisen. this information must, of course, be obtained in private conversation; a good deal of it must be, from its very nature, highly confidential; but it is very important that the teacher should be possessed of it. he will necessarily become possessed of it by degrees in the course of his administration, when, however, it may be too late to be of any service to him. but, by judicious and proper efforts to acquire it beforehand, he will enter upon the discharge of his duties with great advantage. it is like a navigator's becoming acquainted beforehand with the nature and the dangers of the sea over which he is about to sail. such inquiries as these will, in ordinary cases, bring to the teacher's knowledge, in most districts in our country, some cases of peculiarly troublesome scholars, or unreasonable and complaining parents; and stories of their unjustifiable conduct on former occasions will come to him exaggerated by the jealousy of rival neighbors. there is danger that his resentment may be roused a little, and that his mind will assume a hostile attitude at once toward such individuals, so that he will enter upon his work rather with a desire to seek a collision with them, or, at least, with secret feelings of defiance toward them--feelings which will lead to that kind of unbending perpendicularity in his demeanor toward them which will almost inevitably lead to a collision. now this is wrong. there is, indeed, a point where firm resistance to unreasonable demands becomes a duty; but, as a general principle, it is most unquestionably true that it is the teacher's duty _to accommodate himself to the character and expectations of his employers_, not to face and brave them. those italicized words _may be_ understood to mean something which would be entirely wrong; but in the sense in which i mean to use them there can be no question that they indicate the proper path for one employed by others to do work _for them_ in all cases to pursue. if, therefore, the teacher finds by his inquiries into the state of his district that there are some peculiar difficulties and dangers there, let him not cherish a disposition to face and resist them, but to avoid them. let him go with an intention to soothe rather than to irritate feelings which have been wounded before, to comply with the wishes of all so far as he can, even if they are not entirely reasonable, and, while he endeavors to elevate the standard and correct the opinions prevailing among his employers by any means in his power, to aim at doing it gently, and in a tone and manner suitable to the relation he sustains--in a word, let him skillfully _avoid_ the dangers of his navigation, not obstinately run his ship against a rock on purpose on the ground that the rock has no business to be there. this is the spirit, then, with which these preliminary inquiries in regard to the patrons of the school ought to be made. we come now to a second point. . it will assist the young teacher very much in his first day's labors if he takes measures for seeing and conversing with some of the older or more intelligent scholars on the day or evening before he begins his school, with a view of obtaining from them some acquaintance with the internal arrangements and customs of the school. the object of this is to obtain the same kind of information with respect to the interior of the school that was recommended in respect to the district under the former head. he may call upon a few families, especially those which furnish a large number of scholars for the school, and make as many minute inquiries of them as he can respecting all the interior arrangements to which they have been accustomed, what reading-books and other text-books have been used, what are the principal classes in all the several departments of instruction, and what is the system of discipline, and of rewards and punishments, to which the school has been accustomed. if, in such conversations, the teacher should find a few intelligent and communicative scholars, he might learn a great deal about the past habits and condition of the school, which would be of great service to him. not, by any means, that he will adopt and continue these methods as a matter of course, but only that a knowledge of them will render him very important aid in marking out his own course. the more minute and full the information of this sort is which he thus obtains, the better. if practicable, it would be well to make out a catalogue of all the principal classes, with the names of those individuals belonging to them who will probably attend the new school, and the order in which they were usually called upon to read or recite. the conversation which would be necessary to accomplish this would of itself be of great service. it would bring the teacher into an acquaintance with several important families and groups of children under the most favorable circumstances. the parents would see and be pleased with the kind of interest they would see the teacher taking in his new duties. the children would be pleased to be able to render their new instructor some service, and would go to the school-room on the next morning with a feeling of acquaintance with him, and a predisposition to be pleased. and if by chance any family should be thus called upon that had heretofore been captious or complaining, or disposed to be jealous of the higher importance or influence of other families, that spirit would be entirely softened and subdued by such an interview with their new instructor at their own fireside on the evening preceding the commencement of his labors. the great object, however, which the teacher would have in view in such inquiries should be the value of the information itself. as to the use which he will make of it, we shall speak hereafter. . it is desirable that the young teacher should meet his scholars first in an unofficial capacity. for this purpose, repair to the school-room on the first day at an early hour, so as to see and become acquainted with the scholars as they come in one by one. the intercourse between teacher and pupil should be like that between parents and children, where the utmost freedom is united with the most perfect respect. the father who is most firm and decisive in his family government can mingle most freely in the conversation and sports of his children without any derogation of his authority, or diminution of the respect they owe. young teachers, however, are prone to forget this, and to imagine that they must assume an appearance of stern authority always, when in the presence of their scholars, if they wish to be respected or obeyed. this they call keeping up their dignity. accordingly, they wait, on the morning of their induction into office, until their new subjects are all assembled, and then walk in with an air of the highest dignity, and with the step of a king; and sometimes a formidable instrument of discipline is carried in the hand to heighten the impression. now there is no question that it is of great importance that scholars should have a high idea of the teacher's firmness and inflexible decision in maintaining his authority and repressing all disorder of every kind, but this impression should be created by their seeing how he _acts_ in the various emergencies which will spontaneously occur, and not by assuming airs of importance or dignity, feigned for effect. in other words, their respect for him should be based on _real traits_ of character as they see them brought out into natural action, and not on appearances assumed for the occasion. it seems to me, therefore, that it is best for the teacher first to meet his scholars with the air and tone of free and familiar intercourse, and he will find his opportunity more favorable for doing this if he goes early on the first morning of his labors, and converses freely with those whom he finds there, and with others as they come in. he may take an interest with them in all the little arrangements connected with the opening of the school--the building of the fire, the paths through the snow, the arrangements of seats; calling upon them for information or aid, asking their names, and, in a word, entering fully and freely into conversation with them, just as a parent, under similar circumstances, would do with his children. all the children thus addressed will be pleased with the gentleness and affability of the teacher. even a rough and ill-natured boy, who has perhaps come to the school with the express determination of attempting to make mischief, will be completely disarmed by being asked politely to help the teacher arrange the fire, or alter the position of his desk. thus, by means of the half hour during which the scholars are coming together, and of the visits made in the preceding evening, as described under the last head, the teacher will find, when he calls upon the children to take their seats, that he has made a very large number of them his personal friends. many of these will have communicated their first impressions to the others, so that he will find himself possessed, at the outset, of that which is of vital consequence in the opening of any administration--a strong party in his favor. . the time for calling the school to order and commencing exercises of some sort will at length arrive, though if the work of making personal acquaintances is going on prosperously, it may perhaps be delayed a little beyond the usual hour. when, however, the time arrives, we would strongly recommend that the first service by which the regular duties of the school are commenced should be an act of religious worship. there are many reasons why the exercises of the school should every day be thus commenced, and there are special reasons for it on the first day. there are very few districts where parents would have any objection to this. they might, indeed, in some cases, if the subject were to be brought up formally before them as a matter of doubt, anticipate some difficulties, or create imaginary ones, growing out of the supposed sensitiveness of contending sects; but if the teacher were, of his own accord, to commence the plain, faithful, and honest discharge of this duty as a matter of course, very few would think of making any objection to it, and almost all would be satisfied and pleased with its actual operation. if, however, the teacher should, in any case, have reason to believe that such a practice would be contrary to the wishes of his employers, it would, according to views we have presented in another chapter, be wrong for him to attempt to introduce it. he might, if he should see fit, make such an objection a reason for declining to take the school; but he ought not, if he takes it, to act counter to the known wishes of his employers in so important a point. but if, on the other hand, no such objections are made known to him, he need not raise the question himself at all, but take it for granted that in a christian land there will be no objection to imploring the divine protection and blessing at the opening of a daily school. if this practice is adopted, it will have a most powerful influence upon the moral condition of the school. it must be so. though many will be inattentive, and many utterly unconcerned, yet it is not possible to bring children, even in form, into the presence of god every day, and to utter in their hearing the petitions which they ought to present, without bringing a powerful element of moral influence to bear upon their hearts. the good will be made better; the conscientious more conscientious still; and the rude and savage will be subdued and softened by the daily attempt to lead them to the throne of their creator. to secure this effect, the devotional service must be an honest one. there must be nothing feigned or hypocritical; no hackneyed phrases used without meaning, or intonations of assumed solemnity. it must be honest, heartfelt, simple prayer; the plain and direct expression of such sentiments as children ought to feel, and of such petitions as they ought to offer. we shall speak presently of the mode of avoiding some abuses to which this exercise is liable; but if these sources of abuse are avoided, and the duty is performed in that plain, simple, direct, and honest manner in which it certainly will be if it springs from the heart, it must have a great influence on the moral progress of the children, and, in fact, in all respects on the prosperity of the school. but, then, independently of the _advantages_ which may be expected to result from the practice of daily prayer in school, it would seem to be the imperious _duty_ of the teacher to adopt it. so many human minds committed thus to the guidance of one, at a period when the character receives so easily and so permanently its shape and direction, and in a world of probation like this, is an occasion which seems to demand the open recognition of the hand of god on the part of any individual to whom such a trust is committed. the duty springs so directly out of the attitude in which the teacher and pupil stand in respect to each other, and the relation they together bear to the supreme, that it would seem impossible for any one to hesitate to admit the duty, without denying altogether the existence of a god. how vast the responsibility _of giving form and character to the human soul!_ how mighty the influence of which the unformed minds of a group of children are susceptible! how much their daily teacher must inevitably exert upon them! if we admit the existence of god at all, and that he exerts any agency whatever in the moral world which he has produced, here seems to be one of the strongest cases in which his intervention should be sought. and then, when we reflect upon the influence which would be exerted upon the future religious character of this nation by having the millions of children training up in the schools accustomed, through all the years of early life, to being brought daily into the presence of the supreme, with thanksgiving, confession, and prayer, it can hardly seem possible that the teacher who wishes to be faithful in his duties should hesitate in regard to this. some teacher may perhaps say that he can not perform it because he is not a religious man--he makes no pretensions to piety. but this can surely be no reason. he _ought to be_ a religious man, and his first prayer offered in school may be the first act by which he becomes so. entering the service of jehovah is a work which requires no preliminary steps. it is to be done at once by sincere confession, and an honest prayer for forgiveness for the past, and strength for time to come. a daily religious service in school may be, therefore, the outward act by which he, who has long lived without god, may return to his duty. if, from such considerations, the teacher purposes to have a daily religious service in his school, he should by all means begin on the first day, and when he first calls his school to order. he should mention to his pupils the great and obvious duty of imploring god's guidance and blessing in all their ways, and then read a short portion of scripture, with an occasional word or two of simple explanation, and offer, himself, a short and simple prayer. in some cases, teachers are disposed to postpone this duty a day or two, from timidity or other causes, hoping that, after becoming acquainted a little with the school, and having completed their more important arrangements, they shall find it easier to begin. but this is a great mistake. the longer the duty is postponed, the more difficult and trying it will be. and then the moral impressions will be altogether more strong and salutary if an act of solemn religious worship is made the first opening act of the school. where the teacher has not sufficient confidence that the general sense of propriety among his pupils will preserve good order and decorum during the exercise, it may be better for him to _read_ a prayer selected from books of devotion, or prepared by himself expressly for the occasion. by this plan his school will be, during the exercise, under his own observation, as at other times. it may, in some schools where the number is small, or the prevailing habits of seriousness and order are good, be well to allow the older scholars to read the prayer in rotation, taking especial care that it does not degenerate into a mere reading exercise, but that it is understood, both by readers and hearers, to be a solemn act of religious worship. in a word, if the teacher is really honest and sincere in his wish to lead his pupils to the worship of god, he will find no serious difficulty in preventing the abuses and avoiding the dangers which some might fear, and in accomplishing vast good, both in promoting the prosperity of the school, and in the formation of the highest and best traits of individual character. we have dwelt, perhaps, longer on this subject than we ought to have done in this place; but its importance, when viewed in its bearings on the thousands of children daily assembling in our district schools must be our apology. the embarrassments and difficulties arising from the extreme sensitiveness which exists among the various denominations of christians in our land, threaten to interfere very seriously with giving a proper degree of religious instruction to the mass of the youthful population. but we must not, because we have no national _church_, cease to have a national _religion_. all our institutions ought to be so administered as openly to recognize the hand of god, and to seek his protection and blessing; and in regard to none is it more imperiously necessary than in respect to our common schools. . after the school is thus opened, the teacher will find himself brought to the great difficulty which embarrasses the beginning of his labors, namely, that of finding immediate employment at once for the thirty or forty children who all look up to him waiting for their orders. i say thirty or forty, for the young teachers first school will usually be a small one. his object should be, in all ordinary cases, for the first few days, twofold: first, to revive and restore, in the main, the general routine of classes and exercises pursued by his predecessor in the same school; and, secondly, while doing this, to become as fully acquainted with his scholars as possible. it is best, then, _ordinarily_, for the teacher to begin the school as his predecessor closed it, and make the transition to his own perhaps more improved method a gradual one. in some cases a different course is wise undoubtedly, as, for example, where a teacher is commencing a private school, on a previously well-digested plan of his own, or where one who has had experience, and has confidence in his power to bring his new pupils promptly and at once into the system of classification and instruction which he prefers. it is difficult, however, to do this, and requires a good deal of address and decision. it is far easier and safer, and in almost all cases better, in every respect, for a young teacher to revive and restore the former arrangements in the main, and take his departure from them. he may afterward make changes, as he may find them necessary or desirable, and even bring the school soon into a very different state from that in which he finds it; but it will generally be more pleasant for himself, and better for the school, to avoid the shock of a sudden and entire revolution. the first thing, then, when the scholars are ready to be employed, is to set them at work in classes or upon lessons, as they would have been employed had the former teacher continued in charge of the school. to illustrate clearly how this may be done, we may give the following dialogue: _teacher_. can any one of the boys inform me what was the first lesson that the former master used to hear in the morning? the boys are silent, looking to one another. _teacher_. did he hear _any_ recitation immediately after school began? _boys_ (faintly, and with hesitation). no, sir. _teacher_. how long was it before he began to hear lessons? several boys simultaneously. "about half an hour." "a little while." "quarter of an hour." "what did he do at this time?" "set copies," "looked over sums," and various other answers are perhaps given. the teacher makes a memorandum of this, and then inquires, "and what lesson came after this?" "geography." "all the boys in this school who studied geography may rise." a considerable number rise. "did you all recite together?" "no, sir." "there are two classes, then?" "yes. sir." "yes, sir." "more than two." "all who belong to the class that recites first in the morning may remain standing; the rest may sit." the boys obey, and eight or ten of them remain standing. the teacher calls upon one of them to produce his book, and assigns them a lesson in regular course. he then requests some one of the number to write out, in the course of the day, a list of the class, and to bring it with him to the recitation the next morning. "are there any other scholars in the school who think it would be well for them to join this class?" in answer to this question probably some new scholars might rise, or some hitherto belonging to other classes, who might be of suitable age and qualifications to be transferred. if these individuals should appear to be of the proper standing and character, they might at once be joined to the class in question, and directed to take the same lesson. in the same manner, the other classes would pass in review before the teacher, and he would obtain a memorandum of the usual order of exercises, and in a short time set all his pupils at work preparing for the lessons of the next day. he would be much aided in this by the previous knowledge which he would have obtained by private conversation, as recommended under a former head. some individual cases would require a little special attention, such as new scholars, small children, and others; but he would be able, before a great while, to look around him and see his whole school busy with the work he had assigned them, and his own time, for the rest of the morning, in a great degree at his own command. i ought to say, however, that it is not probable that he would long continue these arrangements unaltered. in hearing the different classes recite, he would watch for opportunities for combining them, or discontinuing those where the number was small; he would alter the times of recitation, and group individual scholars into classes, so as to bring the school, in a very short time, into a condition corresponding more nearly with his own views. all this can be done very easily and pleasantly when the wheels are once in motion; for a school is like a ship in one respect--most easily steered in the right direction when under sail. by this plan, also, the teacher obtains what is almost absolutely necessary at the commencement of his labors, time for _observation_. it is of the first importance that he should become acquainted, as early as possible, with the characters of the boys, especially to learn who those are which are most likely to be troublesome. there always will be a few who will require special watch and care, and generally there will be only a few. a great deal depends on finding these individuals out in good season, and bringing the pressure of a proper authority to bear upon them soon. by the plan i have recommended of not attempting to remodel the school wholly at once, the teacher obtains time for noticing the pupils, and learning something about their individual characters. in fact, so important is this, that it is the plan of some teachers, whenever they commence a new school, to let the boys have their own way, almost entirely, for a few days, in order to find out fully who the idle and mischievous are. this is, perhaps, going a little too far; but it is certainly desirable to enjoy as many opportunities for observation as can be secured on the first few days of the school. . make it, then, a special object of attention, during the first day or two, to discover who the idle and mischievous individuals are. they will have generally seated themselves together in little knots; for, as they are aware that the new teacher does not know them, they will imagine that, though perhaps separated before, they can now slip together again without any trouble. it is best to avoid, if possible, an open collision with any of them at once, in order that they may be the better observed. whenever, therefore, you see idleness or play, endeavor to remedy the evil for the time by giving the individual something special to do, or by some other measure, without, however, seeming to notice the misconduct. continue thus adroitly to stop every thing disorderly, while, at the same time, you notice and remember where the tendencies to disorder exist. by this means, the individuals who would cause most of the trouble and difficulty in the discipline of the school will soon betray themselves, and those whose fidelity and good behavior can be relied upon will also be known. the names of the former should be among the first that the teacher learns, and their characters should be among the first which he studies. the most prominent among them--those apparently most likely to make trouble--he should note particularly, and make inquiries out of school respecting them, their characters, and their education at home, so as to become acquainted with them as early and as fully as possible, for he must have this full acquaintance with them before he is prepared to commence any decided course of discipline with them. the teacher often does irreparable injury by rash action at the outset. he sees, for instance, a boy secretly eating an apple which he has concealed in his hand, and which he bites with his book before his mouth, or his head under the lid of his desk. it is perhaps the first day of the school, and the teacher thinks he had better make an example at the outset, and calls the boy out, knowing nothing about his general character, and inflicts some painful or degrading punishment before all the school. a little afterward, as he becomes gradually acquainted with the boy, he finds that he is of mild, gentle disposition, generally obedient and harmless, and that his offense was only an act of momentary thoughtlessness, arising from some circumstances of peculiar temptation at the time; a boy in the next seat, perhaps, had just before given him the apple. the teacher regrets, when too late, the hasty punishment. he perceives that instead of having the influence of salutary example upon the other boys, it must have shocked their sense of justice, and excited dislike toward a teacher so quick and severe, rather than of fear of doing wrong themselves. it would be safer to postpone such decided measures a little--to avoid all open collisions, if possible, for a few days. in such a case as the above, the boy might be kindly spoken to in an under tone, in such a way as to show both the teacher's sense of the impropriety of disorder, and also his desire to avoid giving pain to the boy. if it then turns out that the individual is ordinarily a well-disposed boy, all is right, and if he proves to be habitually disobedient and troublesome, the lenity and forbearance exercised at first will facilitate the effect aimed at by subsequent measures. avoid, then, for the few first days, all open collision with any of your pupils, that you may have opportunity for minute and thorough observation. and here the young teacher ought to be cautioned against a fault which beginners are very prone to fall into, that of forming unfavorable opinions of some of their pupils from their air and manner before they see any thing in their conduct which ought to be disapproved. a boy or girl comes to the desk to ask a question or make a request, and the teacher sees in the cast of countenance, or in the bearing or tone of the individual, something indicating a proud, or a sullen, or an ill-humored disposition, and conceives a prejudice, often entirely without foundation, which weeks perhaps do not wear away. every experienced teacher can recollect numerous cases of this sort, and he learns, after a time, to suspend his judgment. be cautious, therefore, on this point, and in the survey of your pupils which you make during the first few days of your school, trust to nothing but the most sure and unequivocal evidences of character, for many of your most docile and faithful pupils will be found among those whose appearance at first prepossessed you strongly against them. one other caution ought also to be given. do not judge too severely in respect to the ordinary cases of misconduct in school. the young teacher almost invariably does judge too severely. while engaged himself in hearing a recitation, or looking over a "sum," he hears a stifled laugh, and, looking up, sees the little offender struggling with the muscles of his countenance to restore their gravity. the teacher is vexed at the interruption, and severely rebukes or punishes the boy, when, after all, the offense, in a moral point of view, was an exceedingly light one--at least it might very probably have been so. in fact, a large proportion of the offenses against order committed in school are the mere momentary action of the natural buoyancy and life of childhood. this is no reason why they should be indulged, or why the order and regularity of the school should be sacrificed, but it should prevent their exciting feelings of anger or impatience, or very severe reprehension. while the teacher should take effectual measures for restraining all such irregularities, he should do it with the tone and manner which will show that he understands their true moral character, and deals with them, not as heinous sins, which deserve severe punishment, but as serious inconveniences, which he is compelled to repress. there are often cases of real moral turpitude in school, such as where there is intentional, willful mischief, or disturbance, or habitual disobedience, and there may even be, in some cases, open rebellion. now the teacher should show that he distinguishes these cases from such momentary acts of thoughtlessness as we have described, and a broad distinction ought to be made in the treatment of them. in a word, then, what we have been recommending under this head is, that the teacher should make it his special study, for his first few days in school, to acquire a knowledge of the characters of his pupils, to learn who are the thoughtless ones, who the mischievous, and who the disobedient and rebellious, and to do this with candid, moral discrimination, and with as little open collision with individuals as possible. . another point to which the teacher ought to give his early attention is to separate the bad boys as soon as he can from one another. the idleness and irregularity of children in school often depends more on accidental circumstances than on character. two boys may be individually harmless and well-disposed, and yet they may be of so mercurial a temperament that, together, the temptation to continual play will be irresistible. another case that more often happens is where one is actively and even intentionally bad, and is seated next to an innocent, but perhaps thoughtless boy, and contrives to keep him always in difficulty. now remove the former away, where there are no very frail materials for him to act upon, and place the latter where he is exposed to no special temptation, and all would be well. this is all very obvious, and known familiarly to all teachers who have had any experience. but beginners are not generally so aware of it at the outset as to make any direct and systematic efforts to examine the school with reference to its condition in this respect. it is usual to go on, leaving the boys to remain seated as chance or their own inclinations grouped them, and to endeavor to keep the peace among the various neighborhoods by close supervision, rebukes, and punishment. now these difficulties may be very much diminished by looking a little into the arrangement of the boys at the outset, and so modifying it as to diminish the amount of temptation to which the individuals are exposed. this should be done, however, cautiously, deliberately, and with good-nature, keeping the object of it a good deal out of view. it must be done cautiously and deliberately, for the first appearances are exceedingly fallacious in respect to the characters of the different children. you see, perhaps, some indications of play between two boys upon the same seat, and hastily conclude that they are disorderly boys, and must be separated. something in the air and manner of one or both of them confirms this impression, and you take the necessary measures at once. you then find, when you become more fully acquainted with them, that the appearances which you observed were only momentary and accidental, and that they would have been as safe together as any two boys in the school. and perhaps you will even find that, by their new position, you have brought one or the other into circumstances of peculiar temptation. wait, therefore, before you make such changes, till you have ascertained _actual character_, doing this, however, without any unnecessary delay. in such removals, too, it is well, in many cases, to keep the motive and design of them as much as possible out of view; for by expressing suspicion of a boy, you injure his character in his own opinion and in that of others, and tend to make him reckless. besides, if you remove a boy from a companion whom he likes, avowedly to prevent his playing, you offer him an inducement, if he is a bad boy, to continue to play in his new position for the purpose of thwarting you, or from the influence of resentment. it would be wrong, indeed, to use any subterfuge or duplicity of any kind to conceal your object, but you are not bound to explain it; and in the many changes which you will be compelled to make in the course of the first week for various purposes, you may include many of these without explaining particularly the design or intention of any of them. in some instances, however, you may frankly state the whole case without danger, provided it is done in such a manner as not to make the boy feel that his character is seriously injured in your estimation. it must depend upon the tact and judgment of the teacher to determine upon the particular course to be pursued in the several cases, though he ought to keep these general principles in view in all. in one instance, for example, he will see two boys together, james and joseph we will call them, exhibiting a tendency to play, and after inquiring into their characters, he will find that they are good-natured, pleasant boys, and that he had better be frank with them on the subject. he calls one of them to his desk, and perhaps the following dialogue ensues: "james, i am making some changes in the seats, and thought of removing you to another place. have you any particular preference for that seat?" the question is unexpected, and james hesitates. he wishes to sit next to joseph, but doubts whether it is quite prudent to avow it; so he says, slowly and with hesitation, "no, sir, i do not know that i have." "if you have any reason, i wish you would tell me frankly, for i want you to have such a seat as will be pleasant to you." james does not know what to say. encouraged, however, by the good-humored tone and look which the master assumes, he says, timidly, "joseph and i thought we should like to sit together, if you are willing." "oh! you and joseph are particular friends, then, i suppose?" "why, yes, sir." "i am not surprised, then, that you want to sit together, though, to tell the truth, that is rather a reason why i should separate you." "why, sir?" "because i have observed that when two great friends are seated together, they are always more apt to whisper and play. have you not observed it?" "why, yes, sir." "you may go and ask joseph to come here." when the two boys make their appearance again, the teacher continues: "joseph, james tells me that you and he would like to sit together, and says you are particular friends; but i tell him," he adds, smiling, "that that is rather a reason for separating you. now if i should put you both into different parts of the school, next to boys that you are not acquainted with, it would be a great deal easier for you to be still and studious than it is now. do you not think so yourselves?" the boys look at one another and smile. "however, there is one way you can do. you can guard against the extra temptation by extra care; and, on the whole, as i believe you are pretty good boys, i will let you have your choice. you may stay as you are, and make extra exertion to be perfectly regular and studious, or i will find seats for you where it will be a great deal easier for you to be so. which do you think you should rather do?" the boys hesitate, look at one another, and presently say that they had rather sit together. "well," said the teacher, "it is immaterial to me whether you sit together or apart, if you are only good boys, so you may take your seats and try it a little while. if you find it too hard work to be studious and orderly together, i can make a change hereafter. i shall soon see." such a conversation will have many good effects. it will make the boys expect to be watched, without causing them to feel that their characters have suffered. it will stimulate them to greater exertion to avoid all misconduct, and it will prepare the way for separating them afterward without awakening feelings of resentment, if the experiment of their sitting together should fail. another case would be managed, perhaps, in a little different way, where the tendency to play was more decided. after speaking to the individuals mildly two or three times, you see them again at play. you ask them to wait that day after school and come to your desk. they have, then, the rest of the day to think occasionally of the difficulty they have brought themselves into, and the anxiety and suspense which they will naturally feel will give you every advantage for speaking to them with effect; and if you should be engaged a few minutes with some other business after school, so that they should have to stand a little while in silent expectation, waiting for their turn, it would contribute to the permanence of the effect. "well, boys," at length you say, with a serious but frank tone of voice, "i saw you playing in a disorderly manner to-day, and, in the first place, i wish you to tell me honestly all about it. i am not going to punish you, but i wish you to be open and honest about it. what were you doing?" the boys hesitate. "george, what did you have in your hand?" "a piece of paper." "and what were you doing with it?" _george_. william was trying to take it away from me. "was there any thing on it?" "yes, sir." "what?" george looks down, a little confused. _william_. george had been drawing some pictures on it. "i see each of you is ready to tell of the other's fault, but it would be much more honorable if each was open in acknowledging his own. have i ever had to speak to you before for playing together in school?" "yes, sir, i believe you have," says one, looking down. "more than once?" "yes, sir." "more than twice?" "i do not recollect exactly; i believe you have." "well, now, what do you think i ought to do next?" the boys have nothing to say. "do you prefer sitting together, or are you willing to have me separate you?" "we should rather sit together, sir, if you are willing," says george. "i have no objection to your sitting together, if you could only resist the temptation to play. i want all the boys in the school to have pleasant seats." there is a pause, the teacher hesitating what to do. "suppose, now, i were to make one more experiment, and let you try to be good boys in your present seat, would you really try?" "yes, sir," "yes, sir, we will," are the replies. "and if i should find that you still continue to play, and should have to separate you, will you move into your new seats pleasantly, and with good-humor, feeling that i have done right about if?" "yes, sir, we will." thus it will be seen that there may be cases where the teacher may make arrangements for separating his scholars, on an open and distinct understanding with them in respect to the cause of it. we have given these cases, not that exactly such ones will be very likely to occur, or that, when they do, the teacher is to manage them in exactly the way here described, but to exhibit more clearly to the reader than could be done by any general description, the spirit and tone which a teacher ought to assume toward his pupils. we wished to exhibit this in contrast with the harsh and impatient manner which teachers too often assume in such a case, as follows: "john williams and samuel smith, come here to me!" exclaims the master, in a harsh, impatient tone, in the midst of the exercises of the afternoon. the scholars all look up from their work. the culprits slowly rise from their seats, and with a sullen air come down to the floor. "you are playing, boys, all the time, and i will not have it. john, do you take your books, and go and sit out there by the window; and, samuel, you come and sit here on this front seat; and if i catch you playing again, i shall certainly punish you severely." the boys make the move with as much rattling and distention to make a noise; and when they get their new seats, and the teacher is again engaged upon his work, they exchange winks and nods, and in ten minutes are slyly cannonading each other with paper balls. in regard to all the directions that have been given under this head, i ought to say again, before concluding it, that they are mainly applicable to the case of beginners and of small schools. the general principles are, it is true, of universal application, but it is only where a school is of moderate size that the details of position, in respect to individual scholars, can be minutely studied. more summary processes are necessary, i am aware, when the school is very large, and the time of the teacher is incessantly engaged. . in some districts in new england the young teacher will find one or more boys, generally among the larger ones, who will come to the school with the express determination to make a difficulty if they can. the best way is generally to face these individuals at once in the most direct and open manner, and, at the same time, with perfect good-humor and kindness of feeling and deportment toward them personally. an example or two will best illustrate what i mean. a teacher heard a rapping noise repeatedly one day, just after he had commenced his labors, under such circumstances as to lead him to suppose it was designed. he did not appear to notice it, but remained after school until the scholars had all gone, and then made a thorough examination. he found, at length, a broken place in the plastering, where a _lath_ was loose, and a string was tied to the end of it, and thence carried along the wall, under the benches, to the seat of a mischievous boy, and fastened to a nail. by pulling the string he could spring the lath, and then let it snap back to its place. he left every thing as it was, and the next day, while engaged in a lesson, he heard the noise again. he rose from his seat. the scholars all looked up from their books. "did you hear that noise?" said he. "yes, sir." "do you know what it is?" "no, sir." "very well; i only wished to call your attention to it. i may perhaps speak of it again by-and-by." he then resumed his exercise as if nothing had happened. the guilty boy was agitated and confused, and was utterly at a loss to know what to do. what could the teacher mean? had he discovered the trick? and, if so, what was he going to do? he grew more and more uneasy, and resolved that, at all events, it was best for him to retreat. accordingly, at the next recess, as the teacher had anticipated, he went slyly to the lath, cut the string, then returned to his seat, and drew the line in, rolled it up, and put it in his pocket. the teacher, who was secretly watching him, observed the whole manoeuvre. at the close of the school, when the books were laid aside, and all was silence, he treated the affair thus: "do you remember the noise to which i called your attention early this afternoon"?" "yes, sir." "i will explain it to you now. one of the boys tied a string to a loose lath in the side of the room, and then, having the end of it at his seat, he was pulling it to make a noise to disturb us." the scholars all looked astonished, and then began to turn round toward one another to see who the offender could be. the culprit began to tremble. "he did it several times yesterday, and would have gone on doing it had i not spoken about it to-day. do you think this was wrong or not?" "yes, sir;" "wrong;" "wrong," are the replies. "what harm does it do?" "it interrupts the school." "yes. is there any other harm?" the boys hesitate. "it gives me trouble and pain. should you not suppose it would?" "yes, sir." "have i ever treated any boy or girl in this school unjustly or unkindly?" "no, sir;" "no, sir." "then why should any boy or girl wish to give me trouble or pain?" there was a pause. the guilty individual expected that the next thing would be to call him out for punishment. "now what do you think i ought to do with such a boy?" no answer. "perhaps i ought to punish him, but i am very unwilling to do that. i concluded to try another plan--to treat him with kindness and forbearance. so i called your attention to it this afternoon, to let him know that i was observing it, and to give him an opportunity to remove the string. and he did. he went, in the recess, and cut off the string. i shall not tell you his name, for i do not wish to injure his character. all i want is to have him a good boy." a pause. "i think i shall try this plan, for he must have some feelings of honor and gratitude, and if he has, he certainly will not try to give me pain or trouble again after this. and now i shall say no more about it, nor think any more about it; only, to prove that it is all as i say, if you look there under that window after school, you will see the lath with the end of the string round it, and, by pulling it, you can make it snap." another case, a little more serious in its character, is the following: a teacher, having had some trouble with a rude and savage-looking boy, made some inquiry respecting him out of school, and incidentally learned that he had once or twice before openly rebelled against the authority of the school, and that he was now, in the recesses, actually preparing a club, with which he was threatening to defend himself if the teacher should attempt to punish him. the next day, soon after the boys had gone out, he took his hat and followed them, and, turning round a corner of the school-house, found the boys standing around the young rebel, who was sitting upon a log, shaving the handle of the club smooth with his pocket-knife. he was startled at the unexpected appearance of the teacher, and the first impulse was to hide his club behind him; but it was too late, and, supposing that the teacher was ignorant of his designs, he went on sullenly with his work, feeling, however, greatly embarrassed. "pleasant day, boys," said the teacher. "this is a fine sunny nook for you to talk in. "seems to me, however, you ought to have a better seat than this old log," continued he, taking his seat at the same time by the side of the boy. "not so bad a seat, however, after all. what are you making, joseph?" joseph mumbled out something inarticulate by way of reply. "i have got a sharper knife," said he, drawing his penknife out of his pocket. and then, "let me try it," he continued, gently taking the club out of joseph's hand. the boys looked surprised, some exchanged nods and winks, others turned away to conceal a laugh; but the teacher engaged in conversation with them, and soon put them all at their ease except poor joseph, who could not tell how this strange interview was likely to end. in the mean time, the teacher went on shaving the handle smooth and rounding the ends. "you want," said he, "a rasp or coarse file for the ends, and then you could finish it finely. but what are you making this formidable club for?" joseph was completely at a loss what to say. he began to show evident marks of embarrassment and confusion. "i know what it is for; it is to defend yourself against me with. is it not, boys?" said he, appealing to the others. a faint "yes, sir" or two was the reply. "well, now, joseph, it will be a great deal better for us both to be friends than to be enemies. you had better throw this club away, and save yourself from punishment by being a good boy. come, now," said he, handing him back his club, "throw it over into the field as far as you can, and we will all forget that you ever made it." joseph sat the picture of shame and confusion. better feelings were struggling for admission, and the case was decided by a broad-faced, good-natured-looking boy, who stood by his side, saying almost involuntarily, "better throw it, joe." the club flew, end over end, into the field. joseph returned to his allegiance, and never attempted to rise in rebellion again. the ways by which boys engage in open, intentional disobedience are, of course, greatly varied, and the exact treatment will depend upon the features of the individual case; but the frankness, the openness, the plain dealing, and the kind and friendly tone which it is the object of the foregoing illustrations to exhibit, should characterize all. . we have already alluded to the importance of a delicate regard for the _characters_ of the boys in all the measures of discipline adopted at the commencement of a school. this is, in fact, of the highest importance at all times, and is peculiarly so at the outset. a wound to the feelings is sometimes inflicted by a single transaction which produces a lasting injury to the character. children are very sensitive to ridicule or disgrace, and some are most acutely so. a cutting reproof administered in public, or a punishment which exposes the individual to the gaze of others, will often burn far more deeply into the heart than the teacher imagines. and it is often the cause of great and lasting injury, too. by destroying the character of a pupil, you make him feel that he has nothing more to lose or gain, and destroy that kind of interest in his own moral condition which alone will allure him to virtuous conduct. to expose children to public ridicule or contempt tends either to make them sullen and despondent, or else to arouse their resentment and to make them reckless and desperate. most persons remember through life some instances in their early childhood in which they were disgraced or ridiculed at school, and the permanence of the recollection is a test of the violence of the effect. be very careful, then, to avoid, especially at the commencement of the school, publicly exposing those who do wrong. sometimes you may make the offense public, as in the case of the snapping of the lath, described under a former head, while you kindly conceal the name of the offender. even if the school generally understand who he is, the injury of public exposure is almost altogether avoided, for the sense of disgrace does not come nearly so vividly home to the mind of a child from hearing occasional allusions to his offense by individuals among his playmates, as when he feels himself, at a particular time, the object of universal attention and dishonor. and then, besides, if the pupil perceives that the teacher is tender of his reputation, he will, by a feeling somewhere between imitation and sympathy, begin to feel a little tender of it too. every exertion should be made, therefore, to lead children to value their character, and to help them to preserve it, and especially to avoid, at the beginning, every unnecessary sacrifice of it. and yet there are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. if a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school with great advantage. by this means, if it is done in such a way as to _secure_ the influence of the school on the right side, many good effects are sometimes attained. his pride and self-conceit are humbled, his bad influence receives a very decided check, and he is forced to draw back at once from the prominent stand he has occupied. richard jones, for example, is a rude, coarse, self-conceited boy, often doing wrong both in school and out, and yet possessed of that peculiar influence which a bad boy often contrives to exert in school. the teacher, after watching some time for an opportunity to humble him, one day overhears a difficulty among the boys, and, looking out of the window, observes that he is taking away a sled from one of the little boys to slide down hill upon, having none of his own. the little boy resists as well as he can, and complains bitterly, but it is of no avail. at the close of the school that day, the teacher commences conversation on the subject as follows: "boys, do you know what the difference is between stealing and robbery?" "yes, sir." "what!" the boys hesitate, and look at one another. "suppose a thief were to go into a man's store in the daytime, and take away something secretly, would it be stealing or robbery?" "stealing." "suppose he should meet him in the road, and take it away by force?" "then it would be robbery." "yes; when that which belongs to another is taken secretly, it is called stealing; when it is taken openly or with violence, it is called robbery. which, now, do you think is the worst?" "robbery." "yes, for it is more barefaced and determined--then it gives a great deal more pain to the one who is injured. to-day i saw one of the boys in this school taking away another boy's sled, openly and with violence." the boys all look round toward richard. "was that of the nature of stealing or robbery? "robbery," say the boys. "was it real robbery?" they hesitate. "if any of you think of any reason why it was not real robbery, you may name it." "he gave the sled back to him," says one of the boys. "yes; and therefore, to describe the action correctly, we should not say richard robbed a boy of his sled, but that he robbed him of his sled _for a time_, or he robbed him of the _use_ of his sled. still, in respect to the nature and the guilt of it, it was robbery. "there is another thing which ought to be observed about it. whose sled was it that richard took away?" "james thompson's." "james, you may stand up. "notice his size, boys. i should like to have richard jones stand up too, so that you might compare them; but i presume he feels very much ashamed of what he has done, and it would be very unpleasant for him to stand up. you will remember, however, how large he is. now when i was a boy, it used to be considered dishonorable and cowardly for a large, strong boy to abuse a little one who can not defend himself. is it considered so now?" "yes, sir." "it ought to be, certainly; though, were it not for such a case as this, we should not have thought of considering richard jones a coward. it seems he did not dare to try to take away a sled from a boy who was as big as himself, but attacked little james, for he knew he was not strong enough to defend himself." now, in some such cases as this, great good may be done, both in respect to the individual and to the state of public sentiment in school, by openly exposing a boy's misconduct. the teacher must always take care, however, that the state of mind and character in the guilty individual is such that public exposure is adapted to work well as a remedy, and also that, in managing it, he carries the sympathies of the other boys with him. to secure this, he must avoid all harsh and exaggerated expressions or direct reproaches, and while he is mild, and gentle, and forbearing himself, lead the boys to understand and feel the nature of the sin which he exposes. the opportunities for doing this to advantage will, however, be rare. generally it will be best to manage cases of discipline more privately, so as to protect the characters of those that offend. the teacher should thus, in accordance with the directions we have given, commence his labors with careful circumspection, patience, frankness, and honest good-will toward every individual of his charge. he will find less difficulty at the outset than he would have expected, and soon have the satisfaction of perceiving that a mild but most efficient government is quietly and firmly established in the little kingdom over which he is called to reign. the end. how to teach by george drayton strayer and naomi norsworthy february, . preface the art of teaching is based primarily upon the science of psychology. in this book the authors have sought to make clear the principles of psychology which are involved in teaching, and to show definitely their application in the work of the classroom. the book has been written in language as free from technical terms as is possible. in a discussion of the methods of teaching it is necessary to consider the ends or aims involved, as well as the process. the authors have, on this account, included a chapter on the work of the teacher, in which is discussed the aims of education. the success or failure of the work of a teacher is determined by the changes which are brought to pass in the children who are being taught. this book, therefore, includes a chapter on the measurement of the achievements of children. throughout the book the discussion of the art of teaching is always modified by an acceptance upon the part of the writers of the social purpose of education. the treatment of each topic will be found to be based upon investigations and researches in the fields of psychology and education which involve the measurement of the achievements of children and of adults under varying conditions. wherever possible, the relation between the principle of teaching laid down and the scientific inquiry upon which it is based is indicated. any careful study of the mental life and development of children reveals at the same time the unity and the diversity of the process involved. for the sake of definiteness and clearness, the authors have differentiated between types of mental activity and the corresponding types of classroom exercises. they have, at the same time, sought to make clear the interdependence of the various aspects of teaching method and the unity involved in mental development. george drayton strayer. naomi norsworthy. november , . * * * * * table of contents i. the work of the teacher ii. original nature, the capital with which teachers work iii. attention and interest in teaching iv. the formation of habits v. how to memorize vi. the teacher's use of the imagination vii. how thinking may be stimulated viii. appreciation, an important element in education ix. the meaning of play in education x. the significance of individual differences for the teacher xi. the development of moral social conduct xii. transfer of training xiii. types of classroom exercises xiv. how to study xv. measuring the achievements of children * * * * * i. the work of the teacher education is a group enterprise. we establish schools in which we seek to develop whatever capacities or abilities the individual may possess in order that he may become intelligently active for the common good. schools do not exist primarily for the individual, but, rather, for the group of which he is a member. individual growth and development are significant in terms of their meaning for the welfare of the whole group. we believe that the greatest opportunity for the individual, as well as his greatest satisfaction, are secured only when he works with others for the common welfare. in the discussions which follow we are concerned not simply with the individual's development, but also with the necessity for inhibitions. there are traits or activities which develop normally, but which are from the social point of view undesirable. it is quite as much the work of the teacher to know how to provide for the inhibition of the type of activity which is socially undesirable, or how to substitute for such reactions other forms of expression which are worthy, as it is to stimulate those types of activity which promise a contribution to the common good. it is assumed that the aim of education can be expressed most satisfactorily in terms of social efficiency. an acceptance of the aim of education stated in terms of social efficiency leads us to discard other statements of aim which have been more or less current. chief among these aims, or statements of aim, are the following: ( ) culture; ( ) the harmonious development of the capacities or abilities of the individual; ( ) preparing an individual to make a living; ( ) knowledge. we will examine these aims briefly before discussing at length the implications of the social aim. those who declare that it is the aim of education to develop men and women of culture vary in the content which they give to the term culture. it is conceivable that the person of culture is one who, by virtue of his education, has come to understand and appreciate the many aspects of the social environment in which he lives; that he is a man of intelligence, essentially reasonable; and that he is willing and able to devote himself to the common good. it is to be feared, however, that the term culture, as commonly used, is interpreted much more narrowly. for many people culture is synonymous with knowledge or information, and is not interpreted to involve preparation for active participation in the work of the world. still others think of the person of culture as one who has a type or kind of training which separates him from the ordinary man. a more or less popular notion of the man of culture pictures him as one living apart from those who think through present-day problems and who devote themselves to their solution. it seems best, on account of this variation in interpretation, as well as on account of the unfortunate meaning sometimes attached to the term, to discard this statement of the aim of education. the difficulty with a statement of aim in terms of the harmonious development of the abilities or capacities possessed by the individual is found in the lack of any criterion by which we may determine the desirability of any particular kind of development or action. we may well ask for what purpose are the capacities or abilities of the individual to be developed. it is possible to develop an ability or capacity for lying, for stealing, or for fighting without a just cause. what society has a right to expect and to demand of our schools is that they develop or nourish certain tendencies to behave, and that they strive earnestly to eliminate or to have inhibited other tendencies just as marked. another difficulty with the statement of aim in terms of the harmonious development of the capacities is found in the difficulty of interpreting what is meant by harmonious development. do we mean equal development of each and every capacity, or do we seek to develop each capacity to the maximum of the individual's possibility of training? are we to try to secure equal development in all directions? of one thing we can be certain. we cannot secure equality in achievement among individuals who vary in capacity. one boy may make a good mechanic, another a successful business man, and still another a musician. it is only as we read into the statement of harmonious development meanings which do not appear upon the surface, that we can accept this statement as a satisfactory wording of the aim of education. the narrow utilitarian statement of aim that asserts that the purpose of education is to enable people to make a living neglects to take account of the necessity for social coöperation. the difficulty with this statement of aim is that it is too narrow. we do hope by means of education to help people to make a living, but we ought also to be concerned with the kind of a life they lead. they ought not to make a living by injuring or exploiting others. they ought to be able to enjoy the nobler pleasures as well as to make enough money to buy food, clothing, shelter, and the like. the bread-and-butter aim breaks down as does the all-around development aim because it fails to consider the individual in relation to the social group of which he is a member. to declare that knowledge is the aim of education is to ignore the issue of the relative worth of that which we call knowledge. no one may know all. what, then, from among all of the facts or principles which are available are we to select and what are we to reject? the knowledge aim gives us no satisfactory answer. we are again thrown back upon the question of purpose. knowledge we must have, but for the individual who is to live in our modern, industrial, democratic society some knowledges are more important than others. society cannot afford to permit the school to do anything less than provide that equipment in knowledge, in skill, in ideal, or in appreciation which promises to develop an individual who will contribute to social progress, one who will find his own greatest satisfaction in working for the common good. in seeking to relate the aim of education to the school activities of boys and girls, it is necessary to inquire concerning the ideals or purposes which actuate them in their regular school work. _ideals of service_ may be gradually developed, and may eventually come to control in some measure the activities of boys and girls, but these ideals do not normally develop in a school situation in which competition is the dominating factor. we may discuss at great length the desirability of working for others, and we may teach many precepts which look in the direction of service, and still fail to achieve the purpose for which our schools exist. an overemphasis upon marks and distinctions, and a lack of attention to the opportunities which the school offers for helpfulness and coöperation, have often resulted in the development of an individualistic attitude almost entirely opposed to the purpose or aim of education as we commonly accept it. there is need for much reorganization in our schools in the light of our professed aim. there are only two places in our whole school system where children are commonly so seated that it is easy for them to work in coöperation with each other. in the kindergarten, in the circle, or at the tables, children normally discuss the problems in which they are interested, and help each other in their work. in the seminar room for graduate students in a university, it is not uncommon to find men working together for the solution of problems in which they have a common interest. in most classrooms in elementary and in high schools, and even in colleges, boys and girls are seated in rows, the one back of the other, with little or no opportunity for communication or coöperation. indeed, helping one's neighbor has often been declared against the rule by teachers. it is true that pupils must in many cases work as individuals for the sake of the attainment of skill, the acquirement of knowledge, or of methods of work, but a school which professes to develop ideals of service must provide on every possible occasion situations in which children work in coöperation with each other, and in which they measure their success in terms of the contribution which they make toward the achievement of a common end. the socially efficient individual must not only be actuated by ideals of service, but must in the responses which he makes to social demands be governed by his own careful thinking, or by his ability to distinguish from among those who would influence him one whose solution of the problem presented is based upon careful investigation or inquiry. especially is it true in a democratic society that the measure of the success of our education is found in the degree to which we develop the scientific attitude. even those who are actuated by noble motives may, if they trust to their emotions, to their prejudices, or to those superstitions which are commonly accepted, engage in activities which are positively harmful to the social group of which they are members. our schools should strive to encourage the spirit of inquiry and investigation. a large part of the work in most elementary schools and high schools consists in having boys and girls repeat what they have heard or read. it is true that such accumulation of facts may, in some cases, either at the time at which they are learned, or later, be used as the basis for thinking; but a teacher may feel satisfied that she has contributed largely toward the development of the scientific spirit upon the part of children only when this inquiring attitude is commonly found in her classroom. the association of ideas which will result from an honest attempt upon the part of boys and girls to find the solution of a real problem will furnish the very best possible basis for the recall of the facts or information which may be involved. the attempt to remember pages of history or of geography, or the facts of chemistry or of physics, however well they may be organized in the text-book, is usually successful only until the examination period is passed. children who have engaged in this type of activity quite commonly show an appalling lack of knowledge of the subjects which they have studied a very short time after they have satisfied the examination requirement. the same amount of energy devoted to the solution of problems in which children may be normally interested may be expected not only to develop some appreciation of scientific method in the fields in which they have worked, but also to result in a control of knowledge or a memory of facts that will last over a longer period of time. recitations should be places where children meet for the discussion of problems which are vital to them. the question by the pupil should be as common as the question by the teacher. laboratory periods should not consist of following directions, but rather in undertaking, in so far as it is possible, real experiments. we may not hope that an investigating or inquiring turn of mind encouraged in school will always be found operating in the solution of problems which occur outside of school, but the school which insists merely upon memory and upon following instructions may scarcely claim to have made any considerable contribution to the equipment of citizens of a democracy who should solve their common problems in terms of the evidence presented. the unthinking acceptance of the words of the book or the statement of the teacher prepares the way for the blind following of the boss, for faith in the demagogue, or even for acceptance of the statements of the quack. the ideal school situation is one in which the spirit of inquiry and investigation is constantly encouraged and in which children are developing ideals of service by virtue of their _activity_. a high school class in english literature in which children are at work in small groups, asking each other questions and helping each other in the solution of their problems, seems to the writer to afford unusual opportunity for the realization of the social aim of education. a first grade class in beginning reading, in which the stronger children seek to help those who are less able, involves something more significant in education than merely the command of the tool we call reading. a teacher of a class in physics who suggested to his pupils that they find out which was the more economical way to heat their homes,--with hot air, with steam, or with hot water,--evidently hoped to have them use whatever power of investigation they possessed, as well as to have them come to understand and to remember the principles of physics which were involved. in many schools the coöperation of children in the preparation of school plays, or school festivals, in the writing and printing of school papers, in the participation in the school assembly, in the making of shelves, tables, or other school equipment, in the working for community betterment with respect to clean streets and the like, may be considered even more significant from the standpoint of the realization of the social aim of education than are the recitations in which they are commonly engaged. we have emphasized thus far the meaning of the social aim of education in terms of methods of work upon the part of pupils. it is important to call attention to the fact that the materials or content of education are also determined by the same consideration of purposes. if we really accept the idea of participation upon the part of children in modern social life as the purpose of education, we must include in our courses of study only such subject matter as may be judged to contribute toward the realization of this aim. we must, of course, provide children with the tools of investigation or of inquiry; but their importance should not be overemphasized, and in their acquirement significant experiences with respect to life activities should dominate, rather than the mere acquisition of the tool. beginning reading, for example, is important not merely from the standpoint of learning to read. the teaching of beginning reading should involve the enlarging and enriching of experience. thought getting is of primary importance for little children who are to learn to read, and the recognition of symbols is important only in so far as they contribute to this end. the best reading books no longer print meaningless sentences for children to decipher. mother goose rhymes, popular stories and fables, language reading lessons, in which children relate their own experience for the teacher to print or write on the board, satisfy the demand for content and aid, by virtue of the interest which is advanced, in the mastering of the symbols. it is, of course, necessary for one who would understand modern social conditions or problems, to know of the past out of which our modern life has developed. it is also necessary for one who would understand the problems of one community, or of one nation, to know, in so far as it is possible, of the experiences of other peoples. history and geography furnish a background, without which our current problems could not be reasonably attacked. literature and science, the study of the fine arts, and of our social institutions, all become significant in proportion as they make possible contributions, by the individual who has been educated, to the common good. any proper interpretation of the social purpose of education leads inevitably to the conclusion that much that we have taught is of very little significance. processes in arithmetic which are not used in modern life have little or no worth for the great majority of boys and girls. partnership settlements involving time, exact interest, the extraction of cube and of square roots, partial payments, and many of the problems in mensuration, might well be omitted from all courses of study in arithmetic. many of the unimportant dates in history and much of the locational geography should disappear in order that a better appreciation of the larger social movements can be secured, or in order that the laws which control in nature may be taught. in english, any attempt to realize the aim which we have in mind would lay greater stress upon the accomplishment of children in speaking and writing our language, and relatively less upon the rules of grammar. it may well be asked how our conception of aim can be related to the present tendency to offer a variety of courses of instruction, or to provide different types of schools. the answer is found in an understanding and appreciation of the fact that children vary tremendously in ability, and that the largest contribution by each individual to the welfare of the whole group can be made only when each is trained in the field for which his capacity fits him. the movement for the development of vocational education means, above all else, an attempt to train all members of the group to the highest possible degree of efficiency, instead of offering a common education which, though liberal in its character, is actually neglected or refused by a large part of our population. our interest in the physical welfare of children is accounted for by the fact that no individual may make the most significant contribution to the common good who does not enjoy a maximum of physical efficiency. the current emphasis upon moral training can be understood when we accept that conception of morality which measures the individual in terms of his contribution to the welfare of others. however important it may be that individuals be restrained or that they inhibit those impulses which might lead to anti-social activity, of even greater importance must be the part actually played by each member of the social group in the development of the common welfare. if we think of the problems of teaching in terms of habits to be fixed, we must ask ourselves are these habits desirable or necessary for an individual who is to work as a member of the social group. if we consider the problem of teaching from the standpoint of development in intelligence, we must constantly seek to present problems which are worth while, not simply from the standpoint of the curiosity which they arouse, but also on account of their relation to the life activities with which our modern world is concerned. we must seek to develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. as we seek to understand the problem of teaching as determined by the normal mental development of boys and girls, we must have in mind constantly the use to which their capacities and abilities are to be put. any adequate recognition of the social purpose of education suggests the necessity for eliminating, as far as possible, that type of action which is socially undesirable, while we strive for the development of those capacities which mean at least the possibility of contribution to the common good. we study the principles of teaching in order that we may better adapt ourselves to the children's possibilities of learning, but we must keep in mind constantly that kind of learning and those methods of work which look to the development of socially efficient boys and girls. we must seek to provide situations which are in themselves significant in our modern social life as the subject matter with which children may struggle in accomplishing their individual development. we need constantly to have in mind the ideal of school work which will value most highly opportunities for coöperation and for contribution to the common good upon the part of children, which are in the last analysis entirely like the situations in which older people contribute to social progress. more and more we must seek to develop the type of pupil who knows the meaning of duty and who gladly recognizes his obligations to a social group which is growing larger with each new experience and each new opportunity. questions . why would you not be satisfied with a statement of the aim of education which was expressed in terms of the harmonious development of an individual's abilities and capacities? . suggest any part of the courses of study now in force in your school system the omission of which would be in accordance with the social aim of education. . name any subjects or parts of subjects which might be added for the sake of realizing the aim of education. . how may a teacher who insists upon having children ask permission before they move in the room interfere with the realization of the social aim of education? . can you name any physical habits which may be considered socially undesirable? desirable? . what is the significance of pupil participation in school government? . how does the teacher who stands behind his desk at the front of the room interfere with the development of the right social attitude upon the part of pupils? . why is the desire to excel one's own previous record preferable to striving for the highest mark? . in one elementary school, products of the school garden were sold and from the funds thus secured apparatus for the playground was bought. in another school, children sold the vegetables and kept the money. which, in your judgment, was the most worth while from the standpoint of the social development of boys and girls? . a teacher of latin had children collect words of latin origin, references to latin characters, and even advertisements in which latin words or literary references were to be found. the children in the class were enthusiastic in making these collections, and considerable interest was added to the work in latin. are you able to discover in the exercise any other value? . describe some teaching in which you have recently engaged, or which you have observed, in which the methods of work employed by teacher and pupils seemed to you to contribute to a realization of the social purpose of education. . how can a reading lesson in the sixth grade, or a history lesson in the high school, be conducted to make children feel that they are doing something for the whole group? . in what activities may children engage outside of school which may count toward the betterment of the community in which they live? * * * * * ii. original nature, the capital with which teachers work after deciding upon the aims of education, the goals towards which all teaching must strive, the fundamental question to be answered is, "what have we to work with?" "what is the makeup with which children start in life?" given a certain nature, certain definite results are possible; but if the nature is different, the results must of necessity differ. the possibility of education or of teaching along any line depends upon the presence of an original nature which possesses corresponding abilities. the development of intellect, of character, of interest, or of any other trait depends absolutely upon the presence in human beings of capacity for growth or development. what the child inherits, his original nature, is the capital with which education must work; beyond the limits which are determined by inheritance education cannot go. all original nature is in terms of a nervous system. what a child inherits is not ideas, or feelings, or habits, as such, but a nervous system whose correlate is human intelligence and emotion. just what relationship exists between the action of the nervous system and consciousness or intellect or emotion is still an open question and need not be discussed here. one thing seems fairly certain, that the original of any individual is bound up in some way with the kind of nervous system he has inherited. what we have in common, as a human race, of imagination, or reason, or tact, or skill is correlated in some fashion to the inheritance of a human nervous system. what we have as individual abilities, which distinguish us from our fellows, depends primarily upon our family inheritance. certain traits such as interest in people, and accuracy in perception of details, seem to be dependent upon the sex inheritance. all traits, whether racial, or family, or sex, are inherited in terms of a plastic nervous system. the racial inheritance, the capital which all normal children bring into the world, is usually discussed under several heads: reflexes, physiological actions, impulsive actions, instincts, capacities, etc., the particular heads chosen varying with the author. they all depend for their existence upon the fact that certain bonds of connection are performed in the nervous system. just what this connection is which is found between the nerve cells is still open to question. it may be chemical or it may be electrical. we know it is not a growing together of the neurones,[ ] but further than that nothing is definitely known. that there are very definite pathways of discharge developed by the laws of inner growth and independent of individual learning, there can be no doubt. this of course means that in the early days of a child's life, and later in so far as he is governed by these inborn tendencies, his conduct is machine-like and blind--with no purpose and no consciousness controlling or initiating the responses. only after experience and learning have had an opportunity to influence these responses can the child be held responsible for his conduct, for only then does his conduct become conscious instead of merely physiological. there are many facts concerning the psychology of these inborn tendencies that are interesting and important from a purely theoretical point of view, but only those which are of primary importance in teaching will be considered here. a fact that is often overlooked by teachers is that these inborn tendencies to connections of various kinds exist in the intellectual and emotional fields just as truly as in the field of action or motor response. the capacity to think in terms of words and of generals; to understand relationships; to remember; to imagine; to be satisfied with thinking,--all these, as well as such special abilities as skill in music, in managing people or affairs, in tact, or in sympathy, are due to just the same factors as produce fear or curiosity. these former types of tendencies differ from the latter in complexity of situation and response, in definiteness of response, in variability amongst individuals of the same family, and in modifiability; but in the essential element they do not differ from the more evident inborn tendencies. just what these original tendencies are and just what the situations are to which they come as responses are both unknown except in a very few instances. the psychology of original nature has enumerated the so-called instincts and discussed a few of their characteristics, but has left almost untouched the inborn capacities that are more peculiarly human. even the treatment of instincts has been misleading. for instance, instincts have been discussed under such heads as the "self-preservative instincts," "the social instincts," just as if the child had an inborn, mystical something that told him how to preserve his life, or become a social king. original nature does not work in that way; it is only as the experience of the individual modifies the blind instinctive responses through learning that these results can just as easily come about unless the care of parents provides the right sort of surroundings. there is nothing in the child's natural makeup that warns him against eating pins and buttons and poisonous berries, or encourages him to eat milk and eggs and cereal instead of cake and sweets. he will do one sort of thing just as easily as the other. all nature provides him with is a blind tendency to put all objects that attract his attention into his mouth. this response may preserve his life or destroy it, depending on the conditions in which he lives. the same thing is true of the "social instinct"--the child may become the most selfish egotist imaginable or the most self-sacrificing of men, according as his surroundings and training influence the original tendencies towards behavior to other people in one way or the other. of course it is very evident that no one has ever consistently lived up to the idea indicated by such a treatment of original nature, but certain tendencies in education are traceable to such psychology. what the child has by nature is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong--it may become either according to the habits which grow out of these tendencies. a child's inborn nature cannot determine the goal of his education. his nature has remained practically the same from the days of primitive man, while the goals of education have changed. what nature does provide is an immense number of definite responses to definite situations. these provide the capital which education and training may use as it will. it is just because education does need to use these tendencies as capital that the lack of knowledge of just what the responses are is such a serious one. and yet the difficulties of determining just what original nature gives are so tremendous that the task seems a hopeless one to many investigators. the fact that in the human being these tendencies are so easily modified means that from the first they are being influenced and changed by the experiences of the child. because of the quality of our inheritance the response to a situation is not a one-to-one affair, like a key in a lock, but all sorts of minor causes in the individual are operative in determining his response; and, on the other side, situations are so complex in themselves that they contain that which may call out several different instincts. for example, a child's response to an animal will be influenced by his own physical condition, emotional attitude, and recent mental status and by the conditions of size and nearness of the animal, whether it is shaggy or not, moving or still, whether he is alone or with others, on the floor or in his chair, and the like. it will depend on just how these factors combine as to whether the response is one of fear, of curiosity, of manipulation, or of friendliness. when to these facts are added the fact that the age and previous habits of the child also influence his response, the immense complexity of the problem of discovering just what the situations are to which there are original tendencies to respond and just how these tendencies show themselves is evident. and yet this is what psychologists must finally do if the use by teachers of these tendencies is to be both economical and wise. just as an illustration of the possibilities of analysis, thorndike in his "original nature of man" lists eleven different situations which call out an instinctive expression of fear and thirty-one different responses which may occur in that expression. under fighting he says, "there seem, indeed, to be at least six separable sets of connections in the so-called 'fighting instinct,'" in each of which the situation and the response differ from any other one. very few of the instincts are present at birth; most of them develop later in the child's life. pillsbury says, "one may recognize the food-taking instincts, the vocal protests at discomfort, but relatively few others." this delay in the appearance of instincts and capacities is dependent upon the development of the nervous system. no one of them can appear until the connections between nerve centers are ready, making the path of discharge perfect. just when these various nervous connections mature, and therefore just when the respective tendencies should appear, is largely unknown. in only a few of the most prominent and comparatively simple responses is it even approximately known. holding the head up is accomplished about the fourth month, walking and talking somewhere near the twelfth, but the more complex the tendency and the more they involve intellectual factors, the greater is the uncertainty as to the time of development. we are told that fear is most prominent at about "three or four" years of age, spontaneous imitation "becomes very prominent the latter part of the first year," the gang instinct is characteristic of the preadolescent period, desire for adventure shows itself in early adolescence, altruism "appears in the early teens," and the sex instinct "after about a dozen years of life." the child of from four to six is largely sensory, from seven to nine he is motor, from then to twelve the retentive powers are prominent. in the adolescent period he is capable of thinking logically and reasoning, while maturity finds him a man of responsibilities and affairs. although there is some truth in the belief that certain tendencies are more prominent at certain periods in the development of the child than at others, still it must be borne in mind that just when these optimum periods occur is not known. three of the most important reasons for this lack of knowledge are: first, the fact that all inborn tendencies mature gradually and do not burst into being; second, we do not know how transitory they are; and, third, the fact of the great influence of environment in stimulating or repressing such capacities. although the tendency to make collections is most prominent at nine, the beginnings of it may be found before the child is five. moll finds that the sex instinct begins its development at about six years of age, despite the fact that it is always quoted as the adolescent instinct. children in the kindergarten can think out their little problems purposively, even though reasoning is supposed to mark the high school pupil. the elements of most tendencies show themselves early in crude, almost unrecognizable, beginnings, and from these they grow gradually to maturity. in the second place how quickly do these tendencies fade? how transitory are they? it has always been stated in general psychology that instincts are transitory, that therefore it was the business of teachers to strike while the iron was hot, to seize the wave of interest or response at its crest before the ebb had begun. there was supposed to be a "happy moment for fixing in children skill in drawing, for making collections in natural history," for developing the appreciative emotions, for training the social instinct, or the memory or the imagination. children are supposed to be interested and attracted by novelty, rhythm, and movement,--to be creatures of play and imagination and to become different merely as a matter of the transitoriness of these tendencies due to growth. when the activities of the adult and the child are analyzed to see what tendencies have really passed, are transitory, it is difficult to find any that have disappeared. true, they have changed their form, have been influenced by the third factor mentioned above, but change the surroundings a little and the tendency appears. free the adult from the restraints of his ordinary life and turn him out for a holiday and the childish tendencies of interest in novelty and the mysterious, in physical prowess and adventure and play, all make their appearance. in how many adults does the collecting instinct still persist, and the instinct of personal rivalry? in how many has the crude desire for material ownership or the impulse to punish an affront by physical attack died out? experimental evidence is even proving that the general plasticity of the nervous system, which has always been considered to be transitory, is of very, very much longer duration than has been supposed. in illustration of the third fact, namely, the effect of environment to stimulate or repress, witness the "little mothers" of five and the wage earners of twelve who have assumed all the responsibilities with all that they entail of maturity. on the other side of the picture is the indulged petted child of fortune who never grows up because he has had everything done for him all his life, and therefore the tendencies which normally might be expected to pass and give place to others remain and those others never appear. that inborn tendencies do wax, reach a maximum, and wane is probably true, but the onset is much more gradual and the waning much less frequent than has been taken for granted. our ignorance concerning all these matters outweighs our knowledge; only careful experimentation which allows for all the other factors involved can give a reliable answer. one reason why the facts of delayedness and transitoriness in instincts have been so generally accepted without being thoroughly tested has been the belief in the recapitulation or repeating by the individual of racial development. so long as this was accepted as explaining the development of inborn tendencies and their order of appearance, transitoriness and delayedness must necessarily be postulated. this theory is being seriously questioned by psychologists of note, and even its strongest advocate, president hall, finds many questions concerning it which cannot be answered. the chief reasons for its acceptance were first, on logical grounds as an outgrowth of the doctrine of evolution, and second, because of an analogy with the growth of the physical body which was pushed to an extreme. on the physiological side, although there is some likeness between the human embryo and that of the lower animals, still the stages passed through by the two are not the same, being alike only in rough outline, and only in the case of a few of the bodily organs is the series of changes similar. in the case of the physical structure which should be recapitulated most closely, if behavior is to follow the same law,--namely, in that of the brain and nervous system,--there is least evidence of recapitulation. the brain of man does not follow in its development at all the same course taken in the development of brains in the lower animals. and, moreover, it is perfectly possible to explain any similarity or parallelism which does exist between the development of man's embryo and that of lower animals by postulating a general order of development followed by nature as the easiest or most economical, traces of which must then be found in all animal life. when it comes to the actual test of the theory, that of finding actual cases of recapitulation in behavior, it fails. no one has been able to point out just when a child passes through any stage of racial development, and any attempt to do so has resulted in confusion. there is no clear-cut marking off into stages, but, instead, overlapping and coexistence of tendencies characterize the development of the child. the infant of a few days old may show the swimming movements, but at the same time he can support his own weight by clinging to a horizontal stick. which stage is he recapitulating, that of the fishes or the monkeys? the nine-year-old boy loves to swim, climb trees, and hunt like a savage all at the same period, and, what is more, some of these same tendencies characterize the college man. the late maturing of the sex instinct, so old and strong in the race, and the early appearing of the tendencies towards vocalization and grasping, both of late date in the race, are facts that are hard to explain on the basis of the theory of recapitulation. as has been already suggested, one of the most important characteristics of all these tendencies is their modifiability. the very ease with which they can be modified suggests that this is what has most often to be done with them. on examination of the lists of original tendencies there are none which can be kept and fixed in the form in which they first appear. even the best of them are crude and impossible from the standpoint of civilized society. take as an illustration mother-love; what are the original tendencies and behavior? "all women possess originally, from early childhood to death, some interest in human babies, and a responsiveness to the instinctive looks, calls, gestures, and cries of infancy and childhood, being satisfied by childish gurglings, smiles, and affectionate gestures, and moved to instinctive comforting acts of childish signs of pain, grief, and misery." but the mother has to learn not to cuddle the baby and talk to it all the time it is awake and not to run to it and take it up at every cry, to steel her heart against the wheedling of the coaxing gurgles and even to allow the baby to hurt himself, all for his own good. this comes about only as original nature is modified in line with knowledge and ideals. the same need is evidenced by such a valuable tendency as curiosity. so far as original nature goes, the tendency to attend to novel objects, to human behavior, to explore with the eyes and manipulate with the hands, to enjoy having sensations of all kinds merely for their own sakes, make up what is known as the instinct of curiosity. but what a tremendous amount of modification is necessary before these crude responses result in the valuable scientific curiosity. not blind following where instinct leads, but modification, must be the watchword. on the other hand, there are equally few tendencies that could be spared, could be absolutely voted out without loss to the individual or the race. bullying as an original tendency seems to add nothing to the possibilities of development, but every other inborn tendency has its value. jealousy, anger, fighting, rivalry, possessiveness, fear, each has its quota to contribute to valuable manhood and womanhood. again, not suppression but a wise control must be the attitude of the educator. inhibition of certain phases or elements of some of the tendencies is necessary for the most valuable development of the individual, but the entire loss of any save one or two would be disastrous to some form of adult usefulness or enjoyment. the method by which valuable elements or phases of an original tendency are fixed and strengthened is the general method of habit formation and will be taken up under that head in chapter iv. when the modification involves definite inhibition, there are three possible methods,--punishment, disuse, and substitution. as an example of the use of the three methods take the case of a child who develops a fear of the dark. in using the first method the child would be punished every time he exhibited fear of the dark. by using the second method he would never be allowed to go into a dark room, a light being left burning in his bedroom, etc., until the tendency to fear the dark had passed. in the third method the emotion of fear would be replaced by that of joy or satisfaction by making the bedtime the occasion for telling a favorite story or for being allowed to have the best-loved toy, or for being played with or cuddled. the situation of darkness might be met in still another way. if the child were old enough, the emotion of courage might replace that of fear by having him make believe he was a soldier or a policeman. the method of punishment is the usual one, the one most teachers and parents use first. it relies for its effectiveness on the general law of the nervous system that pain tends to weaken the connections with whose activity it is associated. the method is weak in that pain is not a strong enough weapon to break the fundamental connections; it is not known how much of it is necessary to break even weaker ones; it is negative in its results--breaking one connection but replacing it by nothing else. the second method of inhibition is that of disuse. it is possible to inhibit by this means, because lack of use of connections in the nervous system results in atrophy. as a method it is valuable because it does not arouse resistance or anger. it is weak in that as neither the delayedness nor the transitoriness of instincts is known, when to begin to keep the situation from the child, and how long to keep it away in order to provide for the dying out of the connections, are not known. the method is negative and very unsure of results. the method of substitution depends for its use upon the presence in the individual of opposing tendencies and of different levels of development in the same tendency. because of this fact a certain response to a situation may be inhibited by forming the habit of meeting the situation in another way or of replacing a lower phase of a tendency by a higher one. this method is difficult to handle because of the need of knowledge of the original tendencies of children in general which it implies as well as the knowledge of the capacities and development of the individual child with whom the work is being done. the amount of time and individual attention necessary adds another difficulty. however, it is by far the best method of the three, for it is sure, is economical, using the energy that is provided by nature, is educative, and is positive. to replace what is poor or harmful by something better is one of the greatest problems of human life--and this is the outcome of the method of substitution. all three methods have their place in a system of education, and certain of them are more in place at certain times than at others, but at all times if the method of substitution can be used it should be. the instinct of physical activity is one of the most noticeable ones in babyhood. the young baby seems to be in constant movement. even when asleep, the twitchings and squirmings may continue. this continued muscular activity is necessary because the motor nerves offer the only possible path of discharge at first. as higher centers in the brain are developed, the ingoing currents, aroused by all sense stimuli, find other connections, and ideas, images, trains of thoughts, are aroused, and so the energy is consumed; but at first all that these currents can do is to arouse physical activity. the strength of this instinct is but little diminished by the time the child comes to school. his natural inclination is to do things requiring movement of all the growing muscles. inhibition, "sitting still," "being quiet," takes real effort on his part, and is extremely fatiguing. this instinct is extremely valuable in several ways: it gives the exercise necessary to a growing body, provides the experience of muscle movements necessary for control, and stimulates mental growth through the increase and variety of experiences it gives. the tendency to enjoy mental activity, to be satisfied with it for its own sake, is peculiarly a human trait. this capacity shows itself in two important ways--in the interest in sensory stimuli, usually discussed under the head of curiosity, and in the delight in "being a cause" or mental control. the interest in tastes, sounds, sights, touches, etc., merely for their own sake, is very evident in a baby. he spends most of his waking time in just that enjoyment. though more complex, it is still strong when the child enters school, and for years any object of sense which attracts his attention is material which arouses this instinct. the second form in which the instinct for mental ability shows itself is later in development and involves the secondary brain connections. it is the satisfaction aroused by results of which the individual is the cause. for example, the enjoyment of a child in seeing a ball swing or hearing a whistle blown would be a manifestation of curiosity, while the added interest which is always present when the child not only sees the ball swing but swings it, not only hears the whistle but blows it himself, is a result of the second tendency, that of joy in being a cause. as the child grows older the same tendency shows itself on a higher level when the materials dealt with, instead of being sensations or percepts, are images or ideas. the interest in following out a train of ideas to a logical conclusion, of building "castles in the air," of making plans and getting results, all find their taproot in this instinctive tendency towards mental activity. in close connection with the general tendency towards physical activity is the instinct of manipulation. from this crude root grows constructiveness and destructiveness. as it shows itself at first it has the elements of neither. the child inherits the tendency to respond by "many different arm, hand, and finger movements to many different objects"--poking, pulling, handling, tearing, piling, digging, and dropping objects. just what habits of using tools, and the like, will grow out of this tendency will depend on the education and training it gets. the habits of constructiveness may be developed in different sorts of media. the order of their availability is roughly as follows: first, in the use of materials such as wood, clay, raffia, etc.; second, in the use of pencil and brush with color, etc.; third, in the use of words. we should therefore expect and provide for considerable development along manual lines before demanding much in the way of literary expression. indeed, it may be argued that richness of experience in doing is prerequisite to verbal expression. acquisitiveness and collecting are two closely allied tendencies of great strength. every child has a tendency to approach, grasp, and carry off any object not too large which attracts his attention, and to be satisfied by its mere possession. blind hoarding and collecting of objects sometimes valueless in themselves results. this instinct is very much influenced in its manifestation by others which are present at the same time, such as the food-getting instinct, rivalry, love of approval, etc. the time at which the tendency to collect seems strongest is at about nine years, judged by the number of collections per child. rivalry as an instinct shows itself in increased vigor, in instinctive activity when others are engaged in the same activity, and in satisfaction when superiority is attained. there is probably no inborn tendency whereby these responses of increased vigor and satisfaction are aroused in connection with any kind of activity. we do not try to surpass others in the way we talk or in our moral habits or in our intellectual attainments, as a result of nature, but rather as a result of painstaking education. as an instinct, rivalry is aroused only in connection with other instinctive responses. in getting food, in securing attention or approval, in hunting and collecting, the activity would be increased by seeing another doing the same thing, and satisfaction would be aroused at success or annoyance at failure. the use of rivalry in other activities and at other levels comes as a result of experience. the fighting responses are called out by a variety of situations. these situations are definite and the responses to them differ from each other. in each case the child tries by physical force of some kind, by scratching, kicking, biting, slapping, throwing, and the like, to change the situation into a more agreeable one. this is true whether he be trying to escape from the restraining arms of his mother or to compel another child to recognize his mastery. original nature endows us with the pugnacious instinct on the physical level and in connection with situations which for various reasons annoy us. if this is to be raised in its manner of response from the physical to the intellectual level, if the occasions calling it out are to be changed from those that merely annoy one to those which involve the rights of others and matters of principle, it must be as a result of education. nature provides only this crude root. imitation has long been discussed as one of the most important and influential of human instincts. it has been regarded as a big general tendency to attempt to do whatever one saw any one else doing. as such a tendency it does not exist. it is only in certain narrow lines that the tendency to imitate shows itself, such as smiling when smiled at, yelling when others yell, looking and listening, running, crouching, attacking, etc., when others do. to this extent and in similar situations the tendency to imitate seems to be truly an instinct. imitating in other lines, such as writing as another writes, talking, dressing, acting like a friend, trying to use the methods used by others, etc., are a result of experience and education. the "spontaneous," "dramatic," and "voluntary" imitation discussed by some authors are the stages of development of _habits_ of imitation. the desire to be with others of the same species, the satisfaction at company and the discomfort aroused by solitude, is one of the strongest roots of all social tendencies and customs. it manifests itself in young babies, and continues a strong force throughout life. as an instinct it has nothing to do with either being interested in taking one's share in the duties or pleasures of the group or with being interested in people for their own sakes. it is merely that company makes one comfortable and solitude annoys one. anything further must come as a result of experience. motherliness and kindliness have as their characteristic behavior tendencies to respond by instinctive comforting acts to signs of pain, grief, or misery shown by living things, especially, by children, and by the feeling of satisfaction and the sight of happiness in others. of course very often these instinctive responses are interfered with by the presence of some other instinct, such as fighting, hunting, ownership, or scorn, but that such tendencies to respond in such situations are a part of the original equipment of man seems beyond dispute. they are possessed by both sexes and manifest themselves in very early childhood. there are original tendencies to respond both in getting and in giving approval and scorn. by original nature, smiles, pats, admiration, and companionship from one to whom submission is given arouses intense satisfaction; and the withdrawal of such responses, and the expression of scorn or disapproval, excites great discomfort. even the expression of approval or scorn from any one--a stranger or a servant--brings with it the responses of satisfaction or discomfort. just as strongly marked are original tendencies which cause responses of approval and cause as a result of "relief from hunger, rescue from fear, gorgeous display, instinctive acts of strength, daring and victory," and responses of scorn "to the observation of empty-handedness, deformity, physical meanness, pusillanimity, and defect." the desire for approval is never outgrown--it is one of the governing forces in society. if it is to be shown or desired on any but this crude level of instinctive response, it can only come by education. children come to school with both an original nature determined by their human inheritance and by their more immediate family relationship, and with an education more significant, perhaps, than any which the school can provide. from earliest infancy up to the time of entering a kindergarten or a first grade, the original equipment in terms of instincts, capacities, and abilities has been utilized by the child and directed by his parents and associates in learning to walk and to talk, to conform to certain social standards or requirements, to accept certain rules or precepts, or to act in accordance with certain beliefs or superstitions. the problem which the teacher faces is that of directing and guiding an individual, who is at the same time both educated and in possession of tendencies and capacities which make possible further development. not infrequently the education which children have when they come to school may in some measure handicap the teacher. it is unfortunate, but true, that in some homes instinctive tendencies which should have been overcome have been magnified. the control of children is sometimes secured through the utilization of the instinct of fear. the fighting instinct may often have been overdeveloped in a home in which disagreement and nagging, even to the extent of physical violence, have taken the place of reason. pride and jealousy may have taken deep root on account of the encouragement and approval which have been given by thoughtless adults. the teacher does not attack the problem of education with a clean slate, but rather it is his to discover what results have already been achieved in the education of the child, whether they be good or bad, for it is in the light of original nature or original tendencies to behave, and in the light of the education already secured, that the teacher must work. when one realizes the great variety or differences in ability or capacity, as determined by heredity, and when there is added to this difference in original nature the fact of variety in training which children have experienced prior to their school life, he cannot fail to emphasize the necessity for individualizing children. while it is true that we may assume that all children will take delight in achievement, it may be necessary with one child to stir as much as possible the spirit of rivalry, to give as far as one can the delight which comes from success, while for another child in the same class one may need to minimize success on account of a spirit of arrogance which has been developed before school life began. it is possible to conceive of a situation in which some children need to be encouraged to fight, even to the extent of engaging in physical combat, in order to develop a kind of courage which will accept physical discomfort rather than give up a principle or ideal. in the same group there may be children for whom the teacher must work primarily in terms of developing, in so far as he can, the willingness to reason or discuss the issue which may have aroused the fighting instinct. for all children in elementary and in high schools the possibility of utilizing their original nature for the sake of that development which will result in action which is socially desirable is still present. the problem which the teacher faces will be more or less difficult in proportion as the child's endowment by original nature is large or small, and as previous education has been successful or unsuccessful. the skillful teacher is the one who will constantly seek to utilize to the full those instincts or capacities which seem most potent. this utilization, as has already been pointed out, does not mean a blind following of the instinctive tendencies, but often the substitution of a higher form of action for a lower, which may seem to be related to the instinct in question. it is probably wise to encourage collections of stamps, of pictures, of different kinds of wood, and the like, upon the part of children in the elementary school, provided always that the teacher has in mind the possibility of leading these children, through their interest in objects, to desire to collect ideas. indeed, a teacher might measure her success in utilizing the collecting instinct in proportion as children become relatively less interested in things collected, and more interested in the ideas suggested by them, or in the mastery of fields of knowledge or investigation in which objects have very little significance. the desire for physical activity upon the part of children is originally satisfied by very crude performances. development is measured not simply in an increase in manual dexterity, but also in terms of the higher satisfaction which may come from producing articles which have artistic merit, or engaging in games of skill which make for the highest physical efficiency. during the whole period of childhood and adolescence we may never assume that the results of previous education, whether they be favorable or unsatisfactory, are permanent. whether we succeed or not in achieving the ends which we desire, the fact of modifiability, of docility, and of plasticity remains. the teacher who seeks to understand the individuals with whom he works, both in terms of their original nature and in terms of their previous education, and who at the same time seeks to substitute for a lower phase of an instinctive tendency a higher one, or who tries to have his pupils respond to a situation by inhibiting a particular tendency by forming the habit of meeting the situation in another way, need not despair of results which are socially desirable. questions . may a teacher ever expect the children in his class to be equal in achievement? why? . why is it not possible to educate children satisfactorily by following where instincts lead? . which of the instincts seem most strong in the children in your class? . can you give any example of an instinctive tendency which you think should have been outgrown but which seems to persist among your pupils? . give examples of the inhibition of undesirable actions based upon instinctive tendencies by means of ( ) punishment, ( ) disuse, ( ) substitution. . how can you use the tendency to enjoy mental activity? . why does building a boat make a stronger appeal to a boy than engaging in manual training exercises which might involve the same amount of activity? . cite examples of collections made by boys and girls in which the ideas associated with the objects collected may be more important than the objects themselves. . in what degree are we justified in speaking of the social instinct? the instinct to imitate? . how can you use the fighting instinct in your work with children? . what can teachers do to influence the education which children have received or are getting outside of school? . what differences in action among the children in your class do you attribute to differences in original nature? what to differences in education? * * * * * iii. attention and interest in teaching attention is a function of consciousness. wherever consciousness is, attention must perforce be present. one cannot exist without the other. according to most psychologists, the term attention is used to describe the form consciousness takes, to refer to the fact that consciousness is selective. it simply means that consciousness is always focal and marginal--that some ideas, facts, or feelings stand out in greater prominence than do others, and that the presence of this "perspective" in consciousness is a matter of mechanical adjustment. james describes consciousness by likening it to a series of waves, each having a crest and sides which correspond to the focus and margin of attention. the form of the wave changes from a high sharp crest with almost straight sides in pointed, concentrated attention, to a series of mere undulations, when crests are difficult to distinguish, in so-called states of dispersed attention. the latter states are rare in normal individuals, although they may be rather frequent in certain types of low-grade mental defectives. this of course means that states of "inattention" do not exist in normal people. so long as consciousness is present one must be attending to something. the "day dream" is often accompanied by concentrated attention. only when we are truly thinking of nothing, and that can only be as unconsciousness approaches, is attention absent. what is true of attention is also true of interest, for interest is coming more and more to be considered the "feeling side" of attention, or the affective accompaniment of attention. the kind of interest may vary, but some kind is always present. the place the interest occupies may also vary: sometimes the affective state itself is so strong that it forces itself into the focal point and becomes the object of attention. the chief fact of importance, however, is that attention and interest are inseparable and both are coexistent with consciousness. this selective action of consciousness is mechanical, due to the inborn tendencies toward attention possessed by human beings. the situations which by their very nature occupy the focal point in consciousness are color and brightness, novelty, sudden changes and sharp contrasts, rhythm and cadence, movement, and all other situations to which there are other instinctive responses, such as hunting, collecting, curiosity, manipulation, etc. in other words, children are born with tendencies to attend to an enormous number of situations because of the number of instinctive responses they possess. so great is this number that psychologists used to talk about the omnivorousness of children's attention, believing that they attended to everything. such a general attention seems not to be true. however, it is because so many situations have the power to force consciousness to a crest that human beings have developed the intellectual power that puts them so far above other animals. that these situations do attract attention is shown by the fact that individuals respond by movements which enable them to be more deeply impressed or impressed for a longer time by the situations in question. for example, a baby will focus his eyes upon a bright object and then move eyes and head to follow it if it moves from his field of vision. just what the situations are, then, which will arouse responses of attention in any given individual will depend in the first place upon his age, sex, and maturity, and in the second place upon his experience. the process of learning very quickly modifies the inborn tendencies to attention by adding new situations which demand it. it is the things we learn to attend to that make us human rather than merely animal. the fact of attention or selection must of necessity involve also inhibition or neglect. the very fact of the selection of certain objects and qualities means the neglect of others. this fact of neglect is at first just as mechanical as that of attention, but experiences teach us to neglect some situations which by original nature attracted attention. from the standpoint of education what we neglect is quite as important as what is selected for attention. the breadth of a person's attention, _i.e.,_ the number of lines along which attention is possible, must vary with age and experience. the younger or the more immature an individual is, the greater the number of different lines to which attention is given. it is the little child whose attention seems omnivorous, and it is the old person for whom situations worthy of attention have narrowed down to a few lines. this must of necessity be so, due to the interrelation of attention and neglect. the very fact of continuing to give attention along one line means less and less ability and desire to attend along other lines. the question as to how many things, whether objects or ideas, can be attended to at the same time, has aroused considerable discussion. most people think that they are attending to several things, if not to many, at the same second of consciousness. experiments show that if four or five unrelated objects, words, or letters be shown to adults for less than one quarter of a second, they can be apprehended, but the probability is that they are photographed, so to speak, on the eye and counted afterwards. it is the general belief of psychologists at present that the mind attends to only one thing at a time, that only one idea or object can occupy the focal point in consciousness. the apparent contradiction between ordinary experience and psychological experience along this line is due to three facts which are often overlooked. in the first place, the complexity of the idea or thing that can be attended to as a unit varies tremendously. differences in people account for part of this variation, but training and experience account for still more. our ideas become more and more complex as experience and familiarity build them up. qualities which to a little child demand separate acts of attention are with the adult merged into his perception of the object. just as simple words, although composed of separate letters, are perceived as units, so with training, more complex units may be found which can be attended to as wholes. so (to the ignorant or the uninstructed) what is apparently attending to more than one thing at a time may be explained by the complexity of the unit which is receiving the attention. in the second place _doing_ more than one thing at a time does not imply attending to more than one thing at a time. an activity which is habitual or mechanical does not need attention, but can be carried on by the control exercised by the fringe of consciousness. attention may be needed to start the activity or if a difficulty of any kind should arise, but that is all. for the rest of the time it can be devoted to anything else. the great speed with which attention can flash from one thing to another and back again must be taken into consideration in all this discussion. so far as attention goes, one can _do_ as many things at a time as he can make mechanical plus one unfamiliar one. thus a woman can rock the baby's cradle, croon a lullaby, knit, and at the same time be thinking of illustrations for her paper at the woman's club, because only one of these activities needs attention. when no one of the activities is automatic and the individual must depend on the rapid change of attention from one to the other to keep them going, the results obtained are likely to be poor and the fatigue is great. the attempt to take notes while listening to a lecture is of this order, and hence the unsatisfactoriness of the results. the third fact which helps to explain the apparent contradiction under discussion is closely related to this one. it is possible when engaged with one object to have several questions or topics close by in the fringe of consciousness so that one or the other may flash to the focal point as the development of the train of thought demands. the individual is apparently considering many questions at the same time, when in reality it is the readiness of these associations plus the oscillations of attention that account for the activity. the ability to do this sort of thing depends partly on the individual,--some people will always be "people of one idea,"--but training and experience increase the power. the child who in the primary can be given only one thing to look for when he goes on his excursion may grow into the youth who can carry half a dozen different questions in his mind to which he is looking for answers. by concentration of attention is meant the depth of the attention, and this is measured by the ease with which a person's attention can be called off the topic with which he is concerned. the concentration may be so great that the individual is oblivious to all that goes on about him. he may forget engagements and meals because of his absorption. sometimes even physical pain is not strong enough to distract attention. on the other hand, the concentration may be so slight that every passing sense impression, every irrelevant association called up by the topic, takes the attention away from the subject. the depth of concentration depends upon four factors. certain mental and physical conditions have a great deal to do with the concentration of attention, and these will be discussed later. individual differences also account for the presence or absence of power of concentration--some people concentrate naturally, others never get very deeply into any topic. maturity is another factor that is influential. a little child cannot have great concentration, simply because he has not had experience enough to give him many associations with which to work. his attention is easily distracted. although apparently absorbed in play, he hears what goes on about him and notices many things which adults suppose he does not see. this same lack of power shows itself in any one's attention when a new subject is taken up if he has few associations with it. of course this means that other things being equal the older one is, up to maturity at least, the greater one's power of concentration. little children have very little power, adolescents a great deal, but it is the adult who excels in concentration. although this is true, the fourth factor, that of training in concentration, does much toward increasing the power before full maturity is reached. one can learn to concentrate just as he can learn to do anything else. habits of concentration, of ignoring distinctions and interruptions, of putting all one's power into the work in hand, are just as possible as habits of neatness. the laws of habit formation apply in the field of attention just as truly as in every other field of mental life. laboratory experiments prove the large influence which training has on concentration and the great improvement that can be made. it is true that few people do show much concentration of attention when they wish. this is true of adults as well as of children. they have formed habits of working at half speed, with little concentration and no real absorption in the topic. this method of work is both wasteful of time and energy and injurious to the mental stability and development of the individual. half-speed work due to lack of concentration often means that a student will stay with a topic and fuss over it for hours instead of working hard and then dropping it. teachers often do this sort of thing with their school work. not only are the results less satisfactory, because the individual never gets deeply enough into the topic to really get what is there, but the effect on him is bad. it is like "constant dripping wears away the stone." children must be taught to "work when they work and play when they play," if they are to have habits of concentration as adults. the length of time which it is possible to attend to the same object or idea may be reckoned in seconds. it is impossible to hold the attention on an object for any appreciable length of time. in order to hold the attention the object must change. the simple experiment of trying to pay attention to a blot of ink or the idea of bravery proves that change is necessary if the attention is not to wander. what happens is that either the attention goes to something else, or that you begin thinking about the thing in question. of course, the minute you begin thinking, new associations, images, memories, come flocking in, and the attention occupies itself with each in turn. all may concern the idea with which you started out, but the very fact that these have been added to the mental content of the instant makes the percept of ink blot or the concept of bravery different from the bare thing with which the attention began. if this change and fluctuation of the mental state does not take place, the attention flits to something else. the length of time that the attention may be engaged with a topic will depend, then, upon the number of associations connected with it. the more one knows about a topic, the longer he can attend to it. if it is a new topic, the more suggestive it is in calling up past experience or in offering incentive for experiment or application, the longer can attention stay with it. such a topic is usually called "interesting," but upon analysis it seems that this means that for one of the above reasons it develops or changes and therefore holds the attention. this duration of attention will vary in length from a few seconds to hours. the child who is given a problem which means almost nothing, which presents a blank wall when he tries to attend to it, which offers no suggestions for solution, is an illustration of the first. attention to such a problem is impossible; his attention must wander. the genius who, working with his favorite subject, finds a multitude of trains of thought called up by each idea, and who therefore spends hours on one topic with no vacillation of attention, is an illustration of the second. attention has been classified according to the kind of feeling which accompanies the activity. sometimes attention comes spontaneously, freely, and the emotional tone is that accompanying successful activity. on the other hand, sometimes it has to be forced and is accompanied by feelings of strain and annoyance. the first type is called free[ ] attention; the second is forced attention. free attention is given when the object of attention satisfies a need; when the situation attended to provides the necessary material for some self-activity. the activity of the individual at that second needs something that the situation in question gives, and hence free, spontaneous attention results. forced attention is given when there is a lack of just such feeling of need in connection with the object of attention. it does not satisfy the individual--it is distinct from his desires at the time. he attends only because of fear of the results if he does not, and hence the condition is one of strain. all play takes free attention. work which holds the worker because it is satisfying also takes free attention. work which has in it the element of drudgery needs forced attention. the girl making clothes for her doll, the boy building his shack in the woods, the inventor working over his machine, the student absorbed in his history lesson,--all these are freely attending to the thing in hand. the girl running her seam and hating it, the, boy building the chicken coop while wishing to be at the ball game, the inventor working over his machine when his thoughts and desires are with his sick wife, the student trying to study his history when the debate in the civics club is filling his mind,--these are cases when forced attention would probably be necessary. it is very evident that there is no one situation which will necessarily take either free or forced attention because the determining factor is not in the situation _per se_, but in the relation it bears to the mind engaged with it. sometimes the same object will call forth forced attention from one person and free from another. further, the same object may at one time demand free attention and at another time forced attention from the same person, depending on the operation of other factors. it is also true that attention which was at first forced may change into free as the activity is persevered in. although these two types of attention are discussed as if they were entirely separated from each other, as if one occurred in this situation and the other in that, still as a matter of fact the actual conditions involve an interplay between the two. it is seldom true that free attention is given for any great length of time without flashes of forced attention being scattered through it. often the forced attention may be needed for certain parts of the work, although as a whole it may take free attention. the same thing is true of occasions when forced attention is used. there are periods in the activity when free attention will carry the worker on. every activity, then, is likely to be complex so far as the kind of attention used, but it is also characterized by the predominance of one or the other type. the question as to the conditions which call out each type of attention is an important one. as has already been said, free attention is given when the situation attended to satisfies a need. physiologically stated, free attention is given when a neurone series which is ready to act is called into activity. the situations which do this, other things being equal, will be those which appeal to some instinctive tendency or capacity, or to the self-activity or the personal experience of the individual and which therefore are in accord with his stage of development and his experience. forced attention is necessary when the neurone tracts used by the attention are for some reason unready to act. situations to which attention is given through fear of punishment, or when the activity involves a choice of ideal ends as opposed to personal desires, or when some instinctive tendency must be inhibited or its free activity is blocked or interfered with, or when the laws of growth and experience are violated, take forced attention. of course fatigue, disease, and monotony are frequent breeders of forced attention. from the above discussion it must be evident that one of the chief characteristics of free attention is its unity. the mental activity of the person is all directed along one line, that which leads to the satisfying of the need. it is unified by the appeal the situation makes. as a result of such a state the attention is likely to be concentrated, and can be sustained over a long period. of course this means that the work accomplished under such conditions will be greater in amount, more thorough, and more accurate than could be true were there less unity in the process. the opposite in all respects is true of forced attention. it is present when there is divided interest. the topic does not appeal to the need of the individual. he attends to it because he must. part of his full power of attention is given to keeping himself to the work, leaving only a part to be given to the work itself. if there is any other object in the field of attention which is particularly attractive, as there usually is, that claims its share, and the attention is still further divided. divided attention cannot be concentrated; it cannot last long. the very strain and effort involved makes it extremely fatiguing. the results of work done under such conditions must be poor. there can be but little thoroughness, for the worker will do just as much as he must to pass muster, and no more. inaccuracy and superficiality will characterize such work. just as training in giving concentrated attention results in power along that line, so frequent necessity for forced attention develops habits of divided attention which in time will hinder the development of any concentration. from a psychological viewpoint there can be no question but what free attention is the end to be sought by workers of all kinds. it is an absolutely false notion that things are easy when free attention is present. it is only when free attention is present that results worth mentioning are accomplished. it is only under such conditions that the worker is willing to try and try again, and put up with disappointment and failure, to use his ingenuity and skill to the utmost, to go out of his way for material or suggestions; in other words, to put himself into his work in such a way that it is truly educational. on the other hand, forced attention has its own value and could not be dispensed with in the development of a human being. its value is that of means to end--not that of an end in itself. it is only as it leads into free attention that forced attention is truly valuable. in that place the part it plays is tremendous because things are as they are. there will always be materials which will not appeal to a need in some individual because of lack of capacity or experience; there will always be parts of various activities and processes which seem unnecessary and a waste of time to some worker; there will always be choices to be made between instinctive desires and ideal needs, and in each case forced attention is the only means, perhaps, by which the necessary conditions can be acquired that make possible free attention. it is evident, therefore, that forced attention should be called into play only when needed. when needed, it should be demanded rigorously, but the sooner the individual in question can pass from it to the other type, the better. this is true in all fields whether intellectual or moral. a second classification of attention has been suggested according to the answer to the question as to why attention is given. sometimes attention is given simply because the material itself demands it; sometimes for some ulterior reason. the former type is called immediate or intrinsic attention; the latter is called derived, mediate, or extrinsic attention. the former is given to the situation for its own sake; the latter because of something attached to it. forced attention is always derived; free attention may be either immediate or derived. it is immediate and derived free attention that needs further discussion. it should be borne in mind that there is no sharp line of division between immediate and derived attention. sometimes it is perfectly evident that the attention is given for the sake of the material--at other times there can be no doubt but that it is the something beyond the material that holds the attention. but in big, complex situations it is not so evident. for instance, the musician composing just for the love of it is an example of immediate attention, while the small boy working his arithmetic examples with great care in order to beat his seatmate is surely giving derived attention. but under some conditions the motives are mixed and the attention may fluctuate from the value of the material itself to the values to be derived from it. however this may be, at the two extremes there is a clear-cut difference between these two types of attention. the value of rewards and incentives depends on the psychology of derived free attention, while that of punishment and deterrents is wrapped up with derived forced attention. immediate free attention is the more valuable of the two types because it is the most highly unified and most strongly dynamic of all the attention types. the big accomplishments of human lives have been brought to pass through this kind of attention. it is the kind the little child gives to his play--the activity itself is worth while. so with the artist, the inventor, the poet, the teacher, the physician, the architect, the banker--to be engaged in that particular activity satisfies. but this is not true of all artists, bankers, etc., nor with the others all the time. even for the child at play, sometimes conditions arise when the particular part of the activity does not seem worth while in itself; then if it is to be continued, another kind of attention must be brought in--derived attention. this illustration shows the place of derived attention as a means to an end--the same part played by forced attention in its relation to free. derived attention must needs be characteristic of much of the activity of human beings. people have few well-developed capacities, and there are many kinds of things they are required to do. if these are to be done with free attention, heartily, it will only be because of some value that is worth while that is attached to the necessary activity. as activities grow complex and as the results of activities grow remote, the need for something to carry over the attention to the parts of the activity that are seen to be worth while in the first place, or to the results in the second, grows imperative. this need is filled by derived attention, and here it shows its value as means to an end, but it is only when the need for this carrier disappears, and the activity as a whole for itself seems worth while, that the best results are obtained. there is a very great difference between the kinds of motives or values chosen for derived attention, and their value varies in accordance with the following principles. incentives should be closely connected naturally with the subject to which they are attached. they should be suited to the development of the child and be natural rather than artificial. their appeal should be permanent, _i.e._, should persist in the same situation outside of school. they should really stimulate those to whom they are offered. they should not be too attractive in themselves. applying these principles it would seem that derived interests that have their source in instincts, in special capacities, or in correlation of subjects are of the best type, while such extremely artificial incentives as prizes, half holidays, etc., are among the poorest. the value of derived attention is that it gets the work done or the habit formed. of course the hope is always there that it will pass over into the immediate type, but if it does not, at least results are obtained. it has already been shown that results may also be obtained by the use of forced attention, which is also derived. both derived free attention and forced attention are means to an end. the question as to the comparative value of the two must be answered in favor of the derived free attention. the chief reasons for this conclusion are as follows. first, derived free attention is likely to be more unified than forced attention. second, it arouses greater self-activity on the part of the worker. third, the emotional tone is that of being satisfied instead of strain. fourth, it is more likely to lead to the immediate attention which is its end. despite these advantages of derived free attention over forced attention, it still has some of the same disadvantages that forced attention has. the chief of these is that it also may result in division of energy. if the means for gaining the attention is nothing but sugar coating, if it results in the mere entertainment of the worker, there is every likelihood that the attention will be divided between the two. the other disadvantage is that because of the attractiveness of the means used to gain attention it may be given just so long as the incentive remains, and no longer. these difficulties may be largely overcome, however, by the application of the principles governing good incentives. this must mean that the choice of types of attention and therefore the provision of situations calling them out should be in this order: immediate free attention, derived free attention, forced attention. all three are necessary in the education of any child, but each should be used in its proper place. the conditions which insure the best attention of whatever type have to do with both physical and mental adjustments. on the physical side there is need for the adaptation of the sense organ and the body to the situation. for this adaptation to be effective the environmental conditions must be controlled by the laws of hygiene. a certain amount of bodily freedom yields better results than rigidity because the latter draws energy from the task in hand for purposes of inhibition. on the mental side there is need for preparation in terms of readiness of the nerve tracts to be used. james calls this "ideational" preparation. this simply means that one can attend better if he knows something of what he is to attend to. experimental evidence proves without doubt that if the subject knows that he is to see a color, instead of a word, his perception of it is much more rapid and accurate than if he does not have this preparation. this same result is obtained in much more complex sensory situations, and it also holds when the situation is intellectual. contrary to expectation, great quietness is not the best condition for the maximum of attention; a certain amount of distraction is beneficial. the problem of interest and of attention, from the point of view of teaching, is not simply to secure attention, but rather to have the attention fixed upon those activities which are most desirable from the standpoint of realizing the aim or purpose of education. as has already been suggested, children are constantly attending to something. they instinctively respond to the very great variety of stimuli with which they come in contact. our schools seek to provide experiences which are valuable. in school work when we are successful children attend to those stimuli which promise most for the formation of habits, or the growth in understanding and appreciation which will fit them for participation in our social life. we seek constantly in our work as teachers to secure either free or forced attention to the particular part of our courses of study or to the particular experiences which are allotted to the grade or class which we teach. one of the very greatest difficulties in securing attention upon the part of a class is found in the variety of experiences which they have already enjoyed, and the differences in the strength of the appeal which the particular situation may make upon the several members of the group. in class teaching we have constantly to vary our appeal and to differentiate our work to suit the individual differences represented in the class, if we would succeed in holding the attention of even the majority of the children. boys and girls do their best work only when they concentrate their attention upon the work to be done. one of the greatest fallacies that has ever crept into our educational thought is that which suggests that there is great value in having people work in fields in which they are not interested, and in which they do not freely give their attention. any one who is familiar with children, or with grown-ups, must know that it is only when interest is at a maximum that the effort put forth approaches the limit of capacity set by the individual's ability. boys concentrate their attention upon baseball or upon fishing to a degree which demands of them a maximum of effort. a boy may spend hours at a time seeking to perfect himself in pitching, batting, or fielding. he may be uncomfortable a large part of the time, he may suffer considerable pain, and yet continue in his practice by virtue of his great enthusiasm for perfecting himself in the game. interest of a not dissimilar sort leads a man who desires position, or power, or wealth, to concentrate his attention upon the particular field of his endeavor to the exclusion of almost everything else. indeed, men almost literally kill themselves in the effort which they make to achieve these social distinctions or rewards. we may not hope always to secure so high a degree of concentration of attention or of effort, but it is only as we approach a situation in which children are interested, and in which they freely give their attention to the subject in hand, that we can claim to be most successful in our teaching. the teacher who is able in beginning reading to discover to children the tool which will enable them to get the familiar story or rhyme from the book may hope to get a quality of attention which could never be brought about by forcing them to attend to formal phonetic drill. the teacher of biology who has been able to awaken enthusiasm for the investigation of plant and animal life, and who has allowed children to conduct their own investigations and to carry out their own experiments, may hope for a type of attention which is never present in the carrying out of the directions of the laboratory manual or in naming or classifying plants or animals merely as a matter of memory. children who are at work producing a school play will accomplish more in the study of the history in which they seek to discover a dramatic situation, by virtue of the concentration of attention given, than they would in reciting many lessons in which they seek to remember the paragraphs or pages which they have read. the boy who gives his attention to the production of a story for his school paper will work harder than one who is asked to write a composition covering two pages. children who are allowed to prepare for the entertainment of the members of their class a story with which they alone are familiar will give a quality of attention to the work in hand which is never secured when all of the members of the class are asked to reproduce a story which the teacher has read. it is necessary at times to have children give forced attention. there are some things to be accomplished that must be done, regardless of our success in securing free attention. it is entirely conceivable that some boy or girl may not want to learn his multiplication tables, or his words in spelling, or his conjugation or declension in french, and that all that the teacher has done may fail to arouse any great amount of interest or enthusiasm for the work in question. in these cases, and in many others which might be cited, the necessity for the particular habit may be so great as to demand that every pupil do the work or form the habit in question. in these cases we may not infrequently hope that after having given forced attention to the work of the school, children may in time come to understand the importance of the experiences which they are having, or even become interested in the work for its own sake. it is not infrequently true that after a period of forced attention there follows a time during which, on account of the value which children are able to understand as attached to or belonging to the particular exercise, they give free derived attention. many boys and girls have worked through their courses in science or in modern languages because they believed that these subjects would prove valuable not only in preparing them for college, but in giving them a wider outlook on life. their attention was of the free derived type. later on some of these same pupils have become tremendously enthusiastic in their work in the fields in question, and have found such great satisfaction in the work itself, that their attention might properly be characterized as free immediate attention. the importance of making children conscious of their power of concentrating their attention needs to be kept constantly in mind. exercises in which children are asked to do as much as they can in a period of five or ten minutes may be used to teach children what concentration of attention is and of the economy involved in work done under these conditions. the trouble with a great many adults, as well as with children, is that they have never learned what it is to work up to the maximum of their capacity. all too frequently in our attempts to teach children in classes we neglect to provide even a sufficient amount of work to demand of the more able members of the group any considerable amount of continued, concentrated attention. we seek in our work as teachers not only to secure a maximum of attention to the fields of work in which children are engaged, but also to arouse interests and enthusiasms which will last after school days are over. we think of interest often, and properly too, as the means employed to secure a maximum of attention, and, in consequence, a maximum of accomplishment. it is worth while to think often in our work in terms of interest as the end to be secured. children should become sufficiently interested in some of the subjects that we teach to care to be students in these fields, or to find enjoyment in further work or activity along these lines, either as a matter of recreation or, not infrequently, as a means of discovering their true vocation in life. that teacher who has aroused sufficient interest in music to enable the student of musical ability to venture all of the hard work which may be necessary in order to become a skillful musician, has made possibly his greatest contribution by arousing interest or creating enthusiasm. the teacher whose enthusiasm in science has led a boy to desire to continue in this field, even to the extent of influencing him to undertake work in an engineering school, may be satisfied, not so much in the accomplishment of his pupil in the field of science, as in the enthusiasm which has carried him forward to more significant work. even for children who go no farther than the elementary school, interest in history, or geography, in nature study, or in literature, may mean throughout the life of the individuals taught a better use of leisure time and an enjoyment of the nobler pleasures. successful teaching in any part of our school system demands an adjustment in the amount of work to be done, to the abilities, and even to the interest of individual children. much may be accomplished by the organization of special classes or groups in large school systems, but even under the most favorable conditions children cannot be expected to work up to the maximum of their capacity except as teachers recognize these differences in interest and in ability, and make assignments and conduct exercises which take account of these differences. questions . why do all children attend when the teacher raps on the desk, when she writes on the board, when some one opens the door and comes into the room? . some teachers are constantly rapping with their pencils and raising their voices in order to attract attention. what possible weakness is indicated by this procedure? . why do adults attend to fewer things than do children? . in what sense is it possible to attend to two things at the same time? . why are children less able to concentrate their attention than are most adults? . will a boy or girl in your class be more or less easily distracted as he gives free attention or forced attention to the work in hand? . what educational value is attached to an exercise which requires that a boy sit at his desk and work, even upon something in which he is not very much interested, for twenty minutes? . in what sense is it true that we form the habit of concentrating our attention? . why is it wrong to extend a lesson beyond the period during which children are able to concentrate their attention upon the work in hand, or beyond the period during which they do concentrate their attention? . how is it possible to extend the period devoted to a lesson in reading, or in geography, or in latin, beyond the time required to read a story or draw a map, or translate a paragraph? . why is it possible to have longer recitation periods in the upper grades and in the high school than in the primary school? . give examples from your class work of free attention; of forced attention; of free derived attention. . in what sense is it true that we work hardest when we give free attention? . in what sense is it true that we work hardest when we give forced attention? . can you give any example of superficiality or inaccuracy which has resulted from divided attention, upon the part of any member of one of your classes? . does free attention imply lack of effort? . name incidents which you think might properly be offered boys and girls in order to secure free derived attention. . can you cite any example in your teaching in which children have progressed from forced to free attention? . what interests have been developed in your classes which you think may make possible the giving of free attention in the field in question, even after school days are over? . how can you teach children what it is to concentrate their attention and the value of concentrated attention? * * * * * iv. the formation of habits habit in its simplest form is the tendency to do, think, or act as one has done, thought, or acted in the past. it is the tendency to repeat activities of all kinds. it is the tendency which makes one inclined to do the familiar action rather than a new one. in a broader sense, habit formation means learning. it is a statement of the fact that conduct _is_ modifiable and that such modifications may become permanent. the fact of learning depends physiologically on the plasticity of the nervous system. the neurones, particularly those concerned with intellectual life, are not only sensitive to nerve currents but are modified by them. the point where the greatest change seems to take place is at the synapses, but what this modification is, no one knows. there are several theories offered as explanations of what happens, but no one of them has been generally accepted, although the theory of chemical change seems to be receiving the strongest support at present. there can be no disagreement, however, as to the effects of this change, whatever it may be. currents originally passing with difficulty over a certain conduction unit later pass with greater and greater ease. the resistance which seems at first to be present gradually disappears, and to that extent is the conduct modified. this same element of plasticity accounts for the breaking of habits. in this case the action is double, for it implies the disuse of certain connections which have been made and the forming of others; for the breaking of a bad habit means the beginning of a good one. the plasticity of neurone groups seems to vary in two respects--as to modifiability and as to power to hold modifications. the neurone groups controlling the reflex and physiological operations are least easily modified, while those controlling the higher mental processes are most easily modified. the neurone groups controlling the instincts hold a middle place. so far as permanence goes, connections between sensorimotor neurone groups seem to hold modifications longer than do connections between either associative-motor or associative-association. it is probably because of this fact that habit in the minds of so many people refers to some physical activity. of course this is a misconception. wherever the nervous system is employed, habits are formed. there are intellectual, moral, emotional, temperamental habits, just as truly as physical habits. in the intellectual field every operation that involves association or memory also involves habits. good temper, or the reverse, truthfulness, patriotism, thoughtfulness for others, open-mindedness, are as much matters of learning and of habit as talking or skating or sewing. habit is found in all three lines of mental development: intellect, character, and skill. not only does the law of habit operate in all fields of mental activity, but the characteristics which mark its operation are the same. two of these are important. in the first place, habit formation results in a lessening of attention to the process. any process that is habitual can be taken care of by a minimum of attention. in other words, it need no longer be in the focal point, but can be relegated to the fringe. at the beginning of the modification of the neurone tract focal attention is often necessary, but as it progresses less and less attention is needed until the activity becomes automatic, apparently running by itself. not all habits reach this stage of perfection, but this is the general tendency. this lessening of the need for attention means that less energy is used by the activity, and the individual doing the work is less likely to be fatigued. in the second place, habit tends to make the process more and more sure in its results. as the resistance is removed from the synapses, and the one particular series of units come to act more and more as a unit, the current shoots along the path with no sidetracking, and the act is performed or the thought reached unwaveringly with very little chance of error. if the habit being formed is that of writing, the appropriate movements are made with no hesitation, and the chances that certain ones will be made the first time increase in probability. this means a saving of time and an increase in confidence as to the results. a consideration of these characteristics of habits makes clear its dangers as well as its values. the fact that habit is based on actual changes which take place in the nervous system, that its foundation is physical, emphasizes its binding power. most people in talking and thinking of habit regard it as something primarily mental in nature and therefore believe all that is necessary to break any habit is the sufficient exercise of will power. but will power, however strong, cannot break actual physical connections, and it is such connections that bind us to a certain line of activity instead of any other, when once the habit is formed. it is just as logical to expect a car which is started on its own track to suddenly go off on to another track where there is no switch, as to expect a nerve current traveling along its habitual conduction unit to run off on some other line of nervous discharge. habit once formed binds that particular line of thought to action, either good or bad. of course habits may be broken, but it is a work of time and must result from definite physical changes. every habit formed lessens the likelihood of any other response coming in that particular situation. every interest formed, every act of skill perfected, every method of work adopted, every principle or ideal accepted, limits the recognition of any other possible line of action in that situation. habit binds to one particular response and at the same time blinds the individual to any other alternative. the danger of this is obvious. if the habits formed are bad or wasteful ones, the individual is handicapped in his growth until new ones can be formed. on the other hand, habit makes for limitation. despite these dangers, habit is of inestimable value in the development of both the individual and the human race. it is through it that all learning is possible. it makes possible the preservation of our social inheritance. as james says, "habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent." because of its power of limitation it is sometimes considered the foe of independence and originality, but in reality it is the only road to progress. other things being equal, the more good habits a person has, the greater the probability of his doing original work. the genius in science or in art or in statesmanship is the man who has made habitual many of the activities demanded by his particular field and who therefore has time and energy left for the kind of work that demands thinking. habit won't make a genius, but all men of exceptional ability excel others in the number and quality of their habits in the field in which they show power. as the little child differs from the adult in the number and quality of his habits, so the ordinary layman differs from the expert. it is scarcity, not abundance, of habits that forces a man into a rut and keeps him mediocre. just as the three year old, having taken four or five times as long as the adult to dress himself, is tired out at the end of the task, so the amateur in literature or music or morals as compared with the expert. the more habits any one has in any line, the better for him, both from the standpoint of efficiency and productivity, provided that the habits are good and that among them is found the habit of breaking habits. the two great laws of habit formation are the laws of exercise and effect. these laws apply in all cases of habit formation, whether they be the purposeless habits of children or the purposive habits of maturity. the law of exercise says that the oftener and the more emphatically a certain response is connected with a certain situation, the more likely is it to be made to that situation. the two factors of repetition and intensity are involved. it is a common observance that the oftener one does a thing, other things being equal, the better he does it, whether it be good or bad. drill is the usual method adopted by all classes of people for habit formation. it is because of the recognition of the value of repetition that the old maxim of "practice makes perfect" has been so blindly adhered to. practice may make perfect, but it also may make imperfect. all that practice can do is to make more sure and automatic the activity, whatever it is. it cannot alone make for improvement. a child becomes more and more proficient in bad writing or posture, in incorrect work in arithmetic and spelling, with practice just as truly as under other conditions he improves in the same activities. evidence from school experiments, which shows that as many as per cent of the children examined did poorer work along such lines in a second test than in the first which had been given several months earlier, bears witness to the inability of mere repetition to get "perfect" results. to get such results the repetition must be only of the improvements. there must be a constant variation towards the ideal, and a selection of just those variations for practice, if perfect as well as invariable results are to be obtained. the amount of repetition necessary in the formation of any given habit is not known. it will, of course, vary with the habit and with the individual, but experimental psychology will some day have something to offer along this line. we could make a great saving if we knew, even approximately, the amount of practice necessary under the best conditions to form some of the more simple and elementary habits, such as learning the facts of multiplication. one other fact in connection with repetition should be noted, namely, that the exercise given any connection by the learner, freely, of his own initiative counts more than that given under purposive learning. this method of learning is valuable in that it is incidental and often saves energy and possible imitation on the part of the child, but it has certain drawbacks. habits formed this way are ingrained to such an extent that they are very difficult to modify. they were not consciously attended to when they were formed, and hence it is difficult later to raise them to the focal point. hence it is best whenever habits are partial and will need to be modified later, or when the habits must later be rationalized, or when bad habits must be broken, to have the process focalized in attention. the methods of gaining attention have already been discussed. in the second place, if the habit being formed is connected with an instinct, the element of intensity is added. this, of course, means that a connection already made and one which is strongly ready to act is made to give its support to the new connection being formed. of course the instinct chosen for this purpose must be in accord with the particular habit and with the nature of the learner. they may vary from the purely personal and physical up to those which have to do with groups and intellectual reactions. the added impetus of the instinct hastens the speed of the direction or supervision. the psychology of the value of self-activity is operative. it should be borne in mind, however, that the two kinds of exercise must be of the same degree of accuracy if this better result in self-initiated practice is to be obtained. not only is it true that repetition makes for automaticity, but intensity is also an aid. connections which are made emphatically as well as often tend to become permanent. this is particularly true of mental habits. there are two factors of importance which make for intensity in habit formation. first, the focalization of attention on the connections being made adds intensity. bagley in his discussion of this topic makes "focalization in attention" a necessity in all habits. although habits may be formed without such concentration, still it is true that if attention is given to the process, time is saved; for the added intensity secured increases the speed of learning. in certain types of habits, however, when incidental learning plays a large part, much skill may be acquired without focalization of attention in the process. much of the learning of little children is of this type. their habits of language, ways of doing things, mannerisms, and emotional attitudes often come as a result of suggestion and imitation rather than as a result of definite formation of the new habit. the second great law of habit formation is the law of effect. this law says that any connection whose activity is accompanied by or followed by satisfaction tends thereby to be strengthened. if the accompanying emotional tone is annoyance, the connection is weakened. this law that satisfaction stamps connections in, and annoyance inhibits connections, is one of the greatest if not the greatest law of human life. whatever gives satisfaction, that mankind continues to do. he learns only that which results in some kind of satisfaction. because of the working of this law animals learn to do their tricks, the baby learns to talk, the child learns to tell the truth, the adult learns to work with the fourth dimension. repetition by itself is a wasteful method of habit formation. the law of effect must work as well as the law of exercise, if the results are to be satisfactory. as has already been pointed out, it is not the practice alone that makes perfect, but the _stressing_ of improvements, and that fixing is made possible only by satisfaction. pleasure, in the broad sense, must be the accompaniment or the result of any connection that is to become habitual. this satisfaction may be of many different sorts, physical, emotional, or intellectual. it may be occasioned by a reward or recognition from without or by appreciation arising from self-criticism. in some form or other it must be present. two further suggestions in habit formation which grow out of the above laws should be borne in mind. the first is the effect of primacy. in everyday language, "first impressions last longest." the character of the first responses made in any given situation have great influence on all succeeding responses. they make the strongest impression, they are the hardest to eradicate. from a physiological point of view the explanation is evident. a connection untraversed or used but a few times is much more plastic than later when it has been used often. hence the first time the connection is used gives a greater set or bent than any equal subsequent activity. this is true both of the nervous system as a whole and of any particular conduction unit. thus impressions made in childhood count more than those of the same strength made later. the first few attempts in pronouncing foreign words fixes the pronunciation. the first few weeks in a subject or in dealing with any person influences all subsequent responses to a marked degree. the second suggestion has to do with the effect of exceptions. james says, "never allow an exception to occur" in the course of forming a habit. not only will the occurrence of one exception make more likely its recurrence, but if the exception does not recur, at least the response is less sure and less accurate than it otherwise would be. it tends to destroy self-confidence or confidence in the one who allowed the exception. sometimes even one exception leads to disastrous consequences and undoes the work of weeks and months. this is especially true in breaking a bad habit or in forming a new one which has some instinctive response working against it. there has been a great deal of work done in experimental laboratories and elsewhere in the study of the formation of particular habits. the process of habit formation has been shown by learning curves. when these learning curves are compared, it becomes clear that they have certain characteristics in common. this is true whether the learning be directed to such habits as the acquisition of vocabularies in a foreign language or to skill in the use of a typewriter. several of the most important characteristics follow. in the first place it is true of all learning that there is rapid improvement at first. during the beginning of the formation of a habit more rapid advance is made than at any other time. there are two principal reasons for this fact. the adjustments required at the beginning are comparatively simple and easily made and the particular learning is new and therefore is undertaken with zest and interest. after a time the work becomes more difficult, the novelty wears off, therefore the progress becomes less marked and the curve shows fluctuations. another characteristic of the learning curve is the presence of the so-called "plateaus." plateaus show in the curve as flat, level stretches during which there has apparently been no progress. the meaning of these level stretches, and whether or not they can be entirely done away with in any curve, is a matter of dispute. these pauses may be necessary for some of the habits to reach a certain degree of perfection before further progress can be made. however this may be, there are several minor causes which tend to increase the number of plateaus and to lengthen the time spent in any one. in the first place an insecure or an inaccurate foundation must result in an increase of plateaus. if at the beginning, during the initial spurt, for instance, the learner is allowed to go so fast that what he learns is not thoroughly learned, or if he is pushed at a pace that for him makes thoroughness impossible, plateaus must soon occur in his learning curve. in the second place a fruitful cause of plateaus is loss of interest,--monotony. if the learner is not interested, he will not put forth the energy necessary for continued improvement, and a time of no progress is the result. the attitude of the learner toward the work is extremely important, not only in the matter of interest, but in the further attitude of self-confidence. discouragement usually results in hindering progress, whereas confidence tends to increase it. the psychological explanation of this is very evident. both lack of interest in the learning and the presence of discouragement are likely to result in divided attention and that, as has already been shown, results in unsatisfactory work. a third cause for plateaus is physiological. not only must the learner be in the right attitude towards the work, but he must feel physically "fit." there seem to be certain physiological rhythms that may disturb the learning process whose cause cannot be directly determined, but generally the feeling of unfitness can be traced to a simple cause,--such as physical illness, loss of sleep, exercise, or food, or undue emotional strain. the older psychology has left an impression that improvement in any function is limited both as to amount and as to the period during which it must be attained. the physiological limit of improvement has been thought of as one which was rather easily reached. the loss of plasticity of the nervous system has been supposed to be rather rapid, so that marked improvement in a habit after one has passed well into the twenties was considered improbable. recent experiments, however, seem to show that no such condition of affairs exists. there is very great probability that any function whatsoever is improvable with practice, and in most cases to a very marked degree. to find a function which has reached the physiological limit has been very rare, even in experimental research, and even with extended practice series it has been unusual to reach a stage of zero improvement even with adults. thorndike says, "let the reader consider that if he should now spend seven hours, well distributed, in mental multiplication with three place numbers, he would thereby much more than double his speed and also reduce his errors; or that, by forty hours of practice, he could come to typewrite (supposing him to now have had zero practice) approximately as fast as he can write by hand; or that, starting from zero knowledge, he could learn to copy english into german script at a rate of fifty letters per minute, in three hours or a little more."[ ] it is probably true that the majority of adults are much below their limit of efficiency in most of the habits required by their profession, and that in school habits the same thing is true of children. spurious levels of accomplishment have been held up as worthy goals, and efficiency accepted as ultimate which was only two thirds, and often less than that, of what was possible. of course it may not be worth the time and energy necessary to obtain improvement in certain lines,--that must be determined by the particular case,--but the point is, that improvement; is possible with both children and adults in almost every habit they possess with comparatively little practice. neither the physiological limit of a function nor the age limit of the individual is reached as easily or as soon as has been believed. there are certain aids to improvement which must be used in order that the best results may be obtained. some of them have already been discussed and others will be discussed at a later time, so they need only be listed here, the right physiological conditions, the proper distribution of the practice periods, interest in the work, interest in improvement, problem attitude, attention, and absence of both excitement and worry. habits have been treated in psychology as wholes, just as if each habit was a unit. this has been true, whether the habits being discussed were moral habits, such as sharing toys with a younger brother; intellectual habits, such as reading and understanding the meaning of the word "and"; or motor habits, such as sitting straight. the slightest consideration of these habits makes obvious that they differ tremendously in complexity. the moral habit quoted involves both intellectual and motor habits--and not one, but several. from a physiological point of view, this difference in the complexity of habits is made clear by an examination of the number of neural bonds used in getting the habit response to a given situation. in some cases they are comparatively few--in others the number necessary is astonishing. in no case of habit will the bonds used involve but a single connection. just what bonds are needed in order that a child may learn to add, or to spell, to appreciate music, or to be industrious, is a question that only experiment and investigation can answer. at present but little is known as to just what happens, just what connections are formed, when from the original tendency towards vocalization the child just learns to say the word "milk," later reads it, and still later writes it. one thing is certain, the process is not a unitary one, nor is it a simple one. just so long as habit is discussed in general terms, without any recognition of the complexity of the process or to the specific bonds involved, just so long will the process of habit formation be wasteful and inefficient. as a sample of the kind of work being done in connection with special habits, investigation seems to give evidence that in the habit of simple column addition eight or nine distinct functions are involved, each of which involves the use of several bonds. besides these positive connections, a child in learning must inhibit other connections which are incorrect, and these must often outnumber the correct ones. and yet column addition has always been treated as a simple habit--with perhaps one element of complexity, when carrying was involved. it is evident that, if the habit concerned does involve eight or nine different functions, a child might go astray in any one. his difficulty in forming the habit might be in connection with one or several of the processes involved. knowledge on the part of the teacher of these different steps in the habit, and appreciation by him of the possibilities of making errors, are the prerequisites of efficient teaching of habits. in each one of the subjects there is much need of definite experimental work, in order that the specific bonds necessary in forming the habits peculiar to the subject be determined. the psychology of arithmetic, or of physics, or of spelling should involve such information. meanwhile every teacher can do much if she will carefully stop and think just what she is requiring in the given response. an analysis of the particular situation and response will make clear at least some of the largest elements involved, some of the most important connections to be made. it is the specific nature of the connections to be made and the number of those connections that need emphasis in the teaching of habits. not only must the specific nature of the bonds involved in individual habits be stressed, but also the specific nature of the entire complex which is called the habit. there is no such thing as a general curve of learning that will apply equally well, no matter what the habit. the kind of curve, the rate of improvement, the possibilities of plateaus, the permanence of the improvement, all these facts and others vary with the particular habit. in habit formation, as is the case in other types of activity, we get the most satisfactory results only when we secure a maximum of interest in the work to be done. the teacher who thinks that she can get satisfactory results merely by compelling children to repeat over and over again the particular form to be mastered is doomed to disappointment. indeed, it is not infrequently true that the dislike which children get for the dreary exercises which have little or no meaning for them interferes to such a degree with the formation of the habit we hope to secure as to develop a maximum of inaccuracies rather than any considerable improvement. the teacher who makes a game out of her word drill in beginning reading may confidently expect to have children recognize more words the next day than one who has used the same amount of time, without introducing the motive which has made children enjoy their work. children who compare their handwriting with a scale, which enables them to tell what degree of improvement they have made over a given period, are much more apt to improve than are children who are merely asked to fill up sheets of paper with practice writing. a vocabulary in a modern language will be built up more certainly if students seek to make a record in the mastery of some hundreds or thousands of words during a given period, rather than merely to do the work which is assigned from day to day. a group of boys in a continuation school have little difficulty in mastering the habits which are required in order to handle the formal processes in arithmetic, or to apply the formula of algebra or trigonometry, if the application of these habitual responses to their everyday work has been made clear. wherever we seek to secure an habitual response we should attempt to have children understand the use to which the given response is to be put, or, if this is not possible, to introduce some extraneous motive which will give satisfaction. we cannot be too careful in the habits which we seek to have children form to see to it that the first response is correct. it is well on many occasions, if we have any doubt as to the knowledge of children, to anticipate the response which they should give, and to make them acquainted with it, rather than to allow them to engage in random guessing. the boy who in writing his composition wishes to use a word which he does not know how to spell, should feel entirely free to ask the teacher for the correct spelling, unless there is a dictionary at hand which he knows how to use. it is very much better for a boy to ask for a particular form in a foreign language, or to refer to his grammar, than it is for him to use in his oral or written composition a form concerning which he is not certain. a mistake made in a formula in algebra, or in physics, may persist, even after many repetitions might seem to have rendered the correct form entirely automatic. in matters of habit it does not pay to take it for granted that all have mastered the particular forms which have supposedly been taught, and it never pays to attempt to present too much at any one time. more satisfactory work in habit formation would commonly be done were we to _teach_ fewer words in any one spelling lesson, or attempt to fix fewer combinations in any particular drill lesson in arithmetic, or assign a part of a declension or conjugation in a foreign language, or to be absolutely certain that one or two formulas were fixed in algebra or in chemistry, rather than in attempting to master several on the same day. teachers ought constantly to ask themselves whether every member of the class is absolutely sure and absolutely accurate in his response before attempting new work. it is of the utmost importance that particular difficulties be analyzed, and that attention be fixed upon that which is new, or that which presents some unusual difficulty. as has already been implied, it is important not simply to start with as strong a motive as possible, but it is also necessary to keep attention concentrated during the exercises which are supposed to result in habit formation. however strong the motive for the particular work may have been at the beginning, it is likely after a few minutes to lack power, if the particular exercise is continued in exactly the same form. much is to be gained by varying the procedure. oral work alternated with written work, concert work alternated with individual testing, the setting of one group over against another, the attempt to see how much can be done in a given period of minutes,--indeed, any device which will keep attention fixed is to be most eagerly sought for. in all practice it is important that the pupil strive to do his very best. if the ideal of accuracy or of perfection in form is once lost sight of, the responses given may result in an actual loss rather than in gain in fixing the habit. when a teacher is no longer able to secure attention to the work in hand, it is better to stop rather than to continue in order to provide for a given number of repetitions. drill periods of from five to fifteen minutes two or three times a day may almost always be found to produce better results than the same amount of time used consecutively. systematic reviews are most essential in the process of habit formation. the complaint of a fifth-grade teacher that the work in long division was not properly taught in the fourth grade may be due in considerable measure to the fact that she has neglected at the beginning of the fifth grade's work to spend a week or two in careful or systematic review of the work covered in the previous year. the complaint of high school teachers that children are not properly taught in the elementary school would often be obviated if in each of the fields in question some systematic review were given from time to time, especially at the beginning of the work undertaken, in any particular subject which involves work previously done in the elementary school. during any year's work that teacher will be most successful who reviews each day the work of the day before, who reviews each third or fourth day the particularly difficult parts of the work done during the previous periods, who reviews each week and each month, and even each two or three months, the work which has been covered up to that time. when teachers understand that the intervals between repetitions which seem to have fixed a habit may only be gradually lengthened, then will the formation of habits upon the part of boys and girls become more certain, and the difficulties arising from lapses and inaccuracies become less frequent. as has been suggested in previous discussions, it will be necessary in habit formation to vary the requirements among the individuals who compose a group. the motive which we seek to utilize may make a greater appeal to one child than to another. physiological differences may account for the fact that a small number of repetitions will serve to fix the response for one individual as over against a very much larger number of repetitions required for another. it is of the utmost importance that all children work up to the maximum of their capacity. it is very much better, for example, to excuse a boy entirely from a given drill exercise than to have him dawdle or loaf during the period. in some fields a degree of efficiency may be reached which will permit the most efficient children to be relieved entirely from certain exercises in order that they may spend their time on other work. on the other hand, those who are less capable may need to have special drill exercises arranged which will help them to make up their deficiency. the teacher who is acquainted with the psychology of habit formation should secure from the pupils in her class a degree of efficiency which is not commonly found in our schools. questions . in what sense is it true that we have habits of thought? . what habits which may interfere with or aid in your school work are formed before children enter school? . why is it hard to break a habit of speech? . distinguish among actions to which we attribute a moral significance those which are based upon habit and those which are reasoned. . professor james said, "habits are the stuff of which behavior consists." indicate the extent to which this is true for the children in your classes. . in how far is it advantageous to become a creature of habit? . which of our actions should be the result of reason? . should school children reason their responses in case of a fire alarm, in passing pencils, in formal work in arithmetic? name responses which should be the result of reason; others which should be habitual. . why do we sometimes become less efficient when we fix our attention upon an action that is ordinarily habitual? . why do children sometimes write more poorly, or make more mistakes in addition, or in their conjugations or declensions, at the end of the period than they do at the beginning? . how would you hope to correct habits of speech learned at home? what particular difficulty is involved? . when, are repetitions most helpful in habit formation? . when may repetitions actually break down or eliminate habitual responses? . how may the keeping of a record of one's improvement add in the formation of a habit? . what motives have you found most usable in keeping attention concentrated during the exercises in habit formation which you conduct? . the approval or disapproval of a group of boys and girls often brings about a very rapid change in physical, moral, or mental habits on the part of individual children. why? . why should drill work be discontinued when children grow tired and cease to concentrate their attention? . why should reviews be undertaken at the beginning of a year's work? how can reviews be organized to best advantage during the year? . what provision do you make in your work to guard against lapses? * * * * * v. how to memorize there is no sharp distinction between habit and memory. both are governed by the general laws of association. they shade off into each other, and what one might call habit another with equal reason might call memory. their likenesses are greater than their differences. however, there is some reason for treating the topic of association under these two heads. the term memory has been used by different writers to mean at least four different types of association. it has been used to refer to the presence of mental images; to refer to the consciousness of a feeling or event as belonging to one's own past experience; to refer to the presence of connections between situation and motor response; and to refer to the ability to recall the appropriate response to a particular situation. the last meaning of the term is the one which will be used here. the mere flow of imagery is not memory, and it matters little whether the appropriate response be accompanied by the time element and the personal element or not. in fact, most of the remembering which is done in daily life lacks these two elements. memory then is the recall of the appropriate response in a given situation. it differs from habit in that the responses referred to are more often mental rather than motor; in that it is less automatic, more purposeful. the fact that the elements involved are so largely mental makes it true that the given fact is usually found to have several connections and the given situation to be connected with many facts. which particular one will be "appropriate" will depend on all sorts of subtle factors, hence the need of the control of the connection aeries by a purpose and the diminishing of the element of automaticity. as was said before, there is no hard and fast line of division between habit and memory. the recall of the "sqrt( )" or of how to spell "home" or of the french for "table" might be called either or both. all that was said in the discussion of habit applies to memory. this ability to recall appropriate facts in given situations is dependent primarily on three factors: power of retention, number of associations, organization of associations. the first factor, power of retention, is the most fundamental and to some extent limits the usefulness of the other two. it is determined by the character of the neurones and varies with different brains. neurones which are easily impressed and retain their impression simply because they are so made are the gift of nature and the corner stone of a good memory. this retention power is but little, if at all, affected by practice. it is a primary quality of the nervous system, present or absent to the degree determined by each individual's original nature. hence memory as a whole cannot be unproved, although the absence of certain conditions may mean that it is not being used up to its maximum capacity. change in these conditions, then, will enable a person to make use of all the native retentiveness his nervous system has. one of the most important of these conditions is good health. to the extent that good blood, sleep, exercise, etc., put the nervous system in better tone, to that extent the retentive power present is put in better working order. every one knows how lack of sleep and illness is often accompanied by loss in memory. repetition, attention, interest, vividness of impression, all appeal primarily to this so-called "brute memory," or retentive power. pleasurable results seem not to be quite so important, and repetition to be more so when the connections are between mental states instead of between mental states and motor responses. an emphasis on, or an improvement in, the use of any one of these factors may call into play to a greater extent than before the native retentive power of a given child. the power to recall a fact or an event depends not only upon this quality of retentiveness, but also upon the number of other facts or events connected with it. each one of these connections serves as an avenue of approach, a clew by means of which the recall may operate. any single blockade therefore may not hinder the recall, provided there are many associates. this is true, no matter how strong the retentive power may be. it is doubly important if the retentive power is weak. suppose a given fact to be held rather weakly because of comparatively poor retentive power, then the operation of one chain of associates may not be energetic enough to recall it. but if this same fact may be approached from several different angles by means of several chains of associations, the combined power of the activity in the several neurone chains will likely be enough to lift it above the threshold of recall. other things being equal, the likelihood that a needed fact will be recalled is in proportion to the number of its associations. the third factor upon which goodness in memory depends is the organization of associates. number of connections is an aid to memory--but systematization among these connections is an added help. logical arrangement of facts in memory, classification according to various principles, orderly grouping of things that belong together, make the operation of memory more efficient and economical. the difference between mere number of associations and orderly arrangement of those associations may be illustrated by the difference in efficiency between the housekeeper who starts more or less blindly to look all over the house for a lost article, and the one who at least knows that it must be in a certain room and probably in a certain bureau drawer. although memory as a whole cannot be improved because of the limiting power of native retentiveness, memory for any fact or in any definite field may be improved by emphasizing these two factors: number of associations and organization among associations. although all three factors are operative in securing the best type of memory, still the efficiency of a given memory may be due more to the unusual power of one of them than to the combined effect of the three. it is this difference in the functioning of these three factors which is primarily responsible for certain types of memory which will be discussed later. it must also be borne in mind that the power of these factors to operate in determining recall varies somewhat with age. little children and old people are more dependent upon mere retentiveness than upon either of the others, the former because of lack of experience and lack of habits of thought, the latter because of the loss of both of these factors. the adult depends more on the organization of his material, while in the years between the number of the clews is probably the controlling factor. here again there is no sharp line of division; all three are needed. so in the primary grades we begin to require children to organize, and as adults we do all we can to make the power of retention operate at its maximum. many methods of memorizing have been used by both children and adults. recently experimental psychology has been testing some of them. so far as the learner is concerned, he may use repetition, or concentration, or recall as a primary method. repetition means simply the going over and over again the material to be learned--the element depended upon being the number of times the connection is made. concentration means going over the material with attention. not the number of connections is important, but the intensity of those connections. in recall the emphasis is laid upon reinstating the desired connections from within. in using this method, for instance, the learner goes over the material as many times as he sees necessary, then closes the book and recalls from memory what he can of it. the last of the three methods is by far the best, whether the memory desired be rote or logical, for several reasons. in the first place it involves both the other methods or goes beyond them. second, it is economical, for the learner knows when he knows the lesson. third, it is sure, for it establishes connections as they will be used--in other words, the learning provides for recall, which is the thing desired, whereas the other two methods establish only connections of impression. fourth, it tends to establish habits that are of themselves worth while, such as assuming responsibility for getting results, testing one's own power and others. fifth, it encourages the use of the two factors upon which memory depends, which are most capable of development, _i.e.,_ number and organization of associations. in connection with the use of the material two methods have been employed--the part method and the whole method. the learner may break the material up into sections, and study just one, then the next, and so on, or he may take all the material and go through with it from the beginning to the end and then back again. experimental results show the whole method to be the better of the two. however, in actual practice, especially with school children, probably a combination of the two is still better, because of certain difficulties arising from the exclusive use of the whole method. the advantages of the whole method are that it forms the right connections and emphasizes the complete thought and therefore saves time and gives the right perspective. its difficulties are that the material is not all of equal difficulty and therefore it is wasteful to put the same amount of time on all parts; it is discouraging to the learner, as no part may be raised above the threshold of recall at the first study period (particularly true if it is rote memory); it is difficult to use recall, if the whole method is rigidly adhered to. a combination of the two is therefore wise. the learner should be encouraged to go over the material from beginning to end, until the difficult parts become apparent, then to concentrate on these parts for a time and again go over from the beginning--using recall whenever possible. a consideration of the time element involved in memorizing has given use to two other methods, the so-called concentrated and distributive. given a certain amount of time to spend on a certain subject, the learner may distribute it in almost an infinite number of ways, varying not only the length of the period of practice, but also the length of time elapsing between periods. the experimental work done in connection with these methods has not resulted in agreement. no doubt there is an optimum length of period for practice and an optimum interval, but too many factors enter in to make any one statement. "the experimental results justify in a rough way the avoidance of very long practice periods and of very short intervals. they seem to show, on the other hand, that much longer practice periods than are customary in the common schools are probably entirely allowable, and that much shorter intervals are allowable than those customary between the just learning and successive 'reviews' in schools."[ ] this statement leaves the terms very long and very short to be defined, but at present the experimental results are too contradictory to permit of anything more specific. however, a few suggestions do grow from these results. the practice period should be short in proportion as these factors are present: first, young or immature minds; second, mechanical mental processes as opposed to thought material; third, a learner who "warms up" quickly; the presence of fatigue; a function near its limit. thus the length of the optimum period must vary with the age of the learner, the subject matter, the stage of proficiency in the subject, and the particular learner. the same facts must be taken into consideration in deciding on the optimum interval. one fact seems pretty well established in connection with the interval, and that is that a comparatively short period of practice with a review after a night's rest counts more than a much longer period added to the time spent the evening before. there are certain suggestions which if carried out help the learner in his memorizing. in the first place, as the number of associates is one factor determining recall, the fact to be remembered should be presented in many ways, _i.e.,_ appealing to as many senses as possible. in carrying this out, it has been the practice of many teachers to require the material to be remembered to be acted out or written. this is all right in so far as the muscular reactions required are mechanical and take little attention. if, on the other hand, the child has to give much attention to how he is to dramatize it, or if writing in itself is as yet a partially learned process, the attention must be divided between the fact to be memorized and its expression, and hence the desired result is not accomplished. colvin claims that "writing is not an aid to learning until the sixth or seventh grade in the schools." this same fact that an association only partly known is a hindrance rather than a help in fixing another is often violated both in teaching spelling and language. if the spelling of "two" is unknown or only partly known, it is a hindrance instead of a help to teach it at the same time "too" is being taught. second, the learner should be allowed to find his own speed, as it varies tremendously with the individual. third, rhythm is always an aid when it can be used, such as learning the number of days in each month in rhyme. fourth, after a period of hard mental work a few minutes (pillsbury thinks three to six) should elapse before definitely taking up a new line of work. this allows for the so-called "setting" of associations, due to the action of the general law of inertia, and tends to diminish the possibility of interference from the bonds called into play by the new work. fifth, mnemonic devices of simple type are sometimes an aid. most of these devices are of questionable value, as they themselves require more memory work than the facts they are supposed to be fixing. however, if devised by the learner, or if suggested by some one else after failure on the part of the learner to fix the material, they are permissible. memory has been classified in various ways, according to the time element, as immediate and permanent. immediate memory is the one which holds for a short time, whereas permanent memory holds for a long time. people differ markedly in this respect. some can if tested after the study period reproduce the material with a high degree of accuracy, but lose most of it in a comparatively short time. others, if tested in the same way, reproduce less immediately, but hold what they have over a long period. children as a whole differ from adults in having poorer immediate memories, but in holding what is fixed through years. of course permanent memory is the more valuable of the two types for most of life, but on the other hand immediate memory has its own special value. lawyers, physicians, politicians, ministers, lecturers, all need great power of immediate memory in their particular professions. they need to be able to hold a large amount of material for a short time, but then they may forget a great deal of it. memory is also classified according to the arrangement of the material as desultory, rote, and logical memory. in desultory memory the facts just "stick" because of the great retentive power of the brain, there are few connections, the material is disconnected and disjointed. rote memory depends on a special memory for words, aided by serial connections and often rhythm. logical is primarily a memory for meanings and depends upon arrangement and system for its power. little children as a class have good desultory memories and poor logical memories. rote memory is probably at its best in the pre-adolescent and early adolescent years. logical memory is characteristic of mature, adult minds. however, some people excel in one rather than another type, and each renders its own peculiar service. a genius in any line finds a good desultory memory of immense help, despite the fact that logical memory is the one he finds most valuable. teachers, politicians, linguists, clerks, waiters, and others need a well-developed desultory memory. rote memory is, of course, necessary if an individual is to make a success as an actor, a singer, or a musician. according to the rate of acquisition memory has been classified into quick and slow. one learner gets his material so much more quickly than another. up to rather recent years the quick learner has been commiserated, for we believed, "quickly come, quickly go." experimental results have proved this not to be true, but in fact the reverse is more true, _i.e.,_ "quickly come, slowly go." the one who learns quickly, provided he really learns it, retains it just as long and on the average longer than the one who learns much more slowly. the danger, from a practical point of view, is that the quick learner, because of his ability, gets careless and learns the material only well enough to reproduce at the time, whereas the slow learner, because of his lack of ability, raises his efficiency to a higher level and therefore retains. if the quick learner had spent five minutes more on the material, he would have raised his work to the same level as that of the slow one and yet have finished in perhaps half the time. all through the discussion of kinds of memory the term "memory" should have been used in the plural, for after all we possess "memories" and not a single faculty memory which may be quick, or desultory, or permanent. the actual condition of affairs is much more complex, for although it has been the individual who has been designated as quick or logical, it would be much more accurate to designate the particular memory. the same person may have a splendid desultory memory for gossip and yet in science be of the logical type. in learning french vocabularies he may have only a good immediate memory, whereas his memory for faces may be most lasting. his ability to learn facts in history may class him as a quick learner, whereas his slowness in learning music may be proverbial. the degree to which quickness of learning or permanence of memory in one line is correlated with that same ability in others has not yet been ascertained. that there is some correlation is probable, but at present the safest way is to think in terms of special memories and special acquisitions. some experimental work has been done to discover the order in which special memories develop in children. the results, however, are not in agreement and the experiments themselves are unsatisfactory. that there is some more or less definite order of development, paralleling to a certain extent the growth of instincts, is probable, but nothing more definite is known than observation teaches. for instance, every observer of children knows that memory for objects develops before memory for words; that memory for gestures preceded memory for words; that memory for oral language preceded memory for written language; that memory for concrete objects preceded memory for abstractions. further knowledge of the development of special memories should be accompanied by knowledge as to how far this development is dependent on training and to what extent lack of memory involves lack of understanding before it can be of much practical value to the teacher. just as repetition or exercise tends to fix a fact in memory, so disuse of a connection results in the fact fading from memory. "forgetting" is a matter of everyday experience for every one. the rate of forgetting has been the subject of experimental work. ebbinghaus's investigation is the historical one. the results from this particular series of experiments are as follows: during the first hour after study over half of what was learned had been forgotten; at the end of the first day two thirds, and at the end of a month about four fifths. these results have been accepted as capable of rather general application until within the last few years. recent experiments in learning poetry, translation of french into english, practice in addition and multiplication, learning to toss balls and to typewrite, and others, make clear that there is no general curve of forgetting. the rate of forgetting is more rapid soon after the practice period than later, but the total amount forgotten and the rate of deterioration depend upon the particular function tested. no one function can serve as a sample for others. no one curve of forgetting exists for different functions at the same stage of advancement or for the same function at different stages of advancement in the same individual, much less for different functions, at different stages of advancement, in different individuals. much more experimental work is needed before definite general results can be stated. this experimental work, however, is suggestive along several lines, ( ) it seems possible that habits of skill, involving direct sensori-motor bonds, are more permanent than memories involving connections between association bonds. in other words, that physical habits are more lasting than memories of intellectual facts. ( ) overlearning seems a necessary correlate of permanence of connection. that is, what seems to be overlearning at beginning stages is really only raising the material to the necessary level above the threshold for retention. how far overlearning is necessary and when it becomes wasteful are yet to be determined. ( ) deterioration is hastened by competing connections. if during the time a particular function is lying idle other bonds of connection are being formed into some parts or elements of it, the rate of forgetting of the function in question is hastened and the possibility of recall made more problematic. the less the interference, the greater will be the permanence of the particular bonds. a belief maintained by some psychologists is in direct opposition to this general law that disuse causes deterioration. it is usually stated something like this, that periods of incubation are necessary in acquiring skill, or that letting a function lie fallow results in greater skill at the end of that period, or briefly one learns to skate in summer and swim in winter. to some extent this is true, but as stated it is misleading. the general law of the effect of disuse on a memory is true, but under some circumstances its effect is mitigated by the presence of other factors whose presence has been unnoted. sometimes this improvement without practice is explained by the fact that at the last practice period the actual improvement was masked by fatigue or boredom, so that disuse involving rest and the disappearance of fatigue and boredom produces apparent gain, when in reality it but allows the real improvement to become evident. sometimes a particular practice period was accompanied by certain undesirable elements such as worry, excitement, misunderstandings, and so on, and therefore the improvement hindered or masked, whereas at the next period under different conditions there would be less interference and therefore added gain. all experimental evidence is against the opinion that mere disuse in and of itself produces gain. in fact, all results point to the fact that disuse brings deterioration. in the case of memory, as has already been described in habit formation, reviews which are organized with the period between repetitions only gradually lengthened may do much to insure permanence. it is entirely feasible to have children at the end of any school year able to repeat the poems or prose selections which they have memorized, provided that they have been recalled with sufficient frequency during the course of the year. in a subject like geography or history, or in the study of mathematics or science, in which logical memory is demanded, systematic reviews, rather than cramming for examinations, will result in permanence of command of the facts or principles involved, especially when these reviews have involved the right type of organization and as many associations as is possible. it is important in those subjects which involve a logical organization of ideas to have ideas associated around some particular problem or situation in which the individual is vitally interested. children may readily forget a large number of facts which they have learned about cats in the first grade, while the same children might remember, very many of them, had these facts been organized round the problem of taking care of cats, and of how cats take care of themselves. a group of children in an upper grade may forget with great rapidity the facts of climate, soil, surface drainage, industries, and the like, while they may remember with little difficulty facts which belong under each of these categories on account of the interest which they have taken in the problem, "why is the western part of the united states much more sparsely populated than the mississippi valley?" boys and girls who study physics in the high school may find it difficult to remember the principles involved in their study of heat if they are given only in their logical order and are applied only in laboratory exercises which have little or no meaning for them, while the same group of high school pupils may remember without difficulty these same laws or principles if associated round the issue of the most economical way of heating their houses, or of the best way to build an icehouse. there has been in our school system during the past few years more or less of a reaction against verbatim memorization, which is certainly justified when we are considering those subjects which involve primarily an organization of ideas in terms of problems to be solved, rather than memory for the particular form of expression of the ideas in question. it is worth while, however, at every stage of education to use whatever power children may possess for verbatim memorization, especially in the field of literature, and to some extent in other fields as well. it seems to the writers to be worth while to indicate as clearly as possible in the illustration which follows the method to be employed in verbatim memorization. as will be easily recognized, the number and organization of associations are an important consideration. it is especially important to call attention to the fact that any attempt at verbatim memorization should follow a very careful thinking through of the whole selection to be memorized. an organization of the ideas in terms of that which is most important, and that which can be subordinated to these larger thoughts, a combination of method of learning by wholes and by parts, is involved. it is not easy to indicate fully the method by which one would attempt to teach to a group of sixth-grade boys or girls wordsworth's "daffodils." the main outline of the method may, however, be indicated as follows: the first thing to be done is to arouse, in so far as is possible, some interest and enthusiasm for the poem in question. one might suggest to the class something of the beauty of the high, rugged hills, and of the lakes nestling among them in the region which is called the "lake region" in england. the wordsworth cottage near one of the lakes, and at the foot of one of the high hills, together with the walk which is to this day called wordsworth's walk, can be brought to the mind, especially by a teacher who has taken the trouble to know something of wordsworth's home life. the enthusiasm of the poet for the beauties of nature and his enjoyment in walking over the hills and around the lakes, is suggested by the poem itself. one might suggest to the pupils that this is the story of a walk which he took one morning early in the spring. the attempt will be made from this point on to give the illustration as the writer might have hoped to have it recorded as presented to a particular class. the poet tells us first of his loneliness and of the surprise which was his when he caught sight for the first time of the daffodils which had blossomed since the last time that he had taken this particular walk: "i wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once i saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils; beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze." you see, he was not expecting to meet any one or to have any unusual experience. he "wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills," and his surprise was complete when he saw suddenly,--"all at once i saw a crowd, a _host_ of _golden_ daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees." you might have said that they were waving in the wind, but he saw them "fluttering and dancing in the breeze." the daffodils as they waved and danced in the breeze suggested to him the experience which he had had on other walks which he had taken when the stars were shining, and he compares the golden daffodils to the shining, twinkling stars: "continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way, they stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay; ten thousand saw i at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance." the daffodils were as "continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way." there was no beginning and no end to the line,--"they stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay." he saw as many daffodils as one might see stars,--"ten thousand saw i at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance." the poet has enjoyed the beauty of the little rippling waves in the lake, and he tells us that "the waves beside them danced; but they outdid the sparkling waves in glee: a poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company: i gazed--and gazed,--but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought:" the daffodils have really left the poet with a great joy,--the waves beside the daffodils are dancing, "but they outdid the _sparkling_ waves in glee," and of course "a poet could not but be gay in such a jocund company." had you ever thought of flowers as a jocund company? you remember they fluttered and danced in the breeze, they lifted their heads in sprightly dance. do you wonder that the poet says of his experience, "i gazed--and gazed,--but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought"? i wonder if any of you have ever had a similar experience. i remember the days when i used to go fishing, and there is a great joy even now in recalling the twitter of the birds and the hum of the bees as i lay on the bank and waited for the fish to bite. and what is the great joy which is his, and which may belong to us, if we really see the beautiful things in nature? he tells us when he says "for oft, when on my couch i lie in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils." there are days when we cannot get out of doors,--"for oft, when on my couch i lie in vacant or in pensive mood,"--these are the days when we recall the experiences which we have enjoyed in the days which are gone,--"they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." and then for the poet, as well as for us, "and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils." now let us get the main ideas in the story which the poet tells us of his adventure. "i wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills," "i saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils," they were "beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze." they reminded me as i saw the beautiful arched line of "the stars that shine and twinkle on the milky way," because "they stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay"; and as i watched "ten thousand" i saw, "tossing their heads in sprightly dance." and then they reminded me of the waves which sparkled near by, "but they outdid the sparkling waves in glee," and in the happiness which was mine, "i gazed--and gazed,--but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought." and that happiness i can depend upon when upon my couch i lie in vacant or in pensive mood, for "they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude," and my heart will fill with pleasure and dance with the daffodils. these, then, are the big ideas which the poet has,--he wanders lonely as a cloud, he enjoys the great surprise of the daffodils, the great crowd, the host, of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze; he thinks of the stars that twinkle in the milky way, because the line of daffodils seems to have no beginning and no end,--he sees ten thousand of them at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance. and as he looks at them he thinks of the beauty of the sparkling waves, and thinks of them as they dance with glee, and he gazes and gazes without thinking of the wealth of the experience. but later when he writes the poem, he tells us of the wealth of the experience which can last through all of the days when he lies on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, for it is then that this experience flashes upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude, and his heart fills with pleasure and dances with the daffodils. now let us say it all over again, and see how nearly we are able to recall the story of his experience in just the words that he used. i will read it for you first, and then you may all try to repeat it after me. the teacher then reads the whole poem through, possibly more than once, and then asks all of the children to recite it with him, repeating possibly the first stanza twice or three times until they get it, and then the second stanza two or three times, then the third as often as may be necessary, and finally the fourth. it may be well then to go back and again analyze the thought, and indicate, using as far as possible the author's own words, the development of ideas through the poem. then the poem should be recited as a whole by the teacher and children. the children may then be left to study it so that they may individually on the next day recite it verbatim. the writer has found it possible to have a number of children in a sixth grade able to repeat the poem verbatim after the kind of treatment indicated above, and at the end of a period of fifteen minutes. questions . distinguish in so far as you can between habit and memory. . name the factors which determine one's ability to recall. . how can you hope to improve children's memories? which of the factors involved are subject to improvement? . in what way can you improve the organization of associations upon the part of children in any one of the subjects which you teach? how increase the number of associations? . what advantage has the method of concentration over the method of repetition in memorization? . give the reasons why the method of recall is the best method of memorization. . if you were teaching a poem of four stanzas, would you use the method of memorization by wholes or by parts? indicate clearly the degree to which the one or the other method should be used or the nature of the combination of methods for the particular selection which you use for the purposes of illustration. . how long do children in your classes seem to be able to work hard at verbatim memorization? . under what conditions may the writing of the material being memorized actually interfere with the process? when may it help? . why may it not be wise to attempt to teach "their" and "there" at the same time? . what is the type of memory employed by children who have considerable ability in cramming for examinations? is this type of memory ever useful in later life? . what precaution do we need to take to insure permanence in memory upon the part of those who learn quickly? . what is meant by saying that we possess memories rather than a power or capacity called memory? . do we forget with equal rapidity in all fields in which we have learned? what factors determine the rate of forgetting? . why should a boy think through a poem to be memorized rather than beginning his work by trying to repeat the first two lines? * * * * * vi. the teacher's use of the imagination imagination is governed by the same general laws of association which control habit and memory. in these two former topics the emphasis was upon getting a desired result without any attention to the form of that result. imagination, on the other hand, has to do with the way past experience is used and the form taken by the result. it merges into memory in one direction and into thinking in another. no one definition has been found acceptable--in fact, in no field of psychology is there more difference of opinion, in no topic are terms used more loosely, than in this one of imagination. stated in very general terms, imagination is the process of reproducing, or reconstructing any form of experience. the result of such a process is a mental image. when the fact that it is reproduction or reconstruction is lost sight of, and the image reacted to as if it were present, an illusion or hallucination results. images may be classified according to the sense through which the original experience came, into visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, kinæsthetic, and so on. in many discussions of imagery the term "picture" has been used to describe it, and hence in the thought of many it is limited rather definitely to the visual field. of course this is entirely wrong. the recall of a melody, or of the touch of velvet, or of the fragrance of a rose, is just as much mental imagery as the recall of the sight of a friend. three points of dispute in connection with image types are worth while noting. first, the question is raised by some psychologists as to whether kinæsthetic or motor images really exist. an example of such an image would be to imagine yourself as dancing, or walking downstairs, or writing your name, or saying the word "bubble." those who object to such an image type claim that when one tries to get such an image, the attempt initiates slight muscle movements and the result is a sense experience instead of an imaged one. they believe this always happens and that therefore a motor image is an impossibility. others agree that this reinstatement of actual movements often happens, but contend that in such cases the image precedes the movement and that the resulting movement does not always take place. the question is still in dispute. the second question in dispute is as to the possibility of classifying people according to the predominant type of their imagery. people used to be classed as "visualizers," "audiles." etc., the supposition being that their mental imagery was predominantly in terms of vision or hearing. this is being seriously questioned, and experimental work seems to show that such a classification, at least with the majority of people, is impossible. the results which are believed to warrant such a conclusion are as follows: first, no one has ever been tested who always used one type of image. second, the type of image used changed with the following factors: the material, the purpose of the subject, the familiarity of the subject with the experience imagined. for example, the same person would, perhaps, visualize if he were imaging landscape, but get an auditory image of a friend's voice instead of a visual image of him. he might, when under experimental conditions with the controlling purpose,--that of examining his images,--get visual images, but, when under ordinary conditions, get a larger number of auditory and kinæsthetic images. he might when thought was flowing smoothly be using auditory and motor images, but upon the appearance of some obstacle or difficulty in the process find himself flooded with visual images. third, subjects who ranked high in one type of imagery ranked high in others, and subjects who ranked low in one type ranked low also in others. the ability seems to be that of getting clear image types, or the lack of it, rather than the ability to get one type. fourth, most of the subjects reported that the first image was usually followed by others of different types. the conclusions then, that individuals, children as well as adults, are rarely of one fixed type, the mixed type being the usual one, is being generally accepted. in fact, it seems much more probable that materials and outside conditions can more easily be classified as usually arousing a certain type of image, than people can be classified into types. the third point of controversy grows out of the second. some psychologists are asking what is the value of such a classification? suppose people could be put under types in imagery, what would be the practical advantage? such an attempt at classification is futile and not worth while, for two reasons. first, the result of the mental processes--the goal arrived at is the important thing, and the particular type of image used is of little importance. does it make any difference to the business man whether his clerk thinks in terms of the visual images of words or in terms of motor images so long as he sells the goods? to the teacher of geography, does it make any difference whether john in his thinking of the value of trees is seeing them in his mind's eye, or hearing the wind rustle through the leaves, or smelling the moist earth, leaf-mold, or having none of these images, if he gets the meaning, and reaches a right conclusion? second, the sense which gives the clearest, most dependable impressions is not the one necessarily in terms of which the experience is recalled. one of the chief values urged for a classification according to image type of people, especially children, has been that the appeal could then be made through the corresponding sense organs. for instance, group a, being visualizers, will be asked to read the material silently; group b, audiles, will have the material read to them; group c, motiles, will be asked to read the material orally, or asked to dramatize it. for each group the major appeal should be made in terms of the sense corresponding to their image type. but such a correspondence as this does not exist. an individual may learn best by use of his eyes and yet very seldom use visual images in recall. this is true of most people in reading. most people grasp the meaning of a passage better when they read it than when they hear it read, and yet the predominant type of word image is auditory-motor. hence if any classification of children is attempted it should be according to the sense by means of which they learn best, and not according to some supposed image type. many methods of appeal for all children is the safest practical suggestion. images may also be classified according to the use made of past experience. past experience may be recalled in approximately the same form in which it occurred, or it may be reconstructed. in the former case the image is called reproductive image or memory image; in the latter form it is called productive or creative image, or image of the imagination. the reproductive image never duplicates experience, but in its major features it closely corresponds to it, whereas the productive image breaks up old experiences and from them makes new wholes which correspond to no definite occurrence. the elements found in both kinds of imagery must come from experience. one cannot imagine anything the elements of which he has not experienced. creative imagination transcends experience only in the sense that it remodels and remakes, but the result of that activity produces new wholes as far removed from the actual occurrences as "alice in wonderland" is from the humdrum life of a tenement dweller. just the same, the fact that the elements used in creative work must be drawn from experience is extremely suggestive from a practical point of view. it demonstrates the need of a rich sensory life for every child. it also explains the reason for the lack of appreciation on the part of immature children of certain types of literature and certain moral questions. no more need be said here of the reproductive image, as it is synonymous with the memory image and was therefore treated fully under the topic of memory. one fact should be borne in mind, however, and that is, that the creative image is to some extent dependent on the reproductive image as it involves recall. however, as productive imagery involves the recall of elements or parts rather than wholes, an individual may have talent in creative imagery without being above the average in exact reproduction. productive imagery may be classified as fanciful, realistic, and idealistic according to the character of the material used. fanciful productive imagery is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. it is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. little children's imaginations are of this type--it is their play world of make-believe. the incongruity and absurdity of their images have been compared to the dreams of adults. lacking in experience, without knowledge of natural laws, their imagination runs riot with the materials it has at its command. some adults still retain it to a high degree--witness the myths and fairy stories, "alice in wonderland," and the like. all adults in their "castle-building" indulge in this type of imagery to some extent. realistic productive imagery, as its name implies, adheres more strictly to actual conditions, it deals with the probable. it usually is constructed for a purpose, being put to some end beyond itself. it lacks much of the emotional element possessed by the other two types. this is the kind most valuable in reasoning and thinking. it deals with new situations--constructs them, creates means of dealing with them, and forecasts the results. it is the type of productive imagery called into play by inventors, by craftsmen, by physicians, by teachers--in fact, by any one who tries to bring about a change in conditions by the functioning of a definite thought process. this is the kind of imagery which most interests grammar school pupils. they demand facts, not fancies. they are most active in making changes in a world of things. idealistic productive imagery does not fly in the face of reality as does the fanciful, nor does it adhere so strictly to facts as does the realistic. it deals with the possible--with what may be, but with what is not yet. it always looks to the future, for if realized it is no longer idealistic. it is enjoyed for its own sake but does not exist for that alone, but looks towards some result. it is concerned primarily with human lives and has a strong emotional tone. it is the heart of ideals. the adolescent revels in this type of productive imagery. his dreams concerning his own future, his service to his fellow men, his success, and the like involve much idealistic imagery. hero worship involves it. it is one of the differences between the man with "vision" and the man without. the importance of productive imagery cannot be overemphasized. this power to create the new out of the old is one of the greatest possessions of mankind. all progress in every field, whether individual or racial, depends upon it. from the fertility and richness of man's productive imagination must come all the suggestions which will make this world other than what it is. therefore one of the greatest tasks of education at present is to cherish and cultivate this power. one cannot fail to recognize, however, that with the emphasis at present so largely upon memory, the cultivation of the imagination is being pushed into the background despite all our theories to the contrary. not only is productive imagery as a whole worth while, but each type is valuable. an adult lacking power of fanciful imagination lacks power to enjoy certain elements in life and lacks a very definite means of recreation. lacking in realistic imagination he is unable to deal successfully with new situations, but must forever remain in bondage to the past. without idealistic imagination he lacks the motive which makes men strive to be better, more efficient--other than what they are. at certain times in child development one type may need special encouragement, and at another time some other. all should, however, be borne in mind and developed along right and wholesome lines; otherwise, left to itself, any one of these, and especially the last, may be a source of danger to the character. images may be classified according to the material dealt with into object images or concrete images and into word or abstract images. no one of these terms is very good as a name of the image referred to. the first group--object or concrete image--refers to an image in which the sensory qualities, such as color, size, rhythm, sweetness, harmony, etc., are present. the images of a friend, of a text-book, of the national anthem, of an orange, of the schoolroom, and so on, would all be object images. a word or abstract image is one which is a symbol. it stands for and represents certain sensory experiences, the quality of which does not appear in the image. any word, number, mathematical or chemical symbol--in fact, any abstract symbol will come under this type of image. if in the first list of illustrations, instead of having images of the real objects, an individual had images of words in each case, the images would be abstract or verbal images. abstract images shade into concrete by gradual degrees--there is no sharp line of division between the two; however, they do form two different kinds of images, two forms which may have the same meaning. the question as to the respective use and value of these two kinds of images is given different answers. there is no question but that the verbal image is more economical than the object image. it saves energy and time. it brings with it less of irrelevant detail and is more stable than the object image, and therefore results in more accurate thinking. it is abstract in nature and therefore has more general application. on the other hand, it has been claimed for the object image that it necessarily precedes the verbal image--is fundamental to it; that it is essential in creative work dealing with materials and sounds and in the appreciation of certain types of descriptive literature, and that in any part of the thinking process when, because of difficulty of some kind, a percept would help, an object image would be of the same assistance. it is concerning these supposed advantages of the object image that there has been most dispute. there is no proof that the line of growth is necessarily from percept, through object image, to verbal image. in certain fields, notably smell, the object image is almost absent and yet the verbal images in that field carry meaning. it is also true that people whose power of getting clear-cut, vivid object images is almost nil seem to be in nowise hampered by that fact in their use of the symbols. knowing the unreliability of the object image, it would seem very unsafe to use it as the link between percept and symbol. much better to connect the symbol directly with the experience and let it gain its meaning from that. as to its value in constructive work in arts, literature, drama, and invention, the testimony of some experts in each field bears witness that it is not a necessary accompaniment of success. the musician need not hear, mentally, all the harmonies, changes, intervals; he may think them in terms of notes, rests, etc., as he composes. the poet need not see the scene he is describing; verbal images may bear his meanings. of course this does not mean that object images may not be present too, but the point is that the worker is not dependent on them. the aid offered by object images in time of difficulty is still more open to doubt. as an illustration of what is meant by this: suppose a child to be given a carpeting example in arithmetic which he finds himself unable to solve. the claim is made that if he will then call up a concrete image of the room, he will see that the carpet is laid in strips and that suggestion may set him right. but it has been proved experimentally over and over again that if he doesn't know that carpets are laid that way, he will never get it from the image, and if he does know it, he doesn't need an object image. it seems to be a fact that object images do not function, in the sense that one cannot get a correct answer as to color, or form, or number from them. one can read off from a concrete image what he knows to be true of it--or else it is just guessing. "knowing" in each case involves observation and judgment, and that means verbal images. students whose power of concrete imagery is low do, on the average, in situations where a concrete image would supposedly help, just as well as students whose power in this field is high. it does seem to be true that object images give a vividness and color to mental life which may result in a keener appreciation of certain types of literature. this warmth and vividness which object images add to the mental processes of those who have them is a boon. on the whole, then, word images are the more valuable of the two types. upon them depends, primarily, the ability to handle new situations, and even in the constructive fields they are all sufficient. these two facts, added to the fact that they are more accurate, speedy, and general in application, makes them a necessary part of the mental equipment of an efficient worker, and means that much more attention must be given to the development of productive symbol images. two warnings should be borne in mind: first, although the object images are not necessary in general, as discussed above, to any given individual, because of his particular habits of thought, they may be necessary accompaniments to his mental processes. second, although object images may not help in giving understanding or appreciation under new conditions, still the method of asking students to try to image certain conditions is worth while because it makes them stop and think, which is always a help. whether they get object or word images in the process makes no difference. the discussion concerning the possibility of "imageless" thought, while an interesting one, cannot be entered into here. whether "meanings" can exist in the human mind apart from any carrier in the form of some sensory or imaginal state is unsettled, but the discussion has drawn attention to at least the very fragmentary nature of those carriers. a few fragments of words, a mental shrug of the shoulder, a feeling of the direction in which a certain course is leading, a consciousness of one's attitude towards a plan or person--and the conclusion is reached. the thinking, or it may even have been reasoning, involved few clear-cut images of any kind. the fragmentary, schematic nature of the carriers and the large part played by feelings of direction and attitude are the rather astonishing results of the introspective analysis resulting from this discussion. this sort of thinking is valuable for the same reasons that thinking in terms of words is valuable--it only goes a step further, but it needs direction and training. images of all kinds have been discussed as if they stood out clearly differentiated from all other types of mental states. this is necessary in order that their peculiar characteristics and functions may be clear. however, they are not so clearly defined in actual mental life, but shade into each other and into other mental states, giving rise to confusion and error. the two greatest sources of error are: first, the confusion of image with percept, and second, the confusion of memory image with image of the imagination. the chief difference between these mental states as they exist is a difference in kind and amount of associations. these different associates usually give to the percept a vividness and material reality which the other two lack. they give to the memory image a feeling of pastness and trueness which the image of imagination lacks. therefore lack of certain associations, due to lack of experience or knowledge, or presence of associations due to these same causes and to the undue vividness of other connections, could easily result in one of these states being mistaken for another. there is no inherent difference between them. the first type of confusion, between percept and image, has been recently made the subject of investigation. perky found that even with trained adults, if the perceptual stimulus was slight, it was mistaken for an image. all illusions would come under this head. children's imaginary companions, when really believed in, are explained by this confusion. however, the confusion is much more general than these illustrations would seem to imply. the fact that "love is blind," that "we see what we look for" are but statements of this same confusion, and these two facts enter into multitudes of situations all through life. the need to "see life clearly and see it whole" is an imperative one. the second type of confusion, between reproductive and productive memory, is even more common. the "white lies" of children, the embroidering of a story by the adult, the adding to and adding to the original experience until all sense of what really happened is lost, are but ordinary facts of everyday experiences. the unreliability of witness and testimony is due, in part, to this confusion. questions . how is the process of imagination like memory? . what is the relation of imagination to thinking? . what kind of images do you seek to have children use in their work in the subjects which you teach? . can you classify the members of your class as visualizers, audiles, and the like? . if one learns most readily by reading rather than hearing, does it follow that his images will be largely visual? why? . give examples from your own experience of memory images; of creative images. . to what degree does creative imagination depend upon past experiences? . what type of imagery is most important for the work of the inventor? the farmer? the social reformer? . of what significance in the life of an adult is fanciful imagery? . what, if any, is the danger involved in reveling in idealistic productive imagery? . what advantages do verbal images possess as over against object images? . why would you ask children to try to image in teaching literature, geography, history, or any other subject for which you are responsible? . how would you handle a boy who is hi the habit of confusing memory images with images of imagination? . in what sense is it true that all progress, is dependent upon productive imagination? * * * * * vii. how thinking may be stimulated the term "thinking" has been used almost as loosely as the term "imagination," and used to mean almost as many different things. even now there is no consensus of opinion as to just what thinking is. dewey says, "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought."[ ] miller says, "thinking is not so much a distinct conscious process as it is an organisation of all the conscious processes which are relevant in a problematic situation for the performance of the function of consciously adjusting means to end."[ ] thinking always presupposes some lack in adjustment, some doubt or uncertainty, some hesitation in response. so long as the situation, because of its simplicity or familiarity, receives immediately a response which satisfies, there is no need for thinking. only when the response is inadequate or when no satisfactory response is forthcoming is thinking aroused. by far the majority of the daily adjustments made by people, both mental and physical, require no thinking because instinct, habit, and memory suffice. it is only when these do not serve to produce a satisfactory response that thinking is needed--only when there is something problematic in the situation. even in new situations thinking is not always used to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. following an instinctive prompting when confronted by a new situation; blindly following another's lead; using the trial and error method of response; reacting to the situation as to the old situation most like it; or response by analogy: all are methods of dealing with new situations which often result in correct adjustments, and yet none of which need involve thinking. this does not mean that these methods, save the first mentioned, may not be accompanied by thinking; but that each of them may be used without the conscious adjustment of means to end demanded by thinking. that these methods, and not thinking, are the ones most often used, even by adults, in dealing with problems, cannot be denied. they offer an easy means of escape from the more troublesome method of thinking. it is so much easier to accept what some one else says, so much easier to agree with a book's answer to a question than to think it out for oneself. following the first suggestion offered, just going at things in a hit-or-miss fashion, uncritical response by analogy, saves much time and energy apparently, and therefore these methods are adopted and followed by the majority of people in most of the circumstances of life. it is human nature to think only when no other method of mental activity brings the desired response. we think only when we must. not only is it true that problems are often solved correctly by other methods than that of thinking, but on the other hand much thinking may take place and yet the result be an incorrect conclusion, or perhaps no solution at all be reached. think of the years of work men have devoted to a single problem, and yet perhaps at the end of that time, because of a wrong premise or some incorrect data, have arrived at a result that later years have proved to have been utterly false. think of the investigations being carried on now in medicine, in science, in invention, which because of the lack of knowledge are still incomplete, and yet in each case thinking of the most technical and rigorous type has been used. thinking cannot be considered in terms of the result. correct results may be obtained, even in problematic situations, with no thinking, and on the other hand much thinking may be done and yet the results reached be entirely unsatisfactory. thinking is a process involving a certain definite procedure. it is the organisation of all mental states toward a certain definite end, but is not any one mental state. in certain types of situations this procedure is the one most certain of reaching correct conclusions, in some situations it is the only possible one, but the conclusion is not the thinking and its correctness does not differentiate the process from others. from the foregoing discussions it must not be deduced that because of the specific nature and the difficulty of thinking that the power is given only to adults. on the contrary, the power is rooted in the original equipment of the human race and develops gradually, just as all other original capacities do. children under three years of age manifest it. true, the situations calling it out are very simple, and to the adult seem often trivial, as they most often occur in connection with the child's play, but they none the less call for the adjustment of means to end, which is thinking. a lost toy, the absence of a playmate, the breaking of a cup, a thunderstorm, these and hundreds of other events of daily life are occasions which may arouse thinking on the part of a little child. it is not the type of situation, nor its dignity, that is the important thing in thinking, but the way in which it is dealt with. the incorrectness of a child's data, their incompleteness and lack of organization, often result in incorrect conclusions, and still his thinking may be absolutely sound. the difference between the child and the adult in this power is a difference in degree--both possess the power. as dewey says, "only by making the most of the thought-factor, already active in the experience of childhood, is there any promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at adolescence, or at any later period."[ ] thinking, then, is involved in any response which comes as a result of the conscious adaptation of means to end in a problematic situation. many of the processes of mental activity which have been given other names may involve this process. habit formation--when the learner analyzes his progress or failure, when he tries to find a short cut, or when he seeks for an incentive to insure greater improvement--may serve as a situation calling for thinking. the process of apperceiving or of assimilation may involve it. studying and trying to remember may involve it. constructive imagination often calls for it. reasoning, always requires it. in the older psychology reasoning and thinking were often used as synonyms, but more recently it has been accepted by most psychologists that reasoning is simply one type of thinking, the most advanced type, and the most demanding type, but not the only one. thinking may go on (as in the other processes just mentioned) without reasoning, but all reasoning must involve thinking. it is this lack of differentiation between reasoning and thinking, the attempt to make of all thinking, reasoning, that has limited teachers in their attempts to develop thinking upon the part of their pupils. the essentials of the thinking process are three: ( ) a state of doubt or uncertainty, resulting in suspended judgment; ( ) an organization and control of mental states in view of an end to be attained; ( ) a critical attitude involving selection and rejection of suggestions offered. the recognition of some lack of adjustment, the feeling of need for something one hasn't, is the only stimulus toward thinking. this problematic situation, resulting in suspended judgment, caused by the inadequacy of present power or knowledge, may arise in connection with any situation. it is unfortunate that the terms "problematic situation" and "feeling of inadequacy" have been discussed almost entirely in connection with situations when the result has some pragmatic value. there is no question but what the situation arousing thinking must be a live one and a real one, but it need not be one the answer to which will be useful. it is true that with the majority of people, both children and adults, a problem of this type will be more often effective in arousing the thinking process than a problem of a more abstract nature, but it is not always so, nor necessarily so. most children sometimes, and some children most of the time, enjoy thinking simply for the sake of the activity. they do not need the concrete, pragmatic situation--anything, no matter how abstract, that arouses their curiosity or appeals to their love of mastery offers enough of a problem. sometimes children are vitally interested in working geometrical problems, translating difficult passages in latin, striving to invent the perpetual motion machine, even though there is no evident and useful result. it is not the particular type of situation that is the thing to be considered, but the attitude that it arouses in the individual concerned. educators in discussion of the situations that make for thinking must allow for individual differences and must plan for the intellectually minded as well as for others. the thinker confronted by a situation for which his present knowledge is not adequate, recognizes the difficulty and suspends judgment; in other words, does not jump at a conclusion but undertakes to think it out. to do this control is continually necessary. he must keep his problem continually before him and work directly for its solution, avoiding delays, avoiding being side-tracked. this means, of course, the critical attitude towards all suggestions offered. each one as it comes must be inspected in the light of the end to be reached--if it does not seem to help towards that goal, it must be rejected. criticism, selection, and rejection of suggestions offered must continue as long as the thinking process goes on. "to maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry--these are the essentials of thinking." in order to maintain this critical attitude to select and reject suggestions with reference to a goal, the suggestions as they come cannot be accepted as units and followed. such a procedure is possible only when the mental process is not controlled by an end. control by a goal necessitates analysis of the suggestions and abstraction of what in them is essential for the particular problem in hand. it is because no complete association at hand offers a satisfactory response to the situation that the need for thinking arises. each association as it comes must be broken up, certain parts or elements emerge, certain relationships, implications, or functions are made conscious. each of these is examined in turn; as they seem to be valueless for the purpose of the thinker, they are rejected. if one element or relationship seems significant for the problem, it is seized upon, abstracted from its fellows, and becomes the center of the next series of suggestions. a part, element, quality, or what not, of the situation is accepted as significant of it for the time being. the part stands for the whole--this is characteristic of all thinking. as a very simple illustration, consider the following one reported by dewey: "projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which i daily cross the river, is a long white pole, bearing a gilded ball at its tip. it suggested a flag pole when i first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. but soon difficulties presented themselves. the pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flag pole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. it seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying. "i then tried to imagine all possible purposes of such a pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (_a_) possibly it was an ornament. but as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried like poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (_b_) possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. but the same considerations made this improbable. besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house, (_c_) its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving. "in support of this conclusion, i discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot's position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. this hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that i accepted it. i formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly."[ ] the problem was to find out the use of the flag pole. no adequate explanation came as the problem presented itself; it therefore caused a state of uncertainty, of suspended judgment, and a process of thinking in order to get an answer. each suggestion that came was analyzed, its requirements and possibilities checked up by the actual facts and the goal. the suggestions that the pole was simply to carry a flag, was an ornament, was the terminal of a wireless telegraph, were examined and rejected. the final one, that the pole was to point out the direction in which the boat was moving, upon analysis seemed most probable and was accepted. the one characteristic of the pole, that it points direction, and its position, need to be accepted as the essential facts in the situation, for the particular problem. without control of the process, without the two steps of analysis and abstraction, no conclusion could have been reached. analysis and abstraction may be facilitated in three ways. first, by attentive piecemeal examination. the total situation is examined, element by element, attentively, until the element needed is reached or approximated. this method of procedure helps to emphasize minor bonds of association which the element possesses in the learner's experience but which he needs to have brought to his attention. it can only be used when the element is known to some degree. it is the method to use when elements are known in a hazy, incomplete, or indefinite way and need clearing up. second, by varying the concomitant. an element associated with many situations, which vary in other respects, comes to be felt and recognized as independent. this is the method to use when a new element in a complex is to be taught. third, by contrast. a new element is brought into consciousness more quickly if it is set side by side with its opposite. of course, this is only true provided the opposite has already been learned. to present opposites, both of which are new or only partially learned, confuses the analysis instead of facilitating it. reasoning, as the highest type of thinking, includes all that thinking in general does, and adds some particular requirement which differentiates it from the simpler forms. further discussion of it, then, should make clearer the essential in thinking as a process, as well as make clear its most difficult form. reasoning is defined by miller as "controlled thinking,--thinking organized and systematized according to laws and principles and carried on by use of superior technique."[ ] reasoning, then, is the kind of thinking that deals directly with laws and principles. much thinking may be carried on without any overt, definite use of laws and principles, as in constructive imagination or in apperception, but, if this is so, it seems better to call the thinking by one of the other names. of course this classification is somewhat arbitrary, but there can be no question that types of thinking do differ. as has already been noted, some psychologists have used the terms thinking and reasoning as synonyms, but such usage has resulted in confusion and has not been of practical value. it is only as the mental process desired becomes clearly conceived of, its connotations and denotation clearly defined, that it becomes a real goal towards which a teacher or learner may strive. this, then, is the primary criterion of reasoning--that the thinker be dealing consciously with laws and principles. an acceptance of this first essential makes clear that the particular process of reasoning cannot be carried on in subjects which lack laws and principles. spelling, elementary reading, vocabulary study, most of the early work in music and art, the acquisition of facts wherever found--these situations may offer opportunity for thinking, but little if any for reasoning. because a teacher is using the development method does not mean necessarily that her students are reasoning. the two terms are not in any way synonymous. the second essential in reasoning is the presence of a definite technique. this technique consists of two factors: first, certain definite mental states, and second, the use of the process of thinking by either the inductive or the deductive method. first as to the mental states involved. the fact that the thinking deals with laws and principles necessitates the presence, in the thinking process, of constructive verbal or symbolic imagery, logical relationships, logical concepts, and explicit judgments. this does not at all exclude other types of these mental states and entirely different mental states. the kind of analysis involved simply necessitates the presence of these types, whatever others may be present. constructive symbolic imagery has already been discussed. logical relationships are those that are independent of accidental conditions, are not dependent on mere contiguity in time and space, but are inherent in the association involved. such relationships are those of likeness and difference, cause and effect, subject and object, equality, concession, and the like. logical concepts are those which are the result of thinking, whose definite meaning has been brought clearly into consciousness so that a definition could be framed. a child has some notion of the meaning of tree, or man, or chemist, and therefore possesses a concept of some kind, but the exact meaning, the particular qualities necessary, are usually lacking, and so it could not be called a logical concept. explicit judgments are those which contain within themselves the reasons for the inference. they, too, are the result of thinking. one may say that "cheating is wrong," or that "water will not rise above its source level," or that "cleanliness is necessary to health," or that "this is a rembrandt"--as a matter of experience, habit, but without any reflection and with no reasons for such judgment. if, on the other hand, the problems to which these judgments are answers had been a matter of thinking, the reasons or the ground for such judgment would have become conscious and the judgment then become explicit. it must be evident that in any problems dealing with laws and principles the mental states involved must be definite, clear cut, logically sound, and their implications thoroughly appreciated and understood. the second element in the technique necessary in reasoning is the use of either the inductive or the deductive method in the process. induction requires--a problem, search for facts with which to solve it, comparison and analysis of those facts, abstraction of the essential likenesses, and conclusion. deduction requires--a problem, the analysis of the situation and abstraction of its essential elements, search for generals under which to classify it, comparison of it with each general found, and conclusion. it is unfortunate that in the discussions of induction and deduction the differences have been so emphasized that they have been regarded as different processes, whereas the likenesses far outweigh the differences. an examination of the requirements of each as stated above shows that the process in the two is the same. not only do both involve reasoning and therefore require the major steps of analysis and abstraction present in all thinking, but both also involve search and comparison. both, of course, involve the same kind of mental states. at times it is very difficult to distinguish between them. although for practical purposes it is necessary, sometimes, to stress the differences, the inherent similarity should not be lost sight of. the differences between these two methods of reasoning are, first, in the locus of the problem; second, in the order of the steps of the process; third, in the relative proportion of particulars and generals used; fourth, in the devices used, ( ) in induction the problem is concerned with a general. in some situation a concept, law, or principle has proven inadequate as a response. the question is then raised as to what is wrong with it and the inductive process is instigated. the problem is solved when the principle or concept is perfected or enlarged--in other words, is made adequate. in deduction the problem is concerned with the individual situation. some problem is raised by a particular fact or experience and is answered when it is placed under the law or concept to which it belongs. deduction is, practically the classification of particulars. ( ) the order of steps is different. in induction, because present knowledge falls short, the major step of analysis necessary to abstraction of the essential is impossible, and therefore the search for new facts must come first, whereas in deduction, the analysis of the particular situation results in a search for generals and a classification of the situation in question. ( ) in induction many particular facts may be necessary before one concept or principle is made adequate, while in deduction many concepts or principles may be examined before one particular is classified. ( ) in induction the hypothesis is used as a device to make clear the possible goal; in deduction the syllogism is used as a device to make clear the conclusion which has been reached, to throw into relief the classification and the result coming from it. in this discussion, induction and deduction have been treated, for the sake of clearness, as if they acted independently of each other, as if a thinker might at one time use deduction and at another time induction. they have been outlined in such a way that one might think that the movement of the mind in one process was such that it precluded the possibility of the other process. this is not so--the two are inextricably mingled in the actual process of reasoning, and further, induction as used in practical life always involves deduction at two points, as an initial starting point and as an end point. the knowledge that a certain principle is inadequate comes to consciousness through the attempt to classify some particular experience under it. failure results and the inductive process may then be initiated, but this initial attempt is deductive and if it had been successful there would have been no need of induction. after the inductive process is complete and the general principle has been classified or perfected, the final step is testing it to see if it is adequate, first by applying it to the particular problem which caused the whole process, and then to new situations. if it tests, it is accepted,--if not, further induction is necessary. this again is deduction. not only is induction not complete without deduction, but each deduction influences the principle which is applied, making it more sure and more flexible. even in the process of induction, there are attempts to classify these facts which are being gathered under suggested old principles, or half-formed new ones, before the process is completed. this is a deductive movement, even though it prove unsatisfactory or impossible. dewey describes this interaction by saying, "there is thus a double movement in all reflection: a movement from the given partial and confused data to a suggested comprehension (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this suggested whole--which as suggested is a meaning, an idea--to the particular facts, so as to connect these with one another and with additional facts to which the suggestion has directed attention."[ ] however true this intermingling of induction and deduction may be, the fact still remains true that in any given case the major movement is in one direction or the other, and that therefore in order to insure effective thinking measures must be taken accordingly. as a child formulates his conception of a verb, or words the characteristic essentials of the lily-family, or frames the rule for addition of fractions or the action of a base on a metal, he is concerned primarily with the form of the reasoning process known as induction. when he classes a certain word as a conjunction, a certain city as a trade center, a certain problem as one in percentage, he is using deduction. complexes and gradual shadings of one state into another, not clearly defined and sharply differentiated processes and states, are characteristic of all mental life. another unfortunate statement with regard to induction and deduction is that the former "proceeds from particulars to generals" and the latter from "generals to particulars." both of these statements omit the starting point and leave the thinker with no ground for either the particulars or the generals with which he works. the thinker is supposed, let us say, to collect specimens of flowers in order to arrive at a notion of the characteristics of a certain class--but why collect these rather than any others? true, in the artificial situation of a schoolroom or college, the learner often collects in a certain field rather than another, simply because he is told to. but in daily life he would not be told to---the incentive must come from some particular situation which presents a problem and therefore limits the field of search. the starting point must be a particular experience or situation. the same thing is true in deduction, although the syllogistic form has often been misleading. "metals are hard; iron is a metal, therefore iron is hard." but why talk about metals at all--and if so why hardness rather than color or effect on bases or some other characteristic? of course, here again it is some particular problem that defines the search for the general and directs attention to some class characteristics rather than to others. not only is the starting point of all reasoning some definite situation for which there is no adequate response, but the end point must naturally be the same. a particular problem demanding solution is the cause for reasoning, and, of course, the end of the process must be the solution of that problem. from the foregoing it must not be concluded that the processes of induction and deduction are manifested only in connection with reasoning. in fact, their use as a conscious tool of technique in reasoning comes only after considerable experience of their use when there was no conscious purpose and no control. a little child's notion of dog, or tree, or city--in fact, all his psychological concepts necessitate the inductive movement, but it has taken place in his spontaneous thinking and the meanings have evolved after considerable experience without any definite control on his part. so with deduction. as he recognizes this as a chestnut tree, that as a rocking chair, as he decides that this is wrong or that it is going to clear, he is classifying things, or conduct, or conditions, and so is following the deductive movement. but the judgments may come as a result of past experience, may be spontaneous and involve no protracted controlled activity which has been defined as thinking. man's mind works spontaneously both inductively and deductively, and hence the possibility of control of these operations later. thinking is an outgrowth of spontaneous activity; reasoning is but an application of the natural laws of mental activity to certain situations. the laws of readiness, exercise, and effect govern thinking just as they do all other mental processes. thinking is not independent of habit; it is not a mysterious force other than association which deals with novel data. thinking is merely an exhibition of the laws of habit under certain definite situations. at first sight this seems to be impossible, because, as has been emphasized throughout this chapter, thinking takes place when no satisfactory response is at hand and when nothing is offered by past experience which is adequate. as a result of the thinking, responses are reached which never before have occurred as a result of that situation. just the same they are reached only because of the operation of the laws of habit. it must be borne in mind that the laws of association do not work in such a way that only gross total situations are bound to total responses. in man particularly, situations are being continually broken up into elements, and those elements connected with responses. responses are being continually disintegrated, and elements, instead of the whole response, being bound to situations. analysis is continually taking place merely as a result of the working of these laws. if the nervous mechanism of man were not of this hair-trigger variety, if elements did not emerge from a total complex as a result of bonds formed, of readiness of certain tracts, no willing, no attention on the part of the thinker, would ever bring about analysis. this is made very vivid when one is met by a problem he cannot solve. if the situation does not break up, if the right element does not emerge, if the right cue is not given, he is helpless. all he can do is to hold fast to his problem and wait. as the associations are offered, he can select and reject, but that is all. the marvelous power of the genius, the inventor, the reasoner in all fields, is merely an exhibition of the laws of association working with extremely subtle elements. it seems to transcend all experience because these elements and the bonds which experience has formed cannot be observed. a child fails in his thinking often because he uses his past experience and responds by analogy--we note that fact and criticize him for it. but he succeeds for just the same reason and by the use of just the same laws. james long ago showed conclusively that association by similarity, which is one of the prominent types used in reasoning, was only the law of habit working with elements of novel data. the fact that thinking is determined by its aim rather than by its antecedents has also been given a mysterious place as apart from association. the thinker who chose the right associate, the one that led him towards his goal rather than some other, was called sagacious. but, after all, this being governed by an aim is nothing more than the operation of the law of readiness among intellectual bonds. one associate is chosen and another rejected because one is more satisfying than another. certain bonds are made more ready than others because of the general set or attitude of the thinker, and therefore any associate using those bonds brings satisfaction and is retained. "the power that moves the man of science to solve problems correctly is the same that moves him to eat, sleep, rest, and play. the efficient thinker is not only more fertile in ideas and more often productive of the 'right' ideas than the incompetent is; he is also more satisfied by them when he gets them, and more rebellious against the futile and misleading ones. we trust to the laws of cerebral nature to present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea, and also _to prefer that idea to others."_[ ] the reasons for failure of teachers and educators of all kinds to train people to think are numerous. ( ) scarcity of brains which work primarily in terms of connections between subtle elements, relationships, etc. ( ) lack of knowledge or incorrect knowledge, due to narrow experience or poor memory. ( ) lack of the necessary habits of attention and criticism. ( ) lack of power of the more abstract and intellectual operations to bring satisfaction, due partly to original equipment and partly to training. ( ) lack of power to do independent work, due to poor training. schools cannot in any way make good the deficiency which is due to a lack of mental capacity. they can, and should, do something to provide knowledge which is well organized around experiences which have proved vital to pupils. something can undoubtedly be done in the way of cultivating the habit of concentration of attention, and of making more or less habitual the critical attitude. within the range of the ability which the individuals to be educated possess, the school may do much to give training which will make independent work or thinking more common in the experience of school pupils, and therefore much more apt to be resorted to in the case of any problematic situation. possibly the greatest weakness in our schools, as they are at present constituted, is in the dependence of both teachers and children upon text-books, laboratory manuals, lectures, and the like. in almost every field of knowledge which is presented in our elementary and high schools, more opportunity should be given for contact with life activities. such contacts should, in so far as it is possible, involve the organization of the observations which are made with relation to problems and principles which the subject seeks to develop. in nature study or in geography in the elementary school many of the principles involved are never really mastered by children, by virtue of the fact that they merely memorize the words which are involved, rather than solve any of the problems which may occur, either by virtue of their intellectual interests, or on account of their meaning in everyday life. the following of the instructions given in the laboratory manual does not necessarily result in developing the spirit of inquiry or investigation, nor even acquaint pupils with the method of the science which is supposed to be studied. possibly the greatest contribution which a teacher can make to the development of thinking upon the part of children is in discovering to them problems which challenge their attention, the solution of which for them is worth while. as has already been indicated, an essential element in thinking is constantly to select from among the many associations which may be available that one which will contribute to the particular problem which we have in mind. the mere grouping of ideas round some topic does not satisfy this requirement, for such a reciting of paragraphs or chapters may amount simply to memorization and nothing more. if a teacher can in geography or in history send children to their books to find such facts as are available for the solution of a particular problem, she is stimulating thought upon their part, and may at the same time be giving them some command of the technique of inquiry or of investigation. the class that starts to work, either in the discussion during the recitation period, or when they work at their seats, or at home, with a clear statement of the aim or problem may be expected to do much more in the way of thinking than will occur in the experience of those who are merely told to read certain parts of a book. in a well-conducted recitation which involves thinking, the aim needs to be restated a number of times in order that the selection of those associations which are important, and the rejection of those which are not pertinent, may continue over a considerable period. in so far as it is possible, children should be made to feel responsibility for the progress which is made in the solution of their problems. they should be critical of the contributions made by each other. they should be sincere in their expression of doubt, and in questioning whenever they do not understand. above all, if they are really thinking, they need to have an opportunity for free discussion. in classrooms in which children are seated in rows looking at the backs of each other's heads and reciting to the teacher, the tendency is simply to satisfy what the pupils conceive to be the demands of the teacher, rather than to think and to attempt to resolve one's doubts. in classes in which teachers provide not only for a statement of the problem which is to be solved during the study period, but also for a variety in assignments, children may be expected to bring to class differences in points of view and in the data which they have collected. in such a situation discussion is a perfectly normal process, and thinking is stimulated. as children pass through the several grades of the school system, they ought to become increasingly conscious of the process of reasoning. they should be asked to tell how they have arrived at their conclusions. they should give the reason for their judgments. a great deal of loose thinking would be avoided if we could in some measure establish the habit upon the part of boys and girls of asking, "will it work in all cases?"; "what was assumed as a basis for arriving at the conclusion which i have accepted?"; "are the data which have been brought together adequate?"; "to what degree have the fallacies which are more or less common in reasoning entered into my thinking?" it is not that one would hope to give a course in logic to elementary or to high school children, but rather that they should learn, out of the situations which demand thought, constantly to check up their conclusions and to verify them in every possible way. we may not expect by this method to create any unusual power of thought, but we may in some degree provide for the development of a critical attitude which will enable these same boys and girls, both now and as they grow older, to discriminate between those who merely dogmatize, and those who present a sound basis for their reasoning, either in terms of a principle which can be accepted, or in terms of observations or experiments which establish the conclusions which they are asked to accept. in all of the work which involves thinking, it is of the utmost importance that we preserve upon the part of pupils, in so far as it is possible, an open-minded attitude. it is well to have children in the habit of saying with respect to their conclusions that in so far as they have the evidence, this or that conclusion seems to be justified. it may even be well to have them reach the conclusion in some parts of their work that there are not sufficient data available upon which to base a generalization, or that certain principles which are accepted as valid by some thinkers are questioned by others, and that the conclusions which are based upon principles which are not commonly accepted must always be stated by saying: it follows, if you accept a particular principle, that this particular conclusion will hold. we need more and more to encourage the habit of independent work. we must hope as children pass through our school system that they will grow more and more independent in their statement of conclusions and of beliefs. we can never expect that boys and girls, or men and women, will reach conclusions on all of the questions which are of importance to them, but it ought to be possible, especially for those of more than usual capacity, to distinguish between the conclusions of a scientific investigation and the statements of a demagogue. the use of whatever capacity for independent thought which children possess should result in the development of a group of open-minded, inquiring, investigating boys and girls, eager and willing in confronting their common community problems to do their own thinking, or to be guided by those who present conclusions which are recognized as valid. they should learn to act in accordance with well-established conclusions, even though they may have to break with the traditions or superstitions which have operated to interfere with the development of the social welfare of the group with which they are associated. questions . how do children (and adults) most frequently solve their problems? . under what conditions do children think and yet reach wrong conclusions? give examples. . can first-grade children think? give examples which prove your contention. . what are the important elements to be found in all thinking? . show how these elements may be involved in a first-grade lesson in nature study. in an eighth-grade lesson in geography. in the teaching of any high school subject. . when may habit formation involve thinking? memorization? . give five examples of problems which you believe will challenge the brightest pupils in your class. which would seem real and worth solving to the duller members of the group? . how may the analysis of such ideas as come to mind, and the abstraction of the part which is valuable for the solution of a particular problem, be facilitated? . how do you distinguish between thinking and reasoning? . what are the essential elements in reasoning? give an example of reasoning as carried on by one solving a problem in arithmetic or geometry, in geography, physics, or chemistry. . in what respects are the processes of induction and deduction alike? in what do they differ? . at what stage of the inductive process is deduction involved? . give examples of reasoning demanded in school work in which the process is predominantly inductive. deductive. . why are the statements "induction proceeds from particulars to generals" and "deduction from generals to particulars" inadequate to describe either process? . in what sense is thinking dependent upon the operation of the laws of habit? . to what degree is it possible to teach your pupils to think? under what limitations do you work? * * * * * viii. appreciation, an important element in education appreciation belongs to the general field of feeling rather than that of knowing. the element which distinguishes appreciation from memory or imagination or perception is an affective one. any one of these mental states may be present without the state being an appreciative one. but appreciation does not occur by itself as an elementary state, it is rather a complex--a feeling tone accompanying a mental state or process and coloring it. in other words, appreciation involves the presence of some intellectual states, but its addition makes the total complex of an emotional rather than a cognitive nature. the difficulty found in discussing emotions in general, that of defining or describing them in language, which is a tool of the intellect, is felt here. the only way to know what appreciation means is to appreciate. no phase of feeling can be adequately described--its essence is then lost--it must be felt. nevertheless something may be done to differentiate this type of feeling from others. appreciation is an attitude of mind which is passive, contemplative. it may grow out of an active attitude or emotion, or it may lead to one, but in either case the state changes from one of appreciation to something else. in appreciation the individual is quiescent. appreciation, therefore, has no end outside of itself. it is a sufficient cause for being. the individual is satisfied with it. this puts appreciation into the category of recreation. appreciation then always involves the pleasure tone, otherwise it could not be enjoyed. it is always impersonal. it takes the individual outside and beyond his own affairs; it is an other-regarding feeling. possession, achievement, and the like do not arouse appreciation, but rather an egoistical emotion. one of the salient characteristics of emotions is their unifying power. it has aptly been said that in extreme emotional states one _is_ the emotion. the individual and his emotional state become one--a very different state of affairs from what is true in cognition. this element of unification is present to some extent in appreciation, although, because of its complex nature, to a lesser extent than in a simpler, more primitive feeling state. still, in true appreciation one does become absorbed in the object of appreciation; he, for the time being, to some extent becomes identified with what he is appreciating. in, order to appreciate this submerging of one's self, this identification is necessary. appreciation is bound up with four different types of situations which are of most importance to the teacher--( ) appreciation of the beautiful, ( ) appreciation of human nature, ( ) appreciation of the humorous, ( ) appreciation of intellectual powers. the appreciation found in these four types of situations must vary somewhat because of the concomitants, but the characteristics which mark appreciation as such seem to be present in all four. true, in certain of the situations occurring under these types the emotional element may be stronger than in others--in some the intellectual element may seem to almost outweigh the affective, but still the predominant characteristics will be found to be those of an attitude which has the earmarks of appreciation. appreciation of beauty has usually been discussed under the head of aesthetic emotions. as to what rightfully belongs under the head of aesthetics is in dispute--writers on the subject varying tremendously in their opinions. most of the recent writers, however, agree that the stimulus for aesthetic appreciation must be a sense percept or an image of some sense object. ideas, meanings, in and of themselves, are not then objects of aesthetic enjoyment. the two senses which furnish the stimuli for this sort of appreciation are the eye and the ear--the former combining sensations under space form and the latter under time form to produce aesthetic feelings. our senses may cause feelings of pleasure, but the enjoyment is sensuous rather than aesthetic. nature, in all its myriad forms, art, architecture, music, literature, and the dance are the chief sources of aesthetic appreciation. that there is a definite connection between physiological processes and the feeling of appreciation is without doubt true, but just what physiological conditions in connection with visual and auditory perception are fulfilled when some experience gives rise to aesthetic appreciation, and just what is violated when there is lack of such appreciation, is not known. it is known that both harmony and rhythm must be considered in music, and that the structure and muscular control of the eye plus the ease of mental apprehension play important parts in rousing aesthetic feelings in connection with vision, but further than that little is known. the chief danger met in developing the aesthetic appreciation is the tendency to overestimate its dependence on, in the first place, skill in creative work and the active emotions involved in achievement, and in the second place, the intellectual understanding of the situation. it has been largely taken for granted that the constructive work in the arts or in music increased one's power of appreciation. that, if a child used color and painted a little picture, or composed a melody, or modeled in clay, he would therefore be able to appreciate better in these fields. and further that the very development of this power to do necessarily developed the power to appreciate. these two beliefs are true to some extent, but only to a limited extent, and not nearly so far as practice has taken for granted. it is true that some power to do increases power to appreciate, but they parallel each other only for a short time and then diverge, and either may be developed at the expense of the other. in most people the power to appreciate, the passive, contemplative enjoyment, far surpasses the ability to create. on the other hand, men of creative genius often lack power of aesthetic appreciation. this result is natural if one thinks of the mental processes involved in the two. power to do is associated with muscular skill, with technique, and with the personal emotions of active achievement. Æsthetic appreciation, on the other hand, is associated with neither, but with a mental attitude and feelings which are quite different. cultivating one set of processes will not develop the other to any great extent and may, on the other hand, be antagonistic to their development. if the aesthetic emotions, if appreciations of the beautiful, are desired, they must be trained and developed directly. the second danger to be avoided in developing aesthetic appreciation is that of magnifying its dependence on the intellectual factors. to understand, to be able to analyze, to pick out the flaws in a musical selection, or a painting, is not necessary to its appreciation. true, some understanding is necessary, but, as in the case of skill, it is much less than has been taken for granted. appreciation can go far ahead of understanding. the intellectual factor and the feeling response are not absolutely interdependent in degree. not only so, but the prominence of the intellectual factor precludes that of the feeling. when one is emphasized the other cannot be, as they are different sorts of mental stuff. continuous and emphatic development of the intellectual may result in the atrophy of the power of appreciation in any given field either temporarily or permanently. many a boy's power to enjoy the rhythm and melody of poetry has been destroyed by the overemphasis of the critical facility during his high school course. the fact that a person can analyze the painting, point out the plans in its composition, and so on, does not at all mean that he can aesthetically appreciate. contemplative enjoyment may be impossible for him--it bores him. botanists are not noted for their power of aesthetic appreciation. it is an acknowledged fact that some art and music critics have lost their power of appreciation of the things they are continually criticizing. this discussion is not intended to minimize the value of creative skill, or of power of intellectual criticism. both are talents that are well worth while cultivating. but it is necessary for one to decide which of the three, aesthetic appreciation, creative skill, or intellectual criticism, in the fields of art, nature, and music, is most worth while for the majority of people and then make plans accordingly. no one of the three can be best developed and brought to its highest perfection by emphasizing any one of the others. the second type of appreciation is appreciation of human nature: appreciation of the value of human life, appreciation of its virtues and trials, appreciation of great characters, and so on. some writers would probably class this type of appreciation under moral feelings--but moral feelings usually are thought of as active, as accompaniments of conduct, whereas these appreciations are feelings aroused in the onlooker--they are passive and for the time being are an end in themselves. these feelings are stimulated by such studies as literature and history particularly. geography and civics offer some opportunity for their development, and, of course, contact with people is the greatest stimulus. in this latter type of situation the feelings of appreciation easily pass over into active emotions, but so long as one remains an onlooker, they need not do so. this appreciation, sympathy with and enjoyment and approval of human nature, finds its source in the social instincts, but it needs development and training if it is to be perfected. very much of the time this appreciation is inhibited by the emphasis put on understanding. the intellectual faculties of memory, judgment, and criticism are the ones called into play in the study of history and often of literature. these studies leave the learner cold. he knows, but it does not make any difference to him. he can analyze the period or the character, but he lacks any feeling response, any appreciation of the qualities of endurance and loyalty portrayed, lacks any _sympathetic_ understanding of the difficulties met and conquered. as was true of the aesthetic appreciation, a certain amount of understanding is necessary for true appreciation of any kind, but overemphasis of the intellectual element destroys the feeling element. the third type of appreciation to be discussed is the appreciation of humor. perhaps this does not belong with the other type, but it certainly has many of the same characteristics. calkins defines a sense of humor as "enjoyment of an unessential incongruity.... this incongruity must be, as has been said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. a fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous contrast between the dignity and grace of the man erect and the ungainly attitude of the falling figure ceases utterly to be funny when it is seen to entail some physical injury; and wit which burns and sears is not amusing to its victim."[ ] the ability to appreciate the humorous in life is a great gift and should be cultivated to a much greater extent than it is at present. a fourth type of appreciation has been called appreciation of intellectual powers--a poor name perhaps, but the feeling is a real one. enjoyment of style, of logical sequence, of the harmony of the whole, of the clear-cut, concise, telling sentences, are illustrations of what is meant. enjoyment of a piece of literature, of a debate, of an argument, of a piece of scientific research, is not limited to the appreciation of the meanings expressed--in fact, in many cases the only factor that can arouse the feeling element, the appreciation, is this element of form. one may _understand_ an argument or a debate as he hears it, but appreciation, enjoyment of it, comes only as a result of the consciousness of these elements of form. _that_ one possesses these feelings of appreciation, at least to some degree, is a matter of human equipment, but _what_ one appreciates in art, literature, human nature, etc., depends primarily on training. there is almost no situation in life that with all people at all times will arouse appreciative feelings. although there are a few fundamental conditions established by the physical make-up of the sense organs and by the original capacities of the human race, still they are few, and at present largely unknown, and experience does much to modify even these. what is crude, vulgar, inharmonious, in art and music to some people, arouses extreme aesthetic appreciation in others. literature that causes one person to throw the book down in disgust will give greatest enjoyment to another. what is malice to one person is humorous to another. what people enjoy and appreciate depends primarily on their experience for the development of these feelings, depends upon the laws of association, readiness, exercise, and effect. to raise power of appreciation from low levels to high, from almost nothing to a controlling force, needs but the application of these laws. but no one of them can be neglected with impunity. it must be a gradual growth, beginning with tracks that are ready, because of the presence of certain instincts, and working on to others through the law of association. to expect a child of seven to appreciate a steel engraving, or a piece of classic music, or moral qualities in another person is to violate the law of readiness. to expect any one in adult life to enjoy music, or art, or nature, who has not had experience with each and enjoyed each continually as a child, is to violate the laws of exercise and effect. two or three suggestions as to aids in the application of these laws may be in place. first, a wealth of images is an aid to appreciation. second, the absence for the time of the critical attitude. third, an encouragement of the passive contemplative attitude. fourth, the example of others. suggestion and association with other people who do appreciate and enjoy are among the best means of securing it. the value of feelings of appreciation are threefold: first, they serve as recreation. it is in enjoyment of this kind that most of the leisure of civilized races is spent. it serves on the mental level much the same purpose that play does, in fact, much of it is mental play of a kind. second, they are impersonal. they are valuable in that they take us out of ourselves, away from self-interests, and therefore make for mental health and sanity as well as for a sympathetic character. they are also a means of broadening one's experience. third, they have a close relationship with ideals and therefore have an active bearing on conduct. it is not necessarily true that one will tend in himself or in his surroundings to be like what he enjoys and appreciates, but the tendency will be strongly in that direction. if an individual truly appreciates, enjoys, beautiful pictures, good music and books, he will be likely, so far as he can, to surround himself with them. if he appreciates loyalty, openmindedness, tolerance, as he meets them in literature and history, he may become more so himself. at least, the developing of appreciations is the first step towards conduct in those lines. in order to insure the conduct, other means must be taken, but without the appreciation the conduct will be less sure. one who would count most in developing power of appreciation upon the part of children may well inquire concerning his own power of appreciation. there is not very much possibility of the development of joy in poetry, in music, or any other artistic form of expression through association with the teacher who finds little satisfaction in these artistic forms, who has little power of aesthetic appreciation. it is only as teachers themselves are sincere in their appreciation of the nobility of character possessed by the men and women whose lives are portrayed in history, in literature, or in contemporary social life that one may expect that their influence will be important in developing such appreciation upon the part of children. those pupils are fortunate who are taught by teachers who have a sense of humor, who are able to grow enthusiastic over the intellectual achievement of the leaders in the field of study or investigation in which the children are at work. children are, indeed, quick to discover sentimentalism or pseudo-appreciation upon the part of teachers, but even though they may not give any certain expression to their enjoyment, they are usually largely influenced by the attitude and genuine power of appreciation possessed by the teacher. in our attempt to have children grow in the field of appreciation we have often made the mistake of attempting to impose upon them adult standards. a great librarian in one of our eastern cities has said that he would rather have children read dime novels than to have them read nothing. from his point of view it was more important to have children appreciating and enjoying something which they read than to have their lives barren in this respect. in literature, in music, and in fine art the development in power of appreciation is undoubtedly from the simple, cruder forms to those which we as adults consider the higher or nobler forms of expression. mother goose, the rhymes of stevenson, of field, or of riley, may be the beginning of the enjoyment of literature which finds its final expression in the reading and in the possession of the greatest literature of the english language. the simple rote songs which the children learn in the first grade, or which they hear on the phonograph, may lead through various stages of development to the enjoyment of grand opera. pictures in which bright color predominates may be the beginning of power of appreciation which finds its fruition in a home which is decorated with reproductions of the world's masterpieces. it is not only in the artistic field that this growth in power of appreciation from the simpler to the more complex is to be found. children instinctively admire the man who is brave rather than the man who endures. achievement is for most boys and girls of greater significance than self-sacrifice. it is only as we adapt our material to their present attainment, or to an attempt to have them reach the next higher stage of development, that we may expect genuine growth. all too often instead of growth we secure the development of a hypocritical attitude, which accepts the judgment of others, and which never really indicates genuine enjoyment. while it is best not to insist upon an analysis of the feelings that one has in enjoying a picture or a poem or a great character, it is worth while to encourage choice. of many stories which have been told, children may very properly choose one which they would like to tell to others. of many poems which have been read in class, a group of boys may admire one and commit it to memory, while the girls may care for another and be allowed to memorize it. wherever such coöperation is possible, the picture which you enjoy most is the one that will mean most in power of appreciation if placed in your room at home. spontaneous approval, rather than an agreement with an adult teacher who is considered an authority, is to be sought for. there is more in the spontaneous laughter which results as children read together their "alice in wonderland" than could possibly result from an analysis of the quality of humor which is involved. we are coming to understand as a matter of education that we may hope to develop relatively few men and women of great creative genius. the producers of work of great artistic worth are, for the most part, to be determined by native capacity rather than by school exercises. we must think of the great majority of school children as possible consumers rather than as producers. schools which furnish a maximum of opportunity to enjoy music and pictures may hope to develop in their community a power of discrimination in these fields which will result in satisfaction with nothing less than the best. the player-piano and the phonograph may mean more in the development of musical taste in a community than all of the lessons which are given in the reading of music. the art gallery in the high school, the folk dances which have been produced as a part of the school festivals, the reading of the best stories, may prepare the way for the utilization of leisure time in the pursuit of the nobler pleasures. the teacher with a saving sense of humor, large in his power of appreciation of the great men and women of his time, and all of the time keen in his own enjoyment and in his ability to interpret for others those things which are most worth while in literature and in art, may count more largely in the life of the community than the one who is a master in some field of investigation. questions . what are the characteristics of the mental states which are involved in appreciation? . name the different types of situations in which appreciation may be developed. give examples. . does the power to criticize poetry or music necessarily involve appreciation? . to what degree may skill in creative work result in power of appreciation? . what are the elements involved in appreciating human nature? . give an example of appreciation of intellectual powers. . what is the essential element in the appreciation of humor? . explain how the power of appreciation is dependent upon training. . what values in the education of an individual are realized through growth in power of appreciation? . why is it important for a teacher to seek to cultivate his own power of appreciation? . what poems, or pictures, or music would you expect first-grade children to enjoy? why? . would you expect fifth-grade children to grow in appreciation of poetry by having them commit to memory selections from milton's paradise lost? why? . why is it important to allow children to choose the poems that they commit to memory, or the pictures which they hang on their walls? . why would you accept spontaneous expression of approval of the characters in literature or in history, rather than seek to control the judgments of children in this respect? . how may teachers prove most effective in developing the power of appreciation upon the part of children? * * * * * ix. the meaning of play in education all human activity might be classified under three heads,--play, work, and drudgery,--but just what activities belong under each head and just what each of the terms means are questions of dispute. that the boundaries between the three are hazy and undefined, and that they shade gradually into each other, are without doubt true, but after all play is different from work, and work from drudgery. much of the disagreement as to the value of play is due to this lack of definition. even to-day when the worth of play is so universally recognized, we still hear the criticism's of "soft pedagogy" and "sugar coating" used in connection with the application of the principle of play in education. although what we call play has its roots in original equipment, still there is no such thing as the play instinct, in the sense that there is a hunting instinct or a fighting instinct. instead of being a definite instinct, which means a definite response to a definite situation, it is rather a tendency characteristic of all instincts and capacities. it is an outgrowth of the general characteristic of all original nature towards activity of some kind. this tendency is so broad and so complex, the machinery governing it is so delicate, that it produces responses that vary tremendously with subtle changes in the individual, and with slight modifications of the situation. what we call play, then, is nothing more than the manifestations of the various instincts and capacities as they appear at times when they are not immediately useful. the connections in the nervous system are ripe and all other factors have operated to put them in a state of readiness: a situation occurs which stimulates these connections and the child plays. these connections called into activity may result in responses which are primarily physical, intellectual, or emotional--all are manifestations of this tendency towards activity. all habits of all kinds grow out of this same activity: habits which we call work and those which we call play. man has not two original natures, one defined in terms of the play instinct, and the other in terms of work. most of the original tendencies involved in play are not peculiar to it, but also are the source of work. manifestation results in making "mud pies and apple pies"; physical activity results in the kicking, squirming, and wriggling of the infant and the monotonous wielding of the hammer of the road mender. the conditions under which an activity occurs, its concomitants, and the attitude of the individual performing it determine whether it is play or work--not its source or root. much, then, of what we call play is simply the manifestation of instincts and capacities not immediately useful to the child. if they were immediately useful, they would probably be put under the head of work, not play. many of the activities which seem playful to us and not of immediate service do so because of the conditions of civilized life. were the infants living under primitive conditions, "in such a community as a human settlement seems likely to have been twenty-five thousand years ago, their restless examination of small objects would perhaps seem as utilitarian as their fathers' hunting."[ ] certainly the tendency of little children to chase a small object going away from them, and to run from a large object approaching slowly, their tendency to collect and hoard, their tendency to outdo another engaged in any instinctive pursuit, would under primitive conditions have a distinct utilitarian value, and yet all such tendencies are ranked as play when manifested by the civilized child. other tendencies become playful rather than useful because of the complexity of the environment and of the nervous system responding to it. in actual life we don't find activity following a neatly arranged situation--response system. on the contrary, a situation seldom stimulates one response, and a response seldom occurs in the typical form required by theory. it is this mingling of responses brought about by varying elements in the situation that gives the playful effect. in a less complex environment this complexity would be lessened. also experience, habit, tends to pin one type of response to a given situation and the minor connections gradually become eliminated. for example, if a boy of nine, alone in the woods, was approached by another with threatening gestures and scowls, the fighting response would be called out, and we would not call it play, because it served as protection. if the same boy in his own garden, with a group of companions, was approached by another with scowls, a perfectly good-natured tussle might take place and we would call it play. the difference between the two would be in minor elements of the situation. some of these differences are absence or presence of companions, the strangeness or familiarity of the surroundings, the suddenness of the appearance of the other boy, and so on. most of the older theories of play did not take into account these three facts, _i.e.,_ the identity in original nature of the roots of play and work; the fact that man's original nature fits him for primitive not civilized society; the complexity of the situation--response connection and its necessary variation with minor elements in the external situation and in the individual. earlier writers, therefore, felt the need of special theories of play. the best known of these theories are, first, the schiller-spencer surplus energy theory; second, the groos preparation for life theory; third, the g. stanley hall atavistic theory; fourth, the appleton biological theory. each of the theories has some element of truth in it, for play is complex enough to include them all, but each, save perhaps the last, falls short of an adequate explanation. two facts growing out of the theory of play accepted by the last few paragraphs need further discussion. first, the order of development in play. the play activities must follow along the line of the developing instincts and capacities. as the nerve tracts governing certain responses become ready to act, these responses become the controlling ones in play. so it is that for a time play is controlled largely by the instinct of manipulation, at another time physical activity combined with competition is most prominent, at another period imagination controls, still later the puzzle-solving tendency comes to the point followed by all the games involving an intellectual factor. this being true, it is not surprising to find certain types of play characterizing certain ages and to find that though the particular games may vary, there is a strong resemblance between plays of children of the same age all over the world. it must not be forgotten, however, that the readiness of nerve tracts to function, and therefore the play responses, depends on other factors as well as maturity. the readiness of other tracts to function; past experience and habits; the stimulus provided by the present situation; absence of competing stimuli; sex, health, fatigue, tradition--all these and many more factors modify the order of development of the play tendencies. still, having these facts in mind, it is possible to indicate roughly the type of play most prominent at different ages. children from four to seven play primarily in terms of sensory responses, imagination, imitation, and curiosity of the cruder sort. love of rhythm also is strong at this period. from seven to ten individual competition or rivalry becomes very strong and influences physical games, the collecting tendency, and manipulation, all of which tendencies are prominent at this time. ten to twelve or thirteen is characterized by the "gang" spirit which shows itself in connection with all outdoor games and adventures; memory is a large factor in some of the plays of this period, and independent thinking in connection with situations engendered by manipulation and the gang spirit becomes stronger. at this period the differences between girls and boys become more marked. the girls choose quieter indoor games, chumming becomes prominent, and interest in books, especially of the semi-religious and romantic type, comes to the front. in the early adolescent period the emotional factor is strong and characterizes many of the playful activities; the intellectual element takes precedence over the physical; the group interest widens, although the interest in leadership and independent action still remains strong; teasing and bullying are also present. this summary is by no means complete, but it indicates in a very general way the prominent tendencies at the periods indicated. the second fact needing further elaboration is that of the complexity of the play activity. take, for instance, a four-year-old playing with a doll. she fondles, cuddles, trundles it, and takes it to bed with her. it is jumped up and down and dragged about. it is put through many of the experiences that the child is having, especially the unpleasant ones. its eyes and hair, its arms and legs, are examined. questions are asked such as, "where did it come from?" "who made it?" "has it a stomach?" "will it die?" in many instances it is personified. the child is often perfectly content to play with it alone, without the presence of other children. this activity shows the presence of the nursing instinct, the tendency towards manipulation, physical activity, imitation and curiosity of the empirical type. the imagination is active but still undifferentiated from perception. the contentment in playing alone, or with an adult, shows the stage of development of the gregarious instinct. a girl of nine no longer cuddles or handles her doll just for the pleasure she gets out of that, nor is the doll put through such violent physical exercises. the child has passed beyond the aimless manipulation and physical activity that characterized the younger child. instead she makes things for it, clothes, furniture, or jewelry, still manipulation, and still the nursing instincts, but modified and directed towards more practical ends. imitation now shows itself in activities that are organized. the child plays sunday, or calling, or traveling, or market day, in which the doll takes her part in a series of related activities. but in these activities constructive imagination appears as an element. situations are not absolutely duplicated, occurrences are changed to suit the fancy of the player, as demanded by the dramatic interest. a fairy prince, or a godmother, may be participants, but at this age the constructive imagination is likely to work along more practical lines. curiosity is also present, but now the questions asked are such as, "what makes her eyes work?" "why can't she stand up?" or they often pertain to the things that are being made for the doll. they have to do with "how" or "why" instead of the "what." the doll may still be talked to and even be supposed to talk back, but the child knows it is all play; it is no longer personified as in the earlier period. for the child fully to enjoy her play, she must now have companions of her own age, the older person no longer suffices. the outdoor games of boys show the same kind of complexity,--for instance, take any of the running games. with little boys they are unorganized manifestations of mere physical activity. the running is more or less at random, arms and vocal organs are used as much as the legs and trunk. imitation comes in-what one does others are likely to do. the mere "follow" instinct is strong, and they run after each other. the beginnings of the fighting instinct appear in the more or less friendly tussles they have. the stage of the gregarious instinct is shown by the fact that they all play together. later with boys of nine or ten the play has become a game, with rules governing it. the general physical activity has been replaced by a specialized form. imitation is less of a factor. the hunting instinct often appears unexpectedly, and in the midst of the play the elements of the chase interfere with the proper conduct of the game. the fighting instinct is strong, and is very easily aroused. the boys now play in gangs or groups, and the tendency towards leadership manifests itself within the group. the intellectual element appears again and again, in planning the game, in judging of the possibility of succeeding at different stages, or in settling disputes that are sure to arise. so it is with all the plays of children: they are complexes of the various tendencies present, and the controlling elements change as the inner development continues. all activities when indulged in playfully have certain common characteristics. first, the activity is enjoyed for its own sake. the process is satisfying in itself. results may come naturally, but they are not separated from the process; the reason for the enjoyment is not primarily the result, but rather the whole activity. second, the activity is indulged in by the player because it satisfies some inner need, and only by indulging in it can the need be satisfied. it uses neurone tracts that were "ready." growing out of these two major characteristics are several others. the attention is free and immediate; much energy is used with comparatively little fatigue; self-activity and initiative are freely displayed. at the other extreme of activity is drudgery. its characteristics are just the opposite of these. first, the activity is engaged in merely for the result--the process counting for nothing and the result being the only thing of value. second, the process, instead of satisfying some need, is rather felt to be in violation of the nature of the one engaged. it uses neurone tracts that are not "ready" and at the same time prevents the action of tracts that are "ready." it becomes a task. the attention necessarily must be of the forced, derived type, in which fatigue comes quickly as a result of divided attention, results are poor, and there is no chance for initiative. between these two extremes lies work. it differs from play in that the results are usually of more value and in that the attention is therefore often of the derived type. it differs from drudgery in that there is not the sharp distinction between the process and the result and in that the attention may often be of the free spontaneous type. it was emphasized at the beginning of this chapter that the boundaries between the three were hazy and ill defined. this is especially true of work; it may be indistinguishable from play as it partakes of its characteristics, or it may swing to the other extreme and be almost drudgery. the difference between the three activities is a subjective matter--a difference largely in mood, in attitude of the person concerned, due to the readiness or unreadiness of the neurone tracts exercised. the same activity may be play for one person, work for another, and drudgery for still another. further, for the same person the same activity may be play, work, or drudgery, at different times, even within the same day. which of the three is the most valuable for educational purposes? certainly not drudgery. it is deadening, uneducative, undevelopmental. any phase of education, though it may be a seemingly necessary one, that has the characteristics of drudgery is valueless in itself. as a means to an end it may serve--but with the antagonistic attitude, the annoyance aroused by drudgery, it seems a very questionable means. education that can obtain the results required by a civilized community and yet use the play spirit is the ideal. but to have children engaged in play, in the sense of free play, cannot be the only measure. there must be supervision and direction. the spirit that characterizes the activities which are not immediately useful must be incorporated into those that are useful by means of the shifting of association bonds. nor can all parts of the process seem worth while to the learner. sometimes the process or parts of it must become a means to an end, for the end is remote. but all this is true to some extent in free play--digging the worms in order to go fishing, finding the scissors and thread in order to make the doll's dress, making arrangements with the other team to play ball, finding the right pieces of wood for the hut, and so on, may not be satisfactory in and of themselves, but may be almost drudgery. they are _not_ drudgery because they become fused in the whole process, they take over and are lost in the joy of the undertaking as a whole; they become a legitimate means to an end, and in so far take over in derived form the interest that is roused by the whole. it is this fusion of work and play that is desirable in education. this is the great lesson of play--it shows the value and encourages the logical combination of the two activities. children learn to work as they play. they learn the meaning and value of work. work becomes a means to an end, and that end not something remote and disconnected from the activity itself, but as part and parcel of it. thus the activity as a whole imbued with the play spirit becomes motivated. the play spirit is the spirit of art. no great result was achieved in any line of human activity without much work, and yet no great result was ever gained unless the play spirit controlled. it is to this interaction of work and play that each owes much of its value. work in and of itself apart from play lacks educative power; it is only as it leads to and increases the power of play that it is of greatest value. its logical place in education is as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. play, on the other hand, that does not necessitate some work, that does not need work in order that it may function more fully, has lost most of its educational value. to work in play and to play while working is the ideal combination. either by itself is dangerous. two misconceptions should be mentioned. first, the play spirit advocated as one of the greatest educational factors must not be limited to the merely physical activities, nor should it be considered synonymous with what is easy. this characterization of play as being the aimless trivial physical activities of a little child is a misconception of the whole play tendency. it has already been pointed out that any activity which in itself satisfies, whether that be physical, emotional, or intellectual, is play, and all these phases of human activity show themselves in play first. also the fact that play does not mean ease of accomplishment has been noted. it is only in the play spirit that the full resources of child or adult are tested. it is only when the activity fully satisfies some need that the individual throws himself whole-souled into it. it is only under the stimulus of the play spirit that all one's energy is spent, and great results, clear, accurate, and far reaching, are obtained. ease of performance often results in drudgery. to be play, the activity must be suited to the child's capacity, but leave chance for initiative and change and development. the second misconception is that because present-day educators advocate play in education, they believe that the child should do nothing that he doesn't want to. this is wrong on two accounts. first, it is part of the business of an environment to stimulate--readiness depends partly on stimulation. the child may never play unless the stimulation is forcibly and continually applied. second, after all it is the result we are most anxious for in education, and that result is an educated adult. by all means let us obtain this result by the most economical and effective method, and that is by use of the play spirit. but if the result cannot be obtained by this means because of the character of civilized ideals, or the difficulties of group education, or lack of capacity of the individual--then surely other methods, even that of drudgery, must be resorted to. the point is, with the goal in mind, adapt the material of education to the needs of the individual child; in other words, use the play spirit so far as is possible--after that gain the rest by any means whatsoever. so far the discussion has been concerned with the characteristics of the play spirit and its use in connection with the more formal materials of education. however, the free plays of children are valuable in two ways--first, as sources of information as to the particular tendencies ready for exercise at different times, and second, as a means of education in themselves. a knowledge of just which tendencies are most prominent in the plays of a group of children, when they change from "play" to "games," the increase in complexity and organization, the predominance of the intellectual factors,--all this could be of direct service to a teacher in the schoolroom. but it means, to some extent, the observation by the teacher of his particular group of children. such observation is extremely fruitful. the more vigorously, the more wholeheartedly, the more completely a child plays, other things being equal, the better. a deprivation of opportunity to play, or a loss of any particular type of play, means a loss of the development of certain traits or characteristics. an all-round, well-developed adult can grow only from a child developed in an all-round way because of many-sided play. hence the value of public playgrounds and of time to play. hence the danger of the isolated, lonely child, for many plays demand the group. hence the opportunities and the dangers of supervision of play. supervision of play is valuable in so far as it furnishes opportunities and suggestions which develop the elements most worth while in play and which keep play at its highest level, and in so far as it concerns the nature of the individual child, protecting, admonishing, or encouraging, as the case may require. it is dangerous to the child's best good, in so far as it results in domination; for domination will mean, usually, the introduction of plays beyond the child's stage of development and the destruction of the independence and initiative which are two of the most valuable characteristics of free play. valuable supervision of play is art that must be acquired. to influence, while effacing oneself, to guide, while being one of the players, to have an adult's understanding of the needs of child nature and yet to be one with the children--these are the essentials of the supervision of play. questions . distinguish between the fighting instinct and the instinctive basis of play. . under what conditions may an activity which we classify as play for a civilized child be called work for a child living under primitive conditions? . what kinds of plays are characteristic of different age periods in the life of children? . trace the development of some game played by the older boys in your school from its simpler beginnings in the play of little children to its present complexity. . name the characteristics common to all playful activity. . distinguish between play and drudgery. . what is the difference between work and play? . to what degree may the activities of the school be made play? . explain why the same activity may be play for one individual, work for another, and drudgery for a third. . why should we seek to make the play element prominent in school activity? . when is one most efficient in individual pursuits--when his activity is play, when he works, or when he is a drudge? . under what conditions should we compel children to work, or even to engage in an activity which may involve drudgery? . explain how play may involve the maximum of utilization of the abilities possessed by the individual, rather than a type of activity easy of accomplishment. . in what does skill in the supervision of play consist? * * * * * x. the significance of individual differences for the teacher it has been indicated here and there throughout the previous chapters that, despite the fact that there are certain laws governing the various mental traits and processes, still there is variation in the working of those laws. it was pointed out that people differ in kind of memory or imagination in which they excel, in their ability to appreciate, in the speed with which they form habits, and so on. in other words, that boys and girls are not exact duplicates of each other, but that they always differ from each other. now a knowledge of these differences, their amounts, interrelations, and causes are very necessary for the planning of a school system or for the planning of the education of a particular child. what we plan and how we plan educational undertakings must always be influenced by our opinion as to inborn traits, sex differences, specialization of mental traits, speed of development, the respective power of nature and of nurture. the various plans of promotion and grouping of children found in different cities are in operation because of certain beliefs concerning differences in general mental ability. coeducation is urged or deplored largely on the ground of belief in the differing abilities of the sexes. exact knowledge of just what differences do exist between people and the causes of these differences is important for two reasons. first, in order that the most efficient measures may be taken for the education of the individual, and second, in order that the race as a whole may be made better. education can only become efficient and economical when we know which differences between people and which achievements of a given person are due to training, and which are due more largely to original equipment or maturity. it is a waste of time on the one hand for education to concern itself with trying to make all children good spellers--if spelling is a natural gift; and on the other hand, it is lack of efficiency for schools to be largely neglecting the moral development of the children, if morality is dependent primarily on education. exact knowledge, not opinions, along all these lines is necessary if progress is to be made. the principal causes for individual differences are sex, remote ancestry, near ancestry, maturity, and training. the question to be answered in the discussion of each of these causes is how important a factor is it in the production of differences and just what differences is it responsible for. that men differ from women has always been an accepted fact, but exact knowledge of how much and how they differ has, until recent years, been lacking. recently quantitative measurement has been made by a number of investigators. in making these investigations two serious difficulties have to be met. first, that the tests measure only the differences brought about by differences in sex, and not by any other cause, such as family or training. this difficulty has been met by taking people of all ages, from all sorts of families, with all kinds of training, the constant factor being the difference in sex. the second difficulty is that of finding groups in which the selection agencies have been the same and equally operative. it would be obviously unfair to compare college men and women, and expect to get a fair result as to sex differences, because college women are a more highly selected group intellectually than the college men. it is the conventional and social demands that are primarily responsible for sending boys to college, while the intellectual impulse is responsible to a greater extent for sending girls. examination of children in the elementary schools, then, gives a fairer result than of the older men and women. the general results of all the studies made point to the fact that the differences between the sexes are small. sex is the cause of only a small fraction of the differences between individuals. the total difference of men from men and women from women is almost as great as the difference between men and women, for the distribution curve of woman's ability in any trait overlaps the men's curve to at least half its range. in detail the exact measurements of intellectual abilities show a slight superiority of the women in receptivity and memory, and a slight superiority of the men in control of movement and in thought about concrete mechanical situations. in interests which cannot be so definitely measured, women seem to be more interested in people and men in things. in instinctive equipment women excel in the nursing impulse and men in the fighting impulse. in physical equipment men are stronger and bigger than women. they excel in muscular tests in ability to "spurt," whereas women do better in endurance tests. the male sex seems on the whole to be slightly more variable than the female, i.e., its curve of distribution is somewhat flatter and extends both lower and higher than does that of the female; or, stated another way, men furnish more than their proportion of idiots and of geniuses. slight though these differences are, they are not to be disregarded, for sometimes the resulting habits are important. for instance, girls should be better spellers than boys. boys should excel in physics and chemistry. women should have more tact than men, whereas men should be more impartial in their judgments. with the same intellectual equipment as women, men should be found more often in positions of prominence because of the strength of the fighting instinct. the geniuses of the world, the leaders in any field, as well as the idiots, should more often be men than women. that these differences do exist, observation as well as experiment prove, but that they are entirely due to essential innate differences in sex is still open to question. differences in treatment of the sexes in ideals and in training for generation after generation _may_ account for some of the differences noted. what these differences mean from the standpoint of practice is still another question. difference in equipment need not mean difference in treatment, nor need identity of equipment necessarily mean identity of training. the kind of education given will have to be determined not only by the nature of the individual, but also by the ideals held for and the efficiency demanded from each sex. another cause of the differences existing between individuals is difference in race inheritance. in causing differences in physical traits this factor is prominent. the american indians have physical traits in common which differentiate them from other races; the same thing is true of the negroes and the mongolians. it has always been taken for granted that the same kind of difference between the races existed in mental traits. to measure the mental differences caused by race is an extremely difficult problem. training, environment, tradition, are such potent factors in confusing the issue. the difficulty is to measure inborn traits, not achievement. hence the results from actual measurement are very few and are confined to the sensory and sensorimotor traits. woodworth, in summing up the results of these tests, says, "on the whole, the keenness of the senses seems to be about on a par in the various races of mankind.... if the results could be taken at their face value, they would indicate differences in intelligence between races, giving such groups as the pygmy and negrito a low station as compared with most of mankind. the fairness of the test is not, however, beyond question."[ ] the generality of this conclusion concerning the differences in intelligence reveals the lack of data. no tests of the higher intellectual processes, such as the ability to analyze, to associate in terms of elements, to formulate new principles, and the like, have, been given. some anthropologists are skeptical of the existence of any great differences, while others believe that though there is much overlapping, still differences of considerable magnitude do exist. at present we do not know how much of the differences existing between individuals is due to differences in remote ancestry. maturity as a cause of differences between individuals gives quite as unsatisfactory results as remote ancestry. every thoughtful student of children must realize that inner growth, apart from training, has something to do with the changes which take place in a child; that he differs from year to year because of a difference in maturity. this same cause, then, must account to some extent for the differences between individuals of different ages. but just how great a part it plays, what per cent of the difference it accounts for, and what particular traits it affects much or little, no one knows. we say in general that nine-year-old children are more suggestible than six-year-old, and than fourteen-year-old; that the point of view of the fifteen-year-old is different from that of the eleven-year-old; that the power of sense discrimination gradually increases up to about sixteen, and so on. that these facts are true, no one can question, but how far they are due to mere change in maturity and how far to training or to the increase in power of some particular capacity, such as understanding directions, or power of forced attention, is unknown. the studies which have been undertaken along this line have failed in two particulars: first, to distribute the actual changes found from year to year among the three possible causes, maturity, general powers of comprehension and the like, and training; second, to measure the same individuals from year to year. this last error is very common in studies of human nature. it is taken for granted that to examine ten year olds and then eleven year olds and then twelve year olds will give what ten year olds will become in one and two years' time respectively. to test a group of grammar grade children and then a group of high school and then a group of college students will not show the changes in maturity from grammar school to college. the method is quite wrong, for it tests only the ten year olds that stay in school long enough to become twelve year olds; it measures only the very small per cent of the grammar school children who get to college. in other words, it is measuring a more highly selected group and accepting the result obtained from them as true of the entire group. because of these two serious errors in the investigations our knowledge of the influence of maturity as a cause of individual differences is no better than opinion. two facts, however, such studies do make clear. first, the supposition that "the increases in ability due to a given amount of progress toward maturity are closely alike for all children save the so-called 'abnormally-precocious' or 'retarded' is false. the same fraction of the total inner development, from zero to adult ability, will produce very unequal results in different children. inner growth acts differently according to the original nature that is growing. the notion that maturity is the main factor in the differences found amongst school children, so that grading and methods of teaching should be fitted closely to 'stage of growth,' is also false. it is by no means very hard to find seven year olds who can do intellectual work in which one in twenty seventeen year olds would fail."[ ] the question as to how far immediate heredity is a cause of differences found between individuals, can only be answered by measuring how much more alike members of the same family are in a given trait than people picked at random, and then making allowance for similarity in their training. the greater the likenesses between members of the same family, and the greater the differences between members of different families, despite similarities in training, the more can individual differences be traced to differences in ancestry as a controlling cause. the answer to this question has been obtained along four different lines: first, likenesses in physical traits; second, likenesses in particular abilities; third, likenesses in achievement along intellectual and moral lines; fourth, greater likenesses between twins, than ordinary siblings. in physical traits, such as eye color, hair color, cephalic index, height, family resemblance is very strong (the coefficient of correlation being about . ), and here training can certainly have had no effect. in particular abilities, such as ability in spelling, the stage reached by an individual is due primarily to his inheritance, the ability being but little influenced by the differences in home or school training that commonly exist. in general achievement, galton's results show that eminence runs in families, that one has more than three hundred times the chance of being eminent if one has a brother, father, or son eminent, than the individual picked at random. wood's investigation in royal families points to the same influence of ancestry in determining achievement. the studies of the edwards family on one hand and the so-called kallikak family on the other, point to the same conclusion. twins are found to be twice as much alike in the traits tested as other brothers and sisters. though the difficulty of discounting the effect of training in all these studies has been great, yet in every case the investigators have taken pains to do so. the fact that the investigations along such different lines all bear out the same conclusion, namely, that intellectual differences are largely due to differences in family inheritance, weighs heavily in favor of its being a correct one. the fifth factor that might account for individual differences is environment. by environment we mean any influence brought to bear on the individual. the same difficulty has been met in attempting to measure the effect of environment that was met in trying to measure the effect of inner nature--namely, that of testing one without interference from the other. the attempts to measure accurately the effect of any one element in the environment have not been successful. no adequate way of avoiding the complications involved by different natures has been found. one of the greatest errors in the method of working with this problem has been found just here. it has been customary when the effect of a certain element in the environment is to be ascertained to investigate people who have been subject to that training or who are in the process of training, thus ignoring the selective influence of the factor itself in original nature. for instance, to study the value of high school training we compare those in training with those who have never had any; if the question is the value of manual training or latin, again the comparison is made between those who have had it and those who haven't. to find out the influence of squalor and misery, people living in the slums are compared with those from a better district. in each case the fact is ignored that the original natures of the two groups examined are different before the influence of the element in question was brought to bear. why do some children go to high school and others not? why do some choose classical courses and some manual training courses? why are some people found in the slums for generations? the answer in each case is the same--the original natures are different. it isn't the slums make the people nearly so often as it is the people make the slums. it isn't training in latin that makes the more capable man, but the more intellectual students, because of tradition and possibly enjoyment of language study, choose the latin. it is unfair to measure a factor in the environment and give it credit or discredit for results, when those results are also due to original nature as well, which has not been allowed for. it must be recognized by all those working in this field that, after all, man to some extent selects his own environment. in the second place, it must be remembered that the environment will influence folks differently according as their natures are different. there can be no doubt that environment is accountable for some individual differences, but just which ones and to what extent are questions to which at present the answers are unsatisfactory. the investigations which have been carried on agree that environment is not so influential a cause for individual differences in intellect as is near ancestry. one rather interesting line of evidence can be quoted as an illustration. if individual differences in achievement are due largely to lack of training or to poor training, then to give the same amount and kind of training to all the individuals in a group should reduce the differences. if such practice does not reduce the differences, then it is not reasonable to suppose that the differences were caused in the first place by differences in training. as a matter of fact, equalizing training _increases_ the differences. the superior man becomes more superior, the inferior is left further behind than ever. a common occurrence in school administration bears out this conclusion reached by experimental means. the child who skips a grade is ready at the end of three years to skip again, and the child who fails a grade is likely at the end of three years to fail again. though environment seems of little influence as compared with near ancestry in determining intellectual ability _per se_, yet it has considerable influence in determining the line along which this ability is to manifest itself. the fact that between - , . per cent of the college men went into teaching as a profession and . per cent into the ministry, while between - , . per cent chose the former and only per cent the latter, can be accounted for only on the basis of environmental influence of some kind.[ ] another fact concerning the influence of environment is that it is very much more effective in influencing morality than intellect. morality is the outcome of the proper direction of capacities and tendencies possessed by the individual, and therefore is extremely susceptible to environmental influences. we are all familiar with the differences in moral standards of different social groups. one boy may become a bully and another considerate of the rights of others, one learns to steal and another to be honest, one to lie and another to be truthful, because of the influence of their environments rather than on account of differences in their original natures. we are beginning to recognize the importance of environment in moral training in the provisions made to protect children from immoral influences, in the opportunities afforded for the right sort of recreation, and even in the removal of children from the custody of their parents when the environment is extremely unfavorable. though changes in method and ideals cannot reduce the differences between individuals in the intellectual field to any marked extent, such changes can raise the level of achievement of the whole group. for instance, more emphasis on silent reading may make the reading ability of a whole school per cent better, while leaving the distance between the best and worst reader in the school the same. granting that heredity, original nature, is the primary cause of individual differences in intellect (aside from those sex differences mentioned) there remains for environment, education in all its forms, the tremendous task of: first, providing conditions favorable for nervous health and growth; second, providing conditions which stimulate useful capacities and inhibit futile or harmful capacities; third, providing conditions which continually raise the absolute achievement of the group and of the race; fourth, providing conditions that will meet the varying original equipments; fifth, assuming primary responsibility for development along moral and social lines. concerning those individual differences of which heredity is the controlling cause, two facts are worthy of note. first, that human nature is very highly specialized and that inheritance may be in terms of special abilities or capacities. for instance, artistic, musical, or linguistic ability, statesmanship, power in the field of poetry, may be handed down from one generation to the next. this also means that two brothers may be extremely alike along some lines and extremely different along others. second, that there seems to be positive combinations between certain mental traits, whereby the presence of one insures the presence of the other to a greater degree than chance would explain. for instance, the quick learner is slow in forgetting, imagery in one field implies power to image in others, a high degree of concentration goes with superior breadth, efficiency in artistic lines is more often correlated with superiority in politics or generalship or science than the reverse, ability to deal with abstract data implies unusual power to deal with the concrete situation. in fact, as far as exact measures go, negative correlations between capacities, powers, efficiencies, are extremely rare, and, when they occur, can be traced to the influence of some environmental factor. individuals differ from each other to a much greater degree than has been allowed for in our public education. the common school system is constructed on the theory that children are closely similar in their abilities, type of mental make-up, and capacities in any given line. experimentation shows each one of these presuppositions to be false. so far as general ability goes, children vary from the genius to the feeble-minded with all the grades between, even in the same school class. this gradation is a continuous one--there are no breaks in the human race. children cannot be grouped into the very bright, bright, mediocre, poor, very poor, failures--each group being distinct from any other. the shading from one to the other of these classes is gradual, there is no sharp break. not only is this true, but a child may be considered very bright along one line and mediocre along another. brilliancy or poverty in intellect does not act as a unit and apply to all lives equally. the high specialization of mental powers makes unevenness in achievement the common occurrence. within any school grade that has been tested, even when the gradings are as close as those secured by term promotions, it has been found in any subject there are children who do from two to five times as well as others, and from two to five times as much as others. of course this great variation means an overlapping of grades on each side. in dr. bonser's test of children in reasoning he found that per cent of the a pupils were below the best pupils of a grade and that per cent of a pupils were below the mid-pupils of the a, and that the best of the a pupils made a score three times as high as the worst pupils of a. not only is this tremendous difference in ability found among children of the same class, but the same difference exists in rate of development. some children can cover the same ground in one half or one third the time as others and do it better. witness the children already quoted who, skipping a grade, were ready at the end of three years to skip again. variability, not uniformity, is what characterizes the abilities and rate of intellectual growth of children in the schools, and these differences, as has already been pointed out, are caused primarily by a difference in original nature. there is also great difference between the general mental make-up of children--a difference in type. there is the child who excels in dealing with abstract ideas. he usually has power also in dealing with the concrete, but his chief interest is in the abstract. he is the one who does splendid work in mathematics, formal grammar, the abstract phases of the sciences. then there is the child who is a thinker too, but his best work is done when he is dealing with a concrete situation. unusual or involved applications of principles disturb him. so long as his work is couched in terms of the concrete, he can succeed, but if that is replaced by the _x, y, z_ elements, he is prone to fail. there is another type of child--the one who has the executive ability, the child of action. true, he thinks, too, but his forte is in control of people and of things. he is the one who manages the athletic team, runs the school paper, takes charge of the elections, and so on. for principles to be grasped he must be able to put them into practice. the fourth type is the feeling type, the child who excels in appreciative power. as has been urged so many times before, these types have boundaries that are hazy and ill defined; they overlap in many cases. some children are of a well-defined mixed type, and most children have something of each of the four abilities characteristic of the types. still it is true that in looking over a class of children these types emerge, not pure, but controlled by the dominant characteristics mentioned. the same variation is found among any group of children if they are tested along one line, such as memory. some have desultory, some rote, some logical memories; some have immediate memories, others the permanent type. in imagery, some have principally productive imagination, others the matter-of-fact reproductive; some deal largely with object images that are vivid and clear-cut, others fail almost entirely with this type, but use word images with great facility. in conduct, some are hesitating and uncertain, others just the reverse; some very open to suggestions, others scarcely touched at all by it; some can act in accordance with principle, others only in terms of particular associations with a definite situation. so one might run the whole gamut of human traits, and in each one any group of individuals will vary: in attention, in thinking, in ideals, in habits, in interests, in sense discrimination, in emotions, and so on. this is one of the greatest contributions of experimental psychology of the past ten years, the tremendous differences between people along all lines, physical as well as mental. it is lack of recognition of such differences that makes possible such a list of histories of misfits as swift quotes in his chapter on standards of human power in "mind in the making." individual differences exist, education cannot eliminate them, they are innate, due to original nature. education that does not recognize them and plan for them is wasteful and, what is worse, is criminal. the range of ability possessed by children of the same grade in the subjects commonly taught seems not always to be clear in the minds of teachers. it will be discussed at greater length in another chapter, but it is important for the consideration of individual differences to present some data at this time. if we rate the quality of work done in english composition from to per cent, being careful to evaluate as accurately as possible the merit of the composition written, we will find for a seventh and an eighth grade a condition indicated by the following table: ========================================== quality of composition grades ------------------------------------------ _no. of pupils_ rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at ========================================== the table reads as follows: two pupils in the seventh grade and one in the eighth wrote compositions rated at ; six seventh-grade and six eighth-grade pupils wrote compositions rated at , and so on for the whole table. a similar condition of affairs is indicated if we ask how many of a given type of addition problems are solved correctly in eight minutes by a fifth- and a sixth-grade class. ============================================= number of grades problems --------------------------------------------- _no. of pupils_ ============================================= in like manner, if we measure the quality of work done in penmanship for a fifth and sixth grade, with a system of scoring that ranks the penmanship in equal steps from a quality which, is ranked four up to a quality which is ranked eighteen, we find the following results: =============================================== quality of penmanship grades ----------------------------------------------- _no. of pupils_ rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at rated at =============================================== results similar to those recorded above will be found if any accurate measurement is made of the knowledge possessed by children in history or in geography, or of the ability to apply or derive principles in physics or in chemistry, or of the knowledge of vocabulary in latin or in german, and the like. all such facts indicate clearly the necessity for differentiating our work for the group of children who are classified as belonging to one grade. under the older and simpler form of school organization, the one-room rural school, it was not uncommon for children to recite in one class in arithmetic, in another in geography or history, and in possibly still another in english. in our more highly organized school systems, with the attempt to have children pass regularly from grade to grade at each promotion period, we have in some measure provided for individual differences through allowing children to skip a grade, or not infrequently by having them repeat the work of a grade. in still other cases an attempt has been made to adapt the work of the class to the needs and capacities of the children by dividing any class group into two or more groups, especially in those subjects in which children seem to have greatest difficulty. teachers who are alive to the problem presented have striven to adjust their work to different members of the class by varying the assignments, and in some cases by excusing from the exercises in which they are already proficient the abler pupils. whatever adjustment the school may be able to make in terms of providing special classes for those who are mentally or physically deficient, or for those who are especially capable, there will always be found in any given group a wide variation in achievement and in capacity. group teaching and individual instruction will always be required of teachers who would adapt their work to the varying capacities of children. a period devoted to supervised study during which those children who are less able may receive special help, and those who are of exceptional ability be expected to make unusual preparation both in extent and in quality of work done, may contribute much to the efficiency of the school. as paradoxical as the statement may seem, it is true that the most retarded children in our school systems are the brightest. expressed in another way, it can be proved that the more capable children have already achieved in the subjects in which they are taught more than those who are tow or three grades farther advanced. possibly the greatest contribution which teachers can make to the development of efficiency upon the part of the children with whom they work is to be found in special attention which is given to capable children with respect to both the quantity and quality of work demanded of them, together with provision for having them segregated in special classes or passed through the school system with greater rapidity than is now common. in an elementary school with which the writer is acquainted, and in which there were four fifth grades, it was discovered during the past year that in one of these fifth grades in which the brighter children had been put they had achieved more in terms of ability to solve problems in arithmetic, in their knowledge of history and geography, in the quality of english composition they wrote, and the like, than did the children in any one of the sixth grades. in this school this particular fifth grade was promoted to the seventh grade for the following year. many such examples could be found in schools organized with more than one grade at work on the same part of the school course, if care were taken to segregate children in terms of their capacity. and even where there is only one teacher per grade, or where one teacher teaches two or three grades, it should be found possible constantly to accelerate the progress of children of more than ordinary ability. the movement throughout the united states for the organization of junior high schools (these schools commonly include the seventh, eighth, and ninth school years) is to be looked upon primarily as an attempt to adjust the work of our schools to the individual capacities of boys and girls and to their varying vocational outlook. such a school, if it is to meet this demand for adjustment to individual differences, must offer a variety of courses. among the courses offered in a typical junior high school is one which leads directly to the high school. in this course provision is made for the beginning of a foreign language, of algebra, and, in some cases, of some other high school subject during the seventh and eighth years. in another course emphasis is placed upon work in industrial or household arts in the expectation that work in these fields may lead to a higher degree of efficiency in later vocational training, and possibly to the retention of children during this period who might otherwise see little or no meaning in the traditional school course. the best junior high schools are offering in the industrial course a variety of shop work. in some cases machine shop practice, sheet metal working, woodworking, forging, printing, painting, electrical wiring, and the like are offered for boys; and cooking, sewing, including dressmaking and designing, millinery, drawing, with emphasis upon design and interior decoration, music, machine operating, pasting, and the like are provided for girls. another type of course has provided for training which looks toward commercial work, even though it is recognized that the most adequate commercial training may require a longer period of preparation. in some schools special work in agriculture is offered. our schools cannot be considered as satisfactorily organized until we make provision for every boy or girl to work up to the maximum of his capacity. the one thing that a teacher cannot do is to make all of his pupils equal in achievement. whatever adjustment may have been made in terms of special classes or segregation in terms of ability, the teacher must always face the problem of varying the assignment to meet the capacities of individual children, and she ought, wherever it is possible, especially to encourage the abler children to do work commensurate with their ability, and to provide, as far as is possible, for the rapid advancement of these children through the various stages of the school system. questions . what are the principal causes of differences in abilities or in achievement among school children? . what, if any, of the differences noticed among children may be attributed to sex? . are any of the sex differences noticeable in the achievements of the school children with whom you are acquainted? . to what extent is maturity a cause of individual differences? . what evidence is available to show the fallacy of the common idea that children of the same age are equal in ability? . how important is heredity in determining the achievement of men and women? . to what extent, if any, would you be interested in the immediate heredity of the children in your class? why? . to what extent is the environment in which children live responsible for their achievements in school studies? . what may be expected in the way of achievement from two children of widely different heredity but of equal training? . for what factor in education is the environment most responsible? why? . if you grant that original nature is the primary cause of individual differences in intellectual achievements, how would you define the work of the school? . why are you not justified in grouping children as bright, ordinary, and stupid? . will a boy who has unusual ability in music certainly be superior in all other subjects? . why are children who skip a grade apt to be able to skip again at the end of two or three years? . are you able to distinguish differences in type of mind (or general mental make-up) among the children in your classes? give illustrations. . what changes in school organization would you advocate for the sake of adjusting the teaching done to the varying capacities of children? . how should a teacher adjust his work to the individual differences in capacity or in achievement represented by the usual class group? * * * * * xi. the development of moral social conduct morality has been defined in many ways. it has been called "a regulation and control of immediate promptings of impulses in conformity with some prescribed conduct"; as "the organization of activity with reference to a system of fundamental values." dewey says, "interest in community welfare, an interest that is intellectual and practical, as well as emotional--an interest, that is to say, in perceiving whatever makes for social order and progress, and in carrying these principles into execution--is the moral habit."[ ] palmer defines it as "the choice by the individual of habits of conduct that are for the good of the race." all these definitions point to control on the part of the individual as one essential of morality. morality is not, then, a matter primarily of mere conduct. it involves conduct, but the essence of morality lies deeper than the act itself; motive, choice, are involved as well. mere law-abiding is not morality in the strict sense of the word. one may keep the laws merely as a matter of blind habit. a prisoner in jail keeps the laws. a baby of four keeps the laws, but in neither case could such conduct be called moral. in neither of these cases do we find "control" by the individual of impulses, nor "conscious choice" of conduct. in the former compulsion was the controlling force, and in the second blind habit based on personal satisfaction. conduct which outwardly conforms to social law and social progress is unmoral rather than moral. a moment's consideration will suffice to convince any one that the major part of conduct is of this non-moral type. this is true of adults and necessarily true of children. as hall says, most of the supposedly moral conduct of the majority of men is blind habit, not thoughtful choosing. in so far as we are ruled by custom, by tradition, in so far as we do as the books or the preacher says, or do as we see others do, without principles to guide us, without thinking, to that extent the conduct is likely to be non-moral. this is the characteristic reaction of the majority of people. we believe as our fathers believed, we vote the same ticket, hold in horror the same practices, look askance on the same doctrines, cling to the same traditions. morality, on the other hand, is rationalized conduct. now this non-moral conduct is valuable so far as it goes. it is a conservative force, making for stability, but it has its dangers. it is antagonistic to progress. so long as the conditions surrounding the non-moral individual remain unchanged, he will be successful in dealing with them, but if conditions change, if he is confronted by a new situation, if strong temptation comes, he has nothing with which to meet it, for his conduct was blind. it is the person whose conduct is non-moral that suffers collapse on the one hand, or becomes a bigot on the other, when criticism attacks what he held as true or right. morality requires that men have a reason for the faith that is in them. in the second place, morality is conduct. ideals, ideas, wishes, desires, all may lead to morality, but in so far as they are not expressed in conduct, to that extent they do not come under the head of morality. one may express the sublimest idea, may claim the highest ideals, and be immoral. conduct is the only test of morality, just as it is the ultimate test of character. not only is morality judged in terms of conduct, but it is judged according as the conduct is consistent. "habits of conduct" make for morality or immorality. it is not the isolated act of heroism that makes a man moral, or the single unsocial act that makes a man immoral. the particular act may be moral or immoral, and the person be just the reverse. it is the organization of activity, it is the habits a man has that places him in one category or the other. in the third place, morality is a matter of individual responsibility. it is "choice by the individual," the "perceiving whatever makes for social order and progress." no one can choose for another, no one can perceive for another. the burden of choosing for the good of the group rests on the individual, it cannot be shifted to society or the church, or any other institution. each individual is moral or not according as he lives up to the light that he has, according as he carries into execution principles that are for the good of his race. a particular act, then, may be moral for one individual and immoral for another, and non-moral for still another. in the third place, morality is a matter of individual responsibility. it is "choice be the individual," the "perceiving whatever makes for social order and progress." no one can choose for another, no one can perceive for another. the burden of choosing for the good of the group rests on the individual, it cannot be shifted to society or the church, or any other institution. each individual is moral or not according as he lives up to the light that he has, according as he carries into execution principles that are for the good of his race. a particular act, then, may be moral for one individual and immoral for another, and non-moral for still another. to go off into the forest to die if one is diseased may be a moral act for a savage in central africa; but for a civilized man to do so would probably be immoral because of his greater knowledge. to give liquor to babies to quiet them may be a non-moral act on the part of ignorant immigrants from russia; but for a trained physician to do so would be immoral. morality, then, is a personal matter, and the responsibility for it rests on the individual. of course this makes possible the setting up of individual opinion as to what is for the good of the group in opposition to tradition and custom. this is, of course, dangerous if it is mere opinion or if it is carried to an extreme. few men have the gift of seeing what makes for social well-being beyond that of the society of thoughtful people of their time. and yet if a man has the insight, if his investigations point to a greater good for the group from doing something which is different from the standards held by his peers, then morality requires that he do his utmost to bring about such changes. if it is borne in mind that every man is the product of his age and that it is evolution, not revolution, that is constructive, this essential of true morality will not seem so dangerous. all the reformers the world has ever seen, all the pioneers in social service, have been men who, living up to their individual responsibility, have acted as they believed for society's best good in ways that were not in accord with the beliefs of the majority of their time. shirking responsibility, not living up to what one believes is right, is immoral just as truly as stealing from one's neighbor. the fourth essential in moral conduct is that it be for the social good. it is the governing of impulses, the inhibition of desires that violate the good of the group, and the choice of conduct that forwards its interests. this does not mean that the group and the individual are set over against each other, and the individual must give way. it means, rather, that certain impulses, tendencies, motives, of the individual are chosen instead of others; it means that the individual only becomes his fullest self as he becomes a social being; it means that what is for the good of the group in the long run is for the good of the units that make up that group. morality, then, is a relative term. what is of highest moral value in one age may be immoral in another because of change in social conditions. as society progresses, as different elements come to the front because of the march of civilization, so the acts that are detrimental to the good of the whole must change. to-day slander and stealing a man's good name are quite as immoral as stealing his property. acts that injure the mental and spiritual development of the group are even more immoral than those which interfere with the physical well-being. a strong will is not necessarily indicative of a good character. a strong will may be directed towards getting what gives pleasure to oneself, irrespective of the effect on other people. it is the goal, the purpose with which it is exercised, that makes a man with a strong will a moral man or an immoral man. only when one's will is used to put into execution those principles that will bring about social progress is it productive of a good character. thus it is seen that morality can be discussed only in connection with group activity. it is the individual as a part of a group, acting in connection with it, that makes the situation a moral one. individual morality is discussed by some authors, but common opinion limits the term to the use that has been discussed in the preceding paragraphs. if social well-being is taken in its broadest sense, then all moral behavior is social, and all social behavior comes under one of the three types of morality. training for citizenship, for social efficiency, for earning a livelihood, all have a moral aspect. it is only as the individual is trained to live a complete life as one of a group that he can be trained to be fully moral, and training for complete social living must include training in morality. hence for the remainder of this discussion the two terms will be considered as synonymous. we hear it sometimes said, "training in morals and manners," as if the two were distinct, and yet a full, realization of what is for social betterment along emotional and intellectual lines must include a realization of the need of manners. of course there are degrees of morality or immorality according as the act influences society much or little--all crimes are not equally odious, nor all virtues equally commendable, but any act that touches the well-being of the group must come under this category. from the foregoing paragraph, the logical conclusion would be that there is no instinct or inborn tendency that is primarily and distinctly moral as over against those that are social. that is the commonly accepted belief to-day. there is no moral instinct. morality finds its root in the original nature of man, but not in a single moral instinct. it is, on the other hand, the outgrowth of a number of instincts all of which have been listed under the head of the social instinct. man has in his original equipment tendencies that will make him a moral individual _if_ they are developed, but they are complex, not simple. some of these social tendencies which are at the root of moral conduct are gregariousness, desire for approval, dislike of scorn, kindliness, attention to human beings, imitation, and others. now, although man possesses these tendencies as a matter of original equipment, he also possesses tendencies which are opposed to these, tendencies which lead to the advancement of self, rather than the well-being of the group. some of these are fighting, mastery, rivalry, jealousy, ownership. which of these sets of tendencies is developed and controls the life of the individual is a matter of training and environment. in the last chapter it was pointed out that morality was much more susceptible to environmental influences than intellectual achievement, because it was much more a direction and guidance of capacities and tendencies possessed by every one. one's character is largely a product of one's environment. in proof of this, read the reports of reform schools, and the like. children of criminal parents, removed from the environment of crime, grow up into moral persons. the pair of jukes who left the juke clan lost their criminal habits and brought up a family of children who were not immoral. education cannot produce geniuses, but it can produce men and women whose chief concern is the well-being of the group. from a psychological point of view the "choice by the individual of habits of conduct that are for the good of the group" involves three considerations: first, the elements implied in such conduct; second, the stages of development; third, the laws governing this development. first, moral conduct involves the use of habits, but these must be rational habits, so it involves the power to think and judge in order to choose. but thinking that shall result in the choice of habits that are for the well-being of the group must use knowledge. the individual must have facts and standards at his disposal by means of which he may evaluate the possible lines of action presented. further, an individual may know intellectually what is right and moral and yet not care. the interest, the emotional appeal, may be lacking, hence he must have ideals to which he has given his allegiance, which will force him to put into practice what his knowledge tells him is right. and then, having decided what is for the social good and having the desire to carry it out, the moral man must be able to put it into execution. he must have the "will power." morality, then, is an extremely complex matter, involving all the powers of the human being, intellectual, emotional, and volitional--involving the coöperation of heredity and environment. it is evident that conduct that is at so high a level, involving experience, powers of judgment, and control, cannot be characteristic of the immature individual, but must come after years of growth, if at all. therefore we find stages of development towards moral conduct. the first stage of development, which lasts up into the pre-adolescent years, is the non-moral stage. the time when a child may conform outwardly to moral law, but only as a result of blind habit--not as a result of rational choice. it is then that the little child conforms to his environment, reflecting the characters of the people by whom he is surrounded. right to him means what those about him approve and what brings him satisfaction. if stealing and lying meet with approval from the people about him, they are right to him. to steal and be caught is wrong to the average child of the streets, because that brings punishment and annoyance. he has no standards of judging other than the example of others and his own satisfaction and annoyance. the non-moral period, then, is characterized by the formation of habits--which outwardly conform to moral law, or are contrary to it, according as his environment directs. the need to form habits that do conform, that are for the social good, is evident. by having many habits of this kind formed in early childhood, truthfulness, consideration for others, respect for poverty, promptness, regularity, taking responsibility, and so on, the dice are weighted in favor of the continuation of such conduct when reason controls. the child has then only to enlarge his view, build up his principles in accord with conduct already in operation--he needs only to rationalize what he already possesses. on the other hand, if during early years his conduct violates moral law, he is in the grip of habits of great strength which will result in two dangers. he may be blind to the other side, he may not realize how his conduct violates the laws of social progress; or, knowing, he may not care enough to put forth the tremendous effort necessary to break these habits and build up the opposite. from the standpoint of conduct this non-moral period is the most important one in the life of the child. in it the twig is bent. to urge that a child cannot understand and therefore should be excused for all sorts of conduct simply evades the issue. he is forming habits--that cannot be prevented; the question is, are those habits in line with the demands of social efficiency or are they in violation of it? but character depends primarily on deliberate choice. we dare not rely on blind habit alone to carry us through the crises of social and spiritual adjustment. there will arise the insistent question as to whether the habitual presupposition is right. occasions will occur when several possible lines of conduct suggest themselves; what kind of success will one choose, what kind of pleasure? choice, personal choice, will be forced upon the individual. this problem does not usually grow acute until early adolescence, although it may along some lines present itself earlier. when it appears will depend to a large extent on the environment. for some people in some directions it never comes. it should come gradually and spontaneously. this period is the period of transition, when old habits are being scrutinized, when standards are being formulated and personal responsibility is being realized, when ideals are made vital and controlling. it may be a period of storm and stress when the youth is in emotional unrest; when conduct is erratic and not to be depended on; when there is reaction against authority of all kinds. these characteristics are unfortunate and are usually the result of unwise treatment during the first period. if, on the other hand, the period of transition is prepared for during the preadolescent years by giving knowledge, opportunities for self-direction and choice, the change should come normally and quietly. the transition period should be characterized by emphasis upon personal responsibility for conduct, by the development of social ideals, and by the cementing of theory and practice. this period is an ever recurring one. the transition period is followed by the period of true morality during which the conduct chosen becomes habit. the habits characteristic of this final period are different from the habits of the non-moral period, in that they have their source in reason, whereas those of the early period grew out of instincts. this is the period of most value, the period of steady living in accordance with standards and ideals which have been tested by reason and found to be right. the transition period is wasteful and uncertain. true morality is the opposite. but so long as growth in moral matters goes on there is a continuous change from transition period to truly moral conduct and back again to a fresh transition period and again a change to morality of a still higher order. each rationalized habit but paves the way for one still higher. morality, then, should be a continual evolution from level to level. only so is progress in the individual life maintained. morality, then, requires the inhibition of some instincts and the perpetuation of others, the formation of habits and ideals, the development of the power to think and judge, the power to react to certain abstractions such as ought, right, duty, and so on, the power to carry into execution values accepted. the general laws of instinct, of habit, the response by piecemeal association, the laws of attention and appreciation, are active in securing these responses that we call moral, just as they are operative in securing other responses that do not come under this category. it is only as these general psychological laws are carried out sufficiently that stable moral conduct is secured. any violation of these laws invalidates the result in the moral field just as it would in any other. there is not one set of principles governing moral conduct and another set governing all other types of conduct. the same general laws govern both. this being true, there is no need of discussing in detail the operation of laws controlling moral conduct--that has all been covered in the previous chapters. however, there are some suggestions which should be borne in mind in the application of these laws to this field. first, it is a general principle that habits, to be fixed and stable, must be followed by satisfactory results and that working along the opposite line, that of having annoyance follow a lapse in the conduct, is uneconomical and unreliable. this principle applies particularly to moral habits. truth telling, bravery, obedience, generosity, thought for others, church going, and so on must be followed by positive satisfaction, if they are to be part of the warp and woof of life. punishing falsehood, selfishness, cowardice, and so on is not enough, for freedom from supervision will usually mean rejection of such forced habits. a child must find that it pays to be generous; that he is happier when he coöperates with others than when he does not. positive satisfaction should follow moral conduct. of course this satisfaction must vary in type with the age and development of the child, from physical pleasure occasioned by an apple as a reward for self-control at table to the satisfaction which the consciousness of duty well done brings to the adolescent. second, the part played by suggestion in bringing about moral habits and ideals must be recognized. the human personalities surrounding the child are his most influential teachers in this line. this influence of personalities begins when the child is yet a baby. reflex imitation first, and later conscious imitation plus the feeling of dependence which a little child has for the adults in his environment, results in the child reflecting to a large extent the characters of those about him. good temper, stability, care for others, self-control, and many other habits; respect for truth, for the opinion of others, and many other ideals, are unconsciously absorbed by the child in his early years. example not precept, actions not words, are the controlling forces in moral education. hence the great importance of the characters of a child's companions, friends, and teachers, to say nothing of his parents. next to personalities, theaters, moving pictures, and books, all have great suggestive power. third, there is always a danger that theory become divorced from practice, and this is particularly true here because morality is conduct. knowing what is right is one thing, doing it is another, and knowing does not result in doing unless definite connections are made between the two. instruction in morals may have but little effect on conduct. it is only as the knowledge of what is right and good comes in connection with social situations when there is the call for action that true morality can be gained. mere classroom instruction cannot insure conduct. it is only as the family and the school become more truly social institutions, where group activity such as one finds in life is the dominant note, that we can hope to have morality and not ethics, ideals and not passive appreciation, as a result of our teaching. fourth, it is without question true that in so far as the habits fixed are "school habits" or "sunday habits," or any other special type of habits, formed only in connection with special situations, to that extent we have no reason to expect moral conduct in the broader life situations. the habits formed are those that will be put into practice, and they are the only ones we are sure of. because a child is truthful in school, prompt in attendance, polite to his teacher, and so on is no warrant that he will be the same on the playground or on the street. because a child can think out a problem in history or mathematics is no warrant that he will therefore think out moral problems. the only sure way is to see to it that he forms many useful habits out of school as well as in, that he has opportunity to think out moral problems as well as problems in school subjects.[ ] fifth, individual differences must not be forgotten in moral training. individual differences in suggestibility will influence the use of this factor in habit formation. individual differences in power of appreciation will influence the formation of ideals. differences in interest in books will result in differing degrees of knowledge. differences in maturity will mean that certain children in a class are ready for facts concerning sex, labor and capital, crime, and so on, long before other children in the same class should have such knowledge. differences in thinking power will determine efficiency in moral situations just as in others. the more carefully we consider the problem of moral social conduct, the more apparent it becomes that the work of the school can be modified so as to produce more significant results than are commonly now secured. indeed, it may be contended that in some respects the activities of the school operate to develop an attitude which is largely individualistic, competitive, and, if not anti-social, at least non-social. although we may not expect that the habits and attitudes which are developed in the school will entirely determine the life led outside, yet one may not forget that a large part of the life of children is spent under school supervision. as children work in an atmosphere of coöperation, and as they form habits of helpfulness and openmindedness, we may expect that in some degree these types of activity will persist, especially in their association with each other. in a school which is organized to bring about the right sort of moral social conduct we ought to expect that children would grow in their power to accept responsibility for each other. the writer knows of a fourth grade in which during the past year a boy was absent from the room after recess. the teacher, instead of sending the janitor, or she herself going to find the boy, asked the class what they were going to do about it, and suggested to them their responsibility for maintaining the good name which they had always borne as a group. two of the more mature boys volunteered to go and find the boy who was absent. when they brought him into the room a little while later, they remarked to the teacher in a most matter-of-fact way, "we do not think that he will stay out after recess again." in the corridor of an elementary school the writer saw during the past year two boys sitting on a table before school hours in the morning. the one was teaching the multiplication tables to the other. they were both sixth-grade pupils,--the one a boy who had for some reason or other never quite thoroughly learned his tables. the teacher had suggested that somebody might help him, and a boy had volunteered to come early to school in order that he might teach the boy who was backward. a great many teachers have discovered that the strongest motive which they can find for good work in the field of english is to be found in providing an audience, both for the reading or story-telling, and for the english composition. the idea which prevails is that if one is to read, he ought to read well enough to entertain others. if one has enjoyed a story, he may, if he prepares himself sufficiently well, tell it to the class or to some other group. much more emphasis on the undertakings in the attempt to have children accept responsibility, and to engage in a type of activity which has a definite moral social value, is to be found in the schools in which children are responsible for the morning exercises, or for publishing a school paper, or for preparing a school festival. one of the most notable achievements in this type of activity which the writer has ever known occurred in a school in which a group of seventh-grade children were thought to be particularly incompetent. the teachers had almost despaired of having them show normal development, either intellectually or socially. after a conference of all of the teachers who knew the members of this group, it was decided to allow them to prepare a patriot's day festival. the idea among those teachers who had failed with this group was that if the children had a large responsibility, they would show a correspondingly significant development. the children responded to the motive which was provided, became earnest students of history in order that they might find a dramatic situation, and worked at their composition when they came to write their play, some of them exercising a critical as well as a creative faculty which no one had known that they possessed. but possibly the best thing about the whole situation was that every member of the class found something to do in their coöperative enterprise. some members of the class were engaged in building and in decorating the stage scenery; others were responsible for costumes; those who were strong in music devoted themselves to this field. the search for a proper dramatic situation in history and the writing of the play have already been suggested. the staging of the play and its presentation to a large group of parents and other interested patrons of the school required still further specialization and ability. out of it all came a realization of the possibility of accomplishing great things when all worked together for the success of a common enterprise. when the festival day came, the most common statement heard in the room on the part of the parents and others interested in the work of the children was expressed by one who said: "this is the most wonderful group of seventh-grade children that i have ever seen. they are as capable as most high school boys and girls." it is to be recalled that this was the group in whom the teachers originally had little faith, and who had sometimes been called in their school a group of misfits. some schools have found, especially in the upper grades, an opportunity for a type of social activity which is entirely comparable with the demand made upon the older members of our communities. this work for social improvement or betterment is carried on frequently in connection with a course in civics. in some schools there is organized what is known as the junior police. this organization has been in some cases coordinated with the police department. the boys who belong pledge themselves to maintain, in so far as they are able, proper conditions on the streets with respect to play, to abstain from the illegal use of tobacco or other narcotics, and to be responsible for the correct handling of garbage, especially to see that paper, ashes, and other refuse are placed in separate receptacles, and that these receptacles are removed from the street promptly after they are emptied by the department concerned. in one city with which the writer is acquainted, the children in the upper grades, according to the common testimony of the citizens of their community, have been responsible for the cleaning up of the street cars. in other cities they have become interested, and have interested their parents, in the question of milk and water supply. in some cases they have studied many different departments of the city government, and have, in so far as it was possible, lent their coöperation. in one case a group of children became very much excited concerning a dead horse that was allowed to remain on a street near the school, and they learned before they were through just whose responsibility it was, and how to secure the action that should have been taken earlier. still another type of activity which may have significance for the moral social development of children is found in the study of the life activities in the communities in which they live. there is no reason why children, especially in the upper grades or in the high school, should not think about working conditions, especially as they involve sweat-shops or work under unsanitary conditions. they may very properly become interested in the problems of relief, and of the measures taken to eliminate crime. indeed, from the standpoint of the development of socially efficient children, it would seem to be more important that some elementary treatment of industrial and social conditions might be found to be more important in the upper grades and in the high school than any single subject which we now teach. another attempt to develop a reasonable attitude concerning moral situations is found in the schools which have organized pupils for the participation in school government. there is no particular value to be attached to any such form of organization. it may be true that there is considerable advantage in dramatizing the form of government in which the children live, and for that purpose policemen, councilmen or aldermen, mayors, and other officials, together with their election, may help in the understanding of the social obligations which they will have to meet later on. but the main thing is to have these children come to accept responsibility for each other, and to seek to make the school a place where each respects the rights of others and where every one is working together for the common good. in this connection it is important to suggest that schemes of self-government have succeeded only where there has been a leader in the position of principal or other supervisory officer concerned. children's judgments are apt to be too severe when they are allowed to discipline members of their group. there will always be need, whatever attempt we may make to have them accept responsibility, for the guidance and direction of the more mature mind. we seek in all of these activities, as has already been suggested, to have children come to take, in so far as they are able, the rational attitude toward the problems of conduct which they have to face. it is important for teachers to realize the fallacy of making a set of rules by which all children are to be controlled. it is only with respect to those types of activity in which the response, in order to further the good of the group, must be invariable that we should expect to have pupils become automatic. it is important in the case of a fire drill, or in the passing of materials, and the like, that the response, although it does involve social obligation, should be reduced to the level of mechanized routine. most school situations involve, or may involve, judgment, and it is only as pupils grow in power of self-control and in their willingness to think through a situation before acting, that we may expect significant moral development. in the case of offenses which seem to demand punishment, that teacher is wise who is able to place responsibility with the pupil who has offended. the question ought to be common, "what can i do to help you?" the question which the teacher should ask herself is not, "what can i do to punish the pupil?" but rather, "how can i have him realize the significance of his action and place upon him the responsibility of reinstating himself with the social group?" the high school principal who solved the problem of a teacher who said that she would not teach unless a particular pupil were removed from her class, and of the pupil who said that she would not stay in school if she had to go to that teacher, by telling them both to take time to think it through and decide how they would reconcile their differences, is a case in point. what we need is not the punishment which follows rapidly upon our feeling of resentment, but rather the wisdom of waiting and accepting the mistake or offense of the pupil as an opportunity for careful consideration upon his part and as a possible means of growth for him. there has been considerable discussion during recent years concerning the obligation of the school to teach children concerning matters of sex. traditionally, our policy has been one of almost entire neglect. the consequence has been, on the whole, the acquisition upon the part of boys and girls of a large body of misinformation, which has for the most part been vicious. it is not probable that we can ever expect most teachers to have the training necessary to give adequate instruction in this field. for children in the upper grades, during the preadolescent period especially, some such instruction given by the men and women trained in biology, or possibly by men and women doctors who have made a specialty of this field, promises a large contribution to the development of the right attitudes with respect to the sex life and the elimination of much of the immorality which has been due to ignorance or to the vicious misinformation which has commonly been spread among children. the policy of secrecy and ignorance cannot well be maintained if we accept the idea of responsibility and the exercise of judgment as the basis of moral social activity. in no other field are the results of a lack of training or a lack of morality more certain to be disastrous both for the individual and for the social group. questions . how satisfactory is the morality of the man who claims that he does no wrong? . how is it possible for a child to be unmoral and not immoral? . are children who observe school rules and regulations necessarily growing in morality? . why is it important, from the standpoint of growth in morality, to have children form socially desirable habits, even though we may not speak of this kind of activity as moral conduct? . what constitutes growth in morality for the adult? . in what sense is it possible for the same act to be immoral, unmoral, and moral for individuals living under differing circumstances and in different social groups? give an example. . why have moral reformers sometimes been considered immoral by their associates? . what is the moral significance of earning a living? of being prompt? of being courteous? . what are the instincts upon which we may hope to build in moral training? what instinctive basis is there for immoral conduct? . to what extent is intellectual activity involved in moral conduct? what is the significance of one's emotional response? . what stages of development are distinguishable in the moral development of children? is it possible to classify children as belonging to one stage or the other by their ages? . why is it true that one's character depends upon the deliberate choices which he makes among several possible modes or types of action? . why is it important to have positive satisfaction follow moral conduct? . how may the conduct of parents and teachers influence conduct of children? . what is the weakness of direct moral instruction, e.g. the telling of stories of truthfulness, the teaching of moral precepts, and the like? . what opportunities can you provide in your class for moral social conduct? . children will do what is right because of their desire to please, their respect for authority, their fear of unpleasant consequences, their careful, thoughtful analysis of the situation and choice of that form of action which they consider right. arrange these motives in order of their desirability. would you be satisfied to utilize the motive which brings results most quickly and most surely? . in what sense is it true that lapses from moral conduct are the teacher's best opportunity for moral teaching? . how may children contribute to the social welfare of the school community? of the larger social group outside of the school? . how may pupil participation in school government be made significant in the development of social moral conduct? * * * * * xii. transfer of training formal discipline or transfer of training concerns itself with the question as to how far training in one subject, along one line, influences other lines. how far, for instance, training in reasoning in mathematics helps a child to reason in history, in morals, in household administration; how far memorizing gems of poetry or dates in history aids memory when it is applied to learning stenography or botany; how far giving attention to the gymnasium will insure attention to sermons and one's social engagements. the question is, how far does the special training one gets in home and school fit him to react to the environment of life with its new and complex situations? put in another way, the question is what effect upon other bonds does forming this particular situation response series of bonds have. the practical import of the question and its answer is tremendous. most of our present school system, both in subject matter and method, is built upon the assumption that one answer is correct--if it is false, much work remains to be done by the present-day education. the point of view which was held until recent years is best made clear by a series of quotations. "since the mind is a unit and the faculties are simply phases or manifestations of its activity, whatever strengthens one faculty indirectly strengthens all the others. the _verbal_ memory seems to be an exception to this statement, however, for it may be abnormally cultivated without involving to any profitable extent the other faculties. but only things that are rightly perceived and rightly understood can be _rightly_ remembered. hence whatever develops the acquisitive and assimilative powers will also strengthen memory; and, conversely, rightly strengthening the memory necessitates the developing and training of the other powers." (r.n. roark, method in education, p. .) "it is as a means of training the faculties of perception and generalization that the study of such a language as latin in comparison with english is so valuable." (c.l. morgan, psychology for teachers, p. .) "arithmetic, if judiciously taught, forms in the pupil habits of mental attention, argumentative sequence, absolute accuracy, and satisfaction in truth as a result, that do not seem to spring equally from the study of any other subject suitable to this elementary stage of instruction." (joseph payne, lectures on education, vol. i, p. .) "by means of experimental and observational work in science, not only will his attention be excited, the power of observation, previously awakened, much strengthened, and the senses exercised and disciplined, but the very important habit of doing homage to the authority of facts rather than to the authority of men, be initiated." (_ibid_., p. .) the view maintained by these writers is that the mind is made up of certain elemental powers such as attention, reasoning, observation, imagination, and the like, each of which acts as a unit. training any one of these powers means simply its exercise irrespective of the material used. the facility gained through this exercise may then be transferred to other subjects or situations, which are quite different. the present point of view with regard to this question is very different, as is shown by the following quotations: "we may conclude, then, that there is something which may be called formal discipline, and that it may be more or less general in character. it consists in the establishment of habitual reactions that correspond to the form of situations. these reactions foster adjustments, attitudes, and ideas that favor the successful dealing with the emergencies that arouse them. on the other hand, both the form that we can learn to deal with more effectively, and the reactions that we associate with it, are definite. there is no general training of the powers or faculties, so far as we can determine." (henderson, , p. f.) "one mental function or activity improves others in so far as and because they are in part identical with it, because it contains elements common to them. addition improves multiplication because multiplication is largely addition; knowledge of latin gives increased ability to learn french because many of the facts learned in the one case are needed in the other. the study of geometry may lead a pupil to be more logical in all respects, for one element of being logical in all respects is to realize that facts can be absolutely proven and to admire and desire this certain and unquestionable sort of demonstration...." (thorndike, ' , pp. - , _passim_.) "mental discipline is the most important thing in education, but it is specific, not general. the ability developed by means of one subject can be transferred to another subject only in so far as the latter has elements in common with the former. abilities should be developed in school only by means of those elements of subject-matter and of method that are common to the most valuable phases of the outside environment. in the high school there should also be an effort to work out general concepts of method from the specific methods used." (heck, ' , edition of ' , p. .) "... no study should have a place in the curriculum for which this general disciplinary characteristic is the chief recommendation. such advantage can probably be gotten in some degree from every study, and the intrinsic values of each study afford at present a far safer criterion of educational work than any which we can derive from the theory of formal discipline." (angell, ' , p. .) these writers also believe in transfer of training, but they believe the transfer to be never complete, to be in general a very small percentage of the special improvement gained and at times to be negative and to interfere with responses in other fields instead of being a help. they also emphasize the belief that when the transfer does occur, it is for some perfectly valid reason and under certain very definite conditions. they reject utterly the machine-like idea of the mind and its elemental faculties held by the writers first quoted. they hold the view of mental activity which has been emphasized in the discussion of original tendencies and inheritance from near ancestry, _i.e._, that the physical correlate of all types of mental activity is a definite forming of connections between particular bonds-these connections, of course, according to the laws of readiness exercise, and effect, would be determined by the situation acting as a stimulus and would, therefore, vary as the total situation varied. they believe in a highly specialized human brain, which reacts in small groups of nerve tracts--not in gross wholes. they would express each of the "elemental" powers in the plural and not in the singular. the basis of this change of view within the last fifteen or twenty years is to be found in experimental work. the question has definitely been put to the test as to how far training in one line did influence others. for a full description of the various types of experiments performed the reader is referred to thorndike's "psychology of learning," chapter . only an indication of the type of work done and the general character of the results can be given here. experiments in the effect of cross education, in memorizing, in observing and judging sensory and perceptual data, and in forming sensori-motor association habits have been conducted in considerable numbers. a few experiments in special school functions have also been carried out. investigations in the correlation between various parts of the same subject and between different subjects supposed to be closely allied also throw light upon this subject. the results from these different lines of experiment, although confusing and sometimes contradictory, seem to warrant the belief stated above. they have made it very clear that the question of transfer is not a simple one, but, on the contrary, that it is extremely complex. they make plain that in some cases where large transfer was confidently expected, that little resulted, while, on the other hand, in some cases when little was expected, much more occurred. it is evident that the old idea of a large transfer in some subtle and unexplained way of special improvements to a general faculty is false. but, on the other hand, it would be equally false to say that no transfer occurred. the general principle seems to be that transfer occurs when the same bonds are used in the second situation to the extent that the alteration in these particular connections affects the second response. both the knowledge of what bonds are used in various responses and to what extent alteration in them will affect different total responses is lacking. therefore, all that is at present possible is a statement of conditions under which transfer is probable. in general, then, transfer of training will occur to the extent that the two responses use the same bonds--to the extent, then, that there is identity of some sort. this identity which makes transfer possible may be of all degrees of generality and of several different types. first, there may be identity of content. for instance, forming useful connections with six, island, and, red, habit, africa, square root, triangle, gender, percentage, and so on, in this or that particular context should be of use in other contexts and therefore allow of transfer of training. the more common the particular responses are to all sorts of life situations, the greater the possibility of transfer. second, the identity may be that of method or procedure. to be able to add, to carry, to know the method of classifying an unknown flower, to have a definite method of meeting a new situation in hand-work, to know how to use source material in history, to have gained the technique of laboratory skill in chemistry, to know how to study in geography, should be useful in other departments where the same method would serve. some of these methods are, of course, of much more general service than others. in establishing skill in the use of these various procedures, two types of responses are needed. the learner must form connections of a positive nature, such as analyzing, collecting material, criticizing according to standard, picking out the essential and so on, and he must also form connections of a negative character which will cause him to neglect certain tendencies. he must learn not to accept the first idea offered, to neglect suggestions, to hurry or to leave half finished, to ignore interruptions, to prevent personal bias to influence criticism, and so on. these connections which result in neglecting certain elements are quite as important as the positive element, both in the production of the particular procedure and in the transfer to other fields. third, the identity may be of still more general character and be in terms of attitude or ideal. to learn to be thorough in connection with history, accurate in handwork, open-minded in science, persistent in latin, critical in geometry, thorough in class and school activities; to form habits of allegiance to ideals of truth, coöperation, fair play, tolerance, courage, and so on, _may_ help the learner to exhibit these same attitudes in other situations in life. here again the connections of neglect are important. to neglect selfish suggestions, to ignore the escape from consequences that falsehood might make possible, to be dead to fear, to ignore bodily aches and pains, are quite as necessary in producing conduct that is generous, truthful, and courageous as are the positive connections made in building up the ideal. in the discussion of transfer because of identity, it was emphasised that the presence of identity of various types explained cases of transfer that exist and made transfer possible. in no case must it be understood, however, that the presence of these identical elements is a warrant of transfer. transfer _may_ take place under such conditions, but it need not do so. transfer is most sure to occur in cases of identity of substance and least likely in cases of identity of attitude or ideals. to have useful responses to six, above, city, quart, and so on, in one situation will very likely mean responses of a useful nature in almost all situations which have such elements present. it is very different with the ideals. a child may be very accurate in handwork, and yet almost nothing of it show elsewhere; he may be truthful to his teacher and lie to his parents; he may be generous to his classmates and the reverse to his brothers and sisters. persistence in latin may not influence his work in the shop, and the critical attitude of geometry be lacking in his science. transfer in methods holds a middle ground. it seems that the more complex and the more subtle the connections involved, the less is the amount and the surety of the transfer. in order to increase the probability of transfer when connections of method or attitudes are being formed, first, it should be made conscious, and second, it should be put into practice in several types of situations. there is grave danger that the method will not be differentiated from the subject, the ideal from the context of the situation. to many children learning how to study in connection with history, or to be critical in geometry, or to be scientific in the laboratory, has never been separated from the particular situation. the method or the ideal and the situation in which they have been acquired are one--one response. the general elements of method or attitude have never been made conscious, they are submerged in the particular subject or situation, and therefore the probability of transfer is lessened. if, on the other hand, the question of method, as an idea by itself, apart from any particular subject, is brought to the child's attention; if truth as an ideal, independent of context, is made conscious, it is much more likely to be reacted to in a different situation, for it has become a free idea and therefore crystallized. then having freed the general somewhat from its particular setting, the learner should be given opportunity to put it in practice in other settings. to simply form the method connections or the attitude responses in latin and then blindly trust that they will be of general use is unsafe. it is the business of the educator to make as sure as he can of the transfer, and that can only be done by practicing in several fields. these two procedures which make transfer more sure, i.e., making the element conscious and giving practice in several fields, are not sharply divided, but interact. practice makes the idea clearer and freer, and this in turn makes fresh practice profitable. it is simply the application of the law of analysis by varying concomitants. in all this matter of transfer it must be borne in mind that a very slight amount of transfer of some of these more general responses may be of tremendous value educationally, provided it is over a very wide field. if a boy's study of high school science made him at all more scientific in his attitude towards such life situations as politics, morals, city sanitation, and the like, it would be of much more value than the particular habit formed. if a girl's work in home economics resulted in but a slight transfer of vital interest to the actual problems of home-making, it would mean much to the homes of america. if a boy's training in connection with the athletics of his school fosters in him an ideal of fair play which influences him at all in his dealings with men in business, with his family, with himself, the training would have been worth while. to discount training simply because the transfer is slight is manifestly unfair. the kind of responses which transfer are quite as important as the amount of the transfer. the idea that every subject will furnish the same amount of discipline provided they are equally well taught is evidently false. every school subject must now be weighed from two points of view,--first, as to the worth of the particular facts, responses, habits, which it forms, and second, as to the opportunity it offers for the formation of connections which are of general application. the training which educators are sure of is the particular training offered by the subject; the general training is more problematic. hence no subject should be retained in our present curriculum whose only value is a claim to disciplinary training. such general training as the subject affords could probably be gained from some other subject whose content is also valuable. just because a subject is difficult, or is distasteful, is no sign that its pursuit will result in disciplinary training. in fact, the psychology of play and drudgery make it apparent that the presence of annoyance, of distaste, will lessen the disciplinary value. only those subjects and activities which are characterized by the play spirit can offer true educational development. the more the play spirit enters in, the greater the possibility of securing not only special training, but general discipline as well. thorndike sums up the present attitude towards special subjects by saying, "an impartial inventory of the facts in the ordinary pupil of ten to eighteen would find the general training from english composition greater than that from formal logic, the training from physics and chemistry greater than that from geometry, and the training from a year's study of the laws and institutions of the romans greater than that from equal study of their language. the grammatical studies which have been considered the chief depositories of disciplinary magic would be found in general inferior to scientific treatments of human nature as a whole. the superiority for discipline of pure overapplied science would be referred in large measure to the fact that pure science could be so widely applied. the disciplinary value of geometry would appear to be due, not to the simplicity of its conditions, but to the rigor of its proofs; the greatest disciplinary value of latin would appear in the case, not of those who disliked it and found it hard, but of those to whom it was a charming game." questions . it has been experimentally determined that the ease with which one memorizes one set of facts may be very greatly improved without a corresponding improvement in ability to memorize in some other field. how would you use this fact to refute the argument that we possess a general faculty of memory? . how is it possible for a man to reason accurately in the field of engineering and yet make very grave mistakes in his reasoning about government or education? . what assurance have we that skill or capacity for successful work developed in one situation will be transferred to another situation involving the same mental processes of habit formation, reasoning, imagination, and the like? . what are the different types of identity which make possible transfer of training? . how can we make the identity of methods of work most significant for transfer of training and for the education of the individual? . why do ideals which seem to control in one situation fail to affect other activities in which the same ideal is called for? . under what conditions may a very slight amount of transfer of training become of the very greatest importance for education? . why may we not hope for the largest results in training by compelling children to study that which is distasteful? do children (or adults) work hardest when they are forced to attend to that from which they derive little or no satisfaction? . which student gets the most significant training from his algebra, the boy who enjoys work in this field or the boy who worries through it because algebra is required for graduation from the high school? . why may we hope to secure more significant training in junior high schools which offer a great variety of courses than was accomplished by the seventh and eighth grades in which all pupils were compelled to study the same subjects? . why is latin a good subject from the standpoint of training for one student and a very poor subject with which to seek to educate another student? * * * * * xiii. types of classroom exercises the exercises which teachers conduct in their classrooms do not commonly involve a single type of mental activity. it is true, however, that certain lessons tend to involve one type of activity predominantly. there are lessons which seek primarily to fix habits, others in which thinking of the inductive type is primarily involved, and still others in which deductive thinking or appreciation are the ends sought. as has already been indicated in the discussion of habit, thinking, and appreciation in the previous chapters, these types of mental activity are not to be thought of as separate and distinct. habit formation may involve thinking. in a lesson predominantly inductive or deductive, some element of drill may enter, or appreciation may be sought with respect to some particular part of the situation presented. these different kinds of exercises, drills, thinking (inductive or deductive), and appreciation are fairly distinct psychological types. in addition to the psychological types of exercises mentioned above, exercises are conducted in the classroom which may be designated under the following heads: lecturing, the recitation lesson, examination and review lessons. in any one of these the mental process involved may be any of those mentioned above as belonging to the purely psychological types of lessons or a combination of any two or more of them. it has seemed worth while to treat briefly of both sorts of lesson types, and to discuss at some length, lecturing, about which there is considerable disagreement, and the additional topic of questioning, which is the means employed in all of these different types of classroom exercises. _the inductive lesson_. it has been common in the discussion of the inductive development lesson to classify the stages through which one passes from his recognition of a problem to his conclusion in five steps. these divisions have commonly been spoken of as ( ) preparation; ( ) presentation; ( )comparison and abstraction; ( ) generalization; and ( ) application. it has even been suggested that all lessons should conform to this order of procedure. from the discussions in the previous chapters, the reader will understand that such a formal method of procedure would not conform to what we know about mental activity and its normal exercise and development. there is some advantage, however, in thinking of the general order of procedure in the inductive lesson as outlined by these steps. the step of preparation has to do with making clear to the pupil the aim or purpose of the problem with which he is to deal. it is not always possible in the classroom to have children at work upon just such problems as may occur to them. the orderly development of a subject to be taught requires that the teacher discover to children problems or purposes which may result in thinking. the skill of the teacher depends upon his knowledge of the previous experiences of the children in the class and his skill in having them word the problem which remains unsolved in their experience in such a way as to make it attractive to them. indeed, it may be said that children never have a worthy aim unless it is one which is intellectually stimulating. a problem exists only when we desire to find the answer. the term "presentation" suggests a method of procedure which we would not want to follow too frequently; that is, we may hope not simply to present facts for acceptance or rejection, but, rather, we want children to search for the data which they may need in solving their problem. from the very beginning of their school career children need, in the light of a problem stated, to learn to utilize all of the possible sources of information available. their own experience, the questions which they may put to other people, observations which they may undertake with considerable care, books or other sources of information which they may consult, all are to be thought of as tools to be used or sources of information available for the solution of problems. it cannot be too often reiterated that it is not simply getting facts, reading books, performing experiments, which is significant, but, rather, which of these operations is conducted in the light of a problem clearly conceived by children. the step of presentation, as above described, is not one that may be begun and completed before other parts of the inductive lesson are carried on. as soon as any facts are available they are either accepted or rejected, as they may help in the solution of the problem; comparisons are instituted, the essential elements of likeness are noticed, and even a partial solution of the problem may be suggested in terms of a new generalization. the student may then begin to gather further facts, to pass through further steps of comparison, and to make still further modifications of his generalization as he proceeds in his work. at any stage of the process the student may stop to apply or test the validity of a generalization which has been formed. it is even true that the statement of the problem with which one starts may be modified in the light of new facts found, or new analyses instituted, or new elements of likeness which have been discovered. in the conduct of an inductive lesson it is of primary importance that the teacher discover to children problems, the solutions of which are important for them, that he guide them in so far as it is possible for them to find all of the facts necessary in their search for data, that he encourage them to discuss with each other, even to the extent of disagreeing, with respect to comparisons which are instituted or generalizations which are premature, and above all, that he develop, in so far as it is possible, the habit of verifying conclusions. _the deductive lesson._ the interdependence of induction and deduction has been discussed in the chapter devoted to thinking. the procedure in a deductive lesson is from a clear recognition of the problem involved, through the analysis of the situation and abstraction of the essential elements, to a search for the laws or principles in which to classify the particular element or individual with which we are dealing, to a careful comparison of this particular with the general that we have found, to our conclusion, which is established by a process of verification. briefly stated, the normal order of procedure might be indicated as follows: ( ) finding the problem; ( ) finding the generalization or principles; ( ) inference; ( ) verification. it is important in this type of exercise, as has been indicated in the discussion of the inductive lesson, that the problem be made clear. so long as children indulge in random guesses as to the process which is involved in the solution of a problem in arithmetic, or the principle which is to be invoked in science, or the rule which is to be called to mind in explaining a grammatical construction, we may take it for granted that they have no very clear conception of the process through which they must pass, nor of the issues which are involved. in the search for the generalization or principle which will explain the problem, a process of acceptance and rejection is involved. it helps children to state definitely, with respect to a problem in arithmetic, that they know that this particular principle is not the one which they need. it is often by a process of elimination that a child can best explain a grammatical construction, either in english or in a foreign language. of course the elimination of the principle or law which is not the right one means simply that we are reducing the number of chances of making a mistake. if out of four possibilities we can immediately eliminate two of them, there are only two left to be considered. after children have discovered the generalization or principle involved, it is well to have them state definitely the inference which they make. just as in the inductive process we pass almost immediately from the step of comparison and abstraction to the statement of generalization, so in the deductive lesson, when once we have related the particular case under consideration to the principle which explains it, we are ready to state our inference. verification involves the trying out of our inference to see that it certainly will hold. this may be done by proposing some other inference which we find to be invalid, or by seeking to find any other law or principle which will explain our particular situation. here again, as in the inductive lesson, the skillful teacher makes his greatest contribution by having children become increasingly careful in this step of verification. almost any one can pass through the several stages involved in deductive thinking and arrive at a wrong conclusion. that which distinguishes the careful thinker from the careless student is the sincerity of the former in his unwillingness to accept his conclusions until they are verified. _the drill lesson._ the drill lesson is so clearly a matter of fixing habits that little needs to be added to the chapter dealing with this subject. if one were to attempt to give in order the steps of the process involved, they might be stated as follows: ( ) establishing a motive for forming the habit; ( ) knowing exactly what we wish to do, or the habit or skill to be acquired; ( ) recognition of the importance of the focusing of attention during the period devoted to repetitions; ( ) variation in practice in order to lessen fatigue and to help to fix attention; ( ) a recognition of the danger of making mistakes, with consequent provision against lapses; ( ) the principle of review, which may be stated best by suggesting that the period between practice exercises may only gradually be lengthened. possibly the greatest deficiency in drill work, as commonly conducted, is found in the tendency upon the part of some teachers to depend upon repetition involving many mistakes. this is due quite frequently to the assignment of too much to be accomplished. twenty-five words in spelling, a whole multiplication table, a complete conjugation in latin, all suggest the danger of mistakes which will be difficult to eliminate later on. the wise teacher is the one who provides very carefully against mistakes upon the part of pupils. he assigns a minimum number of words, or a number of combinations, or a part of a conjugation, and takes care to discover that children are sure of themselves before indulging in that practice which is to fix the habit. in much of the drill work there is, of course, the desirability of gaining in speed. in this field successful teachers have discovered that much is gained by more or less artificial stimuli which seem to be altogether outside of the work required to form a habit. in drill on column addition successful work is done by placing the problem on the board and following through the combinations by pointing the pointer and making a tap on the board as one proceeds through the column. concert work of this sort seems to have the effect of speeding up those who would ordinarily lag, even though they might get the right result. the most skillful teachers of typewriting count or clap their hands or use the phonograph for the sake of speeding up their students. they have discovered that the same amount of time devoted to typewriting practice will produce anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred per cent more speed under such artificial stimulation as they were in the habit of getting merely by asking the students to practice. these experiences, of course, suggest that drill work will require an expenditure of energy and an alertness upon the part of teachers, and not merely an assignment of work to be done by pupils. _appreciation lesson._ the work which the teacher does in securing appreciation has been suggested in a previous chapter. it will suffice here briefly to state what may be thought of as the order of procedure in securing appreciation. it is not as easy in this case to state the development in terms of particular steps or processes, since, as has already been indicated in the chapter on appreciation, the student is passive rather than active, is contemplating and enjoying, rather than attacking and working to secure a particular result. the work of the teacher may, however, be organized around the following heads: ( ) it is of primary importance that the teacher bring to the class an enthusiasm and joy for the picture, music, poetry, person, or achievement which he wishes to present; ( ) children must not be forced to accept nor even encouraged to repeat the evaluation determined by teachers; ( ) spontaneous and sincere response upon the part of children should be accepted, even though it may not conform to the teacher's estimate; ( ) children should be encouraged to choose from among many of the forms or situations presented for their approval those which they like best; ( ) the technique involved in the creation of the artistic form should be subordinated to enjoyment in the field of the fine arts; ( ) throughout, the play spirit should be predominant, for if the element of drudgery enters, appreciation disappears. teachers who get good results in appreciation secure them mainly by virtue of the fact that they have large capacity for enjoyment in the fields which they present to children. a teacher who is enthusiastic, and who really finds great joy in music, will awaken and develop power of appreciation upon the part of his pupils. the teacher who can enter into the spirit of the child poetry, or of the fairy tale, will get a type of appreciation not enjoyed by the teacher who finds delight only in adult literature. it is of the utmost importance to recognize the fact that children only gradually grow from an appreciation or joy in that which is crude to that which represents the highest type of artistic production. it is important to have children try themselves out in creative work; but the influence of a teacher may be far greater than that of the attempts of the children to produce in these fields. _lecturing_. among the various types of methods used in teaching there is probably no one which has received such severe criticism as the so-called lecture method. the result of this criticism has been, theoretically at least, to abolish lecturing from the elementary school and to diminish the use of this method in the high school, although in the colleges and universities it is still the most popular method. although it is true that the lecture method is not the best one for continual use in elementary and high school, still its entire disuse is unfortunate. so is its blind use by those who still adhere to the old ways of doing things. the chief criticisms of the method are, first, that it makes of the learner a mere recipient instead of a thinker; second, that the material so gained does not become part of the mental life of the hearers and so is not so well remembered nor so easily applied as material gained in other ways; third, that the instructor has no means of determining whether his class is getting the right ideas or wholly false ones; fourth, the method lacks interest in the majority of cases. despite the truth of these criticisms, there are occasions when the lecture or telling method is the best one--in fact the only one that can accomplish the desired result. first, the lecture method may sometimes take the place of books. often, even in the elementary school, there is need for the children to get facts,--information in history or geography or literature,--and the getting of these facts from books would be too difficult or too wasteful. in such a case telling the facts is certainly the best way to give them. a teacher in half a period can give material that it might take the children hours to find. by telling them the facts, he not only saves waste of time, but also retains the interest. very often discouragement and even dislike results from a prolonged search for a few facts. of course in the higher schools, when the material to be given is not in print, when the professor is the source of certain theories, methods, and explanations, lecturing is the only way for students to get the material. it must be borne in mind that human beings are naturally a source of interest, particularly to children, and therefore having the teacher tell, other things being equal, will make a greater impression than reading it in a book. second, the lecture method is valuable as a means of explanation. despite the fact that the material given may be adapted to the child's level of development, still it often happens that it is not clear. then, instead of sending the child to the same material again, an explanation by teacher or fellow pupil is much better. it may be just the inflection used, or the choice of different words, that will clear up the difficulty. third, the telling method should be used for illustration. very often when illustration is necessary the lecture method is supplemented by illustrative material of various types--objects, experiments, pictures, models, diagrams, and so on. none of this material, however, is used to its best advantage unless it is accompanied by the telling method. it is through the telling that the essentials of the illustrative material gain the proper perspective. without such explanation some unimportant detail may focus the attention and the value of the material be lost. it has been customary to emphasize the need for and the value of this concrete illustrative material. teachers have felt that if it was possible to have the actual object, it should be obtained; if that was not possible, why then have pictures, but diagrams and words should only be used as a last resort. there can be no doubt as to the value of the concrete material, especially with little children--but its use has been carried to an extreme because it has been used blindly. for instance, sometimes the concrete material because of its general inherent interest, or because of its special appeal to some instinct, attracts the attention of the child in such a way that the point which was to be illustrated is lost sight of. witness work in nature study in the lower grades, and in chemistry in the high school. the concrete material may be so complex that again the essential point is lost in the mass of detail. no perspective can be obtained because of the complexity--witness work with principles of machines in physics and the circulation of the blood in biology. sometimes the diagram or word explanation with nothing of the more concrete material is the best type of illustration. a fresh application of the principle or lesson by the teacher is another means of illustration and one of the best, for it not only broadens the student's point of view and gives another cue to the material, but it may also make direct connection with his own experience. illustrations in the book often fail to do this, but the teacher knowing his particular class can make the application that will mean most. telling a story or incident is another way of illustration. the personal element is nearly always present in this means, and is a valuable spur to interest. illustrations of all kinds, from the concrete to the story form, have been grossly misused in teaching, so that to-day teachers are almost afraid to use any. the difficulty has been that illustrations have been used as a means of regaining wandering attention. it has been the sugar-coating. the illustration, then, has become the important thing and the material nonimportant. the class has watched the experiment or listened to the story, but when that was over the attention was gone again. illustrations should not be the means of holding the attention; that is the function of the material itself. if the lesson cannot hold the interest, illustrations are worse than useless. illustrations, then, of all kinds must be subordinated to the material--they are only a means to an end, and that end is a better understanding of the material. illustrations, further, should have a vital, necessary connection with the point they are used to make clearer. illustrations that are dragged in, that are not vitally connected with the point, are entirely out of place. if illustrations always truly illustrated, then children would not remember the illustration and forget the point, for remembering the illustration they would be led directly to the point because of the closeness of the connection. fourth, telling or lecturing is the best way to get appreciation. this was discussed in the chapter on appreciation, so need only be mentioned here. the interpretation by the teacher of the character, the picture, the poem, the policy, or what not, not only increases the understanding of the listener, but also calls up feeling responses. it is in this telling that the personality of the teacher, his experiences, his ideals, make themselves felt. one can often win appreciation of and allegiance to the best in life by the use of the telling method in the appropriate situations. fifth, the lecture method should sometimes be used as a means of getting the desired mental attitude. the general laws of learning emphasize the importance of the mind's set as a condition to readiness of neurone tracts. five or ten minutes spent at the beginning of a subject, or a new section of work, in introducing the class to it, may give the keynote for the whole course. a whole period may be profitably be spent this way. not only will the telling method used on such occasions give the right emotional attitude towards a subject, but also the right intellectual set as well. it is evident then that the lecture or telling method has its place in all parts of the educational system, but its place should be clearly and definitely recognized. the danger is not in using it, but in using it at the wrong time, and in overusing it. bearing in mind the dangers that adhere to its use, it is always well, whether the method is used in grades or in college, to mix it with other methods or to follow it by another method that will do the things that the lecture method may have left undone. _the recitation lesson._ as has been suggested in the opening of this chapter, the recitation lesson is not a type involving any particular psychological process. it is, rather, a method of procedure which may involve any of the other types of work already discussed. when the recitation lesson means merely reciting paragraphs from the book with little or no reference to problems to be solved or skill to be developed, it has no place in a schoolroom. when, however, the teacher uses the recitation lesson as an exercise in which he assures himself that facts needed for further progress in thinking have been secured, or that habits have been established, or verbatim memorization accomplished, this type of exercise is justified. it is well to remember that the thought process involved in the development of a subject, or the solution even of a single problem, may extend over many class periods. the recitation lesson may be important in organizing the material which is to be used in the larger thought whole. again, this type of exercise may involve the presentation of material which is to be used as a basis for appreciation in literature, in music, in art, in history, and the like. the organization of experiences of children, whether secured through observations, discussions, or from books, around certain topics may furnish a most satisfactory basis for the development of problems or of the gathering of the material essential for their solution. a better understanding of the conditions which make for success in habit formation, in thinking, and the development of appreciation, will tend to eliminate from our schools that type of exercise in which teachers ask merely that children recite to them what they have been able to remember from the books which they have read or the lectures which they have heard. _the examination and review lessons._ in the establishment of habits, the development of appreciation, or the growth in understanding which we seek to secure through thinking, there will be many occasions for checking up our work. successful teaching requires that the habit that we think we have established be called for and additional practice given from time to time in order to be certain that it is fixed. in like manner, the development of our thought in any field is not something which is accomplished without respect to later neglect. we, rather, build a system of thought with reference to a particular field or subject as a result of thinking, and rethinking through the many different situations which are involved. in like manner, in the field of appreciation the very essence of our enjoyment is to be found in the fact that that which we have enjoyed we recall, and strengthen our appreciation through the revival of the experience. the review is, of course, most successful when it is not simply going over the whole material in exactly the same way. in habit formation it is often advisable to arrange in a different order the stimuli which are to bring the desired responses, for the very essence of habit formation is found in the fact that the particular response can be secured regardless of the order in which they are called for. in thinking, as a subject is developed, our control is measured by the better perspective which we secure. this means, of course, that in review we will not be concerned with reviving all of the processes through which we have passed, but, rather, in a reorganization quite different from that which was originally provided. the examination lesson is classified here as of the same type as the review because a good examination involves all that has been suggested by review. the writer has no sympathy with those who argue against examinations. the only proof that we can get of the success or failure of our work is to be found in the achievement of pupils. it is not desirable to set aside a particular period of a week devoted entirely to examinations, because examinations in all subjects cannot to best advantage be given during the same period. there are stages in the development of our thinking, or in the acquiring of skill, or in our understanding and appreciation which occur at irregular intervals and which call for a summing up of what has gone before, in order that we may be sure of success in the work which is to follow. it is, of course, undesirable to devote a whole week to examinations on account of the strain and excitement under which children labor. it is entirely possible to know of the achievements of children through examinations which have been given at irregular intervals throughout the term. it would be best, probably, never to give more than one examination on any one day, and, as a rule, to devote only the regular class period to such work. in another chapter the discussion of more exact methods of measuring the achievements of children will be discussed at some length. in all of the lesson types mentioned above, one of the most important means employed by teachers for the stimulation of pupils is the question. it seems wise, therefore, to devote some paragraphs to a consideration of questioning as determining skill in teaching. _questioning_. the purpose of a question is to serve as a situation which shall arouse to activity certain nerve connections and thus bring a response. questions, oral or written, are the chief tools used in schools to gain responses. in some situations it is the only means a teacher may have of arousing the response. psychologically, then, the value of the question must be judged by the response. questions may be considered from the point of view of the kind of response they call for. probably the most common kind of question is the one that calls for facts as answers. it involves memory--but memory of a rote type. it does not require thinking. all drill questions are of this type. the connections aroused are definitely final in a certain order, and the question simply sets off the train of bonds that leads directly to the answer. another type of question involving the memory process is the one which initiates recall, but here thought is active. the answer cannot be gained in a mechanical way, but selection and rejection are involved. the answer is to be found by examining past experience, but only in a thoughtful way. questions which call for comparison form another type. these may vary from those which involve the comparison of sense material to those which involve the comparison of policies or epochs. words, characters, plots, definitions, plans, subjects--everything with which intellectual life deals is open to comparison. comparison is one of the steps in the process of reasoning, and hence questions of this type are extremely important. then there are the questions which arouse the response of analysis. these questions vary among themselves according to the type of analysis needed, whether piecemeal attention or analysis due to varying concomitants. the former drives the thinker through gradual recognition and elimination of the known elements to a consciousness of the only partly known. the latter, by attracting the attention to unvarying factors in the changing situations, forces out the new and until then unknown element. some questions require judgment as a response. the judgment may be one concerning relationships, or concerning worth or value, or be merely a matter of definition--all questions calling for criticism are of this type. in any case this type of question involves the thought element at its best. the question requiring organization forms another type. there is no sharp line of division between these types of questions. no one of them should be used exclusively. some of them imply operations of a simple type as well as the particular response demanded by that form. for instance, some of the questions involving analysis imply comparison and recalling. a judgment question might call for all the simple processes noted above and others as well. the responses then vary in complexity and difficulty. the order of advance in both complexity and difficulty of the response is from the mere drill question to the judgment question. another type of question is the one which desires appreciation as a response. this question is one of the most difficult to frame, for it must tend to inhibit the critical attitude and by means of the associations it arouses or its own suggestive power get the appreciative response. questions of this type often call for constructive imagery as a means to the desired end. some questions are directive in their tendency. they require as response an attitude or set of the mind. they set the child thinking in this direction rather than that. in a sense they are suggestive, but they suggest the line of search rather than the response. a final type of question is akin to the one just discussed--the question whose response is further questions. here again the response desired is an attitude, but in this case it is more than an attitude, it is also a definite response that shall come in the form of questions. the questions of a good teacher should result in students asking questions both of people and of books. these last three types of questions are perhaps the most difficult of all. because of their complexity and subtlety they often miss fire and fail of their purpose. properly handled they are among the most powerful tools a teacher has. the type of question used must vary, not only with the particular group of children, and the type of lesson, but also with the subject. questions that would be the best type in mathematics might not be so good for an art lesson. the kinds of questions used must be adapted to the particular situation. psychologically a question is valuable not only in accordance with the kind of response it gets, but also in proportion to the readiness of the response. a question that is of such a character that the response is hazy, stumbling, hesitating--a question that brings no clear-cut response because the child does not understand what is wanted, is a poor question. this does not at all mean that the right response must always come immediately. some of the best questions are put with the intention of forcing the child to realize that he can't answer--that he doesn't know. if that type of response comes to that question, it is the best possible answer. nor need the whole answer come immediately. for instance, in many of the judgment questions the thinking process aroused may take some time before the judgment is reached, and meanwhile several partial answers may be given. but if the question asked started the process, without waste of time in trying to find out what it meant, the question is good. with these explanations, then, the second qualification of a good question is that it secures the appropriate response readily. in order to do this, these factors must be considered: first, the principle of apperception must be recognized. every question must deal with material that is on a level with the stage of development of the one questioned. not only so, but the question must connect somewhere with the learner's experience. this means a recognition also of individual differences. the question must also be couched in language that can be understood easily by the one questioned. to have to try to understand the language of the question as well as the question, results in divided attention and delayed responses. second, the question should be clear and definite. a question that has these characteristics will challenge the attention of the class. it is directed straight at the point at issue, and no time will be lost in wondering what the question means, or in trying two or three tentative answers. third, the younger the child, the simpler the question must be. with little children, to be good a question may involve only one idea, or relationship. the amount involved in the question, its scope and content, must be adapted to the mental development of the learner. it is only a mature thinker who can carry simultaneously two or three points of issue, or possibilities. fourth, the question to gain a ready response must be interesting. not only must the lesson as a whole be interesting, but the questions themselves must have the same quality. dull questions can kill an otherwise good lesson. the form of the question is thus a big factor in gaining a ready response. all the qualities which gain involuntary attention can be used in framing an interesting question--novelty, exaggeration, contrast, life, color, and so on. the third point to be considered in determining a good question is whether or not it satisfies the demands of economy. this demand is a fair one both from the standpoint of the best use of the time at the disposal of the learner, and also from the standpoint of the best means of gaining the greatest development on the part of the learner in a given time. the number of questions asked thus enters in as a factor. when a teacher asks four or five questions when one would serve the same purpose, she is not only wasting time, but the child is not getting the opportunity to do any thinking and therefore is not developing. recent studies on the actual number of questions asked in a recitation point to the conclusion that economy both of time and in development is being seriously overlooked. economy in response may also be brightened by preserving a logical sequence between questions. it is a matter of fact in psychology that associations are systematized about central ideas; it is also a fact that the set of the mind, in this direction rather than that, is characteristic of all work. logical sequence, then, makes use of both these facts--both of the systematization of ideas and of the mental attitude. the fourth test of good questioning is the universality of its appeal. some questions which are otherwise good appeal but to comparatively few in the class. this, of course, means that responses are being gained but from few. the best questioning stimulates most of the class; all members of the class are working. in order to secure this result the questions must be properly distributed over the class. the bright pupils must not be allowed to do all the work; or, on the other hand, all the attention of the teachers must not be given to the dull pupils. not only should the questions be well distributed, but they must vary according to the individual ability of the particular child. this has already been emphasized in dealing with readiness of response. many a lesson has been unsuccessful because the teacher gave too difficult a question to a dull child, and while she was struggling with him, she lost the rest of the class. the reverse is also true, to give a bright child a question that requires almost no thinking means that a mechanical answer will be given and no further activity stimulated. the extent to which all the class are mentally active is one measure of a good question. questions . give an example of a lesson which you have taught which was predominantly inductive. show how you proceeded from the discovery of the problem to your pupils to the solution attained. . what is involved in the "step" of presentation? . why may we not consider the several "steps" of the inductive lesson as occurring in a definite and mutually exclusive sequence? . in what respect is the procedure in a deductive lesson like that which you follow in an inductive lesson? . show how verification is an important element in both inductive and deductive lessons. . give illustrations of successful drill lessons and make clear the reason for the degree of success achieved. . what measures have you found most advantageous in securing speed in drill work? . what are the elements which make for success in an appreciation lesson? . upon what grounds and to what extent can lecturing be defended as a method of instruction? . what may be the relation between a good recitation lesson and the solution of a problem? growth in power of appreciation? . for what purposes should examinations be given? when should examinations be given? . when are questions which call for facts justified? . why are questions which call for comparisons to be considered important? . why is it important to phrase questions carefully? . why should a teacher ask some questions which cannot be answered immediately? . what criteria would you apply in testing the questions which you put to your class? . write five questions which in your judgment will demand thinking upon some topic which you plan to teach to your class. * * * * * xiv. how to study the term study has been used very loosely by both teachers and children. as used by teachers it frequently meant something very different from what children had in mind when they used it. further, teachers themselves have often used the term in connection with mental activities which, technically speaking, could not possibly come under that head. much confusion and lack of efficient work has been the result. recently various attempts have been made to give the term study a more exact meaning. mcmurry defines it as "the work that is necessary in the assimilation of ideas"--"the vigorous application of the mind to a subject for the satisfaction of a felt need." in other words, study is thinking. psychologically, what makes for good thinking makes for good study. study is controlled mental activity working towards the realization of a goal. it is the adaptation of means to end, in the attempt to satisfy a felt need. it involves a definite purpose or goal, which is problematic, the selection and rejection of suggestions, tentative judgments, and conclusion. the mind of the one who studies is active, vigorously active, not in an aimless fashion, but along sharply defined lines. this is the essential characteristic of all study. there are, however, various types of study which differ materially from each other according to the subject matter or to the type of response required. some study involves comparatively little thinking. the directed activity must be present, but the choice, the judgment, may need to be exercised only in the beginning when methods of procedure need to be selected, and later on, perhaps, when successes or failures need to be noted and changes made in the methods accordingly. another type of study needs continual thinking of the most active sort all the way through the period. just the proportion of the various factors involved in thinking which is present at any given study period must be determined by the response. a type of study which would be completely satisfactory for one subject needing one response, would be entirely inadequate for another subject needing another response. to illustrate, in some cases the study must deal with habit formation. the need felt is to learn a mechanical response of a very definite nature to this situation; the problem is to get that response. the thinking would come in in deciding upon the method, in watching for successes, in criticizing progress, and in judging when the end was obtained. a large part of the time spent in study would, however, need to be spent in repetition, in drill. of such character is study of spelling, of vocabularies, of dates; study in order to gain skill in adding, or speed in reading, or to improve in writing or sewing. much of habit formation goes on without study--in fact, to some it may seem to be ludicrous to use the word "study" in connection with the formation of habits. it is just because the study elements in connection with responses of this type have been omitted that there has been such a tremendous waste of time in teaching children to form right habits. this omission also explains the poor results, for the process has been mechanical and blind on the part of the student. at the other extreme in types of study is that which can be used in science and mathematics, in geography and history, when the major part of the time is given to selecting and rejecting suggestions and seems required by the goal. in this type the habituation, the fixing of the material, comes largely as a by-product of the factors used in the thinking. study may, then, be classified according as the response required is physical habit, memory, appreciation, or judgment. these types overlap, no one of them can exist absolutely alone, but it is possible to name them according to the response. study may also be classified into supervised study, or unsupervised study, into individual or group study. we might also classify study as it has to do with books, with people, or with materials. the term has been rather arbitrarily applied to activities that dealt with books, but surely much study is accomplished when people are consulted instead of books, and also when the sources of information or the standards are flowers, or rocks, or textiles. study, then, is a big term, including many different varieties of activities, of varying degrees of difficulty and responsibility. it cannot possibly be taught all at once, according to one method, at one spot in the school curriculum. power to study is of very gradual growth. it must proceed slowly, from simple to complex types. from easy to difficult problems, from situations where there is close supervision and direction to situations where the student assumes full responsibility. knowing how to study is not an inborn gift--it does not come as a matter of intuition, nor does it come in some mysterious way when the child is of high school age. it is governed by the laws of learning, or readiness, exercise, and effect, just as truly as any other ability is. if adults are to know how to study, if they are to use the technique of the various kinds of study efficiently, children must be taught how. nor can we expect the upper grammar grade or the high school teachers to do this. habits of study must be formed just as soon as the responses to which it leads are needed. beginning down in the kindergarten with study in connection with physical and mental habits, the child should be taught how to study. the type must gradually become more complex; he must pass from group to individual study, from supervised to unsupervised, but it must all come logically, from step to step. true, it is not easy to teach how to study. a careful analysis of the various types with their peculiar elements should be a help. first, however, there are some general principles that underlie all study which must be discussed. study must have, as has already been stated, a purpose. the individual, in order to exercise his mind in a controlled way, must have an aim. the clearer and more definite the aim, whether it be little or big, the better the study will be. from the beginning, then, children must be taught to make sure they know what they are going to do before beginning to study. it may be necessary to teach them in the early grades to say to themselves or to the class just what they are going to accomplish in the study. teach them when the lesson is assigned to write down in their books just what the problem for study is. warn them never to begin study without definitely knowing the aim--if they don't know it, make them realize that the first thing to do is to find out the purpose by asking some one else. better no study at all than aimless or misdirected activity, because of lack of purpose. no study worthy of the name can be carried on without interest. the child who studies well must be brought to realize this. the value of interest can be brought home to him by having him compare the work he does, the time he spends, and how he feels when studying something in which he has a vital interest with the results when the topic is uninteresting. of course, as will be pointed out later, much of the gaining of interest lies in the hands of the teacher necessarily, but if the child realizes the need of it in efficient study, some responsibility will rest on him to find an interest if it is not already there. no matter how expert the teacher may be, because of individual differences no problem will be equally interesting to all pupils in itself, and no incentive will have an equal appeal to all children. therefore children should be taught to find interest for themselves. certain devices can be suggested, such as working with another child and competing with him, "making believe" in study, and finding some connection with something in which he is interested, working against his own score, and the like. not only do the demands of economy require that the topic of study receive concentrated attention, but the results themselves are better when such is the case. half an hour of concentrated work gives much better results than an hour of study with scattered attention. an hour spent when half an hour would do is thus not only wasteful of time, but is productive of poorer results and bad habits of study as well. children need to be taught this from the beginning. much time is wasted even by mature university students when they suppose themselves to be studying. children can be taught to ignore distractions--to train themselves to keep their eyes on the book, despite the fact that the door is opened, or a seat mate is looking for a book. they should be encouraged to set themselves time limits in various subjects and adhere to them. it is economical to follow a regular schedule in study--either in the school or at home. let each child make out his study schedule and keep to it. teach children that the best work is done when they are calm and steady. that either excitement or worry is a hindrance. therefore they should avoid doing their studying under those conditions, and should do all they can to remove such conditions. training children to do their best and then not to worry would not only improve the health of many upper grammar grade and high school children, but would also improve their work. study requires a certain critical attitude, a checking up of results against the problem set. in order to be efficient in study a child should know when he has reached the solution, when the means have been adapted to the end, when he has reached the goal. this checking up, of course, means habits of self-criticism and standards. sometimes all that is necessary is for the child to be made conscious of this fact so that he can test himself, for instance, in memory work, or in solving a problem in mathematics. on the other hand, sometimes he will have to compare his work with definite standards, such as the thorndike handwriting scale, or the hillegas composition scale.[ ] in other instances, he will have to search for standards. he will need to know what his classmates have accomplished, what other people think, what other text-books say, and so on. gradually he must be made conscious that study is a controlled activity, and unless it reaches the goal, and the correct one, it is useless. he must be made to feel that the responsibility to see that such results are reached rests on him. these, then, are the general factors involved in all types of study, and therefore are fundamental to good habits of study: a clear purpose; vital interest of some kind; concentrated attention, and a critical attitude. there are further additional suggestions which are peculiar to the special type of study. in study which is directed to habit formation, the student should be taught the danger of allowing exceptions. he should know the possibility of undoing much good work through a little carelessness. preaching won't bring this home to him--it must come through having his attention attracted to such an occurrence in his own work or in that of his mates. after that knowledge of the actual experiences of others, athletes, musicians, and others will help to intensify the impression. the value of repetition as one of the chief factors in habit formation must be emphasized. the child should be encouraged to make opportunities for practice both in free minutes during the school program, and outside of school. he must be taught in habit formation to practice the new habit in the way it is to be used: practicing the sounds of letters in words, the writing movements in writing words, swimming movements in the water, and so on. practicing the whole movements, not trying to gain perfection in parts of it and then putting it together. it is important also that the learner be taught to keep his attention on the result to be obtained, instead of the movements. he should attend to the swing of the club, the lightness of the song, the cut the saw is making, the words he is writing, instead of the muscle movements involved. in breaking up bad habits it is sometimes necessary to concentrate on a part or a movement, when that is the crux of the error, but in general it is a bad practice when forming a new habit. the child must also learn to watch the habit of skill he is forming for signs of improvement and then to try to find out the reason for it. it has been proved experimentally that much of the improvement in habits of skill comes unconsciously to the learner, and necessarily so, but that in order for the improvement to continue and be effective, it must become conscious. of course, at the beginning and for a long time it must be the teacher's duty to point out the improvement and to help the child to think out the reasons for it, but if he is to learn to study by himself the child must finally come to habits of self-criticism which will enable him to recognize success or failure in his own work. in all this discussion of teaching children to study it must be constantly borne in mind that it is a gradual process--and only very slowly does the child become conscious of the technique. which elements can be made conscious, how much he can be left to himself, must depend on his maturity and previous training. in time, however, he should be able to apply them all--for only by so doing will he become capable of independent study. when the study is primarily concerned with memory responses, all the elements which have just been discussed in connection with habit apply, for, after all, memory is but mental habit. there are other factors which enter into and which should be used in this type of study. first, the child should realize the need for understanding the material that is to be learned, before beginning to memorize it. he will then be taught to read the entire assignment through--look up difficult words and references, master the content, whether prose or poetry, whether the learning is to be verbatim or not, before doing anything further. second, he will need to know the value of the modified whole method of learning, as well as its difficulties. if in the supervised periods of study and in class work, this method has been followed, it is very easy to make him conscious of it and willing to adopt it when he comes to do independent study. third, he must be taught to distribute his time so that he does not devote too long a stretch to one subject. the value of going over work in the morning, after having studied the night or two nights before, should be emphasized. also the value of beginning on assignments some time ahead, even if there is not time to finish them. fourth, the child should be taught not to stop his work the minute he can give it perfectly. the need for overlearning, for permanent retention, must be made clear. how much overlearning is necessary, each child should find out for himself. fifth, the value of outlining material as a means of aiding memory must be stressed. sixth, the child should be taught to search for associations, connections of all types, in order to help himself remember facts. he might even be encouraged to make up some mnemonic device as an aid if these measures fail. if instead of simply trying to hammer material in by mere repetition children had been taught in their study to consciously make use of the other elements in a good memory, much time would be saved. but the responsibility should rest finally on the child to make use of these helps. the teacher must make him conscious of them, sometimes from their value by experiment, and then teach him to use them himself. much less can be done as a matter of conscious technique when the occasion of study is to further appreciation. a few suggestions might be offered. first, the child should be taught the value of associating with those who do appreciate in the line in which he is striving for improvement. he should be encouraged to consciously associate with them when opportunities for appreciation come. second, he should know the need for coming in contact with the objects of appreciation if true feeling is to be developed. it is only by mingling with people, reading books, listening to music, that appreciation in those fields can be developed. third, the value of concrete imagery and of connections with personal experience in arousing emotional tone should be emphasized. the child might be encouraged to consciously call up images and make connections with his own experience during study. study, when the object is to arrive at responses of judgment, is the type which has received most attention. this type of study includes within itself several possibilities. although judgment is the only response that can solve the problem, still the problem may be one of giving the best expression in art or music or drama. it may be the analysis of a course of action or of a chemical compound. it may be the comparison of various opinions. it may be the arriving at a new law or principle. it is to one of these types of thinking that the term "study" is usually applied. important as it is, the other three types already discussed cannot be neglected. if children are taught to study in connection with the simpler situations provided by the first two types, they will be the better prepared to deal with this complex type, for this highest type of study involves habit formation often and memory work always. in the type of study involving reasoning, because of its complexity, and because the individual must work more independently, the child must learn the danger of following the first suggestion which offers itself. he must learn to weigh each suggestion offered with reference to the goal aimed at. each step in the process must be tested and weighed in this manner. to go blindly ahead, following out a line of suggestions until the end is reached, which is then found to be the wrong one, wastes much time and is extremely discouraging. no suggestion of the way to adapt means to end should be accepted without careful criticism. the pupil should gradually be made conscious of the technique of reasoning, analysis, comparison, and abstraction. he must know that the first thing to do is to analyze the problem and see just what it requires. he must know that the abstraction depends upon the goal. the learner should be taught the sources of some of the commonest mistakes in judgment. for instance, if he knows of the tendency to respond in terms of analogy, and sees some of the errors to which accepting a minor likeness between two situations as identity lead, he will be much more apt to avoid such mistakes than would otherwise be true. if he knows how unsafe it is to form a judgment on limited data,--if from his own and his classmates' thinking first, and later from the history of science, illustrations are drawn of the disastrous effect of such thinking, he will see the value of seeking sources of information and several points of view before forming his own judgment. in his study the child should be taught not to be satisfied until he has tested the correctness of his judgment by verifying the result. this is a very necessary part of studying. he should check up his own thinking by finding out through appeal to facts if it is so; by putting the judgment into execution; by consulting the opinion of others, and so on. study may be considered from the point of view of the type of material which is used in the process. the student may be engaged on a problem which involves the use of apparatus or specimens of various kinds, or he may need to consult people, or he may have to use books. so far as the first type is concerned, it is obviously unwise to have a student at work on a problem which involves the use of material, unless the technique of method of use is well known. until he can handle the material with some degree of facility it is waste of time for him to be struggling with problems which necessitate such use. such practice results in divided attention, poor results from the study, and often bad habits in technique as well. gaining the technique must be in itself a problem for separate study. children should be taught to ask questions which bear directly on the point they wish to know. if they in working out some problem are dependent on getting some information from the janitor, or the postman, or a mason, they must be able to ask questions which will bring them what they want to know. much practice in framing questions, having them criticized, having them answered just as they are asked, is necessary. children should be aware of the question as a tool in their study and therefore they must know how to handle it. in connection with this second type of material, the problem of the best source of information will arise. children must then be made conscious of the relative values of various persons as sources of a particular piece of information. training in choice of the source of information is very important both when that source is people and also when it is books. teaching children to use books in their study is one of the big tasks of the teacher. they must learn that books are written in answer to questions. in order to thoroughly understand a book, students must seek to frame the questions which it answers. they must also know how to use books to answer their own questions. this means they must know how to turn from part to part, gleaning here or there what they need. it means training in the ability to skim, omitting unessentials and picking out essentials. it means the ability to recognize major points, minor points, and illustrative material. children must be taught to use the table of contents, the index, and paragraph headings. they must, in their search for fuller information or criticism, be able to interpret different authors, use different language, and attack from different angles, even when treating the same object. children must in their studying be taught to use books as a means to an end--not an infallible means, but one which needs continual criticism, modification, and amplification. study may be supervised study, or unsupervised study. to some people the requirements in learning to study may seem too difficult to be possible, but it should be remembered that the process is gradual--that one by one these elements in study are taught to the children in their supervised study periods. these periods should begin in the primary grades, and require from the teacher quite as much preparation as any other period. many teachers have taught subjects, but not how to study subjects. the latter is the more important. the matter of distributed learning periods, of search for motive, of asking questions, of criticizing achievement, of use of books; each element is a topic for class discussion before it is accepted as an element in study. even after it is accepted, it may be raised by some child as a source of particular difficulty and fresh suggestions added. very often with little children it is necessary for the teacher to study the lesson with them. teachers need much more practice in doing this, for one of the best ways to teach a child to study is to study with him. not to tell him, and do the work for him, but to really study with him. later on the supervised study period is one in which each child is silently engaged upon his own work and the teacher passes from one to the other. in order to do this well, the teacher needs to be able to do two things. first, to find out when the child is in difficulty and to locate it, and second, to help him over the trouble without giving too much assistance. adequate questioning is needed in both cases. it is probably true that comparatively little new work should be given for unsupervised study. there is too much danger of error as well as lack of interest unless a start is given under supervision. studying, especially unsupervised, may be done in groups or individually. the former is a stepping-stone to the latter. there is a greater chance for suggestions, for getting the problem worded, for arousing interest and checking results, when a group of children are working together than when a child is by himself. two things must be looked after. first, that the children in the group be taught not to waste time, and second, that the personnel of the group be right. it is not very helpful if one child does all the work, nor if one is so far below the level of the group that he is always tagging along behind. more opportunities for group study in the grammar grades would be advantageous. when it comes to individual study, the student then assumes all responsibility for his methods of study. he should be taught the influence of physical conditions or mental reactions. he will therefore be responsible for choosing in the home and in the school the best possible conditions for his study. he will see to it that, in so far as possible, the air and light are good, that there are no unnecessary distractions, and that he is as comfortable bodily as can be. he must think not only in terms of the goal to be reached, but also with respect to the methods to be employed. he should be asked by the teacher to report his methods of work as well as his results. questions . are children always primarily engaged in thinking when they study? . what type of study is involved in learning a multiplication table, a list of words in spelling, a conjugation in french? . how would you teach a pupil to study his spelling lesson? . in what sense may one study in learning to write? in acquiring skill in swimming? . how would you teach your pupils to memorize? . show how ability to study may be developed over a period of years in some subject with which you are familiar. reading? geography? history? latin translation? . is the boy who reads over and over again his lesson necessarily studying? . can one study a subject even though he may dislike it? can one study without interest? . how can you teach children what is meant by concentration of attention? . how have you found it possible to develop a critical attitude toward their work upon the part of children? . of what factors in habit formation must children become conscious, if they are to study to best advantage in this field? . how may we hope to have children learn to study in the fields requiring judgment? why will not consciousness of the technique of study make pupils equally able in studying? . what exercises can you conduct which will help children to learn how to use books? . how can a teacher study with a pupil and yet help him to develop independence in this field? . how may small groups of children work together advantageously in studying? * * * * * xv. measuring the achievements of children the success or failure of the teacher in applying the principles which have been discussed in the preceding chapters is measured by the achievements of the children. of course, it is also possible that the validity of the principle which we have sought to establish may be called in question by the same sort of measurement. we cannot be sure that our methods of work are sound, or that we are making the best use of the time during which we work with children, except as we discover the results of our instruction. teaching is after all the adaptation of our methods to the normal development of boys and girls, and their education can be measured only in terms of the changes which we are able to bring about in knowledge, skill, appreciation, reasoning, and the like. any attempt to measure the achievements of children should result in a discovery of the progress which is being made from week to week, or month to month, or year to year. it would often be found quite advantageous to note the deficiencies as well as the achievements at one period as compared with the work done two or three months later. it will always be profitable to get as clearly in mind as is possible the variation among members of the same class, and for those who are interested in the supervision of schools, the variation from class to class, from school to school, or from school system to school system. for the teacher a study of the variability in achievement among the members of his own class ought to result in special attention to those who need special help, especially a kind of teaching which will remove particular difficulties. there should also be offered unusual opportunity and more than the ordinary demand be made of those who show themselves to be more capable than the ordinary pupils. the type of measurement which we wish to discuss is something more than the ordinary examination. the difficulties with examinations, as we have commonly organized them, has* been their unreliability, either from the standpoint of discovering to us the deficiencies of children, or their achievements. of ten problems in arithmetic or of twenty words in spelling given in the ordinary examination, there are very great differences in difficulty. we do not have an adequate measure of the achievements of children when we assign to each of the problems or words a value of ten or of five per cent and proceed to determine the mark to be given on the examination paper. if we are wise in setting our examinations, we usually give one problem or one word which we expect practically everybody to be able to get right. on the other hand, if we really measure the achievements of children, we must give some problems or some words that are too hard for any one to get right. otherwise, we do not know the limit or extent of ability possessed by the abler pupils. it is safe to say that in many examinations one question may actually be four or five times as hard as some other to which an equal value is assigned. another difficulty that we have to meet in the ordinary examination is the variability among teachers in marking papers. we do not commonly assign the same values to the same result. indeed, if a set of papers is given to a group of capable teachers and marked as conscientiously as may be by each of them, it is not uncommon to find a variation among the marks assigned to the same paper which may be as great as twenty-five per cent of the highest mark given. even more interesting is the fact that upon re-marking these same papers individual teachers will vary from their own first mark by almost as great an amount. still another difficulty with the ordinary examination is the tendency among teachers to derive their standards of achievement from the group itself, rather than from any objective standard by which all are measured. it is possible, for example, for children in english composition to write very poorly for their grade and still to find the teacher giving relatively high marks to those who happen to belong to the upper group in the class. as a result of the establishment of such a standard, the teacher may not be conscious of the fact that children should be spurred to greater effort, and that possibly he himself should seek to improve his methods of work. out of the situation described above, which includes on the one hand the necessity for measurement as a means of testing the success of our theories and of our practice, and on the other hand of having objective standards, has grown the movement for measurement by means of standard tests and scales. a standard test which has been given to some thousands of children classified by grades or by ages, if given to another group of children of the same grade or age group will enable the teacher to compare the achievement of his children with that which is found elsewhere. for example, the courtis tests in arithmetic, which consist of series of problems of equal difficulty in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division may be used to discover how far facility in these fields has been accomplished by children of any particular group as compared with the achievements of children in other school systems throughout the country. in these tests each of the problems is of equal difficulty. the measure is made by discovering how many of these separate problems can be solved in a given number of minutes.[ ] a scale for measuring the achievements of children in the fundamental operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division has been derived by dr. clifford woody,[ ] which differs from the courtis tests in that it affords opportunity to discover what children can achieve from the simplest problem in each of these fields to a problem which is in each case approximately twice as difficult as the problems appearing on the courtis tests. the great value of this type of test is in discovering to teachers and to pupils, as well, their particular difficulties. a pupil must be able to do fairly acceptable work in addition before he can solve one problem on the courtis tests. considerable facility can be measured on the woody tests before an ability sufficient to be registered on the courtis tests has been acquired. in his monograph on the derivation of these tests mr. woody gives results which will enable the teacher to compare his class with children already tested in other school systems. in the case of all of these standard tests, school surveys and superintendents' reports are available which will make it possible to institute comparisons among different classes and different school systems. one form of the woody tests is as follows: * * * * * series a addition scale by clifford woody name...................... when is your next birthday?...... how old will you be?..... are you a boy or girl?....... in what grade are you?...... ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) + = -- -- -- -- -- -- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) -- + + = -- --- -- ( ) -- -- + = -- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) $ . $ . / + / = / / . . / / . . ( ) / / ----- . . / ----- --- . . --- . . ( ) ( ) ( ) ----- . ( ) / $ . ------ / + / + / = / . / . --- ----- ------ ( ) ( ) ---- / + / + / + / = / + / = ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . . / + / = ft. in. yr. mo. / . . ft. in. yr. mo. / . . ft. in. yr. mo. / . . --------- yr. mo. / . . yr. mo. ------ . . --------- . . -------- . ( ) . . + . + + . + . = ( ) . / + / + / = . . . . . . ---- * * * * * series a subtraction scale by clifford woody name...................... when is your next birthday?......how old will you be?..... are you a boy or girl?.......in what grade are you?....... ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) - = -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) / - = -- -- -- -- --- --- ---- ------ ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . / - / = / yd. ft. in. . / / yd. ft. in. ----- -------- ----- ------ -------------- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) yd. ft. in. - . / . - . = yd. ft. in. / -------------- ------ ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . - . = mo. da. / - / = / / - / = mo. da. / --------------- ----- * * * * * series a division scale by clifford woody name............................... when is your next birthday?....... how old will you be?...... are you a boy or girl?.......... in what grade are you?...... ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) __ ___ ___ __ ___ ___ ) ) ) ) ) ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ÷ = __ __ × __ = ___ ÷ = ) ) ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ______________ _____ / of = _____ ÷ = ) lbs. oz. ) ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ______ ÷ = _____ _____ ______ ) . ) . ) ) . ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ____ ________ _______ _____ ) ) ) ) . ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) / of = ______ / ÷ = / ÷ = . ). ( ) ( ) ( ) / ÷ / = / ÷ / = _____ ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . ÷ / = ______ ______________ ) ) lbs. oz. * * * * * series a multiplication scale by clifford woody name...................... when is your next birthday?...... how old will you be?..... are you a boy or girl?....... in what grade are you?....... ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) × = × = × = × = × = -- --- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) -- --- --- ---- ---- ---- --- --- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . × / . / ---- --- --- --- --- -- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) / × = / × / = . . / × = / . . ------ ---- ---- ----- ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . dollars cents - / × - / = / × / = -- × -- ---- ------------------ ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) / ft. in. / × / × / = . / ft. / in. . ---- --------- --------- ---------- * * * * * a series of problems in reasoning in arithmetic which were given in twenty-six school systems by dr. c.w. stone furnish a valuable test in this field, as well as an opportunity for comparison with other schools in which these problems have been used.[ ] a list of problems follows. solve as many of the following problems as you have time for; work them in order as numbered: . if you buy tablets at cents each and a book for cents, how much change should you receive from a two-dollar bill? . john sold saturday evening posts at cents each. he kept / the money and with the other / he bought sunday papers at cents each. how many did he buy? . if james had times as much money as george, he would have $ . how much money has george? . how many pencils can you buy for cents at the rate of for cents? . the uniforms for a baseball nine cost $ . each. the shoes cost $ a pair. what was the total cost of uniforms and shoes for the nine? . in the schools of a certain city there are pupils; / are in the primary grades, / in the grammar grades, / in the high school, and the rest in the night school. how many pupils are there in the night school? . if - / tons of coal cost $ , what will - / tons cost? . a news dealer bought some magazines for $ . he sold them for $ . , gaining cents on each magazine. how many magazines were there? . a girl spent / of her money for car fare, and three times as much for clothes. half of what she had left was cents. how much money did she have at first? . two girls receive $ . for making buttonholes. one makes , the other . how shall they divide the money? . mr. brown paid one third of the cost of a building; mr. johnson paid / the cost. mr. johnson received $ more annual rent than mr. brown. how much did each receive? . a freight train left albany for new york at o'clock. an express left on the same track at o'clock. it went at the rate of miles an hour. at what time of day will it overtake the freight train if the freight train stops after it has gone miles? a different type of measurement is accomplished by using thorndike's scale for measuring the quality of handwriting.[ ] a typical distribution of the scores which children receive on the handwriting scale reads as follows: for a fourth grade one child writes quality four, two quality six, five quality seven, seven quality eight, eight quality nine, three quality ten, two quality eleven, two quality twelve, one quality thirteen, one quality fourteen. in a table the distributions of scores in penmanship for a large number of papers selected at random show the following results: ============================================================ | grades scores +------+------+------+------+------+------+----- | | | | | | | ------------+-------------+------+------+------+------+----- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | | | -- | | -- | | | | | | -- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -- | -- | | | | | | -- | -- | | -- | | | | | -- | -- | | | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | -- ------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+----- total papers| | | | | | | ============================================================ * * * * * a scale for handwriting of children in grades - the unit of the scale equals approximately one-tenth of the difference between the best and worst of the formal writings of , children in grades - . the differences - , - , - , etc., represent equal fractions of the combined mental scale of merit of from - competent judges. sample , representing zero merit in handwriting. zero merit is arbitrarily defined as that of a handwriting, recognizable as such, but yet not legible at all and possessed of no beauty. [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] [illustration: qual c.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] [illustration: qual c.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] [illustration: qual c.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] [illustration: qual c.png: ] [illustration: qual d.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] [illustration: qual b.png: ] [illustration: qual c.png: ] [illustration: qual d.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual a.png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] quality . [illustration: qual .png: ] * * * * * this table reads as follows: quality four was written by five children in the second grade and two in the third grade, quality five was written by twenty-two children in the second grade, two children in the third grade, three in the fourth grade, three in the fifth grade, none in the sixth grade, one in the seventh grade, and none in the eighth grade, and so on for the whole table.[ ] a scale for measuring ability in spelling prepared by dr. leonard p. ayres arranges the thousand words most commonly used in the order of their difficulty. from this sheet it is possible to discover words of approximately the same difficulty for each grade. a test could therefore be derived from this scale for each of the grades with the expectation that they would all do about equally well. there would also be the possibility of determining how well the spelling was done in the particular school system in which these words were given as compared with the ability of children as measured by an aggregate of more than a million spellings by seventy thousand children in eighty-four cities throughout the united states. such a list could be taken from the scale for the second grade, which includes words which have proved to be of a difficulty represented by a seventy-three percent correct spelling for the class. such a list might be composed of the following words: north, white, spent, block, river, winter, sunday, letter, thank, and best. a similar list could be taken from the scale for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth grade. for example, the words which have approximately the same difficulty,--seventy-three percent to be spelled correctly by the class for the sixth grade,--read as follows: often, stopped, motion, theater, improvement, century, total, mansion, arrive, supply. the great value of such a measuring scale, including as it does the thousand words most commonly used, is to be found not only in the opportunity for comparing the achievements of children in one class or school with another, but also in the focusing of the attention of teachers and pupils upon the words most commonly used.[ ] one of the fields in which there is greatest need for measurement is english composition. teachers have too often thought of english composition as consisting of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like, and have ignored the quality of the composition itself in their attention to these formal elements. a scale for measuring english composition derived by dr. m.b. hillegas,[ ] consisting of sample compositions of values ranging from to . , will enable the teacher to tell just how many pupils in the class are writing each different quality of composition. the use of such a scale will tend to make both teacher and pupil critical of the work which is being done not only with respect to the formal elements, but also with respect to the style or adequacy of the expression of the ideas which the writer seeks to convey. probably in no other field has the teacher been so apt to derive his standard from the performance of the class as in work in composition. even though some teachers find it difficult to evaluate the work of their pupils in terms of the sample compositions given on the scale, much good must come, it seems to the writer, from the attempt to grade compositions by such an objective scale. if such measurements are made two or three times during the year, the performance of individual pupils and of the class will be indicated much more certainly than is the case when teachers feel that they are getting along well without any definite assurance of the amount of their improvement. in one large school system in which the writer was permitted to have the principals measure compositions collected from the sixth and the eighth grades, it was discovered that almost no progress in the quality of composition had been accomplished during these two years. this lack of achievement upon the part of children was not, in the opinion of the writer, due to any lack of conscientious work upon the part of teachers, but, rather, developed out of a situation in which the whole of composition was thought of in terms of the formal elements mentioned above. the hillegas scale, together with the values assigned to each of the samples, is given below. a scale for the measurement of the quality of english composition by milo b. hillegas value . artificial sample _letter_ dear sir: i write to say that it aint a square deal schools is i say they is i went to a school. red and gree green and brown aint it hito bit i say he don't know his business not today nor yeaterday and you know it and i want jennie to get me out. value . artificial sample _my favorite book_ the book i refer to read is ichabod crane, it is an grate book and i like to rede it. ichabod crame was a man and a man wrote a book and it is called ichabod crane i like it because the man called it ichabod crane when i read it for it is such a great book. value . artificial sample _the advantage of tyranny_ advantage evils are things of tyranny and there are many advantage evils. one thing is that when they opress the people they suffer awful i think it is a terrible thing when they say that you can be hanged down or trodden down without mercy and the tyranny does what they want there was tyrans in the revolutionary war and so they throwed off the yok. value . written by a boy in the second year of the high school, aged years _sulla as a tyrant_ when sulla came back from his conquest marius had put himself consul so sulla with the army he had with him in his conquest siezed the government from marius and put himself in consul and had a list of his enemys printy and the men whoes names were on this list we beheaded. value . written by a girl in the third year of the high school, aged years _de quincy_ first: de quincys mother was a beautiful women and through her de quincy inhereted much of his genius. his running away from school enfluenced him much as he roamed through the woods, valleys and his mind became very meditative. the greatest enfluence of de quincy's life was the opium habit. if it was not for this habit it is doubtful whether we would now be reading his writings. his companions during his college course and even before that time were great enfluences. the surroundings of de quincy were enfluences. not only de quincy's habit of opium but other habits which were peculiar to his life. his marriage to the woman which he did not especially care for. the many well educated and noteworthy friends of de quincy. value . written by a boy in the fourth year of the high school, aged years _fluellen_ the passages given show the following characteristic of fluellen: his inclination to brag, his professed knowledge of history, his complaining character, his great patriotism, pride of his leader, admired honesty, revengeful, love of fun and punishment of those who deserve it. value . written by a girl in the first year of the high school, aged years _ichabod crane_ ichabod crane was a schoolmaster in a place called sleepy hollow. he was tall and slim with broad shoulders, long arms that dangled far below his coat sleeves. his feet looked as if they might easily have been used for shovels. his nose was long and his entire frame was most loosely hung to-gether. value . written by a boy in the third year of the high school, aged years _going down with victory_ as we road down lombard street, we saw flags waving from nearly every window. i surely felt proud that day to be the driver of the gaily decorated coach. again and again we were cheered as we drove slowly to the postmasters, to await the coming of his majestie's mail. there wasn't one of the gaily bedecked coaches that could have compared with ours, in my estimation. so with waving flags and fluttering hearts we waited for the coming of the mail and the expected tidings of victory. when at last it did arrive the postmaster began to quickly sort the bundles, we waited anxiously. immediately upon receiving our bundles, i lashed the horses and they responded with a jump. out into the country we drove at reckless speed--everywhere spreading like wildfire the news, "victory!" the exileration that we all felt was shared with the horses. up and down grade and over bridges, we drove at breakneck speed and spreading the news at every hamlet with that one cry "victory!" when at last we were back home again, it was with the hope that we should have another ride some day with "victory." value . written by a boy in the freshman class in college _venus of melos_ in looking at this statue we think, not of wisdom, or power, or force, but just of beauty. she stands resting the weight of her body on one foot, and advancing the other (left) with knee bent. the posture causes the figure to sway slightly to one side, describing a fine curved line. the lower limbs are draped but the upper part of the body is uncovered. (the unfortunate loss of the statue's arms prevents a positive knowledge of its original attitude.) the eyes are partly closed, having something of a dreamy langour. the nose is perfectly cut, the mouth and chin are moulded in adorable curves. yet to say that every feature is of faultless perfection is but cold praise. no analysis can convey the sense of her peerless beauty. value . written by a boy in the freshman class in college _a foreigner's tribute to joan of arc_ joan of arc, worn out by the suffering that was thrust upon her, nevertheless appeared with a brave mien before the bishop of beauvais. she knew, had always known that she must die when her mission was fulfilled and death held no terrors for her. to all the bishop's questions she answered firmly and without hesitation. the bishop failed to confuse her and at last condemned her to death for heresy, bidding her recant if she would live. she refused and was lead to prison, from there to death. while the flames were writhing around her she bade the old bishop who stood by her to move away or he would be injured. her last thought was of others and de quincy says, that recant was no more in her mind than on her lips. she died as she lived, with a prayer on her lips and listening to the voices that had whispered to her so often. the heroism of joan of arc was wonderful. we do not know what form her great patriotism took or how far it really led her. she spoke of hearing voices and of seeing visions. we only know that she resolved to save her country, knowing though she did so, it would cost her her life. yet she never hesitated. she was uneducated save for the lessons taught her by nature. yet she led armies and crowned the dauphin, king of france. she was only a girl, yet she could silence a great bishop by words that came from her heart and from her faith. she was only a woman, yet she could die as bravely as any martyr who had gone before. the following compositions have been evaluated by professor thorndike, and may be used to supplement the scale given above. value last monday the house on the corner of jay street was burned down to the ground and right down by mrs. brons house there is a little child all alone and there is a bad man sleeping in the seller, but we have a wise old monkey in the coal ben so the parents are thankful that they don't have to pay any reward. value some of the house burned and the children were in bed and there were four children and the lady next store broke the door in and went up stars and woke the peple up and whent out of the house when they moved and and the girl was skard to look out of the window and all the time thouhth that she saw a flame. and the wise monkey reward from going to the firehouse and jumping all round and was thankful from his reward and was thankful for what he got. $ . was his reward. value a long time ago, i do not know, how long but a man and a woman and a little boy lived together also a monkey a pet for the little boy it happened that the man and the woman were out, and the monkey and little boy, and the house started to burn, and the monkey took the little boys hand, and, went out. the father had come home and was glad that the monkey had saved his little boy. and that, monkey got a reward. value once upon a time a woman went into a dark room and lit a match. she dropped it on the floor and it of course set the house afire. she jumped out of the window and called her husband to come out too. they both forgot all about the baby. all of a sudden he appeared in the window calling his mother. his father had gone next door to tel afone to the fire house. they had a monkey in the house at the time and he heard the child calling his mother. he had a plan to save the baby. he ran to the window where he was standing. he put his tail about his waist and jumped off the window sill with the baby in his tail. when the people were settled again they gave him a silver collar as a reward. value a university out west, i cannot remember the name, is noted for its hazing, and this is what the story is about. it is the hazing of a freshman. there was a freshman there who had been acting as if he didn't respect his upper class men so they decided to teach him a lesson. the student brought before the black avenger's which is a society in all college to keep the freshman under there rules so they desided to take him to the rail-rode track and tie him to the rails about two hours before a train was suspected and leave him there for about an hour, which was a hour before the . train was expected. the date came that they planned this hazing for so the captured the fellow blindfolded him and lead him to the rail rode tracks, where they tied him. value i should like to see a picture, illustrating a part of l'allegro. where the godesses of mirth and liberty trip along hand in hand. two beautiful girls dressed in flowing garments, dancing along a flower-strewn path, through a pretty garden. their hair flowing down in long curls. their countenances showing their perfect freedom and happiness. their arms extended gracefully smelling some sweet flower. in my mind this would make a beautiful picture. value it was between the dark and the daylight when far away could be seen the treacherous wolves skulking over the hills. we sat beside our campfires and watched them for awhile. sometimes a few of them would howl as if they wanted to get in our camp. then, half discouraged, they would walk away and soon there would be others doing the same thing. they were afraid to come near because of the fires, which were burning brightly. i noticed that they howled more between the dark and the daylight than at any time of the night. value the sun was setting, giving a rosy glow to all the trees standing tall black against the faintly tinted sky. blue, pink, green, yellow, like a conglomeration of paints dropped carelessly onto a pale blue background. the trees were in such great number that they looked like a mass of black crepe, each with its individual, graceful form in view. the lake lay smooth and unruffled, dimly reflecting the beautiful coloring of the sky. the wind started madly up and blew over the lake's glassy surface making mysterious murmurings blending in with the chirping songs of the birds blew through the tree tops setting the leaves rustling and whispering to one another. a squirrel ran from his perch chattering, to the lofty branches--a far and distant hoot echoed in the silence, and soon night, over all came stealing, blotting out the scenery and wrapping all in restful, mysterious darkness. value oh that i had never heard of niagara till i beheld it! blessed were the wanderers of old, who heard its deep roar, sounding through the woods, as the summons to an unknown wonder, and approached its awful brink, in all the freshness of native feeling. had its own mysterious voice been the first to warn me of its existence, then, indeed, i might have knelt down and worshipped. but i had come thither, haunted with a vision of foam and fury, and dizzy cliffs, and an ocean tumbling down out of the sky--a scene, in short, which nature had too much good taste and calm simplicity to realize. my mind had struggled to adapt these false conceptions to the reality, and finding the effort vain, a wretched sense of disappointment weighed me down. i climbed the precipice, and threw myself on the earth feeling that i was unworthy to look at the great falls, and careless about beholding them again. a scale for measuring english composition in the eighth grade, which takes account of different types of composition, such as narration, description, and the like, has been developed by dr. frank w. ballou, of boston.[ ] for those interested in the following up of the problem of english composition this scale will prove interesting and valuable. several scales have been developed for the measurement of the ability of children in reading. among them may be mentioned the scale derived by professor thorndike for measuring the understanding of sentences.[ ] this scale calls attention to that element in reading which is possibly the most important of them all, that is, the attempt to get meanings. we are all of us, for the most part, concerned not primarily with giving expression through oral reading, but, rather, in getting ideas from the printed page. a sample of this scale is given on the following page. * * * * * scale alpha. for measuring the understanding of sentences write your name here............................... write your age.............years............months. set _a_ read this and then write the answers. read it again as often as you need to. john had two brothers who were both tall. their names were will and fred. john's sister, who was short, was named mary. john liked fred better than either of the others. all of these children except will had red hair. he had brown hair. . was john's sister tall or short?..................... . how many brothers had john?.......................... . what was his sister's name?.......................... set _b_ read this and then write the answers. read it again as often as you need to. long after the sun had set, tom was still waiting for jim and dick to come. "if they do not come before nine o'clock," he said to himself, "i will go on to boston alone." at half past eight they came bringing two other boys with them. tom was very glad to see them and gave each of them one of the apples he had kept. they ate these and he ate one too. then all went on down the road. . when did jim and dick come?................................... . what did they do after eating the apples?..................... . who else came besides jim and dick?........................... . how long did tom say he would wait for them?.................. . what happened after the boys ate the apples?.................. set _c_ read this and then write the answers. read it again as often as you need to. it may seem at first thought that every boy and girl who goes to school ought to do all the work that the teacher wishes done. but sometimes other duties prevent even the best boy or girl from doing so. if a boy's or girl's father died and he had to work afternoons and evenings to earn money to help his mother, such might be the case. a good girl might let her lessons go undone in order to help her mother by taking care of the baby. . what are some conditions that might make even the best boy leave school work unfinished?............................................ ................................................................... . what might a boy do in the evenings to help his family?......... . how could a girl be of use to her mother?....................... . look at these words: _idle, tribe, inch, it, ice, ivy, tide, true, tip, top, tit, tat, toe._ cross out every one of them that has an _i_ and has not any _t_ (t) in it. set _d_ read this and then write the answers. read it again as often as you need to. it may seem at first thought that every boy and girl who goes to school ought to do all the work that the teacher wishes done. but sometimes other duties prevent even the best boy or girl from doing so. if a boy's or girl's father died and he had to work afternoons and evenings to earn money to help his mother, such might be the case. a good girl might let her lessons go undone in order to help her mother by taking care of the baby. . what is it that might seem at first thought to be true, but really is false? ....................................................................... . what might be the effect of his father's death upon the way a boy spent his time?................................................................. . who is mentioned in the paragraph as the person who desires to have all lessons completely done?.............................................. ....................................................................... . in these two lines draw a line under every that comes just after a , unless the comes just after a . if that is the case, draw a line under the next figure after the : * * * * * many tests have been devised which have been thought to have more general application than those which have been mentioned above for the particular subjects. one of the most valuable of these tests, called technically a completion test, is that derived by dr. m.r. trabue.[ ] in these tests the pupil is asked to supply words which are omitted from the printed sentences. it is really a test of his ability to complete the thought when only part of it is given. dr. trabue calls his scales language scales. it has been found, however, that ability of this sort is closely related to many of the traits which we consider desirable in school children. it would therefore be valuable, provided always that children have some ability in reading, to test them on the language scale as one of the means of differentiating among those who have more or less ability. the scores which may be expected from different grades appear in dr. trabue's monograph. three separate scales follow. * * * * * _write only one word on each blank_ _time limit: seven minutes_ name .......................... trabue language scale b . we like good boys................girls. . the................is barking at the cat. . the stars and the................will shine tonight. . time................often more valuable................money. . the poor baby................as if it.....................sick. . she................if she will. . brothers and sisters ................ always ................ to help..............other and should................quarrel. . ................ weather usually................ a good effect ................ one's spirits. . it is very annoying to................................tooth-ache, ................often comes at the most................time imaginable. . to................friends is always................the........ it takes. _write only one word on each blank_ _time limit: seven minutes_ name.......................... trabue language scale d . we are going................school. . i................to school each day. . the................plays................her dolls all day. . the rude child does not................many friends. . hard................makes................tired. . it is good to hear................voice....................... ..........friend. . the happiest and................contented man is the one........ ........lives a busy and useful................. . the best advice................usually................obtained ................one's parents. .................things are................ satisfying to an ordinary ................than congenial friends. .................a rule one................association.......... friends. _write only one word on each blank_ _time limit: five minutes_ name ............................ trabue language scale j . boys and................soon become................and women. . the................are often more contented.............. the rich. . the rose is a favorite................ because of................ fragrance and................. . it is very................ to become................acquainted ................persons who................timid. . extremely old..................sometimes..................almost as .................. care as ................... . one's................in life................upon so............ factors ................ it is not ................ to state any single................for................ failure. . the future................of the stars and the facts of............ history are................now once for all,................i like them................not. * * * * * other standard tests and scales of measurement have been derived and are being developed. the examples given above will, however, suffice to make clear the distinction between the ordinary type of examination and the more careful study of the achievements of children which may be accomplished by using these measuring sticks. it is important for any one who would attempt to apply these tests to know something of the technique of recording results. in the first place, the measurement of a group is not expressed satisfactorily by giving the average score or rate of achievement of the class. it is true that this is one measure, but it is not one which tells enough, and it is not the one which is most significant for the teacher. it is important whenever we measure children to get as clear a view as we can of the whole situation. for this purpose we want not primarily to know what the average performance is, but, rather, how many children there are at each level of achievement. in arithmetic, for example, we want to know how many there are who can do none of the courtis problems in addition, or how many there are who can do the first six on the woody test, how many can do seven, eight, and so on. in penmanship we want to know how many children there are who write quality eight, or nine, or ten, or sixteen, or seventeen, as the case may be. the work of the teacher can never be accomplished economically except as he gives more attention to those who are less proficient, and provides more and harder work for those who are capable, or else relieves the able members of the class from further work in the field. it will be well, therefore, to prepare, for the sake of comparing grades within the same school or school system, or for the sake of preparing the work of a class at two different times during the year, a table which shows just how many children there are in the group who have reached each level of achievement. such tables for work in composition for a class at two different times, six months apart, appear as follows: distribution of composition scores for a seventh grade ====================================== | number of children +----------------------- | november | february --------------+-----------+----------- rated at | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | ====================================== a study of such a distribution would show not only that the average performance of the class has been raised, but also that those in the lower levels have, in considerable measure, been brought up; that is, that the teacher has been working with those who showed less ability, and not simply pushing ahead a few who had more than ordinary capacity. it would be possible to increase the average performance by working wholly with the upper half of the class while neglecting those who showed less ability. from a complete distribution, as has been given above, it has become evident that this has not been the method of the teacher. he has sought apparently to do everything that he could to improve the quality of work upon the part of all of the children in the class. it is very interesting to note, when such complete distributions are given, how the achievement of children in various classes overlaps. for example, the distribution of the number of examples on the courtis tests, correctly finished in a given time by pupils in the seventh grades, makes it clear that there are children in the fifth grade who do better than many in the eighth. the distribution of the number of examples correctly finished in the given time by pupils in the several grades =================================================================== addition | subtraction no. of |----------------------+ no. of |------------------------ examples| grades | examples | grades finished| | | | | finished | | | | --------+----+-----+-----+-----+----------+----+-----+-----+------- | | | | | | | | | -- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -- | -- | -- | | | | | | | -- | -- | | -- | | | | | | -- | -- | | | | | | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | | | | -- | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- --------+----+-----+-----+-----+----------+----+-----+-----+------- total | | | | | | | | | papers | | | | | | | | | =================================================================== the distribution of the number of examples correctly finished in the given time by pupils in the several grades ======================================================================= multiplication | division ------------------------------------|---------------------------------- no. of | grades |no. of | grades examples|---------------------------|examples|------------------------- finished| | | | |finished| | | | --------|------+-----+-----+--------|--------|------+-----+-----+------ . . .| | | -- | -- | . . .| | | | -- . . .| | | | -- | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| -- | | | | . . .| | | | . . .| | -- | | | . . .| | | | . . .| -- | -- | | | . . .| -- | | | . . .| -- | -- | | | . . .| -- | | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | | . . .| | -- | | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | | | . . .| -- | -- | -- | | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- | . . .| -- | -- | -- | -- --------+------+-----+-----+--------|--------|------+-----+-----+------- total | | | | | | | | | papers | | | | | | | | | ======================================================================= if the tests had been given in the fourth or the third grade, it would have been found that there were children, even as low as the third grade, who could do as well or better than some of the children in the eighth grade. such comparisons of achievements among children in various subjects ought to lead at times to reorganizations of classes, to the grouping of children for special instruction, and to the rapid promotion of the more capable pupils. in many of these measurements it will be found helpful to describe the group by naming the point above and below which half of the cases fall. this is called the median. because of the very common use of this measure in the current literature of education, it may be worth while to discuss carefully the method of its derivation.[ ] [ ]the _median point_ of any distribution of measures is that point on the scale which divides the distribution into two exactly equal parts, one half of the measures being greater than this point on the scale, and the other half being smaller. when the scales are very crude, or when small numbers of measurements are being considered, it is not worth while to locate this median point any more accurately than by indicating on what step of the scale it falls. if the measuring instrument has been carefully derived and accurately scaled, however, it is often desirable, especially where the group being considered is reasonably large, to locate the exact point within the step on which the median falls. if the unit of the scale is some measure of the variability of a defined group, as it is in the majority of our present educational scales, this median point may well be calculated to the nearest tenth of a unit, or, if there are two hundred or more individual measurements in the distribution, it may be found interesting to calculate the median point to the nearest hundredth of a scale unit. very seldom will anything be gained by carrying the calculation beyond the second decimal place. the best rule for locating the median point of a distribution is to _take as the median that point on the scale which is reached by counting out one half of the measures_, the measures being taken in the order of their magnitude. if we let _n_ stand for the number of measures in the distribution, we may express the rule as follows: count into the distribution, from either end of the scale, a distance covered by *_n/ _ measures. for example, if the distribution contains measures, the median is that point on the scale which marks the end of the th and the beginning of the th measure. if there are measures in the distribution, the median point is reached by counting out - / of the measures; in other words, the median of such a distribution is at the mid-point of that fraction of the scale assigned to the th measure. the _median step_ of a distribution is the step which contains within it the median point. similarly, the _median measure_ in any distribution is the measure which contains the median point. in a distribution containing measures, the th measure is the median measure, because measures are greater and are less than the th, while the th measure is itself divided into halves by the median point. where a distribution contains an even number of measures, there is in reality no median measure but only a median point between the two halves of the distribution. where a distribution contains an uneven number of measures, the median measure is the (_n_+ )/ measurement, at the mid-point of which measure is the median point of the distribution. much inaccurate calculation has resulted from misguided attempts to secure a _median point_ with the formula just given, which is applicable only to the location of the _median measure_. it will be found much more advantageous in dealing with educational statistics to consider only the median point, and to use only the _n_/ formula given in a previous paragraph, for practically all educational scales are or may be thought of as continuous scales rather than scales composed of discrete steps. the greatest danger to be guarded against in considering all scales as continuous rather than discrete, is that careless thinkers may refine their calculations far beyond the accuracy which their original measurements would warrant. one should be very careful not to make such unjustifiable refinements in his statement of results as are often made by young pupils when they multiply the diameter of a circle, which has been measured only to the nearest inch, by . in order to find the circumference. even in the ordinary calculation of the average point of a series of measures of length, the amateur is sometimes tempted, when the number of measures in the series is not contained an even number of times in the sum of their values, to carry the quotient out to a larger number of decimal places than the original measures would justify. final results should usually not be refined far beyond the accuracy of the original measures. it is of utmost importance in calculating medians and other measures of a distribution to keep constantly in mind the significance of each step on the scale. if the scale consists of tasks to be done or problems to be solved, then "doing task correctly" means, when considered as part of a continuous scale, anywhere from doing . up to doing . tasks. a child receives credit for " problems correct" whether he has just barely solved . problems or has just barely fallen short of solving . problems. if, however, the scale consists of a series of productions graduated in quality from very poor to very good, with which series other productions of the same sort are to be compared, then each sample on the scale stands at the middle of its "step" rather than at the beginning. the second kind of scale described in the foregoing paragraph may be designated as "scales for the _quality_ of products," while the other variety may be called "scales for _magnitude_ of achievement." in the one case, the child makes the best production he can and measures its quality by comparing it with similar products of known quality on the scale. composition, handwriting, and drawing scales are good examples of scales for quality of products. in the other case, the scales are placed in the hands of the child at the very beginning, and the magnitude of his achievement is measured by the difficulty or number of tasks accomplished successfully in a given time. spelling, arithmetic, reading, language, geography, and history tests are examples of scales for quantity of achievement. scores tend to be more accurate on the scales for magnitude of achievement, because the judgment of the examiner is likely to be more accurate in deciding whether a response is correct or incorrect than it is in deciding how much quality a given product contains. this does not furnish an excuse for failing to employ the quality-of-products scales, however, for the qualities they measure are not measurable in terms of the magnitude of tasks performed. the fact appears, however, that the method of employing the quality-of-products scales is "by comparison" (of child's production with samples reproduced on the scale), while the method of employing the magnitude-of-achievement scales is "by performance" (of child on tasks of known difficulty). in this connection it may be well to take one of the scales for quality of products and outline the steps to be followed in assigning scores, making tabulations, and finding the medians of distributions of scores. when the hillegas scale is employed in measuring the quality of english composition, it will be advisable to assign to each composition the score of that sample on the scale to which it is nearest in merit or quality. while some individuals may feel able to assign values intermediate to those appearing on the hillegas scale, the majority of those persons who use this scale will not thereby obtain a more accurate result, and the assignment of such intermediate values will make it extremely difficult for any other person to make accurate use of the results. to be exactly comparable, values should be assigned in exactly the same manner. the best result will probably be obtained by having each composition rated several times, and if possible, by a number of different judges, the paper being given each time that value on the hillegas scale to which it seems nearest in quality. the final mark for the paper should be the median score or step (not the median point or the average point) of all the scores assigned. for example, if a paper is rated five times, once as in step number five ( . ), twice as in step number six ( . ), and twice as in step number seven ( . ), it should be given a final mark indicating that it is a number six ( . ) paper. after each composition has been assigned a final mark indicating to what sample on the hillegas scale it is most nearly equal in quality, proceed as follows: make a distribution of the final marks given to the individual papers, showing how many papers were assigned to the zero step on the scale, how many to step number one, how many to step number two, and so on for each step of the scale. we may take as an example the distribution of scores made by the pupils of the eighth grade at butte, montana, in may, . no. of papers rated at all together there were papers from the eighth grade, so that if they were arranged in order according to their merit we might begin at the poorest and count through of them (n/ = / = ) to find the median point, which would lie between the th and the th in quality. if we begin with the composition rated at and count up through the rated at and the rated at in the above distribution, we shall have counted . in order to count out cases, then, it will be necessary to count out of the cases rated at . now we know (if the instructions given above have been followed) that the compositions rated at were so rated by virtue of the fact that the judges considered them nearer in quality to the sample valued at . than to any other sample on the scale. we should expect, then, to find that some of those rated at were only slightly nearer to the sample valued at . than they were to the sample valued at . , while others were only slightly nearer to . than they were to . . just how the compositions rated on were distributed between these two extremes we do not know, but the best single assumption to make is that they are distributed at equal intervals on step . assuming, then, that the papers rated at are distributed evenly over that step, we shall have covered . ( / = . = . ) of the entire step by the time we have counted out of the papers falling on this step. it now becomes necessary to examine more closely just what are the limits of step . it is evident from what has been said above that . is the middle step and that step extends downward from . halfway to . , and upward from . halfway to . . the table given below shows the range and the length of each step in the hillegas scale for english composition. the hillegas scale for english composition ====================================================== step no.|value or sample|range of step |length of step --------+---------------+--------------+-------------- . . . .| | - . [ ] | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - . | . . . . .| . | . - | ====================================================== from the above table we find that step has a length of . units. if we count out of the papers, or, in other words, if we pass upward into the step . of the total distance ( . units), we shall arrive at a point . units (. × . = . ) above the lower limit of step , which we find from the table is . . adding . to . gives . as the median point of this eighth grade distribution. the median and the percentiles of any distribution of scores on the hillegas scale may be determined in a manner similar to that illustrated above, if the scores are assigned to the individual papers according to the directions outlined above. a similar method of calculation is employed in discovering the limits within which the middle fifty per cent of the cases fall. it often seems fairer to ask, after the upper twenty-five per cent of the children who would probably do successful work even without very adequate teaching have been eliminated, and the lower twenty-five per cent who are possibly so lacking in capacity that teaching may not be thought to affect them very largely have been left out of consideration, what is the achievement of the middle fifty per cent. to measure this achievement it is necessary to have the whole distribution and to count off twenty-five per cent, counting in from the upper end, and then twenty-five per cent, counting in from the lower end of the distribution. the points found can then be used in a statement in which the limits within which the middle fifty per cent of the cases fall. using the same figures that are given above for scores in english composition, the lower limit is . and the limit which marks the point above which the upper twenty-five per cent of the cases are to be found is . . the limits, therefore, within which the middle fifty per cent of the cases fall are from . to . . it is desirable to measure the relationship existing between the achievements (or other traits) of groups. in order to express such relationship in a single figure the coefficient or correlation is used. this measure appears frequently in the literature of education and will be briefly explained. the formula for finding the coefficient of correlation can be understood from examples of its application. let us suppose a group of seven individuals whose scores in terms of problems solved correctly and of words spelled correctly are as follows:[ ] ====================================== individuals|no. of |no. of words measured |problems|spelled correctly correctly | | -----------+--------+----------------- a | | b | | c | | d | | e | | f | | g | | ====================================== from such distributions it would appear that as individuals increase in achievement in one field they increase correspondingly in the other. if one is below or above the average in achievement in one field, he is below or above and in the same degree in the other field. this sort of positive relationship (going together) is expressed by a coefficient of + . the formula is expressed as follows: (sum x · y) r = ------------------------------ (sqrt(sum x^ ))(sqrt(sum y^ )) here _r_ = coefficient of correlation. _x_ = deviations from average score in arithmetic (or difference between score made and average score). _y_ = deviations from average score in spelling. sum = is the sign commonly used to indicate the algebraic sum (_i.e._ the difference between the sum of the minus quantities and the plus quantities). _x · y _= products of deviation in one trait multiplied by deviation in the other trait with appropriate sign. applying the formula we find: =================================================================== |arith-| | | spel- | | | | |metic | x | x^ | ling | y | y^ | x·y | --+------+---+------------+-------+---+-------------+-------------+ a | |- | | |- | | + | b | |- | | |- | | + | c | |- | | |- | | + | d | | | | | | | | e | |+ | | |+ | | + | f | |+ | | |+ | | + | g | |+ | | |+ | | + | | ___| | __| ___| | ___| __| | | | |sum x^ = | | | |sum y^ = |sum x·y = + | |av. = | | |av. = | | | | =================================================================== sum x · y + + r = ---------------------------- = --------------------- = ---- = + (sqrt(sum x^ )(sqrt(sum y^ ) (sqrt( ))(sqrt( )) if instead of achievement in one field being positively related (going together) in the highest possible degree, these individuals show the opposite type of relationship, _i.e.,_ the maximum negative relationship (this might be expressed as opposition--a place above the average in one achievement going with a correspondingly great deviation below the average in the other achievement), then our coefficient becomes - . applying the formula: =================================================================== |arith-| | | spel- | | | | |metic | x | x^ | ling | y | y^ | x*y | --+------+---+------------+-------+---+-------------+-------------+ a | |- | | |+ | | - | b | |- | | |+ | | - | c | |- | | |+ | | - | d | | | | | | | | e | |+ | | |- | | - | f | |+ | | |- | | - | g | |+ | | |- | | - | | ___| | __| ___| | ___| __| | | | |sum x^ = | | | |sum y^ = |sum x·y = - | |av. = | | |av. = | | | | =================================================================== it will be observed that in this case each plus deviation in one achievement is accompanied by a minus deviation for the other trait; hence, all of the products of _x_ and _y_ are minus quantities. (a plus quantity multiplied by a plus quantity or a minus quantity multiplied by a minus quantity gives us a plus quantity as the product, while a plus quantity multiplied by a minus quantity gives us a minus quantity as the product.) (sum x·y) - - r = ------------------------------ = ------------------- = ---- = - . (sqrt(sum x^ ))(sqrt(sum y^ )) (sqrt( )sqrt( )) = if there is no relationship indicated by the measures of achievements which we have found, then the coefficient of correlation becomes . a distribution of scores which suggests no relationship is as follows: ================================================================= |arith- | | | | | | |metic | x | x^ |spelling | y | y^ | x.y --+-------+----+-----------+---------+----+-------------+-------- | | | | | | | - + a | | - | | | + | | - + b | | - | | | | | + c | | | | | - | | + d | | + | | | + | | - e | | - | | | - | | - + f | | + | | | - | | g | | + | | | + | | | ____| | | ___ | | | | | | |sum x^ = | | | | sum y^ = | x·y= | av.= | | | av.= | | | =================================================================== (sum x·y) r = ---------------------------- = ------------------- = . (sqrt(sum x^ )sqrt(sum y^ )) (sqrt( )sqrt( )) in a similar manner, when the relationship is largely positive as would be indicated by a displacement of each score in the series by one step from the arrangement which gives a + coefficient, the coefficient will approach unity in value. =============================================================== arithmetic| x | x^ |spelling| y | y^ | ---+------+----+-----------+--------+----+------------+-------- a | | - | | | - | |+ b | | - | | | - | |+ c | | - | | | | |+ d | | | | | - | |+ e | | + | | | + | |+ f | | + | | | + | |sx·y= g | | + | | | + | | |av. = | |sum x^ = |av. = | |sum y^ = | =============================================================== sum x·y + r= -------------------------- = ---- = +. . sqrt(sum x^ )sqrt(sum y^ ) other illustrations might be given to show how the coefficient varies from + , the measure of the highest positive relationship (going together) through to - , the measure of the largest negative relationship (opposition). a relationship between traits which we measure as high as +. is to be thought of as quite significant. it is seldom that we get a positive relationship as large as +. when we correlate the achievements of children in school work. a relationship measured by a coefficient of ±. may _not_ be considered to indicate any considerable positive or negative relationship. the fact that relationships among the achievements of children in school subjects vary from +. to +. is a clear indication of the fact that abilities of children are variable, or, in other words, achievement in one subject does not carry with it an _exactly corresponding_ great or little achievement in another subject. that there is some positive relationship, _i.e.,_ that able pupils tend on the whole to show all-round ability and the less able or weak in one subject _tend_ to show similar lack of strength in other subjects, is also indicated by these positive coefficients. questions . calculate the median point in the following distribution of eighth-grade composition scores on the hillegas scale. quality frequency . calculate the median point in the following distribution of third-grade scores on the woody subtraction scale. no. problems frequency + . compare statistically the achievements of the children in two eighth-grade classes whose scores on the courtis addition tests were as follows: class a-- , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . class b-- , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . . if the marks received in algebra and in geometry by a group of high school pupils were as given below, what relationship is indicated by the coefficient of correlation? |geometry |algebra |marks |marks . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . compare the abilities of the -year-old pupils in the sixth grade with the abilities of the -year-old pupils in the same grade, in so far as these abilities are measured by the completion of incomplete sentences. (note: = . - . .) ================================================== no. sentences | | completed | -year-olds | -year-olds --------------+--------------+-------------------- |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- | |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- |-- | | |-- |-- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-- | | | |-- | |-- |-- |-- | |-- |-- |-- |-- =========================================== . from the scores given here, calculate the relationship between ability to spell and ability to multiply. use the average as the central tendency. ============================== pupil|spelling|multiplication -----+--------+--------------- a | | b | | c | | d | | e | | f | | g | | h | | i | | j | | k | | l | | m | | n | | o | | p | | q | | r | | s | | t | | u | | v | | w | | x | | y | | ============================== * * * * * index achievements of children, measuring the, and examinations, in english composition, in arithmetic, arithmetic scale, reasoning problems in arithmetic, distribution of hand-writing scores, handwriting scale, spelling scale, scale for english composition. Æsthetic emotions, appreciation and skill, appreciation, intellectual factors in. aim of education, i analysis and abstraction, iii. angell, j.r. appreciation, types of, passive attitude in, development in, value of, lesson. associations, organization of, number of. attention, situations arousing response of, and inhibition, breadth of, to more than one thing, concentration of, span of, free, forced, immediate free, immediate and derived, derived, forced, and habit formation, focalization of, divided. ayres, l.p. ballou, f.w. bread-and-butter aim. classroom exercises, types of. coefficient of correlation, calculation of, values of. comparison and abstraction, step of. concentration, of attention. habits of. conduct, moral social. consciousness, fringe of. correlation, coefficient of. courtis, s.a. culture as aim of education. curriculum, omissions from. deduction lesson, the, steps in. deduction, process of. dewey, john. differences, individual, sex. disuse, method of. drill, lesson, the, work, deficiency in. education, before school age. effect, law of. emotions, aesthetic. environment and individual differences. examinations, limitations of. exceptions, danger of. fatigue and habits. formal discipline. gray, w.s. habit formation, and attention, laws of, and instinct, complexity of, and interest, and mistakes. habits, of concentration, modification of the nervous system involved, and fatigue, and will power, and original work. harmonious development of aim. heck, w.h. henderson, e.n. heredity and individual differences. hillegas, m.b. illustrations, use of. imagery, type of, and learning, productive, types of. images, classified, object and concrete. imagination. individual differences, causes of, and race inheritance, and maturity, and heredity, and environment, and organization of public education in composition in arithmetic in penmanship induction and deduction differences in relationship of induction, process of inductive lesson, the inquiry in school work instinctive tendencies modifiability of inhibition of instincts transitoriness of delayedness of of physical activity to enjoy mental activity of manipulation of collecting of rivalry of fighting of imitation of gregariousness of motherliness interest an end judd, c.h. junior high school, the kelly, f.j. knowledge aim learning incidental and imagery curves lecturing and appreciation lesson the inductive mcmurry, f.m. maturity and individual differences measurement of group comparison of seventh-grade scores in composition comparison of scores in arithmetic measuring results in education median calculation of point step measure memorization verbatim whole-part method illustrated memory factors in and native retentiveness and recall part and whole methods practice periods immediate desultory rote logical and forgetting permanence of miller, i.e. moral conduct development of morality defined and conduct and habit and choice and individual opinion social nature of and training for citizenship and original nature and environment stages of development in and habit formation transition period in direct teaching of and classroom work and service by pupils and social responsibility and school rules morgan, c.l. openmindedness original nature of children and racial inheritance and aim of education utilization of and morality original work and habits payne, joseph physical welfare of children play theories of types of complexity of characteristics of and drudgery and work and ease of accomplishment and social demands supervision of preparation steps of presentation steps of problems as stimulus to thinking punishment questioning questions types of responses to number of appeal of reasoning and thinking technique of recapitulation theory recitation social purpose of recitation lesson, the repetition retention power of review review lesson, the roark, r.n. satisfaction result of scales of measurement school government participation in sex differences education social aim of education and curriculum and special types of schools stone, c.w. study how to types of and habit formation and memorization and interest necessity for aim in and concentrated attention involves critical attitude general factors in for appreciation involving thinking use of books in supervised substitution method of thinking defined thinking stimulation of and problematic situations by little children and habit formation essentials in process of for its own sake and critical attitude laws governing and association failure in and classroom exercises thorndike, e.l. thought imageless trabue, m.r. training transfer of identity of response probability of amount of transfer of training will power and habits woody, clifford work, independent work and play footnote : the nervous system is composed of units of structure called neurones or nerve cells. "if we could see exactly the structure of the brain itself, we should find it to consist of millions of similar neurones each resembling a bit of string frayed out at both ends and here and there along its course. so also the nerves going out to the muscles are simply bundles of such neurones, each of which by itself is a thread-like connection between the cells of the spinal cord or brain and some muscle. the nervous system is simply the sum total of all these neurones, which form an almost infinitely complex system of connections between the sense organs and the muscles." the word synapses, meaning clasping together, is used as a descriptive term for the connections that exist between neurone and neurone. footnote : this is synonymous with james's involuntary attention, angell's non-voluntary attention, and titchener's secondary-passive attention. footnote : educational psychology, briefer course, pp. - . footnote : thorndike, psychology of learning, p. . footnote : how we think, p. . footnote : the psychology of thinking, p. . footnote : how we think, p. . footnote : how we think, pp. - . footnote : psychology of thinking, p. . footnote : how we think, p. . footnote : thorndike, educational psychology, briefer course, p. . footnote : introduction to psychology, p. . footnote : thorndike, origin of man, p. . footnote : racial differences in mental traits, pp. and . footnote : thorndike, educational psychology, briefer course, p. . footnote : thorndike, educational psychology, vol. iii, p. . footnote : moral principles in education, p. . footnote : for a fuller discussion of this topic see next chapter. footnote : for a discussion of these scales see chapter xv. footnote : the courtis tests, series b, for measuring the achievements of children in the fundamentals of arithmetic, can be secured from mr. s.a. curtis, eliot street, detroit, mich. footnote : measurements of some achievements in arithmetic, by clifford woody, published by the teachers college bureau of publications, columbia university, . footnote : reasoning test in arithmetic, by c.w. stone, published by the bureau of publications, teachers college, columbia university, . footnote : a scale for handwriting of children, by e.l. thorndike, published by the bureau of publications, teachers college, columbia university. footnote : a scale derived by dr. leonard p. ayres of the russell sage foundation is also valuable for measuring penmanship, and can be purchased from the russell sage foundation. footnote : copies of the spelling scale can be secured from the russell sage foundation, new york, for five cents a copy. footnote : a scale for the measurement of quality in english composition, by milo b. hillegas, published by the bureau of publications, teachers college, columbia university. footnote : the harvard-newton scale for the measurement of english composition, published by the harvard university press, cambridge, mass. footnote : scale alpha. for measuring the understanding of sentences, by e.l. thorndike, published by the bureau of publications, teachers college, columbia university. scales for measuring the rate of silent reading and oral reading have been derived by dr. w.s. gray, of the university of chicago, and by dr. f.j. kelly, of the university of kansas. reference to the use of dr. gray's scale will be found in judd's measuring work of the schools, one of the volumes of the cleveland survey, published by the russell sage foundation. dr. kelly's test, called the kansas silent reading test, can be had from the emporia, kansas, state normal school. footnote : completion test language scales, by m.r. trabue, published by the bureau of publications, teachers college, columbia university. footnote : the student who is not interested in the statistical methods involved in measuring with precision the achievements of pupils may omit the remainder of this chapter. footnote : this explanation of the method of finding the median was prepared for one of the classes in teachers college by dr. m.r. trabue. footnote : the third decimal place is omitted in this table. footnote : in order to discover the relationship which exists between two traits which we have measured we would use many more than seven cases. the illustrations given are made short in order to make it easy to follow through the application of the formula. reveries of a schoolmaster by francis b. pearson state superintendent of public instruction for ohio author of "the evolution of the teacher," "the high-school problem," "the vitalized school." charles scribner's sons new york chicago boston copyright, , by charles scribner's sons contents chapter i. in medias res ii. retrospect iii. brown iv. psychological v. balking vi. lanterns vii. complete living viii. my speech ix. school-teaching x. beefsteak xi. freedom xii. things xiii. targets xiv. sinners xv. hoeing potatoes xvi. changing the mind xvii. the point of view xviii. picnics xix. make-believe xx. behavior xxi. forefingers xxii. story-telling xxiii. grandmother xxiv. my world xxv. this or that xxvi. rabbit pedagogy xxvii. perspective xxviii. purely pedagogical xxix. longevity xxx. four-leaf clover xxxi. mountain-climbing reveries of a schoolmaster chapter i in medias res i am rather glad now that i took a little dip (one could scarce call it a baptism) into the latin, and especially into horace, for that good soul gave me the expression _in medias res_. that is a forceful expression, right to the heart of things, and applies equally well to the writing of a composition or the eating of a watermelon. those who have crossed the channel, from folkstone to boulogne, know that the stanch little ship _invicta_ had scarcely left dock when they were _in medias res_. they were conscious of it, too, if indeed they were conscious of anything not strictly personal to themselves. this expression admits us at once to the light and warmth (if such there be) of the inner temple nor keeps us shivering out in the vestibule. writers of biography are wont to keep us waiting too long for happenings that are really worth our while. they tell us that some one was born at such a time, as if that were really important. why, anybody can be born, but it requires some years to determine whether his being born was a matter of importance either to himself or to others. when i write my biographical sketch of william shakespeare i shall say that in a certain year he wrote "hamlet," which fact clearly justified his being born so many years earlier. the good old lady said of her pastor: "he enters the pulpit, takes his text, and then the dear man just goes everywhere preaching the gospel." that man had a special aptitude for the _in medias res_ method of procedure. many children in school who are not versed in latin would be glad to have their teachers endowed with this aptitude. they are impatient of preliminaries, both in the school and at the dinner-table. and it is pretty difficult to discover just where childhood leaves off in this respect. so i am grateful to horace for the expression. having started right in the midst of things, one can never get off the subject, and that is a great comfort. sometimes college graduates confess (or perhaps boast) that they have forgotten their latin. i fear to follow their example lest my neighbor, who often drops in for a friendly chat, might get to wondering whether i have not also forgotten much of the english i am supposed to have acquired in college. he might regard my english as quite as feeble when compared with shakespeare or milton as my latin when compared with cicero or virgil. so i take counsel with prudence and keep silent on the subject of latin. when i am taking a stroll in the woods, as i delight to do in the autumn-time, laundering my soul with the gorgeous colors, the music of the rustling leaves, the majestic silences, and the sounds that are less and more than sounds, i often wonder, when i take one bypath, what experiences i might have had if i had taken the other. i'll never know, of course, but i keep on wondering. so it is with this latin. i wonder how much worse matters could or would have been if i had never studied it at all. as the old man said to the young fellow who consulted him as to getting married: "you'll be sorry if you do, and sorry if you don't." i used to feel a sort of pity for my pupils to think how they would have had no education at all if they had not had me as their teacher; now i am beginning to wonder how much further along they might have been if they had had some other teacher. but probably most of the misfits in life are in the imagination, after all. we all think the huckleberries are more abundant on the other bush. hoeing potatoes is a calm, serene, dignified, and philosophical enterprise. but at bottom it is much the same in principle as teaching school. in my potato-patch i am merely trying to create situations that are favorable to growth, and in the school i can do neither more nor better. i cannot cause either boys or potatoes to grow. if i could, i'd certainly have the process patented. i know no more about how potatoes grow than i do about the fourth dimension or the unearned increment. but they grow in spite of my ignorance, and i know that there are certain conditions in which they flourish. so the best i can do is to make conditions favorable. nor do i bother about the weeds. i just centre my attention and my hoe upon loosening the soil and let the weeds look out for themselves. hoeing potatoes is a synthetic process, but cutting weeds is analytic, and synthesis is better, both for potatoes and for boys. in good time, if the boy is kept growing, he will have outgrown his stone-bruises, his chapped hands, his freckles, his warts, and his physical and spiritual awkwardness. the weeds will have disappeared. the potato-patch is your true pedagogical laboratory and conservatory. if one cannot learn pedagogy there it is no fault of the potato-patch. horace must have thought of _in medias res_ while hoeing potatoes. there is no other way to do it, and that is bed-rock pedagogy. just to get right at the work and do it, that's the very thing the teacher is striving toward. here among my potatoes i am actuated by motives, i invest the subject with human interest, i experience motor activities, i react, i function, and i go so far as to evaluate. indeed, i run the entire gamut. and then, when i am lying beneath the canopy of the wide-spreading tree, i do a bit of research work in trying to locate the sorest muscle. and, as to efficiency, well, i give myself a high grade in that and shall pass _cum laude_ it the matter is left to me. if our grading were based upon effort rather than achievement, i could bring my aching back into court, if not my potatoes. but our system of grading in the schools demands potatoes, no matter much how obtained, with scant credit for backaches. we have farm ballads and farm arithmetics, but as yet no one has written for us a book on farm pedagogy. i'd do it myself but for the feeling that some strayer, or mcmurry, or o'shea will get right at it as soon as he has come upon this suggestion. that's my one great trouble. the other fellow has the thing done before i can get around to it. i would have written "the message to garcia," but mr. hubbard anticipated me. then, i was just ready to write a luminous description of yellowstone falls when i happened upon the one that dewitt talmage wrote, and i could see no reason for writing another. so it is. i seem always to be just too late. i wish now that i had written "recessional" before kipling got to it. no doubt, the same thing will happen with my farm pedagogy. if one could only stake a claim in all this matter of writing as they do in the mining regions, the whole thing would be simplified. i'd stake my claim on farm pedagogy and then go on hoeing my potatoes while thinking out what to say on the subject. whoever writes the book will do well to show how catching a boy is analogous to catching a colt out in the pasture. both feats require tact and, at the very least, horse-sense. the other day i wanted to catch my colt and went out to the pasture for that purpose. there is a hill in the pasture, and i went to the top of this and saw the colt at the far side of the pasture in what we call the swale--low, wet ground, where weeds abound. i didn't want to get my shoes soiled, so i stood on the hill and called and called. the colt looked up now and then and then went on with his own affairs. in my chagrin i was just about ready to get angry when it occurred to me that the colt wasn't angry, and that i ought to show as good sense as a mere horse. that reflection relieved the tension somewhat, and i thought it wise to meditate a bit. here am i; yonder is the colt. i want him; he doesn't want me. he will not come to me; so i must go to him. then, what? oh, yes, native interests--that's it, native interests. i'm much obliged to professor james for reminding me. now, just what are the native interests of a colt? why, oats, of course. so, i must return to the barn and get a pail of oats. an empty pail might do once, but never again. so i must have oats in my pail. either a colt or a boy becomes shy after he has once been deceived. the boy who fails to get oats in the classroom to-day, will shy off from the teacher to-morrow. he will not even accept her statement that there is oats in the pail, for yesterday the pail was empty--nothing but sound. but even with pail and oats i had to go to the colt, getting my shoes soiled and my clothes torn, but there was no other way. i must begin where the colt (or boy) is, as the book on pedagogy says. i wanted to stay on the hill where everything was agreeable, but that wouldn't get the colt. now, if mr. charles h. judd cares to elaborate this outline, i urge no objection and shall not claim the protection of copyright. i shall be only too glad to have him make clear to all of us the pedagogical recipe for catching colts and boys. chapter ii retrospect mr. patrick henry was probably correct in saying that there is no way of judging the future but by the past, and, to my thinking, he might well have included the present along with the future. today is better or worse than yesterday or some other day in the past, just as this cherry pie is better or worse than some past cherry pie. but even this pie may seem a bit less glorious than the pies of the past, because of my jaded appetite--a fact that is easily lost sight of. folks who extol the glories of the good old times may be forgetting that they are not able to relive the emotions that put the zest into those past events. we used to go to "big meeting" in a two-horse sled, with the wagon-body half filled with hay and heaped high with blankets and robes. the mercury might be low in the tube, but we recked not of that. our indifference to climatic conditions was not due alone to the wealth of robes and blankets, but the proximity of another member of the human family may have had something to do with it. if we could reconstruct the emotional life of those good old times, the physical conditions would take their rightful place as a background. if we could only bring back the appetite of former years we might find this pie better than the pies of old. the good brother who seems to think the textbooks of his boyhood days were better than the modern ones forgets that along with the old-time textbooks went skating, rabbit-hunting, snowballing, coasting, fishing, sock-up, bull-pen, two-old-cat, townball, and shinny-on-the-ice. he is probably confusing those majors with the text-book minor. his criticism of things and books modern is probably a voicing of his regret that he has lost his zeal for the fun and frolic of youth. if he could but drink a few copious drafts from the fountain of youth, the books of the present might not seem so inferior after all. the bread and apple-butter stage of our hero's career may seem to dim the lustre of the later porterhouse steak, but with all the glory of the halcyon days of yore it is to be noted that he rides in an automobile and not in an ox-cart, and prefers electricity to the good old oil-lamp. i concede with enthusiasm the joys of bygone days, and would be glad to repeat those experiences with sundry very specific reservations and exceptions. that thick bread with its generous anointing of apple butter discounted all the nectar and ambrosia of the books and left its marks upon the character as well as the features of the recipient. the mouth waters even now as i recall the bill of fare plus the appetite. but if i were going back to the good old days i'd like to take some of the modern improvements along with me. it thrills me to consider the modern school credits for home work with all the " varieties" as an integral feature of the good old days. alas, how much we missed by not knowing about all this! what miracles might have been wrought had we and our teachers only known! poor, ignorant teachers! little did they dream that such wondrous things could ever be. life might have been made a glad, sweet song for us had it been supplied with these modern attachments. i spent many weary hours over partial payments in ray's third part, when i might have been brushing my teeth or combing my hair instead. then, instead of threading the mazes of greene's analysis and parsing "thanatopsis," i might just as well have been asleep in the haymow, where ventilation was super-abundant. how proudly could i have produced the home certificate as to my haymow experience and received an exhilarating grade in grammar! just here i interrupt myself to let the imagination follow me homeward on the days when grades were issued. the triumphal processions of the romans would have been mild by comparison. the arch look upon my face, the martial mien, and the flashing eye all betoken the real hero. then the pride of that home, the sumptuous feast of chicken and angel-food cake, and the parental acclaim--all befitting the stanch upholder of the family honor. of course, nothing like this ever really happened, which goes to prove that i was born years too early in the world's history. the more i think of this the more acute is my sympathy with maud muller. that girl and i could sigh a duet thinking what might have been. why, i might have had my college degree while still wearing short trousers. i was something of an adept at milking cows and could soon have eliminated the entire algebra by the method of substitution. milking the cows was one of my regular tasks, anyhow, and i could thus have combined business with pleasure. and if by riding a horse to water i could have gained immunity from the _commentaries_ by one julius caesar, full lustily would i have shouted, _a la_ richard iii: "a horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" one man advocates the plan of promoting pupils in the schools on the basis of character, and this plan strongly appeals to me as right, plausible, and altogether feasible. had this been proposed when i was a schoolboy i probably should have made a few conditions, or at least have asked a few questions. i should certainly have wanted to know who was to be the judge in the matter, and what was his definition of character. much would have depended upon that. if he had decreed that cruelty to animals indicates a lack of character and then proceeded to denominate as cruelty to animals such innocent diversions as shooting woodpeckers in a cherry-tree with a flobert rifle, or smoking chipmunks out from a hollow log, or tying a strip of red flannel to a hen's tail to take her mind off the task of trying to hatch a door-knob, or tying a tin can to a dog's tail to encourage him in his laudable enterprise of demonstrating the principle of uniformly accelerated motion--if he had included these and other such like harmless antidotes for ennui in his category, i should certainly have asked to be excused from his character curriculum and should have pursued the even tenor of my ways, splitting kindling, currying the horse, washing the buggy, carrying water from the pump to the kitchen and saying, "thank you," to my elders as the more agreeable avenue of promotion. if we had had character credits in the good old days i might have won distinction in school and been saved much embarrassment in later years. instead of learning the latitude and longitude of madagascar, chattahoochee, and kamchatka, i might have received high grades in geography by abstaining from the chewing of gum, by not wearing my hands in my trousers-pockets, by walking instead of ambling or slouching, by wiping the mud from my shoes before entering the house, by a personally conducted tour through the realms of manicuring, and by learning the position and use of the hat-rack. getting no school credits for such incidental minors in the great scheme of life, i grew careless and indifferent and acquired a reputation that i do not care to dwell upon. if those who had me in charge, or thought they had, had only been wise and given me school credits for all these things, what a model boy i might have been! why, i would have swallowed my pride, donned a kitchen apron, and washed the supper dishes, and no normal boy enjoys that ceremony. by making passes over the dishes i should have been exorcising the spooks of cube root, and that would have been worth some personal sacrifice. what a boon it would have been for the home folks too! they could have indulged their penchant for literary exercises, sitting in the parlor making out certificates for me to carry to my teacher next day, and so all the rough places in the home would have been made smooth. but the crowning achievement would have been my graduation from college. i can see the picture. i am husking corn in the lower field. to reach this field one must go the length of the orchard and then walk across the meadow. it is a crisp autumn day, about ten o'clock in the morning, and the sun is shining. the golden ears are piling up under my magic skill, and there is peace. as i take down another bundle from the shock i descry what seems to be a sort of procession wending its way through the orchard. then the rail fence is surmounted, and the procession solemnly moves across the meadow. in time the president and an assortment of faculty members stand before me, bedight in caps and gowns. i note that their gowns are liberally garnished with spanish needles and cockleburs, and their shoes give evidence of contact with elemental mud. but then and there they confer upon me the degree of bachelor of arts _magna cum laude_. but for this interruption i could have finished husking that row before the dinner-horn blew. chapter iii brown my neighbor came in again this evening, not for anything in particular, but unconsciously proving that men are gregarious animals. i like this neighbor. his name is brown. i like the name brown, too. it is easy to pronounce. by a gentle crescendo you go to the summit and then coast to the bottom. the name brown, when pronounced, is a circumflex accent. now, if his name had happened to be moriarity i never could be quite sure when i came to the end in pronouncing it. i'm glad his name is not moriarity--not because it is irish, for i like the irish; so does brown, for he is married to one of them. any one who has been in cork and heard the fine old irishman say in his musical and inimitable voice, "tis a lovely dye," such a one will ever after have a snug place in his affections for the irish, whether he has kissed the "blarney stone" or not. if he has heard this same driver of a jaunting-car rhapsodize about "shandon bells" and the author, father prout, his admiration for things and people irish will become well-nigh a passion. he will not need to add to his mental picture, for the sake of emphasis or color, the cherry-cheeked maids who lead their mites of donkeys along leafy roads, the carts heaped high with cabbages. even without this addition he will become expansive when he speaks of ireland and the irish. but, as i was saying, brown came in this evening just to barter small talk, as we often do. now, in physical build brown is somewhere between falstaff and cassius, while in mental qualities he is an admixture of plato, solomon, and bill nye. when he drops in we do not discuss matters, nor even converse; we talk. our talk just oozes out and flows whither it wills, or little wisps of talk drift into the silences, and now and then a dash of homely philosophy splashes into the talking. brown is a real comfort. he is never cryptic, nor enigmatic, at least consciously so, nor does he ever try to be impressive. if he were a teacher he would attract his pupils by his good sense, his sincerity, his simplicity, and his freedom from pose. i cannot think of him as ever becoming teachery, with a high-pitched voice and a hysteric manner. he has too much poise for that. he would never discuss things with children. he would talk with them. brown cannot walk on stilts, nor has the air-ship the least fascination for him. one of my teachers for a time was doctor t. c. mendenhall, and he was a great teacher. he could sound the very depths of his subject and simply talk it. he led us to think, and thinking is not a noisy process. truth to tell, his talks often caused my poor head to ache from overwork. but i have been in classes where the oases of thought were far apart and one could doze and dream on the journey from one to the other. doctor mendenhall's teaching was all white meat, sweet to the taste, and altogether nourishing. he is the man who made the first correct copy of shakespeare's epitaph there in the church at stratford-on-avon. i sent a copy of doctor mendenhall's version to mr. brassinger, the librarian in the memorial building, and have often wondered what his comment was. he never told me. there are those "who, having eyes, see not." there had been thousands of people who had looked at that epitaph with the printed copy in hand, and yet had never noticed the discrepancy, and it remained for an american to point out the mistake. but that is doctor mendenhall's way. he is nothing if not thorough, and that proves his scientific mind. well, brown fell to talking about the isle of pines, in the course of our verbal exchanges, and i drew him out a bit, receiving a liberal education on the subjects of grapefruit, pineapples, and bananas. from my school-days i have carried over the notion that the caribbean sea is one of the many geographical myths with which the school-teacher is wont to intimidate boys who would far rather be scaring rabbits out from under a brush heap. but here sits a man who has travelled upon the caribbean sea, and therefore there must be such a place. our youthful fancies do get severe jolts! from my own experience i infer that much of our teaching in the schools doesn't take hold, that the boys and girls tolerate it but do not believe. i cannot recall just when i first began to believe in mt. vesuvius, but i am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. it may have been in my teaching-days, but i'm not quite certain. i have often wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. i feel a pity for poor sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom. but that is not much worse than trying to teach caribbean sea and mt. vesuvius, if we can't really believe in them. but here is brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist who begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which i had at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till i arrive, by alluring stages, at the related unknown, the caribbean sea. too bad that brown isn't a teacher. brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for knowledge is satisfied. somewhere he had come upon some question touching a campanile or, possibly, _the_ campanile, as it seemed to him. nor would he rest content until i had extracted what the books have to say on the subject. he had in mind the campanile at venice, not knowing that the one beside the duomo at florence is higher than the one at venice, and that the leaning tower at pisa is a campanile, or bell-tower, also. when i told him that one of my friends saw the campanile at venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that sunday morning back in , and that another friend had been of the last party to go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and then i knew that i had succeeded in investing the subject with human interest, and i felt quite the schoolmaster. nothing of this did i mention to brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental machinery if only you get results. many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much of their history and geography in the schools. can it be that their teachers failed to invest these places with human interest, that they were but words in a book and not real to them at all? must i travel all the way to yellowstone park to know a geyser? alas! in that case, many of us poor school-teachers must go through life geyserless. wondrous tales and oft heard i in my school-days of glacier, iceberg, canyon, snow-covered mountain, grotto, causeway, and volcano, but not till i came to grindelwald did i really know what a glacier is. there's many a doubting thomas in the schools. chapter iv psychological the psychologist is so insistent in proclaiming his doctrine of negative self-feeling and positive self-feeling that one is impelled to listen out of curiosity, if nothing else. then, just as you are beginning to get a little glimmering as to his meaning, another one begins to assail your ears with a deal of sesquipedalian english about the emotion of subjection and the emotion of elation. just as i began to think i was getting a grip of the thing a college chap came in and proceeded to enlighten me by saying that these two emotions may be generated only by personal relations, and not by relations of persons and things. i was thinking of my emotion of subjection in the presence of an original problem in geometry, but this college person tells me that this negative self-feeling, according to psychology, is experienced only in the presence of another person. well, i have had that experience, too. in fact, my negative self-feeling is of frequent occurrence. jacob must have had a rather severe attack of the emotion of subjection when he was trying to escape from the wrath of esau. but, after his experience at bethel, where he received a blessing and a promise, there was a shifting from the negative self-feeling to the positive--from the emotion of subjection to that of elation. the stone which jacob used that night as a pillow, so we are told, is called the stone of scone, and is to be seen in the body of the coronation chair in westminster abbey. the use of that stone as a part of the chair might seem to be a psychological coincidence, unless, indeed, we can conceive that the fabricators of the chair combined a knowledge of psychology and also of the bible in its construction. it is an interesting conceit, at any rate, that the stone might bring to kings and queens a blessing and a promise, as it had done for jacob, averting the emotion of subjection and perpetuating the emotion of elation. now, there's hazzard, the big, glorious hazzard. i met him first on the deck of the s. s. _campania_, and i gladly agreed to his proposal that we travel together. he is a large man (one need not be more specific) and a veritable steam-engine of activity and energy. it was altogether natural, therefore, that he should assume the leadership of our party of two in all matters touching places, modes of travel, hotels, and other details large and small, while i trailed along in his wake. this order continued for some days, and i, of course, experienced all the while the emotion of subjection in some degree. when we came to the isle of man we puzzled our heads no little over the curious coat of arms of that quaint little country. this coat of arms is three human legs, equidistant from one another. at peel we made numerous inquiries, and also at ramsey, but to no avail. in the evening, however, in the hotel at douglas i saw a picture of this coat of arms, accompanied by the inscription, _quocumque jeceris stabit_, and gave some sort of translation of it. then and there came my emancipation, for after that i was consulted and deferred to during all the weeks we were together. it is quite improbable that hazzard himself realized any change in our relations, but unconsciously paid that subtle tribute to my small knowledge of latin. when we came to stratford i did not call upon miss marie corelli, for i had heard that she is quite averse to men as a class, and i feared i might suffer an emotional collapse. i was so comfortable in my newly acquainted emotion of elation that i decided to run no risks. when at length i resumed my schoolmastering i determined to give the boys and girls the benefit of my recent discovery. i saw that i must generate in each one, if possible, the emotion of elation, that i must so arrange school situations that mastery would become a habit with them if they were to become "masters in the kingdom of life," as my friend long says it. i saw at once that the difficulties must be made only high enough to incite them to effort, but not so high as to cause discouragement. i recalled the sentence in harvey's grammar: "milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf." after we had succeeded in locating the antecedent of "he" we learned from this sentence a lesson of value, and i recalled this lesson in my efforts to inculcate progressive mastery in the boys and girls of my school. i sometimes deferred a difficult problem for a few days till they had lifted the growing calf a few more times, and then returned to it. some one says that everything is infinitely high that we can't see over, so i was careful to arrange the barriers just a bit lower than the eye-line of my pupils, and then raise them a trifle on each succeeding day. in this way i strove to generate the positive self-feeling so that there should be no depression and no white flag. and that surely was worth a trip to the isle of man, even if one failed to see one of their tailless cats. i had occasion or, rather, i took occasion at one time to punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the lord forgive me), and now. i know that in so doing i was guilty of a grave error. what i interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. he was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. to him notoriety was preferable to obscurity. if i had only been wise i would have turned his inclination to good account and might have helped him to self-mastery, if not to the mastery of algebra. he yearned for the emotion of elation, and i was trying to perpetuate his emotion of subjection. if methuselah had been a schoolmaster he might have attained proficiency by the time he reached the age of nine hundred and sixty-eight years if he had been a close observer, a close student of methods, and had been willing and able to profit by his own mistakes. friend virgil says something like this: "they can because they think they can," and i heartily concur. some one tells us that kent in "king lear" got his name from the anglo-saxon word can and he was aptly named, in view of virgil's statement. but can i cause my boys and girls to think they can? why, most assuredly, if i am any sort of teacher. otherwise i ought to be dealing with inanimate things and leave the school work to those who can. i certainly can help young folks to shift from the emotion of subjection to the emotion of elation. i had a puppy that we called nick and thought i'd like to teach him to go up-stairs. when he came to the first stair he cried and cowered and said, in his language, that it was too high, and that he could never do it. so, in a soothing way, i quoted virgil at him and placed his front paws upon the step. then he laughed a bit and said the step wasn't as high as the moon, after all. so i patted him and called him a brave little chap, and he gained the higher level. then we rested for a bit and spent the time in being glad, for nick and i had read our "pollyanna" and had learned the trick of gladness. well, before the day was over that puppy could go up the stairs without the aid of a teacher, and a gladder dog never was. if i had taken as much pains with that boy as i did with nick i'd feel far more comfortable right now, and the boy would have felt more comfortable both then and after. o schoolmastering! how many sins are committed in thy name! i succeeded with the puppy, but failed with the boy. a boy does not go to school to study algebra, but studies algebra to learn mastery. i know this now, but did not know it then, more's the pity! i had another valuable lesson in this phase of pedagogy the day my friend vance and i sojourned to indianapolis to call upon mr. benjamin harrison, who had somewhat recently completed his term as president of the united states. we were fortified with ample and satisfactory credentials and had a very fortunate introduction; but for all that we were inclined to walk softly into the presence of greatness, and had a somewhat acute attack of negative self-feeling. however, after due exchange of civilities, we succeeded somehow in preferring the request that had brought us into his presence, and mr. harrison's reply served to reassure us. said he: "oh, no, boys, i couldn't do that; last year i promised bok to write some articles for his journal, and i didn't have any fun all summer." his two words, "boys" and "fun," were the magic ones that caused the tension to relax and generated the emotion of elation. we then sat back in our chairs and, possibly, crossed our legs--i can't be certain as to that. at any rate, in a single sentence this man had made us his co-ordinates and caused the negative self-feeling to vanish. then for a good half-hour he talked in a familiar way about great affairs, and in a style that charmed. he told us of a call he had the day before from david starr. jordan, who came to report his experience as a member of the commission that had been appointed to adjudicate the controversy between the united states and england touching seal-fishing in the behring sea. it may be recalled that this commission consisted of two americans, two englishmen, and king oscar of sweden. mr. harrison told us quite frankly that he felt a mistake had been made in making up the commission, for, with two americans and two englishmen on the commission, the sole arbiter in reality was king oscar, since the other four were reduced to the plane of mere advocates; but, had there been three americans and two englishmen, or two americans and three englishmen, the function of all would have been clearly judicial. suffice it to say that this great man made us forget our emotion of subjection, and so made us feel that he would have been a great teacher, just as he was a great statesman. i shall always be grateful for the lesson he taught me and, besides, i am glad that the college chap came in and gave me that psychological massage. chapter v balking when i write my book on farm pedagogy i shall certainly make large use of the horse in illustrating the fundamental principles, for he is a noble animal and altogether worthy of the fullest recognition. we often use the expression "horse-sense" somewhat flippantly, but i have often seen a driver who would have been a more useful member of society if he had had as much sense as the horses he was driving. if i were making a catalogue of the "lower animals" i'd certainly include the man who abuses a horse. why, the celebrated german trick-horse, hans, had even the psychologists baffled for a long time, but finally he taught them a big chapter in psychology. they finally discovered that his marvellous tricks were accomplished through the power of close observation. facial expression, twitching of a muscle, movements of the head, these were the things he watched for as his cue in answering questions by indicating the right card. there was a teacher in our school once who wore old-fashioned spectacles. when he wanted us to answer a question in a certain way he unconsciously looked over his spectacles; but when he wanted a different answer he raised his spectacles to his forehead. so we ranked high in our daily grades, but met our waterloo when the examination came around. that teacher, of course, had never heard of the horse hans, and so was not aware that in the process of watching his movements we were merely proving that we had horse-sense. he probably attributed our ready answers to the superiority of his teaching, not realizing that our minds were concentrated upon the subject of spectacles. of course, a horse balks now and then, and so does a boy. i did a bit of balking myself as a boy, and i am not quite certain that i have even yet become immune. doctor james wallace (whose edition of "anabasis" some of us have read, halting and stumbling along through the parasangs) with three companions went out to marathon one day from athens. the distance, as i recall it, is about twenty-two miles, and they left early in the morning, so as to return the same day. their conveyance was an open wagon with two horses attached. when they had gone a mile or two out of town one of the horses balked and refused to proceed. then and there each member of the party drew upon his past experiences, seeking a panacea for the equine delinquency. one suggested the plan of building a fire under the recalcitrant horse, while another suggested pouring sand into his ears. doctor wallace discouraged these remedies as being cruel and finally told the others to take their places in the wagon and he would try the merits of a plan he had in mind. accordingly, when they were seated, he clambered over the dash, walked along the wagon-pole, and suddenly plumped himself down upon the horse's back. then away they went, john gilpin like, doctor wallace's coat-tails and hair streaming out behind. there was no more balking in the course of the trip, and no one (save, possibly, the horse) had any twinges of conscience to keep him awake that night. the incident is brimful of pedagogy in that it shows that, in order to cure a horse of an attack of balking, you have but to distract his mind from his balking and get him to thinking of something else. before this occurrence taught me the better way, i was quite prone, in dealing with a balking boy, to hold his mind upon the subject of balking. i told him how unseemly it was, how humiliated his father and mother would be, how he could not grow up to be a useful citizen if he yielded to such tantrums; in short, i ran the gamut of all the pedagogical bromides, and so kept his mind centred upon balking. now that i have learned better, i strive to divert his mind to something eke, and may ask him to go upon some pleasant errand that he may gain some new experiences. when he returns he has forgotten that he was balking and recounts his experiences most delightfully. ed was one of the balkiest boys i ever had in my school. his attacks would often last for days, and the more attention you paid to him the worse he balked. in the midst of one of these violent and prolonged attacks a lady came to school who, in the kindness of her generous nature, was proposing to give a boy joe (now a city alderman) a christmas present of a new hat. she came to invoke my aid in trying to discover the size of joe's head. i readily undertook the task, which loomed larger and larger as i came fully to realize that i was the sole member of the committee of ways and means. in my dire perplexity i saw ed grouching along the hall. calling him to one side, i explained to the last detail the whole case, and confessed that i did not know how to proceed. at once his face brightened, and he readily agreed to make the discovery for me; and in half an hour i had the information i needed and ed's face was luminous. yes, joe got the hat and ed quit balking. if doctor wallace had not gone to marathon that day i can scarcely imagine what might have happened to ed; and joe might not have received a new hat. i have often wondered whether a horse has a sense of humor. i know a boy has, and i very strongly suspect that the horse has. it was one of my tasks in boyhood to take the horses down to the creek for water. among others we had a roan two-year-old colt that we called dick, and even yet i think of him as quite capable of laughter at some of his own mischievous pranks. one day i took him to water, dispensing with the formalities of a bridle, and riding him down through the orchard with no other habiliments than a rope halter. in the orchard were several trees of the bellflower variety, whose branches sagged near to the ground. dick was going along very decorously and sedately, as if he were studying the golden text or something equally absorbing, when, all at once, some spirit of mischief seemed to possess him and away he bolted, willy-nilly, right under the low-hanging branches of one of those trees. of course, i was raked fore and aft, and, while i did not imitate the example of absalom, i afforded a fairly good imitation, with the difference that, through many trials and tribulations, i finally reached the ground. needless to say that i was a good deal of a wreck, with my clothing much torn and my hands and face not only much torn but also bleeding. after relieving himself of his burden, dick meandered on down to the creek in leisurely fashion, where i came upon him in due time enjoying a lunch of grass. walking toward the creek, sore in body and spirit, i fully made up my mind to have a talk with that colt that he would not soon forget. he had put shame upon me, and i determined to tell him so. but when i came upon him looking so lamblike in his innocence, and when i imagined that i heard him chuckle at my plight, my resolution evaporated, and i realized that in a trial of wits he had got the better of me. moreover, i conceded right there that he had a right to laugh, and especially when he saw me so superlatively scrambled. he had beaten me on my own ground and convicted me of knowing less than a horse, so i could but yield the palm to him with what grace i could command. many a time since that day have i been unhorsed, and by a mere boy who laughed at my discomfiture. but i learned my lesson from dick and have always tried, though grimly, to applaud the victor in the tournament of wits. only so could i hold the respect of the boy, not to mention my own. if a boy sets a trap for me and i walk into it, well, if he doesn't laugh at me he isn't much of a boy; and if i can't laugh with him i am not much of a schoolmaster. chapter vi lanterns i may be mistaken, but my impression is that "the light of the world," by holman hunt, is the only celebrated picture in the world of which there are two originals. one of these may be seen at oxford and the other in st. paul's, london. neither is a copy of the other, and yet they are both alike, so far as one may judge without having them side by side. the picture represents christ standing at a door knocking, with a lantern in one hand from which light is streaming. when i think of a lantern the mind instantly flashes to this picture, to diogenes and his lantern, and to the old tin lantern with its perforated cylinder which i used to carry out to the barn to arrange the bed-chambers for the horses. all my life have i been hearing folks speak of the association of ideas as if one idea could conjure up innumerable others. the lantern that i carried to the barn never could have been associated with diogenes if i had not read of the philosopher, nor with the picture at oxford if i had never seen or heard of it. in order that we have association of ideas, we must first have the ideas, according to my way of thinking. thus it chanced that when i came upon some reference to holman hunt and his great masterpiece, my mind glanced over to the cynical philosopher and his lantern. the more i ponder over that lantern the more puzzled i become as to its real significance. the popular notion is that it is meant to show how difficult it was in his day to find an honest man. but popular conceptions are sometimes superficial ones, and if diogenes was the philosopher we take him to have been there must have been more to that lantern than the mere eccentricity of the man who carried it. if we could go back of the lantern we might find the cynic's definition of honesty, and that would be worth knowing. back home we used to say that an honest man is one who pays his debts and has due respect for property rights. perhaps diogenes had gone more deeply into the matter of paying debts as a mark of honesty than those who go no further in their thinking than the grocer, the butcher, and the tax-man. this all tends to set me thinking of my own debts and the possibility of full payment. i'm just a schoolmaster and people rather expect me to be somewhat visionary or even fantastic in my notions. but, with due allowance for my vagaries, i cannot rid myself of the feeling that i am deeply in debt to somebody for the venus de milo. she has the reputation of being the very acme of sculpture, and certainly the parisians so regard her or they would not pay her such a high tribute in the way of space and position. she is the focus of that whole wonderful gallery. no one has ever had the boldness to give her a place in the market quotations, but i can regale myself with her beauty for a mere pittance. this pittance does not at all cancel my indebtedness, and i come away feeling that i still owe something to somebody, without in the least knowing who it is or how i am to pay. i can't even have the poor satisfaction of making proper acknowledgment to the sculptor. i can acknowledge my obligation to michael angelo for the sistine ceiling, but that doesn't cancel my indebtedness by any means. it took me fifteen years to find the cumaean sibyl. i had seen a reproduction of this lady in some book, and had become much interested in her generous physique, her brawny arms, her wide-spreading toes, and her look of concentration as she delves into the mysteries of the massive volume before her. naturally i became curious as to the original, and wondered if i should ever meet her face to face. then one day i was lying on my back on a wooden bench in the sistine chapel, having duly apologized for my violation of the conventions, when, wonder of wonders, there was the cumaean sibyl in full glory right before my eyes, and the quest of all those years was ended in triumph. true, the sibyl does not compare in greatness with the "creation of adam" in one of the central panels, but for all that i was glad to have her definitely localized. i have never got it clearly figured out just how the letters of the alphabet were evolved, nor who did the work, but i go right on using them as if i had evolved them myself. they seem to be my own personal property, and i jostle them about quite careless of the fact that some one gave them to me. i can't see how i could get on without them, and yet i have never admitted any obligation to their author. the same is true of the digits. i make constant use of them, and sometimes even abuse them, as if i had a clear title to them. i have often wondered who worked out the table of logarithms, and have thought how much more agreeable life has been for many people because of his work. i know my own debt to him is large, and i dare say many others have a like feeling. even the eighth-grade boys in the castle road school, london, share this feeling, doubtless, for in a test in arithmetic that i saw there i noted that in four of the twelve problems set for solution they had permission to use their table of logarithms. they probably got home earlier for supper by their use of this table. i hereby make my humble apologies to mr. thomas a. edison for my thoughtlessness in not writing to him before this to thank him for his many acts of kindness to me. i have been exceedingly careless in the matter. i owe him for the comfort and convenience of this beautiful electric light, and yet have never mentioned the matter to him. he has a right to think me an ingrate. i have been so busy enjoying the gifts he has sent me that i have been negligent of the giver. as i think of all my debts to scientists, inventors, artists, poets, and statesmen, and consider how impossible it is for me to pay all my debts to all these, try as i may, i begin to see how difficult it was for diogenes to find a man who paid all his debts in full. hence, the lantern. it seems to me that, of the varieties of late potatoes the carmen is the premier. part of the charm of hoeing potatoes lies in anticipating the joys of the potato properly baked. charles lamb may write of his roast pig, and the epicures among the ancients may expatiate upon the glories of a dish of peacock's tongues and their other rare and costly edibles, but they probably never knew to what heights one may ascend in the scale of gastronomic joys in the immediate presence of a baked carmen. when it is broken open the steam ascends like incense from an altar, while at the magic touch the snowy, flaky substance billows forth upon the plate in a drift that would inspire the pen of a poet. the further preliminaries amount to a ceremony. there can be, there must be no haste. the whole summer lies back of this moment. there on the plate are weeks of golden sunshine, interwoven with the singing of birds and the fragrance of flowers; and it were sacrilege to become hurried at the consummation. when the meat has been made fine the salt and pepper are applied, deliberately, daintily, and then comes the butter, like the golden glow of sunset upon a bank of flaky clouds. the artist tries in vain to rival this blending of colors and shades. but the supreme moment and the climax come when the feast is glorified and set apart by its baptism of cream. at such a moment the sense of my indebtedness to the man who developed the carmen becomes most acute. if the leaders of contending armies could sit together at this table and join in this gracious ceremony, their rancor and enmity would cease, the protocol would be signed, and there would ensue a proclamation of peace. then the whole world would recognize its debt to the man who produced this potato. having eaten the peace-producing potato, i feel strengthened to make another trial at an interpretation of that lantern. i do not know whether diogenes had any acquaintance with the decalogue, but have my doubts. in fact, history gives us too few data concerning his attainments for a clear exposition of his character. but one may hazard a guess that he was looking for a man who would not steal, but could not find him. in a sense that was a high compliment to the people of his day, for there is a sort of stealing that takes rank among the fine arts. in fact, stealing is the greatest subject that is taught in the school. i cannot recall a teacher who did not encourage me to strive for mastery in this art. every one of them applauded my every success in this line. one of my early triumphs was reciting "horatius at the bridge," and my teacher almost smothered me with praise. i simply took what macaulay had written and made it my own. i had some difficulty in making off with the conjugation of the greek verb, but the more i took of it the more my teacher seemed pleased. all along the line i have been encouraged to appropriate what others have produced and to take joy in my pilfering. mr. carnegie has lent his sanction to this sort of thing by fostering libraries. shakespeare was arrested for stealing a deer, but extolled for stealing the plots of "romeo and juliet," "comedy of errors," and others of his plays. it seems quite all right to steal ideas, or even thoughts, and this may account again for the old man's lantern. but, even so, it would seem quite iconoclastic to say that education is the process of reminding people of their debts and of training them to steal. chapter vii complete living in my quiet way i have been making inquiries among my acquaintances for a long time, trying to find out what education really is. as a schoolmaster i must try to make it appear that i know. in fact, i am quite a sir oracle on the subject of education in my school. but, in the quiet of my den, after the day's work is done, i often long for some one to come in and tell me just what it is. i am fairly conversant with the multiplication table and can distinguish between active and passive verbs, but even with these attainments i somehow feel that i have not gone to the extreme limits of the meaning of education. in reality, i don't know what it is or what it is for. i do wish that the man who says in his book that education is a preparation for complete living would come into this room right now, sit down in that chair, and tell me, man to man, what complete living is. i want to know and think i have a right to know. besides, he has no right to withhold this information from me. he had no right to get me all stirred up with his definition, and then go away and leave me dangling in the air. if he were here i'd ask him a few pointed questions. i'd ask him to tell me just how the fact that seven times nine is sixty-three is connected up with complete living. i'd want him to explain, too, what the binomial theorem has to do with complete living, and also the dative of reference. i got the notion, when i was struggling with that binomial theorem, that it would ultimately lead on to fame or fortune; but it hasn't done either, so far as i can make out. there was a time when i could solve an equation of three unknown quantities, and could even jimmy a quantity out from under a radical sign, and had the feeling that i was quite a fellow. then one day i went into a bookstore to buy a book. i had quite enough money to pay for one, and had somehow got the notion that a boy of my attainments ought to have a book. but, in the presence of the blond chap behind the counter, i was quite abashed, for i did not in the least know what book i wanted. i knew it wasn't a bible, for we had one at home, but further than that i could not go. now, if knowing how to buy a book is a part of complete living, then, in that blond presence, i was hopelessly adrift. i had been taught that gambling is wrong, but there was a situation where i had to take a chance or show the white feather. of course, i took the chance and was relieved of my money by a blond who may or may not have been able to solve radicals. i shall not give the title of the book i drew in that lottery, for this is neither the time nor the place for confessions. i was a book-agent for one summer, but am trying to live it down. hoping to sell a copy of the book whose glowing description i had memorized, i called at the home of a wealthy farmer. the house was spacious and embowered in beautiful trees and shrubbery. there was a noble driveway that led up from the country road, and everything betokened great prosperity. once inside the house, i took a survey of the fittings and could see at once that the farmer had lavished money upon the home to make it distinctive in the neighborhood as a suitable background for his wife and daughters. the piano alone must have cost a small fortune, and it was but one of the many instruments to be seen. there were carpets, rugs, and curtains in great profusion, and a bewildering array of all sorts of bric-a-brac. in time the father asked one of the daughters to play, and she responded with rather unbecoming alacrity. what she played i shall never know, but it seemed to me to be a five-finger exercise. whatever it was, it was not music. i lost interest at once and so had time to make a more critical inspection of the decorations. what i saw was a battle royal. there was the utmost lack of harmony. the rugs fought the carpets, and both were at the throats of the curtains. then the wall-paper joined in the fray, and the din and confusion was torture to the spirit. even the furniture caught the spirit of discord and made fierce attacks upon everything else in the room. the reds, and yellows, and blues, and greens whirled and swirled about in such a dizzy and belligerent fashion that i wondered how the people ever managed to escape nervous prostration. but the daughter went right on with the five-finger exercise as if nothing else were happening. i shall certainly cite this case when the man comes in to explain what he means by complete living. this all reminds me of the man of wealth who thought it incumbent upon him to give his neighbors some benefit of his money in the way of pleasure. so he went to europe and bought a great quantity of marble statuary and had the pieces placed in the spacious grounds about his home. when the opening day came there ensued much suppressed tittering and, now and then, an uncontrollable guffaw. diana, venus, vulcan, apollo, jove, and mercury had evidently stumbled into a convention of nymphs, satyrs, fairies, sprites, furies, harpies, gargoyles, giants, pygmies, muses, and fates. the result was bedlam. parenthetically, i have often wondered how much money it cost that man to make the discovery that he was not a connoisseur of art, and also what process of education might have fitted him for a wise expenditure of all that money. so i go on wondering what education is, and nobody seems quite willing to tell me. i bought some wall-paper once, and when it had been hung there was so much laughter at my taste, or lack of it, that, in my chagrin, i selected another pattern to cover up the evidence of my ignorance. but that is expensive, and a schoolmaster can ill afford such luxurious ignorance. people were unkind enough to say that the bare wall would have been preferable to my first selection of paper, i was made conscious that complete living was impossible so long as that paper was visible. but even when the original had been covered up i looked at the wall suspiciously to see whether it would show through as a sort of subdued accusation against me. i don't pretend to know whether taste in the selection of wall-paper is inherent or acquired. if it can be acquired, then i wonder, again, just how cube root helps it along. i don't know what education is, but i do know that it is expensive. i had some pictures in my den that seemed well enough till i came to look at some others, and then they seemed cheap and inadequate. i tried to argue myself out of this feeling, but did not succeed. as a result, the old pictures have been supplanted by new ones, and i am poorer in consequence. but, in spite of my depleted purse, i take much pleasure in my new possessions and feel that they are indications of progress. i wonder, though, how long it will be till i shall want still other and better ones. education may be a good thing, but it does increase and multiply one's wants. then, in a brief time, these wants become needs, and there you have perpetual motion. when the agent came to me first to try to get me interested in an encyclopaedia i could scarce refrain from smiling. but later on i began to want an encyclopaedia, and now the one i have ranks as a household necessity the same as bathtub, coffee-pot, and tooth-brush. but, try as i may, i can't clearly distinguish between wants and needs. i see a thing that i want, and the very next day i begin to wonder how i can possibly get on without it. this must surely be the psychology of show-windows and show-cases. if i didn't see the article i should feel no want of it, of course. but as soon as i see it i begin to want it, and then i think i need it. the county fair is a great psychological institution, because it causes people to want things and then to think they need them. the worst of it is the less able i am to buy a thing the more i want it and seem to need it. i'd like to have money enough to make an experiment on myself just to see if i could ever reach the point, as did the caliph, where the only want i'd have would be a want. possibly, that's what the man means by complete living. i wonder. chapter viii my speech for some time i have had it in mind to make a speech. i don't know what i would say nor where i could possibly find an audience, but, in spite of all that, i feel that i'd like to try myself out on a speech. i can't trace this feeling back to its source. it may have started when i heard a good speech, somewhere, or, it may have started when i heard a poor one. i can't recall. when i hear a good speech i feel that i'd like to do as well; and, when i hear a poor one, i feel that i'd like to do better. the only thing that is settled, as yet, about this speech that i want to make is the subject, and even that is not my own. it is just near enough my own, however, to obviate the use of quotation-marks. the hardest part of the task of writing or speaking is to gain credit for what some one else has said or written, and still be able to omit quotation-marks. that calls for both mental and ethical dexterity of a high order. but to the speech. the subject is dialectic efficiency--without quotation-marks, be it noted. the way of it is this: i have been reading, or, rather, trying to read the masterly book by doctor fletcher durell, whose title is "fundamental sources of efficiency." this is one of the most recondite books that has come from the press in a generation, and it is no reflection upon the book for me to say that i have been trying to read it. it is so big, so deep, so high, and so wide that i can only splash around in it a bit. but "the water's fine." at any rate, i have been dipping into this book quite a little, and that is how i came upon the caption of my speech. of course, i get the word "efficiency" from the title of the book, and, besides, everybody uses that word nowadays. then, the author of this book has a chapter on "dialectic," and so i combine these two words and thus get rid of the quotation-marks. and that certainly is an imposing subject for a speech. if it should ever be printed on a programme, it would prove awe-inspiring. next to making a good speech, i'd like to be skilled in sleight-of-hand affairs. i'd like to fish up a rabbit from the depths of an old gentleman's silk tile, or extract a dozen eggs from a lady's hand-bag, or transmute a canary into a goldfish. i'd like to see the looks of wonder on the faces of the audience and hear them gasp. the difficulty with such a subject as i have chosen, though, is to fill the frame. i went into a shop in paris once to make some small purchase, expecting to find a great emporium, but, to my surprise, found that all the goods were in the show-window. that's one trouble with my subject--all the goods seem to be in the show-window. but, i'll do the best i can with it, even if i am compelled to pilfer from the pages of the book. in the introduction of the speech i shall become expansive upon the term _dialectic_, and try to impress my hearers (if there are any) with my thorough acquaintance with all things which the term suggests. if i continue expatiating upon the word long enough they may come to think that i actually coined the word, for i shall not emphasize doctor durell especially--just enough to keep my soul untarnished. in a review of this book one man translates the first word "luck." i don't like his word and for two reasons: in the first place, it is a short word, and everybody knows that long words are better for speechmaking purposes. if he had used the word "accidental" or "incidental" i'd think more of his translation and of his review. i'm going to use my word as if doctor durell had said _incidental_. so much for the introduction; now for the speech. from this point forward i shall draw largely upon the book but shall so turn and twist what the doctor says as to make it seem my own. with something of a flourish, i shall tell how in the year a young chemist, named perkin, while trying to produce quinine synthetically, hit upon the process of producing aniline dyes. his incidental discovery led to the establishment of the artificial-dye industry, and we have here an example of dialectic efficiency. this must impress my intelligent and cultured auditors, and they will be wondering if i can produce another illustration equally good. i can, of course, for this book is rich in illustrations. i can see, as it were, the old fellow on the third seat, who has been sitting there as stiff and straight as a ramrod, limber up just a mite, and with my next point i hope to induce him to lean forward an inch, at least, out of the perpendicular. then i shall proceed to recount to them how christopher columbus, in an effort to circumnavigate the globe and reach the eastern coast of asia, failed in this undertaking, but made a far greater achievement in the discovery of america. if, at this point, the old man is leaning forward two or three inches instead of one, i may ask, in dramatic style, where we should all be to-day if columbus had reached asia instead of america--in other words, if this principle of dialectic efficiency had not been in full force. just here, to give opportunity for possible applause, i shall take the handkerchief from my pocket with much deliberation, unfold it carefully, and wipe my face and forehead as an evidence that dispensing second-hand thoughts is a sweat-producing process. then, in a sort of sublimated frenzy, i shall fairly deluge them with illustrations, telling how the establishment of rural mail-routes led to improved roads and these, in turn, to consolidated schools and better conditions of living in the country; how the potato-beetle, which seems at first to be a scourge, was really a blessing in disguise in that it set farmers to studying improved methods resulting in largely increased crops, and how the scale has done a like service for fruit-growers; how a friend of mine was drilling for oil and found water instead, and now has an artesian well that supplies water in great abundance, and how one mr. hellriegel, back in , made the incidental discovery that leguminous plants fixate nitrogen, and, hence, our fields of clover, alfalfa, cow-peas, and soybeans. it will not seem out of place if i recall to them how the revolution gave us washington, the adamses, hancock, madison, franklin, jefferson, and hamilton; how slavery gave us clay, calhoun, and webster; and how the civil war gave us lincoln, seward, stanton, grant, lee, sherman, sheridan, and "stonewall" jackson. if there should, by chance, be any teachers present i'll probably enlarge upon this historical phase of the subject if i can think of any other illustrations. i shall certainly emphasize the fact that the incidental phases of school work may prove to be more important than the objects directly aimed at, that while the teacher is striving to inculcate a knowledge of arithmetic she may be inculcating manhood and womanhood, and that the by-products of her teaching may become world-wide influences. as a peroration, i shall expand upon the subject of pleasure as an incidental of work--showing how the mere pleasure-seeker never finds what he is seeking, but that the man who works is the one who finds pleasure. i think i shall be able to find some apt quotation from emerson before the time for the speech comes around. if so, i shall use it so as to take their minds off the fact that i am taking the speech from doctor durell's book. chapter ix school-teaching the first school that i ever tried to teach was, indeed, fearfully and wonderfully taught. the teaching was of the sort that might well be called elemental. if there was any pedagogy connected with the work, it was purely accidental. i was not conscious either of its presence or its absence, and so deserve neither praise nor censure. i had one pupil who was nine years my senior, and i did not even know that he was retarded. i recall quite distinctly that he had a luxuriant crop of chin-whiskers but even these did not disturb the procedure of that school. we accepted him as he was, whiskers included, and went on our complacent way. he was blind in one eye and somewhat deaf, but no one ever thought of him as abnormal or subnormal. even if we had known these words we should have been too polite to apply them to him. in fact, we had no black-list, of any sort, in that school. i have never been able to determine whether the absence of such a list was due to ignorance, or innocence, or both. so long as he found the school an agreeable place in which to spend the winter, and did not interfere with the work of others, i could see no good reason why he should not be there and get what he could from the lessons in spelling, geography, and arithmetic. i do not mention grammar for that was quite beyond him. the agreement of subject and verb was one of life's great mysteries to him. so i permitted him to browse around in such pastures as seemed finite to him, and let the infinite grammar go by default so far as he was concerned. i have but the most meagre acquaintance with the pedagogical dicta of the books--a mere bowing acquaintance--but, at that time, i had not even been introduced to any of these. but, as the saying goes, "the lord takes care of fools and children," and, so, somehow, by sheer blind luck, i instinctively veered away from the procrustean bed idea, and found some work for my bewhiskered disciple that connected with his native dispositions. had any one told me i was doing any such things i think i should, probably, have asked him how to spell the words he was using. i only knew that this man-child was there yearning for knowledge, and i was glad to share my meagre store of crumbs with him. his gratitude for my small gifts was really pathetic, and right there i learned the joys of the teacher. that man sought me out on our way home from school and asked questions that would have puzzled socrates, but forgot my ignorance of hard questions in his joy at my answers of easy ones. when some light would break in upon him he cavorted about me like a glad dog, and became a second columbus, discovering a new world. i almost lose patience with myself, at times, when i catch myself preening my feathers before some pedagogical mirror, as if i were getting ready to appear in public as an accredited schoolmaster. at such a time, i long to go back to the country road and saunter along beside some pupil, either with or without whiskers, and give him of my little store without rules or frills and with no pomp or parade. in that little school at the crossroads we never made any preparation for some possible visitor who might come in to survey us or apply some efficiency test, or give us a rating either as individuals or as a school. we were too busy and happy for that. we kept right on at our work with our doors and our hearts wide open for every good thing that came our way, whether knowledge or people. as i have said, our work was elemental. i am glad i came across this little book of william james, "on some of life's ideals," for it takes me back, inferentially, to that elemental school, especially in this paragraph which says: "life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. but we of the highly educated classes (so-called) have most of us got far, far away from nature. we are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively and to overlook the common. we are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys." i wish i might go home from school one evening by way of the top of mt. vesuvius, another by way of mt. rigi, and, another, by way of lauterbrunnen. then the next evening i should like to spend an hour or two along the borders of yellowstone canyon, and the next, watch an eruption or two of old faithful geyser. then, on still another evening, i'd like to ride for two hours on top of a bus in london. i'd like to have these experiences as an antidote for emptiness. it would prepare me far better for to-morrow work than pondering johnny's defections, or his grades, whether high or low, or marking silly papers with marks that are still sillier. i like walt whitman because he was such a sublime loafer. his loafing gave him time to grow big inside, and so, he had big elemental thoughts that were good for him and good for me when i think them over after him. if i should ever get a position in a normal school i'd want to give a course in william j. locke's "the beloved vagabond," so as to give the young folks a conception of big elemental teaching. if i were giving a course in ethics, i'd probably select another book, but, in pedagogy, i'd certainly include that one. i'd lose some students, to be sure, for some of them would be shocked; but a person who is not big enough to profit by reading that book never ought to teach school--i mean for the school's sake. if we could only lose the consciousness of the fact that we are schoolmasters for a few hours each day, it would be a great help to us and to our boys and girls. i am quite partial to the "madonna of the chair," and wish i might visit the pitti gallery frequently just to gaze at her. she is so wholesome and gives one the feeling that a big soul looks out through her eyes. she would be a superb teacher. she would fill the school with her presence and still do it all unconsciously. the centre of the room would be where she happened to be. she would never be mistaken for one of the pupils. her pupils would learn arithmetic but the arithmetic would be laden with her big spirit, and that would be better for them than the arithmetic could possibly be. if i had to be a woman i'd want to be such as this madonna--serene, majestic, and big-souled. i have often wondered whether bigness of soul can be cultivated, and my optimism inclines to a vote in the affirmative. i spent a part of one summer in the pine woods far away from the haunts of men. when i had to leave this sylvan retreat it required eleven hours by stage to reach the railway-station. there for some weeks i lived in a log cabin, accompanied by a cook and a professional woodsman. i was not there to camp, to fish, or to loaf, and yet i did all these. there were some duties and work connected with the enterprise and these gave zest to the fishing and the loafing. giant trees, space, and sky were my most intimate associates, and they told me only of big things. they had never a word to say of styles of clothing or becoming shades of neckwear or hosiery. in all that time i was never disturbed by the number and diversity of spoons and forks beside my plate at the dinner-table. many a noble meal i ate as i sat upon a log supported in forked stakes, and many a big thought did i glean from the talk of loggers about me in their picturesque costumes. in the evening i sat upon a great log in front of the cabin or a friendly stump, and forgot such things as hammocks and porch-swings. instead of gazing at street-lamps only a few yards away i was gazing at stars millions of miles away, and, somehow, the soul seemed to gain freedom. and i had luxury, too. i had a room with bath. the bath was at the stream some fifty yards away, but such discrepancies are minor affairs in the midst of such big elemental things as were all about me. my mattress was of young cherry shoots, and never did king have a more royal bed, or ever such refreshing sleep. and, while i slept, i grew inside, for the soft music of the pines lulled me to rest, and the subdued rippling of my bath-stream seemed to wash my soul clean. when i arose i had no bad taste in my mouth or in my soul, and each morning had for me the glory of a resurrection. my trees were there to bid me good morning, the big spaces spoke to me in their own inspiriting language, and the big sun, playing hide-and-seek among the great boles of the trees as he mounted from the horizon, gave me a panorama unrivalled among the scenes of earth. when i returned to what men called civilization, i experienced a poignant longing for my big trees, my sky, and my spaces, and felt that i had exchanged them for many things that are petty and futile. if my school were only out in the heart of that big forest, i feel that my work would be more effective and that i would not have to potter about among little things to obey the whims of convention and the dictates of technicalities, but that the soul would be free to revel in the truth that sky and space proclaim. i do hope i may never know so much about technical pedagogy that i shall not know anything else. this may be what those people mean who speak of the "revolt of the ego." chapter x beefsteak i am just now quite in the mood to join the band; i mean the vocational-education band. the excitement has carried me off my feet. i can't endure the looks of suspicion or pity that i see on the faces of my colleagues. they stare at me as if i were wearing a tie or a hat or a coat that is a bit below standard. i want to seem, if not be, modern and up-to-date, and not odd and peculiar. so i shall join the band. i am not caring much whether i beat the drum, carry the flag, or lead the trick-bear. i may even ride in the gaudily painted wagon behind a spotted pony and call out in raucous tones to all and sundry to hurry around to the main tent to get their education before the rush. in times past, when these vocational folks have piped unto me i have not danced; but i now see the error of my ways and shall proceed at once to take dancing lessons. when these folks lead in the millennium i want to be sitting well up in front; and when they get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow i want to participate in the distribution. i do hope, though, that i may not exhaust my resources on the band and have none left for the boys and girls. i hope i may not imitate mark twain's steamboat that stopped dead still when the whistle blew, because blowing the whistle required all the steam. i suspect that, like the irishman, i shall have to wear my new boots awhile before i can get them on, for this new role is certain to entail many changes in my plans and in my ways of doing things. i can see that it will be a wrench for me to think of the boys and girls as pedagogical specimens and not persons. i have contracted the habit of thinking of them as persons, and it will not be easy to come to thinking of them as mere objects to practise on. the folks in the hospital speak of their patients as "cases," but i'd rather keep aloof from the hospital plan in my schoolmastering. but, being a member of the band, i suppose that i'll feel it my duty to conform and do my utmost to help prove that our cult has discovered the great and universal panacea, the balm in gilead. as a member of the band, in good and regular standing, i shall find myself saying that the school should have the boys and girls pursue such studies as will fit them for their life-work. this has a pleasing sound. now, if i can only find out, somehow, what the life-work of each one of my pupils is to be, i'll be all right, and shall proceed to fit each one out with his belongings. i have asked them to tell me what their life-work is to be, but they tell me they do not know. so i suspect that i must visit all their parents in order to get this information. until i get this information i cannot begin on my course of study. if their parents cannot tell me i hardly know what i shall do, unless i have recourse to their maiden aunts. they ought to know. but if they decline to tell i must begin on a long series of guesses, unless, in the meantime, i am endowed with omniscience. this whole plan fascinates me; i dote upon it. it is so pliable, so dreamy, and so opalescent that i can scarce restrain my enthusiasm. but if i should fit one of my boys out with the equipment necessary for a blacksmith, and then he should become a preacher, i'd find the situation embarrassing. my reputation as a prophet would certainly decline. if i could know that this boy is looking forward to the ministry as his life-work, the matter would be simple. i'd proceed to fit him out with a fire-proof suit of greek, hebrew, and theology and have the thing done. but even then some of my colleagues might protest on the assumption that greek and hebrew are not vocational studies. the preacher might assert that they are vocational for his work, in which case i'd find myself in the midst of an argument. i know a young man who is a student in a college of medicine. he is paying his way by means of his music. he both plays and sings, and can thus pay his bills. in the college he studies chemistry, anatomy, and the like. i'm trying to figure out whether or not, in his case, either his music or his chemistry is vocational. i have been perusing the city directory to find out how many and what vocations there are, that i may plan my course of study accordingly when i discover what the life-work of each of my pupils is to be. if i find that one boy expects to be an undertaker he ought to take the dead languages, of course. if another boy expects to be a jockey he might take these same languages with the aid of a "pony." if a girl decides upon marriage as her vocation, i'll have her take home economics, of course, but shall have difficulty in deciding upon her other studies. if i omit latin, history, and algebra, she may reproach me later on because of these omissions. she may find that such studies as these are essential to success in the vocation of wife and mother. she may have a boy of her own who will invoke her aid in his quest for the value of x, and a mother hesitates to enter a plea of ignorance to her own child. i can fit out the dancing-master easily enough, but am not so certain about the barber, the chauffeur, and the aviator. the aviator would give me no end of trouble, especially if i should deem it necessary to teach him by the laboratory method. then, again, if one boy decides to become a pharmacist, i may find it necessary to attend night classes in this subject myself in order to meet the situation with a fair degree of complacency. nor do i see my way clear in providing for the steeple-climber, the equilibrist, the railroad president, or the tea-taster. i'll probably have my troubles, too, with the novel-writer, the poet, the politician, and the bareback rider. but i must manage somehow if i hope to retain my membership in the band. i see that i shall have to serve quite an apprenticeship in the band before i write my treatise on the subject of pedagogical predestination. the world needs that essay, and i must get around to it just as soon as possible. of course, that will be a great step beyond the present plan of finding out what a boy expects to do, and then teaching him accordingly. my predestination plan contemplates the process of arranging such a course of study for him as will make him what we want him to be. a naturalist tells me that when a queen bee dies the swarm set to work making another queen by feeding one of the common working bees some queen stuff. he failed to tell me just what this queen stuff is. that process of producing a queen bee is what gave me the notion as to my treatise. if the parents want their boy to become a lawyer i shall feed him lawyer stuff; if a preacher, then preacher stuff, and so on. this will necessitate a deal of research work, for i shall have to go back into history, first of all, to find out the course of study that produced newton, humboldt, darwin, shakespeare, dante, edison, clara barton, and the rest of them. if a roast-beef diet is responsible for shakespeare, surely we ought to produce another shakespeare, considering the excellence of the cattle we raise. i can easily discover the constituent elements of the beef pudding of which samuel johnson was so fond by writing to the old cheshire cheese in london. of course, this plan of mine seems not to take into account the lord's work to any large extent. but that seems to be the way of us vocationalists. we seem to think we can do certain things in spite of what the lord has or has not done. the one danger that i foresee in all this work that i have planned is that it may produce overstimulation. some one was telling me that the trees on the embankment there in london are dying of arboreal insomnia. the light of the sun keeps them awake all day, and the electric lights keep them awake all night. so the poor things are dying from lack of sleep. macbeth had some trouble of that sort, too, as i recall it. i'm going to hold on to the vocational stimulation unless i find it is producing pedagogical insomnia. then i'll resign from the band and take a long nap. i'll continue to advocate pudding, pastry, and pie until i find that they are not producing the sort of men and women the world needs, and then i'll beat an inglorious retreat and again espouse the cause of orthodox beefsteak. chapter xi freedom i have often wondered what conjunction of the stars caused me to become a schoolmaster, if, indeed, the stars, lucky or otherwise, had anything to do with it. it may have been the salary that lured me, for thirty-five dollars a month bulks large on a boy's horizon. possibly the fact that in those days there was no anteroom to the teaching business may have been the deciding factor. one had but to exchange his hickory shirt for a white one, and the trick was done. there was not even a fence between the corn-field and the schoolhouse. i might just as easily have been a preacher but for the barrier in the shape of a theological seminary, or a hod-carrier but for the barrier of learning how. as it was, i could draw my pay for husking corn on saturday night, and begin accumulating salary as a schoolmaster on monday. the plan was simplicity itself, and that may account for my choice of a vocation. i have sometimes tried to imagine myself a preacher, but with poor success. the sermon would bother me no little, to make no mention of the other functions. i think i never could get through with a marriage ceremony, and at a christening i'd be on nettles all the while, fearing the baby would cry and thus disturb the solemnity of the occasion and of the preacher. i'd want to take the baby into my own arms and have a romp with him--and so would forget about the baptizing. in casting about for a possible text for this impossible preacher, i have found only one that i think i might do something with. hence, my preaching would endure but a single week, and even at that we'd have to have a song service on sunday evening in lieu of a sermon. my one text would be: "ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." i do not know how big truth is, but it must be quite extensive if science, mathematics, history, and literature are but small parts of it. i have never explored these parts very far inland, but they seem to my limited gaze to extend a long distance before me; and when i get to thinking that each of these is but a part of something that is called truth i begin to feel that truth is a pretty large affair. i suspect the text means that the more of this truth we know the greater freedom we have. my friend brown has an automobile, and sometimes he takes me out riding. on one of these occasions we had a puncture, with the usual attendant circumstances. while brown made the needful repairs, i sat upon the grassy bank. the passers-by probably regarded me as a lazy chap who disdained work of all sorts, and perhaps thought of me as enjoying myself while brown did the work. in this they were grossly mistaken, for brown was having the good time, while i was bored and uncomfortable. why, brown actually whistled as he repaired that puncture. he had freedom because he knew which tool to use, where to find it, and how to use it. but there i sat in ignorance and thraldom--not knowing the truth about the tools or the processes. in the presence of that episode i felt like one in a foreign country who is ignorant of the language, while brown was the concierge who understands many languages. he knew the truth and so had freedom. i have often wondered whether men do not sometimes get drunk to win a respite from the thraldom and boredom of their ignorance of the truth. it must be a very trying experience not to understand the language that is spoken all about one. i have something of that feeling when i go into a drug-store and find myself in complete ignorance of the contents of the bottles because i cannot read the labels. i have no freedom because i do not know the truth. the dapper clerk who takes down one bottle after another with refreshing freedom relegates me to the kindergarten, and i certainly feel and act the part. i had this same feeling, too, when i was making ready to sow my little field with alfalfa. i wanted to have alfalfa growing in the field next to the road for my own pleasure and for the pleasure of the passers-by. a field of alfalfa is an ornament to any landscape, and i like to have my landscapes ornamental, even if i must pay for it in terms of manual toil. i had never even seen alfalfa seed and did not in the least know how to proceed in preparing the soil. if i ever expected to have any freedom i must first learn the truth, and a certain modicum of freedom necessarily precedes the joy of alfalfa. thus it came to pass that i set about learning the truth. i had to learn about the nature of the soil, about drainage, about the right kinds of fertilizer, and all that, before i could even hitch the team to a plough. some of this truth i gleaned from books and magazines, but more of it i obtained from my neighbor john, who lives about two hundred yards up the pike from my little place. john is a veritable encyclopedia of truth when it comes to the subject of alfalfa. there i would sit at the feet of this alfalfa gamaliel. be it said in favor of my reactions that i learned the trick of alfalfa and now have a field that is a delight to the eye. and i now feel qualified to give lessons in alfalfa culture to all and sundry, so great is my sense of freedom. i came upon a forlorn-looking woman once in a large railway-station who was in great distress. she wanted to get a train, but did not know through which gate to go nor where to obtain the necessary information. she was overburdened with luggage and a little girl was tugging at her dress and crying pitifully. that woman was as really in bondage as if she had been in prison looking out through the barred windows. when she had finally been piloted to the train the joy of freedom manifested itself in every lineament of her face. she had come to know the truth, and the truth had set her free. i know how she felt, for one night i worked for more than two hours on what, to me, was a difficult problem, and when at last i had it solved the manifestations of joy caused consternation to the family and damage to the furniture. i never was in jail for any length of time, but i think i know, from my experience with that problem, just how a prisoner feels when he is set free. the big out-of-doors must seem inexpressibly good to him. my neighbor john taught me how to spray my trees, and now, when i walk through my orchard and see the smooth trunks and pick the beautiful, smooth, perfect apples, i feel that sense of freedom that can come only through a knowledge of the truth. i haven't looked up the etymology of _grippe_, but the word itself seems to tell its own story. it seems to mean restriction, subjection, slavery. it certainly spells lack of freedom. i have seen many boys and girls who seemed afflicted with arithmetical, grammatical, and geographical grippe, and i have sought to free them from its tyranny and lead them forth into the sunlight and pure air of freedom. if i only knew just how to do this effectively i think i'd be quite reconciled to the work of a schoolmaster. chapter xii things i keep resolving and resolving to reform and lead the simple life, but something always happens that prevents the execution of my plans. when i am grubbing out willows along the ravine, the grubbing-hoe, a lunch-basket well filled, and a jug of water from the deep well up there under the trees seem to be the sum total of the necessary appliances for a life of usefulness and contentment. there is a friendly maple-tree near the scene of the grubbing activities, and an hour at noon beneath that tree with free access to the basket and the jug seems to meet the utmost demands of life. the grass is luxuriant, the shade is all-embracing, and the willows can wait. so, what additions can possibly be needed? i lie there in the shade, my hunger and thirst abundantly satisfied, and contemplate the results of my forenoon's toil with the very acme of satisfaction. there is now a large, clear space where this morning there was a jungle of willows. the willows have been grubbed out _imis sedibus_, as our friend virgil would say it, and not merely chopped off; and the thoroughness of the work gives emphasis to the satisfaction. the overalls, the heavy shoes, and the sunshade hat all belong in the picture. but the entire wardrobe costs less than the hat i wear on sunday. then the comfort of these inexpensive habiliments! i need not be fastidious in such a garb, but can loll on the grass without compunction. when i get mud upon my big shoes i simply scrape it off with a chip, and that's all there is to it. the dirt on my overalls is honest dirt, and honestly come by, and so needs no apology. i can talk to my neighbor john of the big things of life and feel no shame because of overalls. then, in the evening, when resting from my toil, i sit out under the leafy canopy and revel in the sounds that can be heard only in the country--the croaking of the frogs, the soft twittering of the birds somewhere near, yet out of sight, the cosey crooning of the chickens as they settle upon their perches for the night, and the lonely hooting of the owl somewhere in the big tree down in the pasture. i need not move from my seat nor barter my money for a concert in some majestic hall ablaze with lights when such music as this may be had for the listening. under the magic of such music the body relaxes and the soul expands. the soft breezes caress the brow, and the moon makes shimmering patterns on the grass. but when i return to the town to resume my school-mastering, then the strain begins, and then the reign of complexities is renewed. when i am fully garbed in my town clothing i find myself the possessor of nineteen pockets. what they are all for is more than i can make out. if i had them all in use i'd have to have a detective along with me to help me find things. out there on the farm two pockets quite suffice, but in the town i must have seventeen more. the difference between town and country seems to be about the difference between grubbing willows and schoolmastering. among the willows i find two pockets are all i require; but among the children i must needs have nineteen, whether i have anything in them or not. one of these seems to be designed for a college degree; another is an efficiency pocket; another a discipline pocket; another a pocket for methods; another for professional spirit; another for loyalty to all the folks who are in need of loyalty, and so on. i really do not know all the labels. when i was examined for a license to teach they counted my pockets, and, finding i had the requisite nineteen, they bestowed upon me the coveted document with something approaching _eclat_. in my teaching i become so bewildered ransacking these pockets, trying to find something that will bear some resemblance to the label, that i come near forgetting the boys and girls. but they are very nice and polite about it, and seem to feel sorry that i must look after all my pockets when i'd so much rather be teaching. out in the willow thicket i can go right on with my work without so much care or perplexity. why, i don't need to do any talking out there, and so have time to do some thinking. but here i do so much talking that neither i nor my pupils have any chance for thinking. i know it is not the right way, but, somehow, i keep on doing it. i think it must be a bad habit, but i don't do it when i am grubbing willows. i seem to get to the bottom of things out there without talking, and i can't make out why i don't do the same here in the school. out there i do things; in here i say things. i do wonder if there is any forgiveness for a schoolmaster who uses so many words and gets such meagre results. and then the words i use here are such ponderous things. they are not the sort of human, flesh-and-blood words that i use when talking to neighbor john as we sit on top of the rail fence. these all seem so like words in a book, as if i had rehearsed them in advance. it may be just the town atmosphere, but, whatever it is, i do wish i could talk to these children about decimals in the same sort of words that i use when i am talking with john. he seems to understand me, and i think they could. possibly it is just the tension of town life. i know that i seem to get keyed up as soon as i come into the town. there are so many things here, and many of them are so artificial that i seem unable to relax as i do out there where there are just frogs, and moon, and chickens, and cows. when i am here i seem to have a sort of craze for things. the shop-windows are full of things, and i seem to want all of them. i know i have no use for them, and yet i get them. my neighbor brown bought a percolator, and within a week i had one. i had gone on for years without a percolator, not even knowing about such a thing, but no sooner had brown bought one than every sound i heard seemed to be inquiring: "what is home without a percolator?" so i go on accumulating things, and my den is a veritable medley of things. they don't make me any happier, and they are a great bother. there are fifty-seven things right here in my den, and i don't need more than six or seven of them. there are twenty-two pictures, large and small, in this room, but i couldn't have named five of them had i not just counted them. why i have them is beyond my comprehension. i inveigh against the mania of people for drugs and narcotics, but my mania for things only differs in kind from theirs. i have a little book called "things of the mind," and i like to read it. now, if my mind only had as many things in it as my den, i'd be a far more agreeable associate for brown and my neighbor john. or, if i were as careful about getting things for my mind as i am in accumulating useless bric-a-brac, it would be far more to my credit. if the germs that are lurking in and about these fifty-seven things should suddenly become as large as spiders, i'd certainly be the unhappy possessor of a flourishing menagerie, and i think my progress toward the simple life would be very promptly hastened. chapter xiii targets in my work as a schoolmaster i find it well to keep my mind open and not get to thinking that my way is the only way, or even the best way. i think i learn more from my boys and girls than they learn from me, and so long as i can keep an open mind i am certain to get some valuable lessons from them. i got to telling the college chap about a hen that taught me a good lesson, and the first thing i knew i was going to school to this college youth, and he was enlightening me on the subject of animal psychology, and especially upon the trial-and-error theory. that set me wondering how many trials and errors that hen made before she finally succeeded in surmounting that fence. at any rate, the hen taught me another lesson besides the lesson of perseverance. i have a high wire fence enclosing the chicken-yard, and in order to make steady the posts to which the gate is attached, i joined them at the top by nailing a board across. the hen that taught me the lesson must be both ambitious and athletic, for time after time have i found her outside the chicken-yard. i searched diligently for the place of exit, but could not find it. so, in desperation, i determined one morning to discover how that hen gained her freedom if it took all day. so i found a comfortable seat and waited. in an hour or so the hen came out into the open and took a survey of the situation. then, presently, with skill born of experience, she sidled this way and that, advanced a little and then retreated until she found the exact location she sought, poised herself for a moment, and went sailing right over the board that connected the posts. having made this discovery, i removed the board and used wire instead, and thus reduced the hen to the plane of obedience. just as soon as the hen lacked something to aim at, she could not get over the wire barrier, and she taught me the importance of giving my pupils something to aim at. i like my boys and girls, and believe they are just as smart as any hen that ever was, and that, if i'll only supply things for them to aim at, they will go high and far. every time i see that hen i am the subject of diverse emotions. i feel half angry at myself for being so dull that a mere hen can teach me, and then i feel glad that she taught me such a useful lesson. before learning this lesson i seemed to expect my pupils to take all their school work on faith, to do it because i told them it would be good for them. but i now see there is a better way. in my boyhood days we always went to the county fair, and that was one of the real events of the year. on the morning of that day there was no occasion for any one to call me a second time. i was out of bed in a trice, at the first call, and soon had my chores done ready for the start. i had money in my pocket, too, for visions of pink lemonade, peanuts, ice-cream, candy, and colored balloons had lured me on from achievement to achievement through the preceding weeks, and thrift had claimed me for its own. so i had money because, all the while, i had been aiming at the county fair. we used to lay out corn ground with a single-shovel plough, and took great pride in marking out a straight furrow across the field. there was one man in the neighborhood who was the champion in this art, and i wondered how he could do it. so i set about watching him to try to learn his art. at either end of the field he had a stake several feet high, bedecked at the top with a white rag. this he planted at the proper distance from the preceding furrow and, in going across the field, kept his gaze fixed upon the white rag that topped the stake. with a firm grip upon the plough, and his eyes riveted upon the white signal, he moved across the field in a perfectly straight line. i had thought it the right way to keep my eyes fixed upon the plough until his practice showed me that i had pursued the wrong course. my furrows were crooked and zigzag, while his were straight. i now see that his skill came from his having something to aim at. i am trying to profit by the example of that farmer in my teaching. i'm all the while in quest of stakes and white rags to place at the other side of the field to direct the progress of the lads and lasses in a straight course, and raise their eyes away from the plough that they happen to be using. i want to keep them thinking of things that are bigger and further along than grades. the grades will come as a matter of course, if they can keep their eyes on the object across the field. i want them to be too big to work for mere grades. we never give prizes in our school, especially money prizes. it would seem rather a cheap enterprise to my fine boys and girls to get a piece of money for committing to memory the "gettysburg speech." we respect ourselves and lincoln too much for that. it would grieve me to know that one of my girls could be hired to read a book for an hour in the evening to a sick neighbor. i want her to have her pay in a better and more enduring medium than that. i'd hope she would aim at something higher than that. if i can arrange the white rag, i know the pupils will do the work. there was jim, for example, who said to his father that he just couldn't do his arithmetic, and wished he'd never have to go to school another day. when his father told me about it i began at once to hunt for a white rag. and i found it, too. we can generally find what we are looking for, if we look in dead earnest. well, the next morning there was jim in the arithmetic class along with tom and charley. i explained the absence of harry by telling them about his falling on the ice the night before and breaking his right arm. i told them how he could get on well enough with his other studies, but would have trouble with his arithmetic because he couldn't use his arm. now, tom and charley are quick in arithmetic, and i asked tom to go over to harry's after school and help with the arithmetic, and charley to go over the next day, and jim the third day. now, anybody can see that white rag fluttering at the top of the stake across the field two days ahead. so, my work was done, and i went on with my daily duties. tom reported the next day, and his report made our mouths water as he told of the good things that harry's mother had set out for them to eat. the report of charley the next day was equally alluring. then jim reported, and on his day that good mother had evidently reached the climax in culinary affairs. jim's eyes and face shone as if he had been communing with the supernals. that was the last i ever heard of jim's trouble with arithmetic. his father was eager to know how the change had been brought about, and i explained on the score of the angel-food cake and ice-cream he had had over at harry's, with no slight mention of my glorious white rag. the books, i believe, call this social co-operation, or something like that, but i care little what they call it so long as jim's all right. and he is all right. why, there isn't money enough in the bank to have brought that look to jim's face when he reported that morning, and any offer to pay him for his help to harry, either in money or school credits, would have seemed an insult. my neighbor john tells me many things about sheep and the way to drive them. he says when he is driving twenty sheep along the road he doesn't bother about the two who frisk back to the rear of the flock so long as he keeps the other eighteen going along. he says those two will join the others, all in good time. that helped me with those three boys. i knew that tom and charley would go along all right, so asked them to go over to harry's before i mentioned the matter to jim. when i did ask him he came leaping and frisking into the flock as if he were afraid we might overlook him. what a beautiful straight furrow he ploughed, too. his arithmetic work now must make the angels smile. i shall certainly mention sheep, the hen, and the white rag in my book on farm pedagogy. chapter xiv sinners i take unction to myself, sometimes, in the reflection that i have a soul to save, and in certain moments of uplift it seems to me to be worth saving. some folks probably call me a sinner, if not a dreadful sinner, and i admit the fact without controversy. i do not have at hand a list of the cardinal sins, but i suspect i might prove an alibi as to some of them. i don't get drunk; i don't swear; i go to church; and i contribute, mildly, to charity. but, for all that, i'm free to confess myself a sinner. yet, i still don't know what sin is, or what is the way of salvation either for myself or for my pupils. i grope around all the while trying to find this way. at times, i think they may find salvation while they are finding the value of _x_ in an algebraic equation, and possibly this is true. i cannot tell. if they fail to find the value of _x_, i fall to wondering whether they have sinned or the teacher that they cannot find _x_. i have attended revivals in my time, and have had good from them. in their pure and rarefied atmosphere i find myself in a state of exaltation. but i find myself in need of a continuous revival to keep me at my best. so, in my school work, i feel that i must be a revivalist or my pupils will sag back, just as i do. i find that the revival of yesterday will not suffice for to-day. like the folks of old, i must gather a fresh supply of manna each day. stale manna is not wholesome. i suspect that one of my many sins is my laziness in the matter of manna. i found the value of _x_ in the problem yesterday, and so am inclined to rest to-day and celebrate the victory. if i had to classify myself, i'd say that i am an intermittent. i eat manna one day, and then want to fast for a day or so. i suspect that's what folks mean by a besetting sin. during my fasting i find myself talking almost fluently about my skill and industry as a gatherer of manna, i suspect i am trying to make myself believe that i'm working in the manna field to-day, by keeping my mind on my achievement yesterday. that's another sin to my discredit, and another occasion for a revival. when i am fasting i do the most talking about how busy i am. if i were harvesting manna i'd not have time for so much talk. i should not need to tell how busy i am, for folks could see for themselves. i have tried to analyze this talk of mine about being so busy just to see whether i am trying to deceive myself or my neighbors. i fell to talking about this the other day to my neighbor john, and detected a faint smile on his face which i interpreted to be a query as to what i have to show for all my supposed industry. well, i changed the subject. that smile on john's face made me think of revivals. i read henderson's novel, "john percyfield," and enjoyed it so much that when i came upon his other book, "education and the larger life," i bought and read it. but it has given me much discomfort. in that book he says that it is immoral for any one to do less than his best. i can scarcely think of that statement without feeling that i ought to be sent to jail. i'm actually burdened with immorality, and find myself all the while between the "devil and the deep sea," the "devil" of work, and the "deep sea" of immorality. i suppose that's why i talk so much about being busy, trying to free myself from the charge of immorality. i think it was virgil who said _facilis descensus averno_, and i suppose mr. henderson, in his statement, is trying to save me from the inconveniences of this trip. i suppose i ought to be grateful to him for the hint, but i just can't get any great comfort in such a close situation. i know i must work or go hungry, and i can stand a certain amount of fasting, but to be stamped as immoral because i am fasting rather hurts my pride. i'd much rather have my going hungry accounted a virtue, and receive praise and bouquets. when i am in a lounging mood it isn't any fun to have some henderson come along and tell me that i am in need of a revival. a copy of "baedeker" in hand, i have gone through a gallery of statues but did not find a sinner in the entire company. the originals may have been sinners, but not these marble statues. that is some comfort. to be a sinner one must be animate at the very least. i'd rather be a sinner, even, than a mummy or a statue. st. paul wrote to timothy: "i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course, i have kept the faith." there was nothing of the mummy or the statue in him. he was just a straight-away sinful man, and a glorious sinner he was. i like to think of titian and michael angelo. when their work was done and they stood upon the summit of their achievements they were up so high that all they had to do was to step right into heaven, without any long journey. tennyson did the same. in his poem, "crossing the bar," he filled all the space, and so he had to cross over into heaven to get more room. and riley's "old aunt mary" was another one. she had been working out her salvation making jelly, and jam, and marmalade, and just beaming goodness upon those boys so that they had no more doubts about goodness than they had of the peach preserves they were eating. why, there just had to be a heaven for old aunt mary. she gathered manna every day, and had some for the boys, too, but never said a word about being busy. when i was reading the _georgics_ with my boys, we came upon the word _bufo_ (toad), and i told them with much gusto that that was the only place in the language where the word occurs. i had come upon this statement in a book that they did not have. their looks spoke their admiration for the schoolmaster who could speak with authority. after they had gone their ways, two to porto rico, one to chili, another to brazil, and others elsewhere, i came upon the word _bufo_ again in ovid. i am still wondering what a schoolmaster ought to do in a case like that. even if i had written to all those fellows acknowledging my error, it would have been too late, for they would, long before, have circulated the report all over south america and the united states that there is but one toad in the latin language. if i hadn't believed everything i see in print, hadn't been so cock-sure, and hadn't been so ready to parade borrowed plumage as my own, all this linguistic coil would have been averted. i suppose mr. henderson would send me to jail again for this. i certainly didn't do my best, and therefore i am immoral, and therefore a sinner; _quad erat demonstrandum_. so, i suppose, if i'm to save my soul, i must gather manna every day, and if i find the value of _x_ to-day, i must find the value of a bigger _x_ to-morrow. then, too, i suppose i'll have to choose between mrs. wiggs and emerson, between the katzenjammers and shakespeare, and between ragtime and grand opera. i am very certain growing corn gives forth a sound only i can't hear it. if my hearing were only acute enough i'd hear it and rejoice in it. it is very trying to miss the sound when i am so certain that it is there. the birds in my trees understand one another, and yet i can't understand what they are saying in the least. this simply proves my own limitations. if i could but know their language, and all the languages of the cows, the sheep, the horses, and the chickens, what a good time i could have with them. if my powers of sight and hearing were increased only tenfold, i'd surely find a different world about me. here, again, i can't find the value of _x_, try as i will. the disquieting thing about all this is that i do not use to the utmost the powers i have. i could see many more things than i do if i'd only use my eyes, and hear things, too, if i'd try more. the world of nature as it reveals itself to john burroughs is a thousand times larger than my world, no doubt, and this fact convicts me of doing less than my best, and again the jail invites me. chapter xv hoeing potatoes as i was lying in the shade of the maple-tree down there by the ravine, yesterday, i fell to thinking about my rights, and the longer i lay there the more puzzled i became. being a citizen in a democracy, i have many rights that are guaranteed to me by the constitution, notably life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. in my school i become expansive in extolling these rights to my pupils. but under that maple-tree i found myself raising many questions as to these rights, and many others. i have a right to sing tenor, but i can't sing tenor at all, and when i try it i disturb my neighbors. right there i bump against a situation. i have a right to use my knife at table instead of a fork, and who is to gainsay my using my fingers? queen elizabeth did. i certainly have a right to lie in the shade of the maple-tree for two hours to-day instead of one hour, as i did yesterday. i wonder if reclining on the grass under a maple-tree is not a part of the pursuit of happiness that is specifically set out in the constitution? i hope so, for i'd like to have that wonderful constitution backing me up in the things i like to do. the sun is so hot and hoeing potatoes is such a tiring task that i prefer to lounge in the shade with my back against the constitution. in thinking of the pursuit of happiness i am inclined to personify happiness and then watch the chase, wondering whether the pursuer will ever overtake her, and what he'll do when he does. i note that the constitution does not guarantee that the pursuer will ever catch her--but just gives him an open field and no favors. he may run just as fast as he likes, and as long as his endurance holds out. i suspect that's where the liberty comes in. i wonder if the makers of the constitution ever visualized that chase. if so, they must have laughed, at least in their sleeves, solemn crowd that they were. if i were certain that i could overtake happiness i'd gladly join in the pursuit, even on such a warm day as this, but the dread uncertainty makes me prefer to loll here in the shade. besides, i'm not quite certain that i could recognize her even if i could catch her. the photographs that i have seen are so very different that i might mistake happiness for some one else, and that would be embarrassing. if i should conclude that i was happy, and then discover that i wasn't, i scarcely see how i could explain myself to myself, much less to others. so i shall go on hoeing my potatoes and not bother my poor head about happiness. it is just possible that i shall find it over there in the potato-patch, for its latitude and longitude have never been definitely determined, so far as i am aware. i know i shall find some satisfaction over there at work, and i am convinced that satisfaction and happiness are kinsfolk. possibly my potatoes will prove the answer to some mother's prayer for food for her little ones next winter. who knows? as i loosen the soil about the vines i can look down the vista of the months, and see some little one in his high chair smiling through his tears as mother prepares one of my beautiful potatoes for him, and i think i can detect some moisture in mother's eyes, too. it is just possible that her tears are the consecrated incense upon the altar of thanksgiving. i like to see such pictures as i ply my hoe, for they give me respite from weariness, and give fresh ardor to my hoeing. if each one of my potatoes shall only assuage the hunger of some little one, and cause the mother's eyes to distil tears of joy, i shall be in the border-land of happiness, to say the least. i had fully intended to exercise my inalienable rights and lie in the shade for two hours to-day, but when i caught a glimpse of that little chap in the high chair, and heard his pitiful plea for potatoes, i made for the potato-patch post-haste, as if i were responding to a hurry call. i suppose there is no more heart-breaking sound in nature than the crying of a hungry child. i have been whistling all the afternoon along with my hoeing, and now that i think of it, i must be whistling because my potatoes are going to make that baby laugh. well, if they do, then i shall elevate the hoeing of potatoes to the rank of a privilege. oh, i've read my "tom sawyer," and know about his enterprise in getting the fence whitewashed by making the task seem a privilege. but tom was indulging in fiction, and hoeing potatoes is no fiction. still those whitewash artists had something of the feeling that i experience right now, only there was no baby in their picture as there is in mine, and so i have the baby as an additional privilege. i wish i knew how to make all the school tasks rank as privileges to my boys and girls. if i could only do that, they would have gone far toward a liberal education. if i could only get a baby to crying somewhere out beyond cube root i'm sure they would struggle through the mazes of that subject, somehow, so as to get to the baby to change its crying into laughter. 'tis worth trying. i wonder, after all, whether education is not the process of shifting the emphasis from rights to privileges. i have a right, when i go into the town, to keep my seat in the car and let the old lady use the strap. if i insist upon that right i feel myself a boor, lacking the sense and sensibilities of a gentleman. but when i relinquish my seat i feel that i have exercised my privilege to be considerate and courteous. i have a right to permit weeds and briers to overrun my fences, and the fences themselves to go to rack, and so offend the sight of my neighbors; but i esteem it a privilege to make the premises clean and beautiful, so as to add so much to the sum total of pleasure. i have a right to stay on my own side of the road and keep to myself; but it is a great privilege to go up for a half-hour's exchange of talk with my neighbor john. he always clears the cobwebs from my eyes and from my soul, and i return to my work refreshed. i have a right, too, to pore over the colored supplement for an hour or so, but when i am able to rise to my privileges and take the book of job instead, i feel that i have made a gain in self-respect, and can stand more nearly erect. i have a right, when i go to church, to sit silent and look bored; but, when i avail myself of the privilege of joining in the responses and the singing, i feel that i am fertilizing my spirit for the truth that is proclaimed. as a citizen i have certain rights, but when i come to think of my privileges my rights seem puny in comparison. then, too, my rights are such cold things, but my privileges are full of sunshine and of joy. my rights seem mathematical, while my privileges seem curves of beauty. in his scientific laboratory at princeton, on one occasion, the celebrated doctor hodge, in preparing for an experiment said to some students who were gathered about him: "gentlemen, please remove your hats; i am about to ask god a question." so it is with every one who esteems his privileges. he is asking god questions about the glory of the sunrise, the fragrance of the flowers, the colors of the rainbow, the music of the brook, and the meaning of the stars. but i hear a baby crying and must get back to my potatoes. chapter xvi changing the mind i have been reading, in this book, of a man who couldn't change his mind because his intellectual wardrobe was not sufficient to warrant a change. i was feeling downright sorry for the poor fellow till i got to wondering how many people are feeling sorry for me for the same reason. that reflection changed the situation greatly, and i began to feel some resentment against the blunt statement in the book as being rather too personal. just as i begin to think that we have standardized a lot of things, along comes some one in a book, or elsewhere, and completely upsets my fine and comforting theories and projects me into chaos again. no sooner do i get a lot of facts all nicely settled, and begin to enjoy complacency, than some disturber of the peace knocks all my facts topsy-turvy, and says they are not facts at all, but the merest fiction. then i cry aloud with my old friend cicero, _ubinam gentium sumus_, which, being translated in the language of the boys, means, "where in the world (or nation) are we at?" they are actually trying to reform my spelling. i do wish these reformers had come around sooner, when i was learning to spell _phthisic_, _syzygy_, _daguerreotype_, and _caoutchouc_. they might have saved me a deal of trouble and helped me over some of the high places at the old-fashioned spelling-bees. i have a friend who is quite versed in science, and he tells me that any book on science that is more than ten years old is obsolete. now, that puzzles me no little. if that is true, why don't they wait till matters scientific are settled, and then write their books? why write a book at all when you know that day after tomorrow some one will come along and refute all the theories and mangle the facts? these science chaps must spend a great deal of their time changing their intellectual clothing. it would be great fun to come back a hundred years from now and read the books on science, psychology, and pedagogy. i suppose the books we have now will seem like joke books to our great-grandchildren, if people are compelled to change their mental garments every day from now on. i wonder how long it will take us human coral insects, to get our building up to the top of the water. whoever it was that said that consistency is a jewel would need to take treatment for his eyes in these days. if i must change my mental garb each day i don't see how i can be consistent. if i said yesterday that some theory of science is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then find a revision of the statement necessary to-day, i certainly am inconsistent. this jewel of consistency certainly loses its lustre, if not its identity, in such a process of shifting. i do hope these chameleon artists will leave us the multiplication table, the yardstick, and the ablative absolute. i'm not so particular about the wine-gallon, for prohibition will probably do away with that anyhow. when i was in school i could tell to a foot the equatorial and the polar diameter of the earth, and what makes the difference. why, i knew all about that flattening at the poles, and how it came about. then mr. peary went up there and tramped all over the north pole, and never said a word about the flattening when he came back. i was very much disappointed in mr. peary. i know, quite as well as i know my own name, that the length of the year is three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-eight seconds, and if i find any one trying to lop off even one second of my hard-learned year, i shall look upon him as a meddler. that is one of my settled facts, and i don't care to have it disturbed. if any one comes along trying to change the length of my year, i shall begin to tremble for the safety of the ten commandments. if i believe that a grasshopper is a quadruped, what satisfaction could i possibly take in discovering that he has six legs? it would merely disturb one of my settled facts, and i am more interested in my facts than i am in the grasshopper. the trouble is, though, that my neighbor john keeps referring to the grasshopper's six legs; so i suppose i shall, in the end, get me a grasshopper suit of clothes so as to be in the fashion. this discarding of my four-legged grasshopper and supplying myself with one that has six legs may be what the poet means when he speaks of our dead selves. he may refer to the new suit of mental clothing that i am supposed to get each day, to the change of mind that i am supposed to undergo as regularly as a daily bath. possibly mr. holmes meant something like that when he wrote his "chambered nautilus." at each advance from one of these compartments to another, i suppose i acquire a new suit of clothes, or, in other words, change my mind. let's see, wasn't it theseus whose eternal punishment in hades was just to sit there forever? that seems somewhat heavenly to me. but here on earth i suppose i must try to keep up with the styles, and change my mental gear day by day. i think i might come to enjoy a change of suits every day if only some one would provide them for me; but, if i must earn them myself, the case is different. i'd like to have some one bestow upon me a beautiful greek suit for monday, with its elegance, grace, and dignity, a roman suit for tuesday, a science suit for wednesday, a suit of poetry for thursday, and so on, day after day. but when i must read all of homer before i can have the greek suit, the price seems a bit stiff, and i'm not so avid about changing my mind. we had a township picnic back home, once, and it seemed to me that i was attending a congress of nations, for there were people there who had driven five or six miles from the utmost bounds of the township. that was a real mental adventure, and it took some time for me to adjust myself to my new suit. then i went to the county fair, where were gathered people from all the townships, and my poor mind had a mighty struggle trying to grasp the immensity of the thing. i felt much the same as when i was trying to understand the mathematical sign of infinity. and when i came upon the statement, in my geography, that there are eighty-eight counties in our state, the mind balked absolutely and refused to go on. i felt as did the old gentleman who saw an aeroplane for the first time. after watching its gyrations for some time he finally exclaimed: "they ain't no sich thing." my college roommate, mack, went over to london, once, on some errand, and of course went to the british museum. near the entrance he came upon the rosetta stone, and stood inthralled. he reflected that he was standing in the presence of a monument that marks the beginning of recorded history, that back of that all was dark, and that all the books in all the libraries emanate from that beginning. the thought was so big, so overmastering, that there was no room in his mind for anything else, so he turned about and left without seeing anything else in the museum. since then we have had many a big laugh together as he recounts to me his wonderful visit to the rosetta stone. i see clearly that in the presence of that modest stone he got all the mental clothing he could possibly wear at the time. changing the mind sometimes seems to amount almost to surgery. sometime, if i can get my stub pen limbered up i shall try my hand at writing a bit of a composition on the subject of "the inequality of equals." i know that the declaration tells us that all men are born free and equal, and i shall explain in my essay that it means us to understand that while they are born equal, they begin to become unequal the day after they are born, and become more so as one changes his mind and the other one does not. i try, all the while, to make myself believe that i am the equal of my neighbor, the judge, and then i feel foolish to think that i ever tried it. the neighbors all know it isn't true, and so do i when i quit arguing with myself. he has such a long start of me now that i wonder if i can ever overtake him. one thing, though, i'm resolved upon, and that is to change my mind as often as possible. chapter xvii the point of view just why a boy is averse to washing his neck and ears is one of the deep problems of social psychology, and yet the psychologists have veered away from the subject. there must be a reason, and these mind experts ought to be able and willing to find it, so as to relieve the anxiety of the rest of us. it is easy for me to say, with a full-arm gesture, that a boy is of the earth earthy, but that only begs the question, as full-arm gestures are wont to do. many a boy has shed copious tears as he sat on a bench outside the kitchen door removing, under compulsion, the day's accumulations from his feet as a prerequisite for retiring. he would much prefer to sleep on the floor to escape the foot-washing ordeal. why, pray, should he wash his feet when he knows full well that tomorrow night will find them in the same condition? why all the bother and trouble about a little thing like that? why can't folks let a fellow alone, anyhow? and, besides, he went in swimming this afternoon, and that surely ought to meet all the exactions of capricious parents. he exhibits his feet as an evidence of the virtue of going swimming, for he is arranging the preliminaries for another swimming expedition to-morrow. i recall very distinctly how strange it seemed that my father could sit there and calmly talk about being a democrat, or a republican, or a baptist, or a methodist, or about some one's discovering the north pole, or about the president's message when the dog had a rat cornered under the corn-crib and was barking like mad. but, then, parents can't see things in their right relations and proportions. and there sat mother, too, darning stockings, and the dog just stark crazy about that rat. 'tis enough to make a boy lose faith in parents forevermore. a dog, a rat, and a boy--there's a combination that recks not of the fall of empires or the tottering of thrones. even chicken-noodles must take second place in such a scheme of world activities. and yet a mother would hold a boy back from the forefront of such an enterprise to wash his neck. oh, these mothers! i have read "adam's diary," by mark twain, in which he tells what events were forward in eden on monday, what on tuesday, and so on throughout the week till he came to sunday, and his only comment on that day was "pulled through." in the new england primer we gather the solemn information that "in adam's fall, we sinned all." i admit the fact freely, but beg to be permitted to plead extenuating circumstances. adam could go to church just as he was, but i had to be renovated and, at times, almost parboiled and, in addition to these indignities, had to wear shoes and stockings; and the stockings scratched my legs, and the shoes were too tight. if adam could barely manage to pull through, just think of me. besides, adam didn't have to wear a paper collar that disintegrated and smeared his neck. the more i think of adam's situation, the more sorry i feel for myself. why, he could just reach out and pluck some fruit to help him through the services, but i had to walk a mile after church, in those tight shoes, and then wait an hour for dinner. and i was supposed to feel and act religious while i was waiting, but i didn't. if i could only have gone to church barefoot, with my shirt open at the throat, and with a pocket full of cookies to munch _ad lib_ throughout the services, i am sure that the spiritual uplift would have been greater. the soul of a boy doesn't expand violently when encased in a starched shirt and a paper collar, and these surmounted by a thick coat, with the mercury at ninety-seven in the shade. i think i can trace my religious retardation back to those hungry sundays, those tight shoes, that warm coat, and those frequent jabs in my ribs when i fain would have slept. in my childhood there was such a host of people who were pushing and pulling me about in an effort to make me good that, even yet, i shy away from their style of goodness. the wonder is that i have any standing at all in polite and upright society. so many folks said i was bad and naughty, and applied so many other no less approbrious epithets to me that, in time, i came to believe them, and tried somewhat diligently to live up to the reputation they gave me. i recall that one of my aunts came in one day and, seeing me out in the yard most ingloriously tousled, asked my good mother: "is that your child?" poor mother! i have often wondered how much travail of spirit it must have cost her to acknowledge me as her very own. one thumb, one great toe, and an ankle were decorated with greasy rags, and i was far from being ornamental. i had been hulling walnuts, too, and my stained hands served to accentuate the human scenery. this same aunt had three boys of her own, later on, and a more disreputable-looking crew it would be hard to find. i confess that i took a deal of grim satisfaction in their dilapidated ensemble, just for my aunt's benefit, of course. they were fine, wholesome, natural boys in spite of their parentage, and i liked them even while i gloried in their cuts, bruises, and dirt. at that time i was wearing a necktie and had my shoes polished but, even so, i yearned to join with them in their debauch of sand, mud, and general indifference to convention. they are fine, upstanding young chaps now, and of course their mother thinks that her scolding, nagging, and baiting made them so. they know better, but are too kind and considerate to reveal the truth to their mother. even yet i have something like admiration for the ingenuity of my elders in conjuring up spooks, hob-goblins, and bugaboos with which to scare me into submission. i conformed, of course, but i never gave them a high grade in veracity. i yielded simply to gain time, for i knew where there was a chipmunk in a hole, and was eager to get to digging him out just as soon as my apparent submission for a brief time had proved my complete regeneration. they used to tell me that children should be seen but not heard, and i knew they wanted to do the talking. i often wonder whether their notion of a good child would have been satisfactorily met if i had suddenly become paralyzed, or ossified, or petrified. in either of these cases i could have been seen but not heard. one day, not long ago, when i felt at peace with all the world and was comfortably free from care, a small, thumb-sucking seven-year-old asked: "how long since the world was born?" after i told him that it was about four thousand years he worked vigorously at his thumb for a time, and then said: "that isn't very long." then i wished i had said four millions, so as to reduce him to silence, for one doesn't enjoy being routed and put to confusion by a seven-year-old. after quite a silence he asked again: "what was there before the world was born?" that was an easy one; so i said in a tone of finality: "there wasn't anything." then i went on with my meditations, thinking i had used the soft pedal effectively. silence reigned supreme for some minutes, and then was rudely shattered. his thumb flew from his mouth, and he laughed so lustily that he could be heard throughout the house. when his laughter had spent itself somewhat, i asked meekly: "what are you laughing at?" his answer came on the instant, but still punctuated with laughter: "i was laughing to see how funny it was when there wasn't anything." no wonder that folks want children to be seen but not heard. and some folks are scandalized because a chap like that doesn't like to wash his neck and ears. chapter xviii picnics the code of table etiquette in the days of my boyhood, as i now recall it, was expressed something like: "eat what is set before you and ask no questions." we heeded this injunction with religious fidelity, but yearned to ask why they didn't set more before us. about the only time that a real boy gets enough to eat is when he goes to a picnic and, even there and then, the rounding out of the programme is connected with clandestine visits to the baskets after the formal ceremonies have been concluded. at a picnic there is no such expression as "from soup to nuts," for there is no soup, and perhaps no nuts, but there is everything else in tantalizing abundance. if i find a plate of deviled eggs near me, i begin with deviled eggs; or, if the cold tongue is nearer, i begin with that. in this way i reveal, for the pleasure of the hostesses, my unrestricted and democratic appetite. or, in order to obviate any possible embarrassment during the progress of the chicken toward me, i may take a piece of pie or a slice of cake, thinking that they may not return once they have been put in circulation. certainly i take jelly when it passes along, as well as pickles, olives, and cheese. there is no incongruity, at such a time, in having a slice of baked ham and a slice of angel-food cake on one's plate or in one's hands. they harmonize beautifully both in the color scheme and in the gastronomic scheme. at a picnic my boyhood training reaches its full fruition: "eat what is set before you and ask no questions." these things i do. that's a good rule for reading, too, just to read what is set before you and ask no questions. i'm thinking now of the reader member of my dual nature, not the student member. i like to cater somewhat to both these members. when the reader member is having his inning, i like to give him free rein and not hamper him by any lock-step or stereotyped method or course. i like to lead him to a picnic table and dismiss him with the mere statement that "heaven helps those who help themselves," and thus leave him to his own devices. if southey's, "the curse of kehama," happens to be nearest his plate, he will naturally begin with that as i did with the deviled eggs. or he may nibble at "the house-boat on the styx" while some one is passing the shakespeare along. he may like emerson, and ask for a second helping, and that's all right, too, for that's a nourishing sort of food. having partaken of this generously, he will enjoy all the more the jelly when it comes along in the form of "nonsense anthology." the more i think of it the more i see that reading is very like a picnic dinner. it is all good, and one takes the food which is nearest him, whether pie or pickles. when any one asks me what i am reading, i become much embarrassed. i may be reading a catalogue of books at the time, or the book notices in some magazine, but such reading may not seem orthodox at all to the one who asks the question. my reading may be too desultory or too personal to be paraded in public. i don't make it a practice to tell all the neighbors what i ate for breakfast. i like to saunter along through the book just as i ride in a gondola when in venice. i'm not going anywhere, but get my enjoyment from merely being on the way. i pay the gondolier and then let him have his own way with me. so with the book. i pay the money and then abandon myself to it. if it can make me laugh, why, well and good, and i'll laugh. if it causes me to shed tears, why, let the tears flow. they may do me good. if i ever become conscious of the number of the page of the book i am reading, i know there is something the matter with that book or else with me. if i ever become conscious of the page number in david grayson's "adventures in contentment," or "the friendly road," i shall certainly consult a physician. i do become semiconscious at times that i am approaching the end of the feast, and feel regret that the book is not larger. i have spasms and enjoy them. sometimes, i have a dickens spasm, and read some of his books for the _n_th time. i have frittered away much time in my life trying to discover whether a book is worth a second reading. if it isn't, it is hardly worth a first reading, i don't get tired of my friend brown, so why should i put dickens off with a mere society call? if i didn't enjoy brown i'd not visit him so frequently; but, liking him, i go again and again. so with dickens, mark twain, and shakespeare. the story goes that a second uncle remus was sitting on a stump in the depths of a forest sawing away on an old discordant violin. a man, who chanced to come upon him, asked what he was doing. with no interruption of his musical activities, he answered: "boss, i'se serenadin' m' soul." book or violin, 'tis all the same. uncle remus and i are serenading our souls and the exercise is good for us. i was laid by with typhoid fever for a few weeks once, and the doctor came at eleven o'clock in the morning and at five o'clock in the afternoon. if he happened to be a bit late i grew impatient, and my fever increased. he discovered this fact, and was no more tardy. he was reading "john fiske" at the time, and grant's "memoirs," and at each visit reviewed for me what he had read since the previous visit. he must have been glad when i no longer needed to take my history by proxy, for i kept him up to the mark, and bullied him into reciting twice a day. i don't know what drugs he gave me, but i do know that "fiske" and "grant" are good for typhoid, and heartily commend them to the general public. i am rather glad now that i had typhoid fever. i listen with amused tolerance to people who grow voluble on the weather and their symptoms, and often wish they would ask me to prescribe for them. i'd probably tell them to become readers of william j. locke. but, perhaps, their symptoms might seem preferable to the remedy. a neighbor came in to borrow a book, and i gave her "les miserables," which she returned in a day or so, saying that she could not read it. i knew that i had overestimated her, and that i didn't have a book around of her size. i had loaned my "robin hood," "rudder grange," "uncle remus," and "sonny" to the children round about. i like to browse around among my books, and am trying to have my boys and girls acquire the same habit. reading for pure enjoyment isn't a formal affair any more than eating. sometimes i feel in the mood for a grapefruit for breakfast, sometimes for an orange, and sometimes for neither. i'm glad not to board at a place where they have standardized breakfasts and reading. if i feel in the mood for an orange i want an orange, even if my neighbor has a casaba melon. so, if i want my "middlemarch," i'm quite eager for that book, and am quite willing for my neighbor to have his "henry esmond." the appetite for books is variable, the same as for food, and i'd rather consult my appetite than my neighbor when choosing a book as a companion through a lazy afternoon beneath the maple-tree, i refuse to try to supervise the reading of my pupils. why, i couldn't supervise their eating. i'd have to find out whether the boy was yearning for porterhouse steak or ice-cream, first; then i might help him make a selection. the best i can do is to have plenty of steak, potatoes, pie, and ice-cream around, and allow him to help himself. chapter xix make-believe the text may be found in "over bemerton's," by e. v. lucas, and reads as follows: "a gentle hypocrisy is not only the basis but the salt of civilized life." this statement startled me a bit at first; but when i got to thinking of my experience in having a photograph of myself made i saw that mr. lucas has some warrant for his statement. there has been only one oliver cromwell to say: "paint me as i am." the rest of us humans prefer to have the wart omitted. if my photograph is true to life i don't want it. i'm going to send it away, and i don't want the folks who get it to think i look like that. if i were a woman and could wear a disguise of cosmetics when sitting for a picture the case might not be quite so bad. the subtle flattery of the photograph is very grateful to us mortals whether we admit it or not. my friend baxter introduced me once as a man who is not two-faced, and went on to explain that if i had had two faces i'd have brought the other instead of this one. and that's true. i expect the photographer to evoke another face for me, and hence my generous gift of money to him. i like that chap immensely. he takes my money, gives me another face, bows me out with the grace of a finished courtier, and never, by word or look, reveals his knowledge of my hypocrisy. as a boy i had a full suit of company manners which i wore only when guests were present, and so was always sorry to have guests come. i sat back on the chair instead of on its edge; i didn't swing my legs unless i had a lapse of memory; i said, "yes, ma'am," and, "no, ma'am," like any other parrot, just as i did at rehearsal; and, in short, i was a most exemplary child save for occasional reactions to unlooked-for situations. the folks knew i was posing, and were on nettles all the while from fear of a breakdown; the guests knew i was posing, and i knew i was posing. but we all pretended to one another that that was the regular order of procedure in our house. so we had a very gratifying concert exercise in hypocrisy. we said our prayers that night just as usual. with such thorough training in my youth it is not at all strange that i now consider myself rather an adept in the prevailing social usages. at a musicale i applaud fit to blister my hands, even though i feel positively pugnacious. but i know the singer has an encore prepared, and i feel that it would be ungracious to disappoint her. besides, i argue with myself that i can stand it for five minutes more if the others can. professor james, i think it is, says that we ought to do at least one disagreeable thing each day as an aid in the development of character. being rather keen on character development, i decide on a double dose of the disagreeable while opportunity favors. hence my vigorous applauding. then, too, i realize that the time and place are not opportune for an expression of my honest convictions; so i choose the line of least resistance and well-nigh blister my hands to emphasize my hypocrisy. at a formal dinner i have been known to sink so low into the depths of hypocrisy as to eat shrimp salad. but when one is sitting next to a lady who seems a confirmed celibate, and who seems to find nothing better than to become voluble on the subject of her distinguished ancestors, even shrimp salad has its uses. now, under normal conditions my perverted and plebeian taste regards shrimp salad as a banality, but at that dinner i ate it with apparent relish, and tried not to make a wry face. but, worst of all, i complimented the hostess upon the excellence of the dinner, and extolled the salad particularly, although we both knew that the salad was a failure, and that the dinner itself convicted the cook of a lack of experience or else of a superfluity of potations. when the refreshments are served i take a thimbleful of ice-cream and an attenuated wafer, and then solemnly declare to the maid that i have been abundantly served. in the hallowed precincts that i call my den i could absorb nine rations such as they served and never bat an eye. and yet, in making my adieus to the hostess, i thank her most effusively for a delightful evening, refreshments included, and then hurry grumbling home to get something to eat. such are some of the manifestations of social hypocrisy. these all pass current at their face value, and yet we all know that nobody is deceived. still it is great fun to play make-believe, and the world would have convulsions if we did not indulge in these pleasing deceptions. in the clever little book "molly make-believe" the girl pretends at first that she loves the man, and later on comes to love him to distraction, and she lived happy ever after, too. when, in my fever, i would ask about my temperature, the nurse would give a numeral about two degrees below the real record to encourage me, and i can't think that st. peter will bar her out just for that. the psychologists give mild assent to the theory that a physical attitude may generate an emotion. if i assume a belligerent attitude, they claim that, in time, i shall feel really belligerent; that in a loafing attitude i shall presently be loafing; and that, if i assume the attitude of a listener, i shall soon be listening most intently. this seems to be justified by the experiences of edwin booth on the stage. he could feign fighting for a time, and then it became real fighting, and great care had to be taken to avert disastrous consequences when his sword fully struck its gait. i believe the psychologists have never fully agreed on the question whether the man is running from the bear because he is scared or is scared because he is running. i dare say mr. shakespeare was trying to express this theory when he said: "assume a virtue, though you have it not." that's exactly what i'm trying to have my pupils do all the while. i'm trying to have them wear their company manners continually, so that, in good time, they will become their regular working garb. i'm glad to have them assume the attitudes of diligence and politeness, thinking that their attitudes may generate the corresponding emotions. it is a severe strain on a boy at times to seem polite when he feels like hurling missiles. we both know that his politeness is mere make-believe, but we pretend not to know, and so move along our ways of hypocrisy hoping that good may come. there is a telephone-girl over in the central station, wherever that is, who certainly is beautiful if the voice is a true index. her tones are dulcet, and her voice is so mellow and well modulated that i visualize her as another venus. i suspect that, when she began her work, some one told her that her tenure of position depended upon the quality of her voice. so, i imagine, she assumed a tonal quality of voice that was really a sublimated hypocrisy, and persisted in this until now that quality of voice is entirely natural. i can't think that shakespeare had her specially in mind, but, if i ever have the good fortune to meet her, i shall certainly ask her if she reads shakespeare. now that i think of it, i shall try this treatment on my own voice, for it sorely needs treatment. possibly i ought to take a course of training at the telephone-station. i am now thoroughly persuaded that mr. lucas gave expression to a great principle of pedagogy in what he said about hypocrisy, and i shall try to be diligent in applying it. if i can get my boys to assume an arithmetical attitude, they may come to have an arithmetical feeling, and that would give me great joy. i don't care to have them express their honest feelings either about me or the work, but would rather have them look polite and interested, even if it is hypocrisy. i'd like to have all my boys and girls act as if they consider me absolutely fair, just, and upright, as well as the most kind, courteous, generous, scholarly, skillful, and complaisant schoolmaster that ever lived, no matter what they really think. chapter xx behavior if i only knew how to teach english, i'd have far more confidence in my schoolmastering. but i don't seem to get on. the system breaks down too often to suit me. just when i think i have some lad inoculated with elegant english through the process of reading from some classic, he says, "might of came," and i become obfuscated again. i have a book here in which i read that it is the business of the teacher so to organize the activities of the school that they will function in behavior. well, my boys' behavior in the use of english indicates that i haven't organized the activities of my english class very effectively. i seem to be more of a success in a cherry-orchard than in an english class. my cherries are large and round, a joy to the eye and delightful to the taste. the fruit expert tells me they are perfect, and so i feel that i organized the activities in that orchard efficiently. in fact, the behavior of my cherry-trees is most gratifying. but when i hear my pupils talk or read their essays, and find a deal of imperfect fruit in the way of solecisms and misspelled words, i feel inclined to discredit my skill in organizing the activities in this human orchard. i think my trouble is (and it is trouble), that i proceed upon the agreeable assumption that my pupils can "catch" english as they do the measles if only they are exposed to it. so i expose them to the objective complement and the compellative, and then stand aghast at their behavior when they make all the mistakes that can possibly be made in using a given number of words. i have occasion to wonder whether i juggle these big words merely because i happen to see them in a book, or whether i am trying to be impressive. i recall how often i have felt a thrill of pride as i have ladled out deliberative subjunctives, ethical datives, and hysteron proteron to my (supposedly) admiring latin pupils. if i were a soldier i should want to wear one of those enormous three-story military hats to render me tall and impressive. i have no desire to see a drum-major minus his plumage. the disillusionment would probably be depressing. liking to wear my shako, i must continue to talk of objective complements instead of using simple english. i had watched men make a hundred barrels, but when i tried my skill i didn't produce much of a barrel. then i knew making barrels is not violently infectious. but i suspect that it is quite the same as english in this respect. my behavior in that cooper-shop, for a time, was quite destructive of materials, until i had acquired skill by much practice. if i could only organize the activities in my english class so that they would function in such behavior as lincoln's "letter to mrs. bixby," i should feel that i might continue my teaching instead of devoting all my time to my cherry-orchard. or, if i could see that my pupils were acquiring the habit of correct english as the result of my work, i'd give myself a higher grade as a schoolmaster. my neighbor over here teaches agriculture, and one of his boys produced one hundred and fifty bushels of corn on an acre of ground. that's what i call excellent behavior, and that schoolmaster certainly knows how to organize the activities of his class. my boy's yield of thirty-seven bushels, mostly nubbins, does not compare favorably with the yield of his boy, and i feel that i ought to reform, or else wear a mask. here is my boy saying "might of came," and his boy is raising a hundred and fifty bushels of corn per acre. if i could only assemble all my boys and girls twenty years hence and have them give an account of themselves for all the years after they left school, i could grade them with greater accuracy than i can possibly do now. of course, i'd simply grade them on behavior, and if i could muster up courage, i might ask them to grade mine. i wonder how i'd feel if i'd find among them such folks as edison, burbank, goethals, clara barton, and frances willard. my neighbor john says the most humiliating experience that a man can have is to wear a pair of his son's trousers that have been cut down to fit him. i might have some such feelings as that in the presence of pupils who had made such notable achievements. but, should they tell me that these achievements were due, in some good measure, to the work of the school, well, that would be glory enough for me. one of my boys was telling me only yesterday of a bit of work he did the day before in the way of revealing a process in chemistry to a firm of jewellers and hearing the superintendent say that that bit of information is worth a thousand dollars to the establishment. if he keeps on doing things like that i shall grade his behavior one of these days. i suppose mr. goethals must have learned the multiplication table, once upon a time, and used it, too, in constructing the panama canal. he certainly made it effective, and the activities of that class in arithmetic certainly did function. i tell my boys that this multiplication table is the same one that mr. goethals has been using all the while, and then ask them what use they expect to make of it. one man made use of this table in tunnelling the alps, and another in building the brooklyn bridge, and it seems to be good for many more bridges and tunnels if i can only organize the activities aright. i was standing in front of st. marks, there in venice, one morning, regaling myself with the beauty of the festive scene, and talking to a friend, when four of my boys came strolling up, and they seemed more my boys than ever before. what a reunion we had! the folks all about us didn't understand it in the least, but we did, and that was enough. i forgot my coarse clothes, my well-nigh empty pockets, my inability to buy the many beautiful things that kept tantalizing me, and the meagreness of my salary. these were all swallowed up in the joy of seeing the boys, and i wanted to proclaim to all and sundry; "these are my jewels." those boys are noble, clean, upstanding fellows, and no schoolmaster could help being proud of them. such as they nestle down in the heart of the schoolmaster and cause him to know that life is good. i was sorry not to be able to share my joy with my friend who stood near, but that could not be. i might have used words to him, but he would not have understood. he had never yearned over those fellows and watched them, day by day, hoping that they might grow up to be an honor to their school. he had never had the experience of watching from the schoolhouse window, fervently wishing that no harm might come to them, and that no shadows might come over their lives. he had never known the joy of sitting up far into the night to prepare for the coming of those boys the next day. he had never seen their eyes sparkle in the classroom when, for them, truth became illumined. of course, he stood aloof, for he couldn't know. only the schoolmaster can ever know how those four boys became the focus of all that wondrous beauty on that splendid morning. if i had had my grade-book along i would have recorded their grades in behavior, for as i looked upon those glorious chaps and heard them recount their experiences i had a feeling of exaltation, knowing that the activities of our school had functioned in right behavior. chapter xxi forefingers this left forefinger of mine is certainly a curiosity. it looks like a miniature totem-pole, and i wish i had before me its life history. i'd like to know just how all these seventeen scars were acquired. it seems to have come in contact with about all sorts and sizes of cutlery. if only teachers or parents had been wise enough to make a record of all my bloodletting mishaps, with occasions, causes, and effects, that record would afford a fruitful study for students of education. the pity of it is that we take no account of such matters as phases or factors of education. we keep saying that experience is the best teacher, and then ignore this eloquent forefinger. i call that criminal neglect arising from crass ignorance. why, these scars that adorn many parts of my body are the foot-prints of evolution, if, indeed, evolution makes tracks. the scars on the faces of those students at heidelberg are accounted badges of honor, but they cannot compare with the big scar on my left knee that came to me as the free gift of a corn-knife. those students wanted their scars to take home to show their mothers. i didn't want mine, and made every effort to conceal it, as well as the hole in my trousers. i got my scar as a warning. i profited by it, too, for never were there two cuts in exactly the same place. in fact, they were widely, if not wisely, distributed. they are the indices of the soaring sense of my youthful audacity. and yet neither parents nor teachers ever graded my scars. i recall quite distinctly that, at one time, i proclaimed boldly over one entire page of a copy-book, that knowledge is power, and became so enthusiastic in these numerous proclamations that i wrote on the bias, and zigzagged over the page with fine abandon. but no teacher ever even hinted to me that the knowledge i acquired from my contest with a nest of belligerent bumblebees had the slightest connection with power. when i groped my way home with both eyes swollen shut i was never lionized. indeed, no! anything but that! i couldn't milk the cows that evening, and couldn't study my lesson, and therefore, my newly acquired knowledge was called weakness instead of power. they did not seem to realize that my swollen face was prominent in the scheme of education, nor that bumblebees and yellow-jackets may be a means of grace. they wanted me to be solving problems in common (sometimes called vulgar) fractions. i don't fight bumblebees any more, which proves that my knowledge generated power. the emotions of my boyhood presented a scene of grand disorder, and those bumblebees helped to organize them, and to clarify and define my sense of values. i can philosophize about a bumblebee far more judicially now than i could when my eyes were swollen shut. i went to the town to attend a circus one day, and concluded i'd celebrate the day with eclat by getting my hair cut. at the conclusion of this ceremony the tonsorial beau brummel, in the most seductive tones, suggested a shampoo. i just couldn't resist his blandishments, and so consented. then he suggested tonic, and grew quite eloquent in recounting the benefits to the scalp, and i took tonic. i felt quite a fellow, till i came to pay the bill, and then discovered that i had but fifteen cents left from all my wealth. that, of course, was not sufficient for a ticket to the circus, so i bought a bag of peanuts and walked home, five miles, meditating, the while, upon the problem of life. my scalp was all right, but just under that scalp was a seething, soundless hubbub. i learned things that day that are not set down in the books, even if i did get myself laughed at. when i get to giving school credits for home work i shall certainly excuse the boy who has had such an experience as that from solving at least four problems in vulgar fractions, and i shall include that experience in my definition of education, too. i have tried to back-track paul laurence dunbar, now and then, and have found it good fun. once i started with his expression, "the whole sky overhead and the whole earth underneath," and tried to get back to where that started. he must have been lying on his back on some grass-plot, right in the centre of everything, with that whole half-sphere of sky luring his spirit out toward the infinite, with a pillow that was eight thousand miles thick. if i had been his teacher i might have called him lazy and shiftless as he lay there, because he was not finding how to place a decimal point, i'm glad, on the whole, that i was not his teacher, for i'd have twinges of conscience every time i read one of his big thoughts. i'd feel that, while he was lying there growing big, i was doing my best to make him little. when i was lying on my back there in the pantheon in rome, looking up through that wide opening, and watching a moving-picture show that has no rival, the fleecy clouds in their ever-changing forms against that blue background of matchless italian sky, those gendarmes debated the question of arresting me for disorderly conduct. my conduct was disorderly because they couldn't understand it. but, if raphael could have risen from his tomb only a few yards away, he would have told those fellows not to disturb me while i was being so liberally educated. then, that other time, when my friend reuben and i stood on the very prow of the ship when the sea was rolling high, swinging us up into the heights, and then down into the depths, with the roar drowning out all possibility of talk--well, somehow, i thought of that copy-book back yonder with its message that "knowledge is power." and i never think of power without recalling that experience as i watched that battle royal between the power of the sea and the power of the ship that could withstand the angry buffeting of the waves, and laugh in glee as it rode them down. i know that six times nine are fifty-four, but i confess that i forgot this fact out there on the prow of that ship. some folks might say that reuben and i were wasting our time, but i can't think so. i like, even now, to stand out in the clear during a thunder-storm. i want the head uncovered, too, that the wind may toss my hair about while i look the lightning-flashes straight in the eye and stand erect and unafraid as the thunder crashes and rolls and reverberates about me. i like to watch the trees swaying to and fro, keeping time to the majestic rhythm of the elements. to me such an experience is what my neighbor john calls "growing weather," and at such a time the bigness of the affair causes me to forget for the time that there are such things as double datives. one time i spent the greater part of a forenoon watching logs go over a dam. it seems a simple thing to tell, and hardly worth the telling, but it was a great morning in actual experience. in time those huge logs became things of life, and when they arose from their mighty plunge into the watery deeps they seemed to shake themselves free and laugh in their freedom. and there were battles, too. they struggled and fought and rode over one another, and their mighty collisions produced a very thunder of sound. i tried to read the book which i had with me, but could not. in the presence of such a scene one cannot read a book unless it is one of victor hugo's. that copy-book looms up again as i think of those logs, and i wonder whether knowledge is power, and whether experience is the best teacher. but, dear me! here i've been frittering away all this good time, and these papers not graded yet! chapter xxii story-telling my boys like to have me tell them stories, and, if the stories are true ones, they like them all the better. so i sometimes become reminiscent when they gather about me and let them lead me along as if i couldn't help myself when they are so interested. in this way i become one of them. i like to whittle a nice pine stick while i talk, for then the talk seems incidental to the whittling and so takes hold of them all the more. in the midst of the talking a boy will sometimes slip into my hand a fresh stick, when i have about exhausted the whittling resources of the other. that's about the finest encore i have ever received. a boy knows how to pay a compliment in a delicate way when the mood for compliments is on him, and if that mood of his is handled with equal delicacy great things may be accomplished. well, the other day as i whittled the inevitable pine stick i let them lure from me the story of sant. now, sant was my seatmate in the village school back yonder, and i now know that i loved him whole-heartedly. i didn't know this at the time, for i took him as a matter of course, just as i did my right hand. his name was sanford, but boys don't call one another by their right names. they soon find affectionate nicknames. i have quite a collection of these nicknames myself, but have only a hazy notion of how or where they were acquired. when some one calls me by one of these names, i can readily locate him in time and place, for i well know that he must belong in a certain group or that name would not come to his lips. these nicknames that we all have are really historical. well, we called him sant, and that name conjures up before me one of the most wholesome boys i have ever known. he was brimful of fun. a heartier, more sincere laugh a boy never had, and my affection for him was as natural as my breathing. he knew i liked him, though i never told him so. had i told him, the charm would have been broken. in those days spelling was one of the high lights of school work, and we were incited to excellence in this branch of learning by head tickets, which were a promise of still greater honor, in the form of a prize, to the winner. the one who stood at the head of the class at the close of the lesson received a ticket, and the holder of the greatest number of these tickets at the end of the school year bore home in triumph the much-coveted prize in the shape of a book as a visible token of superiority. i wanted that prize, and worked for it. tickets were accumulating in my little box with exhilarating regularity, and i was nobly upholding the family name when i was stricken with pneumonia, and my victorious career had a rude check. my nearest competitor was sam, who almost exulted in my illness because of the opportunity it afforded him for a rich harvest of head tickets. in the exuberance of his joy he made some remark to this effect, which sant overheard. up to this time sant had taken no interest in the contests in spelling, but sam's remark galvanized him into vigorous life, and spelling became his overmastering passion. indeed, he became the wonder of the school, and in consequence poor sam's anticipations were not realized. day after day sant caught the word that sam missed, and thus added another ticket to his collection. so it went until i took my place again, and then sant lapsed back into his indifference, leaving me to look after sam myself. when i tried to face him down with circumstantial evidence he seemed pained to think that i could ever consider him capable of such designing. the merry twinkle in his eye was the only confession he ever made. small wonder that i loved sant. if i were writing a testimonial for myself i should say that it was much to my credit that i loved a boy like that. as a boy my risibilities were easily excited, and i'm glad that, even yet, i have not entirely overcome that weakness. if i couldn't have a big laugh, now and then, i'd feel that i ought to consult a physician. my boys and girls and i often laugh together, but never at one another. sant had a deal of fun with my propensity to laugh. when we were conning our geography lesson, he would make puns upon such names as chattahoochee and appalachicola, and i would promptly explode. then, enter the teacher. but i drop the mantle of charity over the next scene, for his school-teaching was altogether personal, and not pedagogical. he didn't know that puns and laughter were the reactions on the part of us boys that caused us to know the facts of the book. but he wanted us to learn those facts in his way, and not in our own. poor fellow! _requiescat in pace_, if he can. sant was the first one of our crowd to go to college, and we were all proud of him, and predicted great things for him. we all knew he was brilliant and felt certain that the great ones in the college would soon find it out. and they did; for ever and anon some news would filter through to us that sant was battening upon latin, greek, mathematics, science, and history. of course, we gave all the credit to our little school, and seemed to forget that the lord may have had something to do with it. when we proved by sant's achievements that our school was _ne plus ultra_, i noticed that the irascible teacher joined heartily in the chorus. i intend to get all the glory i can from the achievements of my pupils, but i do hope that they may not be my sole dependence at the distribution of glory. yes, sant graduated, and his name was written high upon the scroll. but he could not deliver his oration, for he was sick, and a friend read it for him. and when he arose to receive his diploma he had to stand on crutches. they took him home in a carriage, and within a week he was dead. the fires of genius had burned brightly for a time and then went out in darkness, because his father and mother were first cousins. at the conclusion of this story, the boys were silent for a long time, and i knew the story was having its effect. then there was a slight movement, and one of them put into my hand another pine stick. i whittled in silence for a time, and then told them of a woman i know who is well-known and highly esteemed in more than one state because of her distinctive achievements. one day i saw her going along the street leading by the hand a little four-year-old boy. he was the picture of health, and rollicked along as only such a healthy little chap can. he was eager to see all the things that were displayed in the windows, but to me he and the proud mother were the finest show on the street. she beamed upon him like another madonna, and it seemed to me that the master must have been looking at some such glorious child as that when he said; "suffer the little children to come unto me." a few weeks later i was riding on the train with that mother, and she was telling me that the little fellow had been ill, and told how anxious she had been through several days and nights because the physicians could not discover the cause of his illness. then she told how happy she was that he had about recovered, and how bright he seemed when she kissed him good-by that morning. i saw her several times that week and at each meeting she gave me good news of the little boy at home. inside of another month that noble little fellow was dead. apparently he was his own healthy, happy little self, and then was stricken as he had been before. the pastor of the church of which the parents are members told me of the death scene. it occurred at about one o'clock in the morning, and the mother was worn and haggard from anxiety and days of watching. the members of the family, the physician, and the pastor were standing around the bed, but the mother was on her knees close beside the little one, who was writhing in the most awful convulsions. then the stricken mother looked straight into heaven and made a personal appeal to god to come and relieve the little fellow's sufferings. again and again she prayed: "oh, god, do come and take my little boy." and the angel of death, in answer to that prayer, came in and touched the baby, and he was still. the mother of that child may or may not know that the grandfather of that child came into that room that night, though he had been long in his grave, and murdered her baby--murdered him with tainted blood. that grandfather had not lived a clean life, and so broke a mother's heart and forced her in agony to pray for the death of her own child. when i had finished i walked quietly away, leaving the boys to their own thoughts, and as i walked i breathed the wish that my boys may live such clean, wholesome, upright, temperate lives that no child or grandchild may ever have occasion to reproach them, or point the finger of scorn at them, and that no mother may ever pray for death to come to her baby because of a taint in their blood. chapter xxiii grandmother my grandmother was about the nicest grandmother that a boy ever had, and in memory of her, i am quite partial to all the grandmothers. i like whistler's portrait of his mother there in the luxembourg--the serene face, the cap and strings, and the folded hands--because it takes me back to the days and to the presence of my grandmother. she got into my heart when i was a boy, and she is there yet; and there she will stay. the bread and butter that she somehow contrived to get to us boys between meals made us feel that she could read our minds. i attended a banquet the other night, but they had no such bread and butter as we boys had there in the shade of that apple-tree. it was real bread and real butter, and the appetite was real, too, and that helped to invest grandmother with a halo. sometimes she would add jelly, and that caused our cup of joy to run over. she just could not bear a hungry look on the face of a boy, and when such a look appeared she exorcised it in the way that a boy likes. what i liked about her was that she never attached any conditions to her bread and butter--no, not even when she added jelly, but her gifts were as free as salvation. the more i think of the matter, the more i am convinced that her gifts were salvation, for i know, by experience, that a hungry boy is never a good boy, at least, not to excess. whatever the vicissitudes of life might be to me, i knew that i had a city of refuge beside grandmother's big armchair, and when trouble came i instinctively sought that haven, often with rare celerity. in that hallowed place there could be no hunger, nor thirst, nor persecution. in that place there was peace and plenty, whatever there might be elsewhere. i often used to wonder how she could know a boy so well. i would be aching to go over to play with tom, and the first thing i knew grandmother was sending me over there on some errand, telling me there was no special hurry about coming back. my father might set his foot down upon some plan of mine ever so firmly, but grandmother had only to smile at him and he was reduced to a degree of limpness that contributed to my escape. i have often wondered whether that smile on the face of grandmother did not remind him, of some of his own boyish pranks. we boys knew, somehow, what she expected of us, and her expectation was the measuring rod with which we tested our conduct. boy-like, we often wandered away into a far country, but when we returned, she had the fatted calf ready for us, with never a question as to our travels abroad. in that way foreign travel lost something of its glamour, and the home life made a stronger appeal. she made her own bill of fare so appetizing that we lost all our relish for husks and the table companions connected with them. she never asked how or where we acquired the cherry-stains on our shirts, but we knew that she recognized cherry-stains when she saw them. the next day our shirts were innocent of foreign cherry-stains, and we experienced a feeling of righteousness. she made us feel that we were equal partners with her in the enterprise of life, and that hoeing the garden and eating the cookies were our part of the compact. when we went to stay with her for a week or two we carried with us a book or so of the lurid sort, but returned home leaving them behind, generally in the form of ashes. she found the book, of course, beneath the pillow, and replaced it when she made the bed, but never mentioned the matter to us. then, in the afternoon, while we munched cookies she would read to us from some book that made our own book seem tame and unprofitable. she never completed the story, however, but left the book on the table where we could find it easily. no need to tell that we finished the story, without help, in the evening, and the next day cremated the other book, having found something more to our liking. one evening, as we sat together, she said she wished she knew the name of jephthah's daughter, and then went on with her knitting as if she had forgotten her wish. at that age we boys were not specially interested in daughters, no matter whose they were; but that challenge to our curiosity was too much for us, and before we went to bed we knew all that is known of that fine girl. that was the beginning of our intimate, personal knowledge of bible characters--ruth, esther, david, and the rest; but grandmother made us feel that we had known about them all along. i know, even yet, just how tall ruth was, and what was the color of her eyes and hair; and esther is the standard by which i measure all the queens of earth, whether they wear crowns or not. one day when we went over to play with tom we saw a peacock for the first time, and at supper became enthusiastic over the discovery. in the midst of our rhapsodizing grandmother asked us if we knew how those beautiful spots came to be in the feathers of the peacock. we confessed our ignorance, and like ajax, prayed for light. but we soon became aware that our prayer would not be answered until after the supper dishes had been washed. our alacrity in proffering our services is conclusive evidence that grandmother knew about motivation whether she knew the word or not. we suggested the omission of the skillets and pans for that night only, but the suggestion fell upon barren soil, and the regular order of business was strictly observed. then came the story, and the narrator made the characters seem lifelike to us as they passed in review. there were jupiter and juno; there were argus with his hundred eyes, the beautiful heifer that was io, and the crafty mercury. in rapt attention we listened until those eyes of argus were transferred to the feathers of the peacock. if mercury's story of his musical pipe closed the eyes of argus, grandmother's story opened ours wide, and we clamored for another, as boys will do. nor did we ask in vain, and we were soon learning of the flying mercury, and how light and airy mercury was, seeing that an infant's breath could support him. after telling of the wild ride of phaeton and his overthrow, she quoted from john g. saxe: "don't set it down in your table of forces that any one man equals any four horses. don't swear by the styx! it is one of old nick's diabolical tricks to get people into a regular 'fix,' and hold 'em there as fast as bricks!" be it said to our credit that after such an evening dish-washing was no longer a task, but rather a delightful prelude to another mythological feast. we wandered with ulysses and shuddered at polyphemus; we went in quest of the golden fleece, and watched the sack of troy; we came to know orpheus and eurydice and pyramus and thisbe; and we sowed dragon's teeth and saw armed men spring up before us. since those glorious evenings with grandmother the classic myths have been among my keenest delights. i read again and again lowell's extravaganza upon the story of daphne, and can hear grandmother's laugh over his delicious puns. i can hear her voice as she reads shelley's musical arethusa, and then turns to his skylark to compare their musical qualities. i feel downright sorry for the boy who has no such grandmother to teach him these poems, but not more sorry than i do for those boys who took that diamond dick book with them when they went visiting. even now, when people talk to me of omniscience i always think of grandmother. chapter xxiv my world "the world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours; we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! this sea that bares her bosom to the moon, the winds that will be howling at all hours and are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers, for this, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not. great god! i'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed out-worn-- so might i, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; have sight of proteus rising from the sea; and hear old triton blow his wreathed horn." --_wordsworth_. i have heard many times that this is one of the best of wordsworth's many sonnets, and in the matter of sonnets, i find myself compelled to depend upon others for my opinions. i'm sorry that such is the case, for i'd rather not deal in second-hand judgments if i could help it. about the most this sonnet can do for me is to make me wonder what my world is. i suppose that the size of my world is the measure of myself, and that in my schoolmastering i am simply trying to enlarge the world of my pupils. i saw a gang-plough the other day that is drawn by a motor, and that set me to thinking of ploughs in general and their evolution; and, by tracing the plough backward, i saw that the original one must have been the forefinger of some cave-dweller. when his forefinger got sore, he got a forked stick and used that instead; then he got a larger one and used both hands; then a still larger one, and used oxen as the motive power; and then he fitted handles to it, and other parts till he finally produced a plough. but the principle has not been changed, and the gang-plough is but a multifold forefinger. it is great fun to loose the tether of the mind and let it go racing along, in and out, till it runs to earth the original plough. whether the solution is the correct one makes but little difference. if friend brown cannot disprove my theory, i am on safe ground, and have my fun whether he accepts or rejects my findings. this is one way of enlarging one's world, i take it, and if this sort of thing is a part of the process of education, i am in favor of it, and wish i knew how to set my boys and girls going on such excursions. i wish i might have gone to school to agassiz just to get my eyes opened. if i had, i'd probably assign to my pupils such subjects as the evolution of a snowflake, the travels of a sunbeam, the mechanism of a bird's wing, the history of a dewdrop, the changes in a blade of grass, and the evolution of a grain of sand. if i could only take them away from books for a month or so, they'd probably be able to read the books to better advantage when they came back. i'd like to take them on a walking trip over the alps and through rural england and scotland for a few weeks. if they could only gather broom, heather, shamrock, and edelweiss, they would be able to see clover, alfalfa, arbutus, and mignonette when they came back home. if they could see black robins in wales and germany, the robin redbreast here at home would surely be thought worthy of notice. if they could see stalactites and stalagmites in luray cave, their world would then include these formations. one of my boys was a member of an exploring expedition in the andes, and one night they were encamped near a glacier. this glacier protruded into a lake, and on that particular night the end of that river of ice broke off and thus formed an iceberg. the glacier was nearly a mile wide, and when the end broke off the sound was such as to make the loudest thunder seem a whisper by comparison. it was a rare experience for this young fellow to be around where icebergs are made, and vicariously i shared his experience. i want to know the price of eggs, bacon, and coffee, but i need not go into camp on the price-list. having purchased my bacon and eggs, i like to move along to where my friend is sitting, and hear him tell of his experiences with glaciers and icebergs, and so become inoculated with the world-enlarging virus. or, if he comes in to share my bacon and eggs, these mundane delights lose none of their flavor by being garnished with conversation on andean themes. i'm glad to have my friend push that greatest of monuments, "the christ of the andes," over into my world. i arise from the table feeling that i have had full value for the money i expended for eggs and bacon. i'd like to have in my world a liberal sprinkling of stars, for when i am looking at stars i get away from sordid things, for a time, and get my soul renovated. i think st. paul must have been associating with starry space just before he wrote the last two verses of that eighth chapter of romans. i can't see how he could have written such mighty thoughts if he had been dwelling upon clothes or symptoms. the reading of a patent-medicine circular is not specially conducive to thoughts of infinity. so i like, in my meditations, to take trips from star to star, and from planet to planet. i like to wonder whether these planets were rightly named--whether venus is as beautiful as the name implies, and whether the martians are really disciples of the warlike mars. i like to drift along upon the canals on the planet mars, with heroic martians plying the oars. i have great fun on such spatial excursions, and am glad that i ever annexed these planets to my world. i can take these stellar companions with me to my potato-patch, and they help the day along. i want pictures in my world, too, and statues; for they show me the hearts of the artists, and that is a sort of baptism. sometimes i grow a bit impatient to see how slowly some work of mine proceeds. then i think of ghiberti, who worked for forty-two years on the bronze doors of the baptistry there in florence, which michael angelo declared to be worthy of paradise. then i reflect that it was worth a lifetime of work to win the praise of such as angelo. this reflection calms me, and i plod on more serenely, glad of the fact that i can count ghiberti and the bronze doors as a part of my world. when i can have titian, rembrandt, leonardo da vinci, andrea del sarto, raphael, and rosa bonheur around, i feel that i have good company and must be on my good behavior. if corot, reynolds, leighton, watts, and landseer should be banished from my world i'd feel that i had suffered a great loss. i like to hobnob with such folks as these, both for my own pleasure and also for the reputation i gain through such associations. i must have people in my world, also, or it wouldn't be much of a world. and i must be careful in my selection of people, if i am to achieve any distinction as a world builder. i just can't leave cordelia out, for she helps to make my world luminous. but she must have companions; so i shall select antigone, evangeline, miranda, mary, and martha if she can spare the time. among the male contingent i shall want job, erasmus, petrarch, dante, goethe, shakespeare, milton, and burns. i want men and women in whose presence i must stand uncovered to preserve my self-respect. i want big people, wise people, and dynamic people in my world, people who will teach me how to work and how to live. if i can get my world made and peopled to my liking, i shall refute mr. wordsworth's statement that the world is too much with us. if i can have the right sort of folks about me, they will see to it that i do not waste my powers, for i shall be compelled to use my powers in order to avert expulsion from their good company. if i get my world built to suit me, i shall have no occasion to imitate the poet's plaint. i suspect there is no better fun in life than in building a world of one's own. chapter xxv this or that one day in london a friend told me that on the market in that city they have eggs of five grades--new-laid eggs, fresh eggs, imported fresh eggs, good eggs, and eggs. a few days later we were in the tate gallery looking at the turner collection when he told me a story of turner. it seems that a friend of the artist was in his studio watching him at his work, when suddenly this friend said: "really, mr. turner, i can't see in nature the colors that you portray on canvas." the artist looked at him steadily for a moment, and then replied: "don't you wish you could?" life, even at its best, certainly is a maze. i find myself in the labyrinth, all the while groping about, but quite unable to find the exit. theseus was most fortunate in having an ariadne to furnish him with the thread to guide him. but there seems to be no second ariadne for me, and i must continue to grope with no thread to guide. there in the tate gallery i was standing enthralled before pictures by watts and leighton, and paying small heed to the turners, when the story of my friend held a mirror before me, and as i looked i asked myself the question: "don't you wish you could?" those barbizon chaps, artists that they were, used to laugh at corot and tell him he was parodying nature, but he went right on painting the foliage of his trees silver-gray until, finally, the other artists discovered that he was the only one who was telling the truth on canvas. every one of my dilemmas seems to have at least a dozen horns, and i stand helpless before them, fearful that i may lay hold of the wrong one. i was reading in a book the other day the statement of a man who says he'd rather have been louis agassiz than the richest man in america. in another little book, "the kingdom of light," the author, who is a lawyer, says that concord, massachusetts, has influenced america to a greater degree than new york and chicago combined. i think i'll blot out the superlative degree in my grammar, for the comparative gives me all the trouble i can stand. everything seems to be better or worse than something else, and there doesn't seem to be any best or worst. so i'll dispense with the superlative degree. whether i buy new-laid eggs, or just eggs, i can't be certain that i have the best or the worst eggs that can be found. if i go over to paris i may find other grades of eggs. our sunday-school teacher wanted a generous contribution of money one day, and, by way of causing purse-strings to relax, told of a boy who was putting aside choice bits of meat as he ate his dinner. upon being asked by his father why he was doing so, he replied that he was saving the bits for rover. he was reminded that rover could do with scraps and bones, and that he himself should eat the bits he had put aside. when he went out to rover with the plate of leavings, he patted him affectionately and said: "poor doggie! i was going to bring you an offering to-day; but i guess you'll have to put up with a collection." i like robert burns and think his "to mary in heaven" is his finest poem. but the critics seem to prefer his "highland mary." so i suppose these critics will look at me, with something akin to pity in the look, and say: "don't you wish you could?" years ago some one planted trees about my house for shade, and selected poplar. now the roots of these trees invade the cellar and the cistern, and prove themselves altogether a nuisance. of course, i can cut out the trees, but then i should have no shade. that man, whoever he was, might just as well have planted elms or maples, but, by some sort of perversity or ignorance, planted poplars, and here am i, years afterward, in a state of perturbation about the safety of cellar and cistern on account of those pesky roots. i do wish that man had taken a course in arboriculture before he planted those trees. it might have saved me a deal of bother, and been no worse for him. back home, after we had passed through the autograph-album stage of development, we became interested in another sort of literary composition. it was a book in which we recorded the names of our favorite book, author, poem, statesman, flower, name, place, musical instrument, and so on throughout an entire page. that experience was really valuable and caused us to do some thinking. it would be well, i think, to use such a book as that in the examination of teachers and pupils. i wish i might come upon one of the books now in which i set down the record of my favorites. it would afford me some interesting if not valuable information. if i were called upon to name my favorite flower now i'd scarcely know what to say. in one mood i'd certainly say lily-of-the-valley, but in another mood i might say the rose. i do wonder if, in those books back yonder, i ever said sunflower, dandelion, dahlia, fuchsia, or daisy. if i should find that i said heliotrope, i'd give my adolescence a pretty high grade. if i were using one of these books in my school, and some boy should name the sunflower as his favorite, i'd find myself facing a big problem to get him converted to the lily-of-the-valley, and i really do not know quite how i should proceed. it might not help him much for me to ask him: "don't you wish you could?" if i should let him know that my favorite is the lily-of-the-valley, he might name that flower as the line of least resistance to my approval and a high grade, with the mental reservation that the sunflower is the most beautiful plant that grows. such a course might gratify me, but it certainly would not make for his progress toward the lily-of-the-valley, nor yet for the salvation of his soul. i have a boy of my own, but have never had the courage to ask him what kind of father he thinks he has. he might tell me. again i am facing a dilemma. dilemmas are quite plentiful hereabouts. i must determine whether to regard him as an asset or a liability. but, that is not the worst of my troubles. i plainly see that sooner or later he is going to decide whether his father is an asset or a liability. we must go over our books some day so as to find out which of us is in debt to the other. i know that i owe him his chance, but parents often seem backward about paying their debts to their children, and i'm wondering whether i shall be able to cancel that debt, to his present and ultimate satisfaction. i'd be decidedly uncomfortable, years hence, to find him but "the runt of something good" because i had failed to pay that debt. when i was a lad they used to say that i was stubborn, but that may have been my unsophisticated way of trying to collect a debt. i take some comfort, in these later days, in knowing that the folks at home credit me with the virtue of perseverance, and i wish they had used the milder word when i was a boy. there is a picture show just around the corner, and i'm in a quandary, right now, whether to follow the crowd to that show or sit here and read ruskin's "sesame and lilies." if i go to see the picture film i'll probably see an exhibition of cowboy equestrian dexterity, with a "happy ever after" finale, and may also acquire the reputation among the neighbors of being up to date. but, if i spend the evening with ruskin, i shall have something worth thinking over as i go about my work to-morrow. so here is another dilemma, and there is no one to decide the matter for me. this being a free moral agent is not the fun that some folks try to make it appear. i don't really see how i shall ever get on unless i subscribe to sam walter foss's lines: "no other song has vital breath through endless time to fight with death, than that the singer sings apart to please his solitary heart." chapter xxvi rabbit pedagogy as i think back over my past life as a schoolmaster i keep wondering how many inebriates i have produced in my career. i'd be glad to think that i have not a single one to my discredit, but that seems beyond the wildest hope, considering the character of my teaching. i am a firm believer in temperance in all things; but, in the matter of pedagogy, my practice cannot be made to square with my theory. in fact, i find, upon reflection, that i have been teaching intemperance all the while. i'm glad the officers of my church do not know of my pedagogical practice. if they did, they would certainly take action against me, and in that case i cannot see what adequate defense i could offer. being a schoolmaster, i could scarcely bring myself to plead ignorance, for such a plea as that might abrogate my license. so i shall just keep quiet and look as nearly wise as possible. it is embarrassing to me to reflect how long it has taken me to see the error of my practice. if i had asked one of my boys he could have told me of the better way. when we got the new desks in our school, back home, our teacher seemed very anxious to have them kept in their virgin state, and became quite animated as he walked up and down the aisle fulminating against the possible offender. in the course of his sulphury remarks he threatened condign punishment upon the base miscreant who should dare use his penknife on one of those desks. his address was equal to a course in "paradise lost," nor was it without its effect upon the audience. every boy in the room felt in his pocket to make sure that it contained his knife, and every one began to wonder just where he would find the whetstone when he went home. we were all eager for school to close for the day that we might set about the important matter of whetting our knives. henceforth wood-carving was a part of the regular order in our school, but it was done without special supervision. of course, each boy could prove an alibi when his own desk was under investigation. it would not be seemly, in this connection, to give a verbatim report of the conversations of us boys when we assembled at our rendezvous after school. suffice it to say that the teacher's ears must have burned. the consensus of opinion was that, if the teacher didn't want the desks carved, he should not have told us to carve them. we seemed to think that he had said, in substance, that he knew we were a gang of young rascallions, and that, if he didn't intimidate us, we'd surely be guilty of some form of vandalism. then he proceeded to point out the way by suggesting penknives; and the trick was done. we were ever open to suggestions. we had another teacher whose pet aversion was match heads. cicero and demosthenes would have apologized to him could they have come in when he was delivering one of his eloquent orations upon this engaging theme. his vituperative vocabulary seemed unlimited, inexhaustible, and cumulative. he raved, and ranted, and exuded epithets with the most lavish prodigality. it seemed to us that he didn't care much what he said, if he could only say it rapidly and forcibly. in the very midst of an eloquent period another match head would explode under his foot, and that seemed to answer the purpose of an encore. the class in arithmetic did not recite that afternoon. there was no time for arithmetic when match heads were to the fore. i sometimes feel a bit guilty that i was admitted to such a good show on a free pass. the next day, of course, the gatling guns resumed their activity; the girls screeched as they walked toward the water-pail to get a drink; we boys studied our geography lesson with faces garbed in a look of innocence and wonder; our mothers at home were wondering what had become of all the matches; and the teacher--but the less said of him the better. we boys needed only the merest suggestion to set us in motion, and like dame rumor in the aeneid, we gathered strength by the going. one day the teacher became somewhat facetious and recounted a red-pepper episode in the school of his boyhood. that was enough for us; and the next day, in our school, was a day long to be remembered. i recall in the school reader the story of "meddlesome matty." her name was really matilda. one day her curiosity got the better of her, and she removed the lid from her grandmother's snuff-box. the story goes on to say: "poor eyes, and nose, and mouth, and chin a dismal sight presented; and as the snuff got further in sincerely she repented." barring the element of repentance, the red pepper was equally provocative of results in our school. i certainly cannot lay claim to any great degree of docility, for, in spite of all the experiences of my boyhood, i fell into the evil ways of my teachers when i began my schoolmastering, and suggested to my pupils numberless short cuts to wrong-doing. i railed against intoxicants, and thus made them curious. that's why i am led to wonder if i have incited any of my boys to strong drink as my teachers incited me to desk-carving, match heads, and red pepper. i have come to think that a rabbit excels me in the matter of pedagogy. the tar-baby story that joel chandler harris has given us abundantly proves my statement. the rabbit had so often outwitted the fox that, in desperation, the latter fixed up a tar-baby and set it up in the road for the benefit of the rabbit. in his efforts to discipline the tar-baby for impoliteness, the rabbit became enmeshed in the tar, to his great discomfort and chagrin. however, brer rabbit's knowledge of pedagogy shines forth in the following dialogue: w'en brer fox fine brer rabbit mixt up wid de tar-baby he feel mighty good, en he roll on de groun' en laff. bimeby he up'n say, sezee: "well, i speck i got you dis time, brer rabbit," sezee. "maybe i ain't, but i speck i is. you been runnin' roun' here sassin' atter me a mighty long time, but i speck you done come ter de een' er de row. you bin cuttin' up yo' capers en bouncin' 'roun' in dis neighborhood ontwel you come ter b'leeve yo'se'f de boss er de whole gang. en den youer allers some'rs whar you got no bizness," sez brer fox, sezee. "who ax you fer ter come en strike up a'quaintance wid dish yer tar-baby? en who stuck you up dar whar you is? nobody in de roun' worril. you des tuck en jam yo'se'f on dat tar-baby widout watin' fer enny invite," sez brer fox, sezee, "en dar you is, en dar you'll stay twel i fixes up a bresh-pile and fires her up, kaze i'm gwineter bobby-cue you dis day, sho," sez brer fox, sezee. den brer rabbit talk mighty 'umble. "i don't keer w'at you do wid me, brer fox," sezee, "so you don't fling me in dat brier-patch. roas' me, brer fox," sezee, "but don't fling me in dat brier-patch," sezee. "hit's so much trouble fer ter kindle a fier," sez brer fox, sezee, "dat i speck i'll hatter hang you," sezee. "hang me des ez high as you please, brer fox," sez brer rabbit, sezee, "but do fer de lord's sake don't fling me in dat brier-patch," sezee. "i ain't got no string," sez brer fos, sezee, "en now i speck i'll hatter drown you," sezee. "drown me des ez deep ez you please, brer fox," sez brer rabbit, sezee, "but do don't fling me in dat brier-patch," sezee. "dey ain't no water nigh," sez brer fox, sezee, "en now i speck i'll hatter skin you," sezee. "skin me, brer fox," sez brer rabbit, sezee, "snatch out my eyeballs, t'ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs," sezee, "but do please, brer fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch," sezee. co'se brer fox wanter hurt brer rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung 'im right in de middle er de brier-patch. dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar brer rabbit struck de bushes, en brer fox sorter hang 'roun' fer ter see w'at wuz gwineter happen. bimeby he hear somebody call 'im, en way up de hill he see brer rabbit settin' cross-legged on a chinkapin log koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip. den brer fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. brer rabbit was bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out: "bred en bawn in a brier-patch, brer fox--bred en bawn in a brier-patch!" en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers. chapter xxvii perspective i wish i could ever get the question of majors and minors settled to my complete satisfaction. i thought my college course would settle the matter for all time, but it didn't. i suspect that those erudite professors thought they were getting me fitted out with enduring habits of majors and minors, but they seem to have made no allowance for changes of styles nor for growth. when i received my diploma they seemed to think i was finished, and would stay just as they had fixed me. they used to talk no little about finished products, and, on commencement day, appeared to look upon me as one of them. on the whole, i'm glad that i didn't fulfil their apparent expectations. i have never been able to make out whether their attentions, on commencement day, were manifestations of pride or relief. i can see now that i must have been a sore trial to them. in my callow days, when they occupied pedestals, i bent the knee to them by way of propitiating them, but i got bravely over that. at first, what they taught and what they represented were my majors, but when i came to shift and reconstruct values, some of them climbed down off their pedestals, and my knee lost some of its flexibility. we had one little professor who afforded us no end of amusement by his taking himself so seriously. the boys used to say that he wrote letters and sent flowers to himself. he would strut about the campus as proudly as a pouter-pigeon, never realizing, apparently, that we were laughing at him. at first, he impressed us greatly with his grand air and his clothes, but after we discovered that, in his case at least, clothes do not make the man, we refused to be impressed. he could split hairs with infinite precision, and smoke a cigarette in the most approved style, but i never heard any of the boys express a wish to become that sort of man. had there occurred a meeting, on the campus, between him and zeus he would have been offended, i am sure, if zeus had failed to set off a few thunderbolts in his honor. we used to have at home a bantam rooster that could create no end of flutter in the chicken yard, and could crow mightily; but when i reflected that he could neither lay eggs nor occupy much space in a frying-pan, i demoted him, in my thinking, from major rank to a low minor, and awarded the palm to one of the less bumptious but more useful fowls. our little professor had degrees, of course, and has them yet, i suspect; but no one ever discovered that he put them to any good use. for that reason we boys lost interest in the man as well as his garnishments. our professor of chemistry was different. he was never on dress-parade; he did not pose; he was no snob. we loved him because he was so genuine. he had degrees, too, but they were so obscured by the man that we forgot them in our contemplation of him. we knew that they do not make degrees big enough for him. i often wonder what degrees the colleges would want to confer upon william shakespeare if he could come back. then, too, i often think what a wonderful letter abraham lincoln could and might have written to mrs. bixby, if he had only had a degree. agassiz may have had degrees, but he didn't really need them. like browning, he was big enough, even lacking degrees, to be known without the identification of his other names. if people need degrees they ought to have them, especially if they can live up to them. possibly the time may come when degrees will be given for things done, rather than for things hoped for; given for at least one stage of the journey accomplished rather than for merely packing a travelling-bag. if this time ever comes thomas a. edison will bankrupt the alphabet. in this coil of degrees and the absence of them, i become more and more confused as to majors and minors. there in college were those two professors both wearing degrees of the same size. judged by that criterion they should have been of equal size and influence. but they weren't. in the one case you couldn't see the man for the degree; in the other you couldn't see the degree for the man. small wonder that i find myself in such a hopeless muddle. i once thought, in my innocence, that there was a sort of metric scale in degrees--that an a.m. was ten times the size of an a.b.; that a ph.d. was equal to ten a.m.'s; and that the ll.d. degree could be had only on the top of mt. olympus. but here i am, stumbling about among folks, and can't tell a ph.d. from an a.b. i do wish all these degree chaps would wear tags so that we wayfaring folks could tell them apart. it would simplify matters if the railway people would arrange compartments on their trains for these various degrees. the ph.d. crowd would certainly feel more comfortable if they could herd together, so that they need not demean themselves by associating with mere a.m.'s or the more lowly a.b.'s. we might hope, too, that by way of diversion they would put their heads together and compound some prescription by the use of which the world might avert war, reduce the high cost of living, banish a woman's tears, or save a soul from perdition. be it said to my shame, that i do not know what even an a.b. means, much less the other degree hieroglyphics. sometimes i receive a letter having the writer's name printed at the top with an a.b. annex; but i do not know what the writer is trying to say to me by means of the printing. he probably wants me to know that he is a graduate of some sort, but he fails to make it clear to me whether his degree was conferred by a high school, a normal school, a college, or a university. i know of one high school that confers this degree, as well as many normal schools and colleges. there are still other institutions where this same degree may be had, that freely admit that they are colleges, whether they can prove it or not. i'll be glad to send a stamped envelope for reply, if some one will only be good enough to tell me what a.b. does really mean. i do hope that the earth may never be scourged with celibacy, but the ever-increasing variety of bachelors, male and female, creates in me a feeling of apprehension. nor can i make out whether a bachelor of arts is bigger and better than bachelors of science and pedagogy. the arts folks claim that they are, and proceed to prove it by one another. i often wonder what a bachelor of arts can do that the other bachelors cannot do, or _vice versa_. they should all be required to submit a list of their accomplishments, so that, when any of the rest of us want a bit of work done, we may be able to select wisely from among these differentiated bachelors. if we want a bridge built, a beefsteak broiled, a mountain tunnelled, a loaf of bread baked, a railroad constructed, a hat trimmed, or a book written, we ought to know which class of bachelors will serve our purpose best. some one asked me just a few days ago to cite him to some man or woman who can write a prize-winning short story, but i couldn't decide whether to refer him to the bachelors of arts or the bachelors of pedagogy. i might have turned to the litt.d.'s, but i didn't suppose they would care to bother with a little thing like that. in college i studied greek and, in fact, won a gold medal for my agility in ramping through mr. xenophon's parasangs. that medal is lost, so far as i know, and no one now has the remotest suspicion that i ever even halted along through those parasangs, not to mention ramping, or that i ever made the acquaintance of ox-eyed juno. but i need no medal to remind roe of those experiences in the greek class. every bluebird i see does that for me. the good old doctor, one morning in early spring, rhapsodized for five minutes on the singing of a bluebird he had heard on his way to class, telling how the little fellow was pouring forth a melody that made the world and all life seem more beautiful and blessed. we loved him for that, because it proved that he was a big-souled human being; and pupils like to discover human qualities in their teachers. the little professor may have heard the bluebird's singing, too; but if he did, he probably thought it was serenading him. if colleges of education and normal schools would select teachers who can delight in the song of a bluebird their academic attainments would be ennobled and glorified, and their students might come to love instead of fearing them. only a man or a woman with a big soul can socialize and vitalize the work of the schools. the mere academician can never do it. the more i think of all these degree decorations in my efforts to determine what is major in life and what is minor, the more i think of george. he was an earnest schoolmaster, and was happiest when his boys and girls were around him, busy at their tasks. one year there were fourteen boys in his school, fifteen including himself, for he was one of them. the school day was not long enough, so they met in groups in the evening, at the various homes, and continued the work of the day. these boys absorbed his time, his strength, and his heart. their success in their work was his greatest joy. of those fourteen boys one is no more. of the other thirteen one is a state official of high rank, five are attorneys, two are ministers of the gospel, two are bankers, one is a successful business man, and two are engineers of prominence. george is the ideal of those men. they all say he gave them their start in the right direction, and always speak his name with reverence. george has these thirteen stars in his crown that i know of. he had no degrees, but i am thinking that some time he will hear the plaudit: "well done, good and faithful servant." chapter xxviii purely pedagogical it was a dark, cold, rainy night in november. the wind whistled about the house, the rain beat a tattoo against the window-panes and flooded the sills. the big base-burner, filled with anthracite coal, was illuminating the room through its mica windows, on all sides, and dispensing a warmth that smiled at the storm and cold outside. there was a book in the picture, also; and a pair of slippers; and a smoking-jacket; and an armchair. from the ceiling was suspended a great lamp that joined gloriously in the chorus of light and cheer. the man who sat in the armchair, reading the book, was a schoolmaster--a college professor to be exact. soft music floated up from below stairs as a soothing accompaniment to his reading. subconsciously, as he turned the pages, he felt a pity for the poor fellows on top of freight-trains who must endure the pitiless buffeting of the storm. he could see them bracing themselves against the blasts that tried to wrest them from their moorings. he felt a pity for the belated traveller who tries, well-nigh in vain, to urge his horses against the driving rain onward toward food and shelter. but the leaves of the book continued to turn at intervals; for the story was an engaging one, and the schoolmaster was ever responsive to well-told stories. it was nine o'clock or after, and the fury of the storm was increasing. as if responding to the challenge outside, he opened the draft of the stove and then settled back, thinking he would be able to complete the story before retiring. in the midst of one of the many compelling passages he heard a bell toll, or imagined he did. brought to check by this startling sensation, he looked back over the page to discover a possible explanation. finding none, he smiled at his own fancy, and then proceeded with his reading. but, again, the bell tolled, and he wondered whether anything he had eaten at dinner could be held responsible for the hallucination. scarcely had he resumed his reading when the bell again tolled. he could stand it no longer, and must come upon the solution of the mystery. bells do not toll at nine o'clock, and the weirdness of the affair disconcerted him. the nearer he drew to the foot of the stair, in his quest for information, the more foolish he felt his question would seem to the members of the family. but the question had scarce been asked when the boy of the house burst forth: "yes, been tolling for half an hour." meekly he asked: "why are they tolling the bell?" "child lost." "whose child?" "little girl belonging to the norwegians who live in the shack down there by the woods." so, that was it! well, it was some satisfaction to have the matter cleared up, and now he could go back to his book. he had noticed the shack in question, which was made of slabs set upright, with a precarious roof of tarred paper; and had heard, vaguely, that a gang of norwegians were there to make a road through the woods to minnehaha falls. beyond these bare facts he had never thought to inquire. these people and their doings were outside of his world. besides, the book and the cheery room were awaiting his return. but the reading did not get on well. the tolling bell broke in upon it and brought before his mind the picture of a little girl wandering about in the storm and crying for her mother. he tried to argue with himself that these norwegians did not belong in his class, and that they ought to look after their own children. he was under no obligations to them--in fact, did not even know them. they had no right, therefore, to break in upon the serenity of his evening. but the bell tolled on. if he could have wrenched the clapper from out that bell, the page of his book might not have blurred before his eyes. as the wind moaned about the house he thought he heard a child crying, and started to his feet. it was inconceivable, he argued, that he, a grown man, should permit such incidental matters in life to so disturb his composure. there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of children lost somewhere in the world, for whom regiments of people were searching, and bells were tolling, too. so why not be philosophical and read the book? but the words would not keep their places, and the page yielded forth no coherent thought. he could endure the tension no longer. he became a whirlwind--slamming the book upon the table, kicking off the slippers, throwing the smoking-jacket at random, and rushing to the closet for his gear. at ten o'clock he was ready--hip-boots, slouch-hat, rubber coat, and lantern, and went forth into the storm. arriving at the scene, he took his place in the searching party of about twenty men. they were to search the woods, first of all, each man to be responsible for a space about two or three rods wide and extending to the road a half-mile distant. lantern in hand, he scrutinized each stone and stump, hoping and fearing that it might prove to be the little one. in the darkness he stumbled over logs and vines, became entangled in briers and brambles, and often was deluged with water from trees as he came in contact with overhanging boughs. but his blood was up, for he was seeking a lost baby. when he fell full-length in the swale, he got to his feet the best he could and went on. book and room were forgotten in the glow of a larger purpose. so for two hours he splashed and struggled, but had never a thought of abandoning the quest until the child should be found. at twelve o'clock they had reached the road and were about to begin the search in another section of the wood when the church-bell rang. this was the signal that they should return to the starting-point to hear any tidings that might have come in the meantime. scarcely had they heard that a message had come from police headquarters in the city, and that information could be had there concerning a lost child when the schoolmaster called out: "come on, craig!" and away went these two toward the barn to arouse old "blackie" out of her slumber and hitch her to a buggy. little did that old nag ever dream, even in her palmiest days, that she could show such speed as she developed in that four-mile drive. the schoolmaster was too much wrought up to sit supinely by and see another do the driving; so he did it himself. and he drove as to the manner born. the information they obtained at the police station was meagre enough, but it furnished them a clew. a little girl had been found wandering about, and could be located on a certain street at such a number. the name of the family was not known. with this slender clew they began their search for the street and house. the map of streets which they had hastily sketched seemed hopelessly inadequate to guide them in and out of by-streets and around zigzag corners. they had adventures a plenty in pounding upon doors of wrong houses and thus arousing the fury of sleepy men and sleepless dogs. one of the latter tore away a quarter-section of the schoolmaster's rubber coat, and became so interested in this that the owner escaped with no further damage. after an hour filled with such experiences they finally came to the right house. joy flooded their hearts as the man inside called out: "yes, wait a minute." once inside, questions and answers flew back and forth like a shuttle. yes, a little girl--about five years old--light hair--braided and hanging down her back--check apron. "she's the one--and we want to take her home." then the lady appeared, and said it was too bad to take the little one out into such a night. but the schoolmaster bore her argument down with the word-picture of the little one's mother pacing back and forth in front of the shack, her hair hanging in strings, her clothing drenched with rain and clinging to her body, her eyes upturned, and her face expressing the most poignant agony. when they left she had thus been pacing to and fro for seven hours and was, no doubt, doing so yet. the mother-heart of the woman could not withstand such an appeal, and soon she was busy in the difficult task of trying to get the little arms into the sleeves of dress and apron. meanwhile, the two bedraggled men were on their knees striving with that acme of awkwardness of which only men are capable, to ensconce the little feet in stockings and shoes. the dressing of that child was worthy the brush of raphael or the smile of angels. at three o'clock in the morning the schoolmaster stepped from the buggy and placed the sleeping baby in the mother's arms, and only the heavenly father knows the language she spoke as she crooned over her little one. as the schoolmaster wended his way homeward, cold, hungry, and worn he was buoyant in spirit to the point of ecstasy. but he was chastened, for he had stood upon the mount of transfiguration and knew as never before that the mission of the schoolmaster is to find and restore the lost child. chapter xxix longevity i'm quite in the notion of playing a practical joke on atropos, and, perhaps, on methuselah, while i'm about it. i'm not partial to atropos at the best. she's such a reckless, uppish, heedless sort of tyrant. she rushes into huts, palaces, and even into the grand stand, and lays about her with her scissors, snipping off threads with the utmost abandon. she wields her shears without any sort of apology or by your leave. not even a check-book can stay her ravages. her devastation knows neither ruth nor gentleness. i don't like her, and have no compunction about playing a joke at her expense. i don't imagine it will daunt her, in the least, but i can have my fun, at any rate. it is now just seven o'clock in the evening, and i shall not retire before ten o'clock at the earliest. so here are three good hours for me to dispose of; and i am the sole arbiter in the matter of disposing of them. my neighbor john has a cow, and he is applying the efficiency test to her. he charges her with every pound of corn, bran, fodder, and hay that she eats, and doctor's bills, too, i suppose, if there are any. then he credits her with all the milk she furnishes. there is quite a book-account in her name, and john has a good time figuring out whether, judged by net results, she is a consumer or a producer. if i can resurrect sufficient mathematical lore, i think i shall try to apply this efficiency test to my three hours just to see if i can prove that hours are as important as cows. i ought to be able, somehow, to determine whether these hours are consumers or producers. i read a book the other evening whose title is "stories of thrift for young americans," and it made me feel that i ought to apply the efficiency test to myself, and repeat the process every waking hour of the day. but, in order to do this, i must apply the test to these three hours. in my dreamy moods, i like to personify an hour and spell it with a capital. i like to think of an hour as the singular of houri which the mohammedans call nymphs of paradise, because they were, or are, beautiful-eyed. my hour then becomes a goddess walking through my life, and, as the poet says, _et vera incessu patuit dea_. if i show her that i appreciate her she comes again just after the clock strikes, in form even more winsome than before, and smiles upon me as only a goddess can. once, in a sullen mood, i looked upon her as if she were a hag. when she returned she was a hag; and not till after i had done full penance did she become my beautiful goddess again. a young man who had been spending the evening in the home of a neighbor complained that they did not play any games, and did nothing but talk. i could not ask what games he meant, fearing that i might smile in his face if he should say crokinole, tiddledy-winks, or button-button. later on i learned that much of the talking was done that evening by a very cultivated man who has travelled widely and intelligently, and has a most engaging manner in his fluent discussions of art, literature, archaeology, architecture, places, and peoples. i was sorry to miss such an evening, and think i could forego tiddledywinks with a fair degree of amiability if, instead, i could hear such a man talk. i have seen people yawn in an art gallery. i fear to play tiddledywinks lest my hour may resume the guise of a hag. but that makes me think of atropos again, and the joke i am planning to play on her. still, i see that i shall not soon get around to that joke if i persist in these dim generalities, as a schoolmaster is so apt to do. well, as i was saying, these three hours are at my disposal, and i must decide what to do with them here and now. in deciding concerning hours i must sit in the judgment-seat whether i like it or not. tomorrow evening i shall have other three hours to dispose of the same as these, and the next evening three others, and my decision to-night may be far-reaching. in six days i shall have eighteen such hours, and in fifty weeks nine hundred. i suppose that a generous estimate of a college year would be ten hours a day for one hundred and eighty days, or eighteen hundred hours in all. i am quite aware that some college boys will feel inclined to apply a liberal discount to this estimate, but i am not considering those fellows who try to do a month's work in the week of examination, and spend their fathers' money for coaching. now, if eighteen hundred hours constitute a college year then my nine hundred hours are one-half a college year, and it makes a deal of difference what i do with these three hours. if i had only started this joke on atropos earlier and had applied these nine hundred hours on my college work, i could have graduated in three years instead of four, and that surely would have been in the line of efficiency. but in those days i was devoting more time and attention to clotho than to atropos. i would fain have ignored lachesis altogether, but she made me painfully conscious of her presence, especially during the finals when, it seemed to me, she was unnecessarily diligent in her vocation. i could have dispensed with much of her torsion with great equanimity. i suppose that now i am trying to square accounts with her by playing this joke on her sister. so i have decided that i shall read a play of shakespeare to-night, another one to-morrow evening, and continue this until i have read all that he wrote. in the fifty weeks of the year i can easily do this and then reread some of them many times. i ought to be able to commit to memory several of the plays, too, and that would be good fun. if those chaps back yonder could recite the koran word for word i shall certainly be able to learn equally well some of these plays. it would be worth while to recite "king lear," "macbeth," "othello," "hamlet," "the tempest," and "as you like it," the last week of the year just before i take my vacation of two weeks. if i can recite even these six plays in those six evenings i shall feel that i did well in deciding for shakespeare instead of tiddledywinks. next year i shall read history, and that will be rare fun, too. in the nine hundred hours i shall certainly be able to read all of fiske, mommsen, rhodes, bancroft, mcmaster, channing, bryce, hart, motley, gibbon, and von holst not to mention american statesmen. about the ides of december i shall hold a levee and sit in state as the characters of history file by. i shall be able to call them all by name, to tell of the things they did and why they did them, and to connect their deeds with the world as it now is. i can't conceive of any picture-show equal to that, and all through my year with shakespeare i shall be looking forward eagerly to my year with the historians. i plainly see that the neighbors will not need to bring in any playthings to amuse and entertain me, though, of course, i shall be grateful to them for their kindly interest. then, the next year i shall devote to music, and if, by practising for nine hundred hours, i cannot acquire a good degree of facility in manipulating a piano or a violin, i must be too dull to ever aspire to the favor of terpsichore. if i but measure up to my hopes during this year i shall be saved the expense of buying my music ready-made. the next year i shall devote to art, and by spending one entire evening with a single artist i shall thus become acquainted with three hundred of them. if i become intimate with this number i shall not be lonesome, even if i do not know the others. i think i shall give an art party at the holiday time of that year, and have three hundred people impersonate these artists. this will afford me a good review of my studies in art. it may diminish the gate receipts of the picture-show for a few evenings, but i suspect the world will be able to wag along. then the next year i shall study poetry, the next astronomy, and the next botany. thus i shall come to know the plants of earth, the stars of heaven, and the emotions of men. that ought to ward off ennui and afford entertainment without the aid of the saloon. in the succeeding twelve years i shall want to acquire as many languages, for i am eager to excel elihu burritt in linguistic attainments even if i must yield to him as a disciple of vulcan. if i can learn a language and read the literature of that language each year, possibly some college may be willing to grant me a degree for work _in absentia_. if not, i shall poke along the best i can and try to drown my grief in more copious drafts of work. and i shall have quite enough to do, for mathematics, the sciences, and the arts and crafts all lie ahead of me in my programme. i plainly see that i have played my last game of tiddledywinks and solitaire. but i'll have fun anyhow. if i gain a half-year in each twelve-month as i have my programme mapped out, in seventy years i shall have a net gain of thirty-five years. then, when atropos comes along with her scissors to snip the thread, thinking i have reached my threescore and ten, i shall laugh in her face and let her know, between laughs, that i am really one hundred and five, and have played a thirty-five-year joke on her. then i shall quote bacon at her to clinch the joke: "a man may be young in years but old in hours if he have lost no time." chapter xxx four-leaf clover i have no ambition to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an iconoclast. to aspire in either of these directions is bad for the digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much that is desirable in human affairs. introspection has its uses, to be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as an objective. a stomach is a valuable asset if only one is not conscious of it. one of the emoluments of schoolmastering is the opportunity it affords for communing with elect souls whose very presence is a tonic. will is one of these. he has a way of shunting my introspection over to the track of the head or the heart. he just talks along and the first thing i know the heart is singing its way through and above the storm, while the head has been connected up to the heart, and they are doing team-work that is good for me and good for all who meet me. at church i like to have them sing the hymn whose closing couplet is: "i'll drop my burden at his feet and bear a song away." i come out strong in singing that couplet, for i like it. in a human sense, that is just what happens when i chat with will for an hour. when i ask him for bread, he never gives me a stone. on the contrary, he gives me good, white bread, and a bit of cake, besides. in one of our chats the other day he was dilating upon henry van dyke's four rules, and very soon had banished all my little clouds and made my mental sky clear and bright. when i get around to evolving a definition of education i think i shall say that it is the process of furnishing people with resources for profitable and pleasant conversation. why, those four rules just oozed into the talk, without any sort of flutter or formality, and made our chat both agreeable and fruitful. henry ward beecher said many good things. here is one that i caught in the school reader in my boyhood: "the man who carries a lantern on a dark night can have friends all about him, walking safely by the help of its rays and he be not defrauded." education is just such a lantern and this schoolmaster, will, knows how to carry it that it may afford light to the friends about him. well, the first of van dyke's rules is: "you shall learn to desire nothing in the world so much but that you can be happy without it." i do wonder if he had been reading in proverbs: "better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." or he may have been reading the statement of st. paul: "for i have learned, in whatever state i am, therewith to be content." or, possibly, he may have been thinking of the lines of paul laurence dunbar, "sometimes the sun, unkindly hot, my garden makes a desert spot; sometimes the blight upon the tree takes all my fruit away from me; and then with throes of bitter pain rebellious passions rise and swell-- but life is more than fruit or grain, and so i sing, and all is well." i am plebeian enough to be fond of milk and crackers as a luncheon; but i have just a dash of the patrician in my make-up and prefer the milk unskimmed. sometimes, i find that the cream has been devoted to other, if not higher, uses and that my crackers must associate perforce with milk of cerulean hue. such a situation is a severe test of character, and i am hoping that at such junctures along life's highway i may find some support in the philosophy of mr. van dyke. i suspect that he is trying to make me understand that happiness is subjective rather than objective--that happiness depends not upon what we have, but upon what we do with what we have. i couldn't be an anarchist if i'd try. i don't grudge the millionaire his turtle soup and caviar. but i do feel a bit sorry for him that he does not know what a royal feast crackers and unskimmed milk afford. if the king and the anarchist would but join me in such a feast i think the king would soon forget his crown and the anarchist his plots, and we'd be just three good fellows together, living at the very summit of life and wishing that all men could be as happy as we. the next rule is a condensed moral code: "you shall seek that which you desire only by such means as are fair and lawful, and this will leave you without bitterness toward men or shame before god." no one could possibly dissent from this rule, unless it might be a burglar. i know the grocer makes a profit on the things i buy from him, and i am glad he does. otherwise, he would have to close his grocery and that would inconvenience me greatly. he thanks me when i pay him, but i feel that i ought to thank him for supplying my needs, for having his goods arranged so invitingly, and for waiting upon me so promptly and so politely. i can't really see how any customer can feel any bitterness toward him. he gives full weight, tells the exact truth as to the quality of the goods, and in all things is fair and lawful. i have no quarrel with him and cannot understand why others should, unless they are less fair, lawful, and agreeable than the grocer himself. i suspect that the grocer and the butcher take on the color of the glasses we happen to be wearing, and that mr. van dyke is admonishing us to wear clear glasses and to keep them clean. the third rule needs to be read at least twice if not oftener: "you shall take pleasure in the time while you are seeking, even though you obtain not immediately that which you seek; for the purpose of a journey is not only to arrive at the goal, but also to find enjoyment by the way." i have seen people rushing along in automobiles at the mad rate of thirty or forty miles an hour, missing altogether the million-dollar scenery along the way, in their haste to get to the end of their journey, where a five-cent bag of peanuts awaited them. had i been riding in an automobile through the streets of tacoma i might not have seen that glorious cluster of five beautiful roses on a single branch in that attractive lawn. because of them i always think of tacoma as the city of roses, for i stopped to look at them. i have quite forgotten the objective point of my stroll; i recollect the roses. when we were riding out from florence on a tram-car to see the ancient fiesole i plucked a branch from an olive-tree from the platform of the car. on that branch were at least a dozen young olives, the first i had ever seen. i have but the haziest recollection of the old theatre and the subterranean passages where catiline and his crowd had their rendezvous; but i do recall that olive branch most distinctly. i cannot improve upon doctor van dyke's statement of the rule, but i can interpret it in terms of my own experiences by way of verifying it. i am sure he has it right. the fourth rule is worthy of meditation and prayer; "when you attain that which you have desired, you shall think more of the kindness of your fortune than of the greatness of your skill. this will make you grateful and ready to share with others that which providence hath bestowed upon you; and truly this is both reasonable and profitable, for it is but little that any of us would catch in this world were not our luck better than our deserts." i shall omit the lesson in arithmetic to-morrow and have, instead, a lesson in life and living, using these four rules as the basis of our lesson. my boys and girls are to have many years of life, i hope, and i'd like to help them to a right start if i can. some of my many mistakes might have been avoided if my teachers had given me some lessons in the art of living, for it is an art and must be learned. these rules would have helped, could i have known them. i am glad to know that my pupils have faith in me. when i pointed out a nettle to them one day, they avoided it; when i showed them a mushroom that is edible, they accepted the statement without question. so i'll see what i can do for them to-morrow with these four rules. then, if we have time, we shall learn the lines of mrs. higginson: "i know a place where the sun is like gold, and the cherry blooms burst with snow, and down underneath is the loveliest nook, where the four-leaf clovers grow. one leaf is for hope, and one is for faith, and one is for love, you know, and god put another in for luck-- if you search, you will find where they grow. but you must have hope, and you must have faith, you must love and be strong--and so, if you work, if you wait, you will find the place where the four-leaf clovers grow." chapter xxxi mountain-climbing mountain-climbing is rare sport. and it is sport if only one has the courage to do it. we had gone to the top of vesuvius on the funicular railway; but one man decided to make the climb. we forgot the volcano in our admiration of the climber. foot by foot he made his way zigzagging this way and that, slipping, falling, and struggling till at last he reached the summit. then, fifty throats poured forth a lusty cheer to do him honor. he was not good to look at, for his clothing was crumpled and soiled, the veins stood out on his neck, his hair was tousled, his face was red and streaming with sweat; yet, for all that, we cheered him and meant it, too. he acknowledged our applause in an honest, simple way, and then disappeared in the crowd. he was not posing as a heroic figure, but was just an honest mountain-climber who accepted the challenge of the mountain and won. in our cheering we did just what the world does: we gave the laurel wreath to the man who wins in a test of courage. i think "excelsior" is pretty good stuff in the way of depicting mountain-climbing, and i always want to cheer that young chap as he fights his way toward the top. he could have stopped down there in the valley, where everything was snug and comfortable, but he chose to climb so as to have a look around. i thought of him one day at scheidegg. there we were, nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, shivering in the midst of ice and snow in mid-july, but we had a look around that made us glad in spite of the cold. as virgil says: "it will be pleasing to remember these things hereafter." i have often noticed that the old soldiers seem to recall the hardest marches, the most severe battles, and the greatest privations more vividly than their every-day experiences. so the mountain-climbing that i have been doing with my boys and girls stands out like a cameo in my retrospective view. sometimes we looked back toward the valley, and it seemed so peaceful and beautiful that it caused the mountain before us to seem ominous. at such times, when courage seemed to be oozing, we needed to reinforce one another with words of cheer. the steep places seemed perilously rough at times, and i could hear a stifled sob somewhere in my little company. at such times i would urge myself along at a more rapid pace, that i might reach a higher level and call out to them in heartening tones to hurry on up to our resting-place. we would often sing a bit in the midst of our resting, and when the sob had been changed to a laugh i felt that life was well worth while. as we toiled upward i was ever on the lookout for a patch of sunlight in the midst of the shadows that it might lure them on. and it never failed. like magic that sun-spot always quickened their pace, and they often hailed it with a shout. they would even race toward that sunny place, their weariness all gone. when a bird sang we always stopped to listen; and the song acted upon them as the music of a band acts upon drooping soldiers. on the next stage of the journey their eyes sparkled, and their step was more elastic. when one stumbled and fell, we helped him to his feet and praised his effort, wholly ignoring the fall. sometimes one would become discouraged and would want to drop out of the company and return home. when this happened, we would gather about him and tell him how good it was to have him with us, how he helped us on, and how sorry we should be to have him absent when we reached the top. when he decided to keep on with us, we gave a mighty cheer and then went whistling on our upward way. we constantly vied with one another in discovering chaste bits of scenery along the way, and we were ever too generous to withhold praise or to appropriate to ourselves the credit that belonged to another. if one found the nest of a bird hidden away in the foliage, we all stopped in admiration. when another discovered a spring gushing out from beneath the rocks, we all refreshed ourselves with the limpid water and poured out our thanks to the discoverer. when a rare flower was found, we took time to examine it minutely till we all felt joy in the flower and in the finder. to us nothing was ever small or negligible that any one of our company discovered. if one started a song we all joined in heartily as if we had been waiting for that one to lead us in the singing. thus each one, according to his gifts and inclinations, became a leader on one or another of the enterprises connected with our journey. so, in time, it seemed to us that the big tree came to meet us in order to give its kindly shade for our comfort; that the bird poured forth its song as a special gift to us to give us new courage; that the flower met us at the right time and place to smile its beauty into our lives; that each stream laughed its way to our feet to quench our thirst, and to share with us its coolness; that the mossy bank gave us a special invitation to enjoy its hospitality; that the cloud had heard our wishes and came to shield us from the sun, and that the path came forth from among the thickets to guide us on our way. because we were winning, all nature seemed to be cheering us on as the people cheered the man at vesuvius. having reached the summit, we sat together in eloquent silence. we had toiled, and struggled, and suffered together, and so had learned to think and feel in unison. our spirits had become fused in a common purpose, and we could sit in silence and not be abashed. we had become honest with our surroundings, honest with one another, and honest with ourselves, and so could smile at mere conventions and find joy in one another without words. we had encountered honest difficulties--rocks, trees, streams, sloughs, tangles, sand, and sun, and had overcome them by honest effort and so had achieved honesty. we had met and overcome big things, too, and in doing so had grown big. no longer did our hearts flutter in the presence of little things, for we had won poise and serenity. the fogs had been banished from our minds; our sight had become clear; our spirits had been enlarged; our courage had been made strong, and our faith was lifted up. a new horizon opened up before us that stretched on and on and made us know that life is a big thing. the sky became our companion with all its myriad stars; the sea became our neighbor with all the life it holds, and the landscape became our dooryard, with all its varied beauty and grandeur. the ships upon the sea and the trains upon the land became our messengers of service. the wires and the air sped our thoughts abroad and linked us to the world. we looked straight into the faces of the big elemental things of life and were not afraid. when we came back among our own people, they seemed to know that some change had taken place and loved us all the more. they came to us for counsel and comfort, paying silent tribute to the wisdom that had come to us from the mountain. they looked upon us not as superiors, but as larger equals. we had learned another language, but had not forgotten theirs. we nestled down in their affections and told them of our mountain, and they were glad. * * * * * and now i sit before the fire and watch the pictures in the flickering flames. in my reverie i see my boys and girls, companions in the mountain-climbing, going upon their appointed ways. i see them healing and comforting the sick, relieving distress, ministering to the needy, and supplanting darkness with light. i see them in their efforts to make the world better and more beautiful, and life more blessed. i see them bringing hope and courage and cheer into many lives. they are bringing the spirit of the mountain down into the valley, and men rejoice. seeing them thus engaged, and hearing them singing as they go, i can but smile and smile. story hour readers third year book three by ida coe, pd.m. assistant principal, public schools city of new york and alice j. christie primary teacher. public schools city of new york contents the land of story books _robert louis stevenson_ hansel and gretel _fairy tale_ the eagle and the fox _fable_ hiawatha's brothers _henry w. longfellow_ the beavers' lodge _indian folklore_ manitou and the squirrels _indian folklore_ the swift runner _indian folklore_ brother rabbit _indian folklore_ queen mab _thomas hood_ cinderella _fairy tale_ the wind _robert louis stevenson_ the bag of winds _greek mythology_ diana and apollo _greek mythology_ the tree _adapted from bjornson_ the fairy tree _fairy tale_ hiawatha's sailing _henry w. longfellow_ gray mole and the indian _indian folklore_ the water lilies _indian folklore_ where go the boats? _robert louis stevenson_ why the sea is salt _northern folklore_ sennin the hermit _from the japanese_ great and little bear _greek mythology_ the boy and the sheep _ann taylor_ the boy who cried wolf _aesop_ the lion's share _aesop_ robin redbreast _william allingham_ thorn rose _fairy tale_ the wolves and the deer _fable_ the cornfields _henry w. longfellow_ the gift of corn _indian folklore_ a boy's song _james hogg_ the frogs' travels _from the japanese_ the merchant's caravan _east indian tale_ queen hulda and the flax _european folklore_ aladdin's lamp _ida coe_ aladdin and the magic lamp _arabian nights_ the whiting and the snail _lewis carroll_ the bonfire in the sea _australian folklore_ robinson crusoe _daniel defoe_ the wonderful world the magic girdle _the brothers grimm_ the land of story books at evening when the lamp is lit, around the fire my parents sit; they sit at home and talk and sing, and do not play at anything. now with my little gun i crawl, all in the dark, along the wall. and follow round the forest track away behind the sofa back. there in the night, where none can spy, all in my hunter's camp i lie, and play at books that i have read, till it is time to go to bed. * * * * * so, when my nurse comes in for me, home i return across the sea, and go to bed with backward looks at my dear land of story books. robert louis stevenson. hansel and gretel in a little cottage at the edge of a forest in germany, lived peter, a poor broom maker, and his wife gertrude. they had two children, hansel and gretel. one day hansel and gretel were left alone at home. their father had gone to the village to sell brooms. their mother was away, too. the children were left busily at work. the boy was mending brooms, the girl knitting stockings. after a time they became tired of their hard work. "come, gretel, let us have some fun!" cried hansel. as he spoke, he threw the broom upon the floor, and pulled the stocking from his sister's hand. "oh, yes!" said gretel. "i will teach you a song, and you can learn the steps of the dance." hansel and gretel danced about the room. gretel sang, while she and hansel danced, "first your foot you tap, tap, tap, then your hands you clap, clap, clap; right foot first, left foot then, round about and back again." presently the mother returned home. she entered the room and found hansel and gretel at play. "you lazy children!" she exclaimed. "why have you not finished your work?" taking the broom that hansel had thrown upon the floor, the mother started to punish him, but the boy was too quick for her. hansel ran nimbly about, and as she was trying to catch him, the mother upset a jug of milk. it was all the food there was in the house. "oh, mother!" cried gretel. "you have spilled the milk, and we shall have nothing to eat." "go out into the woods and gather some strawberries. do not return until you have filled the basket to the brim," commanded the mother. "hansel, help your sister pick the berries, and hurry back, both of you, for there is nothing else for supper." towards evening the father returned from the village. "ho, ho, good wife!" called peter. "i have had great luck to-day, and have sold all my brooms. now for a good supper! see here--bread and butter, some potatoes, ham and eggs. but where are the children?" "they have gone to the woods to gather strawberries," replied gertrude. "it is growing dark. hansel and gretel should have been here long ago," said peter anxiously. the wife began to prepare supper. the husband went to the door of the cottage and looked out into the darkness. "alas, my children!" cried peter. "i fear that the terrible witch of the forest may find them, and that we shall never see them again!" meanwhile hansel and gretel had filled the basket with strawberries, and then had wandered into the forest. they sat down upon a mossy bank under a fir tree, to rest. "here is a fine strawberry! taste it," said gretel. she put a berry into hansel's mouth and took one for herself. "i am so hungry! give me another berry," said hansel. the children tasted another and another of the strawberries, until all were gone. "oh, hansel! we have eaten all of the strawberries," cried gretel. "we must fill the basket again." the children began to hunt for more berries, but it was now growing dark, and they could find none. to make matters worse, they had lost their way. gretel began to cry, but hansel tried to be very brave. "i will take care of you, sister," said he. "hark!" said gretel. they could hear soft voices among the trees. the children became more frightened than before. "what is that, near the dark bushes?" whispered gretel. "it is only the stump of a tree," replied hansel. "it is making faces at me!" said gretel. hansel made faces back again, trying to drive the strange form away. suddenly a light came toward them. "oh, here are father and mother looking for us!" cried gretel. but no, it was only the light of the will-o'-the-wisp. hansel called, "who is there?" echo answered, "who is there?" poor babes in the wood! they fled in terror, back to the mossy bank under the fir tree. there they huddled close together. presently a little man with a long white beard stood before them. he was dressed in gray clothes, and he carried a gray sack upon his back. hansel and gretel were not afraid of the little man, for he seemed very friendly. the little man sang softly, "golden slumbers close your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise. sleep, pretty darlings, do not cry, and i will sing a lullaby. lullaby, lullaby, the sandman am i." then the sandman threw into their tired eyes the sand of sleep. soon the children had gone safely to slumberland. at midnight a little elf, whose home was deep in the heart of an oak tree, came forth and rang a fairy bell. he sang, "twelve small strokes on my tinkling bell-- 'twas made of the white snail's pearly shell;-- midnight comes, and all is well! hither, hither, wing your way, 'tis the dawn of the fairy day!" at the last stroke of twelve, a troop of fairies and wood nymphs appeared. they danced merrily to the tune of the flower bells, forming a ring around the children. when the sun's rays began to shine through the branches of the trees, the fairies tripped away. only the dew fairy remained. she sprinkled dew upon the children's faces with her magic wand. the dew fairy sang, "awake you, o children dear, wake you and rise! the sun glowing brightly, peeps into your eyes!" then the dew fairy departed. "o hansel! hear the birds singing! where are we?" exclaimed gretel. "come, hansel, wake up!" the children looked about them in wonder. the giant trees had disappeared, and near them stood a little house. "what a pretty cottage!" said hansel. "why, it is a candy house! the roof is chocolate, and the windows are sugar plums. what a queer fence! it is gingerbread!" soon they heard some one say, in a squeaky voice, "nibble, nibble, little mouse, who is nibbling my sweet house?" the children only ate and sang and laughed. suddenly the door of the house flew open. an old witch came out. on her head she wore a pointed hat, and in her hand she carried a stick. the candy cottage belonged to the witch of the forest. "oh, ho!" cried the witch. "you dear children, who led you here? come in, and i will give you candies, cakes, apples, and nuts--all that you wish to eat!" hansel and gretel were frightened. they started to run away, but the old witch waved her elder bush above her head. it cast a spell over the children. they could not move. then the witch put hansel into a cage. she brought from the cottage a basket of sugar plums, candies, and nuts. she gave him the sweets to eat. "you will soon be fat enough to cook," she muttered. "i will bake the girl first." grasping the little girl's arm, she shook her roughly, saying, "go into the house and set the table while i build a fire." the old witch gathered some wood. as she threw it upon the fire, she said, "now for a ride through the air on my broom, while the oven is heating!" astride her big broom, the witch rode high above the cottage. she circled around like a huge bird, over the trees and back again, while she sang a strange song. hansel, shut up in the cage, watched her in terror. at last the witch flew down to the ground, on her broom. she alighted close beside the oven, which stood in the front yard. calling the little girl out of the house she said, "open the oven door. then creep inside and see if it is hot enough to bake the bread." but gretel guessed that the witch meant to shut the door upon her, so she said, "i am afraid to creep into the oven." "silly child!" said the witch. "the door is wide enough. why, even i could pass through!" as she spoke, she popped her head into the oven. gretel sprang toward her and shut the oven door. that was the end of the old witch! then gretel ran and unfastened the door of the cage. "we are saved, hansel!" she exclaimed. then she danced about, singing merrily, "first your foot you tap, tap, tap, then your hands you clap, clap, clap; right foot first, left foot then, round about and back again." then, taking the elder bush, gretel waved it above her head as the witch had done. instantly the candy house became a log cabin. sunflowers and morning-glories were growing in the front yard, where the witch's cage and the oven had stood. soon voices were heard. the sounds came nearer, and the father and mother clasped their children in their arms. peter and gertrude lived with the two children in the log cabin in the forest, for many happy years. and the fairies always took good care of both hansel and gretel. the eagle and the fox one morning the fox said to his children, "i will find some eggs for breakfast." then he went to the woods. the fox saw an eagle's nest in the top branch of a tree. "how can i reach those eggs?" thought he. "ha, ha! now i have a plan." he put some grass stalks into his ears and knocked on the tree with them. "throw an egg to me," cried the fox. "if you do not throw an egg to me, i will knock this great tree over with these grass stalks." the eagle was terribly frightened, and she threw an egg down to the fox. "throw another egg down to me at once," demanded the fox, when he saw that he had frightened the eagle. "one egg is enough," said the eagle. "i shall not throw down any more eggs." "throw another egg to me, or i shall knock the tree over with these grass stalks, and take all your eggs," said the fox. the eagle was still more frightened, and she threw down another egg. then the fox laughed and said, "how could i knock down a great tree with these small grass stalks?" the eagle became very angry. she flew down from her nest and grasped the fox with her talons. then she lifted the fox up and flew with him far out to sea. she dropped him upon a lonely island. the fox was left on the lonely island. one day he said to himself, "am i going to die on this island?" then the fox began to sing softly. seals, walruses, porpoises, and whales swam near the island. "what are you singing about?" asked the sea people. "this is what i am singing about," said the fox. "are there more large animals in the waters of the sea, or on dry land?" "certainly there are more animals in the waters of the sea than on dry land," replied the sea people. "well, then, prove it to me!" said the fox. "come up to the surface of the water and form a raft that will reach from this island to the mainland. then i can walk over all of you, and i shall be able to count you." so the large sea people--seals, walruses, porpoises, and whales--came up to the surface of the water. the sea people formed a great raft, that reached from the island across to the mainland. this was what the fox wanted. he ran over the great raft, pretending to count the animals. when at last the fox reached the mainland, he jumped ashore and hastened home. hiawatha's brothers of all beasts he learned the language, learned their names and all their secrets, how the beavers built their lodges, where the squirrels hid their acorns, how the reindeer ran so swiftly, why the rabbit was so timid, talked with them whene'er he met them, called them "hiawatha's brothers." henry w. longfellow. the beavers' lodge big chief had traveled a long distance through the forest. at last he reached the shore of a lake. he was very tired, so he sat down upon a rock to rest. suddenly a large beaver came up from the water and stood before big chief. "who are you, that you dare to enter my kingdom?" demanded the beaver. "i am big chief," replied the indian. "the great spirit has given me power over all the animals. who are you?" "i am master beaver. all the beavers follow me and obey my commands. we are busy people. we always have plenty to do." big chief was not afraid. he showed master beaver his bow and arrows and his wampum belt, saying, "these gifts were bestowed upon me by the great spirit. i am ruler over the animals of field and forest, over the birds, and over the fish." when master beaver saw the bow and arrows and the wampum belt, he knew that the indian was very powerful. so he said, less proudly, "will you come with me and see how the beavers build their lodges?" big chief followed master beaver for a short distance along the shore of the lake. he saw many beavers at work cutting down trees with their sharp teeth. some of the trees had fallen across the water and reached to an island in the lake. on the island, other beavers were plastering the spaces between the trees with mud and leaves. master beaver said that this was the way the beavers built a dam. then he led big chief to the beavers' village on the island. here were many lodges, built of sticks, grass and moss, and plastered with clay. at last master beaver paused before one of the lodges. "enter! this is my home. you are welcome, big chief," said master beaver. the indian followed the beaver through a long, winding tunnel. they came to a large room. the floor of the room was covered with grass and bark. big chief admired the dainty house with its dome-shaped roof. master beaver's wife and his daughter gave the stranger a hearty welcome. they at once prepared a meal of poplar, birch and willow bark, and roots of water lilies. this was choice food for beavers, but it was not the kind of dinner that big chief liked. nevertheless he was very happy. master beaver's daughter waited upon her father and his guest. she was so very fair that she won the heart of big chief. he no longer wished to live alone. he asked master beaver to give the maiden to him, to be his bride. this pleased master beaver very much, for he liked big chief. all the beavers and their neighbors were invited to the wedding. the next morning, some of the beavers arrived bringing clay. then came otters, each carrying a large fish in his mouth as a present for the bride. they were followed by the weasels, the minks, and the muskrats. the guests enjoyed the wedding breakfast in the lodge of master beaver. after the feast, the beavers invited the other animals to meet them on the bank of the lake. there they held a council. they said, "we will build a lodge, which shall be the wedding gift of the beavers." then they chose a place under the birch trees that grew near the shore of the lake. here the beavers began to build a lodge, of sticks of wood and the clay which they had brought with them. soon the cozy lodge was finished. now came the greatest wonder of all. it pleased the great spirit to change the bride into a beautiful woman--a wife suited to the noble and handsome big chief. amid the cheers of their friends, master beaver led the happy couple to the cozy lodge near the lake. there they made their home. manitou and the squirrels "please tell me one more story about the great manitou, grandmother," begged the little indian boy. the grandmother liked to tell stories to the boy. she sat down facing him and told him the story of the great manitou and the squirrels. this was the story she told: once upon a time, there was scarcely any food to be found. the great manitou and his wife had fasted for many days, and they were very hungry. "we must have meat," said manitou. then he thought of a plan. he lifted his bow and aimed a magic arrow through the door of the wigwam. the arrow sped onward in the forest, until it passed through the body of a bear. it held the bear fast to a tree. manitou and his wife went into the forest together. there they found the bear. then manitou said, "we will have a feast and invite our friends." the birds and beasts were glad to accept the invitation. a large company arrived. the woodpecker was the first to taste the food. he began to eat greedily, for he was very hungry. when he put the meat into his mouth, it turned to ashes. the woodpecker began to cough. "this is very impolite; i must not let manitou hear me cough," thought he. the fox was the next to taste the meat. it turned to ashes, and he began to cough. all the other guests began to cough as soon as they had tasted the meat. they tried very hard not to let manitou hear them. they kept on tasting, but the more they tasted the harder they coughed. at last manitou became very angry. "i will make you remember this," said he. in an instant, the woodpecker, the fox, and all the other guests had disappeared. in their place were many squirrels, running up and down the trees and coughing as squirrels always do when taken by surprise. to this day, squirrels do not eat meat, but instead they nibble acorns and nuts. "if you have sharp eyes," added the grandmother, "you will find hollow places in the trees, where the squirrels hide their acorns and nuts." the swift runner in the olden times, the animals were fond of sports. they often held contests, with prizes for those that won. once a prize was offered for the animal who could prove himself the swiftest runner. the reward was to be a pair of great antlers. each animal was to carry the antlers on his head, while running the race. the animal that should win, would have the antlers for his own. a path through the woods was chosen for the race course. there were many bushes and brambles along the way. all the animals gathered at the place of meeting. they chose black bear to be judge of the race. it was decided that the rabbit and the deer alone should try for the prize. "they are the best runners. none of the rest of us could hope to win," said the other animals. white rabbit was given the first chance. "i am willing to try for the prize," white rabbit said, "but i would like first to look over the ground where i am to run." so white rabbit disappeared in the woods. he was gone so long that red fox was sent to look for him. red fox found the rabbit hard at work, cutting off twigs to clear a path along which to run. red fox went back and told the other animals what white rabbit was doing. pretty soon white rabbit came out of the woods. he was all ready to put on the antlers and begin the race for the great prize. "oh, no!" said judge bear. "we cannot allow you to enter the great race. you are too fond of gnawing twigs. you may keep on gnawing twigs instead of trying for the prize." so little white rabbit was not allowed to run for the prize. red fox placed the horns upon the head of the deer and said, "it is your turn to try to win the race." then the animals gave three loud cheers and told the deer to do his best. the deer ran swiftly along the woodland path. he carried the antlers so skillfully that they were not once caught in the bushes. when the deer returned to the place of meeting, judge bear proclaimed him winner of the race. as black bear gave the prize to the deer, he said, "henceforth you shall wear the antlers on your head. you shall always be called the swift runner." brother rabbit one autumn day in the long ago, eagle eye, the great indian chief, was very sad. all summer long there had been no rain. the prairie grass was crisp and brown. the little streams were dry. the animals, finding neither water nor green grass, had gone to the mountains many miles away. the indians of the plains had no food to eat. "i will go and search for the place where the animals have gone, so that i may tell my hunters and save the lives of my people," said eagle eye. so, carrying his canoe to the river, eagle eye paddled up the stream for many days and nights. he watched to see if any of the animals came to the river to drink, but there was not even a squirrel. one night the clouds hung low in the sky. "there will be snow before morning," said eagle eye. then the great chief hauled his canoe up the river bank. he made a shelter with branches of trees. here he slept through the night. in the morning, the ground was covered with snow. "the great spirit is kind," said eagle eye. "now i shall see the footprints of some of the animals, and i can follow them." soon he found the footprints of deer that had been to the river to drink. eagle eye followed the footprints for many miles. at last he found where the animals lived. eagle eye marked some trees, so that he might find the place again. then he started to return to the river bank where he had left his canoe. snow had fallen, and everything was white. eagle eye could not find the canoe. "i am lost!" cried eagle eye. "if only there were some way of finding my canoe!" just then he saw a rabbit peering out from behind the stump of a tree. "o brother rabbit!" called eagle eye. "how glad i am to see you! i am lost. i cannot find the river bank." "let me lead the way," brother rabbit replied. "if you will watch my dark fur against the snow, you can easily follow close behind me." so brother rabbit hopped along, and eagle eye, watching the dark fur against the snow, followed close behind. at last they reached the river bank, and there they found eagle eye's canoe. eagle eye pushed the canoe into the water and stepped in. before he paddled away he said, "you have saved my life, brother rabbit. hereafter your brown fur shall be white when the cold winter comes. then no one will see your body against the snow, and you will always be safe." the rabbit turned pure white. he looked like a ball of snow beside the bushes. then eagle eye smiled. "your enemies will have a long chase after this," he said, "before they will find brother rabbit!" after many days, eagle eye reached his home once more. the chief told his people that he had followed the footprints of deer, and had found where the animals lived. the indians went with eagle eye after the deer, and soon they had plenty of food. queen mab a little fairy comes at night, her eyes are blue, her hair is brown, with silver spots upon her wings, and from the moon she flutters down. she has a little silver wand, and when a good child goes to bed, she waves her hand from right to left, and makes a circle round its head. and then it dreams of pleasant things-- of fountains filled with fairy fish, and trees that bear delicious fruit, and bow their branches at a wish. of arbors filled with dainty scents from lovely flowers that never fade; bright flies that glitter in the sun, and glowworms shining in the shade. and talking birds with gifted tongues, for singing songs and telling tales, and pretty dwarfs to show the way through fairy hills and fairy dales. but when a bad child goes to bed, from left to right she weaves her rings, and then it dreams all through the night of only ugly, horrid things! then lions come with glaring eyes, and tigers growl, a dreadful noise, and ogres draw their cruel knives, to shed the blood of girls and boys. then stormy waves rush on to drown, or raging flames come scorching round, fierce dragons hover in the air, and serpents crawl along the ground. then wicked children wake and weep, and wish the long black gloom away; but good ones love the dark, and find the night as pleasant as the day. thomas hood. cinderella once upon a time, there was a proud, selfish woman who had three daughters. the youngest was prettier than her sisters, and they were jealous of her beauty. they made her do all the housework, while they went to parties and balls. the girl washed the dishes and swept the floors. she tended the fire and fed the parrot whose cage hung by the kitchen window. she spent so much time among the ashes and cinders, that her sisters called her cinderella. now it happened that the king was to give a ball, in honor of the young prince. cinderella's mother and sisters were invited. how pleased they were to receive the invitation! they could think of nothing but the fine clothes they intended to wear. they sent for the best dressmaker they could find. the oldest sister chose a pink silk gown. "i shall wear my red satin cloak trimmed with swan's-down," said she. the second sister chose a gown of green velvet, saying, "the green velvet will show my diamonds to advantage." the night of the great ball came at last. cinderella helped her sisters to dress. "do you not wish that you were going to the ball?" said one of them. "yes, indeed!" sighed poor cinderella. but her sisters only laughed. cinderella watched them from the kitchen window as they drove away in their fine carriage. then she sat down by the fire and began to cry. "why are you crying, cinderella?" said some one gently. there stood her fairy godmother. "i wish i could--i wish i could--" sobbed cinderella. "you wish that you could go to the prince's ball," said the fairy godmother. "yes," nodded cinderella. "stop crying and you may go," said the fairy godmother. "run into the garden and bring me the largest pumpkin that you can find." cinderella could not think how a pumpkin would help her to go, but she obeyed. the fairy godmother scooped out the inside of the pumpkin, leaving only the rind. she carried it to the kitchen door. then she touched the rind with her wand. instantly there stood a great coach covered with gold. "where shall we find horses for such a great coach?" cried cinderella. "bring the mouse trap from the cellar," the fairy godmother replied. "here are six live mice in the trap," said cinderella breathlessly. the fairy godmother lifted the door of the trap. she touched each of the mice with her wand as it ran out. the mice became six beautiful white horses standing before the coach. "where shall we find a coachman to drive the horses?" asked cinderella. "bring the rat trap to me," replied the fairy godmother. cinderella brought the rat trap, and in it was a large gray rat. at a touch of the wand, the rat was changed into a coachman. he sat in state upon the coach. "now run into the garden again. you will find two lizards behind the watering pot. bring them to me." the fairy godmother touched the lizards with her wand. in their place stood two footmen in splendid livery. they stepped to the back of the coach as if they had been footmen all their lives. then the kind fairy godmother touched cinderella's clothes with her wand. the rags became a beautiful costume of satin, covered with pearls. in place of her old shoes were glass slippers that had been made by the fairies. they were the very prettiest little slippers in the world. never had cinderella been so happy! "now you may go to the ball, but do not fail to leave before midnight," said the fairy godmother. "if you stay until the clock strikes twelve," added the fairy godmother, "your coach will again become a pumpkin; your horses will be mice; your coachman will be a rat; your footmen will be lizards, and your beautiful dress will become rags." cinderella stepped into the coach. a few minutes later, the white horses dashed into the royal courtyard. the door of the coach was flung open, and cinderella stepped out. as cinderella entered the ball room, the prince hastened to meet her. "never," said he to himself, "have i seen anyone so lovely!" cinderella was so beautiful, so elegantly dressed, and she danced so well, that the prince fell in love with her. he would dance with no one else. the evening passed away like a dream. suddenly cinderella heard a clock chime three quarters past eleven. she bade the prince good-night and was soon on her way home in the pumpkin coach. when cinderella reached home, she found her fairy godmother waiting to hear about the ball. "it was fine!" said cinderella. "the prince has invited me to attend the ball to be given to-morrow night. oh, how i wish that i might go!" "you may certainly go to the prince's ball to-morrow night. i wish to make you very happy, dear child," said the fairy godmother. by the time the mother and sisters had returned home from the ball, the fairy godmother had disappeared. cinderella was sitting by the kitchen fire in her rags. "do you not wish that you had been to the ball?" asked the sisters. "there was a wonderful princess there. the prince would dance with no one else." "who was she?" asked cinderella. "that we cannot say," answered the two sisters. "she would not tell her name, though the prince, on bended knee, begged her to do so." the next night, as soon as the mother and sisters had started in their carriage to attend the ball, the fairy godmother appeared once more. again, at the touch of her wand, the pumpkin became a coach; the mice became horses; the rat became a coachman, and the lizards became footmen. the fairy godmother touched cinderella's clothes with her wand, and this time her rags became a beautiful costume of silver cloth, covered with rubies. in place of the worn-out shoes were the wonderful glass slippers. "whatever you do, remember to leave before the clock strikes twelve," said the fairy godmother, as cinderella drove away. when cinderella arrived at the king's palace, the prince met her at the door. he would dance with no one else. cinderella was very happy. the hours passed swiftly away, but she left the palace before the clock struck twelve. the king gave another ball the third night. this time cinderella wore a costume of gold cloth, covered with sparkling diamonds; and on her feet were the wonderful glass slippers. the prince met her at the door. he led her to the ball room and again would dance with no one else. this time cinderella was enjoying the ball so much that she forgot the warning of the fairy godmother. suddenly the clock began to strike twelve. with a cry of alarm she fled from the ball room, dropping one of her glass slippers in her haste. the prince hurried after her, but by the time he reached the royal courtyard the beautiful maiden had disappeared. as cinderella arrived at her own gate, the coach became a pumpkin; the horses became mice; the coachman became a rat and the footmen lizards. cinderella was again clothed in rags, but in her hand she carried one of the glass slippers that she had worn at the prince's ball. the mother and sisters came home soon afterwards. they could talk of nothing but the sudden disappearance of the beautiful princess. on the following morning, there was a noise of trumpets and drums. the king's messengers passed through the town, crying, "the king's son will marry the fair maiden whose foot the glass slipper exactly fits." the prince rode behind in his coach. he was followed by a company of attendants, who carried the glass slipper upon a velvet cushion. at last the procession arrived at the home of cinderella. the mother and sisters saw the prince coming. they at once hid pretty cinderella under a tub in the kitchen. the prince tried to fit the glass slipper to the foot of the oldest daughter. the foot was too long and too thin at the heel. "you can pare off the heel," said the mother. but the prince only laughed. he tried the glass slipper on the foot of the second daughter. her foot was too short and too fat at the toe. "you can pare off the toe," said the mother. but the prince only laughed. suddenly the parrot called, from his cage by the kitchen window, "you may pare off the heels, or pare off the toes, but under the tub the slipper goes." the prince ordered his attendants to lift the tub. crouching under it sat cinderella, clothed in rags but wearing on one foot the mate to the glass slipper. the prince knelt upon the velvet cushion, and tried on cinderella's foot the little glass slipper which he had found in the ball room. it fitted exactly. it was like the slipper that cinderella had on the other foot. at that moment, the fairy godmother appeared. she touched cinderella's clothes with her wand. there stood cinderella, dressed in a costume even more beautiful than those she had worn at the palace. then the prince saw that cinderella was indeed the lovely maiden for whom he was searching. he arose and kissed her, and begged her to become his wife. the prince and cinderella were married, and in time they became king and queen. they ruled the kingdom long and well. the wind i saw yon toss the kites on high and blow the birds about the sky; and all around i heard you pass, like ladies' skirts across the grass-- o wind, a-blowing all day long! o wind, that sings so loud a song! i saw the different things you did, but always you yourself you hid. i felt you push, i heard you call, i could not see yourself at all-- o wind, a-blowing all day long! o wind, that sings so loud a song! o you that are so strong and cold, o blower, are you young or old? are you a beast of field and tree, or just a stronger child than me? o wind, a-blowing all day long! o wind, that sings so loud a song! robert louis stevenson. the bag of winds the great caves of an island, far away in the midst of the sea, were the home of the winds. eolus was ruler of the winds. he kept them imprisoned in the caves. sometimes he allowed them to go free for a time, to have a frolic or take exercise. although the winds were often unruly and were fond of mischief, they always obeyed the voice of eolus. north wind was the roughest of all. he would go from his cave on the wildest errands. sometimes he would pile the waves mountains high and would lash them into a tempest. he would tear the sails and break the masts of the vessels. he would uproot the forest trees and tear the roofs from the houses. but at the command of eolus, north wind would cease his roaring and would go sullenly back to his cave. "south wind!" eolus would call. "send a gentle, playful breeze among the flowers. bring gay sunshine and soft showers. sing a song of spring. "west wind! blow steadily against the sails of the ships and speed them on their journey. "east wind! go forth in a jolly, merry mood. whirl the leaves over the ground and scatter the seeds far and wide. "north wind! cover the earth with a blanket of snow. freeze the waters of the lakes and rivers." thus eolus would command the winds, and they would do his bidding. one day a ship stopped near the island of the winds, and anchored. the captain of the ship and the sailors went ashore. eolus treated the visitors very kindly. when the sailors discovered that they had come to the home of the winds, they cried, "o eolus! tell west wind to blow and help us reach home quickly:" then eolus took a leather bag and put into it all the unruly winds. he tied the end of the bag with a silver string. giving the bag to the captain, he said, "fasten the bag to the mast of your ship. do not open it, or trouble will follow." then eolus called west wind from his island cave. the captain and the sailors thanked eolus and started off in the ship. west wind blew gently, and the ship sailed over smooth waters day and night. each day found them nearer home. at last, on the evening of the ninth day, they saw the shores of their own land. the captain cried, "land, ahoy! we shall anchor in the harbor to-morrow." tired with long watching, and thinking that the ship was safe, he went to sleep. then the sailors began to whisper softly to each other. "what do you suppose there is in the bag?" said one. "it is tied with a silver cord. i am sure that it is full of gold," said another. then they planned to rob the captain of his treasure. one of the sailors untied the bag. out rushed the angry winds! they raged and roared. a storm arose, and the ship was sent far out of its course. the captain begged west wind to help the sailors, but he could not. at last the ship was driven back to the home of the winds. eolus was surprised when he saw the ship again. "why have you returned?" asked eolus. "the sailors untied the silver cord at the end of the bag and set the unruly winds free," replied the captain. "please call them back to their caves and help us." "depart!" cried eolus angrily. "i will show you no more favors." sadly they sailed away, and no kind west wind helped them. they toiled for many days and nights, and they suffered great hardship before they came once more in sight of their own land. diana and apollo on an island in the sea, there lived a beautiful woman who had two children, twins. the girl's name was diana, the boy's apollo. it was a floating island. neptune, the king of the sea, had placed four marble pillars under it, and had fastened it with heavy chains. the two children grew rapidly. diana became tall and graceful. jupiter, king of heaven and earth, saw that she was very fair. one day as diana was walking through the forest, jupiter met her and spoke to her, saying, "fair diana, hereafter you shall be called queen of the woods." diana, followed by her maids the wood nymphs, often wandered through the forest. she took care of the deer and all helpless creatures, but she hunted fierce animals. apollo, also, grew to be fair and strong. jupiter bestowed many gifts upon the youth. he gave apollo a pair of swans and a golden chariot, so that the boy could go anywhere, on land or sea. the most wonderful present that jupiter gave to apollo was a silver bow, with sharp arrows which never missed the mark. apollo prized the bow so highly and used it so very skillfully, that he came to be called "master of the silver bow." the tree green stood the tree, with its leaves tender bright. "shall i take them?" said frost, as he breathed thro' the night. "oh! pray let them be, till my blossoms you see!" begged the tree, as she shivered and shook in affright. sweet sang the birds the fair blossoms among. "shall i take them?" said wind, as he swayed them and swung. "oh! pray let them be, till my berries you see!" begged the tree, as its branches all quivering hung. bright grew the berries beneath the sun's heat. "shall i take them?" said lassie so young and so sweet. "ah! take them, i crave! take all that i have!" begged the tree, as it bent its full boughs to her feet. adapted. the fairy tree long, long ago, on an island in the sea, lived a family of seven sisters. the oldest girl ruled the household, and her sisters obeyed her commands. flora, the youngest sister, was sent to the forest each day, to gather wood for the kitchen fire. near the edge of the forest was a cave under some rocks. a stream of water fell over the rocks into a basin in the cave. this was a delightfully cool spot, and flora often rested here on her way home after gathering wood in the forest. she would lie on the mossy bank of the stream, for hours, and dream. one morning as flora ran along the grassy path that led to the cave, she saw a little fish in the stream. its scales flashed out all the colors of the rainbow. "i am going to keep the fish for a pet," said the girl to herself. "i will call him rainbow." so she caught the pretty fish and put him into the basin in the cave. the next day flora went to the forest for wood. she carried some crumbs of bread which she had saved from her breakfast. on the way home she stopped at the cave. the fish was waiting for her. he came to the edge of the basin, and she fed the crumbs to him. how delighted the girl was! she had been so lonely, and now she had a playfellow! every morning, instead of eating the bread which her sister gave to her, flora would save it and feed the crumbs to her pet. the fish would leap to catch them. "here are some crumbs, rainbow," she would say. "this is all to-day, but i shall come again to-morrow." then she would sing a little song. flora began to grow thin, and her sisters wondered what could be the matter. one day the oldest sister followed her to the cave and saw her feed the crumbs of bread to the fish. while flora was away in the forest, the oldest sister caught the fish, carried him home and baked him for supper. the bones were buried under the kitchen fire. the next morning, flora went to the cave as usual, but no fish was there. she sang her little song, and still he did not come. "rainbow cannot be dead," she said, "for i do not see him in the water." then flora hastened home. she threw herself upon her bed and was soon fast asleep. the following morning, a rooster flew up to flora's window and crowed, "cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo! the bones of rainbow wait for you, under the kitchen fire, too." flora arose at once and went downstairs. there, under the kitchen fire, she found the bones of her pet. she wept as she gathered the bones and placed them in a box. she went to the forest and buried the box near the cave. then flora sat down on a mossy bank near the cave and sang this song: "rainbow, rainbow, hear my cry, my great wish do not deny. if you can't come back to me, pray, o pray, become a tree!" as the last words of the song echoed through the cave, there sprang up beside the girl a wonderful fairy tree. its trunk was of ivory. its leaves were of silver fringed with pearls. its flowers were gold, and its fruit gems from which sparkled the bright colors of the rainbow. one day the summer breeze carried a leaf from the fairy tree across the sea to another island. it fell at the feet of the king. he picked up the wonderful leaf, saying, "i shall never rest until i find the tree from which this leaf came." the king set sail with his attendants. he soon landed on the island where the seven sisters lived. as the king and his men were marching through the forest, they found the fairy tree growing at the entrance to the cave. the king tried to pick some of the leaves, but he could not. then he heard the sweet voice of a girl. she was singing, "rainbow, rainbow, speak to me! bend your branches, fairy tree!" and flora came tripping along the grassy path that led to the cave. the king said, "fair maiden, if you can pick a leaf or a flower from this tree, you shall be my queen." as flora reached to pick a flower, the tree bowed low, and every leaf trembled with delight. the maiden at once presented the flower to the king. as he took the flower, the king exclaimed, "to you belongs the fairy tree; pray be my bride and rule with me." flora thought she must be dreaming, but they were married next day, beneath the branches of the fairy tree. adapted from "the lilac fairy book" by andrew lang hiawatha's sailing thus the birch canoe was builded in the valley, by the river, in the bosom of the forest; and the forest life was in it, all its mystery and its magic, all the lightness of the birch tree, all the toughness of the cedar, all the larch's supple sinews; and it floated on the river like a yellow leaf in autumn, like a yellow water lily. henry w longfellow gray mole and the indian an indian was once wandering across the prairie. he was tired, and hungry, and very lonely. he had traveled many miles. at last he came to a brook, in a meadow at the foot of a hill. "i will rest here until noon," thought the indian. he sat down upon the mossy bank beside the brook. presently he heard some one whisper, "lift me up and carry me with you, and i will be your friend." the indian looked carefully about him, to find who was speaking. he saw a small, gray animal peeping from out of the moss. "ha, ha, gray mole!" laughed the indian. "why should i carry you?" "i am far from my island home. if you will carry me to the cliff near the place of breaking light, i can then reach my burrow safely," replied gray mole. the indian placed gray mole in his large wampum belt. "very well, little friend," he said. "you may travel with me, but i shall rest here for a time before starting on the journey." then, covering himself with his deerskin robe, he lay down upon the moss. he was soon fast asleep. at about noon sun passed overhead. sun traveled so close to the earth that his rays scorched and shriveled the deerskin robe. when the indian awoke, he found that his deerskin robe had been scorched and shriveled by sun. he was furiously angry. "i will follow sun and punish him," said the indian. sun had traveled far beyond the meadow and was now fast disappearing behind the hill. the indian started to follow. at last the indian reached the summit of the hill and could look down the other side. sun could no longer be seen. he had hidden in his cave beyond the western sea. the indian traveled until he came to the edge of a cliff. the shining big sea water beat high against the rocks, and in the distance he could see the place of breaking light. "we have come to the cliff, little friend. jump out of my wampum belt," said the indian. "but how are you going to reach your burrow on the island yonder?" "i shall wait here with you until the break of day," replied gray mole. many trees grew near the cliff. east wind blew gently through their branches, rustling the leaves and carrying messages to the indian. oak tree said proudly, "i am king of the forest. the great chief summons his warriors beneath my boughs. here he holds his councils. of my branches the strong arrows are made." ash tree whispered, "my pliant branches make the bows which speed the arrows in their flight." maple tree said softly, "i am the food of the great chief. my sap is sweet and wholesome. people of all nations delight to show me honor." red willow bowed low and said, "my bark is used for the peace pipe of the great chief. of my branches the women weave baskets and mats for their wigwams." marsh reeds, growing near red willow, chimed sweetly, "our stalks are used for the stems of the peace pipes." linden tree swayed to and fro, saying, "i am used for the cradles in which the children are rocked." pine tree said gently, "my sweet singing lulls the children to sleep." and she murmured a soft lullaby. birch tree was standing near the path. "of what use are you, o birch tree?" said the indian. birch tree replied, "my bark covers the canoes that sail upon the lakes and rivers. i am used also for the picture-writing of the people." east wind again blew gently, stirring the leaves of the trees. then cedar tree said, "my pliant branches make the canoes strong and steady." larch tree whispered, "i give my fibrous roots to bind the parts together." fir tree said, "my rosin closes the seams of the canoes, to make them safe." then the indian looked at a cluster of alder trees growing near a stream of water. "of what use are you, o alder trees?" the alder trees replied, "the indian chief comes here to fish in the cool stream. he finds shelter, beneath our branches, from the hot rays of sun!" all this time, gray mole had been busily gathering fibrous roots from the larch tree. he had made a rope to snare sun. then gray mole called to the indian to look toward the place of breaking light. there, in a little bay on gray mole's island, stood a birch canoe. soon the canoe floated to where the indian stood. "follow me," said gray mole. "step into the magic canoe. we will go to the island and there set a snare for sun." the magic canoe carried them safely over the water, and they soon reached the island. then the indian set the snare for sun. presently sun came out of his cave and was at once caught in the snare. for seven days the world was dark. the people suffered from hunger and cold. then the indian cried, "alas, what have i done! who will unfasten the rope and set sun free?" "i can set sun free again," said gray mole. the little mole crept to the snare. nibble, nibble, he went, until the rope gave way. then sun burst forth in all his might. in his anger he blazed a path across the sky. the poor little mole was scorched in the fierce heat, and his eyes were blinded. never again could he see well. the indian was sorry, but he said, "gray mole, you are a true friend. you shall always live with me, and all the moles shall be my forest brothers." then, placing gray mole in his wampum belt once more, he stepped into the canoe, and together they sailed to the indian's home. the water lilies beautiful white flowers with hearts of gold floated on the surface of the lily pond. an indian girl was paddling a canoe gently about among the lily pads. she reached out to pick one of the flowers. suddenly there appeared before her a little man. the little man sat upon a lily pad. he smiled at the girl and said, "listen, and i will tell you the story of the water lilies." this is the story the little man told: once there was a star in the heavens, it shone more brightly than any of the other stars. an indian youth watched it for many nights. each night it seemed to move nearer to the earth. one night the young man had a strange dream. in his dream a beautiful maiden appeared before him and spoke to him. her words were like music. she said that she was the star that shone so brightly in the heavens. she loved the birds and the flowers, and the people of the earth. "i wish to leave my sister stars and dwell upon the earth," said the star maiden. "what form is the best for me to take, to be loved by all?" the young man awoke. at once he hastened to tell his dream to the wise men of the tribe. "the beautiful maiden is the star that we have seen in the south," said the wise men. again the star maiden appeared to the young man in a dream. once more she asked him where she might dwell in safety upon the earth, and what form she should take, to be loved by the indians. "choose for yourself," said the young man. at first the star maiden chose to live in the heart of a white rose that grew on a mountain side. but there she was hidden from sight, so that no one could enjoy her beauty. then she searched among the flowers of the prairie, until she found the blossom of a painted cup. "i will rest here," thought the star maiden as she swung to and fro on the yellow cup. alas! she was not safe there, for a herd of buffaloes came rushing over the prairie. finally the star maiden thought of a place where she was sure she would be safe. "i will live upon the lake," she said. "canoes glide gently over the water, and i shall see the children at their play." in the morning, hundreds of white flowers with hearts of gold floated upon the water. the star maiden lived upon earth in the form of water lilies. when the little man had finished telling the story of the lilies, he jumped into the water and disappeared. "i shall always love the water lilies," said the indian girl as she paddled away. where go the boats? dark brown is the river, golden is the sand, it flows along forever, with trees on either hand. green leaves a-floating, castles of the foam, boats of mine a-boating-- where will all come home? on goes the river and out past the mill, away down the valley, away down the hill; away down the river, a hundred miles or more; other little children shall bring my boats ashore. robert louis stevenson. why the sea is salt long ago, there were two brothers, one rich and one poor. the rich brother was stingy. it was winter. the wind howled down the chimney, and the snow almost covered the hut in which the poor brother lived. "we cannot starve," said the poor brother to his wife. "i will ask my brother to help us." now it annoyed the rich brother to have the poor brother ask for help. when the poor brother asked for bread, the rich brother said angrily, "here, take this ham and go to the dwarfs. they will boil it for you." so the poor brother started out, with the ham under his arm, to find the home of the dwarfs. he trudged on through the snow until he saw seven queer little dwarfs rolling a huge snowball, at the foot of a hill. the dwarfs paid no attention to the poor brother, but kept on rolling the snowball, which grew larger and larger each moment, as they sang, "behind the door the mill you'll find, but snow, the mill will never grind. we'll gather snow, and still more snow, then roll it down to cool below." "ha, ha, ha!" laughed the chief dwarf. "we have snow enough here to put out a dozen fires. come, brothers, let us roll the snowball below!" "heave ho! heave ho!" cried the other six dwarfs. in the twinkling of an eye, the seven little dwarfs had rolled the snowball through an entrance in the side of the hill. down, down, the snowball rolled, until it reached the place where the fires burned. then sizzle, sizzle, came the hot steam pouring out of the entrance. all this time the poor brother had stood watching the seven dwarfs, and saying not a word. but suddenly he thought, "if i do not go below at once, there will be no fire left to boil my ham." so the poor brother groped his way through the steam and the smoke, and at last he found his way into the home of the seven dwarfs. it certainly was a very queer place! there were great fires burning on every side. although the huge snowball had cooled the air, it had not quenched the fires. the chief dwarf was stirring some fat that was boiling in a kettle. when he saw the poor brother standing before him with the ham under his arm, he cried, "ho, ho! who comes here?" before the poor brother could answer, the seven little dwarfs had crowded around him, teasing for the ham. it was many a day since they had tasted ham, and they were very fond of it. "what will you give me for the ham?" asked the poor brother. "we have neither silver nor gold," said the dwarfs, "but we will give you the mill that stands behind the door." "of what use would the mill be to me? i am hungry and have come to boil the ham," said the poor brother. "it is a wonderful mill," the chief dwarf replied. "it will grind anything in the world that you might wish, excepting snow and ham. i will show you how to use it." the poor brother agreed to give the ham in exchange for the mill, and the chief dwarf told him how to use it. the dwarf said, "when you wish the mill to grind, use these words: grind, quickly grind, little mill, grind--with a right good will! "when you wish the mill to stop grinding, you must say, halt, halt, little mill! the mill will obey you." taking the little mill under his arm, the poor brother climbed up and up, until he came to the entrance in the side of the hill. then he trudged home again through the snow. when he arrived in front of the hut, he put the little mill down on the snow, and said at once, "grind, quickly grind, little mill, grind a house--with a right good will!" the little mill ground and ground, until there stood, in place of the hut, the finest house in the world. it had fine large windows and broad stairways, and the house was furnished from garret to cellar. by spring, the mill had ground out the last article that was needed for the house, and the poor brother cried, "halt, halt, little mill!" the mill obeyed him. then the poor brother placed the mill in the barnyard and told it to grind horses, cows, woolly sheep, and fat little pigs. when he told it to halt, the mill stopped grinding. the poor brother carried the mill to the fields and commanded it to grind rich crops of wheat, oats, barley, and corn. then he took the mill into the house and asked it to grind fine clothing for his wife and his daughters, and to keep all the cupboards filled with good things to eat. at last the poor brother had everything that he wanted. he placed the mill behind the kitchen door and sat down, with his wife and daughters, to eat the choicest food he had ever tasted. the rich brother heard about all the strange things that had happened, and he went to visit the poor brother. "how did you manage to become so rich?" he asked in astonishment. the poor brother told about the mill, and that he need only say, "grind, quickly grind, little mill, grind--with a right good will!" and the mill would grind anything he might wish to have. the rich brother did not wait to hear any more but said, "lend the mill to me for an hour." taking it under his arm, the stingy rich brother ran across the fields toward home. his wife was in the hayfield, spreading the hay after the mowers. he passed her on the way home and told her that he would attend to breakfast that morning. "i will call you when all is ready," said he. when the rich brother reached home, he placed the mill on the table, and told it to grind porridge and red herrings. the mill began at once to grind oatmeal porridge and fat red herrings. all the dishes and pans were soon filled. then the porridge and herrings began to flow over the kitchen floor into the yard. the rich brother tried to stop the mill. he turned and twisted and screwed the handle, but he could not stop it, for he did not know the magic words. at last he waded through the porridge across the fields to the mowers, crying, "help! help!" when he told the mowers about the mill, they said, "ask your brother to stop the mill, or we shall be drowned in porridge." then the rich brother ran to the poor brother's house, crying and shouting for help. the poor brother laughed when he found out what had happened. they rowed back to the kitchen in a boat, and the poor brother whispered the magic words. the mill stopped grinding. in the course of time, the porridge soaked into the ground, but after that nothing would grow there excepting oats, and afterwards the brooks and ponds were always filled with herrings. the rich brother no longer wished to keep the mill. the poor brother carried it home once more and placed it behind the door. years afterwards, a rich merchant sailed from a distant land and anchored his ship in the harbor. he visited the home of the poor brother and asked about the mill, for he had heard how wonderful it was. "will it grind salt?" the merchant asked. "yes, indeed!" said the poor brother. "it will grind anything in the whole world excepting snow and ham." "let me borrow the mill for a short time, and great will be your reward," said the merchant. he thought it would be much easier to fill his ship with salt from the mill, than to make a long voyage across the ocean to procure his cargo. the poor brother consented gladly. the merchant went away with the mill. he did not wait to find out how to stop the grinding. when the merchant went aboard the ship, he said to the captain, "here is a great treasure. guard it carefully." the captain thought that the little mill did not appear very wonderful, but he placed it upon the deck of the ship. then he ordered the sailors to their posts of duty, and the ship sailed away. when they were out at sea, the merchant said, "captain, we need not go any further upon our voyage. the mill will grind out salt enough to fill the hold of the ship." so saying he cried, "grind, quickly grind, little mill, grind salt--with a right good will!" and the mill ground salt, and more salt, and still more salt. when the hold of the ship was full of salt, the merchant cried, "now you must stop, little mill." but the little mill did not stop. it kept on grinding salt, and more salt, and still more salt. the captain shouted, "we shall be lost! the ship will sink!" one of the sailors called, "ahoy, captain! throw the mill overboard." so, heave ho! heave ho! and overboard went the wonderful mill, down to the bottom of the deep sea. the captain and his crew sailed home with the merchant's cargo of salt. but the mill kept on grinding salt at the bottom of the sea. and that is why the sea is salt. at least, so some people say. sennin the hermit in the far-away land of japan, there was a little village that lay at the foot of a high mountain. every day the children went to play on the grassy bank near a pond at one end of the village. they threw stones into the water. they fished, and they sailed their toy boats. they picked the wild flowers that grew in the fields near by. they carried with them rice to eat, and from morning until evening they played near the pond. one day, while they were at play, the children were surprised to see an old man with a long, white beard walking toward them. he came from the direction of the mountain. the children stopped their games to watch the old man. he came into their midst, and patting them upon their heads easily made them his friends. the children continued their play, for they knew that the old man was kind. the man watched the children, and when it was time for them to go home, he said, "come to the flat rock on the side of the mountain to-morrow, and i will show you some wonderful games." then he climbed up the mountain once more and disappeared. the following morning, the children went to the flat rock. they found the old man waiting for them. "now, my dear children," said he, "i am going to amuse you. look here!" he picked up some dry sticks. he blew at the ends of the sticks, and at once they became sprays of beautiful cherry, plum, and peach blossoms. he passed a branch of each of the flowers to the girls. then he took a stone and threw it into the air. the stone turned into a dove! another stone became an eagle, another a nightingale, or any bird a boy chose to name. "now," said the old man, "i will show you some animals that i am sure will make you laugh." the children clapped their hands. he recited some verses, and a company of monkeys came leaping upon the rock. the monkeys jumped about, grinning at the same time and performing funny tricks. the children clapped their hands again. then the old man bowed to them and said, "children, i can play no more games to-day. it is time for you to go back to the village. farewell!" the old man turned to go. he went up the mountain in the direction of a cave. the children tried to follow him, but in spite of his age he was more nimble than they. they ran far enough, however, to see him enter the cave. when they reached the entrance, the old man had disappeared. the cave was surrounded by fragrant flowers; but into its depths the children did not dare to go. suddenly one of the girls pointed upwards, crying, "there is the old grandfather!" the others looked up, and there, standing on a cloud over the top of the mountain, was the old man. "let us go home now," said one of the boys. on the way, they met two men of the village, whom their parents had sent to search for them. when the children had told their story, one of the men exclaimed, "ah, happy children! the kind old man is surely sennin, the wonderful hermit of the mountain!" foreign children little indian, sioux or crow, little frosty eskimo, little turk or japanee, o! don't you wish that you were me? you have seen the scarlet trees and the lions over seas; you have eaten ostrich eggs, and turned the turtles off their legs. such a life is very fine, but it's not so nice as mine; you must often, as you trod, have wearied not to be abroad. you have curious things to eat, i am fed on proper meat; you must dwell beyond the foam, but i am safe and live at home. little turk or japanee, o! don't you wish that you were me? robert louis stevenson great and little bear callisto was a beautiful woman whom the god jupiter admired. the goddess juno was very angry because jupiter was kind to callisto. she decided to be revenged. "i will take away her beauty, so that no one shall admire her," said juno. night and day she thought and planned, until she found a way to punish callisto. one morning as the fair and gentle callisto was gathering wild flowers in a field, she was suddenly changed into a bear. then she was driven into a forest near by. "you shall live in this forest forever! a cave under the rocks shall be your home!" exclaimed juno. although she had the form of a bear, callisto was still a woman at heart. she feared all the animals that she met. the hunting dogs frightened her, and she would hide in terror from the hunters. one day a young man was hunting in the forest. callisto recognized him at once as her son arcas. she rushed toward her son to embrace him, but thinking the bear was going to attack him, arcas lifted his hunting spear. as he was about to strike the bear, jupiter appeared. the god snatched away the spear just in time to save callisto's life. jupiter took both callisto and arcas, and placed them in the sky. callisto became the great bear, and arcas the little bear. they have remained in the sky ever since. on pleasant nights you can see them in the sky, as they move around the north star. the boy and the sheep "lazy sheep, pray tell me why in the pleasant field you lie, eating grass and daisies white, from the morning till the night: everything can something do, but what kind of use are you?" "nay, my little master, nay, do not serve me so, i pray! don't you see the wool that grows on my back to make you clothes? cold, ah, very cold you'd be, if you had not wool from me! "true, it seems a pleasant thing nipping daisies in the spring; but what chilly nights i pass on the cold and dewy grass, or pick my scanty dinner where all the ground is brown and bare! "then the farmer comes at last, when the merry spring is past, cuts my woolly fleece away, for your coat in wintry day. little master, this is why in the pleasant fields i lie." ann taylor. the boy who cried wolf there was once a boy who tended his father's sheep on the side of a mountain, near a dark forest. it was a lonely place. no one was near, excepting three men whom the boy could see working in the fields, in the valley below. one day the boy thought he would have some fun. he rushed down toward the valley, crying, "wolf! wolf!" the men ran to meet him, and one of them remained with him for a while. the boy enjoyed the company and the fun so much, that he tried the same trick again, a few days later. again the men ran to help him. soon after this, a wolf really came from the forest and began to steal the sheep. the boy ran after the men, crying more loudly than ever, "wolf! wolf!" but it was of no use for him to call. the men had been fooled twice, and now no one went to help him. so the wolf had a good meal from the herd of sheep. the lion's share the fox and the donkey were friends. one day they agreed to go hunting together. on their way through the forest, they stopped at the den of the lion. "ho, ho, king lion!" called the fox. "friend donkey and i are going to hunt for game. will you go with us?" "certainly," said the lion. "i am ready for a good dinner." the lion, the fox, and the donkey set a trap near the lion's den. then they hid behind the trees near by. soon a wolf came prowling along and was caught in the trap. they attacked the wolf and killed him. "let us have our dinner now. i am hungry," said the lion. "friend donkey," added the lion, "you may divide the animal and give each of us his portion." so the donkey divided the wolf into three equal parts. then he said to the lion, "which part will you have, king lion?" the lion saw how the donkey had divided the animal. king lion was very angry. he said with a roar, "what do you mean, friend donkey, by taking so much for your share?" "i have divided the wolf into three equal parts," said the donkey. "if you do not like the way i have divided the animal, you need not take any." at this the lion was furious. springing upon the poor donkey, he killed him instantly. then the lion turned to the fox. "there are only two of us now," said the lion. "let me see how you will divide the animal." the fox bowed low before king lion. he took one very small piece of meat for himself. then he put all the rest of the animal in a heap for the lion. the lion watched greedily to see what the fox would do next. "this is your share, king lion," said the fox. the lion was pleased with the way the fox had divided the meat. "who taught you how to divide the wolf?" he said. once more the fox bowed low before king lion. then he said humbly, "friend donkey taught me how to divide the wolf!" robin redbreast good-by, good-by to summer! for summer's nearly done; the garden smiling faintly, cool breezes in the sun. our thrushes now are silent, our swallows flown away-- but robin's here with coat of brown, and ruddy breast-knot gay. robin, robin redbreast, o robin dear! robin sings so sweetly in the falling of the year. bright yellow, red, and orange, the leaves come down in hosts; the trees are indian princes, but soon they'll turn to ghosts; the leathery pears and apples hang russet on the bough; it's autumn, autumn, autumn late, 'twill soon be winter now. robin, robin redbreast, o robin dear! and what will this poor robin do? for pinching days are near. the fireside for the cricket, the wheat stack for the mouse, when trembling night winds whistle and moan all round the house; the frosty ways like iron, the branches plumed with snow-- alas! in winter dead and dark, where can poor robin go? robin, robin redbreast, o robin dear! and a crumb of bread for robin, his little heart to cheer! william allingham. thorn rose in the long, long ago, there lived a king and queen who for many years had no children. at last a lovely baby was born to them--a little princess. there was great rejoicing over all the land. the king and queen decided to have a party in honor of the princess. in the palace there was hurry and stir to make ready. messengers were sent far and near, to invite the lords and ladies of the land to the great feast. among the guests invited to the party were seven good fairies. it was a beautiful summer afternoon. the roses on the palace wall were nodding their heads sleepily in the warm breeze, when the chariot with the seven fairies arrived. the good fairies entered the princess' room. there the tiny baby lay, sleeping in a dainty pearl cradle. "she is as sweet and fair as a rose!" they exclaimed. "we will call her rose." now it happened that the king and queen had failed to invite a spiteful and ill-tempered old witch. the old witch was very angry, because she had not been invited to the party. after the guests had all arrived, she entered through the keyhole. no one saw her enter. each of the good fairies bestowed on the princess a precious gift. "i bestow upon you, sweet princess, the gifts of health and cheerfulness," said the first fairy. "you shall be the most beautiful princess in the world," said the second fairy. "you shall be witty and wise," said the third. "you shall have the sweetest voice that ever was heard," said the fourth. "you shall be generous and kind," said the fifth. "everyone shall love you," said the sixth of the good fairies. just then a spiteful laugh was heard. "ah, ah, ah!" some one called. the king and queen saw the old witch who had not been invited to the party. "i will tell you what shall happen to this little wonder," said the witch. "she will cut her finger with a spindle before she is fifteen years old, and then she will die!" the old witch shook her black stick at the princess. then she disappeared, as she had entered, through the keyhole. the king and queen were troubled when they heard the witch's words, but the seventh fairy, who had not yet spoken, stepped forward. "the king's daughter shall not die, but she shall sleep for a hundred years. when the princess falls asleep, everyone in the palace will go to sleep, too. they will all sleep for a hundred years." then the king ordered that every spindle in the kingdom should be destroyed. not a spindle was to be used, anywhere in the country, until after the princess had passed her fifteenth birthday. the gifts of the fairies proved true. the princess was so beautiful and so good that she was loved by all. she was witty and wise and her voice was like a silver bell. one day, when the princess was nearly fifteen years old, she wandered through the palace and up the winding stairs to an old tower. there, in a little room, sat an old woman, busily twisting thread upon a spinning wheel. the old woman had never heard the king's command. "how merrily the wheel goes round! let me see if i can spin!" said the princess. scarcely had the princess touched the spindle when she cut her finger. the girl fell at once into a deep sleep. she lay upon the floor beside the spinning wheel, fast asleep. in the castle below, the king, the queen, and all the servants fell asleep, too. the horses slept in their stalls. the dogs slept in their kennels. the pigeons on the roof, and the birds in their nests, all went sound asleep. even the fire flaming on the hearth became still. deep shadows darkened the sunny rooms of the palace, and the garden round about. a hedge of thorns at once began to grow around the palace. the hedge became thicker and higher as the days went by, until at last it was so tall that not even the palace towers could be seen. the story of the princess, the beautiful thorn rose, was told far and wide. at last a hundred years had passed. prince courageous was traveling through the land. he heard from an old man the story of the thorn hedge, and of the princess who lay in the palace behind the hedge, fast asleep. the old man told the prince that the time had come when the long enchantment was at an end. "but who knows how great the danger may be?" added the old man. "no one has entered the palace for a hundred years!" "i will brave the danger, whatever it may be!" exclaimed prince courageous. "i will find the sleeping princess or lose my life!" so prince courageous mounted his horse and rode through the woods until he came to the tall thorn hedge. he made his way through the underbrush. the briers were thick and the thorns sharp, but prince courageous was strong and brave. he knocked at the gate, but there was no answer. the prince opened the gate and entered the courtyard. all was silence in the palace hall. only the sound of his own footsteps could prince courageous hear. everybody was fast asleep--the horses in their stalls, the pigeons on the roof, the birds in their nests, the servants in the halls, the king and queen on their golden throne. prince courageous tiptoed through the silent rooms. finally, he reached the narrow stairway that led to the tower. the prince climbed the winding stairs. there, beside the spinning wheel, lay the beautiful princess, fast asleep. stepping softly to her side, he kissed the princess on the cheek. thorn rose opened her eyes--and there stood the prince! and now all the court awoke. the horses began to neigh. the dogs began to bark. the pigeons cooed. the birds sang. the kitchen fire burst into flame. the sun shone brightly, and the roses on the palace wall swayed in the breeze. the prince and the princess were married next day, and the seven good fairies danced at the wedding feast. the wolves and the deer long ago, a pack of wolves lived on a prairie. some deer lived near by. the wolves could run swiftly, but they knew that the deer were swift runners, too. the hungry wolves wondered how they might catch the deer and eat them. at last they thought of a fine plan. they invited the deer to run a race with them. the wolves and the deer started in the race side by side, but the deer ran much the faster. the wolves were very angry. "we will eat the deer yet," they said. one day they prepared a great feast. they invited the deer to dine with them. the deer sat down facing the wolves. then the wolves said to the deer, "laugh, you on the other side!" "no," said the deer. "you laugh first." "very well," said the wolves. "we will laugh first." and they laughed, "ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" "now you on the other side laugh, too," said the wolves. then the deer laughed, "mm, mm, mm, mm, mm!" "laugh again," said the deer. "very well," said the wolves, and they laughed, "ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" the deer were frightened when they saw the great, sharp teeth of the hungry wolves. they wanted to run away at once and hide from the wolves, but they were afraid. again the wolves said, "laugh, you on the other side! but do not keep your mouths closed when you laugh. nobody laughs like that." then the deer laughed, "ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" this time they opened their mouths. the wolves could not see any teeth in the mouths of the deer. at once the wolves attacked the deer. they killed and ate them. only a few of the deer escaped. to this day, all deer are afraid of wolves. the wolves laugh and show their teeth when they see the deer. and deer run as fast as they can when they see the wolves. the cornfields then nokomis, the old woman, spake and said to minnehaha, "'tis the moon when leaves are falling; all the wild rice has been gathered, and the maize is ripe and ready, let us gather in the harvest, let us wrestle with mondamin, strip him of his plumes and tassels, of his garments, green and yellow." henry w. longfellow. the gift of corn long, long ago, a tribe of indians lived on a beautiful island in the great lakes. an enemy attacked the indians, and they were driven from home. they wandered far away and settled on the shore of a small lake. brave heart, a strong and powerful indian, remained to guard the beautiful island. one morning brave heart stepped into his canoe. he was planning to paddle around the island. the canoe glided swiftly along by the tall trees that grew near the water. at last brave heart had gone beyond the trees. he saw a vast plain. he paddled to the shore and drew his canoe up the beach. then brave heart started to walk across the plain. suddenly a little man stood in front of him. the stranger was dressed in green, and he wore a green cap with red feathers in it. "ho, ho, brave heart!" cried he. "you are very strong, are you not?" "yes," said brave heart, "i am as strong as any man. but who are you?" "i am red plume," replied the little man. "stay and smoke the peace pipe with me." presently red plume said, "i am small, but i am strong. let us wrestle together, to see which of us is the stronger. if i fall, you must say, 'i have conquered red plume.'" then brave heart wrestled with the little man. he found that red plume was indeed very strong. he felt himself growing weaker each moment. but at last he succeeded in tripping the man. then brave heart cried, "i have conquered red plume!" instantly, to brave heart's surprise, the little man vanished. on the spot where he had stood lay an ear of corn. the corn was covered with greenish husks, and the red silk at the top was like a plume. it looked like the little man. brave heart looked down at the corn in amazement. suddenly the ear of corn spoke. "take me and pull off my green garments," said the ear of corn. "plant my kernels in the ground and cover them with soft soil. break my cob into small pieces and throw them near the trees at the edge of the forest. then depart, and return when the next moon is high in the heavens." brave heart did as he was told. then he went to his canoe and paddled back to his home. he returned when the next moon was high in the heavens. he found the plain covered with tender green plants. near the edge of the forest green vines were growing. brave heart heard some one speaking from the ground. "come again, before the moon of falling leaves," were the words he heard. one day, when the summer was nearly over, brave heart paddled his canoe along the island as far as the plain. it was almost time for the moon of falling leaves. there, near the spot where he had wrestled with the little man, stood a field of ripe corn. the red tassels nodded in the breezes, and the leaves rustled in the wind. near the forest were great yellow pumpkins ripening on the vines. brave heart pulled some ears of ripe corn and gathered some of the pumpkins. then he built a hot fire and roasted the ears of corn. how delicious the roasted corn tasted! once more red plume spoke, again from the cornfield. "you have conquered me, brave heart. if you had not done so, you would have been destroyed. by your strength, you have won the gift of corn." then brave heart was glad. he hastened to his people and brought them back once more to live, ever after, on their beautiful island. and always the people blessed him for the gift of the precious corn. brave heart had conquered red plume. a boy's song where the pools are bright and deep, where the gray trout lies asleep, up the river and o'er the lea, that's the way for billy and me. where the blackbird sings the latest, where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest, where the nestlings chirp and flee, that's the way for billy and me. where the mowers mow the cleanest, where the hay lies thick and greenest, there to trace the homeward bee, that's the way for billy and me. where the hazel bank is steepest, where the shadow falls the deepest, where the clustering nuts fall free, that's the way for billy and me. why the boys should drive away little sweet maidens from the play, or love to banter and fight so well, that's the thing i never could tell. but this i know, i love to play through the meadow, amid the hay; up the water and o'er the lea, that's the way for billy and me. james hogg. the frogs' travels long, long ago, in the country of japan, there were two frogs. one of the frogs lived in a pond near tokio, and the other lived in a little stream near kioto. one fine morning in early spring, these two frogs decided that they would travel forth to see the world. strangely enough, though they had never heard of each other, the same thought came to each frog at the same time. the first frog started along the road which led from tokio to kioto. he found the journey difficult and the road hard to travel. so, when he had hopped to the top of a high hill halfway, he decided to stop a while and rest. the other frog started out on the same road, but from kioto. it took him a long time to reach the hill where the first frog was resting. the two frogs met at the top of the hill. they were delighted to make each other's acquaintance. "greetings, friend!" said the first of the two frogs. "where are you going?" "i have a great desire to see the world, and especially to visit tokio. i am on my way for a visit to tokio now," replied the second frog. "there is no need of hurrying. let us rest here and stretch our limbs," said the first frog. "what a pity that we are not taller!" said the kioto frog. "why?" asked the tokio frog. "if we were taller, we could see both towns from this hill. then we should be able to tell whether or not it were worth while to continue our journey," said the kioto frog. "oh, we can easily find that out!" replied the other. "we can stand on our hind legs and take hold of one another. then each can look at the town toward which he is traveling," he added. "a fine idea! let us try it at once." the two frogs stood upon their hind legs, holding each other tightly to keep from falling. the tokio frog turned toward kioto, and the kioto frog turned toward tokio. the foolish frogs forgot that their eyes were on the backs of their heads. although their noses pointed toward the places to which they wished to go, their eyes beheld the towns from which they had just come. "indeed, i shall travel no further!" the first frog exclaimed. "kioto is exactly like tokio. i shall go home at once," he added. "tokio is only a copy of kioto," said the other frog. "it is not worth while to take the trouble to journey there!" he added disdainfully. the two frogs bade each other a polite farewell, and each returned to his own home town. to the end of their lives, the two frogs believed that tokio and kioto were really exactly alike. neither of the frogs ever again tried to see the world. the merchant's caravan once there was a merchant who had fine silks and rugs to sell. he wished to send his goods to a country on the other side of the sandy desert. the merchant owned a large caravan of camels, and he employed many men. camels were the only animals strong enough to travel over the desert with the heavy loads. for many days, abdul the merchant and his men had been preparing for the journey. the canvas tents and the poles were placed upon one camel. great leather bottles of water were loaded upon another camel. firewood and bags of rice and barley meal were placed upon still another. it required many camels to carry the merchant's goods. at last the caravan was ready for the journey. the sun shone steadily, making the sand so hot that no one could walk upon it in the daytime. but at night both men and camels could travel easily. so abdul the merchant said to the men, "be ready to start after sunset to-night. give the camels plenty of water to drink, and feed them well, for we shall have a long, hard journey." abdul and his men traveled all that night. one man was the pilot. he rode ahead, for he knew the stars, and by them he could guide the caravan. at daybreak they stopped. they spread the canvas tents and fed the camels. they built fires, cooked the rice, and made cakes of the barley meal. during the day, the men rested in the shade of the tents. after the evening meal, the caravan started again on its way. they had traveled thus for three long, silent nights. early on the third morning, the camels raised their heads, stretched their nostrils, and hastened eagerly forward. the pilot cried, "the camels smell water and grass. an oasis is near!" before long they could see palm trees, with their spreading leaves waving in the soft breeze. joyfully they rested during the day. the camels drank freely from the cool spring. the men filled the great leather bottles with fresh water. in the evening, refreshed and happy, the men continued the journey. so they traveled night after night, resting during the heat of the day. at last, one morning the pilot said, "we shall soon reach the end of our journey." the men were very glad to hear this, for they were weary, and the camels needed rest. after supper that night abdul said, "throw away the firewood and most of the water. it will lighten the burden of the camels. by to-morrow we shall reach the city." when the caravan started that evening, the pilot led the way as usual, but after a while, weary with many nights of watching, he fell asleep. all night long the caravan traveled. at daybreak the pilot awoke and looked at the last star, fading in the morning light. "halt!" he called. "the camels must have turned while i slept. we are at the place from which we started yesterday." there was no water to drink. there was no firewood to cook the food. the men spread the tents and lay down under them, saying, "the wood and the water are gone. we are lost!" but abdul said to himself, "this is no time to rest. i must find water. if i give way to despair, all will be lost." then abdul started away from the tent, watching the ground closely. he walked and walked. at last he saw a tuft of grass. "there must be water somewhere under the sand, or this grass would not be here," thought the merchant. he ran back to the tent, shouting and calling, "bring an ax and a spade. come quickly!" the men jumped up and ran with the merchant to the place where the grass was growing. they began to dig in the sand, and presently they struck a rock. abdul jumped down into the hole and put his ear close to the rock. "water! water!" he cried. "i hear water running under this great rock. we must not despair!" then, raising his ax above his head, he struck a heavy blow. again and again he struck the rock. at last the rock broke, and a stream of water, clear as crystal, filled the hole almost before the merchant could jump out of it. a shout of joy burst from the lips of the men. they drank the water eagerly, and afterwards led the camels to the spring. then they set up a pole, to which they fastened a flag, so that other traders might find the well. in the evening, the men again started on their journey, and they reached the city the very next day. queen hulda and the flax there was once a poor peasant, hans by name. he lived with his wife and children in a valley at the foot of a snow-capped mountain. hans often drove his sheep to pasture up the mountain side. he always carried his crossbow with him, to protect the sheep. he was a skillful marksman. once in a while, hans would shoot a deer. the deer meat would serve as food for his family during many days. one day hans was watching his sheep while they grazed on the mountain side. suddenly a deer appeared. its spreading antlers glittered in the morning sunlight with wonderful brightness. the deer bounded across the pasture to the rocks higher up the mountain. hans followed quickly, hoping to approach near enough to shoot an arrow. from rock to rock, higher and higher, hans followed the deer, until at last they were at the summit of the mountain. they sped over the snow until the deer disappeared in the blue grotto. hans followed more slowly, along a dark and narrow tunnel that led to the blue grotto. suddenly he caught a glimpse of a bright light in the distance. he walked on and soon reached a brightly lighted cave. from the walls and ceiling of the cave hung many wonderful crystals and precious stones. a tall woman dressed in pure white stood in the midst of the cave. a golden girdle was fastened about her waist. a crown set with jewels rested on her head. in her hand she held a bunch of blue flowers. lovely maidens in dainty robes, with graceful wreaths of alpine roses on their heads, attended their queen. overcome with wonder, hans knelt before the beautiful woman. as in a dream, he heard her say very softly, "choose for yourself what you will of my treasures--gold, or silver, or precious stones." "most gracious queen," replied hans, "i ask only for the flowers in your hand." the queen was pleased, and she gave the flowers to hans at once. "you have chosen well," said she. "take also these seeds and sow them in your fields." suddenly a peal of thunder shook the grotto. when it had ceased, hans found himself standing alone on the mountain. when hans reached home, he showed his wife the blue flowers and the seeds that had been given him by the queen. "wonderful crystals and precious stones hang from the walls and ceiling of the cave, but the queen is more beautiful than all!" exclaimed hans. "why did you not choose some of the diamonds and gold?" cried his wife, and she scolded hans roundly, because he had taken only flowers and seeds. hans made no reply, but he went to the fields and plowed the ground. then he sowed carefully the seeds that the queen had given him. the weeks passed by. tiny green leaves began to show above the ground. the plants grew taller and taller, and then the blue flowers began to appear. the flowers were so beautiful that even the angry wife was pleased. she had never seen anything like them. hans watched his fields day and night. one moonlight night, he saw the lovely queen of the blue grotto walking about among the flowers, with her maidens. they seemed to be guarding the blossoms. at last the flowers had withered, and the seeds were ripe. then the queen of the blue grotto appeared at the cottage door. the queen of the blue grotto said, "i am queen hulda. i have come to teach you how to spin and weave." "the blue flowers that your husband chose were the wonderful flax," added the queen. "i love it very much." queen hulda taught hans and his wife how to spin and weave linen cloth. many people bought the linen and the flax seeds, so that hans and his wife became very rich. every year queen hulda and her maidens watched over the fields. hans was very happy, because he had chosen the blue flowers of the wonderful flax. aladdin's lamp oh, whither away, ye children dear! to fairy grove in wonderland! the trees bend low with a wondrous glows diamonds and rubies the fruit, and lo, gather the gems, for you they grow. so hither hie, ye children dear! to fairy grove in wonderland! welcome prince and princess gay, elf and fay and sprite at play, dancing till the dawn of day. then hasten all, ye children dear! to enter the realm of wonderland! no giant or genie need cause you alarm, treasures they'll give, and keep away harm, for aladdin's lamp is the hidden charm. aladdin and the magic lamp aladdin was a poor boy who lived in a city of persia. his mother was a widow. she supported herself by weaving mats. one day aladdin was playing in the street. a tall, dark man stood watching him. when the game was finished, the man beckoned to aladdin to come to him. "what is your name, my boy?" asked the man, who was a magician. "my name is aladdin," answered the boy. he wondered who the stranger might be. "and what is your father's name?" the magician asked. "my father was mustapha the tailor, but he died when i was only two years of age," replied aladdin. "alas!" cried the magician, pretending to weep. "he was my brother, and you must be my nephew. i am your long lost uncle." then he embraced aladdin and gave him five gold coins, saying, "come with me, and i will show you the sights." they went from the city, through pretty gardens, into the open country. they walked a long distance. the magician gave aladdin some delicious fruit to eat and told him wonderful stories. the lad scarcely noticed how very far they had gone. at last they reached a valley between two mountains. the magician stood still for a moment and looked about him. "ah!" he exclaimed. "this is the very place for which i have been searching. gather some sticks. i will kindle a fire." soon the fire was burning merrily. the magician took a curious powder from his girdle. he mumbled strange words as he sprinkled it upon the flames. in an instant, the earth beneath their feet trembled, and they heard a rumbling sound like distant thunder. then the ground opened in front of them. there lay a large flat stone with a brass ring fastened to the top. "a wonderful treasure lies hidden below," said the magician. "obey me, and it will soon be ours." then aladdin grasped the ring in the way the magician told him to do, and easily lifted the stone. "now," said the magician, "go down the steps which you see before you. you will come to three great halls. "pass through the halls, but be careful to touch nothing, not even the walls, for if you do, you will certainly die. when you have passed through the halls, you will reach a garden of fruit trees. in a niche in the garden wall, you will see a lighted lamp. put out the light, pour the oil from the bowl, and bring the lamp to me." then the magician placed a magic ring upon aladdin's finger, to guard him, and commanded him to go at once in search of the lamp. aladdin found everything exactly as the magician had said. he went through the halls and the garden until he found the lighted lamp. when he had poured out the oil and had placed the lamp inside his coat, he began to look about him. upon the trees were fruits of every color of the rainbow. some were clear as crystal, some were ruby red, and others sparkled with a green, blue, or purple light. the leaves of the trees were silver and gold. aladdin did not know that these fruits were precious stones--diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and amethysts, but they looked so beautiful that he filled his pockets with them as he passed back through the garden. the magician stood at the top of the steps as aladdin began to climb upward. "give the lamp to me," he cried, holding out his hand. "wait until i reach the top of the steps," aladdin answered. "hand the lamp to me at once!" screamed the magician. "not until i am safely out," replied aladdin. then in a rage the magician rushed to the fire. he threw more of the curious powder upon the fire and muttered the same strange words as before. instantly the stone slipped back into its place. the earth closed over it, and aladdin was left in darkness. the magician at once left persia and went to africa. poor aladdin! he groped his way back through the halls to the beautiful garden of shining fruits, but he could find no way of escape. for two days, he cried and shouted for help. at last, as he clasped his hands in despair, he happened to rub the magic ring which the magician had placed on his finger. instantly a genie rose out of the earth and stood before him. "what is thy will, my master?" asked the genie. "i am the slave of the ring. i serve the one who wears it." "deliver me from this place!" cried aladdin. scarcely had he spoken these words when the earth opened. aladdin found himself at his mother's door. he showed his mother the lamp and the colored fruit, which he still carried in his pockets. "i will tell you all that has happened," he said, "but first give me something to eat, for i am very hungry." "alas!" said the mother. "i have neither money nor food." "sell the old lamp that i brought back with me," said aladdin. "the lamp would bring a higher price if it were clean and bright," replied his mother, and she began to rub the lamp. no sooner had she given the first rub than a great genie appeared. "what is thy will?" asked the genie. "i am the slave of the lamp. i serve the one who holds the lamp." aladdin's mother was so terrified that she dropped the lamp. aladdin managed to grasp it, and say, "bring me something to eat." the slave of the lamp disappeared. he returned, bringing a dainty breakfast served upon plates of pure gold. aladdin now knew what use to make of the magic ring and the wonderful lamp. his mother and he lived happily for years. one day the sultan ordered all of the people to stay at home and close their shutters, while his daughter, the princess, passed by on her way to the bath. aladdin had heard how beautiful the princess was, and he greatly desired to see her face. this seemed impossible, for the princess never went out without a veil which covered her entirely. he peeped through the shutters as she passed by. the princess happened to raise her veil, and aladdin saw her face. the moment aladdin's eyes rested upon the princess, he loved her with all his heart. "mother," he cried, "i have seen the princess, and i have made up my mind to marry her. go at once to the sultan and beg him to give his daughter to me." aladdin's mother laughed at the idea. the next day, however, she went to the palace, carrying the magic fruit as a gift. no one paid any attention to her. she went every day for a week, before the sultan noticed that she was there. "who is the poor woman who comes here every day?" he asked. "bring her forward. i wish to speak to her." aladdin's mother knelt before the throne and told the sultan of her son's love for the princess. "he sends you this gift," she continued, presenting the magic fruit. the sultan was astonished at the gift. he exclaimed, "here indeed is a gift worthy of my daughter! shall i not give her to the one who sends it?" then the sultan told aladdin's mother to return in three months' time, and he would give the princess to her son in marriage. when the time had passed, aladdin again sent his mother to the sultan. "i shall abide by my word," said the sultan, "but he who marries my daughter must first send me forty golden basins filled to the brim with precious stones. "these basins must be carried by forty black slaves led by forty white ones, all of them dressed in rich attire." aladdin's mother returned home. "your hopes are ended," she cried. "not so, mother," answered aladdin. then he rubbed the magician's lamp. when the genie appeared, aladdin told him to provide the forty golden basins filled with jewels, and the eighty slaves. when the procession reached the palace, the slaves presented the jewels to the sultan. he was so delighted with the gift that he was willing to have aladdin marry the princess without delay. "go and tell your son that he may wed my daughter this very day," he said to aladdin's mother. aladdin was delighted to hear the news. he ordered the genie to bring a rich purple robe for him to wear; a beautiful white horse to ride upon; twenty slaves to attend him; six slaves to attend his mother; and ten thousand gold pieces to give to the people. at last everything was ready. aladdin, dressed in his royal robe, started for the palace. as he rode on the beautiful white horse, he scattered the gold coins among the people. they shouted with joy as they followed the procession. at the palace the sultan greeted aladdin joyfully and ordered the wedding feast to be prepared at once. but aladdin said, "not so, your majesty. i will not marry the princess until i have built her a palace." then he returned home and once more summoned the slave of the lamp. "build the finest palace in the world," ordered aladdin. "let the walls be of marble set with precious stones. in the center build a great hall whose walls shall be of silver and gold, lighted by great windows on each side. these windows are to be set with diamonds and rubies. depart! lose no time in obeying my commands!" when aladdin looked out of the window the next morning, there stood the most beautiful palace in the world. then aladdin and his mother returned to the sultan's palace, and the wedding took place amid great rejoicing. aladdin was gentle and kind to all. he became a great favorite at the court, and the people loved him well. for a time, aladdin and his bride lived happily. but there was trouble coming. far away in africa, the magician who had pretended to be aladdin's uncle learned of his escape with the magic lamp. the magician traveled from africa to persia, disguised as a merchant. he carried some copper lamps and went through the streets of the city crying, "new lamps for old!" now it happened that aladdin had gone hunting, and the princess sat alone near an open window. she saw the merchant and sent a slave to find out what the man called. the slave came back laughing. he told the princess that the merchant offered to give new lamps for old ones. the princess laughed, too. then she pointed to the old lamp that stood in a niche of the wall. "there is an old lamp," she said. "take it and see if the man really will exchange it for a new one." when the magician saw the lamp, he knew that it was the one for which he was searching. he took the magic lamp eagerly and gave the slave all of the new lamps. then the magician hurried out of the city. when he was alone, he rubbed the magic lamp, and the genie stood before him. "what is thy will, master?" said he. "i command thee to carry the palace of aladdin, with the princess inside, to africa," said the magician. instantly the palace disappeared. the sultan looked out of his window the next morning. no palace was to be seen. "this has been done by magic!" the sultan exclaimed. he sent his soldiers to bring aladdin home in chains. they met him riding back from the hunt. they carried him to the sultan. when aladdin was allowed to speak, he asked why he was made prisoner. "wretch!" exclaimed the sultan. "come and i will show you." then he led aladdin to the window and showed him that where the palace had been there was only an empty space. aladdin begged the sultan to spare his life and grant him forty days in which to find the princess. so aladdin was set free. he searched everywhere, but he could find no trace of the princess. in despair, he wrung his hands. as he did so, he rubbed the magic ring. instantly the slave of the ring appeared. "what is thy will, master?" asked the genie. "bring back the princess and the palace," said aladdin. "that is not within my power," said the genie. "only the slave of the lamp can bring back the palace." "then take me to the place where the palace now stands, and set me down under the window of the princess." almost before aladdin had finished these words, he found himself in africa, beneath a window of his own palace. "princess! princess!" called aladdin. the princess opened the window. with a cry of joy, aladdin entered and embraced the princess. "tell me, dear," said he, "what has become of the old lamp that stood in the niche of the wall?" "alas!" replied the princess. "a man came through the streets, crying, 'new lamps for old!' i gave him the lamp that stood in the niche, and the next i knew i was here." "the man is a magician. he wished only to secure the magic lamp," said aladdin. "the magician is here," said the princess. "he carries the magic lamp hidden in his robes during the day, and he places it under his pillow at night." while the magician was sleeping that night, aladdin stole softly into the room and took the magic lamp from under the pillow. then he rubbed the lamp and the genie appeared. "i command you to carry the princess and the palace back to persia," cried aladdin. the following morning, the sultan looked out of the window. there, to his surprise, stood the palace of aladdin, in the very place from which it had disappeared. aladdin and the princess lived happily for many years. when the sultan died, they ruled in his place. they were beloved by the people, and there was peace in all the land. the whiting and the snail "will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "there's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. see how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! they are waiting on the shingle-- will you come and join the dance? "you can really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea! but the snail replied, "too far, too far!" and gave a look askance-- said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance. "what matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied, "there is another shore you know, upon the other side. the further off from england the nearer is to france; then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance." lewis carroll. the bonfire in the sea long, long ago, in australia, it is said, fishes could travel as easily on land as they could swim in water. it happened, so the story goes, that the whole fish tribe had been playing tag along a sandy beach near the sea. at last they became tired of the game, fin-fin, the leader of the fishes, said, "let us coast down the great, black rock." now beyond the level shore where the fishes had been playing tag, there were cliffs and rocks. some of the rocks rose straight out of the water, others sloped toward the sandy beach. high above the rest towered the great, black rock. the fishes climbed to the top then, one after another, they followed the leader, each gliding head foremost down the rock. it was fine sport! then the fishes formed a circle and danced, while fin-fin slid down the rock alone. again and again he climbed to the top and slid down, as swiftly as an arrow glides from the bow. finally he turned a somersault at the foot of the rock, and then called to the fishes to stop dancing. "it is time to cook dinner," said fin-fin. "there is a good place for a camp under the trees on the tall cliff yonder." the fishes climbed to the top of the cliff overhanging the sea. they gathered wood and heaped it high at the edge of the cliff. when all was ready for the bonfire, fin-fin rubbed two sticks briskly together. soon a spark fell upon the wood, and instantly the flames leaped upward. then the fishes put some roots in front of the fire to roast. while the roots were cooking, the fishes stretched themselves under the trees. they had almost fallen asleep, when suddenly great drops of rain came splashing down. a dark cloud, which they had not noticed, had covered the sun. the rain fell hard and fast and soon put out the fire. now, you know, this was very serious, for people in those days had no matches, and it was difficult to light a fire. then, too, an icy wind began to blow, and the fishes were soon shivering in the cold. "we shall freeze to death unless we can build a fire again," cried fin-fin. he tried to kindle a flame by rubbing two sticks together. he could not produce even one spark. "it is of no use," said fin-fin. "the wood is too wet. we shall have to wait for the sun to shine again." a tiny fish came forward and bowed before fin-fin, saying, "ask my father, flying-fish, to light the fire. he is skilled in magic, and he can do more than most fishes." so fin-fin asked flying-fish to light the fire once more. flying-fish knelt before the smoldering ashes and fanned briskly with his fins. a tiny thread of smoke curled upward, and a feeble red glow could be seen in the ashes. when the tribe of fishes saw this, they crowded close around flying-fish, keeping their backs toward the cold wind. he told them to go to the other side, because he wanted to fan the fire. by and by the spark grew into a flame, and the bonfire burned brightly. "bring more wood," cried flying-fish. the fishes gathered wood and piled it upon the fire. the red flames roared, and sputtered, and crackled. "we shall soon be warm now," said fin-fin. then the fishes crowded around the fire, closer and closer. suddenly a blast of wind swept across the cliff from the direction of the land, and blew the fire toward the fishes. they sprang back, forgetting that they were on the edge of the cliff. and down, down, down, went the whole fish tribe to the bottom of the sea. the water felt warm, for the strong wind had driven the fire down below, too. there, indeed, was the bonfire at the bottom of the sea, burning as brightly as ever. more wonderful still, the fire never went out, as fires do on land. the water at the bottom of the sea has been warm ever since that day. that is why, on frosty days, the fishes disappear from the surface of the water. they dive to the bottom of the sea, where they can keep warm and comfortable, around the magic bonfire. at least, so some people say. robinson crusoe many years ago, there lived in england a boy whose name was robinson crusoe. though he had never been near the sea, crusoe's dearest wish was to become a sailor and go on a ship to foreign lands. this grieved his mother very much, and she begged the boy to remain at home. his father also warned him of danger, saying, "if you go abroad, you will be most miserable. i cannot give my consent." it happened that crusoe visited hull, a large town by the sea, to say good-by to a companion who was about to sail for london. he could not resist the chance of going on a voyage, and without even sending a message to his father and mother, he went aboard the ship and sailed away. robinson crusoe met with many strange adventures at sea. on his first voyage, the ship was wrecked in a fearful storm, and the crew was saved by sailors from another ship. next, crusoe went on a voyage to africa. on the way there the ship was captured by pirates. the captain of the pirates made a slave of the boy. the man took crusoe to his home and made him dig in the garden and work in the house. one day crusoe hid some food in a small boat and managed to escape, with a boy. they sailed for many long days and nights, keeping close to shore. they did not dare to land, because of the lions and other wild animals. after a time they saw a portuguese vessel. the captain allowed them to go aboard. this ship was bound for south america. they finally landed in brazil. robinson crusoe lived on a plantation in brazil for several years. he raised sugar and tobacco. for a time he was happy and made money. but robinson crusoe was never contented anywhere for very long. when a merchant asked him to go on another voyage to the coast of africa, he consented, and he had soon started on this new venture. at first the weather was very hot. then one day, without warning, a hurricane burst upon them. the wind raged for twelve days, and the ship was nearly torn to pieces. no one expected to escape. after a time the wind abated somewhat. the captain ordered the course of the ship changed, but soon another storm followed, even worse than the first. early one morning, while the wind was still roaring and the ship was rolling from side to side, a sailor who was peering through the fog suddenly cried out, "land! land!" at the same moment, the vessel struck on a sand bar, with a grating sound. the waves dashed over the deck of the ship. with great difficulty, the boats were lowered at the side of the ship. all the sailors climbed into the boats, for they knew not at what moment the ship would break to pieces. the men rowed bravely toward the shore, but suddenly a mountain-like wave rolled over them and upset the boats. crusoe was a very fine swimmer, but no one could swim in such a sea. it was only good fortune and his alertness that landed him safely ashore. wave after wave washed him further and further upon the beach. at last a wave left him beside a rock, to which he clung until the water flowed back to the sea. then he jumped up and ran for his life. robinson crusoe was the only person from the ship who was not drowned. he was thankful indeed for his escape. after resting for a time, crusoe looked about him. he was wet, cold, and hungry. it was growing very dark, and he was afraid of wild animals. he found his knife still in his pocket, so he cut a stick with which to protect himself. then he climbed into a tree and hid among the branches. he was soon sound asleep. when crusoe awoke in the morning, the storm was over, and the sea was calm. he found that the ship had been driven by the waves much nearer to the shore. by noon the water was low. the tide had ebbed so far out that he could walk almost to the ship. he swam for a short distance. when lie reached the vessel, he could find no way to climb up, but at last he discovered a rope hanging over the side. by the help of the rope, he managed to pull himself to the deck. everything in the stern of the ship was safe and dry, and the food was not spoiled. crusoe filled his pockets with biscuits and ate them as he went about his work. he had no time to spare. crusoe needed a boat, to carry to the shore many necessary things. "it is of no use to wish for a boat," he thought, "i must set to work to make one." first he took some spars of wood and a topmast or two, that were on the deck, and threw them overboard, tying each with a rope so that it would not drift away. then he climbed down the side of the ship, and fastened the spars together to make a raft. it was a long time before he was able to make the raft strong enough to hold the things that he wished to take ashore. crusoe loaded the raft with three seamen's chests. he had filled these chests with bread, rice, cheese, dried goat's flesh, and other articles of food. he also took all the clothing he could find. then crusoe dragged a carpenter's tool chest to the side of the ship. he placed this on the raft. nothing on the ship was of more use to him than the tools in this chest. he secured guns, pistols, and shot, also two barrels of dry gunpowder. the trouble now was to land his cargo safely. crusoe had only a broken oar, but he rigged up a sail, and the tide helped him. at last he reached the mouth of a little river. the strong tide carried him to land. he was able to push the raft into a little bay. when the tide flowed out, the raft was left high and dry on the sand, and everything was taken safely ashore. then crusoe thought he would look about the country. he climbed to the top of a high hill. he found that he was on an island, and that there was no sign of people, and nothing living in sight excepting great flocks of birds. day after day, crusoe returned to the ship. he built more rafts and brought from the vessel everything that he considered useful. he made a tent of sails to protect the things that could be spoiled by the sun or rain. after several weeks, the weather changed, and a high wind began to blow. one morning, when crusoe awoke, he found that the ship had broken to pieces and was no longer to be seen. however, he had saved from the wreck everything that he needed. then robinson crusoe decided to find a better place for his tent. there was a little plain on the bide of a hill. at the further end was a rock with a hollow place like the entrance to a cave; but there was really not any cave or way into the rock at all. here he placed his tent. in a half circle, in front of the tent, crusoe drove two rows of strong stakes sharpened at the top, about six inches apart. he laid pieces of rope between the stakes. the fence was about five arid a half feet high and so strong that no one could enter. there was no door, so crusoe climbed in and out by means of a ladder which he always drew up after him. before closing up the end of the fence, crusoe carried within all the articles that he had saved from the wreck. he rigged a double tent inside the fence, to protect all from the sun and rain. when this was finished, crusoe began to dig out the rock. it was not very hard, and soon, behind his tent, he had a cave in which he placed his powder, in small parcels. robinson crusoe was very comfortable. he had saved from the wreck two cats and a dog. he had ink, pens, and paper, so that he could write down all that happened. "but what shall i do when the ink is gone?" thought crusoe. "i must find some way of keeping track of the time." he set up a wooden cross, upon which he cut with a knife the date of his landing. each day he cut another notch in the wood. every seventh notch was twice as long as those for the days between, and the notch for every first day of the month was twice as long again. thus crusoe kept a calendar, or weekly, monthly, and yearly reckoning of time. by and by, he found that there were many goats on the island, and many pigeons which he could obtain for food. after a time, crusoe decided that his cave was too small. as he was sure that there were no wild beasts on the island, he began to make his cave larger, and he finally built a tunnel through the rock outside his fence. then he began to hang his belongings upon the sides of the cave, and to arrange them in order. he even built shelves on the walls, and made a door for the entrance. he also made a table and some chairs. during all this time, robinson crusoe climbed the hill daily. he looked over the lonely waters hoping--always hoping--to see the sail of a ship. at last he gave up all hope of ever leaving the island. several years passed by. the clothing that crusoe had saved from the ship was worn out. he made himself clothes from the skins of the goats on the island. he made also an umbrella of goat skins, to shield him from the hot rays of the sun. though the food which he had taken from the ship had long since been eaten, he raised plenty of barley from seed which he had found in a little bag on the ship. the goats and pigeons on the island supplied him with meat. he had become very tired of never hearing a voice. there were many green parrots among the trees and he decided to catch one and teach it to talk. he found it difficult to obtain one, but finally he did catch a young parrot. at first he could not teach it to say a word, but at last when he came back to his tent from a day on the island, the parrot called, "robin, robin crusoe! poor robin crusoe, where have you been?" one morning, as crusoe started for his canoe, a strange thing happened. he was walking along, and what do you suppose he saw? the print of a man's foot in the sand! the sight made him cold all over. he looked around. he listened, but there was not a sound, yet there in the sand was the print of a man's foot--the toes, the heel, and the sole. he did not go to the boat. instead he hastened back to his cave. he was so frightened that it was some time before he ventured out again. about a year after this, crusoe was surprised one morning to see a bonfire on the shore. he looked through his spyglass and saw a company of savages who had landed in canoes and had built a fire. they had two prisoners whom they were about to kill. one of them saw a chance to escape, and he made a sudden dash for his life, running with great speed straight toward robinson crusoe. crusoe rescued this man. the man was very grateful. crusoe made him understand, after a time, that his name was to be friday. it was on friday that the man had been saved. crusoe taught him to say "yes," and "no," and also to say "master." friday became the faithful servant and companion of robinson crusoe. many more years passed. one morning friday came running toward crusoe, shouting, "master! master! they come!" crusoe ran to the beach and looked toward the sea. there he saw a large sailing vessel making for the shore. the sailing vessel proved to be an english ship. crusoe's stay on the desert island had come to an end. when he took leave of the island, he carried on board the sailing vessel his goat skin cap and umbrella, also the parrot. so after twenty-eight long years robinson crusoe and his faithful servant, friday, sailed away. the voyage was long and hard, but at last they reached the coast of england. the wonderful world great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world, with the wonderful water round you curled, and the wonderful grass upon your breast, world, you are beautifully dressed! the wonderful air is over me, and the wonderful wind is shaking the tree; it walks on the water, and whirls the mills, and talks to itself on the tops of the hills. you friendly earth, how far do you go, with wheat fields that nod, and rivers that flow, and cities and gardens and oceans and isles, and people upon you for thousands of miles? ah! you are so great, and i am so small, i hardly can think of you, world, at all; and yet, when i said my prayers to-day, a whisper within me seemed to say: you are more than the earth, though you are such a dot; you can love and think, and the earth cannot. the magic girdle once upon a time, a little cobbler sat at his bench mending a pair of shoes. he whistled a merry tune as he worked. the day was very warm, and the wax which he had been using began to melt. in less time than it takes to tell it, a swarm, of flies lighted upon the melting wax. "ho, ho!" exclaimed the little cobbler. "who invited you to a feast?" he threw the shoe that he was mending, at the flies, and many fell dead from the blow. the cobbler counted the flies as they lay dead, and he said, "not so bad! that blow should make me famous." then the cobbler took a girdle and painted this rhyme upon it: ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow. "now i shall travel around the world wearing this girdle, and it will make me famous," said the cobbler. so the queer little man put on the girdle and started out to seek his fortune. as he was entering a forest, he saw a bear walking along a narrow path. the cobbler was frightened. there was no way of escape. he waited to see what would happen. the bear growled and ran toward him. the cobbler stood with his girdle in sight. the bear read the words on the girdle: ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow. "is it possible that this little man can kill ten bears at one blow?" thought the bear, "i will be careful not to offend him." so the bear stood still and said, "where are you going, my friend?" "around the world to seek my fortune," proudly replied the cobbler. "stay here for a time and dine with me. i know where there is some choice honey," said the bear, and he led the way to a hollow tree where the bees had stored their honey. but a hunter had set a trap in the tree, and as the bear reached for the honey--snap! his paw was caught fast in the trap. and that was the end of mr. bear! the cobbler quickly stripped off the skin of the animal, saying, "this will make a fine, warm blanket." then he walked away, carrying the skin over his arm and whistling a merry tune. at last the cobbler reached the edge of the forest and began to climb a hill. sitting on a rock overlooking the valley below was a giant. the cobbler's heart beat fast with fear. he walked bravely up to the giant, with his girdle in plain sight. "good-day, friend," said the cobbler. "here you sit at your ease. do you not wish to travel with me to see the world?" the cobbler added. when the giant saw the little stranger walking up to him so boldly, he was greatly surprised. "how dare you enter the land of the giants!" he was about to exclaim. at that moment, he saw the girdle and read the words: ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow. "is it possible that this little man can kill ten giants at one blow?" thought the giant. "i will be careful not to offend him." so the giant said, "good-day, my friend. i see that though you are a little man, you have great strength. let us prove which of us is the stronger." then the giant led the cobbler to a great oak tree that had fallen to the ground. "help me carry this tree to yonder cave," he said. "certainly," said the cobbler. "you take the trunk on your shoulder, and i will carry the top and branches of the tree, which, of course, are the heaviest part." the giant laid the trunk of the tree on his shoulder, but the cobbler sat at his ease among the branches, enjoying the ride. so the giant, who could not see what was going on behind him, had to carry the whole tree, and the little man in the bargain. there the cobbler sat, in the best of spirits, whistling a merry tune as though carrying a tree was mere sport. at last the giant could bear the weight no longer, and he shouted, "hi, hi! i must let the tree fall." then the cobbler sprang nimbly down, seized the tree with both hands, as if he had carried it all the way, and called to the giant, "think of a big fellow like you not being able to carry a tree!" "well," said the giant, "i will admit that you are the stronger. come and spend the night in my cave." the cobbler followed the giant into the cave. there, sitting around a fire, were a number of giants. they were laughing and talking in a noisy manner, and they scarcely noticed the little man. the cobbler spread the bear's skin upon the floor near the fire. then he lay down and pretended to sleep, but all the time he was watching to find a way of escape. at about midnight, the giants went to bed, and they were soon sleeping soundly. the cobbler seized a club which belonged to one of the giants, placed the bear's skin over his arm, and tiptoed out of the cave. he was soon far away from the giants. after many days, the cobbler reached the courtyard of the king's palace. he was very tired, so he spread the bear's skin upon the grass and lay down upon it. he placed the giant's club by his side. soon he was fast asleep. presently one of the king's soldiers came near. he was surprised to find the little man sleeping there, with a giant's club by his side. then he spied the girdle and read the words: ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow. "indeed!" thought the soldier. "this little man must have killed ten bears at one blow, and ten giants besides." then the soldier hurried away and told every one he met about the queer little man. the news spread until it reached the king. "bring this mighty man to me," the king commanded. when the king read the words upon the girdle, he said, "you are the very one i wish to have fight for me in time of war." "i am ready to fight for you, o king!" said the cobbler. the king at once appointed the cobbler commander of his army. not long after this, a war broke out. the king promised the hand of his daughter to the man who should conquer the enemy. the little cobbler, riding upon a white horse, commanded the king's army. what a queer leader he was! about his shoulders was thrown the bear's skin, held firmly by the wonderful girdle, and in one hand he carried the giant's club. when the enemy advanced, and the leader saw the queer commander of the king's army, he smiled and said, "we have little to fear from such a commander." then he saw the curious girdle and read the words: ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow. "is it possible that this little man can kill ten commanders at one blow?" thought the leader. he turned his horse quickly and gave orders for the army to retreat. the cobbler followed the enemy and soon overtook the leader, whom he made prisoner. when the king saw the cobbler returning with the leader, he was delighted. but all at once he remembered the reward that he had promised to the victor. the princess refused to become the bride of one so small and so ugly as the cobbler. "what shall i do?" asked the king. "a king should never break his promise." then the princess whispered to the king, "try to take the little man's girdle from him. he will then lose his power." so the king said to the cobbler, "you may have the hand of the princess if you will give your girdle to me." this made the cobbler very unhappy, for he knew what good fortune the girdle had brought to him. but he smiled and answered in a cheerful voice. "i shall be honored, if your majesty will accept my girdle." he handed the precious girdle to the king. at that moment, something wonderful happened. instead of an ugly little man, there stood a tall, handsome youth. the princess was very willing to become the bride of so handsome a youth. the king now gladly gave his consent to the marriage. next day a great wedding feast was spread in honor of the marriage. after the king's death, the princess and her husband ruled the country. the magic girdle was placed over the throne. ever afterwards, when the new king and queen appeared, the people would shout with great pride, "ha, ha! ho, ho! ten at one blow." youth its education, regimen, and hygiene by g. stanley hall, ph.d., ll.d. president of clark university and professor of psychology and pedagogy preface i have often been asked to select and epitomize the practical and especially the pedagogical conclusions of my large volumes on adolescence, published in , in such form that they may be available at a minimum cost to parents, teachers, reading circles, normal schools, and college classes, by whom even the larger volumes have been often used. this, with the coöperation of the publishers and with the valuable aid of superintendent c.n. kendall of indianapolis, i have tried to do, following in the main the original text, with only such minor changes and additions as were necessary to bring the topics up to date, and adding a new chapter on moral and religions education. for the scientific justification of my educational conclusions i must, of course, refer to the larger volumes. the last chapter is not in "adolescence," but is revised from a paper printed elsewhere. i am indebted to dr. theodore l. smith of clark university for verification of all references, proof-reading, and many minor changes. g. stanley hall. contents i.--pre-adolescence introduction: characterization of the age from eight to twelve--the era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--life close to nature--the age also for drill, habituation, memory work, and regermination--adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very distinct from it ii.--the muscles and motor powers in general muscles as organs of the will, of character, and even of thought--the muscular virtues--fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--the development of the mind and of the upright position--small muscles as organs of thought--school lays too much stress upon these--chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--great variety of spontaneous activities--poise, control, and spurtiness--pen and tongue wagging--sedentary school life vs. free out-of-door activities--modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--plasticity of motor habits at puberty iii.--industrial education. trade classes and schools, their importance in the international market--our dangers and the superiority of german workmen--the effects of a tariff--description of schools between the kindergarten and the industrial school--equal salaries for teachers in france--dangers from machinery--the advantages of life on the old new england farm--its resemblance to the education we now give negroes and indians--its advantage for all-sided muscular development iv.--manual training and sloyd. history of the movement--its philosophy--the value of hand training in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man--a grammar of our many industries hard--the best we do can reach but few--very great defects in manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable--the leipzig system--sloyd is hypermethodic--these crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs--the gospel of work; william morris and the arts and crafts movement--its spirit desirable--the magic effects of a brief period of intense work--the natural development of the drawing instinct in the child v.--gymnastics the story of jahn and the turners--the enthusiasm which this movement generated in germany--the ideal of bringing out latent powers--the concept of more perfect voluntary control--swedish gymnastics--doing everything possible for the body as a machine--liberal physical culture--ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and correcting defects--the ideal of symmetry and prescribing exercises to bring the body to a standard--lamentable lack of correlation between these four systems--illustrations of the great good that a systematic training can effect--athletic records--greek physical training vi.--play, sports, and games the view of groos partial, and a better explanation of play proposed as rehearsing ancestral activities--the glory of greek physical training, its ideals and results--the first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to the past--necessity of developing basal powers before those that are later and peculiar to the individual--plays that interest due to their antiquity--play with dolls--play distinguished by age--play preferences of children and their reasons--the profound significance of rhythm--the value of dancing and also its significance, history, and the desirability of reintroducing it--fighting--boxing--wrestling--bushido--foot-ball--military ideals--showing off--cold baths--hill climbing--the playground movement--the psychology of play--its relation to work vii.--faults, lies, and crimes. classification of children's faults--peculiar children--real fault as distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--truancy, its nature and effects--the genesis of crime--the lie, its classes and relations to imagination--predatory activities--gangs--causes of crime--the effects of stories of crime--temibility--juvenile crime and its treatment viii.--biographies of youth. knightly ideals and honor--thirty adolescents from shakespeare--goethe--c.d. warner--aldrich--the fugitive nature of adolescent experience--extravagance of autobiographies--stories that attach to great names--some typical crazes--illustrations from george eliot, edison, chatterton, hawthorne, whittier, spencer, huxley, lyell, byron, heine, napoleon, darwin, martineau, agassiz, madame roland, louisa alcott, f.h. burnett, helen keller, marie bashkirtseff, mary maclane, ada negri, de quincey, stuart mill, jefferies, and scores of others ix.--the growth of social ideals. change from childish to adult friends--influence of favorite teachers--what children wish or plan to do or be--property and the money sense--social judgments--the only child--first social organizations--student life--associations for youth controlled by adults x.--intellectual education and school work. the general change and plasticity at puberty--english teaching--causes of its failure, ( ) too much time to other languages, ( ) subordination of literary content to form, ( ) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear and mouth, ( ) excessive use of concrete words--children's interest in words--their favorites--slang--story telling--age of reading crazes--what to read--the historic sense--growth of memory span xi.--the education of girls. equal opportunities of higher education now open--brings new dangers to women--ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes should and do diverge--different interests--sex tension--girls more mature than boys at the same age--radical psychic and physiological differences between the sexes--the bachelor women--needed reconstruction--food--sleep--regimen--manners--religion--regularity-- the topics for a girls' curriculum--the eternally womanly xii.--moral and religious training. dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--difficulties in teaching morals--methods in europe--obedience to commands--good habits should be mechanized--value of scolding--how to flog aright--its dangers--moral precepts and proverbs--habituation--training will through intellect--examinations--concentration--originality--froebel and the naive--first ideas of god--conscience--importance of old and new testaments--sex dangers--love and religion--conversion chapter i pre-adolescence introduction: characterization of the age from eight to twelve--the era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development--life close to nature--the age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and regermination--adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very distinct from it. the years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life. the acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has acquired nearly its adult size and weight, health is almost at its best, activity is greater and more varied than it ever was before or ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and resistance to fatigue. the child develops a life of its own outside the home circle, and its natural interests are never so independent of adult influence. perception is very acute, and there is great immunity to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation. reason, true morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but very slightly developed. everything, in short, suggests that this period may represent in the individual what was once for a very protracted and relatively stationary period an age of maturity in the remote ancestors of our race, when the young of our species, who were perhaps pygmoid, shifted for themselves independently of further parental aid. the qualities developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story built upon our primal nature. heredity is so far both more stable and more secure. the elements of personality are few, but are well organised on a simple, effective plan. the momentum of these traits inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and they are often clearly distinguishable from those to be added later. thus the boy is father of the man in a new sense, in that his qualities are indefinitely older and existed, well compacted, untold ages before the more distinctly human attributes were developed. indeed there are a few faint indications of an earlier age node, at about the age of six, as if amid the instabilities of health we could detect signs that this may have been the age of puberty in remote ages of the past. i have also given reasons that lead me to the conclusion that, despite its dominance, the function of sexual maturity and procreative power is peculiarly mobile up and down the age-line independently of many of the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so that much that sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the individual. rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery their fling till twelve. biological psychology finds many and cogent reasons to confirm this view _if only a proper environment could be provided_. the child revels in savagery; and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide. rudimentary organs of the soul, now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune to them in maturer years, on the principle of the aristotelian catharsis for which i have tried to suggest a far broader application than the stagirite could see in his day. these inborn and more or less savage instincts can and should be allowed some scope. the deep and strong cravings in the individual for those primitive experiences and occupations in which his ancestors became skilful through the pressure of necessity should not be ignored, but can and should be, at least partially, satisfied in a vicarious way, by tales from literature, history, and tradition which present the crude and primitive virtues of the heroes of the world's childhood. in this way, aided by his vivid visual imagination, the child may enter upon his heritage from the past, live out each stage of life to its fullest and realize in himself all its manifold tendencies. echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential things on earth. so, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. but we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. books and reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand. these two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of the home and the environment, constitute fundamental education. but now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. we should transplant the human sapling, i concede reluctantly, as early as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect lighting, ventilation, temperature. we must shut out nature and open books. the child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which constitute nearly half its weight, decay. even if it be prematurely, he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the higher qualities of adulthood; for he is not only a product of nature, but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. to many, if not most, of the influences here there can be at first but little inner response. insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the most part only nascent; and most that pertains to the true kingdom of mature manhood is embryonic. the wisest requirements seem to the child more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto. there is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. but the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding. never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. it is the age of external and mechanical training. reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour; and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. these necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well as for morals; and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into them betimes as intensely and as quickly as possible with minimal strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for natural interest, and in calling medicine confectionery. this is not teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and regimentation. the method should be mechanical, repetitive, authoritative, dogmatic. the automatic powers are now at their very apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows or dreams of. here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. the greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon interest, reason or work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child, contentless elements of knowledge. these should be sharply distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method, spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young. adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. the qualities of body and soul that now emerge are far newer. the child comes from and harks back to a remoter past; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent. development is less gradual and more saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. the annual rate of growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often doubled, and even more. important functions, previously non-existent, arise. growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some permanently and some for a season. some of these are still growing in old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. the old measures of dimensions become obsolete, and old harmonies are broken. the range of individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements and all psychic tests increases. some linger long in the childish stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden outburst of impulsion to early maturity. bones and muscles lead all other tissues, as if they vied with each other; and there is frequent flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. nature arms youth for conflict with all the resources at her command--speed, power of shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw--strengthens and enlarges skull, thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for maternity. * * * * * chapter ii the muscles and motor powers in general muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought--the muscular virtues--fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--the development of the mind and of the upright position--small muscles as organs of thought--school lays too much stress upon these--chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--great variety of spontaneous activities--poise, control and spurtiness--pen and tongue wagging--sedentary school life _vs_ free out-of-door activities--modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--plasticity of motor habits at puberty. the muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average adult male human body. they expend a large fraction of all the kinetic energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as one-fifth. the cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture is brain building. in a sense they are organs of digestion, for which function they play a very important rôle. muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. they have built all the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything that man has accomplished with matter. if they are undeveloped or grow relaxed and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their execution is liable to appear and widen. character might be in a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits. to call conduct three-fourths of life, with matthew arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds will, with schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or that he is the sum of his movements, with f.w. robertson; that character is simply muscle habits, with maudsley; that the age of art is now slowly superseding the age of science, and that the artist will drive out with the professor, with the anonymous author of "rembrandt als erzicher";[ ] that history is consciously willed movements, with bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it--all this shows how we have modified the antique ciceronian conception _vivere est cogitari_, [to live is to think] to _vivere est velle_, [to live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular development and regimen.[ ] modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all efferent processes. beyond all their demonstrable functions, every change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which some now see the true kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. habits even determine the deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not words, are the language of complete men. the motor areas are closely related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and even of manners and customs. for the young, motor education is cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all, education is incomplete without a motor side. skill, endurance, and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control and poise, muscular faults. to understand the momentous changes of motor functions that characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable aspects of the subject. perhaps the best scale on which to measure all normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the progress from fundamental to accessory. the former designates the muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. their activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as of the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. the latter or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking, piano-playing. they are represented by smaller and more numerous muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher standpoint of evolution. these smaller muscles for finer movements come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their tensions, if not causing actual movement. it is these that are so liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in school children, especially if excited or fatigued. general paralysis usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that the first symptom of its insidious and never interrupted progress is inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue or hand, or both. starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental activities are lost before death. nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. the first begins as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for locomotion. some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for holding well as tearing, and others for digging. arboreal life seems to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its accessory organs, the fingers. apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible. "when we attempt to measure the gap between man and the lower animals in terms of the form of movement, the wonder is no less great than when we use the term of mentality."[ ] the degree of approximation to human intelligence in anthropoid animals follows very closely the degree of approximation to human movements. the gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[ ] at first the limbs are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk muscles with those that move the large joints are more or less spasmodically active. then comes creeping, with use of the hip muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers. slowly the leg and foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great toe becomes more limited in its action, the thumb increases in flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more mobile and controllable. as the body slowly assumes the vertical attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is transverse instead of from front to back. the shoulder-blades are less parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the same plane. this gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted to one hundred degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost any point within a sphere of which the two arms are radii. the power of grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old locomotor function of the fore limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms, as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and extension of the fingers and hand, movements which are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the bilateral and simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities which as the end of the growth period is approached are determined less by heredity and more by environment. in a sense, a child or a man is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory parts of our activities. the entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the development of all of the arts of expression. these smaller muscles might almost be called organs of thought. their tension is modified with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent, inflection, facial expressions, handwriting, and many forms of so-called mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. the day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not over five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers without moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this later, finer, accessory system of muscles. on the other hand, the child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and functions. the full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. if this general conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her pyramid in the way ross, mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. school and kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue, move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. but still at this stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings dangers homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to small muscles, which lasts until adolescence, is established. then disproportion between function and growth often causes symptoms of chorea. the chief danger is arrest of the development and control of the smaller muscles. many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary, place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the neglect of finer motor possibilities. some who excel in heavy athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. on the other hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work, and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate responsive work. this is, perhaps, the best physiological characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and muscular irritability. the great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality, and health than at any other period of life. intensity, and for a time a spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious minor automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious will. mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor, so school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement requiring exactness. stress upon basal movements is not only compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control, and psycho-physical equilibrium. even when contractions reach choreic intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale that measures the difference between primary and secondary movements and to make the former predominate. the number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated, their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the body as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory motions, is amazing. nearly every external stimulus is answered by a motor response. dresslar[ ] observed a thirteen months' old baby for four hours, and found, to follow preyer's classification, impulsive or spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive, and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm, attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost inexhaustible efferent resources. a friend has tried to record every word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, and finds nothing less than verbigerations. a teacher noted the activities of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single school day[ ], with similar results. lindley[ ] studied common motor automatisms in children, which he divided into classes: in the region of the head, in the feet and legs, in the hands and fingers. arranged in the order of frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows: fingers, feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws, legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. in the last five alone adolescents exceeded children, the latter excelling the former most in those of head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. the writer believes that there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns. school life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the study of these activities. they are familiar, as licking things, clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping, twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (bérillon's onychophagia), shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding and shaking the head, squinting and winking, swaying, pouting and grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting, flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers, muffling, squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking things, etc. the average number of automatisms per persons smith found to be in children , in adolescents . swaying is chiefly with children; playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with age, and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for the development of attention. girls excel greatly in swaying, and also, although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements of tongue, feet, and hands. such movements increase, with too much sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with the nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly used in a given task. they increase up the kindergarten grades and fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving large movements. automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks. the restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs of fatigue. they are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of the fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with age; those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but their frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although there is increased frequency of certain specialized contractions, which indicate the gradual settling of expression in the face. often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick. in idiots[ ] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations), rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. movements often pass to fixed attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions warner has so admirably shown. abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children. many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment, extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and especially of will. hence they must be abundant. all parts should act in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all other parts and functions. some of these activities are more essential for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. here as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. all movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. not only so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some cases be judicious. conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition of every sort of copy may also help to establish the immediate and low-level connection between afferent and efferent processes that brings the organism into direct _rapport_ and harmony with the whole world of sense. perhaps the more rankly and independently they are developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only knew that season, the better. premature control by higher centers, or coördination into higher compounds of habits and ordered serial activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of which they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly abridged. but, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked, and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. the inhibiting functions are at first hard. in trying to sit still the child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts. this repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of arrest" in a sense analogous to that of herbart, or of stimuli that normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic lability in the sense of wundt's _mechanik der nerven_. the concept now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy, whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. these combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action, and modified by some jacksonian third level.[ ] action is now not from independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction may result from any stimulus. the more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the whole. the tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow into those of lower tension than themselves increases as correspondence in time and space widens. the more one of a number of activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be dangerous. before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it is to connect them. intensity of this cross-section activity now tends to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. in a brain with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation, and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire the whole brain. this helps us to understand why brain-workers so often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test, but in sustained and long-enduring effort. in a good brain or in a good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our ego are thus compacted together. it is in the variety and delicacy of these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden age. the aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment. but, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. some automatisms refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often overworked. here we must distinguish constantly between ( ) those growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and ( ) those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost power from disease or fatigue, and ( ) those that have never been subjugated because the central power that should have used them to weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. with regard to many of these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in some children more certainly than in others. in childhood, before twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. motor specialties requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing, pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before its great afflux of strength. the facts seem to show that children of this age, such as hancock[ ] described, who could not stand with feet close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger and then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or uneducable. in children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics or tweaks, etc. instead of disappearing with age, as they should, they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises; and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic. at puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together into wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. good manners and correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways, awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements, more elaborated than in childhood and often highly anesthetic and disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious decomposition later. the avoidable factor in their causation is, with some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. as during the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected, will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. this is again the age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back and shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest muscles. now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. this is especially harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing, and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated. as bryan well says, "the efficiency of a machine depends so far as we know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction of its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be controlled." the motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in all these respects. moreover, the education of the small muscles and fine adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical culture can get; for these are the thought-muscles and movements, and their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. only the brain itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or imitative in origin. whether any of them are of value, as lindley thinks, in arousing the brain to activity, or as müller suggests, in drawing off sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract, we need not here discuss. if so, this is, of course, a secondary and late function--nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing remnants. with these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to consider the conditions under which the adolescent muscles best develop. here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult problems of our age. changes in modern motor life have been so vast and sudden as to present some of the most comprehensive and all-conditioning dangers that threaten civilized races. not only have the forms of labor been radically changed within a generation or two, but the basal activities that shaped the body of primitive man have been suddenly swept away by the new methods of modern industry. even popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant in the early life of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and transformed; and the play age, that once extended on to middle life and often old age, has been restricted. sedentary life in schools and offices, as we have seen, is reducing the vigor and size of our lower limbs. our industry is no longer under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now specialized, monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, bad air, and perhaps poor light, especially in cities. the diseases and arrest bred in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools increase. work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards, stints and piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each individual now achieves a part of a single process and knows little of those that precede or follow. machinery has relieved the large basal muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that involve nerve strain. the coarser forms of work that involve hard lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. it has been estimated that "the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity of work in as compared with is no less than per cent."[ ] personal interest in and the old native sense of responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the past, are in more and more fields gone. those who realize how small a proportion of the young male population train or even engage in amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of judicious training, can best understand how far below his possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling nature's design for him. for unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered, made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride relatively unencumbered. he tilled the reluctant soil, digging with rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. in the stone, iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge of the processes by which they are made. as hunter he followed game, which, when found, he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or effort. in warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we kill "with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble." he caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures in closed spaces. he dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and soul. his courtship was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant physical effort and endurance. adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. grave as are the evils of child labor, i believe far more pubescents in this country now suffer from too little than from too much physical exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. modern industry has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. many labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy. under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better in the future. healthy natural industries will be less and less open to the young. this is the new situation that now confronts those concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is lost. some of the results of these conditions are seen in average measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control. despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that, without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for our nation and our race. the number of common things that can not be done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs, collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts, lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways, automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers, and perhaps the most important for his well-being. if the unfaithful stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in sparta, to strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a physical renaissance. such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the advancement of the kingdom of man. a vast body of evidence could be collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic proportions of body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship, and power to bear exposure, in the development and preservation of teeth and hair, in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well as immunity to many of our diseases. their women are stronger and bear hardship and exposure, monthly periods and childbirth, better. civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases. the progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of the best recent and great changes motor-ward in education and also in personal regimen. health- and strength-giving agencies have put to school the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have vastly enlarged their scope. thousands of youth are now inspired with new enthusiasm for physical development; and new institutions of many kinds and grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, movements, methods, and theories; and the press, the public, and the church are awakened to a fresh interest in the body and its powers. all this is magnificent, but sadly inadequate to cope with the new needs and dangers, which are vastly greater. [footnote : dieterich. göttingen, .] [footnote : see chap. xii.] [footnote : f. burk in from fundamental to accessory. pedagogical seminary, oct., , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : creeping and walking, by a.w. trettien. american journal of psychology, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a morning observation of a baby. pedagogical seminary, december , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : kate carman. notes on school activity. pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a preliminary study of some of the motor phenomena of mental effort. american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : g.e. johnson. psychology and pegagogy of feeble-minded children. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : dr. hughlings jackson, the eminent english pathologist, was the first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory of the nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and mental diseases. the practical success of this application was so great that the hughlings-jackson "three-level theory" is now the established basis of english diagnosis. he conceived the nervous mechanism as composed of three systems, arranged in the form of a hierarchy, the higher including the lower, and yet each having a certain degree of independence. the first level represents the type of simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is localized in the gray matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. the second, or middle level, comprises those structures which receive sensory impulses from the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the periphery or the non-nervous tissues. the motor cells of this middle level also discharge into the motor mechanisms of the lowest level. jackson located these middle level structures in the cortex of the central convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the special senses in the cortex. the highest level bears the same relation to the middle level that it bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connection between the highest and the lowest is assumed; the structures of the middle level mediate between them as a system of relays. according to this hierarchical arrangement of the nervous system, the lowest level which is the simplest and oldest "contains the mechanism for the simple fundamental movements in reflexes and involuntary reactions. the second level regroups these simple movements by combinations and associations of cortical structure in wider, more complex mechanisms, producing a higher class of movements. the highest level unifies the whole nervous system and, according to jackson, is the anatomical basis of mind." for a fuller account of this theory see burk: from fundamental to accessory in the nervous system and of movements. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a preliminary study of some of the motor phenomena of mental effort. american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : encyclopedia of social reform, funk and wagnalls, , p. ] * * * * * chapter iii industrial education trade classes and schools, their importance in the international market--our dangers and the superiority of german workmen--the effects of a tariff--description of schools between the kindergarten and the industrial school--equal salaries for teachers in france--dangers from machinery--the advantages of life on the old new england farm--its resemblance to the education we now give negroes and indians--its advantage for all-sided muscular development. we must glance at a few of the best and most typical methods of muscular development, following the order: industrial education, manual training, gymnastics, and play, sports, and games. industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring only the skill needed for livelihood. thousands of our youth of late have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying, carpentry, forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding, brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticulture, gardening, photography, basketry, stock-raising, typewriting, stenography and bookkeeping, elementary commercial training for practical preparation for clerkships, etc. in this work not only is boston, our most advanced city, as president pritchett[ ] has shown in detail, far behind berlin, but german workmen and shopmen a slowly taking the best places even in england; and but for a high tariff, which protects our inferiority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. in germany, especially, this training is far more diversified than here, always being colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of the region and more specialised and helped out by evening and even sunday classes in the school buildings, and by the still strong apprentice system. froebelian influence in manual training reaches through the eight school years and is in some respects better than ours in lower grades, but is very rarely coeducational, girls' work of sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not being considered manual training. there are now over , schools and workshops in germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five of these are independent schools. the work really began in with v. kass, and is promoted by the great society for boys' handwork. much stress is laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence of kurufa of darmstadt. many objects for illustrating science are made, and one course embraces the seyner water-wheel.[ ] in france it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country. adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by practice, so essential in the struggle for survival. in general this kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view; and to these health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever more narrow and special. the standard here is maximal efficiency of the capacities that earn. it may favor bad habitual attitudes, muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small muscles, involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions, etc., but it has the great advantage of utility, which is the mainspring of all industry. in a very few departments and places this training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts movement and has been faintly touched with the inspiration of beauty. while such courses give those who follow them marked advantage over those who do not, they are chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration. where not one but several or many professes are taught, the case is far better. of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development. this is due to its great variety of occupations, healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reënforcement from immemorial times. i have computed some three-score industries[ ] as the census now classifies them; that were more or less generally known and practiced sixty years ago in a little township, which not only in this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educational environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and representing the ideal of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by the framers of our constitution. contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. so liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat primitive form has been restored and copied many features by many educational institutions for adolescents, of the abbotsholme type and grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive conditions of colonial life. thousands of school gardens have also been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus to the study of nature. farm training at its best instills love of country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from goethe's pedagogic province, and perhaps even from gilman's pie-shaped communities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all directions. in england, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has greatly in france, where nearly every adult male may own land and a large proportion will come to do so. so of processes. as a student in germany i took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here i have learned in a crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory; and i am proud that i can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow, milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete, knit, spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom, and weave frocking. but thus pride bows low before the pupils of our best institutions for negroes, indians, and juvenile delinquents, whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and knowledge, all taken together. instead of seeking soft, ready-made places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so low that every change must be a rise. wherever youth thus trained are thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-à-pie_ for the struggle of life. agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions, institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. we really retain only the knowledge we apply. we should get up interest in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. those who leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and discouraged. instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. by such methods many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would be regenerated in body and spirit. some of the now oldest, richest, and most famous schools of the world were at first established by charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have an undreamed-of future. no others so well fit for a life of respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be central for all at this stage. this diversity of training develops the muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development, which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. the natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps dawson[ ] is right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in the past have gone into such vocations. industry has determined the nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, who have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the race. this, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers. the study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows rather than precedes this. in the largest sense this is the order of nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out and subordinates automatisms. the age of stress in most of these kinds of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some recent methods have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work, wherever and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that, according to the best estimates, only a fraction of one per cent of those who need this training in this country are now receiving it. [footnote : the place of industrial and technical training in public education. technology review, january, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see an article by dr. h.e. kock, education, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see my boy life in a massachusetts country town forty years ago. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : the muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early environment, american physical education review, june, , vol. , pp. - .] * * * * * chapter iv manual training and sloyd history of the movement--its philosophy--the value of hand training in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man--a grammar of our many industries hard--the best we do can reach but few--very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable--the leipzig system--sloyd is hypermethodic--these crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs--the gospel of work, william morris and the arts and crafts movement--its spirit desirable--the magic effects of a brief period of intense work--the natural development of the drawing instinct in the child. manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted form it came to us more than a generation ago from moscow, and has its best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public schools. this work meets the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. the philosophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike pestalozzi's "_keine kentnisse ohne fertigkeiten_," [no knowledge without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of vocations. these claims are all well founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. as man excels the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. it is no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four. when we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations of the method are painful to contemplate. the work is essentially manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk also are little trained. consideration of proportion and bilateral asymmetry are practically ignored. almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. this is a double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given shape. there are now between three and four hundred occupations in the census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called basal types. this requires an effort not without analogy to aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to construct a grammar of speech. hardly an attempt worthy the name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this field to study the conditions and to meet them. like froebel's gifts and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and find their justification rather in their logical sequence and coherence than in being true norms of work. if these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. the wards of the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intricate and mazy. as h.t. bailey well puts it in substance, a master in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: . ability to grasp an idea and embody it. . power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. . knowledge of the history of the craft. . skill in technical processes. american schools emphasize chiefly only the last. the actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths, mechanics, and machinists. these courses are not liberal because they hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of every industry. almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates. these schools instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few trades. this tendency also they even fear, less often because unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and matter. industry is everywhere and always for the sake of the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination is a fatal mistake. to focus on process only, with no reference to the object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of degeneration in education. man is a tool-using animal; but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their invention. hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method. as in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. there is no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. in most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure from which future progress will loom up. indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the experimental stage. goetze at leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected them even with the kindergarten below. in general the whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. in every detail the prime consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect. each operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in france often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to individuality. sloyd has certain special features and claims. the word means skilful, deft. the movement was organised in sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry during the long winter night. home sloyd was installed in an institution of its own for training teachers at nääs. it works in wood only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. it no longer aims to make artisans; but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. it assumes that all and especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. it aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the russian system, and to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. this change of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models, the penates of the sloyd household, the unique features of which persist like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[ ] sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools, drawing, and models. each must be progressive, so that every new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series, and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development. this, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. but the " tools, exercises, models, of which are joints," all learned by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many series at once. every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us eden; and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible with enjoying its fruit. although a philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce educational wholes from fragments of it. the real merits of sloyd have caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and methods that puberty suggests. especially in its partially acclimatized forms to american conditions, it is all adult and almost scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic momentum than it is. it holds singularly aloof from other methods of efferent training and resists coördination with them, and its provisions for other than hand development are slight. it will be one of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that impends. indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the old new england farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few educators. this brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with carlyle's gospel of work and ruskin's medievalism, developed by william morris and his disciples at the red house, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera "patience," and lately revived in some of its features by cobden-sanderson, and of late to some extent in various centers in this country. its ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds and of hans sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines only imitate and vulgarize. in the past, which this school of motor culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed praise. refined men and women have remembered these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival tyrian purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the aldine, and elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was _ad majorem gloriam hominis_ [to the greater glory of man] in a new socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take his rightful place above the man who merely knows. the day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer, who creates, has come. the brain and the hand, too long divorced and each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to a higher level. the workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by scott, revering wagner's revival of the old _deutschenthum_ that was to conquer _christenthum_, or tennyson's arthurian cycle--this was its ideal; even as the jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and made their bible under ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red man. although this movement was by older men and women and had in it something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. hence it has its lessons for us here. a touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of idealism as literary education. this gives soul, interest, content, beauty, taste. if not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious volapük of reasons and abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present. the writings of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without the other. these books and those that breathe their spirit should be the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such things. the muse of art and even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform offer to our selection. all this can never make work become play. indeed it will and should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more abounding life. i must not close this section without brief mention of two important studies that have supplied each a new and important determination concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence. the main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per minute of all whom they will employ. as a sending rate this is not very difficult and is often attained after two months' practise. this standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not employed. bryan and harter[ ] explained the rate of improvement in both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical subject in the curve on the following page. from the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall short. curves and represent the same student. i have added line to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. receiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. if forced by stress of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and permanently attains a faster pace. this is true at each step, and every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former one. at length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the above figure would cross if prolonged. the expert receives so much faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form. [illustration: letters per minute x weeks of practice.] the motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. this seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. in learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. perhaps this holds of every ability. to bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. the second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. one stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. to attain such effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. this shooting together of units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. in many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. youth lives along on a low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions, is evolved. the practical implication here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement is re-enforced by a quotation from senator stanford on the effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training colts for racing. let-ups are especially dangerous. he says, "it is the supreme effort that develops." this, i may add, suggests what is developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its most adult form, and that the products of science, invention, discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point creating diversions and recurrence. the other study, although quite independent, is part a special application and illustration of the same principle. at the age of four or five, when they can do little more than scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished products; but in the second period, which lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it represents, but an image of fancy back of it. this, then, is the golden period for the development of power to create artistically. the child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. he draws out of his own head, and not from copy before his eye. anything and everything is attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. if he followed the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be abashed at his production. indians, conflagrations, games, brownies, trains, pageants, battles--everything is graphically portrayed; but only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines. criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little interest. thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing. adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. the curve is the plateau which barnes has described. the child has measured his own productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is discouraged and dislikes drawing. from twelve on, barnes found drawing more and more distasteful; and this, too, lukens found to be the opinion of our art teachers. the pupils may draw very properly and improve in technique, but the interest is gone. this is the condition in which most men remain all their lives. their power to appreciate steadily increases. only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in creation. these are the artists whose active powers dominate. lukens[ ] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his fourth period of artistic development, there are those "who during adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power." zest in creation then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work itself. at about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period, nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. lukens[ ] draws the interesting curve shown on the following page. [illustration: motor, creative or productive power. sensory or receptive interest in the finished product.] the reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate, roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development. certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about midway in the teens. now impressions sink deepest. the greatest artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone to new environments and sought to depict them. all young people draw best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be some test of the contents of their minds. they must put their own consciousness into a picture. at the dawn of this stage of appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to, and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently. art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of feeling and character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history, and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide. insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and all other accessories. by such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. it will, at first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode forth. it may be crude and lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is original in consciousness, it will be in effect. most creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. none who deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so easily blighted. just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. for the great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. now, although the hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will never come again. i believe that in few departments are current educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts, just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. we do not know how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its lowest ebb. finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer. professor thurston, of cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of inspection abroad, reported that to equal germany we now need: " . twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering instructors and students each. . two thousand technical high schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than students and instructors." if we have elementary trade-schools, this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate , students, served by , teachers. with the strong economic arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out in a later chapter. [footnote : this i have elsewhere tried to show in detail. criticisms of high school physics and manual training and mechanic arts in high schools. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : studies in the physiology and psychology of the telegraphic language. psychological review, january, , vol. , pp. - , and july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study of children's drawings in the early years. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - . see also drawing in the early years, proceedings of the national educational association, , pp. - . das kind als künstler, von c. götze. hamburg, . the genetic _vs._ the logical order in drawing, by f. burk. pedagogical seminary, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : die entwickelungsstufen beim zeichnen. die kinderfehler, september, , vol. , pp. - .] * * * * * chapter v gymnastics the story of jahn and the turners--the enthusiasm which this movement generated in germany--the ideal of bringing out latent powers--the concept of more perfect voluntary control--swedish gymnastics--doing everything possible for the body as a machine--liberal physical culture--ling's orthogenic scheme of economic postures and movements and correcting defects--the ideal of symmetry and prescribing exercises to bring the body to a standard--lamentable lack of correlation between these four systems--illustrations of the great good that a systematic training can effect--athletic records--greek physical training. under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, we here include those denuded of all utilities or ulterior ends save those of physical culture. this is essentially modern and was unknown in antiquity, where training was for games, for war, etc. several ideals underlie this movement, which although closely related are distinct and as yet by no means entirely harmonized. these may be described as follows: a. one aim of jahn, more developed by spiess, and their successors, was to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism. many postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that are never called for in life. some of these are so novel that a great variety of new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and jahn invented many new names, some of them without etymologies, to designate the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that extended the range of motor life. common movements, industries, and even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and coördinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations, so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse through disuse. not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and developed. even the common things that the average untrained youth can not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor possibilities meet men live. the man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity. our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of exercise required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. thus only can we have a truly humanistic physical development, analogous to the training of all the powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and non-professional or non-vocational educational curriculum. the body will thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions and inspirations of the renaissance. thus only can we have a true scale of standardised culture values for efferent processes; and from this we can measure the degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and even play. many modern epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its momentum was early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered with virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and landed in scores of manuals. others have had expectations no less excessive in the opposite direction and have argued that the greatest possible variety of movements best developed the greatest total of motor energy. jahn especially thus made gymnastics a special art and inspired great enthusiasm of humanity, and the songs of his pupils were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. it was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that, in , germany showed herself the greatest military power since ancient rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world both in education and science. these theorizations even in their extreme forms have been not only highly suggestive but have brought great and new enthusiasms and ideals into the educational world that admirably fit adolescence. the motive of bringing out latent, decaying, or even new powers, skills, knacks, and feats, is full of inspiration. patriotism is aroused, for thus the country can be better served; thus the german fatherland was to be restored and unified after the dark days that followed the humiliation of jena. now the ideals of religion are invoked that the soul may have a better and regenerated somatic organism with which to serve jesus and the church. exercise is made a form of praise to god and of service to man, and these motives are reënforced by those of the new hygiene which strives for a new wholeness-holiness, and would purify the body as the temple of the holy ghost. thus in young men's christian association training schools and gymnasiums the gospel of christianity is preached anew and seeks to bring salvation to man's physical frame, which the still lingering effects of asceticism have caused to be too long neglected in its progressive degeneration. as the greek games were in honor of the gods, so now the body is trained to better glorify god; and regimen, chastity, and temperance are given a new momentum. the physical salvation thus wrought will be, when adequately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the modern history of christianity. military ideals have been revived in cult and song to hearten the warfare against evil within and without. strength is prayed for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the highest uses. last but not least, power thus developed over a large surface may be applied to athletic contests in the field, and victories here are valuable as fore-gleams of how sweet the glory of achievements in higher moral and spiritual tasks will taste later. the dangers and sources of error in this ideal of all-sided training are, alas, only too obvious, although they only qualify its paramount good. first, it is impossible thus to measure the quanta of training needed so as rightly to assign to each its modicum and best modality of training. indeed no method of doing this has ever been attempted, but the assessments have been arbitrary and conjectural, probably right in some and wrong in other respects, with no adequate criterion or test for either save only empirical experience. secondly, heredity, which lays its heavy ictus upon some neglected forms of activity and fails of all support for others, has been ignored. as we shall see later, one of the best norms here is phyletic emphasis, and what lacks this must at best be feeble; and if new powers are unfolding, their growth must be very slow and they must be nurtured as tender buds for generations. thirdly, too little regard is had for the vast differences in individuals, most of whom need much personal prescription. b. in practise the above ideal is never isolated from others. perhaps the most closely associated with it is that of increased volitional control. man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment. every new power of controlling these by the will frees man from slavery and widens the field of freedom. to acquire the power of doing all with consciousness and volition mentalizes the body, gives control over to higher brain levels, and develops them by rescuing activities from the dominance of lower centers. thus _mens agitat molem._ [footnote: mind rules the body.] this end is favored by the swedish _commando_ exercises, which require great alertness of attention to translate instantly a verbal order into an act and also, although in somewhat less degree, by quick imitation of a leader. the stimulus of music and rhythm are excluded because thought to interfere with this end. a somewhat sophisticated form of this goal is sought by several delsartian schemes of relaxation, decomposition, and recomposition of movements. to do all things with consciousness and to encroach on the field of instinct involves new and more vivid sense impressions, the range of which is increased directly as that of motion, the more closely it approaches the focus of attention. by thus analyzing settled and established coördinations, their elements are set free and may be organized into new combinations, so that the former is the first stage toward becoming a virtuoso with new special skills. this is the road to inner secrets or intellectual rules of professional and expert successes, such as older athletes often rely upon when their strength begins to wane. every untrained automatism must be domesticated, and every striated muscle capable of direct muscular control must be dominated by volition. thus tensions and incipient contractures that drain off energy can be relaxed by fiat. sandow's "muscle dance," the differentiation of movements of the right and left hand--one, e.g., writing a french madrigal while the other is drawing a picture of a country dance, or each playing tunes of disparate rhythm and character simultaneously on the piano--controlling heart rate, moving the ears, crying, laughing, blushing, moving the bowels, etc., at will, feats of inhibition of reflexes, stunts of all kinds, proficiency with many tools, deftness in sports--these altogether would mark the extremes in this direction. this, too, has its inspiration for youth. to be a universal adept like hippias suggests diderot and the encyclopedists in the intellectual realm. to do all with consciousness is a means to both remedial and expert ends. motor life often needs to be made over to a greater or less extent; and that possibilities of vastly greater accomplishments exist than are at present realized, is undoubted, even in manners and morals, which are both at root only motor habits. indeed consciousness itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very essence and origin. thus life is adjusted to new environments; and if the platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues that come by nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products of reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great indeed. but this implies a distrust of physical human nature as deep-seated and radical as that of calvinism for the unregenerate heart, against which modern common sense, so often the best muse of both psychophysics and pedagogy, protests. individual prescription is here as imperative as it is difficult. wonders that now seem to be most incredible, both of hurt and help, can undoubtedly be wrought, but analysis should always be for the sake of synthesis and never be beyond its need and assured completion. no thoughtful student fully informed of the facts and tentatives in this field can doubt that here lies one of the most promising fields of future development, full of far-reaching and rich results for those, as yet far too few, experts in physical training, who have philosophic minds, command the facts of modern psychology, and whom the world awaits now as never before. c. another yet closely correlated ideal is that of economic postures and movements. the system of ling is less orthopedic than orthogenic, although he sought primarily to correct bad attitudes and perverted growth. starting from the respiratory and proceeding to the muscular system, he and his immediate pupils were content to refer to the ill-shapen bodies of most men about them. one of their important aims was to relax the flexor and tone up the extensor muscles and to open the human form into postures as opposite as possible to those of the embryo, which it tends so persistently to approximate in sitting, and in fatigue and collapse attitudes generally. the head must balance on the cervical vertebra and not call upon the muscles of the neck to keep it from rolling off; the weight of the shoulders must be thrown back off the thorax; the spine be erect to allow the abdomen free action; the joints of the thigh extended; the hand and arm supinated, etc. bones must relieve muscles and nerves. thus an erect, self-respecting carriage must be given, and the unfortunate association, so difficult to overcome, between effort and an involuted posture must be broken up. this means economy and a great saving of vital energy. extensor action goes with expansive, flexor with depressive states of mind; hence courage, buoyancy, hope, are favored and handicaps removed. all that is done with great effort causes wide irradiation of tensions to the other half of the body and also sympathetic activities in those not involved; the law of maximal ease and minimal expenditure of energy must be always striven for, and the interests of the viscera never lost sight of. this involves educating weak and neglected muscles, and like the next ideal, often shades over by almost imperceptible gradation into the passive movements by the zander machines. realizing that certain activities are sufficiently or too much emphasized in ordinary life, stress is laid upon those which are complemental to them, so that there is no pretense of taking charge of the totality of motor processes, the intention being principally to supplement deficiencies, to insure men against being warped, distorted, or deformed by their work in life, to compensate specialties and perform more exactly what recreation to some extent aims at. this wholesome but less inspiring endeavor, which combats one of the greatest evils that under modern civilization threatens man's physical weal, is in some respects as easy and practical as it is useful. the great majority of city bred men, as well as all students, are prone to deleterious effects from too much sitting; and indeed there is anatomical evidence in the structure of the tissues, and especially the blood-vessels of the groins, that, at his best, man is not yet entirely adjusted to the upright position. so a method that straightens knees, hips, spine, and shoulders, or combats the school-desk attitude, is a most salutary contribution to a great and growing need. in the very act of stretching, and perhaps yawning, for which much is to be said, nature itself suggests such correctives and preventives. to save men from being victims of their occupations is often to add a better and larger half to their motor development. the danger of the system, which now best represents this ideal, is inflexibility and overscholastic treatment. it needs a great range of individual variations if it would do more than increase circulation, respiration, and health, or the normal functions of internal organs and fundamental physiological activities. to clothe the frame with honest muscles that are faithful servants of the will adds not only strength, more active habits and efficiency, but health; and in its material installation this system is financially economic. personal faults and shortcomings are constantly pointed out where this work is best represented, and it has a distinct advantage in inciting an acquaintance with physiology and inviting the larger fields of medical knowledge. d. the fourth gymnastic aim is symmetry and correct proportions. anthropometry and average girths and dimensions, strength, etc., of the parts of the body are first charted in percentile grades; and each individual is referred to the apparatus and exercises best fitted to correct weaknesses and subnormalities. the norms here followed are not the canons of greek art, but those established by the measurement of the largest numbers properly grouped by age, weight, height, etc. young men are found to differ very widely. some can lift , pounds, and some not ; some can lift their weight between twenty and forty times, and some not once; some are most deficient in legs, others in shoulders, arms, backs, chests. by photography, tape, and scales, each is interested in his own bodily condition and incited to overcome his greatest defects; and those best endowed by nature to attain ideal dimensions and make new records are encouraged along these lines. thus this ideal is also largely though not exclusively remedial. this system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching their own rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and capacities, in plotting curves that record their own increment in girths, lifts, and other tests, and in observing the effects of sleep, food, correct and incorrect living upon a system so exquisitely responsive to all these influences as are the muscles. to learn to know and grade excellence and defect, to be known for the list of things one can do and to have a record, or to realize what we lack of power to break best records, even to know that we are strengthening some point where heredity has left us with some shortage and perhaps danger, the realization of all this may bring the first real and deep feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things of the soul. growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians; but it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the struggle toward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will later move upward to the intellectual and moral plane. to kindle a sense of physical beauty of form in every part, such as a sculptor has, may be to start youth on the lowest round of the platonic ladder that leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his ideal be not excess of brawn, or mere brute strength, but the true proportion represented by the classic or mean temperance balanced like justice between all extremes. hard, patient, regular work, with the right dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a unique moral effect. the dangers of this system are also obvious. nature's intent can not be too far thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always pertinent, so here we may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some extent, and in some cases almost exclusively, to develop in the direction in which we most excel, to emphasize physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for monotonous uniformity. weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most easily overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury. again, work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports: it is not inspiring to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises imposed like a sentence for the shortcomings of our forebears bring a whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into the gymnasium. these four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from harmonized. swedish, turner, sargent, and american systems are each, most unfortunately, still too blind to the others' merits and too conscious of the others' shortcomings. to some extent they are prevented from getting together by narrow devotion to a single cult, aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in the sale of their own apparatus and books or in the training of teachers according to one set of rubrics. the real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor a log, as the blind men in the fable contended, each thinking the part he had touched to be the whole. this inability of leaders to combine causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in, and of enthusiastic support for, any system on the part of the public. even the radically different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the same partisanship. all together represent only a fraction of the nature and needs of youth. the world now demands what this country has never had, a man who, knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various great athletic traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole motor field, as a few great leaders early in the last century tried to do; who shall gather and correlate the literature and experiences of the past and present with a deep sense of responsibility to the future; who shall examine martial training with all the inspirations, warnings, and new demands; and who shall know how to revive the inspiration of the past animated by the same spirit as the turners, who were almost inflamed by referring back to the hardy life of the early teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who shall catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, popular sports past and present, study both industry and education to compensate their debilitating effects, and be himself animated by a great ethical and humanistic hope and faith in a better future. such a man, if he ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their physical secrets, will come almost as a savior to the bodies of men, and will, like jahn, feel his calling and work sacred, and his institution a temple in which every physical act will be for the sake of the soul. the world of adolescence, especially that part which sits in closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the more grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, waiting for a redeemer for its body. till he appears, our culture must remain for most a little hollow, falsetto, and handicapped by school-bred diseases. the modern gymnasium performs its chief service during adolescence and is one of the most beneficent agencies of which not a few, but every youth, should make large use. its spirit should be instinct with euphoria, where the joy of being alive reaches a point of high, although not quite its highest, intensity. while the stimulus of rivalry and even of records is not excluded, and social feelings may be appealed to by unison exercises and by the club spirit, and while competitions, tournaments, and the artificial motives of prizes and exhibitions may be invoked, the culture is in fact largely individual. and yet in this country the annual _turnerfest_ brings , or , men from all parts of the union, who sometimes all deploy and go through some of the standard exercises together under one leader. instead of training a few athletes, the real problem now presented is how to raise the general level of vitality so that children and youth may be fitted to stand the strain of modern civilization, resist zymotic diseases, and overcome the deleterious influences of city life. the almost immediate effects of systematic training are surprising and would hardly be inferred from the annual increments tabled earlier in this chapter. sandow was a rather weakly boy and ascribes his development chiefly to systematic training. we have space but for two reports believed to be typical. enebuske reports on the effects of seven months' training on young women averaging . years. the figures are based on the percentile column. ----------------+--------+----------------------------------+-------- | | strength of | |lung | | | |right |left |total |capacity| legs |back |chest|forearm|forearm|strength ----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+-------- before training | . | | . | | | | after six months| . | | . | | | | ----------------+--------+------+-----+-----+-------+-------+-------- by comparing records of what he deems standard normal growth with that of naval cadets from sixteen to twenty-one, who had special and systematic training, just after the period of most rapid growth in height, beyer concluded that the effect of four years of this added a little over an inch of stature, and that this gain as greatest at the beginning. this increase was greatest for the youngest cadets. he found also a marked increase in weight, nearly the same for each year from seventeen to twenty one. this he thought more easily influenced by exercise than height. a high vital index ratio of lung capacity to weight is a very important attribute of good training. beyer[ ] found, however, that the addition of lung area gained by exercise did not keep up with the increase thus caused in muscular substance, and that the vital index always became smaller in those who had gained weight and strength by special physical training. how much gain in weight is desirable beyond the point where the lung capacity increases at an equal rate is unknown. if such measurements were applied to the different gymnastic systems, we might be able to compare their efficiency, which would be a great desideratum in view of the unfortunate rivalry between them. total strength, too, can be greatly increased. beyer thinks that from sixteen to twenty-one it may exceed the average or normal increment fivefold, and he adds, "i firmly believe that the now so wonderful performances of most of our strong men are well within the reach of the majority of healthy men, if such performances were a serious enough part of their ambition to make them do the exercises necessary to develop them." power of the organs to respond to good training by increased strength probably reaches well into middle life. it is not encouraging to learn that, according to a recent writer,[ ] we now have seventy times as many physicians in proportion to the general population as there are physical directors, even for the school population alone considered. we have twice as many physicians per population as great britain, four times a many as germany, or physicians, . ministers, . lawyers per thousand of the general population; while even if all male teachers of physical training taught only males of the military age, we should have but . of a teacher per thousand, or if the school population alone be considered, teachers per million pupils. hence, it is inferred that the need of wise and classified teachers in this field is at present greater than in any other. but fortunately while spontaneous, unsystematic exercise in a well-equipped modern gymnasium may in rare cases do harm, so far from sharing the prejudice often felt for it by professional trainers, we believe that free access to it without control or direction is unquestionably a boon to youth. even if its use be sporadic and occasional, as it is likely to be with equal opportunity for out-of-door exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even lameness from initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness of inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome self-knowledge and stimulus. in this country more than elsewhere, especially in high school and college, gymnasium work has been brought into healthful connection with field sports and record competitions for both teams and individuals who aspire to championship. this has given the former a healthful stimulus although it is felt only by a picked few. scores of records have been established for running, walking, hurdling, throwing, putting, swimming, rowing, skating, etc., each for various shorter and longer distances and under manifold conditions, and for both amateurs and professionals, who are easily accessible. these, in general, show a slow but steady advance in this country since , when athletics were established here. in that year there was not a single world's best record held by an american amateur, and high-school boys of to-day could in most, though not in all lines, have won the american championship twenty-five years ago. of course, in a strict sense, intercollegiate contests do not show the real advance in athletics, because it is not necessary for a man in order to win a championship to do his best; but they do show general improvement. we select for our purpose a few of those records longest kept. not dependent on external conditions like boat-racing, or on improved apparatus like bicycling, we have interesting data of a very different order for physical measurements. these down to present writing--july, --are as follows: for the -yard dash, every annual record from to is or seconds, or between these, save in , where owen's record of - / seconds still stands. in the -yard run there is slight improvement since , but here the record of (wefers, - / seconds) has not been surpassed. in the quarter-mile run, the beet record was in (long, seconds). the half-mile record, which still stands, was made in (kilpatrick, minute - / seconds); the mile run in (conneff, minutes - / seconds). the running broad jump shows a very steady improvement, with the best record in (prinstein, feet - / inches). the running high jump shows improvement, but less, with the record of still standing (sweeney, feet - / inches). the record for pole vaulting, corrected to november, , is feet / inches (dole); for throwing the -pound hammer head, feet inches (queckberner); for putting the -pound shot, feet inches (coe, ); the standing high jump, feet - / inches (ewry); for the running high jump, feet - / inches (sweeney). we also find that if we extend our purview to include all kinds of records for physical achievement, that not a few of the amateur records for activities involving strength combined with rapid rhythm movement are held by young men of twenty or even less. in putting the -pound shot under uniform conditions the record has improved since the early years nearly feet (coe, feet inches, best at present writing, ). pole vaulting shows a very marked advance culminating in (dole, feet / inches). most marked of all perhaps is the great advance in throwing the -pound hammer. beginning between and feet in the early years, the record is now feet inches (flanagan, ). the two-mile bicycle race also shows marked gain, partly, of course, due to improvement in the wheel, the early records being nearly minutes, and the best being minutes seconds (mclean, ). some of these are world records, and more exceed professional records.[ ] these, of course, no more indicate general improvement than the steady reduction of time in horse-racing suggests betterment in horses generally. in panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its manifold forms was one of the most characteristic expressions of adolescent nature and needs. not a single time or distance record of antiquity has been preserved, although grasberger[ ] and other writers would have us believe that in those that are comparable, ancient youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in leaping and running. while we are far from cultivating mere strength, our training is very one-sided from the greek norm of unity or of the ideals that develop the body only for the salve of the soul. while gymnastics in our sense, with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently of games was unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours as was its method. nothing, so far as is known, was done for correcting the ravages of work, or for overcoming hereditary defects; and until athletics degenerated there were do exercises for the sole purpose of developing muscle. on the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk, shoulders, and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and ego-centric, deficient on the side of psychic impulsion, and but little subordinated to ethical or intellectual development. yet it does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a safeguard of virtue and temperance. its need is radical revision and coordination of various cults and theories in the light of the latest psycho-physiological science. gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. the present academic zeal for physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with anthropometry. this important and growing department will be represented in the ideal gymnasium of the future--first, by courses, if not by a chair, devoted to the apparatus of measurements of human proportions and symmetry, with a kinesological cabinet where young men are instructed in the elements of auscultation, the use of calipers, the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph, kinesometer to plot graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of percentile grades and in statistical methods, etc. second, anatomy, especially of muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their physiology, with stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the flow of blood and lymph, not excluding the development of the upright position, and all that it involves and implies. third, hygiene will be prominent and comprehensive enough to cover all that pertains to body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and domestic and public hygiene--all on the basis of modern as distinct from the archaic physiology of ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in , before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose concepts are an anomalous survival to-day. mechanico-therapeutics, the purpose and service of each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the value of work on stall bars with chest weights, of chinning, use of the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings, clubs, dumb-bells, work with straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be taught. fourth, the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest development in greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high and not yet developed culture value for youth. this department, both in its practical and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes and scholarships to stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of students who are now unaffected by the influence of athletics. by these methods the motivation of gymnastics, which now in large measure goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be utilised to aid the greatly needed intellectualization of those exercises which in their nature are more akin to work than play. indeed, gutsmuths's first definition of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." so to develop these courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely, satisfy the requirements for the a.b. degree, would coordinate the work of the now isolated curriculum of the training-schools with that of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter; but besides its culture value, which i hold very high, such a step would prepare for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned profession of physical trainers. this has, moreover, great but yet latent and even unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic youth. grote states that among the ancient greeks one-half of all education as devoted to the body, and galton urges that they as much excelled us as we do the african negro. they held that if physical perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence would follow; and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis. in our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations of the future will be those which give most intelligent care to the body. [footnote : see h.g. beyer. the influence of exercise on growth. american physical education review, september-december, , vol. i, pp. - .] [footnote : j.h. mccurdy, physical training as a profession. association seminar, march, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : these records are taken from the world almanac, , and olympic games of at athens. edited by j.e. sullivan, commissioner from the united states to the olympic games. spalding's athletic library, new york, july, .] [footnote : o.h. jaeger, die gymnastik der hellenen. heitz, stuttgart . l. grasberger's great standard work, erziehung und untericht im klassischen alterthum. würzburg, - , vols.] * * * * * chapter vi play, sports, and games the view of groos partial and a better explanation of play proposed as rehearsing ancestral activities--the glory of greek physical training, its ideals and results--the first spontaneous movements of infancy as keys to the past--necessity of developing basal powers before those that are later and peculiar to the individual--plays that interest due to their antiquity--play with dolls--play distinguished by age--play preferences of children and their reasons--the profound significance of rhythm--the value of dancing and also its significance, history, and the desirability of re-introducing it--fighting--boxing--wrestling--bushido--foot-ball--military ideals--showing off--cold baths--hill climbing--the playground movement--the psychology of play--its relation to work. play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more popular field. here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules. artifacts often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty purely hereditary momentum. thus our first problem is to seek both the motor tendencies and the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the past. the view of groos that play is practise for future adult activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. it ignores the past where lie the keys to all play activities. true play never practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often calls for. it exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never mature. in place of this mistaken and misleading view, i regard play as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin to rudimentary organs. the best index and guide to the stated activities of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught, and non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and exact expressions of their motor needs. the young grow up into the same forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long preceded them, only to a limited extent; and if the form of every human occupation were to change to-day, play would be unaffected save in some of its superficial imitative forms. it would develop the motor capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of our past heritage, and the transformation of these into later acquired adult forms is progressively later. in play every mood and movement is instinct with heredity. thus we rehearse the activities of our ancestors, back we know not how far, and repeat their life work in summative and adumbrated ways. it is reminiscent albeit unconsciously, of our line of descent; and each is the key to the other. the psycho-motive impulses that prompt it are the forms in which our forebears have transmitted to us their habitual activities. thus stage by stage we reënact their lives. once in the phylon many of these activities were elaborated in the life and death struggle for existence. now the elements and combinations oldest in the muscle history of the race are rerepresented earliest in the individual, and those later follow in order. this is why the heart of youth goes out into play as into nothing else, as if in it man remembered a lost paradise. this is why, unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body, and also why it so makes for unity of body and soul that the proverb "man is whole only when he plays" suggests that the purest plays are those that enlist both alike. to address the body predominantly strengthens unduly the fleshy elements, and to overemphasize the soul causes weakness and automatisms. thus understood, play is the ideal type of exercise for the young, most favorable for growth, and most self-regulating in both kind and amount. for its forms the pulse of adolescent enthusiasm beats highest. it is unconstrained and free to follow any outer or inner impulse. the zest of it vents and satisfies the strong passion of youth for intense erethic and perhaps orgiastic states, gives an exaltation of self-feeling so craved that with no vicarious outlet it often impels to drink, and best of all realizes the watchword of the turners, _frisch, frei, fröhlich, fromm_ [fresh, free, jovial, pious.]. ancient greece, the history and literature of which owe their perennial charm for all later ages to the fact that they represent the eternal adolescence of the world, best illustrates what this enthusiasm means for youth. jäger and guildersleeve, and yet better grasberger, would have us believe that the panhellenic and especially the olympic games combined many of the best features of a modern prize exhibition, a camp-meeting, fair, derby day, a wagner festival, a meeting of the british association, a country cattle show, intercollegiate games, and medieval tournament; that they were the "acme of festive life" and drew all who loved gold and glory, and that night and death never seemed so black as by contrast with their splendor. the deeds of the young athletes were ascribed to the inspiration of the gods, whose abodes they lit up with glory; and in doing them honor these discordant states found a bond of unity. the victor was crowned with a simple spray of laurel; cities vied with each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were taken down for his entry and immediately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to the gods, and pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal prevalence of good over evil. the best body implied the best mind; and even plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls, but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom weakness was perilously near to wickedness, and ugliness to sin, argues that education must be so conducted that the body can be safely entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a slogan of a more degenerate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well and strong is to be a philosopher--_valare est philosophari_. the greeks could hardly conceive bodily apart from psychic education, and physical was for the sake of mental training. a sane, whole mind could hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was dependent. knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous if it does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does not develop a motor side. body culture is ultimately only for the sake of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. not only is all muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a monster. play at its best is only a school of ethics. it gives not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble and brings out individuality. how the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental training in the land and day of socrates is seen in the identification of knowledge and virtue, "_kennen und können_." [to know and to have the power to do] only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do. from the ethical standpoint, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real subject of knowledge, and there is no science but morals. he is the best man, says xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the happiest who feels that he is improving. life is a skill, an art like a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. good moral and physical development are more than analogous; and where intelligence is separated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract, and desiccated, and the latter formal routine. thus mere conscience and psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually inspiring. not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but work and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the past. the first influence of all right exercise for those in health is feeling of well-being and exhilaration. this is one chief source of the strange enthusiasm felt for many special forms of activity, and the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms of it that are hygienically unfit. to act vigorously from a full store of energy gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly intoxicate. animals must move or cease growing and die. while to be weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. it gives a sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, courage, confidence, enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the etymological sense of that noble word. to be active, agile, strong, is especially the glory of young men. our nature and history have so disposed our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes are stimulated, products of decomposition are washed out by oxygenation and elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic and sympathetic activities is accused, and vegetative processes are normalized. activity may exalt the spirit almost to the point of ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate, and mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature localization is most deleterious. just enough at the proper time and rate contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition, gives moral self-control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that great word means, and favors all higher human aspirations. in all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the combinations. some of the elements speak with a still small voice raucous with age. the first spontaneous movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. many elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze them. many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint things we can not apprehend. later the rehearsals are fuller, and their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral joys. the pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our play give pure delight. its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life. primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us. some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. all are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know it not. gulick[ ] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting than others is to be found in the phylon. the power to throw with accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated. those who could throw unusually well best overcame enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. the nervous and muscular systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back of them a racial setting. so running and dodging with speed and endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and fighting. now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. this makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival. we inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great racial utility. the best athletic sports and games a composed of these racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of great importance. why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so loves to sit all day and fish! it is because this interest dates back to time immemorial. we are the sons of fishermen, and early life was by the water's side, and this is our food supply. this explains why certain exercises are more interesting than others. it is because they touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. thus we see that play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing racial history. plays and games change only in their external form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic content of them, are the same. just as psychic states must be lived out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played off, each in its own time. the best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of heredity. the best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and spontaneity. hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in which nerve centers come into function. the oldest, racial parts come first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much later.[ ] as hughlings jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. by right mastication, deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. thus not only the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best prescribed by heredity. all growth is more or less rhythmic. there are seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times. roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. donaldson showed that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know that little result is achieved. the sequence in which the maturation of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to cajal, energy, originally employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher level. thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great harm may be done. hence every determination of these periods is of great practical as well as scientific importance. the following are the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance of adolescence. the doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight and nine,[ ] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may persist. children can give no better reason why they stop playing with dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old, ashamed, love real babies, etc. the roman girl, when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to venus. mrs. carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like dido, after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife by way of tyrian sword. at thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. occasionally single women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those who have children, play dolls all their lives. gales's[ ] student concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped them early. but the instinct that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle points of contact between doll play and idolatry. before puberty dolls are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always children or babies. there is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is probably false. nor are doll and child comparable to first and second dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as children with too great abandonment are those who make the best mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of motherhood. the number of motor activities that are both inspired and unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both by psychologists and teachers. few purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the history of the race can probably be found even though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to each its phyletic correlate. in an interesting paper dr. gulick[ ] divides play into three childish periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. of the first two periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously, but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. from seven to twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence "two elements predominate--first, the plays are predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play has a program and an end. the second characteristic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage out-of-door life--hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. this characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "the plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm." croswell[ ] found that among , children familiar with kinds of amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among boys as four to one." the age of the greatest number of different amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number, and progressive specialisation occurs. the games of chase, which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. toys and original make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys. "a third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their teens are games of contest--games in which the end is in one way or another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n the struggle between peers." "as children approach the teens, a tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no longer makes playthings but things that are useful." parents and society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the kind of amusement fitting at each age. as the child grows older, society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the accomplishments of some definite aim. the course for this period will concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be devoted to each. the desire for mastery is now at its height. the instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. at fourteen, especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make something and perhaps to coöperate. mcghee[ ] collected the play preferences of , children, and found a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to fifteen, and a very rapid rise from sixteen to eighteen. from eleven onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. games involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of preference even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly seventy per cent. with adolescence, specialization upon a few plays was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in general there were a large number of plays which were popular with none preëminent. even at this age the principle of organization in games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. puberty showed the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet, and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most favored for boys, rose rapidly. although the author does not state it, it would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different seasons were most marked among boys, in part, at least, because their activities are more out of doors. ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic features. no form of activity is more universal than the dance, which is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves seem to have arisen out of it. before it became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. in the dark background of history there is now much evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced. they all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least expense. by it eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. the many work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping, the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that areas and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. most of the old work-canticles are lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used to express. now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial, special, vastly complex, end diversified. it is thus natural that during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly accentuated. at the dawn of this age boys love marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic clapping, etc. the more prominent the factor of repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of constant psychic adjustment and attention. college yells, cheers, rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. these latter emphasise the conflict factor, best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. the effect of musical accompaniment, which the swedish system wrongly rejects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements. adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. before this change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the sentence-sense. the soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as i am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements which are predominantly rhythmic. not only does music start in time marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. the psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. we can not conceive what war, love, and religion would be without it. the old adage that "the parent of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is god" seems borne out not only in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum. dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor needs of youth. perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor education. schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. in very ancient times china ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of the education of boys after the age of thirteen. neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. in japan, in the priestly salic college of ancient rome, in egypt, in the greek apollo cult, it was a form of worship. st. basil advised it; st. gregory introduced it into religious services. the early christian bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and only in , and again in , was it forbidden in church. neale and others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language of the church, than has preaching. savages are nearly all great dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. the character of people is often learned from their dances, and molière says the destiny of nations depends on them. the gayest dancers are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. some mysteries can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. if we consider the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. one writer says that the polka so delighted france and england that statesmen forgot politics. the spirit of the old polish aristocracy still lives in the polonaise. the gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. the greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. national dances like the hornpipe and reel of scotland, the _reihen_, of germany, the _rondes_ of france, the spanish tarantella and _chaconne_, the strathspey from the spey valley, the irish jig, etc., express racial traits. instead of the former vast repertory, the stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild _salterrelle_, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love, mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service, symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad associations. this is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will, inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other agencies have power to do. right dancing can cadence the very soul, give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. it can serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue. that its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent. its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another interesting chapter. very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another correspondence which i believe to be new, between the mode of spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history of the race. one of the most marked distinctions between savage and civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. the former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and manifesting remarkable endurance. as civilization and specialization advance, hours become regular. the cultured man is less desultory in all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy in a year than the savage. women are schooled to regular work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races is compared by bücher[ ] to that of training a eat to work when harnessed to a dog-cart. it is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of method makes them hate labor. the effort of savages is more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert. darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from tidal ascidian.[ ] there is indeed much that suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for males. this mode of life not only preceded the industrial and commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative existence. we see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle habits of adolescents, and, i think, in student and particularly in college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent. this is not reversion, but partly expression of the nature and perhaps the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of civilization. the hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for its own sake or the desire of achievement. to shout and put forth the utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. when maturity is complete this need abates. if this be correct, the phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a rhythm trait of a long racial period. youth needs overexertion to compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset oversleep at times. this seems to be nature's provision to expand in all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. this is treated more fully elsewhere. perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation come personal conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some sense, hunting. the animal world is full of struggle for survival, and primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked against life. in its more brutal forms we see one of the most degrading of all the aspects of human nature. burk[ ] has shown how the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly in boyhood, where fights are often engaged in with desperate abandon. noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled, arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose, or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. in unrestrained anger, man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. the face is distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts, cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty, disheveled and panting with exhaustion. for coarser natures, the spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. these instincts, more or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth brings they become criminal. repulsive as are these grosser and animal manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils that need all its antagonism. to be angry aright is a good part of moral education, and non-resistance under all provocations is unmanly, craven, and cowardly.[ ] an able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milksop, a lady-boy, or sneak. he lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core. hence, instead of eradicating this instinct, one of the great problems of physical and moral pedagogy is rightly to temper and direct it. sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys; and in the great english schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and traditions abound in illustrations of its man-making and often transforming influence in ways well appreciated by hughes and arnold. it makes against degeneration, the essential feature of which is weakening of will and loss of honor. real virtue requires enemies, and women and effeminate and old men want placid, comfortable peace, while a real man rejoices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes, casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. bad as is overpugnacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight, and i have no patience with the sentimentality that would here "pour out the child with the bath," but would have every healthy boy taught boxing at adolescence if not before. the prize-ring is degrading and brutal, but in lieu of better illustrations of the spirit of personal contest i would interest a certain class of boys in it and try to devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest it generates. like dancing it should be rescued from its evil associations, and its educational force put to do moral work, even though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific defects of character. at its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and self-control. the moment this is lost stinging punishment follows. hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition. it has no mean theoretic side, of rules, kinds of blow and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and conflict. i do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of proper purgation, but i know from both personal practise and observation that they are not unconquerable. this form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its comparatively harmless german student form, although this has been warmly defended by jacob grimm, bismarck, and treitschke, while paulsen, professor of philosophy and pedagogy, and schrempf, of theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several americans have thought it better than hazing, which it makes impossible. the dark side of dueling is seen in the hypertrophied sense of honor which under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing, prompting, according to ziegler,[ ] a club of sixteen students to fight over two hundred duels in four weeks in jena early in this century. it is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. although this professor who had his own face scarred on the _mensur_, pleaded for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as infamous and even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. the duel had a religious romantic origin as revealing god's judgment, and means that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and this is still its ideal side. anachronism as it now is and degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training, slight and specialized though it be. the code is conventional, drawn directly from old french military life, and is not true to the line that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best safeguard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of ifs rights. if, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with excessive beer-drinking. fencing, while an art susceptible of high development and valuable for both pose and poise, and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is unilateral and robbed of the vest of inflicting real pain on an antagonist. bushido,[ ] which means military-knightly ways, designates the japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. the youth is inspired by the ideal of tom brown "to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one." it expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty of living aright and dying nobly. it means also sympathy, pity, and love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of poetry. honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the _bushi_ is truthful without an oath. at the tender age of five the _samurai_ is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility. at fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given him, which must be his companions for life. they were made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. they have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be drawn lightly. he is taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for offence and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life cheap beside honor, and die if it is gone. this chivalry is called the soul of japan, and if it fades life is vulgarised. it is a code of ethics and physical training. football is a magnificent game if played on honor. an english tennis champion was lately playing a rubber game with the american champion. they were even and near the end when the american made a bad fluke which would have lost this country its championship. the english player, scorning to win on an accident, intentionally made a similar mistake that the best man might win. the chief evil of modern american football which now threatens its suppression in some colleges is the lust to win at any price, and results in tricks and secret practise. these sneaky methods impair the sentiment of honor which is the best and most potent of all the moral safeguards of youth, so that a young man can not be a true gentleman on the gridiron. this ethical degeneration is far worse than all the braises, sprains, broken bones and even deaths it causes. wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in antiquity reached a high development, and which, although now more known and practised as athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary capacities in its various forms. it represents the most primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with man. purged of its barbarities, and in its greco-roman form and properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than any other form--for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the upright and in every prone position. it, too, has its manual of feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness, quickness, strength, and shiftiness. victory need involve no cruelty or even pain to the vanquished. the very closeness of body to body, emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities, developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. its struggle is usually longer and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character among contests is unique. as a school of posture for art, its varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every muscle group and attitude of the human body; hence its training is most generic and least specialized, and victories have been won by very many kinds of excellence. perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentleman than the _sæva animi tempestas_ [fierce tempest of the soul] of anger. a testy, quarrelsome, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is repulsive. even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its victories and may be a method of moral combat. a strong temper well controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic character; but in view of bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance may cease to be virtues, and summary redress may have a distinct advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. if too repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and the disposition be spoiled. hence the relief and exhilaration of an outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunderstorm, and gives the "peace that passeth understanding" so often dilated on by our correspondents. rather than the abject fear of making enemies whatever the provocation, i would praise those whose best title of honor is the kind of enemies they make. better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative. so closely are love and war connected that not only is individual pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual maturity, when animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which makes teams possible or more permanent. football, baseball, cricket, etc., and even boating can become schools of mental and moral training. first, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to master and observe them effectively is no mean training for the mind controlling the body. these are steadily being revised and improved, and the reasons for each detail of construction and conduct of the game require experience and insight into human nature. then the subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates the social and coöperative instincts, while the honor of the school, college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and all. group loyalty in anglo-saxon games, which shows such a marked increment in coördination and self-subordination at the dawn of puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports at this age, can be so utilized as to develop a spirit of service and devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to god and the church. self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. the long, hard fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers, who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry belong outside academic circles, scrapping and underhand advantages, is a sad comment on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of their educational advantages. the necessity of intervention, which has imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal enthusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our heredity. but even thus the good far predominates. the elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions have no units like the english colleges to be pitted against each other, and so colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering methods often place second-best men in place of the best. but both students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of experience. on the whole, there is less license in "breaking training" and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably predominates, while the progress of recent years bids us hope. finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical education are helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. marching in step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of body; the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform levels social distinction in dress. for the french and italian and especially the german and russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three years of compulsory military service is often compared to an academic course, and the army is called, not without some justification, the poor man's university. it gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain but wholesome fare and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of neatness, many useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great promoter of national health and intelligence. naval schools for midshipmen, who serve before the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide curriculum of ports each year, cavalry schools, where each boy is given a horse to care for, study and train, artillery courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform, and a few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character to the spirit of any institution. the very fancy of being in any sense a soldier opens up a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and tactics, army life and service, military history, battles, patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, should always erect a new standard of honor. youth should embrace every opportunity that offers in this line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual opportunities created by every interest in warfare. it would be easy to create pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history have lived, thought, felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and what causes triumphed in them, and to generalize many of the best things taught in detail in the best schools of war in different grades and lands. a subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest factors of all adolescent sport. male birds and beasts show off their charms of beauty and accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the presence of the female. this instinct seems somehow continuous with the growth of ornaments in the mating season. song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal courtship. the boy who turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is brilliant, brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. the true cake-walk as seen in the south is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse to courtship antics seen in man, but its irradiations are many and pervasive. the presence of the fair sex gives tonicity to youth's muscles and tension to his arteries to a degree of which he is rarely conscious. defeat in all contests is more humiliating and victory more glorious thereby. each sex is constantly passing the examination of the other, and each judges the other by standards different from its own. alas for the young people who are not different with the other sex from what they are with their own!--and some are transformed into different beings. achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. the applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. by universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong, and victorious. this stimulus is wholesome and refining. as is shown later, a bashful youth often selects a maiden onlooker and is sometimes quite unconsciously dominated in his every movement by a sense of her presence, stranger and apparently unnoticed though she be, although in the intellectual work of coeducation girls are most influenced thus. in athletics this motive makes for refinement and good form. the ideal knight, however fierce and terrible, must not be brutal, but show capacity for fine feeling, tenderness, magnanimity, and forbearance. evolutionists tell us that woman has domesticated and educated savage man and taught him all his virtues by exercising her royal prerogative of selecting in her mate just those qualities that pleased her for transmission to future generations and eliminating others distasteful to her. if so, she is still engaged in this work as much as ever, and in his dull, slow way man feels that her presence enforces her standards, abhorrent though it would be to him to compromise in one iota his masculinity. most plays and games in which both sexes participate have some of the advantages with some of the disadvantages of coeducation. where both are partners rather than antagonists, there is less eviration. a gallant man would do his best to help, but his worst not to beat a lady. thus, in general, the latter performs her best in her true rule of sympathetic spectator rather than as fellow player, and is now an important factor in the physical education of adolescents. how pervasive this femininity is, which is slowly transforming our schools, is strikingly seen in the church. gulick holds that the reason why only some seven per cent of the young men of the country are in the churches, while most members and workers are women, is that the qualities demanded are the feminine ones of love, rest, prayer, trust, desire for fortitude to endure, a sense of atonement--traits not involving ideals that most stir young men. the church has not yet learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. fielding hall[ ] asks why christ and buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected by their own race and accepted elsewhere. he answers that these mild beliefs of peace, nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile warrior races, jews and ancient hindus, were adopted where women were free and led in these matters. confucianism, mohammedanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such forms of faith and worship women have small place. this again suggests how the sex that rules the heart controls men. too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at this age. marro[ ] quotes father kneipp, and almost rivals his hydrotherapeutic enthusiasm. cold bathing sends the blood inward partly by the cold which contracts the capillaries of the skin and tissue immediately underlying it, and partly by the pressure of the water over all the dermal surface, quickens the activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the best possible tonic for dermal circulation. it is the best of all gymnastics for the nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the heart and blood vessels. this and the removal of the products of excretion preserve all the important dermal functions which are so easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the liability to skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing overtenderness to sensory discomforts. the exercise of swimming is unique in that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as are rarely used otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and liberal rather than directly preparatory for future avocations. its stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. nothing so directly or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs. the very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating and gives a sense of freedom. where practicable it is well to dispense with bathing suits, even the scantiest. the warm bath tub is enfeebling and degenerative, despite the cold spray later, while the free swim in cold water is most invigorating. happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing the great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and are establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths and swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in clothes, undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee days, bathing suits, and, in london, places for nude bathing after dark; establishing time and distance standards with certificates and even prizes; annexing toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference of youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks this form of exercise. such is its strange fascination that, according to one comprehensive census, the passion to get to the water outranks all other causes of truancy, and plays an important part in the motivation of runaways. in the immense public establishment near san francisco, provided by private munificence, there are accommodations for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees of fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one great covered arena with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts and accessories. so elsewhere the presence of visitors is now often invited and provided for. sometimes wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. open hours and longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged. prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just before are those that involve passive motion and falling, like swinging in its many forms, including the may-pole and single rope varieties. mr. lee reports that children wait late in the evening and in cold weather for a turn at a park swing. psychologically allied to these are wheeling and skating. places for the latter are now often provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds of empty lots. ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by the park commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the walks and streets for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space economy for as many diamonds, bleachers, etc., as possible. games of hitting, striking, and throwing balls and other objects, hockey, tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf and croquet, and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have great "thumogenic" or emotional power. leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. man is by definition an upright being, but only after a long apprenticeship.[ ] thus the hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the mind. locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary habits in modern schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. hill-climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. if hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top. walking, running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and regulative of sex, and there is a deep and close though not yet fully explained reciprocity between the two. arm work is relatively too prominent a feature in gymnasia. those who lead excessively sedentary lives are prone to be turbulent and extreme in both passion and opinion, as witness the oft-adduced revolutionary disposition of cobblers. the play problem is now fairly open and is vast in its relation to many other things. roof playgrounds, recreation piers, schoolyards and even school-buildings, open before and after school hours; excursions and outings of many kinds and with many purposes, which seem to distinctly augment growth; occupation during the long vacation when, beginning with spring, most juvenile crime is committed; theatricals, which according to some police testimony lessen the number of juvenile delinquents; boys' clubs with more or less self-government of the george junior republic and other types, treated in another chapter; nature-study; the distinctly different needs and propensities of both good and evil in different nationalities; the advantages of playground fences and exclusion, their disciplinary worth, and their value as resting places; the liability that "the boy without a playground will become the father without a job"; the relation of play and its slow transition to manual and industrial education at the savage age when a boy abhors all regular occupation; the necessity of exciting interest, not by what is done for boys, but by what they do; the adjustment of play to sex; the determination of the proper average age of maximal zest in and good from sandbox, ring-toss, bean-bag, shuffle-board, peg top, charity, funeral play, prisoner's base, hill-dill; the value and right use of apparatus, and of rabbits, pigeons, bees, and a small menagerie in the playground; tan-bark, clay, the proper alternation of excessive freedom, that often turns boys stale through the summer, with regulated activities; the disciplined "work of play" and sedentary games; the value of the washboard rubbing and of the hand and knee exercise of scrubbing, which a late writer would restore for all girls with clever and greek-named play apparatus; as well as digging, shoveling, tamping, pick-chopping, and hod-carrying exercises in the form of games for boys; the relations of women's clubs, parents' clubs, citizens' leagues and unions, etc., to all this work--such are the practical problems. the playground movement encounters its chief obstacles in the most crowded and slum districts, where its greatest value and success was expected for boys in the early teens, who without supervision are prone to commit abuses upon property and upon younger children,[ ] and are so disorderly as to make the place a nuisance, and who resent the "fathering" of the police, without, at least, the minimum control of a system of permits and exclusions. if hoodlums play at all, they become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the hall house or the civic league, and prefer at first scrub games with individual self-exhibition to organized teams. lee sees the "arboreal instincts of our progenitors" in the very strong propensity of boys from ten to fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling rings, generally occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps and catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to use horizontal and parallel bars. the city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but does not know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country youth. the young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits. dr. sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth of new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the triviality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of students is prone to lapse. it prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. it gives a new standard of honor. for a member of a team to break training would bring reprobation and ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for his class or college. it supplies a splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt the body. it is a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would otherwise go to disorder or riotous excess. it supplies new and advantageous topics for compositions and for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline, teaches respect for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under the necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by contrast; again the business side of managing great contests has been an admirable school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial operations, sometimes involving $ , or more, and has thus prepared some for successful careers. it furnishes now the closest of all links between high school and college, reduces the number of those physically unfit for college, and should give education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. its obvious dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of victory, especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the popular furor give to great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over-emphasis of combative and too stalwart impulses, and a disposition to carry things by storm, by rush-line tactics; friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors who take unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games, spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem monotonous, dull, and boresome. the propensity to codify sports, to standardize the weight and size of their implements, and to reduce them to what spencer calls regimentation, is a outcrop of uniformitarianism that works against that individuation which is one of the chief advantages of free play. this, to be sure, has developed old-fashioned rounders to modern baseball, and this is well, but it is seen in the elaborate draconian laws, diplomacy, judicial and legislative procedures, concerning "eligibility, transfer, and even sale of players." in some games international conformity is gravely discussed. even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the free play of personality. togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. all this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. runners, sprinters, and jumpers,[ ] we are told, on the basis of many careful measurements, must be tall, with slender bodies, narrow but deep chests, longer legs than the average for their height, the lower leg being especially long, with small calf, ankle, and feet, small arms, narrow hips, with great power of thoracic inflation, and thighs of small girth. every player must be studied by trainers for ever finer individual adjustments. his dosage of work must be kept well within the limits of his vitality, and be carefully adjusted to his recuperative power. his personal nascent periods must be noted, and initial embarrassment carefully weeded out. the field of play is as wide as life and its varieties far outnumber those of industries and occupations in the census. plays and games differ in seasons, sex, and age. mcghee[ ] has shown on the basis of some , children, that running plays are pretty constant for boys from six to seventeen, but that girls are always far behind boys and run steadily less from eight to eighteen. in games of choice, boys showed a slight rise at sixteen and seventeen, and girls a rapid increase at eleven and a still more rapid one after sixteen. in games of imitation girls excel and show a marked, as boys do a slight, pubescent fall. in those games involving rivalry boys at first greatly excel girls, but are overtaken by the latter in the eighteenth year, both showing marked pubescent increment. girls have the largest number of plays and specialise on a few less than boys, and most of these plays are of the unorganized kinds. johnson[ ] selected from a far larger number plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language, arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. most of our best games are very old and, johnson thinks, have deteriorated. but children are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. since the berlin play congress in the sentiment has grown that these are of national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body. hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work. several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no pleasure or true euphoria. play is motor poetry. too early distinction between play and work should not be taught. education perhaps should really begin with directing childish sports aright. froebel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. says brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is in it, and the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it." johnson adds that "it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it." sully[ ] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or "non-laughers" in our times in merry old england[ ] every one played games; and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. queen elizabeth's maids of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tons, age. to requote stevenson with variation, as _laborari_, [to labor] so _ludere, et joculari orare sunt_. [to play and to jest are to pray] laughter itself, as kühne long ago showed, is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their tension.[ ] the antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived, for the difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-physic motivations. the young often do their hardest work in play. with interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. play, from one aspect of it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest, breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work without overdrawing their resources of vitality. bible psychology conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills of modern industrial civilization. the curse is overcome only by those who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play. play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it is too abandoned or prolonged. play can do just as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided personality. work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not totality. its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life. interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. play is from within from congenital hereditary impulsion. it is the best of all methods of organizing instincts. its cathartic or purgative function regulates irritability, which may otherwise be drained or vented in wrong directions, exactly as breuer[ ] shows psychic traumata may, if overtense, result in "hysterical convulsions." it is also the best form of self-expression; and its advantage is variability, following the impulsion of the idle, perhaps hyperemic, and overnourished centers most ready to act. it involves play illusion and is the great agent of unity and totalization of body and soul, while its social function develops solidarity and unison of action between individuals. the dances, feasts, and games of primitive people, wherein they rehearse hunting and war and act and dance out their legends, bring individuals and tribes together.[ ] work is menial, cheerless, grinding, regular, and requires more precision and accuracy and, because attended with less ease and pleasure and economy of movement, is more liable to produce erratic habits. antagonistic as the forms often are, it may be that, as carr says, we may sometimes so suffuse work with the play spirit, and _vice versa_, that the present distinction between work and play will vanish, the transition will be less tragic and the activities of youth will be slowly systematised into a whole that better fits his nature and needs; or, if not this, we may at least find the true proportion and system between drudgery and recreation. the worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms generally. it brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces and nothing legible. all beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early stages of proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and encounter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak will, to change and turn to something else increase. perhaps the greatest disparity between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering effort, for _in der beschränkung zeigt sich der meister_ [the master shows himself in limitation]. now no kind or line of culture is complete till it issues in motor habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. the brain unorganized by training has, to recur to richter's well-worn aphorism, saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never makes a grain of it because they never get together. thus willed action is the language of complete men and the goal of education. when things are mechanized by right habituation, there is still further gain; for not only is the mind freed for further and higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor association is a plexus that determines not only conduct and character, but even beliefs. the person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. all will culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. it makes weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. it divorces knowing and doing, _kennen_ and _können_, a separation which the greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. the purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. not only do muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be eliminated as error or superstition. the roots of play lie close to those of creative imagination and idealism. the opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity. however precious and coherent in themselves, all subject-matters thus organized are mere lugs, crimps, and frills. all such culture is spurious, unreal, and parasitic. it may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. with age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. if, as ruskin says, all true work is praise, all true play is love and prayer. instil into a boy's soul learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth and which can not become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of play slowly run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. the instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. the best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital strength that carries burdens. grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not _vice versa_; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth. home, school, church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in bringing youth to its fullest maturity. even vice, crime, and decline are often only arrest or backsliding or reversion. national and racial decline beginning in eliminating one by one the last and highest styles of development of body and mind, mental stimulus of excessive dosage lowers general nutrition. a psychologist that turns his back on mere subtleties and goes to work in a life of service has here a great opportunity, and should not forget, as horace mann said, "that for all that grows, one former is worth one hundred reformers." [footnote : interest in relation to muscular exercise. american physical education review, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : the influence of exercise upon growth by frederic burk. american physical education review, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study of dolls, by g. stanley hall and a.c. ellis. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : studies in imagination, by lilian h. chalmers. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : some psychical aspects of physical exercise. popular science monthly, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : amusements of worcester school children. pedagogical seminary, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study in the play life of some south carolina children. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : arbeit und rythmus. trubner, leipzig, .] [footnote : descent of man. d. appleton and co., , vol. , chap. vi, p. _et seq_] [footnote : teasing and bullying. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see my study of anger. american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : der deutsche student am ende des jahrhunderts, th ed., göschen, leipzig, . see also h. p. shelden: history and pedagogy of american student societies, new york, , p. _et seq_.] [footnote : bushido: the soul of japan. an exposition of japanese thought, by inazo nitobé. new york, , pp. _et seq_.] [footnote : the hearts of men. macmillan, , chap. xxii.] [footnote : la puberté. schleicher frères, éditeurs, paris, .] [footnote : see a.w. trettien. creeping and walking. american journal of psychology, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : constructive and preventive philanthropy, by joseph lee. macmillan, new york, , chaps. x and xi.] [footnote : c.o. bernies. physical characteristics of the runner and jumper. american physical education review, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study in the play life of some south carolina children. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : education by plays and games. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : an essay on laughter. longmans, green and co., london, , p. _et seq_.] [footnote : see brand's popular antiquities of great britain, vols., london, .] [footnote : psychology of tickling, laughing, and the comic, by g. stanley hall and arthur allin. american journal of psychology, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : i. breuer and s. freud. studien über hysterie. f. deuticke, wien, . see especially p. _et seq_.] [footnote : see a valuable discussion by h. a. carr. the survival values of play, investigations of the department of psychology and education of the university of colorado, arthur allin, ph.d., editor, november, , vol. , pp. - ] * * * * * chapter vii faults, lies, and crimes classifications of children's faults--peculiar children--real faults as distinguished from interference with the teacher's ease--truancy, its nature and effects--the genesis of crime--the lie, its classes and relations to imagination--predatory activities--gangs--causes of crime--the effects of stories of crime--temibility--juvenile crime and its treatment. siegert[ ] groups children of problematical nature into the following sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, executive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and _blasé_; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed. a unique and interesting study was undertaken by közle[ ] by collecting and studying thirty german writers on pedagogical subjects since pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. in all, this gave faults, far more in number than their virtues. these were classified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self-will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition; and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted. bohannon[ ] on the basis of _questionnaire_ returns classified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisitive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous and only child. marro[ ] tabulated the conduct of , boys in gymnasial and lyceal classes in italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see table given above). conduct was marked as good, bad, and indifferent, according to the teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in per cent of the cases; at eleven in per cent; at seventeen in per cent; and at fourteen in only per cent. in positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, while it improved at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. in general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; said, to its worst at fourteen; and then improved in yearly increments that did not differ much, and at seventeen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen four points better. [illustration: percentage x age] he computed also the following percentage table of the causes of punishments in certain italian schools for girls and boys near pubescent ages: boys girls quarrels and blows . . laziness, negligence . . untidiness . . improper language . . indecent acts and words . . refusal to work . . various offenses against discipline . . truancy . . plots to run away . . running away . . mr. sears[ ] reports in percentages statistics of the punishments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: disorder, - / ; disobedience, ; carelessness, - / ; running away, - / ; quarreling, ; tardiness, - / ; rudeness, ; fighting, - / ; lying, ; stealing, ; miscellaneous, - / . he names a long list of punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, insult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punishment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc. triplett[ ] attempted a census of faults and defeats named by the teacher. here inattention by far led all others. defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, mental incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affectation, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is a fault which teachers, of course, naturally observe. children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, untidiness, selfishness, etc. parents' view of this subject triplett found still different. here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others following. the vast number of faults mentioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins. in a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather, dexter[ ] found that excessive humidity was most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between and the probability of bad conduct was increased per cent, when between and it was increased per cent. abnormal barometric pressure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from to per cent; while the time of year and precipitation seemed to have almost no effect. while the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in london do not permit clerks to do the more important bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. temperature is known to have a very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modified, etc.[ ] in his study of truancy, kline[ ] starts with the assumption that the maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum temperature. the curve of truancies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. dislike of school, the passion for out-of-door life, and more universal interests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. the habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at restraint. sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liberties, so vagrancy increases crime. the passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. it seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. they long intensely for the utter abandon of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent discarding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realise again the conditions of primitive man. the manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave arraignments of the lack of adaptability of the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken, the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. the truant, although a cording to kline's measurements slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness in more out-of-door vocations. truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is denied. the vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. it is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special charm. in the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. there must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. it is possible to steal and pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. the vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. the constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for himself. this is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination permit. but this stage should end in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. the chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage. crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. the beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between good and bad lies. my own study[ ] of the lies of normal children, by a method carefully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. it is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagination. more commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. children make believe they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of experience. sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. its control and not its elimination in a gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. the life of hartley coleridge,[ ] by his brother, is one of many illustrations. he fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this realm--all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with great reality for years. the vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-hallucinations of kandinsky. two sisters used to say, "let us play we are sisters," as if this made the relation more real. cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological impostures, illustrating his thirty-five faculties. "he lied when he confessed he had lied," said a young sancho panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later admitted their falsity. sir james mackintosh, near puberty, after reading roman history, used to fancy himself the emperor of constantinople, and carried on the administration of the realm for hours at a time. his fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supplements reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. it is a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. these are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regime must be wise. again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. truth is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. the young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother thus. boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. it is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. friendships are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell weaken in their validity. lies to the priest, and above all to god, are the worst. all this makes special attention to friendships, leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for general veracity. the worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. they ease children over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice. these lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. they are also most corrupting and hard to correct. all bad habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment; for those who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently resorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily forgotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. these, even more than the pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions. the lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. youth has an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. callow casualists are fond of declaring that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. a doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it while he had none. the end at first in such cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. the youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a private tribunal is now apparent. many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous; and many systematized palliatives and casuistic word-splittings, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words "not," "perhaps," or "i think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods. next to the selfish lie for protection--of special psychological interest for adolescent crime--is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and affectation and have a passion for always acting a part, attracting attention, etc. the recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both sexes. it is a strange psychological paradox that some can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. the great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in point. they find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence. sheldon's interesting statistics show that among the institutional activities of american children,[ ] predatory organizations culminate from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. these include bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between separate districts, associations for building forts, etc. this form of association is the typical one for boys of twelve. after this age their interests are gradually transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. sheldon's statistics are as follows: age total no. of predatory = girls societies ( ) = boys innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. "the robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder become the real models." the stealing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is collected. an organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought together. some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf sticks and balls. jacob riis says that on the east side of new york, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. he is ambitious to get "pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. his vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and "penny dreadfuls." sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they commit. riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this book."[ ] the names are sufficiently suggestive--hell's kitchen gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, wild indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some i have heard of. some of the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead infants riis says were picked up on the streets in new york in , or of baby farming. they grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on fifth avenue. arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. a gang stole a team in east new york and drove down the avenue, shopping to throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and shooting at all who interfered. one gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. another blew up a grocery store because its owner refused a gift they demanded. another tried to saw off the head of a jewish pedler. one member killed another for calling him "no gent." six murderous assaults were made at one time by these gangs within a single week. one who is caught and does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. a frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. the gang federates all nationalities. property is depreciated and may be ruined if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or "hang-out." a citizen residing on the hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river frontage. they have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, basements, roofs, and corridors they know so well. their inordinate vanity is well called the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and riis calls the gang a club run wild. they have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. a young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman's club, dashed into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave himself up. they batten on the yellowest literature. those of foreign descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents, early learn to despise them. gangs emulate each other in hardihood, and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. they passionately love boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. what is the true moral antitoxin for this class, or at least what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage of city life. in london, where these groups are better organised and yet more numerous, war is often waged between them, weapons are used and murder is not so very infrequent. normally this instinct passes harmlessly over into associations for physical training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the reductives of maturer years have perfected their work. the causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem comparable with the origin of sin and evil. first, of course, comes heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. a large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal as causative agencies. if whatever is physiologically wrong is morally wrong, and whatever is physiologically right is morally right, we have an important ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. there is no doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain early stage of its development tends to deteriorate the strength and infallibility of instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with the danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. its prime object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that in conquering ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice. after the free schools in london were opened there was an increase of juvenile offenders. new kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand larceny, intricate swindling schemes, were doubled, while sneak thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased, and the proportion of educated criminals was greatly augmented.[ ] to collect masses of children and ram them with the same unassimilated facts is not education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime is an expression of educational failure. illiterate criminals are more likely to be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated criminals. every anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and ignorance among primitive people are in nowise incompatible with honesty, integrity, and virtue. indeed there is much reason to suspect that the extremes of wealth and poverty are more productive of crime than ignorance, or even intemperance. educators have no doubt vastly overestimated the moral efficiency of the three r's and forgotten that character in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly made over into habits; while at adolescence more than at any other period of life, it can be cultivated through ideals. the dawn of puberty, although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar proneness to be either very good or very bad. as the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements of the soul, if not indeed of both. although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of schooling, i cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against it for the blind and ignorant assumption that the three r's or any merely intellectual training can moralize. by nature, children are more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as at any other age. it is almost impossible for adults to realize the irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage of development. if we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl, perhaps we can realize that whatever rôle heredity plays, the youth who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of circumstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope. it was this sentiment that impelled zarnadelli to reconstruct the criminal law of italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that made rollet a self-constituted advocate, pleading each morning for the twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in paris. those smitten with the institution craze or with any extreme correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths. first of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived with, and understood as in this country gulick, johnson, forbush and yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. criminaloid youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who is less differentiated. virtue is more uniform and monotonous than sin. there is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and psychic. keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters, children, or pets;[ ] they should understand that in the criminal constitution there are precisely the same ingredients, although perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled, etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would, in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend, mentor, adviser are needed. i incline to think that many children would be better and not worse for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like those of captain kidd, jack sheppard, dick turpin, and other gory tales, and perhaps later tales like eugene aram, and the ophidian medicated novel, elsie venner, etc., on the principle of the aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their activity. again, i believe that judicious and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed, and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil deeds and tendencies. special pedagogic attention should be given to the sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals in boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. further yet benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our associates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about, and not pain, can be directly cultivated. truth-telling presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. it is no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the heroism of telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and so often permanently crippled. the money sense, by all the many means now used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of property rights. the regularity of school work and its industry is a valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict concerning the utility of the school will be determined, as talleck well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal vice and crime. wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must be introduced into the environment. in other words, there must be a system of moral orthopedics. garofalo's[ ] new term and principle of "temibility" is perhaps of great service. he would thus designate the quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. we can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. pain then must be so organised as to follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must also be more or less accentuated. thus the problem of criminology for youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults. they can not be protective of society only, but must have marked reformatory elements. solitude[ ] which tends to make weak, agitated, and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very great discretion. there must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, "mercy but murders, pardoning those who kill"; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, "kill all offenders and suspects, for god will know his own," should have no part nor lot here. the philosopher hartmann has a suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up of transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test. however this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys' club, farm, reformatory, etc. we must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence., or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance, material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for both society and for the individual, it makes no practical difference whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided only that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete. in few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. a mere accident of circumstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rectitude. the heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but i would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract thing. here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges. [footnote : problematische kindesnaturen. eine studie für schule und haus. voigtländer, leipzig, .] [footnote : die pädagogische pathologie in der erziehungskunde des jahrhunderts. bertelsman, gütersloh, , p. .] [footnote : peculiar and exceptional children. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : la puberté. schleicher frères, paris, , p. .] [footnote : home and school punishments. pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study of the faults of children. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , p. _et seq._] [footnote : the child and the weather, by edwin g. dexter. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : psychic effects of the weather, by j.s. lemon. american journal of psychology, january, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : truancy as related to the migrating instinct, by l.w. kline. pedagogical seminary, january, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's lies. american journal of psychology, january, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : poems. with memoir by his brother, vols., london, .] [footnote : american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : how the other half lives. scribner's sons, new york, , p. .] [footnote : the curse in education, by rebecca harding davis. north american review, may, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : holtzendorff: psychologie des mordes. c. pfeiffer, berlin, ] [footnote : la criminologie. paris, alcan, , p. ] [footnote : see its psychology and dangers well pointed out by m.h. small: psychical relations of society and solitude. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - ] * * * * * chapter viii biographies of youth knightly ideals and honor--thirty adolescents from shakespeare--goethe--c.d. warner--aldrich--the fugitive nature of adolescent experience--extravagance of autobiographies--stories that attach to great names--some typical crazes--illustrations from george eliot, edison, chatterton, hawthorne, whittier, spencer, huxley, lyell, byron, heine, napoleon, darwin, martineau, agassiz, madame roland, louisa alcott, f.h. burnett, helen keller, marie bashkirtseff, mary maclane, ada negri, de quincey, stuart mill, jefferies, and scores of others. the knightly ideals and those of secular life generally during the middle ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals of the early christian church; in some respects they were like those of the greeks. honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development and that of the body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of the age fostered conceptions not unlike those of the japanese bushido. where elements of christianity were combined with this we have the spirit of the pure chivalry of king arthur and the knights of the round table, which affords perhaps the very best ideals for youth to be found in history, as we shall see more fully later. in a very interesting paper, entitled "shakespeare and adolescence," dr. m.f. libby[ ] very roughly reckons "seventy-four interesting adolescents among the comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and nineteen among the histories." he selects "thirty characters who, either on account of direct references to their age, or because of their love-stories, or because they show the emotional and intellectual plasticity of youth, may be regarded as typical adolescents." his list is as follows: romeo, juliet, hamlet, ophelia, imogen, perdita, arviragus, guiderius, palamon, arcite, emilia, ferdinand, miranda, isabella, mariana, orlando, rosalind, biron, portia, jessica, phebe, katharine, helena, viola, troilus, cressida, cassio, marina, prince hal, and richard of gloucester. the proof of the youth of these characters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and libby holds that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a yet greater, more profound and concentrated knowledge of adolescence. he thinks "venus and adonis" a successful attempt to treat sex in a candid, naive way, if it be read as it was meant, as a catharsis of passion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of art. to some extent he also finds the story of the passionate pilgrim "replete with the deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" the series culminates in sonnet , which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. it might be said that it is connected by a straight line with the best teachings of plato, and that here humanity picked up the clue, lost, save with some italian poets, in the great interval. in looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. on the one hand are those of which doctor's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at great length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. the development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult consciousness was assumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. at the other extreme, we have writers like charles dudley warner,[ ] a self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. all the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious associations of early life on a new england farm are not only made absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life. aldrich[ ] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his life. howells,[ ] white,[ ] mitter,[ ] grahame,[ ] heidi,[ ] and mrs. barnett,[ ] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this field in this respect. yoder,[ ] in his interesting study of the boyhood of great men, has called attention to the deplorable carelessness of their biographers concerning the facts and influences of their youth. he advocates the great pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high appreciation of it felt by the bolandists, which comte's positivist calendar, that renamed all the days of the year from three hundred and sixty-five such accounts in , also sought to revive. yoder selected fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies preferred, for his study. he found a number of lives whose equipment and momentum have been strikingly due to some devoted aunt, and that give many glimpses of the first polarization of genius in the direction in which fame is later achieved. he holds that, while the great men excelled in memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition of eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull genius and talent. one striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness. lancaster[ ] observes that we are constantly told by adults past thirty that they never had this and that experience, and that those who have had them are abnormal; that they are far more rare than students of childhood assert, etc. he says, "not a single young person with whom i have had free and open conversation has been free from serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. a typical case of many i could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life, precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the typical phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been abnormal, for she knew nothing of any of these experiences. her mother, however, produced her diary, and there she read for the first time since it was written, beginning in the january of her thirteenth year, a long series of resolutions which revealed a course of conduct that brought the color to her face, that she should have found it necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed conclusively that she had passed through about all the phases described. these phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come late in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions with definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. hence we are prone to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records of the tragic emotions and experiences typical and normal at this time, because development has scored away their traces from the conscious soul. there is a wall around the town of boyville, says white,[ ] in substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon youth. an adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among the purblind grown-ups. the town of boyville was old when nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed. in exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy. the adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. but the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. the best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth of men who later achieve distinction, which biographers often incorporate and attach to the time, place, and person of their heroes. as burnham[ ] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations of adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by the struggle for literary effects, that they are not always the best documents, although often based on personal experience. confessionalism is generally overdrawn, distorted, and especially the pains of this age are represented as too keen. of george eliot's types of adolescent character, this may best be seen in maggie tulliver, with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth," and in gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught deronda's eye, was "totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of the other sex whom she had never seen before." there was "the resolute action from instinct and the setting at defiance of calculation and reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her conduct tended to promote proposals." exaggeration, although not the perversions of this age often found in adult characterizations, is marked trait of the writings of adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile may appear rational, so that this suggests that consciousness may at this stage serve as a harmless vent for tendencies that would otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practical affairs. if harmodius and aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of greece, had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle that its analysis tends to dissipate emotion. lancaster[ ] gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from which he selected for careful study, choosing them to show different typical directions of activity. of these, showed a distinct craze for reading in adolescence; became great lovers of nature; wrote poetry, showed a great and sudden development of energy; showed great eagerness for school; devoted themselves for a season to art and music; became very religious; left home in the teens; showed dominant instincts of leadership; had great longings of many kinds; developed scientific tastes; grew very anxious about the future; developed increased keenness of sensation or at least power of observation; in cases health was better; were passionately altruistic; became idealists; showed powers of invention; were devoted to older friends; would reform society; hated school. these, like many other statistics, have only indicative value, as they are based on numbers that are not large enough and upon returns not always complete. a few typical instances from lancaster must here suffice. savonarola was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning his career. shelley during these years was unsocial, much alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and moon, was attached to an older man. beecher was intoxicated with nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his life. george eliot at thirteen had a passion for music and became a clever pianist. at sixteen she was religious, founded societies for the poor and for animals, and had fitting spells of misanthropy. edison undertook to read the detroit free library through, read fifteen solid feet as the books stand on the shelves, was stopped, and says he has read comparatively little since. tolstoi found the aspect of things suddenly changed. nature put on a new appearance. he felt he might commit the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save curiosity and the need of action. the future looked gloomy. he became furiously angry without cause; thought he was lost, hated by everybody, was perhaps not the son of his father, etc. at seventeen he was solitary, musing about immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giving up his studies, fancying himself a great man with new truths for humanity. by and by he took up the old virtuous course of life with fresh power, new resolutions, with the feeling that he had lost much time. he had a deep religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy over his new life. he had a period before twenty when he told desperate lies, for which he could not account, then a passion for music, and later for french novels. rousseau at this age was discontented, immensely in love, wept often without cause, etc. keats had a great change at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which consumed his days with fire, and "with passionate longing to drain the cup of experience at a draft." he was "at the morning hour when the whole world turns to gold." "the boy had suddenly become a poet." chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved, and committed suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. john hunter was dull and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did that of patrick henry, who before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly for hours under the trees. alexander murray awoke to life at fifteen and acquired several languages in less than two years. gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. rittenhouse at fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite time and space. benjamin thompson was roused to a frenzy for sciences at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. franklin had a passion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote verses and sold them on the streets of boston; doubted everything at fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public library in philadelphia before he was twenty-one. robert fulton was poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. he became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen. bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for poetic genius and wrote thanatopsis before he was eighteen. jefferson doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied fifteen hours a day. garfield, though living in ohio, longed for the sea, and ever after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange thrill. hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on forever and never touch shore again. he would roam through the maine woods alone; was haunted by the fear that he would die before twenty-five. peter cooper left home at seventeen; was passionately altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his new york institute. whittier at fourteen found a copy of burns, which excited him and changed the current of his life. holmes had a passion for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic attachments to certain trees. j. t. trowbridge learned german, french, and latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow and wrote it out in the evening. henry followed a rabbit under the public library at albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the shelves, and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library contained, then turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and developed a passion for the sciences. he was stage-struck, and became a good amateur actor. h. h. boyesen was thrilled by nature and by the thought that he was a norseman. he had several hundred pigeons, rabbits, and other pets; loved to be in the woods at night; on leaving home for school was found with his arms around the neck of a calf to which he was saying good-by. maxwell, at sixteen, had almost a horror of destroying a leaf, flower, or fly. jahn found growing in his heart, at this age, an inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong--which later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer woe. when nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at a time alone in the forest, full of longings, courage, altruism, wanted to get away from every one and live like crusoe. t. b. reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a passion for reading; ran away at seventeen; painted, acted, and wrote poetry. cartwright, at sixteen, heard voices from the sky saying, "look above, thy sins are forgiven thee." herbert spencer became an engineer at seventeen, after one idle year. he never went to school, but was a private pupil of his uncle. sir james mackintosh grew fond of history at eleven; fancied he was the emperor of constantinople; loved solitude at thirteen; wrote poetry at fourteen; and fell in love at seventeen. thomas buxton loved dogs, horses, and literature, and combined these while riding on an old horse. at sixteen be fell in love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent power to do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. scott began to like poetry at thirteen. pascal wrote treatises on conic sections at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. nelson went to sea at twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at the same age he left to fight a polar bear. banks, the botanist, was idle and listless till fourteen, could not travel the road marked out for him; when coming home from bathing, he was struck by the beauty of the flowers and at once began his career. montcalm and wolfe both distinguished themselves as leaders in battle at sixteen. lafayette came to america at nineteen, thrilled by our bold strike for liberty. gustavus adolphus declared his own majority at seventeen and was soon famous. ida lewis rescued four men in a boat at sixteen. joan of arc began at thirteen to have the visions which were the later guide of her life. mr. swift has collected interesting biographical material[ ] to show that school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the narrowness of the school enclosure prompts many youth in the wayward age to jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. according to school standards, many were dull and indolent, but their nature was too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. wagner at the nikolaischule at leipzig was relegated to the third form, having already attained to the second at dresden, which so embittered him that he lost all taste for philology and, in his own words, "became lazy and slovenly." priestley never improved by any systematic course of study. w.h. gibson was very slow and was rebuked for wasting his time in sketching. james russell lowell was reprimanded, at first privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year "for general negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally suspended in "on account of continued neglect of his college duties." in early life goldsmith's teacher thought him the dullest boy she had ever taught. his tutor called him ignorant and stupid. irving says that a lad "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance, will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow. i would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment, and, consequently, continue always muddy." huxley detested writing till past twenty. his schooling was very brief, and he declared that those set over him "cared about as much for his intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby farmers." humphry davy was faithful but showed no talent in school, having "the reputation of being an idle boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies of a graver sort." later in life he considered it fortunate that he was left so much to himself. byron was so poor a scholar that he only stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, "now, george, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." schiller's negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his final school thesis was unsatisfactory. hegel was a poor scholar, and at the university it was stated "that he was of middling industry and knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." john hunter nearly became a cabinetmaker. lyell had excessive aversion to work. george combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic. heine agreed with the monks that greek was the invention of the devil. "god knows what misery i suffered with it." he hated french meters, and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. he idled away his time at bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff, cut-and-dried tone" of the leathery professors. humboldt was feeble as a child and "had less facility in his studies than most children." "until i reached the age of sixteen," he says, "i showed little inclination for scientific pursuits." he was essentially self-taught, and acquired most of his knowledge rather late in life. at nineteen he had never heard of botany. sheridan was called inferior to many of his schoolfellows. he was remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning manners, and was "not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his greek grammar." swift was refused his degree because of "dulness and insufficiency," but given it later as a special favor. wordsworth was disappointing. general grant was never above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served the last year as a private. w. h. seward was called "too stupid to learn." napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. "who," asks swift, "were the forty-one above him?" darwin was singularly incapable of mastering any language. "when he left school," he says, "i was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. to my deep mortification, my father once said to me, 'you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.'" harriet martineau was thought very dull. though a horn musician, she could do absolutely nothing in the presence of her irritable master. she wrote a cramped, untidy scrawl until past twenty. a visit to some very brilliant cousins at the age of sixteen had much to do in arousing her backward nature. at this age j. pierpont morgan wrote poetry and was devoted to mathematics. booker t. washington, at about thirteen or fourteen (he does not know the date of his birth), felt the new meaning of life and started off on foot to hampton, five hundred miles away, not knowing even the direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night in richmond. vittorino da feltre,[ ] according to dr. burnham, had a low, tardy development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen, which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which followed when a new world-consciousness intensified his personality. lancaster's summaries show that of actors, the average age of their first great success was exactly years. those he chose had taken to the stage of their own accord, for actors are more born than made. nearly half of them were irish, the unemotional american stock having furnished far less. few make their first success on the stage after , but from to is the time to expect talent in this line, although there is a second rise in his curve before and still more after , representing those whose success is more due to intellect. taking the average age of novelists when their first story met with public approval, the curve reaches its highest point between and . averaging poets, the age at which most first poems were published falls between and . the average age at which first publication showed talent he places at , which is in striking contrast with the average age of inventors at time of the first patent, which is years. a still more striking contrast is that between musicians and professional men. music is by far the most precocious and instinctive of all talents. the average age when marked talent was first shown is a little less than years, per cent showed rare talent before , while the professional men graduated at an average age of years and months, and years must be added to mark the point of recognized success. of artists, per cent showed talent before , the average age being . years. of pioneers who made their mark in the far west, leaving home to seek fortunes near the frontier, the greatest number departed before they were . of scientists, lancaster estimates that their life interest first began to glow on the average a little before they were . in general, those whose success is based on emotional traits antedate by some years those whose renown is more purely in intellectual spheres, and taking all together, the curves of the first class culminate between and . while men devoted to physical science, and their biographers, give us perhaps the least breezy accounts of this seething age, it may be, because they mature late, nearly all show its ferments and its circumnutations, as a few almost random illustrations clearly show: tycho brahe, born in of illustrious danish stock, was adopted by an uncle, and entered the university of copenhagen at thirteen, where multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were taught. when he was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which aroused so much interest that he decided to devote himself to the study of the heavenly bodies. he was able to construct a series of interesting instruments on a progressive scale of size, and finally to erect the great observatory of uraniberg on the island of hven. strange to say, his scientific conclusions had for him profound astrological significance. an important new star he declared was "at first like venus and jupiter and its effects will therefore first be pleasant; but as it then became like mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and destruction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes. lastly, the star became like saturn, and thus will finally come a time of want, death, imprisonment, and all kinds of sad things!" he says that "a special use of astronomy is that it enables us to draw conclusions from the movements in the celestial regions as to human fate." he labored on his island twenty years. he was always versifying, and inscribed a poem over the entrance of his underground observatory expressing the astonishment of urania at finding in the interior of the earth a cavern devoted to the study of the heavens. galileo[ ] was born in of a florentine noble, who was poor. as a youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the university of pisa fell in love with mathematics. isaac newton,[ ] born in , very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very low piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried farming. in one of his university examinations in euclid be did so poorly as to incur special censure. his first incentive to diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high class boy. he then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose to the head of the school. he made many ingenious toys and windmills; a carriage, the wheels of which were driven by the hands of the occupants, and a clock which moved by water; curtains, kites, lanterns, etc.; and before he was fourteen fell in love with miss storey, several yeas older than himself. he entered trinity college at cambridge at eighteen. william herschel, born in , at the outbreak of the seven years' war, when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to england, where he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music. he supported himself until middle age as an organist. in much of his later work he was greatly aided by his sister caroline. when he discovered a sixth planet he became famous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his footsteps, and dying in . agassiz[ ] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. he memorized latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of mss.", and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be able to give the name of every known animal." at fourteen he revolted at mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto planning to spend four years at a cermem university, then in paris, when he could begin to write. rooks were scarce, and a little later he copied, with the aid of his brother, several large volumes, and had fifty live birds in his room at one time. at twelve huxley[ ] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three years later devoured hamilton's logic and became deeply interested in metaphysics. at fourteen he saw and participated in his first post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it, and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. his training was irregular; he taught himself german with a book in one hand while he made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter, soul, and their relations, on radicalism and conservatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on enough. at seventeen he attempted a comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and having finished his survey, resolved to master the topics one after another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon us they were done. "may the list soon get black, although at present i shall hardly be able, i am afraid, to spot the paper." beneath the top skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. he undertook the practise of pharmacy, etc. women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or because, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, the necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or they dwell more on subjective states. manon philipon (madame roland) was born in . her father was an engraver in comfortable circumstances. her earliest enthusiasm was for the bible and lives of the saints, and she had almost a mania for reading books of any kind. in the corner of her father's workshop she would read plutarch for hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping, "why was i not born a greek?" she desired to emulate the brave men of old. books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic sentiment, and lofty aspiration. finding that the french society afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and xavier, loyola, st. elizabeth, and st. theresa became her new idols. she longed to follow even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's death for the sake of jesus. her capacities for self-sacrifice became perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like george eliot's dorothea brooke. she was allowed at the age of eleven to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she courted solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic quality to her imagination. later she experienced to the full revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon youthful credulity. it was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to doubt her creed and even god and the soul, but clung to the gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained constant. at seventeen she was, if not the moat beautiful, perhaps the noblest woman in all france, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood. all her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived and the yet greater death she died. gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. sometimes even its passions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks continue. in her "histoire de ma vie," it is plain that george sand inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. she composed many and interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest yet, etc. she personated an echo and conversed with it. her day-dreams and plays were so intense that she often came back from the world of imagination to reality with a shock. she spun a weird zoological romance out of a rustic legend of _la grande bête_. when her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion and revolt, and was the leader of _les diables_, or those who refused to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. at fifteen she became profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing miracles. she entered one evening the convent church for service, without permission, which was an act of disobedience. the mystery and holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward and was left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. she "breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more with the mind than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice murmur the words written under a convent picture of st. augustine, _tolle, lege,_ and turned around thinking mother alicia spoke, but she was alone. she knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her, as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown god till a nun heard her groaning. at first her ardor impelled her not only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing for a recluse life passed, but left her changed.[ ] when she passed from the simple and catholic faith of her grisette mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at nohant, who was a disciple of voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the profound sentiments inspired by the first communion and the concurrent contempt for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will. the name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream. he was corambé, pure as jesus, beautiful as gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and orpheus, less austere than the christian god, and as much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex from her love for her mother. he appeared in many aspects of physical and moral beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the fault of excess of indulgence. she estimated that she composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane existence. in each of these he became incarnate man on touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of their malice. in this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. there must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a wreath hung over it. instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric, she proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards, green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and "after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection," opened it. in these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the germs of a religion that fitted her heart. from the instant, however, that a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "corambé ceased to dwell in it. the dryads and the cherubim deserted it," and it seemed unreal. the temple was destroyed with great care, and the garlands and shells were buried under the tree.[ ] louisa alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and wished to be the bettine of emerson, in whose library she foraged; wrote him letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her master; sang mignon's song under his window; and was refined by her choice of an idol. her diary was all about herself. if she looked in the glass at her long hair and well-shaped head, she tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, poverty, impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. she imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in order; the useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly furnished with good resolutions. but she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. she was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments. she had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into hamlet and declaim in mock heroic style. from sixteen to twenty-three was her apprenticeship to life. she taught, wrote for the papers, did housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts going. mrs. burnett,[ ] like most women who record their childhood and adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most men. in early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, but loved to "speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, to stoop and kiss them, to praise them for their pretty ways of looking up at her as into the eyes of a friend and beloved. there were certain little blue violets which always seemed to lift their small faces childishly, as if they were saying, 'kiss me; don't go by like that.'" she would sit on the porch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, staring upward, sometimes lying on the grass. heaven was so high and yet she was a part of it and was something even among the stars. it was a weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeling as she stared so fixedly and intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind. every hour and moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. she felt on speaking terms with the rabbits. something was happening in the leaves which waved and rustled as she passed. just to walk, sit, lie around out of doors, to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh as a young dryad, following birds, playing hide-and-seek with the brook-these were her halcyon hours. with the instability of genius, beth[ ] did everything suddenly. when twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled or pushed; she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother, commanded her to dress. she had been ruled before by physical force, but her will and that of her mother were now in collision, and the latter realised she could make her do nothing unless by persuasion or moral influence. being constantly reproved, scolded, and even beaten by her mother, beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued with difficulty. she had spells of being miserable with no cause. she was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. to those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her mental growth over and over, instead of helping her by saying, "don't try, you can't do it," etc. just before the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a servant. all the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. she even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak when i walk across the room i shall get through my lessons without trouble." she always preferred to see two rooks together to one and became expert in the black arts. she used to hear strange noises at night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of disaster at sea, fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in incantations than in doctors' doses. she not only heard voices and very ingeniously described them, but claimed to know what was going to happen and compared her forebodings with the maid. she "got religion" very intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her appetite and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in hell, and tried to save them. beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she overheard a gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face flushed and she had a new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took very clever ways of cross-examining her friends to find if she was handsome. all of a sudden the care of her person became of great importance, and every hint she had heard of was acted on. she aired her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist and feet, washed in buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite in every way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc. the house always irked her. once stealing out of the school by night, she was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded and waved her arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the magnolia, buried her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was particularly attracted to the water, enjoyed scratching and making her feet bleed and eating a lot of green fruit. this liberty was most precious and all through a hot summer she kept herself healthy by exercise in the moonlight. this revived her appetite, and she ended these night excursions by a forage in the kitchen. beth had times when she hungered for solitude and for nature. sometimes she would shut herself in her room, but more often would rove the fields and woods in ecstasy. coming home from school, where she had long been, she had to greet the trees and fields almost before she did her parents. she had a great habit of stealing out often by the most dangerous routes over roofs, etc., at night in the moonlight, running and jumping, waving her arms, throwing herself on the ground, rolling over, walling on all-fours, turning somersaults, hugging trees, playing hide-and-seek with the shadow fairy-folk, now playing and feeling fear and running away. she invoked trees, stars, etc. beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced boy, who sat near her pew sundays. they looked at each other once during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her, dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to please. she watched for him to pass from school. when he appeared, "had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." the first impulse to fly was conquered; she never thought a boy beautiful before. they often met after dark, wrote; finally she grew tired of him because she could not make him feel deeply, sent him off, called him an idiot, and then soliloquized on the "most dreadful grief of her life." the latter stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used to beat him, but his attraction steadily waned. once later, as she was suffering from a dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a companion and an object, she met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her own, brightened as they approached. it was the first appearance of nature's mandate to mate. this friendly glance suffused her whole being with the "glory and vision of love." religion and young men were her need. they had stolen interviews by night and many an innocent embrace and kiss, and almost died once by being caught. they planned in detail what they would do after they were married, but all was taken for granted without formal vows. only when criticized did they ever dream of caution and concealment, and then they made elaborate parades of ignoring each other in public and fired their imaginations with thoughts of disguises, masks, etc. this passion was nipped in the bud by the boy's removal from his school. in preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer[ ] became sober and studious, proposing to model her life on that of each fresh saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with vengeance. she wanted to revive the custom of public confession and wrote letters of penitence and submission, which she tore up later, finding her mind not "all of a piece." she lay prostrate on her prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying on the rim of heaven held by angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or aching intolerably with spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often reasserted itself. religion at that time became an intense emotion nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being tangible. it was rapturous and sensuous. while under its spell, she seemed to float and touch the wings of angels. here solemn gregorian chants are sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of hunger, deception, and self-loathing. now she came to understand how so many sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the narcotic of religious excitement. here, at the age of twelve, youth began and childhood ended with her book. pathetic is the account of helen keller's effort to understand the meaning of the word "love" in its season.[ ] is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. no, said her teacher. is it the warm sun? not exactly. it can not be touched, "'but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. without love, you would not be happy or want to play.' the beautiful truth burst upon my mind. i felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirit of others." this period seems to have came gradually and naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been perhaps the purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. none has ever loved every aspect of nature accessible to her more passionately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful sentiments. the unhappy frost king episode has been almost the only cloud upon her life, which unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period, that is perhaps better marked by the great expansion of mind which she experienced at the world's fair in chicago in , when she was thirteen. about this time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all the advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened. the fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind, which felt that each individual could comprehend all the experiences and emotions of the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and technical obstacle between her soul and nature, and the great monuments of literature, show that she has conserved to a remarkable degree, which the world will wish may be permanent, the best impulses of this golden age. marie bashkirtseff,[ ] who may be taken as one of the best types of exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of noble birth, and began in , at the age of twelve, to write a journal that should be absolutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, or concealment. the journal continues until her death, october, , at the age of twenty-three. it may be described as in some sense a feminine counterpart of rousseau's confessions, but is in some respects a more precious psychological document than any other for the elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an unusually vigorous and gifted soul. twice i have read it from cover to cover and with growing interest. at twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life together. she prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle him on the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be an ideal wife. she agonizes before the glass on whether or not she is pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers to think well of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates over into passionate prayer to god to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in god because she prayed him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn english, both of which he granted. at church some prayers and services seem directly aimed at her; paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has no motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. she has freaky and very changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. when she hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge, prays god for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture of altering her prayer about the duke. she is disgusted with common people, harrowed by jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling, yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and moving only on the surface. when her voice improves she welcomes it with tears and feels an all-powerful queen. the man she loves should never speak to another. her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that ever was or ever will be written. she esteems herself so great a treasure that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please her; thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in dreams her future husband, and quarrels with her photographs. in some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed, everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the next paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and things seem asleep and unreal. her attempts to express her feelings drive her to desperation because words are inadequate. she loves to weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds everything transcendently exquisite. she comes to despise men and wonder whether the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false and saturated with baseness, but on the whole believes that some time or other she is destined to meet one true good and great man. now she is inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and would subordinate everybody and everything; she would never speak a commonplace word, and then again feels that her life has been a failure and she is destined to be always waiting. she falls on her knees sobbing, praying to god with outstretched hands as if he were in her room; almost vows to make a pilgrimage to jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age; wonders if she can ever love again. on throwing a bouquet from a window into a crowd in the corso a young man choked so beautifully a workman who caught it that by that one act of strangling and snatching the bouquet she fell in love. the young man calls and they see each other often. now she is clad from head to foot in an armor of cold politeness, now vanity and now passion seem uppermost in their meetings. she wonders if a certain amount of sin, like air, is necessary to a man to sustain life. finally they vow mutual love and pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that she has cherished illusions or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid or of her spelling in french. she coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is going to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders if god takes intentions into account; resolves to read the new testament, but can not find one and reads dumas instead. in novel-reading she imagines herself the heroine of every scene; sees her lover and they plan their mode of life together and at last kiss each other, but later she feels humiliated, chilled, doubts if it is real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they have changed; fears that she has compromised herself; has eye symptoms that make her fear blindness. once on reading the testament she smiled and clasped her hands, gazed upward, was no longer herself but in ecstasy; she makes many programs for life; is haunted by the phrase "we live but once"; wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that she does not live one-fourth of a life; has several spells of solitary illumination. at other times she wishes to be the center of a salon and imagines herself to be so. she soars on poets' wings, but often has hell in her heart; slowly love is vowed henceforth to be a word without meaning to her. although she suffers from _ennui_, she realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot bear the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother; scorns marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain, but pants for glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of disguising herself as a poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes; thinks her mad vanity is her devil; that her ambitions are justified by no results; hates moderation in anything, would have intense and constant excitement or absolute repose; at fifteen abandons her idea of the duke but wants an idol, and finally decides to live for fame; studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge her success in life; tries target-shooting, hits every time and feels it to be fateful; at times despises her mother because she is so easily influenced by her; meets another man whose affection for her she thinks might be as reverent as religion and who never profaned the purity of his life by a thought, but finally drops him because the possible disappointment would be unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for love of us the happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders what love that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to know. one night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair which vents itself in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room clock, rushes out and throws it into the sea, when she becomes happy. "poor clock!" at another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and resolves to no longer invoke god's help, yet in the next line prays him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are incoherent, she hates herself and everything is contemptible; but she wishes to die peacefully while some one is singing a beautiful air of verdi. again she thinks of shaving her head to save the trouble of arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every moment brings her nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, yet she can trust no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her now; she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly and reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could ever keep her from doing anything she wished. she thinks the journal of her former years exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; wants to make others feel as she feels; finds that the only cure for disenchantment with life is devotion to work; fears her face is wearing an anxious look instead of the confident expression which was its chief charm. "impossible" is a hideous, maddening word; to think of dying like a dog as most people do and leaving nothing behind is a granite wall against which she every instant dashes her head. if she loved a man, every expression of admiration for anything, or anybody else in her presence would be a profanation. now she thinks the man she loves must never know what it is to be in want of money and must purchase everything he wishes; must weep to see a woman want for anything, and find the door of no palace or club barred to him. art becomes a great shining light in her life of few pleasures and many griefs, yet she dares hope for nothing. at eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the name of the father, son, and holy ghost for her wishes. she would like to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the _prix de rome_ under the guise of a man and marry napoleon iv. on winning a medal for her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness, but the next day is scolded and grows discouraged. she has an immense sense of growth and transformation, so that not a trace of her old nature remains; feels that she has far too much of some things, and far too little of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's character, whose pertinacity is like a disease; realizes that one of her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel love; that her temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for every word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely hates herself. at one time she coquets with kant, and wonders if he is right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires balzac because he describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves fleury, who has shown her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she is losing her grip on art and also on god, who no longer hears her prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at thirty. at nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient cries, calls on god, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the young french prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes that god is not what she thought, but is perhaps nature and life or is perhaps chance; she thinks out possible pictures she might paint; develops a platonic friendship for her professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; has spells of reviewing the past. when the doctor finds a serious lung trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that consumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some time or other will come out; reads the new testament again and returns to belief in miracle, and prayer to jesus and the virgin; distributes one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. her eye symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superstitious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies god and death; sees a spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would like to thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a great deal with the thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures; tries to grapple with the terrible question, "what is my unbiased opinion concerning myself?" pants chiefly for fame. when the other lung is found diseased the diary becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or paint? and at last finds much consolation in the visits of bastien-lepage, who comes to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. she keeps up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days before her death, occurring in october, , at the age of twenty-three, and precipitated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch. the confessional outpourings of mary maclane[ ] constitute a unique and valuable adolescent document, despite the fact that it seems throughout affected and written for effect; however, it well illustrates a real type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this country, and was inspired very likely by the preceding. she announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, "jim maclane of selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an "empty damned weariness." she is a female napoleon passionately desiring fame; is both a philosopher and a coward; her heart is wooden; although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires happiness even more than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at once fame, money, power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil, whose coming she awaits. she discusses her portrait, which constitutes the frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a wild, frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her sacrifice, and to whom she would dedicate her life. she loves but one in all the world, an older "anemone" lady, once her teacher. she ran not distinguish between right and wrong; love is the only thing real which will some day bring joy, but it is agony to wait. "oh, dame! damn! damn! damn! every living thing in the world!--the universe be damned!" herself included. she is "marvelously deep," but thanks the good devil who has made her without conscience and virtue so that she may take her happiness when it comes. her soul seeks but blindly, for nothing answers. how her happiness will seethe, quiver, writhe, shine, dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and wreak with love and light when it comes! the devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel, conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. she holds imaginary conversations with him. if happiness does not come soon she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. in butte, montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and barrenness, but finds everything dumb. the six toothbrushes in the bathroom make her wild and profane. she flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to death, who would dearly love to have her. she confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. sometimes her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen. she has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "kind devil, deliver me"--as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of a.c. gunter and albert ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth, thin shoes, etc. she does not seem real to herself everything is a blank. though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart. when something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. she is exasperated that people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for messalina. she most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. "i would live about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." "i long to cultivate the of badness in me." she describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her figure. "in the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed." she discusses her foot, her beautiful hair, her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows she would give up even her marvelous genius far one dear, bright day free from loneliness. when her skirts need sewing, she simply pins them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them with needle and thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. as she walks over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be that he was strong and a perfect villain and she would pray him to lead her to what the world calls her ruin. nothing is of consequence to her except to be rid of unrest and pain. she would be positively and not merely negatively wicked. to poison her soul would rouse her mental power. "oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" "i know that i am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. the world is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for love. ada negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately in earnest.[ ] she began to teach school in a squalid, dismal italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has made her famous. she lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a teacher. she had never seen a theater, but had read of duse with enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill, lake, or large city, but she had read of them. after she began to write, friends gave her two dream days in the city. then she returned, put on her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. the poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience. she craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. she writes: "i have no name--my home a hovel damp; i grew up from the mire; wretched and outcast folk my family, and yet within me burns a flame of fire." there is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. the black abyss attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. she laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over thin, wan children without bread. her whole life goes into song. the boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. she writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. if death comes, she fears "that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog and her well-made body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade" as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones, and veins at will, wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a gasp of malediction." much of her verse is imprecation. "a crimson rain of crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty falls, on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters, of steel, huge engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who felt from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends, all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor. misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. a wretched old man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his happy though humble prime. there is the song of the pickaxe brandished in revolution when mobs cry "peace, labor bread," and in mines of industry beneath the earth. she loves the "defeated" in whose house no fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation of a woman in the factory machinery. at eighteen years "a loom, two handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to me." she is inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar, with his bare neck swelled. he is her demon, her god, and her pride in him is ecstasy. she describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. she longs for infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space. she tells us, "of genius and light i'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the alps; sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." she imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her, while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely dale. she imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers, coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the face with her indignant verse. "thou crawlest and i soar." she chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. she pants for war with outrage and with wrong; questions the abyss for its secret; hears moans and flying shudders; and sees phantoms springing from putrid tombs. the full moon is an old malicious spy, peeping stealthily with evil eye. she is a bird caught in a cursed cage, and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. nothing less than infinite space will satisfy her. even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. in one poem she apostrophizes marie bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. she would be possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. a dwarf beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her pæan to the sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise of hammers and wheels. literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to differ from women in several important respects. first, they write with less abandon. i can recall no male maclanes. a bashkirtseff would be less impossible, and a negri with social reform in her heart is still less so. but men are more prone to characterize their public metamorphoses later in life, when they are a little paled, and perhaps feel less need of confessionalism for that reason. it would, however, be too hazardous to elaborate this distinction too far. secondly and more clearly, men tend to vent their ephebic calentures more in the field of action. they would break the old moorings of home and strike out new careers, or vent their souls in efforts and dreams of reconstructing the political, industrial, or social world. their impracticabilities are more often in the field of practical life and remoter from their own immediate surroundings. this is especially true in our practical country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations of this age of eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense as it is here. thirdly, they erupt in a greater variety of ways, and the many kinds of genius and talent that now often take possession of their lives like fate are more varied and individual. this affords many extreme contrasts, as, e.g., between trollope's pity for, and goethe's apotheosis of his youth; mill's loss of feeling, and jefferies's unanalytic, passionate outbursts of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of symonds, and the progressive religious emancipation of fielding hall; the moral and religious supersensitiveness of oliphant, who was a reincarnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous storminess of müller and ebers; the abnormalities and precocity of de quincey, and the steady, healthful growth of patterson; the simultaneity of a fleshly and spiritual love in keller and goethe, and the duality of pater, with his great and tyrannical intensification of sensation for nature and the sequent mysticity and symbolism. in some it is fulminating but episodic, in others gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal spring. fourth, in their subjective states women outgrow less in their consciousness, and men depart farther from their youth, in more manifold ways. lastly, in its religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, and his enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. yet, despite all these differences, the analogies between the sexes are probably yet more numerous, more all-pervasive. all these biographic facts reveal nothing not found in _questionnaire_ returns from more ordinary youth, so that for our purposes they are only the latter, writ large because superior minds only utter what all more inwardly feel. the arrangement by nationality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference unless it be the above american peculiarity. in his autobiography from - , de quincey[ ] remembered feeling that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded over him. his first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. he had been brought up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and oppression in a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a female servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged him into early pessimism. he felt that little jane would come back certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter misery with the blank anarchy confusion which her death brought could not be completely remembered. he stole into the chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries, blew, and that same hollow memnonian wind he often had heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the corpse. a vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between children that could not perish. the funeral was full of darkness and despair for him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was alone. thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent, although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant and his awakening to it was hard. as a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of london at night, he was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a number of outcast women. in his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity, courage, and fidelity. one night, after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not completed her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. many years later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to meet the "noble-minded ann ----" with whom he had so often conversed familiarly "_more socratico_," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish, and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness. his much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. he had been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an inspiration, yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty, aspiring, ready to fasten a quarrel on his shadow for running before, at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a fag, but finally before his death became a great influence in his life. prominent were the fights between de quincey and another older brother on the one hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight incessantly renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now on one and now on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, where thrice he was taken prisoner, where once one of the factory women kissed him, to the great delight of his heart. he finally invented a kingdom like hartley coleridge, called gom broon. he thought first that it had no location, but finally because his brother's imaginary realm was north and he wanted wide water between them, his was in the far south. it was only two hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was stunned to be told by his brother one day that his own domain swept south for eighty degrees, so that the distance he had relied on vanished. here, however, he continued to rule for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping an imaginary standing army, fishing herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and experiencing how "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." he worried over his obligations to gom broon, and the shadow froze into reality, and although his brother's kingdom tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for eminent men and a history not to be ashamed of. a friend had read lord monboddo's view that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of gom broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects had not emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the tails. they must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a beginning. abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three tails apiece. they had suffered together. vain was his brother's suggestion that they have a roman toga to conceal their ignominious appendages. he was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who finally died, and feared that his subjects were akin to them. john stuart mill's autobiography presents one of the most remarkable modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. no boy ever had more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him or responded better. he can not remember when he began to learn greek, but was told that it was at the age of three. the list of classical authors alone that he read in the original, to say nothing of history, political, scientific, logical, and other works before he was twelve, is perhaps unprecedented in all history. he associated with his father and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes everything to his environment, insists that in natural gifts he is other below than above par, and declares that everything he did could be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical constitution. his father made the greek virtue of temperance or moderation cardinal, and thought human life "a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." he scorned "the intense" and had only contempt for strong emotion. in his teens mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies, and devoted to the propagation of the theories of bentham, ricardo, and associationism. from the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to reform the world. this gave him happiness, deep, permanent, and assured for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. but in the autumn of , when he was twenty years of age, he felt into "a dull state of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had produced pleasure seemed insipid; "the state, i should think, in which converts to methodism usually are when smitten by their first 'conviction of sin.' in this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself; 'suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' and an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'no.' at this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. all my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. the end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? i seemed to have nothing left to live for. at first i hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself, but it did not. a night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. i awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. i carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. for some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. the lines in coleridge's 'dejection'--i was not then acquainted with them--exactly described my case: "'a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, a drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, which finds no natural outlet or relief in word, or sigh, or tear.' "in vain i sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which i had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. i read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and i became persuaded that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. i sought no comfort by speaking to others of what i felt. if i had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, i should not have been in the condition i was. i felt, too, that mine was not an interesting or in anyway respectable distress. there was nothing in it to attract sympathy. advice, if i had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. the words of macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. but there was no one on whom i could build the faintest hope of such assistance. my father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, i looked for help. everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as i was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. my education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result, and i saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all event, beyond the power of his remedies. of other friends, i had at that time none to whom i had any hope of making my condition intelligible. it was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself, and the more i dwelt upon it the more hopeless it appeared." he now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of analysis tends to wear away the feelings. he felt "stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which i had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. the fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as completely as those of benevolence." his vanity had been gratified at too early an age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused indifference, until he despaired of creating any fresh association of pleasure with any objects of human dire. meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanically with his tasks; thought he found in coleridge the first description of what he was feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a being unique and apart. "i asked myself if i could or if i was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. i generally answered to myself that i did not think i could possibly bear it beyond a year." but within about half that time, in reading a pathetic page of how a mere boy felt that he could save his family and take the place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of the scene came over him and he was moved to tears. from that moment, his burden grew lighter. he saw that his heart was not dead and that he still had some stuff left of which character and happiness are made; and although there were several later lapses, some of which lasted many months, he was never again as miserable as he had been. these experience left him changed in two respects. he had a new theory of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness theory of carlyle. he still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. the other change was that for the first time he gave its proper place to internal culture of the individual, especially the training of the feelings which became now cardinal. he relished and felt the power of poetry and art; was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with wordsworth and with nature, and his later depressions were best relieved by the power of rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because of itself but by the states and feelings it aroused. his ode on the intimations of immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation. he had thus come to a very different standpoint from that of his father, who had up to this time formed his mind and life, and developed on this basis his unique individuality. jefferies, when eighteen, began his "story of my heart,"[ ] which he said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which stood face to face with nature and the unknown. his heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air. "lying down on the grass, i spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air and the distant sea.... i desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. i addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. i turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. the rich blue of the unobtainable flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for pure color is the rest of the heart. by all these i prayed. i felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it." he prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. with this inflatus i prayed.... i hid my face in the grass; i was wholly prostrated; i lost myself in the wrestle.... i see now that what i labored for was soul life, more soul learning." after gazing upward he would turn his face into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its center. every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." his "lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. he often tried, but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences. he felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. he was in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. as he lay face down on the grass, seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too costly. thus his naked mind, close against naked mother nature, wrested from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer was "give me the deepest soul life." in other moods he felt the world outré-human, and his mind could by no twist be fitted to the cosmos. ugly, designless creatures caused him to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. he at length concluded there is something higher than soul and above deity, and better than god, for which he searched and labored. he found favorite thinking places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he "felt out into the depths of the ether." his frame could not bear the labor his heart demanded. work of body was his meat and drink. "never have i had enough of it. i wearied long before i was satisfied, and weariness did not bring a cessation of desire, the thirst was still there. i rode; i used the ax; i split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the physical weariness." had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed for more strength. he was often out of doors all day and often half the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long; took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its renewer. yet he abhorred asceticism. he wrestled with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner." he discovered that no one ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future nine-tenths of the time will be leisure, and to that end he will work with all his heart. "i was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, and indefinable aspirations filled me." interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the seventeen years which intervened between the beginning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more or less from their value as documents of adolescent nature. mr. h. fielding hall, author of "the soul of a people," has since written a book[ ] in which, beginning with many definitions of christianity, weighing the opinion of those who think all our advance is made because of, against those who think it in spite of christianity, he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women and with children younger than himself. he was sickly, and believed not in the old but in the new testament; in the sermon on the mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. at twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into a man's, out of the new testament into the old, out of dreams into reality. war was a glorious opportunity, and all followed the british victories, which were announced publicly. big boys were going to sandhurst or woolwich; there were parties; and the school code never turned the other cheek. wars were god's storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life; wealth was worshiped; certain lies were an honor; knowledge was an extremely desirable thing--all this was at first new and delightful, but extremely wicked. sunday was the only other old testament rule, but was then forgotten. slowly a repugnance of religion in all its forms arose. he felt his teachers hypocrites; he raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. at eighteen, he read darwin and found that if he were right, genesis was wrong; man had risen, not fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. if god made the world, the devil seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the seven days of creation were periods, heaven knows how long. why did all profess and no one believe religion? why is god so stern and yet so partial, and how about the trinity? then explanations were given. heaven grew repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the stupid, the childish, and those unfit for earth generally. faiths came from the east. "the north has originated only thor, odin, balder, valkyres." the gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not open him. in the east one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort, close to nature. the representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions. oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of hinduism, buddhism, or hardly of mohammedanism. there are no missions, but religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote three demands: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable hereafter. so he read books and tried to make a system. on a hill, in a thunder-storm in the east, he realized how thor was born. man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. deny eyes, legs, and body of the deity, and nothing is left. god as an abstract spirit is unthinkable, but buddhism offers us no god, only law. necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will--that is the alternative. freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. "the german emperor's god, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a german _pickelhaube_ and swearing german oaths," is not satisfactory. man's god is what he admires most in himself; he can be propitiated, hence atonement; you can not break a law, but you can study it. inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. perhaps both destiny and freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light. thor had no moral code; the greeks were unmoral. jehovah at first asked only fear, reverence, and worship. this gives no guide to life. most codes are directed against a foe and against pain. truth, mercy, courtesy--these were slowly added to reverence; then sanitary rules, hence castes. two codes, those of christ and buddha, tower above all others. they are the same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power, but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one fitted one's self for one by being unfitted for the other world. is heaven a bribe? its ideals are those of children, of girl angels, white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "surely there is nothing in all the world so babyish." one can hardly imagine a man with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those baby faces. if happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will last forever. where is due the weariness or satiety? but if happiness be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to annihilation. but life is change, and change is misery. there is effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. it is the shadows and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. no man that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any heaven, would choose the latter. men die for many things, but all fear the beyond. thus no religion gives us an intelligible first cause, a code or a heaven that we want. the most religious man is the peasant listening to the angelus, putting out a little _ghi_ for his god; the woman crying in the pagoda. thus we can only turn to the hearts of men for the truth of religion. biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years. anthony trollope's autobiography[ ] is pitiful. he was poor and disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his fellow pupils. he describes himself as always in disgrace. at fifteen he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. as a sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, sitting next the sons of big peers. all were against him, and he was allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing but a little greek and latin. once only, goaded to desperation, he rallied and whipped a bully. the boy was never able to overcome the isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. he remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing, arithmetic, french, or german. he knew his masters by their ferules and they him. he believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any human being alive. it was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at winchester, and i have often boasted that i have obtained them all." prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one. for twelve years of tuition, he says, "i do not remember that i ever knew a lesson." at this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ... without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration regarding his future. three of his household were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she was fifty. gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. anthony got a position at the post-office without an examination. he knew no french nor science; was a bad speller and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any subject. still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about with some castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, excluding everything violently improbable. to this practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. during these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless. mark pattison[ ] shows us how his real life began in the middle teens, when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when i first began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." he entered upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts "something of the steps by which i emerged from that frozen condition." he believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of george sand, but not of himself. from the age of twelve on, a fellowship at oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so immature and unimpressionable. william hale white[ ] learned little at school, save latin and good penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves--sundays and week days--and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of the early teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the conscience; and deplores the misery which a little instruction might have saved him. at fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers. he compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by falling in love with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young woman from idleness and vanity by motherhood. but as a boy he was convinced of many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for the clanship of being marked off from the world and of walking home with certain girls. he learned to say in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores; but no one took him at his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of him. soon he began to study theology, but found no help in suppressing tempestuous lust, in understanding the bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. an infidel was a monster whom he had rarely ever seen. at nineteen he began to preach, but his heart was untouched till he read wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this recreated a living god for him, melted his heart to tears, and made him long for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical.[ ] john addington symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. in his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. when he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. in a dim way he felt god near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of christ. later the revelation he found in plato removed him farther from boyhood. he fell in love with gray gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc. walter pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in the character of florian deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of "seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal, assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions; associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for or think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible world, his longings for beauty intensifying his fear of death. he loved to gaze on dead faces in the paris morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. his religious nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in bible personages in some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self, whose companionship made the world more satisfying. there was "a constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met anywhere. "a deep mysticity brooded over real things and partings," marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "the very colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of penitence and peace." "for a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent." in d. c. boulger's life of general charles gordon[ ] he records how, like nelson clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and outbreaks that often made him the terror of his superiors. he was no bookworm, but famous as the possessor of high spirits, very often involved in affairs that necessitated discipline, and seemed greatly out of harmony with the popular idea of the ascetic of mount carmel. as a schoolboy he made wonderful squirts "that would wet you through in a minute." one sunday twenty-seven panes of glass in a large storehouse were broken with screws shot through them by his cross-bow "for ventilation." ringing bells and pushing young boys in, butting an unpopular officer severely in the stomach with his head and taking the punishment, hitting a bully with a clothes-brush and being put back six months in the royal military academy at woolwich; these are the early outcrops of one side of his dual character. although more soldier than saint, he had a very cheery, genial side. he was always ready to take even the severest punishment for all his scrapes due to excessive high spirits. when one of his superiors declared that he would never make an officer, he felt his honor touched, and his vigorous and expressive reply was to tear the epaulets from his shoulders and throw them at his superior's feet. he had already developed some of the rather moody love of seclusion that was marked later, but religion did not strike him deeply enough to bring him into the church until he was twenty-one, when he took his first sacrament. on one occasion he declined promotion within his reach because he would have had to pass a friend to get it. he acted generally on his impulses, which were perhaps better than his judgments, took great pleasure in corresponding on religious topics with his elder sister, and early formed the habit of excessive smoking which gravely affected his health later. his was the rare combination of inner repose and confidence, interrupted by spells of gaiety. williamson, in his "life of holman hunt,"[ ] tells us that at thirteen he was removed from school as inapt in study. he began to spend his time in drawing in his copybooks. he was made clerk to an auctioneer, who fortunately encouraged his passion, and at sixteen was with a calico printer. here he amused himself by drawing flies on the window, which his employer tried to brush off. there was the greatest home opposition to his studying art. after being rejected twice, he was admitted at seventeen to the academy school as a probationer, and the next year, in , as a student. here he met millais and rossetti and was able to relieve the strain on his mind, which the worry of his father concerning his course caused him, and very soon his career began. at thirteen fitzjames stephen[ ] roused himself to thrash a big boy who had long bullied him, and became a fighter. in his sixteenth year, he grew nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at eton that he says, "i was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys"; but in the reaction to the long abuse his mind was steeled against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of unfairness. he read paine's "age of reason," and went "through the bible as a man might go through a wood, cutting down trees. the priests can stick them in again, but they will not make them grow." dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. miss dingwall in "sketches by boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed squeers; barnaby rudge, idiotic and very muscular; joe willet, persistently treated as a boy till he ran away to join the army and married dolly varden, perhaps the most exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the dickens gallery; martin chuzzlewit, who also ran away, as did david copperfield, perhaps the most true to adolescence because largely reminiscent of the author's own life; steerforth, a stranger from home, and his victim, little emily; and to some extent sam weller, dick swiveller, the marchioness, young podsnap, the artful dodger, and charley bates; while oliver twist, little nell, and little dorrit, joe and turveydrop in bleak house, and paul dombey, young as they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. most of his characters, however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true to life.[ ] in the "romance of john inglesant,"[ ] by j. h. shorthouse, we have a remarkable picture of an unusually gifted youth, who played an important rôle in the days of cromwell and king charles, and who was long poised in soul between the church of rome and the english party. he was very susceptible to the fascination of superstition, romance, and day-dreaming, and at eleven absorbed his master's rosicrucian theories of spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each other and with mankind. a mystic platonism, which taught that pindar's story of the argo was only a recipe for the philosopher's stone, fascinated him at fourteen. the philosophy of obedience and of the subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought to live from within, hearing only the divine law, as the worshipers of cybele heard only the flutes. his twin brother eustace was an active worldling, and soon he followed him to court as page to the queen, but delighted more and more in wandering apart and building air castles. for a time he was entirely swayed, and his life directed, by a jesuit father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. at sixteen the doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. he struggled to find the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. soon he was introduced to the "protestant nunnery," as it was called, where the venerable mr. ferran, a friend of george herbert's, was greatly taken by inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner. various forms of extremely high church yet protestant worship were celebrated here each day with great devotion, until he became disgusted with puritanism and craved to participate in the office of mass. at this point, however, he met mr. hobbes, whose rude but forcible condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his lot with it. at seventeen, he saw one night a real apparition of the just executed strafford. the last act of his youth, which we can note here, was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming and saintly mary collet. the rough puritan thorne had made her proposals at which she revolted, but she and inglesant confessed love to each other; she saw, however, that they had a way of life marked out for themselves by an inner impulse and light. this calling they must follow and abandon love, and now john plunged into the war on the side of the king. w. j. stillman[ ] has written with unusual interest and candor the story of his own early life. as a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the whip and lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always remembered this as one of the most vivid experiences of his life. he had a period of nature worship. his first trout was a delirium, and he danced about wildly and furiously. he relates his very vivid impressions of the religious orthodoxy in which he was reared, especially revival sermons; his occasional falsehoods to escape severe punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a river in midwinter; the somberness of his intellectual life, which was long very apathetic; his phenomenal stupidity for years; his sudden insurrections in which he thrashed bullies at school; his fear that he should be sent home in disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended i could construe the latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. my memory came back so distinctly that i could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than i; and, at the end of the second term, i could recite the whole of legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. i have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which i record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology." a. bronson alcott[ ] was the son of a connecticut farmer. he began a diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter yale, and after much restlessness at the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to teach school. here he had a varying and often very hard experience for years. hornes bushnell's[ ] parents represented the episcopal and liberal congregational church. his early life was spent on a farm and in attending a country academy. he became profoundly interested in religion in the early teens and developed extreme interest in nature. at seventeen, while tending a carding machine, he wrote a paper on calvinism. at nineteen he united with the church, and entered yale when he was twenty-one, in . later he tried to teach school, but left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked on a journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a year, became a tutor at yale, experienced a reconversion and entered the ministry. a well-known american, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his youth as follows: "first came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. my mind was full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned beauties whom i rescued. i wrote a story in red ink, which i never read, but a girl friend did, and called it magnificent. the girl fever, too, made me idealize first one five years older than i, later another three years older, and still later one of my own age. i would have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was extremely gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all the time so bashful that i scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no schoolmate ever suspected it all. music also became a craze at fourteen. before, i had hated lessons, now i was thrilled and would be a musician, despite my parents' protests. i practised the piano furiously; wrote music and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred pieces and tunes, including everything musical i knew; would imagine a crowded hall, where i played and swayed with fine airs. the vast assembly applauded and would not let me go, but all the time it was a simple piece and i was a very ordinary player. at fifty years, this is still a relic. i now in hours of fatigue pound the piano and dreamily imagine dazed and enchanted audiences. then came oratory, and i glowed and thrilled in declaiming webster's "reply to hayne," "thanatopsis," byron's "darkness," patrick henry, and best of all "the maniac," which i spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming red necktie. i remember a fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill with a bald summit two miles from home, where i once went because i had been blamed. i tried to sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. it was sunday, and i was keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer, idealization of life; all grew all in a jumble. my resolve to go to college was clinched then and there, and that hill will always remain my pisgah and moriah, horeb and sinai all in one. i paced back and forth in the wind and shouted, 'i will make people know and revere me; i will do something'; and called everything to witness my vow that i never again would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "alas!" he says, "i have never been there since. once, to a summer party who went, i made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. it was too sacramental. certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me certainly took place in my soul." in the biography of frederick douglas[ ] we are told that when he was about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek means of escaping it. he became interested in religion, was converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. with great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of his acquaintance. at sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal overseer covey, who would have invoked the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was no profit from a dead slave. only at twenty did he escape into the new world of freedom. jacob riis[ ] "fell head over heels in love with sweet elizabeth" when he was fifteen and she thirteen. his "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." she played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. he cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. at another time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went to copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had an interview with hans christian andersen. ellery sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of thomas paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to enlist on the privateer _terrible_. he was restless at home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen. indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from "childe harold" to the second and third long chapters in mrs. ward's "david grieve," ending with his engagement to lucy purcell; thackeray's arthur pendennis and his characteristic love of the far older and scheming fanny fotheringay; david in james lane allen's "reign of law," who read darwin, was expelled from the bible college and the church, and finally was engaged to gabriella; and scores more might be enumerated. there is even sonny,[ ] who, rude as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote john burroughs, helped him and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the forest and its occupants, all of which is very _bien trouvé_ if not historic truth. two singular reflections always rearise in reading goethe's autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place, with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second, that this wonderful boy had an extreme propensity for moralizing and drawing lessons of practical service from all about him. this is no less manifest in wilhelm meister's apprenticeship and travels, which supplements the autobiography. both together present a very unique type of adolescence, the elaborate story of which defies epitome. from the puppet craze well on into his precocious university life it was his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. perhaps no one ever studied the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident with such careful observation and analysis. his peculiar diathesis enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he gave them literary form. most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted. goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form followed him for a long time. their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very spiritual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new brightness to the whole world, and to be near her seemed to him an indispensable condition of his being. her _fiancé_ was generally with her, and goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's assistant for although, like all natural boys of aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not favored by his parents. the night following the coronation day several were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his gretchen, with others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the others had awakened in the morning. at last they parted at her door, and for the first and last time they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in thinking of her. he was terribly affronted to fully realize that, although only two years older than himself, she should have regarded him as a child. he tried to strip her of all loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him. the sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she regarded him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work his cure. he was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love, annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl. he was also seized with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with her by which he gained nothing. frenzied by his loss, he began to abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness by the healing power of his poetic talent; the "lover's caprice" was written with the impetus of a boiling passion. in the midst of many serious events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of life, developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even to court danger. he played tricks, although rarely with premeditation. later he mused much upon the transient nature of love and the mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to leipzig. by degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with regard to the best individuals he had known before and grew chummy with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. his disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, and rousseau attracted him. meanwhile his health declined until a long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so delightful, was marred by a serious tumor. his father's disposition was stern, and he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the acquaintance of a religious circle. again goethe was told by a hostile child that he was not the true son of his father. this inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in his system and prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth, during which he compared all distinguished guests with his own physiognomy to detect his own likeness. up to the leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown, unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an almost hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories, that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could be hedged in and separated from all the world. here he began to throw off his former habit of looking at things from the art standpoint and to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. his mother had almost grownup to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. he was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves in sense images. he fell to building air castles of opposition lecture courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university conditions. he first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much harm from being too advanced; learned a great deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable; grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had been careless. he was in despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete change of mind, renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc. he had learned to value and love the bible, and owed his moral culture to it. its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met at the university. from youth he had stood on good terms with god, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive god for not having given better assistance to his infinite good-will. under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despair over what he had been and believed just before. he conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in contradiction, was lucifer to whom creation was committed. he first of all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology was wrought out _in petto_. he used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning god was approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden end to these celebrations. hans anderson,[ ] the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated bible stories from pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be famous and finally, at fourteen, left home for copenhagen, where he was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with the bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but god to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. for nearly a year, until his voice broke, he was a fine singer. he wet with his tears the eyes of a portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. he played with a puppet theater and took a childish delight in decking the characters with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several plays which no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one new year's day to pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy; hugged and kissed a beech-tree till people thought him insane; abhorred the thought of apprenticeship to latin as he did to that of a trade, which was a constant danger; and was one of the most dreamy and sentimental, and by spells religious and prayerful, of youth. george ebers[ ] remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of ' in berlin, soon after which he was placed in froebel's school at keilhau. this great teacher with his noble associates, middendorf, barop, and langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation; led their pupils on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and gave much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their new mates, but new teachers. this transfer from the city to the country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till he was fifteen. trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the saale by moonlight and the lofty steiger at sunset were explored. there were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the school, "_friede, freude, freiheit_,"[peace, joy, freedom] was lived up to. the boys hung on their teachers for stories. the teachers took their boys into their confidence for all their own literary aims, loves, and ideals. one had seen the corpse of körner and another knew prohaska. "the roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to boys according to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature human intellect and which seems most useful to it for later life" was the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for those of the man. here childhood was to live itself out completely and naturally into an ever renewed paradise. the temperaments, dispositions, and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully studied and recorded. some of these are still little masterpieces of psychological penetration, and this was made the basis of development. the extreme teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing, giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted the transition period as well as any that the history of education affords. every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy. when at fifteen ebers was transferred to the kottbus gymnasium, he felt like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the period of effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many sorts of follies did he commit. he wrote "a poem of the world," fell in love with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy for his wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down. in gottfried kelley's "der grüne heinrich,"[ ] the author, whom r.m. meyer calls "the most eminent literary german of the nineteenth century," reviews the memories of his early life. this autobiography is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulterated with fiction like goethe's or with psychoses like rousseau or bashkirtseff. he seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. the first part of this work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minuteness. it is a tale of little things. all the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; god and nature were one, and only when his beloved army died did he wish to believe in immortality. he, too, as a child, found two kinds of love in his heart--the idea and the sensual, very independent--the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. he gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. he describes with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and god; the conflict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc. from a private school in leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of his own poems, max müller returned to leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. for years his chief enjoyment was music.[ ] he played the piano well, heard everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at dessau, but nothing came of it. at the university he saw little of society, was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. he fought three duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years. when hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a french officer to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not get into them. darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers repelled. he says, "i confess i felt quite bewildered for a time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." he wonders how young minds in german universities survive the storms and fogs through which they pass. with bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. later he had an hegelian period, but found in herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know something that no other knew, and also that the germans had then heard only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of indian philosophy. from twenty his struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully launched upon his career in paris, and later went to oxford. at thirteen wagner[ ] translated about half the "odyssey" voluntarily; at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the grandeur of two of shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his new-fledged musical wings by soaring at once to the highest peaks of orchestral achievement without wasting any time on the humble foot-hills." he sought to make a new departure, and, compared to the grandeur of his own composition, "beethoven's ninth symphony appeared like a simple pleyel sonata." to facilitate the reading of his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink--red for strings, green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments. he writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities, and although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra played it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with laughter, it made a deep impression upon the author's mind. even after matriculating at the university he abandoned himself so long to the dissipations common to student life before the reaction came that his relatives feared that he was a good-for-nothing. in his "hannele," hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so absorbed by the "brownies of her brain" that she hardly knows whether she is alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the lord jesus in the form of the schoolmaster whom she adores. in her closing vision there is a symbolic representation of her own resurrection. to the passionate discussions in germany, england, and france, as to whether this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer with an emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color and in fairy tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled by fears of sin against the holy ghost, is answer enough in an ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother taught her these things. saint-pierre's "paul and virginia" is an attempt to describe budding adolescence in a boy and girl born on a remote island and reared in a state of natural simplicity the descriptions are sentimental after the fashion of the age in france, and the pathos, which to us smacks of affectation and artificiality, nevertheless has a vein of truth in it. the story really begins when the two children were twelve; and the description of the dawn of love and melancholy in virginia's heart, for some time concealed from paul, of her disquiet and piety, of the final frank avowal of eternal love by each, set of by the pathetic separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic death and burial of each--all this owes its charm, for its many generations of readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of the human heart at this critical age. this work and rousseau[ ] have contributed to give french literature its peculiar cast in its description of this age. "the first explosions of combustible constitution" in rousseau's, precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. he longed "to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." he only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. at ten he was passionately devoted to a mlle. vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach. he had very different sensuous feelings toward mlle. goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though pure. absolutely under the power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to each other. the former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, turkish rage. when told of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a perfidious girl. a slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis pervades much of his life. pierre loti's "story of a child"[ ] was written when the author was forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring the author down to the age of fourteen and a half. he vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting of pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. loti had a new feeling for the haunting music of chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother, with the idea of going to the south sea islands, and this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the post-office after long misgivings and delays. he had a superficial and a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridiculous, shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would have let himself be cut into bits. he believes his transition period lasted longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was carried from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and absurd manners, and touched moat of the perilous rocks on the voyage of life. he had an early love for an older girl whose name he wrote in cipher on his books, although he felt it a little artificial, but believed it might have developed into a great and true hereditary friendship, continuing that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. the birth of love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden poet, alfred de musset. he was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft, odorous twilight. he walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and wonderful, intoxicating as it advanced, was going to happen. the twilight grew deeper, and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with a languorous and mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were hidden. as it darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they were very personal and seemed to belong to some one already much beloved, who had been found with "transports of infinite joy and tenderness." he woke with a start and sought to retain the phantom, which faded. he could not conceive that was a mere illusion, and as he realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness. it was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment--love which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches." it is, i believe, high time that ephebic literature should be recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the history of letters and in criticism. much of it should be individually prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. this stage of life now has what might almost be called a school of its own. here the young appeal to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the latter have failed to appreciate. again, no biography, and especially no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future life to which it alone can often give the key. rightly to draw the lessons of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of this rich but crude area of experience, but makes maturity saner and more complete. lastly, many if not most young people should be encouraged to enough of the confessional private journalism to teach them self-knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins now if ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material and needs forms of expression peculiar to itself. for additional references on the subject of this chapter, see: alcafarado, marianna, love letters of a portuguese nun. translated by r. h., new york, . richardson, abby sage, abelard and héloise, and letters of héloise, houghton, mifflin and co., boston. smith, theodote l., types of adolescent affection. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. ii, pp. - . [footnote : pedagogical seminary, june , vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : being a boy.] [footnote : story of a bad boy.] [footnote : a boy's town.] [footnote : court of boyville.] [footnote : the spoilt child, by peary chandmitter. translated by g. d. oswell. thacker, spink and co., calcutta, .] [footnote : the golden age] [footnote : frau spyri.] [footnote : the one i knew the best of all.] [footnote : the study of the boyhood of great men. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : the vanishing character of adolescent experiences. northwestern monthly, june, , vol. , p. .] [footnote : the count of boyville, by william allen white. new york, , p. .] [footnote : the study of adolescence. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : lancaster: the psychology and pedagogy of adolescence. pedagogical seminary, july, , vol. , p. .] [footnote : standards of efficiency in school and in life. pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see also vittorio da feltre and other humanist educators, by w. h. woodward. cambridge university press, .] [footnote : see the private life of galileo; from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter. anon, macmillan, london, .] [footnote : see sir david brewster's life of newton. harper, new york, .] [footnote : louis agassiz, his life and work, by c. f. holder. g. p. putnam's sons, new york, .] [footnote : life and letters of thomas h. huxley, by his son leonard huxley. d. appleton and co., new york, .] [footnote : see also sully: a girl's religion. longman's magazine, may, , pp. - .] [footnote : sheldon (institutional activities of american children; american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , p. ) describes a faintly analogous case of a girl of eleven, who organised the worship of pallas athena on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a stream where a young sycamore grew from an old stump, as did pallas from the head of her father zeus. there was a court consisting of king, queen and subjects, and priests who officiated at sacrifices. the king and queen wore goldenrod upon their heads and waded in streams attended by their subjects; gathered flowers for athena; caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her altar. "sometimes there was a special celebration, when, in addition to the slaughtered crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles stolen from the dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," which because of its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at hand.] [footnote : the one i know the best of all. a memory of the mind of a child. by frances hodgson burnett. scribner's sons, new york, ] [footnote : the beth book, by sarah grand. d. appleton and co., new york, .] [footnote : autobiography of a child. hannah lynch, w. blackwood and sons, london, , p. .] [footnote : the story of my life. by helen keller. doubleday, page and co., new york, , p. .] [footnote : journal of a young artist. cassell and co., new york, , p. .] [footnote : the story of mary maclane. by herself. herbert s. stone and co., chicago, , p. .] [footnote : fate. translated from the italian by a.m. von blomberg. copeland and day, boston, .] [footnote : confessions of an opium eater. part i. introductory narrative. (cambridge classics) .] [footnote : longmans, green and co. london, , nd ed.] [footnote : the hearts of men. macmillan, london, , p. .] [footnote : an autobiography. edited by h.m. trollope. vols. london, .] [footnote : see his memoirs. london, .] [footnote : see autobiography of mark rutherford (pseudonym for w.h. white), edited by reuben shapcott. vols. london, .] [footnote : the rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further life as a dissenting minister, who later became something of a literary man; relating how he was slowly driven to leave his little church, how he outgrew and broke with the girl to whom he was engaged, whom he marvelously met and married when both were well on in years, and how strangely he was influenced by the free-thinker mardon and his remarkable daughter. all in all it is a rare study of emancipation.] [footnote : london, , vol. .] [footnote : macmillan, .] [footnote : life of sir j.f. stephen. by his brother, leslie stephen, london, .] [footnote : see the very impressive account of dicken's characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto inadequately recognized interest and influence as an educator. dickens as an educator. james l. hughes. d. appleton and co., new york, , p. .] [footnote : john inglesant: a romance. th ed. macmillan, .] [footnote : the autobiography of a journalist. vols. houghton, mifflin and co., boston, .] [footnote : a. bronson alcott, his life and philosophy. by f. b. sanborn and w. t. harris. roberts bros., boston, .] [footnote : horace bushnell, preacher and theologian. by theodore f. munger. houghton, mifflin and co., boston, .] [footnote : by c.w. chesnutt. (beacon biographies.) small, maynard and co., boston, .] [footnote : the making of an american. macmillan, .] [footnote : sonny. by ruth mcenery stuart. the century co., new york, .] [footnote : the story of my life. works, vol. new edition. houghton, mifflin and co., boston, .] [footnote : the story of my life. translated by m. j. safford. d. appleton and co., new york .] [footnote : gesammelte werke. vierter band. wilhelm hertz, berlin, .] [footnote : my autobiography, p. . chas. scribner's sons, new york, .] [footnote : wagner and his works. by henry t. finck. chas. scribner's sons, new york, .] [footnote : les confessions. oeuvres complètes, vols. and . hachette et cie., paris, .] [footnote : translated from the french by c.f. smith. c.c. birchard and co., boston, .] * * * * * chapter ix the growth of social ideals change from childish to adult friends--influence of favorite teachers--what children wish or plan to do or be--property and the money sense--social judgments--the only child--first social organizations--student life--associations for youth, controlled by adults. in a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environment. almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. our very presence enforces one general law--that of keeping our good-will and avoiding our displeasure. they respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. their early lies are often saying what they think will please. at bottom, the most restless child admires and loves those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and mind. but the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. they have ceased to be the highest ideals. the period of habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. to act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of life. to bring the richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting the ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowledge. this is true education of the will and prepares the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of conflict. this impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.[ ] and yet, "at no time in life will a human being respond so heartily if treated by older and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a superior. the attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good discipline."[ ] parents still think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein when they should loosen it. many young people feel that they have the best of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they must remain in them. if the training of earlier years has been good, guidance by command may now safely give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be heroic. the one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is dullness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great stringency. least of all, at this stage, can the curriculum school be an ossuary. the child must now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that interests him. where this is not done, we have the conditions for the interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin to suspect that father, mother, or both, are not their true parents. not only is there interest in rapidly widening associations with coevals, but a new lust to push on and up to maturity. one marked trait now is to seek friends and companions older than themselves, or next to this, to seek those younger. this is marked contrast with previous years, when they seek associates of their own age. possibly the merciless teasing instinct, which culminates at about the same time, may have some influence, but certain it is that now interest is transpolarized up and down the age scale. one reason is the new hunger for information, not only concerning reproduction, but a vast variety of other matters, so that there is often an attitude of silent begging for knowledge. in answer to lancaster's[ ] questions on this subject, some sought older associates because they could learn more from them, found them better or more steadfast friends, craved sympathy and found most of it from older and perhaps married people. some were more interested in their parents' conversation with other adults than with themselves, and were particularly entertained by the chance of hearing things they had no business to. there is often a feeling that adults do not realize this new need of friendship with them and show want of sympathy almost brutal. stableton,[ ] who has made interesting notes on individual boys entering the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of sympathy, appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. they must now be talked to as equals, and in this way their habits of industry and even their dangerous love affairs run be controlled. he says, "there is no more important question before the teaching fraternity today than how to deal justly and successfully with boys at this time of life. this is the age when they drop out of school" in far too large numbers, and he thinks that the small percentage of male graduates from our high schools is due to "the inability of the average grammar grade or high-school teacher to deal rightly with boys in this critical period of their school life." most teachers "know all their bad points, but fail to discover their good ones." the fine disciplinarian, the mechanical movement of whose school is so admirable and who does not realize the new need of liberty or how loose-jointed, mentally and physically, all are at this age, should be supplanted by one who can look into the heart and by a glance make the boy feel that he or she is his friend. "the weakest work in our schools is the handling of boys entering the adolescent period of life, and there is no greater blessing that can come to a boy at this age, when he does not understand himself, than a good strong teacher that understands him, has faith in him, and will day by day lead him till he can walk alone." small[ ] found the teacher a focus of imitation whence many influences, both physical and mental, irradiated to the pupils. every accent, gesture, automatism, like and dislike is caught consciously and unconsciously. every intellectual interest in the teacher permeates the class--liars, if trusted, became honest; those treated as ladies and gentlemen act so; those told by favorite teachers of the good things they are capable of feel a strong impulsion to do them; some older children are almost transformed by being made companions to teachers, by having their good traits recognized, and by frank apologies by the teacher when in error. an interesting and unsuspected illustration of the growth of independence with adolescence was found in , papers from the second to eighth grades on the characteristics of the best teacher as seen by children.[ ] in the second and third grades, all, and in the fourth, ninety-five per cent specified help in studies. this falls off rapidly in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades to thirty-nine per cent, while at the same time the quality of patience in the upper grades rises from a mention by two to twenty-two per cent. sanford bell[ ] collated the answers of males and females as to who of all their past teachers did them most good, and wherein; whom they loved and disliked most, and why. his most striking result is presented in which shows that fourteen in girls and sixteen in boys is the age in which most good was felt to have been done, and that curves culminating at twelve for both sexes but not falling rapidly until fifteen or sixteen represent the period when the strongest and most indelible dislikes were felt. what seems to be most appreciated in teachers is the giving of purpose, arousing of ideals, kindling of ambition to be something or do something and so giving an object in life, encouragement to overcome circumstances, and, in general, inspiring self-confidence and giving direction. next came personal sympathy and interest, kindness, confidence, a little praise, being understood; and next, special help in lessons, or timely and kindly advice, while stability and poise of character, purity, the absence of hypocrisy, independence, personal beauty, athleticism and vigor are prominent. it is singular that those of each sex have been most helped by their own sex and that this prominence is far greatest in men. four-fifths of the men and nearly one-half of the women, however, got most help from men. male teachers, especially near adolescence, seem most helpful for both sexes. the qualities that inspire most dislike are malevolence, sarcasm, unjust punishment, suspicion, severity, sternness, absence of laughing and smiling, indifference, threats and broken vows, excessive scolding and "roasting," and fondness for inflicting blows. the teacher who does not smile is far more liable to excite animosity. most boys dislike men most, and girls' dislikes are about divided. the stories of school cruelties and indignities are painful. often inveterate grudges are established by little causes, and it is singular how permanent and indelible strong dislike, are for the majority of children. in many cases, aversions engendered before ten have lasted with little diminution till maturity, and there is a sad record of children who have lost a term, a year, or dropped school altogether because of ill treatment or partiality. nearly two thousand children were asked what they would do in a specific case of conflict between teacher and parents. it was found that, while for young children parental authority was preferred, a marked decline began about eleven and was most rapid after fourteen in girls and fifteen in boys, and that there was a nearly corresponding increase in the number of pubescents who preferred the teacher's authority. the reasons for their choice were also analyzed, and it was found that whereas for the young, unconditioned authority was generally satisfactory, with pubesecents, abstract authority came into marked predominance, "until when the children have reached the age of sixteen almost seventy-five per cent of their reasons belong to this class, and the children show themselves able to extend the idea of authority without violence to their sense of justice." on a basis of , papers answering the question whom, of anyone ever heard or read of, they would like to resemble, barnes[ ] found that girls' ideals were far more often found in the immediate circle of their acquaintance than boys, and that those within that circle were more often in their own family, but that the tendency to go outside their personal knowledge and choose historical and public characters was greatly augmented at puberty, when also the heroes of philanthropy showed marked gain in prominence. boys rarely chose women as their ideals; but in america, half the girls at eight and two-thirds at eighteen chose male characters. the range of important women ideals among the girls was surprisingly small. barnes fears that if from the choice of relative as ideals, the expansion to remote or world heroes is too fast, it may "lead to disintegration of character and reckless living." "if, on the other hand, it is expanded too slowly we shall have that arrested development which makes good ground in which to grow stupidity, brutality, and drunkenness--the first fruits of a sluggish and self-contained mind." "no one can consider the regularity with which local ideals die out and are replaced by world ideals without feeling that he is in the presence of law-abiding forces," and this emphasizes the fact that the teacher or parent does not work in a world governed by caprice. the compositions written by thousands of children in new york on what they wanted to do when they were grown up were collated by dr. thurber.[ ] the replies were serious, and showed that poor children looked forward willingly to severe labor and the increased earnestness of adolescent years, and the better answers to the question _why_ were noteworthy. all anticipated giving up the elastic joyousness of childhood and felt the need of patience. up to ten, there was an increase in the number of those who had two or more desires. this number declined rapidly at eleven, rose as rapidly at twelve, and slowly fell later. preferences for a teacher's life exceeded in girls up to nine, fell rapidly at eleven, increased slightly the next year, and declined thereafter. the ideal of becoming a dressmaker and milliner increased till ten, fell at eleven, rose rapidly to a maximum at thirteen, when it eclipsed teaching, and then fell permanently again. the professions of clerk and stenographer showed a marked rise from eleven and a half. the number of boys who chose the father's occupation attained its maximum at nine and its minimum at twelve, with a slight rise to fourteen, when the survey ended. the ideal of tradesman culminated at eight, with a second rise at thirteen. the reason "to earn money" reached its high maximum of fifty per cent at twelve, and fell very rapidly. the reason "because i like it" culminated at ten and fell steadily thereafter. the motive that influenced the choice of a profession and which was altruistic toward parents or for their benefit culminated at twelve and a half, and then declined. the desire for character increased somewhat throughout, but rapidly after twelve, and the impulse to do good to the world, which had risen slowly from nine, mounted sharply after thirteen. thus, "at eleven all the ideas and tendencies are increasing toward a maximum. at twelve we find the altruistic desires for the welfare of parents, the reason 'to earn money'; at thirteen the desire on the part of the girls to be dressmakers, also to be clerks and stenographers. at fourteen culminates the desire for a business career in bank or office among the boys, the consciousness of life's uncertainties which appeared first at twelve, the desire for character, and the hope of doing the world good." "what would you like to be in an imaginary new city?" was a question answered by , written papers.[ ] one hundred and fourteen different occupations were given; that of teacher led with the girls at every age except thirteen and fourteen, when dressmaker and milliner took precedence. the motive of making money led among the boys at every age except fourteen and sixteen, when occupations chosen because they were liked led. the greatest number of those who chose the parent's occupation was found at thirteen, but from that age it steadily declined and independent choice came into prominence. the maximum of girls who chose parental vocations was at fourteen. motives of philanthropy reached nearly their highest point in girls and boys at thirteen. jegi[ ] obtained letters addressed to real or imaginary friends from , german children in milwaukee, asking what they desired to do when they grew up, and why, and tabulated returns from boys and girls for each age from eight to fourteen inclusive. he also found a steadily decreasing influence of relatives to thirteen; in early adolescence, the personal motive of choosing an occupation because it was liked increased, while from twelve in boys and thirteen in girls the consideration of finding easy vocations grew rapidly strong. l. w. cline[ ] studied by the census method returns from , children, who were asked what they wished to be and do. he found that in naming both ideals and occupations girls were more conservative than boys, but more likely to give a reason for their choice. in this respect country children resembled boys more than city children. country boys were prone to inattention, were more independent and able to care for themselves, suggesting that the home life of the country child is more effective in shaping ideals and character than that of the city child. industrial occupations are preferred by the younger children, the professional and technical pursuits increasing with age. judgments of rights and justice with the young are more prone to issue from emotional rather than from intellectual processes. country children seem more altruistic than those in the city, and while girls are more sympathetic than boys, they are also more easily prejudiced. many of these returns bear unmistakable marks that in some homes and schools moralization has been excessive and has produced a sentimental type of morality and often a feverish desire to express ethical views instead of trusting to suggestion. children are very prone to have one code of ideals for themselves and another for others. boys, too, are more original than girls, and country children more than city children. friedrich[ ] asked german school children what person they chose as their pattern. the result showed differences of age, sex, and creed. first of all came characters in history, which seemed to show that this study for children of the sixth and seventh grades was essentially ethical or a training of mood and disposition (_gesinnungsunterricht_), and this writer suggests reform in this respect. he seems to think that the chief purpose of history for this age should be ethical. next came the influence of the bible, although it was plain that this was rather in spite of the catechism and the method of memoriter work. here, too, the immediate environment at this age furnished few ideals (four and one-fifth per cent), for children seem to have keener eyes for the faults than for the virtues of those near them. religion, therefore, should chiefly be directed to the emotions and not to the understanding. this census also suggested more care that the reading of children should contain good examples in their environment, and also that the matter of instruction should be more fully adapted to the conditions of sex. friedrich found as his chief age result that children of the seventh or older class in the german schools laid distinctly greater stress upon characters distinguished by bravery and courage than did the children of the sixth grade, while the latter more frequently selected characters illustrating piety and holiness. the author divided his characters into thirty-five classes, illustrating qualities, and found that national activity led, with piety a close second; that then came in order those illustrating firmness of faith, bravery, modesty, and chastity; then pity and sympathy, industry, goodness, patience, etc. taylor, young, hamilton, chambers, and others, have also collected interesting data on what children and young people hope to be, do, whom they would like to be, or resemble, etc. only a few at adolescence feel themselves so good or happy that they are content to be themselves. most show more or less discontent at their lot. from six to eleven or twelve, the number who find their ideals among their acquaintances falls off rapidly, and historical characters rise to a maximum at or before the earliest teens. from eleven or twelve on into the middle teens contemporary ideals increase steadily. london children are more backward in this expansion of ideals than americans, while girls choose more acquaintance ideals at all ages than do boys. the expansion, these authors also trace largely to the study of history. the george washington ideal, which leads all the rest by far and is greatly overworked, in contrast with the many heroes of equal rank found in england, pales soon, as imperfections are seen and those now making history loom up. this is the normal age to free from bondage to the immediate present, and this freedom is one measure of education. bible heroes are chosen as ideals by only a very small percentage, mostly girls, far more characters being from fiction and mythology; where jesus is chosen, his human is preferred to his divine side. again, it would seem that teachers would be ideals, especially as many girls intend to teach, but they are generally unpopular as choices. in an ideal system they would be the first step in expansion from home ideals. military heroes and inventors play leading rôles in the choices of pubescent boys. girls at all school ages and increasingly up the grades prefer foreign ideals, to be the wife of a man of title, as aristocracies offer special opportunities for woman to shine, and life near the source of fashion is very attractive, at least up to sixteen. the saddest fact in these studies is that nearly half our american pubescent girls, or nearly three times as many as in england, choose male ideals, or would be men. girls, too, have from six to fifteen times as many ideals as boys. in this significant fact we realize how modern woman has cut loose from all old moorings and is drifting with no destination and no anchor aboard. while her sex has multiplied in all lower and high school grades, its ideals are still too masculine. text-books teach little about women. when a woman's bible, history, course of study, etc., is proposed, her sex fears it may reduce her to the old servitude. while boys rarely, and then only when very young, choose female ideals, girls' preference for the life of the other sex sometimes reaches sixty and seventy per cent. the divorce between the life preferred and that demanded by the interests of the race is often absolute. saddest and most unnatural of all is the fact that this state of things increases most rapidly during just those years when ideals of womanhood should be developed and become most dominant, till it seems as if the female character was threatened with disintegration. while statistics are not yet sufficient to be reliable on the subject, there is some indication that woman later slowly reverts toward ideals not only from her own sex but also from the circle of her own acquaintances. the reasons for the choice of ideals are various and not yet well determined. civic virtues certainly rise; material and utilitarian considerations do not seem to much, if at all, at adolescence, and in some data decline. position, fame, honor, and general greatness increase rapidly, but moral qualities rise highest and also fastest just before and near puberty and continue to increase later yet. by these choices both sexes, but girls far most, show increasing admiration of ethical and social qualities. artistic and intellectual traits also rise quite steadily from ten or eleven onward, but with no such rapidity, and reach no such height as military ability and achievement for boys. striking in these studies is the rapid increase, especially from eight to fourteen, of the sense of historic time for historic persons. these long since dead are no longer spoken of as now living. most of these choices are direct expressions of real differences of taste and character. _property,_ kline and france[ ] have defined as "anything that the individual may acquire which sustains and prolongs life, favors survival, and gives an advantage over opposing forces." many animals and even insects store up food both for themselves and for their young. very early in life children evince signs of ownership. letourneau[ ] says that the notion of private property, which seems to us so natural, dawned late and slowly, and that common ownership was the rule among primitive people. value is sometimes measured by use and sometimes by the work required to produce it. before puberty, there is great eagerness to possess things that are of immediate service; but after its dawn, the desire of possession takes another form, and money for its own sake, which is at first rather an abstraction, comes to be respected or regarded as an object of extreme desire, because it is seen to be the embodiment of all values. the money sense, as it is now often called, is very complex and has not yet been satisfactorily analyzed by psychology. ribot and others trace its origin to provision which they think animals that hoard food feel. monroe[ ] has tabulated returns from boys and , girls from six to sixteen in answer to the question as to what they would do with a small monthly allowance. the following table shows the marked increase at the dawn of adolescence of the number who would save it: age. boys. girls. | age. boys. girls. .... per cent per cent | .... per cent per cent .... " " | .... " " .... " " | .... " " .... " " | .... " " .... " " | .... " " this tendency to thrift is strongest in boys, and both sexes often show the tendency to moralize, that is so strong in the early teens. much of our school work in arithmetic is dominated by the money sense; and school savings-banks, at first for the poor, are now extending to children of all classes. this sense tends to prevent pauperism, prodigality, is an immense stimulus to the imagination and develops purpose to pursue a distant object for a long time. to see all things and values in terms of money has, of course, its pedagogic and ethical limitations; but there is a stage when it is a great educational advance, and it, too, is full of phylogenetic suggestions. _social judgement, cronies, solitude_--the two following observations afford a glimpse of the development of moral judgments. from , boys and , girls of each age from six to sixteen who answered the question as to what should be done to a girl with a new box of paints who beautified the parlor chairs with them with a wish to please her mother, the following conclusion was drawn.[ ] most of the younger children would whip the girl, but from fourteen on the number declines very rapidly. few of the young children suggest explaining why it was wrong; while at twelve, , and at sixteen, would explain. the motive of the younger children in punishment is revenge; with the older ones that of preventing a repetition of the act comes in; and higher and later comes the purpose of reform. with age comes also a marked distinction between the act and its motive and a sense of the girl's ignorance. only the older children would suggest extracting a promise not to offend again. thus with puberty comes a change of view-point from judging actions by results to judging by motives, and only the older ones see that wrong can be done if there are no bad consequences. there is also with increased years a great development of the quality of mercy. one hundred children of each sex and age between six and sixteen asked what they would do with a burglar, the question stating that the penalty was five years in prison.[ ] of the younger children nearly nine-tenths ignored the law and fixed upon some other penalty, but from twelve years there is a steady advance in those who would inflict the legal penalty, while at sixteen, seventy-four per cent would have the criminal punished according to law. thus "with the dawn of adolescence at the age of twelve or shortly after comes the recognition of a larger life, a life to be lived in common with others, and with this recognition the desire to sustain the social code made for the common welfare," and punishment is no longer regarded as an individual and arbitrary matter. from another question answered by , children[ ] it was found that with the development of the psychic faculties in youth, there was an increasing appreciation of punishment as preventive; an increasing sense of the value of individuality and of the tendency to demand protection of personal rights; a change from a sense of justice based on feeling and on faith in authority to that based on reason and understanding. children's attitude toward punishment for weak time sense, tested by , children from six to sixteen,[ ] showed also a marked pubescent increase in the sense of the need of the remedial function of punishment as distinct from the view of it as vindictive, or getting even, common in earlier years. there is also a marked increase in discriminating the kinds and degrees of offenses; in taking account of mitigating circumstances, the inconvenience caused others, the involuntary nature of the offense and the purpose of the culprit. all this continues to increase up to sixteen, where these studies leave the child. an interesting effect of the social instinct appears in august mayer's[ ] elaborate study made up on fourteen boys in the fifth and sixth grade of a würzburg school to determine whether they could work better together or alone. the tests were in dictation, mental and written arithmetic, memory, and ebbinghaus's combination exercises and all were given with every practicable precaution to make the other conditions uniform. the conclusions demonstrate the advantages of collective over individual instruction. under the former condition, emulation is stronger and work more rapid and better in quality. from this it is inferred that pupils should not be grouped according to ability, for the dull are most stimulated by the presence of the bright, the bad by the good, etc. thus work at home is prone to deteriorate, and experimental pedagogy shows that the social impulse is on the whole a stronger spur for boys of eleven or twelve than the absence of distraction which solitude brings. from the answers of , boys and , girls from seven to sixteen on the kind of chum they liked best,[ ] it appears that with the teens children are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and dress neatly, and there is an increased number who are liked for qualities that supplement rather than duplicate those of the chooser. "there is an apparent struggle between the real actual self and the ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum that embodies the traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of lacking." the strong like the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid the bold; the small the large, etc. only children[ ] illustrate differing effects of isolation, while "mashes" and "crushes" and ultra-crony-ism with "selfishness for two" show the results of abnormal restriction of the irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.[ ] m. h. small,[ ] after pointing out that communal animals are more intelligent than those with solitary habits, and that even to name all the irradiations of the social instinct would be write a history of the human race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men who developed proclivities to solitude. it is interesting to observe in how many of these cases this was developed in adolescence when, with the horror of mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolution, and subjectivism. the grounds of repulsion from society at this age may be disappointed hunger for praise, wounded vanity, the reaction from over-assertion, or the nursing of some high ideals, as it is slowly realized that in society the individual cannot be absolute. the motives to self-isolation may be because youth feels its lack of physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal desire or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. while maturity of character needs some solitude, too much dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of association follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys, deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the interesting stories of feral men.[ ] in some of these cases the mind is saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary companions, tasks, etc. normally "the tendency to solitude at adolescence indicates not fulness but want"; and a judicious balance between rest and work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise companionship will generally normalize the social relation. _first forms of spontaneous social organizations.--_ gulick has studied the propensity of boys from thirteen on to consort in gangs, do "dawsies" and stumps, get into scrapes together, and fight and suffer for one another. the manners and customs of the gang are to build shanties or "hunkies," hunt with sling shots, build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels and other game, play indian, build tree-platforms, where they smoke or troop about some leader, who may have an old revolver. they find or excavate caves, or perhaps roof them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a battleship. in the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which no contiguous african tribes could be more hostile. they become toughs and tantalize policemen and peddlers; "lick" every enemy or even stranger found alone on their grounds; often smash windows; begin to use sticks and brass knuckles in their fights; pelt each other with green apples; carry shillalahs, or perhaps air-rifles. the more plucky arrange fights beforehand; rifle unoccupied houses; set ambushes for gangs with which they are at feud; perhaps have secrets and initiations where new boys are triced up by the legs and butted against trees and rocks. when painted for their indian fights, they may grow so excited as to perhaps rush into the water or into the school-room yelling; mimic the violence of strikes; kindle dangerous bonfires; pelt policemen, and shout vile nicknames. the spontaneous tendency to develop social and political organizations among boys in pubescent years was well seen in a school near baltimore in the midst of an eight-hundred-acre farm richly diversified with swamp and forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. soon after the opening of this school[ ] the boys gathered nuts in parties. when a tree was reached which others had shaken, an unwritten law soon required those who wished to shake it further first to pile up all nuts under the tree, while those who failed to do so were universally regarded as dishonest and every boy's hand was against them. to pile them involved much labor, so that the second party usually sought fresh trees, and partial shaking practically gave possession of all the fruits on a tree. they took birds' eggs freely, and whenever a bird was found in building, or a squirrel's hole was discovered, the finder tacked his name on the tree and thereby confirmed his ownership, as he did if he placed a box in which a nest was built. the ticket must not blow off, and the right at first lasted only one season. in the rabbit-land every trap that was set preëmpted ground for a fixed number of yards about it. some grasping boys soon made many traps and set them all over a valuable district, so that the common land fell into a few hands. traps were left out all winter and simply set the next spring. all these rights finally came into the ownership of two or three boys, who slowly acquired the right and bequeathed their claims to others for a consideration, when they left school. the monopolists often had a large surplus of rabbits which they bartered for "butters," the unit being the ounce of daily allowance. these could be represented by tickets transferred, so that debts were paid with "butters" that had never been seen. an agrarian party arose and demanded a redistribution of land from the monopolists, as sir henry maine shows often happened in the old village community. legislation and judicial procedure were developed and quarrels settled by arbitration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment by bumping often followed the decision of the boy folk-mote. scales of prices for commodities in "butters" or in pie-currency were evolved, so that we here have an almost entirely spontaneous but amazingly rapid recapitulation of the social development of the race by these boys. from a study of , children's organizations described as a language lesson in school composition, mr. sheldon[ ] arrives at some interesting results. american children tend strongly to institutional activities, only about thirty per cent of all not having belonged to some such organization. imitation plays a very important rôle, and girls take far more kindly than boys to societies organized by adults for their benefit. they are also more governed by adult and altruistic motives in forming their organizations, while boys are nearer to primitive man. before ten comes the period of free spontaneous imitation of every form of adult institution. the child reproduces sympathetically miniature copies of the life around him. on a farm, his play is raking, threshing, building barns, or on the seashore he makes ships and harbors. in general, he plays family, store, church, and chooses officers simply because adults do. the feeling of caste, almost absent in the young, culminates about ten and declines thereafter. from ten to fourteen, however, associations assume a new character; boys especially cease to imitate adult organizations and tend to form social units characteristic of lower stages of human evolution--pirates, robbers, soldiers, lodges, and other savage reversionary combinations, where the strongest and boldest is the leader. they build huts, wear feathers and tomahawks as badges, carry knives and toy-pistols, make raids and sell the loot. cowards alone, together they fear nothing. their imagination is perhaps inflamed by flash literature and "penny-dreadfuls." such associations often break out in decadent country communities where, with fewer and feebler offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and hoodlumism is the direct result of the passing of the rod. these barbaric societies have their place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state of society results. at twelve the predatory function is normally subordinated, and if it is not it becomes dangerous, because the members are no longer satisfied with mere play, but are stronger and abler to do harm, and the spice of danger and its fascination may issue in crime. athleticism is now the form into which these wilder instincts can be best transmuted, and where they find harmless and even wholesome vent. another change early in adolescence is the increased number of social, literary, and even philanthropic organizations and institutions for mutual help--perhaps against vice, for having a good time, or for holding picnics and parties. altruism now begins to make itself felt as a motive. _student life and organizations._ student life is perhaps the best of all fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of adolescence. its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do not vary. cloister and garrison rules have never been enforced even in the hospice, bursa, inn, "house," "hall," or dormitory, and _in loco parentis_ [in place of a parent] practises are impossible, especially with large numbers. the very word "school" means leisure, and in a world of toil and moil suggests paradise. some have urged that _élite_ youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the freedom of their own inclinations, might serve as a biological and ethnic compass to point out the goal of human destiny. but the spontaneous expressions of this best age and condition of life, with no other occupation than their own development, have shown reversions as often as progress. the rupture of home ties stimulates every wider vicarious expression of the social instinct. each taste and trait can find congenial companionship in others and thus be stimulated to more intensity and self-consciousness. very much that has been hitherto repressed in the adolescent soul is now reënforced by association and may become excessive and even aggressive. while many of the race-correlates of childhood are lost, those of this stage are more accessible in savage and sub-savage life. freedom is the native air and vital breath of student life. the sense of personal liberty is absolutely indispensable for moral maturity; and just as truth can not be found without the possibility of error, so the _posse non peccare_ [ability not to sin] precedes the _non posse peccare_, [inability to sin] and professors must make abroad application of the rule _abusus non tollit usum_ [abuse does not do away with use]. the student must have much freedom to be lazy, make his own minor morals, vent his disrespect for what he can see no use in, be among strangers to act himself out and form a personality of his own, be baptized with the revolutionary and skeptical spirit, and go to extremes at the age when excesses teach wisdom with amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true knight of the spirit and his own master. ziegler[ ] frankly told german students that about one-tenth of them would be morally lost in this process, but insisted that on the whole more good was done than by restraint; for, he said, "youth is now in the stage of schiller's bell when it was molten metal." of all safeguards i believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the most effective at this age. sadly as the written code of student honor in all lands needs revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly perverted, tainted and cowardly as it often is, it really means what kant expressed in the sublime precept, "thou canst because thou oughtest." fichte said that _faulheit, feigheit_, and _falschheit_ [laziness, cowardice, falsehood] were the three dishonorable things for students. if they would study the history and enter into the spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive. if professors made it always a point of honor to confess and never to conceal the limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of it, place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, teach no creeds they do not profoundly believe, or topics in which they are not interested, and withhold nothing from those who want the truth, they could from this vantage with more effect bring students to feel that the laziness that, while outwardly conforming, does no real inner work; that getting a diploma, as a professor lately said, an average student could do, on one hour's study a day; living beyond one's means, and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than the talent of the son justifies; accepting stipends not needed, especially to the deprivation of those more needy; using dishonest ways of securing rank in studies or positions on teams, or social standing, are, one and all, not only ungentlemanly but cowardly and mean, and the axe would be laid at the root of the tree. honor should impel students to go nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, or even their name; to keep themselves immaculate from all contact with that class of women which, ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of the students of the university of berlin in a single year to physicians; to remember that other's sisters are as cherished as their own; to avoid those sins against confiding innocence which cry for vengeance, as did valentine against faust, and which strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, and which give a taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness; and to avoid the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which ibsen and tolstoi have described. these things are the darkest blot on the honor of youth. _associations for youth, devised or guided by adults._ here we enter a very different realm. forbush[ ] undertakes an analysis of many such clubs which he divides according to their purpose into nine chief classes: physical training, handicraft, literary, social, civic and patriotic, science-study, hero-love, ethical, religious. these he classifies as to age of the boys, his purview generally ending at seventeen; discusses and tabulates the most favorable number, the instincts chiefly utilized, the kinds of education gained in each and its percentage of interest, and the qualities developed. he commends riis's mode of pulling the safety-valve of a rather dangerous boy-gang by becoming an adult honorary member, and interpreting the impulsions of this age in the direction of adventure instead of in that of mischief. he reminds us that nearly one-third of the inhabitants of america are adolescents, that , , are boys between twelve and sixteen, "that the do-called heathen people are, whatever their age, all in the adolescent stage of life." a few american societies of this class we may briefly characterize as follows: (a) typical of a large class of local juvenile clubs is the "captains of ten," originally for boys of from eight to fourteen, and with a later graduate squad of those over fifteen. the "ten" are the fingers; and whittling, scrap-book making, mat-weaving, etc., are taught. the motto is, "the hand of the diligent shall bear rule"; its watchword is "loyalty"; and the prime objects are "to promote a spirit of loyalty to christ among the boys of the club," and to learn about and work for christ's kingdom. the members wear a silver badge; have an annual photograph; elect their leaders; vote their money to missions (on which topic they hold meetings); act bible stories in costume; hear stories and see scientific experiments; enact a chinese school; write articles for the children's department of religious journals; develop comradeship, and "have a good time." (b) the agassiz association, founded in "to encourage personal work in natural science," now numbers some , members, with chapters distributed all over the country, and was said by the late professor hyatt to include "the largest number of persons ever bound together for the purpose of mutual help in the study of nature." it furnishes practical courses of study in the sciences; has local chapters in thousands of towns and cities in this and other countries; publishes a monthly organ, the swiss cross, to facilitate correspondence and exchange of specimens; has a small endowment, a badge, is incorporated, and is animated by a spirit akin to that of university extension; and, although not exclusively for young people, is chiefly sustained by them. (c) the catholic total abstinence union is a strong, well-organized, and widely extended society, mostly composed of young men. the pledge required of all members explains its object: "i promise with the divine assistance and in honor of the sacred thirst and the agony of our saviour, to abstain from all intoxicating drinks and to prevent as much as possible by advice and example the sin of intemperance in others and to discountenance the drinking customs of society." a general convention of the union has been held annually since . (d) the princely knights of character castle is an organization founded in for boys from twelve to eighteen to "inculcate, disseminate, and practise the principles of heroism--endurance--love, purity, and patriotism." the central incorporated castle grants charters to local castles, directs the ritual and secret work. its officers are supreme prince, patriarch, scribes, treasurer, director, with captain of the guard, watchman, porter, keeper of the dungeon, musician, herald, and favorite son. the degrees of the secret work are shepherd lad, captive, viceroy, brother, son, prince, knight, and royal knight. there are jewels, regalia, paraphernalia, and initiations. the pledge for the first degree is, "i hereby promise and pledge that i will abstain from the use of intoxicating liquor in any form as a beverage; that i will not use profane or improper language; that i will discourage the use of tobacco in any form; that i will strive to live pure in body and mind; that i will obey all rules and regulations of the order and not reveal any of the secrets in any way." there are benefits, reliefs, passwords, a list of offenses and penalties. (e) some , bands of mercy are now organized under the direction of the american humane education society. the object of the organization is to cultivate kindness to animals and sympathy with the poor and oppressed. the prevention of cruelty in driving, cattle transportation, humane methods of killing, care for the sick and abandoned or overworked animals, are the themes of most of its voluminous literature. it has badges, hymnbooks, cards, and certificates of membership, and a motto, "kindness, justice, and mercy to all." its pledge is, "i will try to be kind to all harmless living creatures, and try to protect them from cruel usage," and is intended to include human as well as dumb creatures. the founder and secretary, with great and commendable energy, has instituted prize contests for speaking on humane subjects in schools, and has printed and circulated prize stories; since the incorporation of the society in , he has been indefatigable in collecting funds, speaking before schools and colleges, and prints fifty to sixty thousand copies of the monthly organ. in addition to its mission of sentiment, and to make it more effective, this organization clearly needs to make more provision for the intellectual element by well-selected or constructed courses, or at least references on the life, history, habits, and instincts of animals, and it also needs more recognition that modern charity is a science as well as a virtue. (f) the coming men of america, although organized only in , now claims to be the greatest chartered secret society for boys and young men in the country. it began two years earlier in a lodge started by a nineteen-year-old boy in chicago in imitation of such ideas of masons, odd-fellows, etc., as its founder could get from his older brother, and its meetings were first held in a basement. on this basis older heads aided in its development, so that it is a good example of the boy-imitative helped out by parents. the organization is now represented in every state and territory, and boys travel on its badge. there is an official organ, the star, a badge, sign, and a secret sign language called "bestography." its secret ritual work is highly praised. its membership is limited to white boys under twenty-one. (g) the first harry wadsworth club was established in as a result of e.e. hale's ten times one, published the year before. its motto is, "look up, and not down; look forward, and not back; look out, and not in; lend a hand," or "faith, hope, and charity." its organ is the ten times one record; its badge is a silver maltese cross. each club may organize as it will, and choose its own name, provided it accepts the above motto. its watchword is, "in his name." it distributes charities, conducts a noonday rest, outings in the country, and devotes itself to doing good.[ ] [footnote : tarde: l'opposition universelle. alcan, paris, , p. .] [footnote : the adolescent at home and in school. by e. g. lancaster. proceedings of the national educational association, , p. .] [footnote : the psychology and pedagogy of adolescence. pedagogical seminary, july, , vol. , p. .] [footnote : study of boys entering the adolescent period of life. north western monthly, november, , vol. , pp. - , and a series thereafter.] [footnote : the suggestibility of children. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , p. ] [footnote : characteristics of the best teacher as recognized by children. by h.e. kratz. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - . see also the high school teacher from the pupil's point of view, by w.f. book. pedagogical seminary, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study of the teacher's influence. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's ideals. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : transactions of the illinois society for child study, vol. , no. , , pp. - .] [footnote : children's ambitions. by h.m. willard. barnes's studies in education, vol. , pp. - . (privately printed by earl barnes, sansom street, philadelphia.)] [footnote : transactions of the illinois society for child study, october, , vol. , no. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study in juvenile ethics. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : die ideale der kinder. zeitschrift für pädagogische psychologie, pathologie und hygiene, jahrgang , heft , pp. - .] [footnote : the psychology of ownership, pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : property: its origin and development. chas. scribner's sons, .] [footnote : money-sense of children. will s. monroe. pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : a study of children's rights, as seen by themselves. by m.e. schallenberger. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's attitude toward law. by e. m darrah. barnes's studies in education, vol. , pp. - . (stanford university, .) g. e. stechert and co., new york.] [footnote : class punishment. by caroline frear. barnes's studies in education, vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's attitude toward punishment for weak time sense. by d.s. snedden. barnes's studies in education, vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : ueber einzel- und gesamtleistung des schulkindes. archiv für die gesamte psychologie, band, and heft, , pp. - ] [footnote : development of the social consciousness of children. by will s. monroe. north-western monthly, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : bohannon: the only child in a family. pedagogical seminary, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : j. delitsch: Über schülerfreundschaften in einer volksschulklasse, die kinderfehler. fünfter jahrgang, mai, , pp. - .] [footnote : on some psychical relations of society and solitude. pedagogical seminary, april , vol. , pp. - ] [footnote : a. rauber: homo sapiens ferus. j. brehse, leipzig, . see also my social aspects of education; pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - . also kropotkin: mutual aid a factor of evolution. w. heinemann, london, .] [footnote : rudimentary society among boys, by john h. johnson, mcdonogh, md. mcdonogh school, , reprinted from johns hopkins university studies series (historical and political studies, vol. , no. ).] [footnote : the institutional activities of american children. american journal of psychology, july, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : der deutsche student am ende des . jahrhunderts. th ed. göschen, leipzig, .] [footnote : the social pedagogy of boyhood. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - . see also his the boy problem, with an introduction by g. stanley hall, the pilgrim press, boston, , p. . also winifred buck (boys' self-governing clubs, macmillan, new york, ), who thinks ten million dollars could be used in training club advisers who should have the use of schools and grounds after hours and evenings, conduct excursions, organize games, etc., but avoid all direct teaching and book work generally. this writer thinks such an institution would soon result in a marked increase of public morality and an augmented demand for technical instruction, and that for the advisers themselves the work would be the best training for high positions in politics and reform. clubs of boys from eight to sixteen or eighteen must not admit age disparities of more than two years.] [footnote : see young people's societies, by l.w. bacon. d. appleton and co., new york, , p. . also, f.g. cressey: the church and young men. fleming h. revell co., new york, , p. .] * * * * * chapter x intellectual education and school work the general change and plasticity at puberty--english teaching--causes of its failure: ( ) too much time to other languages, ( ) subordination of literary content to form, ( ) too early stress on eye and hand instead of ear and mouth, ( ) excessive use of concrete words--children's interest in words--their favorites--slang--story telling--age of reading crazes--what to read--the historic sense--growth of memory span. just as about the only duty of young children is implicit obedience, so the chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization, drill, habituation, with only limited appeal to the understanding. after the critical transition age of six or seven, when the brain has achieved its adult size and weight, and teething has reduced the chewing surface to its least extent, begins a unique stage of life marked by reduced growth and increased activity and power to resist both disease and fatigue, which suggests what was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period of maturity. here belong discipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal memory, manual training, practise of instrumental technic, proper names, drawing, drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the correct pronunciation of which is far harder if acquired later, etc. the hand is never so near the brain. most of the content of the mind has entered it through the senses, and the eye-and ear-gates should be open at their widest. authority should now take precedence of reason. children comprehend much and very rapidly if we can only refrain from explaining, but this slows down intuition, tends to make casuists and prigs and to enfeeble the ultimate vigor of reason. it is the age of little method and much matter. the good teacher is now a _pedotrieb_, or boy-driver. boys of this age at now not very affectionate. they take pleasure in obliging and imitating those they like and perhaps in disobliging those they dislike. they have much selfishness and little sentiment. as this period draws to a close and the teens begin, the average normal child will not be bookish but should read and write well, know a few dozen well-chosen books, play several dozen games, be well started in one or more ancient and modern languages--if these must be studied at all, should know something of several industries and how to make many things he is interested in, belong to a few teams and societies, know much about nature in his environment, be able to sing and draw, should have memorized much more than he now does, and be acquainted, at least in story form, with the outlines of many of the best works in literature and the epochs and persons in history.[ ] morally he should have been through many if not most forms of what parents and teachers commonly call "badness," and professor yoder even calls "meanness". he should have fought, whipped and been whipped, used language offensive to the prude and to the prim precisian, been in some scrapes, had something to do with bad, if more with good, associates, and been exposed to and already recovering from as many forms of ethical mumps and measles as, by having in mild form now he can be rendered immune to later when they become far more dangerous, because his moral and religious as well as his rational nature is normally rudimentary. he is not depraved, but only in a savage or half-animal stage, although to a large-brained, large-hearted and truly parental soul that does not call what causes it inconvenience by opprobrious names, an altogether lovable and even fascinating stage. the more we know of boyhood the more narrow and often selfish do adult ideals of it appear. something is amiss with the lad of ten who is very good, studious, industrious, thoughtful, altruistic, quiet, polite, respectful, obedient, gentlemanly, orderly, always in good toilet, docile to reason, who turns away from stories that reek with gore, prefers adult companionship to that of his mates, refuses all low associates, speaks standard english, or is as pious and deeply in love with religious services as the typical maiden teacher or the _à la mode_ parent wishes. such a boy is either under-vitalized and anemic and precocious by nature, a repressed, overtrained, conventionalized manikin, a hypocrite, as some can become under pressure thus early in life, or else a genius of some kind with a little of all these. but with the teens all this begins to be changed and many of these precepts must be gradually reversed. there is an outburst of growth that needs a large part of the total kinetic energy of the body. there is a new interest in adults, a passion to be treated like one's elders, to make plans for the future, a new sensitiveness to adult praise or blame. the large muscles have their innings and there is a new clumsiness of body and mind. the blood-vessels expand and blushing is increased, new sensations and feelings arise, the imagination blossoms, love of nature is born, music is felt in a new, more inward way, fatigue comes easier and sooner; and if heredity and environment enable the individual to cross this bridge successfully there is sometimes almost a break of continuity, and a new being emerges. the drill methods of the preceding period must be slowly relaxed and new appeals made to freedom and interest. we can no longer coerce a break, but must lead and inspire if we would avoid arrest. individuality must have a longer tether. never is the power to appreciate so far ahead of the power to express, and never does understanding so outstrip ability to explain. overaccuracy is atrophy. both mental and moral acquisition sink at once too deep to be reproduced by examination without injury both to intellect and will. there is nothing in the environment to which the adolescent nature does not keenly respond. with pedagogic tact we can teach about everything we know that is really worth knowing; but if we amplify and morselize instead of giving great wholes, if we let the hammer that strikes the bell rest too long against it and deaden the sound, and if we wait before each methodic step till the pupil has reproduced all the last, we starve and retard the soul, which is now all insight and receptivity. plasticity is at its maximum, utterance at its minimum. the inward traffic obstructs the outer currents. boys especially are often dumb-bound, monophrastic, inarticulate, and semi-aphasic save in their own vigorous and inelegant way. nature prompts to a modest reticence for which the deflowerers of all ephebic naiveté should have some respect. deep interests arise which are almost as sacred as is the hour of visitation of the holy ghost to the religious teacher. the mind at times grows in leaps and bounds in a way that seems to defy the great enemy, fatigue; and yet when the teacher grows a little tiresome the pupil is tired in a moment. thus we have the converse danger of forcing knowledge upon unwilling and unripe minds that have no love for it, which is in many ways psychologically akin to a nameless crime that in some parts of the country meets summary vengeance. (_a_) the heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the vernacular literature and language. these are the chief instruments of the social as well as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. the prime place of the former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to the latter, the uniqueness of which should first be considered. the century, the largest complete dictionary of english, claims to have , words, as against , in the old webster's unabridged. worcester's unabridged of has , ; murray's, now in l, it is said, will contain , principal and , compound words, or , words in all. the dictionary of the french academy has , ; that of the royal spanish academy, , ; the dutch dictionary of van dale, , ; the italian and portuguese, each about , literary, or , encyclopedic words. of course, words can really be counted hardly more than ideas or impressions, and compounds, dialects, obsolete terms, localisms, and especially technical terms, swell the number indefinitely. a competent philologist[ ] says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply , , english words for , , american dollars." chamberlain[ ] estimates that our language contains more than two score as many words as all those left us from the latin. many savage languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. our tongue is essentially saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but from all modern languages--indian, african, chinese, mongolian--according to its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. it absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of lear, carrol, and many others.[ ] in this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. here his soul finds its native breath and vital air. he may live as a peasant, using, as max müller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime; or he may need , , like milton, , , like shakespeare, , or , , like huxley, who commanded both literary and technical terms; while in understanding, which far outstrips, use, a philologist may master perhaps , or , words. the content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore and terms for immediate practical life, or this content may be indefinitely elaborated in a rich literature and science. the former is generally well on in its development before speech itself becomes an abject of study. greek literature was fully grown when the sophists, and finally aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech being at first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories. our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, when it was crude and despised, to be patronized and regulated by latin grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good and evil, with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. it has, too, a long history of resistance to this control. once spelling was a matter of fashion or even individual taste; and as the constraint grew, two pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a duel for the right spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor prevailed. phonic and economic influences are now again making some headway against orthographic orthodoxy here; so with definitions. in the days of johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in determining meanings. in pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the word _tomato_ in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. of our tongue in particular it is true, as tylor says in general, condensing a longer passage, "take language all in all, it is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule of thumb. it is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. it is originally and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of conscious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less perfectly the requirements of modern civilization." it is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived from the prim, meager latin contingent of it, is adequate to legislate for the free spirit of our magnificent tongue. again, if this is ever done and english ever has a grammar that is to it what latin grammar is to that language, it will only be when the psychology of speech represented, e.g., in wundt's psychologie der sprache,[ ] which is now compiling and organizing the best elements from all grammars, is complete. the reason why english speakers find such difficulty in learning other languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by throwing off not only inflections but many old rules of syntax, that we have had to go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage of human development. in , at the council of constance, when emperor sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he replied, "i am king of the romans and above grammar." thomas jefferson later wrote, "where strictures of grammar does not weaken expression it should be attended to; but where by a small grammatical negligence the energy of an idea is condensed or a word stands for a sentence, i hold grammatical rigor in contempt." browning, whitman, and kipling deliberately violate grammar and secure thereby unique effects neither asking nor needing excuse. by general consent both high school and college youth in this country are in an advanced stage of degeneration in the command of this the world's greatest organ of the intellect; and that, despite the fact that the study of english often continues from primary into college grades, that no topic counts for more, and that marked deficiency here often debars from all other courses. every careful study of the subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and professor shurman, of nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty years. we are in the case of many christians described by dante, who strove by prayers to get nearer to god when in fact with every petition they were departing farther from him. such a comprehensive fact must have many causes. i. one of these is the excessive time given to other languages just at the psychological period of greatest linguistic plasticity and capacity for growth. school invention and tradition is so inveterate that it is hard for us to understand that there is little educational value--and perhaps it is deëducational--to learn to tell the time of day or name a spade in several different tongues or to learn to say the lord's prayer in many different languages, any one of which the lord only can understand. the polyglot people that one meets on great international highways of travel are linguists only in the sense that the moke on the variety stage who plays a dozen instruments equally badly is a musician. it is a psychological impossibility to pass through the apprenticeship stage of learning foreign languages at the age when the vernacular is setting without crippling it. the extremes are the youth in ancient greece studying his own language only and the modern high school boy and girl dabbling in three or perhaps four languages. latin, which in the eight years preceding increased one hundred and seventy-four per cent. in american high schools, while the proportion entering college in the country and even in massachusetts steadily declined, is the chief offender. in the day of its pedagogical glory latin was the universal tongue of the learned. sturm's idea was to train boys so that if suddenly transported to ancient rome or greece they would be at home there. language, it was said, was the chief instrument of culture; latin, the chief language and therefore a better drill in the vernacular than the vernacular itself. its rules were wholesome swathing bands for the modern languages when in their infancy. boys must speak only latin on the playground. they thought, felt, and developed an intellectual life in and with that tongue.[ ] but how changed all this is now. statistical studies show that five hours a week for a year gives command of but a few hundred words, that two years does not double this number, and that command of the language and its resources in the original is almost never attained, but that it is abandoned not only by the increasing percentage that do not go to college but also by the increasing percentage who drop it forever at the college door. its enormous numerical increase due to high school requirements, the increasing percentage of girl pupils more ready to follow the teacher's advice, in connection with the deteriorating quality of the girls--inevitable with their increasing numbers, the sense that latin means entering upon a higher education, the special reverence for it by catholic children, the overcrowded market for latin teachers whom a recent writer says can be procured by the score at less rates than in almost any other subject, the modern methods of teaching it which work well with less knowledge of it by the teacher than in the case of other school topics, have been attended perhaps inevitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the vaunted new methods; until now the baby latin in the average high school class is a kind of sanctified relic, a ghost of a ghost, suggesting swift's struldbrugs, doomed to physical immortality but shriveling and with increasing horror of all things new. in the german emperor declared it a shame for a boy to excel in latin composition, and in the high schools of sweden and norway it has been practically abandoned. in the present stage of its educational decadence the power of the dead hand is strongly illustrated by the new installation of the old roman pronunciation with which our tongue has only remote analogies, which makes havoc with proper names which is unknown and unrecognized in the schools of the european continent, and which makes a pedantic affectation out of more vocalism. i do not know nor care whether the old romans pronounced thus or not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has pedagogic justification, why still teach a text like the _viri romae_, which is not a classic but a modern pedagogue's composition? i believe profoundly in the latin both as a university specialty and for all students who even approach mastery, but for the vast numbers who stop in the early stages of proficiency it is disastrous to the vernacular. compare the evils of translation english, which not even the most competent and laborious teaching can wholly prevent and which careless mechanical instruction directly fosters, with the vigorous fresh productions of a boy or girl writing or speaking of something of vital present interest. the psychology of translation shows that it gives the novice a consciousness of etymologies which rather impedes than helps the free movement of the mind. jowett said in substance that it is almost impossible to render either of the great dead languages into english without compromise, and this tends to injure the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue, which can be got only by much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts before trying to shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. we confound the little knowledge of word-histories which latin gives with the far higher and subtler sentence-sense which makes the soul of one language so different from that of another, and training in which ought not to end until one has become more or less of a stylist and knows how to hew out modes of expressing his own individuality in great language. there is a sense in which macaulay was not an englishman at all, but a ciceronian latinist who foisted an alien style upon our tongue; and even addison is a foreigner compared to the virile kipling. the nature and needs of the adolescent mind demand bread and meat, while latin rudiments are husks. in his autobiography, booker washington says that for ten years after their emancipation, the two chief ambitions of the young negro of the south were to hold office and to study latin, and he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies. for the american boy and girl, high school too often means latin. this gives at first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to three years the great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and discouraged for many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed. defective nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the influences which make boys and girls leave school. ii. the second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of literature and content to language study. grammar arises in the old age of language. as once applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it always was more or less of a school-made artifact and an alien yoke, and has become increasingly so as english has grown great and free. its ghost, in the many textbooks devoted to it, lacks just the quality of logic which made and besouled it. philology, too, with all its magnificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of speech. in the college, which is its stronghold, it has so inspired professors of english that their ideal is to be critical rather than creative till they prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide general knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than the ability to write good english" that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. good professors of english literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain condescension. many academic chairs of english are filled by men whose acquaintance of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be linguistic and not literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues. at a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who had answered many questions concerning the forms of lucretius, when asked whether he was a dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know, and his professor deemed the question improper. i visited the eleventh recitation in othello in a high school class of nineteen pupils, not one of whom knew how the story ended, so intent had they been kept on its verbiage. hence, too, has come the twelve feet of text-books on english on my shelves with many standard works, edited for schools, with more notes than text. fashion that works from above down the grades and college entrance requirements are in large measure responsible for this, perhaps now the worst case of the prostitution of content to form. long exposure to this method of linguistic manicuring tends to make students who try to write ultra-fastidiously, seeking an over-refined elaboration of petty trifles, as if the less the content the greater the triumph of form alone could be. these petty but pretty nothings are like german confectionery, that appeals to the eye but has little for taste and is worse than nothing for the digestion. it is like straining work on an empty stomach. for youth this embroidery of details is the precocious senescence that nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence. language is vastly larger than all its content, and the way to teach it is to focus the mind upon story, history, oratory, drama, bible, for their esthetic, mental, and above all, moral content, as shown in the last chapter. the more unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the resources of our mother tongue. these prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of diction. to hold up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the gridiron, low tackle, and i would rather be convicted of many errors by such methods than use them. of course this has its place, but it must always be subordinated to a larger view, as in one of the newly discovered _logia_ ascribed to jesus, who, when he found a man gathering sticks on sunday, said to him, "if you understand what you are doing, it is well, but if not, thou shalt be damned." the great teacher who, when asked how he obtained such rare results in expression, answered, "by carefully neglecting it and seeking utter absorption in subject-matter," was also a good practical psychologist. this is the inveterate tendency that in other ages has made pedagogic scribes, talmudists, epigoni, and sophists, who have magnified the letter and lost the spirit. but there are yet other seats of difficulty. iii. it is hard and, in the history of the race, a late change, to receive language through the eye which reads instead of through the ear which hears. not only is perception measurably quite distinctly slower, but book language is related to oral speech somewhat as an herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed specimens to a menagerie. the invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. the winged word of mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with inflection, is the utterance of a living present personality, the consummation of man's gregarious instincts. the book is dead and more or less impersonal, best apprehended in solitude, its matter more intellectualized; it deals in remoter second-hand knowledge so that plato reproached aristotle as being a reader, one remove from the first spontaneous source of original impressions and ideas, and the doughty medieval knights scorned reading as a mere clerk's trick, not wishing to muddle their wits with other people's ideas when their own were good enough for them. but although some of the great men in history could not read, and though some of the illiterate were often morally and intellectually above some of the literate, the argument here is that the printed page must not be too suddenly or too early thrust between the child and life. the plea is for moral and objective work, more stories, narratives, and even vivid readings, as is now done statedly in more than a dozen of the public libraries of the country, not so often by teachers as by librarians, all to the end that the ear, the chief receptacle of language, be maintained in its dominance, that the fine sense of sound, rhythm, cadence, pronunciation, and speech-music generally be not atrophied, that the eye which normally ranges freely from far to near be not injured by the confined treadmill and zigzag of the printed page. closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. speech is directly to and from the soul. writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. never have there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamopapyrus [pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this country. not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. the tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. in some schools, teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. it all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. but is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? here again we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion. of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read much; but that english suffers from insisting upon this double long circuit too early and cultivates it to excess, devitalizes school language and makes it a little unreal, like other affectations of adult ways, so that on escaping from its thraldom the child and youth slump back to the language of the street as never before. this is a false application of the principle of learning to do by doing. the young do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and hearing. to become a good writer one must read, feel, think, experience, until he has something to say that others want to hear. the golden age of french literature, as gaston deschamps and brunetière have lately told us, was that of the salon, when conversation dominated letters, set fashions, and made the charm of french style. its lowest ebb was when bookishness led and people began to talk as they wrote. iv. the fourth cause of degeneration of school english is the growing preponderance of concrete words for designating things of sense and physical acts, over the higher element of language that names and deals with concepts, ideas, and non-material things. the object-lesson came in as a reaction against the danger of merely verbal and definition knowledge and word memory. now it has gone so far that not only things but even languages, vernacular and foreign, are taught by appeals to the eye. more lately, elementary science has introduced another area of pictures and things while industrial education has still further greatly enlarged the material sensori-motor element of training. geography is taught with artifacts, globes, maps, sand boxes, drawing. miss margaret smith[ ] counted two hundred and eighty objects that must be distributed and gathered for forty pupils in a single art lesson. instruction, moreover, is more and more busied upon parts and details rather than wholes, upon analysis rather than synthesis. thus in modern pedagogy there is an increased tyranny of things, a growing neglect or exclusion of all that is unseen. the first result of this is that the modern school child is more and more mentally helpless without objects of sense. conversation is increasingly concrete, if not of material things and persons present in time and even place. instead of dealing with thoughts and ideas, speech and writing is close to sense and the words used are names for images and acts. but there is another higher part of language that is not so abjectly tied down to perception, but that lives, moves, and has its being in the field of concepts rather than percepts, which, to use earle's distinction, is symbolic and not presentative, that describes thinking that is not mere contiguity in space or sequence in time but that is best in the far higher and more mental associations of likeness, that is more remote from activity, that, to use logical terminology, is connotative and not merely denotative, that has extension as well as intension, that requires abstraction and generalization. without this latter element higher mental development is lacking because this means more than word-painting the material world. our school youth today suffer from just this defect. if their psychic operations can be called thought it is of that elementary and half animal kind that consists imagery. their talk with each other is of things of present and immediate interest. they lack even the elements of imagination, which makes new combinations and is creative, because they are dominated by mental pictures of the sensory. large views that take them afield away from the persons and things and acts they know do not appeal to them. attempts to think rigorously are too hard. the teacher feels that all the content of mind must come in through the senses, and that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations will come of themselves later. many pupils have never in their lives talked five minutes before others on any subject whatever that can properly be called intellectual. it irks them to occupy themselves with purely mental processes, so enslaved are they by what is near and personal, and thus they are impoverished in the best elements of language. it is as if what are sometimes called the associative fibers, both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and motion. that the soul of language as an instrument of thought consists in this non-presentative element, so often lacking, is conclusively shown in the facts of speech diseases. in the slowly progressive aphasias, of late so carefully studied, the words first lost are those of things and acts most familiar to the patient, while the words that persist longest in the wreckage of the speech-centers are generally words that do not designate the things of sense. a tailor loses the power to name his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk fluently of what little he may chance to know of god, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. the farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever about politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can talk of financial policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally. the reason obvious. it is because concrete thinking has two forms, the word and the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of the former that it can be lost to both sense and articulation without great impairment, whereas conceptual thinking lacks imagery and depends upon words alone, and hence these must persist because they have no alternate form which vicariates for them. in its lower stages, speech is necessarily closely bound up with the concrete world; but its real glory appears in its later stages and its higher forms, because there the soul takes flight in the intellectual world, learns to live amidst its more spiritual realities, to put names to thoughts, which is far higher than to put names to things. it is in this world that the best things in the best books live; and the modern school-bred distaste for them, the low-ranged mental action that hovers near the coastline of matter and can not launch out with zest into the open sea of thoughts, holding communion with the great dead of the past or the great living of the distant present, seems almost like a slow progressive abandonment of the high attribute of speech and the lapse toward infantile or animal picture-thinking. if the school is slowly becoming speechless in this sense, if it is lapsing in all departments toward busy work and losing silence, repose, the power of logical thought, and even that of meditation, which is the muse of originality, this is perhaps the gravest of all these types of decay. if the child has no resources in solitude, can not think without the visual provocation, is losing subjective life, enthusiasm for public, social, ethical questions, is crippled for intellectual pursuits, cares only in a languid way for literary prose and poetry, responds only to sensuous stimuli and events at short range, and is indifferent to all wide relations and moral responsibility, cares only for commercial self-interest, the tactics of field sport, laboratory occupations and things which call be illustrated from a pedagogic museum, then the school is dwarfing, in dawning maturity, the higher powers that belong to this stage of development and is responsible for mental arrest. in this deplorable condition, if we turn to the child study of speech for help, we find that, although it has been chiefly occupied with infant vocabularies, there are already a very few and confessedly crude and feeble beginnings, but even these shed more light on the lost pathway than all other sources combined. the child once set in their midst again corrects the wise men. we will first briefly recapitulate these and then state and apply their lessons. miss williams[ ] found that out of young ladies only did not have favorite sounds, _[long "a"]_ and _a_ leading among the vowels, and _l_, _r_ and _m_ among the constants. eighty-five had favorite words often lugged in, being good. two hundred and twenty-one, as children, had favorite proper names in geography, and also for boys, but especially for girls. the order of a few of the latter is as follows: helen, ; bessie, ; violet and lilly, ; elsie and beatrice, ; dorothy and alice, ; ethel, ; myrtle, ; mabel, marguerite, pearl, and rose, ; may, ; margaret, daisy, and grace, ; ruth and florence, ; gladys, ; maud, nellie, and gertrude, ; blanche and mary, ; eveline and pansy, ; belle, beulah, constance, eleanor, elizabeth, eve, laura, lulu, pauline, virginia, and vivian, each, etc. of ten words found interesting to adolescents, murmur was the favorite, most enjoying its sound. lullaby, supreme, annannamannannaharoumlemay, immemorial, lillibulero, burbled, and incarnadine were liked by most, while zigzag and shigsback were not liked. this writer says that adolescence is marked by some increased love of words for motor activity and in interest in words as things in themselves, but shows a still greater rise of interest in new words and pronunciations; "above all, there is a tremendous rise in interest in words as instruments of thought." the flood of new experiences, feelings, and views finds the old vocabulary inadequate, hence "the dumb, bound feeling of which most adolescents at one time or another complain and also i suspect from this study in the case of girls, we have an explanation of the rise of interest in slang." "the second idea suggested by our study is the tremendous importance of hearing in the affective side of language." conradi[ ] found that of returns concerning children's pleasure in knowing or using new words, ninety-two per cent were affirmative, eight per cent negative, and fifty per cent gave words especially "liked." some were partial to big words, some for those with z in them. some found most pleasure in saying them to themselves and some in using them with others. in all there were nearly three hundred such words, very few of which were artificial. as to words pretty or queer in form or sound, his list was nearly as large, but the greater part of the words were different. sixty per cent of all had had periods of spontaneously trying to select their vocabulary by making lists, studying the dictionary, etc. the age of those who did so would seem to average not far from early puberty, but the data are too meager for conclusion. a few started to go through the dictionary, some wished to astonish their companions or used large new words to themselves or their dolls. seventy percent had had a passion for affecting foreign words when english would do as well. conradi says "the age varies from twelve to eighteen, most being fourteen to sixteen." some indulge this tendency in letters, and would like to do so in conversation, but fear ridicule. fifty-six per cent reported cases of superfine elegance or affected primness or precision in the use of words. some had spells of effort in this direction, some belabor compositions to get a style that suits them, some memorise fine passages to this end, or modulate their voices to aid them, affect elegance with a chosen mate by agreement soliloquize before a glass with poses. according to his curve this tendency culminates at fourteen. adjectivism, adverbism, and nounism, or marked disposition to multiply one or more of the above classes of words, and in the above order, also occur near the early teens. adjectives are often used as adverbial prefixes to other adjectives, and here favorite words are marked. nearly half of conradi's reports show it, but the list of words so used is small. [illustration: graph showing slang, reading craze, and precision by age.] miss williams presents on interesting curve of slang confessed as being both attractive and used by out of . from this it appears that early adolescence is the curve of greatest pleasure in its use, fourteen being the culminating year. there is very little until eleven, when the curve for girls rises very rapidly, to fall nearly us rapidly from fifteen to seventeen. ninety-three out of who used it did so despite criticism. conradi, who collected and prints a long list of current slang words and phrases, found that of young boys and girls not one failed to confess their use, and eighty-five per cent of all gave the age at which they thought it most common. on this basis he constructs the above curve, comparing with this the curve of a craze for reading and for precision in speech. the reasons given are, in order of frequency, that slang was more emphatic, more exact, more concise, convenient, sounded pretty, relieved formality, was natural, manly, appropriate, etc. only a very few thought it was vulgar, limited the vocabulary, led to or was a substitute for swearing, destroyed exactness, etc. this writer attempts a provisional classification of slang expressions under the suggestive heads of rebukes to pride, boasting and loquacity, hypocrisy, quaint and emphatic negatives, exaggerations, exclamations, mild oaths, attending to one's own business and not meddling or interfering, names for money, absurdity, neurotic effects of surprise or shock, honesty and lying, getting confused, fine appearance and dress, words for intoxication which partridge has collected,[ ]for anger collated by chamberlain,[ ] crudeness or innocent naïveté, love and sentimentality, etc. slang is also rich in describing conflicts of all kinds, praising courage, censuring inquisitiveness, and as a school of moral discipline, but he finds, however, a very large number unclassified; and while he maintains throughout a distinction between that used by boys and by girls, sex differences are not very marked. the great majority of terms are mentioned but once, and a few under nearly all of the above heads have great numerical precedence. a somewhat striking fact is the manifold variations of a pet typical form. twenty-three shock expletives, e.g., are, "wouldn't that ---- you?" the blank being filled by jar, choke, cook, rattle, scorch, get, start, etc., or instead of _you_ adjectives are devised. feeling is so intense and massive, and psychic processes are so rapid, forcible, and undeveloped that the pithiness of some of those expressions makes them brilliant and creative works of genius, and after securing an apprenticeship are sure of adoption. their very lawlessness helps to keep speech from rigidity and desiccation, and they hit off nearly every essential phrase of adolescent life and experience. conventional modes of speech do not satisfy the adolescent, so that he is often either reticent or slangy. walt whitman[ ] says that slang is "an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and to express itself illimitably, which in the highest walks produces poets and poems"; and again, "daring as it is to say so, in the growth of language it is certain that the retrospect of slang from the start would be the recalling from their nebulous condition of all that is poetical in the stores of human utterance." lowell[ ] says, "there is death in the dictionary, and where language is too strictly limited by convention, the ground for expression to grow in is limited also, and we get a potted literature, chinese dwarfs instead of healthy trees." lounsbury asserts that "slang is an effort on the part of the users of language to say something more vividly, strongly, concisely than the language existing permits it to be said. it is the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed." conradi adds in substance that weak or vicious slang is too feeble to survive, and what is vital enough to live fills a need. the final authority is the people, and it is better to teach youth to discriminate between good and bad slang rather than to forbid it entirely. emerson calls it language in the making, its crude, vital, material. it is often an effective school of moral description, a palliative for profanity, and expresses the natural craving for superlatives. faults are hit off and condemned with the curtness sententiousness of proverbs devised by youth to sanctify itself and correct its own faults. the pedagogue objects that it violates good form and established usage, but why should the habits of hundreds of years ago control when they can not satisfy the needs of youth, which requires a _lingua franca_ of its own, often called "slanguage"? most high school and college youth of both sexes have two distinct styles, that of the classroom which is as unnatural as the etiquette of a royal drawing-room reception or a formal call, and the other, that of their own breezy, free, natural life. often these two have no relation to or effect upon each other, and often the latter is at times put by with good resolves to speak as purely and therefore as self-consciously as they knew, with petty fines for every slang expression. but very few, and these generally husky boys, boldly try to assert their own rude but vigorous vernacular in the field of school requirements. these simple studies in this vast field demonstrate little or nothing, but they suggest very much. slang commonly expresses a moral judgment and falls into ethical categories. it usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the language of the school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a description of acts. to restate it in correct english would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-possession, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentative mental content that youth most needs, and which the sensuous presentation methods of teaching have neglected. those who see in speech nothing but form condemn it because it is vulgar. youth has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly. their pith and meatiness are a standing illustration of the need of condensation for intellectual objects that later growth analyzes. these expressions also illustrate the law that the higher and larger the spiritual content, the grosser must be the illustration in which it is first couched. further studies now in progress will, i believe, make this still clearer. again, we see in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. one is to affect foreign equivalents. this at first suggests an appetency for another language like the dog-latin gibberish of children. it is one of the motives that prompts many to study latin or french, but it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of superiority and the love of mystifying others. the other is a very different impulse to widen the vernacular. to pause to learn several foreign equivalents of things of sense may be anti-educational if it limits the expansion of thought in our own tongue. the two are, in fact, often inversely related to each other. in giving a foreign synonym when the mind seeks a new native word, the pedagogue does not deal fairly. in this irradiation into the mother tongue, sometimes experience with the sentiment or feeling, act, fact, or object precedes, and then a name for it is demanded, or conversely the sound, size, oddness or jingle of the word is first attractive and the meaning comes later. the latter needs the recognition and utilization which the former already has. lists of favorite words should be wrought out for spelling and writing and their meanings illustrated, for these have often the charm of novelty as on the frontier of knowledge and enlarge the mental horizon like new discoveries. we must not starve this voracious new appetite "for words as instruments of thought." interest in story-telling rises till twelve or thirteen, and thereafter falls off perhaps rather suddenly, partly because youth is now more interested in receiving than in giving. as in the drawing curve we saw a characteristic age when the child loses pleasure in creating as its power of appreciating pictures rapidly arises, so now, as the reading curve rises, auditory receptivity makes way for the visual method shown in the rise of the reading curve with augmented zest for book-method of acquisition. darkness or twilight enhances the story interest in children, for it eliminates the distraction of sense and encourages the imagination to unfold its pinions, but the youthful fancy is less bat-like and can take its boldest flights in broad daylight. a camp-fire, or an open hearth with tales of animals, ghosts, heroism, and adventure can teach virtue, and vocabulary, style, and substance in their native unity. the pubescent reading passion is partly the cause and partly an effect of the new zest in and docility to the adult world and also of the fact that the receptive are now and here so immeasurably in advance of the creative powers. now the individual transcends his own experience and learns to profit by that of others. there is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints, and the work here is that of the prospector and not of the careful miner. it is the age of skipping and sampling, of pressing the keys lightly. what is acquired is not examinable but only suggestive. perhaps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. it can not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is at hand for use. as augustine said of god, so the child might say of most of his mental content in these psychic areas, "if you ask me, i do not know; but if you do not ask me, i know very well"--a case analogous to the typical girl who exclaimed to her teacher, "i can do and understand this perfectly if you only won't explain it." that is why examinations in english, if not impossible, as goldwin smith and oxford hold, are very liable to be harmful, and recitations and critical notes an impertinence, and always in danger of causing arrest of this exquisite romantic function in which literature comes in the closest relation to life, keeping the heart warm, reënforcing all its good motives, preforming choices, and universalizing its sympathies. r. w. bullock[ ] classified and tabulated , returns from school-children from the third to the twelfth grade, both inclusive, concerning their reading. from this it appeared that the average boy of the third grade "read . books in six months; that the average falls to . in the fourth and fifth grades and rises to a maximum of . at the seventh grade, then drops quite regularly to in the twelfth grade at the end of the high school course." the independent tabulation of returns from other cities showed little variation. "grade for grade, the girls read more than the boys, and as a rule they reach their maximum a year sooner, and from a general maximum of . books there is a drop to . at the end of the course." the age of reading may be postponed or accelerated perhaps nearly a year by the absence or presence of library facilities. tabulating the short stories read per week, it was found that these averaged . in the third grade, rose to . per week in the seventh grade, and in the twelfth had fallen to . , showing the same general tendency. the percentage tables for boys' preference for eight classes of stories are here only suggestive. "war stories seem popular with third grade boys, and that liking seems well marked through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. stories of adventure are popular all through the heroic period, reaching their maximum in the eighth and ninth grades. the liking for biography and travel or exploration grows gradually to a climax in the ninth grade, and remains well up through the course. the tender sentiment has little charm for the average grade boy, and only in the high school course does he acknowledge any considerable use of love stories. in the sixth grade he is fond of detective stories, but they lose their charm for him as he grows older." for girls, "stories of adventure are popular in the sixth grade, and stories of travel are always enjoyed. the girl likes biography, but in the high school, true to her sex, she prefers stories of great women rather than great men, but because she can not get them reads those of men. pity it is that the biographies of so few of the world's many great women are written. the taste for love stories increases steadily to the end of the high school course. beyond that we have no record." thus "the maximum amount of reading is done in every instance between the sixth and eighth grades, the average being in the seventh grade at an average age of fourteen and one-tenth years." seventy-five per cent of all discuss their reading with some one, and the writer urges that "when ninety-five per cent of the boys prefer adventure or seventy-five per cent of the girls prefer love stories, that is what they are going to read," and the duty of the teacher or librarian is to see that they have both in the highest, purest form. henderson[ ] found that of , children from nine to fifteen, least books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, and that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only break being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at the age of twelve." for fiction the high-water mark was reached for both sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for girls than for boys. "at the age of thirteen the record for travel and adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally so. there is a gradual rise in history with age, and a corresponding decline in fiction." kirkpatrick[ ] classified returns from , children from the fourth to the ninth grade in answer to questions that concerned their reading. he found a sudden increase in the sixth grade, when children are about twelve, when there is often a veritable, reading craze. dolls are abandoned and "plays, games, and companionship of others are less attractive, and the reading hunger in many children becomes insatiable and is often quite indiscriminate." it seems to "most frequently begin at about twelve years of age and continue at least three or four years," after which increased home duties, social responsibilities, and school requirements reduce it and make it more discriminating in quality. "the fact that boys read about twice, as much history and travel as girls and only about two-thirds as much poetry and stories shows beyond question that the emotional and intellectual wants of boys and girls are essentially different before sexual maturity." miss vostrovsky[ ] found that among , children there was a great increase of taste for reading as shown by the number of books taken from the library, which began with a sharp rise at eleven and increased steadily to nineteen, when her survey ended; that boys read most till seventeen, and then girls took the precedence. the taste for juvenile stories was declining and that for fiction and general literature was rapidly increased. at about the sixteenth year a change took place in both sexes, "showing then the beginning of a greater interest in works of a more general character." girls read more fiction than boys at every age, but the interest in it begins to be very decided at adolescence. with girls it appears to come a little earlier and with greater suddenness, while the juvenile story maintains a strong hold upon boys even after the fifteenth year. the curve of decline in juvenile stories is much more pronounced in both sexes than the rise of fiction. through the teens there is a great increase in the definiteness of answers to the questions why books were chosen. instead of being read because they were "good" or "nice," they were read because recommended, and later because of some special interest. girls relied on recommendations more than boys. the latter were more guided by reason the former by sentiment. nearly three times as many boys in the early teens chose books because they were exciting or venturesome. even the stories which girls called exciting were tame compared with those chosen by boys. girls chose books more than four times as often because of children in them, and more often because they ware funny. boys care very little for style, but must have incidents and heroes. the author says "the special interest that girls have in fiction begins about the age of adolescence. after the sixteenth year the extreme delight in stories fades," or school demands become more imperative and uniform. girls prefer domestic stories and those with characters like themselves and scenes like those with which they are familiar. "no boy confesses to a purely girl's story, while girls frankly do to an interesting story about boys. women writers seem to appeal more to girls, men writers to boys. hence, the authors named by each sex are almost entirely different. in fiction more standard works, were drawn by boys than by girls." "when left to develop according to chance, the tendency is often toward a selection of books which unfit one for every-day living, either by presenting, on the one hand, too many scenes of delicious excitement or, on the other, by narrowing the vision to the wider possibilities of life." out of full answers, lancaster found that "had what might be called a craze for reading at some time in the adolescent period," and thinks parents little realize the intensity of the desire to read or how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste and inoculate against reading what is bad. the curve rises rapidly from eleven to fourteen, culminates at fifteen, after which it falls rapidly. some become omnivorous readers of everything in their way; others are profoundly, and perhaps for life, impressed with some single book; others have now crazes for history, now for novels, now for dramas or for poetry; some devour encyclopedias; some imagine themselves destined to be great novelists and compose long romances; some can give the dates with accuracy of the different periods of the development of their tastes from the fairy tales of early childhood to the travels and adventures of boyhood and then to romance, poetry, history, etc; and some give the order of their development of taste for the great poets. the careful statistics of dr. reyer show that the greatest greed of reading is from the age of fifteen to twenty-two, and is on the average greatest of all at twenty. he finds that ten per cent of the young people of this age do forty per cent of all the reading. before twenty the curve ascends very rapidly, to fall afterward yet more rapidly as the need of bread-winning becomes imperative. after thirty-five the great public reads but little. every youth should have his or her own library, which, however small, should be select. to seal some knowledge of their content with the delightful sense of ownership helps to preserve the apparatus of culture, keeps green early memories, or makes one of the best tangible mementoes of parental care and love. for the young especially, the only ark of safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer's ink is to turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality. while literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which from the silent alcoves of our nearly , american libraries rule the world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conversation bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a superfetation of alien ideas. the reading passion may rage with great intensity when the soul takes its first long flight in the world of books, and ninety per cent of all conradi's cases showed it. of these, thirty-two per cent read to have the feelings stirred and the desire of knowledge was a far less frequent motive. some read to pass idle time, others to appear learned or to acquire a style or a vocabulary. romance led. some specialized, and with some the appetite was omnivorous. some preferred books about or addressed to children, some fairy tales, and some sought only those for adults. the night is often invaded and some become "perfectly wild" over exciting adventures or the dangers and hardships of true lovers, laughing and crying as the story turns from grave to gay, and a few read several books a week. some were forbidden and read by stealth alone, or with books hidden in their desks or under school books. some few live thus for years in an atmosphere highly charged with romance, and burn out their fires wickedly early with a sudden and extreme expansiveness that makes life about them uninteresting and unreal, and that reacts to commonplace later. conradi prints some two or three hundred favorite books and authors of early and of later adolescence. the natural reading of early youth is not classic nor blighted by compulsion or uniformity for all. this age seeks to express originality and personality in individual choices and tastes. suggestive and briefly descriptive lists of best books and authors by authorities in different fields on which some time is spent in making selection, talks about books, pooling knowledge of them, with no course of reading even advised and much less prescribed, is the best guidance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. others before professor de long, of colorado, have held that the power of reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures and as the artist doré was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. school pressure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous reading, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve to read encyclopedias, and even libraries, or to sample everything to be found in books at home. along with, but never suppressing, it there should be some stated reading, but this should lay down only kinds of reading like the four emphasized in the last chapter or offer a goodly number of large alternative groups of books and authors, like the five of the leland stanford university, and permit wide liberty of choice to both teacher and pupil. few triumphs of the uniformitarians, who sacrifice individual needs to mechanical convenience in dealing with youth in masses, have been so sad as marking off and standardizing a definite quantum of requirements here. instead of irrigating a wide field, the well-springs of literary interest are forced to cut a deep canyon and leave wide desert plains of ignorance on either side. besides imitation, which reads what others do, is the desire to read something no one else does, and this is a palladium of individuality. bad as is the principle, the selections are worse, including the saccharinity ineffable of tennyson's princess (a strange expression of the progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous latinity authors which for the saxon boy suggest david fighting in saul's armor, and which warp and pervert the nascent sentence-sense on a foreign model. worst of all, the prime moral purpose of youthful reading is ignored in choices based on form and style; and a growing profusion of notes that distract from content to language, the study of which belongs in the college if not in the university, develops the tendencies of criticism before the higher powers of sympathetic appreciation have done their work.[ ] (b) other new mental powers and aptitudes are as yet too little studied. very slight are the observations so far made, of children's historic, which is so clearly akin to literary, interest and capacity. with regard to this and several other subjects in the curriculum we are in the state of watts when he gazed at the tea-kettle and began to dream of the steam-engine; we are just recognizing a new power and method destined to reconstruct and increase the efficiency of education, but only after a long and toilsome period of limited successes. mrs. barnes[ ], told a story without date, place, name, or moral and compared the questions which , children would like to have answered about it. she found that the interest of girls in persons, or the number who asked the question "who," culminated at twelve, when it coincided with that of boys, but that the latter continued to rise to fifteen. the interest to know "place where" events occurred culminated at eleven with girls, and at fifteen, and at a far higher point, with boys. the questions "how" and "why," calling for the method and reason, both culminated at twelve for girls and fifteen for boys, but were more infrequent and showed less age differences than the preceding question. interest in the results of the action was most pronounced of all, culminating at twelve in girls and fifteen in boys. details and time excited far less interest, the former jointly culminating for both sexes at eleven. interest in the truth of the narrative was extremely slight, although it became manifest at fifteen, and was growing at sixteen. the number of inferences drawn steadily increased with age, although the increase was very slight after thirteen. both legitimate and critical inferences increased after eleven, while imaginative inferences at that age had nearly reached their maximum. interest in names was very strong throughout, as in primitive people. boys were more curious concerning "who," "where," and "how"; girls as to "why." in general, the historic curiosity of boys was greater than that of girls, and culminated later. the inferences drawn from an imagined finding of a log-house, boat, and arrows on a lonely island indicate that the power of inference, both legitimate and imaginative, develops strongly at twelve and thirteen, after which doubt and the critical faculties are apparent; which coincides with mr. m.a. tucker's conclusion, that doubt develops at thirteen and that personal inference diminishes about that age. the children were given two accounts of the fall of fort sumter, one in the terms of a school history and the other a despatch of equal length from major anderson, and asked which was best, should be kept, and why. choice of the narrative steadily declined after eleven and that of the despatch increased, the former reaching its lowest, the latter its highest, point at fifteen, indicating a preference for the first-hand record. the number of those whose choice was affected by style showed no great change, from twelve to fifteen, but rose very rapidly for the nest two years. those who chose the despatch because it was true, signed, etc., increased rapidly in girls and boys throughout the teens, and the preference for the telegram as a more direct source increased very rapidly from thirteen to seventeen. other studies of this kind led mrs. barnes to conclude that children remembered items by groups; that whole groups were often omitted; that those containing most action were best remembered; that what is remembered is remembered with great accuracy; that generalities are often made more specific; that the number of details a child carries away from a connected narrative is not much above fifty, so that their numbers should be limited; and from it all was inferred the necessity of accuracy, of massing details about central characters or incidents, letting action dominate, omitting all that is aside from the main line of the story, of bringing out cause and effect and dramatizing where possible. miss patterson[ ] collated the answers of , children to the question "what does mean?" the blanks "don't know" decreased very rapidly from six to eight, and thereafter maintained a slight but constant percentage. those who expanded the phase a little without intelligence were most numerous from eight to ten, while the proportion who gave a correct explanation rose quite steadily for both sexes and culminated at fourteen for girls and fifteen for boys. the latter only indicates the pupils of real historic knowledge. the writer concludes that "the sense of historical time is altogether lacking with children of seven, and may be described as slight up to the age of twelve." history, it is thought, should be introduced early with no difference between boys and girls, but "up to the age of twelve or thirteen it should be presented in a series of striking biographies and events, appearing if possible in contemporary ballads and chronicles, and illustrated by maps, chronological charts, and as richly as possible by pictures of contemporary objects, buildings, and people." at the age of fourteen or fifteen, another sort of work should appear. original sources should still be used, but they should illustrate not "the picture of human society moving before us in a long panorama, but should give us the opportunity to study the organization, thought, feeling, of a time as seen in its concrete embodiments, its documents, monuments, men, and books." the statesmen, thinkers, poets, should now exceed explorers and fighters; reflection and interpretation, discrimination of the true from the false, comparison, etc., are now first in order; while later yet, perhaps in college, should come severer methods and special monographic study. studies of mentality, so well advanced for infants and so well begun for lower grades, are still very meager for adolescent stages so far as they bear on growth in the power to deal with arithmetic, drawing and pictures, puzzles, superstitions, collections, attention, reason, etc. enough has been done to show that with authority to collect data on plans and by methods that can now be operated and with aid which should now be appropriated by school boards and teachers' associations, incalculable pedagogic economy could be secured and the scientific and professional character of teaching every topic in upper grammar and high school and even in the early college grades be greatly enhanced. to enter upon this laborious task in every branch of study is perhaps our chief present need and duty to our youth in school, although individual studies like that of binet[ ] belong elsewhere. (c) the studies of memory up the grades show characteristic adolescent changes, and some of these results are directly usable in school. bolton[ ] tested the power of , children to remember and write dictated digits, and found, of course, increasing accuracy with the older pupils. he also found that the memory span increased with age rather than with the growth of intelligence as determined by grade. the pupils depended largely upon visualisation, and this and concentrated attention suggested that growth of memory did not necessarily accompany intellectual advancement. girls generally surpassed boys, and as with clicks too rapid to be counted, it was found that when the pupils reached the limits of their span, the number of digits was overestimated. the power of concentrated and prolonged attention was tested. the probability of error for the larger number of digits, and , decreased in a marked way with the development of pubescence, at least up to fourteen years, with the suggestion of a slight rise again at fifteen. in comprehensive tests of the ability of chicago children to remember figures seen, heard, or repeated by them, it was found that, from seven to nine, auditory were slightly better remembered than visual impressions. from that age the latter steadily increased over the former. after thirteen, auditory memory increased but little, and was already about ten per cent behind visual, which continued to increase at least till seventeen. audiovisual memory was better than either alone, and the span of even this was improved when articulatory memory was added. when the tests were made upon pupils of the same age in different grades it was found in chicago that memory power, whether tested by sight, hearing, or articulation, was best in those pupils whose school standing was highest, and least where standing was lowest. when a series of digits was immediately repeated orally and a record made, it was found[ ] that while from the age of eight to twelve the memory span increased only eight points, from fourteen to eighteen it increased thirteen points. the number of correct reproductions of numbers of seven places increased during the teens, although this class of children remain about one digit behind normal children of corresponding age. in general, though not without exceptions, it was found that intelligence grew with memory span, although the former is far more inferior to that of the normal child than the latter, and also that weakness of this kind of memory is not an especially prominent factor of weak-mindedness. shaw[ ] tested memory in school children by dividing a story of words into phrases, having it read and immediately reproduced by them, and selecting alternate grades from the third grammar to the end of the high school, with a few college students. the maximum power of this kind of memory was attained by boys in the high school period. girls remembered forty-three per cent in the seventh grade, and in the high school forty-seven per cent. the increase by two-year periods was most rapid between the third and fifth grades. four terms were remembered on the average by at least ninety per cent of the pupils, by fifty per cent, and by ten per cent. the story written out in the terms remembered by each percentage from ten to ninety affords a most interesting picture of the growth of memory, and even its errors of omission, insertion, substitution and displacement. "the growth of memory is more rapid in the case of girls than boys, and the figures suggest a coincidence with the general law, that the rapid development incident to puberty occurs earlier in girls than in boys." in a careful study of children's memory, kemsies[ ] concludes that the quality of memory improves with age more rapidly than the quantity. w.g. monroe tested boys and girls, well distributed, from seven to seventeen years of age, and found a marked rise for both visual and auditory memory at fifteen for both sexes. for both sexes, also, auditory memory was best at sixteen and visual at fifteen. when accuracy in remembering the length of tone was used as a test, it was found there was loss from six to seven and gain from seven to eight for both sexes. from eight to nine girls lost rapidly for one and gained rapidly for the following year, while boys were nearly stationary till ten, after which both sexes gained to their maximum at fourteen years of age and declined for the two subsequent years, both gaining power from sixteen to seventeen, but neither attaining the accuracy they had at fourteen.[ ] [illustration: girls and boys at memory reproductions compared.] netschajeff[ ] subjected school children, well distributed between the ages of nine and eighteen, to the following tests. twelve very distinct objects were shown them, each for two seconds, which must them be immediately written down. twelve very distinct noises were made out of sight; numbers of two figures each were read; three-syllable words, which were names of familiar objects, objects that suggested noises, words designating touch, temperature, and muscle sensations, words describing states of feeling, and names of abstract ideas also were given them. the above eight series of twelve each were all reproduced in writing, and showed that each kind of memory here tested increased with age, with some slight tendency to decline at or just before puberty, then to rise and to slightly decline after the sixteenth or seventeenth year. memory for objects showed the greatest amount of increase during the year studied, and works for feeling next, although at all ages the latter was considerably below the former. boys showed stronger memory for real impressions, and girls excelled for numbers and words. the difference of these two kinds of memory was less with girls than with boys. the greatest difference between the sexes lay between eleven and fourteen years. this seems, at eighteen or nineteen, to be slightly increased. "this is especially great at the age of puberty." children from nine to eleven have but slight power of reproducing emotions, but this increases in the next few years very rapidly, as does that of the abstract words. girls from nine to eleven deal better with words than with objects; boys slightly excel with objects. illusions in reproducing words which mistake sense, sound, and rhythm, which is not infrequent with younger children, decline with age especially at puberty. up to this period girls are most subject to these illusions, and afterward boys. the preceding tables, in which the ordinates represent the number of correct reproductions and the abscissas the age, are interesting. lobsien made tests similar to those of netschajeff,[ ] with modifications for greater accuracy, upon boys and girls from nine to fourteen and a half years of age. the preceding tables show the development of the various kinds of memory for boys and girls: boys. age. objects noises number visual acoustic touch feeling sounds concepts concepts concepts concepts - - / . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . normal . . . . . . . . value. girls. - - / . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . - . . . . . . . . normal . . . . . . . . value. the table for boys shows in the fourteenth year a marked increase of memory for objects, noises, and feelings, especially as compared with the marked relative decline the preceding year, when there was a decided increase in visual concepts and senseless sounds. the twelfth year shows the greatest increase in number memory, acoustic impressions, touch, and feeling. the tenth and eleventh years show marked increase of memory for objects and their names. thus the increase in the strength of memory is by no means the same year by year, but progress focuses on some forms and others are neglected. hence each type of memory shows an almost regular increase and decrease in relative strength. the table for girls shown marked increase of all memory forms about the twelfth year. this relative increase is exceeded only in the fourteenth year for visual concepts. the thirteenth year shows the greatest increase for sounds and a remarkable regression for objects in passing from the lowest to the next grade above. in the accuracy of reproducing the order of impressions, girls much exceeded boys at all ages. for seen object, their accuracy was twice that of boys, the boys excelling in order only in number. in general, ability to reproduce a series of impressions increases and decreases with the power to reproduce in any order, but by no means in direct proportion to it. the effect of the last member in a series by a purely mechanical reproduction is best in boys. the range and energy of reproduction is far higher than ordered sequence. in general girls slightly exceed boys in recalling numbers, touch concepts, and sounds, and largely exceed in recalling feeling concepts, real things and visual concept. colegrove[ ] tabulated returns from the early memories of , correspondents with , memories, from which he reached the conclusions, represented in the following curves, for the earliest three memories of white males and females. in the cuts on the following page, the heavy line represents the first memory, the broken the second, and the dotted the third. age at the time of reporting is represented in distance to the right, and the age of the person at the time of the occurrence remembered is represented by the distance upward. "there is a rise in all the curves at adolescence. this shows that, from the age of twelve to fifteen, boys do not recall so early memories as they do both before and after this period." this colegrove ascribes to the fact that the present seems so large and rich. at any rate, "the earliest memories of boys at the age of fourteen average almost four years." his curves for girls show that the age of all the first three memories which they are able to recall is higher at fourteen than at any period before or after; that at seven and eight the average age of the first things recalled is nearly a year earlier than it is at fourteen. this means that at puberty there is a marked and characteristic obliteration of infantile memories which lapse to oblivion with augmented absorption in the present. [illustration: untitled graph.] it was found that males have the greatest number of memories for protracted or repeated occurrences, for people, and clothing, topographical and logical matters; that females have better memories for novel occurrences or single impressions. already at ten and eleven motor memories begin to decrease for females and increase for males. at fourteen and fifteen, motor memories nearly culminate for males, but still further decline for females. the former show a marked decrease in memory for relatives and playmates and an increase for other persons. sickness and accidents to self are remembered less by males and better by females, as are memories of fears. at eighteen and nineteen there is a marked and continued increase in the visual memories of each sex and the auditory memory of females. memory for the activity of others increases for both, but far more strongly for males. colegrove concludes from his data that "the period of adolescence is one of great psychical awaking. a wide range of memories is found at this time. from the fourteenth year with girls and the fifteenth with boys the auditory memories are strongly developed. at the dawn of adolescence the motor memory of voice nearly culminates, and they have fewer memories of sickness and accidents to self. during this time the memory of other persons and the activity of others is emphasized in case of both boys and girls. in general, at this period the special sensory memories are numerous, and it is the golden age for motor memories. now, too, the memories of high ideals, self-sacrifice, and self-forgetfulness are cherished. wider interests than self and immediate friends become the objects of reflection and recollection." after twenty there is marked change in the memory content. the male acquires more and the female less visual and auditory memories. the memories of the female are more logical, and topographical features increase. memories of sickness and accidents to self decrease with the males and increase with the females, while in the case of both there is relative decline in the memories of sickness and accident to others. from all this it would appear that different memories culminate at different periods, and bear immediate relation to the whole mental life of the period. while perhaps some of the finer analyses of colegrove may invite further confirmation, his main results given above are not only suggestive, but rendered very plausible by his evidence. statistics based upon replies to the question as to whether pleasant or unpleasant experiences were best remembered, show that the former increase at eleven, rise rapidly at fourteen, and culminate at eighteen for males, and that the curve of painful memories follows the same course, although for both there is a drop at fifteen. for females, the pleasant memories increase rapidly from eleven to thirteen, decline a little at fourteen, rise again at sixteen, and culminate at seventeen, and the painful memories follow nearly the same course, only with a slight drop at fifteen. thus, up to twenty-two for males, there is a marked preponderance of pleasant over painful memories, although the two rise and fall together. after thirty, unpleasant memories are but little recalled. for the indians and negroes in this census, unpleasant memories play a far more and often preponderating rôle suggesting persecution and sad experiences. different elements of the total content of memory come to prominence at different ages. he also found that the best remembered years of life are sixteen to seventeen for males and fifteen for females, and that in general the adolescent period has more to do than any other in forming and furnishing the memory plexus, while the seventh and eighth year are most poorly remembered. it is also known that many false memories insert themselves into the texture of remembered experiences. one dreams a friend is dead and thinks she is till she is met one day in the street; or dreams of a fire and inquires about it in the morning; dreams of a present and searches the house for it next day; delays breakfast for a friend, who arrived the night before in a dream, to come down to breakfast; a child hunts for a bushel of pennies dreamed of, etc. these phantoms falsify our memory most often, according to dr. colegrove, between sixteen and nineteen. mnemonic devices prompt children to change rings to keep appointments, tie knots in the handkerchief, put shoes on the dressing-table, hide garments, associate faces with hoods, names with acts, things, or qualities they suggest; visualize, connect figures, letters with colors, etc. from a scrutiny of the original material, which i was kindly allowed to make, this appears to rise rapidly at puberty. [footnote : see my ideal school as based on child study. proceedings of the national educational association, , pp. - .] [footnote : charles p.g. scott: the number of words in the english and other languages. princeton university bulletin, may, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : the teaching of english. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see my some aspects of the early sense of self. american journal of psychology, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : sprachgeschichte und sprachpsychologie, mit rucksicht auf b. delbrück's "grundfragen der sprachforschung." leipzig, w. engelmann, ] [footnote : latin in the high school. by edward conradi. pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : the psychological and pedagogical aspect of language. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's interest in words. pedagogical seminary, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : children's interests in words, slang, stories, etc. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : american journal of psychology, april, , vol. , p. _et seq._] [footnote : american journal of psychology, january, , vol. , pp. - . see also vol. , p. _et seq._] [footnote : north american review, november, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : introduction to the biglow papers, series ii.] [footnote : some observations on children's reading. proceedings of the national educational association, , pp. - l.] [footnote : report on child reading. new york report of state superintendent, , vol. , p. .] [footnote : children's reading. north-western monthly, december, , vol. , pp. - , and january, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : a study of children's reading tastes. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : perhaps the best and most notable school reader is das deutsche lesebuch, begun nearly fifty years ago by hopf and paulsiek, and lately supplemented by a corps of writers headed by döbeln, all in ten volumes of over , pages and containing nearly six times as much matter as the largest american series. many men for years went over the history of german literature, from the eddas and nibelungenlied down, including a few living writers, carefully selecting saga, legends, _märchen_, fables, proverbs, hymns, a few prayers, bible tales, conundrums, jests, and humorous tales, with many digests, epitomes and condensation of great standards, quotations, epic, lyric, dramatic poetry, adventure, exploration, biography, with sketches of the life of each writer quoted, with a large final volume on the history of german literature. all this, it is explained, is "_stataric_" or required to be read between _octava_[a] and _obersecunda_. it is no aimless anthology or chrestomathy like chambers's encyclopedia, but it is perhaps the best product of prolonged concerted study to select from a vast field the best to feed each nascent stage of later childhood and early youth, and to secure the maximum of pleasure and profit. the ethical end is dominant throughout this pedagogic canon.] [footnote a: the prussian gymnasium, whose course is classical and fits for the university, has nine classes in three divisions of three classes each. the lower classes are octava, septa, sexta, quinta, and quarta; the middle classes, untertertia, obertertia, and untersecunda; the higher classes, obersecunda, unterprima, and oberprima. pupils must be at least nine years of age and have done three years preparatory work before entrance.] [footnote : the historic sense among children. in her studies in historical method. d. c. heath and co., boston, , p. .] [footnote : special study on children's sense of historical time. mrs. barnes's studies in historical method, d.c. heath and co., boston, , p. .] [footnote : l'etude expérimentale de l'intelligence. schleicher frères, paris, .] [footnote : the growth of memory in school children. american journal of psychology, april, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : contribution to the psychology and pedagogy of feeble-minded children. by g.e. johnson. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , p. .] [footnote : a test of memory in school children. pedagogical seminary, october, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : zeitschrift für pädagogische psychologie, pathologie und hygiene. february, . jahrgang ii, heft , pp. - .] [footnote : see scripture: scientific child study. transactions of the illinois society for child study, may, , vol. , no. , pp. - .] [footnote : experimentelle untersuchungen über die gedächtnissentwickelung bei schulkindern. zeits. f. psychologie, u. physiologie der sinnes-organe, november, . bd. . heft , pp. - .] [footnote : see note , p. .] [footnote : memory: an inductive study. by f.w. colegrove. henry holt and co., new york, , p. . see also individual memories. american journal of psychology, january, , vol. , pp - .] * * * * * chapter xi the education of girls equal opportunities of higher education now open--brings new dangers to women--ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes should and do diverge--different interests--sex tension--girls more mature than boys at the same age--radical psychic and physiological differences between the sexes--the bachelor women--needed reconstruction--food--sleep--regimen--manners--religion--regularity--the topics for a girls' curriculum--the eternal womanly. the long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and other opportunities is essentially won all along the line. her academic achievements have forced conservative minds to admit that her intellect is not inferior to that of man. the old cloistral seclusion and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals are arising. it has been a noble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman's emancipation. the caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as silly as a goose" who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to ask how much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and three for a woman, and go back with a happy "thank you, my dear"; those who love to be called baby, and appeal to instincts half parental in their lovers and husbands; those who find all the sphere they desire in a doll's house, like nora's, and are content to be men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest in the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive only as a diminishing remainder. marriages do still occur where woman's ignorance and helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men, and may be happy, but such cases are no farther from the present ideal and tendency on the one hand than on the other are those which consist in intellectual partnerships, in which there is no segregation of interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment. a typical contemporary writer[ ] thinks the question whether a girl shall receive a college education is very like the same question for boys. even if the four k's, _kirche, kinder, kuchen,_ and _kleider_ (which may be translated by the four c's, _church, children, cooking,_ and _clothes_), are her vocation, college may help her. the best training for a young woman is not the old college course that has proven unfit for young men. most college men look forward to a professional training as few women do. the latter have often greater sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just as serious and important as that of men. the best results are where the sexes are brought closer together, because their separation generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the profession of womanhood. with girls, literature and language take precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman "is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than substance. she may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." in most separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in colleges for men. in the annex system, she does not get the best of the institution. by the coeducation method, "young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. the women do more work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence of the society of men. there is less silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. in coeducational institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are rarely known. the responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility." the character of college work has not been lowered but raised by coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak colleges are coeducational. social strain, jordan thinks, is easily regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the college atmosphere is highly prized. the reasons for the present reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. some think that girls do not help athletics; that men count for most because they are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the place of specialization. women take up higher education because they like it; men because their careers depend upon it. hence their studies are more objective and face the world as it is. in college the women do as well as men, but not in the university. the half-educated woman as a social factor has produced many soft lecture courses and cheap books. this is an argument for the higher education of the sex. finally, jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and he believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual friendship. from the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic the education of women, the fewer children and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. not intelligence, but education by present man-made ways, is inversely as fecundity. the sooner and the more clearly this is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without many notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization. for one, i plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all their grounds and also on others, for the higher education of women, and would welcome them to every opportunity available to men if they can not do better; but i would open to their election another education, which every competent judge would pronounce more favorable to motherhood, under the influence of female principals who do not publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should study motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry; who encourage them to elect "no special subjects because they are women," and who think infant psychology "foolish." various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in england.[ ] some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do almost everything that the boys do in both study and play. there are girl prefects; cricket teams are formed sometimes of both sexes, but often the sexes matched against each other; one play-yard, a dual staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and girls are not tabooed, etc. in other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, and their relations are otherwise restricted. the opinion of english writers generally favors coeducation up to about the beginning of the teens, and from there on views are more divided. it is admitted that, if there is a very great preponderance of either sex over the other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is distinctly greater than that of the other. on the other hand, several urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of the other. some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers than others. coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. many people believe that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially in the upper grades, than boys. it is interesting, however, to observe the differences that still persist. certain games, like football and boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or caned as english boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak, although they soon learn this. they may be a little in danger of being roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys. girls are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and idle. girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. in this, girls are often quite at sea. one writer speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. it is urged, too, that singing classes the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. in many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is broadened. in manual training, girls excel in all artistic work; boys, in carpentry. girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright and thus influencing the tone of the school. calamitous as it world be for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to be given entirely to men. perhaps the great women teachers, whose life and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of arnold and thring with boys, are dying out. very likely economic motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits only. finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of moral tone. the vices that infest boys' schools, which arnold thought a quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished. healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored. for either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex. not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them almost diametrically opposite in the two sexes. hard as it is _per se_, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. they are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of their surroundings. this is truest of the higher education, and more so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and vocational training. woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and demands more and more with advancing age an education that is essentially liberal and humanistic. this is progressively hard when the sexes differentiate in the higher grades. moreover, nature decrees that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics of the higher education. now that woman has by general consent attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training that fits her own nature as well or better. so long as she strives to be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature. divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period--in the early teens. at this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and culminating in nubility, has done its work. the family and the home abundantly recognize this tendency. at twelve or fourteen, brothers and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before. their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes. history, anthropology, and sociology, a well as home life, abundantly illustrate this. this is normal and biological. what our schools and other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. we should respect the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very different thing from fatherhood. neither sex should copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex symphony. i have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural differentiations seen everywhere else. i recognize, of course, the great argument of economy. indeed, we should save money and effort could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds. we could thus give better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. i am by no means ready to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but we can already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss with it. on the one hand, no doubt each sex develops some of its own best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question still remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation secures this end? as has been said, girls and boys are often interested in different aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the view-point of both and bring it into sympathy with that of the other, but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted to the sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. no doubt some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct more thoughtful, and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased. there is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated; they are made more urbane and their thoughts of sex made more healthful. in some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. we should ask, however, what is nature's way at this stage of life? whether boys, in order to be well virified later, ought not to be so boisterous and even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether, on the other hand, girls to be best matured ought not to have their sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month, there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little monstrous, in school associations with boys when she must suppress and conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which suggest withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of inflorescence. it is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard struggle of existence in the world and from mental effort in the school. medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that through this period she should be, as it were, "turned out to grass," or should lie fallow, so far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth the time, no doubt often go too far, but their unanimous voice should not entirely be disregarded. it is not this, however, that i have chiefly in mind here, but the effects of too familiar relations and, especially, of the identical work, treatment, and environment of the modern school. we have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always those of their own sex, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the opposite sex, or those of men. that the ideals of pubescent girls are not found in the great and noble women of the world or in their literature, but more and more in men, suggests a divorce between the ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of the race. we are not furnished in our public schools with adequate womanly ideals in history or literature. the new love of freedom which women have lately felt inclines girls to abandon the home for the office. "it surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly that they would rather be men than women." more than one-half of the schoolgirls in these censuses choose male ideals, as if those of femininity are disintegrating. a recent writer,[ ] in view of this fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend, we shall soon have a female sex without a female character." in the progressive numerical feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not encourage the development of those that constitute the glory of womanhood. "at every age from eight to sixteen, girls named from three to twenty more ideals than boys." "these facts indicate a condition of diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a need of integration." when we turn to boys the case is different. in most public high schools girls preponderate, especially in the upper classes, and in many of them the boys that remain are practically in a girls' school, sometimes taught chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers at an age when strong men should be in control more than at any other period of life. boys need a different discipline and moral regimen and atmosphere. they also need a different method of work. girls excel them in learning and memorization, accepting studies upon suggestion or authority, but are often quite at sea when set to make tests and experiments that give individuality and a chance for self-expression, which is one of the best things in boyhood. girls preponderate in our overgrown high school latin and algebra, because custom and tradition and, perhaps, advice incline them to it. they preponderate in english and history classes more often, let us hope, from inner inclination. the boy sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes precedence over content. he revolts at much method with meager matter. he craves utility, and when all these instincts are denied, without knowing what is the matter, he drops out of school, when with robust tone and with a truly boy life, such as prevails at harrow, eton, and rugby, he would have fought it through and have done well. this feminization of the school spirit, discipline, and personnel is bad for boys. of course, on the whole, perhaps, they are made more gentlemanly, more at ease, their manners improved, and all this to a woman teacher seems excellent, but something is the matter with the boy in early teens who can be truly called "a perfect gentleman." that should come later, when the brute and animal element have had opportunity to work themselves off in a healthful normal way. they still have football to themselves, and are the majority perhaps in chemistry, and sometimes in physics, but there is danger of a settled eviration. the segregation, which even some of our schools are now attempting, is always in some degree necessary for full and complete development. just as the boys' language is apt to creep into that of the girl, so girls' interests, ways, standards and tastes, which are crude at this age, sometimes attract boys out of their orbit. while some differences are emphasized by contact, others are compromised. boys tend to grow content with mechanical, memorized work and, excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to develop those of their own. there is a little charm and bloom rubbed off the ideal of girlhood by close contact, and boyhood seems less ideal to girls at close range. in place of the mystic attraction of the other sex that has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar comradeship brings a little disenchantment. the impulse to be at one's best in the presence of the other sex prows lax and sex tension remits, and each comes to feel itself seen through, so that there is less motive to indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives inspire, because the call for it is incessant. this disillusioning weakens the motivation to marriage sometimes on both sides, when girls grow careless in their dress and too negligent in their manners, one of the best schools of woman's morals; and when boys lose all restraints which the presence of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. thus, i believe, although of course it is impossible to prove, that this is one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among educated young men and women. at eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. of this we saw illustrations in chapter viii. in our environment, however, there is a little danger that this age once well past there will slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest, uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the key was not at hand. thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes. the best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as i have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the other, or trying to find something to which they can devote themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. the tension is almost imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. it is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. the apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. the purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. the girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more--motherhood. in fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more searchingly the question whether the present system of higher education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential elements, and if so what these are. indeed, considering the facts that in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do those for women. one cause may be moral. ethics used to be taught as a practical power for life and reënforced by religious motives. now it is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by metaphysical and epistemological speculations. sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this proverbially tends to bad habits. perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain of fitting and entering. again, girls mature earlier than boys; and the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of femininity. something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or female youth of other lands. to see and admit that there is an evil very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and well-informed mind, i believe, must now take. it is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and strenuous mental work that boys need. the privileges and immunities of her sex are inveterate, and with these the american girl in the middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. already she occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when popularity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher as it is in the pulpit. in these interesting oases where girl sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were i an educational pope, i would promptly canonize. the progressive feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on the male teachers who remain. public sentiment would sustain them in many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes. it is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. not only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound fiber. again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as compared with boys as their increase has been greater. when but few were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively lower. from this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. once more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools, where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps worries to which boys are less subject. this is the nascent stage of periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few critical years, everything that interferes should yield. some kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys. the women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their "cause" or "mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. in science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in chapter xii, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature specialization, and when the _zeitgeist_ [spirit of the times] insists on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for psychological precocity. _das ewig-weibliche_ [the eternal womanly] is no iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. it means that woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. this constitutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic and appreciative. it is not chiefly the , superfluous massachusetts women of the last census, but representatives of every class and age in the , women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands. those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. the male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality is incomplete. in his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and he rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. this is no subjection, but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. this granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which constitute his essential manhood. in all this, the pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic problems. the relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. this is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. for the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. if she does so and helps to evolve a high school and an a.b. course that is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers. but even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus justified. if adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or best. the danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. companionship and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring. thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant girl companionship. if he resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. in this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother. better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle eviration. but if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex. riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older and riper men. in all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. thus the boy is correct in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunderstood by and disappointed in men. boys arrive at the humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. of course, these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or measurable by statistics; but i have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions. to be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. the madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature. sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. the elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age. marholm[ ] points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli. as in the munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid. the more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive. thus her perversions are his fault. man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. he not only supported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. in their inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. sometimes the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations and ideals of women. if women confide themselves, body and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already begun. if he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. where marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as follows: . women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above. this may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the devil. along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the tragedies of life. . the disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. despairing of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. the desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a substitute for inner content. failing to respect herself as a productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and substitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. she perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate expression. . another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the countess schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity. in our civilization, i believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. some such--stella klive, mary maclane, hilma strandberg, marie bashkirtseff--have been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. by and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. this is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. it is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. it is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even unrealized to herself. it is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society. but in a very few years, i believe even in the early twenties with american girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. by thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the men of the french revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent platonic pairing-off relations with some one. there is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general _malaise_ and a sense that society is a false "margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. there are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally. a new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in history, methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. it is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful institution,[ ] who was "early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex, and i have carried the same thought when i began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." there is no sex in mind or in science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be ignored. that woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. mrs. alice freeman palmer[ ] was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own. hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. to assume that the latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. i have forced myself to go through many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. i deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. no one that i know of connected with any of these institutions, where the richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences between the sexes and those in authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in countenance. again, while i sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, i insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. if these colleges are, as the above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. these institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid--old or young--nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. i recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the past. some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was meant for husband and children. some of them belong to the class of superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who leslie stephens thinks contributed to bring about the dark ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and leaving no posterity, caused europe to degenerate. modern ideas and training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers. the bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. the completely developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line of descent. she has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile. this is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. while the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. first she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her child. it crops out again in the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system. these women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like miss mehr, the university student, in hauptmann's "lonely lives," who alienated the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high platonic friendships of this kind. these women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern life and literature. some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for cultivated women." the slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances, and their training is a noble function. already it has produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the future. indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true position and function, for which i plead. hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own problems. while she has been more religious than man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few pestalozzis, or even froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. this is due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté of her nature. but now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. she must be studied objectively and laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never really understand _das ewig-weibliche_, [the eternal womanly] one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man; and here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as man can not, and become its mouthpiece. in many of the new fields opening in biology since darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, animals, savages (witness miss fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. perhaps, too, the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next step of devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs. for the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. while girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. great daily intimacy between the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. the familiar comradeship that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. to the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like hypatia, madame de staël, the misses cobb, martineau, fuller, bronté, by george eliot, george sand, and mrs. browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the holy mother to beatrice clotilda de vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers. we must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. we must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. the expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote dr. r.t. edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." if she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies hood's "song of the shirt"; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like a eminent lady principal,[ ] who thought girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife. without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as abbotsholme[ ] or _l'ecole des roches_,[ ] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows. first, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends to mental elevation and breadth of view. there should be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking and wheeling: playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life and for those indisposed; and plenty of nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. all that can be called environment is even more important for girls than boys, significant as it is for the latter. the first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and matter, should be health--a momentous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. the new hygiene of the last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas soared to the cult of the goddess hygeia. only those who realize what advances have been made in health culture and know something of its vast new literature can realize all that this means. the health of woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence of her body upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be supreme and primary. foods should favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be on the highest plane. the dietary should be abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm. nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime condition and creator of euphoria; and the appetite should be, as it always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs. sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, without luxury. girls need to go away from home a good part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system, with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is suggested. exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points, because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon the rhythm element. out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all else. the principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to sex. free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform _commando_ exercises. boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. the dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. the history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present degradation. no girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.[ ] manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major morals. they can express everything in the whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. now that we understand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. i would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others. women's ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of good breeding, but nervous health. regularity should be another all-pervading norm. in the main, even though he may have "played his sex symphony too harshly," e.h. clark was right. periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. for years everything must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. in the monthly sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. the paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete development. then woman should realize that _to be_ is greater than _to do_; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let lord nature work. in this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (see chapter vii on this point.) the cottage home, which should take the place of the dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for these seasons. there should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. i have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct. moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. this should not be given by male physicians--and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it--but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge. another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. the rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted. religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman's life as politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. its roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altruism. the tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the old testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of kent and saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon jesus's life and work. he should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should his deity be adduced as welcome surplusage. the supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. if the transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment. whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most generic and racial in it. theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. paul and his works and ways should be for the most part deferred until after eighteen. the juvenile well as the cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. the mission recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reënforce, and go hand in hand with piety. religion is in its infancy; and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than by that of criticism. nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should differ somewhat after puberty. the poetic and mythic factors and some glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as god's first revelation, as an old testament related to the bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic schools. chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a subordinate place. the average girl has little love of sozzling and mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. physics, too, should be kept to elementary stages. meteorology should have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. with botany more serious work should be done. plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and vulgar names should have precedence over latin terminology. flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. economic and even medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. the moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on lines different from any of the text-books i have glanced at. here much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops and the great law of sex unfolds. zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. it should start in the environment like everything else. bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of structure should be less essential. woman has domesticated nearly all the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral qualities to her even more than to man. the peacock is an embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning; the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we have seen. at bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up. this shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man and child so closely related to each other. the myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philology, etc. all this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man--history, with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to a very subordinate place. sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her higher education a place above political economy. the stories of the great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should to the fore. art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and classic over what is cheap and fustian. in literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. greek, hebrew, and perhaps latin languages should be entirely excluded, not but that they are of great value and have their place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of more valuable things. german, french, and italian should be allowed and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if desired, and in their proper season. in the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and logic the next least place. psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in all the world is more worthy. if a woman descartes ever arises, she will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not _cogito, ergo sum_, [i think, therefore i am] but _sum, ergo cogito_ [i am, therefore i think]. the psychology of sentiments and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the constitution of conscience will have small place. domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a kind of laboratory method. a nursery with all carefully selected appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn, shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. a general course in pedagogy, especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating. in its largest sense maternity might be the heart of all the higher training of young women. applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation apart. the training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up through the plastic years of pubescence, and future generations shall not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their perfect work. the methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. hints that are not followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping; faith in a god who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative powers that discover and produce--these are lines on which such an institution should develop. specialization has its place, but it always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained elsewhere. unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to learn the full ranges. in most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. his very presence in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual, but all unconsciously so. this mentor should not be more father than brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add another element. he need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even though intimate. he should know the soul of the adolescent girl and how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be involved. but even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most wholesomely tonic. in these all too meager outlines i have sketched a humanistic and liberal education and have refrained from all details and special curriculization. many of the above features i believe would be as helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational institutions, by resuming her crown. the ideal institutions, however, for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent. as a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, i believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more passionately in love with woman as i conceive she came from the hand of god. i keenly envy my catholic friends their maryolatry. who ever asked if the holy mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy of the chaldees or had studied egyptian or babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has ever thought of caring? we can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. the glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire. but with all this love and hunger in my heart, i can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. but, if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his. meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which in each are so closely related. the oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn--we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. we know what can and will ultimately coördinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human nature. the heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new education which is to be, when the school becomes what melanchthon said it must be--a true workshop of the holy ghost--and what the new psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true paradise of restored intuitive human nature. [footnote : david starr jordan: the higher education of women. popular science monthly, december, , vol. , pp. - . see also my article on this subject in munsey's magazine, february, , and president jordan's reply in the march number, .] [footnote : coeducation. a series of essays by various authors, edited by alice woods, with an introduction by m.e. sadler. longmans, green and co., london , p. _et seq_.] [footnote : the evolution of ideals. w.g. chambers, pedagogical seminary, march, , vol. , pp. - . also, b.e. warner: the young woman in modern life. dodd, mead & co., new york, , p. .] [footnote : the psychology of woman. translated by g.a. etchison. richards, london, .] [footnote : physical development of women and children. by miss m.e. allen. american association for physical education., april, .] [footnote : a review of the higher education of women. forum, september, , vol. , pp - . see also g. von bunge: die zunehmende unfähigkeit der frauen ihre kinder zu stillen. münchen reinhardt, , d ed. also president harper's decennial report, pp. xciv-cxi.] [footnote : physical hindrances to teaching girls, by charlotte w. porter. forum, september, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : abbotsholme, - : or ten years' work in an educational laboratory, by cecil reddie, g. allen london, .] [footnote : see l'ecole des roches, a school of the twentieth century, by t.r. croswell. pedagogical seminary, december, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : see chapter vi.] * * * * * chapter xii moral and religious training dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--difficulties in teaching morals--methods in europe--obedience to commands--good habits should be mechanized--value of scolding--how to flog aright--its dangers--moral precepts and proverbs--habituation--training will through intellect--examinations--concentration--originality--froebel and the naive--first ideas of god--conscience--importance of old and new testaments--sex dangers--love and religion--conversion. from its nature as well as from its central importance it might be easily shown that the will is no less dependent on the culture it receives than is the mind. it is fast becoming as absurd to suppose that men can survive in the great practical strain to which american life subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take its doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to suppose that the mind develops in neglect. our changed conditions make this chance of will-culture more doubtful than formerly. a generation or two ago[ ] most school-boys had either farm work, chores, errands, jobs self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they _made_ things, either toys or tools, out of school. most school-girls did house-work, more or less of which is, like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and most salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the youthful body and mind. they undertook extensive works of embroidery, bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, mending, if not cleaning, and even spinning and weaving their own or others' clothing, and cared for the younger children. the wealthier devised or imposed tasks for will-culture, as the german kaiser has his children taught a trade as part of their education. ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or pitchfork, said an eminent educator lately in substance, with no new impression from without, and one constant and only duty, is a schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such as few boys now get in any shape; while city instead of country life brings so many new, heterogeneous and distracting impressions of motion rather than rest, and so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, that with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, and eupeptic minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so depends, are rare. machines supersede muscles, and perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great preponderance over strength, or favors intense rather than constant, long-sustained, unintermittent energy. perhaps too many of our courses of study are better fitted to turn out many-sided but superficial paragraphists, than men who can lay deep plans, and subordinate many complex means to one remote end. meanwhile, if there is any one thing of which our industries and practical arts are in more crying need than another, it is the old-fashioned virtue of thoroughness, of a kind and degree which does not address merely the eye, is not limited by the letter of a contract, but which has some regard for its products for their own sake, and some sense for the future. whether in science, philosophy, morals, or business, the fields for long-ranged cumulative efforts are wider, more numerous, and far more needy than in the days when it was the fashion for men contentedly to concentrate themselves to one vocation, life-work, or mission, or when cathedrals or other yet vaster public works were transmitted, unfinished but ever advancing, from one generation of men to another. it is because the brain is developed, while the muscles are allowed to grow flabby and atrophied, that the deplored chasm between knowing and doing is so often fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and moral culture. the great increase of city and sedentary life has been far too sudden for the human body--which was developed by hunting, war, agriculture, and manifold industries now given over to steam and machinery--to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new environment. let any of us take down an anatomical chart of the human muscles, and reflect what movements we habitually make each day, and realize how disproportionately our activities are distributed compared with the size or importance of the muscles, and how greatly modern specialization of work has deformed our bodies. the muscles that move the scribbling pen are insignificant fraction of those in the whole body, and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx are also comparatively few and small. their importance is, of course, not underrated, but it is disastrous to concentrate education upon them too exclusively or too early in life. the trouble is that few realize what physical vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible healthful energy of will is without strong muscles which are its organ, or how endurance and self-control, no less than great achievement, depend on muscle-habits. both in germany and greece, a golden age of letters was preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national gymnastic enthusiasm which constitutes, especially in the former country, one of the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy. symmetry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything that the human body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus, instruments, and even tools, are culture ideals that in greece, rome, and germany respectively have influenced, as they might again influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a select few. we do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation, and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into fatigue. even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in their own physical culture and development. this is higher than interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own sake alone. in our exciting life and trying climate, in which the experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts are merely exercises. but this is, of course, preliminary. great as is the need, the practical difficulties in the way are very great. first, there are not only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide teachers. some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the child's capacities for real virtue unfold. advanced text-books discuss the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers. secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the opposite effect. perversity and viciousness of will are too often treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. becomes the lowest develops first, there is danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. the third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so, so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. so vital is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of obligation, or finite from infinite duties. those whose training has been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality _per se_ satisfactorily to the _noli me tangere_ [touch me not] spirit of denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and sanctions for the young. how then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will? more than a generation ago germany developed the following method: children of lutheran, catholic and jewish parentage, which include most german children, were allowed one afternoon a week for several years, and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding confirmation, to spend half of a school day with instructors of these respective professions, who were nominated by the church, but examined by the state as to their competence. these teachers are as professional, therefore, as those in the regular class work. each religion is allowed to determine its own course of religious instruction, subject only to the approval of the cultus minister or the local authorities. in this way a rupture between the religious sentiments and teaching of successive generations is avoided and it is sought to bring religious training to bear upon morals. these classes learn scripture, hymns, church service,--the catholics in latin and the jewish in hebrew,--the history of their church and people, and sometimes a little systematic theology. in some of these schools, there are prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of competition is appealed to. a criticism sometimes made against them, especially against the lutheran religious pedagogy, is that it is too intellectual. it is, of course, far more systematic and effective from this point of view than the american sunday school, so that whatever may be said of its edifying effects, the german child knows these topics far better than the american. this system, with modifications, has been adopted in some places in france, england and in america, more often in private than in public schools, however. the other system originated in france some years after the franco-prussian war when the clerical influence in french education gave way to the lay and secular spirit. in these classes, for which also stated times are set apart and which are continued through all the required grades under the name of moral and civic instruction, the religious element is entirely absent, except that there are a few hymns, bible passages and stories which all agree upon as valuable. most of the course is made up of carefully selected maxims and especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achievements in french history and even in literature and the drama. everything, however, has a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is not made offensively prominent. we have here nearly a score of these textbooks, large and small. it would seen as though the resources of the french records and literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are culled from the daily press. the matter is often arranged under headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness versus lying, respect for age, good manners, etc. each virtue is thus taught in a way appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are the outgrowth of this instruction. it is, of course, exposed to much criticism from the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the support of religion, at the very least, in childhood. this system has had much influence in england where several similar courses have been evolved, and in this country we have at least one very praiseworthy effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to older children. besides this, two ways suggest themselves. first, we may try to assume, or tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a basis of will training, e.g., god and immortality, and, ignoring the minority who doubt these, vote them into the public school. pedagogy need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development, greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were their vitality to decay like the faith in the greek or german mythology, we should still have to teach god and a future life as the most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall to teaching the bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its view of life. but this way ignores revelation and supernatural claims, while some have other objections to emancipating or "rescuing" the bible from theology just yet. indeed, the problem how to teach anything that the mind could not have found out for itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern pedagogy, which, since pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to natural and developing methods. the latter teaches that there must not be too much seed sown, too much or too high precept, or too much iteration, and that, in jean paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring out a clear tone. again, a consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory. religious training must be specific at first, and, omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith the earlier may religious motives affect the will. this is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we intend to return in the future, though it must be expected that the happiest consensus will be long quarantined from most schools. meanwhile a second way, however unpromising, is still open. noble types of character may rest on only the native instincts of the soul or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. but if morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form, drift, and uses by itself alone. this, at least, is our purpose in considering the will, and this only. the will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. our very presence imposes one general law on them, viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding our displeasure. as the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. they respect all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play to call your notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief vocation was to learn your desires. their early lies are often saying what they think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of truth. if we are careful to be wisely and without excess happy and affectionate when they are good, and saddened and slightly cooled in manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of association in the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as pleasure increases vitality. if our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a religion. the child learns that while it can not excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. thus, too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. it imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. as if it felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a passion. as the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. he obeys as with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the means be wisely chosen. the authority must, of course, be ascendancy over heart and mind. the more absolute such authority the more the will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. such authority excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and soundest of all moral motives. it is also the most comprehensive, for it is first felt only towards persons, and personality is a bond, enabling any number of complex elements to act or be treated as whole, as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in isolation and detail. in the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost all educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by the mysterious and constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if unblighted by cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will. this unconscious reflection of our character and wishes is the diviner side of childhood, by which it is quick and responsive to everything in its moral environment. the child may not be able to tell whether its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality affects him profoundly. his acts of will have not been _choices_, but a mass of psychic causes far greater than consciousness can estimate have laid a basis of character, than which heredity alone is deeper, before the child knows he has a will. these influences are not transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture. but command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature. here begins the difficulty. a young child can know no general commands. "sit in your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick, with no prohibition to stand the next instant. any just-forbidden act may be done in the next room. all is here and now, and patient reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules which it cannot understand or remember, is our cue. obedience can, however, be instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear of weakening the will by it than in the case of soldiers. as the child grows older, however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, or unusual, there should be increasing care, lest authority be compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity and indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as parodied disobedience, etc., to test us, result. we should, of course, watch for favorable moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural dignity or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low voice which does not too rudely break in upon the child's train of impressions. the acts we command or forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. we should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a untrusty child, or what we can not prevent. our own will should be a rock and not a wave. our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or periodicity of any sort about them. if we alternate from caresses to severity, are fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed and settled plan, if we only now and then take the child in hand, so he does not know precisely what to expect, we really require the child to change its nature with every change in us, and well for the child who can defy such a changeable authority, which not only unsettles but breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning of the formative period. neglect is better than this, and fear of inconsistency of authority makes the best parents often jealous of arbitrariness in teachers. only thus can we develop general habits of will and bring the child to know general maxims of conduct inductively, and only thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in command can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that comes only from doing unpleasant things. even if instant obedience be only external at first, it will work inward, for moods are controlled by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality. yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one thing for adults and often quite another for children. the child knows nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. the various stimuli of discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited good. the command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the child's own soul. we should strive to fill each moment with as little sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future, as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. but yet the hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element of interest will be grounded in the end. the child must find as he advances towards maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by temporizing with it. the young are apt to be most sincere at an age when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. if authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly independence. in these and many other ways everything in conduct should be mechanized as early and completely as possible. the child's notion of what is right is what is habitual, and the simple, to which all else is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar. it is this primitive stratum of habits which principally determines our deepest belief which all must have over and above knowledge--to which men revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. if good acts are a diet and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and right is wrought into the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground texture of the soul, this "memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, is early, rightly and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of destiny for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to fall back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have rudely broken up the whole structure of later associations. not only the more we mechanize thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher work, but we are insured against emergencies in which the choice and deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that which acts quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and perhaps intrinsically stronger motives. reflection always brings in a new set of later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates is lost. our purposive volitions are very few compared with the long series of desires, acts and reactions, often contradictory, many of which were never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed to reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown margins of the soul, constitute the organ of the conscious will. it is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or training, that drastic reconstructions of any sort are needed. only those who mistake weakness for innocence, or simplicity for candor, or forget that childish faults are no less serious because universal, deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, or fail to see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education, while a parent, teacher, or even a god, _all_ love, weakens and relaxes the will. children do not cry for the alphabet; the multiplication table is more like medicine than confectionery, and it is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. "the fruits of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while instructing the mind. the well-schooled will comes, like herder, to scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. we must anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. the will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. we must now compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. to find his habits already formed to the same law that his mature will and the world later enjoin, cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor and child. nothing, however, must be so individual as punishment. for some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for others, however ominous threats may be, they become at once "like scarecrows, on which the foulest birds soonest learn to perch." to scold well and wisely is an art by itself. for some children, pardon is the worst punishment; for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, isolation from friends, suspension from duties; for others, seclusion--which last, however, is for certain ages beset with extreme danger--and for still others, shame from being made conspicuous. mr. spencer's "natural penalties" can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, and those not the worst. basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as aristophanes represented socrates. two boys who quarreled, were made to look into each other's eyes before the whole school till their angry expressions gave way before the general sense of the ridiculous. this is more ingenious than wise. the object of discipline is to avoid punishment, but even flogging should never be forbidden. it maybe reserved, like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted in that it can not be drawn on occasion. the law might even limit the size and length of the rod, and place of application, as in germany, but it should be of no less liberal dimensions here than there. punishment should, of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not vindictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more effective than severity, nor that it is apt to make motives sensuous, and delay the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the physical. but will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be without more or less flogging. i would not, of course, urge the extremes of the past. the spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to toughen, the severity which prevailed in germany for a long time after its thirty years' wars,[ ] the former fashion in many english schools of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to do, and with no notion of disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an admirable strength of will. severe constraint gives poise, inwardness, self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not willingness, while the now too common habit of coquetting for the child's favor, and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, and pedagogic pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it keep step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying a whole school-room to apply a subtle psychology of motives on it, is bad. this reminds one of the jain who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously tread on a worm. possibly it may be well, as schleiermacher suggests, not to repress some one nascent bad act in some natures, but let it and the punishment ensue for the sake of dr. spankster's tonic. dermal pain is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and being flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. insulting defiance, deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are diseases of the will, and, in very rare cases of promethean obstinacy, the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over better. it is a cruel process, but a crampy will in childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the adult. few parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it is needed. it is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to save him from stepping off a precipice. even the worst punishments are but very faint types of what nature has in store in later life for some forms of perversity of will, and are better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. the strength of obstinacy is admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training when the soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. while so few intelligent parents are able to refrain from the self-indulgence of too much rewarding or giving, even though it injures the child, it is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all its stock of goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after punishment has been deserved. if we wait too long, and punish in cold blood, a young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant, and with passion, a little of which is always salutary, on the principle, _ohne affekt kein effekt_, [without passion, no effect] an older child may fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which should always be secured. the maxim, _summum jus summa injuria_, [the rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment is no less injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of the most effective means of will-culture. we never punish but a part, as it were, of the child's nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a liar, and we deal only with the specific act, and must love all the rest of him. and yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average teacher is so inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his varied duties, viz., selecting the right outcrop of the right fault of the right child at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is perhaps not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which madame necker and sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of which the present writer has notes. first, an habitually good child sometimes has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of insubordinate acts are suddenly committed which really mark the first sudden epochful and belated birth of the instinct of independence and self-regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. he is quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and very lenient treatment causes him, after the conflict of tumultuous feelings has expanded his soul, to react healthfully into habitual docility again, if some small field for independent action be at once opened him. the other case is that of _ennui_, of which children suffer such nameless qualms. when i should open half a dozen books, start for a walk, and then turn back, wander about in mind or body, seeking but not finding content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for a toy, an amusement, food, a rare indulgence, only to neglect or even reject it petulantly when granted. these flitting "will-spectres" are physical, are a mild form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue; and punishment is the worst of treatment. rest or diversion is the only cure, and the teacher's mind must be fruitful of purposes to that end. perhaps a third case for palliative treatment is, those lies which attend the first sense of badness. the desire to conceal it occasionally accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the lie true. these cases are probably rare, while the temptation to lie is far greater for one who does ill than for one who does well, for fear is the chief motive, and a successful lie which concealed would weaken the desire to cure a fault. we have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now to the later necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedience has wrought its perfect work, will be natural and inevitable. it is very hard to combine reason and coercion, yet it is needful that children think themselves free long before we cease to determine them. as we slowly cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very few well-chosen mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be taught very simply, so that they will sink deep. education has been defined as working against the chance influences of life, and it is certain that without some precepts and rules the will will not exert itself. if reasons are given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the child will assent but will not do. if the mind is not strong, many wide ideas are very dangerous. strong wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young person falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, subjective or objective, both conduct and thought are soon confused by chaotic and incongruous opinions and beliefs; and false expectations, which are the very seducers of the will, arise. there can be little will-training by words, and the understanding can not realize the ideals of the will. all great things are dangerous, as plato said, and the truth itself is not only false but actually immoral to unexpanded minds. will-culture is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows a case in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing fabulist has undermined the work of years. our precepts must be made very familiar, copiously illustrated, well wrought together by habit and attentive thought, and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them may be sharp and poignant. vague and too general precepts beyond the horizon of the child's real experience do not haunt him if they are outraged. now the child must obey these, and will, if he has learned to obey well the command of others. one of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle-culture, for if the latter are weaker than the nerves and brain, the gap between knowing and doing appears and the will stagnates. gutsmuths, the father of gymnastics in germany before jahn, used to warn men not to fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen or tongue had power to elevate men. they might titillate the soul with words and ideas; but rigorous, symmetrical muscle-culture alone, he and his turner societies believed, could regenerate the fatherland, for it was one thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite another to bear arms in it. they said, "the weaker the body the more it commands; the stronger it is the more it obeys." in this way we shall have a strong, well-knit soul-texture, made up of volitions and ideas like warp and woof. mind and will will be so compactly organized that all their forces can be brought to a single point. each concept or purpose will call up those related to it, and once strongly set toward its object, the soul will find itself borne along by unexpected forces. this power of totalizing, rather than any transcendent relation of elements, constitutes at least the practical unity of the soul, and this unimpeded association of its elements is true or inner freedom of will. nothing is wanting or lost when the powers of the soul are mobilized for a great task, and its substance is impervious to passion. with this organization, men of really little power accomplish wonders. without it great minds are confused and lost. they have only velleity or caprice. the will makes a series of vigorous, perhaps almost convulsive, but short, inconsistent efforts. as jean paul says, there is sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre in the soul, but powder is not made, for they never find each other. to understand this will-plexus is preeminent among the new demands now laid on educators. but, although this focalizing power of acting with the whole rather than with a part of the soul, gives independence of many external, conventional, proximate standards of conduct, deepening our interests in life, and securing us against disappointment by defining our expectations, while such a sound and simple will-philosophy is proof against considerable shock and has firmness of texture enough to bear much responsibility, there is, of course, something deeper, without which all our good conduct is more or less hollow. this is that better purity established by mothers in the plastic heart, before the superfoetation of precept is possible, or even before the "soul takes flight in language"; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary. much every way depends on how aboriginal our goodness is, whether the will acts with effort, as we solve an intricate problem, in solitude, or as we say the multiplication table, which only much distraction can confuse, or as we repeat the alphabet, which the din of battle could not hinder. later and earlier training should harmonize with each other and with nature. thrice happy he who is so wisely trained that he comes to believe he believes what his soul deeply does believe, to say what he feels and feel what he really does feel, and chiefly whose express volitions square with the profounder drift of his will as the resultant of all he has desired or wished, expected, attended to, or striven for. when such an one comes to his moral majority by standing for the first time upon his own careful conviction, against the popular cry, or against his own material interests or predaceous passions, and feels the constraint and joy of pure obligation which comes up from this deep source, a new, original force is brought into the world of wills. call it inspiration, or kant's transcendental impulse above and outside of experience, or spencer's deep reverberations from a vast and mysterious past of compacted ancestral experiences, the most concentrated, distilled and instinctive of all psychic products, and as old as mr. tyndall's "fiery cloud"--the name or even source is little. we would call it the purest, freest, most prevailing, because most inward, will or conscience. this free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction with no sense of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. for most of us, the best education is that which makes us the best and most obedient servants. this is the way of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a private conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit, or even habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so great that most hasten, more or less consciously and voluntarily, to put themselves under authority again, serving only the smallest margin of independence in material interests, choice of masters, etc, and yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the minimum to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of history, viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of selfishness, caprice and conceit. the trouble is in interpreting these moral instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite self-knowledge in which all wisdom culminates. the moral interregnum which the _aufklärung_ [enlightenment] has brought will not end till these instincts are rightly interpreted by in intelligence. the richest streams of thought must flow about them, the best methods must peep and pry till their secrets are found and put into the idea-pictures in which most men think. this brings us, finally, to the highest and also immediately practical method of moral education, viz., training the will by and for intellectual work. youth and childhood must not be subordinated as means to maturity. learning is more useful than knowing. it is the way and not the goal, the work and not the product, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates will and character. to teach only results, which are so simple, without methods by which they were obtained, which are so complex and hard, to develop the sense of possession without the strain of activity, to teach great matters too easily or even as play, always to wind along the lines of least resistance into the child's mind, is imply to add another and most enervating luxury to child-life. only the sense and power of effort, which made lessing prefer the search to the possession of truth, which trains the will in the intellectual field, which is becoming more and more the field of its activity, counts for character and makes instruction really educating. this makes mental work a series of acts, or living thoughts, and not merely words. real education, that we can really teach, and that which is really most examinable, is what we do, while those who acquire without effort may be extremely instructed without being truly educated. it is those who have been trained to put forth mental power that come to the front later, while it is only those whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into power who are in danger of early collapse. it is because of this imperfect appropriation through lack of volitional reaction that mental training is so often dangerous, especially in its higher grades. especially wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peacefully beside undiscarded bad habits, moral weakness is directly cultivated. volitional recollection, or forcing the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strengthens what we may call the mental will; while if multifarious impressions which excite at the time are left to take their chances, at best, fragmentary reproduction, incipient amnesia, the prelude of mental decay, may be soon detected. few can endure the long working over of ideas, especially if at all fundamental, which is needful to full maturity of mind, without grave moral danger. new standpoints and ideas require new combinations of the mental elements, with constant risk that during the process, what was already secured will fall back into its lower components. even oar immigrants suffer morally from the change of manners and customs and ideas, and yet education menus change; the more training the more change, as a rule, and the more danger during the critical transition period while we oscillate between control by old habits, or association within the old circle of thought, and by the new insights, as a medical student often suffers from trying to bring the regulation of his physical functions under new and imperfect hygienic insights. thus most especially if old questions, concerning which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves to give reasons, need to be reopened, there is especial danger that the new equilibrium about which the dynamic is to be re-resolved into static power will be established, if at all, with loss instead of with gain. indeed, it is a question not of schools but of civilization, whether mental training, from the three r's to science and philosophy, shall really make men better, as the theory of popular education assumes, and whether the genius and talent of the few who can receive and bear it can be brought to the full maturity of a knowledge fully facultized--a question paramount, even in a republic, to the general education of the many. the illusion is that beginnings are hard. they are easy. almost any mind can advance a little way into almost any subject. the feeblest youth can push on briskly in the beginning of a new subject, but he forgets, and so does the examiner who marks him, that difficulties increase not in arithmetical but in almost geometrical ratio as he advances. the fact, too, that all topics are taught by all teachers and that we have no specialized teaching in elementary branches, and that examinations are placed in the most debilitating part of our peculiarly debilitating spring, these help us to solve the problem which china has solved so well, viz., how to instruct and not to educate. a pass mark, say of fifty, should be given not for mastery of the first half of the book, or for knowledge of half the matter in it, but for that of three-fourths or more. suppose one choose the easier method of tattooing his mind by attaining the easy early stages of proficiency in many subjects, as is possible and even encouraged in too many of our school and college curricula, he weakens the will-quality of his mind. smattering is dissipation of energy. only great, concentrated and prolonged efforts in one direction really train the mind, because only _they_ train the will beneath it. many little, heterogeneous efforts of different sorts leave the mind in a muddle of heterogeneous impressions, and the will like a rubber band is stretched to flaccidity around one after another bundle of objects too large for it to clasp into unity. here again, _in der beschränkung zeigt sich der meister_ [the master shows himself in self-limitation]; all-sidedness through one-sidedness; by stalking the horse or cow out in the spring time, till he gnaws his small allotted circle of grass to the ground, and not by roving and cropping at will, can he be taught that the sweetest joint is nearest the root, are convenient symbols of will-culture in the intellectual field. even a long cram, if only on one subject, which brings out the relations of the parts, or a "one-study college," as is already devised in the west, or the combination of several subjects even in primary school grades into a "concentration series," as devised by ziller and rein, the university purpose as defined by ziller of so combining studies that each shall stand in the course next to that with which it is inherently closest connected by matter and method, or the requirements of one central and two collateral branches for the doctorate examination--all these devices no doubt tend to give a sense of efficiency, which is one of the deepest and proudest joys of life, in the place of a sense of possession so often attended by the exquisite misery of conscious weakness. the unity of almost any even ideal purpose is better than none, if it tend to check the superficial one of learning to repeat again or of boxing the whole compass of sciences and liberal arts, as so many of our high schools or colleges attempt. finally, in the sphere of mental productivity and originality, a just preponderance of the will-element makes men distrust new insights, quick methods, and short cuts, and trust chiefly to the genius of honest and sustained work, in power of which perhaps lies the greatest intellectual difference between men. when ideas are ripe for promulgation they have been condensed and concentrated, thought traverses them quickly and easily--in a word, they have become practical, and the will that waits over a new idea patiently and silently, without anxiety, even though with a deepening sense of responsibility, till all sides have been seen, all authorities consulted, all its latent mental reserves heard from, is the man who "talks with the rifle and not with the water-hose," or, in a rough farmer's phrase, "boils his words till he can give his hearers sugar and not sap." several of the more important discoveries of the present generation, which cost many weary months of toil, have been enumerated in a score or two of lines, so that every experimenter could set up his apparatus and get the results in a few minutes. let us not forget that, in most departments of mental work, the more we revise and reconstruct our thought, the longer we inhibit its final expression, while the oftener we return to it refreshed from other interests, the clearer and more permeable for other minds it becomes, because the more it tends to express itself in terms of willed action, which is "the language of complete men." so closely bound together are moral and religious training that a discussion of one without the other would be incomplete. in a word, religion is the most generic kind of culture as opposed to all systems or departments which are one sided. all education culminates in it because it is chief among human interests, and because it gives inner unity to the mind, heart, and will. how now should this common element of union be taught? to be really effective and lasting, moral and religious training must begin in the cradle. it was a profound remark of froebel that _the unconsciousness of a child is rest in god_. this need not be understood in guy pantheistic sense. from this rest in god the childish soul should not be abruptly or prematurely aroused. even the primeval stages of psychic growth are rarely so all-sided, so purely unsolicited, spontaneous, and unprecocious, as not to be in a sense a fall from froebel's unconsciousness or rest in god. the sense of touch, the mother of all the other senses, is the only one which the child brings into the world already experienced; but by the pats, caresses, hugs, etc., so instinctive with young mothers, varied feelings and sentiments are communicated to the child long before it recognizes its own body as distinct from things about it. the mother's face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she soon comes to stand in the very place of god to her child. all the religion of which the child is capable during this by no means brief stage of its development consists of those sentiments--gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc., now felt only for her--which are later directed toward god. the less these are now cultivated toward the mother, who is now their only fitting if not their only possible object, the more feebly they will later be felt toward god. this, too, adds greatly to the sacredness and the responsibilities of motherhood. froebel perhaps is right that thus fundamental religious sentiments can be cultivated in the earliest months of infancy. it is of course impossible not to seem, perhaps even not to be, sentimental upon this theme, for the infant soul has no other content than sentiments, and because upon these rests the whole superstructure of religion in child or adult. the mother's emotions, and physical and mental states, indeed, imparted and reproduced in the infant so immediately, unconsciously, and through so many avenues, that it is no wonder that these relations see mystic. whether the mother is habitually under the influence of calm and tranquil emotions, or her temper is fluctuating or violent, or her movements are habitually energetic or soft and caressing, or she be regular or irregular in her ministrations to the infant in her arms, all these characteristics and habits are registered in the primeval language of touch upon the nervous system of the child. from this point of view, poise and calmness, the absence of all intense annuli and of sensations or transitions which are abrupt or sudden, and an atmosphere of quieting influences, like everything which retards by broadening, is in the general line of religious culture. the soul of an infant is well compared to a seed planted in a garden. it is not pressed or moved by the breezes which rustle the leaves overhead. the sunlight does not fall upon it, and even dew and evening coolness scarcely reach it; but yet there is not a breath of air or a ray of sunshine, nor a drop of moisture to which it is responsive, and which does not stir all its germinant forces. the child is a plant, must live out of doors in proper season, and there must be no forcing. religion, then, at this important stage, at least, is naturalism pure and simple, and religious training is the supreme art of standing out of nature's way. so implicit is the unity of soul and body at this formative age that care of the body is the most effective ethico-religious culture. next to be considered are the sentiments which unfold under the influence of that fresh and naive curiosity which attends the first impressions of natural objects from which both religion and science spring as from one common root. the awe and sublimity of a thunderstorm, the sights and sounds of a spring morning, objects which lead the child's thoughts to what is remote in time and space, old trees, ruins, the rocks, and, above all, the heavenly bodies--the utilization of these lessons is the most important task of the religious teacher during the _kindergarten_ stage of childhood. still more than the undevout astronomer, the undevout child under such influences is abnormal. in these directions the mind of the child is as open and plastic as that of the ancient prophet to the promptings of the inspiring spirit. the child can recognize no essential difference between nature and the supernatural, and the products of mythopoeic fancy which have been spun about natural objects, and which have lain so long and so warm about the hearts of generations and races of men, are now the best of all nutriments for the soul. to teach scientific rudiments only about nature, on the shallow principle that nothing should be taught which must be unlearned, or to encourage the child to assume the critical attitude of mind, is dwarfing the heart and prematurely forcing the head. it has been said that country life is religion for children at this stage. however this may be, it is clear that natural religion is rooted in such experiences, and precedes revealed religion in the order of growth and education, whatever its logical order in systems of thought may be. a little later, habits of truthfulness[ ] are best cultivated by the use of the senses in exact observation. to see a simple phenomenon in nature and report it fully and correctly is no easy matter, but the habit of trying to do so teaches what truthfulness is and leaves the impress of truth upon the whole life and character. i do not hesitate to say, therefore, that elements of science should be taught to children for the moral effects of its influences. at the same time all truth is not sensuous, and this training alone at this age tends to make the mind pragmatic, dry, and insensitive or unresponsive to that other kind of truth the value of which is not measured by its certainty so much as by its effect upon us. we must learn to interpret the heart and our native instincts as truthfully as we do external nature, for our happiness in life depends quite as largely upon bringing our beliefs into harmony with the deeper feelings of our nature as it does upon the ability to adapt ourselves to our physical environment. thus not only all religious beliefs and moral acts will strengthen if they truly express the character instead of cultivating affectation and insincerity in opinion, word, and deed, as with mistaken pedagogic methods they may do. this latter can be avoided only by leaving all to naturalism and spontaneity at first, and feeding the soul only according to its appetites and stage of growth. no religious truth must be taught as fundamental--especially as fundamental to morality--which can be seriously doubted or even misunderstood. yet it must be expected that convictions will be transformed and worked over and over again, and only late, if at all, will an equilibrium between the heart and the truth it clings to as finally satisfying be attained. hence most positive religious instruction, or public piety, if taught at all, should be taught briefly as most serious but too high for the child yet, or as rewards to stimulate curiosity for them later, but sacred things should not become too familiar or be conventionalized before they can be felt or understood. the child's conception of god should not be personal or too familiar _at first_, but he should appear distant and vague, inspiring awe and reverence far more than love; in a word, as the god of nature rather than as devoted to serviceable ministrations to the child's individual wants. the latter should be taught to be a faithful servant rather than a favorite of god. the inestimable pedagogic value of the god-idea consists in that it widens the child's glimpse of the whole, and gives the first presentment of the universality of laws, such as are observed in its experiences and that of others, so that all things seem comprehended under one stable system or government. the slow realization that god's laws are not like those of parents and teachers, evadible, suspensible, but changeless, and their penalties sure as the laws of nature, is most important factor of moral training. first the law, the schoolmaster, then the gospel; first nature, then grace, is the order of growth. the pains or pleasures which follow many acts are immediate, while the results that follow others are so remote or so serious that the child must utilize the experience of others. artificial rewards and punishments must be cunningly devised so as to simulate and typify as closely as possible the real natural penalty, and they must be administered uniformly and impartially like laws of nature. as commands are just, and as they are gradually perceived to spring from superior wisdom, respect arises, which kant called the bottom motive of duty, and defined as the immediate determination of the will by law, thwarting self-love. here the child reverences what is not understood as authority, and to the childish "why?" which always implies imperfect respect for the authority, however displeasing its behest, the teacher or parent should always reply, "you cannot understand why yet," unless quite sure that a convincing and controlling insight can be given, such as shall make all future exercise of outward authority in this particular unnecessary. from this standpoint the great importance of the character and native dignity of the teacher is best seen. daily contact with some teachers is itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a spoken precept. here, too, the real advantage of male over female teachers, especially for boys, is seen in their superior physical strength, which often, if highly estimated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of their moods and their discipline. during the first years of school life, a point of prime importance in ethico-religious training is the education of conscience. this latter is the most complex and perhaps the most educable of all our so-called "faculties." a system of carefully arranged talks, with copious illustrations from history and literature, about such topics as fair play, slang, cronies, dress, teasing, getting mad, prompting in class, white lies, affectation, cleanliness, order, honor, taste, self-respect, treatment of animals, reading, vacation pursuits, etc., can be brought quite within the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sympathetic and tactful teacher, and be made immediately and obviously practical. all this is nothing more or less than conscience-building. the old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before comenius, basedow and pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still persists in full force. the senses develop first, and all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of conscience gradually and later in life. they first take the form of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only made more definite by such talks as the above. but parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble, and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of external authority. just as a young medical student with a rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his diet, regimen, etc., to make it "scientific" in a way that an older and a more learned physician would shrink from, so the half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too apt, in the american temperament, to expend, in precocious emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, the force which is needed to bring their insights to maturity. authority should be relaxed gradually, explicitly, and provisionally over one definite department of conduct at a time. to distinguish right and wrong in their own nature is the highest and most complex of intellectual processes. most men and all children are guided only by associations of greater or less subtlety. perhaps the whole round of human duties might be best taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing it in its countless disguises and ramifications through every stage of life. selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by conflicting theories. the bible, the great instrument in the education of conscience, is far less juvenile than it is now the fashion to suppose. at the very least, it expresses the result of the ripest human experience, the noblest traditions of humanity. old testament history, even more than most very ancient history, is distilled to an almost purely ethical content. for centuries scripture was withheld from the masses for the same reason that plato refused at first to put his thoughts into writing, because it would be sure to be misunderstood by very many and lead to that worst of errors and fanaticism caused by half-truths. children should not approach it too lightly. the old testament, perhaps before or more than the new, is the bible for childhood. a good, protracted course of the law pedagogically prepares the way for the apprehension of the gospel. then the study of the old testament should begin with selected tales, told, as in the german schools, impressively, in the teacher's language, but objectively, and without exegetical or hortatory comment. the appeal is directly to the understanding only at first, but the moral lesson is brought clearly and surely within the child's reach, but not personally applied after the manner common with us. probably the most important changes for the educator to study are those which begin between the ages of twelve and sixteen and are completed only some years later, when the young adolescent receives from nature a new capital of energy and altruistic feeling. it is physiological second birth, and success in life depends upon the care and wisdom with which this new and final invoice of energy is husbanded. these changes constitute a natural predisposition to a change of heart, and may perhaps be called, in kantian phrase, its _schema_. even from the psychophysic standpoint it is a correct instinct which has slowly led churches to center so much of their cultus upon regeneration. in this i, of course, only assert here the neurophysical side, which is everywhere present, even if everywhere subordinate to the spiritual side. as everywhere, so here, too, the physical may be called in a sense regulative rather than constitutive. it is therefore not surprising that statistics show that far more conversions, proportionately, take place during the adolescent period, which does not normally end before the age of twenty-four or five, than during any other period of equal length. at this age most churches confirm. before this age the child lives in the present, is normally selfish, deficient in sympathy, but frank and confidential, obedient to authority, and without affectation save the supreme affectation of childhood, viz., assuming the words, manners, habits, etc., of those older than itself. but now stature suddenly increases, and the power of physical and mental endurance and effort diminishes for a time; larynx, nose, chin change, and normal and morbid ancestral traits and features appear. far greater and more protracted, though unseen, are the changes which take place in the nervous system, both in the development of the cortex and expansion of the convolutions and the growth of association-fibers by which the elements shoot together and relation of things are seen, which hitherto seemed independent, to which it seems as if for a few years the energies of growth were chiefly directed. hence this period is so critical and changes in character are so rapid. no matter how confidential the relations with the parent may have been, an important domain of the soul now declares its independence. confidences are shared with those of equal age and withheld from parents, especially by boys, to an extent probably little suspected by most parents. education must be addressed to freedom, which recognizes only self-made law, and spontaneity of opinion and conduct is manifested, often in extravagant and grotesque forms. there is now a longing for that kind of close sympathy and friendship which makes cronies and intimates; there is a craving for strong emotions which gives pleasure in exaggerations; and there are nameless longings for what is far, remote, strange, which emphasizes the self-estrangement which hegel so well describes, and which marks the normal rise of the presentiment of something higher than self. instincts of rivalry and competition now grow strong in boys, and girls grow more conscientious and inward, and begin to feel their music, reading, religion, painting, etc., and to realize the bearing of these upon their future adult life. there is often a strong instinct of devotion and self-sacrifice toward some, perhaps almost any, object, or in almost any cause which circumstances may present. moodiness and perhaps a love of solitude are developed. "growing fits" make hard and severe labor of body and mind impossible without dwarfing or arresting the development, by robbing of its nutrition some part of the organism--stomach, lungs, chest, heart, back, brain, etc.--which is peculiarly liable to disease later. it is never so hard to tell the truth plainly and objectively and without any subjective twist. the life of the mere individual ceases and that of person, or better, of the race, begins. it is a period of realization, and hence often of introspection. in healthy natures it is the golden age of life, in which enthusiasm, sympathy, generosity, and curiosity are at their strongest and best, and when growth is so rapid that, e.g., each college class is conscious of a vast interval of development which separates it from the class below; but it is also a period subject to wertherian crises, such as hume, richter, j.s. mill, and others passed through, and all depends on the direction given to these new forces. the dangers of this period are great and manifest. the chief of these, far greater even than the dangers of intemperance, is that the sexual elements of soul and body will be developed prematurely and disproportionately. indeed, early maturity in this respect is itself bad. if it occurs before other compensating and controlling powers are unfolded, this element is hypertrophied and absorbs and dwarfs their energy and it is then more likely to be uninstructed and to suck up all that is vile in the environment. far more than we realize, the thoughts and feelings of youth center about this factor of his nature. quite apart, therefore, from its intrinsic value, education should serve the purpose of preoccupation, and should divert attention from an element of our nature the premature or excessive development of which dwarfs every part of soul and body. intellectual interests, athleticism, social and esthetic tastes, should be cultivated. there should be some change in external life. previous routine and drill-work must be broken through and new occupations resorted to, that the mind may not be left idle while the hands are mechanically employed. attractive home-life, friendships well chosen and on a high plane, and regular habits, should of course be cultivated. now, too, though the intellect is not frequently judged insane, so that pubescent insanity is comparatively rare, the feelings, which are yet more fundamental to mental sanity, are most often perverted, and lack of emotional steadiness, violent and dangerous impulses, unreasonable conduct, lack of enthusiasm and sympathy, are very commonly caused by abnormalities here. neurotic disturbances, such as hysteria, chorea, and, in the opinion of some physicians, sick-headache and early dementia are peculiarly liable to appear and become seated during this period. in short, the previous selfhood is broken up like the regulation copy handwriting of early school years, and a new individual is in process of crystallization. all is solvent, plastic, peculiarly susceptible to external influences. between love and religion, god and nature have wrought a strong and indissoluble bond. flagellations, fasts, exposure, excessive penances of many kinds, the hindoo cultus of quietude, and mental absorption in vacuity and even one pedagogic motive of a cultus of the spiritual and supernatural, e. g. in the symposium of plato, are all designed as palliatives and alteratives of degraded love. change of heart before pubescent years, there are several scientific reasons for thinking means precocity and forcing. the age signalized by the ancient greeks as that at which the study of what was comprehensively called music should begin, the age at which roman guardianship ended, as explained by sir henry maine, at which boys are confirmed in the modern greek, catholic, lutheran and episcopal churches, and at which the child jesus entered the temple, is as early as any child ought consciously to go about his heavenly father's business. if children are instructed in the language of these sentiments too early, the all-sided deepening and broadening of soul and of conscience which should come with adolescent years will be incomplete. revival sermon which the writer has heard preached to very young children are analogous to exhorting them to imagine themselves married people and inculcating the duties of that relation. it is because this precept is violated in the intemperate haste for immediate results that we may so often hear childish sentiments and puerile expressions so strangely mingled in the religious experience of otherwise apparently mature adults, which remind one of a male voice constantly modulating from manly tones into boyish falsetto. some one has said of very early risers that they were apt to be conceited all the forenoon, and stupid and uninteresting all the afternoon and evening. so, too, precocious infant christians are apt to be conceited and full of pious affectations all the forenoon of life, and thereafter commonplace enough in their religious life. one is reminded of aristotle's theory of catharsis, according to which the soul was purged of strong or bad passions by listening to vivid representations of them on the stage. so, by the forcing method we deprecate, the soul is given just enough religious stimulus to act as an inoculation against deeper and more serious interest later. at this age the prescription of a series of strong feelings is very apt to cause attention to concentrate on physical states in a way which may culminate in the increased activity of the passional nature, or may induce that sort of self-flirtation which is expressed in morbid love of autobiographic confessional outpourings, or may issue in the supreme selfishness of incipient and often unsuspected hysteria. those who are led to christ normally by obeying conscience are not apt to endanger the foundation of their moral character if they should later chance to doubt the doctrine of verbal inspiration or some of the miracles, or even get confused about the trinity, because their religious nature is not built on the sand. the art of leading young men through college without ennobling or enlarging any of the religious notions of childhood is anti-pedagogic and unworthy philosophy, and is to leave men puerile in the highest department of their nature. at the age we have indicated, when the young man instinctively takes the control of himself into his own hands, previous ethico-religious training should be brought to a focus and given a personal application, which, to be most effective, should probably, in most cases, be according to the creed of the parent. it is a serious and solemn epoch, and ought to be fittingly signalised. morality now needs religion, which cannot have affected life much before. now duties should be recognised as divine commands, for the strongest motives, natural and supernatural, are needed for the regulation of the new impulses, passions, desires, half insights, ambitions, etc., which come to the american temperament so suddenly before the methods of self-regulation can become established and operative. now a deep personal sense of purity and impurity are first possible, and indeed inevitable, and this natural moral tension is a great opportunity to the religious teacher. a serious sense of god within, and of responsibilities which transcend this life as they do the adolescent's power of comprehension; a feeling for duties deepened by a realization and experience of their conflict such as some have thought to be the origin of religion itself in the soul--these, too, are elements of the "theology of the heart" revealed at this age to every serious youth, but to the judicious emphasis and utilization of which, the teacher should lend his consummate skill. while special lines of interest leading to a career must be now well grounded, there must also be a culture of the ideal and an absorption in general views and remote and universal ends. if all that is pure and disciplining in what is transcendent, whether to the christian believers, the poet or the philosopher, had even been devised only for the better regulation of human energies set free at this age, but not yet fully defined or realized, they would still have a most potent justification on this ground alone. at any rate, what is often wasted in excess here, if husbanded, ripens into philosophy, the larger love to the world, the true and the good, in a sense not unlike that in the symposium of plato. finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed and formulated by the church, be too sudden and violent, and the capital of moral force which should last a lifetime be consumed in a brief, convulsive effort, like the sudden running down of a watch if its spring be broken. piety is naturally the slowest because the most comprehensive kind of growth. quetelet says that the measure of the state of civilization in a nation is the way in which it achieves its revolutions. as it becomes truly civilized, revolutions cease to be sudden and violent, and become gradually transitory and without abrupt change. the same is true of that individual crisis which psycho-physiology describes as adolescence, and of which theology formulates a higher spiritual potency as conversion. the adolescent period lasts ten years or more, during all of which development of every sort is very rapid and constant, and it is, as already remarked, intemperate haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing, which has made so many regard change of heart as an instantaneous conquest rather than as a growth, and persistently to forget that there is something of importance before and after it in healthful religious experience. [footnote : see author's boy life, in massachusetts country town forty years ago. pedagogical seminary, june, , vol. , pp. - .] [footnote : those interested in school statistics may value the record kept by a swabian schoolmaster named hauberle, extending over fifty-one years and seven months' experience as a teacher, as follows: , blows with a cane; , with a rod; , with a ruler; , with the hand; , over the mouth; , boxes on the ear; , , snaps on the head; , nota benes with bible, catechism, hymnbook and grammar; times boys had to kneel on peas; times on triangular blocks of wand; , had to carry a timber mare; and, , hold the rod high; the last two being punishments of his own invention. of the blows with the cane , were for latin vowels, and , of those with the rod for bible verses and hymns. he used a scolding vocabulary of over , terms, of which one-third were of his own invention.] [footnote : for most recent and elaborate study of children's lies see zeitschrift für pädagogische psychologie, pathologie und hygiene, juli, . jahrgang , heft , pp. - .] * * * * * glossary agamic. unmarried; unmarriageable, sometimes non-sexed. agenic. lacking in reproductive power; sterile. amphimixis. that form of reproduction which involves the mingling of substance from two individuals so as to effect a mixture of hereditary characteristics. it includes the phenomena of conjugation and fertilization among both unicellular and multicellular organisms. anabolism. _see_ metabolism. anamnesic. pertaining to or aiding recollection. anemic. deficient in blood; bloodless. anthropomorphism. the attributing of human characteristics to natural, supernatural, or divine beings. anthropometry. science of measurement of the human body. artifact. any artificial product. aphasia. impairment or lose of the ability to understand or use speech. associationism. the psychological theory which regards the laws of association as the fundamental laws of mental action and development. atavistic. pertaining to reversion through the influence of heredity to remote ancestral characteristics. ataxic. pertaining to inability to coördinate voluntary movements; irregular. calamo-papyrus. reed papyrus or pen-paper. catabolism. _see_ metabolism. catharsis. purgation or cleansing. aristotle's esthetic theory that little renders immune for much. cerebration. brain action, conscious or unconscious. chorea. st. vitus's dance; a nervous disease marked by irregular and involuntary movements of the limbs and face. chrestomathy. a collection of extracts and choice pieces. christenthum. the christian belief; the spirit of christianity. commando exercises. gymnastic exercises whose order is dependent upon the spoken command of the director. cortex. the gray matter of the brain, mostly on its surface. cortical. pertaining to the cortex. craniometry. the measurement of skulls. cryptogamous. having an obscure mode of fertilization; or, of plants that do not blossom. cultus. a system of religious belief and worship. deutschenthum. the spirit of the german people. diathesis. a constitutional predisposition. ephebic. pertaining to the greek system of instruction given to young men to fit them for citizenship; adolescent. epigoni. successors; followers who only follow. epistemology. the theory of knowledge; that branch of logic which undertakes to explain how knowledge is possible and to define its limitations, meaning, and worth. eupeptic. having good digestion. euphoria. the sense of well-being; of fullness of life. eviration. emasculation; loss of manly characteristics. feral. wild by nature; untamed; undomesticated. formicary. an artificial ants' nest. gemÜth. disposition; the entire affective soul and its habitual state. hebetude. dullness; stupidity. hedonistic. relating to hedonism, that form of greek philosophy which taught that pleasure is the chief end of existence. hetaera. a greek courtesan. this class was often highly trained in music and social art, and represented the highest grade of culture among greek women. heterogeny. ( ) the spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements. ( ) that kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the original form reappears. heteronomous. having a different name. horology. the science of measuring time and of constructing instruments for that purpose. hygeia. the greek goddess of health; health. hypermethodic. methodic to excess; overmethodic. hypertrophy. excessive growth. indiscerptible. incapable of being destroyed by separation of parts. inhibition. interference with the normal result of a nervous excitement by an opposing force. irradiation. the diffusion of nervous stimuli out of the path of normal discharge which, as a result of the excitation of a peripheral end organ may excite other central organs than those directly connected with it. kinesological. pertaining to the science of tests and measurements of bodily strength. kinesometer. an instrument for measuring muscular strength. medullation. the investment of nerve fibers with a protective covering or medullary sheath, consisting of white, fat-like matter. meristic. pertaining to the levels or spinal and cerebral segments of the body. metabolism. the act or process by which, on the one hand, dead food is built up into living matter--anabolism, and by which, on the other, the living matter is broken down into simpler products within a cell or organism--catabolism. metamorphosis. change of form or structure; transformation. metempsychosis. the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another. monophrastic. pertaining to or consisting of a single phrase. monotechnic. pertaining to a single art or craft. morphology. the science of form and structure of plants and animals without regard to function. myology. the scientific knowledge of the muscular system. mythopoeic. producing or having a tendency to produce myths. noetic. of, pertaining to, or conceived by, mind. nuance. slight shade; difference; distinction; degree. orthogenic. pertaining to right beginning and development. orthopedic. relating to the art of curing deformities. ossuary. a depository of dry bones. paleopsychic. pertaining to the antiquity of the soul. pantheistic. relating to that doctrine which holds that the entire phenomenal universe, including man and nature, is the ever-changing manifestation of god, who rises to self-consciousness and personality only in man. patristics. that department of study occupied with the doctrines and writings of the fathers of the christian church. phobia. excessive or morbid fear of anything. phyletically. in accordance with the phylum or race; racially. phyletic. pertaining to a race or clan. phylogeny. the history of the evolution of a species or group; tribal history; ancestral development as opposed to ontogeny or the development of the individual. phylum. a term introduced by haeckel to designate the great branches of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. each phylum may include several classes. pickelhaube. the spiked helmet of the german army. plankton. sea animals and plants collectively; distinguished from coast or bottom forms and floating in a great mass. polygamic (love). pertaining to the habit of having more than one mate of the opposite sex. polyphrastic. having many phrases; pertaining to rambling, incoherent speech. post-simian. pertaining to an age later than that in which simian or monkey-like forms prevailed. prenubile. pertaining to the age before sexual maturity or marriageability is reached. prie dieu. a praying desk. propedeutic. preliminary; introductory. prophylactic. any medicine or measure efficacious in preventing disease. pseudophobiac. pertaining to a morbid condition in which the subject is continually in fear of having said something not strictly true. psychogenesis. the origin and development of soul. psychonomic. pertaining to the laws of mind. psychosis. mental constitution or condition; any change in consciousness, especially if abnormal. puberty. the age of sexual maturity. pubescent. relating to the dawning of puberty. pygmoid. of pygmy size and form. rabulist. a chronic wrangler; one who argues about everything. schema. a synopsis; a summary. in the kantian sense, a general type. schematism. an outline of any systematic arrangement; an outline. superfoetation. a second conception some time after a prior one, by which two foetuses of different age exist together in the same female. often used figuratively. temibility. (from italian _temibile_, to be feared.) the principle of adjustment of penalty to crime in just that degree necessary to prevent a repetition of the criminal act. tic. a nervous affection of the muscles; a twitching. transcendental. in the kantian system having an _a priori_ character, transcending experience, presupposed in and necessary to experience. traumata. wounds. traumatism. a wound; any morbid condition produced by wounds or other external violence. verbigeration. the continual utterance of certain words or phrases at short intervals, without reference to their meaning, as seen in insane _gedankenflucht_ or rapid flight of thought. index * * * * * abstract words, need of accessory and fundamental movement accuracy of memory overdone activity of children, motor adolescence biography and literature of characterized agriculture alternations of physical and psychic states altruism of country children of woman, cutlet for amphimixis, psychic, basis of anger anthropometry and ideal of gymnastics arboreal life and the hand art study arts and crafts movement associations devised or guided by adults astronomy athletic festivals in greece athletics as a conversation topic dangers and defects of records in attention fostered by _commando_ exercises rhythm in spontaneous authority and adolescence autobiographies of boyhood automatisms motor, causes and kinds of control and serialization of danger of premature control of desirable bachelor women basal muscles, development of basal powers, development of bathing beauty, age of feminine belief, habit and muscle determining bible, the influence of, in adolescence methods of teaching study of, for girls study of, in german method of will training study of, order in study of, postponed study of, preparation for biography and adolescence blood vessels, expansion at puberty blushing, characteristic of puberty body training, greek botany boxing boys age of little affection in dangers of coeducation for differences between, and girls latitude in conduct and studies of, before puberty puberty in, characteristics of brain action, unity in bullying bushido cakewalk castration, functional in women catharsis, aristotle's theory of character and muscles children faults and crimes of motor activity of motor defects of selfishness of chivalry, medieval chorea christianity, muscular chums and cronies church, feminity in the city children vs. country children civilized men, savages physically superior to climbing hill muscles, age for exercise of coeducation, dangers in college coeducation in english requirements of woman's ideal school and combat, personal, as exercise _commando_ exercises restricted for girls concentration concreteness in modern language study, criticized conduct mechanized of italian schoolboys tabulated weather and confessionalism of young women passional inducement to conflict, _see_ combat control nervous, through dancing of anger of brute instincts of children's movements conversation, athletics in degeneration in, causes of conversion coördination loosened at adolescence inherited tendencies of muscular corporal punishment country children vs. city children crime, juvenile causes of education and reading and cruelty, a juvenile fault culture heroes dancing deadly sins, the seven, vs. modern juvenile faults debate and will-training doll curve domesticity dramatic instinct of puberty drawing, curve of stages of dueling education art in crime and industrial intellectual manual moral and religious of boys of girls physical effort, as a developing force emotions dancing completest language of the religion directed to endurance energy and laziness english language and literature, pedagogy of pedagogic degeneration in, causes of requirements of college sense language, dangers of _ennui_ erect position and true life ethics, study of, criticized ethical judgments of children euphoria and exercise evolution, movement as a measure of exercise health and measurements and music and nascent periods and rhythm and farm work fatigue at puberty chores and not a cause for punishment play and restlessness expressive of result of labor with defective psychic impulsion rhythm of activity and will-culture and faults of children favorite sounds and words fecundity of college women femininity in the church in the school and college feminists fighting flogging foreign languages, dangers of france, religious training in friendships of adolescence fundamental and accessory future life, as a school teaching games groups panhellenic gangs, organized juvenile genius, early development of germany, will-training in girl graduates aversion to marriage of fecundity of sterility of girls and boys, differences between coeducation for, dangers of education of education of, humanistic education of, manners in education of, more difficult than of boys education of, nature in education of, regularity in education of, religion in ideal school and curriculum for overdrawing their energy grammar, place of greece, athletic festivals in greek body training group games growth at puberty gymnastics and its effect on of muscle structure and function, measure of periods rhythmic gymnastics effect on growth, its ideal of, and anthropometry ideals, its four unharmonized, and military ideals and nascent periods and patriotism and proportion and measurement for, criticized swedish habits and muscle hand and arboreal life health, exercise and of girls heredity, a factor in development high school, the coeducation in language study and hill-climbing historic interest, growth of home, restraint of, detrimental honor, among hoodlums in sports hoodlums hysteria imagination, at puberty of children play and individuality, growth of, at puberty industrial education industry and movement inhibition intellect, adolescence in intemperance knightly ideas of youth knowing and doing language, concreteness in, degeneration through dangers of, through eye and hand precision curve of _vs_. literature latin, danger of laughter laziness and energy lies literary men, youth of women, youth of literature and adolescence language _vs_. machinery and movement mammae, loss of function of manners in girls' education manual training defects and criticisms of difficulties of marriage, dangers in delay of influenced by coeducation influenced by college training mastery in art-craft, equipment for maternity, dangers of deferred measurements and exercise memory, accuracy, age, and kinds of sex curve of types of military drill ideals and gymnastics mind and motility money sense monthly period and sabbath motherhood, training for motor, activity, primitive automatisms defects of children defects, general economies powers, general growth of precocity psychoses, muscles and recaptulation regularity movement and industry movements, passive precocity of muscle tension and thought muscles, per cent by weight of body character and motor psychoses and small, and thought will and muscular christianity music and exercise myths, study of nascent periods and exercises nature in girls' education obedience panhellenic games passive movements patriotism and gymnastics peace, man's normal state periodicity in growth in women philology, dangers of plasticity of growth at puberty play course of study imagination and prehistoric activity and problem sex and stages and ages of work and plays and games, codification of precocity, motor in the motor sphere predatory organizations primitive motor activity punishments in school, causes of reading age crime and curve reason, development of recapitulation and motor heredity records in athletics regularity in education of girls religious training, age for for girls in europe premature two methods of retardation as a means of broadening revivalists rhythm, exercise and in primitive activities of work and rest savages physically superior to civilized men school, language study in need of enthusiasm in punishments in, causes of reading in scientific men, youth of sedentary life selfishness of children sex, play and sports and slang curve value of sleep, in education of girls sloyd, origin, aims, criticism of social activities organizations of youth solitude sounds, favorite, and words sports, values of different codification of sexual influence in team work in spurtiness sterility of girl graduates story-telling, interest in struggle-for-lifeurs students' associations stuttering and stammering swedish gymnastics swimming talent, early development of teachers, aversions to team spirit technical courses, need of telegraphic skill temibility theft, juvenile thought and muscle tension transitory nature of youthful experiences tree life and erect posture truancy truth-telling turner movement unmarried women, dangers to vagabondage vagrancy virility in the church weather and conduct will, muscles and training womanly, the eternal women, bachelors dangers to, in not marrying education of, ideal young, confessionalism of work at its best, play play and rest and, rhythm of wrestling young men's christian association * * * * * international education series. * * * * * an ideal school; or, looking forward. by preston w. search, honorary fellow in clark university. with an introduction by pres. g. stanley hall. vol. . mo. cloth, $ . net. "i am not concerned that the things presented in this little constructive endeavor will not find bodily incorporation in schools; for it is cross-fertilization and not grafting that has given us our richest varieties of fruits and flowers. this work is an attempt at spirit, not letter; at principle, not method."--_from the author's preface_. "a book i wish i could have written myself; and i can think of no single educational volume in the world-wide range of literature in this field that i believe so well calculated to do so much good at the present time, and which i could so heartily advise every teacher in the land, of whatever grade, to read and ponder."--_pres. g. stanley hall, clark university_. "it is to my mind the most stimulating book that has appeared for a long time. the conception here set forth of the function of the school is, i believe, the broadest and best that has been formulated. the chapter on illustrative methods is worth more than all the books on 'method' that i know of. the diagrams and tables are very convincing. i am satisfied that the author has given us an epoch-making book."--_henry h. goddard, ph.d., state normal school, west chester, pa_. "i received a copy of 'an ideal school,' and i am satisfied that i made no mistake when i, with the other two members of the book committee, recommended the book to the teachers in our county."--_j.g. dundore, lycoming county, pennsylvania_. "certainly one of the most notable books on education published in many years"--_p.p. claxton, editor atlantic educational journal_. "you have done the cause of real education an important service. this book is, in my opinion, one of the most useful in the international education series."--_albert leonard, editor of the journals of pedagogy_. * * * * * d. appleton and company, new york. dickens as an educator. by james i. hughes, inspector of schools, toronto. vol. . mo. cloth, $ . . adopted by several state teachers' reading circles. all teachers have read dickens's novels with pleasure. probably few, however have presumably thought definitely of him as a great educational reformer. but inspector hughes demonstrates that such is his just title. william t. harris says of "dickens as an educator": "this book is sufficient to establish the claim for dickens as an educational reformer. he has done more than any one else to secure for the child considerate treatment of his tender age. dickens stands apart and alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by all who have to do with schools, and by all parents everywhere in our day and generation." professor hughes asserts that "dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the most comprehensive student of childhood that england has yet produced." the book brings into connected form, under proper headings, the educational principles of this most sympathetic friend of children. "mr. james l. hughes has just published a book that will rank as one of the finest appreciations of dickens ever written."--_colorado school journal._ "mr. hughes has brought together in an interesting and most effective manner the chief teachings of dickens on educational subjects. his extracts make the reader feel again the reality of dickens's descriptions and the power of the appeal that he made for a saner, kindlier, more inspiring pedagogy, and thus became, through his immense vogue, one of the chief instrumentalities working for the new education."--_wisconsin journal of education._ cambridge essays on education edited by a.c. benson, c.v.o., ll.d. master of magdalene college with an introduction by the right hon. viscount bryce, o.m. preface the scheme of publishing a volume of essays dealing with underlying aims and principles of education was originated by the university press syndicate. it seemed to promise something both of use and interest, and the further arrangements were entrusted to a small committee, with myself as secretary and acting editor. our idea has been this: at a time of much educational enterprise and unrest, we believed that it would be advisable to collect the opinions of a few experienced teachers and administrators upon certain questions of the theory and motive of education which lie a little beneath the surface. to deal with current and practical problems does not seem the _first_ need at present. just now, work is both common as well as fashionable; most people are doing their best; and, if anything, the danger is that organisation should outrun foresight and intelligence. moreover a weakening of the old compulsion of the classics has resulted, not in perfect freedom, but in a tendency on the part of some scientific enthusiasts simply to substitute compulsory science for compulsory literature, when the real question rather is whether obligatory subjects should not be diminished as far as possible, and more sympathetic attention given to faculty and aptitude. we have attempted to avoid mere current controversial topics, and to encourage our contributors to define as far as possible the aim and outlook of education, as the word is now interpreted. we have not furthered any educational conspiracy, nor attempted any fusion of view. our plan has been first to select some of the most pressing of modern problems, next to find well-equipped experts and students to deal with each, and then to give the various writers as free a hand as possible, desiring them to speak with the utmost frankness and personal candour. we have not directed the plan or treatment or scope of any essay; and my own editorial supervision has consisted merely in making detailed suggestions on smaller points, in exhorting contributors to be punctual and diligent, and generally revising what the new testament calls jots and tittles. we have been very fortunate in meeting with but few refusals, and our contributors readily responded to the wish which we expressed, that they should write from the personal rather than from the judicial point of view, and follow their own chosen method of treatment. we take the opportunity of expressing our obligations to all who have helped us, and to viscount bryce for bestowing, as few are so justly entitled to do, an educational benediction upon our scheme and volume. a.c. benson magdalene college, cambridge august , contents introduction by the right hon. viscount bryce, o.m. i. the aim of educational reform by john lewis paton, m.a., high master of manchester grammar school; formerly fellow of st john's college, cambridge, assistant master at rugby school, head master of university college school ii. the training of the reason by the very rev. william ralph inge, d.d., dean of st paul's, honorary fellow of jesus college, cambridge, and of hertford college, oxford; formerly lady margaret professor of divinity, fellow of king's college, cambridge, assistant master at eton college, fellow and tutor of hertford college, oxford iii. the training of the imagination by arthur christopher benson, c.v.o., ll.d., master of magdalene college, cambridge; formerly assistant master at eton college iv. religion at school by william wyamar vaughan, m.a., master of wellington college; formerly assistant master at clifton college, and head master of giggleswick school v. citizenship by albert mansbridge, m.a., joint-secretary of the cambridge university tutorial classes committee; founder and formerly secretary of the workers' educational association vi. the place of literature in education by nowell smith, m.a., head master of sherborne school; formerly fellow of magdalen college, oxford, fellow and tutor of new college, oxford, assistant master at winchester college vii. the place of science in education by william bateson, f.r.s., director of the john innes horticultural institution, honorary fellow of st john's college, cambridge; formerly professor of biology in the university of cambridge viii. athletics by frederic blagden malim, m.a., master of haileybury college; formerly assistant master at marlborough college, head master of sedbergh school ix. the use of leisure by john haden badley, m.a., head master of bedales school x. preparation for practical life by sir john david mcclure, ll.d., d.mus., head master of mill hill school xi. teaching as a profession by frank roscoe, secretary of the teachers registration council introduction in times of anxiety and discontent, when discontent has engendered the belief that great and widespread economic and social changes are needed, there is a risk that men or states may act hastily, rushing to new schemes which seem promising chiefly because they are new, catching at expedients that have a superficial air of practicality, and forgetting the general theory upon which practical plans should be based. at such moments there is special need for the restatement and enforcement by argument of sound principles. to such principles so far as they relate to education it is the aim of these essays to recall the public mind. they cover so many branches of educational theory and deal with them so fully and clearly, being the work of skilled and vigorous thinkers, that it would be idle for me to enter in a short introduction upon those topics which they have discussed with special knowledge far greater than i possess. all i shall attempt is to present a few scattered observations on the general problems of education as they stand to-day. the largest of those problems, viz., how to provide elementary instruction for the whole population, is far less urgent now than it was fifty years ago. the act of , followed by the act which made school-attendance compulsory, has done its work. what is wanted now is quality rather than quantity. quantity is doubtless needed in one respect. children ought to stay longer at school and ought to have more encouragement to continue education after they leave the elementary school. but it is chiefly an improvement in the teaching that is wanted, and that of course means the securing of higher competence in the teacher by raising the remuneration and the status of the teaching profession[ ]. the next problem is how to find the finest minds among the children of the country and bring them by adequate training to the highest efficiency. the sifting out of these best minds is a matter of educational organisation and machinery; and the process will become the easier when the elementary teachers, who ought to bear a part in selecting those who are most fitted to be sent on to secondary schools, have themselves become better qualified for the task of discrimination. the question how to train these best minds when sifted out would lead me into the tangled controversy as to the respective educational values of various subjects of instruction, a topic which i must not deal with here. what i do wish to dwell upon is the supreme importance to the progress of a nation of the best talent it possesses. in every country there is a certain percentage of the population who are fitted by their superior intelligence, industry, and force of character to be the leaders in every branch of action and thought. it is a small percentage, but it may be increased by discovering ability in places where the conditions do not favour its development, and setting it where it will have a better chance of growth, just as a seedling tree brought out of the dry shade may shoot up when planted where sun and rain can reach it freely. i am not thinking of those exceptionally great and powerful minds, of whom there may not be more than four or five in a generation, who make brilliant discoveries or change the currents of thought, but rather of persons of a capacity high, if not quite first rate, which enables them, granted fair chances, to rise quickly into positions where they can effectively serve the community. these men, whatever occupation they follow, be it that of abstract thinking, or literary production, or scientific research, or the conduct of affairs, whether commercial or political or administrative, are the dynamic strength of the country when they enter manhood, and its realised wealth when they are in their fullest vigour thirty years later. we need more of them, and more of them may be found by taking pains. the volume of thought continuously applied to the work of life, whether it be applied in the library or study or laboratory, or in the workshop or factory or counting-house or council chamber, has not been keeping pace with the growth of our population, our wealth, our responsibilities. it is not to-day sufficient for the increasing vastness and complexity of the problems that confront a great nation. we in great britain have been too apt to rely upon our energy and courage and practical resourcefulness in emergencies, and thus have tended to neglect those efforts to accumulate knowledge, and consider how it can be most usefully applied, which should precede and accompany action. this deficiency is happily one that can be removed, while a want of qualities which are the gift of nature is less curable. the "efficiency" which is on every one's mouth cannot be extemporised by rushing hastily into action, however energetic. it is the fruit of patient and exact determination of and reflection upon the facts to be dealt with. the view that it was the finest minds that ought to be most cared for, and that to them of right belonged not merely leadership, but even control also, was carried by the ancients, and especially by plato and aristotle, almost to excess. their ideal, and indeed that of most greek thinkers, was the maintenance among the masses of the military valour and discipline which the state needed for its protection, and the cultivation among the chosen few of the highest intellectual and moral excellence. in the middle ages, when power as well as rank belonged to two classes, nobles and clergy, the ideal of education took a religious colour, and that training was most valued which made men loyal to the church and to sound doctrine, with the prospect of bliss in the world to come. in our times, educational ideals have become not merely more earthly but more material. modern doctrines of equality have discredited the ancient view that the chief aim of instruction is to prepare the few wise and good for the government of the state. it is not merely upon this world but also upon the material things of this world, power and the acquisition of territory, industrial production, commerce, finance, wealth and prosperity in all its forms, that the modern eye is fixed. there has been a drifting away from that respect for learning which was strong in the middle ages and lasted down into the eighteenth century. in some countries, as in our own, that which instruction and training may accomplish has been rated far below the standard of the ancients. yet in our own time we have seen two striking examples to show that their estimate was hardly too high. think of the power which the constant holding up, during long centuries, of certain ideals and standards of conduct, exerted upon the japanese people, instilling sentiments of loyalty to the sovereign and inspiring a certain conception of chivalric duty which europe did not reach even when monarchy and chivalry stood highest. think of that boundless devotion to the state as an omnipotent and all-absorbing power, superseding morality and suppressing the individual, which within the short span of two generations has taken possession of germany. in the latter case at least the incessant preaching and teaching of a theory which lowers the citizen's independence and individuality while it saps his moral sense seems to us a misdirection of educational effort. but in it education has at least displayed its power. can a fair statement of the educational ideals which we might here and now set before ourselves be found in saying that there are three chief aims to be sought as respects those we have called the best minds? one aim is to fit men to be at least explorers, even if not discoverers, in the fields of science and learning. a second is to fit them to be leaders in the field of action, leaders not only by their initiative and their diligence, but also by the power and the habit of turning a full stream of thought and knowledge upon whatever work they have to do. a third is to give them the taste for, and the habit of enjoying, intellectual pleasures. many moralists, ancient and modern, have given pleasure a bad name, because they saw that the most alluring and powerfully seductive pleasures, pleasures which appeal to all men alike, were indulged to excess, and became a source of evil. but men will have pleasure and ought to have pleasure. the best way of drawing them off from the more dangerous pleasures is to teach them to enjoy the better kinds. moreover the quieter pleasures of the intellect mean rest, and a greater fitness for resuming work. the pity is that so many sources capable of affording delight are ignored or imperfectly appreciated. may not this be partly the fault of the lines which our education has followed? perhaps some kinds of study would have fared better if their defenders had dwelt more upon the pleasure they afford and less upon their supposed utility. the champions of greek and latin have dilated on the value of grammar as a mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good english style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition discredited by many examples to the contrary. it is really this insistence on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young people and suggested the dictum that "it doesn't much matter what you teach a boy so long as he hates it." better had it been, abandoning the notion that every one should learn greek, to dwell upon the boundless pleasure which minds of imagination and literary taste derive from carrying in memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are more easily remembered because they are not in our own language, and the finest passages of ancient poetry. there are plenty of things--indeed there are far more things--in modern literature as noble and as beautiful as the best of the ancients can give us. but they are not the same things. the ancient poets have the freshness and the fragrance of the springtime of the world [ ]. or take another sort of instance. take the pleasures which nature spreads before us with a generous hand, hills and fields and woods and rocks, flowers and the songs of birds, the ever-shifting aspects of clouds and of landscapes under light and shadow. how few persons in most countries--for there is in this respect a difference between different peoples--notice these things. everybody sees them few observe them or derive pleasure from them. is not this largely because attention has not been properly called to them? they have not been taught to look at natural objects closely and see the variety there is in them. persons in whom no taste for pictures has ever been formed by their having been taken to see, good pictures and told what constitutes merit, are, when led into a picture gallery, usually interested in the subjects. they like to see a sportsman shooting wild fowl, or a battle scene, or even a prize fight, or a mother tending a sick child, because these incidents appeal to them. but they seldom see in a picture anything but the subject; they do not appreciate: imaginative quality or composition, or colour, or light and shade or indeed anything except exact imitation of the actual. so in nature the average man is; struck by something so exceptional as a lofty rock, like ailsa craig or the needles off the isle of wight, or an eclipse of the moon, or perhaps a blood-red sunset; but he does not notice and consequently draws no pleasure from landscapes in general, whether noble; or quietly beautiful. the capacity for taking pleasure, in all these things may not be absent. there is reason: to think that most children possess it, because when they are shown how to observe they usually respond, quickly perceiving, for instance, the differences between one flower and another, quickly, even when quite young, learning the distinctive characters and names of each, enjoying the process of recognising each when they walk along the lanes, as indeed every intelligent child enjoys the exercise of its observing powers. the disproportionate growth of our urban population, a thing regrettable in other respects also, has no doubt made it more difficult to give young people a familiar knowledge of nature, but the facilities for going into the country and the happy lengthening of summer holidays render it easier than formerly to provide opportunities for nature study, which, properly conducted, is a recreation and not a lesson. there is no source of enjoyment which lasts so keen all through life or which fits one better for other enjoyments, such as those of art and of travel. of the value of the habit of alert observation for other purposes i say nothing, wishing here to insist only upon what it may do for delight. it is often alleged that in england boys and girls show less mental curiosity, less desire for knowledge than those of most european countries, or even than those of the three smaller countries north and west of england in which the celtic element is stronger than it is in south britain. a parallel charge has, ever since the days of matthew arnold, been brought against the english upper and middle classes. he declared that they care less for the "things of the mind" and show less respect to eminence in science, literature and art, than is the case elsewhere, as for instance in france, germany, or italy (to which one may add the united states); and he thus explained the scanty interest taken by these classes in educational progress. should this latter charge be well founded, the fact it notes would tend to perpetuate the former evil, for the indifference of parents reacts upon the school and upon the pupils. the love of knowledge is so natural and awakens so early in the normal child, that even if it be somewhat less keen among english than among french or scottish children, we may well believe our deficiencies to be largely due to faulty and unstimulative methods of teaching, and may trust that they will diminish when these methods have been improved. if it be true that the english public generally show a want of interest in and faint appreciation of the value of education, the stern discipline of war will do something to remove this indifference. the comparative poverty and reduction of luxurious habits; which this war will bring in its train, along with a sense of the need that has arisen for turning to the fullest account all the intellectual resources of the country so that it may maintain its place in the world,--these things may be expected to work a change for the better, and lead parents to set more store upon the mental and less upon the athletic achievements of their sons. be this as it may, no one to-day denies that much remains to be done to spread a sense of the value of science for those branches of industry to which (as especially to agriculture) it has been imperfectly applied, to strengthen and develop the teaching of scientific theory as the foundation of technical and practical scientific work, and above all to equip with the largest measure of knowledge and by the most stimulating training those on whom nature has bestowed the most vigorous and flexible minds. to-day e see that the heads of great businesses, industrial and financial, are looking out for men of university distinction to be placed in responsible posts--a thing which did not happen fifty years ago--because the conditions of modern business have grown too intricate to be handled by any but the best trained brains. the same need is at least equally true of many branches of that administrative work which is now being thrust, in growing volume, upon the state and its officials. if we feel this as respects the internal economic life of our country, is it not true also of the international life of the world? in the stress and competition of our times, the future belongs to the nations that recognise the worth of knowledge and thought, and best understand how to apply the accumulated experience of the past. in the long run it is knowledge and wisdom that rule the world, not knowledge only, but knowledge applied with that width of view and sympathetic comprehension of men, and of other nations, which are the essence of statesmanship. [footnote : this has been clearly seen and admirably stated by the present president of the board of education.] [footnote : take for instance this little fragment of alcman: greek: _ou m heti, parthenikai meligaryest imerophônoi, gyia pherein dynatai. bale dê bale kêrylos eiên, hos t hepi kymatos hanthos ham alkyonessi potêtai nêleges hêtor hechôn haliporphyros eiaros hornis._ what can be more exquisite than the epithets in the first line, or more fresh and delicate and tender in imaginative quality than the three last? a modern poet of equal genius would treat the topic with equal force and grace, but the charm, the untranslatable charm of antique simplicity, would be absent.] i the aim of educational reform by j. l. paton high master of manchester grammar school the last century, with all its brilliant achievement in scientific discovery and increase of production, was spiritually a failure. the sadness of that spiritual failure crushed the heart of clough, turned carlyle from a thinker into a scold, and matthew arnold from a poet into a writer of prose. the secret of failure was that the great forces which move mankind were out of touch with each other, and furnished no mutual support. art had no vital relation with industry; work was dissociated from joy; political economy was at issue with humanity; science was at daggers drawn with religion; action did not correspond to thought, being to seeming; and finally the individual was conceived as having claims and interests at variance with the claims and interests of the society of which he formed a part, in fact as standing out against it, in an opposition so sharply marked that one of the greatest thinkers could write a book with the title "man _versus_ the state." as a result, nation was divided against nation, labour against capital, town against country, sex against sex, the hearts of the children were set against the fathers, the church fought against the state, and, worst of all, church fought against church. the discords of the great society were reflect inevitably in the sphere of education. the elementary schools of the nation were divided into two conflicting groups, and both were separated by an estranging gulf from the grammar schools and high schools as the grammar schools in turn were shut off from the public schools on the one hand, and from the schools of art, music, and of technology on the other there was no cohesion, no concerted effort, no mutual support, no great plan of advance, no homologating idea. this fact in itself is sufficient to account for the ineffectiveness, the despondencies, the insincerities and ceaseless unrest of western civilisation in the nineteenth century. the tree of human life cannot flower and bear fruit for the healing of the nations when its great life-forces spend themselves in making war on each other. if the experience of the century which lies before us is to be different, it must be made so by means of education. education is the science which deals with the world as it is capable of becoming. other sciences deal with things as they are, and formulate the laws which they find to prevail in things as they are. the eyes of education are fixed always upon the future, and philosophy of whatever kind, directly adumbrates a utopia, thinks on educational lines. the aim of education must therefore be as wide as it is high, it must be co-extensive with life. the advance must be along the whole front, not on a small sector only. william morris, when he tried his hand at painting, used to say, that what bothered him always was the frame: he could not conceive of art as something "framed off" and isolated from life. just as william morris wanted to turn all life into art, so with education. it cannot be "framed off" and detached from the larger aspects of political and social well-being; it takes all life for its province. it is not an end in itself, any more than the individuals with whom it deals; it acts upon the individual, but through the individual it acts upon the mass, and its aim is nothing less than the right ordering of human society. to cope with a task which can be stated in these terms, education must be free. a new age postulates a new education. the traditions which have dominated hitherto must one by one be challenged to render account of themselves, that which is good in them must be conserved and assimilated, that which is effete must be scrapped and rejected. neither can the administrative machinery, as it exists, be taken for granted; unless it shows those powers of adaptation and growth which show it to be alive and not dead, it too must be scrapped and rejected; new wine is fatal to old skins. education must regain once more what she possessed at the time of the renascence--the power of direction; she must be mistress of her fate. further, if education is to be a force which makes for co-operation in place of conflict, she must not be divided against herself. she must leave behind forever the separations and snobberies, the misunderstandings, the wordy battles beloved of pedants and politicians. the smoke and dust of controversy obscures her vision, and she needs all her energies to tackle the great task which confronts her. in this regard nothing is so full of promise for the future as the new sense of unity which is beginning both to animate and actuate the whole teaching profession, from the university to the kindergarten, and has already eventuated in the formation of a teachers registration council, on which all sorts and conditions of education are represented. the materialists have not been slow to see their chance, to challenge the old tradition of literary education, and to urge the claims of science. but the aim which they place before us is frankly stated--it is the acquisition of wealth; they are "on manna bent and mortal ends," and their conception of the future is a world in which one nation competes against another for the acquisition of markets and commodities. in effect, therefore, materialism challenges the classics, but it accepts the self-seeking ideals of the past generations, and accepts also, as an integral part of the future, the scramble of conflicting interests, labour against capital, nation against nation, man against man. now the first characteristic of the genuine scientific mind is the power of learning by experience. real science never makes the same mistake twice. obviously the repetition of the past can only eventuate in the repetition of the present. and that is precisely what education sets itself to counteract. the materialist forgets three outstanding and obvious facts. firstly, science cannot be the whole of knowledge, because "science" (in his limited sense of the term) deals only with what appears. secondly, power of insight depends not so much upon the senses as on moral qualities, the sense of sympathy and of fairness; it needs self-discipline as well as knowledge both of oneself and one's fellow-man. "how can a man," says carlyle, "without clear vision in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head?" "eyes and ears," said the ancient philosopher, "are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls." thirdly, the tragedy of the past generation was not its failure to accumulate wealth; in that respect it was more successful than any generation which preceded it. the tragedy of the nineteenth century was that, when it had acquired wealth, it had no clear idea, either individually or collectively, what to do with it. and yet the house of humanity faces both ways; it looks out towards the world of appearances as well as to the world of spirit, and is, in fact, the meeting-place of both. materialism is not wrong because it deals with material things. it is wrong because it deals with nothing else. it is wrong, also, in education because taking the point of view of the adult, it makes the material product itself the all-important thing. in every right conception of education the child is central. the child is interested in things. it wants first to _sense_ them, or as froebel would say "to make the outer inner"; it wants to play with them, to construct with them, and along the line of this inward propulsion the educational process has to act. the "thing-studies" if one may so term them, which have been introduced into the curriculum, such as gardening, manual training (with cardboard, wood, metal), cooking, painting, modelling, games and dramatisation, are it is true later introductions, adopted mainly from utilitarian motive; and they have been ingrafted on the original trunk, being at first regarded as detachable extras, but they quickly showed that they were an organic part of the real educative process; they have already reacted on the other subjects of the curriculum, and have, in the earlier stages of education become central. in the same way, vocation is having great influence upon the higher terminal stages of education. all this is part of the most important of all correlations, the correlation of school with life. but the child's interest in things is social. through the primitive occupations of mankind, he is entering step by step into the heritage of the race and into a richer fuller personal experience. the science which enlists a child's interest is not that which is presented from the logical, abstract point of view. the way in which the child acquires it is the same as that in which mankind acquired it--his occupation presents certain difficulties, to overcome these difficulties he has to exercise his thought, he invents and experiments; and so thought reacts upon occupation, occupation reacts upon thought. and out of that reciprocal action science is born. in the same way his play is social--in his games too he enters into the heritage of the race, and in playing them he is learning unconsciously the greatest of all arts, the art of living with others. in his play as well as in his school work the lines of his natural development show how he can be trained to co-operate with the law of human progress. this fitness and readiness to co-operate with the great movement of human progress, all-round fitness of body, mind and spirit, provides the formula which fuses and reconciles two growing tendencies in modern education. there is in the first place the movement towards self-expression and self-development--postulating for the scholar a larger measure of liberty in thought and action, and self-direction than hitherto--this movement is represented mainly by dr montessori, and by "what is and what might be"; it is a movement which is spreading upwards from the infant school to the higher standards. side by side with it is the movement towards the fuller development of corporate life in the school, the movement which trains the child to put the school first in his thoughts, to live for the society to which he belongs and find his own personal well-being in the well-being of that society. this has been, ever since arnold, sedulously fostered in the games of the public schools, and fruitful of good results in that limited sphere; it has been applied with conspicuous success to the development of self-government, and it has reached its fullest expression in the little commonwealth of mr homer lane. but we are beginning to recognise its wider applications, it is capable of transforming the spirit of the class-room activities as well as the activities of a playing field, it is in every way as applicable to the elementary school as to eton, or rugby, or harrow, and to girls as well as to boys. these two movements towards a fuller liberty of self-fulfilment, and towards a fuller and stronger social life, are convergent, and supplement, or rather complement, each other. personality, after all, is best defined as "capacity for fellowship," and only in the social milieu can the individual find his real self-fulfilling. unless he functions socially, the individual develops into eccentricity, negative criticism, and the cynical aloofness of the "superior person." on the other hand without freedom of individual development, the organisation of life becomes the death of the soul. prussia has shown how the psychology of the crowd can be skilfully manipulated for the most sinister ends. it is a happy omen for our democracy that both these complementary movements are combined in the new life of the schools. to both appeals, the appeal of personal freedom, and the appeal of the corporate life, the british child is peculiarly responsive. round these two health-centres the form of the new system will take shape and grow. and growth it must be, not building. the body is not built up on the skeleton, the skeleton is secreted by the growing body. the hope of education is in the living principle of hope and enthusiasm, which stretches out towards perfection. one distrusts instinctively at the present time anything schematic. there are men, able enough as organisers, who will be ready to sit down and produce at two days' notice a full cut-and-dried scheme of educational reconstruction. they will take our present resources, and make the best of them, no doubt, re-arranging and re-manipulating them, and making them go as far as they can. they will shape the whole thing out in wood, and the result will be wooden. it will be static and stratified, with no upward lift. but that is not the way. education is a thing of the spirit, it is instinct with life, [greek: thermon ti pragma] as aristotle would say, drawing upon resources that are not its own, "unseen yet crescive in its faculty" and in its growth taking to itself such outward form as it needs for the purpose of its inward life. six years at least it will take for the new spirit to work itself out into the definite larger forms. that does not mean that it will come without hard purposeful thinking and much patient effort. education does not "happen" any more than "art happens,"--and just as with the arts of the middle ages, so the well-being of education depends not on the chance appearance of a few men of genius but on the right training and love of the ordinary workman for his work. education is a spiritual endeavour, and it will come, as the things of the spirit come, through patience in well-doing, through concentration of purpose on the highest, through drawing continually on the inexhaustible resources of the spiritual world. the supreme "maker" is the poet, the man of vision. for the administrator, the task is different from what it has been. it is for him to watch and help experiments, to prevent the abuse of freedom, not to preserve uniformities but to select variations. but he is handling a power which, as george meredith says, "is a heaven-sent steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers." to-morrow is the day of opportunity. to-day is the day of preparation. yesterday's ideals have become the practical politics of the present hour. our countrymen recognise now as they have never done before that the problem of national reconstruction is in the main a problem of national education: "the future welfare of the nation," to use mr fisher's words, "depends upon its schools." men make light now of the extra millions which a few years ago seemed to bar the way of progress. at the same time the discipline of the last three years has hammered into us a new consciousness of national solidarity and social obligation. as the whole energies of a united people are at this moment concentrated on the duty of destruction which is laid upon us, so after the war with no less urgency and no less oneness of heart the whole energies of a united nation must be concentrated on the upbuilding of life. that upbuilding is to be economic as well as spiritual, but those who think out most deeply the need of the economic situation, are most surely convinced that the problems of industry and commerce are at the bottom human problems and cannot find solution without a new sense of "co-operation and brotherliness[ ]." such is the need and such the task. england is looking to her schools as she never did before. the aim of her education must be both high and wide, higher than lucre, wider than the nation. and the aim of our education cannot be fulfilled until the education of other peoples is infused with the same spirit. education, like finance, must be planned on international lines by international consensus with a view to world peace. only so can it fulfil the ultimate end which already looms on the horizon, becoming when the time has birth a lever to uplift the earth and roll it on another course. [footnote : mr angus watson in _eclipse or empire_, p. .] ii the training of the reason by w. r. inge dean of st paul's the ideal object of education is that we should learn all that it concerns us to know, in order that thereby we may become all that it concerns us to be. in other words, the aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values. values are facts apprehended in their relation to each other, and to ourselves. the wise man is he who knows the relative values of things. in this knowledge, and in the use made of it, is summed up the whole conduct of life. what are the things which are best worth winning for their own sakes, and what price must i pay to win them? and what are the things which, since i cannot have everything, i must be content to let go? how can i best choose among the various subjects of human interest, and the various objects of human endeavour, so that my activities may help and not hinder each other, and that my life may have a unity, or at least a centre round which my subordinate activities may be grouped. these are the chief questions which a man would ask, who desired to plan his life on rational principles, and whom circumstances allowed to choose his occupation. he would desire to know himself, and to know the world, in order to give and receive the best value for his sojourn in it. we english for the most part accept this view of education, and we add that the experience of life, or what we call knowledge of the world, is the best school of practical wisdom. we do not however identify practical wisdom with the life of reason but with that empirical substitute for it which we call common sense. there is in all classes a deep distrust of ideas, often amounting to what plato called _misologia_, "hatred of reason." an englishman, as bishop creighton said, not only has no ideas; he hates an idea when he meets one. we discount the opinion of one who bases his judgment on first principles. we think that we have observed that in high politics, for example, the only irreparable mistakes are those which are made by logical intellectualists. we would rather trust our fortunes to an honest opportunist, who sees by a kind of intuition what is the next step to be taken, and cares for no logic except the logic of facts. reason, as aristotle says, "moves nothing"; it can analyse and synthesise given data, but only after isolating them from the living stream of time and change. it turns a concrete situation into lifeless abstractions, and juggles with counters when it should be observing realities. our prejudices against logic as a principle of conduct have been fortified by our national experience. we are not a quick-witted race; and we have succeeded where others have failed by dint of a kind of instinct for improvising the right course of action, a gift which is mainly the result of certain elementary virtues which we practise without thinking about them, justice, tolerance, and moderation. these qualities have, we think and think truly, been often wanting in the latin nations, which pride themselves on lucidity of intellect and logical consistency in obedience to general principles. recent philosophy has encouraged these advocates of common sense, who have long been "pragmatists" without knowing it, to profess their faith without shame. intellect has been disparaged and instinct has been exalted. intuition is a safer guide than reason, we are told; for intuition goes straight to the heart of a situation and has already acted while reason is debating. much of this new philosophy is a kind of higher obscurantism; the man in the street applauds bergson and william james because he dislikes science and logic, and values will, courage and sentiment. he used to be fond of repeating that waterloo was won on the playing fields of our public schools, until it was painfully obvious that colenso and spion kop were lost in the same place. we have muddled through so often that we have come half to believe in a providence which watches over unintelligent virtue. "be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever," we have said to britannia. so we have acquiesced in being the worst educated people west of the slav frontier. i do not wish to dwell on the disadvantages which we have thus incurred in international competition--our inferiority to germany in chemistry, and to almost every continental nation in scientific agriculture. this lesson we are learning, and are not likely to forget. it is our spiritual loss which we need to realise more fully. in the first place, the majority of englishmen have no thought-out purpose in life beyond the call of "duty," which is an empty ideal until we know what our duty is. confusion of means and ends is especially common in this country, though it is certainly to be found everywhere. the passion for irrational accumulation is one example of the error, which causes the gravest social inconvenience. the largest part of social injustice and suffering is caused by the unchecked indulgence of the acquisitive instinct by those who have the opportunity of indulging it, and who have formed a blind habit of indulging it. no one, however selfish, who had formed any reasonable estimate of the relative values of life, would devote his whole time to the economical exploitation of his neighbours, in order to pile up the instruments of a fuller life, which he will never use. to regard business as a kind of game is, from the highest point of view, right, and our nation gains greatly by applying the ethics of sport to all our external activities; but we err in living for our games, whether they happen to be commerce or football. a friend of mine expostulated with a yorkshire manufacturer who was spending his old age in unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir. the old man answered, "if it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half million as it has given me to make it, i don't grudge it him." that is not the spirit of the real miser or mammon-worshipper. it is the spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no rational standard of good. when such a man intervenes in educational matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. he will wish to make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or the improvement of the material condition of the poor. but knowledge and wisdom refuse to be so treated. like goodness and beauty, wisdom is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas. as one of the cambridge platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections. wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it. another effect of our _misologia_ is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. that such sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently robs honest peter to pay dishonest paul, needs no demonstration. sentimentalism does not believe that prevention is better than cure, and practical politicians know too well that a scientific treatment of social maladies is out of the question in this country. others become fanatics, that is to say, worldlings who are too narrow and violent to understand the world. the root of the evil is that a whole range of the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know nothing of intellectual wealth. and yet the real wealth of a nation consists in its imponderable possessions--in those things wherein one man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not proved incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics. an inexhaustible treasure is freely open to all who have passed through a good course of mental training, a treasure which we can make our own according to our capacities, and our share of which we would not barter for any goods which the law of the land can give or take away. "the intelligent man," says plato, "will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness and wisdom, and will less value the others." the studies which have this effect are those which teach us to admire and understand the good, the true and the beautiful. they are, may we not say, humanism and science, pursued in a spirit of "admiration, hope and love." the trained reason is disinterested and fearless. it is not afraid of public opinion, because it "counts it a small thing that it should be judged by man's judgment"; its interests are so much wider than the incidents of a private career that base self-centred indulgence and selfish ambition are impossible to it. it is saved from pettiness, from ignorance, and from bigotry. it will not fall a victim to those undisciplined and disproportioned enthusiasms which we call fads, and which are a peculiar feature of english and north american civilisation. such reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected not by the reason of the many, but by the fanaticism of the few. a just balance may on the whole be preserved, but there is not much balance in the judgments of individuals. matthew arnold, whose exhortations to his countrymen now seem almost prophetic, drew a strong contrast between the intellectual frivolity, or rather insensibility, of his countrymen and the earnestness of the germans. he saw that england was saved a hundred years ago by the high spirit and proud resolution of a real aristocracy, which nevertheless was, like all aristocracies, "destitute of ideas." our great families, he shows, could no longer save us, even if they had retained their influence, because power is now conferred by disciplined knowledge and applied science. it is the same warning which george meredith reiterated with increasing earnestness in his late poems. what england needs, he says, is "brain." warn her, bard, that power is pressing hotly for his dues this hour, tell her that no drunken blessing stops the onward march of power, has she ears to take forewarnings, she will cleanse her of her stains, feed and speed for braver mornings valorously the growth of brains. power, the hard man knit for action reads each nation on the brow; cripple, fool, and petrifaction fall to him--are falling now. and again: she impious to the lord of hosts the valour of her off-spring boasts, mindless that now on land and main his heeded prayer is active brain. these faithful prophets were not heeded, and we have had to learn our lesson in the school of experience. she is a good teacher but her fees are very high. the author of _friendship's garland_ ended with a despairing appeal to the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he regarded as incurably vulgar. the middle classes are apt to receive hard measure; they have few friends and many critics. we must go back to euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of the community and "the salvation of the state"; but it is, on the whole, true. and our middle class is only superficially vulgar. vulgarity, as mr robert bridges has lately said, "is blindness to values; it is spiritual death." the middle class in matthew arnold's time was no doubt deplorably blind to artistic values; its productions survive to convict it of what he called philistinism; but it is no longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty. and it has never been a contemptible artist in life. mr bridges describes the progress of vulgarity as an inverted platonic progress. we descend, he says, from ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles, till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity. this identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was something of a paradox even in greece, and does not fit the english character at all. our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass windows seem to shout for a friendly zeppelin to obliterate them. but we british have not descended to ugly conduct. pericles and plato would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more "beautiful" than the parthenon itself. the nation has shaken off its vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and self-indulgence. we have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint, and dignity which, a greek would say, could have only been expected of philosophers. and we certainly are not a nation of philosophers. we must not then be too hasty in calling all contempt for intellect vulgar. we have sinned by undervaluing the life of reason; but we are not really a vulgar people. our secular faith, the real religion of the average englishman, has its centre in the idea of a gentleman, which has of course no essential connection with heraldry or property in land. the upper classes, who live by it, are not vulgar, in spite of the absence of ideas with which matthew arnold twits them; the middle classes who also respect this ideal, are further protected by sound moral traditions; and the lower classes have a cheery sense of humour which is a great antiseptic against vulgarity. but though the poet laureate has not, in my opinion, hit the mark in calling vulgarity our national sin, he has done well in calling attention to the danger which may beset educational reform from what we may call democratism, the tendency to level down all superiorities in the name of equality and good fellowship. it is the opposite fault to the aristocraticism which beyond all else led to the decline of greek culture--the assumption that the lower classes must remain excluded from intellectual and even from moral excellence. with us there is a tendency to condemn ideals of self-culture which can be called "aristocratic." but we need specialists in this as in every other field, and the populace must learn that there is such a thing as real superiority, which has the right and duty to claim a scope for its full exercise. the fashionable disparagement of reason, and exaltation of will, feeling or instinct would be more dangerous in a less scientific age. the italian metaphysician aliotta has lately brought together in one survey the numerous leaders in the great "reaction against science," and they are a formidable band. pragmatists, voluntarists, activists, subjective idealists, emotional mystics, and religious conservatives, have all joined in assaulting the fortress of science which half a century ago seemed impregnable. but the besieged garrison continues to use its own methods and to trust in its own hypotheses; and the results justify the confidence with which the assaults of the philosophers are ignored. we are told that the scientific method is ultimately appropriate only to the abstractions of mathematics. but nature herself seems to have a taste for mathematical methods. a sane idealism believes that the eternal verities are adumbrated, not travestied, in the phenomenal world, and does not forget how much of what we call observation of nature is demonstrably the work of mind. the world as known to science is itself a spiritual world from which certain valuations are, for special purposes, excluded. to deny the authority of the discursive reason, which has its proper province in this sphere, is to destroy the possibility of all knowledge. nor can we, without loss and danger, or instinct or intuition above reason. instinct is a faculty which belongs to unprogressive species. it is necessarily unadaptable and unable to deal with any new situation. consecrated custom may keep chinese civilisation safe in a state of torpid immobility for five thousand years; but fifty years of europe will achieve more, and will at last present cathay with the alternative of moving on or moving off. instinct might lead us on if progress were an automatic law of nature, but this belief, though widely held, is sheer superstition. we have to convert the public mind in this country to faith in trained and disciplined reason. we have to convince our fellow-citizens not only that the duty of self-preservation requires us to be mentally as well equipped as the french, germans and americans, but that a trained intelligence is in itself "more precious than rubies." blake said that "a fool shall never get to heaven, be he never so holy." it is at any rate true that ignorance misses the best things in this life if englishmen would only believe this, the whole spirit of our education would be changed, which is much more important than to change the subjects taught. it does not matter very much what is taught; the important question to ask is what is learnt. this is why the controversy about religious education was mainly fatuous. the "religious lesson" can hardly ever make a child religious; religion, in point of fact, is seldom taught at all; it is caught, by contact with someone who has it. other subjects can be taught and can be learnt; but the teaching will be stiff collar-work, and the learning evanescent, if the pupil is not interested in the subject. and how little encouragement the average boy gets at home to train his reason and form intellectual tastes! he may probably be exhorted to "do well in his examination," which means that he is to swallow carefully prepared gobbets of crude information, to be presently disgorged in the same state. the examination system flourishes best where there is no genuine desire for mental cultivation. if there were any widespread enthusiasm for knowledge as an integral part of life the revolt against this mechanical and commercialised system of testing results would be universal. as things are, a clever boy trains for an examination as he trains for a race; and goes out of training as fast as possible when it is over. meanwhile the romance of his life is centred in those more generous and less individual competitions in the green fields, which our schools and universities have developed to such perfection. in classes which have small opportunities for physical exercises, vicarious athletics, with not a little betting, are a disastrous substitute. but the soul is dyed the colour of its leisure thoughts. "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." this is why no change in the curriculum can do much for education, as long as the pupils imbibe no respect for intellectual values at home, and find none among their school-fellows. and yet the capacity for real intellectual interest is only latent in most boys. it can be kindled in a whole class by a master who really loves and believes in his subject. some of the best public school teachers in the last century were hot-tempered men whose disciplinary performances were ludicrous. but they were enthusiastic humanists, and keen scholars passed year by year out of their class-rooms. the importance of a good curriculum is often exaggerated. but a bad selection of subjects, and a bad method of teaching them, may condemn even the best teacher to ineffectiveness. nothing, for example, can well be more unintelligent than the manner of teaching the classics in our public schools. the portions of greek and latin authors construed during a lesson are so short that the boys can get no idea of the book as a whole; long before they finish it they are moved up into another form. and over all the teaching hangs the menace of the impending examination, the riddling sphinx which, as seeley said in a telling quotation from sophocles, forces us to attend to what is at our feet, neglecting all else--all the imponderables in which the true value of education consists. the tyranny of examinations has an important influence upon the choice of subjects as well as upon the manner of teaching them; for some subjects, which are remarkably stimulating to the mind of the pupil, are neglected, because they are not well adapted for examinations. among these, unfortunately, are our own literature and language. it is therefore necessary, even in a short essay which professes to deal only with generalities, to make some suggestions as to the main subjects which our education should include. as has been indicated already, i would divide them into main classes--science and humanism. every boy should be instructed in both branches up to a certain point. we must firmly resist those who wish to make education purely scientific, those who, in bacon's words, "call upon men to sell their books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking minerva and the muses and relying upon vulcan." we want no young specialists of twelve years old; and a youth without a tincture of humanism can never become a man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought. of the teaching of science i am not competent to speak. but as an instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by humanists. to direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs of the human body perform their work; to analyse the light which has travelled for centuries from some distant star; to retrace the history of the earth and the evolution of its inhabitants--such studies cannot fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. they promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline, as the greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric. the air which blows about scientific studies is like the air of a mountain top--thin, but pure and bracing. and as a subject of education science has a further advantage which can hardly be overestimated. it is in science that most of the new discoveries are being made. "the rapture of the forward view" belongs to science more than to any other study. we may take it as a well-established principle in education that the most advanced teachers should be researchers and discoverers as well as lecturers, and that the rank and file should be learners as well as instructors. there is no subject in which this ideal is so nearly attainable as in science. and yet science, even for its own sake, must not claim to occupy the whole of education. the mere _naturforscher_ is apt to be a poor philosopher himself, and his pupils may turn out very poor philosophers indeed. the laws of psychical and spiritual life are not the same as the laws of chemistry or biology; and the besetting sin of the scientist is to try to explain everything in terms of its origin instead of in terms of its full development: "by their roots," he says, "and not by their fruits, ye shall know them." this is a contradiction of aristotle [greek: (_hê physis telos hestin_)], and of a greater than aristotle. the training of the reason must include the study of the human mind, "the throne of the deity," in its most characteristic products. besides science, we must have humanism, as the other main branch of our curriculum. the advocates of the old classical education have been gallantly fighting a losing battle for over half a century; they are now preparing to accept inevitable defeat. but their cause is not lost, if they will face the situation fairly. it is only lost if they persist in identifying classical education with linguistic proficiency. the study of foreign languages is a fairly good mental discipline for the majority; for the minority it may be either more or less than a fair discipline. but only a small fraction of mankind is capable of enthusiasm for language, for its own sake. the art of expressing ideas in appropriate and beautiful forms is one of the noblest of human achievements, and the two classical languages contain many of the finest examples of good writing that humanity has produced. but the average boy is incapable of appreciating these values, and the waste of time which might have been profitably spent is, under our present system, most deplorable. it may also be maintained that the conscientious editor and the conscientious tutor have between them ruined the classics as a mental discipline. fifty years ago, english commentatorship was so poor that the pupil had to use his wits in reading the classics; now if one goes into an undergraduate's room, one finds him reading the text with the help of a translation, two editions with notes, and a lecture note-book. no faculty is being used except the memory, which bishop creighton calls "the most worthless of our mental powers." the practice of prose and verse composition, often ignorantly decried, has far more educational value; but it belongs to the linguistic art which, if we are right, is not to be demanded of all students. are we then to restrict the study of the classics to those who have a pretty taste for style? if so, the cause of classical education is indeed lost. but i can see no reason why some of the great greek and latin authors should not be read, _in translations_, as part of the normal training in history, philosophy and literature. i am well aware of the loss which a great author necessarily suffers by translation; but i have no hesitation in saying that the average boy would learn far more of greek literature, and would imbibe far more of the greek spirit, by reading the whole of herodotus, thucydides, the _republic_ of plato, and some of the plays in good translations, than he now acquires by going through the classical mill at a public school. the classics, like almost all other literature, must be read in masses to be appreciated. boys think them dull mainly because of the absurd way in which they are made to study them. i shall not make any ambitious attempt to sketch out a scheme of literary studies. my subject is the training of the reason. but two principles seem to me to be of primary importance. the first is that we should study the psychology of the developing reason at different ages, and adapt our method of teaching accordingly. the memory is at its best from the age of ten to fifteen, or thereabouts. facts and dates, and even long pieces of poetry, which have been committed to memory in early boyhood, remain with us as a possession for life. we would most of us give a great deal in middle age to recover that astonishingly retentive memory which we possessed as little boys. on the other hand, ratiocination at that age is difficult and irksome. a young boy would rather learn twenty rules than apply one principle. accordingly the first years of boyhood are the time for learning by heart. quantities of good poetry, and useful facts of all kinds should be entrusted to the boy's memory to keep: will assimilate them readily, and without any mental overstrain. but eight or ten years later, "cramming" is injurious both to the health and to the intellect. years have brought, if not the philosophic mind, yet at any rate a mind which can think and argue. the memory is weaker and the process of loading it with facts is more unpleasant. at this stage the whole system of teaching should be different. one great evil of examinations is that they prolong the stage of mere memorising to an age at which it is not only useless but hurtful. another valuable guide is furnished by observing what authors the intelligent boy likes and dislikes. his taste ought certainly to be consulted, if our main object is to interest him in the things of the mind. the average intelligent boy likes homer and does not like virgil; he is interested by tacitus and bored by cicero; he loves shakespeare and revels in macaulay, who has a special affinity for the eternal schoolboy. my other principle is that since we are training young englishmen, whom we hope to turn into true and loyal citizens, we shall presumably find them most responsive to the language, literature, and history of their own country. this would be a commonplace, not worth uttering, in any other country; in england it is, unfortunately, far from being generally accepted nothing sets in a stronger light the inertia and thoughtlessness, not to say stupidity, of the british character in all matters outside the domain of material and moral interests, than our neglect of the magnificent spiritual heritage which we possess in our own history and literature. wordsworth, in one of those noble sonnets which are now, we are glad to hear, being read by thousands in the trenches and by myriads at home, proclaims his faith in the victory of his country over napoleon because he thinks of her glorious past. we must be free or die, who speak the tongue that shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold that milton held. in everything we are sprung of earth's best blood, have titles manifold. it is a high boast, but it is true. but what have we done to fire the imagination of our boys and girls with the vision of our great and ancient nation, now struggling for its existence? what have we taught them of shakespeare and milton, of elizabeth and cromwell, of nelson and wellington? have we ever tried to make them understand that they are called to be the temporary custodians of very glorious traditions, and the trustees of a spiritual wealth compared with which the gold mines of the rand are but dross? do we even teach them, in any rational manner, the fine old language which has been slowly perfected for centuries, and which is now being used up and debased by the rubbishy newspapers which form almost the sole reading of the majority? we have marvelled at the slowness with which the masses realised that the country was in danger, and at the stubbornness with which some of the working class clung to their sectional interests and ambitions when the very life of england was at stake. in france the whole people saw at once what was upon them; the single word _patrie_ was enough to unite them in a common enthusiasm and stern determination. with us it was hardly so; many good judges think that but for the "lusitania" outrage and the zeppelins, part of the population would have been half-hearted about the war, and we should have failed to give adequate support to our allies. the cause is not selfishness but ignorance and want of imagination; and what have we done to tap the sources of an intelligent patriotism? we are being saved not by the reasoned conviction of the populace, but by its native pugnacity and bull-dog courage. this is not the place to go into details about english studies; but can anyone doubt that they could be made the basis of a far better education than we now give in our schools? we have especially to remember that there is a real danger of the modern englishman being cut off from the living past. scientific studies include the earlier phases of the earth, but not the past of the human race and the british people. christianity has been a valuable educator in this way, especially when it includes an intelligent knowledge the bible. but the secular education of the masses is now so much severed from the stream of tradition and sentiment which unites us with the older civilisations, that the very language of the churches is becoming unintelligible to them, and the influence of organised religion touches only a dwindling minority. and yet the past lives in us all; lives inevitably in its dangers, which the accumulated experience of civilisation, valued so slightly by us on its spiritual side, can alone help us to surmount. a nation like an individual, must "wish his days to be bound each to each by natural piety." it too must strive to keep its memory green, to remember the days of old and the years that are past. the jews have always had, in their sacred books, a magnificent embodiment of the spirit of their race; and who can say how much of their incomparable tenacity and ineradicable hopefulness has been due to the education thus imparted to every jewish child? we need a bible of the english race, which shall be hardly less sacred to each succeeding generation of young britons than the old testament is to the jews. england ought to be, and may be, the spiritual home of one quarter of the human race, for ages after our task as a world-power shall have been brought to a successful issue, and after we in this little island have accepted the position of mother to nations greater than ourselves. but england's future is precious only to those to whom her past is dear. i am not suggesting that the history and literatures of other countries should be neglected, or that foreign languages should form no part of education. but the main object is to turn out good englishmen, who may continue worthily and even develop further a glorious national tradition. to do this, we must appeal constantly to the imagination, which wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her most exalted mood." we may thus bring a little poetry and romance into the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. it may well be that their discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature than we suppose. for the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as is apollo's lute. can we end with a definition of the happiness and well-being, which is the goal of education, as of all else that we try to do? probably we cannot do better than accept the famous definition of aristotle, which however we must be careful to translate rightly. "happiness, or well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in an unhampered life." happiness consists in doing rather than being; the activity must be that of the soul--the whole man acting as a person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and it must be unhampered--we must be given the opportunity of doing the best that is in us to do. to awaken the soul; to hold up before it the images of whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple the mind; this is the work which we have called the training of the reason. iii the training of the imagination by a. c. benson master of magdalene college, cambridge it might be hastily assumed by a reader bent on critical consideration, that the subject of my essay had a certain levity or fancifulness about it. works of imagination, as by a curious juxtaposition they are called, are apt to lie under an indefinable suspicion, as including unbusinesslike and romantic fictions, of which the clear-cut and well-balanced mind must beware, except for the sake, perhaps, of the frankest and least serious kind of recreation. considering the part which the best and noblest works of imagination must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use of that particular faculty. the old themes and verses aimed at producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical rhetoricians and poets. no boy, at least in my day, was ever encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across country in pursuit of imagined adventures. even english teaching in its earlier stages seldom aimed at more than transcriptions of actual experience, a day spent in the country, or a walk beside the sea. only quite recently have boys and girls been encouraged to write poems and stories out of their own imaginations; and even now there are plenty of educational critics who would consider such exercises as dilettante things lacking in practical solidity. but i desire in this essay to go further back into the roots of the subject, and my first position is plainly this; that imagination, pure and simple, is a common enough faculty; not perhaps the creative imagination which can array scenes of life, construct romantic experiences, and embody imaginary characters in dramatic situations, but the much simpler sort of imagination which takes pleasure in recalling past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating interesting events. the boy who, weary of the school-term, considers what he will do on the first day of the holidays, or who anxiously forebodes paternal displeasure, is exercising his imagination; and the truth is that the faculty of imagination plays an immense part in all human happiness and unhappiness, considering that, whenever we take refuge from the present in memories or in anticipations, we are using it. the first point then that i shall consider is whether this restless and influential faculty ought not in any case to be _trained_, so that it may not either be atrophied or become over-dominant; and the second point will be the further consideration as to whether the faculty of creative imagination is a thing which should be deliberately developed. in the first place then, it seems to me simply extraordinary that so little heed is paid in education to the using and controlling of what is one of the most potent instinctive forces of the mind. we take careful thought how to strengthen and fortify the body, we go on to spending many hours upon putting memory through its paces, and in developing the reason and the intelligence; we pass on from that to exercising and purifying the character and the will; we try to make vice detestable and virtue desirable. but meanwhile, what is the little mind doing? it submits to the drudgery imposed upon it, it accommodates itself more or less to the conditions of its life; it learns a certain conduct and demeanour for use in public. yet all the time the thought of the boy is running backwards and forwards in secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and comforting itself in tedious hours by framing little plans for the future. i remember my old schoolmastering days, and the hours i spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how constantly one saw boys in the midst of their work, with pen suspended and page unturned, look up with that expression denoting that some vision had passed before the inward eye--which, as wordsworth justly observes, constitutes "the bliss of solitude"--obliterating for a moment the surrounding scene. i do not mean that the thought was a distant or an exalted one--probably it was some entirely trivial reminiscence, or the anticipation of some coming amusement. but i do not think i exaggerate when i say that probably the greater part of a human being's unoccupied hours, and probably a considerable part of the hours supposed to be occupied, are spent in some similar exercise of the imagination. what a confirmation of this is to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams! then the instinct is steadily at work, neither remembering nor anticipating, but weaving together the results of experience into a self-taught tale. and then if one considers later life, it is no exaggeration to say that the greater part of human happiness and unhappiness consists in the dwelling upon what has been, what may be, what might be, and, alas, in our worst moments, upon what might have been "my unhappiest experiences," said lord beaconsfield, "have been those which never happened"; and again the same acute critic of life said that half the clever people he knew were under the impression that they were hated and envied, the other half that they were admired and loved;--and that neither were right! the imaginative faculty then is a species of self-representation, the power of considering our own life and position as from the outside; from it arise both the cheerful hopes and schemes of the sound mind, and the shadowy anxieties and fears of the mind which lacks robustness. it certainly does seem singular that this deep and persistent element in human life is left so untrained and unregarded, to range at will, to feed upon itself. all that the teacher does is to insist as far as possible on a certain concentration of the mind on business at particular times, and if he has ethical purposes at heart, he may sometimes speak to a boy on the advisability of not allowing his mind to dwell upon base or sensual thoughts; but how little attempt is ever made to train the mind in deliberate and continuous self-control! the latest school of pathologists, in the treatment of obsessed or insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. i am inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow contrive to do more--indeed they cannot well do less than is actually done--in teaching the control of that secret undercurrent of thought in which happiness and unhappiness really reside. those who have lived much with boys will know what havoc suspense or disappointment or anxiety or sensuality or unpopularity can make in an immature character. it seems to me that we ought not to leave all this without guidance or direction, but to make a frontal attack upon it. i do not mean that it is necessary to probe too deeply into the imagination, but i believe that the subject should be frankly spoken about, and suggestions made. the point is to get the will to work, and to induce the mind, in the first place, to realise and practise its power of self-command; and in the second place, to show that it is possible to evict an unwholesome thought by the deliberate welcoming and entertaining of a wholesome one. the best of all cures is to provide every boy with some occupation which he indubitably loves. there are a good many boys whose work is not interesting to them, and a certain number to whom the prescribed games are a matter of routine rather than of active pleasure. indeed it may be said that hardly any boys enjoy either work or games in which they see no possibility of any personal distinction. it is therefore of great importance that every boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. a schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict time-table and regular games. a house master ought to be most careful in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency in games small, to find out what the boy really likes and enjoys, and to encourage it by every means in his power. that is the best corrective, to administer wholesome food for the mind to digest. but i believe that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly to boys, from time to time, on the necessity of practising control of thought. my own experience is that boys were always interested in any talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly upon their own actual experience. i can conceive that a teacher who told a class to sit still for three minutes and think about anything they pleased, and added that he would then have something to tell them, might have an admirable object-lesson in getting them to consider how swift and far-ranging their fancies had been; or again he might practise them in concentration of thought by asking them to think for five minutes on a perfectly definite thing--to imagine themselves in a wood, or by the sea, or in a chemist's shop, let us say, and then getting them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which they had imagined. the process could be infinitely extended; but if it were done with some regularity, it would certainly b possible to train boys to concentrate themselves in reflection and recollected observation. or again a quality might be propounded, such as generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. this would have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself, and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. the aim is not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into the past or the future. i believe it to be a very notable lack in our theory of education that so little attempt is made to bring the will to bear upon what may be called the subconscious mind. it is that strange undercurrent of thought which is so imprudently neglected which throws up on its banks, without any apparent purpose or aim, the ideas and images which lurk within it. i do not say that such a training would immediately give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as i know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant thought at arm's length, or to train them in the power of resolutely substituting a current of more wholesome images. the subconscious mind is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and flowering, ought to show us that we have within our reach an extraordinarily potent psychological implement. so far then on the more negative side. i have indicated my strong belief that much may be done to train the mind in self-control. indeed our whole education is built upon the faith that we can, perhaps not implant new faculties, but develop dormant ones; and i am persuaded that when future generations come to survey our methods and processes of education, they will regard with deep bewilderment the amazing fact that we applied so careful a training to other faculties, and yet left so helplessly alone the training of the imaginative faculty, upon which, as i have said, our happiness and unhappiness mainly depend. we must, all of us be aware of the fact that there have been times in our lives when all was prosperous, and when we were yet overshadowed with dreary thoughts; or again times when in discomfort, or under the shadow of failure, or at critical or tragic moments, we have had an unreasonable alertness and cheerfulness. all that is due to the subconscious mind, and we ought at least to try experiments in making it obey us better. i now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of training and developing a higher sort of creative imagination. it is all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the dormancy of existing faculties. it is here, i believe, that much of our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment. i used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and i remember at one time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of concentration by promising that i would tell a story for a few minutes at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily mastered. it certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was simple enough, description as brief and vivid as i could make it, and brisk tangible incidents. but the silence, the luxurious abandonment of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which i never had in teaching latin prose or the greek conditional sentence. i always told stories for an hour on sunday evenings to the boys in my house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are remembered by old pupils, i never met one who did pot recollect the stories. now we have here, i believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which is consistently neglected and even despised. it is regarded as a mere luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance. why can we not also do something to encourage what old hawtrey used so beautifully to call "the sweet pride of authorship"? the worst of it all is that we look so much to tangible results. i do not mean that we must try to develop shakespeares, shelleys, thackerays; such airy creatures have a way of catering for themselves! i do riot at all want to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. but many boys have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising some little vision and creation of their own brains. of course there are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. but there are also a good many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of course and wont, would throw themselves with intense pleasure into literary creation. the work done, for instance, at shrewsbury, at the perse school, at carlisle grammar school, in this direction--i daresay it is done elsewhere, but i have seen the work of these three schools with my own eyes--show what quite average boys are capable of in both english poetry and english prose. one of the best points of such a system of literary composition is that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting directions. my suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more direct cultivation of enjoyment in education. some of our worst mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of pedants and moralists and practical men. one of the first requisites in cultivating intellectual and artistic pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the child. that is a factor which has been most stubbornly and unintelligently disregarded in education. developments in character are of the nature of living things; they cannot be superimposed they must be rooted in the temperament and they must draw nurture and sustenance out of the spirit, as the seed imbibes its substance from the unseen soil and the hidden waters. but what has been constantly done is to introduce the broadest effects and the simplest romance, directly and suddenly to the biggest masterpieces. the absence of all gradation and reconciliation has been characteristic of our literary education. of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the classics, that there is very little in either greek or latin which really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as homer or the _anabasis_ of xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough parsing. even _alice in wonderland_, let me say, could only prove a drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be repeated correctly. it is absolutely essential, if any love of literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon. the practice of dictionary-turning is sufficient by itself to destroy intellectual pleasure, but it used to be defended as a base sort of bribe to strengthen memory: it was argued that boys would try to remember words to save themselves the trouble of looking them up. but this has no origin in fact. boys used not to be encouraged to guess at words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked them out. it is to be hoped that english will be in the future increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of connecting it too much with erudition. the old _clarendon press shakespeare_ was an almost perfect example of how not to edit shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly, the notes were crammed with philology, derivation, illustration. as a matter of fact there is a good deal that is interesting, even to small minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly communicated. most boys are responsive to the pleasure of finding a familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be conveyed orally. what is really requisite is that boys should be taught how to read a book intelligently. in dealing with classical books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and i myself very much doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in dealing, say, with three kindred languages, such as latin, french, and english, the same word, such as _spiritus_, _esprit_, and _spirit_ bear very different significations. the great need is that there should be some work going on in which the boys should not be conscious of dragging an ever-increasing burden of memory. let me take a concrete case. a poem like the _morte d'arthur_, or _the lay of the last minstrel_, is well within the comprehension of quite small boys. these could be read in a class, after an introductory lecture as to date, scene, dramatis personae, with perfect ease, words explained as they occurred, difficult passages paraphrased, and the whole action of the story could pass rapidly before the eye. most boys have a distinct pleasure in rhyme and metre. of course it is an immense gain if the master can really read in a spirited and moving manner, and a training in reading aloud should form a part of every schoolmaster's outfit. i should wish to see this reading lesson a daily hour for all younger boys, so as to form a real basis of education. three of these hours could be given to english, and three to french, for in french there is a wide range both of simple narrative stories and historical romances. the aim to be kept in view would be the very simple one of proving that interest, amusement and emotion can be derived from books which, unassisted, only boys of tougher intellectual fibre could be expected to attack. the personalities of the authors of these books should be carefully described, and the result of such reading, persevered in steadily, would be, what is one of the most stimulating rewards of wider knowledge, the sudden realisation, that is, that books and authors are not lonely and isolated phenomena, but that the literature of a nation is like a branching tree, all connected and intertwined, and that the books of a race mirror faithfully and vividly the ideas of the age out of which they sprang. what makes books dull is the absence of any knowledge by the reader of why the author was at the trouble of expressing himself in that particular way at that particular time. when, as a small boy, i read a book of which the whole genesis was obscure to me, it used to appear to me vaguely that it must have been as disagreeable to the author to write it as it was for me to read it. but if it can be once grasped that books are the outcome of a writer's interest or sense of beauty or emotion or joy, the whole matter wears a different aspect. the same principle applies with just the same force to history and geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from the boy's own experience as opening away and outwards from what is going on about him. the object is or ought to be slowly to extend the boy's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical conditions. the dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with the boy's own experience. the aim should rather be to teach him to look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he finds himself. it may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is stimulating, and that all unconnected knowledge is at best mechanical. perhaps one of the most fruitful of all subjects is vivid biography, and no serious educator could perform a more valuable task than in providing a series of biographies of great men, really intelligible to youthful minds. as a rule, biographies of the first order require an amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the reach of ill-stored minds. but i have again and again found with boys that simple biographical lectures are among the most attractive of all lessons. at one time, with my private pupils, i would take a book at random out of my shelves, read an interesting extract or two, and then say that i would try to show why the author chose such a subject, why he wrote as he did, and how it all sprang out of his life and character and circumstances. of course the difficulty in all this is that the field of knowledge is so vast and various, while the capacities of boys are so small, and the time to be spent on their education so short, that we quail before the attempt to grapple with the problem. we have moreover a vague idea that the well-informed man ought to have a general notion of the world as it is, the course of history, the literature of the ages; and at the same time the scientists are maintaining that a general knowledge of the laws and processes of nature is even more urgently needed. i cannot treat of science here, but i fully subscribe to the belief that a general knowledge of science is essential. but the result of our believing that it is advisable to know so much, is that we attempt to spread the thinnest and driest paste of knowledge over the mind, and all the vivid life of it evaporates in the process. the thing is, frankly, far too big to attempt; and, we must henceforth set our faces against the attainment; of mere knowledge as either advisable or possible. what we must try to do is to educate the faculties of curiosity, interest, imagination and sympathy; we must begin from the boy himself, and conduct him away from himself. what we really ought to aim at is to give him the sense that he is surrounded by strange and beautiful mysteries of nature, of which he can himself observe certain phenomena; that human history, as well as the great world about him, is crowded with interesting and animating figures who have laboured, toiled, loved, acted, suffered, sinned, have felt the impulse both of base and selfish desires, but no less of beautiful, exalted, and inspiring hopes. we want to convince the young that it is not well to be narrow, close-fisted, insolent, suspicious, petty, self-satisfied. _imaginative sympathy_, that is to be the end of all our efforts. if we aim only at producing sympathy, we may get a vague sentimentalism which is just distressed by apparent suffering, and anxious to relieve it momentarily, without reflecting whether it is not the outcome of perfectly curable faults of system and habit. if we aim only at imagination, then we get a barren artistic pleasure in dramatic situations and romantic effects. what we ought to aim at is the sympathy which pities and feels for others, as well as admires and imitates them; and this must be reinforced by the imagination which can concern itself with the causes of what otherwise are but vague emotions. we want to make boys on the one hand detest tyranny and high-handedness and bigotry and ruthless exercise of power, and on the other hand mistrust stupidity and ignorance and baseness and selfishness and suspiciousness. the study of high literature is valuable not as a mere exercise in erudition and linguistic nicety and critical taste, but because the great books mirror best the highest hopes and visions of human nature. the precise extent of the intellectual range matters very little, compared with the perceptiveness and emotion by which the realisation of other lives, other needs, other activities, other problems are accompanied. i must not be supposed, in saying this, to be leaving out of sight the virile exercise of logical and rational faculties; but that is another side of education; and the grave deficiency which i detect in the old theory was that practically all the powers and devices of education were devoted to what was called fortifying the mind and making it into a perfect instrument, while there were left out of sight the motives which were to guide the use of that instrument, and the boy was led to suppose that he was to fortify his mind solely for his own advantage. this individualist theory must somehow be modified. the aim of the process i have described is not simply to indicate to the boy the amount of selfish pleasure which he can obtain from literary masterpieces; it is rather to show the boy that he is not alone and isolated, in a world where it is advisable for him to take and keep all that he can; but that he is one of a great fellowship of emotions and interests, and that his happiness depends upon his becoming aware of this, while his usefulness and nobleness must depend upon his disinterestedness, and upon the extent to which he is willing to share his advantages. the teaching of civics, as it is called, may be of some use in this direction, as showing a boy his points of contact with society. but no instruction in the constitution of society is profitable, unless somehow or other the dutiful motive is kindled, and the heroic virtue of service made beautiful. when then i speak of the training of the imagination, i really mean the kindling of motive; and here again i claim that this must be based on a boy's own experience. he understands well enough the possibility of feeling emotion in relation to a small circle, his home and his immediate friends. but he is probably, like most young creatures, and indeed like a good many elderly ones, inclined to be suspicious of all that is strange and foreign, and to anticipate hostility or indifference. what he would willingly share with a relation or friend, he eagerly withholds from an outsider. to cultivate his imaginative sympathy, to give him an insight into the ways and thoughts of other men, to show to him that the same qualities which evoke his trust and love are not the monopoly of his own small circle--this is just what must be taught, because it is exactly what is not instinctively evolved. the training of the imagination then is a deliberate effort to persuade the young to believe in the real nobility and beauty of life, in the great ideas which are moulding society and welding communities together. it cannot be done in a year or a decade; but it ought to be the first aim of education to initiate the imagination of the young into the idea of fellowship, and to make the thought of selfish individualism intolerable. it is not perhaps the only end of education, but i can hardly believe that it has any nobler or more sacred end. iv religion at school by w. w. vaughan the master of wellington college "after all, how seldom does a christian education teach one anything worth knowing about christianity." these are the words of a man whom the public schools are proud to claim, a man who has seen christian education, whether given in the elementary or in the secondary schools tested by the slow fires of peace, and by the quick devouring furnace of war. they seem at first sight to be a verdict of "guilty" against the teachers or the system in which they play a part. that verdict will not be accepted without protest by those incriminated, but even the protesters will feel some compunction, and now that they can no longer question the heroic "student" as to what he means, and go to him for advice as to the remedies for this failure, they should search their hearts and their experience for the help he might have given, had he not laid down his arms and his life on the somme last autumn. for long the need of help has been felt. the teaching of religion may have been less talked and written about, and less organised by societies and associations, than have been other subjects dealt with at school, but the problem of how best to make it a living force in youth and an enduring force throughout the whole of life is often wrestled with at conferences of schoolmasters which do not publish their proceedings, and by little groups of men who feel the need of one another's help. it is certainly always present in the minds, if not in the hearts, of every head master, boarding-house master and tutor in england. these know well what the difficulties are; these know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the great mountains where the holy spirit really dwells. it is never well to insist too much on difficulties, but a bare statement of those that surround this subject is needed. there are the difficulties of course common to every subject; the difficulty of attracting the real teacher, keeping him as a teacher, improving him as a teacher when he has been attracted. even those who start out on their career with a determination that the teaching of religion at all events should have its full share of their time and thought, find that as their teaching life goes on and fresh duties crowd in to usurp more and more all their energies, that the time they can spare, and the thought they can give, either to the preparation of their divinity lessons, or to the enriching and cultivation of their own souls, shrink. now and then they are cruelly disappointed at the result of their efforts as some conspicuous failure seems to prove their teaching vain; they are often depressed by the apparent apathy of the leaders of the church, by their manifest reluctance even to allow others to make the new bottles which can alone hold the new wine. schoolmasters belong to a devoted and to a comparatively learned profession. they should belong, especially those who feel the needs--and all must to some extent--of the religious life of the school, also to a learning profession; and their learning should go beyond the experience of boyish failings, and boyish tragedies, and boyish virtues with which they are almost daily brought into contact; beyond the dictionaries and handbooks that enable the bible lesson to be well prepared; it should go out into the books that deal with the philosophy and the history of religion--the books of harnack and illingworth, hort and inge, bevan and glover, and of others who make us feel how narrow our outlook on our religion is. it would of course be foolish to drag our pupils with us exactly to the point to which these books may have brought us after many years' experience, but it is essential that we should know of the existence of such a distant point if we are to give to those we teach any idea of there being beyond the limits that they can reach at school a great and wonderful and inspiring region which they, with the help of such leaders as have been mentioned can, nay must, explore for themselves if religion is to be something more than mere emotion, fitful in its working, liable to succumb to all the stronger emotions with which life attacks the citadel of the soul. another difficulty is that the teacher of religion is being more continuously and searchingly tested than the teacher of any other subject. the man who expatiates in the form-room on the beauties of literature, and is suspected of never reading a book is looked upon as merely a harmless fraud by those he teaches. the man who preaches, whether officially in the pulpit or unofficially in the class-room or study, a high standard of conduct, and is unsuccessful in his own efforts to attain it, depreciates for all the value of religion. patience and industry and long-suffering and charitableness are virtues that bear the hall mark of christianity, but they are virtues in which the best men fail continually, are conscious of their own failure and would plead for merciful judgment. if the parish priest is exposed to the criticism of those among whom he lives, a still fiercer light beats upon the pulpit or the desk of the schoolmaster. his consciousness of this sometimes leads him to reduce his teaching to the limits of his practice, instead of extending the former and having faith in his power to bring the latter up to this level. indeed, when teachers and those who are taught are living so close together, both, from a not unworthy fear of insincerity, are liable to make themselves and their ideals out to be worse than they are. it is sympathy alone that can overcome this difficulty. indeed, it is safe to say that without sympathy--sympathy that understands difficulties, working equally in those who are old and those who are young--religion at school must be a very cautious and probably a very barren power. again, the schoolmaster is tempted, and even when he is not tempted the boys credit him with yielding to the temptation to treat religion as a super-policeman: something to make discipline easy and consequently to make his own life smooth. it is no good explaining too often that the aim is to get at religion through discipline, but this aim should ever be before us. man cannot too early in life realise that discipline of itself is valueless. its inestimable value in war, as in all the activities of life, is due to its being the necessary preliminary preparation for courageous action, noble thought, wise self-control and unselfish self-surrender. but above all these difficulties, dominating them all, affecting them all, perhaps poisoning them all, is the fact, not to be escaped though it is often ignored, that so many of the traditions of school life, as of national life, seem founded on a basis opposed to christ's teaching. it is very hard to go through a day of our lives, or even a short railway journey, and not offend against the spirit of the sermon on the mount. older people have never been able to solve this dilemma: the rulers find it more difficult than the ruled. the whole of school life is stimulated by the principle of competition, and kept together by a healthy and, on the whole, a kindly self-assertion which is hard to reconcile with the ideals that are upheld in the new testament. yet at school, quite as much as in the world, competition and self-assertion are tempered by abundant friendliness and generosity; and at school if not in the world, there are an increasing number of individuals who have so much spiritual power that they never need to exercise the more worldly power that clashes with the beatitudes. of this power boys seldom talk, except to some specially sympathetic ear at some specially heart-opening moment, but many are dumbly aware of it and they cultivate it, often unconsciously but to the great gain of those around them, by prayer and faithful worship. but even these richer natures are uncomfortably conscious that there is a conflict between what christ commands and what the world advises. that conflict will not cease until faith has more power over our lives. it cannot grow naturally at school among boys, when it does not live in the nation among men; but it would indeed be faithless to miss, through fear of the world's withering power, any opportunity of quickening pure religion among the young. though these opportunities vary very much in the day and the boarding school, they may be said to occur: ( ) in the scripture lesson; ( ) in the services whether held in chapel or, as is often the case especially in day schools, in the hall; ( ) in the preparation for confirmation; ( ) in all lessons in and out of school. there is a great difference of opinion as to what should be taught in the scripture lesson, and who should teach it. it is easy enough to quote instances of extraordinary ignorance, to argue that, because a man who is in the trenches shocks his chaplain by his real or affected neglect of the facts of bible history or the dogmas of the church, therefore he has never had an opportunity of learning them; that same man would probably not give a much more impressive account of the profane subjects in the school curriculum. there is, too, the fact that a man may have forgotten everything of a subject and yet may have learnt much from it. every teacher knows this, if every schoolboy does not. no one shrinks so much from revealing what he knows as the boy who is conscious that he has learnt a thing and is not sure that he can show his knowledge accurately. no subject has been left so free from what is supposed to be the sterilising influence of examinations as divinity. in many schools there have been one or two inspiring teachers of this subject who justify this system, but on the whole the result does not confirm the opinion that all would be well if we could have complete freedom from examinations. if in the future the harvest in religion is to be more worthy of the seed that is sown and the trouble of cultivation, we must face with more frankness, especially in the later years of a boy's life, all the difficulties that are presented by the problems of the bible and church history. we must have more courage in going beyond the syllabuses that are drawn up by universities and ecclesiastical societies. both have to play for safety, but they are dull cards that this stake requires. teachers have overcome their timidity in dealing with the difficulties presented by the old testament. very few now hesitate to take the book of genesis, and, at all events if they are dealing with a high form, they let the boys see that the conflict between science and religion is only apparent, and that the victory of science does not mean the defeat of religion. if they have been lucky enough to use driver's book on genesis they will have felt on sure ground and any learner who has half understood it will have a shield against some of the weapons that assailed and defeated his father's generation. no teacher now would be afraid of making clear the problems presented by the book of daniel or the book of job, but when the new testament is approached much more diffidence is felt, and indeed ought to be felt. diffidence ought not however to involve silence. a wise teacher has said that it is not the miracles of christ but his standard that keeps men away from his church, and therefore outside the influence for which the church stands. true though this may be of men as life goes on, of the young it is not the whole truth. in those critical years of a man's religion--between eighteen and twenty-five--it is the sudden or the slow-growing doubt about the miracles of the new testament, as much as the lofty standard that the "follow me" of christ requires, that makes the profession and even the holding of a religious faith so hard. more and more are the schools trying to prepare those in their charge for the perils that threaten the physical health and the character of the young; but it is tragic that they should be so unwilling to face frankly the perils that will sap the man's faith, and so expose his soul to the assaults of the world and the devil. it is very hard to put oneself in another's place; perhaps harder for the schoolmaster than for any other man, but when we are teaching such a subject as religion--a subject whose roots must perish if they cannot draw moisture from the springs of sincerity, we should try to imagine what must be the feelings of the thoughtful boy when he first discovers that the lessons which he has so often learnt and the creeds that he has so often repeated were taken by his teachers in a sense which they carefully concealed from him. more harm is done by the economy of truth than by the suggestion of doubt. it may be extraordinarily difficult to treat these problems of the new testament with becoming reverence; but is it not true to say that the day when it becomes easy to any man to do so will be the day when he ought to stop dealing with them? the real irreverence, the only irreverence, is the glib confidence of the ignorant or the cynical concealment of one who knows but dare not tell. what idea of the new testament does the average boy who leaves, say in the fifth form, carry away with him from his public school? he may know that certain facts are told in one gospel and not in another; that there are certain inconsistencies in the accounts given by the different synoptic gospels of the same miracle, or what is apparently the same miracle. he may be able to explain the parables more fully than their author ever meant them to be explained; he may have at his fingers' ends st paul's journeys and even have been thrilled by st paul's shipwreck, but he will probably have missed the meaning of the good news for himself and the power to treasure it for his life's strength. this failure to appreciate and to accept the challenge of religion--a failure shown later on in life in a certain diffidence about foreign missions, and in the toleration of social conditions that deny christ as flatly as ever peter did--is not the fault of the schools alone. the schools only reflect the world outside and the homes from which they are recruited. in neither is there as much light as there should be. the difficulty of the vicious circle dominates this as so many other problems. school reacts on the world, the world on the home[ ] and the home on school, the blame cannot be apportioned, need not be apportioned; how the circle can be broken it is much more important to determine. from time to time it has been broken, so decisively too that for a while the riddle seems solved, at all events the old way is abandoned for ever. arnold's work at rugby must have involved such a breach. his work has never had to be done all over again and there have been many to keep it in repair, but it needs to be extended now in the light of new problems, scientific, social and international. for this, as for all other extensions, courage is needed. the courage to face the difficulties that modern research and modern thought involve and the courage to point out that our lord, though in his short career he changed the bias of men's lives, never claimed to leave man a detailed guide for conduct or for happiness. it was to a simple society that he taught the laws of purity and love, he did not extend the range of their application beyond the needs of the pharisee, the sadducee, the scribe, the peasant and the dweller in the little towns through which he shed the light of his presence. these laws sanctify the whole of life because they dominate the heart, from which all life must spring, but they do not answer all questions about all the subordinate provinces of life. the arts in their narrow sense, philosophy, even pleasure, they pass by. man will not neglect the one or distort the other if he has really breathed the spirit of christ, but at times the urgency of his master's business will seem to shut them out of his life. all this needs learning by the old, and explaining to the young, for otherwise life will be one-sided, and when the day comes, as come it must to those who think, when a choice must be made, and there seems no alternative to following literally in christ's footsteps and turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world, bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood. if, as so often is the case, it ignores their existence, or endeavours to starve them, they may well assert themselves with fatal power, to coarsen and degrade the whole of life. the scripture lesson will indeed miss its opportunity if it does not, in the later stages of a boy's career, set him thinking on these subjects, and help him to a wise appreciation of the holiness of beauty as well as of the beauty of holiness. to accomplish this task the language of the bible itself gives noble help. all the qualities of great literature shine forth from it and it should put to shame and flight the tawdry and the melodramatic. it is an ill service not to make all familiar with the actual words of holy writ. commentaries and bible histories may be at times convenient tools, but they are only tools, and accurate knowledge of what they teach is no compensation for a want of respectful familiarity with the text itself. hardly less important for good and evil are the chapel services. they are much attacked. it has been argued that public worship is distasteful in later life because of the compulsory chapels of boyhood. if this were really so, evidence should be forthcoming that those who come from schools where there is no compulsory attendance at chapel, because there is no chapel to attend, are more eager to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by college chapels than are their more chapel ridden contemporaries. no one, however, can be quite satisfied that chapel services are as helpful as they might be. the difficulty is how to improve them. the suggestion that they should all be voluntary is at first sight attractive but there are two insuperable difficulties. the one is the power of fashion, for it might well become fashionable in a certain house not to attend chapel. those who know anything of the inside of schools know how such a fashion would deter many of the best boys from going, and martyrdom ought not to be part of the training of school life. the other difficulty is more subtle, but none the less real it originates in the boys' quite healthy fear of claiming merit. those in authority, if wise, would not count attendance at chapel for righteousness, but some of the most sensitive boys might think that they would do so, and might stay away in consequence, and thus deprive themselves of something they really valued. two or three, not many, might come from a wrong motive, and perhaps these would stay to pray, but they would be no compensation for the loss of the others. from time to time it is possible to have voluntary services, and attendance at holy communion should always be voluntary, not only in name but in fact. on the whole it is better that a boy who neglects this duty should go on neglecting it, than that those who come should feel that their presence is noted with approval or the reverse. but it is different with the daily service. irksome it may sometimes be, not only to boys; but half its virtue lies in the fact that all are there in body and may sometimes be there in spirit too. the familiarity of the oft-repeated prayers and the oft-sung hymns leads to inattention perhaps, but seldom, it may be hoped, to callousness; religious emotion may only occasionally be stirred but the thread of natural piety, binding man to man and man to god, is strengthened, as fresh strands are added. at the least it may be claimed for the chapel services that they rescue from our hours of business some minutes each day in which our thoughts are free to make their way to the throne of god. christ's promise to bring rest to those who come to him has been fulfilled in many a school chapel. those of us who have had to pass through the valley of sorrow and temptation and loneliness--and who has not?--know that this is no mean claim. boys, even men, often grumble at what they really value. to do so is our national defect, misleading to the onlooker. the truth is, we are so fearful of being accused of casting our pearls before swine, that we often pretend, even to ourselves, that what we know to be the most precious pearl in our possession is valueless. most masters and boys would agree that, in the few weeks preceding confirmation, the religious life is deepest and most sincere. there is a moving of the waters then, and many make the effort, and step in, and are made whole for the time at all events. as to what exactly goes on in the mind of anyone at such a time there can be no certainty. there is the obvious danger of a reaction, and, guard against it as one may, it exists and sometimes leads to disaster; but there is another danger to which the schoolmaster is then liable, it is the danger of making confirmation an occasion for much talk on sexual difficulties. the existence of these should be faced, but at any time rather than at confirmation, except so far as they occur quite naturally in dealing with the commandments. it is a real disaster for a child to associate this time, when he should be trying to shoulder enthusiastically his responsibilities as a citizen of god's kingdom upon earth, with any particular sin. he must indeed overcome evil, but he must overcome it with good. it is on good that his eyes should be fixed. it is towards the lord of all that is good that his heart should be uplifted. anyone who has had to do with this time knows what it means in a boy's religious life, how reluctant he is to speak of it, how perilous it is to disturb his reluctance by inquisitive question or excessive exhortation. he knows, too, how much his own nature has gained by contact at such times with the reverent stirrings of less world-stained souls, how wondrous has been the spiritual refreshment that has come to him from the unconscious witness of the younger heart. for most boys it is a loss not to be confirmed at school, which for the time is the centre of their energies, their hopes, their disappointments and their temptations; but the loss to the masters who share their preparation would be irreparable. they may sometimes blunder from want of knowledge and experience, but their will to help is strong, and perhaps not least persuasive when chastened by diffidence. but all these scripture lessons, chapel services and confirmation preparation will be powerless to produce a christian education, if they be not held together by every lesson and by the whole life of the school. industry and obedience, truthfulness and fidelity to duty, unselfishness and thoroughness, must form the soil without which no religious plant can grow; and these are taught and learnt in the struggle with latin prose, or mathematics, or french grammar, or scientific formula; as well as in the cricket field, on the football ground, in the give and take, the pains and the pleasures of daily life. it is hard for us in england to imagine a purely secular education, the very buildings of many of our schools would protest against it; perhaps it is equally difficult for us to realise how far we fall short of what we might accomplish did the spirit of christianity really inform our lives. to-day is our opportunity. the claims of education are being listened to as they never have been in england. money in millions is being promised, the value of this subject or that is being canvassed, the most venerable traditions are being shaken. it is a time of hope, but a time of danger too. all sorts of plans are being formed for breaking down the partition walls that divide man from man, and class from class, and nation from nation; there is only one plan that will not leave the ground encumbered by ruins. that is the plan of which good men in all ages have caught glimpses, and which the son of man set out for us to follow. the peril now lies, not in the fact of nothing being done, but in some starved idea of a narrow patriotism. the war has surely taught two lessons;--one that the efforts we made before to guard our country from spiritual and moral foes were shamefully trivial compared with those we have made since to keep our visible foe at bay; the other that our responsibilities for the future, if we are to justify our claims to be the champions of justice and weakness, can never be borne unless we learn ourselves, and teach each generation as it grows up, to face the fierce light that shines from heaven. all sorts of devices, ecclesiastical and political have been adopted to break up that light and make it tolerable for our weak eyes. men have been so afraid of children being blinded by it that they have allowed them to sit, some in darkness, and others in the twilight of compromise. it has been said that for the average man in the ancient world there existed two main guides and sanctions for his conduct of life, namely the welfare of his city, and the laws and traditions of his ancestors. has the average man much wiser guides or stronger sanctions now? is a much nobler appeal made to the children of england than was made to the children of athens? just before joshua led his people over the jordan, he instructed them how the ark of the covenant was to go before them and a space to be left between them and it, so that they might know the way by which they must go, _for they had not passed this way before_. once again a river of decision has to be crossed, a road has to be trodden along which men have not passed before. whether we speak of reconstruction or a new start or use any other metaphor to show our conviction that war has changed all things, the idea is the same. we must see to it that the ark of the covenant is borne before our nation and our schools, along the way that is new and still full of stones of stumbling. either the old landmarks have disappeared or a new land has to be explored. somehow, all things have to be made new, for even the spiritual things have been destroyed or are found wanting. it is to the schools, to the homes, to the mothers of england that the richest opportunity comes. if they can solve the difficulty of making the christian education and the christian life react upon one another the partition walls between religion and conduct will be broken down for every age. intentionally or unintentionally, these walls have been built up, perhaps by the teachers and parents, certainly by the conventions of life. the result is that though there is more true religion in the schools than is acknowledged by those outside and than those within care to boast of, and though the standard of conduct is not ignoble, there is too little fusion; both components are brittle, they cannot stand the strain of sudden temptation, they lack enduring power. no one will forget how in those first months of war, consolation was offered even from pulpits for all the horrors and the sadness and the waste of conflict in the thought that as a nation we should be purged of selfishness, of luxury, of sensuality, of all the vices that peace engenders. that is surely a shameful confession, that our religion had been in vain. we had to wait for, and partake in, a three years' orgy of cruelty and violence to learn what our lord had taught us in three years of gentleness. if we are going to teach the same lessons about war when peace is made, to keep alive the fires of hate, and to keep smouldering the embers of suspicion, we shall be confessing that a christian education cannot teach us anything about christianity. the student in arms would not have had us despair. peace when it comes will make demands on our fortitude. there will be many lying in the no-man's land between vice and virtue who will need to be rescued at great risk. there will be many forlorn hopes to be led against disease, the foster child of vice, that has gained strength under the cover of war. the disappointing days of peace will give an opportunity for the development of christian qualities fully as great as the bracing days of battle. teachers will need to gird up their loins for the task of giving a wise welcome to the thousands that an awakened state will send to sit at their feet, and unless they can give spiritual food as well as worldly wisdom and paying knowledge, the souls of the new-comers will be starved beyond the remedy of any free meals. how to spiritualise education is the real problem, for it is only by a spiritualised education that we can escape from the avalanche of materialism that is hanging over the european world just now. no syllabus, no act of parliament can do this. there is no royal road which all can travel. it has been done, to some extent, in the past, and it will have to be done, to a much greater extent, in the future by the layman and the laywoman, by the teachers of all denominations, by some even whom inspectors may consider inefficient and whom children may tolerate as queer. it will be done best by the best teachers, but all teachers can share in the work on the one condition that they have consciously or unconsciously dedicated themselves to the task. for a teacher to write much about it is impossible, he must know how greatly he has failed. and he has not the recompense that comes to many who fail, in the shape of certain knowledge why success has been withheld. that his failure is shared by those who strive to make religion move the world of men is no consolation. indeed, that thought might make him hopeless did it not suggest that the aims and methods of both may be wrong. it is possible to have hoped too much from the school chapels being full, it is possible to fear too much from the churches being empty. piety is no doubt fostered by attendance at a religious service, but there is some distance between piety and true religion. it would probably not be untrue to say that christian education has seemed more concerned with the ceremonial duties of religion than with its spiritual enthusiasm, more eager about faith in some particular explanation of the past than about faith in a re-creation of the future, more attentive to the machinery of the organisation of the church than to the words and commands of its founder. as the church has become more powerful in the world, it has lost its power over men's hearts. to some it has seemed an institution for the relief of poverty, to others the support of the "haves" against the "have-nots," but to too few has it been the home of spiritual adventures, the maintainer of spiritual values. men have escaped from the relentless simplicity of the master's commands by attention to the complicated machinery which disregard of them has made necessary. this may not have been consciously marked by the young, but the atmosphere of religion that they have had to breathe has been the tired atmosphere of the ecclesiastical workshop, and not the bracing air of free service. some restoration of the hopefulness of the early christians is needed; hopefulness is not now the note of what is taught, though with it is sometimes confused the boisterous cheerfulness that is wrongly supposed to attract the young. the appeal of the church must be based on looking forward, not backward, on hope, rather than on repentance. the church will have less to do with the world than it had in the past, because it will have shaken off the fetters of the world: it will not be always explaining to the young how they can enjoy the world and yet deny the world: it will not need to explain itself so often, to insist so pathetically on the superiority of its own channels of influence, but it will attract to itself, or rather to the work that it is trying to do--for it will have forgotten self--all the adventurous spirits who are prepared to risk pain and failure as fellow-workers in fulfilling the purposes of god in the world. what is worth knowing about christianity is surely first and foremost that it is a leaven that might leaven the whole world; and that until that leaven works in each individual heart, in each society, where two or three are gathered together, christ's presence cannot be claimed. as this knowledge is gained, it will be possible for the learner to know in his heart, and not merely by heart, what is meant by the great mysterious terms incarnation, atonement, resurrection; as this knowledge is tested and proved true by experience of life, the meaning and power of prayer will become clearer. a clue will have been put into the hand of each as he travels along the way which he has not passed heretofore. it will not lead all by the same path but it will lead all towards that "great and high mountain," whence "that great city, the holy jerusalem" may be seen. if the teacher is wise, when the mountain top is nigh and before that vision breaks upon his fellow-traveller's sight, he will stand aside with thankful heart, and close his task with the prayer that the glory of god may shine more brightly and more continuously on the newcomer, than it has shone on him. [footnote : nothing is said here about the co-operation of the home with the school. in religion as in all other matters it is assumed. the influence of the home cannot be exaggerated but schoolmasters must resist the temptation to shift the burden of responsibility for any failure on to other shoulders.] v citizenship by a. mansbridge founder of the workers' educational association i direct training for citizenship there is no institution in national life which can free itself from the responsibility of training for citizenship those who come under its influence, whether they be men or women. the problem is common to all institutions, although it may present itself in diverse forms appropriate to varying ages and experiences. it is primarily the problem of all schools and places of education. the aim of education, according to comenius, is "to train generally all who are born to all that is human." from that definition it follows that the purpose of any school must be to bear its part in developing to the utmost the powers of body, mind and spirit for the common good. it must be to secure the application of the finest attributes of the race to the work of developing citizenship, which is the art of living together on the highest plane of human life. citizenship is, in reality, the focusing point of all human virtues though it is often illuminated by the consciousness of a city not made with hands. it represents in a practical form the spirit of courage, unselfishness and sympathy consecrated to service in time of war and peace. generally speaking, in england and her dominions, citizenship is developed in harmony with an ideal of democracy. "the progress of democracy is irresistible," says de tocqueville, "because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency to be found in history." but its right working is dependent entirely upon uplift not only of mind but of spirit. the democratic community, above all other communities, must have within itself schools which at one and the same time impart information concerning the theory and methods of its government and inspire consecration to social service rather than to individual welfare, schools which reveal the transcendence of the interests of the state as compared with the interests of any individual or group of individuals within it. the democratic state has been compared to "one huge christian personality, one mighty growth or stature of an honest man." out of this comparison arises the idea of citizenship reaching out beyond the boundaries of a single state--one honest man among many--and thus responsibility is placed upon the schools to develop knowledge of, and sympathy with, the activities and aspirations of human life in many nations. the comity of nations depends directly upon the intellectual and spiritual honesty which obtains in each of them, and true strength of nationality arises more from the exercise of these qualities than from extent of area or of productive power. every subject taught in a school should serve the needs of the larger citizenship; if it fails to do so it is either wrongly taught or superfluous. social welfare depends upon the right use of knowledge by the individual, however restricted or developed that knowledge may be, whether it be acquired in elementary school or university. there has been much discussion concerning the relative importance of the development of community spirit in the schools and the introduction of the direct teaching of citizenship. the methods are not mutually exclusive; their operations are distinct. the school which does not develop community spirit, which does not fit into its place in the work of training the complete man, is obviously imperfect. the same cannot be said of the school which does not provide direct instruction in citizenship; for teaching may be given in so many indirect ways. some consideration of what has happened in this connection both in england and america will perhaps be most helpful, although the intangible nature of the results would render dangerous any attempt to make definite pronouncements on their success or failure. largely as the result of the realisation of the immediate relationship between national education and national productivity there are abundant signs that the english educational system is about to be developed. the ordinary argument has been well put: a new national spirit has been aroused in our people by the war; if we are to recover and improve our position at the end of the war, that national spirit must be maintained; for unless every man and woman comes to know and feel that industry, agriculture, commerce, shipping, and credit, are national concerns, and that education is a potent means for the promotion of these objects among others, we shall fail in the great effort of national recuperation. in plainer words, our great firms will not make money, wages will fall, and wage-earners will be out of work[ ]. the possibility of the extension of the educational system to meet the needs of technical training need not cause disquiet among those whose desire is for fulness of citizenship, if they are prepared to insist that teachers shall be trained on broad and comprehensive lines and that every vocational course shall include instruction in direct citizenship. the argument is ready to hand and simple. if all men and women must strive to work wisely and well, so also should they learn how to participate in the government, local and national, which their work supports. moreover the right study of a trade or profession induces a perception of the inter-relationship of all human activity. on the other hand it is important that vocational work, at least so far as it is carried out by manual training, should be introduced into schemes of liberal education. in this connection it is worth recalling that in a recent report, the consultative committee of the board of education expressed with complete conviction the opinion that manual training was indispensable in places of secondary education: we consider that our secondary education has been too exclusively concerned with the cultivation of the mind by means of books and the instruction of the teacher. to this essential aim there must be added as a condition of balance and completeness that of fostering those qualities of mind and that skill of hand which are evoked by systematic work. in this way would be generated that "sympathetic and understanding contact between all brainworkers and the complete men who work with both hands and brain" so strongly pleaded for by professor lethaby who insists that "some teaching about the service of labour must be got into all our educational schemes." it must be remembered that the question of vocational training affects chiefly the proposed system of compulsory continuation school education up to the age of eighteen, which has yet to be established for all boys and girls not in attendance at secondary schools or who have not completed a satisfactory period of attendance[ ]. the inadequacy of the period of education allotted to the vast mass of the population and the need for educational reform in many directions can only be noted; both these matters however affect citizenship profoundly. it is upon the expectation of early development on the following lines, indicated without detail, that our consideration of the possibilities of schools in regard to citizenship must be based: ( ) a longer period of elementary school life during which no child shall be employed for other than educational purposes. ( ) the establishment of compulsory continuation schools for all boys and girls up to the age of eighteen, the hours of attendance to be allowed out of reasonable working hours. ( ) complete opportunity for qualified boys and girls to continue their technical or humane studies from the elementary school to the university. ( ) a distinct improvement in the supply and power of teachers, chiefly as the result of better training in connection with universities and the establishment of a remuneration which will enable them to live in the manner demanded by the nature and responsibilities of their calling. the two main aspects of the development of citizenship through the schools which have already been noted may be summarised as follows, and may be considered separately: ( ) the direct teaching of civics or of citizenship; ( ) the development through the ordinary school community of the qualities of the good citizen. [footnote : _interim report of the consultative committee of the board of education on scholarships for higher education, may_, .] [footnote : see _final report of the departmental committee on juvenile education in relation to employment after the war_, , cd. . the bill "to make further provision with respect to education in england and wales and for purposes connected therewith" [bill ], had not been introduced by mr fisher when this article was written.] the direct study of citizenship the study in schools of civic relations has been developed to a much greater extent in america than in england. this is probably due largely to the fact that the american need is the more obvious. in normal times, there is a constant influx of people of different nationalities to the united states whom it is the aim of the government to make into american citizens. at the same time there is in america a greater disposition than in england to adapt abstract study to practical ends, to link the class-room to the factory, to the city hall, and to the capitol itself. as one of her scholars says: both the inspiration and the romance of the scholar's life lie in the perfect assurance that any truth, however remote or isolated, has its part in the unity of the world of truth and its undreamed of applicability to service[ ]. there are in america numerous societies, among them the national education association, the american historical association, the national municipal league, the american political science association, which are working steadily to make the study of civics an essential feature of every part of the educational system. their prime purposes are summarised as follows: ( ) to awaken a knowledge of the fact that the citizen is in a social environment whose laws bind him for his own good; ( ) to acquaint the citizen with the forms of organisation and methods of administration of government in its several departments[ ]. they claim that this can best be done by means of bringing the young citizen into direct contact with the significant facts of the life of his own local community and of the national community. to indicate this more clearly they have applied to the study the name of "community civics." the argument that a sense of unreality may arise as a result of the apparent completeness of knowledge gained in the school is met by the close contact maintained all the time with the community outside. there is unanimity of opinion that civics shall be taught from the elementary school onwards: "we believe," runs the report of the committee of eight of the american historical association, "that elementary civics should permeate the entire school life of the child. in the early grades the most effective features of this instruction will be directly connected with the teaching of regular subjects in the course of study. through story, poem and song there is the quickening of those emotions which influence civic life. the works and biographies of great men furnish many opportunities for incidental instruction in civics. the elements of geography serve to emphasise the interdependence of men--the very earliest lesson in civic instruction. a study of pictures and architecture arouses the desire for civic beauty and orderliness[ ]." a recent inquiry by a committee of the american political science association makes it quite clear that the subject is actually taught in the bulk of the elementary and secondary schools of the various states and that generally the results are satisfactory, or indicate clearly necessary reforms. the difficulty of providing suitable text-books is partly met by the addition of supplementary local information. there are very few colleges and universities which do not provide courses in political science. no claim is made that the teaching of civics makes of necessity good citizens, but merely that it makes the good citizen into a better one. the justification of the subject lies in its own content. it is a study of an important phase of human society and, for this reason the same value as elementary science or history[ ]. there is, moreover, throughout the various american reports, an insistence on the power of the community ideal in the school and the necessity for discipline in the performance of school duties and a due appreciation of the importance of individual action in relation to the class and to the school. in england there has been much general and uncoordinated advocacy of the direct teaching of citizenship, but, for various reasons, it does not appear to have been introduced generally into the schools, nor does there appear to be any immediate likelihood of development in the existing schools. the civic and moral education league made definite inquiry, in , of teachers and schools. they pronounced the results to be disappointing, though they comforted themselves with the incontrovertible dictum that "the people who are doing most have least time to talk about it." as the result of their inquiry, they drew up a statement of the aims of civics which in general and in detail differed little from the ideas accepted in america. if compulsory continued education is introduced, for boys and girls who now have no school education after the elementary school, it is of the utmost importance that the direct study should be included in some form or other before the age of eighteen is reached, and it is in connection with this type of school rather than in connection with the elementary or secondary school that constructive efforts should be made. it must be remembered that mr. acland, when minister for education, introduced the subject into the elementary code of and provided a detailed syllabus. this was generally approved not only as the action of a progressive administrator but as an evidence of the new spirit of freedom beginning to reveal itself in the educational system. there are some education authorities, like the county of chester, which enact that the study of citizenship shall proceed side by side with religious education, but the majority leave it to the teachers to do all that is necessary by the adaptation of other subjects and the development of school spirit. the elaborate nature of mr. acland's syllabus tended to defeat its object, and some held it to be psychologically unsound, but there has also been lack of suitable text-books. in general, however, the whole subject depends peculiarly upon the personality of the teacher who feels no lack of text-books if he is alive to the interest of his lesson. in _studies in board schools_[ ], there is a delightful study of a lesson on "rates" to young citizens with the altruistic text, "all for each, each for all." "citizen carrots," a tired newspaper boy up every morning at five, is revealed as responding with great enthusiasm to this interesting lesson which commences with a drawing on a blackboard of a "regulation workhouse, a board school, a free library, a lamp post, a water-cart, a dustman, a policeman, a steam roller, a navvy or two, and a long-handled shovel stuck in a heap of soil." a hypothetical payer of rates, "mrs smith," is revealed as getting a great deal for her rates: she is protected from any harm; her property is safe; she can walk about the streets with comfort by day or night; her drains are seen to; her rubbish is taken away for her; she has books and newspapers to read; if she has ten children, she can have them well taught for nothing--so that if they are willing to learn, and attend school regularly, they can very easily make their own living when they grow up; if she is ill, she can go to the infirmary for medicine; and if, when she grows old, she is unable to pay rent or buy food or clothes, these things are provided for her. "and please, sir, the parks," interjected the eager carrots. if the definition of a good citizen propounded by professor masterman is true--that he is one who pays his rates without grumbling--"citizen carrots," whatever his disadvantages, is intellectually anyhow on the way to become such a citizen, and certainly in the sketch, "citizen carrots" is determined that the rates shall be expended properly because he himself will have a vote in later days. it is probable that lessons such as these are more frequent than the time-tables would indicate. there are few head masters of elementary schools who would disclaim the adequate teaching of citizenship in their schools. they would explain that the treatment of history and geography proceeding from local standpoints was effective in this direction, and it is the rule rather than otherwise for visits to be paid to places of historic interest within reach of the schools. advantage is also taken of such days as empire day to stimulate interest in the state, as well as to impart knowledge concerning its organisation. all this is reinforced by the use of appropriate reading books which are instruments of indirect, but not necessarily less effective, instruction. the larger opportunities which secondary schools offer have not been taken advantage of to induce the specific study of civics to any greater extent that in the elementary schools, although many schools are able to devote at least a period each week to the consideration of current events, and, naturally, the teaching of history and geography includes much more completely the consideration of institutions both at home and abroad. the idea of the regional or local survey is gaining ground and in some respects it will prove to serve the same purpose as the "community civics" of the american high school. there have been attempts to introduce economics into the secondary school curriculum, but they have not persisted to any extent. in the _memorandum of curricula of secondary schools_ issued by the board of education in , it is suggested that "it will sometimes be desirable to provide, for those who propose on leaving school to enter business, a special commercial course with special study of the more technical side of economic theory and some study of political and constitutional history." for the rest there is no mention of the subjects intimately connected with government. it is clear that the board expects that out of the subjects of the ordinary curriculum, with such special efforts suggested by public interest as may from time to time occur, the student will gain a general knowledge of the affairs of the community round about, some knowledge of the principles of politics, clear ideas concerning movements for social reform, and some acquaintance with international problems. if he does so, he will have secured a useful introduction to the studies associated with adult life. an intelligent study of languages will help materially in this direction and, whilst this is specially true in the cases of greek and latin, there is no reason why modern languages should not serve the same purpose. it is, however, often the case that the study of the history and institutions of modern countries is not associated sufficiently with the study of their language. the public and grammar schools of england, as contrasted with the newer secondary schools, are more especially the homes of classical studies, and it is through the working of these schools that the knowledge of institutions in ancient greece and rome will have its greatest effect on citizenship. the study of political science as a specific subject is gaining ground in universities, whilst the study of the empire and its institutions has naturally made rapid progress during the last few years. there may also be noted distinct tendencies, arising out of the experience of the war, towards the foundation of schools destined to deal with the institutions and the thought of foreign countries. in the schools of economics and history there is fulness of attempt to study all that can be included under the generic title of civics which, after all, may be defined as political and social science interpreted in immediate and practical ways. [footnote : peabody, _the religion of an educated man_.] [footnote : haines, _the teaching of government_.] [footnote : haines, _the teaching of government._] [footnote : bourne, _the teaching of history and civics in the elementary and the secondary school_.] [footnote : charles morley, .] ii indirect training for citizenship after all is said and done the ideal training for citizenship in the schools depends more upon the wisdom engendered in the pupil than upon the direct study of civics. if the spirits of men and women are set in a right direction they will reach out for knowledge as for hid treasure. "wisdom is more moving than any motion; she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness[ ]." it happens also in natural sequence that the spirit developed in a school will lead to the construction of institutions in connection with school life calculated to secure its adequate expression. elementary schools, however, are much handicapped in this way. if it comes about that work other than educational or recreative is forbidden to children during the years of attendance at school, and also that the period of school life is lengthened, there will be opportunity for the development of games on a self-governing basis. elementary school children have a large measure of initiative; all they need is a real chance to exercise it. they would willingly make their schools real centres of child life. many children at present have little else than narrow tenements and the streets, out of which influences arise which war continually against the social influences of the school. the opportunity afforded by well-ordered leisure would be accentuated by the more complete operation of movements such as boys' brigades, boy scouts, girl guides, and church lads' brigades, which are in their several ways doing much to develop citizenship. such bodies are now in effect educational authorities, and classes are organised by them in connection with the board of education. there have been many attempts to introduce self-governing experiments into elementary schools and, whilst they have often been defeated by reason of the immaturity of the children, yet some of them have met with great success. the election of monitors on the lines of a general election is an instance of success in this direction. the ideas which have arisen from the advocacy of the montessori system have induced methods of greater freedom in connection with many aspects of elementary school life. the caldecott community, dealing with working-class children in the neighbourhood of st. pancras, has tried many interesting experiments. that, however, of the introduction of children's courts of justice had to be abandoned, but not until many valuable lessons in child psychology had been learnt. side by side with the elementary school, there are rising in england experiments similar to those undertaken by such organisations as the school city and the george junior republics of america. the most notable among them is the little commonwealth, dorchester, which has achieved astonishing results through the process of taking delinquent children and allowing them self-government. but, hopeful as the prospects are, their ultimate effect will be best estimated when their pupils, restored in youth to the honourable service of the community, are taking their full share in life as adult citizens, and naturally every care is taken in the organisation of these institutions to ensure that the transition from their sheltered citizenship to the outside world shall not be of so abrupt a nature as to tend to render unreal and remote the life in which the children have taken part. nearly all of the more recent experiments in regard to the school and its kindred institutions are co-operative in principle and in method, but it is probably utopian to conceive an educational method which shall achieve the highest success without having included within it the element of competition. if competition is a method obtaining outside the school it is bound to reproduce itself within it. the only possible thing for the school to do is to restrict the influence of competition to the channels where it can be beneficial. the method by which elementary school children pass to the secondary school is by means of competitive scholarships. in common with the consultative committee of the board of education it is necessary to accept the fact that at present "the scholarship system is too firmly rooted in the manner, habits and character of this country to be dislodged, even if it were thrice condemned by theory[ ]." but, in the interests of citizenship, scholarships should be awarded as the result of non-competitive tests, if only to secure that every child shall receive the education for which he or she is fitted. the stress and strain imposed upon many who climb the ladder of education, often occasioned by the inadequacy of the scholarship for the purposes to which it is to be applied, tend to develop characteristics which are so strongly individual as to be distinctly anti-social. it is unfortunate that in many subjects of the curriculum it is not merely bad form to help one's neighbour but distinctly a school sin, and this makes it necessary for a balance to be struck by the introduction of subjects at which all can work for the good of the class or the school. manual work and local surveys are subjects of this nature and should be encouraged side by side with games of which there are three essential aspects:--the individual achievement, the winning of the match or race, and "playing the game." in reference to citizenship the last of these is the only one which ultimately matters. it is generally admitted that the great public schools are those which are most characteristic of english boy life at its best. glorying as they do in a splendid tradition, they have always had in addition the opportunity of adapting themselves to new needs. their reform is always under discussion and perchance they are waiting even now for some arnold or thring to lead them in a new england, for new it will inevitably be. even so, the sense of responsibility they have developed has been translated into the terms of english government over half the world. the objective of the public school boy anxious to take a part in government at home has always been parliament, or such local institutions as demand his service in accordance with the tradition of his family. the tendency to despise the homely duties of a city councillor or poor law guardian is, however, passing. there are few schools which do not welcome visitors to speak to the boys who have first-hand acquaintance with the life of the poor or who are indeed of that life themselves. in this way boys get to realise, as far as it is possible through sympathy, what it means to be out of work, what it means to be hungry for unattainable learning, what children have to suffer, and, in addition to the practical interest which many boys immediately develop, it cannot be doubted that many ideals for the conduct of social life in the future are conceived, even if dimly, for the first time. thanks to the unremitting efforts of large-minded head masters, public school boys more and more realise that they are beneficiaries of the spirit of a past day, not only in the sense of the creation of a noble tradition but actually in regard to the material provision of buildings and the financial support of teaching. there is likely to be an extension of university education in the near future. the ancient universities of oxford and cambridge with their great college system will be strengthened, as will be the universities which were established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. the demand for the better training of teachers will result inevitably in the creation of more universities. the inadequate sum which this country has spent upon university education up to the present will be greatly increased. as a direct result of the opportunity which university life gives to undergraduates for the development of self-governing institutions, there can be little doubt that the university must be regarded above all other schools and most institutions as powerful in the development of good citizenship. the public school tradition will be carried directly into the older universities and in increasing measure into the new universities as the best spirit of the public schools gradually permeates the whole system of our education even down to the elementary schools themselves. when these opportunities so lavishly provided for the development of student life in its self-governing aspects are realised and when above it all there stand great teachers in the lineage of those described by cardinal newman in his eulogy of athens--"the very presence of plato" to the student, "a stay for his mind to rest on, a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men like himself, ever afterwards"--little else can be desired. in every university there must be such teachers, or universities will tend to fall to the level of the life about them. "you can infuse," said lord rosebery at the congress of the universities of the empire, "character, and morals and energy and patriotism by the tone and atmosphere of your university and your professors." from one point of view, all the old universities of europe--bologna, paris, prague, oxford, cambridge, etc.--must be regarded as definite and conscious protests against the dividing and isolating--the anti-civic--forces of the periods of their institution. they represent historically the development of communities for common interest and protection in the great and holy cause of the pursuit of learning, and above all things their story is the story of the growth of european unity and citizenship. the feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by the power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position. the university, on the other hand, was a protest against this isolation of man from man. the smallest school was european and not local[ ]. the spirit which is characteristic of a university in its best aspects, linked with the spirit which is inherent in the ranks of working people, has on more occasions than one set on foot movements for the education of the people. one of the most notable instances of this unity found expression at the oxford co-operative congress of , when arnold toynbee urged co-operators to undertake the education of the citizen. by this he meant: "the education of each member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to other individual citizens and to the community as a whole." "we have abandoned," he said further, "and rightly abandoned the attempt to realise citizenship by separating ourselves from society. we will never abandon the belief that it has yet to be won amid the stress and confusion of the ordinary world in which we move." from that day to this co-operators have always had before them an ideal of education in citizenship and have organised definite teaching year by year. another instance of even greater power lies in the co-operation between the pioneers of the university extension movement at cambridge and the working men, particularly of rochdale and nottingham, to be followed later by that unprecedented revival of learning amongst working people which took place in northumberland and durham in the days before the great coal strike. at a later date, in , the same kind of united action gave rise to the movement of the workers' educational association, which has always conceived its purpose to be the development of citizenship in and through education pursued in common by university man and working man alike. the system of university tutorial classes originated by this association has been based upon an ideal of citizenship, and not primarily upon a determination to acquire knowledge, although it was clearly seen that vague aspirations towards good citizenship without the harnessing of all available knowledge to its cause would be futile. after exception has been made for the body of young men and women who are determined to acquire technical education for the laudable purpose of advancing both their position in life and their utility to society, it is clear that no educational appeal to working men and women will have the least effect if it is not directed towards the purpose of enriching their life, and through them the life of the community. the proof of this lies in the fact that, after they have striven together for years in tutorial classes, they ask for no recognition--in fact they have declined it when it has been offered--and have devoted their powers to voluntary civic work and the work of the associations or unions to which they belong, as well as in very many instances, to the spreading of education throughout the districts in which they live. it is largely due to the leaven of educational enthusiasm which has thus been generated that there is a unanimous movement on the part of working people towards a complete educational system including within it compulsory attendance at continuation schools during the day. the problems that hedge about continuation schools are many, but it is clear that they will be regarded by educationists and by at least some employers as above all else training for citizenship based upon the vocation to which the boy or girl may be devoting himself or herself in working hours. the narrowness of the daily occupation, divorced as it is from the whole spirit and intent of apprenticeship, will be broadened directly the consideration of daily work is placed in the continuation school both on a higher plane and in a complete setting. the compulsory evening school will fail unless it induces a demand for recreation of a pure kind which may be associated with the voluntary evening school and continued along the lines of study into the years of adult life. and even if it is impossible for every student of capacity in the continuation school to pass into the university or technological college, it may be hoped that there need not fail to be opportunities for reaching the heights of ascertained knowledge in the university tutorial class. in the future, as now, only in greater degree, such classes will be regarded as an essential part of university work, and will provide opportunity for the study of those subjects which are most nearly related to citizenship. it is one of the fundamental principles of the workers' educational association that every person, when not under the power of some hostile over-mastering influence, is ready to respond to an educational appeal. not indeed that all are ready or able to become scholars, but that all are anxious to look with understanding eyes at the things which are pure and beautiful. tired men and women are made better citizens if they are taken, as they often are, to picture galleries and museums, to places of historic interest and of scenic beauty, and are helped to understand them by the power of a sympathetic guide. it is by the extension of work of this sort, which can be carried out almost to a limitless extent that the true purpose of social reform will be best served. it is by such means that the press may be elevated, the level of the cinema raised, the efforts of the demagogue neutralised. the workers' educational association is based upon the work of the elementary school and of the associations of working people, notably the co-operative societies and trade unions. the democratic methods obtaining in those associations have themselves proved a valuable contribution to citizenship, and have determined the democratic nature of all adult education. the right and freedom of the student to study what he wishes finds its counterpart in the reasonable demand that man shall live out his life as he wills, provided it moves in a true direction and is in harmony with the needs and aspirations of his fellows. it has seemed in this review of the relation of schools and places of education to the development of citizenship that the fact of the operation of social influences has been implicit at every point. in any case there is, and can be, no doubt that the school, whilst instant in its effect upon the mind of the time, is always being either hindered or helped by the conditions obtaining in the society in which it is set. the relations existing between society and school are revealed in a process of action and reaction. wilhelm von humboldt said that "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools." among other things, it is necessary to develop in the schools an appreciation of all work that is necessary for human welfare. this is the crux of all effort towards citizenship through education. in the long run there can be no full citizenship unless there is fulness of intention to discover capacity and to develop it not for the individual but for the common good. this is primarily the task of an educational system. if a man is set to work for which he is not fitted, whether it be the work of a student or a miner, he is thwarted in his innate desire to attain to the full expression of his being in and through association with his fellow-men, whereas, when a man is doing the right work, that for which he has capacity, he rejoices in his labour and strives continually to perfect it by development of all his powers. the exercise of good citizenship follows naturally as the inevitable result of a rightly developed life. it may not be the citizenship which is exercised by taking active and direct part in methods of government. the son of sirach, meditating on the place of the craftsman, said: all these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his work. without these cannot a city be inhabited ... they will maintain the state of the world, and all their desire is in the work of their craft[ ]. the times are different and the needs of people have changed, but the true test of a citizen may be more in the healthiness of dominating purpose than in the possession and satisfaction of a variety of desires. to "maintain the state of the world" is no mean ambition. if it is difficult for a man to become the good citizen when employed on work for which he is unfitted, it is even more difficult for the man to do so who is set to shoddy work or to work which damages the community. the task laid upon the school is heavy, but it does not stand alone. the family and the church are its natural allies in the modern state. all alike will make mistakes, but, if they clearly set before them the intention to do their utmost to free the capacity of all for the accomplishment of the good of all, wisdom will increase and many tragedies in life will be averted. thus lofty ideals have presented themselves, but they will secure universal admission apart from the immediate practical considerations which bulk so largely and often so falsely in the minds of men, and which are frequently suggested by limitations of finance and lack of faith in the all-sufficient power of wisdom. it is in the consecration of a people to its highest ideals that the true city and the true state become realised on earth and the measure of its consecration, in spite of all devices of teaching or training however wise, determines the true level of citizenship at any time in any place. [footnote : _wisdom of solomon_, vii. .] [footnote : _interim report of the consultative committee of the board of education on scholarships for higher education_, .] [footnote : j.r. green, _a short history of the english people_.] [footnote : _ecclesiasticus_, xxxviii. - .] some books on citizenship [ ]american political science assoc. the teaching of government. . macmillan. s. d. net. [ ]baker, j.h. educational aims and civic needs. . longmans. s. d. net. [ ]balch, g.t. the method of teaching patriotism in public schools. . new york: van nostrand. [ ]bourne, h.e. the teaching of history and civics. . longmans. s. d. net. [ ]dewey, john. democracy and education. . macmillan. s. d. net. [ ]dewey john. the school and society. . chicago univ. press. s. d. net. [ ]dewey, john and evelyn. schools of to-morrow. . dent. s. d. net. findlay, j.j. the school. . williams and norgate. s. d. net. [ ]hall, g. stanley. educational problems. vols. . appleton. s. d. net. ch. . civic education. [ ]henderson, c.h. education and the larger life. . boston: houghton. s. d. [ ]hughes, e.h. the teaching of citizenship. . boston: wilde. s. d. hughes, m.l.v. citizens to be. . constable. s. d. net. [ ]jenks, j.w. citizenship and the schools. . new york: holt. s. d. kerschensteiner, georg. education for citizenship. tr. a.j. pressland. . harrap. s. d. net. the schools and the nation. . macmillan. s. d. net. [ ]monroe, paul. (ed.) cyclopedia of education. vols. macmillan. s. d. net. morgan, alexander. education and social progress. . longmans. s. d. net. oxford and working class education. clarendon press, s. net. paterson, alexander. across the bridges. . arnold. s. d. net. sadler, m.e. (ed.). continuation schools in england and elsewhere. . manchester university press. s. d. net. scott, c.a. social education. . ginn. s. d. net. wallas, graham. the great society. . macmillan. s. d. net. see also: board of education. reports. civics and moral education league papers, york buildings, adelphi, w.c. . [footnote : american.] vi the place of literature in education by nowell smith head master of sherborne school education is a subject upon which everyone--or at least every parent--considers himself entitled to have opinions and to express them. but educational treatises or the considered views of educational experts have a very limited popularity, and in fact arouse little interest outside the circle of the experts themselves. even the average teacher, who is himself, if only he realised it, inside the circle, pays little heed to the broader aspects of education, chiefly, no doubt, because in the daily practice of the art of education he cannot step aside and see it as a whole; he cannot see the wood for the trees. the indifference of laymen however is mainly due to the fact that educational theory, like other special subjects, inevitably acquires a jargon of its own, an indispensable shorthand, as it were, for experts, but far too abstract and technical for outsiders. and his technical language too often reacts upon the actual ideas of the educational theorist, who tends to lose sight of the variety of concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these are. we are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving fowl. but it is certain that in discussing education we ought constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated. otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to become a mere monster of the imagination, and the intellectual _pabulum_, which we propose to offer, suited to the digestion of no human boy or girl in "this very world, which is the world of all of us." in considering, then, the place of literature in education, i propose to keep constantly before my eyes the people with whose education i am personally familiar, namely, myself, my children, and the various types of public school boy which i have known as boy, as undergraduate, as college tutor and as schoolmaster. i say various types of public school boy; for although there still is a public school type in general which is easily recognisable by certain marked superficial characteristics, the popular notion that all public school boys are very much alike in character and outlook is a mere delusion. again, i propose, when i speak of literature, to mean literature, and not a compendious term for anything that is not science. the opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or "humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of education. it may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of intelligible language--a use of the word which certainly admits of no comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no ideas of any educational interest. but i take the word literature in its common acceptation; and, while admitting that i can give no precise and exhaustive definition, i will venture to describe it as the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which have aesthetic value. thus the subject-matter of literature is only limited by experience: as emile faguet says somewhere--without claiming to have made a discovery--_la littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses_. and the tones of literature range from isaiah to wycherley, from thucydides to tolstoy; its forms from pindar to a folk song, from racine to rudyard kipling, from gibbon to herodotus or froissart. and while no two people would agree in drawing the line of aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal expression of thought or emotion was literature or not--a fact which is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste of our pupils--yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we mean by the word in the general sense which i have attempted to describe. as this is not a tractate on education as a whole, i must risk something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of education are ( ) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, ( ) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable pleasure, and ( ) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process of education. none of these objects is exclusive of either of the others. they cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. but they are sufficiently different to be treated distinctly. ( ) hardly anyone would deny that some knowledge and appreciation of literature is an indispensable part of a complete education. the full member of a civilised society must be able to subscribe to the familiar _homo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto_. and literature is obviously one of the greatest, most intense, and most prolific interests of humanity. there have always been thinkers, from plato downwards, who for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of literature with distrust: but their fear is itself evidence of that power. thus literature is a very important part both of the past and of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without some real knowledge of it. a man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war. but the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become. literature in one form or another--too often no doubt put to vile uses--has become so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake mind can scarcely fail to take notice of it. and in any case we need not consider that kind of special genius which education does little either to make or mar. no one is likely seriously to deny that for taking a full and intelligent part in the normal life of a civilised community--in love and friendship, in the family and in society, in the study and practice of citizenship of all degrees--some literary culture is absolutely necessary; nor indeed that, subject to a due balance of qualities and acquirements, the wider and deeper the literary culture the more valuable a member of society the possessor will be. the lubricant of society in all its functions, whether of business or leisure, is sympathy, and a sufficient quantity, as it were, of sympathy to lubricate the complex mechanism of civilised life can only be supplied by a widespread knowledge of the best, and a great deal more than the best, of what has been and is being thought and said in the world. personal intercourse with one another and a common apprehension of god as our father are even more powerful sources of sympathy; but literature provides innumerable channels for the intercommunication and distribution of these sources, without which the sympathies of individuals may be strong and lively, but will almost always be narrowly circumscribed. it is very true that to know mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of widening and deepening such knowledge. this object of literary studies, the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful words of ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he wrote ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollit mores nec sinit esse feros. and it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due balance of qualities and acquirements of which i spoke just now, which have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of literature as a subject of education. the good citizen or man of the world--in the best sense of the phrase--must not be the slave of literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or husband or friend or man of action and affairs. the world of letters, if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the actual world is almost meaningless. now the _genus irritabile vatum_, even when their thoughts, as carlyle put it, "enrich the blood of the world," have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as very defective in the art of living. if their aspirations have been above the standards of their day, their practice has often been below them in such essentially social qualities as probity, faithfulness, consideration for others. moreover their outlook upon life, intense and inspiring though it be, is often a very partial one. even so, it does not follow that because a poet or a philosopher is not in every respect "the compleat gentleman," a citizen _totus teres atque rotundus_, his works are not profitable for the building up of that character. if it did, we must by parity of reasoning discard the discoveries of a misanthropic inventor and the theories of a bigamous chemist. we go to plato and catullus, to shakespeare and shelley, for what they have to give: if we go with our own pet notions of what that ought to be, we are naturally as disgusted as herbert spencer was with homer and tolstoy with shakespeare. tolstoy is indeed a case in point. he is one of the giants of literature, whose masterpieces are already classics; and this position is unaffected by the various judgments that may be formed either of his critical or of his practical wisdom. the lack then of a due balance of qualities and acquirements in so many authors, and we may add other artists, is a cause, but no justification, of that belittlement and even distrust of the literary side of education which are on the whole marked features of the english attitude to-day. but a more potent cause and a real justification of this attitude is the neglect of due balance of qualities and acquirements by so many educators and educational systems. great educators have themselves rarely been narrow-minded men; but the traditions they have founded have gone the way of all traditions. what begins as an inspiration hardens into a formula. the ideals of the renascence were caricatured in their offspring of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. not only did the evolution of modern life with its cities, its printing press, its gunpowder, its steam engine and the rest, destroy the need of the well-to-do to be trained in the practical arts of chivalry, of the chase, of husbandry, even of music and design, so that the bodily activities of boys became relegated to the sphere of mere games and pastimes; but as books usurped more and more of the hours of boyhood, so the instructors of youth fell more and more into the fatally easy path of formal and grammatical treatment. the subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of greece and rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique with which it was surrounded. i do not know when the expression "the dead languages" was invented: but certainly latin and greek have been treated as very dead languages by the great majority of teachers for a very long time. and as "modern subjects," history, geography, modern languages and literatures, gradually thrust their way into the curriculum, each was subjected as far as possible to the same mummification. there is a theory still widely held among teachers that the value of a subject or of a method of instruction depends upon the amount of drudgery which it involves or the degree of repulsion which it excites. the theory rests upon a confusion between the ideas of discipline and punishment, which itself is probably due to the strongly judaistic tone of our so-called christianity. at any rate, far too many schoolmasters suffer from conscientious scruples about allowing the spirits of freedom, initiative, curiosity, enjoyment, to blow through their class-rooms. there has been, always to some extent, but with gathering force in recent years, a natural revolt against this mixture of puritanism, scholasticism, and dilettantism, which made the intellectual side of public school education such a failure except for the few who were born with the spoon of scholarship in their mouths. the irruption of that turbulent rascal, natural science, has perhaps had most to do with humanising our humanistic studies. it was a great step when boys who could not make verses were allowed to make if it was but a smell; and even breaking a test-tube once in a while is more educative than breaking the gender-rules every day of the week. many of my friends, who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look upon me sadly as a renegade because i, who owe almost everything to a "classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of "compulsory greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will turn our flowery groves of academe into mere factories of commercial efficiency. but fear is a treacherous guide. they are the victims of that abstract generalisation of which i spoke at the outset. i check their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my children, and the hundreds of boys i have known. and i see more and more plainly, as i study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. i and my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands--and even legs! we have, as aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge, and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a sole diet of literature. we have desires of many kinds demanding satisfaction and requiring government. we have a sense of duty and vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to carry on the race. we resent, in our inarticulate way, these sneers at our philistinism, commercialism, athleticism, materialism, from dim-eyed pedants on the one hand and superior persons on the other, who have evidently forgotten, if they ever saw, the whole purport of that greek literature the name of which they take in vain. no! _la littérature est une chose qui touche à toutes choses_; but if we are to shut our eyes to all the "things" which evoke it, it becomes what it is to so many, whose education has been in name predominantly literary, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." ( ) the argument has already insensibly led us to treat by implication the second, and indeed the third of our assumed objects. but in our modern insistence upon social relations and citizenship--a very proper insistence, still too much warped and hampered by selfishness and prejudice--there is a real danger of our forgetting how much of our conscious existence is passed, in a true sense, at leisure and alone. it is our ideal on the one side to be "all things to all men": and for any approach to this ideal, as we have seen, the knowledge and sympathy born of literature are indispensable. but on the other side no man or woman is completely fitted out without provision for the blank spaces, the passages and waiting rooms, as it were, to say nothing of the actual "recreation rooms" of the house of life. and there is no provision so abundant, so accessible to all, so permanent, so independent of fortune, and at once so mellowing and fortifying, as literature. our happiness or discontent depends far more, than on anything else, on the habitual occupation of our mind when it is free to choose its occupation. and, since thought is instantaneous, even the busiest of us has far more of that freedom than he knows what to do with unless he has a mental treasury from which he can at will bring forth things new and old. it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of hobbies in a man's own life--and of course indirectly in his relations with his fellows. a single hobby is dangerous. you ride it to death or it becomes your master. you need at least a pair of them in the stable. what they are must depend, you say, upon the temperament, the bent of the individual. true: but our main responsibility as educators consists in our "bending of the twig." it is not temperament nor destiny which renders so many men and women unable to fill their leisure moments with anything more exhilarating than, gossip, grumbling, or perpetual bridge. perhaps the greatest blessing which a parent or a teacher can confer on a boy or girl is discreet, unpriggish, and unpatronising, encouragement and guidance in the discovery and development of hobbies: and if i may venture on a piece of advice to anyone who needs it, i should say: "try to secure that everyone grows up with at least two hobbies; and whatever one of them may be, let the other be literature, or some branch of literature." dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, are a substantial world, both pure and good; round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, our pastime and our happiness will grow. ( ) at this point i can imagine someone, who recognises the importance of literary culture in the equipment of a man or woman of the world, and perhaps feels even more strongly the truth summed up in these lines of wordsworth, expressing the doubt whether the second at least of these objects can be secured, or will not rather be precluded, by admitting the study of literature as such into the school curriculum. this doubt, which i have heard expressed by many lovers of literature, notably by the late canon ainger, is not lightly to be disregarded. it is to be met, however, in my opinion, by keeping clearly before our eyes the third of the objects which we assumed to be aimed at by literary studies as a branch of education--the immediate pleasure of the student. the two objects which we have already discussed are ulterior objects, which should be part of the fundamental faith of the teacher; but while the teacher is in contact with his pupils they should be forgotten in the glowing conviction that the study of literature is, at that very moment, the most delightful thing in the world. of course we all know, or should know, that this is the only attitude of mind for the best teaching in any subject whatever. it takes a great deal more than enthusiasm to make a competent teacher; and it is easy to prepare pupils successfully for almost any written examination without any enthusiasm for anything except success. but, cramming apart, a bored teacher is inevitably a boring one: and while unfortunately the converse is not universally true and an enthusiastic teacher may fail to communicate his enthusiasm, yet it is quite certain that you cannot communicate enthusiasm if you are not possessed of it. but this enthusiasm, indispensable for the best teaching of anything, is, so to speak, doubly indispensable for even competent teaching of literature. on the one hand the ulterior objects of the study, of which i have tried to indicate the importance, are of an impalpable kind. i doubt if there is any subject of the curriculum which it would be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to simple utilitarian motives. on the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey. if the attitude of the teacher reflects the old question of the latin grammar "why should i teach you letters?" he would better turn to some other subject which his pupils will more easily recognise as appropriate to school hours. what's hecuba to him, or he to hecuba, that he should weep for her-- unless indeed he be a candidate for responsions? "ah! it is just as i expected," says my friend orbilius at this point: "this literature-lesson of yours is to be mere play, a 'soft-option' for our modern youth, who is not to be made to stand up to the tussle with latin prose or riders in geometry." softly, my friend! it is quite true that those twin engines of education, classics and mathematics, are adapted partly by long practice, but partly, as i too believe, by their very nature, to discipline the youthful mind to habits of intellectual honesty, of accuracy, of industry and perseverance. it is true that they accomplish some of this discipline--though at what a cost!--in the hands of indifferent teachers. it is true that every other subject of the usual curriculum is much more obviously liable than they are to the dangers of idleness, unreality, false pretence; and that the scoffs, for instance, about "playing with test-tubes," "tracing maps," "dishing up history notes," are in fact too often deserved. but in the first place, if the object to be attained is a worthy one, it is our business to face the dangers of the road, and not to give up the object. if a knowledge and love of literature is part of the birthright of our children, and a part which, as things are, very many of them will never obtain away from school, then we teachers must strive to give it them, even if the process seems shockingly frivolous to the grammarian or the geometrician. and, secondly, it is not true that the study of literature, even in the mother tongue, cannot be a discipline and a delight together. the two are very far from incompatible: indeed that discipline is most effective which is almost or quite unconsciously self-imposed in the joyous exercise of one's own faculties. the genuine footballer and the genuine scholar will both agree with ferdinand the lover, that there be some sports are painful, and their labour delight in them sets off. and the "labour" of the boy or girl who is really wrapped up in a play of shakespeare or is striving to express the growing sense of beauty in fitting forms of language, is no less truly spiritual discipline because it is felt not as pain but as interest and delight. it is fortunately no part of my business to endeavour to instruct teachers in the methods of imparting the love and knowledge of literature. but the value of literary studies in education depends so much upon the spirit in which they are pursued that i may perhaps be permitted a few more words on the practical side of the subject. i have already repeated the truism that no one can impart enthusiasm who is not himself possessed of it: but even the lover of literature sometimes lacks that clear consciousness of aim, and that sympathetic understanding of the personality of his pupil; which are both essential to successful teaching. just as the clever young graduate is tempted to dictate his own admirable history notes to a class of boys, or to puzzle them with the latest theories in archaeology or philosophy, so the literary teacher is apt to dazzle his pupils with brilliant but to them unintelligible criticism, or to surfeit them with literary history, or to impose upon them an inappropriate literary diet because it happens to suit his maturer taste or even his caprice. no one is likely to deny that such errors are possible; but i should not venture to speak so decidedly, if i were not aware of having too often fallen into them myself. and the only safeguard for the teacher is the familiar "keep your eye on the object"--and that in a double sense. we must have a clear conception of our aim, and also a living sympathy with our pupils. i have attempted to indicate the aim, the equipment of boy or girl for civilised life and for spiritual enjoyment. it will be sympathy with our pupils which will chiefly dictate both the method and the material of our instruction. in the early stages of education this sympathy is generally to be found either in parents, if they are fond of literature, or in the teacher, who is usually of the more sympathetic sex. the stories and poetry offered to children nowadays seem to be, as a rule, sympathetically, if sometimes rather uncritically, chosen. the importance of voice and ear in receiving the due impression of literature is recognised; and the value of the child's own expression of its imaginations and its sense of rhythm and assonance is understood. probably more teachers than mr. lamborn supposes would heartily subscribe to the faith which glows in his delightful little book _the rudiments of criticism_, though there must be very few who would not be stimulated by reading it. it is when we come to the middle stage, at any rate of boyhood--for of girls' schools i am not qualified to speak--that there is a good deal to be done before the cultivation of literary taste, and all that this carries with it, will be successfully pursued. in the past, the latin and greek classics were, for the few who really absorbed them, both a potent inspiration and an unrivalled discipline in taste: but it is noteworthy how few even of the _élite_ acquired and retained that lively and generous love of literature which would have enabled them to sow seeds of the divine fire far and wide--"of joy in widest commonalty spread." considering the intensity with which the classics have been studied in the old universities and public schools of the united kingdom, the fine flower of scholarship achieved, the sure touch of style and criticism, one cannot help being amazed at the low standard of literary culture in the rank and file of the classes from which this _élite_ has been drawn. how rare has been the power, or even apparently the desire, of a bradley or a verrall or a murray, to carry the flower of their classical culture into the fields of modern literary study! and how few and fumbling the attempts of ordinary classical teachers to train their pupils in the appreciation of our english literature! in recent years a new type of literary teachers has been rising, who owe little, at any rate directly, to the old classical training; and although their zeal is often undisciplined and "not according to knowledge," with them lies the future hope of literary training in our schools. they bring to their task an enthusiasm which was too often lacking in the "grand old fortifying classical curriculum"; but it is to be hoped that, as the importance of their subject becomes more and more recognised, they will achieve a method which will embody all that was valuable, while discarding much that was narrow and pedantic, in classical teaching. and in particular may they all realise, as many already do, what the classical teacher, however unconsciously, held as an axiom, that in order to enter into the spirit of literature, to appreciate style, to understand in any true sense the meaning of great author's, it is not enough for pupils to listen and to read, and then perhaps to write essays about what they have heard and read. they must also _make_ something, exercise that creative, and at the same time imitative, artistic faculty, which surely is the motive power of most of our progress, at least in early life. nothing has struck me more forcibly than the intense interest which boys will take in their own crude efforts at writing a poem or a story or essay, while they are still quite unable to appreciate with discrimination, or even to enjoy with any sustained feeling, the poetry or prose of the great masters. not that there is anything surprising in this. i know very well that it was writing latin verses that taught me to appreciate virgil, and writing juvenile epics that led me up to milton. but it is an order of progress which we schoolmasters are apt to overlook, expecting our pupils to appreciate what we know to be good work before they have that elementary, but most fruitful, experience which can only come from handling the tools of the craft. the creative and imitative impulse will die down in the great majority; and we shall not make the mistake of continuing to exact formal "composition" from maturer pupils, who no longer find it anything but a drag upon their progress along the unfolding vistas of knowledge and appreciation. our object is not to increase the number of writers, already far too large, but to increase the number of readers, which can never be too large, to raise the standard of literary taste, and so to spread pure enjoyment and all the benefits to society which joy, and joy alone, confers. inspired with such an aim, common sense and sympathy will enable us to overcome the difficulties and avoid the pitfalls which undoubtedly beset the teaching of that most necessary, most delightful, but most elusive and imponderable subject, the appreciation of literature. vii the place of science in education by w. bateson director of the john innes horticultural institution that secondary education in england fails to do what it might is scarcely in dispute. the magnitude of the failure will be appreciated by those who know what other countries accomplish at a fraction of the cost. beyond the admission that something is seriously wrong there is little agreement. we are told that the curriculum is too exclusively classical, that the classes are too large, the teaching too dull, the boys too much away from home, the examination-system too oppressive, athletics overdone. all these things are probably true. each cause contributes in its degree to the lamentable result. yet, as it seems to me, we may remove them all without making any great improvement. all the circumstances may be varied, but that intellectual apathy which has become so marked a characteristic of english life, especially of english public and social life, may not improbably continue. why nations pass into these morbid phases no one can tell. the spirit of the age, that "polarisation of society" as tarde[ ] used to call it, in a definite direction, is brought about by no cause that can be named as yet. it will remain beyond volitional control at least until we get some real insight into social physiology. that the attitude or pose of the average englishman towards education, knowledge, and learning is largely a phenomenon of infectious imitation we know. but even if we could name the original, perhaps real, perhaps fictional, person--for in all likelihood there was such an one--whom english society in its folly unconsciously selected as a model, the knowledge would advance us little. the psychology of imitation is still impenetrable and likely to remain so. the simple interpretation of our troubles as a form of sloth--a travelling along lines of least resistance--can scarcely be maintained. for first there have been times when learning and science were the fashion. whether society benefited directly therefrom may, in passing, be doubted, but certainly learning did. secondly there are plenty of men who under the pressure of fashion devote much effort to the improvement of their form in fatuous sports, which otherwise applied would go a considerable way in the improvement of their minds and in widening their range of interests. of late things have become worse. in the middle of the nineteenth century a perfunctory and superficial acquaintance with recent scientific discovery was not unusual among the upper classes, and the scientific world was occasionally visited even by the august. these slender connections have long since withered away. this decline in the public estimation of science and scientific men has coincided with a great increase both in the number of scientific students and in the provision for teaching science. it has occurred also in the period during which something of the full splendour and power of science has begun to be revealed. great regions of knowledge have been penetrated by the human mind. the powers of man over nature have been multiplied a hundredfold. the fate of nations hangs literally on the issue of contemporary experiments in the laboratory; but those who govern the empire are quite content to know nothing of all this. intercommunication between government departments and scientific advisers has of course much developed. that, even in this country, was inevitable. otherwise the empire might have collapsed long since. experts in the sciences are from time to time invited to confer with heads of departments and even cabinet ministers, explaining to them, as best they may, the rudiments of their respective studies, but such occasional night-school talks to the great are an inadequate recognition of the position of science in a modern state. science is not a material to be bought round the corner by the dram, but the one permanent and indispensable light in which every action and every policy must be judged. to scientific men this is so evident that they are unable to imagine what the world looks like to other people. they cannot realise that by a majority of even the educated classes the phenomena of nature and the affairs of mankind are still seen through the old screens of mystery and superstition. the man of science regards nature as in great and ever increasing measure a soluble problem. for the layman such inquiries are either indifferent and somewhat absurd, or, if they attract his attention at all, are interesting only as possible sources of profit. i suspect that the distinction between these two classes of mind is not to any great degree a product of education. it is contemporary commonplace that if science were more prominent in our educational system everybody would learn it and things would come all right. that interest in science would be extended is probable. there is in the population a residuum of which we will speak later, who would profit by the opportunity; but that the congenitally unscientific, the section from which the heads of government temporal and spiritual, the lawyers, administrators, politicians, the classes upon whose minds the public life of this country almost wholly depends, would by imbibition of scientific diet at any period of life, however early, be essentially altered seems in a high degree unlikely. of the converse case we have long experience, and i would ask those who entertain such sanguine expectations, whether the results of administering literature to scientific boys give much encouragement to their views. this consideration brings us to the one hard, physiological fact that should form the foundation of all educational schemes: the congenital diversity of the individual types. education has too long been regarded as a kind of cookery: put in such and such ingredients in given proportions and a definite product will emerge. but living things have not the uniformity which this theory of education assumes. our population is a medley of many kinds which will continue heterogeneous, to whatever system of education they are submitted, just as various types of animals maintain their several characteristics though nourished on identical food, or as you may see various sorts of apples remaining perfectly distinct though grafted on the same stock. their diversity is congenital. according to the proposal of the reformers the natural sciences should be universally taught and be given "capital importance" in the examinations for the government services, but, cordially as we may approve the suggestion, we ought to consider what exactly its adoption is likely to effect. the intention of the proposal is doubtless that our public servants, especially the highest of them, shall, while preserving the great qualities they now possess, add also a knowledge of science and especially scientific habits of mind. such is the "ample proposition that hope makes." does experience of men accord with it at all? education, whether we like it or not, is a selective agency. i doubt whether the change proposed will sensibly alter the characters of the group on whom our choice at present falls. rather, if forced upon an unwilling community, must it act by substituting another group. the most probable result would not be that the type of men who now fill great positions would become scientific, but rather that their places would be taken by men of an altogether distinct mental type. at the present time these two types of men meet but little. they scarcely know each other. their differences are profound, affecting thoughts, ways of looking at things, and mental interests of every kind. if either could for a moment see the world with the vision of the other he would be amazed, but to do so he would need at least to be born again, and probably, as samuel butler remarked, of different parents. no doubt the abler man of either type could learn with more or less effort or unreadiness the subject-matter and principles of the other's business, but any one who has watched the habits of the two classes will perceive that for them in any real sense to exchange interests, or that either should adopt the scheme of proportion which the other assigns to the events of nature and of life, a metamorphosis well nigh miraculous must be presupposed. the bishop of london speaking lately on behalf of the national mission said that nature helped him to believe in god, and as evidence for his belief referred to the fact that we are not "blown off" this earth as it rushes through space, declaring that this catastrophe had been averted because "some one" had wrapped seventy miles of atmosphere round our planet[ ]. does any one think that the bishop's slip was in fact due to want of scientific teaching at marlborough? his chances of knowing about sir isaac newton, etc., etc., have been as good as those of many familiar with the accepted version. i would rather suppose that such sublunary problems had not interested him in the least, and that he no more cared how we happen to stick on the earth's surface than st paul cared how a grain of wheat or any other seed germinates beneath it, when he similarly was betrayed into an unfortunate illustration. so too on the famous occasion--always cited in these debates--when a home secretary defended the government for having permitted the importation of fats into germany on the ground that the discovery that glycerine could be made from fat was a recent advance in chemistry, he was not showing the defects of a literary education so much as a want of interest in the problems of nature, and the subject-matter of science at large. it is to be presumed indeed that neither fats, nor glycerine, nor the dependent problem how living bodies are related to the world they inhabit, had ever before seemed to him interesting. nor can we suppose they would, even if chemistry were substituted for greek in responsions. the difficulty in obtaining full recognition for science lies deeper than this. it is a part of public opinion or taste which may well survive changes in the educational system. blunders about science like those illustrated above are soon excused. few think much the worse of the perpetrators, whereas a corresponding obliviousness to language, history, literature, and indeed to learning other than their own which we of the scientific fraternity have agreed to condone in our members is incompatible with public life of a high order. both classes have their disabilities. that of the scientific side is well expressed in an incident which befell the late professor hales. examining in the little-go _viva voce_, he asked a candidate, with reference to some line in a greek play, what passage in shakespeare it recalled to him, and received the answer "please, sir, i am a mathematical man." some, no doubt, would rather ignore gravitation. when, for example, one hears, as i did not long since, several scientific students own in perfect sincerity that they could not recall anything about ananias and sapphira and another, more enlightened, say that he was sure ananias was a name for a liar though he could not tell why, one is driven to admit that ignorance of this special but not uncommon kind does imply more than inability to remember an old legend. we may be reluctant to confess the fact, but though most scientific men have some recreation, often even artistic in nature, we have with rare exceptions withdrawn from the world in which letters, history and the arts have immediate value, and simple allusions to these topics find us wanting. of the two kinds of disability which is the more grave? truly gross ignorance of science darkens more of a man's mental horizon, and in its possible bearing on the destinies of a race is far more dangerous than even total blindness to the course of human history and endeavour; and yet it is difficult to question the popular verdict that to know nothing of gravitation though ridiculous is venial, while to know nothing of ananias is an offence which can never be forgiven. that is the real difficulty. the people of this country have definitely preferred the unscientific type, holding the other virtually in contempt. their choice may be right or wrong, but that it is reversible seems unlikely. such revolutions in public opinion are rare events. democracy moreover inevitably worships and is swayed by the spoken word. as inevitably, the range and purposes of science daily more and more transcend the comprehension--even the educated comprehension--of the vulgar, who will of course elevate the nimble and versatile, speaking a familiar language, above dull and inarticulate natural philosophers. in these discussions there is a disposition to forget how very largely natural science is already included in the educational curriculum both at schools and universities. schools subsidised by the board of education are obliged to provide science-teaching. the public schools have equipment, in some cases a superb equipment, for teaching at least physics and chemistry. at the newer universities there are great and vigorous schools of science. of the old universities cambridge stands out as a chief centre of scientific activity. in several branches of science cambridge is without question pre-eminent. the endowments both of the university and the colleges are freely used for the advancement of the sciences. not only in these material ways are scientific studies in no sense neglected, but the position of the sciences is recognised and even envied by those who follow other kinds of learning. the scientific schools of cambridge form perhaps the dominant force among the resident body of the university, and except by virtue of some great increase in the endowments, it would be impossible to extend further the scientific side of cambridge and still maintain other forms of intellectual activity in such proportion as to preserve that healthy co-ordination which is the life of a great university. at oxford the case is no doubt very different. the measure in which the sciences are esteemed appears only too plainly in the small proportion of fellowships filled by men of science. progress has nevertheless begun. at the remarkable conference called in may, , to protest against the neglect of science it was noticeable that the speakers were, in overwhelming majority, oxford men[ ]. among the educational institutions of england there is no general neglect to provide teaching of natural science and much of the language used in reference to the problem of reform is not really in accord with fact. probably no boy able to afford a good secondary school, certainly none able to proceed to a university, is debarred from scientific teaching merely because it does not "form an integral part" of the curriculum. this alone suffices to prove that the real cause of the deplorable neglect of science is to be sought elsewhere. the fundamental difficulty is that which has been already indicated, that public taste and judgment deliberately prefers the type known as literary, or as it might with more propriety be designated, "vocal." in the schools there is no lack of science teaching, but the small percentage of boys whose minds develop early and whose general capacity for learning and aptitude for affairs mark them out as leaders, rarely have much instinct for science, and avoid such teaching, finding it irksome and unsatisfying. these it is, who going afterwards to the universities, in preponderating numbers to oxford, make for themselves a congenial atmosphere, disturbed only by faint ripples of that vast intellectual renascence in which the new shape of civilisation is forming. with self-complacency unshaken, they assume in due course charge of church and state, the press, and in general the leadership of the country. as lawyers and journalists they do our talking for us, let who will do the thinking. observe that their strength lies in the possession of a special gift, which under the conditions of democratic government has a prodigious opportunity. uncomfortable as the reflection may be, it is not to be denied that the countries in which science has already attained the greatest influence and recognition in public affairs are germany and japan, where the opinions of the ignorant are not invited. but facts must be recognised, and our government is likely to remain in the hands of those who have the gift of speech. a general substitution of scientific men for the "vocal" could scarcely be achieved, even if the change were desirable. the utmost limit of success which the conditions admit is some inoculation of scientific interest and ideas upon the susceptible members of the classes already preferred. that a large proportion of those persons are in the biological sense resistant to all such influences must be expected. granting however that a section perhaps even the majority, of our [greek: beltistoi] may prove unamenable to the influences of science no one can doubt that under the present system of education a proportion of not unintelligent boys in practice have little option. from earliest youth classics are offered to them as almost the sole vehicle of education. they do sufficiently well in classics, as they probably would on any other curriculum, to justify themselves and their advisers in thinking that they have made a good beginning to which it is safer to stick. the system has a huge momentum, and so, holding to the "great wheel" that goes up the hill, they let it draw them after. in their protest against the monotony of the courses provided for young boys the reformers are right. the trouble is not that science is not taught in the schools, but that in schools of the highest type, with certain exceptions, the young boys are not offered it. realising the determinism which modern biological knowledge has compelled us to accept, we suspect that the power of education to modify the destinies of individuals is relatively small. abrogating larger hopes we recognise education in its two scientific aspects, as a selective agency, but equally as a provision of opportunity. in view therefore of the congenital diversity of the individual types, that provision should be as diverse and manifold as possible, and the very first essential in an adequate scheme of education is that to the minds of the young something of everything should be offered, some part of all the kinds of intellectual sustenance in which the minds of men have grown and rejoiced. that should be the ideal. nothing of varied stimulus or attraction that can be offered should be withheld. so only will the young mind discover its aptitudes and powers. this ideal education should bring all into contact with _beauty_ as seen first in literature, ancient and modern, with the great models of art and the patterns of nobility of thought and of conduct; and no less should it show to all the _truth_ of the natural world, the changeless systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery or mysticism. but presented with this ideal the schoolmaster will reply that something of everything means nothing _thorough_. i know the objection and what it commonly stands for. it is the cloak and pretext for that accursed pedantry and cant which turns every sort of teaching to a blight. thoroughness is the excuse for giving boys grammar and accidence in the name of greek: diagrams, formulae and numerical examples in the name of science. stripped of disguise this love of thoroughness is nothing but an indolent resolve to make things easy for the teacher, and, worse still, for the examiner. live teaching is hard work. it demands continual freshness and a mind alert. the dullest man can hear irregular verbs, and with the book he knows whether they are said right or wrong, but to take a text and show what the passage means to the world, to reconstruct the scene and the conditions in which it was written, to show the origins and the fruits of ideas or of discoveries, demand qualities of a very different order. the plea for thoroughness may no doubt be offered in perfect sincerity. there are plenty of men, especially among those who desire the office of a pedagogue, whose field of vision is constricted to a slit. if they were painters their work would be in the slang of the day, "tight." one small group of facts they see hard and sharp, without atmosphere or value. their own knowledge having no capacity for extension, no width or relationship to the world at large, they cannot imagine that breadth in itself may be a merit. adepts in a petty erudition without vital antecedents or consequences, they would willingly see the world shrivel to the dimensions of their own landscape. anticipating here the applause of the reforming party, to avoid misapprehension let it be expressly observed that pedantry of this sort is in no sense the special prerogative of teachers of classics. we meet it everywhere. among teachers of science the type abounds, and from the papers set in any natural sciences tripos, not to speak of scholarship examinations of every kind, it would be possible to extract question after question that ought never to have been set, referring to things that need never have been taught, and knowledge that no one but a pedant would dream of carrying in his head for a week. the splendid purpose which science serves is the inculcation of principle and balance, not facts. there is something horrible and terrifying in the doctrine so often preached, reiterated of course by speaker after speaker at the "neglect of science" meeting, that science is to be preferred because of its utility. if the choice were really between dead classics and dead science, or if science is to be vivified by an infusion of commercial, utilitarian spirit, then a thousand times rather let us keep to the classics as the staple of education. they at least have no "use." at least they hold the keys to the glorious places, to the fulness of literature and to the thoughtful speech of all kindred nations, nor are they demeaned with sordid, shop-keeper utility. this was plainly in the mind of the poet laureate, who speaking at the meeting i have referred to, said well that "a merely utilitarian science can never win the spiritual respect of mankind." the main objection that the humanists make to the introduction of natural science as a necessary subject of education, is, he declared, that science is not spiritual, that it does not work in the sphere of ideas. he went on very properly to show how perverse is such a representation of science, but, alas, in further recommendation of science as a safe subject of instruction he added that the antagonism of science to religion is ended, and that the contest had been a passing phase. reading this we may wonder whether we are in fairness entitled to dr bridges's approval. "tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?" since he spoke of the "unscientific attitude" of professor huxley as a thing of the past, candour obliges us to insist emphatically that the struggle continues and must perpetually be renewed. huxley was opposing the teaching of science to that of revelation. in these days the ground has shifted, and supernatural teachings make preferably their defence by an appeal to intuition and other obscure phenomena which can be trusted to defy investigation. against all such apocryphal glosses of evidential truth science protests with equal vehemence, and were huxley here he would treat bergson and his allies with the same scorn and contumely that he meted out to the bishop of oxford on the notorious occasion to which dr bridges made reference. as well might we decorate our writings with plantin title-pages, showing the author embraced by angels and inspiring muses, as recommend ourselves in these disguises. agnosticism is the very life and mainspring of science. not merely as to the supernatural but as to the natural world must science believe nothing save under compulsion. little of value has a man got from science who has not learned to be slow of faith. those early lessons in the study of the natural world will be the best which most frankly declare our ignorance, exciting the mind to attack the unknown by showing how soon the frontier of knowledge is reached. "we don't know" should be ever in the mouth of the teacher, followed sometimes by "we may find out yet." not merely to the investigator but to the pupil the interest of science is strongest in the growing edges of knowledge. the student should be transported thither with the briefest possible delay. details of those parts of science which by present means of investigation are worked out and reduced to general expressions are dull and lifeless. many and many a boy has been repelled, gathering from what he hears in class that science is a catalogue of names and facts interminable. in childhood he may have felt curiosity about nature and the common impulse to watch and collect, but when he begins scientific lessons he discovers too often that they relate not even to the kind of fact which nature is for him, or to the subjects of his early curiosity and wonder, but to things that have no obvious interest at all, measurements of mechanical forces, reaction-formulae, and similar materials. all these, it is true, man has gradually accumulated with infinite labour; upon them, and of such materials has the great fabric of science been reared: but to insist that the approaches to science shall be open only to those who will surmount these gratuitous obstacles is mere perversity. men's minds do not work in that way. how many would discover the grandeur of a gothic building if they were prevented from seeing one until they could work out stresses and strains, date mouldings, and even perhaps cut templates? most of us, to be sure, enjoy the cathedrals more when we acquire some such knowledge, and those who are to be architects must acquire it, but we can scarcely be astonished if beginners turn away in disgust from science presented on those terms. it is from considerations of this kind that i am led to believe that for most boys the easiest and most attractive introduction to science is from the biological side. admittedly chemistry is the more fundamental study, and some rudimentary chemical notions must be imparted very early, but if the framework subject-matter be animals and plants, very sensible progress in realising what science means and aims at doing will have been made before the things of daily life are left behind. these first formal lessons in science should continue and extend the boy's own attempts to find out how the world is made. i shall be charged with running counter both to common sense and to authority in expressing parenthetically the further conviction that, in biology at least, laboratory work is now largely overdone. whether this is so at schools i cannot tell, but at the universities whole mornings and afternoons spent in making elaborate preparations, drawings and series of sections, are frequently wasted. these courses were devised with the highest motives. students were to "find out everything for themselves." generally they are doing nothing of the kind. it may have been so once, but with text-books perfected and teaching stereotyped, the more industrious are slavishly verifying what has been verified repeatedly, or at best acquiring manipulative skill. the rest are doing nothing whatever. they would be better employed taking a walk, devilling for some investigator, browsing in museums or libraries, or even arguing with each other. certainly a few lessons in the use of indexes and books of reference would be far more valuable. students of every grade must of course do some laboratory work, and all should see as much material as possible. my protest is solely against those long, torpid hours compulsorily given to labour which will lead to nothing of novelty, and serves only to teach what can be got readily in other ways. there are a few whose souls crave such employment. by all means let them follow it. but whatever is good for maturer students, biology for schoolboys should be of a less academic cast. the natural history of animals and plants has the obvious merit that it prolongs the inborn curiosity of youth, that its subject-matter is universally at hand, accessible in holidays and in the absence of teachers or laboratories, and best of all that through biological study the significance of science appears immediately, disclosing the true story of man's relation to the world. from natural history the transition to the other sciences, especially to chemistry and physics, is easy and again natural. in the study of life many of the fundamental conceptions of those sciences are met with on the threshold, and boys whose aptitudes are rather of the physical order will at once feel the impulse to follow nature from that aspect. biology is the more inclusive study. a man may be a good chemist and miss the broad meaning of science altogether, being sometimes indeed more devoid of such comprehension than many a philosopher fresh from classical greats. in appealing for a progress from the general to the particular i am not blind to the dangers. biology for the young readily degenerates into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-for-the-best claptrap about adaptation, but a sure remedy is the strong tonic of agnosticism, teaching one of the best lessons science has to offer, the resolute rejection of authority. some take comfort in the hope that all subjects may be taught as branches of science, but the fact that must permanently postpone arrival at this educational utopia is that a great proportion of teachers are not and can never be made scientific. nothing proceeding from such persons will by the working of any schedule, regulation, or even order of the board be ever made to bear any colourable resemblance to science. moreover as has already been indicated, there are plenty of pupils also who will flourish and probably reach their highest development taught by unscientific men, pupils whose minds would be sterilised or starved by that very nourishment which to our thinking is the more generous. were we a homogeneous population one diet for all might be justifiable, but as things are, we should offer the greatest possible variety. from rousseau onwards educationists, deriving their views, i suppose, from some metaphysical or theological conception of human equality, speak continually of the "mind of the child" as if the young of our species conformed to a single type. if the general spread of biological knowledge serves merely to expose that foolish assumption there would be progress to record. dr blakeslee[ ], a well-known american biologist, lately gave a good illustration of this. in a paper on education he showed photographs of two varieties of maize. the ripe fruits of both are colourless if their sheaths be unbroken. the one, if exposed to the light before ripening, by rupture of its sheath, turns red. the second, otherwise indistinguishable, acquires no red colour though uncovered to the full sun. if these maizes were two boys, not improbably the one would be caned for failing to respond to treatment so efficacious in the case of the other. when we hear that such a man has developed too exclusively one side of his nature, with what propriety do we assume that he had any other side to develop? or when we say that such-and-such a course of study tends to make boys too exclusively literary, or scientific, or what not, do we not really mean that it provides too exclusively for those whose aptitudes are of these respective kinds? living in the midst of a mongrel population we note the divers powers of our fellows and we thoughtlessly imagine that if something different had happened to us, we can't say what, we should have been able to rival them. a little honest examination of our powers shows how vain are such suppositions. the right course is to make some provision for all sorts, since unscientific teaching and unscientific persons will remain with us always. teaching of this universal and undifferentiated sort, provided for all in common, should be continued up to the age at which pupils begin to show their tastes and aptitudes, in general about , after which stage such latitude of choice should be given as the resources of the school can provide. of what should the undifferentiated teaching consist? coming from a cultivated home a boy of may be expected to have learned the rudiments of latin, and at least one modern language, preferably french, _colloquially_, arithmetic, outlines of geography, tales from plutarch and from other histories. going to a preparatory school he will read easy latin texts _with translations_ and notes; french books, geography including the elements of astronomy, beginning also algebra and geometry. at dropping french except perhaps a reading once a week, he will begin greek, by means of easy passages again with the translations beside him, continuing the rest as before. transferred at - / to a public school he will go on with latin, starting latin prose, greek texts, again read fast with translations. he will now have his first formal introduction to science in the guise of biology, leading up to lessons and demonstrations in chemistry and physics. at about - / he may drop classics _or mathematics_ according as his tastes have declared themselves, adding modern languages instead, continuing science in all cases, greater or less in amount according to his proclivities. boys with special mathematical ability will of course need special treatment. moreover provision of german for all has avowedly not been made. for all it is desirable and for many indispensable. but as the number who read it for pleasure, never very large, seems likely to diminish, german may perhaps be reserved as a tool, the use of which must be acquired when necessary. such a scheme, i submit, makes no impossible demand on the time-table, allowing indeed many spare hours for accessory subjects such as readings in english or history. note the main features of this programme. the time for things worth learning is found by dropping _grammar_ as a subject of special study. there are to be no lessons in grammar or accidence as such, nor of course any verse compositions except for older boys specialising in classics. _mathematics_ also is treated as a subject which need not be carried beyond the rudiments unless mathematical or physical ability is shown. for other boys it leads literally nowhere, being a road impassable. all the languages are to be taught as we learn them in later life, when the desire or necessity arises, by means of easy passages with the translation at our side. our present practice not only fails to teach languages but it succeeds in teaching how _not_ to learn a language. who thinks of beginning russian by studying the "aspects" of the verbs, or by committing to memory the paradigms which german grammarians have devised on the analogy of latin declensions? auxiliary verbs are the pedagogue's delight, but who begins spanish by trying to discriminate between _tener_ and _haber_, or _ser_ and _estar_, or who learns tables of exceptions to improve his french? these things come by use or not at all. if languages are treated not as lessons but as vehicles of speech, and if the authors are read so that we may find out what they say and how they say it, and at such a pace that we follow the train of thought or the story, all who have any sense of language at all can attend and with pleasure too. what chance has a boy of enjoying an author when he knows him only as a task to be droned through, thirty lines at a time? small blame to the pupil who never discovers that the great authors were men of like passions with ourselves, that the homeric songs were made to be shouted at feasts to heroes full of drink and glory, that herodotus is telling of wonders that his friends, and we too, want to hear, that in the tragedies we hear the voice of sophocles dictating, choked with emotion and tears; that even roman historians wrote because they had something to tell, and caesar, dull proser that he is, composed the _commentaries_ not to provide us with style or grammatical curiosities, but as a record of extraordinary events. to get into touch with any author he must be read at a good pace, and by reading of that kind there is plenty of time for a boy before he reaches to make acquaintance with much of the best literature both of greek and latin. education must be brought up to date; but if in accomplishing that, we lose greek, it will have been sacrificed to obstinate formalism and pedagogic tradition. the defence of classics as a basis of education is generally misrepresented by opponents. the unique value of the classics is not in any begetting of literary style. we are thinking of readers not of writers. much of the best literature is the work of unlettered men, as they never tire of telling us, but it is for the enjoyment and understanding of books and of the world that continuity with the past should be maintained. john bunyan wrote sterling prose, knowing no language but his own. but how much could he read? what judgments could he form? we want also to keep classics and especially greek as the bountiful source of material and of colour, decoration for the jejune lives of common men. if classics cease to be generally taught and become the appanage of a few scholars, the gulf between the literary and the scientific will be made still wider. milton will need more explanatory notes than o. henry. who will trouble about us scientific students then? we shall be marked off from the beginning, and in the world of laboratories hector, antigone and pericles will soon share the fate of poor ananias and sapphira. i come now to the gravest part of the whole question. we plead for the preservation of literature, especially classical literature, as the staple of education in the name of beauty and understanding: but no less do we demand science in the name of truth and advancement. given that our demand succeeds, what consequences may we expect? nothing immediate, as i fear. in opening the discussion it was argued that even if scientific knowledge be widely diffused, any great change in the composition of the ruling classes is scarcely attainable under present conditions of social organisation. even if science stand equal with classics in examinations for the services the general tenor of the public mind will in all likelihood be undisturbed. yet it is for such a revolution that science really calls, and come it will in any community dominated by natural knowledge. science saves us from blunders about glycerine, shows how to economise fuel and to make artificial nitrates, but these, though they decide national destinies, are merely the sheaf of the wave-offering: the harvest is behind. for natural knowledge is destined to give man not only a direct control of the material world but new interpretations of higher problems. though we in england make a stand upon the ancient way, peoples elsewhere will move on. those who have grasped the meaning of science, especially biological science, are feeling after new rules of conduct. the old criteria based on ignorance have little worth. "rights," whether of persons or of nations, may be abstractions well-founded in law or philosophy, but the modern world sooner or later will annul them. the general ignorance of science has lasted so long that we have virtually two codes of right and duty, that founded on natural truth and that emanating from tradition, which almost alone finds public expression in this country. whether we look at the cruelty which passes for justice in our criminal courts, at the prolongation of suffering which custom demands as a part of medical ethics, at this very question of education, or indeed at any problem of social life, we see ahead and know that science proclaims wiser and gentler creeds. when in the wider sphere of national policy we read the declared ideals of statesmen, we turn away with a shrug. they bid us exalt national sentiment as a purifying and redeeming influence, and in the next breath proclaim that the sole way to avert the ruin now menacing the world is to guarantee to all nations freedom to develop, "unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid." so, forsooth, are we to end war. nature laughs at such dreams. the life of one is the death of another. where are the teeming populations of the west indies, where the civilisations of mexico or of peru, where are the blackfellows of australia? since means of subsistence are limited, the fancy that one group can increase or develop save at the expense of another is an illusion, instantly dissipated by appeal to biological fact, nor would a biologist-statesman look for permanent stability in a multiplication of competing communities, some vigorous, others worthless, but all growing in population. rather must a people familiar with science see how small and ephemeral a thing is the pride of nations, knowing that both the peace of the world and the progress of civilisation are to be sought not by the hardening of national boundaries but in the substitution of cosmopolitan for national aspiration. [footnote : _les lois de l'imitation_, , p. .] [footnote : reported in _evening standard_, sept. .] [footnote : two cambridge men spoke, one being lord rayleigh, the chairman, and ten oxford men, besides one originally cambridge, for several years an oxford professor.] [footnote : _journ. of heredity_, viii. , p. .] viii athletics by f. b. malim master of haileybury college at a conference held by the froebel society in january, , the subject for discussion was the employment of women teachers in boys' schools. with some of the questions considered, whether women should have shorter hours than men, whether they are capable of enforcing discipline, and the like, i am not now concerned; but i was interested to hear from one speaker after another that a woman was at a real disadvantage in a boys' school, because she could not take part in the games. the speakers did not come from the public schools, whose devotion to athletics constitutes, we are sometimes told, a public danger, but mainly from primary and secondary day schools in london. but none the less it was assumed that a boy's games are an essential part of his education. the same assumption is made by the managers of boys' clubs and similar organisations which are endeavouring to carry on the education of boys who have left the elementary schools at the age of fourteen. in spite of the great difficulty of finding grounds to play on in the neighbourhood of great towns, cricket and football are encouraged by any possible means among the working lads of our industrial centres. games are more and more being regarded as a desirable element in the education of the british boy, and are provided for him and organised for him by those responsible for his environment. but this is quite a modern development. i have been told by one who was at marlborough in the very early days of that school, that so far were the authorities from providing any means of playing cricket, that the boys themselves were obliged to subscribe small sums for the purchase of the necessary material. the book containing the names of the subscribers fell into the hands of the head master, who gated for the term all boys on the list, assuming without inquiry that they were the clients of a juvenile bookmaker. when we ask why we have come to regard games as a part of a boy's education, we shall naturally answer first that a full education is concerned with the proper development of the body. for this purpose we may employ the old fashioned gymnastic exercises, the modern swedish exercises or outdoor games. and of these the greatest is games. "so far," says dr. saleeby, "as true race culture is concerned, we should regard our muscles merely as servants or instruments of the will. since we have learnt to employ external forces for our purposes, the mere bulk of a muscle is now a matter of little importance. of the utmost importance, on the other hand, is the power to coordinate and graduate the activity of our muscles, so that they may become highly trained servants. this is a matter however not of muscle at all, but of nervous education. its foundation cannot be laid by mechanical things, like dumb-bells and exercises, but by games in which will and purpose and co-ordination are incessantly employed. in other words the only physical culture worth talking about is nervous culture. the principles here laid down are daily defied in very large measure in our nurseries, our schools and our barrack yards. the play of a child, spontaneous and purposeful, is supremely human and characteristic. although when considered from the outside, it is simply a means of muscular development, properly considered it is really the means of nervous development. here we see muscles used as human muscles should be used, as instruments of mind. in schools the same principles should be recognised. from the biological and psychological point of view, the playing field is immensely superior to the gymnasium[ ]." it would be a mistake to under-estimate the value of the swedish system of physical exercises. its object is not the abnormal development of muscle, but the production of a healthy, alert and well balanced body. the military authorities in the last three years have been confronted with the problem of restoring promptness of movement, erectness of carriage, poise and flexibility to numbers of men whose muscles have been given a one-sided development by the constant performance of one kind of manual work, or have grown flabby by long sitting at a desk, and the task would have been much less successfully tackled without the aid of the swedish methods. in schools these exercises may be used with real benefit given two conditions, small classes and a really skilled instructor. for the value a boy derives from the exercises, to a very large extent depends upon himself, on the concentration of his own will. it is almost impossible to make sure in a large class that this concentration is given, and any kind of exercise done without purpose or resolution rapidly degenerates into the most useless gesticulations. but though we may use physical exercises as an aid, i should be sorry to see them ever regarded as a substitute for games. even supposing that they were an adequate substitute in the development of the body (which i doubt) they cannot claim to have an effect at all comparable to that of games in the development of character. sometimes the most extravagant claims are put forward on behalf of athletics as a school of character, almost as extravagant as are the terms in which at other times the "brutal athlete" is denounced. i don't think it is found by experience that athletes cherish higher ideals or are more humble-minded than their less muscular fellows; i doubt if they become more charitable in their judgments or more liberal in their giving. we must carefully limit the claims we make, and then we shall find that we have surer grounds to go on. what virtues can we reasonably suppose to be developed by games? first i should put physical courage. it certainly requires courage to collar a fast and heavy opponent at football, to fall on the ball at the feet of a charging pack or to stand up to fast bowling on a bumpy wicket. schoolboy opinion is rightly intolerant of a "funk," and we should not attach too small a value to this first of the manly virtues. considering as we must the virtues which we are to develop in a nation, we realise that for the security of the nation courage in her young men is indispensable. that it has been bred in the sons of england is attested by the fields of flanders and the beaches of gallipoli. we shall therefore give no heed to those who decry the danger of some schoolboy games. for we shall remember that just as few things that are worth gaining can be won without toil, so there are some things which can only be won by taking risks. few things are less attractive in a boy than the habit of playing for safety; in the old prudence is natural and perhaps admirable, in the young it is precocious and unlovely. but we need not introduce unnecessary risk by the matching of boys of unequal size and age. the practice, for example, of house games in which the boys of one house play together, without regard to size or skill, is very much inferior to an organisation of games by means of "sets," graded solely by the proficiency which boys have shown. in each set boys are matched with others whose skill approximates to their own; they are not overpowered by the strength of older boys and can get the proper enjoyment from the display of such skill as they possess. and as we desire our games to foster the spirit that faces danger, so we shall wish them to foster the spirit that faces hardship, the spirit of endurance. that is why i think that golf and lawn tennis are not fit school games; they are not painful enough. i am afraid we ought on the same ground to let racquets go, though for training in alertness and sheer skill, in the nice harmony of eye and hand racquets has no equal. but cricket, football, hockey, fives can all be painful enough; often victory is only to be won by a clinching of the teeth and the sternest resolve to "stick to it" in face of exhaustion. this is the merit of two forms of athletics which have been oftenest the subject of attack, rowing and running. both of course should be carefully watched by the school doctor; for both careful training is necessary. but a sport which encourages boys to deny themselves luxuries, to scorn ease, to conquer bodily weariness by the exercise of the will, is not one which should be banished because for some the spirit has triumphed to the hurt of the flesh. in a self-indulgent age when sometimes it has seemed that the gibe of our enemies is true, that the most characteristic english word is "comfort," it is good to retain in our schools some forms of activity in which comfort is never considered at all. the ithaca which was [greek: hagathê koyrotrophos] was also [greek: trêcheia]. again no boy can meet with real athletic success who has not learnt to control his temper. it is not merely that public opinion despises the man who is a bad loser; but that to lose your temper very often means to lose the game. it may be true that a rugby forward does not develop his finest game until an opponent's elbow has met his nose and given an extra spice to his onslaught. but in the majority of contests the man who keeps his head will win. notably this is true in boxing, a fine instrument of education, whatever may be the objections to the prize ring. so dispassionate a scientist as professor hall in his monumental work on adolescence, describes boxing as "a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, full of will and self-control. the moment this is lost, stinging punishment follows. hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility, and has been found to have a most beneficial effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition." but perhaps the best lesson that a boy can learn from his games, is the lesson that he must play for his side and not for himself. he does not always learn it; the cricketer who plays for his average, the three-quarters who tries to score himself, are not unknown, though boyish opinion rightly condemns them. popular school ethics are thoroughly sound on this point, and it is the virtue of inter-school and inter-house competitions, that in them a boy learns what it is to forget self and to think of a cause. there is a society outside himself which has its claim upon him, whose victory is his victory, whose defeat is his defeat. whether victory comes through him or through another, is nothing so long as victory be won; later in life men may play games for their health's sake or for enjoyment, but they lose that thrill of intense patriotism, the more intense because of the smallness of the society that arouses it, with which they battled in the mud of some november day for the honour of their school or house. small wonder that when school-fellows meet after years of separation, the memories to which they most gladly return, are the memories of hard-won victories and manfully contested defeats. but victory must be won by fair means. there is a story (possibly without historical foundation) that a foreign visitor to oxford said that the thing that struck him most in that great university was the fact that there were men there who would rather lose a game than win it by unfair means. it would be absurd to pretend that that spirit is universal: the commercial organisation of professional football and the development of betting have gone a long way to degrade a noble sport. but the standard of fair play in school games is high, and it is the encouragement of this spirit by cricket and football that renders them so valuable an aid in the activities of boys' clubs in artisan districts. it has been argued that the prevalence of this generous temper among our troops has been a real handicap in war; that we have too much regarded hostilities as a game in which there were certain rules to be observed, and that when we found ourselves matched against a foe whose object was to win by any means, fair or foul, the soldiers who were fettered by the scruples of honour were necessarily inferior to their unscrupulous foe. it has perhaps yet to be proved that in the long run the unchivalrous fighter always wins, and i doubt whether any of us would really prefer that even in war we should set aside the scruples of fair play. but in the arts and pursuits of peace that man is best equipped to play a noble part who realises that there are rules in the great game of life which an honourable man will respect, that there are advantages which he must not take. how often does some rather inarticulate hero, who has refused some tempting prospect or spurned some specious offer, explain his act of self-denial by the simple phrase of his boyhood, "i thought it wasn't quite playing the game." schoolboy honour is not always a faultless thing; sometimes it means the hiding of real iniquity. but the honour of the playing field is a generous code, and to have learnt its rules is to have learnt the best that the public opinion of a boy community can teach. the chairman of a great engineering firm recently told the incorporated association of headmasters, that when he went to oxford to get recruits for his firm, he did not look for men who had got a first in greats, but for men who would have got a first, if they had worked. for these men had probably given a good deal of their time to rowing or games and had thereby learnt something of the art of dealing with men. the student who sticks to his books learns many lessons, but not this. to be captain of a house or of a school, and to do it well is to practise the art of governing on a small scale. a sore temptation to the schoolmaster is to interfere too much in school games. he sees obvious mistakes being made, wrong tactics being adopted, the wrong sides chosen, and he longs to interfere. he is anxious for victories, and forgets that after all victories are a very secondary business, that games are only a means, not an end, that if he does not let the boys really govern and make their mistakes, the game is failing to provide the training that it ought to give. it is undoubted that schools which are carefully coached by competent players, where the responsibility is largely taken out of the captain's hands, are more likely to win their matches. but much is lost, though the game may be won. the strong captain who goes his own way, chooses his own side, frames his own tactics and inspires the whole team with his own spirit, has had a practical training in the management of men which will stand him in good stead in the greater affairs of life. "we are not very well satisfied" said a war office official, "with the stamp of young officer we are getting. many of them never seem to have played a game in their lives, though they are first-rate mathematicians." and there is no doubt that whether for war or peace mathematics is not a substitute for leadership. courage, endurance, self-control, public spirit, fair play, leadership, these are the virtues which we find may be encouraged by the practice of games at school. it is not a complete list of the christian virtues, perhaps rather we might call them pagan virtues, but it is a fine list for all that. and the best of it is that they are as it were unconsciously learnt, acquired by practice, not by inculcation. the boy who follows virtue for its own sake would be, i fear, a sad prig, but the boy who follows a football for the sake of his house, may develop virtue and enjoy the process. but what are we to put on the other side of the account? if it be true that athletics is a fine school for character, what is the ground for the frequent complaint that the public schools make a "fetish" of athleticism? what precisely is the complaint? it is this, that boys regard, and are encouraged to regard their games as the most important side of their school life, that their interest in them is so overpowering that they have no interest left for the development of the intellect or the acquisition of knowledge, that prominent athletes, not brilliant scholars, are the heroes of a boy community, and that in consequence many men of the better nourished classes, after they have left school, look upon their amusements as the main business of life, give to them the industry and concentration which should be bestowed upon science, letters or industry, and swell the ranks of the amiable and incompetent amateur. it is argued that schools are converted into pleasant athletic clubs, and that boys, instead of learning there to work, merely learn to play. now this is a serious indictment; it is a good thing to learn to play, but it is not the only thing a school should teach. riding, shooting and speaking the truth may have been an adequate curriculum for an ancient persian, but it would not provide a sufficient equipment to enable a man to face the stress of modern competition, or to understand the developments of the science and industry of to-day. is too much time given to the playing of games? in winter time i should say no. i suppose that if we include teaching hours and preparation, a boy spends some six hours a day on his intellectual work, or if you prefer, he is supposed to spend that time. a game of football two or three times a week, does not last more than an hour and a quarter; if you add a liberal allowance for changing and baths, two hours is the whole time occupied. a game of fives or a physical drill class need not demand more than an hour. the game that really wastes time--and i am sorry to admit it--is cricket. i am not thinking so much of the long waits in the pavilion when two batsmen on a side are well set, and the rest have nothing to do but to applaud. i see no way out of that difficulty, so long as wickets are prepared as they are now by artistic groundsmen. i am thinking rather of the excessive practice at nets. an enthusiastic house captain is apt to believe that by assiduous practice the most unlikely and awkward recruit can be converted into a useful batsman, and the result is that he will drive all his house day after day to the nets, until they begin to loathe the sight of a cricket ball. we should recognise that cricket is a game for the few; the majority of boys can never make good cricketers. and happy are those schools which are near a river and can provide an alternative exercise in the summer, which does not require exceptional quickness of eye and wrist and does provide a splendid discipline of body and spirit. in the summer it is well to exempt all boys from cricket, who have really a taste for natural history or photography. summer half-holidays are emphatically the time for hobbies, and it is a serious charge against our games if they are organised to such a pitch that hobbies are practically prohibited. the zealous captain will object that such "slacking" is destroying the spirit of the house. we must endeavour to point out to him that the unwilling player never makes a good player, and that such a boy may be finding his proper development in the pursuit of butterflies, a development which he would never gain by unsuccessful and involuntary cricket. house masters too are apt to complain that freedom for hobbies is subversive of discipline, and to quote the old adage about satan and idle hands. that there is risk, is not to be denied. but you cannot run a school without taking risks. our whole system of leaving the government largely in the hands of boys is full of risks. sometimes it brings shipwreck; more often it does not. for in the majority of cases the policy of confidence is justified by results. there is one way of wasting time that is heartily to be condemned, the waste involved in looking on. i am inclined to think that if all athletic contests took place without a ring of spectators, we should get all the good of games and very little of the evil. certainly professional football would lose its blacker sides if there were no gate money and no betting. few men or boys are the worse for playing games; it is the applause of the mob that turns their heads. but i am afraid i am not logical enough to say that i would forbid boys to watch matches against another school; the emotions that lead to the "breathless hush in the close" are so compounded of patriotism and jealousy for the honour of the school, that they are far from ignoble. but i would not have boys compelled to watch the games against clubs and other non-school teams. above all, if they watch, they must have a run or a game to stir their own blood. the half-holiday must not be spent in shivering on a touchline and then crowding round a fire. that the athlete is a school hero and the scholar is not, is most certainly true. the scholar may once in a way reflect glory on the school by success in an examination, but generally he is regarded as a self-regarding person, who is not likely to help to win the matches of the year. but the hero-worship is not undiscriminating; conceit, selfishness, surliness will go far to nullify the influence of physical strength and skill. boys' admiration for physical prowess is natural and not unhealthy. the harm is done by the advertisement given to such prowess by foolish elders. foremost among such unwise influences i should put the press. even modest boys may begin to think their achievements in the field are of public importance when they find their names in print. some papers publish portraits of prominent players, or a series of articles on "football at x--" or "the prospects of the cricket season at y--". the suggestion that there is a public which is interested in the features of a schoolboy captain, or wishes to know the methods of training and coaching which have led to the success of a school fifteen, is likely to give boys an entirely exaggerated notion of their own importance and to justify in their minds the dedication of a great deal of time to the successes which receive this kind of public recognition. next there is the parent. our ever active critics are apt to forget that schools are to a large extent mirrors, reflecting the tone and opinion of the homes from which boys come. the parent who says when the boy joins the school, "i do not mind whether he gets in the sixth, but i want to see him in the eleven," is by no means an uncommon parent. i have no objection to his wanting to see his boy in the eleven, the deplorable thing is that he is indifferent to intellectual progress. i have heard an elder brother say, "tom has not got into his house eleven yet, but he brought home a prize last term. i have written to tell him he must change all that, we can't have him disgracing the family." when a candidate has failed to qualify for admission to the school at the entrance examination, i have had letters of surprised and pained protest, pointing out that jack is an exceptionally promising cricketer. it is assumed that we should be only too glad to welcome the athlete without regard to his standard of work. if we could get the majority of parents to recognise the schoolmaster's point of view, that while games are an important element of education, they are only one element, and that there are others which must not be neglected, we should have made a real step forward towards the elimination of the excessive reverence paid to the athlete. after the press and the parent comes millinery. perhaps it is utopian to suggest that "caps" can be entirely abolished; but the enterprise of haberdashers and the weakness of school authorities have led to a multiplication of blazers, ribbons, caps, jerseys, stockings, badges, scarves and the like, which certainly tend to mark off the successful player from his fellows, and to make him a cynosure of the vulgar and an object of complacent admiration to himself. success in games should be its own reward. in some cases it certainly is. and the paradox is that very often it is those who are least bountifully endowed by nature who profit most. some there are who have such natural gifts of strength and dexterity, that from the first they can excel at any game. triumphs come to them without hard struggle, and they breathe the incense of applause. but others have a clumsier hand, a slower foot, and yet they have a determination to excel, a resolution in sticking to their task that brings them at the last to a fair measure of skill. such a boy is already rewarded by the toughening of the will that perseverance brings: he does not need a ribbon on his sweater. to give the other, the natural athlete, a coloured scarf, is to run the risk of making him over-value the gifts he owes to nature. there is no reason why a boy who excels in games should not excel in work. the two are not competing sides of education, they are complementary. the schoolmaster's ideal is that his boys should gain the advantages of both. the athlete who neglects his work, grows up with a poorly furnished mind and an untrained judgment. the student who neglects his games, grows up without the nervous development that fits his body to be the instrument of his will, and without the knowledge of men and the habit of dealing with men which are indispensable in many callings. it has been proved again and again that it is possible to get the advantages of both these sides of school life. there is no reason why the playing of school games should be anything but a help to the intellectual development of a boy. but the constant talking about games is by no means harmless, though it is true boys might be talking of worse things. it is related that a french educational critic was once descanting to an english head master on the monotony of the conversation of english public school boys: "they talk of nothing but football." but when he was asked, "and of what do french school boys generally talk?" he was silent. but if "cricket shop" saves us from worse topics, it certainly is destructive of rational conversation on subjects of more general interest. in great boarding schools we collect a population of boys under quite abnormal conditions, cut off for the greater part of their social life from intercourse with older people. it is, i think, a general experience that boys who have been at day schools and are the sons of intelligent parents, have their minds more awakened to the questions of the day in politics, or art, or literature than boys of equal ability who have been at a boarding school. they have had the advantage of hearing their father and his friends discussing topics which are outside the range of school life. boarding schools are often built in some country place away from the surging life of towns, where the noise of political strife and the roar of the traffic of the world are but dimly heard. in such seclusion the life of the school, particularly the active life of the playing fields, occupies the focus of a boy's consciousness. the geographical conditions tend to narrow the range of his interests, and he remains a boy when others are growing to be men. those who have the wider tastes, are deterred from talking about them by the ever present fear of "side." they will talk freely to a master of architecture or music or japanese prints, but they are chary of betraying these enthusiasms to their fellows. and masters are not free from blame: i suppose we all of us sometimes bow down in the house of rimmon, and when the conversation languishes at the tea-table, fall back on a discussion of the last house match. it is the line of least resistance, and after a strenuous day's work it is not easy to maintain a monologue about home rule. not the least of the boons of the war is that it has ousted games from the foremost place as a topic of conversation. i have not noticed that they are less keenly played, although the increase of military work has diminished the time given to them; but they have ceased to monopolise the thoughts of boys. the problem then of reducing the absorption in games is the problem of finding and providing other absorbing interests. we cannot, fortunately, always have the counter-irritant of war. where we fail now, is that the intellectual training of a boy does not interest him enough in most cases to give him subjects of conversation out of school. we give some few new interests by means of societies, literary, antiquarian or scientific. but the main problem is to make every boy see that the work he does in school is connected with his life, that it is meant to open to him the shut doors around him through which he may go out into all the highways and byways of the world. do school games produce the man who regards games as the main business of life? we must emphasise "main." it is certain that they do encourage englishmen to devote some part of their working life to healthy exercise--and few, i suppose, would wish them to do otherwise. the indian civilian does not make a worse judge for playing polo, nor is benin worse administered since golf-links were laid out there. but there are men who never outgrow the boyish narrowness of view that games are the things that matter most. these remain the ruling passion, because no stronger passion comes to drive it out. for this the schools must bear part of the blame, for they have not taught clearly enough that athletics are a means but not an end. not all the blame, for surely some must rest on a society which tolerates the idler, and has no reproach for the man who says "i live only for hunting and golf." and here as elsewhere, i believe we are judged more by a few failures than by many successes. we can all of us in our experience recall many an honest athlete who is now doing splendid service to church or state, doughty curates, self-sacrificing doctors, soldiers who are real leaders of men. when they became men they put away childish things, but they have not forgotten what they owe to the discipline of their boyish games. games are not the first thing in life for them now, but they have no doubt that they can do their work better from an occasional afternoon's play. they see things in their right proportion, because they know that the first thing is to have a job and do it well. if we can teach boys to begin to understand that truth while they are at school, we shall have exorcised the bogey of athleticism. i should expect to find (though i do not know) that the authorities at osborne and dartmouth do not need to bother their minds about that bogey. their boys play games with all a sailor's heartiness, but their ambition is not to be a first-class athlete, but to be a first-class sailor, and the games take their proper place. it may be desirable to reduce the time devoted to games, though as i have said i doubt if there is any need to do so, except for cricket. it may be that we should give more time to handicraft, or military drill. but these things will not change the spirit. what we need to do is to make clearer the object of education in which athletics form a part, that there may be more sense of reality in the boy's school time, more understanding that he is at school to fit himself manfully and capably to play his part on the wider stage of life. [footnote : c.w. saleeby, _parenthood and race culture_, pp. , .] ix the use of leisure by j. h. badley head master of bedales school to teach a sensible use of leisure, healthy both for mind and body, is by no means the least important part of education. nor is it by any means the least pressing, or the least difficult, of school problems. "loafing" at times that have no recognised duties assigned them, is generally a sign of slackness in work and play as well; and if we do not find occupation for thoughts and hands, the rhyme tells us who will. the devils of cruelty and uncleanness will be ready to enter the empty house, and fill it at least with unwholesome talk, and thoughtless if not ill-natured "ragging." yet work and games, whatever keenness we arouse and encourage in these, cannot fill a boy's whole time and thoughts--or, if they do, his life, whether he is student or athlete, or even the occasional combination of both, is still a narrow one and likely to get narrower as years go by. if life to the uneducated means a soulless round of labour varied by the public-house and the "pictures," so to the half-educated it is apt, except in war time, to mean the office and the club, with interests that do not go beyond golf and motoring and bridge. if our lives are emptier and our interests narrower than they need be, it is partly the result of a narrow and unsatisfying education, which leaves half our powers undeveloped and interests untouched, and too often only succeeds in giving us a distaste for those which it touches. both for the sake of the present, therefore, to avoid the dangers of unfilled leisure, and still more for the sake of the future, the wise schoolmaster does all he can to foster, in addition to keenness in the regular work and games, interests, both individual and social, of other kinds as well. he will make opportunities for various handicrafts: he will try to stimulate lines of investigation not arranged for in the class-routine; he will encourage the formation of societies both for discussion and active pursuits, for instruction and entertainment. it is the purpose of this essay to suggest what, along these lines, is possible in the school. but the reasons so far given for the encouragement of leisure-time interests are mainly negative. in order to realise to the full the importance of this side of education, we must look rather at their positive value. from whichever point of view one looks at it, physical, intellectual, or social, this value is not small. some of these interests contribute directly to health in being outdoor pursuits; and these, in not letting games furnish the only motive and means of exercise, can help to establish habits and motives of no little help in later life, when games are no longer easy to keep up. and even in the years when the call of games is strongest, some rivalry of other outdoor pursuits is useful as a preventive of absorption in athleticism, easily carried to excess at school so as to shut out finer interests and influences. it was a consciousness of this that led captain scott, in the letter written in those last hours among the antarctic snows, thinking of his boy at home, and the education that he wished for him, to write: "make the boy interested in natural history, if you can; it is better than games: they encourage it in some schools." besides health--and health, we must remember, is not only a bodily matter, but depends on mental as well as bodily activity, and on the enjoyment of the activity that comes from its being mainly voluntary--the pursuits that we are considering can do much to train skill of various kinds. the class-work represents the minimum that we expect a boy to know; but there is much that necessarily lies outside it of hardly less value. many a boy learns as much from the hobby on which he spends his free time as from the work he does in class. sometimes, indeed, such a free-time hobby reveals the bent that might otherwise have gone undiscovered, and determines the choice of a special line of work for the future career. but the chief value of such interests lies rather in their influence on other work, and on the general development of character. in giving scope for many kinds of skill, they are helping the intellectual training; and however ready we may be to pay lip-service to the principle of learning by doing, and to admit the educational importance of the hand in brain-development, in most of our school work we still ignore these things, so far as any practical application of them is concerned. one is sometimes tempted to wonder if in the future there may not be so complete a reaction from our present ideas and methods as to make what are now regarded as mere hobbies the main matter of education, and to relegate much of the present school course, as the writing of verses has already been relegated, to the category of optional side-shows. at any rate these free-time interests can supply a very useful stimulus to much of the routine work. in these a boy may find himself for the first time, and discover, despite his experience in class, that he is no fool. or at least he may find there a centre of interest, otherwise lacking, round which other interests can group, and to which knowledge obtained in various class-subjects can attach itself, and so get for him a meaning and a use. and further, if we do not make the mistake of narrowing the range of choice, and allow, at any rate at first, a succession of interests, the very range and variety of these pursuits is an antidote against the tendency to early specialisation, encouraged by scholarship and entrance examinations, which is one of the dangers against which we need to be on our guard. if, therefore, without mere dissipation of interest, we can widen the range of mental activities and encourage, by discussions, essays, lectures and so forth, reading round and outside the subjects dealt with in class, this is all to the good. and all this has a social as well as an individual aspect. the meetings for the purposes just mentioned, as well as those for entertainment, have, like games, a real educational value, and do much to cement the comradeship of common interests and common aims that is one of the best things school has to give. and not only among those of the same age. these are things in which the example and influence of the older are particularly helpful to the younger. they can become, like the games, and perhaps to an even greater extent, one of the interests that help to bind together past and present members of a school. and they afford an opportunity for masters to meet boys on a more personal and friendly footing, and to get the mutual knowledge and respect which are all-important if education is to be, in thring's definition, a transmission of life through the living to the living. that the organisation of leisure-time pursuits is of the utmost help to the school as well as to the boy, is the unanimous verdict of the schools in which it has long been a tradition. the master who has had charge, for the past five-and-twenty years, of this organisation in one such school writes that there they consider such pursuits as the very life-blood of the school, and the only rational method of maintaining discipline. if what has here been said is admitted, it is plain that to teach, by every means in our power, the use of leisure, is one of the most important things a school has to do. we might, therefore, turn at once to the consideration of the various means for such teaching that experience has shown to be practicable in the school. but before doing so, there is yet another reason, the most far-reaching of all, to be urged for regarding this as a side of education fully as necessary, at the present time above all, as those sides that none would question. great as is the direct and immediate value of the interests and occupations thus to be encouraged, their indirect influence is more valuable still, if they teach not only handiness and adaptiveness, but also call forth initiative and individuality, and so help to develop the complete and many-sided human personality which is the crown and purpose of education as of life. we do not now think of education as merely book-learning, nor even as concerned only with mind and body, or only as fitting preparation for skilled work and cultured leisure; but rather as the development of the whole human being, with all his possibilities, interests, and motives, as well as powers, his feelings and imagination no less than reason and will. in a word, education is training for life, with all that this connotes, and, as we learn to live only by living, must be thought of not merely as preparation for life, but as a life itself. plainly, if we give it a meaning as wide as this, a great part of education lies outside the school, in the influences of the home surroundings and, after school, of occupation and the whole social environment. but during the school years--and they are the most impressionable of all--it is the school life that is for most the chief formative influence; and now more necessarily so than ever. when, a few generations back, life was still, in the main, life in the country, and most things were still made at home or in the village, the most important part of education lay, except for a few, outside the school. now it is the other way. town life, the replacing of home-made by factory-made goods, the disappearance of the best part of home life before the demands of industry on the one side and the growth of luxury on the other--these things are signs of a tendency that has swept away most of the practical home-education, and thrown it all upon the school. and the schools have even yet hardly realised the full meaning of this change. instead of having to provide only a part of education--the specially intellectual and, in the public schools at least, the physical side--we have now to think of the whole nature of the growing boy or girl, and, by the environment and the occupations we provide, to appeal to interests and motives, and give occasion for the right use of powers, that may otherwise be undeveloped or misused. a school cannot now consist merely of class-rooms and playing fields. this is recognised by the addition of laboratories and workshops, gymnasium, swimming-bath, lecture-hall, museum, art-school, music-rooms--all now essentials of a day school as much as of a boarding school. but many of these things are still only partially made use of, and are apt to be regarded rather as ornamental excrescences, to be used by the few who have a special bent that way, at an extra charge, than as an integral part of education for all. all the interests and means of training that they represent, and others as well, need to be brought more into the daily routine; to some extent in place of the too exclusively literary, or at least bookish, training, that has hitherto been the staple of education, but more, perhaps, since it is not possible to include in the regular curriculum _all_ that is of value, as optional subjects and free-time occupations, though organised as part of the school course. for it is not only the few who already know their bent who need opportunity to be made for following it, but rather those who will not discover their powers without practice, or their interests without suggestion or encouragement. in this respect the war has brought opportunities of no little value to the school, not only in the absorbing interest in the war itself and the desire for knowledge and readiness for effort that it awakens, but also in the demands it has made for practical work of many kinds that boys and girls can do, and the lessons of service that it has taught. work on the land and in the shops, for those whose school time is already too short, is a curtailment, only to be made as a last resort, of the kind of learning they will have no other opportunity to acquire; but it gives to the public schoolboy the feeling of reality that most of his school work lacks. such opportunities of doing what is seen to be productive and necessary work, are, like the making of things for those at the front, and for the wounded, both in themselves and in the motives that inspire them, a valuable part of education that should not be forgotten when the present need for them is over. if, then, by the fullest use of leisure occupations, we are, like canning, to call in a new world to redress the balance of the old, what, in actual practice, is possible in the school? for an answer to this question one has only to see what is done in the schools of the society of friends, in which the use of leisure in these ways has always been a strongly marked feature long before it was taken up by others, with a tradition, indeed, in the older schools, of sixty or a hundred years of accumulated experience behind it. instead of singling out, for description of the use it makes of leisure, any one school in which it might be supposed that there were special conditions present, it will be best to enumerate the various activities that have long been practised in several different schools. of those selected for the purpose not all are connected with the society of friends; some are for boys and some for girls only, and some co-educational; but alike in being boarding schools, and in keeping their boys and girls from an early age until, at the end of their school life, they go on to the university or to their business or professional training. a few of the pursuits to be mentioned are obviously more appropriate for boys, others for girls; but the differences between those that are followed in schools for boys and those for girls are surprisingly small, and to give separate lists would only involve much needless repetition. for the sake of clearness, it may be well to group the various activities according as they are mainly outdoor or indoor occupations. in the outdoor group, games and sports need not be included, as being, in most cases, as much a part of the ordinary school course as the class-work. they only become free-time pursuits, in the sense here intended, in so far as practice for them is optional, and a large amount of free time spent upon it. thus, for example, while swimming is, or should be, compulsory for all, and a regular time found for it in the school time-table, it is entirely a voluntary matter to go in, as in many schools a large number do, for the tests of the royal humane society. apart from games, the outdoor pursuit that occupies the largest place is probably, in most of these schools, some branch of natural history (which may perhaps be held to include geology as well as the study of plant and animal life)--not so much by the making of collections, though this usually serves as a beginning, as by the keeping of diaries, notes of observations illustrated by drawings and photographs, and experimental work, in connection, perhaps, with work done in science classes. similarly in the study of archaeology, visits to places of interest--there are always many old churches within reach, if not other buildings of equal interest--give matter for written notes as well as for drawings and photographs; and in at least one case, the fact that the neighbourhood is rich in roman remains has given opportunity, under the guidance of a keen classical archaeologist, for the laying bare of more than one roman villa, and for making interesting additions to the school museum. besides their use in the service of other pursuits, sketching and photography also have many votaries for their own sake, though the former is usually more dependent on encouragement from above. then there is gardening. the tenure of a plot of ground is a joy to many children; and in the opinion of the writer, some experience, and some experimental work, in the growing of the most necessary food plants, as well as flowers, should form part of the education of all at a certain stage, whether in school time or in free time. for some, where the conditions are favourable, this can be extended to the care of fruit-trees, bees, poultry, and to some kinds of farm-work. the needs of war-time have brought something of this into many schools, to the real gain of education, now and later, if it can be retained, at least as a possibility of choice. so also with the care of the playing fields: the more that the work needed for a game is thrown upon the players themselves, the more does it contribute to education. and so too with constructive work of any kind that, with some help of suggestion or direction, is within the compass even of comparatively unskilled labour. a lengthy list could be given of things accomplished in this way, with an educational value all the greater for their practical purpose, from ruskin's famous road down to the last field levelled and pavilion built or shed put up, by voluntary effort and in time found by the workers without encroaching on regular school work. and lastly, an outdoor occupation for free time which, in the earlier days of school life, we shall do well to encourage--both for its own value and the manifold interests that it encourages and lessons that it teaches, and also for its bearing on questions of national service that will remain to be answered after the war--is the wide range of activities comprised in scouting, undoubtedly one of the chief educational advances of our time. whatever differences of views there may be on the wider questions of military service for national defence, and of making military training a specific part of education, few can deny that, with a view to national service of _some_ kind, the use made by sir robert baden-powell of instincts natural to all at a particular stage of growth, by an organisation which can be kept entirely free from the failings of militarism, is a development of the utmost educational, as well as national, value. if a school already develops, by other means, all the activities trained by scouting, and utilises in other ways the instincts and motives to which it makes appeal, there may be little or nothing to be gained by its adoption. but of how many schools can this be said? for the rest it undoubtedly offers a way of doing, at the stage of growth for which it is best fitted, much of what, if there is any truth in what has been urged above, is, from the point of view of individual development, of greater importance now than ever before. if, in addition to this, it will go far to solve the problem of national service, and to remove the need for conscription in the continental form, there is every reason to give it a prominent place in the activities encouraged, if not insisted upon, at school. let us now turn to the group of indoor pursuits, which, if they have not quite so direct a bearing upon health, are in another way even more important; for a large part of leisure, even at school and still more, in all probability, afterwards, falls at times and under conditions that make some indoor occupation necessary, and the waste or misuse of these times is likely to be greater. in this group certain things need be no more than mentioned, as either applying, at any given time, only to a few picked individuals, or else likely, in the majority of schools, to be made a regular part of the school routine; such as, of the one kind, the editing of the school magazine, or membership of the school fire-brigade with the frequent practices that this involves; or, of the other kind, special gymnastics (including such things as boxing and fencing), or lectures and concerts and other entertainments given to the school, as distinguished from those given by members of it, the preparation for which gives occupation beforehand to much of their leisure. of the free-time pursuits more properly so called, in which many can share, the commonest are probably the various school societies. most schools have one or more debating societies, with meetings at regular intervals throughout the winter terms, for the discussion of questions of general or special interest; the difficulty being more often to find a subject than speakers. many also have essay or literary societies, for reading papers and discussing the books and writers treated of, which involve a considerable amount of previous reading. besides these most schools now have similar societies, in addition to those for carrying out the field-work already mentioned, for holding lectures and discussions on various branches of science. some also have a musical society for gaining fuller acquaintance with the works of the chief composers; and a dramatic society for reading and acting plays as occasion allows. allied with these interests is voluntary laboratory work in some branch of science, both by individuals and groups, which may not unfairly be dignified with the name of research, even if it is only the re-discovery of what has been worked out by others. in some schools special provision is made for encouraging optional work of this kind in astronomy; in others it may be wireless telegraphy, or the use of vegetable dyes, and so forth. in some of this work even the younger can take part; and of the many reasons for its encouragement not the least is the wide field it opens to individual initiative. besides all these more specially intellectual interests, and of still wider appeal, various kinds of handicrafts afford abundant occupation, some for the longer and some also for the shorter periods of leisure. wood-work, carving, work in metal or leather, pottery, basket-plaiting, bookbinding, needlework and embroidery, knitting, netting hammocks and so forth--the only limit to the number of such crafts is the limit to the knowledge and energy of those who can start and direct them, and to the space available, as some can only be carried on in rooms reserved for such work. so, too, with various kinds of art-work--drawing, modelling, lettering, making posters for entertainments; or music, both individual and concerted, orchestra practice, part-singing, glee-clubs and so on; or morrice and other folk-dances, now happily being widely revived. and lastly there are indoor games, some of which, like chess (cards are probably best confined to the sanatorium), have a high training value, and others afford a useful occasional outlet to high spirits; and entertainments got up by some society, or perhaps by a single form, for the rest of the "house" or school, such as a concert or play or even an occasional fancy-dress dance, the preparation for which will happily occupy free time for as long beforehand as is allowed, and does much to encourage ingenuity, especially if strict conditions are imposed that all that is required must be made for the purpose and not bought. but by this time many questions will have arisen in the mind of the reader, especially if much of what has been enumerated lies outside his school experience; questions that demand an immediate answer. even if all this free-time work and play may have a certain value, how can time be found for it without encroaching on the regular work and games which, after all, must be the main concern of the school? and even supposing that time could be found for both, will not all this voluntary activity and pleasure-work absorb the interests and energies that ought to be given to the more serious, if less attractive, studies? and again, how can all this wide range of activity be controlled? who is going to teach, or look after, all these things? how are they to be kept going? are they, or any of them, to be compulsory, or is a boy or girl to be allowed to do anything or nothing, or to flit, butterfly-fashion, from one to another, learning nothing except to fritter away energy in endless mental dissipation? only a brief answer can be attempted to these questions. it might indeed be given in the answer to the old puzzle, _solvitur ambulando_; for, given a clear aim and common sense, most difficulties in education disappear as one goes on. it is, in fact, a question of educational values; that settled, matters of detail soon settle themselves. from what has been said above, it will be plain that the writer is one of those who think these voluntary free-time activities of such value that they are willing, in order to make room for them, to jettison some of the traditions that have gathered about school work and games. let the morning hours be reserved for the severer kinds of class work, but let the afternoons be mainly given to active pursuits of other kinds as well as games; and on one of them at least let expeditions in pursuit of the outdoor interests above outlined be an alternative to the games chosen by the keen players, or compulsory for those without an equivalent hobby. then, too, in the evenings let preparation be varied with handicrafts (the result will be an intellectual gain rather than loss), and time be reserved for the meetings of societies or for entertainments. it may be well to say here that while every one of the things above mentioned is an actual fact in some school, in none, probably, are all attempted at once, nor, of course, do any of their members take up many of these pursuits at the same time; but it is surprising how much can be done by treating a part of some afternoons and evenings in the week as leisure time for these pursuits. when this is done, there is usually a particular member of the staff whose task it is, either permanently or in rotation, to see what is being done, to give suggestions and encouragement to beginners, and to see, if necessary, that freedom does not mean disorder. naturally, in the case of handicrafts, others also take part as actual teachers or at least as fellow-workers; but though it is generally helpful for members of the staff to join in all such work and in discussions, the aim of it all is likely to be more fully attained if as much as possible of the organisation and direction is left to members of the school. so, too, with the question of compulsion. not all have so strong a bent as to know what they want to do, and sometimes interests come only by actual experience. it is well, therefore, to have an understanding that, at certain times, all must follow some one of the possible occupations; but the more it can be left to the individual choice, and the wider the range of choice, the better for the purpose we have in view. not all country rambles need have a definite object, nor all time be actively filled that might be left for reading. but without a definite object few will make a habit of walking, or learn to know and love the country; and not all, especially where there is a multiplicity of other interests, will form the habit of reading unless regular times are set apart for it, times when books must be read and not merely magazines. how far freedom of change from one occupation to another is desirable is largely an individual question. the younger need to try many things before they can settle down to one, in order to discover their real interests and to exercise their faculties. but it is well to have a strict limit to the number of things that may be taken up at once, and a fixed length of time to be given to each before it may be replaced by another. with the older, this, as a rule, settles itself, on the one hand by growing interest in one or two directions, and on the other by the increasing demands of the school work and approaching examinations. it is the younger, therefore, who need most encouragement. in schools where, as said above, there is a long tradition of such free-time work, there is the less need for anything beyond suggestions and general supervision. yet even in these it is found helpful to have, at the beginning of the year, talks upon the subject by some member of the staff, or an old boy perhaps who has devoted himself to some particular branch, in order to explain what can be done and the standard to be maintained. in several of them prizes are offered every year, either by the school or by the old scholars' association or by individual old scholars, for good work in many of the categories mentioned above; these in some schools being the only prizes given. in some cases they are money prizes, as in certain kinds of work the tools or materials used are costly; in others the prizes are not given to individuals, but in the form of a "trophy" to the form or "house" that shows up the best record for the term or year; in others, again, the need of prizes is not felt, but interest and keenness to maintain a good standard are kept up by the public show, held each year, of work done in leisure time. and, it may be added, a great stimulus in itself is the wider freedom that can be earned by those who follow certain branches of study, in the way, for instance, of expeditions, on foot or by bicycle, to places where they can be pursued. but with all this there is, of course, the danger that so much energy may be absorbed in these pursuits that little is left for the ordinary school work. in some few cases, where there is a strong natural bent and the free-time pursuit is a serious object of study, this may be a thing not to be discouraged, as it will provide the truest means of education. but in most cases care is needed to see that the due proportion is kept, and especially that mere amusement is not allowed to occupy the whole of leisure, still less to distract thought and effort from serious work. by making entertainments, which might, if too frequent or too elaborate, have this effect, dependent on the school work being well done, this danger can be minimised. for the rest, if free-time work is found to take the first place in a boy's thoughts, may not this be a sign that the ordinary curriculum and methods of teaching are capable of improvement, and that more use of these natural interests may with advantage be made in class time as well? not that work of any kind can be all pleasure or always outwardly interesting; there is plenty of hard spade-work needed in any study seriously followed, in class or out. but if in education keenness is the first essential and personality the final aim, interest and freedom must have a larger place than is usually allowed them in the class-room if the real education is not to centre in the self-chosen and self-directed pursuits of leisure. one word more. it must not be supposed that all that has been described is only possible, or only needed, in the boarding school or only for a specially leisured class. if, as has here been urged, these activities and interests form an integral part of education in its fullest meaning, they are just as necessary in the day school and cannot be left to chance and the home to see to. and of all the needed reforms in elementary education, amongst the most needed is the greater utilisation of the active interests and instincts of children, in a training that would have a wider outlook and a closer bearing, through practical experience, both on the work of life and the use of leisure. x preparation for practical life by sir j. d. mcclure head master of mill hill school i it is, perhaps, the chief glory of the ideal commonwealth that each and every member thereof is found in his right place. his profession is also his vocation; in it is his pride; through it he attains to the _joie de vivre_; by it he makes his contribution to the happiness of his fellows and to the welfare and progress of the state. the contemplation of the ideal, however, would seem to be nature's anodyne for experience of the actual. in practical life, all attempts, however earnest and continuous, to realise this ideal are frustrated by one or more of many difficulties; and though the millennium follows hard upon armageddon, we cannot assume that in the period vaguely known as "after the war" these difficulties will be fewer in number or less in magnitude. some of the more obvious may be briefly considered. in theory, every child is "good for something"; in practice, all efforts to discover for what some children are good prove unavailing. the napkin may be shaken never so vigorously, but the talent remains hidden. in every school there are many honest fellows who seem to have no decided bent in any direction, and who would probably do equally well, or equally badly, in any one of half-a-dozen different employments. some of these boys are steady, reliable, not unduly averse from labour, willing--even anxious--to be guided and to carry out instructions, yet are quite unable to manifest a preference for any one kind of work. others, again, show real enthusiasm for a business or profession, but do not possess those qualities which are essential to success therein; yet they are allowed to follow their supposed bent, and spend the priceless years of adolescence in the achievement of costly failure. many a promising mechanic has been spoiled by the ill-considered attempts to make a passable engineer; and the annals of every profession abound in parallel instances of misdirected zeal. in saying this, however, one would not wish to undervalue enthusiasm, nor to deny that it sometimes reveals or develops latent and unsuspected talents. the life-work of many is determined largely, if not entirely, by what may be termed family considerations. there is room for a boy in the business of his father or some other relative. the fitness of the boy for the particular employment is not, as a rule, seriously considered; it is held, perhaps, to be sufficiently proved by the fact that he is his father's son. he is more likely to be called upon to recognise the special dispensations of a beneficent providence on his behalf. it is natural that a man should wish the fruits of his labour to benefit his family in the first instance, at any rate; and the desire to set his children well on the road of life's journey seems entirely laudable. it is easy to hold what others have won, to build on foundations which others have laid, and to do this with all their experience and goodwill to aid him. hence when the father retires he has the solid satisfaction of knowing that resigned unto the heavenly will, his son keeps on the business still. it cannot be denied that this policy is often successful; but it is equally undeniable that it is directly responsible for the presence of many incompetent men in positions which none but the most competent should occupy. there are many long-established firms hastening to decay because even they are not strong enough to withstand the disastrous consequences of successive infusions of new (and young) blood. many, too, are deterred from undertaking congenial work by reason of the inadequate income to be derived therefrom, and the unsatisfactory prospects which it presents. let it suffice to mention the teaching profession, which fails to attract in any considerable numbers the right kind of men and women. a large proportion of its members did not become teachers from deliberate choice, but, having failed in their attempt to secure other employment, were forced to betake themselves to the ever-open portals of the great refuge for the destitute, and become teachers (or, at least, become classified as such). true there are a few "prizes" in the profession, and to some of the _rude donati_ the church holds out a helping hand; but the lay members cannot look forward even to the "congenial gloom of a colonial bishopric." others, again, are attracted to employments (for which they may have no special aptitude) by the large salaries or profits which are to be earned therein, often with but little trouble or previous training--or so, at least, they believe. the idea of vocation is quite obscured, and a man's occupation is in effect the shortest distance from poverty which he cannot endure, to wealth and leisure which he may not know how to use. it frequently happens, too, that a young man is unable to afford either the time or the expense necessary to qualify for the profession which he desires to enter, and for which he is well adapted by his talents and temperament. not a few prefer in such circumstances to "play for safety," and secure a post in the civil service. it is plain from such considerations as these that all attempts to realise the utopian ideal must needs be, for the present at least, but very partially successful. politics are not the only sphere in which "action is one long second-best." even if it were possible at the present time to train each youth for that calling which his own gifts and temperament, or the reasoned judgment of his parents, selected as his life-work, it is very far from certain that he would ultimately find himself engaged therein. english institutions are largely based on the doctrine of individual liberty, and those statutes which establish or safeguard individual rights are not unjustly regarded as the "bulwarks of the constitution." but the inalienable right of a father to choose a profession for his son, or of the son to choose one for himself, is often exercised without any real inquiry into the conditions of success in the profession selected. hence the frequent complaints about the "overcrowding of the professions" either in certain localities or in the country at large. the bar affords a glaring example. "there be many which are bred unto the law, yet is the law not bread unto them." the number of recruits which any one branch of industry requires in a single year is not constant, and, in some cases, is subject to great fluctuations; yet there are few or no statistics available for the guidance of those who are specially concerned with that branch, or who are considering the desirability of entering it. the establishment of employment exchanges is a tacit admission of the need of such statistics, and--though less certainly--of the duty of the government to provide them. yet even if they were provided it seems beyond dispute that, in the absence of strong pressure or compulsion from the state, the choice of individuals would not always be in accordance with the national needs. the entry to certain professions--for instance that of medicine--is most properly safeguarded by regulations and restrictions imposed by bodies to which the state has delegated certain powers and duties. it may happen that in one of these professions the number of members is greatly in excess, or falls far short of the national requirements; yet neither state nor professional council has power to refuse admission to any duly qualified candidate, or to compel certain selected people to undergo the training necessary for qualification. it is quite conceivable, however, that circumstances might arise which would render such action not merely desirable but absolutely essential to the national well-being; indeed it is at least arguable that such circumstances have already arisen. the popular doctrine of the early victorian era, that the welfare of the community could best be secured by allowing every man to seek his own interests in the way chosen by himself, has been greatly modified or wholly abandoned. so far are we from believing that national efficiency is to be attained by individual liberty that some are in real danger of regarding the two as essentially antagonistic. the nation, as a whole, supported the legislature in the establishment of compulsory military service; it did so without enthusiasm and only because of the general conviction that such a policy was demanded by the magnitude of the issues at stake. britons have always been ready, even eager, to give their lives for their country; but, even now, most of them prefer that the obligation to do so should be a moral, rather than a legal one. the doctrine of individual liberty implies the minimum of state interference. hence there is no country in the world where so much has been left to individual initiative and voluntary effort as in england; and, though of late the number of government officials has greatly increased, it still remains true that an enormous amount of important work, of a kind which is elsewhere done by salaried servants of the state, is in the hands of voluntary associations or of men who, though appointed or recognised by the state, receive no salary for their services. nor can it be denied that the work has been, on the whole, well done. a traditional practice of such a kind cannot be (and ought not to be) abandoned at once or without careful consideration; yet the changed conditions of domestic and international politics render some modification necessary. if the legislature has protected the purchaser--in spite of the doctrine of "caveat emptor"--by enactments against adulteration of food, and has in addition, created machinery to enforce those enactments, are not we justified in asking that it shall also protect us against incompetence, especially in cases where the effects, though not so obvious, are even more harmful to the community than those which spring from impure food? the prevention of overcrowding in occupations would seem to be the business of the state quite as much as is the prevention of overcrowding in dwelling-houses and factories. the best interests of the nation demand that the entrance to the teaching profession--to take one example out of many--should be safeguarded at least as carefully as the entrance to medicine or law. the supreme importance of the functions exercised by teachers is far from being generally realised, even by teachers themselves; yet upon the effective realisation of that importance the future welfare of the nation largely depends. doubtless most of us would prefer that the supply of teachers should be maintained by voluntary enlistment, and that their training should be undertaken, like that of medical students, by institutions which owe their origin to private or public beneficence rather than to the state; nevertheless, the obligation to secure adequate numbers of suitable candidates and to provide for their professional training rests ultimately on the state. the obligation has been partially recognised as far as elementary education is concerned, but it is by no means confined to that branch. it is well to realise at this point that the efficient discharge of the duty thus imposed will of necessity involve a much greater degree of compulsion on both teachers and pupils than has hitherto been employed. the terrible spectacle of the unutilised resources of humanity, which everywhere confronts us in the larger relations of our national life, has been responsible for certain tentatives which have either failed altogether to achieve their object, or have been but partially successful. much has been heard of the educational ladder--incidentally it may be noted that the educational sieve is equally necessary, though not equally popular--and some attempts have been made to enable a boy or girl of parts to climb from the elementary school to the university without excessive difficulty. to supplement the glaring deficiencies of elementary education a few--ridiculously few--continuation schools have been established. that these and similar measures have failed of success is largely due to the fact that the state has been content to provide facilities, but has refrained from exercising that degree of compulsion which alone could ensure that they would be utilised by those for whose benefit they were created. "such continuation schools as england possesses," says a german critic, "are without the indispensable condition of compulsion." the reforms recently outlined by the president of the board of education show that he, at any rate, admits the criticism to be well grounded. a system which compels a child to attend school until he is fourteen and then leaves him to his own resources can do little to create, and less to satisfy, a thirst for knowledge. during the most critical years of his life--fourteen to eighteen--he is left without guidance, without discipline, without ideals, often without even the desire of remembering or using the little he knows. he is led, as it were, to the threshold of the temple, but the fast-closed door forbids him to enter and behold the glories of the interior. year by year there is an appalling waste of good human material; and thousands of those whom nature intended to be captains of industry are relegated, in consequence of undeveloped or imperfectly trained capacity, to the ranks, or become hewers of wood and drawers of water. many drift with other groups of human wastage to the unemployed, thence to the unemployable, and so to the gutter and the grave. the poor we have always with us; but the wastrel--like the pauper--"is a work of art, the creation of wasteful sympathy and legislative inefficiency." we must be careful, however, in speaking of "the state" to avoid the error of supposing that it is a divinely appointed entity, endowed with power and wisdom from on high. it is, in short, the nation in miniature. even if the legislature were composed exclusively of the highest wisdom, the most enlightened patriotism in the country, its enactments must needs fall short of its own standards, and be but little in advance of those of the average of the nation. it must still acknowledge with solon. "these are not the best laws i could make, but they are the best which my nation is fitted to receive." we cannot blame the state without, in fact, condemning ourselves. the absence of any widespread enthusiasm for education, or appreciation of its possibilities; the claims of vested interests; the exigencies of party government; and, above all, the murderous tenacity of individual rights have proved well-nigh insuperable obstacles in the path of true educational reform. on the whole we have received as good laws as we have deserved. the changed conditions due to the war, and the changed temper of the nation afford a unique opportunity for wiser counsels, and--to some extent--guarantee that they shall receive careful and sympathetic consideration. it may be objected, however, that in taking the teaching profession to exemplify the duty of the state to assume responsibility for both individual and community, we have chosen a case which is exceptional rather than typical; that many, perhaps most, of the other vocations may be safely left to themselves, or, at least left to develop along their own lines with the minimum of state interference. it cannot be denied that there is force in these objections. it should suffice, however, to remark that, if the duty of the state to secure the efficiency of its members in their several callings be admitted, the question of the extent to which, and the manner in which control is exercised is one of detail rather than of principle, and may therefore be settled by the common sense and practical experience of the parties chiefly concerned. a much more difficult problem is sure to arise, sooner or later, in connection with the utilisation of efficients. some few years ago the present prime minister called attention to the waste of power involved in the training of the rich. they receive, he said, the best that money can buy; their bodies and brains are disciplined; and then "they devote themselves to a life of idleness." it is "a stupid waste of first-class material." instead of contributing to the work of the world, they "kill their time by tearing along roads at perilous speed, or do nothing at enormous expense." it has needed the bloodiest war in history to reveal the splendid heroism latent in young men of this class. who can withhold from them gratitude, honour, nay even reverence? but the problem still remains how are the priceless qualities, which have been so freely devoted to the national welfare on the battlefield, to be utilised for the greater works of peace which await us? are we to recognise the right to be idle as well as the right to work? is there to be a kind of second thellusson act, directed against accumulations of leisure? or are we to attempt the discovery of some great principle of conservation of spiritual energy, by the application of which these men may make a contribution worthy of themselves to the national life and character? who can answer? but though it is freely admitted on all hands that some check upon aggressive individualism is imperatively necessary, and that it is no longer possible to rely entirely upon voluntary organisations however useful, there are not a few of our countrymen who view with grave concern any increase in the power and authority of the state. they point out that such increase tends inevitably towards the despotism of an oligarchy, and that such a despotism, however benevolent in its inception, ruthlessly sacrifices individual interests and liberty to the real or supposed good of the state; that even where constitutional forms remain the spirit which animated them has departed; that officialism and bureaucracy with their attendant evils become supreme, and that the national character steadily deteriorates. they warn us that we may pay too high a price even for organisation and efficiency; and, though it is natural that we should admire certain qualities which we do not possess, we ought not to overlook the fact that those methods which have produced the most perfect national organisation in the history of the world are also responsible for orgies of brutality without parallel among civilised peoples. that such warnings are needful cannot be doubted; but may it not be urged that they indicate dangers incident to a course of action rather than the inevitable consequences thereof? in adapting ourselves to new conditions we must needs take risks. no british government could stamp out voluntaryism even if it wished to do so; and none has yet manifested any such desire. the nation does not want that kind of national unity of which germany is so proud, and which seems so admirably adapted to her needs; for the english character and genius rest upon a conception of freedom which renders such a unity foreign and even repulsive to its temper. whatever be the changes which lie before us, the worship of the state is the one form of idolatry into which the british people are least likely to fall. ii the recent adaptation of factories and workshops to the production of war material is only typical of what goes on year by year in peace time, though, of course, to a less degree and in less dramatic fashion. not only are men constantly adapting themselves and their machinery to changed conditions of production, but they are applying the experience and skill gained in the pursuit of one occupation to the problems of another for which it has been exchanged. the comparative ease with which this is done is evidence of the widespread existence of that gift which our enemies call the power of "muddling through," but which has been termed--without wholly sacrificing truth to politeness--the "concurrent adaptability to environment." the british sailor as "handy man" has few equals and no superiors, and he is, in some sort, typical of the nation. the testimony of thucydides to themistocles ([greek: kratistos dê oytos aytoschediazein ta deonta egeneto]) might with equal or even greater truth be applied to many englishmen to-day. as this power [greek: aytoschediazein ta deonta] in the present war saved the allies from defeat at the outset, so we hope and believe it will carry them on to victory at the last. yet it becomes a snare if it leads its possessor to neglect preparation or despise organisation, for neither of which can it ever be an entirely satisfactory substitute, albeit a very costly one. at the same time we should recognise that any system of training which seriously impairs this power tends to deprive us of one of the most valuable of our national assets. it follows that, for the majority at least, exclusive or excessive specialisation in training--vocational or otherwise--so far from being an advantage, is a positive drawback; for, as we have seen, a large proportion of our youth manifest no marked bent in any particular direction, and of those who do but a small proportion are capable of that hypertrophy which the highest specialisation demands. it is important to remember that, though school life is a preparation for practical life, vocational education ought not to begin until a comparatively late stage in a boy's career, if indeed it begins at all while he remains at school. on this it would seem that all professional bodies are agreed; for the entrance examinations, which they have accepted or established are all framed to test a boy's general education and not his knowledge of the special subjects to which he will afterwards devote himself. the evils of premature specialisation are too well known to require even enumeration, and they are increased rather than diminished if that premature specialisation is vocational. the importance of technical training as the means whereby a man is enabled rightly to use the hours of work can hardly be exaggerated; but the value of his work, his worth to his fellows, and his rank in the scale of manhood depend, to at least an equal degree, upon the way in which he uses the hours of leisure. it is one of the greatest of the many functions of a good school to train its members to a wise use of leisure; and though this is not always achieved by direct means the result is none the less valuable. in every calling there must needs be much of what can only be to all save its most enthusiastic devotees--and, at times, even to them--dull routine and drudgery. a man cannot do his best, or be his best, unless he is able to overcome the paralysing influences thus brought to bear upon him by securing mental and spiritual freshness and stimulus; in other words his "inward man must be renewed day by day." there are many agencies which may contribute to such a result; but school memories, school friendships, school "interests" take a foremost place among them. many boys by the time they leave school have developed an interest or hobby--literary, scientific or practical; and the hobby has an ethical, as well as an economic value. nor is this all. excessive devotion to "bread studies," whether voluntary or compulsory, tends to make a man's vocation the prison of his soul. professor eucken recently told his countrymen that the greater their perfection in work grew, the smaller grew their souls. any rational interest, therefore, which helps a man to shake off his fetters, helps also to preserve his humanity and to keep him in touch with his fellows. dr a.c. benson tells of a distinguished frenchman who remarked to him, "in france a boy goes to school or college, and perhaps does his best. but he does not get the sort of passion for the honour and prosperity of his school or college which you english seem to feel." it is this wondrous faculty of inspiring unselfish devotion which makes our schools the spiritual power-houses of the nation. this love for an abstraction, which even the dullest boys feel, is the beginning of much that makes english life sweet and pure. it is the same spirit which, in later years, moves men to do such splendid voluntary work for their church, their town, their country, and even in some cases leads them "to take the whole world for their parish." however much we may strive to reach the beautiful montessori ideal, the fact remains that there must be some lessons, some duties, which the pupil heartily dislikes and would gladly avoid if he could; but they must be done promptly and satisfactorily, and, if not cheerfully, at least without audible murmuring. eventually he may, and often does, come to like them; at any rate he realises that they are not set before him in order to irritate or punish him, but as part of his school training. it will be agreed that the acquirement of a habit of doing distasteful things, even under compulsion, because they are part of one's duty is no bad preparation for a life in which most days bring their quota of unpleasant duties which cannot be avoided, delegated, or postponed. at the present time, however, there is a real danger--in some quarters at least--of unduly emphasising the specifically vocational, or "practical" side of education. the man of affairs knows little or nothing of young minds and their limitations, of the conditions under which teaching is done, or of the educational values of the various studies in a school curriculum. he is prone to choose subjects chiefly or solely because of their immediate practical utility. thus in his view the chief reason for learning a modern language is that business communications will thereby be facilitated. one could wish that he would be content to indicate the end which he has in view, and which he sees clearly, and leave the means of obtaining it to the judgment and experience of the teacher; for in education, as in other spheres of action, the obvious way is rarely the right way, and very often the way of disaster. yet it is a distinct gain to have the practical man brought into the administration of educational affairs; for teachers are, as a rule, too little in contact with the world of commerce to know much of the needs and ideas of business men. the board of education has already established a consultative committee of educationists. why should not a similar standing committee, consisting of representatives of the chambers of commerce of the country be also appointed? such a committee could render, as could no other body, invaluable service to the cause of education. from a recent article by professor leacock we learn that some twenty years ago there was a considerable change in the canadian schools and universities. "the railroad magnate, the corporation manager, the promoter, the multiform director, and all the rest of the group known as captains of industry, began to besiege the universities clamouring for practical training for their sons." mr leacock tells of a "great and famous canadian public school," which he attended, at which practical banking was taught so resolutely that they had wire gratings and little wickets, books labelled with the utmost correctness, and all manner of real-looking things. it all came to an end, and now it appears that in canada they are beginning to find that the great thing is to give a schoolboy a mind that will do anything; when the time comes "you will train your banker in a bank." it may be that everybody has not recognised this, and that the railroad magnates and the rest of them are not yet fully convinced; but mr leacock declares that the most successful schools of commerce will not now attempt to teach the mechanism of business, because "the solid, orthodox studies of the university programme, taken in suitable, selective groups, offer the most practical training in regard to intellectual equipment, that the world has yet devised." to the same purport is the evidence given by mr h.a. roberts, secretary of the cambridge appointments board (see _minutes of evidence taken before the royal commission on the civil service, nd november - th december _, pp. - ). the whole of this testimony deserves careful study. for some few years past the heads of the great business firms, in this country and abroad, have been applying in ever increasing numbers to cambridge (and to oxford also, though in this case statistics do not appear to be available) for men to take charge of departments and agencies; to become, in fact, "captains of industry." in the year before the war ( - ) about men were transferred from cambridge university to commercial posts through the agency of the board[ ]. one might naturally suppose that the majority of these were science men; on the contrary, owing no doubt to the greater number of other posts open to them, they were fewer than might have been expected. graduates from every tripos are found in the in numbers roughly proportional to the numbers in the various tripos lists. shortly before the war an advertisement of an important managership of some works--in south america, if i remember rightly--ended with the intimation that, other things being equal, preference would be given to a man who had taken a good degree in classical honours. that most of such men are successful in their occupations might be deemed to be proved by the steady increase in the number of applications made for their services. there is, however, more definite evidence available. a member of one of the largest business firms in the country testified to the same royal commission that of the cambridge men who had been taken into his employment during the previous seven years had done excellently well, two had left before their probationary period was ended to take up other work; and one only had proved unsatisfactory. this evidence could easily be supplemented did space permit. it is clear, then, that in many callings what is wanted--to begin with, at any rate--is not so much technical knowledge as trained intelligence. another reason for thus choosing university men is not difficult to discover. when mr w.l. hichens (chairman of cammell, laird and co.) addressed the incorporated association of headmasters in january last he declared that in choosing university graduates for business he looked out for the man who might have got a first in greats or history, if he had worked--a man who had other interests as well, who was president of the common room, who had been pleasant in the common room, or on the river, or rowed in his college "eight," or had done something else which showed that he could get on with his fellow-men. in business getting on means getting on with men. the experience of mr hichens is so valuable that i cannot do better than quote further. "a big industrial organisation such as my firm, has, or should have three main sub-divisions--the manufacturing branch, the commercial branch, and the research or laboratory branch.... i will not deal with the rank and file, but with the better educated apprentices, who expect to rise to positions of responsibility. on the workshop side, we prefer that the lads should come to us between sixteen and seventeen, and, if possible (after serving an apprenticeship in the shops and drawing office), that they should then go to a university and take an engineering course. "on the commercial side also we prefer to get the boys between sixteen and seventeen. we have recently, however, reserved a limited number of vacancies for university men. the research department also is, in the main, recruited from university men. but there is this difference, that, whereas the research men should have received a scientific training at the university we require no specialised education in the case of university men joining the commercial side. specialised education at school is of no practical value. there is ample time after a boy has started business to acquire all the technical knowledge that his brain is capable of assimilating. what we want when we take a boy is to assure ourselves that he has ability and moral strength of character, and i submit that the true function of education is to teach him how to learn and how to live--not how to make a living. we are interested naturally to know that a boy has an aptitude for languages or mathematics, but it is immaterial to us whether he has acquired his aptitude, say for learning languages, through learning latin and greek or french and german. the educational value is paramount, the vocational negligible. if, therefore, modern languages are taught because they will be useful in later life, while latin and greek are omitted because they have no practical use, although their educational value may be greater, you will be bartering away the boy's rightful heritage of knowledge for a mess of pottage." there are doubtless many different opinions as to the best way of training boys to become engineers, and in giving the results of his experience mr hichens does not claim that he is voicing the unanimous and well-considered judgments of the whole profession. his statement that "specialised education at school is of no practical value to us" would certainly be challenged by those schools which possess a strong, well-organised engineering side for their elder boys. but there would be substantial unanimity--begotten of long and often bitter experience--in favour of his plea that a sound general education up to the age of sixteen or seventeen at any rate, is an indispensable condition of satisfactory vocational training. "i venture to think," says mr hichens, "that the tendency of modern education is often in the wrong direction--that too little attention is given to the foundations which lie buried out of sight, below the ground, and too much to a showy superstructure. we pay too much heed to the parents who want an immediate return in kind on their money, and forget that education consists in tilling the ground and sowing the seed--forget, too, that the seed must grow of itself." it would appear from what has already been said that though the necessity for vocational training exists in most, if not in all cases, the time in a boy's life at which such training ought to begin is far from being the same for all callings. even where there is general agreement as to the normal age, exceptional circumstances or exceptional ability may justify the postponement of vocational instruction to a much later period than would usually be desirable. thus the fact that two of the most distinguished members of the medical profession graduated as senior wrangler and senior classic respectively, will not justify the average medical student in waiting until he is twenty-three before commencing his professional training. if it be true that in some quarters "specialised education" has been demanded for young boys, it is equally true that many youths pass through school and enter the university without any clear idea of whither they are tending. this uncertainty may be due to a belief that "something is sure to turn up," to the magnitude of their allowances and the ease of their circumstances, occasionally, perhaps, to excessive timidity or underestimation of their powers; but, from whatever cause it springs, such an attitude of mind is deplorable in itself, and fraught with grave moral dangers. it ought to be possible in the case of a boy of sixteen or seventeen to say with some approach to certainty, for what employments he is quite unsuitable, and to indicate the general direction, at least, in which he should seek his life-work. the _onus_ of choice is too often laid upon the boy himself; and the form in which the question is put--what would you _like_ to be?--makes him the judge not only of his own desires and abilities, but also of the conditions of callings with which he can, at best, be but imperfectly acquainted. there is here fine scope for the co-operation of parents and teachers not only with each other but with the various professional and business organisations. it is generally supposed to be the duty of a head master to observe and study the boys committed to his care. it is equally important that he should extend that study and observation to their parents--as an act of justice to the boys, if for no other reason. but there are other reasons. there is knowledge to be gotten from every parent--or at least from every father--about his profession or business--knowledge which, as a rule, he is quite willing to impart. if, in addition, a head master avails himself of the opportunities of getting into touch with men of affairs, leaders of commerce, professional men of all kinds, his advice to parents as to suitable careers for their sons becomes enormously more valuable. at the very least he may save them from some of the more flagrant forms of error; for instance, he may convince them that there are other and more valuable indications of fitness for engineering than the ability to take a bicycle to pieces, and a desire "to see the wheels go round"; and that a boy who is "good at sums" will not, of necessity, make a good accountant. in short, he may prevent them from mistaking a hobby for a vocation. [footnote : in this connection it may be noted that per cent. of the members of trinity college--where the normal number of undergraduates in residence is over --on leaving the university devote themselves to business.] iii it ought to be clearly stated that in writing of schools i have had in mind those which are usually known as public schools; for in the general preparation for practical life the public school boy enjoys many advantages which do not fall to the lot of his less-favoured brother in the elementary school. not only does his education continue for some years longer, but it is conducted along broader lines, and gives him a greater variety of knowledge and a wider outlook. he comes, too, as a rule, from those classes of the community in which there are long standing traditions of discipline, culture, and what may be called the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. these traditions do not, of themselves, keep him from folly, idleness, or even vice; but they do help him to endure hardship, to submit to authority, to cultivate the corporate spirit, to maintain certain standards of schoolboy honour, and, as he himself would say, "to play the game." though in the class-room it may be that appeals are largely made to individualism and selfishness, yet on the playing fields he learns something of the value of co-operation and the virtue of unselfishness. from the very first he begins to develop a sense of civic and collective responsibility, and, in his later years at school, he finds that as a prefect or monitor he has a direct share in the government of the community of which he is a member, and a direct responsibility for its welfare. nor does this sense of corporate life die out when he leaves, for then the old boys' association claims him, and adds a new interest to the past, while maintaining the old inspiration for the future. with the elementary school boy it is not so. to him, as to his parents, the primal curse is painfully real: work is the sole and not always effectual means of warding off starvation. he realises that as soon as the law permits he is to be "turned into money" and must needs become a wage-earner. as a contributor to the family exchequer he claims a voice in his own government, and resists all the attempts of parents, masters, or the state itself to encroach upon his liberty. he begins work with both mind and body immature and ill-trained. there has been little to teach him _esprit de corps_; he has never felt the sobering influence of responsibility; the only discipline he has experienced is that of the class-room, for the o.t.c. and organised games are to him unknown; and when he leaves there is very rarely any association of old boys to keep him in touch with his fellows or the school. here and there voluntary organisations such as the boy scouts have done something--though little--to improve his lot; but, in the main, the evils are untouched. to find the remedy for them is not the least of the many great problems of the future. the improvement of any one branch of industry ultimately means the improvement of those engaged therein. scientific agriculture, for example, is hardly possible until we have scientific agriculturists. in like manner real success in practical life depends on the temper and character of the practitioner even more than upon his technical equipment. there are, however, three great obstacles to the progress of the nation as a whole, obstacles which can only be removed very gradually, and by the continuous action of many moral forces. we are far too little concerned with intellectual interests. "no nation, i imagine," says mr temple, "has ever gone so far as england in its neglect of and contempt for the intellect. if goodness of character means the capacity to serve our nation as useful citizens, it is unobtainable by any one who is content to let his mind slumber." then again we suffer from the low ideal which leads us to worship success. from his earliest years a boy learns from his surroundings, if not by actual precept, to strive not so much to be something as somebody. the love of power rather than fame may be the "last infirmity of noble minds," but it is probably the first infirmity of many ignoble ones. herein lies the justification of the criticism of a friendly alien. "you pride yourselves on your incorruptibility, and quite rightly; for in england there is probably less actual bribery by means of money than in any other country. _but you can all be bribed by power_." lastly (to quote mr hichens yet once more), "strong pressure is being brought to bear to commercialise our education, to make it a paying proposition, to make it subservient to the god of wealth and thus convert us into a money-making mob. ruskin has said that 'no nation can last that has made a mob of itself.' above all a nation cannot last as a money-making mob. it cannot with impunity--it cannot with existence--go on despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on pence." xi teaching as a profession by frank roscoe secretary of the teachers registration council the title of this chapter is prophetic rather than descriptive for although teachers often claim for their work a professional status and find their claim recognised by the common use of the phrase "teaching profession" yet it must be admitted that teachers do not form a true professional body. they include in their ranks instructors of all types, from the university professor to the private teacher or "professor" of music. their terms of engagement and rate of remuneration exhibit every possible variety. their fitness to undertake the work of teaching is not tested specifically, save in the case of certain classes of teachers in public elementary schools, nor is there any general agreement as to the proper nature and scope of such a test, could one be devised. usually, it is true, the prospective employer demands evidence that the intending teacher has some knowledge of the subject he is to teach. he may seek to satisfy himself that the applicant has other desirable qualities, personal and physical, which will fit him to take an active and useful part in school work. these inquiries, however, will have little or no reference to his skill in teaching, apart from what is called discipline or form management. the characteristics of a true profession are not easily defined, but it may be assumed that they include the existence of a body of scientific principles as the foundation of the work and the exercise of some measure of control by the profession itself in regard to the qualifications of those who seek to enter its ranks. taken together, these two characteristics may be said to mark off a true profession from a business or trade. the skilled craftsman or artisan may belong to a union which seeks to control the entrance to its ranks, but the difference between the member of the amalgamated society of engineers and the member of the institution of mechanical engineers is that the former belongs to a body chiefly concerned with the application of certain methods while the latter belongs to one which is concerned with those methods, not only in their application but also in their origin and development. it is recognised that there is a body of scientific knowledge underlying the practice of engineering, and the various professional institutions of engineers seek to extend this knowledge, while claiming also the right to ascertain the qualifications of those who desire to become members of their profession. the same is true in different ways with regard to the professions of law and medicine. it is to be noted also that within these professions the admitted member is on a footing of equality with all his colleagues save only so far as his professional skill and eminence entitle him to special consideration. it will be seen at once that there are great difficulties to be overcome before teaching can be truly described as a profession. the diversity of the work is so great that it may be held that teaching is not one calling but a blend of many. it is difficult to find any common link between the university professor, the head master of a great public school, an instructor in physical training, and a kindergarten teacher. it is not easy to bring together the head master of a preparatory school, working in complete independence, and the head master of a public elementary school, dealing with pupils of about the same age as those in the preparatory school, but controlled and directed by an elected public authority under the general supervision of the board of education. yet despite these apparent divergences of aim all teachers may be regarded as pursuing the same end. they are engaged in bringing to bear upon their pupils certain formal and purposeful influences with the object of enabling them to play their part in the business of life. such formal influences are seconded by countless informal ones. school and university alone do not make the complete man and it is an important part of the teacher's task to second his direct and purposeful teaching by the influence of his own personality and conduct, and by securing that the form or school is in harmony with the general aim of his work. skill in imparting instruction is by no means the whole of the equipment required by a teacher. it is indeed possible to give "a good lesson" or a series of "good lessons" and yet to fail in the real work of teaching. in some branches far too much stress has been laid on the more purely technical and mechanical attributes of good teaching as distinct from the finer and more permanent qualities such as intellectual stimulus, the awakening of a spirit of inquiry, and the development of a true corporate sense. by way of excuse it may be said that teaching has tended to become a form of drill chiefly in those schools where the classes have been too large to permit of anything better than rigid discipline and a constant attention to the learning of facts. teachers in such circumstances are gravely handicapped in all the more enduring and important parts of their work. very large schools and classes of an unwieldy size tend to turn the teacher into a mere drill sergeant. while full provision should always be made for the exercise of the teacher's individuality there must be sought some unifying principle in all forms of teaching work. unless it is agreed that the imparting of instruction demands special skill as distinct from knowledge of the subject-matter we shall be driven to accept the view that the teacher, as such, deserves no more consideration than any casual worker. no claim to rank as a profession can be maintained on behalf of teachers if it is held that their work may be undertaken with no more preparation than is involved in the study of the subject or subjects they purpose to teach. a true profession implies a "mystery" or at least an art or craft and some knowledge of this would seem to be essential for teachers if they are to have professional status. the difficulty in this connection is that the principles of teaching have not yet been worked out satisfactorily. our knowledge of the operations of the mind develops very slowly and those who carry out investigations in this field of research are few in number. their conclusions are not necessarily related to teaching practice but cover a wider field. the study of applied psychology with special reference to the work of the teacher needs to be encouraged since it will serve to enlarge that body of scientific principle which should form the basis of teaching work. it is by no means necessary, or even desirable, that teachers should be expected to spend their time in psychological research. their business is to teach and this requires that they should devote themselves to applying in practice the truths ascertained and verified by the psychologists. for this purpose it will be necessary that they should know something of the method by which these truths are sought and proved. it is also an advantage for teachers to learn something of the history of education, not as a series of biographies of so-called great educators but rather with the object of learning what has been suggested and attempted in former times. such a knowledge furnishes the teacher with the necessary power to deal with new proposals and with the many "systems" and "methods" which are continually arising. instead of becoming an eager advocate of every novelty or adopting an attitude of indiscriminate scepticism he will be in some measure able to estimate the true merit of new proposals, and his knowledge of mental operations will serve as an aid in judging whether they have any germ of sound principle. the alternative plan of leaving the teacher to learn his craft solely by practice often has the result of confining him too closely to narrow and stereotyped methods, based either on the imperfect recollection of his own schooldays, or on the method of some other teacher. imitation is cramping and serves to destroy the qualities of initiative and adaptability which are indispensable to success in teaching. it will be noted that no extravagant demand is put forward on behalf of what is called training in teaching. the methods of training hitherto practised have been based too frequently on the assumption that it is possible to fashion a teacher from the outside, as it were, by causing him to attend lectures on psychology and teaching method and to hear a course of demonstration lessons. this plan may fail completely since it is possible to write excellent examination answers on the subjects named and even to give a prepared lesson reasonably well without being fitted to undertake the charge of a form. it should be recognised that the practice of teaching can be acquired only in the class-room under conditions which are normal and therefore entirely different from those existing in the practising school of a training college. when this truth is fully apprehended we may expect to find that the young teacher is required to spend his first year in a school where the head master and one or more members of the regular staff are qualified to guide his early efforts and to establish the necessary link between his knowledge of theory and his requirements in practice. the departments of education in the universities should be encouraged to develop systematic research into the principles of teaching and should be in close touch with the schools in which teachers are receiving their practical training. the plan suggested will be free from the reproach often levelled against the existing method of training teachers, namely, that it is too theoretical and produces people who can talk glibly about education without being able to manage a class. it will also recognise the truth that the young teacher has much to learn in regard to the art or craft of teaching and that there are certain general principles which he must know and follow if he is to be successful in his chosen work. the application of these principles to his own circumstances is a matter of practice, for in teaching, as in any other art, the element of personality far outweighs in its importance any matter of formal technique or special method. the ascertained and accepted principles underlying all teaching should be known and thereafter the teacher should develop his own method, reflecting in his practice the bent of his mind. the recognition of a principle does not of necessity involve uniformity in practice. freedom in execution is possible only within the limits of an art. the problem is to define these limits in such a liberal manner as will allow for variety and individual expression. the saying that teachers are born, not made, is one which may be made of those who practise any art, but the poet or painter can exercise his innate gifts only within certain limits and with regard to certain rules. it is no less fatal to his art for him to abandon all rules than it is for him to accept every rule slavishly and apply it to himself without intelligence. the acceptance of the principle that there is an art or at least a craft of teaching is a condition precedent to any attempt to make teaching a profession in reality as well as in name. the further requirement is that those who are engaged in teaching should have some power of controlling the conditions under which they work and more especially of testing the qualifications of those who desire to join their ranks. this demands a recognition of the essential unity of all teaching work and a consequent effort to bring all teachers together as members of one body, possessing a certain unity or solidarity in spite of its apparent diversities. to form such a body is a task of great difficulty since the various types of teachers have in the past tended to separate themselves into groups, each having its own association and machinery for the protection of its own interests. apart from the teaching staffs of the various universities, there are in england and wales over fifty associations of teachers, ranging from the national union of teachers with over ninety thousand subscribing members to bodies numbering only a few score adherents. these associations reflect the great diversity of teaching work already described, but all alike are seeking to promote freedom for the teacher in his work and to advance professional objects. such aspirations have been in the minds of teachers for many years and from time to time attempts have been made to realise them by establishing a professional council with its necessary adjunct of a register of qualified persons. seventy years ago the college of preceptors, with its grades of associate, licentiate and fellow, suggesting a comparison with the college of physicians, was established with the object of "raising the standard of the profession by providing a guarantee of fitness and respectability." the college register was to contain the names of all those who were qualified to conduct schools, and admission to the register was controlled by the college itself in order to provide a means of excluding all who were likely to bring discredit upon the calling of a teacher by reason of their inefficiency or misconduct. the scheme thus launched was, however, not comprehensive, since it concerned chiefly the teachers who conducted private schools and did not contemplate the inclusion of those who were engaged in universities, public schools, or the elementary schools working under the then recently established scheme of state grants. teachers in schools of this last description were apparently intended by the government of the day to be regarded as civil servants, appointed and paid by the state. subsequent legislation modified this arrangement, but teachers in schools receiving government grants are still subject to a measure of control, and those in public elementary schools are licensed by the state before being allowed to teach. it will be seen that the effort to organise a teaching profession was hampered from the start by the fact that teachers were not entirely free to set up their own conditions, since the state had already taken charge of one branch, while further difficulties arose from the varied character of different forms of teaching work and from the circumstance that some of these forms were traditionally associated with membership of another profession, that of a clergyman. hence it was that despite several attempts to institute a register of teachers and to organise a profession the difficulties seemed to be insurmountable. between the years and several bills were introduced in parliament with the object of setting up a register of teachers but all met with opposition and were abandoned. the board of education act of gave powers for constituting by order in council a consultative committee to advise the board on any matter referred to the committee and also to frame, with the approval of the board, regulations for a register of teachers. it was not until that an order in council established a registration council and laid down regulations for the institution of a register. the council thus established consisted of twelve members, six of whom were nominated by the president of the board of education while one was elected by each of the following bodies: the headmasters' conference, the headmasters' association, the head mistresses' association, the college of preceptors, the teachers' guild, and the national union of teachers. the members of the council were to hold office for three years, and afterwards, on april, , the constitution of the council was to be revised. the duty assigned to the council was that of establishing and keeping a register of teachers in accordance with the regulations framed by the consultative committee and approved by the board of education. subject to the approval of the board the council was empowered to appoint officers and to pay them. the income was to be provided by fees for registration and the accounts were to be audited and published annually by the board to whom the council was also required to submit a report of its proceedings once a year. under this scheme a register was set up, with two columns, a and b. in the former were placed the names of all teachers who had obtained the government certificate as teachers in public elementary schools. this involved no application or payment by such teachers, who were thus registered automatically. column b was reserved for teachers in secondary schools, public and private. registration in these cases was voluntary and demanded the payment of a registration fee of one guinea in addition to evidence of acceptable qualification in regard to academic standing and professional training. although teachers of experience were admitted on easier terms the regulations were intended to ensure that, after a given date, everybody who was accepted for registration should have passed satisfactorily through a course of training in teaching. as designed in the first instance column b furnished no place for teachers of special subjects and it became necessary to institute supplemental registers in regard to music and other branches which had come to form part of the ordinary curriculum of a secondary school. the scheme thus provided a register divided into groups according to the nature of the accepted applicant's work. such an arrangement presented many difficulties since it ignored all university teachers and assigned the others to different categories depending in some instances on the type of school in which they chanced to be working and in others on the subject which they happened to be teaching. a professional register constructed on these lines had the seeming advantage of supplying information as to the type of work for which the individual teacher was best fitted. on the other hand it was held that the division of teachers into categories was unsound in principle and the teachers in public elementary schools were not slow to resent the suggestion that they belonged to an inferior rank and were properly to be excused the payment of a fee. they pointed out that many of their number held academic qualifications which were higher than those required to secure admission to column b wherein some eleven thousand teachers had been registered, of whom not more than one half were graduates. the views thus expressed were shared by many other teachers and it speedily became manifest that the proposed register could not succeed. in the annual report of the council stated that under existing conditions it was not practicable to frame and publish an alphabetical register of teachers such as appeared to be contemplated in the act of . in june, , the board of education published a memorandum stating the reasons which had led it to take the opportunity afforded by impending legislation to abolish the register, and in the education bill of a clause was inserted which removed from the consultative committee the obligation to frame a register of teachers. this clause was strongly opposed by many associations of teachers. it was urged by these bodies that although one scheme had failed yet a register was still possible and desirable. it was held by many that the task assigned to the registration council had been an impossible one since the conditions of supervision and control imposed under the act of left the council very little freedom and wholly precluded the establishment of a self-governing profession. the general opinion seemed to be that any future register must be in one column avoiding any attempt to divide those registered into different classes and that any future council must be as independent and widely representative as possible. this opinion found expression and official sanction in a memorandum issued by the board of education in after several conferences had been held for the purpose of promoting a new registration scheme. the memorandum stated that: "it should not be so much the kinds of teachers likely to be most rapidly or easily admitted to the register that should specially determine the composition of the council but rather the larger and more general conception of the unification of the teaching profession." this new and wider idea served to govern the formation of the teachers registration council which was established by an order in council of february, . the body constituted by this order consists wholly of teachers and includes eleven representatives of each of the following classes: the teaching staffs of universities, the associations of teachers in public elementary schools, the associations of teachers in secondary schools, and the associations of teachers of specialist subjects. the council thus numbers forty-four and it is ordered that the chairman shall be elected by the council from outside its own body. at least one woman must be elected by each appointing body which sends more than one representative to the council provided that the body includes women among its members. it will be seen that the constitution aimed at forming a council wholly independent and thoroughly representative. this quality was further ensured by the establishment of ten committees, representing various forms of specialist teaching and providing that any conditions of registration framed by the council should be submitted to these committees before publication. the first council under this scheme was formed in and held office for three years as prescribed by the order in council. the chairman was the right honourable a.h. dyke acland and the members included the vice-chancellors of several universities and representatives of forty-two associations of teachers. the first duty of the council was to devise conditions of registration and these were framed during , being published at the end of that year. they provide in the first place that up to the end of any teacher may be admitted to registration who produces evidence of having taught under circumstances approved by the council for a minimum period of five years. regard for existing interests led to the setting up of a period of grace before the full conditions of registration came into force. after , however, these become more stringent and require that before being admitted to registration the teacher shall produce evidence of knowledge and experience, while all save university teachers are also required to have undertaken a course of training in teaching. under both the temporary and later arrangement the minimum age for registration is twenty-five and the fee is a single payment of one guinea. there is no annual subscription. the second council was elected in and appointed as its chairman dr michael e. sadler, vice-chancellor of the university of leeds. up to the middle of july, , the number of teachers admitted to the register was , and the names of these were included in the _official list of registered teachers_ issued by the council at the beginning of . the register itself is too voluminous for publication since it comprises all the particulars which an accepted applicant has submitted. all registered teachers receive a copy of their own register entry together with a certificate of registration. it will be seen that the task of receiving and considering applications for registration forms an important part of the council's work. but it is by no means its chief function. as is shown in the board of education memorandum already quoted the council is intended to promote the unification of the teaching profession. the register is nothing more than the symbol of this unity and the council is charged with the important task of expressing the views of teachers as a body on all matters concerning their work. this is shown in the speech made by the minister of education at the first meeting of the council. after welcoming the members he added: "the object of the council would be not only the formation of a register of teachers. there were many other spheres and fields of usefulness for a council representative of the teaching profession. he hoped that they would be able to speak with one voice as representing the teaching profession, and that the board would be able to consult with them. so long as he was head of the board they would always be most anxious to co-operate with the council and would attach due weight to their views. he hoped that they on their side would realise some of the board's difficulties and that the atmosphere of friendly relationship which he trusted had already been established would continue." the functions of the council are thus seen to extend beyond the mere compilation of a register of teachers and to include constant co-operation with those engaged in educational administration. in view of the desire which is now generally expressed for a closer union between the directive and executive elements in all branches of industry it is safe to assume that the teachers' council will grow steadily in importance, especially if it is seen to have the support of all teachers. meanwhile it furnishes the framework of a possible teaching profession and gives promise of securing for the teacher a definite status by establishing a standard of attainment and qualification. more than this will be required, however, if the work of teaching is to be placed on its proper level in public esteem. those who undertake the work must be led to look for something more than material gain. the teacher needs a sense of vocation no less than the clergyman or doctor. it has been said that "teaching is the noblest of professions but the sorriest of trades" and the absence of any real enthusiasm for the work inevitably produces an attitude of mind which is alien to the spirit of a real teacher. the material reward of the teacher has accurately reflected the want of public esteem attaching to his work. for the most part a meagre pittance has been all that he could anticipate and this has led to a steady decline in the number of recruits. a profession should furnish a reasonable prospect of a career and a fair chance of gaining distinction. such opportunities have been far too few in teaching to attract able and ambitious young men in adequate number. the remedy is to open every branch of educational work and administration to those who have proved themselves to be efficient teachers. the national welfare demands that those who are to be charged with the task of training future citizens should be drawn from the most able of our young people, to whom teaching should offer a career not less attractive than other callings. in particular the teacher should be regarded as a member of a profession and trusted to carry out his duties in a responsible manner. excessive supervision and inspection will tend to discourage and eventually destroy that quality of initiative which is indispensable in all teaching. freed from the monetary cares which now oppress him, definitely established as a member of a profession having some voice in its own concerns, encouraged to exercise his art under conditions of the greatest possible freedom, and provided with reasonable opportunity for advancement, the teacher will be able to take up his work in a new spirit. we may then demand from new-comers a sense of vocation and expect with some justification that teachers will be able to avoid the professional groove which is hardly to be escaped and which is quite inevitable if the conditions of one's work preclude opportunity for maintaining freshness of mind and a variety of personal interest. such limitations as accompany inadequate salaries, lack of prospects and absence of professional status convert teaching into "a dull mechanic art" and deprive it of its chief elements of enjoyment, namely the free exercise of personality and the recurring satisfaction of seeing minds develop under instruction, so that we are conscious of our part in helping the future citizens to make the most of their lives. it is this power of impressing one's own personality on the pliable mind of youth which brings at once the greatest responsibility and the highest reward to the teacher and attaches to his task a true professional character since it may not be undertaken fittingly by any who cherish low aims or despise their work. proofreaders europe. this file was produced from images generously made available by project rastko. the new ideal in education an address given before the league of the empire on july th, . by fr. nicholai velimirovic, ph.d. _reprinted from the "federal magazine."_ london "the electrician" printing and publishing co., limited. salisbury court, fleet street, e.c. the new ideal in education. by father nicholai velimirovic, ph.d. "nature _takes sufficient care of our individualistic sense, leaving to_ education _the care of our panhumanistic sense_." ladies and gentlemen, if we do not want war we must look to the children. there is the only hope and the only wise starting point. it is not without a deep prophetic significance that christ asked children to come unto him. in all the world-calamities, in all wars, strifes, religious inquisitions and persecutions, in all the hours of human misery and helplessness, he has been asking, through centuries, the children to come unto him. i am sure, if anybody has ears for his voice to-day, amidst the thunderings of guns and passions and revenges, one would hear the same call: let the children come unto me!--not kings and politicians, not journalists and generals, not the grown-up people, but children. and so to-day also, when we ask for a way out of the present world-misery, when we _in profundis_ of darkness to-day ask for light, and in sorrow for to-morrow ask for advice and comfort, we must look to the children and christ. why not kings? why does christ not ask the kings to come to him--the kings, and politicians, and journalists, and generals? because they are too much engaged in a wrong state of things, and because they are greatly responsible themselves for such a wrong state of things, and because consequently it is difficult for them to change their ways, their hearts and their minds. it would be very hard for napoleon and pitt to kneel together down before christ and to embrace each other. it would be almost impossible for bismarck and gambetta to walk together. not less it would be impossible for the pope and monsieur loisy or george tyrrel to pray in the same bench. every generation is laden with sins and prejudices. that is the reason why christ goes only a little way with every generation, and then he becomes tired and asks for a new generation--he calls for children. christ is always new and fresh as children are. every generation is spoiled and corrupted by long living and struggling. but for a new generation the world is quite a new wonder. god is shown only to those for whom the world is a new thing, a wonder. no one, who does not admire this world as a wonder, can find god. for the old hæckel no god exists, just because for him no wonder exists. he pretends to know everything. christ means for him nothing and he means for christ nothing. every foolish child, believing in god and in this wonderful world, has more wisdom than the materialistic professor from germany. christ is getting tired of an old generation. sadly he calls for a new one--for children. in our distress to-day, i think, we should multiply his voice, calling for him, for a new generation and for a new education. the education which makes for war. it is called by a very attractive name, the _individualistic_ education. the true name of it is selfishness, or egotism. no religion of asia ever boasted of having been the birthplace of such an education. it is born in the heart of europe, in germany. it was brought up by schopenhauer and goethe. it was subsequently supported by the german biologists, by the musicians, sculptors, philosophers, poets, soldiers, socialists and priests, by the wisest and by the madmen beyond the rhine. unfortunately france, russia and even great britain have not been quite exempt from this pernicious theory of individualistic education. the sophistic theories of athens of old have been renewed in central europe--the individuum is the ultimate aim of education. a human individuum is of limitless worth, said the german interpreters of the new testament. materialistic science, contradicting itself, agreed on that point with modern theology. art, in all its branches, presented itself as the sole expression of one individuum, i.e., of the artist. the modern socialism, contradicting its own name, supported individualism very strongly in every department of human activity. consequently modern pedagogy, based upon the general tendencies, put up the same individualistic ideal as the aim to be achieved by the schools, church, state, and by many other social institutions. the results of the old ideal. war is the result of the old ideal of education. i call it old because it is over for ever, i hope, with this war. the old european ideal of education was so called individualistic. this ideal was supported equally by the churches and by science and art. extreme individualism, developed in germany more than in any other country, resulted in pride, pride resulted in materialism, materialism in pessimism. put upon a dangerous and false base every evil result followed quite naturally. if my poor personality is of limitless value, without any effort and merit of my own, why should not i be proud? if the aim of the world's history is to produce some few genial personalities, as carlyle taught, why should not i think that i am such a personality for my own generation, and why should i not be proud of that? once filled with pride i will soon be filled also with contempt for other men. selfishness and denial of god will follow my pride; this is called by a scientific word materialism. being a materialist, as long as i possess a certain amount of intellectual and physical strength, i will be proud of myself. but as soon as my body or spirit are affected by any illness (it may be only a headache or toothache), i will plunge into a dark pessimism, always the shadow and the end of materialism. modern germany was, as you know, the hearth of individualism, and consequently also of pride, materialism, atheism and pessimism. the worship of strong personalities (to-day: kaiser william and hindenburg) holds the whole of germany in unity during this war, which is not the case either in france or in great britain or russia, where the common cause inspires the unity. the education which makes for peace. when will wars really stop in the world's history? as soon as a new ideal of education is realised. what is this new ideal of education which makes for peace? i will give it in one word: _panhumanism_. this word includes all i wish to say. individualism means a brick, panhumanism means a building. even the greatest individuality (may it be cæsar, or raphael, or luther) is no more than a brick in the panhuman building of history. the lives of individuals are only the points, whereas the life of mankind is a form, a deep, high and large form. if a great and original individuality were the aim of history, i think history should stop with the first man upon earth, for our first ancestor must have been the most striking individual who ever existed. men coming after adam have been like their parents and each other. kaiser william is not such an interesting and striking a creature by far as the first man was. when kaiser william opens his mouth to speak, he speaks words that are known. when he moves or sits, when he eats or prays--all that is a _nuance_ only of what other people do, all is either from heritage or imitation, and quite an insignificant amount is individual. whereas every sound that the first man uttered was quite new for the universe; every movement striking and dramatic; every look of his eyes was discovering new worlds; every joy or sorrow violently felt; every struggle a great accumulation of experiences. and so forth. well, if one striking individuum is the aim of history, history should close with the death of adam. but history still continues. why? just because not adam was its aim, but mankind; not one, or two, or ten heroes, but millions of human creatures; not some few great men, but all men, all together, all without exception. from this point of view we get the true ideal of education. the purpose of education is not to make grand personalities, but to make bricks for the building, i.e., to make suitable members of a collective body and suitable workers of a collective work. collective works are greater than personal works. a pupil from the old, individualistic school would object: --and what do you think of the work of ibsen? _i:_ i think it is incomparably smaller than the ancient scandinavian legends. _he:_ do you not grant that alfred the great was the real creator of the english kingdom? _i:_ never. millions and millions of human creatures are built into this building that we call england, or english history, or english civilisation. _he:_ and what about the man who built st. paul's cathedral? _i:_ it is a collective work, as are all the great works that have been done. the architecture of st. paul's is one of the ancient styles, and no style in architecture was ever invented or created by one person, but by generations and generations. _he:_ and what about victor hugo and milton? are they not great poets? _i:_ yes, they are if compared with certain minor poets, but they are not great if compared with the popular poetry of india or greece. mahabarata, the koran, and zend-avesta, and the bible, are products of collective efforts--therefore they are superior to every personal effort. _he:_ do you not appreciate the great economists and what they did for the household, and common-wealth in general? _i:_ certainly i do; but their work is too much overestimated. not a handful of economic writers, like adam smith and marx, but the common genius of generations and generations arranged the house, set the furniture, created the cooking, constructed towns, invented plays and enjoyments, customs, language, and so forth. _he:_ you agree, i think, that shaljapin and caruso have wonderful voices, don't you? _i:_ yes, i agree. but don't you agree that a choir of millions of human voices would be something much more striking and wonderful than any solo singer since the beginning of time? _he:_ don't you believe in the wisdom of wise men like kant and spencer? _i:_ no, i don't. i think there is incomparably more healthy and more applicable wisdom in the popular sayings, proverbs, parables, and tales of the nations, cultivated and uncultivated, in macedonia, armenia, ceylon, new zealand, japan, &c., than in some dozen of the greatest thinkers of europe. _he:_ who is then in your opinion a great man? _i:_ only a good man is a great man to me, who is conscious that he is a cell in the panhuman organism, or a brick in the building of human history. such a man is more a man of truth and of the future than any conqueror, who thinks that a hundred millions of people and hundreds of years have waited just for him and his guidance, his work, or his wisdom. that is what i would say to a pupil of individualism in education. and at the end i would remind him of christ and his call after the children, and of the new ideal of education, of panhumanism which stands over individualism, and of the collective work of people which stands over every individual work and merit. education as an international affair. it is quite surprising and humiliating that other things can be discussed and settled as international affairs, before education. yet you have hundreds of things regulated by international laws, and among these hundred things education is net yet reckoned. you have the international institution of the red cross, international laws on trade, fishery, travel, copyright, political crimes, barbarities in war-time, &c. but this war shows quite clearly that education--before anything else--should be a matter of international consideration and regulation. behold, how illusory are all international restrictions when the education of a nation is quite excluded from any control! when the nitzschean education of germany teaches the german youth to despise all neighbours, all nations and races as inferior ones, how could you expect the germans to respect the laws and regulations about belgium, and submarines--and zeppelin-warfare, and use of the dum-dum bullets and of poisonous gases? if there is anything to be learned from this war it is doubtless this: the education of youth in all the countries of the world must become an international affair of the very first importance. the russian tsar, mr. carnegie and nobel. the russian tsar suggested the peace conference of the hague. mr. carnegie built a wonderful hall of peace there, formed several commissions for the investigation of war cruelties during the balkan wars, and founded many public libraries for the instruction of the poor. the noble nobel left his big fortune for the support of the best works of literature or science having as their aim the general good of mankind. if i were either the russian tsar or mr. carnegie or professor nobel i would do neither of the three mentioned things, but i would give suggestions and material support to an international board of education. that is the point to start with in the consolidation of the world. i am sorry to say that no one of these three great friends of mankind listens to the prophetic words of christ: let children come unto me! and that no one thought that no great social reform and no real philanthropic foundation of mankind is possible to realise--yea, even to start--otherwise than through the children. the peace conference, being rather a law court than anything else, is beaten by the uncontrolled warlike education of the german nation. carnegie's books have been read by grown-up people who had already got a direction in life, and carnegie's hall of peace in the hague is still an office without business. nobel's prize was given also to some german professors who are responsible for the new pedagogy in germany. mothers, patriots, and priests. these three can be the best possible supporters or the worst enemies of your educational scheme. mothers by nature adore their children and excite their individualism. patriots try to engage the whole heart and imagination of a child for its own country. priests are asking the whole sympathy of a child for their creed and their church. to be individualistic, to be a patriot and a believer are the quite natural gifts of a healthy person. but maternal love exaggerates very often the individualism of a child and makes it egotistic and selfish; exclusively cultivated patriotism degenerates into chauvinism; and exclusive church education makes a bigot. these three kinds of people (alas! the majority), egotists, chauvinists and bigots, will be against an international scheme of education. but you must say to the sensible mothers: the international education of your child will not kill its individuality, but, on the contrary, will use it to the best advantage for mankind and for itself. you are an enemy of your son if you educate him to be an egotist and egoist. in egotism and egoism one has the worst company in this life, the company which leads to pessimism and disgust of life. you must say to the sensible patriots: international education approves of patriotic as of a natural inclination; only the new education intends to make a window in every fatherland so that the child may see its neighbours and stretch its hand to greet them. and you must say to the sensible priests: the international board of education will let every child go to its own church and learn the catechism from its own parish priest; but it will be brought in touch with the children of different creeds, and it will pray with them upon the general ground of all the creeds. the international board of education. . it shall consist of the representatives of all the boards of education in the world. . the members of the board shall officially represent their own country. . the board will be supported materially by the respective governments, and it will dispose of a great fortune from private legacies. for all the philanthropists and peacemakers and peace wishers will support such an institution rather than any other in the world. . the authority of this board shall be equal to the authority of an international political congress. . its duty will be to control education all over the world, banishing or restricting individualism, egotism, chauvinism and bigotism, and promoting by all means panhumanism by developing the mind for collective work, mutual help, personal goodness and humbleness and social greatness. to bring children of the world closer together. let them meet as often as possible; i mean the children from england and the children from serbia, the children from russia and the children from france. so they will know about each other that they all are human beings, and that they all can smile in friendliness on each other. let them travel to each other's country; i mean the children from germany and the children from italy, the children from japan and those from scandinavia. let them see how every spot on earth is wonderful in its way, and how worthy of love, of patriotism. when will the railway companies and ship companies say: let the children come to us? when will they arrange the best trains, better than the royal trains, the most commodious and decorated with flowers and flags of different nations and with one special flag of the children world union? when the moment comes that the wonderful modern communication begins to help the children to meet each other and to pay visits to each other, at that moment the invention of steam and electricity will justify itself. in transferring the troops and facilitating crime it does net justify itself. let the word communication be not only for the sake of crime and for the sake of bread; let it be for the sake of peace and of souls. let them sing together, everyone in his own tongue; i mean the children from the east and west and north and south. you should have been the other day in the mansion house when the english and serbian boys met together, and have listened to the english singing the serbian and the serbian singing the english national anthems, and you would have been fascinated by the sweet revelation of the future world. let the children from the east and west and south and north, pray together. why not? bring them, thousands of them, to a mountain, upon which our ancestors prayed, and let them at sunset kneel down and sing some common prayer that they all know, or, if they have no such common prayer in their creeds, let them just kneel and silently pray! such a silent prayer will do more good than any thousand years' old discussion about religion. it is very easy to convince all the children of the world, just because they are children, that they have one father in heaven, and that they shall send their prayers to him. but even if they send their prayers in different directions, they will arrive at the same place. all prayers, whenever and wherever sent, go always the same way. let the children from the northern ice and from the tropical heat carry on a correspondence. millions of letters are written and sent every day, which mean nonsense and evil. the post communication will justify itself much more by bearing the children's mail, with truth and love, than by bearing perfidious diplomatic notes or letters which mean nonsense and evil. one of the unforgettable events in serbia during this war happened in on christmas day, when an american ship arrived and brought gifts and letters from the children of america to the children of serbia. this wonderful mail produced the greatest imaginable excitement among the serbian children. they were busy, very busy for some weeks, reading the friendly letters from so far, and answering them. i am sure they will forget many sad events of the war, but they never can forget this wonderful and surprising mail, which made for peace more than any of the costly commissions for the investigation of war cruelties, or any of carnegie's empty, although wonderful, luxurious halls of peace. let the children, the representatives of all the countries in the world, come to the hague to hold the international peace congress. the programme of this congress should be: singing, playing, dancing, smiling and praying. they will meet as friends and speak every one in his native language, and they will understand each other very well as friends always understand each other. this children's hague conference will promote the world peace more than the hague conference composed of enemies, mutually annoying themselves by obligatory politeness and bad french. but, you will ask, who is going to arrange and execute all this? the international board of education. but, you will say, it will be very expensive? yes, but, supposing it will be as expensive as the war, for which of the two do you prefer to give money--for such a salvatory experiment or for the war? yet, i am sure of one thing, it will cost less than a war. the international control of education. if you do not watch the education of a country all other international precautions for peace and mutual understanding will be wholly illusory. an international board of education should control the programmes of education of all countries. it should watch that one principle prevails in every educational programme, i.e., the principle of panhumanism. it should not interfere as to the form of education, no, far from that, but look to the unity of the principle of education upon the whole globe. it should carefully avoid all the watchwords which make for separations and wars, like "germany, germany _over all!_" the child must love its own country, but it must know also that its country is not the thing over all other things. it must be taught that god and mankind are something which stands above its country. it should control not only the governmental programmes of education, but it should also watch the mothers, patriots and priests. it should try to have these three world-powers not for the enemies but for the allies and missionaries of a higher, and a panhuman education. the third stage of the european education. there are three stages of the christian european education:-- . compulsory obedience. this was in the middle ages when men were compelled to do the common work by the authority of the church and nobility. . the experiment with individualism. this has been since the renaissance, especially since rousseau--a personality put as the centre and aim of education, the abhorrence of every compulsion whatsoever. . voluntary obedience. it is the education of tomorrow. it is a stage where all men will see their mission in their collective work, and therefore voluntarily enchain themselves into the panhuman organism, plunging their imaginative, pointlike personalities into a big and mystic personality of mankind. the voluntary obedience will mean a voluntary slavery. we are going to be slaves again, but not by royal or papal compulsion, but by our good will; we are going to be slaves as the parts of a body are slaves and servants of each other, and as the bricks are slaves and servants of a great building. we are going to be "prisoners of the lord," as st. paul says, instead of being as now the prisoners of our dreams, imaginations and ambitions. this war will close a period of a wrong education, and will open a period of a right one. it will open our eyes that we may see how we all are one, and how the greatest of us is nothing else than a bigger cell in the immense organism of history. there is no hope for the future in the politicians, or generals, now struggling. the only hope and guarantee lies in the children. a new education in _personal goodness_ making for _social greatness_ is the only salutary war. therefore, let us look to the children! muloch craik. . _the rose and the ring_, by william m. thackeray. a modern edition contains the original illustrations with additions by monsell. crowell. . _granny's story box_. a collection. illustrated by j. knight; published by piper, stephenson, and spence. . _granny's wonderful chair_, containing _prince fairy-foot_. written by frances browne, a blind irish poetess. . _water babies_. charles kingsley. sir noel patton. the macmillan company. . _stories told to a child, including fairy tales; mopsa the fairy_, . by jean ingelow. . _alice's adventures in wonderland_, by lewis carroll (charles dodgson), with illustrations by john tenniel, published by macmillan company, oxford. first edition recalled. later editions were published by richard clay, london. . _at the back of the north wind_; _the princess and the goblin_, . by george macdonald. arthur hughes. strahan. reprinted by blackie. . _the brownies_; , _old-fashioned fairy tales_. by juliana ewing. . _a series of toy-books for children_, by walter crane ( - ). published by routledge and printed in colors by edmund evans. twenty-seven of these stories in nine volumes are published by john lane, bodley head. _princess fioromonde_, , _grimm's household stories_, , and _the cuckoo clock_, , all by mrs. molesworth, were also illustrated by crane. -. _picture-books_, by randolph caldecott ( - ). these were sixteen in number. they are published by f. warne. -. _stories from the eddas; dame wiggins of lee (allen)_; and _the pied piper of hamelin_. these delightful books by kate greenaway ( - ) were published by routledge and engraved by edmund evans. they are now published by f. warne. this brings the english side of the subject down to the present time. present editions of fairy tales are given in chapter vi. in germany there were also many translations from the french of perrault and d'aulnoy. there were editions in , , etc. most of those before the _grimms' tales_ were not important. one might mention:-- . _popular german stories_, by musäus. . _fables, stories, and tales for children_, by caroline stahl. . _bohemian folk-tales_, by wolfgang gerle. - . _kinder und haus-märchen_, by jacob and william grimm. the second edition was published in volumes in berlin, by reiner, in . this latter work formed an era in popular literature and has been adopted as a model by all true collectors since. concerning the modern german fairy tale, the germans have paid such special attention to the selection and grading of children's literature that their library lists are to be recommended. wolgast, the author of _vom kinderbuch_, is an authority on the child's book. the fairy tale received a high estimate in germany and no nation has attained a higher achievement in the art of the fairy tale book. the partial list simply indicates the slight knowledge of available material and would suggest an inviting field to librarians. a great stimulus to children's literature would be given by a knowledge of what the germans have already accomplished in this particular. in germany a child's book, before it enters the market, must first be accepted by a committee who test the book according to a standard of excellence. any book not coming up to the standard is rejected. a few of the german editions in use are given:-- _bilderbücher_, by löwensohn. _bilderbücher_, by scholz. _liebe märchen_. one form of the above, giving three tales in one volume. _märchen_, by w. hauff, published by lowe. one edition, illustrated by arthur rackham, is published by dutton. _the caravan tales_ is an edition published by stokes. _märchen_, by musaus, published by von k.a. müller. - . _undine_, by la motte fouqué. a recent edition, illustrated by rackham, is published by doubleday. - . _books_ by otillie wildermuth. (what of hers should be translated and included?) _hanschen im blaubeerenwald; hanschens skifart märchen_, both by elsa beskow, published by carl. _windchen_; and _wurzelkindern_, both by sybille von olfers, published by schreiber. _das märchen von den sandmannlein_, by riemann, published by schreiber. _der froschkönig_, by liebermann, published by scholz. _weisst du weviel sternlein stehen_, by lewinski, published by schreiber. in sweden there appeared translations of perrault and d'aulnoy. _the blue-bird_ was oftenest printed as a chap-book. folk-tales were collected in:-- _swedish tales_, a collection. h. von schroter. . _folk-tales_. george stevens and hylten cavallius. sweden has given us the modern fairy tale, _the wonderful adventures of nils_ ( volumes). this delightful tale by selma lagerlöf, born , and a winner of the nobel prize, has established itself as a child's classic. it has been translated by v.s. howard, published by doubleday, . in norway we have:-- . _norske folkeeventyr_, collected by asbjörnsen and moe. . _norse tales_. the above tales translated by sir george w. dasent. in denmark we have:-- _sagas of bodvar biarke_. _danske folkeeventyr_, by m. winther, copenhagen, . - . _danmarks folkesagn_, vols., by j.m. thiele. - . _fairy tales_, by hans christian andersen. these tales are important as marking the beginning of the modern fairy tale. they are important also as literary fairy tales and have not been equaled in modern times. in slavonia we have:-- _wochentliche nachrichten_, by busching, published by schottky. in hungary we have:-- . _marchen der magyaren_, by george von gaal. in greece and russia no popular tales were collected before the time of the grimms. in italy the two great collections of the world of fairy tales have been mentioned. italy has also given the modern fairy tale which has been accepted as a classic: _pinocchio_, by c. collodi (carlo lorenzini). this has been illustrated by copeland, published by ginn; and illustrated by folkhard, published by dutton. in america the publication of fairy tales was at first a reprinting of english editions. in colonial times, previous to the revolution, booksellers imported largely from england. after the revolution a new home-growth in literature gradually developed. at first this was largely in imitation of literature in england. after the time of washington irving a distinct american adult literature established itself. the little child's toy-book followed in the wake of the grown-up's fiction. the following list[ ] shows the growth of the american fairy tale, previous to . recent editions are given in chapter vi. - . _forgotten books of the american nursery, a history of the development of the american story-book_. halsey, rosalie v. boston, c.e. goodspeed & co., . pp. - . _isaiah thomas, printer, writer, and collector. nichols, charles l_. a paper read april , , before the club of odd volumes.... boston. printed for the club of odd volumes, . pp. list of juveniles - : pp. - . . _mother goose_. the original mother goose's melody, as first issued by john newbery, of london, about a.d. . reproduced in facsimile from the edition as reprinted by isaiah thomas, of worcester, mass., a.d. (about) ... albany, j. munsell's sons, . pp. . _banbury chap-books and nursery toy-book literature_ (of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) ... pearson, edwin. with very much that is interesting and valuable appertaining to the early typography of children's books relating to great britain and america.... london, a. reader, : pp. impressions from wood-cut blocks by t. and j. bewick, cruikshank, craig, lee, austin, and others. . _the olden time series_. gleanings chiefly from old newspapers of boston and salem, mass. brooks, henry m., _comp_. boston, ticknor & co., . vols. _the books that children read in _ ... by t.c. cushing: vol. , pp. - . - . goodrich, s.g. _recollections of a lifetime_. new york, miller, orton, and mulligan, . vols. children's books ( - ): vol. , pp. - . . _the history of tom thumb_. john dunton, boston. . _chap-books_. benjamin franklin, philadelphia. . _small histories_. andrew bradford, philadelphia. these included _tom thumb_, _tom hickathrift_, and _dick whittington_. . _the child's new plaything_. draper & edwards, boston. reprint. contained alphabet in rhyme, proverbs, fables, and stories: _st. george and the dragon_; _fortunatus_; _guy of warwick_; _brother and sister_; _reynard the fox_; and _the wolf and the kids_. . john newbery's books. advertised in philadelphia _gazette_. the _pretty book for children_ probably included _cinderella_, _tom thumb_, etc. . all juvenile publications for sale in england. imported and sold by hugh gaine, new york. . _children's books_. imported and sold by john mein, a london bookseller who had a shop in boston. included _the famous tommy thumb's story book_; _leo the great giant_; _urax, or the fair wanderer_; and _the cruel giant, barbarico_. . all newbery's publications. reprinted by isaiah thomas, worcester, mass. . _arabian nights. the arabian nights entertainments_ .... the first american edition.... philadelphia, h. & p. rice; baltimore, j. rice & co., . vols. . _blue beard. a new history of blue beard, written by gaffer black beard, for the amusement of little jack black and his pretty sisters_. philadelphia, j. adams, . pp. . _rip van winkle_. a legend included in the works of washington irving, published in london, . . _a visit from st. nicholas_. clement clark moore, in troy _sentinel_, dec. , . written the year before for his own family. the first really good american juvenile story, though in verse. . _babes in the wood_. the history of the children of the wood.... to which is added an interesting account of the captive boy. new york, n.b. holmes. pp. plates. . _mother goose_. the only true mother goose melodies; an exact reproduction of the text and illustrations of the original edition, published and copyrighted in boston in by munroe & francis.... boston, lee & shepard, . pp. . _the fairy book_. with eighty-one engravings on wood, by joseph a. adams. new york, harper & bros. . pp. introduction by "john smith." edited by c.g. verplanck, probably. . _fairy land, and other sketches for youths_, by the author of _peter parley's tales_ (samuel g. goodrich). boston, j. munroe & co. pp. plates, cromo. lith. of bouvé & sharp, boston. . _rainbows for children_, by l. maria child, _ed_. new york, c.s. francis & co. pp. original sketches ... by s. wallin.... b.f. childs, wood engraver: p. . advertising pages: new books published by c.s. francis & co., n.y.... _the fairy gift and the fairy gem_. four volumes of choice fairy tales. each illustrated with fine engravings by french artists: p. . . _wonder book_, by nathaniel hawthorne. illustrated by w. crane, designs, published by houghton, . . _legends of the flowers_, by susan pindar. new york, d. appleton & co., pp. . _fairy tales and legends of many nations_, by charles b. burkhardt. new york, chas. scribner. pp. illustrated by w. walcutt and j.h. cafferty. . _the little glass shoe, and other stories for children_. philadelphia, charles h. davis. pp. advertising pages: a description of illustrated juvenile books, published by charles h. davis: pp. _a book of fairy stories_: p. . . _the history of whittington and his cat_. miss corner and alfred crowquill. _dick whittington_ is said to have been the best seller among juvenile publications for five hundred years. . _flower fables_, by louisa may alcott. boston, g.w. briggs & co. pp. . _the song of hiawatha_, by henry wadsworth longfellow. published now by houghton, illustrated by frederick remington. . _seaside and fireside fairies_, by george blum. translated from the german of georg blum and louis wahl. by a.l. wister. philadelphia, ashmead & evans, pp. . _grimm's goblins_, selected from the _household stories_ of the brothers grimm. jacob l.k. grimm. boston, ticknor & fields. pp. . _fairy book. fairy tales of all nations_, by edouard laboulaye. translated by mary booth. new york, harper & bros., pp. engravings. . _the wonderful stories of fuz-buz the fly and mother grabem the spider_. by s. weir mitchell. philadelphia, j.b. lippincott & co. pp. . _folks and fairies_. stories for little children. lucy comfort. new york, harpers, pp. engravings. advertising pages: six fairy tales published by harper & bros. . _cinderella, or the little glass slipper_. boston, fields, osgood & co. . pp. colored plates by alfred fredericks. . _mother goose_. illustrations of mother goose's melodies. by alexander anderson. new york. privately printed by c.l. moreau (analectic press), , . numb. . (designed and engraved on wood.) . _beauty and the beast_, by albert smith. new york, manhattan pub. co., . pp. with illustrations by alfred crowquill. this brings the american child's fairy tale up to recent publications of the present day which are given in the chapter, "sources of material." an attempt has been made here to give a glimpse of folk and fairy tales up to the time of the grimms, and a view of modern publications in france, germany, england, and america. the grimms started a revolution in folk-lore and in their lifetime took part in the collection of many tales of tradition and influenced many others in the same line of work. an enumeration of what was accomplished in their lifetime appears in the notes of _grimm's household tales_, edited by margaret hunt, published by bonn's libraries, vol. ii, pp. . etc. in modern times the folk-lore society of england and america has been established. now almost every nation has its folk-lore society and folk-tales are being collected all over the world. altogether probably russia has collected fifteen hundred such tales, germany twelve hundred, italy and france each one thousand, and india seven hundred. the work of the grimms, ended in , was continued by emanuel cosquin, who, in his _popular tales of lorraine_, has made the most important recent contribution to folklore,--important for the european tale and important as showing the relation of the european tale to that of india. the principal recent collections of folk-lore are:-- _legends and fairy tales of ireland_. croker. . _welsh and manx tales_. sir john rhys. -. _popular rhymes of scotland_. chambers. . _tales of the west highlands_. campbell. . _popular tales from the norse_. dasent. . _zulu nursery tales_. callaway. . _old deccan days_. frere. . _fireside tales of ireland_. kennedy. . _indian fairy tales_. miss stokes. . _buddhist birth stories_. rhys davids. . _kaffir folk-lore_. theal. . _folk-tales of bengal_. day. . _wide awake stories_. steel and temple. . _italian popular tales_. crane. . _popular tales of lorraine_. cosquin. . _popular tales and fictions_. clouston. . _folk-tales of kashmir_. knowles. . _tales of ancient egypt_. maspero. . _tales of the sun_. mrs. kingscote. . _tales of the punjab_. steel. . _jataka tales_. cowell. . _russian folk-tales_. bain. . _cossack fairy tales_. bain. . _new world fairy book_. kennedy. . _fairy tales, english, celtic, and indian_. joseph jacobs. - . this brings the subject down to the present time. the present-day contributions to folk-lore are found best in the records of the folk-lore society, published since its founding in london, in ; and daily additions, in the folk-lore journals of the various countries. references adams, oscar fay: _the dear old story-tellers_. lothrop. ashton, john: _chap-books of the th century_. chatto & windus. london, . bunce, john t.: _fairy tales, origin and meaning_. macmillan, . chamberlain, a.f.: _the child and childhood in folk-thought_. macmillan. clouston, w.a.: _popular tales and fictions_. edinburgh, blackwoods, . cyclopædia: "mythology." _encyclopædia britannica_. cox, miss roalfe: _cinderella_. introduction by lang. nutt, . dasent, george w.: _popular tales from the norse_. introduction. routledge. fiske, john: _myth and myth-makers_. houghton. field, mrs. e.m.: _the child and his book_. gardner, darton & co. frazer, j.g.: _the golden bough_. (spring ceremonies and primitive view of the soul.) macmillan. frere, miss: _old deccan days_. introduction. mcdonough. godfrey, elizabeth: _english children in the olden time_. dutton, . grimm, william and jacob: _household tales_. edited with valuable notes, by margaret hunt. introduction by lang. bell & sons, bohn's libraries. guerber, hélène a.: _legends of the middle ages_. (reynard the fox) american book co. halliwell, j.o.: _nursery rhymes of england_. _ibid.: popular rhymes and nursery tales_. smith, . halsey, rosalie: _forgotten books of the american nursery_. goodspeed, boston, . hartland, e.s.: _science of fairy tales_. preface. scribner, . _ibid.: english folk and fairy tales_. camelot series, scott, london. hartland, sidney: _legend of perseus_ (origin of a tale). hewins, caroline m.: _the history of children's books_. _atlantic_, : (jan., ). jacobs, joseph: _reynard the fox_. cranford series. macmillan. _ibid.: fairy tales_. introduction, notes and appendix. putnam. keightley, thomas: _fairy mythology_. macmillan. _ibid.: tales and popular fictions_. whittaker & co., london, . lang, andrew: _custom and myth_. longmans, london, . mabie, hamilton: _fairy tales every child should know_. introduction. doubleday. macdonald, george: _the light princess_. introduction. putnam. magazine: "myths and fairy tales." _fortnightly review_, may, . mitchell, donald g.: _about old story-tellers_. scribners. . moses, montrose: _children's books and reading_. kennerley. mulock, miss: _fairy book_. preface. crowell. pearson, edwin. _banbury chap-books and nursery toy-book literature_ ( th and early th centuries). london. a. reader, . perrault, charles: _popular tales_. edited by a. lang. introduction. oxford, . ritson, j.: _fairy tales_. pearson, london, . scott, sir walter: _minstrelsy of scottish border_. preface to tamlane, "dissertation on fairies," p. . skinner, h.m.: _readings in folk-lore_. american book co. steel, flora a.: _tales of the punjab_. introduction and appendix. macmillan. tabart, benj.: _fairy tales, or the lilliputian cabinet_. london, . review: _the quarterly review_, , no. , pp. - . tappan, eva m.: _the children's hour_. introduction to "folk-stories and fables." houghton. taylor, edgar: _german popular stories_. introduction by ruskin. chatto & windus. tylor, e.b.: _primitive culture_. holt, . warner: _fairy tales. library of the world's best literature_, vol. . welsh, charles: _fairy tales children love_. introduction. dodge. _ibid.:_ "the early history of children's books in new england." _new england magazine_, n.s. : - (april, ). _ibid.: a chap-book_. facsimile edition. . world book co. _ibid.: mother goose_. facsimile edition. . world book co. white, gleeson: "children's books and their illustrators." _international studio_, special winter number, - . chapter v classes of fairy tales but the fact that after having been repeated for two thousand years, a story still possesses a perfectly fresh attraction for a child of to-day, does indeed prove that there is in it something of imperishable worth.--felix adler. whatever has, at any time, appealed to the best emotions and moved the heart of a people, must have for their children's children, political, historical, and cultural value. this is especially true of folk-tales and folk-songs.--p.p. claxton, _united states commissioner of education_. i. available types of tales from all this wealth of accumulated folk-material which has come down to us through the ages, we must select, for we cannot crowd the child with all the folk-stuff that folk-lore scientists are striving to preserve for scientific purposes. moreover, naturally much of it contains the crudities, the coarseness, and the cruelties of primitive civilization; and it is not necessary that the child be burdened with this natural history of a past society. we must select from the past. in this selection of what shall be presented to the child we must be guided by two standards: first, we owe it to the child to hand on to him his literary heritage; and secondly, we must help him to make of himself the ideal man of the future. therefore the tales we offer must contribute to these two standards. the tales selected will be those which the ages have found interesting; for the fact that they have lived proves their fitness, they have lived because there was something in them that appealed to the universal heart. and because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. the tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man. they will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. the child would be handicapped in life to be ignorant of these tales. tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven classes of available types: ( ) the accumulative, or clock story; ( ) the animal tale; ( ) the humorous tale; ( ) the realistic tale; ( ) the romantic tale; ( ) the old tale; and ( ) the modern tale. i. the accumulative tale. the accumulative tale is the simplest form of the tale. it may be:-- ( ) a tale of simple repetition. ( ) a tale of repetition with an addition, incremental iteration. ( ) a tale of repetition, with variation. repetition and rhythm have grown out of communal conditions. the old stories are measured utterances. at first there was the spontaneous expression of a little community, with its gesture, action, sound, and dance, and the word, the shout, to help out. there was the group which repeated, which acted as a chorus, and the leader who added his individual variation. from these developed the folk-tale with the dialogue in place of the chorus. of the accumulative tales, _the house that jack built_ illustrates the first class of tales of simple repetition. this tale takes on a new interest as a remarkable study of phonics. if any one were so happy as to discover the phonic law which governs the euphony produced by the succession of vowels in the lines of milton's poetry, he would enjoy the same law worked out in _the house that jack built_. the original, as given by halliwell in his _nursery rhymes of england_, is said to be a hebrew hymn, at first written in chaldaic. to the hebrews of the middle ages it was called the _haggadah_, and was sung to a rude chant as part of the passover service. it first appeared in print in , at prague. later, in leipzig, it was published by the german scholar, liebrecht. it begins:-- a kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces of money: a kid, a kid, then came the cat and ate the kid, etc. then follow the various repetitive stanzas, the last one turning back and reacting on all the others:-- then came the holy one, blessed be he, and killed the angel of death, that killed the butcher, that slew the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burned the staff, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that my father bought for two pieces of money: a kid, a kid. the remarkable similarity to _the old woman, and her pig_[ ] at once proclaims the origin of that tale also. the interpretation of this tale is as follows: the kid is the hebrews; the father by whom it was purchased, is jehovah; the two pieces of money are aaron and moses; the cat is the assyrians; the dog is the babylonians; the staff is the persians; the fire is the greek empire and alexander; the water is the romans; the ox is the saracens; the butcher is the crusaders; and the angel of death is the turkish power. the message of this tale is that god will take vengeance over the turks and the hebrews will be restored to their own land. another tale of simple repetition, whose fairy element is the magic key, is _the key of the kingdom_, also found in halliwell's _nursery rhymes of england_:-- this is the key of the kingdom. in that kingdom there is a city, in that city there is a town, in that town there is a street, in that street there is a lane, in that lane there is a yard, in that yard there is a house, in that house there is a room, in that room there is a bed, on that bed there is a basket, in that basket there are some flowers. flowers in the basket, basket on the bed, bed in the room, etc. _the old woman and her pig_ illustrates the second class of accumulative tale, where there is an addition, and like _titty mouse and tatty mouse_, where the end turns back on the beginning and changes all that precedes. here there is a more marked plot. this same tale occurs in shropshire folk-lore, in the _scotch wife and her bush of berries_, in _club-fist_, an american folk-game described by newell, in cossack fairy tales, and in the danish, spanish, and italian. in the scandinavian, it is _nanny, who wouldn't go home to supper_, and in the punjab, _the grain of corn_, also given in _tales of laughter_. i have never seen a child who did not like it or who was not pleased with himself for accomplishing its telling. it lends itself most happily to illustration. _titty mouse and tatty mouse_ pleases because of the liveliness of its images, and because of the catastrophe at the end, which affects the child just as the tumble of his huge pile of blocks--the crash and general upheaval delight him. this tale has so many variants that it illustrates well the diffusion of fairy tales. it is grimm's _the spider and the flea_, which as we have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the norse _the cock who fell into the brewing vat_; and the indian _the death and burial of poor hen_. the curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some definite time, and from thence spread to all the world. _johnny cake_ and _the gingerbread man_ also represent the second class of accumulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff and a more decided introduction and conclusion. _how jack went to seek his fortune_ also shows more plot. it contains a theme similar to that of _the bremen town musicians_, which is distinctly a beast tale where the element of repetition remains to sustain the interest and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged short-story which is structurally complete, has developed. a fine accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the cossack _straw ox_, which has been described under "the short-story." here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in the unwinding. _the three bears_ illustrates the third class of repetitive story, where there is repetition and variation. here the iteration and parallelism have interest like the refrain of a song, and the technique of the story is like that of _the merchant of venice_. this is the ideal fairy story for the little child. it is unique in that it is the only instance in which a tale written by an author has become a folk-tale. it was written by southey, and appeared in _the doctor_, in london, in . southey may have used as his source, _scrapefoot_, which joseph jacobs has discovered for us, or he may have used _snow white_, which contains the episode of the chairs. southey has given to the world a nursery classic which should be retained in its purity of form. the manner of the folk, in substituting for the little old woman of southey's tale, goldilocks, and the difference that it effects in the tale, proves the greater interest children naturally feel in the tale with a child. similarly, in telling _the story of midas_ to an audience of eager little people, one naturally takes the fine old myth from ovid as bulfinch gives it, and puts into it the marigold of hawthorne's creation. and after knowing marigold, no child likes the story without her. silver hair is another substitute for the little old woman in _the three bears_. the very little child's reception to _three bears_ will depend largely on the previous experience with bears and on the attitude of the person telling the story. a little girl who was listening to _the three bears_ for the first time, as she heard how the three bears stood looking out of their upstairs window after goldilocks running across the wood, said, "why didn't goldilocks lie down beside the baby bear?" to her the bear was associated with the friendly teddy bear she took with her to bed at night, and the story had absolutely no thrill of fear because it had been told with an emphasis on the comical rather than on the fearful. similar in structure to _the three bears_ is the norse _three billy-goats_, which belongs to the same class of delightful repetitive tales and in which the sequence of the tale is in the same three distinct steps. ii. the animal tale the animal tale includes many of the most pleasing children's tales. indeed some authorities would go so far as to trace all fairy tales back to some ancestor of an animal tale; and in many cases this certainly can be done just as we trace _three bears_ back to _scrapefoot_. the animal tale is either an old beast tale, such as _scrapefoot_ or _old sultan_; or a fairy tale which is an elaborated development of a fable, such as _the country mouse and the city mouse_ or the tales of _reynard the fox_ or grimm's _the king of the birds_, and _the sparrow and his four children_; or it is a purely imaginary creation, such as kipling's _the elephant's child_ or andersen's _the bronze pig_. the beast tale is a very old form which was a story of some successful primitive hunt or of some primitive man's experience with animals in which he looked up to the beast as a brother superior to himself in strength, courage, endurance, swiftness, keen scent, vision, or cunning. later, in more civilized society, when men became interested in problems of conduct, animals were introduced to point the moral of the tale, and we have the fable. the fable resulted when a truth was stated in concrete story form. when this truth was in gnomic form, stated in general terms, it became compressed into the proverb. the fable was brief, intense, and concerned with the distinguishing characteristics of the animal characters, who were endowed with human traits. such were the _fables of Æsop_. then followed the beast epic, such as _reynard the fox_, in which the personality of the animals became less prominent and the animal characters became types of humanity. later, the beast tale took the form of narratives of hunters, where the interest centered in the excitement of the hunt and in the victory of the hunter. with the thirst for universal knowledge in the days following bacon there gradually grew a desire to learn also about animals. then followed animal anecdotes, the result of observation and imagination, often regarding the mental processes of animals. with the growth of the scientific spirit the interest in natural history developed. the modern animal story since has a basis of natural science, but it also seeks to search the motive back of the action, it is a psychological romance. the early modern animal tales such as _black beauty_ show sympathy with animals, but their psychology is human. in seton thompson's _krag_, which is a masterpiece, the interest centers about the personality and the mentality of the animal and his purely physical characteristics. perhaps it is true that these physical characteristics are somewhat imaginary and over-drawn and that overmuch freedom has been used in interpreting these physical signs. in kipling's tales we have a later evolution of the animal tale. his animals possess personality in emotion and thought. in the forest-friends of mowgli we have humanized animals possessing human power of thinking and of expressing. in real life animal motives seem simple, one dominant motive crowds out all others. but kipling's animals show very complex motives, they reason and judge more than our knowledge of animal life justifies. in the _just-so stories_ kipling has given us the animal _pourquois_ tale with a basis of scientific truth. of these delightful fairy tales, _the elephant's child_ and _how the camel got his hump_ may be used in the kindergarten. perhaps the latest evolution of the animal tale is by charles g.d. roberts. the animal characters in his _kindred of the wild_ are given animal characteristics. they have become interesting as exhibiting these traits and not as typifying human motives; they show an animal psychology. the tales have a scientific basis, and the interest is centered in this and not in an exaggeration of it. having viewed the animal tale as a growth let us look now at a few individual tales:-- one of the most pleasing animal tales is _henny_ _penny_, or _chicken lichen_, as it is sometimes called, told by jacobs in _english fairy tales_. here the enterprising little hen, new to the ways of the world, ventures to take a walk. because a grain of corn falls on her top-knot, she believes the sky is falling, her walk takes direction, and thereafter she proceeds to tell the king. she takes with her all she meets, who, like her, are credulous,--cocky locky, ducky daddies, goosey poosey, and turky lurky,--until they meet foxy woxy, who leads them into his cave, never to come out again. this is similar to the delightful jataka tale of _the foolish timid rabbit_, which before has been outlined for telling, which has been re-told by ellen c. babbit. in this tale a rabbit, asleep under a palm tree, heard a noise, and thought "the earth was all breaking up." so he ran until he met another rabbit, and then a hundred other rabbits, a deer, a fox, an elephant, and at last a lion. all the animals except the lion accepted the rabbit's news and followed. but the lion made a stand and asked for facts. he ran to the hill in front of the animals and roared three times. he traced the tale back to the first rabbit, and taking him on his back, ran with him to the foot of the hill where the palm tree grew. there, under the tree, lay a cocoanut. the lion explained the sound the rabbit had heard, then ran back and told the other animals, and they all stopped running. _brother rabbit takes some exercise_, a tale from _nights with uncle remus_ is very similar to _henny_ _penny_ and could be used at the same time. it is also similar to grimm's _wolf and seven kids_, the english _story of three pigs_, the irish _the end of the world_, and an italian popular tale. _the sheep and the pig_, adapted from the scandinavian by miss bailey in _for the children's hour_, given also in dasent's _tales from the field_, is a delightfully vivacious and humorous tale which reminds one of _henny penny_. a sheep and pig started out to find a home, to live together. they traveled until they met a rabbit and then followed this dialogue: _r_. "where are you going?" _s. and p_. "we are going to build us a house." _r_. "may i live with you?" _s. and p_. "what can you do to help?" the rabbit scratched his leg with his left hind foot for a minute and said, "i can gnaw pegs with my sharp teeth and i can put them in with my paws." "good," said the sheep and the pig, "you may come with us!" then they met a gray goose who could pull moss and stuff it in cracks, and a cock who could crow early and waken all. so they all found a house and lived in it happily. the spanish _media pollito_, or _little half-chick_, is another accumulative animal tale similar to _henny penny_, and one which is worthy of university study. the disobedient but energetic hero who went off to madrid is very appealing and constantly amusing, and the tale possesses unusual beauty. the interest centers in the character. the beauty lies in the setting of the adventures, as medio pollito came to a stream, to a large chestnut tree, to the wind, to the soldiers outside the city gates, to the king's palace at madrid, and to the king's cook, until in the end he reached the high point of immortalization as the weather-vane of a church steeple. _the story of three pigs_ could contend with _the three bears_ for the position of ideal story for little people. it suits them even better than _the three bears_, perhaps because they can identify themselves more easily with the hero, who is a most winning, clever individual, though a pig. the children know nothing of the standards of the greek drama, but they recognize a good thing; and when the actors in their story are great in interest and in liveliness, they respond with a corresponding appreciation. the dramatic element in _the three pigs_ is strong and all children love to dramatize it. the story is the italian _three goslings_, the negro _tiny pig_, the indian _lambikin_, and the german _the wolf and seven kids_. this tale is given by andrew lang in his _green fairy book_. the most satisfactory presentation of the story is given by leslie brooke in his _golden goose book_. the german version occurred in an old poem, _reinhart fuchs_, in which the kid sees the wolf through a chink. originally the characters must have been kids, for little pigs do not have hair on their "chinny chin chins." one of the earliest modern animal tales is _the good-natured bear_,[ ] by richard hengist horne, the english critic. this tale was written in , just when men were beginning to gain a greater knowledge of animal life. it is both psychological and imaginative. it was brought to the attention of the english public in a criticism, _on some illustrated christmas books_,[ ] by thackeray, who considered it one of the "wittiest, pleasantest, and kindest of books, and an admirable story." it is now out of print, but it seems to be worthy of being preserved and reprinted. the story is the autobiography of a bear, who first tells about his interesting experiences as a baby bear. he first gives to gretchen and the children gathered about him an account of his experience when his mother first taught him to walk alone. iii. the humorous tale the humorous tale is one of the most pleasing to the little child. it pleases everybody, but it suits him especially because the essence of humor is a mixture of love and surprise, and both appeal to the child completely. humor brings joy into the world, so does the little child, their very existence is a harmony. humor sees contrasts, shows good sense, and feels compassion. it stimulates curiosity. its laughter is impersonal and has a social and spiritual effect. it acts like fresh air, it clarifies the atmosphere of the mind and it enables one to see things in a sharply defined light. it reveals character; it breaks up a situation, reconstructs it, and so views life, interprets it. it plays with life, it frees the spirit, and it invigorates the soul. speaking of humor, thackeray, in "a grumble about christmas books," , considered that the motto for humor should be the same as the talisman worn by the prioress in chaucer:-- about hire arm a broche of gold ful shene, on which was first ywritten a crowned _a_, and after, _amor vincit omnia_. he continued: "the works of the real humorist always have this sacred press-mark, i think. try shakespeare, first of all, cervantes, addison, poor dick steele, and dear harry fielding, the tender and delightful jean paul, sterne, and scott,--and love is the humorist's best characteristic and gives that charming ring to their laughter in which all the good-natured world joins in chorus." the humorous element for children appears in the repetition of phrases such as we find in _three bears_, _three pigs_, and _three billy-goats_; in the contrast in the change of voice so noticeable also in these three tales; in the contrast of ideas so conspicuous in kipling's _elephant's child_; and in the element of surprise so evident when johnny cake is eaten by the fox, or when little hen eats the bread, or when little pig outwits the wolf. the humorous element for children also lies in the incongruous, the exaggerated, or in the grotesque, so well displayed in lear's _nonsense rhymes_, and much of the charm of _alice in wonderland_. the humorous element must change accordingly for older children, who become surprised less easily, and whose tales therefore, in order to surprise, must have more clever ideas and more subtle fancy. _the musicians of bremen_ is a good type of humorous tale. it shows all the elements of true humor. its philosophy is healthy; it views life as a whole and escapes tragedy by seeing the comic situation in the midst of trouble. it is full of the social good-comradeship which is a condition of humor. it possesses a suspense that is unusual, and is a series of surprises with one grand surprise to the robbers at their feast as its climax. the donkey is a noble hero who breathes a spirit of courage like that of the fine homeric heroes. his achievement of a home is a mastery that pleases children. and the message of the tale, which after all, is its chief worth--that there ought to be room in the world for the aged and the worn out, and that "the guilty flee when no man pursueth"--appeals to their compassion and their good sense. the variety of noises furnished by the different characters is a pleasing repetition with variation that is a special element of humor; and the grand chorus of music leaves no doubt as to the climax. we must view life with these four who are up against the facts of life, and whose lot presents a variety of contrast. the donkey, incapacitated because of old age, had the courage to set out on a quest. he met the dog who could hunt no longer, stopping in the middle of the road, panting for breath; the cat who had only stumps for teeth, sitting in the middle of the road, wearing an unhappy heart behind a face dismal as three rainy sundays; and the rooster who just overheard the cook say he was to be made into soup next sunday, sitting on the top of the gate crowing his last as loud as he could crow. the donkey, to these musicians he collected, spoke as a leader and as a true humorist. in a simple tale like _the bremen town musicians_ it is surprising how much of interest can develop: the adventure in the wood; the motif of some one going to a tree-top and seeing from there a light afar off, which appears in _hop-o'-my-thumb_ and in many other tales; the example of coöperation, where all had a unity of purpose; an example of a good complete short-story form which illustrates introduction, setting, characters and dialogue--all these proclaim this one of the fine old stories. in its most dramatic form, and to jacobs its most impressive one, it appears in the celtic tales as _jack and his comrades_. it may have been derived from _old sultan_, a grimm tale which is somewhat similar to _the wolf and the hungry dog_, in steinhowel, . _how jack sought his fortune_ is an english tale of coöperation which is similar but not nearly so pleasing. a danish tale of cooperation, _pleiades_, is found in lansing's _fairy tales_. _how six traveled through the world_ is a grimm tale which, though suited to older children, contains the same general theme. very many of the tales suited to kindergarten children which have been mentioned in various chapters, contain a large element of humor. the nonsense drolls are a type distinct from the humorous tale proper, yet distinctly humorous. such are the realistic _lazy jack_, _henny penny_, and _billy bobtail_. then since repetition is an element of humor, many accumulative tales rank as humorous: such as _lambikin_, _the old woman and her pig_, _medio pollito_, _the straw ox_, _johnny cake_, and _three billy-goats_. among the humorous tales proper are andersen's _snow man_; _the cat and the mouse in partnership_; _the rabbit who wanted red wings_; _the elephant's child_; and very many of the uncle remus tales, such as _why the hawk catches chickens_, _brother rabbit and brother tiger_, and _heyo, house_! all in _uncle remus and the little boy_. _the story of little black mingo_ in _tales of laughter_, is a very attractive humorous tale, but it is more suited to the child of the second grade. _drakesbill_ is a french humorous accumulative tale with a plot constructed similarly to that of the cossack _straw ox_. drakesbill, who was so tiny they called him bill drake, was a great worker and soon saved a hundred dollars in gold which he lent to the king. but as the king never offered to pay, one morning drakesbill set out, singing as he went, "quack, quack, quack, when shall i get my money back?" to all the objects he met and to their questions he replied, "i am going to the king to ask him to pay me what he owes me." when they begged, "take me with you!" he was willing, but he said, "you must make yourself small, get into my mouth, and creep under my tongue!" he arrived at the palace with his companions concealed in his mouth: a fox, a ladder, laughing river, and wasp-nest. on asking to see the king, he was not escorted with dignity but sent to the poultry-yard, to the turkeys and chickens who fought him. then he surprised them by calling forth the fox who killed the fowls. when he was thrown into a well, he called out the ladder to help him. when about to be thrown into the fire, he called out the river who overwhelmed the rest and left him serenely swimming. when surrounded by the king's men and their swords he called out the wasp-nest who drove away all but drakesbill, leaving him free to look for his money. but he found none as the king had spent all. so he seated himself upon the throne and became king. the element of humor here, as has been mentioned previously, is that drakesbill, after every rebuff of fortune maintained his happy, fresh vivacity, and triumphantly repeated his one cry, "quack, quack, quack, when shall i get my money back?" there is humor, too, in the repetition of dialogue, as on his way to the king he met the various characters and talked to them. humor lies also in the real lively surprises which drakesbill so effectively gave during his visit to the king. one can see how this tale might have been a satire reflecting upon a spendthrift king. iv. the realistic tale the realistic fairy tale has a great sympathy with humble life and desires to reproduce faithfully all life worth while. the spirit of it has been expressed by kipling-- each in his separate star, shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the god of things as they are. sometimes the realistic story has a scientific spirit and interest. a realistic tale that is good will present not only what is true but what is possible, probable, or inevitable, making its truth impressive. very often it does not reach this ideal. a transcript of actual life may be selected, but that is a photograph and not a picture with a strong purpose to make one point, and with artistic design. the characters, though true to life, may be lifeless and colorless, and their doings and what happens to them uninteresting. for this reason, many modern writers of tales for children, respecting the worth of the realistic, neglect to comply with what the realistic demands, and produce insipid, unconvincing tales. the realistic tale should deal with the simple and the ordinary rather than with the exceptional; and the test is not how much, but how little, credulity it arouses. grimm's _hans in luck_ is a perfect realistic tale, as are grimm's _clever elsa_ and the norse _three sillies_, although these tales are suited to slightly older children. the drolls often appear among the realistic tales, as if genuine humor were more fresh when related to the things of actual life. the english _lazy jack_ is a delightful realistic droll which contains motifs that appear frequently among the tales. the touchstone motif of a humble individual causing nobility to laugh appears in grimm's _dummling and his golden goose_. it appears also in _zerbino the savage_, a most elaborated neapolitan tale retold by laboulaye in his _last fairy tales_; a tale full of humor, wit, and satire that would delight the cultured man of the world. in _lazy jack_ the setting is in humble life. a poor mother lived on the common with her indolent son and managed to earn a livelihood by spinning. one day the mother lost patience and threatened to send from home this idle son if he did not get work. so he set out. each day he returned to his mother with his day's earnings. the humor lies in what he brought, in how he brought it, and in what happened to it; in the admonition of his mother, "you should have done so and so," and jack's one reply, "i'll do so another time"; in jack's literal use of his mother's admonition, and the catastrophe it brought him on the following day, and on each successive day, as he brought home a piece of money, a jar of milk, a cream cheese, a tom-cat, a shoulder of mutton, and at last a donkey. the humor lies in the contrast between what jack did and what anybody "with sense" knows he ought to have done, until when royalty beheld him carrying the donkey on his shoulders, with legs sticking up in the air, it could bear no more, and burst into laughter. this is a good realistic droll to use because it impresses the truth, that even a little child must reason and judge and use his own common sense. _the story of the little red hen_ is a realistic tale which presents a simple picture of humble thrift. andersen's _tin soldier_ is a realistic tale which gives an adventure that might happen to a real tin soldier. _the old woman and her pig_, whose history has been given under _the accumulative tale_, is realistic. its theme is the simple experience of an aged peasant who swept her house, who had the unusual much-coveted pleasure of finding a dime, who went to market and bought a pig for so small a sum. but on the way home, as the pig became contrary when reaching a stile, and refused to go, the old woman had to seek aid. so she asked the dog, the stick, the fire, etc. she asked aid first from the nearest at hand; and each object asked, in its turn sought help from the next higher power. one great source of pleasure in this tale is that each object whose aid is sought is asked to do the thing its nature would compel it to do--the dog to bite, the stick to beat, etc.; and each successive object chosen is the one which, by the law of its nature, is a master to the preceding one. the dog, by virtue of ability to bite, has power over the pig; the stick has ability to master the dog; and water in its power to quench is master over fire. because of this intimate connection of cause and effect, this tale contributes in an unusual degree to the development of the child's reason and memory. he may remember the sequence of the plot or remake the tale if he forgets, by reasoning out the association between the successive objects from whom aid was asked. it is through this association that the memory is exercised. _how two beetles took lodgings_, in _tales of laughter_, is a realistic story which has a scientific spirit and interest. its basis of truth belongs to the realm of nature study. its narration of how two beetles set up housekeeping by visiting an ant-hill and helping themselves to the home and furnishings of the ants, would be very well suited either to precede or to follow the actual study of an ant-hill by the children. the story gives a good glimpse of the home of the ants, of their manner of living, and of the characteristics of the ants and beetles. it is not science mollified, but a good story full of life and humor, with a basis of scientific truth. many tales not realistic contain a large realistic element. the fine old romantic tales, such as _cinderella_, _sleeping beauty_, and _bremen town musicians_, have a large realistic element. in _the little elves_ we have the realistic picture of a simple german home. in _beauty and the beast_ we have a realistic glimpse of the three various ways the wealthy merchant's daughters accommodated themselves to their father's loss of fortune, which reminds us of a parallel theme in shakespeare's _king lear_. in _red riding hood_ we have the realistic starting out of a little girl to visit her grandmother. this realistic element appeals to the child because, as we have noted, it accords with his experience, and it therefore seems less strange. in _titty mouse and tatty mouse_ the setting is realistic but becomes transformed into the romantic when natural doings of everyday life take on meaning from the unusual happening in the tale. it is realistic for titty mouse and tatty mouse to live in a little house, to get some corn, to make a pudding, and to put it on to boil. but when the pot tumbled over and scalded titty, the romantic began. the stool which was real and common and stood by the door became transformed with animation, it talked: "titty's dead, and so i weep"; and it hopped! then a broom caught the same animation from the same theme, and swept; a door jarred; a window creaked; an old form ran round the house; a walnut tree shed its leaves; a little bird moulted his pretty feathers; a little girl spilled her milk; a man tumbled off his ladder; and the walnut tree fell with a crash, upsetting everything and burying titty in the ruins. they all learned to convey the same message. the common and customary became uncommon and unusual with extraordinary life, feeling, and lively movement. other romantic tales with a large realistic element are _the three bears_, _the three pigs_, and _the three billy-goats_, animal tales which of necessity must be largely realistic, for their foundation is in the facts of the nature, habits, and traits of the animal characters they portray. v. the romantic tale the romantic tale reflects emotion and it contains adventure and the picturesque; it deals with dreams, distant places, the sea, the sky, and objects of wonder touched with beauty and strangeness. the purpose of the romantic is to arouse emotion, pity, or the sense of the heroic; and it often exaggerates character and incidents beyond the normal. the test of the romantic tale as well as of the realistic tale is in the reality it possesses. this reality it will possess, not only because it is true, but because it is also true to life. and it is to be remembered that because of the unusual setting in a romantic tale the truth it presents stands out very clearly with much impressiveness. _red riding hood_ is a more impressive tale than _the three bears_. _cinderella_ is a good type of the old romantic tale. it has a never-ending attraction for children just as it has had for all peoples of the world; for this tale has as many as three hundred and forty-five variants, which have been examined by miss cox. in these variants there are many common incidents, such as the hearth abode, the helpful animal, the heroine disguise, the ill-treated heroine, the lost shoe, the love-sick prince, magic dresses, the magic tree, the threefold flight, the false bride, and many others. but the one incident which claims the tale as a cinderella tale proper, is the recognition of the heroine by means of her shoe. in the greek _rhodope_, the slipper is carried off by an eagle and dropped into the lap of the king of egypt, who seeks and marries the owner. in the hindu tale the rajah's daughter loses her slipper in the forest where it is found by the prince. the interpretation of _cinderella_ is that the maiden, the dawn, is dull and gray away from the brightness of the sun. the sisters are the clouds that shadow the dawn, and the stepmother is night. the dawn hurries away from the pursuing prince, the sun, who, after a long search, overtakes her in her glorious robes of sunset. this tale is the hindu _sodewa bai_, the zuni _poor turkey girl_, and the english _rushen coatie, cap-o'-rushes_, and _catskin_. _catskin_, which mr. burchell told to the children of the vicar of wakefield, is considered by newell as the oldest of the cinderella types, appearing in straparola in , while _cinderella_ appeared first in basile in . _catskin_, in ballad form as given by halliwell, was printed in aldermary churchyard, england, in ; and the form as given by jacobs well illustrates how the prose tale developed from the old ballad. the two most common forms of _cinderella_ are perrault's and grimm's, either of which is suited to the very little child. perrault's _cinderella_ shows about twenty distinct differences from the grimm tale:-- ( ) it omits the mother's death-bed injunction to cinderella. ( ) it omits the wooden shoes and the cloak. ( ) the stepmother assigns more modern tasks. it omits the pease-and-beans task. ( ) it shows cinderella sleeping in a garret instead of on the hearth. ( ) it omits the father. ( ) it omits the hazel bough. ( ) it omits the three wishes. ( ) it substitutes the fairy godmother for the hazel tree and the friendly doves. ( ) it substitutes transformation for tree-shaking. ( ) it omits the episode of the pear tree and of the pigeon-house. ( ) it omits the use of pitch and axe-cutting. ( ) it omits the false bride and the two doves. ( ) it substitutes two nights at the ball for three nights. ( ) it makes c. forgiving and generous at the end. the sisters are not punished. ( ) it contains slippers of glass instead of slippers of gold. ( ) it simplifies the narrative, improves the structure, and puts in the condition, which is a keystone to the structure. ( ) it has no poetical refrain. ( ) it is more direct and dramatic. ( ) it draws the characters more clearly. ( ) is it not more artificial and conventional? this contrast shows the grimm tale to be the more poetical, while it is the more complex, and contains more barbarous and gruesome elements unsuited to the child of to-day. of the two forms, the grimm tale seems the superior tale, however, and if rewritten in a literary form suited to the child, might become even preferable. _sleeping beauty_, which is another romantic tale that might claim to be the most popular fairy tale, has for its theme the long sleep of winter and the awakening of spring. the earth goddess, pricked by winter's dart, falls into a deep sleep from which she is awakened by the sun who searches far for her. this tale is similar to the norse _balder_ and the greek _persephone_. some of its incidents appear also in _the two brothers_, an egyptian tale of the nineteenth dynasty of seti ii, in which the hathors who pronounce the fate of the prince correspond to the wicked old fairy. the spindle whose prick caused slumber is the arrow that wounded achilles, the thorn which pricked siegfried, the mistle-toe which wounded balder, and the poisoned nail of the demon in _surya bai_. in the northern form of the story we find the ivy, which is the one plant that can endure winter's touch. the theme of the long sleep occurs in the mediæval legend of _the seven sleepers of ephesus_, in the english _the king of england and his three sons_, poetically as tennyson has given it in his _day-dream_, and in the _story of brunhilde_, in _siegfried_. here a hedge of flames encircles brunhilde who is awakened at the touch of siegfried's magic sword, just as sleeping beauty is awakened by the prince's kiss. the kiss may be a survival of an ancient form of worship of some local goddess. in the hindu _panch-rhul ranee_, seven ditches surmounted by seven hedges of spears, surround the heroine. of the perrault and grimm versions of _sleeping beauty_, the perrault version is long and complex because it contains the minor tale of the cruel stepmother added to the main tale, while the grimm _briar rose_ is a model of structure easily separated into ten leading episodes. _sleeping beauty_ appeared in basile's _pentamerone_ where there is given the beautiful incident of the baby sucking the spike of flax out of its sleeping mother's fingers. the perrault version agrees with that of basile in naming the twins, who are sun and moon in the _pentamerone_, day and dawn. _red riding hood_ is another romantic tale[ ] that could claim to be the one most popular fairy tale of all fairy tales. similar tales occur in the story of the greek kronos swallowing his children, in the algonquin legend repeated in _hiawatha_, and in an aryan story of a dragon swallowing the sun and being killed by the sun-god, indra. _red riding hood_ appeals to a child's sense of fear, it gives a thrill which if not too intense, is distinctly pleasing. but it pleases less noticeably perhaps because of its atmosphere of love and service, and because it presents a picture of a dear little maid. the grandmother's gift of love to the child, the bright red hood, the mother's parting injunction, the wolf's change of aspect and voice to suit the child--all these directly and indirectly emphasize love, tenderness, and appreciation of simple childhood. the child's errand of gratitude and love, the play in the wood, the faith in the woodcutter's presence--all are characteristic of a typical little maid and one to be loved. there is in the tale too, the beauty of the wood--flowers, birds, and the freshness of the open air. the ending of the tale is varied. in perrault the wolf ate grandmother and then ate red riding hood. in grimm one version gives it that the hunter, hearing snoring, went to see what the old lady needed. he cut open the wolf, and grandmother and red riding hood became alive. he filled the wolf with stones. when the wolf awoke, he tried to run, and died. all three were happy; the hunter took the skin, grandmother had her cake and wine, and red riding hood was safe and had her little girl's lesson of obedience. another grimm ending is that little red-cap reached the grandmother before the wolf, and after telling her that she had met him, they both locked the door. then they filled a trough with water in which the sausages had been boiled. when the wolf tried to get in and got up on the roof, he was enticed by the odor, and fell into the trough. a great deal of freedom has been used in re-telling the ending of this tale, usually with the purpose of preventing the wolf from eating red riding hood. in regard to the conclusion of _red riding hood_, thackeray said: "i am reconciled to the wolf eating red riding hood because i have given up believing this is a moral tale altogether and am content to receive it as a wild, odd, surprising, and not unkindly fairy story." the interpretation of _red riding hood_--which the children need not know--is that the evening sun goes to see her grandmother, the earth, who is the first to be swallowed up by the wolf of night and darkness. the red cloak is the twilight glow. the hunter may be the rising sun that rescues all from night. _red riding hood_ has been charmingly elaborated in tieck's _romantic poems_, and a similar story appears in a swedish popular song, _jungfrun i'blaskagen_, in _folkviser_ ; , . vi, vii. the old tale and the modern tale. the old fairy tale is to be distinguished from the modern fairy tale. most of the tales selected have been old tales because they possess the characteristics suited to the little child. the modern fairy tale may be said to begin with andersen's _fairy tales_.--since andersen has been referred to frequently and as a study of _the tin soldier_ has already been given, andersen's work can receive no more detailed treatment here.--the modern fairy tale, since the time of andersen, has yet to learn simplicity and sincerity. it often is long and involved and presents a multiplicity of images that is confusing. it lacks the great art qualities of the old tale, the central unity and harmony of character and plot. the _idea_ must be the soul of the narrative, and the problem is to make happen to the characters things that are expressive of the idea. the story must hold by its interest, and must be sincere and inevitable to be convincing. it must understand that the method of expression must be the method of suggestion and not that of detail. the old tale set no boundaries to its suggestion. it used concrete artistry; but because the symbol expressed less it implied more. the modern tale is more definitely intentional and it often sets boundaries to its suggestion because the symbol expresses so much. frequently it emphasizes the satiric and critical element, and its humor often is heavy and clumsy. to be literature, as has been pointed out, besides characters, plot, setting, and dialogue, a classic must present truth; it must have emotion and imagination molded with beauty into the form of language; and it must have the power of a classic to bestow upon the mind a permanent enrichment. any examination of the modern fairy tale very frequently shows a failure to meet these requirements. the modern tale is not so poor, however, when we mention such tales as lewis carroll's _alice in wonderland_, oscar wilde's _happy prince_, alice brown's _gradual fairy_, frances browne's _prince fairyfoot_, miss mulock's _little lame prince_, barrie's _peter pan_, jean ingelow's _mopsa, the fairy_ and _the ouphe in the wood_, field's _the story of claus_, stockton's _old pipes and the dryad_, kingsley's _water babies_, ruskin's _king of the golden river_, collodi's _pinocchio_, maeterlinck's _blue-bird_, kipling's _just-so stories_ and the tales of the _jungle books_, selma lagerlöf's _wonderful adventures of nils_, the _uncle remus tales_ of harris, etc. but these classics are, with a few exceptions, the richness of the primary and elementary literature. the modern fairy tale suited to the kindergarten child, is at a disadvantage, for most likely it is hidden away in some magazine, waiting for appreciation to bring some attention to it. and in these complex modern days it is difficult to secure a tale whose simplicity suits the little child. among the best tales for little people are miss harrison's _hans and the four giants_ and _little beta and the lame giant_. in _little beta and the lame giant_ a natural child is placed in unusual surroundings, where the gentleness of the giant and the strength of love in the little girl present strong contrasts that please and satisfy. _the sea fairy and the land fairy_ in _some fairies i have met_, by mrs. stawell, though possessing much charm and beauty, is too complicated for the little people. it is a quarrel of a sea fairy and a land fairy. it is marked by good structure, it presents a problem in the introduction, has light fancy suited to its characters, piquant dialogue, good description, visualized expressions, and it presents distinct pictures. its method is direct and it gets immediately into the story. its method of personification, which in this, perhaps the best story of the collection, is rather delightful, in some of the others is less happy and is open to question. _how double darling's old shoes became lady slippers_, by candace wheeler, in _st. nicholas_, is a really delightful modern fairy story suited to be read to the little child. it is the experience of a little girl with new shoes and her dream about her old shoes. but the story lacks in structure, there is not the steady rise to one great action, the episode of the santa claus tree is somewhat foreign and unnecessary, and the conclusion falls flat because the end seems to continue after the problem has been worked out. in _the dwarf's tailor_, by underhill, there is much conversation about things and an indirect use of language, such as "arouse them to reply" and "continued to question," which is tedious. the humor is at times heavy, quoting proverbs, such as "the pitcher that goes too often to the well is broken at last." the climax is without interest. the scene of the dwarfs around the fire--in which the chief element of humor seems to be that the tailor gives the dwarf a slap--is rather foolish than funny. the details are trite and the transformation misses being pleasing. again there is not much plot and the story does not hold by its interest. in _the golden egg and the cock of gold_, by scudder, the conversation is not always to the point, is somewhat on the gossipy order, is trite, and the suspense is not held because the climax is told beforehand. mrs. burton harrison's _old fashioned fairy book_ is very pleasing, but it was written for her two sons, who were older children. it has the fault of presenting too great a variety of images and it lacks simplicity of structure. its _juliet_, or _the little white mouse_, which seems to be a re-telling of d'aulnoy's _good little mouse_, contains a good description of the old-time fairy dress. _deep sea violets_, perhaps the best-written story in the book, gives a good picture of a maiden taken to a merman's realm. _rosy's stay-at-home parties_ has delightful imagination similar to that of andersen. _five little pigs_, by katherine pyle, is a delightful little modern story, which could be used with interest by the child who knows _the story of three little pigs_. _the little rooster_, by southey, is a very pleasing realistic tale of utmost simplicity which, because of its talking animals, might be included here. a criticism of this tale, together with a list of realistic stories containing some realistic fairy tales suited to the kindergarten, may be read in _educational foundations_, october, . _the hen that hatched ducks_, by harriet beecher stowe, is a pleasing and sprightly humorous tale of madam feathertop and her surprising family of eight ducks, and of master gray cock, dame scratchard and dr. peppercorn. a modern tale that is very acceptable to the children is _the cock, the mouse, and the little red hen_, by félicité lefèvre, which is a re-telling of the _story of the little red hen_ combined with the story of _the little rid hin_. in this tale the two old classic stories are preserved but re-experienced, with such details improvised as a clever child would himself naturally make. these additional details appeal to his imagination and give life-likeness and freshness to the tale, but they do not detract from the impression of the original or confuse the identity of the characters in the old tales. one must not forget _peter rabbit_--that captivating, realistic fairy tale by beatrix potter--and his companions, _benjamin bunny, pigling bland, tom kitten_, and the rest, of which children never tire. _peter rabbit_ undoubtedly holds a place as a kindergarten classic. in somewhat the same class of merry animal tales is _tommy and the wishing stone_, a series of tales by thornton burgess, in _st. nicholas_, . here the child enjoys the novel transformation of becoming a musk-rat, a ruffed grouse, a toad, honker the goose, and other interesting personages. a modern fairy tale which is received gladly by children is _ludwig and marleen_, by jane hoxie. here we have the friendly fox who grants to ludwig the wishes he asks for marleen. the theme parallels for the little people the charm of _the fisherman and his wife_, a grimm tale suited to the second grade. among modern animal tales _the elephant's child_[ ], one of the _just-so stories_ by rudyard kipling, ranks high as a fairy tale produced for little children by one of the great literary masters of the short-story. a modern tale that is a bit of pure imagination and seems an attempt to follow grimm and andersen, is _a quick-running squash_, in aspinwall's _short stories for short people_. it uses the little boy's interest in a garden--his garden.--interest centers about the fairy, the magic seed, the wonderful ride, and the happy ending. it uses the simple, everyday life and puts into it the unusual and the wonderful where nothing is impossible. it blends the realistic and the romantic in a way that is most pleasing. _the rich goose_, by leora robinson, in the _outlook_, is an accumulative tale with an interesting ending and surprise. _why the morning glory climbs_, by elizabeth mccracken, in miss bryant's _how to tell stories_, is a simple fanciful tale. _the discontented pendulum_, by jane taylor, in poulssen's _in the child's world_, is a good illustration of the modern purely fanciful tale. _what bunch and joker saw in the moon_, in _wide-awake chatterbox_, about , is a most delightful modern fanciful tale, although it is best suited to the child of nine or ten. _greencap_, by ruth hays, in _st. nicholas_, june, , appeals to the child through the experience of sarah jane, whose mother and father traveled to india. sarah went to live with aunt jane and there met greencap who granted the proverbial "three wishes." _alice in wonderland_ ranks in a class by itself among modern fanciful tales but it is better suited to the child of the third and fourth grades. a modern fairy tale which is suited to the child's simplicity and which will stimulate his own desire to make a tale, is _the doll who was sister to a princess_, one of the _toy stories_ by carolyn bailey which have been published by the _kindergarten review_ during - . among modern tales selected from _fairy stories re-told from st. nicholas_, appear some interesting ones which might be read to the little child, or told in the primary grades. among these might be mentioned:-- _the ballad of the blacksmith's sons_, a modern tale in verse by mary e. wilkins. _casperl_, by h.c. bunner, a modern sleeping beauty tale. this tale has the virtue of not being complex and elaborate. it has the underlying idea that "people who are helping others have a strength beyond their own." _ten little dwarfs_, by sophie dorsey, from the french of emile souvestre. it tells of the ten little dwarfs who lived in the good-wife's fingers. _wondering tom_, by mary mapes dodge. this is a bright story of a boy who hamlet-like, hesitated to act. tom was always wondering. the story contains a fairy, kumtoo-thepoynt, who sat on a toadstool and looked profound. it is realistic and romantic and has fine touches of humor. it tells how wondering tom became transformed into a royal ship-builder. _how an elf set up housekeeping_, by anne cleve. this is a good tale of fancy. an elf set up housekeeping in a lily and obtained a curtain from a spider, down from a thistle, a stool from a toad who lived in a green house in the wood, etc. _the wish-ring_, translated from the german by anne eichberg. this is a tale with the implied message that "the best way to secure one's best wish is to work for it." _the hop-about man_, by agnes herbertson, in _little folks magazine_, is a very pleasing modern romantic fairy tale for little children. wee wun was a gnome who lived in the bye-bye meadow in a fine new house which he loved. as he flew across the meadow he had his pockets full of blue blow-away seeds. in the meadow he found a pair of shoes, of blue and silver, and of course he took them home to his new house. but first he scattered the blue blow-away seeds over the garden wall in the stir-about-wife's garden where golden dandelions grew. and the seeds grew and crowded out the dandelions. next day wee wun found a large blue seed which he planted outside his house; and on the following morning a great blue blow-away which had grown in a night, made his house dark. so he went to the green ogre to get him to take it away. when he came home he found, sitting in his chair, the hop-about-man, who had come to live with him. he had been forewarned of this coming by the little blue shoes when they hopped round the room singing:-- ring-a-ding-dill, ring-a-ding-dill, the hop-about-man comes over the hill. why is he coming, and what will he see? rickety, rackety,--one, two, three. the story then describes wee wun's troubles with the hop-about-man, who remained an unwelcome inhabitant of the house where wee wun liked to sit all alone. the hop-about-man made everything keep hopping about until wee wun would put all careless things straight, and until he would give back to him his blue-and-silver shoes. one day, wee wun became a careful housekeeper and weeded out of the dandelion garden all the blue blow-away plants that grew from the seeds he had scattered there in the stir-about-wife's garden, and when he came home his troubles were over, and the hop-about-man was gone. perhaps one reason for the frequent failure of the modern fairy tale is that it fails to keep in harmony with the times. just as the modern novel has progressed from the romanticism of hawthorne, the realism of thackeray, through the psychology of george eliot, and the philosophy of george meredith, so the little child's story--which like the adult story is an expression of the spirit of the times--must recognize these modern tendencies. it must learn, from _alice in wonderland_ and from _a child's garden of verses_, that the modern fairy tale is not a _cinderella_ or _sleeping beauty_, but the modern fairy tale is the child's mind. the real fairy world is the strangeness and beauty of the child mind's point of view. it is the duty and privilege of the modern fairy tale to interpret the child's psychology and to present the child's philosophy of life. references century co.: _st. nicholas magazine_, ; _st. nicholas fairy stories re-told_. gates, josephine: "and piped those children back again," (pied piper) _st. nicholas_, nov., . hays, ruth: "greencap," _st. nicholas_, june, . hazlitt, william; _essays_. ("wit and humor.") camelot series. scott. hooker, b.: "narrative and the fairy tale," _bookman_, : june and july, , pp. - , pp. - . _ibid_: "types of fairy tales," _forum_, : oct., , pp. - . martin, john: _john martin's book_ (magazine), meredith, george: _the comic spirit_. scribners. moulton, alice o'grady, and literature committee: "humorous tales" _kindergarten review_, dec, . perry, bliss: _a study of prose fiction_. ("the romantic" and "the realistic") houghton. chapter vi sources of material for fairy tales: a list of fairy tales, pictures, picture-books, poems, and books shall we permit our children, without scruple, to hear any fables composed by any authors indifferently, and so to receive into their minds opinions generally the reverse of those which, when they are grown to manhood, we shall think they ought to entertain?--plato, in _the republic_. any list of fairy tales for little children must be selected from those books which, as we have noted, contain the best collections of folk-lore, and from books which contain tales that rank as classics. an examination of the tales of perrault, of grimm, of dasent, of andersen, of jacobs, of harris, and of miscellaneous tales, to see what are suited to the little child, would result in the following lists of tales. those most worthy of study for the kindergarten are marked with an asterisk and those suited to the first grade are marked " ." no attempt has been made to mention all the varied sources of a tale or its best version. the boston public library issues a _finding list of fairy tales and folk stories_, which may be procured easily, and the carnegie library at pittsburg issues in its monthly bulletin for december, , vol. , no. , a _list of folk-tales_, and other stories which may be dramatized. the baker, taylor company, in , issued a _graded guide to supplementary reading_, which contains a list of many of the best editions of folk and fairy tales suited to primary grades. a list of school editions is included in this book. but one cannot fail to be impressed with the general low literary standard of many school editions of fairy tales when judged by the standards here applied to the tales themselves.-- i. a list of fairy tales and folk tales tales of perrault: * cinderella. little thumb. puss-in boots. * red riding hood. sleeping beauty. the three wishes. tales of the grimms: birdie and lena. briar rose. * the cat and the mouse in partnership. chanticleer and partlet. . how they went to the hills to eat nuts. . the visit to m korbes. . the death of partlett. * cinderella. * the elves and the shoemaker. the fox and the geese. the hare and the hedgehog. the house in the wood. * the king of the birds. little brother and sister the little lamb and the little fish. * little red-cap. little snow white. little two-eyes. mother holle. the nose. snow white and rose red. * the sparrow and his four children. star dollars. * the spider and the flea. * the straw, the coal, and the bean. * the town musicians of bremen. the willow wren and the bear. * the wolf and the seven kids. * the wonderful porridge pot. norse tales: cock and hen. the cock and hen a-nutting. the cock and hen that went to the dovrefell. cock, cuckoo, and black cock. * doll i' the grass. gertrude's bird. katie woodencloak (read). the lad who went to the north wind. lord peter (read). one's own children abe always prettiest. * three billy goats. thumbikin (read). * why the bear is stumpy-tailed (pourquois). english tales, by jacobs: * the cat and the mouse. * henny penny. the history of tom thumb. * how jack went to seek his fortune. jack and the bean-stalk. * johnny cake. * lazy jack. * the magpie's nest. master of all masters. * m miacca. m vinegar. * the old woman and her pig. * puddock, mousie, and ratton. scrapefoot. * the story of three bears. * the story of three little pigs. * teeny tiny. * titty mouse and tatty mouse. modern fairy tales, by andersen: * the fir tree. * five peas in a pod. the happy family (retold in _tales of laughter_). little ida's flowers (read). * ole-luk-ole (read to end of thursday). thursday, wedding of a mouse. * the princess and the pea. * the snow man. the steadfast tin soldier. the top and the ball. * thumbelina. what the moon saw: * little girl and chickens. * the new frock (realistic). * little chimney sweep. * bear who played "soldiers." * bread and butter. uncle remus tales, by harris, in _nights with uncle remus_: * brer rabbit and the little tar baby. * brother rabbit and the little girl. * brother rabbit takes a walk. * brother rabbit takes some exercise. * cutta cord-la (similar to wolf and seven kids). * how brother rabbit broke up a party. * how brother rabbit frightens his neighbors. * how m rooster lost his dinner (read). * in some lady's garden. * m benjamin ram (brother rabbit's riddle). * the moon in the mill-pond (pourquois). * why brother beak has no tail (pourquois). * why m dog runs after brother rabbit. * why guinea fowls are speckled (pourquois). uncle remus tales, by harris, in _uncle remus and the little boy_: * brother billy goat's dinner. brother fox smells smoke. * brother rabbit and brother tiger. * brother rabbit and brother lion (similar to _the dog and his shadow_). * brother mud-turtle's trickery. * brother rabbit's money mint. brother wolf says grace. the fire test (use with _three pigs_). fun at the ferry. * heyo, house. the little rabbits. mrs. partridge has a fit. why brother fox's legs are black. * why the hawk catches chickens. tale, by harris, in _little mr. thimblefinger_: * why billy-goat's tail is short. miscellaneous tales: * the adventures of little field mouse, _stories to tell_, bryant. * beta and the lame giant, miss harrison, _in storyland_. * billy bobtail, jane hoxie, _kindergarten stories; child-lore dramatic reader_, scribners. * blunder and the wishing gate, louise chollet, in _child life in prose_, whittier. * the boy and the goat, or the goat in the turnip field (norwegian), _primer_, free and treadwell; _child-lore dramatic reader_, scribners. * the cap that mother made or ander's new cap (swedish), _swedish fairy tales_, mcclurg; _for the story-teller_, bailey. the cat and the parrot or the greedy cat, _how to tell stories_, bryant; _tales of laughter_, wiggin and smith. the cat that waited, _classics in dramatic form_, vol. i, stevenson. * the cat, the cock, and the fox, _tales of laughter_, wiggin and smith. clytie, _nature myths_, flora cooke. the cock, the mouse, and the little red hen, félicité lefèvre, jacobs. * the country mouse and the city mouse, _Æsop's fables_, joseph jacobs. * dame wiggins and her cats, mrs. sharp, in _six nursery classics_, heath. * the discontented pendulum, jane taylor, in _in the child's world_, poulsson. * the doll who was sister to a princess, the toy stories, carolyn bailey, _kindergarten review_, dec., . * drakesbill, _the story-teller's book_, o'grady and throop; _the fairy ring_, wiggin and smith; _firelight stories_, bailey. * the elephant's child, _just-so stories_, kipling. the first christmas tree, _a little book of profitable tales_, eugene field. the five little pigs, katherine pyle, in _wide awake second reader_, little. * the foolish timid rabbit, _jataka tales retold_, babbit. the golden cock, _that's why stories_, bryce. golden rod and aster, _nature myths_, cooke. the grain of corn _(old woman and her pig), tales of the punjab_, steel. greencap, ruth hays, in _st. nicholas_, june, . hans and the four big giants, miss harrison, _in storyland_. the hen that hatched ducks, harriet beecher stowe, in _child life in prose_, whittier. * the hop-about-man, agnes herbertson, in _the story-teller's book_, o'grady and throop; in _little folks' magazine_. * the house that jack built, _six nursery classics_, d.c. heath. how brother rabbit fooled the whale, _stories to tell_, bryant. * how the camel got his hump, _just-so stories_, kipling. how the chipmunk got the stripes on its back, _nature myths_, cooke. * how double darling's old shoes became lady slippers, candace wheeler, in _st. nicholas_, march, ; vol. , pp. - . * how fire was brought to the indians, _the book of nature myths_, holbrook. * how sun, moon, and west wind went out to dinner, _old deccan days_, frère. the jackal and the alligator, _stories to tell_, bryant. the jackals and the lion, _stories to tell_, bryant. king solomon and the ants, _nature myths_, cooke. * the lambikin, _tales of the punjab_, steel; _indian tales_, jacobs. * little jack rollaround, _stories to tell_, bryant. * the little rabbit who wanted red wings, _for the story-teller_, bailey. * the little red hen, _stories to tell_, bryant. * the little red hin (irish dialect verse), _stories to tell_, bryant. * the little rooster, robert southey, in _boston collection of kindergarten stories_, hammett & co. * little spider's first web, _primer_, free and treadwell. * little top-knot (swedish), _first reader_, free and treadwell. * little tuppen, _fairy stories and fables_, baldwin; _primer_, free and treadwell. * ludwig and marleen, jane hoxie, in _kindergarten review_, vol. xi, no. . * medio pollito, the little half-chick (spanish), _the green fairy book_, lang. * mezumi, the beautiful, or the rat princess (japanese), _birch-tree fairy book_, johnson; _tales of laughter_, wiggin and smith. m elephant and m frog, _firelight stories_, bailey. the moon's silver cloak, _classics in dramatic form_, stevenson, vol. i. the mouse and the sausage, _stories and story-telling_, angela keyes. * oeyvind and marit, from _the happy boy_, björnstjerne björnson, in _the story-teller's book_, o'grady and throop; in _child-life in prose_, whittier. * peter rabbit, _peter rabbit_, beatrix potter. the pigs and the giant, pyle, in _child-lore dramatic reader_, scribners. * the quick-running squash, _short stories for short people_, aspinwall. the red-headed woodpecker, _nature myths_, cooke. * the rich goose, leora robinson, in _the outlook_. * the robin's christmas song, _birch-tree fairy book_, johnson. * (wee) robin's yule song. _tales of laughter_, wiggin and smith. * the sheep and the pig (scandinavian), _for the children's hour_, bailey. * the sparrow and the crow, _tales of the punjab_, steel; _birch-tree fairy book_, johnson. * the straw ox, _cossack fairy tales_, bain. * story of the morning-glory seed, m. eytinge, _boston kindergarten stories_. the tale of a black cat, _oak-tree fairy book_, johnson. tommy and the wishing-stone, a series, by t. burgess, in _st. nicholas_, . travels of a fox, _oak-tree fairy book_, johnson. the turtle who couldn't stop talking, _jataka tales retold_, babbit. * the unhappy pine tree, _classic stories_, mcmurry. what bunch and joker saw in the moon, _wide awake chatterbox_, about . the white cat, _fairy tales_, d'aulnoy; _fairy tales_, vol. ii, lansing. * why the evergreen trees never lose their leaves, _the book of nature myths_, holbrook. * why the juniper has berries, _the book of nature myths_, holbrook. * why the morning glory climbs, _how to tell stories_, bryant. the wish bird, _classics in dramatic form_, vol. ii, stevenson. ii. bibliography of fairy tales baker, franklin t.: _bibliography of children's reading_. introduction and lists. teachers college, columbia university. baker taylor company, the: _graded guide to supplementary reading_. . boston public library: _finding list of fairy tales_. carnegie library, pittsburgh. _list of folk tales_. bulletin, dec, , vol. , no. . _ibid_.: _illustrated editions of children's books_. . harron, julia; bacon, corinne; and dana, john: _american library economy_. newark free library, newark, new jersey. haight, rachel webb: "fairy tales." _bulletin of bibliography_, . boston book co. hewins, caroline: _a.l.a. list. books for boys and girls_. third edition, . a.l.a. pub. board, chicago. kready, laura f.: "picture-books for little children." _kindergarten review_, sept., . moulton, alice o'grady, and literature com. of i.k.u.: "humorous stories for children." _kindergarten review_, dec, . salisbury, g.e., and beckwith, m.e.: _index to short stories_. st. louis public library. _lists of stories and programs for story hours_. give best versions. widdemer, margaret: "a bibliography of books and articles relating to children's reading. part i, children's reading in general. part ii, history of children's literature, etc. part iii, guidance of children's reading." _bulletin of bibliography_, july, , oct., , and jan., . boston book co. iii. a list of picture-books[ ] beskow, elsa: _hanschen im blaubeerenwald_. stuttgart. brooke, leslie: _the golden goose book_. f. warne. _ibid._: the _house in the wood_. f. warne. _ibid._: _the truth about old king cole_. f. warne. browning, robert: _the pied piper_, kate greenaway, f. warne; hope dunlap, rand; t. butler stoney, dutton. caldecott, randolph: _picture-books:_ . _the house that jack built_. f. warne. . _hey diddle diddle book_. f. warne. coussens, p.w.: _a child's book of stories_. jessie w. smith. duffield. crane, walter: _picture-books:_ _cinderella_. john lane. _mother hubbard_. john lane. _red riding hood_. john lane. _this little pig_. john lane. grimm, jacob and william: _cruikshank fairy book_. cruikshank, putnam. _ibid._: _das deutsche bilderbuch_. jos. scholz. . _dörnroschen_. . _aschenputtel_. . _frau holle_. . _der wolf und sieben geislein_. _ibid._: _liebe märchen_. , , . jos. scholz. _ibid._: _cherry blossom_. helen stratton. blackie and sons. jerrold, walter: _the big book of fairy tales_. robinson. blackie. olfers, sibylle: _windschen_. j.f. schreiber. _ibid.: wurzelkindern_. j.f. schreiber. sharp, mrs.: _dame wiggins of lee_. introduction by ruskin. kate greenaway. george allen. iv. a list of pictures cinderella. , meinhold. dresden. , meinhold. dresden. , teubner. leipzig. _canadian magazine_, dec., , by val prinsep, a. elves. arthur rackham. _st. nicholas_, nov., . _ibid.: book of pictures_. century. hop-o'-my-thumb. _a child's own book of fairy tales_. dore. h. pisan, engraver. elizabeth s. forbes. _canadian magazine_, dec., . little brother and sister. tempera painting, marianna stokes. _illustrated london news_, dec., . perrault's tales. kay nielsen. _illustrated london news_, dec., . red riding hood. poster, mary stokes. _ladies' home journal_. , meinhold. dresden. , teubner. leipzig and berlin. g. ferrier. engraved for _st. nicholas_, braun, clement, & co. supplement to _american primary teacher_, may, . picture, ft. by ft., new specialty shop, phila., pa. sleeping beauty. mouat, london. _canadian magazine_, dec., . _illustrated london news_, dec., . snow white. a series. maxfield parrish. picture by elizabeth shippen green. two series. five pictures in each. jessie willcox smith. p.f. collier & sons. v. a list of fairy poems allingham, william: _the fairy folk_. the posy ring. bangs, john kendrick: _the little elf_. the posy ring. bird, robert: _the fairy folk_. a child's book of old verses. dodsley, r.: _red caps of fairies. fuimus troes_, old plays. drayton, michael: _nymphal iii_, poets' elysium. herford, oliver: _the elf and the dormouse_. the posy ring. hood, thomas: _a plain direction_. heart of oak books, iii. _ibid._: _queen mab_. a child's book of old verses. howitt, mary: _the fairies of the caldon-low_. the posy ring. _ibid._: _mabel on midsummer day_. the story-teller's book, o'grady and throop. lyly, john: _the urchin's dance and song. song of the first fairy_. _song of the second fairy_. maydes metamorphosis. mcdermot, jessie: _a fairy tale_. fairy tales. rolfe. amer. book co. noyes, alfred: _the magic casement_. an anthology of fairy poetry, with an introduction. dutton. percy, bishop: _the fairy queen_. reliques of ancient poetry; from the mysteries of love and eloquence, london, . shakespeare, william: _ariel's song_; _a fairy song_; "_i know a bank_"; _the song of the fairies_. shakespeare's dramas. stevenson, robert l. _fairy bread_; _the little land_. a child's garden of verses. unknown author: _the fairy_. "_oh, who is so merry_." a child's book of old verses. duffield. wilkins, mary e.: _the ballad of the blacksmith's sons_. fairy stories retold from _st. nicholas_. century. vi. main standard fairy tale books andersen, hans christian: _fairy tales_. vols. pedersen & stone. houghton. _ibid._: _fairy tales_. edited by w.a. and j.k. craigie. oxford university press. _ibid._: _fairy stories for youngest children_. lucas. stratton. blackie. (english edition.) _ibid._: _fairy tales_. mrs. lucas. t.c. and w. robinson. dutton. _ibid._: _fairy tales_. mrs. lucas. helen stratton. dodge. _ibid._: _fairy tales_. maria l. kirk. lippincott. andersen, hans christian: _fairy tales_. edmund dulac. hodder & stoughton. _ibid.: fairy tales_. w.h. robinson. holt. _ibid.: fairy tales_. braekstad. tegner. introd. by gosse. century. asbjörnsen, p.c.: _fairy tales from the far north_. burt. _ibid.: round the yule log_. introd. by gosse. braekstad. lippincott. dasent, sir george w.: _popular tales from the north_. routledge. dutton. _ibid.: popular tales from the north_. putnam. _ibid.: tales from the field_. putnam. grimm, jacob and william: _household tales_. margaret hunt. bonn's libraries, bell & co. _ibid.: household tales_. lucy crane. walter crane. macmillan. _ibid.: fairy tales_. helen stratton. dodge. _ibid.: german popular stories_. tr. edgar taylor. introd. by ruskin. illustrations by cruikshank. chatto & windus. _ibid_.: _fairy tales_. johann & leinweber. mcloughlin. _ibid.: fairy tales_. arthur rackham. doubleday. _ibid.: fairy tales_. hope dunlap. rand. harris, joel chandler: _uncle remus, his songs and sayings_. appleton. _ibid.: nights with uncle remus_. church. houghton. _ibid_.: _uncle remus and his friends_. frost. houghton. _ibid.: uncle remus and the little boy_. j.m. comte. small. jacobs, joseph: _english fairy tales_. vols. batten. putnam. _ibid.: celtic fairy tales_. vols. batten. putnam. _ibid.: indian fairy tales_. batten. putnam. _ibid.: the most delectable history of reynard the fox_. frank calderon. macmillan. _ibid.: europa's fairy tales_. batten. putnam. o'shea, m.v.: _old world wonder stories_. heath. perrault, charles: _tales of mother goose_. welsh. heath. _ibid_.: _fairy tales_. appleton. estes. perrault, charles: _tales of passed times_. temple classics. c. robinson. dutton. _ibid.: popular tales_. edited by andrew lang. french; and english translation of original edition. oxford, clarendon press. vii. fairy tales of all nations celtic. jacobs. . putnam. chinese. pitnam. . crowell. cossack. bain. . burt. danish. bay. . harper. donegal. mcmanus. . doubleday. english. jacobs. . putnam. _ibid_.: folk and fairy stories. hartland, born . camelot series. french. desegur. - . winston. german. grimm. , . bonn's libraries. hungarian. pogany. . stokes. indian. _old deccan days_. frère. . mcdonough. _ibid.: tales of the sun_. mrs. kingscote. . w.h. allen. _ibid.: buddhist birth stories_. rhys davids. . trubner. _ibid.: fairy tales_. stokes. . ellis & white. _ibid.: folk tales of bengal_. day. . macmillan. _ibid.: wide awake stories_. steel and temple. . trubner. _ibid.: folk-tales of kashmir_. knowles. . trubner. _ibid.: tales of the punjab_. steel. . macmillan. irish. yeats. . burt. italian. macdonell. . stokes. _ibid_.: crane. . macmillan. japanese. ozaki. . dutton. manx. morrison. . nutt. new world. kennedy. . dutton. norse. dasent. - . lippincott. _ibid_.: mabie. -. dodd. papuan. kerr. . macmillan. persian. stephen. . dutton. _ibid_.: clouston. . stokes. russian. dole. . crowell. _ibid_.: bain. bilibin. . century. scottish. grierson. . stokes. south african. honey. . baker & taylor. welsh. thomas. . stokes. viii. miscellaneous editions of fairy tales d'aulnoy, madame: _fairy tales_. trans, by planché. gordon browne. mckay. _ibid.: fairy tales_. introd. by anne t. ritchie. scribners. austin, m.h.: _basket woman_. houghton. babbit, ellen: _jataka tales retold_. century. bailey, carolyn: _firelight stories_. bradley. bailey and lewis: _for the children's hour_. bradley. baldwin, james: _fairy stories and fables_. amer. book co. barrie, j.m.: _peter pan in kensington gardens_. rackham. scribners. baumbach, rudolf: _tales from wonderland_. simmons. bertelli, luigi: _the prince and his ants_. holt. bryant, sara c.: _best stories to tell to children_. houghton. burgess, thornton: _old mother west wind_. little. _ibid.: the adventures of reddy fox_. little. _ibid.: the adventures of johnny chuck_. little. _ibid.: tommy and the wishing-stone_. animal tales. _st. nicholas_, . chapin, anna: _the now-a-days fairy book_. jessie w. smith. dodd. chisholm, louey: _in fairyland_. katherine cameron. putnam. _ibid.: little red riding hood; cinderella_; (i read them myself series). dodge. collection: _half a hundred stories for little people_. bradley. cooke, flora j.: _nature myths and stories_. flanagan. cowell, e.b.: _the jatakas or stories of the buddha's former births_. tr. from the pali. vols. cambridge university press. putnam. - . crothers, samuel mcchord: _miss muffet's christmas party_. houghton. emerson, ellen: _indian myths_. houghton. everyman series: _ ; ; and _. dutton. france, anatole: _the honey bee_. john lane. grover, eulalie o., editor: _mother goose_. f. richardson. volland. harris, joel c.: _little mr. thimblefinger_. houghton. harrison, miss: in storyland. central pub. co., chicago. holbrook, florence: _the book of nature myths_. houghton. james, grace: _the green willow_: japanese. goble. macmillan. jerrold, walter: _the reign of king oberon_. robinson. dent. little. johnson, clifton: _fairy books: oak-tree; birch-tree; and elm-tree_. little. _ibid._: _book of fairy tale bears_. houghton. _ibid._: _book of fairy tale foxes_. houghton. kingsley, charles: _water-babies_. warwick goble. macmillan. _ibid_.: _water-babies_. introd, by rose kingsley. margaret tarrant. dutton. kipling, rudyard: _jungle books_. vols. original edition. century. _ibid._: _jungle books_. m. and e. detmold. century. _ibid._: _jungle books_. a. rackham. doubleday. _ibid._: _just-so stories_. doubleday. _ibid._: _puck of pook's hill_. doubleday. _ibid._: _rewards and fairies_. doubleday. laboulaye, edouard: _fairy book_. harper. _ibid._: _last fairy tales_. harper. lang, andrew: _fairy books: red; orange; yellow; green_; _blue; violet; gray; crimson; brown; pink_. longmans. lansing, marion: _rhymes and stories_. ginn. _ibid._: _fairy tales_. vols. ginn. leamy, edward: golden spears. fitzgerald. lefèvré, felicité: _the cock, the mouse, and the little red hen_. tony sarg. jacobs, phila. lindsay, maud: _mother stories; more mother stories_. bradley. maeterlinck, madam: _the children's bluebird_. dodd. molesworth, mary louise: _the cuckoo clock_. maria kirk. lippincott. mulock, miss: _the fairy book_. boyd smith. crowell. _ibid._: _fairy book_. illus. by w. goble. macmillan. _ibid._: _little lame prince_. hope dunlap. rand. musset, paul de: _mr. wind and madam rain_. bennett. putnam. nyblom, helena: _jolly cable and other swedish fairy tales_. folknin. dutton. olcott, frances j.: _arabian nights_. tr. by lane. cairo text. selections. holt. perrault, charles: _the story of bluebeard_. stone & kimball, chicago. poulsson, e.: _in the child's world_. bradley. pyle, howard: _the garden behind the moon_. scribners. _ibid._: _wonder-clock_. harper. pyle, katherine: _fairy tales from many lands_. dutton. rackham, arthur: _mother goose_. century. ramé, louise de la (ouida): _nürnberg stove: bimbi stories for children_. page. rhys, ernest: _fairy gold_. herbert cole. dutton. rolfe, william: _fairy tales in prose and verse_. amer. book co. shakespeare, william: _midsummer night's dream_. with forty illustrations in color by arthur rackham. doubleday. shedlock, marie: _a collection of eastern stories and legends_. foreword by t. rhys davids. dutton. smith, jessie willcox: _mother goose_. dodd. stephen, a.: _fairy tales of a parrot_. ellis. nister. dutton. stockton, f.: _the queen's museum_. f. richardson. scribners. tappan, eva march: _the children's hour: folk stories and fables_. houghton. thorne-thomson: _east o' the sun and west o' the moon_. row. underhill, zoe d.: _the dwarf's tailor_. harper. valentine, mrs. laura: _old, old fairy tales_. f. warne. welsh, charles: _fairy tales children love_. dodge. wheeler, w.a.: _mother goose melodies_. houghton. wiggin, kate; and smith, nora: _the fairy ring: tales of laughter: magic casements_: and _tales of wonder_. doubleday. ix. school editions of fairy tales alderman, e.a.: _classics old and new_. amer. book co. alexander, g.: _child classics_. bobbs. baker, f.t., and carpenter, g.: _language readers_. macmillan. baldwin, james: _the fairy reader_, i and ii. amer. book co. blaisdell, etta (macdonald): _child life in tale and fable_. macmillan. blumenthal, verra: _fairy tales from the russian_. rand. brooks, dorothy: _stories of red children_. educational. bryce, catherine: _child-lore dramatic reader_. scribners. burchill, ettinger: _progressive road to reading_, readers. silver. chadwick, mara p.: _three bears story primer_. educational. chadwick, m.p. and freeman, e.g.: _chain stories and playlets: the cat that was lonesome: the mouse that lost her tail_; and _the woman and her pig_. world book co. coe and christie: _story hour readers_. amer. book co. craik, georgiana: _so fat and mew mew_. heath. davis, m.h. and leung, chow: _chinese fables and folk stories_. amer. book. co. dole, c.f.: _crib and fly_. heath. free and treadwell: _reading literature series_. row, peterson. grover, eulalie o.: _folk lore primer_. atkinson. hale, e.e.: _arabian nights_. selections. ginn. heath, d.c.: _dramatic reader_. heath. henderson, alice: _andersen's best fairy tales_. rand. hix, melvin: _once upon a time stories_. longmans. holbrook, florence: _dramatic reader for the lower grades_. amer. book co. howard, f.w.: _the banbury cross stories: the fairy gift and tom hickathrift_. merrill. johnston, e.; and barnum, m.: _book of plays for little actors_. amer. book. co. kennerley: _the kipling reader_. vols. appleton. ketchum and rice: _our first story reader_. scribners. lang, andrew: _fairy readers_. longmans. lansing, m.: _tales of old england_. ginn. mabie, h.: _fairy tales every child should know_. doubleday. mcmahon, h., m., and a.: _rhyme and story primer_. heath. mcmurry, mrs. lida b.: _classic stories_. public school pub. co. norton, charles e.: _heart of oak books_. heath. norvell, f.t., and haliburton, m.w.: _graded classics_. johnson. perkins, f.o.: _the bluebird arranged for schools_. silver. pratt, mara l.: _legends of red children_. amer. book co. roulet, mary nixon: _japanese folk-stories and fairy tales_. amer. book co. scudder, h.: _andersen's fairy tales: grimm's fairy tales; fables and folk stories; the children's book_. houghton. smythe, louise: _reynard the fox_. amer. book co. spaulding and bryce: _aldine readers_. newson. stevenson, augusta: _children's classics in dramatic form_. vols. houghton. stickney, j.h.: _andersen's fairy tales_. series. ginn. summers, maud: _the summers readers_. beattys. turpin, e.h.: _andersen's fairy tales_. merrill. underwood, kate: _fairy tale plays_ (for infants and juniors). macmillan. university pub. co.: _fairy tales_. standard literature series; hans andersen's best stories; grimm's best stories. newson and co. van sickle, j.h., etc.: _the riverside readers_. houghton. varney, alice: _story plays old and new_. amer. book co. villee: _little folk dialog reader_. sower. wade, mary h.: _indian fairy tales_. wilde. washburne, mrs. m.: _old-fashioned fairy tales_ (retold from poetic versions of thomas hood). rand. white, emma g.: _pantomime primer_. amer. book co. williston, p.: _japanese fairy tales_. series. rand. wiltse, sara e.: _folk lore stories and proverbs_. ginn. wohlfarth, j., and mcmurry, frank: _little folk-tales_. vols. zitkala-sa: _old indian legends_. ginn. appendix illustrations of creative return[ ] tales suited for dramatization _little two-eyes_ _little two-eyes_, which is suited to the first-grade child, is one of the most attractive of folk-tales and contains blended within itself the varied beauties of the tales. it is in _cante-fable_ form, which gives it the poetic touch so appealing to children. it contains the magic rhymes,-- little kid, bleat, i wish to eat! little kid, bleat, clear it off, neat! the fairy wise woman, and the friendly goat. it contains the fairy housekeeping in the forest which combines tea-party, picnic, and magic food--all of which could not fail to delight children. the lullaby to put two-eyes to sleep suits little children who know all there is to know about "going to sleep." the magic tree, the silver leaves, the golden fruit, the knight and his fine steed, and the climax of the tale when the golden apple rolls from under the cask--all possess unusual interest. there is exceptional beauty in the setting of this tale; and its message of the worth of goodness places it in line with _cinderella_. it should be dramatized as two complete episodes, each of three acts:-- _the goat episode_ _place_ the home and the forest. _time_ summer. _act i, scene i_. a home scene showing how the mother and sisters despised two-eyes. _scene ii_. two-eyes and the fairy. _scene iii_. two-eyes and the goat. evening of the first day. _act ii, scene i_. one-eye went with two-eyes. third morning. song ... feast ... return home. _act iii, scene i_. three-eyes went with two-eyes. fourth morning. song ... feast ... return home. _the story of two-eyes_ _place_ the forest; and the magic tree before the house. _time_ summer. _act i, scene i_. two-eyes and the fairy. _act ii, scene i_. the magic tree. mother and sisters attempt to pluck the fruit. _act iii, scene i_. the knight. second attempt to pluck fruit. conclusion. the happy marriage. _snow white_ _the story of snow white_ is one of the romantic fairy tales which has been re-written and staged as a play for children, and now may be procured in book form. it was produced by winthrop ames at the little theatre in new york city. the dramatization by jessie braham white followed closely the original tale. the entire music was composed by edmond rickett, who wrote melodies for a number of london christmas pantomimes. the scenery, by maxfield parrish, was composed of six stage pictures, simple, harmonious, and beautiful, with tense blue skies, a dim suggestion of the forest, and the quaint architecture of the house of the seven dwarfs. pictures in old nursery books were the models for the scenes. because of the simplicity of the plot and the few characters, _snow white_ could be played very simply in four scenes, by the children of the second and third grades for the kindergarten and first grade. _snow white_ _scene i_. a festival on the occasion of snow white's sixteenth birthday. _scene ii_. in the forest. _scene iii_. a room in the house of the seven dwarfs. _scene iv_. the reception to snow white as queen, on the grounds near the young king's palace. the beautiful character of snow white; the glimpse of dwarf life--the kindly little men with their unique tasks and their novel way of living; the beauty and cheer of snow white which her housekeeping brought into their home; their devotion to her; the adventure in the wood; the faithful huntsman; the magic mirror; the wicked queen; and the prince seeking the princess--all contribute to the charm of the tale. the songs written for the play may be learned by the children, who will love to work them into their simple play: _snow white, as fair as a lily, as sweet as a rose_; the song of the forest fairies, _welcome, snow white_; and their second song which they sing as they troop about snow white lying asleep on the dwarf's bed, _here you'll find a happy home, softly sleep!_ or the song of snow white to the dwarfs, _i can brew, i can bake_. _the little lamb and the little fish_ once upon a time there lived a sister and a brother who loved each other very much. they were named gretchen and peterkin. one day their father who was king of the country, left them and brought home with him a new queen who was not kind to the children. she banished them from the castle and told the king bad tales about them. so they made friends with the cook and ate in the kitchen. peterkin would bring water and gretchen could carry plates and cups and saucers. one beautiful spring day when all the children were out-of-doors playing games, gretchen and peterkin went to play with them, by the pond, on the meadow, beyond the castle wall. around this pond the children would run, joining hands and singing:-- "eneke, beneke, let me live, and i to you my bird will give; the bird shall fetch of straw a bunch, and that the cow shall have to munch; the cow shall give me milk so sweet, and that i'll to the baker take, who with it shall a small cake bake; the cake the cat shall have to eat, and for it catch a mouse for me, * * * * * "and this is the end of the tale." round and round the pond the children ran singing; and as the word "tale" fell on peterkin he had to run away over the meadow and all the rest ran after to catch him. but just then the wicked queen from her window in the castle spied the happy children. she did not look pleased and she muttered words which you may be sure were not very pleasant words. the children had been racing across the meadow after peterkin. now one called, "where is peterkin? i saw him near that tree, but now i cannot see him. gretchen, can you see peterkin?--why, where's gretchen?" peterkin and gretchen were nowhere to be seen. suddenly a little boy said, "where did that lamb come from over there? it must have been behind the linden tree!" the children drew near the lamb, when what was their surprise to hear it call out to them, "run children, run quick or the queen will harm you! i am gretchen! run, and never come near the pond again!" and at the little lamb's words the children fled. but the little lamb ran all about the meadow, calling, "peterkin, peterkin!" and would not touch a blade of grass. sadly she walked to the edge of the pond and slowly walked round and round it calling, "peterkin, where are you?" suddenly the water bubbled and a weak voice cried, "here, gretchen, in the pond,-- "here gretchen, here swim i in the pond, nor may i ever come near castle ground." and the lamb replied:-- "ah, my brother! in the wood, a lamb, now i must search for food." then peterkin comforted gretchen and promised early every morning to come up to the water to talk with her; and gretchen promised to come early from the wood, before the sun was up, to be with peterkin. and peterkin said, "i will never forsake you, gretchen, if you will never forsake me!" and gretchen said, "i will never forsake you, peterkin, if you will never forsake me!" then the little lamb fled sadly to the wood to look for food and the little fish swam round the pond. but the children did not forget their playmates. every day they saved their goodies and secretly laid them at the edge of the wood where the lamb could get them. and the lamb always saved some to throw the crumbs to the little fish in the morning. many days passed by. one day visitors were coming to the castle. "now is my chance," thought the wicked queen. so she said to the cook, "go, fetch me the lamb out of the meadow, for there is nothing else for the strangers!" now the lamb had lingered by the pond longer than usual that morning so that the cook easily caught her; and taking her with him tied her to the tree just outside the kitchen. but when the cook was gone to the kitchen, the little fish swam up from the pond into the little brook that ran by the tree and said-- "ah, my sister, sad am i, that so great harm to you is nigh! and far from you i love must be, a-swimming in the deep, deep sea!" and the lamb replied:-- "ah, my brother in the pond, sad must i leave you, though i'm fond; the cook has come to take my life, swim off to sea,--beware!" just then the cook came back and hearing the lamb speak became frightened. thinking it could not be a real lamb, he said, "be still, i will not harm you. run, hide in the wood, and when it is evening, come to the edge of the wood and i will help you!" then the cook caught another lamb and dressed it for the guests. and before evening he went to a wise woman who happened to be the old nurse who had taken care of peterkin and gretchen. she loved the children and she soon saw what the wicked queen had done. she told the cook what the lamb and fish must do to regain their natural forms. as soon as it was dark the little lamb came to the edge of the wood and the cook said, "little lamb, i will tell you what you must do to be a maid again!" so the cook whispered what the wise woman had said. the little lamb thanked the cook and promised to do as he said. next morning very early before the break of day, the little lamb hurried from the wood across the meadow. not taking time to go near the pond she hastily pushed against the castle gate which the kind cook had left unfastened for her. she ran up the path, and there under the queen's window stood the beautiful rose-tree with only two red roses on it--just as the cook had said. not even glancing at the queen's window, the little lamb began nibbling the lowest one. and behold, there in the path stood gretchen again! then hastening to seize the other rose before the sun's first ray might touch it, she ran lightly down the path, away from castle ground, across the meadow to the pond. calling little fish to the water's edge--for he had lingered in the pond--she sprinkled over him the drops of dew in the heart of the rose. and there stood little peterkin beside gretchen! then hand in hand, gretchen and peterkin hurried from the pond and fled into the wood just as the sun began to show beyond the trees. there they built themselves a cottage and lived in it happily ever afterwards. the kind cook and the wise nurse found them and visited them. but gretchen and peterkin never went near castle ground until the cook told them the queen was no more.--_laura f. kready_. _how the birds came to have different nests time..._. _once upon a time when pigs spoke rhyme, and monkeys chewed tobacco. and hens took snuff to make them tough, and ducks went quack, quack, quack, o!_ _place_. ... madge magpie's nest up in a tree-top. _characters_: madge magpie, the teacher; thrush, blackbird, owl, sparrow, starling, and turtle-dove. _all the birds_. "we have come to you, madge magpie, to ask you to teach us how to build nests. all the birds tell how clever you are at building nests." _magpie_. "make a circle round about the foot of this old pear-tree. i will sit upon this limb near my nest and show you how to do it. first i take some mud and make a fine round cake with it." _thrush_. "oh, that's how it's done, is it? i'll hurry home! goodbye, birds, i can't stay another minute! "mud in a cake, mud in a cake, to-whit, to-whee, a nest i'll make!" _magpie_. "next i take some twigs and arrange them about the mud." _blackbird_. "now i know all about it. here i go, i'm off to make my nest in the cherry-tree in mr. smith's cornfield! "sticks upon mud, mud upon sticks, caw, caw! i'll make a nest for six!" _magpie_. "see, here i put another layer of mud over the twigs." _wise owl_. "oh! that's quite obvious. strange i never thought of that before. farewell, come to see me at the old elm-tree beside the gray church! "mud over twigs! to-whit, to-whoo! no better nest than that ever grew!" _magpie_. "see these long twigs. i just twine them round the outside." _sparrow_. "the very thing. i'll do it this very day. i can pick some up on my way home. i'll choose the spout that looks down over the school-yard; then i can see the children at play. they must like me for they never chase me away or hit me. "a nest with twigs twined round and round, chip, chip! no fear that would fall to the ground!" _magpie_. "and see these little feathers and soft stuff. what a comfortable, cosy lining for the nest they make!" _starling_. "that suits me! off i go, i like a cosy warm nest. it shall be in that old plum-tree in the orchard, on the side of the hill. "feathers and down to make cosy and warm, that's the nest to keep us from harm!" _magpie_. "well, birds, have you seen how i made my nest? do you think you know how?--why, where are all the birds? they couldn't wait until i'd finished. only you, turtle-dove, left!" _turtle-dove_. "take two, taffy, take two--o--o--o!" _magpie_. "here i put a twig across. but not two--one's enough!" _turtle-dove_. "take two, taffy, take two--o--o--o!" _magpie_. "one's enough i tell you, do you not see how i lay it across?" _turtle-dove_. "take two, taffy, take two--o--o--o!" _magpie_. "here i fly away from my nest for awhile! i will teach no more birds to build nests. i cannot teach a silly turtle-dove who will not learn. i heard him sing just now as i turned around," _turtle-dove_. "take two, taffy, take two--o--o--o, take two, taffy, take two--o--o--o!" _laura f. kready_. types of tales an animal tale[ ] _the good-natured bear_ "i shall never forget the patience, the gentleness, the skill, and the firmness with which she first taught me to walk alone. i mean to walk on all fours, of course; the upright manner of my present walking was only learned afterwards. as this infant effort, however, is one of my earliest recollections, i have mentioned it before all the rest, and if you please, i will give you a little account of it." "oh! do, mr. bear," cried gretchen; and no sooner had she uttered the words than all the children cried out at the same time, "oh, please do, sir!" the bear took several long whiffs at his pipe, and thus continued,-- "my mother took me to a retired part of the forest (of towskipowski, poland) where few animals ever came; and telling me that i must now stand alone, extended both paws, and slowly lowered me towards the earth. the height as i looked down, seemed terrible, and i felt my legs kick in the air, with fear of i did not know what, till suddenly i felt four hard things and no motion. it was the fixed earth beneath my four infant legs. 'now,' said my mother, 'you are what is called standing alone!' but what she said i heard as in a dream. with my back in the air as though it rested on a wooden trussel, with my nose poking out straight snuffing the fresh breeze and the many secrets of the woods, my ears pricking and shooting with all sorts of new sounds to wonder at, to want to have, to love, or to tumble down at,--and my eyes staring before me full of light and confused gold and dancing things, i seemed to be in a condition over which i had no power to effect the least change, and in which i must remain fixed till some wonderful thing happened. but the firm voice of my mother came to my assistance and i heard her tell me to look upon the earth beneath me and see where i was. first i looked up among the boughs, then side-ways at my shoulder, then i squinted at the tip of my nose--all by mistake and innocence--at last i bent my nose in despair and saw my forepaws standing, and this of course was right. the first thing that caught my attention, being the first thing i saw distinctly, was a little blue flower with a bright jewel in the middle, which i afterwards found was a drop of dew. sometimes i thought this little blue darling was so close that it almost touched my eyes and certainly the color of it was up in my head; sometimes i thought it was deep down, a long way off. when i bent my face towards it to give it a kiss it seemed just where it was though i had not done what i had thought to do. "the next thing i saw upon the ground was a soft-looking little creature that crawled along with a round ball upon the middle of its back, of a beautiful white color, with brown and red curling stripes. the creature moved very, very slowly, and appeared always to follow the opinion and advice of two long horns on its head, that went feeling about on all sides. presently it slowly approached my right forepaw and i wondered how i should feel or smell or hear it as it went over my toes; but the instant one of the horns touched the hair of my paw, both horns shrunk into nothing and presently came out again, and the creature slowly moved away in another direction. while i was wondering at this strange proceeding--for i never thought of hurting the creature, not knowing how to hurt anything, and what should have made the horns think otherwise?--while then i was wondering at this, my attention was suddenly drawn to a tuft of moss on my right near a hollow tree trunk. out of this green tuft looked a pair of very bright round small eyes, which were staring up at me. "if i had known how to walk i should have stepped back a few steps when i saw those bright little eyes, but i never ventured to lift a paw from the earth since my mother had first set me down, nor did i know how to do so, or what were the proper thoughts or motions to begin with. so i stood looking at the eyes and presently i saw that the head was yellow and that it had a large mouth. 'what you have just seen,' said my mother, 'we call a snail; and what you now see is a frog.' the names however did not help me at all to understand. why the first should have turned from my paw so suddenly and why this creature should continue to stare up at me in such a manner i could not conceive. i expected however that it would soon come slowly crawling forth and then i should see whether it would also avoid me in the same manner. i now observed that its body and breast were double some-how, and that its paws were very large for its size, but had no hair upon them, which i thought was probably occasioned by its slow crawling having rubbed it all off. i had scarcely made these observations and reflections, when a beam of bright light breaking through the trees, the creature suddenly gave a great hop right up under my nose; and i, thinking the world was at an end, instantly fell flat down on one side and lay there waiting!"-- with this glimpse of an old-time modern animal tale we shall have to say with "mr. titmarsh," "those who wish to know more about him must buy the book for themselves,"--and add: or they must get some enterprising publisher to reprint it. a few romantic tales[ ] _puss-in-boots and lord peter_ _puss-in-boots_, a romantic tale suited to the first grade, delights with its strong sense of adventure and of the heroic. puss is a master-cat, a hero clever and quick, and with fine imagination to see what would happen and prepare for it. he is successful, combining initiative and motivation delightfully. his devotion to his master seems like disinterested loyalty, love, and sacrifice. while it is true the plot is based on a lie, the moral effect is not bad because we recognize puss as a match-making character similar to the matchmaking jackal of india; and in love "all is fair." moreover puss-in-boots was only true to his cat-nature in playing a trick, and we admire the cleverness of his trick in behalf of a master really deserving. the underlying philosophy of the tale, "that there is a power in making the best with what you possess," appeals to all, and has the ability to lend dignity and force to the light intrigue of the tale. the setting in _puss-in-boots_ gives a touch of nature beauty. first we have the miller's poor home, and from there we are led in succession to the brambles through which puss scampered; the rabbits' warren where he lay in waiting to bag the heedless rabbits; the palace to which he took the rabbits caught by the marquis of carabas; the cornfield where he bagged the partridges; the river-side where the marquis bathed; the meadow where the countrymen were mowing; the cornfields where the good people were reaping; until at last we are escorted to the stately castle where the ogre dwelt. the plot of the tale is very pleasing as it easily arranges itself into a simple drama of three acts:-- act i, scene i. revery of the master. the cat's promise to help. scene ii. puss in the rabbits' warren with his bag. scene iii. puss takes the rabbits to the king in his palace. act ii, scene i. puss with his bag in the cornfield. scene ii. puss takes partridges to the king. scene iii. puss and his master. puss gives advice. act iii, scene i. the marquis bathing and puss by the river-side. scene ii. the drive. puss runs before and meets the mowers. scene iii. the ogre's castle. puss's reception of the coach. marriage of the marquis of carabas. puss becomes a lord. the tale possesses an appeal to the emotions, we want puss-in-boots to accomplish whatever scheme he invents, and we want the miller's son to win the princess. its appeal to the imagination is an orderly succession of images, varied and pleasing. the invention of puss and his successful adventures make the tale one of unusual interest, vivacity, and force. the transformation of the ogre into a lion and again into a mouse, and the consequent climax of puss's management of the mouse, bring in the touch of the miraculous. a similar transformation occurs in hesiod, where the transformed metis is swallowed by zeus. this transformation may be produced by a witch, when the help of another is needed, as in _beauty and the beast_ and in _hansel and grethel_; or the transformation may come from within, as in this case when the ogre changes himself into a mouse, or when a man changes himself into a wolf. a situation which parallels the theme of puss-in-boots occurs in _the golden goose_ where dummling gets as his share only a goose, but having the best disposition makes his fortune out of his goose. grimm's _three feathers_ also contains a similar motif. d'aulnoy's _white cat_, the feminine counterpart of _puss-in-boots_, is a tale of pleasing fancy in which the hero wins the white cat, a transformed princess, who managed to secure for him, the youngest son, the performance of all the tasks his father had set for him. but the most interesting parallel of _puss-in-boots_ is the norse _lord peter_ told by dasent in _norse tales_. here the helpful cat does not use a bag, but in true norse fashion catches game in the wood by sitting on the head of the reindeer and threatening, "if you don't go straight to the king's palace, i'll claw your eyes out!" the norse tale omits the bathing episode. the king wants to visit lord peter but the cat manages that lord peter shall visit the king. the cat promises to supply coach, horses and clothes, not by craft--their source is not given--but they are furnished on the condition that peter must obey to say always, when he sees fine things in the castle, that he has far finer things of his own. in the norse tale peter and the cat work together, peter is in the secret; while in the perrault tale puss does all the managing, carabas is simply being entertained by the king. in the norse tale, on the way home the coach meets a flock of sheep, a herd of fine kine, and a drove of horses. the cat does not threaten that the caretakers shall be "chopped as fine as herbs for the pot," if they do not say all belongs to lord peter, but he cunningly bribes the shepherd with a silver spoon, the neat-herd with a silver ladle, and the drover with a silver stoop. in place of the ogre's castle, there is a troll's castle with three gates--one of tin, one of silver, and one of gold. the norse cat wins the victory by craftily playing upon the troll-nature. he gains the troll's attention by meeting him at the gate and telling him about the secrets of agriculture, one of the secrets of men the trolls wanted to learn. then at the height of interest, he plays upon his curiosity by getting him to look round. whereupon, the troll, meeting the glare of the full sun, burst; for trolls cannot bear the sight of the sun, and live. in the norse tale, the cat, after lord peter at her request cuts off her head, becomes the princess and marries lord peter. in perrault's tale, the king, with french etiquette and diplomacy, invites the marquis to be his son-in-law. the _story of puss-in-boots_ appeared in _straparola_, , , and in _basile_, , . laboulaye, in his _last fairy tales_, has retold the pentamerone tale, _gagliuso_, in which the cat is a crafty advocate of his master's interests, but the master is ungrateful and forgets the cat. the effect of the tale is not pleasing, it is a satire on gratitude. the _story of puss-in-boots_ is also told by ludwig tieck, with twelve etchings by otto speckter, published in leipzig, in . a critic, writing for the quarterly review in , "an article on children's books,"[ ] recommended this edition of _puss-in-boots_ as the beau ideal of nursery books. _puss-in-boots_ appeared also in the swedish of cavallius. a monograph on the carabas tale has been written by andrew lang. _tom thumb and little thumb_ _tom thumb_, another romantic tale suited to the first grade, is one of the most entertaining of tales. the germ of _tom thumb_ exists in various forms in the books of the far east, among american indians, and among the zulus of south africa. tom thumb is one of the oldest characters in english nursery literature. in , the ancient tales of tom thumb were said to have been "in the olde time the only survivors of drouzy age at midnight. old and young, with his tales chim'd mattens till the cock's crow in the morning. batchelors and maids have with his tales compassed the christmas fireblocke till the curfew bell rings candle out. the old shepheard and the young plowboy, after a days' labour, have carol'ed out a _tale of tom thumb_ to make them merry with, and who but little tom hath made long nights seem short and heavy toyles easie." _tom thumb_, as has been previously mentioned, most probably was transmitted to england by the early norsemen. _the tale of tom thumb_, as told by jacobs, was taken from the chap-book version in _halliwell_. the first mention of tom is in scot's _discoverie of witchcraft_, in . tradition says that tom died at lincoln, which was one of the five danish towns of england. a little blue flagstone in the cathedral, said to be his tombstone, was lost and has never been replaced during recent repairs early in the nineteenth century. _tom thumb_ was first written in prose by richard johnson, in . in ashton's _chap-books of the eighteenth century_ we have a facsimile of the chap-book, _the famous history of tom thumb_. the tale is in three parts. the first part, which is much superior to the rest of the tale, was taken from a copy printed for john wright, in . the second and third parts were written about . the first part closes with the death of tom from knightly feats. he was buried in great pomp, but the fairies carried him to fairy land. the first part closed with a promise of the second:-- the fairy queen, she lov'd him so as you shall understand, that once again she let him go down to the fairy land. the very time that he return'd unto the court again, it was as we are well inform'd in good king arthur's reign. when in the presence of the king, he many wonders wrought, recited in the second part which now is to be bought in bow church yard, where is sold diverting histories many; and pleasant tales as e'er was told for purchase of one penny. the second part opens with tom's return to fairy land. his second death is caused by a combat with a cat. again he is taken to fairy land. in the third part the fairy queen sends tom to earth in king thunston's reign. his final death occurred from the bite of a spider. _the life and adventures of tom thumb_ appeared in the _tabart collection of fairy tales_, noted before, and a version entirely in verse was included in _halliwell_. a monograph on _tom thumb_ was written by m. gaston paris. _little thumb_ as it appeared in _perrault_ and in _basile_, was a tale similar to the german _hansel and grethel_. _thumbling_, and _thumbling as journeyman_ are german variants. andersen's _thumbelina_ is a feminine counterpart to _tom thumb_, and in laboulaye's _poucinet_ we have a tale of the successful younger brother, similarly diminutive. there were current many old stories of characters similar to tom thumb. a certain man was so thin that he could jump through the eye of a needle. another crept nimbly to a spider's web which was hanging in the air, and danced skillfully upon it until a spider came, which spun a thread round his neck and throttled him. a third was able to pierce a sunmote with his head and pass his whole body through it. a fourth was in the habit of riding an ant, but the ant threw him off and trampled him. in a work written in , referred to in grimm's _household tales_ a spider relates:-- once did i catch a tailor proud heavy he was as elder wood, from heaven above he'd run a race, with an old straw hat to this place, in heaven he might have stayed no doubt, for no one wished to turn him out. he fell in my web, hung in a knot, could not get out, i liked it not, that e'en the straw hat, safe and sound, nine days ere him came to the ground. a delightful little rhyme, _tom thumb_, is among halliwell's _nursery rhymes_. it may refer to the danish _history of tom thumb_: i had a little husband no bigger than my thumb; i put him in a pint pot and there i bade him drum: i bridled him and saddled him, and sent him out of town; i gave him a pair of garters to tie up his little hose; and a little handkerchief to wipe his little nose. the english version of _tom thumb_ as we know it today, opens with a visit of the magician merlin at the cottage of an honest and hospitable ploughman. merlin rewarded the goodman and his wife for their hospitality by calling on the queen of the fairies, who brought to the home, tom thumb, a boy no bigger than a man's thumb. the time of the tale is in the days of merlin and king arthur's court. the tale is marked by a number of distinct english elements. the introduction of the queen of the fairies, of fairy land and the visit there, and of the fairy clothes they make for tom, are all decidedly english. the sly ways of tom, his tricks and his cleverness are distinctly english humor. he played with the boys for cherry-stones, and took theirs. he had so much curiosity that he fell into his mother's pudding. he was so light that on a windy day he had to be tied to a thistle when his mother went to milk the cow; and so, with his oak-leaf hat, he got caught in the cow's one mouthful. after other strange adventures he arrived at king arthur's court where he became the favorite. his feats at tilts and tournaments give a glimpse of english court life, with its pastime of hunting; and fighting with the sword brings in the knight element. the story has little plot, being a succession of many episodes and a repetition of some. it shows little constructive ability, promises to be a perpetual tale, and is ended only by sudden death at the poisonous breath of the spider. _tom thumb_ is one of the tales of pure fancy, with no underlying meaning, created for pure entertainment, to please children and grown-ups by its little people and little things. the moral is in the effect of tom's character. perrault's _little thumb_ tells how a poor fagot-maker and his wife sat by the hearth, sad with famine, and little thumb overheard their words. when they started to the wood to gather fagots, little thumb, like hansel, scattered pebbles. the parents left the seven children in the wood but little thumb guided them home by his pebbles. they set out a second time, when little thumb scattered bread-crumbs; and as the birds ate them, the children were lost. little thumb climbed a tree and saw the light of the ogre's cottage afar off. the children reached the ogre's cottage where little thumb changed the golden crowns of the seven little ogresses, and putting them on his brothers, saved their lives. then they all fled through the wood and hid in a rock, while the ogre in his seven-league boots, pursued them and lay down to rest at the rock in which they were hidden. little thumb sent his brothers home, stole the fairy boots, and through craft, persuaded the ogre's wife to give him all the ogre's gold. so, rich and happy, he returned to his father's home. this tale shows a number of common motifs that appear in other tales: ( ) the design of distressed parents to expose children to the forest. ( ) the discovery and prevention of the scheme by a child. ( ) the repetition of incident; the clew spoiled by the birds. the trail motif, similar to the one in _hansel and grethel_. ( ) the arrival of children at the home of the ogre. ( ) the shifting of crowns to the heads of his brothers. ( ) the flight of the brothers pursued by the ogre in seven-league boots. ( ) little thumb, stealing the boots and winning court favor, or the ogre's treasure. some say that in this tale, symbolically, the forest represents night; the crumbs and pebbles, stars; and the ogre, the sun. little thumb, because of his cunning and invention, has been called the ulysses of the fairy tales. his adventure with the ogre at the rock, while not a parallel one, reminds one of ulysses and polyphemus. both succeeded in getting the better of the giant. an english edition of this tale was illustrated by william blake. _snow white and rose red_ _snow white and rose red_, besides blending the romantic and the realistic, illustrates rather completely how the old tale may stand the tests which have been emphasized here. as a romantic type, it contains adventure and the picturesque. it arouses emotion. it contains objects of beauty; and the strange bear and the stranger dwarf, about both of whom there is a sense of mystery. it exaggerates character and incidents beyond the normal,--the mother and daughters were more lovely than mortals usually are,--and the harmony between man and beast may belong to the millennium rather than to this common earth. this is one of the most romantic of fairy tales in that it is a highly idealized type. the story was current in germany before the time of the grimms, and appeared in the collection of caroline stahl. the rhyme,-- snowy-white, rosy-red, will ye strike your lover dead? was taken from a popular song, and is found in a child's story in _taschenbuch minerva_ for . _snow white and rose red_ is full of many beauties; the characters are beautiful, the setting is beautiful, and the spirit of the whole is full of beauty. there is sister-love; and mother-love--not the selfish kind that loves but its own, but that similar to the rich growth of our modern times, when mother-love seeks to include those without the home. there is genuine kindness that pours its sweetness on the bear or on the dwarf, that falls like the rain on the deserving and on the ungrateful; there is devotion to animals and a lack of enmity between man and beast; and there is a portrayal of the beauty of domestic life and of the charms of childhood in simple life--its play, its pleasure, and its tasks. this is all set as in two pictures whose sky is the golden glow of passion for the sun and the spring-time and summer it brings. in the first picture, on the edge of the forest stands a little cottage before whose gate grow two rose-trees, a red rose-tree and a white rose-tree, not only symbols of the beauty of the spring-time and of the rich fruitage of summer, but also symbols typifying the more wondrous beauty of the character of the two children, snow white and rose red. in the second picture, a tall palace rears itself, before whose gate grow two rose-trees also, a red rose-tree and a white rose-tree, not only symbols of the same beauty of spring-time and fruitage of summer, but also symbols typifying the beauty of loveliness and the fairness of happiness and prosperity that guarded from harm the lives of the deserving snow white and rose red, and continued to bless them to the close. first, looking at the characters in this tale, we see a mother who illustrates the richness of womanhood. she managed her own home and kept it a place of beauty and cheer. she had two daughters, both lovely, but very different. she recognized this difference and respected it, and permitted each child to enjoy a delightful freedom to grow as was her nature. she permitted the children to play but she also commanded willing obedience. she arranged their work with fairness so that each had her share and each seemed free in doing that work to use her individual taste and judgment. she taught her children to spin and to sew, and she read to them. she told them about the guardian angel who watched over them to keep them from harm. she was not anxious when they were out of sight, for even when snow white and rose red stayed in the wood all night and slept on the leaves, she had no fear, for no accident ever happened to them. as a strong, noble woman, without fear, and full of love, pity, and fairness,--george eliot's ideal of highest character,--the mother of snow white and rose red has no equal in the fairy tales. the two children, beautiful as the roses that grew outside the cottage, were both industrious, good, amiable little girls, who in their natural sweetness showed the spirit of the golden age when peace and good-will dwelt among men. they were natural children and they loved to play. they gathered berries in the forest, they played hide-and-seek among the trees, they waded in the river, went fishing, made wreaths of flowers, and played with their animal friends. they fed the hares cauliflower, or watched the fawns grazing and the goats frisking; and even the birds loved them and did not fly away when they were near. in the home they kept things not only clean but beautiful; they not only did work but took pleasure in doing that work. now at a time when domestic life in the home is being threatened, _snow white and rose red_ gives a realistic picture of the beauty of domestic life, its simple joys and charm. in summer there was always a nose-gay for the mother, and in winter there was a cheery fire with a copper kettle over it, shining like gold. and in the evening when the snow fell fast outside, inside was warmth and comfort. the children sat sewing and the mother reading, while a lamb and a white dove beside them enjoyed their protection and care. the entrance of the bear gave the children a natural thrill of fear. but the mother, with beautiful hospitality, gave the bear protection and kindness and led them to overcome that fear. to the bear they showed that good nature which willingly serves; and in the tricks they played with their comrade they showed a great strength of vitality and that freedom which grows where there is no repression. the bear departed at spring-time; and as he left snow white thought she saw glittering gold under his coat. this seems to hint that the tale is symbolic, typifying the change of seasons. spring, the bear, took refuge in the cottage during the cold winter months; but in the spring he had to go abroad into the forest, to guard his treasures from the evil dwarf of winter. the children again showed their sweetness and good nature when, while gathering sticks, they came upon the dwarf, with his wrinkled face and snow-white beard, the end of which was caught in a split of a tree. the contrast is delightful, between the cross and impatient dwarf and rose red who offered to fetch help, and snow white who politely tried to soothe his impatience by cutting off the end of his beard with her scissors. this time the dwarf snatched a sack of gold which lay at the foot of the tree, and fled, most ungrateful, not even thanking the children. the children had two other adventures with the dwarf; and these, together with their adventure with the bear, make up the plot of the story. they met the dwarf a second time, one day when they went fishing. then rose red told him to be careful or he'd fall into the water, because a great fish was pulling on the bait and his beard became entangled in the fishing-line. snow white again cut off the end of his beard to free him and again he snatched his bag--this time of pearls, lying among the rushes--and fled. one day, on going to town to buy thread, needles, laces, and ribbons, they met the dwarf a third time. this time an eagle had caught him and was about to carry him off. the children, with compassion, held on and freed him; but again he scolded, seized his bag of precious stones, and slipped away to his cave. on their return from town, the children again met the dwarf, in the wood, counting his treasure. again he was very angry, but just then the bear arrived out of the forest and demanded the life of the dwarf. the dwarf offered up in his stead, snow white and rose red. but the bear, faithful to his old comrades, slew the dwarf, and then becoming a beautiful prince, went home with the sisters. snow white married the prince and rose red his brother, and they all lived with their mother happily in the beautiful palace. when the bear slew the dwarf spring returned to the land. the dwarf with his snow-white beard seems to typify winter. each time the dwarf's beard was cut the beard of winter became shorter, another winter month was gone, and there remained a shorter season. the bag of gold which the dwarf first took might signify the golden fruit of autumn, and the pearls and diamonds which he next took, the ice and snow of winter. the dwarf's beard became entangled in the fishing-line when the icy winds of winter began to give the pond its frozen coat; and then the animals of the wood were compelled to seek a refuge. when the bear came out of the wood to meet the dwarf and slew him, the time for the departure of winter was at hand, and spring returned to the land. this fairy tale evidently shows a good, interesting plot, with something happening all the time. the climax is very distinctly marked, everything leads up to the meeting of the bear and the dwarf in the forest. the characters present interesting variety and strong contrasts. the setting is unusually beautiful: the cottage, the wood, the lake, the town, the hillside, the palace, and the two symbolic rose-trees. the tale appeals to the emotions of love, kindness, compassion, and gratitude. it presents to the imagination distinct episodes: the home-life of the children in the cottage, their life in the wood, their adventure with the bear, their three adventures with the dwarf, and the meeting of the bear and the dwarf. the conclusion follows closely upon the climax,--the bear, grateful to the kind children, saved their lives and re-transformed, became a prince. the happy marriage brings the tale to a close, with the palace home guarded by the two rose-trees. the message of the tale is the possible beauty of woman's love and character, and the loveliness of spring and of summer. a modern tale[ ] _the elephant's child_ _the elephant's child_ might be examined here more particularly because it is unusually interesting as an example of the complete test applied to the child's fairy tale. one need not test it as to interest for it was written especially for children by one who could play with them. as to literature it certainly has mind and soul; there is no doubt about its structure or its appeal to the sympathies. the quantity of good humor and fun it bestows upon childhood is a permanent enrichment; for even a child's world has need of all the good cheer and fun that can be given to it. this tale is especially interesting also because it might be classed as almost any one of the types of tales. it is not accumulative though it possesses to a marked degree three characteristics of the accumulative tale, repetition, alliteration, and all sorts of phonic effects. and it is not an old tale. but it is not only one of the most pleasing animal tales we possess but one of the best humorous tales having the rare quality of freshness. it is realistic in its portrayal of animal life; and it is highly romantic in its sense of adventure, the heroic, the strange, and the remote. as a short-story it shows the essentials, originality, ingenuity, and compression. the single interest is how the elephant got his trunk, and everything points to the climax of his getting it. the plot is "entertaining, novel, comical and thrilling." the structure is very easily seen in these ten episodes:-- . the introduction; the family; the child; his home; his questions; the new, fine question. . the elephant's child set out to answer his own question. . the elephant's child met kolokolo bird. . the elephant's child journeyed to the limpopo. . the elephant's child met the python. . the elephant's child met the crocodile. he got his trunk. (climax.) . the elephant's child gained experience from the python. . the elephant's child's journey home. . the elephant's child's return home. . conclusion. how all elephants got trunks. peace. the characters are unique and interesting. they are usual animals but unusual in what they say. they exhibit animal traits and motives but they also show us a hidden meaning in their actions and words. they seem living, they speak directly; yet they preserve the idea of the fable for they are symbolic. the elephant's child typifies human innocence, the inexperience of youth; the kolokolo bird, a friend; the python, experience or wisdom; and the crocodile, guile or evil. all the animals become very interesting because we are concerned to know their particular reason for spanking the "'satiable elephant's child." what they say is so humorous and what they do is consistent, in harmony with their natural animal traits. the child is the hero. he is a very attractive character because he has that rare charm we call temperament. he is curious, polite, and sweet, and follows his own nose in spite of everything. he wins out with strength, experience, and a new nose; and we are rejoiced at his triumphs. his questions are so funny and yet they seem quite what any elephant with a bump of curiosity might ask. to the giraffe--"what made his skin spotty?" to the hippopotamus--"why her eyes were red?" to the baboon--"why melons tasted just so?" and at last, "what does the crocodile have for dinner?" the setting of the tale is suggested continually in expressions which show visual imagination of a high order: such as, "and he lived in africa"; "dragged him through a thorn bush"; "blew bubbles into her ear"; "hove him into a hornet's nest"; and "from graham's town to kimberley and from kimberley to khama's country, and from khama's country east by north to the limpopo." the tale possesses most delightful humor. a verbal magic which fairly scintillates with the comic spirit, and clinging epithets of which kipling is a master, suggest the exact picture needed. humor is secured largely through the use of the unique word; as, "_spanked_," "_precisely_ as kolokolo bird had said," and "for he was a _tidy_ pachyderm." often it is increased by the use of newly coined words; as, "hijjus," "curtiosity," "scalesome, flailsome, tail," "fever-trees," "self-propelling man-of-war," and "schloop of mud." another element of humor in the tale is the artistic use of repetition, which has been previously referred to as one of the child's interests. sometimes one meaning is expressed in several different ways; as, "immediately and directly, without stopping, for a long time." or we are given contrasted terms; as, "a little warm but not at all astonished," and then later, "very warm and greatly astonished." one main element of humor is this way in which expressions reflect back on preceding ones. sometimes we are given very surprising, startling, expressions; as, "wait-a-bit-thorn-bush "--which reminds us of the "all-alone-stone" in _water babies_--and "he sang to himself down his trunk." as to imagination, _the elephant's child_ is a delightful illustration of the appeal to the associative, the penetrative, and the contemplative imagination. while its philosophy may be understood in part by the child it has a deeper meaning for the adult. it seems to imply that it is the way of life to spank somebody else. it is the stronger who spank the weaker until they become strong enough to stand up for themselves. then nobody spanks anybody any more and there is peace. when the child asked a question that no one would answer he set out to find his own answer just as in life it often is best to work to answer one's own questions. when the elephant trusted the crocodile he got something to keep just as in life the innocent may bear the marks of a contest though in no sense responsible for the contest. experience in the guise of the python helped the child in his contest for life with the advice his own common sense would have offered. as an allegory of experience _the elephant's child_ does not view life as a whole; it gives but a glimpse of life. it would say: experience teaches us to make the best with what we have. the way to get experience is to try a new power, just as the child with his trunk tried to kill the fly and eat grass. as soon as he had received his new power he tested it on the hippopotamous. he won the respect of his kind by beating them at their own game. the emotional appeal in _the elephant's child_ would repay study. the dominant emotional tone is that of the adventurous hero with his "'satiable curtiosity." there is vividness of emotion, steadiness of emotion, and a rich variety in the contrasts of feeling. emotion of a moral quality is characteristic of its implied message of worldly wisdom but it does not leave one exactly satisfied. the form of the story is a splendid example of a literary classic style. a pleasing humorous touch is given to the unity of the tale by making the elephant's child pick up with his new trunk, on his way home, the melon-rinds he had scattered on his journey to the limpopo. the coherence in the tale is unusually fine and is secured largely by expressions which look backward or forwards; as, "by and by when that was finished," or "one fine morning," or "that very next morning." any study will show that the tale possesses the general qualities of form and has its parts controlled by the principles of composition. outline i. the worth of fairy tales i. two public tributes ii. the value of fairy tales in education . they bring joy into child-life . they satisfy the play-spirit of childhood . they give a power of accurate observation . they strengthen the power of emotion, develop the power of imagination, train the memory and exercise the reason . they extend and intensify the child's social relations . in school they unify the child's work or play . in the home they employ leisure time profitably . they afford a vital basis for language-training iii. references ii. principles of selection for fairy tales i. the interests of children . fairy tales must follow the law of composition and must contain the interests of children a. a sense of life b. the familiar c. the surprise d. sense impression e. the beautiful f. wonder, mystery, magic g. adventure h. success i. action j. humor k. poetic justice l. the imaginative m. animals n. a portrayal of human relations, especially with children o. the diminutive p. rhythm and repetition q. the simple and sincere r. unity of effect . fairy tales must follow the law of the emotions and avoid elements opposed to the interests of the very young child a. the tale of the witch b. the tale of the dragon c. giant tales d. some tales of transformation e. the tale of strange animal relations and strange creatures f. unhappy tales g. the tale of capture h. the very long tale i. the complicated or the insincere tale ii. the fairy tale as literature . the fairy tale must be a true classic . the fairy tale must have mind and soul . the fairy tale must have the distinguishing marks of literature a. a power to appeal to the emotions ) literary emotion is not personal ) literary emotion must have justness ) literary emotion must have vividness ) literary emotion must have steadiness ) literary emotion must have variety ) literary emotion must have moral quality ) application of the test of emotion to the fairy tales ) the value of fairy tales in the development of emotion b. a power to appeal to the imagination ) appeal to the creative imagination ) appeal to the associative imagination a) appeal to fancy ) appeal to the penetrative imagination ) appeal to the contemplative imagination a) philosophy in the fairy tales b) proverbs in the fairy tales c) relation of the contemplative imagination to science c. a basis of truth, or appeal to the intellect ) the truth must be idealistic a) it may be realistic b) it may be romantic ) value of the appeal of literature to the intellect d. a form more or less perfect ) the elements of form: words, sentences, paragraphs, and wholes a) words, the medium of language must have two powers ( ) denotation, to name what they mean ( ) connotation, to suggest what they imply b) suggestive power of words illustrated ) general qualities characteristic of perfect form a) precision or clearness ( ) precision demands that words have denotation ( ) precision appeals to the intellect b) energy or force ( ) energy demands that words have connotation ( ) energy appeals to the emotions and holds the attention c) delicacy or emotional harmony ( ) delicacy demands that words have the power of adaptation ( ) delicacy demands that form appeal to the æsthetic sense ( ) delicacy is secured by selection and arrangement of words according to emotional associations d) personality ( ) personality gives the charm of individuality ( ) personality suggests the character of the writer ) principles controlling the elements of form, principles of composition a) the principle of sincerity ( ) sincerity demands a just expression b) the principle of unity ( ) unity demands a central idea ( ) unity demands completeness ( ) unity demands no irrelevant material ( ) unity demands method, sequence and climax c) the principle of mass ( ) mass demands that the chief parts readily catch the eye ( ) mass demands harmonious proportion of parts d) the principle of coherence ( ) coherence demands unmistakable relation of parts ( ) coherence demands this unmistakable relation be preserved by the order, forms and connections ) form characterized by perfect adaptation of words to thought and feeling is called style a) style demands that form possess the four general qualities of form in perfection: precision, energy, delicacy, and personality b) style demands that form have its elements controlled by the four general principles: sincerity, unity, mass, and coherence c) _oeyvind and marit_, a modern tale illustrating style d) _three billy-goats gruff_, a folk-tale illustrating style e) the folk-tale generally considered as to literary form f) the tale by grimm, perrault, dasent, harris, jacobs, lang, and andersen considered as to literary form g) the tale of to-day considered as to literary form iii. the fairy tale as a short-story . characters a. characters must be unique, original, and striking b. characters of the fairy tales . plot a. plot must be entertaining, comical, novel, or thrilling b. plot must show a beginning, a middle, and an end c. plot must have a distinct climax d. introduction must be simple e. conclusion must show poetic justice f. plot must be good narration and description ) narration must have truth, interest, and consistency ) description must have aptness and concreteness g. structure illustrated by _three pigs_ and _briar rose_ . setting a. setting must give the time and place, the background of the tale b. setting must arouse sensation and feeling c. effect of transformation of setting ) story sequence preserved by setting illustrated by _robin's christmas song_ d. setting and phonics, illustrated. _the spider and the flea_ e. setting illustrated. _chanticleer and partlet_ . a blending of characters, plot, and setting illustrated by _the elves and the shoemaker_ . tests to be applied to fairy tales . tales examined and tested by the complete test of interests, classic, literature, short-story, narration, and description a. _how the sun, moon, and west wind went to dinner_ (indian) b. the straw ox (cossack) iv. references iii. the telling of fairy tales story-telling as an art. introductory . story-telling as an ancient art . the place of the story in the home, library, and the school . principles of story-telling i. the teacher's preparation. rules . select the tale for some purpose a. the teacher's problem of selecting the tale psychologically or logically . know the tale historically as folk-lore, as literature, and as a short-story a. the various motives contained in the fairy tales listed . master the structure of the tale . dwell upon the life of the story . secure the message . master the form ii. the presentation of the tale . training of the voice a. study of phonetics . exercises in breathing . a knowledge of gesture a. gesture precedes speech b. gesture begins in the face c. hands and arms lie close to the body in controlled emotion . a power of personality . suggestions for telling a. the establishment of the personal relation between the teacher and the listener b. the placing of the story in a concrete situation for the child c. the consideration of the child's aim in listening, by the teacher in her preparation . the telling of the tale a. the re-creative method of story-telling. illustrated by a criticism of the telling of _the princess and the pea_ b. the re-creative method illustrated by _the foolish, timid rabbit_ . adaptation of the fairy tale. illustrated by _thumbelina_ and by _the snow man_ iii. the return from the child story-telling as one phase of the art of teaching. introductory . teaching as good art and as great art; and fairy tales as subject-matter suited to accomplish high purposes in teaching . the part the child has to play in story-telling . the child's return, the expression of his natural instincts or general interests . the instinct of conversation a. language expression, oral re-telling b. the formation of original little stories c. reading of the tale a form of creative reaction . the instinct of inquiry a. appeal of the folk-tale to this instinct b. the instinct of inquiry united to the instinct of conversation, of construction, and of artistic expression, illustrated . the instinct of construction a. clay-modelling b. construction of objects . the instinct of artistic expression a. cutting of free silhouette pictures. illustrated b. drawing and crayon-sketching. illustrated c. painting. illustrated d. song. illustrated e. dance, rhythm plays. illustrated f. game. illustrated g. representation of the fairy tale. illustrated by _the steadfast tin soldier_ h. free play and dramatization ) virtues of dramatization a) it develops voice b) it gives grace of movement c) it develops control and poise d) it strengthens attention and power of visualization e) it combines intellectual, emotional, artistic, and physical action f) it impresses many pieces of literature effectively g) it is the true direct moral method and may establish a habit ) dangers of dramatization a) dramatization often is in very poor form b) dramatization may develop boldness in a child c) dramatization may spoil some literature d) dramatization has lacked sequence in tales used from year to year i. illustrations of creative return ) _the country mouse and the city mouse_ as expression in language, dramatization, drawing, and crayon-sketching ) _the elves and the shoemaker_ as expression in the dramatic game ) _little two-eyes_ as expression in dramatization. a fairy-play outline. (see _appendix_) ) _snow white_ as expression in dramatization. (see _appendix_) ) _sleeping beauty_ as expression of partial narration, dramatic game, and dramatization combined ) _the little lamb and the little fish_, an original tale developed from a grimm fragmentary tale, illustrating expression in folk-game and dramatization. (see _appendix_) ) _the bird and the trees_, an original play illustrating expression in rhythm play and dramatization ) _how the birds came to have different nests_, an original play illustrating language expression and dramatization. (see _appendix_) ) andersen's _fir tree_ as expression in dramatization, illustrating organization of ideas through a play iv. references iv. the history of fairy tales i. the origin of fairy tales . the fairy tale defined . the derivation and history of the name, _fairy_ a. four senses in which _fairy_ has been used . the theories concerning the origin of fairy tales a. fairy tales are detritus of myth ) the evolution of the tale b. fairy tales are myths of sun, rain, dawn, thunder, etc., the aryan theory c. fairy tales all arose in india, the philological theory d. fairy tales owe their origin to the identity of early fancy e. fairy tales owe their origin to a combination of all these theories ii. the transmission of fairy tales . the oral transmission of fairy tales a. examples of transmission of fairy tales: _jack the giant-killer_, _dick whittington_, etc. . literary transmission of fairy tales a. an enumeration of the literary collections and books that have handed down the tales; as _reynard the fox_, the _persian king-book, the thousand and one nights_, straparola's _nights_, basile's _pentamerone_, and perrault's _tales of mother goose_ b. french publications of fairy tales ) the tales of perrault ) tales by followers of perrault ) a list of tales from the time of perrault to the present time c. english and celtic publications of fairy tales ) tales of scotland and ireland ) english tales and books ) a list illustrating the history of the english fairy tale, including chap-books: _jack the giant-killer_, _tom hickathrift_; old collections; etc. ) a list illustrating the development of fairy-tale illustration in england d. german publications of fairy tales ) a list of tales from the time of the grimms to the present e. fairy-tale publications of other nations f. american publications of fairy tales ) a list of tales from the earliest times to g. recent collections of folk-lore iii. references v. classes of fairy tales i. available types of tales . the accumulative or clock story a. tales of simple repetition ) the house that jack built ) the key of the kingdom b. tales of repetition with an addition ) the old woman and her pig ) titty mouse and tatty mouse ) johnny cake ) the gingerbread man ) the straw ox c. tales of repetition and variation ) the three bears ) the three billy goats . the animal tale a. the evolution of the animal tale b. the animal tale may be an old beast tale ) henny penny ) the foolish timid rabbit ) the sheep and the pig ) medio pollito ) the three pigs c. the animal tale may be an elaborated fable, illustrated d. the animal tale may be an imaginary creation, illustrated e. the good-natured bear, a modern type. (see _appendix_) . the humorous tale a. the humorous element for children b. the musicians of bremen, a humorous type c. humorous tales mentioned previously d. drakesbill, a humorous type . the realistic tale a. lazy jack, a realistic type of common life b. the old woman and her pig, a realistic type c. how two beetles took lodgings, a realistic tale of scientific interest d. titty mouse and tatty mouse, a realistic theme transformed into a romantic tale . the romantic tale a. cinderella b. sleeping beauty c. red riding hood d. puss-in-boots. (see _appendix_) ) the norse lord peter (see _appendix_) e. tom thumb, a romantic tale of fancy. (see _appendix_) ) the french little thumb. (see _appendix_) ) the english tom thumb. (see _appendix_) f. snow white and rose red, a highly idealized romantic type tested by the standards included here. (see _appendix_) . the old tale and the modern tale a. the modern tale often lacks the great art qualities of the old tale, unity and harmony, sincerity and simplicity b. the modern tale often fails to use the method of suggestion c. the modern tale often does not stand the test of literature d. the modern tale gives richly to the primary and elementary field e. criticism of a few modern tales ) little beta and the lame giant, a good modern tale ) the cock, the mouse, and the little red hen, a good modern tale ) peter rabbit, a classic; other animal tales ) the elephant's child, a modern animal tale. (see _appendix_) ) a quick-running squash, a good modern tale ) a few st. nicholas fairy stories ) the hop-about-man, a romantic modern fairy tale f. what the modern fairy tale is vi. sources of material for fairy tales: a list of fairy tales, folk-tales, pictures, picture-books, poems, and books. basis on which lists are made. introductory i. a list of fairy tales and folk-tales suited to the kindergarten and first grade . tales of perrault . tales of the grimms . norse tales . english tales, by jacobs . modern fairy tales, by andersen . uncle remus tales, by harris . miscellaneous tales ii. bibliography of fairy tales iii. a list of picture-books iv. a list of pictures v. a list of fairy poems vi. main standard fairy-tale books vii. fairy tales of all nations viii. miscellaneous editions of fairy tales ix. school editions of fairy tales appendix illustrations of creative return tales suited for dramatization little two-eyes snow white the little lamb and the little fish how the birds came to have different nests types of tales an animal tale the good-natured bear a few romantic tales puss-in-boots and lord peter tom thumb and little thumb snow white and rose red a modern tale the elephant's child notes: [ : mcloughlin edition.] [ : what if we could give the child that which is called education through his voluntary activities, and have him always as eager as he is at play! (_froebel_.) what if we could let the child be free and happy, and yet bring to him those things which he ought to have so that he will choose them freely! what would be the possibilities for a future race if we would give the child mind a chance to come out and express itself, if we would remove adult repression, offer a stimulus, and closely watch the product, untouched by adult skill. (_unknown_.) the means by which the higher selective interest is aroused, is the exercise of selected forms of activity. (_susan blow_.)] [ : _little two-eyes_ and _snow white_ are tales also suited to the first grade for dramatization. see _appendix_.] [ : a similar tale is told by miss holbrook in _the book of nature myths_. also by mary mcdowell as "the three little christmas trees." a simple version of this tale, "the three little christmas trees that grew on the hill," is given in _the story-teller's book_ by alice o'grady and frances throop.] [ : joseph jacobs, in his introduction to the cranford edition, and ashton, in _chap-books of the eighteenth century_, furnish most of the facts mentioned here.] [ : this list has been compiled largely from "children's books and their illustrators," by gleeson white, in _the international studio_. special winter number, - .] [ : the following list, compiled by mr. h.h.b. meyer, the chief bibliographer of the library of congress, has been furnished through the courtesy of the united states bureau of education. a few additional books were inserted by the author. the books at the head of the list give information on the subject.] [ : _the woman and her kid_, a version of this tale adapted from an ancient jewish sacred book, is given in _boston kindergarten stories_, p. .] [ : see appendix.] [ : william m. thackeray, _miscellanies_, v. boston: james osgood & co., . "titmarsh among pictures and books"; "on some illustrated christmas books," .] [ : a few romantic tales for the first grade are treated in the appendix: _puss-in-boots_, _lord peter_, _tom thumb_, _little thumb_, and _snow white and rose red_.] [ : see _appendix_.] [ : laura f. kready, "picture-books for little children," _kindergarten review_, sept., .] [ : for _little two-eyes_ and _snow white, see_ note on p. ; for _the little lamb and the little fish, see_ pp. - ; and for _how the birds came to have different nests, see_ p. .] [ : _see_ note, p. .] [ : _see_ note, p. ] [ : reprinted in _living age_, aug. , , vol. , p. .] [ : _see_ p. ] index accumulative or clock story, - . action, - . adaptation of fairy tales, - . adventure, - . adventures of chanticleer and partlet, - . american fairy tales, - . andersen, hans c.: tales by, tested as literary form, ; steadfast tin soldier, , , - ; fir tree, - ; list of tales by, ; editions, - . animal tale: class, - ; evolution of, - ; types of, - , - , - . animals: an interest, ; tale of strange, - . appendix, - : little two-eyes, - ; snow white, - ; the little lamb and the little fish, - ; how the birds came to have different nests, - ; the good-natured bear, - ; puss-in-boots and lord peter, - ; tom thumb and little thumb, - ; snow white and rose red, - ; the elephant's child, - . arabian nights, thousand and one nights, - , , . art: of teaching, - ; in teaching, good, ; in teaching, great, - ; in literature, good, - ; in literature, fine, - ; of story-telling, - , - ; ancient, of story-telling, - . artistic expression, instinct of, - . aulnoy, comtesse d', tales of, - . basile, - . beaumont, madam de, . beautiful, the, - . beauty and the beast, dramatization of, - ; editions of, , . bibliography of fairy tales, - . bird and the trees, - . books, main standard fairy tale, a list, - . _see_ sources of material. breathing, exercises in, - . briar rose, . _see also_ sleeping beauty. capture, tales of, - . celtic fairy tales, - . chap-books, - , , , . characters, - . child: his part in story-telling, - ; interests, - ; instincts, - ; growth: in observation, , - ; in reason, - , - ; in language, ; in emotion, - ; in imagination, - ; in experience, ; in intellect, - ; in self-activity, - ; in consciousness, - ; in initiative, ; in purpose, - ; in creative return possible to him, - ; in self-expression, - ; in organization of ideas, . child's own book, the, . cinderella, a chap-book, , , ; a romantic type, - . classes of tales, - : accumulative, - ; animal, - ; humorous, - ; realistic, - ; romantic, - ; old and modern, compared, - ; references, - . classic, fairy tale as a, - . cock, the mouse, and the little red hen, - . coherence, principle of, - ; illustrated, , . complicated or insincere, the, . composition: general qualities of, - ; precision, ; energy, - ; delicacy, ; personality, ; principles of, - ; sincerity, - ; unity, ; mass, ; coherence, ; style in, - . comte de caylus, . concrete situation, placing of story in, - , - . connotation, - . consciousness, development of, - . construction, expression of instinct of, - . conversation, expression of instinct of, - . country mouse and city mouse, - . crayon-sketching, as expression, . creative return, illustrated, - . _see_ return. criticism: of life, teaching, a, - ; of oeyvind and marit, - ; of three billy-goats gruff, - ; of how the sun, moon, and west wind went out to dinner, - ; of straw ox, - ; of steadfast tin soldier, - ; of musicians of bremen, - ; of drakesbill, - ; of puss-in-boots and norse lord peter, - ; of tom thumb and little thumb, - ; of snow white and rose red, - ; and of elephant's child, - . danish tales, . dasent, sir george w., tales by, as literary form, - ; norse tales by, , , . delicacy, or emotional harmony, quality of, - ; illustrated, , , . denotation, . description, . dick whittington, illustrating oral transmission of tales, ; a chap-book, , , , . diminutive, the, - . dragon tales, . drakesbill, - . dramatic game: elves and the shoemaker, ; sleeping beauty, - . dramatization, as expression, - ; virtues of, , ; dangers of, - ; of sleeping beauty, - ; of bird and the trees, - ; of fir tree, - ; of little two eyes, - ; of snow white, - ; of how the birds came to have different nests, - ; and of puss-in-boots, . drawing, as expression, . dwarf's tailor, . editions, main fairy tale, - ; fairy tale, of all nations, - ; illustrated, - ; miscellaneous, of fairy tales, - ; school, of fairy tales, - . elements to be avoided, - . elephant's child, illustrating: repetition, - ; suggestion, - ; form, - ; modern animal tale, , - . elves and the shoemaker, illustrating: structure and short-story, - ; story, - ; creative return, . emelyan the fool, . emotion, appeal to, distinguishing literary trait, - ; qualities of literary, ; literary, in fairy tales, - ; growth of, - ; comparison of, in fairy tales and shakespeare's dramas, , - . energy or force, quality of, - ; illustrated, , . english fairy tales, - ; collections of, - ; illustrating development of illustration, - ; by jacobs, list, - ; editions, . expression in: language, - ; reading, ; inquiry, - ; construction, - ; art, - ; paper-cutting, - ; drawing, ; painting, ; rhythm play, - ; song, - ; game, - ; representation, - ; dramatization, - , - . fairy, derivation of, - ; history of the name, . fairy tales: worth of, - ; principles of selection for, - ; telling of, - ; history of, - ; classes of, - ; sources of material for, - ; tributes to, - ; interests in, - ; as literature, - ; as classics, - ; possessing mind and soul, - ; distinguished by marks of literature, ; as emotion, - ; as imagination, - ; philosophy in, - ; proverbs in, ; as truth, - ; as form, - ; powers of words in, - ; general qualities of form in, - ; general principles controlling form in, - ; style in, defined, - ; tested as literary form, - ; as a form of short-story, - ; characters, - ; plot, - ; narration, - ; description, ; structure, - ; setting, - ; three elements blended, - ; tested by complete standards, - ; teacher's preparation for telling, - ; presentation of, by teacher, - ; return of child from, - ; rules for preparation of, - ; selection of, - ; motifs in, - ; re-telling of, - ; training of voice in telling, - ; breathing in telling, - ; gesture in telling, - ; power of personality, in telling, - ; suggestions for telling, - ; establishment of personal relation in telling, - ; placing of, in a concrete situation, - ; conception of child's aim in listening to, ; re-creative method of telling, - ; adaptation of, - ; art of teaching, in telling, - ; as expression of conversation, - ; as expression of inquiry, - ; as expression of construction, - ; as expression of art, - ; origin of, - ; transmission of, - ; french, - ; celtic, - ; english, - ; german, - ; tales of other nations, - ; american, - ; collections of folklore, ; accumulative, - ; animal, - ; humorous, - ; realistic, - ; romantic, - , - ; old and modern, - ; of perrault, ; of the grimms, - ; norse, ; english, by jacobs, - ; modern, by andersen, ; uncle remus, by harris, - ; miscellaneous, - ; bibliography of, - ; in picture-books, - ; in pictures, ; in poems, - ; in standard books, - ; of all nations, - ; in miscellaneous editions, - ; in school editions, - ; in appendix, - . familiar, the, - . fancy, , . fir tree, - . first-grade fairy tales, - , - . folk-game, illustrated by little lamb and the little fish, - , - . folk-tales, generally, as literary form, - ; tested as literary form, - ; characters of, compared with those of shakespeare, , - ; recent collections of, . foolish, timid rabbit, illustrating method in story-telling, - ; an animal type, . form, a distinguishing literary trait, , ; perfect, - ; general qualities of, - ; precision, a quality, ; energy, a quality, - ; delicacy, a quality, ; personality, a quality, ; principles controlling, - : sincerity, - ; unity, ; mass, ; coherence, ; style in, - ; illustrated: by oeyvind and marit, - ; by three billy-goats gruff, - ; folk-tales as literary, - ; mastery of tale as, - . french fairy tales, - . game, as expression, - . gardens of the tuileries, . german fairy tales, - . gesta romanorum, - . gesture, knowledge of, - ; library pamphlet relating to, . giant tales, - . golden egg and the cock of gold, - . good-natured bear, a modern animal type, , - ; a book, . grimm, william and jacob, - ; list of tales by, - ; editions by, ; tales by, as literary form, . harris, j.c., list of uncle remus tales by, - ; tales by, as literary form, ; editions by, . henny penny, . history of fairy tales, - ; origin of fairy tales, - ; transmission of fairytales, - ; oral transmission, - ; literary transmission, - ; references, - . hop-about-man, - . house that jack built, - . how the birds came to have different nests, ; - . how the sun, moon, and west wind went out to dinner, - . how two beetles took lodgings, . humor in fairy tales: an interest, - ; - . humorous tales, - ; types of, - . imagination, a distinguishing literary mark of fairy tales, , - ; creative, ; associative, ; penetrative, ; contemplative, - ; fancy, , ; exhibited in child's return, , - . imaginative, the, . initiative, development of, , - . instincts of child, expression of: conversation, - ; inquiry, - ; construction, - ; artistic expression, - . intellect, appeal of fairy tales to, - . interests of children, - ; sense of life, ; the familiar, - ; surprise, - ; sense impression, - ; the beautiful, - ; wonder, mystery, magic, ; adventure, - ; success, ; action, - ; humor, - ; poetic justice, - ; the imaginative, ; animals, ; portrayal of human relations, - ; the diminutive, - ; rhythm and repetition, - ; the simple and the sincere, - ; unity of effect, - ; opposed to, - ; witch tales, ; dragon tales, ; giant tales, - ; some tales of transformation, - ; tales of strange creatures, - ; unhappy tales, ; tales of capture, - ; very long tales, - ; complicated or insincere tales, . introduction, i-iii. inquiry, instinct of, - . jack the giant-killer, , , , . jacobs, joseph, list of tales by, - ; tales by, as literary form, ; editions by, . jatakas, . key of the kingdom, - . kindergarten: play in, - ; work in, unified by the fairy tale, - ; language-training in, - ; interests of child in, - ; standards for literature in, - ; standards for composition in, - ; story-telling in, - ; return to be expected from child in, - ; standards of teaching for teacher in, - ; instincts of child in, - ; history of fairy tales to be used in, - ; classes of tales used in, - ; sources of material for fairy tales to be used in, - . king-book, persian, the, - . lang, andrew, tales by, as literary form, . lambikin, . language, expression in, - . lazy jack, - . life, a sense of, ; criticism of, - ; fairy tale a counterpart to, - . lists: of tales, - ; _see_ sources of material. literature, mind and soul in, - ; qualities of, ; fairy tale as, - . little lamb and the little fish, - , - . little two-eyes, , - . little thumb, editions, ; tale, , - . literary collections of tales, - . logical method of selecting tales, - . long tales, opposed to child's interests, - . lord peter, , . magpie's nest, , - . märchen brunnen or fairy-tale fountain, - . mass, principle of, - ; illustrated in: oeyvind and marit, - ; three billy-goats gruff, . medio pollito, - . memory, development of, . message, of the tale, ; of this book. _see_ summaries. method of story-telling, the recreative, - ; criticism of, - ; illustration of, - ; direct moral, . mind, in literature, . miscellaneous, tales, a list, - ; editions, - . modern tale, compared with old tale, - ; types of, - ; what it is, ; tales, by andersen, - , , , - . motifs in folk-tales, classified, - . mother goose, tales of, - ; her melodies, , , , . musicians of bremen, - , - . narration, in fairy tales, - ; illustrated by sleeping beauty, - . norse tales, ; a list of, ; editions, . objectification in fairy tales, - . oeyvind and marit, - . old woman and her pig, accumulative type, , ; realistic type, - ; an exercise of memory, . organization of ideas, accomplished through fir tree, - ; social, of tale, - . origin of fairy tales, - . outline, - . paper-cutting, - . painting, as expression, . panchatantra, the five books, . pause, in story-telling, - . pentamerone, the, - . perrault, charles, statue of, ; list of tales by, ; tales by, tested as literary form, ; editions by, - . personality, quality of, - ; in oeyvind and marit, ; in three billy-goats gruff, ; power of, - . personal relation, establishment of, - . peter rabbit, . philosophy, in fairy tales, - ; of uncle remus tales, - ; of laboulaye's tales, ; of cat and mouse in partnership, ; of emperor's new suit, - ; of ugly duckling, - ; of elephant's child, ; child's, - . phonics in fairy tales, - . pictures, list, . picture-books, list, - . plot, element of fairy tale as short-story, - ; structure illustrated, - . poems, fairy, list, - . poetic justice, - . poetry, of teaching, . portrayal of human relations, especially with children, - . position, of story-teller, . precision, quality of, ; illustrated in: oeyvind and marit, ; three billy-goats gruff, . preparation, teacher's, in story-telling, - ; rules for telling, - . presentation, teacher's, of tale, - ; training of voice, - ; exercises in breathing, - ; gesture, - ; power of personality, - ; suggestions for telling, - ; establishment of personal relation, - ; placing of story in concrete situation, - , - ; conception of child's aim, ; telling of tale, - ; re-creative method of story-telling, - ; adaptation of fairy tales, - . princess and pea, - . principles, of selection for fairy tales, - ; interests of children, - ; fairy tale as literature, - ; fairy tale as short-story, - ; references, - . principles, of composition, - ; of story-telling, ; of teaching, - ; concerning instincts of children, - . problem, a means of developing consciousness, - . proverbs in fairy tales, . purpose, growth in child's, - . puss-in-boots, , - . psychological method of selecting tales, - . quick-running squash, . realistic, tale, - ; types of, - . reading, as expression, ; relation of, to literature, - , . reason, growth in, - , ; development of, - . re-creative method of story-telling, - . red riding hood, chap-book, ; a romantic type, - . references; chapter i, ; chapter ii, - ; chapter iii, - ; chapter iv, - ; chapter v, - . relation, of contemplative imagination to language-training, - ; of contemplative imagination to power of observation, - ; of contemplative imagination to science, - ; of literature to intellect, - ; of sound to sense or meaning, ; of sound to action, - ; of phonics and emotional effect, ; of gesture to story-telling, - ; personal, between the story-teller and listener, - ; of reading to story-telling, ; of reading to literature, , , , ; of rhyme to meaning, ; of fairy tales to nature study, , - ; of fairy tales to industrial education, - ; of fairy tales to child, - ; of dramatization to story-telling, - ; of fairy tales to literature, - ; of fairy tales to composition, - ; of fairy tales to story-telling, - . repetition, - , - . representation, - . re-telling of fairy tales, - . return, creative, from child, in telling of fairy tales, - : in language, - ; in inquiry, - ; in construction, - ; in artistic expression, - ; in paper-cutting, - ; in drawing, ; in painting, ; in song, - ; in rhythm, - ; in game, - ; in dance, , , ; in dramatization, - ; illustrated, - , - . reynard the fox, place in the animal tale, ; history, - ; chap-book, , , , . rhyme, . rhythm, in fairy tales, - ; plays, - . robin's christmas song, - . romantic tale, - ; types of, - , - . st. nicholas, stories retold from, . sanskrit tales, . school editions of fairy tales, - . science, relation of contemplative imagination to, - . sea fairy and the land fairy, - . selection of fairy tales by teacher, psychological or logical, - . sense impression, - . setting, element of fairy tale as short-story, - ; sequence in, - ; story told by, - ; and phonics, - . sheep and pig, . short-story, fairy tale as, - : elements of, - ; ways of writing, ; characters, - ; plot, - ; narration in, - ; description in, ; setting, - ; elements of, blended, - ; tales tested as, - ; telling of, - . silhouette pictures, cutting of, - . simple and sincere, - . sincerity, principle of, - ; illustrated in: oeyvind and marit, , ; three billy-goats gruff, - . sindibad, the book of, . sleeping beauty, romantic type, - ; uniting partial narration, dramatization, and dramatic game, - . snow white, , - . snow white and rose red, , - . song, as expression, - . soul, in literature, - . sources of material for fairy tales, - : list of fairy tales and folk-tales, - ; bibliography of fairy tales, - ; list of picture-books, - ; list of pictures, ; list of fairy poems, - ; main standard fairy-tale books, - ; fairy tales of all nations, - ; miscellaneous editions of fairy tales, - ; school editions of fairy tales, - . sparrow and the crow, as expression, - . spider and the flea, - . standards, for testing fairy tales, ; for selecting tales, - ; for making lists, - . _see_ summaries. standard fairy-tale books, a list, - . story, place of, in home, library, and school, - ; formation of original stories, - . story-telling, an ancient art, - ; principles governing, ; teacher's preparation for, - ; rules for, - ; presentation in, - ; voice in, - ; breathing in, - ; gesture in, - ; re-creative method of, - ; return from child, in, - ; child's part in, - . straparola, . straparola's nights, . straw ox, - . structure, illustrated, - ; study of, in story-telling, - . study of tale as folk-lore and as literature, - . style, defined, - ; illustrated, - ; qualities of, - ; principles controlling, - . success, . suggestion, illustrated by pope, ; by andersen, ; by kipling, - ; through gesture and sound, ; through arrangement of words and speech-tunes of voice, - . summaries: giving message of book, , - , , - , , , - , . surprise, - . swedish tales, . tales: of mother goose, - ; of perrault, ; of the grimms, - ; norse, ; english, by jacobs, - ; modern fairy, by andersen, ; uncle remus, - ; miscellaneous, - ; fairy, of all nations, - ; literary collections of, - . _see_ fairy tales. teaching, story-telling, a part of the art of, - ; poetry of, ; good art in, ; great art in, - ; a criticism of life, - . telling, of fairy tales, - ; art of story-telling, - ; principles controlling, ; preparation by teacher for, - ; presentation by teacher, in, - ; suggestions for, - ; return by child, from, - ; re-creative method of, - ; adaptation of tales for, - ; references, - . theories of origin of fairy tales: detritus of myth, - ; sun-myth theory, - ; common indian heritage, - ; identity of early fancy, . three bears, illustrating surprise, - ; a chap-book, ; accumulative, - . three billy-goats gruff, - . three pigs, illustrating structure, ; animal type, . thumbelina, illustrating adaptation, ; illustrating rhythm play, . tin soldier, steadfast, as emotion, ; tale of imagination, ; as representation, - ; as a game, , . titty mouse and tatty mouse, , - , - . tom hickathrift, , , , . tom thumb, chap-book tale, , , , ; romantic type, - . tone-color, in story-telling, . training of voice, - . transformation, tales of, - ; kinds of, . transmission, of tales: oral, - ; literary, ; illustrated by: dog gellert, ; dick whittington, ; peruonto, - . tributes, two public, - . truth, basis of, in fairy tales, a distinguishing literary mark, , - . tuileries, gardens of. _see_ gardens. uncle remus tales, by harris, - ; editions, . unhappy tales, . unity, of effect, - ; principle of composition, - ; illustrated in: oeyvind and marit, ; three billy-goats gruff, . value, of fairy tales in education, - , - ; to give joy, - ; to satisfy the play-spirit, - ; to develop observation, ; to give habits of mind, - ; to strengthen emotion, - , - ; to extend social relations, - in home, library, and school, - ; to give language-training, - ; to develop imagination, - ; to develop reason, - ; to develop power of creative return, - ; to develop self-activity, - ; to develop consciousness, through problems, - ; to develop initiative, ; to develop purpose, - ; to develop self-expression, - ; to strengthen originality, - ; to develop organization of ideas, ; and to exercise memory, . version, of tale, - . villeneuve, madam, . voice, training of, - . witch tales, . wolf and the seven kids, expression in painting, ; in song, - . words, powers of, - ; denotation, ; connotation, - ; suggestion, - . wonder, mystery, magic, an interest, . worth of fairy tales, - : two public tributes, - ; value of fairy tales in education, - ; references, . literature in the elementary school the university of chicago press chicago, illinois agents the cambridge university press london and edinburgh the maruzen-kabushiki-kaisha tokyo, osaka, kyoto karl w. hiersemann leipzig the baker & taylor company new york literature in the elementary school by porter lander macclintock, a.m. the university of chicago press chicago, illinois copyright by the university of chicago all rights reserved published november second impression october third impression september fourth impression november fifth impression march sixth impression october seventh impression november composed and printed by the university of chicago press chicago, illinois, u.s.a. to w. d. m. to a. c. d. and to my dear friends and fellow-students lander paul hilda elizabeth hermann josephine isabel beth albert irene henry ruth this little book, the outcome of our common studies, is most loyally and lovingly dedicated preface this book had its origin in several years of experience and experiment in teaching classes in literature in the laboratory school of the university of chicago, when that fruitful venture in education was being conducted by professor john dewey; in many years of private reading with children; and in many years of lecturing to teachers of children. indeed, all the material bears the unconcealable marks of its origin as lectures, it being extremely difficult to turn into decorous chapters in a book, stuff which first took shape as spontaneous and informal lectures. the central matter of the book was published as a series of articles in the _elementary school teacher_ of october, november, and december, , and a synopsis of the whole book was printed and widely circulated in january, . these facts may partially account for a certain familiarity that many readers will perceive. may i venture to hope that this sense of familiarity may also be partly accounted for by the fact that the views expressed are consonant with those arrived at independently by many recent students of literature and of children? were it not a matter of mere justice, this would be scarcely the place to mention my debt of many kinds to professor w. d. macclintock of the university of chicago; the incalculable value of professor dewey's influence and sympathy; and the unforgettable stimulation of mrs. dewey's criticism. neither is it more than justice to express my gratitude for the patience of my publishers, which has endured both much and long. p. l. m. university of chicago june, table of contents chapter page i. literature in the elementary school ii. the services we may expect literature to render in the education of children iii. the kinds of literature and the elements of literature serviceable in the elementary school iv. story v. the choice of stories vi. folk-tale and fairy-story vii. myth as literature viii. hero-tales and romances ix. realistic stories x. nature and animal stories xi. symbolistic stories, fables, and other apologues xii. poetry xiii. drama xiv. the presentation of the literature xv. the return from the children xvi. the correlations of literature xvii. literature out of school and reading other than literature xviii. a course in literature for the elementary school chapter i literature in the elementary school according to the naïvely formal method of division of the old-fashioned homiletics, the title itself offers a quite inevitable outline for the discussion in this chapter--an outline that takes this form: ( ) literature; ( ) literature in the school; ( ) literature in the elementary school; and while we may smile at the pat formality of the little syllabus, we cannot resist its logic. perhaps we can retain the logic while we disguise the formality. when one proposes to enter for any purpose or from any point of view, a large field, especially a field that has already been much explored, he feels that he must hasten to define his bounds, to stake out his particular claim. but he makes a mistake if, in his haste to do this, he fails to make clear his understanding of the location of the large field and his conception of its nature. any new discussion of literature must justify itself at the beginning by declaring from what point of view it will proceed and in what direction it will move. this seems a good place, then, to declare that this whole discussion will concern itself with literature as a part of the training of children. yet this discussion must constantly proceed in the light of certain fundamental conclusions concerning literature in general, and in its essential nature, and it will help us to stand upon common ground to state these conclusions. literature, like every other subject that would claim a place as a discipline in school, is called upon in our day of re-examination and readjustment of the curriculum to make good its claim by showing that it has in its nature something distinctive by virtue of which it performs in the child's education some distinctive service. it is true, that no subject of human interest is a quite detached island; pursued far enough, its edges blur and mingle with the edges of neighboring interests, so that there are regions where the two are indistinguishable. but every body of material has a characteristic center where it declares itself unmistakably. however widely it radiates from this center, however many or however distant areas it touches and mingles with upon its borders, in this center it is itself and nothing else. this becomes clear when we consider some of the larger subjects of educational discipline. there is, for example, a well-defined subject, geography, though if one pursues it far, he comes in one direction upon geology; in other directions, upon history or economics or sociology or politics. or to take another group of subjects, there is a region in which you are dealing with anatomy, though on the edges of it you pass imperceptibly into physiology or general biology. for several reasons it is especially difficult to fix the bounds of literature. it touches the margins of every other human interest; it may reach into any of the areas about it for subject-matter; it shares with all other subjects its means of expression; it lends to all other subjects certain of its methods and devices, when these other subjects must be presented effectively; its very name is applied loosely and half figuratively to writing upon any subject, and for whatever purpose produced. but for all this, literature, too, has its distinctive center, where it can be differentiated from everything else. we begin to make this differentiation when we say that literature is art--that it is one of the fine arts. we set it apart from the other arts by the fact that it uses language as its medium, and we set it apart from other writing by the fact that it uses language in the way art must use it--not for technical purposes, not as a medium for teaching facts or doctrines, not to give information, but to produce artistic pleasure; not to conserve use, but to exhibit aesthetic beauty. when one's mind is clear on this point, he will not be confused by the fact that literature handles matter from other provinces--history for example--or by the fact that other kinds of writing borrow the devices of literature to beautify or otherwise make effective their own material. when scott takes from history the figure of richard coeur de lion, it is not for the purpose of teaching historical fact, but for the sake of putting into his picture a striking person and an effective motive. when macaulay employs many figures of speech, when he rounds out his periods and balances them carefully, when he uses picturesque concrete and particular persons and objects rather than abstractions and generalizations, all to make clear and vivid the information he is giving, he is still writing history and not literature, since he is aiming first at fact and not first at beauty. this recognition of literature as art, and the differentiation of it from the other kinds of writing, so far from being a mere bit of aesthetic theory remote from the teacher and his child, is the fundamental and essential step in the teacher's procedure, because it constitutes at once a clue to lead him in his choice of material, a guide to direct him in the method of using it, and a standard to indicate the nature of the result he may reasonably hope for. when the teacher knows that he is to choose his literature as art he is freed from the obligation of selecting such things as will contain technical information, historical facts, desirable moral lessons, or other utilitarian matter. this is far from saying that in choosing he will be indifferent to the actual material details or to the moral atmosphere of his bit of literature. the fitness or unfitness, the beauty or ugliness of these will often be the ground of his adoption or rejection. it does mean, however, that technical and professional details of fact and teaching, matters which are always subsidiary and secondary in literature as literature, cannot dictate his choice when he is choosing from the point of view of art. the habit of regarding literature as art clarifies immediately the teacher's conception of his method of handling it. to teach literature as literature is not to teach it as an adjunct to some other discipline; it is not to teach it as reading-lessons, or spelling-lessons, nor as grammar--though incidentally the lessons in literature will have great value in all these directions; it is not to teach it as botany, as history, as mythology, as politics, as naval or military tactics, or as ethics--though again, by way of teaching it as literature, interesting by-products in any of these subjects may accrue. it is equally true that a clear understanding of the fact that the results aimed at and legitimately hoped for are to be of the literary, artistic kind, and not of the utilitarian or scientific kind, will lighten and irradiate the teacher's problem and through him the children's task, doing away with the sense of burden and substituting for a vague and shifting end, a definite and delightful purpose. to take a specific instance--it is very little to the purpose of literature to have taught a class that longfellow was an american poet who lived in cambridge, massachusetts; and that, though the myth and legend of hiawatha properly belong to the iroquois, longfellow transferred it to the objibways. so far as the distinctively literary result goes, these facts are neither here nor there. but the enjoyment of the music of the verse, the loving appropriation and appreciation of some of the beautiful images and pictures, some grasp of the large meaning, the noble trend, of the whole poem, a general tuning-up of the class to something like unison with its emotion, a better taste in the whole class, and in a few members of it some improvement in their own powers of expression--these are the kind of result at which the teacher aims when he teaches literature as art. the question of literature in the school has taken on a new aspect in this our current day, and especially in american schools, owing to the decidedly diminished place left for it in the modern curriculum. this has come about most naturally in the vast enrichment of the course on the side of scientific and occupational material. and naturally, too, in the process of turning from a purely book-education, we have tended to turn also from literature--a field which for many generations has seemed to be inextricably shut up in books. but it is also true that, in a large part, this turning-away from literature has been from literature wrongfully apprehended and mistakenly taught. whatever be the explanation of the smaller place given to literature, no thoughtful student of modern education, no matter how firmly he believes in the function of literature, can regret that it should take in the curriculum its due and proportionate place. such a student knows best the follies and absurdities achieved by untrained and inartistic teachers, in whose hands literature is made the center to which they attach any and all other matters of training; he best knows the fact that literature leaves many of the child's powers and capacities untouched; he best knows the danger of over-stimulating those powers and capacities that literature does develop and strengthen, and that it is a misfortune for a child or a class to live prevailingly in an atmosphere distinctively literary; and he knows that a few specimens chosen aright and taught aright produce the essentially literary result more surely and more safely than such a programme as could once be seen in school--a programme that seemed to reflect the teacher's desire to give the children within the grammar school all the reading that they ought reasonably to be expected to have up to maturity. the choosing of literature for use _in school_ creates immediately several important conditions. the bit chosen is elevated at once into the dignity and isolation of a discipline, and is set apart from matter to be read once and casually, for recreation or amusement, at home or in hours of intellectual play, to the single child or a small group of homogeneous children. in view of the fact that the specimen is being chosen for use in class, it must be broad and typical, appealing, as it were, to the universal child. it must not be merely fanciful, freakish, satirical, or witty, because, while there is pretty sure to be some child in every class who would appreciate its flavor, the others would not, and could not be brought to such appreciation. it should not be too imaginative, since it must make its appeal to a group whose experience has been of many kinds and degrees, and it cannot count upon any uniform body of apperception material that has paved the way into a very delicate or very pervasive imaginative atmosphere. it must not be too emotional, because the teacher must be aware of the hysterical children in every class, and because it is next to impossible to tune up any social group as large and as mixed as the class to anything like a high emotional unison or complete artistic like-mindedness. what the class, that composite child, needs are such things as display the broader, simpler aspects of life and art, such as call out in them the simpler and more direct responses. if one is giving a story or a poem a single reading, and reading it merely for recreation, he may pass so lightly over the details, and may so handle its structure, that its weaknesses and faults may not appear, or may easily be lost sight of in the emphasis laid upon the pleasant and successful aspects. but a bit of literature selected for the class must be worth while in every particular; it is to be lingered over, digested, assimilated; it must be fitted to stand out in the light of searching criticism--and the assembled class soon comes to be a very acute and exacting critic; it is to stand the test of individual question and community judgment. if, therefore, it is to become, as one must hope, a part of the children's experience, a contribution to their artistic and moral well-being; if it is to be a bit of real education, it must be sound in structure, trustworthy in detail, satisfactory in issue. no matter how simple it is, it should be good art, and chosen upon the same critical principles that one would apply in choosing good literature of any degree of complexity. while it is a great mistake to suppose that literature for children is a bit of garden ground to be considered apart from the general landscape, it is true that there are certain characteristics of children within the elementary period, and certain accepted conclusions concerning the nature and spirit of their other work, that must be taken as guides in the matter of their literature. it is not sufficient--though it cannot be too often said that it is necessary--that the literature be good; that, no matter how simple it be or how complex, it must satisfy the demands of good criticism--however important it be that it be good, it is equally important that it be fit. one who reads the courses of study and lists of reading prepared for the elementary grades, and examines the manuals for their teachers, comes near concluding that the larger number of mistakes, and the mistakes most disastrous, lie here--in losing sight of the principle of fitness. for in these formal lists, and suggested in the manuals, one may find, first and last, heaped up all that various teachers have themselves happened to like; all that critics have praised; all whose titles sound as if they ought to be good; all that is concerned more or less remotely with other things the children are studying; all that a generation of mistaken educational logic has suggested; all that a mature reader ought to have read in a life-time; all that a blind interpretation, both of childhood and of literature, has called suitable--historical works, american literature, shakespeare's comedies, the _idylls of the king_, sentimental and bloodthirsty juveniles--a chaotic and accidental jumble. out of some such haphazard impulse and some such failure to apply the law of fitness come such mistakes as the introduction of fifth-grade children into the mazes of a satiric social comedy like _a midsummer-night's dream_, or the placing of first-year secondary children amid the bitter jests and baffling irony of _the vicar of wakefield_. such pedagogical misfits arise out of sheer ignorance of the child's nature and its needs, and of the plainest principles of literary interpretation. they persist year after year because of the blind following of supposed authority, nowhere so blind as in matters of literary opinion. the preparation that should be made by the teacher who is to choose and teach this literature is, after all, not so very formidable. we will leave out of the discussion that mystic thing called the teacher's gift. undoubtedly there is such a thing; but it descendeth upon whom it listeth, enabling him to choose by intuition and to teach by inspiration the special bits of literature that prove to be best for the children. but such a person is not safe, unless he supplement his gift with knowledge; his choice is purely personal and esoteric, his principles accidental and incommunicable. what is the nature of the supplement such a teacher must make to his gift? what is the training with which the teacher without the gift must fortify himself? it is little more than one would like to have for his personal culture, and little other than he is obliged to have for his contact with the children in other directions. by dint of much reading of literature and some reading in good criticism he must bring himself to a sane view of the whole subject, realizing what literature is and what it is not; what it can be expected to accomplish in human culture, and what we cannot reasonably ask of it. he must know something of its laws, that he may know how to judge it and when he has judged it aright. this process will inevitably have refined and deepened his taste and broadened his artistic experience in every direction. of course, he will not talk to his children about literature as an art, about critical problems, structural principles, and all that; no more will he, when he is guiding his class in evolving for themselves food and shelter by way of beginning the study of history, talk to them about primitive culture and social evolution. but he is an ill-equipped and untrustworthy guide if he does not have in his own consciousness these large explaining points of view. it is precisely so with the large fundamental principles of literature. one gathers certainty and power for the choice and teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working of the great and simple laws of all art. and more specifically he must imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. he must know and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to love them as great but simple art. he must read the hero tales and romances till he knows them as a treasure house out of which he may draw at his need. many, many children's stories and poems he must read to be able to judge them and he must read all those artists, carroll, stevenson, pater, hauptman, who in _alice_, _the child's garden_, _the child in the house_, _hannele_, have done so much to interpret for us in the artist's way the consciousness of the child. in teaching literature, as in all that he does for the children, he will have use for all the knowledge he can get of childhood and children; for all that he can learn of the trend of conclusion in psychology and educational philosophy; for all knowledge he can acquire as to the meaning and import of all the other subjects of elementary instruction. only then can he choose and teach literature that is fit in both the necessary senses--adapted to the children and harmonious in spirit with the other interests they are pursuing. out of such knowledge of his material and his children there should grow a reasonably clear and consistent vision of the result he hopes to reach and the steps he must take to reach it. out of all these elements should come the courage to examine fearlessly the traditional material. better still, out of this combination will come that faith, enthusiasm, and respect for his material, that confidence in its usefulness, that hopefulness as to its results, which are desirable in a teacher of any subject, but which are absolutely essential in the equipment of a teacher of literature; because he must above all things radiate both light and warmth; he must diffuse about his material and his children the breath of life and the glow of art. chapter ii the services we may expect literature to render in the education of children it would seem to be no part of the present discussion to go into the fundamental processes of determining and defining a child's needs and tastes. in this matter we may assume and build upon the larger conclusions of psychology and educational philosophy. and it is only the larger and more general conclusions that we need, both because there is no doubt concerning them, as there may be concerning those more detailed and remote, and because when we are dealing with children in school, and in class, we are dealing with the type-child--with a composite child, as it were, to whom we can apply only the larger conclusions. everyone who helps to train a child must realize as a practical fact that he has both needs and tastes. the emphasis wisely placed in our day upon enlisting a child's interests and tastes has tended to mislead the unwary and undo the unobservant, so as to produce a blindness or an indifference as to his needs. though, as a matter of mere justice, one must add that the blindness and indifference have had their existence chiefly in the indictments of those who opposed the movement when it was new. few parents or teachers may now be found so benighted as to deny the delight and profit of letting the child grow in all the joy and freedom possible, following his instinctive interests, expressing his original primitive impulses. but we must grant, however sadly, that the modern child is not to be a member of a primitive society; that he is living and to live in a complex, advanced community, to whose standards he must be, on the whole, adjusted and adapted. therefore, his interests and activities must be channeled and guided; new interests must be awakened; he must be in a certain sense put, while he is still a child, into possession of what his race has acquired only after many generations. in literature then, as in the other subjects, we must try to do three things: ( ) allow and meet appropriately the child's native and instinctive interests and tastes; ( ) cultivate and direct these; ( ) awaken in him new and missing interests and tastes. what is there in literature serviceable for any or all of these purposes, and is there in literature anything that is distinctively and uniquely useful in the whole process? it seems only reasonable to look for the answers to these questions among the distinctive features of literature. the most conspicuous and distinguishing fact about literature is, of course, its relation to the imagination. now, when the student of literature or any other art talks about the imagination, he must be allowed to begin, as one may say, where the psychologist leaves off, because, while the psychologist as a scientist likes to limit his attention to the mind acting as imagination, the literary critic must consider, not only this activity of the mind, but its product--a product that presents itself as an elaborate phenomenon. this is the reason why the natural process of the literary critic seems to the student of psychology a beginning at the wrong end; because it is a beginning with an objective product, and with the larger and more salient features of that product. literature finds its material in nature, and in human nature and life. it has no source of supply other than that of every other kind of human thought. but before this material becomes literature, the imagination has lifted it from its place in the actual world and elevated it to the plane of art. working upon this plane with this material, the imagination modifies, transforms, rearranges it, making new combinations, discovering unsuspected relations, bringing to light hidden qualities, revealing new likenesses and unlikenesses; and at last returns to us a product that is a new creation. working in its larger creative capacity, the imagination constructs out of material which may be scattered or chaotic when gathered by observation, unified and organic wholes. indeed this large whole, this completed edifice that the art-product presents is itself an image, a vision present from the beginning of the process of creating. as the architect sees before he begins to build, the plan of his house as a whole and measurably complete thing, so the literary artist has from the beginning this large image, this plan presenting the main features of the thing he is to produce. this allows for the fact that new details are added as he goes on, the plan modified or transformed. but the artist's final result starts as an image. this is not mere aesthetic prosing. we must set it down as vitally important in the point of view of the teacher of literature, that he must look at his material as the product of the imagination in these four ways: first, the imagination presents the large image or plan; second, it chooses the material; third, it decorates, purifies, or otherwise modifies it; fourth, it organizes or recombines it. this recombination into a new whole, no matter how simple it is, will, if it be art at all, display in some degree the large qualities common to all art-form--unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, harmony. it is the fact that in literature you have a large but manageable whole got together under laws producing these qualities and making for completeness and beauty--it is this fact that gives to literature a large share of its power in cultivating the child's imagination. now, there is a very common misapprehension of this phrase "cultivation of the imagination," many people taking it for granted that it invariably and exclusively means increasing the amount of a child's fancy, or the number of his fancies. undoubtedly this is one of the effects of literature, and undoubtedly it is sometimes a desirable thing. there are children born without imagination, or so early crushed down by the commonplaceness of the adult world that they seem never to have a fancy--to be entirely without an inner life or a spiritual playground. but the average child has abundant imagination, and an abundance of imaginations; while children of the artistic or emotional temperament may often be found, especially in the period gathering about the seventh year, living in a world of their own creating, moving in a maze of fantastic notions and combinations of notions, unable to see actual things, and unable to report the facts of an observation or an experience, because of the throng of purely fanciful and invented details that fills their consciousness. to increase the amount of such a child's imaginative material would be a mistake; to throttle or ignore his imaginative activities would be a mistake still more serious. we all know the two paths, one of which is likely to be followed by such a child. either he drifts on, indulging his dreams, inventing unguided fancies, following new vagaries, and later reading those loose, wild, and sentimental things into which his own taste guides him, till all his mental processes become untrustworthy; or he is taken in hand, given fact-studies exclusively, becomes ashamed of his fancies, or loses interest in them because they bear no relation to anything in the actual world as he is learning to know it, and finally loses completely his artistic imaginative power. as an aid toward averting either of these disasters, the imaginative child--who is the average child--as well as the over-fanciful one, needs to have developed in him some ability to select among his fancies, so as to cling to the beautiful and useful, and discard the idle ones. to do this, he must get the ability to put them together in some plan or system that satisfies both his taste and his judgment. they are permanently serviceable either for work or for play only when they attach one to another and cohere into a somewhat orderly whole. one is tempted to think that to put the children into possession of such a faculty or such an accomplishment is the most important step in elementary training, because, as a matter of course, it at once radiates from the handling of their invented or fanciful material into the ordering of that which they gather from deliberate observation; and, as most often happens, the artistic imagination lends a helping hand to the scientific imagination. undoubtedly the pleasantest way and the way that lies most readily open in helping the children to acquire and develop this faculty, is the way of literature. here it is that they see most easily and learn to know most thoroughly those complete and orderly wholes made up from beautiful or significant details, with nothing left fragmentary or unattached. of course the teacher must choose his bit of literature with a view to this effect--a lyric, a ballad, a story, that actually does show economy of material, reasonable and effective arrangement of details, and a satisfying issue. not all the literature available for children does display these qualities. compare, for example, perrault's _cinderella_ with grimm's version of the same tale. the former, whatever the faults of style in the english version we all know, is so far as structure goes, a little classic, having plenty of fancy, to be sure, but exhibiting also perfect economy of incident, certainty and delicacy in the selection and arrangement of details, restraint and truthfulness in the outcome; while the grimm story shows the chaotic, unguided, wasteful choice and arrangement of the mind which remains the victim of its own fancies. the one is mere art-stuff, the other is art. now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family--unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children--who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. but it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole; and out of this experience should grow the further power, so important in this stage of his education--that of grasping, and constructing out of his own material, such complete and ordered wholes. another way in which the imagination works in literature is of peculiar importance, for the children. this, too, is precisely one of those characteristics that distinguish literature from everything else. it lies in the fact that, unlike other kinds of writing, literature proceeds by the presentation of concrete, specific details, the actual image, or images, combined into a definite picture, elevated from the world of actuality to the plane of art, or created on that plane out of details gathered from any source. in proportion as we find in literature abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it dull and inartistic. "the orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. it would be so inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "among the dark boughs the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and vital. "the foxglove blooms centripetally," one may say as dry fact, but when the poet says the fox-gloves drop from throat to top a daily lesser bell, while he conveys the same fact, he does it in the terms of a definite single image, a specific individual process, that gives reality and distinction. it is by virtue of this method of presenting its material that literature performs another valuable and definite service for the child. this lies in increasing and supplementing in many directions his store of images. of course, even the ordinary child has many images, since he has eyes and ears always open and fingers always active. but the sights and sounds he sees are not widely varied, and are rarely beautiful. it is the extraordinary, the occasional child who sees in his home many beautiful objects, who often hears good music, who sees in his street noble buildings, who is taken to the woods, the mountains, the sea, where he may store up many beautiful and distinguished images to serve him later for inner joy and as material for thinking. the other child whose experience is bounded by the streets, the shops, or the farm, will find his store of images increased and enriched by contributions from literature. and the fact that the images and pictures in literature are given with concreteness, with vividness, with vitality in them, not as abstractions nor as technical description, gives them place in the consciousness side by side with those registered by the memory from actual experience, and they serve the same purposes. indeed, the mere raising of a detail to the plane of art, the fitting of an image or a picture into a poem or a story, gives it new distinction and increases its value. says fra lippo: ... we're made so that we love first when we see them painted things we have passed perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see. so the child, when the details he knows or may know in real life are set in literature, sees them surrounded with a halo of new beauty and value. this halo, this well-known radiance of art, spreads itself over the objects that he sees about him, and they, too, take on a new beauty, and so pass into his storehouse of images with their meaning and usefulness increased. whatever else may be the function of the imagination in literature it has these two--that of seeing and creating organic wholes, and that of presenting concrete images and pictures; these two would entitle it to a distinctive place in the training of a child's imagination. as an accompaniment, perhaps as a consequence, of the tendency of the imagination to unify and harmonize its material by seeking always a deeper basis and a larger category, and the other tendency to use in literature the specific detail rather than the generalization, we have the fact of figurative thinking and speaking as a characteristic of this art. a figure involves the discovery of a striking or essential contrast or contradiction between objects, or the recognition of a likeness or affinity ranging in closeness from mere similarity to complete identification. whichever be the process, the result is the universal and typical meanings of literature, its pleasing indirection of statement, its enlarged outlook upon many other spheres, the vista of suggestion and association opening in every direction, the surprised, the shocked or delighted recognitions, that await us on every page. we will pass by as mystical and not demonstrable the inviting theory that a contact with these contrasts and resemblances may put into the hands of the child a clue to the better arrangement of the fragments that compose his world, and may help on in him that process of unification and identification which is the paramount human task; we must leave out of sight here, as too speculative and unpractical, the enlargement and definition of his categories that would come to the child as it comes to everyone, with even the most elementary recognition of the fundamental separations and unions involved in figures; these we may leave aside, while we take the simple and quite obvious aspect of the matter--that the study and understanding of even the commoner figures quicken the child's intelligence, and help to develop mental alertness and certainty. not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. what makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even ordinary conversation is full? the poor belated mind stands helpless amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation emerson can attribute to him, can put him into touch with his kind. the best place to train a child toward quickness, the mental ease and adroitness that come of a ready understanding and use of figure is in literature, one of whose signal characteristics is the use of figure. the appreciation of remote and delicate figures will, of course, come later in a student's experience than the elementary years, after he has had more contact with life and the world and a much widened experience in literature. but the child who has been taught to understand and to use any of the simpler figures has been helped a long way on the road of art and philosophy. literature differs from other kinds of writing in its use of language, since it constantly aims at beautiful and striking expression. since it often seeks beautiful and delicate effects, it is more often closely accurate than other kinds of writing; and since it sometimes seeks strong, noble effects, it is sometimes more vigorous than other writing. for the same and kindred reasons it seeks variety of expression, and so displays a larger choice of words, including new and rare words. these facts have an immediate and beneficial effect upon the style and vocabulary of the children. the fact is plainly obvious to anyone who has observed the superiority as to vocabulary and form of those children who have had much reading or who come from a literary family, and has seen the improvement of all the children in these matters as they add to their experience in literature. this enrichment and refinement of language must be reckoned among the distinctive services of literature. literature, in common with the other arts, but unlike other kinds of writing, aims at beauty--cares first of all for beauty. one must understand the term, of course, as artistic or aesthetic beauty, as it has been interpreted for us from plato down, as quite other than mere prettiness or superficial attractiveness. first, in the selection of its subject-matter it is the strikingly beautiful in nature, in character, in action, and in experience that it seeks out for presentation. when it uses ugly or horrible material, it is for one of these purposes: by way of bringing into stronger relief beauty actually presented beside it; by way of implying beauty not actually presented; by way of producing the grotesque as a form of beauty; by way of awakening fear or terror, which are elements in one kind of beauty; or by way of accomplishing some exploitation or reform conceived by the artist as his duty or his opportunity; so that the artist's use of ugly material produces in every case some effect of beauty. now the problem of the child's contact with beauty as the material or subject-matter of literature is the problem of his contact with it anywhere else. we cannot too often remind ourselves that the material in literature is that of life and the actual world chosen out, often freed from accidental and temporary qualities, and put into suitable setting in art. it therefore makes an appeal not different in kind, and in many cases not different in intensity, from the appeal of objects perceived by the actual senses. accepting once for all the conditions of the imagination, we must conclude that the effect upon the child's taste is the same as in his contact with beautiful and noble objects under conditions of outer space. and as, when we adopt the psychology and pedagogy of whitman's "there was a child went forth," believing that all that the little traveler encounters becomes really and truly a part of him, we are eager to have him encounter the most beautiful sights and sounds of the physical world, so we earnestly desire for him contact with the noble and beautiful objects and persons of the other-world of literature. in the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking beauty of form. there are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity, harmony, completeness, balance--those large beneficent elements of beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without knowing it. of course, one does not talk to him about them, but there they are in his story, his picture, his song, bringing their gift of certainty and repose. then there are the more concrete and obvious details of formal beauty that belong distinctively to the literary art, and are partly matters of craftsmanship--the musical effect of the spoken word, prose or verse, the choice word or phase, the beautiful arrangement of clause or sentence. certain of these elements may be deliberately brought to the child's attention, others may not. but in either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. and we cannot fail to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts. as distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor, of emotion, "dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his line. "the foxglove blooms centripetally," is cold and colorless, however interesting it may be as technical fact, the fox-gloves drop from throat to top, a daily lesser bell quivers with emotional associations. "i come to bury caesar not to praise him"--the caesura of that line is mark antony's sob, and the sympathetic throb of the elementary class. the king sits in dumfermline toun drinking the blude-red wine. what strange thrill is this that goes down the eight-year-old's spine at the sound of these words? it was an ancient mariner and he stoppeth one of three. the mere lines submerge us at once in a new atmosphere tingling with charmed excitement. one would like to say with some new meaning and emphasis that it is precisely this emotion, permeating, warming, and coloring literature, that gives it its reality, that establishes its hold, that gives it its relation to the world--on the one side reflecting life on the other producing life. but it is about this matter of emotion that the teacher's dangers and misgivings lie. there are those who fix upon its emotional nature as grounds for suspicion, if not of condemnation, of literature as a means of discipline. and we must all hasten to confess that this atmosphere of emotion is the snare of the weak teacher and the curse of weak literature. emotion displayed or aroused unworthily, or attached to inadequate or ignoble stimuli, is either mere sentimentality or undue enthusiasm. it should be reckoned nothing short of a crime to stimulate unduly a child's emotion, and to awaken in him feelings for which his nature is not ripe. but the policy or theory of ignoring his emotions, of suppressing them, or of keeping them subdued in school within the bounds of his mild pleasure in scientific observation or mathematical achievement, is surely short-sighted. if the day has not already come, it is fast approaching when we shall see that education means also the calling out and exercising of the feelings--when we shall realize the dessicating influence of american school training upon the emotional nature of children. it should not be difficult for any teacher who has studied the problems of childhood, and who has learned something about judging literature, to choose such literary things as reflect and invite the kind and degree of feeling suitable for a child, as give him legitimate occasion for legitimate emotion, as exercise and cultivate this side of his nature, effecting in him that purifying discharge of emotion which aristotle regarded as one of the helpful offices of literature. it is a matter for rejoicing that in the atmosphere of feeling which surrounds literature and music we may counteract and balance in the child the hardening influence of his fact-studies and his general school discipline. the mere pragmatism of the teaching often turned against literature as a discipline, that every emotional state should eventuate in activity, is met by the contention that the admiration or contempt called out by the record of the courageous or cowardly deed, the apprehension and enjoyment of the musical line or the beautiful image, contain their own issue and event. they register at once a higher moral standard or a quickened and deepened taste. it has already been said, and it must be said again, that it is by virtue of this emotional grip coupled with the powerful and ever-to-be-reckoned-with instinct for imitation, that literature takes hold upon us, passes into our lives, affecting our judgment, our ideals, our conduct. we live by admiration, hope, and love, and even as these are well and wisely placed, in dignity of being we ascend. says wordsworth; and literature affords many opportunities of placing well and wisely these living and life-giving emotions. this brings us at once to the vision of another service rendered the child by literature. here he is as if he looked upon life. he sees events worked out to the issue; he sees people expressing themselves in deeds and words, transforming themselves and others for good or bad, calling upon him for approval or condemnation, or for sympathy. he finds here his heroes, his ideals, his models. he learns manners without tears and morals without a sermon. in some sense he sees life steadily, and sees it whole, so that he widens his social horizon to take in these many groups of all sorts of men; mentally and morally he must enlarge to contain the persons and events he learns to know. it is impossible to overestimate the importance in a child's moral life, whether we interpret this as a social or an individual matter, of the contribution made by literature to his vision, his pattern, of society and of character. this ability of literature to influence the child's inner life and his conduct is so real that it has as many dangers as advantages. there must be no mistakes in selecting for him, if he is to ascend in dignity of being by the steps of literature. it must contain those pictures of life and conduct that are fit and suitable for the child to witness, and possible for him to comprehend. they must be sound to the core, arousing and permanently engaging his genuine interest and his best feelings. and after all, the best thing we can do for a child in teaching him literature is to give him a permanent and innocent joy. we all have our moods in which we are ready to say that the first unconscious, unpremeditated pleasure that comes of a bit of literature is the only result worth having. and we who are professing teachers of literature have times of abnormal sensitiveness to the scorn of the dilettante critics who call us academical and pedagogical. and though we know that pleasure in literature has its elements and its causes, both easily observable, and that taste may be fostered and grown by well-known processes, it is always a wholesome hour for us when we are thrust back upon the fact that, though we may have disciplined his imagination, and may have quickened his fancy; we may have awakened and strengthened his sense of beauty; we may have exercised and cultivated his emotions; we may have enlarged his outlook upon life, and have provided him with social and personal ideals; it is nevertheless, better than all these because it includes most of them, if we have opened up for our scholar this permanent avenue of noble enjoyment. now, not all these results will appear in all the children. some of them the teacher will not see in any child of certain classes. they are not easily ponderable and measurable--even less so than those of other disciplines. it is easy to know when a child can multiply and divide. it is not easy to know when he is in a hopeful stage of literary experience. but it is only in the direction of the results we have been discussing that the teacher of literature can always hopefully work. chapter iii the kinds of literature and the elements of literature serviceable in the elementary school in modern literary study we have been placing much emphasis upon the kinds or species of literary production. in the light of the aesthetics of our day and the newer psychology of art we have been learning much concerning the nature, the function, and one might say the habits of these species. these studies have coincided in time, most opportunely for the teacher of literature, with those that have aimed at the establishing of the needs and tastes of the elementary and adolescent ages. there is a real satisfaction born of the confidence one feels in approaching his problem of choosing literature for children from these two largest points of view--that of the species or fundamental kinds of literature on the one hand, that of the child's actual needs and tastes on the other. this method of approach seems to put the whole field adequately before his view, and to give authority and certainty to his final choice. as a matter of fact there are certain characteristics invariable and inevitable in each of the five species of literature--epic, drama, lyric, fiction, essay--that tell us at once something of its fitness for our purpose. the essay, for example in its typical form is by its essential nature inappropriate. the literary essay, as it is actually constituted, is in subject-matter too abstract and remote, in mood too complex and intricate, and in style too allusive and evasive. its invitation is to a region for which a child has neither chart nor map. the essay rests upon old, old presuppositions; these very presuppositions it is that must be slowly and through many experiences built into the mental life of the child. to be sure, there are a few bits called essays--such as certain of lamb's more anecdotal papers, some of the narrative numbers of _the spectator_, nature-studies with marked literary qualities like some of those of john burroughs--that the grades can understand and enjoy. but these are not typical essays, and they have not the true essay spirit. this spirit, which creates for itself an atmosphere hard to describe, compounded as it is of universal knowingness, ironic indirection, delicately intellectual emotion, and faintly emotional intellectuality--this spirit is quite alien to childhood. and as it is actually constituted, the literary drama, too, represents a life and presents an art-form so complex and so mature as to be beyond a child's grasp. not until this period is closing--and with many children not even then--comes the hour of ripeness for the drama. this question of the child and dramatic literature has so many conditions and modifications that it must be discussed at length in another chapter. but it is evident to every sympathetic student of childhood that this is not the period to present the complex situations, the difficult problems, the over-ripe experiences, that prevailingly constitute the material of literary drama. the literature we do give the children should correspond to the stage of their development in matching as nearly as may be, in tone and spirit their own activities and interests, or should be calculated to arouse in them those interests and activities they ought legitimately to have. it should be of that kind that gives a large free sweep of activity; that reveals character and conduct in their simpler, open aspects; that exhibits literary art phenomena in their plainer, more striking varieties. these qualities are to be found in chosen specimens of the three other species of literature--epic, fiction, lyric. of course one must select from each of the three those specimens that do exhibit the qualities he seeks. he could not offer to children a developed epic in its entirety; but there are many things of the epic kind--ballads, hero-tales, fairy-sagas, certain detachable sections of the great epics themselves--precisely suited to them. we would not introduce them into a mature novel, but there are _märchen_ for them, tales of conquest and adventure, stories of other children's doings. they would be lost and bored in the presence of the elegy or the sonnet; but we may find jingles and songs, and later on odes, fit and right for them. in the epic kind of literature we include not only the epic, but all those other poetic compositions whose principles of organization is narrative--ballad, pastoral, idyll, etc. the presupposition in favor of them as good for the children (and it is borne out by the demonstration) lies in these two facts: they are concerned with events and achievements, and are therefore likely to be active and objective; they proceed by the method of story--the easiest and most helpful for the child to follow and to grasp. it seems necessary to say again that the members of the epic group must be scanned as narrowly with reference to their fitness in subject-matter and suitability in form as those of any other group. there is a fallacy in the assumption that epic is a childlike thing, the product of the childhood of the race. this is akin to the amusing opinion that myth--greek myth, for example--is a childlike accumulation of childish inventions. nay, epic poetry, even those epics that seem most nearly folk-poetry--the _béowulf_, for example--are built upon hoary civilizations, each of them having behind it an art-tradition already old. and if there is an unwarranted assumption in the theory that epic is childlike, there is an unwarrantable presumption in the theory that the mature person outgrows it--that its appeal is only to a primitive and undeveloped taste. the value to the child of the epic is in its objectivity and activity, its large horizons and big spaces. the taste for these things should survive and grow stronger, as should every good taste planted and fostered in childhood. the mature person but adds to his enjoyment of these things a deeper enjoyment as he grows to appreciate the finer details and subtler meanings hidden from the child. the merest primary child can love and enjoy the heroic or amusing adventures of odysseus; he should enjoy them equally when he is forty; but by that time he will have added the ability to appreciate also the wealth of artistic detail, the profound knowledge of human nature, the large mental and religious atmosphere of the poem. for most of this added enjoyment the child has and should have no intellectual welcome, no space yet ready. therefore, in giving the great epics, the teacher must know what aspects, details, and episodes to pass by or to pass lightly over. and he must look carefully to the fitness of any piece of this kind he may consider. it is not sufficient that it have a story. for example _sohrab and rustum_ is a little epic which fits perfectly certain seventh or eighth grades, because, in addition to a sufficiently good story, it has an atmosphere of vast spaces and large movements, a wealth of broad, noble details; and above all, it handles and evokes a simple, primitive emotion, a sorrow which is as impersonal as the sorrows of odysseus--a true epic sorrow. in contrast, _enoch arden_, another piece of the epic kind, is not adapted to children of any age, because it displays a complex domestic and psychic situation which no child ought to be called upon to realize, while the emotion called for is both in kind and amount the sentimentality of adults. even among the folk-ballads the same discrimination must guide us. _sir patrick spens_ is the boy's own; while the poignant pathos of _young waters_, true and piercing as it is, is not for the boy to feel. so, as will be said many times, but always with meaning, we choose, when we are sane, not the novel, complex in plot, involved in motive, overcharged in emotional atmosphere, but the simple, direct-moving romance, the hero-tale, whose subject-matter and method are so broad and universal as to fit even the child. we can welcome, for example, the hearty boyishness of _quentin durward_ or _kidnapped_, where we could not pilot our elementary class safe through the social and ethical sophistications of _the heart of midlothian_, nor steer them intelligently through the involved structure and difficult narrative medium of _the master of ballantrae_. so with the lyric form. if one's choice of a lyric lay between "the splendor falls on castle walls" and "tears, idle tears," he would renounce the complex mature moods, the figures and allusions for which the child's experience has given him no preparation, the pervading tone of rich melancholy of the one, in favor of the buoyant objectivity and more obvious emotional mood of the other. through all the earlier years of the elementary school with some classes, and in some communities throughout the period, the literary experience of the children may best be made up from specimens of these three species. it may be, however, that certain seventh or eighth grades (merely to name the older children) will be found mature enough to profit by the study of certain of the more heroic literary dramas. the same tests of objectivity and simplicity must be applied in selecting these. we should choose, for example, the obvious, and boisterous fun of _the comedy of errors_, rather than the half-hidden satire of _a midsummer-night's dream_; _julius caesar_, since it may fitly be taught as a heroic tragedy; _macbeth_, which, however violent in motive and method, is still direct and simple enough to be within the child's imaginative realization. in most schools also, we may count upon finding in these oldest children in the elementary grades some power of meditation, some interest in abstract questions, some appreciation of humor and wit, much love of eloquence; so that in this last year they may profitably read in class some essays. to be sure, we will choose, not montaigne, but bacon; not pater, but john burroughs; not _dream children_, but _a dissertation on roast pig_. in short, we will avoid the critical and the mystical in essays, and give them objective out-of-door essays like _wake-robin_, humorous anecdotal essays like _old china_, eloquent oratorical essays like gladstone's _kin beyond sea_. indeed, during this seventh and eighth grade period begins the child's hour of ripeness for eloquence and oratory. and it is wise and easy to meet and supply his interest with essays of the address variety, which do for him the characteristic services performed by the literary essay, at the same time that they satisfy his awakening hunger for the rolling music of the oratorical form, answer to his dawning interest in the big world and great questions, and help to build a bridge for him into the public speaking and dramatic aspects of his literary work that he will find, or ought to find, in the secondary school. for want of a good term, i have used, in the title to this chapter, the word "elements" to designate all the details that go to make up the literary work of art. into this term we cover, for mere convenience, and to avoid cumbering ourselves with a tiresome and profitless bit of syllabus-making, these and such matters: structure, story, plot, incident, character, verse, image, figure, epithet, and many other details used to produce the total effect of a bit of literature. it becomes necessary to inquire which among these elements we shall expect to find serviceable for our purpose. of course, they are all valuable even for a child in the sense that they all contribute to the general effect upon his consciousness; but certain of them may profitably be brought into high light and deliberately impressed upon the class; others would best be left lying by for his adult appreciation. take for example, the matter of structure, by which we mean the larger plan or composition by virtue of which the bit of art--poem or story--has a beginning a middle and an end; by virtue of which it starts somewhere, proceeds in an orderly manner, and reaches a destination; as, for example, in our ever admirable _the old woman who found the sixpence_, where you have the sixpence found, the pig bought, the obstacles on the road home, the acquiescence of the cat, the unraveling of the difficulties, the safe return home--a most orderly interdependence and sequence of incidents; or, as an example of a different kind of structure, stevenson's _foreign lands_: the child climbing the cherry tree sees his own garden at his feet, his neighbor's garden over the wall, follows the white road to its disappearance, traces the river to its vanishment, follows it in his mind's eye to its fall into the far-away sea, and then strays on and on into the other-world of his own fancy--a perfect vanishing perspective; or examine with this matter of structure in mind tennyson's _bugle-song_, where you will find a balanced, orderly composition--the horn, the actual echo, the spiritual echo. nothing in literature has a higher educational value than this element of orderly structure, of good "composition." it should be unobtrusively present in practically everything the class learns, and should be deliberately brought to notice, and should be provided for in everything the children produce. it stands to reason that the story is the form which will most constantly and most easily present this element of structure, and that in their study of stories the children can best be impressed with a sense of their bit of art as a whole made up of parts. this aspect of story, as well as the consideration of plot, incident, and character, will receive a more extended treatment than can be given here, in the special chapter on story. as to the smaller elements of literature, it is rather contrary to the best educational thinking of our day to expect the elementary child to show much appreciation of them. it would be a mistake to place any emphasis in teaching him upon delicate or obscure phases of these elements; though there will be, naturally, within the period a growing fineness of appreciation and quickness of perception in these matters. among the youngest children the elements to be emphasized are chiefly those concerned with the musical effects of speech. the teacher will do everything possible to develop and cultivate in the child a love of rhythm--the musical flow of language, whether of verse or prose. in the verse he will try to awaken an enjoyment of rhyme and of meter, of any specially musical collocation of words, of instances of tone-color or other poetic harmony. this cultivation of the child's ear for literature should go on through his whole school life. it should be one of the considerations that weigh in choosing the material for his literary training even throughout his college experience, in order that his ear for musical speech may grow ever more subtle, more responsive to the delicate and noble cadences of poetry and of beautiful prose. beautiful and musical speech is the crowning quality of literature, and the final note of distinction in style, and no amount of originality in image or figure, no degree of delicate fitness in word or phrase, no perfection of skill in logical coherence and arrangement, should persuade us to forgo it. in a class of the younger children the teacher may hope to get attention to an occasional image or larger picture; he may even occasionally secure some deliberate consideration of a figure. and he may be sure, whether their interest in these minor matters be steady and deliberate or not, that he is at least helping them all the while to new and useful words, and to a constantly improved sentence-form. as they grow older, and capable of more attention and patience, they grow rapidly more able to give conscious consideration to literary details. the children of fifth and sixth-grade age will linger over especially beautiful and appropriate words, will stop to realize in detail the pictures, and will consider figures long enough to appropriate them artistically. the normal child has an interesting history with regard to figures of speech. personification he accepts at once. indeed, it is perhaps not a figure to him, but a reality, though he seems to get out of it a conscious artistic joy. such personification as "the daffodil unties her yellow bonnet" he can see and appreciate as figure. metaphor is his native speech, and, so long as it involves no material beyond his power of realization, he has no trouble with it--in appreciating it or in producing it. simile is more baffling; it is easier to go immediately and intuitively to the meaning of a metaphor than to carry in the mind the two expressed sides of the simile. the younger children are puzzled and confused by the details of a homeric simile. but children old enough to read _sohrab and rustum_, if they have been taught how to hold their minds on an artistic detail, are willing to stop and appreciate the two groups of details in each of arnold's similes. but no elementary child will make a homeric, or indeed any simile, except as a _tour de force_. antithesis as a striking and obvious figure is easy and illuminating to children, and seems to come to them quite spontaneously in their own composing. the more subtle figures they will neither appreciate nor use within our period. the fable as allegory and the more extended allegories, even those complex enough to be called symbolistic stories, the seventh and eighth grades in the average school will read and interpret acceptably. on the whole, we may expect to give most of the children some knowledge of the literary nature and function of simple figures, and to awaken in them an ability to enjoy and understand the figurative and allusive atmosphere characteristic of literature. this seems to be the appropriate place to speak of irony, which, while not, of course, a figure of speech, but rather a way of thinking, does frequently help to produce the allusive and indirect tone in literature. it must be the art-playfulness of irony that tempts most people, when they write for children or talk with them, to adopt some form of this method of speaking. but this method of communing with little people is full of dangers; while a pervading and abiding atmosphere of irony is most unfair to them. slow children are baffled and stupefied by it; quick children all too soon catch and adopt the element of insincerity underlying it. nevertheless, passages of ironic intent, together with occasional brief bits in the ironic manner, are educative, quickening the children artistically and intellectually. a little girl of five beamed with intellectual delight and artistic triumph when she said to her mother: "_now_ i can almost always tell when grown people are _speaking irons_." concerning the whole matter of wit and humor in literature the same thing may be said that is said of irony. children are quickened and stimulated intellectually by frequent calls to understand and appreciate passages of witty and humorous writing, or by an occasional and short piece whose whole atmosphere is of this kind. but from the point of view of their literary training and general appreciation of art, it is better to awaken in them and maintain a serious appreciation of greatness and beauty. besides, the child's out-of-school experience may, in many communities, be relied upon to give him sufficient contact with the ironic and humorous forms of art, literary and otherwise. to sum up, then, may we say that it is safe to conclude that within the elementary period we will rely for the children's literary experience upon specimens of the three species--epic, lyric, fiction--introducing, in the older classes, when the conditions seem to justify it, a few simple and heroic dramas, and perhaps a few essays, choosing them from those that exhibit the more direct kind of humor, that are objective in character, or that serve as an introduction to oratory and eloquence? we may feel contented if we have succeeded in cultivating an appreciation of the musical side of speech--among the younger children an enjoyment of the obvious things of meter and rhyme, reaching in the older children enjoyment of the rhythm of prose, and many of the more subtle harmonies of arrangement and tone-color. we may hopefully labor to impress upon them a sense of structure, an appreciation of "composition." we may refine and build upon their instinctive love of story, until we see it taking on within this period the certainty of a cultivated taste. we may develop in them some power to linger over epithet and image and figure, thus beginning to build up in them a sense of craftsmanship, and love of beautiful detail, both of which must enter into one's appreciation of any art before his judgment is safe and his appreciation satisfying. and the teacher who knows how may hope to do all these things joyously and unobtrusively, so that literature may remain what it should always be--a charming and refined variety of play. chapter iv story story is, in general, the narrative of a succession of incidents or events. it is a large, general form or device, useful, indeed inevitable, in all subjects. like language itself, story is a universal medium, conveying the facts of history, of science, of life. whenever we have the steps of any experience arranged according to any of the laws of subsequence or consequence, we have story; such as the story of the dandelion seed, the story of the life of mary stuart, the story of the invention of the steam engine, the story of a day in the city. now, the narration of the events in mere chronological sequence is _story_. as soon as they are arranged in the order of cause and effect--or in any other chosen order; as soon as the narrative leads up to an end or a signal event; as soon as it shows that there has been for any purpose a selection and ordered arrangement of the steps or incidents, we have _a story_. the literary story--the story which is art--differs from other stories in the fact that in it the principle of selection and arrangement operates more thoroughly than in the others. a narrative detailing for technical purposes the steps of an occurrence in nature or in history must follow closely either the sequence of time or the order of cause and effect; and such a report cannot choose among the steps or incidents, but must as a matter of mere fairness, suppress nothing and heighten nothing. it is otherwise with the literary story. here the incidents may be selected at the discretion of the author and arranged in whatever order may best serve to produce his effect; insignificant steps may be eliminated, certain steps may be elaborated and brought into higher light. the will of the artist and his artistic effect constitute a force which may abrogate the laws of cause and effect, or of precedence and subsequence in time. the interest in story is instinctive and universal; the merest string of incidents will attract and hold attention. interest and attention naturally increase and deepen with the greater organization of the material. it is this principle of organization that gives to literary stories some of their unique and distinctive values in education. no method of organization but that of story keeps the younger child's attention long enough and closely enough to carry him undistracted through a large whole. he cannot follow, as can his elders, the flow of emotion which constitutes the thread of continuity in a lyric; he cannot follow a train of thinking through an essay; but he can follow the run of a narrative through even a long story. this fact enables us to put him satisfactorily and pleasantly into the presence of a large organized bit of material, in which he can discriminate the parts, yet which he can grasp as a whole; which he can see as an entity beginning somewhere, proceeding in order, reaching an end. the temptation to amplify the statement of the influence in the child's whole mental experience of this fostering and disciplining of his powers of attention is difficult to resist. but we will leave it with these few words in order to speak of the specifically artistic and literary results of this matter of structure in the story. it is a thing hard to insist upon as a matter of general theory, because written down in cold black and white it seems to convey the impression that emphasis is placed upon mere colorless organization; as if one obliged his children to make an analytical syllabus of their pleasant tale before he regarded it as taught. but it is no such dull thing. beauty and economy of structure lie upon the very surface of the best bits of literature, and need but the most unobtrusive reinforcement from the teacher to work their effect of pleasure and discipline. this pleasure is an artistic product which should expand and develop with the child's reading, until, when he is a mature student, the formal structure of poem or story gives him the same aesthetic and moral satisfaction that he gets from a picture well composed, a monument well balanced. it is not a fancy or a mere pretty theory that a good story, taught as a structure, becomes a norm, a model, a clue to the child in the preservation of his own material, and in the arrangement of it economically and effectively. his attention is trained, his patience is rewarded, his taste refined, his judgment exercised and steadied, his imagination guided and channeled by his contact with a complete, beautiful, and logical creation, whose elements he can see and handle as he can those of the story. from the point of view of the larger structure of the story its elements are the incidents. this term is employed in this chapter rather arbitrarily to designate those smallest separable units of progress by which a story goes forward. it does not necessarily designate a section of the story which records a happening; the introductory and explanatory paragraph we call an incident; a paragraph of description is an incident; the separable sections of the story as it moves are its incidents. a new incident begins when a certain aspect of the action closes, when a new day opens, a new person enters, a change of scene occurs, or even a shift from dialogue to narration; any of these and many other things may cause or signalize a new incident. study for example, grimm's _briar-rose_, which divides naturally and inevitably into ten separable incidents, and which exhibits a beautiful and artistic organization. a teacher should master this aspect of every story he proposes to teach. he should know it intimately as a series of incidents; for these are the things he can manipulate as he uses the story--in case he must shorten it or dramatize it, or otherwise modify it to suit his needs. if he knows how to handle incidents, he may often by a little editing eliminate superfluous matter and convert a loose, overburdened, or merely long story into a usable bit of art. practically every story that has the length and dignity to justify its use for a class, gathers its incidents into movements that correspond to the three or five acts of a drama. there is something almost biologically necessary in at least three parts or movements in every organized narrative--aristotle's obvious beginning, middle, and end. in a story it is but natural that we should have ( ) a section presenting the people and their surroundings, the circumstances which call for or dictate the action; ( ) the central event, the essential adventure; ( ) the dénouement, conclusion, reconciliation, adjustment, or what not. these three movements are beautifully distinct in the _briar-rose_. it helps to impress upon the children the structure of the story if in the study of it these movements are brought to notice--quietly and unobtrusively, perhaps indicated by a mere pause in the telling, or on occasion, more deliberately by some other means. the story should not be so handled as to make the impression that there are abrupt gaps between the movements; rather these movements should be treated as essential parts of a larger composition. in the stories of the dramas the children may study, and in all such stories as they themselves dramatize, they will inevitably see that these stages or movements are essential and vital, dictating the organization of the material into acts. within the arrangement of the story as incidents and movements lies a deeper kind of organization which exhibits many kinds and degrees of complexity. a story may be a run of incidents that report mere activity. so deep and eager is the hunger for story, so unfailing is the primitive epic interest, that almost anybody's attention may be held for a long while by the recital of the merely juxtaposed incidents that constitute this story of activity. but there is no art in this; it is mere story-stuff, not _a story_. under the manipulation of the literary artist, the tale-teller, it takes shape, shifts its incidents about, arranges its stages and emerges a created and organic thing, telling now of action, not of activity. it may be a long narrative, or it may be a mere anecdote. but it has a purpose and a plan, and it reaches an end. this straightforward, single-minded tale does not, however, give complete and final satisfaction. in the first place, it does not represent life, which never proceeds far by single, uninterrupted threads; events are interlinked and complicated, modified and diverted in many directions. in the second place, it does not satisfy the instinct of workmanship in the artist. even the most primitive artist, the very folk itself, has this instinct of craftsmanship which expresses itself in the elaboration and enrichment of its product. in story this instinct displays itself in the more skilful arrangement of the incidents, looking ever to the heightening and deepening of effect, in the enrichment of the presentation by weaving together more than one action into a more and more complex whole. such increased elaboration, and more conscious organization either in the arrangement of the incidents of a single action, or in the interweaving of two or more actions, gives the story _a plot_. it is from the use of stories elaborate enough and developed enough to have a plot that genuine disciplinary value may be expected. the merely chaotic or haphazard run of incidents may amuse and interest the children, but it yields nothing of artistic training. two very simple specimens (useful for so many purposes) will illustrate the point. take the story adumbrated in _the house that jack built_. this is a series of incidents linked together in the accumulative fashion, but proceeding in a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. compare it with the equally primitive accumulative tale of _the old woman who found the sixpence_, from which invaluable tale one can exemplify all the main devices of successful plot-making; the incidents are arranged in a charming pattern, so that the action rises to a summit, descends to an end, and produces an effect; there is the proper proportion of involution (save the mark!), of the making of difficulties, stating the problem, awakening our sympathies; this is followed by the due process of resolution, unraveling the difficulties, with the final restoration of the action to the normal level with the purpose of the story achieved. it is this kind of story that adds to interest and amusement that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes literature from mere writing. now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot constitutes in part the educational value of a story, it is quite obvious to those who know both children and stories that intricate and elaborate plots should not be given to folks in the elementary classes. a story in which the threads of the plot are many or disparate, or one in which the actions must be often, or for any long while, kept separate, confuses rather than trains the young children. better for them are those stories whose plots are open and simple, where the actions of the interlinked threads coincide as much as possible. certain traditional plot devices are out of place in a story chosen for these children; suspense and mystification, for example, those devices so dear in their myriad forms to the cheap and sensational novelist, and so indispensable to the interest of the uncultivated reader, are not desirable in the children's class. their interest needs no such stimulus; their attention should not be subjected to the strain, nor their nerves to the shock, of a sustained suspense with its consequent surprise. rather, their story should move openly and directly, depending for its power upon the skilful interrelation of its interests, yielding the pleasure of recognition and sympathy, so much more artistic and disciplinary than the pleasure of surprise. for this reason plots of the type of shakespeare's great plots, of the type of perrault's _cinderella_, in which the reader is in the confidence of the author from the beginning, are to be desired for the little people. if for any reason it seems well to tell to the younger children a long story built upon suspense and surprise, it is generally well to let them know very soon the issue of affairs--the ultimate disaster or reconciliation--so that they may be free from anxiety and able to attend to the more real matter of the story as it proceeds. this teaching applies to the younger children; as they grow older, they become able to get desirable intellectual experience out of a good detective story, or one with a fairly deep mystification in it, like _treasure island_. the older children, too, may profitably handle a more intricate plot--_ivanhoe_ with its four threads of interest and activity, _the merchant of venice_ with the action shifting about from scene to scene among its various groups. by handling a plot as a matter of literary study we mean, examining it from these points of view. . what are the difficulties set up? . by what devices are the difficulties constituted--conspiracy, intrigue, disguise, quarrel blood-feud, race-hatred, etc., etc.? . how are the difficulties removed? . how many threads of interest has the plot? . how are they linked together or interwoven? . how logical and how fair is the outcome? other questions to be considered in studying the plot will arise in the study of an actual story with an actual class. of fundamental interest in the story are the persons or characters, and it is of prime importance that teachers--be they mothers or masters--should know how to educate the children in this matter. from one point of view--that of the activities of the story, in which the younger children are mainly interested--there are two kinds of persons: those who do things; those who receive things, or for whose sake, or merely in whose presence, things are done. the former are the agents--the pushing, active adventurous persons, who, good or ill, make things happen; the latter are often mere figures, important and perhaps beautiful, put into the story to represent institutions or ideas--like the father of cinderella, who is merely an institutional father; or they are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy godmother; or they are the rewards of endeavor, like the king's daughter given in marriage in many a folk-tale. from another point of view, which regards the actors in the story, not as persons, but as characters, they may be divided into two types; those who are fixed, static, from the beginning--who come into the story fully equipped, and do not change at all within its limits; those who change or develop under the influence of others and of their experiences. in the study of characters more than in any other aspect of story, we must allow for the growth of the children within the elementary period. the youngest children are prepared to appreciate the activities of people, and are interested in the active persons, and by transfer of sympathy, in the persons for whose sake the deeds are done. their typical readiness in reading character does not fail them when the character has been transferred to literature. they are quick to discriminate the main lines and the distinguishing traits of personality. they need only a few facts and signs. the merest nursery child will be found to have settled views of the general character of little boy blue and jack horner, built upon the slender but significant data of the rhymes. but the children i have known have not, up to the sixth grade, followed with much interest or profit any but the slightest and simplest character progression or modification. they are satisfied that the wicked should become more and more wicked, to their final undoing; that the stupid become stupider, to their ultimate extinction; but any evolution of character other than this cumulative one, any transformation more subtle than the conversion of cinderella's sisters, or more delicate than the degeneration of struwelpeter, finds them languid. from these facts the wise teacher takes his hints and builds his plans. he will give these younger children very little of what is known in mature classes as _character-study_--which so easily in these same older classes, degenerates into gossip and the merely idle or pernicious attributing of motives. he will help the child, on the whole, to judge from his deeds whether a man is good or bad, helpful or hindering. but no deed is all mere activity; back of it lie motives and passions, and beyond it lie moral and social results. there is a name for little boy blue's failure in duty, and for jack horner's self-approval; and these qualities have manifestations in forms and circumstances other than those of these two heroes. to these simple deed-inspiring motives and passions, and to their effects on the persons themselves, the teacher must see that the children's attention is directed; so that, as he builds up stroke by stroke the image of his hero and model, the features that he gets from literature at least may be supported by his judgment. of course, as they advance the children awaken, or should be awakened, to some of the more delicate discriminations of motive and action--to the conception of a man who is mixed good and bad; and to a realization of a character changed under our eyes by some experience or by the influence of another person; to some estimate of the farther-reaching consequences of the deeds we witness in our story. and before they have finally passed out of the elementary grades, we may expect them to be able to consider the problems and contradictions that lie, for example, in the character of shylock; they could see his fundamental passions--race-hatred, avarice; they could estimate his motives--personal dislike of the merchant, revenge of his own wrongs and loneliness; they could try to estimate the effect of his character and conduct on the fortunes and characters of the whole group, and finally upon his own fortunes. they might, in the same general and simple way, follow the spiritual struggles of brutus: his great underlying passions--patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him and cassius, him and mark antony. the study of character in these broader lines--the fundamental qualities or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious results in personal and social ways of these actions--constitutes the utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of character. of equal importance in a story with the run of events or plot, and with the persons or characters, is this third thing--the outcome or issue. it is surely wise to follow, for the younger children, the hint given by their own tastes and by the primitive story-tellers, to the extent of giving them prevailingly such stories as have a distinct and signal outcome, leaving the uncertainties and inconclusions of a thoroughgoing realism for a much later period. it is best, on the whole, that the children see the issues of their story settled, the actions passing on to accomplishment--this for the artistic as well as for the moral effect of the tale. it enables them to regard it as a finished whole, having unity and completeness; and it throws light on all the events and persons in the story, to see how things come out in the end. the outcome or issue can be looked at from one or the other, sometimes from both, of two points of view; as a dénouement or round-up of the particular story in hand; or as a solution of a human problem, a universal situation. the entirely satisfying dénouement of _the old woman who found the sixpence_, the removal of her many difficulties, goes no farther than getting her home that night; though, of course, a mature mind of mystic tendencies may see in it a triumph of social co-operation. it will be enough for the third grade to feel a certain luxurious physical well-being, arising from the final safe arrival of the old woman and the pig that night. but in the exquisite little novella of _beauty and the beast_ the outcome of the story is not only a settlement of the affairs of the persons in whom we are interested, but it is also a comment on life of universal application--that in a world where things go as they should, good, gentle, and pretty persons are rewarded with their hearts' desire, while rude, haughty, and cruel persons are either punished or left entirely out in the award of good things. this sort of ending, conclusive and fortunate, the children and the primitive story-makers always prefer; any other kind of ending must be prepared for and defended. the younger children will not accept tragedies; the older ones accept them with difficulty. death and failure are not realizable to them. it may be true, as wordsworth undoubtedly meant us to see in his little cottage-girl in "we are seven," that this refusal to believe in death is due to some supernal truth of vision which we, their elders, seeing only by the light of common day, have lost. but we all know that tragedy is sometimes the way of life, and often the way of art, being ineradicably written in the events of many of the world's great stories. it would be an ethical and artistic folly to substitute a fortunate ending in these stories--quite as unpardonable in the tragic folk tale as in _king lear_ or in one of the greek tragedies. it is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of the tender sides of sympathy and pity. but because they are not provided by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept it--not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that kind--but as a beautiful pathos or grief. to this end one would choose his tragic tale among those which have disaster inwoven from the beginning, so that the class may not have the shock of surprise and the feeling of resentment that come of an unexpected and avoidable catastrophe. take for example, the folk-tale of _little red riding-hood_, a poor story for a class in any form, but poor as a tragedy because there is nothing in the events to warn them of the tragic end. to be sure there is the treacherous wolf, but he is stupid and should by rights be defeated and outwitted; it is simply preposterous, in the code of childhood, that he should triumph. this lack of the inevitable and necessary element in the disaster is doubtless what tempted the folk themselves to divert it by a dénouement, possibly reminiscent of certain mythical stories--the recovery of the maiden from the wolf's stomach, which by its improbability and grotesquerie tempts the skepticism of the class, however young. as an example of the other sort, consider the old ballad long ago adopted as a nursery tale--_the babes in the wood_, which carries in its very nature and in every incident the prophecy of tragedy; so that, however grievous the calamity may be, it does not come upon us with the additional shock of surprise and the additional injury of unreasonableness. this kind of story accomplishes the result of discharging the tender emotions without complicating them too deeply with anger and revenge. but, on the whole, the stories taught the elementary class should be those that end conclusively and fortunately. this principle not only matches and satisfies the child's taste, but it is in entire consonance with the principles of his procedure in other things--it grows out of the method of affirmation and inclusion, regarding elimination and denial as useful in a much later period of his education. as to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something eminently satisfying in poetic justice. legal justice is cold and formal to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle of vengeance. besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the _inferno_, the inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that intervene between it and the cause. logical justice--the natural, uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to their absorption into a new combination--is both too slow and not striking enough. besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal, undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom we love, or to spare somebody we hate. in short, your elementary class demands poetic justice--demands it strong and desires it quick. now, poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come practically to the realistic art of our own generation. it tends to secure completeness and unity. as a matter of fact, in practically every short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice. one would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. it is this that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature, or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. to guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading as possible. poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a haphazard and lawless distribution. there is an artistic flaw in a story in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's stories sympathy sets aside deserving--_the musicians of bremen_, for example. we are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because, being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are therefore in the line for reward. but the youngest child whom i have tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "lazy jack" (joseph jacob's _english fairy tales_), in which a noodle whose stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored princess. it is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic justice is perverted justice. and then, in the long run, when we have studied many stories and fitted the literary stories in with history and the observation of life, we can counteract any effect of unreality we may suspect, by placing the rewards and punishments in their proper places and classes--translating them, as it were, into terms of experience. the fairy-tale may say in effect: "be good and gentle and pretty, and you will marry a prince," or, "if you are mean and spiteful, you will be transformed into a toad;" but it is not so difficult to convert these propositions into terms that have a reality for the third grade, so that marrying a prince and being turned into a toad take their places as typical or symbolistic rewards and punishments. chapter v the choice of stories as a summary and by way of applying the facts, principles, and theories discussed in the foregoing chapter, let us try to decide what constitutes a good story to study with a class of children under thirteen years of age. not to be aware of the critical pitfalls that yawn for one who would say what constitutes a good story for any purpose, would be entirely too naïve; and they beset the path of him who would choose a fairy-tale quite as thickly as that of the critic of mature masterpieces. but many of these pitfalls may be avoided if one narrows his path and walks circumspectly in it. in the present discussion the path is narrowed by two considerations. first, we will leave out of the discussion matters of mere personal taste and instinctive feeling--that region in which impressionism and amateur criticism flourish, confining it as closely as may be to those matters that yield to judgment, and that are, as nearly as possible, matters of fact. there is about every bit of literature a sphere in which the individual taste is sole arbiter. one man's meat is here another man's poison. the merest lay reader here makes up his mind: "i like it," "i like it not;" and there is no appeal from these judgments, and no way of modifying them short of a complete training in criticism, or a complete remaking of the reader's experience. it is quite true that the region in which these differences lie may be greatly reduced by a knowledge of a few fundamental critical principles, and by a mere suppression of prejudices and sentimentalities. but in the last analysis there always remains a margin, a border of this every man's territory. if the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence, social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty. here lies, too, that more or less elusive, but very real, thing that belongs to every bit of literature--what we call "charm." this may be a matter of structure, of style, even of vocabulary, of persons, of furniture, of architecture or other mere accessories--of geography, of the temperament of the reader, a combination of all these or of any number of them, or of other things too numerous or too elusive to be named. every good story has it, or gets it as soon as a sincere and sympathetic reader learns how to read it. if one should ever find a story which after repeated readings develops nothing of this most essential and intangible quality of charm, let him not try to teach it. either it is not a good story, or he has no temperament for art. but, however interesting these matters may be to readers of the gentle guild, and to the impressionist critic, they do not carry us far upon our practical educational choice. this must be guided by a study of those aspects and elements of story which yield to plain observation; which, however artistic, are yet amenable to judgment, and may therefore be impersonally and unemotionally discussed--such as the structure of the story, its use of incident, its movement, its plot, its outcome, the fitness of the whole for the training and best amusement of the children. in the second place, we limit and define our discussion, if another reminder of this important fact may be allowed, by the determination to discuss, not the art of literature, not all or any literature, not all literature for children, but such literature as it may be found expedient and desirable to give to a class of children. . in order to get it into the summary, it having been sufficiently amplified in a previous chapter, and being indeed, self-evident, we will say again that a story, good to teach in class should be one whose material corresponds to the needs and tastes of the children. the experiences portrayed should be, not necessarily those that they have had, but such as they can conceive and imaginatively appropriate, or such as they might safely experience. and since children of this age are living, or ought to be encouraged to live, active, achieving lives, and are not, or ought not to be, introspective or too meditative; since they know little or nothing of intricate social complications or psychic experience, and we do not desire that they should, we will choose their literature with these things in mind. we may safely say that there should be nothing reflected in his story which the inquisitive child may not probe to the very bottom without coming upon knowledge too mature for him. this must be reconciled with the fact that one of the valuable services of literature is to forestall experience and to supplement it. the reconciliation is not difficult to make when once the teacher has grasped the principle of fitness and really walks in the light of what he may easily know about the nature of children. . the larger number of their stories should be of things happening, of achievement, of epic, objective activity. single children should often have a quiet, idyllic story to read. the class should occasionally have such a story or poem to consider and should be carefully guided to the enjoyment of it. but for the class in the larger amount of its work we will choose stories of action, as corresponding most nearly to the experience and interest of the children, as harmonizing most completely with the character of their other disciplines, as serving best to create an atmosphere of artistic _rapport_ in any group large enough to compose a class, while they serve equally well with other stories to effect those other aspects of literary training which we desire. however, all persons who choose and write stories for children should suspect themselves in regard to this matter of activity. when we say that these stories should contain much activity and should move forward chiefly by the method of adventure, we do not mean that there should be unlimited or superfluous activity. the two marks of the sensational story are too much activity, or merely miscellaneous activity, and activities unnecessarily and unnaturally heightened and spiced. it is not difficult to test our stories on either of these points. a good story has a central action to be accomplished; toward this many minor activities co-operate; there should be enough of these to accomplish the result, but there should be economy of invention and skill in arrangement, so that one does not feel that there has been a waste of material nor a bid for overstimulated interest. the danger to the child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance, strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste. . to bear the strain of class use the story should present a sound and beautiful organization. this plea for a good and trustworthy structure should not be mistaken for a plea for a formal and artificial use of a story. it is rather an appeal for the use of the logical and rational side of literature--an urgency that we bring into the training of the children the plain and fundamental matters of art-form that the story exhibits, at the same time that we get out of it the intellectual value it has for the class. if it be a short story, it should go to its climax by a direct and logical path, and close when its effect is produced. if it be a longer story, it should have that arrangement of details and parts that corresponds to the movements of the action, and that serves to get the material before us in the most effective and economical way. stories that are elaborate enough to have a genuine plot are desirable for all classes except perhaps the very youngest. it is not necessary to say again, except by way of an item in the summary, that the plot should be simple and easy to see through, containing very little of the element of suspense, and only a legitimate amount of the element of surprise. some more elaborate plots, with more mystification in them, are intellectually stimulating to the oldest grades, and create an interest of curiosity. but all teachers should learn to regard this stimulus as a mere by-product of literary study, and this curiosity as a merely adventitious ally. . clearly connected with the matter of good and sufficient structure is that of economy of incident. a story which displays a profusion of details may be interesting, and under certain circumstances valuable, to a child. but for the class that is a better story which uses just those incidents essential to the production of its effect. compare our old friend, perrault's _cinderella_, in this matter with grimm's. it needs but two nights at the ball--one when the maiden remembers the godmother's injunction, and one when she forgets it. grimm's version gives us three nights, and fills the story with all manner of irrelevant details, which indicate, indeed, the prodigal wealth of the folk-mind and the unbounded interest of the folk-audience; but they show no superintendence of the folk-artist. of course, when one is judging a story from this point of view, he must take into account the effect to be produced before he pronounces as to the sufficiency or superfluity of the incidents. there must always be enough to be convincing, to give to the story the atmosphere of verisimilitude, and to justify and reward our interest in the affairs of the persons. in andersen's _the ugly duckling_ he needs to produce the effect of lapse of time, the experience of many vicissitudes, and the repeated refusals of the world to receive his genius; every incident then, though it may to some extent reproduce a previous one, is valuable as contributing to the effect. . as a part of the artistic economy of the story, it should have a close unity--closer than we would demand of a story read to our children at home, and closer than we should demand for an adult novel. the threads of the action should be so closely related and interlinked that they are practically all in action all the time. this is particularly true for the younger children. it may not be too great a tax upon the patience and attention of the older children to leave the hero in imminent danger on his desert island, while we return for several chapters to the heroine in the crypts of the wicked duke's castle; but the little ones should not be asked to endure it. the action should be all rounded up within the one design and stop at the artistic stopping-place. to appreciate this aspect of unity, read grimm's _briar-rose_--that wonderful little masterpiece of structure--in comparison with perrault's _the sleeping beauty in the wood_, which trails after it the ugly and inorganic episode of the ogre mother-in-law. even in the cycles of stories the separate episodes should display these qualities of unity. . when we choose our standard class-story, we will have in mind other aspects of the principle of economy, or of due artistic measure. in such a story there should not be an undue appeal to any one emotion. too much horror or disgust will undo the very effect one desires to produce. such a story as _the dog of flanders_, for example, affords a sort of emotional spree of pity and pathos through which the steadier members of a class refuse to go, and which the more emotional members do not need. especially should there not be any unnecessary profusion of magic, of supernatural agencies, of daring and danger. this brings us to the difficult point of the degree or kind of unlikelihood one may risk in such a story. when one is reading to the single child, or to a few children, or if one is a real dramatic genius, this unlikelihood is not so important a matter, because it is not difficult under either of those conditions to create an atmosphere of artistic faith in which any story "goes." but in a big class, with the ordinary teacher it is difficult; some inquisitive or skeptical minds will call for proof or detailed statement, and quite destroy the _rapport_ demanded for the perfect appreciation of the story. in a class i once knew such a skeptic, who was indeed a mere scientific realist, brought the otherwise enraptured class violently to earth during the reading of the passage of odysseus between the whirlpool and the cliff, by the sardonic suggestion that scylla must have had a "rubber-neck." when it can be avoided, do not tempt your skeptic or your cynic by the kind or degree of unlikelihood liable to excite his protest. . the story should be serious. this does not preclude humorous and comic stuff. but the funny things should be sincerely funny, as contra-distinguished from those things that are ostentatiously childlike, elaborately accommodated to the infant mind, ironical, or sentimental, and the teacher must so know his story, and so honor it and his children, that he can render it to them whether it be an improbable adventure of odysseus, or the merest horse-play of a folk-droll, sincerely and cordially. . in the earlier typical years of the elementary school, through the sixth grade (twelve-year-old children) at least, the persons of the story should be those who do things rather than those who become something else. they should display the striking, permanent qualities rather than the elusive, evolving qualities; they should act from simple and strong motives, not from obscure and complex ones. only in the latest years, if at all within the period, should the class be asked to consider more intricate types, more subjective qualities, and more mixed motives. no mistake is likely to be made in this matter, if the stories and plays are well chosen from the point of view of fitness in other respects. every teacher who is conscientious and informed, will realize that these persons in the stories contribute their quota--and a very large one--to that "copy," that ideal self, that broods over every child's inner life, inviting him on, giving him courage and hope, reproof and praise, leading him to whatever he attains of social and personal morality. and every such teacher can help the children to build into their ideals the permanent and valuable qualities of these persons of their story. . the story should be ethically sound. on this point one would like to make discriminating statements. one does not teach literature in order to teach morals and he cannot ask that his fairy-tale should turn out a sermon, or that his hero-tale deliberately inculcate this or that virtue. indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary training--as witness the nursery rhymes, the _garden of verses_, _alice in wonderland_. but if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound, and does not yield satisfactory literary results. no teacher is in danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or glorifies some roguish hero. but let him beware also of those less obvious immoralities, where the success of a story turns upon some piece of unjustifiable trickery or disobedience, or irreverence, or some more serious immorality, which thus has placed upon it the weight of approval. in the chapbook tale of _jack and the bean-stalk_, to take a chance example, the hero's successful adventures hinge upon a piece of folly and disobedience; the kindergartenized version of _the three bears_ excuses an unpardonable breach of manners. the pivotal issue, the central spring of a story must be ethically strong, so as to bear the closest inspection and to justify itself in the fierce light of class discussion. of course, one should be cautious here, so as not to seem merely puritanical or pecksniffian. subtlety is the savage virtue; along with horse-play it is the child's substitute for both wit and humor. the wiles and devices of odysseus only endear him the more to his sympathetic child-followers, as they did to pallas athene herself. we cannot give to the classes the things best for them in other ways, and exclude all tales in which wiliness or subtlety constitutes the method, if not the motive. but we can do this: we can see to it that the trick tends to the securing of final justice, and we can discriminate between mere deceitful trickiness and that subtlety which is, as in the case of odysseus, quickness of wit or steady intellectual dominance. and we must make many allowances, setting ourselves free in the child's moral world as it really is to him, by constant imaginative sympathy. according to the nursery code there is no harm in playing a trick upon a giant; by very virtue of being a giant, with the advantage of size on his side, and more than likely stupid besides, he is fair game for any nimble-witted hero. the children and their heroes use the deliciously frank and entirely satisfying argument of the fisherman who freed the monstrous afreet from the bottle: "this is an afreet, and i am a man, and allah has given me sound reason. therefore i will now plot his destruction." the butcher and the hen-wife, hereditary villains of the folk-tales, are such unpitied victims. the misfortunes of kluge else, of hans in luck, and of the countless other noodles, are but the proper fruit of their folly. every child will instinctively--and indeed ultimately--justify the legal quibble by which portia defeats shylock, as but the just visitation upon his cunningly devised cruelty. let it be a clear case of the biter bitten, and of the injustice or stupidity of the original biter, and one need not fear the result--certainly not the artistic result--upon the sensible child or upon the average class--the average class being, in the end, always a sensible child. at the same time one hastens to say that to use a large number of such stories would place the children in an atmosphere of trickery and petty scheming which would be most undesirable. i have read with a group of children where the presence of one incurably slippery member so poisoned the air that it would have been unwise to study even one story in which success was achieved by the use of a trick or a bit of subtlety. let your stories be ethically sound, even the stratagems and wiles making for justice, and the right sort of mercy. . it is best, on the whole, that the stories given in class have a satisfying and conclusive ending of the romantic sort. it should, of course, be the ending for which the events have paved the way, and the ending which the children, in view of the direction in which their sympathies have been enlisted, will feel to be just. when a tragic ending is inevitable, it should, in the case of the younger children, be provided for and justified. all things considered, it is better, emotionally and artistically, for these younger children to consider in class those stories which have a fortunate ending, displaying the working of poetic justice, leaving for the older groups the tragedies, and the logical justice of a convinced realism. chapter vi folk-tale and fairy-story whatever may be our attitude toward the culture-epoch theory of a child's training and experience, or however much we may vary in our conscious or unconscious application of it, no observer of children will have failed to notice that in the three or four years lying about the seventh, they have their characteristic hour of social and psychic ripeness for fairy-tales. upon this point the philosophical deductions of the technical pedagogues coincide perfectly with the intuitive wisdom of all the generations of mothers and nurses. the imaginative activity of the six- or seven-year-old person coming to school out of the environment of the average modern home is practically on the same level, and follows the same processes, as that of the folk who produced the golden core of folk-tales--not primitive savage fragments of legend, not developed artistic romance, but complete little tales, simple and sincere, molded into acceptable form by generations of use. the vision of the world physical and social that these tales present, and their interpretation of its activities, is that which is normal to the seven-year-old child, and constitutes therefore the natural basis on which his literary education begins, and affords his first effective contact with imaginative art. but when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable, we are still at the beginning of our task. for we find ourselves in the presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the added service of good literature. and so wide is the range of subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual specimens. the most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set of trustworthy and practical principles of selection. we should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. it is now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies; or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements. with the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human material--beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. it is possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact that in all those that are worth using for the children in class, whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom we are choosing. the traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into four classes. . sagas--stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be believed. they are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. they are, as a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making--of the same stuff in many cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales which the poets took up. such folk-sagas are _whittington and his cat_ and _lady godiva_. most of these stories have preternatural or supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination. . _märchen_, or what we call "nursery tales"--those told for artistic pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the art-instinct. they may or may not exhibit the supernatural or preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors. these constitute the large mass of popular and nursery tales; _cinderella_, _beauty and the beast_, _puss in boots_, _briar-rose_, _the musicians of bremen_ will do for examples. . drolls--comic or domestic tales which may or may not make use of the impossible, the marvelous, or the preternatural. generally they are tales of funny misadventures, cunning horse-play, tricks, the misfortunes or undeserved good luck of "noodles." such, chosen from many examples, are _kluge else_, _lazy jack_, _mr. vinegar_, _hans in luck_. . cumulative tales--those in which incident is inter-linked with incident by some more or less artificial principle of association, constituting in some cases a mere string of associated happenings, in others a fairly rounded out story. such, in its simplest form, are _the house that jack built_ and _titty-mouse and tatty-mouse_, _henny-penny_ and the old swapping ballads. the modern stories corresponding to these are of three kinds: those written in imitation of the folk-sagas and _märchen_; those which introduce preter-human elements as symbols; those which personify the phenomena and forces of nature. it is not mere convention that leads one to choose for the children in class the traditionary or folk-tales in preference to the modern fairy-story. many new so-called fairy-tales are doubtless harmless and amusing enough, and may serve a purpose in hours of mere recreation. but they lack those abiding qualities one seeks in a story he gives as discipline and to a class. failing to possess the very fundamental characteristics of the folk-tale, they fail to perform the typical and desirable service of the folk-tale. first of all, modern fairy-tales are neither convinced nor convincing; they are imitations, which cannot fail to miss the soul of the original. there can be no new fairy-tales written, because there is no longer a possibility of belief in fairies, and no longer among adults a possibility of looking at the world as the folk and the child look at it. the substitution of the pert fairies and dapper elves of literature and the theater for the serious preterhuman agents of the folk-tale creates at once in the new stories an atmosphere of dilettantism, of insincerity. titania and oberon, flower-fairies, dew-fairies, gauzy wings and spangled skirts, were not in the mind of the people who told these tales of the sometimes grim and _schauderhaft_ and always serious beings--fairies, elves, goblins, or what not. wicked little brown men disappearing into a green hillock with the human child, in exchange for whom they have left in the cottage cradle a brown imp of their own; the godmother with the fairy-gift who brings justice and joy to the wronged maiden; the slighted wise woman foretelling death and doom over the cradle of the little princess; the kind and gentle beast whom love disenchants and restores to his own noble form--all these were to those who made them serious art, as they should be to the child. if one could make the old distinction without dreading to be misunderstood in these days of opposition to "faculty" criticism, he would say that the folk-tales exhibit the working of the deep human _imagination_, using all the powers of the mind, and reorganizing the world; the modern fairy-tale exhibits the exercise of the _fancy_, disporting itself in a very small corner of the world of art. it is, first of all, as one cannot say too often, the imaginative level of the folk-tales that fits them for the child's use. they are the creative reconstruction of the world by those who were rich in images and sense-material, unhampered in the use of it by any system of logic or body of organized knowledge, simple, sincere and full of faith--as our own well-born children are at six-seven-eight. it is this simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness that gives them their childlikeness--all qualities that one fails to find in the modern fairy-tale written by a grown person for children. nothing is so alien to the consciousness of the child as the consciousness of the grown-up educated man. it is by nothing short of a miracle that he can keep his own sophistications out of what he writes for children. his fairy-tale, failing in simplicity, will betake itself to babbling inanity; failing in earnestness, it gives itself over to sentimentality; failing in belief, it is likely to be filled with cynicism and cheap satire under the guise of playfulness. these faults may be found, all too plentiful, even in the best work of hans christian andersen, while they poison practically everything done for children by kingsley and hawthorne. the immense advantage of the traditionary tales is that they were not made for children. the _märchen_ of our day was the novel or romance of the people among whom it had its earlier history. it therefore escapes entirely the "little dears" appeal and method. the obviously amateur heat-fairies, snow-fairies, flower-fairies, and all the others which figure in the merely fanciful and always misleading myth-making of the belated kindergarten and the holiday book of commerce, serve chiefly to bewilder the child's judgment, to confuse his imagination, and to cheapen the supernatural in his art, which should be sparing and serious, as it should be in all art. besides, the natural phenomena with which these fancies are connected are much more beautiful, more appealing to the imagination, and ultimately more serviceable to art, if they are rightly presented as plain nature. there are certain modern symbolistic stories containing elements of the fantastic and supernatural kind that are good and beautiful enough to make a genuinely desirable contribution to the child's experience. it is advisable to reserve these, however, until the children are old enough and experienced enough to understand them as symbols. such stories are stockton's _the bee-man of orn_, slightly edited; _the water babies_, always expurgated of kingsley's ponderous fooling; _the snow image_, _the ugly duckling_. it is not only that the world of imaginary beings and marvelous forces in the folk-tale enchant the child and further his artistic development in the most natural way; the human world of these tales is a delightful and wholesome one for him to know. it is a naïve and simple world, where he may come close to the actual processes of life and see them as picturesque and interesting. where else in our modern world can a child encounter the shoemaker, the tailor, the miller, the hen-wife, the weaver, the spinner, in their primitive dignity and importance? there are kings, to be sure, and princes, but except in certain of the stories that took permanent literary shape in the seventeenth century, they are, like the kings and princes in the _odyssey_, plain and democratic monarchs, on terms of beautiful equality with the noble swineherd and the charming tailor. king arthur in the nursery ballad stole a peck of barley meal to make a bag-pudding, in the homeliest and most democratic way, and the picture of the queen frying the cold pudding for breakfast seems only natural to the little democrats of six and seven in our own day. this world of genuine people and honest occupations is charming and educative in itself, and constitutes the most effective and convincing background for the supernatural and the marvelous when that element is present. when we have said that it is the folk or traditionary tales that we should choose, we do not mean that we should consider the whole realm of folk-lore material, primitive and savage tales--african, indian, igorrote; though, as a matter of fact, every teacher of children should be something of a scientific student of folk-stories. it increases his respect and sympathy for the specimens he actually chooses to know where they stand in the large whole--their history and human value. besides, the experienced teacher will often find in the outlying regions of folk-tales the germ of a story precisely suited to his needs, and he can have the very real pleasure of endowing it with an acceptable form and putting it into educational circulation. but on the whole, the teacher must be very expert, and must have extraordinary needs, to feel justified in going outside the established canon of fairy-tales for his material. for there is a canon more or less fixed, into which have entered those stories that have from long and perpetual use taken on a more or less acceptable form; stories from those nations whose culture has blended to produce the modern occidental tradition. the canon includes grimm's tales, perrault's _mother goose_ tales, a few of madame d'aulnoy's, a few danish and norwegian stories, some from italian sources and through italian media, some from the _arabian nights_, some unhesitatingly admitted lately from collections of english folk-tales made in our own day, two or three chapbook stories, a few interlopers like _the three bears_, _goody two shoes_, and some of andersen's--not popular tales at all, but having in them some mysterious charm that opened the door to them. one cannot attempt to fix the limits more narrowly, for he has no sooner closed the list than he realizes that every teacher who has used them, every mother who has read them to her little people, every boy or girl who loves them, will have some other tale to insert, some perfect thing not provided for in this tentative catalogue. besides, from time to time there does appear a new claimant with every title to admission, such as some of the irish tales told by seumas mcmanus or douglas hyde, or certain of the zuñi folk-tales collected by cushing. but on the whole, may we not agree that the list indicated constitutes the authentic accepted canon of fairy-tales established and approved by the teachers and children of occidental tradition and rearing? still, there are choices to be made among these folk-tales of the accepted list. no child should be told all of them. practically all children do have too many fairy-tales told them, and suffer in this, as in most of the things supplied them, from the discouraging and confusing "too much." for a whole year in which the main stories are taken from the folk-tales, a half-dozen stories will be enough. it is not among the folk-sagas that one will find the best stories of this kind for his children. these, indeed, are scarcely to be called literature. most of them are tales explaining by a legend some natural feature, the name of a place or a person, or attaching to some historic person a stock adventure, wonderful or preternatural. some of them are, as has been said, germs of hero-tales that never obtained popular artistic favor, or they are far-away echoes of hero-tales, or they are stories of the _pourquoi_ kind--semi-mythical in import, and consequently lacking the universal appeal and fitness of literature. any teacher may find one of the stories of this group adapted to his purpose, but he will not find most of his folk-material here. in the cycles of hero tales, _king arthur_ and _siegfried_ for example, we can find many of these minor sagas imbedded in the larger cycle, but still detachable and often easily adaptable for the younger children. it is among the _märchen_ that we find our supply of stories. this is not the place to discuss the science of nursery-tales, their origin, genesis, dissemination, or any of the other scholar's aspects, inviting though all these topics be. one is quite aware that even in the most social _märchen_ there may be found detritus of myth; one should be equally aware that in certain other _märchen_ he finds the original germ which finally evolved into a myth-story. but let not the teacher and lover of folk-tales as art allow himself to become ensnared in myth interpretations of his tales; that way literary and pedagogic madness lies. countless generations ago those which perchance had a mythical significance lost it and became art, completely humanized in life and experience. the drolls, when one chooses well among them, are precisely adapted to add the element of fun that should never be long absent from the children's literature. there are, of course, numberless comic folk-tales too coarse and too brutal to be used in our day, except by the scientific student of culture. the fun of the drolls is, as a matter of fact, not on a high level--practical jokes, perfectly obvious _contretemps_, the adventures and achievements of noodles, are their typical material. but this is the comic level of the average child for whom we choose them. it is the first step above physical fun, and from this step we can undertake to start him on his delightful journey up the ever-refining path of literary comedy. from tricks and horse-play he may pass rapidly to humor and nonsense. but at six-seven, having had the _little guinea pig_ and _simple simon_ as an undergraduate kinder, he is ready for _hans in luck_ and _mr. miacca_. like the olympians themselves, he will roar at hephaestus' limp, and with the council of homeric heroes he will laugh at the physical chastisement of thersites, and enjoy the none-too-penetrating trick that odysseus played upon the blundering polyphemus. there is no danger that the children will not outgrow this stage of comic appreciation--the danger is that they will outgrow it instead of adding to it all the other stages. there is something wrong with the artistic culture of the man who cannot at forty smile at the follies of the peterkin family, at the same time that he completely savors the comedy of _the egoist_. the accumulative tales have their service to render. perhaps their characteristic moment comes a little earlier than even the first year of school. before he is six the little citizen of the world will have been building up his vision of the interdependence and interaction of men and things. to this vision the accumulative tales bring the contribution of art. many of them, being the simplest adjustment of incident to incident, such as _the old woman who found the sixpence_ and _the little red hen_, are ideal for the nursery and kindergarten child. others still, built upon the accumulative principle, but more complex or more artistic in form, will charm and instruct the first-year scholars--_henny-penny_, for example, and _hans in luck_, and _the three billy goats gruff_. from the point of view of composition, they may well be studied by the older children, because they permit the examination of the separate incidents, and exhibit in most cases the very simplest principles of structure. but coming still closer to the choosing of the actual specimens for the classes, it would be only fatuous to ignore the fact that when we come to the matter of the final choice, we are upon difficult ground, educationally and critically. but we can save ourselves from presumption and dogmatism by discussing a few practical, but general, grounds of choice, reminding ourselves that in the specific school and with the specific class many modifying minor principles will arise. the teacher will be much comforted and steadied if he remember that he is teaching _literature_, and is therefore freed from any obligation to the stories as myth, or as scientific folk-lore, as sociology or as nature-study; let nothing tempt him to the study of the first member of the company of musicians of bremen, as "a type of the solid-hoofed animals," of _red riding-hood_ as a "dawn-myth," or of _the three bears_ as "parenthood in the wild." the teacher will select those tales that have somewhere in their history acquired an artistic organization, rejecting in favor of them those which remain chaotic and disorganized. compare, for example, in this matter, the perfect little plot of madame villeneuve's _beauty and the beast_ with grimm's _the golden bird_--a string of loosely connected, partly irrelevant incidents. he will prefer those that display economy of incident--in which each incident helps along the action, or contributes something essential to the situation. of course, it is rather characteristic of the folk-mind, as of the child-mind, to heap up incidents _à propos de bottes_; but as this is one of the characteristics to be corrected in the child by his training in literature, so it is one of the faults which should exclude a fairy-tale from his curriculum. to make the difference among the stories in this regard quite clear, compare the neat, orderly, and essential flow of incident in _the musicians of bremen_ with the baffling multiplicity and confusion displayed by madame d'aulnoy's _the wonderful sheep_. other things being equal, he will prefer for discipline those fairy-stories which use the fairy and other preternatural elements in artistic moderation, to those that fill every incident with marvels and introduce supernatural machinery apparently out of mere exuberance. this element is much more impressive when used in art with reticence and economy. even a little child grows too familiar with marvels when these crowd one another on every page, and ceases either to shiver or to thrill. in the fairy-tale, as in art for mature people, the supernatural should appear only at the ultimate moment, or for the ultimate purpose, and then in amount and potency only sufficient to accomplish the result. perrault was very cautious upon this point; in all his tales he seems to have reduced the element of the marvelous to the smallest amount and to have called upon it only at the pivotal points. compare in his _cinderella_ the sufficiency of his single proviso, "now, this godmother was a fairy," with the tedious superfluity of irrelevant marvels in grimm's version of the same tale. is this bringing the fascinating abundance of the teutonic folk fancy to a disadvantageous comparison with the neat and orderly, but more common-place, gallic mind? by no means. one has many occasions to regret, when he reads perrault's version of the wonderful tales he found, that he was a precisian in style and a courtier in manners; and we may find in the most apparently artless tales told by grimm or by asbjörnsen the most perfect organization and economy; as, for example in _briar-rose_ or in _the three billy goats gruff_. besides, one hastens to add that every child should hear and should later on have a chance to read some of the free, wandering, fantastic things which his teacher cannot feel justified in giving to the class. one is obliged to take some attitude in mediating the folk-tales to the modern child, toward the fact that we often find them reflecting a moral standard quite different from that which the average well-bred child is brought up by; and this situation is complicated by the fact that the children are too young to understand dramatically another moral standard. this aspect of the stories has been pretty well covered by the general discussion in the previous chapter. but, luckily, it is quite possible to reject all those folk-tales of questionable morals and objectionable taste and still have plenty to choose from. be slow to reject a folk-tale unless the bit of immorality--a lie, an act of disloyalty, or irreverence--or the bit of coarseness really forms the pivot of the story. only then is the story unsafe or incurable. one must take an attitude, not only toward the morals of the folk-tale, but toward its manners as well. there is some violence in many of the most attractive nursery tales; many of them reflect a rather rough-and-tumble state of social communion; many exhibit a superfluity of bloodshed or other grisly physical horrors. we quickly grant that it is not wise to read enough of these, or to linger long enough over the forbidding details, to create a deep or an abiding atmosphere of terror. but it is certainly true that the modern child of six or seven has so little apperception material for physical horrors that they do not take any deep hold upon him. indeed, the safety of modern life, and the absence of visible violence, have taken the emotional appeal out of many grim lessons of spenser's and of dante's. murder in the _märchen_ is to the modern child actually a bit of fine art--merely a neat and convincing way of disposing of iniquitous elder brothers and hostile magicians. the fact that the child's experience and information enable him to make no image of the physiological sequelae of the cutting-off of heads, for instance, makes it easy for the teacher to carry him harmless past details that would seem brutal to his nervous and squeamish elders. and these details are never the point of emphasis in any good story. and on the whole, those persons whom the children like and are likely to incorporate into their "pattern," have manners either just or gentle even in the folk-tales. it might be well to introduce among the folk-tales an occasional short story of contemporary life, recording the activities of persons such as the children actually know. this is not so important in this stage of their experience as it will be later; first because the folk-tales do not seem antiquated nor, if they are wisely selected, unduly fantastic to them, since they find themselves imaginatively so much at home with material and the method; and, in the second place, because in every well-regulated school their fact studies and occupation work are at this time concrete and charming, and keep them rightly and sufficiently in touch with the world of actuality. of course we must accompany and supplement the folk-tales by verses, since even at this age we may impress upon the children the music of speech, and some of the minor literary beauties. they will probably be delighted to repeat (in many classes many of the children will be learning them for the first time) the lovely hereditary jingles and ballads from mother goose--"the crooked man," "i saw a ship a-sailing," "sing a song of sixpence," the rhymes for games and for counting-out. there are a very few of stevenson's simple enough for this period; and there may be a further choice among things found here and there, simple, objective, and perfectly musical. it is not so much the content and meaning of poetry that we can hope to impress upon little people under eight, as the music and motion of the verse. there will be, however, many members of every class who will be interested in the meaning, the images, and the persons, if there be persons. we will take all pains, therefore, to see that these be not unsuitable. these--folk-tales and simple singing lyrics--with a fable or two told as anecdotes, and repeated until even the little children begin to see that there is something more than meets the eye--all graded and modified in the light of the personnel and experience of the actual class, may constitute the literature of the first two years of school. chapter vii myth as literature the presupposition that myth is _par excellence_ the literary material for young children doubtless grew out of a misinterpretation of the so-called mythopoeic age in the children, and some fundamental misconception of the nature of myth and its relation to other folk and traditionary material. there is no place in this little book even to suggest the problems that surround the nature and genesis of myth. but it does seem desirable to make in a simple way a few distinctions that may serve to set us on the right road. first of all, myth is religion, and not art. it is not a thing of mere imagination. it is the explanation or interpretation of some physical fact, some historical occurrence, some social custom, some racial characteristic, some established ritual or worship. it is the religious or emotional response to some influence or activity in the world so impressive or so efficacious as to seem to call for explanation in terms of supernatural agencies. this explanatory or interpretative stage or aspect of myth may be first historically, or it may not be. it is probably first in most myths in a simple and crude form, which in all developed myths has been enriched and modified by influences from the other stages and aspects. the second stage--or shall we call it merely another aspect--is the assigning of distinct personality and individuality to the agencies assumed to account for events and appearances. then follows rapidly the interrelations and interactions of these persons, the surrounding of them with friends and subordinates, the building-up of a whole intricate society of divinities after the model of human society--all at first symbolistic and of religious significance. a third stage or aspect is that of the cult, the worship, the establishment of a priesthood delivering authoritative messages, mediating influences to the people, and adding constantly to the body of explanations and interpretations surrounding each divinity. the fourth stage or aspect is that in which it becomes, or becomes identified with, a body of moral doctrines or ethical principles; where the personal divinities, with their qualities, insignia, and associations, are taken as symbols of inner human forces, of moral and social achievement, as expressions of spiritual influences operant in human nature and life. let it be understood that in naming these stages or aspects there has been no attempt to place them either in chronological or in logical order, and no intention of saying that they stand apart from one another in an easily recognized distinctness. but, however interlinked and mutually modified they may be, we must in any discussion of myth, be aware of these four sides or steps. take, for example, the greek myth of apollo. as an explanation of physical phenomena he is light or fire, sometimes specialized as the spirit of the sun. but he is embodied and endowed with a personality; he has social conditions and subsidiary functions assigned to him. as a person he is the son of zeus and leto, twin brother of artemis, leader of the nine muses, guardian of pastured flocks and herds, as artemis of the wild creatures who feed or frolic by night. as his worship spread and deepened, there gathered about him many other functions--he was the god of healing, of music, of law, of atonement; and many tributary and subordinate divinities were associated with him in all these activities. there gathered into his myth also an enormous and complex body of stories, romantic and mystical, explanatory and prophetic--stories of adventure, of contact with the other gods, of sojourns with men, of pilgrimages to unknown regions; some of them merely romantic, some of them symbolistic, many of them profoundly significant of his powers and offices. and the myth of apollo is remarkable for its ancient and elaborate worship. already when the homeric poems were made, the shrine of apollo at delphos was the scene of an old and complicated ritual. there was even then a temple rich with the accumulated treasure of the votive offerings of generations of worshipers. priests and prophets, the mystic offices of the pythia, poets and musicians, stately processions of kings and warriors seeking oracles, combined to maintain the dignity and sanctity of this most impressive worship. from the very earliest times of which we have record of this myth, apollo was known to be a spiritual and ethical force at work in man's soul. he was named when men tried to speak of those experiences which wrought expiation and purification. he stood for milder law, for beneficent and benevolent social order, for art, for the songs of the sacred bard, the dirge of grief, the paean of victory, the games--all the gentler things of social culture and personal experience. in these and in many other ways did the myth of apollo express the human soul and act upon it. it was a religion--as every developed myth is--to be handled reverently. we might have chosen other examples quite as elaborate and as full of mystic significance--the myth of dionysus, or the more widespread and deeply devotional myth of demeter. art, too, concerned as it is with everything that promotes or reflects man's spirit, has uses for the elements of myth, and has its own way of handling them. on two of the four steps of myth art, especially literature, finds acceptable material. on the stage named second--the stage in which the influence or power becomes personified, takes on relations to other personified influences, and calls into being other divine persons, his children, his helpers and subordinates, takes his place in a society of divinities, and exercises his more or less specialized function in this society, and also in human life and activity--have the poets and romancers found many opportunities. adventures and romantic experiences of all sorts easily attached themselves to the person of some divinity, especially as the character of the personal divinities became more and more humanized by the accretion of such tales. and while we find echoes of myth in _märchen_ and romance, we quite as constantly find apotheosis of merely human romance and adventure in myth. among the literary peoples, poets and dramatists found it often desirable to use the foundation of this group of divine personalities as the starting-point for a performance purely artistic; it gave them the immense advantage of starting without explanation and preparation, since their audiences could be counted upon to know the divine personages and circumstances; and the further advantage of adding dignity and size to their inventions by accrediting them to superhuman agents. these literary additions, these variations upon the religious meanings, invented for artistic purposes, often gradually incorporated themselves into the myth, and by modern students are not carefully distinguished from the other, the religious and devotional elements. a comic adventure told of hermes may not have in it any more of myth than a similar story told of autolycus. literature finds much use for material of the mythical kind on what we have called the fourth step. to express and render concrete, impulses, influences, and powers that sway and dignify human conduct, and that form and ennoble human character, the literary artist gladly employs the persons of the great myths. all human experience has elements and influences coming into it from an apparently mystic sphere, that must either be described in abstract terms or embodied in concrete persons and symbols. the latter is ever the method of art. so we find everywhere in literature the use of the great symbols already constituted in myth, or the invention of new symbols for the purpose. homer would convey to us the sense of the presence that guided and guarded the wise and resourceful odysseus; so the stately athene, ages long the goddess "who giveth skill in fair works, and noble minds," comes and goes through the poem. hauptmann would convey to us in _the sunken bell_, some impression of the magic and the charm of that beauty which lies in the free soul and wild nature, so he invents rautendelein. but neither homer nor hauptmann is priest or devotee interpreting facts or conserving worship. they are artists picturing human life and introducing, each in its place, the various elements of human experience. it is in regard to this literary use of myth that there exists much confusion, and that most mistakes are made as to the educational use of myth. many persons who contend that "myths" can be given to children as literature call the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ "myths;" indeed, they are likely to call all legendary stories in which the supernatural element is large "myths;" and they call all romantic stories that have become attached to any divinity "myths." we should distinguish myth from saga, from legend, from merely fanciful symbolistic tales, from tales of human heroes. the homeric poems make much of the religious side of human nature, and the poet chose in order to give to his action and issue a superhuman dignity to set that action in the presence of the gods themselves. yea, in the climaxes of the titanic struggle the powers themselves take a hand, so deeply does the poet feel that everything noblest and most passionate in human nature is involved; and, despairing, as it were, of conveying to us in merely human terms the implications of the strife between the two kinds of ideals, he sets aphrodite over against athene, not merely trojan against greek. but the _iliad_ is, for all that, not myth nor a collection of myths, but the story of the wrath of achilles--a very human hero, who loved his friend. the story of baldur is myth--explaining and interpreting, personifying and glorifying, a superhuman influence and effect beyond the reach of human experience; the story of siegfried is a saga, a human experience, under whatever enlarged and idealized conditions, yet still a type-experience of the human being. the garden of eden is myth-interpretation and explanation of many, some the grimmest, facts of man's nature, and his relation to a supernatural power; the story of abraham is a saga--a typical history of human experience, a typical picture of human culture. the whole artistic purpose and effect of the hero-tale and the saga are different from those of myth; the center of interest is a human being; the emphasis is upon human life; the meaning is upon the surface. in true myth the purpose is not artistic, but religious; the emphasis is upon superhuman activities; the meaning is buried beneath symbols--the more beautiful the myth, the more difficult and complex the symbol. so one has almost to smile at the statement, commonly made that myth, implying all myth, is childlike, and should therefore be given to little children as literature, especially while they themselves are in the mythopoeic age--presumably from four to seven. there are so many fallacies in this statement that one pauses embarrassed at his many opportunities of attack. first as to the childlikeness of myth. there are, of course, undeveloped races that have a naïve and childish myth, but it is also so crude and unbeautiful that it would never commend itself to one seeking artistic material for children. the developed myths, those that have achieved the elaboration of beautiful episodes, are most unchildlike. they are far, far away from the crude guesses of the primitive mind. they have all been worked over, codified, filled with theological and symbolistic content by priests and poets. one can be very sure that no sensible teacher who has mastered the material, would attempt to teach the whole of any hebrew or greek or scandinavian myth as myth within the elementary period. if he takes one of the especially romantic or beautiful episodes out of the myth, he is obliged to thin it out to the comprehension of the children, and to mutilate it so as to make of it a mere tale. when one reads hawthorne's version of pandora and prometheus and realizes the mere babble, the flippant detail, under which he has covered up the grim titanic story of the yearnings and strivings of the human soul for salvation here and hereafter, the very deepest problems of temptation and sin, of rebellion and expiation, he must see clearly what is most likely to happen when a complex and mature myth is converted into a child's tale. to make a real test, leave the alien greek myth and try the same process with one that we have built into our own religious consciousness--the temptation and fall in the garden of eden; a story, which is, by the way, much more naïve in conception and detail than that of prometheus. we must conclude that such myths are not childlike, and that to make such a version of them as will appeal to the little child's attention and feeling gives but a shallow and distorted view of them. there should undoubtedly be a place in education for the study of myth as religion and as an influence in human culture; should it not be somewhere well within the adolescent period, when the symbols of the great myths attract and do not baffle the child, when their religious content finds a congenial lodging-place and a sympathetic interpretation in his own experiences? it would seem only fair to reserve the beautiful and reverential myths of the greeks, romans, and scandinavians for this period, rather than to use them in the age when there is little more to appeal to than the tendency, so short-lived and shallow-rooted in the modern child, to see personal agencies behind appearances. for this, confused with a degree of grammatical uncertainty of speech, is practically all that we can find under close analysis, of the mythopoeic faculty in little children brought up under modern conditions. there are still those, one discovers, who contend that myth should be given to children as literature, because later in life--when they come to read the _aeneid_ in high school, or _paradise lost_ in college, or _prometheus unbound_ or even macaulay's essays--they will come upon references to zeus, to the fall of troy, to the titans, to isis and osiris, and they ought to be able to call up from what they had as literature in the elementary school such information as would enable them to understand these allusions and fill out these references. luckily, the number of people who hold the fundamental theory of education adumbrated in this view is becoming so rapidly smaller that this chapter will, let us hope, be too late to reach them. the multiplication table is a tool; the mechanics of reading and writing are partially mere tools; but mythology, especially mythology substituted for literature, can in no sense be regarded or treated as a tool. occasionally one meets the statement that myth, and mythical episodes, are more imaginative than stories of human life, and should therefore be given to little children as literature. so far as the persons who hold this view can be pushed to definite terms, they mean either that the conditions of ordinary human life are completely abrogated in mythical stories, and that therefore they are more imaginative than stories of mere human experience could be; or that the details given by the imagination are arranged in some more unusual way--that there is less of judgment and order in the arrangement than in stories of men and their affairs. of course, we realize that the human mind cannot invent ultimate details independent of experience. it is in the number and arrangement of these details that originality inheres--that the varying quality or quantity of imagination lies. now, it is true that in mythical stories the images, the details, are likely to be more numerous, and to be arranged in a less orderly manner than in an art story; this is of the nature of myth. ruskin, in _the queen of the air_, makes so clear a statement of this principle that i shall borrow it for this chapter: a myth in its simplest definition is a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural. thus, if i tell you that hercules killed a water serpent in the lake of lerna, and if i mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. but if, by telling you this, i mean that hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth, only, as, if i left it in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had several heads, which revived as fast as they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot that trod upon them as they slept. and in proportion to the fulness of intended meaning i shall probably multiply and refine upon these improbabilities; or, suppose if, instead of desiring only to tell you that hercules purified a marsh, i wished you to understand [that he contended with envy and evil ambition], i might tell you that this serpent was formed by the goddess whose pride was in the trial of hercules; that its place of abode was by a palm tree; that for every head of it that was cut off, ten rose up with renewed life; and that the hero found at last he could not kill the creature at all by cutting its heads off or crushing them, but only by burning them down; and that the midmost of them could not be killed even in that way, but had to be buried alive. only in proportion as i mean more i shall appear more absurd in my statement. is it fair to conclude that, if there is any ground for the statement that myth is more imaginative than literature, it is either that it is extremely symbolistic, constantly substituting one thing for another, or that, not being art, it heaps up details profusely, unregulated by the ordering and constructive side of the imagination? in the one case, it would have small disciplinary value for the class; in the other, it would be hopelessly beyond their comprehension; and in either case it would not perform the characteristic service of literature. there is much more to be said by those who feel that they find in the mythic stories a large and vague atmosphere, a sort of cosmic stage where things bulk large and sound simple, a great resounding room where the children feel unconsciously the movement of large things. but this is a religious mood. it is precisely the response we should like to have when we tell our children the hebrew myth of the creation--an emotional reaction, vague but deep, to the dim and sublime images of the days--a response that constitutes itself forevermore a part of his religious experience. if we are willing that he should have a similar reaction upon the story of zeus and the titans, if we are willing that he should lay this down, too, among the foundations of his religious life, by all means tell it. but we can not quite fairly tell one to awaken a religious response, and the other an artistic one. this is all quite consistent with an utter repudiation of a hard and fast "faculty" education. there are, of course, borders where myth and literature inextricably intermingle, as there are certain effects of the teaching of mythical episodes which are not to be distinguished from those of the teaching of purely literary material. but the teacher should clear up his mind upon this point; telling a romantic adventure of a god is not teaching myth; telling a story of a hero in which the gods take a share is not teaching myth, any more than the telling of the story of the holy grail is teaching christianity; symbolistic stories whose setting happens to be greek or roman or scandinavian are not myth. it should not be difficult to handle for the children such stories as contain a large amount of religious element. to have them get out of the _odyssey_ the characteristic and desirable effect, it is necessary to give only a few words as to the offices of athene and poseidon in the action, and then put the emphasis where homer puts it--upon odysseus, his character and his experiences. it is no more necessary in reading the _odyssey_ to go into the myth of the divinities concerned, than it would be in teaching _hamlet_ to make an exhaustive excursus into the pneumatology of the ghost. now, there are a great many folk-tales that out of convention have taken on as a sort of afterthought, as it were, an explanatory character. this can be noticed in the charming zuñi folk-tales collected by cushing. often the _pourquoi_ idea is appended in the final paragraph, a belated bit of piety not at all inherent in the tale. then there are, of course, a great many fanciful _pourquoi_ tales, both folk and modern, whose purpose was never more than playful. these cannot be seriously regarded as myth, and must be estimated on their merits as stories. it is hard to be so tolerant with the modern imitations of mythical tales designed to render palatable and pretty facts in the life of the world about us. one cannot believe much in the dew-fairies and frost-fairies and flower-angels, speaking plants and conversing worms, whose mission in life is really a gentle species of university-extension lectures. such stories are not literature; neither are they good technical knowledge. is it not true, as we shall elsewhere have occasion to show, that, with our modern facilities for teaching the facts of nature, we can make them attractive and impressive rather by showing them as they are, than by attributing to them merely fanciful and often petty personalities and genii? of course, in very advanced scientific theory we are driven again to myth-making. one cannot speak of radio-activity except in terms of personality, nor of the final processes of biology without using terms implying purpose and choice. so does the wheel come full circle and all our lives we are mythopoeists. but myth is not literature. as has been intimated previously, it would seem that the time to teach myth as myth is much later--perhaps within the secondary period, when it can be examined as religion, or when the children have gained enough experience, and developed enough dramatic imagination, to take hold of it as a vital element in another culture. the place for the study of the great symbolistic stories, whose background happens to be another people's myth, such as king midas, or prometheus, or apollo with admetus, should be, in any event, as late as the seventh grade, by which time the children are able to look below the surface and begin to understand the types and symbols of art. chapter viii hero-tales and romances in the days before books, when a tale was a tale, they knew how to conserve interest and economize material. when a hero had gained some popular favor, had established his character, had drawn about him a circle of friends, and had just proved himself worthy of our love, he was not lightly cast aside for a new and unknown hero. he was given new conquests, new sorrows were heaped upon him, new minstrels arose to sing his fame, until there gathered about him and his group of friends many, many songs and tales. luckily, in many cases there came a great artist, bard or romancer, who gathered these scattered songs and tales together, gave them a greater or less coherence and something of unity, and so preserved them. some of these cycles of hero-tales are adapted for the delight and discipline of the elementary children. from the cosy and homely atmosphere of the _märchen_--the mother-and nurse-stories--they would pass naturally to the wider and bolder world of the epic tales. the spirit of these tales harmonizes easily with the general tone of their work. they are simple and bold in spirit, full of action, generous and noble in plan and idea; they conserve interest and attention by centering about a single person or a group; they are made up of separable adventures or incidents, which take shape, or with a little editing from the teacher may be made to take shape, as manageable and artistic wholes; it is easy to associate other bits of literature with them, because, in the first place, the tales themselves reflect aspects of life and nature that have appealed to artists in all ages, and because they have themselves inspired many more modern artists. it is therefore easy to constitute one of these cycles the center of the work in literature for some long period--in some cases for a whole year--joining to it such harmonious or contrasted bits of literature as the class may seem to need. some consideration of the best known and most available of the hero-tales may help in the matter of choosing. the _iliad_ is not available without a great deal of editing and rearranging for such use in class. there are several reasons for this, the first being its want of an easily grasped unity. doubtless the mature and experienced reader finds the essential unity of the _iliad_ more satisfying and artistic than that which comes of a more compact and complete plot. but the children cannot easily see that the history of achilles' wrath and love is a complete thing. to them the action seems to be suspended, the events left without issue, the poem unprovided with a legitimate ending. the organization and the organizing principle are obscure to children, since achilles' emotional history cannot easily be made clear or interesting to them. homer's splendid art in glorifying hector and dignifying the trojan cause as a means of reinforcing achilles' triumph, and deepening the sense of the greek victory, is likely to be lost on the children, while it leaves them with a hopelessly divided sympathy. helen, to a mature mind so full of interest ethical and artistic, is beyond the comprehension of the children as anything more than a lay figure. the vast enrichment of epic detail that has gathered into the _iliad_, constituting it for the grown-up lover of all the arts an inexhaustible mine of archaic, artistic, and psychic wealth, has, except in a few picturesque details, which the teacher must make special effort to bring before them, no charm for the children, seeming to them to cumber and delay the action. so the _iliad_ as it stands is not serviceable for the grades in literature. but, as we all know, the poems that form the _iliad_ were songs out of a much larger cycle. if one desires to use sections of the _iliad_, then, it is comparatively easy to collect out of all the material a complete and unified form of the legend of the siege and downfall of troy--using the homeric episodes when it is possible. from sources other than the _iliad_ must be gathered the causes of the war, the education of achilles, the summons of odysseus, the sacrifice of iphegenia, the death of achilles, the building of the wooden horse, and the fall of troy. into this can be inserted in their places the parts selected from the _iliad_--perhaps the quarrel in the assembly from the second book; the deeds of diomedes, from the fifth and sixth; the visit of hector within the city and his farewell to andromache, from the sixth; the trojan triumph, in the seventh; the vengeance upon dolon, in the tenth; the main incidents of the battle among the ships; the deeds and death of patroclus; achilles' arming and his appearance in the fight; the main incidents of the funeral of patroclus; the visit of priam to achilles. these should be arranged in a sort of "say and sing" narrative, the events previous to the action of the _iliad_, and those subsequent to it, to be told in prose narrative; those taken from the _iliad_ itself to be read or recited in some poetical form, linked together, of course, by a running and rapid narrative. only a verse translation--or, if a prose translation, one much more picturesque and eloquent than any we have yet had--will at all represent the nobility of the _iliad_. bryant's translation is the best we now have, and it is too formal and difficult to be understood by the children to whom one desires to give the hero-tales. one can easily see that an arrangement of the _iliad_ made under all these conditions would not finally convey to the children many of the best things we want to give them in their literature. the case is quite different with the _odyssey_. it is the child's own cycle, full of the interests and elements that delight him while they cultivate him. the adventures are linked together by the central hero, and by the design of getting him home; the cycle, therefore, presents a clear unity, and a unity of the kind that takes hold upon the children. the adventures themselves organize easily into smaller separable wholes. they are always interesting, offering us the varieties of the grotesque, the humorous, the sensational, the horrible, the beautiful, the sublime; and they are practically all on the imaginative level of the children in the classes to which they are otherwise adapted. the details are charming and adapted to interest the children, with very little effort on the part of the teacher. it is quite unnecessary to point out how the occupations and employments, the beautiful buildings and objects--plates, cups, clasps--the raft, the palace and garden of alcinoous, the loom of penelope, the lustrous woven robes, the cottage of the good eumaeus, the noble swineherd, build up a world full of charm, not only for the grown-up reader, but for children if they are being properly taught. there is throughout the poem what pater called the atmosphere of refined craftsmanship, and all the occupations and tasks of men here appear surrounded by the entrancing halo of art. odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a hero to the child and the childlike mind. he is active and ever-ready; strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for the effective undoing of his foes. inevitably in any class of modern children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. it is not likely that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take any vital interest in the discussion. for, as i have said elsewhere, subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is in the main just, outwits or removes hostile forces, is acceptable. for the older children, who are somewhat "instructed," and who on the average will have acquired sufficient dramatic sympathy to apprehend an alien standard, a few words as to the greek notions of truthfulness, together with a few explanations as to the privileges allowed to an adventurer hard beset by trickery and stupidity, will generally clear the ground; these explanations should take the emphasis from this aspect of odysseus' character and leave the children free to place it where it belongs. if the _odyssey_ were used with children older than ten, their questions as to odysseus' truthfulness might afford a good occasion for warning them to expect some human imperfections in a hero with whom in most respects they are in complete sympathy. this point of view, acquired somewhat early, saves one many shocks and misconceptions in later reading. it should not be necessary to say that the discussion of odysseus should not amount to "character-study," and should not drift anywhere near hair-splitting moral discriminations. all teachers will agree that it is better to start the _odyssey_ with the fifth book--the experience of odysseus himself--leaving the _telemachiad_ unread, or to be read later. into his few introductory stories the teacher should fit some account of the iniquities of the suitors and the fact of the journey of telemachus--this to pave the way for the delightful story of his return. for our generation--and, one is tempted to believe, for several generations to come--professor palmer's prose translation of the _odyssey_ is the ideal reading version. for the sake of the slight heightening of style, the class might occasionally hear recited a passage in bryant's verse translation. but the poetical, musical, faintly archaic prose of professor palmer has caught perfectly the gentle spiritual tone of the _odyssey_. i have known a class of nine-ten-year children conducted through the _odyssey_ making a side interest of the _realien_, the pottery and weaving, and metal working. such hand-work was a part of their school tasks, and there were collections of pottery and fabrics which they could be taken to see. the experience seemed to co-operate with their own hand-work to develop in them some of that artistic love of beautiful things--things costly, but not expensive--that pervades the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_; and they were distinctly helped on toward that attitude we desire for every child, that of "reverence for the life of man upon the earth." the _odyssey_ will be used, however, in schools where there is no handwork and no chance of seeing collections of suitable objects. pictures are of some service in getting the image of objects--colored prints of greek pottery and costume. engelmann and anderson's _atlas of the homeric poems_ seems to help and interest the children, though there is constant danger that the archaic forms will seem merely ludicrous to many of them. the teacher may correct this by explaining them as decoration and as traditional figures. but we should not depend much upon black-and-white print to help young children to visualize objects and scenes in which color and motion are all-important. now, what follows must be taken as suggestive, and not as a pat formula: you can enrich your central bit of literature by other literature in one of two ways--by reinforcing the impression derived from the main story, or counteracting it and every long story or cycle of stories, particularly the heroic cycles, has its characteristic atmosphere that needs both to be reinforced and to be counteracted. it is true, too, that practically all the stories we use for the elementary children are translations or derived versions of some sort, and do not therefore exhibit the smaller beauties of literary form. it is therefore well to join with them poems or other bits of literature which emphasize the matter of inevitableness of form. by way of enlarging and varying the atmosphere of the _odyssey_, we should not add other greek things, because we are not trying to teach our class about greek civilization, nor to initiate them into the greek spirit, still less to give them instruction in greek legend and mythology. we should rather read them ballads and lyrics which harmonize with the human spirit of the _odyssey_, or which supply something which the _odyssey_ fails to give. for example, since there is so much of the sea in the story, it would be a good moment to teach the children some of the fine things in english verse about the water. they will certainly notice the characteristic greek dread and terror of the sea--"the unvintaged, unpastured, homeless brine." it would be well to balance this in their minds by some of those verses which reflect the english mastery of the sea and the romance of modern sea-going--some of kipling's sea-ballads, for example, or such simple things as barry cornwall's "the sea, the sea, the open sea." we should not fail to build upon another dominant note in the _odyssey_ much that we should like the children to have--the note of home and home-coming, the hearth-stone, and the sheltering roof. of the exciting adventure and the joy of physical contest they will get enough from the stories themselves. it is not necessary to say again that the judgments given here as to the actual practical choice, are always to be taken as suggestions, not as hard and fast directions. every teacher may have, and should have, his own idea, both as to how his central bit of literature should be supplemented, and as to whether or not it needs supplementing. later i shall give the titles of certain of these minor things--still by way of suggestion; ballads and lyrics that have been found to harmonize with the _odyssey_ either as enforcement or addition. most elementary schools have found now the value of the _robin hood_ legend. the bluff, open qualities, the effective activities, the wholesome objectivity of these activities, the breezy atmosphere with which the stories surround themselves, make them acceptable in many aspects. teachers are saved most of the labor of making their own digest of the robin hood material by howard pyle's _robin hood_. in this he has drawn together the whole legend, using not only the english ballads, but scott and peacock, and whatever scattered hints and details he could gather from what must have been a pretty exhaustive reading of english romantic literature. everywhere there are charming reminiscences of chaucer, of spenser, of shakespeare; echoes of ballad and song and romance; making, on the whole, a notable introduction to literature and the literary method. one quickly finds that it is much too literary in places for younger children and has to be simplified; here and there are long idyllic descriptions that the fifth grade, eager for the story, will not brook; occasionally a page of false sentimentality that the teacher with a true ear will infallibly detect and skip. but these minor things can be forgiven in view of the sheer energy, the marvelous objectivity, the epic colorlessness, of the book as a whole. readings from the ballads themselves should be interspersed, read by the teacher to the class. these readings should again be arranged in the _cont-fable_ fashion, turning into suitable form the less interesting passages, and then reading in their original verse form the dramatic and picturesque parts. it need not be said that much better poems may be found than those which pyle has composed for his _robin hood_. timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless, atmosphere. they say that the burden of approval is placed upon an outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general hooliganism. the good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because they never see these results. it needs but a word to transfer the emphasis from robin hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his men. it is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we desire to accomplish. one hastens to acknowledge, however, that the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote, which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this cycle. very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things. with the _odyssey_ we should choose some things to reinforce the love of home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the _robin hood_, and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached condition. some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be enlarged and enriched--as loyalty and devotion to a leader. there is a fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave of their enthusiasm for robin hood, other and nobler ideals of the leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. this properly belongs to a much later period--to what it is not mere jargon to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to those powers that come of introspection. the cycles of stories of king arthur unquestionably contain much that should contribute to the pleasure and wholesome culture of the elementary child. epic activity, bold and generous deeds tempered by gentleness and reverence--this is the atmosphere of the best of the arthur stories, and it is precisely the atmosphere into which one longs to lead the older children of the elementary school. but these good and suitable arthur stories are so tied up with others entirely unsuitable that the choosing and arranging of them becomes the task of the expert psychologist and critic. when one chooses stories out of this legend, he must do with his material--his malory, his chrétien, his _mabinogion_, his tennyson--as these collectors and artists did with theirs: regard it as the stuff of human nature and life, a storehouse of treasures out of which he may draw according to his pleasure or his need. in this case it is the safe pleasure and the artistic needs of his children that will dictate his choice. and he must know thoroughly well his stories and his children; for the pitfalls are many--quite as many in chrétien de troyes and malory as in tennyson. the first of the pitfalls to be avoided is that fantastic feudal gallantry which chrétien and malory substituted for the forthright chivalric business and earnestness of the older legendary stories. in the _song of roland_ one fights for reasons of patriotism or religion; in the arthur romances, and others of their type, one fights for his lady's sake. in the elementary grades the children are still undifferentiated human beings, and should be kept so. to thrust upon them suggestions of "ladies" to be "won" and to be "served" is to usher them into an unknown world, an undemocratic and unbrotherly world from which we should like to keep them, especially the girls, as long as possible. while it is not easy to leave out this element in choosing material from these cycles, it is possible to treat it lightly, since there is in the same material a sufficiency of lions to be hunted, giants to be overcome, and hostile paynims to be exterminated. everyone who has ever read much with children knows that to normal children before their thirteenth year the psychology and _modus operandi_ of love and love-making, innocent or guilty, are so alien as to pass harmlessly by them as a mere bit of the machinery of a story, when these notions do constitute such a bit of machinery in a story otherwise suitable. but it is a mistake to choose matter which obliges us to linger with the little people over these experiences or to emphasize them. he who would retell the arthur stories must be wary here, so difficult is it to put together any series of the adventures that will at all represent the material, and constitute a whole, without using the scarlet thread of guilty passion, or substituting for it something "nice" but wishy-washy. we have only to compare the grim justice of malory's modred with tennyson's sentimental and unconvincing handling of his character and function. when malory wove into the arthur cycle the legend of the holy grail, he introduced an element very hard to handle for children--that religious mysticism, not to say fanaticism, which tennyson chose to set as the pivotal motive of the downfall of the table round. tennyson, writing for mature modern readers a deeply symbolistic poem, and presenting a whole cycle, could, stroke by stroke, build up the impression of this burning zeal, this hypnotic trance of enthusiasm, that led men away after wandering fires, forgetting labor and duty. but simplified to fit the comprehension of the wholesome twelve-year-old it is likely to appear a vague and mistaken piety, producing a practical effect quite out of proportion to its importance. to the modern teacher, with the witchery of the tennysonian music in his blood, it is all but impossible to keep out of prominence that symbolism which lay obvious upon the surface, even in the _morte d'arthur_, but which tennyson heightened into an almost oppressive system of sophisticated and parochial doctrine. an occasional symbolistic nut to crack is not a bad thing for the older children of the grades. but would it not be a mistake to immerse them in a great system of symbolism? to the younger children the sacred outside appearance, the entrancing _schein_, of things is best, and symbolistic art only baffles them or unduly forces their powers. the spirit of dilettante adventure which pervades the mediaeval romances gives them a tone entirely different from that of the epics. in these latter the activities attach themselves to deeds that have to be done, to misfortunes that the hero would willingly have avoided. some of these sought-out adventures have crept insidiously into howard pyle's _robin hood_; but they are entirely foreign to the spirit of the original epos. the idea of "worshipfully winning worship," of seeking adventure for mere adventure's sake, or for the mere display of one's own powers, or for the sake of getting trained, is a corrupting one in our society, and should not be implanted in our children's consciousness. like the old epic heroes, what we have to do we will do--often boldly; but, like the old epic heroes, we will do it because it needs to be done. we can get together a series of stories from the arthur romance that will touch but lightly the exaggerated, false devotion to ladies; that will leave out of sight the guilty passion which lies at the center of malory's poem and of most of the other literary versions; that will put into a minor place the mystical religious element that lingers about the holy grail side of the romance; that will make little of the symbolism, ignore the dilettante and merely amateur adventure, handling the heroic rather than the romantic deeds--that will do all these things and still be a romance of king arthur. he who would make such a version must choose out from malory or _the mabinogion_, material that belongs in such a series. or he may find his material more sifted for him in lanier's _the boy's king arthur_, and _knightly legends of wales_. let him make much of arthur, simple of nature, guileless and strong, looking to conquest and the good of his people rather than to his own "worship" or to his own love-affairs; let him by no means neglect merlin, the most permanently interesting figure; he is odysseus among the greeks, the sacred bard among the warriors, tusitala in samoa, the subtle one, always so appealing and so satisfying to a child's imagination--the embodiment of that intellectual dominance which, be it wisdom or magic, always stands beside epic achievement in the child's estimation. and having got it together, he may reassure himself, as regards his epos of king arthur, that there is no one arthur; that the whole legend is a mine out of which every student may draw a treasure; or, to change the figure, a great, beautiful field in which many people may gather grain according to their need and their taste. much later when, as growing youth, they are waking up to certain mature social problems, the children will be ready for the style and matter of tennyson's _idylls_. but they will not get the characteristic value of the legend till, as mature and experienced readers of books and livers of life, they come back to malory and chrétien de troyes. many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the arthur stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the fourth or fifth grade, and read in the _idylls of the king_ in the seventh and eighth. suggestions for literature to accompany them will be found in a later chapter. anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said about the siegfried legend. in the huge accumulation of sagas, romances, and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of material--much of it totally unsuited for children. so far as i have been able to find, there has not yet been made--certainly not in english--a collection of the stories good in itself and good for children. the teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems well to study the siegfried stories within the grades. the collection of the stories that makes up the _niebelungen lied_ is particularly poor in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and tediously bloody in the heroic parts. among the mass of stories given by morris and magnussen in the _völsunga saga_, and in morris' _sigurd the volsung_, one may find material for making his own epos of siegfried, simple, heroic, triumphant--the siegfried who killed fafnir, escaped the snares of regin, got the nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire and freed brunhild. you may be sure some old saga-singer closed the story here and so may we. this leaves for a much later day in the child's life the tragic siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be planted in a child's consciousness. as we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise it. occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from _the cid_, from the _song of roland_, from the heroic sagas of iceland, from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long, nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged study. in the later years of this period certain classes and certain schools may find it well to read some of the literary stories of adventure, such as _ivanhoe_, or _treasure island_, or _the last of the mohicans_. in the really great stories of adventure we find many of the things we know to be good for the children--the "large room," the open atmosphere, forest, sea, prairie, all the most disastrous chances of war and of travel, noble deeds and generous character. every parent and teacher recognizes the danger which lies in the child's having too much even of good story of adventure. and this sort of story is the peculiar field of the cheap story-teller, in whose work the weaknesses and dangers of the species especially abound. since the "out-put" of such stories is enormous, and since the children's access to them, in communities where they can buy books, or have the use of a public library, is practically unlimited, all teachers and parents should know the marks of the undesirable story of adventure, and be able to guard against it. the weakness and dangers of such a story are these: . the details are exaggerated until the event is too striking and too highly flavored, so as to corrupt the taste and create an appetite that continues to demand gross satisfaction. . there are likely to be too many sensations. the inartistic story of adventure does not work up its incidents with an accumulation of details and an effect of the passage of time that gives it verisimilitude, but rushes forward with a crude and ill-digested happening on every five pages. it is hard to believe that any artistic impression is made upon children whose minds are excited and jaded by such books. they are a mere indulgence. . in all but the best adventure the strain of suspense and surprise is more than the children should be asked to endure. too many experiences of long tension and final hair-breadth escape weaken a child's credence and harden his emotions so as to ruin his power of responding to such appeals. the devices of suspense and surprise are employed, to be sure, by the masters, but generally in due amount; while they are invariably overworked by the cheap writer of adventure. . the facts of life and history are distorted and discolored. this is the condemnation of such books as the henty books. they profess to attach themselves to historical events or periods, while as a matter of fact, they have nothing of the event or the period in them, except a few names and reflections of the most obvious aspects of the mere surface facts. as reflection of a period, or as illumination of an event in it, they are worse than useless--they are absurdly misleading. only a genius, or a student who has immersed himself in the matter, can produce a story whose psychology, sociology, and archaeology will throw real light upon a bygone age or event. there are such stories, but they are not for elementary children; or, if they are, only as adventure, not as history. no one who chooses books for children should be misled by these cheap manufactured stories which claim as their reason for being that they have a historical background. after all, it is scott who has given us the best big stories of adventure. _ivanhoe_, _quentin durward_, _anne of geierstein_, _guy mannering_, with the proper condensations and adaptations, are of the best. cooper, in certain of the leatherstocking novels, creates the atmosphere of really great adventure. stevenson knew the art of writing a "rattling good story," which yet keeps that balance of judgment and sense of proportion, that faithfulness to the truth (not the fact) of experience, which prevent its ever degenerating into sensationalism. quiller-couch and joseph conrad are two more modern writers who have achieved in many cases the level of great stories of adventure. it is not probable that children who are given the older epics and romances in school will have time for these more modern romances of adventure in the class. but whoever guides their out-of-school reading, be it parent or teacher, should have in mind these few simple grounds of choice. chapter ix realistic stories in the material we use for children, while it is not profitable to draw any close distinctions between romantic and realistic stories, we can not fail to distinguish in general between the hero-tale or the folk _märchen_, where we must expect preternatural powers and marvelous events, and the story which purports to deal with real people, and with experiences which, however rare, are still possible or probable. and these stories of real people and actual experiences have their value for the children--their own value, first of all, as making a distinct contribution to the child's education, and another value as tending to counteract and balance the effects of the thoroughgoing romances. no one questions the fact that there are ill effects from too much romance and too many marvels. a child's vision of the world does become distorted if it is too often or too long organized upon a plan dominated by the wonderful or the fantastic; his sense of fact dulled, if his imagination is called upon to appreciate and to produce prevailingly the unusual combinations; his taste vitiated, if he is supplied too abundantly with those striking and super-emotional incidents which fill the romances. all these dangers are counteracted in part by the child's fact-studies, and by his experiences in actual life. but this is not sufficient; it is artistically due him that the antidote should have the same kind of charm as the original poison. it is well, too, to bear in mind that even the small children should be appealed to on several sides, and that their taste should be made as catholic as possible. one is sorry to find a child of eight or ten who likes only fairy-tales, or war-stories, or detective stories; he should like all stories. but we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of verisimilitude. of course, we should require of these stories good form and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we expect from any good literature. in addition, we may expect them to perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic services. first, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of art. those stories which use people and circumstances that we can match in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life; that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. this nimbus of art casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. a group of children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable, found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. the same children, having learned lowell's phrase of the dandelion's "dusty gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to render the burnished gold of the butter-cups. the same class on a picnic labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about uneeda biscuits and ginger-ale, to match the persian's "a jug of wine, a loaf of bread." they were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not go--that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo. the obverse and counterpart of this glow caught by the actual world from art is the vital interest that surrounds a person, or an object, or a sentiment which we come upon in a poem or a story, and which we recognize as corresponding to something in our own experience--a recognition all the more satisfying if the correspondence be that of actual identity. every teacher of younger children recalls at once the tingling interest they feel in practically every story they are told, as some incident or detail parallels or suggests something they have known--"my father has seen a bear;" "once i found an eagle's feather;" "there are daffodils in my grandmother's garden." a little girl of ten had been given a very simple arrangement of a melody from beethoven's _fifth symphony_ to play on the piano. soon after she had learned it, she was taken to hear the symphony. when her melody came dropping in from the flutes and violins--birds and brooks and whispering leaves--she threw up at her friend a flash of radiant surprise and delight. her whole soul stirred to see here--in this stately place, with the great orchestra, in the noble assemblage of glorious concords--her friend, her little song. for days she played it over many times every day, with the greatest tenderness of expression. the wise teacher sees in this eager recognition and identification one of the most desirable results of literary experience, and utilizes it as the most precious of educational opportunities, since this mood of delighted recognition is with the younger children also the mood of creation, and with the older children the most useful and practical clue to the finding of their own literary material. it is in this kind of story--those that reflect the events of actual life and are concerned with ordinary people--that we are able to introduce our children in art to their contemporaries and coevals. it means much for a child's consciousness that he should develop a quick and dramatic sympathy with lives other than his own, and yet like his own--with the experiences and characters of other children, other folks' ways of living. this sympathy is among the literary products, since it is best developed and fostered by literature; this because it is literature only, that handles its material in that concrete and emotional way which produces the impression of actual reality and serves as a substitute for it. teach the little children stevenson's little indian, sioux or crow, little frosty eskimo, little turk or japanese, and teach it with the natural implications that will occur to any teacher of expedients, and you will have taught them a certain attitude of confidential understanding toward their brown brothers (in spite of the decidedly chauvinistic character of this masterpiece) that they would not have got out of a year of social history. the difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching in school are serious. they are most likely to be thin in material, flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a class of acute and questioning children. it is best not to choose any long book of this sort. for the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as may be found in laura richards' _five minute stories_, or such as any teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may find a perfect specimen in one of the children's periodicals, and there is now a wealth of such things in verse. we must be wary of those books about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to adults. such are pater's _the child in the house_, and kenneth graham's _the golden age_. part of _a child's garden of verses_ is of this kind. of this sort, too, is the pretty little _emmy lou_, an interpretation of a child's consciousness, not a children's story. the general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a chapter of miscellanies farther on. it is not possible to make any long book about children the center of a class's work. such material is best used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. it is true of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material not made especially for children, but which appeals to children, however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature. among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most serviceable. like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally they were not made for children. they are those comic and realistic tales which may originally have been coarse, but which have been refined by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work--they are simple, genuine, homely art. such are _kluge else_, _hans in luck_, _great claus and little claus_, _the three sillies_ and all the delightful company of noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs. of course, the great classic of the realistic method suited for children is _robinson crusoe_. from the days of rousseau who designated it as the one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have appreciated its value. indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely associated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of nursery classic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a profoundly philosophical culture-document--an epoch-making piece of art. fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a matter of leaving out the reflective passages, and of translating into modern english the very few phrases and turns of expression now obsolete. one would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose to mere babble--to words of one syllable, or any other form that destroys the flavor of defoe's convincing style. it is easy to arrange the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle--a single experience constituting a portion which may be treated as a complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction of the pots, the saving of the seed. _robinson crusoe_ is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing, or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists. the art and the charm of _robinson crusoe_, and the secret of its literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism--a realism not so much of material as of method--to hold and convince us. a part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm, judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of crusoe's successes. oh, it is a great and convincing book! how great and how convincing one may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "robinsons," taking their inspiration from defoe's book, that really survives--the _swiss family robinson_, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance; yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. that a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of interest, which is also for children the essential interest of _robinson crusoe_--the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat and bread--is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling. the exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of _robinson crusoe_ would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the experiences of voyager and colonist. such would be bret harte's _columbus_, mrs. hemans' _the landing of the pilgrim fathers_, marvell's _bermudas_ (with a few difficult lines omitted). longfellow's _jasper becerra_, the twenty-third psalm, and several chapters from _treasure island_. every teacher could add other titles. the older children--those of the seventh and eighth grades--may profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience, a classic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an almost purely intellectual problem. it is true that the air of intellectual acumen that pervades most of these stories is specious, and that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of reasoning. but it takes an older and more expert person to see this for himself. the teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child's mind with very cheap problems. but if he choose a good story of this kind for reading with his class, he may help to set their minds going in that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a reasoned and inevitable progress of events. properly channeled, this is a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the literary points of view. after all, the best detective story in english is poe's _the gold bug_. there is, of course, that element in _treasure island_, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of _the gold bug_. it is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning _don quixote_. that triumphant book is assuredly a masterpiece of the realistic method. it came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. but it cannot be said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can be said to need it. if the grade has had the king arthur stories of malory or tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they can very certainly be said to need _don quixote_--always, of course, shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which process--such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its unity--it suffers less than any other story in the world. we should be quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of this peculiar kind of realism--that which constitutes itself a satire and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. nothing is more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit, when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a mass. but the peculiar vitality and richness of _don quixote_ lifts it far above the level of parody, constituting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself. however, the whole question must be left open. it may be that not until he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar suffering for _don quixote_, or capable of appreciating it. among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a wisely chosen essay. of course, they are not ready for the indirect and allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay. but there are essays of lamb's, a very few of steele's, some of sidney smith's, some of the more literary of burroughs' nature-studies, bits of oliver wendell holmes and charles dudley warner, that are ideal for them. shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in content to justify long class study? however, certain distinctive and desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the method of realistic detail. in the earliest years these may be secured by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children--indeed, of any modern material, provided it be simple enough--and by the teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life--human life or nature. in the third or fourth grade _robinson crusoe_ forms a desirable basis for the year's work. it should always be accompanied by shorter bits of a more romantic and heroic type. later in the elementary period--say in the sixth or seventh grade--the reasonable and practical element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective kind--a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. and in the seventh and eighth grade these same purposes--that of exhibiting to the children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure--may be served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested. chapter x nature and animal stories in a discussion of these stories we should again take to ourselves the warning that we must guard constantly and carefully against too narrow a view of literature. the reckless lack of knowledge and experience that sweeps into the category of literature everything expressed in words is so irritating to a careful student that he is always in danger of allowing his irritation to help carry him to the other extreme--that of an uncatholic exclusiveness. we must, however, be aware of the fact that other kinds of writing, entirely technical and special in their simpler varieties, are constantly approaching the borders of literature, as they become more and more humanized, draw about them more and more of emotional association, and take on more of the graces of the arts of writing. we must be aware of this, and we must be, as it were, constantly on the lookout for a possible new arrival among the kinds of literature, and be prepared to give it hospitality; and we must acknowledge that some of the results which we desire to accomplish through genuine literature are accomplished through those things that have only some of the characteristics of literature. but still, for the sake of the good pedagogical and critical conscience, and for the sake of keeping the fundamental distinctions as clear as possible, the teacher needs to know precisely what he is doing when he is using this material. he must decide, in the very earliest years of a child's education, whether he is teaching facts and theories, or presenting art, in his story. the custom of using animals and plants to represent human beings and to express human meanings is as old as folk-art itself. quite as old, too, is the revelation that the creatures have individualities and personalities of their own to be dramatically and sympathetically set forth in terms of human psychology, in default of a truer one. the mind of man goeth not back to the time when the fox, the cock, and the ass--reynard, chanticleer, and brunel--the rabbit, the eagle, the oak, and the vine, were not well-defined characters, well provided with affairs. but this early folk treatment of the creatures was distinctly art, occasionally morals, but not science. it did not aim to teach the facts as to the structure and habits of the creatures as life-forms. it interpreted human life through them or them by means of human terms. precisely here we must begin our discrimination between real literature and "nature-stories." the longing to pass down to the infant mind the results of scientific discovery has produced in our generation (perhaps it was really produced in the generation preceding ours) an enormous crop of most anomalous growths in this field of nature-stories. a favorite method of teaching a child the facts about any object or process in nature has been to translate it into a story of human affairs, or draw it up as a picture of a human situation, involving naturally and inevitably, a multitude of extraneous or misleading details. for example, we would teach a child about the distribution of the dandelion plant. so we construct the "story of the dandelion seed." now, there undoubtedly is a _story_ of the dandelion seed. incident follows incident, stage follows stage, from bloom to bloom again--every step beautiful and interesting in itself, and to be completely trusted to make its own appeal, just displayed for itself. but some people doubt this. they have lost, or have never acquired, that faith in nature and her processes which trusts to this appeal; and then they long--and this is quite natural--to enlist in aid of their fact-studies the charm and the emotion that lies in literature. so they endow the dandelion seed with a papa and a mama--a jovial suburbanite of a papa, and a fussy, sentimentalizing mama--with a cradle, with a vocabulary, with a system of morals (there are even "naughty" dandelion seeds), and with many feelings. they tell about his "home," his infancy, his training, his departure, his settling in a new home--all the while with the intention of teaching their infants the facts, but all the while covering them up under a trivial and unnecessary myth. in the end the product is scorned by science for its overlay of misleading detail, and rejected by art for the obnoxious intrusion of work-a-day and professional fact. now, let who will believe that such stories and verses are a legitimate way of conveying or of illuminating scientific fact; but let him not suppose that they are literature. the case is different when the teacher of fact happens to find in art, in real literature, some picture or detail with which to emotionalize and beautify his fact. it does sometimes happen that the poem, the folk-tale, the fable, has set in some charming human light certain aspects of the object which the children are studying. they are entitled to these to help them to see their object or event in the round. it is true, of course, that no piece of literature that handles for its purposes natural objects can afford to be flagrantly inaccurate. we all know how neatly john burroughs punctured longfellow's bit of pathos, "there are no birds in last year's nests," by proving that many species of birds devote themselves to securing and occupying last year's nests. but in the main it is truth rather than fact that literature gives us--truth, or fact colored and interpreted by personal association and emotion; we must not ask colorless fact of her, and it is the most unprofitable quibbling to demand of her scientific exactness, which is always prosaic. on the other hand, there is no place in nature-study for the imagination of invention, nor for any of those striking and dramatic effects arranged and calculated, secured by manipulation and choice of material--effects which are the very native method of literature. but writing about animals and objects in nature may become literature when, losing sight of the need of teaching fact, of giving professional instruction, it presents them as personalities, when it humanizes them, either by attributing to them human qualities and feelings, or by surrounding them with an atmosphere of human emotion and experience; it may become good literature when it does these things well; the chances are all against its becoming great literature at all. if the nature-story making use of literary devices, but designed to teach scientific fact, is anomalous, the case is no better, artistically or educationally, when the story of an animal is made the propaganda of the humane society, or of the anti-vivisectionists, or of any other believers, no matter how just and important may be their belief or doctrine. i have known a child whose outlook was prejudiced, and whose mental repose most seriously disturbed, by an over-earnest and over-colored story of the sufferings of a deserving and phenomenally sensitive cab-horse; and this morbid sense of suffering was the result of reading a book whose style was commonplace, whose structure was chaotic, whose sentiment was melodramatic, and whose psychology was guesswork--which did not yield, in a word, a single one of the desirable fruits of literature. we must devise some way to preserve and to deepen in our little people that humorous, loving sympathy with our furry and hairy brothers, more wholesome and natural than stories of suicidal ponies, revolutionary stallions, persecuted partridges, and heart-broken mastiffs. better than any library of books about them is the friendship of one dog or horse, or the care of any, the humblest, pet. and at least we may remind ourselves that we do not have to accomplish the awakening of that or any other sympathy at the cost of teaching as literature stories undesirable and inartistic. the oldest of beast-tales available for occidental children is the story of reynard the fox. we all know how there grew up about the original core of the story a vast accretion of material, which became ever more and more satirical and abstract, until finally the original folk-cycle was buried under it. of course, in the later forms the tales are most unchildlike. but it is not so difficult to extract from the cycle the original simpler one--or at least to get together a cycle which has the simplicity, the sincerity, and the objectivity of genuine folk-art. the children love the tales, and get so much out of them that it is a pity for any child to miss them completely; though i should never advise that many of the tales be read to them continuously. to do this would be to immerse them in an atmosphere of trickery. it is better to keep the story lying by, and to read them an episode now and then in the intervals of something more serious. many people will question the moral effect of stories in which the rascal uniformly triumphs, as in _reynard_. but i have observed, among the children with whom i have read it, that they are never in sympathy with reynard, and are never pleased with his triumphs. this is in striking, and in some respects puzzling, contrast with the fact that the triumphs and successes of bre'r rabbit in _uncle remus_ always delight the children. the tales that joel chandler harris has assembled in this collection constitute a most charming and usable beast-epic. the universal sympathy with this hero may be encouraged and enjoyed without misgiving, because bre'r rabbit succeeds by subtlety, where reynard succeeds by knavery. bre'r rabbit's triumphs are those of sheer intellect, as truly as are those of odysseus, while reynard's are those of low and cruel cunning. it is impossible to exaggerate the access of charm and interest that invest the _uncle remus_ stories because of uncle remus himself. he is the genuine folk story-teller, full of faith and sincerity, yet steeped in humor, and gifted with the sense of essential reality; add to this that he is a gentle soul, a devoted lover of childhood, with a never-failing sense of the reverence due the child. while to those who know the negro dialect the stories lose much by translation, still they are good enough to bear even this test, and such translation is necessary for some groups of children. like the reynard tales, those of bre'r rabbit are best inserted here and there throughout the year and not read in a mass. the fables--all those oriental and classic ones that are called aesop's, as well as many of la fontaine's--are, from the literary point of view the best of the animal stories. leave quite out of view their moralistic and figurative meanings, and most of them are sympathetic and dramatic presentations of the animals themselves, with those wider human implications that make an anecdote about an animal literature rather than science. the family or the schoolroom that can possess a copy of boutet de monvel's _la fontaine_ has in the pictures the most charming and penetrating criticism and interpretation of the fables themselves, of the animals who appear in them, and of the motives and experiences that lie behind them. scattered throughout the folk-tales and among the fairy-stories that we know best are some fascinating animal stories. the folk-mind is always impressed in an imaginative way with the relation between man and the animals--not always a loving or sympathetic relation. they feel, what the modern writing humanitarian seems to have determined to ignore, that deep, psychic, inscrutable animosity, be it instinct or race-memory or whatever it may be, that has always existed between man and the beasts; though there are among practically all the folk whose tales we have collected, stories of "grateful beasts," of friendly and serviceable animals. then there are such classics as _the little red hen_, _henny-penny_, _the three billy-goats_, and _the musicians of bremen_, whose perfection of art as stories and as presentations of life is beyond criticism. the native stories of many of the north american indian tribes have a charming way of presenting the animals. unfortunately, most of our indian folk-lore was collected and reduced to literary form in what one may call the _blaue blume_ period of folk-lore collecting, and is spoiled everywhere by the oversentimental strain of the period. we could well spare an occasional account of what one might infer to be a common habit of love-lorn indian maidens--that of casting themselves headlong from inaccessible cliffs at sunset,--to make room for some of the humorous and fanciful tales of the animals that the indians knew so well and to which they lived so near. the zuñi folk-tales collected by frank cushing have much of this element in them, and it constitutes one of their many charms. east indian folk-lore is peculiarly rich in tales of animals--fables, bits of beast-wisdom and beast-adventure. it may be that this fact co-operated with his own gift to make rudyard kipling the greatest of all modern makers of animal-stories. the _jungle books_ stand unique and imperishable as one of the perfect art-products of the nineteenth century. like everything else that is true art, these stories never become stale. this gives them a peculiar value. for the children who have had them at home are always willing to hear them again with the class. we can read them _to_ the third grade for the story, and _with_ the sixth grade for the style, and the eighth grade is not above hearing _toomai of the elephants_ at any time. the teacher himself will find unfailing satisfaction in them because, in addition to all their charms as interpretations of the beasts and presentation of human nature, they show all the marks of expert workmanship. this appears in the masterly structure of the story, the organization of the material, the economy of incident, the successful style which combines in a most unusual way, a reserve and finish that would become a literary essayist, with a power of vivid and striking phrase that characterizes the most successful journalist. so that teacher and children are both interested and disciplined by every reading of the _jungle books_. among all their verse literature, from the mother goose melodies to wordsworth in the eighth grade, the children will find poems about animals. a catalogue of the nursery and fairy-book animals is a very instructive document--indeed, a catalogue of poetical beasts in general, is very illuminating. all the verses about animals that have come down to us in the traditionary jingles are good as art and on the whole, fair to the animals. "baa, black sheep," "the mouse ran up the clock," "johnny shuter's mare," and all the others, yield the fruits of literature, but only after much torturing, the fruits of science. gradually to these we add such as cowper's tame but touching pictures of his pets; wordsworth's tender and far-seeing poems about the shepherds and their flocks, the doe and the hart, the pet lamb, the faithful dogs; blake's wonderful pair of poems, "the tiger" and "the lamb;" mary lamb's exquisite picture of the boy and the snake; emerson's "the bumble bee;" those splendid imaginative characterizations of the beasts from the thirty-eighth to the forty-first chapters of job; "the jackdaw of rheims;" "how they brought the good news." why extend the actual list? they are all things that place the animals which appear in them in their romantic or tender relations to human beings, or interpret in a dramatic and literary way the imaginary consciousness of the animal. there is little danger of making poetry that is good enough to be given as poetry, do the work of information-teaching. it seems easy to see in the case of the poem, with its more imaginative method and its more artificial form, that you spoil it as art when you teach it as science. this fact is equally true of a good literary story. chapter xi symbolistic stories, fables, and other apologues it is not possible, in the plan adopted for this little book, to keep the topics always strictly apart. it is not possible, for example, to relegate to one section all one has to say about folk- and fairy-stories, and to another all about fables, because each type has so many aspects and radiations. fables are stories; most of them are animal-stories; they are symbolistic or figurative or allegorical--so that one must approach them from many points of view, and take them into consideration in many connections. there need be, therefore, no apology for taking up in this new section topics partially discussed elsewhere. it seems quite consonant with our best conclusions about younger children to say that, on the whole, in the earlier years of their school life their literature should be of that objective kind where no more is meant than meets the eye. they may have tales of adventure, of plain experience, of highly imaginative experience, of animal life, of fairyland; but as far as possible let them be such as contain no occult and secondary meanings. there are many things desirable for all children, and under certain school conditions compulsory or indispensable for some children, which do have this secondary meaning. such, if one uses them, are the stories from the great myths; such are practically all of andersen's _märchen_; such are the legendary stories of the hebrew patriarchs. of course, the parent or teacher who presents these things to his children may say that the children never perceive or even suspect an inner meaning. and it is true that, with great care and skill, the objective upper surface may be kept before some children. but, on the whole, it is good morality and good pedagogy to give to the children nothing that you are not willing, even desirous, that they should probe to the bottom. it is always a misfortune when one must say to a child, "i can't explain that to you now;" "you can't understand that yet;" so much a misfortune that no teacher should ever invite it. if you have ever looked into the faces of the fifth grade when they were searching you with questions to get at the meaning of andersen's pessimistic story of _the little white hen_; if you have seen the sixth grade grow melancholy, with a vague augury of trouble they could not fathom, when you have read to them the brilliant but tragic little apologue of _mr. seguin's goat_; if you have been obliged to explain to some puzzled and suspicious eight-year-old the _raison d'être_ of the clock-ticking alligator in _peter pan_, you have resolved hereafter to give them no symbolism, or to give them symbolism whose presence they could not possibly suspect (a most difficult thing to do in the case of that many-minded, hundred-eyed child, the class), or to give such symbolism as would invite them into paths where you would gladly have them walk, whose most ultimate implication you are at least _willing_ to explain to them. of course, this principle cannot be pushed to its logical extreme; merely logical extremes are always absurd. one does not go into the philosophical depths of the special historical epoch he chooses for his children, nor does he instruct them in the remote scientific principles behind their window-garden or their aquarium of polywogs and salamanders. but, if he is wise, he hopes to choose such work, and present such aspects of it, as contain no insoluble mystery, and do not tempt the children into paths for which their feet are not ready. so, when one is choosing literature it is very easy to fill all the time the children have for it in the first four or five years of school with things that are largely objective, and that, so far as their large framework goes, mean just what they say. indeed, will not most modern teachers concede that throughout the period and in all his subjects it is for the mental good of the child not to be called upon too frequently to formulate principles, or habitually to look below the surface of his facts for interpretations and secondary meanings? of course, he must be led by the natural stages to see through figures of speech, and to understand and apply proverbs, and the proverbial manner of speech. proverbs, indeed, exemplify and epitomize the essentially literary type of thinking and speaking. they are concrete and picturesque rather than abstract, specific rather than general, though we are to understand by them also the abstract and the general; this is the fact that gives them their unique value as literary training. the teacher must call upon his wisdom in choosing proverbs suitable for the children. many proverbs are pessimistic, even cynical: "it never rains but it pours;" many embody a merely commonplace or unmoral code: "honesty is the best policy;" some are ambiguous: "there's honor among thieves;" some the modern world has outgrown; many are too mature, too occult, or too worldly for a child. but a great store remains--vivid, practical bits of experience and tested wisdom which will develop a child's mental quickness, will do something toward equipping him with the common wisdom of his race, and will accustom him to one of the most characteristic methods of literature. this is a good place to say that good results never seem to come of asking the children for an exposition of the proverb. indeed, it is extremely difficult to get from children an exposition or definition of any kind. the better way of making sure that they have appropriated a proverb is to ask them to invent or re-call an incident or a situation to which the proverb will apply. naturally this is not an exercise for the youngest children. in the earlier years a great many of the simple old fables may be taught. one is tempted to say that the traditionary or given moral should never be told to the children; but that is a little too sweeping. as a rule, however, it is better to lead them to make their own interpretation or generalization, in those cases where such a thing is desired. for, as a matter of fact, many of the fables are so good as stories that they may often be left to stand merely as pleasant tales. but as the children grow more penetrating, the fable is the best possible form of symbolistic literature to set them at first. these, with the minor exercise in the apprehension and interpretation of figures of speech, will be their share of the symbolistic kind of writing for several years. then we may introduce more specimens, and more complex specimens, until in the sixth- and seventh-grade periods they may be able to interpret the universal and symbolic side of much that they read, and to handle with ease and delight such parables as _the great stone face_ or _the bee-man of orn_. their experience in literature will then harmonize with their experience in other directions; for they should then, or immediately afterward, be beginning to look for generalizations, to carry abstract symbols, and to substitute them at will for concrete matter. at the same time, then, they will study these fables as apologues, making in all cases their own moral and application. perhaps this is the place to insert a caution against the practice of extracting a "deeper meaning" out of a child when he does not easily see it, or of so instructing him that he comes to regard every story that he reads as a sort of picture puzzle in which he is to find a "concealed robber" in the shape of a moral or a general lesson. it is a trivial habit of mind, a pernicious critical obsession, of which many over-earnest adult readers are victims--that of wringing from every and any bit of writing an abstract or moralistic meaning. another practical caution may be needed as to these interpretations: do not leave the discussion until the class has worked out from the fable a moral or application that practically the whole class accepts and the teacher indorses. do not accept numerous guesswork explanations and let them pass. even the little children, if they are allowed to interpret at all, should be pushed on and guided to a sound and essential exegesis--to use a term more formidable than the thing it names. do not let them linger even tentatively in that lamentable state of making their explanation rest upon some minor detail, some feature on the outskirts of the story. help them always to go to the center, and to make the essential interpretation. make a point of this whenever they have a story that calls for interpretation at all. to the end that they may be sincere and thorough, choose those things whose secondary meanings they may as children feel and understand. the sixth-grade children could, in most schools, interpret _the ugly ducking_. they may easily be led into the inner significance of _the bee-man of orn_ or _old pipes and the dryad_. they may go on in seventh grade to certain of hawthorne's--perhaps "the great stone face" and others of the _twice told tales_; though hawthorne is so sombre and so moralistic that it is not good for some children to read his tales, still less to linger over them and interpret them. a mature and experienced eighth grade could study "the snow image"; but it is too delicate and remote for all eighth-grade classes. "the minister's black veil" is an example of the peculiar hawthornesque gloom, which the children would not understand or by ill luck would understand, and suffer the consequent dangerous depression. addison's "the vision of mirza" is an example of a standard little allegory, simple and easy, and at the same time full of meaning and fruitful of reflection for the children. the parables of the gospels are quite unique in their beauty and ethical significance, and afford an opportunity for a most valuable kind of training in literary exegesis. certain tales from the _gesta romanorum_ might be read in these older grades, adding the interpretations of the ecclesiastics for the gaiety of the class, and as a terrible warning against wresting an allegory out of a story by sheer violence. there are several reasons why the extended allegories do not yield good results with a class. in the first place, it takes too long to get through them, so that the process keeps the children too long in an atmosphere of allegorical and symbolistic meanings, which will confuse and baffle them. in the second place, all the extended literary allegories have each behind it a complex system of abstract theology or morals, or some other philosophy, which cannot be conveyed to children, but which cannot be hidden from the class. then in any long allegory, such as _the pilgrim's progress_ or _the fairie queene_, the multiplied detail all loaded with secondary significance is extremely misleading to all but expert readers. as ruskin says of myth, we may say of all other allegory: the more it means, the more numerous and the more grotesque do the details become. and we would not choose in a child's literary training any large mass of material in which grotesqueness is a prevailing note. nearly all children are interested in _the pilgrim's progress_, and will listen with eagerness to the romantic and adventurous side of christian's experience, but not, of course, to the didactic and theological passages. and as a matter of fact, modern religious teaching and the new race-consciousness of our generation have taken all sense of reality out of bunyan's theology and religious psychology; and of course, it can be read to the modern child only cursorily, as in the home--never in detail and with the privilege of questioning as in the class. one would expect a really good eighth-grade child to be able to detect and express the lesson in lowell's _the vision of sir launfal_, or tennyson's _sir galahad_, or longfellow's _king robert of sicily_. it need hardly be said that the exercises in the symbolistic kinds of literature are to be inserted here and there among the other lessons. it would be a serious mistake to give any class a whole year--or a whole month, indeed--of this experience in reading. chapter xii poetry there are certain results in literary training that can be secured with children only by the teaching of poetry. in story we and they are intent upon subject-matter, and on the larger matters of the imaginative creation. and, while we older students know that the choice and arrangement of material involved in the making of a story are extremely important and most truly educative, we also know that they belong in the larger framework of the story and do not lend themselves to close inspection or detailed study when our scholars are elementary children. again, most of the stories best suited to the children must be used in translated and adapted versions, and all of them should be told in a way that varies more or less from telling to telling, in vocabulary, in figure, and occasionally in material detail. as a result, the stories, until we come down to the very last year of the period, make on the children no impression of the inevitableness of form, or of any of the smaller devices of style and finish. these may be brought to bear in verse. it should not be necessary to say again that the children will know nothing of "larger effects" and "smaller details;" but the teacher should know them, and should have some plan that will include both in his teaching. neither is it necessary to say that these minor matters of style and finish that we will pause over with our elementary class will prove to be very simple matters from the point of view of the expert and adult critic. it is verse that gives the child most experience in the musical side of literature. the rhythm and cadence of prose have their own music--perhaps more delicate and pleasing to the trained adult ear than the rhythm of verse. but the elementary children need the simple striking rhythm of verse, of verse whose rhythm is quite unmistakable. indeed, it is profitable in the first verses that children learn to have an emphatic meter, so that the musical intention may not be missed, and that it may be possible easily to accompany the recitation of the verses with movement, even concerted movement as of clapping or marching. one who is trying to write a sober treatise in a matter-of-fact way dares not, lest he be set down as the veriest mystic, say all the things that might be said about the function of rhythm, especially in its more pronounced form of meter, among a community of children, no matter what the size of the group--how rhythmic motion, or the flow of measured and beautiful sounds, harmonizes their differences, tunes them up to their tasks, disciplines their conduct, comforts their hurts, quiets their nerves; all this apart from the facts more or less important from the point of view of literature, that it cultivates their ear, improves their taste, and provides them a genuinely artistic pleasure. if it happens that the sounds they are chanting be a bit of real poetry, it further gives them perhaps more than one charming image, and many pleasant or useful words. most children are pleased with the additional music of rhyme. this is true of all kinds of rhyme, but of course it is the regular terminal rhyme that most children notice and enjoy and remember. sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. all the children will rejoice in _rye_--_pie_. but there will be some to whom _sing_--_song_--_sixpence_--_pocket_, _full_--_four_, _blackbirds_--_baked_, are so many delights, and there may be some to whom the wonderful chime of the vowels will make music. anyone who knows children will have noticed the pleasure that the merest babies will take in beautiful or especially pat collocations of syllables. a child whom i knew, just beginning to talk, would say to himself many times a day, and always with a smile of amused pleasure, the phrases "apple-batter pudding," "picallilli pickles," "up into the cherry tree," "piping down the valleys wild." it is probably true that some of his apparent pleasure was that species of hysteria produced in most babies by any mild explosion, and the little fusillade of _p's_ in the examples he liked best would account for a part of his enjoyment. but we must think that there was pleasure there, and, whether it were physical or mental, it arose from the pleasing combination of verbal sounds. most children have this ear for the music of words; and some attempt should be made to evoke it in those that have it not. this quality, then, is the first thing we ask of the verse we choose for the youngest children. the mere jingles, provided they are really musical, are useful to emphasize this side of verse, because, being free from content, they can give themselves entirely to sound. it is also most desirable that some of these earliest verses be set to music that the children can sing; that the class march to the rhythm of recited verses; that they be taught, if possible, to dance to some of them. some such form of accompaniment of the verses, deepens the impression of the music, records in the child's consciousness an impression of the poem as an image of motion, and opens a channel for the expression of the mood produced in the children by the verses--a more acceptable channel of expression, certainly, for all the lyrics and for most of the narrative verses, than mere recitation, and a more artistic one than what we commonly know and dread as elocution. the teaching of verse gives a chance and an invitation to linger over and enjoy many fine and delicate aspects of the art that we are likely to miss in the story. something in the nature of verse--the condensation, the careful arrangement, the chosen words--seems to call upon us to go slowly with it. it may be that we linger to apprehend one by one the details of an image or picture, like-- daffy-down dilly has come up to town in a yellow petticoat and a green gown, the captain was a duck, with a jacket on his back; the cattle are grazing, their heads never raising, there are forty feeding like one; in the pool drowse the cattle up to their knees, the crows fly over by twos and threes; some apt or beautiful phrase-- snowy summits old in story; some bit of simple wisdom that deserves pondering; some flash of wit or epigram, or enticing touch of nonsense. these are really about all that we would pause over in teaching verses to the younger children. indeed, are not these elements about all of what we call the smaller matters of literary art that elementary children may be expected to concern themselves with--the music of the spoken verse, appreciation of the beauty or adequacy of striking pictures and images, recognition of some specially fit epithet, interpretation of an aphorism or a paradox or a bit of nonsense? we will discuss later some possible ways of getting these things done. when we say that a poem gives us our best chance to study these finer details, we should not by any means understand that in teaching a poem we are to ignore the other matter of plan and structure. the very condensation and beautiful organization of a poem are likely to result in a charming plan, which both adds to the children's sense of its beauty and helps to fix it in their memory. every teacher will notice--merely to mention examples--the perfect structure, what we have called the "pattern," of stevenson's "dark brown is the river," of allingham's "i wish i were a primrose," of wordsworth's, "i heard a thousand blended notes;" and every teacher will realize the greater class utility of a poem with such a structure. the kinds of poetry suitable by virtue of their content for the children throughout the whole elementary period are first, lyrics of the simpler varieties, beginning with those which are practically only jingles, and going on to those that are more complex in form and more mature in thought, but which still record, as it were, the first reaction of the mind, the primary mood, not the complex and remote moods of developed lyric poetry; and second, poetry of the epic kind, beginning with the mother goose ballads, and advancing to the objective heroic ballads in which english literature is so rich, and perhaps (undoubtedly in certain schools) including some of the longer narrative poems of the type of idyls. it is clear to most teachers that the less the earlier lyrics say, the better. the simplicity of the content makes it possible to emphasize all the more the music and the motion. as the lyrics increase in content, and as we begin to expect the children to enter into the mood which their poem reflects, it becomes important to select such as record a mood or an experience which they can apprehend or might legitimately apprehend. luckily, in our day it is no longer necessary to remonstrate against what one may almost call the crime of requiring children to study and to return "the barefoot boy," "still sits the schoolhouse by the road," "i remember, i remember the house where i was born"--adult reminiscence of childhood, which is undoubtedly the most alien of moods and processes to the child. but we are likely to be caught by the apparent simplicity of certain verses which, written after the pattern of _a child's garden_--indeed, the class includes some of these very poems--record feelings about children and childhood. these verses, like some of the delightful stories and studies mentioned in a previous chapter are studies and realizations of the child's consciousness calculated to delight and illuminate the adult reader. if children read and understood them, the result would be that ghastly spectacle--a child conscious of his own childhood. no poetry given to children should be too imaginative, too figurative, or too emotional. here, to be sure, one must judge afresh for each class. it is obvious that children of the eighth grade can apprehend a poem that would bewilder the sixth; that children in one community, even in one neighborhood, will understand a poem which children of a different community and upbringing could not fathom. but the standard is, after all, not infinitely variable. a good average seventh grade almost anywhere would appreciate without difficulty, including the spiritual application, tennyson's "bugle song;" they could not find their way among the many figures and the alien imaginative mood, the poignant unknown emotion, of "tears, idle tears." it is not easy to go wrong in choosing the ballads. and by "ballads" we are to understand the short narrative poem, traditionary or artistic. the folk-ballads need translation here and there, and are scarcely available at all for the youngest children. but those who are old enough to hear the robin hood tales will enjoy the folk-ballads, if the teacher take pains to prepare them and read them aright. as in the case of some of the heroic epics, some editing is necessary for most of the ballads. they should be given in the "say and sing," manner, turning the duller or the link portions into prose narrative, and reading the exciting and beautiful passages in the original form. even this accommodated form of the folk-ballads may prove impossible in some classes. there are ballads ideal for the grades in nearly all the modern poets--cowper, scott, wordsworth, campbell, browning, longfellow, whittier, kipling. it is not so easy to choose for elementary children among the longer narrative poems. as a matter of fact, a great number of them are of the idyllic kind, and there is in this class of poems something soft and meditative, or over-emotional and, if one must say it--sentimental or super-romantic, that fits them for the comprehension of older readers, and spoils them for the children. others, such as scott's narrative poems, are too long and a bit too difficult for children younger than the high-school age. here and there one finds a poem, like "paul revere's ride," really more ballad than tale; a tender simple tale like "king robert of sicily," for a mature eighth grade. "the vision of sir launfal;" not forgetting morris' _the man born to be king_, "the fostering of auslag," and perhaps other things from _the earthly paradise_. the simple but lofty style and feeling of "sohrab and rustum" makes it possible for the older children. any teacher who knows both literature and children will see at once what it is that constitutes the fitness of these poems, and what the unfitness of "enoch arden," "the courtship of miles standish," or "lancelot and elaine." perhaps the only library of literature that is perfectly suited to its purpose and its public, and the only collection of masterpieces to be put into the hands of its readers without misgiving, is the nursery rhymes that we call _mother goose's melodies_. it needs no more general praise, and there is no room for specifications. but it is always in order to urge teachers in this case, as in that of the fairy-tales, to increase their knowledge of those traditionary bits of art. when one knows their origin and something of their social and literary history, they take on new dignity and importance. one ceases to look upon them as mere nonsense to be rattled off for the amusement of the baby, and learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously preserved and passed down from baby to baby through these many generations: bits of old song and ballad, games and charms, riddles and incantations, tales of charming incidents and episodes--a gallery of unmatchable portraits, sallies of wit just witty enough for the four-year-old, mild but adequate nonsense; all freed by the lapse of years and the innocence of its devotees from every taint of utilitarianism and occasionalism, winnowed and tested by the generations of mothers and babies that have criticized them, they yield a new charm at every fresh reading to the most experienced reader. they should constitute the first literary material of every english-speaking child. every well-nurtured child will come to school already in possession of many of them. but he will be glad to go over them for the sake of those less fortunate, as well as for the sake of enjoying them with the whole community, and in consideration of the new pictures, games, and songs that will be joined with them. stevenson's _a child's garden of verses_ is in some sense a quite unique poetic production; and this remains true in spite of the many things produced in imitation of it and inspired by it. it is a wonderful example of the recovery by a grown person of the thread of continuity leading him back to actual childhood; the recovery, too, in many instances of the child's consciousness. it is the gate for us all to the lost garden of our own childhood, pathetic in every line with the evanescence of childhood, "whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu." yet in spite of this most poignant appeal to the grown-up person, many of the verses are ideally suited to children. they do not induce in them our mood of pathos and regret, nor do they set their child-readers imaginatively in another experience. they do very really constitute, as stevenson suggests, a window through which the child sees another child far, far away, and in another garden, play; a child with whom he tenderly sympathizes, at whom he lovingly smiles, at whose games he looks on, whose toys and books he knows and loves. the child in the garden is an only child, a lonely child, and a very individualistic child; there is no comradeship in the verses; they cannot be becomingly recited in concert; there is not a chorus or a refrain in the whole book, in which all the children may join; there is nothing communal about them. in spite of all the efforts, they cannot be set to music, except as solos; and if the music matches the mood, it is likely to be difficult for a child to sing. several of them are too imaginative--"windy nights," "shadow march;" some are a bit ironic--"good and bad children," "system," "a happy thought;" some too poignantly pathetic--"the land of nod;" some look at childhood too obviously with the man's eyes--"keepsake mill;" but all these exceptions leave many altogether suitable for children; and their perfect structure, their musical verse-form, their childlike objectivity, and the divine simplicity of their style render them an unceasing delight. though the child of the garden was a solitary child, he had a constantly haunting sense of the world beyond--other children in other lands, the foreign countries he might see by climbing higher, the children who would bring his boats ashore far down the river, the children singing in far japan, the long-ago egyptian boys, hints at the wider experience and bigger world to which the six- and seven-year-old children are so eagerly reaching out. at the same time nobody but stevenson--nobody at least, that has written a book--has ever taken adequately the point of view of the human being three feet high--his tiny horizon, the small exquisite objects to which he comes close, the fairy-dells he sees, the rain-pool sea, the clover tree; nowhere else in art is the little world of the little people adequately pictured--the little world, and its obverse, the colossal grown-ups, with their elephantine furniture amidst which the little men and women must ordinarily move. many of these poems should be read with the single child at home. for the class at school we may use "foreign lands," "singing," "where go the boats," "my shadow," "the swing," "my ship and i"--the more objective and universal of them. there are many pretty bits for the youngest children in christina rossetti's _sing-song_--a book of nursery rhymes not sufficiently known. certain of blake's _songs of innocence_ the children should know, though they are always found too delicate and contemplative for the whole class. every teacher of children should know for his own enlightenment the poems of jane and ann taylor, and dr. watts's _poems for infant minds_. psychologically speaking, they are in a world completely alien to the modern student of children and of education; but there is a stray verse or two like "the violet" or "how doth the little busy bee," that may some day fit the needs of the class. every friend of children, teacher or parent, should know keble's _lyra innocentium_; he cannot afford to miss the tone and atmosphere of wordsworth's poems about children and childhood. as a matter of fact, it is only a few of wordsworth's poems that will go well for class study, though a really enthusiastic teacher may carry even a large class through "the idle shepherd boys" or "the blind highland boy;" the older children should know "heartleap well" and "peter bell." the true wordsworthian is born, only occasionally made; if he declares himself in a class in elementary school, the teacher should guide him. but we should soon learn, and aways remember, that the contemplative and idyllic lyric, however it may delight the chosen child and the adult, will, as a rule, neither please nor train the class, and that poems written for children and about children are not at all likely to be the things children love best and most profit by; the poetry should not linger long in the nursery stage. the class should be pushed on as early as possible into simple but heroic ballads, into lyrics, musical and noble, but simple and easy as to content--all chosen from the great poets. even if one desired it, it would probably be impossible to dislodge _hiawatha_ from its shrine in american elementary schools; and no one ought to covet the task, for the iconoclast is likely to be set down as a vulgar and egotistic person. _hiawatha_ has become entrenched in the schools by some such reasoning as this: here is a poem written by an american on aspects of life among the american aborigines; american children should study it as literature. children ought to be instructed in primitive life and in myth; therefore they should study _hiawatha_ as literature. children should learn much about nature and should learn nature-poetry; therefore they should study _hiawatha_ as literature. of course, there are pretty things in _hiawatha._ some of the passages about the forest and the waters, the making of the canoe, the conquest of mondanim, the picture-writing, may most profitably be interwoven with other things. it is instructive both as to literature and as to fact to put the making of robinson crusoe's boat beside the building of hiawatha's canoe. but there are objections to a long and exclusive course in this poem. the mythical side of it is baffling and discouraging. once more let me say that a _class_ is an extremely acute and inquiring personality; after a few days it "wants to know." and it is puzzled and dismayed, and finally frightened off, by the fact that everything means something else. furthermore, the details both of indian life and of indian belief are so chosen and sifted and beautified as to be most misleading, if we are emphasizing that side of the poem. lastly, it is not good for the young children to have a long-continued and constantly renewed experience in the alien and wearing meter, and the unmusical rhythm of _hiawatha;_ and the verse-form dictates certain trying peculiarities of style, in especial the slightly varied iteration of detail: ah, my brother from the north land, from the kingdom of wabasso, from the land of the white rabbit, you have stolen the maiden from me, you have laid your hand upon her, you have wooed and won my maiden. this redundancy and repetition do not constitute the direct, forward-moving style we should like to impress on the children. all these considerations are offered to justify the judgment, held in great modesty, that _hiawatha_ should not be given in its entirety nor should the children be kept at it for any long drill, but, if at all, in chosen episodes and from time to time. of course, any teacher may see fit to draw out from hiawatha the story of any episode and treat it as a story, for dramatization, or as illuminating some phase of the children's interest and activity. and students old enough to interpret the mythical meaning of the poem may profitably read it. occasionally, and as something apart from their regular lessons, the children should hear beautifully read passages of the incomparable music of some of the great masters, regardless of their understanding of the content--the first sixteen lines of _paradise lost_; some especially musical sonnet of shakespeare's, or some passage of lofty eloquence from the plays; some vague and haunting bit of music from shelly, or poe, or keats; some fanfare of trumpets from byron, or macaulay, or kipling. every teacher will realize that all the titles and authors and kinds mentioned in this study cannot be put into the children's lessons. it is to be hoped that he will realize that they are mentioned as concrete examples, or suggestive instances of things that are good, and to support the principles under discussion. the distinctive service of poetry will be the cultivation of the children's sense of the musical side of literature; the opportunity for appreciating some of the minor beauties of the literary art; and among the older children, acquaintance with the more highly imaginative method, and the more intensely emotional moods. chapter xiii drama there are many of the elements of drama that are eminently serviceable in the child's literary and artistic training. one cannot use the word "elements" in this connection without explaining that the word as used here does not designate absolutely simple and primitive things. they are elements only with respect to the complex whole which we call a drama. the elements of drama are story, plot, character, impersonation, dialogue, gesture, stage requirements; add to these the matter of literary expression, a pronounced structure which divides the production into clearly distinguished parts or acts; and add the further fact that in all its developed and typical specimens drama is the expression and presentation of a complex social situation, or the vehicle of a mature philosophy. it is quite evident, then, that the fully constituted literary drama will be both too complex and too difficult for children under twelve, and in most communities for any elementary children. but the elements of drama are not of necessity always in the difficult and elaborate combination which constitutes a literary drama. they appear singly and in simpler combinations here and there in many of the experiences and occupations of the child. they may be selected and combined for him in such products as will secure for him the distinctive joys and discipline of the drama. for example, there is the element of gesture, which in its elaborated form becomes technical acting. in its primitive and fundamental form it is instinctive with children--well-nigh purposeless at first, uncontrolled and fantastic like the early activities of their imagination, but easily organized and directed toward a purpose. the first step in this direction is the game. some of the charming group-games the children learn even in the kindergarten are genuine dramatic art. such games are, at any rate, the first opportunity to channel and to turn into something like artistic expression the children's ceaseless activity. we have all learned to appreciate the social and physical value of play. we may well add now a respectful estimate of games as art. the group-game may seem at first glance far from the child's literary training; but, as a matter of fact, a good game which has in it, as a good game always has, an orderly process and a climax, is just such an artistic whole as a story. besides, many of our best group-games are accompanied by a rhythmic chant, often by pretty or quaint verses, such as "itisket, itasket, a green and yellow basket;" or, "how many miles to babylon?" or "london bridge is falling down." acting upon this hint, we may substitute for these verses more artistic lines, or we can furnish more artistic lines with the fitting game. and these activities, channeled and disciplined by the group-game, are receiving the best possible training for dramatic acting by and by. we must consider dancing as a form of dramatic gesture, and as a training for it. we may all rejoice in the current change of attitude toward dancing, which bids fair to replace it in education and among the arts. we are learning again to regard it as such a controlling and refining of motion as makes an appeal to one's sense of beauty, not as the vulgar, one might almost say sordid, accomplishment it has been in average society for many generations. the rediscovery of the charming and simple folk-dances has given us a new art for the children, which we may substitute for the unnatural waltz, and the mongrel two-step we have been teaching them for years. a dance is a medium for expressing a mood, and a means of communicating it; like the games, it is a method of channeling and training activity. from this point of view one may see its two-fold relation: on the one hand, to the child's natural activities, taking them up, selecting among them, and combining them into a beautiful whole; on the other hand to dramatic acting, training and controlling the physical movements of gesture and pose and poise. ideally it may have a closer connection with literature. not only may dancing reflect a mood; it may tell a story or present a situation; many primitive dances were of this kind. in a previous chapter i have spoken of dancing as a method of motion to accompany spoken verse, as a means of deepening the sense of rhythm. it is possible to represent in this way, not only the movement of the words, but the mood of the lyric, and, _mutatis mutandis_, the events of the ballad. i have seen the fourth-year class present a little dance of "hickory dickory dock" invented for them by their teacher, and another class a little older do a humorous dance of "there was a man in our town," than which two performances nothing could be more charming. of course, these were not in any sense reproductions of the actions suggested by the jingles; there was no gesture that told of running up the clock, or scratching out his eyes; that would be the business of the old gesticulating elocution so deplorable in the artificiality of its would-be realism. the dances were felt to be merely the active response to the rhythm and the mood of the recited words--bits of dramatic tone-color, as it were. one wonders why all teachers do not make a game of "charades" a frequent class recreation and discipline, since it has in it so many elements of educational value--the contributions to the children's vocabulary, the sugar-coated persuasion to attend to spelling, the frequent need for the invention of dialogue, the sharpening of everybody's wits, and, best of all, the call for significant pantomime, genuine dramatic gesture, and the fun, which is always educative. when we come to the element of impersonation, we are nearer the heart of dramatic art, and perhaps deeper into the circle of the child's interests and instincts as well. imitation is one of the absolute and fundamental aspects of a child's activities. it is impossible to escape calling it an instinct, when one sees that it is deeper and more universal than any impulse or tendency. the interpretation put by more recent psychologists upon the term and the fact of imitation throws a new and grateful light upon it as a principle in drama. in the light of this interpretation, we can not longer think of imitation as a servile, and more or less formal, copying of the thing seen. we are now saying that in these activities of the children, when they are playing horse, or playing hunter, or playing soldier, they are not copying something they have seen or heard of; they _are_ keeping house, they _are_ hunting, they _are_ marching and fighting. not even bodily activity is a more incessant and absolute aspect of play than this of make-believe. imaginative children, and those that have some variety of experience, are rarely at leisure to appear in their own characters--so constant is the dramatic and imitative impulse in exercise. indeed, two little girls i knew, after a forenoon of unceasing and strenuous impersonation of a repertoire ranging from a door-mat and a cake of ice in the delaware on through the ghost of the murdered banquo, were finally obliged to sit down in utter weariness, when one of them suggested: "now let's play we're just plain little girls." in the same nursery of four children the child who returned to the room after any absence always cautiously inquired of each of the others, before taking up affairs: "what are you being now?" in certain hours of his study of literature and literary appreciation one is ready to believe that this impulse toward impersonation is the very fundamental fact in that appreciation. it is the door through which one enters into the situations and feelings which make up the life represented in the story, poem, or drama. this it is that gives that strange grip of reality to literature; it is this that turns the appreciation of literature into personal culture, so that in a very real sense one may substitute literature for experience. it is easy to utilize this passion very early, turning it in the direction of art. in the kindergarten they have long known how to adapt it in the play which they so wisely interchange and amalgamate with their games; and the little pantomimes of "bo-peep" and "little boy blue," of flocks of birds, of butterflies on the wing, and what not, are on the road to true dramatic art. but, alas! this is cut all too short in the school--the average school, where the scholars are converted immediately into the veriest little pitchers--all ears; and, instead of being twenty selves in a day, they are denied the privilege of being even one whole one. this gift for impersonation should, like all their imaginative experiences, be conserved by exercise and guidance; otherwise it remains merely chaotic and accidental, and very soon the child himself is ashamed of it and regards its exercise as a "baby" performance to be left behind in the kindergarten. this exercise and guidance may be given by training the children in little plays, which, to begin with, are not much more than pantomime, but which add, as they go on, other elements of the real drama--an organized action and dialogue. of course, there is the dramatic monologue--the recitation. but this does not meet the needs of the class. it is impossible that all the children should sympathetically impersonate the same character and realize the same experience. neither does this sort of exercise--the recitation--give a chance for co-operation in the production of a bit of social art; it does not give them the discipline of apprehending and producing a large whole, and it tends to develop and foster an unendurable kind and degree of egoism. where are we to get these plays, since there are practically none of respectable literary quality ready to our hand? one must say "practically none," because there are a few in print which can be used, chiefly dramatizations of folk- and fairy-tales. but, for the most part, and just as it should be, the teacher and the class will have to make their own plays, until in the eighth grade or thereabouts they are ready for some literary drama. as will be pointed out later, these co-operatively produced dramas constitute the best possible return which the children can make of their literary training, and at the same time the best possible means of securing their apprehension of the story they use; since in recasting a story as a play they will come to know it as plot, as activity of persons, and as a structure made up of essential parts. almost the first thing the child sees is the fact that there is something organic and necessary about these divisions and subdivisions. he sees them separate themselves out from the narrative as things in themselves, and then reunite to form a complete whole again. it matters not whether the story be one that he has been taught, a historical episode, or a story invented by himself, the emphasis upon structure, upon organization, which is one of the elements of drama, will be helpful, as a matter of literary training. as to the dialogue--the actual literature of this communal drama--we must be most indulgent, and on the whole uncritical. a marked peculiarity of the dramatizations of the little people, as indeed of those of their elders, is that they forget to be literature at all, so that what is not dumb-show must be set down as noise. it is a troublesome and delicate task for the teacher who is guiding them to manage to give the dialogue a tone better than mere commonplace and different from mere bombast. it is wisest, on the whole, to get them to choose stories and events that will sway their dialogue toward the bombastic and away from the commonplace; they will certainly be more spontaneous, and probably more artistic. and it is easy to set into every play some genuine gem of literature--a lyric to be sung, a little story to be told. it is desirable to introduce as much music as possible--really artistic little songs that fit into the atmosphere of the play and help to create it; it makes better "team-work." a dance too, always provided it harmonizes with the tone and spirit of the play, helps the feeling of co-operative production. the children's acting, in the sense of gesture and stage-business, is very likely to be stiff and artificial. marches and dances that belong in the play make an imperative call for movement, and accustom them to action without self-consciousness and formality. the story, then, is generally given--it is something the children have read, it is a historical event, though of course it may be furnished by some inventive member of the class, or evolved by them together. whatever it is, it will in all probability not differ in any way from the story of any narrative. the plot will be the plot of the narrative story; it will be either an accident or a very noteworthy fact, if the material furnished displays a true dramatic plot. there will probably be no true dramatic characterization. the teacher cannot aim at it, and must not expect it; though occasionally the born actor declares himself and presents us "a man in his humor" in true dramatic fashion. but, on the whole, we are contented if up to the time we are twelve or thirteen we move about the stage, as the persons move through the story, delivering ourselves of such dialogue as is needed to put the action forward--and nothing more. it goes without saying that place must be made for a large number of "sups." an army is a great device, for in the marching and manoeuvering most of the class can manage to appear upon the stage first or last. _briar-rose_ makes a great play for the third or fourth grade, for every man in the grade can appear as a thorn-bush in the hedge. there may easily be two different casts for every play. occasionally there is the opportunity for the whole class to appear in character as audience. it is almost impossible to say anything concerning the staging, the theatrical side, of these plays that will be helpful everywhere because the facilities vary so widely in different schools and different communities. in general, it is best to have what answers for a stage. there is some mystic influence in the raised platform, the curtain, the proscenium arch that cuts off this performance from the rest of the world and gives it at once the distinction of art. every dramatic guide of young people should help forward as much as possible the movement to free drama from the tyranny of the stage carpenter, the scene-painter, and the costumer. and with children as with the early folk-players it takes very little to create the illusion. a feather in his head makes the six-year-old a noble red man without more ado. a sash over her shoulder converts a little maiden of the third grade into a haughty princess. but the feather and the sash are good pedagogy as well as good art. an arm-chair makes a parlor; a half-dozen arm-loads of boughs makes a forest. i witnessed a stirring performance of _siegfried, the child of the forest_, where the illusion of the deep-forest glades was created by three rubber plants, a potted palm, and a sword-fern in a jardinière! a golden-haired siegfried with an angora rug thrown over one shoulder, a blackened mimi with a mantle of burlap fastened about him with a trunk-strap--the whole atmosphere of art was there. as the children grow older, and alas! in most cases less imaginative, they will require more properties. if possible, they should work together to make the scenery and provide the properties, and should be prevailed upon to make their own costumes. the wise teacher will keep the costuming out of the hands of the "tender mamas" all he can; for in most cases the participation of the mothers in this side of the preparations, unless they are given specific directions and compelled to follow them, means the introduction of the fatal spirit of competitive finery. the children should be taught to see that the costuming is a part of the art, and that everybody's costume must be brought "within the picture." now, up through the sixth or seventh grades (this will depend upon the average maturity of the children, upon the kind of culture in the homes from which they come, upon the character and knowledge of the teachers in the grades through which they have come) the plays that the children have should be of the kind we have been considering--epic material, mere direct story put together under the simplest of dramatic principles--those of analysis into movements, of dialogue and of action in its simpler forms. but in the eighth school year (merely to set a limit), and bridging the children over into their ninth or first year of high school, there may be a change. the child has gradually become conscious of the complexity of life and human interests; he begins to make his adolescent readjustment to the world, to realize in a conscious way its history and its institutions; his own studies in history have become studies in the interweaving of complex factors; the great social institutions begin to press their claims and offer their attractions; college looms ahead, conditioning all his undertakings; the church makes its appeal or asserts its rights; upon all too many children the institutions of business and industry make their call; in most children their own moral and religious problems, and those of their mates, rise to consciousness. epic directness and singleness now no longer seem an adequate picture of human affairs. it is now that the child has his first moment of ripeness for the characteristic inner things of the literary drama: the clash and combination of institutions; the revolt of the individual against the institution, with his final destruction or adjustment; the plot which is an interweaving of ethical and complex social forces--the characters generally intricate to begin with, and undergoing profound modification in the process of the action, different from the static epic characters he has known hitherto. in short, we may find that the eighth grade is ready for some specimens of that literary type which is the truest artistic presentation of the social and moral complex, the literary drama. luckily, there are grades and shades of complexity, and a wide range of choice as to the nature and difficulty of the problems involved. one would scarcely encourage the eighth- or ninth-year school children to attack the intricate adjustment and interplay of _hamlet_; he would not like them to follow the baffling complexities of social, personal, and economic considerations through _the pillars of society_. but _the merchant of venice_ offers problems and situations which he can understand; in _julius caesar_ and in _macbeth_, in _wilhelm tell_, and in the _wallenstein_ plays, noble and finished dramas as they are, he encounters nothing that he cannot grasp. on the contrary, the ideas and the situations are such as he readily understands, and such as legitimately enlarge his horizon. the shakespeare, at any rate, will probably be studied as poetry, and the children should be encouraged to act, in whole or in part, any play that they can study as literature. it may be that the facilities of the school will prohibit any attempt to stage one of these larger plays. in that event chosen bits may be given as dialogue or monologue fitted into a recital of the story, and a description of the situation. the teacher should always remember that the drama is oral literature, and the literature of it makes its legitimate appeal first to the ear. children memorize so easily, that they will know the play by heart practically as soon as they have finished such a consideration of it as enables them to read it intelligently. if not, the striking and beautiful passages should be deliberately memorized. should these dramatic performances be produced before a public? most certainly yes. let it be however small a public--two neighboring grades, invited parents and friends; but let the study and effort bear its legitimate fruit in the public presentation. only when we lead them to turn back what they have gained into a community asset, have we done anything to train our children in social art. and this is so natural and easy in the case of an acted drama that it is a pity to miss the opportunity. of course, they must love the thing they do. it must be made good enough to give, and be therefore offered. we shall gradually recover from the fright we have been in now for some time as to the children's desire to "show off." how can we be sure we should have had any art, if this motive had not mingled with the others in the production and publication of the art-product? let us cease to give it an invidious name; instead of calling it the desire to "show off," let us call it the artists' passion--be he poet, painter, actor, what not--to communicate, to turn back into the common life this thing he has but drawn out of the common life to elaborate and beautify. the child and the theater makes a difficult problem. one need not say that a habitual theater-going child is a social, and most likely a moral, monster. but children should occasionally see a play with the pomp and circumstance of the stage. in the large cities it is not difficult to find a play or two each year that it is good for a child to see--something of shakespeare, or some other heroic spectacle; some innocent programme of horse-play and frolic; some pretty pantomime, and occasionally a melodrama neither banal nor over-sentimental. if we but realized the theater as an educational and aesthetic force, we might secure many more such things by an intelligent appeal for them and an intelligent reception of them. after the children have had these few heroic plays we have discussed for the eighth or ninth grade, they mature so rapidly that their contact with the literary drama ceases to be a child's problem at all; it passes into the field of secondary training, where it must, as things now are in our schools, be approached from a somewhat different point of view. chapter xiv the presentation of the literature in this day of reaction, not to say revulsion, against "methods" in teaching, it is with much misgiving that one brings one's self to speak of the practical details of teaching a subject, lest he be suspected of having a method or even a system, or lest those suggestions which he tries to give out as genetic and stimulating merely, be taken as a formalized plan. however, each body of material that has any degree of separateness has a handle by which it ought to be taken; disregarding the poor figure--paths by which one most easily comes to the center of it; certain points of view from which it looks most attractive and manageable. some such handles, or paths, or points of view it will be the business of this chapter to indicate; and the suggestions to be offered are, it is to be hoped, so simple and so reasonable as to have occurred to many observing and growing teachers. the somewhat small body of literature to be used in the classes should practically throughout the elementary period be read to the children in class, not read by them. the relation of the literature to reading-lessons will be discussed elsewhere. it may well be that in the last years of the period many of the members of the class will have reached the stage of reading needful for the interpretative and apprehensive reading of literature; but the majority of the class will not. they will master the difficulties of mechanical reading; they may achieve the plane of intelligent reading. but here the large majority of them linger. vast numbers of people never push on to the next plane--that of appreciative reading. and it is small wonder; for the combination of mechanical, intellectual, and emotional processes that it involves constitutes it well-nigh the most difficult of achievements. hosts of estimable and intelligent persons, respectable citizens, live out long years of greater or less usefulness, and never have a glimpse of this kind of reading. it is by no means true that even every good and useful citizen who teaches literature, can do this kind of reading; many times he cannot. but he can read better than the children. they, involved in the difficulties of their inexpert reading, cannot see the woods for the trees; they are obliged to go so slowly, and to absorb so much energy in what one may call the manual work of reading, that they miss the essentially literary things--the movement, the picture, the music. of course, when we say "read," we use the word in the broad sense of rendering the matter _viva voce_, whether it be actual reading from the text or reciting. while the person who is reading a story to children must be most concerned with spirit and meaning, he must not, if he suppose himself to be teaching literature, neglect the matter of style. if the story is a translated one, he must make or choose some beautiful translation. everything that he reads to them he must work over beforehand, so that he can give it with effective certainty. he more than defeats his purpose who transmits to his children no matter how good a story in slip-shod sentences, commonplace phrasing, go-easy enunciation; or, worse than that, in the ostentatiously childlike language and manner that constitute official kindergartenese, or in the hilariously cheerful manner which marks traditional sunday-schoolese; or, worst of all, in that tone of cheap irony that so many people see fit to adopt for all their communications with children. it is the tone of the average adult whenever he enters into conversation with any acquaintance under twelve--an underbred or quite uncalled-for tone of badinage, of quizzing, of insincerity. it is an unpardonable misunderstanding of the dignity and seriousness of children to offer them babble when they ask only simplicity, or to treat with flippancy what to them are the serious things of art. it should be quite possible to be serious without being solemn, and cheerful without being hilarious. this matter of a good style and form is so important that a teacher should achieve it at any cost of trouble and study. i like to use every opportunity to say that he should so thoroughly know his story or poem, be it the simplest old fairy-tale, or the veriest nursery-jingle, that he loves and respects it as art; and should so know and respect his audience and his purpose that a good and suitable literary form flows from him inevitably; or, if he is reading an actual text, that every sentence is both appreciative and interpretative. but, if he cannot achieve this, let him in the first instance write out a good form of his story, or find one and memorize it. there is no denying that in the hands of a cold and mechanical person this production will display some priggishness and false propriety. but the failure as literary training would be less disastrous in this case than if the same person gave a haphazard and commonplace impromptu version. there is such a thing as literary reading as distinguished from the reading of matter technical in content and merely intellectual in appeal. teachers, accustomed as they are to read for facts and intent upon the logical emphasis, are peculiarly prone to read literature poorly--missing the music and the emotion, rendering it all in the hard intellectual manner that is acceptable only as the vehicle of the colorless matter of a technical treatise. there is also such a thing as the telling of a literary story, as distinguished from the telling of any other story. a narrative of events in history, an account of some occurrence in nature or ordinary affairs, may be expected to proceed from point to point without arrangement or succession other than the order of incidents as they occur. the interest is the interest of fact; the thread is that of cause and effect, or any other plain sequence. but in the literary story the incidents are sifted and arranged. certain details are prophecies--foreshadowings of things to come; certain incidents are vital turning-points in the action; certain phrases are the key and counter-sign of the whole story; some paragraphs are plain narration; some are calm description; some are poetic interpretation; some roar with action; some glow with emotion; some sparkle with fun; some lie in shadow, others stand forth in the brilliant light; there are movements in the story, marked by a change of scene, a change of situation, a pause in the action--parts which would be marked in the drama as scenes or acts; there is the gradual approach to the center, the pivotal occurrence, the readjustment of affairs to ordinary life. ideally, all these things will be indicated in the presentation that an accomplished story-teller makes of a literary story. this seems to set the standard very high--too high for the discouraged attempt of the overworked grade teacher. if so, she may reflect that it is triumphantly true that such is the affinity between the child and the story that he will get much delight and nourishment out of any telling of it. who has not hesitated between a smile and a tear at the spectacle of a child or a class hanging enthralled and hungry upon a story rendered by a mother or a teacher whose every pronunciation was a jar, whose every cadence a dislocation, and whose every emphasis a misinterpretation? and remember, the art of story-telling is not the art of the theater, not the art of the actress, but the art of the mother, the nurse; the art of the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun;" the art of the wandering minstrel, of the journeyman tailor, of the exiled younger brother; art designed to reach, not an audience beyond the footlights, but one gathered on the sunny bench of the market-place, on the hearth-stone, under the nursery lamp, in the shady garden, and in their own teacher's schoolroom. as a practical matter, the teacher, in presenting a story or a narrative poem, should take advantage of the natural pauses, the end of one incident or movement and the beginning of the next, in dividing his material for the actual lessons, so that in a long story or in a drama, the end of the lesson coincides with the close of a series of incidents or the close of one of the larger movements. nothing spoils a bit of literature more effectually than taking it in accidental or fragmentary bits. at any cost of time and pains, let there be a sense of completeness in each lesson, a feeling of repose, if only temporary, at the end of each instalment. and whether he closes his lesson or not, the teacher should at the close of every such movement in a class of older children pause to discuss, to review, or to summarize. when he makes this recognition of the close of a series of incidents, or of a movement, he accomplishes two things: he secures a certain amount of completeness, and he helps on in the children the desirable sense of organization, of composition, in their story or play. the nature of the bit of literature chosen must guide the teacher in his first presentation of it. when it is a thing in which the movement is rapid, or the interest in the action or the plot intense, it will doubtless be best to go rapidly through the whole, not pausing for any details. then go over it slowly again, pausing for appreciation and comment. it seems well to repeat here that if the story is long and the plot involves any intensity of suspense, it may be well to let the children know the issue early in the story; the wisdom of this step will depend largely upon the average nerves of the class. there may well be several readings of a thing worth reading once. every teacher knows how well content the younger children, especially, are to go over a thing many times. the interest of the class of older children may be kept up through the many readings of a story or poem, by shifting each time the ground of comment or discussion, opening up a new question or revealing a new point of interest at each reading. in other pieces, the slower moving stories and lyrics, the children are willing to linger over the details at the first reading. it is all but impossible to indicate what such details are, or what we mean by lingering over them. i have pointed out in some detail, in the chapter on poetry, the kind of thing that one would linger over for comment and question. if it is a new, rare, or especially picturesque word, we may ask questions and receive comments, or according to the situation, give quick and direct information about it: "the golden orange _glows_;" "he strung the bow _deftly_;" "the butter-cup catches the sun in its _chalice_." these three words call for attention for different reasons, in addition to the fact that any or all of them might be new and unknown words to the class. in the case of a figure or image we would pause and discuss the various terms and details of it, until most members of the class have at least intellectually apprehended it. such a complex little figure and image as "footsteps of the falling drops down the ladder of the leaves" calls for leisurely appreciation and assimilation. a peculiar musical onomatopoeic line will interest them; "burly dozing bumble-bee," is such a line. they will be delighted to discover why this peculiar assemblage of sounds was chosen in connection with this insect. "the long day wanes, the slow moon climbs," indicating and imitating by its slow movement and long vowels the passage of the lingering hours, is an effect they should be led to realize. we should pause to point out, or to inquire into, the implications of some pregnant or pivotal sentence, such as: "now, cinderella's godmother was fay;" or, "cyclops, you asked my noble name, and i will tell it: my name is noman." the bit selected for detailed study may be larger, amounting to a complete incident--for example, nausicaa with her maids washing her beautiful clothes by the river; some scene or incident full of character and symbolical meaning, as the scene with the hen and the cat in _the ugly duckling_; some ethical or moral question that calls for judgment, such as robin hood's treatment of the unjust abbot, or portia's decision as to shylock's bond. these examples, chosen at random, are intended simply to suggest the kind of thing to be stopped over. it would be a grave mistake to pause over every such detail, or to try to make sure that the children apprehend even intellectually every item as it appears. leave many of them for subsequent readings; let many of them lie permanently, depending rather on the effects of the general tone and spirit of the production for your results. one of the first lessons to learn about the teaching of literature is that it will not do to teach the whole art on the basis of one specimen--that it will not do to teach in any case all that one could. one must rather try to teach the characteristic, the inevitable lesson--the lesson demanded by the genius of his piece. let the teacher avoid by all means the pitfall of "talky-talk" and lecture. keep the literature as near play as possible--the play that cultivates and disciplines through the avenues of refined pleasure. it will often be necessary for the teacher to shorten and otherwise edit the thing he chooses. there will come from time to time dull passages, descriptive passages, passages whose subject-matter is too mature, or in some other way undesirable for his class. he will often be able to economize effort and to secure a better unity of impression, by omitting what is mere enrichment of the picture or reinforcement of the teaching; such incidents may be removed without altering the meaning or the movement. the teacher must be experienced enough to recognize such unnecessary or superfluous incidents; otherwise he only mutilates his story in condensing it. when the children have advanced to some proficiency in reading, they will, of course, begin to read some of their own literature, reading aloud in the class and often having the text before them as the teacher reads. all the children that can read at all should, as a rule, have a printed copy of anything they are asked to memorize; and as a matter of social duty, the teacher of literature, or the teacher in the literature class, will from time to time have a careful exercise in reading for the younger readers; while he will have much reading aloud from the older grades; remembering that the inevitable obverse of receiving literature through the ear is the rendering it with the voice. but, on the whole, they will fare best if up to and probably through the sixth grade they receive what is distinctively literature through the ear. and even after that they should often hear their material rendered by a good reader in class, even though they may be required to read the same material over beforehand, or subsequent to the class reading. every teacher should have in reserve a store of stories and poems, and beautiful passages from great masterpieces which he produces from time to time as a surprise to his class. this is many a time the most effective lesson possible--adding to the children's pleasure the delight of surprise, creating in them the impression of the inexhaustible supply of beautiful things, and testifying to their teacher's own joy in the things he wants them to love. other minor and practical matters, more closely connected with the return from the children than the presentation to them, will be discussed in the next chapter. finally, the whole matter is conditioned and colored by the fact that in any case the literature is transmitted to the children through the personality of the teacher. this is partially true of all a child's subjects and his whole experience in school; but the fact that literature is so inwoven with feeling, and so bound up with matters of personal taste, that it concerns itself so much with matters of ethics and conduct, makes it peculiarly liable to take on color, to narrow or to widen with the personality of him who chooses and renders it. a teacher must accept this fact, and profit by the obvious warnings that arise out of it; but better than that, build his work upon the many beneficent aspects of the fact. the teacher before his class is the sacred bard at the feast; he is an exhaustless spring of joy, a tireless playfellow, a preacher who never proses, a schoolmaster who never scolds. chapter xv the return from the children the discussion must naturally limit itself largely to the immediate return that we may ask of the children from their lessons in literature; since it is not possible to do more than hint at their ultimate effects. it is, of course, a matter of pedagogical morality to ask from them some immediate and practical return, or some actual literary contributions to the lessons. there are certain modifications of the modern doctrine that every stimulation of the mind or the emotions should eventuate in activity--modifications that apply to all the fine arts. the aesthetic experience is a complete experience in itself; the apprehension, the enjoyment, and the final appreciation which one passes through in his contact with a beautiful piece of art--a picture, a symphony, an ode--constitute a complete psychic experience; they eventuate in a better taste, a higher ideal, the record of a pure and noble joy. they do not demand further activity. we need not feel, therefore, that it is a matter of necessity to ask that in every case the class make some tangible response to every literary impression. but the teacher of literature must feel that he shares with all their other teachers the responsibility and the duty of making social beings of the children, of equipping them with the means of expression and communication, so that they may turn back into the sum-total a product in exchange for the material they draw out. he must, therefore, associate with the lessons a legitimate amount of exercise for his class in imparting what they have learned and in creating literary products for themselves. the first and simplest return we ask is the oral comment, the immediate discussion that accompanies the presentation of the work. when a story has been read, there should always be opportunity for question and comment. this the teacher must guide and restrain. of course, he should be hospitable to suggestions and contributions, patient, and generous to questions. but he must be cautious never to let the talk even on the part of the smallest children remain mere prattle, or degenerate into an aimless scamper around the paddock; he will see that there is a point or a line to cling to, and he will manage that this shall be done. every teacher knows how one petty or commonplace child, one would-be wit or skeptic, can drag the discussion into the dust and keep it there, unless he is promptly and perhaps vigorously suppressed. of course, in these discussions there is very small opportunity for training the voice and criticizing the language. let there be, if possible, a free flow of comment and contribution, uninterrupted by any corrections except those of the most egregious errors. the teacher who guides it should study his questions, and even with the little ones should bring into the light of discussion the vital and salient things, and by means of a question from time to time, keep the conference away from triviality and gossip. he will begin to train his children from the beginning to make legitimate inductions from their material, and will require them to give reasons based upon the actual story or poem. he will be able to lead them to find the precise point of departure in the story for the introduction of their personal experience or their new incident, and he will help them in every case to make clear the application of their own material to the discussion. it is in this spontaneous and free, but guided, conference that the children get most good out of the literature lessons. of course, as they grow older the discussion of persons and their conduct, and the ethical and social bearing of events and opinions, may be broadened and deepened. as they grow older, too, more correctness and style and fulness may be demanded in their impromptu contributions to the discussion. a child may, without suspecting it, and consequently without self-consciousness, acquire some considerable skill in extemporaneous speaking and some genuine intellectual ease in conversation from these class discussions. another natural return to be asked from the children is the repetition of the story, in whole or in part, by members of the class in their own words; though of course, after many hearings of it well told the children will have incorporated into their own vocabulary the most useful and characteristic words. this exercise should never be allowed to pass into a careless and slipshod performance; the children should be alive and responding alertly to the call made upon them. their grammar, their sentences, their emphases and intonations may appropriately be corrected more vigorously in this exercise than in the spontaneous discussion. the best literary effect is not secured by having the story retold immediately after the children have heard it, nor by having them understand beforehand that it is to be retold as a formal exercise. it may be brought out of them on some later occasion so as to give it the air of an independent contribution to the pleasure of the class. nothing is more deadly to the atmosphere of a story than the certainty on the part of the children that they are going to be called upon to retell it. this should never become a habitual exercise. it helps in a literary as well as a social way to divide the story in the retelling among the children according to movements, or even according to incidents, since this calls attention to its parts and organization. we may reasonably expect all the poems taught as literature to be memorized, since it does not take many repetitions of a poem to fix it in a child's memory. the vocal production of this poem gives the best opportunity for cultivating the child in voice, in enunciation and pronunciation. the teacher should not, of course, seem querulous and exacting in small matters, and it is better to leave a few careless spots in any one poem than to spoil the children's pleasure in it by too close criticism; but he can do much to help all the children toward a distinguished manner of expression. these memorized poems, like the stories they learn, should not be regarded as formal exercises to be recited once and be done with. they should be called for from time to time as contributions to the pleasure of the whole class. time is profitably given now and then to a story or verse tournament, a _sang-fest_, when the whole store of things acquired is brought out and enjoyed. in the two older classes each child may be required to choose, prepare, and present to the class a bit of literature. the choice and preparation must be done in consultation with the teacher; the presentation to the class regarded as a contribution to their artistic experience and accepted without criticism. paraphrasing is a process of doubtful value. it is never possible to express the precise meaning or mood in other words, and in the case of verse it serves to destroy the sense of inviolability of form that one would desire to develop and deepen. the direction, "state the same thought in other words," should never be given. to one delicately alive to the value of words and the shades of thought, it is a mere contradiction in terms. the same may be said of the practice of getting the children to substitute synonyms; in literature, especially in poetry, there can be no true synonyms, and no precisely synonymous expressions. many pleasant experiments are to be made in connecting some of the handwork of the youngest children with their literature. the attempt to realize some of their images in actual stuff constitutes an artistic experiment that has its literary reverberations, and helps to deepen the association. let them make a cloak for _little red riding-hood_, a fairies' coach of a nut shell, a boat, a tent--or whatever little object or property is imbedded in the story. out of practically every story, and out of many of the poems, they get an inspiration for a picture or a bit of modeling. such associations with literature are legitimate and natural. this appears very clear when we reflect that we are hoping to cultivate the taste and imagination of the children, and to teach them to love human life, with all that this implies, as well as to drill them in language, grammar, and writing. it seems necessary to handle aspects of the problem of language and writing in connection with literature in several different places, as we come upon the topic from different points of view. as has been said before, it is the duty of the teacher of literature, and of the lessons in literature, to help along the work in the language arts. it is even fair to assume that the children will take more interest in their composition lessons, and will get more profit out of them, when they are attached to something they have done in literature; but this is because they get out of literature more impulse toward creation, and more inspiration toward a beautiful and striking manner of expression. but composition is not merely a medium of creative expression; it is a means of plain communication, and should be developed in both directions and from both sources. this means that the children should write in connection with all their subjects, so that they do not, on the one hand, associate "english" and writing with literature only, and do not, on the other hand, run the risk of forming no style but a literary style. it is certainly true that we disquiet ourselves and persecute the children unnecessarily concerning the whole matter of writing during the elementary period. the children scarcely acquire the process of writing as a manual thing in the first four years. during the next four by good luck and much toil, most of them manage to reduce it to the stage of a tool. their consciousness of the process added to their consciousness of their spelling and grammar, leaves them little freedom in using the written composition as an avenue of spontaneous expression. add to this the fact that a large part of this period--the period of ten to fourteen--is the beginning of the great reticence. they are not telling what they know or feel; they have narrowed their vocabulary down to the absolutely necessary terms; they have seen through every device by which the teacher seeks to get them to express themselves. their written compositions will be, therefore, dogged exercises, and should be connected, as far as possible, with colorless information subjects. there are exceptional children and exceptional classes, indeed, to whom these generalizations do not apply. we have all heard of classes in distant elementary schools which "loved" to write. but there will of necessity be a certain amount of composition that will fall in with the work in literature, and will constitute one of the logical returns we ask of the children. this the teacher would like to have as spontaneous and as literary as possible. in general, we should like it to be creative, and not critical or reproductive. we would encourage them to devise new adventures of odysseus, or of robin hood, to give an experience of their own organized into a genuine story, an interpretation and effective description of some incident or event that has interested them or been invented by them. it is necessary, if you expect to get anything literary or creative out of them, to help to put them in the creative and literary mood. talk over with them the thing they mean to do; see that they have the vocabulary they will obviously need; enlarge their range of comparison and allusion by discussion; lead them to divide their material into suitable parts with some acceptable sequence; enrich their topics by kindred material; guide them into the observation and interpretation of material in the imaginative and literary way. some aspects of this process are illustrated in the following experience: a teacher had been reading howard pyle's _robin hood_, with occasionally one of the original ballads interspersed (but not the traditional "robin hood and the potter"), for three months; the children had also memorized during the same time three short lyrics; and in every lesson there had been discussions; the time had come when they must make something. they decided to follow the plan of their book and tell how robin hood added a new member to his band. these children were making pottery by way of handwork, and had lately had an interesting visit to see a potter working with his wheel. so the suggestion naturally made by some member of the class, that the new member of robin hood's band be a potter, was received with instant favor. the teacher read them "peter bell," and their hero promptly became a peddler-potter--the very same, suggested an agile child, whom tom, the piper's son, found beating his ass, and upon whom he played the merry trick. by this time the class could be restrained no longer. they climbed over one another's shoulders, literally and figuratively, with eager suggestions and copious details. after discussing the plan long enough to suggest an organization of the material into three natural parts, the children were set to work. the orderly and patient children produced satisfactory stories, abundant in material and beautiful in detail. all the others produced stories which, however disorderly and careless, were breathless with feeling and overflowing with stuff. some of them adopted tom, the piper's son, as the new member of the band, not being able to forgive the potter for beating the ass; some adopted them both; others, only the potter, duly lessoned and converted; all provided for the donkey. when they were aroused and provided, there was a spontaneous outflow of what was in every case, allowing for the varying temperaments and acquirements of the children, a really literary production. as long as the children are seriously hampered with the mechanics of writing, they should be allowed to dictate their work, when any practical plan can be devised for this. when the class is not too large, they should be taught to make a co-operative product, the teacher taking down what they agree upon, revising it to suit them. in the case of the older children these spontaneous and "literary" productions should not be too minutely criticized, and the revising and rewriting of them should not become a matter of drudgery. they should have other and more colorless written work upon which they may be drilled, lest the drill should kill their creative impulse or spoil their pleasure in the created product. their more important productions may be filed and given back to them six months later for their own correction. this critical review of their own work is generally an occasion of much pride, and the acquisition of some wholesome self-knowledge. it is possible that this attempt to distinguish literary writing from other composition may convey the impression that literature and literary production are set off, quite apart from life, and the children's other experiences and interests. this would be a misfortune. whenever any aspect of their lives, their work, or their play appeals to their emotions and their imaginations, when they are provided with a large vocabulary and have opened for them avenues of comparison, they will turn back a literary product. but it is seldom desirable to create this atmosphere in connection with their other studies, and the literary style and method is not a desirable one for all subjects. for the sake of the practice in writing and composing, and for the sake of acquiring ease in telling in writing what they know or desire to communicate, the children may write something every day. but not oftener than once in six weeks can we build up in a class the atmosphere, furnish the material, and bring up the enthusiasm for the production of something worth while in a literary way--story, essay, play, or poem. to set the elementary child, or even the high-school scholar, tasks of investigating in literature, as if he were a little college student is a serious mistake; or to set for him themes which call for such opinions and judgments as could be safely given only by a mature person. for instance, to ask the eighth grade in the average school to write a character-sketch of shylock is to make a bid for insincerity and unfounded judgment. but satisfactory results may be obtained by giving the children a simple syllabus of questions and suggestions, indicating quite suitable problems for them to work at in their out-of-school reading; this little syllabus is then made the basis of class discussion, and parts of it finally, of written work. it requires some skill to make such a syllabus, since it must not be made up of leading questions nor of tediously detailed suggestions, neither must it attempt to exhaust the material; but must be calculated to stimulate the children to observe and to think, and must be designed to guide them into those aspects of the story, play or poem that they may suitably and profitably consider. such a guide should be placed in the hands of young students including secondary children, whenever they are studying a mature and complex masterpiece. the dramatization and acting of any bit of literature that yields to this process is in many ways the most satisfactory return we can ask. in a previous chapter much has been said about the various dramatic settings and accompaniments of literature. from the treatment of rhymes and jingles as suggestions for games and plays, on through the genuine dramatization of a story, to the presentation of _the merchant of venice_ or some other developed literary drama, the teacher should forward as much as possible this mode of calling out the children. they must, of course, be guided by the teacher in the choice of a story for dramatization, seeking one that has clearly marked movements, some distinct events, a pretty well-rounded plot, occasion for dialogue, and other dramatic possibilities. the class may early be guided to the division of the story into its natural acts and scenes, which implies the omission of superfluous incidents and details. the difficulty comes in the supplying of the actual dialogue. the resourceful teacher will secure this dialogue by various means; for some of the scenes it will flow off without effort from the class in lesson assembled, one child suggesting a remark, another the reply, these being recorded and criticized by the class. for certain other scenes the dialogue may be prepared by groups of two or more children working apart from the class. for certain crucial and lofty scenes the teacher should make the "book." the whole must be submitted for discussion in the class, and may in the end call for considerable revision from the teacher; for the younger children cannot be expected to know and to meet the demands of dramatic dialogue--it must not only be speech, and fairly good as conversation, but it must forward the play with every sentence. of course, this revision must never be so sweeping as radically to remake the play, or even to alter the essential character that the children have given it, no matter how crude it may seem to the teacher and to other mature persons who hear it. let it stand as a bit of child-art, just as we rejoice to let crude productions stand as folk-art. of course, when the older children present a literary play or any part of it, they must memorize and give it conscientiously as it is written. indeed, the rendering with understanding and appreciation, of whatever they have learned of good and beautiful literature is, after all, the most satisfactory and natural return. if even in high school we asked this of the children, instead of those themes of crude or stale literary criticism which we all too often get, great would be the gain in freshness, in sincerity, in appreciation, and in ultimate taste. if we accustom the children to it from the beginning, and never intimate to them that it is difficult, it is about as easy to get verse out of them as prose. this is particularly true if the exercise is a social or co-operative one, in which the whole class unites to produce the ballad or the song. what the single child could not accomplish, the group does with perfect ease. and when the poem is done, nobody can tell who suggested this rhyme, this word, this whole line; but the whole is a product of which each child is proud, though he alone could never have compassed it. the communal story, ballad, song, or play is a unique and interesting performance, and any teacher who has ever assisted in making it feels sure that he has seen far into the social possibilities of art and the philosophy of literature. every teacher must devise his own plan of getting this co-operative, communal, social bit of literature made, but every teacher of literature should try it. all this, of course, has to do with the immediate practical return from the studies in literature. concerning the ultimate, distant return we cannot speak in terms of teaching and learning. art is long; like the human child, being destined to a long and vicissitudinous life, it had a long childhood; and this is true of its growth in each individual as of its growth in the race. so far as regards many of the most desired results of literature, we can but sow the seed, and wait years for the bloom--a lifetime, maybe, for the fruit. but though we may not reach a hand through all the years to grasp the far-off interest of our toil, we have every reason to believe that the harvest will be fair. chapter xvi the correlations of literature the term "correlation" is not to be used in this chapter in the specialized and technical sense that it has taken on in pedagogical discussion. it will be used, with apologies, to designate all connections of literature with any other subject or discipline in the elementary curriculum. no one interested in education can have failed to notice the fact that the doctrines of concentration, correlation, condensation, by whatever name called or under whatever aspect approached, have undergone many modifications and shifts of emphasis. like every other educational doctrine that has much of the truth in it, it was welcomed in the early days of its promulgation as the final solution, and seemed for a time to sweep out of existence, or into its own radius, every other theory or practice. one is obliged to wonder if educational people are peculiarly liable to be caught by a formula or an apparently axiomatic statement, build everything upon it, and silence every question by a reverential appeal to it. such seemed to be the attitude toward the doctrine of correlation when it first sifted down from the savants to the actual teachers in the actual schools; and many and monumental were the follies committed in the name of this pedagogical religion. modified and adapted under actual practical conditions, and criticized by the present generation of educational philosophers, it has come down to the school of today--that is to say, the school that is sensitive enough and free enough to respond quickly to new thinking--as, on the one hand, a protest against isolation and abstraction, and on the other hand, an appeal for such a conservation of the unity and naturalness of the child's consciousness as is consistent with the natural and legitimate use of material. in its present form the doctrine no longer justifies the violent wresting of subjects and topics from their natural settings, to be fitted together in some merely logical and theoretical system of instruction. in the days of determined and thoroughgoing correlation no department of discipline suffered more than the arts; and none of the other arts suffered as did literature. this is not difficult to account for. music and painting are quite professedly and obviously unconcerned with subject-matter--are, as a rule, entirely empty of definite intellectual content. but literature has ideas, it embodies concrete images, mentions specific objects, reflects experience, and sometimes even uses actual persons and historical events; above all, it employs the same medium of expression as the other subjects. all these matters made literature the peculiar prey of the ardent correlationists; to each or any, perhaps to all, of these phenomena in literature they could attach bodies of teaching in technical subjects, and systems of discipline in formal training. the case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other center--geography, for example, or history. for in the first case it was altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature, merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and really literary elements, out of sight. as, for example--and it is an authentic example of a scheme of correlation--the first-grade children are given as the center of their work _the old woman who found the sixpence_; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the type of _digitigrade carnivora_. or--again an authentic example--having read to the first grade _the musicians of bremen_, as one of them happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects and persons used in the story only in the literary way. in the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event, the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the migration of birds, he taught them bryant's "to a waterfowl," emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the poem--the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, _apropos_ of december weather, he set the fifth grade to reading whittier's slow-moving, meditative, and much too mature "snow-bound." as a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information material that may perchance be involved in the art. information-giving is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline combine and play into one another without difficulty. it is not necessary to speak again of the close and easy association of literature with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching, dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized drama. on the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature, it combines most acceptably with music. a great many of the lyrics that are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. and even when they cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. the exercises in drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a store from literature. as a matter of fact, when the children are set the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression--nausicaa throwing the ball, robin hood stringing his bow, siegfried tempering his sword, paul revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old nokomis. this is because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion, the vitality of a remembered joy. and it is true, as every teacher knows who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever can awaken. this mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing, modeling, acting, or music. on the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's literature to their lessons in reading--as regards both their beginning to read and their later practice in reading. it remains true that with all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster, to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. this drudgery literature should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. one would not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very large--larger than that of any other subject. it is quite legitimate to employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading; and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. we have agreed that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways from the reading of history or science. even the younger children can feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. but they should not always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but good style of merely intellectual reading. this they will not do if in their early reading exercises they are given more than their due proportion of literature. it is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the impression that reading is a tool, a key--perhaps we would better call it a gate through which one gets at many things--the joys and rewards of literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of nature, the details of handicraft. a reading-book, or any system of reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a mistake. from another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the reading-lessons with literature. as has been said more than once in these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emancipate literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a matter of the listening ear and the living voice. to identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to retard their mental and artistic growth. they can apprehend and appreciate many things that they cannot read. it is a commonplace that a child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. of course, this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children who learn to read late--the simplicity of the thought and expression in the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to them intellectually. it is in the literature received by his ear that a child grows and exercises his maturer powers. the older children should be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative reading of their literature. the best results in this most profitable aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more completely under control. the objections to the association of drill in writing, in spelling, in grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. it may be granted that there is something in the fact that literature represents the most effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most interesting kind of writing. still this does not constitute a sufficient reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching these things should attach to literature. it is a perfidious breaking of the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as possible of the atmosphere of play. of course, drill in language and in written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these. on the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's education to identify "english" with literature, since there is and should be so much english that is not literature, and so much literature that is not english. one of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. in those elementary classes where the children have instruction in either german or french--or, for the matter of that, in spanish or italian--every effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the characteristic and universal literary effect. the german lyric has all the beauty of music and of image that the english has; the french fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could use in english translation. a few of the fallacies of correlation, or mere co-relation, of literature with other aspects of the children's school experience are these: the fallacy of setting out to teach children the love of home, or country, or nature, or animals, by teaching them literature that expresses or reflects those emotions. the love of one's own country must be in our day a thing of slow and gradual growth. our feelings about our country should arise out of our knowledge of the heroic things in her history, out of the noble plans for her growth, out of the generous things she provides for her children and the children of other lands. out of this or some such basis arises the emotion of patriotism, a poem or a story which reflects this emotion has some such back-ground by implication. to hunt about for a poem or story which teaches patriotism is a putting of the cart before the horse. first arouse in your children the emotion--an original personal emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you are so much the richer. the children will find their own feeling reinforced and nobly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified. the same thing is true as to the love of animals. if the children have the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. but first give your grade a dog, or a cat, or a canary; or give your child in the country a pony, or a lamb, or a pig; that they may feel at first hand the throb of dramatic brotherhood, of humorous kinship, that constitutes love of animals. then, when, judging by the proper canons that test good literature, you find a piece that reflects and deepens this, it is so much pure gain. the same thing is true of nature. the children should have many things that reflect feelings about nature and natural phenomena, and that give the interpretations which great and gifted artists have made of these things. but one should no more go to literature for creating first-hand love of nature than he would go to the same source for facts about any specific phenomenon in nature. of course, this is not saying that we demand that a child shall have had a previous experience of every image and phenomenon of nature that is presented to him in literature. indeed, we expect literature to complement and supplement life in the matter of imagery; to deepen and to arouse experience in the matter of emotion. but the fallacy lies in choosing literature on this ground, and in depending upon literature to create at first hand what is, and should be, an extra-literary feeling. now, from time to time there comes the teacher's way one of those rare chances when he finds the time, the place, and the poem all together, as when on some march day of thaw he can teach "the cock is crowing," of wordsworth; on the first morning of hoar-frost he can read "the frost;" on another day, "the wind"--the things that harmonize with the spirit of an experience. another of the fallacies of correlation is the determined, if not violent, association of the work in literature with the festivals. as a matter of fact, there is not much more than time in certain schools to teach the younger children the things they are expected to know about thanksgiving, christmas, washington's birthday, easter, june. the work for the next celebration begins just as soon as the foregoing one is past. the partitioning of the year into these very emphatic sections, and the carrying of the children through the same round year after year, are questions too general to be treated here. but we are interested in the fact that in most cases the specimens of literature that can be considered applicable to the festivals would never be chosen from out the world of things for their absolute value as literature, nor for their peculiar suitability for the children. so it comes about that the children--the younger classes, at least--spend as much as two-thirds of their time at second- or third-rate specimens of literature. there is not much reason for protesting in our day against that species of correlating literature with something else which consists in teaching in connection with this literature things that the children ought to know later, regardless of their immediate fitness or acceptability; as for example the facts of greek mythology, the characters and plots of shakespeare's plays; we can never be too grateful for that interpretation of childhood and of education which has made this hereafter impossible. at the same time, if we choose wisely now, choose in the light of our best knowledge, the children will be glad all their lives to know the things we choose for them. the connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and is not easily disposed of. as a matter of fact, the partnership between history and literature, so vaguely asserted and so complaisantly accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has usually gone to the wall. indeed, the practical adjustment of history and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. one of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation whose history they are studying; as for example, the homeric poems when they study the history of greece, that they may imbibe the true greek spirit from the poems. now, children of elementary age cannot distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. it is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that they feel. besides, the greek national spirit, the spirit of the characteristic greek period, was not homeric, and the literature of the characteristic greek period would never do for the elementary children. in the case of greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because the homeric poems are never bad for the children. but the same principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring disaster. the other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a class in the history of the plymouth colony, we give them longfellow's "the courtship of miles standish" for literature, which, except for one or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for young children; and as, when we study the american revolution, we give them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period. the whole matter of the historical romance is important and complicated--too complicated and involving too many critical principles to be handled here. it must be sufficient to say in this connection what is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic--that he who takes up and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a master and produces a masterpiece--much too mature and developed for elementary children. only scott possessed the faculty of keeping generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional _longeur_, and adding to it a rattling good story. but scott is too mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that interested him. no, the kinship between history and literature, and the co-operations between them in the children's experience, are not of this external and artificial kind. it is for the mature and philosophical student to study literature as a culture product--its relation to the country and the times that produced it. it is for much older students to read the great romances, like tolstoy's _war and peace_, that adequately mirror an epoch or an epoch-making event. for the children there is a deeper spiritual kinship between history and literature. it has to do with the personal and dramatic side, the biography and adventure of history. it lies in the spirit and atmosphere of human achievement, in the identity of the motives that express themselves in literature and in actual accomplishment. when we study the pioneer and the colonist--the born and doomed colonist--we find his kinsman and prototype in robinson crusoe. when we study the revolution, the revolt against unjust laws, the protest of democracy against class-oppression, we find the spirit of robin hood. i hasten to disclaim any intention of advising these particular combinations. the examples should merely serve to make clear certain aspects of the kinship of spirit between literature and history. of course one does now and again, and as it were, by special grace, find a story or a poem--like the "concord hymn," or "marion's men," or "the landing of the pilgrim fathers"--precisely _apropos_ of his event and beautifully adapted to his literary needs. and one often comes upon a historical document--like _the oregon trail_ or _the autobiography of benjamin franklin_--so picturesque and concrete, so observant of effects of unity and harmony, so full of appeals to the imagination, and so effective in verbal expression, as to yield many of the effects of literature. in spite of all protests against forced and mistaken associations of literature with other subjects in school, we must constantly insist that it is no isolated thing, detached from life. on the contrary, literature arises out of life, and is always arising out of it and reacting upon it. it is effective and practically operative in a child's life precisely because it, too, is life. it is closer, therefore, to his business and bosom than any item or system of knowledge could be. it is not to disturb its trustworthiness and value to say that it does not primarily convey information and cannot be called upon to deliver facts. it does render truth and wisdom, the summary and essence of fact and knowledge. it does not destroy its educational value to say that we shall search it in vain for a body or a system of organized discipline; for, since it is art, it disciplines while it charms and teaches us while it sets us free. the natural correlations of literature are with the other arts, but, above all, with the spirit of childhood, and with the consciousness of children; with the tone and spirit of their other work, rather than with its actual subject-matter. chapter xvii literature out of school and reading other than literature were it not for appearing captious or extravagant, one would like to say that in these days of cheap and easy books, and amidst the temptations of the free libraries, the problem is that of keeping the children from reading too much, rather than of inducing them to read enough. this is particularly true of children in our large american cities, whom we must, in our first generation of city-dwelling, guard against eye-strain, and nerve-strain, and library-air, and physical inactivity of all sorts. luckily, our generation has learned some things about the educational processes that have tended to lessen materially the danger of over-reading. in many homes, and to many children out of school, books and magazines have hitherto been a sort of opiate, from the point of view of the child deadening the hungry sensibilities and lulling the stifled activities; and from the point of view of the parent securing silence and providing an apparently innocuous occupation. this is all too little changed now, though more and more homes are providing opportunity and encouragement for other occupations: shop and studio, and more abundant material and opportunity for play. in the cities the public playgrounds and gymnasiums--and all too rarely the public workshop and studio for children--begin to share with the public library the task of safely taking care of the children out of school. but there will always be time for reading, and by all means the legitimate share of the children's time should be given to it. the so-called supplementary reading given them by the school is largely, i take it, a question of the much reading that will make the process easier, and not a matter of accumulating facts, or of acquiring a wider knowledge of literature. in many schools that i have observed it is often unwisely and carelessly chosen, so far as the literary share of it is concerned. it should be selected partly for its bearing upon the fact-studies, and not wholly made up of things of the literary kind. the bearings of the question of the school's supplementary reading are not literary, or, so far as they are, they have been discussed in other connections. every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got together with reference to his needs and tastes. it may be serviceable to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such a library of a child up to his fourteenth year. there should be in such a collection several biographies. on the whole, let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. children get at their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. in their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images and events of history. it is therefore only good pedagogy to present the figures on their heroic and ideal side. let these biographies include the record of different sorts of men--a statesman, a pioneer, a preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business man, a man of letters--so that many types of character and kinds of experience may be reflected. as the children grow older, they will dip into history for the images--the persons and detachable events. the search for facts and philosophy will come many years later. some tempting books of history should appear on their shelves; _the dutch republic_, _the conquest of mexico_, parkman's romantic narratives, and john fiske's; if possible the illustrated edition of _green's history of the english people_. most of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what they get from the biographies of the central figures in the events--columbus, william of orange, francis drake, and all the other picturesque and heroic persons. other historical reading would best be done under guidance and in connection with the work in school. there should be a few books of travel and exploration. among these there should be some of the original sources, if possible the _bradford journal_, the _jesuit relations_, the _lewis and clark journals_. froissart and marco polo should be included; the fable-making travelers perform a very useful function. to these may be added a few most recent explorations--african, arctic, andean, thibetan. children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science; but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection--not romances of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the door-yard and the home woodland. and when a child develops a taste or a gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. all children should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and inventions. by way of nature and animal books we will include the _jungle books_, an expurgated edition of _reynard the fox_, _aesop's fables_, and, of course, _uncle remus_. other semi-scientific nature-writers will doubtless appear in most collections of children's books--and may do no harm. a book of greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be accessible. no other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so artistically put together. the children do not need to have to do with many myths until they know something about interpreting them. of course, they should have access to the bible in some attractive form. a large illustrated edition--doré's or tissot's--will please and instruct them from their earliest days. this is one of the cases in which pictures--good and imaginative pictures--form a desirable gateway into a realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. of course, poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings. doré's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to a noble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to construct; while tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try to image in reading the hebrew stories--from the nomadic simplicity of the saga of pastoral abraham to the luxurious refinements of the romanized and cosmopolitan jerusalem. the little scholar should find on his shelves lanier's _king arthur_, pyle's _robin hood_, palmer's _odyssey_, some translation of the _iliad_; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected few of scott's romances--_ivanhoe_, _quentin durward_, _guy mannering_, _anne of geierstein_; a few of cooper's; _robinson crusoe_, _don quixote_, william morris' prose tales, a pair of quiller-couch's, and as many of joseph conrad's; these might constitute his romances. but unless he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he is given masses of cheap and easy reading, such as the henty books and the alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of "the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. the cheap and easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the line of least resistance to the young reader. they flow into his mind without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters, he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. one would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the henty and alger type. one can imagine a child whose every bent was against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and commonplace experience. and one can imagine their being useful to wean children away from really vicious books. in a certain boys' club i know, organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable substitute for the bloody romances they had been reading. many of those boys have never passed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was hoped, stepping-stones to better things. there is no place for them in the ideal collection of children's books. certain books, harmless and as recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the children's shelves--miss alcott's, mrs. richards', and others of the many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of using books. to be sure, you will probably find that your child has found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early day re-reading the tournament at ashby, and patronizingly alluding to the time when she was enslaved to "the little general" series, or the "under the roses" or the "eight half-sisters" series, or any other particular juveniles, as "when i was a child." in the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite resolutely. it is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of fairy-tales. eschew all the modern ones. of course, if you have a personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than literary your children will read them. but as to those you choose freely for them let them have grimm and perrault, and the _arabian nights_, and after a while andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough. for poetry, the child should have on his own shelves some pretty edition of the _nursery rhymes_, _the child's garden_, some really good collection of little things--_the posy ring_, for example, henley's _lyra heroica_, lang's _the blue poetry book_, allingham's _book of ballads_. for the rest he should be read to from the poets themselves, and as soon as he is old enough, sent to the volumes of the poets for his reading. as in school so at home the children should hear their poetry read until they acquire some real degree of expertness as readers. children who can not understand at all, poetry which they read silently, will delight in it read aloud. this little collection should contain the classic nonsense, but not all kinds of inartistic fooling and rude fun. there should be _alice in wonderland_ and _through the looking-glass_ (always the one with tenniel's pictures). we must remember that _alice_ is very delicate art, and that its final and deepest appeal is to the mature person. certain very imaginative children take to it as a fanciful tale at the moment of ripeness; others miss it then, and must wait until the wonderful dream-psychology of it, and the delicate satire of its parodies can make their appeal to them as older persons. lear's _nonsense rhymes_ in judicious doses every child should have; "john gilpin's ride;" certain of the _bab ballads_; a little of oliver heresford's delightful foolishness. among the folk- and fairy-tales he will find many comic bits whose kind or degree of humor will suit him admirably in his younger years. in clouston's _book of noodles_ may be found a mine of such funny tales. _the peterkin papers_ is the best of modern noodle-tales. no family can be brought up without the help of _strewel peter_, nor should they miss _little black sambo_. most american children are enchanted with the fun of tom sawyer and huck finn though one must sadly acknowledge that it is woven into back-grounds of a sensational kind not at all improving to an unformed taste. one cannot feel that parodies are in general good for children; though, after they have had a good share of serious enjoyment out of their fairy-tales, and especially if they seem too much or too long absorbed in them, they ought to have _the rose and the ring_ and _prince prigio_. picture-books and illustrated books are another independent little problem. it is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral mahogany sofas, refreshing themselves from antique silver porringers, that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor. it is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old dutch woodcuts in great-grandmama's bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic plates of the _mother-play_; the wonderful prints of comenius' _orbis pictus_; the casualties of john leech's hunting fields. true, they delight in the charming details of all kate greenaway's books; and walter crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to "shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. every nursery that can compass it should have as many as possible of the books illustrated in color by boutet de monvel. the children should never see comic illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. they are all banal as wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. after they have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories. the black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text. there should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the little readers in the big one, beside the illustrated bible, the one big volume of shakespeare with gilbert's pictures--an inexhaustible mine of life and art; engelmann and anderson's _atlas of the homeric poems_, a _dictionary of classical antiquities_, and an encyclopedia that the older children can use, should have a place on these shelves. it is so often said as to amount to a mere convention that the best possible literary experience for a child is to be turned loose to browse (they always say "browse") in a grown-up library. one always finds a malicious pleasure in detecting in these people (and they are always to be found in great plenty) those baby impressions, still uncorrected that they got of many books in the course of their browsing. of course, in a house where there are many books the children will experiment, will taste of many dishes, and possibly devour many things not intended for them. from some of these they will take no serious harm, while in many other cases they will get a permanent warp of judgment or of feeling. it would seem to me wise to guide the child in his explorations, giving him plenty of those grown-up things that you believe to be good for him, and heading him off as long as possible from the others. for all your caution, however, children will be found buried in _tom jones_, mousing about in montaigne, chuckling over _tristram shandy_, and befuddling themselves with _ghosts_ and _anna karénina_. in these cases we can only hope that nature has mercifully ordained that, not having the necessary apperception experience, they will not get at the real truth of these books, and that they will have the luck--rare, to be sure--to remove and correct their mistaken impressions in some subsequent reading. the ideal co-operation between home, school, sunday school, and library is yet to be brought about; teacher and parents can do much to promote it. as a step toward this co-operation they should provide every child who reads in a library with a list of books. the imaginative books in the list given out by the public libraries are practically all juveniles, apparently chosen mainly for the purpose of amusing children who have no books in their homes. these things are undoubtedly amusing; they are superficially appetizing; and they have the same effect that the soda fountain at the corner drug-shop has upon the children's appetite for true nourishment--they take the edge off his hunger so that he has no relish for his bread and butter, though he has had nothing to eat but a hint of cheap flavor, a dash of formaldehyde, a spoonful of poor milk, and a glassful of effervescence. the lists given by parents and teachers may change all this, but only if they include good things, beautiful and interesting enough to make these wasteful juveniles seem unattractive. every schoolroom in which the children are old enough to be interested, and every family should devise a method of digesting the news of the world every day or every week, so that the children may have some knowledge of current events. of course, there are children who cannot be kept from reading the morning paper--crimes, sports, and all. such a child's family should choose its newspaper with all possible care every self-respecting family where there are children should be willing to submit to the very small sacrifice of foregoing the sunday paper, to save the little people from the flood of commonplace, of triviality, and of ribaldry that overwhelms them from these monstrous productions. perhaps no well-brought-up child would be quite well equipped if he has not had _the youth's companion_ and _st. nicholas_ in his childhood; but it is a mistake to let them linger too long in these periodicals, whose contents are somewhat fragmentary as literature, and not quite large enough or full enough as to current events and interests. it is wise to turn the children as soon as possible to the mature and more thorough magazines, among which should be included a technical and scientific journal. by all means do not subject them to the temptation of the various story-magazines--those cheap and easy chronicles of the questionable affairs of undergraduates and chorus girls, of nietzschean superhumanity gone to seed, of imitations of the imitated psychology of the wild, all rendered in the english of third-year college themes. if the adult members of the family must have these things, let them be kept, along with "the season's best sellers," out of easy reach of the children. it should not need to be said that there has been no attempt in the foregoing discussion to recommend every good thing, or to give an exhaustive list of such things in any one line; no more has there been an effort to give warning of all things undesirable, but merely, as in the whole book, to state the underlying principles of choice, with just enough specific examples to make clear their application. chapter xviii a course in literature for the elementary school the list of titles in literature given below must be taken as free suggestion, not at all as dogmatic requirement; least of all should it be regarded as an exhaustive and definitive programme. throughout this little book there has been a deliberate effort to mention no more examples and specimens than would serve to support and illustrate the principles stated or the theories advanced, so as to keep out of it the wearing atmosphere of interminable lists, and to leave those who might accept the doctrines quite free to apply them in the selection of their own specimens. so now in the plan appended the titles have been carefully sifted and resolutely limited. it should not be necessary to say that it is not intended that all the specimens mentioned in any one year should be given within that year in every school--perhaps in any school; or that they should necessarily be given in the year to which they are here assigned. they are rather designed to indicate the kind of thing one would choose for the average classes in the average school, and to suggest things that go well together. i have even ventured to hope that those who read the book will also take the pains to read all the specimens mentioned in the programme, so as to catch their spirit and atmosphere, and after that choose quite freely for themselves these or other titles. the field of choice is especially wide among the folk-tales; all those mentioned are good, and suitable for the places in which they are put. but there are others good and suitable, which may, indeed, better satisfy the needs of some special teacher or class. in some schools, no doubt, it will be well to give a third year of folk-tales and simple lyrics before beginning the hero-tales. in that case the whole course would be pushed along a year, making for the last or eighth year a combination of bits taken from the seventh and eighth years suggested here. the course is planned for a school whose children go on into high school; though one can see little reason for a different course in literature for those children who stop with a grammar-school education. what we covet for such children is not knowledge of much literature, nor knowledge of any literature in particular, but a taste for wholesome books and some trustworthy habits of reading. these results are best secured when a few suitable and beautiful things have been lovingly taught and joyfully apprehended. children thus provided will keep on reading; if they have been really fed on _julius caesar_ or _the tempest_ they will hunger for more shakespeare; if they have taken delight in _treasure island_ they will pursue stevenson and find scott and cooper. the chances for implanting in them some living and abiding love of books are much better if we teach them in school the things they may easily master and completely contain, than if we try to supply them with what only an adult reader can expect to appropriate, which therefore takes on the character of a task, or remains in their minds a mere chaotic mass. the plan of the course is simple and obvious enough. indeed, the main idea is first of all merely that of putting into each year such things as will delight and train a child of that age in literary ways. with this is joined the equally simple and reasonable purpose of giving in each year an acceptable variety looking toward the development of a generous taste--a story, a heroic poem, a musical lyric or two, a bit of fun, a group of fables. throughout the programme there has been a conscious attempt to use things every teacher knows or may very easily find, and of associating things that harmonize in spirit. for the first two years the folk-tales form the core of the course. to the folk-tales is joined a group of simple lyrics, many of them the more formal and expressive of the traditionary rhymes. as a matter of course, in a school where these first- and second-year children have not already had in kindergarten or in the home nursery the simpler rhymes and jingles--"little boy blue," "jack horner," "there was a man in our town"--they should be taught. in the third year _robinson crusoe_ constitutes the large core. as suggested in another chapter it is well to treat this story as if it were a cycle, taking it in episodes, and interweaving with it other bits of literature which harmonize with it, either reinforcing it or counteracting it. it may easily happen that a teacher would select a quite different group of poems for study along with _robinson crusoe_, according as he emphasized some other aspect of the story and according to the maturity of his children. this programme assumes a pretty mature third-year group. it may be in many schools well to transfer, as i have suggested, this whole arrangement to the fourth year. the fifth- and sixth-year work is arranged upon a similar plan--that of constituting a story or a story-cycle the center of the work, and associating with it shorter and supplementary bits. while the poems in both cases are such as harmonize in subject or idea with aspects of the two stories that will inevitably appear in the teaching, they have not been chosen solely from that point of view; they are also in every case beautiful as detached poems, and ideally, at least, suitable for the children. every experienced teacher will have other verses and stories in mind which may be added to those given or substituted for them. some of them will be useful, not as class studies necessarily, but as a part of that "reserve stock" that every teacher has, from which he draws from time to time something to read to his class which they are not expecting. in the programme for the sixth year an alternative is suggested. many teachers will find enough in the _arthur_ stories to form the core of the literature for the year. others will find material for the whole year's stories in the norwegian and icelandic sagas. many will not like the suggestion of giving the antidote of the chivalric romances--_don quixote_. many will prefer to drop hero-tales and romances in favor of more modern stories. such a group of stories is suggested introducing the stories that call for interpretation, and the apprehending of a secondary meaning. this paves the way for the stories of the seventh year which call for some genuine literary interpretation. in the seventh year programme the two dramatic bits of yeats's are suggested, not only because they are charming in themselves, and are in charming artistic contrast, but because they can easily be staged and acted, and are full of suggestion of the kind of thing the children can do themselves. _the pot of broth_ is the dramatization of a well-known folk-droll, and _the hour-glass_ is a morality calling for no complexity of dialogue, of staging, or of dramatic motive--the kind of play the children can most easily produce both as literature and as acting. as suggested in a previous chapter, during this and the following year each child should be encouraged or required to learn a poem or a story of his own choosing, which he presents to the class. this will greatly enrich the class programme. only one fable is suggested--one of fontaine's, the interpretation or moral of which should now be given by the class; many other fables may be used in the same way, if this exercise seems to be profitable. as every observer of schools knows, it is the eighth-year children who need most accommodation and understanding. the programme offered is designed for the normal class in the average school--when the children are really passing into the secondary stage and should be preparing to go into high school without crossing a chasm. but it may need much modification for those eighth-year classes in which there are belated children and unevenly developed children. it is quite possible that _julius caesar_, _the tempest_, and _sohrab and rustum_ may prove impracticable for such a class, and that something easier would have to be substituted. in no case can we hope to teach the two plays exhaustively, either as regards their form or their content. but both these plays are of that kind of great art that has many levels to which one may climb in turn, with his growing maturity. and the beauty of both these plays is that in case the class is precocious and does inquire deeply into them, there is nothing in the political philosophy of _julius caesar_ or in the spiritual and social philosophy of _the tempest_ that may not be safely explained to them. this programme makes no mention, as may be seen, of the many minor lyrics and bits of drama and story that will be added from many sources and in many connections: from their home reading; from the teacher's reserve stock; from their reading lessons; from their work in other languages; from their preparation for festivals and celebrations; from suggestions of weather and season; from occasional current periodicals, and possibly from other sources. and when all is said, one must say again that there cannot be a strictly normalized and fixed curriculum in literature since in this subject more than in any other the personnel of the class must be considered; their typical inheritance, their tradition, their social grade, their community, their other interests, their passing preoccupation and almost their daily mood, are factors in the problem. the teacher who is sensitive to these matters in his class will soon emancipate himself from the fixed curriculum. let him at the same time be sensitive to the emphasis and appeal of each bit of art he chooses for them, and he cannot fail. whatever his results they will be good. after so long a preamble follows the list of specimens: first year sagas: "how arthur drew the sword from the stone." "how arthur got the sword excalibur." märchen: _briar-rose_, grimm. _snow-white and rose-red_, grimm. _the elves and the shoemaker_, grimm. _the musicians of bremen_, grimm. drolls: _simple simon._ _the johnny-cake._ accumulative tales: "the old woman who found the sixpence." _henny-penny_. _the little red hen_. fables: "the crow and the pitcher." "the hare and the tortoise." verses: "i saw a ship a-sailing." "sing a song of sixpence." "there was a little guinea-pig." "tom, tom, the piper's son." "birdie, with the yellow bill," stevenson. "my shadow."--stevenson. second year sagas: "siegfried gets the sword from mimi." "siegfried and the dragon." "siegfried rescues brunhild." märchen: _cinderella, or the little glass slipper._--perrault. "aladdin and the wonderful lamp," in _arabian nights_. "the fisherman and the genie," in _arabian nights_. _beauty and the beast._--madame de beaumont. _the poor little turkey girl._--cushing. drolls: _hans in luck._--grimm. _kluge else._--grimm. chapters from _the peterkin papers_.--hale. _little black sambo._--bannerman. _the gray goose._--pearson. accumulative tales: _the three billygoats_, norwegian. _munachar and manachar_, irish. _titty-mouse and tatty-mouse_. fables: "the town mouse and the field mouse." "the stork and the log." "the fox and the crow." verses: "three children sliding on the ice." "four brothers over the sea." "the fairies," allingham. "little gustava," celia thaxter. "singing," stevenson. "little indian, sioux or crow," stevenson. "the wind," stevenson. "my ship," stevenson. "the lamb," blake. "piping down the valleys wild," blake. "the pied piper of hamelin," browning. "the mountain and the squirrel," emerson. third year _robinson crusoe_. _sinbad the sailor._ _toomai of the elephants._--kipling. _rikki-tikki-tavi._--kipling. _reynard the fox._ (selected stories.) "_uncle remus._" (selected stories.) "the landing of the pilgrim fathers in new england," mrs. hemans. "columbus," joaquin miller. the twenty-third psalm. authorized version. "the idle shepherd boys," wordsworth. "spinning song," wordsworth. "the village blacksmith," longfellow. "tubal cain," mackay. "the wreck of the hesperus," longfellow. "the discoverer of the north cape," longfellow. "the spider and the fly," mary howitt. "the palm tree," whittier. "hiawatha builds his canoe," longfellow. dramatization of a story of some voyager or pioneer. fourth year _robin hood_ (given partly from howard pyle's _robin hood_, partly from the ballads). "under the greenwood tree," shakespeare. "blow, blow, thou winter wind," shakespeare. "waken, lords and ladies gay," scott. "meg merriles," keats. "the chough and the crow," baillie. "song of marion's men," bryant. "my captain," whitman. "lochinvar," scott. "the shepherd of king admetus," lowell. "abou ben ahdem," hunt. "yussouf," lowell. "sherwood," alfred noyes. "march," wordsworth. "when icicles hang by the wall," shakespeare. "the jabberwocky," _alice in wonderland_. fifth year _the odyssey._--george herbert palmer. (translation.) _gulliver's travels_: "the voyage to lilliput." "the white seal," kipling. "the coast-wise lights," kipling. "the sea," barry cornwall. "sir patrick spens," folk ballad. "the inchcape rock," southey. "to a waterfowl," bryant. "lead, kindly light," newman. "the chambered nautilus," holmes. "the lake isle of innisfree," yeats. "breathes there a man," scott. "uphill," christina rossetti. "the long white seam," jean ingelow. "the exile of erin," campbell. sixth year heroic adventures from the chivalric cycles of king arthur, of siegfried, of roland, and the cid, and selected episodes from _don quixote_. or _the drums of the fore and aft._--kipling; _rip van winkle._--irving; _the bee-man of orn._--stockton; _old pipes and the dryad._--stockton; _the man born to be king._--morris. "the lady of shalott," tennyson. "hack and hew," bliss carman. "the song of the chattahoochee," lanier. "the cloud," shelly. "the walrus and the carpenter," from _alice in wonderland_. seventh year _the great stone face._--hawthorne. _the snow image._--hawthorne. _the gold bug._--poe. _the pot of broth._--yeats. _the hour-glass._--yeats. "a dissertation on roast pig," lamb. "the vision of mirza," addison. "king robert of sicily," longfellow. "horatius at the bridge," macaulay. "the ballad of east and west," kipling. "heroes," edna dean proctor. "the yarn of the nancy bell," gilbert. "the wolf and the mastiff," fontaine. eighth year _julius caesar._--shakespeare. _the tempest._--shakespeare. _sohrab and rustum._--arnold. _treasure island._--stevenson. "old china," charles lamb. _wake robin_ (selections).--john burroughs. "my garden acquaintance," warner. "the goblin market," christina rossetti. "each and all," emerson. "hart-leap well," wordsworth. "i wandered lonely as a cloud," wordsworth. "the splendor falls," tennyson. "the revenge," tennyson. "etin the forester," folk ballad. "thomas rymer," folk ballad. anyone who has read these eighteen chapters should find himself provided with a set of maxims and injunctions among which will be the following: . choose the literature for the children under the guidance of those principles by which you test any literature. . remember that literature is art; it must be taught as art, and the result should be an artistic one. . never teach a thing you do not love and admire. but learn to suspect that when you do not love it the fault is in you, and is curable. . according to the best light you have, choose those things that are fitted for the children--corresponding to their experience, or awakening in them experiences you would like them to have. . teach your chosen bit of literature according to its nature and genius. study it so sympathetically that you can follow its hints, and make its emphases. teach each piece for its characteristic effect, and do not try to teach everything in any one piece. . be contented to read with the children a limited number of things. you cannot read every delightful and helpful thing. you can only introduce them to literature and teach them to love it. . when you have led your class, or half your class, into a vital and personal love of literature and set their feet on the long path of the reader's joy, you have done them the best service you can perform as a teacher of literature. finis [transcriber's note] this is derived from a copy on the internet archive: http://www.archive.org/details/educationhowold walsgoog page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. { }. they have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" and inconsistent spelling is left unchanged. unusual use of quotation marks is also unchanged. extended quotations and citations are indented. footnotes have been renumbered to avoid ambiguity, and relocated to the end of the enclosing paragraph. [end transcriber's note] education how old the new by james j. walsh, m.d., ph.d., litt. d. dean and professor of the history of medicine and of nervous diseases at fordham university school of medicine; professor of physiological psychology at the cathedral college, new york. second impression new york fordham university press copyright. , by james j. walsh published october th, second impression march th, the quinn & boden co. press ramway, n.j. to the _xavier alumni sodality_ most of the thoughts contained in this volume were originally expressed at our breakfasts. it seems only fitting, then, that on presentation to a larger audience they should be dedicated to you. j. j. w. _our lady's day._ august , {v} preface the reason for publishing this volume of lectures and addresses is the persuasion that present-day educators are viewing the history of education with short-sighted vision. an impression prevails that only the last few generations have done work of serious significance in education. the history of old-time education is neglected, or is treated as of at most antiquarian interest and there is a failure to understand its true value. the connecting link between the lectures and addresses is the effort to express in terms of the present what educators were doing in the past. once upon a time, when i proclaimed the happiness of the english workmen of the middle ages, the very positive objection was raised, "how could they be happy since their wages were only a few cents a day?" for response it was only necessary to point out that for his eight cents, the minimum wage by act of parliament, the workman could buy a pair of handmade shoes, that being the maximum price established by law, and other necessaries at similar prices. if old-time education is studied with this same care to translate its meaning into modern values, then the very oldest education of which we have any record takes on significance even for our time. {vi} while it is generally supposed that there are many new features in modern education, it requires but slight familiarity with educational history to know that there is very little that is novel. such supposedly new phases as nature-study and technical training and science, physical as well as ethical, are all old stories, though they have had negative phases during which it would be hard to to trace them. the more we know about the history of education the greater is our respect for educators at all times. nearly always they had a perfectly clear idea of what they were trying to do, they faced the problems of education in quite the same spirit that we do and often solved them very well. indeed the results of many periods of old-time education are much better than our own, even when judged by our standards. unfortunately there exists a very common persuasion that evolution plays a large role in education and that we, "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," are necessarily in the forefront of educational advance. there has been much progress in education in the last century, but it would, indeed, be a hopeless world if there had not been progress out of the depths in which education was plunged in the eighteenth century. there were a number of reformers in education at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. it was rather easy to be an educational reformer at that time. the lowest period in the history of {vii} education was about the middle of the eighteenth century. it has been assumed that since we are far ahead of that generation we must be still farther ahead of the people who preceded them. that is the mistake. there are periods of education of very great significance centuries long before that time. in educational lectures and addresses for the past five years, i have been trying to translate into modern terms the meaning of these old periods of education. a great many teachers have thought the ideas valuable and suggestive and so i am tempted to publish them in book form. there is an additional reason, that of wishing to create a bond of sympathy between the two systems of education that have grown up in this country. for some three generations now catholic educators have been independently building up a system of education from the elementary schools to the university. the american world of education is coming to recognize how much they have accomplished. there has even been some curiosity expressed as to how it was all done in spite of apparently insuperable obstacles. one phase of catholic education, its thorough-going conservatism and definite effort to value the past properly and take advantage of its precious lessons, is here represented. my own educational interests have been taken up much more of late years with medicine than with other phases of this subject. hence the {viii} volume contains certain addresses relating to the history of medical education. they are more intimately linked with the general subject of education than might perhaps be thought. we have had finely organized medical education at a number of times in the past, and, indeed, at the present moment can find inspiration and incentive in studying the legal regulation of medicine and of medical education in what might seem to be so-unpromising a time as the thirteenth century. for true educational progress there has always been need of close sympathy between the non-professional and the professional department of universities. only when the professional schools are real graduate departments, requiring under-graduate training for admission, is the university doing its work properly. this was the rule in the past--hence the precious lessons for the present in the story of these old-time universities. these lectures and addresses were actually delivered, not merely read. they were written with that purpose. certain repetitions that would have been avoided if the articles had been prepared directly for reading and not for an audience, may be noted. some of the subjects overlap and certain phases had to be treated usually in variant form in different lectures. for these faults the reader's indulgence is craved. contents chapter page i. education, how old the new ii. the first modern university iii. mediaeval scientific universities iv. ideal popular education v. cycles of feminine education and influence vi. the church and feminine education vii. origins in american education viii. the medical profession for six thousand years ix. university medical schools x. the college man in life xi. new englandism education, how old the new "nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us." --_ecclesiastes i: _. "nullum est jam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius." --terence, _eun. prol.,_ . [nothing is now said which was not said before.] st. jerome relates that his preceptor donatus, commenting on this passage of terence, used to say: "pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt." [may they perish who said our good things before us.] { } education, how old the new [footnote ] [footnote : material for this lecture was gathered for one of a course of lectures on phases of education delivered at st mary's college, south bend, ind., at the sacred heart academy, kenwood, albany, n. y., and at st. mary's college, monroe, mich, . in somewhat developed form it was delivered to the public school teachers of new orleans at the beginning of . in very nearly its present form it was the opening lecture at the course of the brooklyn institute of arts and sciences, on "how old the new is," delivered in the spring of .] popular lectures are usually on some very up-to-date subject. indeed, as a rule they are on subjects that are developing at the moment, and the main aim of the lecturer is to forecast the future. it is before a thing has happened that we want to know about it now, and though, as not infrequently occurs, the lecturer's forecast does not in the event prove him a prophet nor the son of a prophet, for nature usually accomplishes her purposes more simply than the closet philosopher anticipates, at least we have the satisfaction for the moment of thinking that not only are we up to date but a little ahead of it. unfortunately i have to claim your indulgence this evening in this matter, for taking just the opposite course. i am to talk about the oldest book in the world, its old-fashioned yet novel contents, its up-to-date applications, and its significance for the history of the race and, above all, the history of education. the { } one interesting feature, as i hope, of what i have to say, is that old-time methods in education as suggested by this little volume are strangely familiar and its contents are as significant now as they were in the old time from which it comes. the book was written almost as long before solomon as solomon is before us, yet there is a depth of practical wisdom about it that eminently recalls the expression "there is nothing new under the sun." so much attention has been given to education in recent years, we have made such a prominent feature of it in life, have spent so much money on it, have devoted so much time and thought to its development and organization, that we feel very sure that what we are doing now in every line of educational effort represents--indeed must represent--a great advance over anything and everything that was ever accomplished in the past. to say anything else would seem to most people pure pessimism. it would mean that in spite of all the efforts of men we were not making advances. as a matter of fact, all of us know that it is quite possible to make heroic efforts so sadly misdirected that they accomplish nothing and get us nowhere. progress depends not on effort but on the proper direction of the effort. we are supposed, however, to represent one phase and that at the front rank of an inevitable advance in things human, pushed forward, as it were, by the wheel of evolution in its ceaseless progress, and bound { } therefore to make advancement. it is with this idea, so commonly accepted, that i would take issue by showing how much was accomplished in the past that anticipates much of what we are occupied with at the present time, and that serves to show what men can accomplish at any time when they set themselves to doing things with high ideals, well-considered purpose and strenuous effort. there are those who insist that unless men have the encouraging feeling that they are making progress, their efforts are likely to be less strenuous than would otherwise be the case. there are those who think apparently that compliments make the best incentive for successful effort. some of us who know that the world's best work, or at least the work of many of the world's great men, has been done in the midst of opposition, in the very teeth of criticism, in spite of discouragement, may not agree with that opinion. the history of successful accomplishment seems to show, indeed, that incentive is all the stronger as the result of the opposition which arouses to renewed efforts and the criticism which strips whatever is new of errors that inevitably cling to it at the beginning. on the other hand, if there is anything that the lessons of history make clear it is that self-complacency is the very worst thing, above all for intellectual effort of any kind, and that criticism, when judicious, is always beneficial. above all, comparisons are likely to be { } chastening in their effects to make us realize that what we are doing at any particular time does not mean so much more than what many others have done and may indeed even mean less. it is rather interesting, then, to set our complacent assurance that we are doing such wonderful work in education and represent such magnificent progress over against some of the educational work of the past. after all we are not nearly so self-congratulatory about our education, its ways and methods and, above all, its success as we were a dozen years ago. there are many jarring notes of discordant criticism of methods heard, there are many deprecatory remarks passed with regard to our supposed success, and there have been some educators unkind enough,--and, unfortunately, they are often of the inner circle of our educational life,--to say that we are lacking in scholarship to a great degree, and that much of our so-called educational progress has been a tendency toward an accumulation of superficial information rather than a training of the intellect for power. the absolute need of the distinction between education for information and for power has been coming home to us. above all, we have felt that we were not a little deceived by appearances in education and so are more ready to listen to suggestions of various kinds. under these circumstances it has seemed to me, that a calling of attention to what was accomplished at certain long-past periods for { } education, would not only be of interest as information for teachers, but might possibly be helpful or at least suggestive, in the midst of the somewhat disordered state of mind that has resulted from recent criticisms of our educational methods and success, by men whose interest in education cannot be doubted and whose opportunities for knowing are the best. for we are in a time when nearly every important educator, president of a university, dean of a department, old-time teacher or old, thoughtful pupil with the interest of _alma mater_ at heart, who has had something to say with regard to education has said it in rather derogatory fashion. perhaps, then, it will do us good to study the periods of the past and see what they did, how their methods differed or still more often were like our own, what their success was like and what we may learn from them. the surprising thing is the number of repetitions of present-day experiences in education that we shall find in the past. this is true, however, in every mode of thinking quite as well as in education, once careful investigation of conditions is made. if we begin at the beginning and take what is sometimes called the oldest book in the world, we shall see how early definite educational ideas took form. it is a set of moral lessons or instructions given, or supposed to be given, by a father to his son. the father's name was ptah hotep. he was a vizier of king itosi of the fifth dynasty in egypt, some time about b.c. { } the egyptologists used to date him earlier than that, but in recent years they have been clipping centuries off egyptian dates until perhaps king itosi must be considered as having lived probably not earlier than b.c. that makes very little difference for our purpose, however. the oldest manuscript copy of the book was written apparently not later than b.c. it exists as the famous prisse papyrus in the bibliothèque nationale in paris. there is another copy in the british museum. there is a pretty thorough agreement as to these dates, so that we can be sure that this little book which has come to be known as the instruction of ptah hotep, or the proverbs of ptah hotpu--another form of his name with a variation in the title--represents the wisdom of the generations who lived in egypt about years ago. it was written, as i have said, almost as long before solomon as solomon is before us, so that the character of the moral instructions which it contains is extremely interesting. there must have been a number of copies of it made. this and books like it were used as schoolbooks in egypt. they were employed somewhat as we employ copybooks. the writing of the manuscript is the old hieratic, cursive writing of the egyptians, not their hieroglyphics, and the children used portions of this book as copies, listened to dictation from it and learned to write the language by imitating it. of books similar to it we have a number of manuscript copies. some { } of these copies preserved from before b.c. are full of errors such as school children would make in taking down dictation. this was their method of teaching spelling, and after the children had spelled the words the teacher went over them and corrected the mistakes. these corrections were made in a different colored ink from that used by the pupils! the whole system of teaching, as it thus comes before us, resembles our own elementary school teaching much more than we might think possible. spelling, writing, composition are all taught in this way yet, or at least they were when i was at school, and while i have heard that some of the old-fashioned methods were going out, i have also received some hints of the reaction by which they are coming in again, so that the egyptian methods take on a new interest. perhaps there is no more interesting feature of the education of that olden time than the fact that these books which were used as copybooks in the school contain moral lessons. we have been neglecting these in our schools and have come to recognize the danger of such neglect. definite efforts at the organization of moral teaching in some form are being made by many teachers, and their necessity is recognized by all educators. all of these old egyptian books, then, will have a special claim on our interest at the present time. above all, the oldest of them, though it is literally the oldest book in the world, merits { } our attention, because its moral teaching is very clear-cut and its emphasis on ethical precepts very pronounced. we would be very prone to think that what an old father has to say to his boy over fifty centuries ago would have, at most, only an antiquarian interest for us. it is not easy even to imagine that the old gentleman could have known human nature so well and written from so close to the heart of humanity because of his love for his boy, that his words would always have a practical application in life. such, however, is actually the case. any father of the modern time would be proud to be able to give to his boy the eminently practical maxims that this old father has written down. if there is any advice that will be helpful for youth, for the young usually demand that they shall have their own experience and not take it at second hand, this is the advice that is of value. only fools, it is said, learn by their own experience, but then there is good scripture warrant for believing that they were not all wise men in the olden time, and we are pretty well agreed that all the fools are not dead yet. if advice can be of service, however, from one generation to another, then here is the wisdom of age for the inexperience of youth. at least it will serve after the event to show youth that it was properly warned and that it is entirely its own fault if it has been making a fool of itself--as other generations have done before. { } it might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would be rude and crude, expressed with an old man's loquaciousness and with many personal foibles. fortunately for us, while to his son ptah hotep was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call old. in egypt they married comparatively young. this boy was probably the oldest son. it is usually for the oldest that such advice is treasured up and written out. the father then, giving his advice just as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more than forty. to seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. to most of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in serious matters. aristotle declared that a man's body reaches physical perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity at forty-nine. his students were inclined to think that this age was entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was entirely too young. ptah hotep's son, then, very probably looked on his father as most sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman (he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving it for the fathers of others), who would { } be quite tolerable if he only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in the world in this new generation. the real young man of the time, however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so striking as to make his work literature. as such it has come down to us. it is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as wisely as polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that which shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old danish prime minister, whom the ancient vizier of egypt recalls so vividly in many ways. no idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the pyramid of progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. as the poet laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, "we are the heirs of all the ages in the { } foremost files of time"; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors' progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. the farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. it is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours. apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions thus expressed. the nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance that humanity has made. as a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed. ambassador bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address before phi beta kappa at harvard, and took for his subject "what is progress?" phi beta kappa is the fraternity that admits into its classes only the best { } students,--men who have proved their ability by success. mr. bryce, speaking to the most intelligent university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful recent progress. the address subsequently appeared in the _atlantic monthly_ for august, . far from any glorification of progress, the historian of the american commonwealth, who has demonstrated his breadth of view and his notable lack of british insularity by the large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to whether there is any progress in the world. there is certainly no progress in man's highest expressions of his intelligence. as mr. bryce says: "the poetry of the early hebrews and of the early greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. neither has the philosophy of plato and aristotle, nor the speeches of demosthenes and cicero." no one pretends that there is any progress in art. the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back. as has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. in nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. in our generation, { } we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. in painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. whence, then, comes the idea of progress? it has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. there is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. to many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. what evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. the only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to { } have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. it may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at leland stanford university, where under the influence of president jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective evidence for them. professor vernon l. kellogg in his "darwinism to-day," [footnote ] p. , though himself an evolutionist and a darwinian, says: "what may for the moment detain us, however, is a reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection. biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of observation plus experiment. the evidence for its principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps experimentally proved, facts. how is it actually? speaking by and large, we only tell the general truth when we declare that _no indubitable cases of species forming or transforming, that is of descent, have been observed; and that no recognized case of natural selection really selecting has been observed._ i hasten to repeat the names of the ancon sheep, the paraguay cattle, the porto santo rabbit, the artemias of schmankewitch and the de vriesian { } evening primroses to show that i know my list of classic possible exceptions to this denial of observed species forming, and to refer to weldon's broad-and-narrow fronted crabs as a case of what may be an observation of selection at work. _but such a list, even if it could be extended to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is ludicrous as objective proof of that descent and selection, under whose domination the forming of millions of species is supposed to have occurred."_ (italics mine.) [footnote : henry holt and co., new york, .] mr. kellogg, as might be expected from this, objects very much to the application that has been so heedlessly made of certain supposed principles of evolution to pedagogy. in practically every science to which darwinian principles have been applied it is the weakest of the principles that have been appealed to as the foundation for presumedly new developments in the particular science. with regard to the so-called science of education professor kellogg says: "in pedagogy it is also the theory of descent rather than the selection theory which has been drawn on for some rather remarkable developments in child study and instruction. unfortunately it is on that weakest of the three foundation pillars of descent, namely the science of embryology with its müllerian-haeckelian capitulation theory or biogenetic law, that the child-study pedagogues have builded. the species recapitulates in the ontogeny (development) of each of its individuals the course or history of its { } phylogeny (descent or evolution). hence the child corresponds in different periods of its development to the phyletic stages in the descent of man. as the child is fortunately well by its fish, dog and monkey stages before it comes into the care of the pedagogue, he has to concern himself only with safe progress through the various stages of prehistoric and barbarous man. detect the precise phyletic stage cave-man, stone-age man, hunter and roamer, pastoral man, agriculturalist, and treat with the little barbarian accordingly! what simplicity! only one trouble here for the pedagogue: _the recapitulation theory is mostly wrong and what is right in it is mostly so covered up by the wrong part, that few biologists longer have any confidence in discovering the right._ what, then, of our generalizing friends, the pedagogues?" it is in educational matters, above all, then, that we must be careful about assumptions with regard to evolution and supposed inevitable progress because we must, forsooth, be taking advantage of the accumulated experience of previous generations. there is no inevitability about progress in any line. the attainment of any generation depends absolutely on what that generation tries to do, the ideals that it has and the fidelity with which it sets itself to work. we can make just as egregious mistakes, and we have made them, as any generation of the past. we can foster delusions with regard to our all-knowingness just as { } many another foolish people before us have done, and our one hope of real accomplishment for ourselves and our generation is to choose our purposes carefully and then set about their accomplishment with strenuous effort. the lessons of the past in history are extremely precious not only because they show us where others made mistakes but also because they show us the successes of the past. the better we know these, the deeper our admiration for them, the better the outlook for ourselves and our accomplishment. this is the ideal that i would like to emphasize in this series of lectures and addresses and in this, far from there being any pessimism, there is, as it seems to me, the highest optimism. any generation that wants to can do well, but it must want to do efficaciously. any one who thinks that education, in the sense of training of character or advice with regard to practical, every-day life, has evoluted in the course of time, should read this little book that i bring to you this evening. indeed, it is as the first chapter in the history of education that it finds its most valuable place in literature. this teacher of the old-time, who had his boy's best interest at heart, not only knew what to say but how to say it so as to attract a young man's attention. of course it is probable that, even with all this good advice, the young man went his way in his own fashion; for that is ever the mode of the young. but, so far as the experience of another { } could supply for that personal experience which every human being craves, and will have, no matter what the cost, surely this oldest book in the world supplies the best possible material. as literature, it has a finish that is quite surprising. art is said to be the elimination of the superfluous. surely, then, this is artful, in the best sense of that word, to a supreme degree. it is surprising how few repetitions there are, how few tergiversations, how few unnecessary words; and yet the style is not so austere as to be dry and lacking in human interest. probably the most interesting feature of the book is the fact that in it god is always spoken of in the singular. it is not the "gods" who help men, who punish them, who command and must be obeyed, whose providence is so wonderful, but it is always "god." the latest editor,[footnote ] mr. battiscombe g. gunn, in his version always inserts the definite article before the word god because, he says, in different places there were different local gods, and the idea of the writer was to emphasize the fact that the god of any particular locality would act as he declared in his instructions. there are many distinguished egyptologists, however, who insist that the expression "the god," which occurs not only in this but in many other very early egyptian writings, is a { } monotheistic deity whose name is above all names, and transcends all the power of humanity to name him, and hence is spoken of always without a name but with the definite article. [footnote : "the instructions of ptah hotep." translated from the egyptian, with an introduction and an appendix, by battiscombe g. gunn. e. p. dutton & co. wisdom of the east series, .] it is curious indeed to find that the very first bit of instruction given to his son by this wise father is, not to be conceited about what he knows. how striking the expression of his first sentence of this oldest book: "be not proud because thou art learned." and the second is like unto the first: "but discourse with the ignorant man as with the sage." and then at the end of this very first paragraph comes the first figure of speech in human literature that has been presented for us. it is as beautiful in its simplicity and illuminating quality as any of the subsequent time. "fair speech" (by which is meant evidently kindly speech toward those who know less than we do) "is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave maidens on the pebbles." then there comes a series of directions as to how the young man should treat his superiors, his equals and his inferiors. if in argument he is worsted by some one who knows more than himself, he is cautioned. "be not angry." if some one talks nonsense. "correct him." if an ignorant man insists on arguing, "be not scornful with him, but let him alone; then shall he confound himself"; for "it is shameful to confuse a mean mind." the advice may be summed up. do not argue with your superiors, it does no good; nor with { } your equals, state your case and let it go; but above all, not with your inferiors; let them talk and they will make fools of themselves. kindness is always insisted on as the quality most indispensable to a man. "live therefore," says the father, "in the house of kindliness, and men shall come and give gifts of themselves." there are lessons in politeness as well as in kindliness. for instance: "if thou be among the guests of a great man, pierce him not with many glances. it is abhorred of the soul to stare at him. speak not till he address thee. speak when he questioneth thee; so shalt thou be good in his opinion." again, he wants his son not to eat the bread of idleness: "fill not thy mouth at thy neighbor's table." he insists much on the lesson that god helps those who help themselves. "behold," he says, "riches come not of themselves. it is their rule to come to him that actively desires. if he bestir him and collect them himself, god shall make him prosperous; but he shall punish him if he be slothful." on the other hand, the gaining of riches for riches' sake is not worth the while. "when riches are gained, follow the heart; for riches are of no avail if one be weary." as much as to say, after having gained a competency, do not spend further time in amassing wealth, but enjoy in a reasonable way that which has been obtained. there are certain things, however, that a man should not follow; they are unworthy of his { } nature as a man. "as to the man whose heart obeyeth his belly, he causeth disgust in place of love. his heart is wretched, his body is gross. he is insolent toward those endowed by god. he that obeyeth his belly hath an enemy." while the old man warns his son against gluttony and against sloth, he has much to say with regard to covetousness: "if thou desire that thine actions may be good, save thyself from all malice, and beware of the quality of covetousness, which is a grievous inner malady." this expression is rendered still more striking by what is added to it; for the father insists that it is particularly relatives-in-law who quarrel over money. "covetousness setteth at variance fathers-in-law and the kinsmen of the daughter-in-law. it sundereth the wife and the husband; it gathereth unto itself all evils. it is the girdle of all wickedness." it needed only the next sentence to make these expressions supremely modern: "be not covetous as touching shares, in seizing that which is not thine own property." the god of this earliest book that we have from the hand of man has nearly all the interesting and important qualities that we refer to the deity. he is looked up to as the giver of all good things. he loves his creation, and above all loves man, and observes men's actions very carefully, and rewards or punishes them according to their deserts. he desires men to be fruitful, and to multiply upon the earth for their own good and { } for his glory. nothing unworthy of the deity, as he is known by the most educated people, is attributed to this god, who transcends a personal name. there is an utter disregard of all trivial mythology and of all mysterious riddles, though these trimmings of truth are to be found constantly in other egyptian works of later date. indeed, the picture of god is as striking a presentation of the fatherliness and the providence of the almighty and of most of the lovable characteristics of the deity as there is to be found anywhere in literature until the coming of the saviour. one might think that after having warned his son about most of the seven deadly sins as we know them--pride, covetousness, gluttony, envy, sloth and anger,--at least we should not find lust touched on in the modern way. there is, however, in this matter an extremely chaste bit of advice that sums up the whole situation as well as a father can tell his son. the writer says: "no place prospereth wherein lust is allowed to work its way. a thousand men have been ruined for the pleasure of a little time short as a dream. even death is reached thereby. it is a wretched thing. as for the lustful liver, every one leaveth him for what he doeth; he is avoided. if his desires be not gratified, he regardeth no laws." the father tells his son, straightforwardly and emphatically, that indulgence in this vice inevitably leads to loss of friends, of health, of { } everything that the world holds good; and that once a man has started down this path he has no regard for law or order or decency or self-respect. this eighteenth paragraph on a thorny subject is probably one of the most wonderful passages in this advice of a father to his son. fathers of the modern time ask what shall they say to their boys. here is something to tell them that does not excite pruriency, that does set the full state of the case before them and represents probably all that can be said with assurance and safety. in recent years we have heard much of moral and social prophylaxis and the necessity for giving precious information with regard to this subject that may prove helpful to young people. most people are sure to think that this is the first time in the history of the race that there has been an awakening to the necessity for this. of course there is no doubt that owing to delayed marriages and unfortunate social conditions in our large cities we have more need of it than past generations, yet here in this old schoolbook from egypt we have very definite and very wise teaching in the matter. a physician is prone to wonder what did the old man mean by "a thousand men have been ruined for the pleasure of a little time short as a dream. even death is reached thereby." is it possible that he knew something of the physical, or let us rather say, the pathological dangers of the vice? in the discussion of the pictures of old-time surgery in { } _the journal of the american medical association_ i suggested that these generations seem to have known more about this phase of pathology than we are inclined to admit. on the other hand, the father emphatically warns his son that his happiness will depend on loving his wife and caring for her to the best of his ability; though some of the details of that advice are so naively modern in their expression that it seems almost impossible to believe that they should have been spoken nearly six thousand years ago. he says: "if thou would be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife. give her what she wants to eat, get her what she wants to wear [literally, fill her stomach, clothe her back]. gladden her heart during thy lifetime, for she is an estate profitable unto its lord. be not harsh, for gentleness mastereth her more than strength." there is a variant translation of this passage quoted in maspero's "the dawn of civilization," which brings out even more clearly the ideas that seem most modern, and which makes it very sure that it is not the translator who has found in vague old expressions thoughts that, when put into modern words, have modernized old ideas. maspero reads: "if thou art wise, thou wilt go up into thine house and love thy wife at home; thou wilt give her abundance of food; thou wilt clothe her back with garments; all that covers her limbs, her perfumes, are the joy of her life. as { } long as thou lookest to this, she is as a profitable field to her lord [master]." the old gentleman's idea evidently was that, looked at merely from a material standpoint, it was worth a man's while to spend as much time caring for his wife as for his estate. she meant just as much for his happiness in the end and might mean probably more for his unhappiness. it is a very practical way of looking at the subject and perhaps the romancists might think it sordid. it must not be forgotten, however, that this is only the secondary motive suggested. at the beginning he commands him to love his wife for her own sake, and then, after suggesting the material benefit that comes from caring for her, he says that "gentleness mastereth her more than strength." immediately after this valuable advice with regard to the care of the principal member of his household the old man turns to the question of the care of his servants. we are surely prone to think that the servant problem at least is a new development in this little world of ours. many literary works serve to foster the impression that in the old days servants were easy to obtain, that they were always respectful, that they could readily be managed and life with them was, if not one sweet song, at least a very smooth course. men, however, have always been men, and women and even servants have always had minds of their own, and strange as it may seem to us there has always { } been a servant problem and there was one in egypt , years ago. ptah hotep said: "satisfy thine hired servants out of such things as thou hast; it is the duty of one that hath been favored of god. in sooth, it is hard to satisfy hired servants. for one saith, 'he is a lavish person; one knoweth not that which may come from him.' but on the morrow he thinketh, 'he is a person of exactitude (parsimony), content therein.' _and when favors have been shown unto servants, they say 'we go.'_ (italics mine.) peace dwelleth not in that town wherein dwell servants that are wretched." a difficult problem; presents will not solve it but only complicate it, exact justice is necessary, but the peace that follows is worth the trouble it entails. the principle would be valuable in many a squabble of corporate employer and hosts of servants in the modern time. for domestic happiness, it needed only the advice given a little later in this instruction: "let thy face be bright what time thou livest. bread is to be shared. he that is grasping in entertainment himself shall have an empty belly. he that causeth strife cometh himself to sorrow. take not such a one for thy companion. it is a man's kindly acts that are remembered of him in the years after his life." there is one phase of life in which ptah hotep differs entirely from the present generation,--at least if we are to judge the present generation { } from its results in this matter. of course there are many of us who consider that, in spite of six thousand years of distance in time, the old egyptian prime minister is far ahead of our contemporaries in this important subject. he thought that obedience was the most important thing in life. for him independence of spirit, in a young person particularly, was an abomination. in spite of the tendency to loquacity and to repeat itself, often said to be so characteristic of old age, the father, who in all his instructions has never sinned against this literary canon, almost seems to do so when it comes to the question of obedience. over and over again he insists that obedience is the one quality that must characterize a man if he is to get on in life, and if he is to secure happiness, and have a happy generation of his own group around him. the sentences read more like à kempis or some mediaeval writer on spirituality, and seem meant for monks under obedience rather than for a young man of the world, the son of a prime minister, just about to enter on his life work in business and politics. two of the paragraphs are well worth quoting here: "a splendid thing is the obedience of an obedient son; he cometh in and listeneth obediently. excellent in hearing, excellent in speaking, is every man that obeyeth what is noble. the obedience of an obeyer is a noble thing. obedience is better than all things that are; it maketh good will. how good it is that a son should take { } that from his father by which he hath reached old age [obedience]! that which is desired by the god is obedience; disobedience is abhorred of the god. verily, it is the heart that maketh its master to obey or to disobey; for the safe-and-sound life of a man is his heart. it is the obedient man that obeyeth what is said; he that loveth to obey, the same shall carry out commands. he that obeyeth becometh one obeyed. it is good indeed when a son obeyeth his father; and he (his father) that hath spoken hath great joy of it. such a son shall be mild as a master, and he that heareth him shall obey him that hath spoken. he shall be comely in body and honored by his father. his memory shall be in the mouths of the living, those upon earth, as long as they exist. "as for the fool, devoid of obedience, he doeth nothing. knowledge he regardeth as ignorance, profitable things as hurtful things. he doeth all kind of errors, so that he is rebuked therefor every day. he liveth in death therewith. it is his food. at chattering speech he marvelleth, as at the wisdom of princes, living in death every day. he is shunned because of his misfortunes, by reason of the multitude of afflictions that cometh upon him every day." of one thing the old prime minister was especially sure. it was that employment at no single occupation, no matter what it was or how interesting soever it might be, could satisfy a man or even keep him in good health. he felt, { } probably by experience, the necessity for diversity of mind and of occupation, if there was to be any happiness or any real success in life. he has a quiet way of putting it, but he says, as confidently as the most modern of pedagogues, that all work and no play makes jack a dull boy, and all play and no work makes it impossible for jack to get on. but a proper mixture of both makes life livable; and if a man has only the work that he cares for, and can get some of his pleasure in life out of his work, then is all well. "one that reckoneth accounts all the day passeth not an happy moment. one that gladdeneth his heart all the day provideth not for his house. the bowman hitteth the mark, as the steersman reacheth land, by diversity of aim. he that obeyeth his heart shall command." there are some conclusions in the philosophy of life that we are very much inclined to think are the products of modern practical wisdom, and it is rather surprising to find them stated plainly in this old-time advice of the father to his boy. if there is one idea more than another that we are confident is modern, and are almost sure to attribute to the social development of our own generation, it is that riches do not belong to the man who makes them to be used for his own purpose alone, but their possession is justified only if he uses them for the benefit of the community. this is so up-to-date an idea indeed that it is startling to find it expressed in all its { } completeness in this oldest of books. ptah hotep said: "if thou be great after being of no account, and hast gotten riches after poverty, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters so that promotion is come unto thee, then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments [of god]. thou art not the last; another shall be thine equal, and to him shall come the like [fortune and station]." after all this it may be necessary to trace the pedigree of the book, since it might seem to be possible that it was a modern invention. the original of it is the so-called "prisse papyrus," which is well known by name to all students of archaeology and especially of egyptology, and the contents of which are familiar to all who are acquainted with egyptian history and literature. it appears to have been found at thebes, but the exact place is not known. m. prisse d'avennes, the well-known french archaeologist after whom it is named, is said to have bought it from one of the egyptian native workmen, or _fellahin,_ whom he had hired to make excavations in the tombs of thebes. egyptologists generally have accepted the idea that it was actually taken by this workman from the tomb of one of the kings entef, who were of the eleventh dynasty and reigned about b.c. this is not certain, however. after publishing a translation in , m. prisse presented the precious papyrus to the { } bibliothèque royale (now nationale). there it may still be seen. spread out flat, it measures about twenty-four feet in length and six inches in width. there are about eighteen pages of clear red and black writing in the hieratic character. the first part of this manuscript is a portion of another book, the so-called "instructions of ke'gemni." [footnote ] this is, however, only a short fragment, though probably of even older date than the "instructions of ptah hotep." this work we have in its entirety. doubtless its preservation was due to the fact that many copies of it had been made, though only two have come down to us. [footnote : these egyptian names are spelled differently by different modern scholars, according to their idea of the value of certain sounds of the older language as they should be expressed in the modern tongue to which they are most familiar. many english scholars spell this as i have done, ke'gemni. maspero, however, and most of the french scholars, spell it qaqimni. maspero prefers the form phtah-hotpû to that of ptah hotep, which has been adopted by english scholars.] there is a second manuscript of the "instructions of ptah hotep,"--or the "proverbs of phtahhotpû," as the book is called by maspero. this was discovered not long ago in the british museum, by mr. griffith; and, while it is not so complete as the french copy, there is such an agreement between the two manuscripts that there is no doubt about the authenticity of the book and of the fact that it represents the oldest book in the world. its date would be about b.c. if we were { } to follow,--as does the translator of the most easily procurable english edition, mr. gunn,--the chronology of flinders petrie. recent advances in our knowledge of egyptology, however, have brought the dates nearer to us than they were placed before. such men as breasted of chicago, and maspero, would probably take from three hundred to five hundred years from this date. there is a definite tendency in all the histories to bring dates much nearer to the present than before. for a time, the older one could place a date the more scholarly seemed to be the appeal of such an opinion. now the tendency is all the other way. even the latest date that can be given for ptah hotep, or phtahhotpû, would still make his little book the oldest book in the world, however. fortunately for us the manuscripts of the instructions of ptah hotep that have come down to us are in much better condition than those of most of the other instructions of similar kinds formerly used in the schools that have been preserved. in some of these there are a great many errors of writing, spelling and grammar with the corrections of the master above in a different-colored ink. verily, education has not changed much in spite of six millenniums, or very nearly so, of supposed progress since these were written, for the whole process is as familiar as it can be. as mr. battiscombe gunn says in his introduction to his edition "a schoolboy's scrawl over , years { } old is no easy thing to translate." we would seem, however, to have been blessed in the preservation of this oldest book in the world, either of the original copies set by the masters or of such copies as were made by advanced students. the series of lucky chances that have combined to bring to us, in the comparatively perfect form in which it exists, this oldest book in the world is interesting to contemplate. without them we would have no idea of how closely the first people of whom we have any definite records in history resembled us in every essential quality of humanity, even to the ways and modes by which they tried to lift humanity out of the barbaric selfishness inherent in it to what is higher and nobler in its nature. with this surprising resurrection of our school-teaching methods from the past it is interesting to study other phases of the education of these early times, and at the same time to note the accomplishments of the men, of the period, their tastes, the state of their culture as regards the arts and crafts and personal adornment and the decoration of their houses and buildings of various kinds. flinders petrie, the distinguished english egyptologist, in an article on "the romance of early civilization," printed recently in _the independent_ (new york), said: "we have now before us a view of the powers of man at the earliest point to which we can trace written history, and what strikes us most is how very little his nature or abilities have changed in { } seven thousand years; what he admired we admire; what were his limits in fine handiwork are also ours. we may have a wider outlook, a greater understanding of things, our interests may have extended in this interval; but as far as human nature and tastes go, man is essentially unchanged in this interval." we have enough of the products of the arts and crafts of these early egyptian generations to show us that there must have been no inconsiderable training of the men of this time in the making of beautiful art objects. for instance, the interior decoration of their tombs shows us men skilled as designers, clever in the use of colors, with a rather extensive knowledge of pigments and with a definite tendency not to repeat designs but to create new ones. most of the diapered designs of modern interior decorations were original with the egyptians, and some of those found in the tombs uncovered in recent years have been adopted and adapted by modern designers. it is in the matter of jewelry particularly that the ability and the training of the old egyptian workmen are most evident. it would be quite incredible to think that these workmen developed their artistic craftsmanship without training, and therefore there was at least the germ of a technical school or set of schools in oldest egypt. it would be quite impossible to believe this only that we know so much more about other features of egyptian education as anticipations of our own. { } a special word about their jewelry then, because it illustrates a definite training quite different from that of our time, will not be out of place. their jewelry, it may be said at once, is in striking contrast with what we call jewelry in our time. it is true that we are in the midst of one of the worst periods of jewelry-making, but then we are so prone to think of anything very modern as representing the highest evolution, that the contrast is chastening and illuminating. mr. petrie has insisted on the beautiful jewelry, carved precious stones and gold ornaments of the very early period in egypt. in our time we have no jewelry that deserves the name. i doubt whether we even know the real definition of jewelry, so i venture to repeat it. jewels are precious stones themselves of value, usually of a high degree of hardness so that they do not deteriorate with time or wear, to which a greatly enhanced value is added by the handiwork of man. jewels are made by artistic carving and cutting so that besides their precious quality as beautiful colored stones, they have an added charm and interest from human workmanship. we wear no such jewelry in our generation. what we have are merely precious stones. these by an artificial rigging of the market and a combination of the great commercial agencies that control the sale of diamonds and other precious stones, remain very expensive in spite of their comparative abundance. they are worn only because they are a display of the { } amount of money that a person can afford to spend for mere ornaments. there is nothing in these precious stones themselves that carries an appeal to the educated mind. it is true that they are pretty, but only with the prettiness of the play of rainbow colors that delights a childish or uncultured eye. it requires no taste to like them, no culture to appreciate them, and their cost alone gives them value. this is so true that those who possess a magnificent _parure_ of diamonds often also have an imitation of them in cheaper stones that may be worn on most occasions. the danger of loss or the risk of robbery is so great that it has seemed worth while to have this imitation made in many cases. no one except an expert will recognize the difference, and if you are known to possess the real stones it will of course be supposed that you are wearing them. what gives them value as an adornment in the eye of the possessor, and presumably also of the onlookers, is the fact that they must have cost such a large sum of money. they are a vulgar display of wealth. they are typically barbaric and, worn in the profusion now so common, carry us back to the uncultured peoples who like to wear gaudy things. the taste is perhaps a little better, but the essential quality of mind that dictates the wearing of heavy brass rings and strings of beads and that which impels to the display of many diamonds, is hard to differentiate. artistic objects produce a sense of pleasure in { } the beholder, an appreciation of the beautiful handiwork of man. precious stones worn as is now the custom produce only a sense of envy. of course envy comes only to baser minds, but it is perfectly clear that most of those who are supposed to be affected by the sight of diamonds worn in profusion have this particular quality rather well developed. this distinction is often forgotten. personal adornment as well as the adornment of one's house should be in order to give pleasure to others, and not merely a display of wealth for wealth's sake in such a way as is likely to produce envy. the old egyptians made their jewelry with the true artistic sense. flinders petrie has told how beautifully they carved hard gems of various kinds and how the remains of these show us a people of good taste, even though their technique in the manufacture of such objects may have left something to be desired. in connection with this oldest of books it is important to recall this, for it shows that not alone in the applied wisdom of life and the knowledge gained from personal experience were these egyptians of over , years ago brothers and sisters beyond whose wise saws we have not advanced, but also in the realm of art their work takes its place beside what is best in the modern time. some may be inclined to say that while the egyptians may, as indeed we must admit they did, know many things about art and literature and practical wisdom, yet they did not have exact { } knowledge. their knowledge, though large and liberal, had not become scientific. this will scarcely be maintained, however, by any one who realizes how much of applied science there was in the building of the old temples and pyramids and how much they must have developed mechanics, applied and theoretic, in order to accomplish the tasks they thus set themselves. cantor, the german historian of mathematics, acknowledged this and paid a worthy tribute to the old egyptians' development of mathematics, pure and applied, in discussing the expression that had been used by democritus, the early greek geometer, who once declared that "in the construction of plane figures with demonstrations no one has yet surpassed me, not even the rope fasteners (harpedonaptai) of egypt." for a long time this word harpedonaptai was a mystery, but professor cantor cleared it up, and explaining for us the exact meaning of the compound which means literally either rope fasteners or rope stretchers, he says, "there is no doubt that the egyptians were very careful about the exact orientations of their temples and other public buildings. old inscriptions seem to show that only the north and south lines were drawn by actual observation of the stars. the east and west lines were drawn at right angles to the others. now it appears from the practice of heron of alexandria and of the ancient indian and probably also the chinese geometers, that a common method of { } securing a right angle between two very long lines was to stretch round three pegs a rope measured in three portions which were to one another in the ratio : : . the triangle thus formed is right-angled. further the operation of rope stretching is mentioned in egypt, without explanation, at an extremely early time (amenemhat i). if this be the correct explanation of it, then the egyptians were acquainted , years b.c., with a particular case of the proposition now known as the pythagorean theorem." this may not seem to mean very much. yet what it illustrates is just this. these men wanted a certain development of mathematics. they needed it for the work that they were engaged at. they set themselves to the solution of certain problems and in doing so evolved a theorem in pure mathematics and an application of it which greatly simplified construction and gave an impetus to mechanics. in so doing they anticipated the work of a long after time. this is what i would insist is always true with regard to man. when he needs some intellectual development he makes it. when he requires an application of it he succeeds in working it out. later ages may go farther, but had he needed further developments he evidently had the power to make them and probably would have made them. the old greeks had a much better opportunity to study egyptian remains than we have, and especially was this true after the foundation of { } alexandria. there must have been a lively interest in things egyptian aroused in the greek minds by this greek settlement in old egypt. it is not surprising, then, to find some magnificent compliments to the old egyptians in the mouths of some of the writers about the time of the foundation of alexandria. eudemus, for instance, the pupil of aristotle, wrote the history of geometry in which he traces its invention to the egyptians, and states that the reason for its invention was its necessity in the remeasurement of land demanded after the removal of landmarks by the annual rise of the nile. always does one find this, that when there is a serious demand for an invention in theory or practice men make it. it is not a change or development in man that brings about inventions, but a change in his environment which causes new necessities to arise, and then he proceeds with an ability always the same to respond properly to those necessities. eudemus says: "geometry is said by many to have been invented among the egyptians, its origin being due to the measurement of plots of land. this was necessary there because of the rising of the nile, which obliterated the boundaries appertaining to separate owners. nor is it marvellous that the discovery of this and other sciences should have arisen from such an occasion, since everything which moves in development will advance from the imperfect to the { } perfect. from mere sense-perception to calculation, and from this to reasoning, is a natural transition." the old egyptians made some fine developments of arithmetic. these were afterwards lost and were reinvented probably several times. i have already quoted from cantor the opinion that the egyptians were familiar with the properties of the right triangle whose sides were in the ratio : : over , years ago. in the _papyrus_ of ahmes, whose contents probably come from before b.c., there are the solutions of many problems which show how far the egyptians had gone in arithmetical calculations. for instance, there are methods of calculating the solid contents of barns. the solutions are not absolute but are very closely approximate. ahmes has problems that were solved in connection with the pyramids, which make it very clear that the old egyptians had more than a little knowledge of the principles of proportion, of certain geometrical figures and probably were familiar also with the simpler phases at least of trigonometry. the area of a circle is found in ahmes by deducting from the diameter one-ninth and squaring the remainder, which gives a value for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle much more nearly correct than that used by most writers until comparatively recent times. as a teacher of the history of medicine with certain administrative functions in a medical { } school, i have been very much interested in the old-time medicine and above all the details of medical education that we find among the egyptians. ordinarily it would be assumed that there was so little of anything like medical education that it could be scarcely worth while talking about it. on the contrary, we find so much that is being constantly added to by discoverers, that it is a never-ending source of surprise. there is a well-grounded tradition founded on inscriptions that athothis, the son of menes, one of the early kings, wrote a work on anatomy. this king is said to have died about b.c. there are traces of the existence of hospitals at that time in which diseases were studied and medical attendants trained. even earlier than this there was a great physician, the first physician of whom we have record in history, whose name was i-em-hetep, which means "the bringer of peace." he had two other titles, one of which was "the master of secrets," partly because he possessed the secrets of health and disease, very probably also because so many things had to be confided to him as a physician. another of his titles was that of "the scribe of numbers," in reference, doubtless, to the fact that he had to use numbers so carefully in making out his prescriptions. his first title, that of the bringer of peace, shows that very early in the history of medicine it was recognized that the physician's first duty was to bring peace of mind to his patients. a { } distinguished french physician (director) of the department of physiology of the university of paris, professor richet, said not long since, that physicians can seldom cure, they can often relieve, but they can always console, and evidently this oldest physician took his duty of consolation seriously and successfully. he lived in the reign of king tehser, a monarch of the third dynasty in egypt, who reigned about b.c. or a little later. how much this first physician was thought of will be best appreciated from the fact that the well-known step pyramid at sakkara, the old cemetery near memphis, is called by his name. so great indeed was the honor paid to him that after his death he was worshipped as a god, and so we have statues of him seated with a scroll on his knees, with an air of benignant knowledge, a placid-looking man with a certain divine expression of sympathy well suited to his name, the bringer of peace. while they raised him to their altars he does not wear a beard as did all their gods and their kings when they were raised to the godly dignity, but evidently they felt that his humanity was of supreme interest to them. there is another monument at sakkara that is of special interest to us in its consideration of old-time medicine. i discussed it and its inscriptions in the _journal of the american medical association_ (nov. , ). it is the tomb of a surgeon, decorated within with pictures of surgical operations. the grandeur of the tomb and its { } location show us that the surgeon must have held a very prominent place in the community of that time. the date of this tomb is not later than b.c. certain of the surgical operations resembled those done at the present time. there is the opening of a carbuncle at the back of the neck which shows how old are men's diseases and the modes of their treatment. after this the oldest monument in the history of medicine is documentary, the ebers papyrus, the writing of which is probably not much later than b.c. this consists, moreover, of a collection of older texts and suggestions in medicine, and some of the idioms are said to belong to several distant periods. it is probable that certain portions of this papyrus were composed not much later than the oldest book in the world, and that they date from nearly b.c. this papyrus is as interesting and as startling in its anticipation of some of our modern medical wisdom as is the instruction of ptah hotep in the practical wisdom of life. this seems a good deal to say, but there is ample evidence for it. according to dr. carl von klein, who discussed the "medical features of the ebers papyrus" in some detail in the _journal of the american medical association_ about five years ago, over different substances are mentioned as of remedial value in this old-time medical work. there is scarcely a disease of any important organ with which we are familiar in the modern { } time that is not mentioned here. while the significance of diseases of such organs as the spleen, the ductless glands, and the appendix was of course missed, nearly every other pathological condition was either expressly named or at least hinted at. the papyrus insists very much on the value of history-taking in medicine, and hints that the reason why physicians fail to cure is often because they have not studied their cases sufficiently. while the treatment was mainly symptomatic, it was not more so than is a great deal of therapeutics at the present time, even in the regular school of medicine. the number and variety of their remedies and of their modes of administering them is so marvellous, that i prefer to quote dr. von klein's enumeration of them for you: "in this papyrus are mentioned over different substances from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms which act as stimulants, sedatives, motor excitants, motor depressants, narcotics, hypnotics, analgesics, anodynes, antispasmodics, mydriatics, myotics, expectorants, tonics, dentifrices, sialogogues, antisialics, refrigerants, emetics, antiemetics, carminatives, cathartics, purgatives, astringents, cholagogues, anthelmintics, restoratives, haematics, alteratives, antipyretics, antiphlogistics, antiperiodics, diuretics, diluents, diaphoretics, sudorifics, anhydrotics, emmenagogues, oxytocics, ecbolics, galactagogues, irritants, escharotics, caustics, styptics, haemostatics, emollients, demulcents, protectives, antizymotics, { } disinfectants, deodorants, parasiticides, antidotes and antagonists." scarcely less interesting than the variety of remedies were their methods of administration: "medicines are directed to be administered internally in the form of decoctions, infusions, injections, pills, tablets, troches, capsules, powders, potions and inhalations; and externally, as lotions, ointments, plasters, etc. they are to be eaten, drunk, masticated or swallowed, to be taken often once only--often for many days--and the time is occasionally designated--to be taken mornings, evenings or at bedtime. formulas to disguise bad tasting medicaments are also given." we have no advantages over the early egyptians even in elegant prescribing. the traditions with regard to egyptian medicine which came to the greeks seemed so incredible as we found them in the older historians that they used to be joked about. herodotus came in for a good deal of this scoffing. he was said to be entirely too credulous and prone to exaggerate in order to add interest to his history, but every advance in our knowledge in modern time has confirmed what herodotus has to say. in the eighteenth century voltaire said of him, "the father of history, nay, rather the father of lies." that was voltaire's way. anything that was above him he scoffed at. homer was a wandering minstrel such as you might find in the streets of paris, dante was a mediaeval barbarian, { } our own shakespeare was a dramatic butcher, producing his effects by bloodshed and cruelty upon the stage. the nineteenth century has reversed voltaire in every point of this, though some still listen to him in other matters. above all, herodotus has been amply justified by modern investigations. herodotus tells us of the tradition of the number of different kinds of medical specialists in existence among the egyptians. we are very prone to think that specialism is a development of modern medicine. what we know of egypt shows us how old it is and makes it very clear that there must have been specialized modes of medical education for these many doctors who treated only very limited portions of the body and no other. herodotus tells us, to quote for you the quaint english of one of the old translations: "physicke is so studied and practised with the egyptians that every disease hath his several physician, who striveth to excell in healing that one disease and not to be expert in curing many. whereof it cometh that every corner of that country is full of physicians. some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and the inwards." the ebers papyrus shows us that the specialties were by no means scantily developed. we have traditions of operations upon the nose, of remedies for the eyes there are many and the diagnosis and treatment of eye diseases are rather well { } developed. the filling of teeth seems even to have been practised, [footnote ] and while the traditions in this matter are a little dubious, the evidence has been accepted by some good authorities. this specialism in egyptian medicine probably existed long before herodotus, for he seems to speak of it as a very old-time institution in his time, and indeed egypt had degenerated so much that it would be hard to believe that there was any such development there in his time. in the old temples they seem to have used many modes of treatment that we are likely to think of as very modern. music for instance was used to soothe the worried, amusements of various kinds were employed to influence the disturbed mind favorably. in many ways some of the old temples resembled our modern health resorts. to them many patients flocked and were treated and talked about their ailments and went back each year for "the cure" once more, all the while being more benefited, as is true also in our own time, by the regularity of life, the regulation of diet and the mental influence of the place, than by any of the drugs or even the curative waters. [footnote : burdett: "history of hospitals."] in a word, our study of old egypt and egyptian education shows us men doing things just about the way that our generation does them and succeeding just about as well as we succeed. they taught writing, spelling and composition as we do and the moral content of their teaching is admirable. they had training schools for the arts { } and crafts, their taste is better than ours in many things, above all, they trained workmen very well, and the remains of their achievements are still the subject of our admiration. they solved mechanical problems in the building of the pyramids quite as well as we do. they made enough experiments that we would call chemical, to find enduring pigments for decorative purposes and they succeeded in making tools that enabled them to carve stonework beautifully. even their professional education was not very different from our own and its results, particularly in the line of specialism, are startling anticipations of the most modern phase of medicine. they anticipated our interests in psychotherapy and some of them were mental healers, and more of them used the influence of the mind on the body than our physicians have been accustomed to until very recent years. their physicians and surgeons were held in the highest veneration, and what we know of them shows that the judgment of the old egyptians in this matter was very good and better than the average appreciation of physicians at the present time. after all is said no one with any pretence to knowledge of the past would claim for a moment that we were doing better work in anything than men have done at many times in the history of culture. our idea of progress is just one of these vague bits of self-sufficiency that each generation has had in its own time and that has made it feel { } that somehow what it is accomplishing means much in the world's history. it is rather amusing to compare the estimate that any generation has of itself with the appreciation of it by succeeding generations. especially is this true for generations separated by years or more. generations are only made up of men and women, and what man or woman is there who has not thought many times during life that though his or her work might not be estimated very highly by those close to it, this was due but to a sad lack of proper appreciation, since it represented certain qualities that well deserved admiration? we are all gifted with this precious self-conceit, which is not so bad a thing, after all, since it makes us work better than if we had a proper but much less exalted appreciation of our real worth. it is much easier to encourage people to do things than to scold or criticise them into doing them. we shall not quarrel with our generation, then, for being self-conceited,--it is made up of human beings,--but we shall try and not let a due appreciation of our accomplishment be smothered entirely, by this self-conceit. after all, did not our favorite english poet of the late nineteenth century declare us to be "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," and how could it be otherwise than that we should be far ahead of the past, not only because the evolution of man made him more capable of handling difficult problems, but also because we { } had the advantage of the accumulated wisdom such as it was of the past, of the observations and the conclusions of our forefathers and, of course, we were far ahead of them. this idea, however, so widely diffused that it might almost be spoken of as universal, has received many jolts in recent times, since we have come to try to develop the taste and the intellect of our people and not merely our material comforts and our satisfaction with ourselves. it has been pointed out, over and over again, in recent years that, of course, there is no such thing as progress in literature, that in art we are far behind many generations of the past, that in architecture there is not a new idea in the world since the sixteenth century, that in all these modes of human expression we are mere imitators and not originators. our drama is literally and literarily a farce, and no drama that any one expects to live has been written for more than a century. our buildings are replicas of old-time structures, no matter what their purpose, whether it be ecclesiastical, or educational, or municipal, or beneficiary. of course from the scientific standpoint this is, after all, what we might expect. in all the years of history of which we have any record there has been no change in the nature of man and no modification of his being that would lead us to expect from him anything different from what had been accomplished by man in the past. there is no change in man's structure, in the size of his { } body in any way, in his anatomy or his physiology, in his customs, or ways of life, or in his health. the healthy still have about the same expectation of life, to use the life insurance term, and though we have increased the general average duration of life this has been at the expense of other precious qualities of the race. the healthy live longer, but the unhealthy also live longer. the weaklings in mind and body whom nature used to eliminate early are now a burden that must be cared for. in general it may be said, and virchow, the great german pathologist, who was one of the world's great living anthropologists of his time--and that but a few years ago--used to insist, that man's skeleton and, above all, his skull as we can study them in the mummy of the olden time, were exactly the same as those that the race has now. man cannot by thinking add a cubit to his stature, nor an inch to the circumference of his skull. the seventh generation of an academic family each member of which has been at the university in his time, is not any more likely to have special faculties for the intellectual life, indeed it is sometimes hinted that he has less of a chance than if his parents had been peasants for as long as the history of the family can be traced. of course this has no proper bearing on evolution from the biological standpoint, for the length of time that we have in human history may be conceded to be entirely inadequate to produce any noticeable changes on man's body or mind, { } granting that such were in progress. at the most we have , years of history and the evolutionists would tell us that this is as nothing in the unnumbered aeons of evolution. in the popular estimation, however, evolution can almost be seen at work just as if one could see blades of grass growing by watching them closely enough. this impression of man's progress supposed to be supported by the theory of evolution is entirely unfounded. just as his body is the same and his brain the same size, and the relative proportion of brain weight to body weight or at least to skull capacity the same now as they were , years ago; and this is true for both sexes, so that because women have smaller bodies by one-eighth they also have smaller skulls, and this, too, occurs among the mummies in egypt quite as in our own time; so in what he is able to do with body and mind man is unchanged. something of dexterity, of facility, of self-confidence and assurance of results is gained from time to time in history, but lost as often, because a few generations fail to be interested in what interested their immediate predecessors immensely. it is not surprising, then, that history should show us at all times men doing work about like that which they did at any other time--provided they were deeply interested enough. the wisdom of the oldest book in the world, a father's advice to his son, is as practical in most ways as gorgon graham's letters to his boy--and ever so much { } more ethical and true to life. the decorations of the old egyptian tombs, the architecture of their temples, their ways and habits of life so far as we know them, all proclaim them men and women just like ourselves, certainly not separated from us by any gulf or even streamlet of evolution. what are more interesting than any supposed progress in mankind, are the curious ups and downs of interest in particular subjects which follow one another with almost definite regularity in history as we know it. men become occupied with some phase of the expression of life, literature, architecture, government, sometimes in two or three of these at the same time, and then there comes a wonderful period of development. just when this epoch reaches an acme of power of expression there come a self-consciousness and a refinement, welcomed at first as new progress, but that seem to hamper originality. then follows a period of distinct decadence, but with a development of criticism of what was done in the past, with the formulation of certain principles of criticism. just when by this conscious reflection it might be expected that man would surely advance rapidly, further decay takes place and there is a negative phase of power of expression, out of which man is lifted by a new generation usually neglectful of the immediate past, sometimes indeed deprecating it bitterly, though this new phase may have been awakened by a further past, which gets back to nature and to expression for itself. { } the most interesting feature of history is how men have done things, wonderful things that subsequent generations are sure to admire and continue to admire whenever they have sense and training enough, yet forget about them. this is true not only for artistic productions but also for practical applications in science, for inventions, useful discoveries and the like. in surgery, for instance, though we have a continuous history of medicine, all of our instruments have been re-invented at least three or four times. after the reinvention we have been surprised to discover that previous generations had used these instruments long before us. even the suez canal was undoubtedly open at least once before our time. personally i feel sure that america was discovered at least twice before columbus' time and that during several centuries there was considerable intercourse between europe and america. it is extremely important for us then to realize these cycles in human progress and not to deceive ourselves with the idea that because we are doing something that immediately preceding generations knew nothing of, therefore we are doing something that never was done in the world before. this is particularly important for us now, for in my estimation the eighteenth was one of the lowest of centuries in human accomplishment, and therefore we may easily deceive ourselves as to our place in human history in this century. { } reflections of this kind are, it seems to me, particularly important for educators, especially in the midst of our tendency to accept evolution unthinkingly in this generation. man's skull has not changed, his body has not been modified, his soft tissues are the same as they used to be. his brain is no different. why, then, should he not have done things in the olden time just about as he does them now? we do not think that acquired characters are inherited. oliver wendell holmes talks of emerson as the seventh generation of an academic family, but there are none of us who think that this made it any easier for emerson to acquire an education, or gave him a better development of mind. those of us who have experience in education know that the descendant of a family of peasants for centuries or of farmers for many generations, easily outstrips some of the scions of academic families in intellect. it is the man that counts and not his descent. just this is true of generations as well as of individuals. whenever men have set themselves to doing things they have accomplished about as good results at any time in history as at any other. we apparently do not benefit by the accumulation of the experience of our predecessors. at least we can find no trace of that in history. for a certain number of enterprising generations there is manifest upward progress. then something always happens to disturb the succession of ideas, sometimes it is nothing more than { } an over-refinement that leads to bad taste, and decadence takes the place of progress. the accomplishment of any particular generation, then, depends not on its place in any real or fancied scheme of evolution, but on its own ideals and its determined efforts to achieve them. there are people who insist that this doctrine is pessimistic and discouraging and that, if we do not keep before men the consoling feeling that they are advancing beyond their forebears, there is not the same incentive to work as there would be under other circumstances. on the contrary, as it seems to me, this other idea that everything depends on ourselves and not on our predecessors, constitutes the highest form of incentive. we at the present time are far below many preceding generations in art, literature, architecture, arts and crafts and many developments of taste. here is no evolution, but the story of how each generation sets itself to work. why, then, should we think that in education, one of the highest of the arts, the moulding of the human mind into beautiful shapes instead of the moulding of more plastic material, we should be far ahead of the past and, therefore, in a position to find no precious lessons in it? the history of education not alone of the last three centuries of education, but of at least , years of education, is worth while knowing and it magnificently exemplifies how old is the new in education. { } { } the first modern university { } "what is it that hath been? the same thing that shall be. what is it that hath been done? the same that shall be done." --_ecclesiastes i: ._ "to one small people . . . it was given to create the principle of progress. that people was the greek. except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not greek in its origin." --maine. { } the first modern university [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this address was gathered for lectures on the history of education at st. mary's seminary, scranton, pa., and st. joseph's college, chestnut hill, philadelphia. it was largely added to for the introductory lecture in a course to the teachers of the parochial schools of philadelphia, march, . very nearly in its present form it was delivered before the brooklyn institute of arts and sciences as the second lecture in the course on "how old the new is," april, .] we are very prone to think that our universities represent new developments in the history of humanity. we are aware that there were great educational institutions in the world at many times before the present, and that some of them profoundly affected the intellectual life of their time; we are likely to think, however, that these institutions were very different from our modern universities. they were not so well organized, they lacked endowments, their departments were not co-ordinated, they did not have the libraries and, of course, not the laboratory facilities that our modern universities have, and then, above all, they did not devote themselves to that one department of knowledge, physical science, in which absolute truth can be reached, and in which each advance in knowledge as made can be chronicled and set down as a sure basis for future work and workers in the same line for all time. { } the older institutions of learning were given up to speculation, to idealism, to metaphysics, and, of course, therefore, their work, as many educated people are now prone to look at it, was too shadowy to last, too cloudy to serve as a foundation for any enduring scientific knowledge. i do not think that i exaggerate when i make this as the statement of the thought of a good many people of our time who are at least supposed to be educated and who consider that they are reasonably familiar with the educational institutions of the past. it has seemed to me, then, that it would be interesting and opportune to trace the origin, the development and the accomplishments of the first institution of learning that is very similar to our own; and to retrace some of the achievements of its professors, the circumstances in which they were done and the conditions surrounding an ancient school which i think our study will make clear as well deserving of the title of the first modern university. this was not the collection of schools at athens, though there is no doubt at all that great intellectual and educational work was accomplished there, but not in our modern university sense. the schools were independent, and while the rivalry engendered by this undoubtedly did good so long as genius ruled in the schools, it brought about a degeneration into sophistry, from here comes the word, and argumentativeness, once the great master had been { } displaced by disciples who were sure that they knew their master's mind, and probably thought, as disciples always do, that they were going beyond their master, but who really occupied themselves with curious and trifling tergiversations of mind within the narrow circle of ideas laid down by the master,--as has nearly always been the case. the first modern university was that of alexandria. it was quite as much under greek influence as the schools of athens. there have been commentators on the story of cleopatra, who have suggested that her african cast of countenance did not prove a deterrent to her success as a conqueror of hearts, and who argue from this to the fact that it is not physical charm but personality that counts in woman's power over men, quite forgetting, if they ever knew, that cleopatra was a greek of the greeks, a daughter of the line of the ptolemys, probably a direct descendant though with the bar sinister of philip of macedon, born of a house so watchful over its greek blood and so resentful of any possible admixture of anything less noble with itself, that for generations it had been the custom for brother to marry sister, in order that the race of the ptolemys might be perpetuated in absolute purity. alexandria, while a cosmopolitan city in the inhabitants who dwelt in it and in the wide diffusion of commercial interests that centred there as a mart for east and west, was absolutely ruled by greeks and represents for many centuries after { } the decline of athens had come, the brightest focus of greek intellectual life, greek culture and art, greek letters and education and every phase of that greek influence in aesthetics which has always meant so much in the world's history. the interesting fact about alexandria in the history of education, is that it was the home of a modern university in every sense of that term, having particularly the features that many people are prone to think of as representing modern evolution in education. the buildings of the university were erected practically by a legacy left by the great conqueror himself, alexander. the central point of interest in the university was a great library, the nucleus of which was the library of aristotle, tutor of alexander, which had been collected with the help of that great conqueror and was the finest collection of books in the world of that time. the main subject of interest in the university was physical science and its sister subject mathematics, which raises mere nature-study into the realm of science, and this scientific physical education was conducted in connection with the great museum or collection of objects of interest to scientists that had also been made partly by aristotle himself and partly for his loved tutor by the gratitude of alexander during his conquering expeditions in the far east. finally professors were attracted to alexandria by the offer of a better salary than had ever been paid at educational institutions before this, and { } by the additional offer of a palace to live in, supplied by the ruler of the country. it is no wonder, then, that in attendance also, as well as in the prestige of its professors, alexandria resembled a modern university. it was its devotion to science, however, that especially characterized this first great institution of learning of which we have definite records. this devotion to science went so far that even literature was studied from the scientific standpoint. such details as we have of the instruction at alexandria and the books that have come down to us, all show men interested in philology, in comparative literature, in grammar and comparative grammar, rather than in the idealistic modes of knowledge. we have commentaries on the great authors, but no great original works of genius in literature from the professors of alexandria. the translation of the septuagint version of the old testament is a typical example of the sort of work that was being done at alexandria. they collected the documents of the nations and translated them for purposes of comparative study. it was an education for information rather than for power. the main idea of the time and place was to know as much as possible about literature, rather than to know what it represented in terms of life, and the real meaning of both literature and life was obscured in the study about and about them. people studied books about books rather than the books { } themselves. there was much writing of books about books, and it was nearly always comparatively trivial things in the great authors that attracted most attention from the many scholiasts, critics, editors, commentators, lecturers of the time. personally i could well understand such an incident happening at alexandria as is said to have happened at a well-known english (of course not american!) university not long ago. the class was construing shakespeare and one of the students asked the professor what the meaning of a particular figure used by the great dramatist was. the professor replied that they were there to construe shakespeare's language and not bother about his meaning--yet it was a class in literature. literature in recent years as studied at the universities has come to be quite as scientific in its modes and methods as it was at the university of alexandria. may i also add that it has become quite as sterile of results of any importance. there is very little real study of literature, practically no encouragement of the attempt to draw inspiration from the great authors, but all devotion to the grammar, to the philology, to comparative literature as exemplified in the old writers. books were the great essentials at alexandria. this is not surprising seeing that the university was founded around a great library, and that this library continued to be the greatest in the world in its time. every student who came to alexandria bringing a book with him of which there was { } no copy in the library, was required by a decree of the authorities to leave a copy behind him. in all the university towns of the times--and there were many founded in the rising eastern cities of alexander's empire, as it gradually crumbled into smaller pieces providing new capitals with less power but with quite as much national feeling as the capital cities of larger states, libraries became the fashion and a city's main claim to prestige in education and the intellectual life was the number of its books. antioch, tarsus, cos, cnidos and pergamos are examples of this state of affairs. pergamos was so jealous of the prestige of the alexandrian library that it forbade the exportation of parchment, an invention of pergamos which received its name from that city. petty jealousies were quite as much the rule among educational institutions then as they have been at any time since. to many people it will seem quite absurd to talk of alexandria as having done serious scientific work because the methods of science and scientific investigation are supposed to have been, as they think, discovered by lord bacon in the seventeenth century. it is curious how many educated people, or at least supposedly educated people, have this as their basic notion of the history of science. men wandered in the mazes of inductive reasoning utterly unable to bring observations together in such a way as to discover laws, utterly incompetent to note phenomena and { } bring them into relations to one another so as to show their scientific bearing, until queen elizabeth's lord chancellor came to show the way out of the labyrinth and leave the precious cord through its corridors, by which others may easily thread their way into the free air of scientific truth. i know nothing that is more absurd than this. it is a commonplace among educators, however; it is frequently referred to in educational addresses as if it were a universally accepted proposition, and to dispute it would seem the rankest kind of scientific heresy to these narrow minds. fortunately there are two writers, macaulay and huxley, to whom even these people are likely to listen, who have expressed themselves with regard to this precious historic superstition that lord bacon invented the inductive method of reasoning with what my long-worded friend would call appropriate opprobrium. macaulay says: "the inductive method has been practised ever since the beginning of the world by every human being. it is constantly practised by the most ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless schoolboy, by the very child at the breast. that method leads the clown to the conclusion that if he sows barley he shall not reap wheat. by that method the schoolboy learns that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout. the very infant, we imagine, is led by induction to expect milk from his mother or nurse, and none from his father. not only is it not true that { } bacon invented the inductive method; but it is not true that he was the first person who correctly analyzed that method and explained its uses. aristotle had long before pointed out the absurdity of supposing that syllogistic reasoning could ever conduct men to the discovery of any new principle, had shown that such discoveries must be made by induction, and by induction alone, and had given the history of the inductive process, concisely indeed, but with great perspicuity and precision." and huxley quite as emphatically points out: "the method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about--rendered precise and exact." while the whole trend of education, even that of literature, was scientific at alexandria, the principal feature of the teaching was, as we have said, concerned with the physical sciences and mathematics. it is in mathematics that the greatest triumphs were secured. euclid's "geometry," as we use it at the present time in our colleges and universities, was put into form by euclid teaching at the university of alexandria in the early days of the institution. euclid's setting forth of geometry was so perfect that it has remained for over , years the model on which all text-books of geometry of all the later times have been written. there seems no doubt that { } writers on the history of mathematics are quite justified in proclaiming euclid's "geometry" as one of the greatest intellectual works that ever came from the hand of man. the first ptolemy was fortunate in having secured this man as the founder of the mathematical department of his university. his example, the wonderful incentive of his work, the absolute perfection of his conclusions, must have proved marvellous emulative factors for the students who flocked to alexandria. commonly mathematicians are said to be impractical geniuses so occupied with mathematical ideas that their influence in other ways counts for little in university life. if we are to believe the stories that come to us with regard to euclid, however, and there is every reason to believe them, for some of them come from men who are almost contemporaries, or from men who had their information from contemporaries, euclid's influence in the university must have been for all that is best in education. proclus tells the story of king ptolemy once having asked euclid, if there was any shorter way to obtain a knowledge of geometry than through the rather difficult avenue of euclid's own text-book, and the great mathematician replied that there was "no royal road to geometry." stobaeus relates the story of a student who, having learned the first theorem, asked "but what shall i make by learning these things?" the question is so modern that euclid's { } answer deserves to be in the memory of all those who are interested in education. euclid called his slave and said, "give him twopence, since he must make something out of everything that he does, even the improvement of his mind." probably even more significant than the tradition that euclid did his work at this first modern university, and that besides being a mathematician he was a man of very practical ideas in education, is the fact that he was appreciated by the men of his time and that his work was looked up to with highest reverence by his contemporaries and immediate successors as representing great achievement. it is not ever thus. far from resenting in any way the magnificent synthesis that he had made of many rather vague notions in mathematics before his time, his contemporaries united in doing him honor. they realized that his teaching created a proper scientific habit of mind. pappus says of apollonius that he spent a long time as a pupil of euclid at alexandria and it was thus that he acquired a thorough scientific habit of mind. after euclid's time the value of his discoveries as a means of training the mind was thoroughly appreciated. the greek philosophers are said to have posted on the doors of their schools "let no one enter here who does not know his euclid." in the midst of the crumbling of old-fashioned methods of education in the introduction of the elective system, in the modern time, many of our best educators have insisted { } that at least this portion of mathematics, euclid's contribution to the science, should be a required study, and most educators feel, even when there is question of law or medical study, that one of the best preparations is to be found in a thorough knowledge of euclid. almost as wonderful as the work of euclid was that of the second great mathematician of the alexandrian school, archimedes, who not only developed pure mathematics but applied mathematical principles to mechanics and proved besides to have wonderful mechanical ability and inventive genius. it was archimedes of whom cicero spoke so feelingly in his "tusculan disputations," when about a century and a quarter after archimedes' death, he succeeded in finding, his tomb in the old cemetery at syracuse during his quaestorship there. how curious it is to think that after so short a time as years from the date of his death archimedes was absolutely forgotten by his fellow-syracusans, who resolutely denied that any trace of archimedes' tomb existed. this stranger from rome knew much more of archimedes than his fellow-citizens a scant four generations after his time. not how men advance, but how they forget even great advance that has been made, lose sight of it entirely at times and only too often have to rediscover it, is the most interesting phase of history. cicero says, "thus one of the noblest cities of greece and one which at one time had been very { } celebrated for learning, knew nothing of the monument of its greatest genius until it was rediscovered for them by a native of arpinum"--cicero's modest designation for himself. we have known much more about archimedes' inventions than about his mathematical works. the archimedian screw, a spiral tube for pumping water, invented by him, is still used in egypt. the old story with regard to his having succeeded in making burning mirrors by which he was enabled to set the roman vessels on fire during the siege of syracuse, used to be doubted very seriously and, indeed, by many considered a quite incredible feat, clearly an historical exaggeration, until cuvier and others in the early part of the nineteenth century succeeded in making a mirror by which in an experiment in the jardin des plantes in paris wood was set on fire at a distance of feet. as the roman vessels were very small, propelled only by oars or at least with very small sail capacity, and as their means of offence was most crude and they had to approach surely within feet of the wall to be effective, the old story therefore is probably entirely true. the other phase of history according to which archimedes succeeded in constructing instruments by which the roman vessels were lifted bodily out of the water, is probably also true, and certainly comes with great credibility of the man of whom it is told that, after having studied the lever, he declared that if he only had { } some place to rest his lever, he could move the world. the well-known story of his discovery in hydrostatics, by which he was enabled to tell the king whether the royal goldsmiths had made his crown of solid gold or not, is very well authenticated. archimedes realized the application of the principle of specific gravity in the solution of such problems while he was taking a bath. quite forgetful of his state of nudity he ran through the streets, crying "eureka! eureka! i have found it! i have found it!" there are many other significant developments of hydrostatics and mechanics, besides specific gravity and the lever, the germs of which are at least attributed to archimedes. he seems to have been one of the world's great eminent practical geniuses. that he should have been a product of alexandria and should even have been a professor there would be a great surprise if we did not know alexandria as a great scientific university. as it is, it is quite easy to understand how naturally he finds his place in the history of that university and how proud any modern university would be to have on the rolls of its students and professors a man who not only developed pure science but who made a series of practical applications that are of great value to mankind. such men our modern universities appropriately claim the right to vaunt proudly as the products of their training. when we analyze something of the work in { } pure mathematics that was accomplished by archimedes our estimation of him is greatly enhanced. his work "on the quadrature," that is the finding of the area of a segment of the parabola, is probably his most significant contribution to mathematical knowledge. his proof of the principal theorem in this is obtained by the "method of exhaustion," which had been invented by eudoxus but was greatly developed by archimedes. this method contains in itself the germ of that most powerful instrument of mathematical analysis in the modern time, the calculus. another very important work was "the sphere and the cylinder." this was more appreciated in his own time, and as a consequence, after his death the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder was cut on his tomb in commemoration of his favorite theorem, that the volume of the sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder and its surface is four times that of the base of the cylinder. it was by searching for this symbol, famous in antiquity, that cicero was enabled to find his tomb according to the story that i have already related. within the last few years the reputation of archimedes in pure mathematics has been greatly enhanced by the discovery by professor heiberg of a lost work of the great alexandrian professor in constantinople. archimedes himself stated in a dedication of the work to eratosthenes the method employed in this. he says: "i have thought it well to analyze and lay down for you { } in this same book a peculiar method by means of which it will be possible for you to derive instruction as to how certain mathematical questions may be investigated by means of mechanics. and i am convinced that this is equally profitable in demonstrating a proposition itself, for much that was made evident to me through the medium of mechanics was later proved by means of geometry, because the treatment by the former method had not yet been established by way of a demonstration. for of course it is easier to establish a proof, if one has in this way previously obtained a conception of the questions, than for him to seek it without such a preliminary notion. . . . indeed, i assume that some one among the investigators of to-day or in the future, will discover by the method here set forth still other propositions which have not yet occurred to me." on this professor smith comments: "perhaps in all the history of mathematics no such prophetic truth was ever put into words. it would almost seem as if archimedes must have seen as in a vision the methods of galileo, cavalieri, pascal, newton, and many other great makers of the mathematics of the renaissance and the present time." many other distinguished professors of mathematics have, since this declaration of archimedes came under their notice, declared that he must have had almost a prophetic vision of certain developments of mathematics and especially applied { } mathematics and mechanics and their relation to one another, that were only to come in much later and indeed comparatively modern times. undoubtedly archimedes' works proved the germ of magnificent development not only immediately after his own time but in the long-after time of the renaissance, when their translation awakened minds to mathematical problems and their solutions that would not otherwise have come. we know much less of the life of the third of the great trio of teachers and students of alexandria, apollonius of perga. perhaps it should be enough for us to know that his contemporaries spoke of him as "the great geometer," though they were familiar with euclid's book and with archimedes' mighty work. apollonius was surely a student of alexandria for many years and he was probably also a professor of mathematics there. he developed especially what we know now as conic sections. his book on the subject contains practically all of the theorems to be found in our text-books of analytical geometry or conic sections of the present time. it was developed with rigorous mathematical logic and euclidean conclusiveness. these three men show us beyond all doubt how finely the mathematical side of the university developed. after archimedes the greatest mechanical genius of the university of alexandria was heron. to him we owe a series of inventions and discoveries in hydrostatics and the { } construction of various mechanical toys that have been used in the laboratories since. there is even a little engine run by steam--the aeolipile--invented by him, which shows how close the old greeks were to the underlying principles of discoveries that were destined to come only after the development of industries created a demand for them in the after time. heron's engine is a globe of copper mounted on pivots, containing water, which on being heated produces steam that finds its way out through tubes bent so as to open in opposite directions on each side of the globe. the impact of the escaping steam on the air sets the globe revolving, and the principle of the turbine engine at work is clear. we have used steam for nearly years always with a reciprocating type of movement, so that to apply energy in one direction the engine has had to move its parts backwards and forwards, but here was a direct-motion turbine engine in the long ago. our great steamboats, the _lusitania_ and the _mauretania,_ now cross the ocean by the use of this principle and not by the reciprocating engine, and it is evident that it is along these lines the future developments of the application of steam are to take place. another extremely interesting invention made by heron is the famous fountain called by his name, and which still is used to illustrate principles in pneumatics in our classrooms and laboratories. by means of condensed air water is made { } to spring from a jet in a continuous stream and seems paradoxically to rise higher than its source. probably his best work in the domain of physics is that on pneumatics in which are given not only a series of discussions, but of experiments and demonstrations on the elasticity of air and of steam. these experiments could only have been conducted in what we now call a physical laboratory. indeed these inventions of his are still used in laboratories for demonstration purposes. while we may think, then, that the foundation of laboratories was reserved to our day, there is abundant evidence for their existence at the university of alexandria. we shall return to this subject a little later, when the evidence from other departments has been presented, and then it will be clear, i think, that the laboratory methods were favorite modes of teaching at the university of alexandria and were in use in nearly all departments of science both for research and for demonstration purposes. the work of the other great teacher at alexandria which was to influence mankind next to that of euclid, was not destined to withstand the critical study of succeeding generations, though it served for some , years as the basis of their thinking in astronomy. this was the work of ptolemy, the great professor of astronomy at alexandria of the first century after christ. it is easy for us now to see the absurdity of ptolemy's system. it is even hard for us to { } understand how men could have accepted it. it must not be forgotten, however, that it solved all the astronomical problems of fifteen centuries and that it even enabled men, by its application, to foretell events in the heavens, and scientific prophecy is sometimes claimed to be the highest test of the truth of a system of scientific thought. even so late as francis bacon refused to accept copernicanism, already before the world for more than a century, because it did not, as it seemed to him, solve all the difficulties, while ptolemy's system did. as great an astronomer as tycho brahe living in the century after copernicus still clung to ptolemy's teaching. it must not be forgotten that when galileo restated copernicanism, the reason for the rejection of his teaching by all the astronomers of europe almost without exception, was that his reasons were not conclusive. they preferred to hold on to the old which had been so satisfying than to accept the new which seemed dubious. their wisdom in this will be best appreciated from the fact that none of galileo's reasons maintained themselves. though his system has been rejected, still ptolemy must be looked up to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "almagest" as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. the fact that he represented a climax of astronomical development at alexandria some four centuries after the foundation of { } that university, serves to show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as with mathematics. astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. generations of professors had given themselves to research and to the publication of important works quite as in the modern time, and alexandria may well claim the right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific problems of the world around it. the most important part of the scientific work of the university of alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical department. it is a well-known law in the history of medicine that, whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine and in medical education is accomplished. this was eminently the case at alexandria. the departments of the arts, of linguistics and of philosophy were gathered { } around the great building known in greek as the mouseion, a word that has come to us through the latin under the guise of museum. this temple of the muses contained collections of various kinds and near it was situated the great library. not far away was the serapeum, or temple of serapis, the goddess of life, around which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the medical school. as teachers for this medical school some of the greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first ptolemy and a great period in medical history began. the practical wisdom guiding the ptolemys in the organization of this medical school will be best appreciated from the fact that they took the first step by inviting two distinguished physicians, the products of the two greatest medical schools of the time, to lay the foundations at alexandria. they were probably the best investigators of their time and they had behind them fine traditions of research, thorough observation and conservative reasoning and theorizing on scientific subjects. erasistratos was a disciple of metrodoros, the son-in-law of aristotle. he had studied for a time under another great teacher, chrysippos of cnidos. we are likely to know much more of cos than of cnidos because of the reputation in the after time of hippocrates, whose name is so closely connected with cos that the two are almost invariably associated, but cnidos was one of the great university towns of the later greek { } civilization. eudoxus the astronomer, ctesias the writer on persian history, and sostratos the builder of the great lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, the pharos at alexandria, were products of this university. its medical school was famous when cos had somewhat declined, and chrysippos was one of the leading physicians of the world and one of the acknowledged great teachers of medicine when erasistratos studied under him at cnidos, and obtained that scientific training and incentive to original research which was to prove so valuable to alexandria. his colleague, herophilos, was quite as distinguished as erasistratos and owed his training to the rival school of cos. whether it was intentional or not to secure these two products of rival schools for the healthy spirit of competition that would come from it, and because they wanted to have at alexandria the emulation that would naturally be aroused by such a condition, is not known, but there can be no doubt of the wisdom of the choice and of the foresight which dictated it. herophilos had studied medicine under praxagoras, one of the best-known successors of hippocrates. while distinguished as a surgeon he had more influence on medicine than almost any man of his time, except possibly erasistratos. he was, however, a great anatomist and, above all, a zoologist who, according to tradition, had obtained his knowledge of animals from the most { } careful zootomy of literally thousands of specimens. his fair fame is blackened by the other tradition that he practised vivisection on human beings--criminals being turned over to him for that purpose by the ptolemys, who were deeply interested in his researches. the traditions in this matter, however, serve to confirm the idea of his zeal as an investigator and his ardent labors in medical science. tertullian declares that he dissected at least living persons. we know that he did much dissection of human cadavers and there is question whether tertullian's statement was not gross exaggeration due to confusion between dissection and vivisection. both of these men did some magnificent work upon the brain. this being the first period in the history of humanity when human beings could be dissected freely, it is not surprising that they should take up brain anatomy with ardent devotion, in the hope to solve some of the many human problems that seemed to centre in this complex organ. before this anatomy had been learned mainly from animals, and as human beings differ most widely from animals by their brain, naturally, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, anatomists gave themselves to thorough work on this structure where so many discoveries were waiting to be made. after the brain and nervous system the heart was studied, and erasistratos' description of its valves, of its general structure and even of its physiology, show how much he { } knew. to know something of the work of these two anatomists is to see at once what is accomplished in a university medical school where medical science, and not the mere practice of medicine alone, is the object of teachers and students. i have told the story of this in my address before the graduates of the st. louis medical university medical school, and here i shall simply refer you to that. [footnote ] [footnote : the details of what was accomplished in the medical department at alexandria were given to some extent at least in the lecture in brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid repetitions in the printed copy.] of course all these studies at the university could not be conducted without laboratory equipment. of itself the dissecting room is a laboratory and until very recent years it was the only laboratory that most of the medical schools had. the numerous experiments in vivisection, if they really took place, required special arrangements and could only be conducted in what we now call a laboratory of physiology. this is not idle talk but represents the realities of the situation. other laboratories there must have been. it would be quite impossible to conceive of a man like archimedes carrying on his work, especially of the application of mathematical principles to mechanics, of the demonstration of mechanical principles themselves and of the invention of the many interesting machines which he made, without what we call laboratory facilities. the ptolemys were { } interested in his work, they supplied him with a place to do it, many of his advanced students at least must have been interested in this work so that, as i see it, there was what we would now call a physical laboratory in connection with his teaching at the university of alexandria. what we know about the development of zoology under erasistratos and herophilos would seem to indicate that there must have been such special facilities for the investigation of zoological problems as we would call a laboratory of physiology. a magnificent collection of plants was made for the university and these were studied and classified, and while we hear nothing of their dissection, there were at least botanical rooms for methodical study, if not botanical laboratories. ptolemy's work represented the culmination of astronomical information which had been gathered for several centuries. this could only be brought together in what we would now call an observatory and this represents another laboratory of physical science. our laboratory work, therefore, must have been anticipated to a great extent. we must not forget that our university laboratories are only a couple of generations old altogether and that they represent a very recent development of educational work. it is extremely interesting, therefore, to find them anticipated in germ at least, if not in actuality, at the first modern university of which we have sufficiently complete records to enable us to { } appreciate just the sort of work that was being done and the ways and modes of its education. i think that even this comparatively meagre description of the first university of which we have knowledge makes it very clear that alexandria deserves the name of the first modern university. it resembled our own in so many ways that i, for one, find it impossible to discover any essential difference between them. at alexandria they anticipated every phase of modern university education. their literature was studied from a scientific standpoint. they devoted themselves to an overwhelming extent to the study of the physical sciences and mathematics, their professors were inventors, developers of practical applications of science, experts to whom appeal was made when important scientific questions had to be settled, and their teaching was done with demonstrations and a laboratory system very like our own. nothing that i know illustrates better the tendency of human achievement not to represent advance but to occur in cycles than the story of this first modern university. that is why i have tried to tell it to you as an exquisite illustration of how old the new is in education. { } { } mediaeval scientific universities { } "qui ad pauca respiciunt faciliter pronuntiant." --an old philosopher. [those who know little readily pronounce judgment.] { } mediaeval scientific universities [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this address was originally gathered for a lecture in a course on the history of education delivered to the sisters of charity of mount st. vincent's, some in number; teachers in the catholic public schools of new york city, and for corresponding lectures to the academy of the sacred heart, kenwood. the address was delivered substantially in its present form at the catholic club of cornell university, under the title "the relations of the church to science."] probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations in science. our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed, were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation. in the light of what we know or, perhaps i should say, what we are coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an amazing, presumption on our part. over and over again in the world's history men have been { } interested in science, both in pure science and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical sciences. apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a science of language. of course the protest that will be heard at once is that what we now mean by science is physical science. even taking the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old greeks, that old greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied, developed wonderfully at the university of alexandria, that there was a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time: archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his great burning-mirrors, and a little later heron inventing the first germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with them, are studying both pure and applied science. it is simply failure to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past, that has permitted people to retain { } curious notions of the absence of science in antiquity. probably most people would be quite ready to concede, and especially after even a brief calling to their attention of some educational facts, that the old greeks did enjoy a scientific educational development; it would probably even be admitted that the traditions of science of various kinds from egypt, from chaldea, from babylonia point to previous eras of scientific development. they would probably still insist, however, that there had been a long interval of utter neglect of science lasting nearly , years and that our interest is properly a resurrection of science-study after a long burial. they do not even hesitate to blame the educational authorities of the interval for their failure to occupy themselves with scientific ideas and are prone to find reasons of various kinds to account for this failure. as the church was dominant in education during the middle ages this makes a ready scapegoat, and so we have heard much of the repression of scientific study by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the determined effort made to keep men from inquiring about the problems of nature around them, because this would lead them to think for themselves and have doubts with regard to faith. indeed this attitude of mind in the history of science is so usual that it is a commonplace, and men who are supposed to be scholars talk off-handedly of direct church opposition to science. { } there is no doubt at all that the church was the commanding influence in education during the middle ages. whatever was studied was taken up because the church authorities were interested in it. whatever was not studied was absent from the curriculum because of their lack of interest. while study was magnificently encouraged there were many subjects, though not near so many as is often thought, that were repressed. the church must certainly be held responsible in every way for the teaching of the middle ages, both as regards its extent and its limitations. the charters of the universities were granted by the popes. the universities themselves usually were cathedral schools which had developed, and to which had become attached various graduate departments. the ecclesiastical authorities were in control of them. the rector of the university was usually the archdeacon of the cathedral or the chancellor of the diocese. the professors at the universities were practically all of them in clerical orders, and the great body of the students were clerics, in the sense that they had assumed at least minor orders and were supposed to be in preparation for a clerical life. this was, indeed, the one sure way to secure exemption from the military duties of the time and to prevent interference of various kinds by the civil power with the leisure necessary for study. no man had any essential rights in the middle ages except such as were conferred on him by some organization { } to which he belonged, and the clerical order was particularly powerful. now the interesting phase of the education afforded by these universities under ecclesiastical control with clerical students and professors constituting the large majority of members, with the influence of the religious orders paramount for centuries, is that it was entirely scientific in character and largely occupied with the physical sciences, though the culture sciences formed the basis of it. huxley, though he is surely the last man of recent times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the scientific significance of mediaeval education, recognized this fact very well and stated it very emphatically. in his inaugural address on universities actual and ideal, delivered as rector of aberdeen university after discussing the subject with evident careful preparation, he said: "the scholars of the mediaeval universities seem to have studied grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy, theology and music. thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. for these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and physical science and art. { } _and i doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old trivium and quadrivium does."_ (italics mine.) of course huxley says, "sometimes it may be in caricature." we must not forget, however, that first even huxley hesitates to say that it is caricature, for he knows how easy it is to be mistaken in our estimation of the true significance of an old-time mode of thought, and then, too, he knew comparatively how little we were sure of the real thoughts and conclusions of these men of the olden time because of defective sympathy and even defective knowledge of their work. our knowledge in this matter has greatly increased since his time. as a matter of fact, the more we know about these old masters and the mediaeval universities the less are we likely to think of their work as lacking in seriousness in any sense. the quarter of a century that has elapsed since huxley so cogently urged this at aberdeen has brought many facts unknown to us before and has shown us what good work, even in the physical sciences, was accomplished in these old-time universities. for instance, nothing is more common in the mouths of certain kinds of scholars than the expressions of wonder as to why men did not study nature more assiduously before our time. here is a magnificent open book full of the most alluring lessons which any one may study for himself, and that somehow it is presumed men neglected { } down to our time. we are the age of nature students, and preceding times are looked at askance for having neglected the opportunities that lay so invitingly open to them in this subject. it has always been a wonder to me how people dare to talk this way. our old literatures are full of observations on nature. in my book on "the popes and science" i take dante as a typical product of the universities of the thirteenth century, and show without any difficulty as it seems to me, that there is no poet of the modern time who can draw figures from nature which demand even a detailed knowledge of nature with so much confidence as dante. he knows the most intimate details about the birds, about many animals, about the ways of flowers, about children, describes some experiments in science, has a wide knowledge of astronomy and in general is familiar with nature quite as much if not more than any modern writer not _ex professo_ a naturalist. he describes the metamorphosis of insects, how the ants communicate with one another, knows the secrets of the bees and exhibits wide knowledge of the secrets of bird life. the presumption that people did not study nature in the olden time is quite unjustified. they did not write long books about trivial subjects of nature-study. they did not conclude that because they were seeing something for the first time, that that was the first time in the world's history it had ever been seen. they were gentle, { } kindly scholars who assumed that others had eyes and saw too, and as fortunately there was no printing press there was not that hurried rushing into print, with superficial observations and still more superficial conclusions, which has characterized so much of our recent literature of nature-study and that has been so well dubbed "nature faking." of course we have had faking of the same kind in nearly everything else: we have history faking in our supposed historical romances, science faking in our pseudo-science, science-history faking in our ready presumption that the men of the olden time could not have had our interests, and, above all--may i now say it?--in our cheap conclusion that there must have been some reason for their lack of interest in science, and then the assumption without anything further, that it must have been because of the church. just as soon as there is question of there having been any serious scientific study during the middle ages, in the sense of observations in physical science, investigation of the physical phenomena of nature and the drawing of conclusions from them and the evolving of laws, there are a large number of people who consider themselves very well informed, who will at once object that this must be quite absurd, since at this time lord chancellor bacon had not as yet laid down the great foundations of the physical sciences in his discussion of inductive reasoning. i have already { } ventured to suggest, in the address on "the first modern university," how utterly ridiculous any such notion is. i have quoted lord macaulay and huxley as ridiculing those who entertained such an idea. here i may be permitted to recur to the subject by quotations from the same authorities. i have often found that anything i myself said in this matter was at once considered as quite incredible, since my feelings were entirely too favorable toward the middle ages and then my religious affiliations are somehow supposed to unfit me for scientific thinking. fortunately macaulay and huxley have expressed themselves in this matter even more vigorously than i would be likely to, and so i may simply quote them. as lord macaulay wrote in his well-known essay: "the vulgar notion about bacon we take to be this, that he invented a new method of arriving at truth, which method is called induction, and that he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which had been in vogue before his time. this notion is as well founded as that of the people who, in the middle ages, imagined that virgil was a great conjurer. many who are far too well informed to talk such extravagant nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to what bacon really effected in this matter." still more apposite is what professor huxley has to say. discoursing on the phenomena of { } organic nature, after warning his auditors not to suppose that scientific investigation is "some kind of modern black art," he adds: "i say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the 'baconian philosophy.' to hear people talk about the great chancellor--and a very great man he certainly was--you would think that it was he who had invented science, and that there was no such thing as sound reasoning before the time of queen elizabeth. "there are many men who, though knowing absolutely nothing of the subject with which they may be dealing, wish nevertheless to damage the author of some view with which they think fit to disagree. what they do is not to go and learn something about the subject; . . . but they abuse the originator of the view they question, in a general manner, and wind up by saying that, 'after all, you know, the principles and method of this author are totally opposed to the canons of the baconian philosophy.' then everybody applauds, as a matter of course, and agrees that it must be so." lord bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned copernicanism because it failed to solve the problems of the universe, and condemned dr. gilbert, the great founder in magnetism, whose work was the best { } exemplification of inductive science of that time. of course bacon did not invent science nor its methods. he was only a publicist popularizing them. they had existed in the minds of all logical thinkers from the beginning. his great namesake, friar bacon, much better deserves to be thought a pioneer in modern physical science than the chancellor,--and he was a mediaeval university man. we are prone to think of the old-time universities as classical or literary schools with certain limited post-graduate features, more or less distantly smacking of science. the reason for this is easy to understand. it is because out of such classical and literary colleges our present universities, with their devotion to science, were developed or transformed during the last generation or two. it is to be utterly ignorant of mediaeval education, however, to think that the classical and literary schools are types of university work in the middle ages. the original universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries paid no attention to language at all except inasmuch as latin, the universal language, was studied in order that there might be a common ground of understanding. latin was not studied at all, however, from its literary side; to style as such the professors in the old mediaeval universities and the writers of the books of the time paid no attention. indeed it was because of this neglect of style in literature and of the niceties of classical latin that the university men of recent centuries before our own, { } so bitterly condemned the old, mediaeval teachers and were so utterly unsympathetic with their teaching and methods. we, however, have come once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too little, and when the matter is supposed to be everything, and we should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education who were in the same boat. we have inherited traditions of misunderstanding in this matter, but we should know the reasons for them and then they will disappear. as a matter of fact, exactly the same thing happened in our modern change of university interests during the latter half of the nineteenth century as happened in the latter half of the fifteenth century in italy, and in the next century throughout europe. with the fall of constantinople the greeks were sent packing by the turks and they carried with them into italy manuscripts of the old greek authors, examples of old greek art and the classic spirit of devotion to literature as such. a new educational movement termed the study of the humanities had been making some way in italy during the preceding half-century before the fall of constantinople, but now interest in it came with a rush. the clergymen, the nobility, even the women of the time became interested in the new learning, as it was called. private schools of various kinds were opened for the study of it, and everybody considered that it was the one thing that people who { } wanted to keep up to date, smart people, for they have always been with us, should not fail to be familiar with. the humanities became the fashion, just as science became the fashion in the nineteenth century. fashion has a wonderfully pervasive power and it runs in cycles in intellectual matters as well as in clothes. the devotees of the new learning demanded a place for it in the universities. university faculties perfectly confident, as university faculties always are, that what they had in the curriculum was quite good enough, and conservative enough to think that what had been good enough for their forefathers was surely good enough also for this generation, refused to admit the new studies. for a considerable period, therefore, the humanities had to be pursued in institutions apart from the universities. indeed it was not until the jesuits showed how valuable classical studies might be made for developmental purposes and true education that they were admitted into the universities. note the similarity with certain events in our own time in all this. two generations ago the universities refused to admit science. they were training men in their undergraduate departments by means of classical literature. they argued exactly as did the old mediaeval universities with regard to the new learning, that they had no place for science. science had to be learned, then, in separate institutions for a time. the scientific { } educational movement made its way, however, until finally it was admitted into the university curricula. now we are in the midst of an educational period when the classics are losing in favor so rapidly that it seems as though it would not be long before they would be entirely replaced by the sciences, except, in so far as those are concerned who are looking for education in literature and the classic languages for special purposes. it will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned, because it represents much more closely than we might have imagined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the classical period which we have seen go out of fashion to so great an extent in the last two generations. we shall readily find that at least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled up the rest of the curriculum. philosophy, which occupied so prominent a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which remained almost down to our day, attests. physical science was not the sole object of these mediaeval institutions of learning, but they were thoroughly scientific. the main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such { } discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to his creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the material world as would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his powers. huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. language was learned through grammar, the science of language. reasoning was learned through logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications to practical life. mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at all appreciate. cantor, the german historian of mathematics, in hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the development of mathematics during the centuries before the renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way that makes it very clear that the teaching at the universities in this subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live universities ought to make. then there was astronomy, metaphysics, theology, music and law and medicine. the science of law was developed and, above all, great { } collections of laws made for purposes of scientific study. of astronomy every one was expected to know much, of medicine we shall have considerable to say hereafter, but in the meantime it is well to recall that these mediaeval centuries maintained a high standard of medical education and brought some wonderful developments in the sciences allied to medicine and above all in their applications to therapeutics. surgery never reached so high a plane of achievement down to our own time, as during the period when it was studied so faithfully and developed so marvellously at the mediaeval universities. it was inasmuch as a knowledge of physics was needed for the development of metaphysics that the mediaeval schoolmen devoted themselves to the study of nature. they turned with as much ardor and devotion as did herbert spencer in the nineteenth century, to the accumulation of such information with regard to nature as would enable them to draw conclusions, establish general principles and lay firm foundations for reasonings with regard to the creature and the creator. it is, above all, this phase of mediaeval teaching work, of the schoolmen's ardent interest that is misunderstood, often ignored and only too frequently misrepresented in the modern time. for instance, in the discussion of the status of matter in the universe the scholastics and notably thomas aquinas had come to the conclusion that matter was absolutely indestructible. he { } even went so far as to say that man could not destroy it, and god would not annihilate it. _nihil omnino in nihilum redigetur_--nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness, was his dictum as the conclusion of a course of lectures on this subject. he saw the changes in matter all round him that were supposed to be destructive, the burnings, the vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but he knew that these only brought changes in matter and not destruction of the underlying substance. for him, as for all the scholastic philosophers, matter was composed of two principles, as they were called. one of these was prime matter and the other form. to prime matter, one of these, matter or substance owed all its negative qualities, inertia and the like. to form, the dynamic element or principle, it owed all its individuating qualities. prime matter was the same in all things. form was the energy or bundle of energies, the dynamic principle, as we have said, which entering into prime matter, made the different kinds of matter that we speak of. it is extremely interesting to compare this old scholastic teaching with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the notions which have come to us from researches in physical chemistry in recent years. our scientists no longer believe that we have some eighty different elements, essentially different kinds of matter, that cannot by any chance or process be changed one { } into another. we have seen one form of elementary matter changing into another, helium emanations becoming radium, have heard of professor ramsay's transmutation of various elements, and have about come to the conclusion that in the radio-active substances we have a wonderful transmuting power. a prominent american professor of chemistry declared not long since that he would like to treat a large quantity of lead ore in order to extract from it all the silver which so constantly occurs in connection with it in the natural state, and then having put the lead ore aside for a score of years, would like to examine it again, confident that he would find traces of silver in it once more, which had developed as a consequence of the radio-activity present in the substance and which is constantly changing lead into silver in small quantities. newton's declaration, when he saw crystals of gold in connection with copper, that gold had been developed from the copper, seemed very foolish a century ago, but no one would consider it so at the present moment. we are prone to think that these old mediaeval philosophers accepting to some extent at least the philosopher's stone with its supposed capacity for changing baser metals into precious, and with their acceptance of the transmutation of substances, cannot have had any real scientific bent of mind. we are coming to the realization, however, that in many ways by pure reasoning, in { } conjunction with such observation as they had at hand, they anticipated our most recent conclusions in very marvellous ways. we know now that radium, or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone of the olden time. we are not surprised at the transmutation of metals and of substances, on the contrary, we are looking for it. i remember once stating the old theory of matter and form to a distinguished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas of the composition of matter. he asked why this teaching was not more generally known. i had to tell him that in every catholic school of philosophy, it was taught as a basic doctrine, and that far from being concealed it was the very touchstone of catholic philosophic teaching, and had often been the subject of deprecation and contemptuous remarks on the part of those who thought that it represented somewhat foolish old-fashioned teaching handed down to us from the backwardness and abysm of time. we have demonstrated the indestructibility of matter in modern times by experimental methods. the mediaeval schoolmen reached similar conclusions, however, by strict reasoning from the premises of observation that they had in the olden times. we may be apt to think that they knew very little about nature and the details of physical science, but that will be only because we do not { } know their great books. albertus magnus is a typical example of a renowned teacher of the thirteenth century who was, however, at the same time a highly respected member of his order, holding important official positions in it and thoroughly honored and respected by his ecclesiastical superiors so that he was made a bishop, yet writing volumes of observation with regard to nearly every phase of physical science. a list of his books reads like a section of a catalogue of a library of physical science. i have told the story of his career in the second series of "catholic churchmen in science," but the names of his volumes are sufficient to show what sort of work he was doing. he has volumes on chemistry, botany, on physics, on cosmography, on animal locomotion, on respiration, on generation and corruption, on age and death and life, on phases of psychology, the soul, sense and sensation, memory, sleep, the intellect and many another subject. those who think that there was no attention paid to science in the middle ages must know nothing at all of albertus magnus' work. above all, those who talk thus are entirely ignorant of all that roger bacon did. roger bacon himself was a student of the university of paris. he was a professor there. he corresponded with the scientists of europe quite as frequently or at least as significantly as professors of the modern time do with each other. students submitted their discoveries to him. we { } have peregrinus' letter to him with regard to magnetism and electricity and know of others. we have his own books, in which he treats not only the scientific problems, but inventions and applied science of all kinds. at the present time his interest in aeronautics has a special appeal to us. he was sure that men would sometime make a successful airship. he even thought that he could make one himself, but his experiments proved unsuccessful. his theory of it was very interesting. in his work "de secretis artis et naturae operibus" he writes that a machine could be constructed in which a man sitting in the centre might move wings by means of a crank and thus, quite after the fashion of birds, fly through the air. it was he who wrote that the time would come when carriages would move along the roads without men or horses to pull them. at the moment he was experimenting with gunpowder. he realized, therefore, that sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes. that is, of course, just what we are doing with gasolene. he suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and without sails. he was anticipating our motor boat. he taught that light moves with a definite rate of velocity, though that fact was not demonstrated for several centuries after his time. he worked out most of the theory of lenses as we have it at the present time. he was sure that experiment and { } observation constituted the only way by which knowledge of nature could be obtained. in this he was but following his great teacher albertus magnus, who insisted that in natural philosophy experiment alone brought sure knowledge; _"experimentum solum certificat in talibus."_ are his own words. roger bacon's devotion to mathematics shows how thoroughly scientific was the trend of his mind. without mathematics he was sure that one could not reach scientific knowledge, or that what one did get was without certainty. some of his expressions in this matter are strikingly modern. it is no wonder that his writings and teachings were so great a surprise to his generation that the pope ordered him to write out his knowledge in books. without this order we would not have had roger bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade him to be possessed of sufficient money to enable him to purchase writing materials, which were then very expensive. indeed the mathematics of the mediaeval universities is the best proof of the seriousness of their devotion to science and, may it also be said, of their success. cantor, in his "history of mathematics," and he is the great authority in the matter, devotes nearly pages of his second volume to the mathematicians of the thirteenth century alone, two of whom, leonard of pisa and jordanus nemorarius, did so much in arithmetic, in the theory of numbers, and in geometry, { } as to work a revolution in mathematics. they had great disciples like john of holywood (probably a town near dublin), johannes campanus and others. no wonder that at the end of the century roger bacon said, "for without mathematics nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be obtained," and again, "for he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedy." the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw even more important work done. cantor has half a dozen men in the fifteenth century to whom he devotes more than twenty-five pages each. how the place of this in mediaeval teaching can have escaped the notice of those who insist so much on the neglect of science during the middle ages, is hard to understand. this alone would convict them of ignorance of what they are talking about. the educational genius of the great university century, the thirteenth, the man who influenced his contemporaries and succeeding generations more than any other, was thomas aquinas, to whom the church, for his knowledge and goodness, gave the title of saint. if any further proof that these centuries were interested in science were needed, or that the universities in which he was the leading light as scholar and professor in the thirteenth century, and as the great master to whom all looked reverentially after, were developing scientific studies, it would be found in { } his works. philosophy is developed scientifically in his "contra gentes" and theology, scientifically in his great "summa." it is the very austerity of the scientific qualities of these books that have made them forbidding for many modern readers, who, therefore, have failed to understand the scientific spirit of the time. st. thomas aquinas, however, was, as i suggested at the beginning of this, deeply interested in every form of information with regard to what we now call physical science. he evidently drank in with avidity all that had been observed with regard to living creatures and, when we come to analyze his works with care and read his books with the devotion of his own students, we find many anticipations of what is most modern in our science. the indestructibility of matter, matter and form, that is the doctrine of the unity of the basis of matter, the conservation of energy in the sense that the forms of matter change but do not disappear, all these were commonplaces in his thought and teaching. i have recently had occasion to point out how close he came to that thought in modern biology which is probably considered to be one of our most modern contributions to the theory of evolution. it is expressed by the formula of herbert spencer, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." according to this the completed human being repeats in the course of its development the history of the race, that is to say, the varying phases of foetal development { } in the human embryo, from the single cell in which it originates up to the perfect being as it is born into the world, retrace the history by which from the single-cell being man has gradually developed. the whole theory of evolution is supposed by many people to be modern, but of course it is not. this particular phase of it, however, is thought surely to be modern. it is sometimes spoken of as the fundamental law of biogeny. in recent years serious doubts have been thrown on it, but with that we have nothing to do here. it is very curious to find, however, that st. thomas, in his teaching with regard to the origin and development of the human being, says, almost exactly, what the most ardent supporters of this so-called fundamental biogenetic law proclaimed in recent years. he says that "the higher a form is in the scale of being and the farther it is removed from mere material form, the more intermediate forms must be passed through before the finally perfect form is reached. therefore, in the generation of animal and man--these having the most perfect forms--there occur many intermediate forms in generations and consequently destruction, because the generation of one being is the destruction of another." st. thomas does not hesitate to draw his conclusions from this doctrine without hesitation. he proclaims that the human material is first animated by a vegetative soul or principle of life, and then by an animal soul and only ultimately, when the matter has { } been properly prepared for it, by a rational soul. he said: "the vegetative soul, therefore, which is first in the embryo, while it lives the life of a plant, is destroyed, and there succeeds a more perfect soul, which is at once nutrient and sentient, and for that time the embryo lives the life of an animal: upon the destruction of this there succeeds the rational soul, infused from without." his discussion of the position of the church and of faith to science is extremely interesting, because here once more he faces a modern problem. aquinas was very sensitive with regard to the imposition upon christians of things which supposedly they had to believe on the score of faith, though they were really not of faith at all. some of his expressions in this matter are very strong and he was especially fond of quoting st. augustine, who was very emphatic on this point. one of these typical passages deserves to find a place here because, while the word philosophy is used, it is evidently science in our modern sense of the word that is intended. augustine talks of what the philosophers have said of the heavens or the stars and the motion of the sun and moon, meaning of course the astronomers, who were in the old days classed as natural philosophers. this passage, then, which contains the opinions of the two greatest teachers of the church in the west may well serve as a guide for those who are interested in science, and a warning for those who would { } obtrude faith too far into scientific questions, and thus limit investigation and hamper that freedom of intellect which is so important for the development of science. st. thomas said in his introduction to the reply to master john of vercelli: "i have endeavored to reply but with this protest at the outset, that many of these articles do not pertain to the teachings of faith, but rather to the dogmas of the philosophers. but it works a great injury either to assert or deny as belonging to sacred doctrine such things as do not bear upon the doctrine of piety. for augustine says, 'when i hear certain christians ignorant of those things (namely, what philosophers have said of the heavens, or the stars, or the motion of the sun and moon) or misunderstanding them, i look with patience upon such men: nor do i see any reason to hinder them, when of thee, lord creator of all things, they do not believe unworthy things, if perhaps they be ignorant of the structure, and condition of corporal creatures. but they are a hindrance if they think these things belong to the very doctrine of piety; and more, pertinaciously, dare to affirm that of which they are ignorant.' but that they may be the cause of injury augustine shows. 'it is very disgraceful,' he says, 'and pernicious and especially to be avoided, that a christian speaking of these things as though according to christian teaching should so rave that any infidel may hear; so that, as it is said, seeing him altogether in the wrong, he may { } scarcely contain his mirth. and it is not so hurtful that one man should be seen to err, as that our writers are believed by those who are without [the church] to have such opinions, and to the ruin of those whose salvation is our care they are scorned and contemned as unlearned.' whence it seems safer to me that those things which philosophers have commonly held, and are not repugnant to our faith, should neither be asserted as dogmas of faith, although at times they may be introduced under the names of the philosophers, nor so denied as contrary to the faith, as to give occasion to the wise of this world of contemning the teaching of the faith." is it any wonder that professor saintsbury of the university of edinburgh, whose training in the old scotch universities has given him a breadth of sympathy not common in our time, and whose wide knowledge of the literature of that period as well as its philosophy and education, and whose training in the discussion of the criticism of all time in his "history of criticism" has made his opinion of special value, should have sympathetically turned to these old teachers and deprecated a little bitterly the modern attitude towards them? he said: "yet there has always in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who, whatever they were, were { } thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. and there have even, in these latter days, been some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the thirteenth." i have always considered, however, that the easiest way to show the modern student of science how supremely scientific in his temper was st. thomas, is to quote for him the passage from that great teacher with regard to the resurrection. in every way, that is typically modern. st. thomas faces the question that after death men's bodies decay, the material of them is taken up and used in many other living beings, so that how can we dare to believe that we shall rise again on the last day with the same bodies that we now have? st. thomas discusses this knotty problem straightforwardly and solves it more satisfactorily, even for all the knowledge that we have of it now, than has ever been done. "what does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on uninterruptedly clearly can be no bar to the identity of the arisen man with the man that was. in a man's body while he lives there are not only the same parts in respect of matter, but also in respect of species. in respect of matter there is a flux and reflux of parts. still that fact does not bar the man's numerical unity { } from the beginning to the end of his life. the form and species of the several parts continue throughout life, but the matter of the parts is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter accrues through nourishment. yet the man is not numerically different by the difference of his component parts at different ages, although it is true that the material composition of the man at one stage of his life is not his material composition at another. addition is made from without to the stature of a boy without prejudice to his identity, for the boy and the adult are numerically the same man." the most important feature of the scientific teachings of the mediaeval universities has been left till the last because it is the clinching confirmation of a claim that these were essentially scientific universities. it is to be found in the position of the medical schools and the state of medical teaching during the middle ages. so curiously has the history of education been written, and, above all, of medical education, that to most people this would seem to be surely the department of education which would prove just the opposite. we have heard so much about church opposition to anatomy and church opposition to surgery, of its repression of the development of medical science and even medical art, because the church wanted to make people believe in the value of masses, relics and prayers--and pay for them--that most people are quite sure that there { } was no medical education of any significance in the middle ages. nothing shows more clearly how viciously the history of education has been written than the existence of such false impressions. not only are they utterly unfounded, but they are based on supreme ignorance of one of the greatest periods in the history of medicine that we have in all the world's history. not only were the schools excellent and the teaching progressive, but there was a fine development of medical science and, above all, of surgery. surgery is supposed to be particularly the department of medicine that did not develop. we have learned better in recent years, and now we know that there was no greater period in the history of surgery than that from to when, alas! following so-called history, we used to think there was no surgery. the first question that any one who knows anything about the subject asks with regard to the progress in medicine of a particular time or country is, what was the standard of its medical education? what was the standard of admission to the medical schools, how many years of medical studies were required? to this question the middle ages have a wonderful answer that has not been realized until recent years. we now have frederick ii's famous law for the regulation of the practice of medicine and the maintaining of standards in medical schools. this law was promulgated in the two sicilies, the southern part of { } italy and sicily proper. according to it no one was allowed to practise medicine who had not studied for four years in a recognized university and then practised for one year with a physician before receiving his license to practise by himself. if he wanted to practise surgery he had to spend an additional special year in the study of anatomy. the university medical schools were graduate schools and did not admit a student unless he had completed the undergraduate course. of course it may be thought that this was due entirely to the great emperor frederick, who was far ahead of his time and who, therefore, anticipated the progress of medical teaching by many centuries. we have, however, many other documents which illustrate the state of medical education at this time. the charters of the medical schools were granted by the popes and were very explicit in what they required of the new faculties in order that standards might be maintained. pope john xxii, for instance, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, issued charters for medical schools at perugia and cahors. he required that there should be four years of medical study and three years of preliminary work. he went into details to secure the maintenance of standards. the original faculties of these schools would all have to be doctors in medicine from either paris or bologna, and it must be their duty to establish in the new schools the standards of their { } almae matres. examinations were to be conducted under oath, men were not to be granted degrees unless they deserved them, the votes of professors rejecting candidates or graduating them were to be under oath-bound secrecy, so as to have them absolutely free from personal influence, and every precaution was taken to secure the highest possible standards. it was as a consequence of their direct attachment to these old mediaeval medical schools that the medical schools founded here in america in the sixteenth century at once began with high standards. three years of preliminary work was required and four years of medicine. in the united states no preliminary requirements were demanded; and for a full century only two years of medical study, which really consisted of but two terms of four months each, was the requirement. the old mediaeval medical schools were originally attached to the universities, and it is a well-known rule in the history of education that whenever the medical schools are independent then standards are sure to be low. whenever the university controls the medical school and it is a real graduate department, then standards of admission and of graduation are properly maintained. it is surprising to think that the old mediaeval universities should be able to give us lessons in this matter and should put us to shame for our slip-shod nineteenth-century medical education in the united states, but this is a simple fact. contrast { } the south american countries where the mediaeval traditions with which they were founded constrained them to give four, five and even six years to medicine before granting a degree. go a step further and see how devoted to science were the universities of lima (peru) and mexico, centuries before we did any serious scientific work in the united states, and all because they were direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities. the feeling of certain modern educators would be that it did not matter how much time these mediaeval universities gave to medicine since, after all, they had nothing of any value to teach in medicine. even educated people have been led to believe that there was nothing in medicine and, above all, in the surgery of those times to be of any value. probably no opinion is more foolishly ignorant or more ridiculously absurd than this, though it is a commonplace among people who are sure they know something about history, and, above all, among those who consider themselves authorities in the history of education, and of the development of science. in surgery a magnificent development was made at this time of which i shall have something to say later. in medicine there was much less anticipation of our modern progress, but even here there was much that demands our respect. one of the university men, simon of genoa, worked out the dosage of opium and indicated its uses. anodyne drugs were { } employed much more generally and successfully than we are apt to think; various methods of anaesthesia, one of them by inhalation, of which i shall say more when talking of surgery, were invented and a large number of drugs and simples were experimented with. down at montpellier bernard gordon suggested red light for smallpox. this is not much of a record, perhaps, but we must not forget what professor richet, the director of the physiological laboratory of the university of paris, said not long since in an article on "physicians and medicine" in _la revue de deux mondes._ it is startling but chasteningly true. "the therapeutics of any generation has always been quite absurd to the second succeeding generation." indeed it is one of the almost disheartening things in the history of medicine to see how treatments come in, are widely accepted and hailed as great advances in therapeutics and then gradually disappear. they bled a great deal and they purged not a little, in accordance with the teaching in the medical schools of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but then they bled a great deal and purged a great deal more, according to the teaching of the medical schools of the beginning of the nineteenth century. there have been many periods in the interval when purging and bleeding were, and very properly, not nearly so popular. it was in preventive medicine particularly that { } these progressive medical men of the early university days secured their triumphs. they made separate hospitals for the lepers all over europe, and by segregation succeeded in wiping out that disease, though it was as widely spread as tuberculosis in our day and presented just as serious a problem. indeed the most encouraging incentive for our present tuberculosis campaign is drawn by many authorities from the experience with leprosy, which was eventually obliterated as an endemic popular disease, by strict segregation methods. these same generations created special hospitals for erysipelas and thus prevented the spread of this disease in the ordinary hospitals, where it used to be so serious a factor for morbidity if not for mortality. men forgot this later and the disease became a serious problem once more in all the hospitals of even a generation ago. the hospital organization worked out by these university men is the finest jewel in the crown of their accomplishment as applied scientists. pope innocent iii, himself a university of paris man, founded the santo spirito hospital in rome, summoning for that purpose the best authority on hospitals in europe, guy of montpellier, and then required the bishops of the world to erect similar hospitals in their dioceses. this was done, and it is virchow, whose sympathies were anything but favorable to the popes, who has been most loud in his praise of the wonderful hospital organization of these centuries. every town in { } europe of , inhabitants or more had a hospital, and there were hospitals in many of the smaller towns. it would be easy to think that these hospitals were rudely built, were badly ventilated, were ill-arranged and, above all, were likely to be houses for the perpetuation of disease rather than for the regaining of health. we are prone to think that we are the first generation to solve the problem of hospital construction. we know what poorly-constructed, badly-planned institutions were the hospitals of three generations ago. what, then, must have been the hospital buildings of centuries ago? this argument has no place in history; the worst hospitals in the world and in history were erected at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. some of the best hospitals ever constructed date from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. this was a time when great architects were successfully solving the construction problems for cathedrals, municipal buildings, colleges and the like, and they solved them quite as successfully for hospitals. some of these hospitals were models in their way. one of them, built toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the sister of st. louis, marguerite of bourgogne, with its large windows high in the walls, in single-story buildings, with arrangements for the segregation of patients, with the kitchens in a separate building, with beautiful { } frescoes on the walls so that patients' minds might be occupied and not left to their own often disturbing devices as with our bare wall, with a stream of running water divided so as to pass on both sides of the hospital, is a model of construction for all time. it was in surgery rather than medicine, however, that these great mediaeval university medical schools left their impress upon the history of medicine. during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we have a series of wonderful teachers of surgery, whose achievements we know not by tradition nor by fragments of their writings, but by the text-books which they wrote and which constituted the teaching for generations and sometimes for centuries after their time. gurlt, the great german historian of surgery, devotes some pages of the first volume of his "history of surgery" to the surgical accomplishments of the middle ages. he even protests that space compels him to abbreviate the story of what these old-time masters of surgery did to lay the foundation of modern surgical practices. it is a commonplace in the american writing of history that there was no surgery at this time. president white says that, "for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable until the german emperor wenceslas, in , ordered that it should be held in honor again." the two centuries immediately preceding this date represent the { } greatest period in the history of surgery down to our own time, and because of its originality probably greater in real achievement than even our vaunted age. it is sometimes the custom to say that this surgery was derived from the arabs. this is supposed to rob the mediaeval universities of any prestige that may come to them for this marvellous progress. gurlt, however, in his "history of surgery," in his sketch of roger (ruggiero), who was the first of the great surgeons of the thirteenth century, who taught at the italian universities, says: "though arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to italy by constantine africanus years before roger's time, these exercised no influence over italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of the influence of the arabs to be found in roger's work." when gurlt says this it is because he has deliberately studied the question, and we can be absolutely sure, therefore, that whatever we find in surgery at this time comes to us from these great mediaeval universities themselves, and is not imported from abroad. after roger, who was at bologna for a time after having been in paris, and who then became a papal physician, there are a series of great names that deserve to be mentioned. four names are connected together by association as master and pupil for what may be termed four generations of surgical progress. from the birth { } of the first to the death of the last represents about years. that years is a gloriously fruitful century in the history of surgery. the first of the group is william of salicet, of whom professor clifford allbutt, the regius professor of physic at the university of cambridge, in his address on the "historical relations of medicine and surgery to the end of the sixteenth century," delivered by special invitation at the congress of arts and sciences at the world's fair in st. louis in , has the highest praise. allbutt says: "like lanfranc and the other great surgeons of the italian tradition, and unlike franco and paré, william had the advantage of the liberal university education of italy; but like paré and wurtz, he had a large practical experience in hospitals and on the battlefield and fully recognized that surgery cannot be learned from books only." allbutt praises him and rightly for his careful notes of cases and then tells us something of his accomplishments in surgery. he says: "william discovered that dropsy may be due to a _durities renum_ six centuries before bright; he substituted the knife for the arabist abuse of the cautery; _he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention_ (italics ours), he described the danger of wounds of the neck; he sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of suppurative diseases of the hip; and he referred chancre and phagedaena to their proper causes." { } his pupil lanfranc equalled his master in devotion to practical surgery and surpassed him in his development of the great science of medicine. pagel, the well-known german historian of medicine, says that, in his text-book lanfranc has excellent chapters on the affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth, and treats of hernia in a very practical common-sense way. he warns against the radical operation and says, in words that come home to us with strange familiarity at the present time, that many surgeons decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient but for the sake of the money that is in them. lanfranc's discussion of cystotomy, pagel characterizes as prudent but rational, for he considers that the operations should not be feared too much but not delayed too long. in patients suffering from the inconvenience which comes from large quantities of fluid in the abdomen he advises _paracentesis abdominis_, but warns against putting the patient in danger from such an operation without due consideration. pagel says that lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest surgeons of the middle ages and the real establisher of the prestige of the french school of surgery which maintained its prominence down to the nineteenth century. lanfranc had been invited to paris to take the chair of surgery, because the authorities of the university wanted to add prestige to the medical school, which was not as well known as the school { } of philosophy. the fame of william of salicet had spread throughout academic europe, and so lanfranc was offered the chair at the university of paris in order to carry his master's message there. the next in the succession of great teachers at paris was mondeville, who found less to do in an original way than his master lanfranc and his protomaster william, but who accomplished much for surgery. all that he did was thrown into the shade by what was accomplished for succeeding generations by the next in the series, guy de chauliac, who studied for a time in paris under mondeville, though his early medical education was obtained at montpellier, but had also had the advantage of spending a year in italy at the various medical schools which were famous at that time. these two incidents, lanfranc's invitation to paris to be a teacher there from italy more than a thousand miles away, and guy de chauliac's studies in all the important universities of europe of the time before he took up his own work, illustrate better than any words of ours can the ardent enthusiasm for study, the thoroughgoing anticipation of our most modern methods in education. mondeville, like chauliac, had made very nearly the same round of the universities. it is a custom, not a chance incident, that we have to deal with here. guy de chauliac has been given the name of the father of modern surgery. any one who wants to see why should read the text-book on surgery that { } chauliac wrote and which for two centuries after his time (he died about the middle of the fourteenth century) continued to be the most used text-book of surgery in the medical schools of europe. chauliac, for instance, describes the treatment of conditions within all three of the important cavities of the body, the skull, the thorax and the abdomen. pagel has three closely-printed pages in small type of titles alone of subjects in surgery which chauliac treated with distinction. his description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. he describes the passage of a catheter, for instance, with the accuracy and complete technique of a man who knew the difficulties of it in complicated cases from practical experience. he even recognizes the dangers for the patient from the presence of anatomical anomalies of various kinds and describes certain of the more important of them. he has very exact indications for trephining. for empyema he advises opening of the chest and indicates where and how. he says very frankly that in wounds of the abdomen the patient will die if the intestines have been perforated and left untreated, and he describes a method of suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient's life. his treatment of bone surgery and of fractures and dislocations is especially interesting and shows how far these very practical men had reached conclusions resembling those of our time. { } it was in hernia particularly that chauliac's surgical genius manifested itself. he operated for hernia and its radical cure, placing the patient in an exaggerated trendelenberg position, head down, feet fastened to a slanting board. for such work anatomy had to be known very well, and chauliac had made special studies at bologna under bertruccio, the successor of mondino. chauliac once declared that the surgeon ignorant of anatomy carves the human body as a blind man would carve wood. of ulcers of all kinds chauliac writes from a knowledge evidently derived from experience. of ulcers due to cancer he has much to say. he considers them hopeless unless they can be excised at a very early stage and the incision followed by caustics. for carcinomatous ulcers there is not much that we can do beyond this, even in our day. it is no wonder that the great historians of medicine have been unanimous in praise of this wonderful scientific genius. for my lecture on "old-time medical education," before the johns hopkins historical club, last year, i quoted some of those opinions. portal, for instance, says of him, "it may be averred that guy de chauliac said nearly everything that modern surgeons say and that his work is of infinite price, but unfortunately too little pondered." malgaigne declares chauliac's "chirurgia magna," "a masterpiece of learned and luminous writing." pagel says, "chauliac represents the summit of attainment in mediaeval { } surgery, and he laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the french maintained down to the nineteenth century." professor clifford allbutt says of chauliac's treatise, "this great work i have studied carefully and not without prejudice; yet i cannot wonder that fallopius compared the author with hippocrates or that john freind calls him the prince of surgeons. the book is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise." in a word it has all the qualities that are usually said to be lacking in the work of mediaeval scientists, and it is a standing reproach to those who ignorantly have made so little of the work of these wonderful men of the olden time, who anticipated so many of the features of our modern medicine and surgery that we are prone to think of as representing climaxes in human progress, indications of a wonderful human evolution. two other names of great professors of surgery deserve to be mentioned because they make it very clear that this wonderful development of surgery was not confined to france and italy, but made itself felt all over europe. one of these is john ypermann, a surgeon of the early fourteenth century, of whom almost nothing was known until about twenty-five years ago, when the belgian historian, broeck, brought to light his works and gathered some details of his life. he was a pupil of lanfranc, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at paris on a scholarship voted by his native town of ypres, { } which provided maintenance and tuition fees for him at the great french university expressly in order that he might become expert in surgery. we are likely to think of ypres as an unimportant town, but it was one of the great industrial centres of europe and one of the most populous, busy towns of flanders in the middle ages, noted for its manufacture of linens and fine laces. the famous cloth hall, erected in the thirteenth century, one of the most beautiful architectural monuments in europe, and one of the finest buildings of its kind in the world, was the result of the same spirit that sent ypermann to paris. after his return ypermann settled down in his native town and obtained great renown not only at home, so that in that part of the country an expert surgeon is still spoken of as an ypermann, but he became famous throughout all the teutonic countries. he is the author of two books in flemish. one of these is on medicine. pagel calls it an unimportant compilation. the terms that occur in it, however, are enough to show us how much more than we are likely to think, these old masters in medicine discussed problems that are still puzzling us. he treats of dropsy, rheumatism, under which occur the terms coryza and catarrh, icterus, phthisis (he calls the tuberculous tysiken), apoplexy, epilepsy, frenzy, lethargy, fallen palate, cough, shortness of breath, lung abscess, hemorrhage, blood-spitting, liver abscess, hardening of the spleen, affections of the kidney, { } bloody urine, diabetes, incontinence of urine, dysuria, strangury, gonorrhea and involuntary seminal emissions--all these terms are quoted directly from pagel. his work in medicine, however, is as nothing compared to his writings on surgery. a special feature of his book is the presence of seventy illustrations of instruments of the most various kinds, together with a plate showing the anatomical features of the stitching of a wound in the head. even pagel's brief account of its contents will be a source of never-ending surprise for those who think that surgery has developed entirely in our time. even in this work on surgery, however, there are many things that we now treat under medicine. as this gives us an opportunity to show how much more of medicine was known at this time than is usually thought, i venture to quote some of pagel's brief resume of the contents of a single chapter. this is a chapter devoted to intoxications, which includes the effect of cantharides as well as alcohol, and treats of the bites of snakes, scorpions and of the fatal effects of wounds due to the bite of mad dogs. the other great surgeon and surgical writer of the time, for there must have been many distinguished surgeons and only a few writers, if we can trust to common experience in that matter, was john ardern, an english surgeon. he was educated in montpellier, practised for a time in france, then settled for some years in the { } small town of newark in nottinghamshire, and then for nearly thirty years in london. his "practice of surgery," as yet existing only in manuscript, is another one of these wonderful contributions to the applied sciences of anatomy and medicine at a time when such applications are often supposed to have been absent. he was an expert operator and had a wide reputation for his success in the treatment of diseases of the rectum. he was the inventor of a new clyster apparatus. daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of ardern's manuscript in st. john's college, oxford, says that it contained numerous illustrations of instruments and operations. we fortunately possess an excellent manuscript copy in the surgeon general's library at washington, and sometime it is hoped this will be edited and published. the most interesting feature of the work of all of these men is their dependence on personal observation and not on authority. guy de chauliac's position in this matter can be very well appreciated from his criticism of john of gaddesden's book in which he bewails the blind following of those who had gone before. his bitterest reproach for many of his predecessors was that, "they followed one another like cranes, whether for fear or love he would not say." pagel praises ypermann for the well-marked striving which he has noted in him to free himself from the bondage of authority, and because most of his therapeutic { } descriptions rest upon his own experience. william of salicet, at the beginning of this great period of surgery, had insisted that notes of cases were the most valuable sources of wisdom in medicine and surgery. the last of them, ardern, gave statistics of his cases and was quite as proud as any modern surgeon of the large number that he had operated on. he gives these carefully and accurately. i have dwelt on the medical side of these universities mainly, of course, because this is more familiar to me as a historian of medicine than their work in other scientific departments, but also to a great extent because the medical schools gathered unto themselves nearly all the scientific knowledge of the time. botany, mineralogy, climatology, meteorology were all studied for the sake of what could be learned from them for the benefit of medicine. even astronomy which was then the old astrology, was cultivated seriously, because of the supposed effect of the stars on human constitutions. for this we surely cannot blame these mediaeval students of science since four centuries later galileo and even kepler were still making horoscopes for their patrons and laying down laws from astronomy that were supposed to be applicable to medicine. even copernicus studied astronomy and medicine side by side and this combination of studies was not at all infrequent. the medical schools, then, are the real index of { } the serious interest of the mediaeval universities in science. our scientific departments in modern universities have developed other interests, because of various applications that these have to life and its concerns. always in scientific universities applied science is sure to encroach upon the domain of pure science, and no one knows that better than we do, for we have been bewailing the presence of machine shops and boiler factories on the university grounds. the old universities did not teach applied mechanics or engineering, but that does not mean that these subjects were not taught. there were special technical schools conducted by the gilds by means of apprenticeship and the journeyman training, which enabled them to teach those who cared to have it all the knowledge necessary for construction work of various kinds. the wonderful architectural engineering exhibited in the cathedrals, university buildings, town halls and castles of this time, and the magnificent bridges, some of which are still in existence, show us that the technical subjects were by no means neglected. [footnote ] our mediaeval forefathers in education had the wisdom not to let the technical subjects interfere with pure science too much, as they inevitably do whenever the two are brought too closely together. culture is always overshadowed by the practical, but not to the ultimate benefit of the race. [footnote : see address on "ideal education of the masses."] the proof for us here in america, close at { } hand, that these universities of the middle ages were thoroughly scientific in spirit and not only capable of, but actually active and successful in scientific investigation, is to be found in our earliest american universities. we are prone to think, because of the curiously defective way in which our histories of education have been written, that the only things worth while talking about in the origins of education here in america are to be found in english america. recent investigations have shown how utterly deceived we were by foolish self-conceit in this matter. long before the english-american universities were founded, and still longer before they began to do any serious work in education, there were important universities having literally thousands of students in attendance in the spanish-american countries. the university of mexico and the university of lima in peru were both founded about the middle of the sixteenth century. harvard came nearly a century later, yale a full century and a half, princeton more than two centuries. the contrast between our english-american institutions of learning, however, and their spanish-american rivals in accomplishment and numbers in attendance is still more striking than the mere dates of foundation. of course there were chairs of many sciences, strange as that may seem to us with our ridiculous traditions with regard to the history of education. these spanish-american universities were { } the direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities. they were in close relationship with salamanca, valladolid and alcala. they were the progeny of scientific universities and they were, of course, occupied mainly with science. in spite of the fact that already the influence of the renaissance, with its classical studies as the basis of education, had begun to make itself felt, these spanish-american universities retained, to a great extent, the scientific curriculum. nor must it be thought that they were shilly-shally institutions of learning, doing nothing in reality, but making a great pretence of studying many things. to know the very opposite we turn to bourne, himself at the time a professor at yale, and writing one of the volumes of a series edited by professor albert bushnell hart, who holds the chair of history at harvard, to be told in very definite emphatic terms how successfully investigations in science and scientific education were carried on in mexico. professor bourne says: "not all the institutions of learning founded in mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in english america until the nineteenth century. _mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology._ { } dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. conspicuous are toribio de motolinia's 'historia de las indias de nueva españa,' duran's 'historia de las indias de nueva españa,' but most important of all sahagun's great work on mexican life and religion." the scientific products of these universities in america are interesting because almost as a rule we know absolutely nothing about them in english america, and, therefore, conclude there must have been none. the first book written on a medical topic in america was the "secretos de chirurgia," written by dr. pedrarias de benavides, which was published at valladolid in spain in . the first book on medicine actually published in this country was "opera medicinalia," by francisco bravo. [footnote ] on columbus' second expedition, however, a dr. chança who had been physician-in-ordinary to the king and queen of spain, was sent with the expedition as what we would now call a scientific attaché. on his return he wrote a volume of scientific observations that he had made in america. some of these were doubtless written while he was over here, though the book was published in spain. dr. ybarra of new york recently published a résumé of this in the smithsonian publications and an article on it in the _journal of the american medical association_. { } it shows very well how wide were the scientific interests of the physicians of the time and how ardent their investigation of science, for there is scarcely a phase of modern science that would be touched on by the corps of scientists now attached to such an expedition which does not receive some serious treatment in dr. chança's book. thus early did the spanish-americans take up scientific investigation seriously. [footnote : published in mexico, .] professor bourne of yale, in his chapter on the "transmission of the european culture," in the third volume of the american nation series, [footnote ] says (p. ): "early in the eighteenth century the lima university [lima, peru] counted nearly , students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors [in its faculty] in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts. ulloa reports that 'the university makes a stately appearance from without, and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments.' _there were chairs of all the sciences_, and 'some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of europe.' the coming of the jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in america. they established colleges, one of which, the little jesuit college at juli, on lake titicaca, became a seat of genuine learning." [footnote : harpers, new york, .] a distinguished professor of medicine in this country to whose attention this state of medical { } education in the spanish-american countries, so different from what is thought, was called, said: "what a surprise it is to find that while we have been accustomed to think that the _primum mobile_ [the active initiative] in education in this country came from the anglo-saxons, we now find that they were long anticipated in every department of education by the spaniards, though we have been rather accustomed to despise them for their backwardness." with regard to the establishment of the first american medical school, it is no longer a surprise to find that it was established in mexico, just as soon as we realize that the mexican university was closely in touch with the traditions of the mediaeval universities generally and these all established medical schools as university departments. the standards of these mediaeval medical schools were transported to america and maintained. our medical schools in the united states got away from the universities, became mere preparatory institutions, granted degrees for just as little study as possible, two terms of four months each in most cases, sometimes given in the same calendar year and requiring no preliminary training. we are reforming this now for a generation, but just inasmuch as we are, far from advancing, we are going straight back to the mediaeval universities and their standards and methods. with all this evidence before us it seems perfectly clear that these old mediaeval universities { } must be considered to have been scientific universities in our fullest modern sense of the term. they devoted all their time to the study of phenomena around them and the attempt to find the principles underlying them. they went at it somewhat differently in many departments of science than those which are now employed, but in all their practical work at least, they anticipated our methods as well as many of our results. the great professors wrote text-books and students who were ardent in the pursuit of knowledge copied out those text-books by hand. they had no way of easily multiplying them almost indefinitely, as we have at the present time. probably nothing shows so well the enthusiastic zeal of these times in the pursuit of scientific knowledge as the fact that so many copies of these textbooks still remain for us. much has been lost by war and fire, and still more by wanton destruction by people who could not understand, for there were many intervening generations that sold these old manuscripts by the ton for the use of grocers to wrap up butter and any other commodity. if we only had the wealth of manuscript that was originally created it would be easy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and show the wonderful scientific scholarship of these mediaeval universities. as it is, there cannot be the slightest doubt that these were great scientific universities. how, then, has the opposite tradition of science only { } coming to cultivation in our time obtained a foothold; above all, how has it happened that men have insisted that there was no science in these old days because the church was opposed to science and would not permit its study or allow of scientific investigation? if we were to believe many writers who have been taken very seriously, anatomy was conducted only under the pain of death, chemistry made one liable to all sorts of penalties and other forms of science were absolutely banned. there is no reason at all for any such declarations from what we know of the history of science. the place where such groundless assertions are found is in the so-called history of religion. the _odium theologicum_ was very bitter, and ignorant men said things without knowing, and then their statements were copied by others who knew even less. probably there is no more serious blot on the history of education and, above all, the history of science, than the fact that men supposed to be scholarly have been so ready to accept absolutely ignorant statements with regard to the state of science during the middle ages. it would be amusing, if it were not so amazing, to recall the utter lack of scholarship that characterized the men who wrote such things, but above all the generations that accepted such history as solemn truth and even conferred academic dignities and degrees on such men. take a book like dr. draper's "conflict of science and religion." it { } is founded on the uttermost lack of knowledge of the subjects of which he speaks. it is true that he has consulted historical writers. they were all secondary authorities. he had never gone back to look up a single original document of any kind. he was a physician; supposedly at least, then, he should know the history of medicine. he knows nothing at all about the great medical schools of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; of the great period of surgery that occurred at this time he has no inkling. had he cared really to know anything about the period he could have seen some of the text-books written by these men. instead we have an exhibition, in his book, of the most consummate assumption of knowledge associated with sublime ignorance and bitter condemnation for old institutions, educational and ecclesiastical, in matters of which he knows nothing, though if he did know, his opinion would surely be just the opposite to that he has expressed. to a great degree this is true of president white's "a history of the warfare of science with theology." secondary authorities constantly figure in it, and they are quoted from, as a rule, with the definite idea of proving a particular thesis--that theology is opposed to science. of course it is very different to that of draper, there is much more of true scholarship in it, but it is sad to think that the prestige of a president of a great university who had been a professor of { } history should have been lent to statements so egregiously misleading as those which are constantly to be found in his work. even sadder it is to think that this has been accepted by many people as a scholarly work and as representing the last word on the subject. the "cambridge modern history" in its preface said, that history has been a long conspiracy against the truth and that we must now go back once more to the original documents. "it has become impossible," the editors declare, "for the historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. the honest student continually finds himself deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth." in no department of history is this expression more true than in that of education, and especially of science and the relation of educational institutions to scientific development. no man should now dare venture to say anything about the state of science at any time in the world's history who has not seen some of the books written at that time. above all, no one should venture to make little of the past on the strength of what religiously prejudiced writers have said about it. this story of the mediaeval universities is most illuminating from that standpoint. they were { } scientific universities closely resembling our own. it has become the custom to talk of them as if they were institutions of learning that accomplished nothing, and wasted their time over trifles. we often hear of how much time was wasted in dialectics in the middle-age universities, but surely it was not more than is wasted over technics in our modern university. hundreds of books were written about the quips and quiddities of logic, but thousands of volumes are full of technics and most of our scientific journals are crowded with it. let us, then, if for no other reason than our fraternity with them, begin to do justice to these old universities. their scholars were ardent and zealous, their professors were enthusiastic and laborious. the tomes they issued were larger and their writings more voluminous than those of our own professors. they are hard reading, but no one must dare to criticise them unless he has read them, and, above all, no one must make little of them without knowing something about them at first hand. this is scholarship; the secondary information that has been popular is sciolism. let us get back to scholarship. that is what we need just now in america. { } ideal popular education { } "according to my view he who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in the particular way which the work requires: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; and he who is to be a good husbandman at tilling the ground; those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. and they should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. for example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding or some other exercise for amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children's inclinations and pleasures by the help of amusements to their final aim in life. the sum of education is right training in the nursery. the soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected. do you agree with me thus far?"--plato, _laws_ (jowett), vol. iv, p. . scribner, . "there will be gymnasia and schools in the midst of the city, and outside the city circuses (playgrounds) and open spaces for riding places and archery. in all of these there should be instructors of the young."--plato, _laws_ (jowett), vol. iv, p. . scribner, . { } ideal popular education [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this lecture was collected for a course on the history of education delivered to the sisters of charity of mount st. vincent's, at st stephen's hall, new york city, in january and february, . the material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of philadelphia in the spring of .] we have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our education of the masses is a failure. teaching people to read and write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge, overgrown sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. indeed we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. the learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper, the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. with some rather { } disconnected information this is practically all that our ordinary education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums of money on it. we are just beginning to realize that other forms of education and not these superficial introductions to supposed scholarship, which can mean so little, constitute realities in education. we have come to realize that germany, where it is said that more than sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. by contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children have the opportunity for such training. we are very prone to think, however, that the technical school is a modern idea. we assume that it owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork and craftsmanship has at length arisen. nothing could well be less true than this. it is true that the eighteenth century saw practically no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity for it. in the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded the masses of the people in all sorts of arts and { } crafts and trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical schools. they did not call these teaching institutions technical schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from such schools. this training the people of these times owed to the gilds. these were, of course, of many forms, the arts gilds, the crafts gilds, the merchants gilds, and then the various trades gilds. boys were apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that his parents chose for him, and then began his training. it was conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. the master provided him with board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be. after his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his gild. if he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was { } considered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. this was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. the piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old english word masterpiece was derived. this might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. the only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products turned out by these workmen. it was these graduates of the apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the english cathedrals, the english municipal buildings, the castles and the palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. it was the graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling, who produced the wonderful stained glass, the beautiful bells, the finished ironwork, the surpassing woodwork, the sculpture, the decoration,--in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture of the wonderful gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--which we have learned to value so highly in recent years. if we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would have to import the workmen. these wonderful { } products were made in cities so small that we would be apt to think them scarcely more than insignificant towns in our time. no town in england during the thirteenth century, with the possible exception of london, had more than , , and most of the cathedral towns were under , in population and many of them had less than , . the extent to which this teaching went and how much it partook of the nature of real technical training can be very well appreciated from recent studies of these early times. there has probably never been more beautiful handicraftsmanship nor better products of what we now call the arts and crafts than during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when this system of educating the masses became thoroughly organized. any one who knows the details of the decoration of the great gothic cathedrals or of the monasteries and castles and municipal buildings of these centuries will be well acquainted with these marvels of accomplishment, scattered everywhere throughout england, france, germany, italy and spain in this period. something of the story of it all i tried to tell, as far as the cathedrals are concerned, in my book, "the thirteenth the greatest of centuries." those who care to see another side of it will find it in mr. a. ralph adams cram's "the ruined abbeys of great britain." [footnote ] mr. cram, himself a { } successful modern architect, does not hesitate to declare some of this work as among the most beautiful that ever was made, even including the ancient greek and roman productions. in his searches into the ruins of these old abbeys he has found mutilated fragments so consummate in their faultless art that they deserve a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age. [footnote : new york, the churchman company, .] it was not alone, however, in the arts of sculpture and decoration, that is in those finer accomplishments that would occupy only a few of the workmen, but in every detail of adornment that these artistic craftsmen excelled. the locks and bolts, the latches and hinges, the grilles, even the very fences and gates made in wrought iron, are beautiful in every line and in the artistic efficiency of their designs. the carved woodwork is in many places a marvel. when a gate has to be moved, or a hinge is no longer used, or a lock or even a key from these early times goes out of commission, we would consider it almost a sacrilege to throw it away; it is transported to the museum--not alone because of its value as an antique but, as a rule, also because of its charm as a work of art. when a bench-end is no longer needed it, too, finds its way into the museum. as rev. augustus jessopp has shown very clearly in his studies of the old english parishes, these marvels of iron and woodwork were made, in most cases, respectively by the village blacksmith and the village carpenter. in the archives of { } some of the parishes of the middle ages the accounts are found showing that these men were paid for them. when the village blacksmith and the village carpenter becomes the artist artisan capable of producing such good work, then indeed is there an ideal education at work and a technical training that may be boasted of. the most important feature of this education remains to be spoken of, however. it consisted of the fine development and occupation of the mind that came from this system. men found happiness in their work. in a population of less than , , of people many thousands of workmen, engaged in building these magnificent monuments of that old time, reaped a blessed pleasure in the doing of beautiful things. they, too, had a share in the great monument of which their town was worthily proud and the opportunity to make something worth while for it. instead of idly envying others they devoted themselves to making whatever their contribution might be as beautiful as possible. it might be only the hinges for the doors or the latch for the gates, it might be only the stonework for the bases of pillars, though it might be the beautiful decoration of their capitals; but everything was being done beautifully and an artist hand was required everywhere. men must have tried over and over again to make such fine things. they were not done at haphazard nor at one trial. there must have been many a spoiled piece { } rejected, not so much by the foreman as by the critical, educated taste of the workmen themselves who were able to make such beautiful things. men who could make such artistic products must have labored much and begun over and over again. this must have made the finest occupation of mind that a great mass of people has ever had in all the world's history. american millionaires model the gates of their parks and the grille doors of their palaces under the wise direction of modern architects who fortunately know enough to follow the designs created by these village workmen of the olden time. modern palatial residences are glad to have samples of the wood-carving of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as models for their decoration, and as attractive pieces around which present-day work may be done. we have to import our workmen, even our large cities cannot supply all that we want of them, and yet little towns of a few thousand inhabitants had them in sufficient abundance in the olden time to enable them to make every portion of their great monumental buildings, cathedrals, abbeys, universities, castles and town halls beautiful in every way. this represents the triumph of a technical training afforded by the gilds of workmen of the olden time. we have to insist on this because our present generation has been so sure that ours was the first generation that gave any serious attention to the education of the masses, that it is important to show by { } contrast how much of a mistake we have made and how well an older generation accomplished its purpose. the chapter of the "lost arts" might well be told with regard to this old time. they had secrets in glass-making which were the tradition of the teaching of particular gilds that we have been unable to find again in the modern time. there is a jewel-like lustre to their colors that is sometimes simply marvellous in its depth and purity. at lincoln the contrast between old and new glass can be seen very well. the old windows of the thirteenth century time were stoned out by the parliamentarians when they captured the town, because forsooth they could have no such idolatry as that in their presence. the old sexton, who as man and boy for over sixty years had lived his life under the beautiful tints of the old glass, now saw it scattered upon the floor in fragments. he could not part with it thus and so he gathered it up into bags, broken to pieces though it was, and hid it away in the crypt. in the nineteenth century when they were restoring the cathedral they found these fragments of the old windows. they pieced them together and they proved to be so beautiful that, though they could not fit them as they were in the olden time, at least they succeeded in making a beautiful patchwork of colored glass. over on the other side of lincoln cathedral they then placed some new windows of the { } modern time. these were made in france, i believe. they were made about the middle of the nineteenth century, when stained-glass making was almost at its lowest ebb. they were considered to be very beautiful, however, and something like £ , sterling was paid for them. the contrast between the two sets of windows is very striking. the old windows are so beautiful, the new ones are so commonplace. the visitor, even though he knows nothing about art, notices the contrast and, if he has an eye for color, views with something of a shock this attempt of the nineteenth century to do something that had been so well done by the gild-trained workmen of the technical schools of the middle ages. though they are represented here only by patched fragments of their work he can scarcely repress a smile at the effect of their work in cheapening the modern. everywhere it is the same way. mr. f. rolfe, writing from venice, where he has been studying thirteenth-century glass, and talking of its wonderful beauty as compared to anything modern, says: "there are also fragments of two windows, pieced together and the missing parts filled in with the best which modern murano can do. these show the celebrated beroviero ruby glass (secret lost) of marvellous depth and brilliancy in comparison with which the modern work is merely watery. (the ancient is just like a decanter of port wine.)" this is the story, no matter where one goes, { } throughout europe. at york they would not surrender the town to the parliamentary army until a guarantee had been given them that their cathedral would not be devastated as had been the case elsewhere. besides general ireton was a friend of the yorkists and he was ready to agree to the stipulation. the agreement was not fully carried out, fanatic soldiers could not be entirely restrained, but some of the old glass remains. there is probably nothing more beautiful in all the realm of artistic glass-making than the famous five sisters window at york. in france the revolution repeated what the puritans accomplished of ruin in england. notre dame has no trace of its old glass. in some of the cathedrals, however, there has fortunately been preserved for us enough of it to know how wonderfully the makers of it must have been trained, and to let us realize how much of experiment, of investigation, of study that we would now call applied chemistry must have gone to the making of this wonderful old glass. these technical schools were not merely passing on arts and crafts traditions, but each generation was adding to the secrets of the gilds by original research of its own. we are prone to think that such work of original investigation was reserved for our time, but that is only because of the foolish self-complacency which blinds us to what other generations did. the stained glass of the cathedrals of bourges { } and of chartres shows the marvellous success of these old workers in glass and their power to make enduring products. it is a mystery to see how their blues have lasted while the sun has shone through them all these years and caused no deterioration or only such as softens and adds to beauty but not really causes to fade. blue had to be used in great profusion on the windows because the symbolism of color was well determined and blue stood for the virtue of purity and was the blessed virgin's color. it had to come in, therefore, on nearly all occasions. usually by irradiation blue causes surrounding colors to lose something of their tint, and by contrast often spoils what would ordinarily be expected to prove beautiful color effects. these old workmen had found the secret of using it in such a way as not thus to spoil surrounding colors, not to permit it to be too assertive, yet we have wonderful enduring blues that have come down to us practically unchanged through all these centuries. where the workmen of the old time set themselves producing pure color effects, their windows look like jewels and coruscate in the light of the setting sun--for their most charming effects were particularly obtained in the west windows--with a glorious beauty that has appealed to every generation since. it was not alone in the building trades, however, that these fine things were accomplished. bookmaking reached a degree of perfection that { } has never been excelled. humphreys, the authority on illuminated books, declares that the manuscript volumes of the thirteenth century, illuminated as they are by the patient labor and the finely developed taste of this time, are the most beautiful ever made. we have one example of the thirteenth-century illuminated book in the lenox library in new york for which, i believe, the museum authorities were quite willing to pay some $ , , and it is worth much more than that now, for it is a wondrously beautiful example of the illuminations of the time. like the glassmakers, these bookmakers had secrets that have been lost, and that we with all our knowledge of science and of art in the modern time, or at least our fondly complacent notion of our knowledge of art and science, are unable to find the formulas for. they used blues in their illuminating work that have never faded, though blues are so prone to fade on parchment. they managed their blues in wonderful way and they still are as fresh and as undisturbing of the harmony of other colors as in the long ago. they could burnish gold and it stays as bright as when it was first applied to the leaves, even after seven centuries. we have lost the art of burnishing gold in such applied work and ours becomes dull after a time. nor was this teaching of technics confined only to the men. from this period we have the most beautiful needlework in the world. the famous { } cope of ascoli has recently attracted wide attention. mr. pierpont morgan purchased it and was willing to pay $ , for it, though the jewels that had been on it originally had been removed. his experts assured him that it was the most beautiful piece of needlework in the world. afterwards it was found to have been stolen, and so he restored it to the italian government, who did not return it to the little convent of ascoli in north central italy, from which it had been stolen and where it was made at the end of the thirteenth century ( ), elsewhere in europe they were doing just as charming work with the needle. in fact england, not italy, was the acknowledged home of it. the english cope of cyon is another notable example of needlework from this time. thirteenth-century work with the needle is famous in the history of the art. it was the product of just the same forces that gave us the wonderful stained glass. they, too, used colors and applied great art principles to this unpromising mode of expression and accomplished great results. i have had the privilege of seeing the copy of the cope of ascoli that was made while in mr. morgan's possession, and, like the stained glass of york or bourges or chartres, it is one of the things not likely ever to be forgotten, so beautiful a realization is it of what is best in taste and art. the supremely interesting feature of this popular education was its effect upon the lives, and { } minds, and happiness of the workmen. men got up to their work in the morning not as to a routine occupation in which they did the same things over and over again, until they were so tired that they could scarcely do them any more, and then came home to rest from fatigue in weariness of mind and of body. but they awoke from sound sleep with the memory that ideas had been coming to them the day before, and especially towards evening that, now with fresh bodies, they might be able to execute better, and that it would surely be a pleasure to work out. they came to their work with an artist's spirit, hopeful that they would be able to express in the material what they saw so clearly with their mind's eye. it was tiresome working but the hours were not long, and always there was the thought of accomplishment worthy of the cathedral or the abbey or the town hall, worthy to be placed beside the masterpieces in the best sense of that dear old word, that their fellow-workmen of the other gilds were accomplishing around them. they went to bed healthily tired but not weary, sometimes to dream of their work, not as a nightmare, but as something that represented possibilities of accomplishment. when technical schools can lift men up to this plane then, indeed, there is a chance for happiness even for the workmen. compare with this for a moment the lot of the modern workman. he goes out in the morning to work that seldom is interesting, that he { } practically never cares to do only that he must get money enough to support himself and his family, and that requires the frequent repetition of routine movements until he is weary, body and soul. he must work or starve. he has very little interest in it as a rule, often none at all, and sometimes he is thoroughly disgusted with it. he must earn money enough to get bread to live to-day so that he shall be able to go and work again tomorrow. and so the humdrum round from day to day with nothing to relieve the prospect until the darkness comes when no man can work. as to dreams of accomplishment or pleasure in his work, as the artist has, there is practically none. he needs must go on, and that is all about it. is it any wonder that this breeds discontent? happy is the man who has found his work. there is only one happiness in this little life of ours and that consists in having work to do that one cares to do, and the chance to do it in such order and with such rewards as make life reasonably pleasant, satisfying from the material side. there are no pleasures in life equal to the joy of the worker in his work when he cares for it. pleasures are at most but passing incidents. the work is what counts. these workmen of the middle ages taught in the technical schools of that olden time had chances for happiness, chances that were well taken, such as perhaps no other generation of workmen could have. of course it may be said that, after all, there { } were only opportunities for a few to work at the great architectural monuments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. in a sense this is true, but it must not be forgotten that without modern mechanical means and with the slow, patient laborious effort required to raise these huge edifices, much time and many men were required. besides the cathedrals and the abbeys there were many private castles and town halls, and then in many places the homes of the gilds themselves, some of which, as, for instance, the famous hall of the clothmakers at ypres, are among the most beautiful monuments of the architecture of that period. in everything, however, the workmen had a chance to do beautiful work. in the textile industries this is the time when some of the most beautiful cloth ever made was invented and brought to perfection. linen was woven with wonderful skill, satin was invented and brought to perfection, silk brocades of marvellous designs of many kinds were made, threads of gold and silver were introduced into the textures, wonderfully fine effects were studied out and applied in the industries, and just as in the decorative arts so in the arts of cloth-weaving and of many other forms of human endeavor, there was an artistic craftsmanship such as we have lost sight of to a great extent in our age of machinery. the irish poet, yeats, in bidding a group of american friends good-bye some five years ago, said that we had many opportunities for culture { } in life here in america, but we must be careful to take them fully and not deceive ourselves with counterfeits, or we would surely miss something of the precious privilege and development that might be ours. among other things he said, that we must not forget "that until the very utensils in the kitchen are useful as well as beautiful no nation can think of itself as really cultured." if men and women can bear without constraint to handle things that are merely useful without beauty in them, there is something seriously lacking in their culture. whatever is merely useful is hideous. nature never made anything that was merely useful in all the world's history. the things of nature around us are all wonderful utilities and yet charmingly beautiful. the pretty flowers are seed envelopes meant to attract birds and insects, so that the seeds may be scattered. the beautiful fruits are other seed envelopes meant to attract man and the animals, so that the seeds may be carried far and wide. the leaves of trees are eminently useful as lungs and stomach and yet are beautiful and have a wondrous variety and a charm all their own. this precious lesson of nature they seem to have understood well in the middle ages and applied it with marvellous perfection. it has often been called to attention that portions of gothic edifices in dark corners, out of the sight of the ordinary visitor, are just as beautifully decorated in their own way as those which are { } especially on exhibition. the gravestones in their churches, though meant to be trodden under foot and often covered by the dirt from the shoes of passersby, yet had bronze ornaments that are so beautiful that in the modern time artists take rubbings of them so as to carry the designs away with them. while every portion of the church is beautiful, the same thing was true in the castles and to a great extent in their own homes. the furniture of that time, even in the houses of smaller tradesmen, was beautiful in its simplicity, its solidity, its charm of line, and then, above all, its absolute rejection of all pretence of seeming to be anything other than it was. their drinking cups were beautiful, their domestic utensils of various kinds had charming lines and, though they did not have as many as we have in the modern time, what they had were so beautiful that now we find them on exhibition in museums, and we are beginning to imitate them in order that the wealthy may have as bric-à-brac ornaments in their houses, the utensils which were in ordinary use in the homes of the middle classes of the thirteenth century. there was a satisfaction for the workman in making all these beauteous things. he knew, as a rule, for whom they were to be made. he knew where they were to be placed. he often saw his handiwork afterwards. his reputation depended on it. there was a happiness then in doing it well, and in taking his time to it, that surpasses { } any idle pleasure away from his work, as happiness always surpasses pleasure. there was the joy of the doing, and joys we are coming to appreciate mean ever so much more than pleasures. what we want at the present time are more joys and less pleasures. how many men and women were blessed in that time because they had found their work. that is the only real happiness in life. how profusely it was scattered over the mediaeval world. almost nothing that was made was of a character that could be done by mere routine. a man had to occupy both mind and body in the making of the textiles, of the kitchen utensils, of the furniture, of the various metal utensils required for houses, and so for nearly everything else. it is the workman who has mere routine work that has opportunity to think about other things and brood over his lot and grow more and more dissatisfied. it is the man who does not have to give his mind to what he is doing, but who while his body grows more and more tired accomplishing a limited set of constantly repeated movements, may allow his mind to ponder gloomily over his condition, compare it with that of others and grow envious, who has the worst possible seeds of discontent in his occupation. men who did this sort of work that required active mental attention, learned to think for themselves. when they had moments of leisure, not having newspapers and superficial shallow books { } to waste their time on, they did some thinking. any one who has had a little intimate contact with the old-fashioned artisans, the shoemakers, the harnessmakers, the cabinetmakers who work at benches, the woodcarvers, men who have real trades, knows how often one finds among them a deep, serious thinker with regard to the problems of life around. they do not drink in other people's opinions and then think that they are thinking, because they are able to repeat some formulas of words. such men are not easily led. they make good jurymen, they have logic; above all, they are thoughtful. there must have been much of this in the old time among the handicraftsmen of the middle ages. it is doubtless to this that we owe the fact that these men were gradually organized in many wonderful ways into the basic democracy on which the liberties of the english-speaking people of the world are founded. we shall have much more to say of this in treating of the wonderful fraternal organizations, with solutions for nearly every problem of social need, which these men succeeded in working out for themselves in times considered to have been benighted. there was another phase of the education of these members of the gilds that is even more interesting because it trenches particularly on the intellectual side of life, the provision of entertainment and solves an important social problem. this was the organization of dramatic { } performances for the people in which the members of the gilds took part. the stories of the old testament and of the new, and of the lives of the saints, and of various incidents connected with church history, were worked up into plays and were presented in the various cities. we have the remains of many cycles of these plays. they represent the beginnings of our modern dramatic literature. they were simple and very naive, but they were interesting and they concerned some of the deepest and most beautiful thoughts with which man has ever been concerned. the members of the gilds and their families took part in them. the principal sets of plays were given in the springtime at the various festivals of the church, so frequent then. most of the spare time from christmas on, especially the long hours of the winter evenings, were occupied in preparations of various kinds for these spring dramatic performances. it is impossible to conceive of anything more likely to give people innocent and joyful yet absorbing occupations of mind than these preparations. some of the young men and women were chosen as the actors and had to learn their parts and be rehearsing them. choruses had to be trained, costumes had to be made, some scenery had to be arranged, everything was done by the members of the particular gild for each special portion of the cycle of the play assigned to them. garments had actually to be manufactured out of the wool, { } the dyeing of them had to be managed, spangles had to be made for them, there must have been busy occupation of the most interesting kind for many hands. of course it is easy to say that these naive productions could not have meant very much for the people. any one who thinks so, however, has had no experience with private theatricals, and above all has never had the opportunity to see how much they mean for the occupation of young folks' minds and the keeping of them out of mischief during the winter months when they are much indoors. when the jesuits founded their great schools in europe they laid it down as one of the rules of the institute to be observed in all their schools, that plays in certain number should be given every year, partly for the sake of the educational effect of such occupation with dramatic literature, but mainly because of the interest aroused by them and the occupation of mind for young folks which they involve. as to how much they may mean, perhaps the best way for those of our day to realize it is to take the example of oberammergau with its great passion play still given. here we have a typical instance of a passion play of the olden time maintaining itself. the preparations for it occupy the villagers in their mountain home not for months only, but for years before it is given. it represents the centre of the village life, is the main portion of its activities. the place of a { } family with regard to the play constitutes its position in the village aristocracy. something of this must have been true in the gilds of the middle ages in these dramatic performances. just as at oberammergau nearly every one of the villagers has something to do or is in some way connected with the preparation of the play, so most of the members of the particular gilds and probably their families had some connection with their plays. the children had their interest and curiosity aroused and were allowed to help in their measure, and then when the glorious day of the performance came, there must have been joy in the hearts of all and rejoicing over its success. this is the sort of occupation of mind that we would like to be able to provide for our people in the cities and towns, but circumstances are such that we cannot. those who would think that these old passion and mystery plays meant very little for the people who did not take part in them and, above all, very little for the spectators, in an educational way, forget entirely that this side of the work of the old plays can also be studied at oberammergau. this little town of , inhabitants occupies itself for years to such good effect that, when the performances are given crowds flock from all over the world to witness them. when i was there in i think that i saw the most cosmopolitan gathering that i had ever been in, though i have been to several international { } medical congresses. there were russians and poles, and scandinavians and americans and australians, and there stayed in the house with us a little party from buenos ayres, and our seat companions in the train were english, who had been born in india, and they pointed out to us some south africans who had come to see the passion play. this village of , inhabitants succeeds in producing actors who are capable of arousing thus the interest of the world, and they have artistic taste enough to mount it well, and they manage their performances in thoroughly dignified fashion, and yet in many ways they have the simplicity and, above all, the dear old simple faith of the mediaeval people from whom they come. this is the best possible evidence that we could have of the place of the old plays in the life of the people. we have another form of evidence that is extremely interesting. out of these old mystery plays, dramas of the nativity and of the passion with the introductions and interludes to these central facts of creation, there developed first the morality plays and then the drama of the modern time. twice in the history of the world, each time quite independent of the other, the drama has originated anew out of religious ceremonials. in old greece this is the origin of the drama; in the middle ages exactly the same thing happened. nor was this origin unworthy in any way of the great development that came. some of the old { } mystery plays were written with wonderful dramatic insight and with a capacity to bring out dramatic moments that is very admirable. as for the morality plays we have had one of them repeated to us in recent years, "everyman," and well it has served to show how able was the genius of these old dramatic writers. people of the modern sordid time listened for two hours enraptured and then went away, paying the tribute of silence to this wonderful arrangement of the ideas connected with such a familiar theme as the four last things to be remembered--death, judgment, heaven and hell. fine as is "everyman," there are some critics who think the "castle of perseverance," written about the same time, the latter part of the fifteenth century, an even greater play. the most important feature of this work in dramatics of the old gilds was not the entertainment, though with what we know of how low entertainment can sink and how much it can mean for degradation, surely that would be sufficient, but the fact that all of the workmen and their families in the towns were occupied with the high thoughts and the beautiful phrases and the uplifting motives and the deep significance of the bible stories. these are so simple that no one could fail to understand. they are written so close to the heart of human nature that even the simplest child can appreciate their meaning. they are full of the most precious lessons, yet without { } any of that moralizing that is often so sterile and so characteristic of what we call mere preaching. all the townspeople were occupied for months beforehand with these stories. they got ever closer and closer to the heart of the mystery in them. they got closer thus to the heart of the mystery of life. they were made to feel the presence of the creator and of providence while occupying themselves with thoughts that are the essence of deepest poetry. what would one not give to be able to occupy a great number of people, for many hours every winter, with such thoughts, not alone for their moral effect but their real educational value. they did not add useless information to useless information, but they did bring development of mind and, above all, heart. in my book "the thirteenth the greatest of centuries," [footnote ] i tell the story of how the various trades gilds in the towns divided these phases of the mystery plays among themselves. every one had an opportunity to do something. they were the tanners and the plasterers, the cardmakers and the fullers, the coopers, the armorers, the gaunters and glovers, the shipwrights, the pessners, fishmongers and mariners, the parchment-makers and bookbinders, the hosiers, the spicers, the pewterers and founders, the tylers and smiths, the chandlers, the orfevers, the goldsmiths, the goldbeaters, the money-makers, and then many other trades whose names sound curious to us of { } the modern time. the bowyers or makers of bows; the fletchers or arrow featherers; the hay-resters or workers in horsehair, the bowlers or bowlmakers, the feystours, makers of saddle-trees; the verrours, glaciers; the dubbers, refurbishers of clothes; the lumniners or illuminators, the scriveners or public writers; the drapers, the mercers; the lorymers or bridle-makers; the spurriers, makers of spurs; the cordwaners; the bladesmiths; the curriers; the scalers, and many others, all had their chances to take part in these old plays. [footnote : catholic summer school press, new york, .] they were not being entertained, but were themselves active agents in the doing of things for themselves and for others. this is what brings real contentment with it. superficial entertainment that occupies the surface of the mind for the moment means very little for real recreation of mind. what men need is to have something that makes them think along lines different to those in which they are engaged in their daily work. this gives real rest. the blood gets away from parts of the brain where it has been all day, flows to new parts, and recreation is the result. such entertainment, however, must occupy the very centre of interest for the moment and not be something seen in passing and then forgotten. the modern psychotherapeutist would say, that no better amusement than this could possibly be obtained since it brought real diversion of mind. above all, we of the modern time who know how vicious, how immoral in its tendencies, how { } suggestive of all that is evil, how familiarizing with what is worst in men until familiarity begets contempt, commercial entertainment in the shape of dramatics, so-called at least, may be, cannot help but admire and envy and would emulate, if we could, this fine solution of a very pressing social problem that the gilds found in an educational feature that is of surpassing value. there are three post-graduate courses in modern life that are quite beyond the control of our educational authorities, though we talk much of our interest and our accomplishments in education. these three have more influence over the people than all of our popular education. they are the newspaper, the library and the theatre. some of us who know what the library is doing are not at all satisfied with it. we are spending an immense amount of money mainly to furnish the cheapest kind of mere superficial amusement to the people of our cities. in so doing we are probably hurting their power of concentration of mind instead of helping it, and it is this concentration of mind that is the best fruit of education. this is, however, another story. of the newspaper, as we now have it, the less said the better. it is bringing our young people particularly into intimate contact with many of the vicious and brutalizing things of life, the sex crimes, brutal murders and prize-fights, so that uplift and refinement almost become impossible. as for the theatre, no one now thinks of it as { } educationally valuable. our plays are such superficial presentations of the life around us that once they have had their run no one thinks of reviving them. this is the better side of the theatre. the worst side is absolutely in the hands of the powers of evil and is confessedly growing worse all the time. besides these indirect educational features the gilds encouraged certain formal educational institutions that are of great interest, and that have been misunderstood for several centuries until recent years. in many places they maintained grammar schools and these grammar schools were eminently successful in helping to make scholars of such of the sons of the members of the gilds as wanted to lift themselves above their trades into the intellectual life. we know more about the grammar school at stratford-on-avon than of any of the others. the reason for this is that we have been interested in the antiquities of shakespeare's town and the conditions which obtained in it, before as well as during his lifetime. the gild of the holy cross of stratford maintained a grammar school in which many pupils were educated. that this was not a singular feature of gild work is evident from what we know of many other gilds. these gild schools were suppressed in the reformation time and then later had to be replaced by the so-called edward vi grammar schools, in one of which it is usually said that shakespeare was educated. as the english { } historian gairdner declared not long since in his "history of the pre-reformation times in england," edward has obtained a reputation for foundations in charity and in education that he by no means deserved. the schools founded by him particularly were nothing more than re-establishments of popular schools of the olden time whose endowment had been confiscated. the new foundations were makeshifts to appease popular clamor. the old gilds did not believe in devoting all the early years of children to mere book-learning. some few with special aptitudes for this were provided with opportunities. the rest were educated in various ways at home until their apprenticeship to a trade began, and then their real education commenced. our own experience with education in the early years from six to eight or nine is not particularly favorable. children who enter school a little later than the legal age graduate sooner and with even higher marks than those who begin at the age of six. this has been shown by statistics in england in many cities. what is learned with so much fuss and worry and bother for the children and the teachers from six to eight, is rapidly picked up in a few months at the age of eight or nine, and then is better assimilated. the grammar schools of the gilds took the children about the age of nine or ten and then gave them education in letters. that education, by the way, began at six in the morning and, { } with two hours of intervals, continued until four in the afternoon. they believed in the eight-hour day for children, but they began it good and early so that artificial light might not constitute a problem. the best schooling, however, afforded by the gilds, after that in self-help of course, was that in mutual aid. we are establishing schools of philanthropy in the modern time and we talk much about the organization of charity and other phases of mutual aid. in this as in everything else we map out, as george eliot once said, our ignorance of things, or at least our gropings after solutions of problems, in long greek names, which often serve to produce the idea that we know ever so much more about these subjects than we really do. the training in brotherly love and helpfulness in the old gilds was a fine school. those who think that it is only now that ideas of mutuality in sharing responsibilities, of co-operation and co-ordination of effort for the benefit of all, of community interests, are new, should study toulmin smith's work on the gilds, or read brentano on the foreign gilds. there is not a phase of our organization of charity in the modern time that was not well anticipated by the members of the gilds, and that, too, in ways such as we cannot even hope to rival unless we change the basis on which our helpfulness is founded. theirs was not a stooping down of supposed better, or so-called upper classes, to help the lower, { } but organization among the people to help themselves so that there was in no sense a pauperization. every phase of human need was looked to. we are just beginning to realize our obligations to care for the old, and the last twenty years has seen various efforts on the part of governments to provide old-age pensions. in the middle ages according to the laws of the gilds the man who had paid his dues for seven years would then draw a weekly pension equal to something more than five dollars now, for all the rest of his life if he were disabled by injury, or had become incapacitated from old age or illness. then there were gilds to provide insurance against loss by fire, loss by robbery on land and also on sea, loss by shipwreck, loss even by imprisonment and all other phases of human needs. if the workman were injured his family nursed him during the day but a brother member of the gild, as we have said, was sent to care for him at night, and a good portion of his wages went on, paid to him out of the gild chest. if he died his widow and orphans were cared for by a special pension. the widow did not have to break up the family and send the children to orphan asylums. there were practically no orphan asylums. the gilds cared for the children of dead members. as the boys grew up special attention was given them so as to provide a trade for them, and they were given earlier opportunities than others to get on in life. { } the orphans were the favorite children of the gilds, and instead of a child being handicapped by the loss of his parents when he was young, it sometimes happened that he got better opportunities than if his parents lived. these gilds provided opportunities for social entertainment and friendly intercourse and for such acquaintanceship as would afford mutual pleasure and give opportunities for the meeting of the young folks,--sons and daughters of the members of the gild. they had their yearly benefit at which the wives of the members and their sweethearts were supposed by rule to come, and then they had other meetings and social gatherings--picnics in the country in the summer, dances in the winter time and all in a circle where every one knew every one else, and all went well. these are some social features of these gilds educational in the highest sense that we can well envy in the modern time, when we find it so difficult to secure innocent, happy pleasures for young people that will not leave a bad taste in the mouth afterwards. when a member of the gild died his brother members attended the mass which was said for him and gave a certain amount in charity that was meant to be applied for his benefit. the whole outlook on life was eminently brotherly. there has never been such a teaching of true fraternity, of the brotherhood of man, of the necessity for mutual aid and then of such practice of it as makes it easy, as among these old gilds. { } the finest result of this teaching is to be seen in the democratic spirit that gradually arose as a consequence of these gilds and their teaching of self-government in all local affairs to the people. the gilds were arranged and organized in the various parishes. these parishes were independent communities for local affairs who had charge of the police system, the health, the road-making, the path-keeping, the boundary-guarding and, in general, the comfort and convenience of the community. the gildsmen, more than any others, were the factors in these parishes. they accumulated money for the various purposes and had great influence in the development of the community life and the solution of local government problems. it would be very easy to think that the gilds could not have fulfilled all these duties and subserved all these needs. if we recall, however, that there were , gilds in england at the end of the fifteenth century, when there were not more than , , of people in the whole country, then we can see how much could be accomplished. alas, at the beginning of the next century all their moneys were confiscated, and because they were church societies, every one of them requiring attendance at church duties and at mass, as well as at the masses for the dead, but, above all, for the crime of having money in their treasuries at a time when the king needed money and his appetite had been whetted by the spoil of the { } monasteries and the churches, the gilds were obliterated. only a few of them in london that had powerful protectors and that escaped on the plea that they were commercial organizations and not religious societies, were able to preserve something of their old-time integrity. these are now so rich that they are the wonder of those who know them. they give us a good idea, however, of the deep foundations that had been established out of the common chest in the purchase of property for these gilds. in solving the problems of industrial insurance, of providing for the widows and the orphans, of securing annuities when they would be needed, these gilds set us an example that it would be well for us to follow. the insurance money was not accumulated in such huge sums that it would be a constant temptation for exploitation on the part of officials. it was distributed in comparatively small sums in many thousands of treasuries, and was under the surveillance of those most interested in it. the old-age pensions were not governmental, issued in large numbers and open to inevitable abuses, but were given by those who knew, to those whose necessities were well known. no wonder that we find democratic government developing co-ordinately with these gilds. at the beginning of the thirteenth century magna charta was signed. about the middle of it the first english parliament met, before the end of it the proper representation of the cities and { } towns which were mainly controlled by the gilds was secured and during the last quarter of it the english common law came into effect so as to secure the rights of all. bracton's great "digest of the english common law" was written about , and it is still the great sourcebook of the principles of law in english-speaking countries. in many of the states of our union the supreme courts still make their decisions on the basis of the english common law, and until a decade or two ago all of them did. the people's rights were secured by the education of the people and the property laws and those for the guardianship of the person and for the prevention of autocratic interference with liberty were all of them put into effect as a consequence of this education in democracy. this, then, was surely an ideal teaching of the masses, a teaching of the arts and crafts, a teaching of mutual aid, a teaching of true fraternity, a teaching of book-learning whenever that was considered necessary or advisable, a teaching of the rights of man and a wonderful development of laws as a consequence, and all of this accomplished not by the upper classes, stooping to lift the lower classes, but out of the conscious development of the lower classes themselves, so that there came a true evolution and not merely a superficial influence from without. if we want to know how to teach the masses and to help them to contentment, happiness, occupation of mind, { } uplifting entertainment, cheerful amusement and, above all, to conscious democratic government, here is the model of it as it can be found nowhere else. i commend it to those who are teaching and who, realizing the failure of our modern education in many ways, are looking about for the remedies that will help to make our popular education more efficient. the soul of this ideal education of the masses was the training of character. they had no illusions that the mere imparting of information would make people better nor that the knowing of many things would make them more desirable citizens. probably they did not consciously reason much about these subjects, but their instincts led them straight. mr. edward o. sisson, writing in the _atlantic monthly_ for july, , says that the final question regarding education is whether it avails to produce the type of character required by the republic (nation) and the race. to accomplish this we need to fit our practice to herbart's great formula that, "the chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the universe." take any part of this system of education that i have called the ideal education of the masses and try it by that standard and see how high its mark will be. their handiwork is mainly an act of devotion to the god of the universe and its products are the most beautiful gifts that ever were offered to him. cathedral stonework, glass-work, ironwork, beautiful sacred vessels, handsomest { } vestments ever made, needlework, lacework, the beautiful setting of the cathedral; what an act of worship it all was! when it was finished, it belonged to no class but to the whole people. it was theirs to be proud of and to worship in. their very amusements were often acts of worship. their plays concerned the revelations of god to man, for they were all founded on the bible, and even for those who may not accept those revelations as divine the fact that the men and women, the masses, the handworkmen and the little traders, were for many months in each year engaged with the high ethical thoughts that constitute the greatest contribution to the ethical revelation of the universe that we have in literature, must of itself be an eminently satisfying feature of this old-time education. as regards the creator, these people were constantly made familiar with him, his works and ways. their holidays were holy-days. they were anniversaries in the life of the god-man or his chosen servants. the men and women whom they celebrated on those days were chosen characters who had devoted themselves unselfishly to others, so that the after-time hailed them as saints because of their forgetfulness of self. we know what this constantly recurring reminder of the lives of great men and women may be, and then we must not forget that on these days in their great cathedral they heard the story of the life of the saint of the day, and often a discourse on the qualities that { } stamped him or her as worthy of admiration. let us remember, above all, that there were as many women saints as men, and that these were held up for the admiration and emulation of growing youth. this was ethical training at every turn in life. above all, there was constant training in that thoughtfulness for others that means so much in any true system of education. when members of the gilds fell ill, their families nursed them during the day, but members of the gilds chosen for that purpose nursed them at night. it was felt that the family did quite enough not to exhaust itself by night watching. when brother members of the gild died their fellows attended their funeral in a body, and, above all, took part in the mass for their souls. people who do not understand the catholic idea of mass for the dead will not appreciate this in the way that catholics do, but at least they will understand the brotherliness of the act and the beautiful purpose that prompted so many to gather, in order that even after death they might do whatever they could for this departed brother. besides the death of a brother gildsman was the signal for the giving of alms because the merit of these alms, it was felt, could be transferred to his account, and so the bond of fraternity continued even in the life beyond. the ethical effect of all this on the minds of people who sincerely believed can scarcely be exaggerated. here is a training of the will and { } of character, and a teaching of the relationship of man to man and of man to the creator carried out into all the smallest details of life. above all, these generations had a training in personal service for one another. every one exercised charity. it was not a few of the very wealthy who practised philanthropy. they had safeguards which, as far as is possible, prevented abuse of this charity. the alms, for instance, that was given on the occasion of a brother's funeral was not distributed hit or miss and all at one time, but members of the gild bought from the treasurer tokens which might be redeemed in bread and meat or in cast-off clothing or in some other way. these were distributed to the poor as they seemed to need them. if you met a poor man who seemed really in want you could give him one or more of these tokens and then be sure that while he would get whatever was necessary to supply his absolute needs, he would not be able to abuse charity. in our time we constantly have stories of large accumulations on the part of street beggars who own valuable property and have accounts in savings banks and the like. there was no possibility of this under the mediaeval system and yet charity was widely exercised, every one took some part in it, and there was that training, not only in effective pity for affliction, but also in helpfulness for others, which means so much more than the exercise of occasional charity, because, for the moment, one is touched by the { } sight of suffering or has remorse because one feels that one has been indulging one's self and wants the precious satisfaction that will come from a little making up for luxurious extravagance. in our time, when we have gradually excluded moral teaching and training almost entirely from our schools and our methods of education, this phase of the ideal education of the masses is particularly interesting. milton declared that "the main skill and groundwork of education will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations as will draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots." their great stone-books, the cathedrals, where all who came could read the life of the lord, the frequent reminders of the lives of the saints, doers among men who forgot themselves and thought of others, the fraternal obligations of the gilds and their intercourse with each other, all these constituted the essence of an education as nearly like that demanded by milton as can well be imagined. it seems far-fetched to go back five, six, even seven centuries to find such ideals in practice, but the educator who is serious and candid with himself will find it easy to discover the elements of a wonderful intellectual and, above all, moral training of the people, that is the whole people from the lowest to the highest, in these early days. { } cycles of feminine education and influence { } "and if i am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. for reflect--if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" --plato, _laws_ (jowett), p. . scribner, . { } cycles of feminine education and influence [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this was gathered for a lecture on the history of education delivered for the academy of the sacred heart, kenwood, albany, n. y., and st. joseph's college, chestnut hill, philadelphia, pa. very nearly in its present form the address was delivered before the league for the civic education of women, at the colony club, new york city, in the winter of .] nothing is commoner than to suppose that what we are doing at the present day is an improvement over whatever they were doing at any time in the past in the same line. we were rather proud during the nineteenth century to talk of that century as the century of evolution. evolutionary terms of all kinds found their way even into everyday speech and a very general impression was produced that we are in the midst of progress so rapid and unerring, that even from decade to decade it is possible to trace the wonderful advance that man is making. we look back on the early nineteenth century as quite hopelessly backward. they had no railroads, no street-car lines, no public street lighting, no modes of heating buildings that gave any comfort in the cold weather, no elevators, and when we compare our present comfortable condition with the discomforts of that not so distant period, we feel how much evolution has done for us, and inevitably { } conclude that just as much progress as has been made in transportation and in comfort, has also been made in the things of the mind, and, above all, in education, so that, while the millennium is not yet here, it cannot surely be far off; and men are attaining at last, with giant strides, the great purpose that runs through the ages. probably in nothing is the assumption that we are doing something far beyond what was ever accomplished before, more emphatically expressed than in the ordinary opinions as to what is being done by and for women in our generation. we have come to think that at last in the course of evolution woman is beginning to come into something of her rights, she is at last getting her opportunity for the higher education and for professional education so far as she wants it, and as a consequence is securing that influence which, as the equal of man, she should have in the world. now there is just one thing with regard to this very general impression which deserves to be called particularly to attention. this is not the first time in the world's history, nor the first by many times, that woman has had the opportunity for the higher education and has taken it very well. neither is it the first time that she has insisted on having an influence in public affairs, but on the contrary, we can readily find a very curious series of cycles of feminine education and of the exercise of public influence by women, with intervals of almost negative phases in these matters that { } are rather difficult to explain. let us before trying to understand what the feministic movement means in our own time and, above all, before trying to sum up its ultimate significance for the race, study some of the corresponding movements in former times. the most interesting phase of the woman movement in history is that which occurred at the time of the renaissance. because it is typical of the phases of the feministic movement at all times, and then, too, because it is closer to us and the records of it are more complete, it will be extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of it. it may be necessary for that to make a little excursion into the history of the period. during the early fifteenth century the turks were bothering constantinople so much, that greek scholars, rendered uncomfortable at home, began making their way over into italy rather frequently, bringing with them precious manuscripts and remains of old greek art. besides commerce aroused by the crusades was making the intercourse between east and west much more intimate than it had been and, as a result, a taste for greek letters and art was beginning to be felt in certain portions of italy. when constantinople fell, about the middle of the fifteenth century, the prestige of the old capital of the greek empire was lost, and scholars abandoned it for italy in large numbers. this is the time of the renaissance. the rebirth that the word { } signifies, is not a rebirth of art and architecture and literature into the modern world, as if there had been nothing before, for gothic art and architecture and literature is quite as wonderful, if not more so, than anything that came after, and there are good authorities who insist that the renaissance hurt, rather than helped, europe. the renaissance was a rebirth of greek ideas and ideals in aesthetics into the european world, and while we may not agree with sir henry maine that whatever lives and moves in the intellectual world is greek in origin, there is no doubt that greek can be the source of most wonderful incentive and such it proved to be during the fifteenth century. men and women began to study greek and they paid much more attention as a consequence to the latin classics modelled on the greek, and so the new learning, the so-called humanities, became the centre of intellectual interest. they were studied first in private schools, but before long a place for these new studies was demanded in the curriculum of the universities. the universities, however, were occupied with the so-called seven liberal arts, which were really scientific studies. there was geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, with considerable ethics and political science, so that they resembled in many ways our modern universities as they have been transformed since the re-introduction of scientific studies into them. { } the university faculties were content and conservative after the fashion of universities ever, and they quite naturally refused to entertain the notion of such a radical change as the introduction of classical studies into the curriculum. this is just exactly what the classical universities of the early nineteenth century did when they were asked by scientific enthusiasts to re-introduce scientific studies into the curriculum, which in the course of years had come to be made up almost exclusively of classical studies. in this curious way does history repeat itself. unable to obtain a place for the studies in humanism in the universities, ruling princes and wealthy members of the nobility proceeded to found special schools for these subjects. in these schools without the traditions of the past, the women asked and obtained the privilege of studying. there had come a noteworthy change in intellectual interest, a novelty was introduced into education. whenever that happens woman always asks and always obtains the privilege of the higher education. during the renaissance period she proceeded to show her intellectual power. many of the women of the renaissance became distinguished for scholarship. perhaps one thing should be noted with regard to that. their reputation for scholarship was largely confined to their younger years. they were more precocious, or applied themselves better to their studies, and accordingly knew more of the classics { } at twenty than their male relatives who had the same opportunities. indeed we hear of them as brilliant scholars at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. they took part in latin plays that were brilliantly performed before the nobility, higher ecclesiastics, cardinals and even the popes. they were brilliant in music, in the languages and in their taste for art. later on in life we do not hear so much of them. they evidently were ready to leave the serious work of scholarship to the men and content themselves with being enlightened patrons of literature, beneficent advocates of the arts, liberal customers of the artistic geniuses of the time. above all, we find no great original works from them. they are charming appreciators but not good inventors--at this time, of course. while they do not occupy themselves with dry-as-dust scholarship, there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the renaissance, with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the time. it was they who insisted on the building of the town houses, finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. it was for them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. they were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from artists the wonderful paintings of the time. the sculptors made for them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. the artists laid out beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to { } appreciate again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly cultivated. they bought the books that were issued by the manutiuses at venice. isabella d'este had a standing order that all the books issued from this great venetian press should be sent to her. books were costly treasures in these times. a single volume of one of these incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from manutius's printing establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money. the women designed their own dresses. they encouraged the miniature painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally took up these arts themselves. they fostered the development of textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth, so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at this time. tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of their patronage. they wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. as can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women are responsible for it. these women of the renaissance decorated their homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste and, above all, had them set charmingly in the italian { } renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired. while they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some of them wrote poetry that has lived (lucrezia tornabuoni dei medici, vittoria colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (marguerite of navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for their sons (forli, d'este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we have every phase of development of woman's power. there can be no doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the development of her intellectual life, and that she took her opportunities with great success. we have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. there was a wonderful group of women at the court of giovanna of naples in the first half of the fifteenth century, because naples got her renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to constantinople and having many greek traditions from the old days when southern italy was magna graecia. then there are a series of finely educated women connected with the medici household at florence. the mother of the great lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real literary power. the d'este family is { } better known generally, and then there were the gonzagas, some of the women of the house of forli, vittoria colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. everywhere women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life. everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work. it would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it was in italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and intellectual influence were allowed to women. just as the renaissance movement itself spread throughout europe affecting the education, the literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere we find striking expressions of it. in france, for instance, the renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and was not much behind italy in feminine education. queen anne of bretagne organized the court school of the time, and interest in literature became the fashion of the hour. marguerite of navarre is a woman of the renaissance, and so is renée of anjou, while the name { } of louise la cordière shows, for _la cordière_ means the cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not confined to the nobility. mary queen of scots, educated in france, whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into latin, show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got out,--is a typical woman of the french renaissance. sichel has told the story of these women of france very well, and those who want to know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to him. in spain, too, the renaissance movement made itself felt in every department. most of spain's cathedrals were finished during the renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world. spain's literary renaissance came a little later, but when it did it contributed at least two great names to the world literature--cervantes and calderon. the women of the nation were also affected, and queen isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many interests. spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in st. teresa. how much of sympathy there was with this great expression of feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that spanish ecclesiastics talk of teresa as their spanish doctor of the church, and that in rome there is amongst the statues { } of the doctors and the fathers in the church one woman figure, that of st. teresa, with the title _mater spiritualium_--mother of spiritual things. her books, profoundly admired by the spaniards, were the favorite reading for such extremely different minds as fénelon and bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for german mystics. they were beautifully translated by crashaw into english, and have been the subject of great interest during the present feministic movement, especially since george eliot's reference to her in the preface of "middlemarch." in england the renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture, though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great elizabethan period of english literature is really an expression of the renaissance in england. here almost more than anywhere else in europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things intellectual that developed. queen mary was a well-educated woman, queen elizabeth read greek as well as latin easily, lady jane grey preferred her lessons in greek, under roger ascham, to going to balls and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest sense of the term. it has been hinted that it was perhaps this that disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. the losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean the losing of it { } more literally when crowns are at stake. there are many other names of noble women of this time that might be mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development. that the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so also are they imitated when they do well. besides, the story that we have of margaret more and her friends shows that the middle classes were also stirred to interest in things intellectual. the usual objection, when this story of the renaissance and the feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours, is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only a few of the nobility. this is not true, and there are many reasons why it is not true. first, the upper classes are always imitated by the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure that it spread. we have not the records of many educated women, but those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could readily secure it. there were probably as many women to the population of europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are proportionately in america at the present time. europe had but a small population altogether in the fifteenth century. there { } were probably less than , , of people in england at the end, even, of the sixteenth century. in elizabeth's time when the census was taken, because of the spanish armada, these were the figures. there were not many more people in all europe then than there are now in england. if out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of distinguished women whom i have just spoken of, then there must have been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education. [footnote ] [footnote : what an interesting reflection on the notion of supposed progress is the fact pointed out by ambassador bryce in his address on progress (_atlantic_ july, ), that while out of , , of people there were so many genius men and women accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as many. most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern mind come in a single century,--the sixteenth. at the present time the western civilization then represented by , , has near to , , of people. we make no pretension at all, however, to the claim that we have more great men than they had. we should have ten times as many, but on the contrary we are quite willing to concede that we have very few compared to their number and almost none, if indeed there are any, who measure up to the high standards of achievement of that time more than four centuries ago. it is thoughts of this kind that show one how much we must correct the ordinarily accepted notions with regard to progress and inevitable development, and each generation improving on its predecessors and the like, that are so commonly diffused but that represent no reality in history at all.] it is true that it was, as a rule, only the daughters of the nobility who received the opportunity for the higher education, or at least obtained it with facility. it must not be forgotten, however, just what the nobility of italy, and, { } indeed, of other countries also, represented. the conditions there are most typical and it is worth while studying them out. the medici, for instance, of florence, whose women folk were so well educated, were members of the gilds of the apothecaries, as their name indicates, who made a fortune on drugs and precious stones and beautiful stuffs from the east, and then became the bankers of europe. noblemen were created because of success in war, success in politics, success in diplomacy, but also because of success in commerce, and occasionally success in the arts. not many educators and artists were among them any more than in our time, because they were not, as a rule, possessed of the fortune properly to keep up the dignity of a patent of nobility. the daughters of the nobility of italy, however, were not very different, certainly their origin was very similar to that of the daughters of the wealthy men of america, who are, after all, the only ones who can take advantage of the higher education in our time. we must not forget that, compared to the whole population, the number of women securing the higher education is very limited. to think that the renaissance with this provision of ample opportunities for feminine education was the first epoch of this kind in the world's history would be to miss sadly a host of historical facts and their significance. unfortunately history has been so written from the standpoint of { } man and his interests, that this phase of history is not well known and probably less understood. history has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to war, diplomacy and politics. while we have known much of heroes and battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic achievement of all kinds. we have known even less of popular movements. we have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the middle ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic development. kings and warriors and kings' mistresses and ugly diplomacy and rotten politics, have occupied the centre of the stage in history. surely we are coming to a time when other matters, the human things and not the animal instincts, will be the main subject of history; when fighting and sex and acquisitiveness and selfishness shall give place in history to mutual aid, uplift, unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others. as soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times. before the renaissance the great phase of education had been that of the universities. the first of the universities was founded down at salerno around a medical school, the { } second that of bologna around a law school and the third that of paris with a school of philosophy and theology as a nucleus. this seems to be about the way that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development. first, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his creator come to be profound vital interests. such, at least, is the story of the origin of the universities in the thirteenth century. the surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine education and influence is what happened at salerno. here some twenty miles back from naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the mediterranean, where old greek traditions had maintained themselves, for southern italy was called magna graecia, where the intercourse with the arabs and with the northern shores of africa and with the near east, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the first modern medical school came into existence. in the department of women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate professors in the university. we have the text-book of one of them, trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the salernitan school of women physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when we talk of a school of { } painting, and not at all in the sense of our modern women's medical schools. trotula was the wife of the professor of medicine at the university, plataerius i, and the mother of another professor at the university, plataerius ii, herself a professor like them. there are many other names of women professors at the university of salerno in this department. women, however, were not alone allowed to practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted to women in naples, of which at this time salerno was the university, to practise both medicine and surgery. it seems to have been quite common, i should say, at least as common as in our own time for women to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a footing of absolute equality. probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and unexpected development of professional education for women is to be found in the conditions out of which salerno developed. the school was originally a monastic school under the influence of the benedictine monks from monte cassino not far away. the great archbishop alphanus i, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor there, was himself { } a benedictine monk. how intimately the relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of salerno, constantine africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the monastery of monte cassino. his great friend desiderius was the abbot there, and his influence was still very strong at salerno. desiderius afterwards became pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this southern italian university. in a word, it was in the midst of the most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great teaching institution occurred. the wise old monks were thoroughly practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of problems. when the next great university, that of bologna, was founded, it developed, as i have suggested, around a law school. irnerius revived the study of the old roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so much attention that students from all over europe flocked to bologna. law is different from medicine in many respects. the right of women to study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of medical education is manifest. with regard to law, however, there can scarcely be grave question as to the { } advisability of woman studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. this was particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had no rights until she married. in spite of the many inherent improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely opened at bologna before women became students in it. probably irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students, but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been quite open to them. as out of the law school the university gradually developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were accorded to women at bologna. we have the story of their success in mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy. according to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition, one distinguished woman student of bologna, maria di novella, achieved such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century that she was appointed professor of mathematics. apparently the faculty of bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties, which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in the mathematical tripos than the senior wrangler, though they do not accord her the senior wranglership. the story goes on to say that signorina di novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that her { } beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. this would seem to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. i remember once telling this story before a convent audience. the dear old mother superior, who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "did you say that she was young?" and i said yes, according to the tradition; "and handsome?" and i nodded the affirmative, "well, then," she said, "i do not believe the rest of the story." but then, after all, what do dear old mothers superior know about the world or its ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty, intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the feelings of others? it was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional work at the university of bologna. in medicine, as well as in law, women reached distinction. the first great professor of anatomy of modern times is mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the medical schools for two centuries. one of his assistants was { } alessandra giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy. at the surgeon general's library in washington, in one of the early printed editions of mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. to her, according to an old italian chronicle, we owe the invention of methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of dissection, even more deterrent at that time. it is curiously interesting to find that another great improvement in the teaching of anatomy, invented in italy nearly four centuries later, came also from a woman teaching at an italian university, madame manzolini. the tradition connecting these two women is unbroken. there is not a century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth in which there were not distinguished women professors at the universities of italy, and, therefore, also students in large numbers. just how many women students there were we do not know. it might seem to be a comparatively easy problem to find out just how many there were at any given time by looking up the registers of the universities. once in bologna itself i got hold of the old university registers, confident that now i would learn just what was { } the proportion of women students at the university. i was utterly disappointed, however, italian mothers had, so far as the settlement of this question is concerned, the unfortunate habit occasionally of giving boys' names to girls, and girls' names to boys. they called their children after favorite saints. a girl might well be called antonio, for the feminine form was not in common use in earlier times. many boys had for first name maria. it used to be the custom in venice for every child, no matter what its sex, to receive from the church the two names maria giovanni, and then the parents might add what other names they pleased. the names of royalty, with their frequent use of mingled masculine and feminine names, show how much confusion can be worked to any scheme for the determination of the sex of students at the old universities by this, for us, unfortunate habit. curiously enough, it was during the thirteenth century when the development of feminine education in the early university period was at its height, that certain changes in the domestic economy of the bolognese are worthy of notice. two kinds of prepared food became popular, if they were not, indeed, both invented at this time. one of them, bearing the classic name bologna, is still with us, has spread throughout the world, and is likely to continue to be an important article of food for many centuries more. another form of prepared food was a sort of dessert called bologna { } pudding, prepared from cereals, and which can still be purchased in bologna, though foreigners, as a rule, do not care much for it. these two articles of food modified materially the preparation of food for meals at this time. it was possible to buy both of these, as now, ready made, and so the housewife was spared the bother and trouble and expenditure of time required for this work. we have here one phase of the origin of the delicatessen stores. this sort of change in domestic economy has always been noted whenever women have gone out of the home for other occupations and have become something less--or more--than the housewives and mothers they were before. such changes in the dietary, however, in the direction of ready-made food are never popular with men. one german historical writer has been unkind enough to say that this is one of the reasons why the higher education gradually became much less popular, or at least attracted less attention than before. "women want things for themselves, and if they are opposed insist on getting them," is the way this cynic teuton puts it. "if, after a time, however, having got what they want, they find that the men do not like them to have it, they gradually abandon it." according to him bologna and bologna pudding saved the stooping over the kitchen range, or whatever took its place in those days, and gave all classes of women more opportunity for intellectual development or at least { } for occupation with things different from household duties, but after a time the more or less resentful attitude of the men brought about a change. however that may be is hard to say. another interesting feature of the history of these times connected in some way with feminine education or, at least, with feminine occupation with other things besides their households, was a great devotion to a particular breed of pet dogs of which one hears much in the accounts of the life at bologna at this time. here, once more, the german cynic has had his say. he has suggested that, whenever women became occupied with things outside their home, with a consequent diminution in the number of children, they are almost sure to find an outlet for their affections in devotion to dogs and other pets. apparently he would suggest that they literally go to the dogs. it is very curious that just during this thirteenth century, when feminine education at bologna is at its height, one hears so much of these pets. at other times in the world's history, when women have taken to intellectual interests and especially when there has been a fall in the birth-rate, this same attention to pet animals is worthy of study. after the thirteenth century there seems to have been a reaction against these pets. it is to be hoped that there is no connection between this and the prepared foods spoken of, but the decline in the popularity of pets and of woman's { } occupation with intellectual interests went hand in hand. for all of this i am indebted to german authorities whose attitude towards feminine education may somewhat prejudice them and, indeed, probably does so, but these things are only mentioned as showing certain views that are held. the interesting thing for us is that after a period of somewhat more than a century of rather intense interest on the part of the women in nearly every phase of the intellectual life, there is then a diminution of interest, so that by the end of the fourteenth century women, even where feminine intellectual life was vigorous, are occupied almost without exception as they were before the university period, mainly with domestic concerns. while feminine education was so common in the ecclesiastically ruled universities of italy, the custom did not spread in western europe. the reason is not far to seek. all of the western universities owe their origins to paris. oxford was due to a withdrawal of english students from paris, cambridge to a similar withdrawal from oxford. many of the scotch universities are grandchildren of paris. all of the french universities are direct descendants, except montpellier. the spanish universities have a similar relation. the experience with feminine education at paris had been unfortunate. the héloïse and abélard incident came in a formative stage of the university. it settled unfavorably the { } whole question of feminine attendance at universities for the west. it seems a small thing to have such a wide and far-reaching influence, but it is very often on little things that the success or failure of great social movements of any kind depends. we have practically no record of any relaxation of university regulations in this matter in the west. perhaps the teutonic character was opposed to it, perhaps the teutonic women were less anxious for it, being more occupied with church and children and their home, but there was none, and its absence is responsible for the feeling so common among us, that now for the first time in the world women are enjoying the opportunity for the higher education. even the university epoch, however, is not the first phase of opportunities for the education of woman in modern history. far from it, indeed, we can find much more than traces of a feminist movement in other centuries before this, and, indeed, in many of them. when charlemagne established schools for his people and invited alcuin, the english monk, to develop educational institutions for his people, the first and most important school was that of the imperial palace where alcuin himself taught. in this the women of paris were given opportunities quite as well as the men; indeed, they seem to have taken a more vivid interest and their example seems to have been the highest incentive for many of the men to take up a work so foreign to their natures, { } for as yet they had all the barbarous instincts of their gothic ancestors, only slightly tamed and modified by two or three centuries of gradual uplift and religious training of character. there are letters from the women of the palace, and especially charlemagne's daughter, to alcuin, discussing phases of his teaching and suggesting problems and questions with regard to the matters which he had been making the subject of his instruction. it would be easy to think that this incident of the palace school did not mean very much and that its passing influence did not make itself felt widely nor for long. the state of education at this time must not be forgotten. only the clergy, as a rule, had leisure for it. all the rest of the world were engaged either in the frequent wars or in a tireless struggle for subsistence as farmers, merchants and craftsmen. the nobility neglected education just as much as the upper classes always do, though there were certain fashions which gained a foothold and that seem to show that they had some interest. many a nobleman of the mediaeval centuries, however, boasted that he could not sign his own name. he was rather proud of the fact that he had not lowered himself to mere book knowledge. there were large numbers of the clergy and the monks, however, and these were the scholars of the period. there were also at this time large numbers of religious women, and these in their leisure hours { } spent much time at educational matters and some of them accomplished lasting results. the mother of the family, the court dame, the wife of the nobleman, whose castle was much more the home of work than it has ever been at any time since, had but little leisure for the intellectual life. the nuns devoted themselves to beautiful handiwork, to the composition as well as the transcription of books and to the cultural interests generally. it has always been true, as a rule, that the woman who accomplished anything in the intellectual life must be either a celibate, or at most, the mother of but a child or two. the mother of a large family, unless she is extremely exceptional, cannot be expected to be productive in the intellectual life. she has not the time for original work, and still less for the filing process necessary for appropriate expression. there are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule. one of the two forms of production apparently women must give up to devote themselves to the other. the nuns in the middle ages, in the retirement of their convents, gave themselves much more than we are likely to think possible, to literary and scientific production. within the past year i have published sketches of two distinguished women of the tenth and twelfth centuries whose books show us the intellectual interests of the women of this time. only that women were having opportunities for mental development { } these would not have been written, and as they were written for women, it is evident that those interests were quite widely diffused. one of these two authors comes in what is sometimes called the darkest of the dark ages, the tenth century; the other was born in the eleventh. they serve to show how much more intense than we are likely to think was the interest of the time in things intellectual. without printing and without any proper means of publication, somehow these women succeeded in making literary monuments that have outlasted the wreck and ruin of time, and that have been of sufficient interest to mankind to be preserved among vicissitudes which seemed surely destined to destroy them. one of the two ladies was roswitha, or hrotswitha, a nun of gandersheim, in what is now hanover, who in the tenth century wrote a series of comedies in imitation of terence, probably not meant to be played but to be read. she says in the preface that the reason for writing them was that so many religious were reading the indecent literature of classical rome, with the excuse that it was necessary for the cultivation of style or for the completion of their education, that she wanted and had striven to write something moral and christian to replace the older writings. that preface of itself ought to be enough to show us that in the nunneries along the rhine, of which we know that there were many, there must have been a much more { } widespread and ardent interest in literature, and, above all, in classic literature, than we have had any idea of until recently. hrotswitha, to give her her saxon name, was only a young woman of twenty-five when she wrote the series of stories and plays thus prefaced, and while her style, of course, does not compare with the classics, worse latin has often been written by people who were sure that they knew more about latinity than any nun of the obscure tenth century could possibly have known. the other woman writer of about this time was hildegarde, the abbess of a monastery along the rhine, born at the end of the eleventh century, who wrote a text-book of medicine, which was the most important document in the history of medicine in this century. the nuns were the nurses and the hospital attendants and in the country places, to a great extent, the physicians of this time. in the cities there were regular practitioners of medicine, but the infirmarian of a monastery cared for the ailing monks and the people on the monastery estates when ill, and often they were many in number, and the infirmarian of a convent did the same thing for the sisters and for at least the women folk among the people of the neighborhood. it was in order to gather together and preserve the medical traditions of the monasteries and convents that hildegarde, who afterwards came to be known as st. hildegarde, wrote her volume on medicine. it has been recently { } issued in the collection of old writings called "migne's patrologia," and has drawn many praises from historical critics for the amount of information which it contains. these two, hroswitha and hildegarde, furnish abundant evidence of the intellectual life of the convents of this old time and more than hint at how much has been lost that might have helped us to a larger knowledge of them. with this in mind it will be easier to understand a preceding phase of the history of feminine education in europe. the first nation that was converted to christianity in a body, so that christian ideas and ideals had a chance for assertion and application in the life of the people, was ireland. christianity when introduced into rome met with the determined opposition of old paganism. after the migration of nations and the coming down of the barbarians upon the roman empire, there was little opportunity for christianity to assert itself until after these teutonic peoples had been lifted out of their barbarism to a higher plane of civilization. in ireland, however, not only did conversion to christianity convert the whole people, but it came to a people who possessed already a high degree of civilization and culture, a literature that we have been learning to think more and more of in recent years, many arts, and the development of science, in the form of medicine at least, to a high degree. the law and music, the language and the literature of { } the early irish all show us a highly cultivated people. when christianity came to them, then, education became its watchword. schools were opened everywhere on the island. ireland became the island of saints and of scholars, and literally thousands of students flocked from england and the mainland to these irish schools. the first and the greatest of these was that founded by st. patrick himself at armagh. during the century after his death there were probably at one time as many as , students at armagh. only next in importance to this great school of the irish apostle was that of his great feminine co-worker, st. brigid, who did for the women of ireland what st. patrick had been doing for the men. it is probable that there were , students at kildare, brigid's great school, at one time. it is curious to think that there should have been something like co-education , years ago, and, above all, in ireland, but kildare seems to have had a system not unlike that in vogue at many of our universities in the modern time. the male and female students were thoroughly segregated,--may i say this is not the last time in the world's history that segregation was the distinguishing trait of co-education,--but the teachers of the men at kildare seem also to have lectured to the women. the men occupied an entirely subsidiary position, however; even the bishops of kildare in brigid's time were appointed on her recommendation. for centuries { } afterwards the abbess of kildare, brigid's successor, had the privilege of a commanding voice in the selection of the bishop. the school at kildare was conducted mainly by and for women, though there were men in the neighboring monastery who taught both classes of pupils. perhaps the most interesting feature of the education of kildare is that it was not concerned exclusively, nor even for the major part apparently, with book-learning. the book-learning of the irish schools was celebrated. down at kildare, however, certain of the arts and crafts were cultivated with special success. lace-making and the illumination of books were two of the favorite occupations of these students at kildare in which marvellous success was achieved. the tradition of irish lace-making which has maintained itself during all the centuries began, or at least, secured its first great prestige, in brigid's time. gerald the welshman, sometimes spoken of as giraldus cambrensis, told of having seen during a journey in ireland centuries after brigid's time, but nearly a thousand years ago, a copy of the scriptures that was wonderfully illuminated. he thought it the most beautiful book in the world. his description tallies very closely with that of the book of kells. some have even ventured to suggest that he actually saw the book of kells at kildare. this is extremely improbable, however, and the book of kells almost surely originated elsewhere. there { } seems, however, to have been at kildare some book nearly as beautiful as the book of kells, made there, and establishing peradventure the thoroughness of the artistic education given at kildare at this time. so much for feminine influence and education under christianity. most people are likely to know much more of the place of women in greece and rome than during christian times. we are prone, however, to exaggerate the dependence of woman among both latins and greeks and to think that she had very few opportunities for intellectual development and almost none for expression of her personality and the exertion of her influence. here, once more, as in many other phases of this subject we are, through ignorance, assuming conditions in the past that are quite unlike those which actually existed. recently in the _atlantic monthly,_ mrs. emily james putnam, sometime the dean of barnard, in an article on "the roman lady," [footnote ] has completely undermined usual notions with regard to the position of the roman woman. the roman matrons had rights all their own, and succeeded in asserting themselves in many ways. there was never any seclusion of the women in rome and the roman _matrona_ at all times enjoyed personal freedom, entertained her husband's guests, had a voice in his affairs, managed his house and came and went as she pleased. mrs. putnam suggests that "in { } early days she shared the labors and the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile neighbors. it may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the roman woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of a pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the american woman to-day comes to her from the brave colonial housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight." [footnote : _atlantic monthly,_ june, .] indeed the more one studies social life in rome the more clear does it become that conditions were very similar for women to what they are in this latest of the republics here in america. this will not be surprising if we but learn to realize that the circumstances of the development of rome itself, the environment in which the women were placed resembled ours of the later time much more closely than we have had any idea of until recent years. the italian historian, ferrero, has read new lessons into roman history for us by showing us the past in terms of the present. the conditions that developed at rome, as i have said, were very similar to those which developed in the modern american republic. riches came, luxury arose. eastern slaves came to do all the work in the household that could formerly be accomplished by the women, greek hand-maidens particularly took every solicitude out of her hands, and then the roman matron looked around for something to occupy herself with, and { } it was not long before we have expressions from the men that would remind us of many things that have been said in the last generation or so. there is a well-known speech of cato delivered in opposition to the repeal of the oppian law which forbade women to hold property, that is reported by livy and sounds strangely modern. mrs. putnam talks of it very aptly, "as an expression of the ever recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent female." "'if, romans,' said he, 'every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. it was not without painful emotions of shame that i just now made my way into the forum through a crowd of women. had i not been restrained by respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, i should have said to them, "what sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women's husbands? could not each have made the same request to her husband at home? are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private, and with other women's husbands than your own?" "'our ancestors thought it not proper that women should transact any, even private business, without a director. we, it seems, suffer them now to interfere in the management of state { } affairs. will you give the reins to their untractable nature and their uncontrolled passions? this is the smallest of the injunctions laid on them by usage or the laws, all of which women bear with impatience; they long for liberty, or rather for license. what will they not attempt if they win this victory? the moment they have arrived at an equality with men, they will become your superiors.'" the social conditions which developed at rome are indeed so strangely like those with which we are now familiar as to be quite startling. as a mere man i should hesitate to suggest this, since it refers particularly to feminine affairs and domestic concerns, but since it has been betrayed by one of the sex perhaps i may venture to quote it. once more i turn to mrs. putnam for an apt expression of the conditions. she says: "the greeks, who, to be sure, had nothing in their dwellings that was not beautiful, had still supposed the great works of art were for public places. with the romans began the private collection of chefs-d'oeuvre in its most snobbish aspect. the parts played by the sexes in this enterprise sometimes showed the same division of labor that prevails very largely in a certain great nation of our own day that shall be nameless: the husband paid for the best art that money could buy, and the wife learned to talk about it and to entertain the artist. it is true that the roman lady began also to improve her mind. she { } studied greek, and hired greek masters to teach her history and philosophy. ladies flocked to hear lectures on all sorts of subjects, originating the odd connection between scholarship and fashion which still persists." this subject may be pursued with ever-increasing recognition of similarity between that time and our own. for instance, mrs. putnam says: "a woman of fashion, we are told, reckoned it among her ornaments if it were said of her that she was well read and a thinker, and that she wrote lyrics almost worthy of sappho. she, too, must have her hired escort of teachers, and listen to them now and then, at table or while she was having her hair dressed,--at other times she was too busy. and often while the philosopher was discussing high ethical themes her maid would come in with a love-letter, and the argument must wait till it was answered. "nothing very important in the way of production resulted from all the lady's literary activity. the verses, if sulpicia's they be, are the sole surviving evidence of creative effort among her kind; and, respectable as they are, they need not disturb sappho's repose. it was indirectly that the roman lady affected literature, since kinds began to be produced to her special taste; for it is hardly an accident that the _vers de société_ should expand, and the novel originate, in periods when for the first time women were a large element in the reading public." { } in our time it has been said, that one of the reasons why the young man does not marry is often that he is fearful of the superiority of the college-bred young woman. he knows that he himself has no more intelligence than is absolutely necessary for the proper conduct of life, and he fears that his "breaks" in grammar, in literature, in taste for art, in social things, may make him the laughing-stock of the educated woman. we would be reasonably sure, most of us, that at least this is the first time in the world's history that anything like this has happened. it is rather interesting, however, to read some of the reflections of the roman satiric poets on the state of affairs that developed in rome as a consequence of study and lectures and at least supposed scholarship becoming the fashion. "i hate the woman," says juvenal, "who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of palaemon and consulting them; the feminine antiquary who recalls verses unknown to me, and corrects the words of an unpolished friend which even a man would not observe. let a husband be allowed to make a solecism in peace." i recommend the reading of juvenal to the college young woman of the modern time, not only for its classic but for its social value. among the greeks the position of women was quite different from what is usually supposed. it is only too often the custom to think that the greek women, confined to a great degree to their { } houses, sharing little in the public discussions, coming very slightly into public in any way, were more or less despised by the men and tolerated, but surely not much respected. the place of women in life at any time can be best judged from the position assigned them by the dramatic poets of any period. the larger the mind of the dramatic poet, the more of a genius he is, the more surely does his estimate expressed in literature represent life as he saw it. ruskin pointed out that shakespeare has no heroes and many heroines; that, while he has no men that stand in unmarred perfection of character, "there is scarcely a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity." what is thus true of shakespeare is just as true of the great dramatic poets of the greeks. in practically all the extant plays of aeschylus, sophocles and euripides, women are the heroines. they are represented as nobler, braver, more capable of suffering, with a better appreciation of their ethical surroundings and the realities of life, than the men around them. as much as antigone is superior to her quarrelsome brothers, as alcestis rises above her selfish husband, as tecmessa is superior to and would have saved ajax if only he had permitted her, so everywhere do we find women occupying not a place of equality but a position of superiority. these plays were written by men. just as in { } the case of shakespeare they were written by men mainly to be witnessed by men, for while three-fourths of our audiences at theatres now are women, at least three-fourths of the audience in shakespeare's time were men, and in the old greek theatre the men largely exceeded the women in attendance. these were masculine pictures of the place of woman, painted not in empty compliment but with profoundest respect and deepest understanding. we honor these writers as the greatest in the history of literature because they saw life so clearly and so truly. literature is only great when it mirrors life to the nail. what the greek dramatists had done, homer had done before them. his picture of the older greek women shows us that they were on an absolute equality in their households with the men, that not only were they thoroughly respected and loved for themselves, but, to repeat ruskin, they were looked up to as infallibly wise counsellors, as the best possible advisers to whom a man could go, provided they themselves were of high character and their hearts, as well as their intellects, were interested in the problems involved. there are, of course, in all of the dramatists some wicked women. in the whole round of shakespeare's characters there are only three wicked women who have degraded their womanhood among the principal figures. these are lady macbeth, regan and goneril. we have corresponding characters in the greek dramatists. { } clytemnestra is the lady macbeth of greek tragedy. euripides, the feminist as he has been called, has shown us, as feminists ever, more of the worst side of women than his greater predecessors aeschylus and sophocles. he has exhibited the extent to which religious over-enthusiasm can carry women in the "bacchae," and was the first to introduce the sex problem. in general it may be said, as ruskin says of shakespeare, that when a greek dramatist pictures wicked women "they are at once felt to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they had abandoned." indeed tragedy, as we see it in the great tragic poets, might be defined as the failure on the part of a good woman to save the men who are nearest and dearest to her from the faults into which their characters impel them. all the great dramatists, ancient and modern, represent women once more in ruskin's words as "infallibly faithful and wise counsellors--incorruptibly just and pure examples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save." how little there is in any question of evolution having brought new influence or higher place to woman may be very well realized from this position of women among the old greeks. gladstone has called attention to it very forcibly in his "essay on the place of ancient greece in the providential order," when he says, "outside { } the pale of christianity, it would be difficult to find a parallel in point of elevation to the greek women of the heroic age." he has taken the place of woman as representing the criterion by which the civilization and the culture of a people at any time may be judged, though he does not at all think that one finds a constant upward tendency in history in this regard. he says: "for when we are seeking to ascertain the measure of that conception which any given race has formed of our nature, there is, perhaps, no single test so effective, as the position which it assigns to woman. for as the law of force is the law of brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law does man approximate to the brute. and in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with deity. but the emancipation and due ascendency of woman are not a mere fact, they are the emphatic assertion of a principle, and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force and the enthronement of other and higher laws in its place and its despite." of course, of the formal education of the women of greece we know very little. we do know that they would not have been respected as they were, looked up to by their sons and their husbands, honored as the poets have shown them to be, put upon the stage as the heroines of the race, only that they had been intellectually as well as { } morally the equals--nay, the superiors--of the men around them. we do not know much about the teaching of women before and during the classical period, but we can understand very well from what we know of them that they must have had good opportunities for education. plato, of course, insists that women should be educated in every way exactly as the men. he mentions specifically gymnastics and horseback riding, and says that women should be trained in these as well as things intellectual, for they should have their bodies developed as well as their minds. his reason for demanding equal education is very interesting, because it is an anticipation of what is being said rather emphatically at the present time. he says: "if i am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. for reflect if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" his idea evidently was that only one-half those who ought to be citizens were properly trained for civic duties if the education of women were neglected. it is extremely interesting in the light of this to read some of aristophanes' plays. three of them, "lysistrata," the "thesmophoriazusae," which has a simpler name "the women's festival," for it referred to the great feast of thesmophoria in honor of ceres and proserpine, and { } the "ecclesiazusae." this last title may be rendered a little freely "the female parliament," for in it women secure, by a little fraud, the right to vote and vote themselves into office as the main portion of the plot of the play. all three of these plays refer particularly to the question of women's rights, and though "the women's festival" was written as a satire on euripides it is evident that only this subject was about as prominently before the people of athens as the question of votes for women is in our time, aristophanes would not have written these satiric comedies. the subjects of his plays are always the very latest actuality in athens. socrates was satirized in "the clouds" within a few months of his death. "the war" was written while athens was actually engaged in it, and "the peace" was written within a few months after the signing of the treaty. votes for women must actually have been on the very centre of the carpet when aristophanes wrote his "ecclesiazusae" or "feminine parliament." lest it should be thought that i intrude myself in any way in trying to boil down for you the old satiric comedy, or that i am modernizing aristophanes in order to adapt the ideas of this play more fully to conditions that are around us at the present time, i shall read to you the excellent condensation of it made by the rev. w. lucas collins, m.a., in his "aristophanes," in the series of "ancient classics for english { } readers," that scholarly introduction to the classic authors of which mr. collins is the editor. he says: "the women have determined, under the leadership of a clever lady named praxagora, to reform the constitution of athens. for this purpose they will dress like men--beards included--and occupy the seats in the pnyx, so as to be able to command a majority of votes in the next public assembly, the parliament of athens. praxagora is strongly of opinion with the modern mrs. poyser, that on the point of speaking, at all events, the women have great natural advantages over the men; that 'when they have anything to say they can mostly find words to say it in.' they hold a midnight meeting for the purpose of rehearsing their intended speeches and getting accustomed to their new clothes. two or three of the most ambitious orators unfortunately break down at the very outset, much to their leader's disgust, by addressing the assembly as 'ladies' and swearing female oaths and using many other unparliamentary expressions quite unbefitting their masculine attire. praxagora herself, however, makes a speech which is very generally admired. she complains of the mismanagement hitherto of public affairs, and asserts that the only hope of salvation for the state is to put the government into the hands of the women; arguing, like lysistrata in the comedy of that name, that those who have so long managed the domestic establishment { } successfully are best fitted to undertake the same duties on a larger scale. the women, too, are shown by their advocate to be highly conservative, and, therefore, safe guardians of the public interests: "they roast and boil after the good old fashion, they keep the holidays that were kept of old. they make their cheesecakes by the old receipts. they keep a private bottle like their mothers. they plague their husbands--as they always did." even in the management of a campaign, they will be found more prudent and more competent than the men: "being mothers, they'll be chary of the blood of their own sons, our soldiers; being mothers, they will take care their children do not starve when they're on service; and, for ways and means, trust us, there's nothing cleverer than a woman: and as for diplomacy, they'll be hard indeed to cheat--they know too many tricks themselves." her speech is unanimously applauded; she is elected lady-president on the spot, by public acclamation, and the chorus of ladies march off towards the pnyx to secure their places like the old gentlemen in 'the wasps' ready for the daybreak. "in the next scene, two of the husbands enter in great perplexity, one wrapped in his wife's dressing gown, and the other with only his under-garment { } on and without his shoes. they both want to go to the assembly but cannot find their clothes. while they are wondering what in the world their wives can have done with them, and what is become of the ladies themselves, a third neighbor, chremes, comes in. he has been to the assembly; but even he was too late to get the threepence which was allowed out of the public treasury to all who took their seat in good time, and which all athenian citizens, if we may trust their satirist, were so ludicrously eager to secure. the place was quite full already, and of strange faces, too. and a handsome fair-faced youth (praxagora in disguise, we are to understand) had got up, and amid the loud cheers of those unknown voters had proposed and carried a resolution, that the government of the state should be placed in the hands of a committee of ladies,--an experiment which had found favor also with others, chiefly because it was 'the only change which had not as yet been tried at athens.' his two neighbors are somewhat confounded at his news, but congratulate themselves on the fact that the wives will now, at all events, have to see to the maintenance of the children, and that 'the gods sometimes bring good out of evil.' "the women return, and get home as quickly as they can to change their costume so that the trick by which the passing of this new decree has been secured may not be detected. praxagora succeeds in persuading her husband that she had { } been sent for in a hurry to attend a sick neighbor, and only borrowed his coat to put on 'because the night was so cold' and his strong shoes and staff, in order that any evil-disposed person might take her for a man as she tramped along, and so not interfere with her. she at first affects not to have heard of the reform which has been just carried, but when her husband explains it, declares it will make athens a paradise. then she confesses to him that she has herself been chosen, in full assembly, 'generalissima of the state.' she puts the question, however, just as we have all seen it put by a modern actress,--'will this house agree to it?' and if praxagora was at all attractively got up, we may be sure it was carried by acclamation in the affirmative. _then, in the first place, there shall be no more poverty; there shall be community of goods, and so there shall be no law suits, and no gambling and no informers._ (they promised more even than our suffragettes--if possible.) moreover, there shall be community of wives,--and all the ugly wives shall have the first choice of husbands. so she goes off to her public duties, to see that these resolutions are carried out forthwith; the good citizen begging leave to follow close at her side, so that all who see him may say, 'what a fine fellow is our generalissima's husband!' "the scene changes to another street in athens, where the citizens are bringing out all their property, to be carried into the market-place { } and inventoried for the common stock. citizen 'a' dances with delight as he marshals his dilapidated chattels into a mock procession--from the meal sieve, which he kisses, it looks so pretty with its powdered hair, to the iron pot which looks as black 'as if lysimachus' (some well-known fop of the day, possibly present among the audience) 'had been boiling his hair dye in it.' this patriot, at least, has not much to lose, and hopes he may have something to gain, under these female communists. "but his neighbor, who is better off, is in no such hurry. the athenians, as he remarks, are always making new laws and abrogating them; what has been passed to-day very likely will be repealed to-morrow. besides it is a good old national habit to take, not to give. he will wait a while before he gives in an inventory of his possessions. (one might think of an income tax law in the united states in the twentieth century.) "but at this point comes the city-beadle (an appointment now held, of course, by a lady) with a summons to a banquet provided for all citizens out of the public funds: and amongst the items in the bill of fare is one dish whose name is composed of seventy-seven syllables--which aristophanes gives us, but which the reader shall be spared. (it has been boiled down by the american schoolboy to just 'hash.') citizen 'b' at once delivers it as his opinion that 'every { } man of proper feeling should support the constitution to the utmost of his ability,' and hurries to take his place at the feast. there are some difficulties caused, very naturally by the new communistic regulations as to providing for the old and ugly women, but with these we need not deal. the piece ends with an invitation, issued by direction of praxagora through her lady-chamberlain, to the public generally, spectators included, to join the national banquet which is to inaugurate the new order of things." in a previous comedy aristophanes had told of another interference of women in the political life of athens that contains so many reminders of the modern time, and shows so definitely how old the new is, that it deserves a place here. above all, the desertions from the cause of the women when they find that their political duties interfere with their home duties, and that they have to sacrifice many of the joys of life even though they are duties that may at times seem irksome enough,--children, household work, etc.,--for these newer obligations with which they have so little sympathy, is especially interesting. once more i prefer to take the rev. mr. collins' summary of the play in order that it may be clear that aristophanes' meaning is not being stretched for the purpose of making points with regard to present-day conditions. after all, mr. collins' little book was written very nearly thirty years ago, when very little of the present feministic { } movement, at least in the form in which we are now familiar with it, had asserted itself. "they determine, under the leading of the clever lysistrata, wife to one of the magistrates, to take the question (of the ending of the war) into their own hands. they resolve upon a voluntary separation from their husbands--a practical divorce _a mensa et thoro_--until peace with sparta shall be proclaimed. it is resolved that a body of the elder matrons shall seize the acropolis and make themselves masters of the public treasury. these form one of the two choruses in the play, the other being composed of the old men of athens. the latter proceed (with a good deal of comic difficulty, owing to the steepness of the ascent and their shortness of breath) to attack the acropolis, armed with torches and fagots and pans of charcoal, with which they hope to smoke out the occupants. but the women have provided themselves with buckets of water, which they empty on the heads of their assailants, who soon retire discomfited to call the police. but the police are, in their turn, repulsed by these resolute insurgents, whom they do not exactly know how to deal with. at last a member of the public committee comes forward to parley, and a dialogue takes place between him and lysistrata. 'why,' he asks, 'have they thus taken possession of the citadel?' 'they have resolved henceforth to manage the public revenues themselves,' is the { } reply, 'and not allow them to be applied to carrying on this ruinous war.' 'that is no business for women,' argues the magistrate. 'why not?' says lysistrata; 'the wives have long had the management of the private purses of the husbands, to the great advantage of both.' in short, the women have made up their minds to have their voice no longer ignored, as hitherto, in questions of peace and war. their remonstrances have always been met with the taunt that 'war is the business of men;' and to any question they have ventured to ask their husbands on such points, the answer has always been the old cry--old as the days of homer--'go spin, you jade, go spin!' but they will put up with it no longer. as they have always had wit enough to clear the tangled threads in their work, so they have no doubt of settling all these difficulties and complications in international disputes, if it is left to them. but what concern, her opponent asks, can women have with war, who contribute nothing to its dangers and hardships? 'contribute, indeed!' says the lady; 'we contribute the sons who carry it on.' and she throws down to her adversary her hood, her basket and her spindle, and bids him 'go home and card wool,'--it is all such old men are fit for; henceforth the proverb (of the men's making) shall be reversed,--'war shall be the care of the women.' the magistrate retires not having got the best of it, very naturally, in an encounter of words; and the chorus of elders raise the cry--{ } well known as a popular partisan cry at athens, and sure to call forth a hearty laugh in such juxtaposition--that the women are designing to 'set up a tyranny!' "but poor lysistrata soon has her troubles. her unworthy recruits are fast deserting her. they are going off to their husbands in the most sneaky manner--creeping out through the little hole under the citadel which led to the celebrated cave of pan, and letting themselves down from the walls by ropes at the risk of breaking their necks. those who are caught all have excellent excuses. one has some fleeces of fine milesian wool at home which must be seen to,--she is sure the moths are eating them. another has urgent occasion for the doctor; a third cannot sleep alone for fear of the owls--of which, as every one knows, there were really a great many at athens. the husbands, too, are getting uncomfortable without their housekeepers; there is no one to cook their victuals; and one poor soul comes and humbly entreats his wife at least to come home and wash and dress the baby. "it is becoming plain that either the war or the wives' resolution will soon give way, when there arrives an embassy from sparta. they cannot stand this general strike of the wives. they are agreed already with their enemies, the athenians, on one point--as to the women--that the old greek comedian's proverb, which we have borrowed and translated freely, is true,-- "there is no living with 'em--or without 'em." { } "they are come to offer terms of peace. when two parties are already of one mind, as lysistrata observes, they are not long in coming to an understanding. a treaty is made on the spot, with remarkably few preliminaries." whenever we have sufficient remains to illustrate the life of any period of history with reasonable completeness, we find women occupying a much more important place than is usually conceded to them. the trouble is that we assume that we know something about the past, because we have somewhere obtained a vague notion of it and then we fill in details in accordance with that preconceived notion. the general rule, unfortunately, is to make as little of the past as possible and to consider that, of course, they must have been very different from us, and surely far behind us in everything. the more one really knows of history, however, the less does one think this. we must not let our complacent self-satisfaction with our own generation disturb our proper appreciation of past generations, however. an english writer said not very long ago, and now that we have reviewed various periods in the history of feminine influence and of education, i think that you will recognize the justice of what he said, "it is too much the easy custom of the present self-admiring day--not a bit more self-satisfied, after all, than each day has been in its { } turn--to hold the women of the past as something little better than dolls for their attainments, a little dearer than slaves for their position and despicably content therein." nothing could well be less true than this. what is apt to strike us, however, after a review of the phases of feminine education and influence such as i have sketched, is that there are undoubtedly times during which very little is heard of feminine influence and almost nothing at all of feminine education. there are periods on the other hand when these subjects are the very centre of human interest. this interest waxes to a certain climax and then apparently wanes. what is the reason for these waxings and wanings? is there anything that we know about them that will help us to account for them? if women have once achieved a certain position and have once secured certain privileges in the matter of education, it might reasonably be expected that, barring some great cataclysm or political upheaval, that completely disrupted society, they would not abandon these hard-won rights and precious privileges, and so we should not have to be going through the storm and stress of another period of discussion, controversy, opposition with regard to woman's rights. how is it that rights once attained--and never unless after a struggle, for no matter how civilized a period or how cultured a people, they do not grant rights to any class unless forced to do so-- that these rights have afterwards been lost, or at least greatly diminished and partly forgotten? { } in this we come upon one of the mysteries of history and of the life of man. how is it that men secure certain knowledge and then forget it--literally forget all about it--how is it that men make discoveries and then lose sight of them so that they have to be made over again; how is it that men even make useful inventions of all kinds and these are lost sight of and the invention has to be made over again in succeeding generations? how is it that the suez canal was opened at least once before our time and then allowed to fill up with sand, and we had to do the work all over again two generations ago? how is it that america was discovered at least twice, probably oftener, before columbus' time, and yet his was a real discovery? we actually have papal documents addressed to bishops in greenland from popes in the thirteenth century, mentioning missions on the mainland of america. there are traditions that seem to point beyond all doubt to the fact that the irish monks were here in america in the eighth and ninth centuries. those traditions come from three or four different sources. there was a reverence for the cross among the indians in certain parts of the country. a tradition of white-robed priests who came from over the sea. the norse name for america was irland it mikla, ireland the great, { } that is, the island of the irish, much larger than ireland itself and lying beyond it in the seas. how is it, indeed, that there are many discoveries and rediscoveries of the same principle in science? heron's engine at alexandria was an anticipation of the turbine principle in the application of steam. when we dug up surgical instruments at pompeii we were surprised to find that they had the form of many instruments that we thought we had invented in our time. in glass-making, in iron-working, in all the arts and crafts precious secrets are discovered, then lost, then rediscovered, and this may even happen several times. we find no sign of a continuous progress, but recurring phases that represent ups and downs in man's interest in certain things and his achievements corresponding to the intensity of his interest. such a thing as a regular progressive advance one finds nowhere in history. nations do not maintain their power after they have achieved it. just as soon as the struggle to maintain themselves is over, internal troubles of various kinds set disintegrating factors at work and it is not long before decadence can be noted and then the disappearance of the people or at least of its national prominence becomes inevitable. we shall not be surprised to find ups and downs in the history of feminine influence and education, for this is the rule of history. we have only been laboring under the false notion that definite progress was the rule because of { } over-absorption in the evolution theory--but it is not. there seems to be in this matter a certain check upon the occupation of woman with interests external to her household that would tempt her to occupy herself much with duties extraneous to the family life. after all, one thing is perfectly clear. only women can be mothers. we have not succeeded even in getting the slightest possible hint of any method of continuing the race except by the ordinary process of maternity. whatever of direct evolution the advocates of the theory of evolution have suggested as coming in humanity so that it may be the subject of observation, has been due in their minds to the lengthening of the period during which the young of the race are cared for. as we go up in the scale of life from the lowest to the highest, infancy-- meaning by that the period during which the offspring is cared for by the parents--lengthens. in the very small beings there is none. as we ascend in the scale we find traces of parental care. then comes occupation of the parents with their offspring from a few hours up to a day or two, and then finally months and years, until in the human race infancy has been gradually prolonged to twenty years. this is herbert spencer's observation and it is interesting and suggestive. a mother then especially, though also a father, must care for children, not alone for months before and after birth, but for a score of years. { } occupation with other things, though necessary, detracts from this care of children, and if exaggerated leads to the celibate condition or that approaching it, the limitation of families within narrow bounds. the mother of but two or three children may occupy herself with other things and, indeed, has to find other occupation of mind. at certain periods in the world's history a certain number of these women accumulate and the tendency to celibacy or to very limited maternity makes itself felt, and then this class of people usually fails to propagate enough of the species like themselves to take their places in the world. it is a matter of common comment at the present moment that if the women's colleges were to depend on the progeny of their graduates to fill the classes in succeeding years, the numbers at the schools not only would not increase but would constantly tend to decrease. of course this same thing is true of the descendants of the male graduates of many of our eastern universities, and i believe that attention has been particularly called to it with regard to our three oldest universities. such are the risks of life and the fatalities incident to disease, even with our present improved hygienic conditions, that anything less than five or six children in a family will not prove sufficient eventually to replace the parents in their activities. when to small families is added the number of celibates consequent upon absorption in self-improvement, then the failure of the { } cultured classes even to replace themselves becomes very manifest, and hence our dwindling native populations, if we take that word to mean the families that have been in the country for more than two generations. nature does not confide conditions in humanity entirely to man, however. this would be to leave mankind subject to certain whims and fashions and the caprices of times and people. there are many biological checks which maintain mankind in a certain equilibrium. a typical example of it is the regulation of the number of each sex born. in general the proportion of the sexes to one another maintains a ratio very near that of equality under ordinary natural conditions. this obtains in spite of the fact that man is so much more subject to accidents than woman, so much more likely to catch and succumb to disease and so much more likely to wear himself out prematurely as the result of his labors. the death-rate among women at all ages is lower than that of men, yet a constant, definite equilibrium of the sexes is maintained with accurate nicety. there is evidently some check existing in nature itself that prevents any disturbance of this fixed ratio. not only is nature able to maintain this, but in cases where, because of some serious disturbance of natural conditions, a decided inequality of the ratio occurs by accident, nature is able to restore conditions to the previous normal, without our being quite able to understand just how this is { } accomplished. we do not know how sex is determined. there have been many explanations offered, but all of them have proved inadequate and most of them quite nugatory. in spite of our lack of knowledge there have been times in history when a striking manifestation of nature's power has occurred. for instance, after the thirty years' war in germany the ratio between the sexes had been so much disturbed that, according to some historians, there were probably nearly twice as many women as men in existence in the germanic countries. the men had been cut off by the war itself, by famines consequent upon it, by extreme and unusual efforts to support their families and by epidemic diseases in camps and campaigns. the disproportion was so great that a relaxation of the marriage laws was permitted for a time in certain of the countries and men were allowed to have two wives. under these conditions nature at once began to reassert herself, the number of male births was greatly increased and the disproportion between the sexes immediately began to lessen. at the end of scarcely more than three generations the normal equilibrium of the sexes was restored and there was about an equal number of men and women again. here we have the effect of one of these curiously interesting biological checks upon man's foolish quarrelsomeness which might result in a too great disproportion of the sexes. we shall not be surprised, then, if we find other { } such biological checks and compensations exerting themselves. in recent years sir francis galton, the cousin of darwin, who is recognized as the best living authority in statistical biology, and professor karl pearson, who has done more than any one else to bring out many curious and interesting but very important biological laws by the study of statistics, have insisted in their studies of the effect of the law of primogeniture, that when there are small families, the children are more likely to be nervous, oftener have an inclination to mental disease and have less resistive vitality against disease in general than the average child of the larger families. there is a small but significant advantage in vitality that accrues to later children of a family. this is so contrary to the frequently expressed opinion that only the children of small families can be brought up properly to resist disease and have such advantages in their education and nutrition as to be of better health, that i should hesitate to quote it, only that it has behind it the authority of such distinguished scientists as galton and pearson. they are both conservative englishmen, they have no theory of their own that they are supporting, they have no axe to grind in things social and political for the launching of the new theory, they are only making observations on the facts presented and the data that have been collected. here is another striking example of a check on certain tendencies in humanity that apparently { } nature does not approve of, or to avoid personifying a process, we had better say are not according to nature's laws. the small family does not perpetuate itself. it has certain natural disadvantages that work against it. it gradually disappears and the races of larger families maintain themselves. we need not have had recourse to galton's and pearson's principle in this matter, for we see the results of the small family in present-day history. france is decreasing in population. our own puritan families are dying out. american families generally of more than three generations are not perpetuating themselves. the teeming fertility of the poor immigrants who come to us is, with immigration itself, supplying our increase in population. our nation is, as a result, gradually becoming something very different from what our forefathers anticipated. what has apparently happened, then, in the history of feminine education and influence is that, whenever women became occupied with such modes of education, or the cultivation of phases of feminine influence that took them out of their houses, away from family life and far from the hearthstone, the particular classes of women who thus became interested did not propagate themselves, or propagated themselves to such a limited degree that, after a time, their kind disappeared to a great extent. the domestic woman with tendencies to care much more for her maternal duties than for any extra-domiciliary successes { } propagated herself, raised her children with her ideals, cultivated domesticity and consciously or unconsciously fostered the mother idea as the main feature of woman's life and her principal source not only of occupation, but of joy in the living, of consolation and of genuine accomplishment. the tendency, as can readily be seen in our own time, of the other class of woman is largely to foster, often unconsciously, but of course often consciously also, the opposite notions. she talks of the slavery of child-raising, the limitations of the home woman, the drudgery of domestic life, forgetting that life is work and that the only happiness in life is to have work that you want to do, whatever it may be, but all this talk has its inevitable effect upon all but the born mother woman, and the result is the fad for public occupation instead of domestic life. it is easy to see what the result of the opposite opinion is. every tendency of the intellectual woman so-called is to repress such natural instincts as lead to the propagation of the race and the continuance of her kind. of course it will be said that intellectual women are quite willing to have one or two children. first, this is not true for a great many of them. secondly, for those who have one or two children losses by death and failure to marry in the second generation, because of conscious or unconscious discouragements and the exaggeration of ideas with regard to the danger of maternity, lead often to a complete { } suppression of the family in the second or third generation. apparently the rule of history is that there are four or five generations of women interested in intellectual things particularly, who follow one another in these periods of special feminine education and exertion of influence outside of the home. then there comes a distinct decadence of the feminist movement, because of the gradual diminution in number of women who are interested in such things, and then, while there are always certain women who develop great intellectual abilities which require a larger stage than the home for their display, and while there are always some who find an intellectual career or rather make it, very little is heard of feminism and women's claims. they are satisfied to rule their husbands, to raise their children, to be saints to their sons and elder sisters to their daughters, and the feminine world has its simple joys and not much fuss about rights. it may seem far-fetched thus to appeal to a biological check or a great underlying natural law in a matter of this kind, but in recent years biology has so often been appealed to to justify unsocial conditions that its true application needs to be pointed out. we have heard, for instance, much of the struggle for life and the competition that is supposed to be inevitable in nature, while all the time it has apparently been forgotten that there is no struggle for life within the species { } except when there is some disturbance of the ordinary order of nature, as in times of famine, or when a mother is foraging for her children. on the contrary, mutual aid is the rule within the species and there is no animal small or large, from the ant to the elephant, that does not help its kind and has not certain wonderful instincts for helpfulness, the origin of which we do not know, but which are founded in nature itself. man justifies inhumanity to man by the supposed struggle for life, while all the time nature teaches us the opposite law. nature's way is that of elimination. her interest is the race. she cares very little for the individual and guards only her great purpose of securing the propagation of the race. apparently such intense preoccupation with the intellectual life as provides opportunity for serious education, for literary work and for the exertion of diffuse influence in a community, does not make for the propagation of the race or its proper preservation. we can see this easily in the world around us, in the limited progeny of those who live the intellectual or selfish life to the exclusion of racial interests. this is opposed to nature's purpose and she proceeds to eliminate those who stand in her way. this is not done by any cataclysmic process but by a law of nature. those involved in the influence disturbing to her purpose eliminate themselves. this is as true for indulgence in toxic substances that produce certain personal { } momentary good feelings, as for the more deliberate avoidance of certain of nature's burdens which brings about a certain negative pleasure at least by lessening the amount of pain that has to be borne and trouble to be endured. to these pains and troubles nature has attached some of the best of the compensations of life. the domestic joys are properly man's highest source of unalloyed pleasure without remorse. our review of the phases of feminine education and influence would seem to show that there has occurred a series of cycles about three centuries apart in the history of the race, during which women become very much occupied with things external to their household. such cycles are represented by our own period, that of the renaissance in the sixteenth century, that of the university period in the thirteenth century, and then that at charlemagne's court earlier, though the barbaric conditions following the migration of nations probably did not allow a natural expression of the tendencies at this time. earlier in history, in the first century before christ and just after and in the fourth century before christ in greece, there had been, as we have pointed out, such cycles. during the intervening centuries there is a negative phase in the movement, so that feminism, under which is understood woman's expression of herself outside of her home and the exertion of her influence apart from her family and immediate friends, is very little in { } evidence. during these times the domestic woman reasserts herself. during the positive phases of the movement she continues to have her children, the feminists do not, or at least not to the same extent. they and their kind are gradually eliminated, at least to a great degree, and so the negative phase comes on. this is not an argument and is not meant as such. it is meant to be a scientific reading of the meaning of certain phases of the history of the race as they can be studied. i would be the last in the world to think that i could influence present-day activities by any such indications of a great law in the history of the race that takes three centuries from phase to phase. after all, who cares for a law that does not affect our generation, but at most the third and fourth succeeding generations, and the manifestation of whose phenomena can only be recognized in three-century periods? what i have tried to do is to point out just what are the cycles of feminine influence and education in the world's history, and then to work out the reasons why, quite contrary to what might be expected, these phases have not continued, but are interrupted by periods of utter decadence of feminine influence or interest in public life and education. perhaps in our time we are going to change all that. that is the feeling that we are prone to have. others may have made progress and forgotten about it, or { } may have made mistakes and been eliminated for them, but we are so consciously active in our affairs that we cannot think of ourselves as likely to suffer the fate of our predecessors. there is much of that feeling abroad in the present day, there has always been much of that feeling abroad in every other day, for each succeeding generation in its turn is perfectly sure that what it is doing means more than ever before, though it can see very clearly the mistakes made by its predecessors. it is somewhat like our feeling towards other persons and their accomplishments in life as compared to our own. most of us are quite sure that whatever we are doing is quite significant, though we can see plainly that what most of our friends are doing, or are trying to do, is altogether trivial and insignificant. in recent years we have come to realize more and more how much history needs to be studied in the light of biology. the decadence of greece was probably due, to a great extent, to the bringing back by alexander's conquering soldiers of malaria from the orient, and thus the vanquished proved the ruin of their conquerors. the great plagues of the olden time which sometimes carried away nearly one-half the human race in a single visitation, were due to insect pests of various kinds, which all unknown to men conveyed the disease and diffused it widely. it will not be easy always to read the lessons of biology in history aright. whether i have done so for you { } or not, in this matter of the history of feminism, i cannot tell. the story, however, has been interesting to work out, and i do not think that its conclusions have ever been presented to the public in quite this form before. they are now presented not with the idea that they should be accepted as absolute, but for the criticism and consideration of those who are most vitally interested and who want to know all that can be known about the conditions surrounding woman's influence in the world and her place for good in the history of the race. { } { } the church and feminine education { } "it is your duty to see that your daughter loves study and work, securing this by the promise of rewards or some other means of emulation. above all you must take care not to give her disgust for study for fear that this may continue as she grows older. let her not learn in her childhood what she should unlearn later in life." --_letter of st. jerome to leta, the wife of toxolus, the son of st. paula_. "the sum of education is right training in the nursery. the soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected." --plato, _laws_ (jowett), vol. iv, p. . scribner, . "the minds of children are most of all influenced by the training they receive at home." --pope leo xiii. { } the church and feminine education [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this address was gathered originally for the normal courses on the history of education for many of the teaching sisterhoods in this country. in its present form it was the address to the graduates of st. elizabeth's college, convent station, n. j., on the occasion of the celebration of the jubilee of the foundation of its teaching work.] lady bachelors: i have had frequent occasions to address all sorts of bachelors on their graduation, of science and arts and letters and pedagogy, but this is my first opportunity to address ladies crowned, at least symbolically, with the laurel berries of the bachelorhood in art. we are apt to think of young ladies rather as masters of arts innumerable, and as needing no degree to attest their abilities. while i am glad, indeed, to address you as lady bachelors i do so with the fondest hope that you will all proceed to further degrees either academic or domestic and not remain in that nondescript class of bachelor-maids. i should like to be able to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to have the privilege of addressing you on this fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of st. elizabeth's. there is an apt illustration of the communion of saints in your title as a college. founded in honor of that noble, saintly american woman, elizabeth seton, { } and yet called particularly after that saint elizabeth whom the mother of the lord set out to visit as the first act of her motherhood of the church, there always rises in my mind besides, the thought of that other saint elizabeth whom the germans delight to call the dear saint elizabeth, who, though she died when she was scarcely twenty-four, has left a name undying in the annals of helpfulness for others. this st. elizabeth, whose name i recall with special willingness now that i see you ready to go out to do your world's work, lived in the midst of what has been until quite recent years the despised middle ages, out of which as little good might be expected as out of nazareth in the olden time, yet she so stamped her personality on the world of her day that now the after-time, neglectful, as a rule, of the individual, so careless even of the world's (supposed) great ones, will not willingly let her name die. she is still with us as a great living force. they read a sketch of her life, i have heard, at the meeting of the neighborhood house in new york within the last few months, as an incentive to that devotion to the needy that characterized her. she was a woman who thought not at all of herself, but all of others. as a consequence, mankind in its better moods has never ceased to turn to her. evidently the formula for being remembered is to forget yourself. i am sure, however, that that has been brought home to you so well during your { } years at st. elizabeth's that it would, indeed, be bringing coals to newcastle for me to say anything about it in the few minutes i have to talk to you. what i have chosen to say to you refers to that higher catholic education for women of which you are now going out as the representatives. i do it all the more readily because, through the kindness of your beloved teachers, i have had the privilege of co-operating a little in that education, for i appreciate that privilege very much. apparently a good many people cherish the idea that the catholic church is opposed to feminine education, or at least to the higher education of women as we know it now, and that in the past her influence has been constantly and consistently exerted against any development of this phase of human accomplishment. in the liturgy of the church women are usually spoken of as the devout female sex, and it is supposed that the one effort of the church itself, the unerring purpose of ecclesiastical authorities, was to prevent women from becoming learned lest they should lose something of their devoutness. apparently it is forgotten that some of the greatest devotees in the church, the saintly women who were held up to the admiration and emulation of their sisters in the after-time, women like st. catherine of sienna, st. angela merici, st. jane frances de chantal and, above all, st. teresa, { } were eminently intellectual women as well as models of devotion. this same idea as to the church deliberately fostering ignorance has been quite common in the writings of certain types of historians with regard to other departments of education, and those of us who are interested in the history of medicine have been rather surprised to be told that, because the church wanted to keep people in readiness to look to masses and prayers and relics and shrines for the cure of their ailments,--and, of course, pay for the privilege of taking advantage of these,--the development of medicine was discouraged, the people were kept in ignorance and all progress in scientific knowledge was hampered. it is, indeed, amusing to hear this when one knows that for seven centuries the greatest contributors to medical science have been the papal physicians, deliberately called to rome, many of them, because they were the great medical scientists of their day, and the popes would have no others near. for centuries the papal medical school was the finest in the world for the original research done there, and bologna at the height of its fame was in the papal states. with so many other presumptions with regard to the position of the church towards education, it is not surprising that there should be a complete misunderstanding of her attitude toward feminine education, an absolute ignoring of the realities of the history of education, which show { } exactly the opposite of anything like opposition to be true. i have had a good deal to do in laboring at least to correct many false ideas with regard to the history of education, and, above all, with what concerns supposed church opposition to various phases of educational advance. i know no presumption of opposition on the part of the church to education that is so groundless, however, as that which would insist that it is only now with what people are pleased to call the breaking up of church influence generally, so that even the catholic church has to bow, though unwillingly, to the spirit of the times and to modern progress, that feminine education is receiving its due share of attention. most people seem to be quite sure that the first serious development of opportunities for the higher education of women came in our time. they presume that never before has there been anything worth while talking about in this matter. just inasmuch as they do they are completely perverting the realities of the history of education, which are in this matter particularly interesting and by no means lacking in detail. whenever there is any question of church influence in education, or of the spirit of the church with regard to education, those who wish to talk knowingly of the subject should turn to the period in which the church was a predominant factor in human affairs throughout europe. this is, as is well known, the thirteenth century. the { } pope who was on the throne at the beginning of this century, innocent iii, is famous in history for having set down kings from their thrones, dictated many modifications of political policy to the countries of europe whenever secular governments were violating certain great principles of justice, and in general, was looked up to as the most powerful of rulers in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. a typical example of the place occupied by the church is to be seen when philip augustus of france repudiated his lawful wife to marry another. pope innocent set himself sternly against the injustice, and the proud french king, at the time one of the most powerful sovereigns of europe, had to take back the neglected wife from the scandinavian countries, the distance and weakness of whose relatives would seem to make it so easy for a determined monarch to put her aside. when king john in england violated the rights of his people, innocent put the country under an interdict, released john's subjects from their allegiance and promptly brought the shifty plantagenet to terms. the pope at the end of the century, the great boniface viii, was scarcely less assertive of the rights of the church and of the papacy than the first of the thirteenth-century pontiffs. while he was not so successful as his great predecessor in maintaining his rights, the policy of the church evidently had not changed. most of the popes of the interval wielded an immense influence for good { } that was felt in every sphere of life in europe in their time. now it is with regard to this period that it is fair to ask the question, what was the attitude of the church toward education? owing to her acknowledged supremacy in spiritual matters and the extension of the spiritual authority even over the temporal authorities whenever the essential principles of ethics or any question of morals was concerned, the church could absolutely dictate the educational policy of europe. now, this is the century when the universities arose and received their most magnificent development. the great lateran council, held at the beginning of the century, required every bishop to establish professorships equivalent to what we now call a college in connection with his cathedral. the metropolitan archbishops were expected to develop university courses in connection with their colleges. everywhere, then, in europe universities arose, and there was the liveliest appreciation and the most ardent enthusiasm for education, so that not only were ample opportunities provided, but these were taken gloriously and the culture of modern europe awoke and bloomed wonderfully. some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative statistics available, there were more students at the universities of oxford and cambridge to the population of the england of that day, than there are { } to the population of even such an educationally well provided city as greater new york in the present year of grace . this seems astounding to our modern ideas, but it is absolutely true if there is any truth in history. the statistics are provided by men who are not at all favorable to catholic education or the church's influence for education. at this same time there were probably more than , students at the university of bologna, and almost beyond a doubt , at the university of paris. we have not reached such figures for university attendance again, even down to the present. students came from all over the world to these universities, but more than twenty other universities were founded throughout europe in this century. the population was very scanty compared to what it is at the present time; there were probably not more than , , of people on the whole continent. england had less than , , of people and, as we know very well by the census made before the coming of the armada, had only slightly more than , , even in elizabeth's time, some two centuries later. here is abundant evidence of the attitude of the church towards education. now comes the question for us. what about feminine education at the time of this great new awakening of educational purpose throughout europe? if we can find no trace of it, then are we justified in saying that if the church did not oppose, at least she did not { } favor the higher education for women. let us see what we find. the first university in our modern sense of the word came into existence down at salerno around the great medical school which had existed there for several centuries. probably the most interesting feature of the teaching at salerno is the fact that the department of the diseases of women in the great medical school was in charge of women professors for several centuries, and we have the books they wrote on this subject, and know much of the position they occupied. the most distinguished of them, trotula, left us a text-book on her subject which contained many interesting details of the medicine of the period, and we know of her that she was the wife of one professor of medicine at salerno and the mother of another. she was the foundress of what was called the school of salernitan women physicians, using the word school in the same sense in which it is employed when we talk of a school of painters. this is all the more interesting because the university of salerno was mainly under monastic influence. originally the schools in connection with the school of medicine were founded from the great benedictine monastery of monte cassino not far away. the first great teacher of medicine at salerno, constantine africanus, whose influence was dominant in his own time and continued afterwards through his writings, became a benedictine monk in his early middle age. the { } preparatory schools for the medical courses at salerno were largely in the hands of the benedictines. the university itself was under the influence of the archbishop of salerno more than any other, and the one who did most for it, the great alphanus, had been a benedictine monk. ordinarily this would be presumed to preclude any possibility of the development of a great phase of education for women, and especially professional education for women at the university of salerno. just the contrary happened. the wise monks, who knew human life and appreciated its difficulties, recognized the necessity, or at least the advisability, for women as medical attendants on women and children, and so the first great modern school of medicine, mainly under monastic influence, had the department of women's diseases in the hands of women themselves. in naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the government in this matter. an almost exactly similar state of affairs to that thus seen at salerno developed at bologna, only there the university was founded round the law school, and the first women students were in that school. when irnerius established his great lectureship of roman law at bologna, to which students were attracted from all over europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter { } and several other women who reached distinction in the law school. as the other departments of the university of bologna developed we find women as students and teachers in these. one of the assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at bologna, mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two centuries after this time, was a young woman, alessandra giliani. it is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues might be used for demonstrating purposes. as the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when there have not been some distinguished women professors at the italian universities. nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came madame manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. made in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. in the meantime many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at { } the italian universities. in the thirteenth century there was a great teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a curtain. it is evident that the educated women of the middle ages could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others, quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and not to the higher education. women physicians, educators, mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are to be found at the universities of italy while the church and the ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities. unfortunately the spread of this feminine educational movement from italy to the west of europe was disturbed by the héloïse and abélard incident at the university of paris, and as all the western universities owe their origin to paris, they took the tradition created there after abélard's time, that women should not be allowed to enter the university. when, however, three centuries later, the renaissance brought in the new learning, the schools of humanism independent of the universities admitted women on absolute terms of equality with men, and some of the women became the distinguished scholars of the time. the church's influence is plainly to be seen in this, and the women took part in plays given in greek and classic latin before the cardinals and prominent ecclesiastics, and everywhere the { } feeling developed that, if women wanted to have the higher education of the humanities or, as it was then called, the new learning, they should have it. this feminine educational movement spread all over europe. anne of bretagne organized a school at the french court for the women of the court, and such women as mary queen of scots, margaret of navarre, renée of anjou, louise la cordiére are a few of the french women of the renaissance who attained distinction for broad culture and education at this time. spain, too, had its women of the renaissance. one of the first of them was isabella of castile, whose assistance to columbus was no mere accident, nor due so much to personal influence exerted on her, as to her own broad interest in the things of the mind in her time. her daughter catherine, who became queen of england, was deeply educated, while her daughter, queen mary of england, knew the classics and especially latin very well. during her time in england many of the nobility of the higher classes were distinguished for education. lady jane grey preferred to study greek to going to balls and routs, and sacrificed hunting parties for her lessons under roger ascham, in the great greek authors. queen elizabeth knew greek and latin very well. the famous countess of arundell at this time was a distinguished scholar. margaret more is a bright example of opportunities for the higher education given and taken in the lower classes of { } the nobility of the england of her time. one thing we can be sure of in the england of that time, if the queen and the highest nobility were interested in education and devoted their time to it so sedulously and successfully, then without doubt those beneath them in rank did so likewise. the upper classes are not alone imitated in things unworthy, but also in what is best if they only provide the good example. to anyone who knows the history of the church, however, these incidents in feminine education will not be surprising. every time, as a rule, that there has been a great new awakening in education, women, too, have demanded the right to have their share in it, and the church, far from discouraging, has always helped to provide educational opportunities. when in the ninth century charlemagne reorganized the education of europe, or, at least, reinstituted it for his people, the women of the palace had their opportunities to attend the palace school as well as the men. that palace school was a very wonderful travelling university, wandering wherever the court went. it was at aix, it was probably at paris for a time; when charlemagne went down to italy it went with him and seems to have held some sessions even while he was in rome; there is a tradition of its existence while he stayed one winter in verona. though the teachers in it were monks, for charlemagne and alfred, the great, broad-minded rulers, who did so much for { } their people, had no illusions about the high place that the monks held in life in their time, women were taught at the schools as well as men. charlemagne and alfred were in the best possible position to know who were the best teachers in their time, and they turned with confidence to the monks. people generally, and, above all, their great rulers, knew nothing of the condemnation of the monks in the dark ages which came a thousand years after their time; from people who knew nothing about them and who had even less sympathy with them. they both knew them and sympathized with all they were doing, therefore their cordial encouragement of them. their attitude was eminently justified by the fact that the monks were broad enough, in spite of their monastic habits and their supposed lack of appreciation for women, to take up to a great extent even the teaching of women. there are letters from the women of the court of charlemagne written to alcuin and to other teachers of the time, which show how interested were the women in the school work. this is not surprising if we recall that, when benedict founded the monks of the west, who were to provide the homes where culture was to be maintained and the classics preserved for us and education gradually diffused, his sister st. scholastica did the same thing for the women as her brother was doing for the men. anyone who knows the story of the benedictine convents for { } women and the books there produced, plays, stories, even works on medicine and other sciences, will realize how much was accomplished for the higher education of women in these institutions in unpromising times. the women who wanted to follow the intellectual life were given the opportunity and many of them did excellent work. within the last year i have written and published sketches of the lives of st. hildegarde, who wrote books on medicine in the twelfth century, and of hroswitha, the nun of gandersheim, who wrote latin comedies in imitation of terence in the tenth century. these serious literary and scientific writings by women in what is usually presumed to be the darkest period of the so-called dark ages, and preserved for us out of the wreck and ruin that came down on nearly everything produced in those times, shows us very clearly how much more than we have been accustomed to think these women of the middle ages were interested in the intellectual life. books are written only when there are readers and appreciation for them, and the interest of contemporaries and the hope of future interest as an incentive. of course, even before the foundation of the benedictines we have a great living example of the encouragement of the church for the higher education of women. it came at a time and under circumstances that furnish abundant evidence of how much the church appreciates and is ready to encourage education and how precious she realizes { } it is for her children. when the first nation was converted as a whole to christianity, when the irish people came over under the apostolic patrick's wonderful missionary zeal, the first thing that was done in this first christian nation was to found schools. ireland became the island of saints and of scholars. while the barbarians had overrun europe and destroyed the schools there, ireland became the home of the best teachers in the world and men flocked to her from all over europe. these schools, however, were not reserved for the men, but abundant opportunities were also afforded women for scholarship and for culture of every kind. only second in importance to st. patrick's great school at armagh during the first century in the history of ireland as a christian nation was st. brigid's school at kildare. we know from giraldus cambrensis, now better known as gerald the welshman, that, in his travels in ireland centuries afterwards, but before the destruction of kildare, he saw many wonderful evidences of the intellectual life of that institution. above all, he saw a famous copy of the holy scripture so beautifully illuminated that he thought it the finest book in the world. his description would show us that if this copy of the scriptures which gerald saw was not the book of kells as some have ventured to suggest, it was at least a copy not unlike that famous illuminated volume which is, perhaps, the most { } beautiful book that ever came from the hand of man. the arts and the crafts evidently were studied and practised as well as book-learning at kildare, and brigid's influence brought to her at her college of kildare, literally thousands of the daughters of the nobility of ireland, of england and of portions of the continent, attracted by her sanctity and her scholarship and the wonderful intellectual and artistic work that was being accomplished there. with these facts in mind it is easy to see that the church, far from opposing in any way the higher education for women, has not only encouraged but actually patronized it whenever there is a demand for it on the part of any generation in history. feminine education comes and goes, so though in less markedly cyclical fashion does masculine education. just what the law behind these cycles is we do not know as yet. one thing is sure, now that another cycle of interest has come to feminine education in the world, the church is not only willing but anxious to give her children the benefit of it, and the growth of the higher education among catholics for catholic young women in america in the last decade is the best evidence of this. our teaching sisterhoods in this country have nobly lifted themselves up to the occasion demanded, and we may well be proud of our catholic colleges for women. personally i know what is being done at some half a dozen of them, and i have no hesitation { } in saying that they are giving a better, solider, though perhaps, a less showy education than their secular rivals. of your work at st. elizabeth's i have had such personal information as makes me realize how thorough are the efforts to provide every possible opportunity for higher feminine education and how successful they are. only less absurd than the notion that the church is in any way opposed to feminine education is the thought that seems to be in many people's minds in our day, that the church would prefer to keep woman in the background and does not want her to do great influential things when those are demanded of her. the feeling seems to be that only modern evolution has brought such opportunities for women to exert the precious humanitarian influence that is sometimes possible for her. how much those who talk thus forget the history of the church if they ever knew it, but also of feminine influence in the world, is very clear from even a short resume of feminine achievements in christian times. whenever there has been a great movement in the church that meant much for the men and women of a time, beside the man who initiated it, if she was not, indeed, the initiator herself, stood a great woman only a little less significant in influence, as a rule, and sometimes even greater than he. in the conversion of the first people to christianity, beside st. patrick stood st. brigid. in the foundation of the monks of the west that { } great institution that meant so much for the church and for europe, beside st. benedict stood st. scholastica, his sister, doing and organizing for the women of her time and succeeding generations, what her brother did for the men. when, in the newer dispensation of the foundation of the mendicant religious orders, st. francis came to bring a great new message to the world, beside him and only a little less influential than he in his lifetime, and saving his work for its genuine mission after his death, came st. clare. when the tide of the religious revolt spreading down from germany, was pushed back in spain, beside st. teresa, for here the greater protagonist of the movement was a woman, stood st. john of god. when st. francis de sales came to do his great work for education and for the uplift of the better classes, beside him and scarcely less influential than he in every way, was st. jane frances de chantal. in the great new organization of modern charity under st. vincent de paul beside that wonderful friend of the poor whose work is the underlying impulse of all modern organized charity in the best sense of that much abused term, stood the modest and humble but strongly beautiful woman, the foundress of the sisters of charity, madame le gras. even in the nineteenth century with the newer organizations of education demanded by changed conditions, when such foundations as those of the sacred heart and of the sisters of notre dame { } came into existence, men and women co-operated in these works and only now are we realizing to the full the sanctity of such women as blessed madame barat or the venerable julie billiart and their adviser and friend, father varin, the jesuit. nor was it only in connection with work accomplished by men or initiated by them that we find women doing great work. it must not be forgotten that many of the religious orders which are accomplishing fine work in every line of helpful endeavor, often hundreds of years after their foundations, in conditions very different from those in which they were established, originated in the minds of women and had their constitutions worked out practically without any help from men, and often, indeed, against the judgment of men. the world of our day is not prone to appreciate at its proper worth these great works of women who took for an aim in life unselfish purpose, rather than any more personal ambition. it must not be forgotten, then, that the first settlement worker of modern times, the dear st. elizabeth of hungary, is one of the great influences that will never die. the cathedral erected in her honor within a few years after her death is the most beautiful monument to woman anywhere in the world. what st. elizabeth was to the thirteenth century, st. catherine of sienna was to the fourteenth. without her influence and her place in it, it would be impossible to { } understand the history of that century, though sometimes history has been written without a mention of her. in the fifteenth century came joan of arc, in the sixteenth and seventeenth some of the brave women who founded great humanitarian works in connection with the early missionaries in this country. everywhere in history you find catholic women accomplishing great things. after all, this is only what is to be anticipated from what is symbolized and prefigured in the story of the foundation of the church. when the son of god came as the redeemer of mankind, beside him in his life and mission, the highest of mortals in the influence that she was to have over all succeeding generations, stood the woman, whose seed was to crush the serpent's head, the mother from whom he had chosen to take his human flesh. the mother of the messiah became the mother of the infant church and the mother of all christians ever since. surely this was given for a sign not to be contradicted in the after-time. as the mother beside the son, so was woman ever to stand as the most precious influence in the work of christianity. as the great scheme of redemption was dependent on her consent, so ever was woman to be god's greatest auxiliary in the accomplishment of good for humanity. you can understand, then, that when i say to you graduates of st. elizabeth's, go out and fulfill your missions, whatever they may be, i mean { } that you shall be ready to take up any work for which your education and your training fit you, and god grant it may bring you such opportunities for good as have been exemplified in the lives of so many catholic women all down the ages. there is nothing more than this that i could say to you. our mother church, far from wanting to keep women in the background, has always accorded them full and equal rights in their own domains and, above all, has given them absolute independence in the religious organizations as far as that is compatible with effective co-operation in good work. you may be sure, then, that any work that you find to do worthy of you, and that you take up whole-heartedly, will have not only her blessing but you shall find every encouragement. the glorious examples of the catholic women of the past, educated, intellectual women, some of whom like st. teresa, st. catherine of sienna, st. jane frances de chantal and st. brigid are high among the greatest intellectual women that ever lived, will be your guiding stars, and if you keep them in mind you shall not go wrong. remember that we expect much and we have a right to expect much of the women graduates of our catholic women's colleges--you have a great mission, you have put your hand to the plow, do not look back,--onward and upward. god's in his world and all's well. only our co-operation is needed. { } { } origins in american education { } "libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." --caesar, _bell. gall., iii: ._ [men believe readily what they want to.] "great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the past; the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given away .... it has become impossible for the historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. the honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical literature." --_preface of "cambridge modern history."_ { } origins in american education [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this address was collected for a lecture on the history of education for the sisters of charity of mount st. vincent's, new york, and the sacred heart academy, kenwood, albany, n. y. subsequently it was developed for an address to the parochial school teachers of new orleans and for the summer normal courses of st. mary's college, south bend, ind., and st. mary's college, monroe, mich. very nearly in its present form the address was delivered in a course at boston college in the spring of .] here in the united states we have been somewhat amazingly ignorant of our brother americans of mexico and of south america. our ignorance has been so complete as to have the usual result of quite intolerant bigotry with regard to the significance of what was being done in these spanish-american countries. a distinguished ex-president of one of our american universities said in his autobiography, that a favorite maxim of his for his own guidance was, "the man i don't like is the man i don't know." if we only know enough about people, we always find out quite enough about them that is admirable to make us like them. whenever we are tempted to conclude that somebody is hopelessly insignificant then what we need to correct is our judgment by better knowledge of them. for most americans, for we have arrogated to ourselves the title of americans to the exclusion of any possible share { } in it of our south american brethren, spanish america has been so hopelessly backward, so out of all comparison with ourselves, as to be quite undeserving of our notice unless it be for profound deprecation. fortunately for us in recent years our knowledge of spanish america has become larger and deeper and more genuine, and as a consequence there has been less assumption of knowledge founded on ignorance. every gain in knowledge of spanish america has raised spanish america and her peoples in our estimation. not long since at a public dinner the president of a great american university said, "we have only just discovered spanish america." this is literally true. we have thought that we knew much about it, and that that much showed us how little deserving of our attention was spanish america, while all the while a precious mine of information with regard to the beginnings of the history of education, of literature, of culture, nay, even of physical science on this continent, remained to be studied in these countries and not our own. our scholars are now engaged in bringing together the materials out of which a real history of spanish america can be constructed for their fellow-americans of the north, and their surprise when it is placed before them is likely to be supreme. in the meantime there are some phases of this information that, i think, it will be interesting to bring together for you. { } josh billings, writing as "uncle esek" in the _century magazine_ some twenty-five years ago, made use of an expression which deserves to be frequently recalled. he said: "it is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them ridiculous as the knowin' so many things that ain't so." we have a very typical illustration of the wisdom of this fine old saw in the history of education here in america as it is being developed by scholarly historical research at the present time. the consultation of original documents and of first-hand authorities in the history of spanish-american education has fairly worked a revolution in the ideas formerly held on this subject. the new developments bring out very forcibly how supremely necessary it is to know something definite about a subject before writing about it, and yet how many intelligent and supposedly educated men continue to talk about things with an assumption of knowledge when they know nothing at all about them. catholics are supposed by the generality of americans to have come late into the field of education in this country. whatever there is of education on this continent is ordinarily supposed to be due entirely to the efforts of what has been called the anglo-saxon element here. at last, however, knowledge is growing of what the catholic spaniards did for education in america and as a consequence the face of the history of education is being completely changed. every { } advance in history in recent years has made for the advantage of the catholic church. modern historical methods insist on the consultation of original documents and give very little weight to the quotation of second-hand authorities. we are getting at enduring history as far as that is possible, and the real position of the church is coming to light. in no portion of human accomplishment is the modification of history more striking than with regard to education. there was much more education in the past centuries than we have thought and the catholic church was always an important factor in it. nowhere is this truth more striking than with regard to education here in america in the spanish-american countries. professor edward gaylord bourne, professor of history at yale university, wrote the volume on spain in america which constitutes the third volume of "the american nation," a history of this country in twenty-seven volumes edited by professor albert bushnell hart, who holds the chair of history at harvard university. professor bourne has no illusions with regard to the relative value of anglo-saxon and spanish education in this country. in his chapter on "the transmission of european culture" he says: "early in the eighteenth century the lima university (lima, peru) counted nearly two thousand students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors (in its faculty) in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts." ulloa { } reports that "the university makes a stately appearance from without and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments." there were chairs of all the sciences and "some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of europe." "the coming of the jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in america. they established colleges, one of which, the little jesuit college at juli, on lake titicaca, became a seat of genuine learning." (bourne.) he does not hesitate to emphasize the contrast between spanish america and english america with regard to education and culture, and the most interesting feature of his comparison is that spanish america surpassed the north completely and anticipated by nearly two centuries some of the progress that we are so proud of in the nineteenth century. what a startling paragraph, for instance, is the following for those who have been accustomed to make little of the church's interest in education and to attribute the backwardness of south america, as they presumed they knew it, to the presence of the church and her influence there. "not all the institutions of learning founded in mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in english america until the nineteenth { } century. mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. conspicuous are toribio de motolinia's 'historia de las indias de nueva españa,' duran's 'historia de las indias de nueva españa,' but most important of all sahagun's great work on mexican life and religion." indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. while the english in america were paying practically no attention to science, the spaniards were deeply interested in it. dr. chança, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the king and queen and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in spain, joined columbus' second expedition in order to make scientific notes. the little volume that he issued as the report of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to the science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to indian medicine, indian customs, their knowledge of botany and of metals, certain phases of zoology, and the like, that show how wide was the interest in science of this spanish physician of over four hundred years ago. { } after reading paragraphs such as professor bourne has written with regard to education in spanish america, how amusing it is to reflect that one of the principal arguments against the catholic church has been that she keeps nations backward and unprogressive and uneducated--and the south american countries have been held up derisively and conclusively as horrible examples of this. even we catholics have been prone to take on an apologetic mood with regard to them. the teaching of history in english-speaking countries has been so untrue to the realities that we have accepted the impression that the spanish-american countries were far behind in all the ways that were claimed. now we find that instead of presenting grounds for apology they are triumphant examples of how soon and how energetically the church gets to work at the great problems of education wherever she gains a position of authority or even a foothold of influence. instead of needing to be ashamed of them, as we have perhaps ignorantly been, there is a reason to be deservedly proud of them. their education far outstripped our own in all the centuries down to the nineteenth, and the culture of the spanish-americans, quite a different thing from education, is deeper than ours even at the present time. it is hard for north america to permit herself to be persuaded of this, but there is no doubt of its absolute truth. it is only since the days of steam that the { } english-speaking races in america have come to possess a certain material progress above that of the spanish-american countries. bourne says: "if we compare spanish america with the united states a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the north there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in spanish america there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science. no one can read humboldt's account of the city of mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the united states over mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam." while we are prone to think that a republican form of government is the great foster-mother of progress and that whatever development may have come in south american countries has been the result of the foundation of the south american republics, professor bourne is not of that opinion and is inclined to think that if the spanish colonial government could have been maintained at its best until the coming of the age of steam or well on into the nineteenth century, then the south american republics would have been serious { } rivals of the united states and have been kept from being so hampered as they were by their internal political dissensions. his paragraph on this matter is so contradictory of ordinary impressions, here in the united states particularly, that it seems worth while calling attention to it because it contains that most precious of suggestions, a thought that is entirely different from any that most people have had before. he says: "during the first half-century after the application of steam to transportation mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old régime. if the rule of spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of charles iii; if a succession of such viceroys as revilla gigedo, in mexico, and de croix and de taboaday lemos, in peru, could have borne sway in america until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified and a distinctly spanish-american spirit developed, a great spanish-american federal state might possibly have been created, capable of self-defense against europe, and inviting co-operation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the north." lima was the great centre for education in south america, and mexico, in spanish north america, was not far at all behind. the tracing of the steps of the development of education in mexico emphasizes especially the difference between the spaniards and the englishmen in their { } relation to the indian. bishop zumaraga wanted a college for indians in his bishopric, and it was because of this beneficent purpose that the first institution for higher education in the new world was founded as early as . at that time the need for education for the whites was not felt so much, since only adults as a rule were in the colony, the number of children and growing youths being as yet very small. accordingly, the college of santa cruz, in tlaltelolco, one of the quarters of the city of mexico reserved for the indians, was founded under the bishop's patronage. among the faculty were graduates of the university of paris and of salamanca, two of the greatest universities of europe of this time, and they had not only the ambition to teach, but also to follow out that other purpose of a university--to investigate and write. among them were such eminent scholars as bernardino de sahagun, the founder of american anthropology, and juan de torquemada, who is himself a product of mexican education, whose "monarquia indiana" is a great storehouse of facts concerning mexico before the coming of the whites, and precious details with regard to mexican antiquities. knowing this, it is not surprising that the curriculum was broad and liberal. besides the elementary branches and grammar and rhetoric, instruction was provided in latin, philosophy, mexican medicine, music, botany (especially with { } reference to native plants), the zoology of mexico, some principles of agriculture, and the native languages. it is not surprising to be told that many of the graduates of this college became alcaldes and governors in the indian towns, and that they did much to spread civilization and culture among their compatriots. the english-speaking americans furnished nothing of this kind, and our colleges for indians came only in the nineteenth century. it is true that harvard, according to its charter, was "for the education of the indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness," but the indians were entirely neglected and no serious effort was ever made to give them any education. it was a son of the puritans who said that his forefathers first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines, and the difference in the treatment of the indians by the english and the spaniards is a marked note in all their history. during the next few years schools were established also for the education of mestizo children, that is, of the mixed race who are now called creoles. in fact, in a fund from the royal exchequer was given for the teaching of these children. strange as it may seem, for we are apt to think that the teaching of girls is a modern idea, schools were also established for indian girls. all of these schools continued to flourish, and gradually spread beyond the city of mexico itself into the villages of the indians. as a { } matter of fact, wherever a mission was established a school was also founded. every town, indian as well as spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital and school for teaching indian children spanish and the elements of religion. the teaching and parish work in the indian villages was in charge of two or more friars, as a rule, and was well done. the remains of the monasteries with their magnificent spanish-american architecture, are still to be seen in many portions of mexico and of the spanish territories that have been incorporated with the united states, in places where they might be least expected, and they show the influence for culture and education that gradually extended all over the mexican country. in the course of time the necessity for advanced teaching for the constantly growing number of native whites began to be felt, and so during the fifth decade of the sixteenth century a number of schools for them came into existence in the city of mexico. the need was felt for some central institution. accordingly, the spanish crown was petitioned to establish authoritatively a university. such a step would have been utterly out of the question in english america, because the crown was so little interested in colonial affairs. in the spanish country, however, the crown was deeply interested in making the colonists feel that though they were at a distance from the centre of government, their rulers were interested in { } securing for them, as far as possible, all the opportunities of life at home in spain. this is so different from what is ordinarily presumed to have been the attitude of spain towards its colonies as to be quite a surprise for those who have depended on old-fashioned history, but there can be no doubt of its truth. accordingly, the university of mexico received its royal charter the same year as the university of lima ( ). mexico was not formally organized as a university until . in the light of these dates, it is rather amusing to have the century dictionary, under the word harvard university, speak of that institution as the oldest and largest institution of learning in america. it had been preceded by almost a century, not only in south america, but also in north america. the importance of harvard was as nothing compared to the universities of lima and mexico, and indeed for a century after its foundation harvard was scarcely more than a small theological school, with a hundred or so of pupils, sometimes having no graduating class, practically never graduating more than eight or ten pupils, while the two spanish-american universities counted their students by the thousand and their annual graduates by the hundred. the reason for the success of these south american universities above that of harvard is to be found in the fact that harvard's sphere of usefulness was extremely limited because of { } religious differences and shades of differences. this had hampered all education in protestant countries very seriously. professor paulsen, who holds the chair of philosophy at the university of berlin, calls attention to the fact that the reformation had anything but the effect of favoring education that has often been said. the picture that he draws of conditions in germany a century before the foundation of harvard would serve very well as a lively prototype of the factors at work in preventing harvard from becoming such an educational institution as the universities of lima and mexico so naturally became. he says, in "german universities and university studies": "during this period [after luther's revolt] a more determined effort was made to control instruction than at any period before or since. the fear of heresy, the extraordinary anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox lines, was not less intense at the lutheran than at the catholic institutions; perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine was not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two directions, toward catholicism or calvinism. even the philosophic faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines. thus came about these restrictions within the petty states and their narrow-minded established churches which well-nigh stifled the intellectual life of the german people." because of this and the fact that the attendance { } at the college did not justify it, the school of medicine at harvard was not opened until after the revolution ( ). the law school was not opened until . this is sometimes spoken of as the earliest law school connected with a university on this continent, but, of course, only by those who know nothing at all about the history of the spanish-american universities. in the spanish countries the chairs in law were established very early; indeed, before those of medicine. canon law was always an important subject in spanish universities, and civil law was so closely connected with it that it was never neglected. when the charter of the university of lima was granted by the emperor charles v, in , the town was scarcely more than fifteen years old. it had been founded in . curiously enough, just about the same interval had elapsed between the foundation of the massachusetts colony by the pilgrims and the legal establishment of the college afterward known as harvard by the general court of the colony. it is evident that in both cases it was the needs of the rising generation who had come to be from twelve to sixteen years of age that led to the establishment of these institutions of higher education. the actual foundation of harvard did not come for two years later, and the intention of the founders was not nearly so broad as that of the founders of the university of lima. already at lima schools had been { } established by the religious orders, and it was with the idea of organizing the education as it was being given that the charter from the crown was obtained. with regard to both lima and mexico, within a few years a bull of approval and confirmation was asked and obtained from the pope. the university of lima continued to develop with wonderful success. in the middle of the seventeenth century it had more than a thousand students, at the beginning of the eighteenth it had two thousand students, and there is no doubt at all of its successful accomplishment of all that a university is supposed to do. juan antonio ribeyro, who was the rector of the university of lima forty years ago, said in the introduction to "the university annals for " that, "it cannot be denied that the university of peru during its early history filled a large role of direct intervention for the formation of laws, for the amelioration of customs and in directing all the principal acts of civil and private society, forming the religious beliefs, rendering them free from superstitions and errors and influencing all the institutions of the country to the common good." certainly this is all that would be demanded of a university as an influence for uplift, and the fact that such an ideal should have been cherished shows how well the purpose of an educational institution had been realized. the scholarly work done by some of these professors at spanish-american universities still { } remains a model of true university work. it is the duty of the university to add to knowledge as well as to disseminate it. that ideal of university existence is supposed to be a creation of the nineteenth century, and indeed is often said to have been brought into the history of education by the example of the german universities. we find, however, that the professors of the spanish-american universities accomplished much in this matter and that their works remain as precious storehouses of information for after generations. professor bourne has given but a short list of them in addition to those that have already been mentioned, but even this furnishes an excellent idea of how much the university professors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in spanish america were taking to heart the duty of gathering, arranging and classifying knowledge for after generations. they did more in the sciences than in anything else. it is often thought that our knowledge of the ethnology and anthropology of the indians is entirely the creation of recent investigators, but that is true only if one leaves out of account the work of these old spanish-american scholars. professor bourne says: "the most famous of the earlier peruvian writers were acosta, the historian, the author of the 'natural and civil history of the indies'; the mestizo garciasso de la vega, who was educated in spain and wrote of the inca empire and de soto's expedition; sandoval, the author of the { } first work on africa and the negro written in america; antonio leon pinelo, the first american bibliographer, and one of the greatest as well of the indefatigable codifiers of the old legislation of the indies. pinelo was born in peru and educated at the jesuit college in lima, but spent his literary life in spain." of the university of mexico more details are available than of peru, and the fact that it was situated here in north america and that the culture which it influenced has had its effect on certain portions of the united states, has made it seem worth while to devote considerable space to it. the university was called the royal and pontifical university of mexico, because, while it was founded under the charter of the king of spain, this had been confirmed by a bull from the pope, who took the new university directly under the patronage of the holy see. the reason for the foundation of the university, as the men at that time saw it, is contained in the opening chapter of st. john's gospel, which is quoted as the preamble of the constitutions of the university: "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god. the same was in the beginning with god. all things were made by him and without him was made nothing that was made. in him was life, and the life was the light of men." this they considered ample reason for the erection of a university and the spread of knowledge with god's own sanction. { } the patron saints of the university, as so declared by the first article of the constitutions, were st. paul the apostle, and st. catherine the martyr. among the patrons, however, were also mentioned in special manner two other saints--st. john nepomucen, who died rather than reveal the secrets of the confessional, and st. aloysius gonzaga, the special patron of students. it is evident that these two patrons had been chosen with a particular idea that devotion to them would encourage the practice of such virtues and devotion to duty as would be especially useful to the students, clerical and secular, of the university. on all four of the feast days of these patrons the university had a holiday. this would seem to be adding notably to the number of free days in a modern university, but must have meant very little at the university of mexico, they had so many other free days. the most striking difference between the calendar of the university of mexico and that of a modern university would be the number of days in the year in which no lectures were given. there were some forty of these altogether. besides the four patron saint days, the feast day of every apostle was a holiday. besides these, all the fathers and doctors of the church gave reasons for holidays. then there was st. sebastian's day, in order that young men might be brave, st. joseph's day, the annunciation, the expectation, the assumption and the nativity of the blessed virgin, the { } invention of the holy cross, the three rogation days and the feast of our lady of the snows. besides, there were st. magdalen's, st. ann's, st. ignatius' and st. lawrence's day. these were not all, but this will give an idea how closely connected with the church were the lectures at the university, or, rather, the intermission from the lectures. it might be said that this was a serious waste of precious time, and that our universities in the modern time would not think of imitating them, but such a remark could come but from some one who did not realize the real condition that obtained in the old-time universities. at the present time our universities finish their scholastic year about the middle of may and do not begin again until october--nearly twenty weeks. at these old universities their annual intermission between scholastic years lasted only the six weeks from the feast of the nativity of the blessed virgin, september , to st luke's day, october . they had five weeks at easter time and two weeks at christmas time. they spread their year out over a longer period and compensated for shorter vacations by granting holidays during the year. their year's labor was less intense and spread out over more ground than ours. the development of the university of mexico into a real university in the full sense of the old _studium generale_, in which all forms of human knowledge might be pursued, is very interesting { } and shows the thoroughgoing determination of the spanish americans to make for themselves and their children an institute of learning worthy of themselves and their magnificent new country. chartered in , it was not formally opened until . chairs were established in this year in theology, sacred scripture, canon law and decretals, laws, art, rhetoric and grammar. both spanish and latin were taught in the classes of grammar and rhetoric. to these was added very shortly a chair in mexican indian languages, in accordance with the special provisions of the imperial charter. the university continued to develop and added further chairs and departments as time went on. it had a chair of jurisprudence at the beginning, but its law department was completed in by the addition of two other chairs, one in the institutes of law, the other in codes of law. in the meantime the university had begun to make itself felt as a corporate body for general uplift by publications of various kinds. its professor of rhetoric, dr. cervantes salazer, published in three interesting latin dialogues in imitation of erasmus' dialogues. at the moment erasmus' "colloquia" was the most admired academic work in the university world of the time. the first of these dialogues described the university of mexico, and the other two, taking up mexico city and its environments, gave an excellent idea of { } what the spanish-american capital of mexico was three centuries and a half ago. "the early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the distant european presses for the publication of their manuals. the printing press was introduced into the new world probably as early as , and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary christian doctrine called 'la escala espiritual' (the ladder of the spirit), was issued in . no copy of it, however, is known to exist. seven different printers plied their craft in new spain in the sixteenth century. among the notable issues of these presses, besides the religious works and church service works, were dictionaries and grammars of the mexican languages, puga's 'cedulario' in , a compilation of royal ordinances, farfan's 'tractado de medicina.' in appeared the first text-book published in america for instruction in latin, a manual of poetics with illustrative examples from heathen and christian poets." (bourne.) with the light thrown on the early history of printing on this continent by a paragraph like this, how amusing it is to be told that the tradition among the printers and the publishers and even the bibliophiles of the united states is that the first book printed in america was the massachusetts bay psalm book printed, i believe, in . there were no less than seven printing presses at work in mexico during the sixteenth { } century, fully fifty years before the massachusetts bay psalm book was issued. how interesting it is for those who still like to insist that the catholic church is opposed to the distribution of the scriptures to the people or its printing in the vernacular, to find how many editions of it were printed in mexico and in south america during the sixteenth century. this story of the printing press in spanish america in the early days would of itself make a most interesting chapter in a volume on american origins, which could probably be extended into a very valuable little manual of bibliography and bibliophilic information that would arouse new interest in the accumulation of early american books. the university had been founded just twenty-five years when provision was made for the establishment of the medical department. according to most of the chronicles the first chair in medicine was founded june , , although there are some authorities who state that this establishment came only in . i am a graduate of the university of pennsylvania medical school myself, and i yield to none of her sons in veneration for my alma mater, but i cannot pass over this statement of the foundation of the medical school in mexico without recalling that we have been rather proud at the university of pennsylvania to be known as the first american medical school. this is, of course, only due to our fond united states way of assuming { } ourselves to be all america and utterly neglecting any knowledge of spanish america. i believe that there are tablets erected at the university of pennsylvania chronicling our priority. one of them is to the first graduating class, the other to the first faculty of the medical school. i believe that between the erection of the two tablets there had come to be some suspicion of the possibility that south america was ahead of us in this respect and so the second tablet specifically mentions north america. when i talked some time ago before the college of physicians of philadelphia on this subject one of my friends, who was a teacher at the university, asked me what they should do with their tablets. i suggested that, by all means, they should be allowed to remain, and that as soon as possible an opportunity should be secured to erect the third tablet containing a statement of the real facts with regard to the place of the university of pennsylvania as the protagonist in medicine in the united states. the tablets will then serve to show the gradual evolution of our knowledge of the true history of medical education in this country. it is all the more important that this should be the arrangement because the university of pennsylvania has been a leader in "the discovery" of south america that has been made by us in the last few years. between the date of the foundation of the first chair in medicine at the beginning of the { } last quarter of the sixteenth century and the foundation of the city, mexico had not been without provision of physicians. in the very first year of the existence of the university of mexico, though there was no formal faculty of medicine, two doctors received their degrees in medicine from the university. they had been students in spain and were able to satisfy the faculty of their ability. this shows that the institution was considered to have the power to confer these degrees upon those who brought evidence of having completed the necessary studies, though it was not in a position to provide facilities for these studies. it is evident that this custom continued in subsequent years until the necessity for medical studies at home became evident. the intimate connection between the universities of old spain and of new spain is a very interesting subject in the educational history of the time. even before the foundation of the university, however, definite efforts were made by the authorities to secure proper medical service for the colonists and to prevent their exploitation by quacks and charlatans. strict medical regulations were established by the municipal council of the city of mexico in so as to prevent quacks from europe, who might think to exploit the ills of the settlers in the new colony, from practising medicine. licenses to practise were issued only to those who showed the possession of a university degree. { } this strict regulation of medical practice was extended also to the apothecaries in . even before this, arrangements had been made for the regular teaching of barber-surgeons, so that injuries and wounds of various kinds might be treated properly, and so that emergencies might be promptly met, even in the absence of a physician, by these barber-surgeons. dr. bandelier, in his article on francisco bravo in the second volume of the catholic encyclopedia, calls attention to some important details with regard to medicine in mexico in the early part of the sixteenth century, and especially to this distinguished physician who published the first book on medicine in that city in . three years before that time dr. pedrarius de benavides had published his "secretos de chirurgia" at valladolid, in spain, a work which had been written in america and contained an immense amount of knowledge that is invaluable with regard to indian medicinal practice. dr. bravo's work, however, has the distinction of being the first medical treatise printed in america. the issuance of these books shows the intense interest in medicine in the sixteenth century, but there are other details which serve to show how thorough and practical were the efforts of the authorities in securing the best possible medical practice. in there was founded in the city of mexico a hospital, which still stands and which was a model in its way. that way was { } much better than the mode of the construction of hospitals in the eighteenth century, for instance, when hospitals and care for the ailing reached the lowest ebb in modern times. other hospitals besides this foundation by cortez soon arose, and the wards of these hospitals were used for purposes of clinical teaching. clinical or bedside teaching in medicine is supposed to be a comparatively recent feature of medical education. there are traces of it, however, at all times in history and while at times when theory ruled the practical application of observation waned, it was constantly coming back whenever men took medical education seriously. its employment in mexico seems to have been an obvious development of their very practical methods, which began with the teaching of first aid to the injured and developed through special studies of the particular diseases of the country and of the methods of curing them by native drugs. a chair of botany existed already in connection with the university, and this, with the lectures on medicine, constituted the medical training until , when a second medical lectureship was added. during the course of the next twenty years altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded, so that besides the two lectureships in medicine there was a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics, the special duty of which was to lecture on galen _"de methodo medendi,"_ a { } chair of mathematics and astrology, for the stars were supposed to influence human constitutions by all the learned men of this time and even kepler and galileo and tycho-brahe were within this decade making horoscopes for important people in europe, and, finally, a chair of prognostics. most of the teaching was founded on hippocrates and galen, and lest this should seem sufficient to condemn it as hopelessly backward in the minds of many, it may be recalled that during the century following this time sydenham, in england, and boerhaave, in holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time and looked on with great reverence by the teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to hippocrates and galen. as a matter of fact, the medical school of the university of mexico was furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school in europe at that time, at least so far as the subjects lectured on are concerned. indeed, it was modelled closely after the spanish universities, which were considered well up to the standard of the time. in the meantime additional chairs in university subjects continued to be founded. another chair in arts was established in , and further chairs in law and grammar were added at the beginning of the sixteenth century. the spanish crown was very much interested in mexican education, and king philip ii of spain, who is usually mentioned in english history for quite { } other qualities than his interest in culture and education, was especially liberal in his provision from the crown revenues of funds for the university. at the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to flores in his "history of medicine in mexico from the indian times down to the present," the total amount of income from the crown allowed the university of mexico was nearly $ , . this was about shakespeare's time, and so we have readily available calculations as to the buying power of money at that time compared to our own. it is usually said that the money of elizabeth's time had eight to ten times the trading value of ours. this would mean that the university of mexico had nearly an income of $ , apart from fees and other sources of revenue. this would not be considered contemptible even in our own day for a university having less than twenty professorships. the number of students at the university of mexico is not absolutely known, but, as we have seen, professor bourne calculates that the university of lima had at the beginning of the eighteenth century more than , students. the university of mexico at the same time probably had more than , students, and both of these universities were larger in number than any institution of learning within the boundaries of the present united states until after the middle of the nineteenth century. after all, we began to have universities in the real sense of { } that word--that is, educational institutions giving opportunities in undergraduate work and the graduate departments of law, medicine and theology--not until nearly the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. our medical and law schools did not, as a rule, become attached to our universities until the second half of the nineteenth century, and even late in that. this was to the serious detriment of post-graduate work, and especially detrimental to the preliminary training required for it, and consequently to the products of these schools. before a student could enter one of the post-graduate departments at the university of mexico in law or medicine, he was required to have made at least three years of studies in the undergraduate departments. when we contrast this regulation with the custom in the united states, the result is a little startling. until the last quarter of the nineteenth century students might enter our medical schools straight from the plow or the smithy or the mechanic's bench, and without any preliminary education, after two terms of medical lectures consisting of four months each, be given a degree which was a license to practise medicine. the abuses of such a system are manifest, and actually came into existence. they were not permitted in mexico even in the seventeenth century. it might perhaps be thought that these magnificent opportunities in education were provided { } only for the higher classes, or concerned only book learning and the liberal and professional studies. far from any such exclusiveness as this, their schools were thoroughly rounded and gave instruction in the arts and crafts and recognized the value of manual training. we have only come to appreciate in the last few decades how much we have lost in education in america by neglecting these features of education for the masses. while germany has manual training for over fifty per cent. of the children who go to her schools, here in the united states we provide it for something less than one per cent, of our children. they made no such mistake as this in the spanish-american countries. indeed, professor bourne's paragraph on this subject is perhaps the most interesting feature of what he has to say with regard to education in spanish america. the objective methods of education, as he depicts them, the thoroughly practical content of education, and the fact that the church was one of the main factors in bringing about this well-rounded education, is of itself a startling commentary on the curiously perverted notions that have been held in the past with regard to the comparative value of education in spanish and in english america and the attitude of the church toward these educational questions: "both the crown and the church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater { } scale than was possible or even attempted in the english colonies. the early franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. the native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years indians were learning to read and write. pedro de gante, a flemish lay brother and a relative of charles v, founded and conducted in the indian quarter in mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. in its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters." if there was all this of progress in education in spanish-american countries in advance of what we had in the united states, people will be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the spanish-american education? this is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. we are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable. such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for english-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there { } can possibly be in existence certain great products of spanish-american education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in spanish than in english america. the fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of american education in the north, even at the present time. our whole attitude toward the south american people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them. the most striking product of south american education was the architectural structures which the spanish-american people erected as ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of their education. the cathedrals in the spanish towns of south america and mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in europe. as a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. their cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. the ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches. most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had { } a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they are. their municipal buildings partook of this same type. some of them are very handsome structures. of their universities we have already heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely decorated within. it must not be forgotten that the spanish americans practically invented the new style of architecture. how effective that style is, we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the building of the pan-american exposition at buffalo. that style is essentially american. it is the only new thing that america has contributed to construction since its settlement. how thoroughly suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in florida, in the last decade or so, can judge very well. many of its effects are an adaptation of classical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet uncertain climate of many parts of south america. some of the old monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of architecture in every sense of the word. if the spanish-american monks had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their influence in american life have been without its enduring effects. this is a typical { } product of the higher culture of the south spanish-american people. with regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. hence there was not the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the spanish americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty. on the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if there had been any real culture in the minds of the english americans, we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. if we contrast for a moment the hospitals of english and spanish america the difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important quality in the minds of the builders at the north. spanish-american hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as examples of the architectural taste of their builders. they were usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them from the heat of the climate. in many features they surpass many hospitals that have been built in america until very recent years. they were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are very beautiful { } examples of how to build places for the care of the ailing. contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all kinds in north america, down to the latter half of the nineteenth century. we have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. they were built merely for utility. some of them still have an interest for us because of historical associations, but they are a standing evidence of the lack of taste of our anglo-saxon ancestors. the english poet, yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful. what is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public buildings that are to be merely useful? as a matter of fact, most of them were barracks. the american people woke up somewhat in the nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. a few handsome structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful. the effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. { } the late mr. ernest crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to havana. he had visited the cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old spanish ways. it is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. it was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. it was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. he came north by land. the first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of hoboken. every other town that he struck in the north reminded him more and more of hoboken, until he came to the immortal hoboken itself. the american end of the anglo-saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like hoboken as far as possible. there is only one town in this country that is not like hoboken, and that is washington; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the pension building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like hoboken. perhaps we shall be able to save it. as for havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer { } epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it. the parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the american people, which did not exist among the spanish americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. the hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in america, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in american life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word. there were other products of spanish-american education quite as striking as the architectural beauties with which mexicans and south americans adorned their towns. quite as interesting, indeed, as their architecture is their literature. ordinarily we are apt to assume that because we have heard almost nothing of spanish-american literature, there must be very little of it, and what little there is must have very little significance. this is only another one of these examples { } of how ridiculous it is to know something "that ain't so." spanish-american literature is very rich. it begins very early in the history of the spanish settlement. it is especially noteworthy for its serious products, and when the world's account of the enduring literature of the past four centuries will be made up much more of what was written in south america will live than what has been produced in north america. this seems quite unpatriotic, but it is only an expression of proper estimation of values, without any of that amusing self-complacency which so commonly characterizes north american estimation of anything that is done by our people. south american literature, in the best sense of that much abused term, begins shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, with the writing of the spanish poet, ercilla's, epic, "araucana," which was composed in south america during the decade from to . this is a literary work of genuine merit, that has attracted the attention of critics and scholars of all kinds and has given its author a significant place even in the limited field of epic poetry among the few great names that the world cares to recall in this literary mode. voltaire considered this epic poem a great contribution to literature, and in the prefatorial essay to his own epic, the "henriade," he praises it very highly. the poem takes its name from the araucanos indians, who had risen in revolt against the spaniards in chile, and { } against whom the poet served for nearly ten years. he did not learn to despise them, and while the literature which does justice to the lofty sentiments which sometimes flowed from mouths of great indian chiefs, is supposed to be much more recent, ercilla's most enthusiastically extolled passage is the noble speech which he has given to the aged chief, colocolo, in the "araucana." the expedition against the araucanos inspired two other fine poems--that of pedro de ona, "arauco domado," written near the end of the century, and "araucana," written by diego de santisteban, whose poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. a fourth poet, juan de castellanos, better than either of these, wrote "elegias de varones ilustres de indias." he was a priest who had served in america, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits of the indians that he had observed during his life among them, and made them the subject of his poetry. this was only the beginning of a serious spanish-american literature, that has continued ever since. father charles warren currier, in a series of lectures at the catholic summer school three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body of spanish-american literature was much larger and much more important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our english-american literature. in the light of what these spaniards had done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life in { } their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising a saying as it might otherwise be. all of these things stand together and are confirmations one of the other. the most interesting product of spanish-american education, however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. it consists of their treatment of the indians. from the very beginning, as we have just shown, their literature in spanish america did justice to the indians. they saw his better traits. it is true they had a better class of indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in north america that was done by the settlers was prone to reduce the native in the scale of civilization. he was taught the vices and not the virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. just as the literary men were interested in the better side of his character, so the spanish-american scientists were interested in his folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology and anthropology--in a word, in all that north americans have only come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. books on all these subjects were published, and now constitute a precious fund of knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only for the devotion of spanish-american scholars. it is not surprising, then, that the indian { } himself, with all this interest in him, did not disappear, as in north america, but has remained to constitute the basis of south american peoples. if the south american peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left. wherever the english went always the aborigines disappeared before them. the story is the same in new zealand and australia as it is in north america, and it would be the same in india, only for the teeming millions that live in that peninsula, for whom anglo-saxon civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but rather the contrary. the white man's burden has been to carry the indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could cling to his shifty master and was shaken off to destruction. this story of the contrast of the treatment of the indian at the north and the south is probably the best evidence for the real depth of culture that the magnificent education of the spaniards, so early and so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this continent. alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of the interest of the spanish government and the spanish church in the organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as to bring happiness and uplift for { } both natives and colonists in the spanish-american countries. abuses there were, as there always will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in contact with an inferior. these abuses, however, were exceptions and not the rule. the policy instituted by the spaniards and maintained in spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse of the natives is well worthy of admiration. english-speaking history has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. mr. sidney lee, the editor of the english biographical dictionary and the author of a series of works on shakespeare which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in scribner's last year on "the call of the west." this was meant to undo much of the prejudice which exists in regard to spanish colonization in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the english explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. there seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. in the meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has been allowed to warp english history in this matter, and how, as a consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite view to the { } reality in this matter. lest we should be thought to be exaggerating, we venture to quote one of the opening paragraphs of mr. sidney lee's article as it appeared in scribner's for may, : "especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of american history. spain's initial adventures in the new world are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine protecting providence by english defenders of the true religion. many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century spain as the avaricious accumulator of american gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of american trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them. cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. on the other hand, the english adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native. "no such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed { } books, maps and manuscripts concerning america which circulated in shakespeare's england. there a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the elizabethan. religious zeal is seen to inspirit the spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his english contemporary. the motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light which illumes every corner of the picture the commanding facts of the spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler." here is magnificent praise from one who cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities to bias his judgment. he has studied the facts and not the prejudiced statements of his countrymen. the more carefully the work of the spaniards in america during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is studied, the more praise is bestowed upon them. the more a writer knows of actual conditions the more does he feel poignantly the injustice that has been done by the protestant tradition which abused the good that was accomplished by the catholic spanish and which neglected, distorted and calumniated his deeds and motives. this bit of protestant tradition is, after all, only suffering the fate that every other { } protestant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the church upon her people in every way. it has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the catholic church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. whenever the reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. erasmus said in his time, "wherever lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. rev. augustus jessop, himself an anglican clergyman, tells how "art died out in rural england" after the reformation, which he calls the great pillage, and "king whitewash and queen ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." the same thing happened in germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. german national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth { } century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by luther in the sixteenth century has passed away. these are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the catholic spaniard and the english protestant here in america during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past years. { } { } the medical profession for six thousand years { } "tu recte vivis si curas esse quod audis; neve putes alium sapiente bonoque beatum." --horace, _ep_., , . [you are living right if you take care to be what people say you are. do not imagine that any one who is really happy is other than wise and good.] "quod ipse sis, non quod habearis, interest." --publius syrus. [the question is what you are, not what you are thought to be.] "may you so raise your character, that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt for the advantage it shall receive by your example." --lord halifax. { } the medical profession for six thousand years [footnote ] [footnote : this was the address to the graduates at the first commencement of the fordham university school of medicine, june , .] i have felt that the first graduation of the youngest of the medical schools might very well be occupied with the consideration of the place of the medical profession in history. we are rather apt in the modern time to neglect the lessons of history and, above all, of the history of science, first because it is not always easy to get definite information with regard to it, and secondly and mainly because we are likely to imagine that scientific and medical history can mean very little for us. in america particularly we have neglected the history of medicine and it has been one of the definite efforts at fordham university school of medicine to renew interest in this subject. it is entirely too important to be neglected and it has valuable lessons for all generations, but especially for a generation so occupied with itself, that it does not properly consider the claims of the past to recognition for fine work accomplished, and for the exhibition of some of the best qualities of the human intellect in the pursuit of scientific and practical medical knowledge in previous generations. { } at the earliest dawn of history we find institutions called temples in which men were being treated for their ailments. those who treated them we have been accustomed to speak of as priests. and such they were, since their functions included the direction of religious services. these religious services, however, were not the exercises of religion as we know them now, but were special services meant to propitiate certain gods who were supposed to rule over health and disease. there were other kinds of temples besides these. we still talk of temples of justice meaning our law courts, and our phrase comes from an older time when people went to have their differences of opinion adjudicated by men who conducted the services of praise and prayer for particular deities who were supposed to mete out justice to men, but the temple attendants were at the same time expert in deciding causes, knowing right and wrong, wise in declaring how justice should be done. these early temples, then, in which the ailing were treated and over which experts in disease and its treatment presided, were not temples in our modern sense, but were much like hospitals as we know them now. they would remind us of the hospitals conducted by religious orders, trained to care for the illnesses of mankind and yet deeply interested in the worship of god. human institutions are never so different from one another, even in spite of long distance of time { } or place, as they are usually presumed to be. men and women have not changed in all the period of human history that we know, and their modes and ways of life often have a startling similarity if we but find the key for the significance of customs that seem to be very different. these temples of the gods of health and of disease, then, were places where patients congregated and men studied diseases for generations, and passed on their knowledge from one to another, and accumulated information, and elaborated theories, and came to conclusions, often on insufficient premises, and did many other things that we are doing at the present time. the medical profession is directly descended from these institutions. they are among the oldest that we know of in human history. these special temples are only a little less ancient than other forms of temples if, indeed, they were not the first to be founded, for man's first most clamorous reason for appeal to the gods has ever been himself and his own health. with the reception of your diplomas this evening you now belong to what is therefore probably the oldest profession in the world. in welcoming you into it let me call your attention particularly to the fact that the history of our profession can be traced back to the very beginning of the course of time, for as long as we have any account of men's actions in an organized social order. { } we are very prone in the modern time to think that what we are doing in each successive generation is of so much greater significance than what was accomplished before our time that it is really scarcely worth while to give much attention to the past. this self-sufficient complacency with regard to the present would be quite unbearable only that each successive generation in its turn has had the same tendency and has expiated its fault by being thought little of by subsequent generations. we shall have our turn with those we affect to despise. it is supposed to be particularly true in every department of science and, above all, in medicine that there is such a wide chasm between what we are doing now and what was accomplished by our forebears, no matter how intelligent they were in the long ago, that to occupy ourselves seriously with the history of medicine may be a pleasant occupation for an elderly physician who has nothing better to do, but can mean very little for the young man entering upon practice or for the physician busy with his patients. medical history may be good enough for some book-worm interested in dry-as-dust details for their own sake and perhaps because he rejoices in the fact that other people do not know them, but can have very little significance for the up-to-date physician. this is an impression that is dying hard just now, but it is dying. we are learning that there is very little that we are { } doing even now that has not been done before us and that, above all, the great physicians, no matter how long ago they wrote, always have precious lessons for us that we cannot afford to neglect, even though they be or or , or even , years ago. at all of these dates in the past there were physicians whose works will never die. in every department of human history the impression that we are the only ones whose work is significant has been receiving a sad jolt in recent years, and perhaps in no branch of science is this so true as in medicine. we are coming to realize how much the physicians and surgeons of long distant times accomplished, and, above all, we are learning to appreciate that they approached problems in medicine at many periods of medical history in the best scientific temper of the modern time. of course there were abuses, but, then, the lord knows, there are abuses now. of course their therapeutics had many absurdities in it, but, then, let us not forget that professor charles richet, the director of the department of physiology at the university of paris, declared not long ago in an article in the best known of french magazines, the _revue des deux mondes_, that the therapeutics of any generation of the world's history always contained many absurdities--for the second succeeding generation. the curious thing about it is that some of these supposed absurdities afterward come { } back into vogue and prove to be precious germs of discovery, or remedies of value that occasionally even develop into excellent systems of treatment. of course there were superstitions in the old days, but, then, there have been superstitions in medicine at all times. any one who thinks that we are without superstitions in medicine at the present time, superstitions that are confidently accepted by many regular practising physicians, must, indeed, be innocent. a superstition is in its etymology a survival. it comes from the latin _superstes_, a survivor. it is the acceptance of some doctrine the reasons for which have disappeared in the progress of knowledge or the development of science, though the doctrine itself still maintains a hold on the minds of man. superstition has nothing necessarily to do with religion, though it is with regard to religion that doctrines are particularly apt to be accepted after the reasons for them have disappeared. in medicine, however, superstitions are almost as common as in religion. i shall never forget a discussion with two of the most prominent physicians of this country on this subject. one of them was our greatest pathologist, the other a great teacher of clinical medicine, who came into medicine through chemistry and therefore had a right to opinions with regard to the chemical side of medicine. we had been discussing the question of how much serious medical { } education there was in the middle ages and how, in spite of the magnificent work done, so many superstitions in medicine continued to maintain themselves. i remarked that it seemed impossible to teach truths to large bodies of men without having them accept certain doctrines which they thought truths but which were only theories and which they insisted on holding after the reasons for them had passed away. i even ventured to say that i thought that there were as many superstitions now, and such as there were, were of as great significance as those that maintained themselves in the middle ages. my chemical clinician brother on the right side said, "let us not forget in this regard the hold the uric acid diathesis has on the english-speaking medical profession." and the brother pathologist on the left side: "well, and what shall we say of intestinal auto-intoxication?" perhaps you will not realize all the force of these expressions at the present time, but after you have been five years in the practice of medicine and have been flooded by the literature of the advertising manufacturing pharmacist and by the samples of the detail man and his advice and suggestion of principles of practice, if you will listen to them, perhaps you will appreciate how much such frank expressions mean as portraying the medical superstitions of our time. surely we who have for years been much occupied with the superstition, for such it now { } turns out to be, of heredity in medicine, will not be supercilious toward older generations and their superstitions. until a few years ago we were perfectly sure that a number of diseases were inherited directly. tuberculosis, rheumatism, gout, various nutritional disturbances all were supposed to pass from father to son and from mother to daughter, or sometimes to cross the sex line. for a time cancer was deemed to be surely hereditary to some degree at least. now most of us know that probably no disease is directly inherited, that acquired characters are almost surely not transmitted, and that while defects may be the subject of heredity, disease never is. not only this, biological investigations have served to show that what is the subject of inheritance is just the opposite,--resistance to disease. a person whose father and mother had suffered from tuberculosis used to think it almost inevitable that he too should suffer from it. if they had died that he too would die. our experts in tuberculosis declare now, that if tuberculosis has existed in the preceding generation there is a much better chance of the patient recovering from it, or at least resisting it for a long time, than if there had been no tuberculosis in the family. we had been harboring the superstition of heredity, the surviver opinion from a preceding generation, until we learned better by observation. let us turn from such discussion to the { } beginnings of the story of our medical profession as it has been revealed to us in recent years. the first picture that we have of a physician in history is, indeed, one to make us proud of our profession. the first physician was i-em-hetep, whose name means "the bringer of peace." he had two other titles according to tradition, one of which was "the master of secrets," evidently in reference to the fact that more or less necessarily many secrets must be entrusted to the physician, but also, doubtless, in connection with the knowledge of the secrets of therapeutics which he was supposed to possess. another of his titles was that of "the scribe of numbers," by which, perhaps, reference is made to his prescriptions, which may have been lengthy, for there are many "calendar" prescriptions in the early days, but may only refer to the necessity of his knowing weights and measures and numbers very exactly for professional purposes. i-em-hetep lived in the reign of king tchser, a monarch of the third dynasty in egypt, the date of which is somewhat uncertain, but is about b.c. how distinguished this first physician was in his time may be gathered from the fact that the well-known step pyramid at sakkara, the old cemetery near memphis, is attributed to him. so great was the honor paid to him that, after his death he was worshipped as a god, and so we have statues of him as a placid-looking man with a certain divine expression, seated with a { } scroll on his knees and an air of benignant knowledge well suited to his profession. i called attention in [footnote ] to the fact that the earliest pictures of surgical operations extant had recently been uncovered in the cemetery of sakkara near memphis in egypt. these pictures show that surgery was probably an organized branch of medicine thus early, and the fact that they are found in a very important tomb shows how prominent a place in the community the surgeon held at that time. the oldest document after that which we have with regard to medicine is the "ebers papyrus," the writing of which was done probably about b.c. this, however, is only a copy of an older manuscript or series of manuscripts, and there seems to be no doubt that the text, which contains idioms of a much older period, or, indeed, several periods, probably represents accumulations of information made during , or even , years before the date of our manuscript. indeed, it is not improbable that the oldest portions of the "ebers papyrus" owe their origin to men of the first egyptian dynasties, nearly , years b.c. to be members of a profession that can thus trace its earliest written documents to a time nearly some , years ago, is an honor that may be readily appreciated and that may allow of some complacency. [footnote : _journal of the american medical association_, november , .] there is a well-grounded tradition which shows { } us that an egyptian monarch with whose name even we are familiar, though we may not be able to pronounce it very well--he was athothis, the son of menes--wrote a work on anatomy. the exact date of this monarch's death is sometimes said to be b.c. we have traces of hospitals in existence at this time and something of the nature of a medical school. indeed, one may fairly infer that medical education, which had been developing for some time, probably for some centuries, took a definite form at this time in connection with the temples of saturn. priests and physicians were the same, or at least physicians formed one of the orders of the clergy and the teachers of medicine particularly were clergymen. this tradition of close affiliation between religion and medicine continued down to the fifteenth century. how few of us there are who realize that until the fourteenth century the professors of medicine at the great universities were not married men, because members of the faculty, as is true at the present time of many members of the faculty in the english universities, were not allowed to marry. the old clerical tradition was still maintaining itself even with regard to the medical teachers. perhaps the most interesting thing about this early history of medicine in egypt is that, with the very earliest dawn of medical history, we have traces of highly developed specialism in medicine. there were thirty-six departments of medicine, or { } at least there were thirty-six medical divinities who presided over the particular parts of the human body. in the larger temples, at least, there was a special corps of priest physicians for each one of these departments. herodotus, the father of history, is particularly full in his details of egyptian history, and though he wrote about b.c., nearly , years ago, his attention was attracted by this highly developed specialism among the egyptians. he tells us in quaint fashion, "physicke is so studied and practised with the egyptians that every disease hath his several physician, who striveth to excell in healing that one disease and not to be expert in curing many. whereof it cometh that every corner of that country is full of physicians. some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and the inwards." it is interesting to realize that the same state of affairs upon which you young graduates will come now that you are going out to find an opportunity to practise for yourselves at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, is not very different from that which the great father of history chronicles as the state of affairs among the egyptians between and , before christ,--let us say about , years ago. you, too, will find that every corner is full of physicians, some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and everything else under the sun quite as in { } ancient egypt. after a time you will probably find that some little corner has been left for you, and you will work hard enough to get into it first, and then to fill it afterward. the story of how young physicians have got on in their first few years has probably been interesting at all times in the world's history. i think that i know about it at five different periods, and in every one of these there seemed to be no possible room, and yet somehow room was eventually found, though only after there had been a struggle, in the midst of which a certain number of the young physicians found another sphere of activity besides medicine. of course it is easy to think that these specialties did not amount to much, but any such thought is the merest assumption. a single instance will show you how completely at fault this assumption is. dentistry is presumed to be a very modern profession. as a matter of fact mummies were found in the cemetery of thebes whose bodies probably come from before b.c., who have in their teeth the remains of gold fillings that were well put in, and show good workmanship, nearly , years ago. [footnote ] after dentistry, the specialty that we would be sure could not have had any significant existence so long ago would be that of ophthalmology. as a matter of fact, it is with regard to the knowledge of eye diseases displayed by these early teachers of { } medicine that the "ebers papyrus" is most startling. it is especially full in diagnosis and contained many valuable hints for treatment. as for laryngology and rhinology, one of the earliest medical records that we have, is the rewarding by one of the kings of egypt of an early dynasty (nearly b.c.), of a physician who had cured him of a trouble of the nose of long standing, that seems to have interfered with his breathing. [footnote : burdett: "history of hospitals."] it is easy to think in spite of all this, that the egyptians did not know much medicine; but only one who knows nothing about it thinks so. according to dr. carl von klein, who discussed the "medical features of the ebers papyrus" in the _journal of the american medical association_ about five years ago, over different substances are mentioned as of remedial value in this old-time medical work. there is scarcely a disease of any important organ with which we are familiar in the modern time that is not mentioned here. while the significance of diseases of such organs as the spleen, the ductless glands, and the appendix was, of course, missed, nearly every other pathological condition was either expressly named or at least hinted at. the papyrus insists very much on the value of history-taking in medicine, and hints that the reason why physicians fail to cure is often because they have not studied their cases sufficiently. while the treatment was mainly symptomatic, it was not more so than is a great deal of therapeutics { } at the present time, even in the regular school of medicine. the number and variety of their remedies and of their modes of administering them is so marvellous, that i prefer to quote dr. von klein's enumeration of them for you: "in this papyrus are mentioned over different substances from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms which act as stimulants, sedatives, motor excitants, motor depressants, narcotics, hypnotics, analgesics, anodynes, antispasmodics, mydriatics, myotics, expectorants, tonics, dentifrices, sialogogues, antisialics, refrigerants, emetics, antiemetics, carminatives, cathartics, purgatives, astringents, cholagogues, anthelmintics, restoratives, haematics, alteratives, antipyretics, antiphlogistics, antiperiodics, diuretics, diluents, diaphoretics, sudorifics, anhydrotics, emmenagogues, oxytocics, caustics, ecbolics, galactagogues, irritants, escharotics, caustics, styptics, haemostatics, emollients, demulcents, protectives, antizymotics, disinfectants, deodorants, parasiticides, antidotes and antagonists." scarcely less interesting than the variety of remedies were their methods of administration: "medicines are directed to be administered internally in the form of decoctions, infusions, injections, pills, tablets, troches, capsules, powders, potions and inhalations; and externally, as lotions, ointments, plasters, etc. they are to be eaten, drunk, masticated or swallowed, to be taken often once only--often for many days--and the time { } is occasionally designated--to be taken mornings, evenings or at bedtime. formulas to disguise bad tasting medicaments are also given." we have no advantage over the early egyptians even in elegant prescribing. with all this activity in egypt, it is easy to understand that the other great nations of antiquity also have important chapters in the history of medicine. the earliest accounts would seem to indicate that the chaldeans, the assyrians and the babylonians all made significant advances in medicine. it seems clear that a work on anatomy was written in china about the year b.c. some of the other eastern nations made great progress. the hindoos in particular have in recent years been shown to have accomplished very good work in medicine itself. charaka, a hindu surgeon, who lived not later than b.c., made some fine contributions to the medical literature in hindostani. there were hospitals in all these countries, and these provided opportunities for the practice of surgery. laparotomy was very commonly done by hindu surgeons, and one of the rules enjoined by hindu students was the constant habit of visiting the sick and seeing them treated by experienced physicians. clinical teaching is often spoken of as a modern invention, but it is as old as hospital systems, and they go back to the dawn of history. it is among the greeks, however, that the most { } important advances in medicine, so far as we are concerned, were made. this is, however, not so much because of what they did as from the fact that they were more given to writing, and then their writings have been better preserved for us than those of other nations. the first great physician among the greeks was aesculapius, of whom, however, we have only traditions. he is fabled to have been the son of apollo, the god of music and the arts, and therefore to have been a near relative of the muses. the connection is rather interesting, because sometimes people try to remove medicine from among the arts that minister to the happiness of man, and place it among the sciences whose application is for his profit. medicine still remains an art, however. the temples of aesculapius were the first hospitals, though the priests were not the only ones who practised medicine, for there were laymen who, after having served for some time in the hospitals, wandered through the country under the name of asclepiads, treating people who were not able to go to the hospitals or shrines. these evidently, then, were the first medical schools in greece as well as the first hospitals. six hundred years after aesculapius came hippocrates, of cos, the father of medicine. he undoubtedly had the advantage of many egyptian medical traditions and other oriental medical sources, as well as the observations made in the hospitals and shrines of aesculapius. he { } wrote some great works in medicine that have never grown old, young men do not read them, old men who are over-persuaded of how much progress is being made by their own generation in medicine neglect them. the busy practitioner has no time for them. the great teachers of medicine whom all the professors look up to and who think for us in each generation turn fondly back to hippocrates, and marvel at his acumen of observation and his wonderful knowledge of men and disease. sydenham thought that no one had ever written like him, and in our turn we honor sydenham by calling him the english hippocrates. boerhaave, van swieten, liancisi, the great fathers of modern clinical medicine, turned with as much reverence to hippocrates as does osler, the regius professor of medicine at oxford, in our twentieth century. hippocrates wrote , years ago, but his writing is eternal in interest and value. the famous oath of hippocrates, which used to be read to all the graduates of medicine, well deserved that honor, for it represents the highest expression of professional dignity and obligation. there is a lofty sense of professional honor expressed in it that cannot be excelled at any period in the world's history. among other things that hippocrates required his adepts in medicine, his medical students when they graduated into physicians, to swear to was the following: "i will follow the system of regimen which { } according to my ability and judgment i consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. i will give no deadly medicine to man, woman, or child born or unborn. with purity and with holiness i will pass my life and practise my art, whatever in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, i see or hear in the life of men which ought not to be spoken of abroad, i shall not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. while i continue to keep this oath inviolate may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of my art respected by all men in all times; but should i trespass and violate this oath may the reverse be my lot." it is sometimes thought that after the roman medicine, which was an imitation of the greek (though galen well deserves a place by himself, and galen is usually thought of as a roman though he wrote in greek and had obtained his education at pergamos in asia minor), there was an interregnum in medicine until our own time. this is, however, quite as much of an assumption as to suppose that the egyptians had no medicine--as we used to until we knew more about them--or that old-time medicine is quite negligible because we were ignorant of its value, the middle ages had much more of medicine than we are likely to think, and just as soon as the great universities arose at the end of the { } twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, medicine gained a new impetus and flourished marvellously. these university medical schools of the later middle ages are models in their way, and put us to shame in many things. according to a law of the emperor frederick ii issued for the two sicilies in , [footnote ] three years of preliminary study were required at the university before a student might take up the medical course, and then he had to spend four years at medicine, and practise for a year under the supervision of a physician of experience before he was allowed to practise for himself. the story of the medicine of this time is all the more wonderful because subsequent generations forgot about it until recent years, and supposed that all of this period was shrouded in darkness. it was probably one of the most brilliant periods in medical history. some of the men who worked and taught in medicine at this time will never be forgotten. [footnote : for the complete text of this law, the first regulating the practice of medicine in modern times, also the first pure drug law, see walsh's _the popes and science_, new york, fordham university press, .] probably the greatest of them was guy de chauliac, a papal chamberlain, whom succeeding generations have honored with the title of father of surgery. his great text-book, the "chirurgia magna," was in common use for several centuries after his death, and is full of surgical teaching that we are prone to think much { } more modern. he trephined the skull, opened the thorax, operated within the abdomen, declared that patients suffering from wounds of the intestines would die unless these were sewed up, operated often for hernia in an exaggerated trendelenberg position, with the patient's head down on a board, but said that many more patients were operated upon for hernia "for the benefit of the surgeon's purse than for the good of the patient." his directions for the treatment of fractures and for taxis in hernia were followed for full four centuries after his time. no wonder that pagel, the great german historian, declared that "chauliac laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the french maintained down to the nineteenth century." portal, in his "history of surgery," declares that "guy de chauliac said nearly everything which modern surgeons say, and his work is of infinite price, but unfortunately too little read, too little pondered." malgaigne declared "the 'chirurgia magna' a masterpiece of learned and luminous writing." chauliac's [footnote ] personal character, however, is even more admirable than his surgical knowledge. he was at avignon when the black death occurred and carried away one-half the population. he was one of the few physicians who had the { } courage to stay. he tells us very simply that he did stay not because he had no fear, for he was dreadfully afraid, but he thought it his duty to stay. toward the end of the epidemic, he caught the fever but survived it and has written a fine description of it. he was looked upon as the leader of surgery in his time, and this is his advice as to what the surgeon should be as given in the introductory chapter of his "chirurgia magna": "the surgeon should be learned, skilled, ingenious and of good morals; be bold in things that are sure, cautious in dangers; avoid evil cures and practices; be gracious to the sick, obliging to his colleagues, wise in his predictions; be chaste, sober, pitiful and merciful; not covetous nor extortionate of money; but let the recompense be moderate, according to the work, the means of the sick, the character of the issue or event and its dignity." no wonder that malgaigne says of him: "never since hippocrates has medicine heard such language filled with so much nobility and so full of matter in so few words." [footnote : for sketch of chauliac see _johns hopkins hospital bulletin_, , or _catholic churchmen in science_, second series. dolphin press, philadelphia, .] the old-time medical traditions of education which in the mediaeval universities produced such men as william of salicet and lanfranc and mondeville and guy de chauliac, persisted during the next two centuries in the southern countries of europe, and then were transferred to america through spain. the first american medical school was not, as has so often been said, at my own alma mater, the university of { } pennsylvania, which had its first lectures in , while the physicians and surgeons of new york did not come for some ten years later and harvard only in the following decade, but in the medical school of the university of mexico, where the first lectures were held in , and where a full medical school was organized before the end of the sixteenth century. in this medical school, which during the seventeenth century came to have several hundred students, the university tradition of the olden time was well preserved. three years of preliminary study at the university were required before a student could take up the course in medicine, and four years of medical study were required before graduation. we have some of the text-books, and know much about the curriculum of this old medical school, and in every way it is worthy of the old university traditions. unfortunately our universities in what is now the united states developed very slowly. king's college (columbia) did not become a university in the sense of having law and medical schools as well as an undergraduate department until the nineteenth century had almost begun. harvard did not have a law school affiliated with it until the first quarter of the nineteenth century had almost run its course. the affiliations between the medical schools and the universities in these cases was only very slight, and the medical schools were entirely in the hands of the { } medical faculty, whose main purpose during a great part of the nineteenth century was to make medical studies as short as possible and as inexpensive as they could possibly be made for the faculty, because that left so much more of the fees to be absorbed by the historic septennate of professors who ruled and managed the university. the consequence was that during most of the nineteenth century two terms of four months each were all that was required for the diploma in medicine in most american medical schools. three schools maintained a very high standard by requiring twenty weeks in each of two calendar years. the medical school that was considered one of the best in the country, and whose graduates obtained the highest marks in the army and navy examinations, that of the university of virginia, required but two terms of four and one-half months each which might be taken in the same calendar year, and then gave the doctor's degree. it may be as well to say that the doctor's degree or diploma was a license to practise. there were no state regulations for the practice of medicine, and no matter how obtained, a diploma allowed practise. as some one has well said the diploma, then, was a license to practise, not medicine, the lord knows! but to practise on one's patients until one had learned some medicine. it is out of this slough of despond in medical education that we have climbed in the last thirty-five years. we are getting back to the { } old-time university traditions. let us hope that we shall not allow ourselves to get away from them again. there are ups and downs in medical practice and medical fashions and medical education, and all depends on the men who compose the profession at any one time and not on any mythical progress that holds them up and compels them to do better than those who went before them. the highest compliment that can be paid to american medicine and medical men is that, in spite of this handicap of education they did not utterly degenerate, but, on the contrary, somehow managed to maintain the dignity of the profession and do much good work. it is to you to-day, entering on this profession, that we look to do your share in keeping up the dignity of the medical profession and in maintaining standards in medical education. we have a glorious tradition of , years behind us with the great men of the profession worshipped as gods at the beginning, because men thought so much of them, and remembered fondly as great masters when they came in the after-time. from i-em-hetep through aesculapius and hippocrates and galen and guy de chauliac and sydenham and boerhaave down to our own time, the men whom we delight to honor are the ones who did not work with an eye single to their own success, but who tried, above all, to do things for humanity and for the profession to which they belonged. the man who is successful as a { } money-maker in his profession is only doing half his duty. he must make medicine as well as money, that is, he must by his observations help others to recognize and treat disease better than they did before; he must labor for the benefit of humanity, and, above all, he must see that there are no decadence of professional spirit and no deterioration of medical education as far as his influence can go. it is men of this kind that we hope to send forth from fordham, and you stand in the van of them all, and i wish you god-speed. { } university medical schools { } "knowledge comes but wisdom lingers." --tennyson, _locksley hall_. "the foundation stones of the whole modern structure of human wisdom have all been laid by the architects of yesterday. thrice wise is he who knows the quarries and builders of by-gone ages and is able to differentiate the stones which have been rejected from those which have been utilized." --anon. "ideo medico id in primis curandum, ut ab aegro circumstantias omnes accurate intelligat, intellectas consideret, ut inter curandum media illa adhibeat, quae tollendo morbo apta sunt, ne ex medicina nocumentum proveniat." --basil valentine, _triumphal chariot of antimony_. [the physician must therefore especially take care that he understand all the circumstances of his patient very clearly, and after understanding them weigh them well, so that during his treatment he may use those means which are especially suited to control the disease, lest any harm should come from his medicine.] { } university medical schools [footnote ] [footnote : address to the graduates of st. louis university medical and dental schools, may , , at the odeon, st. louis.] it affords me great pleasure to accept the invitation of your faculty to address the graduates of a university medical school here in the middle west. i wondered, of course, what i should talk to you about, and have come to the conclusion that as an historian of medicine any message i may have for you is likely to come from my own subject. it so happens that we are just beginning to realize that the history of medicine may have much greater significance for us than we have usually been accustomed to think, and, above all, that it may mean much in furnishing incentive for the maintaining and raising of standards in medical education. in recent years there has come a very decided improvement in medical education in the united states. it is not hard to understand that the foreigner lifts his eyebrows in surprise when he is told that most of our medical schools a generation ago required but two terms of four months each, and that there was then just beginning to be a demand for a little more complete course and better facilities. there was a large number of medical schools, turning out graduates every year with the degree { } of doctor of medicine, which was a license to practise in every state in the union, for there were no state or federal laws regulating the practice of medicine. as for preliminary requirements the less said the better. if a man could write his name and, indeed, he did not have to write it very plainly, he found it easy to matriculate in a medical school and to be graduated at the end of two scant terms of four months each. he might come from the mines, or from the farm, or from before the mast, or from the smithy, or the carpenter shop; he need know nothing of chemistry, nor physics, nor of botany, nor of english and, above all, of english grammar, and he was at once admitted to what was called a professional school and graduated when he had served his time. practically no one was plucked. the desire of the faculty for numbers of students forbade that in most cases. the two terms in medicine were not even successive courses. the second-year student listened, as a rule, to the same lectures that he might have heard the preceding year. we all know the reason now for this extremely low standard of medical education. proprietary medical schools made it their one business in life to make just as much out of medical education as possible and the historic septennate of professors, or sometimes the dean, pocketed the fees (i came near saying spoils) every year, and robbed medical american education of { } whatever possibilities it might have for the real training of young men in the science and art and practice of medicine. perhaps the most interesting feature of this maintenance of extremely low standards in medical education, however, is the fact that in spite of it, men, or at least some of them, succeeded in obtaining a good foundation in medicine and then by personal work afterwards came to be excellent practitioners of medicine. professor welch said not long since: "one can decry the system of those days, the inadequate preliminary requirements, the short courses, the dominance of the didactic lecture, the meagre appliances for demonstrative and practical instruction, but the results were better than the system. our teachers were men of fine character devoted to their duties; they inspired us with enthusiasm, interest in our studies and hard work, and they imparted to us sound traditions of our profession." nothing that i know is a better compliment to american enterprise and power of overcoming the difficulties of the situation than the life stories of some of the men who came from these completely inadequate schools. if with the maimed training and incomplete education given a generation ago american medicine not only succeeded in maintaining the dignity of the profession to a noteworthy degree, but also developed many men who made distinct contributions to world medicine, what will we not do now that { } our medical education is gradually being lifted up out of the slough of despond in which it was and the preliminary education for medical studies set at a standard where real work of thoroughly scientific character can be looked for, from the very beginning of the medical course? is it any wonder, then, that those of us who have the best interests of american medicine at heart are watching with careful solicitude the movement that is now reforming medical education in this country? the one hope of medical education is, and always has been, organic connection with a university. real university medical schools, that is medical schools as the genuine post-graduate departments of universities with the fine training that they give, have opened our eyes to what is needed in medical education in this country. some of the old-time medical schools here in the united states had been connected by name with universities but this was more apparent than real, and the medical faculty ruled absolutely in its own department and throttled medical education and divided the income of the college among themselves, devoting as little as possible to equipment, to laboratories, to all that was needed for medical education. now has come the epoch of university medical schools in this country. i came near saying america, but we must not forget that the spanish-american countries, having adopted their educational systems from the mother latin country, { } have always maintained the organic connection of the medical school with their universities, and as a consequence a good preliminary education, the equivalent of three years of college work with us, is required and has always been, and then some four years in the medical school and, indeed, in most of the countries five or six years and in one at least seven years of medical study required. i have thought, however, that this story of medical education in connection with universities and real university work will be especially interesting to the graduates of this thorough western university, whose work in medicine is acknowledged as up to some of the best standards of professional attainment and whose organic connection with a great university assures not only the continuance, but the future development of medical education here along lines that shall place this among the serious progressive medical schools of the world. the first university medical school that well deserves that name is the one that came into existence in connection with the university of alexandria. i have been at some pains, because it is so delightfully amusing, to point out how closely the university of alexandria resembles our modern universities in most particulars. it was founded by a great conqueror, who had gone forth to conquer the world, and having attained almost universal dominion sighed for more worlds to conquer. then he set about the foundation of { } a great city that was to be the capital of his empire, and endowed a great institution of learning in that capital that was to attract students from all over the world. when he died prematurely the ptolemys, who inherited the african portion of his vast dominions, carried out his wishes. money was no object at alexandria: they put up magnificent buildings, founded a great library, bought a lot of first editions of books in the shape of author's original manuscripts, stole the archives at athens, used alexander's collection (made for aristotle) as the foundation of what we would call a museum, paid professors better salaries than they received at that time anywhere else and housed them in palaces. what a strangely familiar sound all this has! then alexandria proceeded to do scientific work. euclid wrote his geometry, and, unchanged, it has come down to us and we still use it as a text-book in our colleges. archimedes, following up euclid's work, laid the foundation, of mechanics in his study of the lever and the screw, and of hydrostatics and of optics in his studies of specific gravity and burning mirrors and lenses. he made a series of marvellous inventions showing that he was a practical as well as a theoretic genius, who would be gladly welcomed, nay, eagerly sought for, as a member of the faculty even of a university of the highest rank or largest income in our modern times. ptolemy elaborated the system of astronomy that had been so ably { } developed by teachers at alexandria before his time, and heron invented his engines, which we have had as toys in our laboratories for centuries. we realized the true significance of one of them only when the turbine engine was invented and we found that the principle of it was in the toy engine of this old natural philosopher of alexandria. they even did their literature scientifically at the university of alexandria. we have no great original works from them in literature, but they invented comparative literature; for this making the septuagint translation of the holy scriptures and doing the same for many other religious documents of the surrounding nations for comparative study. it is rather easy to understand, then, that a medical school arose in connection with this scientific university, and that it did excellent work. the collections of aristotle contained many illustrations which served as the basis for zoology, botany, comparative anatomy and probably even comparative physiology. the ptolemys were very liberal and allowed dissection of the human body, so that human anatomy developed from a definite scientific standpoint better then ever before. the number of strangers in the town and the rather unhealthy climate of egypt left many unclaimed bodies. it has always been the difficulty of obtaining bodies much more than prejudice against the violation of the human body on any general principle, that has been the reason { } for the absence of human dissection in many periods of the world's history. we object to having the bodies of friends cut up, but we do not mind much if the bodies of those who are unknown to us are treated in that way. so long as men did not travel much there were few unclaimed bodies. with the advent of travel came abundant material for dissection and the ptolemys allowed the medical school to use it. two great anatomists built up the structure of scientific human anatomy on the rather good foundation that had been laid on animal anatomy in the foretime. after all, the anatomy of the animal resembles that of man so much that very precious knowledge had been gained from zootomies in the previous ages. these two anatomists were erasistratos and herophilos. both of them studied the brain especially, as might have been expected. for just as soon as the opportunity for dissecting man was provided, this, his most complex structure, attracted instant attention. herophilos has named after him the _torcular herophili_, and the name he gave the curious appearance in the floor of the fourth ventricle--the _calamus scriptorius_--is still retained. he describes the membranes of the brain, the various sinuses, the choroid plexuses, the cerbral ventricles and traced the origin of the nerves from the brain and the spinal cord, recognizing, according to well-grounded tradition, the distinction between nerves of sensation and motion. { } he described the eye and especially the vitreous body, the choroid and the retina. he did not neglect other portions of anatomy, however, and his power of exact observation, as well as his detailed study, may be judged from his remark that the left spermatic vein in certain cases joins the renal. erasistratos, his colleague, was perhaps even a more successful investigator than herophilos. he represented the best tradition of greek medicine of the time. he had two distinguished teachers, one of them metrodoros, the son-in-law of aristotle. it was probably through this influence that erasistratos received his invitation from the first ptolemy to come to alexandria. the scientific work of alexandria was founded on aristotle's collections, on his books, for his library was brought to alexandria as the foundation of the great university library, and then best of all on the direct tradition of his scientific teaching through this pupil of his son-in-law. erasistratos' other great teacher was the well-known chrysippos of cnidos. cnidos was the great rival medical school to that of cos. owing to the reputation of hippocrates we know of cos, but we must not ignore cnidos. erasistratos' discoveries were more in connection with the heart than anything else. he came very near discovering the circulation. his description of the valves and of their function is very clear. he looked for large-sized { } anastomoses between veins and arteries and, of course, did not discover the minute capillaries which required malpighi's microscope to reveal them nearly , years after. like herophilos, erasistratos also studied the brain very faithfully. one story that we have of erasistratos deserves to be in the minds of young graduates in medicine, because it illustrates the practical character of the man and also how much more important at times it may be in the practice of medicine to know men well rather than to know medical science alone. erasistratos was summoned on a consultation to antioch to see the son of king seleucus. seleucus was one of the four of alexander's generals who, like ptolemy, had divided the world among them after the young conqueror's death. his portion of the eastern world, with its capital at antioch, was probably the richest region of that time. there had been no happiness, however, in the royal household for months because the scion of the seleucidae, the heir to the throne, was ill and no physician had been able to tell what was the matter with him, and, above all, no one had been able to do anything to awaken him from a lethargy that was stealing over him, making him quite incapable of the ordinary occupations of men, or to dispel an apathy which was causing him to lose all interest in affairs around him. he was losing in weight, he looked miserable, he seemed really to have been stricken by one of { } the serious diseases as yet undifferentiated at that time which were expressed by the word phthisis, which referred to any wasting disease. as a last hope then almost, erasistratos was summoned from distant alexandria as a consultant in the case of young seleucus. the proceeding, after all, is very similar to what happens in our own time. the head of an important department in medicine at a university is asked to go a long distance to see the son of a reigning monarch, or of a millionaire prince in industry, or perhaps a coal baron, or a railroad king, and a special train is supplied for him and every convenience consulted. a caravan was sent to bring erasistratos over the desert to antioch. it is such consultations that count in a physician's life. i hope sincerely that you shall have many of them and that you shall conduct them as successfully as erasistratos this one. the young prince's case proved as puzzling to erasistratos for a time as it had to so many other physicians before him. like the experienced practitioner he was, he did not make his diagnosis at once, however. will you remember that when you, too, have a puzzling case? it is when we do not take time to make our diagnosis that it often proves erroneous. not ignorance, but failure to investigate properly, is responsible for most of our errors. he asked to see the patient a number of times, and saw him under varying conditions. finally, one day, while he was { } examining the young man's pulse--and i may tell you that erasistratos made a special study of the pulse and knew many things about it that it is unfortunate that the moderns neglect--his patient's pulse gave a sudden leap and then continued to go much faster than it had gone before. at the same time there came a rising color to the young man's cheek. erasistratos looked up to see what was the cause of this striking change, and found that the young wife of the king seleucus, the prince's stepmother, had just come into the room. seleucus, as an old man, had married a very handsome young woman, and it was evident that the young man's heart was touched in her regard, and that here was the cause of the trouble. erasistratos did not proclaim his discovery at once. he did announce that now he knew the cause of the trouble, that it was an affection of the heart that would be cured by travel, and he proposed to take young seleucus back with him to alexandria. in private, very probably, he told his young patient that he had discovered his secret, and then persuaded him that absence would be the thing for him. very probably the young man considered that cure was impossible, and with many misgivings he consented to go to alexandria, and as has happened many times before and since, in spite of the patient's assurance to the contrary, the travel cure proved effective even for the heart affection. { } i hope sincerely that you shall have as much tact, as much knowledge of men and women and as much success as this great teacher at the first of our modern university medical schools, when the great consultations do come your way, for it is easy to understand that when the young man recovered under the kindly ministrations of erasistratos and the good effect of absence from the disturbing heart factor, erasistratos was loaded with the wealth of the east and acquired a reputation that made him known throughout all the world of that time. there is a curious commentary on this story that i think you should also know. it is galen who has preserved the incident for us. he does so in the book on the pulse, mainly in order to show, as he thinks, the fatuity of such observations. after giving the details he says, "of course, there is no special pulse of love." poor galen, how his wits must have been wool-gathering, or how forgetful he must have been of his own youth writing in the serenity of age, or how lacking in ordinary human experience if that is his serious meaning. the older man was by far the better observer, and i hope that you shall not forget in the time to come that there are many things that affect men and women besides bacteria and auto-intoxications of various kinds and metabolic disturbances and nutritional changes. erasistratos seems to have known very well how much the mind, or as they called it in the older terminology, and we { } still cling to the phrase, the heart, meant for many a phenomenon of existence supposed to be physically pathologic and yet really only representing psychologic influences apart from the physical side of the being. i may say to you that the more you know about these old teachers of medicine the more you will appreciate and value their largeness of view, their breadth of knowledge of humanity and their practical ways. it is no wonder that students from all over the world were attracted to alexandria for the next three centuries because of the opportunities, for the study of medicine afforded them there. after the first century of its existence not as much was accomplished as at the beginning, because what always happens in the history of medicine after a period of successful investigation, happened also there. men concluded that nearly everything that could be, had been discovered and began to theorize. they were sure that their theories explained things. men have persisted in spinning theories in medicine. theories have almost never helped us and they always have wasted our time. _observation! observation_ is the one thing that counts, alexandria continued to have her reputation, however, and in the first century of the christian era was the centre of medical interest. it was probably here that st. luke was educated, and as we know now from the careful examination of the { } third gospel and of the acts, he knew his greek medical terms very well. harnack has shown us recently once more how thoroughly luke converted the ordinary popular terms of the other evangelists into the greek medical terms of his time. luke must have known medicine very well. his testimony to the miracles of christ is therefore all the more valuable, and so the alexandrian medical school has its special place in the order of providence. we are prone to think because of the curious way in which not only the histories of medical education, but of all education, have been written, that while there were some medical schools in the interval from the days of alexandria and rome down to the modern time, these were so hampered by unfortunate conditions that men practically did nothing in education and, above all, scientific and medical education until comparatively recent times. nothing could well be more absurd than such an opinion. the great universities founded during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries attracted more students to the population of the countries of the time than go to our universities to the number of our population in the present time. these universities are the model of our universities of the present time and, indeed, the history of many of the old european universities is continuous for seven centuries. they had an undergraduate department in which students were trained in grammar, rhetoric, logic, { } arithmetic, astronomy, music and gymnastics, and graduate departments of law, theology and medicine. professor huxley, reviewing mediaeval education, once said that the undergraduate education of the mediaeval universities was better than our own. he doubted "that the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as this old trivium and quadrivium did." their post-graduate work was just as fine as their undergraduate work. they made the law of the world in the thirteenth century, and laid the foundations on which the philosophy and theology of the after-time have been built up. strange as it may seem to many accustomed to give credence to far different traditions, they did the same thing in medicine. take as a single example what they did for the regulation of medical education and practice. a law of the emperor frederick ii, issued in for the two sicilies (southern italy and sicily proper), required three years of preliminary training in the ordinary undergraduate course at the university before a man was allowed to take up medicine, and four years at medicine before he got his degree. but even this was not all; after graduation, a year of practice with a physician was required before he was allowed to practise for himself. if he were going to practise surgery an extra year of the study of anatomy was required. but it may { } be said by those who cannot persuade themselves that the middle ages so far anticipated us: since they knew almost nothing of medicine and surgery, what did they spend their time at during these four years? the more we know about the details of that early teaching, the more we respect them and the more we admire the magnificent work of the old-time professors and their schools. probably the most surprising feature of their teaching was surgery. we are rather likely to think that the development of surgery was reserved for our day. nothing could be more untrue. the greatest period in the history of surgery, with the possible exception of our own time, is the century and a half from to . what they taught in surgery we know not from tradition, but from the text-books of the great teachers which have been preserved for us, and which have been recently republished. three men stand out pre-eminent: william of salicet; lanfranc, who taught at paris, having been invited there from italy, where he had been a pupil of william of salicet, and guy de chauliac, to whom has been given by universal accord the title of father of modern surgery. there is practically nothing in modern surgery that these men did not touch in their text-books. perhaps the most surprising thing is to find that william of salicet, in discussing his { } cases, suggested that sometimes he succeeded in obtaining union by first intention by keeping his wounds clean. alas for the surgery of succeeding centuries, guy de chauliac, a greater mechanical genius than william, insisted that union by first intention was an illusion and that it could only come through pus formation. laudable pus became the shibboleth of surgery for centuries, imposed upon it by the genius of a great man. most men think that they think, they really follow leaders, and so we followed blindly after guy until lister came and showed us our mistake. guy was the professor of surgery down at montpellier, and also the physician to the popes, who for the time were at avignon. his text-book of surgery is full of expressions that reveal the man and the teacher. he said the surgeon who cuts the human body without a knowledge of anatomy is like a blind carpenter carving wood. he insisted that men should make observations for themselves and not blindly follow others. he discussed operations on the head, the thorax and the abdomen. he said that wounds of the intestines would surely be fatal unless sewed up, and he described the technique of suture for them. his specialty was operation for hernia. there are pictures still extant of operations for hernia done about this time in an exaggerated trendelenberg position. the patient is fastened to a board by the legs, head down, the board at an angle of { } forty-five degrees against the wall. the intestines dropped back from the site of operation and allowed the surgeon to proceed without danger. guy said that more patients were operated on for the sake of the doctor's pocket in hernia cases than for their own benefit. his instructions to his students, his high standard of professional advice, all show us one of the great physicians of all time and historians of medicine are unanimous in their praise of him. the next great development in medicine came at the time of the renaissance with the reorganization of the universities. in the sixteenth century italy particularly did magnificent work in the universities, stimulated by close touch with old greek medicine. at padua, at bologna, above all, at rome, the great foundations of the modern medical sciences were laid. i need only mention the names of vesalius, varolius, eustachius, fallopius, columbus (who discovered the circulation of the blood in the lungs), caesalpinus, to whom and rightly the italians attribute the discovery of the systemic circulation nearly half a century before harvey. these men all of them did fine work, everywhere in italy. they were doing original investigation of the greatest value. whenever anybody anywhere in europe at this time wanted to do good work in science of any kind,--astronomy, mathematics, physics and, above all, in any of the medical sciences,--he went down to italy; italy was and continued for five { } centuries after the thirteenth to be what france was for a scant half a century in the nineteenth, and germany for a corresponding period just before our own time. how curiously the history of science and of medicine was written when it seems to contradict this. above all, what ridiculous nonsense has been talked about papal opposition to science. the great universities of italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had charters from the popes. they were immediately under ecclesiastical influence, yet they did fine work in anatomy and surgery. the father of modern surgery was a papal physician. the papal physicians for seven centuries have been the greatest contributors to medicine. the popes deliberately selected as their physicians the greatest investigators of the time. besides guy de chauliac such men as eustachius, varolius, columbus, caesalpinus, lancisi, malpighi were papal physicians. we have even a more striking testimony to the papal patronage and encouragement of medicine and to the church's fostering care of medical education, here in america. the first university medical school in america was not, as has so often been said, the medical school of the university of pennsylvania founded in , but the medical school of the university of mexico, where medical lectures were first delivered in . our medical schools in this country have only become genuine university medical schools in the sense { } of being organic portions of the university in the last twenty-five years. before that their courses were brief and unworthy and no preliminary education was required. the universities of spanish america from the very beginning required three years of preliminary training in the university before medicine could be taken up, and then four years of medical studies. these four years became five and six years in certain countries, and at no time during the nineteenth century did the medical education of spanish america sink to the low level unfortunately reached in the united states. the lesson of it is clear. when medical education is seriously undertaken as a university department, all is well. when it is not, the results are disastrous. in our day and country another great awakening of university life has come and with it a drawing together in intimate union of universities and their graduate departments. above all, the medical schools have profited by this closer connection with university work, and the prospects for medical education in the united states and a new period of wonderful progress in it are very bright. you have my hearty congratulations, then, on your graduation from a great university medical school here in the west, and i hope sincerely that you shall prove worthy of alma mater. you have had the privileges of university education and these involve duties. { } this is ever true, though unfortunately it is somewhat seldom realized. _noblesse oblige_. we hear much in these days of the stewardship of wealth, and do not let us forget that there is a stewardship of talent and education. much more will be demanded of you because of your opportunities, and we look for an accomplishment on your part far above the ordinary in medical work and maintenance and uplift of professional dignity, that shall mean much for your fellows. remember that you are doing only half your duty if you but make your living or even make money. you are bound besides to make medicine. for all that the forefathers have done for us we in this generation must make return by a broadening of their medical views for the benefit of posterity. if you were graduates of some fourth-rate proprietary medical school, perhaps it would be sufficient if you succeeded in making your living out of your profession. perhaps even your teachers would then be quite satisfied with you. no such meagre accomplishment can possibly satisfy those who are sending you out to-day. above all, you must remember that your education is not for yourself, but for the benefit of others as well. if, somehow, its influence becomes narrowed so as only to affect yourself and your intimate friends then it is essentially a failure. you must not only live your lives for yourselves, but so that at the end of them the community shall have been benefited and medicine { } and its beneficent mission to mankind shall be broader and more significant because you have lived. with this message, then, i welcome you as brother physicians and bid you god-speed in your professional work. { } { } the college man in life { } "non scholae sed vitae discimus." --seneca, _epist._, . [we learn for life not for school.] "nec si non obstatur, propterea etiam permittitur." --cicero, _philip_., xiii, . [and because a thing is not forbidden that does not make it permissible.] "ubicunque homo est ibi beneficio locus est." --seneca, _de vita beata_, . [wherever man is there is room to do good.] "then let us not leave the meaning of education ambiguous or ill-defined. at present, when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may sometimes be very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. for we are not speaking of education in this sense of the word, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. this is the only training, which upon our view would be characterized as education; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all. but let us not quarrel with one another about the name, provided that the proposition which has just been granted hold good: to wit, that those who are rightly educated generally become good men. neither must we cast a slight upon education, which is the first and fairest thing that the best of men can ever have, and which, though liable to take a wrong direction, is capable of reformation. and this work of reformation is the great business of every man while he lives." --plato, _laws_ (jowett), vol. iv, p. . scribner, . { } the college man in life [footnote ] [footnote : this was the address to the graduates at boston college, june , ] gentlemen of the graduating class: the custom is, i fear, for the orator who addresses the graduating class to talk over the heads of those who have received their degree to the larger audience who are assembled for the academic function. now, that i do not propose to do. what i have to say is to you. my message is meant entirely for you. since your friends are present i have to raise my voice so that they shall hear what i have to say, but i consider that they are here only on sufferance and that i am here to say whatever i can that may mean something for you in the careers that are opening up to you. now, i am not of those who think that the main purpose of the eld is to give advice to the young. man is so fashioned that he wants to get his own experience for himself. it is true that "only fools learn by their own experience," wise men learn by that of others. but then we have divine warrant for saying that there used to be a goodly proportion of fools in the world and human experience agrees in our own time that not all the fools are dead yet. our advice may not be taken in all its literalness; that would be too much to { } expect, but it has become an academic custom to give it, in the hope that it will be a landmark, perhaps an incentive, it may be a warning, surely some time a precious memory in the time to come. few men who ever lived were less likely to think that their advice might mean very much than dear old bobbie burns, to whom one of your number referred, and yet some time i hope that in some serious mood you'll read and think well on the poetic epistle of advice to his youthful friend. there are some lines at the beginning of it that have haunted me at times these many years when i have been asked to address studious youth at the commencement, as our term for the occasion so well declares, of their real education in the post-graduate courses of that university of hard knocks which valedictorians at this season of the year are so prone to call the cold, cold world. the scottish ploughman bard said in the choice english he could so well assume on occasion: "i long hae tho't, my youthful friend, a something to hae sent you. though it may serve no ither end than as a kind memento; but how the subject theme may gang. let time and chance determine; perhaps it may turn out a sang perhaps turn out a sermon." one thing is sure, whatever i shall say to you shall not be a song, though, alas! addresses { } of advice are prone to sound like sermons. yet the sermon, after all, in the old latin word _sermo_ is only a discourse, and i am going to make mine as brief as possible. it shall, i hope, serve to round out some of the things that you yourselves have been saying with regard to catholics and social works and, above all. catholic college men in social works. we are rightly getting to estimate the value of a man in our time in terms of what he accomplishes for others much more than for himself. almost any one who devotes himself with sufficient exclusiveness to the business of helping himself will make a success of it, though some may doubt of the value of that success. what is difficult above all in our time, when the spirit of individualism is so rampant, is to make a success of helpfulness for others while making life flow on with reasonable smoothness for one's self. i do not hope to be able to impart to you the precious secret of how surely to do this, but something that i may say may be helpful to you in leading a larger than a mere selfish life, so that when the end shall come, as come it must, though one would never suspect it from the ways of men, the world will be a little better at least because you have lived. education has become the fetish of the day and the shibboleth by which the philistine is recognized from the chosen people of culture and refinement. popular education has become the { } watchword of the time, and all things are fondly hoped for and confidently promised in its name. we are somewhat in doubt as to the mode of education that will be surely effective for all good and we are not quite certain as to how the results are exactly to be obtained, but education is to make the world better; to get rid gradually, yet inevitably, of the evil that is in it; to lift men up to the higher plane of knowledge where selfishness is at least not supposed to exist, or surely to be greatly minimized, where crime, of course, shall disappear, and where even the minor evils so hide their diminished heads that the millennium can not be far distant. it is true that some of these glorious promises seem long in fulfilment to those who are a little sceptical of the influence of particular forms of education that are now popular, but, of course, the response to that is, that so far we have not had the time to have the full benefit of education exert itself. at the end of the eighteenth century the encyclopedists in france, in their great campaign for the diffusion of information among the people and the spread of what they were pleased to call education, though some of us are prone to think that they hopelessly confused the distinction between education for power and education for information, confidently promised that when men knew enough, poverty, of course, would disappear and in its train would go all the attendant evils, { } vice and crime and immorality, and with them, of course, unhappiness would disappear from the world. that is considerably over a century now, but we have not found it advisable as yet to do away with courts of law, nor jails, nor policemen, nor any of the mechanism of the law for the suppression of crime and immorality. indeed, there are those who are unkind enough to say, that we now have to make use of more means than ever in proportion to the population for the suppression of vice and crime, and that they are more emphatically demanded even than at the time of the encyclopedists. as for unhappiness and poverty, recent investigations in our large cities show so large a proportion of people willing yet unable to obtain a decent living wage, that it is quite startling. our insane asylums are growing much more rapidly than the population, and not a few of the inmates are there because of immorality. suicide is on the increase faster than the population and unfortunately the greatest increase is noted in the younger years. it is between fifteen and twenty-five that suicides are multiplying. of course the answer to this is, that education is not as yet carried to that extent among the great mass of people which would enable it to have its full beneficial effects. our common school education is not enough to bring people under the beneficent influence of this great civilizing factor for the development of mankind. { } educators would urge that it is the higher education which serves to obliterate the ills that human flesh is heir to, moral as well as physical, as far, of course, as that is possible in so imperfect a world as this. if we could but extend the advantages of the higher education, of college and university training to the majority of the people, then say the advocates of education as a panacea for human ills, we would surely have that approach to the millennium which intellectual development by the diffusion of information can and must give. it is worth while analyzing that proposition a little and applying it to present-day conditions as we know them. after all we have been turning out a large number of those who have had the benefit of the higher education from our colleges and universities during the last generation or so. they have gone out by the thousand to influence their fellows and presumably to be shining lights for profound improvement of life, striking examples that surely will prove an incentive and a source of emulation to others to do the right, avoid the wrong, be helpful instead of selfish and, in general, show the world how much education means for the happiness of all. there is a slang expression familiar in new york just now that you in new england may not know, for i understand that even the owls near boston do not say "to-whit-to-whoo" but "to-whit-to-whoom," that may be quoted here: "some men are born good, { } some make good and some are caught with the goods on them." not all of the graduates of colleges and universities were born good, of course. i wonder what we shall find with regard to the other two phases of existence. there are not a few who are critically perverse enough to say that, while many have made good, too many have been caught with the goods on them. let us take the subject that is so strikingly brought before us in our everyday life in recent years, the question of political corruption. of course it is to be presumed that it is the non-college men who are both corruptors and corrupted. it is, of course, just as confidently to be presumed, on the other hand, that it is the college men who are the forerunners in all the exposures of recent years. alas! for human nature, it is just the contrary. the leaders in big corruption, the mainstays of what has come to be called "big political business," have nearly all been college men. this has been true in california, in missouri, in pennsylvania, in new york, in illinois. it would be easy to add other states, but i am only mentioning those where investigations are not yet forgotten, though we american people have cultivated a really marvellous power of forgetting. the states are sufficiently far apart from one another to make it very clear that the condition is not limited to a particular locality but is practically universal. in recent years we have been getting closer to the { } man higher up. in a great many of the cases, i should say in a majority of them, he has proved to be a university man, and if not, then university men have been his right hands in the accomplishment of evil. the boards of directors of corporations, life insurance, fire insurance, railroads, great industries and manufactures, even banks, who have known that laws were being violated and who have not cared because it was money in their pockets, have in many cases, perhaps even in the majority of cases, been college men. certainly college graduates have not proved to be the little leaven that would leaven the whole mass for righteousness. in the even more dangerous evils of our time that have risked the very existence of democratic government, in the imposition on the people by the privileged classes of indirect taxes and tariffs that make life hard for the poor, but add largely to the wealth of the rich, college men have only too often been the active agents. without their active co-operation certainly these crying injustices to the poor would never have been accomplished. they have often been adding useless millions to useless millions simply for the game; not caring how much the poor had to suffer. they have been accumulating at the expense of the working classes what governor hughes of new york so well called, not long since, a corruption fund for their children. they have been the prime factors in many agencies { } for evil and they have not been the guardians of the rights of others, the weaker ones, that we have a right to expect of them. in the awful evils that have been exposed as a consequence of the fellow-servant doctrine and the contributory negligence principle at law, which have been the root of so much suffering in the world, college men have not helped to point out evils and organized for the solution of them, though they have been closely in contact with all the problems of them as judges, lawyers, directors of railroad companies, and industrial concerns. in general, while they have been in a position to know and alleviate some of the worst ills of our social system, they have done very little. they helped to bind fetters. it is men of much lower social station and education who have awakened us. the investigations of recent years as to the condition of wage-earners have shown us many unfortunate evils. it was known that one in four of the population in london was living in dire poverty and this was thought to be due to the special circumstances in london. an investigation of york in england showed, however, that smaller towns, even cathedral towns, that were supposed to be almost without poverty, were hot-beds of it and were nearly as bad as london. then, we took the flattering unction to our souls that these were altogether foreign conditions. such investigations as we could make in new york, however, showed that we were little if any { } better than the reports from england and germany revealed abroad. then it was said that the large city, that brood-oven of vice and misery, was responsible. pittsburg, for instance, set up the claim that while great fortunes were made there the workmen were paid better wages than any place else in the world. alas for the fallibility of human judgment in social affairs! the pittsburg survey was made and it was found that while a few of the better-class workmen were paid very well, the great mass of the workmen were awfully underpaid, and it was impossible for the majority of them to live decently on what they received. further investigations into industrial conditions have only emphasized the conclusions obtained from the survey. human life has become very cheap in this country. a prominent clergyman said not very long ago that it was safer to be a murderer in the united states than a brakeman. the expression is true if the proportion of brakemen who lose their lives to murderers who lose theirs in this country is taken. we are careless of the lives of the honest workman, and sentimentally over-careful of the lives and comfort of the criminal. every now and then there are inevitable reactions against this laxity of the law, and as a consequence, while canada has no lynchings and there are none in england, while peoples of our stock have no need to appeal to force, we lynch many more than we execute in this { } country. the leaders of many of the mobs, as the directors of the industrial companies who knowingly allow the waste of life to go on, have had the benefit of our american education, such as it is. educated people are responsible for things that are and unless they meet their responsibilities there will be no improvement. some of these abuses have risen to a climax. not long ago a story was told that illustrates, as it seems to me, some present-day feelings very well. a great steel company having a contract for a bridge in the far east, was rushing the last steel beams for the completion of the contract. america is noted for its marvellous power to do work rapidly that other countries take time for. there was a heavy penalty attached if they did not complete the contract on time. a fast steamer was waiting in new york harbor all ready to take this last consignment out with it. a special train was standing in the yards of the steel plant, to be rushed to new york just as soon as the beams were completed. in the midst of all the hurry and bustle a workman got his foot caught in the huge crane which transports the immense beams from one portion of the plant to the other. an examination of the manner in which he was caught showed clearly that he could not be released without taking the crane apart. that would mean that thirty-six hours would have to be spent in the mechanical handling of that crane. if that were done it would be { } quite impossible to make the shipment on time, so closely was the period of completion calculated. not only was there a heavy money penalty, but there would be a decided loss of american prestige. the workman who was caught was only a foreigner. he was only getting $ . a day. just one thing was to be done evidently, because that steamer had to sail on time and that freight train had to get out the next morning. the other foreign workmen were put out of the shops, only the confidential men were left, an ambulance was summoned; as it appeared in sight the crane was run over the portion of the foot that was caught, the man was removed to the care of the surgeon, his wound was dressed at the hospital, the contract was completed on time and american enterprise and power to do things faster than all the world was vindicated. we are making money. in the meantime the directors of companies under whom such things are done are mainly college men. whether they feel it or not they are personally responsible for everything that happens in their business, for it is their business by which human life is sacrificed or human suffering increased, or human morality deteriorated. probably the majority of the stockholders in the companies are college men. some of them are college women. they are deriving incomes from forms of injustice, from conditions that cause human suffering that { } might be avoided. they are, whether they know it or not, committing one of the crimes that calls to heaven for vengeance--defrauding laborers of their wages; because to pay a man less than a decent living wage is to defraud that laborer of his wages. no man has a right to go into the labor market and buy labor as cheaply as he can. men must live, they must support their families, and to compel them to take less than a decent living wage is to hold them in slavery. every man who derives an income from such sources must know whether there is injustice at work or not in whatever he benefits by. it is easy to plead ignorance, but the ignorance is no justification. when we take money from something we must know that that money has no taint of injustice about it. there is a startling passage in the scriptures that i have often thought should be repeated more frequently in our time. it is, "from the sins we know not of, o lord deliver us." there are many things that are done for the educated rich in our time, things that are full of injustice, yet from which the rich derive great benefits for which they will be held responsible. i cannot see it else. we hear much in our time of the stewardship of wealth, of the fact that if a man has much more money than others he is bound thereby to do more good with it, just inasmuch as he has superfluous means must he accomplish not only actually more but { } proportionately more than those who are less wealthy around him. what is true thus of material wealth is even truer of intellectual wealth. the man who has more education than his neighbors is bound thereby to be helpful to his neighbors, to uplift them--how much one hesitates to use that much-abused word,--to help solve their problems, to make life happier for them; he is bound to use his faculties, god-given as they are and developed by intellectual opportunities, not for himself alone, but for all those around him. unfortunately recent generations of college men have not taken this responsibility seriously, or have not seen the duty that lay before them and the burden imposed on them by the very necessity of conditions. as a consequence they have often been leaders in evil. they have almost invariably been protagonists of selfishness and of individualism. so long as they have gotten much out of life they have not cared whether others have had the paths for even reasonable happiness and some opportunities in life made smooth. only too often they have been a stumbling block in the road for others less educated than they. they have been the men higher up, the bribers who are ever so much worse than the bribed, the company directors who have turned aside and seen evil and injustice and pretended in smug propriety that it was no affair of theirs, or perhaps have said in self-justification--and such self-justification!--that if they did not do it { } others would; the wealthy men who have used every means to get around the law to oppress the poor, to add useless wealth to useless wealth at the cost of others, even at the risk of subverting liberty, overturning government and ruining this latest experiment in democracy. i am not a muckraker, but we cannot hide from ourselves and we must not miss the real meaning of the events in the life around us as it really is. when i think of the situation i am prone to compare with it other generations of college men and what they accomplished. history is not worth while if it tells us only of the past. it is of no more value than any other story, real or fictitious. history is significant only when the lessons of the past are valuable to the present. we are prone to think of education as influencing deeply only recent generations. let me try and tell you briefly the story of some generations of college men who accomplished things that it will be worth while for us to consider to-day. when the universities came into existence in the early thirteenth century social conditions were about as bad as can well be imagined. the incursions of the goths had rubbed out all the old roman law and the customs of the various nations had been obliterated in the disorder of the migration of the nations, when might absolutely made right. gradually out of the inevitable lawlessness of the dark ages the church, by her beneficent influence, brought the beginnings of { } law and order so far as barbarous peoples could be lifted up. in the sixth century there was nearly everywhere in europe social chaos. during the next centuries came the gradual uplift. christianity in ireland did much even in the preceding century, and then helped in the regeneration of europe in the succeeding centuries. charlemagne helped greatly, as his name chronicles, and alfred, well deserving of the name the great, carried on his work. in the tenth century everywhere the dawn of better things was to be seen. in the eleventh century organization of civil rights begins to make itself felt; in the twelfth century the universities were coming into existence; and then with the thirteenth century there was a great rejuvenescence of humanity in every department, but, above all, in the social order. under feudalism men had no rights of themselves except such as were conferred on them by some external agency. in the thirteenth century the essential rights of man begin to make themselves felt and find confident assertion. it is not hard to trace the steps of the development. magna charta was signed in . the first english parliament met in . the representative nature of that parliament became complete in the next twenty years. the english common law was put into form about the beginning of the last quarter of the century and in bracton published his great digest of it. the principle there shall be no taxation without { } representation, our own basis for the declaration of independence five centuries later, was proclaimed as early as and was emphasized by the great pope boniface viii at the end of the century. early in the century, the great lateran council decreed that every diocese in the world should have a college and that the metropolitan sees at least should have such opportunities for post-graduate study as we now call universities. the first great pope of the century, innocent iii, laid the foundation of a great city hospital in rome and required that every bishop throughout the world should have one in his see and that the model of it should be that of the santo spirito hospital in rome. leprosy was an epidemic disease among the people, somewhat as tuberculosis is now; measures were taken for the segregation of lepers, leper hospitals were built for them outside of the town, and these great generations solved a problem in hygiene as difficult as is ours with regard to tuberculosis. above all, the rights of the people were assured to them. at the beginning of the century probably the most striking thing among the population of the various towns, if a modern had a chance to visit them, would be the number of the maimed and the halt and the blind. we would be apt to wonder where were the industrial and manufacturing plants responsible for all this maiming of the people, and look in vain for the belching chimneys of factories or trains. it was { } another form of selfishness that produced cripples in the twelfth century. punishment was by maiming. for offences against property a man lost an eye, or a hand, or a leg. very often the offences were of a kind that we would resent punishment for in the modern time. if a man were caught poaching on a nobleman's preserves of game, and sometimes it was the hunger of his children that drove him to it, he lost a hand. for a second offence, he lost an eye. for failures to pay various taxes, if the offence were repeated, maiming was likely to be the consequence. all this was in as perfect accordance with law as our fellow-servant or contributory-negligence doctrines. so that the sight of the maimed person might deter others from following this example of recalcitrancy, it was hoped that these cripples would not die, though in the imperfect surgery of the time they often did. always the selfish pleasures of the upper classes so-called, when they are thoughtless, mean the loss of all possibilities of happiness for the lower classes. the ways of it all may be different from age to age, the results and the responsibility are always the same. in the thirteenth century all this was changed. st. louis of france sent one of his greatest noblemen who had unreasonably punished student poachers on a penitential pilgrimage to the holy land and inflicted a heavy fine, and all notwithstanding the protest of the most powerful nobles { } of his kingdom whose rights were invaded. how we do always hear about the invasion of the rights of the entrenched classes. in england men, even men without any patent of nobility or clerical privilege, began to have rights and others had duties towards them. above all, men were given opportunities to bring out what was best in them. the great cathedrals were built, the great monasteries, some of the greatest castles, some of the fine colleges at the universities. many of the municipal buildings were erected in the glorious architecture of the times. at these men were employed in what is probably the happiest work that a man can do. they had the chance to express themselves in the beautiful achievements of their hands. the village blacksmith made gates, and locks, and bolts, and hinges for cathedrals that are so beautiful that all the world has wondered at them ever since. the stained glass is the finest ever made. the illuminated books are beautiful beyond description, the handsomest of all times. the needlework of the vestments stands out as the most beautiful in history. the men and women who did these things were happy in the execution of beautiful works of art, and as the population was only scanty a large proportion of them were closer to beautiful things than the world has ever known. blessed is the man who has found his work. these men had found their work and were happy. instead of going out to the deadly routine of { } work they did not like, but that they had to do, because they must earn enough so as to get bread enough to eat for themselves and family, so that they might live and go out and work once more to-morrow and to-morrow, and so on to the end of recorded time, the workman dreamt of the beauty that he might express; went out hoping to achieve it; failed often but still hoped, and hope is life's best consolation; came away reluctantly, thinking that surely he would accomplish something on the morrow. it is the difference between mere routine work and the handicraftsmanship that satisfies because it occupies the whole man. is it any wonder that our workman is discontented; is it any wonder that the england of that time should be called merry england and the france and italy gay france and italy? all this organization of the workmen was accomplished by the university men of the time. they were mainly clergymen, but they had in them not only the wish, but the faculty to help those around them, and so there arose the beautiful creations of that time in art, architecture, literature and political freedom which did so much for the masses of the people. there were more students at the universities at the end of the thirteenth century to the population of the various countries of europe than there are at the present time. that seems impossible, but so do all the other achievements of the thirteenth century,--their cathedrals, their arts and crafts, their { } universities, their literature,--until you go back to study them. there is absolutely no doubt about these statistics. these university men were trained to self-government and to the government of others in the university life of the time. they took that training out with them, not for selfish purposes alone, but for the help of others. what they accomplished is to be found in the social uplift that followed. there is scarcely a right or a development of liberty that we have now that cannot be found, in germ at least, often in complete evolution, in the thirteenth century. the supreme courts of most of our states still make their decisions following the old english common law which was laid down in that century. but it will be said, while so much was done for the workman, have we not heard that his wages were a few cents, almost nothing, and that his hours were long and he was little better than a slave? only the first portion of this has any truth in it. he did get what seems to us a mere pittance for his day's wages. as pointed out by m. urbain gohier, the french socialist, when he visited this country to lecture a few years ago, the workmen of this time had already obtained the eight-hour day, the three eights as they are called, eight hours of work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for themselves. besides they had the saturday half-holiday, or at least, after the vesper hour, work could not be required of them, and there was more than one holy-day of { } obligation every two weeks, on which they did not work, and on the vigil of which work ceased at four o'clock. as for their wages, by act of parliament they got fourpence a day at the end of the century and this does not seem much, but the same act of parliament set the minimum wage and the maximum price that could be charged for the necessities of life. a pair of hand-made shoes could be bought for fourpence, and no workman can do anything like that for a day's wage at the present or usually for more than double his daily wages. a fat goose cost but twopence halfpenny, and when the father of a family can buy two fat geese for his daily wages, there is no danger of the family starving. our wages are higher, but the necessities of life have gone up so high that the wages can scarcely touch them. in the parliament that passed these laws the greater proportion were college men. i suppose probably three-fourths of the members of both houses had been at the university. now that the question of the abolition of the house of lords is occupying much attention, we sometimes hear of it as a mediaeval institution. it is spoken of as an inheritance from an earlier and ruder time. i wonder how much the people who talk thus know about the realities. they must be densely ignorant of what the house of lords used to be. at the present moment there are in the english house of lords members, only { } of whom do not owe their position directly or solely to the accident of birth. even about half of this seventy-five can only be selected from the hereditary nobility of scotland and of ireland. in the middle ages it was quite different. until the reformation so-called the lords spiritual formed a majority of the house of lords. they consisted not only of the bishops but of the abbots and priors of monasteries and the masters of the various religious and knightly orders. this upper chamber of the olden time was elected in the best possible sense of the word. they were usually men who had risen from the ranks of the people and who had been chosen because of their unselfishness to be heads of religious houses and religious orders. there were abuses by which some of these lords spiritual obtained their places by what we now call pull, but the great majority of them were selected for their virtues, and because they had shown their power to rule over themselves had been chosen to rule over others. they were men who could own nothing for themselves and families, and in whom every motive, human and divine, appealed to make life as happy as possible for others. they were all of them university men. compare for a moment the present house of lords with that house of lords and you will see the difference between the old time and the present. no wonder england was merry england, no wonder historian { } after historian has declared that the people were happier at this time than they have ever been before or since, no wonder men had leisure to make great monuments of genius in architecture, in the arts and in literature. no wonder the universities, in the form in which they have been useful to mankind ever since, were organized in this century; no wonder all our rights and liberties come to us. great generations of the university men nobly did their work. young men, you are graduating from a college that is literally a lineal descendant of those old-time universities. you have had the training of heart and of will as well as of mind that was given to these students of the olden times. you have been taught that the end of life is not self, but that life shall mean something for others as well as yourself, that every action shall be looked at from the standpoint of what it means for others as well as for yourselves, and that you shall never do anything that will even remotely injure others. you are not only going to lead honest but honorable lives. you are going to be true to yourselves first, but absolutely faithful to others. they are telling a story in new york now that, perhaps, some of you have heard. it is of the young man who had graduated at the head of his class at the high school and delighted his old father's heart. he kept up the good work, and came out first in his class at college. then, when { } he led a large class at the law school, you can understand how proud the old gentleman was. tom came home to practise law in a long-established firm where there was an opening for him. some six months later he said, one day, to his father, "well, i made $ , to-day," and the old gentleman said, "well, tom, that is a good deal of money to make. i hope you made it honestly." the young man lifted his head and said, "you can be sure that i would not make it dishonestly." "that is right," the old man said. "tell us how it came about." then tom told how he knew that a trolley line was going to run out far from town and that he had secured an option on some property through which it was going to pass. "you know old farmer simpson out on the plank road?" he said. "his boys have left him and gone to the city; he cannot work his farm any longer himself, and he cannot hire men for it, and he wants to get rid of it. i got positive information yesterday through one of our clients that a trolley line is going out through that farm. when i went out to see the old man he knew me at once, spoke about you, and when i offered to try to sell the farm for him and suggested the advisability of signing an option on it to me at a definite figure, so that i may be able to close the price with any one who wanted it, he signed at once at a ridiculously low figure because, though, as he said, he did not care to sign the papers for lawyer folk, { } he knew i was different. i have got the farm at so low a price that $ , is the smallest profit i can look for. i think i will get that profit out of the company for the right of way, and then i will have the rest of the farm for myself. it will make a mighty nice country place." then there was a pause. the old gentleman did not lighten up any over the story, as tom seemed to think he would. after a minute's silence the old man said, "well, tom, that was not what i sent you to college and law school for, to come out here and take advantage of my old neighbors. i thought that you would be helpful to us all, and that there would be more of happiness in the world because of your education. you may call that transaction honest, and perhaps it is legal, but i know that it is dishonorable. tom, if you don't give farmer simpson back his option i do not think i want you to live here with me any more. somehow i couldn't feel as if i could hold up my head if ever i passed farmer simpson and his wife, if you did. you may act as his attorney if you will and take a good fair fee for it, but you must not absorb all the profits just because the old man is in trouble and is glad to trust an old neighbor's son." of course tom's father was dreadfully old-fashioned and out of date. of course there are some people who will say that this sort of thing is quixotic. now, this sort of thing is what higher education should mean, and does mean, in a { } catholic college. your principles are not taught you for the sake of exercises of piety, nor attendance at religious duties. these you have got to do anyhow, but they are meant to inflow into every action of your life and to make the basic principle of them all, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." you are graduating from a catholic college with high aims, you have had many advantages, more than are accorded usually in our time to men of your years in the training of heart and will as well as intellect, and much is expected of you. you are rich in real education and a stewardship of great intellectual and moral wealth is given over to you, and you must be better than others and be, above all, ever helpful to others. your education was not given for your benefit, but for that of the community. your neighbors are all round you. see that at the end of your life they shall all be happier because you have lived. if you do not do so you shall sadly disappoint the hopes of your teachers and, above all, you shall be false to the trust that has been confided to you. pass on the torch of charity. let all the world be dear to you in the old-fashioned sense of that dear old word charity, not merely distantly friendly in the new-fangled sense of the long greek term philanthropy. be just while you are living your lives and you will not have the burden of philanthropy that so many rich men are now complaining of in your older years, and, above all, { } you will not have the contempt and aversion of those who may accept your bounty, but who know how questionably you acquired the means of giving it and are not really thankful. i have done but for just one word. be just and fear not. if you will be just in your dealing with men, you will have no need for further advice and no need for repentance. i thank you. { } new englandism { } "it isn't so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them ridiculous as the knowing so many things that ain't so." --josh billings, _writing as "uncle esek" in the "century."_ { } new englandism [footnote ] [footnote : the material for this was collected for a banquet address in boston on evacuation day, , before the knights of columbus. it was developed for various lectures on the history of education, in order to illustrate how easy it is to produce a tradition which is not supported by historical documents. in its present form it appeared as an article in the _west coast magazine_ for july, , at the request of the editor, mr. john s. mcgroarty, with whom, more years ago than either of us care to recall now, i had learned the new england brand of united states history at a country school.] there is a little story told of a supposed recent celestial experience, that seems, to some people, at least--perhaps it may be said without exaggeration, to most of those alas! not born in new england--to illustrate very well the attitude of new englanders, and especially of the bostonese portion of the new england population, towards all the rest of the world and the heavens besides. st. peter, the celestial gate-keeper, is supposed to be disturbed from the slumbers that have been possible so much oftener of late years because of the infrequent admissions since the world has lost interest in other-worldliness, by an imperious knocking at the gate. "who's there?" he asks in a very mild voice, for he knows by long experience that that kind of knocking usually comes from some grand dame from the terrestrial regions. the reply, in rather imperative { } tone, is, "i am mrs. beacon from boston," with emphasis on the boston, "well, madam," peter says in reply, "you may come in, but," he adds with a wisdom learned doubtless from many previous incidents of the same kind, "you won't like it." of course, the thoroughgoing admiration of new england people, and especially of bostonians, for all that is new england, and, above all, all that is boston, has been well recognized for a long while and has not failed of proper appreciation, to some degree at least, even in new england itself. to oliver wendell holmes we owe that delightful characterization of it in the "autocrat of the breakfast table," "boston state house is the hub of the solar system. you could not pry that out of a boston man (and _a fortiori_ i think it may be said out of a boston woman) if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar." james russell lowell expressed the same idea very forcibly in other words in some expressions of his essay on "a certain condescension in foreigners," that have been perhaps oftenest quoted and are dear to every true new englander's heart. of course, he meant it a great deal more than half in jest, but who of us who know our down easterners doubt that most of them take it considerably more than half in earnest? their attitude shows us very well how much the daughter new england was ready to take after mother england in { } the matter of thinking so much of herself that she must perforce be condescending to others. lowell's expression is worthy to be placed beside that of oliver wendell holmes for the guidance of american minds. they are keys to the situation. "i know one person," said lowell, "who is singular enough to think cambridge (mass.) the very best spot on the habitable globe. 'doubtless god could have made a better, but doubtless he never did.'" it only needed his next sentence fully to complete the significance of boston and its academic suburb in the eyes of every good bostonian. "the full tide of human existence may be felt here as keenly as johnson felt it at charing cross and in a larger sense." of course there is no insuperable objection to allowing new englanders to add to the gayety of nations in this supreme occupation with themselves, and we would gladly suffer them if only they would not intrude their new englandism on some of the most important concerns of the nation. but that is impossible, for new englandism is most obtrusive. it is new england that has written most of the history of this country and its influence has been paramount on most of our education. it has supplied most of the writers of history and moulded most of the school-teachers of the country. the consequence has been a stamping of new englandism all over our history and on the minds of rising generations for the better part of a century, with a { } perversion of the realities of history in favor of new england that is quite startling when attention is particularly directed to it. the editors of the "cambridge modern history," in their preface, called attention to the immense differences between what may be called documentary and traditional history. they declare that it has become "impossible for historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. the honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals, and official publications in order to reach the truth." most people reading this would be prone to think that any such arraignment of american history, as is thus made by the distinguished cambridge editors of history in general, would be quite out of the question. after all, our history, properly speaking, extends only over a couple of centuries and we would presumably be too close to the events for any serious distortion of them to have been made. for that reason it is interesting to realize what an unfortunate influence the fact that our writers have come mainly from new england and have been full of the new england spirit has had on our american history. every american schoolboy is likely to be possessed of the idea that the first blood shed in the revolution was in the so-called boston massacre. { } it is well known that that event thus described was nothing more than a street brawl in which five totally unarmed passers-by were shot down without their making the slightest resistance, as an act of retaliation on the part of drunken soldiers annoyed by boys throwing snowballs at them. this has been magnified into an important historical event. two months before it, however, there was an encounter in new york with the citizens under arms as well as the soldiers, and it was at golden hill on manhattan island and not in boston that the first blood of the revolution was shed. miss mary l. booth, in her "history of the city of new york," says: "thus ended the battle of golden hill, a conflict of two days' duration, which, originating as it did in the defense of a principle, was an affair of which new yorkers have just reason to be proud, and which is worthy of far more prominence than has usually been given it by standard historians. it was not until nearly two months after that the boston massacre occurred, a contest which has been glorified and perpetuated in history, yet this was second both in date and in significance to the new york battle of golden hill." practically every other incident of these times has been treated in just this way, in our school histories at least. every american schoolboy knows of the boston tea party, and usually can and does tell the story with great gusto because { } it delights his youthful dramatic sense. not only the children, but every one else seems to think that the organization of the tea party was entirely due to the new england spirit of resistance to "taxation without representation." how few of them are taught that this destruction of the tea had been definitely agreed upon by all the colonies and that it was only by chance that massachusetts happened to be first in the execution of the project. my friend, dr. thomas addis emmet, in his article on "some popular myths of american history," in the _magazine of history_ (february, ), has stated this aspect of the question very forcibly. "previous to the arrival of the ships in boston, concerted action had been agreed upon, as has been already shown, in regard to the destruction of the tea, from charleston, s. c., to portsmouth, n. h. the people of philadelphia had been far more active and outspoken at the outset than they of boston, and it was this decisiveness which caused the people of boston to act, after they had freely sought beforehand the advice and moral support of the other colonies." it would be utterly unjust to limit the movement which culminated in the boston tea party to any one or even several of the colonies; to make so much of the boston incident is to falsify history in fact, but, above all, in the impression produced upon the rising generation that boston was a leader in this movement. the first { } tea-ship arrived in boston november , , and two others shortly after, but it was not until the evening of december th that their contents were thrown overboard. over six weeks before this a precisely similar occurrence had taken place in new york without any such delay, and though the movement proved futile because it was undertaken on a false alarm, it is easy to understand that due credit should be given to those who took part in it for their thoroughgoing spirit of opposition to british measures. on this subject once more dr. emmet, whose great collection of americana made him probably more familiar with he sources of american history than any one of our generation, has been, in the article already quoted, especially emphatic. "on november , , an alarm was raised in the city of new york to the effect that a tea-ship had entered the harbor. a large assembly of people at once occurred, among whom those in charge of the movement were disguised as mohawk indians. this alarm proved a false one, but at a meeting then organized a series of resolutions was adopted which was received by the other colonies as the initiative in the plan of resistance already determined upon throughout the country. our schoolbooks are chiefly responsible for the almost universal impression that the destruction of tea, which occurred in boston harbor, was an episode confined to that city, while the fact is that the tea sent to this country was either { } destroyed or sent back to england from every seaport in the colonies. the first tea-ship happened to arrive in boston and the first tea was destroyed there; for this circumstance due credit should be given the bostonians. but the fact that the actors in this affair were disguised as mohawk indians shows that they were but following the lead of new york, where this particular disguise had been adopted forty-one days before, for the same purpose." just as the boston massacre has been insistently pointed out as the first blood shed for american liberty, so the battle of lexington has been drilled into our school children's minds as the first organized armed resistance to the british. without wishing at all to detract from the glory of those who fought at lexington, there is every reason not to let the youth of this country grow up with the notion that massachusetts was the first to put itself formally under arms against the mother country. lexington was not fought until april , . the battle of alamance, n. c., which occurred on may , , deserves much more to be considered as the first organized resistance to british oppression. the north carolina regulators rather than the new england minute men should have the honor of priority as the first armed defenders of their rights against encroachment. the subject is all the more interesting because the british leader who tried to ride rough-shod over stout americans in north carolina and met { } with open opposition was the infamous general tryon of subsequent connecticut fame. every one knows of his pernicious activity in connecticut, very few that he had been previously active in north carolina. that is the difference between history as "it has been written" for new england and the south. that the battle of alamance was no mere chance engagement, and that the north carolinians were aflame with the real spirit that finally gave freedom to the colonies, can be best realized from the fact that the first declaration of independence was made at mecklenberg in north carolina, and that some of its sentiments, and even perhaps its phrases, were adopted in the subsequent formal declaration of independence of all the colonies. for those who may be surprised that north carolina should have been so prominent in these first steps in revolutionary history and these primary developments of the great movement that led to the freedom of the colonies, for we are accustomed to think of north carolina as one of the backward, unimportant portions of the country, it may be well to say that at the time of the revolution she was the third state in the union in population, following virginia and pennsylvania in the number of inhabitants, exceeding new york in population by the total census of new york city and long island, and ahead of massachusetts, which immediately followed it in the list by almost as many. the sturdy { } inhabitants of the northern of the carolinas had been for a decade before the revolution constantly a thorn in the side of the british government and had been recognized as leaders in the great movement that was gradually being organized to bring all the colonies together for mutual help against the encroachments of the british government on their rights. our school children fail almost entirely to know this because they have been absorbed by massachusetts history--but then north carolina did not have the good fortune to have writers of history. new england had them and to spare, and with a patriotic zeal for their native heath beyond even their numbers. of course it may be said that these are old-time historical traditions which have found their way into history and are difficult to get out, though most of those who know any history realize their absurdity, and the modern historian, even though he may be from new england, holds the balance much more equitably between the different portions of the country. apparently this is just what is not true, for new england professors of history and writers of history still continue to write in the same old strain of such surpassing admiration for new englanders that every other portion of the country is cast into shadow. it was a distinguished professor of history at harvard who, within five years, in an important historical work, [footnote ] said: "whatever the social mixture { } of the future, one thing is certain; the standards, aspirations and moral and political ideas of the original english settlers not only dominate their own descendants, but permeate the body of immigrants of other races--the puritans have furnished the little leaven that leavens the whole lump." [footnote : "the american nation," vols.] one wonders just what such a sentence means and, of course, finds it in many ways amazingly amusing. one would think that the only english settlers were the puritans, and that they had had great influence in the origin of our government. apparently, for the moment at least, this harvard professor forgot in his enthusiasm for the forefathers in massachusetts that the other branch of english settlers, those of virginia, were ever so much more important in the colonial times and for long afterwards, than the puritans. of the first five presidents four were from virginia. it is possible they forget now, in massachusetts, that only one was from massachusetts, and that that one did more to disturb government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" than any other, so that after four short years the country would have no more of him and no more of these massachusetts puritans for more than a quarter of a century. this dear, good professor of harvard has deliberately called all the non-english elements in our population foreigners because of his absorption in new england. he said: "if the list of american { } great men be scanned the contribution of the foreigner stands out clearly. the two greatest financiers of america have been the english west indian alexander hamilton and the genevan albert gallatin. two presidents, van buren and roosevelt, are of dutch stock; five others, jackson, buchanan, grant, arthur and mckinley of scotch and scotch-irish descent." all "foreigners" except the new englanders! save the mark! it is rather interesting to find that their contemporaries of the revolutionary period did not share that high estimation of the new englanders which they themselves clung to so tenaciously and have writ so large in our history that the tradition of new england's unselfish wonder-working in that olden time has never perished. most of us are likely to know something about the rather low estimation, at most toleration, in which during the revolutionary period many of the members of congress from new england were held by fellow-members of congress from other portions of the country. they were the most difficult to bring into harmony with others, the slowest to see anything that did not directly enhance the interests of new england; they were more constantly in opposition to great movements that meant much for the future of the colonies themselves and the government of the united states afterward than any others. we are prone to excuse this, however, on the score { } of their intolerant puritanism, and taught by our new england schoolmasters, most of us, at least, fondly cherish the notion that all the new englanders made supreme sacrifices for the country and did it with a whole-hearted spirit of self-forgetfulness that made every man, above all in massachusetts, an out-and-out patriot. it is curious to find how different were the opinions of those from other portions of the country who came in contact with new englanders at this time, from that which is to be found in their histories. washington, for instance, had by no means the same high opinion of the new englanders, and, above all, of the new england troops, that they had of themselves and that their historians have so carefully presented of them. it is said that sparks edited many of washington's criticisms of new englanders out of his edition of the "life and letters." certain it is that some of the letters which sparks did not consider it proper to quote from, contain material that is very interesting for the modern historian who wants to get at contemporary documents, and for whom contemporary opinions such as that of washington cannot but seem especially valuable. in a letter from the camp at cambridge, august , , to lund washington at mt. vernon, washington said: "the people of this government [massachusetts] have obtained a character which they by no means deserve; their officers, generally { } speaking, are the most indifferent kind of people i ever saw. i have already broke one colonel and five captains for cowardice, and for drawing more pay and provisions than they had men in their companies. there are two more colonels now under arrest and to be tried for the same offenses; in short, they are by no means such troops, in any respect, as you are led to believe of them from the accounts which are published; but i need not make myself enemies among them by this declaration, although it is consistent with truth. i dare say the men would fight very well (if properly officered), although they are an exceedingly dirty and nasty people. had they been properly conducted at bunker's hill (on the th of june) or those that were there properly supported, the regulars would have met with a shameful defeat, and a much more considerable loss than they did, which is now known to be exactly , , killed and wounded. it was for their behavior on that occasion that the above officers were broke, for i never spared one that was accused of cowardice, but brought them to immediate trial." one of the most interesting perversions of the history written by new englanders is that in their emphasis of new englandism they have sometimes signally failed to write even their own history as the documents show it. there has been much insistence, for instance, on the supposed absolute purity of the english origin of { } the settlers in new england and especially in massachusetts until long after the revolution. palfrey, in the introduction to his "history of new england," says: "the people of new england are a singularly unmixed race. there is probably not a county in england occupied by a population of purer english blood than they are." senator lodge, forty years later, in his "history of the revolution," re-echoes mr. palfrey's words, and says that "the people were of almost pure english blood, with a small infusion of huguenots and a slight mingling in new hampshire of scotch-irish from londonderry." during the past ten years the secretary of state of massachusetts, by order of the legislature, has been compiling from the state archives the muster roll of the massachusetts soldiers and sailors of the revolutionary war. this does not bear out at all what mr. palfrey and mr. lodge have asserted so emphatically as to the exclusively english origin of the population of new england and, above all, of massachusetts at this critical time. there is not a familiar irish name that does not occur many times. the fighting race was well represented. there were kellys and burkes, though by some unaccountable circumstance only sheas. there were o'briens and other o's and macs galore. there are aherns and brannigans and bannons and careys and carrolls and connellys, connors and corcorans and costellos and cosgroves and { } costigans, and so on right through the alphabet. curiously enough there are no lodges on the muster roll, but there is not an irish name beginning with "l" that is not represented. there are no less than larkins and some learys and lonergans and lanigans and all the other celtic patronymics in "l." dr. emmet, who has investigated very carefully the question of the deportation of the irish to this country under cromwell, says that many shiploads of them were sent to massachusetts in the seventeenth century. he declares that enough irish girls were sent over to massachusetts at this time to furnish wives for all the immediate descendants of the puritans. there are certainly many more irish names than are dreamt of in the very early times. priscilla alden's name before she tempted john to give her his rather pretty name, has never found its way into poetry because no poetry would stand it--it was mullen or mullins. even after the revolution the place of new england, but especially massachusetts, in the republic has been sadly misrepresented in our american history as a rule, because our school historians at least have usually been bostonians. when washington, in , made his first visit as president of the united states to new england, he was received very enthusiastically in connecticut, though this state had not been wholly favorable to the new government, but in { } massachusetts his reception was distinctly cold, and indeed, almost insulting. john hancock was governor of this state and he absolutely refused to meet the president at the state line, though most other governors had done this, and while president washington was in boston he declined even to call on him. the reason for this was the assumption of a characteristic massachusetts attitude. there seems no doubt now that john hancock, not because he was pompous john hancock, not because he was the governor of massachusetts--and this idea had been fostered among his people--honestly believed that the governor of massachusetts was a greater man in every way than the president of the nation. there are many who might say that this state of mind has endured even to the present time. certainly massachusetts' representative men have constantly set the interests of their commonwealth above those of the union. new england has always had a tendency that way. during the newspaper agitation over the recent tariff bill one of the cartoonists represented the united states as a puppy dog with new england as the tail, with the caption, "how long is the tail going to wag the dog?" during the second war with great britain in new england was the most recalcitrant portion of the union, and another conceited governor of the state hampered the nation in every way. our histories for { } schools, at least, have been so written as to produce the impression that only the south ever was dissatisfied with the union, inclined to be rebellious and ready to talk about the nullification of the compact which bound the states together. the hartford convention is mentioned, but not given near the place that it deserves, since it represents the feeling, very rife at that time, that such a procedure as nullification was quite justifiable. twelve delegates from massachusetts were present in this convention and there was a decided spirit of rebellion against the general government because, forsooth, the war had injured boston's business. it is not alone in history, however, that new england's thoroughgoing admiration for herself has served to disturb the attainment of truth by the rising generation of americans. besides exaggerating the comparative influence of new england in the affairs of the country, they have exaggerated the place of favorite new england authors in the literature of the world to such a degree that growing young america cannot help but have a number of false notions of comparative literary values, which he has to rid himself of before he is able to attain any proper appreciation of world literature or even of english literature. a little group of new england literary folk came into prominence about the middle of the nineteenth century. because they were the best that new england could produce, { } apparently they were considered by new englanders as the best in the world. english critics, of course, laughed at their self-complacency, but our new england schoolmasters took new england's writers so seriously and proceeded to write so much about them and make them so much the subject of teaching not alone in new england but in every part of the country, that now it is almost impossible to get our people to accept any true standards, since admiration for these quite unimportant new england writers has ruined any proper critical literary appreciation. as a consequence our rising generations for some time have been inclined to take emerson seriously as a great philosopher, writer and thinker. they have been very prone to accept dear old oliver wendell holmes, kindliest of men, charmingest of writers, as a great literary man. there have literally been hundreds of english writers such as these in the past three centuries of english literary history, who now take up at most but a few lines in even large histories of english literature. taking emerson seriously is fortunately going out of fashion. if one wanted a criterion of the depth of thought of the generation that accepted him originally and passed him along as a significant philosophic prophet, then surely one need go no farther. our optimistic carlyle, writing in a minor key, looms up so much smaller now than a generation ago that we can readily realize how { } new englandism infected literary and philosophic standards. what is thus said of emerson may be repeated, with perhaps a little less emphasis, of the other writers whom new england has insisted on proclaiming to the world as representative of all that was best and highest in literature--because for a moment they commanded attention in new england. there was a time, not so long ago, when it was considered the proper thing in this country to talk of longfellow as a great poet. of course, no one does so any more. the devotion to him of so much time in our schools, while so many much more important contributions to our english poetry have but scanty attention paid them, is still producing not only a false impression on children's minds as to his proper place in literature, but is playing sad havoc with literary standards generally, so far as they may be the subject of teaching. longfellow was, of course, nothing more than a pleasant balladist and a writer of conventional thoughts on rather commonplace themes in reasonably smooth verse. for really profound thought longfellow's poetry has never a place. his loftiest flights of imagination do not bring him anywhere near the great mysteries of human life or the deep thoughts that run through men's minds when they are touched to the quick. of the sterner passions of men he had scarcely an inkling. whittier, of course, has much more real poetry { } in his little store of verse than longfellow, but whittier's voice is only a very low treble and his religious training was too narrow to permit him any breadth of poetic feeling. no one thinks now that anything that whittier wrote will live to be read by any but curious students of certain anti-slavery movements in connection with the history of our civil war. he will have an interest for antiquarian litterateurs, scarcely more than that. of james russell lowell's rather charming academic verse one would prefer to say nothing, only that the serious study of it in our schools leads the present generation to think that he, too, must be considered seriously as a poet. it is doubtful if russell lowell ever thought of himself as a poet at all. appropriate thoughts charmingly expressed for occasions, in verse reasonably tuneful, he could do better than most men of his time in america--that was all. of real poetic quality there is almost none. lowell's verse will not be read at all except by the professional critic before another generation has passed, and i am sure that no one realized this better than lowell himself. what longfellow and lowell will be remembered for in the history of nineteenth century literature, most of the rising generation of americans know very little about and the great majority of them completely ignore. it is for their critical and expository work in introducing great foreign authors--really great poets--to the { } knowledge of their countrymen that both longfellow and lowell will deserve the gratitude of all future generations and some of their work in this regard will endure when their verse is forgotten. longfellow's edition of dante was not only well worth all the time he gave to it during thirty years, but represents a monument in american literature that will be fondly looked back to by many a generation of english-speaking people. very probably of his work in verse the "golden legend" will mean more to a future generation than almost anything else that longfellow has done. above all, it was precious in making americans realize how profound and how beautiful had been the work of the poets of europe seven centuries ago. in the light of this gradual reduction of the value of new england's literature to its lowest terms it is extremely amusing to find occasionally expressions of the value of the new england period in english literature as expressed by enthusiastic new englanders and, above all, by ardent--what, for want of a better term we must call--new englanderesses. one of these, miss helen winslow, has recently and quite deservedly been made great fun of by mr. h. w. horwin in an article in the _national review_ (england), headed, "are americans provincial?" which brings home a few truths to us in what concerns our complacent self-satisfaction with ourselves. miss winslow declares that the { } great bostonian period was "a literary epoch, the like of which has scarcely been known since the elizabethan period." she proclaims that "the papyrus club [of boston] is known to men of letters and attainments everywhere." she notes that "scott, balzac and thackeray received a legal training," just when she is going to add that "robert grant is also a lawyer." she adds that "young people everywhere adore the name of sophie sweet" (whoever she may be). is it any wonder that the ordinary non-new-england american "gets hot under the collar" for his countrymen under such circumstances? two really great masters of literature we had in america during the nineteenth century, poe and hawthorne. because of our new england schoolmasters, as it seems to most of us, poe has never come into his own proper appreciation in this country. the french consider him the great master of the short story, and that has come to occupy such a prominent place in our so-called literature in america, that one might look for an apotheosis of poe. he is the one writer whose works in both prose and verse have influenced deeply the literary men of other countries besides our own. no other american writer has been given the tribute of more than a perfunctory notice in the non-english-speaking countries. in spite of this poe's name was kept out of the hall of fame at new york university, { } which was meant to enshrine the memory of our greatest thinkers and literary men, though we had generally supposed that the national selection of the jury to decide those whose names should be honored, would preclude all possibility of any narrow sectional influence perverting the true purpose of the institution. poe has never been popular in new england, nor has he been appreciated at his true worth by the literary circles of new england. their schoolmasterly influence has been pervasive enough to keep from poe his true meed of praise among our people generally, though all our poets and literary men look up to him as our greatest poetic genius. as for hawthorne, there is no doubt that he is our greatest american writer in prose. he was the one man in new england with a great message. his writings came from deep down in the human heart, from the very wellsprings of human passion, and had their origin not far from where soul touches body in this human compound. the english, usually supposed to be slow of recognition for things american, acknowledged his high worth almost at once. some of us here in america, indeed, have had the feeling that to a great extent our people have had to learn the lesson of proper appreciation for hawthorne from the english-speaking people across the water. to americans, for years, he was little more than a story-writer, not so popular as { } many another writer of stories, and his really great qualities were to a great extent ignored. because puritan new england was out of sympathy with the mystical spirit of his writings only a late and quite inadequate appreciation of the value of his work was formed by his countrymen. something of this unfortunate lack of appreciation crept into the schoolmastering of the country, and hawthorne is probably not as highly valued in his native land as he is in england, though france and germany have learned to look up to him as our greatest of american literary men--the one of our writers who, with poe, attracts a world audience. when there is question of anything else besides literature, of course, new england has no claims at all to make, and she has stood for many unfortunate austere tendencies in american life. for anything like public spirit for art or music or aesthetics in any department the puritan soul had no use. consequently our artistic development was seriously delayed as a nation by the influence that new england had as the schoolmaster of the country. the consequence was that our churches were bare and ugly, our homes lacking in the spirit of beauty and our municipalities mere places to live and make money in, but with no provision for the enjoyment of life. it is in this that new england has doubtless done us most harm and it is for this reason that many people will re-echo that expression of a { } descendant of the puritans who declares that it would have been "an awfully good thing when the puritans landed on plymouth rock if only plymouth rock had landed on the puritans." it would have saved us an immense deal of inhibition of all the art impulses of this country, which were almost completely choked off for so long by the narrow puritanism so rampant in new england and so diffusively potent in our educational system. in conclusion one feels like recalling once more lowell's "essay on a certain condescension in foreigners." surely the daughter new england, consciously or unconsciously, has treated the rest of the country very much like mother england used to treat nascent english america long ago. there are many of us who in recent years have come to know new englandism and its proneness to be condescending, who have felt very much like paraphrasing, with the addition of the adjective "new" here and there, certain of lowell's best-known sentences. the new version will make quite as satisfactory a bit of satire on our down east compatriots as lowell's hits on the mother country and our english cousins across the water. very probably there are more people who will appreciate the satire in this new application of the great american essayist's words than they did in its original form: "it will take (new) england a great while to get over her airs of patronage toward us, or even passably { } to conceal them. she has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly (new) english, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of (neo-) anglicanism." [additional material] the popes and science--the story of the papal relations to science from the middle ages down to the nineteenth century. by james j. walsh, m. d., ph. d., ll. d. pp. price. $ . net. prof. pagel, professor of history at the university of berlin: "this book represents the most serious contribution to the history of medicine that has ever come out of america." sir clifford allbutt, regius professor of physic at the university of cambridge (england): "the book as a whole is a fair as well as a scholarly argument." _the evening post_ (new york) says: "however strong the reader's prejudice * * * * he cannot lay down prof. walsh's volume without at least conceding that the author has driven his pen hard and deep into the 'academic superstition' about papal opposition to science." in a previous issue it had said: "we venture to prophesy that all who swear by dr. andrew d. white's history of the warfare of science with theology in christendom will find their hands full, if they attempt to answer dr. james j. walsh's the popes and science." _the literary digest_ said: "the book is well worth reading for its extensive learning and the vigor of its style." _the southern messenger_ says: "books like this make it clear that it is ignorance alone that makes people, even supposedly educated people, still cling to the old calumnies." _the nation_ (new york) says: "the learned fordham physician has at command an enormous mass of facts, and he orders them with logic, force and literary ease. prof. walsh convicts his opponents of hasty generalizing if not anti-clerical zeal." _the pittsburg post_ says: "with the fair attitude of mind and influenced only by the student's desire to procure knowledge, this book becomes at once something to fascinate. on every page authoritative facts confute the stereotyped statement of the purely theological publications." prof. welch, of johns hopkins, quoting martial, said: "it is pleasant indeed to drink at the living fountain-heads of knowledge after previously having had only the stagnant pools of second-hand authority." prof. piersol, professor of anatomy at the university of pennsylvania, said: "i have been reading the book with the keenest interest, for it indeed presents many subjects in what to me at least is a new light. every man of science looks to the beacon--truth--as his guiding mark, and every opportunity to replace even time-honored misconceptions by what is really the truth must be welcomed." _the independent_ (new york) said: "dr. walsh's books should be read in connection with attacks upon the popes in the matter of science by those who want to get both sides." makers of electricity--by brother potamian, f. c. s., sc. d. (london), professor of physics in manhattan college, and james j. walsh, m. d.. ph. d.. litt. d.. dean and professor of the history of medicine and of nervous diseases at fordham university school of medicine, new york. fordham university press, west th street illustrated. price, $ . net. postage. cents extra. _the scientific american:_ "one will find in this book very good sketches of the lives of the great pioneers in electricity, with a clear presentation of how it was that these men came to make their fundamental experiments, and how we now reach conclusions in science that would have been impossible until their work of revealing was done. the biographies are those of peregrinus, columbus, norman and gilbert, franklin and some contemporaries, galvini, volta, coulomb, oersted, ampére, ohm, faraday, clerk maxwell, and kelvin." _the boston globe:_ "the book is of surpassing interest" _the new york sun:_ "the researches of brother potamian among the pioneers in antiquity and the middle ages are perhaps more interesting than dr. walsh's admirable summaries of the accomplishment of the heroes of modern science. the book testifies to the excellence of catholic scholarship." _the evening post:_ "it is a matter of importance that the work and lives of men like gilbert, franklin, galvini, volta, ampére and others should be made known to the students of electricity, and this office has been well fulfilled by the present authors. the book is no mere compilation, but brings out many interesting and obscure facts, especially about the earlier men." _the philadelphia record:_ "it is a glance at the whole field of electricity by men who are noted for the thoroughness of their research, and it should be made accessible to every reader capable of taking a serious interest in the wonderful phenomena of nature." _electrical world:_ "aside from the intrinsic interest of its matter, the book is delightful to read owing to the graceful literary style common to both authors. one not having the slightest acquaintance with electrical science will find the book of absorbing interest as treating in a human way and with literary art the life work of some of the greatest men of modern times; and, moreover, in the course of his reading he will incidentally obtain a sound knowledge of the main principles upon which almost all present-day electrical development is based. it is a shining example of how science can be popularized without the slightest twisting of facts or distortion of perspective. electrical readers will find the book also a scholarly treatise on the evolution of electrical science, and a most refreshing change from the 'engineering english' of the typical technical writer." catholic summer school press series the highest value attaches to historical research on the lines you so ably indicate, especially at the present time, when the enemies of holy church are making renewed efforts to show her antagonism to science and human progress generally. i shall have much pleasure in perusing your work entitled "the thirteenth greatest of centuries." wishing you every blessing, i am, yours sincerely in xt., r. card. merry del val. rome, january th, . jas. j. walsh, esq., new york. the thirteenth greatest of centuries --by james j. walsh. m. d., ph. d., litt. d.. dean and professor of nervous diseases and of the history of medicine at fordham university school of medicine; professor of physiological psychology at cathedral college, new york. catholic summer school press. west th street, n. t., georgetown university edition. over additional illustrations and twenty-six chapters that might have been, nearly pages. price, $ . , post free. prof. william osler, of oxford, delivering the linacre lecture before the university of cambridge, said: "that good son of the church and of the profession, dr. james j. walsh, has recently published a charming book on the thirteenth as the greatest of centuries. he makes a very good case for what is called the first renaissance." _the saturday review_ (of london): "the volume contains a mass of interesting facts that will start a train of profitable thought in many readers' minds." _the educational review_ said: "the title of dr. walsh's book, the thirteenth greatest of centuries, will startle many readers, but we respectfully commend to the open-minded his presentation of that great epoch. a century that witnessed such extraordinary achievements in architecture, in arts and crafts, in education, and in literature and law, as did the thirteenth, is not to be lightly dismissed or unfavorably compared with periods nearer our own." _the pittsburg post_ said: "dr. walsh writes infused with all the learning of the past, enthusiastic in modern research, and sympathetic, in true scholarly style, with investigation in every line. one need only run over a few of the topical headings to feel how plausible the thesis is. the assemblage of the facts and the elucidation of their mutual relations by dr. walsh shows the master's skill. the work bristles on every page with facts that may be familiar to many, but which were never before so arranged in just perspective with their convincing force so clearly shown." cardinal moran, of sydney, australia: "just the sort of literature we want for english readers at the present day." note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) bill's school and mine a collection of essays on education by william suddards franklin [illustration of author's signature] south bethlehem, pennsylvania franklin, macnutt and charles publishers of educational books all rights reserved copyright, by william s. franklin press of the new era printing company lancaster, pa. dedicated to a university supported and controlled by the people of pennsylvania. the time will come when men will think of nothing but education. nietzsche. * * * * * to face page iv since the first of august, , this prophecy of nietzsche's has shaped itself in the author's mind in an altered tense and in an altered mood.--the time has come when men must think of nothing but education; by education the author does not mean inconsequential bookishness, and neither did nietzsche! * * * * * preface. the greater part of the essay, _bill's school and mine,_ was written in , but the title and some of the material were borrowed from my friend and college mate william allen white in , when the essay was printed in the south bethlehem _globe_ to stimulate interest in a local playground movement. the second essay, _the study of science,_ is taken from franklin and macnutt's _elements of mechanics,_ the macmillan company, new york, . i have no illusions concerning the mathematical sciences, for it is to such that the essay chiefly relates. unquestionably the most important function of education is to develop personality and character; but science is impersonal, and an essay which attempts to set forth the meaning of science study must make an unusual demand upon the reader. some things in this world are to be understood by sympathy, and some things are to be understood by serious and painful effort. the third essay, _part of an education,_ was privately printed in under the title _a tramp trip in the rockies,_ and it is introduced here to illustrate a phase of real education which is in danger of becoming obsolete. the school of hardship is not for those who love luxury, and to the poverty stricken it is not a school--it is a juggernaut. the five minor essays are mere splashes, as it were; but in each i have said everything that need be said, except perhaps in the matter of exhortation. for the illustrations i am under obligations to my cousin mr. daniel garber of philadelphia. william suddards franklin south bethlehem, pa., october , . * * * * * to face page vi supplement to preface. your attention is called especially to the five short essays, or splashes, on pages { }, { }, { }, { } and { }; each of these short essays fills about a page, and if you read them you will understand why the _independent_ has called this little book a package of dynamite. the first essay, entitled bill's school and mine, is easy reading, and if one is not irredeemably literal in one's mode of thinking, it is very pleasant reading. the tall talk which is sprinkled throughout this essay and which reaches a climax on pages { } and { } is not intended to be actually fatal in its seemingly murderous quality! many contented city people in reading this essay should be prompted after the manner of cow-boy who in a spell of seemingly careless gun play says to his sophisticated friend "smile, d---- you, smile". the essay on the study of science is somewhat of a "sticker", and if any particular reader does not like it he can let it alone, but there is an increasing number of young men in this world who must study science whether they like it or not. indeed the object of this particular essay is to explain this remarkable and in some respects distressing fact. the essay relates primarily to the physical sciences, narrowly speaking, because the author's teaching experience has been wholly in physics and chemistry. one can get a fairly good idea of the author's point of view by reading the portions of the essay which stand in large print, but it is quite necessary to read the small print with more or less painful care if one is to get any fundamental idea of the matter under consideration. the reader will please consider thoughtfully the close juxta-position of this essay and the following short essay on the discipline of work. the essay, part of an education, is the story of a tramp trip through the rocky mountains of colorado and wyoming, and it is an introduction to the little essay on the uses of hardship. * * * * * table of contents. pages. bill's school and mine - play as a training in application - the energizing of play - the study of sciences - the discipline of work - part of an education - the uses of hardship - the public school - bill's school and mine it seems that the japanese have domesticated nature. lafcadio hearne. i always think of my school as my boyhood. until i was big enough to swim the missouri river my home was in a little kansas town, and we boys lived in the woods and in the water all summer, and in the woods and on the ice all winter. we trapped and hunted, we rowed and fished, and built dams, and cut stick horses, and kept stick-horse livery stables where the grapevines hung, and where the paw-paws mellowed in the fall. we made mud slides into our swimming hole, and we were artists in mud-tattoo, painting face and body with thin black mud and scraping white stripes from head to foot. we climbed the trees and cut our names, we sucked the sap of the box elder and squashed poke berries for war paint. we picked wild grapes and gooseberries, and made pop-guns to shoot green haws. in the autumn we gathered walnuts, and in the spring we greeted the johnny-jump-ups, and the sweet williams as they peered through the mold. always, we boys were out of doors, as it seems to me; and i did the chores. it is something to learn the toughness of hickory under the saw, how easily walnut splits, how mean elm is to handle; and a certain dexterity comes to a boy who teaches a calf to drink, or slops hogs without soiling his sunday clothes in the evening. and the hay makes acrobats. in the loft a boy learns to turn flip-flops, and with a lariat rope he can make a trapeze. my rings were made by padding the iron rings from the hubs of a lumber wagon and swinging them from the rafters. bill, little bethlehem bill, has a better school than i had; the house and the things that go with it. bill's teachers know more accurately what they are about than did my teachers in the old days out west half a century ago. and, of course, bill is getting things from his school that i did not get. but he is growing up with a woefully distorted idea of life. what does bill know about the woods and the flowers? where in bill's makeup is that which comes from browsing on berries and nuts and the rank paw paw, and roaming the woods like the bander-log? and the crops, what does he know about them? the silver-sides used to live in the pool under the limestone ledges by the old stone quarry where the snakes would sun themselves at noon. the wild rose, with its cinnamon-scented flower and curling leaves, used to bloom in may for me--for me and a little brown-eyed girl who found her ink-bottle filled with them when the school bell called us in from play. and on saturdays we boys roamed over the prairies picking wild flowers, playing wild plays and dreaming wild dreams--children's dreams. do you suppose that little bill dreams such dreams in a fifty-foot lot with only his mother's flowers in the window pots to teach him the great mystery of life? bill has no barn. i doubt if he can skin a cat, and i am sure he cannot do the big drop from the trapeze. to turn a flip-flop would fill him with alarm, and yet jim betts, out in kansas, used to turn a double flip-flop over a stack of barrels! and jim betts is a man to look at. he is built by the day. he has an educated body, and it is going into its fifties with health and strength that bill will have to work for. and jim betts and i used to make our own kites and nigger-shooters and sleds and rabbit traps. bill's school seems real enough, but his play and his work seem rather empty. of course bill cannot have the fringe of a million square miles of wild buffalo range for his out-of-doors. no, bill cannot have that. never, again. and to imagine that bill needs anything of the kind is to forget the magic of bill's "make-believe!" a tree, a brook, a stretch of grass! what old-world things bill's fancy can create there! what untold history repeat itself in bill's most fragmentary play! bill, is by nature, a conjuror. give him but little and he will make a world for himself, and grow to be a man. older people seem, however, to forget, and deprive bill of the little that he needs; and it is worth while, therefore, to develop the contrast between bill's school and that school of mine in the long-ago land of my boyhood out-of-doors. the land of out-of-doors! what irony there is in such glowing phrase to city boys like bill! the supreme delight of my own boyhood days was to gather wild flowers in a wooded hollow, to reach which led across a sunny stretch of wild meadow rising to the sky; and i would have you know that i lived as a boy in a land where a weed never grew[a]. i wish that bill might have access to the places where the wild flowers grow, and above all i wish that bill might have more opportunity to see his father at work. a hundred years ago these things were within the reach of every boy and girl; but now, alas, bill sees no other manual labor than the digging of a ditch in a cluttered street, or stunted in growth, he has almost become a part of the machine he daily tends, and boyville has become a paved and guttered city, high-walled, desolate, and dirty; with here and there a vacant lot hideous with refuse in early spring and overwhelmed with an increasing pestilence of weeds as the summer days go by! and the strangest thing about it all is, that bill accepts unquestioningly, and even with manifestations of joy, just any sort of a world, if only it is flooded with sunshine. i remember how, in my boyhood, the rare advent of an old tin can in my favorite swimming hole used to offend me, while such a thing as a cast-off shoe was simply intolerable, and i wonder that bill's unquenchable delight in outdoor life does not become an absolute rage in his indifference to the dreadful pollution of the streams and the universal pestilence of weeds and refuse in our thickly populated districts. i cannot refrain from quoting an amusing poem of james whitcomb riley's, which expresses (more completely than anything i know) the delight of boys in outdoor life, where so many things happen and so many things lure; and you can easily catch in the swing of riley's verse that wanton note which is ordinarily so fascinatingly boyish, but which may too easily turn to a raging indifference to everything that makes for purity in this troubled life of ours. three jolly hunters. o there were three jolly youngsters; and a-hunting they did go, with a setter-dog and a pointer-dog and a yaller-dog also. looky there! and they hunted and they hal-looed; and the first thing they did find was a dingling-dangling hornets' nest a-swinging in the wind. looky there! and the first one said, "what is it?" said the next, "let's punch and see," and the third one said, a mile from there, "i wish we'd let it be!" looky there! (showing the back of his neck.) and they hunted and they hal-looed; and the next thing they did raise was a bobbin bunnie cotton-tail that vanished from their gaze. looky there! one said it was a hot baseball, zippt thru the brambly thatch, but the others said 'twas a note by post or a telergraph dispatch. looky there! so they hunted and they hal-looed; and the next thing they did sight, was a great big bull-dog chasing them, and a farmer hollering "skite!" looky there! and the first one said "hi-jinktum!" and the next, "hi-jinktum-jee!" and the last one said, "them very words has just occurred to me!" looky there! (showing the tattered seat of his pants.) this is the hunting song of the american bander-log[b], and this kind of hunting is better than the kind that needs a gun. to one who falls into the habit of it, the gun is indeed a useless tool. i am reminded of a day i spent with a gun at a remote place in the rocky mountains, where, during the days i have camped there on four different trips, i have seen as many as of the wildest of north american animals, the rocky mountain sheep. i lay in ambush for three hours waiting for sheep, and the sheep came; but they were out of range again before i saw them because i had become so interested in killing mosquitoes! i timed myself at intervals, and per minute for three solid hours makes an honest estimate of , . and i was hungry, too. i fancy the sheep were not frightened but wished the good work to go on undisturbed. do you, perhaps, like candy? did you ever consider that the only sweetmeat our forefathers had for thousands of years was wild honey? and those sour times--if i may call them such--before the days of sugar and candy, come much nearer to us than you realize, for i can remember my own grandfather's tales of bee-hunting in tennessee. just imagine how exciting it must have been in the days of long-ago to find a tree loaded with--candy! a bee tree! if bill were to go back with me to the wild woods of tennessee, some thrill of that old excitement would well up from the depths of his soul at finding such a tree. you may wonder what i am driving at, so i will tell you, that one of the most exciting experiences of my boyhood was a battle with a colony of bumble bees. i was led into it by an older companion and the ardor and excitement of that battle, as i even now remember it, are wholly inexplicable to me except i think of it as a representation through inherited instinct of a ten-thousand-years' search for wild honey. my schooling grew out of instinctive reactions toward natural things; hunting and fishing, digging and planting in the spring, nutting in the fall, and the thousands of variations which these things involve, and i believe that the play of instinct is the only solid basis of growth of a boy or girl. i believe, furthermore, that the very essence of boy humor is bound up with the amazing incongruity of his instincts. was there ever a boy whose instincts (many of them mere fatuity like his digestive appendix) have not led him time and again into just thin air, to say nothing of water and mud! for my part i have never known anything more supremely funny than learning what a hopeless mess of wood pulp and worms a bumble-bee's nest really is, except, perhaps, seeing another boy learn the same stinging lesson. the use of formulas, too, is unquestionably instinctive, and we all know how apt a boy is to indulge in formulas of the hocus-pocus sort, like tom sawyer's recipe for removing warts by the combined charm of black midnight and a black cat, dead. and a boy arrives only late in his boyhood, if ever, to some sense of the distinction between formulas of this kind and such as are vital and rational. i think that there is much instruction and a great deal of humor connected with the play of this instinctive tendency. i remember a great big boy, a hired man on my grandfather's farm, in fact, who was led into a fight with a nest of hornets with the expectation that he would bear a charmed skin if he shouted in loud repetition the words, "jew's-harp, jew's-harp." talk about catching birds by putting salt on their tails! once, as i rowed around a bend on a small stream, i saw a sand-hill crane stalking along the shore. into the water i went with the suddenly conceived idea that i could catch that crane, and, swimming low, i reached the shore, about feet from the bird, jumped quickly out of the water, made a sudden dash and the bird was captured! once i saw a catfish, gasping for air at the surface of water that had been muddied by the opening of a sluice-way in a dam. swimming up behind the fish, i jambed a hand into each gill, and, helped by the fish's tail, i pushed it ashore; and it weighed pounds! a friend of mine, by the name of stebbins, once followed his dog in a chase after a jack rabbit. the rabbit made a wide circle and came back to its own trail some distance ahead of the dog, then it made a big sidewise jump, and sat looking at the dog as it passed by; so intently indeed that stebbins walked up behind the rabbit and took it up with his hands. i think you will agree with me that my outdoor school was a wonderful thing. the land of out-of-doors! to young people the best school and play-house, and to older people an endless asylum of delight. "the grass so little has to do, a sphere of simple green with only butterflies to brood and bees to entertain. "and stir all day to pretty tunes the breezes fetch along, and hold the sunshine in its lap and bow--to everything. "and thread the dew all night, like pearls, and make itself so fine, a duchess were too common for such a noticing. "and even when it dies, to pass in odors so divine as lowly spices gone to sleep, or amulets of pine. "and then to dwell in sovereign barns and dream the days away, the grass so little has to do-- i wish i were the hay." * * * * * the most important thing, i should say, for the success of bill's fine school is that ample opportunity be given to bill for every variety of play including swimming and skating, and wherever possible, boating. it is ridiculous to attempt to teach bill anything without the substantial results of play to build upon. playgrounds are the cheapest and, in many respects, the best of schools, but they are almost entirely lacking in many of our towns which have grown to cities in a generation in this great nation of villagers. the boroughs of the bethlehems, for example, have no playground connected with a public school, nor any other public place where boys can play ball. what do you think? (this and the following communication are from a small paper, printed and published by two bethlehem boys.) we, the editors, have been dragged along back alleys, across open sewers, and through rank growths of weed and thistle to view the monocacy meadows to consider the possibility of their use as a playground or park. we are not much impressed with the proposal, the place is apparently hopeless, but the park enthusiast could not be touched by argument. to our very practical objection that the cost would be excessive, he made the foolish reply that there is no cost but a saving in using what has hitherto been wasted. to our expressed disgust for the open sewers and filth he replied that that was beside the question, for, as he said, we must sooner or later take care of the filth anyway. but, we said, the creek is contaminated above the town. very well, he replied, we have the right to prohibit such contamination. but worst of all, in double meaning, was his instant agreement to our statement that we had our cemeteries which, he said, were really better than any bethlehem park could be. communication. _dear editors:_ i took a walk along the monocacy creek on sunday afternoon and discovered clear water several miles above town and a fine skating pond; but i suppose that you and all of your subscribers will have to go to our enterprising neighbor, allentown, to find any well-kept ice to skate on this winter. most people think that you boys can swim in nature's own water, skate on nature's own ice, and roam in nature's own woods, but it is absolutely certain that your elders must take some care and pains if you town boys are to do any of these things. and yet, here in the east, children are said to be brought up (implying care and pains) and hogs are said to be raised (implying only feeding). i thank the lord that i was "raised" in the west where there are no such false distinctions. your subscriber, s. p.s.--as i came home covered with beggar-lice and cockle-burrs i saw a ring of fire on south mountain, an annual occurrence which has been delayed a whole week this autumn by a flourish of posters in several languages offering one hundred dollars reward! s. in these days of steam and electricity we boast of having conquered nature. well, we have got to domesticate nature before much else can be accomplished in this country of ours. we have got to take care of our brooks and our rivers, of our open lands and our wooded hills. we have got to do it, and bill would be better off if we took half of the cost of his fine school to meet the expense of doing it. when i was a boy i belonged to the bander-log, but bill belongs to another tribe, the rats, and there is nothing i would like so much to do as to turn pied piper and lure the entire brood of bethlehem boys and girls to friedensville[c] and into that awful chasm of crystal water to come back no more, no, not even when an awakened civic consciousness had made a park of the beautiful monocacy meadows and converted the creek into a chain, a regular diamond necklace of swimming holes. i beg the garbage men's (not a printer's error for man's) pardon for speaking of the beautiful monocacy meadows. i refer to what has been and to what might easily continue to be. as for the diamond necklace, that, of course, would have to be above our gas works where the small stream of pure tar now joins the main stream. i know a small river in kansas which is bordered by rich bottom lands from one-half to one mile in width between beautifully scalloped bluffs--where the upland prairie ends. in early days thick covering of grass was everywhere, and the clear stream, teeming with life, wound its way along a deep channel among scattered clusters of large walnut trees and dense groves of elm and cotton wood, rippling here and there over beds of rock. now, however, every foot of ground, high and low, is mellowed by the plow, and the last time i saw the once beautiful valley of wolf river it was as if the whole earth had melted with the rains of june, such devastation of mud was there! surely it requires more than the plow to domesticate nature; indeed, since i have lived between the coal-bearing alleghenies and the sea, i have come to believe that it may require more than the plow and the crowded iron furnace, such pestilence of refuse and filth is here! { } i suppose that i am as familiar with the requirements of modern industry as any man living, and as ready to tolerate everything that is economically wise, but every day as i walk to and fro i see our monocacy creek covered with a scum of tar, and in crossing the river bridge i see a half mile long heap of rotting refuse serving the lehigh as a bank on the southern side; not all furnace refuse either by any means, but nameless stinking stuff cast off by an indifferent population and carelessly left in its very midst in one long unprecedented panorama of putrescent ugliness! and when, on splendid autumn days, the nearby slopes of old south mountain lift the eyes into pure oblivion of these distressing things, i see again and again a line of fire sweeping through the scanty woods. this i have seen every autumn since first i came to bethlehem. it is easy to speak in amusing hyperbole of garbage heaps and of brooks befouled with tar, but to have seen one useless flourish of posters on south mountain in fifteen years! that is beyond any possible touch of humor. it is indeed unfortunate that our river is not fit for boys to swim in, and it is not, for i have tried it, and i am not fastidious either, having lived an amphibious boyhood on the banks of the muddiest river in the world; but it is a positive disgrace that our river is not fit to look at, that it is good for nothing whatever but to drink; much too good, one would think, for people who protect the only stretch of woodland that is accessible to their boys and girls by a mere flourish of posters!{ } i was born in kansas when its inhabitants were largely indians, and when its greatest resource was wild buffalo skins; and whatever objection you may have to this description of my present home-place between the coal-bearing alleghenies and the sea, please do not imagine that i have a sophisticated sentimentality towards the beauties of nature! no, i am still enough of an indian to think chiefly of my belly when i look at a stretch of country. in the west i like the suggestion of hog-and-hominy which spreads for miles and miles beneath the sky, and here in the east i like the promise of pillars of fire and smoke and i like the song of steam! bill's school and mine! it may seem that i have said a great deal about my school, and very little about bill's. but what is bill's school? surely, bill's fine school-house and splendid teachers, and bill's good mother are not all there is to bill's school. no, bill's school is as big as all bethlehem, and in its bigger aspects it is a bad school, bad because bill has no opportunity to play as a boy should play, and bad because bill has no opportunity to work as a boy should work. "i b'en a-kindo musin', as the feller says", and i'm about o' the conclusion that they ain't no better time, when you come to cypher on it, than the times we used to know, when we swore our first 'dog-gone-it' sorto solem'-like and low. "you git my idy, do you?--little tads, you understand-- jes' a wishin', thue and thue you, that you on'y was a man. yet here i am this minute, even forty, to a day, and fergittin' all that's in it, wishin' jes the other way!" i wonder if our bill will "wish the other way" when he is a man? indeed, i wonder if he will ever be a man. if we could only count on that, bill's school would not be our problem. play as a training in application. never yet was a boy who dreamed of ice-cream sundaes while playing ball. * * * * * to face page play as a training in application. never yet was a boy who dreamed of ice-cream sundaes while playing ball. every one knows that play means health and happiness to children, and nearly every one thinks of the playgrounds movement as based solely on ideals of health and ideals of happiness in a rather narrow sense; but the movement means much more than health and happiness as these terms are generally understood. the indian boy's play, which included practice with the bow and arrow, foot racing, ball playing and horse-back riding, was perfectly adapted to the needs of his adult life, but how about base ball and prisoner's base for the boy who is to become a salesman or a mechanic, a physician or an engineer? good fun and a good appetite certainly come from these games, and one may also place to their credit a tempered reasonableness and a high regard for what is fair and square; _but as a training in application nothing can take their place._ play as a training in application! that certainly is a paradox; and yet everyone knows that play is the first thing in life to give rise to that peculiar overwhelming eagerness which alone can bring every atom of one's strength into action. ability to focus one's whole mind upon an undertaking and to apply one's whole body in concentrated effort is what our boys and girls are most in need of, and vigorous competitive play serves better than anything else, if, indeed there is anything else to create it. intense and eager application! that means not only an escape from laziness and apathy, but eagerness is the only thing in the world that defies fatigue. a healthy boy can put forth an amazing amount of physical effort and be fresh at the end of a day of play. and a man whose habit of application is so highly developed that it assumes a quality of eagerness and never fails in absolute singleness of purpose, is there any limit to what such a man can do? * * * * * every one knows that play means health and happiness to children, and nearly every one thinks of the playgrounds movement as based solely on ideals of health and ideals of happiness in a rather narrow sense; but the movement means much more than health and happiness as these terms are generally understood.{ } the indian boy's play, which included practice with the bow and arrow, foot racing, ball playing and horse-back riding, was perfectly adapted to the needs of his adult life, but how about base ball and prisoner's base for the boy who is to become a salesman or a mechanic, a physician or an engineer? good fun and a good appetite certainly come from these games, and one may also place to their credit a tempered reasonableness and a high regard for what is fair and square; _but as a training in application nothing can take their place._ play as a training in application! that certainly is a paradox; and yet everyone knows that play is the first thing in life to give rise to that peculiar overwhelming eagerness which alone can bring every atom of one's strength into action. ability to focus one's whole mind upon an undertaking and to apply one's whole body in concentrated effort is what our boys and girls are most in need of, and vigorous competitive play serves better than anything else, if, indeed there is anything else to create it. intense and eager application! that means not only an escape from laziness and apathy, but eagerness is the only thing in the world that defies fatigue. a healthy boy can put forth an amazing amount of physical effort and be fresh at the end of a day of play. and a man whose habit of application is so highly developed that it assumes a quality of eagerness and never fails in absolute singleness of purpose, is there any limit to what such a man can do? the energizing of play. strenuous play leads to strenuous work. * * * * * to face page the energizing of play. strenuous play leads to strenuous work. play ball. scarcely more than a generation ago every american boy came under the spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort and hardship! a hunting and fishing boyhood! such has been the chief source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an effective substitute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young people to intense activity. the lure of the wild! alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame world of ours. but our boys remain as a perennial race of wild indians however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not dependent upon completely truthful externals. the genuine wild indian becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country; but our boy bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long as the earth shall last. indeed he has no need of such a thing, for if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and milk when the day is done! indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as whitcomb riley tells in his hunting song of the american bander-log, and the gang idea contains the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible problem, namely, to find an effective substitute for the lure of the wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity. many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. indeed this is largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it is different. they may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking sex like grown-up sordidly imaginative hottentots in darkest africa; but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization, as with our boy scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon competitive athletics. a dozen large ball fields and two or three good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important thing for our boy bill; and they would do more to make him into an energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put together. * * * * * scarcely more than a generation ago every american boy came under the spell of hunting and fishing; and there is no more powerful incentive to laborious days, nor any anodyne so potent for bodily discomfort and hardship! a hunting and fishing boyhood! such has been the chief source of human energy in this lazy world of ours, the chief basis of life-long habit of persistent and strenuous effort; and the problem of educational play is to a great extent the problem of finding an effective substitute for the lure of the wild for stimulating young people to intense activity.{ } the lure of the wild! alas it is but a poet's fancy in this tame world of ours. but our boys remain as a perennial race of wild indians however tame the world may come to be; and fortunately they are not dependent upon completely truthful externals. the genuine wild indian becomes a sorry spectacle, even if he does not sicken and die, when he is deprived of his millions of square miles of wild buffalo country; but our boy bill cannot have such an out-of-doors, never again as long as the earth shall last. indeed he has no need of such a thing, for if his fancy is stirred by ardent playmates he will chase an imaginary stag around a vacant lot all day if only there is a mixture of earth and sky and greenery to set off his make believe--and eat mush and milk when the day is done! indeed youngsters must hunt in packs, as whitcomb riley tells in his hunting song of the american bander-log, and the gang idea contains the ultimate solution of what would otherwise be an impossible problem, namely, to find an effective substitute for the lure of the wild for the energizing of the intensely active kind of play, the kind of play that trains for application, the kind that approaches hunting and fishing or tribal warfare or the settling of a blood-feud in its persistent, single-minded and strenuous activity. many grown-ups seem to think that mere permission is now a sufficient basis for play, as it was in pioneer and rural days. indeed this is largely true for very small children who can sit in the sunshine and make mud pies or dig holes in a bed of sand; but with older boys it is different. they may indeed fight or steal, or engage in the worst varieties of gang activity, or sit by a fire in a back alley talking sex like grown-up sordidly imaginative hottentots in darkest africa; but strenuous play requires suggestive example and organization, as with our boy scouts; and it depends to a very great extent upon competitive athletics. a dozen large ball fields and two or three good-sized swimming pools are, next to his food, the most important thing for our boy bill; and they would do more to make him into an energetic and industrious man than all the rest of his school work put together. the study of science. grau theurer freund ist alle theorie und grün des lebens goldener baum. goethe everyone realizes the constraint that is placed upon the lives of men by the physical necessities of the world in which we live, and although in one way this constraint is more and more relieved with the progress of the applied sciences, in another way it becomes more and more exacting. it is indeed easier to cross the atlantic ocean now than it was in leif ericsson's time, but consider the discipline of the shop, and above all consider the rules of machine design! could even the hardy norsemen have known anything as uncompromisingly exacting as these? to do things becomes easier and easier, but to learn how to do things becomes more and more difficult. every person i have ever talked with, old or young, theorist or practician, student-in-general or specialist in whatever line, has exhibited more or less distinctly a certain attitude of impatience towards the exactions of this or that phase of the precise modes of thought of the physical sciences. "da wird der geist euch wohl dressiert in spanische stiefeln eingeschnuert." in a recent article[d] on the distinction between the liberal and technical in education, my friend and colleague, professor percy hughes, says that in speaking of an education as liberal we thereby associate it with liberalism in politics, in philosophy and theology, and in men's personal relations with each other. in each case liberalism seems fundamentally, to denote freedom, and liberalism in education is the freedom of development in each individual of that character and personality which is his true nature. all this i accept in the spirit of an optimist, assuming men's true natures to be good, but i do not, and i am sure that professor hughes does not, consider that technical education, unless it be inexcusably harsh and narrow, is illiberal; nor that liberal education, unless it be inexcusably soft and vague, is wholly non-technical. the liberal and the technical are not two kinds of education, each complete in itself. indeed, professor hughes speaks of liberal education, not as a category, but as a condition which makes for freedom of development of personality and character. it seems to me, however, that there are phases of education which have but little to do with personality, and i call to your attention this definition of liberalism in education, in order that i may turn sharply away from it as a partial definition which, to a great extent, excludes the physical sciences. indeed, i wish to speak of a condition in education which is the antithesis of freedom. i wish to explain the teaching of elementary physical science as a mode of constraint, as an impressed constructive discipline without which no freedom is possible in our dealings with physical things. i wish to characterize the study of elementary physical science as a reorganization of the workaday mind of a young man as complete as the pupation of an insect; and i wish to emphasize the necessity of exacting constraint as the essential condition of this reorganization. there is a kind of salamander, the axolotl, which lives a tadpole-like youth and never changes to the adult form unless a stress of dry weather annihilates his watery world; but he lives always and reproduces his kind as a tadpole, and a very funny-looking tadpole he is, with his lungs hanging like feathery tassels from the sides of his head. when the aquatic home of the axolotl dries up, he quickly develops a pair of internal lungs, lops off his tassels and embarks on a new mode of life on land. so it is with our young men who are to develop beyond the tadpole stage, they must meet with quick and responsive inward growth that new and increasing "stress of dryness," as many are wont to call our modern age of science and organized industry. stress of dryness! indeed no flow of humor is to be found in the detached impersonalities of the sciences, and if we are to understand the characteristics of physical science we must turn our attention to things which lead inevitably to an exacting and rigid mathematical philosophy. it certainly is presumptive to tell a reader that he must turn his attention to such a thing, but there is no other way; the best we can do is to choose the simplest path. let us therefore consider the familiar phenomena of motion. the most prominent aspect of all phenomena is motion. in that realm of nature which is not of man's devising[e] motion is universal. in the other realm of nature, the realm of things devised, motion is no less prominent. every purpose of our practical life is accomplished by movements of the body and by directed movements of tools and mechanisms, such as the swing of scythe and flail, and the studied movements of planer and lathe from which are evolved the strong-armed steam shovel and the deft-fingered loom. the laws of motion. every one has a sense of the absurdity of the idea of reducing the more complicated phenomena of nature to an orderly system of mechanical law. to speak of motion is to call to mind first of all the phenomena that are associated with the excessively complicated, incessantly changing, turbulent and tumbling motion of wind and water. these phenomena have always had the most insistent appeal to us, they have confronted us everywhere and always, and life is an unending contest with their fortuitous diversity, which rises only too often to irresistible sweeps of destruction in fire and flood, and in irresistible crash of collision and collapse where all things mingle in one dread fluid confusion! the laws of motion! consider the awful complexity of a disastrous tornado or the dreadful confusion of a railway wreck, and understand that what we call the laws of motion, although they have a great deal to do with the ways in which we think, have very little to do with the phenomena of nature. the laws of motion! there is indeed a touch of arrogance in such a phrase with its unwarranted suggestion of completeness and universality, and yet the ideas which constitute the laws of motion have an almost unlimited extent of legitimate range, _and these ideas must be possessed with a perfect precision if one is to acquire any solid knowledge whatever of the phenomena of motion._ the necessity of precise ideas. herein lies the impossibility of compromise and the necessity of coercion and constraint; one must think so and so, there is no other way. and yet there is always a conflict in the mind of even the most willing student because of the constraint which precise ideas place upon our vivid and primitively adequate sense of physical things; and this conflict is perennial but it is by no means a one-sided conflict between mere crudity and refinement, for refinement ignores many things. indeed, precise ideas not only help to form[f] our sense of the world in which we live but they inhibit sense as well, and their rigid and unchallenged rule would be indeed a stress of dryness. the laws of motion. we return again and yet again to the subject, for one is not to be deterred therefrom by any concession of inadequacy, no, nor by any degree of respect for the vivid youthful sense of those things which to suit our narrow purpose must be stripped completely bare. it is unfortunate, however, that the most familiar type of motion, the flowing of water or the blowing of the wind, is bewilderingly useless as a basis for the establishment of the simple and precise ideas which are called the "laws of motion," and which are the most important of the fundamental principles of physics. these ideas have in fact grown out of the study of the simple phenomena which are associated with the motion of bodies in bulk without perceptible change of form, the motion of rigid bodies, so called. before narrowing down the scope of the discussion, however, let us illustrate a very general application of the simplest idea of motion, the idea of velocity. every one has, no doubt, an idea of what is meant by the velocity of the wind; and a sailor, having what he calls a ten-knot wind, knows that he can manage his boat with a certain spread of canvas and that he can accomplish a certain portion of his voyage in a given time; but an experienced sailor, although he speaks glibly of a ten-knot wind, belies his speech by taking wise precaution against every conceivable emergency. he knows that a ten-knot wind is by no means a sure or a simple thing with its incessant blasts and whirls; and a sensitive anemometer, having more regard for minutiae than any sailor, usually registers in every wind a number of almost complete but excessively irregular stops and starts every minute and variations of direction that sweep around half the horizon! wer will was lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben sucht erst den geist heraus zu treiben. goethe. we must evidently direct our attention to something simpler than the wind. let us, therefore, consider the drawing of a wagon or the propulsion of a boat. it is a familiar experience that effort is required to start a body moving and that continued effort is required to maintain the motion. certain very simple facts as to the nature and effects of this effort were discovered by sir isaac newton, and on the basis of these facts newton formulated the laws of motion. the effort required to start a body or to keep it moving is called force. thus, if one starts a box sliding along a table one is said to exert a force on the box. the same effect might be accomplished by interposing a stick between the hand and the box, in which case one would exert a force on the stick and the stick in its turn would exert a force on the box. we thus arrive at the notion of force action between inanimate bodies, between the stick and the box in this case, and newton pointed out that the force action between the two bodies _a_ and _b_ always consists of two equal and opposite forces, that is to say, if body _a_ exerts a force on _b,_ then _b_ exerts an equal and opposite force on _a,_ or, to use newton's words, action is equal to reaction and in a contrary direction. in leading up to this statement one might consider the force with which a person pushes on the box and the equal and opposite force with which the box pushes back on the person, but if one does not wish to introduce the stick as an intermediary, it is better to speak of the force with which the hand pushes on the box, and the equal and opposite force with which the box pushes back on the hand, because in discussing physical phenomena it is of the utmost importance to pay attention only to impersonal [ ] things. indeed our modern industrial life, in bringing men face to face with an entirely unprecedented array of intricate mechanical and physical problems, demands of every one a great and increasing amount of impersonal thinking, and the precise and rigorous modes of thought of the physical sciences are being forced upon widening circles of men with a relentless insistence--all of which it was intended to imply by referring to the "stress of dryness" which overtakes the little axolotl in his contented existence as a tadpole. when we examine into the conditions under which a body starts to move and the conditions under which a body once started is kept in motion, we come across a very remarkable fact, if we are careful to consider every force which acts upon the body, and this remarkable fact is that the forces which act upon _a body at rest_ are related to each other in precisely the same way as the forces which act upon _a body moving steadily along a straight path._ therefore it is convenient to consider, _first_ the relation between the forces which act upon a body at rest, or upon a body in uniform motion, and _second_ the relation between the forces which act upon a body which is starting or stopping or changing the direction of its motion. suppose a person _a_ were to hold a box in mid-air. to do so it would of course be necessary for him to push upwards on the box so as to balance the downward pull of the earth, the weight of the box as it is called. if another person _b_ were to take hold of the box and pull upon it in any direction, _a_ would have to exert an equal pull on the box in the opposite direction to keep it stationary. _the forces which act upon a stationary body are always balanced._ every one, perhaps, realizes that what is here said about the balanced relation of the forces which act upon a stationary box, is equally true of the forces which act on a box similarly held in a steadily moving railway car or boat. therefore, _the forces which act upon a body which moves steadily along a straight path are balanced._ this is evidently true when the moving body is surrounded on all sides by things which are moving along with it, as in a car or a boat; but how about a body which moves steadily along a straight path but which is surrounded by bodies which do not move along with it? everyone knows that some active agent such as a horse or a steam engine must pull steadily upon such a body to keep it in motion. if left to itself such a moving body quickly comes to rest. many have, no doubt, reached this further inference from experience, namely, that the tendency of moving bodies to come to rest is due to the dragging forces, or friction, with which surrounding bodies act upon a body in motion. thus a moving boat is brought to rest by the drag of the water when the propelling force ceases to act; a train of cars is brought to rest because of the drag due to friction when the pull of the locomotive ceases; a box which is moving across a table comes to rest when left to itself, because of the drag due to friction between the box and the table. we must, therefore, always consider two distinct forces when we are concerned with a body which is kept in motion, namely, the _propelling force_ due to some active agent such as a horse or an engine, and the _dragging force_ due to surrounding bodies. newton pointed out that when a body is moving steadily along a straight path, the propelling force is always equal and opposite to the dragging force. therefore, _the forces which act upon a body which is stationary, or which is moving uniformly along a straight path, are balanced forces._ many hesitate to accept as a fact the complete and exact balance of propelling and dragging forces on a body which is moving steadily along a straight path in the open, but direct experiment shows it to be true, and the most elaborate calculations and inferences based upon this idea of the complete balance of propelling and dragging forces on a body in uniform motion are verified by experiment. one may ask, why a canal boat, for example, should continue to move if the pull of the mule does not exceed the drag of the water; but why should it stop if the drag does not exceed the pull? understand that we are not considering the starting of the boat. the fact is that the conscious effort which one must exert to drive a mule, the cost of the mule, and the expense of his keep, are what most people think of, however hard one tries to direct their attention solely to the state of tension in the rope that hitches the mule to the boat after the boat is in full motion; and most people consider that if the function of the mule is simply to balance the drag of the water so as to keep the boat from stopping, then why should there not be some way to avoid the cost of so insignificant an operation? there is, indeed, an extremely important matter involved here, but it has no bearing on the question as to the balance of propulsion and drag on a body which moves steadily along a straight path. let us now consider the relation between the forces which act upon a body which is changing its speed, upon a body which is being started or stopped, for example. everyone has noticed how a mule strains at his rope when starting a canal boat, especially if the boat is heavily loaded, and how the boat continues to move for a long time after the mule ceases to pull. in the first case, the pull of the mule greatly exceeds the drag of the water, and the speed of the boat increases; in the second case, the drag of the water of course exceeds the pull of the mule, for the mule is not pulling at all, and the speed of the boat decreases. when the speed of a body is changing, the forces which act on the body are unbalanced. we may conclude therefore that _the effect of an unbalanced force acting on a body is to change the velocity of the body,_ and it is evident that the longer the unbalanced force continues to act the greater the change of velocity. thus if the mule ceases to pull on a canal boat for one second the velocity of the boat will be but slightly reduced by the unbalanced drag of the water, whereas if the mule ceases to pull for two seconds the decrease of velocity will be much greater. _in fact the change of velocity due to a given unbalanced force is proportional to the time that the force continues to act._ this is exemplified by a body falling under the action of the unbalanced pull of the earth; after one second it will have gained a certain amount of velocity (about feet per second), after two seconds it will have made a total gain of twice as much velocity (about feet per second), and so on. since the velocity produced by an unbalanced force is proportional to the time that the force continues to act, it is evident that the effect of the force should be specified as so-much-velocity-produced-per-second, exactly as in the case of earning money, the amount one earns is proportional to the length of time that one continues to work, and we always specify one's earning capacity as so-much-money-earned-per-day. everyone knows what it means to give an easy pull or a hard pull on a body. that is to say, we all have the ideas of greater and less as applied to forces. everybody knows also that if a mule pulls hard on a canal boat, the boat will get under way more quickly than if the pull is easy, that is, the boat will gain more velocity per unit of time under the action of a hard pull than under the action of an easy pull. therefore, any precise statement of the effect of an unbalanced force on a given body must correlate the precise value of the force and the exact amount of velocity produced per unit of time by the force. this seems a very difficult thing, but its apparent difficulty is very largely due to the fact that we have not as yet agreed as to what we are to understand by the statement that one force is precisely three, or four, or any number of times as great as another. suppose, therefore, that _we agree to call one force twice as large as another when it will_ as _produce in a given body twice as much velocity in a given time_ (remembering of course that we are now talking about unbalanced forces, or that we are assuming for the sake of simplicity of statement, that no dragging forces exist). as a result of this definition we may state that _the amount of velocity produced per second in a given body by an unbalanced force is proportional to the force._ of course we know no more about the matter in hand than we did before we adopted the definition, but we do have a good illustration of how important a part is played in the study of physical science, by what we may call making-up one's mind, in the sense of putting one's mind in order. this kind of thing is very prominent in the study of elementary physics, and the rather indefinite reference (in the story of the little tasseled tadpole) to an inward growth as needful before one can hope for any measure of success in our modern world of scientific industry was an allusion to this thing, the "making-up" of one's mind. nothing is so essential in the acquirement of exact and solid knowledge as the possession of precise ideas, not indeed that a perfect precision is necessary as a means for retaining knowledge, _but that nothing else so effectually opens the mind for the perception even of the simplest evidences of a subject_[g]. we have now settled the question as to the effect of different unbalanced forces on a given body on the basis of very general experience, and by an agreement as to the precise meaning to be attached to the statement that one force is so many times as great as another; but how about the effect of the same force upon different bodies, and how may we identify the force so as to be sure that it is the same? it is required, for example, to exert a given force on body _a_ and then exert the same force on another body _b._ this can be done by causing a third body _c_ (a coiled spring, for example) to exert the force; then the forces exerted on _a_ and _b_ are the same if the reaction in each case produces the same effect on body _c_ (the same degree of stretch, for example). concerning the effects of the same unbalanced force on different bodies three things have to be settled by experiment as follows: (a) in the first place let us suppose that a certain force _f_ is twice as large as a certain other force _g,_ according to our agreement, because the force _f_ produces twice as much velocity every second as force _g_ when the one and then the other of these forces is caused to act upon a given body, a piece of lead for example. then, does the force _f_ produce twice as much velocity every second as the force _g_ whatever the nature and size of the given body, whether it be wood, or ice, or sugar? experiment shows that it does. (b) in the second place, suppose that we have such amounts of lead, or iron, or wood, etc., that a certain given force produces the same amount of velocity per second when it is made to act, as an unbalanced force, upon one or another of these various bodies. then what is the relation between the amounts of these various substances? experiment shows that they all have the same mass in grams, or pounds, as determined by a balance. that is, a given force produces the same amount of velocity per second in a given number of grams of any kind of substance. thus the earth pulls with a certain definite force (in a given locality) upon _m_ grams of any substance and, aside from the dragging forces due to air friction, all kinds of bodies gain the same amount of velocity per second when they fall under action of the unbalanced pull of the earth. (c) in the third place, what is the relation between the velocity per second produced by a given force and the mass in grams (or pounds) of the body upon which it acts. experiment shows that _the velocity per second produced by a given force is inversely proportional to the mass of the body upon which the force acts._ in speaking of the mass of the body in grams (or pounds) we here refer to the result which is obtained by weighing the body on a balance scale, and the experimental fact which is here referred to constitutes a very important discovery: namely, when one body has twice the mass of another, according to the balance method of measuring mass, it is accelerated half as fast by a given unbalanced force. the effect of an unbalanced force in producing velocity may therefore be summed up as follows: _the velocity per second produced by an unbalanced force is proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body upon which the force acts, and the velocity produced by an unbalanced force is always in the direction of the force._ * * * * * "we advise all men," says bacon, "to think of the true ends of knowledge, and that they endeavor not after it for curiosity, contention, or the sake of despising others, nor yet for reputation or power or any other such inferior consideration, but solely for the occasions and uses of life." it is difficult to imagine any other basis upon which the study of physics can be justified than for the occasions and uses of life; in a certain broad sense, indeed, there is no other justification. but the great majority of men must needs be practical in the narrow sense, and physics, as the great majority of men study it, relates chiefly to the conditions which have been elaborated through the devices of industry as exemplified in our mills and factories, in our machinery of transportation, in optical and musical instruments, in the means for the supply of power, heat, light, and water for general and domestic use, and so on. from this narrow practical point of view it may seem that there can be nothing very exacting in the study of the physical sciences; but what is physics? that is the question. one definition at least is to be repudiated; it is not "the science of masses, molecules and the ether." bodies have mass and railways have length, and to speak of physics as the _science of masses_ is as silly as to define railroading as the _practice of lengths,_ and nothing as reasonable as this can be said in favor of the conception of physics as the science of molecules and the ether; it is the sickliest possible notion of physics, whereas the healthiest notion, even if a student does not wholly grasp it, is that physics is the science of the ways of taking hold of things and pushing them! bacon long ago listed in his quaint way the things which seemed to him most needful for the advancement of learning. among other things he mentioned "a new engine or a help to the mind corresponding to tools for the hand," and the most remarkable aspect of present-day physical science is that aspect in which it constitutes a realization of this new engine of bacon{ }. we continually force upon the extremely meager data obtained directly through our senses, an interpretation which, in its complexity and penetration, would seem to be entirely incommensurate with the data themselves, and we exercise over physical things a kind of rational control which greatly transcends the native cunning of the hand. the possibility of this forced interpretation and of this rational control depends upon the use of two complexes: (a) a _logical structure,_ that is to say, a body of mathematical and conceptual theory which is brought to bear upon the immediate materials of sense, and (b) a _mechanical structure,_ that is to say, either ( ) a carefully planned _arrangement of apparatus,_ such as is always necessary in making physical measurements, or ( ) a carefully planned _order of operations,_ such as the successive operations of solution, reaction, precipitation, filtration, and weighing in chemistry. these two complexes do indeed constitute a new engine which helps the mind as tools help the hand; it is through the enrichment of the materials of sense by the operation of this new engine that the elaborate interpretations of the physical sciences are made possible, and the study of elementary physics is intended to lead to the realization of this new engine: (a) by the building up in the mind, of the logical structure of the physical sciences; (b) by training in the making of measurements and in the performance of ordered operations, and (c) by exercises in the application of these things to the actual phenomena of physics and chemistry at every step and all of the time with every possible variation. that, surely, is a sufficiently exacting program; and the only alternative is to place the student under the instruction of jules verne where he need not trouble himself about foundations but may follow his teacher pleasantly on a care-free trip to the moon or with easy improvidence embark on a voyage of twenty-thousand leagues under the sea. what it means to study physical science may be explained further by mentioning the chief difficulties encountered in the teaching of that subject. one difficulty is that the native sense of most men is woefully inadequate without stimulation and direction for supplying the sense material upon which the logical structure of the science is intended to operate. a second difficulty is that the human mind is so in the habit of considering the practical affairs of life that it can hardly be turned to that minute consideration of apparently insignificant details which is so necessary in the scientific analysis even of the most practical things. everyone knows the capacity of the indian for long continued and serious effort in his primitive mode of life, and yet it is difficult to persuade an indian "farmer" to plow. everyone knows also that the typical college student is not stupid, and yet it is difficult to persuade the young men of practical and business ideals in our colleges and technical schools to study the abstract elements of science. indeed it is as difficult to get the average young man to hold abstract things in mind as to get a young indian to plow, and for almost exactly the same reason. the scientific details of any problem are in themselves devoid of human value, and this quality of detachment is the most serious obstacle to young people in their study of the sciences. a third difficulty which indeed runs through the entire front-of-progress of the human understanding is that the primitive mind-stuff of a young man must be rehabilitated in entirely new relations in fitting the young man for the conditions of modern life. every science teacher knows how much coercion is required for so little of this rehabilitation; but the bare possibility of the process is a remarkable fact, and that it is possible to the extent of bringing a newton or a pasteur out of a hunting and fishing ancestry is indeed wonderful. everyone is familiar with the life history of a butterfly, how it lives first as a caterpillar and then undergoes a complete transformation into a winged insect. it is, of course, evident that the bodily organs of a caterpillar are not at all suited to the needs of a butterfly, the very food (of those species which take food) being entirely different. as a matter of fact almost every portion of the bodily structure of the caterpillar is dissolved as it were, into a formless pulp at the beginning of the transformation, and the organization of a flying insect then grows out from a central nucleus very much as a chicken grows in the food-stuff of an egg. so it is in the development of a young man. in early childhood the individual, if he has been favored by fortune, exercises and develops more or less extensively the primitive instincts and modes of the race in a free outdoor life, and the result is so much mind-stuff to be dissolved and transformed with more or less coercion and under more or less constraint into an effective mind of the twentieth-century type. a fourth difficulty is that the possibility of the rehabilitation of mind-stuff has grown up as a human faculty almost solely on the basis of language, and the essence of this rehabilitation lies in the formation of ideas; whereas _a very large part of physical science is a correlation in mechanisms._ the best way of meeting this quadruply difficult situation in the teaching of elementary physics is to relate the teaching as much as possible to the immediately practical and intimate things of life, and to go in for suggestiveness as the only way to avoid a total inhibition of the sense that is born with a young man. such a method is certainly calculated to limber up our theories and put them all at work, the pragmatic method, our friends the philosophers call it, a method which pretends to a conquering destiny. the discipline of work. the first object of all work--not the principal one, but the first and necessary one--is to get food, clothes, lodging, and fuel. but it is quite possible to have too much of all these things. i know a great many gentlemen, who eat too large dinners; a great many ladies, who have too many clothes. i know there is lodging to spare in london, for i have several houses there myself, which i can't let. and i know there is fuel to spare everywhere, since we get up steam to pound the roads with, while our men stand idle; or drink till they can't stand, idle, or otherwise. ruskin. { } two generations ago school was supplemented by endless opportunity for play, and children had to work about the house and farm more and more as they grew to maturity. play and work were in those days as plentiful as sunshine and air, and it is no wonder that educational ideals were developed taking no account of them. but we cling to these old ideals at the present time when children have no opportunity to play, when there is an almost complete absence of old fashioned chores about the home, when boys never see their fathers at work, and when the only opportunity for boys and girls to work outside the home is to face the certainty of reckless exploitation! what a piece of stupidity! our entire educational system, primary and secondary, collegiate and technical, is sick with inconsequential bookishness, and school work has become the most inefficient of all the organized efforts of men. yes but we have our manual training schools and our college courses in shop work and shop inspection. away with such scholastic shams! the beginnings of manual training must indeed be provided for in school; paper cutting, sewing and whittling. but from the absurdity of an academic epitome of industry may the good lord deliver us! and he will deliver us, never fear, for the law of economy is his law too. _the greatest educational problem of our time is how to make use of commercial and industrial establishments as schools to the extent that they are schools._ the first object of all work is indeed to get food and clothes and lodging and fuel, but the essence of work is a human discipline as kindly and beneficent as the sunshine and the rain, and the greatest need of our time is that the discipline of work come again to its own in our entire system of education. _this book is dedicated to the kind of education that is proving itself at the university of cincinnati._ * * * * * to face page and whittling. but from the absurdity of an academic epitome of industry may the good lord deliver us! and he will deliver us, never fear, for the law of economy is his law too. _the greatest educational problem of our time is how to make use of commercial and industrial establishments as schools to the extent that they are schools._ the first object of all work is indeed to get food and clothes and lodging and fuel, but the essence of work is a human discipline as kindly and beneficent as the sunshine and the rain, and the greatest need of our time is that the discipline of work come again to its own in our entire system of education. _this book is dedicated to the kind of education that is proving itself at the university of cincinnati._ * * * * * part of an education. prairie born; once his feet touch the slope of western mountain the level road they ever more shall spurn. if once he drink from snow-pure crystal fountain his thirst shall, ever more consuming, burn with deepened draughts from common stream. once his eye catch glimpse of more substantial glory than prairie horizon high piled with clouded foam his quickened yearning shall inspire old story of unbounded, deathless realms beyond the sunset--home! there were two of us, a prairie born tenderfoot in the person of a sixteen-year-old college sophomore and the writer. after months of anticipation and planning we hurried away at the close of the college term, leaving the prairies of iowa to spend a short vacation in the mountains; and we arrived in denver on a perfect, cloudless morning in june. since early daylight we had kept an eager watch to westward across the even plains to catch a first glimpse of the great front range of the rocky mountains with its covering of summer snow, and after making some purchases of camp supplies we climbed to capitol hill in denver to see the foothills soften to purple and the snow fields melt to liquid gold as the crystal day turned to crimson glory with the setting of the sun. [illustration: sunset washes] "this is the land that the sunset washes, those are the banks of the yellow sea where it arose, and whither it rushes this is the western mystery." late in the evening we took the train for loveland from which place we were to start on a walking trip to laramie, up in wyoming. in loveland we purchased a pony and a pack-saddle. the pony had never been broken to the saddle, and inasmuch as the art of packing has always to be learned anew when one has not practiced it for several years, both of us were, in some respects, as green as the pony, and naturally somewhat nervous when we started from loveland. the pony served us well however and at the worst only gave us a name for the bucking horse pass when we crossed the range of the medicine bow mountains from the waters of the grand river to those of the north platte. from loveland we reached sprague's ranch in estes park, thirty-five miles away, in two days of easy travel over a good stage road, encountering a snow squall in the high foothills which left us cold and wet at sundown of the first day. in estes park we stayed three days, fishing, running up to timber line as preliminary exercise, and writing letters. the writer had spent two previous summers in estes park near sprague's ranch in company with friends from the university of kansas. camp acclimatization june st. _my dear little friend:_-- d. and i reached this place day before yesterday. i saw fred sprague yesterday. he had already learned of our presence in the park, having seen our characteristic hob-nail tracks, and, as his mother tells me, he remarked upon seeing them that "god's people had come," meaning the kansas boys with whom he became acquainted in ' and ' . we have passed thousands of flowers since leaving loveland, white poppies, cactus, blue bells, columbine and others more than i can tell. the blue bells are of the same kind that you and i found near bloomington several weeks ago. it would be very nice if you and i could make some of our saturday excursions in this country. i wish i could tell you more of our trip. of course it is scarcely begun as yet, but i know pretty well what it will be; hard, for one thing, and lonesome, but strangely fascinating. we are beginning already to have that attitude towards nature which i imagine indians have, namely, the desire to get something to eat out of everything we see. [m. had written her brother d. at moraine post office of the pies and cakes they were making at home.] this is by no means greediness, for a measured appetite is essentially incompatible with the conditions of indian life. in fact the only wild animals which are not gourmands on occasion are those which eat grass. of course, we are at best only agency indians, but we shall soon be off our reservation. few people realize the utter desolation of many parts of the rocky mountains; and often on my mountain trips, hungry and foot-sore, my fancy has turned to what my friend 'gric[h] has told me of the utterly desolate funeral mountains that border death valley in southern california, and of the infinite sunshine there. what would _you_ think, my little friend, even now amid the comforts and joys of home, if you could hear a trustworthy account of an actual trip over those dreadful mountains and into that awful valley? i hope that the map with the accompanying description will help you to a knowledge of the geography and geology of this country. i send kind regards to your father and mother. your friend, f. starting from estes park for the grand river country we stopped over night at _camp desolation_ in windy gulch, an enormous amphitheater rising above timber line on the north, east, and west, and opening to the south into big thompson canyon. the mouth of the gulch is dammed by the lateral moraine of an ancient thompson glacier and behind this dam is a level, marshy stretch with a few green spruce and thickets of aspen, black alder and mountain willow. near timber line also is a scattered fringe of green with dots of white. all the rest is a desolate stretch of burned timber. trailing to the head of windy gulch in the morning we gained the summit of thompson ridge which we followed in a northwesterly direction for about twelve miles; then we circled around the head of big thompson river and went down to camp at the head of the cache la poudre river, precisely on the continental divide in milner pass about two hundred feet below timber line with specimen mountain immediately to the north of us. specimen mountain camp, june th. _my dear b:_-- d. and i are going to run down to grand lake settlement to-morrow for bacon and flour so i write this today. i have been in camp all morning cooking and mending while d. has been looking for sheep up in the crater of specimen mountain. he saw two and shot without effect. specimen mountain is an extinct volcano and sheep come to the crater to lick. i have seen as many as a hundred and fifty sheep there at different times during the four trips that i have made to this region, but i have hunted them only one day (the first) of the twenty-five that i have spent in this camp--without success, of course. flowers in profusion are found at these altitudes already where the shrinking snow drifts have exposed the ground to the warm june sun, but under the drifts it is yet the dead of winter. as the season advances the snow recedes, and each newly uncovered strip of ground passes with exuberant haste through a cycle of spring. we came over from estes park yesterday and the day before. at one point i carried the horse's pack about a quarter of a mile on account of steepness of trail and depth of snow, leaving the pony under d.'s guidance to wallow through as best she could. we shall, no doubt, have some hard work getting out of the grand river valley to the north over the medicine bow but we intend to keep at it. we are, of course, likely to get cold and wet, tired and hungry. in fact, i am neither very dry nor very warm now as i write, for it is half snowing and half raining; nor hungry (?) for i have just eaten three slices of bacon, half a corn cake eight inches in diameter and an inch thick, with bacon gravy made with flour and water, and nearly a quart of strong coffee of syrupy sweetness. i do wish d. had killed that sheep this morning! we hope to get some trout to-morrow out of grand river, but to see the sheets of water which are being shed off the range from rain and melting snow makes one feel uncertain of the trout fishing. i will close for this time and put this into my knapsack. to-morrow d. and i will get our "walkins" on bright and early, and pack it to grand lake. this is a tough country beyond imagination. yours sincerely, f. when trailing above timber line on our way to specimen mountain and subsequently we were on snow much of the time; below timber line at high altitudes we contended about equally with snow and fallen timber; and at middle altitudes where the timber is heavy and where fires have been frequent and disastrous the fallen timber alone is quite enough to make travel troublesome. mud and water, fallen and falling, we encountered everywhere, but without much concern. the greatest vexation to the amateur traveler in the rockies is to slip off a log in trying to cross a stream, and thus get wet all over, when if one had been reasonable, one might have been wet only to the middle. an awkward comrade of ' did this so many times that it became a standing joke; but 'gric,{ } as we called him, that is to say _agricola,_ after his father "farmer" funston of kansas, developed grit enough to take him through death valley in southern california, to take him, all alone, , miles down the yukon river in an open boat and across miles of unexplored country during the winter night to the shores of the arctic ocean, to take him into the cuban army, where he received three serious wounds, and finally to take him through the philippines with our volunteer army where he captured aguinaldo. from _specimen mountain camp_ in milner pass we made our way to grand river over an extremely difficult trail, nearly breaking our pony's leg in the fallen timber, and, finding it impossible to reach grand lake by the river trail without wetting our pack, we went into (_mosquito_) camp and did our week's washing. the next day we left our pony, and made a flying round trip of thirty miles to the settlement. the next morning, hoping to escape the mosquitoes, we moved camp several miles up stream and in the afternoon we climbed to the summit of one of the high spurs of a nameless[j] peak in the range of the medicine bow. we got back to camp late in the evening in a sharp rain, which continued all night. the next morning promised fair weather, and after some hesitation, we packed up for the trip over to north park. starting at eight o'clock we reached the deserted mining camp, lulu, at eleven, having forded grand river seven times, the water of it ice cold and swift as an arrow. we then began to climb the range, the summit of which we reached at three o'clock at the pass of the bucking horse far above timber line. at four o'clock we began the descent into the valley of the michigan fork of the north platte. the rain, until now fitful, became steady and we, determined to reach a good camping place, kept our pony at a half-trot until eight o'clock, when we found a deserted cabin. we were too impatiently hungry to make biscuit, which we ordinarily baked in the frying pan before cooking our bacon, so we made our supper of graham mush, bacon, bacon gravy and coffee. next morning we found to our dismay that our baking powder had been left at the bucking horse--and no wonder, for our pack had been strewn for a quarter of a mile along the trail--so we were reduced to mush again for breakfast. gould's ranch, july th. _my dear b:_ we have just returned from a week's hunt in the medicine bow mountains east of here. we saw elk, killed a deer, and spent the fourth of july on a prominent but nameless peak from which we got a splendid view. * * * * * after breakfast at camp _mush,_ mr. e.b. gould, a neighboring cattle rancher who has no cattle, was attracted by the smoke of our campfire, and coming up to see us, he invited us to his shanty to eat venison. we went. we have now been with him a week and we are starting on our second carcass. gould lives by hunting and trapping, and by odd work in the park during the haying season. he came to this country years ago with a hunting party and has been hunting ever since. several years ago he took up a claim in the extreme southeastern corner of north park conveniently near to hunting grounds in the medicine bow. he gave up his claim, for good, a year ago, and made an overland trip to new mexico. that did not satisfy him either, so now he is back in his old shanty again. he thinks we are the toughest "tender-foots" he ever saw. he approves of us, there is no doubt about that, and he has pulled up his stakes to travel with us just for the pleasure of our company! he takes great interest in d.'s knowledge of bugs, and d. and he are both real hunters each according to his experience. before we fell in with gould i could persuade d. to wanton exertion in the way of mountain climbing but now i am in the minority, but the hunters propose, with a flourish, the scaling of every peak that comes in sight. i had a spell of mountain fever just before the fourth and gould dosed me with sage brush tea, the vilest concoction i ever had to take. gould is not accustomed to walk except when actually hunting, so he has a riding horse, and a trusty old pack animal whose minimum name is "g---- d---- you jack," and whose maximum name (and load) is indeterminate. gould is going with us to spend a week in the range of the rabbit's ear, far to the west across north park. he has an old wagon which, if it holds together, will save d. and me some tedious steps across the desert, for indeed this "park" is a desert. we shall pass through walden, the metropolis and supply station of the park. yours, f. from d.'s mother _my precious boy:_ i trust you will excuse me for using this paper but i am up stairs, and no one [is] here to bring me any other. they tell me i need not wonder that we do not hear from you and i shall try not to be disappointed if we do not hear for a while. nevertheless my dear boy, the uncertainty i feel in regard to your safety will make a letter very welcome indeed. perhaps i would have more courage if i were strong. for five days i have been very uncomfortable. i am sitting up some today for the first [time] and hope soon to be well as usual. we were exceedingly glad to hear from you from grand lake. i cannot, however, say that the account of your experience by stone slide[k] and river have lessened my anxiety. i am writing now, thursday, in bed. i have been quite poorly again. we shall not look now for a letter from you but hope to see you face to face before many days. may god bless and keep you! give our love to mr. f. all join me in tenderest love to you. your devoted mother. at walden we laid in a fresh supply of flour and bacon, and canned goods, especially canned fruit, to last us while we stayed with the wagon. we then pushed on to the west, striking camp on the west fork of the north platte, where we stayed two nights. here we tried hard a third time for trout without success, but we turned off the water from an irrigating ditch and captured a large number of "squaw fish" (suckers). from _camp chew_ we made our way well up into the foothills of the range of the rabbit's ear, and then packed our animals, minimum jack and our pony, and pushed up the range over the worst trail we had yet encountered, through an absolute wilderness of fallen timber. rain with fog set in as we approached timber line, and we were forced to go into camp early to wait for morning. morning came with fog and rain, and we spent the entire day hunting trail, only to go into camp again towards evening. the next day, however, came clear and we made our way over the range, through frying pan meadow, and reached camp down on elk river towards evening without difficulty. we found good fishing here at last and great numbers of deer but no elk. after three rainy days in _elk river camp,_ one of which was spent jerking venison of d.'s killing, we packed up and made the return trip over the range in one day of hard travel, going into camp by the shore of a shallow pond well out on the barren level of north park. the next morning we parted company with gould, and in two days we made sixty stage road miles across north park and over the northern portion of the medicine bow mountains to woods post office at the edge of the laramie plains, twenty-five miles from laramie. [illustration: looking north across specimen mountain stone slide.] we had intended walking through to laramie, but ninety miles and two mountain ranges in three days, not to mention the writer's terribly blistered feet, had temporarily taken some of the ambition out of us, and after some fine diplomacy d. and the writer each found that the other was willing to descend to stage coach riding. we accordingly sold our fine little pony for five dollars, packed our outfit in a compact bundle which we wrapped in our small tent (which had been used as a smoke-house for curing venison at _elk river camp_), and took the stage for laramie. at laramie we took the train for home, and with eyes eagerly awake we watched for hundreds of miles an increasing luxuriance of vegetation which reached its climax in the marvelously rich, endless, undulating fields of eastern nebraska and iowa: this is the land that the sunset washes these are the waves of the yellow sea; where it arose and whiter it rushes, this is the western mystery. [illustration: in the range of the rabbit's ear.] we had been away from home for thirty-three days, and in the mountains for thirty-one nights--indians reckon by nights; and we had tramped more than three hundred and fifty miles from loveland to the edge of the laramie plains. a large portion of the time was spent at high altitudes where the weather is not lamb-like in june, and no small portion of the three hundred and fifty miles was mud and water, snow and fallen timber, through a country as rough, perhaps, as is to be found anywhere, and as interesting. the only way to study geography is with the feet! no footless imagination can realize the sublimity of western mountain and plain. nothing but a degree of hardship can measure their widespread chaos and lonely desolation, and only the freshened eagerness of many mornings can perceive their matchless glory. [illustration: near frying pan meadow.] we reached home weather-beaten almost beyond recognition, but in robust health, especially d., who had actually gained in weight during the trip. from the railroad station we carried our outfit, and venison, two miles to the college grounds, reaching d.'s home about midnight. here our madly exuberant spirits were suddenly checked by finding that the illness of d.'s mother had become extremely serious. however she was determined to see us both--to give a last approval. "we never know how high we are till we are called to rise; and then, if we are true to plan, our statures touch the skies. "the heroism we recite would be a daily thing, did not ourselves the cubits warp for fear to be a king." after four days d.'s mother died. it fell to b. and f. to make a sculptor's plaster mask, and photographs; and to f. to watch overnight--and hasten to the woods in the morning. "the bustle in a house the morning after death is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth. "the sweeping up the heart and putting love away we shall not want to use again until eternity." a beautiful campanile now stands on the college campus erected in memory of d.'s mother by the state of iowa; and from this memory-tower a chime of bells greets those who pass in joy and those who pass in sorrow; as we have passed, our time. "superiority to fate is difficult to learn. 'tis not conferred by any, but possible to earn a pittance at a time, until, to her surprise, the soul with strict economy subsists till paradise." the uses of hardship. did you chance, my friends, any of you, to see, the other day, the rd number of the _graphic,_ with the picture of the queen's concert in it? all the fine ladies sitting so trimly, and looking so sweet, and doing the whole duty of woman--wearing their fine clothes gracefully; and the pretty singer, white-throated, warbling "home sweet home" to them, so morally, and melodiously! here was yet to be our ideal of virtuous life, thought the _graphic!_ surely we are safe back with our virtues in satin slippers and lace veils--and our kingdom of heaven is come _with_ observation! ruskin. ruskin has said that the children of the rich often get the worst education to be had for money, whereas the children of the poor often get the best education for nothing. and the poor man's school is hardship. { } it is generally admitted that wealthy american parents are too indulgent towards their children. however this may be, many an american father is determined that his sons shall not go through what he himself went through as a boy, forgetting that the hardships of his youth were largely the hardships of pioneer life which have vanished forever. no boy with good stuff in him and with a fair education unmixed with extravagant habits of living can possibly have more hardship nowadays than is good for him. every young man must sooner or later stand by himself; and hardship, which in its essence is to be thrown on one's own resources, is the best school. but the most alluring school of hardship, a sort of summer school of the university of hard knocks, is a walking trip into the mountains to the regions of summer snow, carrying one's whole outfit on one's back as did the kansas boys of ' , or indulging in the ownership of a pack-pony and a miner's tent as did d. and the writer in ' . the hardships of such a trip are of the old old type, the facing of all kinds of weather and the hunting for food, and they waken a thousand-fold deeper response than the most serious hunt for a job in a modern city. the public school denmark hill, april st, . _my friends:_ it cannot but be pleasing to us to reflect, this day, that if we are often foolish enough to talk english without understanding it, we are often wise enough to talk latin without knowing it. for this month retains its pretty roman name, which means the month of opening; of the light in the days, and the life in the leaves, and of the voices of birds, and of the hearts of men. and being the month of manifestation, it is pre-eminently the month of fools;--for under the beatific influence of moral sunshine, or education, the fools always come out first. but what is less pleasing to reflect upon, this spring morning, is, that there are some kinds of education which may be described, not as moral sunshine, but as moral moonshine; and that, under these, fools come out both first--and last. we have, it seems, now set our opening hearts much on this one point, that we will have education for all men and women now, and for all girls and boys that are to be. nothing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine also what kind of education we are to have. it is taken for granted that any education must be good;--that the more of it we get, the better; that bad education only means little education; and that the worst we have to fear is getting none. alas that is not at all so. getting no education is by no means the worst thing that can happen to us. the real thing to be feared is getting a bad one. ruskin. the recent exchange of visits between pennsylvanians and wisconsinites has resulted in the organization of an association for the carrying out of the wisconsin idea in pennsylvania; but the new york _evening post,_ in commenting upon the pennsylvania version of the wisconsin idea, calls attention to the fact that in wisconsin the idea is carried into effect by public agencies, whereas the pennsylvania version is to be executed privately! the _evening post_ did not, indeed, say execute; i, myself, have introduced the word, because it so exactly conveys the meaning of the _post's_ criticism.{ } why is it that so many good people take up things like the boy scout movement, privately, never giving a moment's thought to our rusting school machinery? why are we so privately minded as to enthuse over mrs. so-and-so's out-of-the-city movement for children, never thinking of the _potentialities_ of establishments like girard college? the trouble is that we americans have never learned to do things together; we still have the loyal but lazy habit of looking expectantly for a king, and, of course, we get a philadelphia ring, the lowest circle in the inferno of the worst; and all the while our might be doers of good affect a kind of private kingship, and sink into a mire of idiotic[l] impotence. the seven wonders of the world all fade into insignificance in comparison with one great fact in modern government, a fact so fundamental that we seldom think of it, namely, the great fact of taxation. funds sufficient to meet every public need of the community flow automatically into the public treasury. this is indeed a very remarkable thing, but it seems almost ludicrous when we consider that wasteful expenditure of public funds is the universal rule, and that good people everywhere are struggling to do public things privately! was there ever before two such horns to a dilemma? fog horns, grown inwardly on every pennsylvanian's head! when a city of , people has an annual school budget of $ , , it is evident that everything can be done that needs to be done for the schooling of children. i believe that the school day should be increased to hours, the school week to days, and the school year to months; with elastic provision for home work and out-of-town visiting. i believe that school activities should include a wide variety of simple hand work, and a great deal of outdoor play, with ample provision for the things that are done by boy scouts and camp fire girls; and when children are old enough and strong enough to begin their vocational training, their school activities should be combined with work in office and factory. let no one imagine that such a program is impracticable; for in the city, school is the sum of all influences outside the home, and the school day is now more than eight hours, the school week is more than six days, and school lasts the whole year through; these are the facts, say what you will; and everything is in a dreadful state of confusion--excepting only book work. _it is time for us to think of the public school as including everything which makes for the efficient organization and orderly control of the juvenile world._ the junior municipality, which has been recently proposed, added to existing school work with provision for simple manual training and outdoor play would constitute a fairly complete realization of this wide conception of the public school, and any narrower conception is hopeless in a modern city. as to educational values there is a widespread misunderstanding. imagine a teacher taking his youngsters on a hike two or three times a week all winter long! every parent, _hoping for his children to escape the necessity of work,_ would howl in stupid criticism "is that what i send my children to school for?" or the school superintendent might have the point of view of the excessively teachy teacher, who, in a recent discussion of the boy scout idea, admitted that cross-country hikes would be a good thing, provided, something were associated with them to justify them, and this something was understood to be bookish! as to vocational training, on the other hand, we must reckon with the manufacturer who will not train workmen for his competitors but who expects his competitors to train workmen for him. and we must also reckon with the ministerial member of the school-board who meets a proposal for vocational training with the question "how then will you educate for life?" "ich ging im walde so fuer mich hin, und nichts zu suchen das war mein sinn." the youngster who goes on a hike for nothing will get everything, and to be fit for service is to be fit for life. * * * * * to face page as to educational values there is a widespread misunderstanding. imagine a teacher taking his youngsters on a hike two or three times a week all winter long! every parent, _hoping for his children to escape the necessity of work,_ would howl in stupid criticism "is that what i send my children to school for?" or the school superintendent might have the point of view of the excessively teachy teacher, who, in a recent discussion of the boy scout idea, admitted that cross-country hikes would be a good thing, provided, something were associated with them to justify them, and this something was understood to be bookish! as to vocational training, on the other hand, we must reckon with the manufacturer who will not train workmen for his competitors but who expects his competitors to train workmen for him. and we must also reckon with the ministerial member of the school-board who meets a proposal for vocational training with the question "how then will you educate for life?" "ich ging im walde so fuer mich hin, und nichts zu suchen das war mein sinn." the youngster who goes on a hike for nothing will get everything, and to be fit for service is to be fit for life. * * * * * footnotes a: the western prairies, except in the very center of the mississippi valley, are beautifully rolling, and they meet every stream with deeply carved bluffs. in the early days every stream was fringed with woods; and prairie and woodland, alike, knew nothing beyond the evenly balanced contest of indigenous life. there came, however, a succession of strange epidemics, as one after another of our noxious weeds gained foothold in that fertile land. i remember well several years when dog-fennel grew in every nook and corner of my home town in kansas; then, after a few years, a variety of thistle grew to the exclusion of every other uncultivated thing; and then followed a curious epidemic of tumble-weed, a low spreading annual which broke off at the ground in the fall and was rolled across the open country in countless millions by the autumn winds. i remember well my first lone "beggar louse," and how pretty i thought it was! and my first dandelion, and of that i have never changed my opinion! b: road-song of the bander-log. (from kipling's jungle-book.) here we go in a flung festoon, half way up to the jealous moon! don't you envy our pranceful bands? don't you wish your feet were hands? wouldn't you like if your tails were--so-- curved in the shape of a cupid's bow? now you're angry, but--never mind-- brother, thy tail hangs down behind! here we sit in a branchy row, thinking of beautiful things we know; dreaming of deeds we mean to do, all complete in a minute or two-- something noble and grand and good, done by merely wishing we could. now we're going to--never mind-- brother, thy tail hangs down behind! all the talk we ever have heard uttered by bat, or beast, or bird-- hide or scale or skin or feather-- jabber it quickly and altogether! excellent! wonderful! once again! now we are talking just like men. let's pretend we are--never mind-- brother, thy tail hangs down behind! this is the way of the monkey-kind. then join our leaping lines that scumfish through the pines, that rocket by where light and high the wild grape swings. by the rubbish in our wake, by the noble noise we make, be sure, be sure, we're going to do some splendid things. c: the site of an abandoned zinc mine, where a few of the bethlehem boys go to swim. d: popular science monthly, october, . e: science as young people study it has two chief aspects, or in other words, it may be roughly divided into two parts, namely, the study of _the things which come upon us,_ as it were, and the study of _the things which we deliberately devise._ the things that come upon us include weather phenomena and every aspect and phase of the natural world, the things we cannot escape; and the things we devise relate chiefly to the serious work of the world, the things we laboriously build and the things we deliberately and patiently seek. f: see discussion on bacon's new engine on page { } g: opens the mind, that is, for those things which are conformable to or consistent with the ideas. the history of science presents many cases where accepted ideas have closed the mind to contrary evidences for many generations. let young men beware! h: see page { } j: a volcanic mass of rugged spurs radiating from a great central core; points and ridges rising, beautifully red, from immense fields of snow. d. and the writer call it mt. mcdonald, but having made no survey, the purely sentimental report which we could send to the map makers in washington would not suffice as a record there. k: the crater of specimen mountain is worn away on one side by water, and the crater now forms the head of a ragged gulch. near the head of this gulch is a slope of loose stone, as steep as loose stone can lie, which has a vertical height of or feet. l: among the greeks an idiot was a man who thought only of his private affairs, a privately minded man. +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | transcriber's note: | | | | some illustrations' captions have been moved out of the paragraph. | | | | some text has been rejoined to correct paragraphs. | | | | spelling has been made consistent throughout but reflects the | | author's preference. | | | | duplicate pages have been left in the text. | | | | footnotes were moved to the end of the book. | | | | supplement to preface was included in the preface. | | | | footnote [h] reference to gric should refer to page not page . | | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ children's ways by the same author. _the human mind_: a text-book of psychology. vols. vo, s. _outlines of psychology._ crown vo, s. _the teacher's handbook of psychology._ crown vo, s. _studies of childhood._ vo, s. d. longmans, green, and co., london, new york, and bombay. children's ways being selections from the author's _studies of childhood_, with some additional matter by james sully, m.a., ll.d. grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic, university college, london longmans, green, and co. paternoster row, london and bombay aberdeen university press. preface. the kindly welcome accorded by the press to my volume _studies of childhood_ has suggested to me that there was much in it which might be made attractive to a wider class of readers than that addressed in a psychological work. i have, accordingly, prepared the following selections, cutting out abstruse discussions, dropping as far as possible technical language, and adapting the style to the requirements of the general reader. in order to shorten the work the last two chapters--"extracts from a father's diary" and "george sand's childhood"--have been omitted. the order of treatment has been altered somewhat, and a number of stories has been added. i hope that the result may succeed in recommending what has long been to myself one of the most delightful of subjects to many who would not be disposed to read a larger and more difficult work, and to draw on a few of these, at least, to a closer and more serious inspection of it. contents. part i.--at play. chapter page i. the realm of fancy the transforming wand fancy's resting-places in storyland ii. the enchantment of play the young pretender mysteries of dolldom serious side of play part ii.--at work. iii. attacking our language the namer of things the sentence-builder the interpreter of words iv. the serious searcher the thoughtful observer the pertinacious questioner v. first thoughts: (_a_) the natural world the fashion of things the bigger world dreams birth and growth vi. first thoughts: (_b_) self and other mysteries the visible self the hidden self the unreachable past the supernatural world the great maker vii. the battle with fears: (_a_) the onslaught the battery of sounds the alarmed sentinel viii. the battle with fears (_continued_) the assault of the beasts the night attack (_b_) damage of the onslaught (_c_) recovery from the onslaught ix. good and bad in the making traces of the brute the promise of humanity the lapse into lying fealty to truth x. rebel and subject (_a_) the struggle with law: first tussle with authority evading the law the plea for liberty (_b_) on the side of law the young stickler for the proprieties the enforcer of rules xi. at the gate of the temple the greeting of beauty first peep into the art-world first ventures in creation xii. first pencillings the human face divine the vile body side views of things children's ways. part i. at play. chapter i. the realm of fancy. one of the few things we seemed to be certain of with respect to child-nature was that it is fancy-full. childhood, we all know, is the age for dreaming; for living a life of happy make-believe. even here, however, we want more accurate observation. for one thing, the play of infantile imagination is probably much less uniform than is supposed. there seem to be very serious children who rarely, if ever, indulge in a wild fancy. mr. ruskin has recently told us that when a child he was incapable of acting a part or telling a tale, that he never knew a child "whose thirst for visible fact was at once so eager and so methodic". one may, nevertheless, safely say that a large majority of the little people are, for a time at least, fancy-bound. a child that did not want to play and cared nothing for the marvels of storyland would surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child ought to be. supposing that this is the correct view, there still remains the question whether children's imagination always plays in the same fashion. now science is beginning to bring to light differences of childish fancy. for one thing it suggests that children have their favourite type of mental imagery, that one child's fancy may habitually move in a coloured world, another in a world of sounds, and so forth. the fascination of _robinson crusoe_ to many a boy lies in the wealth of images of movement and adventure which it supplies. with this difference in the material with which a child's fancy plays, there are other differences which turn on his temperament and predominant feelings. hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagination broods by preference on gloomy and alarming objects, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome. perhaps i have said enough to justify my plea for new observations and for a reconsideration of hasty theories in the light of these. nor need we object to a fresh survey of what is perhaps the most delightful side of child-life. (_a_) _the transforming wand._ the play of young fancy meets us in the very domain of the senses: it is active, often bewilderingly active, when the small person seems busily engaged in looking at things and moving among them. we see this fanciful "reading" of things when a child calls the star an "eye," i suppose because of its brightness and its twinkling movement, or says that a dripping plant is "crying". this transforming touch of the magic wand of young fancy has something of crude nature-poetry in it. this is abundantly illustrated in what may be called childish metaphors, by which they try to describe what is new and strange. for example, a little boy of nineteen months looking at his mother's spectacles said: "little windows". another boy two years and five months, on looking at the hammers of a piano which his mother was playing, called out: "there is owlegie" (diminutive of owl). his eye had instantly caught the similarity between the round felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece of wood, and the owl's face divided by its beak. in like manner another little boy called a small oscillating compass-needle a "bird" probably on the ground of its fluttering movement. pretty conceits are often resorted to in this effort to get at home with strange objects, as when stars were described by one child as "cinders from god's stove," and butterflies as "pansies flying". this play of imagination upon the world of sense has a strong vitalising or personifying element. a child is apt to attribute life and sensation to what we serious people regard as lifeless. thus he gives not only a body but a soul to the wind when it whistles or howls at night. the most unpromising things come in for this warming, life-giving touch of a child's fancy. thus one little fellow, aged one year eight months, conceived a special fondness for the letter w, addressing it thus: "dear old boy w". miss ingelow tells us that when a child she used to feel sorry for the pebbles in the causeway for having to lie always in one place, and would carry them to another place for a change. it is hard for us elders to get back to this childish way of looking at things. one may however hazard the guess that there is in it a measure of dreamy illusion. this means that only a part of what is present is seen, the part which makes the new object like the old and familiar one. and so it gets transformed into a semblance of the old one; just as a rock gets transformed for our older eyes into the semblance of a human face. there is another way in which children's fancy may transmute the objects of sense. mr. ruskin tells us that when young he got to connect or "associate" the name "crocodile" so closely with the creature that when he saw it printed it would take on something of the look of the beast's lanky body. how far, one wonders, does this process of transformation of external objects go in the case of imaginative children? it is not improbable that before the qualities of things and their connections one with another are sufficiently known for them to be interesting in themselves they often acquire interest through the interpretative touch of childish fancy. there is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over the things of sense. it is well known that a certain number of people habitually "colour" the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the sound of a particular vowel or musical tone to have its characteristic tint, which they are able to describe accurately. this "coloured hearing," as it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. children are now beginning to be tested as to their possession of this trick of fancy. it was found in the case of a number of school-children that nearly per cent. described the tones of certain instruments as coloured. there was, however, no agreement among these children as to the particular tint belonging to a given sound: thus whereas one child mentally "saw" the tone of a fife as pale or bright, another saw it as dark. i have confined myself here to what i have called the _play_ of imagination, the magical transmuting of things through the sheer liveliness of childish fancy. the degree of transmutation will of course vary with the intensity of the imagination. sometimes when a child dwells on the fancy it may grow into a momentary illusion. a little girl of four, sitting by the side of her mother in the garden, picked up a small pink worm and said: "ah! you do look nice; how a thrush would like you!" and thereupon, realising the part of the fortunate thrush, proceeded, to her mother's horror, to eat up the worm quite composedly. the momentary illusion of something nice to eat, here produced by a lively realisation of a part, may arise in other cases from strong feeling, more especially fear, which, as we shall see, has so large a dominion over the young mind. this witchcraft of the young fancy in veiling and transforming the actual surroundings is a good deal restrained by the practical needs of every-day life and by intercourse with older and graver folk. there are, however, regions of child-life where it knows no check. one of these is child's play, to be spoken of presently: another is the filling up of the blank spaces in the visible world with the products of fancy. we will call these regions on which the young wing of fancy is wont to alight and rest, fancy's resting-places. _fancy's resting-places._ most people, perhaps, can recall from their childhood the pleasure of cloud-gazing. the clouds are such strange-looking things, they change their forms so quickly, they seem to be doing so many things, now slumbering lazily, now rushing wildly on. cloud-land is safe away from the scrutiny of fingers, so we never can be sure what they would be if we got to them. some children take fright at their big, strange forms and their weird transformations: but a happy child that loves day-dreaming will spend many delightful hours in fashioning these forms into wondrous and delightful things, such as kings and queens, giants and dwarfs, beautiful castles, armies marching to battle, or driven in flight, pirates sailing over fair isle-dotted seas. there is a delicious satisfaction to young minds in thus finding a habitation for their cherished images. to project them in this way into the visible world, to know that they are located in that spot before the eye, is to "realise" them, in the sense of giving them the fullest possible reality. next to the cloud-world come distant parts of the terrestrial scene. the chain of hills, perhaps, faintly visible from the home, has been again and again endowed by a child's fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. at times when they have shown a soft blue, he has made fairy-land of them; at other times when standing out black and fierce-looking against the western sky at eventide, he has half shuddered at them, peopling them with horrid monsters. best of all, i think, for this locating of images, are the hidden spaces of the visible world. one child used to wonder what was hidden behind a long stretch of wood which closed in a good part of his horizon. many a child has had his day-dreams about the country lying beyond the hills on the horizon. one little girl who lived on a cattle-station in australia used to locate beyond a low range of hills a family of children whom she called her little girls, and about whom she related endless stories. with timid children this tendency to project images into unseen places becomes a fearful kind of wonder, not altogether unpleasant when confined to a moderate intensity. i remember the look of awe on the face of a small boy whose hand i held as we passed one summer evening a dark wood, and he whispered to me that the wolves lived in that wood. this impulse of timid children to project their dark fancies into obscure and hidden places often stops short at vague undefinable conjecture. "when (writes a german author) i was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, i always felt that there must or might be something unheard of hidden away behind every bundle of straw, and in the corners." here we can hardly speak of a housing of images: at such a moment perhaps the little brain has such a rush of weird images that no one grows distinct. the exact opposite of this is where a child has a very definite image in his mind, and wants to find a home for it in the external world. this wish seems to be particularly active in relation to the images derived from stories. this housing instinct is strong in the case of the poor houseless fairies. one little boy put his fairies in the wall of his bedroom, where, i suppose, he found it convenient to reach them by his prayers. his sister located a fairy in a hole in a smallish stone. as with the fancies born of fairy-tales, so with the images of humbler human personages known by way of books. charles dickens, when a child, had a strong impulse to locate the characters of his stories in the immediate surroundings. he tells us that "every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (_roderic random_, _tom jones_, _gil blas_, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. i have seen tom pipes go climbing up the church steeple; i have watched strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate." _in storyland._ the reference to stories naturally brings us to another domain of children's imagination: the new world opened up by their story-books, which is all strange and far away from the nursery where they sit and listen, and in which, nevertheless, they manage in a sense to live and make a new home. how is it, one is disposed to ask, that most children, at any rate, have their imagination laid hold of, and fired to a white heat, by mere words? to watch the small listener in its low chair, with head raised, eyes fixed, and hands clasped, drinking in every word of your story, giving sign by occasional self-cuddling and other spasmodic movements of the almost overpowering delight which fills its breast, is to be face to face with what is a mystery to most "grown-ups". perhaps we elders, who are apt to think that we have acquired all the knowledge and to forget how much we have lost, will never understand the spell of a story for the lively impressionable brain of a child. one thing, however, is pretty certain: our words have a way of calling up in children's minds very vivid and very real images of things, images quite unlike those which are called up in the minds of most older people. this magic power of a word to summon the corresponding image, has, i suspect, a good deal to do with a child's intense way of realising his stories. the passionate interest in stories means more than this however. it means that the little brain is wondrously deft at disentangling our rather hard language and reducing the underlying ideas to an intelligible simplicity. a mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, "i'm afraid you can't understand it, dear," for which she got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: "oh, yes, i can very well, if only you would not explain". the "explaining" is resented because it interrupts the child's own secret art of "making something" out of our words. and what glorious inner visions the skilful little interpreter often manages to get from these troublesome words of ours. scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself in definite outline and magical colouring. at each stage the anticipation of the next undiscernible stage is a thrilling mystery. perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of dream-like absorption in storyland than thackeray. in one of his delightful "roundabout papers," he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood: "hush! i never read quite to the end of my first _scottish chiefs_. i couldn't. i peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! do i forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear walter scott--and down came the monitor's dictionary on my head!" the intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. who can resist a child's hungry demand for a story? and after you have satisfied his first request, he will ask for more, and if then you are weak enough to say you know no more stories he will catch you by answering: "tell me the same again". as a result of the intensity with which a child's imagination seizes on a narrative it tends to become afterwards a record of fact, a true history. that children look at their stories in this way till they get undeceived seems to be shown by the respect which they pay to the details and even to the words. woe to the unfortunate mother who in repeating one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. one such, a friend of mine, when relating "puss in boots" inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. she was greeted by a sharp volley of "noes!" as the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. it has added to the child's self-created world new territory, in which he may wander and live blissful moments. this permanent occupation of storyland is shown in the child's impulse to bring the figures of story-books into the actual surroundings. it is shown, too, in his fondness for introducing them into his play, of which i shall speak presently. to this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of fairy and other tales. these at first, and for some time, have in them more of play than of serious art, and so can be touched on here where we are dealing with the play of young fancy. we see the beginning of such fanciful invention in childish "romancing" which is often started by the sight of some real object. for example, a little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: "look at that poor ole man, mamma; he has dot (got) a bad leg". then romancing, as he was now wont to do: "he dot on a very big 'orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. we must make it well." then after a thoughtful pause: "mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to i". later on children of an imaginative turn wax bolder and spin longer stories and create scenes and persons with whom they live in a prolonged companionship. but of this more presently. partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by a more spontaneous play of creative fancy, children's minds often pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. the princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the generous but discriminating old gentleman who brings christmas presents, as well as the beings fashioned by the more original sort of child for himself, these live on just like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments during the day, bringing into the child's life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, and making in many cases, for a time at least, the most real of all realities. i am far from saying that _all_ children make a fancy world for themselves in this way. as i said at the beginning of the chapter the differences among children in this respect are great. yet i think it is safe to say that most children, and especially lonely children who have not a full active life provided for them by companions and opportunities of adventure, do live a good fraction of their life in dreamland. where the active life is provided a child is apt to play rather than lose himself passively in fancy dreams. but play, too, is to a large extent a product of the liveliness of the young imagination. we will now glance at it in this light. chapter ii. the enchantment of play. children's "play," as the expression is commonly understood, differs from the sportive movements of fancy considered in the last chapter by its essentially active character. we do not speak of a child playing save when he does something, however slight, by way of expressing or acting out a fancy. this outer expression of fancy in some active form is commonly called by children themselves "pretending" to be or to do something, by older people when looking back on the pretence "making-believe". in order to understand what childish fancy is like, and how it works, we must carefully watch it as it moves among the toys and creates a new play-world. _the young pretender._ child's play is a kind of creation of a make-believe but half-real world. as such, it has its primal source in the impulse to act out and embody in sensible form some interesting idea; in which respect, as we shall see by-and-by, it has a close kinship to what we call art. the image, say of the wood, of the chivalrous highwayman, or what not, holds the child's brain, and everything has to accommodate itself to the mastering force. now since play is the acting out of some interesting and exciting fancy, it comes at once into collision with the child's actual surroundings. here, however, he finds his opportunity. the floor of the room is magically transformed into a prairie, a sea, or other locality, the hidden space under the table becomes a robber's cave, a chair serves as horse, ship, or other vehicle, to suit the exigencies of the particular play. the passion for play is essentially active; it is the wild longing to act a part; it is thus in a way dramatic. the child-adventurer as he personates robinson crusoe or other hero becomes another being. and in stepping, so to say, out of his every-day self he has to step out of his every-day world. hence the transformation of his surroundings by what has been called the "alchemy of imagination". even a sick child confined to his bed will, as mr. stevenson tells us in his pretty child's song, "the land of counterpane," make these transformations of his surroundings:-- and sometimes for an hour or so i watched my leaden soldiers go, with different uniforms and drills, among the bed-clothes through the hills; and sometimes sent my ships in fleets, all up and down among the sheets; or brought my trees and houses out, and planted cities all about. the impulse to act a part, which is the very life-breath of play, meets us in a crude form very early. even an infant will, if there is a cup at hand, seem to go through something like a pretence of drinking. a little boy of about eighteen months who was digging in the garden began suddenly to play at having a bath. he got into the big bucket he was using for digging, took a handful of earth and dribbled it over him, saying, "'ponge, 'ponge," and then stepped out and asked for "tow'l, tow'l". another boy less than two would spend a whole wet afternoon enjoying his make-believe "painting" of the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. there is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative make-believe children _know_ that they are acting a part. it is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a kind of conscious performance, like that of the stage-actor. a child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. when absorbed in play the last thing he is thinking of is a spectator. as we know, the intrusion of a grown-up is very apt to mar children's play, by calling them back to the dull world of every-day. this impulse to get away from his common and tiresome self into a new part will often carry a child rather far. not only does he want to be a prince, or a fairy, he will even make an attempt to become an animal. he will greatly enjoy going on all fours and making dreadful noises if only he has a play-companion to be frightened; and possibly he does get some way towards feeling like the bloodthirsty lion whom he fancies himself. it is worth noting that such passing out of one's ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player. a cat or a dog will be quite ready to go through a kind of make-believe game, yet even in its play the cat remains the cat, and the dog the dog. such play-like transmutation of the self is sometimes carried over longer periods. a child will play at being something for a whole day. for example, a boy of three and a half years would one day lead the life of a coal-heaver, another day that of a soldier, and so forth, and was rather particular in expecting his mother to remember which of his favourite characters he was adopting on this or that day. in a good deal of this play-action there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child of vigorous fancy plays out his part with imaginary surroundings. children in their second year will act out a scene purely by means of pantomimic movements. thus one little fellow not quite two years old would, when taken out in his perambulator, amuse himself by putting out his hand and pretending to catch "little micies" (mice), which make-believe little rodents he proceeded to cuddle and to stroke, winding up his play by throwing them away, or handing them over to his mother. in like manner he would pretend to feed chickens, taking imaginary food with one hand out of the other, and scattering it with an accompaniment of "chuck! chuck! chuck!" this tendency of the little player to conjure up new surroundings, and to bring to his side desirable companions, is, i suspect, common among lonely children. one little fellow of four passed much of his time in journeyings to edinburgh, "london town," china and so forth in quest of his two little boys who roved about with their "mamsey," a "mrs. cock". they paid him visits when he was alone, always contriving to depart "just two tiny minutes" before any one came in.[ ] mr. canton's little heroine took to nursing an invisible "iccle gaal" (little girl), of whose presence she seemed perfectly assured.[ ] [ ] from a paper by mrs. robert jardine. [ ] _the invisible playmate_, p. ff. if only the young imagination is strong enough there may be more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious companions, perfectly obedient to the little player's will, take the place of less controllable ones. yet this kind of play, which derives no support from the surroundings, makes heavy demands on the imagination, and would not, one suspects, satisfy most children. the character of the little player's actual surroundings is, for the most part, a matter of small concern to him. if only he has a dark corner and a piece of furniture or two he can build his play-scene. what he does want is some semblance of a living companion. whatever his play he needs somebody, if only as listener to his make-believe; and when his imagination cannot rise to an invisible auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the bath, a fire-shovel, or a clothes-prop in the garden. in more active sorts of play, where something has to be done, he will commonly want a living companion. in this making of play-companions we see again the transforming power of a child's fancy. mr. ruskin speaks somewhere of "the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making everything out of nothing". this delightful secret of childhood is illustrated in its fondness for toys and its way of behaving towards them. later on, i think, children are apt to grow more sophisticated, to pay more attention to their surroundings, and to require more realistic accessories for their play actions. this, at least dr. stanley hall tells us, is true of doll-plays. _mysteries of dolldom._ the fact that children make living things out of their toy horses, dogs and the rest is known to every observer of their ways. to the natural unsceptical eye the boy on his rudely carved "gee-gee" slashing the dull flank with all a boy's glee, looks as if he were possessed with the fancy that the rigid inert-looking block which he bestraddles is a very horse. this breathing of life into playthings is seen in all its magic force in play with dolls. a doll, broadly conceived, is anything which a child carries about and makes a pet of. the toy horse, dog or what not that a little boy nurses, feeds and takes to bed with him has much of the dignity of a true doll. but adopting conventional distinctions we shall confine the word to those things which are more or less endowed by childish fancy with human form and character. i read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but young boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are hardly less devoted than girls. endless is the variety of _rôle_ assigned to the doll. it is the all-important comrade in that _solitude à deux_ of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. mrs. burnett tells us that when nursing her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures. very tenderly, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, doing her best to keep it clean and tidy, feeding it, putting it to bed, amusing it, for example, by showing it her pictures, tending it with fidelity during bouts of sickness, and giving it the honours of a funeral when, from the attack of a dog set on by an unfeeling brother or other cause, it comes to "die";[ ] or when, as in the case of little jane welsh (afterwards mrs. carlyle), the time has come for the young lady to cast aside her dolls. [ ] i owe this and other observations on the treatment of dolls to dr. stanley hall's curious researches. the doll-interest implies a deep mysterious sympathy. children wish their dolls to share in their things, to be kissed when they are kissed, and so to come close to them in experience and feeling. not only so, they look for sympathy from their doll-companions, taking to them all their childish troubles. so far is this feeling of oneness carried in some cases that the passion for dolls has actually rendered the child indifferent to child-companions. it is not every little girl who like little maggie tulliver has only "occasional fits of fondness" for her nursling when the brother is absent. not only in this lavishing of tenderness and of sympathy on the doll, but in the occasional discharge on it of a fit of anger, children show how near it comes to a human companion. the punishment of the doll is an important element in nursery-life. it is apt to be carried out with formal solemnity and often with something of brutal emphasis. yet tenderness being the strongest part of the doll-attachment, the little disciplinarians are apt to suffer afterwards for their cruelty, one little girl showing remorse after such a chastisement of her pet for several days. i have talked here of "dolls," but i must not be supposed to be speaking merely of the lovely creatures with blue eyes and yellow hair with which the well-to-do child is wont to be supplied. nothing is more strange and curious in child-life than its art of manufacturing dolls out of the most unpromising materials. the creative child can find something to nurse and fondle and take to bed with it in a bundle of hay tied round with a string, in a shawl, a pillow, a stick, a clothes-pin, or a clay-pipe. victor hugo, with a true touch, makes the little outcast cosette, who has never had a "real doll," fashion one out of a tiny leaden sword and a rag or two, putting it to sleep in her arms with a soft lullaby. do any of us really understand the child's attitude of mind towards its doll? although gifted writers like george sand have tried to take us back to the feeling of childhood, it may be doubted whether they have made it intelligible to us. and certainly the answers to questions collected in america have done little, if anything, towards making it clear. the truth is that the perfect child's faith in dolldom passes away early, in most cases it would appear about the age of thirteen or fourteen. it is then that the young people begin clearly to realise the shocking fact that dolls have no "inner life". occasionally girls will go on playing with dolls much later than this, but not surely with the old sincerity. that many children have a genuine delusion about their dolls seems evident. that is to say when they talk to them and otherwise treat them as human they imaginatively realise that they can understand and feel. the force of the illusion, blotting out from the child's view the naked reality before its eyes, is a striking illustration of the vividness of early fancy. perhaps, too, this intensity of faith comes in part of the strength of the impulses which commonly sustain the doll-passion. of these the instinct of companionship, of sympathy, is the strongest. a lady tells me she remembers that when a child she had a passionate longing for a big, big doll, which would give her the full sweetness of cuddling. the imitative impulse, too, prompting the child to carry out on the doll actions similar to those carried out on itself by mother and nurse, is a strong support of the delusion. a doll, as the odd varieties selected show, seems to be, more than anything else, something to be dressed. children's reasons for preferring one doll to another, as that it can have its face washed, or that it has real hair which can be combed, show how the impulse to carry out nursery operations sustains the feeling of attachment. a girl (the same that wanted the big doll to fondle) had dolls of the proper sort; yet she preferred to make one out of a little wooden stool, because she could more realistically act out with this odd substitute the experience of taking her pet out for a walk, making it stand, for example, when she met a friend. of course, the child's faith, like other faith, is not always up to the height of perfect ardour. a child of six or seven, when the passion for dolls is apt to be strong, will have moments of coolness, leaving "poor dolly" lying in the most humiliating posture on the floor, or throwing it away in a sudden fit of disenchantment and disgust. scepticism will intrude, especially when the hidden "inside" comes to view as mere emptiness, or at best as nothing but sawdust. children seem, as george sand says, to oscillate between the real and the impossible. yet the intrusion of doubt does not, in many cases at least, interfere with an enduring trust. dr. stanley hall tells us that "long after it is _known_ that they are wood, wax, etc., it is _felt_ that they are of skin, flesh, etc.". yes, that is it; the child, seized with the genuine play-mood, _dreams_ its doll into a living child, or living adult. how oddly the player's faith goes on living side by side with a measure of doubt is illustrated in the following story. a little girl begged her mother not to make remarks about her doll in her (the doll's) presence, as she had been trying all her life to keep that doll from knowing that she was not alive.[ ] [ ] from an article on "the philosophy of dolls," _chambers' journal_, . the treating of the doll and images of animals, such as the wooden or india-rubber horse, as living things is the outcome of the play-impulse. all the imaginative play of children seems, so far as we can understand it, to have about it something of illusion. this fact of the full sincere acceptance of the play-world as for the moment the real one, is illustrated in the child's jealous insistence that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new one. "about the age of four," writes m. egger of his boys, "felix is playing at being coachman; emile happens to return home at the moment. in announcing his brother, felix does not say, 'emile is come;' he says, 'the brother of the coachman is come'." it is illustrated further in the keen resentment of any act on the part of the mother or other person which seems to contradict the facts of the new world. a boy of two who was playing one morning in his mother's bed at drinking up pussy's milk from an imaginary saucer on the pillow, said a little crossly to his mother, who was getting into bed after fetching his toys: "don't lie on de saucer, mammy!" the pain inflicted on the little player by such a contradictory action is sometimes intense. a little girl of four was playing "shops" with her younger sister. "the elder one (writes the mother) was shopman at the time i came into her room and kissed her. she broke out into piteous sobs, i could not understand why. at last she sobbed out: 'mother, you never kiss the man in the shop'. i had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion." but there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. the child finds himself confronted by the unbeliever who questions what he says about the doll's crying and so forth, and in this case he will often stoutly defend his creed. "discussions with sceptical brothers (writes dr. stanley hall), who assert that the doll is nothing but wood, rubber, wax, etc., are often met with a resentment as keen as that vented upon missionaries who declare that idols are but stocks and stones." it is the same with the toy-horse. "when (writes a mother of her boy) he was just over two years old l. began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (dobbin) as if it were a real living creature. 'no tarpenter (carpenter) made dobbin,' he would say, 'he is not wooden but kin (skin) and bones and dod (god) made him.' if any one said 'it' in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly: 'it! you mut'ent tay _it_, you mut tay _he_.'" while play in its absorbing moments, and even afterwards, may thus produce a genuine illusion, the state of perfect realisation is of course apt to be broken by intervals of scepticism. this has already been illustrated in the case of the doll. the same little boy that played with the imaginary mice was sitting on his stool pretending to smoke like his grandpapa out of a bit of bent cardboard. suddenly his face clouded over; he stroked his chin, and remarked in a disappointed tone, "i have not got any whiskers". the dream of full manhood was here rudely dispelled by a recall to reality. a measure of the same fanciful transformation of things that has been illustrated in make-believe play, a measure, too, of the illusion which frequently accompanies it, enters, i believe, into all children's pastimes. whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the child controls a thing which in the freedom of its movements suggests that it has a will of its own? this seems borne out by the following story. a little girl of five once stopped trundling her hoop and said to her mother she thought that her hoop must be alive, because "it is so sensible; it goes where i want it to". perhaps the same thing may be said of other toys, as the kite and the sailing boat. _serious side of play._ i have here treated the whole realm of childish fancy as one of play, as one in which happy childhood finds its own sunny world. yet it is clear that this is after all only one side of children's dream-world. like our own world it has its climates, and if fancy is often frolicsome and games deliciously sweet, they sometimes become serious to the point of a quite dreadful solemnity. that children's imagination is wont to hover, with something of the fascination of the moth, on the confines of the fearful, is known to us all. some children, no doubt, have much more of the passion for the gruesome and blood-curdling than others, since temperament counts for much here; yet it is pretty safe to say that most know something of this horrible fascination. dreams, whether of the night or of the day, are not always of beautiful fairies and the like. weird, awful-looking figures have a way of pushing themselves into the front of the scene. especially when the "tone" of the frail young nerves runs down from poor health do these alarming shapes appear, and acquire a mighty hold on the child's imagination. of the timidity of the early years of life i shall have more to say by-and-by. here i want to bring out how the very vividness of children's images exposes them to what is sometimes at least their worst form of suffering. a child, at once sensitive and imaginative, frequently passes into a state of half hallucination in which the products of fancy take on visible reality. george sand, in her delightful reminiscences of childhood, relates more than one of these terrible prostrating hallucinations of the early years.[ ] [ ] see my account of george sand's childhood, in _studies of childhood_, chap. xii. we see the same gloomy turn of the young imagination in the readiness with which children accept superstitions about ghosts, witches, and so forth. those who are brought up in the country in contact with the superstitious beliefs of the peasant appear to imbibe them with great energy. this is true of george sand, who gives us an interesting account of the legends of the french peasants, with whom when a little girl she was allowed to associate. american children, especially those who come under the influence of the beliefs of the negro and of the indian, may, as that delightful book, _tom sawyer_, tells us, become quite experts in folk-lore. even in england and among well-to-do people children will show an alarming facility in adopting the superstitious ideas of the servants. much the same thing shows itself in children's romancings and in their preferences in the matter of stories. so far from these being always bright and amusing, they frequently show a very decided tinge of blackness. the young imagination seems to be especially plastic under the touch of the gruesome. it loves to be roused to its highest pitch of activity by the presentation of something fearsome, something which sends a wild tremor through the nerves. and even when the story is free from this touch of the dreadful it takes on seriousness by reason of the earnestness which the child's mind brings to it. coming now to active play, we find here, too, in the region which seems to owe its very existence to the childish instinct of enjoyment, traces of the same seriousness. for most children, one suspects, play would become a tame thing were there not the fearful to conjure with. the favourite play-haunts, the dark corners under the table, behind the curtains, and so forth, show what a vital element of play is supplied by the excitement of the state of half-dread. it is in the games which set the young nerves gently shaking, when a robber has to be met or a giant attacked in his cave, that one sees best, i think, how terribly earnest children's play may become. even where play has in it nothing alarming it is apt to take on a serious aspect. this has been illustrated in what has been said about the doll and other play-illusions. most of children's play is imitative of the serious actions of grown-up folk. in nursing her doll the little girl is taking to her domestic duties in the most serious of moods; similarly when the little boy assumes the responsibilities of coachman or other useful functionary. the imitative impulse of childhood is wont in these cases to follow out the correct and prescribed order with punctilious exactness. the doll must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and so forth, with the regularity that obtains in the child's own life; the coachman must hold the whip, urge on the horses, or stop them in the proper orthodox manner. and the same fidelity to model and prescription shows itself in those games which reproduce the page of fiction. here again tom sawyer is an excellent example. the way in which that leader of boys lays down the law to huckleberry finn when they play at pirates or at robin hood and his merry men illustrates forcibly this serious aspect of play. part ii. at work. chapter iii. attacking our language. no part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language. the small person's first efforts in linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition of human intercourse. the difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this field of infantile activity. a child first begins to work in downright earnest when he tries to master these difficulties. as we are here studying the child at an age when he has acquired a certain hold on human speech, i shall make no attempt to describe the babbling of the first months which precedes true speech. for the same reason i shall have to pass by the interesting beginnings of sign-making, and shall only just touch the first stages of articulate performance. all this is, i think, deeply interesting, but it cannot be adequately dealt with here, and i have fully dealt with it in my larger work. the first difficulty which our little linguist has to encounter is the mechanical one of reproducing, with a recognisable measure of approximation, our verbal sounds. what a very rough approximation it is at first, all mothers know. when, for example, a child expects you to translate his sound "koppa" into "tommy," or "pots" into "hippopotamus," it will be acknowledged that he is making heavy demands. yet though he causes us difficulties in this way he does so because he finds himself in difficulties. his articulatory organ cannot master the terrible words we put in his way, and he is driven to these short cuts and other make-shifts. _the namer of things._ leaving now the problem of getting over the mechanical difficulties of our speech, let us see what the little explorer has to do when trying to use verbal sounds with their right meanings. here, too, we shall find that huge difficulties beset his path, and that his arrival at the goal proves him to have been in his way as valiant and hard-working as an african explorer. one feature of the early tussle with our language is curious and often quaintly pretty. having at first but few names, the little experimenter makes the most of these by extending them in new and surprising directions. the extension of names to new objects on the ground of some perceived likeness has been touched on above (p. ); and many other examples might be given. thus when one child first saw a star and wanted to name it he called it, as if by a poetic metaphor, an "eye". in like manner the name "pin" was extended by another child to a crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and seemed to mean something little to be taken between the fingers. the same child used the sound "'at" (hat) for anything put on the head, including a hair-brush. similarly children often extend the names "mamma, baby" to express any contrast of size, as when a small coin was called by an american child a "baby dollar". in this extension of language by the child we find not merely a tendency to move along lines of analogy, as in the above instances, but to go from a thing to its accompaniments by way of what the psychologist calls association. this is illustrated by the case of darwin's grandchild, who after learning to use the common children's name for duck, "quack," proceeded to call a sheet of water "quack". in like manner a little girl called the gas lamp "pop" from the sound produced when lighting it, and then carried over the name "pop" to the stool on which the maid stood when proceeding to light it. there is another curious way in which children are driven by the slenderness of their verbal resources to "extend" the names they learn. they will often employ a word which indicates some relation to express what may be called the inverted relation. for example, like the unschooled yokel they will sometimes make the word "learn" do duty for "teach" also. in one case "spend" was made to express "cost". it was a somewhat similar inversion when a little girl called her parasol blown about by the wind "a windy parasol," and a stone that made her hand sore "a very sore stone". not only do the small experimenters thus stretch the application of their words beyond our conventional limitations, they are often daring enough when their stock fails them to invent new names. sometimes this is done by framing a new composite name out of familiar ones. one child, for example, possessing the word steam-ship and wanting the name sailing-ship, cleverly hit upon the composite form "wind-ship". one little girl, when only a year and nine months old, showed quite a passion for classing objects by help of such compound names, arranging the rooms, for example, into "morner-room," "dinner-room" (she was fond of adding "er" at this time) and "nursery-room". savages do much the same kind of thing, as when the aztecs called a boat a "water-house". it is no less bold a feat when the hard-pressed tyro in speechland frames a new word on the model of other words which he already knows. the results are often quaint enough. one small boy talked of the "rainer," the fairy who makes rain, and another little boy dubbed a teacher the "lessoner". two children invented the quaint substantive "thinks" for "thoughts," and another child used the form "digs" for holes dug in the ground. other droll inventions occur, as when one small person asked to see another worm "deading," and neatly expressed the act of undoing a parcel by the form "unparcel"; and when another child spoke of his metal toy being "unhotted," lacking our word cooled, and asked, "can't i be sorried?" for "can't i be forgiven?" just as children invent new general names, so they now and again invent "proper" names in order to mark off one person or thing from another of the same kind. thus a german professor tells us that his grand-niece introduced her new nurse, who had the same name, "mary," as her old one, as "evening mary," because she had arrived in the evening. of course children's experiments in language are not always so neat as this. they are sometimes misled by false analogies into the formation of such clumsy words as "sorrified" for "sorry," and "magnicious" for "magnificent". _the sentence-builder._ it is an interesting moment when the young linguist tries his hand at putting words together in sentences. as is pretty well known, a child has for some time to try to make known his thoughts and wishes by single vocables, such as "mamma," "milk," "puss," "up," and so forth. each of these words serves in the first baby language for a variety of sentences. thus "puss!" means sometimes "puss is doing something," at other times "i want puss," and so forth. but somewhere about the age of one year nine months the child makes bold to essay a more explicit and definite form of statement. the construction of sentences proceeds in a cautious manner. at first the structure is of the simplest, two words being placed one after the other, in what is called apposition, as in the couple, "big bir" (big bird), "papa no" (papa's nose), and the like. later on longer sentences are attempted of a similar pattern; and it is truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude fashion without any aid from those valuable auxiliaries, prepositions, and the like. for example, one boy when in his twentieth month gave this elaborate order to his father, "dada toe toe ba," that is, "dada is to go and put his toes in the bath". quaint inversions of our order not infrequently occur in this early sentence-making. thus one child used the form, "out-pull-baby 'pecs," meaning in our language, "baby pulls (or will pull) out the spectacles". sometimes the order reminds us still more closely of the idiom of foreign languages, as when a little girl said: "how babba (baby, _i.e._, herself) does feed nicely!" another curious feature of children's first style of composition is the fondness for antithesis. a little boy used when wishing to express his approval of something, say a dog, to use the form, "this a nice bow-wow, not nasty bow-bow". similarly a little girl said, "boo (the name of her cat) dot (got) tail; poor babba (baby) dot no tail," proceeding to search for a tail under her skirts. in the first attempts to fit our words together dreadful slips are apt to occur. the way in which children are wont to violate the rules of grammar when using verbs, as in saying "eated" for "ate," "scram" for "screamed," "be'd" for "was," and so on, is well known, and there are many excuses to be found for these very natural errors. particularly instructive are the odd confusions which children are apt to fall into when they come to use the pronouns, and more particularly "i," "me". many a child begins by using "i" and "you" with mechanical imitation of others, meaning by "you" his own person, which is, of course, called "you" by others when addressing him. the forms "i," "me" and "my" are apt to be hopelessly mixed up, as in saying "me go" and "my go" for "i go," "me book" for "my book," and so forth. one little boy used the form "i am" for "i," saying, for example, "i am don't want to". a little german girl had an odd way of splitting up herself into two persons, saying, for example, "she has made me wet," meaning that she had made herself wet. throughout this work of mastering our language a child is wont to eke out his deficiencies by bold strokes of originality. when, for example, a little girl towards the end of the second year, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, says, in default of the word "jump," "make mamma high". robert hamerling, the austrian poet, when a child, being told by his sick mother that he had not said something she wished him to say, answered, "i said it, but you didn't hear, you are poorly, and so _blind in the ear_". quite pretty metaphors are sometimes hit upon, as when a little boy of two seeing his father putting a piece of wood on the fire said, "flame going to eat it". a boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, "it rains off," for "the rain has left off". once a girl about the same age as the boy hit on the idiom, "no two 'tatoes left," for "only one potato is left". pretty constructions sometimes appear in these make-shifts, as when a little girl of whom mrs. meynell tells, wishing to know how far she might go in spending money on fruit, asked, "what mustn't it be more than?" _the interpreter of words._ there is one part of this task of mastering our language which deserves especial notice, _viz._, the puzzling out of the meanings we put, or try to put, into our words. many good stories of children show that they have a way of sadly misunderstanding our words. this arises often from the ignorance of the child and the narrowness of his experience, as when a sunday school scholar understood the story of the good samaritan to mean that a gentleman came and poured some paraffin (_i.e._, oil) over the poor man. by a child's mind what we call accidentals often get taken to be the real meaning. a boy and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. later on the boy was put into a "suit". a lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not the twins, when she replied, "no, we _used_ to be". "twin" was inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity in dress. it should be remembered, too, that we greatly add to the difficulties of the small student of our language by reason of the ambiguities of our expressions, and of our short and elliptical modes of speaking. it was a quite natural misconception when an american child, noting that children were "half price" at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap. many another child besides jean ingelow has been saddened at being told by her father or other grown-up who was dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he "had a bone in his leg". much misapprehension arises, too from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way, as when a small boy indignantly resented the statement of his mother who was driving him behind a rather skittish pony, "pony has lost his head". children are desirous of understanding us and make brave efforts to put meanings into our words, sometimes falling comically short of the mark. a little fellow of two who had been called "fat" by his nurse when given his bath, afterwards proceeded to call his father "fat" when he saw him taking his bath. "fat" had by a natural misconception taken on the meaning of "naked". it was a simple movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the inspector, "what is an average?" by saying, "what the hen lays eggs on". she had heard her mother say, "the hen lays so many eggs 'on the average' every week," and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this average. it is the same with what is read to them. where they do not recognise a meaning they invent one, or if necessary substitute an intelligible word for an unintelligible one. young hermiston in r. l. stevenson's last story naturally enough said in speaking of his father, the "hanging judge," "it were better for that man if a _milestone_ were bound about his neck". similarly they will invert the relations of words in order to arrive at something like a meaning. mr. canton relates in his pretty sketch of a child, _the invisible playmate_, that his little heroine, who knew the lines in _struwwelpeter_-- the doctor came and shook his head, and gave him nasty physic too-- was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, "and will the doctor come and shook my head?" it was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient. there is something of this same impatience of meaningless sayings, of the same keen desire to import a meaning into strange words, in children's "word-play," as we call it. for example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse's neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some time. he thereupon exclaimed, "i don't think it's _new_ ralgia, i call it _old_ ralgia". was this playful punning or a half-serious attempt to correct a misstatement? a child called his doll "shakespeare" because its spear-like legs could be shaken. we know that adults sometimes do the same kind of thing, as a cabman i once overheard speaking to somebody about putting down "_ash_phalt". we all like to feel at home with words, and if they look dreadfully strange we do our best to give them a look of old acquaintance. it should be added that children, though they eke out their deficiencies by inventing new verbal forms and putting new meanings into our words, have on the whole a vast respect for words. this is seen in their way of stickling for accuracy when others repeat familiar word-forms. the zeal of a child in correcting the language not only of other children, but of grown-ups, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his corrective function, are well known to parents. sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. "shall i read to you out of this book, baby?" asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. "no," replied the infant, "not _out_ of dot book, but somepy inside of it." the same little stickler for verbal accuracy, when his nurse asked him, "are you going to build your bricks, baby?" replied solemnly, "we don't build bricks, we make them and then build _with_ them". yet such disagreeable pedantry shows how conscientiously the small curly head is trying to bring clearness and order into the dark tangle of our speech, and it ought not to be treated harshly. chapter iv. the serious searcher. in a former chapter we dealt with a child's mind as a harbourer of fancies, as subject to the illusive spell of its bright imagery. yet with this play of fancy there goes a respectable quantity of serious inquiry into the things of the real world. this is true, i believe, even of highly imaginative children, who now and again come down from their fancy-created world and regard the solid matter-of-fact one at their feet with shrewdly scrutinising eyes. for children, like some of those patients of whom the hypnotist tells us, live alternately two lives. the child not only scans his surroundings, he begins to reflect on what he observes, and does his best to understand the puzzling scene which meets his eyes. and all this gives seriousness, a deep and admirable seriousness, to his attitude; so that one may forgive the touch of exaggeration when mr. bret harte writes: "all those who have made a loving study of the young human animal will, i think, admit that its dominant expression is _gravity_ and not playfulness". we may now turn to this graver side of the young intelligence. _the thoughtful observer._ this serious examination of things begins early. most of us have been subjected to the searching gaze of an infant's eyes when we first made it overtures of friendship. how much this fixed gaze of a child of six months takes in nobody can say. what we find when the child grows and can give an account of his observations is that, while often surprisingly minute in particular directions, they are narrowly confined. thus a child will sometimes be so impressed with the colour of an object as almost to ignore its form. a little girl of eighteen months, who knew lambs and called them "lammies," on seeing two black ones in a field among some white ones called out, "eh! doggie, doggie!" the likeness of colour to the black dog overpowered the likeness in form to the other lambs close by. we shall find further examples of this one-sided observation when we come to consider children's drawings. the pressure of practical needs tends, however, to develop a fuller examination of objects. a lamb and a dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a number of marks in which the supremely interesting detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. individual things, too, have to be more carefully distinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the line between what is "mine" and "not mine," for example, spoons and picture-books. the recognition of the mother, say, exacts this fuller inspection, for she cannot always be recognised by her height alone, for example, when she is sitting, nor by her hair alone, as when she has her hat on, so that _a group_ of distinctive features has to be seized. when once the eye has begun to note differences it makes rapid progress. this is particularly true where the development of a special interest leads to a habit of concentration on a particular kind of object. thus little boys when the "railway interest" seizes them are apt to be finely observant of the differences between this and that engine and so forth. a boy aged two years and eleven months, after travelling over two railways, asked his mother if she had noticed the difference in the make of the rails on the two lines. of course she had not, though she afterwards ascertained that there was a slight difference which the boy's keener eyes had detected. the fineness of children's distinguishing observation is well illustrated in their recognition of small drawings and photographs, as when one child of two instantly picked out the likeness of his father from a small _carte de visite_ group. in truth, children's observation, when close and prolonged, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a really powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. the boy, john ruskin, could look for hours together at flowing water, noting all its subtle changes. another little boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, _the railway train_, and inspected the drawings almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining the treasure even at meals. "at the end of this time (writes his mother) he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture." along with this serious work of observing things there often goes a particularly bright and exact recollection of them and their names. feats of memory in the first three years are, i suspect, a common theme of discourse among admiring mothers. here is a sample of many stories sent me. a little girl only nine months old when taken out for a walk was shown some lambs at the gate of a field. on being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate, "baa, baa!" later on children will remember through much longer intervals. a little boy of two years on seeing a girl cousin who lived in the country where he had visited five months before, at once asked whether her dog "bruce" barked. another boy aged two years and ten months on revisiting his mother's paternal home in italy after four or five months remembered small details, _e.g._, how the grapes were cut, and how the wine was made. nor does the busy brain of the child stop at observing and recalling what lies about him. he begins at an early age to compare this thing with that, and to note the relations and connections of things, how he is almost as tall as the table, for example, and a good deal taller than pussy, how he has a spoon while his elders have knives and forks, and so forth. and all the while he is trying to get at the general rule or law which obtains in this and that realm of things. the first attempts of a child to grasp the causal connections of things are apt to be quaint enough. professor preyer tells us that his little boy, having been told to blow on his hand which had been hurt, proceeded afterwards when he had struck his head against something "to blow of his own accord, supposing that the blowing would have a soothing effect, even when it did not reach the injured part".[ ] [ ] _the development of the intellect_ (appleton & co.), p. . since the little searcher in trying to piece his facts together in their proper connections must, as all of us do, make use of such experiences as he happens to have, he will pretty certainly fall into the error of "hasty generalisation," as we call it, taking things to be really connected which accidentally occur together, it may be in a single instance only. an american boy of ten who had happened to have a teacher who was short and cross, and a second who was tall and very kind, said to his new teacher, who struck him as short, "i'm afraid you'll make a cross teacher". yet while we smile at such simplicity ought we not to remember that older people, too, sometimes commit similar blunders, and that after all the impulse to reason can only work itself into a good sound faculty by risking such blunders? _the pertinacious questioner._ the effort of the child to understand the things about him grows noteworthy somewhere near the end of the third year, and about the same time there comes the questioning "mania," as we are apt to regard it. the first question was put in the case of a boy in the twenty-eighth month, in the case of a girl in the twenty-third month. but the true age of inquisitiveness when questions are fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year. a common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children's questioning is one of the ways in which they love to plague their elders. we shall see presently how much truth there is in this view. it may be enough here to say that a good deal of this first questioning is something very different. a child asks you what this thing is you wear on your watch-chain, why you part your hair in the middle, or what not, because he feels that he is ignorant, and for the moment at any rate he would like to get his ignorance removed. more than this, his question shows that he thinks you can satisfy his curiosity. questioning may take various directions. a good deal of the child's catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by a more or less keen desire for fact. the typical form of this line of questioning is "what?" the motive here is commonly the wish to know something which will connect itself with and complete a bit of knowledge already gained. "how old is rover?" "where was rover born?" "who was his father?" "what is that dog's name?" "what sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?" this kind of questioning may spring out of pure childish curiosity, or out of some practical need, as that of acting out a part in play. thus a kindergarten teacher was wont to be besieged with questions of this kind from her small boys when playing at being animals: "do walruses swim fast or slow?" "do lions climb trees?" one feature in this pursuit of fact is the great store which a child sets by names of things. it has been pointed out by a french writer that the form of question: "what is this?" often means, "what is it called?" a child is apt to think that everything has its own name. one little boy explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers, just as babies have. perhaps children when they find out the name of a new thing feel that they know it, that they have been introduced to it, so to speak. another motive in this early questioning is the desire for an explanation of what is seen or heard about the reason and the cause of things. it takes the well-known forms, "why?" "who made?" and so forth. who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whine-like sound of this question? nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little "why?" let us in judging of this pitiless "why?" try to understand the situation of the small searcher confronted by so much that is strange and puzzling in nature, and in human life alike. just because he is born a thinker he must try at least to bring the strange thing into some connection with his familiar world. and what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up for a solution of the difficulty? the demand for the reason or explanation of a thing may be satisfied by a bare reference to some other thing which is similar and so fitted to throw the light of familiarity on what is new and strange. for example, you may sometimes still a child's questioning as to why pussy has fur by telling him that it is pussy's hair. a child may find an appeasement, too, of his logical appetite in learning that what is new and strange to him comes under a general rule, that, for example, many other animals besides pussy have fur. nevertheless, i suspect that a child's "why?" aims farther than this; that it is only fully appeased by a knowledge of what we older folk call a reason, that is to say of the cause which originates a thing, and of the purpose which it serves. it is easy to see, indeed, that this questioning curiosity of the little ones is largely directed to the subject of origins or makings. what hours and hours do they not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are made! the inquiry into origin starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been produced by hand-craft after the manner of household possessions. the world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. and this is perhaps natural enough, for of the things whose production the child sees are not the larger number fashioned by human hands? he himself makes a considerable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. and, then, he is wont to watch with a keen interest the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hay-ricks. to ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the type of causation which is familiar to him. the demand for a reason takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear. the search now is for the use of a thing, the end which the maker had in view when he fashioned it. when, for example, a child asks, "why is there such a lot of dust?" he seems to be seeking the purpose which the maker of dust had in mind, or in other words the use of dust. similarly when things are endowed with life and their own purpose, as in asking, "why does the wind blow?" here the child thinks of nature's processes as if they were a kind of human action which we can understand by seeing into its aim. here are some curious observations which seem to illustrate this childish idea of how nature's processes originate. a little girl whom we will call m., when one year eleven months old, happened to be walking with her mother on a windy day. at first she was delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: "wind make mamma's hair untidy, babba (her own name) make mamma's hair tidy, _so wind not blow adain_ (again)". about three weeks later the same child being out in the rain with her mother said: "mamma, dy (dry) babba's hands, _so not rain any more_". this little inquirer seems clearly to have conceived of the wind and rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness. we may notice something more in this early form of questioning. children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after the manner of people, that their activity is motived by some aim, but that this aim concerns us human creatures. the wind and the rain came and went in our little girl's nature-theory just to vex and not to vex "mamma" and "babba". a little boy of two years two months sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, "sun not look at hennie," and then more pleadingly, "please, sun, not look at poor hennie". such observations show that children, like savages, and possibly, too, some persons who would not like to be called savages, are inclined to look at nature's doings as specially designed to injure or benefit themselves. there is reason to think that the idea of use is prominent in the first conceptions of things. a french inquirer, m. binet, has brought this fact out by questioning a considerable number of children. thus, when asked what a hat is, one child answered, "pour mettre sur la tête". similarly children asked by other inquirers, "what is a tree?" answered, "to make the wind blow," "to sit under," and so forth. later on a more scientific form of questioning arises. the little searcher begins to understand something about the processes of nature, and tries by questioning his elders to get a glimpse into their manner of working. this quest of a natural explanation of things marks the transition to the level of thought of the civilised man. here, again, the small investigator finds much hard work to be got through, for nature's doings are apt to be varied and rather complex. a child, for example, finds that when he dips his hand into sand, clay, or what not, he makes a hole. but when he puts it into water no hole is left behind. hence we can understand one little fellow asking his father, "how _is_ it that when we put our hand into the water we don't make a hole in it?" here we have not mere curiosity; we have perplexity at what looks contradictory to the usual run of things. the same thing is illustrated in the question of another little boy, "can they (the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?" among the things which are apt to puzzle the young inquirer is the disappearance of things. he can as little understand this as the beginning of things, and so he will ask: "where does the sea swim to?" or "where does the wind go to?" or "where does the wet (_e.g._, on the pavement after rain) go to?" as the view of things begins to widen and embrace the absent and the past new puzzles occur and prompt to a more philosophical kind of questioning. sometimes it is the mere vastness of the world, the multitude of things, which oppresses and confuses the young understanding. "mother," asked a small boy of four, "why _is_ there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?" a little girl about three and a half years old asked her mother, "mamma, why do there be any more days, why do there? and why don't we leave off eating and drinking?" it is hard for us older folk to get behind questions like this so as to understand the source of the childish bewilderment. the subject of origins is, as we all know, apt to be a sore puzzle for the childish mind. the beginnings of living things are, of course, the great mystery. "there's such a lot of things," remarked the little zoologist i have recently been quoting, "i want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. i want to know who made god, and i want to know if pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties." finding that this was not so, he observed: "oh, then, i s'pose she has to have god to help her if she doesn't have kitties in eggs given her to sit on". another little boy, five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: "when there _is_ no egg where does the hen come from? when there _was_ no egg, i mean, where _did_ the hen come from?" another little fellow was puzzled to know how the first child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and a half years put it: "when everybody was a baby--then who could be their nurse--if they were all babies?" in this bold sweep of inquiry a child is apt to go back to the absolute beginnings of things, as when he asks, "who made god?" or, "what was there before god?" the idea that god has _always_ been seems to be particularly perplexing and even oppressive to a child's mind. sometimes the questioning takes on a still clearer ring of metaphysics, startling and shocking perhaps the patient listener. a little boy of three once put the poser: "if i'd gone upstairs, could god make it that i hadn't?" or as another boy of eight put it to a distinguished biologist, "mr. --, mr. --, if god wanted me to be good, and i wouldn't be good, who would win?" needless to say that this young philosopher was a britisher. with many children confronted with the mysteries of god and the devil this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological speculation. thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly recognisable in the question once put by an american boy under eight years of age to a priest who visited his home: "father, why don't god kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?" the different lines of questioning here briefly illustrated are apt to run on concurrently from about the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. yet, through these alternating bouts of questioning we can recognise laws of progress. thus children will ask first about the things which first interest them, as, for example, animals and babies. again the questioning grows gradually more intelligent, more reasonable, accommodating itself, often after much suffering, to the adamantine limits of human knowledge. while i have here regarded children's questioning seriously as the expression of a genuine desire for knowledge, i am well aware that this cannot be said of all of it. the hard-pressed mother knows that a child's "why?" is often used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put a meaning into it. a good deal of the more reckless kind of children's asking, when one question is followed by another with an irritating pertinacity, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character. some of it, indeed, as when a little american asked her mother: "mamma, why ain't edna belle (her baby sister) me, and why ain't i edna belle?" comes alarmingly near the rage of questioning observed in certain forms of mental disease, and may perhaps be a symptom of an over-wrought brain. to admit this, however, is far from saying that we ought to treat all this questioning with a mild contempt. the little questioners flatter us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and good manners should compel us to treat their questions with some attention. and if now and then they torment us with a string of random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that wrongfully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands? chapter v. first thoughts: (_a_) the natural world. we have seen in the last chapter that children have their characteristic ways of looking at their new world. these ways often result in the formation of definite ideas or "thoughts" which may last for years. we will now try to follow the little thinker in his first attempt at framing a theory of nature and her doings. here, too, we shall find that the active little brain has its work cut out for it. as already suggested, things are often so puzzling to the child that it is only by dint of a good deal of questioning that he can piece them together at all. and even after he has had his questions answered he sometimes finds it well-nigh impossible to reconcile one fact with another, and to reach a clear view of things as a whole. _the fashion of things._ the first thoughts on nature and her processes are moulded very largely by the tendencies of the young mind touched on in the last chapter. like the savage the child is apt to think of the wind and the thunder as somebody's doing, and as aimed specially at himself. hence the strongly marked mythological or supernatural element in children's theories. here, it is evident, thought is supported by a somewhat capricious fancy. when, for example, a child accounts for the wind by saying that somebody is waving a very big fan somewhere, or, more prettily, that it is made by the fanning of the angels' wings, he comes very near that romancing which we have regarded as the play of imagination. yet though fanciful it is still thought, just because it aims, however wildly, at explaining something in the real world. with this fanciful and mythological element there goes a more scientific one. even the fan myth recognises a mechanical process, _viz._, the waving of something to and fro, which does undoubtedly produce a movement of the air. children's first theories of nature often show a queer mingling of supernatural and natural conceptions. i propose now to examine a few of the commoner ideas of children respecting natural objects. one characteristic of this first thought about things appears at an early age. a child seems inclined to take all that he sees for real tangible substance: it is some time before he learns that "things are not what they seem". for example, an infant will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall and flat objects in pictures. this tendency to make things out of all he sees shows itself in pretty forms, as when a little girl one year eleven months old, "gathered sunlight in her hands and put it on her face," and about a month earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke. this was the same child that tried to make the wind behave by tidying her mother's hair; and her belief in the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to lift her up high so that she might see the wind; which reminds one of r. l. stevenson's lines to the wind:-- i felt you push, i heard you call, i could not see yourself at all. in making a reality out of the wind a child is led not by sight, but by touch. he _feels_ the wind, and so the wind must be something substantial. the common childish thought about the wind shows that the young mind is apt to be much impressed by the movements of things. movement seems for all of us the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. when the movement of an object is not seen to be caused by some other object, but seems to be spontaneous, it is apt to be taken by children as by uncivilised races to be the sign of life, and of something like human impulse. a child of eighteen months used to throw kisses to the fire. some children in the infant department of a london board school were asked what things in the room were alive, and they promptly replied: "the smoke and the fire". big things moving by some internal contrivance of which the child knows nothing, more especially engines, are of course endowed with life. a little girl of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of _the invisible playmate_ tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke the "dear head" of a locomotive. next to movement a sound which seems to be produced by the thing itself leads children to endow it with life. are not movement and vocal sound the two great channels by which the child itself expresses its feelings and impulses? the wind often owes something of its life to its sound. the common tendency of children to think of the sea as alive, of which m. pierre loti gives an excellent illustration in his _roman d'un enfant_, is no doubt based on the perception of its noise and movement. a little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. the impulse, too, to endow with life an object which looks so very much of a machine as a railway engine, is probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. closely related to this impulse to ascribe life to what we call inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive of them as growing. this is illustrated in the remark of a little boy of three and a half years who when criticised by his mother for trying to make a walking-stick out of a very short stick, observed: "me use it for walking-stick when stick be bigger". i have referred in the last chapter to children's way of thinking of things as made by somebody. the idea of hand-work is extended in odd ways. for example, quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to all kinds of objects. anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken". thus a little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked: "the moon is broken". on the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything not broken or intact was said to be "mended". do children when they talk in this fashion really think that things are constantly undergoing repairs at the hand of some mysterious mechanic, or are they using their familiar terms figuratively in default of others? it is hard to say. curious thoughts about nature's processes arise later when the inquirer tries to make them intelligible to himself. here the first mechanical conceptions of the wind deserve attention. an american child, asked what a tree was, answered oddly, "to make the wind blow". a pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms which stood in front of the house not far from the windows of his bedroom. this putting of the cart before the horse is funny enough, yet it is perfectly natural. all the wind-making a child can observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a newspaper, and so forth, is effected by the movement of a material object. _the bigger world._ with respect to distant objects, a child is of course freer to speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the heavenly bodies are wont to be odd enough. his thoughts about these remote objects are rendered quainter by his inability to conceive of great distances. children naturally enough take this world to be what it looks to their uninstructed eyes. thus the earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky a sort of inverted bowl placed upon it. many children appear like the ancients to suppose that the sky and the heavenly bodies touch the earth somewhere, and could be reached by taking a long, long journey. other and similar ideas are formed by some. thus one little girl used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. the heavenly bodies are apt to be taken for flat discs. the brother of the little girl just referred to took the sun to be a big kind of cask cover, which could be put on the round globe to make a "see-saw". when this first simple creed gets corrected, children go to work to put a meaning into what is told them by their instructors. thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as mr. barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. when religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are wont to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. some hard thinking is carried out by the young heads in the effort to reconcile the various things they learn about the celestial region. thus the sky is apt to be thought of as _thin_, probably by way of explaining the light of the stars and moon, which is supposed to shine through the sky-roof. one american child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one part is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through a sort of semi-transparent curtain. others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half "buttoned" into the sky. characteristic movements of childish thought show themselves in framing ideas of the making of the world. the boy of four described by mrs. jardine thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that then the little bits left over were all rolled into the moon. such an idea of cosmogony seems nonsense till one remembers the work of cutting out the finer figures in paper. in much the same way children try to understand the movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies by help of the familiar movements of terrestrial objects. thus the sun was thought by american children to fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-ball, and, by a child with a more mechanical turn, to roll, presumably as a hoop rolls, and so forth. theological ideas, too, are pressed into the service of childish explanation, as when the disappearance of the sun is ascribed to god's pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and the like. the impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the nature-man to some fine myth-making. the american children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for describing the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of as the noise made by god when groaning, when walking heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"--ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. in like manner the lightning is attributed to god's lighting the gas, or striking many matches at once. by a similar use of familiar household operations god is supposed to cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by passing it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[ ] [ ] i am indebted for these illustrations to an article by dr. stanley hall on "the contents of children's minds". throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. thus one of the american children referred to said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light the lamps. the little girl of whom mr. canton writes thought "the wind and the rain and the moon 'walking' came out to see _her_, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object". when frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. an earthquake may be thought of as a kind of wonder show, specially got up for the admiration of a sufficient body of spectators. two children, d. and k., aged ten and five respectively, lived in a small american town. d., who was reading about an earthquake, addressed his mother thus: "oh, isn't it dreadful, mamma? do you suppose we will ever have one here?" k., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders, answered: "why, no, d., they don't have earthquakes in little towns like this". later on nature's arrangements are criticised from the same point of view. a girl of seven, going back to the interesting question of babies, remarked to her mother: "wouldn't it be convenient if you laid an egg, and then if you changed your mind you needn't hatch it?" _dreams._ children are apt to have their own thoughts about the strange semblances of objects which sometimes present themselves to their eyes, more particularly the "spectra" which we see after looking at the sun or when the circulation of the retina is disturbed. one little fellow spun quite a romance about the spectra he used to see when poorly, saying that they were angels, and that they went into his toy-basket and played with his toys. the most common form of such illusory appearance is, of course, the dream, and i believe that children dwell much on the mystery of dreaming. the simpler kind of child, like the savage, is disposed to take his dreams for sensible realities. a boy in an elementary school in london, aged five years, said one day: "teacher, i saw an old woman one night against my bed". another child, a little girl in the same school, told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on being asked, "where?" answered quaintly, "i saw it in my pillow". a little boy whom i know once asked his mother not to put him to bed in a certain room, "because there were so many dreams in the room". yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-objects do not belong to the common world, in the sights of which we all partake. another theory has then to be found. i believe that many children, especially those who, being imaginative when awake, make their fairy-stories and their own romancings very real to themselves, and who, as a result of this, are wont to return to them in their dreams, are inclined to identify dreamland and fairyland. if they want to see their "fairies" by day they will shut their eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough occur to them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are going to see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer time. other ideas about dreams also occur among children. a gentleman tells me that when a child he used to think that dreaming, though different from actual seeing, was yet more than having one's own individual fancies; on dreaming, for example, that he had met certain people he supposed that each of these must have had a dream in which he had met him. this, it may be remembered, is very much the fanciful idea of dreaming which mr. du maurier works out in his pretty story _peter ibbetson_. there is some evidence to show that a thoughtful child, when he begins to grasp the truth that dreams are only unreal phantasms, becomes confused, and wonders whether the things too which we see when waking are not unreal. here is a quaint example of this transference of childish doubt from dreamland to the every-day world. a little boy five years old asked his teacher: "wouldn't it be funny if we were dreaming?" and being satisfied by the reply elicited that it would be funny, he continued more explicitly: "supposing every one in the whole world were dreaming, wouldn't _that_ be funny? they might be, mightn't they?" receiving a slightly encouraging, "perhaps they might," he wound up his argument in this fashion: "yes, but i don't think we are--i'm sure we are not. perhaps we should wake up and find _every one_ gone away." this is dark enough, but suggests, i think, that doubt as to the bright beautiful forms seen in sleep is casting its shadow on the real world, on the precious certainty of the presence of those we love. a little girl about six and a half years old being instructed by her father as to the making of the world remarked: "perhaps the world's a fancy". the doubt in this case too was, one may conjecture, led up to by the loss of faith in dreamland. _birth and growth._ we may now pass to some of children's characteristic thoughts about living things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic animals. the most interesting of these, i think, are those respecting growth and birth. as already mentioned, the growth of things is one of the most stimulating of childish puzzles. led no doubt by what others tell him, a child finds that things are in general made bigger by additions from without, and his earliest conception of growth is, i think, that of such addition. thus, plants are made to grow, that is, swell out, by the rain. the idea that the growth or expansion of animals comes from eating is easily reached by the childish intelligence, and, as we know, nurses and parents have a way of recommending the less attractive sorts of diet by telling children that they will make them grow. the idea that the sun makes us grow, often suggested by parents (who may be ignorant of the fact that growth _is_ more rapid in the summer than in the winter), is probably interpreted by the analogy of an infusion of something into the body. a number of children, i have found, have the queer notion that towards the end of life there is a process of shrinkage. old people are supposed to become little again. one of the american children referred to, a little girl of three, once said to her mother: "when i am a big girl and you are a little girl i shall whip you just as you whipped me now". at first one is almost disposed to think that this child must have heard of mr. anstey's amusing story, _vice versâ_. yet i have collected a number of similar observations. for example, a little boy that i know, when about three and a half years old, used often to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of manner: "when i am big then you will be little, then i will carry you about and dress you and put you to sleep". and one little girl asked about some old person of her acquaintance: "when will she begin to get small?" another little girl asked her grown-up cousin who was reading to her something about an old woman: "do people turn back into babies when they get quite old?" another interesting fact to be noted here is that some children firmly believe that persons after dying and going to heaven will return to earth as little children. an american lady writes to me that two of her boys found their way independently of each other to this idea. thus one of them speaking of a playmate who had been drowned, and who was now, he was told, in heaven, remarked: "then god will let him come back and be a baby again". what, it may be asked, is the explanation of this quaint childish thought? i think it probable that it is suggested in different ways. one must remember that as a child grows taller grown-ups may seem _by comparison_ to get shorter. again old people are wont to stoop and so to look shorter; and then children often hear in their stories of "little old" people. i suspect, however, that in some cases there is a more subtle train of thought. as the belief of the two brothers in people's coming back from heaven suggests, the idea of shrinkage is connected with those of birth and death. may it not be that the more thoughtful sort of child reasons in this way? babies which are sent from heaven must have been something there; and people when they die must continue to be something in heaven. why, then, the "dead" people that go to this place are the very same as the babies that come from it. to make this theory "square" with other knowledge, the idea of shrinkage, either before or after death, has to be called in. that it takes place before death is supported by what was said above, and probably also by the information often given to children that people when they die are carried by angels to heaven just as the babies are said to be brought down to earth by the angels. the origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we have seen, with much food for speculation. here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. his inconvenient questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and thus arise the well-known legends about the doctor, the angel and so forth. with the various lore thus collected, supplemented by the pretty conceits of hans andersen and other writers of fairy stories, the young inquirer has to do his best. how the child-thinker is apt to go to work here is illustrated in a collection of the thoughts of american school-children. some of these said that god drops babies for the women and doctors to catch them, others that he brings them down to earth by means of a wooden ladder, others again, that mamma, nurse, or doctor goes up and fetches them in a balloon. they are said by other children to grow in cabbages, or to be placed by god in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor, who takes them to sick folks that want them. here we have delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and bible lore, as in the use of jacob's ladder and the legend of moses placed among the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious, wonder-producing sewer. not all children, by any means, elaborate even this crude sort of theory. the less speculative and more practical kind of child accepts what he is told and proceeds to apply it, sometimes oddly enough. thus the _lancet_ recently contained an amusing letter from some children, the eldest of whom was seven, addressed to a doctor asking for a baby for their mother's next birthday. it was to be "fat and bonny, with blue eyes and fair hair"--a perfect doll in fact; and a characteristic postscript asked: "which would be the cheaper--a boy or a girl?" these ideas of children about babies partly communicated by others, partly thought out for themselves, are naturally enough made to account for the beginnings of animal life. this is illustrated in the supposition of the little boy, already quoted, who thought that god helps pussy to have "'ickle kitties," seeing that she hasn't any kitties in eggs given her to sit upon. chapter vi. first thoughts: (_b_) self and other mysteries. we may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought about that standing mystery, the self. as our discussion of the child's ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself. _the visible self._ the date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different children according to the rapidity of the mental development and to the character of the surrounding circumstances. the little girl, who was afterwards to be known as george sand, may be supposed to have had an exceptional development; and the blow which she received as a baby in arms, and to which she ascribes the first dawn of self-consciousness, was, of course, exceptional too. there are probably many robust and unreflective children, knowing little of life's misery, who get on extremely well without any consciousness of self. the earliest idea of children about "myself" is a mental picture of the body. they come to learn that their body is different from other objects of sense by a number of experiences, such as grasping the foot, striking the head, receiving soft caresses, kisses, and so forth. such experiences may suffice to develop even during the first year the idea that their body is "me" in the sense that it is the living seat of pain and pleasure. the moving limbs are, of course, a specially interesting part of this bodily self. yet there is reason to think that children regard the trunk as the most important and vital part of themselves. thus one small boy who, when put to bed, could not get into a comfortable posture, said queerly: "i can't get my hands out of the way of myself". this may be because they learn to connect the impressive experiences of aches and pains with the trunk, and because they observe that the maimed can do without arms and without legs. it is interesting to note that in the development of the idea of the soul by the race its seat was placed in the trunk, _viz._, the heart, long before it was localised in the head. children are probably confirmed in this view of the supreme importance of the trunk by our way of specially referring to it when speaking of the "body". about this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works, the child speculates vastly. the experience of bleeding has suggested to some children that it is filled with blood. when later on the young thinker hears of the stomach, bones and so forth, he sets about theorising on these mysterious matters. odd twistings of thought occur when the higher anatomy is talked of in his hearing. a six-year-old girl, of whom mr. canton writes, thus delivered herself with respect to the brain and its functions: "brain is what you think with in your head, and the more you think the more crinkles there are". the growth of the folds was understood, with charming childish simplicity, as the immediate effect of thought, like the crinkling of the skin of the forehead. at a later stage of the child's development, no doubt, when he begins to grasp the idea of a conscious thinking "i," the head will become a principal portion of the bodily self. children are quite capable of finding their way, in part at least, to the idea that the mind has its lodgment in the head. but it is long before this thought grows clear. this may be seen in children's talk, as when a girl of four spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her _eyes_. even after a child has learned from others that we think with our brains he may go on supposing that our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak. very interesting in connection with the first stages of development of the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. it would be absurd to expect a child when first placed before a glass to recognise his own face. he will smile at the reflection as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. if held when about six months old in somebody's arms before a glass a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of the familiar face of his carrier by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recognise his own. he appears at first and for some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to a stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl (fifteen months old), offering it things. an infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to touch it. some children on noticing their own and other people's shadows on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. here, too, in time, as with young animals, _e.g._, kittens, the strange appearance is taken as a matter of course. some children seem to follow out in part the line of thought of uncivilised races, and take reflections and shadows for a kind of "double" of the self. one of dr. stanley hall's correspondents writes to him that he used to have small panics at his own shadow, trying to run away from it, and to stamp on it, thinking it might be his soul. we find another illustration of this doubling of the self in the autobiography of george sand, which relates that when a child, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, she invented a theory of her double existence. we know, too, that the boy hartley coleridge distinguished among the "hartleys" a picture hartley and a shadow hartley. to one little boy the idea of being photographed seemed uncanny, as if it were a robbing himself of something and the making of another self. but much more needs to be known about these matters. the prominence of the bodily element in a child's first idea of himself is seen in the tendency to regard his sameness as limited by unaltered bodily appearance. a child of six, with his shock of curls, will, naturally enough, refuse to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. one boy who had attained to the dignity of knickerbockers used to speak of his petticoated predecessor as a little girl. _the hidden self._ in process of time, however, what we call the conscious self, that which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. it is probable that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness takes place towards the end of the third year, when the difficult forms of language, "i," "me," "mine," commonly come to be used with intelligence. this is borne out by the following story: a little girl of three lying in bed shut her eyes and said: "mother, you can't see me now". the mother replied: "oh, you little goose, i can see you but you can't see me". to which she rejoined: "oh, yes, i know you can see _my body_, mother, but you can't see _me_". the "me" here was, i suppose, the expression of the inner self through the eyes. the same child at about the same age was concerned as to the reality of her own existence. one day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: "mother, am _i_ real, or only a pretend like my dolls?" the first thought about self as something existing apart from all that is seen is apt to be very perplexing to the thoughtful child. as one lady puts it, writing to me of her childish experience: "the power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually". as may be seen by this quotation, the first thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. among the many things that puzzled one much-questioning little lad already quoted was this: "how do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?" a girl in her fifth year wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can't move except somebody moves it. _the unreachable past._ very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. the idea of what we call personal identity does not appear to be fully reached at first; the little boy already quoted who referred to his past self by saying, "when i was a little girl," must have had a very hazy idea of his sameness with that small petticoated person. it would seem, indeed, as if a child found it easy to dissociate his present self from his past, to deny all kinship with it. the difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. the true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. this is illustrated in the question of a little boy: "where was i a hundred years ago? where was i before i was born?" it remains a mystery for all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside. even when a child begins to take in the fact that there was a time when he was not, he is unable to think of absolute non-existence. a little girl of three being shown a photograph of her family and not seeing her own face in the group asked: "where is me?" being duly instructed that she was not here, or indeed anywhere, she asked: "was i killed?" it is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children's minds towards this mystery, "before you were born". a child accustomed to be made the centre of others' interest may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. a little girl of three, on being told by her mother of something which happened long before she was born, asked in amazement: "and what did you do without h.? did you cry all day for her?" sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the outer world. we have all been perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here again we are apt to "get used" to the puzzle. children may be deeply impressed with this apparent contradiction. jean ingelow in the interesting reminiscences of her childhood writes: "i went through a world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before i was there to see it". a little boy of five who was rather given to saying "clever" things, was one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: "why, m., however did the world go round before you came into it?" m. at once replied: "why, it _didn't_ go round. it only began five years ago." this child, too, had probably felt little jean ingelow's difficulty. a child will sometimes try to escape from this puzzle by way of the supernatural ideas already referred to. if of quick intelligence he will see in the legend of babies brought from heaven to earth a way of prolonging his existence backwards. the same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity: "there are no pumps in heaven where i came from". he had evidently worked out the idea of heaven-sent babies into a theory of pre-natal existence. in thinking of their past, children have to encounter that terrible mystery, time. they seem at first quite unable to think of time as we think of it, in an abstract way. "to-day," "to-morrow" and "yesterday" are spoken of as things which move. a girl of four asked: "where is yesterday gone to?" and "where will to-morrow come from?" another difficulty is the grasping of great lengths of time. a child is apt to exaggerate greatly a short period. the first morning at school has seemed an eternity to some who have carried the recollection of it into middle life. even the minutes when, as mrs. maynell writes, "your mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gabble of the grown-up," may have seemed very, very big. possibly this sense of the immeasurable length of certain experiences of childhood gives to the child's sense of past time something of an aching vastness which older people can hardly understand. do not the words "long, long ago," when we use them in telling a child a story, still carry with them for our ears a strangely far-off sound? again, children find it hard to map out the divisions of time, and to see the relations of one period to another. one little boy about five and a half finding that something had happened before his father was born, asked whether it was in the time of the romans. his historical perspective had, not unnaturally perhaps, set the "time of the romans" just before the life of the oldest of his household. _the supernatural world._ a child's first acquaintance with the supernatural is frequently made through the medium of fairy-story or other fiction. and, as has been suggested in an earlier chapter, he can put a germ of thought into the tradition of a fairy-world. it is, however, when something in the shape of theological instruction supervenes that the supernatural becomes a problem for the young intellect. he is told of these mysterious things as of certainties, and in the measure in which he is a thinker, he will try to get a clear intelligent view of things. like the beginning of life, its ending is one of the recurring puzzles of early days. a child appears better able to imagine others dying than himself; this seems to be suggested by a story published by stanley hall of a little girl who from six to nine feared that all other people would die one by one, and that she would be left alone on the earth. the first recoil from an inscrutable mystery soon begins to give place to a feeling of dread. a little girl of three and a half years asked her mother to put a great stone on her head, because she did not want to die. she was asked how a stone would prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic: "because i shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head; and people who grow tall get old and then die". the first way of regarding death seems to be as a temporary state like sleep, which it so closely resembles. a little boy of two and a half years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once asked: "will mrs. p. still be dead when we go back to london?" the knowledge of burial gives a new and alarming turn to the child's thought. he now begins to speculate much about the grave. the instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and feeling to the buried body is illustrated in the request made by a little boy to his mother: "don't put earth on my face when i am buried". in the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox creed the idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side with that of burial. here comes one of the hardest puzzles for the logical child. one boy tried to reconcile the story of heaven with the fact of burial, at first by assuming that the good people who went to heaven were not buried at all; and later by supposing that the journey to heaven was somehow to be effected after burial and by way of the grave. other devices for getting a consistent view of things are also hit upon. some children have supposed that the _head_ only passes into heaven, partly from taking the "body" to be the trunk only, and partly from a feeling that the head is the seat of the thinking mind. the idea of dead people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little brain to its logical consequences. animals when they die are, naturally enough, supposed to go to heaven also. _the great maker._ children seem disposed, apart from religious instruction, to form ideas of supernatural beings. sometimes it is a dreadful person who exerts a malign influence on the child, sending him, for example, his pains in the stomach. in other cases it is a fairy-like being who is created into a mighty benefactor, and half-worshipped and prayed to in childish fashion. even when religious instruction supplies the form of the supernatural being the young thinker deals with this in his own original way. he has to understand the mysteries of god, satan and the rest, and he can only understand them by shedding on them the light of homely terrestrial facts. hence the undisguised materialism of the child's theology. according to dr. stanley hall's inquiries into the thoughts of american children, god is apt to be imaged as a big, very strong man or giant. one child thought of him as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky; another, as so tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds. he is commonly supposed, in conformity with what is told him, to dwell just above the sky, which last, as we have seen, is thought of as a dividing floor, through the chinks of which we get glimmerings of the glory of the heaven above. but some children show more of their own thought in localising the deity, placing him, for example, in one of the stars, or the moon, or lower down "upon the hill". differences in childish feeling, as well as in intelligence, reflect themselves in the first ideas about the divine dwelling-place. it seems commonly to be conceived of as a grand house or mansion. while, however, some children deck it out with all manner of lovely things, including a park, flowers, and birds, others give it a homelier character, thinking, for example, of doors and possible draughts, like a little girl who asked god "to mind and shut the door, because he (_i.e._, grandpapa who had just died) can't stand the draughts". some children, too, of a less exuberant fancy are disposed to think of heaven as by no means so satisfyingly lovely, and rather to shrink from a long wearisome stay in it. while thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky god is supposed to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth. what seems to impress children most, especially boys, in the traditional account of god is his power of making things. he is emphatically the artificer, the "demiurgos," who not only has made the world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human needs. according to some of the american school-children he fabricates all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. the boy has a great admiration for the maker, and one small english boy once expressed this oddly by asking his mother whether a group of working men returning from their work were "gods". this admiration for superior power and skill favours the idea of god's omnipotence. this is amply illustrated in children's spontaneous prayers, which ask for things, from fine weather on a coming holiday to a baby with curly hair and other lovely attributes, with all a child's naïve faith. yet a critical attitude will sometimes be taken up towards this mystery of unlimited power. the more logical and speculative sort of child will now and then put a sceptical question to his elders on this subject. a boy of eight turned over the problem whether god could beat him in a foot-race if he were starter and judge and refused to let god start till he had reached the goal; and he actually measured out the racecourse on a garden path and went through the part of running, afterwards sitting down and giving god time to run, and then pondering the possibility of his beating him. the idea of god's omniscience, too, may come readily enough to a child accustomed to look up admiringly to the boundless knowledge of some human authority, say a clergyman. yet i know of cases where the dogma of god's infinite knowledge provoked in the child's mind a sceptical attitude. one little fellow remarked on this subject rather profanely: "i know a 'ickle more than kitty, and you know a 'ickle more than me; and god knows a 'ickle more than you, i s'pose; then he can't know so very much after all". another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the child's intelligence. while he is told that god has a special abode in heaven, he is told also that he is here, there and everywhere, and can see everything. more particularly the idea of being always watched is, i think, repugnant to sensitive and high-spirited children. an american lady, miss shinn, speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was under this constant surveillance, declared that she "would _not_ be so tagged". an english boy of three, on being informed by his older sister that god can see and watch us while we cannot see him, thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said: "i'm very sorry, dear, i can't (b)elieve you". when the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated by the active little brain for making it intelligible. thus one child thought of god as a very small person who could easily pass through the keyhole. the opposite idea of god's huge framework, illustrated above, is probably but another attempt to figure the conception of omnipresence. curious conclusions too are sometimes drawn from the supposition. thus a little girl of three years and nine months one day said to her mother in the abrupt childish manner: "mr. c. (a gentleman she had known who had just died) is in this room". her mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered: "oh, no!" whereupon the child resumed: "yes, he is. you told me he is with god, and you told me god was everywhere; so as mr. c. is with god, he must be in this room." it might easily be supposed that the child's readiness to pray to god is inconsistent with what has just been said. yet i think there is no real inconsistency. children's idea of prayer appears commonly to be that of sending a message to some one at a distance. the epistolary manner noticeable in many prayers, especially at the beginning and the ending, seems to illustrate this. the mysterious whispering in which a prayer is often conveyed is, i suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known only to the child to transmit itself to the divine ear. of the child's belief in god's goodness it is needless to say much. for these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who is just as ready as he is able to help them out of every manner of difficulty, and who, if they only ask prettily, will send them all the nice things they long for. yet, happy little optimists as they are inclined to be, they will now and again be saddened by doubt, and wonder why the nice things asked for don't come, and why the dear kind god allows them to suffer so much. while a child is thus apt to think of god as nicer than the nicest gentleman visitor who is wont to bring toys and do wondrous things for his delectation, he commonly imports into his conception a touch of human caprice. fear may readily suggest to a child who has had some orthodox instruction that the wind howling at night is the noise of god's anger, or that the thunder is due to a sudden determination of the creator to shoot him dead. the sceptical child, again, who is by no means so rare, may early begin to wonder how god can be so good and yet allow men to kill animals, and allow satan to do such a lot of wicked things. one of the hardest puzzles set to a child by the common religious instruction is the doctrine of god's eternity. the idea of a vast, endless "for ever," whether past or future, seems to be positively overwhelming to many young minds. the continual frustration of the attempt to reach a resting-place in a beginning or an end may bring on something of mental giddiness. hence the wearisome perplexities of the first thoughts about god's past. the question, "who made god?" seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of child-thought. when told that god has always been, unchanging, and knowing no youth, he wants to get behind this "always was," just as at an earlier stage of his development he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. other mysteries of the orthodox faith may undergo a characteristic solution in the hard-working mind of a child. a friend tells me that when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the trinity. he happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it by likening it to his own family group, in which the holy ghost had, rather oddly, to take the place of the mother. thoughtful children by odd processes of early logic are apt when interpreting the words and actions of their teachers to endow god with surprising attributes. for example, a boy of four asked his aunt one sunday to tell him why god was so fond of three-penny bits. asked why he thought god had this particular liking, he explained by saying that he noticed that on sunday morning people ask for a three-penny bit "instead of" three pennies, and that as they take it to church he supposed that they gave it to god. i have tried to show that the more thoughtful children seek to put meaning into the communications about the unseen world which they are wont to receive from their elders. perhaps these elders if they knew what is apt to go on in a child's mind would reconsider some of the answers which they give to the little questioner, and select with more care the truths which, as they flatter themselves, they are making so plain to their little ones. chapter vii. the battle with fears: (_a_) the onslaught. it is often asked whether children have as lively, as intense feelings as their elders. those emotions of childhood which are wont to break out into violent expression, such as angry disappointment and gladness, may not, it is said, be in themselves so intense as they look. in order to get more data for settling the question we must try to reach their less demonstrative feelings, those which they are apt to hide from view out of shame, or some other impulse. of these none is more interesting than fear, and it so happens that a good deal of inquiry has of late been directed to this feeling. that we must not expect too much knowledge here seems certain. fear is one of the shyest of the young feelings. a little fellow of two coming out of his grandpapa's house one evening into the darkness with his mother, asked her: "would you like to take hold of my hand, mammy?" his father took this to mean the beginning of boyish determination not to show fear. still, with the help of observations of parents, and later confessions and descriptions of childish fear, we may be able to get some insight into the dark subject. that fear is one of the characteristic feelings of children needs, one supposes, no proving. in spite of the wonderful stories of horatio nelson, and of their reflections in literature, _e.g._, mr. barrie's "sentimental tommy," i entertain the gravest doubts as to the existence of a perfectly fearless child. children differ enormously, and the same child differs enormously at different times in the intensity of his fear, but they all have the characteristic _disposition_ to fear. it seems to belong to these wee, weakly things, brought face to face with a new strange world, to tremble. they are naturally timid, as all that is weak and ignorant in nature is apt to be timid. i have said that fear is well marked in the child. yet, though it is true that a state of "being afraid" when fully developed shows itself by unmistakable signs, there are many cases where it is by no means easy to say whether the child experiences the feeling. people are apt to think that every time a child starts it is feeling afraid of something, but as we shall presently see, being startled and really frightened are two experiences, which, though closely related, must be carefully distinguished. a child may, further, show a sort of æsthetic repugnance to certain sounds, such as those of a piano; to ugly forms, _e.g._, a hunch-back figure; to particular touches, such as that of fur or velvet, without having the full experience of fear. observers of children are by no means careful to distinguish true fear from other feelings which resemble it. fear proper shows itself in such signs as these, in the stare, the grave look, the movement of turning away and hiding the face against the nurse's or mother's shoulder, or of covering it with the hands. in the severer forms, known as terror, it leads to trembling and to wild shrieking. changes of colour also occur, the child's face turning white, or possibly in some cases red. when frightened by anything an older child will commonly run from the object of his fear, though the violence of the feeling may sometimes paralyse the limbs and chain the would-be fugitive to the spot. this often happens, i fancy, with a sudden oncoming of dread at discovering oneself alone in the dark. _the battery of sounds._ as is well known, sudden and loud sounds, such as that of a door banging, will give a shock to an infant in the first weeks of life, which though not amounting to fear is its progenitor. a clearer manifestation occurs when a new and unfamiliar sound calls forth the grave look, the trembling lip, and possibly the fit of crying. darwin noticed these in one of his own boys at the age of four and a half months, when he produced the new sound of a loud snoring. it is not every new sound which is thus disconcerting to the little stranger. sudden sharp sounds of any kind seem to be especially disliked, as those of a dog's bark. a little girl burst out crying on first hearing the sound of a baby rattle; and she did the same two months later on accidentally ringing a hand bell. children often show curious caprices in their objections to sounds. thus a little girl when taken into the country at the age of nine months took a liking to most of the animals she saw, but on hearing the bleating of the sheep showed a distinct germ of fear by sheltering herself against her nurse's shoulder. so disturbing are new sounds apt to be to the young child that even musical ones are often disliked at first. the first hearing of the tones of a piano has upset the comfort of many a child. a child of five and a half months conceived a kind of horror for a banjo, and screamed if it were played or only touched. animals may show a similar dread of musical sounds. i took a young cat of about eight weeks into my lap and struck some chords not loudly on the piano. it got up, moved uneasily from side to side, then bolted to a corner of the room and seemed to try to get up the walls. many dogs, too, certainly appear to be put out, if not to be made afraid, on hearing the music of a brass band. fear of nature's great sounds, more especially the wind and thunder, which is common among older children, owes its intensity not merely to their volume, which seems to surround and crush, but also to the mystery of their origin. we should remember too that sounds are, for the child still more than for the adult, expressive of feeling and intention. hence religious ideas readily graft themselves on to the noisy utterances of wind and thunder. wind is conceived of, for example, as the blowing of god when angry, and thunder, as we have seen, as his snoring, and so forth. i am far from saying that all children manifest this fear of sounds. many babies welcome the new and beautiful sounds of music with a joyous greeting. even the awful thunder-storm may gladly excite and not frighten. children will sometimes get through the first months without this fear, and then develop it as late as the second year. i think, then, that in these disturbing effects of sound we have to do with something more than a mere nervous shock or a start. they involve a rudiment of the feeling of uneasiness at what is unexpected and disturbing, and so may be said to be the beginning of true childish fears. this element of anxiety becomes more clearly marked where the sound is not only disturbing but mysterious, as when a toy emits a sound, or water produces a rushing noise in some hidden pipe. there is another kind of disturbance which shows itself also in the first year, and has a certain analogy to the discomposing effect of sound. this is the feeling of bodily insecurity which appears very early when the child is awkwardly carried, or when in dandling it, it is let down back-foremost. one child in her fifth month was observed when carried to hold on to the nurse's dress as if for safety. and it has been noticed by more than one observer that on dandling a baby up and down in one's arms, it will on descending, that is when the support of the arms is being withdrawn, show signs of discontent in struggling movements. this is sometimes regarded as an inherited fear; yet it seems possible that, like the jarring effect of noise on the young nerves, it is the result of a rude disturbance. a child accustomed to the support of its cradle, the floor, or somebody's lap, might be expected to be put out when the customary support is withdrawn wholly or partially. the sense of equilibrium is disturbed in this case. other senses, more particularly that of touch, may bring their disturbing elements, too. many children have a strong repugnance to cold clammy things, such as a cold moist hand, and what seems stranger, to the touch of something that seems altogether so likable as fur. whether the common dislike of children to water has anything to do with its soft yieldingness to touch i cannot say. this whole class of early repugnances to certain sensations seems to stand on the confines between mere dislikes and fears, properly so called. a child may very much dislike touching fur without being in the strict sense afraid of it, though the dislike may readily develop into a true fear. _the alarmed sentinel._ we may now pass to the disconcerting and alarming effects to which a child is exposed through his sense of sight. this, as we know, is the intellectual sense, the sentinel that guards the body, keeping a look-out for what is afar as for what is anear. the uneasiness which a child experiences at seeing things is not, like the uneasiness at sounds, a mere effect of violent sensation; it arises much more from a perception of something menacing. among the earliest alarmers of sight may be mentioned the appearance of something new and strange, especially when it involves a sudden abolition of customary arrangements. although we are wont to think of children as loving and delighting in what is new, we must not forget that it may also trouble and alarm. this feeling of uneasiness and apparently of insecurity in presence of changed surroundings shows itself as soon as a child has begun to grow used or accustomed to a particular state of things. among the more disconcerting effects of a rude departure from the customary, is that of change of place. when once an infant has grown accustomed to a certain room it is apt to find a new one strange, and will eye its features with a perceptibly anxious look. this sense of strangeness in places sometimes appears very early. a little girl on being taken at the age of four months into a new nursery, "looked all round and then burst out crying". some children retain this feeling of uneasiness up to the age of three years and later. here, again, clearly marked differences among children disclose themselves. on entering an unfamiliar room a child may have his curiosity excited, or may be amused by the odd look of things, so that the fear-impulse is kept under by other and pleasanter ones. what applies to places applies also to persons. a child may be said to combine the attachment of the dog to persons with that of the cat to localities. any sudden change of the customary human surroundings, for example, the arrival of a stranger on the scene, is apt to trouble him. during the first three months, there is no distinct manifestation of a fear of strangers. it is only later, when recurring forms have grown familiar, that the approach of a stranger, especially if accompanied by a proposal to take the child, calls forth clear signs of displeasure and the shrinking away of fear. professor preyer gives between six and seven months as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face. here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children showing themselves more hospitable than others. it would be curious to compare the ages at which children begin to take kindly to new faces. professor preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity. one strange variety of the fear of strangers is the uneasiness shown in presence of some one who is only partially recognisable. one little boy of eight months moaned in a curious way when his nurse returned home after a fortnight's holiday. another boy of about ten months is said to have shown a marked shrinking from an uncle who strongly resembled his father. such facts, taken with the familiar one that children are apt to be frightened at the sight of a parent partially disguised, suggest that half-stranger half-friend may be for a child's mind worse than altogether a stranger. the uneasiness which comes from a sense of being in a new room or face to face with a stranger may perhaps be described as a feeling of what the germans call the "unhomely". the little traveller has lost his bearings, and he begins to feel that he himself is lost. this effect of homelessness is, of course, most marked when a child finds himself in a strange place. much of the acuter fear of children probably has in it something of this dizzy sickening sense of being lost. a little girl between the ages of seven and ten used to wake up in a fright crying loudly because she could not think where she was. many a child when exploring a new and dark room, or still more venturesomely wandering alone out of doors, has suddenly woke up to the strange homeless look of things. i once saw a wee girl at a children's party who appeared to enjoy herself well enough up to a certain point, but was then suddenly seized by this sense of being lost in a new room among new faces, so that all her older sister's attempts to reassure her failed to stay the paroxysm of grief and terror. we may see a measure of this same distrust of the new, this same clinging to the homely, in many of children's lesser fears, as, for example, that of new clothes. an infant has been known to break out into tears at the sight of a new dress on its mother, though the colour and pattern had, one would have supposed, nothing alarming. the fear of black clothes, of which there are many known examples, probably includes further a special dislike for this colour. here, again, we may see two opposed impulses at work, of which either one or the other may be uppermost in different children, or at different times in the same child. the dread of new clothes has its natural antagonist in the love of new clothes, which is often supported in children of a "subjective" turn by a feeling of something like disgrace at having to go on wearing the same clothes so long. sometimes the love of novelty becomes a passion. the boy alfred de musset at the age of four, watching his mother fitting on his feet a pair of pretty red shoes, exclaimed: "dépèche-toi, maman, mes souliers neufs vont devenir vieux". some other fears closely resemble that of new clothes insomuch as they involve an unpleasant transformation of a familiar object, the human figure, the mainstay of a child's trust. possibly the alarming effect of making faces, which is said to disturb a child within the first three months, illustrates the effect of shock at the spoiling of what is getting familiar and liked. the donning of a pair of dark spectacles, by extinguishing the focus of childish interest, the eye, will produce a like effect of the uncanny. children show a similar dislike and fear at the sight of an ugly doll with features greatly distorted from the familiar pattern. the fear of certain big objects contains, i think, the germ of this feeling of uneasiness in the presence of strange surroundings. one of the best illustrations of this is produced by a first sight of the sea. some children clearly show signs of alarm, nestling towards their nurses when they are carried near the edge of the water. yet here, again, the behaviour of the childish mind varies greatly. a little boy who first saw the sea at the age of thirteen months exhibited signs not of fear but of wondering delight, prettily stretching out his tiny hands towards it as if wanting to go to it. i am disposed to think that imaginative children, whose minds take in something of the bigness of the sea, are more susceptible of this variety of fear. this conjecture is borne out by the case of two sisters, of whom one, an imaginative child, had not even at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas the sister, who was comparatively unimaginative, was perfectly fearless. the supposition finds a further confirmation in the descriptions given by imaginative writers of their early impressions of the sea, for example, that of m. pierre loti in his volume _le roman d'un enfant_. the fear of an eclipse of the moon and other celestial phenomena, owes something of its force and persistence to their unknown and inaccessible character. a child is easily annoyed at that great white thing, which seems like a human face to look down on him, and which never comes a step nearer to let him know what it really is. it may be conjectured too that a child's fear of clouds, when they take on uncanny forms, is supported by their inaccessibility; for he cannot get near them and touch them. it seems, however, according to some recent researches in america, that children's fear of celestial bodies, especially the moon and clouds, is connected with the thought that they may fall on them. the idea of these strange-looking objects above the head, having no visible support, and often taking on a threatening mien, may well give rise to fear in a child's breast akin to the superstitious fear of the savage. self-moving objects, which are not manifestly living things, are apt to excite a feeling of alarm in children, as indeed to some extent in the more intelligent animals. just as a dog will run away from a leaf whirled about by the wind, so children are apt to be terrified by the strange and quite irregular behaviour of a feather as it glides along the floor or lifts itself into the air. a girl of three, who happened to pull a feather out of her mother's eider-down quilt, was so alarmed at seeing it float in the air that she would not come near the bed for days afterwards. shrewd nurses know of this weakness, and have been able effectually to keep a child in a room by putting a feather in the keyhole. the fear here seems to be of something which simulates life and yet is not recognisable as a familiar living form. it was, i suppose, the same uncanny suggestion of life which made a child of four afraid at the sight of a leaf floating on the water of the bath-tub. fear of feathers is, i believe, known among the superstitions of adults. this simulation of life by what is perceived to be not alive probably takes part in other forms of childish dread. toys which take on too impudently the appearance of life may excite fear, as, for example, a toy cow which "moved realistically when it reared its head," a combination which completely scared its possessor, a boy about the age of one and a half years. a child can itself _make_ its toy alive, and so does not want the toy-maker to do so. the fear of shadows, which appears among children as among superstitious adults, seems to arise partly from their blackness and eerie forms, partly from their uncanny movements and changes of form. some of us can recall with r. l. stevenson the childish horror of going up a staircase to bed when, ... all round the candle the crooked shadows come, and go marching along up the stair. one's own shadow is worst of all, doggedly pursuing, horribly close at every movement, undergoing all manner of ugly and weird transformations. chapter viii. the battle with fears (_continued_). _the assault of the beasts._ there are two varieties of children's fears so prominent and so important that it seems worth while to deal with them separately. these are the dread of animals and of the dark. it may well seem strange that the creatures which are to become the companions and playmates of children, and one of the chief sources of their happiness, should cause so much alarm when they first come on the scene. yet so it is. many children, at least, are at first terribly put out by quite harmless members of the animal family. in some cases, no doubt, as when a child takes a strong dislike to a dog after having been alarmed at its barking, we have to do with the disturbing effect of sound merely. fear here takes its rise in the experience of shock. in other cases we have to do rather with a sort of æsthetic dislike to what is disagreeable and ugly than with a true fear. children sometimes appear to feel a repugnance to a black sheep or other animal just because they dislike black objects, though the feeling may not amount to fear properly so called. yet allowing for these sources of repugnance, it seems probable that many children from about two or three onwards manifest something indistinguishable from fear at the first sight of certain animals. the directions of this childish fear vary greatly. darwin's boy when taken to the zoological gardens at the age of two years three months showed a fear of the big caged animals whose forms were strange to him, such, _e.g._, as the lion and the tiger. some children have shown fear on seeing a tame bear, others have selected the cow as their pet dread, others the butting ram, and so forth. nor do they confine their aversions to the bigger animals. snakes, caterpillars, worms, small birds such as sparrows, spiders and even moths have looked alarming enough to throw a child into a state of terror. it is sometimes thought that these early fears of animals are inherited from remote ancestors to whom many wild animals were really dangerous. but i do not think that this has been proven. the variety of these childish recoilings, and the fact that they seem to be just as often from small harmless creatures as from big and mighty ones, suggest that other causes are at work here. we may indeed suppose that a child's nervous system has been so put together and poised that it very readily responds to the impression of strange animal forms by a tremor. special aspects of the unfamiliar animal, aided by special characteristics of its sounds, probably determine the directions of this tremor. in many cases, i think, the mere bigness of an animal, aided by the uncanny look which often comes from an apparent distortion of the familiar human face, may account for some of these early fears. in other cases we can see that it is the suggestion of attack which alarms. this applies pretty certainly to the butting ram, and may apply to pigeons and other birds whose pecking movements readily appear to a child's mind a kind of attack. and this supplies an explanation of the fear of one boy of two years three months at the sight of pigs when sucking; for, as the child let out afterwards, he thought they were biting their mother. the unexpectedness of the animal's movements too, especially when, as in the case of birds, mice, spiders, they are rapid, might excite uneasiness. in other cases it is something uncanny in the movement which excites fear, as when one child was frightened at seeing a cat's tail move when the animal was asleep. the apparent fear of worms and caterpillars in some children may be explained in this way, though associations of disagreeable touch probably assist here. in the case of many of the smaller animals, _e.g._, small birds, mice, and even insects when they come too near, the fear may not improbably have its source in a vague apprehension of invasion. these shrinkings from animals are among the most capricious-looking of all childish fears. many robust children with hardy nerves know little or nothing of them. here, too, as in the case of new things generally, the painfulness of fear is opposed and may be overcome by the pleasure of watching and by the deeper pleasure of "making friends". quite tiny children, on first seeing ducks and other animals, so far from being alarmed, will run after the pretty creatures to make pets of them. nothing perhaps is prettier in child-life than the pose and look of one of these defenceless youngsters when he is making a brave effort to get the better of his fear at the approach of a strange big dog and to proffer friendship to the shaggy monster. the perfect love which lies at the bottom of children's hearts towards their animal kinsfolk soon casts out fear. and when once the reconciliation has been effected it will take a good deal of harsh experience to make the child ever again entertain the thought of danger. _the night attack._ fear of the dark, and especially of _being alone_ in the dark, which includes not only the nocturnal dread of the dark bedroom, but that of closets, caves, woods, and other gloomy places, is no doubt very common among children. it does not show itself in the early months. a baby of three or four months if accustomed to a light may no doubt be upset at being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of the dark. this presupposes a certain development of the mind, and more particularly what we call imagination. it is said by dr. stanley hall to attain its greatest strength about the age of five to seven, when images of things are known to be vivid. so far as we can understand it the fear of the dark is rarely of the darkness as such. the blackness present to the eye in a dark room does no doubt encompass us and seem to close in upon and threaten to stifle us. we know, too, that children sometimes show fear of mists, and that many are haunted by the idea of the stifling grave. hence, it is not improbable that children seized by the common terror and dizziness on suddenly waking may feel the darkness as something oppressive. this is borne out by the fact that a little boy on surmounting his dread told his father that he used to think the dark "a great large live thing the colour of black". a child can easily make a substantial thing out of the dark, as he can out of a shadow. yet in most, if not all, cases imagination is active here. the darkness itself offers points for the play of imagination. owing to the activity of the retina, which goes on even when no light excites it, brighter spots are apt to stand out from the black background, to take form and to move; and all this supplies food to a child's fancy. i suspect that the alarming eyes of people and animals which children are apt to see in the dark receive their explanation in this way. of course these sources of uneasiness grow more pronounced when a child is out of health and his nervous tone falls low. even older people who have this fear describe the experience as seeing shadowy flitting forms, and this suggests that the activity of that wonderful little structure the retina is at the bottom of it. the same thing seems to be borne out by the common dread in the dark of _black_ forms, _e.g._, a black coach with headless coachman dressed in black. a girl of nineteen remembers that when a child she seemed on going to bed to see little black figures jumping about between the ceiling and the bed. the more familiar forms of a dread of the dark are sustained by images of threatening creatures which lie hidden in the blackness or half betray their presence in the way just indicated. these images are in many cases the revival of those acquired from the experiences of the day, and from storyland. the fears of the day live on undisturbed in the dark hours of night. the dog that has frightened a child will, when he goes to bed, be projected into the surrounding blackness. any shock in the waking hours may in this way give rise to a more or less permanent fear of being alone in a dark place. in not a few instances the alarming images are the product of fairy-stories, or of ghost and other alarming stories told by nurses and others thoughtlessly. in this way the dark room becomes for a timid child haunted by a "bogie" or other horror. alarming animals, generally black, as that significant expression _bête noire_ shows, are frequently the dread of these solitary hours in the dark room. lions and wolves, monsters not describable except by saying that they have claws, which they can stretch out, these seem to fill the blackness for some children. the vague horrors of big black shapeless things are by no means the lightest to bear. in addition to this overflow of the day's fears into the unlit hours, sleep and the transitional states between sleeping and waking also furnish much alarming material. probably the worst moment of this trouble of the night is when the child wakes suddenly from a sleep or half-sleep with some powerful dream-image still holding him in its clutches, and when the awful struggle to wake and to be at home with the surroundings issues in the cry, "where am i?" it is in these moments of absolute hopeless confusion that the impenetrable blackness, refusing to divulge its secret, grows insufferable. the dream-images, but slightly slackening their hold, people the blackness with nameless terrors. the little sufferer has to lie and battle with these as best he may, perhaps till the slow-moving day brings reassuring light and the familiar look of things. how terrible beyond all description, all measurement with other things, these nightmare fears may be in the case of nervous children, the reminiscences of charles lamb and others have told us. it is not too much, i think, to say that to many a child this dread of the black night has been the worst of his sufferings. at no time is he really so brave as when he lies still in a cold damp terror and trusts to the coming of the morning light. i do not believe that fear of the dark is universal among young children. i know a child that did not show any trace of it till some rather too gruesome stories of grimm set his brain horror-spinning when he ought to have been going to sleep. a lady whom i know tells me that she never had the fear as a child though she acquired it later, towards the age of thirty. how common it is among children under ten or twelve, we have as yet no means of judging. some inquiries of dr. stanley hall show that out of about young people under thirty only two appear to have been wholly exempt from it, but the ages at which the fear first appeared are not given. here, again, we have a counterbalancing side. an imaginative child can fill the dark vacancy of the bedroom with bright pleasing images. on going to bed and saying good-night to the world of daylight, he can see his beloved fairies, talk to them and hear them talk. we know how r. l. stevenson must, when a child, have gladdened many of his solitary dark hours by bright fancies. even when there is a little trepidation a hardy child may manage to play with his fears, and so in a sense to enjoy his black phantasmagoria, just as grown-ups may enjoy the horrors of fiction. it will perhaps turn out that imaginative children have both suffered and enjoyed the most in these ways, the effect varying with nervous tone and mental condition. yet it seems probable that the fearful suffering mood has here been uppermost. why these nocturnal images tend to be gloomy and alarming may, i think, be explained by a number of circumstances. the absence of light and the oncoming of night have, as we know, a lowering effect on the functions of the body; and it is not unlikely that this might so modify the action of the brain as to favour the rise of gloomy thoughts. the very blackness of night, too, which we must remember is actually seen by the child, would probably tend to darken the young thoughts. we know how commonly we make black and dark shades of colour symbols of melancholy and sorrow. if to this we add that in the night a child is apt to feel lost through a loss of all his customary landmarks, and that, worst of all, he is, in the midst of this blackness which blots out his daily home, left to himself, robbed of that human companionship which is his necessary stay and comfort, we need not, i think, wonder at his so often encountering "the terror by night". (_b_) _damage of the onslaught._ i have now, perhaps, illustrated sufficiently some of the more common and characteristic fears of children. the facts seem to show that they are exposed on different sides to the attacks of fear, and that the attacking force is large and consists of a variety of alarming shapes. if now we glance back at these several childish fears, one feature in them which at once arrests our attention is the small part which remembered experiences of evil play in their production. the child is inexperienced, and if humanely treated knows little of the acuter forms of human suffering. it would seem at least as if he feared not so much because his experience had made him aware of a real danger in this and that direction, as because he was constitutionally and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling of insecurity. more particularly children are apt to feel uneasy when face to face with the new, the strange, the unknown, and this uneasiness grows into a more definite feeling of fear as soon as the least suggestion of harmfulness is added; as when a child recoils with dread from a stranger who has a big projecting eye that looks a menace, or a squint which suggests a sly way of looking at you, or an ugly and advancing tooth that threatens to bite. how much the fear of the dark is due to inability to see and so to know is shown by the familiar fact that children and adults who can enter a strange gloomy-looking room and keep brave as long as things are before their eyes are wont to feel a creepy sense of "something" behind them when they turn their backs to retire and can no longer see. it is shown too in the common practice of children and their elders to look into the cupboard, under the bed, and so forth, before putting out the light; for that which has not been inspected retains dire possibilities of danger. where a child does not know he is apt to fancy something. it is the activity of children's imagination which creates and sustains the larger number of their fears. do we not indeed in saying that they are for the greater part groundless say also that they are "fanciful"? children's fears are often compared with those of animals. no doubt there are points of contact. the misery of a dog when street music is going on is very suggestive of a state of uneasiness if not of fully developed fear. dogs, cats, and other animals will "shy" at the sight of "uncanny" moving objects, such as leaves, feathers, and shadows. yet the great point of difference remains that animals not having imagination are exempt from many of the fearful foes which menace childhood, including that arch-foe, the black night. a much more instructive comparison of children's fears may be made with those of savages. both have a like feeling of insecurity in presence of the big unknown, especially the mysterious mighty things, such as the storm-wind, and the rare and startling things, _e.g._, the eclipse and the thunder. the ignorance and simplicity of mind, moreover, aided by a fertile fancy, which lead to this and that form of childish fear are at work also in the case of uncivilised adults. hence the familiar observation that children's superstitious fears often reflect those of savage tribes. while children have this organic predisposition to fear, the sufferings introduced by what we call human experience begin at an early date to give definite direction to their fears. how much it does this in the first months of life it is difficult to say. in the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass, or its cold bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. some children, at least, have a surprising way of going through a good deal of physical suffering from falls, cuts and so forth, without acquiring a genuine fear of what hurts them. it is a noteworthy fact that a child will be more terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if there be a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the suffering. even where fear can be clearly traced to experience it is doubtful whether in all cases it springs out of a definite expectation of some particular kind of harm. when, for example, a child who has been frightened by a dog betrays signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, and even of a picture of a dog, may we not say that he dreads the sight and the idea of the dog rather than any harmful act of the animal? in these fears, then, we seem to see much of the workmanship of nature, who has so shaped the child's nervous system and delicately poised it that the trepidation of fear comes readily. according to some she has done more, burdening a child's spirit with germinal remains of the fears of far-off savage ancestors, to whom darkness and the sounds of wild beasts were fraught with danger. that, however, is far from being satisfactorily demonstrated. we can see why in the case of children, as in that of young animals, nature tempers a bold curiosity of the new by mingling with it a certain amount of uneasiness, lest the ignorant helpless things should come to grief by wandering from parental shelter and supplies. this, it seems to me, is all that nature has done. and in so doing has she not, with excellent economy, done just enough? the extent of suffering brought into child-life by the assaults of fear is hard to measure. even the method of questioning young people about their fears, which is now in vogue, is not likely to bring us near a solution of this problem. and this for the good reason that children are never more reticent than when talking of their fears, and that by the time the fears are surmounted few can be trusted to give from memory an accurate report of them. one thing seems pretty clear, and the new questioning of children which is going on apace in america seems to bear it out, _viz._, that, since it is the unknown which is the primary occasion of these childish fears, and since the unknown in childhood is almost everything, the possibilities of suffering from this source are great enough. alike the good, the ill offend thy sight, and rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright. (_c_) _recovery from the onslaught._ nevertheless it is quite possible here to go from one extreme of indifference to another of sentimental exaggeration. even allowing what george sand says, that fear is "the greatest moral suffering of children," the suffering may turn out to be less cruelly severe than it looks. to begin with, then, if children are sadly open to the attacks of fear on certain sides they are completely defended on other sides by their ignorance. this is well illustrated in the pretty story of the child walter scott, who was found out of doors lying on his back during a thunderstorm, clapping his hands and shouting, "bonnie! bonnie!" at each new flash. again, if, as we have supposed, children's fears are mostly due to a feeling of insecurity in view of the unknown, they may be said to correct themselves to a large extent. by getting used to the disturbing sound, the ugly black doll, and so forth, a child, like a dog, tends to lose its first fear. one must say "tends," for the well-known fact that many persons carry with them into later life their early fear of the dark shows that when once the habit of fearing has got set no amount of familiarity will suffice to dissolve it. not only are the points of attack thus limited; the attack when it does take place may bring something better than a debasing fear. a child may, it is certain, suffer acutely when it is frightened. but if only there is the magic circle of the mother's arms within reach may it not be said that the fear is more than counterbalanced by the greatest emotional luxury of childhood, the loving embrace? it is the shy fears, breeding the new fear of exposure to unloving eyes and possibly to ridicule, which are the tragedy of childhood. in addition to these extraneous aids children are provided by nature with capacities of self-defence. i have pointed out that the impulses of curiosity and fear lie close together in a child's mind, so that one can hardly say beforehand which of the two is going to be awakened first by the coming of the new and strange thing. the eager desire to know about things is perhaps the most perfect inward defence against many childish fears. even when fear is half awake the passionate longing to see will force its way. a little girl that was frightened at a japanese doll just given her and would not approach it, insisted on seeing it at some distance every day. the same backing of a timid child's spirit by hardy curiosity shows itself in his way of peeping at a dog which has just terrified him and gradually approaching the monster. better still, in the hardier race of children nature has planted an impulse which not only disarms fear but turns it into a frolicsome companion. many children, i feel sure, maintain a double attitude towards their terrors, the bogies, the giants and the rest. moments of cruel suffering alternate with moments of brave exultation. fear in children, even more than in adults, is an instinctive process into which but little thought enters. if the nerves are slack, and if the circumstances are eerie and fear-provoking, the sudden strange sound, the appearance of a black something, will send the swift shudder through the small body; if, on the other hand, the child is cooler and has the cheering daylight to back him, he may be bold enough to play with his fears, and to talk of them to others with the chuckle of superiority.[ ] the more real and oppressive the fit of fear the more enjoyable is the subsequent self-deliverance by a perspicacious laugh likely to be. the beginnings of childish bravery often take the form of laughing away their fears. even when the ugly phantoms are not wholly driven back they are half seen through, and the child who is strong enough can amuse himself with them, suffering the momentary compression for the sake of the joyous expansion which so swiftly follows. a child of two, the same that asked his mother, "would you like to take hold of my hand?" was once taken out by her on a little sledge. being turned too suddenly he was pitched into the snow, almost on his head; but on being picked up by his mother he remarked quite calmly: "i nearly tumbled off". another child of six on entering an empty room alone, stamped his foot and shouted: "go away everything that's here!" in such ways do the nerves of a strong child recover themselves after shock and tremor, taking on something of the steady pose of human bravery. [ ] mrs. meynell gives an example of this in her volume _the children_ ("the man with two heads"). chapter ix. good and bad in the making. children have had passed on their moral characteristics the extremes of human judgment. by some, including a number of theologians, they have been viewed as steeped in depravity; by others, _e.g._, rousseau, they have been regarded as the perfection of the creator's workmanship. if we are to throw any light on the point in dispute we must avoid the unfairness of applying grown-up standards to childish actions, and must expect neither the vices nor the virtues of manhood. we must further take some pains to get, so far as this is possible, at children's natural inclinations so as to see whether, and if so how far, they set in the direction of good or of bad. _traces of the brute._ even a distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. the characteristic feelings and impulses are centred in self and the satisfaction of its wants. what is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others' participation in such enjoyment? we note, further, that when later on he makes fuller acquaintance with his social surroundings, his first attitude has in it much of the hostility of the ishmaelite. the removal of the feeding bottle before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby's "will to live," and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. here we have the first rude germ of that opposition of will which makes the ishmaelite look on others as his foes. the same attitude of isolating hostility is apt to show itself towards other children. in the matter of toys, for example, the natural way of a child is very frequently not only to make free with other children's property when he has the chance, but to show the strongest objection to any imitation of this freedom by others, sometimes indeed to display a dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. the same vigorous egoism inspires the whole scale of childish envies and jealousies, from those having to do with things of the appetite to those which trouble themselves about the marks of others' good-will, such as caresses and praises. in this wide category of childish egoisms we seem to be near the level of animal ways. out of all this fierce pushing of desire whereby the child comes into rude collision with others' wishes, there issue the storms of young passion. the energy of these displays of wrath as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. we all know the shocking scene as the boy ishmaelite gives clearest and most emphatic utterance to his will by hitting out with his arms, stamping and kicking, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them, and accompanying this war-dance with savage howlings and yellings. the outburst tends to concentrate itself in a real attack on somebody. sometimes this is the offender, as when darwin's boy at the age of two years and three months would throw books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him. but almost anybody or anything will do as an object of attack. a child of four on having his lordly purpose crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner. hitting is in many cases improved upon by biting. such fits of temper, as we call them, vary in their manner from child to child. thus, whereas one little boy would savagely bite or roll on the floor, his sister was accustomed to dance about and stamp. they vary greatly too in their frequency and their force. some children show in their anger little if anything of savage furiousness. it is to be added, that with those who do show it, it is wont in most cases to appear only for a limited period. the resemblance of this fierce anger to the fury of the savage and of the brute can hardly fail to be noticed. here indeed, as is illustrated in the good hymn of our nursery days, which bids us leave biting to the dogs, we see most plainly how firmly planted an animal root lies at the bottom of our proud humanity. ages of civilisation have not succeeded in eradicating some of the most characteristic and unpleasant impulses of the brute. at the same time a child's passionateness is more than a brute instinct. he suffers consciously; he realises himself in lonely antagonism to a world. this is seen in the bodily attitude of dejection which often follows the more vigorous stage of the fit, when the little ishmaelite, growing aware of the impotence of his anger, is wont to throw himself on the floor and to hide his head in solitary wretchedness. this consciousness of absolute isolation and hostility reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as human will. a dim recognition of the stronger will facing him brings the sense of injury, of tyrannous power. now this feeling of being injured and oppressed is human, and is fraught with moral possibilities. it is not as yet morally good; for the sense of injury is capable of developing, and may actually turn by-and-by into, hatred. yet, as we shall see, it holds within itself a promise of something higher. this predominance of self, this kinship with the unsocial brute, which shows itself in these germinal animosities, seems to be discoverable also in the unfeelingness of children. a common charge against them from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel. that children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, i suppose, incontestable. the troubles which harass and oppress the mother may leave her small companion quite unconcerned. he either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some trivial circumstance of her affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling. if, for example, she is ill, the event is interesting to him merely as supplying him with new treats. a little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother's sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: "i have had a very nice time, mamma's ill!" the order of the two statements is significant of the common attitude of mind of children towards others' sufferings. when it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. while a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being often taken with a shocking curiosity to peep into the dead room, and to get perhaps the gruesome pleasure of touching the dead body so as to know what "as cold as death" means, and at best showing only a feeling of awe before a great mystery. no one, i think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are often profoundly and shockingly callous. but the question arises here, too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. it is one thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. we are apt to forget that a large part of the manifestation of human suffering is quite unintelligible to a little child. again, when an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to spy something besides the sadness. the little girl who wanted to touch, and to know the meaning of "cold as death," on going to see a dead schoolmate was not unnaturally taken up with the beauty of the scene, with the white hangings and the white flowers. i am far from saying that the first acquaintance with death commonly leaves a child indifferent to the signs of woe. i believe, on the contrary, that children are frequently affected in a vague way by the surrounding gloom. in some cases, too, as published reminiscences of childhood show, the first acquaintance with the cruel monarch has sometimes shaken a child's whole being with an infinite, nameless sense of woe. with this unfeelingness children are frequently charged with active unkindness, amounting to cruelty. la fontaine spoke of the age of childhood as pitiless (_sans pitié_). this appearance of cruelty will now and again show itself in dealings with other children. one of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. children, i have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. one little girl was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make a beginning, fortunately only a feeble beginning, at smashing its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy an ugly-looking doll. such malicious treatment of smaller infants is, i think, rare. more common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child's dealings with animals. it is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of his cruelty. at first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malevolent intention in a child's treatment of animals. a little girl when only a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. older children often have a way of treating even their pets with a similar roughness. yet i think we cannot safely say that such rough usage is intended to be painful. it seems rather to be the outcome of the mere energy of the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate his pet. the case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. let me give a well-observed instance. a little boy of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: 'mr. fly dom (gone) to by-by'. but he would not touch it or another fly again--a doubt evidently remained, and he continued uneasy about it." here the arrest of life clearly brought a kind of shock, and we may safely say was not thought out beforehand. children may pounce upon and maul small moving things for a number of reasons. the wish to gratify their sense of power--which is probably keener in children who so rarely gratify it than in grown-ups--will often explain these actions. to stop all that commotion, all that buzzing on the window-pane, by a single tap of the finger, that may bring a delicious thrill of power to a child. curiosity, too, is a powerful incentive to this kind of maltreatment of animals. children have something of the anatomist's impulse to take living things apart, to see where the blood is, as one child put it, and so forth. i think, then, that we may give the small offenders the benefit of the doubt, and not attribute their rough handling of animals to a wish to inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which they are clearly aware. wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight in showing one's power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to explain a large part of the unlearned brutality of the first years. we have now looked at one of the darkest sides of the child and have found that though it is decidedly unpleasant it is not quite so ugly as it has been painted. children are no doubt apt to be greedy, and otherwise unsociable, to be ferocious in their anger, and to be sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is some consolation to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism. _the promise of humanity._ pure ishmaelite as he seems, however, a child has what we call the social instincts, and inconsistently enough no doubt he shows at times that after all he wants to join himself to those whom at other times he treats as foes. if he has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of tenderness. if he is now dead to others' sufferings he is at another time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness. the germ of this instinct of attachment to society may be said to disclose itself in a rude form in the first weeks of life, when he begins to get used to and to depend on the human presence, and is miserable when this is taken from him. in this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate kind of sympathy. just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. the intenser realisation of this oneness comes after separation. a girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother during six weeks. on the return of the latter she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her restored companion for a minute. a like outbreak of tender sympathy is apt to follow a fit of naughtiness when a child feels itself taken back to the mother's heart. sympathy, it is commonly said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. a child has been observed under the age of seven months to look unhappy, drawing down well the corners of the mouth in the characteristic baby-fashion when his nurse pretended to cry. this imitative sympathy deepens with attachment. we see something of it in the child's make-believe. when, for example, a little girl on finding that her mother's head ached pretended to have a bad head, we appear to see the working of an impulse to get near and share in others' experiences. the same feeling shows itself in play, especially in the treatment of the doll, which has to go through all that the child goes through, to be bathed, scolded, nursed when poorly, and so forth. from this imitative acting of another's trouble, so as to share in it, there is but a step to that more direct apprehension of it which we call sympathy. children sometimes begin to display such understanding of others' trouble early in the second year. one mite of fourteen months was quite concerned at the misery of an elder sister, crawling towards her and making comical endeavours by grunts and imitative movements of the fingers to allay her crying. i have a number of stories showing that for a period beginning early in the second year it is not uncommon for children to betray an exuberance of pity, being moved almost to tears, for example, when the mother says, "_poor_ uncle!" or when contemplating in a picture the tragic fate of humpty dumpty. very sweet and sacred to a mother are the first manifestations of tenderness towards herself. a child about the age of two has a way of looking at and touching its mother's face with something of the rapturous expression of a lover. still sweeter, perhaps, are the first clear indications of loving concern. the temporary loss of her presence, due to illness or other cause, is often the occasion for the appearance of a deeper tenderness. a little boy of three spontaneously brought his story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a little knight. at other times it is the suspicion of an injury to his beloved one, as when one little fellow seeing the strange doctor lay hold of his mother's wrist stood up like an outraged turkey-cock, backing into his mother's skirts, ready to charge the assaulter. a deeper and thoughtful kind of sympathy often comes with the advent of the more reflective years. thought about the overhanging terror, death, is sometimes its awakener. "are you old, mother?" asked a boy of five. "why?" she answered. "because," he continued, "the older you are the nearer you are to dying." there was no doubt thought of his own loss in this question: yet there was, one may hope, a germ of solicitude for the mother too. this first thought for others frequently takes the practical form of helpfulness. a child loves nothing better than to assist in little household occupations. a boy of two years and one month happened to overhear his nurse say to herself: "i wish that anne would remember to fill the nursery boiler". "he listened, and presently trotted off; found the said anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying: 'nanna, nanna!' (come to nurse). she followed, surprised and puzzled, the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he pointed to the boiler, and added: 'go dare, go dare,' so that the girl comprehended and did as he bade her." with this practical form of sympathy there goes a quite charming disposition to give pleasure in other ways. a little girl when just a year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty things to everybody. generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. early in the second year, too, children are wont to show themselves kindly by giving kisses and other pretty courtesies. in truth from about this date they are often quite charming in their expressions of good will, so that the good bishop earle hardly exaggerates when he writes of the child: "he kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater". later on a like amiable disposition will show itself in graceful turns of speech, as when a little girl, aged three and a quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: "please, mamma, will you pin this with the greatest pleasure?" just as there are these beginnings of affectionate concern for the mother and other people, so there is ample evidence of kindness to animals. the charge of cruelty in the case of little children is, indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole behaviour towards the animal world. when once the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will generally take kindly to an animal. a little boy of fifteen months quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather's dog, and began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and to throw stones for his amusement. at a quite early age, too, children will show the germ of a truly humane feeling towards animals. the same little boy that bravely got over his fear of the dog's barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry on seeing a horse fall in the street. stronger manifestations of pity are seen at a later age. a little boy of four was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond. the indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts. this is one of the most striking manifestations of the better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself. the close absorbing sympathy which we often observe between a child and animals seems to come from a sense of common weaknesses and needs. perhaps there is in it something of that instinctive impulse of helpless things to band together which we see in sheep and other gregarious animals. a mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old: "why, r., i believe you are kinder to the animals than to me". "perhaps i am," he replied, "you see they are not so well off as you are." the same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children with their toy babies and animals. allowing for occasional outbreaks of temper and acts of violence, a child's intercourse with his doll or his toy "gee gee" is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude which has something of the endurance of a maternal instinct. here, too, as we know, children vary greatly; there are the loving and the unloving moods, and there are the loving and the unloving children. yet allowing for these facts, i think it may be said that in these first fresh outgoings of human tenderness we have a comforting set off to the unamiable manifestations described above. _the lapse into lying._ the other main charge against children is that they tell lies. according to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the manner born, and equally adept with the mendacious savage. even writers on childhood who are by no means prejudiced against it lean to the view that lying is instinctive and universal among children. now it is surely permissible to doubt whether little children have so clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to be liars in this full sense. much of what seems shocking to the adult unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious. to begin with those little ruses and dissimulations which are said to appear almost from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is plainly difficult to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies. when, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your asking for it holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this action a lie, even though there may be in it a germ of deception. these little ruses or "acted lies" seem at the worst to be attempts to put you off the scent in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the minimum of intentional deception. this childish passion for guarding secrets may account for later and more serious-looking falsehoods. there is a more alarming appearance of mendacity when the child comes to the use of language and proffers statements which, if he reflected, he might know to be false. even here, however, we may easily apply grown-up standards unfairly. anybody who has observed children's play and knows how real to them their fancies become for the moment will be chary of applying to their sayings the word "lie". there may be solemn sticklers for truth who would be shocked to hear the child when at play saying, "i am a coachman," "dolly is crying," and so forth. but the discerning see nothing to be alarmed at here. on the same level of moral obliquity i should be disposed to place those cases where a child will contradictingly say the opposite of what he is told. a little french boy was overheard saying to himself: "papa parle mal, il a dit _sevette_, bébé parle bien, il dit _serviette_". such reversals may be a kind of play too: the child not unnaturally gets tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and for the moment imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely enjoying the idea. the case looks graver when an "untruth" is uttered in answer to a question. a little boy on being asked by his mother who told him something, answered, "dolly". "false, and knowingly false," somebody will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster instantly proceeded to laugh. but is not this laugh just the saving clause of the story, suggesting that it was play and the spirit of mischief at bottom? in this case, i suspect, there was co-operant a strongly marked childish characteristic, the love of producing an effect. a child has a large measure of that feeling which r. l. stevenson attributes to the light-hearted innes in _weir of hermiston_, "the mere pleasure of beholding interested faces". the well-known "cock and bull" stories of small children are inspired by this love of strong effect. it is the dramatic impulse of childhood endeavouring to bring life into the dulness of the serious hours. childish vanity often assists, as where a little girl of five would go about scattering the most alarming kind of false news, as, for example, that baby was dead, simply to court attention and make herself of some importance. a quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these, backed by a strong impulse to astonish, and a playful turn for contradiction and paradox, seem to me to account for most of this early fibbing and other similar varieties of early misstatement. naughty it is, no doubt, in a measure; but is it quite fairly branded as lying, that is, as a serious attempt to deceive? in some cases, i think, the vivid play of imagination which prompts the untrue assertion may lead to a measure of self-deception. when, for example, an italian child, of whom signorina lombroso tells us, who is out for a walk, and wanting to be carried says, "my leg hurts me and my foot too just here, i can't walk, i can't, i can't," it is possible at least that the vivid imagination of the south produces at the moment an illusory sense of fatigue. and if so we must hesitate to call the statement wholly a falsehood. a fertile source of childish "untruth," which may be more true than untrue in the sense of expressing the conviction of the moment, is the wish to please. an emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for his mother gushes out, "you're the best mother in the whole world!" may be hardly conscious of any exaggeration. there is more of artfulness in the flatteries which appear to involve a calculating intention to say the nice agreeable thing. some children, especially little girls, are, i believe, adepts at these amenities. those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are perhaps those who in later years make the good society actors. yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty flatteries, one needs to be superhuman in order to condemn them harshly. the other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, i suspect, may point to a more intentional and conscious kind of untruth. if, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say "yes" makes it very hard to say "no". mrs. burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. when she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called edith, remarked to her: "that's a pretty name. my baby is eleanor. isn't that a pretty name?" on being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of "eleanor," and yet feared to be rude and say so. she got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as "edith". in such cases as this the fear to give offence may be reinforced by the mastering force of "suggestion". just as the hypnotiser "suggests" to his subject the idea that he is ill, that the dirty water in this glass is wine, and so forth, compelling him to accept and act out the idea, so we all exercise a kind of suggestive sway over children's minds. our leading questions, as when we say, "isn't this pretty?" may for a moment set up a half belief that the thing must be so. thus in a double fashion do our words control children's thoughts, driving them now into contradiction, drawing them at other times and in other moods into submissive assent. wordsworth has illustrated how an unwise and importunate demand for a reason from a child may drive him into invention.[ ] [ ] see his poem, _anecdote for fathers, showing how the practice of lying may be taught_. ("poems referring to the period of childhood.") i do not say that these are the only impulses which prompt to this early fibbing. from some records of the first years i learn that a child may drift into something like a lie under the pressure of fear, more especially fear of being scolded. one little fellow, more than once instanced in this work, a single child brought up wholly by his mother, perpetrated his first fib when he was about twenty-two months old. he went, it seems, and threw his doll down stairs in one of those capricious outbursts towards favourites which children share with certain sovereigns, then went to his mother and making great pretence of grief said, "poor dolly tumbled". if this had stood alone i should have been ready to look on it as a little childish comedy; but the same child a month or two afterwards would invent a fib when he wanted his mother to do something. for example, he was one morning lying in bed with his mother and wanted much to get up. his mother told him to look for the watch and see what time it was. he felt under the pillow pretending to find and consult the time-teller, saying: "time to get up". here it was clearly the force of the young will resisting an unpleasant check which excited the sober faculties to something like deception. to say that our moral discipline with its injunctions, its corrections, is a great promoter of childish untruth may sound shocking, but it is i think an indisputable truth. we can see how this begins to work in the first years. for example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother "monkey," and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: "i said _i_ was a monkey". a child is often driven into such ruses by the instinct of self-protection. our system of discipline may develop untruth in other ways too. when, for example, punishment has been inflicted and its inflicter, relenting, asks: "are you sorry?" or "aren't you sorry?" the answer is exceedingly likely to be "no," even though this may at the moment be half felt to be untrue. from such partial untruths the way is easy to complete ones, as when a naughty little boy who is shut up in his room and kept without food, is asked: "are you hungry?" and with the hardihood of a confirmed sinner answers "no," even though the low and dismal tone of the word shows how much the untruth goes against the grain. i think there is no doubt, then, that at a certain age children may, more especially under a severe home authority, develop, apart from contagion, a tendency to falsehood. some may see in this, as in childish fears and cruelties, rudiments of characteristics which belonged to remote uncivilised ancestors. however this be, it is hard to say that these fibs have that clear intention to deceive which constitutes a complete lie. there are curious points in the manner of childish fibbing. a good many children seem to be like savages in distinguishing those to whom one is bound to speak the truth. the "bad form" of telling a lie to the head-master is a later illustration of the same thing. on the other hand it seems to be thought that there are people who are specially fitted to be the victims of untruth. even young children soon find out who it is among the servants that being credulous supplies the best listener to their amazing inventions. another interesting point is the way in which the perfectly baseless fictions of children are apt to grow into permanent "stories". in the nursery and in the playground there are wont to be developed myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded, and may be handed down to successors. in all such cases of propagated untruths the impulse of imitation and the tendency of the child's mind to accept statements uncritically are of course at work. the "lie" propagated by this influence of contagion very soon ceases to be a lie. _fealty to truth._ in order to understand what childish untruth really amounts to we must carefully note its after-effects on the perpetrator. it seems certain that many children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering that, of the falsity of which they are more or less aware. this is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the young casuist thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, "i do not mean it," "in my mind," or some similar palliative. such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry. the remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, is much more than this passing qualm, and has been remembered by many in later life. here is a case. a young lady whom i know remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. one day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: "poor child, you could not see well". she knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie. such remorse, in certain cases prolonged beyond the first lie, comes to the little offender as he or she lies in bed and recalls the untruths of the day. some children suffer greatly from this periodic reflection on their lies. some of the more poignant of the sufferings which come to the sensitive child from saying what is false are those of fear, fear of those terrific penalties which religious teaching attaches to the lying tongue. it seems likely that childish devices for allaying their qualms when saying what is untrue are intended somehow to make things right with god, and so to avoid the dreaded chastisement. i am sure, too, that the subsequent remorse, especially at night, is very largely a dread of some awful manifestation of god's wrath. while i should set down much of this horror of children at discovering themselves liars to a dread of supernatural penalties, i should not set down the whole. i am disposed to think that there is another force at work in the little people's consciousness. in order to explain what i mean, i must begin by saying that a tendency towards conscious falsehood, though common, does not seem to be universal among children. several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously put forth an untruth. i can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose. i am ready to go further and to suggest that where a child is brought up normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth. one may easily see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with a false statement. i remember after more than twelve years one little boy's outbreaks of righteous indignation at meeting with untrue statements about his beloved horses and other things in one of his books, for which he had all a child's reverence. the idea of knowingly perpetrating an untruth, so far as i can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. may it, then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law--law not wholly imposed by the mother's command, but rooted in the very habits of social life? our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will develop into the vices of cruelty and lying. on the other hand it has shown us that there are other and counteracting impulses, germs of human sympathy and of respect for the binding custom of truthfulness. so far from saying that child-nature is utterly bad or beautifully perfect, we should say that it is a disorderly jumble of impulses, each pushing itself upwards in lively contest with the others, some towards what is bad, others towards what is good. it is on this motley group of tendencies that the hand of the moral cultivator has to work, selecting, arranging, organising into a beautiful whole. chapter x. rebel and subject. children are early confronted with our laws, and it is worth while asking how they behave in relation to these. many persons seem to think that children generally are disobedient, lawless creatures; others, that some are obedient, others disobedient. perhaps neither of these views is quite exact enough. (_a_) _the struggle with law: first tussle with authority._ let us begin our study by looking a little more closely at what we call the disobedient attitude of children. that it exists nobody, surely, can well doubt. the very liveliness of young limbs and young wits brings their possessors into conflict with our sedate customs. the person who tries to wield authority over these small people is constantly introducing unpleasant checkings of vigorous impulse. a child has large requirements in the matter of movements and experiments with things, which are apt to clash with what the mother considers orderliness; when he is out of doors he exhibits a duck-like fondness for dirty water, whereas civilisation, represented by his tidy nurse, wills it that man should, at least when not in the arctic regions, be clean; he shows a perverse passion for fun and tricks when the mother thinks it the right time for serious talk, and so forth. in these ways there comes the tussle with human law. yet surely, if we consider the matter impartially, we shall see that these collisions in the early years are perfectly normal and right. in the interests of the race, at any rate, we ought perhaps to regard him as the better child, as the child of finer promise, who will not subject himself to human law without a considerable show of resistance. the first and most impressive form of resistance to the laws of grown-ups is the use of physical force, which has already been touched on. there is something pathetically comic in the spectacle of these mites resorting to the arbitrement of force, trying their small hand at pushing, striking, and the like; and as we have seen the effort is wont soon to exhaust itself in childish despair. as soon as our authority begins to assert itself in the issuing of commands the child's disposition to disobey, that is to have his way rather than ours, is apt to show itself now and again in decided refusals. when, let us say, the nurse gives up pulling him from the dirty pool, and bids him come away, he may very likely assert himself in an eloquent, "i won't," or less bluntly, "i can't come yet". here, of course, there may be no wilful rejection of recognised law, but merely resistance to this particular disagreeable order coming from this particular person. nevertheless we must, i fear, admit that such refusals to obey orders have in them something of true lawlessness. the whole attitude of the child when he thus "tries on" defiance of commands is certainly suggestive of the rebel's temper. nobody is so completely reckless as the child-rebel. when the fit is on him he pays not the least attention to the most awful of warnings. one little offender of four when he was reminded by his sister--two years older--that he would be shut out from heaven retorted impiously, "i don't care"; adding, for reasons best known to himself, "uncle won't go--i'll stay with him". _evading the law._ in addition to this first impressive form of opposition there are later ones which plainly show the spirit of antagonism. the conflict with law now takes on the aspect of evasion or "trying it on". one of the simplest of these childish tricks is the invention of an excuse for not instantly obeying a command, as "come here!" "don't tease pussy!" a child soon finds out that to say "i won't" when he is bidden to do something is indiscreet as well as vulgar. he wants to have his own way without resorting to a gross breach of good manners, so he replies insinuatingly, "i's very sorry, but i's too busy," or in some such conciliatory words. this field of invention offers a fine opportunity for the imaginative child. a small boy of three years and nine months on receiving from his nurse the familiar order, "come here!" at once replied, "i can't, nurse, i's looking for a flea," and pretended to be much engrossed in the momentous business of hunting for this quarry in the blanket of his cot. the little trickster is such a lover of fun that he is pretty certain to betray his ruse in a case like this, and our small flea-catcher, we are told, laughed mischievously as he proffered his excuse. such sly fabrications may be just as naughty as the uninspired excuses of a stupidly sulky child, but it is hard to be quite as much put out by them. it is a further refinement when the staunch little lover of liberty sets about "easing" the pressure of commands. if, for example, he is told to keep perfectly quiet because mother or father wants to sleep, he will prettily plead for the reservation of whispering ever so softly. if he is forbidden to ask for things at the table he will resort to sly indirect reminders of what he wants, as when a boy of five and a half years whispered audibly: "i hope somebody will offer me some more soup," or when a girl of three and a half years, with more subtle insinuation, observed on seeing the elder folk eating cake: "i not asking". a like astuteness will show itself in meeting the dismal accusations and scoldings. sometimes the fault-finding is daringly ignored, and the small culprit, after keeping up an excellent appearance of listening, proceeds in the most artless way to talk about something more agreeable, or, what is worse, to criticise the manner of his correction; as when a small boy interrupted his mother's well-prepared homily by remarking: "mamma, when you talk you don't move your upper jaw". in cases in which no attempt is made to ignore the accusation, the small wits are wont to be busy discovering exculpations. here we have the ruses, often crude enough, by which the little culprit tries to shake off moral responsibility, to deny the authorship of the "naughty" action. the blame is put on anybody or anything--if there is no other scape-goat in view, then on the hands or other "bodily agents". this last device is sometimes hit upon very early, as when a mite of two who was told to stop crying gasped out: "elsie cry--_not_ elsie cry--tears cry--naughty tears!" we find too at an early age a suggestion of fatalism, as when a boy of three who was blamed for not eating his crusts, and his procedure contrasted with that of his virtuous sire, remarked: "yes, but, papa, you see god had made you and me different". next to these denials of the "naughty" action come attempts at justification. sometimes these look like pitiful examples of quibbling. a boy had been rough with his baby brother. his mother chid him, telling him he might hurt baby. he then asked his mother, "isn't he my own brother?" and on his mother admitting so incontestable a proposition, exclaimed triumphantly, "well, you said i could do what i liked with _my own_ things". at other times they have a dreadful look of being fibs invented for the purpose of covering a fault. under a severe mode of discipline a child is apt, as already hinted, to slip over the boundary line of truth in his self-protective efforts to escape blame and punishment. one other illustration of this keen childish dialectic when face to face with the accuser deserves to be touched on. the sharpened faculties have something of a lawyer's quickness in detecting a flaw in the indictment. any exaggeration into which a feeling of indignation happens to betray the accuser is instantly pounced upon. if, for example, a child is scolded for pulling kitty's ears and making her cry it is enough for the little stickler for accuracy to be able to say: "i wasn't pulling kitty's _ears_, i was only pulling _one_ of her ears". the ability to deny the charge in its initial form gives him a great advantage, and robs the accusation in its amended form of much of its sting. whence, by the way, one may infer that wisdom in managing children shows itself in nothing more than in a scrupulous exactness in the use of words. _the plea for liberty._ while there are these isolated attacks on various points of the daily discipline, we see now and again a bolder line of action in the shape of a general protest against its severity. sometimes the parental authority is contrasted unfavourably with that of some other mother. the small boy who invented a family, _viz._, a mother called mrs. cock and her little boys, frequently referred to this lady for the purpose of giving point to protests against the severity of the real mother. "for instance (writes the latter) when mother refuses her paint-box as a plaything, or declines to supply unlimited note-paper for 'scwibbleation,' a reproachful little voice is heard, 'mrs. cock always gives her paint-box and all her paper to my little boys'. a pause. then follows suggestively: 'i fink she loves them vewy much'."[ ] on the other hand, if the child accepts the mother's plea, that she has to impose restraints because she is a good mother, he is apt to wish that she were a shade less good. a boy of four had one morning to remain in bed till ten o'clock as a punishment for misbehaviour. he proceeded to address his mother in this wise: "if i had any little children i'd be a worse mother than you--i'd be quite a bad mother; i'd let the children get up directly i had done my breakfast at any rate". [ ] from a published article by mrs. robert jardine (compare above, pp. , ). enough has been said to illustrate the ways in which the natural child kicks against the imposition of restraints on his free activity. he begins by showing himself an open foe to authority. for a long time after, while making a certain show of submission, he harbours in his breast something of the rebel's spirit. he does his best to evade the most galling parts of the daily discipline, and displays an admirable ingenuity in devising excuses for apparent acts of insubordination. and, lastly, where candour is permitted, he is apt to prove himself an exceedingly acute critic of the system which is imposed on him. all this, moreover, seems to show that a child objects not only to the particular administration under which he happens to live, but to all law as implying restraints on free activity. thus, from the child's point of view, so far as we have yet examined it, punishment as such is a thing which ought not to be. so strong and deep-reaching is this antagonism to law and its restraints apt to be that the common longing to be "big" is, i believe, largely grounded on the expectation of liberty. to be big seems to the child more than anything else to be able to do what one likes without interference from others. "do you know," asked a little fellow of four years, "what i shall do when i'm a big man? i'll go to a shop and buy a bun and pick out all the currants." one must have left in him much of the child in order to understand the fascination of that forbidden pleasure of daintily selecting the currants. (_b_) _on the side of law._ if, however, we look closer we shall find that this hostility is not the whole, perhaps not the most fundamental part, of a child's attitude towards law. it is evident that the early criticism of parental government referred to above, so far from implying rejection of all rule, plainly implies its acceptance. some of the earliest and bitterest protests against interference are directed against what looks to the child irregular or opposed to law, as when, for example, he is allowed for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then suddenly deprived of it. and does not all the exercise of childish ingenuity in excuses imply in an indirect way that _if he had done_ what is described in the indictment it would be naughty and deserving of punishment? other facts in early life bear out the conjecture that a child has law-abiding as well as law-resisting impulses. i think we may often discern evidence of this in his suffering when in disgrace. when he is too young perhaps to feel the shame, he will feel, and acutely too, the estrangement, the loneliness, the sudden shrinkage of his beloved world. the greater the love and the dependence, the greater will be this feeling of devastation. the same little boy who said to his mother: "i'd be a worse mother," remarked to her a few months later that if he could say what he liked to god it would be: "love me when i'm naughty". there is, perhaps, in this childish suffering often something more than the sense of being homeless and outcast. a child of four or five may, i conceive, when suffering disgrace have a dim consciousness of having broken with his normal orderly self, of having set at defiance that which he customarily honours and obeys. now this setting up of an orderly law-abiding self seems to me to imply that there are impulses which make for order. a child, as i understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing caprices--whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule and order--and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. and, as i conceive, this reverence for precedent and rule is the deeper and the stronger impulse. _the young stickler for the proprieties._ i believe that those who know young children will agree with me that they show an instinctive respect for what is customary and according to rule, such as a particular way of taking food, dressing, and definite times for doing this and that. nor can we regard this as merely a reflection of our respect for law, for as we shall presently see it reaches far beyond the limits of the rules laid down by adults. it seems to be a true instinct which comes before education and makes education possible. it is related to habit, the great principle which runs through the whole of life. the first crude manifestation of this disposition to make rule is seen in the insistence on the customary, as to the places of things, the order of procedure at meals and such like. the little boy of two, often quoted here, showed a punctilious feeling for order in the placing of things. he protested one morning in his mother's bedroom against a hair-brush being placed on the washing-stand near the tooth-brushes, saying quaintly: "that toof-brush is a brush one". older children are apt to be sticklers for order at the meal-table: thus, the cup and the spoon have to be put in precisely the right place. similarly, the sequences of the day, _e.g._, the lesson before the walk, the walk before bed, have to be rigorously observed. this feeling for order may develop itself even where the system of parental government is by no means characterised by rigorous insistence on such minutiæ of procedure. this impulse to extend rule appears more plainly in many of the little ceremonial observances of the child. very charmingly is this respect for rule exhibited in all dealings with animals, also dolls and other pets. not only are they required to do things in a proper orderly manner, but people have to treat them with due deference. one little fellow when saying good-night to his mother insisted on her going through with his doll precisely the same round of kissing and hand-shaking that he required in his own case. this jealous regard for ceremony and the proprieties of behaviour is seen in the enforcement of rules of politeness by children who will extend them far beyond the scope intended by the parent. a delightful instance of this fell under my own observation, as i was walking on hampstead heath. it was a spring day, and the fat buds of the chestnuts were bursting into magnificent green plumes. two well-dressed "misses," aged, i should say, about nine and eleven, were taking their correct morning walk. the elder called the attention of the younger to one of the trees, pointing to it. the younger exclaimed in a highly shocked tone: "oh, maud (or was it 'mabel'?), you know you _shouldn't_ point!" the domain of prayer well illustrates the same tendency. the child is wont, as we have seen, to think of god as a very, very grand person, and naturally, therefore, extends to him all the courtesies he knows of. thus he must be addressed politely with the due forms, "please," "if you please," and the like. the german child shrinks from using the familiar form "du" in his prayers. as one maiden of seven well put it in reply to a question why she used "sie" (the polite form of "you") in her prayers: "ich werde doch den lieben gott nicht du nennen: ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht" (but i mustn't call god "thou": i don't know him, you see). on the other hand, god must not be kept waiting. "oh, mamma," said a little boy of three years and eight months (the same that was so insistent about the kissing and hand-shaking), "how long you have kept me awake for you; god has been wondering so whenever i was going to say my prayers." all the words must be nicely said to him. a little boy, aged four and three-quarter years, once stopped in the middle of a prayer and asked his mother: "oh! how do you spell that word?" the question is curious as suggesting that the child may have regarded his silent communication to the far-off king as a kind of letter. _the enforcer of rules._ not only do children thus of themselves extend the scope of our commands, they show a disposition to make rules for themselves. if, after being told to do a thing on a single occasion only, a child is found repeating the action on other occasions, this seems to show the germ of a law-making impulse. a little boy of two years and one month was once asked to give a lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. some time after, on receiving some new toys, he put away, of his own accord, his old ones as before for the less fortunate children. that the instinct for order assists moral discipline may be seen in the fact that children are apt to pay enormous deference to our rules. nothing is more suggestive here than their talk among themselves, the emphasis they are wont to lay on the "must" and "must not". the truth is that children have a tremendous belief in the sacredness of rules. this recognition of the absolute imperativeness of a rule properly laid down by the recognised authority is seen in the frequent insistence on its observance in new circumstances. it has been pointed out by professor preyer that a child of two years and eight months will follow out the prohibitions of the mother when he falls into other hands, sternly protesting, for example, against the nurse giving him the forbidden knife at table. very proper children rather like to instruct their aunts and other ignorant persons as to the right way of dealing with them, and will rejoice in the opportunity of setting them straight even when it means a deprivation for themselves. the self-denying ordinance, "mamma doesn't let me have many sweets," is by no means beyond the powers of a very correct little person. a still clearer evidence of this respect for law as such, apart from its particular enforcement by the parent, is supplied by children's way of extending the rules imposed on themselves to others. no trait is better marked in the normal child than the impulse to subject others to his own disciplinary system. with what amusing severity are they wont to lay down the law to their dolls, and to their animal playmates, subjecting them to precisely the same prohibitions and punishments as those to which they themselves are subject! nor do they stop here. they enforce the duties just as courageously on their human elders. a mite of eighteen months went up to her elder sister, who was crying, and with perfect mimicry of the nurse's corrective manner, said: "hush! hush! papa!" pointing at the same time to the door. this judicial bent of the child is a curious one and often develops a priggish fondness for setting others morally straight. small boys have to endure much in this way from the hands of slightly older sisters proficient in matters of law and delighting to enforce the moralities. but sometimes the sisters lapse into naughtiness, and then the small boys have their chance. they too can on such occasions be priggish if not downright hypocritical. a little boy had been quarrelling with his sister named muriel just before going to bed. on kneeling down to say his prayers and noticing that muriel was sitting near and listening, he prayed aloud in this wise, "please, god, make muriel a good girl," then looked up and said in an angry voice, "do you hear that, muriel?" and after this digression resumed his petition. this mania for correction shows itself too in relation to the authorities themselves. a collection of rebukes and expositions of moral precept supplied by children to their erring parents would be amusing and suggestive. here is an example: a boy of two--the moral instruction of parents by the child begins betimes--would not go to sleep when bidden to do so by his father and mother. at length the father, losing patience, addressed him with a man's fierce emphasis. this mode of admonition so far from cowering the child simply offended his sense of propriety, for he rejoined: "you s'ouldn't, s'ouldn't, assum (_i.e._, 'arthur,' the father's name), you s'ould speak nicely". we may now turn to what some will regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, _viz._, their spontaneous self-submission to its commands. we are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only when under compulsion: but this is far from the truth. a very young child will show the germ of a disposition freely to adopt a law. a little girl, when only twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself: "tay dar" (stay there). about the same time, after being naughty and squealing "like a railway-whistle," she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, "be dood, babba" (her name). in like manner the little boy often quoted at the age of twenty months said to himself when walking down the garden, "sonny darling, mind nettles". here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the mother's fashion of control, but they seem, too, to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control. very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. the girl just quoted, when less than two years old, would go to her mother and confess some piece of naughtiness and suggest the punishment. a little boy aged two years and four months was deprived of a pencil from thursday to sunday for scribbling on the wall-paper. his punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. on saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. when his nurse fetched him she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected, saying: "no, nanna (name for nurse), look at it till sunday". and sure enough when sunday came, and the pencil was restored to him, he promptly showed nurse his picture. that there is this tendency to fall in with punishment for breach of rule is borne out by some recent questionings of school children in america as to their views of the justice of their punishments. the results appear to show that they regard a large part of their corrections for naughtiness as a matter of course, the younger ones being apparently harsher in their views of what constitutes a proper punishment than the older ones. these evidences of an impulse to look on correction as a quite proper thing are corroborated by stories of self-punishment. here is an example: a girl of nine had been naughty, and was very sorry for her misbehaviour. shortly after she came to her lesson limping, and remarked that she felt very uncomfortable. being asked by her governess what was the matter with her she said: "it was very naughty of me to disobey you, so i put my right shoe on to my left foot and my left shoe on to my right foot". the facts here briefly illustrated seem to me to show that there is in the child from the first a rudiment of true law-abidingness, which exists side by side and struggles with the childish love of liberty and rebelliousness. and this is a force of the greatest consequence to the disciplinarian. it is something which takes side in the child's breast with the reasonable governor and the laws which he or she administers. it secures in many cases, at least, a ready compliance with a large part of the discipline enforced. chapter xi. at the gate of the temple. one of the most interesting phases of a child's activity is its groping after what we call art. although a decided bent towards some special form of our art may be rare among children, most of them betray some rudiment of a feeling for beauty and of an impulse to produce it. it will be well to begin by glancing at the responses of children to the various presentations of beauty in nature and art, and then to examine their attempts at artistic production. _the greeting of beauty._ in looking in a young child for responses to the beauty of things, we must not, of course, expect a clear appreciation of its several phases. here our aim will be to collect evidences of a natural feeling which may afterwards under favourable conditions grow into a discerning taste. even in infancy we may detect in the movements of the arms, the admiring cooing sounds, this greeting of nature's beauty as of something kindred. in the home interior it is commonly some bit of bright light, especially when it is in movement, which first charms the eye of the novice; the dancing fire-flame, for example, the play of the sunlight on a bit of glass or a gilded frame, the great globe of the lamp just created. in some cases it is a patch of bright colour or a gay pattern on the mother's dress which calls forth a full vocal welcome in the shape of baby "talking". in the out-of-door scene, too, it is the glitter of the running water, or a meadow all white with daisies, which captivates the glance. light, the symbol of life's joy, seems to be the first language in which the spirit of beauty speaks to a child. a feeling for the charm of colour comes distinctly later. the first pleasure from coloured toys and pictures is hardly distinguishable from the welcome of the glad light, the delight in mere brightness. this applies pretty manifestly to the strongly illumined rose-red curtain which professor preyer's boy greeted with signs of satisfaction at the age of twenty-three days. later on, too, when it is possible to test a child's feeling for colour, it has been found that a decided preference is shown for the bright or "luminous" tints, _viz._, red and yellow. an american observer, miss shinn, tells us that her niece in her twenty-eighth month had a special fondness for the daffodils--the bright tints of which allured, as we know, an older maiden, and, alas! to the place whence all brightness was banished. among the other coloured objects which captivated the eye of this little girl were a patch of white cherry blossom, and a red sun-set sky. such observations might easily be multiplied. whiteness, it is to be noted, comes, as we might expect, with the brighter tones of the other colours among the first favourites. at what age a child begins to appreciate the value of colour as colour, to like blue or red for its own sake and apart from its brightness, it is hard to say. the experiments made so far are not conclusive, though they seem to show that taste for colour does not always develop along the same lines. thus, according to the observer of one child, blue is one of the first to be preferred, though this is said not to be true of other children. later on, i believe, a child is wont to have his favourite colour, and to be ready to defend it against the preferences of others. liking for a single colour is a considerably smaller display of mind than an appreciation of the relation of two colours. many adults, it is said, hardly have a rudiment of this feeling, pairing the most fiercely antagonistic tints. common observation shows that most children, like the less cultivated adults, prefer juxtapositions of colours which are strongly opposed, such as blue and red or blue and yellow. it would be interesting to know whether there is any general preference as between these two combinations. it is, of course, a long step from this recognition of the contrast and mutual emphasising of colour to that of its quiet harmonious combinations. that little children have their likings in the matter of form is, i think, indisputable, but they are not those of the cultivated adult. one of the first out-goings of admiration towards form is the child's praise of "tiny" things. the common liking of children for small natural forms, _e.g._, those of the lesser birds, insects, and sea-shells, is well known. how they love to "pile up" the endearing epithets "wee," "tiny" (or "teeny"), and the rest! here, as in so many of these childish admirations, we have to do not with a purely æsthetic perception. the feeling for the tiny things probably has in it the warmth of a young personal sympathy. if now we turn to the higher aspects of form, such as symmetry and proportion, we encounter a difficulty. a child may acquire while quite young and before any methodical education commences a certain feeling for regular form. but can we be sure that this is the result of his own observations? we have to remember that his daily life, where the home is orderly, helps to impress on him regularity of form. in the laying of the cloth on the dinner-table, for example, he sees the regular division of space enforced as a law. every time he is dressed, or sees his mother dress, he has an object-lesson in symmetrical arrangement. and so these features take on a kind of moral rightness before they are judged of as pleasing to the eye and as beautiful. the feeling for proportion, as, for example, between the height of a horse and that of a house, is, as children's drawings show us, in general very defective. a susceptibility to the pleasures of light, colour, and certain simple aspects of form, may be said to supply the basis of a crude perception of beauty. a quite small child is capable of acquiring a real admiration for a beautiful lady, in the appreciation of which brightness, colour, grace of movement, the splendour of dress, all have their part, while the charm for the eye is often reinforced by a sweet and winsome quality of voice. such an admiration is not of course a pure appreciation of beauty: awe, some feeling for the social dignity of dress, perhaps a longing to be embraced by the charmer, may all enter into it; yet delight in the _look_ of a thing for its own sake is surely the core of the feeling. perhaps the nearest approach to a pure æsthetic enjoyment in these early days is the love of flowers. the wee round wonders with their mystery of velvety colour are well fitted to take captive the young eye. i believe most children who live among flowers and have access to them acquire something of this sentiment, a sentiment in which admiration for beautiful things combines with a kind of dumb childish sympathy. no doubt there are marked differences among children here. there are some who care only, or mainly, for their scent, and the keen sensibilities of the olfactory organ appear to have a good deal to do with early preferences and prejudices in the matter of flowers. others again care for them mainly as a means of personal adornment, though i am disposed to think that this partially interested fondness is less common with children than with many adults. in much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the manifestations of taste among uncivilised races. admiration for brilliant colours, for moving things, such as feathers, is common to the two. yet a child coming under the humanising influences of culture soon gets far away from the level of the savage. perhaps his almost perfectly spontaneous love of tiny flowers is already a considerable advance on his so-called prototype. many adults assume that a child can look at a landscape as they look at it, taking in the whole picturesque effect. when he is taken to switzerland and shown a fine "view," his eye, so far from seizing the whole, will provokingly pounce on some unimportant detail of the scene and give undivided attention to this, that the eye of a child of ten or less can enjoy the reddening of a snow-peak, or the emergence of a bright green alp from the mountain mist, i fully believe. but it is quite another thing to expect him to appreciate great extent of view and all the unnameable relations of form, of light and shade, and of colour, which compose a landscape. _first peep into the art-world._ while nature is thus speaking to a child through her light, her colour and her various forms, human art makes appeal also. in a cultured home a child finds himself at the precincts of the art-temple, and feels there are wondrous delights within if he can only get there. one of the earliest of these appeals is to the ear. a child outside the temple of art hears its music before he sees its veiled beauties. i have had occasion to show how sadly new sounds may perturb the spirit of an infant. yet these same waves of sound, which break upon and shake the young nerves, give them, too, their most delightful thrill. nowhere in adult experience do pleasure and sadness lie so near one another as in music, and a child's contrasting responses, as he now shrinks away with trouble in his eyes, now gratefully reaches forth and falls into joyous sympathetic movement, are a striking illustration of this proximity. in the case of many happy children the interest in the sounds of things, _e.g._, the gurgle of running water, the soughing of the trees, is a large one. an approach to æsthetic pleasure is seen in the responses to rhythmic series of sounds. rhythm, it has been well said, is a universal law of life: all the activities of the organism have their regular changes, their periodic rise and fall. the rhythm of a simple tune plays favourably on a child's ear, enhancing life according to this great law. his ear, his brain, his muscles take on a new joyous activity, and the tide of life rises higher. nursery rhymes, which, it has recently been suggested, should be banished, bring something of this joy of ordered movement, and help to form the rhythmic ear. with this feeling for rhythm there soon appears a discerning feeling for quality of tone. first of all, i suspect, comes the appreciation of moderation and smoothness of sound; it is the violent sounds which mostly offend the young ear. a child's preference for the mother's singing is, perhaps, a half reminiscence of the soft-low tones of the lullaby. purity or sweetness of tone, little by little, makes itself felt, and a child takes dislikes to certain voices as wanting in this agreeable quality. much later, in the case of all but gifted children, do the mysteries of harmony begin to take on definite form and meaning. the arts which give to the eye semblances or representations of objects appeal to a child much more through his knowledge of things. the enjoyment of a picture means the understanding of it as a picture, and this requires a process of self-education. a child begins to make acquaintance with the images of things when set before a mirror. here he can inspect what he sees, say the reflection of the face of his mother or nurse, and compare it at once with the original. with pictures there is no such opportunity of directly comparing with the original, and children have to find out as best they may what the drawings in their picture-books mean. a dim discernment of what a drawing represents may appear early. a little boy was observed to talk to pictures at the end of the eighth month. a girl of forty-two weeks showed the same excitement at the sight of a life-size painting of a cat as at that of a real cat. another child, a boy, recognised pictures of animals by spontaneously naming them "bow-wow," etc., at the age of ten months. the early recognition of pictured objects, of which certain animals have a measure, is often strikingly discerning. a child a little more than a year old has been known to pick out her father's face in a group of nine, the face being scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter. another curious point in this early deciphering of drawings and photographs is that a child seems indifferent to the _position_ of the picture, holding it as readily inverted as in its proper position. one little girl of three and a half "does not mind (writes her father) whether she looks at a picture the right way up or the wrong; she points out what you ask for, eyes, feet, hands, tail, etc., about equally well whichever way up the picture is, and never asks to have it put right that she may see it better". a like indifference to the position of a picture, and of a letter, has been observed among backward races. surprising as this early recognition of pictures undoubtedly is, it is a question whether it necessarily implies any idea of the true nature of them, as being merely semblances or representations of things. that children do not, at first, clearly seize the meaning of pictures is seen in the familiar fact that they will touch them just as they touch shadows, and otherwise treat them as if they were tangible realities. one little girl attempted to smell at the trees in a drawing and pretended to feed some pictorial dogs. this may have been half play. but here is a more convincing example. a girl was moved to pity by a picture of a lamb caught in a thicket, and tried to lift the branch that lay across the animal. with less intelligent children traces of this tendency to take pictorial representation for reality may appear as late as four. one american boy having looked at a picture of people going to church in the snow, and finding on the next day that the figures in the drawing were exactly in the same position, seemed perplexed, and remarked naïvely: "why, mrs. c., these people haven't got there yet, have they?" it is not surprising after this to learn that some children are slow in seizing the representative character of acting. if, for example, a father at christmas-tide disguises himself as santa claus, his child will only too readily take him to be what he represents himself to be, and this when the disguise, especially in the matter of the voice, leaves much to be desired. children, like uneducated adults, have been known to take a spectacle on the stage of a theatre too seriously. yet their own play, which, though serious at the moment, is known afterwards to be "pretending," probably renders many of them particularly quick in interpreting dramatic play. this tendency to take art-representations for realities reappears even in the mental attitude of a child towards his stories. a verbal narrative has of course in itself nothing similar to the scenes and events of which it tells. in this it differs from the semblance of the picture and of the dramatic spectacle. yet a story, just because it uses our common forms of language and takes the guise of a narrative about people who lived at such a time and place, may well appear to a child's mind to tell of real events. at any rate we know that he is wont to believe tenaciously in the truth of his stories. careful observations of these first movements of the child's mind towards art will illustrate the variable directions of his taste. the preferences of a boy of four in the matter of picture-books tell us where his special interests lie, what things he finds pretty, and may supply a hint as to how much of a genuine æsthetic faculty he is likely to develop later on. it is curious to note children's first manifestations of a sense of the pathetic and the comic as represented in art. here marked differences present themselves. those of a more serious turn are apt to show a curious preference for the graver aspects of things. they like stories, for example, with a certain amount of tension and even of thrill in them. there are others who disclose a special susceptibility to the more simple effects of pathos. there are sentimental children, as there are sentimental adults, who seem never happier than when the tears are ready to start. it may be suspected from the number of descriptions of early deaths in literature for the young that some at least must take pleasure in this kind of description. a child's strong feeling of attachment to animals is apt at a certain age to give to stories about the hardships of horses and the like something of an overpowering sadness. the sense of the comic in children is a curious subject to which justice has not yet been done. the tendency to judge them by our grown-up standards shows itself in an expectation that their laughter will follow the directions of our own. their fun is, i suspect, of a very elemental character. they are apt to be tickled by the spectacle of some upsetting of the proprieties, some confusion of the established distinctions of rank. dress, as we have seen, has an enormous symbolic value for their mind, and any incongruity here is apt to be specially laughter-provoking. one child between three and four was convulsed at the sight of his baby bib fastened round the neck of his bearded sire. there is, too, a considerable element of rowdiness in children's sense of the comical, as may be seen by the enduring popularity of the spectacle of punch's successful misdemeanours and bravings of the legal authority. the sense of humour which is finely percipient and half reflective is far from their level, as indeed it is from that of the average adult. hence the fact familiar to parents that stories which treat of child-life with the finer kind of humour may utterly fail to tickle a young reader. _first ventures in creation._ it is sometimes said that children are artists in embryo, that in their play and throughout their activity they manifest the germs of the art-impulse. it seems worth while to examine the saying. there is no doubt that in much of the first spontaneous activity there is a trace of æsthetic feeling and the impulse to produce something pretty. yet the feeling is in most children weak and vacillating, and is wont to be mixed with other and less noble ones. one of the lower and mixed forms of artistic activity, in the case of the child and of the race alike, is personal adornment. the impulse to study appearances appears to reach far down in animal life. two impulses seem to be at work here: to frighten or overawe others, as seen in the raising of feathers and hair so as to increase size, and to attract, which possibly underlies the habit of trimming feathers and fur among birds and quadrupeds. the same two impulses are said to lie at the root of the elaborate art of personal adornment developed by savages. in the case of children brought up in the ways of civilisation where personal cleanliness and adornment are peremptorily enforced in the face of many a tearful protest, it seems at first vain to look for the play of instinctive tendencies. yet i think if we observe closely we shall detect traces of a spontaneous impulse towards self-adornment. children, like uncultured adults, are wont to prize a bit of finery in the shape of a string of beads or of daisies for the neck, a feather for the hat, and so forth. imitation of the ways of their elders doubtless plays a part here, but it is aided by an instinct for adornment. little girls perhaps represent the attractive function of adornment: they like to be thought pretty. little boys when decking themselves out with tall hat and monstrously big clothes seem to be trying to put on an alarming aspect. since children are left so little free to deck themselves, it is of course hard to study the development of æsthetic taste in this domain of their activity. yet their quaint attempts to improve their appearance throw an interesting side-light on their æsthetic preferences. while in general they have in their hearts almost as much love of glitter, of gaudy colour, as uncivilised adults, they betray striking differences of feeling; some developing, for example, a bent towards modest neatness and refinement, and this, it may be, in direct opposition to the whole trend of home influence. another domain of childish activity which is akin to art is the manifestation of grace. a good deal of the charm of movement, of gesture, of intonation, in a young child may be unconscious, and as much a result of happy physical conditions as the pretty gambols of a kitten. yet one may commonly detect in graceful children the rudiment of an æsthetic feeling for what is nice, and also of the instinct to please. there is, indeed, in these first actions, such as the kissing of the hand to other children in the street, something of the simple grace and dignity of the more amiable of those uncivilised races which we dishonour by calling them savages. this feeling for pleasing effect in bodily carriage and movement, in the use of speech and gesture, is no doubt far from being a pure art-activity. traces of self-consciousness, of vanity, are often discernible in it; yet at least it attests the existence of a certain appreciation of what is beautiful, and of something akin to the creative impulse of the artist. a true art-impulse is characterised by a pure love of doing something which, either in itself as an action or in the material result which it produces, is beautiful. into this there enters, at the moment at least, no consciousness of self. now there is one field of children's activity which, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, is marked by just this absorption of thought in action for its own sake, and that is play. to say that play is art-like has almost become a commonplace. like art it is inspired and sustained by a pure love of producing. like art, too, on its representative side, play aims at producing an imitation or semblance of something. the semblance may be plastic, residing in the material product of the action, as in making things such as castles out of cardboard or sand; or it may be dramatic and reside in the action itself, as in much of the childish play already described. the imitative impulse prompting to the production of the semblance of something appears very early in child-life. a good deal of the imitation which occurs in the second half year is the taking on, under the lead of another's example, of actions which are more or less useful. this applies, for example, to such actions as waving the hand in sign of farewell, and of course to vocal imitation of others' verbal sounds. at an early date we find, further, a perfectly useless kind of imitation which is more akin to that of art. a quite young child will, for example, _pretend_ to do something, as to take an empty cup and carry out the semblance of drinking. the imitation of the sounds and movements of animals, which comes early too, may be said to be imitative in the more artistic sense, inasmuch as it has no aim beyond that of mimetic representation. later on, towards the third year, this simple type of imitative action grows more complex, so that a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. a child, for example, occupies himself with pretending to be an organ-grinder's monkey, going duly and in order through the action of jumping down from his seat, and taking off his cap by way of begging for the stranger's contribution. here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. this play-like performance, again, gradually divides itself into a more serious kind of action, analogous to serious drama, and into a lighter representation of some funny scene, which has in it something akin to comedy. meanwhile, another form of imitation is developing, the fashioning of lasting semblances. early illustrations of this impulse are the making of a river out of the gravy in the plate, the pinching of pellets of bread till they take on something of resemblance to known forms. one child, three years old, would occupy himself at table by turning his plate into a clock, in which the knife and fork were made to act as hands, and cherry stones put round the plate to represent the hours. such table-pastimes are known to all observers of children, and have been prettily touched on by r. l. stevenson in his essay on "child's play". these formative touches are, at first, rough enough, the transformation being effected, as we have seen, much more by the alchemy of the child's imagination than by the cunning of his hands. yet, crude as it is, and showing at first almost as much of chance as of design, it is a manifestation of the same plastic impulse which possesses the sculptor and the painter. the more elaborate constructive play which follows--the building with cards and wooden bricks, the moulding with sand and clay, and the first spontaneous drawings--is the direct descendant of this rude formative activity. the kindergarten is, indeed, a kind of smaller art-world where the dramatic and plastic impulses of the child are led into orderly action. in this imitative play we see from the first the artistic tendency to set forth what is characteristic in the things represented. thus in the unstudied acting of the nursery, the nurse, the coachman, and the rest, are presented by a few broad touches; characteristic actions, such as pouring out the medicine, jerking the reins, being aided by one or two rough accessories, as the medicine bottle or the whip. in this way child's play, like primitive art, shows a certain unconscious selectiveness. it presents what is constant and typical, imperfectly enough no doubt. the same selection of broadly distinctive traits is seen where some individual person, _e.g._, a particular newsboy or gardener, seems to be represented. a similar tendency to a somewhat bald typicalness of outline is seen in the first rude attempts of children to construct, whether with materials like cards or bricks, or with pencil, the semblance of a house, a garden and so forth. as observation widens and grows finer, the first bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like. a larger number of distinctive traits is taken up into the play. thus the coachman's talk becomes richer, fuller of reminiscences of the stable, etc., and so colour is given to the dramatic picture. similarly with the products of the plastic impulse. with this more realistic tendency to exhibit the characteristic with something like concrete fulness we see the germ at least of the idealistic impulse to transcend the level of common things, to give prominence to what has value, to touch the representation with the magic light of beauty. even a small child playing with its coloured petals or its shells will show a rudiment of this artistic feeling for beautiful arrangement. no doubt there are striking variations among children in this respect. play discloses in many ways differences of feeling and ideas: among others, in the unequal degrees of tastefulness of the play scene. yet the presence of an impulse, however rudimentary, to produce what has beauty and charm for the eye is a fact which we must recognise. along with this feeling for the sensuous effect of beauty we can discern the beginnings of fancy and invention whereby the idea represented is made more prominent and potent. this tendency, like the others, shows itself in a crude form at first, as in the earlier and coarser art of the race. in children's play we can see much of the uncultured man's love of strong effect. the pathos of the death of the pet animal or of the child has to be made obvious and strongly effective by a mass of painful detail; the comic incident must be made broadly farcical by heavy touches of caricature; the excitement of perilous adventure has to be intensified by multiplying the menacing forces and the thrilling situations. yet crude as are these early attempts at strengthening the feebleness of the actual they are remotely akin to the idealising efforts of true art. nevertheless, children's play, though akin to it, is not completely art. as pointed out above, the action in a child's play is not intended as a dramatic spectacle. the small player is too self-centred, if i may so say. the scenes he acts out, the semblances he shapes with his hands, are not produced, as art is produced, for its own worth's sake, but rather as providing a new world into which he may retire and enjoy privacy. a child in playing a part does not "play" in order to delight others. "i remember," writes r. l. stevenson, "as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork _even when there was none to see_." the same is true when children play at being indians or what not: they are not "acting" in the theatrical sense of the word. while, then, one can say that there is something akin to art in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, we must add that, for the development of the true impulse of the artist, a good deal more is needed. the play-impulse will only get specialised into the art-impulse when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and by a sense of beauty and the æsthetic worth of things; when, further, it begins to concentrate itself on one mode of imitative activity, as, for example, dramatic representation or drawing. i have chosen here to deal with the more spontaneous manifestations of an art-like impulse in children, rather than to describe their first attempts at art as we understand it. here--in the case of all but those endowed with a genuine artistic talent--we are apt to find too much of the adult's educative influence, too little of what is spontaneous and original. at the same time, some of this art-activity, more particularly the first weaving of stories, is characteristic enough to deserve a special study. i have made a small collection of early stories, and some of them are interesting enough to be quoted. here is a quaint example of the first halting manner of a child of two and a half years as invention tries to get away from the sway of models: "three little bears went out a walk, and they found a stick, and they poked the fire with it, and they poked the fire and then went a walk". soon, however, the young fancy is apt to wax bolder, and then we get some fine invention. a boy of five years and a quarter living at the sea-side improvised as follows. he related "that one day he went out on the sea in a lifeboat, when suddenly he saw a big whale, and so he jumped down to catch it; but it was so big that he climbed on it and rode on it in the water, and all the little fishes laughed so". with this comic story may be compared a more serious not to say tragic one from the lips of a girl one month younger, which is characterised by an almost equal fondness for the wonderful. "a man wanted to go to heaven before he died. he said, 'i don't want to die, and i must see heaven!' jesus christ said he must be patient like other people. he then got _so_ angry, and screamed out as loud as he could, and kicked up his heels as high as he could, and they (the heels) went into the sky, and the sky fell down and broke the earth all to pieces. he wanted jesus christ to mend the earth again, but he wouldn't, so this was a good punishment for him." this last, which is the work of one now grown into womanhood and no longer a story-teller, is interesting in many ways. the wish to go to heaven without dying is, as i know, a motive derived from child-life. the manifestations of displeasure could, one supposes, only have been written by one who was herself experienced in the ways of childish "tantrums". the naïve conception of sky and earth, and lastly the moral issue of the story, are no less instructive. these samples may serve to show that in the stories of by no means highly gifted children we come face to face with interesting traits of the young mind, and can study some of the characteristic tendencies of early and primitive art. of the later efforts to imitate older art, as verse writing, the same cannot, i think, be said. children's verses, so far as i have come across them, are poor and stilted, showing all the signs of the cramping effect of models and rules to which the young mind cannot easily accommodate itself, and wanting in true childish inspiration. no doubt, even in these choking circumstances, childish feeling may now and again peep out. the first prose compositions, letters before all if they may be counted art, give more scope for the expression of this feeling and the characteristic movements of young thought, and might well repay careful study. there is one other department of children's art which clearly does deserve to be studied with some care--their drawing. and this for the very good reason that it is not wholly a product of our influence and education, but shows itself in its essential characteristics as a spontaneous self-taught activity which takes its rise, indeed, in the play-impulse. to this i propose to devote my next and last chapter. chapter xii. first pencillings. a child's first attempts at drawing are not art proper, but a kind of play. as he sits at the table and covers a sheet of paper with line-scribble he is wholly self-centred, "amusing himself," as we say, and caring nothing about the production of a thing of æsthetic value. yet even in this infantile scribbling we see a tendency towards art-production in the effort of the small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of something to another's eyes, as when he bids his mother look at the "man," "gee-gee," or what else he cheerfully imagines his scribble to delineate. such early essays to represent objects by lines, though commonly crude enough and apt to shock the æsthetic sense of the matured artist by their unsightliness, are closely related to art, and deserve to be studied as a kind of preliminary stage of pictorial design. in studying what is really a large subject it will be well for us to narrow the range of our inquiry by keeping to delineations of the human figure and of animals, especially the horse. these are the favourite topics of the child's pencil, and examples of them are easily obtainable. as far as possible i have sought spontaneous drawings of quite young children, _viz._, from between two and three to about six. in a strict sense, of course, no child's drawing is absolutely spontaneous and independent of external stimulus and guidance. the first attempts to manage the pencil are commonly aided by the mother or other instructor, who, moreover, is wont to present a model drawing, and, what is even more important at this early stage, to supply model-movements of the arm and hand. in most cases, too, there is some slight amount of critical inspection, as when she asks, "where is papa's nose?" "where is doggie's tail?" in one case, however, i have succeeded in getting drawings of a little girl who was carefully left to develop her own ideas. even in the instances where adult supervision is apt to interfere, we can, i think, by patient investigation distinguish traits which are genuinely childish. a child's drawing begins with a free aimless swinging of the pencil to and fro, which movements produce a chaos of slightly curved lines. these movements are purely spontaneous, or, if imitative, are so only in the sense that they follow roughly the directions of another's pencil. in this first line-scribble there is no serious intention to trace a particular form. what a child seems to do in this rough imitation of another's movements is to make a tangle of lines, more or less straight, varied by loops, which in a true spirit of play he makes believe to be the semblance of "mamma," "pussy," or what not, as in fig. (_a_) and (_b_). possibly in not a few cases the interpretation first suggests itself after the scribble, the child's fancy discerning some faint resemblance in his formless tangle to a human head, a cat's tail, and so forth. [illustration: fig. (_a_).[ ]] [illustration: fig. (_b_).[ ]] [ ] fig. (_a_) is a drawing of a man by a child of twenty months, reproduced from prof. m. baldwin's _mental development_, p. ; fig. (_b_) is a drawing of a man by a child of two years three months, reproduced from an article on children's drawings by mr. h. t. lukens in _the pedagogical seminary_, vol. iv. ( ). this habit of scribble may persist after a child attempts a linear description of the parts of an object. thus a little girl in her fourth year when asked to draw a cat produced the two accompanying figures (fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). [illustration: fig. (_a_).] [illustration: fig. (_b_).] here it is evident we have a phase of childish drawing which is closely analogous to the symbolism of language. the form of representation is chosen arbitrarily and not because of its likeness to what is represented. this element of symbolic indication will be found to run through the whole of childish drawing. as soon as the hand acquires a certain readiness in drawing lines and closed lines or "outlines," and begins to connect the forms produced with the necessary movements, drawing takes on a more intentional character. the child now aims at constructing a particular linear representation, that of a man, a horse, or what not. these first attempts to copy in line the forms of familiar objects are among the most curious products of the child's mind. they follow standards and methods of their own; they are apt to get hardened into a fixed conventional manner which may reappear even in mature years. they exhibit with a certain range of individual difference a curious uniformity, and they have their parallels in what we know of the first crude designs of the untutored savage. _the human face divine._ it has been wittily observed by an italian writer, signor corrado ricci, that children in their drawings reverse the order of natural creation by beginning instead of ending with man. it may be added that they start with the most dignified part of this crown of creation, _viz._, the human head. a child's attempt to represent a man appears commonly to begin by drawing a sort of circle for the front view of the head. a dot or two, sometimes only one, sometimes as many as five, are thrown in as a rough way of indicating the features. i speak here of the commoner form. there are however variations of this. some children draw a squarish outline for head, but these are children _at school_. in one case, that of a little girl aged three years four months, the outline was not completed, the facial features being set between two vertical columns of scribble, which do duty for legs (fig. ). sometimes the features are simply laid down without any enclosing contour; and this arrangement appears not only in children's drawings but in those of savage adults. [illustration: fig. .[ ]] [ ] reproduced from the article already referred to, by mr. lukens. the representation of the head sometimes appears alone, but a strong tendency to bring in the support of the legs soon shows itself. this takes at first the crude device of a couple of vertical lines attached to the head (see fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] coming now to the mode of representing the face, we find at an early stage the commencement of an attempt to differentiate the features. in drawings of children of three we frequently see that while the eyes are indicated by dots the nose is given as a short vertical line. similarly when the mouth appears it does so commonly as a horizontal line. we notice that more attention is given to the problem of placing a feature than to that of making a likeness of it. indeed this first drawing is largely a pointing out or noting down of features without any serious effort to draw them. the representation is a kind of local description rather than a true drawing. curious differences appear in respect of the completeness of this linear noting or enumerating of features. the nose more particularly appears and disappears in a capricious way in the drawings of the same child. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] odd differences, reflecting differences of intelligence, show themselves in the management of this diagram of the human face. one child, a jamaica girl of seven, went so far as to draw the face with only one eye (fig. ). again though, as i have said, a child will try to give a correct local arrangement, for example putting the nose between and below the eyes, he does not always reach accuracy of localisation. many children habitually set the two eyes far up towards the crown of the head, as in fig. . when the features begin to be represented by something more like a form we find in most cases a curious want of proportion. the eye, for instance, is often greatly exaggerated; so is the mouth, which is sometimes drawn right across the face, as in fig. . as the drawing progresses we note a kind of evolution of the features. in the case of the eye, for example, we may often trace a gradual development, the dot being displaced by a small circle or ovoid, this last supplemented by a second outer circle, or by an arch or pair of arches. in like manner the mouth, from being a bare symbolic indication, gradually takes on form and likeness. there appears a rude attempt to picture the mouth cavity and to show those interesting accessories, the teeth. the nose, too, tries to look more like a nose by help of various ingenious expedients, as by drawing an angle, a triangle, and a kind of scissors arrangement in which the holders stand for the nostrils (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_); compare above, fig. ). ears, hair, and the other adjuncts come in later as after-thoughts. much the same characteristics are observable in the treatment of these features. _the vile body._ at first, as i have observed, the trunk is commonly omitted. the indifference of the young mind to this is seen in the obstinate persistence of the first scheme of a head set on two legs, even when two arms are added and attached to the sides of the head. indeed a child will sometimes complete the drawing by adding feet and hands before he troubles to bring in the trunk (see fig. ). from this common way of spiking the head on two forked or upright legs there occurs an important deviation. the contour of the head may be left incomplete, and the upper part of the curve be run on into the leg-lines, as in the accompanying example by a jamaica girl (fig. ). [illustration: fig. (_a_).] [illustration: fig. (_b_).] [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. (_a_).[ ]] [illustration: fig. (_b_).] [illustration: fig. (_c_).] [illustration: fig. (_d_).] [ ] fig. (_a_) is a reproduction of a drawing of a girl of four and a half years, from mr. lukens' article. the drawing of the trunk may commence in different ways. sometimes a lame attempt is made to indicate it by leaving space between the head and the legs, that is, by not attaching the legs to the head. another contrivance is where the space between the legs is shown to be the trunk by shading or by drawing a vertical row of buttons. in other cases the contour of the head appears to be elongated so as to serve for head and trunk. a better expedient is drawing a line across the two vertical lines and so marking off the trunk (see fig. (_a_) to (_d_)). in drawings made by brazilian indians we see another device, _viz._, a pinching in of the vertical lines (see fig. (_e_)). after the trunk has been recognised by the young draughtsman he is apt to show his want of respect for it by making it absurdly small in proportion to the head, as in fig. . it assumes a variety of shapes, triangular, rectangular, and circular or ovoid, this last being, however, the most common. [illustration: fig. (_e_).] [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] at this stage there is no attempt to show the joining on of the head to the trunk by means of the neck. when this is added it is apt to take the exaggerated look of caricature, as in fig. . a curious feature which not infrequently appears in this first drawing of the trunk is the doubling of the corporeal ovoid, one being laid upon the other. as this appears when a neck is added it looks like a clumsy attempt to indicate the pinch at the waist--presumably the female waist (see fig. ). the introduction of the arms is very uncertain. to the child, as also to the savage, the arms seem far less important than the legs, and are omitted in rather more than one case out of two. after all, the divine portion, the head, can be supported very well without their help. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] the arms, being the thin lanky members, are, like the legs, commonly represented by lines. the same thing is noticeable in the drawings of savages. they appear, in the front view of the figure, as more or less stretched out, so as to show beyond the trunk; and their appearance always gives a certain liveliness to the form, an air of joyous expression, as if to say, "here i am!" (see fig. , the drawing of a boy of six). in respect of their structure a process of gradual evolution may be observed. the primal rigidity of the straight line yields later on to the freedom of an organ. thus an attempt is made to represent by means of a curve the look of the bent arm, as in the accompanying drawing by a boy of five (fig. ). in other cases the angle of the elbow is indicated. this last improvement seems to come comparatively late in children's drawings, which here, as in other respects, lag behind the crudest outline sketches of savages. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] the mode of insertion or attachment of the arms is noteworthy. where they are added to the trunkless figure they sometimes appear as emerging from the sides of the head, as in a drawing by a boy of two and a half years (see fig. ), but more commonly, from the point of junction of the head and legs (see above, fig. (_b_)). after the trunk is added they appear to sprout from almost any point of this. it may be added that their length is often grotesquely exaggerated. the arm in these childish drawings early develops the interesting adjunct of a hand. like other features this is apt at first to be amusingly forced into prominence by its size. the treatment of the hand illustrates in a curious way the process of artistic evolution, the movement from a bare symbolic indication towards a more life-like representation. thus one of the earliest and rudest devices i have met with, though in a few cases only, is that of drawing strokes across the line of the arm to serve as signs of fingers (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .--humpty dumpty on the wall.] [illustration: fig. .] it is an important advance when the branching lines are set in a bunch-like arrangement at the extremity of the arm-line. from this point the transition is easy to the common "toasting-fork" arrangement, in which the finger-lines are set on a hand-line (see above, figs. and (_b_)). from this stage, again, there is but a step to the first crude attempt to give contour first to the hand alone, as in fig. , and then to hand and fingers, as in figs. and . various odd arrangements appear in the first attempts to outline arm and hand. in one, which occurs not infrequently, a thickened arm is made to expand into something like a fan-shaped hand, as in fig. . [illustration: fig. .] there is a corresponding development of the foot from a bare indication by a line to something like a form in which toes are commonly represented by much the same devices as fingers. in the better drawings, however, one notes signs of a tendency to hide the toes, and to indicate the notch between the heel and the sole of the boot. _side views of things._ so far, i have dealt only with the child's treatment of the front view of the human face and figure. new and highly curious characteristics begin to appear when he attempts to give the profile aspect. a child, it must be remembered, prefers the full face arrangement, as he wants to indicate all its important features, especially the two eyes. "if," writes a kindergarten teacher, "one makes drawings in profile for quite little children, they will not be satisfied unless they see two eyes; and sometimes they turn a picture round to see the other side." this reminds one of a story told, i believe, by catlin of the indian chief, who was so angry at a representation of himself in profile that the unfortunate artist went in fear of his life. at the same time children do not rest content with this front view. after a time they try, without any aid from the teacher, to grope their way to a new mode of representing the face and figure, which, though it would be an error to call it a profile drawing, has some of its characteristics. the first clear indication of an attempt to give the profile aspect of the face is the introduction of the side view of the nose into the contour. the little observer is soon impressed by the characteristic, well-marked outline of the nose in profile; and the motive to bring this in is strengthened by his inability, already illustrated, to make much of the front view of the organ. the addition is made either by adding a spindle-like projection after completing the circle of the head, as in figs. and (_a_), or more adroitly by modifying the circular outline. the other features, the eyes and the mouth, are given in full view as before. it may well seem a puzzle to us how a normal child of five or six can complacently set down this self-contradictory scheme of a human head. how little any idea of consistency troubles the young draughtsman is seen in the fact that he will, not infrequently, reach the absurdity of doubling the nose, retaining the vertical line which did duty in the first front view along with the added nasal projection (see fig. ). this appearance of the nose as a lateral projection is apt to be followed by a similar side view of the ear (as seen in fig. ), of the beard and other adjuncts which the little artist wants to display in the most advantageous way. some children stop at this mixed scheme, continuing to give the two eyes and the mouth, as in the front view, and frequently also the front view of the body. this becomes a fixed conventional way of representing a man. with children of finer perception the transition to a correct profile view may be carried much further. yet a lingering fondness for the two eyes is apt to appear at a later stage in this development of a consistent treatment of the profile; a feeling that the second eye is not in its right place prompting the artist in some cases to place it _outside the face_ (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). [illustration: fig. .--a miner.] [illustration: fig. (_a_).] [illustration: fig. (_b_).] other confusions are apt to appear in these early attempts at drawing a man in profile. the trunk, for example, is very frequently represented in front view with a row of buttons running down the middle, though the head and feet seem clearly shown in side view. the arms, too, not uncommonly are spread out from the two sides of the trunk just as in the front view. it would take too long to offer a complete explanation of these characteristics of children's drawings. i must content myself here with touching on one or two of the main causes at work. first of all, then, it seems pretty evident that most children when they begin to draw are not thinking of setting down a likeness of what they see when they look at an object. in the first simple stage we have little more than a jotting down of a number of linear notes, a kind of rude and fragmentary description in lines rather than in words. here a child aims at bringing into his scheme what seems to him to have most interest and importance, such as the features of the face, the two legs, and so forth. in the later and more ambitious attempt to draw a man in profile the old impulse to set down what seems important continues to show itself. although the little draughtsman has decided to give to the nose, to the ear, and possibly to the manly beard and the equally manly pipe, the advantage of a side view, he goes on exhibiting those sovereign members, the two round eyes, and the mouth with its flash of serried teeth, in their full front-view glory. it is enough for him to know that the lord of creation has these members, and he does not trouble about so small a matter as our capability of seeing them all at the same moment. in like manner a child will sometimes, on first clothing the human form, exhibit arms and legs through their covering (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). all this shows that even at this later and decidedly "knowing" stage of his craft he is not much nearer the point of view of our pictorial art than he was in the earlier stage of bald symbolism. much the same kind of thing shows itself in a child's manner of treating the forms of animals, which his pencil is wont to attack soon after that of man. here the desire to exhibit what is characteristic and worthy naturally leads at the outset to a representation of the body in profile. a horse is rather a poor affair looked at from the front. a child must show his four legs, as well as his neck and his tail. but though the profile seems to be the aspect selected, the little penciller by no means confines himself to a strict record of this. the four legs have to be shown not half hidden by overlappings but standing quite clear one of another. the head, too, must be turned towards the spectator, or at least given in a mixed scheme--half front view, half side view (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). [illustration: fig. (_a_) (from general pitt rivers' collection of drawings).] [illustration: fig. (_b_) (reproduced from a drawing published by mr. h. t. lukens).] a like tendency to get behind the momentary appearance of an object and to present to view what the child _knows_ to be there is seen in early drawings of men on horseback, in boats, railway carriages, houses, and so forth. here the interest in the human form sets at defiance the limitations of perspective, and shows us the rider's second leg through the horse's body, the rower's body through the boat, and so forth. the widespread appearance of these tendencies among children of different european countries, of half-civilised peoples, like the jamaica blacks, as well as among adult savages, shows how deeply rooted in the natural mind is this quaint notion of drawing. [illustration: fig. (_a_).--a horse.] [illustration: fig. (_b_).--a quadruped.] at the same time there are, as i have allowed, important differences in children's drawings. a few have the eye and the artistic impulse needed for picturing, roughly at least, the _look_ of an object. i have lately looked through the drawings of a little girl in a cultured home where every precaution was taken to shut out the influences of example and educational guidance. when at the age of four years eight months she first drew the profile of the human face she quite correctly put in only one eye, and added a shaded projection for nose (see fig. ). in like manner she was from the first careful to show only one leg of the rider, one rein over the horse's neck, and so forth; and would sometimes, with a child's sweet thoughtfulness, explain to her mother why she proceeded in this way. yet even in the case of this child one could observe now and again a rudiment of the tendency to bring in what is hidden. thus in one drawing she shows the rider's near leg through the trouser; in another she introduces the front view of a horse's nostrils (if not also of the ears) in what is otherwise a drawing of the profile (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. (_a_).] [illustration: fig. (_b_).] yet while children's drawings are thus so far away from those reproductions of the look of a thing which we call pictures, they are after all a kind of rude art. even the amusing errors which they contain, though a shock to our notions of pictorial semblance, have at least this point of analogy to art, that they aim at selecting and presenting what is characteristic and valuable. in many of the rude drawings with which we have here been occupied we may detect faint traces of individual originality, especially in the endeavour to give life and expression to the form. to this it is right to add that some drawings of young children from two to six which i have seen are striking proofs of the early development now and again of the artist's feeling for what is characteristic in line, and for the economic suggestiveness of a bare stroke (see fig. (_a_) and (_b_)). when once a child's eye is focussed for the prettiness of things the dawn of æsthetic perception is pretty sure to bring with it a more serious effort to reproduce their look. among children, as among adults, it is love which makes the artist. [illustration: fig. (_a_) (drawn by a boy aged two years one month).] [illustration: fig. (_b_) (drawn by a girl of five and a half years).] [illustration] [illustration: dr. montessori giving a lesson in touching geometrical insets] the montessori method scientific pedagogy as applied to child education in "the children's houses" with additions and revisions by the author by maria montessori translated from the italian by anne e. george with an introduction by professor henry w. holmes of harvard university _with thirty-two illustrations from photographs_ new york frederick a. stokes company mcmxii _copyright, , by_ frederick a. stokes company _all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the scandinavian_ _i place at the beginning of this volume, now appearing in the united states, her fatherland, the dear name of_ _alice hallgarten_ _of new york, who by her marriage to baron leopold franchetti became by choice our compatriot._ _ever a firm believer in the principles underlying the case dei bambini, she, with her husband, forwarded the publication of this book in italy, and, throughout the last years of her short life, greatly desired the english translation which should introduce to the land of her birth the work so near her heart._ _to her memory i dedicate this book, whose pages, like an ever-living flower, perpetuate the recollection of her beneficence._ acknowledgments grateful acknowledgment is made to mrs. guy baring, of london, for the loan of her manuscript translation of "pedagogia scientifica"; to mrs. john r. fisher (dorothy canfield) for translating a large part of the new work written by dr. montessori for the american edition; and to the house of childhood, inc., new york, for use of the illustrations of the didactic apparatus. dr. montessori's patent rights in the apparatus are controlled, for the united states and canada, by the house of childhood, inc. the publishers. preface to the american edition in february, , professor henry w. holmes, of the division of education of harvard university, did me the honour to suggest that an english translation be made of my italian volume, "_il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all' educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini_." this suggestion represented one of the greatest events in the history of my educational work. to-day, that to which i then looked forward as an unusual privilege has become an accomplished fact. the italian edition of "_il metodo della pedagogia scientifica_" had no preface, because the book itself i consider nothing more than the preface to a more comprehensive work, the aim and extent of which it only indicates. for the educational method for children of from three to six years set forth here is but the earnest of a work that, developing the same principle and method, shall cover in a like manner the successive stages of education. moreover, the method which obtains in the _case dei bambini_ offers, it seems to me, an experimental field for the study of man, and promises, perhaps, the development of a science that shall disclose other secrets of nature. in the period that has elapsed between the publication of the italian and american editions, i have had, with my pupils, the opportunity to simplify and render more exact certain practical details of the method, and to gather additional observations concerning discipline. the results attest the vitality of the method and the necessity for an extended scientific collaboration in the near future, and are embodied in two new chapters written for the american edition. i know that my method has been widely spoken of in america, thanks to mr. s. s. mcclure, who has presented it through the pages of his well-known magazine. indeed, many americans have already come to rome for the purpose of observing personally the practical application of the method in my little schools. if, encouraged by this movement, i may express a hope for the future, it is that my work in rome shall become the centre of an efficient and helpful collaboration. to the harvard professors who have made my work known in america and to _mcclure's magazine_, a mere acknowledgment of what i owe them is a barren response; but it is my hope that the method itself, in its effect upon the children of america, may prove an adequate expression of my gratitude. maria montessori. rome, . contents page acknowledgments v the american edition vii introduction xvii chapter i a critical consideration of the new pedagogy in its relation to modern science influence of modern science upon pedagogy italy's part in the development of scientific pedagogy difference between scientific technique and the scientific spirit direction of the preparation should be toward the spirit rather than toward the mechanism the master to study man in the awakening of his intellectual life attitude of the teacher in the light of another example the school must permit the free natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born stationary desks and chairs proof that the principle of slavery still informs the school conquest of liberty, what the school needs what may happen to the spirit prizes and punishments, the bench of the soul all human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force chapter ii history of methods necessity of establishing the method peculiar to scientific pedagogy origin of educational system in use in the "children's houses" practical application of the methods of itard and séguin in the orthophrenic school at rome origin of the methods for the education of deficients application of the methods in germany and france séguin's first didactic material was spiritual methods for deficients applied to the education of normal children social and pedagogic importance of the "children's houses" chapter iii inaugural address delivered on the occasion of the opening of one of the "children's houses" the quarter of san lorenzo before and since the establishment of the "children's houses" evil of subletting the most cruel form of usury the problem of life more profound than that of the intellectual elevation of the poor isolation of the masses of the poor, unknown to past centuries work of the roman association of good building and the moral importance of their reforms the "children's house" earned by the parents through their care of the building pedagogical organization of the "children's house" the "children's house" the first step toward the socialisation of the house the communised house in its relation to the home and to the spiritual evolution of women rules and regulations of the "children's houses" chapter iv pedagogical methods used in the "children's houses" child psychology can be established only through the method of external observation anthropological consideration anthropological notes environment and schoolroom furnishings chapter v discipline discipline through liberty independence abolition of prizes and external forms of punishment biological concept of liberty in pedagogy chapter vi how the lesson should be given characteristics of the individual lessons method of observation the fundamental guide difference between the scientific and unscientific methods illustrated first task of educators to stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop chapter vii exercises of practical life suggested schedule for the "children's houses" the child must be prepared for the forms of social life and his attention attracted to these forms cleanliness, order, poise, conversation chapter viii refection--the child's diet diet must be adapted to the child's physical nature foods and their preparation drinks distribution of meals chapter ix muscular education--gymnastics generally accepted idea of gymnastics is inadequate the special gymnastics necessary for little children other pieces of gymnastic apparatus free gymnastics educational gymnastics respiratory gymnastics, and labial, dental, and lingual gymnastics chapter x nature in education--agricultural labour: culture of plants and animals the savage of the aveyron itard's educative drama repented in the education of little children gardening and horticulture basis of a method for education of children the child initiated into observation of the phenomena of life and into foresight by way of auto-education children are initiated into the virtue of patience and into confident expectation, and are inspired with a feeling for nature the child follows the natural way of development of the human race chapter xi manual labour--the potter's art, and building difference between manual labour and manual gymnastics the school of educative art archæological, historical, and artistic importance of the vase manufacture of diminutive bricks and construction of diminutive walls and houses chapter xii education of the senses aim of education to develop the energies difference in the reaction between deficient and normal children in the presentation of didactic material made up of graded stimuli education of the senses has as its aim the refinement of the differential perception of stimuli by means of repeated exercises three periods of séguin chapter xiii education of the senses and illustrations of the didactic material: general sensibility: the tactile, thermic, baric and stereognostic senses education of the tactile, thermic and baric senses education of the stereognostic sense education of the senses of taste and smell education of the sense of vision exercises with the three series of cards education of the chromatic sense exercise for the discrimination of sounds musical education tests for acuteness of hearing a lesson in silence chapter xiv general notes on the education of the senses aim in education biological and social education of the senses makes men observers and prepares them directly for practical life chapter xv intellectual education sense exercises a species of auto-education importance of an exact nomenclature, and how to teach it spontaneous progress of the child the greatest triumph of scientific pedagogy games of the blind application of the visual sense to the observation of environment method of using didactic material: dimensions, form, design free plastic work geometric analysis of figures exercises in the chromatic sense chapter xvi method for the teaching of reading and writing spontaneous development of graphic language: séguin and itard necessity of a special education that shall fit man for objective observation and direct logical thought results of objective observation and logical thought not necessary to begin teaching writing with vertical strokes spontaneous drawing of normal children use of froebel mats in teaching children sewing children should be taught how before they are made to execute a task two diverse forms of movement made in writing experiments with normal children origin of alphabets in present use chapter xvii description of the method and didactic material used exercise tending to develop the muscular mechanism necessary in holding and using the instrument in writing didactic material for writing exercise tending to establish the visual-muscular image of the alphabetical signs, and to establish the muscular memory of the movements necessary to writing exercises for the composition of words reading, the interpretation of an idea from written signs games for the reading of words games for the reading of phrases point education has reached in the "children's houses" chapter xviii language of childhood physiological importance of graphic language two periods in the development of language analysis of speech necessary defects of language due to education chapter xix teaching of numeration: introduction to arithmetic numbers as represented by graphic signs exercises for the memory of numbers addition and subtraction from one to twenty: multiplication and division lessons on decimals: arithmetical calculations beyond ten chapter xx sequence of exercises sequence and grades in the presentation of material and in the exercises first grade second grade third grade fourth grade fifth grade chapter xxi general review of discipline discipline better than in ordinary schools first dawning of discipline comes through work orderly action is the true rest for muscles intended by nature for action the exercise that develops life consists in the repetition, not in the mere grasp of the idea aim of repetition that the child shall refine his senses through the exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment obedience is naturally sacrifice obedience develops will-power and the capacity to perform the act it becomes necessary to obey chapter xxii conclusions and impressions the teacher has become the director of spontaneous work in the "children's houses" the problems of religious education should be solved by positive pedagogy spiritual influence of the "children's houses" illustrations dr. montessori giving a lesson in touching geometrical insets _frontispiece_ facing page dr. montessori in the garden of the school at via giusti children learning to button and lace. ribbon and button frames children playing a game with tablets of coloured silk girl touching a letter and boy telling objects by weight pupils arranging colours in chromatic order didactic apparatus to teach differentiation of objects blocks by which children are taught thickness, length and size geometric insets to teach form geometric insets and cabinet cards used in teaching form and contour frames illustrating lacing; shoe buttoning; buttoning of other garments; hooks and eyes tablets with silk, for educating the chromatic sense didactic apparatus for training the sense of touch, and for teaching writing children touching letters and making words with cardboard script montessori children eating dinner school at tarrytown, n. y. introduction an audience already thoroughly interested awaits this translation of a remarkable book. for years no educational document has been so eagerly expected by so large a public, and not many have better merited general anticipation. that this widespread interest exists is due to the enthusiastic and ingenious articles in _mcclure's magazine_ for may and december, , and january, ; but before the first of these articles appeared a number of english and american teachers had given careful study to dr. montessori's work, and had found it novel and important. the astonishing welcome accorded to the first popular expositions of the montessori system may mean much or little for its future in england and america; it is rather the earlier approval of a few trained teachers and professional students that commends it to the educational workers who must ultimately decide upon its value, interpret its technicalities to the country at large, and adapt it to english and american conditions. to them as well as to the general public this brief critical introduction is addressed. it is wholly within the bounds of safe judgment to call dr. montessori's work remarkable, novel, and important. it is remarkable, if for no other reason, because it represents the constructive effort of a woman. we have no other example of an educational system--original at least in its systematic wholeness and in its practical application--worked out and inaugurated by the feminine mind and hand. it is remarkable, also, because it springs from a combination of womanly sympathy and intuition, broad social outlook, scientific training, intensive and long-continued study of educational problems, and, to crown all, varied and unusual experience as a teacher and educational leader. no other woman who has dealt with dr. montessori's problem--the education of young children--has brought to it personal resources so richly diverse as hers. these resources, furthermore, she has devoted to her work with an enthusiasm, an absolute abandon, like that of pestalozzi and froebel, and she presents her convictions with an apostolic ardour which commands attention. a system which embodies such a capital of human effort could not be unimportant. then, too, certain aspects of the system are in themselves striking and significant: it adapts to the education of normal children methods and apparatus originally used for deficients; it is based on a radical conception of liberty for the pupil; it entails a highly formal training of separate sensory, motor, and mental capacities; and it leads to rapid, easy, and substantial mastery of the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. all this will be apparent to the most casual reader of this book. none of these things, to be sure, is absolutely new in the educational world. all have been proposed in theory; some have been put more or less completely into practice. it is not unjust, for instance, to point out that much of the material used by dr. walter s. fernald, superintendent of the massachusetts institution for the feeble-minded at waverley, is almost identical with the montessori material, and that dr. fernald has long maintained that it could be used to good effect in the education of normal children. (it may interest american readers to know that séguin, on whose work that of dr. montessori is based, was once head of the school at waverley.) so, too, formal training in various psycho-physical processes has been much urged of late by a good many workers in experimental pedagogy, especially by meumann. but before montessori, no one had produced a system in which the elements named above were combined. she conceived it, elaborated it in practice, and established it in schools. it is indeed the final result, as dr. montessori proudly asserts, of years of experimental effort both on her own part and on the part of her great predecessors; but the crystallisation of these experiments in a programme of education for normal children is due to dr. montessori alone. the incidental features which she has frankly taken over from other modern educators she has chosen because they fit into the fundamental form of her own scheme, and she has unified them all in her general conception of method. the system is not original in the sense in which froebel's system was original; but as a system it is the novel product of a single woman's creative genius. as such, no student of elementary education ought to ignore it. the system doubtless fails to solve all the problems in the education of young children; possibly some of the solutions it proposes are partly or completely mistaken; some are probably unavailable in english and american schools; but a system of education does not have to attain perfection in order to merit study, investigation, and experimental use. dr. montessori is too large-minded to claim infallibility, and too thoroughly scientific in her attitude to object to careful scrutiny of her scheme and the thorough testing of its results. she expressly states that it is not yet complete. practically, it is highly probable that the system ultimately adopted in our schools will combine elements of the montessori programme with elements of the kindergarten programme, both "liberal" and "conservative." in its actual procedure school work must always be thus eclectic. an all-or-nothing policy for a single system inevitably courts defeat; for the public is not interested in systems as systems, and refuses in the end to believe that any one system contains every good thing. nor can we doubt that this attitude is essentially sound. if we continue, despite the pragmatists, to believe in absolute principles, we may yet remain skeptical about the logic of their reduction to practice--at least in any fixed programme of education. we are not yet justified, at any rate, in adopting one programme to the exclusion of every other simply because it is based on the most intelligible or the most inspiring philosophy. the pragmatic test must also be applied, and rigorously. we must try out several combinations, watch and record the results, compare them, and proceed cautiously to new experiments. this procedure is desirable for every stage and grade of education, but especially for the earliest stage, because there it has been least attempted and is most difficult. certainly a system so radical, so clearly defined, and so well developed as that of dr. montessori offers for the thoroughgoing comparative study of methods in early education new material of exceptional importance. without accepting every detail of the system, without even accepting unqualifiedly its fundamental principles, one may welcome it, thus, as of great and immediate value. if early education is worth studying at all, the educator who devotes his attention to it will find it necessary to define the differences in principle between the montessori programme and other programmes, and to carry out careful tests of the results obtainable from the various systems and their feasible combinations. one such combination this introduction will suggest, and it will discuss also the possible uses of the montessori apparatus in the home; but it may be helpful first to present the outstanding characteristics of the montessori system as compared with the modern kindergarten in its two main forms. certain similarities in principle are soon apparent. dr. montessori's views of childhood are in some respects identical with those of froebel, although in general decidedly more radical. both defend the child's right to be active, to explore his environment and develop his own inner resources through every form of investigation and creative effort. education is to guide activity, not repress it. environment cannot create human power, but only give it scope and material, direct it, or at most but call it forth; and the teacher's task is first to nourish and assist, to watch, encourage, guide, induce, rather than to interfere, prescribe, or restrict. to most american teachers and to all kindergartners this principle has long been familiar; they will but welcome now a new and eloquent statement of it from a modern viewpoint. in the practical interpretation of the principle, however, there is decided divergence between the montessori school and the kindergarten. the montessori "directress" does not teach children in groups, with the practical requirement, no matter how well "mediated," that each member of the group shall join in the exercise. the montessori pupil does about as he pleases, so long as he does not do any harm. montessori and froebel stand in agreement also on the need for training of the senses; but montessori's scheme for this training is at once more elaborate and more direct than froebel's. she has devised out of séguin's apparatus a comprehensive and scientific scheme for formal gymnastic of the senses; froebel originated a series of objects designed for a much broader and more creative use by the children, but by no means so closely adapted to the training of sensory discrimination. the montessori material carries out the fundamental principle of pestalozzi, which he tried in vain to embody in a successful system of his own: it "develops piece by piece the pupil's mental capacities" by training separately, through repeated exercises, his several senses and his ability to distinguish, compare, and handle typical objects. in the kindergarten system, and particularly in the "liberal" modifications of it, sense training is incidental to constructive and imaginative activity in which the children are pursuing larger ends than the mere arrangement of forms or colours. even in the most formal work in kindergarten design the children are "making a picture," and are encouraged to tell what it looks like--"a star," "a kite," "a flower." as to physical education, the two systems agree in much the same way: both affirm the need for free bodily activity, for rhythmic exercises, and for the development of muscular control; but whereas the kindergarten seeks much of all this through group games with an imaginative or social content, the montessori scheme places the emphasis on special exercises designed to give formal training in separate physical functions. in another general aspect, however, the agreement between the two systems, strong in principle, leaves the montessori system less formal rather than more formal in practice. the principle in this case consists of the affirmation of the child's need for social training. in the conservative kindergarten this training is sought once more, largely in group games. these are usually imaginative, and sometimes decidedly symbolic: that is, the children play at being farmers, millers, shoemakers, mothers and fathers, birds, animals, knights, or soldiers; they sing songs, go through certain semi-dramatic activities--such as "opening the pigeon house," "mowing the grass," "showing the good child to the knights," and the like; and each takes his part in the representation of some typical social situation. the social training involved in these games is formal only in the sense that the children are not engaged, as the montessori children often are, in a real social enterprise, such as that of serving dinner, cleaning the room, caring for animals, building a toy house, or making a garden. it cannot be too strongly emphasized that even the most conservative kindergarten does not, on principle, exclude "real" enterprises of this latter sort; but in a three-hour session it does rather little with them. liberal kindergartens do more, particularly in europe, where the session is often longer. nor does the montessori system wholly exclude imaginative group games. but dr. montessori, despite an evidently profound interest not only in social training, but also in æsthetic, idealistic, and even religious development, speaks of "games and foolish stories" in a casual and derogatory way, which shows that she is as yet unfamiliar with the american kindergartner's remarkable skill and power in the use of these resources. (of course the american kindergartner does not use "foolish" stories; but stories she does use, and to good effect.) the montessori programme involves much direct social experience, both in the general life of the school and in the manual work done by the pupils; the kindergarten extends the range of the child's social consciousness through the imagination. the groupings of the montessori children are largely free and unregulated; the groupings of kindergarten children are more often formal and prescribed. on one point the montessori system agrees with the conservative kindergarten, but not with the liberal: it prepares directly for the mastery of the school arts. there can be no doubt that dr. montessori has devised a peculiarly successful scheme for teaching children to write, an effective method for the introduction of reading, and good material for early number work. both types of kindergarten increase, to be sure, the child's general capacity for expression: kindergarten activity adds to his stock of ideas, awakens and guides his imagination, increases his vocabulary, and trains him in the effective use of it. children in a good kindergarten hear stories and tell them, recount their own experiences, sing songs, and recite verses, all in a company of friendly but fairly critical listeners, which does even more to stimulate and guide expression than does the circle at home. but even the conservative kindergarten does not teach children to write and to read. it does teach them a good deal about number; and it may fairly be questioned whether it does not do more fundamental work in this field than the montessori system itself. the froebelian gifts offer exceptional opportunity for concrete illustration of the conceptions of _whole_ and _part_, through the creation of wholes from parts, and the breaking up of wholes into parts. this aspect of number is at least as important as the series aspect, which children get in counting and for which the montessori "long stair" provides such good material. the froebelian material may be used very readily for counting, however, and the montessori material gives some slight opportunity for uniting and dividing. so far as preparation for arithmetic is concerned, a combination of the two bodies of material is both feasible and desirable. the liberal kindergarten, meanwhile, abandoning the use of the gifts and occupations for mathematical purposes, makes no attempt to prepare its pupils directly for the school arts. compared with the kindergarten, then, the montessori system presents these main points of interest: it carries out far more radically the principle of unrestricted liberty; its materials are intended for the direct and formal training of the senses; it includes apparatus designed to aid in the purely physical development of the children; its social training is carried out mainly by means of present and actual social activities; and it affords direct preparation for the school arts. the kindergarten, on the other hand, involves a certain amount of group-teaching, in which children are held--not necessarily by the enforcement of authority, yet by authority, confessedly, when other means fail--to definite activities; its materials are intended primarily for creative use by the children and offer opportunity for mathematical analysis and the teaching of design; and its procedure is rich in resources for the imagination. one thing should be made entirely clear and emphatic: in none of these characteristics are the two systems rigidly antagonistic. much kindergarten activity is free, and the principle of prescription is not wholly given over by the "houses of childhood"--witness their _rules and regulations_; the kindergarten involves direct sense training, and the montessori system admits some of the froebel blocks for building and design; there are many purely muscular activities in the kindergarten, and some of the usual kindergarten games are used by montessori; the kindergarten conducts some gardening, care of animals, construction-work, and domestic business, and the montessori system admits a few imaginative social plays; both systems (but not the liberal form of the kindergarten) work directly toward the school arts. since the difference between the two programmes is one of arrangement, emphasis, and degree, there is no fundamental reason why a combination especially adapted to english and american schools cannot be worked out. the broad contrast between a montessori school and a kindergarten appears on actual observation to be this: whereas the montessori children spend almost all their time handling _things_, largely according to their individual inclination and under individual guidance, kindergarten children are generally engaged in group work and games with an imaginative background and appeal. a possible principle of adjustment between the two systems might be stated thus: work with objects designed for formal sensory, motor, and intellectual training should be done individually or in purely voluntary groups; imaginative and social activity should be carried on in regulated groups. this principle is suggested only as a possible basis for education during the kindergarten age; for as children grow older they must be taught in classes, and they naturally learn how to carry out imaginative and social enterprises in free groups, and the former often alone. nor should it be supposed that the principle is suggested as a rule to which there can be no exception. it is suggested simply as a general working hypothesis, the value of which must be tested in experience. although it has long been observed by kindergartners themselves that group-work with the froebelian materials, especially such work as involves geometrical analysis and formal design, soon tires the children, it has been held that the kindergartner could safeguard her pupils from loss of interest or real fatigue by watching carefully for the first signs of weariness and stopping the work promptly on their appearance. for small groups of the older children, who can do work of this sort with ease and enjoyment, no doubt the inevitable restraint of group teaching is a negligible factor, the fatiguing effects of which any good kindergartner can forestall. but for younger children a régime of complete freedom would seem to promise better results--at least so far as work with objects is concerned. in games, on the other hand, group teaching means very little restraint and the whole process is less tiring any way. to differentiate in method between these two kinds of activity may be the best way to keep them both in an effective educational programme. to speak of an effective educational programme leads at once, however, to an important aspect of the montessori system, quite aside from its relation to the kindergarten, with which this introduction must now deal. this is the social aspect, which finds its explanation in dr. montessori's own story of her first school. in any discussion of the availability of the montessori system in english and american schools--particularly in american public schools and english "board" schools--two general conditions under which dr. montessori did her early work in rome should be borne in mind. she had her pupils almost all day long, practically controlling their lives in their waking hours; and her pupils came for the most part from families of the laboring class. we cannot expect to achieve the results dr. montessori has achieved if we have our pupils under our guidance only two or three hours in the morning, nor can we expect exactly similar results from children whose heredity and experience make them at once more sensitive, more active, and less amenable to suggestion than hers. if we are to make practical application of the montessori scheme we must not neglect to consider the modifications of it which differing social conditions may render necessary. the conditions under which dr. montessori started her original school in rome do not, indeed, lack counterpart in large cities the world over. when one reads her eloquent "inaugural address" it is impossible not to wish that a "school within the home" might stand as a centre of hopeful child life in the midst of every close-built city block. better, of course, if there were no hive-like city tenements at all, and if every family could give to its own children on its own premises enough of "happy play in grassy places." better if every mother and father were in certain ways an expert in child psychology and hygiene. but while so many unfortunate thousands still live in the hateful cliff-dwellings of our modern cities, we must welcome dr. montessori's large conception of the social function of her "houses of childhood" as a new gospel for the schools which serve the city poor. no matter what didactic apparatus such schools may use, they should learn of dr. montessori the need of longer hours, complete care of the children, closer co-operation with the home, and larger aims. in such schools, too, it is probable that the two fundamental features of dr. montessori's work--her principle of liberty and her scheme for sense training--will find their completest and most fruitful application. it is just these fundamental features, however, which will be most bitterly attacked whenever the social status of the original _casa dei bambini_ is forgotten. anthropometric measurements, baths, training in personal self-care, the serving of meals, gardening, and the care of animals we may hear sweepingly recommended for all schools, even for those with a three-hour session and a socially favored class of pupils; but the need for individual liberty and for the training of the senses will be denied even in the work of schools where the conditions correspond closely to those at san lorenzo. of course no practical educator will actually propose bathtubs for all schools, and no doubt there will be plenty of wise conservatism about transferring to a given school any function now well discharged by the homes that support it. the problems raised by the proposal to apply in all schools the montessori conception of discipline and the montessori sense-training are really more difficult to solve. is individual liberty a universal educational principle, or a principle which must be modified in the case of a school with no such social status as that of the original "house of childhood"? do all children need sense training, or only those of unfavorable inheritance and home environment? no serious discussion of the montessori system can avoid these questions. what is said in answer to them here is written in the hope that subsequent discussion may be somewhat influenced to keep in view the really deciding factor in each case--the actual situation in the school. there is occasion enough in these questions, to be sure, for philosophical and scientific argument. the first question involves an ethical issue, the second a psychological issue, and both may be followed through to purely metaphysical issues. dr. montessori believes in liberty for the pupil because she thinks of life "as a superb goddess, ever advancing to new conquests." submission, loyalty, self-sacrifice seem to her, apparently, only incidental necessities of life, not essential elements of its eternal form. there is obvious opportunity here for profound difference of philosophic theory and belief. she seems to hold, too, that sense perception forms the sole basis for the mental and hence for the moral life; that "sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which the child may build up a clear and strong mentality," including, apparently, his moral ideals; and that the cultivation of purpose and of the imaginative and creative capacities of children is far less important than the development of the power to learn from the environment by means of the senses. these views seem to agree rather closely with those of herbart and to some extent with those of locke. certainly they offer material for both psychological and ethical debate. possibly, however, dr. montessori would not accept the views here ascribed to her on the evidence of this book; and in any case these are matters for the philosopher and the psychologist. a pedagogical issue is never wholly an issue of high principle. can it reasonably be maintained, then, that an actual situation like that in the first "house of childhood" at rome is the only situation in which the montessori principle of liberty can justifiably find full application? evidently the roman school is a true republic of childhood, in which nothing need take precedence of the child's claim to pursue an active purpose of his own. social restraints are here reduced to a minimum; the children must, to be sure, subordinate individual caprice to the demands of the common good, they are not allowed to quarrel or to interfere with each other, and they have duties to perform at stated times; but each child is a citizen in a community governed wholly in the interests of the equally privileged members thereof, his liberty is rarely interfered with, he is free to carry out his own purposes, and he has as much influence in the affairs of the commonwealth as the average member of an adult democracy. this situation is never duplicated in the home, for a child is not only a member of the family, whose interests are to be considered with the rest, but literally a subordinate member, whose interests must often be frankly set aside for those of an adult member or for those of the household itself. children must come to dinner at dinner time, even if continued digging in the sand would be more to their liking or better for their general development of muscle, mind, or will. it is possible, of course, to refine on the theory of the child's membership in the family community and of the right of elders to command, but practically it remains true that the common conditions of family life prohibit any such freedom as is exercised in a montessori school. in the same way a school of large enrollment that elects to cover in a given time so much work that individual initiative cannot be trusted to compass it, is forced to teach certain things at nine o'clock and others at ten, and to teach in groups; and the individual whose life is thus cabined and confined must get what he can. for a given school the obvious question is, considering the work to be done in the time allowed, can we give up the safeguards of a fixed programme and group teaching? the deeper question lies here: is the work to be done in itself so important that it is worth while to have the children go through it under compulsion or on interest induced by the teacher? or to put it another way: may not the work be so much less important than the child's freedom that we had better trust to native curiosity and cleverly devised materials anyway and run the risk of his losing part of the work, or even the whole of it? for schools beyond the primary grade there will be no doubt as to the answer to this question. there are many ways in which school work may safely be kept from being the deadening and depressing process it so often is, but the giving up of all fixed and limited schedules and the prescriptions of class teaching is not one of them. even if complete liberty of individual action were possible in schools of higher grade, it is not certain that it would be desirable: for we must learn to take up many of our purposes in life under social imperative. but with young children the question becomes more difficult. what work do we wish to make sure that each child does? if our schools can keep but half a day, is there time enough for every child to cover this work without group teaching at stated times? is the prescription and restraint involved in such group teaching really enough to do the children any harm or to make our teaching less effective? can we not give up prescription altogether for parts of the work and minimise it for others? the general question of individual liberty is thus reduced to a series of practical problems of adjustment. it is no longer a question of total liberty or no liberty at all, but a question of the practical mediation of these extremes. when we consider, furthermore, that the teacher's skill and the attractiveness of her personality, the alluring power of the didactic apparatus and the ease with which it enables children to learn, to say nothing of a cheerful and pleasant room and the absence of set desks and seats, may all work together to prevent scheduled teaching in groups from becoming in the least an occasion for restraint, it is plain that in any given school there may be ample justification for abating the rigour of dr. montessori's principle of freedom. every school must work out its own solution of the problem in the face of its particular conditions. the adoption of sense-training would seem to be much less a matter for variable decision. some children may need less than others, but for all children between the ages of three and five the montessori material will prove fascinating as well as profitable. a good deal of modern educational theory has been based on the belief that children are interested only in what has social value, social content, or "real use"; yet a day with any normal child will give ample evidence of the delight that children take in purely formal exercises. the sheer fascination of tucking cards under the edge of a rug will keep a baby happy until any ordinary supply of cards is exhausted; and the wholly sensory appeal of throwing stones into the water gives satisfaction enough to absorb for a long time the attention of older children--to say nothing of grown-ups. the montessori apparatus satisfies sense hunger when it is keen for new material, and it has besides a puzzle-interest which children eagerly respond to. dr. montessori subordinates the value of the concrete mental content her material supplies to its value in rendering the senses more acute; yet it is by no means certain that this content--purely formal as it is--does not also give the material much of its importance. indeed, the refinement of sensory discrimination may not in itself be particularly valuable. what professor g. m. whipple says on this point in his _manual of menial and physical tests_ (p. ) has much weight: the use of sensory tests in correlation work is particularly interesting. in general, some writers are convinced that keen discrimination is a prerequisite to keen intelligence, while others are equally convinced that intelligence is essentially conditioned by "higher" processes, and only remotely by sensory capacity--barring, of course, such diminution of capacity as to interfere seriously with the experiencing of sensations, as in partial deafness or partial loss of vision. while it is scarcely the place here to discuss the evolutionary significance of discriminative sensitivity, it may be pointed out that the normal capacity is many times in excess of the actual demands of life, and that it is consequently difficult to understand why nature has been so prolific and generous; to understand, in other words, what is the sanction for the seemingly hypertrophied discriminative capacity of the human sense organs. the usual "teleological explanations" of our sensory life fail to account for this discrepancy. again, the very fact of the existence of this surplus capacity seems to negative at the outset the notion that sensory capacity can be a conditioning factor in intelligence--with the qualification already noted. it is quite possible that the real pedagogical value of the montessori apparatus is due to the fact that it keeps children happily engaged in the exercise of their senses and their fingers when they crave such exercise most and to the further fact that it teaches them without the least strain a good deal about forms and materials. these values are not likely to be much affected by differing school conditions. in the use of the material for sense-training, english and american teachers may find profit in two general warnings. first, it should not be supposed that sense training alone will accomplish all that dr. montessori accomplishes through the whole range of her school activities. to fill up most of a morning with sense-training is to give it (except perhaps in the case of the youngest pupils) undue importance. it is not even certain that the general use of the senses will be much affected by it, to say nothing of the loss of opportunity for larger physical and social activity. second, the isolation of the senses should be used with some care. to shut off sight is to take one step toward sleep, and the requirement that a child concentrate his attention, in this situation, on the sense perceptions he gets by other means than vision must not be maintained too long. no small strain is involved in mental action without the usual means of information and control. the proposal, mentioned above, of a feasible combination of the montessori system and the kindergarten may now be set forth. if it is put very briefly and without defense or prophecy, it is because it is made without dogmatism, simply in the hope that it will prove suggestive to some open-minded teacher who is willing to try out any scheme that promises well for her pupils. the conditions supposed are those of the ordinary american public-school kindergarten, with a two-year programme beginning with children three and a half or four years old, a kindergarten with not too many pupils, with a competent kindergartner and assistant kindergartner, and with some help from training-school students. the first proposal is for the use of the montessori material during the better part of the first year instead of the regular froebelian material. to the use of the montessori devices--including the gymnastic apparatus--some of the time now devoted to pictures and stories should also be applied. it is not suggested that no froebelian material should be used, but that the two systems be woven into each other, with a gradual transition from the free, individual use of the montessori objects to the same sort of use of the large sizes of the froebel gifts, especially the second, third, and fourth. when the children seem to be ready for it, a certain amount of more formal work with the gifts should be begun. in the second year the froebelian gift work should predominate, without absolute exclusion of the montessori exercises. in the latter part of the second year the montessori exercises preparatory to writing should be introduced. throughout the second year the full time for stories and picture work should be given to them, and in both years the morning circle and the games should be carried on as usual. the luncheon period should of course remain the same. one part of dr. montessori's programme the kindergartner and her assistant should use every effort to incorporate in their work--the valuable training in self-help and independent action afforded in the care of the materials and equipment by the children themselves. this need not be confined to the montessori apparatus. children who have been trained to take out, use, and put away the montessori objects until they are ready for the far richer variety of material in the froebelian system, should be able to care for it also. of course if there are children who can return in the afternoon, it would be very interesting to attempt the gardening, which both froebel and montessori recommend, and the montessori vase-work. for the possible scorn of those to whom all compromise is distasteful, the author of this introduction seeks but one compensation--that any kindergartner who may happen to adopt his suggestion will let him study the results. as to the use of the montessori system in the home, one or two remarks must suffice. in the first place, parents should not expect that the mere presence of the material in the nursery will be enough to work an educational miracle. a montessori directress does no common "teaching," but she is called upon for very skillful and very tiring effort. she must watch, assist, inspire, suggest, guide, explain, correct, inhibit. she is supposed, in addition, to contribute by her work to the upbuilding of a new science of pedagogy; but her educational efforts--and education is not an investigative and experimental effort, but a practical and constructive one--are enough to exhaust all her time, strength, and ingenuity. it will do no harm--except perhaps to the material itself--to have the montessori material at hand in the home, but it must be used under proper guidance if it is to be educationally effective. and besides, it must not be forgotten that the material is by no means the most important feature of the montessori programme. the best use of the montessori system in the home will come through the reading of this book. if parents shall learn from dr. montessori something of the value of child life, of its need for activity, of its characteristic modes of expression, and of its possibilities, and shall apply this knowledge wisely, the work of the great italian educator will be successful enough. this introduction cannot close without some discussion, however limited, of the important problems suggested by the montessori method of teaching children to write and to read. we have in american schools admirable methods for the teaching of reading; by the aldine method, for instance, children of fair ability read without difficulty ten or more readers in the first school year, and advance rapidly toward independent power. our instruction in writing, however, has never been particularly noteworthy. we have been trying recently to teach children to write a flowing hand by the "arm movement," without much formation of separate letters by the fingers, and our results seem to prove that the effort with children before the age of ten is not worth while. sensible school officers are content to let children in the first four grades write largely by drawing the letters, and there has been, a fairly general conviction that writing is not in any case especially important before the age of eight or nine. in view of dr. montessori's success in teaching children of four and five to write with ease and skill, must we not revise our estimate of the value of writing and our procedure in teaching it? what changes may we profitably introduce in our teaching of reading? here again our theory and our practice have suffered from the headstrong advocacy of general principles. because by clumsy methods children used to be kept at the task of learning the school arts to the undoubted detriment of their minds and bodies, certain writers have advocated the total exclusion of reading and writing from the early grades. many parents refuse to send their children to school until they are eight, preferring to let them "run wild." this attitude is well justified by school conditions in some places; but where the schools are good, it ignores not only the obvious advantages of school life quite aside from instruction in written language, but also the almost complete absence of strain afforded by modern methods. now that the montessori system adds a new and promising method to our resources, it is the more unreasonable: for as a fact normal children are eager to read and write at six, and have plenty of use for these accomplishments. this does not mean, however, that reading and writing are so important for young children that they should be unduly emphasised. if we can teach them without strain, let us do so, and the more effectively the better; but let us remember, as dr. montessori does, that reading and writing should form but a subordinate part of the experience of a child and should minister in general to his other needs. with the best of methods the value of reading and writing before six is questionable. our conscious life is bookish enough as it is, and it would seem on general grounds a safer policy to defer written language until the age of normal interest in it, and even then not to devote to it more time than an easy and gradual mastery demands. of the technical advantages of the montessori scheme for writing there can be little doubt. the child gains ready control over his pencil through exercises which have their own simple but absorbing interest; and if he does not learn to write with an "arm movement," we may be quite content with his ability to draw a legible and handsome script. then he learns the letters--their forms, their names, and how to make them--through exercises which have the very important technical characteristic of involving a _thorough sensory analysis_ of the material to be mastered. meumann has taught us of late the great value in all memory work of complete impression through prolonged and intensive analytical study. in the teaching of spelling, for instance, it is comparatively useless to devise schemes for remembering unless the original impressions are made strong and elaborate; and it is only by careful, varied, and detailed sense impression that such material as the alphabet can be thus impressed. so effective is the montessori scheme for impressing the letters--especially because of its novel use of the sense of touch--that the children learn how to make the whole alphabet before the abstract and formal character of the material leads to any diminution of interest or enthusiasm. their initial curiosity over the characters they see their elders use is enough to carry them through. in italian the next step is easy. the letters once learned, it is a simple matter to combine them into words, for italian spelling is so nearly phonetic that it presents very little difficulty to any one who knows how to pronounce. it is at just this point that the teaching of english reading by the montessori method will find its greatest obstacle. indeed, it is the unphonetic character of english spelling that has largely influenced us to give up the alphabet method of teaching children to read. other reasons, to be sure, have also induced us to teach by the word and the sentence method; but this one has been and will continue to be the deciding factor. we have found it more effective to teach children whole words, sentences, or rhymes by sight, adding to sense impressions the interest aroused by a wide range of associations, and then analysing the words thus acquired into their phonetic elements to give the children independent power in the acquisition of new words. our marked success with this method makes it by no means certain that it is "in the characteristic process of natural development" for children to build up written words from their elements--sounds and syllables. it would seem, on the contrary, as james concluded, that the mind works quite as naturally in the opposite direction--grasping wholes first, especially such as have a practical interest, and then working down to their formal elements. in the teaching of spelling, of course, the wholes (words) are already known at sight--that is, the pupil recognises them easily in reading--and the process aims at impressing upon the child's mind the exact order of their constituent elements. it is because reading and spelling are in english such completely separate processes that we can teach a child to read admirably without making him a "good speller" and are forced to bring him to the latter glorious state by new endeavours. we gain by this separation both in reading and in spelling, as experience and comparative tests--popular superstition to the contrary notwithstanding--have conclusively proved. the mastery of the alphabet by the montessori method will be of great assistance in teaching our children to write, but of only incidental assistance in teaching them to read and to spell. once more, then, this introduction attempts to suggest a compromise. in the school arts the programme used to such good effect in the italian schools and the programme which has been so well worked out in english and american schools may be profitably combined. we can learn much about writing and reading from dr. montessori--especially from the freedom her children have in the process of learning to write and in the use of their newly acquired power, as well as from her device for teaching them to read connected prose. we can use her materials for sense training and lead as she does to easy mastery of the alphabetic symbols. our own schemes for teaching reading we can retain, and doubtless the phonetic analysis they involve we shall find easier and more effective because of our adoption of the montessori scheme for teaching the letters. the exact adjustment of the two methods is of course a task for teachers in practice and for educational leaders. to all educators this book should prove most interesting. not many of them will expect that the montessori method will regenerate humanity. not many will wish to see it--or any method--produce a generation of prodigies such as those who have been heralded recently in america. not many will approve the very early acquisition by children of the arts of reading and writing. but all who are fair-minded will admit the genius that shines from the pages which follow, and the remarkable suggestiveness of dr. montessori's labors. it is the task of the professional student of education to-day to submit all systems to careful comparative study, and since dr. montessori's inventive power has sought its tests in practical experience rather than in comparative investigation, this duller task remains to be done. but however he may scrutinise the results of her work, the educator who reads of it here will honour in the dottoressa maria montessori the enthusiasm, the patience, and the constructive insight of the scientist and the friend of humanity. henry w. holmes. harvard university, february , . the montessori method chapter i a critical consideration of the new pedagogy in its relation to modern science it is not my intention to present a treatise on scientific pedagogy. the modest design of these incomplete notes is to give the results of an experiment that apparently opens the way for putting into practice those new principles of science which in these last years are tending to revolutionise the work of education. much has been said in the past decade concerning the tendency of pedagogy, following in the footsteps of medicine, to pass beyond the purely speculative stage and base its conclusions on the positive results of experimentation. physiological or experimental psychology which, from weber and fechner to wundt, has become organised into a new science, seems destined to furnish to the new pedagogy that fundamental preparation which the old-time metaphysical psychology furnished to philosophical pedagogy. morphological anthropology applied to the physical study of children, is also a strong element in the growth of the new pedagogy. but in spite of all these tendencies, scientific pedagogy has never yet been definitely constructed nor defined. it is something vague of which we speak, but which does not, in reality, exist. we might say that it has been, up to the present time, the mere intuition or suggestion of a science which, by the aid of the positive and experimental sciences that have renewed the thought of the nineteenth century, must emerge from the mist and clouds that have surrounded it. for man, who has formed a new world through scientific progress, must himself be prepared and developed through a new pedagogy. but i will not attempt to speak of this more fully here. several years ago, a well-known physician established in italy a _school of scientific pedagogy_, the object of which was to prepare teachers to follow the new movement which had begun to be felt in the pedagogical world. this school had, for two or three years, a great success, so great, indeed, that teachers from all over italy flocked to it, and it was endowed by the city of milan with a splendid equipment of scientific material. indeed, its beginnings were most propitious, and liberal help was afforded it in the hope that it might be possible to establish, through the experiments carried on there, "the science of forming man." the enthusiasm which welcomed this school was, in a large measure, due to the warm support given it by the distinguished anthropologist, giuseppe sergi, who for more than thirty years had earnestly laboured to spread among the teachers of italy the principles of a new civilisation based upon education. "to-day in the social world," said sergi, "an imperative need makes itself felt--the reconstruction of educational methods; and he who fights for this cause, fights for human regeneration." in his pedagogical writings collected in a volume under the title of "_educazione ed istruzione_" (pensieri),[ ] he gives a résumé of the lectures in which he encouraged this new movement, and says that he believes the way to this desired regeneration lies in a methodical study of the one to be educated, carried on under the guidance of pedagogical anthropology and of experimental psychology. [ ] trevisini, . "for several years i have done battle for an idea concerning the instruction and education of man, which appeared the more just and useful the more deeply i thought upon it. my idea was that in order to establish natural, rational methods, it was essential that we make numerous, exact, and rational observations of man as an individual, principally during infancy, which is the age at which the foundations of education and culture must be laid. "to measure the head, the height, etc., does not indeed mean that we are establishing a system of pedagogy, but it indicates the road which we may follow to arrive at such a system, since if we are to educate an individual, we must have a definite and direct knowledge of him." the authority of sergi was enough to convince many that, given such a knowledge of the individual, the art of educating him would develop naturally. this, as often happens, led to a confusion of ideas among his followers, arising now from a too literal interpretation, now from an exaggeration, of the master's ideas. the chief trouble lay in confusing the experimental study of the pupil, with his education. and since the one was the road leading to the other, which should have grown from it naturally and rationally, they straightway gave the name of scientific pedagogy to what was in truth pedagogical anthropology. these new converts carried as their banner, the "biographical chart," believing that once this ensign was firmly planted upon the battle-field of the school, the victory would be won. the so-called school of scientific pedagogy, therefore, instructed the teachers in the taking of anthropometric measurements, in the use of esthesiometric instruments, in the gathering of psychological data--and the army of new scientific teachers was formed. it should be said that in this movement italy showed herself to be abreast of the times. in france, in england, and especially in america, experiments have been made in the elementary schools, based upon a study of anthropology and psychological pedagogy, in the hope of finding in anthropometry and psychometry, the regeneration of the school. in these attempts it has rarely been the _teachers_ who have carried on the research; the experiments have been, in most cases, in the hands of physicians who have taken more interest in their especial science than in education. they have usually sought to get from their experiments some contribution to psychology, or anthropology, rather than to attempt to organise their work and their results toward the formation of the long-sought scientific pedagogy. to sum up the situation briefly, anthropology and psychology have never devoted themselves to the question of educating children in the schools, nor have the scientifically trained teachers ever measured up to the standards of genuine scientists. the truth is that the practical progress of the school demands a genuine _fusion_ of these modern tendencies, in practice and thought; such a fusion as shall bring scientists directly into the important field of the school and at the same time raise teachers from the inferior intellectual level to which they are limited to-day. toward this eminently practical ideal the university school of pedagogy, founded in italy by credaro, is definitely working. it is the intention of this school to raise pedagogy from the inferior position it has occupied as a secondary branch of philosophy, to the dignity of a definite science, which shall, as does medicine, cover a broad and varied field of comparative study. and among the branches affiliated with it will most certainly be found pedagogical hygiene, pedagogical anthropology, and experimental psychology. truly, italy, the country of lombroso, of de-giovanni, and of sergi, may claim the honour of being pre-eminent in the organisation of such a movement. in fact, these three scientists may be called the founders of the new tendency in anthropology: the first leading the way in criminal anthropology, the second in medical anthropology, and the third in pedagogical anthropology. for the good fortune of science, all three of them have been the recognised leaders of their special lines of thought, and have been so prominent in the scientific world that they have not only made courageous and valuable disciples, but have also prepared the minds of the masses to receive the scientific regeneration which they have encouraged. (for reference, see my treatise "pedagogical anthropology.")[ ] [ ] montessori: "l'antropologia pedagogica." vallardi. surely all this is something of which our country may be justly proud. to-day, however, those things which occupy us in the field of education are the interests of humanity at large, and of civilisation, and before such great forces we can recognise only one country--the entire world. and in a cause of such great importance, all those who have given any contribution, even though it be only an attempt not crowned with success, are worthy of the respect of humanity throughout the civilised world. so, in italy, the schools of scientific pedagogy and the anthropological laboratories, which have sprung up in the various cities through the efforts of elementary teachers and scholarly inspectors, and which have been abandoned almost before they became definitely organised, have nevertheless a great value by reason of the faith which inspired them, and because of the doors they have opened to thinking people. it is needless to say that such attempts were premature and sprang from too slight a comprehension of new sciences still in the process of development. every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements. when st. francis of assisi saw his lord in a vision, and received from the divine lips the command--"francis, rebuild my church!"--he believed that the master spoke of the little church within which he knelt at that moment. and he immediately set about the task, carrying upon his shoulders the stones with which he meant to rebuild the fallen walls. it was not until later that he became aware of the fact that his mission was to renew the catholic church through the spirit of poverty. but the st. francis who so ingenuously carried the stones, and the great reformer who so miraculously led the people to a triumph of the spirit, are one and the same person in different stages of development. so we, who work toward one great end, are members of one and the same body; and those who come after us will reach the goal only because there were those who believed and laboured before them. and, like st. francis, we have believed that by carrying the hard and barren stones of the experimental laboratory to the old and crumbling walls of the school, we might rebuild it. we have looked upon the aids offered by the materialistic and mechanical sciences with the same hopefulness with which st. francis looked upon the squares of granite, which he must carry upon his shoulders. thus we have been drawn into a false and narrow way, from which we must free ourselves, if we are to establish true and living methods for the training of future generations. to prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an easy matter. when we shall have instructed them in anthropometry and psychometry in the most minute manner possible, we shall have only created machines, whose usefulness will be most doubtful. indeed, if it is after this fashion that we are to initiate our teachers into experiment, we shall remain forever in the field of theory. the teachers of the old school, prepared according to the principles of metaphysical philosophy, understood the ideas of certain men regarded as authorities, and moved the muscles of speech in talking of them, and the muscles of the eye in reading their theories. our scientific teachers, instead, are familiar with certain instruments and know how to move the muscles of the hand and arm in order to use these instruments; besides this, they have an intellectual preparation which consists of a series of typical tests, which they have, in a barren and mechanical way, learned how to apply. the difference is not substantial, for profound differences cannot exist in exterior technique alone, but lie rather within the inner man. not with all our initiation into scientific experiment have we prepared _new masters_, for, after all, we have left them standing without the door of real experimental science; we have not admitted them to the noblest and most profound phase of such study,--to that experience which makes real scientists. and, indeed, what is a scientist? not, certainly, he who knows how to manipulate all the instruments in the physical laboratory, or who in the laboratory of the chemist handles the various reactives with deftness and security, or who in biology knows how to make ready the specimens for the microscope. indeed, it is often the case that an assistant has a greater dexterity in experimental technique than the master scientist himself. we give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself. the scientist is not the clever manipulator of instruments, he is the worshipper of nature and he bears the external symbols of his passion as does the follower of some religious order. to this body of real scientists belong those who, forgetting, like the trappists of the middle ages, the world about them, live only in the laboratory, careless often in matters of food and dress because they no longer think of themselves; those who, through years of unwearied use of the microscope, become blind; those who in their scientific ardour inoculate themselves with tuberculosis germs; those who handle the excrement of cholera patients in their eagerness to learn the vehicle through which the diseases are transmitted; and those who, knowing that a certain chemical preparation may be an explosive, still persist in testing their theories at the risk of their lives. this is the spirit of the men of science, to whom nature freely reveals her secrets, crowning their labours with the glory of discovery. there exists, then, the "spirit" of the scientist, a thing far above his mere "mechanical skill," and the scientist is at the height of his achievement when the spirit has triumphed over the mechanism. when he has reached this point, science will receive from him not only new revelations of nature, but philosophic syntheses of pure thought. it is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the _spirit_ than the mechanical skill of the scientist; that is, the _direction_ of the _preparation_ should be toward the spirit rather than toward the mechanism. for example, when we considered the scientific preparation of teachers to be simply the acquiring of the technique of science, we did not attempt to make these elementary teachers perfect anthropologists, expert experimental psychologists, or masters of infant hygiene; we wished only to _direct them_ toward the field of experimental science, teaching them to manage the various instruments with a certain degree of skill. so now, we wish to _direct_ the teacher, trying to awaken in him, in connection with his own particular field, the school, that scientific _spirit_ which opens the door for him to broader and bigger possibilities. in other words, we wish to awaken in the mind and heart of the educator an _interest in natural phenomena_ to such an extent that, loving nature, he shall understand the anxious and expectant attitude of one who has prepared an experiment and who awaits a revelation from it.[ ] [ ] see in my treatise on pedagogical anthropology the chapter on "the method used in experimental sciences." the instruments are like the alphabet, and we must know how to manage them if we are to read nature; but as the book, which contains the revelation of the greatest thoughts of an author, uses in the alphabet the means of composing the external symbols or words, so nature, through the mechanism of the experiment, gives us an infinite series of revelations, unfolding for us her secrets. now one who has learned to spell mechanically all the words in his spelling-book, would be able to read in the same mechanical way the words in one of shakespeare's plays, provided the print were sufficiently clear. he who is initiated solely into the making of the bare experiment, is like one who spells out the literal sense of the words in the spelling-book; it is on such a level that we leave the teachers if we limit their preparation to technique alone. we must, instead, make of them worshippers and interpreters of the spirit of nature. they must be like him who, having learned to spell, finds himself, one day, able to read behind the written symbols the _thought_ of shakespeare, or goethe, or dante. as may be seen, the difference is great, and the road long. our first error was, however, a natural one. the child who has mastered the spelling-book gives the impression of knowing how to read. indeed, he does read the signs over the shop doors, the names of newspapers, and every word that comes under his eyes. it would be very natural if, entering a library, this child should be deluded into thinking that he knew how to read the sense of all the books he saw there. but attempting to do this, he would soon feel that "to know how to read mechanically" is nothing, and that he needs to go back to school. so it is with the teachers whom we have thought to prepare for scientific pedagogy by teaching them anthropometry and psychometry. but let us put aside the difficulty of preparing scientific masters in the accepted sense of the word. we will not even attempt to outline a programme of such preparation, since this would lead us into a discussion which has no place here. let us suppose, instead, that we have already prepared teachers through long and patient exercises for the _observation_ of _nature_, and that we have led them, for example, to the point attained by those students of natural sciences who rise at night and go into the woods and fields that they may surprise the awakening and the early activities of some family of insects in which they are interested. here we have the scientist who, though he may be sleepy and tired with walking, is full of watchfulness, who is not aware that he is muddy or dusty, that the mist wets him, or the sun burns him; but is intent only upon not revealing in the least degree his presence, in order that the insects may, hour after hour, carry on peacefully those natural functions which he wishes to observe. let us suppose these teachers to have reached the standpoint of the scientist who, half blind, still watches through his microscope the spontaneous movements of some particular infusory animalcule. these creatures seem to this scientific watcher, in their manner of avoiding each other and in their way of selecting their food, to possess a dim intelligence. he then disturbs this sluggish life by an electric stimulus, observing how some group themselves about the positive pole, and others about the negative. experimenting further, with a luminous stimulus, he notices how some run toward the light, while others fly from it. he investigates these and like phenomena; having always in mind this question: whether the fleeing from or running to the stimulus be of the same character as the avoidance of one another or the selection of food--that is, whether such differences are the result of choice and are due to that dim consciousness, rather than to physical attraction or repulsion similar to that of the magnet. and let us suppose that this scientist, finding it to be four o'clock in the afternoon, and that he has not yet lunched, is conscious, with a feeling of pleasure, of the fact that he has been at work in his laboratory instead of in his own home, where they would have called him hours ago, interrupting his interesting observation, in order that he might eat. let us imagine, i say, that the teacher has arrived, independently of his scientific training, at such an attitude of interest in the observation of natural phenomena. very well, but such a preparation is not enough. the master, indeed, is destined in his particular mission not to the observation of insects or of bacteria, but of man. he is not to make a study of man in the manifestations of his daily physical habits as one studies some family of insects, following their movements from the hour of _their morning awakening_. _the master is to study man in_ the awakening of his intellectual life. the interest in humanity to which we wish to educate the teacher must be characterised by the intimate relationship between the observer and the individual to be observed; a relationship which does not exist between the student of zoology or botany and that form of nature which he studies. man cannot love the insect or the chemical reaction which he studies, without sacrificing a part of himself. this self-sacrifice seems to one who looks at it from the standpoint of the world, a veritable renunciation of life itself, almost a martyrdom. but the love of man for man in a far more tender thing, and so simple that it is universal. to love in this way is not the privilege of any especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all men. to give an idea of this second form of preparation, that of the spirit, let us try to enter into the minds and hearts of those first followers of christ jesus as they heard him speak of a kingdom not of this world, greater far than any earthly kingdom, no matter how royally conceived. in their simplicity they asked of him, "master, tell us who shall be greatest in the kingdom of heaven!" to which christ, caressing the head of a little child who, with reverent, wondering eyes, looked into his face, replied, "whosoever shall become as one of these little ones, he shall be greatest in the kingdom of heaven." now let us picture among those to whom these words were spoken, an ardent, worshipping soul, who takes them into his heart. with a mixture of respect and love, of sacred curiosity and of a desire to achieve this spiritual greatness, he sets himself to observe every manifestation of this little child. even such an observer placed in a classroom filled with little children will not be the new educator whom we wish to form. but let us seek to implant in the soul the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the reverent love of the disciple of christ, and we shall have prepared the _spirit_ of the teacher. from the child itself he will learn how to perfect himself as an educator. let us consider the attitude of the teacher in the light of another example. picture to yourself one of our botanists or zoologists experienced in the technique of observation and experimentation; one who has travelled in order to study "certain fungi" in their native environment. this scientist has made his observations in open country and, then, by the aid of his microscope and of all his laboratory appliances, has carried on the later research work in the most minute way possible. he is, in fact, a scientist who understands what it is to study nature, and who is conversant with all the means which modern experimental science offers for this study. now let us imagine such a man appointed, by reason of the original work he has done, to a chair of science in some university, with the task before him of doing further original research work with hymenoptera. let us suppose that, arrived at his post, he is shown a glass-covered case containing a number of beautiful butterflies, mounted by means of pins, their outspread wings motionless. the student will say that this is some child's play, not material for scientific study, that these specimens in the box are more fitly a part of the game which the little boys play, chasing butterflies and catching them in a net. with such material as this the experimental scientist can do nothing. the situation would be very much the same if we should place a teacher who, according to our conception of the term, is scientifically prepared, in one of the public schools where the children are repressed in the spontaneous expression of their personality till they are almost like dead beings. in such a school the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have acquired. it is not enough, then, to prepare in our masters the scientific spirit. we must also make ready the _school_ for their observation. the school must permit the _free_, _natural manifestations_ of the _child_ if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. this is the essential reform. no one may affirm that such a principle already exists in pedagogy and in the school. it is true that some pedagogues, led by rousseau, have given voice to impracticable principles and vague aspirations for the liberty of the child, but the true concept of liberty is practically unknown to educators. they often have the same concept of liberty which animates a people in the hour of rebellion from slavery, or perhaps, the conception of _social liberty_, which although it is a more elevated idea is still invariably restricted. "social liberty" signifies always one more round of jacob's ladder. in other words it signifies a partial liberation, the liberation of a country, of a class, or of thought. that concept of liberty which must inspire pedagogy is, instead, universal. the biological sciences of the nineteenth century have shown it to us when they have offered us the means for studying life. if, therefore, the old-time pedagogy foresaw or vaguely expressed the principle of studying the pupil before educating him, and of leaving him free in his spontaneous manifestations, such an intuition, indefinite and barely expressed, was made possible of practical attainment only after the contribution of the experimental sciences during the last century. this is not a case for sophistry or discussion, it is enough that we state our point. he who would say that the principle of liberty informs the pedagogy of to-day, would make us smile as at a child who, before the box of mounted butterflies, should insist that they were alive and could fly. the principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy, and, therefore, the same principle pervades the school. i need only give one proof--the stationary desks and chairs. here we have, for example, a striking evidence of the errors of the early materialistic scientific pedagogy which, with mistaken zeal and energy, carried the barren stones of science to the rebuilding of the crumbling walls of the school. the schools were at first furnished with the long, narrow benches upon which the children were crowded together. then came science and perfected the bench. in this work much attention was paid to the recent contributions of anthropology. the age of the child and the length of his limbs were considered in placing the seat at the right height. the distance between the seat and the desk was calculated with infinite care, in order that the child's back should not become deformed, and, finally, the seats were separated and the width so closely calculated that the child could barely seat himself upon it, while to stretch himself by making any lateral movements was impossible. this was done in order that he might be separated from his neighbour. these desks are constructed in such a way as to render the child visible in all his immobility. one of the ends sought through this separation is the prevention of immoral acts in the schoolroom. what shall we say of such prudence in a state of society where it would be considered scandalous to give voice to principles of sex morality in education, for fear we might thus contaminate innocence? and, yet, here we have science lending itself to this hypocrisy, fabricating machines! not only this; obliging science goes farther still, perfecting the benches in such a way as to permit to the greatest possible extent the immobility of the child, or, if you wish, to repress every movement of the child. it is all so arranged that, when the child is well-fitted into his place, the desk and chair themselves force him to assume the position considered to be hygienically comfortable. the seat, the foot-rest, the desks are arranged in such a way that the child can never stand at his work. he is allotted only sufficient space for sitting in an erect position. it is in such ways that schoolroom desks and benches have advanced toward perfection. every cult of the so-called scientific pedagogy has designed a model scientific desk. not a few nations have become proud of their "national desk,"--and in the struggle of competition these various machines have been patented. undoubtedly there is much that is scientific underlying the construction of these benches. anthropology has been drawn upon in the measuring of the body and the diagnosis of the age; physiology, in the study of muscular movements; psychology, in regard to perversion of instincts; and, above all, hygiene, in the effort to prevent curvature of the spine. these desks were indeed scientific, following in their construction the anthropological study of the child. we have here, as i have said, an example of the literal application of science to the schools. i believe that before very long we shall all be struck with great surprise by this attitude. it will seem incomprehensible that the fundamental error of the desk should not have been revealed earlier through the attention given to the study of infant hygiene, anthropology, and sociology, and through the general progress of thought. the marvel is greater when we consider that during the past years there has been stirring in almost every nation a movement toward the protection of the child. i believe that it will not be many years before the public, scarcely believing the descriptions of these scientific benches, will come to touch with wondering bands the amazing seats that were constructed for the purpose of preventing among our school children curvature of the spine! the development of these scientific benches means that the pupils were subjected to a régime, which, even though they were born strong and straight, made it possible for them to become humpbacked! the vertebral column, biologically the most primitive, fundamental, and oldest part of the skeleton, the most fixed portion, of our body, since the skeleton is the most solid portion of the organism--the vertebral column, which resisted and was strong through the desperate struggles of primitive man when he fought against the desert-lion, when he conquered the mammoth, when he quarried the solid rock and shaped the iron to his uses, bends, and cannot resist, under the yoke of the school. it is incomprehensible that so-called _science_ should have worked to perfect an instrument of slavery in the school without being enlightened by one ray from the movement of social liberation, growing and developing throughout the world. for the age of scientific benches was also the age of the redemption of the working classes from the yoke of unjust labor. the tendency toward social liberty is most evident, and manifests itself on every hand. the leaders of the people make it their slogan, the labouring masses repeat the cry, scientific and socialistic publications voice the same movement, our journals are full of it. the underfed workman does not ask for a tonic, but for better economic conditions which shall prevent malnutrition. the miner who, through the stooping position maintained during many hours of the day, is subject to inguinal rupture, does not ask for an abdominal support, but demands shorter hours and bettor working conditions, in order that he may be able to lead a healthy life like other men. and when, during this same social epoch, we find that the children in our schoolrooms are working amid unhygienic conditions, so poorly adapted to normal development that even the skeleton becomes deformed, our response to this terrible revelation is an orthopedic bench. it is much as if we offered to the miner the abdominal brace, or arsenic to the underfed workman. some time ago a woman, believing me to be in sympathy with all scientific innovations concerning the school, showed me with evident satisfaction _a corset or brace for pupils_. she had invented this and felt that it would complete the work of the bench. surgery has still other means for the treatment of spinal curvature. i might mention orthopedic instruments, braces, and a method of periodically suspending the child, by the head or shoulders, in such a fashion that the weight of the body stretches and thus straightens the vertebral column. in the school, the orthopedic instrument in the shape of the desk is in great favour to-day; someone proposes the brace--one step farther and it will be suggested that we give the scholars a systematic course in the suspension method! all this is the logical consequence of a material application of the methods of science to the decadent school. evidently the rational method of combating spinal curvature in the pupils, is to change the form of their work--so that they shall no longer be obliged to remain for so many hours a day in a harmful position. it is a conquest of liberty which the school needs, not the mechanism of a bench. even were the stationary seat helpful to the child's body, it would still be a dangerous and unhygienic feature of the environment, through the difficulty of cleaning the room perfectly when the furniture cannot be moved. the foot-rests, which cannot be removed, accumulate the dirt carried in daily from the street by the many little feet. to-day there is a general transformation in the matter of house furnishings. they are made lighter and simpler so that they may be easily moved, dusted, and even washed. but the school seems blind to the transformation of the social environment. it behooves us to think of what may happen to the _spirit_ of the child who is condemned to grow in conditions so artificial that his very bones may become deformed. when we speak of the redemption of the workingman, it is always understood that beneath the most apparent form of suffering, such as poverty of the blood, or ruptures, there exists that other wound from which the soul of the man who is subjected to any form of slavery must suffer. it is at this deeper wrong that we aim when we say that the workman must be redeemed through liberty. we know only too well that when a man's very blood has been consumed or his intestines wasted away through his work, his soul must have lain oppressed in darkness, rendered insensible, or, it may be, killed within him. the _moral_ degradation of the slave is, above all things, the weight that opposes the progress of humanity--humanity striving to rise and held back by this great burden. the cry of redemption speaks far more clearly for the souls of men than for their bodies. what shall we say then, when the question before us is that of _educating children_? we know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher who, in the ordinary schoolroom, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of the scholars. in order to succeed in this barren task, she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their attention. prizes and punishments are every-ready and efficient aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those who are condemned to be his listeners. it is true that to-day it is deemed expedient to abolish official whippings and habitual blows, just as the awarding of prizes has become less ceremonious. these partial reforms are another prop approved of by science, and offered to the support of the decadent school. such prizes and punishments are, if i may be allowed the expression, the _bench_ of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit. here, however, these are not applied to lessen deformities, but to provoke them. the prize and the punishment are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them. the jockey offers a piece of sugar to his horse before jumping into the saddle, the coachman beats his horse that he may respond to the signs given by the reins; and, yet, neither of these runs so superbly as the free horse of the plains. and here, in the case of education, shall man place the yoke upon man? true, we say that social man is natural man yoked to society. but if we give a comprehensive glance to the moral progress of society, we shall see that little by little, the yoke is being made easier, in other words, we shall see that nature, or life, moves gradually toward triumph. the yoke of the slave yields to that of the servant, and the yoke of the servant to that of the workman. all forms of slavery tend little by little to weaken and disappear, even the sexual slavery of woman. the history of civilisation is a history of conquest and of liberation. we should ask in what stage of civilisation we find ourselves and if, in truth, the good of prizes and of punishments be necessary to our advancement. if we have indeed gone beyond this point, then to apply such a form of education would be to draw the new generation back to a lower level, not to lead them into their true heritage of progress. something very like this condition of the school exists in society, in the relation between the government and the great numbers of the men employed in its administrative departments. these clerks work day after day for the general national good, yet they do not feel or see the advantage of their work in any immediate reward. that is, they do not realise that the state carries on its great business through their daily tasks, and that the whole nation is benefited by their work. for them the immediate good is promotion, as passing to a higher class is for the child in school. the man who loses sight of the really big aim of his work is like a child who has been placed in a class below his real standing: like a slave, he is cheated of something which is his right. his dignity as a man is reduced to the limits of the dignity of a machine which must be oiled if it is to be kept going, because it does not have within itself the impulse of life. all those petty things such as the desire for decorations or medals, are but artificial stimuli, lightening for the moment the dark, barren path in which he treads. in the same way we give prizes to school children. and the fear of not achieving promotion, withholds the clerk from running away, and binds him to his monotonous work, even as the fear of not passing into the next class drives the pupil to his book. the reproof of the superior is in every way similar to the scolding of the teacher. the correction of badly executed clerical work is equivalent to the bad mark placed by the teacher upon the scholar's poor composition. the parallel is almost perfect. but if the administrative departments are not carried on in a way which would seem suitable to a nation's greatness; if corruption too easily finds a place; it is the result of having extinguished the true greatness of man in the mind of the employee, and of having restricted his vision to those petty, immediate facts, which he has come to look upon as prizes and punishments. the country stands, because the rectitude of the greater number of its employees is such that they resist the corruption of the prizes and punishments, and follow an irresistible current of honesty. even as life in the social environment triumphs against every cause of poverty and death, and proceeds to new conquests, so the instinct of liberty conquers all obstacles, going from victory to victory. it is this personal and yet universal force of life, a force often latent within the soul, that sends the world forward. but he who accomplishes a truly human work, he who does something really great and victorious, is never spurred to his task by those trifling attractions called by the name of "prizes," nor by the fear of those petty ills which we call "punishments." if in a war a great army of giants should fight with no inspiration beyond the desire to win promotion, epaulets, or medals, or through fear of being shot, if these men were to oppose a handful of pygmies who were inflamed by love of country, the victory would go to the latter. when real heroism has died within an army, prizes and punishments cannot do more than finish the work of deterioration, bringing in corruption and cowardice. all human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force. thus a young student may become a great doctor if he is spurred to his study by an interest which makes medicine his real vocation. but if he works in the hope of an inheritance, or of making a desirable marriage, or if indeed he is inspired by any material advantage, he will never become a true master or a great doctor, and the world will never make one step forward because of his work. he to whom such stimuli are necessary, had far better never become a physician. everyone has a special tendency, a special vocation, modest, perhaps, but certainly useful. the system of prizes may turn an individual aside from this vocation, may make him choose a false road, for him a vain one, and forced to follow it, the natural activity of a human being may be warped, lessened, even annihilated. we repeat always that the world _progresses_ and that we must urge men forward to obtain progress. but progress comes from the _new things that are born_, and these, not being foreseen, are not rewarded with prizes: rather, they often carry the leader to martyrdom. god forbid that poems should ever be born of the desire to be crowned in the capitol! such a vision need only come into the heart of the poet and the muse will vanish. the poem must spring from the soul of the poet, when he thinks neither of himself nor of the prize. and if he does win the laurel, he will feel the vanity of such a prize. the true reward lies in the revelation through the poem of his own triumphant inner force. there does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example, the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved. our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which can bring us a true compensation. sometimes there is given to us a moment when we fancy ourselves to be among the great ones of the world. these are moments of happiness given to man that he may continue his existence in peace. it may be through love attained or because of the gift of a son, through a glorious discovery or the publication of a book; in some such moment we feel that there exists no man who is above us. if, in such a moment, someone vested with authority comes forward to offer us a medal or a prize, he is the important destroyer of our real reward--"and who are you?" our vanished illusion shall cry, "who are you that recalls me to the fact that i am not the first among men? who stands so far above me that he may give me a prize?" the prize of such a man in such a moment can only be divine. as for punishments, the soul of the normal man grows perfect through expanding, and punishment as commonly understood is always a form of _repression_. it may bring results with those inferior natures who grow in evil, but these are very few, and social progress is not affected by them. the penal code threatens us with punishment if we are dishonest within the limits indicated by the laws. but we are not honest through fear of the laws; if we do not rob, if we do not kill, it is because we love peace, because the natural trend of our lives leads us forward, leading us ever farther and more definitely away from the peril of low and evil acts. without going into the ethical or metaphysical aspects of the question, we may safely affirm that the delinquent before he transgresses the law, has, _if he knows of the existence of a punishment_, felt the threatening weight of the criminal code upon him. he has defined it, or he has been lured into the crime, deluding himself with the idea that he would be able to avoid the punishment of the law. but there has occurred within his mind, a _struggle between the crime and the punishment_. whether it be efficacious in hindering crime or not, this penal code is undoubtedly made for a very limited class of individuals; namely, criminals. the enormous majority of citizens are honest without any regard whatever to the threats of the law. the real punishment of normal man is the loss of the consciousness of that individual power and greatness which are the sources of his inner life. such a punishment often falls upon men in the fullness of success. a man whom we would consider crowned by happiness and fortune may be suffering from this form of punishment. far too often man does not see the real punishment which threatens him. and it is just here that education may help. to-day we hold the pupils in school, restricted by those instruments so degrading to body and spirit, the desk--and material prizes and punishments. our aim in all this is to reduce them to the discipline of immobility and silence,--to lead them,--where? far too often toward no definite end. often the education of children consists in pouring into their intelligence the intellectual contents of school programmes. and often these programmes have been compiled in the official department of education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the child. ah, before such dense and wilful disregard of the life which is growing within these children, we should hide our heads in shame and cover our guilty faces with our hands! sergi says truly: "to-day an urgent need imposes itself upon society: the reconstruction of methods in education and instruction, and he who fights for this cause, fights for human regeneration." chapter ii history of methods if we are to develop a system of scientific pedagogy, we must, then, proceed along lines very different from those which have been followed up to the present time. the transformation of the school must be contemporaneous with the preparation of the teacher. for if we make of the teacher an observer, familiar with the experimental methods, then we must make it possible for her to observe and to experiment in the school. the fundamental principle of scientific pedagogy must be, indeed, the _liberty of the pupil_;--such liberty as shall permit a development of individual, spontaneous manifestations of the child's nature. if a new and scientific pedagogy is to arise from the _study of the individual_, such study must occupy itself with the observation of _free_ children. in vain should we await a practical renewing of pedagogical methods from methodical examinations of pupils made under the guidance offered to-day by pedagogy, anthropology, and experimental psychology. every branch of experimental science has grown out of the application of a method peculiar to itself. bacteriology owes its scientific content to the method of isolation and culture of microbes. criminal, medical, and pedagogical anthropology owe their progress to the application of anthropological methods to individuals of various classes, such as criminals, the insane, the sick of the clinics, scholars. so experimental psychology needs as its starting point an exact definition of the technique to be used in making the experiment. to put it broadly, it is important to define _the method_, _the technique_, and from its application to _await_ the definite result, which must be gathered entirely from actual experience. one of the characteristics of experimental sciences is to proceed to the making of an experiment _without preconceptions of any sort_ as to the final result of the experiment itself. for example, should we wish to make scientific observations concerning the development of the head as related to varying degrees of intelligence, one of the conditions of such an experiment would be to ignore, in the taking of the measurements, which were the most intelligent and which the most backward among the scholars examined. and this because the preconceived idea that the most intelligent should have the head more fully developed will inevitably alter the results of the research. he who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. it is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the _method_ in the search for truth. we must not start, for example, from any dogmatic ideas which we may happen to have held upon the subject of child psychology. instead, we must proceed by a method which shall tend to make possible to the child complete liberty. this we must do if we are to draw from the observation of his spontaneous manifestations conclusions which shall lead to the establishment of a truly scientific child psychology. it may be that such a method holds for us great surprises, unexpected possibilities. child psychology and pedagogy must establish their content by successive conquests arrived at through the method of experimentation. our problem then, is this: to establish the _method peculiar_ to experimental pedagogy. it cannot be that used in other experimental sciences. it is true that scientific pedagogy is rounded out by hygiene, anthropology, and psychology, and adopts in part the technical method characteristic of all three, although limiting itself to a special study of the individual to be educated. but in pedagogy this study of the individual, though it must accompany the very different work of _education_, is a limited and secondary part of the science as a whole. this present study deals in part with the _method_ used in experimental pedagogy, and is the result of my experiences during two years in the "children's houses." i offer only a beginning of the method, which i have applied to children between the ages of three and six. but i believe that these tentative experiments, because of the surprising results which they have given, will be the means of inspiring a continuation of the work thus undertaken. indeed, although our educational system, which experience has demonstrated to be excellent, is not yet entirely completed, it nevertheless constitutes a system well enough established to be practical in all institutions where young children are cared for, and in the first elementary classes. perhaps i am not exact when i say that the present work springs from two years of experience. i do not believe that these later attempts of mine could alone have rendered possible all that i set forth in this book. the origin of the educational system in use in the "children's houses" is much more remote, and if this experience with normal children seems indeed rather brief, it should be remembered that it sprang from preceding pedagogical experiences with abnormal children, and that considered in this way, it represents a long and thoughtful endeavour. about fifteen years ago, being assistant doctor at the psychiatric clinic of the university of rome, i had occasion to frequent the insane asylums to study the sick and to select subjects for the clinics. in this way i became interested in the idiot children who were at that time housed in the general insane asylums. in those days thyroid organotherapy was in full development, and this drew the attention of physicians to deficient children. i myself, having completed my regular hospital services, had already turned my attention to the study of children's diseases. it was thus that, being interested in the idiot children, i became conversant with the special method of education devised for these unhappy little ones by edward séguin, and was led to study thoroughly the idea, then beginning to be prevalent among the physicians, of the efficacy of "pedagogical treatment" for various morbid forms of disease such as deafness, paralysis, idiocy, rickets, etc. the fact that pedagogy must join with medicine in the treatment of disease was the practical outcome of the thought of the time. and because of this tendency the method of treating disease by gymnastics became widely popular. i, however, differed from my colleagues in that i felt that mental deficiency presented chiefly a pedagogical, rather than mainly a medical, problem. much was said in the medical congresses of the medico-pedagogic method for the treatment and education of the feeble minded, and i expressed my differing opinion in an address on _moral education_ at the pedagogical congress of turin in . i believe that i touched a chord already vibrant, because the idea, making its way among the physicians and elementary teachers, spread in a flash as presenting a question of lively interest to the school. in fact i was called upon by my master, guido baccelli, the great minister of education, to deliver to the teachers of rome a course of lectures on the education of feeble-minded children. this course soon developed into the state orthophrenic school, which i directed for more than two years. in this school we had an all-day class of children composed of those who in the elementary schools were considered hopelessly deficient. later on, through the help of a philanthropic organisation, there was founded a medical pedagogic institute where, besides the children from the public schools, we brought together all of the idiot children from the insane asylums in rome. i spent these two years with the help of my colleagues in preparing the teachers of rome for a special method of observation and education of feeble-minded children. not only did i train teachers, but what was much more important, after i had been in london and paris for the purpose of studying in a practical way the education of deficients, i gave myself over completely to the actual teaching of the children, directing at the same time the work of the other teachers in our institute. i was more than an elementary teacher, for i was present, or directly taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening without interruption. these two years of practice are my first and indeed my true degree in pedagogy. from the very beginning of my work with deficient children ( to ) i felt that the methods which i used had in them nothing peculiarly limited to the instruction of idiots. i believed that they contained educational principles _more rational_ than those in use, so much more so, indeed, that through their means an inferior mentality would be able to grow and develop. this feeling, so deep as to be in the nature of an intuition, became my controlling idea after i had left the school for deficients, and, little by little, i became convinced that similar methods applied to normal children would develop or set free their personality in a marvellous and surprising way. it was then that i began a genuine and thorough study of what is known as remedial pedagogy, and, then, wishing to undertake the study of normal pedagogy and of the principles upon which it is based, i registered as a student of philosophy at the university. a great faith animated me, and although i did not know that i should ever be able to test the truth of my idea, i gave up every other occupation to deepen and broaden its conception. it was almost as if i prepared myself for an unknown mission. the methods for the education of deficients had their origin at the time of the french revolution in the work of a physician whose achievements occupy a prominent place in the history of medicine, as he was the founder of that branch of medical science which to-day is known as otiatria (diseases of the ear). he was the first to attempt a methodical education of the sense of hearing. he made these experiments in the institute for deaf mutes founded in paris by pereire, and actually succeeded in making the semi-deaf hear clearly. later on, having in charge for eight years the idiot boy known as "the wild boy of aveyron," he extended to the treatment of all the senses those educational methods which had already given such excellent results in the treatment of the sense of hearing. a student of pinel, itard, was the first educator to practise _the observation_ of the pupil in the way in which the sick are observed in the hospitals, especially those suffering from diseases of the nervous system. the pedagogic writings of itard are most interesting and minute descriptions of educational efforts and experiences, and anyone reading them to-day must admit that they were practically the first attempts at experimental psychology. but the merit of having completed a genuine educational system for deficient children was due to edward séguin, first a teacher and then a physician. he took the experiences of itard as his starting point, applying these methods, modifying and completing them during a period of ten years' experience with children taken from the insane asylums and placed in, a little school in rue pigalle in paris. this method was described for the first time in a volume of more than six hundred pages, published in paris in , with the title: "traitement moral, hygiène et education des idiots." later séguin emigrated to the united states of america where he founded many institutions for deficients, and where, after another twenty years of experience, he published the second edition of his method, under a very different title: "idiocy and its treatment by the physiological method." this volume was published in new york in , and in it séguin had carefully defined his method of education, calling it the _physiological method_. he no longer referred in the title to a method for the "education of idiots" as if the method were special to them, but spoke now of idiocy treated by a physiological method. if we consider that pedagogy always had psychology as its base, and that wundt defines a "physiological psychology," the coincidence of these ideas must strike us, and lead us to suspect in the physiological method some connection with physiological psychology. while i was assistant at the psychiatric clinic, i had read edward séguin's french book, with great interest. but the english book which was published in new york twenty years later, although it was quoted in the works about special education by bourneville, was not to be found in any library. i made a vain quest for it, going from house to house of nearly all the english physicians, who were known to be specially interested in deficient children, or who were superintendents of special schools. the fact that this book was unknown in england, although it had been published in the english language, made me think that the séguin system had never been understood. in fact, although séguin was constantly quoted in all the publications dealing with institutions for deficients, the educational _applications_ described, were quite different from the applications of séguin's system. almost everywhere the methods applied to deficients are more or less the same as those in use for normal children. in germany, especially, a friend who had gone there in order to help me in my researches, noticed that although special materials existed here and there in the pedagogical museums of the schools for deficients, these materials were rarely used. indeed, the german educators hold the principle that it is well to adapt to the teaching of backward children, the same method used for normal ones; but these methods are much more objective in germany than with us. at the bicêtre, where i spent some time, i saw that it was the didactic apparatus of séguin far more than his _method_ which was being used, although, the french text was in the hands of the educators. the teaching there was purely mechanical, each teacher following the rules according to the letter. i found, however, wherever i went, in london as well as in paris, a desire for fresh counsel and for new experiences, since far too often séguin's claim that with his methods the education of idiots was actually possible, had proved only a delusion. after this study of the methods in use throughout europe i concluded my experiments upon the deficients of rome, and taught them throughout two years. i followed séguin's book, and also derived much help from the remarkable experiments of itard. guided by the work of these two men, i had manufactured a great variety of didactic material. these materials, which i have never seen complete in any institution, became in the hands of those who knew how to apply them, a most remarkable and efficient means, but unless rightly presented, they failed to attract the attention of the deficients. i felt that i understood the discouragement of those working with feeble-minded children, and could see why they had, in so many cases, abandoned the method. the prejudice that the educator must place himself on a level with the one to be educated, sinks the teacher of deficients into a species of apathy. he accepts the fact that he is educating an inferior personality, and for that very reason he does not succeed. even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child's level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. instead of all this, we must know how to call to the _man_ which lies dormant within the soul of the child. i felt this, intuitively, and believed that not the didactic material, but my voice which called to them, _awakened_ the children, and encouraged them to use the didactic material, and through it, to educate themselves. i was guided in my work by the deep respect which i felt for their misfortune, and by the love which these unhappy children know how to awaken in those who are near them. séguin, too, expressed himself in the same way on this subject. reading his patient attempts, i understand clearly that the first didactic material used by him was _spiritual_. indeed, at the close of the french volume, the author, giving a résumé of his work, concludes by saying rather sadly, that all he has established will be lost or useless, if the _teachers_ are not prepared for their work. he holds rather original views concerning the preparation of teachers of deficients. he would have them good to look upon, pleasant-voiced, careful in every detail of their personal appearance, doing everything possible to make themselves attractive. they must, he says, render themselves attractive in voice and manner, since it is their task to awaken souls which are frail and weary, and to lead them forth to lay hold upon the beauty and strength of life. this belief that we must act upon the spirit, served as a sort of _secret key_, opening to me the long series of didactic experiments so wonderfully analysed by edward séguin,--experiments which, properly understood, are really most efficacious in the education of idiots. i myself obtained most surprising results through their application, but i must confess that, while my efforts showed themselves in the intellectual progress of my pupils, a peculiar form of exhaustion prostrated me. it was as if i gave to them some vital force from within me. those things which we call encouragement, comfort, love, respect, are drawn from the soul of man, and the more freely we give of them, the more do we renew and reinvigorate the life about us. without such inspiration the most perfect _external stimulus_ may pass unobserved. thus the blind saul, before the glory of the sun, exclaimed, "this?--it is the dense fog!" thus prepared, i was able to proceed to new experiments on my own account. this is not the place for a report of these experiments, and i will only note that at this time i attempted an original method for the teaching of reading and writing, a part of the education of the child which was most imperfectly treated in the works of both itard and séguin. i succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to read and to write so well that i was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children. and they passed the examination successfully. these results seemed almost miraculous to those who saw them. to me, however, the boys from the asylums had been able to compete with the normal children only because they had been taught in a different way. they had been helped in their psychic development, and the normal children had, instead, been suffocated, held back. i found myself thinking that if, some day, the special education which had developed these idiot children in such a marvellous fashion, could be applied to the development of normal children, the "miracle" of which my friends talked would no longer be possible. the abyss between the inferior mentality of the idiot and that of the normal brain can never be bridged if the normal child has reached his full development. while everyone was admiring the progress of my idiots, i was searching for the reasons which could keep the happy healthy children of the common schools on so low a plane that they could be equalled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils! one day, a directress in the institute for deficients, asked me to read one of the prophecies of ezekiel which had made a profound impression upon her, as it seemed to prophesy the education of deficients. "the hand of the lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. "and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. "and he said unto me, son of man, can these bones live? and i answered, o lord god, thou knowest. "again he said unto me, prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, o ye dry hones, hear the word of the lord. "thus saith the lord god unto these bones; behold, i will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: "and i will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that i am the lord. "so i prophesied as i was commanded: and as i prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. "and when i beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. "then said he unto me, prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, thus saith the lord god; come from the four winds, o breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. "so i prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. "then he said unto me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of israel: behold, they say, our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts." in fact, the words--"i will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live," seem to me to refer to the direct individual work of the master who encourages, calls to, and helps his pupil, preparing him for education. and the remainder--"i will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you," recalled the fundamental phrase which sums up séguin's whole method,--"to lead the child, as it were, by the hand, from the education of the muscular system, to that of the nervous system, and of the senses." it was thus that séguin taught the idiots how to walk, how to maintain their equilibrium in the most difficult movements of the body--such as going up stairs, jumping, etc., and finally, to feel, beginning the education of the muscular sensations by touching, and reading the difference of temperature, and ending with the education of the particular senses. but if the training goes no further than this, we have only led these children to adapt themselves to a low order of life (almost a vegetable existence). "call to the spirit," says the prophecy, and the spirit shall enter into them, and they shall have life. séguin, indeed, led the idiot from the vegetative to the intellectual life, "from the education, of the senses to general notions, from general notions to abstract thought, from abstract thought to morality." but when this wonderful work is accomplished, and by means of a minute physiological analysis and of a gradual progression in method, the idiot has become a man, he is still an inferior in the midst of his fellow men, an individual who will never be able fully to adapt himself to the social environment: "our bones are dried, and our hope is lost; we are cut off for our parts." this gives us another reason why the tedious method of séguin was so often abandoned; the tremendous difficulty of the means, did not justify the end. everyone felt this, and many said, "there is still so much to be done for normal children!" having through actual experience justified my faith in séguin's method, i withdrew from active work among deficients, and began a more thorough study of the works of itard and séguin. i felt the need of meditation. i did a thing which i had not done before, and which perhaps few students have been willing to do,--i translated into italian and copied out with my own hand, the writings of these men, from beginning to end, making for myself books as the old benedictines used to do before the diffusion of printing. i chose to do this by hand, in order that i might have time to weigh the sense of each word, and to read, in truth, the _spirit_ of the author. i had just finished copying the pages of séguin's french volume when i received from new york a copy of the english book published in . this old volume had been found among the books discarded from the private library of a new york physician. i translated it with the help of an english friend. this volume did not add much in the way of new pedagogical experiments, but dealt with the philosophy of the experiences described in the first volume. the man who had studied abnormal children for thirty years expressed the idea that the physiological method, which has as its base the individual study of the pupil and which forms its educative methods upon the analysis of physiological and psychological phenomena, must come also to be applied to normal children. this step, he believed, would show the way to a complete human regeneration. the voice of séguin seemed to be like the voice of the forerunner crying in the wilderness, and my thoughts were filled with the immensity and importance of a work which should be able to reform the school and education. at this time i was registered at the university as a student of philosophy, and followed the courses in experimental psychology, which had only recently been established in italian universities, namely, at turin, rome and naples. at the same time i made researches in pedagogic anthropology in the elementary schools, studying in this way the methods in organisation used for the education of normal children. this work led to the teaching of pedagogic anthropology in the university of rome. i had long wished to experiment with the methods for deficients in a first elementary class of normal children, but i had never thought of making use of the homes or institutions where very young children were cared for. it was pure chance that brought this new idea to my mind. it was near the end of the year , and i had just returned from milan, where i had been one of a committee at the international exhibition for the assignment of prizes in the subjects of scientific pedagogy and experimental psychology. a great opportunity came to me, for i was invited by edoardo talamo, the director general of the roman association for good building, to undertake the organisation of infant schools in its model tenements. it was signor talamo's happy idea to gather together in a large room all the little ones between the ages of three and seven belonging to the families living in the tenement. the play and work of these children was to be carried on under the guidance of a teacher who should have her own apartment in the tenement house. it was intended that every house should have its school, and as the association for good building already owned more than tenements in rome the work seemed to offer tremendous possibilities of development. the first school was to be established in january, , in a large tenement house in the quarter of san lorenzo. in the same quarter the association already owned fifty-eight buildings, and according to signor talamo's plans we should soon be able to open sixteen of these "schools within the house." this new kind of school was christened by signora olga lodi, a mutual friend of signor talamo and myself, under the fortunate title of _casa dei bambini_ or "the children's house." under this name the first of our schools was opened on the sixth of january, , at via dei masi. it was confided to the care of candida nuccitelli and was under my guidance and direction. from the very first i perceived, in all its immensity, the social and pedagogical importance of such institutions, and while at that time my visions of a triumphant future seemed exaggerated, to-day many are beginning to understand that what i saw before was indeed the truth. on the seventh of april of the same year, , a second "children's house" was opened in the quarter of san lorenzo; and on the eighteenth of october, , another was inaugurated by the humanitarian society in milan in the quarter inhabited by workingmen. the workshops of this same society undertook the manufacture of the materials which we used. on the fourth of november following, a third "children's house" was opened in rome, this time not in the people's quarter, but in a modern building for the middle classes, situated in via famagosta, in that part of the city known as the prati di castello; and in january, , italian switzerland began to transform its orphan asylums and children's homes in which the froebel system had been used, into "children's houses" adopting our methods and materials. the "children's house" has a twofold importance: the social importance which it assumes through its peculiarity of being a school within the house, and its purely pedagogic importance gained through its methods for the education of very young children, of which i now made a trial. as i have said, signor talamo's invitation gave me a wonderful opportunity for applying the methods used with deficients to normal children, not of the elementary school age, but of the age usual in infant asylums. if a parallel between the deficient and the normal child is possible, this will be during the period of early infancy _when the child who has not the force to develop_ and _he who is not yet developed_ are in some ways alike. the very young child has not yet acquired a secure co-ordination of muscular movements, and, therefore, walks imperfectly, and is not able to perform the ordinary acts of life, such as fastening and unfastening its garments. the sense organs, such as the power of accommodation of the eye, are not yet completely developed; the language is primordial and shows those defects common to the speech of the very young child. the difficulty of fixing the attention, the general instability, etc., are characteristics which the normal infant and the deficient child have in common. preyer, also, in his psychological study of children has turned aside to illustrate the parallel between pathological linguistic defects, and those of normal children in the process of developing. methods which made growth possible to the mental personality of the idiot ought, therefore, to _aid the development of young children_, and should be so adapted as to constitute a hygienic education of the entire personality of a normal human being. many defects which become permanent, such as speech defects, the child acquires through being neglected during the most important period of his age, the period between three and six, at which time he forms and establishes his principal functions. here lies the significance of my pedagogical experiment in the "children's houses." it represents the results of a series of trials made by me, in the education of young children, with methods already used with deficients. my work has not been in any way an application, pure and simple, of the methods of séguin to young children, as anyone who will consult the works of the author will readily see. but it is none the less true that, underlying these two years of trial, there is a basis of experiment which goes back to the days of the french revolution, and which represents the earnest work of the lives of itard and séguin. as for me, thirty years after the publication of séguin's second book, i took up again the ideas and, i may even say, the work of this great man, with the same freshness of spirit with which he received the inheritance of the work and ideas of his master itard. for _ten years_ i not only made practical experiments according to their methods, but through reverent meditation absorbed the works of these noble and consecrated men, who have left to humanity most vital proof of their obscure heroism. thus my ten years of work may in a sense be considered as a summing up of the forty years of work done by itard and séguin. viewed in this light, fifty years of active work preceded and prepared for this apparently brief trial of only two years, and i feel that i am not wrong in saying that these experiments represent the successive work of three physicians, who from itard to me show in a greater or less degree the first steps along the path of psychiatry. as definite factors in the civilisation of the people, the "children's houses" deserve a separate volume. they have, in fact, solved so many of the social and pedagogic problems in ways which have seemed to be utopian, that they are a part of that modern transformation of the home which must most surely be realised before many years have passed. in this way they touch directly the most important side of the social question--that which deals with the intimate or home life of the people. it is enough here to reproduce the inaugural discourse delivered by me on the occasion of the opening of the second "children's house" in rome, and to present the rules and regulations[ ] which i arranged in accordance with the wishes of signor talamo. [ ] see page . it will be noticed that the club to which i refer, and the dispensary which is also an out-patients' institution for medical and surgical treatment (all such institutions being free to the inhabitants) have already been established. in the modern tenement--casa moderna in the prati di castello, opened november , , through the philanthropy of signor talamo--they are also planning to annex a "communal kitchen." chapter iii inagural address delivered on the occasion of the opening of one of the "children's houses" it may be that the life lived by the very poor is a thing which some of you here to-day have never actually looked upon in all its degradation. you may have only felt the misery of deep human poverty through the medium of some great book, or some gifted actor may have made your soul vibrato with its horror. let us suppose that in some such moment a voice should cry to you, "go look upon these homes of misery and blackest poverty. for there have sprung up amid the terror and the suffering, cases of happiness, of cleanliness, of peace. the poor are to have an ideal house which shall be their own. in quarters where poverty and vice ruled, a work of moral redemption is going on. the soul of the people is being set free from the torpor of vice, from the shadows of ignorance. the little children too have a 'house' of their own. the new generation goes forward to meet the new era, the time when misery shall no longer be deplored but destroyed. they go to meet the time when the dark dens of vice and wretchedness shall have become things of the past, and when no trace of them shall be found among the living." what a change of emotions we should experience! and how we should hasten here, as the wise men guided by a dream and a star hastened to bethlehem! i have spoken thus in order that you may understand the great significance, the real beauty, of this humble room, which seems like a bit of the house itself set apart by a mother's hand for the use and happiness of the children of the quarter. this is the second "children's house"[ ] which has been established within the ill-favoured quarter of san lorenzo. [ ] dr. montessori no longer directs the work in the casa dei bambini in the quarter of san lorenzo. the quarter of san lorenzo is celebrated, for every newspaper in the city is filled with almost daily accounts of its wretched happenings. yet there are many who are not familiar with the origin of this portion of our city. it was never intended to build up here a tenement district for the people. and indeed san lorenzo is not the _people's_ quarter, it is the quarter of the _poor_. it is the quarter where lives the underpaid, often unemployed workingman, a common type in a city which has no factory industries. it is the home of him who undergoes the period of surveillance to which he is condemned after his prison sentence is ended. they are all here, mingled, huddled together. the district of san lorenzo sprang into being between and at the time of the great building fever. no standards either social or hygienic guided these new constructions. the aim in building was simply to cover with walls square foot after square foot of ground. the more space covered, the greater the gain of the interested banks and companies. all this with a complete disregard of the disastrous future which they were preparing. it was natural that no one should concern himself with the stability of the building he was creating, since in no case would the property remain in the possession of him who built it. when the storm burst, in the shape of the inevitable building panic of to , these unfortunate houses remained for a long time untenanted. then, little by little, the need of dwelling-places began to make itself felt, and these great houses began to fill. now, those speculators who had been so unfortunate as to remain possessors of these buildings could not, and did not wish to, add fresh capital to that already lost, so the houses constructed in the first place in utter disregard of all laws of hygiene, and rendered still worse by having been used as temporary habitations, came to be occupied by the poorest class in the city. the apartments not being prepared for the working class, were too large, consisting of five, six, or seven rooms. these were rented at a price which, while exceedingly low in relation to the size, was yet too high for any one family of very poor people. this led to the evil of subletting. the tenant who has taken a six room apartment at eight dollars a month sublets rooms at one dollar and a half or two dollars a month to those who can pay so much, and a corner of a room, or a corridor, to a poorer tenant, thus making an income of fifteen dollars or more, over and above the cost of his own rent. this means that the problem of existence is in great part solved for him, and that in every case he adds to his income through usury. the one who holds the lease traffics in the misery of his fellow tenants, lending small sums at a rate which generally corresponds to twenty cents a week for the loan of two dollars, equivalent to an annual rate of per cent. thus we have in the evil of subletting the most cruel form of usury: that which only the poor know how to practise upon the poor. to this we must add the evils of crowded living, promiscuousness, immorality, crime. every little while the newspapers uncover for us one of these _intérieurs_: a large family, growing boys and girls, sleep in one room; while one corner of the room is occupied by an outsider, a woman who receives the nightly visits of men. this is seen by the girls and the boys; evil passions are kindled that lead to the crime and bloodshed which unveil for a brief instant before our eyes, in some lurid paragraph, this little detail of the mass of misery. whoever enters, for the first time, one of these apartments is astonished and horrified. for this spectacle of genuine misery is not at all like the garish scene he has imagined. we enter here a world of shadows, and that which strikes us first is the darkness which, even though it be midday, makes it impossible to distinguish any of the details of the room. when the eye has grown accustomed to the gloom, we perceive, within, the outlines of a bed upon which lies huddled a figure--someone ill and suffering. if we have come to bring money from some society for mutual aid, a candle must be lighted before the sum can be counted and the receipt signed. oh, when we talk of social problems, how often we speak vaguely, drawing upon our fancy for details instead of preparing ourselves to judge intelligently through a personal investigation of facts and conditions. we discuss earnestly the question of home study for school children, when for many of them home means a straw pallet thrown down in the corner of some dark hovel. we wish to establish circulating libraries that the poor may read at home. we plan to send among these people books which shall form their domestic literature--books through whose influence they shall come to higher standards of living. we hope through the printed page to educate these poor people in matters of hygiene, of morality, of culture, and in this we show ourselves profoundly ignorant of their most crying needs. for many of them have no light by which to read! there lies before the social crusader of the present day a problem more profound than that of the intellectual elevation of the poor; the problem, indeed, of _life_. in speaking of the children born in these places, even the conventional expressions must be changed, for they do not "first see the light of day"; they come into a world of gloom. they grow among the poisonous shadows which envelope over-crowded humanity. these children cannot be other than filthy in body, since the water supply in an apartment originally intended to be occupied by three or four persons, when distributed among twenty or thirty is scarcely enough for drinking purposes! we italians have elevated our word "casa" to the almost sacred significance of the english word "home," the enclosed temple of domestic affection, accessible only to dear ones. far removed from this conception is the condition of the many who have no "casa," but only ghastly walls within which the most intimate acts of life are exposed upon the pillory. here, there can be no privacy, no modesty, no gentleness; here, there is often not even light, nor air, nor water! it seems a cruel mockery to introduce here our idea of the home as essential to the education of the masses, and as furnishing, along with the family, the only solid basis for the social structure. in doing this we would be not practical reformers but visionary poets. conditions such as i have described make it more decorous, more hygienic, for these people to take refuge in the street and to let their children live there. but how often these streets are the scene of bloodshed, of quarrel, of sights so vile as to be almost inconceivable. the papers tell us of women pursued and killed by drunken husbands! of young girls with the fear of worse than death, stoned by low men. again, we see untellable things--a wretched woman thrown, by the drunken men who have preyed upon her, forth into the gutter. there, when day has come, the children of the neighbourhood crowd about her like scavengers about their dead prey, shouting and laughing at the sight of this wreck of womanhood, kicking her bruised and filthy body as it lies in the mud of the gutter! such spectacles of extreme brutality are possible here at the very gate of a cosmopolitan city, the mother of civilisation and queen of the fine arts, because of a new fact which was unknown to past centuries, namely, _the isolation of the masses of the poor_. in the middle ages, leprosy was isolated: the catholics isolated the hebrews in the ghetto; but poverty was never considered a peril and an infamy so great that it must be isolated. the homes of the poor were scattered among those of the rich and the contrast between these was a commonplace in literature up to our own times. indeed, when i was a child in school, teachers, for the purpose of moral education, frequently resorted to the illustration of the kind princess who sends help to the poor cottage next door, or of the good children from the great house who carry food to the sick woman in the neighbouring attic. to-day all this would be as unreal and artificial as a fairy tale. the poor may no longer learn from their more fortunate neighbours lessons in courtesy and good breeding, they no longer have the hope of help from them in cases of extreme need. we have herded them together far from us, without the walls, leaving them to learn of each other, in the abandon of desperation, the cruel lessons of brutality and vice. anyone in whom the social conscience is awake must see that we have thus created infected regions that threaten with deadly peril the city which, wishing to make all beautiful and shining according to an æsthetic and aristocratic ideal, has thrust without its walls whatever is ugly or diseased. when i passed for the first time through these streets, it was as if i found myself in a city upon which some great disaster had fallen. it seemed to me that the shadow of some recent struggle still oppressed the unhappy people who, with something very like terror in their pale faces, passed me in these silent streets. the very silence seemed to signify the life of a community interrupted, broken. not a carriage, not even the cheerful voice of the ever-present street vender, nor the sound of the hand-organ playing in the hope of a few pennies, not even these things, so characteristic of poor quarters, enter here to lighten this sad and heavy silence. observing these streets with their deep holes, the doorsteps broken and tumbling, we might almost suppose that this disaster had been in the nature of a great inundation which had carried the very earth away; but looking about us at the houses stripped of all decorations, the walls broken and scarred, we are inclined to think that it was perhaps an earthquake which has afflicted this quarter. then, looking still more closely, we see that in all this thickly settled neighbourhood there is not a shop to be found. so poor is the community that it has not been possible to establish even one of those popular bazars where necessary articles are sold at so low a price as to put them within the reach of anyone. the only shops of any sort are the low wine shops which open their evil-smelling doors to the passer-by. as we look upon all this, it is borne upon us that the disaster which has placed its weight of suffering upon these people is not a convulsion of nature, but poverty--poverty with its inseparable companion, vice. this unhappy and dangerous state of things, to which our attention is called at intervals by newspaper accounts of violent and immoral crime, stirs the hearts and consciences of many who come to undertake among these people some work of generous benevolence. one might almost say that every form of misery inspires a special remedy and that all have been tried here, from the attempt to introduce hygienic principles into each house, to the establishment of crêches, "children's houses," and dispensaries. but what indeed is benevolence? little more than an expression of sorrow; it is pity translated into action. the benefits of such a form of charity cannot be great, and through the absence of any continued income and the lack of organisation it is restricted to a small number of persons. the great and widespread peril of evil demands, on the other hand, a broad and comprehensive work directed toward the redemption of the entire community. only such an organisation, as, working for the good of others, shall itself grow and prosper through the general prosperity which it has made possible, can make a place for itself in this quarter and accomplish a permanent good work. it is to meet this dire necessity that the great and kindly work of the roman association of good building has been undertaken. the advanced and highly modern way in which this work is being carried on is due to edoardo talamo, director general of the association. his plans, so original, so comprehensive, yet so practical, are without counterpart in italy or elsewhere. this association was incorporated three years ago in rome, its plan being to acquire city tenements, remodel them, put them into a productive condition, and administer them as a good father of a family would. the first property acquired comprised a large portion of the quarter of san lorenzo, where to-day the association possesses fifty-eight houses, occupying a ground space of about , square metres, and containing, independent of the ground floor, , small apartments. thousands of people will in this way receive the beneficent influence of the protective reforms of the good building association. following its beneficent programme, the association set about transforming these old houses, according to the most modern standards, paying as much attention to questions related to hygiene and morals as to those relating to buildings. the constructional changes would make the property of real and lasting value, while the hygienic and moral transformation, would, through the improved condition of the inmates, make the rent from these apartments a more definite asset. the association of good building therefore decided upon a programme which would permit of a gradual attainment of their ideal. it is necessary to proceed slowly because it is not easy to empty a tenement house at a time when houses are scarce, and the humanitarian principles which govern the entire movement make it impossible to proceed more rapidly in this work of regeneration. so it is, that the association has up to the present time transformed only three houses in the quarter of san lorenzo. the plan followed in this transformation is as follows: a: to demolish in every building all portions of the structure not originally constructed with the idea of making homes, but, from a purely commercial standpoint, of making the rental roll larger. in other words, the new management tore down those parts of the building which encumbered the central court, thus doing away with dark, ill-ventilated apartments, and giving air and light to the remaining portion of the tenement. broad airy courts take the place of the inadequate air and light shafts, rendering the remaining apartments more valuable and infinitely more desirable. b: to increase the number of stairways, and to divide the room space in a more practical way. the large six or seven room suites are reduced to small apartments of one, two, or three rooms, and a kitchen. the importance of such changes may be recognised from the economic point of view of the proprietor as well as from the standpoint of the moral and material welfare of the tenant. increasing the number of stairways diminishes that abuse of walls and stairs inevitable where so many persons must pass up and down. the tenants more readily learn to respect the building and acquire habits of cleanliness and order. not only this, but in reducing the chances of contact among the inhabitants of the house, especially late at night, a great advance has been made in the matter of moral hygiene. the division of the house into small apartments has done much toward this moral regeneration. each family is thus set apart, _homes_ are made possible, while the menacing evil of subletting together with all its disastrous consequences of overcrowding and immorality is checked in the most radical way. on one side this arrangement lessens the burden of the individual lease holders, and on the other increases the income of the proprietor, who now receives those earnings which were the unlawful gain of the system of subletting. when the proprietor who originally rented an apartment of six rooms for a monthly rental of eight dollars, makes such an apartment over into three small, sunny, and airy suites consisting of one room and a kitchen, it is evident that he increases his income. the moral importance of this reform as it stands to-day is tremendous, for it has done away with those evil influences and low opportunities which arise from crowding and from promiscuous contact, and has brought to life among these people, for the first time, the gentle sentiment of feeling themselves free within their own homes, in the intimacy of the family. but the project of the association goes beyond even this. the house which it offers to its tenants is not only sunny and airy, but in perfect order and repair, almost shining, and as if perfumed with purity and freshness. these good things, however, carry with them a responsibility which the tenant must assume if he wishes to enjoy them. he must pay an actual tax of _care_ and _good will_. the tenant who receives a clean house must keep it so, must respect the walls from the big general entrance to the interior of his own little apartment. he who keeps his house in good condition receives the recognition and consideration due such a tenant. thus all the tenants unite in an ennobling warfare for practical hygiene, an end made possible by the simple task of _conserving_ the already perfect conditions. here indeed is something new! so far only our great national buildings have had a continued _maintenance fund_. here, in these houses offered to the people, the maintenance is confided to a hundred or so workingmen, that is, to all the occupants of the building. this care is almost perfect. the people keep the house in perfect condition, without a single spot. the building in which we find ourselves to-day has been for two years under the sole protection of the tenants, and the work of maintenance has been left entirely to them. yet few of our houses can compare in cleanliness and freshness with this home of the poor. the experiment has been tried and the result is remarkable. the people acquire together with the lore of home-making, that of cleanliness. they come, moreover, to wish to beautify their homes. the association helps this by placing growing plants and trees in the courts and about the halls. out of this honest rivalry in matters so productive of good, grows a species of pride new to this quarter; this is the pride which the entire body of tenants takes in having the best-cared-for building and in having risen to a higher and more civilised plane of living. they not only live in a house, but they _know how to live_, they _know how to respect_ the house in which they live. this first impulse has led to other reforms. from the clean home will come personal cleanliness. dirty furniture cannot be tolerated in a clean house, and those persons living in a permanently clean house will come to desire personal cleanliness. one of the most important hygienic reforms of the association is that of _the baths_. each remodeled tenement has a place set apart for bathrooms, furnished with tubs or shower, and having hot and cold water. all the tenants in regular turn may use these baths, as, for example, in various tenements the occupants go according to turn, to wash their clothes in the fountain in the court. this is a great convenience which invites the people to be clean. these hot and cold baths _within the house_ are a great improvement upon the general public baths. in this way we make possible to these people, at one and the same time, health and refinement, opening not only to the sun, but to progress, those dark habitations once the _vile caves_ of misery. but in striving to realise its ideal of a semi-gratuitous maintenance of its buildings, the association met with a difficulty in regard to those children under school age, who must often be left alone during the entire day while their parents went out to work. these little ones, not being able to understand the educative motives which taught their parents to respect the house, became ignorant little vandals, defacing the walls and stairs. and here we have another reform the expense of which may be considered as indirectly assumed by the tenants as was the care of the building. this reform may be considered as the most brilliant transformation of a tax which progress and civilisation have as yet devised. the "children's house" is earned by the parents through the care of the building. its expenses are met by the sum that the association would have otherwise been forced to spend upon repairs. a wonderful climax, this, of moral benefits received! within the "children's house," which belongs exclusively to those children under school age, working mothers may safely leave their little ones, and may proceed with a feeling of great relief and freedom to their own work. but this benefit, like that of the care of the house, is not conferred without a tax of care and of good will. [ ]the regulations posted on the walls announce it thus: [ ] see page . "the mothers are obliged to send their children to the 'children's house' clean, and to co-operate with the directress in the educational work." two obligations: namely, the physical and moral care of their own children. if the child shows through its conversation that the educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how to take advantage of their good opportunities. those who give themselves over to low-living, to fighting, and to brutality, shall feel upon them the weight of those little lives, so needing care. they shall feel that they themselves have once more cast into the darkness of neglect those little creatures who are the dearest part of the family. in other words, the parents must learn to _deserve_ the benefit of having within the house the great advantage of a school for their little ones. "good will," a willingness to meet the demands of the association is enough, for the directress is ready and willing to teach them how. the regulations say that the mother must go at least once a week, to confer with the directress, giving an account of her child, and accepting any helpful advice which the directress may be able to give. the advice thus given will undoubtedly prove most illuminating in regard to the child's health and education, since to each of the "children's houses" is assigned a physician as well as a directress. the directress is always at the disposition of the mothers, and her life, as a cultured and educated person, is a constant example to the inhabitants of the house, for she is obliged to live in the tenement and to be therefore a co-habitant with the families of all her little pupils. this is a fact of immense importance. among these almost savage people, into these houses where at night no one dared go about unarmed, there has come not only to teach, _but to live the very life they live_, a gentlewoman of culture, an educator by profession, who dedicates her time and her life to helping those about her! a true missionary, a moral queen among the people, she may, if she be possessed of sufficient tact and heart, reap an unheard-of harvest of good from her social work. this house is verily _new_; it would seem a dream impossible of realisation, but it has been tried. it is true that there have been before this attempts made by generous persons to go and live among the poor to civilise them. but such work is not practical, unless the house of the poor is hygienic, making it possible for people of better standards to live there. nor can such work succeed in its purpose unless some common advantage or interest unites all of the tenants in an effort toward better things. this tenement is new also because of the pedagogical organisation of the "children's house." this is not simply a place where the children are kept, not just an _asylum_, but a true school for their education, and its methods are inspired by the rational principles of scientific pedagogy. the physical development of the children is followed, each child being studied from the anthropological standpoint. linguistic exercises, a systematic sense-training, and exercises which directly fit the child for the duties of practical life, form the basis of the work done. the teaching is decidedly objective, and presents an unusual richness of didactic material. it is not possible to speak of all this in detail. i must, however, mention that there already exists in connection with the school a bathroom, where the children may be given hot or cold baths and where they may learn to take a partial bath, hands, face, neck, ears. wherever possible the association has provided a piece of ground in which the children may learn to cultivate the vegetables in common use. it is important that i speak here of the pedagogical progress attained by the "children's house" as an institution. those who are conversant with the chief problems of the school know that to-day much attention is given to a great principle, one that is ideal and almost beyond realisation,--the union of the family and the school in the matter of educational aims. but the family is always something far away from the school, and is almost always regarded as rebelling against its ideals. it is a species of phantom upon which the school can never lay its hands. the home is closed not only to pedagogical progress, but often to social progress. we see here for the first time the possibility of realising the long-talked-of pedagogical ideal. we have put _the school within the house_; and this is not all. we have placed it within the house as the _property of the collectivity_, leaving under the eyes of the parents the whole life of the teacher in the accomplishment of her high mission. this idea of the collective ownership of the school is new and very beautiful and profoundly educational. the parents know that the "children's house" is their property, and is maintained by a portion of the rent they pay. the mothers may go at any hour of the day to watch, to admire, or to meditate upon the life there. it is in every way a continual stimulus to reflection, and a fount of evident blessing and help to their own children. we may say that the mothers _adore_ the "children's house," and the directress. how many delicate and thoughtful attentions these good mothers show the teacher of their little ones! they often leave sweets or flowers upon the sill of the schoolroom window, as a silent token, reverently, almost religiously, given. and when after three years of such a novitiate, the mothers send their children to the common schools, they will be excellently prepared to co-operate in the work of education, and will have acquired a sentiment, rarely found even among the best classes; namely, the idea that they must _merit_ through their own conduct and with their own virtue, the possession of an educated son. another advance made by the "children's houses" as an institution is related to scientific pedagogy. this branch of pedagogy, heretofore, being based upon the anthropological study of the pupil whom it is to educate, has touched only a few of the positive questions which tend to transform education. for a man is not only a biological but a social product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of education, is the home. scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the environment within which this new generation grows! i believe, therefore, that in opening the house to the light of new truths, and to the progress of civilisation we have solved the problem of being able to modify directly, the _environment_ of the new generation, and have thus made it possible to apply, in a practical way, the fundamental principles of scientific pedagogy. the "children's house" marks still another triumph; it is the first step toward the _socialisation of the house_. the inmates find under their own roof the convenience of being able to leave their little ones in a place, not only safe, but where they have every advantage. and let it be remembered that _all_ the mothers in the tenement may enjoy this privilege, going away to their work with easy minds. until the present time only one class in society might have this advantage. rich women were able to go about their various occupations and amusements, leaving their children in the hands of a nurse or a governess. to-day the women of the people who live in these remodeled houses, may say, like the great lady, "i have left my son with the governess and the nurse." more than this, they may add, like the princess of the blood, "and the house physician watches over them and directs their sane and sturdy growth." these women, like the most advanced class of english and american mothers, possess a "biographical chart," which, filled for the mother by the directress and the doctor, gives her the most practical knowledge of her child's growth and condition. we are all familiar with the ordinary advantages of the communistic transformation of the general environment. for example, the collective use of railway carriages, of street lights, of the telephone, all these are great advantages. the enormous production of useful articles, brought about by industrial progress, makes possible to all, clean clothes, carpets, curtains, table-delicacies, better tableware, etc. the making of such benefits generally tends to level social caste. all this we have seen in its reality. but the communising of _persons_ is new. that the collectivity shall benefit from the services of the servant, the nurse, the teacher--this is a modern ideal. we have in the "children's houses" a demonstration of this ideal which is unique in italy or elsewhere. its significance is most profound, for it corresponds to a need of the times. we can no longer say that the convenience of leaving their children takes away from the mother a natural social duty of first importance; namely, that of caring for and educating her tender offspring. no, for to-day the social and economic evolution calls the working-woman to take her place among wage-earners, and takes away from her by force those duties which would be most dear to her! the mother must, in any event, leave her child, and often with the pain of knowing him to be abandoned. the advantages furnished by such institutions are not limited to the labouring classes, but extend also to the general middle-class, many of whom work with the brain. teachers, professors, often obliged to give private lessons after school hours, frequently leave their children to the care, of some rough and ignorant maid-of-all-work. indeed, the first announcement of the "children's house" was followed by a deluge of letters from persons of the better class demanding that these helpful reforms be extended to their dwellings. we are, then, communising a "maternal function," a feminine duty, within the house. we may see here in this practical act the solving of many of woman's problems which have seemed to many impossible of solution. what then will become of the home, one asks, if the woman goes away from it? the home will be transformed and will assume the functions of the woman. i believe that in the future of society other forms of communistic life will come. take, for example, the infirmary; woman is the natural nurse for the dear ones of her household. but who does not know how often in these days she is obliged to tear herself unwillingly from the bedside of her sick to go to her work? competition is great, and her absence from her post threatens the tenure of the position from which she draws the means of support. to be able to leave the sick one in a "house-infirmary," to which she may have access any free moments she may have, and where she is at liberty to watch during the night, would be an evident advantage to such a woman. and how great would be the progress made in the matter of family hygiene, in all that relates to isolation and disinfection! who does not know the difficulties of a poor family when one child is ill of some contagions disease, and should be isolated from the others? often such a family may have no kindred or friends in the city to whom the other children may be sent. much more distant, but not impossible, is the communal kitchen, where the dinner ordered in the morning is sent at the proper time, by means of a dumb-waiter, to the family dining-room. indeed, this has been successfully tried in america. such a reform would be of the greatest advantage to those families of the middle-class who must confide their health and the pleasures of the table to the hands of an ignorant servant who ruins the food. at present, the only alternative in such cases is to go outside the home to some café where a cheap table d'hôte may be had. indeed, the transformation of the house must compensate for the loss in the family of the presence of the woman who has become a social wage-earner. in this way the house will become a centre, drawing into itself all those good things which have hitherto been lacking: schools, public baths, hospitals, etc. thus the tendency will be to change the tenement houses, which have been places of vice and peril, into centres of education, of refinement, of comfort. this will be helped if, besides the schools for the children, there may grow up also _clubs_ and reading-rooms for the inhabitants, especially for the men, who will find there a way to pass the evening pleasantly and decently. the tenement-club, as possible and as useful in all social classes as is the "children's house," will do much toward closing the gambling-houses and saloons to the great moral advantage of the people. and i believe that the association of good building will before long establish such clubs in its reformed tenements here in the quarter of san lorenzo; clubs where the tenants may find newspapers and books, and where they may hear simple and helpful lectures. we are, then, very far from the dreaded dissolution of the home and of the family, through the fact that woman has been forced by changed social and economic conditions to give her time and strength to remunerative work. the home itself assumes the gentle feminine attributes of the domestic housewife. the day may come when the tenant, having given to the proprietor of the house a certain sum, shall receive in exchange whatever is necessary to the _comfort_ of life; in other words, the administration shall become the _steward_ of the family. the house, thus considered, tends to assume in its evolution a significance more exalted than even the english word "home" expresses. it does not consist of walls alone, though these walls be the pure and shining guardians of that intimacy which is the sacred symbol of the family. the home shall become more than this. it lives! it has a soul. it may be said to embrace its inmates with the tender, consoling arms of woman. it is the giver of moral life, of blessings; it cares for, it educates and feeds the little ones. within it, the tired workman shall find rest and newness of life. he shall find there the intimate life of the family, and its happiness. the new woman, like the butterfly come forth from the chrysalis, shall be liberated from all those attributes which once made her desirable to man only as the source of the material blessings of existence. she shall be, like man, an individual, a free human being, a social worker; and, like man, she shall seek blessing and repose within the house, the house which has been reformed and communised. she shall wish to be loved for herself and not as a giver of comfort and repose. she shall wish a love free from every form of servile labour. the goal of human love is not the egotistical end of assuring its own satisfaction--it is the sublime goal of multiplying the forces of the free spirit, making it almost divine, and, within such beauty and light, perpetuating the species. this ideal love is made incarnate by frederick nietzsche, in the woman of zarathustra, who conscientiously wished her son to be better than she. "why do you desire me?" she asks the man. "perhaps because of the perils of a solitary life? "in that case go far from me. i wish the man who has conquered himself, who has made his soul great. i wish the man who has conserved a clean and robust body. i wish the man who desires to unite with me, body and soul, to create a son! a son better, more perfect, stronger, than any created heretofore!" to better the species consciously, cultivating his own health, his own virtue, this should be the goal of man's married life. it is a sublime concept of which, as yet, few think. and the socialised home of the future, living, provident, kindly; educator and comforter; is the true and worthy home of those human mates who wish to better the species, and to send the race forward triumphant into the eternity of life! rules and regulations of the "children's houses" the roman association of good building hereby establishes within its tenement house number, a "children's house," in which may be gathered together all children under common school age, belonging to the families of the tenants. the chief aim of the "children's house" is to offer, free of charge, to the children of those parents who are obliged to absent themselves for their work, the personal care which the parents are not able to give. in the "children's house" attention is given to the education, the health, the physical and moral development of the children. this work is carried on in a way suited to the age of the children. there shall be connected with the "children's house" a directress, a physician, and a caretaker. the programme and hours of the "children's house" shall be fixed by the directress. there may be admitted to the "children's house" all the children in the tenement between the ages of three and seven. the parents who wish to avail themselves of the advantages of the "children's house" pay nothing. they must, however, assume these binding obligations: (a) to send their children to the "children's house" at the appointed time, clean in body and clothing, and provided with a suitable apron. (b) to show the greatest respect and deference toward the directress and toward all persons connected with the "children's house," and to co-operate with the directress herself in the education of the children. once a week, at least, the mothers may talk with the directress, giving her information concerning the home life of the child, and receiving helpful advice from her. there shall be expelled from the "children's house": (a) those children who present themselves unwashed, or in soiled clothing. (b) those who show themselves to be incorrigible. (c) those whose parents fail in respect to the persons connected with the "children's house," or who destroy through bad conduct the educational work of the institution. chapter iv pedagogical methods used in the "children's houses" as soon as i knew that i had at my disposal a class of little children, it was my wish to make of this school a field for scientific experimental pedagogy and child psychology. i started with a view in which wundt concurs; namely, that child psychology does not exist. indeed, experimental researches in regard to childhood, as, for example, those of preyer and baldwin, have been made upon not more than two or three subjects, children of the investigators. moreover, the instruments of psychometry must be greatly modified and simplified before they can be used with children, who do not lend themselves passively as subjects for experimentation. child psychology can be established only through the method of external observation. we must renounce all idea of making any record of internal states, which can be revealed only by the introspection of the subject himself. the instruments of psychometric research, as applied to pedagogy, have up to the present time been limited to the esthesiometric phase of the study. my intention was to keep in touch with the researches of others, but to make myself independent of them, proceeding to my work without preconceptions of any kind. i retained as the only essential, the affirmation, or, rather, the definition of wundt, that "all methods of experimental psychology may be reduced to one; namely, carefully recorded observation of the subject." treating of children, another factor must necessarily intervene: the study of the development. here too, i retained the same general criterion, but without clinging to any dogma about the activity of the child according to age. anthropological consideration in regard to physical development, my first thought was given to the regulating of anthropometric observations, and to the selection of the most important observations to be made. i designed an anthropometer provided with the metric scale, varying between . metre and . metres. a small stool, centimetres high, could be placed upon the floor of the anthropometer for measurements taken in a sitting position. i now advise making the anthropometer with a platform on either side of the pole bearing the scale, so that on one side the total stature can be measured, and on the other the height of the body when seated. in the second case, the zero is indicated at centimetres; that is, it corresponds to the seat of the stool, which is fixed. the indicators on the vertical post are independent one of the other and this makes it possible to measure two children at the same time. in this way the inconvenience and waste of time caused by having to move the seat about, is obviated, and also the trouble of having to calculate the difference in the metric scale. having thus facilitated the technique of the researches, i decided to take the measurements of the children's stature, seated and standing, every month, and in order to have these regulated as exactly as possible in their relation to development, and also to give greater regularity to the research work of the teacher, i made a rule that the measurements should be taken on the day on which the child completed each month of his age. for this purpose i designed a register arranged on the following plan:-- ========================================================== || september | october ---------++--------------------+-------------------------- day of || stature | stature etc. month |+----------+---------+----------+--------------- || standing | sitting | standing | sitting ---------++----------+---------+----------+--------------- || | | | |+----------+---------+----------+--------------- || | | | |+----------+---------+----------+--------------- || | | | |+----------+---------+----------+--------------- || | | | |+----------+---------+----------+--------------- etc. || | | | ---------++----------+---------+----------+--------------- the spaces opposite each number are used to register the name of the child born on that day of the month. thus the teacher knows which scholars she must measure on the days which are marked on the calendar, and she fills in his measurements to correspond with the month in which he was born. in this way a most exact registration can be arrived at without having the teacher feel that she is overburdened, or fatigued. with regard to the weight of the child, i have arranged that it shall be taken every week on a pair of scales which i have placed in the dressing-room where the children are given their bath. according to the day on which the child is born, monday, tuesday, wednesday, etc., we have him weighed when he is ready to take a bath. thus the children's baths (no small matter when we consider a class of fifty) are sub-divided into seven days, and from three to five children go to the bath every day. certainly, theoretically, a daily bath would be desirable, but in order to manage this a large bath or a number of small ones would be necessary, so that a good many children could be bathed at once. even a weekly bath entails many difficulties, and sometimes has to be given up. in any case, i have distributed the taking of the weight in the order stated with the intention of thus arranging for and making sure of periodical baths.[ ] [ ] incidentally, i may say, that i have invented a means of bathing children contemporaneously, without having a large bath. in order to manage this, i thought of having a long trough with supports at the bottom, on which small, separate tubs could rest, with rather large holes in the bottom. the little tubs are filled from the large trough, into which the water runs and then goes into all the little tubs together, by the law of the levelling of liquids, going through the holes in the bottom. when the water is settled, it does not pass from tub to tub, and the children will each have their own bath. the emptying of the trough brings with it the simultaneous emptying of the little tubs, which being of light metal, will be easily moved from the bottom of the big tub, in order to clean it. it is not difficult to imagine arranging a cork for the hole at the bottom. these are only projects for the future! the form here given shows the register which we use in recording the weight of the children. every page of the register corresponds to a month. it seems to me that the anthropological measurements, the taking and recording of which i have just described, should be the only ones with which the schoolmistress need occupy herself; and, therefore, the only ones which should be taken actually within the school. it is my plan that other measurements should be taken by a physician, who either is, or is preparing to be, a specialist in infant anthropology. in the meantime, i take these special measurements myself. ====================================================== | september +----------+----------+----------+---------- | st week | nd week | rd week | th week | lbs. | lbs. | lbs. | lbs. +----------+----------+----------+---------- monday____|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ tuesday___|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ wednesday_|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ ______|__________|__________|__________|__________ etc. | | | | | | | | ----------+----------+----------+----------+---------- the examination made by the physician must necessarily be complex, and to facilitate and regulate the taking of these measurements i have designed and had printed biological charts, of which i here give an example. _number_ _____________ _date_ _________________ _name and surname_ ______________________________ _age_ ________ _name of parents_ ________ _mother's age_ ___ _father's age_ ___ _professions_ __________________________________________ _details of hereditary antecedents_ ____________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _personal antecedents_ ________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ anthropological notes +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | standing | weight | chest | seated | index of | ponderal | | stature | | meas. | stature | stature[ ] | index[ ] | |----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------| | | | | | | | |----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------| | | | | | | | +----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------+ +------------------------------------+ | head | |----------------+-------------------| | | dia. | dia. | cephalic | | cir. | front | across | index | | | to back | | | |------+---------+--------+----------| | | | | | |------+---------+--------+----------| | | | | | +------+---------+--------+----------+ _physical constitution_ ________________________________ _condition of muscles_ ________________________________ _colour of skin_ ______________________________________ _colour of hair_ ______________________________________ notes _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ [ ] for the index of stature dr. montessori combines the seated and standing statures. [ ] the ponderal index is found by combining the height and weight. as will be seen, these charts are very simple. i made them so because i wished the doctor and the schoolmistress to be able to use them freely and independently. by this method the anthropometrical records are arranged in an orderly way, while the simplicity of the mechanism, and the clearness of the charts, guarantee the making of such observations as i have considered fundamental. referring to the physician's biographical chart, i advise that once a year the following measurements be taken: circumference of the head; the two greater diameters of the head; the circumference of the chest; and the cephalic, ponderal, and stature indices. further information concerning the selection of these measurements may be found in my treatise, "antropologia pedagogica." the physician is asked to take these measurements during the week, or at least within the month, in which the child completes a year of his age, and, if it is possible, on the birthday itself. in this way the task of the physician will also be made easier, because of its regularity. we have, at the most, fifty children in each of our schools, and the birthdays of these scattered over the days of the year make it possible for the physician to take his measurements from time to time, so that the burden of his work is not heavy. it is the duty of the teacher to inform the doctor of the birthdays of the children. the taking of these anthropometrical measurements has also an educational side to it, for the pupils, when they leave the "children's house," know how to answer with clearness and certainty the following questions:-- on what day of the week were you born? on what day of the month? when does your birthday come? and with all this they will have acquired habits of order, and, above all, they will have formed the habit of observing themselves. indeed, i may say here, that the children take a great pleasure in being measured; at the first glance of the teacher and at the word stature, the child begins instantly to take off his shoes, laughing and running to place himself upon the platform of the anthropometer; placing himself of his own accord in the normal position so perfectly that the teacher needs only to arrange the indicator and read the result. aside from the measurements which the physician takes with the ordinary instruments (calipers and metal yard measure), he makes observations upon the children's colouring, condition of their muscles, state of their lymphatic glands, the condition of the blood, etc. he notices any malformations; describes any pathological conditions with care (any tendency to rickets, infant paralysis, defective sight, etc.). this objective study of the child will guide the doctor when he finds it advisable to talk with the parents concerning its condition. following this, when the doctor has found it desirable, he makes a thorough, sanitary inspection of the home of the child, prescribing necessary treatment and eventually doing away with such troubles as eczema, inflammation of the ear, feverish conditions, intestinal disturbances, etc. this careful following of the case in hand is greatly assisted by the existence of the _dispensary within the house_, which makes feasible direct treatment and continual observation. i have found that the usual question asked patients who present themselves at the clinics, are not adapted for use in our schools, as the members of the families living in these tenements are for the greater part perfectly normal. i therefore encourage the directress of the school to gather from her conversations with the mothers information of a more practical sort. she informs herself as to the education of the parents, their habits, the wages earned, the money spent for household purposes, etc., and from all this she outlines a history of each family, much on the order of those used by le-play. this method is, of course, practical only where the directress lives among the families of her scholars. in every case, however, the physician's advice to the mothers concerning the hygienic care of each particular child, as well as his directions concerning hygiene in general, will prove most helpful. the directress should act as the go-between in these matters, since she is in the confidence of the mothers, and since from her, such advice comes naturally. environment: schoolroom furnishings the method of _observation_ must undoubtedly include the _methodical observation_ of the morphological growth of the pupils. but let me repeat that, while this element necessarily enters, it is not upon this particular kind of observation that the method is established. the method of observation is established upon one fundamental base--_the liberty of the pupils in their spontaneous manifestations_. with this in view, i first turned my attention to the question of environment, and this, of course, included the furnishing of the schoolroom. in considering an ample playground with space for a garden as an important part of this school environment, i am not suggesting anything new. the novelty lies, perhaps, in my idea for the use of this open-air space, which is to be in direct communication with the schoolroom, so that the children may be free to go and come as they like, throughout the entire day. i shall speak of this more fully later on. the principal modification in the matter of school furnishings is the abolition of desks, and benches or stationary chairs. i have had tables made with wide, solid, octagonal legs, spreading in such a way that the tables are at the same time solidly firm and very light, so light, indeed, that two four-year-old children can easily carry them about. these tables are rectangular and sufficiently large to accommodate two children on the long side, there being room for three if they sit rather close together. there are smaller tables at which one child may work alone. i also designed and had manufactured little chairs. my first plan for these was to have them cane seated, but experience has shown the wear on these to be so great, that i now have chairs made entirely of wood. these are very light and of an attractive shape. in addition to these, i have in each schoolroom a number of comfortable little armchairs, some of wood and some of wicker. another piece of our school furniture consists of a little washstand, so low that it can be used by even a three-year-old child. this is painted with a white waterproof enamel and, besides the broad, upper and lower shelves which hold the little white enameled basins and pitchers, there are small side shelves for the soap-dishes, nail-brushes, towels, etc. there is also a receptacle into which the basins may be emptied. wherever possible, a small cupboard provides each child with a space where he may keep his own soap, nail-brush, tooth-brush, etc. in each of our schoolrooms we have provided a series of long low cupboards, especially designed for the reception of the didactic materials. the doors of these cupboards open easily, and the care of the materials is confided to the children. the tops of these cases furnish room for potted plants, small aquariums, or for the various toys with which the children are allowed to play freely. we have ample blackboard space, and these boards are so hung as to be easily used by the smallest child. each blackboard is provided with a small case in which are kept the chalk, and the white cloths which we use instead of the ordinary erasers. above the blackboards are hung attractive pictures, chosen carefully, representing simple scenes in which children would naturally be interested. among the pictures in our "children's houses" in rome we have hung a copy of raphael's "madonna della seggiola," and this picture we have chosen as the emblem of the "children's houses." for indeed, these "children's houses" represent not only social progress, but universal human progress, and are closely related to the elevation of the idea of motherhood, to the progress of woman and to the protection of her offspring. in this beautiful conception, raphael has not only shown us the madonna as a divine mother holding in her arms the babe who is greater than she, but by the side of this symbol of all motherhood, he has placed the figure of st. john, who represents humanity. so in raphael's picture we see humanity rendering homage to maternity,--maternity, the sublime fact in the definite triumph of humanity. in addition to this beautiful symbolism, the picture has a value as being one of the greatest works of art of italy's greatest artist. and if the day shall come when the "children's houses" shall be established throughout the world, it is our wish that this picture of raphael's shall have its place in each of the schools, speaking eloquently of the country in which they originated. the children, of course, cannot comprehend the symbolic significance of the "madonna of the chair," but they will see something more beautiful than that which they feel in more ordinary pictures, in which they see mother, father, and children. and the constant companionship with this picture will awaken in their heart a religious impression. this, then, is the environment which i have selected for the children we wish to educate. i know the first objection which will present itself to the minds of persons accustomed to the old-time methods of discipline;--the children in these schools, moving about, will overturn the little tables and chairs, producing noise and disorder; but this is a prejudice which has long existed in the minds of those dealing with little children, and for which there is no real foundation. swaddling clothes have for many centuries been considered necessary to the new-born babe, walking-chairs to the child who is learning to walk. so in the school, we still believe it necessary to have heavy desks and chairs fastened to the floor. all these things are based upon the idea that the child should grow in immobility, and upon the strange prejudice that, in order to execute any educational movement, we must maintain a special position of the body;--as we believe that we must assume a special position when we are about to pray. our little tables and our various types of chairs are all light and easily transported, and we permit the child to _select_ the position which he finds most comfortable. he can _make himself comfortable_ as well as seat himself in his own place. and this freedom is not only an external sign of liberty, but a means of education. if by an awkward movement a child upsets a chair, which falls noisily to the floor, he will have an evident proof of his own incapacity; the same movement had it taken place amid stationary benches would have passed unnoticed by him. thus the child has some means by which he can correct himself, and having done so he will have before him the actual proof of the power he has gained: the little tables and chairs remain firm and silent each in its own place. it is plainly seen that the _child has learned to command his movements_. in the old method, the proof of discipline attained lay in a fact entirely contrary to this; that is, in the immobility and silence of the child himself. immobility and silence which _hindered_ the child from learning to move with grace and with discernment, and left him so untrained, that, when he found himself in an environment where the benches and chairs were not nailed to the floor, he was not able to move about without overturning the lighter pieces of furniture. in the "children's houses" the child will not only learn to move gracefully and properly, but will come to understand the reason for such deportment. the ability to move which he acquires here will be of use to him all his life. while he is still a child, he becomes capable of conducting himself correctly, and yet, with perfect freedom. the directress of the casa dei bambini at milan constructed under one of the windows a long, narrow shelf upon which she placed the little tables containing the metal geometric forms used in the first lessons in design. but the shelf was too narrow, and it often happened that the children in selecting the pieces which they wished to use would allow one of the little tables to fall to the floor, thus upsetting with great noise all the metal pieces which it held. the directress intended to have the shelf changed, but the carpenter was slow in coming, and while waiting for him she discovered that the children had learned to handle these materials so carefully that in spite of the narrow and sloping shelf, the little tables no longer fell to the floor. the children, by carefully directing their movements, had overcome the defect in this piece of furniture. the simplicity or imperfection of external objects often serves to develop the _activity_ and the dexterity of the pupils. this has been one of the surprises of our method as applied in the "children's houses." it all seems very logical, and now that it has been actually tried and put into words, it will no doubt seem to everyone as simple as the egg of christopher columbus. chapter v. discipline the pedagogical method of _observation_ has for its base the _liberty_ of the child; and _liberty is activity_. discipline must come through liberty. here is a great principle which is difficult for followers of common-school methods to understand. how shall one obtain _discipline_ in a class of free children? certainly in our system, we have a concept of discipline very different from that commonly accepted. if discipline is founded upon liberty, the discipline itself must necessarily be _active_. we do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. he is an individual _annihilated_, not _disciplined_. we call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. such a concept of _active discipline_ is not easy either to comprehend or to apply. but certainly it contains a great _educational_ principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility. a special technique is necessary to the teacher who is to lead the child along such a path of discipline, if she is to make it possible for him to continue in this way all his life, advancing indefinitely toward perfect self-mastery. since the child now learns to _move_ rather than to _sit still_, he prepares himself not for the school, but for life; for he becomes able, through habit and through practice, to perform easily and correctly the simple acts of social or community life. the discipline to which the child habituates himself here is, in its character, not limited to the school environment but extends to society. the liberty of the child should have as its _limit_ the collective interest; as its _form_, what we universally consider good breeding. we must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts. but all the rest,--every manifestation having a useful scope,--whatever it be, and under whatever form it expresses itself, must not only be permitted, but must be _observed_ by the teacher. here lies the essential point; from her scientific preparation, the teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. in our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity, and of absolute _respect_ for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. the teacher must understand and _feel_ her position of _observer_: the _activity_ must lie in the _phenomenon_. such principles assuredly have a place in schools for little children who are exhibiting the first psychic manifestations of their lives. we cannot know the consequences of suffocating a _spontaneous action_ at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate _life itself_. humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals; and we must _respect_ religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality. if any educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to _help_ toward the complete unfolding of this life. to be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the _arrest_ of _spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks_. it is of course understood, that here we do not speak of useless or dangerous acts, for these must be _suppressed_, _destroyed_. actual training and practice are necessary to fit for this method teachers who have not been prepared for scientific observation, and such training is especially necessary to those who have been accustomed to the old domineering methods of the common school. my experiences in training teachers for the work in my schools did much to convince me of the great distance between these methods and those. even an intelligent teacher, who understands the principle, finds much difficulty in putting it into practice. she can not understand that her new task is apparently _passive_, like that of the astronomer who sits immovable before the telescope while the worlds whirl through space. this idea, that _life acts of itself_, and that in order to study it, to divine its secrets or to direct its activity, it is necessary to observe it and to understand it without intervening--this idea, i say, is very difficult for anyone to _assimilate_ and _to put into practice_. the teacher has too thoroughly learned to be the one free activity of the school; it has for too long been virtually her duty to suffocate the activity of her pupils. when in the first days in one of the "children's houses" she does not obtain order and silence, she looks about her embarrassed as if asking the public to excuse her, and calling upon those present to testify to her innocence. in vain do we repeat to her that the disorder of the first moment is necessary. and finally, when we oblige her to do nothing but _watch_, she asks if she had not better resign, since she is no longer a teacher. but when she begins to find it her duty to discern which are the acts to hinder and which are those to observe, the teacher of the old school feels a great void within herself and begins to ask if she will not be inferior to her new task. in fact, she who is not prepared finds herself for a long time abashed and impotent; whereas the broader the teacher's scientific culture and practice in experimental psychology, the sooner will come for her the marvel of unfolding life, and her interest in it. notari, in his novel, "my millionaire uncle," which is a criticism of modern customs, gives with that quality of vividness which is peculiar to him, a most eloquent example of the old-time methods of discipline. the "uncle" when a child was guilty of such a number of disorderly acts that he practically upset the whole town, and in desperation he was confined in a school. here "fufu," as he was called, experiences his first wish to be kind, and feels the first moving of his soul when he is near to the pretty little fufetta, and learns that she is hungry and has no luncheon. "he glanced around, looked at fufetta, rose, took his little lunch basket, and without saying a word placed it in her lap. "then he ran away from her, and, without knowing why he did so, hung his head and burst into tears. "my uncle did not know how to explain to himself the reason for this sudden outburst. "he had seen for the first time two kind eyes full of sad tears, and he had felt moved within himself, and at the same time a great shame had rushed over him; the shame of eating near to one who had nothing to eat. "not knowing how to express the impulse of his heart, nor what to say in asking her to accept the offer of his little basket, nor how to invent an excuse to justify his offering it to her, he remained the victim of this first deep movement of his little soul. "fufetta, all confused, ran to him quickly. with great gentleness she drew away the arm in which he had hidden his face. "'do not cry, fufu,' she said to him softly, almost as if pleading with him. she might have been speaking to her beloved rag doll, so motherly and intent was her little face, and so full of gentle authority, her manner. "then the little girl kissed him, and my uncle yielding to the influence which had filled his heart, put his arms around her neck, and, still silent and sobbing, kissed her in return. at last, sighing deeply, he wiped from his face and eyes the damp traces of his emotion, and smiled again. "a strident voice called out from the other end of the courtyard: "'here, here, you two down there--be quick with you; inside, both of you!' "it was the teacher, the guardian. she crushed that first gentle stirring in the soul of a rebel with the same blind brutality that she would have used toward two children engaged in a fight. "it was the time for all to go back into the school--and everybody had to obey the rule." thus i saw my teachers act in the first days of my practice school in the "children's houses." they almost involuntarily recalled the children to immobility without _observing_ and _distinguishing_ the nature of the movements they repressed. there was, for example, a little girl who gathered her companions about her and then, in the midst of them, began to talk and gesticulate. the teacher at once ran to her, took hold of her arms, and told her to be still; but i, observing the child, saw that she was playing at being teacher or mother to the others, and teaching them the morning prayer, the invocation to the saints, and the sign of the cross: she already showed herself as a _director_. another child, who continually made disorganised and misdirected movements, and who was considered abnormal, one day, with an expression of intense attention, set about moving the tables. instantly they were upon him to make him stand still because he made too much noise. yet this was one of the _first manifestations_, in this child, of _movements_ that were _co-ordinated_ and _directed toward a useful end_, and it was therefore an action that should have been respected. in fact, after this the child began to be quiet and happy like the others whenever he had any small objects to move about and to arrange upon his desk. it often happened that while the directress replaced in the boxes various materials that had been used, a child would draw near, picking up the objects, with the evident desire of imitating the teacher. the first impulse was to send the child back to her place with the remark, "let it alone; go to your seat." yet the child expressed by this act a desire to be useful; the time, with her, was ripe for a lesson in order. one day, the children had gathered themselves, laughing and talking, into a circle about a basin of water containing some floating toys. we had in the school a little boy barely two and a half years old. he had been left outside the circle, alone, and it was easy to see that he was filled with intense curiosity. i watched him from a distance with great interest; he first drew near to the other children and tried to force his way among them, but he was not strong enough to do this, and he then stood looking about him. the expression of thought on his little face was intensely interesting. i wish that i had had a camera so that i might have photographed him. his eye lighted upon a little chair, and evidently he made up his mind to place it behind the group of children and then to climb up on it. he began to move toward the chair, his face illuminated with hope, but at that moment the teacher seized him brutally (or, perhaps, she would have said, gently) in her arms, and lifting him up above the heads of the other children showed him the basin of water, saying, "come, poor little one, you shall see too!" undoubtedly the child, seeing the floating toys, did not experience the joy that he was about to feel through conquering the obstacle with his own force. the sight of those objects could be of no advantage to him, while his intelligent efforts would have developed his inner powers. the teacher _hindered_ the child, in this case, from educating himself, without giving him any compensating good in return. the little fellow had been about to feel himself a conqueror, and he found himself held within two imprisoning arms, impotent. the expression of joy, anxiety, and hope, which had interested me so much faded from his face and left on it the stupid expression of the child who knows that others will act for him. when the teachers were weary of my observations, they began to allow the children to do whatever they pleased. i saw children with their feet on the tables, or with their fingers in their noses, and no intervention was made to correct them. i saw others push their companions, and i saw dawn in the faces of these an expression of violence; and not the slightest attention on the part of the teacher. then i had to intervene to show with what absolute rigour it is necessary to hinder, and little by little suppress, all those things which we must not do, so that the child may come to discern clearly between good and evil. if discipline is to be lasting, its foundations must be laid in this way and these first days are the most difficult for the directress. the first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between _good_ and _evil_; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound _good_ with _immobility_, and _evil_ with _activity_, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline. and all this because our aim is to discipline _for activity_, _for work_, _for good_; not for _immobility_, not for _passivity_, not for _obedience_. a room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed. to seat the children in rows, as in the common schools, to assign to each little one a place, and to propose that they shall sit thus quietly observant of the order of the whole class as an assemblage--this can be attained later, as _the starting place_ of _collective education_. for also, in life, it sometimes happens that we must all remain seated and quiet; when, for example, we attend a concert or a lecture. and we know that even to us, as grown people, this costs no little sacrifice. if we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to _his own place_, _in order_, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a _good thing_ to be thus placed in order, that it is a _good and pleasing arrangement in the room_, this ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs--then their remaining in their places, _quiet_ and _silent_, is the result of a species of _lesson_, not an _imposition_. to make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practice, to have them _assimilate a principle of collective order_--that is the important thing. if, after they have understood this idea, they rise, speak, change to another place, they no longer do this without knowing and without thinking, but they do it because they _wish_ to rise, to speak, etc.; that is, from that _state of repose and order_, well understood, they depart in order to undertake _some voluntary action_; and knowing that there are actions which are prohibited, this will give them a new impulse to remember to discriminate between good and evil. the movements of the children from the state of order become always more co-ordinated and perfect with the passing of the days; in fact, they learn to reflect upon their own acts. now (with the idea of order understood by the children) the observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered--this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions; it is the only one in which she must read and study if she is to become a real educator. for the child with such exercises makes, to a certain extent, a selection of his own _tendencies_, which were at first confused in the unconscious disorder of his movements. it is remarkable how clearly _individual differences_ show themselves, if we proceed in this way; the child, conscious and free, _reveals himself_. there are those who remain quietly in their seats, apathetic, or drowsy; others who leave their places to quarrel, to fight, or to overturn the various blocks and toys, and then there are those others who set out to fulfil a definite and determined act--moving a chair to some particular spot and sitting down in it, moving one of the unused tables and arranging upon it the game they wish to play. our idea of liberty for the child cannot be the simple concept of liberty we use in the observation of plants, insects, etc. the child, because of the peculiar characteristics of helplessness with which he is born, and because of his qualities as a social individual is circumscribed by _bonds_ which _limit_ his activity. an educational method that shall have _liberty_ as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of these various obstacles. in other words, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish, in a rational manner, the _social bonds_, which limit his activity. little by little, as the child grows in such an atmosphere, his spontaneous manifestations will become more _clear, with the clearness of truth_, revealing his nature. for all these reasons, the first form of educational intervention must tend to lead the child toward independence. independence no one can be free unless he is independent: therefore, the first, active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence. little children, from the moment in which they are weaned, are making their way toward independence. what is a weaned child? in reality it is a child that has become independent of the mother's breast. instead of this one source of nourishment he will find various kinds of food; for him the means of existence are multiplied, and he can to some extent make a selection of his food, whereas he was at first limited absolutely to one form of nourishment. nevertheless, he is still dependent, since he is not yet able to walk, and cannot wash and dress himself, and since he is not yet able to _ask_ for things in a language which is clear and easily understood. he is still in this period to a great extent the _slave_ of everyone. by the age of three, however, the child should have been able to render himself to a great extent _independent_ and free. that we have not yet thoroughly assimilated the highest concept of the term _independence_, is due to the fact that the social form in which we live is still _servile_. in an age of civilisation where servants exist, the concept of that _form of life_ which is _independence_ cannot take root or develop freely. even so in the time of slavery, the concept of liberty was distorted and darkened. our servants are not our dependents, rather it is we who are dependent upon them. it is not possible to accept universally as a part of our social structure such a deep human error without feeling the general effects of it in the form of moral inferiority. we often believe ourselves to be independent simply because no one commands us, and because we command others; but the nobleman who needs to call a servant to his aid is really a dependent through his own inferiority. the paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition. any nation that accepts the idea of servitude and believes that it is an advantage for man to be served by man, admits servility as an instinct, and indeed we all too easily lend ourselves to _obsequious service_, giving to it such complimentary names as _courtesy_, _politeness_, _charity_. in reality, _he who is served is limited_ in his independence. this concept will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; "i do not wish to be served, _because_ i am not an impotent." and this idea must be gained before men can feel themselves to be really free. any pedagogical action, if it is to be efficacious in the training of little children, must tend to _help_ the children to advance upon this road of independence. we must help them to learn to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down stairs, to lift up fallen objects, to dress and undress themselves, to bathe themselves, to speak distinctly, and to express their own needs clearly. we must give such help as shall make it possible for children to achieve the satisfaction of their own individual aims and desires. all this is a part of education for independence. we habitually _serve_ children; and this is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous, since it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity. we are inclined to believe that children are like puppets, and we wash them and feed them as if they were dolls. we do not stop to think that the child _who does not do, does not know how to do_. he must, nevertheless, do these things, and nature has furnished him with the physical means for carrying on these various activities, and with the intellectual means for learning how to do them. and our duty toward him is, in every case, that of _helping him_ to make a conquest of such useful acts as nature intended he should perform for himself. the mother who feeds her child without making the least effort to teach him to hold the spoon for himself and to try to find his mouth with it, and who does not at least eat herself, inviting the child to look and see how she does it, is not a good mother. she offends the fundamental human dignity of her son,--she treats him as if he were a doll, when he is, instead, a man confided by nature to her care. who does not know that to _teach_ a child to feed himself, to wash and dress himself, is a much more tedious and difficult work, calling for infinitely greater patience, than feeding, washing and dressing the child one's self? but the former is the work of an educator, the latter is the easy and inferior work of a servant. not only is it easier for the mother, but it is very dangerous for the child, since it doses the way and puts obstacles in the path of the life which is developing. the ultimate consequences of such an attitude on the part of the parent may be very serious indeed. the grand gentleman who has too many servants not only grows constantly more and more dependent upon them, until he is, finally, actually their slave, but his muscles grow weak through inactivity and finally lose their natural capacity for action. the mind of one who does not work for that which he needs, but commands it from others, grows heavy and sluggish. if such a man should some day awaken to the fact of his inferior position and should wish to regain once more his own independence, he would find that he had no longer the force to do so. these dangers should be presented to the parents of the privileged social classes, if their children are to use independently and for right the special power which is theirs. needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces. oriental women wear trousers, it is true, and european women, petticoats; but the former, even more than the latter, are taught as a part of their education the art of _not moving_. such an attitude toward woman leads to the fact that man works not only for himself, but for woman. and the woman wastes her natural strength and activity and languishes in slavery. she is not only maintained and served, she is, besides, diminished, belittled, in that individuality which is hers by right of her existence as a human being. as an individual member of society, she is a cypher. she is rendered deficient in all those powers and resources which tend to the preservation of life. let me illustrate this: a carriage containing a father, mother, and child, is going along a country road. an armed brigand stops the carriage with the well-known phrase, "your money or your life." placed in this situation, the three persons in the carriage act in very different ways. the man, who is a trained marksman, and who is armed with a revolver, promptly draws, and confronts the assassin. the boy, armed only with the freedom and lightness of his own legs, cries out and betakes himself to flight. the woman, who is not armed in any way whatever, neither artificially nor naturally (since her limbs, not trained for activity, are hampered by her skirts), gives a frightened gasp, and sinks down unconscious. these three diverse reactions are in close relation to the state of liberty and independence of each of the three individuals. the swooning woman is she whose cloak is carried for her by attentive cavaliers, who are quick to pick up any fallen object that she may be spared all exertion. the peril of servilism and dependence lies not only in that "useless consuming of life," which leads to helplessness, but in the development of individual traits which indicate all too plainly a regrettable perversion and degeneration of the normal man. i refer to the domineering and tyrannical behaviour with examples of which we are all only too familiar. the domineering habit develops side by side with helplessness. it is the outward sign of the state of feeling of him who conquers through the work of others. thus it often happens that the master is a tyrant toward his servant. it is the spirit of the task-master toward the slave. let us picture to ourselves a clever and proficient workman, capable, not only of producing much and perfect work, but of giving advice in his workshop, because of his ability to control and direct the general activity of the environment in which he works. the man who is thus master of his environment will be able to smile before the anger of others, showing that great mastery of himself which comes from consciousness of his ability to do things. we should not, however, be in the least surprised to know that in his home this capable workman scolded his wife if the soup was not to his taste, or not ready at the appointed time. in his home, he is no longer the capable workman; the skilled workman here is the wife, who serves him and prepares his food for him. he is a serene and pleasant man where he is powerful through being efficient, but is domineering where he is served. perhaps if he should learn how to prepare his soup he might become a perfect man! the man who, through his own efforts, is able to perform all the actions necessary for his comfort and development in life, conquers himself, and in doing so multiplies his abilities and perfects himself as an individual. we must make of the future generation, _powerful men_, and by that we mean men who are independent and free. abolition of prizes and of external forms of punishment once we have accepted and established such principles, the abolition of prizes and external forms of punishment will follow naturally. man, disciplined through liberty, begins to desire the true and only prize which will never belittle or disappoint him,--the birth of human power and liberty within that inner life of his from which his activities must spring. in my own experience i have often marvelled to see how true this is. during our first months in the "children's houses," the teachers had not yet learned to put into practice the pedagogical principles of liberty and discipline. one of them, especially, busied herself, when i was absent, in _remedying_ my ideas by introducing a few of those methods to which she had been accustomed. so, one day when i came in unexpectedly, i found one of the most intelligent of the children wearing a large greek cross of silver, hung from his neck by a fine piece of white ribbon, while another child was seated in an armchair which had been conspicuously placed in the middle of the room. the first child had been rewarded, the second was being punished. the teacher, at least while i was present, did not interfere in any way, and the situation remained as i had found it. i held my peace, and placed myself where i might observe quietly. the child with the cross was moving back and forth, carrying the objects with which he had been working, from his table to that of the teacher, and bringing others in their place. he was busy and happy. as he went back and forth he passed by the armchair of the child who was being punished. the silver cross slipped from his neck and fell to the floor, and the child in the armchair picked it up, dangled it on its white ribbon, looking at it from all sides, and then said to his companion: "do you see what you have dropped?" the child turned and looked at the trinket with an air of indifference; his expression seemed to say; "don't interrupt me," his voice replied "i don't care." "don't you care, really?" said the punished one calmly. "then i will put it on myself." and the other replied, "oh, yes, put it on," in a tone that seemed to add, "and leave me in peace!" the boy in the armchair carefully arranged the ribbon so that the cross lay upon the front of his pink apron where he could admire its brightness and its pretty form, then he settled himself more comfortably in his little chair and rested his arms with evident pleasure upon the arms of the chair. the affair remained thus, and was quite just. the dangling cross could satisfy the child who was being punished, but not the active child, content and happy with his work. one day i took with me on a visit to another of the "children's houses" a lady who praised the children highly and who, opening a box she had brought, showed them a number of shining medals, each tied with a bright red ribbon. "the mistress," she said "will put these on the breasts of those children who are the cleverest and the best." as i was under no obligation to instruct this visitor in my methods, i kept silence, and the teacher took the box. at that moment, a most intelligent little boy of four, who was seated quietly at one of the little tables, wrinkled his forehead in an act of protest and cried out over and over again;--"not to the boys, though, not to the boys!" what a revelation! this little fellow already knew that he stood among the best and strongest of his class, although no one had ever revealed this fact to him, and he did not wish to be offended by this prize. not knowing how to defend his dignity, he invoked the superior quality of his masculinity! as to punishments, we have many times come in contact with children who disturbed the others without paying any attention to our corrections. such children were at once examined by the physician. when the case proved to be that of a normal child, we placed one of the little tables in a corner of the room, and in this way isolated the child; having him sit in a comfortable little armchair, so placed that he might see his companions at work, and giving him those games and toys to which he was most attracted. this isolation almost always succeeded in calming the child; from his position he could see the entire assembly of his companions, and the way in which they carried on their work was an _object lesson_ much more efficacious than any words of the teacher could possibly have been. little by little, he would come to see the advantages of being one of the company working so busily before his eyes, and he would really wish to go back and do as the others did. we have in this way led back again to discipline all the children who at first seemed to rebel against it. the isolated child was always made the object of special care, almost as if he were ill. i myself, when i entered the room, went first of all directly to him, caressing him, as if he were a very little child. then i turned my attention to the others, interesting myself in their work, asking questions about it as if they had been little men. i do not know what happened in the soul of these children whom we found it necessary to discipline, but certainly the conversion was always very complete and lasting. they showed great pride in learning how to work and how to conduct themselves, and always showed a very tender affection for the teacher and for me. the biological concept of liberty in pedagogy from a biological point of view, the concept of _liberty_ in the education of the child in his earliest years must be understood as demanding those conditions adapted to the most favourable _development_ of his entire individuality. so, from the physiological side as well as from the mental side, this includes the free development of the brain. the educator must be as one inspired by a deep _worship of life_, and must, through this reverence, _respect_, while he observes with human interest, the _development_ of the child life. now, child life is not an abstraction; _it is the life of individual children_. there exists only one real biological manifestation: the _living individual_; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. by education must be understood the active _help_ given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. the child is a body which grows, and a soul which develops,--these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. we must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must _await from them_ the manifestations which we know will succeed one another. _environment_ is undoubtedly a _secondary_ factor in the phenomena of life; it can modify in that it can help or hinder, but it can never _create_. the modern theories of evolution, from naegeli to de vries, consider throughout the development of the two biological branches, animal and vegetable, this interior factor as the essential force in the transformation of the species and in the transformation of the individual. the origins of the _development_, both in the species and in the individual, _lie within_. the child does not grow _because_ he is nourished, _because_ he breathes, _because_ he is placed in conditions of temperature to which he is adapted; he grows because the potential life within him develops, making itself visible; because the fruitful germ from which his life has come develops itself according to the biological destiny which was fixed for it by heredity. adolescence does not come _because_ the child laughs, or dances, or does gymnastic exercises, or is well nourished; but because he has arrived at that particular physiological state. life makes itself manifest,--life creates, life gives:--and is in its turn held within certain limits and bound by certain laws which are insuperable. the _fixed_ characteristics of the species do not change,--they can only vary. this concept, so brilliantly set forth by de vries in his mutation theory, illustrates also the limits of education. we can act on the _variations_ which are in relation to the environment, and whose limits vary slightly in the species and in the individual, but we cannot act upon the _mutations_. the mutations are bound by some mysterious tie to the very font of life itself, and their power rises superior to the modifying elements of the environment. a species, for example, cannot _mutate_ or change into another species through any phenomenon of _adaptation_, as, on the other hand, a great human genius cannot be suffocated by any limitation, nor by any false form of education. the _environment_ acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be. but environment can act in two opposite senses, favouring life, and stifling it. many species of palm, for example, are splendid in the tropical regions, because the climatic conditions are favourable to their development, but many species of both animals and plants have become extinct in regions to which they were not able to adapt themselves. life is a superb goddess, always advancing, overthrowing the obstacles which environment places in the way of her triumph. this is the basic or fundamental truth,--whether it be a question of species or of individuals, there persists always the forward march of those victorious ones in whom this mysterious life-force is strong and vital. it is evident that in the case of humanity, and especially in the case of our civil humanity, which we call society, the important and imperative question is that of the _care_, or perhaps we might say, the _culture_ of human life. chapter vi how the lessons should be given "let all thy words be counted." _dante, inf., canto_ x. given the fact that, through the régime of liberty the pupils can manifest their natural tendencies in the school, and that with this in view we have prepared the environment and the materials (the objects with which the child is to work), the teacher must not limit her action to _observation_, but must proceed to _experiment_. in this method the lesson corresponds to an _experiment_. the more fully the teacher is acquainted with the methods of experimental psychology, the better will she understand how to give the lesson. indeed, a special technique is necessary if the method is to be properly applied. the teacher must at least have attended the training classes in the "children's houses," in order to acquire a knowledge of the fundamental principles of the method and to understand their application. the most difficult portion of this training is that which refers to the method for discipline. in the first days of the school the children do not learn the idea of collective order; this idea follows and comes as a result of those disciplinary exercises through which the child learns to discern between good and evil. this being the case, it is evident that, at the outset the teacher _cannot give_ collective lessons. such lessons, indeed, will always be _very rare_, since the children being free are not obliged to remain in their places quiet and ready to listen to the teacher, or to watch what she is doing. the collective lessons, in fact, are of very secondary importance, and have been almost abolished by us. characteristics of the individual lessons:--conciseness, simplicity, objectivity the lessons, then, are individual, and _brevity_ must be one of their chief characteristics. dante gives excellent advice to teachers when he says, "let thy words be counted." the more carefully we cut away useless words, the more perfect will become the lesson. and in preparing the lessons which she is to give, the teacher must pay special attention to this point, counting and weighing the value of the words which she is to speak. another characteristic quality of the lesson in the "children's houses" is its _simplicity_. it must be stripped of all that is not absolute truth. that the teacher must not lose herself in vain words, is included in the first quality of conciseness; this second, then, is closely related to the first: that is, the carefully chosen words must be the most simple it is possible to find, and must refer to the truth. the third quality of the lesson is its _objectivity_. the lesson must be presented in such a way that the personality of the teacher shall disappear. there shall remain in evidence only the _object_ to which she wishes to call the attention of the child. this brief and simple lesson must be considered by the teacher as an explanation of the object and of the use which the child can make of it. in the giving of such lessons the fundamental guide must be the _method of observation_, in which is included and understood the liberty of the child. so the teacher shall _observe_ whether the child interests himself in the object, how he is interested in it, for how long, etc., even noticing the expression of his face. and she must take great care not to offend the principles of liberty. for, if she provokes the child to make an unnatural effort, she will no longer know what is the _spontaneous_ activity of the child. if, therefore, the lesson rigorously prepared in this brevity, simplicity and truth is not understood by the child, is not accepted by him as an explanation of the object,--the teacher must be warned of two things:--first, not to _insist_ by repeating the lesson; and second, _not to make the child feel that he has made a mistake_, or that he is not understood, because in doing so she will cause him to make an effort to understand, and will thus alter the natural state which must be used by her in making her psychological observation. a few examples may serve to illustrate this point. let us suppose, for example, that the teacher wishes to teach to a child the two colours, red and blue. she desires to attract the attention of the child to the object. she says, therefore, "look at this." then, in order to teach the colours, she says, showing him the red, "this is _red_," raising her voice a little and pronouncing the word "red" slowly and clearly; then showing him the other colour, "this is _blue_." in order to make sure that the child has understood, she says to him, "give me the red,"--"give me the blue." let us suppose that the child in following this last direction makes a mistake. the teacher does not repeat and does not insist; she smiles, gives the child a friendly caress and takes away the colours. teachers ordinarily are greatly surprised at such simplicity. they often say, "but everybody knows how to do that!" indeed, this again is a little like the egg of christopher columbus, but the truth is that not everyone knows how to do this simple thing (to give a lesson with such simplicity). to _measure_ one's own activity, to make it conform to these standards of clearness, brevity and truth, is practically a very difficult matter. especially is this true of teachers prepared by the old-time methods, who have learned to labour to deluge the child with useless, and often, false words. for example, a teacher who had taught in the public schools often reverted to collectivity. now in giving a collective lesson much importance is necessarily given to the simple thing which is to be taught, and it is necessary to oblige all the children to follow the teacher's explanation, when perhaps not all of them are disposed to give their attention to the particular lesson in hand. the teacher has perhaps commenced her lesson in this way:--"children, see if you can guess what i have in my hand!" she knows that the children cannot guess, and she therefore attracts their attention by means of a falsehood. then she probably says,--"children, look out at the sky. have you ever looked at it before? have you never noticed it at night when it is all shining with stars? no! look at my apron. do you know what colour it is? doesn't it seem to you the same colour as the sky? very well then, look at this colour i have in my hand. it is the same colour as the sky and my apron. it is _blue_. now look around you a little and see if you can find something in the room which is blue. and do you know what colour cherries are, and the colour of the burning coals in the fireplace, etc., etc." now in the mind of the child after he has made the useless effort of trying to guess there revolves a confused mass of ideas,--the sky, the apron, the cherries, etc. it will be difficult for him to extract from all this confusion the idea which it was the scope of the lesson to make clear to him; namely, the recognition of the two colours, blue and red. such a work of selection is almost impossible for the mind of a child who is not yet able to follow a long discourse. i remember being present at an arithmetic lesson where the children were being taught that two and three make five. to this end, the teacher made use of a counting board having coloured beads strung on its thin wires. she arranged, for example, two beads on the top line, then on a lower line three, and at the bottom five beads. i do not remember very clearly the development of this lesson, but i do know that the teacher found it necessary to place beside the two beads on the upper wire a little cardboard dancer with a blue skirt, which she christened on the spot the name of one of the children in the class, saying, "this is mariettina." and then beside the other three beads she placed a little dancer dressed in a different colour, which she called "gigina." i do not know exactly how the teacher arrived at the demonstration of the same, but certainly she talked for a long time with these little dancers, moving them about, etc. if _i_ remember the dancers more clearly than i do the arithmetic process, how must it have been with the children? if by such a method they were able to learn that two and three make five, they must have made a tremendous mental effort, and the teacher must have found it necessary to talk with the little dancers for a long time. in another lesson a teacher wished to demonstrate to the children the difference between noise and sound. she began by telling a long story to the children. then suddenly someone in league with her knocked noisily at the door. the teacher stopped and cried out--"what is it! what's happened! what is the matter! children, do you know what this person at the door has done? i can no longer go on with my story, i cannot remember it any more. i will have to leave it unfinished. do you know what has happened? did you hear! have you understood? that was a noise, that is a noise. oh! i would much rather play with this little baby (taking up a mandolin which she had dressed up in a table cover). yes, dear baby, i had rather play with you. do you see this baby that i am holding in my arms?" several children replied, "it isn't a baby." others said, "it's a mandolin." the teacher went on--"no, no, it is a baby, really a baby. i love this little baby. do you want me to show you that it is a baby? keep very, very quiet then. it seems to me that the baby is crying. or, perhaps it is talking, or perhaps it is going to say papa or mamma." putting her hand under the cover, she touched the strings of the mandolin. "there! did you hear the baby cry! did you hear it call out?" the children cried out--"it's a mandolin, you touched the strings, you made it play." the teacher then replied, "be quiet, be quiet, children. listen to what i am going to do." then she uncovered the mandolin and began to play on it, saying, "this is sound." to suppose that the child from such a lesson as this shall come to understand the difference between noise and sound is ridiculous. the child will probably get the impression that the teacher wished to play a joke, and that she is rather foolish, because she lost the thread of her discourse when she was interrupted by noise, and because she mistook a mandolin for a baby. most certainly, it is the figure of the teacher herself that is impressed upon the child's mind through such a lesson, and not the object for which the lesson was given. to obtain a _simple lesson_ from a teacher who has been prepared according to the ordinary methods, is a very difficult task. i remember that, after having explained the material fully and in detail, i called upon one of my teachers to teach, by means of the geometric insets, the difference between a square and a triangle. the task of the teacher was simply to fit a square and a triangle of wood into the empty spaces made to receive them. she should then have shown the child how to follow with his finger the contours of the wooden pieces and of the frames into which they fit, saying, meanwhile, "this is a square--this is a triangle." the teacher whom i had called upon began by having the child touch the square, saying, "this is a line,--another,--another,--and another. there are four lines: count them with your little finger and tell me how many there are. and the corners,--count the corners, feel them with your little finger. see, there are four corners too. look at this piece well. it is a square." i corrected the teacher, telling her that in this way she was not teaching the child to recognise a form, but was giving him an idea of sides, of angles, of number, and that this was a very different thing from that which she was to teach in this lesson. "but," she said, trying to justify herself, "it is the same thing." it is not, however, the same thing. it is the geometric analysis and the mathematics of the thing. it would be possible to have an idea of the form of the quadrilateral without knowing how to count to four, and, therefore, without appreciating the number of sides and angles. the sides and the angles are abstractions which in themselves do not exist; that which does exist is this piece of wood of a determined form. the elaborate explanations of the teacher not only confused the child's mind, but bridged over the distance that lies between the concrete and the abstract, between the form of an object and the mathematics of the form. let as suppose, i said to the teacher, that an architect shows you a dome, the form of which interests you. he can follow one of two methods in showing you his work: he can call attention to the beauty of line, the harmony of the proportions, and may then take you inside the building and up into the cupola itself, in order that you may appreciate the relative proportion of the parts in such a way that your impression of the cupola as a whole shall be founded on general knowledge of its parts, or he can have you count the windows, the wide or narrow cornices, and can, in fact, make you a design showing the construction; he can illustrate for you the static laws and write out the algebraic formulæ necessary in the calculation of such laws. in the first place, you will be able to retain in your mind the form of the cupola; in the second, you will have understood nothing, and will come away with the impression that the architect fancied himself speaking to a fellow engineer, instead of to a traveller whose object was to become familiar with the beautiful things about him. very much the same thing happens if we, instead of saying to the child, "this is a square," and by simply having him touch the contour establish materially the idea of the form, proceed rather to a geometrical analysis of the contour. indeed, we should feel that we are making the child precocious if we taught him the geometric forms in the plane, presenting at the same time the mathematical concept, but we do not believe that the child is too immature to appreciate the simple _form_; on the contrary, it is no effort for a child to look at a square window or table,--he sees all these forms about him in his daily life. to call his attention to a determined form is to clarify the impression he has already received of it, and to fix the idea of it. it is very much as if, while we are looking absent-mindedly at the shore of a lake, an artist should suddenly say to us--"how beautiful the curve is that the shore makes there under the shade of that cliff." at his words, the view which we have been observing almost unconsciously, is impressed upon our minds as if it had been illuminated by a sudden ray of sunshine, and we experience the joy of having crystallised an impression which we had before only imperfectly felt. and such is our duty toward the child: to give a ray of light and to go on our way. i may liken the effects of these first lessons to the impressions of one who walks quietly, happily, through a wood, alone, and thoughtful, letting his inner life unfold freely. suddenly, the chime of a distant bell recalls him to himself, and in that awakening he feels more strongly than before the peace and beauty of which he has been but dimly conscious. to stimulate life,--leaving it then free to develop, to unfold,--herein lies the first task of the educator. in such a delicate task, a great art must suggest the moment, and limit the intervention, in order that we shall arouse no perturbation, cause no deviation, but rather that we shall help the soul which is coming into the fulness of life, and which shall live from its _own forces_. this _art_ must accompany the _scientific method_. when the teacher shall have touched, in this way, soul for soul, each one of her pupils, awakening and inspiring the life within them as if she were an invisible spirit, she will then possess each soul, and a sign, a single word from her shall suffice; for each one will feel her in a living and vital way, will recognise her and will listen to her. there will come a day when the directress herself shall be filled with wonder to see that all the children obey her with gentleness and affection, not only ready, but intent, at a sign from her. they will look toward her who has made them live, and will hope and desire to receive from her, new life. experience has revealed all this, and it is something which forms the chief source of wonder for those who visit the "children's houses." collective discipline is obtained as if by magic force. fifty or sixty children from two and a half years to six years of age, all together, and at a single time know how to hold their peace so perfectly that the absolute silence seems that of a desert. and, if the teacher, speaking in a low voice, says to the children, "rise, pass several times around the room on the tips of your toes and then come back to your place in silence" all together, as a single person, the children rise, and follow the order with the least possible noise. the teacher with that one voice has spoken to each one; and each child hopes from her intervention to receive some light and inner happiness. and feeling so, he goes forth intent and obedient like an anxious explorer, following the order in his own way. in this matter of discipline we have again something of the egg of christopher columbus. a concert-master must prepare his scholars one by one in order to draw from their collective work great and beautiful harmony; and each artist must perfect himself as an individual before he can be ready to follow the voiceless commands of the master's baton. how different is the method which we follow in the public schools! it is as if a concert-master taught the same monotonous and sometimes discordant rhythm contemporaneously to the most diverse instruments and voices. thus we find that the most disciplined members of society are the men who are best trained, who have most thoroughly perfected themselves, but this is the training or the perfection acquired through contact with other people. the perfection of the collectivity cannot be that material and brutal solidarity which comes from mechanical organisation alone. in regard to infant psychology, we are more richly endowed with prejudices than with actual knowledge bearing upon the subject. we have, until the present day, wished to dominate the child through force, by the imposition of external laws, instead of making an interior conquest of the child, in order to direct him as a human soul. in this way, the children have lived beside us without being able to make us know them. but if we cut away the artificiality with which we have enwrapped them, and the violence through which we have foolishly thought to discipline them, they will reveal themselves to us in all the truth of child nature. their gentleness is so absolute, so sweet, that we recognise in it the infancy of that humility which can remain oppressed by every form of yoke, by every injustice; and child love and _knowledge_ is such that it surpasses every other love and makes us think that in very truth humanity must carry within it that passion which pushes the minds of men to the successive conquest of thought, making easier from century to century the yokes of every form of slavery. chapter vii exercises of practical life proposed winter schedule of hours in the "children's houses" opening at nine o'clock--closing at four o'clock - . entrance. greeting. inspection as to personal cleanliness. exercises of practical life; helping one another to take off and put on the aprons. going over the room to see that everything is dusted and in order. language: conversation period: children give an account of the events of the day before. religious exercises. - . intellectual exercises. objective lessons interrupted by short rest periods. nomenclature, sense exercises. - : . simple gymnastics: ordinary movements done gracefully, normal position of the body, walking, marching in line, salutations, movements for attention, placing of objects gracefully. : - . luncheon: short prayer. - . free games. - . directed games, if possible, in the open air. during this period the older children in turn go through with the exercises of practical life, cleaning the room, dusting, putting the material in order. general inspection for cleanliness: conversation. - . manual work. clay modelling, design, etc. - . collective gymnastics and songs, if possible in the open air. exercises to develop forethought: visiting, and caring for, the plants and animals. as soon as a school is established, the question of schedule arises. this must be considered from two points of view; the length of the school-day and the distribution of study and of the activities of life. i shall begin by affirming that in the "children's houses," as in the school for deficients, the hours may be very long, occupying the entire day. for poor children, and especially for the "children's houses" annexed to workingmen's tenements, i should advise that the school-day should be from nine in the morning to five in the evening in winter, and from eight to six in summer. these long hours are necessary, if we are to follow a directed line of action which shall be helpful to the growth of the child. it goes without saying, that in the case of little children such a long school-day should be interrupted by at least an hour's rest in bed. and here lies the great practical difficulty. at present we must allow our little ones to sleep in their seats in a wretched position, but i foresee a time, not distant, when we shall be able to have a quiet, darkened room where the children may sleep in low-swung hammocks. i should like still better to have this nap taken in the open air. in the "children's houses" in rome we send the little ones to their own apartments for the nap, as this can be done without their having to go out into the streets. it must be observed that these long hours include not only the nap, but the luncheon. this must be considered in such schools as the "children's houses," whose aim is to help and to direct the growth of children in such an important period of development as that from three to six years of age. the "children's house" is a garden of child culture, and we most certainly do not keep the children for so many hours in school with the idea of making students of them! the first step which we must take in our method is to _call_ to the pupil. we call now to his attention, now to his interior life, now to the life he leads with others. making a comparison which must not be taken in a literal sense,--it is necessary to proceed as in experimental psychology or anthropology when one makes an experiment,--that is, after having prepared the instrument (to which in this case the environment may correspond) we prepare the subject. considering the method as a whole, we must begin our work by preparing the child for the forms of social life, and we must attract his attention to these forms. in the schedule which we outlined when we established the first "children's house," but which we have never followed entirely, (a sign that a schedule in which the material is distributed in arbitrary fashion is not adapted to the régime of liberty) we begin the day with a series of exercises of practical life, and i must confess that these exercises were the only part of the programme which proved thoroughly stationary. these exercises were such a success that they formed the beginning of the day in all of the "children's houses." first: cleanliness. order. poise. conversation. as soon as the children arrive at school we make an inspection for cleanliness. if possible, this should be carried on in the presence of the mothers, but their attention should not be called to it directly. we examine the hands, the nails, the neck, the ears, the face, the teeth; and care is given to the tidiness of the hair. if any of the garments are torn or soiled or ripped, if the buttons are lacking, or if the shoes are not clean, we call the attention of the child to this. in this way, the children become accustomed to observing themselves and take an interest in their own appearance. the children in our "children's houses" are given a bath in turn, but this, of course, can not be done daily. in the class, however, the teacher, by using a little washstand with small pitchers and basins, teaches the children to take a partial bath: for example, they learn how to wash their hands and clean their nails. indeed, sometimes we teach them how to take a foot-bath. they are shown especially how to wash their ears and eyes with great care. they are taught to brush their teeth and rinse their mouths carefully. in all of this, we call their attention to the different parts of the body which they are washing, and to the different means which we use in order to cleanse them: clear water for the eyes, soap and water for the hands, the brush for the teeth, etc. we teach the big ones to help the little ones, and, so, encourage the younger children to learn quickly to take care of themselves. after this care of their persons, we put on the little aprons. the children are able to put these on themselves, or, with the help of each other. then we begin our visit about the schoolroom. we notice if all of the various materials are in order and if they are clean. the teacher shows the children how to clean out the little corners where dust has accumulated, and shows them how to use the various objects necessary in cleaning a room,--dust-cloths, dust-brushes, little brooms, etc. all of this, when the children are allowed _to do it by themselves_, is very quickly accomplished. then the children go each to his own place. the teacher explains to them that the normal position is for each child to be seated in his own place, in silence, with his feet together on the floor, his hands resting on the table, and his head erect. in this way she teaches them poise and equilibrium. then she has them rise on their feet in order to sing the hymn, teaching them that in rising and sitting down it is not necessary to be noisy. in this way the children learn to move about the furniture with poise and with care. after this we have a series of exercises in which the children learn to move gracefully, to go and come, to salute each other, to lift objects carefully, to receive various objects from each other politely. the teacher calls attention with little exclamations to a child who is clean, a room which is well ordered, a class seated quietly, a graceful movement, etc. from such a starting point we proceed to the free teaching. that is, the teacher will no longer make comments to the children, directing them how to move from their seats, etc., she will limit herself to correcting the disordered movements. after the directress has talked in this way about the attitude of the children and the arrangement of the room, she invites the children to talk with her. she questions them concerning what they have done the day before, regulating her inquiries in such a way that the children need not report the intimate happenings of the family but their individual behaviour, their games, attitude to parents, etc. she will ask if they have been able to go up the stairs without getting them muddy, if they have spoken politely to their friends who passed, if they have helped their mothers, if they have shown in their family what they have learned at school, if they have played in the street, etc. the conversations are longer on monday after the vacation, and on that day the children are invited to tell what they have done with the family; if they have gone away from home, whether they have eaten things not usual for children to eat, and if this is the case we urge them not to eat these things and try to teach them that they are bad for them. such conversations as these encourage the _unfolding_ or development of language and are of great educational value, since the directress can prevent the children from recounting happenings in the house or in the neighbourhood, and can select, instead, topics which are adapted to pleasant conversation, and in this way can teach the children those things which it is desirable to talk about; that is, things with which we occupy ourselves in life, public events, or things which have happened in the different houses, perhaps, to the children themselves--as baptism, birthday parties, any of which may serve for occasional conversation. things of this sort will encourage children to describe, themselves. after this morning talk we pass to the various lessons. chapter viii refection--the child's diet in connection with the exercises of practical life, it may be fitting to consider the matter of refection. in order to protect the child's development, especially in neighbourhoods where standards of child hygiene are not yet prevalent in the home, it would be well if a large part at least of the child's diet could be entrusted to the school. it is well known to-day that the diet must be adapted to the physical nature of the child; and as the medicine of children is not the medicine of adults in reduced doses, so the diet must not be that of the adult in lesser quantitative proportions. for this reason i should prefer that even in the "children's houses" which are situated in tenements and from which little ones, being at home, can go up to eat with the family, school refection should be instituted. moreover, even in the case of rich children, school refection would always be advisable until a scientific course in cooking shall have introduced into the wealthier families the habit of specialising in children's food. the diet of little children must be rich in fats and sugar: the first for reserve matter and the second for plastic tissue. in fact, sugar is a stimulant to tissues in the process of formation. as for the _form_ of preparation, it is well that the alimentary substances should always be minced, because the child has not yet the capacity for completely masticating the food, and his stomach is still incapable of fulfilling the function of mincing food matter. consequently, soups, purées, and meat balls, should constitute the ordinary form of dish for the child's table. the nitrogenous diet for a child from two or three years of age ought to be constituted chiefly of milk and eggs, but after the second year broths are also to be recommended. after three years and a half meat can be given; or, in the case of poor children, vegetables. fruits are also to be recommended for children. perhaps a detailed summary on child diet may be useful, especially for mothers. _method of preparing broth for little children._ (age three to six; after that the child may use the common broth of the family.) the quantity of meat should correspond to gramme for every cubic centimetre of broth and should be put in cold water. no aromatic herbs should be used, the only wholesome condiment being salt. the meat should be left to boil for two hours. instead of removing the grease from the broth it is well to add butter to it, or, in the case of the poor, a spoonful of olive oil; but substitutes for butter, such as margerine, etc., should never be used. the broth must be prepared _fresh_; it would be well, therefore, to put the meat on the fire two hours before the meal, because as soon as broth is cool there begins to take place a separation of chemical substances, which are injurious to the child and may easily cause diarrhea. _soups._ a very simple soup, and one to be highly recommended for children, is bread boiled in salt water or in broth and abundantly seasoned with oil. this is the classic soup of poor children and an excellent means of nutrition. very like this, is the soup which consists of little cubes of bread toasted in butter and allowed to soak in the broth which is itself fat with butter. soups of grated bread also belong in this class. pastine,[ ] especially the glutinous pastine, which are of the same nature, are undoubtedly superior to the others for digestibility, but are accessible only to the privileged social classes. [ ] those very fine forms of vermicelli used in soups. the poor should know how much more wholesome is a broth made from remnants of stale bread, than soups of coarse spaghetti--often dry and seasoned with meat juice. such soups are most indigestible for little children. excellent soups are those consisting of purées of vegetables (beans, peas, lentils). to-day one may find in the shops dried vegetables especially adapted for this sort of soups. boiled in salt water, the vegetables are peeled, put to cool and passed through a sieve (or simply compressed, if they are already peeled). butter is then added, and the paste is stirred slowly into the boiling water, care being taken that it dissolves and leaves no lumps. vegetable soups can also be seasoned with pork. instead of broth, sugared milk may be the base of vegetable purées. i strongly recommend for children a soup of rice boiled in broth or milk; also cornmeal broth, provided it be seasoned with abundant butter, but not with cheese. (the porridge form--polenta, really cornmeal mush, is to be highly recommended on account of the long cooking.) the poorer classes who have no meat-broth can feed their children equally well with soups of boiled bread and porridge seasoned with oil. _milk and eggs._ these are foods which not only contain nitrogenous substances in an eminently digestible form, but they have the so-called _enzymes_ which facilitate assimilation into the tissues, and, hence, in a particular way, favour the growth of the child. and they answer so much the better this last most important condition if they are _fresh_ and _intact_, keeping in themselves, one may say, the life of the animals which produced them. milk fresh from the cow, and the egg while it is still warm, are assimilable to the highest degree. cooking, on the other hand, makes the milk and eggs lose their special conditions of assimilability and reduces the nutritive power in them to the simple power of any nitrogenous substance. to-day, consequently, there are being founded _special dairies for children_ where the milk produced is sterile; the rigorous cleanliness of the surroundings in which the milk-producing animals live, the sterilisation of the udder before milking, of the hands of the milker, and of the vessels which are to contain the milk, the hermetic sealing of these last, and the refrigerating bath immediately after the milking, if the milk is to be carried far,--otherwise it is well to drink it warm, procure a milk free from bacteria which, therefore, has no need of being sterilised by boiling, and which preserves intact its natural nutritive powers. as much may be said of eggs; the best way of feeding them to a child is to take them still warm from the hen and have him eat them just as they are, and then digest them in the open air. but where this is not practicable, eggs must be chosen fresh, and barely heated in water, that is to say, prepared _à la coque_. all other forms of preparation, milk-soup, omelettes, and so forth, do, to be sure, make of milk and eggs an excellent food, more to be recommended than others; but they take away the specific properties of assimilation which characterise them. _meat._ all meats are not adapted to children, and even their preparation must differ according to the age of the child. thus, for example, children from three to five years of age ought to eat only more or less finely-ground meats, whereas at the age of five children are capable of grinding meat completely by mastication; at that time it is well to _teach the child accurately how to masticate_ because he has a tendency to swallow food quickly, which may produce indigestion and diarrhea. this is another reason why school-refection in the "children's houses" would be a very serviceable as well as convenient institution, as the whole diet of the child could then be rationally cared for in connection with the educative system of the houses. the meats most adapted to children are so-called white meats, that is, in the first place, chicken, then veal; also the light flesh of fish, (sole, pike, cod). after the age of four, filet of beef may also be introduced into the diet, but never heavy and fat meats like that of the pig, the capon, the eel, the tunny, etc., which are to be _absolutely excluded_ along with mollusks and crustaceans, (oysters, lobsters), from the child's diet. croquettes made of finely ground meat, grated bread, milk, and beaten eggs, and fried in butter, are the most wholesome preparation. another excellent preparation is to mould into balls the grated meat, with sweet fruit-preserve, and eggs beaten up with sugar. at the age of five, the child may be given breast of roast fowl, and occasionally veal cutlet or filet of beef. boiled meat must never be given to the child, because meat is deprived of many stimulating and even nutritive properties by boiling and rendered less digestible. _nerve feeding substances._ besides meat a child who has reached the age of four may be given fried brains and sweetbreads, to be combined, for example, with chicken croquettes. _milk foods._ all cheeses are to be excluded from the child's diet. the only milk product suitable to children from three to six years of age is fresh butter. _custard._ custard is also to be recommended provided it be _freshly prepared_, that is immediately before being eaten, and _with very fresh_ milk and eggs: if such conditions cannot be rigorously fulfilled, it is preferable to do without custard, which is not a necessity. _bread._ from what we have said about soups, it may be inferred that bread is an _excellent food_ for the child. it should be well selected; the crumb is not very digestible, but it can be utilised, when it is dry, to make a bread broth; but if one is to give the child simply a piece of bread to eat, it is well to offer him the crust, the end of the loaf. bread sticks are excellent for those who can afford them. bread contains many nitrogenous substances and is very rich in starches, but is lacking in fats; and as the fundamental substances of diet are, as is well known, three in number, namely, proteids, (nitrogenous substances), starches, and fats, bread is not a complete food; it is necessary therefore to offer the child buttered bread, which constitutes a complete food and may be considered as a sufficient and complete breakfast. _green vegetables._ children must never eat raw vegetables, such as salads and greens, but only cooked ones; indeed they are not to be highly recommended either cooked or raw, with the exception of spinach which may enter with moderation into the diet of children. potatoes prepared in a purée with much butter form, however, an excellent complement of nutrition for children. _fruits._ among fruits there are excellent foods for children. they too, like milk and eggs, if freshly gathered, retain a _living_ quality which aids assimilation. as this condition, however, is not easily attainable in cities, it is necessary to consider also the diet of fruits which are not perfectly fresh and which, therefore, should be prepared and cooked in various ways. all fruits are not to be advised for children; the chief properties to be considered are the degree of _ripeness_, the _tenderness_ and _sweetness_ of the pulp, and its _acidity_. peaches, apricots, grapes, currants, oranges, and mandarins, in their natural state, can be given to little children with great advantage. other fruits, such as pears, apples, plums, should be cooked or prepared in syrup. figs, pineapples, dates, melons, cherries, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, and chestnuts, are excluded for various reasons from the diet of early childhood. the preparation of fruit must consist in removing from it all indigestible parts, such as the peel, and also such parts as the child inadvertently may absorb to his detriment, as, for example, the seed. children of four or five should be taught early how carefully the seeds must be thrown away and how the fruits are peeled. afterwards, the child so educated may be promoted to the honour of receiving a fine fruit intact, and he will know how to eat it properly. the culinary preparation of fruits consists essentially in two processes: cooking, and seasoning with sugar. besides simple cooking, fruits may be prepared as marmalades and jellies, which are excellent but are naturally within the reach of the wealthier classes only. while jellies and marmalades may be allowed, candied fruits,--on the other hand,--_marrons glacés_, and the like, are absolutely excluded from the child's diet. _seasonings._ an important phase of the hygiene of child diet concerns seasonings--with a view to their rigorous limitation. as i have already indicated, sugar and some fat substances along with kitchen salt (sodium chloride) should constitute the principal part of the seasonings. to these may be added _organic acids_ (acetic acid, citric acid) that is, vinegar and lemon juice; this latter can be advantageously used on fish, on croquettes, on spinach, etc. other condiments suitable to little children are some aromatic vegetables like garlic and rue which disinfect the intestines and the lungs, and also have a direct anthelminthic action. spices, on the other hand, such as pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and especially mustard, are to be absolutely abolished. _drinks._ the growing organism of the child is very rich in water, and, hence, needs a constant supply of moisture. among the beverages, the best, and indeed the only one, to be unreservedly advised is pure fresh spring water. to rich children might be allowed the so-called table waters which are slightly alkaline, such as those of san gemini, acqua claudia, etc., mixed with syrups, as, for example, syrup of black cherry. it is now a matter of general knowledge that all fermented beverages, and those exciting to the nervous system, are injurious to children; hence, all alcoholic and caffeic beverages are absolutely eliminated from child diet. not only liquors, but wine and beer, ought to be unknown to the child's taste, and coffee and tea should be inaccessible to childhood. the deleterious action of alcohol on the child organism needs no illustration, but in a matter of such vital importance insistent repetition is never superfluous. alcohol is a poison especially fatal to organisms in the process of formation. not only does it arrest their total development (whence infantilism, idiocy), but also predisposes the child to nervous maladies (epilepsy, meningitis), and to maladies of the digestive organs, and metabolism (cirrhosis of the liver, dyspepsia, anæmia). if the "children's houses" were to succeed in enlightening the people on such truths, they would be accomplishing a very lofty hygienic work for the new generations. instead of coffee, children may be given roasted and boiled barley, malt, and especially chocolate which is an excellent child food, particularly when mixed with milk. distribution of the meals another chapter of child diet concerns the distribution of the meals. here, one principle must dominate, and must be diffused, among mothers, namely, that the children shall be kept to rigorous meal hours in order that they may enjoy good health and have excellent digestion. it is true that there prevails among the people (and it is one of the forms of maternal ignorance most fatal to children) the prejudice that children in order to grow well must be eating almost continuously, without regularity, nibbling almost habitually a crust of bread. on the contrary, the child, in view of the special delicacy of his digestive system, has more need of regular meals than the adult has. it seems to me that the "children's houses" with very prolonged programmes are, for this reason, suitable places for child culture, as they can direct the child's diet. _outside of their regular meal hours, children should not eat._ in a "children's house" with a long programme there ought to be two meals, a hearty one about noon, and a light one about four in the afternoon. at the hearty meal, there should be soup, a meat dish, and bread, and, in the case of rich children, also fruits or custard, and butter on the bread. at the four o'clock meal there should be prepared a light lunch, which from a simple piece of bread can range to buttered bread, and to bread accompanied by a fruit marmalade, chocolate, honey, custard, etc. crisp crackers, biscuits, and cooked fruits, etc., might also be usefully employed. very suitably the lunch might consist of bread soaked in milk or an egg _à la coque_ with bread sticks, or else of a simple cup of milk in which is dissolved a spoonful of mellin's food. i recommend mellin's food very highly, not only in infancy, but also much later on account of its properties of digestibility and nutrition, and on account of its flavour, which is so pleasing to children. mellin's food is a powder prepared from barley and wheat, and containing in a concentrated and pure state the nutritive substances proper to those cereals; the powder is slowly dissolved in hot water in the bottom of the same cup which is to be used for drinking the mixture, and very fresh milk is then poured on top. the child would take the other two meals in his own home, that is, the morning breakfast and the supper, which latter must be _very light_ for children so that shortly after they may be ready to go to bed. on these meals it would be well to give advice to mothers, urging them to help complete the hygienic work of the "children's houses," to the profit of their children. the morning breakfast for the rich might be milk and chocolate, or milk and extract of malt, with crackers, or, better, with toasted bread spread with butter or honey; for the poor, a cup of fresh milk, with bread. for the evening meal, a soup is to be advised (children should eat soups twice a day), and an egg _à la coque_ or a cup of milk; or rice soup with a base of milk, and buttered bread, with cooked fruits, etc. as for the alimentary rations to be calculated, i refer the reader to the special treatises on hygiene: although practically such calculations are of no great utility. in the "children's houses," especially in the case of the poor, i should make extensive use of the vegetable soups and i should have cultivated in the garden plots vegetables which can be used in the diet, in order to have them plucked in their freshness, cooked, and enjoyed. i should try, possibly, to do the same for the fruits, and, by the raising of animals, to have fresh eggs and pure milk. the milking of the goats could be done directly by the larger children, after they had scrupulously washed their hands. another important educative application which school-refection in the "children's houses" has to offer, and which concerns "practical life," consists in the preparing of the table, arranging the table linen, learning its nomenclature, etc. later, i shall show how this exercise can gradually increase in difficulty and constitute a most important didactic instrument. it is sufficient to intimate here that it is very important to teach the children to eat with cleanliness, both with respect to themselves and with respect to their surroundings (not to soil the napkins, etc.), and to use the table implements (which, at least, for the little ones, are limited to the spoon, and for the larger children extended to the fork and knife). chapter ix muscular education--gymnastics the generally accepted idea of gymnastics is, i consider, very inadequate. in the common schools we are accustomed to describe as gymnastics a species of collective muscular discipline which has as its aim that children shall learn to follow definite ordered movements given in the form of commands. the guiding spirit in such gymnastics is coercion, and i feel that such exercises repress spontaneous movements and impose others in their place. i do not know what the psychological authority for the selection of these imposed movements is. similar movements are used in medical gymnastics in order to restore a normal movement to a torpid muscle or to give back a normal movement to a paralysed muscle. a number of chest movements which are given in the school are advised, for example, in medicine for those who suffer from intestinal torpidity, but truly i do not well understand what office such exercises can fulfil when they are followed by squadrons of normal children. in addition to these formal gymnastics we have those which are carried on in a gymnasium, and which are very like the first steps in the training of an acrobat. however, this is not the place for criticism of the gymnastics used in our common schools. certainly in our case we are not considering such gymnastics. indeed, many who hear me speak of gymnastics for infant schools very plainly show disapprobation and they will disapprove more heartily when they hear me speak of a gymnasium for little children. indeed, if the gymnastic exercises and the gymnasium were those of the common schools, no one would agree more heartily than i in the disapproval expressed by these critics. we must understand by _gymnastics_ and in general by muscular education a series of exercises tending to _aid_ the normal development of physiological movements (such as walking, breathing, speech), to protect this development, when the child shows himself backward or abnormal in any way, and to encourage in the children those movements which are useful in the achievement of the most ordinary acts of life; such as dressing, undressing, buttoning their clothes and lacing their shoes, carrying such objects as balls, cubes, etc. if there exists an age in which it is necessary to protect a child by means of a series of gymnastic exercises, between three and six years is undoubtedly the age. the special gymnastics necessary, or, better still, hygienic, in this period of life, refer chiefly to walking. a child in the general morphological growth of his body is characterised by having a torso greatly developed in comparison with the lower limbs. in the new-born child the length of the torso, from the top of the head to the curve of the groin, is equal to per cent of the total length of the body. the limbs then are barely per cent of the stature. during growth these relative proportions change in a most noticeable way; thus, for example, in the adult the torso is fully half of the entire stature and, according to the individual, corresponds to or per cent of it. this morphological difference between the new-born child and the adult is bridged so slowly during growth that in the first years of the child's life the torso still remains tremendously developed as compared with the limbs. in one year the height of the torso corresponds to per cent of the total stature, in two years to , in three years to . at the age when a child enters the infant school his limbs are still very short as compared with his torso; that is, the length of his limbs barely corresponds to per cent of the stature. between the years of six and seven the proportion of the torso to the stature is from to per cent in such a period therefore the child not only makes a noticeable growth in height, (he measures indeed at the age of three years about . metre and at six years . metres) but, changing so greatly the relative proportions between the torso and the limbs, the latter make a most decided growth. this growth is related to the layers of cartilage which still exist at the extremity of the long bones and is related in general to the still incomplete ossification of the entire skeleton. the tender bones of the limbs must therefore sustain the weight of the torso which is then disproportionately large. we cannot, if we consider all these things, judge the manner of walking in little children by the standard set for our own equilibrium. if a child is not strong, the erect posture and walking are really sources of fatigue for him, and the long bones of the lower limbs, yielding to the weight of the body, easily become deformed and usually bowed. this is particularly the case among the badly nourished children of the poor, or among those in whom the skeleton structure, while not actually showing the presence of rickets, still seems to be slow in attaining normal ossification. we are wrong then if we consider little children from this physical point of view as _little men_. they have, instead, characteristics and proportions that are entirely special to their age. the tendency of the child to stretch out on his back and kick his legs in the air is an expression of physical needs related to the proportions of his body. the baby loves to walk on all fours just because, like the quadruped animals, his limbs are short in comparison with his body. instead of this, we divert these natural manifestations by foolish habits which we impose on the child. we hinder him from throwing himself on the earth, from stretching, etc., and we oblige him to walk with grown people and to keep up with them; and excuse ourselves by saying that we don't want him to become capricious and think he can do as he pleases! it is indeed a fatal error and one which has made bow-legs common among little children. it is well to enlighten the mothers on these important particulars of infant hygiene. now we, with the gymnastics, can, and, indeed, should, help the child in his development by making our exercises correspond to the movement which he _needs to make_, and in this way save his limbs from fatigue. one very simple means for helping the child in his activity was suggested to me by my observation of the children themselves. the teacher was having the children march, leading them about the courtyard between the walls of the house and the central garden. this garden was protected by a little fence made of strong wires which were stretched in parallel lines, and were supported at intervals by wooden palings driven into the ground. along the fence, ran a little ledge on which the children were in the habit of sitting down when they were tired of marching. in addition to this, i always brought out little chairs, which i placed against the wall. every now and then, the little ones of two and one half and three years would drop out from the marching line, evidently being tired; but instead of sitting down on the ground or on the chairs, they would run to the little fence and catching hold of the upper line of wire they would walk along sideways, resting their feet on the wire which was nearest the ground. that this gave them a great deal of pleasure, was evident from the way in which they laughed as, with bright eyes, they watched their larger companions who were marching about. the truth was that these little ones had solved one of my problems in a very practical way. they moved themselves along on the wires, pulling their bodies sideways. in this way, they moved their limbs _without throwing upon them the weight of the body_. such an apparatus placed in the gymnasium for little children, will enable them to fulfil the need which they feel of throwing themselves on the floor and kicking their legs in the air; for the movements they make on the little fence correspond even more correctly to the same physical needs. therefore, i advise the manufacture of this little fence for use in children's playrooms. it can be constructed of parallel bars supported by upright poles firmly fixed on to the heavy base. the children, while playing upon this little fence, will be able to look out and see with, great pleasure what the other children are doing in the room. other pieces of gymnasium apparatus can be constructed upon the same plan, that is, having as their aim the furnishing of the child with a proper outlet for his individual activities. one of the things invented by séguin to develop the lower limbs, and especially to strengthen the articulation of the knee in weak children, is the trampolino. this is a kind of swing, having a very wide seat, so wide, indeed, that the limbs of the child stretched out in front of him are entirely supported by this broad seat. this little chair is hung from strong cords and is left swinging. the wall in front of it is reinforced by a strong smooth board against which the children press their feet in pushing themselves back and forth in the swing. the child seated in this swing exercises his limbs, pressing his feet against the board each time that he swings toward the wall. the board against which he swings may be erected at some distance from the wall, and may be so low that the child can see over the top of it. as he swings in this chair, he strengthens his limbs through the species of gymnastics limited to the lower limbs, and this he does without resting the weight of his body upon his legs. other pieces of gymnastic apparatus, less important from the hygienic standpoint, but very amusing to the children, may be described briefly. "the pendulum," a game which may be played by one child or by several, consists of rubber balls hung on a cord. the children seated in their little armchairs strike the ball, sending it from one to another. it is an exercise for the arms and for the spinal column, and is at the same time an exercise in which the eye gauges the distance of bodies in motion. another game, called "the cord," consists of a line, drawn on the earth with chalk, along which the children walk. this helps to order and to direct their free movements in a given direction. a game like this is very pretty, indeed, after a snowfall, when the little path made by the children shows the regularity of the line they have traced, and encourages a pleasant war among them in which each one tries to make his line in the snow the most regular. the little round stair is another game, in which a little wooden stairway, built on the plan of the spiral, is used. this little stair is enclosed on one side by a balustrade on which the children can rest their hands. the other side is open and circular. this serves to habituate the children to climbing and descending stairs without holding on to the balustrade, and teaches them to move up and down with movements that are poised and self-controlled. the steps must be very low and very shallow. going up and down on this little stair, the very smallest children can learn movements which they cannot follow properly in climbing ordinary stairways in their homes, in which the proportions are arranged for adults. another piece of gymnasium apparatus, adapted for the broad-jump, consists of a low wooden platform painted with various lines, by means of which the distance jumped may be gauged. there is a small flight of stairs which may be used in connection with this plane, making it possible to practise and to measure the high-jump. i also believe that rope-ladders may be so adapted as to be suitable for use in schools for little children. used in pairs, these would, it seems to me, help to perfect a great variety of movements, such as kneeling, rising, bending forward and backward, etc.; movements which the child, without the help of the ladder, could not make without losing his equilibrium. all of these movements are useful in that they help the child to acquire, first, equilibrium, then that co-ordination of the muscular movements necessary to him. they are, moreover, helpful in that they increase the chest expansion. besides all this, such movements as i have described, reinforce the _hand_ in its most primitive and essential action, _prehension_;--the movement which necessarily precedes all the finer movements of the hand itself. such apparatus was successfully used by séguin to develop the general strength and the movement of prehension in his idiotic children. the gymnasium, therefore, offers a field for the most varied exercises, tending to establish the co-ordination of the movements common in life, such as walking, throwing objects, going up and down stairs, kneeling, rising, jumping, etc. free gymnastics by free gymnastics i mean those which are given without any apparatus. such gymnastics are divided into two classes: directed and required exercises, and free games. in the first class, i recommend the march, the object of which should be not rhythm, but poise only. when the march is introduced, it is well to accompany it with the singing of little songs, because this furnishes a breathing exercise very helpful in strengthening the lungs. besides the march, many of the games of froebel which are accompanied by songs, very similar to those which the children constantly play among themselves, may be used. in the free games, we furnish the children with balls, hoops, bean bags and kites. the trees readily offer themselves to the game of "pussy wants a corner," and many simple games of tag. [illustration: dr. montessori in the garden of the school at via giusti] [illustration: (a) children three and one-half and four years old learning to button and lace. (b) ribbon and button frames. these are among the earliest exercises.] educational gymnastics under the name of educational gymnastics, we include two series of exercises which really form a part of other school work, as, for instance, the cultivation of the earth, the care of plants and animals (watering and pruning the plants, carrying the grain to the chickens, etc.). these activities call for various co-ordinated movements, as, for example, in hoeing, in getting down to plant things, and in rising; the trips which children make in carrying objects to some definite place, and in making a definite practical use of these objects, offer a field for very valuable gymnastic exercises. the scattering of minute objects, such as corn and oats, is valuable, and also the exercise of opening and closing the gates to the garden and to the chicken yard. all of these exercises are the more valuable in that they are carried on in the open air. among our educational gymnastics we have exercises to develop co-ordinated movements of the fingers, and these prepare the children for the exercises of practical life, such as dressing and undressing themselves. the didactic material which forms the basis of these last named gymnastics is very simple, consisting of wooden frames, each mounted with two pieces of cloth, or leather, to be fastened and unfastened by means of the buttons and buttonholes, hooks and eyes, eyelets and lacings, or automatic fastenings. in our "children's houses" we use ten of these frames, so constructed that each one of them illustrates a different process in dressing or undressing. one: mounted with heavy pieces of wool which are to be fastened by means of large bone buttons--corresponds to children's dresses. two: mounted with pieces of linen to be fastened with pearl buttons--corresponds to a child's underwear. three: leather pieces mounted with shoe buttons--in fastening these leather pieces the children make use of the button-hook--corresponds to a child's shoes. four: pieces of leather which are laced together by means of eyelets and shoe laces. five: two pieces of cloth to be laced together. (these pieces are boned and therefore correspond to the little bodices worn by the peasants in italy.) six: two pieces of stuff to be fastened by means of large hooks and eyes. seven: two pieces of linen, to be fastened by means of small hooks and worked eyelets. eight: two pieces of cloth to be fastened by means of broad coloured ribbon, which is to be tied into bows. nine: pieces of cloth laced together with round cord, on the same order as the fastenings on many of the children's underclothes. ten: two pieces to be fastened together by means of the modern automatic fasteners. through the use of such toys, the children can practically analyse the movements necessary in dressing and undressing themselves, and can prepare themselves separately for these movements by means of repeated exercises. we succeed in teaching the child to dress himself without his really being aware of it, that is, without any direct or arbitrary command we have led him to this mastery. as soon as he knows how to do it, he begins to wish to make a practical application of his ability, and very soon he will be proud of being sufficient unto himself, and will take delight in an ability which makes his body free from the hands of others, and which leads him the sooner to that modesty and activity which develops far too late in those children of to-day who are deprived of this most practical form of education. the fastening games are very pleasing to the little ones, and often when ten of them are using the frames at the same time, seated around the little tables, quiet and serious, they give the impression of a workroom filled with tiny workers. respiratory gymnastics the purpose of these gymnastics is to regulate the respiratory movements: in other words, to teach the _art of breathing_. they also help greatly the correct formation of the child's _speech habits_. the exercises which we use were introduced into school literature by professor sala. we have chosen the simple exercises described by him in his treatise, "cura della balbuzie."[ ] these include a number of respiratory gymnastic exercises with which are co-ordinated muscular exercises. i give here an example: [ ] "cura della balbuzie e del difetti di pronunzia." sala. ulrico hoepli, publisher, milan, italy. mouth wide open, tongue held flat, hands on hips. breathe deeply, lift the shoulders rapidly, lowering the diaphragm. expel breath slowly, lowering shoulders slowly, returning to normal position. the directress should select or devise simple breathing exercises, to be accompanied with arm movements, etc. exercises for proper use of _lips, tongue, and teeth_. these exercises teach the movements of the lips and tongue in the pronunciation of certain fundamental consonant sounds, reinforcing the muscles, and making them ready for these movements. these gymnastics prepare the organs used in the formation of language. in presenting such exercises we begin with the entire class, but finish by testing the children individually. we ask the child to pronounce, _aloud_ and with _force_, the first syllable of a word. when all are intent upon putting the greatest possible force into this, we call each child separately, and have him repeat the word. if he pronounces it correctly, we send him to the right, if badly, to the left. those who have difficulty with the word, are then encouraged to repeat it several times. the teacher takes note of the age of the child, and of the particular defects in the movements of the muscles used in articulating. she may then touch the muscles which should be used, tapping, for example, the curve of the lips, or even taking hold of the child's tongue and placing it against the dental arch, or showing him clearly the movements which she herself makes when pronouncing the syllable. she must seek in every way to aid the normal development of the movements necessary to the exact articulation of the word. as the basis for these gymnastics we have the children pronounce the words: _pane_--_fame_--_tana_--_zina_--_stella_--_rana_--_gatto_. in the pronunciation of _pane_, the child should repeat with much force, _pa_, _pa_, _pa_, thus exercising the muscles producing orbicular contraction of the lips. in _fame_ repeating _fa_, _fa_, _fa_, the child exercises the movements of the lower lip against the upper dental arch. in _tana_, having him repeat _ta_, _ta_, _ta_, we cause him to exercise the movement of the tongue against the upper dental arch. in _zina_, we provoke the contact of the upper and lower dental arches. with _stella_ we have him repeat the whole word, bringing the teeth together, and holding the tongue (which has a tendency to protrude) close against the upper teeth. in _rana_ we have him repeat _r_, _r_, _r_, thus exercising the tongue in the vibratory movements. in _gatto_ we hold the voice upon the guttural _g_. chapter x nature in education--agricultural labour: culture of plants and animals itard, in a remarkable pedagogical treatise: "_des premiers développements du jeune sauvage de l'aveyron_," expounds in detail the drama of a curious, gigantic education which attempted to overcome the psychical darkness of an idiot and at the same time to snatch a man from primitive nature. the savage of the aveyron was a child who had grown up in the natural state: criminally abandoned in a forest where his assassins thought they had killed him, he was cured by natural means, and had survived for many years free and naked in the wilderness, until, captured by hunters, he entered into the civilised life of paris, showing by the scars with which his miserable body was furrowed the story of the struggles with wild beasts, and of lacerations caused by falling from heights. the child was, and always remained, mute; his mentality, diagnosed by pinel as idiotic, remained forever almost inaccessible to intellectual education. to this child are due the first steps of positive pedagogy. itard, a physician of deaf-mutes and a student of philosophy, undertook his education with methods which he had already partially tried for treating defective hearing--believing at the beginning that the savage showed characteristics of inferiority, not because he was a degraded organism, but for want of education. he was a follower of the principles of helvetius: "man is nothing without the work of man"; that is, he believed in the omnipotence of education, and was opposed to the pedagogical principle which rousseau had promulgated before the revolution: "_tout est bien sortant des mains de l'auteur des choses, tout dégénère dans les mains de l'homme_,"--that is, the work of education is deleterious and spoils the man. the savage, according to the erroneous first impression of itard, demonstrated experimentally by his characteristics the truth of the former assertion. when, however, he perceived, with the help of pinel, that he had to do with an idiot, his philosophical theories gave place to the most admirable, tentative, experimental pedagogy. itard divides the education of the savage into two parts. in the first, he endeavours to lead the child from natural life to social life; and in the second, he attempts the intellectual education of the idiot. the child in his life of frightful abandonment had found one happiness; he had, so to speak, immersed himself in, and unified himself with, nature, taking delight in it--rains, snow, tempests, boundless space, had been his sources of entertainment, his companions, his love. civil life is a renunciation of all this: but it is an acquisition beneficent to human progress. in itard's pages we find vividly described the moral work which led the savage to civilisation, multiplying the needs of the child and surrounding him with loving care. here is a sample of the admirably patient work of itard as _observer of the spontaneous expressions_ of his pupil: it can most truly give teachers, who are to prepare for the experimental method, an idea of the patience and the self-abnegation necessary in dealing with a phenomenon which is to be observed: "when, for example, he was observed within his room, he was seen to be lounging with oppressive monotony, continually directing his eyes toward the window, with his gaze wandering in the void. if on such occasions a sudden storm blew up, if the sun, hidden behind the clouds, peeped out of a sudden, lighting the atmosphere brilliantly, there were loud bursts of laughter and almost convulsive joy. sometimes, instead of these expressions of joy, there was a sort of frenzied rage: he would twist his arms, put his clenched fists upon his eyes, gnashing his teeth and becoming dangerous to those about him. "one morning, when the snow fell abundantly while he was still in bed, he uttered a cry of joy upon awaking, leaped from his bed, ran to the window and then to the door; went and came impatiently from one to the other; then ran out undressed as he was into the garden. there, giving vent to his joy with the shrillest of cries, he ran, rolled in the snow, gathered it up in handfuls, and swallowed it with incredible avidity. "but his sensations at sight of the great spectacles of nature did not always manifest themselves in such a vivid and noisy manner. it is worthy of note that in certain cases they were expressed by a quiet regret and melancholy. thus, it was when the rigour of the weather drove everybody from the garden that the savage of the aveyron chose to go there. he would walk around it several times and finally sit down upon the edge of the fountain. "i have often stopped for _whole hours_, and with indescribable pleasure, to watch him as he sat thus--to see how his face, inexpressive or contracted by grimaces, gradually assumed an expression of sadness, and of melancholy reminiscence, while his eyes were fixed upon the surface of the water into which from time to time he would throw a few dead leaves. "if when there was a full moon, a sheaf of mild beams penetrated into his room, he rarely failed to wake and to take his place at the window. he would remain there _for a large part of the night_, erect, motionless, with his head thrust forward, his eyes fixed on the countryside lighted by the moon, plunged in a sort of contemplative ecstasy, the immobility and silence of which were only interrupted at long intervals by a breath as deep as a sigh, which died away in a plaintive sound of lamentation." elsewhere, itard relates that the boy did not know the _walking gait_ which we use in civilised life, but only the _running gait_, and tells how he, itard, ran after him at the beginning, when he took him out into the streets of paris, rather than violently check the boy's running. the gradual and gentle leading of the savage through all the manifestations of social life, the early adaptation of the teacher to the pupil rather than of the pupil to the teacher, the successive attraction to a new life which was to win over the child by its charms, and not be imposed upon him violently so that the pupil should feel it as a burden and a torture, are as many precious educative expressions which may be generalised and applied to the education of children. i believe that there exists no document which offers so poignant and so eloquent a contrast between the life of nature and the life of society, and which so graphically shows that society is made up solely of renunciations and restraints. let it suffice to recall the run, checked to a walk, and the loud-voiced cry, checked to the modulations of the ordinary speaking voice. and, yet, without any violence, leaving to social life the task of charming the child little by little, itard's education triumphs. it is true that civilised life is made by renunciation of the life of nature; it is almost the snatching of a man from the lap of earth; it is like snatching the new-born child from its mother's breast; but it is also a new life. in itard's pages we see the final triumph of the love of man over the love of nature: the savage of the aveyron ends by _feeling_ and preferring the affection of itard, the caresses, the tears shed over him, to the joy of immersing himself voluptuously in the snow, and of contemplating the infinite expanse of the sky on a starry night: one day after an attempted escape into the country, he returns of his own accord, humble and repentant, to find his good soup and his warm bed. it is true that man has created enjoyments in social life and has brought about a vigorous human love in community life. but nevertheless he still belongs to nature, and, especially when he is a child, he must needs draw from it the forces necessary to the development of the body and of the spirit. we have intimate communications with nature which have an influence, even a material influence, on the growth of the body. (for example, a physiologist, isolating young guinea pigs from terrestrial magnetism by means of insulators, found that they grew up with rickets.) in the education of little children itard's educative drama is repeated: we must prepare man, who is one among the living creatures and therefore belongs to nature, for social life, because social life being his own peculiar work, must also correspond to the manifestation of his natural activity. but the advantages which we prepare for him in this social life, in a great measure escape the little child, who at the beginning of his life is a predominantly vegetative creature. to soften this transition in education, by giving a large part of the educative work to nature itself, is as necessary as it is not to snatch the little child suddenly and violently from its mother and to take him to school; and precisely this is done in the "children's houses," which are situated within the tenements where the parents live, where the cry of the child reaches the mother and the mother's voice answers it. nowadays, under the form of child hygiene, this part of education is much cultivated: children are allowed to grow up in the open air, in the public gardens, or are left for many hours half naked on the seashore, exposed to the rays of the sun. it has been understood, through the diffusion of marine and apennine colonies, that the best means of invigorating the child is to immerse him in nature. short and comfortable clothing for children, sandals for the feet, nudity of the lower extremities, are so many liberations from the oppressive shackles of civilisation. it is an obvious principle that we should sacrifice to natural liberties in education only as much as is _necessary_ for the acquisition of the greater pleasures which are offered by civilisation without _useless sacrifices_. but in all this progress of modern child education, we have not freed ourselves from the prejudice which denies children spiritual expression and spiritual needs, and makes us consider them only as amiable vegetating bodies to be cared for, kissed, and set in motion. the _education_ which a good mother or a good modern teacher gives to-day to the child who, for example, is running about in a flower garden is the counsel _not to touch the flowers_, not to tread on the grass; as if it were sufficient for the child to satisfy the physiological needs of his body by moving his legs and breathing fresh air. but if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation, in order that he may lay up for himself treasure from the directly educating forces of living nature. the method for arriving at this end is to set the child at agricultural labour, guiding him to the cultivation of plants and animals, and so to the intelligent contemplation of nature. already, in england mrs. latter has devised the _basis_ for a method of child education by means of _gardening_ and _horticulture_. she sees in the contemplation of developing life the bases of religion, since the soul of the child may go from the creature to the creator. she sees in it also the point of departure for intellectual education, which she limits to drawing from life as a step toward art, to the ideas about plants, insects, and seasons, which spring from agriculture, and to the first notions of household life, which spring from the cultivation and the culinary preparation of certain alimentary products that children later serve upon the table, providing afterwards also for the washing of the utensils and tableware. mrs. latter's conception is too one-sided; but her institutions, which continue to spread in england, undoubtedly complete the natural _education_ which, up to this time limited to the physical side, has already been so efficacious in invigorating the bodies of english children. moreover, her experience offers a positive corroboration of the practicability of agricultural teaching in the case of little children. as for deficients, i have seen agriculture applied on a large scale to their education at paris by the means which the kindly spirit of baccelli tried to introduce into the elementary schools when he attempted to institute the "little educative gardens." in every _little garden_ are sown different agricultural products, demonstrating practically the proper method and the proper time for seeding and for crop gathering, and the period of development of the various products; the manner of preparing the soil, of enriching it with natural or chemical manures, etc. the same is done for ornamental plants and for gardening, which is the work yielding the best income for deficients, when they are of an age to practise a profession. but this side of education, though it contains, in the first place, an objective method of intellectual culture, and, in addition, a professional preparation, is not, in my opinion, to be taken into serious consideration for child education. the educational conception of this age must be solely that of aiding the psycho-physical development of the individual; and, this being the case, agriculture and animal culture contain in themselves precious means of moral education which can be analysed far more than is done by mrs. latter, who sees in them essentially a method of conducting the child's soul to religious feeling. indeed, in this method, which is a progressive ascent, several gradations can be distinguished: i mention here the principal ones: _first._ _the child is initiated into observation_ of the phenomena of life. he stands with respect to the plants and animals in relations analogous to those in which the _observing_ teacher stands towards him. little by little, as interest and observation grow, his zealous care for the living creatures grows also, and in this way, the child can logically be brought to appreciate the care which the mother and the teacher take of him. _second._ the child is initiated into _foresight_ by way of _auto-education_; when he knows that the life of the plants that have been sown depends upon his care in watering them, and that of the animals, upon his diligence in feeding them, without which the little plant dries up and the animals suffer hunger, the child becomes vigilant, as one who is beginning to feel a mission in life. moreover, a voice quite different from that of his mother and his teacher calling him to his duties, is speaking here, exhorting him never to forget the task he has undertaken. it is the plaintive voice of the needy life which lives by his care. between the child and the living creatures which he cultivates there is born a mysterious correspondence which induces the child to fulfil certain determinate acts without the intervention of the teacher, that is, leads him to an _auto-education_. the rewards which the child reaps also remain between him and nature: one fine day after long patient care in carrying food and straw to the brooding pigeons, behold the little ones! behold a number of chickens peeping about the setting hen which yesterday sat motionless in her brooding place! behold one day the tender little rabbits in the hutch where formerly dwelt in solitude the pair of big rabbits to which he had not a few times lovingly carried the green vegetables left over in his mother's kitchen! i have not yet been able to institute in rome the breeding of animals, but in the "children's houses" at milan there are several animals, among them a pair of pretty little white american fowl that live in a diminutive and elegant _chalet_, similar in construction to a chinese pagoda: in front of it, a little piece of ground inclosed by a rampart is reserved for the pair. the little door of the _chalet_ is locked at evening, and the children take care of it in turn. with what delight they go in the morning to unlock the door, to fetch water and straw, and with what care they watch during the day, and at evening lock the door after having made sure that the fowl lack nothing! the teacher informs me that among all the educative exercises this is the most welcome, and seems also the most important of all. many a time when the children are tranquilly occupied in tasks, each at the work he prefers, one, two, or three, get up silently, and go out to cast a glance at the animals to see if they need care. often it happens that a child absents himself for a long time and the teacher surprises him watching enchantedly the fish gliding ruddy and resplendent in the sunlight in the waters of the fountain. one day i received from the teacher in milan a letter in which she spoke to me with great enthusiasm of a truly wonderful piece of news. the little pigeons were hatched. for the children it was a great festival. they felt themselves to some extent the parents of these little ones, and no artificial reward which had flattered their vanity would ever have provoked such a truly fine emotion. not less great are the joys which vegetable nature provides. in one of the "children's houses" at rome, where there was no soil that could be cultivated, there have been arranged, through the efforts of signora talamo, flower-pots all around the large terrace, and climbing plants near the walls. the children never forget to water the plants with their little watering-pots. one day i found them seated on the ground, all in a circle, around a splendid red rose which had bloomed in the night; silent and calm, literally immersed in mute contemplation. _third._ the children are initiated into the virtue of _patience and into confident expectation_, which is a form of faith and of philosophy of life. when the children put a seed into the ground, and wait until it fructifies, and see the first appearance of the shapeless plant, and wait for the growth and the transformations into flower and fruit, and see how some plants sprout sooner and some later, and how the deciduous plants have a rapid life, and the fruit-trees a slower growth, they end by acquiring a peaceful equilibrium of conscience, and absorb the first germs of that wisdom which so characterised the tillers of the soil in the time when they still kept their primitive simplicity. _fourth._ _the children are inspired with a feeling for nature_, which is maintained by the marvels of creation--that creation which _rewards_ with a generosity not measured by the labour of those who help it to evolve the life of its creatures. even while at the work, a sort of correspondence arises between the child's soul and the lives which are developed under his care. the child loves naturally the manifestations of life: mrs. latter tells us how easily little ones are interested even in earthworms and in the movement of the larvæ of insects in manure, without feeling that horror which we, who have grown up isolated from nature, experience towards certain animals. it is well then, to develop this feeling of trust and confidence in living creatures, which is, moreover, a form of love, and of union with the universe. but what most develops a feeling of nature is the _cultivation_ of the _living_ things, because they by their natural development give back far more than they receive, and show something like infinity in their beauty and variety. when the child has cultivated the iris or the pansy, the rose or the hyacinth, has placed in the soil a seed or a bulb and periodically watered it, or has planted a fruit-bearing shrub, and the blossomed flower and the ripened fruit offer themselves as a _generous gift_ of nature, a rich reward for a small effort; it seems almost as if nature were answering with her gifts to the feeling of desire, to the vigilant love of the cultivator, rather than striking a balance with his material efforts. it will be quite different when the child has to gather the _material_ fruits of his labour: motionless, uniform objects, which are consumed and dispersed rather than increased and multiplied. the difference between the products of nature and those of industry, between divine products and human products--it is this that must be born spontaneously in the child's conscience, like the determination of a fact. but at the same time, as the plant must give its fruit, so man must give his labour. _fifth._ _the child follows the natural way of development of the human race._ in short, such education makes the evolution of the individual harmonise with that of humanity. man passed from the natural to the artificial state through agriculture: when he discovered the secret of intensifying the production of the soil, he obtained the reward of civilisation. the same path must be traversed by the child who is destined to become a civilised man. the action of educative nature so understood is very practically accessible. because, even if the vast stretch of ground and the large courtyard necessary for physical education are lacking, it will always be possible to find a few square yards of land that may be cultivated, or a little place where pigeons can make their nest, things sufficient for spiritual education. even a pot of flowers at the window can, if necessary, fulfil the purpose. in the first "children's house" in rome we have a vast courtyard, cultivated as a garden, where the children are free to run in the open air--and, besides, a long stretch of ground, which is planted on one side with trees, has a branching path in the middle, and on the opposite side, has broken ground for the cultivation of plants. this last, we have divided into so many portions, reserving one for each child. while the smaller children run freely up and down the paths, or rest in the shade of the trees, the _possessors of the earth_ (children from four years of age up), are sowing, or hoeing, watering or examining, the surface of the soil watching for the sprouting of plants. it is interesting to note the following fact: the little reservations of the children are placed along the wall of the tenement, in a spot formerly neglected because it leads to a blind road; the inhabitants of the house, therefore, had the habit of throwing from those windows every kind of offal, and at the beginning our garden was thus contaminated. but, little by little, without any exhortation on our part, solely through the respect born in the people's mind for the children's labour, nothing more fell from the windows, except the loving glances and smiles of the mothers upon the soil which was the beloved possession of their little children. chapter xi manual labour--the potter's art and building manual labour is distinguished from manual gymnastics by the fact that the object of the latter is to exercise the hand, and the former, to _accomplish a determinate work_, being, or simulating, a socially useful object. the one perfects the individual, the other enriches the world; the two things are, however, connected because, in general, only one who has perfected his own hand can produce a useful product. i have thought wise, after a short trial, to exclude completely froebel's exercises, because weaving and sewing on cardboard are ill adapted to the physiological state of the child's visual organs where the powers of the accommodation of the eye have not yet reached complete development; hence, these exercises cause an _effort_ of the organ which may have a fatal influence on the development of the sight. the other little exercises of froebel, such as the folding of paper, are exercises of the hand, not work. there is still left plastic work,--the most rational among all the exercises of froebel,--which consists in making the child reproduce determinate objects in clay. in consideration, however, of the system of liberty which i proposed, i did not like to make the children _copy_ anything, and, in giving them clay to fashion in their own manner, i did not direct the children to _produce useful things_; nor was i accomplishing an educative result, inasmuch as plastic work, as i shall show later, serves for the study of the psychic individuality of the child in his spontaneous manifestations, but not for his education. i decided therefore to try in the "children's houses" some very interesting exercises which i had seen accomplished by an artist, professor randone, in the "school of educative art" founded by him. this school had its origin along with the society for young people, called _giovinezza gentile_, both school and society having the object of educating youth in gentleness towards their surroundings--that is, in respect for objects, buildings, monuments: a really important part of civil education, and one which interested me particularly on account of the "children's houses," since that institution has, as its fundamental aim, to teach precisely this respect for the walls, for the house, for the surroundings. very suitably, professor randone had decided that the society of _giovinezza gentile_ could not be based upon sterile theoretical preachings of the principles of citizenship, or upon moral pledges taken by the children; but that it must proceed from an artistic education which should lead the youth to appreciate and love, and consequently respect, objects and especially monuments and historic buildings. thus the "school of educative art" was inspired by a broad artistic conception including the reproduction of objects which are commonly met in the surroundings; the history and pre-history of their production, and the illustration of the principal civic monuments which, in rome, are in large measure composed of archæological monuments. in order the more directly to accomplish his object, professor randone founded his admirable school in an opening in one of the most artistic parts of the walls of rome, namely, the wall of belisarius, overlooking the villa umberto primo--a wall which has been entirely neglected by the authorities and by no means respected by the citizens, and upon which randone lavished care, decorating it with graceful hanging gardens on the outside, and locating within it the school of art which was to shape the _giovinezza gentile_. here randone has tried, very fittingly, to rebuild and revive a form of art which was once the glory of italy and of florence--the potter's art, that is, the art of constructing vases. the archæological, historical, and artistic importance of the vase is very great, and may be compared with the numismatic art. in fact the first object of which humanity felt the need was the _vase_, which came into being with the utilisation of fire, and before the discovery of the _production_ of fire. indeed the first food of mankind was cooked in a vase. one of the things most important, ethnically, in judging the civilisation of a primitive people is the grade of perfection attained in _pottery_; in fact, the _vase_ for domestic life and the axe for social life are the first sacred symbols which we find in the prehistoric epoch, and are the religious symbols connected with the temples of the gods and with the cult of the dead. even to-day, religious cults have sacred vases in their sancta sanctorum. people who have progressed in civilisation show their feeling for art and their æsthetic feeling also in _vases_ which are multiplied in almost infinite form, as we see in egyptian, etruscan, and greek art. the vase then comes into being, attains perfection, and is multiplied in its uses and its forms, in the course of human civilisation; and the history of the vase follows the history of humanity itself. besides the civil and moral importance of the vase, we have another and practical one, its literal _adaptability_ to every modification of form, and its susceptibility to the most diverse ornamentation; in this, it gives free scope to the individual genius of the artist. thus, when once the handicraft leading to the construction of vases has been learned (and this is the part of the progress in the work, learned from the direct and graduated instruction of the teacher), anyone can modify it according to the inspiration of his own æsthetic taste and this is the artistic, individual part of the work. besides this, in randone's school the use of the potter's wheel is taught, and also the composition of the mixture for the bath of majolica ware, and baking the pieces in the furnace, stages of manual labour which contain an industrial culture. another work in the school of educative art is the manufacture of diminutive bricks, and their baking in the furnace, and the construction of diminutive _walls_ built by the same processes which the masons use in the construction of houses, the bricks being joined by means of mortar handled with a trowel. after the simple construction of the wall,--which is very amusing for the children who build it, placing brick on brick, superimposing row on row,--the children pass to the construction of real _houses_,--first, resting on the ground, and, then, really constructed with foundations, after a previous excavation of large holes in the ground by means of little hoes and shovels. these little houses have openings corresponding to windows and doors, and are variously ornamented in their façades by little tiles of bright and multi-coloured majolica: the tiles themselves being manufactured by the children. thus the children learn to _appreciate_ the objects and constructions which surround them, while a real manual and artistic labour gives them profitable exercise. such is the manual training which i have adopted in the "children's houses"; after two or three lessons the little pupils are already enthusiastic about the construction of vases, and they preserve very carefully their own products, in which they take pride. with their plastic art they then model little objects, eggs or fruits, with which they themselves fill the vases. one of the first undertakings is the simple vase of red clay filled with eggs of white clay; then comes the modelling of the vase with one or more spouts, of the narrow-mouthed vase, of the vase with a handle, of that with two or three handles, of the tripod, of the amphora. for children of the age of five or six, the work of the potter's wheel begins. but what most delights the children is the work of building a wall with little bricks, and seeing a little house, the fruit of their own hands, rise in the vicinity of the ground in which are growing plants, also cultivated by them. thus the age of childhood epitomises the principal primitive labours of humanity, when the human race, changing from the nomadic to the stable condition, demanded of the earth its fruit, built itself shelter, and devised vases to cook the foods yielded by the fertile earth. chapter xii education of the senses in a pedagogical method which is experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume the greatest importance. experimental psychology also takes note of movements by means of sense measurements. pedagogy, however, although it may profit by psychometry is not designed to _measure_ the sensations, but _educate_ the senses. this is a point easily understood, yet one which is often confused. while the proceedings of esthesiometry are not to any great extent applicable to little children, the _education_ of the _senses_ is entirely possible. we do not start from the conclusions of experimental psychology. that is, it is not the knowledge of the average sense conditions according to the age of the child which leads us to determine the educational applications we shall make. we start essentially from a method, and it is probable that psychology will be able to draw its conclusions from pedagogy so understood, and not _vice versa_. the method used by me is that of making a pedagogical experiment with a didactic object and awaiting the spontaneous reaction of the child. this is a method in every way analogous to that of experimental psychology. i make use of a material which, at first glance, may be confused with psychometric material. teachers from milan who had followed the course in the milan school of experimental psychology, seeing my material exposed, would recognise among it, measures of the perception of colour, hardness, and weight, and would conclude that, in truth, i brought no new contribution to pedagogy since these instruments were already known to them. but the great difference between the two materials lies in this: the esthesiometer carries within itself the possibility of _measuring_; my objects on the contrary, often do not permit a measure, but are adapted to cause the child to _exercise_ the senses. in order that an instrument shall attain such a pedagogical end, it is necessary that it shall not _weary_ but shall _divert_ the child. here lies the difficulty in the selection of didactic material. it is known that the psychometric instruments are great _consumers of energy_--for this reason, when pizzoli wished to apply them to the education of the senses, he did not succeed because the child was annoyed by them, and became tired. instead, _the aim of education is to develop the energies_. psychometric instruments, or better, the instruments of _esthesiometry_, are prepared in their differential gradations upon the laws of weber, which were in truth drawn from experiments made upon adults. with little children, we must proceed to the making of trials, and must select the didactic materials in which they show themselves to be interested. this i did in the first year of the "children's houses" adopting a great variety of stimuli, with a number of which i had already experimented in the school for deficients. much of the material used for deficients is abandoned in the education of the normal child--and much that is used has been greatly modified. i believe, however, that i have arrived at a _selection of objects_ (which i do not here wish to speak of in the technical language of psychology as stimuli) representing the minimum _necessary_ to a practical sense education. these objects constitute the _didactic system_ (or set of didactic materials) used by me. they are manufactured by the house of labour of the humanitarian society at milan. a description of the objects will be given as the educational scope of each is explained. here i shall limit myself to the setting forth of a few general considerations. _first._ _the difference in the reaction between deficient and normal children, in the presentation of didactic material made up of graded stimuli._ this difference is plainly seen from the fact that the same didactic material used with deficients _makes education possible_, while with normal children it _provokes auto-education_. this fact is one of the most interesting i have met with in all my experience, and it inspired and rendered possible the method of _observation_ and _liberty_. let us suppose that we use our first object,--a block in which solid geometric forms are set. into corresponding holes in the block are set ten little wooden cylinders, the bases diminishing gradually about the millimetres. the game consists in taking the cylinders out of their places, putting them on the table, mixing them, and then putting each one back in its own place. the aim is to educate the eye to the differential perception of dimensions. with the deficient child, it would be necessary to begin with exercises in which the stimuli were much more strongly contrasted, and to arrive at this exercise only after many others had preceded it. with normal children, this is, on the other hand, the first object which we may present, and out of all the didactic material this is the game preferred by the very little children of two and a half and three years. once we arrived at this exercise with a deficient child, it was necessary continually and actively to recall his attention, inviting him to look at the block and showing him the various pieces. and if the child once succeeded in placing all the cylinders properly, he stopped, and the game was finished. whenever the deficient child committed an error, it was necessary to correct it, or to urge him to correct it himself, and when he was able to correct an error he was usually quite indifferent. now the normal child, instead, takes spontaneously a lively interest in this game. he pushes away all who would interfere, or offer to help him, and wishes to be alone before his problem. it had already been noted that little ones of two or three years take the greatest pleasure in arranging small objects, and this experiment in the "children's houses" demonstrates the truth of this assertion. now, and here is the important point, the normal child attentively observes the relation between the size of the opening and that of the object which he is to place in the mould, and is greatly interested in the game, as is clearly shown by the expression of attention on the little face. if he mistakes, placing one of the objects in an opening that is small for it, he takes it away, and proceeds to make various trials, seeking the proper opening. if he makes a contrary error, letting the cylinder fall into an opening that is a little too large for it, and then collects all the successive cylinders in openings just a little too large, he will find himself at the last with the big cylinder in his hand while only the smallest opening is empty. the didactic material _controls every error_. the child proceeds to correct himself, doing this in various ways. most often he feels the cylinders or shakes them, in order to recognise which are the largest. sometimes, he sees at a glance where his error lies, pulls the cylinders from the places where they should not be, and puts those left out where they belong, then replaces all the others. the normal child always repeats the exercise with growing interest. indeed, it is precisely in these errors that the educational importance of the didactic material lies, and when the child with evident security places each piece in its proper place, he has outgrown the exercise, and this piece of material becomes useless to him. this self-correction leads the child to concentrate his attention upon the differences of dimensions, and to compare the various pieces. it is in just this comparison that the _psycho-sensory_ exercise lies. there is, therefore, no question here of teaching the child the _knowledge_ of the dimensions, through the medium of these pieces. neither is it our aim that the child shall know how to use, _without an error_, the material presented to him thus performing the exercises well. that would place our material on the same basis as many others, for example that of froebel, and would require again the _active_ work of the _teacher_, who busies herself furnishing knowledge, and making haste to correct every error in order that the child may _learn the use of the objects_. here instead it is the work of the child, the auto-correction, the auto-education which acts, for the _teacher must not interfere_ in the _slightest_ way. no teacher can furnish the child with the _agility which he acquires_ through gymnastic _exercises_: it is necessary that the _pupil perfect himself_ through his own efforts. it is very much the same with the _education of the senses_. it might be said that the same thing is true of every form of education; a man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done. one of the difficulties of putting this method into practice with teachers of the old school, lies in the difficulty of preventing them from intervening when the little child remains for some time puzzled before some error, and with his eyebrows drawn together and his lips puckered, makes repeated efforts to correct himself. when they see this, the old-time teachers are seized with pity, and long, with an almost irresistible force, to help the child. when we prevent this intervention, they burst into words of compassion for the little scholar, but he soon shows in his smiling face the joy of having surmounted an obstacle. normal children repeat such exercises many times. this repetition varies according to the individual. some children after having completed the exercise five or six times are tired of it. others will remove and replace the pieces at least _twenty times_, with an expression of evident interest. once, after i had watched a little one of four years repeat this exercise sixteen times, i had the other children sing in order to distract her, but she continued unmoved to take out the cylinders, mix them up and put them back in their places. an intelligent teacher ought to be able to make most interesting individual psychological observations, and, to a certain point, should be able to measure the length of time for which the various stimuli held the attention. in fact, when the child educates himself, and when the control and correction of errors is yielded to the didactic material, there _remains for the teacher nothing but to observe_. she must then be more of a psychologist than a teacher, and this shows the importance of a scientific preparation on the part of the teacher. indeed, with my methods, the teacher teaches _little_ and observes _much_, and, above all, it is her function to direct the psychic activity of the children and their physiological development. for this reason i have changed the name of teacher into that of directress. at first this name provoked many smiles, for everyone asked whom there was for this teacher to direct, since she had no assistants, and since she must leave her little scholars _in liberty_. but her direction is much more profound and important than that which is commonly understood, for this teacher directs _the life and the soul_. _second._ _the education of the senses has, as its aim, the refinement of the differential perception of stimuli by means of repeated exercises._ there exists a _sensory culture_, which is not generally taken into consideration, but which is a factor in esthesiometry. for example, in the mental _tests_ which are used in france, or in a series of tests which de sanctis has established for the _diagnosis_ of the intellectual status, i have often seen used _cubes of different sizes placed at varying distances_. the child was to select the _smallest_ and the _largest_, while the chronometer measured the time of reaction between the command and the execution of the act. account was also taken of the errors. i repeat that in such experiments the factor of _culture_ is forgotten and by this i mean _sensory culture_. our children have, for example, among the didactic material for the education of the senses, a series of ten cubes. the first has a base of ten centimetres, and the others decrease, successively, one centimetre as to base, the smallest cube having a base of one centimetre. the exercise consists in throwing the blocks, which are pink in colour, down upon a green carpet, and then building them up into a little tower, placing the largest cube as the base, and then placing the others in order of size until the little cube of one centimetre is placed at the top. the little one must each time select, from the blocks scattered upon the green carpet, "the largest" block. this game is most entertaining to the little ones of two years and a half, who, as soon as they have constructed the little tower, tumble it down with little blows of the hand, admiring the pink cubes as they lie scattered upon the green carpet. then, they begin again the construction, building and destroying a definite number of times. if we were to place before these tests one of my children from three to four years, and one of the children from the first elementary (six or seven years old), my pupil would undoubtedly manifest a shorter period of reaction, and would not commit errors. the same may be said for the tests of the chromatic sense, etc. this educational method should therefore prove interesting to students of experimental psychology as well as to teachers. in conclusion, let me summarize briefly: our didactic material renders auto-education possible, permits a methodical education of the senses. not upon the ability of the teacher does such education rest, but upon the didactic system. this presents objects which, first, attract the spontaneous attention of the child, and, second, contain a rational gradation of stimuli. we must not confuse the _education_ of the senses, with the concrete ideas which may be gathered from our environment by means of the senses. nor must this education of the senses be identical in our minds with the language through which is given the nomenclature corresponding to the concrete idea, nor with the acquisition of the abstract idea of the exercises. let us consider what the music master does in giving instruction in piano playing. he teaches the pupil the correct position of the body, gives him the idea of the notes, shows him the correspondence between the written notes and the touch and the position of the fingers, and then he leaves the child to perform the exercise by himself. if a pianist is to be made of this child, there must, between the ideas given by the teacher and the musical exercises, intervene long and patient application to those exercises which serve to give agility to the articulation of the fingers and of the tendons, in order that the co-ordination of special muscular movements shall become automatic, and that the muscles of the hand shall become strong through their repeated use. the pianist must, therefore, _act for himself_, and the more his natural tendencies lead him to _persist_ in these exercises the greater will be his success. however, without the direction of the master the exercise will not suffice to develop the scholar into a true pianist. the directress of the "children's house" must have a clear idea of the two factors which enter into her work--the guidance of the child, and the individual exercise. only after she has this concept clearly fixed in her mind, may she proceed to the application of a _method_ to _guide_ the spontaneous education of the child and to impart necessary notions to him. in the opportune quality and in the manner of this intervention lies the _personal art_ of the _educator_. for example, in the "children's house" in the prati di castello, where the pupils belong to the middle-class, i found, a month after the opening of the school, a child of five years who already knew how to compose any word, as he knew the alphabet perfectly--he had learned it in two weeks. he knew how to write on the blackboard, and in the exercises in free design he showed himself not only to be an observer, but to have some intuitive idea of perspective, drawing a house and chair very cleverly. as for the exercises of the chromatic sense, he could mix together the eight gradations of the eight colours which we use, and from this mass of sixty-four tablets, each wound with silk of a different colour or shade, he could rapidly separate the eight groups. having done this, he would proceed with ease to arrange each colour series in perfect gradation. in this game the child would almost cover one of the little tables with a carpet of finely-shaded colours. i made the experiment, taking him to the window and showing him in full daylight one of the coloured tablets, telling him to look at it well, so that he might be able to remember it. i then sent him to the table on which all the gradations were spread out, and asked him to find the tablet like the one at which he had looked. he committed only very slight errors, often choosing the exact shade but more often the one next it, rarely a tint two grades removed from the right one. this boy had then a power of discrimination and a colour memory which were almost prodigious. like all the other children, he was exceedingly fond of the colour exercises. but when i asked the name of the white colour spool, he hesitated for a long time before replying uncertainly "white." now a child of such intelligence should have been able, even without the special intervention of the teacher, to learn the name of each colour. the directress told me that having noticed that the child had great difficulty in retaining the nomenclature of the colours, she had up until that time left him to exercise himself freely with the games for the colour sense. at the same time he had developed rapidly a power over written language, which in my method as presented through a series of problems to be solved. these problems are presented as sense exercises. this child was, therefore, most intelligent. in him the discriminative sensory perceptions kept pace with great intellectual activities--attention and judgment. but his _memory for names_ was inferior. the directress had thought best not to interfere, as yet, in the teaching of the child. certainly, the education of the child was a little disordered, and the directress had left the spontaneous explanation of his mental activities excessively free. however desirable it may be to furnish a sense education as a basis for intellectual ideas, it is nevertheless advisable at the same time to associate the _language_ with these _perceptions_. in this connection i have found excellent for use with normal children _the three periods_ of which the lesson according to séguin consists: _first period._ the association of the sensory perception with the name. for example, we present to the child, two colours, red and blue. presenting the red, we say simply, "this is red," and presenting the blue, "this is blue." then, we lay the spools upon the table under the eyes of the child. _second period._ recognition of the object corresponding to the name. we say to the child, "give me the red," and then, "give me the blue." _third period._ the remembering of the name corresponding to the object. we ask the child, showing him the object, "what is this?" and he should respond, "red." séguin insists strongly upon these three periods, and urges that the colours be left for several instants under the eyes of the child. he also advises us never to present the colour singly, but always two at a time, since the contrast helps the chromatic memory. indeed, i have proved that there cannot be a better method for teaching colour to the deficients, who, with this method were able to learn the colours much more perfectly than normal children in the ordinary schools who have had a haphazard sense education. for normal children however there exists a _period preceding_ the three periods of séguin--a period which contains the real _sense education_. this is the acquisition of a fineness of differential perception, which can be obtained _only_ through auto-education. this, then, is an example of the great superiority of the normal child, and of the greater effect of education which such pedagogical methods may exercise upon the mental development of normal as compared with deficient children. the association of the name with the stimulus is a source of great pleasure to the normal child. i remember, one day, i had taught a little girl, who was not yet three years old, and who was a little tardy in the development of language, the names of three colours. i had the children place one of their little tables near a window, and seating myself in one of the little chairs, i seated the little girl in a similar chair at my right. i had, on the table, six of the colour spools in pairs, that is two reds, two blues, two yellows. in the first period, i placed one of the spools before the child, asking her to find the one like it. this i repeated for all three of the colours, showing her how to arrange them carefully in pairs. after this i passed to the three periods of séguin. the little girl learned to recognise the three colours and to pronounce the name of each. she was so happy that she looked at me for a long time, and then began to jump up and down. i, seeing her pleasure, said to her, laughing, "do you know the colours?" and she replied, still jumping up and down, "yes! yes!" her delight was inexhaustible; she danced about me, waiting joyously for me to ask her the same question, that she might reply with the same enthusiasm, "yes! yes!" another important particular in the technique of sense education lies in _isolating the sense_, whenever this is possible. so, for example, the exercises on the sense of hearing can be given more successfully in an environment not only of silence, but even of darkness. for the education of the senses in general, such as in the tactile, thermic, baric, and stereognostic exercises, we blindfold the child. the reasons for this particular technique have been fully set forth by psychology. here, it is enough to note that in the case of normal children the blindfold greatly increases their interest, without making the exercises degenerate into noisy fun, and without having the child's attention attracted more to the _bandage_ than to the sense-stimuli upon which we wish to _focus_ the attention. for example, in order to test the acuteness of the child's sense of hearing (a most important thing for the teacher to know), i use an empiric test which is coming to be used almost universally by physicians in the making of medical examinations. this test is made by modulating the voice, reducing it to a whisper. the child is blindfolded, or the teacher may stand behind him, speaking his name, in _a whisper_ and from varying distances. i establish a _solemn silence_ in the schoolroom, darken the windows, have the children bow their heads upon their hands which they hold in front of their eyes. then i call the children by name, one by one, in a whisper, lighter for those who are nearer me, and more clearly for those farther away. each child awaits, in the darkness, the faint voice which calls him, listening intently, ready to run with keenest joy toward the mysterious and much, desired call. the normal child may be blindfolded in the games where, for example, he is to recognise various weights, for this does help him to intensify and concentrate his attention upon the baric stimuli which he is to test. the blindfold adds to his pleasure, since he is proud of having been able to guess. the effect of these games upon deficient children is very different. when placed in darkness, they often go to sleep, or give themselves up to disordered acts. when the blindfold is used, they fix their attention upon the bandage itself, and change the exercise into a game, which does not fulfil the end we have in view with the exercise. we speak, it is true, of _games_ in education, but it must be made clear that we understand by this term a free activity, ordered to a definite end; not disorderly noise, which distracts the attention. the following pages of itard give an idea of the patient experiments made by this pioneer in pedagogy. their lack of success was due largely to errors which successive experiments have made it possible to correct, and in part to the mentality of his subject. "iv: in this last experiment it was not necessary, as in the one preceding, to demand that the pupil repeat the sounds which he perceived. this double work, distributing his attention, was outside the plane of my purpose, which was to educate each organ separately. i, therefore, limited myself to following the simple perception of sounds. to be certain of this result, i placed my pupil in front of me with his eyes blinded, his fists closed, and had him extend a finger every time that i made a sound. he understood this arrangement, and as soon as the sound reached his ear, the finger was raised, with a species of impetuosity, and often, with demonstrations of joy which left no doubt as to the pleasure the pupil took in these bizarre lessons. indeed, whether it be that he found a real pleasure in the sound of the human voice, or that he had at last conquered the annoyance he at first felt on being deprived of the light for so long a time, the fact remains that more than once, during the intervals of rest, he came to me with his blindfold in his hand, holding it over his eyes, and jumping with joy when he felt my hands tying it about his head. "v: having thoroughly assured myself, through such experiments as the one described above, that all sounds of the voice, whatever their intensity, were perceived by vittorio, i proceeded to the attempt of making him compare these sounds. it was no longer a case of simply noting the sounds of the voice, but of perceiving the differences and of appreciating all these modifications and varieties of tone which go to make up the music of the word. between this task and the preceding there stretched a prodigious difference, especially for a being whose development was dependent upon gradual effort, and who advanced toward civilisation only because i led thitherward so gently that he was unconscious of the progress. facing the difficulty now presented, i had need to arm myself more strongly than ever with patience and gentleness, encouraged by the hope that once i had surmounted this obstacle all would have been done for the sense of hearing. "we began with the comparison of the vowel sounds, and here, too, made use of the hand to assure ourselves as to the result of our experiments. each one of the fingers was made the sign of one of the five vowels. thus the thumb represented a and was to be raised whenever this vowel was pronounced; the index finger was the sign for e; the middle finger for i; and so on. "vi: not without fatigue, and not for a long time, was i able to give a distinct idea of the vowels. the first to be clearly distinguished was o, and then followed a. the three others presented much greater difficulty, and were for a long time confused. at last, however, the ear began to perceive distinctly, and, then, there returned in all their vivacity, those demonstrations of joy of which i have spoken. this continued until the pleasure taken in the lessons began to be boisterous, the sounds became confused, and the finger was raised indiscriminately. the outbursts of laughter became indeed so excessive that i lost patience! as soon as i placed the blindfold over his eyes the shouts of laughter began." itard, finding it impossible to continue his educational work, decided to do away with the blindfold, and, indeed, the shouts ceased, but now the child's attention was distracted by the slightest movement about him. the blindfold was necessary, but the boy had to be made to understand that he must not laugh so much and that he was having a lesson. the corrective means of itard and their touching results are worth reporting here! "i wished to intimidate him with my manner, not being able to do so with my glance. i armed myself with a tambourine and struck it lightly whenever he made a mistake. but he mistook this correction for a joke, and his joy became more noisy than ever. i then felt that i must make the correction a little more severe. it was understood, and i saw, with a mixture of pain and pleasure, revealed in the darkened face of this boy the fact that the feeling of injury surpassed the unhappiness of the blow. tears came from beneath the blindfold, he urged me to take it off, but, whether from embarrassment or fear, or from some inner preoccupation, when freed from the bandage he still kept his eyes tightly closed. i could not laugh at the doleful expression of his face, the closed eyelids from between which trickled an occasional tear! oh, in this moment, as in many others, ready to renounce my task, and feeling that the time i had consecrated to it was lost, how i regretted ever having known this boy, and bow severely i condemned the barren and inhuman curiosity of the men who in order to make scientific advancement had torn him away from a life, at least innocent and happy!" here also is demonstrated the great educative superiority of scientific pedagogy for normal children. finally, one particular of the technique consists in the _distribution of the stimuli_. this will be treated more fully in the description of the didactic system (materials) and of the sense education. here it is enough to say that one should proceed from _few stimuli strongly contrasting, to many stimuli in gradual differentiation always more fine and imperceptible_. so, for example, we first present, together, red and blue; the shortest rod beside the longest; the thinnest beside the thickest, etc., passing from these to the delicately differing tints, and to the discrimination of very slight differences in length and size. chapter xiii education of the senses and illustrations of the didactic material: general sensibility; the tactile, thermic, baric, and stereognostic senses the education of the tactile and the thermic senses go together, since the warm bath, and heat in general, render the tactile sense more acute. since to exercise the tactile sense it is necessary to _touch_, bathing the hands in warm water has the additional advantage of teaching the child a principle of cleanliness--that of not touching objects with hands that are not clean. i therefore apply the general notions of practical life, regarding the washing of the hands, care of the nails, to the exercises preparatory to the discrimination of tactile stimuli. the limitation of the exercises of the tactile sense to the cushioned tips of the fingers, is rendered necessary by practical life. it must be made a necessary phase of _education_ because it prepares for a life in which man exercises and uses the tactile sense through the medium of these finger tips. hence, i have the child wash his hands carefully with soap, in a little basin; and in another basin i have him rinse them in a bath of tepid water. then i show him how to dry and rub his hands gently, in this way preparing for the regular bath. i next teach the child how to _touch_, that is, the manner in which he should touch surfaces. for this it is necessary to take the finger of the child and to draw _it very, very lightly_ over the surface. another particular of the technique is to teach the child to hold his eyes closed while he touches, encouraging him to do this by telling him that he will be able to feel the differences better, and so leading him to distinguish, without the help of sight, the change of contact. he will quickly learn, and will show that he enjoys the exercise. often after the introduction of such exercises, it is a common thing to have a child come to you, and, closing his eyes, touch with great delicacy the palm of your hand or the cloth of your dress, especially any silken or velvet trimmings. they do verily _exercise_ the tactile sense. they enjoy keenly touching any soft pleasant surface, and become exceedingly keen in discriminating between the differences in the sandpaper cards. the didactic material consists of; _a_--a rectangular wooden board divided into two equal rectangles, one covered with very smooth paper, or having the wood polished until a smooth surface is obtained; the other covered with sandpaper, _b_--a tablet like the preceding covered with alternating strips of smooth paper and sandpaper. i also make use of a collection of paper slips, varying through many grades from smooth, fine cardboard to coarsest sandpaper. the stuffs described elsewhere are also used in these lessons. as to the thermic sense, i use a set of little metal bowls, which are filled with water at different degrees of temperature. these i try to measure with a thermometer, so that there may be two containing water of the same temperature. [illustration: the cloister school of the franciscan nuns in rome children playing a game with tablets of coloured silk] [illustration: (a) girl touching a letter and boy telling objects by weight.] [illustration: (b) arranging tablets of silk in their chromatic order. there are eight colours, and eight shades of each colour, making sixty-four gradations in all.] i have designed a set of utensils which are to be made of very light metal, and filled with water. these have covers, and to each is attached a thermometer. the bowl touched from the outside gives the desired impression of heat. i also have the children put their hands into cold, tepid, and warm water, an exercise which they find most diverting. i should like to repeat this exercise with the feet, but i have not bad an opportunity to make the trial. for the education of the baric sense (sense of weight), i use with great success little wooden tablets, six by eight centimetres, having a thickness of / centimetre. these tablets are in three different qualities of wood, wistaria, walnut, and pine. they weigh respectively, , , and grammes, making them differ in weight by grammes. these tablets should be very smooth; if possible, varnished in such a way that every roughness shall be eliminated, but so that the natural colour of the wood shall remain. the child, _observing_ the colour, _knows_ that they are of differing weights, and this offers a means of controlling the exercise. he takes two of the tablets in his hands, letting them rest upon the palm at the base of his outstretched fingers. then he moves his hands up and down in order to gauge the weight. this movement should come to be, little by little, almost insensible. we lead the child to make his distinction purely through the difference in weight, leaving out the guide of the different colours, and closing his eyes. he learns to do this of himself, and takes great interest in "guessing." the game attracts the attention of those near, who gather in a circle about the one who has the tablets, and who take turns in _guessing_. sometimes the children spontaneously make use of the blindfold, taking turns, and interspersing the work with peals of joyful laughter. education of the stereognostic sense the education of this sense leads to the recognition of objects through feeling, that is, through the simultaneous help of the tactile and muscular senses. taking this union as a basis, we have made experiments which have given marvellously successful educational results. i feel that for the help of teachers these exercises should be described. the first didactic material used by us is made up of the bricks and cubes of froebel. we call the attention of the child to the form of the two solids, have him feel them carefully and accurately, with his eyes open, repeating some phrase serving to fix his attention upon the particulars of the forms presented. after this the child is told to place the cubes to the right, the bricks to the left, always feeling them, and without looking at them. finally the exercise is repeated, by the child blindfolded. almost all the children succeed in the exercise, and after two or three times, are able to eliminate every error. there are twenty-four of the bricks and cubes in all, so that the attention may be held for some time through this "game"--but undoubtedly the child's pleasure is greatly increased by the fact of his being watched by a group of his companions, all interested and eager. one day a directress called my attention to a little girl of three years, one of our very youngest pupils, who had repeated this exercise perfectly. we seated the little girl comfortably in an armchair, close to the table. then, placing the twenty-four objects before her upon the table, we mixed them, and calling the child's attention to the difference in form, told her to place the cubes to the right and the bricks to the left. when she was blindfolded she began the exercise as taught by us, taking an object in each hand, feeling each and putting it in its right place. sometimes she took two cubes, or two bricks, sometimes she found a brick in the right hand, a cube in the left. the child had to recognise the form, and to remember throughout the exercise the proper placing of the different objects. this seemed to me very difficult for a child of three years. but observing her i saw that she not only performed the exercise easily, but that the movements with which we had taught her to feel the form were superfluous. indeed the instant she had taken the two objects in her hands, if it so happened that she had taken a cube with the left hand and a brick in the right, she _exchanged_ them _immediately_, and _then_ began the laborious feeling the form which we had taught and which she perhaps, believed to be obligatory. but the objects had been recognised by her through _the first light touch_, that is, the _recognition_ was _contemporaneous_ to _the taking_. continuing my study of the subject, i found that this little girl was possessed of a remarkable _functional ambidexterity_--i should be very glad to make a wider study of this phenomenon having in view the desirability of a simultaneous education of both hands. i repeated the exercise with other children and found that they _recognise_ the objects before feeling their contours. this was particularly true of the _little ones_. our educational methods in this respect furnished a remarkable exercise in associative gymnastics, leading to a rapidity of judgment which was truly surprising and had the advantage of being perfectly adapted to very young children. these exercises of the stereognostic sense may be multiplied in many ways--they amuse the children who find delight in the recognition of a stimulus, as in the thermic exercises; for example--they may raise any small objects, toy soldiers, little balls, and, above all, the various _coins_ in common use. they come to discriminate between small forms varying very slightly, such as corn, wheat, and rice. they are very proud of _seeing without eyes_, holding out their hands and crying, "here are my eyes!" "i can see with my hands!" indeed, our little ones walking in the ways we have planned, make us marvel over their unforeseen progress, surprising us daily. often, while they are wild with delight over some new conquest,--we watch, in deepest wonder and meditation. education of the senses of taste and smell this phase of sense education is most difficult, and i have not as yet had any satisfactory results to record. i can only say that the exercises ordinarily used in the tests of psychometry do not seem to me to be practical for use with young children. the olfactory sense in children is not developed to any great extent, and this makes it difficult to attract their attention by means of this sense. we have made use of one test which has not been repeated often enough to form the basis of a method. we have the child smell fresh violets, and jessamine flowers. we then blindfold him, saying, "now we are going to present you with flowers." a little friend then holds a bunch of violets under the child's nose, that he may guess the name of the flower. for greater or less intensify we present fewer flowers, or even one single blossom. [illustration: (a) drawing table and inset. (b) wooden tablets. these are partly covered with sandpaper to give rough and smooth surfaces. (c) solid insets. with these the child, working by himself, learns to differentiate objects according to thickness, height, and size. _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] [illustration: (a) broad stair. (b) long stair. (c) tower. blocks by which children are taught thickness, length, size. _copyright, by carl r. byoir_] but this part of education, like that of the sense of taste, can be obtained by the child during the luncheon hour;--when he can learn to recognise various odours. as to taste, the method of touching the tongue with various solutions, bitter or acid, sweet, salty, is perfectly applicable. children of four years readily lend themselves to such games, which serve as a reason for showing them how to rinse their mouths perfectly. the children enjoy recognising various flavours, and learn, after each test, to fill a glass with tepid water, and carefully rinse their months. in this way the exercise for the sense of taste is also an exercise in hygiene. education of the sense of vision _i. differential visual perception of dimensions_ _first._ solid insets: this material consists of three solid blocks of wood each centimetres long, centimetres high and centimetres wide. each block contains ten wooden pieces, set into corresponding holes. these pieces are cylindrical in shape and are to be handled by means of a little wooden or brass button which is fixed in the centre of the top. the cases of cylinders are in appearance much like the cases of weights used by chemists. in the first set of the series, the cylinders are all of equal height ( millimetres) but differ in diameter. the smallest cylinder has a diameter of centimetre, and the others increase in diameter at the rate of / centimetre. in the second set, the cylinders are all of equal diameter, corresponding to half the diameter of the largest cylinder in the preceding series--( millimetres). the cylinders in this set differ in height, the first being merely a little disk only a centimetre high, the others increase millimetres each, the tenth one being millimetres high. in the third set, the cylinders differ both in height and diameter, the first being centimetre high and centimetre in diameter and each succeeding one increasing / centimetre in height and diameter. with these insets, the child, working by himself, learns to differentiate objects according to _thickness_, according to _height_, and according to _size_. in the schoolroom, these three sets may be played with by three children gathered about a table, an exchange of games adding variety. the child takes the cylinders out of the moulds, mixes them upon the table, and then puts each back into its corresponding opening. these objects are made of hard pine, polished and varnished. _second._ large pieces in graded dimensions:--there are three sets of blocks which come under this head, and it is desirable to have two of each of these sets in every school. (_a_) thickness: this set consists of objects which vary from _thick_ to _thin_. there are ten quadrilateral prisms, the largest of which has a base of centimetres, the others decreasing by centimetre. the pieces are of equal length, centimetres. these prisms are stained a dark brown. the child mixes them, scattering them over the little carpet, and then puts them in order, placing one against the other according to the graduations of thickness, observing that the length shall correspond exactly. these blocks, taken from the first to the last, form a species of _stair_, the steps of which grow broader toward the top. the child may begin with the thinnest piece or with the thickest, as suits his pleasure. the control of the exercise is not _certain_, as it was in the solid cylindrical insets. there, the large cylinders could not enter the small opening, the taller ones would project beyond the top of the block, etc. in this game of the big stair, the _eye_ of the child can easily recognise an error, since if he mistakes, the _stair_ is irregular, that is, there will be a high step, behind which, the step which should have ascended, decreases. (_b_) length: long and short objects:--this set consists of _ten rods_. these are four-sided, each face being centimetres. the first rod is a metre long, and the last a decimetre. the intervening rods decrease, from first to last, decimetre each. each space of decimetre is painted alternately _red_ or _blue_. the rods, when placed close to each other, must be so arranged that the colours correspond, forming so many transverse stripes--the whole set when arranged has the appearance of a rectangular triangle made up of organ pipes, which decrease on the side of the hypothenuse. the child arranges the rods which have first been scattered and mixed. he puts them together according to the graduation of length, and observes the correspondence of colours. this exercise also offers a very evident control of error, for the regularity of the decreasing length of the stairs along the hypothenuse will be altered if the rods are not properly placed. this most important set of blocks will have its principal application in arithmetic, as we shall see. with it, one may count from one to ten and may construct the addition and other tables, and it may constitute the first steps in the study of the decimal and metric system. (_c_) size: objects, larger and smaller:--this set is made up of ten wooden cubes painted in rose-coloured enamel. the largest cube has a base of centimetres, the smallest, of centimetre, the intervening ones decrease centimetre each. a little green cloth carpet goes with these blocks. this may be of oilcloth or cardboard. the game consists of building the cubes up, one upon another, in the order of their dimensions, constructing a little tower of which the largest cube forms the base and the smallest the apex. the carpet is placed on the floor, and the cubes are scattered upon it. as the tower is built upon the carpet, the child goes through the exercise of kneeling, rising, etc. the control is given by the irregularity of the tower as it decreases toward the apex. a cube misplaced reveals itself, because it breaks the line. the most common error made by the children in playing with these blocks at first, is that of placing the second cube as the base and placing the first cube upon it, thus confusing the two largest blocks. i have noted that the same error was made by deficient children in the repeated trials i made with the tests of de sanctis. at the question, "which is the largest?" the child would take, not the largest, but that nearest it in size. any of these three sets of blocks may be used by the children in a slightly different game. the pieces may be mixed upon a carpet or table, and then put in order upon another table at some distance. as he carries each piece, the child must walk without letting his attention wander, since he must remember the dimensions of the piece for which he is to look among the mixed blocks. the games played in this way are excellent for children of four or five years; while the simple work of arranging the pieces in order upon the same carpet where they have been mixed is more adapted to the little ones between three and four years of age. the construction of the tower with the pink cubes is very attractive to little ones of less than three years, who knock it down and build it up time after time. [illustration: a few of the many geometric insets of wood used to teach form _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] [illustration: (a) geometric insets of wood, and frame. the frame furnishes the control necessary for exactness of work. (b) cabinet. (for storing geometric inset frames.) _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] _ii. differential visual perception of form and visual-tactile-muscular perception_ _didactic material._ plane geometric _insets of wood_: the idea of these insets goes back to itard and was also applied by séguin. in the school for deficients i had made and applied these insets in the same form used by my illustrious predecessors. in these there were two large tablets of wood placed one above the other and fastened together. the lower board was left solid, while the upper one was perforated by various geometric figures. the game consisted in placing in these openings the corresponding wooden figures which, in order that they might be easily handled, were furnished with a little brass knob. in my school for deficients, i had multiplied the games calling for these insets, and distinguished between those used to teach colour and those used to teach form. the insets for teaching colour were all circles, those used for teaching form were all painted blue. i had great numbers of these insets made in graduations of colour and in an infinite variety of form. this material was most expensive and exceedingly cumbersome. in many later experiments with normal children, i have, after many trials, completely excluded the plane geometric insets as an aid to the teaching of colour, since this material offers no control of errors, the child's task being that of _covering_ the forms before him. i have kept the geometric insets, but have given them a new and original aspect. the form in which they are now made was suggested to me by a visit to the splendid manual training school in the reformatory of st. michael in rome. i saw there wooden models of geometric figures, which could be set into corresponding frames or placed above corresponding forms. the scope of these materials was to lead to exactness in the making of the geometric pieces in regard to control of dimension and form; the _frame_ furnishing the _control_ necessary for the exactness of the work. this led me to think of making modifications in my geometric insets, making use of the frame as well as of the inset i therefore made a rectangular tray, which measured × centimetres. this tray was painted a dark blue and was surrounded by a dark frame. it was furnished with a cover so arranged that it would contain six of the square frames with their insets. the advantage of this tray is that the forms may be changed, thus allowing us to present any combination we choose. i have a number of blank wooden squares which make it possible to present as few as two or three geometric forms at a time, the other spaces being filled in by the blanks. to this material i have added a set of white cards, centimetres square. these cards form a series presenting the geometric forms in other aspects. in the _first_ of the series, the form is cut from blue paper and mounted upon the card. in the _second_ box of cards, the _contour_ of the same figures is mounted in the same blue paper, forming an outline one centimetre in width. on the _third_ set of cards the contour of the geometric form is _outlined by a blank line_. we have then the tray, the collection of small frames with their corresponding insets, and the set of the cards in three series. [illustration: some of the card forms used in the exercises with the three series of cards. _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] i also designed a case containing six trays. the front of this box may be lowered when the top is raised and the trays may be drawn out as one opens the drawers of a desk. each _drawer_ contains six of the small frames with their respective insets. in the first drawer i keep the four plain wooden squares and two frames, one containing a rhomboid, and the other a trapezoid. in the second, i have a series consisting of a square, and five rectangles of the same length, but varying in width. the third drawer contains six circles which diminish in diameter. in the fourth are six triangles, in the fifth, five polygons from a pentagon to a decagon. the sixth drawer contains six curved figures (an ellipse, an oval, etc., and a flower-like figure formed by four crossed arcs). _exercise with the insets._ this exercise consists in presenting to the child the large frame or tray in which we may arrange the figures as we wish to present them. we proceed to take out the insets, mix them upon the table, and then invite the child to put them back in place. this game may be played by even the younger children and holds the attention for a long period, though not for so long a time as the exercise with the cylinders. indeed, i have never seen a child repeat this exercise more than five or six times. the child, in fact, expends much energy upon this exercise. he must _recognise_ the form and must look at it carefully. at first many of the children only succeed in placing the insets after many attempts, trying for example to place a triangle in a trapezoid, then in a rectangle, etc. or when they have taken a rectangle, and recognise where it should go, they will still place it with the long side of the inset across the short side of the opening, and will only after many attempts, succeed in placing it. after three or four successive lessons, the child recognises the geometric figures with _extreme_ facility and places the insets with a security which has a tinge of nonchalance, or of _slight contempt for an exercise that is too easy_. this is the moment in which the child may be led to a methodical observation of the forms. we change the forms in the frame and pass from contrasted frames to analogous ones. the exercise is easy for the child, who habituates himself to placing the pieces in their frames without errors or false attempts. the first period of these exercises is at the time when the child is obliged to make repeated _trials_ with figures that are strongly contrasted in form. the _recognition_ is greatly helped by associating with the visual sense the muscular-tactile perception of the forms. i have the child touch[ ] the contour of the piece with the _index finger_ of _his right hand_, and then have him repeat this with the contour of the frame into which the pieces must fit. we succeed in making this a _habit_ with the child. this is very easily attained, since all children love to _touch_ things. i have already learned, through my work with deficient children, that among the various forms of sense memory that of the muscular sense is the most precocious. indeed, many children who have not arrived at the point of recognising a _figure by looking at it_, could recognise it by _touching it_, that is, by computing the movements necessary to the following of its contour. the same is true of the greater number of normal children;--confused as to where to place a figure, they turn it about trying in vain to fit it in, yet as soon as they have touched the two contours of the piece and its frame, they succeed in placing it perfectly. undoubtedly, the association of the _muscular-tactile_ sense with that of _vision_, aids in a most remarkable way the perception of forms and fixes them in memory. [ ] here and elsewhere throughout the book the word "touch" is used not only to express contact between the fingers and an object, but the moving of fingers or hand over an object or its outline. in such exercises, the control is absolute, as it was in the solid insets. the figure can only enter the corresponding frame. this makes it possible for the child to work by himself, and to accomplish a genuine sensory auto-education, in the visual perception of form. _exercise with the three series of cards. first series._ we give the child the wooden forms and the cards upon which the white figure is mounted. then we mix the cards upon the table; the child must arrange them in a line upon his table (which he loves to do), and then place the corresponding wooden pieces upon the cards. here the control lies in the eyes. the child must _recognise_ this figure, and place the wooden piece upon it so perfectly that it will cover and hide the paper figure. the eye of the child here corresponds to the frame, which _materially_ led him at first to bring the two pieces together. in addition to covering the figure, the child is to accustom himself to _touching_ the contour of the mounted figures as a part of the exercise (the child always voluntarily follows those movements); and after he has placed the wooden inset he again touches the contour, adjusting with his finger the superimposed piece until it exactly covers the form beneath. _second series._ we give a number of cards to the child together with the corresponding wooden insets. in this second series, the figures are repeated by an outline of blue paper. the child through these exercises is passing gradually from the _concrete_ to the _abstract_. at first, he handled only _solid objects_. he then passed to a _plane figure_, that is, to the plane which in itself does not exist. he is now passing to the _line_, but this line does not represent for him the abstract contour of a plane figure. it is to him the _path which he has so often followed with his index finger_; this line is the _trace_ of a _movement_. following again the contour of the figure with his finger, the child receives the impression of actually leaving a trace, for the figure is covered by his finger and appears as he moves it. it is the eye now which guides the movement, but it must be remembered that this movement was _already prepared_ for when the child touched the contours of the solid pieces of wood. _third series._ we now present to the child the cards upon which the figures are drawn in black, giving him, as before, the corresponding wooden pieces. here, he has actually passed to the _line_; that is, to an abstraction, yet here, too, there is the idea of the result of a movement. this cannot be, it is true, the trace left by the finger, but, for example, that of a pencil which is guided by the hand in the same movements made before. these geometric figures in simple outline _have grown out_ of a gradual series of representations which were concrete to vision and touch. these representations return to the mind of the child when he performs the exercise of superimposing the corresponding wooden figures. _iii. differential visual perception of colours:--education of the chromatic sense_ in many of our _lessons on the colours_, we make use of pieces of brightly-coloured stuffs, and of balls covered with wool of different colours. the didactic material for the _education of the chromatic_ sense is the following, which i have established after a long series of tests made upon normal children, (in the institute for deficients, i used as i have said above, the geometric insets). the present material consists of small flat tablets, which are wound with coloured wool or silk. these tablets have a little wooden border at each end which prevents the silk-covered card from touching the table. the child is also taught to take hold of the piece by these wooden extremities, so that he need not soil the delicate colours. in this way, we are able to use this material for a long time without having to renew it. [illustration: (a) lacing. (b) shoe buttoning. (c) buttoning of other garments. (d) hooks and eyes. frames illustrating the different processes of dressing and undressing. _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] [illustration: tablets wound with coloured silk used for educating the chromatic sense. the tablets are shown in the boxes in which they are kept. _copyright, , by carl r. byoir_] i have chosen eight tints, and each one has with it eight gradations of different intensity of colour. there are, therefore, sixty-four colour-tablets in all. the eight tints selected are _black_ (_from grey to white_), _red_, _orange_, _yellow_, _green_, _blue_, _violet_ and _brown_. we have duplicate boxes of these sixty-four colours, giving us two of each exercise. the entire set, therefore, consists of one hundred twenty-eight tablets. they are contained in two boxes, each divided into eight equal compartments so that one box may contain sixty-four tablets. _exercises with the colour-tablets._ for the earliest of these exercises, we select three strong colours: for example, _red_, _blue_, and _yellow_, in pairs. these six tablets we place upon the table before the child. showing him one of the colours, we ask him to find its duplicate among the mixed tablets upon the table. in this way, we have him arrange the colour-tablets in a column, two by two, pairing them according to colour. the number of tablets in this game may be increased until the eight colours, or sixteen tablets, are given at once. when the strongest tones have been presented, we may proceed to the presentation of lighter tones, in the same way. finally, we present two or three tablets of the same colour, but of different tone, showing the child how to arrange these in order of gradation. in this way, the eight gradations are finally presented. following this, we place before the child the eight gradations of two different colours (red and blue); he is shown how to separate the groups and then arrange each group in gradation. as we proceed we offer groups of more nearly related colours; for example, blue and violet, yellow and orange, etc. in one of the "children's houses," i have seen the following game played with the greatest success and interest, and with surprising _rapidity_. the directress places upon a table, about which the children are seated, as many colour groups as there are children, for example, three. she then calls each child's attention to the colour each is to select, or which she assigns to him. then, she mixes the three groups of colours upon the table. each child takes rapidly from the mixed heap of tablets all the gradations of his colour, and proceeds to arrange the tablets, which, when thus placed in a line, give the appearance of a strip of shaded ribbon. in another "house," i have seen the children take the entire box, empty the sixty-four colour-tablets upon the table and after carefully mixing them, rapidly collect them into groups and arrange them in gradation, constructing a species of little carpet of delicately coloured and intermingling tints. the children very quickly acquire an ability before which we stand amazed. children of three years are able to put all of the tints into gradation. _experiments in colour-memory._ experiments in colour-memory may be made by showing the child a tint, allowing him to look at it as long as he will, and then asking him to go to a distant table upon which all of the colours are arranged and to select from among them the tint similar to the one at which he has looked. the children succeed in this game remarkably, committing only slight errors. children of five years enjoy this immensely, taking great pleasure in comparing the two spools and judging as to whether they have chosen correctly. at the beginning of my work, i made use of an instrument invented by pizzoli. this consisted of a small brown disk having a half-moon shape opening at the top. various colours were made to pass behind this opening, by means of a rotary disk which was composed of strips of various colours. the teacher called the attention of the child to a certain colour, then turned the disk, asking him to indicate the same disk when it again showed itself in the opening. this exercise rendered the child inactive, preventing him from controlling the material. it is not, therefore, an instrument which can promote the _education_ of the senses. exercise for the discrimination of sounds it would be desirable to have in this connection the didactic material used for the "auricular education" in the principal institutions for deaf mutes in germany and america. these exercises are an introduction to the acquisition of language, and serve in a very special way to centre the children's discriminative attention upon the "modulations of the sound of the human voice." with very young children linguistic education must occupy a most important place. another aim of such exercises is to educate the ear of the child to noises so that he shall accustom himself to distinguish every slight noise and compare it with _sounds_, coming to resent harsh or disordered noises. such sense education has a value in that it exercises æsthetic taste, and may be applied in a most noteworthy way to practical discipline. we all know how the younger children disturb the order of the room by shouts, and by the noise of over-turned objects. the rigorous scientific education of the sense of hearing is not practically applicable to the didactic method. this is true because the child cannot _exercise himself through his own activity_ as he does for the other senses. only one child at a time can work with any instrument producing the gradation of sounds. in other words, _absolute silence_ is necessary for the discrimination of sounds. [illustration] signorina maccheroni, directress, first of the "children's house" in milan and later in the one in franciscan convent at rome, has invented and has had manufactured a series of thirteen bells hung upon a wooden frame. these bells are to all appearances, identical, but the vibrations brought about by a blow of a hammer produce the following thirteen notes: the set consists of a double series of thirteen bells and there are four hammers. having struck one of the bells in the first series, the child must find the corresponding sound in the second. this exercise presents grave difficulty, as the child does not know how to strike each time with the same force, and therefore produces sounds which vary in intensity. even when the teacher strikes the bells, the children have difficulty in distinguishing between sounds. so we do not feel that this instrument in its present form is entirely practical. for the discrimination of sounds, we use pizzoli's series of little whistles. for the gradation of noises, we use small boxes filled with different substances, more or less fine (sand or pebbles). the noises are produced by shaking the boxes. in the lessons for the sense of hearing i proceed as follows: i have the teachers establish silence in the usual way and then i _continue_ the work, making the silence more profound. i say, "st! st!" in a series of modulations, now sharp and short, now prolonged and light as a whisper. the children, little by little, become fascinated by this. occasionally i say, "more silent still--more silent." i then begin the sibilant st! st! again, making it always lighter and repeating "more silent still," in a barely audible voice. then i say still in a low whisper, "now, i hear the clock, now i can hear the buzzing of a fly's wings, now i can hear the whisper of the trees in the garden." the children, ecstatic with joy, sit in such absolute and complete silence that the room seems deserted; then i whisper, "let us close our eyes." this exercise repeated, so habituates the children to immobility and to absolute silence that, when one of them interrupts, it needs only a syllable, a gesture to call him back immediately to perfect order. in the silence, we proceeded to the production of sounds and noises, making these at first strongly contrasted, then, more nearly alike. sometimes we present the comparisons between noise and sound. i believe that the best results can be obtained with the primitive means employed by itard in . he used the drum and the bell. his plan was a graduated series of drums for the noises,--or, better, for the heavy harmonic sounds, since these belong to a musical instrument,--and a series of bells. the diapason, the whistles, the boxes, are not attractive to the child, and do not educate the sense of hearing as do these other instruments. there is an interesting suggestion in the fact that the two great human institutions, that of hate (war), and that of love (religion), have adopted these two opposite instruments, the drum and the bell. i believe that after establishing silence it would be educational to ring well-toned bells, now calm and sweet, now clear and ringing, sending their vibrations through the child's whole body. and when, besides the education of the ear, we have produced a _vibratory_ education of the whole body, through these wisely selected sounds of the bells, giving a peace that pervades the very fibres of his being, then i believe these young bodies would be sensitive to crude noises, and the children would come to dislike, and to cease from making, disordered and ugly noises. in this way one whose ear has been trained by a musical education suffers from strident or discordant notes. i need give no illustration to make clear the importance of such education for the masses in childhood. the new generation would be more calm, turning away from the confusion and the discordant sounds, which strike the ear to-day in one of the vile tenements where the poor live, crowded together, left by us to abandon themselves to the lower, more brutal human instincts. _musical education_ this must be carefully guided by method. in general, we see little children pass by the playing of some great musicians as an animal would pass. they do not perceive the delicate complexity of sounds. the street children gather about the organ grinder, crying out as if to hail with joy the _noises_ which will come instead of sounds. for the musical education we must _create instruments_ as well as music. the scope of such an instrument in addition to the discrimination of sounds, is to awaken a sense of rhythm, and, so to speak, to give the _impulse_ toward calm and co-ordinate movements to those muscles already vibrating in the peace and tranquillity of immobility. i believe that stringed instruments (perhaps some very much simplified harp) would be the most convenient. the stringed instruments together with the drum and the bells form the trio of the classic instruments of humanity. the harp is the instrument of "the intimate life of the individual." legend places it in the hand of orpheus, folk-lore puts it into fairy hands, and romance gives it to the princess who conquers the heart of a wicked prince. the teacher who turns her back upon her scholars to play, (far too often badly), will never be the _educator_ of their musical sense. the child needs to be charmed in every way, by the glance as well as by the pose. the teacher who, bending toward them, gathering them about her, and leaving them free to stay or go, touches the chords, in a simple rhythm, puts herself in communication with them, _in relation with their very souls_. so much the better if this touch can be accompanied by her _voice_, and the children left free to follow her, no one being obliged to sing. in this way she can select as "adapted to education," those songs which were followed by all the children. so she may regulate the complexity of rhythm to various ages, for she will see now only the older children following the rhythm, now, also the little ones. at any rate, i believe that simple and primitive instruments are the ones best adapted to the awakening of music in the soul of the little child. i have tried to have the directress of the "children's house" in milan, who is a gifted musician, make a number of trials, and experiments, with a view to finding out more about the muscular capacity of young children. she has made many trials with the pianoforte, observing how the children _are not sensitive_ to the musical _tone_, but only to the _rhythm_. on a basis of rhythm she arranged simple little dances, with the intention of studying the influence of the rhythm itself upon the co-ordination of muscular movements. she was greatly surprised to discover the _educational disciplinary_ effect of such music. her children, who had been led with great wisdom and art through liberty to a _spontaneous_ ordering of their acts and movements, had nevertheless lived in the streets and courts, and had an almost universal habit of jumping. being a faithful follower of the method of liberty, and not considering that _jumping_ was a wrong act, she had never corrected them. she now noticed that as she multiplied and repeated the rhythm exercises, the children little by little left off their ugly jumping, until finally it was a thing of the past. the directress one day asked for an explanation of this change of conduct. several little ones looked at her without saying anything. the older children gave various replies, whose meaning was the same. "it isn't nice to jump." "jumping is ugly." "it's rude to jump." this was certainly a beautiful triumph for our method! this experience shows that it is possible to educate the child's _muscular sense_, and it shows how exquisite the refinement of this sense may be as it develops in relation to the _muscular memory_, and side by side with the other forms of sensory memory. _tests for acuteness of hearing_ the only entirely successful experiments which we have made so far in the "children's houses" are those of the _clock_, and of the _lowered_ or whispered _voice_. the trial is purely empirical, and does not lend itself to the measuring of the sensation, but it is, however, most useful in that it helps us to an approximate knowledge of the child's auditory acuteness. the exercise consists in calling attention, when perfect silence has been established, to the ticking of the clock, and to all the little noises not commonly audible to the ear. finally we call the little ones, one by one from an adjoining room, pronouncing each name in a low voice. in preparing for such an exercise it is necessary to _teach_ the children the real meaning of _silence_. toward this end i have several _games_ of _silence_, which help in a surprising way to strengthen the remarkable discipline of our children. i call the children's attention to myself, telling them to see how silent i can be. i assume different positions; standing, sitting, and maintain each pose _silently, without movement_. a finger moving can produce a noise, even though it be imperceptible. we may breathe so that we may be heard. but i maintain _absolute_ silence, which is not an easy thing to do. i call a child, and ask him to do as i am doing. he adjusts his feet to a better position, and this makes a noise! he moves an arm, stretching it out upon the arm of his chair; it is a noise. his breathing is not altogether silent, it is not tranquil, absolutely unheard as mine is. during these manoeuvres on the part of the child, and while my brief comments are followed by intervals of immobility and silence, the other children are watching and listening. many of them are interested in the fact, which they have never noticed before; namely, that we make so many noises of which we are not conscious, and that there are _degrees of silence_. there is an absolute silence where nothing, _absolutely nothing_ moves. they watch me in amazement when i stand in the middle of the room, so quietly that it is really as if "i were not." then they strive to imitate me, and to do even better. i call attention here and there to a foot that moves, almost inadvertently. the attention of the child is called to every part of his body in an anxious eagerness to attain to immobility. when the children are trying in this way, there is established a silence very different from that which we carelessly call by that name. it seems as if life gradually vanishes, and that the room becomes, little by little, empty, as if there were no longer anyone in it. then we begin to hear the tick-tock of the clock, and this sound seems to grow in intensity as the silence becomes absolute. from without, from the court which before seemed silent, there come varied noises, a bird chirps, a child passes. the children sit fascinated by that silence as if by some conquest of their own. "here," says the directress, "here there is no longer anyone; the children have all gone away." having arrived at that point, we darken the windows, and tell the children to close their eyes, resting their heads upon their hands. they assume this position, and in the darkness the absolute silence returns. "now listen," we say. "a soft voice is going to call your name." then going to a room behind the children, and standing within the open door, i call in a low voice, lingering over the syllables as if i were calling from across the mountains. this voice, almost occult, seems to reach the heart and to call to the soul of the child. each one as he is called, lifts his head, opens his eyes as if altogether happy, then rises, silently seeking not to move the chair, and walks on the tips of his toes, so quietly that he is scarcely heard. nevertheless his step resounds in the silence, and amid the immobility which persists. having reached the door, with a joyous face, he leaps into the room, choking back soft outbursts of laughter. another child may come to hide his face against my dress, another, turning, will watch his companions sitting like statues silent and waiting. the one who is called feels that he is privileged, that he has received a gift, a prize. and yet they know that all will be called, "beginning with the most silent one in all the room." so each one tries to merit by his perfect silence the certain call. i once saw a little one of three years try to suffocate a sneeze, and succeed! she held her breath in her little breast, and resisted, coming out victorious. a most surprising effort! this game delights the little ones beyond measure. their intent faces, their patient immobility, reveal the enjoyment of a great pleasure. in the beginning, when the soul of the child was unknown to me, i had thought of showing them sweetmeats and little toys, promising to give them to the ones who were _called_, supposing that the gifts would be necessary to persuade the child to make the necessary effort. but i soon found that this was unnecessary. the children, after they had made the effort necessary to maintain silence, enjoyed the sensation, took pleasure in the _silence_ itself. they were like ships safe in a tranquil harbour, happy in having experienced something new, and to have won a victory over themselves. this, indeed, was their recompense. they _forgot_ the promise of sweets, and no longer cared to take the toys, which i had supposed would attract them. i therefore abandoned that useless means, and saw, with surprise, that the game became constantly more perfect, until even children of three years of age remained immovable in the silence throughout the time required to call the entire forty children out of the room! it was then that i learned that the soul of the child has its own reward, and its peculiar spiritual pleasures. after such exercises it seemed to me that the children came closer to me, certainly they became more obedient, more gentle and sweet. we had, indeed, been isolated from the world, and had passed several minutes during which the communion between us was very close, i wishing for them and calling to them, and they receiving in the perfect silence the voice which was directed personally toward each one of them, crowning each in turn with happiness. _a lesson in silence_ i am about to describe a lesson which _proved_ most successful in teaching the perfect silence to which it is possible to attain. one day as i was about to enter one of the "children's houses," i met in the court a mother who held in her arms her little baby of four months. the little one was swaddled, as is still the custom among the people of rome--an infant thus in the swaddling bands is called by us a _pupa_. this tranquil little one seemed the incarnation of peace. i took her in my arms, where she lay quiet and good. still holding her i went toward the schoolroom, from which the children now ran to meet me. they always welcomed me thus, throwing their arms about me, clinging to my skirts, and almost tumbling me over in their eagerness. i smiled at them, showing them the "_pupa_." they understood and skipped about me looking at me with eyes brilliant with pleasure, but did not touch me through respect for the little one that i held in my arms. i went into the schoolroom with the children clustered about me. we sat down, i seating myself in a large chair instead of, as usual, in one of their little chairs. in other words, i seated myself solemnly. they looked at my little one with a mixture of tenderness and joy. none of us had yet spoken a word. finally i said to them, "i have brought you a little teacher." surprised glances and laughter. "a little teacher, yes, because none of you know how to be quiet as she does." at this all the children changed their positions and became quiet. "yet no one holds his limbs and feet as quietly as she." everyone gave closer attention to the position of limbs and feet. i looked at them smiling, "yes, but they can never be as quiet as hers. you move a little bit, but she, not at all; none of you can be as quiet as she." the children looked serious. the idea of the superiority of the little teacher seemed to have reached them. some of them smiled, and seemed to say with their eyes that the swaddling bands deserved all the merit. "not one of you can be silent, voiceless as she." general silence. "it is not possible to be as silent as she, because,--listen to her breathing--how delicate it is; come near to her on your tiptoes." several children rose, and came slowly forward on tiptoe, bending toward the baby. great silence. "none of you can breathe so silently as she." the children looked about amazed, they had never thought that even when sitting quietly they were making noises, and that the silence of a little babe is more profound than the silence of grown people. they almost ceased to breathe. i rose. "go out quietly, quietly," i said, "walk on the tips of your toes and make no noise." following them i said, "and yet i still hear some sounds, but she, the baby, walks with me and makes no sound. she goes out silently!" the children smiled. they understood the truth and the jest of my words. i went to the open window, and placed the baby in the arms of the mother who stood watching us. the little one seemed to have left behind her a subtle charm which enveloped the souls of the children. indeed, there is in nature nothing more sweet than the silent breathing of a new-born babe. there is an indescribable majesty about this human life which in repose and silence gathers strength and newness of life. compared to this, wordsworth's description of the silent peace of nature seems to lose its force. "what calm, what quiet! the one sound the drip of the suspended oar." the children, too, felt the poetry and beauty in the peaceful silence of a new-born human life. chapter xiv general notes on the education of the senses i do not claim to have brought to perfection the method of sense training as applied to young children. i do believe, however, that it opens a new field for psychological research, promising rich and valuable results. experimental psychology has so far devoted its attention to _perfecting the instruments by which the sensations are measured_. no one has attempted the _methodical_ preparation _of the individual for the sensations_. it is my belief that the development of psychometry will owe more to the attention given to the preparation of the _individual_ than to the perfecting of the _instrument_. but putting aside this purely scientific side of the question, the _education of the senses_ must be of the greatest _pedagogical_ interest. our aim in education in general is two-fold, biological and social. from the biological side we wish to help the natural development of the individual, from the social standpoint it is our aim to prepare the individual for the environment. under this last head technical education may be considered as having a place, since it teaches the individual to make use of his surroundings. the education of the senses is most important from both these points of view. the development of the senses indeed precedes that of superior intellectual activity and the child between three and seven years is in the period of formation. we can, then, help the development of the senses while they are in this period. we may graduate and adapt the stimuli just as, for example, it is necessary to help the formation of language before it shall be completely developed. all education of little children must be governed by this principle--to help the natural _psychic_ and _physical development_ of the child. the other aim of education (that of adapting the individual to the environment) should be given more attention later on when the period of intense development is past. these two phases of education are always interlaced, but one or the other has prevalence according to the age of the child. now, the period of life between the ages of three and seven years covers a period of rapid physical development. it is the time for the formation of the sense activities as related to the intellect the child in this age develops his senses. his attention is further attracted to the environment under the form of passive curiosity. the stimuli, and not yet the reasons for things, attract his attention. this is, therefore, the time when we should methodically direct the sense stimuli, in such a way that the sensations which he receives shall develop in a rational way. this sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which he may build up a clear and strong mentality. it is, besides all this, possible with the education of the senses to discover and eventually to correct defects which to-day pass unobserved in the school. now the time comes when the defect manifests itself in an evident and irreparable inability to make use of the forces of life about him. (such defects as deafness and near-sightedness.) this education, therefore, is physiological and prepares directly for intellectual education, perfecting the organs of sense, and the nerve-paths of projection and association. but the other part of education, the adaptation of the individual to his environment, is indirectly touched. we prepare with our method the infancy of the _humanity of our time_. the men of the present civilisation are preeminently observers of their environment because they must utilise to the greatest possible extent all the riches of this environment. the art of to-day bases itself, as in the days of the greeks, upon observation of the truth. the progress of positive science is based upon its observations and all its discoveries and their applications, which in the last century have so transformed our civic environment, were made by following the same line--that is, they have come through observation. we must therefore prepare the new generation for this attitude, which has become necessary in our modern civilised life. it is an indispensable means--man must be so armed if he is to continue efficaciously the work of our progress. we have seen the discovery of the roentgen rays born of observation. to the same methods are due the discovery of hertzian waves, and vibrations of radium, and we await wonderful things from the marconi telegraph. while there has been no period in which thought has gained so much from positive study as the present century, and this same century promises new light in the field of speculative philosophy and upon spiritual questions, the theories upon the matter have themselves led to most interesting metaphysical concepts. we may say that in preparing the method of observation, we have also prepared the way leading to spiritual discovery. the education of the senses makes men observers, and not only accomplishes the general work of adaptation to the present epoch of civilisation, but also prepares them directly for practical life. we have had up to the present time, i believe, a most imperfect idea of what is necessary in the practical living of life. we have always started from ideas, and have _proceeded thence_ to _motor activities_; thus, for example, the method of education has always been to teach intellectually, and then to have the child follow the principles he has been taught. in general, when we are teaching, we talk about the object which interests us, and then we try to lead the scholar, when he has understood, to perform some kind of work with the object itself; but often the scholar who has understood the idea finds great difficulty in the execution of the work which we give him, because we have left out of his education a factor of the utmost importance, namely, the perfecting of the senses. i may, perhaps, illustrate this statement with a few examples. we ask the cook to buy only 'fresh fish.' she understands the idea, and tries to follow it in her marketing, but, if the cook has not been trained to recognise through sight and smell the signs which indicate freshness in the fish, she will not know how to follow the order we have given her. such a lack will show itself much more plainly in culinary operations. a cook may be trained in book matters, and may know exactly the recipes and the length of time advised in her cook book; she may be able to perform all the manipulations necessary to give the desired appearance to the dishes, but when it is a question of deciding from the odor of the dish the exact moment of its being properly cooked, or with the eye, or the taste, the time at which she must put in some given condiment, then she will make a mistake if her senses have not been sufficiently prepared. she can only gain such ability through long practice, and such practice on the part of the cook is nothing else than a _belated education_ of the senses--an education which often can never be properly attained by the adult. thia is one reason why it is so difficult to find good cooks. something of the same kind is true of the physician, the student of medicine who studies theoretically the character of the pulse, and sits down by the bed of the patient with the best will in the world to read the pulse, but, if his fingers do not know how to read the sensations his studies will have been in vain. before he can become a doctor, he must gain a _capacity for discriminating between sense stimuli_. the same may be said for the _pulsations_ of the _heart_, which the student studies in theory, but which the ear can learn to distinguish only through practice. we may say the same for all the delicate vibrations and movements, in the reading of which the hand of the physician is too often deficient. the thermometer is the more indispensable to the physician the more his sense of touch is unadapted and untrained in the gathering of the thermic stimuli. it is well understood that the physician may be learned, and most intelligent, without being a good practitioner, and that to make a good practitioner long practice is necessary. in reality, this _long practice_ is nothing else than a tardy, and often inefficient, _exercise_ of the senses. after he has assimilated the brilliant theories, the physician sees himself forced to the unpleasant labor of the semiography, that is to making a record of the symptoms revealed by his observation of and experiments with the patients. he must do this if he is to receive from these theories any practical results. here, then, we have the beginner proceeding in a stereotyped way to tests of _palpation_, percussion, and auscultation, for the purpose of identifying the throbs, the resonance, the tones, the breathings, and the various sounds which _alone_ can enable him to formulate a diagnosis. hence the deep and unhappy discouragement of so many young physicians, and, above all, the loss of time; for it is often a question of lost years. then, there is the immorality of allowing a man to follow a profession of so great responsibility, when, as is often the case, he is so unskilled and inaccurate in the taking of symptoms. the whole art of medicine is based upon an education of the senses; the schools, instead, _prepare_ physicians through a study of the classics. all very well and good, but the splendid intellectual development of the physician falls, impotent, before the insufficiency of his senses. one day, i heard a surgeon giving, to a number of poor mothers, a lesson on the recognition of the first deformities noticeable in little children from the disease of rickets. it was his hope to lead these mothers to bring to him their children who were suffering from this disease, while the disease was yet in the earliest stages, and when medical help might still be efficacious. the mothers understood the idea, but they did not know how to recognise these first signs of deformity, because they were lacking in the sensory education through which they might discriminate between signs deviating only slightly from the normal. therefore those lessons were useless. if we think of it for a minute, we will see that almost all the forms of adulteration in food stuffs are rendered possible by the torpor of the senses, which exists in the greater number of people. fraudulent industry feeds upon the lack of sense education in the masses, as any kind of fraud is based upon the ignorance of the victim. we often see the purchaser throwing himself upon the honesty of the merchant, or putting his faith in the company, or the label upon the box. this is because purchasers are lacking in the capacity of judging directly for themselves. they do not know how to distinguish with their senses the different qualities of various substances. in fact, we may say that in many cases intelligence is rendered useless by lack of practice, and this practice is almost always sense education. everyone knows in practical life the fundamental necessity of judging with exactness between various stimuli. but very often sense education is most difficult for the adult, just as it is difficult for him to educate his hand when he wishes to become a pianist. it is necessary to begin the education of the senses in the formative period, if we wish to perfect this sense development with the education which is to follow. the education of the senses should be begun methodically in infancy, and should continue during the entire period of instruction which is to prepare the individual for life in society. Æsthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. multiply the sensations, and develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli, and we _refine_ the sensibility and multiply man's pleasures. beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. the æsthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coarse senses. the world to him is narrow and barren. in life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of æsthetic enjoyment, before which men pass as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them. now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross. _onanism_, so often found among normal children of the lower classes, alcoholism, fondness for watching sensual acts of adults--these things represent the enjoyment of those unfortunate ones whose intellectual pleasures are few, and whose senses are blunted and dulled. such pleasures kill the man within the individual, and call to life the beast. [illustration: _s_--sense, _c_--nerve centre, _m_--motor.] indeed from the physiological point of view, the importance of the education of the senses is evident from an observation of the scheme of the diagrammatic arc which represents the functions of the nervous system. the external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is transmitted along the centripetal way to the nerve centre--the corresponding motor impulse is elaborated, and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement. although the arc represents diagrammatically the mechanism of reflex spinal actions, it may still be considered as a fundamental key explaining the phenomena of the more complex nervous mechanisms. man, with the peripheral sensory system, gathers various stimuli from his environment. he puts himself thus in direct communication with his surroundings. the psychic life develops, therefore, in relation to the system of nerve centres; and human activity which is eminently social activity, manifests itself through acts of the individual--manual work, writing, spoken language, etc.--by means of the psychomotor organs. education should guide and perfect the development of the three periods, the two peripheral and the central; or, better still, since the process fundamentally reduces itself to the nerve centres, education should give to psychosensory exercises the same importance which it gives to psychomotor exercises. otherwise, we _isolate_ man from his _environment_. indeed, when with _intellectual culture_ we believe ourselves to have completed education, we have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world. we have not made practical men. if, on the other hand, wishing through education to prepare for practical life; we limit ourselves to exercising the psychomotor phase, we lose sight of the chief end of education, which is to put man in direct communication with the external world. since _professional work_ almost always requires man to make _use of his surroundings_, the technical schools are not forced to return to the very beginnings of education, sense exercises, in order to supply the great and universal lack. chapter xv intellectual education "... to lead the child from the education of the senses to ideas." _edward séguin._ the sense exercises constitute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psychosensory processes. the directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas--from the concrete to the abstract, and to the association of ideas. for this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions--as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli. the teacher, in other words, when she gives a lesson must seek to limit the field of the child's consciousness to the object of the lesson, as, for example, during sense education she isolated the sense which she wished the child to exercise. for this, knowledge of a special technique is necessary. the educator must, "_to the greatest possible extent, limit his intervention; yet he must not allow the child to weary himself in an undue effort of auto-education_." it is here, that the factor of individual limitation and differing degrees of perception are most keenly felt in the teacher. in other words, in the quality of this intervention lies the art which makes up the individuality of the teacher. a definite and undoubted part of the teacher's work is that of teaching an exact nomenclature. she should, in most cases, pronounce the necessary names and adjectives without adding anything further. these words she should pronounce distinctly, and in a clear strong voice, so that the _various sounds_ composing the word may be distinctly and plainly perceived by the child. so, for example, touching the smooth and rough cards in the first tactile exercise, she should say, "this is smooth. this is rough," repeating the words with varying modulations of the voice, always letting the tones be clear and the enunciation very distinct. "smooth, smooth, smooth. rough, rough, rough." in the same way, when treating of the sensations of heat and cold, she must say, "this is cold." "this is hot." "this is ice-cold." "this is tepid." she may then begin to use the generic terms, "heat," "more heat," "less heat," etc. _first._ "the lessons in nomenclature must consist simply in provoking the association of the name with the object, or with the abstract idea which the name represents." thus the _object_ and the _name_ must be united when they are received by the child's mind, and this makes it most necessary that no other word besides the name be spoken. _second._ the teacher must always _test_ whether or not her lesson has attained the end she had in view, and her tests must be made to come within the restricted field of consciousness, provoked by the lesson on nomenclature. the first test will be to find whether the name is still associated in the child's mind with the object. she must allow the necessary time to elapse, letting a short period of silence intervene between the lesson and the test. then she may ask the child, pronouncing slowly and very clearly the name or the adjective she has taught: "which is _smooth_? which is _rough_?" the child will point to the object with his finger, and the teacher will know that he has made the desired association. but if he has not done this, that is, if he makes a mistake, _she must not correct him_, but must suspend her lesson, to take it up again another day. indeed, why correct him? if the child has not succeeded in associating the name with the object, the only way in which to succeed would be to _repeat_ both the action of the sense stimuli and the _name_; in other words, to repeat the lesson. but when the child has failed, we should know that he was not at that instant ready for the psychic association which we wished to provoke in him, and we must therefore choose another moment. if we should say, in correcting the child, "no, you have made a mistake," all these words, which, being in the form of a reproof, would strike him more forcibly than others (such as smooth or rough), would remain in the mind of the child, retarding the learning of the names. on the contrary, the _silence_ which follows the error leaves the field of consciousness clear, and the next lesson may successfully follow the first. in fact, by revealing the error we may lead the child to make an undue _effort_ to remember, or we may discourage him, and it is our duty to avoid as much as possible all unnatural effort and all depression. _third._ if the child has not committed any error, the teacher may provoke the _motor activity_ corresponding to the idea of the object: that is, to the _pronunciation of the name_. she may ask him, "what is this?" and the child should respond, "smooth." the teacher may then interrupt, teaching him how to pronounce the word correctly and distinctly, first, drawing a deep breath and, then, saying in a rather loud voice, "smooth." when he does this the teacher may note his particular speech defect, or the special form of baby talk to which he may be addicted. in regard to the _generalisation_ of the ideas received, and by that i mean the application of these ideas to his environment, i do not advise any lessons of this sort for a certain length of time, even for a number of months. there will be children who, after having touched a few times the stuffs, or merely the smooth and rough cards, _will quite spontaneously touch the various surfaces about them_, repeating "smooth! rough! it is velvet! etc." in dealing with normal children, we must _await_ this spontaneous investigation of the surroundings, or, as i like to call it, this _voluntary explosion_ of the exploring spirit. in such cases, the children experience a joy at each _fresh discovery_. they are conscious of a sense of dignity and satisfaction which encourages them to seek for new sensations from their environment and to make themselves spontaneous _observers_. the teacher should _watch_ with the most solicitous care to see when and how the child arrives at this generalisation of ideas. for example, one of our little four-year-olds while running about in the court one day suddenly stood still and cried out, "oh! the sky is blue!" and stood for some time looking up into the blue expanse of the sky. one day, when i entered one of the "children's houses," five or six little ones gathered quietly about me and began caressing, lightly, my hands, and my clothing, saying, "it is smooth." "it is velvet." "this is rough." a number of others came near and began with serious and intent faces to repeat the same words, touching me as they did so. the directress wished to interfere to release me, but i signed to her to be quiet, and i myself did not move, but remained silent, admiring this spontaneous intellectual activity of my little ones. the greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: _to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child_. one day, a little boy, following one of our exercises in design, had chosen to fill in with coloured pencils the outline of a tree. to colour the trunk he laid hold upon a red crayon. the teacher wished to interfere, saying, "do you think trees have red trunks?" i held her back and allowed the child to colour the tree red. this design was precious to us; it showed that the child was not yet an observer of his surroundings. _my way of treating this was to encourage the child to make use of the games for the chromatic sense._ he went daily into the garden with the other children, and could at any time see the tree trunks. when the sense exercises should have succeeded in attracting the child's spontaneous attention to colours about him, then, in some _happy moment_ he would become aware that the tree trunks were not red, just as the other child during his play had become conscious of the fact that the sky was blue. in fact, the teacher continued to give the child outlines of trees to fill in. he one day chose a brown pencil with which to colour the trunk, and made the branches and leaves green. later, he made the branches brown, also, using green only for the leaves. thus we have _the test_ of the child's intellectual progress. we can not create observers by saying, "_observe_," but by giving them the power and the means for this observation, and these means are procured through education of the senses. once we have _aroused_ such activity, auto-education is assured, for refined well-trained senses lead us to a closer observation of the environment, and this, with its infinite variety, attracts the attention and continues the psychosensory education. if, on the other hand, in this matter of sense education we single out definite concepts of the quality of certain objects, these very objects become associated with, or a part of, the training, which is in this way limited to those concepts taken and recorded. so the sense training remains unfruitful. when, for example, a teacher has given in the old way a lesson on the names of the colours, she has imparted an idea concerning that particular _quality_, but she has not educated the chromatic sense. the child will know these colours in a superficial way, forgetting them from time to time; and at best his appreciation of them will lie within the limits prescribed by the teacher. when, therefore, the teacher of the old methods shall have provoked the generalisation of the idea, saying, for example, "what is the colour of this flower!" "of this ribbon?" the attention of the child will in all probability remain torpidly fixed upon the examples suggested by her. we may liken the child to a clock, and may say that with the old-time way it is very much as if we were to hold the wheels of the clock quiet and move the hands about the clock face with our fingers. the hands will continue to circle the dial just so long as we apply, through our fingers, the necessary motor force. even so is it with that sort of culture which is limited to the work which the teacher does with the child. the new method, instead, may be compared to the process of winding, which sets the entire mechanism in motion. this motion is in direct relation with the machine, and not with the work of winding. so the spontaneous psychic development of the child continues indefinitely and is in direct relation to the psychic potentiality of the child himself, and not with the work of the teacher. the movement, or the _spontaneous psychic activity_ starts in our case from the education of the senses and is maintained by the observing intelligence. thus, for example, the hunting dog receives his ability, not from the education given by his master, but from the _special acuteness_ of his senses; and as soon as this physiological quality is applied to the right environment, the _exercise of hunting_, the increasing refinement of the sense perceptions, gives the dog the pleasure and then the passion for the chase. the same is true of the pianist who, refining at the same time his musical sense and the agility of his hand, comes to love more and more to draw new harmonies from the instrument. thia double perfection proceeds until at last the pianist is launched upon a course which will be limited only by the personality which lies within him. now a student of physics may know all the laws of harmony which form a part of his scientific culture, and yet he may not know how to follow a most simple musical composition. his culture, however vast, will be bound by the definite limits of his science. our educational aim with very young children must be to _aid the spontaneous development of the mental, spiritual, and physical personality_, and not to make of the child a cultured individual in the commonly accepted sense of the term. so, after we have offered to the child such didactic material as is adapted to provoke the development of his senses, we must wait until the activity known as observation develops. and herein lies the _art of the educator_; in knowing how to measure the action by which we help the young child's personality to develop. to one whose attitude is right, little children soon reveal _profound individual differences_ which call for very different kinds of help from the teacher. some of them require almost no intervention on her part, while others demand actual _teaching_. it is necessary, therefore, that the teaching shall be rigorously guided by the principle of limiting to the greatest possible point the active intervention of the educator. here are a number of games and problems which we have used effectively in trying to follow this principle. games of the blind the games of the blind are used for the most part as exercises in general sensibility as follows: _the stuffs._ we have in our didactic material a pretty little chest composed of drawers within which are arranged rectangular pieces of stuff in great variety. there are velvet, satin, silk, cotton, linen, etc. we have the child touch each of these pieces, teaching the appropriate nomenclature and adding something regarding the quality, as coarse, fine, soft. then, we call the child and seat him at one of the tables where he can be seen by his companions, blindfold him, and offer him the stuffs one by one. he touches them, smooths them, crushes them between his fingers and decides, "it is velvet,--it is fine linen,--it is rough cloth," etc. this exercise provokes general interest. when we offer the child some unexpected foreign object, as, for example, a sheet of paper, a veil, the little assembly trembles as it awaits his response. _weight._ we place the child in the same position, call his attention to the tablets used for the education of the sense of weight, have him notice again the already well-known differences of weight, and then tell him to put all the dark tablets, which are the heavier ones, at the right, and all the light ones, which are the lighter, to the left. we then blindfold him and he proceeds to the game, taking each time two tablets. sometimes he takes two of the same colour, sometimes two of different colours, but in a position opposite to that in which he must arrange them on his desk. these exercises are most exciting; when, for example, the child has in his hands two of the dark tablets and changes them from one hand to the other uncertain, and finally places them together on the right, the children watch in a state of intense eagerness, and a great sigh often expresses their final relief. the shouts of the audience when the entire game is followed without an error, gives the impression that their little friend _sees with his hands_ the colours of the tablets. _dimension and form._ we use games similar to the preceding one, having the child distinguish between different coins, the cubes and bricks of froebel, and dry seeds, such as beans and peas. but such games never awaken the intense interest aroused by the preceding ones. they are, however, useful and serve to associate with the various objects those qualities peculiar to them, and also to fix the nomenclature. application of the education of the visual sense to the observation of the environment _nomenclature._ this is one of the most important phases of education. indeed, nomenclature prepares for an _exactness_ in the use of language which is not always met with in our schools. many children, for example, use interchangeably the words thick and big, long and high. with the methods already described, the teacher may easily establish, by means of the didactic material, ideas which are very exact and clear, and may associate the proper word with these ideas. _method of using the didactic material_ _dimensions._ the directress, after the child has played for a long time with the three sets of solid insets and has acquired a security in the performance of the exercise, takes out all the cylinders of equal height and places them in a horizontal position on the table, one beside the other. then she selects the two extremes, saying, "this is the _thickest_--this is the _thinnest_." she places them side by side so that the comparison may be more marked, and then taking them by the little button, she compares the bases, calling attention to the great difference. she then places them again beside each other in a vertical position in order to show that they are equal in height, and repeats several times, "thick--thin." having done this, she should follow it with the test, asking, "give me the thickest--give me the thinnest," and finally she should proceed to the test of nomenclature, asking, "what is this?" in the lessons which follow this, the directress may take away the two extreme pieces and may repeat the lesson with the two pieces remaining at the extremities, and so on until she has used all the pieces. she may then take these up at random, saying, "give me one a little thicker than this one," or "give me one a little thinner than this one." with the second set of solid insets she proceeds in the same way. here she stands the pieces upright, as each one has a base sufficiently broad to maintain it in this position, saying, "this is the highest" and "this is the lowest." then placing the two extreme pieces side by side she may take them out of the line and compare the bases, showing that they are equal. from the extremes she may proceed as before, selecting each time the two remaining pieces most strongly contrasted. with the third solid inset, the directress, when she has arranged the pieces in gradation, calls the child's attention to the first one, saying, "this is the largest," and to the last one, saying, "this is the smallest." then she places them side by side and observes how they differ both in height and in base. she then proceeds in the same way as in the other two exercises. similar lessons may be given with the series of graduated prisms, of rods, and of cubes. the prisms are _thick_ and _thin_ and of equal _length_. the rods are _long_ and _short_ and of equal _thickness_. the cubes are _big_ and _little_ and differ in size and in height. the application of these ideas to environment will come most easily when we measure the children with the anthropometer. they will begin among themselves to make comparisons, saying, "i am taller,--you are thicker." these comparisons are also made when the children hold out their little hands to show that they are clean, and the directress stretches hers out also, to show that she, too, has clean hands. often the contrast between the dimensions of the hands calls forth laughter. the children make a perfect game of measuring themselves. they stand side by side; they look at each other; they decide. often they place themselves beside grown persons, and observe with curiosity and interest the great difference in height. _form._ when the child shows that he can with security distinguish between the forms of the plane geometric insets, the directress may begin the lessons in nomenclature. she should begin with two strongly-contrasted forms, as the square and the circle, and should follow the usual method, using the three periods of séguin. we do not teach all the names relative to the geometric figures, giving only those of the most familiar forms, such as square, circle, rectangle, triangle, oval. we now call attention to the fact that there are _rectangles which are narrow and long_, and others which are _broad and short_, while the _squares_ are equal on all sides and can be only big and little. these things are most easily shown with the insets, for, though we turn the square about, it still enters its frame, while the rectangle, if placed across the opening, will not enter. the child is much interested in this exercise, for which we arrange in the frame a square and a series of rectangles, having the longest side equal to the side of the square, the other side gradually decreasing in the five pieces. in the same way we proceed to show the difference between the oval, the ellipse, and the circle. the circle enters no matter how it is placed, or turned about; the ellipse does not enter when placed transversely, but if placed lengthwise will enter even if turned upside down. the oval, however, not only cannot enter the frame if placed transversely, but not even when turned upside down; it must be placed with the _large_ curve toward the large part of the opening, and with the _narrow_ curve toward the _narrow_ portion of the opening. the circles, _big_ and _little_, enter their frames no matter how they are turned about. i do not reveal the difference between the oval and the ellipse until a very late stage of the child's education, and then not to all children, but only to those who show a special interest in the forms by choosing the game often, or by asking about the differences. i prefer that such differences should be recognised later by the child, spontaneously, perhaps in the elementary school. it seems to many persons that in teaching these forms we are teaching _geometry_, and that this is premature in schools for such young children. others feel that, if we wish to present geometric forms, we should use the _solids_, as being more concrete. i feel that i should say a word here to combat such prejudices. to _observe_ a geometric form is not to _analyse_ it, and in the analysis geometry begins. when, for example, we speak to the child of sides and angles and explain these to him, even though with objective methods, as froebel advocates (for example, the square has four sides and can be constructed with four sticks of equal length), then indeed we do enter the field of geometry, and i believe that little children are too immature for these steps. but the _observation of the form_ cannot be too advanced for a child at this age. the plane of the table at which the child sits while eating his supper is probably a rectangle; the plate which contains his food is a circle, and we certainly do not consider that the child is too _immature_ to be allowed to look at the table and the plate. the insets which we present simply call the attention to a given _form_. as to the name, it is analogous to other names by which the child learns to call things. why should we consider it premature to teach the child the words _circle_, _square_, _oval_, when in his home he repeatedly hears the word _round_ used in connection with plates, etc. he will hear his parents speak of the _square_ table, the _oval_ table, etc., and these words in common use will remain for a long time _confused_ in his mind and in his speech, if we do not interpose such help as that we give in the teaching of forms. we should reflect upon the fact that many times a child, left to himself, makes an undue effort to comprehend the language of the adults and the meaning of the things about him. opportune and rational instruction _prevents_ such an effort, and therefore does not _weary_, but _relieves_, the child and satisfies his desire for knowledge. indeed, he shows his contentment by various expressions of pleasure. at the same time, his attention is called to the word which, if he is allowed to pronounce badly, develops in him an imperfect use of the language. this often arises from an effort on his part to imitate the careless speech of persons about him, while the teacher, by pronouncing clearly the word referring to the object which arouses the child's curiosity, prevents such effort and such imperfections. here, also, we face a widespread prejudice; namely, the belief that the child left to himself gives absolute repose to his mind. if this were so he would remain a stranger to the world, and, instead, we see him, little by little, spontaneously conquer various ideas and words. he is a traveller through life, who observes the new things among which he journeys, and who tries to understand the unknown tongue spoken by those about him. indeed, he makes a great and _voluntary effort_ to understand and to imitate. the instruction given to little children should be so directed as to _lessen this expenditure_ of poorly directed effort, converting it instead into the enjoyment of conquest made easy and infinitely broadened. we are _the guides_ of these travellers just entering the great world of human thought. we should see to it that we are intelligent and cultured guides, not losing ourselves in vain discourse, but illustrating briefly and concisely the work of art in which the traveller shows himself interested, and we should then respectfully allow him to observe it as long as he wishes to. it is our privilege to lead him to observe the most important and the most beautiful things of life in such a way that he does not lose energy and time in useless things, but shall find pleasure and satisfaction throughout his pilgrimage. i have already referred to the prejudice that it is more suitable to present the geometric forms to the child in the _solid_ rather than in the _plane_, giving him, for example, the _cube_, the _sphere_, the _prism_. let us put aside the physiological side of the question showing that the visual recognition of the solid figure is more complex than that of the plane, and let us view the question only from the more purely pedagogical standpoint of _practical life_. the greater number of objects which we look upon every day present more nearly the aspect of our plane geometric insets. in fact, doors, window-frames, framed pictures, the wooden or marble top of a table, are indeed _solid_ objects, but with one of the dimensions greatly reduced, and with the two dimensions determining the form of the plane surface made most evident. when the plane form prevails, we say that the window is rectangular, the picture frame oval, this table square, etc. _solids having a determined form prevailing in the plane surface_ are almost the only ones which come to our notice. and such solids are clearly represented by our _plane geometric insets_. the child will _very often_ recognise in his environment forms which he has learned in this way, but he will rarely recognise the _solid geometric forms_. that the table leg is a prism, or a truncated cone, or an elongated cylinder, will come to his knowledge long after he has observed that the top of the table upon which he places things is rectangular. we do not, therefore, speak of the fact of recognising that a house is a prism or a cube. indeed, the pure solid geometric forms _never exist_ in the ordinary objects about us; these present, instead, a _combination of forms_. so, putting aside the difficulty of taking in at a glance the complex form of a house, the child recognises in it, not an _identity_ of form, but an _analogy_. he will, however, see the plane geometric forms perfectly represented in windows and doors, and in the faces of many solid objects in use at home. thus the knowledge of the forms given him in the plane geometric insets will be for him a species of magic _key_, opening the external world, and making him feel that he knows its secrets. i was walking one day upon the pincian hill with a boy from the elementary school. he had studied geometric design and understood the analysis of plane geometric figures. as we reached the highest terrace from which we could see the piazza del popolo with the city stretching away behind it, i stretched out my hand saying, "look, all the works of man are a great mass of geometric figures;" and, indeed, rectangles, ovals, triangles, and semicircles, perforated, or ornamented, in a hundred different ways the grey rectangular façades of the various buildings. such uniformity in such an expanse of buildings seemed to prove the _limitation_ of human intelligence, while in an adjoining garden plot the shrubs and flowers spoke eloquently of the infinite variety of forms in nature. the boy had never made these observations; he had studied the angles, the sides and the construction of outlined geometric figures, but without thinking beyond this, and feeling only annoyance at this arid work. at first he laughed at the idea of man's massing geometric figures together, then he became interested, looked long at the buildings before him, and an expression of lively and thoughtful interest came into his face. to the right of the ponte margherita was a factory building in the process of construction, and its steel framework delineated a series of rectangles. "what tedious work!" said the boy, alluding to the workmen. and, then, as we drew near the garden, and stood for a moment in silence admiring the grass and the flowers which sprang so freely from the earth, "it is beautiful!" he said. but that word "beautiful" referred to the inner awakening of his own soul. this experience made me think that in the observation of the plane geometric forms, and in that of the plants which they saw growing in their own little gardens, there existed for the children precious sources of spiritual as well as intellectual education. for this reason, i have wished to make my work broad, leading the child, not only to observe the forms about him, but to distinguish the work of man from that of nature, and to appreciate the fruits of human labour. (_a_) _free design._ i give the child a sheet of white paper and a pencil, telling him that he may draw whatever he wishes to. such drawings have long been of interest to experimental psychologists. their importance lies in the fact that they reveal the _capacity_ of the child for observing, and also show his individual tendencies. generally, the first drawings are unformed and confused, and the teacher should ask the child _what he wished to draw_, and should write it underneath the design that it may be a record. little by little, the drawings become more intelligible, and verily reveal the progress which the child makes in the observation of the forms about him. often the most minute details of an object have been observed and recorded in the crude sketch. and, since the child draws what he wishes, he reveals to us which are the objects that most strongly attract his attention. (_b_) _design consisting of the filling in of outlined figures._ these designs are most important as they constitute "the preparation for writing." they do for the colour sense what _free design_ does for the sense of _form_. in other words, they reveal the capacity of the child _in the matter of observation of colours_, as the free design showed us the extent to which he was an observer of form in the objects surrounding him. i shall speak more fully of this work in the chapter on _writing_. the exercises consist in filling in with coloured pencil, certain outlines drawn in black. these outlines present the simple geometric figures and various objects with which the child is familiar in the schoolroom, the home, and the garden. the child must _select_ his colour, and in doing so he shows us whether he has observed the colours of the things surrounding him. _free plastic work_ these exercises are analogous to those in free design and in the filling in of figures with coloured pencils. here the child makes whatever he wishes with _clay_; that is, he models those objects which he remembers most distinctly and which have impressed him most deeply. we give the child a wooden tray containing a piece of clay, and then we await his work. we possess some very remarkable pieces of clay work done by our little ones. some of them reproduce, with surprising minuteness of detail, objects which they have seen. and what is most surprising, these models often record not only the form, but even the _dimensions_ of the objects which the child handled in school. many little ones model the objects which they have seen at home, especially kitchen furniture, water-jugs, pots, and pans. sometimes, we are shown a simple cradle containing a baby brother or sister. at first it is necessary to place written descriptions upon these objects, as it is necessary to do with the free design. later on, however, the models are easily recognisable, and the children learn to reproduce the geometric solids. these clay models are undoubtedly very valuable material for the teacher, and make clear many individual differences, thus helping her to understand her children more fully. in our method they are also valuable as psychological manifestations of development according to age. such designs are precious guides also for the teacher in the matter of her intervention in the child's education. the children who, in this work reveal themselves as observers, will probably become spontaneous observers of all the world about them, and may be led toward such a goal by the indirect help of exercises tending to fix and to make more exact the various sensations and ideas. these children will also be those who arrive most quickly at the act of _spontaneous writing_. those whose clay work remains unformed and indefinite will probably need the direct revelation of the directress, who will need to call their attention in some material manner to the objects around them. _geometric analysis of figures; sides, angles, centre, base_ the geometric analysis of figures is not adapted to very young children. i have tried a means for the _introduction_ of such analysis, limiting this work to the _rectangle_ and making use of a game which includes the analysis without fixing the attention of the child upon it. this game presents the concept most clearly. the _rectangle_ of which i make use is the plane of one of the children's tables, and the game consists in laying the table for a meal. i have in each of the "children's houses" a collection of toy table-furnishings, such as may be found in any toy-store. among these are dinner-plates, soup-plates, soup-tureen, saltcellars, glasses, decanters, little knives, forks, spoons, etc. i have them lay the table for six, putting _two places_ on each of the longer sides, and one place on each of the shorter sides. one of the children takes the objects and places them as i indicate. i tell him to place the soup tureen in the _centre_ of the table; this napkin in a _corner_. "place this plate in the centre of the short _side_." then i have the child look at the table, and i say, "something is lacking in this _corner_. we want another glass on this _side_. now let us see if we have everything properly placed on the two longer sides. is everything ready on the two shorter sides? is there anything lacking in the four corners?" i do not believe that we may proceed to any more complex analysis than this before the age of six years, for i believe that the child should one day take up one of the plane insets and _spontaneously_ begin to count the sides and the angles. certainly, if we taught them such ideas they would be able to learn them, but it would be a mere learning of formulæ, and not applied experience. _exercises in the chromatic sense_ i have already indicated what colour exercises we follow. here i wish to indicate more definitely the succession of these exercises and to describe them more fully. _designs and pictures._ we have prepared a number of outline drawings which the children are to fill in with coloured pencil, and, later on, with a brush, preparing for themselves the water-colour tints which they will use. the first designs are of flowers, butterflies, trees and animals, and we then pass to simple landscapes containing grass, sky, houses, and human figures. these designs help us in our study of the natural development of the child as an observer of his surroundings; that is, in regard to colour. the children _select the colours_ and are left entirely free in their work. if, for example, they colour a chicken red, or a cow green, this shows that they have not yet become observers. but i have already spoken of this in the general discussion of the method. these designs also reveal the effect of the education of the chromatic sense. as the child selects delicate and harmonious tints, or strong and contrasting ones, we can judge of the progress he has made in the refinement of his colour sense. the fact that the child must _remember_ the colour of the objects represented in the design encourages him to observe those things which are about him. and then, too, he wishes to be able to fill in more difficult designs. only those children who know how to keep the colour _within_ the outline and to reproduce the _right colours_ may proceed to the more ambitious work. these designs are very easy, and often very effective, sometimes displaying real artistic work. the directress of the school in mexico, who studied for a long time with me, sent me two designs; one representing a cliff in which the stones were coloured most harmoniously in light violet and shades of brown, trees in two shades of green, and the sky a soft blue. the other represented a horse with a chestnut coat and black mane and tail. chapter xvi methods for the teaching of reading and writing _spontaneous development of graphic language._ while i was directress of the orthophrenic school at rome, i had already began to experiment with various didactic means for the teaching of reading and writing. these experiments were practically original with me. itard and séguin do not present any rational method through which writing may be learned. in the pages above quoted, it may be seen how itard proceeded in the teaching of the alphabet and i give here what séguin says concerning the teaching of writing. "to have a child pass from design, to writing, which is its most immediate application, the teacher need only call d, a portion of a circle, resting its extremities upon a vertical; a, two obliques reunited at the summit and cut by a horizontal, etc., etc. "we no longer need worry ourselves as to how the child shall learn to write: he designs, _then_ writes. it need not be said that we should have the child draw the letters according to the laws of contrast and analogy. for instance, o beside i; b with p; t opposite l, etc." according to séguin, then, we do not need to _teach_ writing. the child who draws, will write. but writing, for this author, means printed capitals! nor does he, in any other place, explain whether his pupil shall write in any other way. he instead, gives much space to the description of _the design which prepares for_, and which _includes_ writing. this method of design is full of difficulties and was only established by the combined attempts of itard and séguin. "chapter xl: design. in design the first idea to be acquired is that of the plane destined to receive the design. the second is that of the trace or delineation. within these two concepts lies all design, all linear creation. "these two concepts are correlative, their relation generates the idea, or the capacity to produce the lines in this sense; that lines may only be called such when they follow a methodical and determined direction: the trace without direction is not a line; produced by chance, it has no name. "the rational sign, on the contrary, has a name because it has a direction and since all writing or design is nothing other than a composite of the diverse directions followed by a line, we must, before approaching what is commonly called writing, _insist_ upon these notions of plane and line. the ordinary child acquires these by instinct, but an insistence upon them is necessary in order to render the idiot careful and sensitive in their application. through methodical design he will come into rational contact with all parts of the plane and will, guided by imitation, produce lines at first simple, but growing more complicated. "the pupil may be taught: first, to trace the diverse species of lines. second, to trace them in various directions and in different positions relative to the plane. third, to reunite these lines to form figures varying from simple to complex. we must therefore, teach the pupil to distinguish straight lines from curves, vertical from horizontal, and from the various oblique lines; and must finally make clear the principal points of conjunction of two or more lines in forming a figure. "this rational analysis of design, _from which writing will spring_, is so essential in all its parts, that a child who, before being confided to my care, already wrote many of the letters, has taken six days to learn to draw a perpendicular or a horizontal line; he spent fifteen days before imitating a curve and an oblique. indeed the greater number of my pupils, are for a long time incapable of even imitating the movements of my hand upon the paper, before attempting to draw a line in a determined direction. the most imitative, or the least stupid ones, produce a sign diametrically opposite to that which i show them and all of them confound the points of conjunction of two lines no matter how evident this is. it is true that the thorough knowledge i have given them of lines and of configuration helps them to make the connection which must be established between the plane and the various marks with which they must cover the surface, but in the study rendered necessary by the deficiency of my pupils, the progression in the matter of the vertical, the horizontal, the oblique, and the curve must be determined by the consideration of the difficulty of comprehension and of execution which each offers to a torpid intelligence and to a weak unsteady hand. "i do not speak here of merely having them perform a difficult thing, since i have them surmount a _series_ of difficulties and for this reason i ask myself if some of these difficulties are not greater and some less, and if they do not grow one from the other, like theorems. here are the ideas which have guided me in this respect. "the vertical is a line which the eye and the hand follow directly, going up and down. the horizontal line is not natural to the eye, nor to the hand, which lowers itself and follows a curve (like the horizon from which it has taken its name), starting from the centre and going to the lateral extremity of the plane. "the oblique line presupposes more complex comparative ideas, and the curve demands such firmness and so many differences in its relation to the plane that we would only lose time in taking up the study of these lines. the most simple line then, is the vertical, and this is how i have given my pupils an idea of it. "the first geometric formula is this: only straight lines may be drawn from one given point to another. "starting from this axiom, which the hand alone can demonstrate, i have fixed two points upon the blackboard and have connected them by means of a vertical. my pupils try to do the same between the dots they have upon their paper, but with some the vertical descends to the right of the point and with others, to the left, to say nothing of those whose hand diverges in all directions. to arrest these various deviations which are often far more defects of the intelligence and of the vision, than of the hand, i have thought it wise to restrict the field of the plane, drawing two vertical lines to left and right of the points which the child is to join by means of a parallel line half way between the two enclosing lines. if these two lines are not enough, i place two rulers vertically upon the paper, which arrest the deviations of the hand absolutely. these material barriers are not, however, useful for very long. we first suppress the rulers and return to the two parallel lines, between which the idiot learns to draw the third line. we then take away one of the guiding lines, and leave, sometimes that on the right, sometimes that on the left, finally taking away this last line and at last, the dots, beginning by erasing the one at the top which indicates the starting point of the line and of the hand. the child thus learns to draw a vertical without material control, without points of comparison. "the same method, the same difficulty, the same means of direction are used for the straight horizontal lines. if, by chance, these lines begin well, we must await until the child curves them, departing from the centre and proceeding to the extremity _as nature commands him_, and because of the reason which i have explained. if the two dots do not suffice to sustain the hand, we keep it from deviating by means of the parallel lines or of the rulers. "finally, have him trace a horizontal line, and by uniting with it a vertical ruler we form a right angles. the child will begin to understand, in this way, what the vertical and horizontal lines really are, and will see the relation of these two ideas as he traces a figure. "in the sequence of the development of lines, it would seem that the study of the oblique should immediately follow that of the vertical and the horizontal, but this is not so! the oblique which partakes of the vertical in its inclination, and of the horizontal in its direction, and which partakes of both in its nature (since it is a straight line), presents perhaps, because of its relation to other lines, an idea too complex to be appreciated without preparation." thus séguin goes on through many pages, to speak of the oblique in all directions, which he has his pupils trace between two parallels. he then tells of the four curves which he has them draw to right and left of a vertical and above and below a horizontal, and concludes: "so we find the solution of the problems for which we sought--the vertical line, the horizontal, the oblique, and the four curves, whose union forms the circle, contain all possible lines, _all writing_. "arrived at this point, itard and i were for a long time at a standstill. the lines being known, the next step was to have the child trace regular figures, beginning of course, with the simplest. according to the general opinion, itard had advised me to begin with the square and i had followed this advice _for three months_, without being able to make the child understand me." after a long series of experiments, guided by his ideas of the genesis of geometric figures, séguin became aware that the triangle is the figure most easily drawn. "when three lines meet thus, they always form a triangle, while four lines may meet in a hundred different directions without remaining parallel and therefore without presenting a perfect square. "from these experiments and many others, i have deduced the first principles of writing and of design for the idiot; principles whose application is _too simple_ for me to discuss further." such was the proceeding used by my predecessors in the teaching of writing to deficients. as for reading, itard proceeded thus: he drove nails into the wall and hung upon them, geometric figures of wood, such as triangles, squares, circles. he then drew the exact imprint of these upon the wall, after which he took the figures away and had the "boy of aveyron" replace them upon the proper nails, guided by the design. from this design itard conceived the idea of the plane geometric insets. he finally had large print letters made of wood and proceeded in the same way as with the geometric figures, that is, using the design upon the wall and arranging the nails in such a way that the child might place the letters upon them and then take them off again. later, séguin used the horizontal plane instead of the wall, drawing the letters on the bottom of a box and having the child superimpose solid letters. after twenty years, séguin had not changed his method of procedure. a criticism of the method used by itard and séguin for reading and writing seems to me superfluous. the method has two fundamental errors which make it inferior to the methods in use for normal children, namely: writing in printed capitals, and the preparation for writing through a study of rational geometry, which we now expect only from students in the secondary schools. séguin here confuses ideas in a most extraordinary way. he has suddenly jumped from the psychological observation of the child and from his relation to his environment, to the study of the origin of lines and their relation to the plane. he says that the child _will readily design a vertical line_, but that the horizontal will soon become a curve, because "_nature commands it_" and this _command of nature_ is represented by the fact that man sees the horizon as a curved line! the example of séguin serves to illustrate the necessity of a _special education_ which shall fit man for _observation_, and shall direct _logical thought_. the observation must be absolutely objective, in other words, stripped of preconceptions. séguin has in this case the preconception that geometric design must prepare for writing, and that hinders him from discovering the truly natural proceeding necessary to such preparation. he has, besides, the preconception that the deviation of a line, as well as the inexactness with which the child traces it, are due to "_the mind and the eye, not to the hand_," and so he wearies himself _for weeks and months in explaining_ the direction of lines and in guiding _the vision_ of the idiot. it seems as if séguin felt that a good method must start from a superior point, geometry; the intelligence of the child is only considered worthy of attention in its relation to abstract things. and is not this a common defect? let us observe mediocre men; they pompously assume erudition and disdain simple things. let us study the clear thought of those whom we consider men of genius. newton is seated tranquilly in the open air; an apple falls from the tree, he observes it and asks, "why?" phenomena are never insignificant; the fruit which falls and universal gravitation may rest side by side in the mind of a genius. if newton had been a teacher of children he would have led the child to look upon the worlds on a starry night, but an erudite person might have felt it necessary first to prepare the child to understand the sublime calculus which is the key to astronomy--galileo galilei observed the oscillation of a lamp swung on high, and discovered the laws of the pendulum. in the intellectual life _simplicity_ consists in divesting one's mind of every preconception, and this leads to the discovery of new things, as, in the moral life, humility and material poverty guide us toward high spiritual conquests. if we study the history of discoveries, we will find that they have come from _real objective observation_ and _from logical thought_. these are simple things, but rarely found in one man. does it not seem strange, for instance, that after the discovery by laveran of the malarial parasite which invades the red blood-corpuscles, we did not, in spite of the fact that we know the blood system to be a system of closed vessels, even so much as _suspect the possibility_ that a stinging insect might inoculate us with the parasite? instead, the theory that the evil emanated from low ground, that it was carried by the african winds, or that it was due to dampness, was given credence. yet these were vague ideas, while the parasite was a definite biological specimen. when the discovery of the malarial mosquito came to complete logically the discovery of laveran, this seemed marvellous, stupefying. yet we know in biology that the reproduction of molecular vegetable bodies is by scission with alternate sporation, and that of molecular animals is by scission with alternate conjunction. that is, after a certain period in which the primitive cell has divided and sub-divided into fresh cells, equal among themselves, there comes the formation of two diverse cells, one male and one female, which must unite to form a single cell capable of recommencing the cycle of reproduction by division. all this being known at the time of laveran, and the malarial parasite being known to be a protozoon, it would have seemed logical to consider its segmentation in the stroma of the red corpuscle as the phase of scission and to await until the parasite gave place to the sexual forms, which must necessarily come in the phase succeeding scission. instead, the division was looked upon as spore-formation, and neither laveran, nor the numerous scientists who followed the research, knew how to give an explanation of the appearance of the sexual forms. laveran expressed an idea, which was immediately received, that these two forms were degenerate forms of the malarial parasite, and therefore incapable of producing the changes determining the disease. indeed, the malaria was apparently cured at the appearance of the two sexual forms of the parasite, the conjunction of the two cells being impossible in the human blood. the theory--then recent--of morel upon human degeneration accompanied by deformity and weakness, inspired laveran in his interpretation, and everybody found the idea of the illustrious pathologist a fortunate one, because it was inspired by the great concepts of the morellian theory. had anyone, instead, limited himself to reasoning thus: the original form of the malarial insect is a protozoon; it reproduces itself by scission, under our eyes; when the scission is finished, we see two diverse cells, one a half-moon, the other threadlike. these are the feminine and masculine cells which must, by conjunction, alternate the scission,--such a reasoner would have opened the way to the discovery. but _so simple_ a process of reasoning did not come. we might almost ask ourselves how great would be the world's progress if a special form of education prepared men for pure observation and logical thought. a great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant. i say all this to defend the necessity, which i feel we face, of preparing the coming generations by means of more rational methods. it is from these generations that the world awaits its progress. we have already learned to make use of our surroundings, but i believe that we have arrived at a time when the necessity presents itself for _utilising_ human force, through a scientific education. to return to séguin's method of writing, it illustrates another truth, and that is the tortuous path we follow in our teaching. this, too, is allied to an instinct for complicating things, analogous to that which makes us so prone to appreciate complicated things. we have séguin teaching _geometry_ in order to teach a child to write; and making the child's mind exert itself to follow geometrical abstractions only to come down to the simple effort of drawing a printed d. after all, must the child not have to make another effort in order to _forget_ the print, and _learn_ the script! and even we in these days still believe that in order to learn to write the child must first make vertical strokes. this conviction is very general. yet it does not seem natural that to write the letters of the alphabet, which are all rounded, it should be necessary to begin with straight lines and acute angles. in all good faith, we wonder that it should be difficult to do away with the angularity and stiffness with which the beginner traces the beautiful curve of the o.[ ] yet, through what effort on our part, and on his, was he forced to fill pages and pages with rigid lines and acute angles! to whom is due this time-honoured idea that the first sign to be traced must be a straight line? and why do we so avoid preparing for curves as well as angles? [ ] it will, of course, be understood that this is a criticism of the system in use in italian schools. a. e. g. let us, for a moment, divest ourselves of such preconceptions and proceed in a more simple way. we may be able to relieve future generations of _all effort_ in the matter of learning to write. is it necessary to begin writing with the making of vertical strokes? a moment of clear and logical thinking is enough to enable us to answer, no. the child makes too painful an effort in following such an exercise. the first steps should be the easiest, and the up and down stroke, is, on the contrary, one of the most difficult of all the pen movements. only a professional penman could fill a whole page and preserve the regularity of such strokes, but a person who writes only moderately well would be able to complete a page of presentable writing. indeed, the straight line is unique, expressing the shortest distance between two points, while _any deviation_ from that direction signifies a line which is not straight. these infinite deviations are therefore easier than that _one_ trace which is perfection. if we should give to a number of adults the order to draw a straight line upon the blackboard, each person would draw a long line proceeding in a different direction, some beginning from one side, some from another, and almost all would succeed in making the line straight. should we then ask that the line be drawn in a _particular direction_, starting from a determined point, the ability shown at first would greatly diminish, and we would see many more irregularities, or errors. almost all the lines would be long--for the individual _must needs gather impetus_ in order to succeed in making his line straight. should we ask that the lines be made short, and included within precise limits, the errors would increase, for we would thus impede the impetus which helps to conserve the definite direction. in the methods ordinarily used in teaching writing, we add, to such limitations, the further restriction that the instrument of writing must be held in a certain way, not as instinct prompts each individual. thus we approach in the most conscious and restricted way the first act of writing, which should be voluntary. in this first writing we still demand that the single strokes be kept parallel, making the child's task a difficult and barren one, since it has no purpose for the child, who does not understand the meaning of all this detail. i had noticed in the note-books of the deficient children in france (and voisin also mentions this phenomenon) that the pages of vertical strokes, although they began as such, ended in lines of c's. this goes to show that the deficient child, whose mind is less resistant than that of the normal child, exhausts, little by little, the initial effort of imitation, and the natural movement gradually comes to take the place of that which was forced or stimulated. so the straight lines are transformed into curves, more and more like the letter c. such a phenomenon does not appear in the copy-books of normal children, for they resist, through effort, until the end of the page is reached, and, thus, as often happens, conceal the didactic error. but let us observe the spontaneous drawings of normal children. when, for example, picking up a fallen twig, they trace figures in the sandy garden path, we never see short straight lines, but long and variously interlaced curves. séguin saw the same phenomenon when the horizontal lines he made his pupils draw became curves so quickly instead. and he attributed the phenomenon to the imitation of the horizon line! that vertical strokes should prepare for alphabetical writing, seems incredibly illogical. the alphabet is made up of curves, therefore we must prepare for it by learning to make straight lines. "but," says someone, "in many letters of the alphabet, the straight line does exist," true, but there is no reason why as a beginning of writing, we should select one of the details of a complete form. we may analyse the alphabetical signs in this way, discovering straight lines and curves, as by analysing discourse, we find grammatical rules. but we all _speak_ independently of such rules, why then should we not write independently of such analysis, and without the separate execution of the parts constituting the letter? it would be sad indeed if we could _speak_ only _after_ we had studied grammar! it would be much the same as demanding that before we _looked_ at the stars in the firmament, we must study infinitesimal calculus; it is much the same thing to feel that before teaching an idiot to write, we must make him understand the abstract derivation of lines and the problems of geometry! no less are we to be pitied if, in order to write, we must follow analytically the parts constituting the alphabetical signs. in fact the _effort_ which we believe to be a necessary accompaniment to learning to write is a purely artificial effort, allied, not to writing, but to the _methods_ by which it is taught. let us for a moment cast aside every dogma in this connection. let us take no note of culture, or custom. we are not, here, interested in knowing how humanity began to write, nor what may have been the origin of writing itself. let us put away the conviction, that long usage has given us, of the necessity of beginning writing by making vertical strokes; and let us try to be as clear and unprejudiced in spirit as the truth which, we are seeking. "_let us observe an individual who is writing, and let us seek to analyse the acts he performs in writing_," that is, the mechanical operations which enter into the execution of writing. this would be undertaking the _philosophical study of writing_, and it goes without saying that we should examine the individual who writes, not the _writing_; the _subject_, not the _object_. many have begun with the object, examining the writing, and in this way many methods have been constructed. but a method starting from the individual would be decidedly original--very different from other methods which preceded it. it would indeed signify a new era in writing, _based upon anthropology_. in fact, when i undertook my experiments with normal children, if i had thought of giving a name to this new method of writing, i should have called it without knowing what the results would be, the _anthropological method_. certainly, my studies in anthropology inspired the method, but experience has given me, as a surprise, another title which seems to me the natural one, "the method of _spontaneous_ writing." while teaching deficient children i happened to observe the following fact: an idiot girl of eleven years, who was possessed of normal strength and motor power in her hands, could not learn to sew, or even to take the first step, darning, which consists in passing the needle first over, then under the woof, now taking up, now leaving, a number of threads. i set the child to weaving with the froebel mats, in which a strip of paper is threaded transversely in and out among vertical strips of paper held fixed at top and bottom. i thus came to think of the analogy between the two exercises, and became much interested in my observation of the girl. when she had become skilled in the froebel weaving, i led her back again to the sewing, and saw with pleasure that she was now able to follow the darning. from that time on, our sewing classes began with a regular course in the froebel weaving. i saw that the necessary movements of the hand in sewing _had been prepared without having the child sew_, and that we should really find the way to _teach_ the child _how_, before _making him execute_ a task. i saw especially that preparatory movements could be carried on, and reduced to a mechanism, by means of repeated exercises not in the work itself but in that which prepares for it. pupils could then come to the real work, able to perform it without ever having directly set their hands to it before. i thought that i might in this way prepare for writing, and the idea interested me tremendously. i marvelled at its simplicity, and was annoyed that _i had not thought before_ of the method which was suggested to me by my observation of the girl who could not sew. in fact, seeing that i had already taught the children to touch the contours of the plane geometric insets, i had now only to teach them to touch with their fingers the _forms of the letters of the alphabet_. i had a beautiful alphabet manufactured, the letters being in flowing script, the low letters centimetres high, and the taller ones in proportion. these letters were in wood, / centimetre in thickness, and were painted, the consonants in blue enamel, the vowels in red. the under side of these letter-forms, instead of being painted, were covered with bronze that they might be more durable. we had only one copy of this wooden alphabet; but there were a number of cards upon which the letters were painted in the same colours and dimensions as the wooden ones. these painted letters were arranged upon the cards in groups, according to contrast, or analogy of form. corresponding to each letter of the alphabet, we had a picture representing some object the name of which began, with the letter. above this, the letter was painted in large script, and near it, the same letter, much smaller and in its printed form. these pictures served to fix the memory of the sound of the letter, and the small printed letter united to the one in script, was to form the passage to the reading of books. these pictures do not, indeed, represent a new idea, but they completed an arrangement which did not exist before. such an alphabet was undoubtedly most expensive and when made by hand the cost was fifty dollars. the interesting part of my experiment was, that after i had shown the children how to place the movable wooden letters upon those painted in groups upon the cards, i had them _touch them repeatedly in the fashion of flowing writing_. i multiplied these exercises in various ways, and the children thus learned to make _the movements necessary to reproduce the form of the graphic signs without writing_. i was struck by an idea which had never before entered my mind--that in writing we make _two diverse_ forms of movement, for, besides the movement by which the form is reproduced, there is also that of _manipulating the instrument of writing_. and, indeed, when the deficient children had become expert in touching all the letters according to form, _they did not yet know how to hold a pencil_. to hold and to manipulate a little stick securely, corresponds to the _acquisition of a special muscular mechanism which is independent of the writing movement_; it must in fact go along with the motions necessary to produce all of the various letter forms. it is, then, _a distinct mechanism_, which must exist together with the motor memory of the single graphic signs. when i provoked in the deficients the movements characteristic of writing by having them touch the letters with their fingers, i exercised mechanically the psycho-motor paths, and fixed the muscular memory of each letter. there remained the preparation of the muscular mechanism necessary in holding and managing the instrument of writing, and this i provoked by adding two periods to the one already described. in the second period, the child touched the letter, not only with the index finger of his right hand, but with two, the index and the middle finger. in the third period, he touched the letters with a little wooden stick, held as a pen in writing. in substance i was making him repeat the same movements, now with, and now without, holding the instrument. i have said that the child was to follow the _visual_ image of the outlined letter. it is true that his finger had already been trained through touching the contours of the geometric figures, but this was not always a sufficient preparation. indeed, even we grown people, when we trace a design through glass or tissue paper, cannot follow perfectly the line which we see and along which we should draw our pencil. the design should furnish some sort of control, some mechanical guide, for the pencil, in order to follow with _exactness_ the trace, _sensible in reality only to the eye_. the deficients, therefore, did not always follow the design exactly with either the finger or the stick. the didactic material did not offer _any control_ in the work, or rather it offered only the uncertain control of the child's glance, which could, to be sure, see if the finger continued upon the sign, or not. i now thought that in order to have the pupil follow the movements more exactly, and to guide the execution more directly, i should need to prepare letter forms so indented, as to represent a _furrow_ within which the wooden stick might run. i made the designs for this material, but the work being too expensive i was not able to carry out my plan. after having experimented largely with this method, i spoke of it very fully to the teachers in my classes in didactic methods at the state orthophrenic school. these lectures were printed, and i give below the words which, though they were placed in the hands of more than elementary teachers, did not draw from them a single helpful idea. professor ferreri[ ] in an article speaks with amazement of this fact.[ ] [ ] g. ferreri--per l'insegnamento della scrittura (sistema della dott m. montessori) bollettino dell' associazione romana per la cura medico--pedigogica dei fanciulli anormali e deficienti poveri, anno , n. , ottobre . roma tipografia delle terme diocleziane. [ ] riassunto delle lezion di didattica, della dott. montessori anno , stab. lit. romano, via frattina , disp. a, pag. : "_lettura e scrittura simultanee._" "at this point we present the cards bearing the vowels painted in red. the child sees irregular figures painted in red. we give him the vowels in wood, painted red, and have him superimpose these upon the letters painted on the card. we have him touch the wooden vowels in the fashion of writing, and give him the name of each letter. the vowels are arranged on the cards according to analogy of form: _o_ _e_ _a_ _i_ _u_ "we then say to the child, for example, 'find o. fat it in its place.' then, 'what letter is this?' we here discover that many children make mistakes in the letters if they only look at the letter. "they could however tell the letter by touching it. most interesting observations may be made, revealing various individual types: visual, motor. "we have the child touch the letters drawn upon the cards,--using first the index finger only, then the index with the middle finger,--then with a small wooden stick held as a pen. the letter must be traced in the fashion of writing. "the consonants are painted in blue, and are arranged upon the cards according to analogy of form. to these cards are annexed a movable alphabet in blue wood, the letters of which are to be placed upon the consonants as they were upon the vowels. in addition to these materials there is another series of cards, where, besides the consonant, are painted one or two figures the names of which begin with that particular letter. near the script letter, is a smaller printed letter painted in the same colour. "the teacher, naming the consonant according to the phonetic method, indicates the letter, and then the card, pronouncing the names of the objects painted there, and emphasizing the first letter, as, for example, '_p-pear_: give me the consonant _p_--put it in its place, touch it,' etc. _in all this we study the linguistic defects of the child._ "tracing the letter, in the fashion of writing, begins the muscular education which prepares for writing. one of our little girls taught by this method has reproduced all the letters with the pen, though she does not as yet recognise them all. she has made them about eight centimetres high, and with surprising regularity. this child also does well in hand work. the child who looks, recognises, and touches the letters in the manner of writing, prepares himself simultaneously for reading and writing. "touching the letters and looking at them at the same time, fixes the image more quickly through the co-operation of the senses. later, the two facts separate; looking becomes reading; touching becomes writing. according to the type of the individual, some learn to read first, others to write." i had thus, about the year , initiated my method for reading and writing upon the fundamental lines it still follows. it was with great surprise that i noted the _facility_ with which a deficient child, to whom i one day gave a piece of chalk, traced upon the blackboard, in a firm hand, the letters of the entire alphabet, writing for the first time. this had arrived much more quickly than i had supposed. as i have said, some of the children wrote the letters _with a pen and yet could not recognise one of them_. i have noticed, also, in normal children, that the muscular sense is most easily developed in infancy, and this makes writing exceedingly easy for children. it is not so with reading, which requires a much longer course of instruction, and which calls for a superior intellectual development, since it treats of the _interpretation of signs_, and of the _modulation of accents of the voice_, in order that the word may be understood. and all this is a purely mental task, while in writing, the child, under dictation, _materially translates_ sounds into signs, and _moves_, a thing which is always easy and pleasant for him. writing develops in the little child with _facility_ and _spontaneity_, analogous to the development of spoken language--which is a motor translation of audible sounds. reading, on the contrary, makes part of an abstract intellectual culture, which is the interpretation of ideas from graphic symbols, and is only acquired later on. my first experiments with normal children were begun in the first half of the month of november, . in the two "children's houses" in san lorenzo, i had, from the date of their respective inaugurations (january in one and march in the other), used only the games of practical life, and of the education of the senses. i had not presented exercises for writing, because, like everybody else, i held the prejudice that it was necessary to begin as late as possible the teaching of reading and writing, and certainly to avoid it before the age of six. but the children seemed to demand some _conclusion_ of the exercises, which had already developed them intellectually in a most surprising way. they knew how to dress and undress, and to bathe, themselves; they knew how to sweep the floors, dust the furniture, put the room in order, to open and close boxes, to manage the keys in the various locks; they could replace the objects in the cupboards in perfect order, could care for the plants; they knew how to observe things, and how to see objects with their hands. a number of them came to us and frankly demanded to be taught to read and write. even in the face of our refusal several children came to school and proudly showed us that they knew how to make an o on the blackboard. finally, many of the mothers came to beg us as a favour to teach the children to write, saying, "here in the 'children's houses' the children are awakened, and learn so many things easily that if you only teach reading and writing they will soon learn, and will then be spared the great fatigue this always means in the elementary school." this faith of the mothers, that their little ones would, from us, be _able to learn to read and write without fatigue_, made a great impression upon me. thinking upon the results i had obtained in the school for deficients, i decided during the august vacation to make a trial upon the reopening of the school in september. upon second thought i decided that it would be better to take up the interrupted work in september, and not to approach reading and writing until october, when the elementary schools opened. this presented the added advantage of permitting us to compare the progress of the children of the first elementary with that made by ours, who would have begun the same branch of instruction at the same time. in september, therefore, i began a search for someone who could manufacture didactic materials, but found no one willing to undertake it. i wished to have a splendid alphabet made, like the one used with the deficients. giving this up, i was willing to content myself with the ordinary enamelled letters used upon shop windows, but i could find them in script form nowhere. my disappointments were many. so passed the whole mouth of october. the children in the first elementary had already filled pages of vertical strokes, and mine were still waiting. i then decided to cut out large paper letters, and to have one of my teachers colour these roughly on one side with a blue tint. as for the touching of the letters, i thought of cutting the letters of the alphabet out of sandpaper, and of gluing them upon smooth cards, thus making objects much like those used in the primitive exercises for the tactile sense. only after i had made these simple things, did i become aware of the superiority of this alphabet to that magnificent one i had used for my deficients, and in the pursuit of which i had wasted two months! if i had been rich, i would have had that beautiful but barren alphabet of the past! we wish the old things because we cannot understand the new, and we are always seeking after that gorgeousness which belongs to things already on the decline, without recognising in the humble simplicity of new ideas the germ which shall develop in the future. i finally understood that a paper alphabet could easily be multiplied, and could be used by many children at one time, not only for the recognition of letters, but for the composition of words. i saw that in the sandpaper alphabet i had found the looked-for guide for the fingers which touched the letter. this was furnished in such a way that no longer the sight alone, but the touch, lent itself directly to teaching the movement of writing with exactness of control. in the afternoon after school, the two teachers and i, with great enthusiasm, set about cutting out letters from writing-paper, and others from sandpaper. the first, we painted blue, the second, we mounted on cards, and, while we worked, there unfolded before my mind a clear vision of the method in all its completeness, so simple that it made me smile to think i had not seen it before. the story of our first attempts is very interesting. one day one of the teachers was ill, and i sent as a substitute a pupil of mine, signorina anna fedeli, a professor of pedagogy in a normal school. when i went to see her at the close of the day, she showed me two modifications of the alphabet which she had made. one consisted in placing behind each letter, a transverse strip of white paper, so that the child might recognise the direction of the letter, which he often turned about and upside down. the other consisted in the making of a cardboard case where each letter might be put away in its own compartment, instead of being kept in a confused mass as at first. i still keep this rude case made from an old pasteboard box, which signorina fedeli had found in the court and roughly sewed with white thread. she showed it to me laughing, and excusing herself for the miserable work, but i was most enthusiastic about it. i saw at once that the letters in the case were a precious aid to the teaching. indeed, it offered to the eye of the child the possibility of comparing all of the letters, and of selecting those he needed. in this way the didactic material described below had its origin. i need only add that at christmas time, less than a month and a half later, while the children in the first elementary were laboriously working to forget their wearisome pothooks and to prepare for making the curves of o and the other vowels, two of my little ones of four years old, wrote, each one in the name of his companions, a letter of good wishes and thanks to signor edoardo talamo. these were written upon note paper without blot or erasure and the writing was adjudged equal to that which is obtained in the third elementary grade. chapter xvii description of the method and didactic material used first period: exercise tending to develop the muscular mechanism necessary in holding and using the instrument in writing _design preparatory to writing.--didactic material._ small wooden tables; metal insets, outline drawings, coloured pencils. i have among my materials two little wooden tables, the tops of which form an inclined plane sloping toward a narrow cornice, which prevents objects placed upon the table from slipping off. the top of each table is just large enough to hold four of the square frames, into which the metal plane geometric insets are fitted, and is so painted as to represent three of these brown frames, each containing a square centre of the same dark blue as the centres of the metal insets. the metal insets are in dimension and form a reproduction of the series of plane geometric insets in wood already described. _exercises_. placed side by side upon the teacher's desk, or upon one of the little tables belonging to the children, these two little tables may have the appearance of being one long table containing eight figures. the child may select one or more figures, taking at the same time the frame of the inset. the analogy between these metal insets and the plane geometric insets of wood is complete. but in this case, the child can freely use the pieces, where before, he arranged them in the wooden frame. he first takes the metal frame, places it upon a sheet of white paper, and with a coloured pencil _draws around the contour of the empty centre_. then, he takes away the frame, and upon the paper there remains a geometric figure. this is the first time that the child has reproduced through design, a geometric figure. until now, he has only placed the geometric insets above the figures delineated on the three series of cards. he now places upon the figure, which he himself has drawn, the metal inset, just as he placed the wooden inset upon the cards. his next act is to follow the contour of this inset with a pencil of a different colour. lifting the metal piece, he sees the figure reproduced upon the paper, in two colours. here, for the first time is born the abstract concept of the geometric figure, for, from two metal pieces so different in form as the frame and the inset, there has resulted the same design, which is a _line_ expressing a determined figure. this fact strikes the attention of the child. he often marvels to find the same figure reproduced by means of two pieces so different, and looks for a long time with evident pleasure at the duplicate design--almost as if it were _actually produced_ by the objects which serve to guide his hand. besides all this, the child learns _to trace lines_ determining figures. there will come a day in which, with still greater surprise and pleasure, he will trace graphic signs determining words. after this, he begins the work which directly prepares for the formation of the muscular mechanism relative to the holding and manipulation of the instrument of writing. with a coloured pencil of his own selection, held as the pen is held in writing, he _fills in_ the figure which he has outlined. we teach him not to pass outside the contour, and in doing so we attract his attention to this contour, and thus _fix_ the idea that a line may determine a figure. the exercise of filling in one figure alone, causes the child to perform repeatedly the movement of manipulation which would be necessary to fill ten copy-book pages with vertical strokes. and yet, the child feels no weariness, because, although he makes exactly the muscular co-ordination which is necessary to the work, he does so freely and in any way that he wishes, while his eyes are fixed upon a large and brightly coloured figure. at first, the children fill pages and pages of paper with these big squares, triangles, ovals, trapezoids; colouring them red, orange, green, blue, light blue, and pink. gradually they limit themselves to the use of the dark blue and brown, both in drawing the figure and in filling it in, thus reproducing the appearance of the metal piece itself. many of the children, quite of their own accord, make a little orange-coloured circle in the centre of the figure, in this way representing the little brass button by which the metal piece is to be held. they take great pleasure in feeling that they have reproduced exactly, like true artists, the objects which they see before them on the little shelf. observing the successive drawings of a child, there is revealed to us a duplicate form of progression: _first._ little by little, the lines tend less and less to go outside the enclosing line until, at last, they are perfectly contained within it, and both the centre and the frame are filled in with close and uniform strokes. _second._ the strokes with which the child fills in the figures, from being at first short and confused, become gradually _longer, and more nearly parallel_, until in many cases the figures are filled in by means of perfectly regular up and down strokes, extending from one side of the figure to the other. in such a case, it is evident that the child is _master of the pencil_. the muscular mechanism, necessary to the management of the instrument of writing, _is established_. we may, therefore, by examining such designs, arrive at a clear idea of the maturity of the child in the matter of _holding the pencil or pen in hand_. to vary these exercises, we use the _outline drawings_ already described. through these designs, the manipulation of the pencil is perfected, for they oblige the child to make lines of various lengths, and make him more and more secure in his use of the pencil. if we could count the lines made by a child in the filling in of these figures, and could transform them into the signs used in writing, they would fill many, many copy-books! indeed, the security which our children attain is likened to that of children in our ordinary third elementary grade. when for the first time they take a pen or a pencil in hand, they know how to manage it almost as well as a person who has written for a long time. i do not believe that any means can be found which will so successfully and, in so short a space of time, establish this mastery. and with it all, the child is happy and diverted. my old method for the deficients, that of following with a small stick the contours of raised letters, was, when compared with this, barren and miserable! even when the children _know how to write_ they continue these exercises, which furnish an unlimited progression, since the designs may be varied and complicated. the children follow in each design essentially the same movements, and acquire a varied collection of pictures which grow more and more perfect, and of which they are very proud. for i not only _provoke_, but perfect, the writing through the exercises which we call preparatory. the control of the pen is rendered more and more secure, not by repeated exercises in the writing, but by means of these filled-in designs. in this way, my children _perfect themselves in writing, without actually writing_. second period: exercises tending to establish the visual-muscular image of the alphabetical signs, and to establish the muscular memory of the movements necessary to writing _didactic material._ cards upon which the single letters of the alphabet are mounted in sandpaper; larger cards containing groups of the same letters. the cards upon which the sandpaper letters are mounted are adapted in size and shape to each letter. the vowels are in light-coloured sandpaper and are mounted upon dark cards, the consonants and the groups of letters are in black sandpaper mounted upon white cards. the grouping is so arranged as to call attention to contrasted, or analogous forms. the letters are cut in clear script form, the shaded parts being made broader. we have chosen to reproduce the vertical script in use in the elementary schools. _exercises._ in teaching the letters of the alphabet, we begin with the _vowels_ and proceed to the consonants, pronouncing the _sound_, not the name. in the case of the consonants, we immediately unite the sound with one of the vowel sounds, repeating the syllable according to the usual phonetic method. the teaching proceeds according to the three periods already illustrated. _first._ association of the visual and muscular-tactile sensation with the letter sound. the directress presents to the child two of the cards upon which vowels are mounted (or two of the consonants, as the case may be). let us suppose that we present the letters i and o, saying, "this is i! this is o!" as soon as we have given the sound of a letter, we have the child trace it, taking care to show him _how_ to trace it, and if necessary guiding the index finger of his right hand over the sandpaper letter _in the sense of writing_. "_knowing how to trace_" will consist in _knowing the direction_ in which a given graphic sign must be followed. the child learns quickly, and his finger, already expert in the tactile exercise, _is led_, by the slight roughness of the fine sandpaper, over the exact track of the letter. _he may then repeat indefinitely_ the movements necessary to produce the letters of the alphabet, without the fear of the mistakes of which a child writing with a pencil for the first time is so conscious. if he deviates, the smoothness of the card immediately warns him of his error. the children, as soon as they have become at all expert in this tracing of the letters, take great pleasure in repeating it _with closed eyes_, letting the sandpaper lead them in following the form which they do not see. thus the perception will be established by the direct muscular-tactile sensation of the letter. in other words, it is no longer the visual image of the letter, but the _tactile sensation_, which guides the hand of the child in these movements, which thus become fixed in the muscular memory. there develop, contemporaneously, three sensations when the directress _shows the letter_ to the child and has him trace it; the visual sensation, the tactile sensation, and the muscular sensation. in this way the _image of the graphic sign_ is fixed _in a much shorter space of time_ than when it was, according to ordinary methods, acquired only through the visual image. it will be found that the _muscular memory_ is in the young child the most tenacious and, at the same time, the most ready. indeed, he sometimes recognises the letters by touching them, when he cannot do so by looking at them. these images are, besides all this, contemporaneously associated with the alphabetical sound. _second._ perception. _the child should know how to compare and to recognise the figures, when he hears the sounds corresponding to them._ the directress asks the child, for example, "give me o!--give me i!" if the child does not recognise the letters by looking at them, she invites him to trace them, but if he still does not recognise them, the lesson is ended, and may be resumed another day. i have already spoken of the necessity of _not revealing_ the error, and of not insisting in the teaching when the child does not respond readily. _third._ language. _allowing the letters to lie for some instants upon the table, the directress asks the child, "what is this?" and he should respond, o, i._ in teaching the consonants, the directress pronounces only the _sound_, and as soon as she has done so unites with it a vowel, pronouncing the syllable thus formed and alternating this little exercise by the use of different vowels. she must always be careful to emphasize the sound of the consonant, repeating it by itself, as, for example, _m_, _m_, _m_, _ma_, _me_, _mi_, _m_, _m_. when the child _repeats_ the sound he isolates it, and then accompanies it with the vowel. it is not necessary to teach all the vowels before passing to the consonants, and as soon as the child knows one consonant he may begin to compose words. questions of this sort, however, are left to the judgment of the educator. i do not find it practical _to follow a special rule_ in the teaching of the consonants. often the curiosity of the child concerning a letter leads us to teach that desired consonant; a name pronounced may awaken in him a desire to know what consonants are necessary to compose it, and this _will_, or _willingness_, of the pupil is a much more _efficacious_ means than any rule concerning the _progression_ of the letters. when the child pronounces _the sounds_ of the consonants, he experiences an evident pleasure. it is a great novelty for him, this series of sounds, so varied and yet so distinct, _presenting_ such enigmatic signs as the letters of the alphabet. there is mystery about all this, which provokes most decided interest. one day i was on the terrace while the children were having their free games; i had with me a little boy of two years and a half left with me, for a moment, by his mother. scattered about upon a number of chairs, were the alphabets which we use in the school. these had become mixed, and i was putting the letters back into their respective compartments. having finished my work, i placed the boxes upon two of the little chairs near me. the little boy watched me. finally, he drew near to the box, and took one of the letters in his hand. it chanced to be an f. at that moment the children, who were running in single file, passed us, and, seeing the letter, called out in chorus the corresponding sound and passed on. the child paid no attention to them, but put back the f and took up an r. the children running by again, looked at him laughing, and then began to cry out "r, r, r! r, r, r!" little by little the baby understood that, when he took a letter in hand, the children, who were passing, cried out a sound. this amused him so much that i wished to observe how long he would persist in this game without becoming tired. he kept it up for _three-quarters of an hour_! the children had become interested in the child, and grouped themselves about him, pronouncing the sounds in chorus, and laughing at his pleased surprise. at last, after he had several times held up f, and had received from his public the same sound, he took the letter again, showing it to me, and saying, "f, f, f!" he had learned this from out the great confusion of sounds which he had heard; the long letter which had first arrested the attention of the running children, had made a great impression upon him. it is not necessary to show how the separate pronunciation of the alphabetical sounds _reveals_ the condition of the child's speech. defects, which are almost all related to the _incomplete_ development of the language itself, manifest themselves, and the directress may take note of them one by one. in this way she will be possessed of a record of the child's progress, which will help her in her individual teaching, and will reveal much concerning the development of the language in this particular child. in the matter of _correcting linguistic defects_, we will find it helpful to follow the physiological rules relating to the child's development, and to modify the difficulties in the presentation of our lesson. when, however, the child's speech is sufficiently developed, and when he _pronounces all the sounds_, it does not matter which of the letters we select in our lessons. many of the defects which have become permanent in adults are due to _functional errors in the development_ of the language during the period of infancy. if, for the attention which we pay to the correction of linguistic defects in children in the upper grades, we would substitute _a direction of the development of the language_ while the child is still young, our results would be much more practical and valuable. in fact, many of the defects in pronunciation arise from the use of a _dialect_, and these it is almost impossible to correct after the period of childhood. they may, however, be most easily removed through the use of educational methods especially adapted to the perfecting of the language in little children. we do not speak here of actual linguistic _defects_ related to anatomical or physiological weaknesses, or to pathological facts which alter the function of the nervous system. i speak at present only of those irregularities which are due to a repetition of incorrect sounds, or to the imitation of imperfect pronunciation. such defects may show themselves in the pronunciation of any one of the consonant sounds, and i can conceive of no more practical means for a methodical correction of speech defects than this exercise in pronunciation, which is a necessary part in learning the graphic language through my method. but such important questions deserve a chapter to themselves. turning directly to the method used in teaching writing, i may call attention to the fact that it is contained in the two periods already described. such exercises have made it possible for the child to learn, and to fix, the muscular mechanism necessary to the proper holding of the pen, and to the making of the graphic signs. if he has exercised himself for a sufficiently long time in these exercises, he will be _potentially_ ready to write all the letters of the alphabet and all of the simple syllables, without ever having taken chalk or pencil in his hand. we have, in addition to this, begun the teaching of _reading_ at the same time that we have been teaching _writing_. when we present a letter to the child and enunciate its sound, he fixes the image of this letter by means of the visual sense, and also by means of the muscular-tactile sense. he associates the sound with its relative sign; that is, he relates the sound to the graphic sign. but _when he sees and recognises, he reads; and when he traces, he writes_. thus his mind receives as one, two acts, which, later on, as he develops, will separate, coming to constitute the two diverse processes of _reading and writing_. by teaching these two acts contemporaneously, or, better, by their _fusion_, we place the child _before a new form of language_ without determining which of the acts constituting it should be most prevalent. we do not trouble ourselves as to whether the child in the development of this process, first learns to read or to write, or if the one or the other will be the easier. we must rid ourselves of all preconceptions, and must _await from experience_ the answer to these questions. we may expect that individual differences will show themselves in the prevalence of one or the other act in the development of different children. this makes possible the most interesting psychological study of the individual, and should broaden the work of this method, which is based upon the free expansion of individuality. third period: exercises for the composition of words _didactic material._ this consists chiefly of alphabets. the letters of the alphabet used here are identical in form and dimension with the sandpaper ones already described, but these are cut out of cardboard and are not mounted. in this way each letter represents an object which can be easily handled by the child and placed wherever he wishes it. there are several examples of each letter, and i have designed cases in which the alphabets may be kept. these cases or boxes are very shallow, and are divided and subdivided into many compartments, in each one of which i have placed a group of four copies of the same letter. the compartments are not equal in size, but are measured according to the dimensions of the letters themselves. at the bottom of each compartment is glued a letter which is not to be taken out. this letter is made of black cardboard and relieves the child of the fatigue of hunting about for the right compartment when he is replacing the letters in the case after he has used them. the vowels are cut from blue cardboard, and the consonants from red. in addition to these alphabets we have a set of the capital letters mounted in sandpaper upon cardboard, and another, in which they are cut from cardboard. the numbers are treated in the same way. [illustration: (a) training the sense of touch. learning the difference between rough and smooth by running fingers alternately over sandpaper and smooth cardboard; distinguishing different shapes by fitting geometric insets into place; distinguishing textures. (b) learning to write and read by touch. the child at the left is tracing sandpaper letters and learning to know them by touch. the boy and girl are making words out of cardboard letters.] [illustration: (a) children touching letters. the child on the left has acquired lightness and delicacy of touch by very thorough preparatory exercises. the one on the right has not had so much training. (b) making words with cardboard script.] _exercises._ as soon as the child knows some of the vowels and the consonants we place before him the big box containing all the vowels and the consonants which he knows. the directress pronounces very clearly a word; for example, "mama," brings out the sound of the m very distinctly, repeating the sounds a number of times. almost always the little one with an impulsive movement seizes an m and places it upon the table. the directress repeats "ma--ma." the child selects the a and places it near the m. he then composes the other syllable very easily. but the reading of the word which he has composed is not so easy. indeed, he generally succeeds in reading it only after a _certain effort_. in this case i help the child, urging him to read, and reading the word with him once or twice, always pronouncing very distinctly, _mama, mama_. but once he has understood the mechanism of the game, the child goes forward by himself, and becomes intensely interested. we may pronounce any word, taking care only that the child understands separately the letters of which it is composed. he composes the new word, placing, one after the other, the signs corresponding to the sounds. it is most interesting indeed to watch the child at this work. intensely attentive, he sits watching the box, moving his lips almost imperceptibly, and taking one by one the necessary letters, rarely committing an error in spelling. the movement of the lips reveals the fact that he _repeats to himself an infinite number of times_ the words whose sounds he is translating into signs. although the child is able to compose any word which is clearly pronounced, we generally dictate to him only those words which are well-known, since we wish his composition to result in an idea. when these familiar words are used, he spontaneously rereads many times the word he has composed, repeating its sounds in a thoughtful, contemplative way. the importance of these exercises is very complex. the child analyses, perfects, fixes his own spoken language,--placing an object in correspondence to every sound which he utters. the composition of the word furnishes him with substantial proof of the necessity for clear and forceful enunciation. the exercise, thus followed, associates the sound which is heard with the graphic sign which represents it, and lays a most solid foundation for accurate and perfect spelling. in addition to this, the composition of the words is in itself an exercise of intelligence. the word which is pronounced presents to the child a problem which he must solve, and he will do so by remembering the signs, selecting them from among others, and arranging them in the proper order. he will have the _proof_ of the exact solution of his problem when he _rereads_ the word--this word which he has composed, and which represents for all those who know how to read it, _an idea_. when the child hears others read the word he has composed, he wears an expression of satisfaction and pride, and is possessed by a species of joyous wonder. he is impressed by this correspondence, carried on between himself and others by means of symbols. the written language represents for him the highest attainment reached by his own intelligence, and is at the same time, the reward of a great achievement. when the pupil has finished the composition and the reading of the word we have him, according to the habits of order which we try to establish in connection with all our work, "_put away_" all the letters, each one in its own compartment. in composition, pure and simple, therefore, the child unites the two exercises of comparison and of selection of the graphic signs; the first, when from the entire box of letters before him he takes those necessary; the second, when he seeks the compartment in which each letter must be replaced. there are, then, three exercises united in this one effort, all three uniting to _fix the image of the graphic sign_ corresponding to the sounds of the word. the work of learning is in this case facilitated in three ways, and the ideas are acquired in a third of the time which would have been necessary with the old methods. we shall soon see that the child, on hearing the word, or on thinking of a word which he already knows, _will see_, with his mind's eye, all the letters, necessary to compose the word, arrange themselves. he will reproduce this vision with a facility most surprising to us. one day a little boy four years old, running alone about the terrace, was heard to repeat many times, "to make zaira, i must have z-a-i-r-a." another time, professor di donato, in a visit to the "children's house," pronounced his own name for a four-year-old child. the child was composing the name, using small letters and making it all one word, and had begun, thus--_diton_. the professor at once pronounced the word more distinctly; di _do_ nato, whereupon the child, without scattering the letters, picked up the syllable _to_ and placed it to one side, putting _do_ in the empty space. he then placed an _a_ after the _n_, and, taking up the _to_ which he had put aside, completed the word with it. this made it evident that the child, when the word was pronounced more clearly, understood that the syllable _to_ did not belong at that place in the word, realised that it belonged at the end of the word, and therefore placed it aside until he should need it. this was most surprising in a child of four years, and amazed all of those present. it can be explained by the clear and, at the same time, complex vision of the signs which the child must have, if he is to form a word which he hears spoken. this extraordinary act was largely due to the orderly mentality which the child had acquired through repeated spontaneous exercises tending to develop his intelligence. these three periods contain the entire method for the acquisition of written language. the significance of such a method is clear. the psycho-physiological acts which unite to establish reading and writing are prepared separately and carefully. the muscular movements peculiar to the making of the signs or letters are prepared apart, and the same is true of the manipulation of the instrument of writing. the composition of the words, also, is reduced to a psychic mechanism of association between images heard and seen. there comes a moment in which the child, without thinking of it, fills in the geometric figures with an up and down stroke, which is free and regular; a moment in which he touches the letters with closed eyes, and in which he reproduces their form, moving his finger through the air; a moment in which the composition of words has become a psychic impulse, which makes the child, even when alone, repeat to himself "to make zaira i must have z-a-i-r-a." now this child, it is true, _has never written_, but he has mastered all the acts necessary to writing. the child who, when taking dictation, not only knows how to compose the word, but instantly embraces in his thought its composition as a whole, will be able to write, since he knows how to make, with his eyes closed, the movements necessary to produce these letters, and since he manages almost unconsciously the instrument of writing. more than this, the freedom with which the child has acquired this mechanical dexterity makes it possible for the impulse or spirit to act at any time through the medium of his mechanical ability. he should, sooner or later, come into his full power by way of a spontaneous explosion into writing. this is, indeed, the marvellous reaction which has come from my experiment with normal children. in one of the "children's houses," directed by signorina bettini, i had been especially careful in the way in which writing was taught, and we have had from this school most beautiful specimens of writing, and for this reason, perhaps i cannot do better than to describe the development of the work in this school. one beautiful december day when the sun shone and the air was like spring, i went up on the roof with the children. they were playing freely about, and a number of them were gathered about me. i was sitting near a chimney, and said to a little five-year-old boy who sat beside me, "draw me a picture of this chimney," giving him as i spoke a piece of chalk. he got down obediently and made a rough sketch of the chimney on the tiles which formed the floor of this roof terrace. as is my custom with little children, i encouraged him, praising his work. the child looked at me, smiled, remained for a moment as if on the point of bursting into some joyous act, and then cried out, "i can write! i can write!" and kneeling down again he wrote on the pavement the word "hand." then, full of enthusiasm, he wrote also "chimney," "roof." as he wrote, he continued to cry out, "i can write! i know how to write!" his cries of joy brought the other children, who formed a circle about him, looking down at his work in stupefied amazement. two or three of them said to me, trembling with excitement, "give me the chalk. i can write too." and indeed they began to write various words: _mama_, _hand_, _john_, _chimney_, _ada_. not one of them had ever taken chalk or any other instrument in hand for the purpose of writing. it was the _first time_ that they had ever written, and they traced an entire word, as a child, when speaking for the first time, speaks the entire word. the first word spoken by a baby causes the mother ineffable joy. the child has chosen perhaps the word "mother," seeming to render thus a tribute to maternity. the first word written by my little ones aroused within themselves an indescribable emotion of joy. not being able to adjust in their minds the connection between the preparation and the act, they were possessed by the illusion that, having now grown to the proper size, they knew how to write. in other words, writing seemed to them only one among the many gifts of nature. they believe that, as they grow bigger and stronger, there will come some beautiful day when they _shall know how to write_. and, indeed, this is what it is in reality. the child who speaks, first prepares himself unconsciously, perfecting the psycho-muscular mechanism which leads to the articulation of the word. in the case of writing, the child does almost the same thing, but the direct pedagogical help and the possibility of preparing the movements for writing in an almost material way, causes the ability to write to develop much more rapidly and more perfectly than the ability to speak correctly. in spite of the ease with which this is accomplished, the preparation is not partial, but complete. the child possesses _all_ the movements necessary for writing. and written language develops not gradually, but in an explosive way; that is, the child can write _any word_. such was our first experience in the development of the written language in our children. those first days we were a prey to deep emotions. it seemed as if we walked in a dream, and as if we assisted at some miraculous achievement. the child who wrote a word for the first time was full of excited joy. he might be compared to the hen who has just laid an egg. indeed, no one could escape from the noisy manifestations of the little one. he would call everyone to see, and if there were some who did not go, he ran to take hold of their clothes forcing them to come and see. we all had to go and stand about the written word to admire the marvel, and to unite our exclamations of surprise with the joyous cries of the fortunate author. usually, this first word was written on the floor, and, then, the child knelt down before it in order to be nearer to his work and to contemplate it more closely. after the first word, the children, with a species of frenzied joy, continued to write everywhere. i saw children crowding about one another at the blackboard, and behind the little ones who were standing on the floor another line would form consisting of children mounted upon chairs, so that they might write above the heads of the little ones. in a fury at being thwarted, other children, in order to find a little place where they might write, overturned the chairs upon which their companions were mounted. others ran toward the window shutters or the door, covering them with writing. in these first days we walked upon a carpet of written signs. daily accounts showed us that the same thing was going on at home, and some of the mothers, in order to save their pavements, and even the crust of their loaves upon which they found words written, made their children presents of _paper_ and _pencil_. one of these children brought to me one day a little note-book entirely filled with writing, and the mother told me that the child had written all day long and all evening, and had gone to sleep in his bed with the paper and pencil in his hand. this impulsive activity which we could not, in those first days control, made me think upon the wisdom of nature, who develops the spoken language little by little, letting it go hand in hand with the gradual formation of ideas. think of what the result would have been had nature acted imprudently as i had done! suppose nature had first allowed the human being to gather, by means of the senses, a rich and varied material, and to acquire a store of ideas, and had then completely prepared in him the means for articulate language, saying finally to the child, mute until that hour, "go--speak!" the result would have been a species of sudden madness, under the influence of which the child, feeling no restraints, would have burst into an exhausting torrent of the most strange and difficult words. i believe, however, that there exists between the two extremes a happy medium which is the true and practical way. we should lead the child more gradually to the conquest of written language, yet we should still have it come as a _spontaneous fact_, and his work should from the first be almost perfect. experience has shown us how to control this phenomenon, and how to lead the child more _calmly_ to this new power. the fact that the children _see_ their companions writing, leads them, through imitation, to write _as soon as_ they can. in this way, when the child writes he does not have the entire alphabet at his disposal, and the number of words which he can write is limited. he is not even capable of making all of the words possible through a combination of the letters which he does know. he still has the great joy of the _first written word_, but this is no longer the source of _an overwhelming surprise_, since he sees just such wonderful things happening each day, and knows that sooner or later the same gift will come to all. this tends to create a calm and ordered environment, still full of beautiful and wonderful surprises. making a visit to the "children's house," even during the opening weeks, one makes fresh discoveries. here, for instance, are two little children, who, though they fairly radiate pride and joy, are writing tranquilly. yet, these children, until yesterday, had never thought of writing! the directress tells me that one of them began to write yesterday morning at eleven o'clock, the other, at three in the afternoon. we have come to accept the phenomenon with calmness, and tacitly recognise it as a _natural form of the child's development_. the wisdom of the teacher shall decide when it is necessary to encourage a child to write. this can only be when he is already perfect in the three periods of the preparatory exercise, and yet does not write of his own accord. there is danger that in retarding the act of writing, the child may plunge finally into a tumultuous effort, due to the fact that he knows the entire alphabet and has no natural check. the signs by which the teacher may almost precisely diagnose the child's maturity in this respect are: the _regularity_ of the _parallel_ lines which fill in the geometric figures; the recognition with closed eyes of the sandpaper letters; the security and readiness shown in the composition of words. before intervening by means of a direct invitation to write, it is best to wait at least a week in the hope that the child may write spontaneously. when he has begun to write spontaneously the teacher may intervene to _guide_ the progress of the writing. the first help which she may give is that of _ruling_ the blackboard, so that the child may be led to maintain regularity and proper dimensions in his writing. the second, is that of inducing the child, whose writing is not firm, to _repeat the tracing_ of the sandpaper letters. she should do this instead of _directly_ correcting his actual writing, for the child does not perfect himself by repeating the act of writing, but by repeating the acts preparatory to writing. i remember a little beginner who, wishing to make his blackboard writing perfect, brought all of the sandpaper letters with him, and before writing touched two or three times _all of the letters needed in the words he wished to write_. if a letter did not seem to him to be perfect he erased it and _retouched_ the letter upon the card before rewriting. our children, even after they have been writing for a year, continue to repeat the three preparatory exercises. they thus learn both to write, and to perfect their writing, without really going through the actual act. with our children, actual writing is a test; it springs from an inner impulse, and from the pleasure of explaining a superior activity; it is not an exercise. as the soul of the mystic perfects itself through prayer, even so in our little ones, that highest expression of civilisation, written language, is acquired and improved through exercises which are akin to, but which are not, writing. there is educational value in this idea of preparing oneself before trying, and of perfecting oneself before going on. to go forward correcting his own mistakes, boldly attempting things which he does imperfectly, and of which he is as yet unworthy dulls the sensitiveness of the child's spirit toward his own errors. my method of writing contains an educative concept; teaching the child that prudence which makes him avoid errors, that dignity which makes him look ahead, and which guides him to perfection, and that humility which unites him closely to those sources of good through which alone he can make a spiritual conquest, putting far from him the illusion that the immediate success is ample justification for continuing in the way he has chosen. the fact that all the children, those who are just beginning the three exercises and those who have been writing for months, daily repeat the same exercise, unites them and makes it easy for them to meet upon an apparently equal plane. here there are no _distinctions_ of beginners, and experts. all of the children fill in the figures with coloured pencils, touch the sandpaper letters and compose words with the movable alphabets; the little ones beside the big ones who help them. he who prepares himself, and he who perfects himself, both follow the same path. it is the same way in life, for, deeper than any social distinction, there lies an equality, a common meeting point, where all men are brothers, or, as in the spiritual life, aspirants and saints again and again pass through the same experiences. writing is very quickly learned, because we begin to teach it only to those children who show a desire for it by spontaneous attention to the lesson given by the directress to other children, or by watching the exercises in which the others are occupied. some individuals _learn_ without ever having received any lessons, solely through listening to the lessons given to others. in general, all children of four are intensely interested in writing, and some of our children have begun to write at the age of three and a half. we find the children particularly enthusiastic about tracing the sandpaper letters. during the first period of my experiments, when the children were shown the alphabet _for the first time_, i one day asked signorina bettini to bring out to the terrace where the children were at play, all of the various letters which she herself had made. as soon as the children saw them they gathered about us, their fingers outstretched in their eagerness to touch the letters. those who secured cards were unable to touch them properly because of the other children, who crowded about trying to reach the cards in our laps. i remember with what an impulsive movement the possessors of the cards held them on high like banners, and began to march, followed by all the other children who clapped their hands and cried out joyously. the procession passed before us, and all, big and little, laughed merrily, while the mothers, attracted by the noise, leaned from the windows to watch the sight. the average time that elapses between the first trial of the preparatory exercises and the first written word is, for children of four years, from a month to a month and a half. with children of five years, the period is much shorter, being about a month. but one of our pupils learned to use in writing all the letters of the alphabet in twenty days. children of four years, after they have been in school for two months and a half, can write any word from dictation, and can pass to writing with ink in a note-book. our little ones are generally experts after three months' time, and those who have written for six months may be compared to the children in the third elementary. indeed, writing is one of the easiest and most delightful of all the conquests made by the child. if adults learned as easily as children under six years of age, it would be an easy matter to do away with illiteracy. we would probably find two grave hinderances to the attainment of such a brilliant success: the torpor of the muscular sense, and those permanent defects of spoken language, which would be sure to translate themselves into the written language. i have not made experiments along this line, but i believe that one school year would be sufficient to lead an illiterate person, not only to write, but to express his thoughts in written language. so much for the time necessary for learning. as to the execution, our children _write well_ from the moment in which they begin. the _form_ of the letters, beautifully rounded and flowing, is surprising in its similarity to the form of the sandpaper models. the beauty of our writing is rarely equalled by any scholars in the elementary schools, _who have not had special exercises in penmanship_. i have made a close study of penmanship, and i know how difficult it would be to teach pupils of twelve or thirteen years to write an entire word without lifting the pen, except for the few letters which require this. the up and down strokes with which they have filled their copy-book make flowing writing almost impossible to them. our little pupils, on the other hand, spontaneously, and with a marvellous security, write entire words without lifting the pen, maintaining perfectly the slant of the letters, and making the distance between each letter equal. this has caused more than one visitor to exclaim, "if i had not seen it i should never have believed it." indeed, penmanship is a superior form of teaching and is necessary to correct defects already acquired and fixed. it is a long work, for the child, _seeing_ the model, must follow the _movements_ necessary to reproduce it, while there is no direct correspondence between the visual sensation and the movements which he must make. too often, penmanship is taught at an age when all the defects have become established, and when the physiological period in which the _muscular memory_ is ready, has been passed. we directly prepare the child, not only for writing, but also for _penmanship_, paying great attention to the _beauty of form_ (having the children touch the letters in script form) and to the flowing quality of the letters. (the exercises in filling-in prepare for this.) reading _didactic material._ the didactic material for the lessons in reading consists in slips of paper or cards upon which are written in clear, large script, words and phrases. in addition to these cards we have a great variety of toys. experience has taught me to distinguish clearly between _writing and reading_, and has shown me that the two acts _are not absolutely contemporaneous_. contrary to the usually accepted idea, writing _precedes reading_. i do not consider as _reading_ the test which the child makes _when he verifies_ the word that he has written. he is translating signs into sounds, as he first translated sounds into signs. in this verification he already knows the word and has repeated it to himself while writing it. what i understand by reading is the _interpretation_ of an idea from the written signs. the child who has not heard the word pronounced, and who recognises it when he sees it composed upon the table with the cardboard letters, and who can tell what it means; this child _reads_. the word which he reads has the same relation to written language that the word which he hears bears to articulate language. both serve to _receive the language_ transmitted to us _by others_. so, until the child reads a transmission of ideas from the written word, _he does not read_. we may say, if we like, that writing as described is a fact in which the psycho-motor mechanism prevails, while in reading, there enters a work which is purely intellectual. but it is evident how our method for writing prepares for reading, making the difficulties almost imperceptible. indeed, writing prepares the child to interpret mechanically the union of the letter sounds of which the written word is composed. when a child in our school knows how to write, _he knows how to read the sounds_ of which the word is composed. it should be noticed, however, that when the child composes the words with the movable alphabet, or when he writes, he has _time to think_ about the signs which he must select to form the word. the writing of a word requires a great deal more time than that necessary for reading the same word. the child who _knows how to write_, when placed before a word which he must interpret by reading, is silent for a long time, and generally reads the component sounds with the same slowness with which he would have written them. but _the sense of the word_ becomes evident only when it is pronounced clearly and with the phonetic accent. now, in order to place the phonetic accent the child must recognise the word; that is, he must recognise the idea which the word represents. the intervention of a superior work of the intellect is necessary if he is to read. because of all this, i proceed in the following way with the exercises in reading, and, as will be evident, i do away entirely with the old-time primer. i prepare a number of little cards made from ordinary writing-paper. on each of these i write in large clear script some well-known word, one which has already been pronounced many times by the children, and which represents an object actually present or well known to them. if the word refers to an object which is before them, i place this object under the eyes of the child, in order to facilitate his interpretation of the word. i will say, in this connection, the objects used in these writing games are for the most part toys of which we have a great many in the "children's houses." among these toys, are the furnishings of a doll's house, balls, dolls, trees, flocks of sheep, or various animals, tin soldiers, railways, and an infinite variety of simple figures. if writing serves to correct, or better, to direct and perfect the mechanism of the articulate language of the child, reading serves to help the development of ideas, and relates them to the development of the language. indeed, writing aids the physiological language and reading aids the social language. we begin, then, as i have indicated, with the nomenclature, that is, with the reading of names of objects which are well known or present. there is no question of beginning with words that are _easy or difficult_, for the _child already knows how to read any word_; that is, he knows how to read _the sounds which compose it_. i allow the little one to translate the written word slowly into sounds, and if the interpretation is exact, i limit myself to saying, "faster." the child reads more quickly the second time, but still often without understanding. i then repeat, "faster, faster." he reads faster each time, repeating the same accumulation of sounds, and finally the word bursts upon his consciousness. then he looks upon it as if he recognised a friend, and assumes that air of satisfaction which so often radiates our little ones. this completes the exercise for reading. it is a lesson which goes very rapidly, since it is only presented to a child who is already prepared through writing. truly, we have buried the tedious and stupid a b c primer side by side with the useless copy-books! when the child has read the word, he places the explanatory card under the object whose name it bears, and the exercise is finished. one of our most interesting discoveries was made in the effort to devise a game through which the children might, without effort, learn to read words. we spread out upon one of the large tables a great variety of toys. each one of them had a corresponding card upon which the name of the toy was written. we folded these little cards and mixed them up in a basket, and the children who knew how to read were allowed to take turns in drawing these cards from the basket. each child had to carry his card back to his desk, unfold it quietly, and read it mentally, not showing it to those about him. he then had to fold it up again, so that the secret which it contained should remain unknown. taking the folded card in his hand, he went to the table. he had then to pronounce clearly the name of a toy and present the card to the directress in order that she might verify the word he had spoken. the little card thus became current coin with which he might acquire the toy he had named. for, if he pronounced the word clearly and indicated the correct object, the directress allowed him to take the toy, and to play with it as long as he wished. when each child had had a turn, the directress called the first child and let him draw a card from another basket. this card he read as soon as he had drawn it. it contained the name of one of his companions who did not yet know how to read, and for that reason could not have a toy. the child who had read the name then offered to his little friend the toy with which he had been playing. we taught the children to present these toys in a gracious and polite way, accompanying the act with a bow. in this way we did away with every idea of class distinction, and inspired the sentiment of kindness toward those who did not possess the same blessings as ourselves. this reading game proceeded in a marvellous way. the contentment of these poor children in possessing even for a little while such beautiful toys can be easily imagined. but what was my amazement, when the children, having learned to understand the written cards, _refused_ to take the toys! they explained that they did not wish to waste time in playing, and, with a species of insatiable desire, preferred to draw out and read the cards one after another! i watched them, seeking to understand the secret of these souls, of whose greatness i had been so ignorant! as i stood in meditation among the eager children, the discovery that it was knowledge they loved, and not the silly _game_, filled me with wonder and made me think of the greatness of the human soul! we therefore put away the toys, and set about making _hundreds_ of written slips, containing names of children, cities, and objects; and also of colours and qualities known through the sense exercises. we placed these slips in open boxes, which we left where the children could make free use of them. i expected that childish inconstancy would at least show itself in a tendency to pass from one box to another; but no, each child finished emptying the box under his hand before passing to another, being verily _insatiable_ in the desire to read. coming into the school one day, i found that the directress had allowed the children to take the tables and chairs out upon the terrace, and was having school in the open air. a number of little ones were playing in the sun, while others were seated in a circle about the tables containing the sandpaper letters and the movable alphabet. a little apart sat the directress, holding upon her lap a long narrow box full of written slips, and all along the edge of her box were little hands, fishing for the beloved cards. "you may not believe me," said the directress, "but it is more than an hour since we began this, and they are not satisfied yet!" we tried the experiment of bringing balls, and dolls to the children, but without result; such futilities had no power beside the joys of _knowledge_. seeing these surprising results, i had already thought of testing the children with print, and had suggested that the directress _print_ the word under the written word upon a number of slips. but the children forestalled us! there was in the hall a calendar upon which many of the words were printed in clear type, while others were done in gothic characters. in their mania for reading the children began to look at this calendar, and, to my inexpressible amazement, read not only the print, but the gothic script. there therefore remained nothing but the presentation of a book, and i did not feel that any of those available were suited to our method. the mothers soon had proofs of the progress of their children; finding in the pockets of some of them little slips of paper upon which were written rough notes of marketing done; bread, salt, etc. our children were making lists of the marketing they did for their mothers! other mothers told us that their children no longer ran through the streets, but stopped to read the signs over the shops. a four-year-old boy, educated in a private house by the same method, surprised us in the following way. the child's father was a deputy, and received many letters. he knew that his son had for two months been taught by means of exercises apt to facilitate the learning of reading and writing, but he had paid slight attention to it, and, indeed, put little faith in the method. one day, as he sat reading, with the boy playing near, a servant entered, and placed upon the table a large number of letters that had just arrived. the little boy turned his attention to these, and holding up each letter read aloud the address. to his father this seemed a veritable miracle. as to the average time required for learning to read and write, experience would seem to show that, starting from the moment in which the child writes, the passage from such an inferior stage of the graphic language to the superior state of reading averages a fortnight. _security_ in reading is, however, arrived at much more slowly than perfection in writing. in the greater majority of cases the child who writes beautifully, still reads rather poorly. not all children of the same age are at the same point in this matter of reading and writing. we not only do not force a child, but we do not even _invite_ him, or in any way attempt to coax him to do that which he does not wish to do. so it sometimes happens that certain children, _not having spontaneously presented themselves_ for these lessons, are left in peace, and do not know how to read or write. if the old-time method, which tyrannized over the will of the child and destroyed his spontaneity, does not believe in making a knowledge of written language _obligatory_ before the age of six, much less do we! i am not ready to decide, without a wider experience, whether the period when the spoken language is fully developed is, in every case, the proper time for beginning to develop the written language. in any case, almost all of the normal children treated with our method begin to write at four years, and at five know how to read and write, at least as well as children who have finished the first elementary. they could enter the second elementary a year in advance of the time when they are admitted to first. _games for the reading of phrases._ as soon as my friends saw that the children could read print, they made me gifts of beautifully illustrated books. looking through these books of simple fairy lore, i felt sure that the children would not be able to understand them. the teachers, feeling entirely satisfied as to the ability of their pupils, tried to show me i was wrong, having different children read to me, and saying that they read much more perfectly than the children who had finished the second elementary. i did not, however, allow myself to be deceived, and made two trials. i first had the teacher tell one of the stories to the children while i observed to what extent they were spontaneously interested in it. the attention of the children wandered after a few words. i had _forbidden_ the teacher to recall to order those who did not listen, and thus, little by little, a hum arose in the schoolroom, due to the fact that each child, not caring to listen had returned to his usual _occupation_. it was evident that the children, who seemed to read these books with such pleasure, _did not take pleasure in the sense_, but enjoyed the mechanical ability they had acquired, which consisted in translating the graphic signs into the sounds of a word they recognised. and, indeed, the children did not display the same _constancy_ in the reading of books which they showed toward the written slips, since in the books they met with so many unfamiliar words. my second test, was to have one of the children read the book to me. i did not interrupt with any of those explanatory remarks by means of which a teacher tries to help the child follow the thread of the story he is reading, saying for example: "stop a minute. do you understand? what have you read? you told me how the little boy went to drive in a big carriage, didn't you? pay attention to what the book says, etc." i gave the book to a little boy, sat down beside him in a friendly fashion, and when he had read i asked him simply and seriously as one would speak to a friend, "did you understand what you were reading?" he replied: "no." but the expression of his face seemed to ask an explanation of my demand. in fact, the idea that _through the reading of a series of words the complex thoughts of others might be communicated to us_, was to be for my children one of the beautiful conquests of the future, a new source of surprise and joy. the _book_ has recourse to _logical language_, not to the mechanism of the language. before the child can understand and enjoy a book, the _logical language_ must be established in him. between knowing how to read the _words_, and how to read the _sense_, of a book there lies the same distance that exists between knowing how to pronounce a word and how to make a speech. i, therefore, stopped the reading from books and waited. one day, during a free conversation period, _four_ children arose at the same time and with expressions of joy on their faces ran to the blackboard and wrote phrases upon the order of the following: "oh, how glad we are that our garden has begun to bloom." it was a great surprise for me, and i was deeply moved. these children had arrived spontaneously at the art of _composition_, just as they had spontaneously written their first word. the mechanical preparation was the same, and the phenomenon developed logically. logical articulate language had, when the time was ripe, provoked the corresponding explosion in written language. i understood that the time had come when we might proceed to _the reading of phrases_. i had recourse to the means used by the children; that is, i wrote upon the blackboard, "do you love me?" the children read it slowly aloud, were silent for a moment as if thinking, then cried out, "yes! yes!" i continued to write; "then make the silence, and watch me." they read this aloud, almost shouting, but had barely finished when a solemn silence began to establish itself, interrupted only by the sounds of the chairs as the children took positions in which they could sit quietly. thus began between me and them a communication by means of written language, a thing which interested the children intensely. little by little, they _discovered_ the great quality of writing--that it transmits thought. whenever i began to write, they fairly _trembled_ in their eagerness to understand what was my meaning without hearing me speak a word. indeed, _graphic_ language does not need spoken words. it can only be understood in all its greatness when it is completely isolated from spoken language. this introduction to reading was followed by the following game, which is greatly enjoyed by the children. upon a number of cards i wrote long sentences describing certain actions which the children were to carry out; for example, "close the window blinds; open the front door; then wait a moment, and arrange things as they were at first." "very politely ask eight of your companions to leave their chairs, and to form in double file in the centre of the room, then have them march forward and back on tiptoe, making no noise." "ask three of your oldest companions who sing nicely, if they will please come into the centre of the room. arrange them in a nice row, and sing with them a song that you have selected," etc., etc. as soon as i finished writing, the children seized the cards, and taking them to their seats read them spontaneously with great intensity of attention, and all _amid the most complete silence_. i asked then, "do you understand?" "yes! yes!" "then do what the card tells you," said i, and was delighted to see the children rapidly and accurately follow the chosen action. a great activity, a movement of a new sort, was born in the room. there were those who closed the blinds, and then reopened them; others who made their companions run on tiptoe, or sing; others wrote upon the blackboard, or took certain objects from the cupboards. surprise and curiosity produced a general silence, and the lesson developed amid the most intense interest. it seemed as if some magic force had gone forth from me stimulating an activity hitherto unknown. this magic was graphic language, the greatest conquest of civilisation. and how deeply the children understood the importance of it! when i went out, they gathered about me with expressions of gratitude and affection, saying, "thank you! thank you! thank you for the lesson!" this has become one of the favourite games: we first establish _profound silence_, then present a basket containing folded slips, upon each one of which is written a long phrase describing an action. all those children who know how to read may draw a slip, and read it _mentally_ once or twice until they are certain they understand it. they then give the slip back to the directress and set about carrying out the action. since many of these actions call for the help of the other children who do not know how to read, and since many of them call for the handling and use of the materials, a general activity develops amid marvellous order, while the silence is only interrupted by the sound of little feet running lightly, and by the voices of the children who sing. this is an unexpected revelation of the perfection of spontaneous discipline. experience has shown us that _composition_ must _precede logical_ reading, as writing preceded the reading of the word. it has also shown that reading, if it is to teach the child to _receive an idea_, should be _mental_ and not _vocal_. reading aloud implies the exercise of two mechanical forms of the language--articulate and graphic--and is, therefore, a complex task. who does not know that a grown person who is to read a paper in public prepares for this by making himself master of the content? reading aloud is one of the most difficult intellectual actions. the child, therefore, who _begins_ to read by interpreting thought _should read mentally_. the written language must isolate itself from the articulate, when it rises to the interpretation of logical thought. indeed, it represents the language which _transmits thought at a distance_, while the senses and the muscular mechanism are silent. it is a spiritualised language, which puts into communication all men who know how to read. education having reached such a point in the "children's houses," the entire elementary school must, as a logical consequence, be changed. how to reform the lower grades in the elementary schools, eventually carrying them on according to our methods, is a great question which cannot be discussed here. i can only say that the _first elementary_ would be completely done away with by our infant education, which includes it. the elementary classes in the future should begin with children such as ours who know how to read and write; children who know how to take care of themselves; how to dress and undress, and to wash themselves; children who are familiar with the rules of good conduct and courtesy, and who are thoroughly disciplined in the highest sense of the term, having developed, and become masters of themselves, through liberty; children who possess, besides a perfect mastery of the articulate language, the ability to read written language in an elementary way, and who begin to enter upon the conquest of logical language. these children pronounce clearly, write in a firm hand, and are full of grace in their movements. they are the earnest of a humanity grown in the cult of beauty--the infancy of an all-conquering humanity, since they are intelligent and patient observers of their environment, and possess in the form of intellectual liberty the power of spontaneous reasoning. for such children, we should found an elementary school worthy to receive them and to guide them further along the path of life and of civilisation, a school loyal to the same educational principles of respect for the freedom of the child and for his spontaneous manifestations--principles which shall form the personality of these little men. [illustration: example of writing done with pen, by a child five years. one-fourth reduction. translation: "we would like to wish a joyous easter to the civil engineer edoardo talamo and the princess maria. we will ask them to bring their pretty children here. leave it to me: i will write for all. april , ."] chapter xviii language in childhood graphic language, comprising dictation and reading, contains articulate language in its complete mechanism (auditory channels, central channels, motor channels), and, in the manner of development called forth by my method, is based essentially on articulate language. graphic language, therefore, may be considered from two points of view: (_a_) that of the conquest of a new language of eminent social importance which adds itself to the articulate language of natural man; and this is the cultural significance which is commonly given to graphic language, which is therefore taught in the schools without any consideration of its relation to spoken language, but solely with the intention of offering to the social being a necessary instrument in his relations with his fellows. (_b_) that of the relation between graphic and articulate language and, in this relation, of an eventual possibility of utilising the written language to perfect the spoken: a new consideration upon which i wish to insist and which gives to graphic language a _physiological importance_. moreover, as spoken language is at the same time a _natural function_ of man and an instrument which he utilises for social ends, so written language may be considered in itself, in its _formation_, as an organic _ensemble_ of new mechanisms which are established in the nervous system, and as an instrument which may be utilised for social ends. in short, it is a question of giving to written language not only a physiological importance, but also a _period of development_ independent of the high functions which it is destined to perform later. it seems to me that graphic language bristles with difficulties in its beginning, not only because it has heretofore been taught by irrational methods, but because we have tried to make it perform, as soon as it has been acquired, the high function of teaching _the written language_ which has been fixed by centuries of perfecting in a civilised people. think how irrational have been the methods we have used! we have analysed the graphic signs rather than the physiological acts necessary to produce the alphabetical signs; and this without considering that _any graphic sign_ is difficult to achieve, because the visual representation of the signs have no hereditary connection with the motor representations necessary for producing them; as, for example, the auditory representations of the word have with the motor mechanism of the articulate language. it is, therefore, always a difficult thing to provoke a stimulative motor action unless we have already established the movement before the visual representation of the sign is made. it is a difficult thing to arouse an activity that shall produce a motion unless that motion shall have been previously established by practice and by the power of habit. thus, for example, the analysis of writing into _little straight lines and curves_ has brought us to present to the child a sign without significance, which therefore does not interest him, and whose representation is incapable of determining a spontaneous motor impulse. the artificial act constituted, therefore, an _effort_ of the will which resulted for the child in rapid exhaustion exhibited in the form of boredom and suffering. to this effort was added the effort of constituting _synchronously_ the muscular associations co-ordinating the movements necessary to the holding and manipulating the instrument of writing. all sorts of _depressing_ feelings accompanied such efforts and conduced to the production of imperfect and erroneous signs which the teachers had to correct, discouraging the child still more with the constant criticism of the error and of the imperfection of the signs traced. thus, while the child was urged to make an effort, the teacher depressed rather than revived his psychical forces. although such a mistaken course was followed, the graphic language, so painfully learned, was nevertheless to be _immediately_ utilised for social ends; and, still imperfect and immature, was made to do service in the _syntactical construction of the language_, and in the ideal expression of the superior psychic centres. one must remember that in nature the spoken language is formed gradually; and it is already established in _words_ when the superior psychic centres use these words in what kussmaul calls _dictorium_, in the syntactical grammatical formation of language which is necessary to the expression of complex ideas; that is, in the language of the _logical mind_. in short the mechanism of language is a necessary antecedent of the higher psychic activities which are to _utilise it_. there are, therefore, two periods in the development of language: a lower one which prepares the nervous channel and the central mechanisms which are to put the sensory channels in relation with the motor channels; and a higher one determined by the higher psychic activities which are _exteriorized_ by means of the preformed mechanisms of language. [illustration] thus for example in the scheme which kussmaul gives on the mechanism of articulate language we must first of all distinguish a sort of cerebral diastaltic arc (representing the pure mechanism of the word), which is established in the first formation of the spoken language. let e be the ear, and t the motor organs of speech, taken as a whole and here represented by the tongue, a the auditory centre of speech, and m the motor centre. the channels ea and mt are peripheral channels, the former centripetal and the latter centrifugal, and the channel am is the inter-central channel of association. [illustration] the centre a in which reside the auditive images of words may be again subdivided into three, as in the following scheme, viz.: sound (so), syllables (sy), and words (w). that partial centres for sounds and syllables can really be formed, the pathology of language seems to establish, for in some forms of centro-sensory dysphasia, the patients can pronounce only sounds, or at most sounds and syllables. small children, too, are, at the beginning, particularly sensitive to simple sounds of language, with which indeed, and especially with _s_, their mothers caress them and attract their attention; while later the child is sensitive to syllables, with which also the mother caresses him, saying: "_ba, ba, punf, tuf!_" [illustration] finally it is the simple word, dissyllabic in most cases, which attracts the child's attention. but for the motor centres also the same thing may be repeated; the child utters at the beginning simple or double sounds, as for example _bl_, _gl_, _ch_, an expression which the mother greets with joy; then distinctly syllabic sounds begin to manifest themselves in the child: _ga_, _ba_; and, finally, the dissyllabic word, usually labial: _mama_. [illustration] we say that the spoken language begins with the child when the word pronounced by him signifies an _idea_; when for example, seeing his mother and recognising her he says "_mamma_;" and seeing a dog says, "_tettè_;" and wishing to eat says: "_pappa_." thus we consider _language begun_ when it is established in relation to perception; while the language itself is still, in its psycho-motor mechanism, perfectly rudimentary. that is, when above the diastaltic arc where the mechanical formation of the language is still unconscious, the recognition of the word takes place, that is, the word is perceived and associated with the object which it represents, language is considered to have begun. on this level, _later_, language continues the process of perfecting in proportion as the hearing perceives better the component sounds of the words and the psycho-motor channels become more permeable to articulation. this is the first stage of spoken language, which has its own beginning and its own development, leading, through the perceptions, to the _perfecting_ of the primordial mechanism of the language itself; and at this stage precisely is established what we call _articulate language_, which will later be the means which the adult will have at his disposal to express his own thoughts, and which the adult will have great difficulty in perfecting or correcting when it has once been established: in fact a high stage of culture sometimes accompanies an imperfect articulate language which prevents the æsthetic expression of one's thought. the development of articulate language takes place in the period between the age of two and the age of seven: the age of _perceptions_ in which the attention of the child is spontaneously turned towards external objects, and the memory is particularly tenacious. it is the age also of _motility_ in which all the psycho-motor channels are becoming permeable and the muscular mechanisms establish themselves. in this period of life by the mysterious bond between the auditory channel and the motor channel of the spoken language it would seem that the auditory perceptions have the direct power of _provoking_ the complicated movements of articulate speech which develop instinctively after such stimuli as if awaking from the slumber of heredity. it is well known that it is only at this age that it is possible to acquire all the characteristic modulations of a language which it would be vain to attempt to establish later. the mother tongue alone is well pronounced because it was established in the period of childhood; and the adult who learns to speak a new language must bring to it the imperfections characteristic of the foreigner's speech: only children who under the age of seven years learn several languages at the same time can receive and reproduce all the characteristic mannerisms of accent and pronunciation. thus also the _defects_ acquired in childhood such as dialectic defects or those established by bad habits, become indelible in the adult. what develops later, the _superior_ language, the _dictorium_, no longer has its origin in the mechanism of language but in the intellectual development which makes use of the mechanical language. as the articulate language develops by the exercise of its mechanism and is enriched by perception, the _dictorium_ develops with syntax and is enriched by _intellectual culture_. going back to the scheme of language we see that above the arc which defines the lower language, is established the _dictorium_, _d_,--from which now come the motor impulses of speech--which is established as _spoken language_ fit to manifest the ideation of the intelligent man; this language will be enriched little by little by intellectual culture and perfected by the grammatical study of syntax. [illustration] hitherto, as a result of a preconception, it has been believed that written language should enter only into the development of the _dictorium_, as the suitable means for the acquisition of culture and of permitting grammatical analysis and construction of the language. since "spoken words have wings" it has been admitted that intellectual culture could only proceed by the aid of a language which was stable, objective, and capable of being analysed, such as the graphic language. but why, when we acknowledge the graphic language as a precious, nay indispensable, instrument of intellectual education, for the reason that it _fixes the ideas_ of men and permits of their analysis and of their assimilation in books, where they remain indelibly written as an ineffaceable memory of words which are therefore always present and by which we can analyse the syntactical structure of the language, why shall we not acknowledge that it is _useful_ in the more humble task of _fixing_ the _words_ which represent perception and of analysing their component sounds? compelled by a pedagogical prejudice we are unable to separate the idea of a graphic language from that of a function which heretofore we have made it exclusively perform; and it seems to us that by teaching such a language to children still in the age of simple perceptions and of motility we are committing a serious psychological and pedagogical error. but let us rid ourselves of this prejudice and consider the graphic language in itself, reconstructing its psycho-physiological mechanism. it is far more simple than the psycho-physiological mechanism of the articulate language, and is far more directly accessible to education. _writing_ especially is surprisingly simple. for let us consider _dictated_ writing: we have a perfect parallel with spoken language since a _motor_ action must correspond with _heard_ speech. here there does not exist, to be sure, the mysterious hereditary relations between the heard speech and the articulate speech; but the movements of writing are far simpler than those necessary to the spoken word, and are performed by large muscles, all external, _upon which we can directly act_, rendering the motor channels permeable, and establishing psycho-muscular mechanisms. this indeed is what is done by my method, which _prepares the movements directly_; so that the psycho-motor impulse of the heard speech _finds the motor channels already established_, and is manifested in the act of writing, like an explosion. the real difficulty is in the _interpretation of the graphic signs_; but we must remember that we are in the _age of perceptions_, where the sensations and the memory as well as the primitive associations are involved precisely in the characteristic progress of natural development. moreover our children are already prepared by various exercises of the senses, and by methodical construction of ideas and mental associations to perceive the graphic signs; something like a patrimony of perceptive ideas offers material to the language in the process of development. the child who recognises a triangle and calls it a triangle can recognise a letter _s_ and denominate it by the sound _s_. this is obvious. let us not talk of premature teaching; ridding ourselves of prejudices, let us appeal to experience which shows that in reality children proceed without effort, nay rather with evident manifestations of pleasure to the recognition of graphic signs presented as objects. [illustration] and with this premise let us consider the relations between the mechanisms of the two languages. the child of three or four has already long begun his articulate language according to our scheme. but he finds himself in the period in which the _mechanism of articulate language is being perfected_; a period contemporary with that in which he is acquiring a content of language along with the patrimony of perception. the child has perhaps not heard perfectly in all their component parts the words which he pronounces, and, if he has heard them perfectly, they may have been pronounced badly, and consequently have left an erroneous auditory perception. it would be well that the child, by exercising the motor channels of articulate language should establish exactly the movements necessary to a perfect articulation, _before_ the age of easy motor adaptations is passed, and, by the fixation of erroneous mechanisms, the defects become incorrigible. to this end the _analysis of speech_ is necessary. as when we wish to perfect the language we first start children at composition and then pass to grammatical study; and when we wish to perfect the style we first teach to write grammatically and then come to the analysis of style--so when we wish to perfect the _speech_ it is first necessary that the speech _exist_, and then it is proper to proceed to its analysis. when, therefore, the child _speaks_, but before the completion of the development of speech which renders it fixed in mechanisms already established, the speech should be analysed with a view to perfecting it. now, as grammar and rhetoric are not possible with the spoken language but demand recourse to the written language which keeps ever before the eye the discourse to be analysed, so it is with speech. the analysis of the transient is impossible. the language must be materialised and made stable. hence the necessity of the written word or the word represented by graphic signs. in the third stage of my method for writing, that is, composition of speech, is included the _analysis of the word_ not only into signs, but into the component sounds; the signs representing its translation. the child, that is, _divides_ the heard word which he perceives integrally as a _word_, knowing also its meanings, into sounds and syllables. [illustration] let me call attention to the following diagram which represents the interrelation of the two mechanisms for writing and for articulate speech. [illustration: the peripheric channels are indicated by heavy lines; the central channels of association by dotted lines; and those referring to association in relation to the development of the heard speech by light lines. _e_ ear; _so_ auditory centre of sounds; _sy_ auditory centre of syllables; _w_ auditory centre of word; _m_ motor centre of the articulate speech; _t_ external organs of articulate speech (tongue); _h_ external organs of writing (hand); _mc_ motor centre of writing; _vc_ visual centre of graphic signs; _v_ organ of vision.] whereas in the development of spoken language the sound composing the word might be imperfectly perceived, here in the teaching of the graphic sign corresponding to the sound (which teaching consists in presenting to the child a sandpaper letter, naming it _distinctly_ and making the child _see_ it and _touch_ it), not only is the perception of the heard sound _clearly_ fixed--separately and clearly--but this perception is associated with two others: the centro-motor perception and the centro-visual perception of the written sign. the triangle _vc_, _mc_, _so_ represents the association of three sensations in relation with the analysis of speech. when the letter is presented to the child and he is made to touch and see it, while it is being named, the centripetal channels _eso_; _h_, _mc_, _so_; _v_, _vc_, _so_ are acting and when the child is made to name the letter, alone or accompanied by a vowel, the external stimulus acts in _v_ and passes through the channels _v_, _vc_, _so_, _m_, _t_; and _v_, _cv_, _so_, _sy_, _m_, _t_. when these channels of association have been established by presenting visual stimuli in the graphic sign, the corresponding movements of articulate language can be provoked and studied one by one in their defects; while, by maintaining the visual stimulus of the graphic sign which provokes articulation and accompanying it by the auditory stimulus of the corresponding _sound_ uttered by the teacher, their articulation can be perfected; this articulation is by innate conditions connected with the __heard speech; that is, in the course of the pronunciation provoked by the visual stimulus, and during the repetition of the relative movements of the organs of language, the auditory stimulus which is introduced into the exercise contributes to the perfecting of the pronunciation of the isolated or syllabic sounds composing the spoken word. when later the child writes under dictation, translating into signs the sounds of speech, he analyses the heard speech into its sounds, translating them into graphic movements through channels already rendered permeable by the corresponding muscular sensations. defects of language due to lack of education defects and imperfections of language are in part due to organic causes, consisting in malformations or in pathological alterations of the nervous system; but in part they are connected with functional defects acquired in the period of the formation of language and consist in an erratic pronunciation of the component sounds of the spoken word. such errors are acquired by the child who hears words imperfectly pronounced, or _hears bad speech_, the dialectic accent enters into this category; but there also enter vicious habits which make the natural defects of the articulate language of childhood persist in the child, or which provoke in him by imitation the defects of language peculiar to the persons who surrounded him in his childhood. the normal defects of child language are due to the fact that the complicated muscular agencies of the organs of articulate language do not yet function well and are consequently incapable of reproducing the _sound_ which was the sensory stimulus of a certain innate movement. the association of the movements necessary to the articulation of the spoken words is established little by little. the result is a language made of words with sounds which are imperfect and often lacking (whence incomplete words). such defects are grouped under the name _blæsitas_ and are especially due to the fact that the child is not yet capable of directing the movements of his tongue. they comprise chiefly: _sigmatism_ or imperfect pronunciation of _s_; _rhotacism_ or imperfect pronunciation of _r_; _lambdacism_ or imperfect pronunciation of _l_; _gammacism_ or imperfect pronunciation, of _g_; _iotacism_, defective pronunciation of the gutturals; _mogilalia_, imperfect pronunciation of the labials, and according to some authors, as preyer, mogilalia is made to include also the suppression of the first sound of a word. some defects of pronunciation which concern the utterance of the vowel sound as well as that of the consonant are due to the fact that the child _reproduces perfectly_ sounds imperfectly heard. in the first case, then, it is a matter of functional insufficiencies of the peripheral motor organ and hence of the nervous channels, and the cause lies in the individual; whereas in the second case the error is caused by the auditory stimulus and the cause lies outside. these defects often persist, however attenuated, in the boy and the adult: and produce finally an erroneous language to which will later be added in writing orthographical errors, such for example as dialectic orthographical errors. if one considers the charm of human speech one is bound to acknowledge the inferiority of one who does not possess a correct spoken language; and an æsthetic conception in education cannot be imagined unless special care be devoted to perfecting articulate language. although the greeks had transmitted to rome the art of educating in language, this practice was not resumed by humanism which cared more for the æsthetics of the environment and the revival of artistic works than for the perfecting of the man. to-day we are just beginning to introduce the practice of correcting by pedagogical methods the serious defects of language, such as stammering; but the idea of _linguistic gymnastics_ tending to its perfection has not yet penetrated into our schools as a _universal method_, and as a detail of the great work of the æsthetic perfecting of man. some teachers of deaf mutes and intelligent devotees of orthophony are trying nowadays with small practical success to introduce into the elementary schools the correction of the various forms of _blæsitas_, as a result of statistical studies which have demonstrated the wide diffusion of such defects among the pupils. the exercises consist essentially in _silence_ cures which procure calm and repose for the organs of language, and in patient _repetition_ of the _separate_ vowel and consonant _sounds_; to these exercises is added also respiratory gymnastics. this is not the place to describe in detail the methods of these exercises which are long and patient and quite out of harmony with the teachings of the school. but in my methods are to be found all exercises for the corrections of language: (_a_) _exercises of silence_, which prepare the nervous channels of language to receive new stimuli perfectly; (_b_) _lessons_ which consist first of the distinct pronunciation by the teacher of _few words_ (especially of _nouns_ which must be associated with a concrete idea); by this means clear and perfect _auditory stimuli_ of language are started, stimuli which are _repeated_ by the teacher when the child has conceived the idea of the object represented by the word (recognition of the object); finally of the provocation of articulate language on the part of the child who must repeat _that word alone_ aloud, pronouncing its separate sounds; (_c_) _exercises in graphic language_, which analyse the sounds of speech and cause them to be repeated separately in several ways: that is, when the child learns the separate letters of the alphabet and when he composes or writes words, repeating their sounds which he translates separately into composed or written speech; (_d_) _gymnastic exercises_, which comprise, as we have seen, both _respiratory exercises_ and those of _articulation_. i believe that in the schools of the future the conception will disappear which is beginning to-day of "_correcting in the elementary schools_" the defects of language; and will be replaced by the more rational one of _avoiding them by caring for the development of language_ in the "children's houses"; that is, in the very age in which language is being established in the child. chapter xix teaching of numeration; introduction to arithmetic children of three years already know how to count as far as two or three when they enter our schools. they therefore _very easily_ learn numeration, which consists _in counting objects_. a dozen different ways may serve toward this end, and daily life presents many opportunities; when the mother says, for instance, "there are two buttons missing from your apron," or "we need three more plates at table." one of the first means used by me, is that of counting with money. i obtain _new_ money, and if it were possible i should have good reproductions made in cardboard. i have seen such money used in a school for deficients in london. the _making of change_ is a form of numeration so attractive as to hold the attention of the child. i present the one, two, and four centime pieces and the children, in this way learn to count to _ten_. no form of instruction is more _practical_ than that tending to make children familiar with the coins in common use, and no exercise is more useful than that of making change. it is so closely related to daily life that it interests all children intensely. having taught numeration in this empiric mode, i pass to more methodical exercises, having as didactic material one of the sets of blocks already used in the education of the senses; namely, the series of ten rods heretofore used for the teaching of length. the shortest of these rods corresponds to a decimetre, the longest to a metre, while the intervening rods are divided into sections a decimetre in length. the sections are painted alternately red and blue. [illustration] some day, when a child has arranged the rods, placing them in order of length, we have him count the red and blue signs, beginning with the smallest piece; that is, _one_; one, two; one, two, three, etc., always going back to one in the counting of each rod, and starting from the side a. we then have him name the single rods from the shortest to the longest, according to the total number of the sections which each contains, touching the rods at the sides b, on which side the stair ascends. this results in the same numeration as when we counted the longest rod-- , , , , , , , , , . wishing to know the number of rods, we count them from the side a and the same numeration results; , , , , , , , , , . this correspondence of the three sides of the triangle causes the child to verify his knowledge and as the exercise interests him he repeats it many times. we now unite to the exercises in _numeration_ the earlier, sensory exercises in which the child recognised the long and short rods. having mixed the rods upon a carpet, the directress selects one, and showing it to the child, has him count the sections; for example, . she then asks him to give her the one next in length. he selects it _by his eye_, and the directress has him _verify_ his choice by _placing the two pieces side by side and by counting their sections_. such exercises may be repeated in great variety and through them the child learns to assign a _particular name to each one of the pieces in the long stair_. we may now call them piece number one; piece number two, etc., and finally, for brevity, may speak of them in the lessons as one, two, three, etc. the numbers as represented by the graphic signs at this point, if the child already knows how to write, we may present the figures cut in sandpaper and mounted upon cards. in presenting these, the method is the same used in teaching the letters. "this is one." "this is two." "give me one." "give me two." "what _number_ is this?" the child traces the number with his finger as he did the letters. _exercises with numbers._ association of the graphic sign with the quantity. i have designed two trays each divided into five little compartments. at the back of each compartment may be placed a card bearing a figure. the figures in the first tray should be , , , , , and in the second, , , , , . the exercise is obvious; it consists in placing within the compartments a number of objects corresponding to the figure indicated upon the card at the back of the compartment. we give the children various objects in order to vary the lesson, but chiefly make use of large wooden pegs so shaped that they will not roll off the desk. we place a number of these before the child whose part is to arrange them in their places, one peg corresponding to the card marked one, etc. when he has finished he takes his tray to the directress that she may verify his work. _the lesson on zero._ we wait until the child, pointing to the compartment containing the card marked zero, asks, "and what must i put in here?" we then reply, "nothing; zero is nothing." but often this is not enough. it is necessary to make the child _feel_ what we mean by _nothing_. to this end we make use of little games which vastly entertain the children. i stand among them, and turning to one of them who has already used this material, i say, "come, dear, come to me _zero_ times." the child almost always comes to me, and then runs back to his place. "but, my boy, you came _one_ time, and i told you to come _zero_ times." then he begins to wonder. "but what must i do, then?" "nothing; zero is nothing." "but how shall i do nothing?" "don't do anything. you must sit still. you must not come at all, not any times. zero times. no times at all." i repeat these exercises until the children understand, and they are then, immensely amused at remaining quiet when i call to them to come to me zero times, or to throw me zero kisses. they themselves often cry out, "zero is nothing! zero is nothing!" exercises for the memory of numbers when the children recognise the written figure, and when this figure signifies to them the numerical value, i give them the following exercise: i cut the figures from old calendars and mount them upon slips of paper which are then folded and dropped into a box. the children draw out the slips, carry them still folded, to their seats, where they look at them and refold them, _conserving the secret_. then, one by one, or in groups, these children (who are naturally the oldest ones in the class) go to the large table of the directress where groups of various small objects have been placed. each one selects _the quantity_ of objects corresponding to the number he has drawn. the number, meanwhile, has been left _at the child's place_, a slip of paper mysteriously folded. the child, therefore, must _remember_ his number not only during the movements which he makes in coming and going, but while he collects his pieces, counting them one by one. the directress may here make interesting individual observations upon the number memory. when the child has gathered up his objects he arranges them upon his own table, in columns of two, and if the number is uneven, he places the odd piece at the bottom and between the last two objects. the arrangement of the pieces is therefore as follows:-- o o o o o o o o o o x xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx x xx xx xx xx xx xx xx x xx xx xx xx xx x xx xx xx x xx the crosses represent the objects, while the circle stands for the folded slip containing the figure. having arranged his objects, the child awaits the verification. the directress comes, opens the slip, reads the number, and counts the pieces. when we first played this game it often happened that the children took _more objects_ than were called for upon the card, and this was not always because they did not remember the number, but arose from a mania for the having the greatest number of objects. a little of that instinctive greediness, which is common to primitive and uncultured man. the directress seeks to explain to the children that it is useless to have all those things upon the desk, and that the point of the game lies in taking the exact number of objects called for. little by little they enter into this idea, but not so easily as one might suppose. it is a real effort of self-denial which holds the child within the set limit, and makes him take, for example, only two of the objects placed at his disposal, while he sees others taking more. i therefore consider this game more an exercise of will power than of numeration. the child who has the _zero_, should not move from his place when he sees all his companions rising and taking freely of the objects which are inaccessible to him. many times zero falls to the lot of a child who knows how to count perfectly, and who would experience great pleasure in accumulating and arranging a fine group of objects in the proper order upon his table, and in awaiting with security the teacher's verification. it is most interesting to study the expressions upon the faces of those who possess zero. the individual differences which result are almost a revelation of the "character" of each one. some remain impassive, assuming a bold front in order to hide the pain of the disappointment; others show this disappointment by involuntary gestures. still others cannot hide the smile which is called forth by the singular situation in which they find themselves, and which will make their friends curious. there are little ones who follow every movement of their companions with a look of desire, almost of envy, while others show instant acceptance of the situation. no less interesting are the expressions with which they confess to the holding of the zero, when asked during the verification, "and you, you haven't taken anything?" "i have zero." "it is zero." these are the usual words, but the expressive face, the tone of the voice, show widely varying sentiments. rare, indeed, are those who seem to give with pleasure the explanation of an extraordinary fact. the greater number either look unhappy or merely resigned. we therefore give lessons upon the meaning of the game, saying, "it is hard to keep the zero secret. fold the paper tightly and don't let it slip away. it is the most difficult of all." indeed, after awhile, the very difficulty of remaining quiet appeals to the children, and when they open the slip marked zero it can be seen that they are content to keep the secret. addition and subtraction from one to twenty: multiplication and division the didactic material which we use for the teaching of the first arithmetical operations is the same already used for numeration; that is, the rods graduated as to length which, arranged on the scale of the metre, contain the first idea of the decimal system. the rods, as i have said, have come to be called by the numbers which they represent; one, two, three, etc. they are arranged in order of length, which is also in order of numeration. the first exercise consists in trying to put the shorter pieces together in such a way as to form tens. the most simple way of doing this is to take successively the shortest rods, from one up, and place them at the end of the corresponding long rods from nine down. this may be accompanied by the commands, "take one and add it to nine; take two and add it to eight; take three and add it to seven; take four and add it to six." in this way we make four rods equal to ten. there remains the five, but, turning this upon its head (in the long sense), it passes from one end of the ten to the other, and thus makes clear the fact that two times five makes ten. these exercises are repeated and little by little the child is taught the more technical language; nine plus one equals ten, eight plus two equals ten, seven plus three equals ten, six plus four equals ten, and for the five, which remains, two times five equals ten. at last, if he can write, we teach the signs _plus_ and _equals_ and _times_. then this is what we see in the neat note-books of our little ones: + = + = × = + = + = when all this is well learned and has been put upon the paper with great pleasure by the children, we call their attention to the work which is done when the pieces grouped together to form tens are taken apart, and put back in their original positions. from the ten last formed we take away four and six remains; from the next we take away three and seven remains; from the next, two and eight remains; from the last, we take away one and nine remains. speaking of this properly we say, ten less four equals six; ten less three equals seven; ten less two equals eight; ten less one equals nine. in regard to the remaining five, it is the half of ten, and by cutting the long rod in two, that is dividing ten by two, we would have five; ten divided by two equals five. the written record of all this reads: - = - = ÷ = - = - = once the children have mastered this exercise they multiply it spontaneously. can we make three in two ways? we place the one after the two and then write, in order that we may remember what we have done, + = . can we make two rods equal to number four? + = , and - = ; - = . rod number two in its relation to rod number four is treated as was five in relation to ten; that is, we turn it over and show that it is contained in four exactly two times: ÷ = ; × = . another problem: let us see with how many rods we can play this same game. we can do it with three and six; and with four and eight; that is, × = × = × = × = ÷ = ÷ = ÷ = ÷ = at this point we find that the cubes with which we played the number memory games are of help: x x|x xx x|x xx x|x xx x|x xx x|x | x x|x xx x|x xx x|x xx x|x | | x x|x xx x|x xx x|x | | | x x|x xx x|x | | | | x x|x from this arrangement, one sees at once which are the numbers which can be divided by two--all those which have not an odd cube at the bottom. these are the even numbers, because they can be arranged in pairs, two by two; and the division by two is easy, all that is necessary being to separate the two lines of twos that stand one under the other. counting the cubes of each file we have the quotient. to recompose the primitive number we need only reassemble the two files thus × = . all this is not difficult for children of five years. the repetition soon becomes monotonous, but the exercises may be most easily changed, taking again the set of long rods, and instead of placing rod number one after nine, place it after ten. in the same way, place two after nine, and three after eight. in this way we make rods of a greater length than ten; lengths which we must learn to name eleven, twelve, thirteen, etc., as far as twenty. the little cubes, too, may be used to fix these higher numbers. having learned the operations through ten, we proceed with no difficulty to twenty. the one difficulty lies in the _decimal numbers_ which require certain lessons. lessons on decimals: arithmetical calculations beyond ten the necessary didactic material consists of a number of square cards upon which the figure ten is printed in large type, and of other rectangular cards, half the size of the square, and containing the single numbers from one to nine. we place the numbers in a line; , , , , , , , , , . then, having no more numbers, we must begin over again and take the again. this is like that section in the set of rods which, in rod number , extends beyond nine. counting along _the stair_ as far as nine, there remains this one section which, as there are no more numbers, we again designate as ; but this is a higher than the first, and to distinguish it from the first we put near it a zero, a sign which means nothing. here then is . covering the zero with the separate rectangular number cards in the order of their succession we see formed: , , , , , , , , . these numbers are composed by adding to rod number , first rod number , then , then , etc., until we finally add rod number to rod number , thus obtaining a very long rod, which, when its alternating red and blue sections are counted, gives us nineteen. the directress may then show to the child the cards, giving the number , and he may place rod after rod . she then takes away the card bearing , and places over the zero the card bearing the figure , whereupon the child takes away rod and replaces it with rod , thus making . each of these acts may be recorded thus: + = ; + = , etc. we proceed in the same way to subtraction. when the number itself begins to have a clear meaning to the child, the combinations are made upon one long card, arranging the rectangular cards bearing the nine figures upon the two columns of numbers shown in the figures a and b. a b +----+ +----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----+ +----+ upon the card a we superimpose upon the zero of the second , the rectangular card bearing the : and under this the one bearing two, etc. thus while the one of the ten remains the same the numbers to the right proceed from zero to nine, thus: in card b the applications are more complex. the cards are superimposed in numerical progression by tens. +----+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +----+ almost all our children count to , a number which was given to them in response to the curiosity they showed in regard to learning it. i do not believe that this phase of the teaching needs further illustrations. each teacher may multiply the practical exercises in the arithmetical operations, using simple objects which the children can readily handle and divide. chapter xx sequence of exercises in the practical application of the method it is helpful to know the sequence, or the various series, of exercises which must be presented to the child successively. in the first edition of my book there was clearly indicated a progression for each exercise; but in the "children's houses" we began contemporaneously with the most varied exercises; and it develops that there exist _grades_ in the presentation of the material in its entirety. these grades have, since the first publication of the book, become clearly defined through experience in the "children's houses." sequence and grades in the presentation of material and in the exercises _first grade_ as soon as the child comes to the school he may be given the following exercises: moving the seats, in silence (practical life). lacing, buttoning, hooking, etc. the cylinders (sense exercises). among these the most useful exercise is that of the cylinders (solid insets). the child here begins to _fix his attention_. he makes his first comparison, his first selection, in which he exercises judgment. therefore he exercises his intelligence. among these exercises with the solid insets, there exists the following progression from easy to difficult: (a) the cylinders in which the pieces are of the same height and of decreasing diameter. (b) the cylinders decreasing in all dimensions. (c) those decreasing only in height. _second grade_ _exercises of practical life._ to rise and be seated in silence. to walk on the line. _sense exercises._ material dealing with dimensions. the long stair. the prisms, or big stair. the cubes. here the child makes exercises in the recognition of dimensions as he did in the cylinders but under a very different aspect. the objects are much larger. the differences much more evident than they were in the preceding exercises, but here, _only the eye of the child_ recognises the differences and controls the errors. in the preceding exercises, the errors were mechanically revealed to the child by the didactic material itself. the impossibility of placing the objects in order in the block in any other than their respective spaces gives this control. finally, while in the preceding exercises the child makes much more simple movements (being seated he places little objects in order with his hands), in these new exercises he accomplishes movements which are decidedly more complex and difficult and makes small muscular efforts. he does this by moving from the table to the carpet, rises, kneels, carries heavy objects. we notice that the child continues to be confused between the two last pieces in the growing scale, being for a long time unconscious of such an error after he has learned to put the other pieces in correct order. indeed the difference between these pieces being throughout the varying dimensions the same for all, the relative difference diminishes with the increasing size of the pieces themselves. for example, the little cube which has a base of centimetres is double the size, as to base, of the smallest cube which has a base of centimetre, while the largest cube having a base of centimetres, differs by barely / from the base of the cube next it in the series (the one of centimetres base). thus it would seem that, theoretically, in such exercises we should begin with the smallest piece. we can, indeed, do this with the material through which size and length are taught. but we cannot do so with the cubes, which must be arranged as a little "tower." this column of blocks must always have as its base the largest cube. the children, attracted above all by the tower, begin very early to play with it. thus we often see very little children playing with the tower, happy in believing that they have constructed it, when they have inadvertently used the next to the largest cube as the base. but when the child, repeating the exercise, _corrects himself of his own accord_, in a permanent fashion, we may be certain that _his eye_ has become trained to perceive even the slightest differences between the pieces. in the three systems of blocks through which dimensions are taught that of length has pieces differing from each other by centimetres, while in the other two sets, the pieces differ only centimetre. theoretically it would seem that the long rods _should be the first to attract the attention_ and to exclude errors. this, however, is not the case. the children are attracted by this set of blocks, but they commit the greatest number of errors in using it, and only after they have for a long time eliminated every error in constructing the other two sets, do they succeed in arranging the long stair perfectly. this may then be considered as the most difficult among the series through which dimensions are taught. arrived at this point in his education, the child is capable of fixing his attention, with interest, upon the thermic and tactile stimuli. the progression in the sense development is not, therefore, in actual practice identical with the theoretical progression which psychometry indicates in the study of its subjects. nor does it follow the progression which physiology and anatomy indicate in the description of the relations of the sense organs. in fact, the tactile sense is the _primitive_ sense; the organ of touch is the most _simple_ and the most widely diffused. but it is easy to explain how the most simple sensations, the least complex organs, are not the first through which to attract the _attention_ in a didactic presentation of sense stimuli. therefore, when the _education of the attention has been begun_, we may present to the child the rough and smooth surfaces (following certain thermic exercises described elsewhere in the book). these exercises, if presented at the proper time, _interest_ the children _immensely_. it is to be remembered that these games are of the _greatest importance_ in the method, because upon them, in union with the exercises for the movement of the hand, which we introduce later, we base the acquisition of writing. together with the two series of sense exercises described above, we may begin what we call the "pairing of the colours," that is, the recognition of the identity of two colours. this is the first exercise of the chromatic sense. here, also, it is only the _eye_ of the child that intervenes in the judgment, as it was with the exercises in dimension. this first colour exercise is easy, but the child must already have acquired a certain grade of education of the attention through preceding exercises, if he is to repeat this one with interest. meanwhile, the child has heard music; has walked on the line, while the directress played a rhythmic march. little by little he has learned to accompany the music spontaneously with certain movements. this of course necessitates the repetition of the same music. (to acquire the sense of rhythm _the repetition of the same exercise is necessary_, as in all forms of education dealing with spontaneous activity.) the exercises in silence are also repeated. _third grade_ _exercises of practical life._ the children wash themselves, dress and undress themselves, dust the tables, learn to handle various objects, etc. _sense exercises._ we now introduce the child to the recognition of gradations of stimuli (tactile gradations, chromatic, etc.), allowing him to exercise himself freely. we begin to present the stimuli for the sense of hearing (sounds, noises), and also the baric stimuli (the little tablets differing in weight). contemporaneously with the gradations we may present the _plane geometric insets_. here begins the education of the movement of the hand in following the contours of the insets, an exercise which, together with the other and contemporaneous one of the recognition of tactile stimuli in gradation, _prepares for writing_. the series of cards bearing the geometric forms, we give after the child recognises perfectly the same forms in the wooden insets. these cards serve to prepare for the _abstract signs_ of which writing consists. the child learns to recognise a delineated form, and after all the preceding exercises have formed within him an ordered and intelligent personality, they may be considered the bridge by which he passes from the sense exercises to writing, from the _preparation_, to the actual _entrance into instruction_. _fourth grade_ _exercises of practical life._ the children set and clear the table for luncheon. they learn to put a room in order. they are now taught the most minute care of their persons in the making of the toilet. (how to brush their teeth, to clean their nails, etc.) they have learned, through the rhythmic exercises on the line, to walk with perfect freedom and balance. they know how to control and direct their own movements (how to make the silence,--how to move various objects without dropping or breaking them and without making a noise). _sense exercises._ in this stage we repeat all the sense exercises. in addition we introduce the recognition of musical notes by the help of the series of duplicate bells. _exercises related to writing_ / _design_ / the child passes to the _plane geometric insets in metal_. he has already co-ordinated the movements necessary to follow the contours. here he no longer _follows them with his finger_, but with a pencil, leaving the double sign upon a sheet of paper. then he fills in the figures with coloured pencils, holding the pencil as he will later hold the pen in writing. contemporaneously the child is taught to _recognise_ and _touch_ some of the letters of the alphabet made in sandpaper. _exercises in arithmetic._ at this point, repeating the sense exercises, we present the long stair with a different aim from that with which it has been used up to the present time. we have the child _count_ the different pieces, according to the blue and red sections, beginning with the rod consisting of one section and continuing through that composed of ten sections. we continue such exercises and give other more complicated ones. in design we pass from the outlines of the geometric insets to such outlined figures as the practice of four years has established and which will be published as models in design. these have an educational importance, and represent in their content and in their gradations one of the most carefully studied details of the method. they serve as a means for the continuation of the sense education and help the child to observe his surroundings. they thus add to his intellectual refinement, and, as regards writing, they prepare for the high and low strokes. after such practice it will be _easy for the child to make high or low letters_, and this will do away with the _ruled note-books_ such as are used in italy in the various elementary classes. in the _acquiring_ of the use of _written language_ we go as far as the knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, and of composition with the movable alphabet. in arithmetic, as far as a knowledge of the figures. the child places the corresponding figures beside the number of blue and red sections on each rod of the long stair. the children now take the exercise with the wooden pegs. also the games which consist in placing under the figures, on the table, a corresponding number of coloured counters. these are arranged in columns of twos, thus making the question of odd and even numbers clear. (this arrangement is taken from séguin.) _fifth grade_ we continue the preceding exercises. we begin more complicated rhythmic exercises. in design we begin: (_a_) the use of water colours. (_b_) free drawing from nature (flowers, etc.). composition of words and phrases with the movable alphabet. (_a_) spontaneous writing of words and phrases. (_b_) reading from slips prepared by the directress. we continue the arithmetical operations which we began with the long stair. the children at this stage present most interesting differences of development. they fairly _run_ toward instruction, and order their _intellectual growth_ in a way that is remarkable. this joyous growth is what we so rejoice in, as we watch in these children, humanity, growing in the spirit according to its own deep laws. and only he who experiments can say how great may be the harvest from the sowing of such seed. chapter xxi general review of discipline the accumulated experience we have had since the publication of the italian version has repeatedly proved to us that in our classes of little children, numbering forty and even fifty, the discipline is much better than in ordinary schools. for this reason i have thought that an analysis of the discipline obtained by our method--which is based upon liberty,--would interest my american readers. whoever visits a well kept school (such as, for instance, the one in rome directed by my pupil anna maccheroni) is struck by the discipline of the children. there are forty little beings--from three to seven years old, each one intent on his own work; one is going through one of the exercises for the senses, one is doing an arithmetical exercise; one is handling the letters, one is drawing, one is fastening and unfastening the pieces of cloth on one of our little wooden frames, still another is dusting. some are seated at the tables, some on rugs on the floor. there are muffled sounds of objects lightly moved about, of children tiptoeing. once in a while comes a cry of joy only partly repressed, "teacher! teacher!" an eager call, "look! see what i've done." but as a rule, there is entire absorption in the work in hand. the teacher moves quietly about, goes to any child who calls her, supervising operations in such a way that anyone who needs her finds her at his elbow, and whoever does not need her is not reminded of her existence. sometimes, hours go by without a word. they seem "little men," as they were called by some visitors to the "children's house"; or, as another suggested, "judges in deliberation." in the midst of such intense interest in work it never happens that quarrels arise over the possession of an object. if one accomplishes something especially fine, his achievement is a source of admiration and joy to others: no heart suffers from another's wealth, but the triumph of one is a delight to all. very often he finds ready imitators. they all seem happy and satisfied to do what they can, without feeling jealous of the deeds of others. the little fellow of three works peaceably beside the boy of seven, just as he is satisfied with his own height and does not envy the older boy's stature. everything is growing in the most profound peace. if the teacher wishes the whole assembly to do something, for instance, leave the work which interests them so much, all she needs to do is to speak a word in a low tone, or make a gesture, and they are all attention, they look toward her with eagerness, anxious to know how to obey. many visitors have seen the teacher write orders on the blackboard, which were obeyed joyously by the children. not only the teachers, but anyone who asks the pupils to do something is astonished to see them obey in the minutest detail and with obliging cheerfulness. often a visitor wishes to hear how a child, now painting, can sing. the child leaves his painting to be obliging, but the instant his courteous action is completed, he returns to his interrupted work. sometimes the smaller children finish their work before they obey. a very surprising result of this discipline came to our notice during the examinations of the teachers who had followed my course of lectures. these examinations were practical, and, accordingly, groups of children were put at the disposition of the teachers being examined, who, according to the subject drawn by lot, took the children through a given exercise. while the children were waiting their turn, they were allowed to do just as they pleased. _they worked incessantly_, and returned to their undertakings as soon as the interruption caused by the examination was over. every once in a while, one of them came to show us a drawing made during the interval. miss george of chicago was present many times when this happened, and madame pujols, who founded the first "children's house" in paris, was astonished at the patience, the perseverance, and the inexhaustible amiability of the children. one might think that such children had been severely repressed were it not for their lack of timidity, for their bright eyes, for their happy, free aspect, for the cordiality of their invitations to look at their work, for the way in which they take visitors about and explain matters to them. these things make us feel that we are in the presence of the masters of the house; and the fervour with which they throw their arms around the teacher's knees, with which they pull her down to kiss her face, shows that their little hearts are free to expand as they will. anyone who has watched them setting the table must have passed from one surprise to another. little four-year-old waiters take the knives and forks and spoons and distribute them to the different places; they carry trays holding as many as five water-glasses, and finally they go from table to table, carrying big tureens full of hot soup. not a mistake is made, not a glass is broken, not a drop of soup is spilled. all during the meal unobtrusive little waiters watch the table assiduously; not a child empties his soup-plate without being offered more; if he is ready for the next course a waiter briskly carries off his soup-plate. not a child is forced to ask for more soup, or to announce that he has finished. [illustration: montessori children at dinner the tables are set in the grounds of the school of the franciscan nuns, in rome.] [illustration: school at tarrytown, n. y. the two girls at the left are constructing the big stair and the tower. the boy in the center has constructed the long stair, and is placing the figures beside the corresponding rods. the child to the right is tracing sandpaper letters.] remembering the usual condition of four-year-old children, who cry, who break whatever they touch, who need to be waited on, everyone is deeply moved by the sight i have just described, which evidently results from the development of energies latent in the depths of the human soul. i have often seen the spectators at this banquet of little ones, moved to tears. but such discipline could never be obtained by commands, by sermonizings, in short, through any of the disciplinary devices universally known. not only were the actions of those children set in an orderly condition, but their very lives were deepened and enlarged. in fact, such discipline is on the same plane with school-exercises extraordinary for the age of the children; and it certainly does not depend upon the teacher but upon a sort of miracle, occurring in the inner life of each child. if we try to think of parallels in the life of adults, we are reminded of the phenomenon of conversion, of the superhuman heightening of the strength of martyrs and apostles, of the constancy of missionaries, of the obedience of monks. nothing else in the world, except such things, is on a spiritual height equal to the discipline of the "children's houses." to obtain such discipline it is quite useless to count on reprimands or spoken exhortations. such means might perhaps at the beginning have an appearance of efficacy: but very soon, the instant that real discipline appears, all of this falls miserably to the earth, an illusion confronted with reality--"night gives way to day." the first dawning of real discipline comes through work. at a given moment it happens that a child becomes keenly interested in a piece of work, showing it by the expression of his face, by his intense attention, by his perseverance in the same exercise. that child has set foot upon the road leading to discipline. whatever be his undertaking--an exercise for the senses, an exercise in buttoning up or lacing together, or washing dishes--it is all one and the same. on our side, we can have some influence upon the permanence of this phenomenon, by means of repeated "lessons of silence." the perfect immobility, the attention alert to catch the sound of the names whispered from a distance, then the carefully co-ordinated movements executed so as not to strike against chair or table, so as barely to touch the floor with the feet--all this is a most efficacious preparation for the task of setting in order the whole personality, the motor forces and the psychical. once the habit of work is formed, we must supervise it with scrupulous accuracy, graduating the exercises as experience has taught us. in our effort to establish discipline, we must rigorously apply the principles of the method. it is not to be obtained by words; no man learns self-discipline "through hearing another man speak." the phenomenon of discipline needs as preparation a series of complete actions, such as are presupposed in the genuine application of a really educative method. discipline is reached always by indirect means. the end is obtained, not by attacking the mistake and fighting it, but by developing activity in spontaneous work. this work cannot be arbitrarily offered, and it is precisely here that our method enters; it must be work which the human being instinctively desires to do, work towards which the latent tendencies of life naturally turn, or towards which the individual step by step ascends. such is the work which sets the personality in order and opens wide before it infinite possibilities of growth. take, for instance, the lack of control shown by a baby; it is fundamentally a lack of muscular discipline. the child is in a constant state of disorderly movement: he throws himself down, he makes queer gestures, he cries. what underlies all this is a latent tendency to seek that co-ordination of movement which will be established later. the baby is a man not yet sure of the movements of the various muscles of the body; not yet master of the organs of speech. he will eventually establish these various movements, but for the present he is abandoned to a period of experimentation full of mistakes, and of fatiguing efforts towards a desirable end latent in his instinct, but not clear in his consciousness. to say to the baby, "stand still as i do," brings no light into his darkness; commands cannot aid in the process of bringing order into the complex psycho-muscular system of an individual in process of evolution. we are confused at this point by the example of the adult who through a wicked impulse _prefers_ disorder, and who may (granted that he can) obey a sharp admonishment which turns his will in another direction, towards that order which he recognises and which it is within his capacity to achieve. in the case of the little child it is a question of aiding the natural evolution of voluntary action. hence it is necessary to teach all the co-ordinated movements, analysing them as much as possible and developing them bit by bit. thus, for instance, it is necessary to teach the child the various degrees of immobility leading to silence; the movements connected with rising from a chair and sitting down, with walking, with tiptoeing, with following a line drawn on the floor keeping an upright equilibrium. the child is taught to move objects about, to set them down more or less carefully, and finally the complex movements connected with dressing and undressing himself (analysed on the lacing and buttoning frames at school), and for even each of these exercises, the different parts of the movement must be analysed. perfect immobility and the successive perfectioning of action, is what takes the place of the customary command, "be quiet! be still!" it is not astonishing but very natural that the child by means of such exercises should acquire self-discipline, so far as regards the lack of muscular discipline natural to his age. in short, he responds to nature because he is in action; but these actions being directed towards an end, have no longer the appearance of disorder but of work. this is discipline which represents an end to be attained by means of a number of conquests. the child disciplined in this way, is no longer the child he was at first, who knows how to _be_ good passively; but he is an individual who has made himself better, who has overcome the usual limits of his age, who has made a great step forward, who has conquered his future in his present. he has therefore enlarged his dominion. he will not need to have someone always at hand, to tell him vainly (confusing two opposing conceptions), "be quiet! be good!" the goodness he has conquered cannot be summed up by inertia: his goodness is now all made up of action. as a matter of fact, good people are those who advance towards the good--that good which is made up of their own self-development and of external acts of order and usefulness. in our efforts with the child, external acts are the means which stimulate internal development, and they again appear as its manifestation, the two elements being inextricably intertwined. work develops the child spiritually; but the child with a fuller spiritual development works better, and his improved work delights him,--hence he continues to develop spiritually. discipline is, therefore, not a fact but a path, a path in following which the child grasps the abstract conception of goodness with an exactitude which is fairly scientific. but beyond everything else he savours the supreme delights of that spiritual _order_ which is attained indirectly through conquests directed towards determinate ends. in that long preparation, the child experiences joys, spiritual awakenings and pleasures which form his inner treasure-house--the treasure-house in which he is steadily storing up the sweetness and strength which will be the sources of righteousness. in short, the child has not only learned to move about and to perform useful acts; he has acquired a special grace of action which makes his gestures more correct and attractive, and which beautifies his hands and indeed his entire body now so balanced and so sure of itself; a grace which refines the expression of his face and of his serenely brilliant eyes, and which shows us that the flame of spiritual life has been lighted in another human being. it is obviously true that co-ordinated actions, developed spontaneously little by little (that is, chosen and carried out in the exercises by the child himself), must call for less effort than the disorderly actions performed by the child who is left to his own devices. true rest for muscles, intended by nature for action, is in orderly action; just as true rest for the lungs is the normal rhythm of respiration taken in pure air. to take action away from the muscles is to force them away from their natural motor impulse, and hence, besides tiring them, means forcing them into a state of degeneration; just as the lungs forced into immobility, would die instantly and the whole organism with them. it is therefore necessary to keep clearly in mind the fact that rest for whatever naturally acts, lies in some specified form of action, corresponding to its nature. to act in obedience to the hidden precepts of nature--that is rest; and in this special case, since man is meant to be an intelligent creature, the more intelligent his acts are the more he finds repose in them. when a child acts only in a disorderly, disconnected manner, his nervous force is under a great strain; while on the other hand his nervous energy is positively increased and multiplied by intelligent actions which give him real satisfaction, and a feeling of pride that he has overcome himself, that he finds himself in a world beyond the frontiers formerly set up as insurmountable, surrounded by the silent respect of the one who has guided him without making his presence felt. this "multiplication of nervous energy" represents a process which can be physiologically analysed, and which comes from the development of the organs by rational exercise, from better circulation of the blood, from the quickened activity of all the tissues--all factors favourable to the development of the body and guaranteeing physical health. the spirit aids the body in its growth; the heart, the nerves and the muscles are helpful in their evolution by the activity of the spirit, since the upward path for soul and body is one and the same. by analogy, it can be said of the intellectual development of the child, that the mind of infancy, although characteristically disorderly, is also "a means searching for its end," which goes through exhausting experiments, left, as it frequently is, to its own resources, and too often really persecuted. once in our public park in rome, the pincian gardens, i saw a baby of about a year and a half, a beautiful smiling child, who was working away trying to fill a little pail by shoveling gravel into it. beside him was a smartly dressed nurse evidently very fond of him, the sort of nurse who would consider that she gave the child the most affectionate and intelligent care. it was time to go home and the nurse was patiently exhorting the baby to leave his work and let her put him into the baby-carriage. seeing that her exhortations made no impression on the little fellow's firmness, she herself filled the pail with gravel and set pail and baby into the carriage with the fixed conviction that she had given him what he wanted. i was struck by the loud cries of the child and by the expression of protest against violence and injustice which wrote itself on his little face. what an accumulation of wrongs weighed down that nascent intelligence! the little boy did not wish to have the pail full of gravel; he wished to go through the motions necessary to fill it, thus satisfying a need of his vigorous organism. the child's unconscious aim was his own self-development; not the external fact of a pail full of little stones. the vivid attractions of the external world were only empty apparitions; the need of his life was a reality. as a matter of fact, if he had filled his pail he would probably have emptied it out again in order to keep on filling it up until his inner self was satisfied. it was the feeling of working towards this satisfaction which, a few moments before, had made his face so rosy and smiling; spiritual joy, exercise, and sunshine, were the three rays of light ministering to his splendid life. this commonplace episode in the life of that child, is a detail of what happens to all children, even the best and most cherished. they are not understood, because the adult judges them by his own measure: he thinks that the child's wish is to obtain some tangible object, and lovingly helps him to do this: whereas the child as a rule has for his unconscious desire, his own self-development. hence he despises everything already attained, and yearns for that which is still to be sought for. for instance, he prefers the action of dressing himself to the state of being dressed, even finely dressed. he prefers the act of washing himself to the satisfaction of being clean: he prefers to make a little house for himself, rather than merely to own it. his own self-development is his true and almost his only pleasure. the self-development of the little baby up to the end of his first year consists to a large degree in taking in nutrition; but afterwards it consists in aiding the orderly establishment of the psycho-physiological functions of his organism. that beautiful baby in the pincian gardens is the symbol of this: he wished to co-ordinate his voluntary actions; to exercise his muscles by lifting; to train his eye to estimate distances; to exercise his intelligence in the reasoning connected with his undertaking; to stimulate his will-power by deciding his own actions; whilst she who loved him, believing that his aim was to possess some pebbles, made him wretched. a similar error is that which we repeat so frequently when we fancy that the desire of the student is to possess a piece of information. we aid him to grasp intellectually this detached piece of knowledge, and, preventing by this means his self-development, we make him wretched. it is generally believed in schools that the way to attain, satisfaction is "to learn something." but by leaving the children in our schools in liberty we have been able with great clearness to follow them in their natural method of spontaneous self-development. to have learned something is for the child only a point of departure. when he has learned the meaning of an exercise, then he begins to enjoy repeating it, and he does repeat it an infinite number of times, with the most evident satisfaction. he enjoys executing that act because by means of it he is developing his psychic activities. there results from the observation of this fact a criticism of what is done to-day in many schools. often, for instance when the pupils are questioned, the teacher says to someone who is eager to answer, "no, not you, because you know it" and puts her question specially to the pupils who she thinks are uncertain of the answer. those who do not know are made to speak, those who do know to be silent. this happens because of the general habit of considering the act of knowing something as final. and yet how many times it happens to us in ordinary life to _repeat_ the very thing we know best, the thing we care most for, the thing to which some living force in us responds. we love to sing musical phrases very familiar, hence enjoyed and become a part of the fabric of our lives. we love to repeat stories of things which please us, which we know very well, even though we are quite aware that we are saying nothing new. no matter how many times we repeat the lord's prayer, it is always new. no two persons could be more convinced of mutual love than sweethearts and yet they are the very ones who repeat endlessly that they love each other. but in order to repeat in this manner, there must first exist the idea to be repeated. a mental grasp of the idea, is indispensable to the beginning of _repetition_. the exercise which develops life, consists _in the repetition, not in the mere grasp of the idea_. when a child has attained this stage, of repeating an exercise, he is on the way to self-development, and the external sign of this condition is his self-discipline. this phenomenon does not always occur. the same exercises are not repeated by children of all ages. in fact, repetition corresponds to a _need_. here steps in the experimental method of education. it is necessary to offer those exercises which correspond to the need of development felt by an organism, and if the child's age has carried him past a certain need, it is never possible to obtain, in its fulness, a development which missed its proper moment. hence children grow up, often fatally and irrevocably, imperfectly developed. another very interesting observation is that which relates to the length of time needed for the execution of actions. children, who are undertaking something for the first time are extremely slow. their life is governed in this respect by laws especially different from ours. little children accomplish slowly and perseveringly, various complicated operations agreeable to them, such as dressing, undressing, cleaning the room, washing themselves, setting the table, eating, etc. in all this they are extremely patient, overcoming all the difficulties presented by an organism still in process of formation. but we, on the other hand, noticing that they are "tiring themselves out" or "wasting time" in accomplishing something which we would do in a moment and without the least effort, put ourselves in the child's place and do it ourselves. always with the same erroneous idea, that the end to be obtained is the completion of the action, we dress and wash the child, we snatch out of his hands objects which he loves to handle, we pour the soup into his bowl, we feed him, we set the table for him. and after such services, we consider him with that injustice always practised by those who domineer over others even with benevolent intentions, to be incapable and inept. we often speak of him as "impatient" simply because we are not patient enough to allow his actions to follow laws of time differing from our own; we call him "tyrannical" exactly because we employ tyranny towards him. this stain, this false imputation, this calumny on childhood has become an integral part of the theories concerning childhood, in reality so patient and gentle. the child, like every strong creature fighting for the right to live, rebels against whatever offends that occult impulse within him which is the voice of nature, and which he ought to obey; and he shows by violent actions, by screaming and weeping that he has been overborne and forced away from his mission in life. he shows himself to be a rebel, a revolutionist, an iconoclast, against those who do not understand him and who, fancying that they are helping him, are really pushing him backward in the highway of life. thus even the adult who loves him, rivets about his neck another calumny, confusing his defence of his molested life with a form of innate naughtiness characteristic of little children. what would become of us if we fell into the midst of a population of jugglers, or of lightning-change impersonators of the variety-hall? what should we do if, as we continued to act in our usual way, we saw ourselves assailed by these sleight-of-hand performers, hustled into our clothes, fed so rapidly that we could scarcely swallow, if everything we tried to do was snatched from our hands and completed in a twinkling and we ourselves reduced to impotence and to a humiliating inertia? not knowing how else to express our confusion we would defend ourselves with blows and yells from these madmen, and they having only the best will in the world to serve us, would call us haughty, rebellious, and incapable of doing anything. we, who know our own _milieu_, would say to those people, "come into our countries and you will see the splendid civilisation we have established, you will see our wonderful achievements." these jugglers would admire us infinitely, hardly able to believe their eyes, as they observed our world, so full of beauty and activity, so well regulated, so peaceful, so kindly, but all so much slower than theirs. something of this sort occurs between children and adults. it is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses consists; their aim is not that the child shall _know_ colours, forms and the different qualities of objects, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment. these exercises are true intellectual gymnastics. such gymnastics, reasonably directed by means of various devices, aid in the formation of the intellect, just as physical exercises fortify the general health and quicken the growth of the body. the child who trains his various senses separately, by means of external stimuli, concentrates his attention and develops, piece by piece, his mental activities, just as with separately prepared movements he trains his muscular activities. these mental gymnastics are not merely psycho-sensory, but they prepare the way for spontaneous association of ideas, for ratiocination developing out of definite knowledge, for a harmoniously balanced intellect. they are the powder-trains that bring about those mental explosions which delight the child so intensely when he makes discoveries in the world about him, when he, at the same time, ponders over and glories in the new things which are revealed to him in the outside world, and in the exquisite emotions of his own growing consciousness; and finally when there spring up within him, almost by a process of spontaneous ripening, like the internal phenomena of growth, the external products of learning--writing and reading. i happened once to see a two-year-old child, son of a medical colleague of mine, who, fairly fleeing away from his mother who had brought him to me, threw himself on the litter of things covering his father's desk, the rectangular writing-pad, the round cover of the ink-well. i was touched to see the intelligent little creature trying his best to go through the exercises which our children repeat with such endless pleasure till they have fully committed them to memory. the father and the mother pulled the child away, reproving him, and explaining that there was no use trying to keep that child from handling his father's desk-furniture, "the child is restless and naughty." how often we see all children reproved because, though they are told not to, they will "take hold of everything." now, it is precisely by means of guiding and developing this natural instinct "to take hold of everything," and to recognise the relations of geometrical figures, that we prepare our little four-year-old men for the joy and triumph they experience later over the phenomenon of spontaneous writing. the child who throws himself on the writing-pad, the cover to the ink-well, and such objects, always struggling in vain to attain his desire, always hindered and thwarted by people stronger than he, always excited and weeping over the failure of his desperate efforts, _is wasting_ nervous force. his parents are mistaken if they think that such a child ever gets any real rest, just as they are mistaken when they call "naughty" the little man longing for the foundations of his intellectual edifice. the children in our schools are the ones who are really at rest, ardently and blessedly free to take out and put back in their right places or grooves, the geometric figures offered to their instinct for higher self-development; and they, rejoicing in the most entire spiritual calm, have no notion that their eyes and hands are initiating them into the mysteries of a new language. the majority of our children become calm as they go through such exercises, because their nervous system is at rest. then we say that such children are quiet and good; external discipline, so eagerly sought after in ordinary schools is more than achieved. however, as a calm man and a self-disciplined man are not one and the same, so here the fact which manifests itself externally by the calm of the children is in reality a phenomenon merely physical and partial compared to the real _self-discipline_ which is being developed in them. often (and this is another misconception) we think all we need to do, to obtain a voluntary action from a child, is to order him to do it. we pretend that this phenomenon of a forced voluntary action exists, and we call this pretext, "the obedience of the child." we find little children specially disobedient, or rather their resistance, by the time they are four or five years old, has become so great that we are in despair and are almost tempted to give up trying to make them obey. we force ourselves to praise to little children "the virtue of obedience" a virtue which, according to our accepted prejudices, should belong specially to infancy, should be the "infantile virtue" yet we fail to learn anything from the fact that we are led to emphasize it so strongly because we can only with the greatest difficulty make children practise it. it is a very common mistake, this of trying to obtain by means of prayers, or orders, or violence, what is difficult, or impossible to get. thus, for instance, we ask little children to be obedient, and little children in their turn ask for the moon. we need only reflect that this "obedience" which we treat so lightly, occurs later, as a natural tendency in older children, and then as an instinct in the adult to realise that it springs spontaneously into being, and that it is one of the strongest instincts of humanity. we find that society rests on a foundation of marvellous obedience, and that civilisation goes forward on a road made by obedience. human organisations are often founded on an abuse of obedience, associations of criminals have obedience as their key-stone. how many times social problems centre about the necessity of rousing man from a state of "obedience" which has led him to be exploited and brutalised! obedience naturally is _sacrifice_. we are so accustomed to an infinity of obedience in the world, to a condition of self-sacrifice, to a readiness for renunciation, that we call matrimony the "blessed condition," although it is made up of obedience and self-sacrifice. the soldier, whose lot in life is to obey if it kills him is envied by the common people, while we consider anyone who tries to escape from obedience as a malefactor or a madman. besides, how many people have had the deeply spiritual experience of an ardent desire to obey something or some person leading them along the path of life--more than this, a desire to sacrifice something for the sake of this obedience. it is therefore entirely natural that, loving the child, we should point out to him that obedience is the law of life, and there is nothing surprising in the anxiety felt by nearly everyone who is confronted with the characteristic disobedience of little children. but obedience can only be reached through a complex formation of the psychic personality. to obey, it is necessary not only to wish to obey, but also to know how to. since, when a command to do a certain thing is given, we presuppose a corresponding active or inhibitive power of the child, it is plain that obedience must follow the formation of the will and of the mind. to prepare, in detail, this formation by means of detached exercises is therefore indirectly, to urge the child towards obedience. the method which is the subject of this book contains in every part an exercise for the will-power, when the child completes co-ordinated actions directed towards a given end, when he achieves something he set out to do, when he repeats patiently his exercises, he is training his positive will-power. similarly, in a very complicated series of exercises he is establishing through activity his powers of inhibition; for instance in the "lesson of silence," which calls for a long continued inhibition of many actions, while the child is waiting to be called and later for a rigorous self-control when he is called and would like to answer joyously and run to his teacher, but instead is perfectly silent, moves very carefully, taking the greatest pains not to knock against chair or table or to make a noise. other inhibitive exercises are the arithmetical ones, when the child having drawn a number by lot, must take from the great mass of objects before him, apparently entirely at his disposition, only the quantity corresponding to the number in his hand, whereas (as experience has proved) he would _like_ to take the greatest number possible. furthermore if he chances to draw the zero he sits patiently with empty hands. still another training for the inhibitive will-power is in "the lesson of zero" when the child, called upon to come up zero times and give zero kisses, stands quiet, conquering with a visible effort the instinct which would lead him to "obey" the call. the child at our school dinners who carries the big tureen full of hot soup, isolates himself from every external stimulant which might disturb him, resists his childish impulse to run and jump, does not yield to the temptation to brush away the fly on his face, and is entirely concentrated on the great responsibility of not dropping or tipping the tureen. a little thing of four and a half, every time he set the tureen down on a table so that the little guests might help themselves, gave a hop and a skip, then took up the tureen again to carry it to another table, repressing himself to a sober walk. in spite of his desire to play he never left his task before he had passed soup to the twenty tables, and he never forgot the vigilance necessary to control his actions. will-power, like all other activities is invigorated and developed through methodical exercises, and all our exercises for will-power are also mental and practical. to the casual onlooker the child seems to be learning exactitude and grace of action, to be refining his senses, to be learning how to read and write; but much more profoundly he is learning how to become his own master, how to be a man of prompt and resolute will. we often hear it said that a child's will should be "broken" that the best education for the will of the child is to learn to give it up to the will of adults. leaving out of the question the injustice which is at the root of every act of tyranny, this idea is irrational because the child cannot give up what he does not possess. we prevent him in this way from forming his own will-power, and we commit the greatest and most blameworthy mistake. he never has time or opportunity to test himself, to estimate his own force and his own limitations because he is always interrupted and subjected to our tyranny, and languishes in injustice because he is always being bitterly reproached for not having what adults are perpetually destroying. there springs up as a consequence of this, childish timidity, which is a moral malady acquired by a will which could not develop; and which with the usual calumny with which the tyrant consciously or not, covers up his own mistakes, we consider as an inherent trait of childhood. the children in our schools are never timid. one of their most fascinating qualities is the frankness with which they treat people, with which they go on working in the presence of others, and showing their work frankly, calling for sympathy. that moral monstrosity, a repressed and timid child, who is at his ease nowhere except alone with his playmates, or with street urchins, because his will-power was allowed to grow only in the shade, disappears in our schools. he presents an example of thoughtless barbarism, which resembles the artificial compression of the bodies of those children intended for "court dwarfs," museum monstrosities or buffoons. yet this is the treatment under which nearly all the children of our time are growing up spiritually. as a matter of fact in all the pedagogical congresses one hears that the great peril of our time is the lack of individual character in the scholars; yet these alarmists do not point out that this condition is due to the way in which education is managed, to scholastic slavery, which has for its specialty the repression of will-power and of force of character. the remedy is simply to enfranchise human development. besides the exercises it offers for developing will-power, the other factor in obedience is the capacity to perform the act it becomes necessary to obey. one of the most interesting observations made by my pupil anna maccheroni (at first in the school in milan and then in that in the via guisti in rome), relates to the connection between obedience in a child and his "knowing how." obedience appears in the child as a latent instinct as soon as his personality begins to take form. for instance, a child begins to try a certain exercise and suddenly some time he goes through it perfectly; he is delighted, stares at it, and wishes to do it over again, but for some time the exercise is not a success. then comes a time when he can do it nearly every time he tries voluntarily but makes mistakes if someone else asks him to do it. the external command does not as yet produce the voluntary act. when, however, the exercise always succeeds, with absolute certainty, then an order from someone else brings about on the child's part, orderly adequate action; that is, the child _is able_ each time to execute the command received. that these facts (with variations in individual cases) are laws of psychical development is apparent from everyone's experience with children in school or at home. one often hears a child say, "i did do such and such a thing but now i can't!" and a teacher disappointed by the incompetence of a pupil will say, "yet that child was doing it all right--and now he can't!" finally there is the period of complete development in which the capacity to perform some operation is permanently acquired. there are, therefore, three periods: a first, subconscious one, when in the confused mind of the child, order produces itself by a mysterious inner impulse from out the midst of disorder, producing as an external result a completed act, which, however, being outside the field of consciousness, cannot be reproduced at will; a second, conscious period, when there is some action on the part of the will which is present during the process of the development and establishing of the acts; and a third period when the will can direct and cause the acts, thus answering the command from someone else. now, obedience follows a similar sequence. when in the first period of spiritual disorder, the child does not obey it is exactly as if he were psychically deaf, and out of hearing of commands. in the second period he would like to obey, he looks as though he understood the command and would like to respond to it, but cannot,--or at least does not always succeed in doing it, is not "quick to mind" and shows no pleasure when he does. in the third period he obeys at once, with enthusiasm, and as he becomes more and more perfect in the exercises he is proud that he knows how to obey. this is the period in which he runs joyously to obey, and leaves at the most imperceptible request whatever is interesting him so that he may quit the solitude of his own life and enter, with the act of obedience into the spiritual existence of another. to this order, established in a consciousness formerly chaotic, are due all the phenomena of discipline and of mental development, which open out like a new creation. from minds thus set in order, when "night is separated from day" come sudden emotions and mental feats which recall the biblical story of creation. the child has in his mind not only what he has laboriously acquired, but the free gifts which flow from spiritual life, the first flowers of affection, of gentleness, of spontaneous love for righteousness which perfume the souls of such children and give promise of the "fruits of the spirit" of st. paul--"the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness." they are virtuous because they exercise patience in repeating their exercises, long-suffering in yielding to the commands and desires of others, good in rejoicing in the well-being of others without jealousy or rivalry; they live, doing good in joyousness of heart and in peace, and they are eminently, marvellously industrious. but they are not proud of such righteousness because they were not conscious of acquiring it as a moral superiority. they have set their feet in the path leading to righteousness, simply because it was the only way to attain true self-development and learning; and they enjoy with simple hearts the fruits of peace that are to be gathered along that path. these are the first outlines of an experiment which shows a form of indirect discipline in which there is substituted for the critical and sermonizing teacher a rational organisation of work and of liberty for the child. it involves a conception of life more usual in religious fields than in those of academic pedagogy, inasmuch as it has recourse to the spiritual energies of mankind, but it is founded on work and on liberty which are the two paths to all civic progress. chapter xxii conclusions and impressions in the "children's houses," the old-time teacher, who wore herself out maintaining discipline of immobility, and who wasted her breath in loud and continual discourse, has disappeared. for this teacher we have substituted the _didactic material_, which contains within itself the control of errors and which makes auto-education possible to each child. the teacher has thus become a _director_ of the spontaneous work of the children. she is not a _passive_ force, a _silent_ presence. the children are occupied each one in a different way, and the directress, watching them, can make psychological observations which, if collected in an orderly way and according to scientific standards, should do much toward the reconstruction of child psychology and the development of experimental psychology. i believe that i have by my method established the conditions necessary to the development of scientific pedagogy; and whoever adopts this method opens, in doing so, a laboratory of experimental pedagogy. from such work, we must await the positive solution of all those pedagogical problems of which we talk to-day. for through such work there has already come the solution of some of these very questions: that of the liberty of the pupils; auto-education; the establishment of harmony between the work and activities of home life and school tasks, making both work together for the education of the child. the problem of religious education, the importance of which we do not fully realise, should also be solved by positive pedagogy. if religion is born with civilisation, its roots must lie deep in human nature. we have had most beautiful proof of an instinctive love of knowledge in the child, who has too often been misjudged in that he has been considered addicted to meaningless play, and games void of thought. the child who left the game in his eagerness for knowledge, has revealed himself as a true son of that humanity which has been throughout centuries the creator of scientific and civil progress. we have belittled the son of man by giving him foolish and degrading toys, a world of idleness where he is suffocated by a badly conceived discipline. now, in his liberty, the child should show us, as well, whether man is by nature a religious creature. to deny, _a priori_, the religions sentiment in man, and to deprive humanity of the education of this sentiment, is to commit a pedagogical error similar to that of denying, _a priori_, to the child, the love of learning for learning's sake. this ignorant assumption led us to dominate the scholar, to subject him to a species of slavery, in order to render him apparently disciplined. the fact that we assume that religions education is only adapted to the adult, may be akin to another profound error existing in education to-day, namely, that of overlooking the education of the senses at the very period when this education is possible. the life of the adult is practically an application of the senses to the gathering of sensations from the environment. a lack of preparation for this, often results in inadequacy in practical life, in that lack of poise which causes so many individuals to waste their energies in purposeless effort. not to form a parallel between the education of the senses as a guide to practical life, and religious education as a guide to the moral life, but for the sake of illustration, let me call attention to how often we find inefficiency, instability, among irreligious persons, and how much precious individual power is miserably wasted. how many men have had this experience! and when that spiritual awakening comes late, as it sometimes does, through the softening power of sorrow, the mind is unable to establish an equilibrium, because it has grown too much accustomed to a life deprived of spirituality. we see equally piteous cases of religious fanaticism, or we look upon intimate dramatic struggles between the heart, ever seeking its own safe and quiet port, and the mind that constantly draws it back to the sea of conflicting ideas and emotions, where peace is unknown. these are all psychological phenomena of the highest importance; they present, perhaps, the gravest of all our human problems. we europeans are still filled with prejudices and hedged about with preconceptions in regard to these matters. we are very slaves of thought. we believe that liberty of conscience and of thought consists in denying certain sentimental beliefs, while liberty never can exist where one struggles to stifle some other thing, but only where unlimited expansion is granted; where life is left free and untrammelled. he who really does not believe, does not fear that which he does not believe, and does not combat that which for him does not exist. if he believes and fights, he then becomes an enemy to liberty. in america, the great positive scientist, william james, who expounds the physiological theory of emotions, is also the man who illustrates the psychological importance of religious "conscience." we cannot know the future of the progress of thought: here, for example, in the "children's houses" the triumph of _discipline_ through the conquest of liberty and independence marks the foundation of the progress which the future will see in the matter of pedagogical methods. to me it offers the greatest hope for human redemption through education. perhaps, in the same way, through the conquest of liberty of thought and of conscience, we are making our way toward a great religious triumph. experience will show, and the psychological observations made along this line in the "children's houses" will undoubtedly be of the greatest interest. this book of methods compiled by one person alone, must be followed by many others. it is my hope that, starting from the _individual study of the child_ educated with our method, other educators will set forth the results of their experiments. these are the pedagogical books which await us in the future. from the practical side of the school, we have with our methods the advantage of being able to teach in one room, children of very different ages. in our "children's houses" we have little ones of two years and a half, who cannot as yet make use of the most simple of the sense exercises, and children of five and a half who because of their development might easily pass into the third elementary. each one of them perfects himself through his own powers, and goes forward guided by that inner force which distinguishes him as an individual. one great advantage of such a method is that it will make instruction in the rural schools easier, and will be of great advantage in the schools in the small provincial towns where there are few children, yet where all the various grades are represented. such schools are not able to employ more than one teacher. our experience shows that one directress may guide a group of children varying in development from little ones of three years old to the third elementary. another great advantage lies in the extreme facility with which written language may be taught, making it possible to combat illiteracy and to cultivate the national tongue. as to the teacher, she may remain for a whole day among children in the most varying stages of development, just as the mother remains in the house with children of all ages, without becoming tired. the children work by themselves, and, in doing so, make a conquest of active discipline, and independence in all the acts of daily life, just as through daily conquests they progress in intellectual development. directed by an intelligent teacher, who watches over their physical development as well as over their intellectual and moral progress, children are able with our methods to arrive at a splendid physical development, and, in addition to this, there unfolds within them, in all its perfection, the soul, which distinguishes the human being. we have been mistaken in thinking that the natural education of children should be purely physical; the soul, too, has its nature, which it was intended to perfect in the spiritual life,--the dominating power of human existence throughout all time. our methods take into consideration the spontaneous psychic development of the child, and help this in ways that observation and experience have shown us to be wise. if physical care leads the child to take pleasure in bodily health, intellectual and moral care make possible for him the highest spiritual joy, and send him forward into a world where continual surprises and discoveries await him; not only in the external environment, but in the intimate recesses of his own soul. it is through such pleasures as these that the ideal man grows, and only such pleasures are worthy of a place in the education of the infancy of humanity. our children are noticeably different from those others who have grown up within the grey walls of the common schools. our little pupils have the serene and happy aspect and the frank and open friendliness of the person who feels himself to be master of his own actions. when they run to gather about our visitors, speaking to them with sweet frankness, extending their little hands with gentle gravity and well-bred cordiality, when they thank these visitors for the courtesy they have paid us in coming, the bright eyes and the happy voices make us feel that they are, indeed, unusual little men. when they display their work and their ability, in a confidential and simple way, it is almost as if they called for a maternal approbation from all those who watch them. often, a little one will seat himself on the floor beside some visitor silently writing his name, and adding a gentle word of thanks. it is as if they wished to make the visitor feel the affectionate gratitude which is in their hearts. when we see all these things and when, above all, we pass with these children from the busy activity of the schoolroom at work, into the absolute and profound silence which they have learned to enjoy so deeply, we are moved in spite of ourselves and feel that we have come in touch with the very souls of these little pupils. the "children's house" seems to exert a spiritual influence upon everyone. i have seen here, men of affairs, great politicians preoccupied with problems of trade and of state, cast off like an uncomfortable garment the burden of the world, and fall into a simple forgetfulness of self. they are affected by this vision of the human soul growing in its true nature, and i believe that this is what they mean when they call our little ones, wonderful children, happy children--the infancy of humanity in a higher stage of evolution than our own. i understand how the great english poet wordsworth, enamoured as he was of nature, demanded the secret of all her peace and beauty. it was at last revealed to him--the secret of all nature lies in the soul of a little child. he holds there the true meaning of that life which exists throughout humanity. but this beauty which "lies about us in our infancy" becomes obscured; "shades of the prison house, begin to close about the growing boy ... at last the man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day." truly our social life is too often only the darkening and the death of the natural life that is in us. these methods tend to guard that spiritual fire within man, to keep his real nature unspoiled and to set it free from the oppressive and degrading yoke of society. it is a pedagogical method informed by the high concept of immanuel kant: "perfect art returns to nature." the end the teacher essays and addresses on education by george herbert palmer and alice freeman palmer boston and new york houghton mifflin company the riverside press cambridge copyright, , by george herbert palmer all rights reserved _published november _ second impression preface the papers of this volume fall into three groups, two of the three being written by myself. from my writings on education i have selected only those which may have some claim to permanent interest, and all but two have been tested by previous publication. those of the first group deal with questions about which we teachers, eager about our immeasurable art beyond most professional persons, never cease to wonder and debate: what is teaching? how far may it influence character? can it be practiced on persons too busy or too poor to come to our class-rooms? to subjects of what scope should it be applied? and how shall we content ourselves with its necessary limitations? under these diverse headings a kind of philosophy of education is outlined. the last two papers, having been given as lectures and stenographically reported, i have left in their original colloquial form. a group of papers on harvard follows, preceded by an explanatory note, and the volume closes with a few papers by mrs. palmer. she and i often talked of preparing together a book on education. now, alone, i gather up these fragments. contents page i. problems of school and college i. the ideal teacher ii. ethical instruction in the schools iii. moral instruction in the schools iv. self-cultivation in english v. doubts about university extension vi. specialization vii. the glory of the imperfect ii. harvard papers viii. the new education ix. erroneous limitations of the elective system x. necessary limitations of the elective system xi. college expenses xii. a teacher of the olden time iii. papers by alice freeman palmer xiii. three types of women's colleges xiv. women's education in the nineteenth century xv. women's education at the world's fair xvi. why go to college? i problems of school and college i the ideal teacher in america, a land of idealism, the profession of teaching has become one of the greatest of human employments. in - half a million teachers were in charge of sixteen million pupils. stating the same facts differently, we may say that a fifth of our entire population is constantly at school; and that wherever one hundred and sixty men, women, and children are gathered, a teacher is sure to be among them. but figures fail to express the importance of the work. if each year an equal number of persons should come in contact with as many lawyers, no such social consequences would follow. the touch of the teacher, like that of no other person, is formative. our young people are for long periods associated with those who are expected to fashion them into men and women of an approved type. a charge so influential is committed to nobody else in the community, not even to the ministers; for though these have a more searching aim, they are directly occupied with it but one day instead of six, but one hour instead of five. accordingly, as the tract of knowledge has widened, and the creative opportunities involved in conducting a young person over it have correspondingly become apparent, the profession of teaching has risen to a notable height of dignity and attractiveness. it has moved from a subordinate to a central place in social influence, and now undertakes much of the work which formerly fell to the church. each year divinity schools attract fewer students, graduate and normal schools more. on school and college instruction the community now bestows its choicest minds, its highest hopes, and its largest sums. during the year - the united states spent for teaching not less than $ , , . such weighty work is ill adapted for amateurs. those who take it up for brief times and to make money usually find it unsatisfactory. success is rare, the hours are fixed and long, there is repetition and monotony, and the teacher passes his days among inferiors. nor are the pecuniary gains considerable. there are few prizes, and neither in school nor in college will a teacher's ordinary income carry him much above want. college teaching is falling more and more into the hands of men of independent means. the poor can hardly afford to engage in it. private schools, it is true, often show large incomes; but they are earned by the proprietors, not the teachers. on the whole, teaching as a trade is poor and disappointing business. when, however, it is entered as a profession, as a serious and difficult fine art, there are few employments more satisfying. all over the country thousands of men and women are following it with a passionate devotion which takes little account of the income received. a trade aims primarily at personal gain; a profession at the exercise of powers beneficial to mankind. this prime aim of the one, it is true, often properly becomes a subordinate aim of the other. professional men may even be said to offer wares of their own--cures, conversions, court victories, learning--much as traders do, and to receive in return a kind of reward. but the business of the lawyer, doctor, preacher, and teacher never squares itself by equivalent exchange. these men do not give so much for so much. they give in lump and they get in lump, without precise balance. the whole notion of bargain is inapplicable in a sphere where the gains of him who serves and him who is served coincide; and that is largely the case with the professions. each of them furnishes its special opportunity for the use of powers which the possessor takes delight in exercising. harvard college pays me for doing what i would gladly pay it for allowing me to do. no professional man, then, thinks of giving according to measure. once engaged, he gives his best, gives his personal interest, himself. his heart is in his work, and for this no equivalent is possible; what is accepted is in the nature of a fee, gratuity, or consideration, which enables him who receives it to maintain a certain expected mode of life. the real payment is the work itself, this and the chance to join with other members of the profession in guiding and enlarging the sphere of its activities. the idea, sometimes advanced, that the professions might be ennobled by paying them powerfully, is fantastic. their great attraction is their removal from sordid aims. more money should certainly be spent on several of them. their members should be better protected against want, anxiety, neglect, and bad conditions of labor. to do his best work one needs not merely to live, but to live well. yet in that increase of salaries which is urgently needed, care should be used not to allow the attention of the professional man to be diverted from what is important,--the outgo of his work,--and become fixed on what is merely incidental,--his income. when a professor in one of our large universities, angered by the refusal of the president to raise his salary on his being called elsewhere, impatiently exclaimed, "mr. president, you are banking on the devotion of us teachers, knowing that we do not willingly leave this place," the president properly replied, "certainly, and no college can be managed on any other principle." professional men are not so silly as to despise money; but after all, it is interest in their work, and not the thought of salary, which predominantly holds them. accordingly in this paper i address those only who are drawn to teaching by the love of it, who regard it as the most vital of the fine arts, who intend to give their lives to mastering its subtleties, and who are ready to meet some hardships and to put up with moderate fare if they may win its rich opportunities. but supposing such a temper, what special qualifications will the work require? the question asked thus broadly admits no precise answer; for in reality there is no human excellence which is not useful for us teachers. no good quality can be thought of which we can afford to drop. some day we shall discover a disturbing vacuum in the spot which it left. but i propose a more limited problem: what are those characteristics of the teacher without which he must fail, and what those which, once his, will almost certainly insure him success? are there any such essentials, and how many? on this matter i have pondered long; for, teaching thirty-nine years in harvard college, i have each year found out a little more fully my own incompetence. i have thus been forced to ask myself the double question, through what lacks do i fail, and in what direction lie the roots of my small successes? of late years i think i have hit on these roots of success and have come to believe that there are four of them,--four characteristics which every teacher must possess. of course he may possess as many more as he likes,--indeed, the more the better. but these four appear fundamental. i will briefly name them. first, a teacher must have an aptitude for vicariousness; and second, an already accumulated wealth; and third, an ability to invigorate life through knowledge; and fourth, a readiness to be forgotten. having these, any teacher is secure. lacking them, lacking even one, he is liable to serious failure. but as here stated they have a curiously cabalistic sound and show little relation to the needs of any profession. they have been stated with too much condensation, and have become unintelligible through being too exact. let me repair the error by successively expanding them. the teacher's art takes its rise in what i call an aptitude for vicariousness. as year by year my college boys prepare to go forth into life, some laggard is sure to come to me and say, "i want a little advice. most of my classmates have their minds made up about what they are going to do. i am still uncertain. i rather incline to be a teacher, because i am fond of books and suspect that in any other profession i can give them but little time. business men do not read. lawyers only consult books. and i am by no means sure that ministers have read all the books they quote. on the whole it seems safest to choose a profession in which books will be my daily companions. so i turn toward teaching. but before settling the matter i thought i would ask how you regard the profession." "a noble profession," i answer, "but quite unfit for you. i would advise you to become a lawyer, a car conductor, or something equally harmless. do not turn to anything so perilous as teaching. you would ruin both it and yourself; for you are looking in exactly the wrong direction." such an inquirer is under a common misconception. the teacher's task is not primarily the acquisition of knowledge, but the impartation of it,--an entirely different matter. we teachers are forever taking thoughts out of our minds and putting them elsewhere. so long as we are content to keep them in our possession, we are not teachers at all. one who is interested in laying hold on wisdom is likely to become a scholar. and while no doubt it is well for a teacher to be a fair scholar,--i have known several such,--that is not the main thing. what constitutes the teacher is the passion to make scholars; and again and again it happens that the great scholar has no such passion whatever. but even that passion is useless without aid from imagination. at every instant of the teacher's life he must be controlled by this mighty power. most human beings are contented with living one life and delighted if they can pass that agreeably. but this is far from enough for us teachers. we incessantly go outside ourselves and enter into the many lives about us,--lives dull, dark, and unintelligible to any but an eye like ours. and this is imagination, the sympathetic creation in ourselves of conditions which belong to others. our profession is therefore a double-ended one. we inspect truth as it rises fresh and interesting before our eager sight. but that is only the beginning of our task. swiftly we then seize the lines of least intellectual resistance in alien minds and, with perpetual reference to these, follow our truth till it is safely lodged beyond ourselves. each mind has its peculiar set of frictions. those of our pupils can never be the same as ours. we have passed far on and know all about our subject. for us it wears an altogether different look from that which it has for beginners. it is their perplexities which we must reproduce and--as if a rose should shut and be a bud again--we must reassume in our developed and accustomed souls something of the innocence of childhood. such is the exquisite business of the teacher, to carry himself back with all his wealth of knowledge and understand how his subject should appear to the meagre mind of one glancing at it for the first time. and what absurd blunders we make in the process! becoming immersed in our own side of the affair, we blind ourselves and readily attribute to our pupils modes of thought which are not in the least theirs. i remember a lesson i had on this point, i who had been teaching ethics half a lifetime. my nephew, five years old, was fond of stories from the odyssey. he would creep into bed with me in the morning and beg for them. one sunday, after i had given him a pretty stiff bit of adventure, it occurred to me that it was an appropriate day for a moral. "ulysses was a very brave man," i remarked. "yes," he said, "and i am very brave." i saw my opportunity and seized it. "that is true," said i. "you have been gaining courage lately. you used to cry easily, but you don't do that nowadays. when you want to cry now, you think how like a baby it would be to cry, or how you would disturb mother and upset the house; and so you conclude not to cry." the little fellow seemed hopelessly puzzled. he lay silent a minute or two and then said, "well no, uncle, i don't do that. i just go sh-sh-sh, and i don't." there the moral crisis is stated in its simplicity; and i had been putting off on that holy little nature sophistications borrowed from my own battered life. but while i am explaining the blunders caused by self-engrossment and lack of imagination, let me show what slight adjustments will sometimes carry us past depressing difficulties. one year when i was lecturing on some intricate problems of obligation, i began to doubt whether my class was following me, and i determined that i would make them talk. so the next day i constructed an ingenious ethical case and, after stating it to the class, i said, "supposing now the state of affairs were thus and thus, and the interests of the persons involved were such and such, how would you decide the question of right,--mr. jones." poor jones rose in confusion. "you mean," he said, "if the case were as you have stated it? well, hm, hm, hm,--yes,--i don't think i know, sir." and he sat down. i called on one and another with the same result. a panic was upon them, and all their minds were alike empty. i went home disgusted, wondering whether they had comprehended anything i had said during the previous fortnight, and hoping i might never have such a stupid lot of students again. suddenly it flashed upon me that it was i who was stupid. that is usually the case when a class fails; it is the teacher's fault. the next day i went back prepared to begin at the right end. i began, "oh, mr. jones." he rose, and i proceeded to state the situation as before. by the time i paused he had collected his wits, had worked off his superfluous flurry, and was ready to give me an admirable answer. indeed in a few minutes the whole class was engaged in an eager discussion. my previous error had been in not remembering that they, i, and everybody, when suddenly attacked with a big question, are not in the best condition for answering. occupied as i was with my end of the story, the questioning end, i had not worked in that double-ended fashion which alone can bring the teacher success; in short, i was deficient in vicariousness,--in swiftly putting myself in the weak one's place and bearing his burden. now it is in this chief business of the artistic teacher, to labor imaginatively himself in order to diminish the labors of his slender pupil, that most of our failures occur. instead of lamenting the imperviousness of our pupils, we had better ask ourselves more frequently whether we have neatly adjusted our teachings to the conditions of their minds. we have no right to tumble out in a mass whatever comes into our heads, leaving to that feeble folk the work of finding in it what order they may. ours it should be to see that every beginning, middle, and end of what we say is helpfully shaped for readiest access to those less intelligent and interested than we. but this is vicariousness. _noblesse oblige._ in this profession any one who will be great must be a nimble servant, his head full of others' needs. some discouraged teacher, glad to discover that his past failures have been due to the absence of sympathetic imagination, may resolve that he will not commit that blunder again. on going to his class to-morrow he will look out upon his subject with his pupils' eyes, not with his own. let him attempt it, and his pupils will surely say to one another, "what is the matter to-day with teacher?" they will get nothing from that exercise. no, what is wanted is not a resolve, but an aptitude. the time for using vicariousness is not the time for acquiring it. rather it is the time for dismissing all thoughts of it from the mind. on entering the classroom we should leave every consideration of method outside the door, and talk simply as interested men and women in whatever way comes most natural to us. but into that nature vicariousness should long ago have been wrought. it should be already on hand. fortunate we if our great-grandmother supplied us with it before we were born. there are persons who, with all good will, can never be teachers. they are not made in that way. their business it is to pry into knowledge, to engage in action, to make money, or to pursue whatever other aim their powers dictate; but they do not readily think in terms of the other person. they should not, then, be teachers. the teacher's habit is well summed in the apostle's rule, "look not every man on his own things, but every man also"--it is double--"on the things of others." and this habit should become as nearly as possible an instinct. until it is rendered instinctive and passes beyond conscious direction, it will be of little worth. let us then, as we go into society, as we walk the streets, as we sit at table, practice altruistic limberness and learn to escape from ourselves. a true teacher is always meditating his work, disciplining himself for his profession, probing the problems of his glorious art, and seeing illustration of them everywhere. in only one place is he freed from such criticism, and that is in his classroom. here in the moment of action he lets himself go, unhampered by theory, using the nature acquired elsewhere, and uttering as simply as possible the fulness of his mind and heart. direct human intercourse requires instinctive aptitudes. till altruistic vicariousness has become our second nature, we shall not deeply influence anybody. but sympathetic imagination is not all a teacher needs. exclusive altruism is absurd. on this point too i once got instruction from the mouths of babes and sucklings. the children of a friend of mine, children of six and four, had just gone to bed. their mother overheard them talking when they should have been asleep. wondering what they might need, she stepped into the entry and listened. they were discussing what they were here in the world for. that is about the size of problems commonly found in infant minds. the little girl suggested that we are probably in the world to help others. "why, no indeed, mabel," said her big brother, "for then what would others be here for?" precisely! if anything is only fit to give away, it is not fit for that. we must know and prize its goodness in ourselves before generosity is even possible. plainly, then, beside his aptitude for vicariousness, our ideal teacher will need the second qualification of an already accumulated wealth. these hungry pupils are drawing all their nourishment from us, and have we got it to give? they will be poor, if we are poor; rich if we are wealthy. we are their source of supply. every time we cut ourselves off from nutrition, we enfeeble them. and how frequently devoted teachers make this mistake! dedicating themselves so to the immediate needs of those about them that they themselves grow thinner each year. we all know the "teacher's face." it is meagre, worn, sacrificial, anxious, powerless. that is exactly the opposite of what it should be. the teacher should be the big bounteous being of the community. other people may get along tolerably by holding whatever small knowledge comes their way. a moderate stock will pretty well serve their private turn. but that is not our case. supplying a multitude, we need wealth sufficient for a multitude. we should then be clutching at knowledge on every side. nothing must escape us. it is a mistake to reject a bit of truth because it lies outside our province. some day we shall need it. all knowledge is our province. in preparing a lecture i find i always have to work hardest on the things i do not say. the things i am sure to say i can easily get up. they are obvious and generally accessible. but they, i find, are not enough. i must have a broad background of knowledge which does not appear in speech. i have to go over my entire subject and see how the things i am to say look in their various relations, tracing out connections which i shall not present to my class. one might ask what is the use of this? why prepare more matter than can be used? every successful teacher knows. i cannot teach right up to the edge of my knowledge without a fear of falling off. my pupils discover this fear, and my words are ineffective. they feel the influence of what i do not say. one cannot precisely explain it; but when i move freely across my subject as if it mattered little on what part of it i rest, they get a sense of assured power which is compulsive and fructifying. the subject acquires consequence, their minds swell, and they are eager to enter regions of which they had not previously thought. even, then, to teach a small thing well we must be large. i asked a teacher what her subject was, and she answered, "arithmetic in the third grade." but where is the third grade found? in knowledge, or in the schools? unhappily it is in the schools. but if one would be a teacher of arithmetic, it must be arithmetic she teaches and not third grade at all. we cannot accept these artificial bounds without damage. instead of accumulated wealth they will bring us accumulated poverty, and increase it every day. years ago at harvard we began to discuss the establishment of a graduate school; and i, a young instructor, steadily voted against it. my thought was this: harvard college, in spite of what the public imagines, is a place of slender resources. our means are inadequate for teaching even undergraduates. but graduate instruction is vastly more expensive; courses composed of half a dozen students take the time of the ablest professors. i thought we could not afford this. why not leave graduate instruction to a university which gives itself entirely to that task? would it not be wiser to spend ourselves on the lower ranges of learning, covering these adequately, than to try to spread ourselves over the entire field? doubting so, i for some time opposed the coming of a graduate school. but a luminous remark of our great president showed me the error of my ways. in the course of debate he said one evening, "it is not primarily for the graduates that i care for this school; it is for the undergraduates. we shall never get good teaching here so long as our instructors set a limit to their subjects. when they are called on to follow these throughout, tracing them far off toward the unknown, they may become good teachers; but not before." i went home meditating. i saw that the president was right, and that i was myself in danger of the stagnation he deprecated. i changed my vote, as did others. the graduate school was established; and of all the influences which have contributed to raise the standard of scholarship at harvard, both for teachers and taught, that graduate work seems to me the greatest. every professor now must be the master of a field of knowledge, and not of a few paths running through it. but the ideal teacher will accumulate wealth, not merely for his pupils' sake, but for his own. to be a great teacher one must be a great personality, and without ardent and individual tastes the roots of our being are not fed. for developing personal power it is well, therefore, for each teacher to cultivate interests unconnected with his official work. let the mathematician turn to the english poets, the teacher of classics to the study of birds and flowers, and each will gain a lightness, a freedom from exhaustion, a mental hospitality, which can only be acquired in some disinterested pursuit. such a private subject becomes doubly dear because it is just our own. we pursue it as we will; we let it call out our irresponsible thoughts; and from it we ordinarily carry off a note of distinction lacking in those whose lives are too tightly organized. to this second qualification of the teacher, however, i have been obliged to prefix a condition similar to that which was added to the first. we need not merely wealth, but an already accumulated wealth. at the moment when wealth is wanted it cannot be acquired. it should have been gathered and stored before the occasion arose. what is more pitiable than when a person who desires to be a benefactor looks in his chest and finds it empty? special knowledge is wanted, or trained insight, or professional skill, or sound practical judgment; and the teacher who is called on has gone through no such discipline as assures these resources. i am inclined to think that women are more liable to this sort of bankruptcy than men. their sex is more sympathetic than ours and they spend more hastily. they will drop what they are doing and run if a baby cries. excellence requires a certain hardihood of heart, while quick responsiveness is destructive of the larger giving. he who would be greatly generous must train himself long and tenaciously, without much attention to momentary calls. the plan of the great teacher, by which he took thirty years for acquisition and three for bestowal, is not unwise, provided that we too can say, "for their sakes i sanctify myself." but the two qualifications of the teacher already named will not alone suffice. i have known persons who were sympathetically imaginative, and who could not be denied to possess large intellectual wealth, who still failed as teachers. one needs a third something, the power to invigorate life through learning. we do not always notice how knowledge naturally buffets. it is offensive stuff, and makes young and wholesome minds rebel. and well it may; for when we learn anything, we are obliged to break up the world, inspect it piecemeal, and let our minds seize it bit by bit. now about a fragment there is always something repulsive. any one who is normally constituted must draw back in horror, feeling that what is brought him has little to do with the beautiful world he has known. where was there ever a healthy child who did not hate the multiplication table? a boy who did not detest such abstractions as seven times eight would hardly be worth educating. by no ingenuity can we relieve knowledge of this unfortunate peculiarity. it must be taken in disjointed portions. that is the way attention is made. in consequence each of us must be to some extent a specialist, devoting himself to certain sides of the world and neglecting others quite as important. these are the conditions under which we imperfect creatures work. our sight is not world-wide. when we give our attention to one object, by that very act we withdraw it from others. in this way our children must learn and have their expansive natures subdued to pedagogic exigencies. because this belittlement through the method of approach is inevitable, it is all-important that the teacher should possess a supplemental dignity, replacing the oppressive sense of pettiness with stimulating intimations of high things in store. partly on this account a book is an imperfect instructor. truth there, being impersonal, seems untrue, abstract, and insignificant. it needs to shine through a human being before it can exert its vital force on a young student. quite as much for vital transmission as for intellectual elucidation, is a teacher employed. his consolidated character exhibits the gains which come from study. he need not point them out. if he is a scholar, there will appear in him an augustness, accuracy, fulness of knowledge, a buoyant enthusiasm even in drudgery, and an unshakable confidence that others must soon see and enjoy what has enriched himself; and all this will quickly convey itself to his students and create attention in his classroom. such kindling of interest is the great function of the teacher. people sometimes say, "i should like to teach if only pupils cared to learn." but then there would be little need of teaching. boys who have made up their minds that knowledge is worth while are pretty sure to get it, without regard to teachers. our chief concern is with those who are unawakened. in the sistine chapel michael angelo has depicted the almighty moving in clouds over the rugged earth where lies the newly created adam, hardly aware of himself. the tips of the fingers touch, the lord's and adam's, and the huge frame loses its inertness and rears itself into action. such may be the electrifying touch of the teacher. but it must be confessed that not infrequently, instead of invigorating life through knowledge, we teachers reduce our classes to complete passivity. the blunder is not altogether ours, but is suggested by certain characteristics of knowledge itself: for how can a learner begin without submitting his mind, accepting facts, listening to authority, in short becoming obedient? he is called on to put aside his own notions and take what truth dictates. i have said that knowledge buffets, forcing us into an almost slavish attitude, and that this is resented by vigorous natures. in almost every school some of the most original, aggressive, and independent boys stand low in their classes, while at the top stand "grinds,"--objects of horror to all healthy souls. now it is the teacher's business to see that the onslaught of knowledge does not enfeeble. between the two sides of knowledge, information and intelligence, he is to keep the balance true. while a boy is taking in facts, facts not allowed to be twisted by any fancy or carelessness, he is all the time to be made to feel that these facts offer him a field for critical and constructive action. if they leave him inactive, docile, and plodding, there is something wrong with the teaching. facts are pernicious when they subjugate and do not quicken the mind that grasps them. education should unfold us and truth together; and to enable it to do so the learner must never be allowed to sink into a mere recipient. he should be called on to think, to observe, to form his own judgments, even at the risk of error and crudity. temporary one-sidedness and extravagance is not too high a price to pay for originality. and this development of personal vigor, emphasized in our day by the elective system and independent research, is the great aim of education. it should affect the lower ranges of study as truly as the higher. the mere contemplation of truth is always a deadening affair. many a dull class in school and college would come to life if simply given something to do. until the mind reacts for itself on what it receives, its education is hardly begun. the teacher who leads it so to react may be truly called "productive," productive of human beings. the noble word has recently become germanized and corrupted, and is now hardly more than a piece of educational slang. according to the judgments of to-day a teacher may be unimaginative, pedantic, dull, and may make his students no less so; he will still deserve a crown of wild olive as a "productive" man if he neglects his classroom for the printing press. but this is to put first things second and second things first. he who is original and fecund, and knows how to beget a similar spirit in his students, will naturally wish to express himself beyond his classroom. by snatching the fragments of time which his arduous work allows, he may accomplish much worthy writing and probably increase too his worth for his college, his students, and himself. but the business of book-making is, after all, collateral with us teachers. not for this are we employed, desirable though it is for showing the kind of mind we bear. many of my most productive colleagues have printed little or nothing, though they have left a deep mark on the life and science of our time. i would encourage publication. it keeps the solitary student healthy, enables him to find his place among his fellows, and more distinctly to estimate the contributions he is making to his subject. but let him never neglect his proper work for that which must always have in it an element of advertising. too long i have delayed the fourth, the disagreeable, section of my paper. briefly it is this: a teacher must have a readiness to be forgotten. and what is harder? we may be excellent persons, may be daily doing kindnesses, and yet not be quite willing to have those kindnesses overlooked. many a man is ready to be generous, if by it he can win praise. the love of praise,--it is almost our last infirmity; but there is no more baffling infirmity for the teacher. if praise and recognition are dear to him, he may as well stop work. dear to him perhaps they must be, as a human being; but as a teacher, he is called on to rise above ordinary human conditions. whoever has followed me thus far will perceive the reason. i have shown that a teacher does not live for himself, but for his pupil and for the truth which he imparts. his aim is to be a colorless medium through which that truth may shine on opening minds. how can he be this if he is continually interposing himself and saying, "instead of looking at the truth, my children, look at me and see how skilfully i do my work. i thought i taught you admirably to-day. i hope you thought so too." no, the teacher must keep himself entirely out of the way, fixing young attention on the proffered knowledge and not on anything so small as the one who brings it. only so can he be vicarious, whole-hearted in invigorating the lives committed to his charge. moreover, any other course is futile. we cannot tell whether those whom we are teaching have taken our best points or not. those best points, what are they? we shall count them one thing, our pupils another. we gather what seems to us of consequence and pour it out upon our classes. but if their minds are not fitted to receive it, the little creatures have excellent protective arrangements which they draw down, and all we pour is simply shed as if nothing had fallen; while again we say something so slight that we hardly notice it, but, happening to be just the nutritive element which that small life then needs, it is caught up and turned into human fibre. we cannot tell. we work in the dark. out upon the waters our bread is cast, and if we are wise we do not attempt to trace its return. on this point i received capital instruction from one of my pupils. in teaching a course on english empiricism i undertook a line of exposition which i knew was abstruse. indeed, i doubted if many of the class could follow; but there on the front seat sat one whose bright eyes were ever upon me. it seemed worth while to teach my three or four best men, that man in particular. by the end of the term there were many grumblings. my class did not get much out of me that year. they graduated, and a couple of years later this young fellow appeared at my door to say that he could not pass through cambridge without thanking me for his work on locke, berkeley, and hume. pleased to be assured that my questionable methods were justified, and unwilling to drop a subject so agreeable, i asked if he could tell precisely where the value of the course lay. "certainly," he answered. "it all centred in a single remark of locke's. locke said we ought to have clear and distinct ideas. i don't think i got anything else out of the course." well, at first i was inclined to think the fellow foolish, so to mistake a bit of commonplace for gospel truth. why did he not listen to some of the profound things i was saying? but on reflection i saw that he was right and i wrong. that trivial saying had come to him at a critical moment as a word of power; while the deep matters which interested me, and which i had been offering him so confidently day by day, being unsuited to him, had passed him by. he had not heard them. to such proper unthankfulness we teachers must accustom ourselves. we cannot tell what are our good deeds, and shall only plague ourselves and hinder our classes if we try to find out. let us display our subjects as lucidly as possible, allow our pupils considerable license in apprehension, and be content ourselves to escape observation. but though what we do remains unknown, its results often awake deep affection. few in the community receive love more abundantly than we. wherever we go, we meet a smiling face. throughout the world, by some good fortune, the period of learning is the period of romance. in those halcyon days of our boys and girls we have a share, and the golden lights which flood the opening years are reflected on us. though our pupils cannot follow our efforts in their behalf, and indeed ought not,--it being our art to conceal our art,--yet they perceive that in the years when their happy expansion occurred we were their guides. to us, therefore, their blind affections cling as to few beside their parents. it is better to be loved than to be understood. perhaps some readers of this paper will begin to suspect that it is impossible to be a good teacher. certainly it is. each of the four qualifications i have named is endless. not one of them can be fully attained. we can always be more imaginative, wealthy, stimulating, disinterested. each year we creep a little nearer to our goal, only to find that a finished teacher is a contradiction in terms. our reach will forever exceed our grasp. yet what a delight in approximation! even in our failures there is comfort, when we see that they are generally due not to technical but to personal defects. we have been putting ourselves forward, or have taught in mechanical rather than vital fashion, or have not undertaken betimes the labor of preparation, or have declined the trouble of vicariousness. evidently, then, as we become better teachers we also become in some sort better persons. our beautiful art, being so largely personal, will at last be seen to connect itself with nearly all other employments. every mother is a teacher. every minister. the lawyer teaches the jury, the doctor his patient. the clever salesman might almost be said to use teaching in dealing with his customer, and all of us to be teachers of one another in daily intercourse. as teaching is the most universal of the professions, those are fortunate who are able to devote their lives to its enriching study. ii ethical instruction in the schools within a few years a strong demand has arisen for ethical teaching in the schools. teachers themselves have become interested, and wherever they are gathered the question, "what shall this teaching be?" is eagerly discussed. the educational journals are full of it. within a year there have been published seven books on the subject. several of them--it would be hardly an exaggeration to say all--are books of marked excellence. seldom does so large a percentage of books in a single year, in a single country, and on a single subject reach so high a level of merit. i shall not criticise them, however, nor even engage in the popular discussion of which they form a part. that discussion concerns itself chiefly with the methods by which ethics may be taught. i wish to go behind this controversy and to raise the previous question whether ethics should be taught to boys and girls at all. evidently there are strong reasons why it should be. always and everywhere it is important that men should be good. to be a good man!--it is more than half the fulfilment of life. better to miss fame, wealth, learning, than to miss righteousness. and in america, too, we must demand not the mere trifle that men shall be good for their own sakes, but good in order that the life of the state may be preserved. a widespread righteousness is in a republic a matter of necessity. where all rule all, each man who falls into evil courses infects his neighbor, corrupting the law and corrupting still more its enforcement. the question of manufacturing moral men becomes, accordingly, in a democracy, urgent to a degree unknown in a country where but a few selected persons guide the state. there is also special urgency at the present time. the ancient and accredited means of training youth in goodness are becoming, i will not say broken, but enfeebled and distrusted. hitherto a large part of the moral instruction of mankind has been superintended by the clergy. in every civilized state the expensive machinery of the church has been set up and placed in the hands of men of dignity, because it has been believed that by no other engine can we so effectively render people upright. i still believe this, and i am pretty confident that a good many years will pass before we shall dispense with the ennobling services of our ministers. and yet it is plain that much of the work which formerly was exclusively theirs is so no longer. much of it is performed by books, newspapers, and facilitated human intercourse. ministers do not now speak with their old authority; they speak merely as other men speak; and we are all asking whether in the immense readjustment of faith now going on something of their peculiar power of moral as well as of intellectual guidance may not slip away. the home too, which has hitherto been the fundamental agency for fostering morality in the young, is just now in sore need of repair. we can no longer depend upon it alone for moral guardianship. it must be supplemented, possibly reconstructed. new dangers to it have arisen. in the complex civilization of city life, in the huge influx of untutored foreigners, in the substitution of the apartment for the house, in the greater ease of divorce, in the larger freedom now given to children, to women, in the breaking down of class distinctions and the readier accessibility of man to man, there are perils for boy and girl which did not exist before. and while these changes in the outward form of domestic life are advancing, certain protections against moral peril which the home formerly afforded have decayed. it would be curious to ascertain in how many families of our immediate time daily prayers are used, and to compare the number with that of those in which the holy practice was common fifty years ago. it would be interesting to know how frequently parents to-day converse with their children on subjects serious, pious, or personal. the hurry of modern life has swept away many uplifting intimacies. even in families which prize them most, a few minutes only can be had each day for such fortifying things. domestic training has shrunk, while the training of haphazard companions, the training of the streets, the training of the newspapers, have acquired a potency hitherto unknown. it is no wonder, then, that in such a moral crisis the community turns to that agency whose power is already felt beneficently in a multitude of other directions, the school. the cry comes to us teachers, "we established you at first to make our children wiser; we want you now for a profounder service. can you not unite moral culture with intellectual?" it may be; though discipline of the passions is enormously more difficult than discipline of the mind. but at any rate we must acknowledge that our success in the mental field is largely staked on our success in the moral. our pupils will not learn their lessons in arithmetic if they have not already made some progress in concentration, in self-forgetfulness, in acceptance of duty. nor can we touch them in a single section of their nature and hope for results. instruction must go all through. we are obliged to treat each little human being as a whole if we would have our treatment wholesome. and then too we have had such successes elsewhere that we may well feel emboldened for the new task. nearly the whole of life is now advantageously surveyed in one form or another in our schools and colleges; and we have usually found that advance in instruction develops swiftly into betterment of practice. we teach, for example, social science and analyze the customs of the past; but soon we find bands of young men and women in all the important cities criticising the government of those cities, suggesting better modes of voting, wiser forms of charity; and before we know it the community is transformed. we cannot teach the science of electricity without improving our street-cars, or at least without raising hopes that they may some day be improved. each science claims its brother art. theory creeps over into action. it will not stay by itself; it is pervasive, diffusive. and as this pervasive character of knowledge in the lower ranges is perceived, we teachers are urged to press forward its operation in the higher also. why have we no school-books on human character, the highest of all themes? once direct the attention of our pupils to this great topic, and may we not ultimately bring about that moral enlargement for which the time waits? i have stated somewhat at length the considerations in behalf of ethical instruction in the schools because those considerations on the whole appear to me illusory. i cannot believe such instruction feasible. were it so, of course it would have my eager support. but i see in it grave difficulties, difficulties imperfectly understood; and a difficulty disregarded becomes a danger, possibly a catastrophe. let me explain in a few words where the danger lies. between morals and ethics there is a sharp distinction, frequently as the two words are confused. usage, however, shows the meaning. if i call a man a man of bad morals, i evidently mean to assert that his conduct is corrupt; he does things which the majority of mankind believe he ought not to do. it is his practice i denounce, not his intellectual formulation. in the same way we speak of the petty morals of society, referring in the phrase to the small practices of mankind, the unnumbered actions which disclose good or bad principles unconsciously hidden within. it is entirely different when i call a man's ethics bad. i then declare that i do not agree with his comprehension of moral principles. his practice may be entirely correct. i do not speak of that; it is his understanding that is at fault. for ethics, as was long ago remarked, is related to morals as geometry to carpentry: the one is a science, the other its practical embodiment. in the former, consciousness is a prime factor; from the latter it often is absent altogether. now what is asked of us teachers is that we invite our pupils to direct study of the principles of right conduct, that we awaken their consciousness about their modes of life, and so by degrees impart to them a science of righteousness. this is theory, ethics; not morals, practice; and in my judgment it is dangerous business, with the slenderest chance of success. useless is it to say that the aim of such instruction need not be ethical, but moral. whatever the ultimate aim, the procedure of instruction is of necessity scientific. it operates through intelligence, and only gets into life so far as the instructed intelligence afterward becomes a director. this is the work of books and teachers everywhere: they discipline the knowing act, and so bring within its influence that multitude of matters which depend for excellent adjustment on clear and ordered knowledge. such a work, however, is evidently but partial. many matters do not take their rise in knowledge at all. morality does not. the boy as soon as born is adopted unconsciously into some sort of moral world. while he is growing up and is thinking of other things, habits of character are seizing him. by the time he comes to school he is incrusted with customs. the idea that his moral education can be fashioned by his teacher in the same way as his education in geography is fantastic. it is only his ethical training which may now begin. the attention of such a boy may be called to habits already formed; he may be led to dissect those habits, to pass judgment on them as right or wrong, and to inquire why and how they may be bettered. this is the only power teaching professes: it critically inquires, it awakens interest, it inspects facts, it discovers laws. and this process applied in the field of character yields ethics, the systematized knowledge of human conduct. it does not primarily yield morals, improved performance. nor indeed is performance likely to be improved by ethical enlightenment if, as i maintain, the whole business of self-criticism in the child is unwholesome. by a course of ethical training a young person will, in my view, much more probably become demoralized than invigorated. what we ought to desire, if we would have a boy grow morally sturdy, is that introspection should not set in early and that he should not become accustomed to watch his conduct. and the reason is obvious. much as we incline to laud our prerogative of consciousness and to assert that it is precisely what distinguishes us from our poor relations, the brutes, we still must acknowledge that consciousness has certain grave defects when exalted into the position of a guide. large tracts of life lie altogether beyond its control, and the conduct which can be affected by it is apt--especially in the initial stages--to be rendered vague, slow, vacillating, and distorted. only instinctive action is swift, sure, and firm. for this reason we distrust the man who calculates his goodness. we find him vulgar and repellent. we are far from sure that he will keep that goodness long. if i offer to shake hands with a man with precisely that degree of warmth which i have decided it is well to express, will he willingly take my hand? a few years ago there were some nonsense verses on this subject going the rounds of the english newspapers. they seemed to me capitally to express the morbid influence of consciousness in a complex organism. they ran somewhat as follows: the centipede was happy, quite, until the toad for fun said, "pray which leg comes after which?" this worked her mind to such a pitch she lay distracted in a ditch. considering how to run. and well she might! imagine the hundred legs steered consciously--now it is time to move this one, now to move that! the creature would never move at all, but would be as incapable of action as hamlet himself. and are the young less complex than centipedes? shall their little lives be suddenly turned over to a fumbling guide? shall they not rather be stimulated to unconscious rectitude, gently led into those blind but holy habits which make goodness easy, and so be saved from the perilous perplexities of marking out their own way? so thought the sagacious aristotle. to the crude early opinion of socrates that virtue is knowledge, he opposed the ripened doctrine that it is practice and habit. this, then, is the inexpugnable objection to the ethical instruction of children: the end which should be sought is performance, not knowledge, and we cannot by supplying the latter induce the former. but do not these considerations cut the ground from under practical teaching of every kind? instruction is given in other subjects in the hope that it may finally issue in strengthened action, and i have acknowledged that as a fact this hope is repeatedly justified. why may not a similar result appear in ethics? what puts a difference between that study and electricity, social science, or manual training? this: according as the work studied includes a creative element and is intended to give expression to a personal life, consciousness becomes an increasingly dangerous dependence. why are there no classes and text-books for the study of deportment? is it because manners are unimportant? no, but because they make the man, and to be of any worth must be an expression of his very nature. conscious study would tend to distort rather than to fashion them. their practice cannot be learned in the same way as carpentry. but an analogy more enlightening for showing the inaptitude of the child for direct study of the laws of conduct is found in the case of speech. between speech and morals the analogies are subtle and wide. so minute are they that speech might almost be called a kind of vocal morality. like morality, it is something possessed long before we are aware of it, and it becomes perfect or debased with our growth. we employ it to express ourselves and to come into ordered contact with our neighbor. by it we confer benefits and by it receive benefits in turn. rigid as are its laws, we still feel ourselves free in its use, though obliged to give to our spontaneous feelings forms constructed by men of the past. ease, accuracy, and scope are here confessedly of vast consequence. it has consequently been found a matter of extreme difficulty to bring a young person's attention helpfully to bear upon his speech. indirect methods seem to be the only profitable ones. philology, grammar, rhetoric, systematic study of the laws of language, are dangerous tools for a boy below his teens. the child who is to acquire excellent speech must be encouraged to keep attention away from the words he uses and to fix it upon that which he is to express. abstract grammar will either confound the tongue which it should ease, or else it will seem to have no connection with living reality, but to be an ingenious contrivance invented by some dry-as-dust for the torture of schoolboys. and a similar pair of dangers await the young student of the laws of conduct. on the one hand, it is highly probable that he will not understand what his teacher is talking about. he may learn his lesson; he may answer questions correctly; but he will assume that these things have nothing to do with him. he becomes dulled to moral distinctions, and it is the teaching of ethics that dulls him. we see the disastrous process in full operation in a neighboring field. there are countries which have regular public instruction in religion. the argument runs that schools are established to teach what is of consequence to citizens, and religion is of more consequence than anything else. therefore introduce it, is the conclusion. therefore keep it out, is the sound conclusion. it lies too near the life to be announced in official propositions and still to retain a recognizable meaning. i have known a large number of german young men. i have yet to meet one whose religious nature has been deepened by his instruction in school. and the lack of influence is noticeable not merely in those who have failed in the study, but quite as much in those who have ranked highest. in neither case has the august discipline meant anything. the danger would be wider, the disaster from the benumbing influence more serious, if ethical instruction should be organized; wider, because morality underlies religion, and insensitiveness to the moral claim is more immediately and concretely destructive. yet here, as in the case of religion, of manners, or of speech, the child will probably take to heart very little of what is said. at most he will assume that the text-book statement of the rules of righteousness represents the way in which the game of life is played by some people; but he will prefer to play it in his own way still. young people are constructed with happy protective arrangements; they are enviably impervious. so in expounding moral principles in the schoolroom, i believe we shall touch the child in very few moral spots. nevertheless, it becomes dulled and hardened if it listens long to sacred words untouched. but the benumbing influence is not the gravest danger; analogies of speech suggest a graver still. if we try to teach speech too early and really succeed in fixing the child's attention upon its tongue, we enfeeble its power of utterance. consciousness once awakened, the child is perpetually inquiring whether the word is the right word, and suspecting that it is not quite sufficiently right to be allowed free passage. just so a momentous trouble appears when the moral consciousness has been too early stirred. that self-questioning spirit springs up which impels its tortured possessor to be continually fingering his motives in unwholesome preoccupation with himself. instead of entering heartily into outward interests, the watchful little moralist is "questioning about himself whether he has been as good as he should have been, and whether a better man would not have acted otherwise." no part of us is more susceptible of morbidness than the moral sense; none demoralizes more thoroughly when morbid. the trouble, too, affects chiefly those of the finer fibre. the majority of healthy children, as has been said, harden themselves against theoretic talk, and it passes over them like the wind. here and there a sensitive soul absorbs the poison and sets itself seriously to work installing duty as the mainspring of its life. we all know the unwholesome result: the person from whom spontaneity is gone, who criticises everything he does, who has lost his sense of proportion, who teases himself endlessly and teases his friends--so far as they remain his friends--about the right and wrong of each petty act. it is a disease, a moral disease, and takes the place in the spiritual life of that which the doctors are fond of calling "nervous prostration" in the physical. few countries have been so desolated by it as new england. it is our special scourge. many here carry a conscience about with them which makes us say, "how much better off they would be with none!" i declare, at times when i see the ravages which conscientiousness works in our new england stock, i wish these new englanders had never heard moral distinctions mentioned. better their vices than their virtues. the wise teacher will extirpate the first sproutings of the weed; for a weed more difficult to extirpate when grown there is not. we run a serious risk of implanting it in our children when we undertake their class instruction in ethics. such, then, are some of the considerations which should give us pause when the public is clamoring at our schoolhouse doors and saying to us teachers, "we cannot bring up our children so as to make them righteous citizens. undertake the work for us. you have done so much already that we turn to you again and entreat your help." i think we must sadly reply, "there are limits to what we can do. if you respect us, you will not urge us to do the thing that is not ours. by pressing into certain regions we shall bring upon you more disaster than benefit." fully, however, as the dangers here pointed out may be acknowledged, much of a different sort remains also true. have we not all received a large measure of moral culture at school? and are we quite content to say that the greatest of subjects is unteachable? i would not say this; on the contrary, i hold that no college is properly organized where the teaching of ethics does not occupy a position of honor. the college, not the school, is the place for the study. it would be absurd to maintain that all other subjects of study are nutritious to man except that of his own nature; but it is far from absurd to ask that a young man first possess a nature before he undertakes to analyze it. a study useless for developing initial power may still be highly profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. youth should be spontaneous, instinctive, ebullient; reflection whispers to the growing man. many of the evils that i have thus far traced are brought about by projecting upon a young mind problems which it has not yet encountered in itself. such problems abound in the later teens and twenties, and then is the time to set about their discussion. but even in college i would have ethical study more guarded than the rest. had i the power, i would never allow it to be required of all. it should be offered only as an elective and in the later years of the course. when i entered college i was put in my freshman year into a prescribed study of this sort. happily i received no influence from it whatever. it passed over and left me untouched; and i think it had no more effect on the majority of my classmates. possibly some of the more reflective took it to heart and were harmed; but in general it was a mere wasting of precious ointment which might have soothed our wounds if elected in the senior year. of course great teachers defy all rules; and under a hopkins, a garman, or a hyde, the distinctions of elective and prescribed become unimportant. yet the principle is clear: wait till the young man is confronted with the problems before you invite him to their solution. has he grown up unquestioning? has he accepted the moral code inherited from honored parents? can he rest in wise habits? then let him be thankful and go his way untaught. but has he, on the other hand, felt that the moral mechanism by which he was early guided does not fit all cases? has he found one class of duties in conflict with another? has he discovered that the moral standards obtaining in different sections of society, in different parts of the world, are irreconcilable? in short, is he puzzled and desirous of working his way through his puzzles, of facing them and tracking them to their beginnings? then is he ripe for the study of ethics. yet when it is so undertaken, when those only are invited to partake of it who in their own hearts have heard its painful call, even then i would hedge it about with two conditions. first, it should be pursued as a science, critically, and the student should be informed at the outset that the aim of the course is knowledge, not the endeavor to make better men. and, secondly, i would insist that the students themselves do the work; that they do not passively listen to opinions set forth by their instructor, but that they address themselves to research and learn to construct moral judgments which will bear critical inspection. some teachers, no doubt, will think it wisest to accomplish these things by tracing the course of ethics in the past, treating it as a historical science. others will prefer, by announcing their own beliefs, to stimulate their students to criticise those beliefs and to venture on their own little constructions. the method is unimportant; it is only of consequence that the students themselves do the ethicizing, that they trace the logic of their own beliefs and do not rest in dogmatic statement. yet such an undertaking may well sober a teacher. i never see my class in ethics come to their first lecture that i do not tremble and say to myself that i am set for the downfall of some of them. in every such studious company there must be unprepared persons whom the teacher will damage. he cannot help it. he must move calmly forward, confident in his subject, but knowing that because it is living it is dangerous. iii moral instruction in the schools the preceding paper has discussed sufficiently the negative side of moral education. it has shown how children should not be approached. but few readers will be willing to leave the matter here. are there no positive measures to be taken? is there no room in our schools for any teaching of morality, or must the most important of subjects be altogether banished from their doors? there is much which might lead us to think so. if a teacher may not instruct his pupils in morality, what other concern with it he should have is not at once apparent. one may even suspect that attention to it will distract him from his proper work. every human undertaking has some central aim and succeeds by loyalty to it. each profession, for example, singles out one of our many needs and to this devotes itself whole-heartedly. such a restriction is wise. no profession could be strong which attempted to meet the requirements of man as a whole. the physician accordingly selects his little aim of extirpating suffering and disease. his studies, his occupation, his aptitudes, his hopes of gain, his dignity as a public character, all have reference to this. whatever is incompatible with it, of however great worth in itself, is rightly ignored. to save the soul of a patient may be of larger consequence than to invigorate his body. but the faithful physician attends to spiritual matters only so far as he thinks them conducive to bodily health. or again the painter, because he is setting ocular beauty before us, concerns himself with harmonies of color, balance of masses, rhythms of line, rather than with history, anecdote, or incitements to noble living. i once heard a painter say, "there is religion enough for me in seeing how half a dozen figures can be made to go together," and i honored him for the saying. so too i should hold that the proper aim of the merchant is money-making and that only so much of charity or public usefulness can fairly be demanded of him as does not conflict with his profits. it is true that there are large ways and petty ways of acquiring gain, and one's own advantage cannot for long be separated from that of others. still, the merchant rightly desists from any course which he finds in the long run commercially unprofitable. what, then, is the central aim of teaching? confessedly it is the impartation of knowledge. whatever furthers this should be eagerly pursued; and all that hinders it, rejected. when schoolmasters understand their business it will be useless for the public to call to them, "we want our children to be patriotic. drop for a time your multiplication table while you rouse enthusiasm for the old flag." they would properly reply, "we are ready to teach american history. as a part of human knowledge, it belongs to our province. but though the politicians fail to stir patriotism, do not put their neglected work upon us. we have more than we can attend to already." now in my previous paper i showed how a theoretic knowledge of good conduct had better not be given to children. by exposition of holy laws they are not nourished, but enfeebled. what they need is right habits, not an understanding of them: to become good persons rather than to acquire a critical acquaintance with goodness. what moral function then remains for the schools? to furnish knowledge of morality has been proved dangerous. for teachers to turn away from imparting knowledge and devote their scanty time to fashioning character is to abandon work which they alone are fitted to perform. yet to let them send forth boys and girls alert in mind and loose in character is something which no community will long endure. until one has clearly faced these alternative perplexities he is in no condition to advise about grafting morality into a school curriculum; for until then he will be pretty sure to be misled by the popular notion of morality as a thing apart, demanding separate study, a topic like geography or english literature. but the morality nutritious for school-children is nothing of this kind. no additional hour need be provided for its teaching. in teaching anything, we teach it. a false antithesis was therefore set up just now when we suggested that a teacher's business was to impart knowledge rather than to fashion character. he cannot do the one without the other. let him be altogether true to his scientific aims and refuse to accommodate them to anything else; he will be all the better teacher of morality. carlyle tells of a carpenter who broke all the ten commandments with every stroke of his hammer. a scholar breaks or keeps them with every lesson learned. so conditioned on morality is the process of knowing, so inwrought is it in the very structure of the school, that a school might well be called an ethical instrument and its daily sessions hours for the manufacture of character. only the species of character manufactured will largely depend on the teacher's acquaintance with the instrument he is using. to increase that acquaintance and give greater deftness in the use of so exquisite an instrument is the object of this paper. once mastered, the tools of his own trade will be more prized by the earnest teacher than any additional handbook of ethics. it will be easiest to point out the kind of moral instruction a school is fitted to give, if we distinguish with somewhat exaggerated sharpness its several lines of activity. a school is primarily a place of learning; it is unavoidably a social unit, and it is incidentally a dependent fellowship. no one of these aspects is ever absent from it. each affords its own opportunity for moral training. the combination of them gives a school its power. yet each is so detachable that it may well become the subject of independent study. i. a school is primarily a place of learning, and to this purpose all else in it is rightfully subordinated. but learning is itself an act, and one more dependent than most on moral guidance. it occurs, too, at a period of life whose chief business is the transformation of a thing of nature into a spiritual being. several stages in this spiritual transformation through which the process of learning takes us i will point out. a school generally gives a child his first acquaintance with an authoritatively organized world and reveals his dependence upon it. by nature, impulses and appetites rule him. a child is charmingly self-centred. the world and all its ordered goings he notices merely as ministering to his desires. nothing but what he wishes, and wishes just now, is important. he relates all this but little to the wishes of other people, to the inherent fixities of things, to his own future states, to whether one wish is compatible with another. his immediate mood is everything. of any difference between what is whimsical or momentary and what is rational or permanent he is oblivious. to him dreams and fancies are as substantial as stars, hills, or moving creatures. he has, in short, no idea of law nor any standards of reality. now it is the first business of instruction to impart such ideas and standards; but no less is this a work of moralization. the two accordingly go on together. whether we call the chaotic conditions of nature in which we begin life ignorance or deficient morality, it is equally the work of education to abolish them. both education and morality set themselves to rationalize the moody, lawless, transient, isolated, self-assertive, and impatient aspects of things, introducing the wondering scholar to the inherent necessities which surround him. "schoolmasters," says george herbert, "deliver us to laws." and probably most of us make our earliest acquaintance with these impalpable and controlling entities when we take our places in the school. there our primary lesson is submission. we are bidden to put away personal likings and see how in themselves things really are. eight times nine does not permit itself to be seventy-three or sixty-four, but exactly and forever seventy-two. cincinnati lies obstinately on the ohio, not on the mississippi, and it is nonsense to speak of daniel webster as a president of the united states. the agreement of verbs and nouns, the reactions of chemical elements were, it seems, settled some time before we appeared. they pay little attention to our humors. we must accept an already constituted world and adjust our little self to its august realities. of course the process is not completed at school. begun there, it continues throughout life; its extent, tenacity, and instantaneous application marking the degree which we reach in scientific and moral culture. let a teacher attempt to lighten the task of himself or his pupil by accepting an inexact observation, a slipshod remembrance, a careless statement, or a distorted truth, and he will corrupt the child's character no less than his intelligence. he confirms the child's habit of intruding himself into reality and of remaining listless when ordained facts are calling. education may well be defined as the banishment of moods at the bidding of the permanently real. but to acquire such obedient alertness persistence is necessary, and in gaining it a child wins a second victory over disorderly nature. by this he becomes acquainted not merely with an outer world, but with a still stranger object, himself. i have spoken already of the eagerness of young desires. they are blind and disruptive things. one of them pays small heed to another, but each blocks the other's way, preventing anything like a coherent and united life. a child is notoriously a creature of the moment, looking little before and after. he must be taught to do so before he can know anything or be anybody. a school matures him by connecting his doings of to-day with those of to-morrow. here he begins to estimate the worth of the present by noticing what it contributes to an organic plan. each hour of study brings precious discipline in preferring what is distantly important to what is momentarily agreeable. a personal being, in some degree emancipated from time, consequently emerges, and a selfhood appears, built up through enduring interests. the whole process is in the teacher's charge. it is his to enforce diligence and so to assist the vague little life to knit itself solidly together. nor should it be forgotten that to become each day the possessor of increasing stores of novel and interesting truths normally brings dignity and pleasure. this honorable delight reacts, too, on the process of learning, quickening its pace, sharpening its observation, and confirming its persistence. it is of no less importance for the character, to which it imparts ease, courage, beauty, and resourcefulness. but on the teacher it will depend whether such pleasure is found. a teacher who has entered deeply into his subject, and is not afraid of allowing enthusiasm to appear, will make the densest subject and the densest pupil glow; while a dull teacher can in a few minutes strip the most engrossing subject of interest and make the diligence exacted in its pursuit deadening. it is dangerous to dissociate toil and delight. the school is the place to initiate their genial union. whoever learns there to love knowledge, will be pretty secure of becoming an educated and useful man and of finding satisfaction in whatever employment may afterwards be his. one more contribution to character which comes from the school as a place of learning i will mention: it should create a sense of freedom. without this both learning and the learner are distorted. it is not enough that the child become submissive to an already constituted world, obedient to its authoritative organization; not enough that he find pleasure in it, or even discover himself emerging, as one day's diligence is bound up with that of another. all these influences may easily make him think of himself as a passive creature, and consequently leave him half formed. there is something more. rightly does the psalmist call the fear of the lord the beginning of wisdom rather than its end; for that education is defective which fashions a docile and slavish learner. as the child introduces order into his previously capricious acts, thoughts, and feelings, he should feel in himself a power of control unknown before, and be encouraged to find an honorable use for his very peculiarities. he should be brought to see that the world is unfinished and needs his joyful coöperation, that it has room for individual activity and admits rationally constructed purposes. from his earliest years a child should be encouraged to criticise, to have preferences, and to busy himself with imaginative constructions; for all this development of orderly freedom and of rejoicing in its exercise is building up at once both knowledge and character. ii. yet a school becomes an ethical instrument not merely through being a place of learning but because it is also a social unit. it is a coöperative group, or company of persons pledged every instant to consider one another, their common purpose being jarred by the obtrusion of any one's dissenting will. accordingly much that is proper elsewhere becomes improper here. as soon as a child enters a schoolroom he is impressed by the unaccustomed silence. a happy idea springs in his mind and clamors for the same outgo it would have at home, but it is restrained in deference to the assembled company. in crossing the room he is taught to tread lightly, though for himself a joyous dash might be agreeable; but might it not distract the attention of those who are studying? the school begins at nine o'clock and each recitation at its fixed hour, these times being no better than others except as facilitating common corporate action. to this each one's private ways become adjusted. the subordination of each to all is written large on every arrangement of school life; and it needs must be so if there is to be moral advance. for morality itself is nothing but the acceptance of such habits as express the helpful relations of society and the individual. punctuality, order, quiet, are signs that the child's life is beginning to be socialized. a teacher who fails to impress their elementary righteousness on his pupils brutalizes every child in his charge. such relations between the social whole and the part assume a variety of forms, and the school is the best place for introducing a child to their niceties. those other persons whom a schoolboy is called on continually to regard may be either his superiors, equals, or inferiors. to each we have specific duties, expressed in an appropriate type of manners. our teachers are above us,--above us in age, experience, wisdom, and authority. to treat them as comrades is unseemly. confession of their superiority colors all our approaches. they are to be listened to as others are not. their will has the right of way. our bearing toward them, however trustful or even affectionate, shows a respectfulness somewhat removed from familiarity. on the other hand schoolmates are comrades, at least those of the same sex, class, strength, and intelligence. among them we assert ourselves freely, yet with constant care to secure no less freedom for them, and we guard them against any damage or annoyance which our hasty assertiveness might cause. in case of clash between their interest and our own, ours is withdrawn. and then toward those who are below us, either in rank or powers, helpfulness springs forth. we are eager to bridge over the separating chasm and by our will to abolish hindering defects. these three types of personal adjustment--respect, courtesy, and helpfulness, with their wide variety of combination--form the groundwork of all good manners. in their beginnings they need prompting and oversight from some one who is already mature. a school which neglects to cultivate them works almost irreparable injury to its pupils. for if these possibilities of refined human intercourse are not opened in the school years, it is with great difficulty they are arrived at afterwards. the spiritualizing influence of the school as a social unit is, however, not confined to the classroom. it is quite as active on the playground. there a boy learns to play fair, accustoms himself to that greatest of social ties, _l'esprit du corps_. throughout life a man needs continually to merge his own interests in those of a group. he must act as the father of a family, an operative in a factory, a voter of boston, an american citizen, a member of an engine company, union, church, or business firm. his own small concerns are taken up into these larger ones, and devotion to them is not felt as self-sacrifice. a preparation for such moral ennoblement is laid in the sports of childhood. what does a member of the football team care for battered shins or earth-scraped hands? his side has won, and his own gains and losses are forgotten. soon his team goes forth against an outside team, and now the honor of the whole school is in his keeping. what pride is his! as he puts on his uniform, he strips off his isolated personality and stands forth as the trusted champion of an institution. nor does this august supersession of the private consciousness by the public arise in connection with sports alone. as a member of the school, a boy acts differently from what he otherwise would. there is a standard of conduct recognized as suitable for a washington school boy, and from it his own does not widely depart. for good or for ill each school has its ideals of "good form" which are compulsive over its members and are handed on from class to class. to assist in moulding, refining, and maintaining these is the weightiest work of a schoolmaster. for these ideals have about them the sacredness of what is traditional, institutional, and are of an unseen, august, and penetrative power, comparable to nothing else in character-formation. to modify them ever so slightly a teacher should be content to work for years. iii. a third aspect of the school i have called its character as a dependent fellowship, and i have said that this is merely incidental. a highly important incident it is, however, and one that never fails to recur. what i would indicate by the dark phrase is this: in every school an imperfect life is associated with one similar but more advanced, one from which it perpetually receives influences that are not official nor measurable in money payment. a teacher is hired primarily to teach, and with a view also to his ability to keep order throughout his little society and to make his authority respected there. but side by side with these public duties runs the expression of his personality. this is his own, something which he hides or discloses at his pleasure. to his pupils, however, he must always appear in the threefold character of teacher, master, and developed human being; while they correspondingly present themselves to him as pupils, members of the school, and elementary human beings. of these pairs of relationships two are contrasted and supplemental,--teacher and pupil, master and scholar, having nothing in common, each being precisely what the other is not. as human beings, however, pupil and teacher are akin and removed from one another merely by the degree of progress made by the elder along a common path. here then the relation is one of fellowship, but a fellowship where the younger is largely dependent on the older for an understanding of what he should be. by example, friendship, and personal influence a teacher is certain to affect for good or ill every member of his school. in any account of the school as an ethical instrument this subtlest of its moral agencies deserves careful analysis. there are different sorts of example. i may observe how the shopman does up a package, and do one so myself the next morning. a companion may have a special inflection of voice, which i may catch. i may be drawn to industry by seeing how steadily my classmate studies. i may adopt a phrase, a smile, or a polite gesture, which was originally my teacher's. all these are cases of direct imitation. some one possesses a trait or an act which is passed over entire to another person, by whom it is substituted for one of his own. though the adoption of such alien ways is dangerous, society could hardly go on without it. it is its mode of transmitting what is supposed to be already tested and of lodging it in the lives of persons of less experience, with the least cost to the receivers. most teachers will have habits which their pupils may advantageously copy. yet supposing the imitated ways altogether good, which they seldom are, direct imitation is questionable as disregarding the particular character of him in whom the ways are found and in assuming that they will be equally appropriate if engrafted on anybody. but this is far from true, and consequently he who imitates much is, or soon will be, a weakling. on the whole, a teacher needs to guard his pupils against his imitable peculiarities. if sensible, he will snub whoever is disposed to repeat them. still, there is a noble sort of imitation, and that school is a poor place where it does not go on. certain persons have a strange power of invigorating us by their presence. when with them, we can do what seems impossible alone. they are our examples rather as wholes, and in their strength and spirit, than in their single traits or acts; and so whatever is most distinctive of ourselves becomes renewed through contact with them. it was said of the late dr. jowett that he sent out more pupils who were widely unlike himself than any oxford teacher of his time. that is enviable praise; for the wholesomeness of example is tested by inquiring whether it develops differences or has only the power of duplicating the original. every teacher knows how easy it is to send out cheap editions of himself, and in his weaker moments he inclines to issue them. but it is ignoble business. our manners and tones and phrases and the ways we have of doing this and that are after all valuable only as expressions of ourselves. for anybody else they are rubbish. what we should like to impart is that earnestness, accuracy, unselfishness, candor, reverence for god's laws, and sturdiness through hardship, toward which we aspire--matters in reality only half ours and which spring up with fresh and original beauty in every soul where they once take root. the dependent fellowship of a school makes these larger, enkindling, and diversifying influences peculiarly possible. it should be a teacher's highest ambition to exercise them. and though we might naturally expect that such inspiring teachers would be rare, i seldom enter a school without finding indications of the presence of at least one of them. but for those who would acquire this larger influence a strange caution is necessary: examples do not work that are not real. we sometimes try to "set an example," that is, to put on a type of character for the benefit of a beholder; and are usually disappointed. personal influence is not an affair of acting, but of being. those about us are strangely affected by what we veritably are, only slightly by what we would have them see. if we are indisposed to study, yet, knowing that industry is good for our scholars, assume a bustling diligence, they are more likely to feel the real portion of the affair, our laziness, than the activity which was designed for their copying. astonishingly shrewd are the young at scenting humbug and being unaffected by its pretensions. there is consequently no method to be learned for gaining personal influence. almost everything else requires plan and effort. this precious power needs little attention. it will not come in one way better than another. a fair measure of sympathetic tact is useful for starting it; but in the long run persons rude and suave, talkative and silent, handsome and ugly, stalwart and slight, possess it in about equal degree, the very characteristics which we should be disposed to count disadvantageous often seeming to confirm its hold. since it generally comes about that our individual interests become in some measure those of our pupils too, the only safe rule for personal influence is to go heartily about our own affairs, with a friendly spirit, and let our usual nature have whatever effect it may. still, there is one important mode of preparation: seeing that personal influence springs from what we are, we can really be a good deal. in a former paper, on the ideal teacher, i pointed this out and insisted that to be of any use in the classroom we teachers must bring there an already accumulated wealth. i will not repeat what i have said already, for a little reflection will convince any one that when he lacks personal influence he lacks much besides. a great example comes from a great nature, and we who live in fellowship with dependent and imitative youth should acquire natures large enough to serve both their needs and our own. let teachers be big, bounteous, and unconventional, and they will have few backward pupils. personal influence is often assumed to be greater the closer the intimacy. i believe the contrary to be the case. familiarity, says the shrewd proverb, breeds contempt. and certainly the young, who are little trained in estimating values, when brought into close association with their elders are apt to fix their attention on petty points and so to miss the larger lines of character. these they see best across an interval where, though visible only in outline, they are clear, unconfused with anything else, and so productive of their best effect. for the immature, distance is a considerable help in inducing enchantment, and nothing is so destructive of high influence as a slap-on-the-back acquaintance. one who is to help us much must be above us. a teacher should carefully respect his own dignity and no less carefully that of his pupil. in our eagerness to help, we may easily cheapen a fine nature by intruding too frequently into its reserves; and on the other hand i have observed that the boy who comes oftenest for advice is he who profits by it least. it is safest not to meddle much with the insides of our pupils. an occasional weighty word is more compulsive than frequent talk. within the limits then here marked out we who live in these dependent fellowships must submit to be admired. we must allow our pupils to idealize us and even offer ourselves for imitation. it is not pleasant. usually nobody knows his weaknesses better than the one who is mistaken for an example. but what a helpful mistake! what ennobling influences come to schoolboys when once they can think their teacher is the sort of person they would like to be! perhaps at the very moment that teacher is thinking they are the sort of person he would like to be. no matter. what they admire is worthy, even if not embodied precisely where they imagine. in humility we accept their admiration, knowing that nothing else can so enlarge their lives. as i recall my college days, there rise before me two teachers. as i entered the lecture rooms of those two men, i said to myself, "oh, if some day i could be like that!" and always afterwards as i went to those respective rooms, the impression of dignity deepened. i have forgotten the lessons i learned from those instructors. i never can discharge my debt to the instructors themselves. such are the moral resources of our schools. without turning aside in the slightest from their proper aim of imparting knowledge, teachers are able,--almost compelled--to supply their pupils with an intellectual, social, and personal righteousness. what more is wanted? when such opportunities for moral instruction are already within their grasp, is it worth while to incur the grave dangers of ethical instruction too? i think not, and i even fear that the establishment of courses in moral theory might weaken the sense of responsibility among the other teachers and lead them to attach less importance to the moralization of their pupils by themselves. this is burdensome business, no doubt, but we must not shift it to a single pair of shoulders. rather let us insist, when bad boys and girls continue in a school, that the blame belongs to the teachers as a whole, and not to some ethical coach. it is from the management and temper of a school that its formative influence proceeds. we cannot safely turn over anything so all-pervading to the instructors of a single department. that school where neatness, courtesy, simplicity, obtain; where enthusiasm goes with mental exactitude, thoroughness of work with interest, and absence of artificiality with refinement; where sneaks, liars, loafers, pretenders, rough persons are despised, while teachers who refuse to be mechanical hold sway--that school is engaged in moral training all day long. yet while i hold that the systematic study of ethics had on the whole better be left to the colleges, i confess that the line which i have attempted to draw between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the age which is best directed by instinct and the age when the questioning faculties put forward their inexorable demands, is a wavering one and cannot be sharply drawn. by one child it is crossed at one period, by another at another. seldom is the crossing noticed. before we are aware we find ourselves in sorrow on the farther side. happy the youth who during the transition time has a wise friend at hand to answer a question, to speak a steadying word, to open up the vista which at the moment needs to be cleared. only one in close personal touch is serviceable here. but in defect of home guidance, to us teachers falls much of the charge of developing the youthful consciousness of moral matters naturally, smoothly, and without jar. this has always been a part of the teacher's office. so far as i can ascertain schools of the olden time had in them a large amount of wholesome ethical training. schools were unsystematic then; there lay no examination paper ahead of them; there was time for pause and talk. if a subject arose which the teacher deemed important for his pupils' personal lives, he could lead them on to question about it, so far as he believed discussion useful. this sort of ethical training the hurry of our time has largely exterminated; and now that wholesome incidental instruction is gone, we demand in the modern way that a clear-cut department of ethics be introduced into the curriculum. but such things do not let themselves be treated in departmental fashion. the teacher must still work as a friend. he cannot be discharged from knowing when and how to stimulate a question, from discerning which boy or girl would be helped by consciousness and which would be harmed. in these high regions our pupils cannot be approached in classes. they require individual attention. and not because we are teachers merely, but because we and they are human beings, we must be ready with spiritual aid. iv self-cultivation in english english study has four aims: the mastery of our language as a science, as a history, as a joy, and as a tool. i am concerned with but one, the mastery of it as a tool. philology and grammar present it as a science; the one attempting to follow its words, the other its sentences, through all the intricacies of their growth, and so to manifest laws which lie hidden in these airy products no less than in the moving stars or the myriad flowers of spring. fascinating and important as all this is, i do not recommend it here. for i want to call attention only to that sort of english study which can be carried on without any large apparatus of books. for a reason similar, though less cogent, i do not urge historical study. probably the current of english literature is more attractive through its continuity than that of any other nation. notable works in verse and prose have appeared in long succession, and without gaps intervening, in a way that would be hard to parallel in any other language known to man. a bounteous endowment this for every english speaker, and one which should stimulate us to trace the marvellous and close-linked progress from the times of the saxons to those of tennyson and kipling. literature too has this advantage over every other species of art study, that everybody can examine the original masterpieces and not depend on reproductions, as in the cases of painting, sculpture, and architecture; or on intermediate interpretation, as in the case of music. to-day most of these masterpieces can be bought for a trifle, and even a poor man can follow through centuries the thoughts of his ancestors. but even so, ready of access as it is, english can be studied as a history only at the cost of solid time and continuous attention, much more time than the majority of those for whom i am writing can afford. by most of us our mighty literature cannot be taken in its continuous current, the later stretches proving interesting through relation with the earlier. it must be taken fragmentarily, if at all, the attention delaying on those parts only which offer the greatest beauty or promise the best exhilaration. in other words, english may be possible as a joy where it is not possible as a history. in the endless wealth which our poetry, story, essay, and drama afford, every disposition may find its appropriate nutriment, correction, or solace. he is unwise, however busy, who does not have his loved authors, veritable friends with whom he takes refuge in the intervals of work and by whose intimacy he enlarges, refines, sweetens, and emboldens his own limited existence. yet the fact that english as a joy must largely be conditioned by individual taste prevents me from offering general rules for its pursuit. the road which leads one man straight to this joy leads another to tedium. in all literary enjoyment there is something incalculable, something wayward, eluding the precision of rule, and rendering inexact the precepts of him who would point out the path to it. while i believe that many suggestions may be made, useful to the young enjoyer and promotive of his wise vagrancy, i shall not undertake here the complicated task of offering them. let enjoyment go, let history go, let science go, and still english remains--english as a tool. every hour our language is an engine for communicating with others, every instant for fashioning the thoughts of our own minds. i want to call attention to the means of mastering this curious and essential tool, and to lead every one who reads me to become discontented with his employment of it. the importance of literary power needs no long argument. everybody acknowledges it, and sees that without it all other human faculties are maimed. shakespeare says that death-bringing time "insults o'er dull and speechless tribes." it and all who live in it insult over the speechless person. so mutually dependent are we that on our swift and full communication with one another is staked the success of almost every scheme we form. he who can explain himself may command what he wants. he who cannot is left to the poverty of individual resource; for men do what we desire only when persuaded. the persuasive and explanatory tongue is, therefore, one of the chief levers of life. its leverage is felt within us as well as without, for expression and thought are integrally bound together. we do not first possess completed thoughts and then express them. the very formation of the outward product extends, sharpens, enriches the mind which produces, so that he who gives forth little after a time is likely enough to discover that he has little to give forth. by expression too we may carry our benefits and our names to a far generation. this durable character of fragile language puts a wide difference of worth between it and some of the other great objects of desire,--health, wealth, and beauty, for example. these are notoriously liable to accident. we tremble while we have them. but literary power, once ours, is more likely than any other possession to be ours always. it perpetuates and enlarges itself by the very fact of its existence and perishes only with the decay of the man himself. for this reason, because more than health, wealth, and beauty, literary style may be called the man, good judges have found in it the final test of culture and have said that he, and he alone, is a well-educated person who uses his language with power and beauty. the supreme and ultimate product of civilization, it has well been said, is two or three persons talking together in a room. between ourselves and our language there accordingly springs up an association peculiarly close. we are as sensitive to criticism of our speech as of our manners. the young man looks up with awe to him who has written a book, as already half divine; and the graceful speaker is a universal object of envy. but the very fact that literary endowment is immediately recognized and eagerly envied has induced a strange illusion in regard to it. it is supposed to be something mysterious, innate in him who possesses it and quite out of the reach of him who has it not. the very contrary is the fact. no human employment is more free and calculable than the winning of language. undoubtedly there are natural aptitudes for it, as there are for farming, seamanship, or being a good husband. but nowhere is straight work more effective. persistence, care, discriminating observation, ingenuity, refusal to lose heart,--traits which in every other occupation tend toward excellence,--tend toward it here with special security. whoever goes to his grave with bad english in his mouth has no one to blame but himself for the disagreeable taste; for if faulty speech can be inherited, it can be exterminated too. i hope to point out some of the methods of substituting good english for bad. and since my space is brief, and i wish to be remembered, i throw what i have to say into the form of four simple precepts which, if pertinaciously obeyed, will, i believe, give anybody effective mastery of english as a tool. first then, "look well to your speech." it is commonly supposed that when a man seeks literary power he goes to his room and plans an article for the press. but this is to begin literary culture at the wrong end. we speak a hundred times for every once we write. the busiest writer produces little more than a volume a year, not so much as his talk would amount to in a week. consequently through speech it is usually decided whether a man is to have command of his language or not. if he is slovenly in his ninety-nine cases of talking, he can seldom pull himself up to strength and exactitude in the hundredth case of writing. a person is made in one piece, and the same being runs through a multitude of performances. whether words are uttered on paper or to the air, the effect on the utterer is the same. vigor or feebleness results according as energy or slackness has been in command. i know that certain adaptations to a new field are often necessary. a good speaker may find awkwardnesses in himself when he comes to write, a good writer when he speaks. and certainly cases occur where a man exhibits distinct strength in one of the two, speaking or writing, and not in the other. but such cases are rare. as a rule, language once within our control can be employed for oral or for written purposes. and since the opportunities for oral practice enormously outbalance those for written, it is the oral which are chiefly significant in the development of literary power. we rightly say of the accomplished writer that he shows a mastery of his own tongue. this predominant influence of speech marks nearly all great epochs of literature. the homeric poems are addressed to the ear, not to the eye. it is doubtful if homer knew writing, certain that he knew profoundly every quality of the tongue,--veracity, vividness, shortness of sentence, simplicity of thought, obligation to insure swift apprehension. writing and rigidity are apt to go together. in homer's smooth-slipping verses one catches everywhere the voice. so too the aphorisms of hesiod might naturally pass from mouth to mouth, and the stories of herodotus be told by an old man at the fireside. early greek literature is plastic and garrulous. its distinctive glory is that it contains no literary note; that it gives forth human feeling not in conventional arrangement, but with apparent spontaneity--in short, that it is speech literature, not book literature. and the same tendency continued long among the greeks. at the culmination of their power the drama was their chief literary form,--the drama, which is but speech ennobled, connected, clarified. plato too, following the dramatic precedent and the precedent of his talking master, accepted conversation as his medium for philosophy and imparted to it the vivacity, ease, waywardness even, which the best conversation exhibits. nor was the experience of the greeks peculiar. our literature shows a similar tendency. its bookish times are its decadent times, its talking times its glory. chaucer, like herodotus, is a story-teller, and follows the lead of those who on the continent entertained courtly circles with pleasant tales. shakespeare and his fellows in the spacious times of great elizabeth did not concern themselves with publication. marston in one of his prefaces thinks it necessary to apologize for putting his piece in print, and says he would not have done such a thing if unscrupulous persons, hearing the play at the theatre, had not already printed corrupt versions of it. even the queen anne's men, far removed though they are from anything dramatic, still shape their ideals of literature by demands of speech. the essays of the spectator, the poems of pope, are the remarks of a cultivated gentleman at an evening party. here is the brevity, the good taste, the light touch, the neat epigram, the avoidance of whatever might stir passion, controversy, or laborious thought, which characterize the conversation of a well-bred man. indeed it is hard to see how any literature can be long vital which is based on the thought of a book and not on that of living utterance. unless the speech notion is uppermost, words will not run swiftly to their mark. they delay in delicate phrasings while naturalness and a sense of reality disappear. women are the best talkers. i sometimes please myself with noticing that three of the greatest periods of english literature coincide with the reigns of the three english queens. fortunate it is, then, that self-cultivation in the use of english must chiefly come through speech; because we are always speaking, whatever else we do. in opportunities for acquiring a mastery of language the poorest and busiest are at no large disadvantage as compared with the leisured rich. it is true the strong impulse which comes from the suggestion and approval of society may in some cases be absent, but this can be compensated by the sturdy purpose of the learner. a recognition of the beauty of well-ordered words, a strong desire, patience under discouragements, and promptness in counting every occasion as of consequence,--these are the simple agencies which sweep one on to power. watch your speech then. that is all which is needed. only it is desirable to know what qualities of speech to watch for. i find three,--accuracy, audacity, and range,--and i will say a few words about each. obviously, good english is exact english. our words should fit our thoughts like a glove and be neither too wide nor too tight. if too wide, they will include much vacuity beside the intended matter. if too tight, they will check the strong grasp. of the two dangers, looseness is by far the greater. there are people who say what they mean with such a naked precision that nobody not familiar with the subject can quickly catch the sense. george herbert and emerson strain the attention of many. but niggardly and angular speakers are rare. too frequently words signify nothing in particular. they are merely thrown out in a certain direction to report a vague and undetermined meaning or even a general emotion. the first business of every one who would train himself in language is to articulate his thought, to know definitely what he wishes to say, and then to pick those words which compel the hearer to think of this and only this. for such a purpose two words are often better than three. the fewer the words, the more pungent the impression. brevity is the soul, not simply of a jest, but of wit in its finer sense where it is identical with wisdom. he who can put a great deal into a little is the master. since firm texture is what is wanted, not embroidery or superposed ornament, beauty has been well defined as the purgation of superfluities. and certainly many a paragraph might have its beauty brightened by letting quiet words take the place of its loud words, omitting its "verys," and striking out its purple patches of fine writing. here is ben jonson's description of bacon's language: "there happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speech. no man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. no member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. his hearers could not cough or look aside without loss. he commanded when he spoke, and had his judges angry or pleased at his discretion." such are the men who command, men who speak "neatly and pressly." but to gain such precision is toilsome business. while we are in training for it, no word must unpermittedly pass the portal of the teeth. something like what we mean must never be counted equivalent to what we mean. and if we are not sure of our meaning or of our word, we must pause until we are sure. accuracy does not come of itself. for persons who can use several languages, capital practice in acquiring it can be had by translating from one language to another and seeing that the entire sense is carried over. those who have only their native speech will find it profitable often to attempt definitions of the common words they use. inaccuracy will not stand up against the habit of definition. dante boasted that no rhythmic exigency had ever made him say what he did not mean. we heedless and unintending speakers, under no exigency of rhyme or reason, say what we mean but seldom, and still more seldom mean what we say. to hold our thoughts and words in significant adjustment requires unceasing consciousness, a perpetual determination not to tell lies; for of course every inaccuracy is a bit of untruthfulness. we have something in mind, yet convey something else to our hearer. and no moral purpose will save us from this untruthfulness unless that purpose is sufficient to inspire the daily drill which brings the power to be true. again and again we are shut up to evil because we have not acquired the ability of goodness. but after all, i hope that nobody who hears me will quite agree. there is something enervating in conscious care. necessary as it is in shaping our purposes, if allowed too direct and exclusive control consciousness breeds hesitation and feebleness. action is not excellent, at least, until spontaneous. in piano-playing we begin by picking out each separate note; but we do not call the result music until we play our notes by the handful, heedless how each is formed. and so it is everywhere. consciously selective conduct is elementary and inferior. people distrust it, or rather they distrust him who exhibits it. if anybody talking to us visibly studies his words, we turn away. what he says may be well enough as school exercise, but it is not conversation. accordingly, if we would have our speech forcible, we shall need to put into it quite as much of audacity as we do of precision, terseness, or simplicity. accuracy alone is not a thing to be sought, but accuracy and dash. it was said of fox, the english orator and statesman, that he was accustomed to throw himself headlong into the middle of a sentence, trusting to god almighty to get him out. so must we speak. we must not before beginning a sentence decide what the end shall be; for if we do, nobody will care to hear that end. at the beginning, it is the beginning which claims the attention of both speaker and listener, and trepidation about going on will mar all. we must give our thought its head, and not drive it with too tight a rein, nor grow timid when it begins to prance a bit. of course we must retain coolness in courage, applying the results of our previous discipline in accuracy; but we need not move so slowly as to become formal. pedantry is worse than blundering. if we care for grace and flexible beauty of language, we must learn to let our thought run. would it, then, be too much of an irish bull to say that in acquiring english we need to cultivate spontaneity? the uncultivated kind is not worth much; it is wild and haphazard stuff, unadjusted to its uses. on the other hand no speech is of much account, however just, which lacks the element of courage. accuracy and dash, then, the combination of the two, must be our difficult aim; and we must not rest satisfied so long as either dwells with us alone. but are the two so hostile as they at first appear? or can, indeed, the first be obtained without the aid of the second? supposing we are convinced that words possess no value in themselves, and are correct or incorrect only as they truly report experience, we shall feel ourselves impelled in the mere interest of accuracy to choose them freshly and to put them together in ways in which they never coöperated before, so as to set forth with distinctness that which just we, not other people, have seen or felt. the reason why we do not naturally have this daring exactitude is probably twofold. we let our experiences be blurred, not observing sharply, nor knowing with any minuteness what we are thinking about; and so there is no individuality in our language. and then, besides, we are terrorized by custom and inclined to adjust what we would say to what others have said before. the cure for the first of these troubles is to keep our eye on our object, instead of on our listener or ourselves; and for the second, to learn to rate the expressiveness of language more highly than its correctness. the opposite of this, the disposition to set correctness above expressiveness, produces that peculiarly vulgar diction known as "school-ma'am english," in which for the sake of a dull accord with usage all the picturesque, imaginative and forceful employment of words is sacrificed. of course we must use words so that people can understand them, and understand them too with ease; but this once granted, let our language be our own, obedient to our special needs. "whenever," says thomas jefferson, "by small grammatical negligences the energy of an idea can be condensed, or a word be made to stand for a sentence, i hold grammatical rigor in contempt." "young man," said henry ward beecher to one who was pointing out grammatical errors in a sermon of his, "when the english language gets in my way, it doesn't stand a chance." no man can be convincing, writer or speaker, who is afraid to send his words wherever they may best follow his meaning, and this with but little regard to whether any other person's words have ever been there before. in assessing merit let us not stupefy ourselves with using negative standards. what stamps a man as great is not freedom from faults, but abundance of powers. such audacious accuracy, however, distinguishing as it does noble speech from commonplace speech, can be practised only by him who has a wide range of words. our ordinary range is absurdly narrow. it is important, therefore, for anybody who would cultivate himself in english to make strenuous and systematic efforts to enlarge his vocabulary. our dictionaries contain more than a hundred thousand words. the average speaker employs about three thousand. is this because ordinary people have only three or four thousand things to say? not at all. it is simply due to dulness. listen to the average schoolboy. he has a dozen or two nouns, half a dozen verbs, three or four adjectives, and enough conjunctions and prepositions to stick the conglomerate together. this ordinary speech deserves the description which hobbes gave to his "state of nature," that "it is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." the fact is, we fall into the way of thinking that the wealthy words are for others and that they do not belong to us. we are like those who have received a vast inheritance, but who persist in the inconveniences of hard beds, scanty food, rude clothing, who never travel, and who limit their purchases to the bleak necessities of life. ask such people why they endure niggardly living while wealth in plenty is lying in the bank, and they can only answer that they have never learned how to spend. but this is worth learning. milton used eight thousand words, shakespeare fifteen thousand. we have all the subjects to talk about that these early speakers had; and in addition we have bicycles and sciences and strikes and political combinations and all the complicated living of the modern world. why then do we hesitate to swell our words to meet our needs? it is a nonsense question. there is no reason. we are simply lazy, too lazy to make ourselves comfortable. we let our vocabularies be limited and get along rawly without the refinements of human intercourse, without refinements in our own thoughts; for thoughts are almost as dependent on words as words on thoughts. for example, all exasperations we lump together as "aggravating," not considering whether they may not rather be displeasing, annoying, offensive, disgusting, irritating, or even maddening; and without observing too that in our reckless usage we have burned up a word which might be convenient when we should need to mark some shading of the word "increase." like the bad cook, we seize the frying-pan whenever we need to fry, broil, roast, or stew, and then we wonder why all our dishes taste alike while in the next house the food is appetizing. it is all unnecessary. enlarge the vocabulary. let any one who wants to see himself grow resolve to adopt two new words each week. it will not be long before the endless and enchanting variety of the world will begin to reflect itself in his speech, and in his mind as well. i know that when we use a word for the first time we are startled, as if a fire-cracker went off in our neighborhood. we look about hastily to see if any one has noticed. but finding that no one has, we may be emboldened. a word used three times slips off the tongue with entire naturalness. then it is ours forever, and with it some phase of life which had been lacking hitherto. for each word presents its own point of view, discloses a special aspect of things, reports some little importance not otherwise conveyed, and so contributes its small emancipation to our tied-up minds and tongues. but a brief warning may be necessary to make my meaning clear. in urging the addition of new words to our present poverty-stricken stock i am far from suggesting that we should seek out strange, technical or inflated expressions, which do not appear in ordinary conversation. the very opposite is my aim. i would put every man who is now employing a diction merely local and personal in command of the approved resources of the english language. our poverty usually comes through provinciality, through accepting without criticism the habits of our special set. my family, my immediate friends, have a diction of their own. plenty of other words, recognized as sound, are known to be current in books and to be employed by modest and intelligent speakers, only we do not use them. our set has never said "diction," or "current," or "scope," or "scanty," or "hitherto," or "convey," or "lack." far from unusual as these words are, to adopt them might seem to set me apart from those whose intellectual habits i share. from this i shrink. i do not like to wear clothes suitable enough for others, but not in the style of my own plain circle. yet if each one of that circle does the same, the general shabbiness is increased. the talk of all is made narrow enough to fit the thinnest there. what we should seek is to contribute to each of the little companies with which our life is bound up a gently enlarging influence, such impulses as will not startle or create detachment, but which may save from humdrum, routine and dreary usualness. we cannot be really kind without being a little venturesome. the small shocks of our increasing vocabulary will in all probability be as helpful to our friends as to ourselves. such then are the excellences of speech. if we would cultivate ourselves in the use of english, we must make our daily talk accurate, daring and full. i have insisted on these points the more because in my judgment all literary power, especially that of busy men, is rooted in sound speech. but though the roots are here, the growth is also elsewhere. and i pass to my later precepts, which, if the earlier one has been laid well to heart, will require only brief discussion. secondly, "welcome every opportunity for writing." important as i have shown speech to be, there is much that it cannot do. seldom can it teach structure. its space is too small. talking moves in sentences, and rarely demands a paragraph. i make my little remark,--a dozen or two words,--then wait for my friend to hand me back as many more. this gentle exchange continues by the hour; but either of us would feel himself unmannerly if he should grasp an entire five minutes and make it uninterruptedly his. that would not be speaking, but rather speech-making. the brief groupings of words which make up our talk furnish capital practice in precision, boldness and variety; but they do not contain room enough for exercising our constructive faculties. considerable length is necessary if we are to learn how to set forth _b_ in right relation to _a_ on the one hand and to _c_ on the other; and while keeping each a distinct part, are to be able through their smooth progression to weld all the parts together into a compacted whole. such wholeness is what we mean by literary form. lacking it, any piece of writing is a failure; because in truth it is not a piece, but pieces. for ease of reading, or for the attainment of an intended effect, unity is essential--the multitude of statements, anecdotes; quotations, arguings, gay sportings and appeals, all "bending one way their gracious influence." and this dominant unity of the entire piece obliges unity also in the subordinate parts. not enough has been done when we have huddled together a lot of wandering sentences and penned them in a paragraph, or even when we have linked them together by the frail ties of "and, and." a sentence must be compelled to say a single thing; a paragraph, a single thing; an essay, a single thing. each part is to be a preliminary whole and the total a finished whole. but the ability to construct one thing out of many does not come by nature. it implies fecundity, restraint, an eye for effects, the forecast of finish while we are still working in the rough, obedience to the demands of development and a deaf ear to whatever calls us into the by-paths of caprice; in short it implies that the good writer is to be an artist. now something of this large requirement which composition makes, the young writer instinctively feels, and he is terrified. he knows how ill-fitted he is to direct "toil coöperant to an end"; and when he sits down to the desk and sees the white sheet of paper before him, he shivers. let him know that the shiver is a suitable part of the performance. i well remember the pleasure with which, as a young man, i heard my venerable and practised professor of rhetoric say that he supposed there was no work known to man more difficult than writing. up to that time i had supposed its severities peculiar to myself. it cheered me, and gave me courage to try again, to learn that i had all mankind for my fellow sufferers. where this is not understood, writing is avoided. from such avoidance i would save the young writer by my precept to seek every opportunity to write. for most of us this is a new way of confronting composition--treating it as an opportunity, a chance, and not as a burden or compulsion. it saves from slavishness and takes away the drudgery of writing, to view each piece of it as a precious and necessary step in the pathway to power. to those engaged in bread-winning employments these opportunities will be few. spring forward to them, then, using them to the full. severe they will be because so few, for only practice breeds ease; but on that very account let no one of them pass with merely a second-best performance. if a letter is to be written to a friend, a report to an employer, a communication to a newspaper, see that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. the majority of writings are without these pleasing adornments. only the great pieces possess them. bear this in mind and win the way to artistic composition by noticing what should be said first, what second and what third. i cannot leave this subject, however, without congratulating the present generation on its advantages over mine. children are brought up to-day, in happy contrast with my compeers, to feel that the pencil is no instrument of torture, hardly indeed to distinguish it from the tongue. about the time they leave their mother's arms they take their pen in hand. on paper they are encouraged to describe their interesting birds, friends, adventures. their written lessons are almost as frequent as their oral, and they learn to write compositions while not yet quite understanding what they are about. some of these fortunate ones will, i hope, find the language i have sadly used about the difficulty of writing extravagant. and let me say too that since frequency has more to do with ease of writing than anything else, i count the newspaper men lucky because they are writing all the time, and i do not think so meanly of their product as the present popular disparagement would seem to require. it is hasty work undoubtedly and bears the marks of haste. but in my judgment, at no period of the english language has there been so high an average of sensible, vivacious and informing sentences written as appears in our daily press. with both good and evil results, the distinction between book literature and speech literature is breaking down. everybody is writing, apparently in verse and prose; and if the higher graces of style do not often appear, neither on the other hand do the ruder awkwardnesses and obscurities. a certain straightforward english is becoming established. a whole nation is learning the use of its mother tongue. under such circumstances it is doubly necessary that any one who is conscious of feebleness in his command of english should promptly and earnestly begin the cultivation of it. my third precept shall be, "remember the other person." i have been urging self-cultivation in english as if it concerned one person alone, ourself. but every utterance really concerns two. its aim is social. its object is communication; and while unquestionably prompted halfway by the desire to ease our mind through self-expression, it still finds its only justification in the advantage somebody else will draw from what is said. speaking or writing is, therefore, everywhere a double-ended process. it springs from me, it penetrates him; and both of these ends need watching. is what i say precisely what i mean? that is an important question. is what i say so shaped that it can readily be assimilated by him who hears? this is a question of quite as great consequence and much more likely to be forgotten. we are so full of ourselves that we do not remember the other person. helter-skelter we pour forth our unaimed words merely for our personal relief, heedless whether they help or hinder him whom they still purport to address. for most of us are grievously lacking in imagination, which is the ability to go outside ourselves and take on the conditions of another mind. yet this is what the literary artist is always doing. he has at once the ability to see for himself and the ability to see himself as others see him. he can lead two lives as easily as one life; or rather, he has trained himself to consider that other life as of more importance than his, and to reckon his comfort, likings and labors as quite subordinated to the service of that other. all serious literary work contains within it this readiness to bear another's burden. i must write with pains, that he may read with ease. i must find out men's wants and wills, and meet them _there_. as i write, i must unceasingly study what is the line of least intellectual resistance along which my thought may enter the differently constituted mind; and to that line i must subtly adjust, without enfeebling, my meaning. will this combination of words or that make the meaning clear? will this order of presentation facilitate swiftness of apprehension, or will it clog the movement? what temperamental perversities in me must be set aside in order to render my reader's approach to what i would tell him pleasant? what temperamental perversities in him must be accepted by me as fixed facts, conditioning all i say? these are the questions the skilful writer is always asking. and these questions, as will have been perceived already, are moral questions no less than literary. that golden rule of generous service by which we do for others what we would have them do for us is a rule of writing too. every writer who knows his trade perceives that he is a servant, that it is his business to endure hardship if only his reader may win freedom from toil, that no impediment to that reader's understanding is too slight to deserve diligent attention, that he has consequently no right to let a single sentence slip from him unsocialized--i mean, a sentence which cannot become as naturally another's possession as his own. in the very act of asserting himself he lays aside what is distinctively his. and because these qualifications of the writer are moral qualifications they can never be completely fulfilled so long as we live and write. we may continually approximate them more nearly, but there will still always be possible an alluring refinement of exercise beyond. the world of the literary artist and the moral man is interesting through its inexhaustibility; and he who serves his fellows by writing or by speech is artist and moral man in one. writing a letter is a simple matter, but it is a moral matter and an artistic; for it may be done either with imagination or with raw self-centredness. what things will my correspondent wish to know? how can i transport him out of his properly alien surroundings into the vivid impressions which now are mine? how can i tell all i long to tell and still be sure the telling will be for him as lucid and delightful as for me? remember the other person, i say. do not become absorbed in yourself. your interests cover only the half of any piece of writing; the other man's less visible half is necessary to complete yours. and if i have here discussed writing more than speech, that is merely because when we speak we utter our first thoughts, but when we write, our second,--or better still, our fourth; and in the greater deliberation which writing affords i have felt that the demands of morality and art, which are universally imbedded in language, could be more distinctly perceived. yet none the less truly do we need to talk for the other person than to write for him. but there remains a fourth weighty precept, and one not altogether detachable from the third. it is this: "lean upon the subject." we have seen how the user of language, whether in writing or in speaking, works for himself; how he works for another individual too; but there is one more for whom his work is performed, one of greater consequence than any person, and that is his subject. from this comes his primary call. those who in their utterance fix their thoughts on themselves, or on other selves, never reach power. that resides in the subject. there we must dwell with it and be content to have no other strength than its. when the frightened schoolboy sits down to write about spring, he cannot imagine where the thoughts which are to make up his piece are to come from. he cudgels his brain for ideas. he examines his pen-point, the curtains, his inkstand, to see if perhaps ideas may not be had from these. he wonders what his teacher will wish him to say and he tries to recall how the passage sounded in the third reader. in every direction but one he turns, and that is the direction where lies the prime mover of his toil, his subject. of that he is afraid. now, what i want to make evident is that this subject is not in reality the foe, but the friend. it is his only helper. his composition is not to be, as he seems to suppose, a mass of his laborious inventions, but it is to be made up exclusively of what the subject dictates. he has only to attend. at present he stands in his own way, making such a din with his private anxieties that he cannot hear the rich suggestions of the subject. he is bothered with considering how he feels, or what he or somebody else will like to see on his paper. this is debilitating business. he must lean on his subject, if he would have his writing strong, and busy himself with what it says rather than with what he would say. matthew arnold, in the important preface to his poems of , contrasting the artistic methods of greek poetry and modern poetry, sums up the teaching of the greeks in these words: "all depends upon the subject; choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will follow." and he calls attention to the self-assertive and scatter-brained habits of our time. "how different a way of thinking from this is ours! we can hardly at the present day understand what menander meant when he told a man who inquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind. a modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along. i verily think that the majority of us do not in our hearts believe that there is such a thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem or to be demanded from a poet. we permit the poet to select any action he pleases and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies us with occasional bursts of fine writing and with a shower of isolated thoughts and images." great writers put themselves and their personal imaginings out of sight. their writing becomes a kind of transparent window on which reality is reflected, and through which people see, not them, but that of which they write. how much we know of shakespeare's characters! how little of shakespeare! of him that might almost be said which isaiah said of god, "he hideth himself." the best writer is the best mental listener, the one who peers farthest into his matter and most fully heeds its behests. preëminently obedient is such a writer,--refinedly, energetically obedient. i once spent a day with a great novelist when the book which subsequently proved his masterpiece was only half written. i praised his mighty hero, but said i should think the life of an author would be miserable who, having created a character so huge, now had him in hand and must find something for him to do. my friend seemed puzzled by my remark, but after a moment's pause said, "i don't think you know how we work. i have nothing to do with the character. now that he is created he will act as he will." and such docility must be cultivated by every one who would write well, such strenuous docility. of course there must be energy in plenty; the imagination which i described in my third section, the passion for solid form as in my second, the disciplined and daring powers as in my first; but all these must be ready at a moment's notice to move where the matter calls and to acknowledge that all their worth is to be drawn from it. religion is only enlarged good sense, and the words of jesus apply as well to the things of earth as of heaven. i do not know where we could find a more compendious statement of what is most important for one to learn who would cultivate himself in english than the saying in which jesus announces the source of his power, "the word which ye hear is not mine, but the father's which sent me." whoever can use such words will be a noble speaker indeed. these then are the fundamental precepts which every one must heed who would command our beautiful english language. there is of course a fifth. i hardly need name it; for it always follows after, whatever others precede. it is that we should do the work, and not think about it; do it day after day and not grow weary in bad doing. early and often we must be busy and be satisfied to have a great deal of labor produce but a small result. i am told that early in life john morley, wishing to engage in journalism, wrote an editorial and sent it to a paper every day for nearly a year before he succeeded in getting one accepted. we all know what a power he became in london journalism. i will not vouch for the truth of this story, but i am sure an ambitious author is wise who writes a weekly essay for his stove. publication is of little consequence so long as one is getting one's self hammered into shape. but before i close this paper let me acknowledge that in it i have neglected a whole class of helpful influences, probably quite as important as any i have discussed. purposely i have passed them by. because i wished to show what we can do for ourselves, i have everywhere assumed that our cultivation in english is to be effected by naked volition and a kind of dead lift. these are mighty agencies, but seldom in this interlocked world do they work well alone. they are strongest when backed by social suggestion and unconscious custom. ordinarily the good speaker is he who keeps good company, but increases the helpful influence of that company by constant watchfulness along the lines i have marked out. so supplemented, my teaching is true. by itself it is not true. it needs the supplementation of others. let him who would speak or write well seek out good speakers and writers. let him live in their society,--for the society of the greatest writers is open to the most secluded,--let him feel the ease of their excellence, the ingenuity, grace and scope of their diction, and he will soon find in himself capacities whose development may be aided by the precepts i have given. most of us catch better than we learn. we take up unconsciously from our surroundings what we cannot altogether create. all this should be remembered, and we should keep ourselves exposed to the wholesome words of our fellow men. yet our own exertions will not on that account be rendered less important. we may largely choose the influences to which we submit; we may exercise a selective attention among these influences; we may enjoy, oppose, modify, or diligently ingraft what is conveyed to us,--and for doing any one of these things rationally we must be guided by some clear aim. such aims, altogether essential even if subsidiary, i have sought to supply; and i would reiterate that he who holds them fast may become superior to linguistic fortune and be the wise director of his sluggish and obstinate tongue. it is as certain as anything can be that faithful endeavor will bring expertness in the use of english. if we are watchful of our speech, making our words continually more minutely true, free and resourceful; if we look upon our occasions of writing as opportunities for the deliberate work of unified construction; if in all our utterances we think of him who hears as well as of him who speaks; and above all, if we fix the attention of ourselves and our hearers on the matter we talk about and so let ourselves be supported by our subject--we shall make a daily advance not only in english study, but in personal power, in general serviceableness and in consequent delight. v doubts about university extension[ ] a step has lately been taken in american education which excites the interest and hopes of us all. england has been our teacher,--england and a persuasive apostle from that country. a few years ago the english universities became discontented with their isolation. for generations they had been devoting themselves to a single class in the community, and that too a class which needed least to be brought to intelligence and power. the mass of the nation, those by whom its labor and commerce were conducted, had little access to oxford and cambridge. poverty first, then social distinctions, and, until recent days, sectarian haughtiness barred them out. their exclusion reacted on the training of the universities themselves. conservatism flourished. the worth of an intellectual interest was rated rather by its traditional character than by its closeness to life. the sciences, latter-day things, were pursued hardly at all. the modern literatures, english included, had no place. plato and aristotle furnished most of the philosophy. while the rest of the world was deriving from germany methods of study, from france methods of exposition, and from america methods of treating all men alike as rational, english scholarship, based on no gymnasia, lycées, or high schools, went its way, little regarding the life of its nation or that of the world at large. but there has come a change. reformers have been endeavoring to go out and find the common man, and, in connection with him, to develop those subjects which before, according to university tradition, were looked at somewhat askance. english literature, political economy, modern history, have been put in the foreground of this popularized education. far and wide throughout england an enthusiastic band of young teachers, under the guidance of officers of the universities, have been giving instruction in these subjects to companies in which social grades are for the time forgotten. and since public libraries are rare in england, and among the poorer classes the reading habit is but slightly formed, an ambitious few among the hearers have prized their opportunities sufficiently to undertake a certain amount of study and to hand in papers for the lecturer to inspect and to mark. in exceptional cases as many as one third of the audience have thus written exercises and passed examinations. the great majority of those in attendance during the three months' term of course do nothing more than listen to the weekly lecture. this is the very successful english movement which for some years has been exciting admiration the world over, and which it is proposed to introduce into the united states. rightly to estimate its worth those aspects of it to which attention has just been directed should carefully be borne in mind. they are these: the movement is as much social as scholarly and accompanies a general democratic upheaval of an aristocratic nation; it springs up in the neighborhood of universities to which the common people do not resort, and in which those subjects which most concern the minds of modern men are little taught; in its country other facilities for enabling the average man to capture knowledge--public libraries, reading clubs, illustrated magazines, free high schools--are not yet general; it flourishes in a small and compact land, where a multitude of populous towns are in such immediate neighborhood and so connected by a network of railroads that he who is busied in one place to-day can, with the slightest fatigue and expense, appear in five other towns during the remaining days of the week. these conditions, and others as gravely distinctive, do not exist in america. from the first the american college has been organized by the people and for the people. it has been about as much resorted to by the poor as by the rich. through a widely developed system of free public schools it has kept itself closely in touch with popular ideals. its graduates go into commercial life as often as into medicine, the ministry, or the law. it has shown itself capable of expansion too in adjusting itself to the modern enlargement of knowledge. the rigid curriculum, which suited well enough the needs of our fathers, has been discarded, and every college, in proportion to the resources at its command, now offers elective studies and seeks to meet the needs of differing men. to all who can afford four years (soon it may be three), and who are masters of about half as much capital as would support them during the same time elsewhere, the four hundred colleges of our country offer an education far too good to be superseded, duplicated, or weakened. in these colleges excellent provision has been made, and has been made once for all, for everybody who has a little time and a little money to devote to systematic education of the higher sort. but our educational scheme has one serious limitation, and during the last fifty years there have been many earnest efforts to surmount it. not every man is free to seek a systematic training. multitudes are tied to daily toil and only in the evening can they consider their own enlargement. many grow old before the craving for knowledge arises. many also, with more or less profit, have attended a college, but are glad subsequently to supply those defects of education which the experiences of life relentlessly bring to view. to all these classes, caught in the whirl of affairs, the college does not minister. it is true that much that such people want they get from the public library, especially as our librarians of the modern type energetically accept their duties as facilitators of the public reading. much is also obtainable from the cheap issues of the press and from such endowed courses of higher instruction as those of the lowell, cooper, brooklyn, peabody, and drexel institutes. but, after all, these supplementary aids, though valuable, are deficient in guiding power. most persons, especially if novices, work best under inspection. to learners teachers are generally important. there seems to be still a place in our well-supplied country for an organization which shall arouse a more general desire for knowledge; which shall stand ready to satisfy this desire more cheaply, with less interruption to daily occupation, and consequently in ways more fragmentary than the colleges can; and yet one which shall not leave its pupils alone with books, but shall supply them with the impulse of the living word and through writing, discussion and directed reading, shall economize and render effective the costly hours of learning. unquestionably there is a field here which the colleges cannot till, a field whose harvest would enrich us all. can any other agency till it? to every experiment thus far it has yielded only meagre, brief and expensive returns. a capital thing it would be to give to the busy that which normally requires time and attention; but how to do it is the question,--how to do it in reality, and not in mere outward seeming. chautauqua has not done it, impassioned though that rough and generous institution has been for wide and fragmentary culture. its work, indeed, has had a different aim; and, amusing as that work often appears, it ought to be understood and acknowledged as of fundamental consequence in our hastily settled and heterogeneous land. chautauqua sends its little books and papers into stagnant homes from maine to california and gives the silent occupants something to think about. conversation springs up; and with it fresh interests, fresh hopes. a new tie is formed between young and old, as together they persue the same studies and in the same graduating class walk through the golden gate. any man who loves knowledge and his native land must be glad at heart when he visits a summer assembly of chautauqua: there listens to the orator's recognition address; attends the swiftly successive round tables upon milton, temperance, geology, the american constitution, the relations of science and religion, and the doctrine of rent; perhaps assists at the cooking school, the prayer meeting, the concert and the gymnastic drill; or wanders under the trees among the piazzaed cottages and sees the hall of philosophy and the wooden doric temple shining on their little eminences; and, best of all, perceives in what throngs have gathered here the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker,--a throng themselves, their wives and daughters a throng--all heated in body, but none the less aglow for learning and a good time. the comic aspects of this mixture of science, fresh air, flirtation, greek reminiscence, and devoutness are patent enough; but the way in which the multitude is being won to discard distrust of knowledge, and to think of it rather as the desirable goal for all, is not so generally remarked by scholarly observers. yet that is the weighty fact. the actual product in education may not be large; enthusiasm and the memory may be more stimulated than the rational intelligence. but minds are set in motion; an intellectual world, beyond the domestic and personal, begins to appear; studious thought forms its fit friendship with piety, gladness and the sense of a common humanity; a groundwork of civilization is prepared. to find a popular movement so composite and aspiring, we must go back to the mediæval crusades or the greek mysteries. in these alone do we observe anything so ideal, so bizarre, so expressive of the combined intellectual and religious hopes of a people. in many chautauqua homes pathetic sacrifices will be made in the next generation to send the boys and girls to a real college. now, in proposing to transport to this country english extension methods the managers have had in mind nothing so elementarily important as chautauqua. they have felt the pity we all feel for persons of good parts who, through poverty or occupation, are debarred from a college training. they seek to reach minds already somewhat prepared, and to such they undertake to supply solid instruction of the higher grades. it is this more ambitious design which calls for criticism. professor r. g. moulton speaks of extension education as "distinguished from school education, being moulded to meet the wants of adults." and again, "so far as method is concerned, we have considered that we are bound to be not less thorough, but more thorough, if possible, than the universities themselves." if, in the general educational campaign, we liken chautauqua to a guerrilla high school, university extension will be a guerrilla college. both move with light armor, have roving commissions, attack individuals, and themselves appear in the garb of ordinary life; but they are equipped for a service in which the more cumbrous organizations of school and college have thus far proved ineffective. it is a fortunate circumstance that, with fields of operation so distinct, no jealousy can exist between the two bands of volunteers, or between them both and the regular army. the success of either would increase the success of the other two. to chautauqua we are all indebted for lessening the popular suspicion of expert knowledge; and if the plans of the extension committee could be carried out, college methods would have a vogue, and a consequent respect, which they have never yet enjoyed. every one, accordingly, civilian or professional, wishes the movement well, and recognizes that the work it proposes to do in our country is not at present performed. its aims are excellent. are they also practicable? we cannot with certainty say that they are not, but it is here that doubts arise,--doubts of three sorts: those which suspect a fundamental difference in the two countries which try the experiment; those which are incredulous about the permanent response which our people will make to the education offered; and those which question the possibility of securing a stable body of extension teachers. the first set of these doubts has been briefly but sufficiently indicated at the beginning of this paper; the second may with still greater brevity be summed up here in the following connected series of inquiries:-- with the multitude of other opportunities for education which american life affords, will any large body of men and women attend extension lectures? will they attend after the novelty is worn off, say during the third year? will they do anything more than attend? will they follow courses of study, write essays, and pass examinations? will the extension system, any better than its decayed predecessor, the old lyceum system, resist the demands of popular audiences and keep itself from slipping out of serious instruction into lively and eloquent entertainment? if the lectures are kept true to their aim of furnishing solid instruction, can they in the long run be paid for? will it be possible to find in our country clusters of half a dozen towns so grouped and so ready to subscribe to a course of lectures on each day of the week that out of the entire six a living salary can be obtained? will the new teachers be obliged to confine themselves to the suburbs of large cities, abandoning the scattered dwellers in the country, that portion of our population which is almost the only one at present cut off from tolerable means of culture? if in order to pursue these destitute ones, correspondence methods are employed, in addition to the already approved methods of lecture instruction, will lowering of the standard follow? in england three or four years of extension lectures are counted equivalent to one year of regular study, and a person who has attended extension courses for this time may be admitted without further examination to the second year of university residence. will anything of the sort be generally attempted here? these grave questions are as yet insusceptible of answer. affirmative, desirable answers do not seem probable; but experience alone can make the matter plain. of course the managers are watchfully bearing such questions in mind, and critical watchfulness may greatly aid the better answer and hinder the less desirable. accordingly anything like a discussion of this class of practical doubts would be inappropriate here. data for the formation of a confident opinion do not exist. all that can be done by way of warning is to indicate certain large improbabilities, leaving them to be confirmed or thwarted by time and human ingenuity. but with the third class of doubts the case is different. these relate to the constitution of the staff of teachers, and here sufficient facts are at hand to permit a few points to be demonstrated with considerable certainty. when, for example, we ask from what source teachers are to be drawn, we are usually told that they must come from college faculties. if the method of the extension lecturer is to be as thorough as that of the universities themselves, the lecturers must be experts, not amateurs; and where except at the colleges does a body of experts exist? no doubt many well-trained men are scattered throughout the community as merchants, doctors, school-teachers, and lawyers. but these men, when of proved power, have more than they properly can attend to in their own affairs. it seems to be the colleges, therefore, to which the movement must look for its teachers; and in the experiments thus far made in this country the extension lecturing has been done for the most part by college officers. a professor of history, political economy, or literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course of instruction elsewhere. this feature of the american system, one may say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the colleges and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension scheme itself. in england the extension teachers are not university teachers. to have no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the american undertaking. the very name, university extension, besides being barbaric, is in its english employment largely misleading; since neither the agencies for extending nor indeed, for the most part, the studies extended, are found at the universities at all. a small syndicate or committee, appointed from among the university officers, is the only share the university has in the business. the impression, so general in this country, that english university teachers are roaming about the island, lecturing to mixed audiences, is an entire error. the university teachers stay at home and send other people, their own graduates chiefly, to instruct the multitude. a committee of them decides on the qualifications for the work of such persons as care to devote themselves to itinerant teaching as a profession. for those so selected they arrange times, places, and subjects; but they themselves do not move from their own lecture rooms. nor is there occasion for their doing so. in the slender development of popular education in england, many more persons of the upper classes become trained as specialists than can find places as university teachers. there thus arises a learned and leisured accumulation which capitally serves the country in case of a new educational need. on this accumulated stock of cultured men--men who otherwise could not easily bring their culture to market--the extension movement draws. these men are its teachers, its permanent teachers, since there are not competing places striving to draw them away. in the two countries the educational situation is exactly reversed: in england there are more trained men than positions; in america, more positions than trained men. it seems probable too that this condition of things will continue long, so far as we are concerned; at least there is no present prospect of our reaching a limit in the demand for competent men. whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far and wide for a suitable person to fill it. the demand is not from the old places alone. almost every year a new college is founded. every year the old ones grow. in twenty-five years harvard has quadrupled its staff. columbia, cornell, princeton, yale, the university of michigan, the university of pennsylvania,--indeed almost every strong college in the country,--shows an immense advance. a western state is no sooner settled than it establishes a state university, and each of the sects starts from one to three colleges besides. no such perpetual expansion goes on in england. the number of learned positions there is measurably fixed. if more experts than can fill them, or than care to enter political life, the liberal professions, and the civil service, are manufactured in the course of a year, the surplus stock is at the disposal of the extension syndicate. many of these men too are persons of means, to whom a position of dignity is of more consequence than a large salary. the problem, accordingly, of organizing popular instruction out of such a body of waiting experts is a comparatively simple one; but it is not so simple here. in our country any man who has a fair acquaintance with a special subject and moderate skill in imparting it, especially if he will be contented with a small salary, can be pretty sure of college appointment. naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement, despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have turned at once to the colleges; but the colleges are a very unsafe support to lean upon. a professor in a university where the studies are elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or business man. merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its limits, is an enormous task. teaching too is no longer an affair of text-books and recitations. leisurely days of routine ease belong to the past. a professor nowadays must prepare lectures incessantly; must perpetually revise them; must arrange examinations; direct the reading of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of their voluminous written work; personally oversee his advanced men; gather them about him in laboratory, seminary and conference; attend innumerable committee and faculty meetings; devise legislation for the further development of his college and department; correspond with schools and colleges where his students, after taking their higher degree, may suitably be placed; and if at the end of a hard-worked day he can find an hour's leisure, he must still keep his door open for students or fellow-officers to enter. so laborious have become the duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a year without one or two of their members breaking down. with the growing complexity of work it often seems as if the proper business of college officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly connected. it is useless to say that these things are not necessary. whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject and his influence grow. it is because professors now see that they cannot safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. any movement which seeks to withdraw a professor's attention from these things, and induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a serious damage. no amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms. to be an explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous profession. it admits no half-hearted service. of course if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is different. rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may on occasion recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and offer it to a popular audience. in this way a professor makes himself known and makes his college known. many of the small colleges are now engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising themselves. but such lecturing is incidental, voluntary and perpetually liable to interruption. beyond the immediate series of lectures it cannot be depended on. there is nothing institutional about it. the men who undertake it are owned elsewhere, and a second mortgage is not usually a very valuable piece of property. a movement which places its reliance on the casual teaching of overworked men is condemned from the start. university extension can never pass beyond the stage of amateurism and temporary expedient until, like its english namesake, it has a permanent staff of instructors exclusively devoted to its service. where, then, is such a staff to be obtained? in view of the conditions of education in this country already described, it is improbable that it can be obtained at all. but something may still be done,--something, however, of a more modest sort than enthusiasts at present have in mind. there issue from our great universities every year a number of men who have had two or three years' training beyond their bachelor's degree. some of them have had a year or two of foreign study. they frequently wish to teach. places do not immediately open to them. if the extension movement would set them to work, it might have all their time at a moderate salary for two or three years. such men, it is true, would be inexperienced, and their connection with itinerant teaching could not be rendered lasting. as soon as one of them proved his power as a teacher, some college would call him; and he would seldom prefer the nomadic and fragmentary life to an established one. plainly too under the charge of such men the grade of instruction could not be the highest; but it might be sound, inspiriting even, and it is in any case all that present circumstances render possible. we may mourn that those who are masters in their several provinces are already fully employed. we may wish there were a multitude of masters sitting about, ready for enlistment in a missionary undertaking. but there are no such masters. the facts are evident enough; and if the extension movement aims at a durable existence, it will respect these facts. the men it wants it cannot have without damaging them; and damaging them, it damages the higher education of which they are the guardians. teachers of a lower grade are at hand, ready to be experimented with. the few experiments already tried have been fairly successful. let the extension leaders give up all thought of doing here what has been done in england. the principal part of that work is performed for us by other means. the wisest guidance, accordingly, may not lead the movement to any long success. if, however, university extension will keep itself clearly detached from other educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable instruction, there is a fair prospect that by somewhat slow degrees a permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy americans intelligent. footnotes: [ ] printed in . vi specialization[ ] ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class, this afternoon belongs to you. this morning we dedicated a chime of bells to the memory of mrs. palmer, and in those moving exercises you had but a slender share. probably not half a dozen of you ever saw her who, once seen, was loved with romantic ardor. undoubtedly many of you are different from what you would have been had she not lived, and lived here; for her influence so passed into the structure of this university that she will shape successive generations of you for a long time to come. but enough of her. let us dismiss her from our thoughts. too much praise we have already lavished on one who was ever simple and self-forgetting. she would chide our profusion. if we would think as she would wish us to think, let us turn rather to the common matters of the day, reflecting on those joys and perplexities which have attended you throughout these formative years. one especially among these perplexities, perhaps the greatest of all, i would invite you to consider now. let me set it clearly before you. this morning i sat down to breakfast with about a hundred of you who had entered on the attainment of the highest degree which this university offers. you were advanced specialists. you had each chosen some single line of endeavor. but even then i remembered that you were not the only specialists here. before me this afternoon i see candidates in medicine, men and women who have taken for their specialty the warfare with pain and disease. they have said, "all that i can ever know, i will bring to bear on this urgent problem." here also are the lawyers, impassioned for justice, for the quelling of human strife. that is their specialty. they too restrict themselves to a single point of view. beside them sit the scientific men, who looking over the vast expanse of nature have accepted the task of tracing the physical aspects of this marvellous machine. nor can i stop here. throughout the undergraduate department, as we all know, run dominant interests. i should be ashamed of a young man who in his four years had not found some compulsive interest; for it is only when an interest compels that we can say that education has begun. so long as we are simply learning what is set before us, taking the routine mass of academic subjects, we may be faithful students, but we are not scholars. no, it is when with a free heart we give ourselves to a subject, bidding it take of us all it demands and feeling that we had rather attend to it than to anything else, because it expresses our personal desires--then it is that its quickening influence takes hold. but this is specialization. we might think of the university of chicago then as a great specializing machine. but why has each of you set himself this task of specialization? because the world needs leaders, and you have chosen yourselves to be those leaders. are you aware how exceptional is your condition? the last census shows that at present hardly one per cent of our population is in our colleges. you are of that one per cent, and you are here in order that you may enlighten the other ninety-nine per cent. if through ignorance you fail, you will cause others to fail and you had better never have come to this university. to some sort of leadership you have dedicated yourselves, and to this aim you should be true. but do not at times doubts cross your mind? have you not occasionally asked yourselves whether you can attain such leadership and make the most of your lives by shutting yourselves up to a specialty? multitudes of interesting things are calling; shall you turn away from them and follow a single line? it will be worth while to-day to consider these fundamental questions and inquire how far we are justified in specializing, what dangers there are in it, and in what degree those dangers may be avoided. let me say, then, at the start, that i regard specialization as absolutely essential to scholarship. there is no scholarship without it, for it is involved in the very process of knowing. when i look at this desk i am specializing; that is, i am detaching this piece of furniture from all else in the room. i am limiting myself, and i cannot see without it. i can gaze without specialization, but i cannot see without specialization. if i am to know anything by sight, that knowledge must come through the limitation of sight. i seize this object, cast away all others, and thus fix my attention. or if i am carefully to observe, i even put my eye on a single point of the desk. there is no other way. clear knowledge becomes possible only through precise observation. now specialization is nothing but this necessary limitation of attention; and we, as specialists, are merely carrying out on a large scale what every human being must practise in some degree whenever he knows. we employ the process persistently, and for the sake of science are willing to hold ourselves steadily to a single line of observation. and we cannot do otherwise. the principles involved in the specialization of the senses run throughout all science. if we would know, we must hold the attention long on a given subject. but there is an unfortunate side to specialization. it obliges us to discard other important interests. to discard merely unimportant ones is easy. but every evening when i sit down to devote myself to my ethics i am aware that there are persons starving in boston who might be saved if i should drop my work and go to them. yet i sit calmly there and say, "let them starve; i am going to study ethics." i do not see how i could be a suitable professor of ethics unless i were willing thus to limit myself. that is the hard part, as i understand it, of specialization,--the cutting off of things that are worth while. i am sure you have already found it out. many of you have come from places of narrow opportunity and here find a welcome abundance. remembering how you have longed to obtain such privileges, you will be tempted to scatter yourselves over a wide field, gathering a little here and a little there. at the end of the year you will have nothing, if you do that. the only possibility of gain is to choose your field, devote serious time to it, count yourself a specialist, and propose to live like one. goethe admirably announces the principle: "wer grosses will muss sich beschränken können." you must accept limitations if you will go on to power, for in limitation the very process of knowledge is rooted. furthermore, not only is specialization forced upon us by the nature of knowledge, but without it our own powers cannot receive appropriate discipline. it is difficult business to fashion a sound observer. each province of science has its special modes of observation, its own modes of reasoning even. so long as we are unfamiliar with these and obliged to hold ourselves to them through conscious control, our work is poor. it is slow, inaccurate, and exhausting. only when we have trained ourselves to such aptitudes that within a certain field our observations and reasonings are instinctive do we become swift, sure, and unfatigued in research. to train our powers then we must begin to specialize early and hold ourselves steadily within bounds. as one looks over the names of those who have accomplished much, one is surprised at the number who were early specialists. take my own department: berkeley writes his great work when he is twenty-five; hume publishes his masterpiece at twenty-seven. or again, keats had brought his wonderful results to accomplishment and died at twenty-five; shelley at thirty; marlowe, the greatest loss english letters ever met, at twenty-seven. it is just the same in other fields: alexander dies at thirty-six, jesus at thirty-three. yes, let us look nearer home: the most forcible leader american education has ever had became president of harvard university at thirty-five; president hyde of bowdoin took his position at twenty-seven; my own wife, alice freeman, was president of wellesley at twenty-six. these are early specialists; and because they specialized early they acquired an aptitude, a smoothness of work, a precision of insight, and width of power which could not have been theirs had they begun later. i would not deny that there have been geniuses who seemed to begin late: kant was such; locke was such. you will recall many within your own fields. but i think when you search the career of those who come to power in comparatively late years, you will find that there has usually been a train of covert specialization running through their lives. they may not have definitely named their field to themselves, or produced work within that field in early years, but everything had been converging toward that issue. i believe, therefore, you ought to respect your specialty, because only through it can your powers be brought to their highest accuracy and service. one more justification of specialization i will briefly mention, that it is necessary for the organization of society. no motive is good for much until it is socialized. if specialization only developed our individual selves, we could hardly justify it; but it is the means of progress for society. the field of knowledge is vast; no man can master it, and its immensity was never so fully understood as to-day. the only way the whole province can be conquered and brought under subjection to human needs is by parting it out, one man being content to till his little corner while his neighbor is engaged on something widely different. we must part out the field of knowledge and specialize on our allotted work, in order that there may be entirety in science. if we seek to have entirety in ourselves, science will be fragmentary and feeble. that division of labor which has proved efficient everywhere else is no less needful in science. but i suppose it is hardly necessary to justify specialization to this audience. most of you have staked heavily on it, putting yourselves to serious inconvenience, many of you heavily mortgaging your future, in order to come here and devote yourselves to some single interest. i might confidently go through this room asking each of you what is your subject? and you would proudly reply, "my subject is this. my subject is this. my subject is this." i think you would feel ashamed if you had not thus specialized. i see no occasion, therefore, to elaborate what i have urged. as i understand it, the three roots of specialization are these: it is grounded in the very nature of the knowing process; it is grounded in the needs of ourselves as individuals, in order that we may attain our maximum efficiency; it is grounded in the needs of society, because only so can society reach that fulness of knowledge which its progress requires. but, after all, the beliefs which are accepted as matters of course in this room are largely denounced outside it. we must acknowledge that our confidence in specialization encounters many doubts in the community. it may be well, then, to place ourselves where that community stands and ask the general public to tell us why it doubts us, what there is in our specialized attitude which it thinks defective, and what are the complaints which it is disposed to bring against us? i will try to take the position of devil's advocate and plead the cause of the objector to specialization. specialization, it is said, leads to ignorance; indeed it rather aims at ignorance than knowledge. when i attend to this desk, it is true i secure a bit of knowledge, but how small is that bit in comparison to all the things in this room which i might know about! it is but a fraction. yet i have condemned all else in the room to ignorance, reserving only this one little object for knowledge. now that is what we are all of us doing on a great scale; by specializing, by limiting our attention, we cut off what is not attended to. it is often assumed that attention is mainly a positive affair and occupied with what we are to know. but that is a very small portion of it; really its important part is the negative, the removal of what we do not wish to observe. we cut ourselves off from the great mass of knowledge which is offered. is it not then true that every specialist has disciplined himself to be an ignoramus? he has drawn a fence around a little portion of the universe and said, "within that fence i know something." "yes," the public replies, "but you do not know anything outside." and is not the public right? when we step forward and claim to be learned men, is not the public justified in saying, "i know a great deal more than you do; i know a thousand things and you know only one. you say you know that one through and through, and of course i do not know my thousand things through and through. but it is not necessary. i perceive their relations; i can handle them; i can use them in practice; can you?" "well, no," we are obliged to say, "we specialists are a little fumbling when we try to take hold of the world. we are not altogether skilful in action, just because we are such specialists." you students here have been devoting yourselves to some one point--i am afraid many of you are going to have sad experience of it--you have been learning to know something nobody else on earth does know, and then you go forth to seek a position. but the world may have no use for you; there are only two or three positions of that sort in the country, and those may happen to be filled. just because you are such an elaborate scholar you cannot earn your daily bread. you have cut yourself off from everything but that one species of learning, and that does not happen to be wanted. therefore you are not wanted. such is the too frequent condition of the specialist. the thousand things he does not know; it is only the one thing he does know. and because he is so ignorant, he is helpless. turning then to our second justification of specialization, the case seems equally bad. i said that specialization was needed for the training of our powers. the training of them all? not that, but the training of only certain ones among them. the others hang slack. in those regions of ourselves we count for little. we are men of weight only within the range of the powers we have trained; and what a large slice of us lies outside these! accordingly the general public declares that there is no judgment so bad as the judgment of a specialist. few practical situations exactly coincide with his specialty, and outside his specialty his judgment is worse than that of the novice. he has been training himself in reference to something precise; and the moment he ventures beyond it, the very exactitude of his discipline limits his worth. the man who has not been a specialist, who has dabbled in all things and has acquired a rough and ready common sense, that man's judgment is worth something in many different sections of life, but the judgment of the specialist is painfully poor beyond his usual range. you remember how, in the comic opera, the practice is satirized of appointing a person who has never been at sea to take charge of the navy of a great country. but that is the only sensible course to pursue. put a specialist there, and the navy will be wretchedly organized, because the administration of the navy requires something more than the specialism of seamanship. it is necessary to coördinate seamanship with many other considerations, and the man trained in the specialty of seamanship is little likely to have that ability. therefore ordinarily we use our experts best by putting them under the control of those who are not experts. common sense has the last word. the coördinating power which has not been disciplined in single lines is what ultimately takes the direction of affairs. we need the specialist within his little field; shut him up there, and he is valuable enough; but don't let him escape. that seems to be the view of the public. they keep the specialist confined because they utterly distrust his judgment when he extends himself abroad. and when we look at the third of our grounds for justification, social need, the public declares that the specialists are intolerably presumptuous. knowing their own subject, they imagine they can dictate to anybody and do not understand how limited is their importance. again and again it happens that because a man does know some one thing pretty well he sets himself up as a great man in general. my own province suffers in this respect more than most; for as soon as a man acquires considerable skill in chemistry or biology, he is apt to issue a pronunciamento on philosophy. but philosophy does not suffer alone. everywhere the friends of the great specialist are telling him he has proved himself a mighty man, quite competent to sit in judgment on the universe; and he, forgetting that the universe and the particular subject he knows something about are two different things, really imagines that his ignorant opinions deserve consideration. now i suppose we must acknowledge that in all this blasphemy against our calling, there is a good deal of truth. these certainly are dangers which all of us specialists incur. i agree that they are inevitable dangers. do not, however, let us on account of them abandon specialization and seek to acquire a mass of miscellaneous information. bacon said, "i take all knowledge for my province." if we say it, we shall become not bacons but fools. no, that is the broad road to ignorance. but laying these profound dangers of specialization well to heart, assured that they beset us all, let us search for remedial measures. let us ask how such dangers may be reduced to a minimum. is there a certain way in which we may engage in the specialist's research and still save ourselves from some of the evils i have here depicted? i think there is. to find it we will follow the same three avenues which have been leading us thus far. in regard to the first, the limitation of attention, i understand that, after all, our specialty cannot fill our entire life. we do sometimes sit down to dinner; we occasionally talk with a friend; we now and then take a journey; we permit ourselves from time to time to read some other book than one which refers to our subject. that is, i take it, if we are fully alive to the great danger that in specializing we are cutting off a large part of the universe, we shall be wise in gathering eagerly whatever additional knowledge we may acquire outside our specialty. and i must say that the larger number of eminent specialists whom i have happened to know have been men pretty rich in knowledge outside their specialties. they were men who well apprehended the extreme danger of their limited modes of pursuit and who greedily grasped, therefore, at every bit of knowledge they could obtain which lay beyond their province. they appropriated all the wisdom they could; and merely because it did not exactly fit in with their specialty, they did not turn it away. i do not know how far it is wise to go in this effort to repair the one-sidedness in which most of us are compelled to live. a rather extreme case was once brought to my attention. there was a student at harvard who had been a high scholar with me, and i found that he was also so specializing in the classics that when he graduated he took classical honors. some years later i learned that he was one of the highest scholars in the medical school. meeting him a few years after he had entered his profession, i asked, "how did it happen that you changed your mind so markedly? you devoted yourself to classics and philosophy in college. what made you finally decide to become a physician?" "finally decide!" said he. "why, from childhood up i never intended to be anything else." "but," i persisted, "i cannot be mistaken in recalling that you devoted yourself in college to classics and philosophy." "yes," he said, "i did, because i knew i should never have another chance at those subjects. i was going to give the rest of my life to medicine, so i took those years for classics and philosophy." i asked, "wasn't that a great mistake; haven't you now found out your blunder?" "oh, no," said he, "i am a much better physician on that account; i could not have done half so well if i hadn't had all that training in philosophy and classics." now i cannot advise such a course for everybody. it takes a big man to do that. if you are big enough, it is worth while laying a very broad foundation; but considering the size on which most of us are planned, it is wiser to begin early and specialize from the very start. well, then, here is one mode of making up for the defects of specialization: we may pick up knowledge outside our subject. but it is an imperfect mode; you never can put away your limitations altogether. you can do a great deal. use your odd quarter-hours wisely and do not merely play in fragmentary times, understanding that these are precious seasons for acquiring the knowledge which lies beyond your province. then every time you talk with anybody, lead him neatly to what he knows best, keeping an attentive ear, becoming a first-class listener, and seeking to get beyond yourself. by doing so you will undoubtedly much enlarge the narrow bounds to which you have pledged yourself. yet this policy will not be enough. it will require to be supplemented by something more. therefore i should say in the second place, that in disciplining our powers we must be careful to conceive our specialty broadly enough. in taking it too narrowly lies our chief danger. there are two types of specialist. there is the man who regards his specialty as a door into which he goes and by which he shuts the world out, hiding himself with his own little interests. that is the petty, poor specialist, the specialist who never becomes a man of power, however much he may be a man of learning. but there is an entirely different sort of specialist from that; it is the man who regards his specialty as a window out of which he may peer upon all the world. his specialty is merely a point of view from which everything is regarded. consequently without departing from our specialty each of us may escape narrowness. instead of running over all the earth and contemplating it in a multitude of different aspects, the wise specialist chooses some single point of view and examines the universe as it is related to this. everything therefore has a meaning for him, everything contributes something to his specialty. narrowing himself while he is getting his powers disciplined, as those powers become trained he slacks them off and gives them a wider range; for he knows very well that while the world is cut up into little parcels it never can be viewed rightly. it will always be distorted. for, after all, things are what they are through their relations, and if you snap those relations you never truly conceive anything. accordingly, as soon as we have got our specialty, we should begin to coördinate that specialty with everything else. at first we may fix our attention on some single problem within a given field, but soon we discover that we cannot master that problem without knowing the rest of the field also. as we go on to know the rest of the field and make ourself a fair master of that science, we discover that that science depends on other sciences. never was there an age of the world in which this interlocking of the sciences was so clearly perceived as in our day. formerly we seemed able to isolate a particular topic and know something of it, but in our evolutionary time nothing of that kind is possible. each thing is an epitome of the whole. have you been training your eye to see a world in a grain of sand? can you look through your specialty out upon the total universe and say: "i am a specialist merely because i do not want to be a narrow man. my specialty is my telescope. everything belongs to me. i cannot, it is true, turn to it all at once. being a feeble person i must advance from point to point, accepting limitations; but just as fast as i can, having mastered those limitations, i shall cast them aside and press on into ever broader regions." but i said specialization was fundamentally justified through the organization of society, because by its division of toil we contribute our share to the total of human knowledge; and yet the popular objector declares that we are presumptuous, and because we have mastered our own specialty we are apt to assume ourselves capable of pronouncing judgment over the whole field. undoubtedly there is this danger; but such a result is not inevitable. the danger is one which we are perfectly capable of setting aside. the temper of our mind decides the matter, and this is entirely within our control. what is the use of our going forth presumptuous persons? we certainly shall be unserviceable if we are persons of that type. that is not the type of charles darwin in biology, of william james in psychology, of horace howard furness in shakespeare criticism, of albert michelson in physics. these are men as remarkable for modesty and simplicity as for scholarly insight. the true characteristic of a learned specialist is humility. what we want to be training ourselves in is respect for other people and a sense of solidarity with them. our work would be of little use if there were not somebody at our side who cared nothing for that work of ours and cared immensely for his own. it is our business to respect that other man, whether he respects us or not. we must learn to look upon every specialist as a fellow worker. without him we cannot be perfect. let us make ourselves as large as possible, in order that we may contribute our little something to that to which all others are contributing. it is this coöperative spirit which it should be ours to acquire. and it seems to me that you are under peculiarly fortunate circumstances for acquiring it. what strikes me as fatal is to have a group of young specialists taken and trained by themselves, detachedly, shut off from others. nothing of that sort occurs here. every day you are rubbing shoulders with persons who have other interests than yours. when you walk to dinner, you fall in with a comrade who has been spending his day over something widely unlike that which has concerned you. possibly you have been able to lead him to talk about it; possibly you have gained an insight into what he was seeking, and seen how his work largely supplements your own. if you have had proper respect for him and proper humility in regard to yourself, this great society of specialists has filled out your work for you day after day; and in that sense of coöperation, of losing yourselves in the common service of scientific mankind, you have found the veritable glory of these happy years. footnotes: [ ] on the morning of june , , a chime of bells was dedicated at the university of chicago in honor of alice freeman palmer. at the convocation exercises in the afternoon the following address was delivered. vii the glory of the imperfect[ ] a few years ago matthew arnold, after travelling in this country and revising the somewhat unfavorable opinion of us which he had formed earlier and at a distance, still wrote in his last paper on civilization in the united states that america, in spite of its excellences, is an uninteresting land. he thought our institutions remarkable. he pointed out how close a fit exists between them and the character of the citizens, a fit so close as is hardly to be found in other countries. he saw much that is of promise in our future. but after all, he declares that no man will live here if he can live elsewhere, because america is an uninteresting land. this remark of mr. arnold's is one which we may well ponder. as i consider how many of you are preparing to go forth from college and establish yourselves in this country, i ask myself whether you must find your days uninteresting. you certainly have not been finding them uninteresting here. where were college days ever dull? it is a beautiful circumstance that, the world over, the period of education is the period of romance. no such thing was ever heard of as a college student who did not enjoy himself, a college student who was not full of hope. and if this has been the case with us prosaic males of the past, what must be the experience of your own hopeful sex? i am sure you are looking forward with eagerness to your intended work. is it to be blighted? are you to find life dull? it might seem from the remark of mr. arnold that it would probably be so, for you must live in an uninteresting land. when this remark of mr. arnold's was first made a multitude of voices in all parts of our country declared that mr. arnold did not know what he was talking about. as a stupid englishman he had come here and had failed to see what our land contains. in reality every corner of it is stuffed with that beauty and distinction which he denied. for that was the offensive feature of his statement: he had said in substance the chief sources of interest are beauty and distinction. america is not beautiful. its scenery, its people, its past, are not distinguished. it is impossible, therefore, for an intelligent and cultivated man to find permanent interests here. the ordinary reply to these unpleasant sayings was, "america is beautiful, america is distinguished." but on the face of the matter this reply might well be distrusted. mr. arnold is not a man likely to make such a mistake. he is a trained observer. his life has been passed in criticism, and criticism of an extremely delicate sort. it seems to me it must be rather his standards than his facts which are at fault. many of us would be slow to believe our teacher had made an error in observation; for to many of us he has been a very great teacher indeed. through him we have learned the charm of simplicity, the refinement of exactitude, the strength of finished form; we have learned calmness in trial too, the patience of duty, ability to wait when in doubt; in short, we have learned dignity, and he who teaches us dignity is not a man lightly to be forgotten or disparaged. i say, therefore, that this answer to mr. arnold, that he was in error, is one which on its face might prudently be distrusted. but for other than prudential reasons i incline to agree with mr. arnold's opinion. even though i were not naturally disposed to credit his judgment, i should be obliged to acknowledge that my own observations largely coincide with his. in europe i think i find beauty more abundant than in america. certainly the distinguished objects, the distinguished persons, whom i go there to see, are more numerous than those i might by searching find here. i cannot think this portion of mr. arnold's statement can be impugned. and must we then accept his conclusion and agree that your lives, while sheltered in this interesting college, are themselves interesting; but that when you go forth the romance is to pass away? i do not believe it, because i question the standard which mr. arnold employs. he tells us that the sources of the interesting are beauty and distinction. i doubt it. however much delight and refreshment these may contribute to our lives, i do not believe they predominantly constitute our interests. evidently mr. arnold cannot have reached his opinion through observation, for the commonest facts of experience confute him. there is in every community a certain class of persons whose business it is to discover what people regard as interesting. these are the newspaper editors; they are paid to find out for us interesting matters every day. there is nothing they like better than to get hold of something interesting which has not been observed before. are they then searchers for beauty and distinction? i should say not. here are the subjects which these seekers after interesting things discussed in my morning paper. there is an account of disturbances in south america. there is a statement about mr. blaine's health. there is a report of a prize fight. there are speculations about the next general election. there is a description of a fashionable wedding. these things interest me, and i suspect they interest the majority of the readers of that paper; though they can hardly be called beautiful or distinguished. obviously, therefore, if mr. arnold had inspected the actual interests of to-day, he would have been obliged to recognize some other basis for them than beauty and distinction. yet i suppose all will feel it would be better if the trivial matters which excite our interest in the morning journal were of a more beautiful, of a more distinguished sort. our interests would be more honorable then. these things interest merely because they are facts, not because they are beautiful. a fact is interesting through being a fact, and this commonest and most basal of interests mr. arnold has overlooked. he has not perceived that life itself is its own unceasing interest. before we can decide, however, whether he has overlooked anything more, we must determine what is meant by beauty. let us analyze the matter a little. let us see if we can detect why the beautiful and the distinguished are interesting, and still how we can provide a place for the other interests which are omitted in his statement. if we should look at a tree and ask ourselves why this tree is more beautiful than another, we should probably find we had thought it so on some such grounds as these: the total bunch of branches and leaves, that exquisite green mass sunning itself, is no larger than can well be supported on the brown trunk. it is large enough; there is nothing lacking. if it were smaller, the office of the trunk would hardly be fulfilled. if larger, the trunk would be overpowered. those branches which extend themselves to the right adequately balance those which are extended to the left. scrutinizing it, we find every leaf in order, each one ready to aërate its little sap and so conduce to the life of the whole. there is no decay, no broken branch. nothing is deficient, but at the same time there is nothing superfluous. each part ministers to every part. in all parts the tree is proportionate--beautiful, intrinsically beautiful, because it is unsuperfluous, unlacking. and when we turn to other larger, more intricately beautiful objects, we find the same principle involved. fulness of relations among the parts, perfection of organism, absence of incongruity, constitute the beauty of the object. were you ever in wiltshire in england, and did you visit the splendid seat of the earls of pembroke, wilton house? it is a magnificent pile, designed by holbein the painter, erected before elizabeth began to reign. its green lawns, prepared ages ago, were adapted to their positions originally and perform their ancient offices to-day. time has changed its gardens only by making them more lovely than when they were planned. so harmonious with one another are grounds and castle that, looking on the stately dwelling, one imagines that the creator himself must have had it in mind in his design of the spot. and when you enter, all is equally congruous. around the central court runs the cloistered statuary gallery, out of which open the several halls. passing through these, you notice the portraits not only of past members of the family--men who have been among the most distinguished of england's worthies--but also portraits of the eminent friends of the pembrokes, painted by notable artists who were often themselves also friends of the family. in the library is shown sidney's "arcadia," written in this very garden, with a lock of elizabeth's hair inclosed. in the chief hall a play of shakespeare's is reported to have been performed by his company. half a dozen names that shine in literature lend intellectual glory to the place. but as you walk from room to room, amazed at the accumulation of wealth and proud tradition, you perceive how each casual object makes its separate contribution to the general impression of stateliness. a glance from a window discloses an enchanting view: in the distance, past the cedars, rises the spire of salisbury cathedral, one of the most peaceful and aspiring in england. all parts--scenery, buildings, rich possessions, historic heritages--minister to parts. romantic imagination is stirred. it is beautiful, beautiful beyond anything america can show. and if we turn to that region where beauty is most subtly embodied, if we turn to human character, we find the conditions not dissimilar. the character which impresses us most is that which has fully organized its powers, so that every ability finds its appropriate place without prominence; one with no false humility and without self-assertion; a character which cannot be overthrown by petty circumstance, but, steadfast in itself, no part lacking, no part superfluous, easily lets its ample functions assist one another in all that they are summoned to perform. when we behold a man like this, we say, "this is what i would be. here is the goal toward which i would tend. this man, like wilton house, like the beautiful tree, is a finished thing." it is true when we turn our attention back and once more criticise, we see that it is not so. no human character can be finished. it is its glory that it cannot be. it must ever press forward; each step reached is but the vantage-ground for a further step. there is no completeness in human character--in human character save one. and must we then consider human character uninteresting? according to mr. arnold's standard perhaps we ought to do so. but through this very case the narrowness of that standard becomes apparent. mr. arnold rightly perceives that beauty is one of our higher interests. it certainly is not our only or our highest, because in that which is most profoundly interesting, human life, the completeness of parts which constitutes beauty is never reached. there must obviously be another and a higher source of interest, one too exalted to be found where awhile ago i sketched it, in the mere occurrence of a fact. we cannot say that all events, simply because they occur, are alike interesting. to find in them an intelligent interest we must rate their worth. i agree, accordingly, with mr. arnold in thinking that it is the passion for perfection, the assessment of worths, which is at the root of all enduring interests. but i believe that in the history of the world this passion for perfection, this deepest root of human interests, has presented itself in two forms. the greek conceived it in one way, the christian has conceived it in another. it was the office of that astonishing people, the greeks, to teach us to honor completeness, the majesty of the rounded whole. we see this in every department of their marvellous life. whenever we look at a greek statue, it seems impossible that it should be otherwise without loss; we cannot imagine any portion changed; the thing has reached its completeness. before it we can only bow and feel at rest. just so it is when we examine greek architecture. there too we find the same ordered proportion, the same adjustment of part to part. and if we turn to greek literature, the stately symmetry is no less remarkable. what page of sophocles could be stricken out? what page--what sentence? just enough, not more than enough! the thought has grown, has asserted its entirety; and when that entirety has been reached, it has stopped, delighted with its own perfection. a splendid ideal, an ideal which never can fail, i am sure, to interest man so long as he remains intelligent! and yet this beautiful greek work shows only one aspect of the world. it omitted something, it omitted formative life. joy in birth, delight in beginnings, interest in origins,--these things did not belong to the greek; they came in with christianity. it is jesus christ who turns our attention toward growth, and so teaches us to delight in the imperfect rather than in the perfect. it is he who, wishing to give to his disciples a model of what they should be, does not select the completed man, but takes the little child and sets him before them and to the supercilious says, "take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones." he teaches us to reverence the beginning of things. and at first thought it might well seem that this reverence for the imperfect was a retrogression. what! is not a consummate man more admirable than a child? "no," jesus answered; and because he answered so, pity was born. before the coming of jesus christ, i think we may say that the sick, the afflicted, the child--shall i not say the woman?--were but slightly understood. it is because god has come down from heaven, manifesting even himself in forms of imperfection, it is on this account that our intellectual horizon has been enlarged. we may now delight in the lowly, we may stoop and gather imperfect things and rejoice in them,--rejoice beyond the old greek rejoicing. yet it is easy to mistake the nature of this change of standard, and in doing so to run into grave moral danger. if we content ourselves with the imperfect rather than with the perfect, we are barbarians. we are not christians nor are we greeks, we are barbarians. but that is not the spirit of jesus. he teaches us to catch the future in the instant, to see the infinite in the finite, to watch the growth of the perfect out of the imperfect. and he teaches us that this delight in progress, in growth, in aspiration, in completing, may rightly be greater than our exultation in completeness. in his view the joy of perfecting is beyond the joy of perfection. now i want to be sure that you young women, who are preparing yourselves here for larger life and are soon to emerge into the perplexing world, go forth with clear and christian purpose. for though what i have been discussing may appear dry and abstract, it is an extremely practical matter. consider a moment in which direction you are to seek the interests of your life. will you demand that the things about you shall already possess their perfection? will you ask from life that it be completed, finished, beautiful? if so, you are doomed to dreary days. or are you to get your intellectual eyes open, see beauty in the making, and come to rejoice in it there rather than after it is made? that is the question i wish to present to-day; and i shall ask you to examine several provinces of life and see how different they appear when surveyed from one point of view or from the other. undoubtedly all of you on leaving here will go into some home, either the home of your parents or--less fortunate--some stranger's home. and when you come there, i think i can foretell one thing: it will be a tolerably imperfect place in which you find yourself. you will notice a great many points in which it is improvable; that is to say, a great many respects in which you might properly wish it otherwise. it will seem to you, i dare say, a little plain, a little commonplace, compared with your beautiful college and the college life here. i doubt whether you will find all the members of your family--dear though they may be--so wise, so gentle-mannered, so able to contribute to your intellectual life as are your companions here. will you feel then, "ah! home is a dull place; i wish i were back in college again! i think i was made for college life. possibly enough i was made for a wealthy life. i am sure i was made for a comfortable life. but i do not find these things here. i will sit and wish i had them. of course i ought not to enjoy a home that is short of perfection; and i recognize that this is a good way from complete." is this to be your attitude? or are you going to say, "how interesting this home! what a brave struggle the dear people are making with the resources at their command! what kindness is shown by my tired mother; how swift she is in finding out the many small wants of the household! how diligent my father! should i, if i had had only their narrow opportunities, be so intelligent, so kind, so self-sacrificing as they? what can i do to show them my gratitude? what can i contribute toward the furtherance, the enlargement, the perfecting, of this home?" that is the wise course. enter this home not merely as a matter of loving duty, but find in it also your own strong interests, and learn to say, "this home is not a perfect home, happily not a perfect home. i have something here to do. it is far more interesting than if it were already complete." and again, you will not always live in a place so attractive as cleveland. there are cities which have not your beautiful lake, your distant views, your charming houses excellently shaded with trees. these things are exceptional and cannot always be yours. you may be obliged to live in an american town which appears to you highly unfinished, a town which constantly suggests that much still remains to be done. and then are you going to say, "this place is not beautiful, and i of course am a lover of the beautiful. how could one so superior as i rest in such surroundings? i could not respect myself were i not discontented." is that to be your attitude? it is, i am sorry to think, the attitude of many who go from our colleges. they have been taught to reverence perfection, to honor excellence; and instead of making it their work to carry this excellence forth, and to be interested in spreading it far and wide in the world, they sit down and mourn that it has not yet come. how dull the world would be had it come! perfection, beauty? it constitutes a resting-place for us; it does not constitute our working-place. i maintain, therefore, in regard to our land as a whole that there is no other so interesting on the face of the earth; and i am led to this conviction by the very reasoning which brought mr. arnold to a contrary opinion. i accept his judgment of the beauty of america. his premise is correct, but it should have conducted him to the opposite conclusion. in america we still are in the making. we are not yet beautiful and distinguished; and that is why america, beyond every other country, awakens a noble interest. the beauty which is in the old lands, and which refreshes for a season, is after all a species of death. those who dwell among such scenes are appeased, they are not quickened. let them keep their past; we have our future. we may do much. what they can do is largely at an end. in literature also i wish to bring these distinctions before you, these differences of standard; and perhaps i cannot accomplish this better than by exhibiting them as they are presented in a few verses from the poet of the imperfect. i suppose if we try to mark out with precision the work of mr. browning,--i mean not to mark it out as the browning societies do, but to mark it out with precision,--we might say that its distinctive feature is that he has guided himself by the principle on which i have insisted: he has sought for beauty where there is seeming chaos; he has loved growth, has prized progress, has noted the advance of the spiritual, the pressing on of the finite soul through hindrance to its junction with the infinite. this it is which has inspired his somewhat crabbed verses, and has made men willing to undergo the labor of reading them, that they too may partake of his insight. in one of his poems--one which seems to me to contain some of his sublimest as well as some of his most commonplace lines, the poem on "old pictures in florence,"--he discriminates between greek and christian art in much the same way i have done. in "greek art," mr. browning says:-- you saw yourself as you wished you were, as you might have been, as you cannot be; earth here, rebuked by olympus there; and grew content in your poor degree with your little power, by those statues' godhead, and your little scope, by their eyes' full sway, and your little grace, by their grace embodied, and your little date, by their forms that stay. you would fain be kinglier, say, than i am? even so, you will not sit like theseus. you would prove a model? the son of priam has yet the advantage in arms' and knees' use. you're wroth--can you slay your snake like apollo? you're grieved--still niobe's the grander! you live--there's the racers' frieze to follow: you die--there's the dying alexander. so, testing your weakness by their strength, your meagre charms by their rounded beauty, measured by art in your breadth and length, you learned--to submit is a mortal's duty. growth came when, looking your last on them all, you turned your eyes inwardly one fine day and cried with a start--what if we so small be greater and grander the while than they! are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? in both, of such lower types are we precisely because of our wider nature; for time, theirs--ours, for eternity. to-day's brief passion limits their range; it seethes with the morrow for us and more. they are perfect--how else? they shall never change: we are faulty--why not? we have time in store. the artificer's hand is not arrested with us; we are rough-hewn, no-wise polished: they stand for our copy, and once invested with all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. you will notice that in this subtle study mr. browning points out how through contact with perfection there may come content with our present lot. this i call the danger of perfection, our possible belittlement through beauty. for in the lives of us all there should be a divine discontent,--not devilish discontent, but divine discontent,--a consciousness that life may be larger than we have yet attained, that we are to press beyond what we have reached, that joy lies in the future, in that which has not been found, rather than in the realized present. and it seems to me if ever a people were called on to understand this glory of the imperfect, it is we of america, it is you of the middle west; it is especially you who are undertaking here the experiment of a woman's college. you are at the beginning, and that fact should lend an interest to your work which cannot so readily be realized in our older institutions. as you look eastward upon my own huge university, harvard university, it probably appears to you singularly beautiful, reverend in its age, magnificent in its endowments, equable in its working; perhaps you contemplate it as nearing perfection, and contrast your incipient college with it as hardly deserving the name. you are entirely mistaken. harvard university, to its glory be it said, is enormously unfinished; it is a great way from perfect; it is full of blemishes. we are tinkering at it all the time; and if it were not so, i for one should decline to be connected with it. its interest for me would cease. you are to start free from some trammels that we feel. because we have so large a past laid upon us we have not some freedoms of growth, some opportunities of enlargement, which you possess. accordingly, in your very experiment here you have a superb illustration of the principle i am trying to explain. this young and imperfect college should interest you who are members of it; it should interest this intelligent city. wise patrons should find here a germ capable of such broad and interesting growth as may well call out their heartiest enthusiasm. if then the modes of accepting the passion for perfection are so divergent as i have indicated, is it possible to suggest methods by which we may discipline ourselves in the nobler way of seeking the interests of life?--i mean by taking part with things in their beginnings, learning to reverence them there, and so attaining an interest which will continually be supported and carried forward. you may look with some anxiety upon the doctrine which i have laid down. you may say, "but beauty is seductive; beauty allures me. i know that the imperfect in its struggle toward perfection is the nobler matter. i know that america is, for him who can see all things, a more interesting land than spain. yes, i know this, but i find it hard to feel it. my strong temptation is to lie and dream in romance, in ideal perfection. by what means may i discipline myself out of this degraded habit and bring myself into the higher life, so that i shall always be interested in progress, in the future rather than in the past, in the on-going rather than in the completed life?" i cannot give an exact and final receipt for this better mind. a persistently studied experience must be the teacher. to-day you may understand what i say, you may resolve to live according to the methods i approve. but you may be sure that to-morrow you will need to learn it all over again. and yet i think i can mention several forms of discipline, as i may call them. i can direct your attention to certain modes by which you may instruct yourselves how to take an interest in the imperfect thing, and still keep that interest an honorable one. in my judgment, then, your first care should be to learn to observe. a simple matter--one, i dare say, which it will seem to you difficult to avoid. you have a pair of eyes; how can you fail to observe? ah! but eyes can only look, and that is not observing. we must not rest in looking, but must penetrate into things, if we would find out what is there. and to find this out is worth while, for everything when observed is of immense interest. there is no object so remote from human life that when we come to study it we may not detect within its narrow compass illuminating and therefore interesting matter. but it makes a great difference whether we do thus really observe, whether we hold attention to the thing in hand, and see what it contains. once, after puzzling long over the charm of homer, i applied to a learned friend and said to him, "can you tell me why homer is so interesting? why can't you and i write as he wrote? why is it that his art is lost, and that to-day it is impossible for us to awaken an interest at all comparable to his?"--"well," said my friend, "i have often meditated on that, but it seems to come to about this: homer looked long at a thing. why," said he, "do you know that if you should hold up your thumb and look at it long enough, you would find it immensely interesting?" homer looks a great while at his thumb. he sees precisely the thing he is dealing with. he does not confuse it with anything else. it is sharp to him; and because it is sharp to him it stands out sharply for us over thousands of years. have you acquired this art, or do you hastily glance at insignificant objects? do you see the thing exactly as it is? do you strip away from it your own likings and dislikings, your own previous notions of what it ought to be? do you come face to face with things? if you do, the hardest situation in life may well be to you a delight. for you will not regard hardships, but only opportunities. possibly you may even feel, "yes, here are just the difficulties i like to explore. how can one be interested in easy things? the hard things of life are the ones for which we ought to give thanks." so we may feel if we have made the cool and hardy temper of the observer our own, if we have learned to put ourselves into a situation and to understand it on all sides. why, the things on which we have thus concentrated attention become our permanent interests. for example, unluckily when i was trained i was not disciplined in botany. i cannot, therefore, now observe the rose. some of you can, for you have been studying botany here. i have to look stupidly on the total beauty of the lovely object; i can see it only as a whole, while you, fine observer, who have trained your powers to pierce it, can comprehend its very structure and see how marvellously the blooming thing is put together. my eyes were dulled to that long ago; i cannot observe it. beware, do not let yourselves grow dull. observe, observe, observe in every direction! keep your eyes open. go forward, understanding that the world was made for your knowledge, that you have the right to enter into and possess it. and then besides, you need to train yourselves to sympathize with that which lies beyond you. it is easy to sympathize with that which lies within you. many persons go through life sympathizing with themselves incessantly. what unhappy persons! how unfit for anything important! they are full of themselves and answer their own motion, while there beyond them lies all the wealthy world in which they might be sharers. for sympathy is feeling with,--it is the identification of ourself with that which at present is not ourself. it is going forth and joining that which we behold, not standing aloof and merely observing, as i said at first. when we observe, the object we observe is alien to us; when we sympathize, we identify ourselves with it. you may go into a home and observe, and you will make every person in that home wretched. but go into a home and sympathize, find out what lies beyond you there, see how differently those persons are thinking and feeling from the ways in which you are accustomed to think and feel; yet notice how imperfect you are in yourself, and how important it is that persons should be fashioned thus different from you if even your own completion is to come; then, i say, you will find yourself becoming large in your own being, and a large benefactor of others. do not stunt sympathy, then. do not allow walls to rise up and hem it in. never say to yourself, "this is my way; i don't do so and so. i know only this and that; i don't want to know anything else. you other people may have that habit, but these are my habits, and i always do thus and thus." do not say that. nothing is more immoral than moral psychology. you should have no interest in yourself as you stand; because a larger selfhood lies beyond you, and you should be going forth and claiming your heritage there. do not stand apart from the movements of the country,--the political, charitable, religious, scientific, literary movements,--however distastefully they may strike you. identify yourself with them, sympathize with them. they all have a noble side; seek it out and claim it as your own. throw yourself into all life and make it nobly yours. but i am afraid it would be impossible for you thus to observe, thus to sympathize, unless you bring within your imperfect self just grounds of self-respect. you must contribute to things if you would draw from things. you must already have acquired some sort of excellence in order to detect larger excellence elsewhere. you should therefore have made yourself the master of something which you can do, and do on the whole better than anybody else. that is the moral aspect of competition, that one person can do a certain thing best and so it is given him to do. some of you who are going out into the world before long will, i fear, be astonished to find that the world is already full. it has no place for you; it never anticipated your coming and it has reserved for you no corner. your only means of gaining a corner will be by doing something better than the people who are already there. then they will make you a place. and that is what you should be considering here. you should be training yourself to do something well, it really does not matter much what. can you make dresses well? can you cook a good loaf of bread? can you write a poem or run a typewriter? can you do anything well? are you a master somewhere? if you are, the world will have a place for you; and more than that, you will have within yourself just grounds for self-respect. to sum up, what i have been saying throughout this address merely amounts to this: that the imperfect thing--the one thing of genuine interest in all the world--gets its right to be respected only through its connection with the totality of things. do not, then, when you leave college say to yourself, "i know greek. that is a splendid thing to know. these people whom i am meeting do not know it and are obviously of a lower grade than i." that will not be self-respectful, because it shows that you have not understood your proper place. you should respect yourself as a part of all, and not as of independent worth. to call this wide world our own larger self is not too extravagant an expression. but if we are to count it so, then we must count the particular thing which we are capable of doing as merely our special contribution to the great self. and we must understand that many are making similar contributions. what i want you to feel, therefore, is the profound conception of mutual helpfulness and resulting individual dignity which st. paul has set forth, according to which each of us is performing a special function in the common life, and that life of all is recognized as the divine life, the manifestation of the life of the father. when you have come to that point, when you have seen in the imperfect a portion, an aspect, of the total, perfect, divine life, then i am not afraid life will be uninteresting. indeed i would say to every one who goes from this college, you can count with confidence on a life which shall be vastly more interesting beyond the college walls than ever it has proved here, if you have once acquired the art of penetrating into the imperfect, and finding in limited, finite life the infinite life. "to apprehend thus, draws us a profit from all things we see." ii harvard papers the following papers relate primarily to harvard university and are chiefly of historic interest. but since out of that centre of investigation and criticism has come a large part of what is significant in american education, the story of its experiences will be found pretty generally instructive for whoever would teach or learn. the first three papers were published in the andover review for , , and , and are now printed without alteration. time has changed most of the facts recorded in these papers, and the university is now a different place from the one depicted here. an educational revolution was then in progress, more influential than any which has ever visited our country before or since. harvard was its leader, and had consequently become an object of suspicion through wide sections of the land. i was one of those who sought to allay those suspicions and to clear up some of the mental confusions in which they arose. to-day harvard's cause is won. all courses leading to the bachelor's degree throughout the country now recognize the importance of personal choice. but the history of the struggle exhibits with peculiar distinctness a conflict which perpetually goes on between two currents of human progress, a conflict whose opposing ideals are almost equally necessary and whose champions never fail alike to awaken sympathy. as a result of this struggle our children enjoy an ampler heritage than was open to us their fathers. do they comprehend their added wealth and turn it to the high uses for which it was designed? in good measure they do. a brief consideration of the ethical aims which have shaped the modern college may enable them to do so still more. appended to these are two papers: one on college economics in , describing the first attempt ever made, i believe, to ascertain from students themselves the cost of the higher education; the other setting forth a picturesque and noble figure who belonged to the days before the flood, when the prescribed system was still supreme. footnotes: [ ] delivered at the first commencement of the woman's college of western reserve university. viii the new education during the year - the freshmen of harvard college chose a majority of their studies. up to that time no college, so far as i know, allowed its first year's men any choice whatever. occasionally, one modern language has been permitted rather than another; and where colleges are organized by "schools,"--that is, with independent groups of studies each leading to a different degree,--the freshman by entering one school turns away from others, and so exercises a kind of selection. but with these possible exceptions, the same studies have always been required of all the members of a given freshman class. under the new harvard rules, but seven sixteenths of the work of the freshman year will be prescribed; the entire remainder of the college course, with the exception of a few exercises in english composition, will be elective. a fragment of prescribed work so inconsiderable is likely soon to disappear. at no distant day the harvard student will mark out for himself his entire curriculum from entrance to graduation. even if this probable result should not follow, the present step toward it is too significant to be passed over in silence, for it indicates that after more than half a century of experiment the harvard faculty are convinced of the worth of the elective system. in their eyes, option is an engine of efficiency. people generally treat it as a concession. freedom is confessedly agreeable; restive boys like it; let them have as much as will not harm them. but the harvard authorities mean much more than this. they have thrown away that established principle of american education, that every head should contain a given kind of knowledge; and having already organized their college from the top almost to the bottom on a wholly different plan, they now declare that their new principle has been proved so safe and effective that it should supplant the older method, even in that year when students are acknowledged to be least capable of self-direction. on what facts do they build such confidence? what do they mean by calling their elective principle a system? does not the new method, while rendering education more agreeable, tend to lower its standard? or, if it succeeds in stimulating technical scholarship, is it equally successful in fostering character and in forming vigorous and law-revering men? these questions i propose to answer, for they are questions which every friend of harvard, and indeed of american education, wishes people pressingly to ask. those most likely to ask them are quiet, god-fearing parents, who, having bred their sons to a sense of duty, expect college life to broaden and consolidate the discipline of the home. these are the parents every college wants to reach. their sons, whether rich or poor, are the bone and sinew of the land. in my judgment the new education, once understood, will appeal to them more strongly than to any other class. but it is not easy to understand it. my own understanding of it has been of slow growth. when, in , i left andover seminary and came to teach at harvard, i distrusted the more extreme developments of the elective system. up to i opposed the introduction of voluntary attendance at recitations. not until four years ago did i begin to favor the remission of greek in the requisites for entrance. in all these cases my party was defeated; my fears proved groundless; what i wished to accomplish was effected by means which i had opposed. i am therefore that desirable persuader, the man who has himself been persuaded. the misconceptions through which i passed, i am sure beset others. i want to clear them away, and to present some of the reasons which have turned me from an adherent of the old to an apostle of the new faith. an elementary misconception deserves a passing word. the new system is not a mere cutting of straps; it is a system. its student is still under bonds, bonds more compulsive than the old, because fitted with nicer adjustment to each one's person. on h. m. s. pinafore the desires of every sailor receive instant recognition. the new education will not agree to that. it remains authoritative. it will not subject its student to alien standards, nor treat his deliberate wishes as matters of no consequence; but it does insist on that authority which reveals to a man his own better purposes and makes them firmer and finer than they could have become if directed by himself alone. what the amount of a young man's study shall be, and what its grade of excellence, a body of experts decides. the student himself determines its specific topic. everybody knows how far this is from a prescribed system; not so many see that it is at a considerable remove from unregulated or nomadic study. an american at a german university, or at a summer school of languages, applies for no degree and is under no restraint. he chooses whatever studies he likes, ten courses or five or one; he works on them as much as suits his need or his caprice; he submits what he does to no test; he receives no mark; the time he wastes is purely his own concern. study like this, roving study, is not systematic at all. it is advantageous to adult students,--to those alone whose wills are steady, and who know their own wants precisely. most colleges draw a sharp distinction between the small but important body of students of this class--special students, as they are called--and the great company of regulars. these latter are candidates for a degree, are under constant inspection, and are moved along the line only as they attain a definite standard in both the quantity and quality of their work. after accomplishing the studies of the freshman year, partly prescribed and partly elective, a harvard student must pass successfully four elective courses in each of his subsequent three years. by "a course" is understood a single line of study receiving three hours a week of instruction; fifty per cent of a maximum mark must be won in each year in order to pass. throwing out the freshman year, the precise meaning of the harvard b.a. degree is therefore this: its holder has presented twelve courses of study selected by himself, and has mastered them at least half perfectly. here, then, is the essence of the elective system,--fixed quantity and quality of study, variable topic. work and moderate excellence are matters within everybody's reach. it is not unfair to demand them of all. if a man cannot show success somewhere, he is stamped _ipso facto_ a worthless fellow. but into the specific topic of work an element of individuality enters. to succeed in a particular branch of study requires fitness, taste, volition,--incalculable factors, known to nobody but the man himself. here, if anywhere, is the proper field for choice; and all american colleges are now substantially agreed in accepting the elective principle in this sense and applying it within the limits here marked out. it is an error to suppose that election is the hasty "craze" of a single college. every senior class in new england elects a portion of its studies. every important new england college allows election in the junior year. amherst, bowdoin, yale, and harvard allow it in the sophomore. outside of new england the case is the same. it is true, all the colleges except harvard retain a modicum of prescribed study even in the senior year; but election in some degree is admitted everywhere, and the tendency is steadily in the direction of a wider choice. the truth is, harvard has introduced the principle more slowly than other colleges. she was merely one of the earliest to begin. in , on the recommendation of judge story, options were first allowed, in modern languages. twenty years of experiment followed. in electives were finally established for seniors and juniors; in for sophomores; in for freshmen. but the old method was abandoned so slowly that as late as some prescribed study remained for seniors, till for juniors, and till for sophomores. during this long and unnoticed period, careful comparison was made between the new and old methods. a mass of facts was accumulated, which subsequently rendered possible an extremely rapid adoption of the system by other colleges. public confidence was tested. comparing the new harvard with the old, it is plain enough that a revolution has taken place; but it is a revolution like that in the england of victoria, wrought not by sudden shock, but quietly, considerately, conservatively, inevitably. those who have watched the college have approved; the time of transition has been a time of unexampled prosperity. for the last fifteen years the gifts to the university have averaged $ , a year. the steady increase in students may be seen at a glance by dividing the last twenty-five years into five-year periods, and noting the average number of undergraduates in each: - , ; - , ; - , ; - , ; - , . these facts are sufficient to show that harvard has reached her present great prosperity by becoming the pioneer in a general educational movement. what made the movement general was the dread of flimsy study. our world is larger than the one our grandfathers inhabited; it is more minutely subdivided, more finely related, more subtly and broadly known. the rise of physical science and the enlargement of humanistic interests oblige the college of to-day to teach elaborately many topics which formerly were not taught at all. not so many years ago a liberal education prepared men almost exclusively for the four professions,--preaching, teaching, medicine, and law. in the first century of its existence one half the graduates of harvard became ministers. of the graduates of the last ten years a full third have entered none of the four professions. with a narrow field of knowledge, and with students who required no great variety of training, the task of a college was simple. a single programme decently covered the needs of all. but as the field of knowledge widened, and men began to notice a difference between its contents and those of the college curriculum, an effort was made to enlarge the latter by adding subjects from the former. modern languages crept in, followed by sciences, political economy, new departments of history, literature, art, philosophy. for the most part, these were added to the studies already taught. but the length of college days is limited. the life of man has not extended with the extension of science. to multiply subjects was soon found equivalent to cheapening knowledge. where three subjects are studied in place of one, each is pushed only one third as far. a crowded curriculum is a curriculum of superficialities, where men are forever occupied with alphabets and multiplication-tables,--elementary matters, containing little mental nutriment. thoroughgoing discipline, the acquisition of habits of intellectual mastery, calls for acquaintance with knowledge in its higher ranges, and there is no way of reaching these remoter regions during the brief season of college life except by dividing the field and pressing along paths where personal friction is least. accordingly, alternative options began to be allowed, at first between the new subjects introduced, then between these and the old ones. but in this inevitable admission of option a new principle was introduced whose germinal force could not afterwards be stayed. the old conception had been that there were certain matters a knowledge of which constituted a liberal education. compared with the possession of these, the temper of the receiving mind was a secondary affair. this view became untenable. under the new conditions, college faculties were forced to recognize personal aptitudes, and to stake intellectual gains upon them. in assessing the worth of studies, attention was thus withdrawn from their subject-matter and transferred to the response they called forth in the apprehender. hence arose a new ideal of education, in which temper of mind had preëminence over _quæsita_, the guidance of the powers of knowing over the store of matters known. the new education has accordingly passed through two stages of development: first, in order to avoid superficiality when knowledge was coming in like a flood, it was found necessary to admit choice; secondly, in the very necessity of this admission was disclosed a more spiritual ideal of the relation of the mind of man to knowledge. and this new ideal, i hold, should now commend itself not as a thing good enough if collateral, but as a principle, organic and exclusive. to justify its dominance a single compendious reason is sufficient: it uplifts character as no other training can, and through influence on character it ennobles all methods of teaching and discipline. we say to our student at harvard, "study greek, german, history, or botany,--what you will; the one thing of consequence is that you should will to study something." the moral factor is thus put forward, where it belongs. the will is honored as of prime consequence. other systems treat it as a merely concurrent and auxiliar force. they try to smuggle it into operation wrapped in a mass of matter-of-course performances. it is the distinctive merit of the elective system that it strips off disguises, places the great facts of the moral life in the foreground, forces the student to be conscious of what he is doing, permits him to become a partaker in his own work, and makes him perceive that gains and losses are immediately connected with a volitional attitude. when such a consciousness is aroused, every step in knowledge becomes a step toward maturity. there is no sudden transformation, but the boy comes gradually to perceive that in the determination of the will are found the promise and potency of every form of life. many people seem to suppose that at some epoch in the life of a young man the capacity to choose starts up of itself, ready-made. it is not so. choice, like other human powers, needs practice for strength. to learn how to choose, we must choose. keep a boy from exercising his will during the formative period from eighteen to twenty-two, and you turn him into the world a child when by years he should be a man. to permit choice is dangerous; but not to permit it is more dangerous; for it renders dependency habitual, places outside the character those springs of action which should be set within it, treats personal adhesion as of little account, and through anxiety to shield a young life from evil cuts it off from opportunities of virile good. even when successful, the directive process breeds an excellence not to be desired. plants and stones commit no errors. they are under a prescribed system and follow given laws. personal man is in continual danger, for to self-direction is attached the prerogative of sin. for building up a moral manhood, the very errors of choice are serviceable. i am not describing theoretic advantages. a manlier type of character actually appears as the elective principle extends. the signs of the better life are not easy to communicate to those who have not lived in the peculiar world of a college. a greater ease in uprightness, a quicker response to studious appeal, a deeper seriousness, still keeping relish for merriment, a readier amenability to considerations of order, an increase of courtesy, a growing disregard of coarseness and vice, a decay of the boyish fancy that it is girlish to show enthusiasm,--tendencies in these directions, hardly perceptible to others, gladden the watchful heart of a teacher and assure him that his work is not returning to him void. every company of young men has a notion of what it is "gentlemanly" to do. into this current ideal the most artificial and incongruous elements enter. perhaps it is counted "good form" to haze a freshman, to wear the correctest cut of trousers, to have a big biceps muscle, or to be reputed a man of brains. whatever the notion, it is allegiance to some such blind ideal, rather than the acceptance of abstract principles of conduct, which guides a young man's life. to change ever so little these influential ideals is the ambition of the educator; but they are persistent things, held with the amazing conservatism of youth. when i say that a better tone prevails as the elective system takes root, i mean that i find the word "gentleman," as it drops from student mouths, enlarging and deepening its meaning from year to year, departing from its usage as a term of outward description and drawing to itself qualities more interior. direct evidence on a matter so elusive can hardly be given, but i can throw a few sidelights upon it. hazing, window-smashing, disturbing a lecture-room, are things of the past. the office of proctor--the literary policeman of the olden time--has become a sinecure. several years ago the faculty awarded honorable mention at graduation to students who attained a high rank in three or more courses of a single department. the honor was not an exalted one, but being well within the powers of all it soon became "not quite the thing" to graduate without it. in the last senior class men out of received honorable mention. this last fact shows that a decent scholarship has become reputable. but more than this is true: the rank which is reckoned decent scholarship is steadily rising. i would not overstate the improvement. the scale of marking itself may have risen slightly. but taking the central scholar of each class during the last ten years,--the scholar, that is, who stands midway between the head and the foot,--this presumably average person has received the following marks, the maximum being :-- year - - - - - - - - - - ----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- fresh. soph. jun. sen. it will be observed that the marks in this table become higher as the student approaches the end of his course and reaches the years where the elective principle is least restricted. let the eye pass from the left upper corner of the table to the right lower corner and take in the full significance of a change which has transformed freshmen, doomed to prescribed studies and half of them ranking below sixty per cent, into seniors so energetic that half of them win four fifths of a perfect mark in four electives. it is not only the poor who are affected in this way. about half the men who appear on the rank list each year receive no pecuniary aid, and are probably not needy men. but it may be suspected that high marks mean easy studies. the many different lines of work cannot be equally severe, and it is said that those which call for least exertion will be sure to prove the favorites. as this charge of "soft" courses is the stock objection to the elective system, i shall be obliged to examine it somewhat minutely. like most of the popular objections, it rests on an _a priori_ assumption that thus things must be. statistics all run the other way. yet i am not surprised that people believe it. i believed it once myself when i knew nothing but prescribed systems. under these, it certainly is true that ease is the main factor in making a study popular. when choice is permitted, the factor of interest gets freer play, and exerts an influence that would not be anticipated by those who have never seen it in operation. severe studies are often highly popular if the subject is attractive and the teaching clear. here is a list of the fifteen courses which in - (the last year for which returns are complete) contained the largest numbers of seniors and juniors, those classes being at that time the only ones which had no prescribed studies: mill's political economy, seniors and juniors; european history from the middle of the eighteenth century, ; history of ancient art, ; comparative zoölogy, ; political and constitutional history of the united states, ; psychology, ; geology, ; constitutional government of england and the united states, ; advanced geology, with field work, ; homer, sixteen books, ; ethics, ; logic, and introduction to philosophy, ; shakespeare, six plays, ; economic history, advanced course, ; legal history of england to the sixteenth century, . in these years the senior and junior classes together contained men, who chose four electives apiece. in all, therefore, choices were made. the above list shows ; so that, as nearly as may be, one half of the total work of two years is here represented. the other half was devoted to interests more special, which were pursued in smaller companies. are these choices unwise? are they not the studies which should largely occupy a young man's thoughts toward the close of his college life? they are the ones most frequently set for the senior and junior years by colleges which retain prescribed studies. from year to year choices differ a little. the courses at the lower end of the list may give place to others which do not appear here. i print the list simply to indicate the general character of the studies elected. in it appears only one out of all the modern languages, and that, too, a course in pure literature in which the marking is not reputed tender. another year a course of french or german might come in; but ordinarily--except when chosen by specialists--the languages, modern and ancient, are elected most largely during the sophomore year. following directly the prescribed linguistic studies of the freshman year, they are deservedly among the most popular, though not the easiest, courses. in nearly half the courses here shown no text-book is used, and the amount of reading necessary for getting an average mark is large. a shelf of books representing original authorities is reserved by the instructor at the library, and the pupil is sent there to prepare his work. how, it will be asked, are choices so judicious secured? simply by making them deliberate. last june studies were chosen for the coming year. during the previous month students were discussing with one another what their electives should be. how this or that course is conducted, what are the peculiarities of its teacher, what is the proportion in it between work given and gains had, are matters which then interest the inhabitants of hollis and holyoke as stocks interest wall street. most students, too, have some intimacy with one or another member of the faculty, to whom they are in the habit of referring perplexities. this advice is now sought, and often discreetly rejected. the elective pamphlet is for a time the best-read book in college. the perplexing question is, what courses to give up? all find too many which they wish to take. the pamphlet of this year offers courses, divided among twenty departments. the five modern languages, for example, offer, all told, different courses; sanskrit, persian, assyrian, hebrew, and arabic, ; greek and latin, each; natural history, ; physics and chemistry, ; mathematics, ; history and philosophy, each; the fine arts, including music, ; political economy, ; roman law, . these numbers will show the range of choice; on its extent a great deal of the efficiency of the system depends.[ ] after the electives are chosen and reported in writing to the dean, the long vacation begins, when plans of study come under the scrutiny of parents, of the parish minister, or of the college graduate who lives in the next street. until september , any elective may be changed on notice sent to the dean. during the first ten days of the term, no changes are allowed. this is a time of trial, when one sees for himself his chosen studies. afterwards, for a short time, changes are easy, if the instructors consent. for the remainder of the year no change is possible, unless the reasons for change appear to the dean important. other restrictions on the freedom of choice will readily be understood without explanation. advanced studies cannot be taken till preliminary ones are passed. notices are published by the french and german departments that students who elect those languages must be placed where proficiency fits them to go. courses especially technical in character are marked with a star in the elective pamphlet, and cannot be chosen till the instructor is consulted. by means like these the faculty try to prevent the wasting of time over unprofitable studies. of course they do not succeed. i should roughly guess that a quarter, possibly a third, of the choices made might be improved. this estimate is based on the answers i have received to a question put to some fifty recent graduates: "in the light of your present experience, how many of your electives would you change?" i seldom find a man who would not change some; still more rarely one who would change one half. as i look back on my own college days, spent chiefly on prescribed studies, i see that to make these serve my needs more than half should have been different. there was anglo-saxon, for example, which was required of all, no english literature being permitted. a course in advanced chemical physics, serviceable no doubt to some of my classmates, came upon me prematurely, and stirred so intense an aversion to physical study that subsequent years were troubled to overcome it. one meagre meal of philosophy was perhaps as much as most of us seniors could digest, but i went away hungry for more. i loved greek, but for two years i was subject to the instructions of a certain professor, now dead, who was one of the most learned scholars and unprofitable teachers i ever knew. of the studies which brought me benefit, few did so in any vigorous fashion. every reader will parallel my experience from his own. prescribed studies may be ill-judged or ill-adapted, ill-timed or ill-taught, but none the less inexorably they fall on just and unjust. the wastes of choice chiefly affect the shiftless and the dull, men who cannot be harmed much by being wasted. the wastes of prescription ravage the energetic, the clear-sighted, the original,--the very classes who stand in greatest need of protection. what i would assert, therefore, is not that in the elective system we have discovered the secret of stopping educational waste. that will go on as long as men need teaching. i simply hold that the monstrous and peculiarly pernicious wastes of the old system are now being reduced to a minimum. select your cloth discreetly, order the best tailor in town to make it up, and you will still require patience for many misfits; but they will be fewer, at any rate, than when garments are served out to you and the whole regiment by the government quartermaster. nobody who has taught both elective and prescribed studies need be told how the instruction in the two cases differs. with perfunctory students, a teacher is concerned with devices for forcing his pupils onward. teaching becomes a secondary affair; the time for it is exhausted in questioning possible shirks. information must be elicited, not imparted. the text-book, with its fixed lessons, is a thing of consequence. it is the teacher's business to watch his pupils, to see that they carry off the requisite knowledge; their business, then, it soon becomes to try to escape without it. between teacher and scholar there goes on an ignoble game of matching wits, in which the teacher is smart if he can catch a boy, and the boy is smart if he can know nothing without being found out. because of this supposed antagonism of interests american higher education seldom escapes an air of unreality. we seem to be at the opera bouffe. a boy appears at the learning-shop, purchases his parcel of knowledge, and then tries to toss it under the counter and dodge out of the door before the shopman can be quick enough to make him carry off the goods. nothing can cure such folly except insistence that pupil's neglect is not teacher's injury. the elective system points out to a man that he has something at stake in a study, and so trains him to look upon time squandered as a personal loss. where this consciousness can be presumed, a higher style of teaching becomes possible. methods spring up unlike formal lectures, unlike humdrum recitations. the student acquires--what he will need in after life--the power to look up a single subject in many books. theses are written; discussions held; in higher courses, problems of research supersede defined tasks. during - , fifty-six per cent of the harvard undergraduates consulted the college library; during - , eighty-five per cent. in a similar way governmental problems change their character. formerly, it was assumed that a student who followed his own wishes would be indisposed to attend recitations. penalties were accordingly established to compel him to come. at present, there is not one of his twelve recitations a week which a harvard student might not "cut." of course i do not mean that unlimited absence is allowed. any one who did not appear for a week would be asked what he was doing. but for several years there has been no mechanical regulation,--so much absence, so much penalty. i had the curiosity to see how largely, under this system of trust, the last senior class had cared to stay away. i counted all absences, excused and unexcused. some men had been sick for considerable periods; some had been worthless, and had shamelessly abused their freedom. reckoning in all misdeeds and all misfortunes, i found that on the average each man had been absent a little less than twice a week.[ ] the test of high character is the amount of freedom it will absorb without going to pieces. the elective system enlarges the capacity to absorb freedom undisturbed. but it would be unfair to imply that the new spirit is awakened in students alone. professors are themselves instructed. the obstacles to their proper work, those severest of all obstacles which come from defective sympathy, are cleared away. a teacher draws near his class, and learns what he can do for it. long ago it was said that among the gentiles--people spiritually rude--great ones exercised authority, while in a state of righteousness this should not be so; there the leader would estimate his importance by his serviceability. it was a teacher who spoke, and he spoke to teachers. to-day teachers' dangers lie in the same direction. always dealing with inferiors, isolated from criticism, by nature not less sluggish than others, through the honorable passion which they feel for their subject disposed to set the private investigation of it above its exposition, teachers are continually tempted to think of a class as if it existed for their sakes rather than they for its. fasten pupils to the benches, and nothing counteracts this temptation except that individual conscience which in all of us is a faculty that will well bear strengthening. it may be just to condemn the dull, the intolerant, the self-absorbed teacher; but why not condemn also the system which perpetuates him? nobody likes to be inefficient; slackness is largely a fault of inadvertence. that system is good which makes inadvertence difficult and opens the way for a teacher to discover whether his instructions hit. give students choice, and a professor gets the power to see himself as others see him. how this is accomplished appears by examining three possible cases. suppose, in the first place, i become negligent this year, am busy with private affairs, and so content myself with imparting nothing, with calling off questions from a text-book, or with reading my old lectures; i shall find out my mistake plainly enough next june, when fewer men than usual elect my courses. suppose, secondly, i give my class important matter, but put it in such a form that young minds cannot readily assimilate it; the same effect follows, only in this case i shall probably attract a small company of the hardier spirits,--in some subjects the very material a teacher desires. or suppose, lastly, i seek popularity, aim at entertainment, and give my pupils little work to do; my elective becomes a kind of sink, into which are drained off the intellectual dregs of the college. other teachers will get rid of their loafers; i shall take them in. but i am not likely to retain them. a teacher is known by the company he keeps. in a vigorous community a "soft" elective brings no honor to its founder. i shall be apt to introduce a little stiffening into my courses each year, till the appearance of the proper grade of student tells me i am proved to have a value. there is, therefore, in the new method a self-regulating adjustment. teacher and taught are put on their good behavior. a spirit of faithfulness is infused into both, and by that very fact the friendliest relation is established between them. i have left myself little room to explain why the elective system should be begun as early as the freshman year, and surely not much room is needed. a system proved to exert a happy influence over character, and thence over manners and scholarly disposition, is exactly the maturing agency needed by the freshman of eighteen. it is the better suited to him because the early years of college life are its least valuable portion, which can bear, therefore, most economically the disciplining losses sure to come when a student is learning to choose. more than this, the change from school methods to character methods is too grave a one to be passed over as an incident in the transition from year to year. a change of residence should mark it. it should stand at the entrance to a new career. parents should be warned, and those who have brought up their sons to habits of luxurious ease should be made fully aware that a college which appeals to character has no place for children of theirs. every mode of training has its exclusions. i prefer the one which brings least profit to our dangerous classes,--the indolent rich. leslie stephen has said that the only argument rascals can understand is the hangman. the only inducement to study, for boys of loose early life, is compulsion. but for the plain democratic many, who have sound seed in themselves, who have known duty early, and who have found in worthy things their law and impulse, the elective system, even during the freshman year, gives an opportunity for moral and mental expansion such as no compulsory system can afford. * * * * * perhaps in closing i ought to caution the reader that he has been listening to a description of tendencies merely, and not of completed attainment. in no college is the new education fully embodied. it is an ideal, toward which all are moving, and a powerfully influential ideal. in explaining it, for the sake of simplicity i have confined myself to tracing the working of its central principle, and i have drawn my illustrations from that harvard life with which i am most familiar. but simplicity distorts; the shadows disappear. i am afraid i may seem to have hinted that the harvard training already comes pretty near perfection. it does not--let me say so distinctly. we have much to learn. side by side with nobler tendencies to which i have directed attention, disheartening things appear. the examination paper still attacks learning on its intellectual side, the marking system on its moral. all i have sought to establish is this: there is a method which we and many other colleges in different degrees have adopted, which is demonstrably a sound method. its soundness should by this time be generally acknowledged, and criticism should now turn to the important work of bettering its details of operation. may what i have written encourage such criticism and help to make it wise, penetrative, and friendly. footnotes: [ ] but a great deal of the expense also. how much larger the staff of teachers must be where everything is taught to anybody than where a few subjects are offered to all, may be seen by comparing the number of teachers at harvard-- , instructing men--with those of glasgow university in -- , instructing men. [ ] or sixteen per cent of his recitations. readers may like to compare this result with the number of absences elsewhere. at a prominent new england college, one of the best of those which require attendance, a student is excused from ten per cent of his exercises. but this amount does not cover absences of necessity,--absences caused by sickness, by needs of family, and by the many other perfectly legitimate hindrances to attendance. the percentage given for the harvard seniors includes all absences whatsoever. ix erroneous limitations of the elective system in a paper published in the andover review a year ago, i called attention to the fact that a new principle is at work in american education. that principle, briefly stated, is this: the student now consciously shares in his own upbuilding. his studies are knitted closely to his personal life. under this influence a new species of power is developed. scholarship broadens and deepens, boyishness diminishes, teacher and pupil meet less artificially. the college, as an institution, wins fresh life. public confidence awakens; pupils, benefactions, flow in. over what i wrote an eager controversy has arisen, a controversy which must have proved instructive to those who need instruction most. in the last resort questions of education are decided by educators, as those of sanitation by sanitary engineers; but in both cases the decision has reference to public needs, and people require to be instructed in the working of appliances which are designed for their comfort. there is danger that such instruction may not be given. professional men become absorbed in their art and content themselves with reticence, leaving the public ignorant of the devices by which its health is to be preserved. a great opportunity, therefore, comes to the common householder when these professional men fall foul of one another. in pressing arguments home they frequently take to ordinary speech, and anybody who then lends an ear learns of the mysteries. the present discussion, i am sure, has brought this informatory gain to every parent who reads the andover review and has a studious boy. the gain will have been greater because of the candor and courtesy with which the attacking party has delivered its assault. the contest has been earnest. its issues have been rightly judged momentous. for good or for ill, the choice youth of the land are to be shaped by whatever educational policy finally wins. yet, so far as i recall, no unkind word has slipped from the pen of one of my stout opponents; no disparagement of man or college has mixed with the energetic advocacy of principle; the discussion has set in well toward things. i cannot call this remarkable. of course it is not easy to be fair and strong at once. sweetness and light are often parted. yet we rightly expect the scholar's life to civilize him who pursues it, and we anticipate from books a refinement of the spirit and the manners as well as the understanding. my opponents have been scholars, and have spoken as scholars speak. it is a pleasure to linger in their kindly contentious company. so i gladly accept the invitation of the editors of the review to sum up our discussion and to add some explanatory last words. the papers which have appeared fall into two easily distinguishable classes, the descriptive and the critical. to the former i devote but a brief space, so much more direct is the bearing of the latter on the main topic of debate--the question, namely, what course the higher education can and what it cannot now take. yet the descriptive papers perform a service and deserve a welcome word. suspecting that i was showing off harvard rather favorably, professors planted elsewhere have attempted to make an equally favorable exhibit of their own colleges. in my manifesto they have seen "a coveted opportunity to bring forward corresponding statistics which have not been formed under the harvard method." perhaps this was to mistake my aim a little. i did intend to advance my college in public esteem; she deserves that of me in everything i write. but primarily i thought of myself as the expounder of an important policy, which happens to have been longer perceived and more elaborately studied at harvard than elsewhere. i hope i did not imply that harvard, having this excellence, has all others. she has many weaknesses, which should not be shielded from discerning discussion. nor did i intend to commit the injustice to harvard--an injustice as gross as it is frequent--of treating her as a mere embodiment of the elective system. harvard is a complex and august institution, possessed of all the attractions which can be lent by age, tradition, learning, continually renewed resources, fortunate situation, widespread clientage, enthusiastic loyalty, and forceful guidance. she is the intellectual mother of us all, honored certainly by me, and i believe by thousands of others, for a multiplicity of subtle influences which stretch far outside her special modes of instruction. but for the last half-century harvard has been developing a new and important policy of education. coincident with this development she has attained enormous popular esteem and internal power. the value and limits of this policy, the sources of this esteem and power, i wish everybody, colleges and populace, to scrutinize. to make these things understood is to help the higher education everywhere. in undertaking this _quasi_ philosophical task, i count it a piece of good fortune to have provoked so many lucid accounts of what other colleges are doing. the more of these the better. the public cannot be too persistently reminded of the distinctive merits of this college and of that. let each be as zealous as possible; gains made by one are gains for all. depreciatory rivalry between colleges is as silly as it is when religious sects quarrel in the midst of a perishing world. probably such rivalries have their rise in the dull supposition that a fixed constituency of pupils exists somewhere, which if not turned toward one college may be drawn to another. as the old political economists tell of a "wages fund," fixed and constant in each community, so college governors are apt to imagine a public pupil-hoard, not susceptible of much increase or diminution, which may by inadvertence fall into other hands than their own. in reality each college creates its constituency. its students come, in the main, from the inert mass of the uncollegiate public. only one in eight among harvard students is a son of a harvard graduate; and probably the small colleges beget afresh an even larger percentage of their students. on this account the small colleges have been a power in the land. to disparage them shall never be my office. in a larger degree than the great universities they spread the college idea among people who would not otherwise possess it. the boy who lives within fifty miles of one of them reflects whether he will or will not have a college training. were there no college in the neighborhood, he might never consider the matter at all. it is natural enough for undergraduates to decry every college except their own; but those who love education generously, and who seek to spread it far and wide, cannot afford the luxury of envy. one common danger besetting us all should bind us together. in the allurements of commerce boys may forget that college is calling. they do forget it. according to my computations the number of persons in the new england colleges to-day is about the same as the number in the insane asylums; but little more than the number of idiots. probably this number is not increasing in proportion to population. professor newton, of oberlin, finds that the increase of students during the ten years between and , in twenty of our oldest leading colleges, was less than three and a half per cent, the population of the united states increasing during the same period twenty-three per cent. in view of facts like these, careful study of the line along which college growth is still possible becomes a necessity. it will benefit all colleges alike. no one engaged in it has a side to maintain. we are all alike seekers. whatever instructive experience any college can contribute to the common study, and whatever pupils she may thereby gain, will be matter for general rejoicing. to such a study the second, or critical, class of papers furnishes important stimulus; for these have not confined themselves to describing institutions: they have gone on to discuss the value and limits of the principle which actuates the new education everywhere. in many respects their writers and i are in full accord. in moral aim we always are, and generally too in our estimate of the present status. we all confess that the conditions of college education have changed, that the field of knowledge has enlarged, that a liberal training nowadays must fit men for more than the four professions of preaching, teaching, medicine, and law. we agree that the prescribed systems of the past are outgrown. we do not want them. we doubt whether they were well suited to their own time; we are sure they will never fit ours. readjustments of curricula, we all declare, must be undertaken if the higher education is to retain its hold on our people. further still, we agree in the direction of this readjustment. my critics, no less than i, believe that a widely extended scope must be given to individual choice. with the possible exception of professor denison, about whose opinion i am uncertain, everybody who has taken part in the controversy recognizes the elective principle as a beneficial one and maintains that in some form or other it has come to stay, people generally are not aware what a consensus of opinion on this point late years have brought about. to rid ourselves once for all of further controversy let us weigh well the words of my opponents. mr. brearley begins his criticism addressed to the new york harvard club thus: "we premise that every one accepts the elective principle. some system based on that principle must be established. no one wants the old required systems back, or any new required system." professor howison says: "an elective system, in its proper place, and under its due conditions, is demonstrably sound." professor ladd does not express himself very fully on this point in the andover review, but his opinions may be learned from the new englander for january, . when, in , yale college reformed its curriculum and introduced elective studies, it became desirable to instruct the graduates about the reasons for a step which had been long resisted. after a brief trial of the new system, professor ladd published his impressions of it. i strongly commend his candid paper to the attention of those who still believe the old methods the safer. he asserts that "a perfect and final course of college study is, if not an unattainable ideal, at present an impossible achievement." the considerations which were "the definite and almost compulsory reasons for instituting a comprehensive change" he groups under the following heads: ( ) the need of modern languages; ( ) the crowding of studies in the senior year; ( ) the heterogeneous and planless character of the total course; ( ) the need of making allowance for the tastes, the contemplated pursuits, and the aptitudes of the individual student. substantially, these are the evils of prescription which i pointed out; only, in my view, they are evils not confined to a single year. stating his observation of the results of election, professor ladd says: "increased willingness in study, and even a new and marked enthusiasm on the part of a considerable number of students, is another effect of the new course already realized. the entire body of students in the upper classes is more attentive, regular, interested, and even eager, than ever before." "more intimate and effective relations are secured in many cases between teachers and pupils." these convictions in regard to the efficiency which the elective principle lends to education are not confined to my critics and myself. let me cite testimony from representatives of other colleges. the last amherst catalogue records (page ) that "excellent results have appeared from this [the elective] method. the special wants of the student are thus met, his zest and progress in his work are increased, and his association with his teachers becomes thus more close and intimate." president robinson says, in his annual report for to the corporation of brown university: "there are advantages in a carefully guarded system of optional studies not otherwise obtainable. the saving of time in preparing for a special calling in life is something, and the cumulative zeal in given lines of study, where a gratified and growing taste is ever beckoning onward, is still more. but above all, some provision for choice among ever-multiplying courses of study has become a necessity." in addressing the american institute of instruction at bar harbor, july , , professor a. s. hardy, of dartmouth, is reported as saying: "every educator now recognizes the fact that individual characteristics are always sufficiently marked to demand his earliest attention; and, furthermore, that there is a stage in the process of education where the choice, the responsibility, and the freedom of the individual should have a wide scope." president adams, in his inaugural address at cornell in , asserted that "there are varieties of gifts, call them, if you will, fundamental differences, that make it impossible to train successfully all of a group of boys to the same standard. these differences are partly matters of sheer ability, and partly matters of taste; for if a boy has so great an aversion to a given study that he can never be brought to apply himself to it with some measure of fondness, he is as sure not to succeed in it as he would be if he were lacking the requisite mental capacity." in determining, then, what the new education may wisely be, let this be considered settled: it must contain a large element of election. that is the opinion of these unbiased judges. they find personal choice necessary for promoting a wider range of topics in the college, a greater zeal on the part of the student, and more suitable relations between teacher and pupil. with this judgment i, of course, heartily agree, though i should make more prominent the moral reason of the facts. i should insist that a right character and temper in the receiving mind is always a prerequisite of worthy study.[ ] but i misrepresent these gentlemen if i allow their testimony to stop here. they maintain that the elective principle as thus far carried out, though valuable, is still meagre and one-sided. they do not think it will be found self-sufficing and capable of guarding its own working. they see that it has dangers peculiar to itself, and believe that to escape them it will require to be restricted and furnished with supplemental influences. i believe so too. choice is important, but it is also important that one should choose well. the individual is sacred, but only so far as he is capable of recognizing the sacredness of laws which he has had no part in making. unrestricted arbitrary choice is indistinguishable from chaos; and undoubtedly every method of training which avoids mechanism and includes choice as a factor leaves a door open in the direction of chaos. infinite wisdom left that door open when man was created. to dangers from this source i am fully alive. i totally dissent from those advocates of the elective system who would identify it with a _laissez-faire_ policy. the cry that we must let nature take care of itself is a familiar one in trade, in art, in medicine, in social relations, in the religious life, in education; but in the long run it always proves inadequate. man is a personal spirit, a director, a being fitted to compare and to organize forces, not to take them as they rise, like a creature of nature. the future will certainly not tolerate an education less organic than that of the past; but just as certainly will it demand that the organic tie shall be a living one,--one whose bond may assist those whom it restricts to become spontaneous, forcible, and diverse. if i am offered only the alternative of absolutism or _laissez-faire_, i choose _laissez-faire_. out of chaotic nature beautiful forms do continually come forth. but absolutism kills in the cradle. it cannot tolerate a life that is imperfect, and so it stifles what it should nourish. up to this point my critics and i have walked hand in hand. henceforth we part company. i shall not follow out all our little divergencies. my object from the first has been to trace the line along which education may now proceed. it must, it seems, be a line including election; but election limited how? to disentangle an answer to this vexed question, i pass by the many points in which my critics have shown that i am foolish, and the few others in which i might show them so, and turn to the fundamental issue between us, our judgment of what the supplemental influences are which will render personal initiative safe. personal initiative is assured. the authoritative utterances i have just quoted show that it can never again be expelled from american colleges. but what checks are compatible with it? accepting choice, what treatment will render it continually wiser? here differences of judgment begin to appear, and here i had hoped to receive light from my critics. the question is one where coöperative experience is essential. but those who have written against me seem hardly to have realized its importance. they generally confine themselves to showing how bad my plans are, and merely hint at better ones which they themselves might offer. but what are these plans? wise ways of training boys are of more consequence than harvard misdeeds. we want to hear of a constructive policy which can take a young man of nineteen and so train him in self-direction that four years later he may venture out alone into a perplexing, and for the most part hostile, world. the thing to be done is to teach boys how to manage themselves. admit that the harvard discipline does not do this perfectly at present; what will do it better? here we are at an educational crisis. we stand with this aim of self-guidance in our hands. what are we going to do with it? it is as dangerous as a bomb. but we cannot drop it. it is too late to objurgate. it is better to think calmly what possible modes of treatment are still open. when railroads were found dangerous, men did not take to stage-coaches again; they only studied railroading the more. now in the mass of negative criticism which the last year has produced i detect three positive suggestions, three ways in which it is thought limitation may be usefully applied to supplement the inevitable personal initiative. these modes of limitation, it is true, are not worked out with any fulness of practical detail, as if their advocates were convinced that the future was with them. rather they are thrown out as hints of what might be desirable if facts and the public would not interfere. but as they seem to be the only conceivable modes of restricting the elective principle by any species of outside checkage, i propose to devote the remainder of this paper to an examination of their feasibility. in a subsequent paper i shall indicate what sort of corrective appears to me more likely to prove congruous and lasting. i. the first suggestion is that the elective principle should be limited from beneath. universities and schools are to advance their grade, so that finally the universities will secure three or four years of purely elective study, while the schools, in addition to their present labors, will take charge of the studies formerly prescribed by the college. the schools, in short, are to become german gymnasia, and the colleges to delay becoming universities until this regeneration of the schools is accomplished.[ ] a certain "sum of topics" is said to be essential to the culture of the man and the citizen. in the interest of church and state, young minds must be provided with certain "fact forms," with a "common consciousness," a "common basis of humanism." important as personal election is, to allow it to take place before this common basis is laid is "to strike a blow at the historic substance of civilization." how extensive this common consciousness is to be may be learned from professor howison's remark that "languages, classical and modern; mathematics, in all its general conceptions, thoroughly apprehended; physics, acquired in a similar manner, and the other natural sciences, though with much less of detail; history and politics; literature, especially of the mother tongue, but, indispensably, the masterpieces in other languages, particularly the classic; philosophy, in the thorough elements of psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics, each historically treated, and economics, in the history of elementary principles, must all enter into any education that can claim to be liberal." the practical objections to this monarchical scheme are many. i call attention to three only. in the first place, the argument on which it is based proves too much. if we suppose a common consciousness to be a matter of such importance, and that it cannot be secured except by sameness of studies, then that state is criminally careless which allows ninety-nine hundredths of its members to get an individual consciousness by the simple expedient of never entering college. the theory seems to demand that every male--and why not female?--between sixteen and twenty be indoctrinated in "the essential subject-matters," without regard to what he or she may personally need to know or do. this is the plan of religious teaching adopted by the roman church, which enforces its "fact forms" of doctrine on all alike; without securing, however, by this means, according to the judgment of the outside world, any special freshness of religious life. i do not believe the results would be better in the higher secular culture, and i should be sorry to see roman methods applied there; but if they are to be applied, let them fall impartially on all members of the community. to put into swaddling clothes the man who is wise enough to seek an education, and to leave his duller brother to kick about as he pleases, seems a little arbitrary. but secondly, there is no more prospect of persuading our high schools to accept the prescribed subjects of the colleges than there is of persuading our government to transform itself into the german. already the high schools and the colleges are unhappily drawing apart. the only hope of their nearer approach is in the remission by the colleges of some of the more burdensome subjects at present exacted. paid for by common taxation, these schools are called on to equip the common man for his daily struggle. that they will one day devote themselves to laying the foundations of an ideally best education for men of leisure is grotesquely improbable. although harvard draws rather more than one-third of her students from states outside new england, the whole number of students who have come to her from the high schools of these states, during a period of the last ten years, is but sixty-six. fitting for college is becoming an alarmingly technical matter, and is falling largely into the hands of private tutors and academies. it may be said, however, thirdly, that it is just these academies which might advantageously take the present freshmen and sophomore studies. they would thus become the exclusive avenues to the university of the future, leaving it free to do its own proper work with elective studies. considering the great expense which this lengthening of the curriculum of the academy implies, it is plain that the number of schools capable of fitting boys in this way would always be small. these few academies, with their monopoly of learned training, would lose their present character and be erected into little colleges,--colleges of a second grade. that any such thing is likely to occur, i do not believe; but if it were, would it aid the higher education and promote its wide dispersion? precisely the contrary. instead of going to the university from the academies, boys would content themselves with the tolerable education already received. for the most part they would decline to go farther. it is useless to say that this does not happen in germany, where the numbers resorting to the university are so large as to have become the subject of complaint; for the german government, controlling as it does all access to the professions, is able to force through the gymnasia and through special courses at the university a body of young men who would otherwise be seeking their fortunes elsewhere. whether such control would be desirable in this country, i will not consider. some questions are not feasible even for discussion. but it is to english experience we must look to see what our case would be. the great public schools of england--eton, rugby, harrow, winchester, westminster, cheltenham--are of no higher order than under the proposed plan andover and exeter would become. from these two academies nearly ninety-five per cent of the senior classes now enter some college. but of the young men graduating from the english schools named, so far as i can ascertain, less than fifty per cent go to the university. with the greater pressure toward commercial life in this country, the number would certainly be less than in england. to build up colleges of a second grade, and to permit none but those who have passed them to enter colleges of the first, is to cut off the higher education from nearly all those who do not belong to the privileged classes; it is to make the "common consciousness" less common, and to turn it, even more effectually than at present, into the consciousness of a clique. he who must make a living for himself or for others cannot afford to reach his profession late. the age of entering college is already too high. with improved methods of teaching i hope it maybe somewhat reduced. at any rate, every study now added to the high schools or academies is a fresh barrier between education and the people. ii. if, then, by prescribing a large amount of study outside the university the elective principle is not likely to be successfully limited, is it not probable that within the college itself the two counter principles of election and prescription, mutually limiting, mutually supporting, will always be retained? this is the second suggestion; to bring studies of choice and studies commanded into juxtaposition. the backbone of the college is to be kept prescribed, the fleshy parts to be made elective. by a special modification of the plan, the later years are turned largely, perhaps wholly, toward election, and a line is drawn at the junior, or even the sophomore year, below which elective studies are forbidden to penetrate. is not this the plan that will finally be judged safest? it certainly is the safest for a certain number of years. before it can securely reach anything else, every college must pass through this intermediate state. after half a century of testing election harvard still retains some prescribed studies. the harvard juniors chose for nineteen years before the sophomores, and the sophomores seventeen years before the freshmen. in introducing electives a sober pace is commendable. a university is charged with the greatest of public trusts. the intelligence of the community is, to a large extent, in its keeping. it is bound to keep away from risky experiments, to disregard shifting popular fancies, and to be as conservative as clearness of sight will permit. i do not plead, therefore, that harvard and yale should abolish all prescription the coming year. they certainly should not. in my opinion most colleges are moving too fast in the elective direction already. i merely plead that we must see where we are going. as public guides, we must forecast the track of the future if we would avoid stumbling into paths which lead nowhere. that is all i am attempting here. i want to ascertain whether the dual system of limitation is a stable system, one in which we can put our trust, or whether it is a temporary convenience, likely to slip away a little year after year. what does history say? let us examine the facts of the past. the following table shows at the left the fifteen new england colleges. in the next three parallel columns is printed the percentage of elective studies which existed in these colleges in - ; in the last three, the percentage which exists to-day. to render the comparison more exact, i print the sophomore, junior, and senior years separately, reserving the problem of the freshman year for later discussion. | - | - +------+-----+-----+------+-----+----- | soph.| jun.| sen.| soph.| jun.| sen. ----------+------+-----+-----+------+-----+----- amherst | . | . | . | . | . | . bates | | | | | | boston | | | | . | . | . bowdoin | | | | . | . | . brown | | . | . | . | . | . colby | | | | | . | . dartmouth | | | | | . | . harvard | . | . | . | . | . | . middlebury| | | | | | trinity | | | | | . | . tufts | | . | . | | . | . vermont | | | | | | wesleyan | | . | . | . | . | . williams | | | | | | . yale | | | | . | . | . this table yields four conclusions: ( ) a rapid and fateful revolution is going on in the higher education of new england. we do not exaggerate the change when we speak of an old education and a new. ( ) the spread of it is in tolerable proportion to the wealth of the college concerned. the new modes are expensive. it is not disapproval which is holding the colleges back; it is inability to meet the cost. i am sorry to point out this fact. to my mind one of the gravest perplexities of the new education is the query, what are the small colleges to do? they have a usefulness altogether peculiar; yet from the life-giving modern methods of training they are of necessity largely cut off. ( ) the colleges which long ago foresaw their coming necessities have been able to proceed more cautiously than those which acknowledged them late. ( ) the movement is one of steady advance. there is no going back. it must be remembered, too, that the stablest colleges have been proceeding with these changes many more years than the period shown in the table. are we, then, prepared to dismiss prejudice from our minds and to recognize what steadiness of advance means? in other matters when a general tendency in a given direction is discovered, extending over a long series of years, visible in individuals widely unlike, and presenting no solitary case of backward turning, we are apt to conclude that there is a force in the movement which will carry it still further onward. we are not disposed to seize on some point in its path and to count that an ultimate holding-ground. this, i say, would be a natural conclusion unless we could detect in the movement tendencies at work in an opposite direction. are there any such tendencies here? i cannot find them. prescription invariably loses; election invariably gains. but in order to make a rational prediction about the future we must know more than the bare facts of the past; we need to know why these particular facts have arisen. what are the reasons that whenever elective and prescribed studies are mixed, an extrusive force regularly appears in the elective? the reasons are not far to seek. probably every professor in new england understands them. the two systems are so incongruous that each brings out the vices rather than the virtues of its incompatible brother. prescribed studies, side by side with elective, appear a bondage; elective, side by side with prescribed, an indulgence. so long as all studies are prescribed, one may be set above another in the mind of the pupil on grounds of intrinsic worth; let certain studies express the pupil's wishes, and almost certainly the remainder, valuable as they may be in themselves, will express his disesteem. it is useless to say this should not be so. it always is. the zeal of work, the freshness of interest, which now appear in the chosen studies, are deducted from those which are forced. on the latter as little labor as possible is expended. they become perfunctory and mechanical, and soon restive pupils and dissatisfied teachers call for fresh extension of energizing choice. this is why the younger officers in all the colleges are eager to give increased scope to the elective studies. they cannot any longer get first-rate work done in the prescribed. alarmed by the dangers of the new principle, as they often and justly are, they find that the presence of prescription, instead of diminishing the dangers, adds another and a peculiarly enfeebling one to those which existed before. so certain are these dangers, and so inevitable the expanding power of the elective principle, that it is questionable whether it would not be wise for a college to refuse to have anything to do with elective studies so soon as it knows itself too weak to allow them to spread. for where will the spreading stop? it cannot stop till the causes of it stop. the table just given shows no likelihood of its stopping at all, and a little reflection will show that each enlargement increases the reasons for another enlargement still. if prescribed studies are ever exceptional, ineffective, and obnoxious, they certainly become more so as they diminish in number. a college which retains one of them is in a condition of unstable equilibrium. but is this true of the freshman year? will not a special class of considerations keep prescription enduring and influential there, long after it has lost its usefulness in the later years? a boy of nineteen comes from home about as untrained in will as in intelligence. will it not always be thought best to give him a year in which to acquaint himself with his surroundings and to learn what studies he may afterwards profitably select? possibly it will. i incline to think not. the case of the freshman year is undoubtedly peculiar. taking a large body of colleges, we have direct evidence that during their last three years the elective principle steadily wins and never loses. we have but a trifle of such evidence as regards the freshman year. there the struggle of the two forces has barely begun. it has begun at harvard, and the usual result is already foreshadowed. the prescribed studies are disparaged studies; they are not worked at the best advantage. still, i do not like to prophesy on evidence so narrow. i will merely say i see no reason to suppose that colleges will meet with permanent success in mingling incompatible kinds of study in their freshman year. but i can only surmise. let any college that inclines to try the experiment do so. it may be thought, however, a wiser course to keep the freshman year untouched by choice. a solid year of prescription is thus secured as a limitation on the election that is to follow. this plan is so often advised, especially by persons unacquainted with the practical working of colleges, that it requires a brief examination by itself. let us suppose the revolution which we have traced in the sophomore, junior, and senior years to have reached its natural terminus; let us suppose that in these years all studies have become elective, while the freshman year remains completely prescribed; the college will then fall into two parts, a preparatory department and a university department. in these two departments the character of the instruction, the methods of study, the consciousness of the students, will be altogether dissimilar. the freshmen will not be taken by upper classmen as companions; they will be looked down upon as children. hazing will find abundant excuse. an abrupt line will be drawn, on whose farther side freedom will lie, on whose hither side, bondage. the sophomore, a being who at best has his peculiarities, will find his sense of self-sufficiency doubled. whatever badly-bred boy parents incline to send to college will seem to them safe enough for a year, and they will suppose that during this period he will learn how to behave. of course he will learn nothing of the sort. manly discipline has not yet begun. at the end of the freshman year a boy will be only so much less a boy as increase of age may make him. through being forced to study mathematics this year there comes no sustaining influence fitted to fortify the judgment when one is called the next year to choose between greek and german. on the contrary, the change from school methods to maturing methods is rendered as dangerous as possible by allowing it to take place quite nakedly, by itself, unsupported by other changes, and at the mere dictation of the almanac. an emancipation so bare and sudden is not usual elsewhere. for boys who do not go to college, departure from home is commonly recognized as a fit occasion for putting on that dangerous garment, the _toga virilis_. entrance to the university constitutes a similar epoch, when change of residence, new companions, altered conditions of living, a realization that the old supports are gone, and the presumption with which every one now meets the youth that he is to be treated as a man among men, become helpful influences coöperating to ease the hard and inevitable transition from parental control to personal self-direction. a safer time for beginning individual responsibility cannot be found. at any rate, whether my diagnosis of reasons is correct or not, the fact is clear,--self-respecting colleges do not tolerate preparatory departments. they do not work well. they are an element of weakness in the institution which harbors them. even where at first they are judged necessary, so soon as the college grows strong they are dropped. when we attempt to plan an education for times to come, we must bear in mind established facts. turn the freshman year into a preparatory department, fill it with studies antithetic in aim, method, and spirit to those of later years, and something is established which no sober college ever permitted to remain long within its borders. this is the teaching of the past without an exception. to suppose the future will be different is but the blind hope of a timid transitionalism. iii. the third suggestion for restricting election is the group system. this deserves a more respectful treatment than the methods hitherto discussed, for it is something more than a suggestion: it is a system, a constructive plan of education, thought out in all its parts, and directed toward an intended end. the definition which i have elsewhere offered of the elective system, that it demands a fixed quantity and quality of study with variable topic, would be applicable also to the group system. accordingly it belongs to the new education rather than to the old. no less than the elective system it is opposed to the methods of restriction thus far described. these latter methods attempt to limit election by the ballast of an alien principle lodged beneath it or by its side. they put a weight of prescription into the preparatory schools, into the early college years, or into parallel lines of study extending throughout the college course. the source of their practical trouble lies here: the two principles, election and prescription, are nowhere united; they remain sundered and at war, unserviceable for each other's defects. the group system intertwines them. it permits choice in everything, but at the same time prescribes everything. this it effects by enlarging the unit of choice and prescribing its constituent factors. a group or block of studies is offered for choice, not a single study. all the studies of a group must be taken if any are, the "if" being the only matter left for the student to settle. the group may include all the studies open to a student at the university. one decision may determine his entire course. or, as in the somewhat analogous arrangement of the english universities, one group may be selected at the beginning and another in the middle of the university life. the group itself is sometimes contrived so as to allow an individual variation; different students read different books; a special phase of philosophy, history, or science receives prominence. but the boundaries of the group cannot be crossed. all the studies selected by the college authorities to form a single group must be taken; no others can be. in this method of limiting choice there is much that is attractive. i feel that attraction strongly. under the exceptional conditions which exist at the johns hopkins university, a group system has done excellent work. like all the rest of the world, i honor that work and admire its wise directors. but group systems seem to me to possess features too objectionable to permit them to become the prevalent type of the future, and i do not see how these features can be removed without abandoning what is distinctive, and changing the whole plan into the elective system, pure and simple. the objectionable features connect themselves with the size of the unit of choice, with difficulties in the construction of the groups, and with the attempt to enforce specialization. but these are enigmatic phrases; let me explain them. obviously, for the young, foresight is a hard matter. while disciplining them in the intricate art of looking ahead, i should think it wise to furnish frequently a means of repairing errors. penalties for bad choices should not be too severe. now plainly the larger the unit of choice, the graver the consequences of erroneous judgment. the group system takes a large unit, a body of studies; the simple elective system, a small unit, the single study. errors of choice are consequently less reparable under the group system than under pure election. to meet this difficulty the college course at baltimore has been reduced from four years to three; but even so, a student who selects a group for which he finds himself unfit cannot bring himself into proper adjustment without the loss of a year. if he does not discover his unfitness until the second year has begun, he loses two years. under the elective system, the largest possible penalty for a single mistake is the loss of a single study, one quarter of a year's work. this necessary difference in ease of reparability appears to me to mark an inferiority in group systems, considered as methods of educating choice. to the public it may seem otherwise. i am often astonished to find people approving irreparable choices and condemning reparable ones. that youths between nineteen and twenty-three should select studies for themselves shocks many people who look kindly enough on marriages contracted during those years. boys still unbearded have a large share in deciding whether they will go to college, to a scientific school, to a store, to sea, or to a cattle-ranch. their lives are staked on the wisdom of the step taken. yet the american mode of meeting these family problems seems to our community, on the whole, safer than the english way of regulating them by tradition and dictation. the choice with heavy stakes of the boy who does not go to college is frequently set off favorably against the choices with light stakes of the boy who goes. perhaps a similarly lenient judgment will in the long run be passed on the great stakes involved in group systems. i doubt it. i think it will ultimately be judged less dangerous and more maturing to grant a young man, in his passage through a period of moral discipline, frequent opportunities of repair. again, the practical difficulties of deciding what groups shall be formed are enormous. what studies shall enter into each? how many groups shall there be? if but one, we have the old-fashioned college with no election. if two, we have the plan which yale has just abandoned, a fixed undergraduate department maintained in parallel vigor with a fixed scientific school. but in conceding the claims of variety even to this degree, we have treated the fundamental differences between man and man as worthy, not reprehensible; and can we say that the proper differences are only two? must we not acknowledge a world at least as complex as that they have in baltimore, where there appear to be seven reputable species of mankind: "those who wish a good classical training; those who look toward a course in medicine; those who prefer mathematical studies with reference to engineering, astronomy, and teaching; those who wish an education in scientific studies, not having chosen a specialty; those who expect to pursue a course in theology; those who propose to study law; those who wish a literary training not rigidly classical." here a classification of human wishes is attempted, but one suspects that there are legitimate wishes which lie outside the scheme. it does not, for example, at once appear why a prospective chemist should be debarred from all regular study of mathematics. it seems hard that a youth of literary tastes should be cut off from greek at entrance unless he will agree to take five exercises in it each week throughout his college course. one does not feel quite easy in allowing nobody but a lawyer or a devotee of modern languages to read a page of english or american history. the johns hopkins programme is the most ingenious and the most flexible contrivance for working a group system that i have ever seen. for this reason i mention it as the most favorable type of all. considering its purposes, i do not believe it can be much improved. as applied to its little band of students, , it certainly works few hardships. yet all the exclusions i have named, and many more besides, appear in it. i instance these simply to show what barriers to knowledge the best group system erects. remove these, and others quite as great are introduced. try to avoid them by allowing the student of one group to take certain studies in another, and the sole line which parts the group system from the elective is abandoned. in practice, it usually is abandoned. confronted with the exigencies of operation, the so-called group system turns into an elective system, with highly specialized lines of study strongly recommended. with this more genial working i have nothing now to do. my point is this: a system of hard and fast groups presents difficulties of construction and maintenance too great to recommend it to the average college of the future as the best mode of limiting the elective principle. probably, however, this difficulty will chiefly be felt by persons engaged in the actual work of educational organization. the outer public will think it a more serious objection that grouped colleges are in reality professional schools carried down to the limits of boyhood. so far as they hold by their groups, they are nurseries of specialization. that this is necessarily so may not at first be apparent. a little consideration of the contrast in aim between group systems and prescribed will make the matter plain. prescribed systems have gained their long hold on popular confidence by aiming at harmonious culture. they argue, justly enough, that each separate sort of knowledge furnishes something of its own to the making of a man. this particular "something," they say, can be had from no other source. the sum of these "somethings" constitutes a rounded whole. the man who has not experienced each of them in some degree, however small, is imperfectly planned. one who has been touched by all has laid the foundations of a liberal education. degree of acquaintance with this subject or with that may subsequently enlarge. scholarly interest may concentrate. but at the first, the proper aim is balanced knowledge, harmonious development of all essential powers, avoidance of one-sidedness. on this aim the group system bestows but a secondary attention. regarding primarily studies, not men, it attempts to organize single connected departments of knowledge. accordingly it permits only those studies to be pursued together which immediately cohere. it lays out five, ten, any number of paths through the field of knowledge, and to one of these paths the pilgrim is confined. each group constitutes a specialty,--a specialty intensified in character as, in order to escape the difficulties of maintenance just pointed out, the number of groups is allowed to increase. by insistence on specialization regard for general culture is driven into a subordinate place. the advocates of prescription maintain that there are not half a dozen ground-plans of perfected humanity. they say there is but one. if we introduce variety of design into a curriculum, we neglect that ideal man who resides alike in all. we trust, on the contrary, in our power to hit some line of study which may deservedly appeal to one human being while not so appealing to another. we simply note the studies which are most congruous with the special line selected, and by this congruity we shape our group. in the new aim, congruity of studies, adaptation to a professional purpose, takes precedence of harmonious development of powers. i have no doubt that specialization is destined to become more marked in the american education of the future. it must become so if we are to produce the strong departmental scholars who illuminate learning in other countries; indeed, it must become so if we are to train competent experts for the affairs of daily life. the popular distrust of specializing is sure to grow less as our people become familiar with its effects and see how often narrow and thorough study, undertaken in early life, leads to ultimate breadth. it is a pretty dream that a man may start broad and then concentrate, but nine out of every ten strong men have taken the opposite course. they have begun in some one-sided way, and have added other sides as occasion required. almost in his teens shakespeare makes a specialty of the theatre, napoleon of military science, beethoven of music, hunter of medicine, faraday of chemistry, hamilton of political science. the great body of painters, musicians, poets, novelists, theologians, politicians, are early specialists. in fact, self-made men are generally specialists. something has aroused an interest, and they have followed it out until they have surveyed a wide horizon from a single point of view. in offering wider opportunities for specialization, colleges have merely been assimilating their own modes of training to those which prevail in the world at large. it does not, therefore, seem to me objectionable that group systems set a high value on specialization. that is what every man does, and every clear-eyed college must do it too. what i object to is that group systems, so far as they adhere to their aim, _enforce_ specialization. among every half-dozen students, probably one will be injured if he cannot specialize largely; two or three more might wisely specialize in lower degree; but to force the remaining two or three into curricula shaped by professional bias is to do them serious damage. there are sober boys of little intrepidity or positive taste, boys who properly enough wish to know what others know. they will not make scholars. they were not born to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge. they have another function: they preserve and distribute such knowledge as already exists. many of them are persons of wealth. to furnish them glimpses of varied learning is to save them from barbarism. still another large class is composed of boys who develop late. they are boys who will one day acquire an interest of their own, if they are allowed to roam about somewhat aimlessly in the domain of wisdom until they are twenty-one. both of these classes have their rights. the prescribed system was built to support them; the elective shelters and improves them; but a group system shuts them all out, if they will not on leaving school adopt professional courses. whenever i can hear of a group system which like the old college has a place for the indistinct young man, and like the new elective college matures him annually by suggesting that he take part in shaping his own career, i will accept the group system. then, too, the public will probably accept it. until then, rigid groups will be thought by many to lay too great a strain on unseasoned powers of choice, to present too many practical difficulties of construction, and to show too doctrinaire a confidence that every youth will fit without pinching into a specialized class. footnotes: [ ] these conditions of intellectual nourishment were long ago recognized in other, less formal, departments of mental training. in his essays on _books and reading_ president porter wrote in : "the person who asks. what shall i read? or, with what shall i begin? may have read for years in a mechanical routine, and with a listless spirit; with scarcely an independent thought, with no plans of self-improvement, and few aspirations for self-culture. to all these classes the advice is full of meaning: 'read what will satisfy your wants and appease your desires, and you will comply with the first condition to reading with interest and profit.' hunger and thirst are better than manifold appliances and directions, in respect to other than the bodily wants, towards a good appetite and a healthy digestion. if a man has any self-knowledge or any power of self-direction, he is surely competent to ask himself what is the subject or subjects in respect to which he stands most in need of knowledge or excitement from books. if he can answer this question, he has gone very far towards answering the question, 'what book or books can i read with satisfaction and profit?'" (chap. iv, p. .) [ ] in deference to certain writers i employ their favorite term "university" in contrast with the term "college," yet i must own i do not know what it means. an old signification is clear. a university is an assemblage of schools, as our government is an assemblage of states. in england, different corporations, giving substantially similar instruction, are brought together by a common body which confers the degrees. in this country, a group of professional schools--law, medicine, theology, and science--are associated through one governing body with the college proper, that is, with the candidates for the b.a. degree. in this useful sense, tufts and bowdoin are universities; amherst and brown, colleges. but germany, which has thrown so many parts of the world into confusion, has introduced exaltation and mystery here. a university now appears to mean "a college as good as it can be," a stimulating conception, but not a finished or precise one. i would not disparage it. it is a term of aspiration, good to conjure with. when we want to elevate men's ideas, or to obtain their dollars, it is well to talk about creating a true university: just as it is wise to bid the forward-reaching boy to become "a true gentleman." x necessary limitations of the elective system the preceding paper has sufficiently discussed the impossible limitations of the elective system, and has shown with some minuteness the grounds of their impossibility. the methods there examined are the only ones suggested by my critics. they all agree in this, that they seek to narrow the scope of choice. they try to combine with it a hostile factor, and they differ merely in their mode of combination. the first puts a restraining check before election; the second puts one by its side; the third makes the two inseparable by allowing nothing to be chosen which is not first prescribed. the general purpose of all these methods is mine also. election must be limited. unchartered choice is licentious and self-destructive. i quarrel with them only because the modes of effecting their purpose tend to produce results of a transient and inappropriate sort. the aim of education, as i conceive it, is to spiritualize the largest possible number of persons, that is, to teach them how to do their own thinking and willing and to do it well. but these methods effect something widely different. they either aristocratize where they should democratize, or they belittle where they should mature, or else they professionalize where they should humanize. a common trouble besets them all: the limiting authority is placed in external and arbitrary juxtaposition to the personal initiative which it professes to support. it should grow out of this initiative and be its interpreter and realization. by limitation of choice the proposers of these schemes appear to mean making choice less. i mean fortifying it, keeping it true to itself, making it more. control that diminishes the quantity of choice is one thing; control that raises the quality, quite another. how important is this distinction and how frequently it is forgotten! words like "limitation," "control," "authority," "obedience," are words of majesty, but words also of doubtful import. they carry a freight of wisdom or of folly, according to the end towards which they steer. in order to sanction or discard limitations which induce obedience, we must bear that end in mind. let us stop a moment, and see that we have it in mind now. old educational systems are often said to have erred by excess of authority. i could not say so. the elective system, if it is to possess the future, must become as authoritative as they. more accurately we say that their authority was of a wrong sort. a father may exercise an authority over his child no less directive than that of the master over the slave; but the father is trying to accomplish something which the master disregards; the father hopes to make the will of another strong, the master to make it weak; the father commands what the child himself would wish, had he sufficient experience. the child's obedience accordingly enlightens, steadies, invigorates his independent will. invigoration is the purpose of the command. the authority is akin--secretly akin--to the child's own desires. no alien power intervenes, as when a slave obeys. here a foreign will thwarts the slave's proper motions. over against his own legitimate desires, the desire of a totally different being appears and claims precedence. obedience like this brings no ennoblement. the oftener a child obeys, the less of a child is he; the oftener a slave, the more completely he is a slave. roughly to say, then, that submission to authority is healthy for a college boy, argues a mental confusion. there are two kinds of authority,--the authority of moral guidance, and the authority of repressive control: parental authority, respecting and vivifying the individual life and thus continually tending to supersede itself; and masterly authority, whose command, out of relation to the obeyer's wish, tends ever to bring the obedient into bondage. which shall college authority be? authority is necessary, ever-present authority. if the young man's choice is to become a thing of worth, it must be encompassed with limitations. but as the need of these limitations springs from the imperfections of choice, so should their aim be to perfect choice, not to repress it. to impose limitations which do not ultimately enlarge the youth they bind is to make the means of education "oblige against its main end." this moral authority is what the new education seeks. to a casual eye, the colleges of to-day seem to be growing disorganized; a closer view shows construction taking place, but taking place along the lines of the vital distinction just pointed out. men are striving to bring about a germane and ethical authority in the room of the baser mechanical authorities of the past. in this distinction, then, a clue is to be found which, if followed up, will lead us away from impossible limitations of the elective system, and conduct us at length to the possible, nay, to the inevitable ones. as the elective principle is essentially ethical, its limitations, if helpfully congruous, must be ethical too. they must be simply the means of bringing home to the young chooser the sacred conditions of choice; which conditions, if i rightly understand them, may compactly be entitled those of intentionality, information, and persistence. to secure these conditions, limitations exist. in the very nature of choice such conditions are implied. choice is sound as they prevail, whimsical as they diminish. an education which lays stress on the elective principle is bound to lay stress on these conditions also. it cannot slip over into lazy ways of letting its students drift, and still look for credit as an elective system. people will distrust it. that is why they distrust harvard to-day. the objections brought against the elective system of harvard are in reality not levelled against the elective system at all. they are directed against its bastard brother, _laissez-faire_. objectors suspect that the conditions of choice which i have named are not fulfilled. they are not fulfilled, i confess, or rather i stoutly maintain. to come anywhere near fulfilling them requires long time and study, and action unimpeded by a misconceiving community. both time and study harvard has given, has given largely. the records of scholarship and deportment which i exhibited in my first paper show in how high a degree harvard has already been able to remove from choice the capricious, ignorant, and unsteadfast characteristics which rightly bring it into disrepute. but much remains to do, and in that doing we are hampered by the fact that a portion of the public is still looking in wrong directions. it cannot get over its hankering after the delusive modes of limitation which i have discussed. it does not persistently see that at present the proper work of education is the study of means by which self-direction may be rendered safe. leaders of education themselves see this but dimly, as the papers of my critics naïvely show. until choice was frankly accepted as the fit basis for the direction of a person by a person, its fortifying limitations could not be studied. now they must be studied, now that the old methods of autocratic control are breaking down. as a moral will comes to be recognized as the best sort of steam power, the modes of generating that power acquire new claims to attention. henceforth the training of the will must be undertaken by the elective system as an integral part of its discipline. i am not so presumptuous as to attempt to prophesy the precise forms which methods of moral guidance will take. moral guidance is a delicate affair. its spirit is more important than its procedure. flexibility is its strength. methods final, rigid, and minute do not belong to it. nor can it afford to forget the one great truth of _laissez-faire_, that wills which are to be kept fresh and vigorous will not bear much looking after. time, too, is an important factor in the shaping of moral influences. experiments now in progress at harvard and elsewhere must discriminate safe from unsafe limitations. leaving then to the future the task of showing how wide the scope of maturing discipline may become, i will merely try to sketch the main lines along which experiments are now proceeding, i will give a few illustrative examples of what is being done and why, and i will state somewhat at large how, in my judgment, more is yet to be accomplished. to make the matter clear, a free exposition shall be given of the puzzling headings already named; that is, i will first ramblingly discuss the limitations on choice which may deepen the student's intentionality of aim; secondly, those which increase his information in regard to means; and thirdly, those which may strengthen his persistence in a course once chosen. i. that intentionality should be cultivated, i need not spend many words in explaining. everybody acknowledges that without a certain degree of it choice is impossible. many persons assert also that boys come to college with no clear intentions, not knowing what they want, waiting to be told; for such, it is said, an elective system is manifestly absurd. i admit the fact. it is true. the majority of the freshmen whom i have known in the last seventeen years have been, at entrance, deficient in serious aims. but from this fact i draw a conclusion quite opposite to the one suggested. it is election, systematized election, which these boys need; for when we say a young student has no definite aims, we imply that he has never become sufficiently interested in any given intellectual line to have acquired the wish to follow that line farther. such a state of things is lamentable, and certainly shows that prescribed methods--the proper methods, in my judgment, for the school years--have in his case proved inadequate. it is useless to continue them into years confessedly less suited to their exercise. perhaps it is about equally useless to abandon the ill-formed boy to unguided choice. prescription says, "this person is unfit to choose, keep him so"; _laissez-faire_ says, "if he is unfit to choose, let him perish"; but a watchful elective system must say, "granting him to be unfit, if he is not spoiled, i will fit him." and can we fit him? i know well enough that indifferent teachers incline to shirk the task. they like to divide pupils into the deceptive classes of good and bad, meaning by the former those who intend to work, and by the latter those who intend not to. but we must get rid of indifferent teachers. teachers with enthusiasm in them soon discover that the two classes of pupils i have named may as well be dismissed from consideration. where aims have become definite, a teacher has little more to do. the boy who means to work will get learning under the poorest teacher and the worst system; while the boy who means not to work may be forced up to the pierian spring, but will hardly be made to drink. a vigorous teacher does not assume intention to be ready-made. he counts it his continual office to help in making it. on the middle two quarters of a class he spends his hardest efforts, on students who are friendly to learning but not impassioned for it, on those who like the results of study but like tennis also, and popularity, and cigars, and slackness. the culture of these weak wills is the problem of every college. here are unintentional boys waiting to be turned into intentional men. what limitations on intellectual and moral vagrancy will help them forward? the chief limitation, the one underlying all others, the one which no clever contrivance can ever supersede, is vitalized teaching. suitable subjects, attractively taught, awake lethargic intention as nothing else can. an elective system, as even its enemies confess, enormously stimulates the zeal of teachers. it consequently brings to bear on unawakened boys influences of a strangely quickening character. when i hear a man trained under the old methods of prescription say, "at the time i was in college i could not have chosen studies for myself, and i do not believe my son can," i see, and am not surprised to see, that he does not understand what forces the elective system sets astir. so powerful an influence have these forces over both teachers and pupils, that questions of hard and easy studies do not, as outsiders are apt to suppose, seriously disturb the formation of sound intentions. the many leaders in education whose opinions on election i quoted in my previous paper agree that the new modes tend to sobriety and intentionality of aim. when professor ladd speaks of "the unexpected wisdom and manliness of the choices already made" in the first year of election at new haven, he well expresses the gratified surprise which every one experiences on perceiving in the very constitution of the elective system a sort of limitation on wayward choice. this limitation seems to me, as professor ladd says he found it,[ ] a tolerable preventive of choices directly aimed at ease. in a community devoted to athletics, baseball is not played because it is "soft," and football avoided on account of its difficulty. a similar state of things must be brought about in studies. in a certain low degree it has come about already. as election breeds new life in teaching, the old slovenly habit of liking best what costs least begins to disappear. easy courses will exist and ought to exist. prescribed colleges, it is often forgotten, have more of them than elective colleges. the important matter is, to see that they fall to the right persons. where everything is prescribed, students who do not wish easy studies are still obliged to take them. under election, soft courses may often be pursued with advantage. a student whose other courses largely depend for their profit on the amount of private reading or of laboratory practice accomplished in connection with them is wise in choosing one or more in which the bulk of the work is taken by the teacher. i do not say that soft courses are always selected with these wise aims in view. many i know are not. we have our proper share of hardened loafers--"tares in our sustaining corn"--who have an unerring instinct as to where they can most safely settle. but large numbers of the men in soft courses are there to good purpose; and i maintain that the superficial study of a subject, acquainting one with broad outlines, is not necessarily a worthless study. at harvard to-day i believe we have too few such superficial courses. as i look over the elective pamphlet, and note the necessarily varying degrees of difficulty in the studies announced there, i count but six which can, with any justice, be entitled soft courses; and several of these must be reckoned by anybody an inspiration to the students who pursue them. there is a tendency in the elective system, as i have shown elsewhere, to reduce the number of soft courses somewhat below the desirable number. i insist, therefore, that under a pretty loose elective system boys are little disposed to intentionally vicious choices. my fears look in a different direction. i do not expect depravity, but i want to head off aimless trifling. i agree with the opponents of election in thinking that there is danger, especially during the early years of college life, that righteous intention may not be distinct and energetic. boys drift. inadequate influences induce their decisions. the inclinations of the clique in which a young man finds himself are, without much thought, accepted as his own. heedlessness is the young man's bane. it should not be mistaken for vice; the two are different. a boy who will enter a dormitory at twelve o'clock at night, and go to the third story whistling and beating time on the banisters, certainly seems a brutish person; but he is ordinarily a kind enough fellow, capable of a good deal of self-sacrifice when brought face to face with need. he simply does not think. so it is in study: there, too, he does not think. now in college a boy should learn perpetually to think; and an excellent way of helping him to learn is to ask him often what he is thinking about. the object of the questioning should not be to thwart the boy's aims, rather to insure that they are in reality his own. essentially his to the last they should remain, even though intrinsically they may not be the best. young persons, much more than their elders, require to talk over plans from time to time with an experienced critic, in order to learn by degrees the difficult art of planning. by such talk intentionality is fortified. there is much of this talk already; talk of younger students with older, talk with wise persons at home, and more and more every year with the teachers of the courses left and the courses entered. all this is good. haphazard modes breed an astonishing average of choices that possess a meaning. the waste of a _laissez-faire_ system comes nowhere near the waste of a prescribed. but what is good when compared with a bad thing may be poor when compared with excellence itself. we must go on. a college, like a man, should always be saying, "never was i so good as to-day, and never again will i be so bad." we must welcome criticisms more than praises, and seek after our weak points as after hid treasures. the elective system seems to me weak at present through lacking organized means of bringing the student and his intentions face to face. intentions grow by being looked at. at the english universities a young man on entering a college is put in charge of a special tutor, without whose consent he can do little either in the way of study or of personal management.[ ] dependence so extreme is perhaps better suited to an infant school than to an american college; and even in england, where respectful subservience on the part of the young has been cultivated for generations, the system is losing ground. since the tutors were allowed to marry and to leave the college home, tutorial influence has been changing. in most american colleges twenty-five years ago there were officers known as class tutors, to whom, in case of need, a student might turn. petty permissions were received from these men, instead of from a mechanical central office. so far as this plan set personal supervision in the place of routine it was, in my eyes, good. but the relation of a class tutor to his boys was usually one of more awe than friendship. at the johns hopkins university there is a board of advisers, to some member of which each student is assigned at entrance. the adviser stands _in loco parentis_ to his charges. the value of such adjustments depends on the nature of the parental tie. if the relation is worked so as to stimulate the student's independence, it is good; if so as to discharge him from responsibility, it unfits for the life that follows. at harvard special students not candidates for a degree have recently been put in charge of a committee, to whom they are obliged to report their previous history and their plans of study for each succeeding year. the committee must know at all times what their charges are doing. something of this sort, i am convinced, will be demanded at no distant day, as a means of steadying all students in elective colleges. large personal supervision need not mean diminution of freedom. a young man may possess his freedom more solidly if he recognizes an obligation to state and defend the reasons which induce his choice. for myself, i should be willing to make the functions of such advisory committees somewhat broad. as a college grows, the old ways of bringing about acquaintance between officers and students become impracticable. but the need of personal acquaintance, unhappily, does not cease. new ways should be provided. a boy dropped into the middle of a large college must not be lost to sight; he must be looked after. to allow the teacher's work of instruction to become divorced from his pastoral, his priestly, function is to cheapen and externalize education. i would have every student in college supplied with somebody who might serve as a discretionary friend; and i should not think it a disadvantage that such an expectation of friendship would be as apt to better the instructor as the student. before leaving this part of my subject, i may mention a subordinate, but still valuable, means of limiting choice so as to increase its intentionality. the studies open to choice in the early years should be few and elementary. the significance of advanced courses cannot be understood till elementary ones are mastered, and immature choice should not be confused by many issues. at harvard this mode of limitation is largely employed. although the elective list for - shows courses, a freshman has hardly more than one eighth of these to choose from; in any given case this number will probably be reduced about one half by insufficient preparation or conflict of hours. seemingly about a third of the list is offered to the average sophomore; but this amount is again cut down nearly one half by the operation of similar causes. the practice of hedging electives with qualifications is a growing one. it may well grow more. it offers guidance precisely at the point where it is most needed. it protects rational choice, and guards against many of the dangers which the foes of election justly dread. ii. a second class of limitations of the elective system, possible and friendly, springs from the need of furnishing the young elector ample information about that which he is to choose. the best intentions require judicious aim. if studies are taken in the dark, without right anticipation of their subject-matter, or in ignorance of their relation to other studies, small results follow. here, i think it will be generally agreed, prescribed systems are especially weak. their pupils have little knowledge beforehand of what a course is designed to accomplish. work is undertaken blindly, minds consenting as little as wills. an elective system is impossible under such conditions. its student must know when he chooses, what he chooses. he must be able to estimate whether the choice of greek will further his designs better than the choice of greek . at harvard, methods of furnishing information are pretty fully developed. in may an elective pamphlet is issued, which announces everything that is to be taught in the college during the following year. most departments, also, issue additional pamphlets, describing with much detail the nature of their special courses, and the considerations which should lead a student to one rather than another. if the courses of a department are arranged properly, pursuing one gives the most needful knowledge about the available next. this knowledge is generally supplemented at the close of the year by explanations on the part of the instructor about the courses that follow. in the elective pamphlet a star, prefixed to courses of an advanced and especially technical character, indicates that the instructor must be privately consulted before these courses can be chosen. consultations with instructors about all courses are frequent. that most effective means of distributing information, the talk of students, goes on unceasingly. with time, perhaps, means may be devised for informing a student more largely what he is choosing. the fullest information is desirable. that which is at present most needed is, i think, some rough indication of the relations of the several provinces of study to one another. information of this sort is peculiarly hard to supply, because the knowledge on which it professes to rest cannot be precise and unimpeachable. we deal here with intricate problems, in regard to which experts are far from agreed, problems where the different point of view provided in the nature of each individual will rightly readjust whatever general conclusions are drawn. the old type of college had an easy way of settling these troublesome matters dogmatically, by voting, in open faculty-meeting, what should be counted the normal sequence of studies, and what their mixture. but as the votes of different colleges showed no uniformity, people have gradually come to perceive that the subject is one where only large outlines can distinctly be made out.[ ] to these large outlines i think it important to direct the attention of undergraduates. in most german universities a course of _encyclopädie_ is offered, a course which gives in brief a survey of the sciences, and attempts to fix approximately the place of each in the total organization of knowledge. i am not aware that such a course exists in any american college. indeed, there was hardly a place for it till dogmatic prescription was shaken. but if something of the kind were now established in the freshman year, our young men might be relieved of a certain intellectual short-sightedness, and the choices of one year might better keep in view those of the other three. iii. and now granting that a student has started with good intentions and is well informed about the direction where profit lies, still have we any assurance that he will push those intentions with a fair degree of tenacity through the distractions which beset his daily path? we need, indeed we must have, a third class of helpful limitations which may secure the persistent adhesion of our student to his chosen line of work. probably this class of limitations is the most important and complex of all. to yield a paying return, study must be stuck to. a decision has little meaning unless the volition of to-day brings in its train a volition to-morrow. self-direction implies such patient continuance in well-doing that only after persistence has become somewhat habitual can choice be called mature. to establish onward-leading habits, therefore, should be one of the chief objects in devising limitations of election. only we must not mistake; we must look below the surface. mechanical diligence often covers mental sloth. it is not habits of passive docility that are desirable, habits of timidity and uncriticising acceptance. against forming these pernicious and easily acquired habits, it may be necessary even to erect barriers. the habit wanted is the habit of spontaneous attack. prescription deadened this vital habit; it mechanized. his task removed, the student had little independent momentum. election invigorates the springs of action. formerly i did not see this, and i favored prescribed systems, thinking them systems of duty. that absence of an aggressive intellectual life which prescribed studies induce, i, like many others, mistook for faithfulness. experience has instructed me. i no longer have any question that for the average man sound habits of steady endeavor grow best in fields of choice. emerson's words are words of soberness:-- he that worketh high and wise nor pauses in his plan, will take the sun out of the skies ere freedom out of man. furthermore, in attempting to stimulate persistence i believe we must ultimately rely on the rational interest in study which we can arouse and hold. undoubtedly much can be done to save this interest from disturbance and to hold vacillating attention fixed upon it; but it, and it alone, is to be the driving force. methods of college government must be reckoned wise as they push into the foreground the intrinsic charm of wisdom, mischievous as they hide it behind fidelity to technical demand. in other matters we readily acknowledge interest as an efficient force. we call it a force as broad as the worth of knowledge, and as deep as the curiosity of man. "put your heart into your work," we say, "if you will make it excellent." a dozen proverbs tell that it is love that makes the world go round. every employment of life springs from an underlying desire. the cricketer wants to win the game; the fisherman to catch fish; the farmer to gather crops; the merchant to make money; the physician to cure his patient; the student to become wise. eliminate desire, put in its place allegiance to the rules of a game, and what, in any of these cases, would be the chance of persistent endeavor? it seems almost a truism to say that limitations of personal effort designed to strengthen persistency must be such as will heighten the wish and clear its path to its object. obvious as is the truth here presented, it seems in some degree to have escaped the attention of my critics. after showing that the grade of scholarship at harvard steadily rises, that our students become more decorous and their methods of work less childish, i stated that, under an extremely loose mode of regulating attendance five sixths of the exercises were attended by all our men, worst and best, sick and well, most reckless and most discreet. few portions of my obnoxious paper have occasioned a louder outcry. i am told of a neighboring college where the benches show but three per cent of absentees. i wonder what the percentage is in charlestown state prison. nobody doubts that attendance will be closer if compelled. but the interesting question still remains, "are students by such means learning habits of spontaneous regularity?" this question can be answered only when the concealing restraint is removed. it has been removed at harvard,--in my judgment too largely removed,--and the great body of our students is seen to desire learning and to desire it all the time. is it certain that the students of other colleges, if left with little or no restraint, would show a better record? the point of fidelity and regularity, it is said, is of supreme importance. so it is. but fidelity and regularity in study, not in attending recitations. if ever the harvard system is perfected, so that students here are as eager for knowledge as the best class of german university men, i do not believe we shall see a lower rate of absence; only then, each absence will be used, as it is not at present, for a studious purpose. the modern teacher stimulates private reading, exacts theses, directs work in libraries. pupils engaged in these things are not dependent on recitations as text-book schoolboys are. the grade of higher education cannot rise much so long as the present extreme stress is laid on appearance in the class-room. in saying this i would not be understood to defend the method of dealing with absences which has for some years been practised at harvard. i think the method bad. i have always thought it so, and have steadily favored a different system. the behavior of our students under a regulation so loose seems to me a striking testimony to the scholarly spirit prevalent here. as such i mentioned it in my first paper, and as such i would again call attention to it. but i am not satisfied with the present good results. i want to impress on every student that absence from the class-room can be justified by nothing short of illness or a scholarly purpose. for a gainful purpose the merchant is occasionally absent from his office; for a gainful purpose a scholar of mine may omit a recitation. but smith can be absent profitably when brown would meet with loss. i accordingly object to methods of limiting absence which exact the same numerical regularity of all. college records may look clean, yet students be learning little about duty. limitation, in my judgment, should be so adjusted as to strengthen the man's personal adhesion to plans of daily study. such limitations cannot be fixed by statute and worked by a single clerk. moral discipline is not a thing to be supplied by wholesale. professors must be individually charged with the oversight of their men. i would have excuses for occasional absence made to the instructor, and i should expect him to count it a part of his work to see that the better purposes of his scholars did not grow feeble. a professor who exercised such supervisory power slackly would make his course the resort of the indolent; one who was over-stringent would see himself deserted by indolent and earnest alike. my rule would be that no student be allowed to present himself at an examination who could not show his teacher's certificate that his attendance on daily work was satisfactory. traditions in this country and in germany are so different that i should have confidence in a method working well here though it worked ill there. at any rate, whenever it fell into decay, it could--a proviso necessary in all moral matters--be readjusted. a rule something like this the harvard faculty has recently adopted by voting that "any instructor, with the approval of the dean, may at any time exclude from his course any student who in his judgment has neglected the work of the course." probably the amount of absence which has hitherto occurred at harvard will under this vote diminish. suppose, then, by these limitations on a student's caprice we have secured his persistence in outward endeavor, still one thing more is needed. we have brought him bodily to a recitation room; but his mind must be there too, his aroused and active mind. limitations that will secure this slippery part of the person are difficult to devise. nevertheless, they are worth studying. their object is plain. they are to lead a student to do something every day; to aid him to overcome those tendencies to procrastination, self-confidence, and passive absorption which are the regular and calculable dangers of youth. they are to teach him how not to cram, to inspire him with respect for steady effort, and to enable him each year to find such effort more habitual to himself. these are hard tasks. the old education tried to meet them by the use of daily recitations, a plan not without advantages. the new education is preserving the valuable features of recitations by adopting and developing the _seminar_. but recitations pure and simple have serious drawbacks. they presuppose a text-book, which, while it brings definiteness, brings also narrowness of view. the learner masters a book, not a subject. after-life possesses nothing analogous to the text-book. a struggling man wins what he wants from many books, from his own thought, from frequent consultations. why should not a student be disciplined in the ways he must afterwards employ? moreover, recitations have the disadvantage that no large number of men can take part on any single day. the times of trial either become amenable to reckoning, or, in order to prevent reckoning, a teacher must resort to schemes which do not commend him to his class. undoubtedly in recitation the reciter gains, but the gains of the rest of the class are small. the listeners would be more profited by instruction. an hour with an expert should carry students forward; to occupy it in ascertaining where they now stand is wasteful. for all these reasons there has been of late years a strong reaction against recitations. lectures have been introduced, and the time formerly spent by a professor in hearing boys is now spent by boys in hearing a professor. plainly in this there is a gain, but a gain which needs careful limitation if the student's persistence in work is to be retained. a pure lecture system is a broad road to ignorance. students are entertained or bored, but at the end of a month they know little more than at the beginning. lectures always seem to me an inheritance from the days when books were not. learning--how often must it be said!--is not acceptance; it is criticism, it is attack, it is doing. an active element is everywhere involved in it. personal sanction is wanted for every step. one who will grow wise must perform processes himself, not sit at ease and behold another's performance. these simple truths are now tolerably understood at harvard. there remain in the college few courses of pure recitations or of pure lectures. i wish all were forbidden by statute. in almost all courses, in one way or another, frequent opportunity is given the student to show what he is doing. in some, especially in elementary courses, lectures run parallel with a text-book. in some, theses, that is, written discussions, are exacted monthly, half-yearly, annually, in addition to examinations. in some, examinations are frequent. in some, a daily question, to be answered in writing on the spot, is offered to the whole class. often, especially in philosophical subjects, the hour is occupied with debate between officer and students. more and more, physical subjects are taught by the laboratory, linguistic and historical by the library. in a living university a great variety of methods spring up, according to the nature of the subject and the personality of the teacher. variety should exist. in constantly diversified ways each student should be assured that he is expected to be doing something all the time, and that somebody besides himself knows what he is doing. as yet this assurance is not attained; we can only claim to be working toward it. every year we discover some fresh limitation which will make persistence more natural, neglect more strange. i believe study at harvard is to-day more interested, energetic, and persistent than it has ever been before. but that is no ground for satisfaction. a powerful college must forever be dissatisfied. each year it must address itself anew to strengthening the tenacity of its students in their zeal for knowledge. by the side of these larger limitations in the interest of persistency, it may be well to mention one or two examples of smaller ones which have the same end in view. by some provision it must be made difficult to withdraw from a study once chosen. choice should be deliberate and then be final. it probably will not be deliberate unless it is understood to be final. a few weeks may be allowed for an inspection of a chosen course, but at the close of the first month's teaching the harvard faculty tie up their students and allow change only on petition and for the most convincing cause. an elective college which did not make changes of electives difficult would be an engine for discouraging intentionality and persistence. i incline to think, too, that a regulation forbidding elementary courses in the later years would render our education more coherent. in this matter elective colleges have an opportunity which prescribed ones miss. in order to be fair to all the sciences, college faculties are obliged to scatter fragments of them throughout the length and breadth of prescribed curricula. twenty-five years ago every harvard man waited till his senior year before beginning philosophy, acoustics, history, and political economy. to-day the fourteen other new england colleges, most of whom, like the harvard of twenty-five years ago, offer a certain number of elective studies, still show senior years largely occupied with elementary studies. five forbid philosophy before the senior year; eight, political economy; two, history; six, geology. out of the seven colleges which offer some one of the eastern languages, all except harvard oblige the alphabet to be learned in the senior year. of the six which offer italian or spanish, harvard alone permits a beginning to be made before the junior year, while two take up these languages for the first time in the senior year. in three new england colleges german cannot be begun till the junior year. in a majority, a physical subject is begun in the junior and another in the senior year. at yale nobody but a senior can study chemistry. such postponement, and by consequence such fragmentary work, may be necessary where early college years are crowded with prescribed studies. but an elective system can employ its later years to better advantage. it can bring to a mature understanding the interests which freshmen and sophomores have already acquired. elementary studies are not maturing studies; they do not make the fibre of a student firm. to studies of a solidifying sort the last years should be devoted. i should like to forbid seniors to take any elementary study whatever, and to forbid juniors all except philosophy, political economy, history, fine arts, sanskrit, hebrew, and law. under such a rule we should graduate more men who would be first rate at something; and a man who is first rate at something is generally pretty good at anything. such, then, are a few examples of the ways in which choice may be limited so as to become strong. they are but examples, intended merely to draw attention to the three kinds of limitation still possible. humble ways they may seem, not particularly interesting to hear about; business methods one might call them. but by means of these and such as these the young scholar becomes clearer in intention, larger in information, hardier in persistence. in urging such means i shall be seen to be no thick and thin advocate of election. that i have never been. originally a doubter, i have come to regard the elective system, that is, election under such limitations as i have described, as the safest--indeed as the only possible--course which education can now take, i advocate it heartily as a system which need not carry us too fast or too far in any one direction, as a system so inherently flexible that its own great virtues readily unite with those of an alien type. under its sheltering charge the worthier advantages of both grouped and prescribed systems are attainable. i proclaim it, therefore, not as a popular cry nor as an educational panacea, but as a sober opportunity for moral and intellectual training. limited as it is at harvard, i see that it works admirably with the studious, stimulatingly with those of weaker will, not unendurably with the depraved. these are great results. they cannot be set aside by calling them the outcome of "individualism." in a certain sense they are. but "individualism" is an uncertain term. in every one of us there is a contemptible individuality, grounded in what is ephemeral and capriciously personal. systematic election, as i have shown, puts limitations on this. but there is a noble individuality which should be the object of our fostering care. nothing that lends it strength and fineness can be counted trivial. to form a true individuality is, indeed, the ideal of the elective system. let me briefly sketch my conception of that ideal. george herbert, praising god for the physical world which he has made, says that in it "all things have their will, yet none but thine." such a free harmony between thinking man and a lord of his thought it is the office of education to bring about. at the start it does not exist. the child is aware of his own will, and he is aware of little else. he imagines that one pleasing fancy may be willed as easily as another. as he matures, he discovers that his will is effective when it accords with the make of the world and ineffective when it does not. this discovery, bringing as it does increased respect for the make of the world and even for its maker, degrades or ennobles according as the facts of the world are now viewed as restrictive finalities or as an apparatus for larger self-expression. seeing the power of that which is not himself, a man may become passively receptive, and say, "then i am to have no will of my own"; or he may become newly energetic, knowing that though he can have no will of his separate own, yet all the power of god is his if he will but understand. a man of the latter sort is spiritually educated. much still remains to be done in understanding special laws; and with each fresh understanding, a fresh possibility of individual life is disclosed. the worth, however, of the whole process lies in the man's honoring his own will, but honoring it only as it grows strong through accordance with the will of god. now into our colleges comes a mixed multitude made up of all the three classes named: the childish, who imagine they can will anything; the docile, so passive in the presence of an ordered world that they have little individual will left; the spiritually-minded or original, who with strong interests of their own seek to develop these through living contact with truths which they have not made. our educational modes must meet them all, respecting their wills wherever wise, and teaching the feeble to discriminate fanciful from righteous desires. for carrying forward such a training the elective system seems to me to have peculiar aptitudes. what i have called its limitations will be seen to be spiritual assistances. to the further invention of such there is no end. a watchful patience is the one great requisite, patience in directors, instructed criticism on the part of the public, and a brave expression of confidence when confidence is seen to have been earned. footnotes: [ ] doubtless some have carried out the intention of making everything as soft as possible for themselves. but the choices, in fact, do not as yet show the existence of any such intention in any considerable number of cases; they show rather the very reverse.--professor ladd in _the new englander_, january, , p. . [ ] as the minute personal care given to individual students in the english universities is often and deservedly praised, i may as well say that it costs something. oxford spends each year about $ , , on men; harvard, $ , on . [ ] i may not have a better opportunity than this to clear up a petty difficulty which seems to agitate some of my critics. they say they want the degree of a.b. to mean something definite, while at present, under the elective system, it means one thing for john doe, and something altogether different for his classmate, richard roe. that is true. besides embodying the general signification that the bearer has been working four years in a way to satisfy college guardians, the stately letters do take on an individual variation of meaning for every man who wins them. they must do so as long as we are engaged in the formation of living persons. if the college were a factory, our case would be different. we might then offer a label which would keep its identity of meaning for all the articles turned out. wherever education has been a living thing, the single degree has always contained this element of variety. the german degree is as diverse in meaning as ours. the degree of the english university is diverse, and more diverse for honors men--the only ones who can properly be said to deserve it--than for inert pass men. degrees in this country have, from the first, had considerable diversity, college differing from college in requirement, and certainly student from student in attainment. that twenty-five years ago we were approaching too great uniformity in the signification of degrees, i suppose most educators now admit. that was a mechanical and stagnant period, and men have brought over from it to the more active days of the present ideals formed then. precision of statement goes with figures, with etiquette, with military matters; but descriptions of the quality of persons must be stated in the round. xi college expenses[ ] the subject of college expenses has been much debated lately. at our commencement dinner, a year ago, attention was called to it. our chairman on that occasion justly insisted that the ideal of the university should be plain living and high thinking. and certainly there is apt to be something vulgar, as well as vicious, in the man of books who turns away from winning intellectual wealth and indulges in tawdry extravagance. yet every friend of harvard is obliged to acknowledge with shame that the loose spender has a lodging in our yard. no clear-sighted observer can draw near and not perceive that in all his native hideousness the man of the club and the dog-cart is among us. i do not think this strange. in fact, i regard it as inevitable. it is necessarily connected with our growth. the old college we might compare, for moral and intellectual range, with a country village; our present university is a great city, and we must accept the many-sided life, the temptations as well as the opportunities, of the great city. probably nowhere on this planet can a thousand young men be found, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, who will not show examples of the heedless, the temptable, and the depraved. let us not, then, shrink from acknowledging the ugly fact; extravagance is here,--shameless, coarse extravagance. i hope nothing i say may diminish our sense of its indecency. but how widespread is it? we must not lose sight of that important question. how largely does it infect the college? are many students large spenders? must a man of moderate means on coming here be put to shame? will he find himself a disparaged person, out of accord with the spirit of the place, and unable to obtain its characteristic advantages? these are the weighty questions. only after we have answered them can we determine the moral soundness of the university. wherever we go on earth we shall find the insolently rich and wasteful. they, like the poor, are always with us; their qualities are cheap. but what we want to know is whether, side by side with them, we have a company of sober men, who care for higher things and who spend no more than the higher things require. facts of proportion and degree form the firm basis of general judgments, and yet i am aware that these are the hardest facts to obtain. hitherto nobody has known any such facts in regard to the expenses of harvard. assertions about the style of living here have only expressed the personal opinion of the assertor, or at best have been generalizations from a few chance cases. no systematic evidence on the subject has existed. it is time it did exist, and i have made an attempt to obtain it. to each member of the graduating class i sent a circular, a month ago, asking if he would be willing to tell me in confidence what his college course had cost. i desired him to include in his report all expenses whatever. he was to state not merely his tuition, board, and lodging, but also his furniture, books, clothing, travel, subscriptions, and amusements; in fact, every dollar he had spent during the four years of his study, except his charges for class day and the summer vacations; these times varying so widely, it seemed to me, in their cost to different men that they could not instructively enter into an average. the reply has been very large indeed. to my surprise, out of a class of two hundred and thirty-five men actually in residence, two hundred and nineteen, or ninety-three per cent, have sent reports. am i wrong in supposing that this very general "readiness to tell" is itself a sign of upright conduct? but i would not exaggerate the worth of the returns. they cannot be trusted to a figure. it has not been possible to obtain itemized statements. college boys, like other people, do not always keep accounts. but i requested my correspondents, in cases of uncertainty, always to name the larger figure; and though those who have lived freely probably have less knowledge about what they have spent than have their economical classmates, i think we may accept their reports in the rough. we can be reasonably sure whether they have exceeded or fallen below a certain medium line, and for purposes more precise i shall not attempt to use them. anything like minute accuracy i wish expressly to repudiate. the evidence i offer only claims to be the best that exists at present; and i must say that the astonishing frankness and fulness of the reports give me strong personal assurance of the good faith of the writers. in these letters i have seen a vivid picture of the struggles, the hopes, the errors, and the repentings of the manly young lives that surround me. what, then, are the results? out of the two hundred and nineteen men who have replied, fifty-six, or about one quarter of the class, have spent between $ and $ in each of the four years of residence; fifty-four, or again about a quarter, have spent between $ and $ ; but sixty-one, hardly more than a quarter, have spent a larger sum than $ . the smallest amount in any one year was $ ; the largest, $ .[ ] i ask you to consider these figures. they are not startling, but they seem to me to indicate that a soberly sensible average of expense prevails at harvard. they suggest that students are, after all, merely young men temporarily removed from homes, and that they are practising here, without violent change, the habits which the home has formed. those who have been accustomed to large expenditure spend freely here; those of quiet and considerate habits do not lightly abandon them. i doubt if during the last twenty-five years luxury has increased in the colleges as rapidly as it has in the outside world. there is no reason, either, to suppose that the addition of the sixteen men who have not replied would appreciably affect my results. the standing of these men on the last annual rank-list was sixty-eight per cent. they seem to me average persons. their silence i attribute to mistakes of the mail, to business, to neglect, or to the very natural disinclination to disclose their private affairs. to refuse to answer my intrusive questions, or even to acknowledge that college days were costly, is not in itself evidence of wantonness. small spenders are usually high scholars; but this is by no means always the case. in the most economical group i found seven who did not reach a rank of seventy per cent. last year; whereas out of the seven largest spenders of the class three passed seventy-five per cent. it would be rash to conclude that large sums cannot be honorably employed. but it may seem that the smallest of the sums named is large for a poor man. it may be believed that even after restraint and wisdom are used, harvard remains the college of the rich. there is much in our circumstances to make it so. an excellent education is unquestionably a costly thing, and to live where many men wish to live calls for a good deal of money. we have, it is true, this splendid hall, which lessens our expense for food and encompasses us with ennobling influences; but it costs $ a year to board here. our tuition bill each year is $ . the university owns rooms; but not a third of them rent for less than $ a year, the average rent being $ . these large charges for tuition and room-rent are made necessary by the smallness of the general fund which pays the running expenses of the college. very few of the professorships are endowed, and so the tuition-fee and room-rent must mainly carry the expenses of teaching. still, there is another side to the story. thus far i have figured out the expenses, and have said nothing about the means of meeting them. perhaps to get the advantages of harvard a student may need to spend largely; but a certain circumstance enables him to do so,--i mean the matchless benevolence of those who have preceded us here. the great sums intrusted to us for distribution in prizes, loan-funds, and scholarships make it possible for our students to offset the cost of their education to such a degree that the net output of a poor boy here is probably less than in most new england colleges. at any rate, i have asked a large number of poor students why they came to expensive harvard, and again and again i have received the reply: "i could not afford to go elsewhere." the magnitude of this beneficiary aid i doubt if people generally understand, and i have accordingly taken pains to ascertain what was the amount given away this year. i find that to undergraduates alone it was $ , ; to members of the graduate department, $ , ; and to the professional schools $ : making in a single year a total of assistance to students of the university of more than $ , . next year this enormous sum will be increased $ , by the munificent bequest of mr. price greenleaf. fully to estimate the favorable position of the poor man at harvard, we should take into account also the great opportunities for earning money through private tuition, through innumerable avenues of trade, and through writing for the public press. a large number of my correspondents tell of money earned outside their scholarships.[ ] these immense aids provided for our students maintain a balance of conditions here, and enable even the poorest to obtain a harvard education. and what an education it is; how broad and deep and individually stimulating,--the most truly american education which the continent affords! but i have no need to eulogize it. it has already entered into the very structure of you who listen. let me rather close with two pieces of advice. the first shall be to parents. give your son a competent allowance when you send him to harvard, and oblige him to stick to it. to learn calculation will contribute as much to his equipment for life as any elective study he can pursue; and calculation he will not learn unless, after a little experience, you tell him precisely what sum he is to receive. if in a haphazard way you pour $ into his pocket, then in an equally haphazard way $ will come out. whatever extravagance exists at harvard to-day is the fault of you foolish parents. the college, as a college, cannot stop extravagance. it cannot take away a thousand dollars from your son and tell him--what would be perfectly true--that he will be better off with the remaining thousand; that you must do yourselves. and if you ask, "what is a competent allowance?" out of what my correspondents say i will frame you five answers. if your son is something of an artist in economy, he may live here on $ , or less; he will require to be an artist to accomplish it. if he will live closely, carefully, yet with full regard to all that is required, he may do so, with nearly half his class, on not more than $ . if you wish him to live at ease and to obtain the many refinements which money will purchase, give him $ . indeed, if i were a very rich man, and had a boy whose character i could trust, so that i could be sure that all he laid out would be laid out wisely, i might add $ more, for the purchase of books and other appliances of delicate culture. but i should be sure that every dollar i gave him over $ would be a dollar of danger. let my second piece of advice be to all of you graduates. when you meet a poor boy, do not rashly urge him to come to harvard. estimate carefully his powers. if he is a good boy,--docile, worthy, commonplace,--advise him to go somewhere else. here he will find himself borne down by large expense and by the crowd who stand above him. but whenever you encounter a poor boy of eager, aggressive mind, a youth of energy, one capable of feeling the enjoyment of struggling with a multitude and of making his merit known, say to him that harvard college is expressly constituted for such as he. here he will find the largest provision for his needs and the clearest field for his talents. money is a power everywhere. it is a power here; but a power of far more restricted scope than in the world at large. in this magnificent hall rich and poor dine together daily. at the union they debate together. at the clubs which foster special interests,--the finance club, the philological club, the philosophical club, the french club, the signet, and the o. k.--considerations of money have no place. if the poor man is a man of muscle, the athletic organizations will welcome him; if a man skilled in words, he will be made an editor of the college papers; and if he has the powers that fit him for such a place, the whole body of his classmates will elect him orator, ivy orator, odist, or poet, without the slightest regard to whether his purse is full or empty. the poor man, it is true, will not be chosen for ornamental offices, for positions which imply an acquaintance with etiquette, and he may be cut off from intimacy with the frequenters of the ballroom and the opera; but as he will probably have little time or taste for these things, his loss will not be large. in short, if he has anything in him,--has he scholarship, brains, wit, companionability, stout moral purpose, or quiet christian character,--his qualities will find as prompt a recognition at harvard as anywhere on earth. footnotes: [ ] delivered in memorial hall, cambridge, june , . since this date the scale of expenditure in college, as elsewhere, has been steadily rising. [ ] perhaps i had better mention the adjustments by which these results have been reached. when a man has been in college during only the closing years of the course, i assume that he would have lived at the same rate had he been here throughout it. i have added $ for persons who board at home, and another hundred for those who lodge there. though i asked to have the expenses of class day and the summer vacations omitted, in some instances i have reason to suspect that they are included; but of course i have been obliged to let the error remain, and i have never deducted the money which students often say they expect to recover at graduation by the sale of furniture and other goods. there is a noticeable tendency to larger outlay as the years advance. some students attribute this to the greater cost of the studies of the later years, to the more expensive books and the laboratory charges; others, to societies and subscriptions; others, to enlarged acquaintance with opportunities for spending. [ ] for the sake of lucidity, i keep the expense account and the income account distinct. for example, a man reports that he has spent $ a year, winning each year a scholarship of $ , and earning by tutoring $ , and $ by some other means. the balance against him is only $ a year; but i have included him in the group of $ spenders. xii a teacher of the olden time on the th of february, , evangelinus apostolides sophocles, professor of ancient, byzantine, and modern greek in harvard university, died at cambridge, in the corner room of holworthy hall which he had occupied for nearly forty years. a past generation of american schoolboys knew him gratefully as the author of a compact and lucid greek grammar. college students--probably as large a number as ever sat under an american professor--were introduced by him to the poets and historians of greece. scholars of a riper growth, both in europe and america, have wondered at the precision and loving diligence with which, in his dictionary of the later and bzyantine greek, he assessed the corrupt literary coinage of his native land. his brief contributions to the nation and other journals were always noticeable for exact knowledge and scrupulous literary honesty. as a great scholar, therefore, and one who through a long life labored to beget scholarship in others, sophocles deserves well of america. at a time when greek was usually studied as the schoolboy studies it, this strange greek came among us, connected himself with our oldest university, and showed us an example of encyclopædic learning, and such familiar and living acquaintance with homer and Ã�schylus--yes, even with polybius, lucian, and athenæus--as we have with tennyson and shakespeare and burke and macaulay. more than this, he showed us how such learning is gathered. to a dozen generations of impressible college students he presented a type of an austere life directed to serene ends, a life sufficient for itself and filled with a never-hastening diligence which issued in vast mental stores. it is not, however, the purpose of this paper to trace the influence over american scholarship of this hardly domesticated wise man of the east. nor will there be any attempt to narrate the outward events of his life. these were never fully known; and could they be discovered, there would be a kind of impiety in reporting them. few traits were so characteristic of him as his wish to conceal his history. his motto might have been that of epicurus and descartes: "well hid is well lived." yet in spite of his concealments, perhaps in part because of them, few persons connected with harvard have ever left behind them an impression of such massive individuality. he was long a notable figure in university life, one of those picturesque characters who by their very being give impulse to aspiring mortals and check the ever-encroaching commonplace. it would be ungrateful to allow one formerly so stimulating and talked about to fall into oblivion. now that a decent interval after death has passed, a memorial to this unusual man may be reverently set up. his likeness may be drawn by a fond though faithful hand. or at least such stories about him may be kindly put into the record of print as will reflect some of those rugged, paradoxical, witty, and benignant aspects of his nature which marked him off from the humdrum herd of men. my own first approach to sophocles was at the end of my junior year in college. it was necessary for me to be absent from his afternoon recitation. in those distant days absences were regarded by harvard law as luxuries, and a small fixed quantity of them, a sort of sailor's grog, was credited with little charge each half-year to every student. i was already nearing the limit of the unenlargeable eight, and could not well venture to add another to my score. it seemed safer to try to win indulgence from my fierce-eyed instructor. early one morning i went to sophocles's room. "professor sophocles," i said, "i want to be excused from attending the greek recitation this afternoon." "i have no power to excuse," uttered in the gruffest of tones, while he looked the other way. "but i cannot be here. i must be out of town at three o'clock." "i have no power. you had better see the president." finding the situation desperate, i took a desperate leap. "but the president probably would not allow my excuse. at the play of the hasty pudding club to-night i am to appear as leading lady. i must go to brookline this afternoon and have my sister dress me." no muscle of the stern face moved; but he rose, walked to a table where his class lists lay, and, taking up a pencil, calmly said: "you had better say nothing to the president. you are here _now_. i will mark you so." he sniffed, he bowed, and, without smile or word from either of us, i left the room. as i came to know sophocles afterwards, i found that in this trivial early interview i had come upon some of the most distinctive traits of his character; here was an epitome of his _brusquerie_, his dignity, his whimsical logic, and his kind heart. outwardly he was always brusque and repellent. a certain savagery marked his very face. he once observed that, in introducing a character, homer is apt to draw attention to the eye. certainly in himself this was the feature which first attracted notice; for his eye had uncommon alertness and intelligence. those who knew him well detected in it a hidden sweetness; but against the stranger it burned and glared, and guarded all avenues of approach. startled it was, like the eye of a wild animal, and penetrating, "peering through the portals of the brain like the brass cannon." over it crouched bushy brows, and all around the great head bristled white hair, on forehead, cheeks, and lips, so that little flesh remained visible, and the life was settled in two fiery spots. this concentration of expression in the few elementary features of shape, hair, and eyes made the head a magnificent subject for painting. rembrandt should have painted it. but he would never allow a portrait of himself to be drawn. into his personality strangers must not intrude. venturing once to try for memoranda of his face, i took an artist to his room. the courtesy of sophocles was too stately to allow him to turn my friend away, but he seated himself in a shaded window, and kept his head in constant motion. when my frustrated friend had departed, sophocles told me, though without direct reproach, of two sketches which had before been surreptitiously made,--one by the pencil of a student in his class, another in oils by a lady who had followed him on the street. toward photography his aversion was weaker; perhaps because in that art a human being less openly meddled with him. from this sense of personal dignity, which made him at all times determined to keep out of the grasp of others, much of his brusqueness sprang. on the morning after he returned from his visit to greece a fellow professor saw him on the opposite side of the street, and, hastening across, greeted him warmly: "so you have been home, mr. sophocles; and how did you find your mother?" "she was up an apple-tree," said sophocles, confining himself to the facts of the case. a boy who snowballed him on the street he prosecuted relentlessly, and he could not be appeased until a considerable fine was imposed; but he paid the fine himself. many a bold push was made to ascertain his age; yet, however suddenly the question came, or however craftily one crept from date to date, there was a uniform lack of success. "i see allibone's dictionary says you were born in ," a gentleman remarked. "some statements have been nearer, and some have been farther from the truth." one day, when a violent attack of illness fell on him, a physician was called for diagnosis. he felt the pulse, he examined the tongue, he heard the report of the symptoms, then suddenly asked, "how old are you, mr. sophocles?" with as ready presence of mind and as pretty ingenuity as if he were not lying at the point of death, sophocles answered: "the arabs, dr. w., estimate age by several standards. the age of hassan, the porter, is reckoned by his wrinkles; that of abdallah, the physician, by the lives he has saved; that of achmet, the sage, by his wisdom. i, all my life a scholar, am nearing my hundredth year." to those who had once come close to sophocles these little reserves, never asserted with impatience, were characteristic and endearing. i happen to know his age; hot irons shall not draw it from me. closely connected with his repellent reserve was the stern independence of his modes of life. in his scheme, little things were kept small and great things large. what was the true reading in a passage of aristophanes, what the usage of a certain word in byzantine greek,--these were matters on which a man might well reflect and labor. but of what consequence was it if the breakfast was slight or the coat worn? accordingly, a single room, in which a light was seldom seen, sufficed him during his forty years of life in the college yard. it was totally bare of comforts. it contained no carpet, no stuffed furniture, no bookcase. the college library furnished the volumes he was at any time using, and these lay along the floor, beside his dictionary, his shoes, and the box that contained the sick chicken. a single bare table held the book he had just laid down, together with a greek newspaper, a silver watch, a cravat, a paper package or two, and some scraps of bread. his simple meals were prepared by himself over a small open stove, which served at once for heat and cookery. eating, however, was always treated as a subordinate and incidental business, deserving no fixed time, no dishes, nor the setting of a table. the peasants of the east, the monks of southern monasteries, live chiefly on bread and fruit, relished with a little wine; and sophocles, in spite of cambridge and america, was to the last a peasant and a monk. such simple nutriments best fitted his constitution, for "they found their acquaintance there." the western world had come to him by accident, and was ignored; the east was in his blood, and ordered all his goings. yet, as a grave man of the east might, he had his festivities, and could on occasion be gay. among a few friends he could tell a capital story and enjoy a well-cooked dish. but his ordinary fare was meagre in the extreme. for one of his heartier meals he would cut a piece of meat into bits and roast it on a spit, as homer's people roasted theirs. "why not use a gridiron?" i once asked. "it is not the same," he said. "the juice then runs into the fire. but when i turn my spit it bastes itself." his taste was more than usually sensitive, kept fine and discriminating by the restraint in which he held it. indeed, all his senses, except sight, were acute. the wine he drank was the delicate unresinated greek wine,--corinthian, or chian, or cyprian; the amount of water to be mixed with each being carefully debated and employed. each winter a cask was sent him from a special vineyard on the heights of corinth, and occasioned something like a general rejoicing in cambridge, so widely were its flavorous contents distributed. whenever this cask arrived, or when there came a box from mt. sinai filled with potato-like sweetmeats,--a paste of figs, dates, and nuts, stuffed into sewed goatskins,--or when his hens had been laying a goodly number of eggs, then under the blue cloak a selection of bottles, or of sweetmeats, or of eggs would be borne to a friend's house, where for an hour the old man sat in dignity and calm, opening and closing his eyes and his jack-knife; uttering meanwhile detached remarks, wise, gruff, biting, yet seldom lacking a kernel of kindness, till bedtime came, nine o'clock, and he was gone, the gifts--if thanks were feared--left in a chair by the door. there were half a dozen houses and dinner tables in cambridge to which he went with pleasure, houses where he seemed to find a solace in the neighborhood of his kind. but human beings were an exceptional luxury. he had never learned to expect them. they never became necessities of his daily life, and i doubt if he missed them when they were absent. as he slowly recovered strength, after one of his later illnesses, i urged him to spend a month with me. refusing in a brief sentence, he added with unusual gentleness: "to be alone is not the same for me and for you. i have never known anything else." unquestionably much of his disposition to remain aloof and to resist the on-coming intruder was bred by the experiences of his early youth. his native place, tsangarada, is a village of eastern thessaly, far up among the slopes of the pindus. thither, several centuries ago, an ancestor led a migration from the west coast of greece, and sought a refuge from turkish oppression. from generation to generation his fathers continued to be shepherds of their people, the office of proëstos, or governor, being hereditary in the house. sturdy men those ancestors must have been, and picturesque their times. in late winter afternoons, at holworthy, when the dusk began to settle among the elms about the yard, legends of these heroes and their far-off days would loiter through the exile's mind. at such times bloody doings would be narrated with all the coolness that appears in cæsar's commentaries, and over the listener would come a sense of a fantastic world as different from our own as that of bret harte's argonauts. "my great-grandfather was not easily disturbed. he was a young man and proëstos. his stone house stood apart from the others. he was sitting in its great room one evening, and heard a noise. he looked around, and saw three men by the farther door. 'what are you here for?' 'we have come to assassinate you.' 'who sent you?' 'andreas.' it was a political enemy. 'how much did andreas promise you?' 'a dollar.' 'i will promise you two dollars if you will go and assassinate andreas.' so they turned, went, and assassinated andreas. my great-grandfather went to scyros the next day, and remained there five years. in five years these things are forgotten in greece. then he came back, and brought a wife from scyros, and was proëstos once more." another evening: "people said my grandfather died of leprosy. perhaps he did. as proëstos he gave a decision against a woman, and she hated him. one night she crept up behind the house, where his clothes lay on the ground, and spread over his clothes the clothes of a leper. after that he was not well. his hair fell off and he died. but perhaps it was not leprosy; perhaps he died of fear. the knights of malta were worrying the turks. they sailed into the harbor of volo, and threatened to bombard the town. the turks seized the leading greeks and shut them up in the mosque. when the first gun was fired by the frigate, the heads of the greeks were to come off. my grandfather went into the mosque a young man. a quarter of an hour afterwards, the gun was heard, and my grandfather waited for the headsman. but the shot toppled down the minaret, and the knights of malta were so pleased that they sailed away, satisfied. the turks, watching them, forgot about the prisoners. but two hours later, when my grandfather came out of the mosque, he was an old man. he could not walk well. his hair fell off, and he died." sometimes i caught glimpses of turkish oppression in times of peace. "i remember the first time i saw the wedding gift given. no new-made bride must leave the house she visits without a gift. my mother's sister married, and came to see us. i was a boy. she stood at the door to go, and my mother remembered she had not had the gift. there was not much to give. the turks had been worse than usual, and everything was buried. but my mother could not let her go without the gift. she searched the house, and found a saucer,--it was a beautiful saucer; and this she gave her sister, who took it and went away." "how did you get the name of sophocles?" i asked, one evening. "is your family supposed to be connected with that of the poet?" "my name is not sophocles. i have no family name. in greece, when a child is born, it is carried to the grandfather to receive a name." (i thought how, in the odyssey, the nurse puts the infant odysseus in the arms of his mother's father, autolycus, for naming.) "the grandfather gives him his own name. the father's name, of course, is different; and this he too gives when he becomes a grandfather. so in old greek families two names alternate through generations. my grandfather's name was evangelinos. this he gave to me; and i was distinguished from others of that name because i was the son of apostolos, apostolides. but my best schoolmaster was fond of the poet sophocles, and he was fond of me. he used to call me his little sophocles. the other boys heard it, and they began to call me so. it was a nickname. but when i left home people took it for my family name. they thought i must have a family name. i did not contradict them. it makes no difference. this is as good as any." one morning he received a telegram of congratulation from the monks in cairo. "it is my day," he said. "how did the monks know it was your birthday?" i asked. "it is not my birthday. nobody thinks about that. it is forgotten. this is my saint's day. coming into the world is of no consequence; coming under the charge of the saints is what we care for. my name puts me in the virgin's charge, and the feast of the annunciation is my day. the monks know my name." to the greek church he was always loyal. its faith had glorified his youth, and to it he turned for strength throughout his solitary years. its conventual discipline was dear to him, and oftener than of his birthplace at the foot of mt. olympus he dreamed of mt. sinai. on mt. sinai the emperor justinian founded the most revered of all greek monasteries. standing remote on its sacred mountain, the monastery depends on cairo for its supplies. in cairo, accordingly, there is a branch or agency which during the boyhood of sophocles was presided over by his uncle constantius. at twelve he joined this uncle in cairo. in the agency there, in the parent monastery on sinai itself, and in journeyings between the two, the happy years were spent which shaped his intellectual and religious constitution. though he never outwardly became a monk, he largely became one within. his adored uncle constantius was his spiritual father. through him his ideals had been acquired,--his passion for learning, his hardihood in duty, his imperturbable patience, his brief speech which allowed only so many words as might scantily clothe his thought, his indifference to personal comfort. he never spoke the name of constantius without some sign of reverence; and in his will, after making certain private bequests, and leaving to harvard college all his printed books and stereotype plates, he adds this clause: "all the residue and remainder of my property and estate i devise and bequeath to the said president and fellows of harvard college in trust, to keep the same as a permanent fund, and to apply the income thereof in two equal parts: one part to the purchase of greek and latin books (meaning hereby the ancient classics) or of arabic books, or of books illustrating or explaining such greek, latin, or arabic books; and the other part to the catalogue department of the general library.... my will is that the entire income of the said fund be expended in every year, and that the fund be kept forever unimpaired, and be called and known as the constantius fund, in memory of my paternal uncle, constantius the sinaite, kônstantios sinaitnês." this man, then, by birth, training, and temper a solitary; whose heritage was mt. olympus, and the monastery of justinian, and the greek quarter of cairo, and the isles of greece; whose intimates were hesiod and pindar and arrian and basilides,--this man it was who, from onward, was deputed to interpret to american college boys the hallowed writings of his race. thirty years ago too, at the period when i sat on the green bench in front of the long-legged desk, college boys were boys indeed. they had no more knowledge than the high-school boy of to-day, and they were kept in order by much the same methods. thus it happened, by some jocose perversity in the arrangement of human affairs, that throughout our sophomore and junior years we sportive youngsters were obliged to endure sophocles, and sophocles was obliged to endure us. no wonder if he treated us with a good deal of contempt. no wonder that his power of scorn, originally splendid, enriched itself from year to year. we learned, it is true, something about everything except greek; and the best thing we learned was a new type of human nature. who that was ever his pupil will forget the calm bearing, the occasional pinch of snuff, the averted eye, the murmur of the interior voice, and the stocky little figure with the lion's head? there in the corner he stood, as stranded and solitary as the egyptian obelisk in the hurrying place de la concorde. in a curious sort of fashion he was faithful to what he must have felt an obnoxious duty. he was never absent from his post, nor did he cut short the hours, but he gave us only such attention as was nominated in the bond; he appeared to hurry past, as by set purpose, the beauties of what we read, and he took pleasure in snubbing expectancy and aspiration. "when i entered college," says an eminent greek scholar, "i was full of the notion, which i probably could not have justified, that the greeks were the greatest people that had ever lived. my enthusiasm was fanned into a warmer glow when i learned that my teacher was himself a greek, and that our first lesson was to be the story of thermopylæ. after the passage of herodotus had been duly read, sophocles began: 'you must not suppose these men stayed in the pass because they were brave; they were afraid to run away.' a shiver went down my back. even if what he said had been true, it ought never to have been told to a freshman." the universal custom of those days was the hearing of recitations, and to this sophocles conformed so far as to set a lesson and to call for its translation bit by bit. but when a student had read his suitable ten lines, he was stopped by the raised finger; and sophocles, fixing his eyes on vacancy and taking his start from some casual suggestion of the passage, began a monologue,--a monologue not unlike one of browning's in its caprices, its involvement, its adaptation to the speaker's mind rather than to the hearer's, and its ease in glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. during these intervals the sluggish slumbered, the industrious devoted themselves to books and papers brought in the pocket for the purpose, the dreamy enjoyed the opportunity of wondering what the strange words and their still stranger utterer might mean. the monologue was sometimes long and sometimes short, according as the theme which had been struck kindled the rhapsodist and enabled him, with greater or less completeness, to forget his class. when some subtlety was approached, a smile--the only smile ever seen on his face by strangers--lifted for a moment the corner of the mouth. the student who had been reciting stood meanwhile, but sat when the voice stopped, the white head nodded, the pencil made a record, and a new name was called. there were perils, of course, in records of this sort. reasons for the figures which subsequently appeared on the college books were not easy to find. some of us accounted for our marks by the fact that we had red hair or long noses; others preferred the explanation that our professor's pencil happened to move more readily to the right hand or to the left. for the most part we took good-naturedly whatever was given us, though questionings would sometimes arise. a little before my time there entered an ambitious young fellow, who cherished large purposes in greek. at the end of the first month under his queer instructor he went to the regent and inquired for his mark in plato. it was three, the maximum being eight. horror-stricken, he penetrated sophocles's room. "professor sophocles," he said. "i find my mark is only three. there must be some mistake. there is another jones in the class, you know, j. s. jones" (a lump of flesh), "and may it not be that our marks have been confused?" an unmoved countenance, a little wave of the hand, accompanied the answer: "you must take your chance,--you must take your chance." in my own section, when anybody was absent from a certain bench, poor prindle was always obliged to go forward and say, "i was here to-day, professor sophocles," or else the gap on the bench where six men should sit was charged to prindle's account. in those easy-going days, when men were examined for entrance to college orally and in squads, there was a good deal of eagerness among the knowing ones to get into the squad of sophocles; for it was believed that he admitted everybody, on the ground that none of us knew any greek, and it was consequently unfair to discriminate. fantastic stories were attributed to him, for whose truth or error none could vouch, and were handed on from class to class. "what does philadelphia mean?" "brotherly love," the student answers. "yes! it is to remind us of ptolemy philadelphus, who killed his brother." a german commentator had somewhere mentioned lions in connection with the peloponnesus, and sophocles inquires of brown if he knows the date when lions first appeared in the peloponnesus. he does not, nor does smith nor robinson. at length green, driven to bay, declares in desperation that he doesn't believe there ever were lions in the peloponnesus. to whom sophocles: "you are right. there were none." "do you read your examination books?" he once asked a fellow instructor. "if they are better than you expect, the writers cheat; if they are no better, time is wasted." "is to-day story day or contradiction day?" he is reported to have said to one who, in the war time, eagerly handed him a newspaper, and asked if he had seen the morning's news. how much of this cynicism of conduct and of speech was genuine perhaps he knew as little as the rest of us; but certainly it imparted a pessimistic tinge to all he did and said. to hear him talk, one would suppose the world was ruled by accident or by an utterly irrational fate; for in his mind the two conceptions seemed closely to coincide. his words were never abusive; they were deliberate, peaceful even; but they made it very plain that so long as one lived there was no use in expecting anything. paradoxes were a little more probable than ordered calculations; but even paradoxes would fail. human beings were altogether impotent, though they fussed and strutted as if they could accomplish great things. how silly was trust in men's goodness and power, even in one's own! most men were bad and stupid,--germans especially so. the americans knew nothing, and never could know. a wise man would not try to teach them. yet some persons dreamed of establishing a university in america! did they expect scholarship where there were politicians and business men? evil influences were far too strong. they always were. the good were made expressly to suffer, the evil to succeed. better leave the world alone, and keep one's self true. "put a drop of milk into a gallon of ink; it will make no difference. put a drop of ink into a gallon of milk; the whole is spoiled." i have felt compelled to dwell at some length on these cynical, illogical, and austere aspects of sophocles's character, and even to point out the circumstances of his life which may have shaped them, because these were the features by which the world commonly judged him, and was misled. one meeting him casually had little more to judge by. so entire was his reserve, so little did he permit close conversation, so seldom did he raise his eye in his slow walks on the street, so rarely might a stranger pass within the bolted door of his chamber, that to the last he bore to the average college student the character of a sphinx, marvellous in self-sufficiency, amazing in erudition, romantic in his suggestion of distant lands and customs, and forever piquing curiosity by his eccentric and sarcastic sayings. all this whimsicality and pessimism would have been cheap enough, and little worth recording, had it stood alone. what lent it price and beauty was that it was the utterance of a singularly self-denying and tender soul. the incongruity between his bitter speech and his kind heart endeared both to those who knew him. like his venerable cloak, his grotesque language often hid a bounty underneath. how many students have received his surly benefactions! in how many small tradesmen's shops did he have his appointed chair! his room was bare: but in his native town an aqueduct was built; his importunate and ungrateful relatives were pensioned; the monks of mt. sinai were protected against want; the children and grand-children of those who had befriended his early years in america were watched over with a father's love; and by care for helpless creatures wherever they crossed his path he kept himself clean of selfishness. one winter night, at nearly ten o'clock, i was called to my door. there stood sophocles. when i asked him why he was not in bed an hour ago, "a. has gone home," he said. "i know it," i answered; for a. was a young instructor dear to me. "he is sick," he went on. "yes." "he has no money." "well, we will see how he will get along." "but you must get him some money, and i must know about it." and he would not go back into the storm--this graybeard professor, solicitous for an overworked tutor--till i assured him that arrangements had been made for continuing a.'s salary during his absence. i declare, in telling the tale i am ashamed. am i wronging the good man by disclosing his secret, and saying that he was not the cynical curmudgeon for which he tried to pass? but already before he was in his grave the secret had been discovered, and many gave him persistently the love which he still tried to wave away. toward dumb and immature creatures his tenderness was more frank, for these could not thank him. children always recognized in him their friend. a group of curly-heads usually appeared in his window on class day. a stray cat knew him at once, and, though he seldom stroked her, would quickly accommodate herself near his legs. by him spiders were watched, and their thin wants supplied. but his solitary heart went out most unreservedly and with the most pathetic devotion toward fragile chickens; and out of these uninteresting little birds he elicited a degree of responsive intelligence which was startling to see. one of his dearest friends, coming home from a journey, brought him a couple of bantam eggs. when hatched and grown, they developed into a little five-inch burnished cock, which shone like a jewel or a bird of paradise, and a more sober but exquisite hen. these two, frank and nina, and all their numerous progeny for many years, sophocles trained to the hand. each knew its name, and would run from the flock when its white-haired keeper called, and, sitting upon his hand or shoulder, would show queer signs of affection, not hesitating even to crow. the same generous friend who gave the eggs gave shelter also to the winged consequences. and thus it happened that three times a day, so long as he was able to leave his room, sophocles went to that house where radcliffe college is now sheltered to attend his pets. white grapes were carried there, and the choicest of corn and clamshell; and endless study was given to devising conveniences for housing, nesting, and the promenade. but he did not demand too much from his chickens. in their case, as in dealing with human beings, he felt it wise to bear in mind the limit and to respect the foreordained. when nina was laying badly, one springtime, i suggested a special food as a good egg-producer. but sophocles declined to use it. "you may hasten matters," he said, "but you cannot change them. a hen is born with just so many eggs to lay. you cannot increase the number." the eggs, as soon as laid, were pencilled with the date and the name of the mother, and were then distributed among his friends, or sparingly eaten at his own meals. to eat a chicken itself was a kind of cannibalism from which his whole nature shrank. "i do not eat what i love," he said, rejecting the bowl of chicken broth i pressed upon him in his last sickness. for protecting creatures naturally so helpless, sternness--or at least its outward seeming--became occasionally necessary. one day young thornton's dog leaped into the hen-yard and caused a commotion there. sophocles was prompt in defence. he drew a pistol and fired, while the dog, perceiving his mistake, retreated as he had come. the following day thornton senior, walking down the street, was suddenly embarrassed by seeing sophocles on the same sidewalk. remembering, however, the old man's usually averted gaze, he hoped to pass unnoticed. but as the two came abreast, gruff words and a piercing eye signalled stoppage. "mr. thornton, you have a son." "yes, mr. sophocles, a boy generally well-meaning but sometimes thoughtless." "your son has a dog." "a nervous dog, rather difficult to regulate." "the dog worried my chickens." "so i heard, and was sorry enough to hear it." "i fired a pistol at him." "very properly. a pity you didn't hit him." "the pistol was not loaded." and before mr. thornton could recover his wits for a suitable reply sophocles had drawn from his pocket one of his long sinaitic sweetmeats, had cut off a lump with his jack-knife, handed it to mr. thornton, and with the words, "this is for the boy who owns the dog," was gone. the incident well illustrates the sweetness and savagery of the man, his plainness, his readiness to right a wrong and protect the weak, his rejection of smooth and unnecessary words, his rugged exterior, and the underlying kindness which ever attended it. if in ways so uncommon his clinging nature, cut off from domestic opportunity, went out to children and unresponsive creatures, it may be imagined how good cause of love he furnished to his few intimates among mankind. they found in him sweet courtesy, undemanding gentleness, an almost feminine tact in adapting what he could give to what they might receive. to their eyes the great scholar, the austere monk, the bizarre professor, the pessimist, were hidden by the large and lovable man. even strangers recognized him as no common person, so thoroughly was all he did and said purged of superfluity, so veracious was he, so free from apology. his everyday thoughts were worthy thoughts. he knew no shame or fear, and had small wish, i think, for any change. always a devout christian, he seldom used expressions of regret or hope. probably he concerned himself little with these or other feelings. in the last days of his life, it is true, when his thoughts were oftener in arabia than in cambridge, he once or twice referred to "the ambition of learning" as the temptation which had drawn him out from the monastery, and had given him a life less holy than he might have led among the monks. but these were moods of humility rather than of regret. habitually he maintained an elevation above circumstances,--was it stoicism or christianity?--which imparted to his behavior, even when most eccentric, an unshakable dignity. when i have found him in his room, curled up in shirt and drawers, reading the "arabian nights," the greek service book, or the "ladder of the virtues" by john klimakos, he has risen to receive me with the bearing of an arab sheikh, and has laid by the greek folio and motioned me to a chair with a stateliness not natural to our land or century. it would be clumsy to liken him to one of plutarch's men; for though there was much of the heroic and extraordinary in his character and manners, nothing about him suggested a suspicion of being on show. the mould in which he was cast was formed earlier. in his bearing and speech, and in a certain large simplicity of mental structure, he was the most homeric man i ever knew. iii papers by alice freeman palmer while mrs. palmer always avoided writing, and thought--generous prodigal!--that her work was best accomplished by spoken words, her complying spirit could not always resist the appeals of magazine editors. i could wish now that their requests had been even more urgent. and i believe that those who read these pages will regret that one possessed of such breadth of view, clearness, charm and cogency of style should have left a literary record so meagre. all these papers are printed precisely as she left them, without the change of a word. i have not even ventured on correction in the printed report of one of her addresses, that on going to college. its looser structure well illustrates her mode of moving an audience and bringing its mothers to the course of conduct she approved. xiii three types of women's colleges[ ] american college education in the quarter-century since the civil war has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it in a hundred years before. these changes have not occurred unnoticed. a multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. there still exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men's colleges in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system, both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor's and master's degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work--these, and many sequents of these, touching the physical, social, and religious life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion. the advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties which beset the education of men, but it has perplexities of its own in addition. after fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we are still in chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we were at the beginning. no educational convention meets without a session devoted to the difficulties in "the higher education of women," so important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one system the variety of its needs. yet chaos may be thought more chaotic than it really is. in the din of discussion it would not be strange if the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. we are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college training for girls. some of us hope we may never find it, believing that in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. but already three tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear, which it will be the purpose of this paper to explain. the nature of each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth in no spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us wiser and more patient in our future growth. what, then, are the three types, and how have they arisen? when to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment. in nearly every state west of the alleghanies, "universities" had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. these democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. "why," asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, "should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? why should we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our existing colleges would be bettered by more students? by far the large majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why should they be separated in the lecture room for only the four years between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation means the doubling of an equipment already too poor by half?" it is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, coeducation was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate and by a radical change in policy. when once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. from the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike for men and women. the total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to washington in , was three hundred and eighty-nine. of these two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two thirds, were coeducational. among them are all the state universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the protestant sects. hitherto i have spoken as if coeducation were a western movement; and in the west it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. but it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in massachusetts. bradford academy, chartered in , is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in , three years after the foundation of coeducational oberlin, and in the very year when mount holyoke was opened by mary lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. ipswich and abbot academies in massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. it has been the dominant sentiment in the east that boys and girls should be educated separately. the older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. the requirements for the two sexes are thought to be different. girls are to be trained for private, boys for public life. let every opportunity be given, it is said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship, among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social life. much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly. a powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman's education in the east. in the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women's colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. these colleges--vassar, opened in , wellesley and smith in , and bryn mawr in --have received in gifts of every kind about $ , , , and are educating nearly two thousand students. for the whole country the commissioner of education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. but these resources proved inadequate. there came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for training in subjects of advanced research. for this, only the best equipped men's universities were thought sufficient, and women began to resort to the great universities of england and germany. in an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the harvard annex began, twelve years ago, to provide women with instruction by members of the harvard faculty. where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; in short, in the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm for scholarship, and the opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two hundred and fifty years. these, then--coeducation, the woman's college, and the annex--are the three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of women's education has thus far issued. of course they are but types--that is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; they are rather the central forms to which many varieties approximate. the characteristic features of each i must now describe, and, as i promised at the beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each, while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of its qualities. to explain dangers as well as promises is the business of the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. to this business i now turn, and i may naturally have most in mind the university of michigan, my own alma mater, wellesley college, with whose government i have been connected for a dozen years, and the harvard annex, whose neighbor i now am. coeducation involves, as its name implies, the education of a company of young men and women as a single body. to the two sexes alike are presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline, of organization. the typical features are identical classrooms, libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same instructors; and the same honors for like work. ordinarily all the instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are held by women. usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over the one than over the other. this feature, however, is not essential. at cornell, oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity, buildings have been provided where the young women may--in some instances, must--live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a lady in charge. but in most of the higher coeducational institutions the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both sexes become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school, and social life--especially under the ample opportunities for learning the uses of freedom which our social habits afford--safely to undertake a college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. of course all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the classroom, the laboratory, and the thesis. the girl who goes to the university of michigan to-day, just as when i entered there in , finds her own boarding-place in one of the quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. she makes the business arrangements for her winter's fuel and its storage; she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and church. the advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in church on her first sunday. strong is the comradeship among these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all rival the boys. in my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung upon proving that "lady greek" involved the accents, and that women's minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. and still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties about coeducation have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and women exists. it is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life. in estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that it does not meet every need of a woman's nature. no system can--no system that has yet been devised. a woman is an object of attraction to men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. the exercise of her special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined moral perceptions. but then, over and above all this, she is a human being--a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. in a large tract of her character--is it the largest tract?--her own needs and those of the young man are identical. both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young man's education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. why, the defenders of coeducation ask, may not the same principles apply to women? why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? in education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. the differences must be attended to privately. at any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the two sides--the woman side and the human side--it will be generally agreed that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly weak in agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational action. the artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept the hard things and leave to her the easy--by these influences any comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in her early teens. the coeducationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and to tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. coeducation, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. the strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural, unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. the early fear that coeducation would result in classroom romances has proved exaggerated. these young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. marriage is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a successful marriage as ballroom intercourse or a summer at bar harbor. the weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths. it does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. refining home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which have been encouraged in her more tenderly nurtured sister. the woman's college is organized under a different and far more complex conception. the chief business of the man's college, whether girls are admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement of special investigation. the woman's college aims to do all this, but it aims also to make for its students a home within its own walls and to develop other powers in them than the merely intellectual. at the outset this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as life itself. when girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands to them preëminently _in loco parentis_. it must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, be ready in case of illness and, to prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene and sanitation, accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its students, but also in large degree of their physical power in the future. it generally furnishes them means of social access to the best men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction while seeking still to respect the varied faiths of its students. in short, the arrangements of the woman's college, as conceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness at building up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners, developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the means of sound learning. it may be said that a similar upbuilding of the personal life results from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some extent, enlarging life. but the question is one of directness or indirectness of aim. the woman's college puts this aim in the foreground side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. by setting its students apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common life. every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from her relations with them in the classroom. in appointing these women to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a candidate was an accomplished specialist. she must be this, but she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than of instruction. harvard and johns hopkins can ask their pupils to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed his hair. they will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. but neither wellesley nor any other woman's college could find a place in its faculty for a woman sophocles or sylvester. learning alone is not enough for women. not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous sympathies. to effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse. the influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon the characters of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. i have watched the ennobling process go on for many years among wellesley students, and i am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls' college community affords. that choicest product of modern civilization, the american girl, is here in all her diverse colors. she comes from more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political party; from nearly every state and territory in the union, and from the foreign lands into which english and american missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated. the farmer's daughter from the western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of new england. the pride of a southern senator's home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her college course because her father's life was given for the union. side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. they here learn to "see great things large, and little things small." this detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls' college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. according to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. an earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum. it is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to the girls' college. it is said that its students never escape from themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. is it desirable that they should? that i shall not undertake to decide. i have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women. whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a question of social ethics which the future must answer. i have set forth a type, perhaps in the endeavor after clearness exaggerating a little its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types than individual cases would justify. there are colleges for women which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. no doubt those which move furthest in the directions i have indicated are capable of modification. but i believe what i have said gives a substantially true account of an actually existing type--a type powerful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of a different type. the third type is the "annex," a recent and interesting experiment in the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. only a few cases exist, and as the harvard annex is the most conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred students, i shall describe it as the typical example. in the harvard annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is furnished entirely by members of the harvard faculty. no college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the annex staff of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. a wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each week from a famous greek or latin professor; a woman who has been long familiar with french literature explores with a learned specialist some single period in the history of the language. because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the annex enter one or more of its courses. there are consequently among its students women much older than the average of those who attend the colleges. the business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who provide classrooms, suggest boarding-places, secure the instructors, solicit the interest of the public--in short, manage all the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. in the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one. no detail in the management of harvard college is changed by the presence in cambridge of the harvard annex. if the corporation of harvard should assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give the girl graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the annex would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from harvard college as the medical, law, or divinity schools. the students of the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college undergraduates. the immediate governing boards of college and medical school are separate. but here comparison fails, for the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of all its resources. this the young women cannot do. they have only the rights of all cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the university. the harvard annex is, then, to-day a woman's college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. the fay house, where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of old cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. this is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give their entertainments. the students lodge in all parts of cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct only to themselves. the ladies of the management are lavish in time and care to make the girls' lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is as separate and independent as in the typical coeducational college. it is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. manifestly, the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if they happen to exist at all. in this, however, is the incalculable feature of the system. the annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. a girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a topic in which she is greatly interested. she arranges to join the annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that through pressure of other work the professor will be unable to teach in the annex the following year. the fact that favor rules, and not rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and for its literary work obliges the annex largely to depend on its own library. yet when all these weaknesses are confessed--and by none are they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the annex themselves--it should be said that hitherto they have not practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. the annex girl succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still, in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom reached elsewhere. a plan in some respects superficially analogous to the american annex has been in operation for many years at the english, and more recently at some of the scotch universities, where a hall or college for women uses many of the resources of the university. but this plan is so complicated with the peculiar organization of english university life that it cannot usefully be discussed here. in the few colleges in this country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its methods vary markedly. barnard college in new york is an annex of columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by columbia's teaching force, though columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. the new woman's college at cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to adelbert college, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction. in both barnard and cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in government. indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better equipped universities for men, whose resources they can to some extent use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. when they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable to the instabilities which at present beset the harvard annex. so far, however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the ordinary woman's college, and loses its distinctive merits. if the connection between it and the university should ever become so close that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself, it would become a question whether the barriers between the men's and the women's lecture rooms could be economically maintained. the preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman's study is carried on inside a man's college, in the women's college outside it, in the annex beside it. each of these situations has its advantage. but will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their distinctive vigor? present indications render this improbable. already coeducational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their girls. the separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of the ph.d. the annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the one side, sometimes to the other. and outside them all, the great body of men's colleges continually find it harder to maintain their isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex. the result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of bringing woman to her powers. while the public mind is so uncertain, so liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges, and antiquated ideals. it is well that for a good while to come woman's higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by any means it may save girls. those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a man's college may be persuaded to send her to a girls'. those who find it easier to honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be tempted into an annex. the important thing is that the adherents of these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so well. to understand one another kindly is the business of the hour--to understand and to wait. footnotes: [ ] published in _the forum_ for september, . xiv women's education in the nineteenth century[ ] one of the most distinctive and far-reaching movements of the nineteenth century is that which has brought about the present large opportunities for the higher education of women. confining itself to no country, this vast movement has advanced rapidly in some, slowly and timidly in others. in america three broad periods mark its progress: first, the period of quiescence, which ends about ; second, the period of agitation, ending with the civil war; the third, though far as yet from completion, may be called the period of accomplishment. for the first two hundred years in the history of our country little importance was attached to the education of women, though before the nineteenth century began, twenty-four colleges had been founded for the education of men. in the early years of this century private schools for girls were expensive and short-lived. the common schools were the only grades of public instruction open to young women. in the cities of massachusetts, where more was done for the education of boys than elsewhere, girls were allowed to go to school only a small part of the year, and in some places could even then use the schoolroom only in the early hours of the day, or on those afternoons when the boys had a half-holiday. anything like a careful training of girls was not yet thought of. this comparative neglect of women is less to be wondered at when we remember that the colleges which existed at the beginning of this century had been founded to fit men for the learned professions, chiefly for the ministry. neither here nor elsewhere was it customary to give advanced education to boys destined for business. the country, too, was impoverished by the long struggle for independence. the government was bankrupt, unable to pay its veteran soldiers. irritation and unrest were everywhere prevalent until the ending of the second war with england, in . immediately succeeding this began that great migration to the west and south-west which carried thousands of the most ambitious young men and women from the east to push our frontiers farther and farther into the wilderness. even in the older parts of the country the population was widely scattered. the people lived for the most part in villages and isolated farms. city life was uncommon. as late as only nine per cent of the population was living in cities of or more inhabitants. under such conditions nothing more than the bare necessities of education could be regarded. but this very isolation bred a kind of equality. in district schools it became natural for boys and girls to study together and to receive the same instruction from teachers who were often young and enthusiastic. these were as a rule college students, granted long winter vacations from their own studies that they might earn money by teaching village schools. thus most young women shared with their brothers the best elementary training the country afforded, while college education was reserved for the few young men who were preparing for the ministry or for some other learned profession. from the beginning it had been the general custom of this country to educate boys and girls together up to the college age. to-day in less than six per cent of all our cities is there any separate provision of schools for boys and girls. this habitual early start together has made it natural for our men and women subsequently to read the same books, to have the same tastes and interests, and jointly to approve a large social freedom. on the whole, women have usually had more leisure than men for the cultivating of scholarly tastes. the first endowment of the higher education of women in this country was made by the moravians in the seminary for girls which they founded at bethlehem, pennsylvania, in . they founded another girls' seminary at lititz in . though both of these honorable foundations continue in effective operation to-day, their influence has been for the most part confined to the religious communion of their founders. in an academy with wider connections was founded at bradford, massachusetts, at first open to boys and girls, since limited to girls. from that time academies and seminaries for girls increased rapidly. one of the most notable was troy seminary, founded by emma hart willard and chartered in . miss willard drew up broad and original plans for the higher education of girls, laid them before president monroe, appealed to the new york legislature for aid, and dreamed of establishing something like collegiate training. more than three hundred students entered her famous seminary, and for seventeen years she carried it on with growing reputation. her address to the president in is still a strong statement of the importance to the republic of an enlightened and disciplined womanhood. even more influential was the life and work of mary lyon, who in founded mount holyoke seminary, and labored for the education of women until her death, in . of strong religious nature, great courage and resource, she went up and down new england securing funds and pupils. her rare gift of inspiring both men and women induced wide acceptance of her ideals of character and intelligence. seminaries patterned after mount holyoke sprang up all over the land, and still remain as centres of powerful influence, particularly in the middle west and on the pacific coast. with this development, through the endowment of many excellent seminaries, of the primary education of girls into something like secondary or high-school opportunities, the period of quiescence comes to an end. there follows a period of agitation when the full privilege of college training side by side with men was demanded for women. this agitation was closely connected on the one hand with the antislavery movement and the general passion for moral reform at that time current; and, on the other, with the interest in teaching and that study of its methods which horace mann fostered. from to it was becoming evident that women were destined to have a large share in the instruction of children. for this work they sought to fit themselves, and the reformers aided them. oberlin college, which began as a collegiate institute in , was in chartered as a college. from the beginning it admitted women, and in three women took its diploma. antioch college, under horace mann's leadership, opened in , admitting women on equal terms with men. in elmira college was founded, the first institution chartered as a separate college for women. even before the civil war the commercial interests of the country had become so much extended that trade was rising into a dignity comparable to that of the learned professions. men were more and more deserting teaching for the business life, and their places, at first chiefly in the lower grades, were being filled by women. during the five years of the war this supersession of men by women teachers advanced rapidly. it has since acquired such impetus that at present more than two thirds of the training of the young of both sexes below the college grade has fallen out of the hands of men. in the mean time, too, though in smaller numbers, women have invaded the other professions and have even entered into trade. these demonstrations of a previously unsuspected capacity have been both the cause and the effect of enlarged opportunities for mental equipment. the last thirty or forty years have seen the opening of that new era in women's education which i have ventured to call the period of accomplishment. from the middle of the century the movement to open the state universities to women, to found colleges for men and women on equal terms, and to establish independent colleges for women spread rapidly. from their first organization the state universities of utah ( ), iowa ( ), washington ( ), kansas ( ), minnesota ( ), nebraska ( ) admitted women. indiana, founded in , opened its doors to women in , and was followed in by michigan, at that time the largest and far the most influential of all the state universities. from that time the movement became general. the example of michigan was followed until at the present time all the colleges and universities of the west, excepting those under catholic management, are open to women. the only state university in the east, that of maine, admitted women in . virginia, georgia, and louisiana alone among all the state universities of the country remain closed to women. this sudden opening to women of practically all universities supported by public funds is not more extraordinary than the immense endowments which during the same period have been put into independent colleges for women, or into colleges which admit men and women on equal terms. of these privately endowed colleges, cornell, originally founded for men, led the way in in opening its doors to women. the west and south followed rapidly, the east more slowly. of the colleges which at the end of the century are reported by the bureau of education, admit women; or, excluding the catholic colleges, per cent of all are open to women. of the sixty leading colleges in the united states there are only ten in which women are not admitted to some department. these ten are all on the atlantic seaboard and are all old foundations. this substantial accomplishment during the last forty years of the right of women to a college education has not, however, resulted in fixing a single type of college in which that education shall be obtained. on the contrary, three clearly contrasted types now exist side by side. these are the independent college, the coeducational college, and the affiliated college. to the independent college for women men are not admitted, though the grade, the organization, and the general aim are supposed to be the same as in the colleges exclusively for men. the first college of this type, elmira ( ), has been already mentioned. the four largest women's colleges--vassar, opened in ; smith, in ; wellesley, in , and bryn mawr, in --take rank among the sixty leading colleges of the country in wealth, equipment, teachers and students, and variety of studies offered. wells college, chartered as a college in , the woman's college of baltimore, opened in , and mt. holyoke, reorganized as a college in , have also large endowments and attendance. all the women's colleges are empowered to confer the same degrees as are given in the men's colleges. the development of coeducation, the prevailing type of education in the united states for both men and women, has already been sufficiently described. in coeducational colleges men and women have the same instructors, recite in the same classes, and enjoy the same freedom in choice of studies. to the faculties of these colleges women are occasionally appointed, and, like their male colleagues, teach mixed classes of men and women. many coeducational colleges are without halls of residence. where these exist, special buildings are assigned to the women students. the affiliated colleges, while exclusively for women, are closely connected with strong colleges for men, whose equipment and opportunities they are expected in some degree to share. at present there are five such: radcliffe college, the originator of this type, connected with harvard university, and opened in ; sophie newcomb memorial college, at tulane university, opened in ; the college for women of western reserve university, ; barnard college, at columbia university, ; the woman's college of brown university, . in all these colleges the standards for entrance and graduation are the same as those exacted from men in the universities with which they are affiliated. to a considerable extent the instructors also are the same. during the last quarter-century many professional schools have been opened to women--schools of theology, law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, technology, agriculture. the number of women entering these professions is rapidly increasing. since the increase of women students in medicine is per cent, in dentistry per cent, in pharmacy per cent, in technology and agriculture per cent. while this great advance has been accomplished in america, women in england and on the continent, especially during the last thirty years, have been demanding better education. though much more slowly and in fewer numbers than in this country, they have everywhere succeeded in securing decided advantages. no country now refuses them a share in liberal study, in the instruction of young children, and in the profession of medicine. as might be expected, english-speaking women, far more than any others, have won and used the opportunities of university training. since women have been studying at cambridge, england, and since at oxford. at these ancient seats of learning they have now every privilege except the formal degree. to all other english and scotch universities, and to the universities of the british colonies, women are admitted, and from them they receive degrees. in the most northern countries of europe--in iceland, finland, norway, sweden, denmark--the high schools and universities are freely open to women. in eastern europe able women have made efforts to secure advanced study, and these efforts have been most persistent in russia and since the crimean war. when denied in their own land, russian women have flocked to the swiss and french universities, and have even gone in considerable numbers to finland and to italy. now russia is slowly responding to its women's entreaties. during the last ten years the universities of rumania, bulgaria, hungary, and greece have been open to women; while in constantinople the american college for girls offers the women of the east the systematic training of the new england type of college. in western, central, and southern europe all university doors are open. in these countries, degrees and honors may everywhere be had by women, except in germany and austria. even here, by special permission of the minister of education, or the professor in charge, women may hear lectures. each year, too, more women are granted degrees by special vote and as exceptional cases. in brief, it may be said that practically all european universities are now open to women. no american woman of scholarship, properly qualified for the work she undertakes, need fear refusal if she seeks the instruction of the greatest european scholars in her chosen field. each year american women are taking with distinction the highest university degrees of the continent. to aid them, many fellowships and graduate scholarships, ranging in value from $ to $ , are offered for foreign study by our colleges for women and by private associations of women who seek to promote scholarship. large numbers of ambitious young women who are preparing themselves for teaching or for the higher fields of scientific research annually compete for this aid. three years ago an association was formed for maintaining an american woman's table in the zoölogical station at naples. by paying $ a year they are thus able to grant to selected students the most favorable conditions for biological investigation. this association has also just offered a prize of $ , to be granted two years hence, for the best piece of original scientific work done in the mean time by a woman. the american schools of classical studies in athens and rome admit women on the same terms as men, and award their fellowships to men and women indifferently. one of these fellowships, amounting to $ a year, has just been won by a woman. the experience, then, of the last thirty years shows a condition of women's education undreamed of at the beginning of the century. it shows that though still hampered here and there by timorous restrictions, women are in substantial possession of much the same opportunities as are available for men. it shows that they have both the capacity and the desire for college training, that they can make profitable and approved use of it when obtained, and that they are eager for that broader and more original study after college work is over which is at once the most novel and the most glorious feature of university education to-day. indeed, women have taken more than their due proportion of the prizes, honors, and fellowships which have been accessible to them on the same terms as to men. their resort to institutions of higher learning has increased far more than that of men. in the total number of college students in each million of population was . last year it had risen to , much more than doubling in twenty-seven years. during this time the number of men had risen from to , or had not quite doubled. the women rose from in to in , having increased their former proportional number more than six times, and this advance has also been maintained in graduate and professional schools. the immensity of the change which the last century has wrought in women's education may best be seen by setting side by side the conditions at its beginning and at its close. in no colleges for women existed, and only two endowed schools for girls--these belonging to a small german sect. they had no high schools, and the best grammar schools in cities were open to them only under restrictions. the commoner grammar and district schools, and an occasional private school dedicated to "accomplishments," were their only avenues to learning. there was little hostility to their education, since it was generally assumed by men and by themselves that intellectual matters did not concern them. no profession was open to them, not even that of teaching, and only seven possible trades and occupations. in a third of all the college students in the united states are women. sixty per cent of the pupils in the secondary schools, both public and private, are girls--_i.e._ more girls are preparing for college than boys. women having in general more leisure than men, there is reason to expect that there will soon be more women than men in our colleges and graduate schools. the time, too, has passed when girls went to college to prepare themselves solely for teaching or for other bread-winning occupations. in considerable numbers they now seek intellectual resources and the enrichment of their private lives. thus far between and per cent of women college graduates have at some time taught. in the country at large more than per cent of the teaching is done by women, in the north atlantic portion over per cent. even in the secondary schools, public and private, more women than men are teaching, though in all other countries the advanced instruction of boys is exclusively in the hands of men. never before has a nation intrusted all the school training of the vast majority of its future population, men as well as women, to women alone. footnotes: [ ] published in _the new york evening post_, . xv women's education at the world's fair[ ] few persons have stood in the court of honor at chicago and felt the surpassing splendors gathered there, without a certain dismay over its swiftly approaching disappearance. never in the world before has beauty been so lavish and so transient. probably in all departments of the fair a hundred million dollars have been spent. now the nation's holiday is done, the little half-year is over, and the palaces with their widely gathered treasures vanish like a dream. is all indeed gone? will nothing remain? wise observers perceive some permanent results of the merry-making. what these will be in the busy life of men, others may decide: i point out chiefly a few of the beneficial influences of the great fair on the life of women. the triumph of women in what may be called their detached existence, that is, in their guidance of themselves and the separated affairs of their sex, has been unexpectedly great. the government appointed an independent board of lady managers who, through many difficulties, gathered from every quarter of the globe interesting exhibits of feminine industry and skill. these they gracefully disposed in one of the most dignified buildings of the fair, itself a woman's design. here they attractively illustrated every aspect of the life of women, domestic, philanthropic, commercial, literary, artistic, and traced their historic advance. close at hand, in another building also of their own erection, they appropriately appeared as the guardians and teachers of little children. their halls were crowded, their dinners praised, their reception invitations coveted. throughout they showed organizing ability on a huge scale; they developed noteworthy leaders; what is more, they followed them, and they have quarrelled no more, and have pulled wires less, than men in similar situations; their courage, their energy, their tact in the erection of a monument to woman were astonishing; and the efforts of their central board were efficiently seconded by similar companies in every state. as in the sanitary and christian commissions and the hospital service of the war, in the multitude of women's clubs, the woman's christian temperance union, the king's daughters, the associations for promoting women's suffrage, so once more here women found an opportunity to prove their ability as a banded sex; and it is clear that they awakened in the nation a deeper respect for their powers. but the very triumph does away with its further necessity. having amply proved what they can do when banded together, women may now the more easily cease to treat themselves as a peculiar people. henceforth they are human beings. women's buildings, women's exhibits, may safely become things of the past. at any future fair no special treatment of women is likely to be called for. after what has been achieved, the self-consciousness of women will be lessened, and their sensitiveness about their own position, capacity, and rights will be naturally outgrown. the anthropologist may perhaps still assemble the work of a single sex, the work of people of a single color, or of those having blue eyes. but ordinary people will find less and less interest in these artificial classifications, and will more and more incline to measure men's and women's products by the same scale. even at chicago large numbers of women preferred to range their exhibits in the common halls rather than under feminine banners, and their demonstration of the needlessness of any special treatment of their sex must be reckoned as one of the most considerable of the permanent gains for women from the fair. if, then, women have demonstrated that they are more than isolated phenomena, that they should indeed be treated as integral members of the human family, in order to estimate rightly the lasting advantages they have derived from the fair we must seek those advantages not in isolations but in conjunctions. in the common life of man there is a womanly side and a manly side. both have profited by one splendid event. manufactures and transportation and mining and agriculture will hereafter be different because of what has occurred at chicago; but so will domestic science, the training of the young, the swift intellectual interest, the finer patriotism, the apprehension of beauty, the moral balance. it is by growth in these things that the emancipation of women is to come about, and the fair has fostered them all in an extraordinary degree. although the fair was officially known as a world's fair, and it did contain honorable contributions from many foreign countries, it was, in a sense that no other exhibition has been before, a nation's fair. it was the climacteric expression of america's existence. it gathered together our past and our present, and indicated not uncertainly our future. here were made visible our beginnings, our achievements, our hopes, our dreams. the nation became conscious of itself and was strong, beautiful, proud. all sections of the country not only contributed their most characteristic objects of use and beauty, but their inhabitants also came, and learned to know one another, and their land. during the last two years there has hardly been a village in the country which has not had its club or circle studying the history of the united states. no section has been too poor to subscribe money for maintaining national or state pride. in order to see the great result, men have mortgaged their farms, lonely women have taken heavy life insurance, stringent economy will gladly be practised for years. a friend tells me that she saw an old man, as he left the court of honor with tears in his eyes, turn to his gray-haired wife and say, "well, susan, it paid even if it did take all the burial money." once before, we reached a similar pitch of national consciousness,--in war. young, unprepared, divided against ourselves, we found ourselves able to mass great armies, endure long strains, organize campaigns, commissariats, hospitals, in altogether independent ways, and on a scale greater than europe had seen. then men and women alike learned the value of mutual confidence, the strength of coöperation and organization. once again now, but this time in the interest of beauty and of peace, we have studied the art of subordinating fragmentary interests to those of a whole. the training we have received as a nation in producing and studying the fair, must result in a deeper national dignity, which will both free us from irritating sensitiveness over foreign criticism, and give us readiness to learn from other countries whatever lessons they can teach. our own provinces too will become less provincial. with increased acquaintance, the east has begun to drop its toleration of the west, and to put friendliness and honor in its place. no more will it be believed along the atlantic coast that the mississippi valley cares only for pork, grain and lumber. as such superstitions decay, a more trustful unity becomes possible. the entire nation knows itself a nation, possessed of common ideals. in this heightened national dignity, women will have a large and ennobling share. but further, from the fair men, and women with them, have acquired a new sense of the gains that come from minute obedience to law. hitherto, "go as you please" has been pretty largely the principle of american life. in the training school of the last two years of preparation and the six months of the holding of the fair, our people, particularly our women, have been solidly taught the hard and needful lesson that whims, waywardness, haste, inaccuracy, pettiness, personal considerations, do not make for strength. wherever these have entered, they have flawed the beautiful whole, and flecked the honor of us all. where they have been absent results have appeared which make us all rejoice. never in so wide an undertaking was the unity of a single design so triumphant. as an unknown multitude coöperated in the building of a mediæval cathedral, so throughout our land multitudes have been daily ready to contribute their unmarked best for the erection of a common glory. we have thus learned to prize second thoughts above first thoughts, to league our lives and purposes with those of others, and to subordinate the assertion of ourselves to that of a universal reason. hence has sprung a new trust in one another and a new confidence in our future. the friendliness of our people, already rendered natural by our democratic institutions, has received a deeper sanction. how distinctly it was marked on the faces of the visitors at the fair! i was fortunate enough to spend several hours there on chicago day, when nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand people were admitted. the appearance of those plain, intelligent, happy, helpful thousands, all strangers and all kind, was the most encouraging sight one woman had at the fair. it has been said that the moral education of a child consists in imparting to him the three qualities, obedience, sympathy, dignity. these all have been taught by the fair, and women, more swiftly perceptive than men, have probably learned their lesson best. one more profound effect of the fair upon human character must be mentioned, on character in those features which are of especial importance to women. our people have here gained a new sense of beauty, and of beauty at its highest and rarest, not the beauty of ornament and decoration, but that of proportion, balance, and ordered suitability of parts. every girl likes pretty things, but the rational basis of beauty in the harmonious expression of use, and in furnishing to the eye the quiet satisfaction of its normal demands, seldom attracts attention. at chicago these things became apparent. each building outwardly announced its inner purpose. each gained its effect mainly by outline and balance of masses rather than by richness of detail. each was designed in reference to its site and to its neighbor buildings. almost every one rested the eye which it still stimulated. color, form, purpose, proportion, sculpture, vegetation, stretches of water, the brown earth, all coöperated toward the happy effect. what visitor could see it and not have begotten in him the demand for beauty in his own surroundings? it is said that the centennial exhibition affected the domestic architecture and the household decoration of the whole eastern seaboard. the fair will do the same, but it will bring about a beauty of a higher, simpler sort. in people from every section, artistic taste has been developed, or even created; and not only in their houses, but in the architecture of their public buildings and streets shall we see the results of this vision of the white city by the lake. huddled houses in incongruous surroundings will become less common. at heart we americans are idealists, and at a time when the general wealth is rapidly increasing, it is an indescribable gain to have had such a training of the æsthetic sense as days among the great buildings and nights on the lagoons have brought to millions of our people. the teachability of the common american is almost pathetic. one building was always crowded--the fine arts building; yet great pictures were the one thing exhibited with which americans have hitherto had little or no acquaintance. this beauty, connected essentially with the feminine side of life, will hereafter, through the influence of the fair, become a more usual possession of us all. if such are the permanent gains for character which women in common with men, yet even more than they, have derived from the fair, there remain to be considered certain helps which have been brought to women in some of their most distinctive occupations. of course they have had here an opportunity to compare the different kinds of sewing-machines, pianos, type-writers, telegraphs, clothes-wringers, stoves, and baby-carriages, and no doubt they will do their future work with these complicated engines more effectively because of such comparative study. but there are three departments which ancestral usage has especially consecrated to women, and to intelligent methods in each of these the fair has given a mighty impulse. these three departments are the care of the home, the care of the young, and the care of the sick, the poor, and the depraved. at philadelphia in vienna bread was made known, and the native article, sodden with saleratus, which up to that time had desolated the country, began to disappear. the results in cookery from the chicago exhibition will be wider. they touch the kitchen with intelligence at more points. where tradition has reigned unquestioned, science is beginning to penetrate, and we are no longer allowed to eat without asking why and what. this new "domestic science"--threatening word--was set forth admirably in the rumford kitchen, where a capital thirty-cent luncheon was served every day, compounded of just those ingredients which the human frame could be demonstrated to require. the health-food companies, too, arrayed their appetizing wares. workingmen's homes showed on how small a sum a family could live, and live well. arrangements for sterilizing water and milk were there, atkinson cookers, gas and kerosene stoves. the proper sanitation of the home was taught, and boards of health turned out to the plain gaze of the world their inquisitorial processes. numberless means of increasing the health, ease, and happiness of the household with the least expenditure of time and money were here studied by crowds of despairing housekeepers. many, no doubt, were bewildered; but many, too, went away convinced that the most ancient employment of women was rising to the dignity and attractiveness of a learned profession. when it is remembered that nine tenths of the teachers of elementary schools are women, it can be seen how important for them was the magnificent educational exhibit. here could be studied all that the age counts best in kindergarten, primary, grammar, high and normal schools, and in all the varieties of training in cookery, sewing, dressmaking, manual training, drawing, painting, carving. many of the exhibitors showed great skill in making their methods apprehensible to the stranger. and then there were the modes of bodily training, and the lamentable image of the misformed average girl; and in the children's building classes could actually be seen engaged in happy exercise, and close at hand appliances for the nursery and the playground. nor in the enlarged appliances for woman's domestic life must those be omitted which tell how cheaply and richly the girl may now obtain a college training like her brother, and become as intelligent as he. no woman went away from the educational exhibits of the fair in the belief that woman's sphere was necessarily narrow. there is no need to dilate on the light shed by the fair upon problems of sickness, poverty, and crime. everybody knows that nothing so complete had been seen before. the anthropological building was a museum of these subjects, and scattered in other parts of the fair was much to interest the puzzled and sympathetic soul. one could find out what an ideal hospital was like, and how its service and appliances should be ordered. one studied under competent teachers the care of the dependent and delinquent classes. one learned to distinguish surface charity from sound. as men grow busier and women more competent, the guidance of philanthropy passes continually more and more into the gentler hands. women serve largely on boards of hospitals, prisons, charities, and reforms, and urgently feel the need of ampler knowledge. the fair did much to show them ways of obtaining it. such are the permanent results of the fair most likely to affect women. they fall into three classes: the proofs women have given of their independent power, their ability to organize and to work toward a distant, difficult, and complex end; the enlargement of their outlook, manifesting itself in a new sense of membership in a nation, a more willing obedience to law, and a higher appreciation of beauty; and, lastly, the direct assistance given to women in their more characteristic employments of housekeeping, teaching, and ministering to the afflicted. that these are all, or even the most important, results which each woman will judge she has obtained, is not pretended. everybody saw at the fair something which brought to individual him or her a gain incomparable. and, after all, the greatest thing was the total, glittering, murmurous, restful, magical, evanescent fair itself, seated by the blue waters, wearing the five crowns, served by novel boatmen, and with the lap so full of treasure that as piece by piece it was held up, it shone, was wondered at, and was lost again in the pile. this amazing spectacle will flash for years upon the inward eye of our people, and be a joy of their solitude. footnotes: [ ] published in _the forum_ for december, . xvi why go to college? to a largely increasing number of young girls college doors are opening every year. every year adds to the number of men who feel as a friend of mine, a successful lawyer in a great city, felt when in talking of the future of his four little children he said, "for the two boys it is not so serious, but i lie down at night afraid to die and leave my daughters only a bank account." year by year, too, the experiences of life are teaching mothers that happiness does not necessarily come to their daughters when accounts are large and banks are sound, but that on the contrary they take grave risks when they trust everything to accumulated wealth and the chance of a happy marriage. our american girls themselves are becoming aware that they need the stimulus, the discipline, the knowledge, the interests of the college in addition to the school, if they are to prepare themselves for the most serviceable lives. but there are still parents who say, "there is no need that my daughter should teach; then why should she go to college?" i will not reply that college training is a life insurance for a girl, a pledge that she possesses the disciplined ability to earn a living for herself and others in case of need; for i prefer to insist on the importance of giving every girl, no matter what her present circumstances, a special training in some one thing by which she can render society service, not of amateur but of expert sort, and service too for which it will be willing to pay a price. the number of families will surely increase who will follow the example of an eminent banker whose daughters have been given each her specialty. one has chosen music, and has gone far with the best masters in this country and in europe, so far that she now holds a high rank among musicians at home and abroad. another has taken art; and has not been content to paint pretty gifts for her friends, but in the studios of new york, munich, and paris she has won the right to be called an artist, and in her studio at home to paint portraits which have a market value. a third has proved that she can earn her living, if need be, by her exquisite jellies, preserves, and sweetmeats. yet the house in the mountains, the house by the sea, and the friends in the city are not neglected, nor are these young women found less attractive because of their special accomplishments. while it is not true that all girls should go to college any more than that all boys should go, it is nevertheless true that they should go in greater numbers than at present. they fail to go because they, their parents, and their teachers, do not see clearly the personal benefits distinct from the commercial value of a college training. i wish here to discuss these benefits, these larger gifts of the college life,--what they may be, and for whom they are waiting. it is undoubtedly true that many girls are totally unfitted by home and school life for a valuable college course. these joys and successes, these high interests and friendships, are not for the self-conscious and nervous invalid, nor for her who in the exuberance of youth recklessly ignores the laws of a healthy life. the good society of scholars and of libraries and laboratories has no place and no attraction for her who finds no message in plato, no beauty in mathematical order, and who never longs to know the meaning of the stars over her head or the flowers under her feet. neither will the finer opportunities of college life appeal to one who, until she is eighteen (is there such a girl in this country?), has felt no passion for the service of others, no desire to know if through history, or philosophy, or any study of the laws of society, she can learn why the world is so sad, so hard, so selfish as she finds it, even when she looks upon it from the most sheltered life. no, the college cannot be, should not try to be, a substitute for the hospital, reformatory, or kindergarten. to do its best work it should be organized for the strong, not for the weak; for the high-minded, self-controlled, generous, and courageous spirits, not for the indifferent, the dull, the idle, or those who are already forming their characters on the amusement theory of life. all these perverted young people may, and often do, get large benefit and invigoration, new ideals, and unselfish purposes from their four years' companionship with teachers and comrades of a higher physical, mental, and moral stature than their own. i have seen girls change so much in college that i have wondered if their friends at home would know them,--the voice, the carriage, the unconscious manner, all telling a story of new tastes and habits and loves and interests, that had wrought out in very truth a new creature. yet in spite of this i have sometimes thought that in college more than elsewhere the old law holds, "to him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have." for it is the young life which is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting influences of college days. what, then, for such persons are the rich and abiding rewards of study in college or university? preëminently the college is a place of education. that is the ground of its being. we go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful, that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world. no college which does not thoroughly educate can be called good, no matter what else it does. no student who fails to get a little knowledge on many subjects, and much knowledge on some, can be said to have succeeded, whatever other advantages she may have found by the way. it is a beautiful and significant fact that in all times the years of learning have been also the years of romance. those who love girls and boys pray that our colleges may be homes of sound learning, for knowledge is the condition of every college blessing. "let no man incapable of mathematics enter here," plato is reported to have inscribed over his academy door. "let no one to whom hard study is repulsive hope for anything from us," american colleges might paraphrase. accordingly in my talk to-day i shall say little of the direct benefits of knowledge which the college affords. these may be assumed. it is on their account that one knocks at the college door. but seeking this first, a good many other things are added. i want to point out some of these collateral advantages of going to college, or rather to draw attention to some of the many forms in which the winning of knowledge presents itself. the first of these is happiness. everybody wants "a good time," especially every girl in her teens. a good time, it is true, does not always in these years mean what it will mean by and by, any more than the girl of eighteen plays with the doll which entranced the child of eight. it takes some time to discover that work is the best sort of play, and some people never discover it at all. but when mothers ask such questions as these: "how can i make my daughter happy?" "how can i give her the best society?" "how can she have a good time?" the answer in most cases is simple. send her to college--to almost any college. send her because there is no other place where between eighteen and twenty-two she is so likely to have a genuinely good time. merely for good times, for romance, for society, college life offers unequalled opportunities. of course no idle person can possibly be happy, even for a day, nor she who makes a business of trying to amuse herself. for full happiness, though its springs are within, we want health and friends and work and objects of aspiration. "we live by admiration, hope, and love," says wordsworth. the college abounds in all three. in the college time new powers are sprouting, and intelligence, merriment, truthfulness, and generosity are more natural than the opposite qualities often become in later years. an exhilarating atmosphere pervades the place. we who are in it all the time feel that we live at the fountain of perpetual youth, and those who take but a four years' bath in it become more cheerful, strong, and full of promise than they are ever likely to find themselves again; for a college is a kind of compendium of the things that most men long for. it is usually planted in a beautiful spot, the charm of trees and water being added to stately buildings and stimulating works of art. venerable associations of the past hallow its halls. leaders in the stirring world of to-day return at each commencement to share the fresh life of the new class. books, pictures, music, collections, appliances in every field, learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the best words of the best men for holy days,--all are here. no wonder that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days, the romantic period of youth. no wonder that dr. holmes's poems to his harvard classmates find an echo in college reunions everywhere; and gray-haired men, who outside the narrowing circle of home have not heard their first names for years, remain bill and joe and john and george to college comrades, even if unseen for more than a generation. yet a girl should go to college not merely to obtain four happy years, but to make a second gain, which is often overlooked, and is little understood even when perceived; i mean a gain in health. the old notion that low vitality is a matter of course with women; that to be delicate is a mark of superior refinement, especially in well-to-do families; that sickness is a dispensation of providence,--these notions meet with no acceptance in college. years ago i saw in the mirror frame of a college freshman's room this little formula: "sickness is carelessness, carelessness is selfishness, and selfishness is sin." and i have often noticed among college girls an air of humiliation and shame when obliged to confess a lack of physical vigor, as if they were convicted of managing life with bad judgment, or of some moral delinquency. with the spreading scientific conviction that health is a matter largely under each person's control, that even inherited tendencies to disease need not be allowed to run their riotous course unchecked, there comes an earnest purpose to be strong and free. fascinating fields of knowledge are waiting to be explored; possibilities of doing, as well as of knowing, are on every side; new and dear friendships enlarge and sweeten dreams of future study and work, and the young student cannot afford quivering nerves or small lungs or an aching head any more than bad taste, rough manners, or a weak will. handicapped by inheritance or bad training, she finds the plan of college life itself her supporter and friend. the steady, long-continued routine of mental work, physical exercise, recreation, and sleep, the simple and wholesome food, in place of irregular and unstudied diet, work out salvation for her. instead of being left to go out of doors when she feels like it, the regular training of the gymnasium, the boats on lake and river, the tennis court, the golf links, the basket ball, the bicycle, the long walk among the woods in search of botanical or geological specimens,--all these and many more call to the busy student, until she realizes that they have their rightful place in every well-ordered day of every month. so she learns, little by little, that buoyant health is a precious possession to be won and kept. it is significant that already statistical investigation in this country and in england shows that the standard of health is higher among the women who hold college degrees than among any other equal number of the same age and class. and it is interesting also to observe to what sort of questions our recent girl graduates have been inclined to devote attention. they have been largely the neglected problems of little children and their health, of home sanitation, of food and its choice and preparation, of domestic service, of the cleanliness of schools and public buildings. colleges for girls are pledged by their very constitution to make persistent war on the water cure, the nervine retreat, the insane asylum, the hospital,--those bitter fruits of the emotional lives of thousands of women. "i can never afford a sick headache again, life is so interesting and there is so much to do," a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first college year. and while her mother was in a far-off invalid retreat, she undertook the battle against fate with the same intelligence and courage which she put into her calculus problems and her translations of sophocles. her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove the measure of her hard-won success. formerly the majority of physicians had but one question for the mother of the nervous and delicate girl, "does she go to school?" and only one prescription, "take her out of school." never a suggestion as to suppers of pickles and pound-cake, never a hint about midnight dancing and hurried daytime ways. but now the sensible doctor asks, "what are her interests? what are her tastes? what are her habits?" and he finds new interests for her, and urges the formation of out-of-door tastes and steady occupation for the mind, in order to draw the morbid girl from herself into the invigorating world outside. this the college does largely through its third gift of friendship. until a girl goes away from home to school or college, her friends are chiefly chosen for her by circumstances. her young relatives, her neighbors in the same street, those who happen to go to the same school or church,--these she makes her girlish intimates. she goes to college with the entire conviction, half unknown to herself, that her father's political party contains all the honest men, her mother's social circle all the true ladies, her church all the real saints of the community. and the smaller the town, the more absolute is her belief. but in college she finds that the girl who earned her scholarship in the village school sits beside the banker's daughter; the new england farmer's child rooms next the heiress of a hawaiian sugar plantation; the daughters of the opposing candidates in a sharply fought election have grown great friends in college boats and laboratories; and before her diploma is won she realizes how much richer a world she lives in than she ever dreamed of at home. the wealth that lies in differences has dawned upon her vision. it is only when the rich and poor sit down together that either can understand how the lord is the maker of them all. to-day above all things we need the influence of men and women of friendliness, of generous nature, of hospitality to new ideas, in short, of social imagination. but instead, we find each political party bitterly calling the other dishonest, each class suspicious of the intentions of the other, and in social life the pettiest standards of conduct. is it not well for us that the colleges all over the country still offer to their fortunate students a society of the most democratic sort,--one in which a father's money, a mother's social position, can assure no distinction and make no close friends? here capacity of every kind counts for its full value. here enthusiasm waits to make heroes of those who can lead. here charming manners, noble character, amiable temper, scholarly power, find their full opportunity and inspire such friendships as are seldom made afterward. i have forgotten my chemistry, and my classical philology cannot bear examination; but all round the world there are men and women at work, my intimates of college days, who have made the wide earth a friendly place to me. of every creed, of every party, in far-away places and in near, the thought of them makes me more courageous in duty and more faithful to opportunity, though for many years we may not have had time to write each other a letter. the basis of all valuable and enduring friendships is not accident or juxtaposition, but tastes, interests, habits, work, ambitions. it is for this reason that to college friendship clings a romance entirely its own. one of the friends may spend her days in the laboratory, eagerly chasing the shy facts that hide beyond the microscope's fine vision, and the other may fill her hours and her heart with the poets and the philosophers; one may steadfastly pursue her way toward the command of a hospital, and the other toward the world of letters and of art; these divergences constitute no barrier, but rather an aid to the fulness of friendship. and the fact that one goes in a simple gown which she has earned and made herself, and the other lives when at home in a merchant's modern palace--what has that to do with the things the girls care about and the dreams they talk over in the walk by the river or the bicycle ride through country roads? if any young man to-day goes through harvard lonely, neglected, unfriended, if any girl lives solitary and wretched in her life at wellesley, it is their own fault. it must be because they are suspicious, unfriendly, or disagreeable themselves. certainly it is true that in the associations of college life, more than in any other that the country can show, what is extraneous, artificial, and temporary falls away, and the every-day relations of life and work take on a character that is simple, natural, genuine. and so it comes about that the fourth gift of college life is ideals of personal character. to some people the shaping ideals of what character should be, often held unconsciously, come from the books they read; but to the majority they are given by the persons whom they most admire before they are twenty years old. the greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. the college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them--ah, they were few, and i am sure i did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their classrooms--gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and i were totally unconscious at the time. for many years i have known that my study with them, no matter whether of philosophy or of greek, of mathematics or history or english, enlarged my notions of life, uplifted my standards of culture, and so inspired me with new possibilities of usefulness and of happiness. not the facts and theories that i learned so much as the men who taught me, gave this inspiration. the community at large is right in saying that it wants the personal influence of professors on students, but it is wholly wrong in assuming that this precious influence comes from frequent meetings or talks on miscellaneous subjects. there is quite as likely to be a quickening force in the somewhat remote and mysterious power of the teacher who devotes himself to amassing treasures of scholarship, or to patiently working out the best methods of teaching; who standing somewhat apart, still remains an ideal of the christian scholar, the just, the courteous man or woman. to come under the influence of one such teacher is enough to make college life worth while. a young man who came to harvard with eighty cents in his pocket, and worked his way through, never a high scholar, and now in a business which looks very commonplace, told me the other day that he would not care to be alive if he had not gone to college. his face flushed as he explained how different his days would have been if he had not known two of his professors. "do you use your college studies in your business?" i asked. "oh, no!" he answered. "but i am another man in doing the business; and when the day's work is done i live another life because of my college experiences. the business and i are both the better for it every day." how many a young girl has had her whole horizon extended by the changed ideals she gained in college! yet this is largely because the associations and studies there are likely to give her permanent interests--the fifth and perhaps the greatest gift of college life of which i shall speak. the old fairy story which charmed us in childhood ended with "and they were married and lived happy ever after." it conducted to the altar, having brought the happy pair through innumerable difficulties, and left us with the contented sense that all the mistakes and problems would now vanish and life be one long day of unclouded bliss. i have seen devoted and intelligent mothers arrange their young daughters' education and companionships precisely on this basis. they planned as if these pretty and charming girls were going to live only twenty or twenty-five years at the utmost, and had consequently no need of the wealthy interests that should round out the fullgrown woman's stature, making her younger in feeling at forty than at twenty, and more lovely and admired at eighty than at either. emerson in writing of beauty declares that "the secret of ugliness consists not in irregular outline, but in being uninteresting. we love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. if command, eloquence, art, or invention exists in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. beauty without grace is the head without the body. beauty without expression tires." of course such considerations can hardly come with full force to the young girl herself, who feels aged at eighteen, and imagines that the troubles and problems of life and thought are hers already. "oh, tell me to-night," cried a college freshman once to her president, "which is the right side and which is the wrong side of this andover question about eschatology?" the young girl is impatient of open questions, and irritated at her inability to answer them. neither can she believe that the first headlong zest with which she throws herself into society, athletics, into everything which comes in her way, can ever fail. but her elders know, looking on, that our american girl, the comrade of her parents and of her brothers and their friends, brought up from babyhood in the eager talk of politics and society, of religious belief, of public action, of social responsibility--that this typical girl, with her quick sympathies, her clear head, her warm heart, her outreaching hands, will not permanently be satisfied or self-respecting, though she have the prettiest dresses and hats in town, or the most charming of dinners, dances, and teas. unless there comes to her, and comes early, the one chief happiness of life,--a marriage of comradeship,--she must face for herself the question, "what shall i do with my life?" i recall a superb girl of twenty as i overtook her one winter morning hurrying along commonwealth avenue. she spoke of a brilliant party at a friend's the previous evening. "but, oh!" she cried, throwing up her hands in a kind of hopeless impatience, "tell me what to do. my dancing days are over!" i laughed at her, "have you sprained your ankle?" but i saw i had made a mistake when she added, "it is no laughing matter. i have been out three years. i have not done what they expected of me," with a flush and a shrug, "and there is a crowd of nice girls coming on this winter; and anyway, i am so tired of going to teas and ball-games and assemblies! i don't care the least in the world for foreign missions, and," with a stamp, "i am not going slumming among the italians. i have too much respect for the italians. and what shall i do with the rest of my life?" that was a frank statement of what any girl of brains or conscience feels, with more or less bitter distinctness, unless she marries early, or has some pressing work for which she is well trained. yet even if that which is the profession of woman _par excellence_ be hers, how can she be perennially so interesting a companion to her husband and children as if she had keen personal tastes, long her own, and growing with her growth? indeed, in that respect the condition of men is almost the same as that of women. it would be quite the same were it not for the fact that a man's business or profession is generally in itself a means of growth, of education, of dignity. he leans his life against it. he builds his home in the shadow of it. it binds his days together in a kind of natural piety, and makes him advance in strength and nobility as he "fulfils the common round, the daily task." and that is the reason why men in the past, if they have been honorable men, have grown old better than women. men usually retain their ability longer, their mental alertness and hospitality. they add fine quality to fine quality, passing from strength to strength and preserving in old age whatever has been best in youth. it was a sudden recognition of this fact which made a young friend of mine say last winter, "i am not going to parties any more; the men best worth talking with are too old to dance." even with the help of a permanent business or profession, however, the most interesting men i know are those who have an avocation as well as a vocation. i mean a taste or work quite apart from the business of life. this revives, inspires, and cultivates them perpetually. it matters little what it is, if only it is real and personal, is large enough to last, and possesses the power of growth. a young sea-captain from a new england village on a long and lonely voyage falls upon a copy of shelley. appeal is made to his fine but untrained mind, and the book of the boy poet becomes the seaman's university. the wide world of poetry and of the other fine arts is opened, and the shelleyian specialist becomes a cultivated, original, and charming man. a busy merchant loves flowers, and in all his free hours studies them. each new spring adds knowledge to his knowledge, and his friends continually bring him their strange discoveries. with growing wealth he cultivates rare and beautiful plants, and shares them with his fortunate acquaintances. happy the companion invited to a walk or a drive with such observant eyes, such vivid talk! because of this cheerful interest in flowers, and this ingenious skill in dealing with them, the man himself is interesting. all his powers are alert, and his judgment is valued in public life and in private business. or is it more exact to say that because he is the kind of man who would insist upon having such interests outside his daily work, he is still fresh and young and capable of growth at an age when many other men are dull and old and certain that the time of decay is at hand? there are two reasons why women need to cultivate these large and abiding interests even more persistently than men. in the first place, they have more leisure. they are indeed the only leisured class in the country, the only large body of persons who are not called upon to win their daily bread in direct, wage-earning ways. as yet, fortunately, few men among us have so little self-respect as to idle about our streets and drawing-rooms because their fathers are rich enough to support them. we are not without our unemployed poor; but roving tramps and idle clubmen are after all not of large consequence. our serious non-producing classes are chiefly women. it is the regular ambition of the chivalrous american to make all the women who depend on him so comfortable that they need do nothing for themselves. machinery has taken nearly all the former occupations of women out of the home into the shop and factory. widespread wealth and comfort, and the inherited theory that it is not well for the woman to earn money so long as father or brothers can support her, have brought about a condition of things in which there is social danger, unless with the larger leisure are given high and enduring interests. to health especially there is great danger, for nothing breaks down a woman's health like idleness and its resulting ennui. more people, i am sure, are broken down nervously because they are bored, than because they are overworked; and more still go to pieces through fussiness, unwholesome living, worry over petty details, and the daily disappointments which result from small and superficial training. and then, besides the danger to health, there is the danger to character. i need not dwell on the undermining influence which men also feel when occupation is taken away and no absorbing private interest fills the vacancy. the vices of luxurious city life are perhaps hardly more destructive to character than is the slow deterioration of barren country life. though the conditions in the two cases are exactly opposite, the trouble is often the same,--absence of noble interests. in the city restless idleness organizes amusement; in the country deadly dulness succeeds daily toil. but there is a second reason why a girl should acquire for herself strong and worthy interests. the regular occupations of women in their homes are generally disconnected and of little educational value, at least as those homes are at present conducted. given the best will in the world, the daily doing of household details becomes a wearisome monotony if the mere performance of them is all. to make drudgery divine a woman must have a brain to plan and eyes to see how to "sweep a room as to god's laws." imagination and knowledge should be the hourly companions of her who would make a fine art of each detail in kitchen and nursery. too long has the pin been the appropriate symbol of the average woman's life--the pin, which only temporarily holds together things which may or may not have any organic connection with one another. while undoubtedly most women must spend the larger part of life in this modest pin-work, holding together the little things of home and school and society and church, it is also true, that cohesive work itself cannot be done well, even in humble circumstances, except by the refined, the trained, the growing woman. the smallest village, the plainest home, give ample space for the resources of the trained college woman. and the reason why such homes and such villages are so often barren of grace and variety is just because these fine qualities have not ruled them. the higher graces of civilization halt among us; dainty and finished ways of living give place to common ways, while vulgar tastes, slatternly habits, clouds and despondency reign in the house. little children under five years of age die in needless thousands because of the dull, unimaginative women on whom they depend. such women have been satisfied with just getting along, instead of packing everything they do with brains, instead of studying the best possible way of doing everything small or large; for there is always a best way, whether of setting a table, of trimming a hat, or teaching a child to read. and this taste for perfection can be cultivated; indeed, it must be cultivated, if our standards of living are to be raised. there is now scientific knowledge enough, there is money enough, to prevent the vast majority of the evils which afflict our social organism, if mere knowledge or wealth could avail; but the greater difficulty is to make intelligence, character, good taste, unselfishness prevail. what, then, are the interests which powerfully appeal to mind and heart, and so are fitted to become the strengthening companions of a woman's life? i shall mention only three, all of them such as are elaborately fostered by college life. the first is the love of great literature. i do not mean that use of books by which a man may get what is called a good education and so be better qualified for the battle of life, nor do i mention books in their character as reservoirs of knowledge, books which we need for special purposes, and which are no longer of consequence when our purpose with them is served. i have in mind the great books, especially the great poets, books to be adopted as a resource and a solace. the chief reason why so many people do not know how to make comrades of such books is because they have come to them too late. we have in this country enormous numbers of readers,--probably a larger number who read, and who read many hours in the week, than has ever been known elsewhere in the world. but what do these millions read besides the newspapers? possibly a denominational religious weekly and another journal of fashion or business. then come the thousands who read the best magazines, and whatever else is for the moment popular in novels and poetry--the last dialect story, the fashionable poem, the questionable but talked-of novel. let a violent attack be made on the decency of a new story, and instantly, if only it is clever, its author becomes famous. but the fashions in reading of a restless race--the women too idle, the men too heavily worked--i will not discuss here. let light literature be devoured by our populace as his drug is taken by the opium-eater, and with a similar narcotic effect. we can only seek out the children, and hope by giving them from babyhood bits of the noblest literature, to prepare them for the great opportunities of mature life. i urge, therefore, reading as a mental stimulus, as a solace in trouble, a perpetual source of delight; and i would point out that we must not delay to make the great friendships that await us on the library shelves until sickness shuts the door on the outer world, or death enters the home and silences the voices that once helped to make these friendships sweet. if homer and shakespeare and wordsworth and browning are to have meaning for us when we need them most, it will be because they come to us as old familiar friends whose influences have permeated the glad and busy days before. the last time i heard james russell lowell talk to college girls, he said,--for he was too ill to say many words,--"i have only this one message to leave with you. in all your work in college never lose sight of the reason why you have come here. it is not that you may get something by which to earn your bread, but that every mouthful of bread may be the sweeter to your taste." and this is the power possessed by the mighty dead,--men of every time and nation, whose voices death cannot silence, who are waiting even at the poor man's elbow, whose illuminating words may be had for the price of a day's work in the kitchen or the street, for lack of love of whom many a luxurious home is a dull and solitary spot, breeding misery and vice. now the modern college is especially equipped to introduce its students to such literature. the library is at last understood to be the heart of the college. the modern librarian is not the keeper of books as was his predecessor, but the distributer of them, and the guide to their resources, proud when he increases the use of his treasures. every language, ancient or modern, which contains a literature is now taught in college. its history is examined, its philology, its masterpieces, and more than ever is english literature studied and loved. there is now every opportunity for the college student to become an expert in the use of his own tongue and pen. what other men painfully strive for he can enjoy to the full with comparatively little effort. but there is a second invigorating interest to which college training introduces its student. i mean the study of nature, intimacy with the strange and beautiful world in which we live. "nature never did betray the heart that loved her," sang her poet and high priest. when the world has been too much with us, nothing else is so refreshing to tired eyes and mind as woods and water, and an intelligent knowledge of the life within them. for a generation past there has been a well-nigh universal turning of the population toward the cities. in only nine per cent of our people lived in cities of eight thousand inhabitants or more. now more than a third of us are found in cities. but the electric car, the telephone, the bicycle, still keep avenues to the country open. certain it is that city people feel a growing hunger for the country, particularly when grass begins to grow. this is a healthy taste, and must increase the general knowledge and love of nature. fortunate are the little children in those schools whose teachers know and love the world in which they live. their young eyes are early opened to the beauty of birds and trees and plants. not only should we expect our girls to have a feeling for the fine sunset or the wide-reaching panorama of field and water, but to know something also about the less obvious aspects of nature, its structure, its methods of work, and the endless diversity of its parts. no one can have read matthew arnold's letters to his wife, his mother, and his sister, without being struck by the immense enjoyment he took throughout his singularly simple and hard-working life in flowers and trees and rivers. the english lake country had given him this happy inheritance, with everywhere its sound of running water and its wealth of greenery. there is a close connection between the marvellous unbroken line of english song and the passionate love of the englishman for a home in the midst of birds, trees, and green fields. the world is so full of a number of things, that i think we should all be as happy as kings, is the opinion of everybody who knows nature as did robert louis stevenson. and so our college student may begin to know it. let her enter the laboratories and investigate for herself. let her make her delicate experiments with the blowpipe or the balance; let her track mysterious life from one hiding-place to another; let her "name all the birds without a gun," and make intimates of flower and fish and butterfly--and she is dull indeed if breezy tastes do not follow her through life, and forbid any of her days to be empty of intelligent enjoyment. "keep your years beautiful; make your own atmosphere," was the parting advice of my college president, himself a living illustration of what he said. but it is a short step from the love of the complex and engaging world in which we live to the love of our comrades in it. accordingly the third precious interest to be cultivated by the college student is an interest in people. the scholar to-day is not a being who dwells apart in his cloister, the monk's successor; he is a leader of the thoughts and conduct of men. so the new subjects which stand beside the classics and mathematics of mediæval culture are history, economics, ethics, and sociology. although these subjects are as yet merely in the making, thousands of students are flocking to their investigation, and are going out to try their tentative knowledge in college settlements and city missions and children's aid societies. the best instincts of generous youth are becoming enlisted in these living themes. and why should our daughters remain aloof from the most absorbing work of modern city life, work quite as fascinating to young women as to young men? during many years of listening to college sermons and public lectures in wellesley, i always noticed a quickened attention in the audience whenever the discussion touched politics or theology. these are, after all, the permanent and peremptory interests, and they should be given their full place in a healthy and vigorous life. but if that life includes a love of books, of nature, of people, it will naturally turn to enlarged conceptions of religion--my sixth and last gift of college life. in his first sermon as master of balliol college, dr. jowett spoke of the college, "first as a place of education, secondly as a place of society, thirdly as a place of religion." he observed that "men of very great ability often fail in life because they are unable to play their part with effect. they are shy, awkward, self-conscious, deficient in manners, faults which are as ruinous as vices." the supreme end of college training, he said, "is usefulness in after life." similarly, when the city of cambridge celebrated in harvard's memorial hall the life and death of the gallant young ex-governor of massachusetts, william e. russell, men did well to hang above his portrait some wise words he had lately said, "never forget the everlasting difference between making a living and making a life." that he himself never forgot; and it was well to remind citizens and students of it, as they stood there facing too the ancient words all harvard men face when they take their college degrees and go out into the world, "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." good words these to go out from college with. the girls of wellesley gather every morning at chapel to bow their heads together for a moment before they scatter among the libraries and lecture rooms and begin the experiments of the new day. and always their college motto meets the eyes that are raised to its penetrating message, "not to be ministered unto, but to minister." how many a young heart has loyally responded, "and to give life a ransom for many." that is the "wellesley spirit"; and the same sweet spirit of devout service has gone forth from all our college halls. in any of them one may catch the echo of whittier's noble psalm,-- our lord and master of us all! whate'er our name or sign, we own thy sway, we hear thy call, we test our lives by thine. that is the supreme test of life,--its consecrated serviceableness. the master of balliol was right; the brave men and women who founded our schools and colleges were not wrong. "for christ and the church" universities were set up in the wilderness of new england; for the large service of the state they have been founded and maintained at public cost in every section of the country where men have settled, from the alleghanies across the prairies and rocky mountains down to the golden gate. founded primarily as seats of learning, their teachers have been not only scientists and linguists, philosophers and historians, but men and women of holy purposes, sound patriotism, courageous convictions, refined and noble tastes. set as these teachers have been upon a hill, their light has at no period of our country's history been hid. they have formed a large factor in our civilization, and in their own beautiful characters have continually shown us how to combine religion and life, the ideal and practical, the human and the divine. such are some of the larger influences to be had from college life. it is true all the good gifts i have named may be secured without the aid of the college. we all know young men and women who have had no college training, who are as cultivated, rational, resourceful, and happy as any people we know, who excel in every one of these particulars the college graduates about them. i believe they often bitterly regret the lack of a college education. and we see young men and women going through college deaf and blind to their great chances there, and afterwards curiously careless and wasteful of the best things in life. while all this is true, it is true too that to the open-minded and ambitious boy or girl of moderate health, ability, self-control, and studiousness, a college course offers the most attractive, easy, and probable way of securing happiness and health, good friends and high ideals, permanent interests of a noble kind, and large capacity for usefulness in the world. it has been well said that the ability to see great things large and little things small is the final test of education. the foes of life, especially of women's lives, are caprice, wearisome incapacity, and petty judgments. from these oppressive foes we long to escape to the rule of right reason, where all things are possible, and life becomes a glory instead of a grind. no college, with the best teachers and collections in the world, can by its own power impart all this to any woman. but if one has set her face in that direction, where else can she find so many hands reached out to help, so many encouraging voices in the air, so many favoring influences filling the days and nights? the riverside press cambridge, massachusetts u. s. a [transcriber's note: text set within braces is printed upside down in the original text in order to facilitate its use with a test subject sitting at a table across from the examiner.] condensed guide for the stanford revision of the binet-simon intelligence tests by lewis m. terman professor of education stanford university houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago san francisco _the riverside press cambridge_ copyright, , by lewis m. terman all rights reserved _the riverside press_ cambridge, massachusetts printed in the u. s. a. preface since the appearance of the stanford revision of the binet-simon intelligence scale i have been frequently urged to prepare a condensed guide which would make the application of the tests easier and more convenient. i have hesitated somewhat to act upon this suggestion because i have not wished to encourage the use of the scale without the supplementary directions and explanations which are set forth in the original text of the stanford revision.[ ] the demand has become so insistent, however, that i have decided to heed it. i have been led to this decision largely by the fact that my revision is now so generally used by examiners who are sufficiently experienced to be trusted to follow the correct procedure without the necessity of constantly consulting the complete text. those who are thoroughly familiar with the contents of the latter will find the _condensed guide_ a convenient help. it is impossible, however, to warn the inexperienced examiner too emphatically against the dangers inherent in the routine application of mental tests without some knowledge of their derivation, meaning, and purpose. the necessary psychological background for the use of the binet scale i have tried to supply in _the measurement of intelligence_, and in _the intelligence of school children_ i have explained the practical uses of mental tests in the grading and classification of school children. it is only as a supplement to these books that the procedure of the stanford revision is here presented in abbreviated form. [footnote : lewis m. terman: _the measurement of intelligence_. (riverside textbooks in education.) houghton mifflin company.] for the further aid of the experienced examiner a condensed record blank has also been prepared. although this is considerably cheaper than the original record booklet and in certain respects perhaps somewhat more convenient, it is not recommended as a satisfactory substitute except when used by thoroughly trained examiners. beginners, at least, should continue to use the complete record booklet both because of the accuracy of procedure which it fosters and because of the advantages of having a complete verbatim record of the responses. besides being indispensable for the analytical study of the child's mental processes, the complete record makes possible the correction of errors in scoring and permits interesting qualitative comparisons between earlier and later performances by the same subject. it is believed that only for the veteran examiner, and perhaps even then only in special cases, are these advantages outweighed by the lower cost of the abbreviated blank. the labor of preparing this _guide_ was made considerably lighter than it would otherwise have been by the fact that a similar guide had been prepared in the office of the surgeon-general for use in the army. i am greatly indebted to dr. j. w. bridges and to major h. c. bingham for assistance in the preparation of the latter. their careful work has saved me many hours and has doubtless made the _condensed guide_ more accurate and serviceable than it could otherwise have been. lewis m. terman _stanford university, march , _ general directions general directions for the use of the stanford revision have been fully set forth in chapter viii of _the measurement of intelligence_. as this guide is only a handbook of procedure for the tests themselves, i shall not here undertake either to summarize that chapter or to add to it. i trust it may safely be assumed that no responsible person will attempt to apply the tests who is not familiar with the book which explains them and presents the general considerations which should govern their use. however, extended observation of the difficulties which students and teachers encounter in learning to use the stanford revision has taught me that there are certain injunctions which cannot easily be too often repeated. among these the following "ten commandments" have been selected for reëmphasis here: . the subject's attention and coöperation must be secured. thanks to the novelty and inherent interest of the tests, this is usually not difficult to do. but there are degrees of _rapport_, and the examiner should not be satisfied with his efforts until the subject becomes wholly absorbed in the tasks set him by the tests. the importance of tactful encouragement and a kindly, genial manner cannot be too strongly emphasized, nor, on the other hand, the risk incurred in allowing a parent to witness the test. hardly anything is more likely to spoil an examination than the presence of a critical or over-sympathetic parent. sometimes the teacher's presence is hardly less objectionable. . the correct formulas should be thoroughly learned and strictly adhered to. unless this is done the scale used is not the stanford revision, whatever else it may be. for the first fifty or hundred examinations the tests should be given directly from this guide. little by little, as the procedure becomes memorized, the examiner should attempt to free himself of the necessity of reading the formulas, but for a long time it is necessary to check up one's procedure by frequent reference to the guide if practice in error is to be avoided. . the examiner should early learn to withstand the temptation of wholesale coaxing and cross-questioning. to do so often robs the response of significance and is likely to interfere with the establishment of _rapport_. a simple "what do you mean?" or, "explain what you mean," is sufficient to clarify most answers which are not clear. at the same time the examiner should be on guard against mistaking exceptional timidity for inability to respond. persuasive encouragement is frequently necessary, but this should not be allowed to degenerate into a chronic habit of coaxing. . the record should always be made as the test proceeds. memory should never be trusted. as a rule enough of each response should be recorded to enable one to score it at any time later. the great advantage of the record booklet is that it permits this. only the most expert examiner should limit his record to pluses and minuses. . the examination should be thorough. it should include at least one year in which there is no failure and at least one year in which there is no success. when lack of time necessitates an abbreviation of the examination, this should be done by using only the starred tests rather than by shortening the range of the examination. . success in alternative tests may not be substituted for failure in one of the regular tests. ordinarily the alternatives should be omitted. they have been included in the scale chiefly as a convenience in case materials are lacking for any of the regular tests, or in case any of the latter should be deemed for some special reason unsuitable. the ball and field test, for example, is often rendered unsuitable by coaching, and one of the alternates should always be substituted for the vocabulary test in the case of subjects whose mother tongue is other than english. other substitutions or omissions are necessary in the case of subjects who are illiterate. . care should be taken to ascertain the correct age. this is often misstated both by young normal children and by defectives. the age should be recorded in years _and months_. . in ordinary calculation of the intelligence quotient without any mechanical aid (as slide rule, calculating chart, or table), both age and mental age should be reduced to months before dividing. . to avoid the danger of large error it is absolutely essential that the adding of credits to secure mental age and the dividing of mental age by chronological age to secure the intelligence quotient be performed twice. . finally, in calculating the intelligence quotient of subjects who are more than sixteen years old, the chronological age should be counted as sixteen. it is possible, as certain army data suggest, that a lower age than sixteen should have been taken, but until the matter has been more thoroughly investigated by the use of unselected adult subjects the age sixteen will continue to be used in the stanford revision. directions: the tests[ ] [footnote : detailed directions for administering stanford-binet scale and for scoring are available in terman's _the measurement of intelligence_. (riverside textbooks in education.) houghton mifflin company.] year iii . _pointing to parts of body_ say, "show me your nose." "put your finger on your nose." if two or three repetitions of instructions bring no response, say, "is this (pointing to chin) your nose?" "no?" "then where is your nose?" same for eyes, mouth, and hair. credit if correct part is indicated (in any way) three times out of four. . _naming familiar objects_ show s., one at a time, key (not yale), penny (not new), closed knife, watch, pencil. say each time, "what is this?" or, "tell me what this is." credit if three responses out of five are correct. . _pictures--enumeration_ say, "now i am going to show you a pretty picture." show picture (_a_) and say, "tell me what you see in this picture," or, "look at the picture and tell me everything you can see in it." if no response, "show me the ----." "that is fine: now tell me everything you see in the picture." if necessary ask, "and what else?" same for pictures (_b_) and (_c_). credit if at least three objects in one picture are enumerated spontaneously, or if one picture is described or interpreted. . _giving sex_ if s. is a boy, "are you a little boy or a little girl?" if s. is a girl, "are you a little girl or a little boy?" if no response, "are you a little girl?" (if a boy); or "are you a little boy?" (if a girl). if answer is "no," say, "well, what are you? are you a little boy or a little girl?" (or vice versa). . _giving last name_ ask, "what is your name?" if answer is only first or last name, e.g., walter, say, "yes, but what is your other name? walter what?" and if necessary, "is your name walter smith?" . _repeating sentences_ "can you say, 'nice kitty'?" "now say, 'i have a little dog.'" if no response, repeat first sentence two or three times. same procedure for (_b_) "the dog runs after the cat" and (_c_) "in summer the sun is hot," except that these may be given only once. credit if at least one sentence is given without error after a single reading. _alt. repeating three digits_ say, "listen. say, , . now say, , , ." same for , , , and , , . may repeat (_a_), not others. rate, a little faster than one digit per second. credit if one set out of the three is given correctly after a single reading. year iv . _comparison of lines_ show card (iv ) and say, "see these lines. look closely and tell me which one is longer. put your finger on the longest one." if no response, "show me which line is the biggest." show twice more (reversing card at second showing) and ask, "which one is the longest here?" if only two out of three are correct, repeat the entire test. credit if three responses out of three, or five out of six, are correct. . _discrimination of forms_ use the forms supplied with the package of test material. one of the two cards containing the forms is to be cut up, so that the forms may be placed one at a time on the other card at "x." place circle at "x" on card and say, "show me one like this," at same time passing the finger around the circumference of the circle. if no response, "do you see all of these things?" (running finger over the various forms). "and do you see this one?" (pointing to circle again). "now, find me another one just like this." a first error should be corrected thus, "no, find one just like this" (again passing finger around the outline of form at "x"). make no comment on any other errors, but pass on to the square, then the triangle, and the rest in any order. commend successes. credit for correct choices out of . the first error, if corrected, counts as correct. . _counting four pennies_ place four pennies in a horizontal row. say, "see these pennies. count them and tell me how many there are. count them with your finger, this way" (pointing to the first one on the subject's left)--"one. now, go ahead." if s. gives number without pointing, say, "no, count them with your finger, this way," starting him as before. have s. count aloud. credit for correct count tallying with pointing. . _copying square_ show s. the square and say, "you see that?" (pointing to square). "i want you to make one just like it. make it right here" (showing space on record blank). "go ahead. i know you can do it nicely." unless drawing is clearly satisfactory, repeat twice more, saying each time "make it exactly like this," pointing to model. pencil. credit if one drawing is satisfactory. score liberally. (see scoring card.) . _comprehension_ be sure to get s.'s attention before asking question. repeat if necessary. allow seconds for answer. (_a_) "what must you do when you are sleepy?" (_b_) "what ought you to do when you are cold?" (_c_) "what ought you to do when you are hungry?" credit if two responses of the three are correct. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, p. .) . _repeating four digits_ say, "listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through, i want you to say them exactly as i do. listen closely and get them just right." give (_a_) , , , , then (_b_) , , , , and (_c_) , , , , if necessary. may repeat (_a_) until attempt is made, but not others. rate, a little faster than one digit per second. credit if one set of the three is correctly repeated in order, after a single reading. . _alt. repeating sentences_ say, "listen; say this, 'where is kitty?'" "now, say this, ----," reading the first sentence in a natural voice, distinctly and with expression. may re-read the first sentence. (_a_) "the boy's name is john. he is a very good boy." (_b_) "when the train passes you will hear the whistle blow." (_c_) "we are going to have a good time in the country." credit if at least one sentence is repeated correctly after a single reading. year v . _comparison of weights_ place the and gram weights before s., or inches apart. say, "you see these blocks. they look just alike, but one of them is heavy and one is light. try them and tell me which one is heavier." repeat instructions if necessary, saying, "tell me which one is the heaviest." if s. merely points without lifting blocks, or picks up one at random, say, "no, that is not the way. you must take the blocks in your hands and try them, like this." (illustrate.) give second trial with position of weights reversed; third trial with weights in same position as first. credit if two of three comparisons are correct. . _naming colors_ show card (v ) and say, pointing to colors in the order, red, yellow, blue, green, "what is the name of that color?" credit if all colors are correctly named, without marked uncertainty. . _Æsthetic comparison_ show pairs of faces in order from top to bottom of card (v ). say, "which of these two pictures is the prettiest?" credit if all _three_ comparisons are made correctly. . _definitions: use or better_ say, "you have seen a chair. you know what a chair is. tell me, what is a chair?" if necessary urge as follows: "i am sure you know what a chair is. you have seen a chair." "now, tell me, what is a chair?" if s. rambles say, "yes, but tell me; what is a chair?" same for horse, fork, doll, pencil, table. credit if four words out of the six are defined in terms of use or better. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, p. .) . _patience_ use two cards, each x inches. divide one of them diagonally into two triangles. place the uncut card on the table with one of the longer sides toward s. then lay the divided card thus [illustration], and say, "i want you to take these two pieces (touching the two triangles) and put them together so they will look exactly like this" (pointing to rectangle). if s. hesitates, repeat instructions with a little urging. if first attempt is a failure, replace pieces, saying, "no; put them together so they will look like this" (pointing to rectangle). do not suggest further by face or word whether response is correct. if a piece is turned over, turn it back and don't count that trial. give, if necessary, three trials of one minute each. credit if two of the three trials are successful. . _three commissions_ take s. to center of room. say, "now, i want you to do something for me. here's a key. i want you to put it on that chair over there; then i want you to shut (or open) that door, and then bring me the box which you see over there" (pointing in turn to the objects designated). "do you understand? be sure to get it right. first, put the key on the chair, then shut (or open) the door, then bring me the box (again pointing). go ahead." stress words first and then. give no further aid. credit if the three commissions are executed in proper order. _alt. giving age_ say, "how old are you?" year vi . _right and left_ say, "show me your right hand" (stress right and hand, etc., rather strongly and equally). same for left ear, right eye. if there is one error, repeat whole test, using left hand, right ear, left eye. avoid giving aid in any way. credit if three of three, or five of six responses are correct. . _missing parts_ show card (vi ) and say, "there is something wrong with this face. it is not all there. part of it is left out. look carefully and tell me what part of the face is not there." same for (_b_) and (_c_). if s. gives irrelevant answer, say, "no; i am talking about the face. look again and tell me what is left out of the face." if correct response does not follow, point to the place where eye should be and say, "see, the eye is gone." then proceed to others, asking, "what is left out of this face?" for (_d_) say, "what is left out of this picture?" no help except on (_a_). order is eyes, mouth, nose, arms. credit if correct response is made for three of four pictures. . _counting thirteen pennies_ place thirteen pennies in horizontal row. say, "see these pennies. count them and tell me how many there are. count them with your finger, this way" (pointing to the first one on the subject's left)--"one. now, go ahead." if s. gives number without pointing, say, "no, count them with your finger, this way," starting him as before. have s. count aloud. second trial given if only minor mistake is made. credit if one correct count, tallying with the pointing, is made in first or second trials. . _comprehension_ say (_a_) "what's the thing to do if it is raining when you start to school?" (_b_) "what's the thing to do if you find that your house is on fire?" (_c_) "what's the thing to do if you are going some place and miss your train (car)?" may repeat a question, but do not change form. credit if two of three responses are correct. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _naming four coins_ show in order nickel, penny, quarter, dime, asking, "what is that?" if answer is "money," say, "yes, but what do you call that piece of money?" credit if three of four responses are correct. . _repeating sentences_ say, "now, listen. i am going to say something and after i am through i want you to say it over just as i do. understand? listen carefully and be sure to say exactly what i say." repeat, "say exactly what i say," before reading each sentence. do not re-read any sentence. (_a_) "we are having a fine time. we found a little mouse in the trap." (_b_) "walter had a fine time on his vacation. he went fishing every day." (_c_) "we will go out for a long walk. please give me my pretty straw hat." credit if one sentence out of three is repeated without error, or two with not more than one error each. _alt. forenoon and afternoon_ if a.m., ask, "is it morning or afternoon?" if p.m., "is it afternoon or morning?" year vii . _giving numbers of fingers_ say, "how many fingers have you on one hand?" "how many on the other hand?" "how many on both hands together?" if s. begins to count, say, "no, don't count. tell me without counting," and repeat question. credit if all three questions are answered correctly and promptly without counting ( , , or , , ). . _pictures; description_ show card (_a_) and say, "what is this picture about?" "what is this a picture of?" may repeat question, but do not change it. same for (_b_) and (_c_). order, dutch home, canoe, post office. credit if two of the three pictures are described or interpreted. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _repeating five digits_ say, "now, listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through, i want you to say them exactly as i do. listen closely and get them just right." give (_a_) , , , , , and if necessary (_b_) , , , , , and (_c_), , , , , . do not re-read any set. avoid grouping. credit if one set of the three is given correctly. . _tying bow knot_ show s. a completed bow knot (shoestring tied around a pencil) and say: "you know what kind of a knot this is, don't you? it is a bow knot. i want you to take this other piece of string and tie the same kind of knot around my finger." give s. string of same length and hold finger conveniently for s. credit if double bow (both ends folded in) is tied within one minute. the usual half knot as basis must not be omitted. single bow, half credit. . _giving differences_ say, "what is the difference between a fly and a butterfly?" if s. does not understand, say, "you know flies, do you not? you have seen flies? and you know the butterflies? now, tell me the difference between a fly and a butterfly." same for stone and egg, and wood and glass. credit if any real difference is given in two of three questions. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _copying diamond_ place diamond before s., and give pen, saying, "i want you to draw one exactly like this. make it right here" (showing space on record blank). give three trials if necessary, saying each time, "make it exactly like this one." (note that pen and ink must be used.) credit if two drawings are satisfactory. (see scoring card.) _alt. . naming days of week_ say, "you know the days of the week, do you not? name the days of the week for me." if response is correct, check by asking, "what day comes before tuesday?" "before thursday?" "before friday?" credit if correct response is given within seconds, and if two of three checks are correct. _alt. . three digits backwards_ say, "listen carefully. i am going to read some numbers again but this time i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say -- -- , you would say -- -- . do you understand?" then, "ready, now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." if s. gives digits forwards, repeat instructions. if necessary, give (_b_) and (_c_), repeating, "ready, now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." , , ; , , ; , , . credit if one set is repeated backwards without error. year viii . _ball and field_ present "round field" on record blank with gate facing s. and say, "let us suppose that your baseball has been lost in this round field. you have no idea what part of the field it is in. you don't know what direction it came from, how it got there, nor with what force it came. all you know is that the ball is lost somewhere in the field. now, take this pencil and mark out a path to show me how you would hunt for the ball so as to be sure not to miss it. begin at the gate and show me what path you would take." if s. stops, say, "but suppose you have not found it yet, which direction would you go next?" credit in year viii for "inferior" plan (or better); in years viii and xii for "superior" plan. (see scoring card.) . _counting to _ say, "you can count backwards, can you not? i want you to count backwards for me from to . go ahead." if s. counts - say, "no, i want you to count backwards from to , like this: -- -- and clear on down to . now, go ahead." have s. try, even if he says he cannot, but do not prompt. credit for counting from to within seconds with not more than one error. spontaneous corrections allowed. . _comprehension_ say, "what's the thing for you to do: (_a_) "when you have broken something which belongs to some one else? (_b_) "when you are on your way to school and notice that you are in danger of being late? (_c_) "if a playmate hits you without meaning to do it?" questions may be repeated once or twice, but form must not be changed. credit if two of three responses are correct. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, p. .) . _finding likenesses: two things_ say, "i am going to name two things which are alike in some way, and i want you to tell me _how_ they are alike." (_a_) "wood and coal: in what way are they alike?" if difference is given, say, "no, i want you to tell me how they are _alike_. in what way are wood and coal _alike_?" (_b_) "in what way are an apple and a peach alike?" (_c_) "in what way are iron and silver alike?" (_d_) "in what way are a ship and an automobile alike?" credit if any real likeness is given for two of the four pairs. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _definitions: superior to use_ ask, "what is a balloon?" same for tiger, football, soldier. do not comment on responses. may repeat questions. credit if two of four definitions better than use are given. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _vocabulary_ see last section. if both lists of words are given, credit if definitions are satisfactory; if only one list is given, the requirement is . _alt. . naming six coins_ show nickel, penny, quarter, dime, silver dollar, and half-dollar in order, asking, "what is that?" if answer is "money," say, "yes, but what do you call that piece of money?" credit if all six coins are correctly named. spontaneous corrections allowed. _alt. . writing from dictation_ give pen, ink, and paper, and say, "i want you to write something for me as nicely as you can. write these words: 'see the little boy.' be sure to write it all: 'see the little boy.'" do not dictate the words separately, nor give further repetition. credit if sentence is written without omission of a word and legibly enough to be easily recognized. misspelling disregarded if word is easily recognizable. (see scoring card.) year ix . _giving the date_ ask in order, (_a_) "what day of the week is to-day?" (_b_) "what month is it?" (_c_) "what day of the month is it?" (_d_) "what year is it?" if s. gives day of month for day of week, or _vice versa_, repeat question with suitable emphasis. no other help. credit if there is no error greater than three days in (_c_) and no error in (_a_), (_b_), and (_d_). spontaneous correction allowed. . _arranging five weights_ place , , , , and gram weights before s. and say, "see these blocks. they all look alike, don't they? but they are not alike. some of them are heavy, some are not quite so heavy, and some are still lighter. no two weigh the same. now, i want you to find the heaviest one and place it here. then find the one that is just a little lighter and put it here. then put the next lighter one here, and the next lighter one here, and the lightest of all at this end (pointing). ready; go ahead." give second and, if necessary, third trial, repeating instructions only if s. has used an absurd procedure. do not show s. the correct method. credit for correct arrangement in two of three trials. . _making change_ ask, "if i were to buy cents' worth of candy and should give the storekeeper cents, how much money would i get back?" similarly for - cents; and - cents. s. is not allowed coins or pencil and paper. if s. forgets problem, repeat once, but not more. spontaneous corrections allowed. credit if two answers of three are correct. . _four digits backwards_ say, "listen carefully. i am going to read some numbers, and i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say -- -- , you would say -- -- . do you understand?" then, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." if s. gives digits forwards, repeat instructions. if necessary, give (_b_) and (_c_), repeating each time, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." , , , ; , , , ; , , , . credit if one set is repeated backwards without error. . _three words in one sentence_ say, "you know what a sentence is, of course. a sentence is made up of some words which say something. now, i am going to give you three words, and you must make up a sentence that has all three words in it. the three words are 'boy,' 'river,' 'ball.' go ahead and make up a sentence that has all three words in it." repeat instructions if necessary, but do not illustrate. may say, "the three words must be put with some other words so that all of them together will make a sentence." give only one trial, and do not caution against making more than one sentence. do not hurry s., but allow only one minute. then say, "now make a sentence that has in it the three words 'work,' 'money,' 'men.'" if necessary give (_c_) desert, rivers, lakes, in the same way. credit if satisfactory sentence is given in two of three trials. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _finding rhymes_ say, "you know what a rhyme is, of course. a rhyme is a word that sounds like another word. two words rhyme if they end in the same sound. for example, 'hat,' 'cat,' 'rat,' 'bat,' all rhyme with one another. now, i am going to give you one minute to find as many words as you can that rhyme with 'day.' ready; go ahead." if s. fails, repeat explanation, and give sample rhymes for day, as say, may, pay, hay. otherwise, proceed, "now, you have another minute to name all the words you can think of that rhyme with 'mill.'" same, if necessary, for spring. do not repeat explanation after "mill" or "spring." credit if three rhymes in one minute are given for each of two out of three words. _alt. . naming the months_ say, "name all the months of the year." if correct, check by asking, "what month comes before april?" "before july?" "before november?" credit if months are correctly named within seconds with not more than one error, and if two of three checks are correct. _alt. . counting value of stamps_ say, "you know, of course, how much a stamp like this costs (pointing to a -cent stamp). and you know how much one like this costs (pointing to a -cent stamp). now, how much money would it take to buy all these stamps?" (showing three -cent stamps and three -cent stamps). do not tell values, where not known; if values are known but sum is wrongly given, give second trial, saying, "tell me how you got it." credit if correct value is given in not over seconds. year x . _vocabulary_ see last section. if both lists are given, satisfactory definitions are required; if only one list is given, the requirement is . . _absurdities_ "i am going to read a sentence which has something foolish in it, some nonsense. listen carefully and tell me what is foolish about it." after reading say, "what is foolish about that?" give sentences twice if necessary, repeating exactly. if response is ambiguous, ask s. what he means. (_a_) a man said: "i know a road from my house to the city which is down hill all the way to the city and down hill all the way back home." (_b_) an engineer said that the more cars he had on his train the faster he could go. (_c_) yesterday the police found the body of a girl cut into pieces. they believe that she killed herself. (_d_) there was a railroad accident yesterday, but it was not very serious. only people were killed. (_e_) a bicycle rider, being thrown from his bicycle in an accident, struck his head against a stone and was instantly killed. they picked him up and carried him to the hospital, and they do not think he will get well again. credit if four responses out of five are satisfactory. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _drawing designs from memory_ give s. pencil and paper, then say, "this card has two drawings on it. i am going to show them to you for ten seconds, then i will take the card away and let you draw from memory what you have seen. look at both drawings carefully and remember that you have only ten seconds." show card (x ) for seconds, right side up. have s. reproduce designs immediately, and note on his paper which is the top of his drawing. credit if one design is reproduced correctly and one at least half correctly. (see scoring cards.) . _reading and report_ {new york, september th. a fire last night burned three houses near the center of the city. it took some time to put it out. the loss was fifty thousand dollars, and seventeen families lost their homes. in saving a girl who was asleep in bed, a fireman was burned on the hands.} show selection and say, "i want you to read this for me as well as you can." pronounce for s. all words he cannot make out, allowing not over seconds' hesitation. (record reading time and errors.) when s. has finished, say, "very well done. now, tell me what you read. begin at the first and tell everything you can remember." when s. stops, ask, "and what else?" credit if selection is read within seconds with not more than two errors, and if report given contains at least eight "memories" as separated above. minor changes in wording allowed. scoring is done by checking word groups on record blank. . _comprehension_ ask in order, (_a_) "what ought you to say when someone asks your opinion about a person you don't know very well?" (_b_) "what ought you to do before undertaking (beginning) something very important?" (_c_) "why should we judge a person more by his actions than by his words?" may repeat but not change question except to substitute beginning in (_b_) in case undertaking seems not to be understood. credit if two of three replies are satisfactory. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _naming sixty words_ say, "now, i want to see how many different words you can name in minutes. when i say ready, you must begin and name the words as fast as you can, and i will count them. do you understand? be sure to do your very best, and remember that just any words will do, like 'clouds,' 'dog,' 'chair,' 'happy'--ready; go ahead." whenever there is a pause of seconds, say, "go ahead as fast as you can. any words will do." don't allow sentences or counting; if attempted, interrupt with "counting (or sentences) not allowed. you must name separate words. go ahead." credit if words, exclusive of repetitions, are given in three minutes. if time is limited one minute may be given and words required. _alt. . repeating six digits_ "now, listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through i want you to say them exactly as i do. listen closely and get them just right." give (_a_) and if necessary (_b_). , , , , , ; , , , , , . credit if one set is given without error. _alt. . repeating sentences_ say, "now listen. i am going to say something and after i am through i want you to say it over just as i do. understand? listen carefully and be sure to say exactly what i say." repeat, "say exactly what i say," before reading each sentence. do not re-read any sentence. (_a_) the apple tree makes a cool pleasant shade on the ground where the children are playing. (_b_) it is nearly half-past one o'clock; the house is very quiet and the cat has gone to sleep. (_c_) in summer the days are very warm and fine; in winter it snows and i am cold. credit if one sentence out of three is repeated without error, or two with not more than one error each. _alt. . healy-fernald puzzle_ place frame (short side toward s.) and blocks on table and say, "i want you to put these blocks in this frame so that all the space will be filled up. if you do it rightly, they will all fit in and there will be no space left over. go ahead." do not suggest hurrying. note procedure, especially tendencies to repeat absurd moves, and moves which leave spaces obviously impossible to fill. credit if s. fits blocks into place three times within a total time of five minutes for the three trials. year xii . _vocabulary_ see last section. satisfactory definitions if both lists are given; if only one list is given. . _definitions: abstract words_ say "what is pity?" "what do we mean by pity?" etc. if response contains word to be defined, ask, "yes, but what does it mean to pity some one?" same for revenge, charity, envy, justice. question s. if response is not clear. credit if three of the five words are satisfactorily defined. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _ball and field_ present "round field" on record blank with gate facing s. and say, "let us suppose that your baseball has been lost in this round field. you have no idea what part of the field it is in. you don't know what direction it came from, how it got there, nor with what force it came. all you know is that the ball is lost somewhere in the field. now, take this pencil and mark out a path to show me how you would hunt for the ball so as to be sure not to miss it. begin at the gate and show me what path you would take." if s. stops, say, "but suppose you have not found it yet, which direction would you go next?" credit in year viii for "inferior" plan (or better); in years viii and xii for "superior" plan. (see scoring card.) . _dissected sentences_ {for the started an we country early at hour to asked paper my teacher correct i my a defends dog good his bravely master} point to the first group of words (for the, etc.), and say, "here is a sentence that has the words all mixed up, so that they don't make any sense. if the words were changed around in the right order they would make a good sentence. look carefully and see if you can tell me how the sentence ought to read." do not hurry s., but allow only one minute. if s. fails on the first sentence, read it for him slowly and correctly, pointing at each word as you speak it. same procedure for second and third, except that no help is given. credit if two sentences of three are correct, or one correct and two nearly correct. time, one minute each. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, p. .) . _interpretation of fables_ present fables in order given below. say, "you know what a fable is? fables, you know, are little stories which teach us a lesson. i am going to read a fable to you. listen carefully, and when i am through i will ask you to tell me what lesson the fable teaches us." after reading, say, "what lesson does that teach us?" question s. if response is not clear. proceed with (_b_), (_c_), (_d_), and (_e_) thus: "here is another. listen again and tell me what lesson this fable teaches us." after each ask, "what lesson does that teach us?" (_a_) hercules and the wagoner a man was driving along a country road, when the wheels suddenly sank in a deep rut. the man did nothing but look at the wagon and call loudly to hercules to come and help him. hercules came up, looked at the man, and said: "put your shoulder to the wheel, my man, and whip up your oxen." then he went away and left the driver. (_b_) the milkmaid and her plans a milkmaid was carrying her pail of milk on her head, and was thinking to herself thus: "the money for this milk will buy hens; the hens will lay at least eggs; the eggs will produce at least chicks; and with the money which the chicks will bring i can buy a new dress to wear instead of the ragged one i have on." at this moment she looked down at herself, trying to think how she would look in her new dress; but as she did so the pail of milk slipped from her head and dashed upon the ground. thus all her imaginary schemes perished in a moment. (_c_) the fox and the crow a crow, having stolen a bit of meat, perched in a tree and held it in her beak. a fox, seeing her, wished to secure the meat, and spoke to the crow thus: "how handsome you are! and i have heard that the beauty of your voice is equal to that of your form and feathers. will you not sing for me, so that i may judge whether this is true?" the crow was so pleased that she opened her mouth to sing and dropped the meat, which the fox immediately ate. (_d_) the farmer and the stork a farmer set some traps to catch cranes which had been eating his seed. with them he caught a stork. the stork, which had not really been stealing, begged the farmer to spare his life, saying that he was a bird of excellent character, that he was not at all like the cranes, and that the farmer should have pity on him. but the farmer said: "i have caught you with these robbers, the cranes, and you have got to die with them." (_e_) the miller, his son, and the donkey a miller and his son were driving their donkey to a neighboring town to sell him. they had not gone far when a child saw them and cried out: "what fools those fellows are to be trudging along on foot when one of them might be riding." the old man, hearing this, made his son get on the donkey, while he himself walked. soon they came upon some men. "look," said one of them, "see that lazy boy riding while his old father has to walk." on hearing this the miller made his son get off, and he climbed upon the donkey himself. farther on they met a company of women, who shouted out: "why, you lazy old fellow, to ride along so comfortably while your poor boy there can hardly keep pace by the side of you!" and so the good-natured miller took his boy up behind him and both of them rode. as they came to the town a citizen said to them, "why, you cruel fellows! you two are better able to carry the poor little donkey than he is to carry you." "very well," said the miller, "we will try." so both of them jumped to the ground, got some ropes, tied the donkey's legs to a pole and tried to carry him. but as they crossed the bridge the donkey became frightened, kicked loose, and fell into the stream. credit in year xii if score is points or more; in year xvi if score is points or more. allow points for each fable for correct, and for partially correct response. (note carefully scoring directions in _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _five digits backwards_ "listen carefully; i am going to read some numbers, and i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say -- -- , you would say -- -- . do you understand?" then, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." if s. gives digits forwards, repeat instructions. if necessary, give (_b_) and (_c_), repeating each time, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." , , , , ; , , , , ; , , , , . credit if one set is repeated backwards without error. . _pictures; interpretation_ show in succession dutch home, river scene, post office, and colonial house, saying each time, "tell me what this picture is about. explain this picture." may prompt with, "go ahead," or "explain what you mean." credit if three of the four pictures are satisfactorily interpreted. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _finding likenesses; three things_ say, "i am going to name three things which are alike in some way, and i want you to tell me _how_ they are alike. snake, cow, and sparrow; in what way are they alike?" may repeat or urge with, "i'm sure you can tell me how a snake, a cow, and a sparrow are alike," but do not change form of question. if difference is given, say, "no, i want you to tell me how they are _alike_. in what way are a snake, a cow, and a sparrow alike?" same for (_b_) book, teacher, newspaper; (_c_) wool, cotton, leather; (_d_) knife-blade, penny, piece of wire; (_e_) rose, potato, tree. credit if any real similarity is given in three out of five trials. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) year xiv . _vocabulary_ see last section. satisfactory definitions if both lists are given; if only one list is given. . _induction test_ (if xviii is to be given, it should precede this test.) provide six sheets of tissue paper, - / by inches. take the first sheet, and telling s. to watch what you do, fold it once, and in the middle of the folded edge cut out a small notch; then ask s. to tell you how many holes there will be in the paper when it is unfolded. whatever the answer, unfold the paper and hold it up broadside for s.'s inspection. next, take another sheet, fold it once as before and say, "now, when we folded it this way and cut out a piece, you remember it made one hole in the paper. this time we will give the paper another fold and see how many holes we shall have." then proceed to fold the paper again, this time in the other direction, cut out a piece from the folded side, and ask how many holes there will be when the paper is unfolded. then unfold the paper, hold it up before s. so as to let him see the result. whatever the answer, proceed with the third sheet. fold it once and say, "when we folded it this way there was one hole." fold it again and say, "and when we folded it this way there were two holes." fold the paper a third time and say, "now, i am folding it again. how many holes will it have this time when i unfold it?" again unfold paper while s. looks on. continue in the same manner with sheets four, five, and six, adding one fold each time. in folding each sheet recapitulate results, saying (with the sixth, for example): "when we folded it this way there was one hole; when we folded it again there were two; when we folded it again there were four; when we folded it again there were eight; when we folded it again there were sixteen; now tell me how many holes there will be if we fold it once more." avoid saying, "when we folded it once, twice, three times." after sixth response, ask, "can you tell me a rule by which i could know each time how many holes there are going to be?" credit if answer to sixth question is correct, and governing rule is correctly stated. . _president and king_ say, "there are three main differences between a president and a king; what are they?" if s. stops after one difference is given, urge him on, if possible, until three are given. credit if two of the three correct answers are given. . _problem questions_ say, "listen, and see if you can understand what i read." then read the problem slowly and with expression. if necessary, re-read problem. (_a_) a man who was walking in the woods near a city stopped suddenly very much frightened, and then ran to the nearest policeman, saying that he had just seen hanging from the limb of a tree a ---- a what? if response is not clear, say, "explain what you mean." (_b_) my neighbor has been having queer visitors. first, a doctor came to his house, then a lawyer, then a minister (preacher or priest). what do you think happened there? if response is simply "a death," etc., check up by asking what the lawyer came for. (_c_) an indian who had come to town for the first time in his life saw a white man riding along the street. as the white man rode by, the indian said: "the white man is lazy; he walks sitting down." what was the white man riding on that caused the indian to say, "he walks sitting down?" credit if two of the three problems are satisfactorily answered. spontaneous corrections allowed. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - , for important scoring directions.) . _arithmetical reasoning_ {if a man's salary is $ a week and he spends $ a week, how long will it take him to save $ ? if pencils cost cents, how many pencils can you buy for cents? at cents a yard, how much will feet of cloth cost?} show s. the problems one at a time. have s. read each problem aloud and, with the printed problem still before him, find the answer without the use of pencil or paper. in the case of illiterates, examiner reads each problem for s. two or three times. credit if two of the three problems are correctly solved, within one minute each, not including time spent in reading. . _reversing hands of clock_ say, "suppose it is six-twenty-two o'clock, that is, twenty-two minutes after six; can you see in your mind where the large hand would be, and where the small hand would be?" "now, suppose the two hands of the clock were to trade places, so that the large hand takes the place where the small hand was, and the small hand takes the place where the large hand was, what time would it then be?" repeat the test with the hands at . ( minutes after ),[ ] and again with the hands at . ( minutes before ). [footnote : . is substituted instead of . , formerly used, because it is capable of more accurate solution and is less confusing.] credit if two of the three problems are solved with error of no more than or minutes. _alt. repeating seven digits_ "now listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through, i want you to say them exactly as i do. listen closely and get them just right." give (_a_) and if necessary (_b_). , , , , , , ; , , , , , , . credit if one set is reproduced without error. year xvi . _vocabulary_ see last section. satisfactory definitions if both lists are given; if only one list is given. . _interpretation of fables_ see xii for procedure. allow points for each fable correctly interpreted, and if response is somewhat inferior to the standard. credit in xii if score is points or more; in xvi if score is points or more. (note carefully scoring in _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _differences between abstract terms_ ask, "what is the difference between-- (_a_) "laziness and idleness? (_b_) "evolution and revolution? (_c_) "poverty and misery? (_d_) "character and reputation?" if answer is ambiguous, get s. to explain. if he merely defines the words, say, "yes, but i want you to tell me the difference between ---- and ----." credit if three of the four answers are given correctly. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _enclosed boxes_ show s. a small cardboard box, and say, "listen carefully. you see this box; it has two smaller boxes inside of it, and each one of the smaller boxes contains a little tiny box. how many boxes are there altogether, counting the big one?" allow one-half minute, record answer, then show second box, saying, "this box has two smaller boxes inside, and each of the smaller boxes contains _two_ tiny boxes. how many altogether?" similarly for (_c_) and (_d_), using three and three, and four and four. emphasize slightly the words "three" and "four." credit if three of the four problems are solved correctly within one-half minute each. spontaneous corrections are counted as correct. . _six digits backwards_ say "listen carefully. i am going to read some numbers, and i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say -- -- , you would say -- -- . do you understand?" then, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." if s. gives digits forwards repeat instructions. if necessary, give (_b_) and (_c_), repeating each time, "ready now; listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." , , , , , ; , , , , , ; , , , , , . credit if one set is repeated backwards without error. . _code_ show s. the code given on card (xvi ). say, "see these diagrams here? look and you will see that they contain all the letters of the alphabet. now, examine the arrangement of the letters. they go (pointing) a b c, d e f, g h i, j k l, m n o, p q r, s t u v, w x y z. you see the letters in the first two diagrams are arranged in the up-and-down order (pointing again), and the letters in the other two diagrams run in just the opposite way from the hands of a clock (pointing). look again and you will see that the second diagram is just like the first, except that each letter has a dot with it, and that the last diagram is like the third except that here, also, each letter has a dot. now, all of this represents a code; that is, a secret language. it is a real code, one that was used in the civil war for sending secret messages. this is the way it works: we draw the lines which hold a letter, but leave out the letter. here, for example, is the way we would write 'spy.'" then write the words "spy" and "trench," pointing out carefully where each letter comes from, and emphasizing the fact that the dot must be used in addition to the lines in writing any letter in the second or fourth diagram. then add: "i am going to have you write something for me; remember, now, how the letters go, first (pointing, as before) a b c, d e f, g h i, then j k l, m n o, p q r, then s t u v, then w x y z. and don't forget the dots for the letters in this diagram and this one" (pointing). at this point, take away the diagrams, give s. pencil and paper, and tell him to write the words "come quickly." say nothing about hurrying. do not permit s. to reproduce the code and then to copy the code letters from his reproduction. credit if the words are written within six minutes with not more than two errors, omission of dot counting as half error. _alt. . repeating sentences_ say, "now, listen. i am going to say something and after i am through i want you to say it over just as i do. understand? listen carefully and be sure to say exactly what i say." repeat "say exactly what i say" before reading each sentence. do not re-read any sentence. (_a_) walter likes very much to go on visits to his grandmother, because she always tells him many funny stories. (_b_) yesterday i saw a pretty little dog in the street. it had curly brown hair, short legs, and a long tail. credit if one sentence is repeated without a single error. _alt. . comprehension of physical relations_ (_a_) draw a horizontal line or inches long. an inch or two above it draw a horizontal line about an inch long parallel to the first. say, "the long line represents the perfectly level ground of a field, and the short line represents a cannon. the cannon is pointed horizontally (on a level) and is fired across this perfectly level field." after it is clear that these conditions of the problem are comprehended, add, "now, suppose that this cannon is fired off and that the ball comes to the ground at this point here (pointing to the farther end of the line which represents the field). take this pencil and draw a line which will show what path the cannon ball will take from the time it leaves the mouth of the cannon till it strikes the ground." (_b_) say, "you know, of course, that water holds up a fish that is placed in it. well, here is a problem: suppose we have a bucket which is partly full of water. we place the bucket on the scales and find that with the water in it it weighs exactly pounds. then we put a -pound fish into the bucket of water. now, what will the whole thing weigh?" if s. responds correctly, say, "how can this be correct, since the water itself holds up the fish?" (_c_) "you know, do you not, what it means when they say a gun 'carries yards?' it means that the bullet goes yards before it drops to amount to anything." when this is clear, proceed, "now, suppose a man is shooting at a mark about the size of a quart can. his rifle carries perfectly more than yards. with such a gun is it any harder to hit the mark at yards than it is at yards?" credit if two of the three problems are satisfactorily solved. for (_a_), line must begin almost on a level and drop more rapidly toward the end. for (_b_), s. must adhere positively to right answer. for (_c_), s. must know that a small deviation at yards becomes a larger deviation at yards. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - for important scoring rules.) year xviii . _vocabulary_ see last section. satisfactory definitions if both lists are given; if only one list is given. . _paper-cutting test_ when this test is given it should precede xiv . take a piece of paper about inches square and say, "watch carefully what i do. see, i fold the paper this way (folding it once over in the middle). then i fold it this way (folding it again in the middle, but at right angles to the first fold). now, i will cut out a notch right here" (indicating). cut notch, keeping fragments out of view. leave folded paper exposed, but pressed flat against table. then give s. a pencil and a second sheet of paper like the one already used and say, "take this piece of paper and make a drawing to show how the other sheet of paper would look if it were unfolded. draw lines to show the creases in the paper and show what results from the cutting." do not permit s. to fold second sheet, and do not say, "draw the holes." credit if creases are correctly represented, with correct number of holes correctly located. . _repeating eight digits_ say, "now, listen. i am going to say over some numbers and after i am through, i want you to say them exactly as i do. listen closely and get them just right." give (_a_), and if necessary (_b_) and (_c_). , , , , , , , ; , , , , , , , ; , , , , , , , . credit if one set is reproduced without error. . _repeating thought of passage_ say, "i am going to read a little selection of about six or eight lines. when i am through i will ask you to repeat as much of it as you can. it doesn't make any difference whether you remember the exact words or not, but you must listen carefully so that you can tell me everything it says." read (_a_), and if necessary (_b_), recording response verbatim. urge s. to give thought of selection in his own words, if he hesitates. (_a_) tests, such as we are now making, are of value both for the advancement of science and for the information of the person who is tested. it is important for science to learn how people differ and on what factors these differences depend. if we can separate the influence of heredity from the influence of environment, we may be able to apply our knowledge so as to guide human development. we may thus in some cases correct defects and develop abilities which we might otherwise neglect. (_b_) many opinions have been given on the value of life. some call it good, others call it bad. it would be nearer correct to say that it is mediocre; for on the one hand our happiness is never as great as we should like, and on the other hand our misfortunes are never as great as our enemies would wish for us. it is this mediocrity of life which prevents it from being radically unjust. credit if main thoughts of one of the selections are given in reasonably consecutive order. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - .) . _seven digits backwards_ say, "listen carefully, i am going to read some numbers, and i want you to say them backwards. for example, if i should say -- -- you would say -- -- . do you understand?" then, "ready now, listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." if s. gives the digits forwards, repeat instructions. if necessary, give (_b_) and (_c_), repeating each time: "ready now, listen carefully, and be sure to say the numbers backwards." , , , , , , ; , , , , , , ; , , , , , , . credit if one set is repeated backwards without error. . _ingenuity test_ state problem (_a_) orally, repeating it if s. does not respond promptly. do not allow s. to use pencil or paper, and ask him to give his solution orally as he works it out. record his statement in full. if s. resorts to some such method as "fill the -pint vessel two-thirds full," or "i would mark the inside of the -pint vessel so as to show where pints come to," etc., inform him that such a method is not allowable; that this would be guessing, since he could not be sure when the -pint vessel was two-thirds full, or whether he had marked off his -pint vessel accurately. tell him he must measure out the water without any guesswork and explain also that it is a fair problem, not a "catch." say nothing about pouring from one vessel to another, but if s. asks whether this is permissible, say "yes." if s. has not solved (_a_) correctly within five minutes, explain the solution in full and proceed to (_b_). state (_b_) orally and allow s. five minutes for its solution. do not explain in case of failure. if s. succeeds on either (_a_) or (_b_), but not with both, give problem (_c_) orally, allowing five minutes for this also. (_a_) "a mother sent her boy to the river and told him to bring back exactly pints of water. she gave him a -pint vessel and a -pint vessel. show me how the boy can measure out exactly pints of water, using nothing but these two vessels and not guessing at the amount. you should begin by filling the -pint vessel first. remember, you have a -pint vessel and a -pint vessel, and you must bring back exactly pints." same formula for (_b_) and , get . begin with ; and (_c_) and , get . begin with . credit if two of the three problems are solved correctly, each within five minutes. _vocabulary_ "i want to find out how many words you know. listen; and when i say a word, you tell me what it means. what is an orange?" etc. if s. can read, let him see the words on the vocabulary lists. continue in each list till or successive words have been missed. if s. thinks formal definition is required, say: "just tell me in your own words; say it any way you please. all i want is to find out whether you know what a ---- is." may ask s. to explain what he means if it is not clear. list list . gown . orange . tap . bonfire . scorch . straw . puddle . roar . envelope . haste . rule . afloat . health . guitar . eye-lash . mellow . copper . impolite . curse . plumbing . pork . noticeable . outward . muzzle . southern . quake . lecture . reception . dungeon . majesty . skill . treasury . ramble . misuse . civil . crunch . insure . forfeit . nerve . sportive . juggler . apish . regard . snip . stave . shrewd . brunette . repose . hysterics . peculiarity . mars . conscientious . mosaic . charter . bewail . coinage . priceless . dilapidated . disproportionate . promontory . tolerate . avarice . artless . gelatinous . depredation . drabble . lotus . philanthropy . frustrate . irony . harpy . embody . flaunt . swaddle . ochre . exaltation . milksop . infuse . incrustation . selectman . retroactive . declivity . ambergris . laity . achromatic . fen . perfunctory . sapient . casuistry . cameo . piscatorial . theosophy . sudorific . precipitancy . parterre . paleology . shagreen . homunculus . complot . limpet a definition is satisfactory if it gives one correct meaning for the word, regardless of whether that meaning is the most common one, and however poorly it may be expressed. (see _the measurement of intelligence_, pp. - , for illustrations of satisfactory and unsatisfactory responses.) time may be saved, with little loss of accuracy, by giving one list only, and in this case list should be used. the standards required for passing are as follows: _if both_ _if one_ _lists given_ _list given_ viii x xii xiv xvi xviii * * * * * * * by the same author the intelligence of school children how children differ in ability, the use of mental tests in school grading, and the proper education of exceptional children. the measurement of intelligence an explanation of and a complete guide for the use of the stanford revision and extension of the binet-simon intelligence scale. test material eighteen plates and one copy of the record booklet, being the test material needed in giving the tests to children. record booklet put up for general use in packages of , each forming a complete test record for one child. condensed guide for the stanford revision of the binet-simon intelligence tests. abbreviated filing record card for the stanford revision of the binet-simon tests. put up for general use in packages of , each forming a complete filing record for one child. houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago means and ends of education by j. l. spalding bishop of peoria who bringeth many things, for each one something brings chicago a. c. mcclurg and company copyright by a. c. mcclurg £ co. a.d. by bishop spalding education and the higher life. mo. $ . . things of the mind. mo. $ . . means and ends of education. mo. $ . . a. c. mcclurg and co. chicago. contents. chapter i. truth and love ii. truth and love iii. the making of one's self iv. woman and education v. the scope of public-school education vi. the religious element in education vii. the higher education means and ends of education. chapter i. truth and love. none of us yet know, for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought--proof against all adversity;--bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts; which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us--houses built without hands for our souls to live in.--ruskin. stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to god and famous to all ages.--milton. a great man's house is filled chiefly with menials and creatures of ceremony; and great libraries contain, for the most part, books as dry and lifeless as the dust that gathers on them: but from amidst these dead leaves an immortal mind here and there looks forth with light and love. from the point of view of the bank president, emerson tells us, books are merely so much rubbish. but in his eyes the flowers also, the flowing water, the fresh air, the floating clouds, children's voices, the thrill of love, the fancy's play, the mountains, and the stars are worthless. not one in a hundred who buy shakspere, or milton, or a work of any other great mind, feels a genuine longing to get at the secret of its power and truth; but to those alone who feel this longing is the secret revealed. we must love the man of genius, if we would have him speak to us. we learn to know ourselves, not by studying the behavior of matter, but through experience of life and intimate acquaintance with literature. our spiritual as well as our physical being springs from that of our ancestors. freedom, however, gives the soul the power not only to develop what it inherits, but to grow into conscious communion with the thought and love, the hope and faith of the noble dead, and, in thus enlarging itself, to become the inspiration and source of richer and wider life for those who follow. as parents are consoled by the thought of surviving in their descendants, great minds are upheld and strengthened in their ceaseless labors by the hope of entering as an added impulse to better things, from generation to generation, into the lives of thousands. the greatest misfortune which can befall genius is to be sold to the advocacy of what is not truth and love and goodness and beauty. the proper translation of _timeo hominem unius libri_ is not, "i fear a man of one book," but "i dread a man of one book:" for he is sure to be narrow, one-sided, and unreasonable. the right phrase enters at once into our spiritual world, and its power becomes as real as that of material objects. the truth to which it gives body is borne in upon us as a star or a mountain is borne in upon us. kings and rich men live in history when genius happens to throw the light of abiding worlds upon their ephemeral estate. carthage is the typical city of merchants and traders. why is it remembered? because hannibal was a warrior and virgil a poet. the strong man is he who knows how and is able to become and be himself; the magnanimous man is he who, being strong, knows how and is able to issue forth from himself, as from a fortress, to guide, protect, encourage, and save others. life's current flows pure and unimpeded within him, and on its wave his thought and love are borne to bless his fellowmen. if he who gives a cup of water in the right spirit does god's work, so does he who sows or reaps, or builds or sweeps, or utters helpful truth or plays with children or cheers the lonely, or does any other fair or useful thing. take not seriously one who treats with derision men or books that have been deemed worthy of attention by the best minds. he is false or foolish. as we cherish a human being for the courage and love he inspires, so books are dear to us for the noble thoughts and generous moods they call into being. to drink the spirit of a great author is worth more than a knowledge of his teaching. he who desires to grow wise should bring his reason to bear habitually upon what he sees and hears not less than upon what he reads; for thus he soon comes to understand that whatever he thinks or feels, says or does, whatever happens within the sphere of his conscious life, may be made the means of self-improvement. "he is not born for glory," says vauvenargues, "who knows not the worth of time." the educational value of books lies in their power to set the intellectual atmosphere in vibration, thereby rousing the mind to self-activity; and those which have not this power lack vitality. if in a whole volume we find one passage in which truth is expressed in a noble and striking manner, we have not read in vain. to read with profit, we should read as a serious student reads, with the mind all alive and held to the subject; for reading is thinking, and it is valuable in proportion to the stimulus it gives to the exercise of faculty. the conversation of high and ingenuous minds is doubtless as instructive as it is delightful, but it is seldom in our power to call around us those with whom we should wish to hold discourse; and hence we go back to the emancipated spirits, who having transcended the bounds of time and space, are wherever they are desired and are always ready to entertain whoever seeks their company. genius neither can nor will discover its secret. why his thought has such a mould and such a tinge he no more knows than why the flowers have such a tint and such a perfume; and if he knew he would not care to tell. nothing is wholly manifest. in the most trivial object, as in the simplest word, there lies a world of meaning which does not reveal itself to a passing glance. if therefore thou wouldst come to right understanding, consider all things with an awakened and interested curiosity. when the mind at last finds itself rightly at home in its world, it is as delighted as children making escape from restraining walls, as full of spirit as colts newly turned upon the greensward. in the realm of truth each one is king, and what he knows is as much his own as though he were its first discoverer. however firmly thou holdest to thy opinions, if truth appears on the opposite side, throw down thy arms at once. a book has the power almost of a human being to inspire admiration or disgust, love or hatred. to be useful is a noble thing, to be necessary is not desirable. the youth has not enough ambition unless he has too much. it is difficult to give lessons in the art of pleasing without teaching that of lying. the discouraged are already vanquished. in judging the deed let not the character of the doer influence thy opinion, for good is good, evil evil, by whomsoever done. when the author is rightly inspired his words need not interpretation. they are as natural and as beautiful as the faces of children or as new-blown flowers, and their meaning is plain. the spirit and love of dogmatism is characteristic of the imperfectly educated. as there is a communion of saints, there is a communion of noble minds, living and dead. to speak of love which is not felt, of piety which is not a living sentiment within us, is to weaken both in ourselves and in those who hear us the power of faith and affection. the best that has been known and experienced by minds and hearts lies asleep in books, ready to awaken for whoever holds the magician's wand. books which at their first appearance create a breeze of excitement, are forgotten when the wind falls. a human soul rightly uttering itself, in whatever age or country, ceases to belong to any age or country, and becomes part of the universal life of man. a sprightly wit may serve only to lead us astray, and to enmesh us more hopelessly in error. deeper knowledge is the remedy for the foolishness of sciolism: like cures like. in the books in which men worth knowing have put some of the vital quality which makes them worth knowing, there is perennial inspiration. they are the form and substance of an immortal spirit which, in creating them, became itself. "i have not made my book," says montaigne, "more than my book has made me." were one to ask an acquaintance who knows men to point out the individuals whom he should make his friends, his request would probably receive an unsatisfactory reply: for how, except by trial, is it possible to say who will suit whom? those whose friendship would be valuable might, for whatever cause, be disagreeable to him, as the greatest and noblest may be unpleasant companions. many a one whom we admire as he stands forth in history, whose words and deeds thrill and uplift us, we should detest had we known him in life; and others to whom we might have been drawn would have cared nothing for us. between men and books there is doubtless a wide difference, though a good book contains the best of the life of some true man. but when we are asked to point out the books one should learn to love, we are confronted with much the same difficulty as had we been asked to name the persons whom he should make his friends. a book can have worth for us only when we have learned to love it; and since a real book, like a real man, has its proper character, it is not easy to determine whom it will please or displease. once it has taken a safe place in literature, it will, of course, be praised by everybody; but this, like the praise of men, is often meaningless. all who read know something about the great books, but their knowledge, unless it leads them to intimate acquaintance with some one or several of these books, has little worth. books are, indeed, a world which each one must discover for himself. another may tell us about them, but the truth and beauty there is in them for each one, each one must find. the value of a book, like that of a man, lies not in its freedom from fault, but in its qualities, in the good it contains. words which inspire the love of spiritual beauty and noble action cannot be false: the consent of the wise places them in the canon. the imperishable goods are truth, freedom, love, and beauty. valuable alone is that which enriches and ennobles life. there are natures for whom the lack of knowledge is as painful as the lack of food. they are ahungered and athirst for it, and their suffering impels them to ceaseless meditation and study, as the only means of relief. the self-educator's first and simplest aim should be to learn to know and do well whatever he knows and does; and to this end let him often observe and consider how rare are they who know anything thoroughly or do well any of the hundred things which are part of daily life: who talk well, or write well, or behave well. herbert spencer affirms that it is better to learn the meanings of things than the meanings of words; but he loses sight of the fact that the meanings of things become plain only when things are clothed in words, which, in truth, are things, being nothing else than the very form and body of nature as it reveals itself within the mind of man. the world is chiefly a mental fact. from mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of causality, color, warmth, and beauty. were there no mind, there would be no world. the end of man is the pursuit of perfection, through communion with god, his fellows, and nature, by means of knowledge and conduct, of faith, hope, admiration, and love. it is easy to praise work overmuch. like money, it is a means, not an end, and it is good or evil as it is made to help or harm the worker, for man is an end, not a means. the work which millions are still forced to do is a curse,--the trail of the serpent is over it all, and no people has the right to call itself civilized, while work which dehumanizes is not merely permitted, but encouraged. let us not teach the young to believe they are born into a world of delights and pleasures, but let us strive to enable them to realize that, upon this earth, only the wise and good and strong can make themselves really at home; that for the wicked and the weak its very delights and pleasures turn to sorrow and suffering. we pity the hard-driven beast of burden. how then is it possible to look with complacency on a world in which multitudes of human beings are condemned to the work of the ox and the ass? for the healthy man, wealth and happiness would seem to be identical, if his desires are confined to the things of which money is the equivalent. but this is a delusion, for the plenary possession of these things has never satisfied a human being. man needs virtue, knowledge, love, and to take the obvious view, he needs the power to enjoy the things money buys; and of this money deprives him. when we consider the many unworthy means men take to gain wealth and office, we are forced to believe that to reach their ends they are ready to profess to hold opinions and beliefs about which they care nothing or which they really do not accept at all. by this following of time-servers and place-hunters every noble cause is weakened and the purest faith is corrupted. to labor for those we love, to sit in the hours of rest, with wife and children about us, smiling in the blaze of the fire we have lighted, sheltered by the roof we have built, secure in the sense of protection our presence inspires, is to feel that life is good. but is it not a higher thing to turn away, in disrespect of all this peace and comfort, and to strive alone, by thought and deed, to find the way which leads to god and to be a pioneer therein for those who wander helpless and astray? the more we dwell with truth and love, the more conscious we become that they are the best, and are everlasting; and thus our immortality is revealed to us. visibly we float on the boundless stream and disappear; but inasmuch as we are truth-loving and love-cherishing, we dwell in an abiding city, and may behold our bodies carried forth by the flood, as a man sees his house swept away, while he himself remains. our thoughtlessness and indifference, our indolence and frivolousness, blind us to the infinite worth and significance of life; and they who call themselves religious often take it as lightly as worldlings and unbelievers. in the universe there is nothing which exists separate and apart from other things. the satellites hold to the planets, the planets to the suns, the suns to one another, all in obedience to the same laws which bind the body to earth, and cause the water to flow and the vapor to rise. for the senses there is separateness, but for the mind there is union and unity. communion is the law of souls as of bodies. both are immersed in a boundless world, from which if they could be drawn forth they would cease to be. the principle of this infinite harmony is love, is god. the right human bond is that which unites soul with soul; and only they are truly akin who consciously live in the same world, who think, believe, and love alike, who hope for the same things, aspire to the same ends. our mental view never reaches the ultimate nature of being, and hence our knowledge, whether of material or of spiritual things, is incomplete. faith is the effort to supply the defect which inheres in all our knowing. knowledge springs from faith, faith from knowledge, as rivers from clouds, clouds from rivers. the more we know, the more we believe; and our growing consciousness does not make us content to rest in a mechanical view of nature, but it brings home to us with increasing power the awfulness of the infinite mystery, which we more and more clearly perceive to be a spiritual rather than a material fact. if at present there is a certain failure of will and consequent discouragement in the pursuit of moral and intellectual perfection, this is a result of our passing bewilderment in the presence of the revelations of science and of the mighty forces it places in the hands of man, and not of any new knowledge which tends to inspire misgivings concerning the being of god and our kinship with him:--- from nature up to law, from law to love: this is the ascendant path in which we move, impelled by god in ways that lighten still, till all things meet in one eternal thrill. as the universe revealed by the copernican astronomy and the other natural sciences is infinitely more sublime and marvellous than such a world as the israelites, the greeks, or the romans imagined, so they who see rightly in the luminous ether of modern intelligence understand better than the ancients that human life is not an ephemeral and superficial, but an immortal and central power, enrooted in god, and drawing its substance and sustenance from him. the appeal to shame is a poor argument. the fact that men of great intellectual power and learning have held an opinion to be true does not make it so. new knowledge may have shown it to be false, or the general advance of the race may have changed the point of view. the presumption of the larger wisdom of the ancients we cannot accept: for we, not they, are the true ancients. the purest and the holiest prayer men speak is this: "thy will be done." they who utter it from the inmost soul, find peace, even as a fretful child sinks to rest upon the mother's bosom. in learning to love the will of god they come at last not merely to believe, but to feel that his will guides the universe, and that all will be well. when an utterance comes forth from the depths of our spiritual being, men cannot but hearken. it is as though we should bring to exiles tidings of a long-lost home and country. to what a weight he stoops who addresses himself with fixed resolve to the life of thought! the burden indeed is heavy, but the pathway lies through pleasant fields where great souls move to and fro in freedom and at peace. and as he grows accustomed to his labor, the world widens, the heavens break open, the dead live again, and with them he rises into the high regions where the petty cares and passions of mortals do not reach. he who would educate himself must make use of his own powers. he must observe, think, examine, read, argue, ponder; he must learn when to hold judgment in suspense, and when to give the wings of the soul free sweep through the high and serene realms of truth and beauty. the farther we dwell from the crowd, with its current opinion, the better and truer shall we and our thoughts become. they who write for multitudinous readers rise with difficulty above the dignity of mountebanks. there is a radical defect in the character of whoever works in the spirit of a trifler, however blameless his conduct. the power to inspire faith in the seriousness and goodness of life is a sufficient test of the worth of a scheme of education. no one should fill an office which he is unable to hold without hindrance to the play of mind and heart that makes him a man. the dignities we possess at the cost of knowledge and virtue are like jewels for the sake of which one goes hungry and naked; mere glittering baubles for which we barter the soul's prosperity. experience is personal, and it is largely incommunicable; but genius--and in this lies its power and charm--renders it communicable. what the poet or the painter has felt and seen, he makes all men feel and see. the difference between man and man, between the child and the youth, the youth and the adult, is chiefly a difference in feeling, in the manner in which they are impressed; and it is our nature to be drawn in admiration or reverence to those who by their words or deeds give us deeper impressions of the worth of life, and thus open for us new sources of feeling. fair thoughts rise in the heart and mind of genius, like the fragrant breath which the dewy flowers exhale in the face of the rising sun, and they utter themselves as simply as matin songs warbled by sweet-throated birds. faith in the infinite nature and worth of truth, goodness, and love, is the dawn which shall merge into the fulness of day, when, in other worlds, god looks upon the soul, reborn from out this seemingness. our position, our reputation, our wealth, our comforts, are but a vesture like the body itself. they shall fall away, and we shall remain with god. there is no liberty but obedience to the impulse of the higher nature which urges us to think nobly, to act rightly, and to love constantly. the dominion of appetite is slavery; the dominion of reason and conscience is freedom. renan somewhere says he could wish for nothing better than that a little volume of selections from his writings might commend itself to young women, whose fair faces should bend over it, and find there a reflection of their own pure souls. but where there is no god, the soul is not mirrored, and we never really love an author who weakens faith and hope. with whatever success we advance towards the wide and serene life of the pure reason, let us still cling to faith, hope, and love, the primal powers which keep watch at our birth, and which bend over our cradles, and which alone lift us into the world of enduring peace and hold us within the sheltering arms of god. in the enlightened mind, faith is a higher virtue than it can be for the ignorant, and to sustain it there is need of a nobler life. he whom neither learning nor power nor wealth can corrupt must have virtue; for learning breeds conceit, and power begets pride, and wealth debases both the mind and heart. the intellect does not recognize that conscience may forbid its exercise, since knowledge cannot be evil. if earth were a hell and life a curse and the universe but a cinder, it would still be good to know the fact. the saddest truth is better than the merriest lie. to know a thing is to be conscious of its relation to the mind. we know it, not in itself, but in and through this relation. our knowledge of god, who is the absolute, is not absolute knowledge, but a knowledge of him in so far as he is related to the mind of man. since, however, mind is reason and not unreason, there is harmony between it and things, between it and god; and hence to be conscious of its relation to god and the universe is to be conscious of a real relation, in which both the thinker and his thought are in truth what they seem to be. the ultimate reality is inferred, not directly perceived. it reveals itself to the purest faith and love, and may be hidden from one who knows all the sciences. as man's relations to his fellows make him a social and political being, so his relations to the unseen power behind and within the visible world, of whose presence he is always, however dimly, conscious, and to whom he refers whatever touches the senses, as well as the principle of life itself, make him a religious being. in identifying what seem to be our particular interests with the interests of all, we make escape from narrowness and isolation into the general life of humanity; and when we come to understand that not only mankind but all nature is a unity in the consciousness of the infinite and eternal, bound together by thought and love, we enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of god, and feel that nor height nor depth nor things past nor things to come shall separate us from the divine charity. we are akin to all that may become part of our life; and whatever we know or love or admire is spiritualized and made human. to understand the things of the spirit we must have spiritual experience. the intuitions of time and space, as well as the principle of causality, are given in the constitution of the mind. so is the idea of being, of perfection, of beauty, of eternity, of infinity, of duty. to think implies being, to perceive things as existing in time and space implies consciousness of eternity and infinity. to know the imperfect is possible only in the light of the perfect. subject is itself object, the first known and best understood, and the laws of mind are laws of being. if the constitution of mind makes the revelation of the material world possible only under the forms of time and space, intelligible only as sequence of cause and effect, the reason is to be found in the nature of things. if the constitution of mind postulates one who knows and shapes, in a world in which whatever is, is intelligible, in which there is order, proportion, and purpose, it is because such an one is given in the nature of things, and he is god. however living our faith, it is faith and not knowledge; and should it become knowledge, it would cease to be faith. there are three kinds of authors,--those who impart knowledge, those who give delight, and those who strengthen and inspire. a noble thought rightly expressed sweeps the higher nerve centres as the touch of a perfect performer the strings of an instrument; but if the instrument is poor and irresponsive, the appeal is made in vain. life has the power to propagate itself, and if the words thou utterest are living, they will strike root somewhere and bud and blossom and bear fruit; but if there is no life in them, be content to have them fall and lie amid the dust of the dead. god and the universe are what they are, and the best even genius can do is to throw over them a revealing light. he who feels that he is always in the presence of god will strive as religiously to think only what is true as he will strive to do only what is right. a phrase which leaps forth aglow with life from the heart and brain of genius, not only lives forever, but retains forever the power to awaken, when brought into contact with a brain and heart, the thrill with which it first came into being. only a few know and love the poet, but they are young and fair, and the music of high thoughts and pure love is rhythmic with the current of their blood; and if among them there be found some who are old, they are choice spirits who have risen from out the lapses of time into regions where what is true and beautiful is so forever. this little band of chosen ones accompanies him adown the centuries, and listens to the melody which wells in his heart and breaks into songs that shall give delight as long as the air of spring is pleasant and the flowers fragrant and the carollings of birds delightful; and while the poet strolls on the outskirts of time, thus loved and thus attended, the stormy and glittering favorites of the crowd drop from sight and are forgotten, or remembered but as the echo of a name. a line from homer, which sounds like a response from our own heart, is clothed with the mystery of diviner power, because it makes us feel that we were alive thousands of years ago amid the grecian isles, thus revealing to us the unreality of time and space, and the everlasting nature of truth and beauty. as it is right to admire and love whatever is good wherever it is found, it needs must be the part of wisdom to seek to know and appreciate all that is true and high in the works of genius, though there, like precious stones and metals in the mine, it be mingled with baser matter. it is but narrowness or intellectual pharisaism to turn from a great author because in his life and works there may be things of which we cannot approve. shall we abandon god because his world is full of evil, or christ because there is corruption in the church? st. paul appeals to pagan literature, st. augustine is the disciple of plato, st. thomas aquinas of aristotle, and the culture and civilization of christendom are largely due to influences which are not christian. whatever is good is from god. there is no surer mark of the lack of culture than the use of ill-natured and abusive epithets. to feel the need of injurious words to express one's opinion, merely shows that one is angry, and anger is vulgar. whatever is inspired by vanity is in bad taste. this is why a showy style is a false style, why fine writing is poor writing. the author yields to the spirit of vainglory, whereas he should be wholly bent upon uttering his thought as he knows it. it is as though he should call our attention to a costly garb when what we want to see is a man. as a plain face is better than a mask, though fine, so one's own style, though inferior, is better than any which is borrowed. true books survive without help or let of critics, by virtue of their vital quality, which attracts kindred spirits with irresistible power. when their worth becomes known, the critics set up a howl of praise, and many buy; but only a few make them their serious study, and learn to know and love them. truth is the mind's food; and, like that of the body, it is nourishment only when it has been digested and assimilated. it is, after all, but a little while since man began to think. as yet he is learning the alphabet. take heart then, and apply thy mind. as we grow older the years seem to run to months, the months to weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours, the hours to moments, until time, like an exhalation, appears to dissolve in the inane, and become the nothing it was and is and will be for eternity. if thought were given us, like house and clothing, merely for our personal comfort, wisdom would lead us to think with and like all the world. they who are eager for the good opinion of others seem to have but weak faith in their own worth. the art of pleasing would better deserve our study were there more who are worth pleasing, or were it less difficult to please without loss of sincerity and without stooping to the service of vulgar interests. not how much or how many things thou knowest is of import. an industrious reader, of retentive memory, will easily know more things than a great philosopher compared with whom he is but a child. know thyself was the sum of what socrates taught, and each of the seven wise men rested his fame upon an apothegm. to expect the multitude to appreciate the best in life or literature, is to expect them to be what they have never been and will probably never be. would you have an ox admire the sunrise or the pearly dew, when all he feels the need of is grass? appeal to the many if you will, but if your appeal is for the highest, only the few will hearken. consider not what great men or books are worth in themselves, but what they are worth to thee; for thou art able to judge of their value only in so far as thou understandest and lovest them. if thou canst not bear trouble, sorrow, and disappointment without loss of composure, thou art poorly equipped for life's struggle. if thou mayst not lead the life thou wouldst wish, thou canst at least make the life thou leadest the means to improve thyself. if we were so constituted that thought, feeling, and imagination might have free and healthful play in ever-during darkness and isolation, life would still be good. could i live surrounded by those i love, i should feel less keenly the discontent which the consciousness of my higher needs creates; and besides, it is not easy to rest in the comforts and luxuries which make and keep us inferior, except in the company of those we love. if our ordinary power of sight were as great as that we gain with the help of the microscope, the world would become for us a place of horrors; and if we could clearly see ourselves as we are, life would be less endurable. god blurs our vision as a mother hides from her child its wound. pleasures which quickly end in revulsion of feeling are but momentary escapes from pain; and they alone are fortunate who are able to persevere in pursuits which give them pure delight. "all good," says kant, "which is not based on the highest moral principle is but empty appearance and splendid misery." sensations of color, taste, sound, smell, touch, heat and cold, perceptions of magnitude, and temporal and spatial relations, is the sum of what we know; and yet we are conscious that reason means infinitely more than this, that its proper object is the eternal world of truth, goodness, and beauty. think for thyself with a single view to truth; for so only will thy thought be of worth and service to others. we feel ourselves only in action, and hence the need of doing lest we lose ourselves and be swallowed in nothingness. and for the old and feeble even worry, i suppose, is a comfort, for it helps to keep this self-consciousness alive. it is impossible to say whence a thought comes, and it is often difficult to determine the occasion by which it has been suggested. fortunate are the children all of whose knowledge comes from man and nature in their purity, whose memory holds no words which are not the symbols of what they themselves have seen and felt, in whose minds no will-o'-the-wisp from chimera worlds flits to and fro. it is only by keeping men in ignorance and vice that it is possible to keep them from the contagion of great thoughts. they who have little are thought to have no right to anything. thus the plagiarized sayings of napoleon and other nurslings of fame pass for their own; who their real authors were, seeming to be a matter of indifference. if i am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than i am, why should i think highly of the influences which have made me what i am? should i publish what i believe to be true and well expressed, and competent judges should declare it to be worthless in form and substance, the verdict would be interesting to me, and i should set to work to discover why and how i had so far failed in discernment. "a thoroughly cultivated man," says fontenelle, "is informed by all the thinkers of the past, as though he had lived and continued to grow in knowledge during all the centuries." the author is rewarded when his readers are made better. the most persuasive of men are the praisers of patent medicines. their eloquence is more richly rewarded than that of all the orators, who also are paid, for the most part, in inverse ratio to the amount of truth they utter. fame, as fame, is the merest vanity. no wise man wishes to be talked and written about, living or dead, to be a theme chiefly for fools. literature is writing in which genuine thought and feeling are rightly expressed. they who content themselves with what others have uttered, learn nothing. the blind need a guide, but they who are able to see should look for themselves. there is, indeed, in the words of genius a glow which never dies; but it only dazzles and misleads, if it fails to stimulate and strengthen our own powers of vision. true speech is not idle; it is utterance of life, the mate of action, and the begetter of noble deeds. strive for knowledge and strength, but do not appear to have them. "a book," says la bruyère, "which exalts the mind and inspires high and manly thoughts, is good, and the work of a master." a phrase suffices to tell the man is ignorant or the book worthless. as the body is nourished by dead things, vegetable and animal, so the mind feeds on the thoughts of those who have ceased to live, which, it would seem, are never rightly understood until the thinkers have passed away. to be unwilling to be proved wrong is to fail in love of truth; to resent an objection is to lack culture. one may believe what cannot be demonstrated, but to grow angry because there is no proof is absurd. to do deeds and to utter thoughts which long after we have departed shall remain to cheer, to illumine, to strengthen and console, is to be like god; and the desire of noble minds is not of praise, but of abiding power for good. he who is certain of himself needs not the good opinion of men, not of those even who are competent to judge. only the vain and foolish or the designing and dishonest will wish to receive credit for more ability and virtue than they have. an exaggerated reputation may nourish conceit or win favor; but the wise and the good put away conceit, and desire not favors which are granted from mistaken notions. "i hate false words," says landor, "and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness those that fit the thing." dwell not with complacency upon aught thou hast or hast achieved, but address thyself each day, like a simple-hearted child, to the task god sets thee; and remember when the last hour comes thou canst carry nothing to him but faith in his mercy and goodness. chapter ii. truth and love. truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.--bacon. as those who have little think their little much, so those who have few ideas believe with obstinacy that they are the sum of all truth. if the world could but be made to see what they see there would be no ills. they have not even a suspicion of the unutterable complexity of the warp and woof of nature and of life; and when their opinions are combated they imagine they thereby acquire new importance, and they defend them with such zeal that they make proselytes and found sects in religion, politics, and literature. the source of the greater part of error is the absoluteness the mind attributes to its knowledge and, as part of this, the persuasion that at each stage of our mental life, we are capable of seeing things as they are. the aim of the philosopher, as of the christian, is to escape from the ephemeral self by renouncing what is petty, partial, apparent, and transitory, that the true self may unfold in the world of the permanent, of things which have an aptitude for perpetuity; but the philosopher's efforts are intellectual and moral, while the christian's source of strength is the love which is enrooted in divine faith. "the brief precept," says st. augustine, "is given there once for all,--love, and do what thou wilt. if thou art silent, be silent for love; if thou speakest, speak for love; if thou correctest, correct for love; if thou sparest, spare for love. the root of love is within, and from it only good can come." life springs from love, and love is its being, aim, and end. each soul is born of souls yearning that he be born, and he lives only so far as he leaves himself and becomes through love part of the life of god and the race of man. primordial matter, with which the physicists start, is twin brother of nothing. in every conceivable hypothesis, we assume either that nothing is the cause of something, or that from the beginning there was something or some one who is all the universe may become. if truth and love and goodness are of the essence of the highest life evolved in nature, they are of the essence of that by which nature exists and energizes. if reason is valid at all, it avails as an immovable foundation for faith in god and in man's kinship with him. the larger the world we live in, the greater the opportunities for self-education. he who knows friends and foes, who is commended and found fault with, who tastes the delights of home and breathes the air of strange lands, who is followed and opposed, who triumphs and suffers defeat, who contends with many and is left alone, who dwells with his own thoughts and in the company of the great minds of all time,--necessarily gains wisdom and power, and learns to feel himself a man. science springs from man's yearning for truth; art, from his yearning for beauty; religion, from his yearning for love: and as truth, beauty, and love are a harmony, so are science, art, and religion; and if conflicts arise, they are the results of ignorance and passion. the charm of faith, hope, and love, of knowledge, beauty, and religion, lies in their power to open life's prison, thus permitting the soul to escape to commune with the infinite and eternal, with the boundless mysterious world of being which forever draws us on and forever eludes our grasp. the higher the man, the more urgent this need of self-escape. we look upon lifelong imprisonment of the body as among the greatest of evils, but that the mind should be suffered to languish in the dungeon of ignorance, error, and prejudice, seems comparatively a slight thing. thy whole business, as a rational being, is to know and follow truth,--with gratitude and joy if possible, but, in any case, with courage and resignation. mind maketh man; and the most money and place can do, is to make millionnaires and titularies. the alpine guides, who lead travellers through the sublimest scenery in the world, are as insensible to its grandeur as the stocks they grasp; and we nearly all are as indifferent as these drudges to nature's divine spectacle, with its starlit heavens, its risings and settings of sun and moon, its storms and calms, its changes of season, its clouds and snows and breath of many-tinted flowers, its children's faces, and plumage and songs of birds. as we judge of many things by samples, a glance may suffice to show the worthlessness of a book, but the value of one that is genuine is not quickly perceived, for it reveals itself the more the oftener it is read and pondered. there is not a more certain, a purer, or a more delightful source of contentment and independence than a taste for the best literature. in the midst of occupations and cares of whatever kind it enables us to look forward to the hour when the noblest minds and most generous hearts shall welcome us to their company to be entertained with great thoughts rightly uttered and with information concerning whatever is of interest to man. in every home the best works of the great poets, historians, philosophers, orators, and story-writers should lie within reach of the young, who should be permitted, not urged, to read them. we may know a man by the company he keeps; we may know him better still by the books he loves: and if he loves none, he is not worth knowing. matthew arnold praises culture for "its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons." when we have learned to love work, to love honest work, work well done, excellently well done, we have within ourselves the most fruitful principle of education. who shall speak ill of bodily health and vigor? herbert spencer affirms that it is man's first duty to be a good animal. but since we cannot all be athletes or be well even, let us not refuse to find consolation in the fact that much of what is greatest, whether in the world of thought or action, has been wrought by mighty souls in feeble and suffering bodies; and since men gladly risk health and life to acquire gold, shall we not be willing, if need be, to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," if so we may attain to truth and love? great things are accomplished only by concentration. what we ourselves think, love, and do, until it becomes a habit, is the form and substance of our life. to live in the company of those who have or seek culture is to breathe the vital air of mental health and vigor. the scientific investigator gives his whole attention to the facts before him; but the discipline of close observation, however favorable it may be to accuracy, weakens capacity for wide and profound views. on the other hand, the speculative thinker is apt to grow heedless or oblivious of facts. hence a minute observer is seldom a great philosopher, a great philosopher rarely a careful observer. "employment," says ruskin, "is the half, and the primal half of education, for it forms the habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of man." tell me at and in what thou workest, and i will tell thee what thou art. the secret of education lies in the words of christ,--he that hath eyes to see, let him see; he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. the soul must flow through the channels of the senses until it meets the universe and clothes it with the beauty and meaning which reveal god. when i think of all the truth which still remains for me to learn, of all the good i yet may do, of all the friends i still may serve, of all the beauty i may see, life seems as fresh and fair, as full of promise, as is to loving souls the dawn of their bridal day. animals, children, savages, the thoughtless and frivolous, live in the present alone; they consequently lead a narrow, ephemeral, and superficial existence. they strike no deep roots into the past, they forebode no divine future, they enter not behind the veil where the soul finds ever-during truth and power. "the world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." whatever sets the mind in motion may lead us to secret worlds, though it be a falling apple, as with newton, or the swing of the pendulum, as with galileo, or a boy's kite, as with franklin, or throwing pebbles into the water, as with turner. watt sat musing by the fire, and noticed the rise and fall of the lid of the boiling kettle, and the steam engine, like a vision from unknown spheres, rose before his imagination. a child, carelessly playing with the glasses that lay on the table of a spectacle-maker, gave the clew to the invention of the telescope. the pestle, flying from the hand of schwarz, told him he had found the explosive which has transformed the world. drifting plants, of a strange species, whispered to columbus of a continent that lay across the atlantic. patient observation and work are the mightiest conquerors. among the maxims, called triads, which have come down to us from the celtic bards, we find this: "the three primary requisites of genius,--an eye that can see nature; a heart that can feel nature; and boldness that dares follow nature." he who has no philosophy and no religion, no theory of life and the world, has nothing which he finds it greatly important to say or do. he lacks the impulse of genius, the educator's energy and enthusiasm. having no ideal, he has no end to which he may point and lead. to do well it is necessary to believe in the worth of what we do. the power which upholds and leads us on is faith,--faith in god, in ourselves, in life, in education. forever to be blessed and cherished is the love-inspired mother or the teacher whose generous heart and luminous mind first leads us to believe in the priceless worth of wisdom and virtue, thus kindling within the soul a quenchless fire which warms and irradiates our whole being. to be god's workman, to strive, to endure, to labor, even to the end, for truth and righteousness, this is life. "my desire," says dante, "and my will rolled onward, like a wheel in even motion, swayed by the love which moves the sun and all the stars." if there are any who shrink from wrong more than from disgrace they best deserve to be called religious. strive not to be original or profound, but to think justly and to express clearly what thou seest; and so it may happen that thy view shall pierce deeper than thou knowest. the words and deeds which are most certain to escape oblivion are those which nourish the higher life of the soul. self-love, the love of one's real self, of one's soul, is the indispensable virtue. it is this we seek when we strive to know and love truth and justice; it is this we seek, when we love god and our fellow-men. in turning from ourselves to find them, we still seek ourselves; in abandoning life we seek richer and fuller life. truth separate from love is but half truth. think of that which unites thee with thy fellows rather than of what divides thee from them. religion is the bond of love, and not a subject for a debating club. if thou wouldst refute thy adversaries, commit the task to thy life more than to thy words. read the history of controversy and ask thyself whether there is in it the spirit of christ, the meek and lowly one? its champions belong to the schools of the sophists rather than to the worshippers of god in spirit and in truth. and what has been the issue of all their disputes but hatreds and sects, persecutions and wars? if it is my duty to be polite and helpful to my neighbor, it is plainly also my duty to treat his opinions and beliefs with consideration and fairness. there is a place in south america where the whole population have the goitre, and if a stranger who is free from the deformity chances to pass among them, they jeer and cry, "there goes one who has no goitre." what could be more delightfully human? we think it a holy thing to put down duelling, the battle of one with one; but we are full of enthusiasm over battles of a hundred thousand with a hundred thousand. thus the southern slave-owners were sworn advocates of the rights of man and of popular liberty. the explanation of many provoking things is to be found in dr. johnson's words,--"ignorance, simple ignorance;" but of many more probably in these other words,--greed, simple greed. "in science," says bulwer, "read by preference the newest books; in literature, the oldest." this is wiser than emerson's saying: "never read a book which is not a year old." the facility with which it is now possible to get at whatever is known on any subject has a tendency to create the opinion that reading up in this or that direction is education, whereas such reading as is generally done, is unfavorable to discipline of mind. shall our chautauquas and summer schools help to foster this superstition? what passion can be more innocent than the passion for knowledge? and what passion gives better promise of blessings to one's self and to one's fellow-men? why desire to have force and numbers on thy side? is it not enough that thou hast truth and justice? the loss of the good opinion of one's friends is to be regretted, but the loss of self-respect is the only true beggary. zeal for a party or a sect is more certain of earthly reward than zeal for truth and religion. as it is unfortunate for the young to have abundance of money, fine clothes, and social success, so popularity is hurtful to the prosperity of the best gifts. it draws the mind away from the silence and strength of eternal truth and love into a world of clamor and noise. patience is the student's great virtue; it is the mark of the best quality of mind. it takes an eternity to unfold a universe; man is the sum of the achievements of innumerable ages, and whatever endures is slow in acquiring the virtues which make for permanence. the will to know, manifesting itself in persistent impulse, in never-satisfied yearning, is the power which urges to mental effort and enables us to attain culture. "if a thing is good," says landor, "it may be repeated. the repetition shows no want of invention; it shows only what is uppermost in the mind, and by what the writer is most agitated and inflamed." what hast thou learned to admire, to long for, to love, genuinely to hope for and believe? the answer tells thy worth and that of the education thou hast received. when we have said a thousand things in praise of education, we must, at last, come back to the fundamental fact that nearly everything depends on the kind of people of whom we are descended, and on the kind of family in which our young years have passed. nearly everything, but not everything; and it is this little which makes liberty possible, which inspires hope and courage, which, like the indefinable something that gives the work of genius its worth and stamp, makes us children of god and masters of ourselves. "wisdom is the principal thing," says solomon; "therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding." he who makes himself the best man is the most successful one, while he who gains most money or notoriety may fail utterly as man. with the advance of civilization our wants increase; and yet it is the business of religion and culture to raise us above the things money buys, and consequently to diminish our wants. they who are nearest to god have fewest wants; and they who know and follow truth need not place or title or wealth. to every one the tempter comes, with a thousand pretexts drawn both from the intellect and the emotional nature, promising to lull conscience to sleep that he may lead the lower life in peace; but he who hearkens becomes a victim as helpless and as wretched as the victims of alcohol and opium. in deliberate persevering action for high ends, all the subconscious forces within us, the many currents, which, like hidden water-veins, go to make our being, are taken up and turned in a deep-flowing stream into the ocean of our life. in such course of conduct the baser self is swallowed, and we learn to feel that we are part of the divine energy which moves the universe to finer issues. as life is only by moments and in narrow space, a little thing may disturb us and a little thing may take away the cause of our trouble. we are petty beings in a world of petty concerns. a little food, a little sleep, a little joy is enough to make us happy. a word can fill us with dismay, a breath can blow out the flickering flame of our self-consciousness. i often ride among graves, and think how easy it is for the fretful children of men to grow quiet. there they lie, having become weary of their toys and plays, on the breast of the great mother from whom they sprang, about whose face they frolicked and fought and cried for a day, and then fell back into her all-receiving arms, as raindrops fall into the water and mingle with it and are lost. no sight is so pathetic as that of a vast throng seeking to enjoy themselves. the hopelessness of the task is visible on all their thousand faces, athwart which, while they talk or listen or look, the shadow of care flits as if thrown from dark wings wheeling in circuits above them. the sorrow and toil and worry they have thought to put away, still lie close to them, like a burden which, having been set down, waits to be taken up again. god surely sees with love and pity his all-enduring and all-hoping children; it is his voice we hear in the words of christ, "misereor super turbam." i cannot but wish to be myself, and therefore to be happy; but when i think of god as essential to my happiness, i feel it is enough for me to know and love him; for to imagine i might be of service to him would be the fondest conceit. but he makes it possible for me to help my fellows, and in doing this, i fulfil the will of him who is the father of all. the divine reveals itself in the human; and that religion alone is true which, striking its roots deep into humanity, exerts all its power to make men more godlike by making them more human. they who in good faith inflicted the tortures of the inquisition were led not by the light of reason, or that which springs from the contemplation of the life of christ, but by the notion that the rack and fagot are instruments of mercy, if employed to save men from eternal torments; and tyrants, who are always cruel, gave encouragement and aid to the victims of fanaticism. why should the sorrow or the sin or the loss of any human being give me pleasure? is it not always the same story? in the fall of one we all are degraded, since, whoever fails, it is our common nature which suffers hurt. whether or not we have come forth from a merely animal condition, let us thank god we are human, and bend all our energies to remove the race farther and farther from the life over which thought and love and conscience have no dominion. in the presence of the mighty machine, whose wheels and arms are everywhere, whose power is drawn from the exhaustless oceans and the boundless heavens, the importance of the individual dwindles and seems threatened with extinction. at such a time it is good to know that a right human soul is greater than a universe of machinery. we feel that we are higher than all the suns and planets, because we know and love, and they do not; but when, in the light of this superiority, we turn to the thought of our own littleness, being scarcely more than nothing, such trouble rises in the soul that we throw ourselves upon god to escape doubt of the reality of life. if we believe that man is what he eats, his education is simply a question of alimentation; but if we hold that he is what he knows, and loves, and yearns, and strives for, his education is a problem of soul-nutrition. the child is made educable by its faith in the father and mother, which is nothing else than faith in their truth and love; and the educableness of the man is in proportion to his faith in the sovereign and infinite nature of truth and love, which is faith in god. it is in youth that we are most susceptible of education, because it is the privilege of youth to be free from tyrannic cares, and to be sensitive to the charm of noble and disinterested passions. if we show the young soul the way to higher worlds, he will not ask us to strew it with flowers, or pave it with gold, but he will be content to walk with bruised feet along mountain wastes, if at the summit is illumination and joy and peace. as in religion many are called but few chosen, as in the race for wealth and place many start but few win the prize, so in the pursuit of intellectual and moral excellence, of the few who begin, the most soon weary, while of the remnant, many grow infirm in purpose or in body before the goal is reached. time and space, which hold all things, separate all things; but religion and culture bind them into unity through faith in god and through knowledge, thus forming a communion of holy souls and noble minds, for whom discord and division disappear in the harmony of the divine order in which temporal and spatial conditions of separateness yield to the eternal presence of truth and love. new ideas seem at first to remain upon the surface of the soul, and generations sometimes pass before they enter into its substance and become motives of conduct; and, in the same way, sentiments may influence conduct, when the notions from which they sprang have long been rejected. the old truth must renew itself as the race renews itself; it must be re-interpreted and re-applied to the life of each individual and of each generation, if its liberating and regenerating power is to have free scope. reason and conscience are god's most precious gifts; and what does he ask but that we make use of them? right thinking, like right doing, is the result of innumerable efforts, innumerable failures, the final outcome of which is a habit of right thought and conduct. whoever believes in truth, freedom, and love, and follows after them with his whole heart, walks in god's highway, which leads to peace and blessedness. a thing may be obscure from defect of light or defect of sight; and in the same way an author may be found dull either because he is so, or because his readers are dull. the noblest book even is but dead matter until a mind akin to its creator's awakens it to life again. the appeal to the imagination has infinitely more charm than the appeal to the senses. "but when evening falls," says machiavelli, "i go home and enter my study. on the threshold i lay aside my country garments, soiled with mire, and array myself in courtly garb. thus attired, i make my entrance into the ancient courts of the men of old, where they receive me with love, and where i feed upon that food which only is my own, and for which i was born. for four hours' space i feel no annoyance, forget all care; poverty cannot frighten nor death appall me." a man of genius works for all, for he compels all to think. an enlightened mind and a generous heart make the world good and fair. where there is perfect confidence, conversation does not drag; while for those who love it is enough that they be together: if they are silent, it is well; if they speak, mere nothings suffice. the world of knowledge, all that men know, is, in truth, little and simple enough. it seems vast and intricate because we are imperfectly educated. the soul, like the body, has its atmosphere, out of which it cannot live. when opinions take the place of convictions, ideas that of beliefs, great characters become rare. the pith of virtue lies not in thinking, but in doing. a real man strives to assert himself; for whether he seeks wealth, or power, or fame, or truth, or virtue, or the good of his fellows, he knows that he can succeed only through self-assertion, through the prevalence of his own thought and life. they who abdicate the rights god gives the individual, seek in vain to preserve by constitutional enactments a semblance of liberty. if it is human to hate whom we have injured, it is not less so to despise whom we have deceived; and yet those who are easily deceived are the most innocent or the most high-minded and generous. it seems hardly a human and must therefore be a divine thing, to live and deal with men without in any way giving them trouble and annoyance. truth loves not contention, and when men fight for it, it vanishes in the noise and smoke of the combat. the controversies of the schools, whether of philosophy, theology, literature, or natural science, have been among the saddest exhibitions of ineptitude. is it conceivable that a thinker, or a believer, or a scholar, or an investigator should wrangle in the spirit of a pothouse politician? the more certain we are of ourselves and of the truth of what we hold, the easier it is for us to be patient and tolerant. wicked is whoever finds pleasure in another's pain. we can know more than we can love. hence communion with the world is wider through the mind than through the heart, though less intimate and less satisfying. it is, however, longer active, for we continue to be delighted by new truth when we have ceased to care to make new friends. learn to bear the faults of men as thou sufferest the changes of weather,--with equanimity; for impatience and anger will no more improve thy neighbors than they will prevent its being hot or cold. what men think or say of thee is unimportant--give heed to what thou thyself thinkest and sayst. if thou art ignored or reviled, remember such has been the fate of the best, while the world's favorites are often men of blood or lust or mere time-servers. he who does genuine work is conscious of the worth of what he does, and is not troubled with misgivings or discouraged by lack of recognition. if god looked away from his universe it would cease to be; and he sees him. the more we detach ourselves from crude realism, from the naive views of uneducated minds, the easier it becomes for us to lead an intellectual and religious life, for such detachment enables us to realize that the material world has meaning and beauty only when it has passed through the alembic of the spirit and become purified, fit object for the contemplation of god and of souls. they are true students who are drawn to seek knowledge by mental curiosity, by affinity with the intelligible, like that which binds and holds lover to lover, making their love all-sufficient and above all price. all that is of value in thy opinions is the truth they contain--to hold them dearer than truth is to be irrational and perverse. thy faith is what thou believest, not what thou knowest. the crowd loves to hear those who treat the tenets of their opponents with scorn, who overwhelm their adversaries with abuse, who make a mockery of what their foes hold sacred; but to vulgarity of this kind a cultivated mind cannot stoop. to do so is a mark of ignorance and inferiority; is to confuse judgment, to cloud intellect, and to strengthen prejudice. if there are any who are so absurd or so perverse as to be unworthy of fair and rational treatment, to refute them is loss of time, to occupy one's self with them is to keep bad company. with the contentious, who are always dominated by narrow and petty views and motives, enter not into dispute, but look beyond to the wide domain of reason and to the patience and charity of christ. when minds are alive and active, opposing currents of thought necessarily arise. contradiction is the salt which keeps truth from corruption. as we let the light fall at different angles upon a precious stone, and change our position from point to point to study a work of art, so it is well to give more than one expression to the same truth, that the intellectual rays falling upon it from several directions, and breaking into new tints and shades, its full meaning and worth may finally be brought clearly into view. if those with whom thou art thrown appear to thee to be hard and narrow, call to mind that they have the same troubles and sorrows as thyself, essentially too the same thoughts and yearnings; and as, in spite of all thy faults, thou still lovest thyself, so love them too, even though they be too warped and prejudiced to appreciate thy worth. the wise man never utters words of scorn, for he best knows such words are devil-born. our opponents are as necessary to us as our friends, and when those who have nobly combated us die, they seem to take with them part of our mental vigor; they leave us with a deeper sense of the illusiveness of life. freedom is found only where honest criticism of men and measures is recognized as a common right. as one man's meat is another's poison, so in the world of intelligible things what refreshes and invigorates one, may weary and depress another. what delights the child makes no impression upon the man. men and women, the ignorant and the learned, philosophers and poets, mothers and maidens, doers and dreamers, find their entertainment largely in different worlds. napoleon despised the idealogue; the idealogue sees in him but a conscienceless force. outcries against wrong have little efficacy. they alone improve men who inspire them with new confidence, new courage, who help them to renew and purify the inner sources of life. harsh zeal provokes excess, because it provokes contradiction. whoever stirs the soul to new depths, whoever awakens the mind to new thoughts and aspirations, is a benefactor. the common man sees the fruits of his toil; the seed which divine men sow, ripens for others. the counsels worldlings give to genius can only mislead. not only the truth which christ taught, but the truth which nearly all sublime thinkers have taught, has seemed to the generation to which it was announced but a beggarly lie. the powerful have sneered with pilate, while the mob have done the teachers to death. make truth thy garb, thy house, wherein thou movest and dwellest, and art comfortable and at home. if thou knowest what thou knowest and believest what thou believest, thou canst not be disturbed by contradiction, but shalt feel that thy opposers are appointed by god to confirm thee in truth. as the merchant keeps journal and ledger, so should he whose wealth is truth, take account in writing of the thoughts he gains from observation, reflection, reading, and intercourse with men. we become perfectly conscious of our impressions only in giving expression to them; hence ability to express what we feel and know is one of the chief and most important aims and ends of education. what thou mayst not learn without employing spies, or listening to the stories of the malignant or the gossip of the vulgar, be content not to know. our miseries spring from idleness and sin; and idleness is sin and the mother of sin. "to confide in one's self and become something of worth," says michelangelo, "is the best and safest course." life-weariness, when it is not the result of long suffering, comes of lack of love, for to love any human being in a true and noble way makes life good. whatever mistakes thou mayst have made in the choice of a profession and in other things, it is still possible for thee to will and do good, to know truth, and to love beauty, and this is the best life can give. think of living, and thou shalt find no time to repine. the character of the believer determines the character of his faith, whatever the formulas by which it is expressed. what we are is the chief constituent of the world in which we now live, and this must be true also of the world in which we believe and for which we hope. for the sensualist a spiritual heaven has neither significance nor attractiveness. the highest truth the noblest see has no meaning for the multitude, or but a distorted meaning. what is divinest in the teaching of christ, only one in thousands, now after the lapse of centuries, rightly understands and appreciates. it is not so much the things we believe, know, and do, as the things on which we lay the chief stress of hope and desire, that shape our course and decide our destiny. they alone receive the higher gifts, who, to obtain them, renounce the lower pleasures and rewards of life. those races are noblest, those individuals are noblest, who care most for the past and the future, whose thoughts and hopes are least confined to the world of sense which from moment to moment ceaselessly urges its claims to attention. desire fanned by imagination, when it turns to sensual things, makes men brutish; but when its object is intellectual and moral, it lifts them to worlds of pure and enduring delight. when we would form an estimate of a man, we consider not what he knows, believes, and does, but what kind of being his knowledge, faith, and works have made of him. he who makes us learn more than he teaches has genius. whoever has freed himself from envy and bitterness may begin to try to see things as they are. each one is the outcome of millions of causes, which, so far as he can see, are accidental. how ridiculous then to complain that if this or that only had not happened, all would be well. it is ignorance or prejudice to make a man's conduct an argument against the worth of his writings. byron was a bad man, but a great poet; bacon was venal, but a marvellous thinker. books, to be interesting to the many, must abound in narrative, must run on like chattering girls, and make little demand upon attention. the appeal to thought is like a beggar's appeal for alms,--heeded by one only in hundreds who pass; for, to the multitude, mental effort is as disagreeable as parting with their money. a newspaper is old the day after its publication, and there are many books which issue from the press withered and senile, but the best, like the gods, are forever young and delightful. "whatever bit of a wise man's work," says ruskin, "is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. it is mixed always with evil fragments,--ill-done, redundant, affected work; but if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and _those_ are the book." again: "no book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked so that you may refer to the passages you want in it." unity, steadfastness, and power of will mark the great workers. a dominant impulse urges them forward, and with firm tread they move on till death bids them stay. as the will succumbs to idleness and sin, it can be developed and maintained in health and vigor only by right action. if thou makest thy intellectual and moral improvement thy chief business, thou shalt not lack for employment, and with thy progress thy joy and freedom shall increase. progress is betterment of life. the accumulation of discoveries, the multiplication of inventions, the improvement of the means of comfort, the extension of instruction, and the perfecting of methods, are valuable in the degree in which they contribute to this end. the characteristic of progress is increase of spiritual force. in material progress even, the intellectual and moral element is the value-giving factor. progress begets belief in progress. as we grow in worth and wisdom, our faith in knowledge and conduct is developed and confirmed, and with more willing hearts we make ourselves the servants of righteousness and love; for in the degree in which religion and culture prevail within us, co-operation for life tends to supersede the struggle for life, which if not the dominant law, is, at least, the general course of things when left to nature's sway. catchwords, such as progress, culture, enlightenment, and liberty, are for the multitude rarely more than psittacisms, mere parrot sounds. so long as we genuinely believe in an ideal and strive to incarnate it, the spirit of hope kindles the flame of enthusiasm within the breast. its attainment, however, if the ideal is sensual or material, leads to disappointment and weariness. behold yonder worshipper at the shrine of money and pleasure, whose life is but a yawn between his woman and his wine. but if the ideal is spiritual, failure in the pursuit cannot dishearten us, and success but opens to view diviner worlds towards which we turn our thought and love with self-renewing freshness of mind. if thou seekest for beauty, it is everywhere; if for hideousness, it too is everywhere. to believe in one's self, to have genuine faith in the impressions, thoughts, hopes, loves, and aspirations which are in one's own soul, and to strive ceaselessly to come to clear knowledge of this inner world which each one bears within himself, is the secret of culture. to bend one's will day by day to the weaving this light of the mind and warmth of the heart into the substance of life, into conduct, is the secret of character. at whatever point of time or space we find ourselves, we can begin or continue the task of self-improvement; for the only essential thing is the activity of the soul, seeking to become conscious of itself, through and in god and his universe. the little bird upbuilds its nest of little things by ceaseless quest: and he who labors without rest by little steps will reach life's crest. the true reader is brought into contact with a personality which reveals itself or permits its secret to be divined. in spirit and imagination he lives the life of the author. in his book he finds the experience and wisdom of years compressed into a few pages which he reads in an hour. the vital sublimation of what made a man is thus given him in its essence to exalt or to degrade, to inspire or to deaden his soul. in looking through the eyes of another, he learns to see himself, to understand his affinities and his tendencies, his strength and his weakness. eat this volume and go speak to the children of israel, said the spirit to the prophet ezekiel. the meaning is--mentally devour, digest, and assimilate the book into the fibre and structure of thy very being, and then shalt thou be able to utter words of truth and wisdom to god's chosen ones. the world's spiritual wealth, so far as it has existence other than in the minds of individuals, is stored in literature, in books,--the great treasure-house of the soul's life, of what the best and greatest have thought, known, believed, felt, suffered, desired, toiled, and died for; and whoever fails to make himself a home in this realm of truth, light, and freedom, is shut out from what is highest and most divine in human experience, and sinks into the grave without having lived. to those who have uttered themselves in public speech, there comes at times a feeling akin to self-reproach. they have taken upon themselves the office of teacher, and yet what have they taught that is worth knowing and loving? they have lost the privacy in which so much of the charm and freedom of life consists; they have been praised or blamed without discernment; and a great part of what they have said and written seems to themselves little more than a skeleton from which the living vesture has fallen. ask them not to encourage any one to become an author. the more they have deafened the world with their voices, the more will they, like carlyle, praise the eternal silence. they have in fact been taught, by hard experience, that the worth of life lies not in saying or writing anything whatever, but in pure faith, in humble obedience, in brave and steadfast striving. the woman who sweeps a room, the mother who nurses her child, the laborer who sows and reaps, believing and feeling that they are working with god, are leading nobler lives and doing diviner things than the declaimers and theorizers, and the religion which upholds them and lightens their burdens is better than all the philosophies. chapter iii. the making of one's self. the wise man will esteem above everything and will cultivate those sciences which further the perfection of his soul.--plato. it has become customary to call these endings of the scholastic year commencements; just as the people of the civilized world have agreed to make themselves absurd by calling the ninth month the seventh, the tenth the eighth, the eleventh the ninth, and the twelfth the tenth. and, indeed, the discourses which are delivered on these occasions would be more appropriate and more effective if made to students who, having returned from the vacations with renewed physical vigor, feel also fresh urgency to exercise of mind. but now, so little is man in love with truth, the approach of the moment when you are to make escape and find yourselves in what you imagine to be a larger and freer world, occupies all your thoughts, and thrills you with an excitement which makes attention difficult; and, like the noise of crowds and brazen trumpets, prevents the soul from mounting to the serene world where alone it is free and at home. since, however, the invitation with which i have been honored directs my address to the graduates of notre dame in this her year of golden jubilee, i may, without abuse of the phrase, entitle it a commencement oration; for the day on which a graduate worthy of the name leaves his college is the commencement day of a new life of study, more earnest and more effectual than that which is followed within academic walls, because it is the result of his sense of duty alone and of his uncontrolled self-activity. and, though i am familiar with the serious disadvantages with which a reader as compared with a speaker has to contend, i shall read my address, if for no other reason, because i shall thus be able to measure my time; and if i am prolix, i shall be so maliciously, and not become so through the obliviousness which may result from the illusive enthusiasm that is sometimes produced in the speaker by his own vociferation, and which he fondly imagines he communicates to his hearers. the chief benefit to be derived from the education we receive in colleges and universities, and from the personal contact into which we are there thrown with enlightened minds, is the faith it tends to inspire and confirm in the worth of knowledge and culture, of conduct and religion; for nothing else we there acquire will abide with us as an inner impulse to self-activity, a self-renewing urgency to the pursuit of excellence. if we fail, we fail for lack of faith; but belief is communicated from person to person,--_fides ex auditu_,--and to mediate it is the educator's chief function. through daily intercourse with one who is learned and wise and noble, the young gain a sense of the reality of science and culture, of religion and morality; which thus cease to be for them vague somethings of which they have heard and read, and become actual things,--realities, like monuments they have inspected, or countries through which they have travelled. they have been taken by the hand and led where, left to themselves, they would never have gone. the true educator inspires not only faith, but admiration also, and confidence and love,--all soul-evolving powers. he is a master whose pupils are disciples,--followers of him and believers in the wisdom he teaches. he founds a school which, if it does not influence the whole course of thought and history, like that of plato or aristotle, does at least form a body of men, distinguished by zeal for truth and love of intellectual and moral excellence. to be able thus, in virtue of one's intelligence and character, to turn the generous heart and mind of youth to sympathy with what is intelligible, fair, and good in thought and life, is to be like god,--is to have power in its noblest and most human form; and its exercise is the teacher's chief and great reward. to be a permanent educational force is the highest earthly distinction. is not this the glory of the founders of religions, of the discoverers of new worlds? in stooping to the mind and heart of youth, to kindle there the divine flame of truth and love, we ourselves receive new light and warmth. to listen to the noise made by the little feet of children when at play, and to the music of their merry laughter, is pleasant; but to come close to the aspiring soul of youth, and to feel the throbbings of its deep and ardent yearnings for richer and wider life, is to have our faith in the good of living revived and intensified. it is the divine privilege of the young to be able to believe that the world can be moulded and controlled by thought and spiritual motives; and in breathing this celestial air, the choice natures among them learn to become sages and saints; or if it be their lot to be thrown into the fierce struggles where selfish and cruel passions contend for the mastery over justice and humanity, they carry into the combat the serene strength of reason and conscience; for their habitual and real home is in the unseen world, where what is true and good has the omnipotent for its defence. of this soul of youth we may affirm without fear of error-- "the soul seeks god; from sphere to sphere it moves, immortal pilgrim of the infinite." life is the unfolding of a mysterious power, which in man rises to self-consciousness, and through self-consciousness to the knowledge of a world of truth and order and love, where action may no longer be left wholly to the sway of matter or to the impulse of instinct, but may and should be controlled by reason and conscience. to further this process by deliberate and intelligent effort is to educate. hence education is man's conscious co-operation with the infinite being in promoting the development of life; it is the bringing of life in its highest form to bear upon life, individual and social, that it may raise it to greater perfection, to ever-increasing potency. to educate, then, is to work with the power who makes progress a law of living things, becoming more and more active and manifest as we ascend in the scale of being. the motive from which education springs is belief in the goodness of life and the consequent desire for richer, freer, and higher life. it is the point of union of all man's various and manifold activity; for whether he seeks to nourish and preserve his life, or to prolong and perpetuate it in his descendants, or to enrich and widen it in domestic and civil society, or to grow more conscious of it through science and art, or to strike its roots into the eternal world through faith and love, or in whatever other way he may exert himself, the end and aim of his aspiring and striving is educational,--is the unfolding and uplifting of his being. the radical craving is for life,--for the power to feel, to think, to love, to enjoy. and as it is impossible to reach a state in which we are not conscious that this power may be increased, we can find happiness only in continuous progress, in ceaseless self-development. this craving for fulness of life is essentially intellectual and moral, and its proper sphere of action is the world of thought and conduct. he who has a healthy appetite does not long for greater power to eat and drink. a sensible man who has sufficient wealth for independence and comfort does not wish for more money; but he who thinks and loves and acts in obedience to conscience feels that he is never able to do so well enough, and hence an inner impulse urges him to strive for greater power of life, for perfection. he is akin to all that is intelligible and good, and is drawn to bring himself into ever-increasing harmony with this high world. hence attention is for him like a second nature, for attention springs from interest; and since he feels an affinity with all things, all things interest him. and what is thus impressed upon his mind and heart he is impelled to utter in deed or speech or gesture or song, or in whatever way thought and sentiment may manifest themselves. attention and expression are thus the fundamental forms of self-activity, the primary and essential means of education, of developing intellectual and moral power. interest is aroused and held by need, which creates desire. if we are hungry, whatever may help us to food interests us. our first and indispensable interests relate to the things we need for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race; and to awaken desire and stimulate effort to obtain them, instinct is sufficient, as we may see in the case of mere animals. but as progress is made, higher and more subtle wants are developed. we crave for more than food and wife and children. the social organism evolves itself; and as its complexity increases, the relations of the individual to the body of which he is a member are multiplied, and become more intricate. as we pass from the savage to the barbarous, and from the barbarous to the civilized state, intellect and conscience are brought more and more into play. mental power gains the mastery over brute force, and little by little subdues the energies of inorganic nature, and makes them serve human ends. iron is forced to become soft and malleable, and to assume every shape; the winds bear man across the seas; the sweet and gentle water is imprisoned and tortured until with its fierce breath it does work in comparison with which the mythical exploits of gods and demi-gods are as the play of children. strength of mind and character takes precedence of strength of body. hercules and samson are but helpless infants in the presence of the thinker who reads nature's secret and can compel her to do his bidding. if we bend our thoughts to this subject, we shall gain insight into the meaning and purpose of education, which is nothing else than the urging of intellect and conscience to the conquest of the world, and to the clear perception and practical acknowledgment of the primal and fundamental truth that man is man in virtue of his thought and love. instruction, which is but part of education, has for its object the development of the intellect and the transmission of knowledge. this, whether we consider the individual or society, is indispensable. it is good to know. knowledge is not only the source of many of our highest and purest joys, but without it we can attain neither moral nor material good in the nobler forms. virtue when it is enlightened gains a higher quality. and if we hold that action and not thought is the end of life, we cannot deny that action is, in some degree at least, controlled and modified by thought. nevertheless, instruction is not the principal part of education; for human worth is more essentially and more intimately identified with character and heart than with knowledge and intellect. what we will is more important than what we know; and the importance of what we know is derived largely from its influence on the will or conduct. a nation, like an individual, receives rank from character more than from knowledge; since the true measure of human worth is moral rather than intellectual. the teaching of the school becomes a subject of passionate interest, through our belief in its power to educate sentiment, stimulate will, and mould character. for in the school we do more than learn the lessons given us: we live in an intellectual and moral atmosphere, acquire habits of thought and behavior; and this, rather than what we learn, is the important thing. to imagine that youths who have passed through colleges and universities, and have acquired a certain knowledge of languages and sciences, but have not formed strongly marked characters, should forge to the front in the world and become leaders in the army of religion and civilization, is to cherish a delusion. the man comes first; and scholarship without manhood will be found to be ineffectual. the semi-culture of the intellect, which is all a mere graduate can lay claim to, will but help to lead astray those who lack the strength of moral purpose; and they whom experience has made wise expect little from young men who have bright minds and have passed brilliant examinations, but who go out into the world without having trained themselves to habits of patient industry and tireless self-activity. man is essentially a moral being; and he who fails to become so, fails to become truly human. individuals and nations are brought to ruin not by lack of knowledge, but by lack of conduct. "now that the world is filled with learned men," said seneca, "good men are wanting." he was nero's preceptor, and saw plainly how powerless intellectual culture was to save rome from the degeneracy which undermined its civilization and finally brought on its downfall. if in college the youth does not learn to govern and control himself,--to obey and do right in all things, not because he has not the power to disobey and do wrong, but because he has not the will,--nothing else he may learn will be of great service. it seems to me i perceive in our young men a lack of moral purpose, of sturdiness, of downright obstinate earnestness, in everything--except perhaps in money-getting pursuits; for even in these they are tempted to trust to speculation and cunning devices rather than to persistent work and honesty, which become a man more than crowns and all the gifts of fortune. without truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect no worthy or noble life can be led. and unless we can get into our colleges youths who can be made to drink into their inmost being this vital truth, little good can be accomplished there. now, it often happens that these institutions are, in no small measure, refuges into which the badly organized families of the wealthy send their sons in the vain expectation that the fatal faults of inheritance and domestic training will be repaired. in college, as wherever there are men, quality is more precious than quantity. the number of students is great enough when they are of the right kind; and the work which now lies at our hand is to make it possible that those who have talent and the will to improve themselves may enter our institutions of learning. but those who are shown to be insusceptible of education should be eliminated; for they profit not themselves, and are a hindrance to the others. gladly i turn from them to you, young gentlemen, who have persevered in the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and to-day are declared worthy to receive the highest honor notre dame can confer. the deepest and the best thing in us is faith in reason; for when we look closely, we perceive that faith in god, in the soul, in good, in freedom, in truth, is faith in reason. individuals, nations, the whole race, wander in a maze of errors. the world of the senses is apparent and illusive, that of pure thought vague and shadowy. science touches but the form and surface; speculation is swallowed in abysses and disperses itself; ignorance darkens, passion blinds the mind; the truth of one age becomes the error of a succeeding; opinions change from continent to continent and from century to century. the more we learn, the less we know; and what we most of all desire to know eludes our grasp. but, nevertheless, our faith in reason is unshaken; and holding to this faith, we hold to god, to good, to freedom, and to truth. goodness is the radical principle; the good, the primal aim and final end of life; for the good is whatever is helpful to life. hence what is true is good, what is useful is good, what is fair is good, what is right is good; and the true, the useful, the fair, and the right are intertwined and circle about man like a noble sisterhood, to waken him to life, and to urge him toward god, the supreme good, whose being is power, wisdom, love without limit. the degree of goodness in all things is measured by their approach to this absolute being. hence the greater our strength, wisdom, and love, the greater our good, the richer and more perfect our life. there is no soul which does not bow with delight and reverence before beauty and power; and when we come to true insight, we perceive that holiness is beauty and goodness power. genuine spiritual power is from god, and compels the whole mechanic world to acknowledge its absoluteness. the truths of religion and morality are of the essence of our life; they cannot be learned from another, but must be wrought into self-consciousness by our own thinking and doing,--by habitual meditation, and constant obedience to conscience. virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are their own reward: they are primarily and essentially ends, and only incidentally means. hence those who strive for perfection with the view thereby to gain recognition, money, or place, do not really strive for perfection at all. they are also unwise; for virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are not the surest means to such ends, and they can be acquired only with infinite pains. the highest human qualities cease to be the highest when they are made subordinate to the externalities of office and wealth. the one aim of a mind smitten with the love of excellence is to live consciously and lovingly with whatever is true or good or fair. and such a one cannot be disturbed whether by the general indifference of men or by their praise or blame. the standpoint of the soul is: what thou art, not what others think thee. if thou art at one with thy true self, god and the eternal laws bear thee up and onward. the moral and the religious life interpenetrate each other. to sunder them is to enfeeble both. to weaken faith is to undermine character; to fail in conduct is to deprive faith of inspiration and vigor. learn to live thy religion, and thou shalt have little need or desire to argue and dispute about it. truth is mightier than its witnesses, religion greater than its saints and martyrs. learn to think, and thou shalt easily learn to live. in the presence of the highest manifestations of thought and love, of truth and beauty, nothing perfect or divine is incredible. men of genius, philosophers, poets, and saints, who by thinking and doing make this ethereal but most real world rise before us in concrete form and substance, are heavenly messengers and illuminators of the soul. had none of them lived, how should we see and understand that man is godlike and that god is truth and love? we cannot make this high world plain by telling about it. it is not a land which may be described. it is a state of soul which they alone comprehend who have been transformed by patient meditation and faithful striving. but once it is revealed, a thousand errors and obscurities fall away from us. if not educated, strive at least to be educable,--a believer in wisdom, and sensitive to all high influence, and eager to be quit of thy ignorance and hardness. as the dead cannot produce the live, so mechanical minds, however much they may be able to drill, train, and instruct, cannot educate. the secret of the mother's specific educational power lies in the fact that she is a spiritual not a mechanical force, loves and is loved by her pupils. the most ennobling and the most thoroughly satisfying sentiment of which we are capable is love. until we love we are strangers to ourselves. we are like beings asleep or lost to the knowledge of themselves and all things, till, awakening to the appeal of the pure light and the balmy air, they look upon what is not themselves; and, finding it fair and beautiful, learn in loving it to feel and know themselves. increase of the power to love is increase of life. but love needs guidance. we first awaken in the world of the senses, and are attracted by what we see and touch and taste. the aim of education is to help the soul to rise above this world, in which, if we remain, we are little better than brutes. hence the teacher seeks in many ways to reveal to the young the fact that the perfect, the best, cannot be seen or touched, cannot be grasped even by the mind; but that it is, nevertheless, that which they should strive to make themselves capable of loving above all things. and thus he prepares them to understand what is meant by the love of truth and righteousness, by the love of god. in the training of animals even, patience and gentleness are more effective than violence. how, then, shall we hope by physical constraint and harsh methods to educate human beings, who are human precisely because they are capable of love and are swayed by rational motives? there is no soul so gross, so deeply buried in matter, but it shall from some point or other make a sally to show it still bears the impress of god's image. at such points the educator will keep watch, studying how he may make this single ray of light interfuse itself with his pupil's whole being. it is not possible to know there is no god, no soul, no free will, no right or wrong; at the worst, it is only possible to doubt all this. the universe is as inconceivable as god, and theories of matter as full of difficulties as theories of spirit. it is a question of belief or unbelief; ultimately a question of health or disease, of life or death. they who have no faith in god can have little faith in the worth of life, which can be for them but an efflorescence of death, a sort of inexplicable malady of atoms dreaming they are conscious. if the age tends irresistibly to destroy belief in god, the end will be the ruin of belief in the good of life. in the mean while the doubt which weakens the springs of hope and love is not a symptom of health but of disease, pregnant with suffering and misery for all, but most of all for the young. he who is loved in a true and noble way is surrounded by an element of spiritual light in which his worth is revealed to him. in perceiving what he is to another, he comes to understand what he is or may be in himself. our self respect even is largely due to the love we receive in childhood and youth. enthusiasm springs from faith in god and in the soul, which begets in us a high and heroic belief in the divine good of life. it is thus an educational force of highest value. it calms and exalts the soul like the view of the starlit heavens and the everlasting mountains. it is, in every good and noble cause, a fountain head of endurance and perseverance. it bears us on with a sense of joy and vigor, such as is felt when, mounted on a high-mettled steed, we ride in the pleasant air of a spring morning, amid the beauties and grandeurs of nature. in the front of battle and in the presence of death it throws around the soul the light of immortal things. it gives us the plenitude of existence, the full and high enjoyment of living. on its wings the poet, the lover, the orator, the hero, and the saint are borne in rapture through worlds whose celestial glory and delightfulness cold and unmoved minds do not suspect. it is not a flame from the dry wood and withered grass, but a heat and glow from the abysmal depths of being. it makes us content to follow after truth and love in dark and narrow ways, as the miner, in central deeps where sunlight has never fallen, seeks his treasure. it keeps us fresh and young; and, like the warmer sun, reclothes the world day by day with new beauty. it teaches patience, the love of work without haste and without worry. it gives strength to hear and speak truth, and to walk in the sacred way of truth, as though we but idly strolled with pleasant friends amid fragrant flowers. it gives us deeper consciousness of our own liberty, faith in human perfectibility, which lies at the root of our noblest efforts; to which the more we yield ourselves the more we feel that we are free. it knows a thousand words of truth and might, which it whispers in gentlest tones to rightly attuned ears: since the universe is a harmony whose diapason is god, why should thy life strike a discordant note? yield not to discouragement; thou art alive, and god is in his world. the combat and not the victory proclaims the hero. if thy success had been greater, thou hadst been less. the noisy participants in great conflicts, of whatever kind, exercise less influence upon the outcome than choice spirits, who, turning aside from the thunder and smoke of battle, gain in lonely striving and meditation view of new truth by which the world is transformed. we owe more to columbus than to isabella; to descartes than to louis xiv.; to bacon than to elizabeth; to pestalozzi than to napoleon; to goethe than to blücher; to pasteur than to bismarck. if thou wouldst be persuaded and convinced, persuade and convince thyself. be thy aim not increase of happiness, but of knowledge, wisdom, power, and virtue; and thou shalt, without thinking of it, find thyself also happy. character is formed by effort, resistance, and patience. if necessity is the mother of invention, suffering is the mother of high moods and great thoughts. poets have sung to ease their sorrow-burdened or love-tortured hearts; and the travail of souls yearning with ineffable pain for truth has led to the nearest view of god. wisdom is the child of suffering, as beauty is the child of love. if a truth discourages thee, thou art not yet ripe for it; for thee it is not yet wholly true. work not like an ox at the plough, but like a setter afield; not because thou must, but because thou takest delight in thy task. only they have come of age who have learned how to educate themselves. education, like life, works from within outward: the teacher loosens the soil and removes the obstacles to light and warmth and moisture; but growth comes of the activity of the soul itself. a new century will not make new men; but if, in truth, it be a new century, it will be made so by the deeper thought and diviner love of men and women. let the old tell what they have done, the young what they are doing, and fools what they intend to do. the power to control attention, as a good rider holds his horse to the road and to his gait, is a result of education; and when it is acquired other things become easy. let not poverty or misfortune or insult or flattery or success, o seeker after truth and beauty! turn thee from thy divine task and purpose. pardon every one except thyself, and put thy trust in god and in thyself. "if i buy thee," asked one of a spartan captive, "and treat thee well, wilt thou be good?"--"i will," he replied, "if thou buy me or not; or if, having bought me, thou treat me ill." if there be anything of worth in thee, it will make thee strong and contented; it is so good for thee to have it that thou canst easily forget it is unrecognized by others. if all sufferings, sorrows, and disappointments had been left out of thy life, wouldst thou be more or less than thou art? less worthy, doubtless, and less wise. in these evils, then, there is something good. if thou couldst but bear this always in mind, thou shouldst be better able to suffer pain, whether of body or soul. there are things thou hast greatly desired which, had they been given thee, would make thee wretched. the wiser thou growest, the better shalt thou understand how little we know what is for the best. "had i but lived!" cried obermann. and a woman of genius replied: "be consoled, o obermann! hadst thou lived, thou hadst lived in vain." so it is. in the end we neither regret that pleasures have been denied us, nor feel that those we have enjoyed were a gain unless they are associated with the memory of high faith and thought and virtuous action. he who is careful to fill his mind with truth and his heart with love will not lack for retreats in which he may take refuge from the stress and storms of life. noise, popularity, and buncombe: onions, smoke, and bedbugs. be thy own rival, comparing thyself with thyself, and striving day by day to be self-surpassed. if thy own little room is well lighted the whole world is less dark. if thou art busy seeking intellectual and moral illumination and strength, thou shalt easily be contented. higher place would mean for thee less liberty, less opportunity to become thyself. the secret of progress lies in knowing how to make use, not of what we have chosen, but of what is forced upon us. to occupy one's self with trifles weans from the habit of work more effectually than idleness. perfect skill comes of talent, study, and exercise; and the study and exercise must continue through the whole course of life. to cease to learn is to lose freshness and the power to interest. we lack will rather than strength; are able to do more and better than we are inclined to do; and say we can not because we have not the courage to say we will not. the law of unstable equilibrium applies to thee, as to whatever has life. thou canst not remain what thou art, but must rise or fall. the body is under the sway of physical law, but the progress of the mind is left in a large measure to the play of free will. if thou willest what thou oughtest, thou canst do what thou willest; for obligation cannot transcend ability. happy are they who from earliest youth understand the meaning of duty, and hearken to the stern but all-reasonable voice of this daughter of god, the smile upon whose face is the fairest thing we know. he who willingly accepts the law of moral necessity is free; for in thus accepting it he transcends it, and is self-determined; while he who rebels against this law sinks to a lower plane of being than the properly human, and becomes the slave of appetite and passion. duty means sacrifice; it is a turning from the animal to the spiritual self; from the allurements of the world of manifold sensation--from ease, idleness, gain, and pleasure--to the high and lonely regions, where the command of conscience speaks in the name of god and of the nature of things. forget thyself and do thy best, as unconscious of vain-glorious thoughts as though thou wert a wind or a stream, an impersonal force in the service of god and man. obey conscience, and laugh in the face of death. convince thyself that the best thing for thee is to know truth and to make truth the law of thy life. let this faith subordinate all else, as it is, indeed, faith in reason and in god. abhorrence of lies is the test of character. hold fast by what thou knowest to be true, not doubting for a moment because thou canst not reconcile it with other truth. somewhere, somehow, truth will be matched with truth, as love mates heart with heart. a man's word is himself, his reason, his conscience, his faith, his love, his aspiration. if it is false or vain or vile, he is so. it is the expression of life as it has come to consciousness within him. it is the revelation of quality of being; it is of the man himself, his sign and symbol, the form and mould and mirror of his soul. thou thinkest to serve god with lies, thou devil-worshipper and fool! the moral value of the study of science lies in the love of truth it inspires and inculcates. he who knows science knows that liars are imbeciles. from the educator's point of view, truthfulness is the essential thing. his aim and end is to teach truth, and the love of truth, which leavens the whole mass and makes it life-giving. but the liar has no proper virtue of any kind. the doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient, and laborious mind is worthy of respect. in such doubt there may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds. but the scepticism of sciolists lacks the depth and genuineness of truth. to be frivolous where there is question of all that gives life meaning and value is want of sense. the sciolist is one who has a superficial knowledge of various things, which for lack of deep views and coherent thought, for lack of the understanding of the principles of knowledge itself, he is unable to bring into organic unity. the things he knows are confused and intermingled, and thus fail either to enlighten his mind or to impel him to healthful activity. he forms opinions lightly and pronounces judgment rashly. knowing nothing thoroughly, he has no suspicion of the infinite complexity of the world of life and thought. the evil effects of this semi-culture are most disagreeable and most harmful in those whose being has been developed only on its temporal and earthly side. their spiritual and moral nature has no centre about which it may move, and they wander on the surface of things in self-satisfied conceit, proclaiming that what is beyond the senses is beyond the reach of the mind, as though our innermost consciousness were not of what is intangible and invisible. all divine things are within and about us, here and now; but we are too gross to see the celestial light, or to catch the whisperings of the heavenly voices. god is here; but we, like plants and mollusks, live in worlds of which we do not dream, upheld and nourished and borne onward by a power of whom we are but dimly conscious,--nay, of whom, for the most part, we are unconscious. there is a truth above the reach of logic, an impulse of the mind and heart which urges beyond the realms of sense, beyond the ken of the dialectician, to the infinite and eternal, before whom the material universe is but a force at whose finest touch souls awaken to the thrill of thought and love. when we are made conscious of the fact that the divine word is the light of men, we readily understand that our every true thought, our every good deed, our every deeper view of nature and of life, comes from god, who is always urging us into the glorious liberty of his children, until we become a heavenly republic in which righteousness, peace, and joy shall reign. "the restless desire of every man to improve his position in the world is the motive power of all social development, of all progress," says scherr, unable to perceive that the mightiest impulses to nobler and wider life have been given by those who were not thinking at all of improving their position, but were wholly bent upon improving themselves. make choice, o youth! between having and being. if having is thy aim, consent to be inferior; if being is thy aim, be content with having little. real students, cultivators of themselves, are not inspired by the love of fame or wealth or position, but they are driven by an inner impulse to which they cannot but yield. their enthusiasm is not a fire that blazes for an hour and then dies out; it is a heat from central depths of life, self-fed and inextinguishable. the impulse to nobler and freer life springs, never from masses of men, but always from single luminous minds and glowing hearts. the lightning of great thoughts shows the way to heroic deeds. it is better to know than to be known, to love than to be loved, to help than to be helped; for since life is action, it is better to act than to be acted upon. whosoever makes himself purer, worthier, wiser, works for his country, works for god. the belief that the might of truth is so great that it must prevail in spite of whatever opposition, needs, to say the least, interpretation; for it has often happened that truth has been overcome for whole generations and races; and the important consideration is not whether it shall finally prevail, but whether it shall prevail for us, for our own age and people. it is of the nature of spiritual gifts to work in every direction; they enrich the individual and the nation; they develop, purify, and refine the intellectual, moral, and physical worlds in which men live and strive. the state and the church are organisms; the body, the social and religious soul, under the guidance of god, creates for itself. and not only should there be no conflict between them, but there should be none between them and the free and full development of the individual. a peasant whose mental state is what it might have been a thousand years ago is for us, however moral and religious, an altogether unsatisfactory kind of man. all knowledge is pure, and all speech is so if it spring from the simple desire to utter what is seen and recognized as truth. the love of liberty is rare. it is not found in those whose life-aim is money, pleasure, and place, which enslave; but in those who love truth, which is the only liberating power. knowledge is the correlative of being, and only a high and loving soul can know what truth is or understand what christ meant when he said: "ye shall know truth, and truth shall make you free." high thinking and right loving may make enemies of those around us, but they make us godlike. how seldom in our daily experience of men do we find one who wishes to be enlightened, reformed, and made virtuous! how easy it is to find those who wish to be pleased and flattered! at no period in history has civilization been so widespread or so complex as to-day. never have the organs of the social body been so perfect. never has it been possible for so many to co-operate intelligently in the work of progress. you, gentlemen, have youth and faith and the elements of intellectual and moral culture. in the freshness and vigor of early manhood, you stand upon the threshold of the new century. you speak shakspeare's and milton's tongue; in your veins is the blood which in other lands and centuries has nourished the spirit which makes martyrs, heroes, and saints. your religion strikes its roots into the historic past of man's noblest achievements, and looks to the future with the serene confidence with which it looks to god. your country, if not old, is not without glory. its soil is as fertile, its climate as salubrious as its domain is vast. it is peopled by that aryan race, which, from most ancient days, has been the creator and invincible defender of art and science and philosophy and liberty; and with all this the divine spirit and doctrine of the son of man have been interfused. we are here in america constituted on the wide basis of universal freedom, universal opportunity, universal intelligence, universal good-will. our government is the rule of all for the welfare of all; it has stood the test of civil war, and in many ways proved itself both beneficent and strong. already we have subdued this continent to the service of man. within a hundred years we have grown to be one of the most populous and wealthy and also one of the most civilized and progressive nations of the earth. your opportunities are equal to the fullest measure of human worth and genius. in the midst of a high and noble environment it were doubly a disgrace to be low and base. in intellectual and moral processes and results the important consideration is not how much, but what and how. how much, for instance, one has read or written gives us little insight into his worth and character; but when we know what and how he has read and written, we know something of his life. when i am told that america has more schools, churches, and newspapers than any other land, i think of their kind, and am tempted to doubt whether it were not better if we had fewer. the more general and the higher the average education of the people, the more urgent is the need of thoroughly cultivated and enlightened minds to lead them wisely. the standard of our intellectual and professional education is still low; and neither from the press nor the pulpit nor legislative halls do we hear highest wisdom rightly uttered. to be an intellectual force in this age one must know--must know much and know thoroughly; for now in many places there are a few, at least, who are acquainted with the whole history of thought and discovery, who are familiar with the best thinking of the noblest minds that have ever lived; and to imagine that a sciolist, a half-educated person, can have anything new or important to impart is to delude one's self. but if you fail, you will fail like all who fail,--not from lack of knowledge, but from lack of conduct; for the burden which in the end bears us down is that of our moral delinquencies. all else we may endure, but that is a sinking and giving way of the source of life itself. it is better, in every way, that you should be true christian men than that you should do deeds which will make your names famous. and if you could believe this with all your heart, you would find peace and freedom of spirit, even though your labors should seem vain and your lives of little moment. the more reason and conscience are brought to bear upon you, the more will you be lifted into the high and abiding world, where truth and love and holiness are recognized to be man's proper and imperishable good. become all it is possible for you to become. what this is you can know only by striving day by day, from youth to age, even unto the end; leaving the issue with god and his master-workman, time. chapter iv. woman and education. progress, man's distinctive mark alone; not god's and not the beasts'; god is, they are; man partly is and wholly hopes to be.--browning. the partialness of man's life, the low level on which the race has been content to dwell, is attributable, in no small measure, to the injustice done to woman. it was assumed she was inferior, and to make the assumption true, she was kept in ignorance, dwarfed and treated as a means rather than as an end. the right to grow is the primal right; it is the right to live, to unfold our being on every side in the ceaseless striving for truth and love and beauty. in comparison with this, purely political and civil rights are unimportant. and in a free state this fundamental right must not only be acknowledged and defended, but a public opinion must be created which shall declare it to be the most sacred and inviolable. the principle is universal, and is as applicable to woman as to man. there is not a religion, a philosophy, a science, an art for man and another for woman. consequently there is not, in its essential elements at least, an education for man and another for woman. in souls, in minds, in consciences, in hearts, there is no sex. what is the best education for woman? that which will best help her to become a perfect human being, wise, loving, and strong. what is her work? whatever may help her to become herself. what is forbidden her? nothing but what degrades or narrows or warps. what has she the right to do? any good and beautiful and useful thing she is able to do without hurt to her dignity and worth as a human being. between her and man the real question is not of more and less, of inferiority and superiority, but of unlikeness. chastity is woman's great virtue; truthfulness, which is the highest form of courage, is man's; yet men and women are equally bound to be chaste and truthful. mildness and sweet reasonableness are woman's subtlest charms; wisdom and valor, man's; yet women should be wise and brave, and men should be mild and reasonable. the spiritual endowment of the sexes is much the same, but they are not equally interested in the same things. man prefers thought; woman, sentiment; he reaches his conclusions through analysis and argument; she, through feeling and intuition. he has greater power of self-control; she, of self-sacrifice. he is guided by law and principle; she, by insight and tact; he demands justice; she, equity. he wishes to be honored for wealth and position; she, for herself. for him what he possesses is a means; for her, something to which she holds and is attached. he asks for power; she, for affection. he derives his idea of duty from reason; she, from faith and love. he prefers science and philosophy; she, literature and art. his religion is a code of morality; hers, faith and hope and love and imagination. for her, things easily become persons; for him, persons are little more than things. she has greater power of self-effacement, forgetting herself wholly in her love. whether she marry or become a nun, she abandons her name, the symbol of her identity, in proof that she is dedicate to the race and to god. the arguments of infidels have less weight with her than with man, for her sense of religion is more genuine, her faith more inevitable. she passes over objections as a chaste mind passes over what is coarse or impure. she more easily finds complacency in her appearance and surroundings, but she has less pride and conceit than man. she is more grateful, too, because she loves more, and the heart makes memory true. if her greater fondness for jewelry and showy adornment proves her to be more barbarous, her greater refinement and chastity prove her to be more civilized than man. and does not her delight in dress come of her care for beauty, which in a world of coarse and ugly creatures is a virtue as fair as the face of spring? why should the flowers and the fields, the hills and the heavens, be beautiful, and man hideous, and the cities where he abides dismal? are we but cattle to be stalled and fed? are corn and beef and iron the only good and useful things? are we not human because we think and admire, and are exalted in the presence of what is infinitely true and divinely fair? faith, hope, and love are larger and more enduring powers for woman than for man. she feeds the sacred fire which never dies on the altars of home and religion and country. she lives a more interior life, and more easily retains consciousness of the soul's reality and of god's presence. if she speaks less of patriotism in peaceful times, in the hour of danger the white light flashes from her soul. it is this that makes brave men think of their mothers and wives and sisters when they march to battle. they know that those sweet hearts, however keen the pangs they suffer, would rather have them dead than craven. when woman shall grow to the full measure of her endowments, a purer flame will glow upon the hearth, and love of country will be a more genuine passion. if she gain a wider and more varied interest in life, she will become happier, more willing and more able to help the progress of the race. like man, she exists for herself and god, and in her relations to others, her duties are not to the home alone, but to the whole social body, religious and civil. whether man or woman, is a minor thing; to be wise and worthy and loving is all in all. our deeper consciousness and practical recognition of the equality of the sexes is better evidence that we are becoming christian and civilized than popular government and all our mechanical devices. we, however, still have prejudices as ridiculous and harmful as that which made it unbecoming in a woman to know anything or in a man of birth to engage in business. if we hold that every human being has the right to do whatever is fair or noble or useful, we must also hold that it is wrong to throw hindrance in the way of the complete education of any human being. we at last, however slowly, are approaching the standpoint of christ, who, with his divine eye upon the sexless soul, overlooks distinctions of sex, and placing the good of life in knowing and loving, in being and doing, makes it the privilege and duty of all to help all to know and love, to become and do. is it true? is it right? these are the immortal questions, springing from what within us is most like god, and they who deal deceitfully with them have no claim upon attention. they are jugglers and liars. what is developed is not really changed, but made more fully itself, and by giving to woman a truer education, the beauty and charm of her nature will be brought more effectively into play. none of us love "a woman impudent and mannish grown;" but knowledge and culture and strength of mind and heart and body have no tendency to produce such a caricature. whether there is question of man or woman, the aim and end of education is to bring forth in the individual the divine image of humanity as it exists in the thought of god, as it is revealed in the life of christ. "yet in the long years liker must they grow; the man be more of woman, she more of man: he gain in sweetness and in moral height, nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world; she mental breadth, nor fail in childward care; more as the double-natured poet each." the apothegm, man is born to do, woman to endure, no longer commends itself to our judgment. both are born to do and to endure; and in educating girls, we now understand that it is our business to strengthen them and to stimulate them to self-activity. we strive to give them self-control, sanity, breadth of view, wide sympathies, and an abiding sense of justice. one might, indeed, be tempted to think it were well woman should retain a touch of folly, that she still may be able to believe the man she loves is half divine; but to think so one must be a man, with his genius for self-conceit. to train a girl chiefly with a view to success in society is to pervert, is to hinder from attaining to the power of free, rich, and varied life. it is to neglect education for accomplishments; it is to prefer form to substance, manner to conduct, graceful carriage and dress to thought and love. we degrade her when we consider her as little else than a candidate for matrimony. a man may remain single and become the noblest of his kind, and so may a woman. marriage is first of all for the race; the individual may stand alone and grow to the full measure of human strength and worth. the popular contempt for single women who have reached a certain age, is but a survival of the contempt for all women which is found among savages and barbarians. in the education of woman, as of man, the end is increase of power,--of the might there is in intelligence and love, of the strength there is in gentleness and sweetness and light, of the vigor there is in health, in the rhythmic pulse and in deep breathing, of the sustaining joy there is in pure affection and in devotion to high purposes. whether there is question of boys or of girls, the safe way is to strive to make them all it is possible for them to become, putting our trust for the rest in human nature and in god; for talent, like genius, is a divine gift, and to prevent its development is to sin against religion and humanity. for girls as for boys, the aim should be not knowledge, but power; not accomplishments, but faculty. nine-tenths of what we learn in school is quickly forgotten, and is valueless unless it issue in increase of moral and intellectual strength. "in whatever direction i turn my thoughts," says schleiermacher, "it seems to me that woman's nature is nobler and her life happier than man's; and if ever i play with an idle wish it is that i might be a woman." hardly any man, i imagine, would rather be a woman, and many women doubtless would rather be men; and yet there is much in schleiermacher's thought, if we believe, as the wise do believe, that love is the best, and that they who love most are the highest and, therefore, the happiest, since the noblest mind the best contentment has. what fountains to the desert are, what flowers to the fresh young spring, what heaven's breast is to the star, that woman's love to earth doth bring. whether mid deserts she is found, or girt about by happy home, where'er she treads is holy ground above which rises love's high dome. or be she mother called or wife, or sister or the soul's twin mate, she still is each man's best of life, his crown of joy, his high estate. what is our christian faith but the revelation of the supreme and infinite worth of love, as being of the essence of god himself? is it not easy to believe that to a loving soul in an all-chaste body the unseen world may lie open to view? that joan of arc saw heavenly visions and heard whisperings from higher worlds, who can doubt that has considered how her most pure womanly soul redeemed a whole people, and, by them forsaken, from midst fierce flames took its flight to god? should women vote? the rule of the people is good only when it is the rule of the good and wise among the people, and of these, women, in great numbers, are part. the leadership of the best comes near to being the leadership of god. but the question of the suffrage for women is grave; it is one on which an enlightened mind will long hold judgment in suspense. does not political life, as it exists in our democracy, tend to corrupt both voters and office-seekers? is it not largely a life of cant, pretence, and hypocrisy, of venality, corruption, and selfishness, of lying, abuse, and vulgarity? do not public men, like public women, sell themselves, though in a different way? is the professional politician, the professional caucus-manipulator, the professional voter, the type of man we can admire or respect even? the objection so frequently raised, that political life would corrupt women, has, at least, the merit of a certain grim humorousness. could it by any chance make them as bad as it makes men? to tell them they are the queens of the home, to whom the mingling with plebeians is degrading, is an insult to their intelligence. we have forsworn kings and queens, both in private and in public life, and at home women are, for the most part, drudges. what need is there of a hollow phrase when the appeal to truth is obvious? "a servant with this clause makes drudgery divine; who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine." active participation in political life is not a refining, an ennobling, a purifying influence. is it desirable that the half of the people to which the interests of the home, of the heart, of the religious and moral education of the young are especially committed, should be hurled into the maelstrom of selfish passion and coarse excitement? the smartness and self-assertiveness of american women are already excessive; they lack repose, serenity, and self-restraint. if they rush into the arena of noisy and vulgar strife, will not the evil be increased? will not the political woman lose something of the sacred power of the wife and mother? are not the primal virtues, those which make life good and fair and which are a woman's glory,--are they not humble and quiet and unobtrusive? the suffrage has not emancipated the masses of men, who are still held captive in the chains of poverty and dehumanizing toil. do women themselves, those, at least, in whom the woman soul, which draws us on and upward, is most itself, desire that the vote be given them? but whatever our opinions on the subject may be, let us not lose composure. "if a great change is to be made," says edmund burke, "the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing the mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of providence itself than the mere designs of men. they will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate." whether or not woman shall become a politician, there is no doubt that she is becoming a worker in a constantly widening field. the elementary education of the country is already intrusted to her. she is taking her position in the higher institutions of learning. she has gained admission to professional life. in the business world, her competition with man is more and more felt. in literature, in our country at least, her appreciativeness is greater than man's, and her performance not inferior to his. there is a larger number of serious students among women than among men. in the divinely imposed task of self-education, they are fast becoming the chief workers. they are the great readers of books, especially of poetry. the muse was the first school-mistress, and the love of genuine poetry is still the finest educational influence. the vulgar passions and coarse appetites which rob young men of faith in the higher life and of the power to labor perseveringly for ideal ends, have little hold upon the soul of woman. her betrayers are frivolity and vanity, and a too confiding heart; and the more she is educated the less will she take delight in what is merely external, and the greater will become her ability to bring sentiment under the control of reason and conscience. there are not two educations, then, one for man, and another for woman, but both alike we bid contend to the uttermost for completeness of life; bid both trust in human educableness, which makes possible the hope of attaining all divine things. true faith in education is ever associated with genuine humility. only they strive infinitely who feel that their lack is infinite. the power of education is as many sided and as manifold as life. there is no finest seed or flower or fruit, no most serviceable animal, which has not been brought to perfection by human thought and labor, or which, were this help withdrawn, would not degenerate; and if the highest thought and the most intelligent labor were made to bear ceaselessly upon the improvement of the race of man, we should have a new world. when we consider all the beauty, knowledge, and love which are within man's reach, how is it possible not to believe that infinitely more and higher lie beyond? call to mind whatever quality of life, physical, intellectual, or moral, and you will have little difficulty in seeing that it is a result of education. we are born, indeed, with unequal endowments; but strength of limb, ease and swiftness of motion, grace and fluency of speech, modulation of voice, distinctness of articulation, correctness of pronunciation, power of attention, fineness of ear, clearness of vision, control of hand and certainty of touch in drawing, writing, painting, playing upon instruments and operating with the knife, truth and vividness of imagination, force of will, refinement of manner, perfection of taste, skill in argument, purity of desire, rectitude of purpose, power of sympathy and love, together with whatever else goes to the making of a perfect man or woman, are all acquired through educational processes. education is the training of a human being with a view to make him all he may become; and hence it is possible to educate one's self in many ways and on many sides. refinement, grace, and cleanliness are aims and ends, as truly as are vigor and suppleness of mind and strength and purity of heart. like sunshine and flowers and the songs of birds, they help to make life pleasant and beautiful. even the fishes are not clean, but the only clean animal is here and there a man or a woman who has forsworn dirt visible and invisible. we can educate ourselves in every direction, to sleep well even, and neither physicians nor poets have told half the good there is in sleep. the bare thought of it always brings to me the memory of lulling showers, and grazing sheep, and murmuring streams, and bees at work, and the breath of flowers and cooing doves and children lying on the sward, and lazy clouds slumbering in azure skies. it is pleasant as the approach of evening, fresh and fair as the rising sun which sets all the world singing, sacred and pure as babes smiling in their dreams on the breasts of gentle mothers. if thou canst not see the divine worth in nature and in works of genius, it is because thou art what thou art. can the worm at thy feet recognize thy superiority? the blind and the heedless see nothing, o foolish maid. what i know and love is of my very being, is, in fact, my knowing and loving self. quality of knowledge and love determines quality of life, and when i know and love god i am divine. as trees are enrooted in earth, as fishes are immersed in water, and our bodies in air, that they may live, so the soul has its being in god that it may have life, that it may know and love. i become self-conscious only in becoming conscious of what is not myself; and when the not-myself is the eternal, is god, my self-consciousness is divine. the marvel and the mystery of our being is that self-consciousness should exist at all, not that it should continue to exist forever. but words cannot strengthen or explain or destroy our belief in god, in the immortality of the soul, and in the freedom of the will. the antagonism supposed to exist between scientific facts or theories and religious faith would cease to be recognized as real, were it not for the eagerness with which those who are incapable of profound and comprehensive views, catch up certain shibboleths and hurl them like firebrands upon the combustible imaginations of the unthinking. to prove, means, in the proper sense of the word, to test, to bring ideas, opinions, and beliefs to the ordeal of reason, of accepted standards of judgment. it is a criticism of the mind and its operations, and hence it may easily happen that to prove is to weaken and unsettle. in what is most vital, in belief in god, immortality, and freedom of the will, in religion and morality, our faith is stronger than any proof that may be brought in its defence; and this is not less true of our faith in the reality of nature and the laws of science; and when this is made plain by criticism, those whose mental grasp is weak or partial, are confused and tempted to doubt. they are not helped, but harmed, and our ceaseless discussions and provings, in press and pulpit, are the source of much of the unrest, religious doubt, and moral weakness of the age. the people need to be taught by those who know and believe, not by those whose skill is chiefly syllogistic and critical. philosophic speculation is like a vast mountain into which men, generation after generation, have sunk shafts in search of some priceless treasure, and have left in the materials they have thrown out the mark and evidence of failure. but the noblest minds will still be haunted by the infinite mystery which they will seek in vain to explain. their faith in reason, like that of the vulgar, cannot be shaken, nor can defeat, running through thousands of years, enfeeble their courage or dampen their ardor. let our increasing insight into nature's laws fill us with thankfulness and joy. it is good, and makes for good. let us bow with respect and reverence before the army of patient investigators who bring highly disciplined faculties to bear upon the most useful researches. let knowledge grow. a nearer and truer view of the boundless fact will not make the world less wonderful, or the soul less divine, or god less adorable. if one should declare that it is contrary to the teachings of faith to hold that conversation may be carried on by persons a thousand miles apart, it would be sufficient to reply that such conversation takes place, and that to attempt to annul fact by doctrine is absurd. there is no excuse for the controversial conflict between science and religion; for science is ascertained fact, not theory about fact, and when fact is rightly ascertained it is accepted of all men. the most certain fact, for each one, is that he knows and loves, and that this power comes to him through communion with what is higher and deeper and wider than himself,--with god. there was a time when collisions among the masses of the sidereal system were frequent, shocks of unimaginable force by which the celestial bodies were shivered into atoms, so that what now remains is but a survival of worlds which escaped destruction in the chaotic struggle when suns madly rushed on one another and rose in star-dust about the face of god, who was, and is, and shall be, eternal and forever the same. where there is no thinker, there is no thing. it is in, and through, and with him that we know ourselves and our environment; and recognize that our particular life is, in its implications, universal and divine. he is the principle of unity which is present in whatever is an object of thought, and which gives the mind the power to co-ordinate the manifold of sensation into the harmony of truth; he is the principle of goodness and beauty, which makes the universe fair, and thrills the heart of man with hope and love. amid endless change, he alone is permanent, and he is power and wisdom and love, and they only are good and wise and strong who cleave to his eternal and absolute being. but since here and now the real world of matter as distinguished from the apparent is hidden behind the veil of sense, it is vain to hope that the world of eternal life shall be made plain to the pure reason. religion, like life, is faith, hope, and love, striving and doing, not intellectual intuition and beatific vision. we find it impossible to separate our thought of god from that of infinite goodness and love; but when we look away from our own souls to nature's pitiless and fatal laws, we realize that this faith in all-embracing and all-conquering love is opposed by seemingly insurmountable difficulties. it is a mystery we believe, not a truth we comprehend. systems of philosophy, morality, and religion, however cunningly devised, cannot make men philosophers, sages, or saints. this they can become only through the communion which faith, hope, and love have power to establish with the living fountain-head of truth, wisdom, and goodness. the pursuit of knowledge, like the struggle for wealth and place, ends in disillusion, in the disappointment which results from the contrast between what we hope for and what we attain. the greater the success, the more complete the disenchantment. as the rich and famous best see the unsatisfactoriness of wealth and honor, so they who know much best understand how knowledge avails not, how it is but a cloud-built citadel, whose foundations rest upon the uncertain air, whose walls and turrets lose in substance what they gain in height. when we imagine we know all things, we awake as from a dream to find that we know nothing, that our knowing is but a believing, our science but a faith. we are little children who wander in a father's wide domain, seeing many things and understanding not anything, who imagine we are in a real and abiding world, while in truth we are but passing through the picture-gallery of the senses. faith, hope, and love:--these three are life's deep root; they reach into infinity, whence life doth shoot. but faith and hope have not attained the eternal best; while love, sweet love, the end has gained,-- in god to rest. so long as these life-begetting, life-sustaining, and life-developing powers hold mightier sway over the soul of woman than over that of man, so long will woman's heel crush the serpent's head and woman's arms bear salvation to the world. she will not worship the rising sun, or become the idolatress of success, but within her heart will cherish fallen heroes and lost causes and the memory of all the sorrows by which god humanizes the world. if we consider mankind merely as a phenomenon, the extinction of the race need give us little more concern than the disappearance of pterodactyls and ichthyosauri. what repels from such contemplation is not man's physical, but his spiritual being,--that which makes him capable of thought and love, of faith and hope. the universe is anthropomorphized, for whithersoever man looks he sees the reflection of his own countenance. what he calls things are stamped with the impress and likeness of himself, as he himself is an image of the eternal mind, in which all things are mirrored. an atheist or a materialist, an agnostic or a pessimist, may have greater knowledge, greater intellectual force than the most devout believer in god; but is it possible for him to feel so thoroughly at home in the world, to feel so deeply that, whatever happens, it is and will be well with him? in an atheistic world the spirit of man is ill at ease. he who has no god makes himself the centre of all things, and, like a spoiled child, loses the power to admire, to enjoy, and to love. genuine faith in god is such an infinite force that one may be tempted to doubt whether it is found. undisciplined minds become victims of the formulas they receive, and if what they have accepted as truth is shown to be false or incomplete, they grow discouraged and lose faith; but the wise know that the verbal vesture of truth is a symbol which has but a proximate and relative value. the spirit is alive, and ceaselessly outgrows or transmutes the body with which it is clothed. what we can do with anything,--with money, knowledge, wealth,--depends on what we are. ruskin prefers holy work to holy worship; but the antithesis is mistaken, for if worship is holy it impels to work, if work is holy it impels to worship. god's most sacred visible temple is a human body, and its profanation is the worst sacrilege. all true belief, when we come to the last analysis, is belief in god, and the teacher of religion must keep this fact always in view. the law of the struggle for life applies to opinions, beliefs, hopes, aims, ideals, just as it applies to individuals and species. whatever survives, survives through conflict, because it is fit to survive. it does not follow, however, that the best survives, though we must think that in the end this is so, since we believe in god. when serious minds grapple with problems so remote from vulgar opinion that they seem to be meaningless or insoluble, the multitude, ever ready, like a crowd of boys, to mock and jeer, break forth into insult. these men, they cry are wicked, or they are fools. in a society where it is assumed that all are equal, those who are really superior incur suspicion as though it were criminal to be different from the multitude; and hence they rarely win the favor of the crowd. the life-current of those who stir up a noise about them, runs shallow. the champion of the prize-ring or the race-course is hailed with shouts, for the crowd understand the achievement; but what can they know of the worth of a sage or a saint? the noblest struggles are of the mind and heart wrestling with unseen powers, with spirits, as st. paul says, that they may compel them to give up the secret of truth and holiness. a glimpse of truth, a thrill of love, is better than the applause of a whole city. in striving steadfastly for thy own perfection and the happiness of others thou walkest and workest with god. thy progress will help others to labor for their own, and the happiness thou givest will return to thee and become thine; and what is the will of god, if it is not the perfection and happiness of his children? to have merely enough strength to bear life's burden, to do the daily task, to face the cares which return with the sun and follow us into the night, is to be weak, is to lack the strong spirit for which work is light as play, and whose secret is heard in whispers by the hero and the saint. to be able to give joy and help to others we must have more life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness than we need for ourselves; and it is in giving joy and help to others that we ourselves receive increase of life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness. be persuaded within thy deepest soul, that moral evil can never be good, and that sin can never be gain. so act that if all men acted as thou, all would be well. if to be like others is thy aim, thou art predestined to remain inferior. to be followed and applauded is to be diverted from one's work. better alone with it in a garret than a guest in a banquet hall. let thy prayer be work and work thy prayer, as god's truth and love are everywhere, and whether by word or deed thou strive in him alone thou canst be alive. if thou hast done thy best, god will give it worth. if thou carest not for truth and love, for thee they are nothing worth; but it is because thou thyself art worthless. wisdom and virtue is all thou lackest; of other things thou hast enough. when the passion for self-improvement is strong within us, all our relations to our fellow-men and nature receive new meaning and power, as opportunities to make ourselves what it is possible for us to become; and as we grow accustomed to take this view of whatever happens, we are made aware that disagreeable things are worth as much as the pleasant, that foes are as useful as friends. the obstacle arrests attention, provokes effort, and educates. it throws the light back upon the eye, and reveals the world of color and form; from it all sounds reverberate. we grow by overcoming; the force we conquer becomes our own. we rise on difficulties we surmount. what opposes, arouses, strengthens, and disciplines the will, discloses to the mind its power, and implants faith in the efficacy of patient, persevering labor. they who shrink from the combat are already defeated. to make everything easy is to smooth the way whereby we descend. to surround the young with what they ought themselves to achieve is to enfeeble and corrupt them. happy is the poor man's son, who whithersoever he turns, sees the obstacle rise to challenge him to become a man; miserable the children of the rich, whose cursed-blessed fortune is an ever-present invitation to idleness and conceit. o mothers, you whose love is the best any of us have known, harden your sons, and urge them on, not in the race for wealth, but in the steep and narrow way wherein, through self-conquest and self-knowledge, they rise toward god and all high things. nothing that has ever been said of your power tells the whole truth, and the only argument against you is the men who are your children. education is always the result of personal influence. a mother, a father in the home, a pure and loving heart at the altar, a true man or woman in the school, a noble mind uttering itself in literature, which is personal thought and expression,--these are the forces which educate. life proceeds from life, and religion, which is the highest power of life, can proceed only from god and religious souls. not by preaching and teaching, but by living the life, can we make ourselves centres of spiritual influence. be like others, walk in the broad way, one of a herd, content to graze in a common pasture, believing equality man's highest law, though its meaning be equality with the brute. is this our ideal? it is an atheistic creed. there is no god, there is nothing but matter, but atoms, and atoms are alike and equal,--let men be so too. to struggle with infinite faith and hope for some divine good is idolatry, is to believe in god; to be one's self is the unpardonable sin. it is thy aim to rise, to distinguish thyself; this means thou wouldst have higher place, more money, a greater house than thy neighbor's. it is a foolish ambition. instead of trying to distinguish thyself, strive to become thyself, to make thyself worthy of the approval of god and wise men. "i am not to be pitied, my lord," said bayard; "i die doing my duty." god has not given his world into thy keeping, but he has given thee to thyself to fashion and complete. if thou art busy seeking money or pleasure or praise, little time will remain wherein to seek and find thyself. they who are interesting to themselves, are interesting to themselves alone. the self-absorbed are the victims of mental and moral disease. the life which flows out to others, bearing light and warmth and fragrance, feels itself in the blessings it gives; that which is self-centred, stagnates like a pool, and becomes the habitation of doleful creatures. there is a popularity which is born of the worship of noble deeds,--it is the best. there is another, which comes of the crowd's passion for what is noisy and spectacular,--it is the worst. the one is the popularity of heroes, the other that of charlatans. whatever thy chosen work, it is thy business to make thyself a man or a woman, and not a mere specialist; yet in following a specialty with enthusiasm, thou shalt go farther towards perfection and completeness of life than the multitude of pretenders, who are not in earnest about anything. every harsh and unjust sentiment, every narrow and unworthy thought consented to and entertained, remains like a stain upon character. whoever speaks or writes against freedom or knowledge or faith in god, or love of man or reverence of woman, but makes himself ridiculous; for men feel and believe that their true world is a world of high thoughts and noble sentiments, and they can neither respect nor trust those who strive to weaken their hold upon this world. become thyself; do thy work. for this, all thy days are not too many or too long. if thou and it are worthy to be known, the presentation can be made in briefest time; and it matters little though it be deferred until after thy death. besides whatever other conditions, time is necessary to bring the best things to maturity, and to imagine that excellence demands less than lifelong work, is to mistake. it is by the patient observation of the infinitesimal that science has done its best work; and it is only by unwearying attention to the thousand little things of life that we may hope to make some approach to moral and intellectual perfection. he who works with joy and cheerfulness in the field which himself has found and chosen, will acquire knowledge and skill, and his labor will be transformed into increase and newness of life. we gain a clear view of things only when we set them apart from ourselves, and contemplate them simply as objects of thought. to see them aright we must be free from emotion and behold them in the cold air of the intellect. to look on them as in some way bound up with our personal good or evil, is to have the vision blurred. study in the spirit of an investigator, who has no other than a scientific interest in what he sets himself to examine. the wise physician is wholly intent upon making a correct diagnosis, though the patient be his mother. what gain would self-delusion bring him or her he loves? things are what they are, and it is our business to know them. observe and hold thy judgment in suspense until patient looking shall have made truth so plain that to pass judgment is superfluous. the aim of mental training is clearness and accuracy of view, together with the strength to keep steadfastly looking into the world of intelligible things. what rouses desire tends to enslave; what gives delight tends to liberate; the one appeals to the senses, the other to the soul. hence, intellectual and moral pleasures alone are associated with the sense of freedom and pure joy. the lovers of freedom are as rare as the lovers of truth and of god. for most, liberty is but a trader's commodity, to be parted with for price, as their obedience is a slave's service. the chief good consists in acting justly and nobly, rather than in thinking acutely and profoundly. the free play of the mind is delightful, but the law of moral obligation is the deepest thing in us. honor, place, and wealth, which are won at the price of self-improvement, the wise will not desire. great opportunities seldom present themselves, but every moment of every hour of thy conscious life is an opportunity to improve thyself, which for thee is the best and most necessary thing. since our power over others is small, but over ourselves large, let us devote our energies to self-improvement. "nor let any man say," writes locke, "he cannot govern his passions, nor hinder them from breaking out and carrying him into action; for what he can do before a prince or great man he can do alone or in the presence of god, if he will." the sure way to happiness is to yield ourselves wholly to god, knowing that he has care of us, and at the same time to seek to draw from life whatever joy and delight it may bestow upon a high mind and a pure heart, receiving the blessing gladly, conscious all the while that what is external cannot really be ours, and is not, therefore, necessary to our contentment. that many are wiser and stronger than thou, is not a motive for discouragement; the depressing thought is, that so few are wise and strong. he who gives his whole life to what he believes he is most capable of doing, succeeds, whatever be the worth of his work. there are many who are busy with many things; but one who has a high purpose, and who devotes all his energies to its fulfillment, is not easily found; and great and interesting characters are, therefore, rare. to what better use can we put life than to employ it in ameliorating life? it is to this every wise and good man devotes himself, whether he be priest or teacher, physician or lawyer, philosopher or poet, captain of industry or statesman. chapter v. the scope of public-school education. our system of public-school education is a result of the faith of the people in the need of universal intelligence for the maintenance of popular government. does this system include moral training? since the teaching of religious doctrines is precluded, this, i imagine, is what we are to consider in discussing the scope of public-school education. the equivalents of scope are aim, end, opportunity, range of view; and the equivalents of education are training, discipline, development, instruction. the proper meaning of the word education, it seems, is not a drawing out, but a training up, as vines are trained to lay hold of and rise by means of what is stronger than themselves. my subject, then, is the aim, end, opportunity, and range of view of public-school education, which to be education at all, in any true sense, must be a training, discipline, development, and instruction of man's whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral. this, i suppose, is what herbert spencer means when he defines education to be a preparation for complete living. montaigne says the end of education is wisdom and virtue; comenius declares it to be knowledge, virtue, and religion; milton, likeness to god through virtue and faith; locke, health of body, virtue, and good manners; herbart, virtue, which is the realization in each one of the idea of inner freedom; while kant and fichte declare it to consist chiefly in the formation of character. all these thinkers agree that the supreme end of education is spiritual or ethical. the controlling aim, then, should be, not to impart information, but to upbuild the being which makes us human, to form habits of right thinking and doing. the ideal is virtually that of israel,--that righteousness is life,--though the greek ideal of beauty and freedom may not be excluded. it is the doctrine that manners make the man, that conduct is three-fourths of life, leaving but one-fourth for intellectual activity and æsthetic enjoyment; and into this fourth of life but few ever enter in any real way, while all are called and may learn to do good and avoid evil. "in the end," says ruskin, "the god of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones." we can all learn to become active, modest, and kind; to turn from idleness, pride, greed, and cruelty. but we cannot all make ourselves capable of living in the high regions of pure thought and ideal beauty; and for the few even who are able to do this, it is still true that conduct is three-fourths of life. "the end of man," says büchner, "is conversion into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia." this also is an ideal, and he thinks we should be pleased to know that in dying we give back to the universe what had been lent. he moralizes too; but if all we can know of our destiny is that we shall be converted into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, the sermon may be omitted. on such a faith it is not possible to found a satisfactory system of education. men will always refuse to think thus meanly of themselves, and in answer to those who would persuade them that they are but brutes, they will, with perfect confidence, claim kinship with god; for from an utterly frivolous view of life both our reason and our instinct turn. the scope of public-school education is to co-operate with the physical, social, and religious environment to form good and wise men and women. unless we bear in mind that the school is but one of several educational agencies, we shall not form a right estimate of its office. it depends almost wholly for its success upon the kind of material furnished it by the home, the state, and the church; and, to confine our view to our own country, i have little hesitation in affirming that our home life, our social and political life, and our religious life have contributed far more to make us what we are than any and all of our schools. the school, unless it works in harmony with these great forces, can do little more than sharpen the wits. many of the teachers of our indian schools are doubtless competent and earnest; but their pupils, when they return to their tribes, quickly lose what they have gained, because they are thrown into an environment which annuls the ideals that prevailed in the school. the controlling aim of our teachers should be, therefore, to bring their pedagogical action into harmony with what is best in the domestic, social, and religious life of the child; for this is the foundation on which they must build, and to weaken it is to expose the whole structure to ruin. hence the teacher's attitude toward the child should be that of sympathy with him in his love for his parents, his country, and his religion. his reason is still feeble, and his life is largely one of feeling; and the fountain-heads of his purest and noblest feelings are precisely his parents, his country, and his religion, and to tamper with them is to poison the wells whence he draws the water of life. to assume and hold this attitude with sincerity and tact is difficult; it requires both character and culture; it implies a genuine love of mankind and of human excellence; reverence for whatever uplifts, purifies, and strengthens the heart; knowledge of the world, of literature, and of history, united with an earnest desire to do whatever may be possible to lead each pupil toward life in its completeness, which is health and healthful activity of body and mind and heart and soul. as the heart makes the home, the teacher makes the school. what we need above all things, wherever the young are gathered for education, is not a showy building, or costly apparatus, or improved methods or text-books, but a living, loving, illumined human being who has deep faith in the power of education and a real desire to bring it to bear upon those who are intrusted to him. this applies to the primary school with as much force as to the high school and university. those who think, and they are, i imagine, the vast majority, that any one who can read and write, who knows something of arithmetic, geography, and history, is competent to educate young children, have not even the most elementary notions of what education is. what the teacher is, not what he utters and inculcates, is the important thing. the life he lives, and whatever reveals that life to his pupils; his unconscious behavior, even; above all, what in his inmost soul he hopes, believes, and loves, have far deeper and more potent influence than mere lessons can ever have. it is precisely here that we americans, whose talent is predominantly practical and inventive, are apt to go astray. we have won such marvellous victories with our practical sense and inventive genius that we have grown accustomed to look to them for aid, whatever the nature of the difficulty or problem may be. machinery can be made to do much, and to do well what it does. with its help we move rapidly; we bring the ends of the earth into instantaneous communication; we print the daily history of the world and throw it before every door; we plough and we sow and we reap; we build cities, and we fill our houses with whatever conduces to comfort or luxury. all this and much more machinery enables us to do. but it cannot create life, nor can it, in any effective way, promote vital processes. now, education is essentially a vital process. it is a furthering of life; and as the living proceed from the living, they can rise into the wider world of ideas and conduct only by the help of the living; and as in the physical realm every animal begets after its own likeness, so also in the spiritual the teacher can give but what he has. if the well-spring of truth and love has run dry within himself, he teaches in vain. his words will no more bring forth life than desert winds will clothe arid sands with verdure. much talking and writing about education have chiefly helped to obscure a matter which is really plain. the purpose of the public school is or should be not to form a mechanic or a specialist of any kind, but to form a true man or woman. hence the number of things we teach the child is of small moment. those schools, in fact, in which the greatest number of things are taught give, as a rule, the least education. the character of the roman people, which enabled them to dominate the earth and to give laws to the world, was formed before they had schools, and when their schools were most flourishing they themselves were in rapid moral and social dissolution. we make education and religion too much a social affair, and too little a personal affair. their essence lies in their power to transform the individual, and it is only in transforming him that they recreate the wider life of the community. the founder of christianity addressed himself to the individual, and gave little heed to the state or other environment. he looked to a purified inner source of life to create for itself a worthier environment, and simply ignored devices for working sudden and startling changes. they who have entered into the hidden meaning of this secret and this method turn in utter incredulity from the schemes of declaimers and agitators. the men who fill the world, each with his plan for reforming and saving it, may have their uses, since the poet tells us there are uses in adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head; but to one deafened by their discordant and clamorous voices, the good purpose they serve seems to be as mythical as the jewel in the toad's head. have not those who mistake their crotchets for nature's laws invaded our schools? have they not succeeded in forming a public opinion and in setting devices at work which render education, in the true sense of the word, if not impossible, difficult? literature is a criticism of life, made by those who are in love with life, and have the deepest faith in its possibilities; and all criticism which is inspired by sympathy and faith and controlled by knowledge is helpful. complacent thoughts are rarely true, and hardly ever useful. it is a prompting of nature to turn from what we have to what we lack, for thus only is there hope of amendment and progress. we are, to quote emerson, "built of furtherance and pursuing, not of spent deeds, but of doing." hence the wise and the strong dwell not upon their virtues and accomplishments, but strive to learn wherein they fail, for it is in correcting this they desire to labor. they wish to know the truth about themselves, are willing to try to see themselves as others see them, that self-knowledge may make self-improvement possible. they turn from flattery, for they understand that flattery is insult. now, if this is the attitude of wise and strong men, how much more should it not be that of a wise and strong people? whenever persons or things are viewed as related in some special way to ourselves, our opinions of them will hardly be free from bias. when, for instance, i think or speak of my country, my religion, my friends, my enemies, i find it difficult to put away the prejudice which my self-esteem and vanity create, and which, like a haze, ever surrounds me to color or obscure the pure light of reason. it cannot do us harm to have our defects and shortcomings pointed out to us; but to be told by demagogues and declaimers that we are the greatest, the most enlightened, the most virtuous people which exists or has existed, can surely do us no good. if it is true, we should not dwell upon it, for this will but distract us from striving for the things in which we are deficient; and if it is false, it can only mislead us and nourish a foolish conceit. it is the orator's misfortune to be compelled to think of his audience rather than of truth. it is his business to please, persuade, and convince; and men are pleased with flattering lies, persuaded and convinced by appeals to passion and interest. happier is the writer, who need not think of a reader, but finds his reward in the truth he expresses. it is not possible for an enlightened mind not to take profound interest in our great system of public education. to do this he need not think it the best system. he may deem it defective in important requisites. he may hold, as i hold, that the system is of minor importance, the kind of teacher being all important. but if he loves his country, if he loves human excellence, if he has faith in man's capacity for growth, he cannot but turn his thoughts, with abiding attention and sympathy, to the generous and determined efforts of a powerful and vigorous people to educate themselves. were our public-school system nothing more than the nation's profession of faith in the transforming power of education, it would be an omen of good and a ground for hope; and one cannot do more useful work than to help to form a public opinion which will accept with thankfulness the free play of all sincere minds about this great question, and which will cause the genuine lovers of our country to turn in contempt from the clamors politicians and bigots are apt to raise when an honest man utters honest thought on this all-important subject. i am willing to assume and to accept as a fact that our theological differences make it impossible to introduce the teaching of any religious creed into the public school. i take the system as it is,--that is, as a system of secular education,--and i address myself more directly to the question proposed: what is or should be its scope? the fact that religious instruction is excluded makes it all the more necessary that humanizing and ethical aims should be kept constantly in view. whoever teaches in a public school should be profoundly convinced that man is more than an animal which may be taught cunning and quickness. a weed in blossom may have a certain beauty, but it will bear no fruit; and so the boy or youth one often meets, with his irreverent smartness, his precocious pseudo-knowledge of a hundred things, may excite a kind of interest, but he gives little promise of a noble future. the flower of his life is the blossom of the weed, which in its decay will poison the air, or, at the best, serve but to fertilize the soil. if we are to work to good purpose we must take our stand, with the great thinkers and educators, on the broad field of man's nature, and act in the light of the only true ideal of education,--that its end is wisdom, virtue, knowledge, power, reverence, faith, health, behavior, hope, and love; in a word, whatever powers and capacities make for intelligence, for conduct, for character, for completeness of life. not for a moment should we permit ourselves to be deluded by the thought that because the teaching of religious creeds is excluded, therefore we may make no appeal to the fountain-heads which sleep within every breast, the welling of whose waters alone has power to make us human. if we are forbidden to turn the current into this or that channel, we are not forbidden to recognize the universal truth that man lives by faith, hope, and love, by imagination and desire, and that it is precisely for this reason that he is educable. we move irresistibly in the lines of our real faith and desire, and the educator's great purpose is to help us to believe in what is high and to desire what is good. since for the irreverent and vulgar spirit nothing is high or good, reverence, and the refinement which is the fruit of true intelligence, urge ceaselessly their claims on the teacher's attention. goethe, i suppose, was little enough of a christian to satisfy the demands of an agnostic cripple even, and yet he held that the best thing in man is the thrill of awe; and that the chief business of education is to cultivate reverence for whatever is above, beneath, around, and within us. this he believed to be the only philosophical and healthful attitude of mind and heart towards the universe, seen and unseen. may not the meanest flower that blows bring thoughts that lie too deep for tears? is not reverence a part of all the sweetest and purest feelings which bind us to father and mother, to friends and home and country? is it not the very bloom and fragrance, not only of the highest religious faith, but also of the best culture? let the thrill of awe cease to vibrate, and you will have a world in which money is more than man, office better than honesty, and books like "innocents abroad" or "peck's bad boy" more indicative of the kind of man we form than are the noblest works of genius. what is the great aim of the primary school, if it is not the nutrition of feeling? the child is weak in mind, weak in will, but he is most impressionable. feeble in thought, he is strong in capacity to feel the emotions which are the sap of the tree of moral life. he responds quickly to the appeals of love, tenderness, and sympathy. he is alive to whatever is noble, heroic, and venerable. he desires the approbation of others, especially of those whom he believes to be true and high and pure, he has unquestioning faith, not only in god but in great men, who, for him, indeed, are earthly gods. is not his father a divine man, whose mere word drives away all fear and fills him with confidence? the touch of his mother's hand stills his pain; if he is frightened, her voice is enough to soothe him to sleep. to imagine that we are educating this being of infinite sensibility and impressionability when we do little else than teach him to read, write, and cipher, is to cherish a delusion. it is not his destiny to become a reading, writing, and ciphering machine, but to become a man who believes, hopes, and loves; who holds to sovereign truth, and is swayed by sympathy; who looks up with reverence and awe to the heavens, and hearkens with cheerful obedience to the call of duty; who has habits of right thinking and well doing which have become a law unto him, a second nature. and if it be said that we all recognize this to be so, but that it is not the business of the school to help to form such a man; that it does its work when it sharpens the wits, i will answer with the words of william von humboldt: "whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools." now, what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is not the power of shrewd men, wholly absorbed in the striving for wealth, reckless of the means by which it is gotten, and who, whether they succeed or whether they fail, look upon money as the equivalent of the best things man knows or has; who therefore think that the highest purpose of government, as of other social forces and institutions, is to make it easy for all to get abundance of gold and to live in sloven plenty; but what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is the power of intelligence and virtue, of wisdom and conduct. we believe, and in fact know, that humanity, justice, truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect are higher and mightier than anything mere sharpened wits can accomplish. but if these virtues, which constitute nearly the whole sum of man's strength and worth, are to be introduced into the life of the nation, they must be introduced into the schools, into the process of education. we must recognize, not in theory alone but in practice, that the chief end of education is ethical, since conduct is three-fourths of human life. the aim must be to make men true in thought and word, pure in desire, faithful in act, upright in deed; men who understand that the highest good does not lie in the possession of anything whatsoever, but that it lies in power and quality of being; for whom what we are and not what we have is the guiding principle; who know that the best work is not that for which we receive most pay, but that which is most favorable to life, physical, moral, intellectual, and religious; since man does not exist for work or the sabbath, but work and rest exist for him, that he may thrive and become more human and more divine. we must cease to tell boys and girls that education will enable them to get hold of the good things of which they believe the world to be full; we must make them realize rather that the best thing in the world is a noble man or woman, and to be that is the only certain way to a worthy and contented life. all talk about patriotism which implies that it is possible to be a patriot or a good citizen without being a true and good man, is sophistical and hollow. how shall he who cares not for his better self care for his country? we must look, as educators, most closely to those sides of the national life where there is the greatest menace of ruin. it is plain that our besetting sin, as a people, is not intemperance or unchastity, but dishonesty. from the watering and manipulating of stocks to the adulteration of food and drink, from the booming of towns and lands to the selling of votes and the buying of office, from the halls of congress to the policeman's beat, from the capitalist who controls trusts and syndicates to the mechanic who does inferior work, the taint of dishonesty is everywhere. we distrust one another, distrust those who manage public affairs, distrust our own fixed will to suffer the worst that may befall rather than cheat or steal or lie. dishonesty hangs, like mephitic air, about our newspapers, our legislative assemblies, the municipal government of our towns and cities, about our churches even, since our religion itself seems to lack that highest kind of honesty, the downright and thorough sincerity which is its life-breath. if the teacher in the public school may not insist that an honest man is the noblest work of god, he may teach at least that he who fails in honesty fails in the most essential quality of manhood, enters into warfare with the forces which have made him what he is, and which secure him the possession of what he holds dearer than himself, since he barters for it his self-respect; that the dishonest man is an anarchist and dissocialist, one who does what in him lies to destroy credit, and the sense of the sacredness of property, obedience to law, and belief in the rights of man. if our teachers are to work in the light of an ideal, if they are to have a conscious end in view, as all who strive intelligently must have, if they are to hold a principle which will give unity to their methods, they must seek it in the idea of morality, of conduct, which is three-fourths of life. i myself am persuaded that the real and philosophical basis of morality is the being of god, a being absolute, infinite, unimaginable, inconceivable, of whom our highest and nearest thought is that he is not only almighty, but all-wise and all-good as well. but it is possible, i think, to cultivate the moral sense without directly and expressly assigning to it this philosophical and religious basis; for goodness is largely its own evidence, as virtue is its own reward. it all depends on the teacher. life produces life, life develops life; and if the teacher have within himself a living sense of the all-importance of conduct, if he thoroughly realize that what we call knowledge is but a small part of man's life, his influence will nourish the feelings by which character is evolved. the germ of a moral idea is always an emotion, and that which impels to right action is the emotion rather than the idea. the teachings of the heart remain forever, and they are the most important; for what we love, genuinely believe in, and desire decides what we are and may become. hence the true educator, even in giving technical instruction, strives not merely to make a workman, but to make also a man, whose being shall be touched to finer issues by spiritual powers, who shall be upheld by faith in the worth and sacredness of life, and in the education by which it is transformed, enriched, purified, and ennobled. he understands that an educated man, who, in the common acceptation of the phrase, is one who knows something, who knows many things, is, in truth, simply one who has acquired habits of right thinking and right doing. the culture which we wish to see prevail throughout our country is not learning and literary skill; it is character and intellectual openness,--that higher humanity which is latent within us all; which is power, wisdom, truth, goodness, love, sympathy, grace, and beauty; whose surpassing excellence the poor may know as well as the rich; whose charm the multitude may feel as well as the chosen few. "he who speaks of the people," says guicciardini, "speaks, in sooth, of a foolish animal, a prey to a thousand errors, a thousand confusions, without taste, without affection, without firmness." the scope of our public-school education is to make common-places of this kind, by which all literature is pervaded, so false as to be absurd; and when this end shall have been attained, democracy will have won its noblest victory. how shall we find the secret from which hope of such success will spring? by so forming and directing the power of public opinion, of national approval, and of money, as to make the best men and women willing and ready to enter the teacher's profession. the kind of man who educates is the test of the kind of education given, and there is properly no other test. when we americans shall have learned to believe with all our hearts and with all the strength of irresistible conviction that a true educator is a more important, in every way a more useful, sort of man than a great railway king, or pork butcher, or captain of industry, or grain buyer, or stock manipulator, we shall have begun to make ourselves capable of perceiving the real scope of public-school education. chapter vi. the religious element in education. the theory of development, which is now widely received and applied to all things, from star dust to the latest fashion, is at once a sign and a cause of the almost unlimited confidence which we put in the remedial and transforming power of education. we no longer think of god as standing aloof from nature and the course of history. he it is who works in the play of atoms and in the throbbings of the human heart; and as we perceive his action in the evolution both of matter and of mind, we know and feel that, when with conscious purpose we strive to call forth and make living the latent powers of man's being, we are working with him in the direction in which he impels the universe. education, therefore, we look upon as necessary, not merely because it is indispensable to any high and human kind of life, but also because god has made development the law both of conscious and unconscious nature. he is in act all that the finite may become, and the effort to grow in strength, knowledge, and virtue springs from a divine impulse. although we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that it is but a minor satellite, a globule lost in space, our deepest thought still finds that the end of nature is the production of rational beings, of man; for the final reason for which all things exist is that the infinite good may be communicated; and since the highest good is truth and holiness, it can be communicated only to beings who think and love. hence all things are man's, and he exists that he may make himself like god; in other words, that he may educate himself; for the end of education is to fit him for completeness of life, to train all his faculties, to call all his endowments into play, to make him symmetrical and whole in body and soul. this, of course, is the ideal, and consequently the unattainable; but in the light of ideals alone do we see rightly and judge truly; and to take a lower view of the aim and end of education is to take a partial view. to hold that god is, and that man truly lives only in so far as he is made partaker of the divine life, is, by implication, to hold that his education should be primarily and essentially religious. our opinions and beliefs, however, are never the result of purely rational processes, and hence a mere syllogism has small persuasive force, or even no influence at all, upon our way of looking at things, or the motives which determine action. as it is useless to argue against the nature of things, so we generally plead in vain when our world-view is other than that of those whom we seek to convince; for those who observe from different points either do not see the same objects or do not see them in the same light. life is complex, and the springs of thought and action are controlled in mysterious ways by forces and impulses which we neither clearly understand nor accurately measure. what is called the spirit of the age, the spirit which, as the poet says, sits at the roaring loom of time and weaves for god the garment whereby he is made visible to us, exercises a potent influence upon all our thinking and doing. we live in an era of progress, and progress means differentiation of structure and specialization of function. the more perfect the organism, the more are its separate functions assigned to separate parts. as social aggregates develop, a similar differentiation takes place. offices which were in the hands of one are distributed among several. agencies are evolved by which processes of production, distribution, and exchange are carried on. trades and professions are called into existence. as enlightenment and skill increase, men become more difficult to please. they demand the best work, and the best work can be done, as a rule, only by specialists. specialization thus becomes a characteristic of civilization. the patriarch is both king and priest. in greece and rome, religion is a function of the state. in the middle age, the church and the state coalesce, and form such an intimate union that the special domain of either is invaded by both. but differentiation finally takes place, and we all learn to distinguish between the things of cæsar and the things of god. this separation has far-reaching results. in asserting its independence, the state was driven to use argument as well as force. thus learning, which in the confusion that succeeded the incursions of the barbarians was cultivated almost exclusively by ecclesiastics, grew to be of interest and importance to laymen. they began to study, and the subjects which most engaged their thoughts were not religious, in the accepted sense of the word. the protestant rebellion is but a phase of this revolution. it began with the introduction of the literature of greece into western europe. the spirit of inquiry and mental curiosity was thereby awakened in wider circles; enthusiasm for the truth and beauty to which greek genius has given the most perfect expression, was aroused; and interest in intellectual and artistic culture was called forth. new ideals were upheld to fresh and wondering minds. the contagion spread, and the thirst for knowledge was carried to ever-widening spheres. it thus came to pass that the cleric and the scholar ceased to be identical. the boundaries of knowledge were enlarged when the inductive method was applied to the study of nature, and it soon became impossible for one man to pretend to a mastery of all science. and so the principle of the division of labor was introduced into things of the intellect. of old, the prophet or the philosopher was supposed to possess all wisdom; but now it had become plain that proficiency could be hoped for only by lifelong devotion to some special branch of knowledge. this led to other developments. the business of teaching, which had been almost exclusively in the hands of ecclesiastics, was now necessarily taken up by laymen also. as feudalism fell to decay, and the assertion of popular rights began to point to the advent of democracy, the movement in opposition to privilege logically led to the claim that learning should no longer be held to be the appanage of special classes, but that the gates of the temple of knowledge should be thrown open to the whole people. to make education universal, the most ready and the simplest means was to levy a school tax; and as this could be done only by the state, the state established systems of education and assumed the office of teacher. the result of all this has been that the school, which throughout christendom is the creation of the church, has in most countries very largely passed into the control of the civil government. this transference of control need not, however, involve the exclusion of religious influence and instruction; though once the state has gained the ascendency, the natural tendency is to take a partial and secular view of the whole question of education, and to limit the functions of the school to the training of the mental faculties. and, as a matter of fact, this tendency is found in men of widely differing and even conflicting opinions and convictions concerning religion itself. it is most pronounced, however, in the educational theories and systems of positivists and agnostics. as they hold that there is no god, or that we cannot know that there is a god, they necessarily conclude that it is absurd to attempt to teach children anything about god. this view is forcibly expressed by issaurat, a french writer on education, in a recently published volume, which he calls "the evolution and history of pedagogy." "all religion," he affirms, in the concluding chapter of his book, "impedes, thwarts, misdirects, and troubles the natural education of man, the normal and harmonious development of his physical, moral, and intellectual faculties; and since educational reform is not possible without reformation in the government, it is the duty of the state, not merely to separate itself from the church, but to suppress the church and to found the science of education upon biological philosophy, upon transformism--let us say the word, upon materialism." this view is manifestly the inevitable result of issaurat's general system of thought and belief. in his opinion, matter alone really exists, and what is called spirit is but a phase of its evolution. the world of spirit, therefore, is illusory; and to bring up the young to believe that it is the infinite, essential reality, is to teach them what is false, and to give a wrong direction to the whole course of life. for practical purposes this is the view not only of materialists and positivists, but of agnostics as well, who, though they do not deny the existence of spirit, assert that only the phenomenal can be known, or become the subject-matter of teaching. they all agree in holding that the theological world-view was the primitive one, which, yielding to the metaphysical, has been finally superseded by the scientific, the sole basis of a rational philosophy. the ideas of god, substance, cause, and end, are metaphysical ideas, which, if we wish to understand nature, must be ignored; for the study of nature is the study simply of facts and their relations with one another. there is, so they think, no such thing as substance, any more than there is such a thing as a principle of gravity, heat, light, electricity, or chemical affinity. the vital principle too, which has played so great a part in physiological inquiries, must be given up; and therefore, while nearly all the philosophers, from kant to our own day, have made psychology the foundation of the science of education, there is at present a marked tendency to have it rest solely on biology. whether and to what extent these theories are true or false, is beyond the purpose of this argument. true or false, they fairly describe the views of a large number of thinkers in our day, and enable us to form a conception of their philosophy of education. "why trouble ourselves," asks professor huxley, "about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing? with a view to our duty in this life, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent that is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events." our volition counts as a condition, but it is after all only a part of the course of events, and, consequently, the only belief it is necessary to hold is, that the course of events is ascertainable by our faculties to a practically unlimited extent. such is the brief creed of materialists and agnostics. the order of nature is the only known god, and man's sole end and duty is to make himself acquainted with it, that through obedience he may attain the highest perfection and happiness of which he is capable. this is the one true religion, and an enlightened people should forbid that any other be taught in their schools. here we have an intelligible and well-defined position, and the one which, from the point of view of such men as issaurat and huxley, is alone tenable. every one now, who thinks at all, has some theory of the world, and hence the shades of unbelief as of belief are many; and since views of education are part of a more general system of philosophy, it is inevitable that those who disagree upon the fundamental questions of thought, disagree also in their notions as to what is the school's proper office. materialists, pantheists, positivists, secularists, and pessimists unite in denying that there is a god above and distinct from nature, while agnostics and cosmists affirm that such a being, if he exist, must necessarily lie outside the domain of knowledge. positive religious doctrines, therefore, are superstition. as these views are reflected in a more or less vague way in the writings of the multitude of those who make the current literature, public opinion becomes averse to religious dogmas. a large number of cultivated minds turn from all definite systems, whether of thought or belief. everything may be tolerated, if only the spirit of dogmatism is away. they recognize how great a thing religion is, how profoundly it touches life, how powerfully it shapes conduct. without it, civilization is hard and mechanical, art is formal and feeble, and man himself but a shrewd animal. but, from their points of view, doctrines about god and christ and the church have nothing to do with religion. to think of god as substance is to convert him into nature, to think of him as a person is to limit him. the only absolute is the moral order of the world. the religion of christ is not a theory or a system of thought; it is a view of life, and its essence is found in belief in the reality of moral ideas. the supernatural may fall away,--even the notion of a providence which rules the world in the interest of the good may be given up,--and we still have the method and the secret of jesus, all that is of value in his life and teaching. all theology is an illusion, all creeds are a mistake. religion rests upon the moral power, which is not a conclusion drawn from facts, but the fact itself,--the primal and essential fact in human life. religion is simply morality suffused by the glow and warmth of a devout and reverent temper, and to teach doctrines about god and the church will not make men religious. it is obvious to object that morality supposes belief in a personal god and in the soul of man, as law implies a law-giver. this objection is meaningless, not only for the thinkers whom i have mentioned, but for others who find little interest in the literary and religious ideas of such men as matthew arnold. morality, they claim, is independent, not only of metaphysics, but of religion as well. it is a science, as yet, indeed, imperfectly developed, but a science nevertheless, just as chemistry or physiology is a science. human acts are controlled, not by a higher will or man's freedom of choice, but by physical laws. the peculiarity of this view does not lie in the contention that ethics is a science, but in the claim that it is a science altogether independent of metaphysical and religious dogmas. all forces, it is asserted, physical, mental, and moral, are identical; and morality, like bodily vigor, is a product of organism. it is, in fact, but an elaboration of the two radical instincts of nutrition and propagation, from which springs the twofold movement of conscious life, the egoistic and the altruistic. this theory is accepted alike in the german school of materialism, in the french school of positivism, and in the english school of utilitarianism. what the influence of modern empiricism upon american opinion may be, it is difficult to determine. americans certainly are a practical people, but they are not devoid of interest in speculative views. more than any other people, possibly, they have faith in the marvellous things which science is destined to accomplish, and they willingly listen to men of science, even when they quit the regions of fact for those of opinion. thus the various theories, to which the progress of natural knowledge has given rise, are received by them, if not with implicit trust, with a kind of feeling, at least, that they may be true. there is even a disposition to treat doubts of the truth of christianity as a mark of intellectual vigor, and sometimes as a sign of religious sincerity. preoccupied with material interests, but yet finding time to read the thoughts of many minds and to hear the discussion of antagonistic opinions and systems, they find it difficult to trust with entire confidence to what they know or believe. it all seems to be relative, and another generation may see everything in a different light. problems take the place of principles, religious convictions are feeble, the grasp of christian truth is relaxed, and the result is a certain moral hesitancy and infirmity. they are not hostile to the churches, but they are more or less indifferent to their doctrines. as each sect has its peculiar creed, the dogmatic position of the church is thought to be of little moment. the important thing is to promote intelligence and virtue. the distinctively sectarian view they look upon as narrow and false, and the good which ecclesiastical organizations do is done in spite of their characteristic doctrines. the note of sectarianism is to them what the note of provincialism is to a man of culture, or lack of breeding to a gentleman. the moral fervor, which sectarians more than others feel, is, they freely grant, a power for good. it has a wholesome influence upon character, and is a support of the virtues which make free institutions possible, and which alone can make them permanent. but it has no necessary connection with theological doctrines, since it is found in earnest believers, whatever their creed. it is the child of enthusiastic faith, and is nourished and kept living by worship, not by dogmatic asseverations. as the power of the churches does not lie in their creeds, to make these creeds a school lesson cannot be desirable, especially when we reflect that the method of religion and the method of science are at variance. such, i imagine, are the views of large numbers of americans, who are not members of any church, but whose influence is strongly felt in political and commercial as well as in social and professional life. and numbers of zealous protestants are in substantial agreement with them, since they hold that faith is an emotional rather than an intellectual state of mind, and that religion is not so much a way of thinking as a way of feeling and acting. they assume, of course, as the prerequisites of religious belief, the dogmas of the existence of a personal god and of an immortal human soul; but, for the rest, they lay stress upon conduct and piety, not upon orthodox faith. a church must have a creed, as a party must have a platform; but unhesitating confidence in the truth of the doctrines which it thus formulates is not indispensable. american churches tend to ignore creeds. this is due, in a measure, to the growing desire to form a union among the several sects; but it is none the less a sign of waning belief in dogmatic religion. hence the increasing emphasis which preaching lays upon the moral, æsthetic, and emotional aspects of the religious life. hence, too, the assumption that the soul of the church may live, though the body be dead. but, apart from all theories and systems of belief and thought, public opinion in america sets strongly against the denominational school. the question of education is considered from a practical rather than from a theoretical point of view, and public sentiment on the subject may be embodied in the following words: the civilized world now recognizes the necessity of popular education. in a government of the people, such as this is, intelligence should be universal. in such a government, to be ignorant is not merely to be weak, it is also to be dangerous to the common welfare; for the ignorant are not only the victims of circumstances, they are the instruments which unscrupulous and designing men make use of, to taint the source of political authority and to thwart the will of the people. to protect itself, the state is forced to establish schools and to see that all acquire at least the rudiments of letters. this is so plain a case that argument becomes ridiculous. they who doubt the good of knowledge are not to be reasoned with, and in america not to see that it is necessary, is to know nothing of our political, commercial, and social life. but the american state can give only a secular education, for it is separate from the church, and its citizens profess such various and even conflicting beliefs, that in establishing a school system, it is compelled to eliminate the question of religion. church and state are separate institutions, and their functions are different and distinct. the church seeks to turn men from sin, that they may become pleasing to god and save their souls; the state takes no cognizance of sin, but strives to prevent crime, and to secure to all its citizens the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. americans are a christian people. religious zeal impelled their ancestors to the new world, and when schools were first established here, they were established by the churches, and religious instruction formed an important part of the education they gave. this was natural, and it was desirable even, in primitive times, when each colony had its own creed and worship, when society was simple, and the state as yet imperfectly organized. here, as in the old world, the school was the daughter of the church, and she has doubtless rendered invaluable service to civilization, by fostering a love for knowledge among barbarous races and in struggling communities. but the task of maintaining a school system such as the requirements of a great and progressive nation demands, is beyond her strength. this is so, at least, when the church is split into jealous and warring sects. to introduce the spirit of sectarianism into the class-room would destroy the harmony and good-will among citizens, which it is one of the aims of the common school to cherish. there is, besides, no reason why this should be done, since the family and the church give all the religious instruction which children are capable of receiving. this, it seems to me, is a fair presentation of the views and ideas which go to the making of current american opinion on the question of religious instruction in state schools; and current opinion, when the subject-matter is not susceptible of physical demonstration, cannot be turned suddenly in an opposite direction. when men have grown accustomed to look at things in a certain way, they have acquired a mental habit, which no mere argument, however cogent or eloquent, is able to overcome. to what extent this view of the school question prevails is readily perceived by whoever recalls to mind that not one of the states of the union has attempted to introduce the denominational system of education, while all the political parties have bound themselves to uphold the present purely secular system. the opinion that the prosperity of the nation depends upon the intelligence and activity of the people, and to no appreciable extent upon the influence of ecclesiastical organizations, has so far prevailed, that the general feeling has come to be that the state has no direct interest in the church, which is the concern merely of individuals. the religious denominations themselves have helped to inspire this sentiment by their jealousies and rivalries. the smaller sects feel that state aid for denominational schools would accrue to the benefit chiefly of the larger; and the others are willing to forego favors which they could not receive without permitting the catholic church to participate also in the bounty of the government. the catholic view of the school question is as clearly defined as it is well known. it rests upon the general ground that man is created for a supernatural end, and that the church is the divinely appointed agency to help him to attain his supreme destiny. if education is a training for completeness of life, its primary element is the religious, for complete life is life in god. hence we may not assume an attitude toward the child, whether in the home, in the church, or in the school, which might imply that life apart from god could be anything else than broken and fragmentary. a complete man is not one whose mind only is active and enlightened; but he is a complete man who is alive in all his faculties. the truly human is found not in knowledge alone, but also in faith, in hope, in love, in pure-mindedness, in reverence, in the sense of beauty, in devoutness, in the thrill of awe, which goethe says is the highest thing in man. if the teacher is forbidden to touch upon religion, the source of these noble virtues and ideal moods is sealed. his work and influence become mechanical, and he will form but commonplace and vulgar men. and if an educational system is established on this narrow and material basis, the result will be deterioration of the national type, and the loss of the finer qualities which make men many-sided and interesting, which are the safeguards of personal purity and of unselfish conduct. religion is the vital element in character, and to treat it as though it were but an incidental phase of man's life is to blunder in a matter of the highest and most serious import. man is born to act, and thought is valuable mainly as a guide to action. now, the chief inspiration to action, and above all to right action, is found in faith, hope, and love, the virtues of religion, and not in knowledge, the virtue of the intellect. knowledge, indeed, is effectual only when it is loved, believed in, and held to be a ground for hope. man does not live on bread alone, and if he is brought up to look to material things, as to the chief good, his higher faculties will be stunted. if to do rightly rather than to think keenly is man's chief business here on earth, then the virtues of religion are more important than those of the intellect; for to think is to be unresolved, whereas to believe is to be impelled in the direction of one's faith. in epochs of doubt things fall to decay; in epochs of faith the powers which make for full and vigorous life, hold sway. the education which forms character is indispensable, that which trains the mind is desirable. the essential element in human life is conduct, and conduct springs from what we believe, cling to, love, and yearn for, vastly more than from what we know. the decadence and ruin of individuals and of societies come from lack of virtue, not from lack of knowledge. "the hard and valuable part of education," says locke, "is virtue; this is the solid and substantial good, which the teacher should never cease to inculcate till the young man places his strength, his glory, and his pleasure in it." we may, of course, distinguish between morality and religion, between ethics and theology. as a matter of fact, however, moral laws have everywhere reposed upon the basis of religion, and their sanction has been sought in the principles of faith. as an immoral religion is false, so, if there is no god, a moral law is meaningless. theorists may be able to construct a system of ethics upon a foundation of materialism; but their mechanical and utilitarian doctrines have not the power to exalt the imagination or to confirm the will. their educational value is feeble. here in america we have already passed the stage of social development in which we might hold out to the young, as an ideal, the hope of becoming president of the republic, or the possessor of millions of money. we know what sorry men presidents and millionnaires may be. we cannot look upon our country simply as a wide race-course with well-filled purses hanging at the goal for the prize-winners. we clearly perceive that a man's possessions are not himself, and that he is or ought to be more than anything which can belong to him. ideals of excellence, therefore, must be substituted for those of success. opinion governs the world, but ideals draw souls and stimulate to noble action. the more we transform with the aid of machinery the world of matter, the more necessary does it become that we make plain to all that man's true home is the world of thought and love, of hope and aspiration. the ideals of utilitarianism and secularism are unsatisfactory. they make no appeal to the infinite in man, to that in him which makes pursuit better than possession, and which, could he believe there is no absolute truth, love, and beauty, would lead him to despair. to-day, as of old, the soul is born of god and for god, and finds no peace unless it rest in him. theology, assuredly, is not religion; but religion implies theology, and a church without a creed is a body without articulation. the virtues of religion are indispensable. without them, it is not well either with individuals or with nations; but these virtues cannot be inculcated by those who, standing aloof from ecclesiastical organizations, are thereby cut off from the thought and work of all who in every age have most loved god, and whose faith in the soul has been most living. religious men have wrought for god in the church, as patriots have wrought for liberty and justice in the nation; and to exclude the representatives of the churches from the school is practically to exclude religion,--the power which more than all others makes for righteousness, which inspires hope and confidence, which makes possible faith in the whole human brotherhood, in the face even of the political and social wrongs which are still everywhere tolerated. to exclude religion is to exclude the spirit of reverence, of gentleness and obedience, of modesty and purity; it is to exclude the spirit by which the barbarians have been civilized, by which woman has been uplifted and ennobled and the child made sacred. from many sides the demand is made that the state schools exercise a greater moral influence, that they be made efficient in forming character as well as in training the mind. it is recognized that knowing how to read and write does not insure good behavior. since the state assumes the office of teacher, there is a disposition among parents to make the school responsible for their children's morals as well as for their minds, and thus the influence of the home is weakened. whatever the causes may be, there seems to be a tendency, both in private and in public life, to lower ethical standards. the moral influence of the secular school is necessarily feeble, since our ideas of right and wrong are so interfused with the principles of christianity that to ignore our religious convictions is practically to put aside the question of conscience. if the state may take no cognizance of sin, neither may its school do so. but in morals sin is the vital matter; crime is but its legal aspect. men begin as sinners before they end as criminals. the atmosphere of religion is the natural medium for the development of character. if we appeal to the sense of duty, we assume belief in god and in the freedom of the will; if we strive to awaken enthusiasm for the human brotherhood, we imply a divine fatherhood. accordingly, as we accept or reject the doctrines of religion, the sphere of moral action, the nature of the distinction between right and wrong, and the motives of conduct all change. in the purely secular school only secular morality may be taught; and whatever our opinion of this system of ethics may otherwise be, it is manifestly deficient in the power which appeals to the heart and the conscience. the child lives in a world which imagination creates, where faith, hope, and love beckon to realms of beauty and delight. the spiritual and moral truths which are to become the very life-breath of his soul he apprehends mystically, not logically. heaven lies about him; he lives in wonderland, and feels the thrill of awe as naturally as he looks with wide-open eyes. do not seek to persuade him by telling him that honesty is the best policy, that poverty overtakes the drunkard, that lechery breeds disease, that to act for the common welfare is the surest way to get what is good for one's self; for such teaching will not only leave him unimpressed, but it will seem to him profane, and almost immoral. he wants to feel that he is the child of god, of the infinitely good and all-wonderful; that in his father, divine wisdom and strength are revealed; in his mother, divine tenderness and love. he so believes and trusts in god that it is our fault if he knows that men can be base. in nothing does the godlike character of christ show forth more beautifully than in his reverence for children. shall we profess to believe in him, and yet forbid his name to be spoken in the houses where we seek to train the little ones whom he loved? shall we shut out him whose example has done more to humanize, ennoble, and uplift the race of man than all the teachings of the philosophers and all the disquisitions of the moralists? if the thinkers, from plato and aristotle to kant and pestalozzi, who have dealt with the problems of education, have held that virtue is its chief aim and end, shall we thrust from the school the one ideal character who, for nearly nineteen hundred years, has been the chief inspiration to righteousness and heroism; to whose words patriots and reformers have appealed in their struggles for liberty and right; to whose example philanthropists have looked in their labors to alleviate suffering; to whose teaching the modern age owes its faith in the brotherhood of men; by whose courage and sympathy the world has been made conscious that the distinction between man and woman is meant for the propagation of the race, but that as individuals they have equal rights and should have equal opportunities? we all, and especially the young, are influenced by example more than by precepts and maxims, and it is unjust and unreasonable to exclude from the schoolroom the living presence of the noblest and best men and women, of those whose words and deeds have created our christian civilization. in the example of their lives we have truth and justice, goodness and greatness, in concrete form; and the young who are brought into contact with these centres of influence will be filled with admiration and enthusiasm; they will be made gentle and reverent; and they will learn to realize the ever-fresh charm and force of personal purity. teachers who have no moral criteria, no ideals, no counsels of perfection, no devotion to god and godlike men, cannot educate, if the proper meaning of education is the complete unfolding of all man's powers. the school, of course, is but one of the many agencies by which education is given. we are under the influence of our whole environment,--physical, moral, and intellectual; political, social, and religious; and if, in all this, aught were different, we ourselves should be other. the family is a school and the church is a school; and current american opinion assigns to them the business of moral and religious education. but this implies that conduct and character are of secondary importance; it supposes that the child may be made subject to opposite influences at home and in the school, and not thereby have his finer sense of reverence, truth, and goodness deadened. the subduing of the lower nature, of the outward to the inner man, is a thing so arduous that reason, religion, and law combined often fail to accomplish it. if one should propose to do away with schools altogether, and to leave education to the family and the church, he would be justly considered ridiculous; because the carelessness of parents and the inability of the ministry of the church would involve the prevalence of illiteracy. now, to leave moral and religious education to the family and the churches involves, for similar reasons, the prevalence of indifference, sin, and crime. if illiteracy is a menace to free institutions, vice and irreligion are a greater menace. the corrupt are always bad citizens; the ignorant are not necessarily so. parents who would not have their children taught to read and write, were there no free schools, will as a rule neglect their religious and moral education. in giving religious instruction to the young, the churches are plainly at a disadvantage; for they have the child but an hour or two in seven days, and they get into their sunday classes only the children of the more devout. if the chief end of education is virtue; if conduct is three-fourths of life; if character is indispensable, while knowledge is only useful,--then it follows that religion--which, more than any other vital influence, has power to create virtue, to inspire conduct, and to mould character--should enter into all the processes of education. our school system, then, does not rest upon a philosophic view of life and education. we have done what it was easiest to do, not what it was best to do; and in this, as in other instances, churchmen have been willing to sacrifice the interests of the nation to the whims of a narrow and jealous temper. the denominational system of popular education is the right system. the secular system is a wrong system. the practical difficulties to be overcome that religious instruction may be given in the schools are relatively unimportant, and would be set aside if the people were thoroughly persuaded of its necessity. an objection which dr. harris, among others, insists upon, that the method of science and the method of religion are dissimilar, and that therefore secular knowledge and religious knowledge should not be taught in the same school, seems to me to have no weight. the method of mathematics is not the method of biology; the method of logic is not the method of poetry; but they are all taught in the same school. a good teacher, in fact, employs many methods. in teaching the child grammatical analysis, he has no fear of doing harm to his imagination or his talent for composition. no system, however, can give assurance that the school is good. to determine this we must know the spirit which lives in it. the intellectual, moral, and religious atmosphere which the child breathes there is of far more importance, from an educational point of view, than any doctrines he may learn by rote, than any acts of worship he may perform. the teacher makes the school; and when high, pure, devout, and enlightened men and women educate, the conditions favorable to mental and moral growth will be found, provided a false system does not compel them to assume a part and play a role, while the true self--the faith, hope, and love whereby they live--is condemned to inaction. the deeper tendency of the present age is not, i think, to exclude religion from any vital process, but rather to widen the content of the idea of religion until it embrace the whole life of man. the worship of god is not now the worship of infinite wisdom, holiness, and justice alone, but is also the worship of the humane, the beautiful, and the industriously active. whether we work for knowledge or freedom, or purity or strength, or beauty or health, or aught else that is friendly to completeness of life, we work with god and for god. in the school, as in whatever other place in the boundless universe a man may find himself, he finds himself with god, in him moves, lives, and has his being. chapter vii. the higher education.[ ] [ ] a discourse pronounced at the third plenary council of baltimore, which, being enforced by the offer of three hundred thousand dollars by miss caldwell, led to the founding of the university at washington. the subject which i have been asked to treat is the higher education of priests; which, i suppose, is the highest education of man, since the ideal of the christian priest is the most exalted, his vocation the most sublime, his office the most holy, his duties the most spiritual, and his mission--whether we consider its relation to morality, which is the basis of individual and social welfare, or to religion, which is the promise and the secret of immortal and godlike life--is the most important and the most sacred which can be assigned to a human being. religion and education--like religion and morality--are nearly related. pure religion, indeed, is more than right education; and yet it may be said with truth that it is but a part of the best education, for it co-operates with other forces--with climate, custom, social conditions, and political institutions--to develop and fashion the complete man; and the special instruction of teachers--which is the narrow meaning of the word--is modified, and to a great extent controlled, by these powers which work unseen, and are the vital agents that make possible all conscious educational efforts. the faith we hold, the laws we obey, the domestic and social customs to which our thoughts and loves are harmonized, the climate we live in, mould our characters and give to our souls a deeper and more lasting tinge than any school, though it were the best. my subject, however, does not demand that i consider these general and silent agencies by which life is influenced, but leads me to the discussion of the methods by which man, with conscious purpose, seeks to form and instruct his fellow-man; to the discussion of the special education which brings art to the aid of nature, and becomes the auxiliary and guide of the other forces which contribute to the development of our being. in this age, when all who think at all turn their thoughts to questions of education, it is needless to call attention to the interest of the subject, which, like hope, is immortal, and fresh as the innocent face of laughing childhood. is not the school for all men a shrine to which their pilgrim thoughts return to catch again the glow and gladness of a world wherein they lived by faith and hope and love when round the morning sun of life the golden purple clouds were hanging, and earth lay hidden in mist, beneath which the soul created a new paradise? to the opening mind all things are young and fair; and to remember the delight that accompanied the gradual dawn of knowledge upon our mental vision, sweet and beautiful as the upglowing of day from the bosom of night, is to be forever thankful for the gracious power of education. and is there not in all hearts a deep and abiding yearning for great and noble men, and therefore an imperishable interest in the power by which they are moulded? when fathers and mothers look upon the fair blossoming children that cling to them as the vine wraps its tendrils round the spreading bough, and when their great love fills them with ineffable longing to shield these tender souls from the blighting blasts of a cold and stormy world, and little by little to prepare them to stand alone and breast the gales of fortune, do they not instinctively put their trust in the power of education? when, at the beginning of the present century, germany lay prostrate at the feet of napoleon, the wise and the patriotic among her children yielded not to despondency, but turned with confidence to truer methods and systems of education, and assiduous teaching and patient waiting finally brought them to sedan. when, in the sixteenth century, heresy and schism seemed near to final victory over the church, pope julius iii. declared that the evils and abuses of the times were the outgrowth of the shameful ignorance of the clergy, and that the chief hope of the dawning of a brighter day lay in general and thorough ecclesiastical education. and the catholic leaders who finally turned back the advancing power of protestantism, re-established the church in half the countries in which it had been overthrown, and converted more souls in america and asia than had been lost in europe, belonged to the greatest educational body the world has ever seen. what is history but examples of success through knowledge and righteousness, and of failure through lack of understanding and of virtue? wherein lies the superiority of civilized races over barbarians if not in their greater knowledge and superior strength of character? and what but education has placed in the hands of man the thousand natural forces which he holds as a charioteer his well-reined steeds, bidding the winds carry him to distant lands, making steam his tireless, ever-ready slave, and commanding the lightning to speak his words to the ends of the earth? what else than this has taught him to map the boundless heavens, to read the footprints of god in the crust of the earth ages before human beings lived, to measure the speed of light, to weigh the imperceptible atom, to split up all natural compounds, to create innumerable artificial products with which he transforms the world and with a grain of powder marches like a conquering god around the globe? what converts the meaningless babbling of the child into the stately march of oratoric phrase or the rhythmic flow of poetic language? what has developed the rude stone and bronze implements of savage and barbarous hordes into the miraculous machinery which we use? by what power has man been taught to carve the shapeless rock into an image of ideal beauty, or with it to build his thought into a temple of god, where the soul instinctively prostrates itself in adoration? is not all this, together with whatever else is excellent in human works, the result of education, which gives to man a second nature with more admirable endowments? and is not religion itself a kind of celestial education, which trains the soul to godlike life? no progress in things divine or human is made by man except through effort, and effort is the power and the law of education. the maxim of the spiritual writers that not to struggle upward and onward is to be drawn downward, applies to every phase of our life. whence do we derive strength of soul but from the uplifting of the mind and heart to god which we call prayer? to pray is to think, to attend, to hold the mind lovingly to its object; and this is what we do when we study. hence prayer, which is the voice of religion, is a part of education,--nay, its very soul, breathing on all the chords of life, till their thousand dissonances meet in rhythmic harmony. what is the pulpit but the holiest teacher's chair that has been placed upon the earth? and as the presence of a noble character is a more potent influence than words, so sacramental communion with christ is man's chief school of faith, of hope, and love. there are worthy persons who turn, as from an unholy thought, from the emphatic announcement of the need of the best human qualities for the proper defence of the cause of god in the world. such speech seems to them to be vain and unreal; for god is all in all, and man is nothing. but in our day it is easier to go astray in the direction of self-annihilation than in that of self-assertion; since the common tendency now of all false philosophies is pantheistic, and issues in unconscious contempt of individual life. if man is but a bubble, merging forth and re-absorbed, without past or future, then indeed both he, and what he seems to do, sink into the eternal flow of matter, and are undeserving of a thought. this certainly is not the christian view, to which man is revealed as a lesser god, and co-worker with the eternal, whose thought can reach the infinite, and whose will can oppose that of the omnipotent. in christ, god co-operates with man for the salvation of the world; and in the church, man co-operates with god to this same end. the more complete the man, the more fit is he to work with god. even bodily disfigurement is looked upon as an obstacle; how much more, then, shall lack of intelligence and want of heart render us unworthy of the divine office? i certainly shall never deny that love, which the apostle exalts above faith and hope, is higher also than knowledge. the light of the mind is as that of the moon--fair and soft and soothing, without heat, without the power to call forth and nourish life; but the light of the soul, which is love, is the sunlight, whose kiss, like a word of god, makes the dead to live, and clothes the world in strength and beauty. character is more than intellect, love is more than knowledge, religion is more than morality; and a great heart brings us closer to god, nearer to all goodness, than a bright mind. education is essentially moral, and the intellectual qualities themselves, which we seek to develop, derive their chief efficacy from underlying ethical qualities upon which they rest and from which they receive their energy and the power of self-control. inequality of will is the great cause of inequality of mind; and the will is strengthened by the practice of virtue, as the body by food and exercise. if this is a general truth, with what special force must it not apply to the ministers of a religion the paramount and ceaseless aim of which is to make men holy, so that at times it has almost seemed as though the church were indifferent as to whether they are learned or beautiful or strong? she pronounces no man a doctor unless he be also a saint; and when i insist that the priest shall possess the best mental culture of his age,--that without this he fights with broken weapons, speaks with harsh voice a language men will neither hear nor understand, teaches truths which, having not the freshness and the glow of truth, neither kindle the heart nor fire the imagination,--i do not forget that, without the moral earnestness which is born of faith and purity of life, mere cultivation of mind will not give him power to unseal the fountains of living waters which refresh the garden of god. the universal harmony is felt by a pure heart better than it can be perceived by a keen intellect. to a sinless soul the darker side even of life and nature is not wholly dark, and the mental difficulties which the existence of evil involves in no way weaken the consciousness of the essential goodness that lies at the heart of all things. in the religious, as in the moral world, men trust to what we are rather than to what we say, and the teacher of spiritual truth is never strong, unless his life and character inspire a confidence which arguments alone do not create; for in questions that reach beyond the sphere of sensation, we feel that insight is better than reasons, and hence we instinctively prefer the testimony of a god-like soul to the conclusions of a cultivated mind: and indeed our blessed lord ever assumes that the obstacle to the perception of divine truth is moral and not intellectual. the pure of heart see god; the evil-doer loves darkness and shuns the light. st. paul goes even farther, and associates mental cultivation with a tendency directly opposed to religious faith, which is humble. "knowledge puffeth up." but the words of the apostle should not be stretched beyond his purpose, which is to point to pride as a special danger of the intellectual as sensuality is a danger of the ignorant. for man to have aught is to run a risk, and hence to do as little as possible is in the thought of the timid a mark of prudence. and indeed, if fear be nearer to wisdom than courage, then should we fear everything, for danger is everywhere. a breath may sow the seed of death; a look may slay the soul. in knowledge, in ignorance, in strength, in weakness, in wealth, in poverty, in genius, in stupidity, in company, in solitude, in innocence itself, danger lurks. but god does not abolish life that danger may cease to be; and they who put their trust in him will not seek to darken the mind lest knowledge lead man astray, but will rather in a righteous cause make the venture of all things, as st. ignatius preferred the hope of saving others to the certainty of his own salvation. and may we not maintain, since we hold that there is no inappeasable conflict between god and nature, between the soul and matter, between revelation and science, that the apparent antagonism lies in our apprehension, and not in things themselves, and consequently that reconcilement is to be sought for through the help of thoroughly trained minds? the poet speaks the truth, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." they who know but little and imperfectly, see but their knowledge, if so it may be called, and walk in innocent unconsciousness of their infinite nescience. the narrower the range of our mental vision, the greater the obstinacy with which we cling to our opinions; and the half-educated, like the weak and the incompetent, are often contentious, but whosoever is able to do his work does it, and finds no time for dispute. he who possesses a disciplined mind, and is familiar with the best thoughts that live in the great literatures, will be the last to attach undue importance to his own thinking. a sense of decency and a kind of holy shame will keep him far from angry and unprofitable controversy; nor will he mistake a crotchet for a panacea, nor imagine that irritation is enlightenment. the blessings of a cultivated mind are akin to those of religion. they are larger liberty, wider life, purer delights, and a juster sense of the relative values of the means and ends which lie within our reach. knowledge, like religion, leads us away from what appears to what is, from what passes to what remains, from what flatters the senses to that which speaks to the soul. wisdom and religion converge, as love and knowledge meet in god; and to the wise as to the religious man, no great evil can happen. into prison they both carry the sweet company of their thoughts, their faith and hope, and are freer in chains than the great in palaces. in death they are in the midst of life, for they see that what they know and love is imperishable, nor subject even to atomic disintegration. he who lives in the presence of truth yearns not for the company of men, but loves retirement as a saint loves solitude; and in times like ours, when men no longer choose the desert for a dwelling-place, the passionate desire of intellectual excellence co-operates with religious faith to guard them against dissipation and to lift them above the spirit of the age. the thinker is never lonely, as he who lives with god is never unhappy. is not the love of excellence, which is the scholar's love, a part of the love of goodness which makes the saint? and are not intellectual delights akin to those religion brings? they are pure, they elevate, they refine; time only increases their charm, and in the winter of age, when the body is but the agent of pain, contemplation still remains like the light of a higher world, to tinge with beauty the clouds that gather around life's setting. how narrow and monotonous is sensation! how wide and various is thought! they who live in the senses are fettered and ill at ease; they who live in the soul are free and joyful. and since the priest, unless he be a saint, must have, like other men, some human joy, and since he dwells not in the sacred circle of the love of wife and children, in which the multitudes find repose and contentment, what solace, what refreshment, in the midst of cares and labors, shall we offer him? if there be aught for him that is not unworthy or dangerous, except the pleasures of the mind, to me it is unknown; and though a well-trained intellect should do no more than to enable us to take delight in pure and noble objects, it would be a chief help to worthy life. and when the whole tendency of our social existence is to draw men out of themselves and to make them seek the good of life in what is external, as money, display, position, renown, is it not a gain, if, while we open their minds to the charm of intellectual beauty, we make them see that this eager striving for wealth and place is a vulgar chase? and does not the spirit of refinement in thought, in speech, in manner, add worth and fairness to him whom it inspires, though the motive which preserves him from what is low or gross be no higher than a fastidious delicacy and self-respect? to deny the moral influence of intellectual culture is as great an error as to affirm that it alone is a sufficient safeguard of morality. its tendency unquestionably is to make men gentle, amiable, fair-minded, truthful, benevolent, modest, sober. it curbs ambition and teaches resignation; chastens the imagination and mitigates ferocity; dissuades from duelling because it is barbarous, and from war because it is cruel, and from persecution because it trusts in the prevalence of reason. it seeks to fit the mind and the character to the world, to all possible circumstances, so that whatever happens we remain ourselves,--calm, clear-seeing, able to do and to suffer. at great heights, or in the presence of irresistible force, as of a mighty waterfall, we grow dizzy; and in the same way, in the midst of multitudes, in the eagerness of strife, in the whirlwind of passion, equipoise is lost, and we cease to be ourselves, to become part of an aggregate of forces that hurry us on, whither we know not. to be able to stand in the presence of such power, and to feel its influence, and yet not to lose self-possession, is to be strong; is, on proper occasion, to be great. and the aim of the best education is to teach us the secret and the method of this complete self-control; and in so far it is not only moral, but also religious, though religion walks in a more royal road, and bids us love god and trust so absolutely in him that life and death become equal, and all the ways and workings of men as the storm to one who on lofty mountain peak, amid the blue heavens, with the sunlight around him and the quiet breathing of the winds, sees far below, as in another world, the black clouds and lurid lightning flash and hears the roll of distant thunder. it is far from my thought, it is needless to say, that mental cultivation can be made to take the place or do the work of religion, even in the case of the very few for whom the best discipline of mind is possible. my aim is simply to show that the type of character which it tends to create is not necessarily at variance with religious principle and life, as is, for instance, that of the mere worldling; but that it conspires with christian faith to produce, if not the same, at least similar virtues, though its ethical influence is comparatively superficial, and the moral qualities which it produces lack consistency and the power to withstand the fire of the passions. it is enough for my purpose to point out that if intellectualism is often the foe of religious truth, there is no good reason why it should not also be its ally. no excellence, as i conceive, of whatever kind, is rejected by catholic teaching, and the perfection of the mind is not less divine than the perfection of the heart. it is good to know, as it is good to hope, to believe, to love. a cultivated intellect, an open mind, a rich imagination, with correctness of thought, flexibility of view, and eloquent expression, are among the noblest endowments of man; and though they should serve no other purpose than to embellish life, to make it fairer and freer, they would nevertheless be possessions without price, for the most nobly useful things are those which make life good and beautiful. like virtue they are their own reward, and like mercy they bear a double blessing. it is the fashion with many to affect contempt for men of superior culture, because they look upon education as simply a means to tangible ends, and think knowledge valuable only when it can be made to serve practical purposes. this is a narrow and a false view; for all men need the noble and the beautiful, and he who lives without an ideal is hardly a man. our material wants are not the most real for being the most sensible and pressing, and they who create or preserve for us models of spiritual and intellectual excellence are our greatest benefactors. which were the greater loss for england, to be without wellington and nelson, or to be without shakspeare and milton? whatever the answer be, in the one case england would suffer, in the other the whole world would feel the loss. though a thoroughly trained intellect is less worthy of admiration than a noble character, its power is immeasurably greater; for, example can influence but a few and for a short time, but when a truth or a sentiment has once found its best expression, it becomes a part of literature, and like a proverb is current forevermore; and so the kings of thought become immortal rulers, and without their help the godlike deeds of saints and heroes would be buried in oblivion. "words pass," said napoleon, "but deeds remain." the man of action exaggerates the worth of action, but the philosopher knows that to act is easy, to think, difficult; and that great deeds spring from great thoughts. there are words that never grow silent, there are words that have changed the face of the earth, and the warrior's wreath of victory is entwined by the muse's hand. the power of athens is gone, her temples are in ruins, the acropolis is discrowned, and from mars' hill no voice thunders now; but the words of socrates, the great deliverer of the mind, and the father of intellectual culture, still breathe in the thoughts of every cultivated man on earth. the glory of jerusalem has departed, the broken stones of solomon's temple lie hard by the graves that line the brook of kedron, and from the minaret of mount sion the misbeliever's melancholy call sounds like a wail over a lost world; but the songs of david still rise from the whole earth in heavenly concert, upbearing to the throne of god the faith and hope and love of countless millions. and is not the blessed saviour the eternal word? and is not the bible god's word? and is not the gospel the word, which, like an electric thrill, runs to the ends of the world? "currit verbum," says st. paul. "man lives not on bread alone, but on every word that cometh forth from the mouth of god." nay, there is life in all the true and noble thoughts that have blossomed in the mind of genius and filled the earth with fragrance and with fruit. shall i be told that the intellectual cultivation and discipline, which gives to man control of his knowledge, the perfect use of his faculties, justness of perception with ease and grace of expression, cannot bring serviceable advocacy or defence to the cause of divine truth? what does truth need but to be known? and since to reach the mind and heart of man it must be clothed in words, what is so necessary to it as the garb and vesture, the form and color, the warmth and life, which shall so mark it that to be loved it needs but be seen? and who shall so clothe it, if not he who has the freest, the most flexible, the clearest, the best disciplined mind? in the apostolic age, when the manifestations of miraculous power accompanied the announcement of christian doctrine, the lack of the persuasive words of human eloquence was not felt. let him who can drink poison and touch scorpions, and not suffer harm, despise the aid of learning; but for us, who are not so assisted, no cultivation of mind or preparation of heart can be too great; and to appear in the garb of a savage were less unseemly than to speak the holiest and the highest truths in the barbarous tongue of ignorance. our way here cannot be doubtful. either we must hold with certain peculiar heretics that learning is a hindrance to the efficacious teaching of religious truth, or, denying this, we must hold, since mental culture is serviceable, that the best is most serviceable. may we not take this for a principle,--to believe that god does everything, and then to act as though he left everything for us to do? or this: since grace supposes nature, the growth and strength of the church is not wholly independent of the natural endowments of her ministers? as a matter of fact we catholics are constantly speaking and acting upon principles of this kind. we maintain that without a proper education our children must lose the faith; and that without careful moral and mental training no man is likely to become a good priest; and all that i further insist upon is that if he is to do the best work, he must have the best intellectual discipline. in an intellectual age, at least, he cannot be the worthy minister of worship, unless he is also the accomplished teacher of truth. in vain shall we clothe him in rich symbolic vestments, place him in majestic temples, before marble altars, in the midst of solemn music, in the dim sober-tinted light, with the great and noble looking out upon him, as from a spirit world,--in vain shall all this be, if when he himself speaks, his words are felt to be but the echo of a coarse and empty mind. and hence our enemies would gladly leave us the poetry of our worship, would even enter our churches to be comforted, to be soothed, to seek the elevation and enlargement of thought and sentiment which comes upon us in the presence of what is vast, mysterious, and sublime, if we would but confess that it is only poetry, good and beautiful only as art is good and beautiful. the spirit of the time, in fact, it seems to me, is more and more disposed to grant us everything except the possession of intellectual truth. that the catholic church is a marvellous power; that her triumphs have been so enduring and so unexpected that only the foolish or the ignorant will predict her downfall; that she overcame paganism; that she saved christianity when rome fell; that she restrained the ferocity of the barbarians, protected the weak, encouraged labor, preserved the classics, maintained the unity and sanctity of marriage, defended the purity and dignity of woman, espoused the cause of the oppressed, and in a lawless and ignorant age proclaimed the supremacy of right and the worth of learning; that to these signal services must be added her power to give ease and pleasantness to the social relations of men, keeping them equally remote from puritan severity and pagan license; her eye for beauty and grace, which has made her the foster-mother of all the arts; her love of the excellent and the noble, which has enabled her to create types of character that are immortal; her practical wisdom, giving her the secret of dealing with every phase of life, so that her saints are doctors, apostles, mystics, philanthropists, artists, poets, kings, beggars, warriors, peasants, barbarians, philosophers,--all this, if i mistake not, unbelievers even are more and more willing to concede. nor are they slow to express their admiration of the strength and majesty of this single power amid the christian nations, which reaches back to the great civilizations that have perished, which has preserved its organic unity intact amid the social revolutions of two thousand years, and which is acknowledged still to be the greatest moral force in the world. but, underlying all they say and think, is the assumption that the foundations of this noble structure are crumbling; that the world of faith and thought in which it was upbuilt is become a desert where no flower blooms, no living soul is found; that the temple is beautiful only as a ruin is beautiful, where owls hoot and bats flit to and fro. "there is not a creed, we are told, which is not shaken, nor an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable; not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve." the conquests of the human mind in the realms of nature have produced a world-wide ferment of thought, an intellectual activity which is without a parallel. they have increased the power of man to an almost incredible degree, have given him control of the earth and the seas, have placed within his grasp undreamed-of forces, have opened to his view unsuspected mysteries; they have placed him on a new earth and under new heavens, and thrown a light never seen before upon the history of his race. as a part of this vast development new questions have risen, new theories have been broached, new doubts have suggested themselves; and because we have changed, all else seems to have changed also. and since, underlying all questions, there is found a question of religion, the discussion of religious and philosophic problems has, in our day, become a social necessity, and the science of criticism, together with the physical sciences, has driven the disputants upon new and difficult ground, where the battle must be fought, and where retreat is not possible. as well imagine that society will again take on the form of feudalism, as that the human mind will return to the point of view from which our ancestors looked on nature. and this world-view shapes and colors all our thinking, in theology as in other sciences, so that truths which were latent have come to light, and principles which have long been held find new and wider application. never has the defence of religion required so many and such excellent qualities of intellect as in the present day. the early apologists who contrasted the sublimity and purity of christian faith with a corrupt paganism had not a difficult task. in the middle age the intellect of the world was on the side of christ. the controversy which sprang up with the advent of protestantism was biblical and historical, and its criticism was superficial. the anti-christian schools of thought of the eighteenth century were literary rather than philosophical, and the objections they urged were founded chiefly upon political and social considerations. in all these discussions the territory in dispute was well defined and relatively small. but into what a different world are not we thrown! these earlier explorers sailed upon rivers whose banks were lined by firm-set rocky cliffs, by the overshadowing boughs of primeval forests, with here and there pleasant slopes of green where they might lie at rest amid the fragrance of wild flowers; but from our peter's bark we look out upon the dark unfathomed seas towards an unknown world whose margin ever fades and recedes as we seem to draw near the haven of our desire. as in the beginning of the twelfth century the cry, "god wills it!" rang through europe, and from all her lands armies of mailed knights sprang into battle-array and turned their faces towards the holy city, resolved to wrench from infidel hands the sacred tomb of christ, so now, from her thousand watch-towers, science sounds her clarion note with quite other intent, urging on to the attack of the citadel of god in the heart of man, renewing upon lower fields the war in which immortal spirits contended with the almighty "in dubious battle on the plains of heaven, and shook his throne." as "he jests at scars that never felt a wound," so here the lesser knowledge makes the bolder man. not that difficulties should create doubts, or that objections may not be answered, or that it is necessary to refute each hypothesis that appears and fades like a dissolving view, or to notice each unwarrantable inference from unquestioned facts, or that it is worth while to address ourselves to minds whose nebulous and shifting opinions make it impossible that they should receive correct impressions; but the field upon which attacks upon religion are now made is so vast, the confusion of thought into which new discoveries and speculations have thrown the minds of even educated men is so bewildering, the methods for the ascertainment of truth are so tangled and misapplied, the rushing on of multitudes to discuss problems which have hitherto been left to philosophers, and which they alone can rightly enunciate, is so stupefying, that those who have the clearest perception of the mental state of the modern world, and who are able to take the finest and most comprehensive view of the religious, philosophic, and scientific controversies of the day, seem loath to enter into a struggle where the ground continually changes, and where victory at the best is only partial, and but leads to further contest. it is well to remember, also, that in the intellectual arena to attack is easier than to defend, and any shallow, incoherent talker or writer can propose difficulties which the keenest thinker will find great trouble to explain. since we and our works fall to ruin and pass away, we seem instinctively to take the side of those who seek to undermine and overthrow systems of thought and belief which claim to be indestructible, and the human heart is half a traitor to the church which declares that she is indefectible and infallible. is there not indeed, however we account for it, in all nature a kind of dread and horror of the supernatural, such as one who hides within his bosom a secret of dark guilt feels in the presence of the conscience of mankind? and does not this make the world lean to the side of those who would eliminate god from nature? and yet, since man's heart is the home of contradictions, is it not also true to say that he is naturally religious? his faith in god is as deep and unwavering as his faith in the testimony of the senses; and if there are atheists there are also men who hold that all things are unreal and only appear to be; that the world is but a myriad-formed, a myriad-tinted idea, the dream of a substanceless dreamer. not only do we believe in god and in the soul, but all that we love, all that we hope for, all that gives to life charm, dignity, and sacredness, is interpenetrated, perfumed, and illumined by this faith. if men could be persuaded that the unconscious is the beginning and the end of all things, what good would have been gained? the light of heaven would fade away, and the soul's high faith be made a lie; the poor would have no friend, and the rich no heart; the wicked would be without fear, and the good without hope; success would be consecrated, and death alone would remain as the refuge of the unfortunate. even animal indulgence, in sinking out of the moral order, would lose its human charm. if then in our day there is wide-spread scepticism, a sort of vague feeling that science is undermining religion and that the most sacred beliefs are dissolving, the cause of this lies not so much in the natural tendencies of the mind and heart, as in social conditions, in passing phases of thought, in the shifting of the point of view from which men have hitherto been accustomed to look on nature; and the continuance and the progress of doubt, and consequently of indifference, is, to some extent at least, to be ascribed also to the fact that the most earnest believers in god and in christianity have, for now more than a century, been less eager to acquire the best philosophic and literary cultivation of mind than others who, having lost faith in the supernatural, seek for compensation in a wider and deeper knowledge of nature, and in the mental culture which enables them to enjoy more keenly the high thoughts and fair images which live in literature and art. as a well-trained intellect, in argument with the unskilful, easily makes the worse appear the better cause, so in an age or a country where the best discipline of mind is found chiefly among those who are not christians, or at least not catholics, public opinion will drift away from the church, until the view finally becomes general that, whatever she may have been in other times, her day is past. nor will aught external, however fair or glorious, secure her against this danger. how often in the history of nations and of religions is not outward splendor the mark of inward decay? when rome was free, a simple life sufficed; but when liberty fled, marble palaces arose. the monarch who built versailles made the scaffold on which french royalty perished; and so a dying faith, like the setting sun, may drape itself in glory. the kingdom of god is within; there is the source of life and strength, without which nor numbers nor wealth, nor stately edifices nor solemn rites, avail. nor can we be certain of men's love when we cease to have influence over their thoughts. the proper appeal is to the heart through the mind; and even a mother loses half her power when she ceases to be the intellectual superior of her children. how then shall the heavenly mother of the soul keep her place in the world, if those who speak in her name mar by imperfect and ignorant utterance the celestial harmony of her doctrines? ah! let us learn to see things as they are. in face of the modern world, that which the catholic priest most needs, after virtue, is the best cultivation of mind, which issues in comprehensiveness of view, in exactness of perception, in the clear discernment of the relations of truths and of the limitations of scientific knowledge, in fairness and flexibility of thought, in ease and grace of expression, in candor, in reasonableness; the intellectual culture which brings the mind into form gives it the control of its faculties, creates the habit of attention, and develops firmness of grasp. the education of which i speak is expansion and discipline of mind rather than learning; and its tendency is not so much to form profound dogmatists, or erudite canonists, or acute casuists, as to cultivate a habit of mind, which, for want of a better word, may be called philosophical; to enlarge the intellect, to strengthen and supple its faculties, to enable it to take connected views of things and their relations, and to see clear amid the mazes of human error and through the mists of human passion. i speak of that perfection of the intellect, which, to use the words of cardinal newman, "is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place and with its own characteristics upon it. it is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres." this is, indeed, ideal; but they who believe not in ideals were not born to know the real worth of things: "spite of proudest boast reason, best reason is to imperfect man an effort only and a noble aim,-- a crown, an attribute of sovereign power, still to be courted, never to be won." it is plain that education of this kind aims at something quite different from the mere imparting of useful knowledge. it takes the view that it is good to know, even though knowledge should not be a means to wealth or power or any other common aim of life. it regards the mind as the organ of truth, and trains it for its own sake, without reference to the exercise of a profession. hence its distinguishing characteristic is that it is liberal and not professional. it holds cultivated faculties in higher esteem than learning, and it makes use of knowledge to improve the intellect, rather than of the intellect to acquire knowledge. hence, one may be a skilful physician, a judicious lawyer, a learned theologian, and yet be greatly lacking in mental culture. it is a common experience to find that professional men are apt to be narrow and one-sided. their mind, like the dyer's hand, is subdued to what it works in. they want comprehensiveness of view, flexibility of thought, openness to light, and freedom of mental play. they think in grooves, make the rules of their art the measure of truth, and their own methods of inquiry the only valid laws of reasoning. these same defects may be observed in those who are given exclusively to the study of physical science. when they sweep the heavens with the telescope and do not find god, they conclude that there is no god. when the soul does not reveal itself under the microscope, they argue it does not exist; and since there is no thought without nervous movement, they claim that the brain thinks. now, if it is desirable that those who are charged with the teaching and defence of divine truth should be free from this narrowness and one-sidedness, this lack of openness to light and freedom of mental play, the education of the priest must be more than a professional education; and he must be sent to a school higher and broader than the ecclesiastical seminary, which is simply a training college for the practical work of the ministry. the purpose for which it was instituted is to prepare young men for the worthy exercise of the general functions of the priestly office, and the good it has done is too great and too manifest to need commendation. but the ecclesiastical seminary is not a school of intellectual culture, either here in america or elsewhere, and to imagine that it can become the instrument of intellectual culture is to cherish a delusion. it must impart a certain amount of professional knowledge, fit its students to become more or less expert catechists, rubricists, and casuists, and its aim is to do this; and whatever mental improvement, if any, thence results, is accidental. hence its methods are not such as one would choose who desires to open the mind, to give it breadth, flexibility, strength, refinement, and grace. its text-books are written often in a barbarous style, the subjects are discussed in a dry and mechanical way, and the professor, wholly intent upon giving instruction, is frequently indifferent as to the manner in which it is imparted; or else not possessing himself a really cultivated intellect, he holds in slight esteem expansion and refinement of mind, looking upon it as at the best a mere ornament. i am not offering a criticism upon the ecclesiastical seminary, but am simply pointing to the plain fact that it is not a school of intellectual culture, and consequently, if its course were lengthened to five, to six, to eight, to ten years, its students would go forth to their work with a more thorough professional training, but not with more really cultivated minds. the test of intellect is not so much what we know as the manner in which it is known; just as in the moral world, the important consideration is not what virtues we possess, but the completeness with which they are ours. he who really believes in god, serves him, loves him, is a hero, a saint; whereas he who half believes may have a thousand good qualities, but not a great character. knowledge is not education any more than food is nutrition; and as one may eat voraciously, and yet remain without bodily health or strength, so one may have great learning, and yet be almost wholly lacking in intellectual cultivation. his learning may only oppress and confuse him, be felt as a load, and not as a vital principle, which upraises, illumines, and beautifies the mind; mentally he may still be a boy, in whom memory predominates, and whose intellect is only a receptacle of facts. memory is the least noble of the intellectual faculties, and the nearest to animal intelligence; and to know well is, in the eyes of a true educator, of quite other importance than to know much. but a memory, more or less well-stored, is nearly all a youth carries with him from the college to the seminary, and here he enters, as i have already pointed out, upon a course not of intellectual discipline, but of professional studies, whose object is not "to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, eloquent expression," but simply to impart the requisite skill for the ordinary exercise of the holy ministry. hence it is not surprising that priests who are zealous, earnest, self-sacrificing, who to piety join discretion and good sense, rarely possess the intellectual culture of which i am speaking, for the simple reason that a university and not a seminary is the school in which this kind of education is received. that the absence of such trained intellects is a most serious obstacle to the progress of the catholic faith, no thoughtful man will doubt or deny. since the mind is a power, in religion, as in every sphere of thought and life, the discipline which best develops and perfects its faculties will fit it to do its work, whatever it may be, in the most effective manner. hence, though the education of which i speak does not directly aim at being useful, it is in fact the most useful, and prepares better than any other for the business of life. it enables a man to master a subject with ease, to fill an office with honor; and whatever he does, the mark of completeness and finish will be found upon his work. he sees more clearly, judges more calmly, reasons more pertinently, speaks more seasonably than other men. the free and full possession of his faculties gives him power to turn himself to whatever may be demanded of him, whether it be to govern wisely, or to counsel judiciously, or to write gracefully, or to plead eloquently. whatever course in life he may take, whatever line of thought or investigation he may pursue, his intellectual culture will give him superiority over men who, with equal or greater talents, lack his education; and he possesses withal resources within himself, which in a measure make him independent of fortune, and which, when failure comes and the world abandons him, remain, like faith, or hope, or a friend, to make him forget his misfortunes. of the english universities, with all their shortcomings, cardinal newman says: "at least they can boast of a succession of heroes and statesmen, of literary men and philosophers, of men conspicuous for great natural virtues, for habits of business, for knowledge of life, for practical judgment, for cultivated tastes, for accomplishments, who have made england what it is,--able to subdue the earth, able to domineer over catholics." it is only in a university that all the sciences are brought together, their relations adjusted, their provinces assigned. there natural science is limited by metaphysics; morality is studied in the light of history; language and literature are viewed from the standpoint of ethnology; the criticism which seeks beauty and not deformity, which in the gardens of the mind takes the honey and leaves the poison, is applied to the study of eloquence and poetry; and over all religion throws the warmth and life of faith and hope, like a ray from heaven. the mind thus lives in an atmosphere in which the comparison of ideas and truths with one an other is inevitable; and so it grows, is strengthened, enlarged, refined, made pliant, candid, open, equitable. when numbers of priests will be able to bring this cultivation of intellect to the treatment of religious subjects, then will catholic theology again come forth from its isolation in the modern world; then will catholic truth again irradiate and perfume the thoughts and opinions of men; then will catholic doctrines again sink into their hearts, and not remain loose in the mind to be thrown aside, as one casts away the outworn vesture of the body; then will it be felt that the fascination of christian faith is still fresh, supreme, as far above the charm of science as the joy of a poet's soul is above the pleasures of sense. the religious view of life must forever remain the true view, since no other explains our longings and aspirations, or justifies hope and enthusiasm; and the worship of god in spirit and in truth, which christ has revealed to the world, the religion not of an age or a people, but of all time and of the human race, must eternally prevail when brought home to us in a language which we understand; for we place the testimony of reason above that of the senses. to the eye the sun rises and sets, to the mind it is stationary; and we accept, not what is seen, but what is known. is there need of stronger evidence that the power within, which is our real self, is spiritual? and is it not enough to see clearly, to perceive that in the struggle of mind with matter, which is the essential form of the conflict of spiritualism with materialism, of religion with science, the soul, in the end, will be victorious, and rest in the real world of faith and intuition, and not in the pictured world of the senses? religion, indeed, like morality, is in the nature of things, and catholic faith is una's red cross knight, on whose shield are old dints of deep wounds and cruel marks of many a bloody field, who is assailed by all the powers of earth and of the nether world, armed with whatever weapons may hurt the mind or corrupt the heart, but whom heavenly providence rescues from the jaws of monsters and leads on to victory. but what true believer thinks himself excused from effort, because christ has declared that the gates of hell shall not prevail against his church? does he not know that though, when we consider her whole course through the world, she has triumphed, so as to have become the miracle of history, yet has she at many points suffered disastrous defeat? hence, those who love her must be vigilant, and stand prepared for battle. and in an age when persecution has either died away or lost its harshness, when crying abuses have disappeared, when heresy has run its course, and the struggle of the world with the church has become almost wholly intellectual, it is not possible, assuredly, that her ministers should have too great power of intellect. and consequently it is not possible that the bishops, in whose hands the education of priests is placed, should have too great a care that they receive the best mental culture. and if this is a general truth, with what pertinency does it not come home to us here in america, who are the descendants of men who, on account of their faith, have for centuries been oppressed and thrust back from opportunities of education, and who, when persecution and robbery had reduced them to ignorance and poverty, were forced to hear their religion reproached with the crimes of her foes? and now, when at length a fairer day has dawned for us in this new world, what can be more natural than our eager desire to move out from the valleys of darkness towards the hills and mountain tops that are bathed in sunlight? what more praiseworthy than the fixed resolve to prove that not our faith, but our misfortunes made and kept us inferior. and, since we live in the midst of millions who have indeed good will towards us, but who still bear the yoke of inherited prejudices, and who, because for three hundred years real cultivation of mind was denied to catholics who spoke english, conclude that protestantism is the source of enlightenment, and the church the mother of ignorance, do not all generous impulses urge us to make this reproach henceforth meaningless? and in what way shall we best accomplish this task? surely not by writing or speaking about what the influence of the church is, or by pointing to what she has done in other ages, but by becoming what we claim her spirit tends to make us. here, if anywhere, the proverb is applicable--_verba movent, exempla trahunt_. as the devotion of american catholics to this country and its free institutions, as shown not on battle-fields alone, but in our whole bearing and conduct, convinces all but the unreasonable of the depth and sincerity of our patriotism, so when our zeal for intellectual excellence shall have raised up men who will take place among the first writers and thinkers of their day their very presence will become the most persuasive of arguments to teach the world that no best gift is at war with the spirit of catholic faith, and that, while the humblest mind may feel its force, the lofty genius of augustine, of dante, and of bossuet is upborne and strengthened by the splendor of its truth. but if we are to be intellectually the equals of others, we must have with them equal advantages of education; and so long as we look rather to the multiplying of schools and seminaries than to the creation of a real university, our progress will be slow and uncertain, because a university is the great ordinary means to the best cultivation of mind. the fact that the growth of the church here, like that of the country itself, is chiefly external, a growth in wealth and in numbers, makes it the more necessary that we bring the most strenuous efforts to improve the gifts of the soul. the whole tendency of our social life insures the increase of churches, convents, schools, hospitals, and asylums; our advance in population and in wealth will be counted from decade to decade by millions, and our worship will approach more and more to the pomp and splendor of the full ritual; but this very growth makes such demands upon our energies, that we are in danger of forgetting higher things, or at least of thinking them less urgent. few men are at once thoughtful and active. the man of deeds dwells in the world around him; the thinker lives within his mind. contemplation, in widening the view, makes us feel that what even the strongest can do is lost in the limitless expanse of space and time; and the soul is tempted to fall back upon itself and to gaze passively upon the course of the world, as though the general stream of human events were as little subject to man's control as the procession of the seasons. busy workers, on the other hand, having little taste or time for reflection, see but the present and what lies close to them, and the energy of their doing circumscribes their thinking. but the church needs both the men who act and the men who think; and since with us everything pushes to action, wisdom demands that we cultivate rather the powers of reflection. and this is the duty alike of true patriots and of faithful catholics. all are working to develop our boundless material resources; let a few at least labor to develop man. the millions are building cities, reclaiming wildernesses, and bringing forth from the earth its buried treasures; let at least a remnant cherish the ideal, cultivate the beautiful, and seek to inspire the love of moral and intellectual excellence. and since we believe that the church which points to heaven is able also to lead the nations in the way of civilization and of progress, why should we not desire to see her become a beneficent and ennobling influence in the public life of our country? she can have no higher temporal mission than to be the friend of this great republic, which is god's best earthly gift to his children. if, as english critics complain, our style is inflated, it is because we feel the promise of a destiny which transcends our powers of expression. whatever fault men may find with us, let them not doubt the world-wide significance of our life. if we keep ourselves strong and pure, all the peoples of the earth shall yet be free; if we fulfil our providential mission, national hatred shall give place to the spirit of generous rivalry, the people shall become wiser and stronger, society shall grow more merciful and just, and the cry of distress shall be felt, like the throb of a brother's heart, to the ends of the world. where is the man who does not feel a kind of religious gratitude as he looks upon the rise and progress of this nation? above all, where is the catholic whose heart is not enlarged by such contemplation? here, almost for the first time in her history, the church is really free. her worldly position does not overshadow her spiritual office, and the state recognizes her autonomy. the monuments of her past glory, wrenched from her control, stand not here to point, like mocking fingers, to what she has lost. she renews her youth, and lifts her brow, as one who, not unmindful of the solemn mighty past, yet looks with undimmed eye and unfaltering heart to a still more glorious future. who in such a presence, can abate hope, or give heed to despondent counsel, or send regretful thoughts to other days and lands? whoever at any time, in any place, might have been sage, saint, or hero, may be so here and now; and though he had the heart of francis, and the mind of augustine, and the courage of hildebrand, here is work for him to do. in whatsoever direction we turn our thoughts, arguments rush in to show the pressing need for us of a centre of life and light such as a catholic university would be. without this we can have no hope of entering as a determining force into the living controversies of the age; without this it must be an accident if we are represented at all in the literature of our country; without this we shall lack a point of union to gather up, harmonize, and intensify our scattered forces; without this our bishops must remain separated, and continue to work in random ways; without this the noblest souls will look in vain for something larger and broader than a local charity to make appeal to their generous hearts; without this we shall be able to offer but feeble resistance to the false theories and systems of education which deny to the church a place in the school; without this the sons of wealthy catholics will, in ever increasing numbers, be sent to institutions where their faith is undermined; without this we shall vainly hope for such treatment of religious questions and their relations to the issues and needs of the day, as shall arrest public attention and induce catholics themselves to take at least some little notice of the writings of catholics; without this in struggles for reform and contests for rights we shall lack the wisdom of best counsel and the courage which skilful leaders inspire. we are a small minority in the presence of a vast majority; we still bear the disfigurements and weaknesses of centuries of persecution and suffering; we cling to an ancient faith in an age when new sciences, discoveries, and theories fascinate the minds of men, and turn their thoughts away from the past to the future; we preach a spiritual religion to a people whose prodigious wealth and rapid triumphs over nature have caused them to exaggerate the value of material progress; we teach the duty of self-denial to a refined and intellectual generation, who regard whatever is painful as evil, whatever is difficult as omissible; we insist upon religious obedience to the church in face of a society where children are ceasing to reverence and obey even their parents;--if in spite of all this we are to hold our own, not to speak of larger hopes, it is plain that we may neglect nothing which will help us to put forth our full strength. i do not, of course, pretend that this higher education is all that we need, or that, of itself, it is sufficient; but what i claim is that it would be a source of strength for us who are in want of help. god works in many ways, through many agencies, and i bow in homage to the humblest effort in a righteous cause of the lowliest human being. there are diversities of graces, but the same spirit; diversities of ministries, but the same lord. _numquid omnes doctores?_ asks st. paul. but since he places teachers by the side of apostles and prophets, surely they will teach to best purpose who to the humility of faith add the luminousness of knowledge. to those who reject the idea of human co-operation in things divine i speak not; but we who believe that we are co-operators with christ cannot think that it is possible to bring to this godlike work either too great preparation of heart or too great cultivation of mind. nor must we think lightly even of refinement of thought and speech and behavior, for we know that manners come of morals, and that morals in turn are born of manners, as the ocean breathes forth the clouds and the clouds fill the ocean. let there be then an american catholic university, where our young men, in the atmosphere of faith and purity, of high thinking and plain living, shall become more intimately conscious of the truth of their religion and of the genius of their country; where they shall learn the repose and dignity which belong to their ancient catholic descent, and yet not lose the fire which glows in the blood of a new people; to which from every part of the land our eyes may turn for guidance and encouragement, seeking light and self-confidence from men in whom intellectual power is not separate from moral purpose, who look to god and his universe from bending knees of prayer, who uphold-- "the cause of christ and civil liberty as one, and moving to one glorious end." should such an intellectual centre serve no other purpose than to bring together a number of eager-hearted, truth-loving youths, what light and heat would not leap forth from the shock of mind with mind; what generous rivalries would not spring up; what intellectual sympathies, resting on the breast of faith, would not become manifest, grouping souls like atoms, to form the substance and beauty of a world? o solemn groves that lie close to louvain and to freiburg, whose air is balm and whose murmuring winds sound like the voices of saints and sages whispering down the galleries of time, what words have ye not heard bursting forth from the strong hearts of keen-witted youths, who, titan-like, believed they might storm the citadel of god's truth! how many a one, heavy and despondent, in the narrow, lonesome path of duty, has remembered you, and moved again in unseen worlds, upheld by faith and hope! who has listened to the words of your teachers and not felt the truth of the saying of pope pius ii.,--that the world holds nothing more precious or more beautiful than a cultivated intellect? the presence of such men invigorates like mountain air, and their speech is as refreshing as clear-flowing fountains. to know them is to be forever their debtor. the company of a saint is the school of saints; a strong character develops strength in others, and a noble mind makes all around him luminous. why may not eight million catholics upbuild a home for great teachers, for men who, to real learning and cultivation of mind, shall add the persuasiveness of easy and eloquent diction; whose manifest and indisputable superiority shall put to shame the self-conceit of american young men, our most familiar intellectual bane, and an insuperable obstacle to all improvement,--self-conceit, which is the beatitude of vulgar characters and shallow minds? if our students should find in such an institution but one man, who, like socrates, with ironic questioning might make for them the discovery of the new world of their own ignorance, the gain would be great enough. why may we not have a centre of light and truth which will raise up before us standards of intellectual excellence; which will enable us to see that our so-called educated men are as far from being scholars as the makers of our horrible show-bills are from being artists; which will teach us that it is not only false but vulgar to call things by pretentious names,--as, for instance, to call a politician a statesman, a declaimer an orator, or a latin school a university. ah! surely as to whether an american catholic university is desirable there cannot be two opinions among enlightened men. but is it feasible? a true university is one of the noblest foundations of the great catholic ages, when faith rose almost to the height of creative power, and it were folly in me to maintain that such an undertaking is not surrounded by many and great difficulties. to begin with the material for foundation, money is necessary, and this, i am persuaded, we may have. a noble cause will find or make generous hearts. men above all we need, for every kind of existence propagates itself only by itself. but let us bear in mind that the best teacher is not necessarily or often he who knows the most, but he who has most power to determine the student to self-activity; for in the end the mind educates itself. as distrust is the mark of a narrow intellect or a bad heart, so a readiness to believe in the ability of others is not only a characteristic of able men, but it is also the secret charm which calls around them helpers and followers. hence, a strong man who loves his work is a better educator than a half-hearted professor who carries whole libraries in his head. to bring together in familiar and daily life a number of young men, chosen for the brightness of their minds and an eager yearning for knowledge, is to create an atmosphere of intellectual warmth and light, which invigorates and inspires the master, while it stimulates his disciples. in such company it will not be difficult to form teachers. but will it be possible to find young men who will consent, when after years of study they have finally reached the priesthood, to continue in a higher institution the arduous and confining labors to the end of which they have looked as to the beginning of a new life? in other lands such students are found, and if with us there is a tendency to rush with precipitancy and insufficient preparation to whatever work we may have chosen, this is but a proof of the need of special efforts to restrain an ardor which springs from weakness and not from strength. haste is a mark of immaturity. he who is certain of himself and master of his tools, knows that he is able, and neither hurries nor worries, but works and waits. the rank weed shoots up in a day and as quickly dies; but the long-growing olive-tree stands from century to century, and drops from its gently waving boughs ripe fruit through the quiet autumn air. the church endures forever; and we american catholics, in the midst of our rapidly-moving and ever-changing society, should be the first to learn to temper energy with the patient strength which gives the courage to toil and wait through a long life, if so we make ourselves worthy to speak some fit word or do some needful deed. and to whom shall this lesson first be taught if not to the clerics, whose natural endowments single them out as future leaders of catholic thought and enterprise; and where can this lesson so well be learned as in a school whose standard of intellectual excellence shall be the highest? while we look, therefore, to the founding of a true university, we will begin, as the university of paris began in the twelfth century, and as the present university of louvain began fifty years ago, with a national school of philosophy and theology, which will form the central faculty of a complete educational organism. around this, the other faculties will take their places, in due course of time; and so the beginning which we make will grow, until like the seed planted in the earth, it shall wear the bloomy crown of its own development. and though the event be less than our hope, though even failure be the outcome, is it not better to fail than not to attempt a worthy work which might be ours? only they who do nothing derive comfort from the mistakes of others; and the saying that a blunder is worse than a crime is doubtless true for those who have no other measure of worth and success than the conventional standards of a superficial public opinion. we at least know-- "there lives a judge to whose all-pondering mind a noble aim faithfully kept is as a noble deed; in whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed." the end. transcriber's notes: . page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/autiobiographyt platgoog . greek text [greek: ] is transliterated. . diphthong oe represented by and [oe] [illustration: thomas platter.] the autobiography of thomas platter, a schoolmaster of the sixteenth century. translated from the german, by mrs. finn. second edition. with fac-simile engravings. london: b. wertheim, aldine chambers, paternoster row. . london: c. f. hodgson, printer, gough square fleet street. contents. chapter i. master thomas becomes a goatherd chapter ii. master thomas becomes a travelling scholar chapter iii. master thomas begins to study chapter iv. master thomas becomes a rope-maker and hebrew professor chapter v. master thomas becomes armour-bearer and then schoolmaster chapter vi. master thomas in the war, and professor in basle chapter vii. master thomas turns printer chapter viii. master thomas becomes professor again--dies original maxims for the young. by j. c. lavater. translated from the german, by mrs. finn. cloth lettered, s. "we cannot enough recommend this unpretending volume to those who have charge of the rising generation."--_monthly mag_. "an epitome of moral duties for children, drawn up with considerable ability by the original author.... the translation does great credit to the daughter of a clergyman."--_british mag_. autobiography. chapter i. master thomas becomes a goatherd. [illustration: i had drawn myself up by the grass about a step but could get no farther.] i came into this world on the shrove-tuesday of the year , just as they were coming together for mass. from this circumstance, my friends derived the confident hope that i should become a priest, for at that time that sort of superstition was still every where prevalent. i had one sister, named christina; she alone was with my mother when i was born, and she afterwards told it me. my father's name was anthony platter, of the old family of platter, who have their name from a house which stands on a broad plat (platte). this plat is a rock on a very high mountain, near a village of the name of grenchen, in the district and parish of visp, a considerable village of the canton of st. gall. my mother, however, was named anteli summermatter, of the very great family of that name. her father attained the age of . i conversed with him six years before his death; and then he told me that he knew ten more men in the parish of visp who were all older than he. when he was years old he married a woman who bore him one son. by his first wife he left sons and daughters, of whom some were white-headed and some grey before he died. they called him old hans summermatter. the house in which i was born is near the village of grenchen, and is called am graben. my mother could not nurse me herself, therefore i was obliged to drink cow's milk through a small horn, as is the custom in that country when they wean a child: because they give the children nothing to eat, but only milk to drink, till they are four or five years old. my father died when i was so young that i do not remember ever to have seen him. it is usual in that country for almost all women to be able to weave and sew. before the winter, almost all the men go into the territory of berne to buy wool: this the women spin, and make rustic cloth of it for coats and trowsers for the peasants. so also my father was in the district of thun, in the territory of berne, buying wool. there he was attacked by the plague and died, and was buried at staffisburg, a village near thun. soon after, my mother married a man of the name of heintzmann, who lived in a house between stalden and visp, that was called am grunde. so the children were all separated from her: i do not exactly know how many of them there were. of my sisters, i knew only two;--one, whose name was elizabeth, died in entlibuch, where she was married;--the name of the other was christina, and she died above stalden, at burgen, of the plague, with eight persons of her family. of my brothers, i knew three: the first was called simeon, the other hans, the third theodore. simeon and hans fell in battle. theodore died at oberhofen, on the lake of thun: for the usurers had mined my father, so that my brothers were obliged to go to service almost as soon as they could do any thing; and as i was the youngest, some of my aunts, my father's sisters, had me with them for a while. i can still well remember that i was with one whose name was margaret. she carried me to a house that was called "in der wilde," near grenchen. one of my aunts was there also: she wrapped me up in a truss of straw that was accidentally in the room, and laid me on the table, and went to the other women. once in the night, after my aunts had laid me down, they went to the mass at candle-mass time. then i got up, and had run through the snow in winter, naked, to a house. when they came back, and did not find me, they were in great distress, but found me at last in that house, between two men, who were warming me, for i was frozen in the snow. afterwards when i was also for a while with the same aunts, at "in der wilde," my eldest brother arrived from the savoy war, and brought me a little wooden horse, which i drew along by a thread before the door. i still remember well that i really thought the little horse could walk, and can therefore well explain to myself how the little children often think that their dolls, and what they have, are alive. my brother also strode over me with one leg, as i still perfectly remember, and said, "oho! tommy, now you will never grow any more." when i was about three years old. cardinal matthew schinner passed through the country to hold a visitation and confirm every where, as is the custom in the catholic church, and came to grenchen also. at this time there was a priest in grenchen, whose name was anthony platter; he was a relation of mine; to him they brought me, that he should act as godfather at my confirmation. when however the cardinal had dined, and was gone again into the church to confirm, (i do not know what my uncle had to do), i ran without his knowledge into the church, that i might be confirmed, and that my godfather might give me a crown piece, as it is the custom to give the children something. the cardinal sat in an arm chair waiting till they brought him the children. i still recollect very well that i ran up to him. as my godfather was not with me, he spoke to me: "what do you want, my child?" i said, "i should like to be confirmed." then he said, smiling, "what is your name?" i answered, "my name is master thomas." then he laughed, murmured something with his hand laid on my head, and gave me a gentle slap on the cheek. at this moment mr. anthony came, and excused himself by saying that i had run away without his knowledge. then the cardinal related to him what i had said, and said to that gentleman, "certainly that child will become something wonderful,--probably a priest." and because i was born just as they were ringing for mass, many people supposed that i should become a priest; on which account also they sent me to school earlier than usual. when i was about six years old they sent me to eisenthal behind stalden, where my mother's sister had a husband, called thomas of rüdi, who lived on a farm called am boden. for him i was obliged to keep the goats near the house. i can remember how i often stuck in the snow, so that i could scarcely get out, and my shoes remained behind, so that i came home barefoot and shivering. this farmer had about eighty goats, which i had to tend in my seventh and eighth years. when therefore i opened the stable, and did not immediately get out of the way, the goats, as i was still so little, knocked me down, ran over me, and trod on my head, arms, and back; for i usually fell on my face. when i drove them over the bridge, then the foremost ran past me into the corn field; and when i drove these out, the others ran in. then i used to cry and lament; for i knew well that in the evening i should be beaten. when, however, other goatherds came to me from other farmers, they helped me; particularly one, called thomas of leidenbach. he had pity on me, and shewed me much kindness. then we all sat together, when we had led the goats up the high and frightful mountains, and ate our supper. each one had a shepherd's basket on his back, with cheese and rye-bread in it. one day when we had dined we set about shooting for a trial of skill. on the top of a high rock there was a flat piece of ground. as one after the other now shot at the mark, one stood before me who wished to shoot. i endeavoured to get out of his way, that he should not strike me on the head; but as i stepped back a few paces i fell backwards from off the rock. the shepherds all cried out, "lord jesus! lord jesus!" till i was out of sight; for i had fallen under the rock, so that they could not see me; and they fully believed that i was killed. i however soon got up again, and climbed up by the side of the rock to them. if they wept before for grief, they now wept for joy. six weeks after a goat belonging to one of them fell down at the same spot, and was killed! so carefully had god watched over me. about half a year after, i led out my goats early in the morning before the other shepherds, (for i was the nearest,) over a point of rock, called white point, when my goats turned to the right over a piece of rock that was a good foot wide, but below which there was, in a frightful abyss more than fathoms deep, nothing but rocks. from the ledge of the rock one goat went up after the other, over one where they had scarcely room to put their feet on the little roots of grass which had grown on the rock. as soon as they were up, i wished to get after them. when, however, i had drawn myself up by the grass about a step, i could get no farther; neither did i dare to step upon the rock again, much less to jump backwards, for i was afraid if i did so that i should jump too far, and so fall over the dreadful precipice. i remained therefore a good while in this position, and waited for the help of god, for i could not help myself; except that i held myself with both hands by a little tuft of grass, and supported myself by turns with my great toes on another tuft of grass. in this predicament i suffered extreme anxiety; for i was afraid that the great vultures that flew about in the air below me, would carry me away, as it sometimes does happen in the alps, that they take away children and lambs. whilst i stood there and the wind blew about my garment behind--for i had no trowsers on--my comrade thomas perceived me from a distance, but did not know what it was. when he saw my coat fluttering in the wind, he supposed that it was a bird. when, however, he recognised me, he was so terrified that he became quite pale, and called to me, "now, tommy, stand still!" then he hurried upon the ledge of rock, took me in his arms, and carried me down again to where we could get after the goats another way. some years after, when i came home from the schools in distant lands, and my companion heard of it, he came, and reminded me how he had rescued me from death (as indeed is true, for which i give the glory to god). he said to me, that when i became a priest i should remember him, and pray to god for him. the master, however, with whom i served at that time, afterwards told my wife, "that he had never had a better little servant, as young and small as i was." amongst other sisters of my father, was one of the name of frances, who was unmarried, and my father had particularly recommended me to her care, as being the youngest child. when therefore the people told her in what a dangerous employment i was engaged, and that i should certainly kill myself some day by a fall, she came to my master and declared to him that she would not have me there any longer. at this he was dissatisfied; still she took me away again to grenchen, where i was born, and placed me with a rich old farmer who was called "hans im boden." for him i was also obliged to mind the goats; when it happened one day that i and a little girl (who also minded her father's goats) were playing by an artificial channel, whereby the water was conducted down the mountain to the grounds, and had forgotten ourselves in play. we had made little meadows, and watered them as children do. in the mean while the goats had gone up the mountain, we knew not whither. then i left my little coat lying there, and ascended the mountain up to the very top; the little girl however went home without the goats. i, on the contrary, as a poor servant, would not venture to go home unless i had the goats. up very high i saw a kid that was just like one of my young goats, and this i followed at a distance till the sun went down. when i looked back to the village and saw that at the houses it was quite night, i began to descend again; but it was soon quite dark. in the mean time i climbed from one tree to another, and held myself by the loose roots from which the earth had fallen off. when however it became quite dark, i would not venture any farther, but held myself by my left hand on a root; with the other i scratched the earth loose under the trees and roots, to hollow out a place to lie in, and listened how the lumps of earth rolled down into the abyss. thereupon i forced myself into the opening which was made between the earth and roots, in order to lie firmly, and not to fall down in my sleep. i had nothing on except a little shirt, neither shoes nor hat; for the little coat, in my anxiety at having lost the goats, i had left by the watercourse. as i lay under the tree the ravens became aware that i was there, and made a noise on the tree; so that i was in great terror, being afraid that a bear was at hand. i crossed myself, however, and fell asleep, and slept till the morning, when the sun was shining over all the mountains. when however i awoke, and saw where i lay, i do not know that i was ever more frightened in my life: for had i in the night gone four yards deeper, i must have fallen down, a frightfully steep precipice many thousand feet deep. i was in great trouble too about the mode of getting away from thence. i drew myself from one root to the other, till i again got to the place from whence i could run down the mountain to the houses. when i was just out of the wood, near the farms, the little maid met me with the goats which she was driving out again; for they had run home of themselves the night before, and the people in whose service i was, were very much frightened on account of my not having come home with the goats. they believed that i had fallen and killed myself, and asked my aunt and the people in that house in which i was born (for that stood next to the house in which i served) whether they knew any thing of me, for that i had not come home with the goats. from that time on they would not allow me to mind goats any more, because they had to endure so much anxiety on my account. whilst i was with this master and tended his goats, i once fell into a boiler of hot milk which stood on the fire, and scalded myself, so that one could see the scars all my life after. i was also in two other perils besides this while i was with him. once there were two of us little goatherds in the wood, and were talking of various childish things: amongst others we wished that we could fly, for then we would fly out of the mountain to germany (for so switzerland was called in st. gall). on a sudden came a frightfully large bird darting down upon us, so that we thought it was going to carry one or both of us away. at this we both began to scream, and to defend ourselves with our shepherd's crooks, and to cross ourselves, till the bird flew away; then we said to one another, "we have done wrong in wishing to be able to fly; god did not create us for flying, but for walking." another time i was in a very deep fissure looking for crystals, of which many were found in it. all at once i saw a stone as large as an oven starting from the side, and as i had no time to get out of the way, i stooped down upon my face. the stone fell several fathoms down to a spot above me, and from thence it made a spring away over me, so that i escaped with a whole skin. i had plenty of such joys and happiness on the mountains among the goats, of which i now remember nothing more. this i well know, that i seldom had whole toes, but often great bruises; had many bad falls; without shoes for the most part in summer, or else wooden ones; and endured great thirst. my food was in the morning, before day, a rye-broth, that is, a soup made of rye-meal. cheese and rye-bread are given in a little basket to be carried at one's back; at night cheese-milk; of all however there was a fair allowance. in summer, lying on hay; in winter, on a straw mattrass full of all sorts of vermin. such are the resting-places of the poor little shepherds who serve the farmers in the wildernesses. chapter ii. master thomas becomes a travelling scholar. [illustration: "the urchin has robbed me of a goose."] as they would not any longer allow me to tend the goats, i entered the service of a farmer who had one of my aunts to wife, and was a fiery passionate man. i had to keep his cows; for at most places in st. gall they have not shepherds in common, to mind the cows for all; but whoever has a mountain whither he can send them during the summer, has a little shepherd who watches them upon his own property. when i had been with them a while my aunt frances came, who wished to send me to my uncle, mr. anthony platter, that i should learn _the writings_ (such was their phrase when they wished to send any one to school). that gentleman was at that time no longer in grenchen, but was become an old man at st. nicholas, in the village that is called gasse. when my farmer, whose name was the "antsche," or "anthony an der habzucht," was aware of my aunt's intention, he was much dissatisfied: and said, "that i would learn nothing notwithstanding;" and added, putting the forefinger of his right hand into the palm of the left, "the urchin will learn just as much as i can drive my finger through." that i saw and heard myself. my aunt answered, "oh! who knows? god has not refused him his gifts: he may yet become a pious priest." and so she led me to the spiritual gentleman, when i was about nine and a half years old. then it was that my sufferings really began, for the gentleman was a very passionate man, but i a little awkward peasant boy. he beat me barbarously; often took me by the ears and dragged me from the ground. i screamed like a goat that had the knife sticking into it, so that often the neighbours came screaming in to him to know whether he would kill me out and out. i did not remain long with him. just at this time there came one who had travelled to the schools at ulm and munich in bavaria, a grandson of my old grandfather. this student's name was paul summermatter. my friends had told him of me, and he promised them that he would take me with him, and in germany take me to school. as soon as i heard of this i fell on my knees, and besought god almighty to help me away from the priest, who taught me sheer nothing, but on the contrary beat me unmercifully. i had scarcely learned to sing the "salve" a little, and to go about the village with other scholars who were also with the priest, and were obliged to sing before the houses for eggs. once, when we were about to celebrate mass, the other boys sent me into the church to fetch a taper. this i thrust alight into my sleeve and burnt myself so, that i still bear about me the scar of it. when paul wished to wander again, i was to come to him to stalden. behind stalden is a house called "zum müllibach;" there my mother's brother, simon summermatter, lived; he was to be my guardian, and gave me a golden florin: which i carried in my hand to stalden, and on the way often looked at it to see whether i had it, and then gave it to paul. thus we left the country. i was then obliged to beg for the necessary money on the road, and also to share it with paul my bacchant. schools were not then established in all places; and young persons who wished to learn any thing, or to prepare themselves for any religious office, which at that time required but little knowledge, went, either singly or in greater numbers, after renowned teachers. as they were for the most part poor people, they lived on alms by the way. and when the thing degenerated the grown ones were called bacchants, because they lived well on what was obtained by begging, and led a wild and dissolute life: the little ones were called _a-b-c_ fags.[ ] they, when the begging was not sufficient, did not make any scruple about stealing, which was called "sharp-shooting." they were, however, usually called scholastics, or travelling scholars. so bad were the school-arrangements; until the reformation made improvements in this department also. on account of my simplicity and provincial dialect, people gave very liberally to me. when i crossed over the grimsel, and came into an inn at night, i saw a stove made of tiles of white delft for the first time, and the moon shone on the tiles. i thought it was a large calf, for i saw only two tiles shining, and believed them to be the eyes. in the morning i saw geese, of which i had never seen any before. when therefore they set on me hissing, as geese are accustomed to do, i ran away from them with a loud cry, for i thought it was the devil who wanted to devour me. in lucerne i saw the first tiled roofs, and wondered very much at the red colour. hereupon we came to zurich: there paul waited for several comrades who wished to go with us to meissen. in the mean time i went for alms, with which i was obliged almost entirely to support paul: for when i came into an inn the people liked to hear me speak the st. gall dialect, and gave me liberally. at that time there was in zurich a certain fellow, a great rogue, out of leak in st. gall: his name was carle. he once came to me--for we lodged in the same house--and said to me, that i should allow him to give me one blow on the bare back, and that he would give me a zurich sixer (sixpence) for it. i allowed myself to be persuaded. he then laid hold of me stoutly, laid me across a chair, and beat me very sorely. when i had borne that, he asked me to lend him the sixer again, for he wished to sup with the landlady at night, and could not pay the reckoning. i gave him the sixpence, but never got it again. thus were my innocency and inexperience abused. after we had waited for company about eight or nine weeks, we set out for meissen; for me, a very long journey, because i was not accustomed to travel so far, and besides that, i was obliged to provide my provisions on the way. we travelled eight or nine together--three little fags, and the rest great bacchants, as they were called, and i was the smallest and youngest of the fags. when i could not get on vigorously, my relation paul walked behind me with a rod or stick, and beat me on the bare legs; for i had no hose on, but bad shoes. i cannot now remember all that befel us on the road; but some adventures i have not yet forgotten. when we were upon the journey, and were speaking of all sorts of things, the bacchants narrated to one another how it was the custom in meissen and silesia for the fags to be allowed to steal geese and ducks, and other articles of provision, and that nothing was done to them on that account if they could only escape from the owner. in my simplicity i believed every thing, for i knew nothing of the commandments of god, and had had no experience of the world. we were one day not far from a village; there was a great flock of geese there, and the herdsman was not at hand, but pretty far off with the cowherds. then i asked my comrades, the fags, "when shall we be in meissen, that i may throw at the geese and kill them?" they said, "we are there already." then i took a stone, threw it, and hit one on the foot. the others fled away, but the lame one could not follow. i took another stone, threw, and hit it on the head, so that it fell down; for when with the goats, i had learned to throw well, so that no shepherd of my age was superior to me: could also blow the shepherd's horn, and leap with the pole; for in such arts i exercised myself with my fellow-shepherds. i then ran to it, and caught the goose by the neck, and put it under my little coat, and went along the road through the village. then the gooseherd came running after, shouting through the village, "the urchin has robbed me of a goose." i and my fellow fags ran off, and the feet of the goose hung out from under my little coat. the peasants came out of their houses with halberds, and followed us. when i now saw that i could not escape with the goose, i let it fall. i jumped aside into a thicket outside the village; but my two comrades ran along the road and were overtaken by two peasants. they then fell down on their knees and begged for mercy, for that they had done them no harm. the peasants therefore seeing that he was not there who had let the goose fall, went back into the village and took the goose along with them. when i saw how they ran after my companions, i was in a great fright, and said to myself, "o god! i believe that i have not blessed myself to-day:" as i had been taught that i should bless myself every morning. when the peasants came into the village they found our bacchants in the public-house; for they had gone before, and we came after. then the peasants thought that they ought to pay for the goose, which would have made about two bats (four-pence), but i do not know whether they paid it or not. when they came to us again they laughed, and asked how it had happened. i excused myself with saying, that i thought such was the custom of the country; but they said that it was not yet time. when, however, some of the bacchants behaved themselves very rudely towards us, some of us, with paul, determined to run away from the bacchants, and go by way of dresden to breslau. on the way we had to suffer much from hunger, so that several days we ate nothing but raw onions with salt; some days roasted acorns, crab-apples, and wild pears. many a night we lay in the open air, because no one would suffer us in the houses, no matter how early we might ask for lodging. now and then the dogs were set at us. when however we came to breslau there was an abundance of every thing; yes, every thing was so cheap that the poor fags used to eat too much, and often made themselves sick. at first we went to school in the cathedral of the holy cross; when however we heard that in the principal parish of st. elizabeth there were several swiss, we went thither. there were there two from bremgarten, two from mellingen, and others, besides a number of suabians. there was no difference made between the suabians and the swiss; they addressed one another as countrymen, and protected one another. the city of breslau has seven parishes, each a separate school: and no scholar was allowed to go singing into another parish; else they immediately shouted "ad idem! ad idem!" then the fags ran together, and beat one another very sorely. there were, as was said at that time, several thousand bacchants and fags in the city at once, who all lived upon alms. it was said also that there were some that had been there twenty, thirty, or more years, who had had their fags that were obliged to wait upon them. i have often in one evening carried my bacchants five or six loads of provisions home to the school where they lived. people gave to me very willingly, because i was little, and a swiss; for they were uncommonly fond of the swiss. they also felt great compassion with the swiss, because just at that time they had suffered sorely in the great battle at milan; so that the common people said, "the swiss have now lost their pater-noster." for before that, they imagined that the swiss were quite invincible. i one day went up to two gentlemen or country squires in the market-place, (i heard afterwards that the one was called benzenauer, the other tucker,) who were walking there, and asked alms from them, as poor fags were accustomed to do. tucker said to me, "from whence are you?" and when he heard that i was a swiss, he was surprised, together with benzenauer, and said to me, "but are you really a swiss? if that is the fact, i will adopt you as a son, and i will assure you of that here before the council in breslau; but, in return, you must promise to remain with me, and accompany me wherever i go." i answered, "in my native place i was given in charge to a certain person; i will ask him about it." but when i asked my relation paul about it, he said, "i have conducted you out of your own native place, and i will conduct you to your own friends again, and then whatever they bid you, that you can do." i therefore declined this offer. but whenever i came before the house i was not allowed to go empty away. thus i remained for a time in breslau; was also three times ill in one winter, so that they were obliged to bring me into the hospital, for the travelling scholars had a particular hospital and physicians for themselves. sixteen hellers were also paid weekly from the town-house for each sick person, by which one person could be well supported. care was then taken of the patients, and they had good beds, only they were not clean; so that i rather lay upon the floor than in the beds. during the winter the fags lay upon the floor in the school; but the bacchants in small chambers, of which there were several hundreds at st. elizabeth's. but in summer, when it was hot, we lay in the church-yard: collected grass, such as is spread in summer before the doors on sunday in the gentlemen's streets,[ ] and lay in it, like pigs in the straw. when however it rained we ran into the school; and when there was thunder we sang responsories and other sacred music the whole night, with the subcantor. now and then after sapper, in summer, we went into the beer-houses to beg for beer. and the drunken polish peasants would then give us so much, that i was often unable to find my way to the school again, though only a stone's throw from it. in short, there was plenty to eat here, but there was not much study; and of true piety no one had an idea. in the school at st. elizabeth's, indeed, nine bachelors of arts read lectures at the same hour, and in the same room; still the greek language had not yet made its way anywhere in the country; neither had any one printed books, except the preceptor, who had a printed terence. what was read had first to be dictated, then pointed, then construed, and at last explained; so that the bacchants had to carry away thick books of notes when they went home. from breslau eight of us migrated again to dresden; had however to suffer much from hunger on the way. we then determined to separate for one day; some went to see after geese; some after turnips, and carrots, and onions; some about a pot; we little ones however were to procure bread and salt in the neighbouring town of neumark. in the evening we intended to assemble again outside the city, and there take up our lodging, and cook what we might have. about a gunshot distant from the city there was a well, by which we wished to remain during the night; but when the fire was seen, they fired at us; still no one was hit. we therefore took ourselves off behind a ridge to a little rivulet and thicket. the bigger companions hewed branches down, and made a hut; others plucked the geese, of which they had managed to get two; others cut the turnips into the pot, and put the head and feet and the like in also; others made two wooden spits, and began to roast; and as soon as it was a little brown, we took it from the spit and ate it, and the turnips too. to none of us did it occur that we were partaking of stolen provisions, and so were worthy of punishment in the sight of god and man. in the night we heard something making an odd noise. there was a wear near us from which the water had been let off the day before, and the fish were springing up to the wall; we therefore took as many as we could carry in a shirt, and on a stick, and set off for the nearest village. there we gave part of them to a peasant, that, in return, he should boil the others in beer for us. from dresden we went to nuremberg. on the way, not far from dresden, it happened that i went into a village to request alms, and came before a peasant's house. then the peasant asked me where i came from. when he heard that i was a swiss, he asked, if i had any companions. i answered, "my companions are waiting for me outside the village." "desire them to come hither," said he, and he got a good meal ready for us; also beer enough to drink. when we were comfortable, and the peasant with us, he said to his mother, who was lying in bed in the room, "mother, i have often heard from you, that you would like to see a swiss before you die: there you see several; i have invited them for your sake." then the mother raised herself up, thanked the son for bringing such guests, and said, "i have heard so much good of the swiss, that i very much desired to see one: methinks that i will now die more willingly; therefore make yourselves merry." whereupon she laid herself down again, and we set out again after we had thanked the peasant. from thence we came to munich, where paul and i found lodging with a soap-boiler of the name of hans schräll, who was a master of arts of vienna, but an enemy to the clerical state. him i helped to make soap, rather more than i went to school; and travelled about with him to the villages to buy ashes. paul at length determined to pay a visit to our home, for we had not been at home during five years. accordingly, we went home to st. gall. my friends were then unable to understand me, and said, "our tommy speaks so profoundly, that no one can understand him:" for, being young, i had learned something of the language of every place where i had been. chapter iii. master thomas begins to study. my stay at home was not long. we soon set out again towards ulm. paul then took another boy with him, whose name was hildebrand kälbermatter; he was also very young. some cloth, such as was made in that country, was given to him for a little coat. when we came to ulm, paul desired me to go about with the cloth, and beg the money to pay for the making. with it i earned a great deal of money; for i understood begging well, because the bacchants had always kept me to it. to the schools on the contrary, they did not draw me, not even so much as to teach me to read. thus it was at ulm too: when i ought to have gone to school, i was obliged to run about with the cloth. i suffered great hunger at this time; for all that i got i had to bring to the bacchants, and did not dare, for fear of stripes, to eat even a morsel. paul had taken another bacchant to live with him, of the name of achatius, a native of mayence; and i, with my companion hildebrand, had to wait on them both. but my companion ate almost all that was given him at the houses himself. the bacchants on that account went after him into the street, and found him eating: thereupon they threw him on a bed, covered his head with a pillow, so that he could not cry, and beat him with all their might. that made me afraid, so that i brought home all that i got. they had often so much bread that it became mouldy; they then cut off the mouldy outside, and gave it to us to eat. i was often very hungry, and frost-bitten too, because i had to go about in the dark till midnight, to sing for bread. now there was at that time a pious widow at ulm, who had a son, paul reling, and two daughters. this widow during the winter often wrapt my feet in a warm fur, which she laid behind the stove, to warm them when i came; gave me also a basin full of vegetables, and then allowed me to go home. i was indeed sometimes so hungry, that i drove the dogs in the street away from their bones, and gnawed them; i also sought together the last crumbs out of the bags, and eat them. from ulm we went to munich, where i still had to beg for money to make up the cloth, which however was not mine. a year after we came again to ulm, intending to go once more to our native place. i brought the cloth again with me, however, and was obliged again to beg for money to make it up. i can still well remember that some said to me, "what! has the coat never been made? i believe that you are playing tricks." what became of the cloth, and whether the coat was ever made, i know not. from thence we made a visit to our native place, and after that returned again to munich. as three of us little fags had no lodging, we intended to go at night to the corn-market, and sleep upon the corn sacks. there were several women in the street standing before the salt-house, who asked where we were going. a butcher's widow was of the number, who, when she understood that we were swiss, said to her maid, "run, hang the pot with the soup and the remainder of the meat over the fire; they must lodge with me to-night; i am friendly to all swiss. i served in an inn at inspruck at the time the emperor maximilian held his court there. the swiss had much dealing with him then, and were such good people, that i will be friendly to them all my life long." she gave us enough to eat and drink, and a good place to rest in. in the morning she said to us, "if one of you will stay with me, i will give him lodging, and meat and drink." we were all willing, and because i looked a little sharper than the others, she chose me. i helped her with her household and field occupations; but was still obliged, however, to wait on my bacchant. the woman did not like to see that, and said, "let the bacchant alone, and stay with me, then you need not beg." for eight days, therefore, i went neither to the bacchant nor to the school. he then came and knocked at the house-door. she said to me, "your bacchant is there, say that you are sick." i did what she desired me, for i did not know that a lie of that kind was a sin. when paul came she said to him, "you are truly a fine gentleman, and should have looked after thomas: he has been sick, and is so still." he said then, "i am sorry for it, boy: when you can go out again, come to me." afterwards, on a sunday, i went to vespers; then he said to me after vespers, "you fag, you do not come to me, i will trample you under foot some day." then i resolved that he should not trample on me, for that i would run away. on sunday i said to the butcher's widow that i wanted to go into the school and wash my shirt. i went, however, over the iser, for i was afraid that if i went to switzerland paul would follow me. at the other side of the iser is a hill; there i sat down, looked at the city, and cried bitterly, because i had now no longer any one to help me. i thought of going to saltzburg or vienna in austria. as i sat there, a peasant came by with his waggon. he had brought salt to munich, and was already drunk, although the sun had only just risen. i asked him to allow me to get up, and rode with him till he stopped to get something for himself and his horses to eat. in the mean time i begged in the village; and not far from the village i waited for him, and fell asleep. on awaking i cried heartily; for i thought that the peasant had driven away, and felt as if i had lost a father. however he soon came, quite drunk; told me to get up again, and asked whither i wished to go? i said to saltzburg. when it was evening he drove side-ways off the highroad, and said, "now you can get down, there is the road to saltzburg." we had driven eight miles that day. i came into a village; when i got up in the morning there was a hoar frost, as if it had snowed, and i had no shoes, only torn socks; no cap, and a jacket without folds. i therefore went to passau, and wished there to get a passage, and sail on the danube to vienna. in passau they would not let me in. then i determined to go to switzerland, and asked the gatekeeper which was the nearest road to switzerland. "by munich," said he. "to munich!" i answered, "i will not go. i would rather go out of my way ten miles to avoid it." he then directed me to freissing, where there was a high-school or university. there i found swiss. but before many days had elapsed paul arrived with an halberd. the fags said to me, "the bacchant from munich is here, and is looking for you." then i ran out at the gate as if he had been behind me, and went to ulm, where i came to my saddler's widow, who had formerly warmed my feet by wrapping them in fur. after several weeks, one came to me who had been a companion of paul's, and said to me, "your relation paul is here, and looking for you." so he had come eighteen miles after me; for in me he had lost a good benefice, because i had supported him several years. when however i heard this, although it was nearly night, i ran out at the gate, on the road to constance; but lamented in my soul, for it was very grievous to me on account of the dear woman who had taken care of me like a mother. so i crossed the lake to constance, and went over the bridge, and saw some little swiss peasants in white jackets. oh how glad i was! i imagined i was in the kingdom of heaven. from thence i came to zurich, where i found some fellow-countrymen, natives of st. gall, great bacchants; to them i offered my services, if in return they would instruct me; but that they did as little as the others. after several months paul sent his fag hildebrand from munich, to tell me that if i would return he would pardon me; but i would not, but stayed in zurich, though indeed without studying. there was one anthony benetz there, out of visp in st. gall, who persuaded me to accompany him on a tour to strasburg. when we arrived, there were a great many poor scholars there, and, as was said, not even one good school; we therefore went to schlestadt. a gentleman met us, and asked, "where are you going?" when he heard that we wished to go to schlestadt he dissuaded us from it, by saying that there were many poor scholars there, and no rich people. whereupon my comrade began to cry bitterly, because he did not know any other place to go to. i comforted him, and said, "be of good courage! if there is one in schlestadt who makes shift to live alone, i will manage to support us both." whilst in a village outside of schlestadt, where we got lodging in a mill, i got such a pain that i thought i must choke, and scarcely could get breath; for i had eaten a great many green nuts, which fall off about that season. anthony then cried again; for he thought that he should lose his companion, and then not know how to help himself any more: and yet he had ten crowns secretly about him, and i not a halfpenny. when we came into the town, and had found lodging in the house of an aged married couple, of whom the man was stone blind, we went to the preceptor, mr. john sapidus, and begged of him to receive us. he asked us whence we came; when we said, "from switzerland, from. st. gall." he said, "there are wicked peasants there; they drive all their bishops away out of the country. if you intend to study properly you need not give me any thing; but if not, you must pay me, or i will pull your coats off your back." that was the first school which seemed to me to go on well. at that time the study of languages and sciences came into fashion. it was the same year that the diet was held at worms. sapidus had at one time nine hundred scholars, amongst whom were several fine learned fellows, who afterwards became celebrated men. when i entered the school i could do nothing, not even read the donatus,[ ] and was nevertheless already eighteen years old. i seated myself among the little children, but was like the clucking hen among the chickens. when we had been there from autumn till whitsuntide, and there was a continual influx of scholars from all quarters, i was no longer able to procure sustenance for us both; we therefore went away to solothurn, where there was a tolerably good school, and also a maintenance easier to be found. but as a set-off against this, we had to stay much in church, and lose time: so we went again to our native place, where i remained awhile, and went to school to a priest who taught me a little writing, and other things i know not what. here i got the ague, and was nursed by my aunt frances in grenchen. at the same time i taught the little son of my other aunt, simon steiner, his a b c. he came to zurich a year after, and studied by degrees: then he came to strasburg, where he became dr. bucer's famulus: and because he was attentive to his studies, he was made teacher of the thirds and afterwards of the second, class; and was very much regretted by the scholars at strasburg when he died. in the following spring i left the country again, with two brothers. when we took leave of our mother, she cried and said, "god have mercy upon me, that now i must see three sons go into misery." excepting that time i never saw my mother cry, for she was a courageous stout-hearted woman, but rather rough. when her third husband died, whom she had married in my absence, she remained a widow, and did all manner of work like a man, in order that she might be better able to bring up her youngest children. hewing wood, hay-making, threshing, and other work which belongs more to men than women, were not too much for her. she had also buried three of her children herself, who had died in a time of very great pestilence; for in time of pestilence it costs a great deal to get persons buried by the gravediggers. towards us her first children she was very harsh, for which reason we seldom entered the house. once when i came to her again, after an absence of five years, in which i had travelled much in far distant lands, the first word she said to me was, "has the devil carried you hither once more?" i answered, "the devil has not carried me, but my feet; i will not however be a burden to you long." she then said, "you are not a burden to me; but it grieves me that you go strolling backwards and forwards in this manner, and doubtless learn nothing at all. if you learned to work, as your late father did, that would be better;--you will never be a priest: i am not so lucky as to be the mother of a priest." so i remained with her two or three days. she was otherwise a respectable, honest, and pious woman, as was admitted by every body. on my departure with my two brothers, as we were crossing the letshi mountain towards gestelen, my brothers sat down upon the slopes on the snow, and so slid down the mountain. i wished to imitate them, but because i did not instantly put my feet asunder the snow threw me over, so that i slid down the mountain head over heels. it would have been no wonder if i had killed myself by knocking my head against a tree; for there were no rocks. three times i had the same mishap, for i always thought that i should be able to do it as well as my brothers; but they were more used to the mountains than i. thus we travelled on together. they both remained in entlibuch, but i went on to zurich. there i lodged with the mother of the far famed, pious, and learned mr. rudolph gwalther, who is now pastor at st. peter's. he was then in the cradle, and i used often to rock him. i now visited the school in frauenmünster, in which wolfgang knaüel, a pious master of arts, taught. i was quite in earnest in my desire to study, for i perceived that it was high time. they said at that time, that a teacher would come from einsiedeln, a learned and faithful man, but extremely old. so i made a seat for myself in a corner not far from the teacher's seat, and said to myself, "in this corner you will study or die." when he came into the school for the first time, he said, "this is a nice school, but methinks there are stupid boys: still we shall see; only be industrious." this i know, that had my life depended on it i could not have declined a noun of the first declension, although i had learned donatus off by heart to a nicety. for when i was at schlestadt, sapidus had a certain bachelor of arts, george von andlau, a very learned man: he plagued the bacchants so grievously with the donatus, that i thought, "if it be such a good book, then you must learn it by heart," and as i learned to read it i learned it by heart at the same time. that turned to good account for me in the opinion of father myconius, my new teacher in zurich; for he began at once to read terence with us, and then we had to decline and conjugate every little word of a whole comedy. he used often to deal with me until my shirt was wet with perspiration through fear, and my eyes grew dim; and yet he never gave me a blow, except on one single occasion with the left hand on my cheek. he also read lectures upon the holy scriptures, which were attended by many of the laity; for at that time the light of the gospel was just beginning to dawn, although mass and the idolatrous pictures in the churches were continued for a long time after. whenever he was rough towards me, he afterwards took me to his house, and gave me a meal; for he liked to hear me relate how i had travelled through all the countries in germany, and what i had suffered every where, which i could much better remember then than now. myconius without doubt was already acquainted with the pure doctrine; but was obliged, notwithstanding, to go to church at frauenmünster with his scholars to sing the vesper, matins, and masses, and to direct the singing. once he said to me, "custos,"[ ] (for i was his custos), "i would now rather read four lessons than sing one mass; do me a favour, and sometimes attend to an easy mass, a requiem, and such like for me: i will not let it be unrewarded." with that i was well content, for i was accustomed to that sort of thing, not only at zurich, but also at solothurn and elsewhere; for everything was still popish. many a one was to be found who could sing better than expound a gospel; and it was daily to be seen in the schools that wild bacchants went off and were ordained, if they could only sing a little, though they understood nothing either of grammar or gospel. during the time that i was custos, i was often in want of wood for heating the school. one morning zuinglius was to preach before day in frauenmünster; and as they were ringing the bell for service, there being no wood for heating the school, i thought in my simplicity, "you have no wood, and there are so many idols in the church!" as no one was there i went into the church to the nearest altar, seized a wooden st. john, hurried with him into the school, put him into the stove, and said to him, "johnny, now bend yourself; you must go into the stove, even though you do represent a st. john." when he began to burn, there were nasty great blisters from the oil paint. i thought, "now hold still; if you stir, which you however will not do, i will shut-to the door of the stove, and you dare not come out, unless the evil one fetches you." in the mean time the wife of myconius came, intending to go to church to the sermon, and said, "god give you a good day, my son; have you heated the stove?" i closed the stove door, and said, "yes, mother; i am quite ready." i would not however tell it to her; for if it had been known, it would have cost me my life at that time. in the school myconius said, "custos, you have had famous wood to-day," i thought, "st. john deserves the most praise." when we were to sing the mass two priests were quarrelling together, and one said to the other, "you lutheran knave, you have robbed me of a st. john." this they continued a good while. myconius did not know what the matter was, but st. john was never found again. of course i never told it to any one, till several years after, when myconius was preacher at basle; i then told it to him, and he wondered very much, and remembered well how the priests had quarrelled together. although it appeared to me then that popery was mere mummery, yet i still had it in my mind to become a priest, and to do the duties of my office faithfully, and deck out my altar smartly. for of real piety i understood at that time nothing; all rested merely on outward ceremonies. when, however, ulrich zuinglius preached severely against it, my scruples increased more and more in course of time. otherwise i had prayed much, and fasted rather more than was agreeable to me; had also my saints and patrons, to whom i prayed: our lady, the virgin mary, that she would be my intercessor with her son; st. catherine, that i might become learned; st. barbara, that i might not die without the sacrament; st. peter, that he would open heaven to me. what i neglected i wrote in a little book, and when there was a holiday at school, as on thursday and saturday, i went to frauenmünster to a school: began and wrote all my offences upon a chair, and paid one debt after the other with prayers, blotting them out one after the other, and thought then that i had done right. six times i went with processions from zurich to einsiedeln; was diligent in confession, and have often fought with my companions for popery. one day, however, ulrich zuinglius preached in söllnau upon the gospel of st. john x., "i am the good shepherd," &c.: that he explained so pointedly, that i felt as if some one had pulled me up into the air by the hair of my head, and made known to me how god would require the blood of the lost sheep at the hands of the shepherds who are guilty of their destruction. then i thought to myself, "if that be the meaning, then adieu to the priest's office! a priest i will never be!" i continued however in my studies; began also to dispute with my comrades; attended the sermons diligently, and was fond of hearing my preceptor myconius. mass and the idolatrous pictures, however, were still continued at zurich. chapter iv. master thomas becomes rope-maker and hebrew professor. [illustration: i read as i went backwards and forwards when i twisted.] at that time six of us went home to st. gall: and on our arrival at glyss, one saturday, we heard that the priests were singing vespers. after vespers one of them came and asked, "whence do you come?" i, as the boldest, replied, "from zurich." on this the priest said, "what have you done in that heretic city?" i became angry and said, "why heretic city?" the priest replied, "because they have put away the mass, and removed the pictures from the church." thereupon i said, "that is not so, for they still celebrate mass there; they have also pictures; why are they then heretics?" "for this reason," he replied, "because they do not consider the pope as the head of the christian church, and do not call upon the saints." i went on, "why is the pope the head of the christian church?" he said, "because st. peter was pope at rome, and has given the popedom there to his successors." i said, "st. peter very likely was never at rome;" pulled my new testament out of the bag, and shewed him how in the epistle to the romans the apostle salutes so many, and yet never mentions st. peter, who, according to his assertion, was the most eminent among the christians of that place. thereupon he said, "how could that be true, then, that christ met st. peter outside the city of rome, and was asked by him where he was going to? whereupon he answered. to rome, to allow myself to be crucified." i asked, "where have you read this story?" he said, "i have often heard it from my grandmother." thereupon i answered, "so, then, i perceive that your grandmother is your bible! and why should we call upon the saints?" answer--"because it is written, god is wonderful in all his works." then i stooped down, plucked a little plant, and said, "if one were to collect all men together, they would not be able to make a plant like this." he then became angry, and so our conversation ended. we had besides more than an hour's walk before us that night. early on sunday we came to visp, where a lazy ignorant priest was to celebrate his first mass; for which reason a great many priests and scholars, and a great crowd of other people, came together. we scholars helped the priest to sing the mass. then one who passed for the most eminent preacher preached from a window, and said amongst other things, to the young priest, "o thou noble knight! thou holy knight! thou art holier than the mother of god herself: for she only bore christ once, but thou shalt hear him every day of thy life henceforth." then one on the bridge, a basle master of arts, out of sitten, said a little too loud, "priest! you lie like a miscreant." the priests had all an eye upon me;--i knew not why, till i saw the priest with whom i had disputed the day before; then i could well imagine that he had complained of me. when the mass was over, all the priests and scholars were invited to dinner; but no one invited me. no man can believe how happy i then was, and how willing i was to fast for christ's sake. when however my mother saw me, she said, "how comes it that they have not invited you also?" and she put bread and cheese into a bowl, and prepared me some porridge. once when i was there at home, i visited my uncle (my mother's brother) who was at that time castellan (that is, chief person in the visper tenth), and said to him after supper, "uncle, tomorrow i shall set out again." he asked "whither?" i said: "to zurich." he: "pray do not go to that place, at your peril; for the confederates will invade it; and have sent deputies from all places. they will be taught to give up the heretic faith." i: "and is no one here from zurich?" he: "there is a messenger here with a letter." i: "have they read the letter before the deputies and country people?" he: "yes." i: "and what does the letter contain?" he: "in the letter they declare that they have adopted a doctrine by which they intend to abide! but if any one can convince them of another out of the old or new testament, then they will give it up." i: "is not that right?" upon that he said distinctly, and in these very words, "let the devil take them and the new testament together." i was horrified, and said, "o god! how you speak! it would be no wonder if god were to punish you both in body and soul. what then is the new testament?" "it is their new heretic doctrine," said he; "so the deputies have acquainted us, particularly the one from berne." thereupon i said, "the new testament is the new covenant which christ established with the faithful, and sealed with his blood. that is recorded in the four gospels and in the epistles of the holy apostles." then he said, "is that so?" "yes," i answered; "and if you will, i will go with you to-morrow to visp, and, if they will let me speak openly, i shall not let myself be restrained either by shame or by fear." he then said, "if the matter stands thus, i will not give my voice for making war upon them." on the following day the country people consulted together, and determined that this was a religious matter, and because the people of zurich desired to be taught by the holy scriptures, the learned should be left to fight it out together. so nothing came of it, and i went again to zurich, and pursued my studies in great poverty. i lodged in the house of an old woman of the name of hutmacherinn, and had a room in company with a good and tolerably clever companion. there god knows that i often suffered great hunger, and many days had not a mouthful of bread to eat. more than once i put some water into a pan, begged of the woman a little salt to put into the water, and then drank it from sheer hunger. i had to give a zurich shilling to the woman every week for the room; i therefore went now and then with messages across the country, for i got a bat (two-pence) for a mile; or i helped to carry wood, or to do other work of which many a student would be ashamed, and got something to eat for it, of which i was very glad and well satisfied. i was also custos, for which i got at every quarterly fast a zurich angster from each of the boys, of whom there were nearly sixty, sometimes more. zuinglius and myconius used also often to employ me to carry letters to the lovers of the truth in the allied districts. in this service i have often ventured my life with joy, that the doctrine of the truth might be spread, and several times narrowly escaped. so i remained in poverty in zurich till mr. henry werdmüller engaged me as tutor to his sons; one of whom, otho werdmüller, afterwards became master of arts in wittenberg, and then preacher at zurich; the other, however, was killed in the battle of kappel. my sufferings from want were now at an end, for i got my dinner every day, but was near over-doing myself with study. i wished to study latin, greek, and hebrew, all at the same time; and many a night slept very little, but tormented myself grievously with struggling against sleep; often i took cold water, raw turnips, or sand into my mouth, that the grating of my teeth might awake me. my dear father myconius often warned me against it, and said nothing to me if it sometimes happened that sleep overpowered me during the lesson. though i never had the fortune to hear lectures on latin, greek, and hebrew grammar, yet i began to read them with others, in order to practise myself in them; for myconius only drilled us diligently in the latin language; not being himself thoroughly master of the greek, as this was something very rare at that time. in private i occupied myself with lucian and homer, of which i had translations. now also it happened that father myconius took me to live in his house. he had several boarders, among whom was the late dr. gessner, with whom i was to work donatus and the declensions: this exercise was uncommonly useful to me. at that time myconius had the very learned theodore bibliander as assistant, who was extraordinarily well versed in all languages, but particularly in the hebrew, and had written a hebrew grammar. he also boarded at myconius's table, and instructed me, at my request, in hebrew. i used to get up early every morning, made a fire in the stove in myconius's little apartment, seated myself before the stove, and copied the grammar as long as bibliander slept, and he never found it out. in this year damian irmi, of basle, wrote to pellican in zurich, that he was going to venice, and that if there were any poor fellows who might like to have hebrew bibles, he would bring some with him as cheap as possible. dr. pellican told him to bring twelve. when they came a copy cost a crown. i had still a crown left of a legacy which i had received a short time before; that i gave with joy for one, and then began to compare the original hebrew bible with the translation, and so to make myself acquainted with the meaning of the words. one day conrad pur, preacher at mettmenstetten, in the canton of zurich, came; and when he saw me sitting at work over the hebrew bible, he said, "are you a hebrew? you must teach it to me also." i said, "i know nothing;" but he would not let himself be put off his purpose, till i promised him; for i also thought that by staying there longer i might become a burden to myconius. i therefore went with him to mettmenstetten, instructed him in hebrew, had plenty to eat and to drink, and remained seven-and-twenty weeks with him. from him i came to hedingen, to pastor weber, who likewise desired instruction in hebrew, and remained about twenty weeks with him. after that i came to another pastor at rifferswyl; he was eighty years old, and wished to begin to learn hebrew. from him i came again to zurich. in the mean time there came a very learned young man from lucern, of the name of rudolph collin; he was to go to constance to receive priest's orders. zuinglius, however, and myconius, persuaded him to learn the rope-making trade with his money instead. after he had married, and become a master, i asked him to teach me the rope-making trade also. he said he had no hemp. now just at that time a small legacy had fallen to me from my mother; with that i bought the master a cwt. of hemp, and learned as much as possible, till it was used up; but had, at the same time, always a desire for study, i used to get up quietly when the master thought i was asleep, and strike a light, and had a homer, and secretly my master's translation, out of which i made notes into my homer. when i was working at my trade, i took homer with me. when the master discovered that, he said, "platere! pluribus intentus, minor est ad singula sensus:" (either study or follow your trade!) once as we were eating our supper, and drinking water to it, he said, "platere! how does pindar begin?" i answered, "[greek: ariston men to hudor]," (water is the best). he then laughed and said, "then we will follow pindar's advice and drink water, because we have no wine." when i had used up the cwt. of hemp my apprenticeship was over, and i intended to go to basle. i therefore took leave of my master, as if i was going early next morning; but i went to my old lodging at the house of the hatter's widow, and remained there six weeks privately, and wrote a gloss upon euripides, that i might be able to take it as well as homer with me; for i intended also to study on the way. i then took my bundle and left zurich at day-break, came in one day as far as muttentz, and the next morning to basle. here i inquired after a master, and came to hans stäheli at the ox-market, whom they called the red rope-maker. they said that he was the rudest master on the whole length of the rhine, on which account the rope-making journeymen did not like to be with him, and i found a place open the sooner. when he first employed me i could scarcely hang up the hemp, and could twist it very little. then the master shewed me his manners, began to be abusive and to curse, and said, "go stick out the eyes of the master that taught you; what shall i do with you? you can do nothing!" he did not however know that i had not worked up more than one cwt. of hemp in my whole life. that i did not dare to tell him; for he had a very bad apprentice who could work better than i, and who treated me very contemptuously, and insulted me. after the master had tried me eight days, i spoke to him in a friendly manner, and said that he should have patience with me; and whether he gave me wages or not, that i would render him faithful service, and write down every thing punctually; for no one in the house could write. "i have," said i, "learned little--that i clearly perceive;--my master had seldom any hemp." so he allowed himself to be persuaded to keep me, and gave me two-pence a week wages. with this money i bought candles and studied at night although i was obliged to work till the trumpet sounded in the evening and to get up again in the morning at the sound of the trumpet. yet i was willing to bear that, if i could only stay and learn the trade. in the course of half a year i was able to twist a day's work, and act as foreman. i also worked often, when we made the large ropes or cables, in the sweat of my brow. then the master used to laugh at me, and say, "had i studied so much as you, and had such a love for it, i would let the rope-making go where it liked;" for he saw well that i had a singular love for books. i had made acquaintance with a pious printer, andrew cratander; he presented me with a plautus, which he had printed in octavo. as it was not yet bound, i took one sheet after the other, and stuck it in a little wooden fork split at the bottom, and the little fork i stuck in the hemp. this i read as i went backwards and forwards when i twisted, and then when the master came i threw the hemp over it. once, however, he caught me in the act, and behaved very wildly. "if you wish to study," said he, "follow it, or follow the trade. is it not enough that i allow it you by night, or on a holiday, that you must also read while you twist?" on holidays, as soon as i had eaten my dinner, i took my little book, went into a summer-house, and read the whole day, till the watchman at the city gate called. by degrees i made acquaintance with a few students, particularly with the scholars of dr. beatus rhenanus. these and others often passed my shop, and wished me to give up the rope-making trade, and they would recommend me to erasmus of rotterdam, who at that time lived at basle. but it was all of no use, although erasmus himself came to me once, as i was helping to make a great rope on the peter's-place; although with great exertion and labour i only got bad food, and not enough of that, and in winter had to suffer sadly from cold. i became acquainted with dr. oporinus, amongst others. he requested me to instruct him in hebrew; but i excused myself, saying that i myself knew but little of it, and also that i had not time. as however he left me no peace, i made my master the offer, that if he would only let me have some time free, i would serve him for nothing, or else take less wages than hitherto. he then allowed me every day one hour in the afternoon, from four to five. now oporinus put up a notice on the church, that a certain person intended to give lessons in the elements of the hebrew language, about four o'clock on monday, at st. leonard's. when i came there at the appointed hour, thinking that i should find oporinus alone,--for i had not seen the bill on the church door,--there were eighteen very learned gentlemen there. i wished directly to run away; but dr. oporinus called to me, "do not run away; these are also good fellows." although i was ashamed of being seen in my little apron which ropemakers are in the habit of wearing, yet i allowed myself to be persuaded, and began to read them "munster's hebrew grammar," which had not yet come to basle, also the prophet jonah, as well as i was able. the same year a frenchman came from basle, whom the queen of navarre had sent that he should learn hebrew. he also came into the school; and when i went in with my poor clothes, i seated myself behind the stove, where i had a comfortable little seat, and allowed the students to sit at the table. the frenchman now asked, "when does our professor come?" oporinus pointed to me. at this he looked at me, and without doubt felt surprise, because he thought such an one ought to be otherwise dressed, and not so badly. when the lesson was over, he took me by the hand, led me over the little bridge, and asked me how it happened that i was so badly clothed; and offered to write respecting me to the queen, saying that she would make me a great man if i would only follow him. this person was expensively dressed, had a golden cap, and a servant who carried his hat and cloak after him. he also attended my lectures till he left the place; but i had no wish to follow him. chapter v. master thomas becomes armour-bearer and then schoolmaster. when for the first time they took the field against the five cantons, (lucern, schwyz, uri, unterwalden, and zug,) my master was also summoned, and i carried his armour to mettmenstetten. when however a truce was concluded, i remained a while in zurich with myconius; and studied. he and his wife recommended me to marry their housekeeper anne, and give up the wandering hither and thither, and then they would make us their heirs. i allowed myself to be persuaded, and after a few days we went to dübendorf, to myconius's brother-in-law, to church, and celebrated the wedding with such pomp, that there were people at table with us who did not know that it was a wedding. myconius owed my wife fourteen florins wages, of which he gave her two florins. with these we went away the first day to mettmenstetten to the gentleman whom i had taught hebrew, by way of lucern, and sarnen, to visp in st. gall. at first we visited my sister christina in bürgendorf; she had there a husband and nine children. he had two aunts, who were so old that they did not know how old they were, and no one else did. with her we remained until st. gall's day. i had inherited some household furniture, which my sister had kept for me; and she lent me her ass, that i might bring it to visp. there happened to be an empty house there with a bed that was not wanted, and we got it lent to us rent free. it was almost the best house in the village, with nice windows that had panes. there all went on well at first. i began to prepare my rope-making trade, and to keep a school. in winter i had about thirty scholars; in summer scarcely six. each had to pay a penny every quarterly fast; besides which, i got many presents. i had many relations; one brought me eggs, another cheese, or a ball of butter. also others, whose children came to me to school, brought the like; some a quarter of a sheep; those who were at home in the village gave milk, vegetables, jugs of wine; so that seldom a day passed in which something was not given to us. at times we have reckoned at night, that in one day eight or nine different presents had been sent to us. a few weeks before my arrival, several women in eisterthal, who were in a room together, had spoken of me, how magnificent the first mass would be that i should celebrate, and how large the offerings which i should receive. for of the summermatters alone, the family of my mother, i had seventy-two cousins, not one of whom was yet married, and who therefore would have been able to carry their offerings to the altar themselves. through my marrying, however, all these splendid hopes were disappointed. when we began our housekeeping i borrowed fifteen swiss bats of my uncle, anthony summermatter. with this we began to trade--bought wine, and sold it again retail; bought apples also, which, my wife sold again to the boys who would have them; so that we did very well, and had no want. i had never been so well off. the priests however were not very friendly to me, although they did me an occasional kindness, and often invited me as a guest, that i might not take too much to the lutheran ways. but when i had to go to church, and help to sing the mass, it was a burden to me, and against my conscience to be obliged to help in the commission of idolatry,--to be present, and not to be able to speak my mind freely at all times. i therefore began to think over the matter, what i should do in order to get out again, and went to zurich to consult with father myconius. he advised me to leave the place, for that i had prospects of being able to go to basle again. when i set out on the journey home, i had a scholar with me, who was not able to keep up with me on the grimsel. it began to snow and to rain, and was very cold; so that we were almost frozen. as however i was acquainted with the manner of living upon the mountains, i told the boy that he should not sit down, but keep going forward. now and then i went on far before him to warm myself, and then ran back to the boy; till at last, by the help of god, we came to the hospital, a good inn on the mountain, where one can find good victuals and drink. that was before the middle of august. it happened once before, that i went over the same mountain, and because i was alone, and did not know the method of travelling over the mountains, becoming faint and tired i sat down, and wished to rest. i then suddenly felt an odd sensation about my heart; i became delightfully warm, and fell asleep with my arms laid on my knees; when a man came to me, laid his hands upon both my shoulders, awoke me, and said, "hey! why do you sit there; stand up and walk?" what became of the man i know not; but whithersoever i looked, above or below, i could see no one. i then stood up, took out of my bag a bit of bread, and ate it. when i related that to several people who were acquainted with the life on the mountains, they said i had been good as dead; for if any one feels excessively cold on the mountains, and sits down from weakness, the blood rushes from the heart into the face and extremities, and the person must die. i cannot think otherwise than that god preserved my life in a wonderful manner, as the people also assured me, for there is no easier death than freezing. on that account persons are sometimes found upon the mountains sitting as though they slept, and they are dead. when however the inhabitants of the mountains, who are acquainted with this danger, are overtaken by night, they take each other's hands and move round and round in a circle, if it be ever so dark, till it becomes day again. my wife was glad when i came home; for the pastor of the village had been seized with the plague, and no one would attend on him. she was also anxious as to how it might fare with herself, if she should become sick. i had experienced the same thing several years before; for whilst going to school at zurich, there was a terrible plague there; so that in the great minster they laid nine hundred persons in one grave, and in another seven hundred. at that time i went home with others of my countrymen, and had a boil on my leg, which i looked upon as a plague boil; by reason of which they would scarcely let us in any where. i went to grenchen to my aunt frances, and between galpentran (a little village at the foot of the mountain) and grenchen, i fell asleep eighteen times in half a day. my aunt, however, put on a bandage of herb-leaves, and no evil consequence ensued to me or others; yet neither i nor my aunt was allowed to go near any one for six weeks. being now desirous to leave the country, when the bishop baron adrian you rietmatt heard of it he sent his cousin john von rietmatt to me with a message that i should come to him at sitten, and become schoolmaster of the whole country; and that a good salary should be given me. i thanked his grace, but begged several years' more leave of absence, for that i was still young and unlearned, and should like to study more. at this he shook his finger at me, and said, "o platter! you would be old and clever enough, but you have something else in your mind; but when we call upon you at some future time we hope that you will be more ready to serve your native country than a foreign land." so i took my baby that had been born meanwhile, the cradle suspended from a hook on my back, and left the place. the child's godmother gave it at parting a double ducat. besides that, from twelve to fifteen pieces of money had also been given to us. the little household furniture which we took with us i carried, and the mother followed after as a calf the cow. the books, however, i had sent by way of berne to basle; thither we also went by way of zurich. i carried the child, and a scholar went with us who helped the mother to carry her bundle. after looking for a dwelling for a long time, we at last got a small house which was called the sign of the lion's head. dr. oporinus was living in the great court by the bishop's palace (where afterwards the baroness von schönau lived), and was schoolmaster at the castle. through the solicitation of some pious people i was appointed assistant to dr. oporinus, and the gentlemen deputies fixed my salary at forty pounds. so much, they said, they had never given to any one before me. out of this i had to pay ten pounds house-rent; at that time too every thing was dear; for a quartern of corn cost six pounds, and a quart of wine eight rapps. the scarcity however did not last long. i went to the market and bought a little cask of wine--i think it was an aulm--which i carried home upon my shoulder. during the drinking of this wine my wife and i had many disputes; for we had no drinking vessel but an anker, and as soon as we went into the cellar with the anker, there was a quarrel. i said, "do you drink; you have to nurse." my wife said, "drink you; you have to study, and to work yourself to death in the school." afterwards a good friend bought us a glass, in shape something like a boot; with which we went into the cellar when we had bathed. this glass held rather more than the anker. the cask lasted long; and when it was out we bought another. i went into the hospital, and bought a little kettle and a tub, both of which had holes in them. i also bought a chair, and a tolerably good bed, for five pounds. we had not much superfluous furniture; but god be praised, poor, as we were from the beginning, i cannot remember we ever had a meal without bread and wine. i studied every day,--got up early, and went to bed late;--in consequence of which i often had the headache, and great dizziness; so that at times i had to hold by the benches. the physicians would gladly have helped me by bleeding and the like, but it was all in vain. at that time a famous physician--epiphanius, a native of venice--came to bruntrut, who cured me in a very simple manner; so that i never had dizziness again, except when i stayed up too long, and remained fasting. chapter vi. master thomas in the war--becomes professor in basle. not long after that, the inhabitants of zurich and the five cantons went to war again. the event was very lamentable, for many a worthy and honest man met his death there; amongst others that eminent man, ulrich zuinglius. i was at that time in zurich. when the battle was lost, and the report reached zurich, they sounded an alarm on the great bell, just about the time the candles were lighted. then many people ran out of the town towards the sihlbridge, lower down on the albis. i also snatched up a halberd and sword in myconius's house, and ran out with the others: but when we had proceeded some distance, the sight was so dreadful that i thought to myself, "better for you to have staid at home;" for many met us who had only one hand; others held their head with both hands, grievously wounded and bloody; others suffering still more dreadfully, and men with them who lighted them along, for it was dark. when we came to the bridge they let every one out over the bridge; but into zurich they would let no man; for there were armed men standing on the bridge to hinder it;--otherwise i believe the most would have fled into the city. they then exhorted each other not to be disheartened. there was one man out of the zurich territory, a very stout-hearted fellow, who spoke with a loud voice, so that every one could hear, and reminded them how it often happened that at the beginning the prospect was gloomy, and yet afterwards matters turned out well; he also advised that during the night they should march towards the albis, for the purpose of receiving the enemy should they come on the morrow. when we reached that place no captain was any where to be found; for they had all been shot in the night. besides this, it was excessively cold at that time: for in the morning there was a severe frost. we then made fires; and i seated myself close to one of the fires, and pulled off my shoes to warm my feet. there was also one fuchsberger at my fire, at that time trumpeter of the states of zurich; he had neither shoes nor cap, nor any sort of weapon. as we sat there an alarm was sounded to see how the people would behave themselves; and while i was going to draw on my shoes, fuchsberger snatched up my halberd, and was going into the ranks with it. i said to him, "hold, comrade! leave me my weapon:" when he gave it back instantly, and said, "well, in god's name they knocked me about so grievously yesterday, they may kill me outright to-day;" and with these words he laid hold of a large hedge-stake, and placed himself in the rank directly before me. then i thought, "what a fine fellow that is! and there he stands quite unarmed!" i repented very much that i had not let him keep my halberd. otherwise i had given myself up to my unalterable fate, and thought, "now it must be." i was not at all frightened; but thought i would defend myself stoutly with my halberd; and if i lost my halberd, then i would defend myself vigorously with my sword. when however they saw that no enemy was at hand, they allowed the ranks to disband themselves; and i was not less glad than many another whom i knew, and who used to walk about very haughtily in zurich, but trembled there like an aspen leaf. then i heard a brave man, who stood on an elevated place, call out aloud, "where are our captains? o god of heaven! is there then no one here to direct us what to do?" although several thousands of us were assembled, yet no one knows what would have happened if the enemy had come up. when it was about nine o'clock in the morning the chief captain was seen coming across a meadow; he had lost his way in the flight: the other captain, william vom rothen hause, had been killed. the third, however, george göldin, had so conducted himself, that afterwards in zurich he was convicted of treachery, and had to leave the country. what further happened there i know not: for i was not equipped like the others; and having nothing to eat, i went back again to zurich. my old teacher myconius asked me, "what is the news? has ulrich zuinglius been killed?" when i said "yes," he said, with a grieved heart, "my god! have mercy upon us: now i have no wish to remain any longer in zurich;" for zuinglius and myconius had been good friends for many years. when i had got something to eat; we went out together into a chamber, and myconius said, "where shall i now go to? i have no desire to remain longer in zurich." hearing a few days after, that the preacher hieronymus bodanus, of st. alban's in basle, had also been killed in the battle, i said to myconius, "go to basle, and become preacher there." he answered, "what preacher would give way to me, and let me occupy his place?" i now acquainted him that the preacher of st. alban's had been killed, and that i believed he would be received there: there was however nothing more said about it. after the peace was concluded, four hundred swiss came, who were desirous to get into the town at night. this caused a tumult among the citizens, who feared that they were going to make a murderous night of it; for there were but too many traitors in the town, who could have pointed out which were to be murdered. they then locked the gate, and the whole rennway was filled with people. the traitorous blockhead escher, who had become colonel in lavater's place, rode out to the swiss at the sihl, and gave them lodging--whoever would not let them into his house he forced the door, and was very friendly to them. when every one had gone home from the rennway, dr. ammianus came to myconius, and said to him, "mr. myconius, i will not allow you to sleep in your house to-night. no one knows what may happen, and they will certainly not spare you; come therefore with me." several of his scholars escorted him to dr. ammianus's house, and i amongst them. myconius said to me, "thomas, do you sleep with me to-night;" so we both slept in one bed, and each had a halberd lying beside him in the bed. on the following day the swiss went up along the lake of zurich towards home. when all was quiet again, and as i was losing my time, i determined to go again to basle to my studies. i studied in the college, and slept in my own bed; i had my board at the sign of the pilgrim's staff, for my wife was still in zurich. there i have often dined for threepence; so that one can well imagine what sort of plenty i had. at that time i said to henry billing, the son of the burgomaster, that i had heard from myconius that he did not like to stay longer in zurich now that ulrich zuinglius had been killed. he said, "do you think that he could be persuaded to come here to us?" i related my conversation with him respecting the preacher's office at st. alban's. he informed his father, the burgomaster, of it; and he in turn told it to the gentlemen deputies, who sent for me to come to the convent of the augustines, in order to converse with me. after they had heard me they sent me to zurich to fetch myconius. the travelling expences i had however to bear myself. on the journey to basle, four horsemen met us in the field above mumpf, and as that was not in the jurisdiction of the confederacy myconius said, "what if those men should take us prisoners, and carry us to ensen?" i comforted him however when they came nearer, by saying, "do not be afraid, they are baslers." they were the cadets wolfgang von landenberg, eglin offenberg, landenberg's son, and a horse-soldier. when they were come nearer i said, "i know that they are baslers, for i have often seen them at [oe]colompadius's sermons." at mumpf they turned in at the bell inn, for it was near night, and we also turned in there. when we came into the room, cadet wolfgang asked, "whence do you come?" myconius answered, "from zurich." the cadet said, "what news in zurich?" myconius replied, "they are in great trouble because master ulrich zuinglius has been killed." cadet wolfgang continued, "who are you?" myconius answered, "my name is myconius, and i am schoolmaster in zurich, at the frauenmünster." thereupon he also asked him who he was? he said, "i am wolfgang von landenberg." a little while afterwards myconius taking me by the coat, led me aside, and said, "now i see how industriously you go to church in basle: it appears to me that this cadet did not take up much room in the church." this he said because he had heard him much talked of. whilst we sat, the cadet eglin also came into the room, together with the two others. after supper they began to drink immoderately, and the horseman brought myconius a glass full to the brim. myconius drank a little out of the glass; then the horseman said, "o, sir, you must not put me off so." as he continued importuning him, myconius became angry, and said, "hark ye, comrade, i was able to drink before you were able to count five--leave me alone." the cadet eglin, who sat at the top of the table, heard that, and asked, "what is the matter with you there?" myconius answered, "that young fellow there wants to force me to drink." on that eglin became very angry with the horseman; so that we thought that he would beat him; he spoke very sharply to him: "thou miserable fellow, wilt thou force an old man to drink?" and the like. thereupon he asked myconius, "dear sir, who are you?" "my name is oswald myconius." "were you not once schoolmaster at st. peter's in basle?" "yes." the cadet said, "my dear sir, then you were my preceptor: had i minded you then i should have become an honest man; whereas at present i can scarcely say what i am." they then went on drinking immoderately. the cadet wolf, however, had not taken any part whatever in the quarrel. when elgin had had enough, he laid himself down with his elbows on the table. on this his father began to scold him harshly, as if he had committed the greatest crime. after supper myconius and i went to bed: they however drank more before they went to bed, and made an abominable noise with singing and shouting. we heard afterwards that they had been about fourteen days in zurich, and had, with those who felt rather joy than sorrow, assisted at the funeral of zuinglius, and others who had been killed. next morning, as we were going over the melifeld, myconius said to me, "how did you like the education of those gentlemen yesterday? to make a person drink till he is sick, is no shame; but to lay the elbows a little on the table deserves all that cursing and scolding!" on our arrival in basle, myconius went to dr. oporinus, but i to the college. several days after, myconius was to preach the council-sermon. i do not know whether he had been told of it or not. when i came to him he was still in bed; i said, "father, get up; you are to preach." "what," replied he, "must i preach?" and raising himself up quickly, he turned to me with these words: "tell me what i shall preach." "i do not know," i said. he continued, "i am determined you shall tell me." thereupon i proposed to him to shew in his sermon whence and wherefore the misfortune came that had befallen us. he required me to make a note of it on a slip of paper. that i did, and gave him my little testament, into which he put the slip of paper, and so entered the pulpit; and expounded the question to the learned people who had assembled to hear him, as one who had never before preached a sermon. they were however all so surprised at his sermon, that i heard amongst others dr. grynäus say to a student of the name of sultzer, after the sermon, "o simon, let us pray to god that _that_ man may be spared to us, for that man can teach." so then he was received as preacher at st. alban's. i accompanied him again to zurich, and then went back again to basle to my studies. after he had received his honourable dismissal he came with his wife to basle, and my wife also came with him. when however he began to preach at st. alban's, so many people went to hear him, that it was determined to elect him, in place of dr. [oe]colompadius, to the office of antistes, or chief pastor, of which situation mr. thomas gyrenfalk had hitherto done the duties. i immediately got the professorship of the greek language in the pædagogium, and lectured upon ceporins' grammar and lucian's dialogues: but oporinus received the professorship of poetry. not long after, there was an attack of an infectious disease, and dr. heerwag's corrector of the press--jacob rubert, the beloved friend of oporinus and myself--died; thereupon dr. sultzer came for a while in his stead into dr. heerwag's service: but when he saw that the work rather hindered than helped him in his studies, he persuaded me to undertake it. i was indeed fearful that it would be too much for me; but dr. heerwag never ceased to press me, until i complied with his request. this business i attended to for four years, with much trouble and labour; for there never was a burden taken off my shoulders but another was laid on in its place. chapter vii. master thomas turns printer. in the mean time it happened that at the diet at sitten, in st. gall, it was resolved to call me to the situation of chief teacher; and the captain, "simon in alben," was commanded to write to me, and tell me to come. it was christmas-time that the resolution was passed, the execution was delayed till shrovetide. now at that time there was one herbert, provost in the lower college: he had been first at basle, and then went to friburg, where he gave out that he could not hold out any longer among the heretics in basle. after that he came again to basle, where they were unwilling to receive him, unless he assured them on oath that he was devoted heartily to the reformed confession. this oath he took at once, and said he could not endure the idolatrous doings at friburg. this man had boarders from st. gall, from whom he learned that they wished to have me there as teacher. as i had to superintend dr. heerwag's printing-office while he was in frankfort at the fair, and could not therefore immediately obey the call i had received, herbert availed himself of the opportunity and hastened to sitten to the bishop, whom he informed falsely that i would not come; for that i had said that i should not like to plunge into the midst of idolatry; and also that i was in the habit of eating meat on forbidden days, and the like. the bishop readily believed it; for i was already suspected by him as to my religion: so herbert was received. when he came again to basle i went to him into the college, and asked him, "what have you been doing in st. gall?" (for i already knew of the matter.) he answered, that he had had private business. then i said, "you have had the business of a rogue, and a wicked fellow. you have no doubt slandered me; but i will also go there, and if you have lied about me i will convict you of your wickedness." i really took the journey to st. gall, for i had private business besides. when i arrived at visp, the bishop happened to be there just then for the purpose of confirming. i also met the captain, simon, who had a house in visp, and visited him. at first he expressed his dissatisfaction that i had not come at the right time, and told me that on that account another had been already appointed. he also told me what crooked artifices herbert had employed with the bishop, and how only the day before, he had written and sent a messenger to say that i was coming, and that they should not believe me. the captain finished with these words: "well! the priests have chosen for themselves a teacher, and him they shall have." i would gladly have waited on the bishop, but could not manage it till he came to gusten. there he gave me an audience, and as i entered said, "thomas, while esau was following the chase jacob took his blessing away." i answered, "has then your princely grace only one blessing?" he then bade me welcome, and said that he had been informed that i would not come, also that i was suspected as to my faith; and that at basle i was in the habit of eating meat on forbidden days. thereupon i answered, "yes, my lord, and he that has told that of me has also eaten meat often enough on forbidden days;" which was true, for we had very often dined at dr. phrygius's when the doctor invited me, and the little man came to see what he could get. also when i said that, there were three canons standing by, and the governor, anthony venetz, and they intimated that if that was the case with the little man, they would let him go about his business and take me. but i said, "no; for then between two stools he would fall to the ground, and i have a good service already;" so i went back to basle. and here it occurs to me, that some time before, my very faithful and dear friend henry billing, son of the burgomaster in basle, had requested me to take a journey with him into the country of the confederacy, and then he would go with me into st. gall. we went therefore first to shaffhousen, constance; after that to lindau, where he had business; and from thence to st. gall, toggenburg, rapperschwyl, zuge, schweitz, and uri. we were treated with great respect, when it was known that we were from basle. after that we went into the valley of urseron to realp; but when in the evening henry saw the mountains he was terrified, and hesitated about crossing the mountain on the morrow. he was so cast down, that the landlady said, "if the baslers are all so faint-hearted, they will not go to war with the st. gallians. i am a feeble woman, yet i would take the child to-morrow by the hand and go over the mountains with him." henry did not sleep much during the night. we had engaged a strong alpine guide to shew us the way: he took a staff over his shoulder, went forward in the snow, and sang so loud that the mountains echoed again. he however slipped a little in the plain, as it was pretty dark; and henry seeing him fall, would not go a single step farther, but said, "do you go to st. gall, i will go back to basle." i would not however separate from him in the wilds, but determined to accompany him out again. this made me so spiritless that we conversed but little together that day. we came again to uri, and from thence to the lake. there a little wind arose, so that henry was very much afraid, and said to the boatman, "get ashore, i will not sail any further." the boatman said, "there is no danger." but henry behaved himself so outrageously that we were obliged to get to land not far from the place where william tell sprang on shore. we came to a little village, where we slept on straw. in the morning we went to berkenried, then to unterwalden, and over the brünig into the valley of hasli. then i said to him, "now you have a good road to thun, and from thence to berne and basle." so we parted, and i crossed the grimsel to st. gall. when i came to visp, captain simon was there, who was very favourably inclined towards me. he was master of arts at cologne; had read cicero's officia at the academy at basle; afterwards had business ten years in rome with the pope, and was well versed in the latin language. he said to me, "i shall take the bath at briegen to cure the gout; bathe with me, and i will pay for you." i went with him; for the bath is not half a mile distant from visp. at first several of us had to carry him into the bath; but when he had bathed about two hours he could walk out on two crutches. there came thither also the captain of the guard of the duke of milan, who had physicked away nine hundred ducats on one leg without being any the better: he also bathed, and in three days his ankle was well, and remained so from that hour. that i saw with my own eyes, and other things besides; so that i could relate wonders enough concerning it. the bath did me a great deal of good, except that i lost all appetite, and could scarcely eat any thing but rye bread; neither could i drink any wine, for it was too strong for me. i complained of that to the host. captain peter oweling, who was a wonderfully fine man, and had also studied in milan; and he said to him, "oh! if you only had sour wine!" he ordered wine for me from morrill, which was dreadfully sour; for it is there very wild, and is the highest wine that grows in that country. when the wine came, the host said to me, "platter, i will make you a present of that wine." it was about two saum. he then gave me a pretty crystal glass, which held nearly a measure of wine: with this i went into the cellar, and drank the largest draught i ever remember to have swallowed in my life before, for i had been a long time very thirsty, because i drank nothing but warm bath water, and there was also an eruption on my skin. when i had taken that draught i lost all wish for any more of that wine; but my appetite for eating and drinking had returned again. captain simon received many presents in the bathing place, and amongst others seventy and odd pheasants, some feathers of which i brought to basle. as i had no opportunity of sending letters to basle, and remained away nine weeks, they said that i had certainly perished on the mountain. when the bath cure was over i went again to basle, and became, as before, corrector of the press to dr. heerwag, and professor at the pædagogium. i afterwards, in partnership with dr. oporinus, balthasar ruch, and ruprecht winter, bought the printing establishment of andrew cratander, and became a master-printer. that trade i followed several years with much sorrow and trouble, particularly on account of the debts i had to contract, because i had no property of my own to advance. one day, as oporinus and i were still professors, it happened that the town secretary invited me into his house, and asked me how it was that the university did not rightly prosper. i said, "methinks that there are too many professors; for there are often more of them than students. it would be enough if there were four eminent men, who must however be well remunerated, and four with inferior salaries, that would be eight persons; if each were to read industriously only one lecture a day, there would be students enough." he then said, "what shall we do with our baslers?" i said, "if you will attend to that, and not rather care for the youth, then i can advise nothing more; i have always had the idea that the baslers should be preferred if they can be found; but if not, then the best that can be had ought to be taken, in order that youth may be assisted." this advice was at once followed with respect to me and dr. oporinus; for as we had engaged in the printing, it was expected either that we should give up the printing, and apply ourselves to the professorship, or else give up the professorship. the latter happened; for we were so deeply engaged in that trade, that we could not have given it up without great loss. chapter viii. master thomas becomes professor again--dies. [illustraton: i went on with the printing.] i therefore went on with the printing, and had a bad time of it, as also my wife and children; for the children were often obliged to fold paper till their little fingers bled. but yet my circumstances were improved; for with the printing alone i was able to gain florins a year, improve my printing-office and household furniture, and always found people to advance me money when i wanted it. notwithstanding, from various circumstances, i got tired of my business after some time;--and was also requested from different quarters to become schoolmaster again: for in a few years they had had i several schoolmasters, and the school had almost entirely fallen into decay. i one day called on mr. rudolph frey; he was chief deputy, and constable in the town. he said, "pray become schoolmaster; by so doing you will oblige the council, and serve god and the world." dr. grynæus said to me, "become schoolmaster! there is no office more heavenly! there is nothing i would rather be, if only i had not to say a thing twice over." they went on persuading me, until at last i consented. i got a salary of florins, of which i had to pay to the assistants; and thus i turned professor again; but i had to get through a great deal of disputing with the university, because they did not wish me to be independent, and to read lectures, the right to which they claimed for themselves exclusively. when my wife and i had attained a considerable age, a dreadful sickness came, which spared no age, and also seized us both. but our heavenly father allowed us to remain yet a little longer here below on earth. the lord grant us grace that it may serve to the glory of god and salvation of our souls! amen! and to the glory of god i cannot conceal, that during the whole of my sickness i did not experience the least pain; although my wife and others had to bear great suffering. that also i ascribe to the mercy of god! may he deliver us all from everlasting torment, through his son jesus christ. amen. * * * the close of this history, which thomas wrote for his son felix, runs as follows: "now i have, according to your desire, dear son felix, written the beginning and continuation of my life up to the present time, as well as i could remember it after so many years; but certainly not _all_, for who would be able to do that? for i have often been in great dangers on the mountains and waters, as on the lakes of constance and lucerne; and others also on the rhine; likewise on land in poland, hungary, silesia, meissen, swabia, and bavaria, where in my youth (besides what is noted in this book) i suffered very much; so that i often thought, how is it possible that i am still alive, and can stand or walk so long a time, and have neither broken nor injured a limb? god protected me by his angels; and however mean my beginning, and however full of danger my life has been, i have notwithstanding, as you see, arrived at a tolerably comfortable position; for although i had as good as nothing of private property, and my wife possessed nothing, still in time we have arrived at this point, that i, by great application to business, have acquired, in the town of basle, four houses, with tolerable furniture: also, through the blessing of god, possess an estate with house and farm, besides the official residence at the school; whilst at first i had not a hut in basle to afford me refuge. and, notwithstanding my mean descent, yet god has granted me the honour of having been now thirty-and-one years professor in the head-school next the university, in the far famed city of basle, and of having instructed the child of many an honourable man, of whom many have become doctors, or otherwise learned men: several, and indeed not a few, of the nobility, who now possess and rule over land and people, and others who sit on the judgment seat, and in the council. also, at all times, i have had many boarders, both of noblemen and other people of consequence, who speak well of me, and shew me all manner of kindness; so that the worshipful town of zurich, and other places, have sent me presents of their wine of honour. likewise, in strasburg, eleven doctors have appeared to my honour, because i brought up my dear brother simon, who is preceptor of the second class there. at sitten, when they sent me the wine of the city, the curate said, 'this wine the city of sitten sends to our dear countryman, thomas platter, as to a father of the children of the province of st. gall.' what shall i then say of thee also, felix, of thy honour and prosperity, that god has granted thee the honour, that thou hast already lived long and happily with thy wife, and hast been known to princes and lords, noblemen and commons. this all, dear felix, thou wilt acknowledge and own, ascribing nothing to thyself, but giving god alone honour and glory all thy life long: thus thou wilt attain to everlasting life.--written by thomas platter, the th of february , the seventy-third year of my age. god grant me a happy end, through jesus christ. amen." in the year , the th january, my dear father died happily. almighty god grant that he may rise again joyfully at the coming of our saviour jesus christ. amen. dr. felix platter. footnotes: [footnote : literally "sharp-shooters;" but the office is probably the same as that known still in england by the name of "fag."] [footnote : it is still not unusual in poland, on certain festival days or public occasions, to strew a sort of reed or coarse grass in the streets.] [footnote : the latin grammar of Ælius donatus, a famous latin scholar and teacher of the th century, which was then in general use.] [footnote : school-servant in fact.] * * * * * printed by c. f. hodgson, gough square, london. special method in primary reading special method in primary reading and oral work with stories by charles a. mcmurry, ph.d. director of practice department, northern illinois state normal school, de kalb, illinois new york the macmillan company london: macmillan & co., ltd. _all rights reserved_ copyright, . by the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped july, ; reprinted april, . preface this book attempts the discussion of two very important problems in primary education. first, the oral work in the handling of stories, and second, the introduction to the art of reading in the earliest school work. the very close relation between the oral work in stories and the exercises in reading in the first three years in school is quite fully explained. the oral work in story-telling has gained a great importance in recent years, but has not received much discussion from writers of books on method. following this "special method in primary reading," a second volume, called the "special method in the reading of complete english classics in the grades of the common school," completes the discussion of reading and literature in the intermediate and grammar grades. both of the books of special method are an application of the ideas discussed in "the principles of general method" and "the method of the recitation." still other volumes of special method in geography, history, and natural science furnish the outlines of the courses of study in these subjects, and also a full discussion of the value of the material selected and of the method of treatment. at the close of each chapter and at the end of the book a somewhat complete graded list of books, for the use of both pupils and teachers, is given. the same plan is followed in all the books of this series, so that teachers may be able to supply themselves with the best helps with as little trouble as possible. charles a. mcmurry. contents chapter i page the reason for oral work in stories chapter ii the basis of skill in oral work chapter iii first grade stories chapter iv second grade stories chapter v third grade stories chapter vi primary reading through incidental exercises and games chapter vii method in primary reading chapter viii list of books for primary grades special method in primary reading chapter i the reason for oral work in stories the telling and reading of stories to children in early years, before they have mastered the art of reading, is of such importance as to awaken the serious thought of parents and teachers. to older people it is a source of constant surprise--the attentive interest which children bestow upon stories. almost any kind of a story will command their wide-awake thought. but the tale which they can fully understand and enjoy has a unique power to concentrate their mental energy. there is an undivided, unalloyed absorption of mind in good stories which augurs well for all phases of later effort. to get children into this habit of undivided mental energy, of singleness of purpose in study, is most promising. in primary grades, the fluttering, scatter-brained truancy of thought is the chronic obstacle to success in study. the telling or reading of stories to children naturally begins at home, before the little ones are old enough for school. the mother and father, the aunts and uncles, and any older person who delights in children, find true comfort and entertainment in rehearsing the famous stories to children. the mother goose, the fables, the fairy tales, the "arabian nights," eugene field's and stevenson's poems of child life, the bible stories, the myths, and some of the old ballads have untold treasures for children. if one has a voice for singing the old melodies, the charm of music intensifies the effect. little ones quickly memorize what delights them, and not seldom, after two or three readings, children of three and four years will be heard repeating whole poems or large parts of them. the repetition of the songs and stories till they become thoroughly familiar gives them their full educative effect. they become a part of the permanent furniture of the mind. if the things which the children learn in early years have been well selected from the real treasures of the past (of which there is a goodly store), the seeds of true culture have been deeply sown in their affections. the opportunities of the home for good story-telling are almost boundless. parents who perceive its worth and are willing to take time for it, find in this early period greater opportunity to mould the lives of children and put them into sympathetic touch with things of beauty and value than at any other time. at this age children are well-nigh wholly at the mercy of their elders. they will take what we give them and take it at its full worth or worthlessness. they absorb these things as the tender plant absorbs rain and sunshine. the kindergarten has naturally found in the story one of its chief means of effectiveness. stories, songs, and occupations are its staples. dealing with this same period of early childhood, before the more taxing work of the school begins, it finds that the children's minds move with that same freedom and spontaneity in these stories with which their bodies and physical energies disport themselves in games and occupations. it is fortunate for childhood that we have such wholesome and healthful material, which is fitted to give a child's mental action a well-rounded completeness. his will, his sensibility, and his knowing faculty, all in one harmonious whole, are brought into full action. in short, not a fragment but the whole child is focussed and concentrated upon one absorbing object of thought. the value of the oral treatment of stories is found in the greater clearness and interest with which they can be presented orally. there is a keener realism, a closer approximation to experimental facts, to the situations, the hardships, to the sorrows and triumphs of persons. the feelings and impulses of the actors in the story are felt more sharply. the reality of the surrounding conditions and difficulties is presented so that a child transports himself by the power of sympathy and imagination into the scenes described. there is no way by which this result can be accomplished in early years except by the oral presentation of stories. until the children have learned to read and have acquired sufficient mastery of the art of reading so that it is easy and fluent, there is no way by which they can get at good stories for themselves. average children require about three years to acquire this mastery of the reading art. not many children read stories from books, with enjoyment and appreciation, till they are nine or ten years old; but from the age of four to ten they are capable of receiving an infinite amount of instruction and mental stimulus from hearing good stories. in fact, many of the best stories ever produced in the history of the world can be thoroughly enjoyed by children before they have learned to read. this is true of grimm's and andersen's stories, of the myths of hiawatha and norseland, and of the early greeks, of the bible stories, the "arabian nights," "robin hood," besides many other stories, poems, ballads, and biographies which are among the best things in our literature. in these early years the minds of children may be enriched with a furnishment of ideas of much value for all their future use, a sort of capital well invested, which will bring rich returns. minds early fertilized with this variety of thought material become more flexible, productive, and acquisitive. for many years, and even centuries, it was supposed that early education could furnish children with little except the forms and instruments of knowledge, the tools of acquisition, such as ability to read, spell, and write, and to use simple numbers. but the susceptibility of younger children to the powerful culture influence of story, poem, and nature study, was overlooked. we now have good reason to believe that there is no period when the educative and refining influences of good literature in the form of poems and story can be made so effective as in this early period from four to ten years. that period which has been long almost wholly devoted to the dry formalities and mechanics of knowledge, to the dull and oftentimes benumbing drills of alphabets, spelling, and arithmetical tables, is found to be capable of a fruitful study of stories, fables, and myths, and an indefinite extension of ideas and experiences in nature observation. but the approach to these sunny fields of varied and vivid experience is not through books, except as the teacher's mind has assimilated their materials and prepared them for lively presentation. the oral speech through which the stories are given to children is completely familiar to them, so that they, unencumbered by the forms of language, can give their undivided thought to the story. oral speech is, therefore, the natural channel through which stories should come in early years. the book is at first wholly foreign to them, and it takes them three years or more of greater or less painful effort to get such easy mastery of printed forms as to gain ready access to thought in books. a book, when first put into the hands of a child, is a complete obstruction to thought. the oral story, on the contrary, is a perfectly transparent medium of thought. a child can see the meaning of a story through oral speech as one sees a landscape through a clear window-pane. if a child, therefore, up to the age of ten, is to get many and delightsome views into the fruitful fields of story-land, this miniature world of all realities, this repository of race ideas, it must be through oral speech which he has already acquired in the years of babyhood. it is an interesting blunder of teachers, and one that shows their unreflecting acceptance of traditional customs, to assume that the all-absorbing problem of primary instruction is the acquisition of a new book language (the learning to read), and to ignore that rich mother tongue, already abundantly familiar, as an avenue of acquisition and culture. but we are now well convinced that the ability to read is an instrument of culture, not culture itself, and primarily the great object of education is to inoculate the children with the ideas of our civilization. the forms of expression are also of great value, but they are secondary and incidental as compared with the world of ideas. there is an intimate connection between learning to read and the oral treatment of stories in primary schools which is very interesting and suggestive to the teacher. routine teachers may think it a waste of time to stop for the oral presentation of stories. but the more thoughtful and sympathetic teacher will think it better to stimulate the child's mind than to cram his memory. the young mind fertilized by ideas is quicker to learn the printed forms than a mind barren of thought. yet this proposition needs to be seen and illustrated in many forms. children should doubtless make much progress in learning to read in the first year of school. but coincident with these exercises in primary reading, and, as a general thing, preliminary to them, is a lively and interested acquaintance with the best stories. it is a fine piece of educative work to cultivate in children, at the beginning of school life, a real appreciation and enjoyment of a few good stories. these stories, thus rendered familiar, and others of similar tone and quality, may serve well as a part of the reading lessons. it is hardly possible to cultivate this literary taste in the reading books alone, unrelieved by oral work. the primers and first readers, when examined, will give ample proof of this statement. in spite of the utmost effort of skilled primary teachers to make attractive books for primary children, our primers and first readers show unmistakable signs of their formal and mechanical character. they are essentially drill books. it seems well, therefore, to have in primary schools two kinds of work in connection with story and reading, the oral work in story-telling, reproduction, expression, etc., and the drill exercises in learning to read. the former will keep up a wide-awake interest in the best thought materials suitable for children, the latter will gradually acquaint them with the necessary forms of written and printed language. moreover, the interest aroused in the stories is constantly transferring itself to the reading lessons and giving greater spirit and vitality even to the primary efforts at learning to read. in discussing the method of primary reading we shall have occasion to mention the varied devices of games, activities, drawings, dramatic action, blackboard exercises, and picture work, by which an alert primary teacher puts life and motive into early reading work, but fully as important as all these things put together is the growing insight and appreciation for good stories. when a child makes the discovery, as hugh miller said, "that learning to read is learning to get stories out of books" he has struck the chord that should vibrate through all his future life. the real motive for reading is to get something worth the effort of reading. even if it takes longer to accomplish the result in this way, the result when accomplished is in all respects more valuable. but it is probable that children will learn to read fully as soon who spend a good share of their time in oral story work. in discussing the literary materials used in the first four grades, we suggest the following grading of certain large groups of literary matter, and the relation of oral work to the reading in each subsequent grade is clearly marked. oral work. reading. _ st grade._ games, mother goose. lessons based on games, etc. fables, fairy tales. board exercises. nature myths, child poems. primers, first readers. simple myths, stories, etc. _ d grade._ robinson crusoe. fables, fairy tales. hiawatha. myths and poems. seven little sisters. second readers. hiawatha primer. _ d grade._ greek and norse myths. robinson crusoe. ballads and legendary andersen's & grimm's tales. stories. child's garden of verses. ulysses, jason, siegfried. third readers. old testament stories. _ th grade._ american pioneer history greek and norse myths. stories. historical ballads. early biographical stories ulysses, arabian nights. of europe, as alfred, hiawatha, wonder book. solon, arminius, etc. this close dependence of reading proper, in earlier years, upon the oral treatment of stories as a preliminary, is based fundamentally upon the idea that suitable and interesting thought matter is the true basis of progress in reading, and that the strengthening of the taste for good books is a much greater thing than the mere acquisition of the art of reading. the motive with which children read or try to learn to read is, after all, of the greatest consequence. the old notion that children must first learn to read and then find, through the mastery of this art, the entrance to literature is exactly reversed. first awaken a desire for things worth reading, and then incorporate these and similar stories into the regular reading exercises as far as possible. in accordance with this plan, children, by the time they are nine or ten years old, will become heartily acquainted with three or four of the great classes of literature, the fables, fairy tales, myths, and such world stories as crusoe, aladdin, hiawatha, and ulysses. moreover, the oral treatment will bring these persons and actions closer to their thought and experience than the later reading alone could do. in fact, if children have reached their tenth year without enjoying those great forms of literature that are appropriate to childhood, there is small prospect that they will ever acquire a taste for them. they have passed beyond the age where a liking for such literature is most easily and naturally cultivated. they move on to other things. they have passed through one great stage of education and have emerged with a meagre and barren outfit. the importance of oral work as a lively means of entrance to studies is seen also in other branches besides literature. in geography and history the first year or two of introductory study is planned for the best schools in the form of oral narrative and discussion. home geography in the third or fourth year, and history stories in the fourth and fifth years of school, are best presented without a text book by the teacher. although the children have already overcome, to some extent, the difficulty of reading, so great is the power of oral presentation and discussion to vivify and realize geographical and historical scenes that the book is discarded at first for the oral treatment. in natural science also, from the first year on the teacher must employ an oral method of treatment. the use of books is not only impossible, but even after the children have learned to read, it would defeat the main purpose of instruction to make books the chief means of study. the ability to observe and discern things, to use their own senses in discriminating and comparing objects, in experiments and investigations, is the fundamental purpose. in language lessons, again, it is much better to use a book only as a guide and to handle the lessons orally, collecting examples and stories from other studies as the basis for language discussions. it is apparent from this brief survey that an oral method is appropriate to the early treatment of all the common school studies, that it gives greater vivacity, intensity, simplicity, and clearness to all such introductory studies. the importance of story-telling and the initiation of children into the delightful fields of literature through the teacher rather than through the book are found to harmonize with a mode of treatment common to all the studies in early years. in this connection it is interesting to observe that the early literature of the european nations was developed and communicated to the people by word of mouth. the homeric songs were chanted or sung at the courts of princes. at athens, in her palmy days, the great dramatists and poets either recited their productions to the people or had them presented to thousands of citizens in the open-air theatres. even historians like thucidides read or recited their great histories before the assembled people. in the early history of england, scotland, and other countries, the minstrels sang their ballads and epic poems in the baronial halls and thus developed the early forms of music and poetry. shakespeare wrote his dramas for the theatre, and he seems to have paid no attention at all to their appearance in book form, never revising them or putting them into shape for the press. this practice of all the early races of putting their great literature before the people by song, dramatic action, and word of mouth is very suggestive to the teacher. the power and effectiveness of this mode of presentation, not only in early times but even in the highly civilized cities of london and athens, is unmistakable proof of the educative value of such modes of teaching. this is only another indication of the kinship of child life with race life, which has been emphasized by many great thinkers. the oral method offers a better avenue for all vigorous modes of expression than the reading book. it can be observed that the general tendency of the book is toward a formal, expressionless style in young readers. go into a class where the teacher is handling a story orally and you will see her falling naturally into all forms of vivid narrative and presentation, gesture, facial expression, versatile intonation, blackboard sketching and picture work, the impersonation of characters in dialogue, dramatic action, and general liveliness of manner. the children naturally take up these same activities and modes of uttering themselves. even without the suggestion of teachers, little children express themselves in such actions, attitudes, and impersonations. this may be often observed in little boys and girls of kindergarten age, when telling their experiences to older persons, or when playing among themselves. the freedom, activity, and vivacity of children is, indeed, in strong contrast to the apathetic, expressionless, monotonous style of many grown people, including teachers. but the oral treatment of stories has a tendency to work out into modes of activity even more effective than those just described. in recent years, since so much oral work has been done in elementary schools, children have been encouraged also to express themselves freely in blackboard drawings and in pencil work at their desks by way of illustrating the stories told. moreover, in paper cutting, to represent persons and scenes, in clay modelling, to mould objects presented, and in constructive and building efforts, in making forts, tents, houses, tools, dress, and in showing up modes of life, the children have found free scope for their physical and mental activities. these have not only led to greater clearness and vividness in their mental conceptions, but have opened out new fields of self-activity and inventiveness. so long as work in reading and literature was confined to the book exercises, nearly all these modes of expression were little employed and even tabooed. finally, the free use of oral narrative in the literature of early years, in story-telling and its attendant modes of expression, opens up to primary teachers a rare opportunity of becoming genuine educators. there was a time, and it still continues with many primary teachers, when teaching children to read was a matter of pure routine, of formal verbal drills and repetitions, as tiresome to the teacher, if possible, as to the little ones. but now that literature, with its treasures of thought and feeling, of culture and refinement, has become the staple of the primary school, teachers have a wide and rich field of inspiring study. the mastery and use of much of the preferred literature which has dropped down to us out of the past is the peculiar function of the primary teacher. contact with great minds, like those of kingsley, ruskin, andersen, the grimm brothers, stevenson, dickens, hawthorne, de foe, browning, Ã�sop, homer, and the unknown authors of many of the best ballads, epics, and stories, is enough to give the primary teacher a sense of the dignity of her work. on the other hand, the opportunity to give to children the free and versatile development of their active powers is an equal encouragement. teachers who have taken up with zeal this great problem of introducing children to their full birthright, the choice literature of the world suited to their years, and of linking this story work with primary reading so as to give it vitality,--such teachers have found school life assuming new and unwonted charms; the great problems of the educator have become theirs; the broadened opportunity for the acquisition of varied skill and professional efficiency has given a strong ambitious tone to their work. chapter ii the basis of skill in oral work accepting the statement that skill in oral presentation of a story is a prime demand in early education, the important question for teachers is how to cultivate their resources in this phase of teaching, how to become good story-tellers. it may be remarked that, for the great majority of people, story-telling is not a gift but an acquisition. there are, of course, occasional geniuses, but they may be left out of consideration. they are not often found in the schoolroom any more than in other walks of life. what we need is a practical, sensible development of a power which we all possess in varying degrees. nor is it the fluent, volatile, verbose talker who makes a good oral teacher, but rather one who can see and think clearly: one who knows how to combine his ideas and experiences into clear and connected series of thought. we may proceed, therefore, to a discussion of the needs and resources of a good story-teller. . without much precaution it may be stated that he should have a rich experience in all the essential realities of human life. this covers a large field of common things and refers rather to contact with life than to mere book knowledge. yet it is the depth, heartiness, and variety of knowledge rather than the source from which it springs that concerns us. books often give us just this deep penetrating experience, as soon as we learn how to select and use them. we need to know human life directly and in all sorts of acts, habits, feelings, motives, and conditions,--something as shakespeare knew it, only within the compass of our narrower possibilities. likewise the physical world with its visible and invisible forces and objects besetting us on every side. these things must impress themselves upon us vividly in detail as well as in the bulk. the hand that has been calloused by skill-producing labor, the back that aches with burdens bravely borne, the brain that has sweat with strong effort, are expressions of this kind of knowledge of the world. clear-grained perceptions are acquired from many sources: from travel, labor, books, reflection, sickness, observation. i go to-day into a small shop where heavy oak beer-kegs are made, and watch the man working this refractory material into water-tight kegs that will stand hard usage at the hands of hard drinkers for twenty years. if my mind has been at work as i watch this man for an hour, with his heavy rough staves made by hand, his tools and machines, his skill and strong muscular action, the amount and profit of his labor, that man's work has gone deep into my whole being. i can almost live his life in an hour's time, and feel its contact with the acute problems of our modern industrial life. that is a kind of knowledge and experience worth fully as much as a sermon in trinity church or a university lecture. the teacher needs a great store of these concrete facts and illustrations. without them he is a carpenter without tools or boards. he needs to know industries, occupations, good novels, typical life scenes, sunsets, sorrows, joys, inventions, poets, farmers--all such common, tangible things. even from fools and blackguards he can get experiences that will last him a lifetime if they only strike in and do not flare off into nothingness. social experience in all sorts of human natures, disposition, and environing circumstance is immediately valuable to the teacher. close acquaintance with children, with their early feelings and experiences, with their timidity or boldness, with their whims or conceits, their dislikes and preferences, their enthusiasms and interests, with their peculiar home and neighborhood experiences and surroundings, with their games and entertainments, with the books and papers they read, with their dolls and playthings, their vacations and outings, with their pets and playhouses, with their tools and mechanical contrivances--all these and other like realities of child life put the teacher on a footing of possible appreciation and sympathy with children. these are the materials and facts which a good teacher knows how to work up in oral recitations. of course the kindly, sympathetic social mood which is not fretted by others' frailties and perversities, but, like irving or addison, exhibits a liberal charity or humorous affection for all things human, is a fortunate possession or acquisition for the teacher. . it may be said also, without fear of violent contradiction, that a teacher needs to be a master of the story he is about to tell. it may be well to spread out to view the important things necessary to such a mastery. the reading over of the story till its facts and episodes have become familiar and can be reproduced in easy narrative is at least a minimum requirement. even this moderate demand is much more serious than the old text-book routine in history or reading, where the teacher, with one eye on the book, the other on the class, and his finger at the place, managed to get the questions before the class in a fixed order. let us look a little beneath the surface of the story. what is its central idea, the author's aim or motive in producing it? not a little effort and reflection may be necessary to get at the bottom of this question. some of the most famous stories, like "aladdin," "gulliver's travels," and the "city musicians," may be so wild and wayward as to elude or blunt the point of this question. the story may have a hard shell, but the sharp teeth of reflection will get at the sweet kernel within, else the story is not worth while. in some of the stories, like "baucis and philemon," "the great stone face," "the pied piper of hamelin," "the discontented pine tree," and "hiawatha's fasting," the main truth is easily reflected from the story and caught up even by the children. this need for getting at the heart of the story is clearly seen in all the subsequent work. it is the exercise of such a critical judgment which qualifies the teacher to discriminate between good and poor stories. in the treatment of the story the essential topics are laid out upon the basis of this controlling idea or motive. the leading aims and carefully worded questions point toward this central truth. the side lights and attendant episodes are arranged with reference to it like the scenes in a drama. the effort to get at the central truth and the related ideas is a sifting-out process, a mode of assimilating and mastering the story more thorough-going than the mere memorizing of the facts and words for the purpose of narration. the thought-getting self-activity and common-sense logic which are involved in this mode of assimilating a story are good for both pupils and teacher. the mastery of a story needed by an oral teacher implies abundance of resource in illustrative device and explanation. when children fail to grasp an idea, it is necessary to fall back upon some familiar object or experience not mentioned in the book. emergencies arise which tax the teacher's ingenuity to the utmost. even the children will raise queries that baffle his wit. in preparing a story for the classroom it is necessary to see it from many sides, to foresee these problems and difficulties. oftentimes the collateral knowledge derived from history or geography or from similar episodes in other stories will suggest the solution. it is a favorite maxim of college teachers and of those who deal mostly with adults or older pupils, that if a person knows a thing he can teach it. leaving out of account the numerous cases of those who are well posted in their subjects, but cannot teach, it is well to note the scope, variety, and thoroughness of knowledge necessary to a good teacher to handle it skilfully with younger children. besides the thorough knowledge of the subject which scholars have demanded, it requires an equally clear knowledge of the mental resources of children, the language which they can understand, the things which attract their interest and attention, and the ways of holding the attention of a group of children of different capacities, temper, and disposition. any dogmatic professor who thinks he can teach the story of "cinderella" or andersen's "five peas in the pod," because he has a full knowledge of the facts of the story, should make trial of his skill upon a class of twenty children in the first grade. we suggest, however, that he do it quietly, without inviting in his friends to witness his triumph. no, the mastery of the subject needed for an effective handling of it in oral work is different and is greater than they have yet dreamed of who think that mere objective knowledge is all that is needed by a teacher. the application of knowledge to life is generally difficult, more taxing by far than the mere acquisition of facts and principles. but the use of one's knowledge in the work of instructing young children, in getting them to acquire and assimilate it, is perhaps the most difficult of all forms of the application of knowledge. it is difficult because it is so complex. to think clearly and accurately on some topic for one's single self is not easy, but to get twenty children of varying capacities and weaknesses, with their stumbling, acquisitive, flaring minds, to keep step along one clear line of thought is a piece of daring enterprise. the mastery of the story, therefore, for successful oral work, must be detailed, comprehensive, many-sided, and adapted to the fluttering thoughts of childhood. . the chief instrument through which the teacher communicates the story is oral speech, and this he needs to wield with discriminating skill and power. preachers and lecturers, when called upon to talk to children, nearly always talk over their heads, using language not appropriate and comprehensible to children. those accustomed to deal with little folks are quickly sensitive to this amateur awkwardness. young teachers just out of the higher schools make the same blunder. they are also inclined to think that fluency and verbosity are a sign of power. but such false tinsel makes no impression upon children except confusion of thought. children require simple, direct words, clearly defined in thought and grounded upon common experience and conviction. facts and realities should stand behind the words of a teacher. what he seeks to marshal before children is people and things. words should serve as photographs of objects; instantaneous views of experiences. in some social and diplomatic circles words are said to conceal thought, but this kind of verbal diplomacy has no place in schools. it is an interesting question how far the language and style of the authors should be preserved by the narrator. it would be an error to forbid the exact use of the author's words and an equal error to require it. it seems reasonable to say that the teacher should become absorbed in the author's style and mode of presenting the story. this will lead to a close approximation to the author's words, without any slavish imitation. in the midst of oral presentation and discussion it would be impossible to hold strictly to the original. the teacher's own language and conception of the story will press in to simplify and clarify the meaning. no one holds strictly to a literary style in telling a story. conversational ideas and original momentary impulses of thought demand their own forms of utterance. and yet it is well to appropriate the style and expression of the writer so as to accustom the children to the best forms. a few very apt and forcible sentences will be found in any good author which the teacher will naturally employ. but the teacher must have freedom. when he has once thoroughly appropriated the story he must give vent to his own spontaneity and power. later, when the children come to read these stories, they will enjoy them in their full literary form. . the power of clear and interesting presentation of a story is one of the chief professional acquisitions of a good primary teacher. it involves many things besides language, including liveliness of manner, gesture, facial expression, action, dramatic impersonation, skill in blackboard illustration, good humor and tact in working with children, a strong imagination, and a real appreciation for the literature adapted to children. perhaps the fundamental need is simplicity and clearness of thought and language combined with a pleasing and attractive manner. vague and incomprehensible thoughts and ideas are all out of place. the teacher should be strict with himself in this matter, and while reading and mastering the story, should use compulsion upon himself to arrive at an unmistakable clearness of thought. the objects, buildings, palaces, woods, caves, animals, persons, and places should be sharply imaged by the imagination; the feelings and passions of the actors should be keenly realized. often a vague and uncertain conception needs to be scanned, the passage reread, and the notion framed into clearness. in describing the palace of the sleeping beauty, begirt with woods, the sentinels standing statuelike at the portal, the lords and ladies at their employments, the teacher should think out the entrance way, hall, rooms, and persons of the palace so clearly that his thought and language will not stumble over uncertainties. transparent clearness and directness of thought are the result of effort and circumspection. they are well worth the pains required to gain them. a teacher who thinks clearly will generate clear habits of thought in children. the power of interesting narrative and description is not easily explained. it is a thing not readily analyzed into its elements. perhaps the best way to find out what it is may be discovered by reading the great story-tellers, such as macaulay, irving, kingsley, de foe, hawthorne, homer, plutarch, scott, and dickens. novelists like george eliot, victor hugo, cooper, scott, and dickens, possess this secret also, and even some of the historians, as herodotus, fiske, green, parkman, motley, and others. it is not so important that a teacher should give a cold analysis of their qualities as that he should fall insensibly into the vivid and realistic style of the best story-tellers. one who has read pyle's robin hood stories until they are familiar will, to a considerable extent, appropriate his fertile and happy old-english style, the sturdy english spirit of bold robin, his playful humor, and his apt utterance of homely truths. there are certain qualities that stand out prominently in the good story-tellers. they are simple and concrete in their descriptions, they deal very little in general, vague statements or abstractions, they hold closely to the persons of the story in the midst of interesting surroundings, they are profuse in the use of distinct figures of speech, appealing to the fancy or imagination. they often have a humorous vein which gives infinite enjoyment and spreads a happy charity throughout the world. the art of graphic illustration on the blackboard is in almost constant demand in oral work. even rude and untechnical sketches by teachers who have no acquired skill in artistic drawing are of the greatest value in giving a quick and accurate perception of places, buildings, persons, and surrounding conditions of a story or action. the map of crusoe's island, the drawings to represent his tent, cave, boat, country residence, fortifications, dress, utensils, and battles are natural and simple modes of realizing clearly his labors and adventures. they save much verbal description and circumlocution. the teacher needs to acquire absolute boldness and freedom in using such illustrative devices. the children will, of course, catch this spirit, as they are by nature inclined to use drawing as a mode of expression. a similar freedom in the teacher is necessary in the use of bodily action, gesture, and facial expression in story-telling. the teacher needs to become natural, childlike, and mobile in these things; for children are naturally much given to such demonstrations in the expression of their thought. little girls of three and four years in the home, when free from self-consciousness, are marvellously and delightfully expressive by means of eyes, gestures, hands, and arms and whole bodily attitudes. why should not this naive expressiveness be gently fostered in the school? indeed it is, and in many schools the little ones are as happy and whole-souled and spontaneous in their modes of expression as we have suggested. dramatization, if cultivated, extends a teacher's gamut of expressiveness. our inability or slowness to respond to this suggestion is a sign of a certain narrowness or cramp in our culture and training. in normal schools where young teachers are trained in the art of reading, the dramatic instinct should be strongly developed. the power to other one's self in dramatic action, to assume and impersonate a variety of characters, is a real expression and enlargement of the personality. it demands sympathy and feeling as well as intellectual insight. the study and reading of the great dramatists, the seeing of good plays, amateur efforts in this direction, the frequent oral reading of shakespeare, dickens, and other dramatists and novelists will cultivate and enlarge the teacher's power in this worthy and wholesome art. the use of good pictures is also an important means of adding to the beauty and clearness of stories. the pictures of indian life in "hiawatha," the illustrated editions of "robinson crusoe," the copies of ancient works of art in some editions of the greek myths, howard pyle's illustrated "robin hood," and other books of this character add greatly to the vividness of ideas. such pictures should be handled with care, not distributed promiscuously among the children while the lesson is going on. the teacher needs to study a picture, and discuss it intelligently with the children, asking questions which bring out its representative qualities. it is evident the skilful oral presentation of a story calls out no small degree of clear knowledge, force of language, illustrative device, dramatic instinct, and a freedom and versatility of action both mental and physical. . a clear outline of leading points in a story is a source of strength to the teacher and the basis later of good reproductive work by the children. the short stories in the first grade hardly need a formal outline, and even in second grade the sequence of ideas in a story is often so simple and easy that outlines of leading topics may not be needed. but in third and fourth grade it is well in the preliminary study and mastery of a story to divide it up into clearly marked segments, with a distinctive title for each division. it is difficult to get teachers to do this kind of close logical work, and still more difficult to have them remember it in the midst of oral presentation and discussion. if the main points of the story as thus outlined are placed upon the blackboard as the narrative advances, it keeps in mind a clear survey of the whole and serves as the best basis for the children's reproduction of the story. it compels both teacher and pupils to keep to a close logical connection of ideas and a sifting out of the story to get at the main points. without these well-constructed outlines the memory of the story is apt to fall into uncertainty and confusion, and the children's reproduction becomes fragmentary and disorderly. experience shows that teachers are prone to be loose and careless in bringing their stories into such a well-ordered series of distinct topics. it is really a sign of a thoughtful, logical, and judicious mastery of a subject to have thrown it thus into its prominent points of narration. oral work often fails of effectiveness and thoroughness, because of these careless habits of teachers. such an outline, when put into the children's regular note-books, serves as the best basis for later surveys and reviews. . the oral narration and presentation of stories has a curious way of being turned into _development lessons_, in which the teacher deals in questions and problematic situations and the children work out many of the facts and incidents of the story by a series of guesses and inferences. these are well known as development lessons, and they are capable of exhibiting the highest forms of excellence in teaching or the most drivelling waste of time. the subject is a hard one to handle, but it needs a clear and simple elucidation as much as any problem in the teaching profession. generally speaking it is better for young teachers not to launch out recklessly upon the full tide of development instruction. it is better to learn the handling of the craft on quieter waters. development work needs to be well charted. the varying winds and currents, storms and calms, need to be studied and experienced before one may become a good ship's master. let young teachers first acquire power in clear, simple, direct narration and description, using apt and forcible language and holding to a clear-cut line of thought. this is no slight task, and when once mastered and fixed in habit becomes the foundation of a wider freedom and skill in development exercises. the works of the great story-tellers furnish excellent models of this sort of skill, and teachers may follow closely in the lines struck out by scott or hawthorne in narrating a story. a book story cannot do otherwise than simply narrate; it cannot develop, set problems and questions and have children to find solutions and answers. it must tell the facts and answer the questions. but in oral narration there is room not only for all the skill of the story-writer, but also the added force of voice, personality, lively manner, gesture, action, and close adaptation to the immediate needs of children and subject. this is enough to command the undivided effort of the young teacher at first, without entering the stormy waters and shifting currents of pure development work. yet the spirited teacher will not go far in narrating a story without a tendency to ask questions to intensify the children's thought, or to quicken the discussion of interesting points. even if the teachers or parents are but reading a good story from a book, it is most natural, at times, to ask questions about the meaning of certain new words, or geographical locations, or probabilities in the working out of the story. these are the simple beginnings of development work, and produce greater thoughtfulness, keener perceptions of the facts, and a better absorption of the story into a child's previous knowledge. a sharp limitation of development work is also found in the circumstance that a large share of the facts in a story cannot by any sort of ingenuity be developed. they form the necessary basis for later development questions. even many of the facts which might be developed by a skilful teacher are better told directly, because of the difficulty and time-devouring nature of the process. there may be a few central problems in every story, which, after the necessary facts and conditions have been plainly told, can be thoroughly sifted out by questions, answers, and discussions. but to work out all the little details of a story by question and surmise, to get the crude, unbaked opinions of all the members of a class upon every episode and fact in a story, is a pitiful caricature of good instruction. the purpose of good development work is to get children to go deeper into the meaning of a story, to realize its situations more keenly, and to acquire habits of thoughtfulness, self-reliant judgment, and inventiveness in solving difficulties. these results, and they are among the chiefest set for the educator, cannot be accomplished by mere narration and description. their superior excellence and worth are the prize of that superior skill which first-class development work demands. with these preliminary remarks, criticisms, and limitations in mind, we may inquire what are the essentials of good development work in oral lessons. ( ) determine what parts of a story are capable of development; what facts must be clearly present to the mind before questions can be put and inferences derived. in a problem in arithmetic we first state the known facts, the conditions upon which a solution can be based, and then put a question whose answer is to be gained by a proper conjunction and inference from these facts. the same thing is true in reasoning upon the facts in a story. ( ) in placing a topic before children it is always advisable to touch up the knowledge already possessed by the children, or any parts of their previous experience which have strong interpretative ideas for the new lesson. at this point apt questions which probe quickly into their _previous knowledge and experience_ are at a premium. the teacher needs to have considered beforehand in what particulars the children's home surroundings and peculiar circumstances may furnish the desired knowledge. the form of the questions may also receive close attention. for these words must provoke definite thought. they should have hooks on them which quickly drag experience into light. ( ) in order to give direction to the children's thoughts on the story's line of progress, _interesting aims_ should be set up. these aims, without anticipating precise results, must guide the children towards the desired ends and turning-points in the story. the mind should be kept in suspense as to the outcome, and the thoughts should centre and play about these clearly projected aims. such aims, floating constantly in the van, are the objective points, towards which the energy of thought is directed. every good story-teller keeps such aims expressly or tacitly in view. novelists and dramatists hinge the interest of readers or spectators upon this curiosity which is kept acutely sensitive about results. such an aim should be simple and concrete, not vague or abstract, or general. it may be put in the form of a question or statement or suggestion. it will be a good share of the teacher's work in the preparation of the lesson to pick out and word these aims which centre upon the leading topics of the lesson. for it is not enough to have an aim at the beginning of a story, every chapter or separate part of the story should have its aim. for aims are what stimulate effort and keep up an attentive interest. ( ) self-activity and thoughtfulness in working out problems find their best opportunity in development work. the book, in narrating a story, cannot set problems, or, if it does, it forthwith assumes the task of solving them. but in the oral development of a story the essential facts and conditions may be clearly presented and the solution of the difficulties, as in arithmetic, left largely to the ingenuity and reasoning power of the children. in the story of hiawatha's boat-building the problem may be set to the children as to what materials he will use in the construction of the canoe, how the parts were put together, and how he might decorate it. not that the children will give the whole solution, but they can contribute much to it. in "robinson crusoe" many such problems arise. how shall he conceal his cave and house from possible enemies? where can he store his powder to keep it from the lightning and from dampness? in fact, nearly every step in crusoe's interesting career is such a problem or difficulty to battle with. in kingsley's "greek heroes" and other renderings of the greek myths, the heroes are young men who have shrewdness, courage, and strength to overcome difficulties. to put these difficulties before children in such a way that they by their own thinking may anticipate, in part at least, the proper solutions, is one of the chief merits of development work. the story of ulysses is a series of shrewd contrivances to master difficulties or to avoid misfortunes, so that his name has become a synonym for shrewdness. the story itself, therefore, furnishes prime opportunities to develop resourcefulness. how shall he escape from the enraged polyphemos in the cave? his invention of the wooden horse before troy; his escape from the sirens; his battle with the suitors and others. the story of aladdin has such interesting inventions, and even the fairy tales and fables have many turns of shrewdness and device where the children's wits may be stimulated. the turning-points and centres of interest in all such stories are the true wrestling-grounds of thought. to put them point-blank before children in continuous narrative, without question or discussion, is not the way to produce thoughtfulness and inventive power. merely reading or telling stories to children without comment is entertaining, but not educative in the better sense. children will have plenty of chances at home and in the school library to read and hear stories, but it is the business of the school to teach them how to think as they read, to produce a habit of foreseeing, reviewing, comparing, and judging. the serious defect of much of young people's reading, from ten years on, is its superficial, transitory character. it lacks depth, strength, and permanency. it is not many stories that can be orally treated in this thorough-going way, but enough to give the right idea, and to cultivate habit and taste for more thoughtful study. for skilled teachers, therefore, development lessons, within certain limits, constitute a most important phase of oral instruction. it has been sometimes assumed that a child acquires greater self-reliance and a stronger exercise in self-activity by learning his lesson by himself from a book. this is probably true in much of the arithmetic, where he works out the solution of problems unaided; but in history and literature the book work is chiefly memory work, and oftentimes becomes of such parrot-like character as to be almost destitute of higher educative qualities. it is advisable, therefore, to strengthen the educative value of story work by giving it, through oral instruction, this problem-solving character, this thought-stimulating, self-reliant attitude of mind. . when the teacher has shown his best skill in presenting and discussing a section of a story, it then devolves upon the children to show their knowledge and grasp of the subject by reproducing it. the task of getting this well done requires, perhaps, as much skill and force of character as all previous work of oral instruction. obstacles are met with at once. it is dull work to go back over the same thing again, and the children soon get tired of it. they want something new and more exciting, and press for the rest of the story. many children are at first deficient in power of attention and in language, so that their efforts at reproduction are clumsy and poor. the interest is weak, the attention of the children scattering, and the class is apt to go to pieces under the strain of such dull work. this is an emergency where a teacher needs both skill and force of character. (what a comfort it is to a writer to have such a platitude as this to fall back upon, when he gets a teacher into a place where nothing but his own devices can save him.) there are, however, some hopeful considerations which may encourage a teacher whose feet are not already too deep in the bog of discouragement. children enjoy the retelling of good stories with which they are familiar. they will do it at home, even if they are not very proficient at it in school. in every class there are some talkative children who are always willing to make an effort. again, it is not always difficult to interest boys and girls in doing a thing that requires skill and power, such as memory, attentiveness, and mastery of correct language. the force of the teacher's influence and authority is worth something in setting up high standards of proficiency. indeed, children respect a teacher who makes rigorous demands upon them. the retelling of stories is, after all, no harder nor duller than the reciting of a lesson learned out of a book. on the other hand, the whole effectiveness of oral work depends upon the success of these oral reproductions. if children know that the teacher is in earnest they will be more attentive, so as to be able to fulfil the requirement. such a reproduction reveals at once a child's correct or incorrect grasp of the subject, and in either case the teacher knows what to do next. errors and misconceptions can be corrected and such explanations or additional facts given as will clarify the subject. in such reproductions it is praiseworthy to help the children as little as possible, to throw them back upon their own power as much as possible. if the teacher constantly relieves them with suggestive questions, they lean more and more upon her direction and lose all self-reliant power of continuous narrative. no, let the teacher keep a prudent silence, let her seal her lips, if necessary, in order to teach boys and girls to stand on their own power of thought. under this sort of discipline, kindly but rigorous, children will gradually acquire confidence in manner, variety and choice of language, in short, the ability to grasp clearly, hold firmly, and express accurately the ideas which are presented to them. the whole purpose of this sort of instruction is not so much to see how skilfully a teacher can present a lesson (though that is a fine art) as to determine how well a boy or girl can master or express knowledge, can learn to think and speak for himself. . some teachers despair of treating stories orally in large classes of primary children. the task of holding together such wriggling varieties of mental force and mental inertia is great. some children are quick and excitable, others are unresponsive and dull. some are timid and sensitive, others bold and demonstrative. some are talkative and irrepressible, others silent or listless. it is interesting to consider the function and value of a good child's story to fit in to such varying needs and personalities. if the purpose of the primary school is simply to keep children busy at some kind of orderly work, there are other tamer employments than stories. but if the idea is to put children's minds and bodies into healthy, vigorous action, it would be difficult to find a more suitable instrument than a fitting story. but a good primary teacher knows better than to establish brusque and fixed standards of uniform success for all children. it will take much time and patience to get anything like good oral responses from some children. like budding flowers some unfold their leaves and petals much quicker at the touch of sunshine than others. but the sun does not stop shining because all do not come out at once. the crudest efforts of little children must be received with kindness and encouragement. the power of reproducing thought and language is very slowly acquired by many children. they are timidly self-conscious, distrustful of their own powers, and have not learned to throw themselves with confidence upon the good-will of their teachers. it may take months with some children to overcome these obstacles, and to bring them to a confident use of their powers, but it is the highest delight of a teacher to reach this result. some children, on the other hand, are so talkative and impulsive that they will monopolize the time of the class to no good purpose. their enthusiasm requires tempering and their soberer thought strengthening. another difficulty lies in the necessary effort to get correct english, to gradually mould the language of children into correct forms. the perverse habits of children, the influence of home and playground, the inveterate preference for slang and crude, crass expressions, and their sensitive pride against unusual refinements of speech, make the cultivation of good english an uphill task. but roads must be laid out through this wilderness of hills and valleys, stumps and brush. and these roads must be gradually worked down into smooth highways of travel. it is pioneer toil, requiring the steady use of axe and mattock and spade. there is no kind of school training where good english can be cultivated to better advantage, where the power of correct, independent, well-articulated speech can be so well strengthened as in oral story. it is in the close contact of this work that the teacher is dealing directly with the original stock of experiences, ideas, and words of every child, and with these as instruments of acquisition, helping him to get a spirited introduction to the world of ideas in books and literature. it is here that we can get a glimpse of that vast work which the elementary schools of the country are doing in the way of americanizing the children of various nationalities and in giving them not only a common language, but a common body of ideas rooted in the earliest experiences of childhood and already laying hold of many of the richest treasures of american history and of the world's literature. . as children advance from the first year into the second and third years the character of the oral story-telling gradually changes. children should acquire more power of attention, greater command of language and ability to grasp and hold at one telling a larger section of a story. the stories themselves become more complex, the questions and problems set by the teacher more difficult. the necessity for sharp, logical outlines of leading topics increases as one advances in the grades. older children can be held more rigidly to common standards of excellence in thought and language. in this, however, the teacher should always remember that children differ greatly in their natural powers of expression, and that a forcing process will not be so successful as a stimulating and encouraging attitude in the teacher. . the good oral treatment of most stories leads the children to much activity in material constructions. where the minds of children are brought to a healthy activity their bodies and physical energies are pretty sure to be called into play to work out the suggested lines of thought. "robinson crusoe" invariably leads the children to a multitude of building and making enterprises, such as moulding vessels in clay, constructing the barricade around his tent and cave, the making of chairs and tables, etc. we have already noticed the readiness of children to make blackboard or other drawings of interesting objects in a story, or to cut them out with scissors from paper. this effort to experience the realities of life more directly by making objects of common utility and necessity is a characteristic and powerful tendency of childhood. it is commonly seen in children about the house, when, for example, they must have wagons, wheelbarrows, tools, or a set of garden implements with which to imitate the employments of their elders. parkman and others often speak of the constant practice of little indian boys with bow and arrows. our purpose here is not to discuss this matter at length, but simply to notice its prominent place in connection with the oral lesson in story. the intense interest awakened in stories leads quickly to these efforts at construction. what shall the teacher do with this powerful tendency of children to carry over these ideas into the field of practical constructive labor? to the thinker this tendency is perhaps the surest proof of the value of the story. it does not stop with words nor ideas. it pushes far into the region of voluntary, physical, and mental labor and application of knowledge. the teacher who will make good use of this enterprising constructive desire of children must know definitely about tools, boards, shops, various industries, and technical trades, the special materials, inventions, and devices of artisans in the common occupations, such as farming, gardening, blacksmithing, the carpenter shop, the baker, the quarry, the brick kiln, etc. it will not be strange if many teachers recoil, at first glance, from this leap into industrial life. it suggests that the schoolhouse must become a big machine shop, agricultural station, etc. the trouble is, of course, that teachers do not feel themselves qualified in these things. they know almost as little as the children about such matters, and have much less inclination to know more. but our modern education is taking a decided turn in this direction, and with good reason. the close acquaintance of our teachers with the common occupations of life, with their materials, tools, machines, constructions, and skill would supply them with a rich collection of practical, concrete, illustrative knowledge of the greatest use in instructing children. it is impossible to mention anything which would be of more service to them in the details of instruction. the advantages to the children of such teaching, re-enforced by this concrete detail of common life, are so numerous and important as to deserve a special effort. the benefit to teachers would quickly more than recompense them for the labor involved. by occasional visits of observation in shops, fields, stores, and factories, by assisting children in their constructive efforts, the teacher will acquire knowledge, strength, and confidence for such work. the unfamiliarity of teachers with these everyday industrial matters, and their feeling of helplessness as regards things not in the usual routine of school, are the real hindrances to be overcome. there are other subjects in the school course, like home geography and the early lessons in nature study, which deal more directly than stories with these practical forms of industrial life and constructive activity. they will also demand and cultivate an increasing knowledge of this practical phase of life and education. the lessons in oral story-telling stand thus closely linked with progressive experimental knowledge in other studies. a brief retrospect and summary of the requirements necessary as a basis of good oral treatment of stories will impress us with the skill and resourcefulness needed by the teacher. . first-hand experience with the realities of life. . intimate knowledge and sympathy with child life. . the many-sided mastery of the story for teaching purposes. . skill in the use of simple, apt, and forcible language. . power of narrative and description, together with various forms of graphic illustration, dramatic action, etc. . clear and simple outline of leading topics. . acquired power in the use of development methods, including question, problem, discussion, aims, and the training of children to self-activity and thoughtfulness. . the successful oral reproduction of stories by the children. . tact in the handling of large classes, with children of differing temperament and capacity, and the encouragement of timid children. . changing character of oral work in advancing grades. . the need of insight and ability to supervise constructive activities. these things include a wide range of clear knowledge and confident skill and resource. teachers need first of all to cultivate resourcefulness in the use of their own knowledge and experience, and to add to both of these as rapidly as circumstances permit. the mere reading of stories to children by the teacher, at odd times, on friday afternoons or on special occasions, is also of much value as a means of interesting children in a wide range of good books. it is a source of entertainment and culture, which, when judiciously and skilfully employed, adds much to the educative power of the school. chapter iii first grade stories fairy tales young children, as we all know, are delighted with stories, and in the first grade they are still in this story-loving period. a good story is the best medium through which to convey ideas and also to approach the difficulties of learning to read. such a story, wilmann says, is a pedagogical treasure. by many thinkers and primary teachers the fairy stories have been adopted as best suited to the wants of the little folk just emerging from the home. a series of fairy tales was selected by ziller, one of the leading herbartians, as a centre for the school work of the first year. these stories have long held a large place in the home culture of children, especially of the more cultivated class. now it is claimed that what is good for the few whose parents may be cultured and sympathetic, may be good enough for the children of the common people and of the poor. moreover, stories that have made the fireside more joyous and blessed may perchance bring vivacity and happiness into schoolrooms. the home and the school are coming closer together. it is even said that well-trained, sympathetic primary teachers may better tell and impress these stories than overworked mothers and busy fathers. if these literary treasures are left for the homes to discover and use, the majority of children will know little or nothing of them. many schools in this country have been using them in the first grade in recent years with a pleasing effect. but what virtue lies concealed in these fairy myths for the children of our practical and sensible age? why should we draw from fountains whose sources are back in the prehistoric and even barbarous past? to many people it appears as a curious anachronism to nourish little children in the first decade of this new century upon food that was prepared in the tents of wandering tribes in early european history. what are the merits of these stories for children just entering upon scholastic pursuits? they are known to be generally attractive to children of this age, but many sober-minded people distrust them. are they really meat and drink for the little ones? and not only so, but the choicest meat and drink, the best food upon which to nourish their unfolding minds? fairy tales are charged with misleading children by falsifying the truth of things. and, indeed, they pay little heed to certain natural laws that practical people of good sense always respect. a child, however, is not so humdrum practical as these serious truth-lovers. a little girl talks to her doll as if it had real ears. she and her little brother make teacups and saucers out of acorns with no apparent compunctions of conscience. they follow cinderella to the ball in a pumpkin chariot, transformed by magic wand, with even greater interest than we read of a presidential ball. a child may turn the common laws of physical nature inside out and not be a whit the worse for it. its imagination can people a pea-pod with little heroes aching for a chance in the big world, or it can put tender personality into the trunk and branches of the little pine tree in the forest. there are no space limits that a child's fancy will not spring over in a twinkling. it can ride from star to star on a broomstick, or glide over peaceful waters in a fairy boat drawn by graceful swans. without suggestion from mother or teacher, children put life and personality into their playthings. their spontaneous delights are in this playful exercise of the fancy, in masquerading under the guise of a soldier, bear, horse, or bird. the fairy tale is the poetry of children's inner impulse and feeling; their sparkling eyes and absorbed interest show how fitting is the contact between these childlike creations of the poet and their own budding thoughts. in discussing the qualities requisite in a fairy story to make it a pedagogical treasure, wilmann says:[ ] "when it is laid down as a first and indispensable requirement that a story be genuinely childlike, the demand sounds less rigorous than it really is. it is easier to feel than to describe the qualities which lend to a story the true childlike spirit. it is not simplicity alone. a simple story that can be understood by a child is not on that account childlike. the simplicity must be the ingenuousness of the child. close to this lies the abyss of silliness into which so many children's stories tumble. a simple story may be manufactured, but the quality of true simplicity will not be breathed into it unless one can draw from the deeper springs of poetic invention. it is not enough that the externals of the story, such as situation and action, have this character, but the sensibilities and motives of the actors must be ingenuous and childlike; they should reflect the child's own feeling, wish, and effort. but it is not necessary on this account that the persons of the story be children. indeed the king, prince, and princess, if they only speak and act like children, are much nearer the child's comprehension than any of the children paraded in a manufactured story, designed for the 'industrious youth.' for just as real poetry so the real child's story lies beyond reality in the field of fancy. with all its plainness of thought and action, the genuine child's story knows how to take hold of the child's fancy and set its wings in motion. and what a meaning has fancy for the soul of the child as compared with that of the adult. for us the activity of fancy only sketches arabesques, as it were, around the sharply defined pictures of reality. the child thinks and lives in such arabesques, and it is only gradually that increasing experience writes among these arabesques the firmer outlines of things. the child's thoughts float about playfully and unsteadily, but the fairy tale is even lighter winged than they. it overtakes these fleeting summer birds and wafts them together without brushing the dust from their wings. [ ] wilmann, _paedagogische vorträge_. "but fostering the activity of fancy in children is a means, not an end. it is necessary to enter the field of fancy because the way to the child's heart leads through the fancy. the effect upon the heart of the child is the second mark and proof of the genuine child's story. we are not advocates of the so-called moral stories which are so short-winded as to stop frequently and rest upon some moral commonplace. platitudes and moral maxims are not designed to develop a moral taste in the minds of young children, for they appeal to the understanding and will of the pupil and presuppose what must be first built up and established. true moral training is rather calculated to awaken in the child judgments of right and wrong, of good and evil (on simple illustrative examples). not the impression left by a moralizing discourse is the germ of a love of the good and right, but rather the child's judgment springing from its own conviction. 'that was good.' 'what a mean thing!' "those narratives have a moral force which introduce persons and acts that are simple and transparent enough to let the moral light shine through, that possess sufficient life to lend warmth and vigor to moral judgments. no attempt to cover up or pass over what is bad, nor to paint it in extravagant colors. for the bad develops the judgment no less than the good. it remains only to have a care that a child's interest inclines toward the good, the just, and the right." wilmann summarizes the essentials of a good story, and then discusses the fairy tales as follows:-- "there are then five requirements to be made of a real child's story: let it be truly childlike, that is, both simple and full of fancy; let it form morals in the sense that it introduces persons and matters which, while simple and lively, call out a moral judgment of approval or disapproval; let it be instructive and lead to thoughtful discussions of society and nature; let it be of permanent value, inviting perpetually to a reperusal; let it be a connected whole, so as to work a deeper influence and become the source of a many-sided interest. "the child's story which, on the basis of the aforenamed principles, can be made the starting-point for all others, is grimm's fairy tale of folk lore. we are now called upon to show that the folk-lore fairy tale answers to the foregoing requirements, and in this we shall see many a ray of light cast back upon these requirements themselves. "is the german fairy tale childlike? full of simplicity as well as of fancy? a deeply poetic saying of jacob grimm may teach us the answer. 'there runs through these poetic fairy tales the same deep vein of purity by reason of which children seem to us so wonderful and blessed. they have, as it were, the same pale-blue, clear, and lustrous eyes which can grow no more although the other members are still delicate and weak and unserviceable to the uses of earth.' klaiber quotes this passage in his 'das märchen und die kindliche phantasie,' and says with truth and beauty, 'yes; when we look into the trusting eyes of a child, in which none of the world's deceit is to be read as yet, when we see how these eyes brighten and gleam at a beautiful fairy tale, as if they were looking out into a great, wide, beautiful wonder-world, then we feel something of the deep connection of the fairy story with the childish soul.' we will bring forward one more passage from a little treatise, showing depth and warmth of feeling, which stealthily takes away from the doubters their scruples about the justification of the fairy tale. 'it is strange how well the fairy tale and the child's soul mutually understand each other. it is as if they had been together from the very beginning and had grown up together. as a rule the child only deals with that part of real life which concerns itself and children of its age. whatever lies beyond this is distant, strange, unintelligible. under the leading of the fairy tale, however, it permits itself to be borne over hill and valley, over land and sea, through sun and moon and stars, even to the end of the world, and everything is so near, so familiar, so close to its reach, as if they had been everywhere before, just as if obscure pictures within had all at once become wonderfully distinct. and the fairies all, and the king's sons, and the other distinguished personages, whom it learns to know through the fairy tale,--they are as natural and intelligible as if the child had moved its life long in the highest circles, and had had princes and princesses for its daily playmates. in a word, the world of the fairy tale is the child's world, for it is the world of fancy.' "for this reason children live and move in fairyland, whether the story be told by the mother or by the teacher in the primary school. what attention as the story proceeds! what anxiousness when any danger threatens the hero, be he king's son or a wheat-straw! what grief, even to tears, when a wrong is practised upon some innocent creature! and far from it that the joy in the fairy tale decrease when it is told or discussed over again. then comes the pleasure of representation--bringing the story upon the stage. though a child has but to represent a flower in the meadow, the little face is transfigured with the highest joy. "but the childish joy of fairy tales passes away; not so the inner experiences which it has brought with it. i am not affirming too much when i say that he who, as a child, has never listened with joy to the murmuring and rustling of the fresh fountain of fairyland, will have no ear and no understanding for many a deep stream of german poetry. it is, after all, the modest fountain of fairy song which, flowing and uniting with the now noisy, now soft and gently flowing, current of folk song, and with the deep and earnest stream of tradition, which has poured such a refreshing current over german poetry, out of which our most excellent uhland has drawn so many a heart-strengthening draught. "the spirit of the people finds expression in fairy tale as in tradition and song, and if we were only working to lift and strengthen the national impulse, a moral-educative instruction would have to turn again and again to these creations of the people. what was asserted as a general truth in regard to classical products, that they are a bond between large and small, old and young, is true of national stories and songs more than of anything else. they are at once a bond between the different classes, a national treasure, which belongs alike to rich and poor, high and low. the common school then has the least right of all to put the fairy tale aside, now that few women versed in fairy lore, such as those to whom grimm listened, are left. "but does the fairy tale come of noble blood? does it possess what we called in the case of classics an old title of nobility? if we keep to this figure of speech, we shall find that the fairy tale is not only noble, but a very royal child among stories. it has ruled from olden times, far and wide, over many a land. hundreds of years gone, grimm's fairy stories lived in the people's heart, and not in germany alone. if our little ones listen intently to aschenputtel, french children delighted in cindrillon, the italian in cenerentola, the polish in kopcinszic. the fact that mediæval story-books contain grimm's tales is not remarkable, when we reflect that traits and characteristics of the fairy tale reach back beyond the christian period; that frau holle is hulda, or frigg, the heathen goddess; that 'wishing-cap,' 'little lame-leg,' and 'table cover thyself,' etc., are made up out of the attributes of german gods. finally, such things as 'the sleeping beauty,' which is the earth in winter sleep, that the prince of summer wakes with kisses in springtime, point back to the period of primitive indo-german myth. "but in addition to the requirement of classical nobility, has the fairy story also the moral tone which we required of the genuine child's story? does the fairy story make for morals? to be sure it introduces to an ideal realm of simple moral relations. the good and bad are sharply separated. the wrong holds for a time its supremacy, but the final victory is with the good. and with what vigor the judgment of good and evil, of right and wrong, is produced. we meet touching pictures, especially of good-will, of faithfulness, characteristic and full of life. think only of the typical interchange of words between lenchen and fundevogel. said lenchen, 'leave me not and i will never leave thee.' said fundevogel, 'now and nevermore.' we are reminded of the bible words of the faithful ruth, 'whither thou goest i will go; where thou lodgest i will lodge; where thou diest i will die and there will i be buried.' "important for the life of children is the rigor with which the fairy tale punishes disobedience and falsehood. think of the suggestive legendary story of the child which was visited again and again with misfortune because of its obstinacy, till its final confession of guilt brings full pardon. it is everywhere a christian thread which runs through so many fairy stories. it is love for the rejected, oppressed, and abandoned. whatever is loaded with burdens and troubles receives the palm, and the first becomes the last. "the fairy story fulfils the first three requirements for a true child's story. it is childlike, of lasting value, and fosters moral ideas. as to unity it will suffice for children of six years (for this is, in our opinion, the age at which it exerts its moral force) that the stories be told in the same spirit, although they do not form one connected narrative. if a good selection of fairy tales according to their inner connection is made, so that frequent references and connections can be found, the requirement of unity will be satisfied. "the fairy tale seems to satisfy least of all the demand that the true child's story must be instructive, and serve as a starting-point for interesting practical discussion. the fairy story seems too airy and dreamy for this, and it might appear pedantry to load it with instruction. but one will not be guilty of this mistake if one simply follows up the ideas which the story suggests. when the story of a chicken, a fox, or a swan is told it is fully in harmony with the childish thought to inquire into the habits of these animals. when the king is mentioned it is natural to say that we have a king, to ask where he lives, etc. just because the fairy tale sinks deep and holds a firm and undivided attention, it is possible to direct the suggested thoughts hither or thither without losing the pleasure they create. if one keeps this aim in mind, instructive material is abundant. the fairy tale introduces various employments and callings, from the king to the farmer, tailor, and shoemaker. many passages in life, such as betrothal, marriage, and burial, are presented. labors in the house, yard, and field, and numerous animals, plants, and inanimate things are touched upon. for the observation of animals and for the relation between them and children, it is fortunate that the fairy tale presents them as talking and feeling. thereby the interest in real animals is increased and heartlessness banished. how could a child put to the torture an animal which is an old friend in fairy story? "i need only suggest in this place how the fairy story furnishes material for exercises in oral language, for the division of words into syllables and letters, and how the beginnings of writing, drawing, number, and manual exercises may be drawn from the same source. "from the suggestions just made the following conclusions at least may be reasonably drawn. a sufficient counterpoise to the fantastical nature of the fairy tale can be given in a manner simple and childlike, if the objects and relations involved in the narratives are brought clearly before the senses and discussed so that instruction about common objects and home surroundings is begun." in speaking of shakespeare's early training in literature, charles kingsley says:-- "i said there was a literary art before shakespeare--an art more simple, more childlike, more girlish, as it were, and therefore all the more adapted for young minds, but also an art most vigorous and pure in point of style: thoroughly fitted to give its readers the first elements of taste, which must lie at the root of even the most complex æsthetics. "the old fairy superstition, the old legends and ballads, the old chronicles of feudal war and chivalry, the earlier moralities and mysteries and tragicomic attempts--these were the roots of his poetic tree--they must be the roots of any literary education which can teach us to appreciate him. these fed shakespeare's youth; why should they not feed our children's? why indeed? that inborn delight of the young in all that is marvellous and fantastic--has that a merely evil root? no surely! it is a most pure part of their spiritual nature; a part of 'the heaven which lies about us in our infancy'; angel-wings with which the free child leaps the prison-walls of sense and custom, and the drudgery of earthly life." felix adler says:[ ] "but how shall we handle these _märchen_ and what method shall we employ in putting them to account for our special purpose? i have a few thoughts on this subject, which i shall venture to submit in the form of counsels. [ ] _moral instruction of children._ d. appleton & co. "my _first counsel_ is: tell the story; do not give it to the child to read. there is an obvious practical reason for this. children are able to benefit by hearing fairy tales before they can read. but that is not the only reason. it is the childhood of the race, as we have seen, that speaks in the fairy story of the child of to-day. it is the voice of an ancient far-off past that echoes from the lips of the storyteller. the words 'once upon a time' open up a vague retrospect into the past, and the child gets its first indistinct notions of history in this way. the stories embody the tradition of the childhood of mankind. they have on this account an authority all their own, not, indeed, that of literal truth, but one derived from their being types of certain feelings and longings which belong to childhood as such. the child, as it listens to the _märchen_, looks up with wide-opened eyes to the face of the person who tells the story, and thrills responsive as the touch of the earlier life of the race thus falls upon its own. such an effect, of course, cannot be produced by cold type. tradition is a living thing and should use the living voice for its vehicle. "my _second counsel_ is also of a practical nature, and i make bold to say quite essential to the successful use of the stories. do not take the moral plum out of the fairy-tale pudding, but let the child enjoy it as a whole. do not make the story taper toward a single point, the moral point. you will squeeze all the juice out of it if you try. do not subordinate the purely fanciful and naturalistic elements of the story, such as the love of mystery, the passion for roving, the sense of fellowship with the animal world, in order to fix attention solely on the moral element. on the contrary, you will gain the best moral effect by proceeding in exactly the opposite way. treat the moral element as an incident, emphasize it indeed, but incidentally. pluck it as a wayside flower. how often does it happen that, having set out on a journey with a distinct object in mind, something occurs on the way which we had not foreseen, but which in the end leaves the deepest impression on the mind.... "the value of the fairy tales is that they stimulate the imagination; that they reflect the unbroken communion of human life with the life universal, as in beasts, fishes, trees, flowers, and stars; and that incidentally, but all the more powerfully on that account, they quicken the moral sentiments. "let us avail ourselves freely of the treasures which are thus placed at our disposal. let us welcome _das märchen_ into our primary course of moral training, that with its gentle bands, woven of 'morning mist and morning glory,' it may help to lead our children into bright realms of the ideal." a selection of fairy stories suited to our first grade will differ from a similar selection for foreign schools. there has been a disposition among american teachers for several years to appropriate the best of these stories for use in the primary schools. in different parts of the country skilful primary teachers have been experimenting successfully with these materials. there are many schools in which both teachers and pupils have taken great delight in them. the effort has been made more particularly with first grade children, the aim of teachers being to lead captive the spontaneous interest of children from their first entrance upon school tasks. some of the stories used at the first may seem light and farcical, but experiments with children are a better test than the preconceived notions of adults who may have forgotten their early childhood. the story of the "four musicians," for example, is a favorite with the children. at the risk of repetition, and to emphasize some points of special importance, we will review briefly the method of oral treatment and the use of the stories in early primary reading. the children have no knowledge of reading or perhaps of letters. the story is told with spirit by the teacher, no book being used in the class. question and interchange of thought between pupil and teacher will become more frequent and suggestive as the teacher becomes more skilled and sympathetic in her treatment of the story. in the early months of school life the aim is to gain the attention and coöperation of children by furnishing abundant food for thought. children are required or at least encouraged to narrate the story or a part of it in the class. they tell it at school and probably at home, till they become more and more absorbed in it. even the backward or timid child gradually acquires courage and enjoys narrating the adventures of the peas in the pod or those of the animals in the "four musicians." the teacher should acquire a vivid and picturesque style of narrating, persistently weaving into the story, by query and suggestion, the previous home experiences of the children. they are only too ready to bring out these treasures at the call of the teacher. often it is necessary to check their enthusiasm. there is a need not simply for narrative power, but for quick insight and judgment, so as to bring their thoughts into close relation to the incidents. nowhere in all the schools is there such a call for close and motherly sympathy. the gentle compulsion of kindness is required to inspire the timid ones with confidence. for some of them are slow to open their delicate thought and sensibility, even to the sunny atmosphere of a pleasant school. a certain amount of drill in reproduction is necessary, but fortunately the stories have something that bears repetition with a growing interest. added to this is the desire for perfect mastery, and thus the stories become more dear with familiarity. incidentally, there should be emphasis of the instructive information gathered concerning animals and plants that are actors in the scenes. the commonest things of the house, field, and garden acquire a new and lasting interest. sometimes the teacher makes provision in advance of the story for a deeper interest in the plants and animals that are to appear. in natural science lessons she may take occasion to examine the pea blossom, or the animals of the barnyard, or the squirrel or birds in their cages. when, a few days later, the story touches one of these animals, there is a quick response from the children. this relation between history and natural science strengthens both. many an opportunity should be given for the pupils to express a warm sympathy for gentle acts of kindness or unselfishness. the happiness that even a simple flower may bring to a home is a contagious example. kindly treatment of the old and feeble, and sympathy for the innocent and helpless, spring into the child's own thought. the fancy, sympathy, and interest awakened by a good fairy tale make it a vehicle by which, consciously and unconsciously, many advantages are borne home to pupils. among other things, it opens the door to the reading lesson; that is, to the beginning efforts in mastering and using the symbols of written language. the same story which all have learned to tell, they are now about to learn to read from the board. one or two sentences are taken directly from the lips of the pupils as they recall the story, and the work of mastering symbols is begun at once with zest. first is the clear statement of some vivid thought by a child, then a quick association of this thought with its written symbols on the board. there is no readier way of bringing thought and form into firm connection, that is, of learning to read. keep the child's fresh mental judgment and the written form clearly before his mind till the two are wedded. let the thought run back and forth between them till they are one. after fixing two or three sentences on the board, attention is directed more closely to the single words, and a rapid drill upon those in the sentence is followed by a discovery and naming of them in miscellaneous order. afterward new sentences are formed by the teacher out of the same words, written on the board, and read by the children. they express different, and perhaps opposite forms of thought, and should exercise the child's sense and judgment as well as his memory of words. an energetic, lively, and successful drill of this kind upon sentences drawn from stories has been so often witnessed, that its excellence is no longer a matter of question. these exercises are a form of mental activity in which children delight if the teacher's manner is vigorous and pleasant. when the mastery of new word-forms as wholes is fairly complete, the analysis may go a step farther. some new word in the lesson may be taken and separated into its phonic elements, as the word _hill_, and new words formed by dropping a letter and prefixing letters or syllables, as _ill_, _till_, _until_, _mill_, _rill_, etc. the power to construct new words out of old materials should be cultivated all along the process of learning to read. still other school activities of children stand in close relation to the fairy tales. they are encouraged to draw the objects and incidents in which the story abounds. though rude and uncouth, the drawings still often surprise us with their truth and suggestiveness. the sketches reveal the content of a child's mind as almost nothing else--his misconceptions, his vague or clearly defined notions. they also furnish his mental and physical activities an employment exactly suited to his needs and wishes. the power to use good english and to express himself clearly and fittingly is cultivated from the very first. while this merit is purely incidental, it is none the less valuable. the persistence with which bad and uncouth words and phrases are employed by children in our common school, both in oral work and in composition, admonishes us to begin early to eradicate these faults. it seems often as if intermediate and grammar grades were more faulty and wretched in their use of english than primary grades. but there can be no doubt that early and persistent practice in the best forms of expression, especially in connection with interesting and appropriate thought matter, will greatly aid correctness, fluency, and confidence in speech. there is also a convincing pedagogical reason why children in the first primary should be held to the best models of spoken language. they enter the school better furnished with oral speech than with a knowledge of any school study. their home experiences have wrought into close association and unity, word and thing. so intimate and living is the relation between word and thought or object, that a child really does not distinguish between them. this is the treasure with which he enters school, and it should not be wrapped up in a napkin. it should be unrolled at once and put to service. oral speech is the capital with which a child enters the business of education; let him employ it. a retrospect upon the various forms of school activity which spring, in practical work, from the use of a good fairy story, reveals how many-sided and inspiriting are its influences. starting out with a rich content of thought peculiarly germane to childish interests, it calls for a full employment of the language resources already possessed by the children. in the effort to picture out, with pencil or chalk, his conceptions of the story, a child exercises his fanciful and creative wit, as well as the muscles of arms and eyes. a good story always finds its setting in the midst of nature or society, and touches up with a simple, homely, but poetic charm the commonest verities of human experience. the appeal to the sensibility and moral judgment of pupils is direct and spontaneous, because of the interests and sympathies that are inherent in persons, and touch directly the childish fancy. and, lastly, the irrepressible traditional demand that children shall learn to read, is fairly and honestly met and satisfied. it is not claimed that fairy tales involve the sum total of primary instruction, but they are an illustration of how rich will be the fruitage of our educational effort if we consider first the highest needs and interests of children, and allow the formal arts to drop into their proper subordination. "the best is good enough for children," and when we select the best, the wide-reaching connections which are established between studies carry us a long step toward the now much-bruited correlation and concentration of studies. books of materials for teachers classic stories for the little ones. public school publishing co., bloomington, ill. grimm's fairy tales (wiltse). ginn & co. german fairy tales (grimm). maynard, merrill, & co. grimm's german household tales. houghton, mifflin, & co. stories from hans andersen. houghton, mifflin, & co. andersen's fairy tales, two volumes. part i and part ii. ginn & co. fairy stories and fables. american book co. fables and folk stories (scudder). houghton, mifflin, & co. rhymes and jingles (dodge). scribner's sons. fairy stories for children (baldwin). american book co. songs and stories. university publishing co. fairy life. university publishing co. six nursery classics (o'shea). d. c. heath & co. grimm's fairy tales. educational publishing co. a book of nursery rhymes (welch). d. c. heath & co. verse and prose for beginners in reading. houghton, mifflin, & co. heart of oak, no. i. d. c. heath & co. heart of oak, no. ii. d. c. heath & co. the eugene field book. scribner's sons. moral education of children (adler). d. appleton & co. chapter vi. on fairy tales. literature in schools (scudder). houghton, mifflin, & co. chapter on nursery classics. the fables no group of stories has a more assured place in the literature for children than the Ã�sop's "fables." some of the commonest have been expanded into little stories which are presented orally to children in the first school year, as "the lion and the mouse," "the ants and the grasshoppers," "the dog and his shadow," and others. they are so simple and direct that they are used alongside the fairy tales for the earliest instruction of children. as soon as children have acquired the rudiments of reading the Ã�sop's "fables" are commonly used in the second and third school year as a reading book, and all the early reading books are partly made up from this material. if we inquire into the qualities of these stories which have given them such a universal acceptance, we shall find that they contain in a simple, transparent form a good share of the world's wisdom. more recent researches indicate that they originated in india, and reached europe through persia and arabia, being ascribed to Ã�sop. this indicates that like most early literature of lasting worth, they are products of the folk-mind rather than of a single writer, and it is the opinion of adler that they express the ripened wisdom of the people under the forms of oriental despotism. the sad and hopeless submission to a stronger power expressed by some of the fables, it is claimed, unfits them for use in our freer life to-day. there are certain points in which their attractiveness to children is clearly manifest. the actors in the stories are usually animals, and the ready interest and sympathy of children for talking animals are at once appealed to. in all the early myths and fairy tales, human life seems to merge into that of the animals, as in "hiawatha," and the fables likewise are a marked expression of this childlike tendency. adler says: "the question may be asked why fables are so popular with boys. i should say because schoolboy society reproduces in miniature, to a certain extent, the social conditions which are reflected in the fables. among unregenerate schoolboys there often exists a kind of despotism, not the less degrading because petty. the strong are pitted against the weak--witness the fagging system in english schools--and their mutual antagonism produces in both the characteristic vices which we have noted above." a literature which clearly pictures these relations so that they can be seen objectively by the children may be of the greatest social service in education. adler says further: "the psychological study of schoolboy society has been only begun, but even what lies on the surface will, i think, bear out this remark. now it has become one of the commonplaces of educational literature that the individual of to-day must pass through the same stages of evolution as the human race as a whole. but it should not be forgotten that the advance of civilization depends on two conditions: first, that the course of evolution be accelerated, that the time allowed to the successive stages be shortened; and, secondly, that the unworthy and degrading elements which entered into the process of evolution in the past, and at the time were inseparable from it, be now eliminated. thus the fairy tales which correspond to the myth-making epoch in human history must be purged of the dross of superstition which still adheres to them, and the fables which correspond to the age of primitive despotisms must be cleansed of the immoral elements they still embody."[ ] [ ] adler, _moral instruction of children_, pp. - . the peculiar form of moral teaching in the "fables" suits them especially to children. a single trait of conduct, like greediness or selfishness, is sharply outlined in the story and its results made plain. "we have seen nothing finer in teaching than the building up of these little stories in conversational lessons--first to illustrate some mental or moral trait; then to detach the idea from its story picture, and find illustrations for it in some other act or incident. and nothing can be more gratifying as a result, than, through the transparency of childish hearts, to watch the growth of right conduct from the impulses derived from the teaching; and so laying the foundations of future rightness of character."[ ] [ ] introduction to stickney's _Ã�sop's fables_. ginn & co. the moral ideas inculcated by the fables are usually of a practical, worldly-wisdom sort, not high ideals of moral quality, not virtue for its own sake, but varied examples of the results of rashness and folly. this is, perhaps, one reason why they are so well suited to the immature moral judgments of children. adler says: "often when a child has committed some fault, it is useful to refer by name to the fable that fits it. as, when a boy has made room in his seat for another, and the other crowds him out, the mere mention of the fable of the porcupine is a telling rebuke; or the fable of the hawk and the pigeons may be called to mind when a boy has been guilty of mean excuses. on the same principle that angry children are sometimes taken before a mirror to show them how ugly they look, the fable is a kind of mirror for the vices of the young." again: "the peculiar value of the fables is that they are instantaneous photographs which reproduce, as it were, in a single flash of light, some one aspect of human nature, and which, excluding everything else, permit the attention to be entirely fixed on that one." but the value of the fable reaches far beyond childhood. the frequency with which it is cited in nearly all the forms of literature, and its aptness to express the real meaning of many episodes in real life, in politics and social events, in peace and war, show the universality of the truth it embodies. a story which engraves a truth, as it were with a diamond point, upon a child's mind, a truth which will swiftly interpret many events in his later life, deserves to take a high place among educative influences. fables and nature myths scudder's fables and folk stories. houghton, mifflin, & co. Ã�sop's fables (stickney). ginn & co. book of legends (scudder). houghton, mifflin, & co. stories for children (lane). the american book co. a child's garden of verses (stevenson). scribner's sons. Ã�sop's fables. educational publishing co. the book of nature myths (holbrook). houghton, mifflin, & co. the moral instruction of children (adler), chapters vii and viii. d. appleton & co. chapter iv second grade stories "robinson crusoe" in selecting suitable literature for children of the second grade, we follow in the steps of a number of distinguished writers and teachers and choose an english classic--"robinson crusoe." rousseau gave this book his unqualified approval, and said that it would be the first, and, for a time, the only book that Ã�mile should read. the herbartians have been using it a number of years, while many american teachers have employed it for oral work in second grade, in a short school edition. in one sense, the book needs no introduction, as it has found its way into every nook and corner of the world. originally a story for adults, it has reached all, and illustrated christmas editions, designed even for children from three years and upward, are abundant. to the youth of all lands, it has been, to say the least, a source of delight, but it has been regarded as a book for the family and home. what would happen should the schoolmaster lay his hand on this treasure and desecrate it to school purposes! we desire to test this classic work on the side of its pedagogical value and its adaptation to the uses of regular instruction. if it is really unrivalled as a piece of children's literature, perhaps it has also no equal for school purposes. in making the transition from the fairy tale to "robinson crusoe," an interesting difference or contrast may be noticed. wilmann says:[ ] "'crusoe' is at once simple, and plain, and fanciful; to be sure, in the latter case, entirely different from the fairy tale. in the fairy story the fancy seldom pushes rudely against the boundaries of the real world. but otherwise in 'crusoe.' here it is the practical fancy that is aroused, if this expression appear not contradictory. what is crusoe to do now? how can he help himself? what means can he invent? many of the proposals of the children will have to be rejected. the inexorable 'not possible' shoves a bolt before the door. the imagination is compelled to limit itself to the task of combining and adjusting real things. the compulsion of things conditions the progress of the story. 'thoughts dwell together easily, but things jostle each other roughly in space.'" [ ] wilmann, _paedagogische vorträge_. there are other striking differences between "crusoe" and the folk-lore stories, but in this contrast we are now chiefly concerned. after reaching the island, he is checked and limited at every step by the physical laws imposed by nature. struggle and fret as he may against these limits, he becomes at last a philosopher, and quietly takes up the struggle for existence under those inexorable conditions. the child of seven or eight is vaguely acquainted with many of the simple employments of the household and of the neighborhood. crusoe also had a vague memory of how people in society in different trades and occupations supply the necessaries and comforts of life. even the fairy stories give many hints of this kind of knowledge, but robinson crusoe is face to face with the sour facts. he is cut off from help and left to his own resources. the interest in the story is in seeing how he will shift for himself and exercise his wits to insure plenty and comfort. with few tools and on a barbarous coast, he undertakes what men in society, by mutual exchange and by division of labor, have much difficulty in performing. crusoe becomes a carpenter, a baker and cook, a hunter, a potter, a fisher, a farmer, a tailor, a boatman, a stock-raiser, a basket-maker, a shoemaker, a tanner, a fruit-grower, a mason, a physician. and not only so, but he grapples with the difficulties of each trade or occupation in a bungling manner because of inexperience and lack of skill and exact knowledge. he is an experimenter and tester along many lines. the entire absence of helpers centres the whole interest of this varied struggle in one person. it is to be remembered that crusoe is no genius, but the ordinary boy or man. he has abundant variety of needs such as a child reared under civilized conditions has learned to feel. the whole range of activities, usually distributed to various classes and persons in society, rests now upon his single shoulders. if he were an expert in all directions, the task would be easier, but he has only vague knowledge and scarcely any skill. the child, therefore, who reads this story, by reason of the slow, toilsome, and bungling processes of crusoe in meeting his needs, becomes aware how difficult and laborious are the efforts by which the simple, common needs of all children are supplied. a reference to the different trades and callings that crusoe assumes will show us that he is not dealing with rare and unusual events, but with the common, simple employments that lie at the basis of society in all parts of the world. the carpenter, the baker, the farmer, the shoemaker, etc., are at work in every village in every land. doubtless this is one reason why the story acquires such a hold in the most diverse countries. the arab or the chinese boy, the german or american child, finds the story touching the ordinary facts of his own surroundings. though the story finds its setting in a far-away, lonely island in tropical seas, crusoe is daily trying to create the objects and conditions of his old home in england. but these are the same objects that surround every child; and therefore, in reading "robinson crusoe," the pupil is making an exhaustive and interesting study of his own home. the presence of a tropical vegetation and of a strange climate does not seriously impair this fact. the skill of a great literary artist appears in his power to create a situation almost devoid of common comforts and blessings and then in setting his hero to work to create them by single-handed effort. it will hardly be questioned that the study of the home and home neighborhood by children is one of the large and prominent problems in education. out of their social, economic, and physical environment children get the most important lessons of life. not only does the home furnish a varied fund of information that enables them to interpret books, and people, and institutions, as they sooner or later go out into the world, but all the facts gathered by experience and reading in distant fields must flow back again to give deeper meaning to the labors and duties which surround each citizen in his own home. but society with its commerce, education, and industries, is an exceedingly complex affair. the child knows not where to begin to unravel this endless machinery of forms and institutions. in a sense he must get away from or disentangle himself from his surroundings in order to understand them. there are no complex conditions surrounding crusoe, and he takes up the labors of the common trades in a simple and primitive manner. physical and mental effort are demanded at every step, from crusoe and from the children. many of his efforts involve repeated failure, as in making pottery, in building a boat, while some things that he undertakes with painful toil never attain success. the lesson of toil and hardship connected with the simple industries is one of great moment to children. our whole social fabric is based on these toils, and it is one of the best results of a sound education to realize the place and importance of hard work. it scarcely needs to be pointed out that crusoe typifies a long period of man's early history, the age when men were learning the rudiments of civilization by taking up the toils of the blacksmith, the agriculturist, the builder, the domesticator of animals and plants. men emerged from barbarism as they slowly and painfully gained the mastery over the resources of nature. crusoe is a sort of universal man, embodying in his single effort that upward movement of men which has steadily carried them to the higher levels of progress. it has been said with some truth that robinson crusoe is a philosophy of history. but we scarcely need such a high-sounding name. to the child he is a very concrete, individual man, with very simple and interesting duties. in a second point the author of "robinson crusoe" shows himself a literary master. there is an intense and naive realism in his story. even if one were so disposed, it would require a strong effort to break loose from the feeling that we are in the presence of real experiences. there is a quiet but irresistible assumption of unvarnished and even disagreeable fact in the narrative. but it is useless to describe the style of a book so familiar. its power over youthful fancy and feeling has been too often experienced to be doubted. the vivid interest which the book awakens is certain to carry home whatever lessons it may teach with added force. so great is this influence that boys sometimes imitate the efforts of crusoe by making caves, building ovens, and assuming a style of dress and living that approximates crusoe's state. this supplies to teachers a hint of some value. the story of crusoe should lead to excursions into the home neighborhood for the purpose of a closer examination of the trades and occupations there represented. an imitation of his labors may also be encouraged. the effort to mould and bake vessels from potter's clay, the platting of baskets from willow withes, the use of tools in making boxes or tables may be attempted far enough to discover how lacking in practical ability the children are. this will certainly teach them greater respect for manual skill. from the previous discussion it might appear that we regard the story of crusoe as technological and industrial rather than moral. but it would be a mistake to suppose that a book is not moral because it is not perpetually dispensing moral platitudes. most men's lives are mainly industrial. the display of moral qualities is only occasional and incidental. the development of moral character is coincident with the labors and experiences of life and springs out of them, being manifested by the spirit with which one acts toward his fellow-men. but crusoe was alone on his island, and there might seem to be no opportunity to be moral in relation to others. society, to be sure, was conspicuous by its absence. but the intense longing with which he thought of the home and companionships lost is perhaps the strongest sentiment in the book. his loneliness brings out most vividly his true relation to home and friends. his early life, till the shipwreck, was that of a wayward and reckless youth, disobedient to parents and seemingly without moral scruples. even during the first months upon the island there appears little moral change or betterment. but slowly the bitter experiences of his lonely life sober him. he finds a bible, and a fit of sickness reveals the distresses that may lie before him. when once the change has set in, it is rapid and thorough. he becomes devout, he longs to return to his parents and atone for his faults. a complete reformation of his moral disposition is effected. if one will take the pains to read the original "robinson crusoe" he will find it surprisingly serious and moral in its tone. he devotes much time to soliloquizing on the distresses of his condition and upon the causes which have brought him to misery. he diagnoses his case with an amount of detail that must be tedious to children. the fact that these parts of the book often leave little direct impression upon children is proof that they are chiefly engaged with the adventure and physical embarrassments of crusoe. for the present it is sufficient to observe that the story is deeply and intensely moral both in its spirit and in the changes described in "crusoe." we are next led to inquire whether the industrial and moral lessons contained in this story are likely to be extracted from it by a boy or girl who reads it alone, without the aid of a teacher. most young readers of "crusoe" are carried along by the interesting adventure. it is a very surprising and entertaining story. but children even less than adults are inclined to go deeper than the surface and draw up hidden treasures. de foe's work is a piece of classic literature. but few people are inclined to get at the deeper meaning and spirit of a classical masterpiece unless they go through it in companionship with a teacher who is gifted to disclose its better meaning. this is true of any classical product we might mention. it should be the peculiar function of the school to cultivate a taste, and an appreciative taste, for the best literature; not by leaving it to the haphazard home reading of pupils, but by selecting the best things adapted to the minds of children and then employing true teaching skill to bring these treasures close to the hearts and sympathies of children. many young people do not read "robinson crusoe" at all; many others do not appreciate its better phases. the school will much improve its work by taking for its own this best of children's stories, and by extending and deepening the children's appreciation of a classic. the story of robinson crusoe is made by the herbartians the nucleus for the concentration of studies in the second year. this importance is given to it on account of its strong moral tone and because of its universal typical character in man's development. without attempting a solution of the problem of concentration at this juncture, we should at least observe the relations of this story to the other studies. wilmann says: "the everywhere and nowhere of the fairy tale gives place to the first geographical limitations. the continents, the chief countries of europe, come up, besides a series of geographical concepts such as island, coast, bay, river, hill, mountain, sea, etc. the difference in climate is surprising. crusoe fears the winter and prepares for it, but his fear is needless, for no winter reaches his island." we have already observed its instructive treatment of the common occupations which prepare for later geographical study, as well as for natural science. many plants and animals are brought to notice which would furnish a good beginning for natural science lessons. it is advisable, however, to study rather those home animals and plants which correspond best to the tropical products or animals in the lessons. tropical fruits, the parrot, and the goat we often meet at home, but in addition, the sheep, the ox, the mocking-bird, the woodpecker, our native fruits and grains, and the fish, turtles, and minerals of the home, may well be suggested and studied in science lessons parallel with the life of crusoe. following upon the oral treatment and discussion of "robinson crusoe" the children are easily led to like efforts at construction, as, for instance, the making of a raft, the building of the cave and stockade, the making of chairs and tables, the moulding of jars and kettles out of clay, the weaving of baskets, the preparation and cooking of foods, the planting of grains, the construction of an oven or house, boat building, and other labors of crusoe in providing for his wants. it is quite customary now in second grade to set the children to work in these efforts to solve crusoe's problems, so that they, by working with actual materials, may realize more fully the difficulties and trials to which he was subjected. in close connection with these constructive efforts are the drawings of the scenes of the story, such as the shipwreck, the stockade, the boat, the map of the island, and some of the later events of the story. a still further means of giving reality to the events is to dramatize some of the scenes between friday and crusoe, and to dress and equip these and other persons in the story in fitting manner. the children gladly enter into such dramatic action. these various forms of drawing, action, and constructive work are in close connection with the home studies of industries and occupations,--farming, gardening, carpenter and blacksmith shops, weaving, cooking, bakeries, and excursions to shops--which follow the crusoe story in the study of home geography in the third grade. although the story should be given and discussed orally, the children should also read it later as a part of the regular reading exercise of the course. instead of suffering from this repetition, their interest will only be increased. classical products usually gain by repetition. the facts are brought out more clearly and the deeper meaning is perceived. to have the oral treatment of a story precede its reading by some weeks or months produces an excellent effect upon the style of the reading. the thought being familiar, and the interest strong, the expression will be vigorous and natural. children take a pride in reading a story which they at first must receive orally for lack of reading power. the same advantageous drill in the use of good english accrues to the crusoe story that was observed in the fairy tales. there is abundant opportunity for oral narrative and description. the use of the pencil and chalk in graphic representation should be encouraged both in teacher and in pupils. thus the eye becomes more accurate in observation and the hand more free and facile in tracing the outlines of the interesting forms studied. the use of tools and materials in construction gives ideas an anchorage, not only in the brain, but even in the nerves and muscles. in thus glancing over the field we discover the same many-sided and intimate relation with other school studies, as in the previous grade. in fact, "crusoe" is the first extended classical masterpiece which is presented to the children as a whole. such parts of the story as are of most pedagogical value should be simplified and woven together into a continuous narrative. that part of the story which precedes the shipwreck may be reduced to a few paragraphs which bring out clearly his early home surroundings, his disobedience and the desertion of his parents, and the voyage which led to his lonely life upon the island. the period embraced in his companionless labors and experiences constitutes the important part for school uses. a few of the more important episodes following the capture of friday and his return home may be briefly told. we deem it a long step forward to get some of our great classical masterpieces firmly embedded in the early years of our school course. it will contribute almost as much to the culture and stimulation of teachers as of pupils. the method of handling this narrative before the class will be similar to that of the fairy tales. a simple and vivid recital of the facts, with frequent questions and discussions, so as to draw the story closer to the child's own thought and experience, should be made by the teacher. much skill in illustrative device, in graphic description, in diagram or drawing, in the appeal to the sense experiences of the pupils, is in demand. the excursion to places of interest in the neighborhood suggested by the story begins to be an important factor of the school exercises. as children grow older they acquire skill and confidence in oral narrative, and should be held to greater independence in oral reproductions. one of the best school editions of "robinson crusoe" is published by ginn & co. a simple edition for second grade is published by the public school publishing co. the teacher should be supplied with one of the larger, fuller editions of "robinson crusoe," like that of houghton, mifflin, & co., in the riverside literature series. it furnishes a much fuller detail of knowledge for the teacher's use. it will also be of great advantage for classroom use to possess an illustrated edition like that of george routledge & sons. the full treatment of this story, first in simple, oral narrative, later by its use as a reading book, and later still by the child reading the complete edition for himself in private, illustrates the intensive concentration of thought and constructive activity upon a great piece of literature as opposed to a loose and superficial treatment. such a piece of work should remain for life a source of deeper thought, feeling, and experience. other editions life and adventures of robinson crusoe. american book co. robinson crusoe. lee and shepard. robinson crusoe for youngest readers. educational pub. co. robinson crusoe. university publishing co. de foe's robinson crusoe (hale). ginn & co. de foe's robinson crusoe. maynard, merrill, & co. "hiawatha" the story of hiawatha has been much used for oral treatment in primary grades, and as a basis for exercises in learning to read. later the complete poem has been much read in third, fourth, or fifth grade as a piece of choice literature. a story which is growing so rapidly in favor with primary teachers may explain our effort to determine its educational value. that the story begins with the early childhood of hiawatha and describes his home and early training at the feet of nokomis, is at least one point in its favor. by the shores of gitche gumee, by the shining big-sea-water, stood the wigwam of nokomis, daughter of the moon, nokomis. dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water, beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining big-sea-water. there the wrinkled, old nokomis nursed the little hiawatha, rocked him in his linden cradle, bedded soft in moss and rushes, safely bound with reindeer sinews. the traditions and stories he learned from the lips of nokomis will remind children of their own home life, while his companionship with birds and animals will touch them in a sympathetic place. then the little hiawatha learned of every bird its language, learned their names and all their secrets, how they built their nests in summer, where they hid themselves in winter, talked with them whene'er he met them, called them "hiawatha's chickens." the games and exercises of his youth will remind them of their own sports and introduce them to indian life. this home of hiawatha, and the description of his childhood, are a happy introduction to the simple surroundings of indian life on the shores of the northern sea. primitive indian modes of life, traditions and myths, appeal naturally to children, and the whole story has this setting of early simplicity which adapts it in many ways to child study. the indian nature myths, which in themselves are attractive, are here woven into a connected series by their relation to hiawatha in the training of his childhood and in the exploits of his manhood. the number of pure fairy tales scattered through the story adapts it especially for young children, while the descriptions of home customs, feasts, weddings, merrymaking, and games, show the happier side of their life. ye who love a nation's legends, love the ballads of a people, that like voices from afar off call to us to pause and listen, speak in tones so plain and childlike, scarcely can the ear distinguish whether they are sung or spoken;-- listen to this indian legend, to this song of hiawatha! ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, who have faith in god and nature, who believe, that in all ages every human heart is human, that in even savage bosoms there are longings, yearnings, strivings for the good they comprehend not, that the feeble hands and helpless, groping blindly in the darkness, touch god's right hand in that darkness, and are lifted up and strengthened;-- listen to this simple story, to this song of hiawatha! the description of husking time is such a pleasing scene, while the picture writing of the indians, their totems and rude drawings, are in harmony with their traditions and religion. on the border of the forest, underneath the fragrant pine-trees, sat the old men and the warriors smoking in the pleasant shadow. in uninterrupted silence looked they at the gamesome labor of the young men and the women; listened to their noisy talking, to their laughter and their singing, heard them chattering like the magpies, heard them laughing like the blue jays, heard them singing like the robins. and whene'er some lucky maiden found a red ear in the husking, found a maize-ear red as blood is, "nushka!" cried they all together, "nushka! you shall have a sweetheart, you shall have a handsome husband!" "ugh!" the old men all responded from their seats beneath the pine-trees. and the jossakeeds, the prophets, the wabenos, the magicians, and the medicine-men, the medas, painted upon bark and deer-skin figures for the songs they chanted, for each song a separate symbol, figures mystical and awful, figures strange and brightly colored; and each figure had its meaning, each some magic song suggested. one of the most striking features of this story is its setting in nature. more than any other piece of literature now used in the school, it is redolent of fields and forest. should you ask me, whence these stories, whence these legends and traditions, with the odors of the forest, with the dew and damp of meadows, with the curling smoke of wigwams, with the rushing of great rivers, with their frequent repetitions, and their wild reverberations, as of thunder in the mountains? i should answer, i should tell you, "from the forests and the prairies, from the great lakes of the northland, from the land of the ojibways, from the land of the dacotahs, from the mountains, moors, and fenlands, where the heron, the shuh-shuh-gah, feeds among the reeds and rushes." should you ask where nawadaha found these songs, so wild and wayward, found these legends and traditions, i should answer, i should tell you, "in the birds'-nests of the forest, in the lodges of the beaver, in the hoof-prints of the bison, in the eyry of the eagle! all the wild-fowl sang them to him, in the moorlands and the fenlands, in the melancholy marshes; chetowaik, the plover, sang them, mahng, the loon, the wild-goose, wawa, the blue heron, the shuh-shuh-gah, and the grouse, the mushkodasa!" this description of primitive man is as complete an absorption into his natural surroundings as is possible. his food and clothing, his tents and boats, his weapons and war gear, are drawn directly from nature's first supplies, and man, in this case, seems almost a part of nature, so completely are his thoughts and activities determined and colored by his environment. like the animals, in their protective coloring, he becomes an undistinguishable part of his surroundings. his nature myths and superstitions are but phases and expressions of the contact of his crude mind with forces and objects in nature. in this respect there are many interesting suggestions of similar interpretations among the norse and greek mythologies. the close and friendly contact of hiawatha with trees and animals, his companionship with the squirrel, the woodpecker, and the beaver, his talking acquaintance with trees of the forest, with the fishes in the big-sea-water, and with the masters of the winds, the storm, and the thunder, make him an interesting guide for the children among the realms of nature. ye who love the haunts of nature, love the sunshine of the meadow, love the shadow of the forest, love the wind among the branches, and the rain-shower and the snow-storm, and the rushing of great rivers through their palisades of pine-trees, and the thunder in the mountains, whose innumerable echoes flap like eagles in their eyries;-- listen to these wild traditions, to this song of hiawatha! a happy, sympathetic love for the sights and sounds in nature is a fortunate beginning of nature lore. the imaginative interpretations are common to all the early races and in full harmony with the temper of childhood. even from the standpoint of nature study, this early poetic joy in nature descriptions is profitable. the matter-of-fact, analytic study of natural science in succeeding years need not begrudge the children this happiness, this interpretative play of the imagination, this music of field and forest. in early childhood, nature and poetry are one, and as lowell says, "let us not go about to make life duller than it is." the simplicity and beauty of the language and figure of speech make many parts of this poem especially appropriate for children. young and beautiful was wabun; he it was who brought the morning, he it was whose silver arrows chased the dark o'er hill and valley; he it was whose cheeks were painted with the brightest streaks of crimson, and whose voice awoke the village, called the deer, and called the hunter. he meanwhile sat weary waiting for the coming of mondamin, till the shadows, pointing eastward, lengthened over field and forest, till the sun dropped from the heaven, floating on the waters westward, as a red leaf in the autumn falls and floats upon the water, falls and sinks into its bosom. and the pleasant water-courses, you could trace them through the valley, by the rushing in the spring-time, by the alders in the summer. by the white fog in the autumn, by the black line in the winter. the simple music and rhythm of the poetic form is so delightful to children that they absorb whole passages into their memory without conscious effort. the mere re-reading of parts of the poem to little children under six years will often produce this happy result. a little girl of three years picked up, among others, this passage:-- dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water, beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining big-sea-water. the repetitions of the same or similar passages, so common throughout the poem, is a successful appeal to children's favor. it gives the story a sort of mother goose flavor which is delightful. while the story centres in hiawatha, it has a variety of interesting personalities, giving expression to the striking features of this primitive society. hiawatha's loved ones, minnehaha and old nokomis, stand first, and his chosen friends are next. two good friends had hiawatha, singled out from all the others, bound to him in closest union, and to whom he gave the right hand of his heart in joy and sorrow; chibiabos, the musician, and the very strong man, kwasind. and these two, as i have told you, were the friends of hiawatha, chibiabos, the musician, and the very strong man, kwasind. long they lived in peace together, spake with naked hearts together, pondering much and much contriving how the tribes of men might prosper. in connection with these persons is a most pleasing series of adventures, bringing to notice those heroic qualities which children love to witness. the very strong man, kwasind, is a fitting companion in their thoughts to samson and hercules; and chibiabos, he the best of all musicians, he the sweetest of all singers, has had many a prototype since the days of orpheus. pau-puk-keewis, with his dancing and tricks, will also prove a curious character, something like proteus of old. you shall hear how pau-puk-keewis he, the handsome yenadizze, whom the people called the storm fool, vexed the village with disturbance; you shall hear of all his mischief, and his flight from hiawatha, and his wondrous transmigrations, and the end of his adventures. the character of hiawatha, as of the benefactor, of one devoted, with high purpose, to the welfare of his people, may be regarded as the deeper motive of the author. it is the thought of ideal good in hiawatha which gives tone and meaning to the whole poem. you shall hear how hiawatha prayed and fasted in the forest, not for greater skill in hunting, not for greater craft in fishing, not for triumphs in the battle, and renown among the warriors, but for profit of the people, for advantage of the nations. the views of geography and history at the beginning and close of the poem not only give a broad scope to the story, but have an interesting bearing upon the study of geography and history in those years of school which immediately follow. the narrative reaches from the vale of tawasentha in new york, across the great lakes and shining big-sea-water to minnehaha and the upper mississippi, and even to the prairies and the distant rocky mountains beyond. in the summoning of the tribes at the great pipe stone quarry there is a broad survey of the indian tribes of the united states. from the vale of tawasentha, from the valley of wyoming, from the groves of tuscaloosa, from the far-off rocky mountains, from the northern lakes and rivers all the tribes beheld the signal, saw the distant smoke ascending, the pukwana of the peace-pipe. down the rivers, o'er the prairies, came the warriors of the nations. a map of north america is necessary for showing the meaning of this description to the children. in the last part the coming of the white man and the prophecy of his spreading over the land, and the dwindling of the native tribes to the westward, are given. iagoo's description of the white men, their ships and appearance, to his people on the return from his travels, will greatly please the children. he had seen, he said, a water bigger than the big-sea-water, broader than the gitche gumee, bitter so that none could drink it! at each other looked the warriors, looked the women at each other, smiled, and said, "it cannot be so! kaw!" they said, "it cannot be so;" "o'er it," said he, "o'er this water came a great canoe with pinions, a canoe with wings came flying, bigger than a grove of pine-trees, taller than the tallest tree-tops!" and the old men and the women looked and tittered at each other; "kaw!" they said, "we don't believe it!" the story of hiawatha has been used sufficiently in primary grades to show how many are its suggestions for drawing and constructive work. little children take delight in drawing the indian tents, bows and arrows, pine forests, indian warriors and dress, the canoe, the tomahawk, the birds and animals. the cutting of these forms in paper they have fully enjoyed. pictures of indian life, collections of arrow-heads, the peace-pipes, articles of dress, cooking utensils, wampum, stone hatchets, red pipe-stone ornaments, or a visit to any collection of indian relics are desirable as a part of this instruction. the museums in cities and expositions are rich in these materials, and in many private collections are just the desired objects of study. it is well known that children love to construct tents, dress in indian style, and imitate the mode of life, the hunting, dancing, and sports of indians. teachers have taken advantage of this instinct to allow them to construct an indian village on a small scale, and assume the dress and action of hiawatha and his friends, and even to dramatize parts of the story. it is only certain selected parts of the "hiawatha" that lend themselves best to the oral treatment with children, and that, at first, not in the poetic form. in fact, the oral treatment of a story in beautiful poetic form demands a peculiar method. for example, in treating the childhood of hiawatha as he dwelt with old nokomis in the tent beside the sea, the main facts of this episode, or a part of it, may be talked over by means of description, partly also by development, question, and answer, and when these things are clear, let this passage of the poem be read to the children. the preliminary treatment and discussion will put the children in possession of the ideas and pictures by which they can better appreciate and assimilate the poem. this mode of introducing children to a poem or literary masterpiece is not uncommon with children in later years, at least in the middle grades. it has been customary to use nearly the whole poem in fourth or fifth school year for regular reading, and it is well suited to this purpose. its use in primary grades for such oral treatment as we have described will not interfere with its employment as reading matter later on, but rather increase its value for that purpose. the method of handling such a poem as reading has been discussed in the special method in the reading of complete english classics. a number of books have been written by practical teachers on the use of "hiawatha" in primary grades:-- "the hiawatha primer." houghton, mifflin, & co. "hints on the study of hiawatha" (alice m. krackowizer). a. flanagan, publisher. the best edition of the "hiawatha" is "longfellow's song of hiawatha," which is well illustrated. published by houghton, mifflin, & co. other editions are "the song of hiawatha." the educational publishing co. "longfellow's hiawatha." the macmillan co. "song of hiawatha." university publishing co. chapter v third grade stories the mythical stories in the third grade we wish to bring a number of the mythical stories vividly before the children. the classical myths which belong to the literature of europe are the fund from which to select the best. not all, but only a few of the simple and appropriate stories can be chosen. only two recitation periods a week are usually set apart for the oral treatment of these old myths. but later in the progress of the reading lessons other similar stories should be treated. the few recitation periods used for oral work are rather designed to introduce children to the spirit of this literature, to get them into the appreciative mind. this body of ancient myths comes down to us, sifted out of the early literature of the active-minded greeks. they have found their way as a simple and charming poetry into the national literature of all the european countries. is this the material suited to nine- and ten-year-old children? it will not be questioned that these myths belong to the best literary products of europe, but are they suited to children? it is evident that some of our best literary judges have deemed them appropriate. hawthorne has put them into a form designed especially for the young folk. charles kingsley wrote of the greek myths for his children: "now i love these old hellens heartily, and they seem to me like brothers, though they have all been dead and gone many a hundred years. they are come to tell you some of their old fairy tales, which they loved when they were young like you. for nations begin at first by being children like you, though they are made up of grown men. they are children at first like you--men and women with children's hearts; frank, and affectionate, and full of trust, and teachable, loving to see and learn all the wonders around them; and greedy also, too often, and passionate and silly, as children are." not a few other authors of less note have tried to turn the classical myths of the old greek poets into simple english for the entertainment and instruction of children. scarcely any of these stories that have not appeared in various children's books in recent years. taken as a whole, they are a storehouse of children's literature. the philosopher, herbart, looked upon poems of homer as giving ideal expression to the boyhood of the race, and the story of ulysses was regarded by him as the boy's book,--the greek robinson crusoe. for the child of nine years he thought it the most suitable story. kingsley says in his introduction: "now you must not think of the greeks in this book as learned men, living in great cities, such as they were afterwards, when they wrought all their beautiful works, but as country people, living on farms and in walled villages, in a simple, hard-working way; so that the greatest kings and heroes cooked their own meals and thought it no shame, and made their own ships and weapons, and fed and harnessed their own horses. so that a man was honored among them, not because he happened to be rich, but according to his skill and his strength and courage and the number of things he could do. for they were but grown-up children, though they were right noble children too, and it was with them as it is now at school, the strongest and cleverest boy, though he be poor, leads all the rest." in the introduction to the "wonder book" we find the following: "hawthorne took a vital interest in child life. he was accustomed to observe his own children very closely. there are private manuscripts extant which present exact records of what his young son and elder daughter said or did from hour to hour, the father seating himself in their playroom and patiently noting all that passed. to this habit of watchful and sympathetic scrutiny we may attribute in part the remarkable felicity, the fortunate ease of adaptation to the immature understanding, and the skilful appeal to the fresh imaginations which characterize his stories for the young." hawthorne himself says: "the author has long been of the opinion that many of the classical myths were capable of being rendered into very capital reading for children.... no epoch of time can claim a copyright on these immortal fables. they seem never to have been made, and so long as man exists they can never perish; but by their indestructibility itself they are legitimate subjects, for every age to clothe with its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality.... the author has not always thought it necessary to write downward in order to meet the comprehension of children. he has generally suffered the theme to soar, whenever such was its tendency. children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. it is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them." a brief analysis of the qualities which render these myths so attractive will help us to see their value in the education of children. the astonishing brightness of fanciful episode and of pure and clear-cut imagery has an indestructible charm for children. they can soar into and above the clouds on the shining wings of pegasus. with eolus they shut up the contrary winds in an ox-hide, and later let them out to plague the much-suffering ulysses. they watch with astonishment as jason yokes the fire-breathing oxen and strews the field with uprooted stumps and stones as he prepares the soil for the seed of dragon's teeth. each child becomes a poet as he recreates the sparkling brightness of these simple pictures. and when a child has once suffered his fancy to soar to these mountain heights and ocean depths, it will no longer be possible to make his life entirely dull and prosaic. he has caught glimpses of a bright world that will linger unfading in the uplands of his memory. and while they are so deep and lofty they are still, as hawthorne says, very simple. some of the most classic of the old stories are indeed too long for third grade children; too many persons and too much complexity, as in the "tales of troy." but on the other hand, many of the most beautiful of the old myths are as plain and simple to a child as a floating summer cloud. high in the sky they may be or deep in the reflection of some lake or spring, but clear and plain to the thought of a little child. these stories in their naive simplicity reflect the wonder and surprise with which a person first beholds grand and touching scenery, whether it be the oppressive grandeur of some beetling mountain crag, or the placid quiet of a moonlit stream. the stories selected for this grade should be the simplest and best: "the golden touch," "perseus," "the chimæra," of hawthorne, the episodes of the "golden fleece," with others similar. in one form or another they introduce us to the company of heroes, or, at least, of great and simple characters. deeds of enterprise and manliness or of unselfishness and generosity are the climax of the story. to meet danger and hardship or ridicule for the sake of a high purpose is their underlying thought. perseus and jason and ulysses are all ambitious to prove their title to superior shrewdness and courage and self-control. when we get fairly into the mythical age, we find ourselves among the heroes, among those striving for mastery and leadership in great undertakings. physical prowess and manly spirit are its chief virtues. and can there be any question that there is a time in the lives of children when these ideas fill the horizon of their thought? samson and david and hercules, bellerophon and jason, are a child's natural thoughts or, at least, they fit the frame of his mind so exactly that one may say the picture and the frame were made for each other. the history of most countries contains such an age of heroes. tell in switzerland, siegfried in germany, bruce in scotland, romulus and horatius at rome, alfred in england, are all national heroes of the mythical age, whose deeds are heroic and of public good. the greek stories are only a more classic edition of this historical epoch, and should lead up to a study of these later products of european literature. several forms of moral excellence are objectively realized or personified in these stories. as the wise centaur, after teaching jason to be skilful and brave, sent him out into the world, he said: "well, go, my son; the throne belongs to thy father and the gods love justice. but remember, wherever thou dost wander, to observe these three things: "relieve the distressed. "respect the aged. "be true to thy word."[ ] [ ] _jason's quest_ (lowell), p. . and many events in jason's life illustrate the wisdom of these words. the miraculous pitcher is one whose fountain of refreshing milk bubbled always because of a gentle deed of hospitality to strangers. king midas, on the other hand, experiences in most graphic form the punishment which ought to follow miserly greed, while his humble penitence brought back his daughter and the homely comforts of life. bellerophon is filled with a desire to perform a noble deed that will relieve the distress of a whole people. after the exercise of much patience and self-control he succeeds in his generous enterprise. many a lesson of worldly wisdom and homely virtue is brought out in the story of ulysses' varied and adventuresome career. these myths bring children into lively contact with european history and geography, as well as with its modes of life and thought. the early history of europe is in all cases shrouded in mist and legend. but even from this historically impenetrable past has sprung a literature that has exercised a profound influence upon the life and growth of the people. not that children are conscious of the significance of these ideas, but being placed in an atmosphere which is full of them, their deeper meaning gradually unfolds itself. the early myths afford an interesting approach for children to the history and geography of important countries. those countries they must, sooner or later, make the acquaintance of both geographically and historically, and could anything be designed to take stronger hold upon their imagination and memory than these charming myths, which were the poetry and religion of the people once living there? it is a very simple and primitive state of culture, whose ships, arms, agriculture, and domestic life are given us in clear and pleasing pictures. our own country is largely lacking in a mythical age. our culture sprang, more than half-grown, from the midst of europe's choicest nations, and out of institutions that had been centuries in forming. the myths of europe are therefore as truly ours as they are the treasure of englishmen, of germans, or of greeks. again, our own literature, as well as that of european states, is full of the spirit and suggestion of the mythical age. our poets and writers have drawn much of their imagery from this old storehouse of thought, and a child will better understand the works of the present through this contact with mythical ages. in method of treatment with school classes, these stories will admit of a variation from the plan used with "robinson crusoe." one unaccustomed to the reading of such stories would be at a loss for a method of treatment with children. there is a charm and literary art in the presentation that may make the teacher feel unqualified to present them. the children are not yet sufficiently masters of the printed symbols of speech to read for themselves. shall the teacher simply read the stories to children? we would suggest first of all, that the teacher, who would expect to make use of these materials, steep himself fully in literature of this class, and bring his mind into familiar acquaintance and sympathy with its characters. in interpreting classical authors to pupils, we are justified in requiring of the teacher intimate knowledge and appreciative sympathy with his author. certainly no one will teach these stories well whose fancy was never touched into airy flights--who cannot become a child again and partake of his pleasures. no condescension is needed, but ascension to a free and ready flight of fancy. by learning to drink at these ancient fountains of song and poetry, the teacher might learn to tell a fairy story for himself. but doubtless it will be well to mingle oral narrative and description on the part of the teacher with the fit reading of choice parts so as to better preserve the classic beauty and suggestion of the author. children are quite old enough now to appreciate beauty of language and expressive, happy turns of speech. in the midst of question, suggestion, and discussion between pupil and teacher, the story should be carried forward, never forgetting to stop at suitable intervals and get such a reproduction of the story as the little children are capable of. and indeed they are capable of much in this direction, for their thoughts are more nimble, and their power of expression more apt, oftentimes, than the teacher's own. we would not favor a simple reading of these stories for the entertainment of pupils. it should take more the form of a school exercise, requiring not only interest and attention, but vigorous effort to grasp and reproduce the thought. the result should be a much livelier and deeper insight into the story than would be secured by a simple reading for amusement or variety. they should prepare also for an appreciative reading of other myths in the following grades. after all, in two or three recitation periods a week, extending through a year, it cannot be expected that children will make the acquaintance of all the literature that could be properly called the myth of the heroic age in different countries. all that we may expect is to enter this paradise of children, to pluck a few of its choicest flowers, and get such a breath of their fragrance that there will be a child's desire to return again and again. the school also should provide in the succeeding year for an abundance of reading of myths. the same old stories which they first learned to enjoy in oral recitations should be read in books, and still others should be utilized in the regular reading classes of the fourth and fifth grades. in this way the myths of other countries may be brought in, the story of tell, of siegfried, of alfred, and of others. in summarizing the advantages of a systematic attempt to get this simple classic lore into our schools, we recall the interest and mental activity which it arouses, its power to please and satisfy the creative fancy in children, its fundamental feeling and instincts, the virtues of bravery, manliness, and unselfishness, and all this in a form that still further increases its culture effect upon teacher and pupil. it should never be forgotten that teacher and pupil alike are here imbibing lessons and inspirations that draw them into closer sympathy because the subject is worthy of both old and young. in addition to the earlier greek myths we may mention the following subjects as suitable for oral treatment: the story of ulysses has been much used in schools with oral presentation, and is one of the best tales for this purpose in all literature. a somewhat full discussion of the value of this story for schools is found in the special method in reading of complete english classics. the norse mythology has also received much attention from teachers who have used the oral mode of treatment. several of the best books of norse mythology are mentioned in the appended list. also the great story of siegfried. some of the old traditional stories in the early history of rome, of france, germany, and england, have been used for oral narration and reading to children. the "seven little sisters" and its companion book "each and all," and the "ten boys on the road from long ago to now," by jane andrews, published by ginn & co., have been employed extensively for oral and reading work in the third and fourth years of school. the "seven little sisters" is valuable in connection with the beginnings of geography. books for third year of school the wonder book of nathaniel hawthorne. the following stories are especially recommended: the gorgon's head, the golden touch, the miraculous pitcher, and the chimæra. one should preserve as much as possible of the spirit and language of the author. perhaps in classes with children the other stories will be found equally attractive: the paradise of children and the three golden apples. published by houghton, mifflin, & co., boston. kingsley's greek heroes. the stories of perseus, the argonauts, and theseus, especially adapted to children. it may be advisable for the teacher to abbreviate the stories, leaving out unimportant parts, but giving the best portions in the fullest detail. published by ginn & co.; the macmillan co. story of the iliad and story of the odyssey (church). simple and interesting narrative of the homeric stories. the macmillan co. jason's quest (lowell). the story of the argonauts with many other greek myths woven into the narrative. this book is a store of excellent material. the teacher should select from it those parts specially suited to the grade. published by sibley & ducker, chicago. adventures of ulysses (lamb). a small book from which the chief episodes of ulysses' career can be obtained. published by ginn & co., boston. the story of siegfried (baldwin). published by scribner's sons. peabody's old greek folk stories. simple and well written. a supplement to the wonder book. published by houghton, mifflin, & co. tales of troy (de garmo). the story of the siege of troy and of the great events of homer's iliad. this story, on account of its complexity, we deem better adapted to the fourth grade. published by the public school publishing co., bloomington, ill. stories of the old world (church). stories of the argo, of thebes, of troy, of ulysses, and of Ã�neas. stories are simply and well told. it is a book of pages, and would serve well as a supplementary reader in fourth grade. published by ginn & co. gods and heroes (francillon). a successful effort to cover the whole field of greek mythology in the story form. ginn & co. the tanglewood tales (nathaniel hawthorne). a continuation of the wonder book. heroes of asgard. stories of norse mythology; simple and attractive. macmillan & co. the story of ulysses (agnes s. cook). an account of the adventures of ulysses, told in connected narrative, in language easily comprehended by children in the third and fourth grades. public school publishing co., bloomington, ill. old norse stories (bradish). stories for reference and sight reading. american book co. norse stories (mabie). an excellent rendering of the old stories. dodd, mead, & co. myths of northern lands (guerber). american book co. the age of fable (bulfinch). lee and shepard. readings in folk lore (skinner). american book co. national epics (rabb). a. c. mcclurg & co. classic myths (gayley). ginn & co. bryant's odyssey. complete poetic translation. houghton, mifflin, & co. bryant's iliad. houghton, mifflin, & co. butcher and lang's prose translation of the odyssey. the macmillan co. the odyssey of homer (palmer). houghton, mifflin, & co. a prose translation. myths and myth makers (fiske). moral instruction of children (felix adler). chapter x. d. appleton & co. the bible stories the stories of early bible history have been much used in all european lands, and in america, for the instruction of children. among jews and christians everywhere, and even among mohammedans, these stories have been extensively used. they include the simple accounts of the patriarchs, abraham, isaac, jacob, joseph and his brethren, moses, joshua, samson, samuel, and david. it may be seen at a glance that no more famous stories than these could be selected from the history of any country in the world. they stand preëminent as graphic descriptions of the modes of life which prevailed in the early period of civilized races. the old patriarchs lived in what is usually called the pastoral age, when men dwelt in tents and moved about from place to place with their flocks in search of pasture. the patriarch at the head of the family, and even of a whole tribe, is the father, ruler, priest, and judge for the little community over which he presides. in his person there is a simple union of all the important powers of the later hebrew state. the dignity and authority which centre in the person of abraham, together with a marked gravity and strength of character, lend a distinct grandeur to his personality, so that he has been recognized in all ages as one of the great figures in the history of the world; the foremost of the old patriarchs,--the father of the faithful. a similar respect and dignity attaches to all these old bible characters, and in the case of moses, rises to a supreme height, while in david the warrior, statesman, and poet are united in one of the most pronounced and pleasing characters in the world's history. these old stories are also unparalleled in the simplicity and transparent clearness with which the life of the pastoral age is depicted. human nature comes out in a series of pictures most striking and individual, and yet unmistakably true to life and reality. and yet while this life was so small in its compass, it is almost wholly free from narrowness and provincialism. the universal qualities of human nature, common to men in all ages and countries, stand out with a clearness which even little children can grasp. the story of joseph and his brethren is probably the finest story that was ever written for children from eight to ten years of age. the characters involved in this family history are striking and impressive, and the strength of the family virtues and affections has never been set forth with greater simplicity and power. the heroic qualities which appear in the old bible stories, especially in moses, samson, and david, would bear a favorable comparison with the men of the heroic age in all countries. strength of character combined with faith in high ideals, pursued with unwavering resolution, is a peculiar merit of these narratives. the heroes of the hebrew race should be compared, later on, with the most renowned heroes of england, scotland, germany, and greece, and even of america, for they have common qualities which have like merit as educative materials for the young. this early literature of the bible stories will be found to contain a large part of the universal thought of the world, that is, of the masterly ideas which, because of their superior truth and excellence, have gradually worked their way as controlling principles into the life of all modern nations. it need hardly be said that these stories have a peculiar charm and attractiveness for children. the simplicity of a patriarchal age, the strong interest in persons of heroic quality, the descriptions of early childhood, the heroic deeds of bold and high-spirited youth,--these things command the unfaltering interest of children, and at the same time give their lives a touch of moral strength and idealism which is of the highest promise. the oral treatment of these stories in the third or fourth year of school is the only mode of bringing them before the children in their full power, and they are well adapted to easy oral narrative and discussion. the language is the genuine, simple, powerful old english, and the teacher should become thoroughly saturated with these simple words and modes of thought. the dramatic element is also not lacking in many parts, and can be well executed in the classroom. many opportunities will be furnished to the children for drawing pictures illustrating the stories. many of the most famous masterpieces of painting and sculpture represent the persons and scenes of these tales. the great heroes of christian art have exhausted their skill in these representations, which are now being furnished to the schools by the large publishing houses. even the costumes and modes of life are thus brought home to the children in the most realistic yet artistic way. an acquaintance with such early stories of hebrew history is an introduction to some of the finest literature of the english language. first, that dealing with the hebrew scriptures themselves, as the books of moses, the psalms of david, and second, a number of the great poems of english masters, as the "burial of moses" and milton's "samson agonistes." in short, we may say that these stories are the key to a large part of our best english thought. adler, in his "moral instruction of children," says: "the narrative of the bible is fairly saturated with the moral spirit; the moral issues are everywhere in the forefront. duty, guilt, and its punishment, the conflict of conscience with inclination, are the leading themes. the hebrew people seem to have been endowed with what may be called 'a moral genius,' and especially did they emphasize the filial and fraternal duties to an extent hardly equalled elsewhere. now it is precisely these duties that must be impressed upon young children, and hence the biblical stories present us with the very material we require. they cannot, in this respect, be replaced; there is no other literature in the world that offers what is equal to them in value for the particular object we now have in view." if we could only contemplate the patriarchal stories as a part of the great literature of the world, on account of its typical yet realistic portraiture of men and women, we might use this material as we use the very best derived from other sources. mr. adler remarks that "this typical quality in homer's portraiture has been one secret of its universal impressiveness. the homeric outlines are in each case brilliantly distinct, while they leave to the reader a certain liberty of private conception, and he can fill them in to satisfy his own ideal. we may add that this is just as true of the bible as of homer. the biblical narrative, too, depicts a few essential traits of human nature, and refrains from multiplying minor traits which might interfere with the main effect. the bible, too, draws its figures in outline, and leaves every age free to fill them in so as to satisfy its own ideal." moreover, their use is not a matter of experiment. for hundreds of years they have held the first place in the best homes and schools of germany, england, and america, and their educative influence has been profoundly felt in all christian nations. we have several editions of the stories adapted from the bible for school use. in the bible itself they are not found in the simple, connected form that makes them available for school use. one of the best editions for school is that published by houghton, mifflin, & co., called, "old testament stories in scriptural language." a free and somewhat original rendering of the stories is given by baldwin in his "old stories of the east," published by the american book co. both of these books have been extensively used in the schools of this country. the oral treatment of the bible stories in the schools has not been common in this country, but it has all the merits described by us in the chapter on oral instruction. in fourth and fifth grades these books may serve well for exercises in reading. in a great many schools of this country they can be used and are used without giving offence to anybody, and where this is true, they well deserve recognition in our school course because of their superior presentation of some of the great universal ideas of our civilization. books for teachers of bible literature the modern reader's bible, twenty-one volumes (richard moulton). the macmillan co. children's series. old testament and new testament stories. in two volumes. the macmillan co. stories from the bible (church). the macmillan co. story of the chosen people (guerber). the american book co. the literary study of the bible (moulton). d. c. heath & co. stories of robin hood in the latter part of third grade or beginning of fourth, the stories of robin hood are likely to prove exhilarating to children. these stories of the bold, manly, good-natured outlaw, with his band of trusty men in sherwood forest, have been famous throughout england these five hundred years, and the stories themselves, and the ballads accompanying them, are a genuine part of the treasures of the older english literature. they have been worked by howard pyle into the stout, hearty english style which is so appropriate to the rendering of the deeds of this sturdy english yeoman and his band. their careless life and woodland sports under the greenwood tree, and their merry adventures and shooting matches, have been the delight of many a generation of english children. but even their woodland sports were a severe and rugged training in hardy endurance and manly spirit. pyle says well in his preface: "for honest purposes manfully followed and hard knocks courageously endured must always interest the wholesome boy; while nature is so closely akin to man in the golden days of his green youth that tales of the greenwood, where the leaves rustle and the birds sing, and all the air is full of sweet savors of growing things, must ever have a potent charm for the fresh imagination of childhood." one phase of this training, as manifested in the stories, is not only the ability to take hard knocks and keep a stiff upper lip, as the old saying goes, but to master chagrin and anger and endure fun and gibes at one's own expense; indeed, even with aching bones and buzzing ears, to join in the merriment over one's own discomfiture. this is an unusual accompaniment of even good stories, which makes them truly wholesome. the fun of the stories also is of a light and rollicking sort which children should have a chance to thoroughly enjoy. in fact it is excellent material upon which to cultivate their early sense of the comic and humorous. the literature used in early school years has, unfortunately, too little of the sportive and laughable, and the robin hood adventures will help in no small degree to remedy this defect. it is interesting to note, also, that brute strength is not at a premium, but skill and quick-wittedness. not the least attractive and forcible part of robin hood's character is the shrewd-witted versatility and boldness with which he plays any part which circumstances require him to assume. his foes are circumvented by his shrewdness and keen wit even as much as by his unfailing skill in archery or dexterous strength in personal contest. robin hood's relation to the british government was known as that of the outlaw, although the visit of king richard to him in sherwood forest and his service under that prince and others gave him a certain legal status. he has always been regarded as a popular hero representing the rights of the common people. after describing robin hood's first adventure with the foresters and his outlawry, howard pyle says: "but robin hood lay hidden in sherwood forest for one year, and in that time there gathered around him many others like himself, outlawed for this cause and for that. "so, in all that year, five score or more good, stout yeomen joined themselves to him, and chose him to be their leader and chief. then they vowed that even as they themselves had been despoiled they would despoil their oppressors, whether baron, abbot, knight, or squire, and that from each they would take that which had been wrung from the poor by unjust taxes, or land rents, or in wrongful fines; but to the poor folk they would give a helping hand in need and trouble, and would return to them that which had been unjustly taken from them. besides this, they swore never to harm a child, nor to wrong a woman, be she maid, wife, or widow; so that, after a while, when the people began to find that no harm was meant to them, but that money or food came in time of want to many a poor family, they came to praise robin and his merry men, and to tell many tales of him and of his doings in sherwood forest, for they felt him to be one of themselves." when we consider the stories which tradition has handed down relative to the exploits of robin hood, the old-english ballads which celebrate them in song, the stories of king richard's visit to him in sherwood, and robin's visit to the court of eleanor and king henry at london town, to share in the great shooting-match, and the story of locksley in scott's "ivanhoe"--we might almost say that robin hood would bear favorable comparison with any englishman of his time. at any rate it would be difficult to find among the kings and great lords of that age one who had so much regard for justice and fair dealing among men, to say nothing of his kindness to the poor and needy. he stands distinctly for those rights of the common people which were constantly violated by the powerful and influential in that half-barbarous age of feudalism. it is from this instinct for popular rights that the body of english liberties has gradually developed, and it is not strange that robin hood has always been regarded as a hero among a people who have preserved this instinct for liberty and justice. the foresters of robin hood's band were lovers of forest and glade; the song of the bird and fragrance of wild flowers were sweet to them. in pyle's introductory chapter is this description of their retreat under the greenwood. "so turning their backs upon the stream, they plunged into the forest once more, through which they traced their steps till they reached the spot where they dwelt in the depths of the woodland. there had they built huts of bark and branches of trees, and made couches of sweet rushes spread over with skins of fallow deer. here stood a great oak tree with branches spreading broadly around, beneath which was a seat of green moss where robin hood was wont to sit at feast and at merrymaking, with his stout men about him. here they found the rest of the band, some of whom had come in with a brace of fat does. then they built great fires, and after the feast was ready they all sat down, but robin hood placed little john at his right hand, for he was henceforth to be the second in the band." little john's bout with the tanner of blyth is introduced thus:-- "one fine day, not long after little john had left abiding with the sheriff and had come back to the merry greenwood, robin hood and a few chosen fellows of his band lay upon the soft sward beneath the greenwood tree where they dwelt. the day was warm and sultry, so that whilst most of the band were scattered through the forest upon this mission and upon that, these few stout fellows lay lazily beneath the shade of the tree, in the soft afternoon, passing jests among themselves and telling merry stories, with laughter and mirth. "all the air was laden with the bitter fragrance of the may, and all the bosky shades of the woodlands beyond rang with the sweet song of birds,--the throstle-cock, the cuckoo, and the wood-pigeon,--and with the song of birds mingled the cool sound of the gurgling brook that leaped out of the forest shades, and ran fretting amid its rough gray stones across the sunlit open glade before the trysting-tree." this delight in the beauty and music of all nature about them is a sort of atmosphere which gives tone to all the stories of this group. the language in which the stories are narrated is rich in the quaint and vigorous phrases of old english, reminding one of the times of shakespeare and before. one could hardly give the children a better introduction to the riches of our mother tongue. the description of english customs, the popular festivities, the booths of the market town, the parade of feudal lords and retainers, the constraints placed upon hunting by kings and lords, and the hardships of the poor are touched upon in significant ways. the stories give an insight into the english character, their love of rude sports, their ballad literature, and their respect for honesty and courage and shrewdness. the ballads associated with the robin hood legends are often beautiful and striking expressions of the english spirit, and have a special charm for children. they should be read in connection with the later reading of the stories in the third and fourth school years. the bearing of these tales upon early feudal history and the general literature of that age is of importance. this is well illustrated in "ivanhoe" in the use by richard of robin hood and his archers in the attack upon torquilstone, and in various exploits of the men of the greenwood when brought in contact with knights on horseback. there is also a kinship in these narratives with some of the best stories and novels of early english history, as scott's "tales of a grandfather," kingsley's "hereward the wake," jane andrew's "gilbert the page," and a number of scott's novels. in the oral treatment of the stories in the third or fourth school year, the teacher will find her powers of presentation taxed in a peculiar way. the quaint language and humorous tone, the occasional witty conceits, will need to be appreciated and enjoyed, and the mode of presentation suited to the thought. let the teacher first of all thoroughly enjoy the stories and in rendering them to children in the classroom lose herself in the tone and spirit of the account. it requires great freedom and flexibility of body and mind to do this well, but that is what a teacher most of all needs. the humorous part, especially, will require a certain unbending of the stiff manners of a teacher, but no harm is done in this. the large volume of robin hood stories by pyle should be in the hands of the teacher, if possible, although it is an expensive book. it is much fuller in the special details of the stories needed by the teacher, though the smaller book is far better adapted as a reading book for schools. to illustrate the place which the robin hood legends hold in english history and literature, the following selections, quoted from tennyson's "the foresters" and one of the old ballads, are given. they are taken from "english history told by english poets," published by the macmillan company, where the passage from "the foresters" is given at greater length. king richard in sherwood forest lord tennyson (from "the foresters") robin hood and maid marian, friar tuck and george-a-green, will scarlet, midge the miller's son, little john, and the rest are legendary characters loved and sung from the fourteenth century to modern times. the charm of these light-hearted highwaymen was felt by shakespeare himself: "they say he is already in the forest of arden, and a many merry men with him: and there they live like the old robin hood of england; they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world."--("as you like it," i, i.) tennyson adopts the tradition that the generous outlaws dwelt in sherwood forest in cumberlandshire, and that their leader, robin hood, was the banished earl of huntingdon. the plot of the "the foresters" turns upon the sudden return of richard from his austrian captivity and the consequent collapse of the intrigues conducted by his crafty and cruel brother john. _robin hood._ am i worse or better? i am outlaw'd. i am none the worse for that i held for richard and i hated john. i am a thief, ay, and a king of thieves. ay! but we rob the robber, wrong the wronger, and what we wring from them we give the poor. i am none the worse for that, and all the better for this free forest-life, for while i sat among my thralls in my baronial hall the groining hid the heavens; but since i breathed, a houseless head beneath the sun and stars, the soul of the woods hath stricken thro' my blood, the love of freedom, the desire of god, the hope of larger life hereafter, more tenfold than under roof. true, were i taken they would prick out my sight. a price is set on this poor head; but i believe there lives no man who truly loves and truly rules his following, but can keep his followers true. i am one with mine. traitors are rarely bred save under traitor kings. our vice-king john, true king of vice--true play on words--our john, by his norman arrogance and dissoluteness, hath made me king of all the discontent of england up thro' all the forest land north to the tyne: being outlaw'd in a land where law lies dead, we make ourselves the law. _king richard_ (to _robin_). my good friend robin, earl of huntingdon, for earl thou art again, hast thou no fetters for those of thine own band who would betray thee? _robin._ i have; but these were never worn as yet, i never found one traitor in my band. * * * * * our forest games are ended, our free life, and we must hence to the king's court. i trust we shall return to the wood. meanwhile, farewell old friends, old patriarch oaks. a thousand winters will strip you bare as death, a thousand summers robe you life-green again. you seem, as it were, immortal, and we mortal. how few junes will heat our pulses quicker! how few frosts will chill the hearts that beat for robin hood! _marian._ and yet i think these oaks at dawn and even, or in the balmy breathings of the night, will whisper evermore of robin hood. we leave but happy memories to the forest. we dealt in the wild justice of the woods. all those poor serfs whom we have served will bless us, all those pale mouths which we have fed will praise us-- all widows we have holpen pray for us, our lady's blessed shrines throughout the land be all the richer for us. you, good friar, you much, you scarlet, you dear little john, your names will cling like ivy to the wood. and here perhaps a hundred years away some hunter in day-dreams or half asleep will hear our arrows whizzing overhead, and catch the winding of a phantom horn. _robin._ and surely these old oaks will murmur thee marian along with robin. i am most happy-- art thou not mine?--and happy that our king is here again, never i trust to roam so far again, but dwell among his own. strike up a stave, my masters, all is well. how robin hood rescued the widow's three sons robin hood and his followers were bandits and outlaws, but the people loved them because they defied the hateful forest laws and made light of the sheriff. the king's officers were responsible for the maintenance of order, but in these lawless times they often used their power for their own advantage, imposing heavy fines and penalties on the poor, and extorting bribes from the rich. the following is one of the oldest and rudest of the many robin hood ballads:-- there are twelve months in all the year, as i hear many say, but the merriest month in all the year is the merry month of may. now robin hood is to nottingham gone, with a link a down and a day, and there he met a silly[ ] old woman, was weeping on the way. "what news? what news, thou silly old woman? what news hast thou for me?" said she, "there's my three sons in nottingham town to-day condemned to die." "o, have they parishes burnt?" he said, "or have they ministers slain? or have they robbed any virgin? or other men's wives have ta'en?" "they have no parishes burnt, good sir, nor yet have ministers slain, nor have they robbed any virgin, nor other men's wives have ta'en." "o, what have they done?" said robin hood, "i pray thee tell to me." "it's for slaying of the king's fallow-deer, bearing their long bows with thee." "dost thou not mind, old woman," he said, "how thou madest me sup and dine? by the truth of my body," quoth bold robin hood, "you could not tell it in better time." now robin hood is to nottingham gone, with a link a down and a day, and there he met with a silly old palmer, was walking along the highway. "what news? what news, thou silly old man? what news, i do thee pray?" said he, "three squires in nottingham town are condemned to die this day." "come change thy apparel with me, old man, come change thy apparel for mine; here is forty shillings in good silver, go drink it in beer or wine." now robin hood is to nottingham gone, with a link a down and a down. and there he met with the proud sheriff, was walking along the town. "o christ you save, o sheriff!" he said; "o christ you save and see; and what will you give to a silly old man to-day will your hangman be?" "some suits, some suits," the sheriff he said, "some suits i'll give to thee; some suits, some suits, and pence thirteen, to-day's a hangman's fee." then robin he turns him round about, and jumps from stock to stone: "by the truth of my body," the sheriff he said, "that's well jumpt, thou nimble old man." "i was ne'er a hangman in all my life, nor yet intends to trade; but curst be he," said bold robin, "that first a hangman was made! "i've a bag for meal, and a bag for malt, and a bag for barley and corn; a bag for bread, and a bag for beef, and a bag for my little small horn. "i have a horn in my pocket, i got it from robin hood, and still when i set it to my mouth, for thee it blows little good." "o, wind thy horn, thou proud fellow, of thee i have no doubt. i wish that thou give such a blast, till both thy eyes fall out." the first loud blast that he did blow, he blew both loud and shrill; a hundred and fifty of robin hood's men came riding over the hill. the next loud blast that he did give, he blew both loud and amain. and quickly sixty of robin hood's men came shining over the plain. "o, who are these," the sheriff he said, "come tripping over the lea?" "they're my attendants," brave robin did say; "they'll pay a visit to thee." they took the gallows from the slack, they set it in the glen. they hanged the proud sheriff on that, released their own three men. [ ] simple robin hood books the merry adventures of robin hood (howard pyle). finely illustrated, $ . . scribner's sons. some adventures of robin hood (pyle). small school edition, illustrated; scribner's sons. tennyson's the foresters. the robin hood ballads are found in many of the ballad books. ivanhoe contains several scenes from the life of robin hood (locksley). chapter vi primary reading through incidental exercises and games based on school movements, studies, and games before entering upon the discussion of the usual methods of introducing children to the art of reading we will give a treatment of the incidental opportunities offered by the other studies, by school movements and games in primary classes, for introducing children to the written and printed forms. it is assumed that the more closely the written or printed words and sentences are related to the children's activities, or the more dependent these activities are made upon a knowledge of the word-forms, the quicker and more natural will be their mastery. to put it briefly, the teacher abstains from the use of oral speech to a considerable extent and substitutes the written forms of the words on the blackboard in giving directions, in games, and in treating topics in literature and science. the following chapter is taken wholly from the lessons given by mrs. lida b. mcmurry in the first grade. many other similar lessons were worked out, but these are probably sufficient to fully illustrate the plan. the teacher's aim in the beginning reading is to lead the child to look to the lesson, either word or sentence or paragraph, to find what it has to say to him--to present the lesson in such a way that the child shall quicken into life in its presence--shall reach forward to grasp this much-desired thing. the attention of the child is centred on the thought; he grasps the symbols because he must reach, through them, the thought. much of the early reading can be taught in a purely incidental way--in the general exercises of the school and in the literature and nature-study recitations. reading taught incidentally (a) _in the general management of the school._ the directions which are at first given to children orally, _e.g._, _rise_, _turn_, _pass_, _sit_, _skip_, _fly_, _march_, _run_, _walk_, _pass to the front_, _pass to the back_, are later written upon the board. when the children seem to have become familiar with the written direction, the order in which the directions are given is sometimes changed, as a test, _e.g._, the following directions are usually given in this order--_turn_, _rise_, _pass_. instead of writing _turn_ first, the teacher writes _pass_. if the children understand, they will rise at once and pass without waiting to turn. the names of the children, instead of being spoken, are often written; in this way the children become familiar with the names of all the children in the school. the teacher, writing _clarence_ upon the board, says, "i would like this boy to erase the boards to-night." the first time it is written the teacher speaks the name as she writes it. it may be necessary to do this several times. the teacher does not look at clarence as she writes his name. if he does not recognize his name after it has appeared repeatedly, his eyesight may well be tested. if heedlessness is the cause of the failure, another name is written at the board, and clarence loses the opportunity to do the service. no drill should be given on these names. the repetition incident to the frequent calling upon the child is all that is necessary to fix the name. the names of the songs and of the poems which the children are memorizing are written upon the board as needed. the teacher says, "we will sing this song this morning." if the children do not recognize its title as the teacher points to it, she gives it. after a while the children will recognize the names of all the songs and the poems which are in use in the room. the children become familiar with the written form of the smaller numbers in this way--the number of absent children is reported at each session and written on the board. on friday the teacher records upon the board some facts of the week, or of the month, which the children learned from their weather charts--viz., the number of sunny and the number of cloudy days. the number of children in each row is ascertained and written at the board that the monitors may know how many pairs of scissors, pieces of clay, or pencils to select. the poems, after being partially committed to memory, are written upon the board; when the pupils falter, reference is made to the line in question as it appears upon the board. the teacher sometimes writes her morning greeting or evening farewell at the board--thus: "good morning, children," or, "good-by for to-day." the children read silently and respond with, "good morning, miss eades," or, "good night, miss farr." often she communicates facts of interest at the board. if the pupils are unable to interpret what she has written, she reads for them, _e.g._, the teacher writes, "we have vacation to-morrow." quite likely some child, unable to read at all, will say, "we have _something_, but i can't tell what it is." (these same words will occur again, when needed to express a thought, and it is a waste of energy to drill upon them.) when the children have interpreted the above sentence at the board, the teacher writes, "do you know why?" the children read the question silently and give the answer audibly, and say, "it is decoration day." we too often allow children to treat a question in their reading as if its end were reached in the asking. to lead the children to form a habit of answering questions asked in writing or in print, such questions as the following are, from time to time, written at the board: "did you see the rainbow last night?" "what color was it?" "did you see any birds on saturday?" "what ones?" "have you been to the woods?" "what did you find there?" (b) _in connection with the literature._ the name of the story which the teacher is about to tell is placed upon the board. at the first writing the teacher tells the pupils what it is, if necessary, _e.g._, the teacher says, "we shall have a story about '_the three bears_,'" pointing to the title upon the board. the next day she says, "i would like you to tell me all you can about this story"--writing its name upon the board. in the final reproduction of the story the teacher assigns topics, _e.g._: chauncey may tell me about this (writing at the board): _silver-hair going to the woods_. eva may tell about this: _silver-hair going into the kitchen_. jennie may tell about this: _silver-hair going into the sitting room_. willie may tell about this: _silver-hair going upstairs_. should the child go beyond the limited topic, the teacher points to the board and asks about what he was to tell. at the close of each story that can be dramatized, the teacher assigns at the board the part which each is to take, thus: after the story of "the old woman and the pig" is learned, the teacher writes in a column each child's name opposite the animal or thing which he is to represent, in this way. _agnes_--the old woman. _glenn_--the pig. _sadie_--the dog, etc. (c) _in connection with the nature study._ in the spring the children are looking for the return of the birds, the first spring blossoms, and the opening of the tree buds. the teacher often makes her own discoveries known through writing, upon the board, _e.g._, "i saw a robin this morning," or "i found a blue violet yesterday," or "i saw some elm blossoms last night." the class, by the aid of the teacher, make a bird, a flower, and a tree-bud calendar, on which are recorded the name and date of the first seen of each. these names are put on the calendars in the presence of the children, and they frequently "name their treasures o'er." the mode of travelling is written beside the name of each familiar bird as the children make the discoveries, thus:-- { hops. { walks. robin { runs. crow { { flies. { flies. questions arise during the recitation which the children will answer later from observation. that the children may not forget them they are placed high up on the board where they can be preserved. frequent reference is made to them to see if the pupils are prepared to answer them. when a question is answered it is erased, making room for another. the reading recitation for the early reading, games, literature, and nature study may form the basis. * * * * * (i) _games as a basis for the reading._ the child enters school from a life of play. it is our purpose, so far as possible, to make use of this natural bent of the child to insure interest in his reading, as well as to give him the free exercise, which he needs, of his muscles. it may be urged as an argument against the use of the games, that they are too noisy and attract the attention of the children who are busy at their seats. often it would be a good thing for these children to watch the younger ones at their games. it would rest them and put them into closer sympathy with the little ones. in a short time they will not care so much to watch them. the little children should be thoughtful of the older ones and move about as quietly as is possible. the following are some of the games which we have used in our primary school. they are given in the way of suggestion only. they are played at first by following spoken directions. when the children are perfectly familiar with the oral direction, the written direction is gradually substituted. the children do not stay long enough on one game to become tired of it. two or three or even more are played at a single recitation. it is not the plan to drill the pupils upon the written directions, but by frequent repetitions to familiarize them with them. the games are most suitable for the very earliest reading lessons. the plan for teaching one of them, the first one given here, will be written out quite fully. the others will be given with less detail. the ring game _material._--six celluloid rings, red, white, blue, yellow, green, and black. surcingle rings can be painted the colors desired. _directions._--take the red ring, jennie. take the blue ring, eva. take the yellow ring, wallace. take the green ring, chauncey. take the black ring, gregory. take the white ring, lloyd. when the children are ready to hide the rings this direction is given to the remainder of the class:-- close your eyes. this to the pupils who hold the rings:-- hide the rings. when the children have all the rings hid they announce it by lightly clapping their hands, upon which the children open their eyes. directions are then given to those who did not hide rings, for finding the rings, _e.g._:-- find the red ring. find the blue ring, etc. no notice is taken of any ring but the one called for. a limited time is given for the finding of each. at the close of that time, if the ring is not discovered, the one who hid it gets it. when the written directions are first used the whole sentence need not be put upon the board, _e.g._, the teacher need write only--_the red ring_. she says to the child, "find _this_"--pointing to the board; or _red_, alone, may be written, in which case the teacher points to the word, saying, "you may find _this ring_." there is considerable rivalry to see who will find the most rings. when the children seem to know the written directions perfectly, a test is made of their ability, actually, to read them; thus, instead of writing, "_take_ the red ring," the teacher writes, "_find_ the red ring." she writes "hide the rings," before she writes, "close your eyes." if the children recognize what is written they will set the teacher right. ball and cord _material._--small, soft rubber balls with short rubber cords attached. the cords have a loop for the finger. ball in right hand. toss up. hold. toss down. hold. toss to the right. hold. toss to the left. hold. ball in left hand. toss up, etc. in this and succeeding games it is left to the discretion of the teacher as to when the written directions shall be introduced. ball game _material._--a soft rubber ball. form a circle. take the ball, roy. toss the ball. roll the ball. bounce the ball. throw the ball. give the ball to sadie. in this game one of the children takes the ball to the circle. each, as the ball is tossed to him, tosses it to another. at the direction of the teacher the game of _tossing the ball_ is changed to one of _rolling_ _the ball_, the pupils squatting on the floor; this in turn is changed later as the directions indicate. care must be taken that all children are treated alike in this game. the children themselves will look out for this if properly directed at the outset of the game. hunting the violet _material._--violets scattered about the room. find a blue violet, glenn. find a violet bud, edith. find a yellow violet, lloyd. find a violet leaf, sadie. find a white violet, jennie. find a purple violet, rudolph. sing to the violets. children sing softly:-- "oh, violets, pretty violets, i pray you tell to me why are you the first flowers that bloom upon the lea?" etc. a tree game--(spring or fall) _material._--leaves of the different trees with which the children are familiar. glenn may be a maple tree. choose your leaf. wallace may be an elm tree. choose your leaf. chauncey may be a birch tree. choose your leaf, etc. make a little forest. toss in the wind. (the leaves are pinned upon the children as each chooses his leaf, and they dance lightly about as if tossed by the wind.) caring for the animals _material._--wooden or paper animals. a portion of the table is marked off by a chalk line for the farmyard. drive in a pig, willie. lead in a horse, gregory. drive in a sheep, sadie. lead in a cow, roy, etc. they are driven in at night, then driven out in the morning. sometimes they are hurried in because of the approach of a storm. doll play--(general) _material._--penny dolls or larger ones. take a doll. rock the baby. pat the baby. sing the baby to sleep. put the baby to bed. take up the baby. wash its face. comb its hair. feed it bread and milk. take it for a walk. at the direction, "sing the baby to sleep," the children sing very softly:-- "rock-a-bye baby,"--or some other lullaby. the bed is the chair on which the child is sitting. all stand and turn about together to put the babies to bed. they go through the movements only of washing the face and hands and combing the hair, and of feeding bread and milk. they perform these acts in unison. the rainbow fairies--(spring) _material._--large bows of tissue paper with streamers, of the various colors mentioned. eva may be a yellow fairy. roy may be a blue fairy. edith may be a green fairy. louise may be a red fairy. lloyd may be an orange fairy. sadie may be a violet fairy. the others may be trees. join hands, fairies. dance about the trees. as the first direction is given eva steps to the table and takes a yellow bow which is pinned to her left shoulder: the others follow as called upon. the leaves _material._--a leaf of one of several colors pinned on each child. the wind calls:-- come yellow leaf. come red leaf. come green leaves, etc. dance in the wind. at the last direction the children fly over a small area, hither and thither; some one way, some another, passing and repassing one another, simulating the leaves in a storm. a flock of birds all the children are little birds. fly to the fields. pick up seeds. take a drink. bathe in the creek. preen your feathers. fly home. perch on a twig. _sing._ they sing:-- "we are little birdies, happy we, happy we. we are little birdies singing in a tree." hunting birds _material._--colored pictures of birds common to the locality in which the game is used. find a robin, rudolph. find a bluebird, gregory, etc. the child indicated finds the picture of the bird called for and places it on the blackboard ledge which serves as a picture gallery. hunting leaves is a game similar to the above. movement game frederick may be a pony. louise may be a kitty, etc. (of the other children--one may be a boy; another, a bird; another, a horse; another, a fish; another, a girl, etc.) trot, pony. run, dog. skip, boy, etc. they perform singly, and also in a body. making garden _material._--trays or box-covers of sand, and a toy set of garden tools for each pupil. take the spade. spade the earth. take the hoe. hoe the ground. take the rake. smooth the ground. make holes (or rows). plant corn (or sow the seed). cover the seed. water the garden. the farmer's pets for this game the children are all seated in chairs except one for whom no chair is provided. each child seated takes the name of some animal on the farm, _e.g._, a dog, cat, horse, chicken, duck, or cow. the one standing is the farm-hand and says, _e.g._, "my master wants his dog." the dog must jump up and turn around. if he fails to do so, he steps to one side taking his chair with him. if when he is again called upon he answers correctly, he resumes his seat in the circle. occasionally the farm-hand says, "my master wants all of his pets." when all rise and change seats quietly. the farm-hand tries to get a seat, leaving another child to be the farm-hand. in changing seats they change names as a single name belongs to each chair. * * * * * (ii) _literature as a basis for the reading._ the stories in the form indicated below are given after the children have become thoroughly familiar with them through oral presentation, after, too, the children have gained some facility in reading, through the use of the games, and the directions, etc., used in the general management of the school. before the board work is presented the children dramatize the story which they are to read. they look to the board to find out what to say that they may impersonate the character in the story. each mimics in tone and action the one whose part he takes. as no two mimic in the same way there is no lack of variety and interest. if the children are thoughtful they will know every time into whose mouth to put each sentence. they need to be alert, however. the names of the speakers, given in the margin, are for the benefit of the readers of this article. they are not put on the board. the children do not need them. the old woman and the pig i _the old woman._ i was sweeping my house. i found this dime. what shall i buy? i know; i will buy a pig. where is my sunbonnet? where is my cane? here i go. tramp! tramp! tramp! ii. _old woman._ tap, tap, tap! _the farmer._ come in. good morning, old woman. _old woman._ good morning, sir. i want to buy a pig. _farmer._ all right; i have some. will you look at them? here they are. _old woman._ i like this one. i will take it. good morning. _farmer._ good morning. iii _old woman._ go on, pig. that fence is low, you can jump over. _pig._ grunt! grunt! _old woman._ what shall i do? i must have help. i will go back. iv _old woman._ dog, dog, bite pig. _dog._ no, no. (_shaking his head._) v _old woman._ stick, stick, whip dog. _stick._ no, no. (_shaking head as before._) vi-xii. _similar to two above._ xiii _old woman._ cat, cat, kill rat. _cat._ i will if you will give me some milk. _old woman._ i will go to the cow. xiv _old woman._ cow, cow, give me some milk. _cow._ i will if you will give me some hay. _old woman._ all right. tramp! tramp! tramp! here is the hay, cow. _cow._ chew, chew, chew, chew. now you may have some milk. _old woman._ thank you, cow. xv _old woman._ come, kitty, kitty, kitty. here is some milk for you. _cat._ lap, lap, lap, lap. _old woman._ now catch the rat. _cat._ patter, patter, patter. (_given softly--it is the cat running after the rat._) the three bears i _the papa bear._ that soup is hot. it must cool. we will take a walk. ii _silver-hair._ tap! tap! tap! no one at home. i will go in. what is that on the table? it is three bowls of soup. i am hungry. (_tasting of the soup in the big bowl._) that is too hot. (_tasting of soup in middle-sized bowl._) that is too cold. (_tasting of soup in little bowl._) that is just right. it is good. i will eat a little. iii i am tired. here are three chairs. that is too high. that is too wide. this is just right. i will rest here. oh, it broke! iv i am sleepy. i will go upstairs. here are three beds. that is too hard. that is too soft. this is just right. i will sleep here. v _papa bear._ somebody has been tasting my soup. _mamma bear._ _somebody has been tasting my soup._ _baby bear._ somebody has been tasting my soup. it is all gone. vi _papa bear._ somebody has been sitting in my chair. _mamma bear._ _somebody has been sitting in my chair._ _baby bear._ somebody has been sitting in my chair. it is all broken. vii _papa bear._ somebody has been lying on my bed. _mamma bear._ _somebody has been lying on my bed._ _baby bear._ somebody has been lying on my bed. why, here she is! _silver-hair._ oh, my! i will jump. now i will run. the fir tree i i am a little fir tree. i want to be tall. i hate rabbits. they jump over me. ii i am three years old. the rabbit cannot jump over me now. it runs around me. i wish i were taller. i hate to be so little. iii now i am six years old. here come the woodchoppers. they will take me away. here i go. thump! thump! thump! iv what a fine house. how beautiful this moss is. what are these people going to give me? i am so happy! v here are the children. how they like me! see them dance about me. _everybody looks at me._ do not take away my beautiful dress. do not put out the lights. vi here come the servants. they will give me my beautiful dress. oh, oh, oh! don't put me up there. it is dark. i want to be planted. vii i wish i were at home. i want to see the rabbit. it may jump over me. i will not care. i want to see the other trees. the rats come. i do not like rats. viii out again! i like the air. now i shall be planted. i am glad to see the flowers. i am glad to hear the birds. now i shall live. ix that boy called me ugly. he took my beautiful star. i wish i were in the woods. i shall never be happy again. pop! pop! pop! pop! the street musicians i _the donkey._ i am very old. i am very weak. i can work no more. my master will not keep me. i will run away. i will go to the city. i can make music. i will join a band. trot! trot! trot! ii what is that in the road? it is an old dog. what is the matter? _dog._ i am very old. i am very weak. i cannot hunt. my master will not keep me. how can i live? _donkey._ come with me. you can play the bass drum. join a band. _dog._ good! good! good! i will go. _dog and donkey._ trot! trot! trot! iii _donkey._ what is that in the road? it is an old cat. what is the matter, old whiskers? _cat._ i am very old. i am very weak. i cannot catch mice. my mistress will not keep me. how can i live? _donkey._ come with us. you can sing. join a band. _cat._ good! good! good! i will go. _all three._ trot! trot! trot! iv _donkey._ what is that on the gate? it is a rooster. what is the matter? _rooster._ the cook will kill me. _donkey._ come with us. you can sing. join a band. _rooster._ good! good! good! i will go. _all four._ trot! trot! trot! the unhappy pine tree i i am a little pine tree. i do not like to be a pine tree. my leaves are needles. needles are not pretty. i wish i had gold leaves. ii _in the morning._ why do the trees look at me? what has happened? gold leaves! gold leaves! just what i wanted! good! good! good! iii _to the robber._ do not take my leaves. i want them. they are beautiful. give them back. no leaves! no leaves! i wish i had glass leaves. iv _in the morning._ oh, how beautiful! glass leaves! glass leaves! no robber will take them. i can keep them. i am so happy! v cloud, do not come. wind, do not blow. keep still, keep still. a leaf is broken. another! another! all gone! all gone! no beautiful leaves. i wish i had bright green leaves. vi _in the morning._ oh, my pretty green leaves! no one will steal them. nothing will break them. i shall not need to keep still. i will dance. dance! dance! dance! vii goat, do not come here. these are my leaves. i want them. they are pretty. oh, oh, oh! all my pretty leaves are gone. what shall i do? i wish i had my needles. viii oh, mother, mother, see! i have my old leaves. i like them. they are best of all. no one will steal them. nothing will break them. nothing will eat them. i can keep them. my dear old leaves! * * * * * (iii) _nature study as a basis for the reading._ the subjects in which the pupils are most interested are made the basis for the reading lessons. sometimes there is a guessing game like the following: the teacher, holding a flower in her closed hand, writes:-- guess what i have. it is a flower. it is white. _it has a yellow centre._ (the children answer--a daisy.) or-- guess what i have. it is a leaf. it is yellow. it is long. it is narrow. (the children answer--the willow.) after the pupils have made a careful study of a few birds or flowers, the reading lesson describes one of these, and the pupils are expected to name it from the description. if a child gives the wrong name, one of those who know better points out the line or lines barring out this object, and reads to the one making the mistake as proof of his error. i live in the woods. i am not a bird. i am not a flower. i am not a tree. i run up trees. i eat nuts. i have a bushy tail. what is my name? (_squirrel._) i am a little bird. my back is brown. my breast is white. my bill is curved. i go up a tree trunk. i fly to another tree. i like insects. what is my name? (_the brown creeper._) this is a big bird. it is blue. it has black bands on its tail and wings. it has a crest. its bill is black. it scolds. what is its name? (_the blue jay._) the children sometimes play a game like the following: all but one personify red-headed woodpeckers. the _one_ questions from the board. if a red-headed woodpecker fails to answer the question put to him, he takes the place of the interlocutor. it is an honor to be able to answer all the questions put:-- what color is your head? what color is your throat? what color is your breast? what colors on your wings? what color is your bill? what do you do? where do you make your nest? to a set of questions like the following, the children give the answers, after reading the questions silently:-- what bird did you first see this spring? what have you seen a robin do? what flower did you see first? what yellow flowers have you seen this spring? what white flowers? what blue flowers? what bird builds a nest in a tree trunk? what bird builds a nest on the ground? the baby robin i saw two robins on the ground. one was a mamma robin. the other was a baby robin. the baby robin was as big as its mother. its breast was spotted. its mother gave it an earthworm. at first it dropped it, but its mother picked it up and gave it to her baby again. this time it got a better hold. by several gulps it swallowed the worm. the mother looked proud of her baby. (this is the teacher's experience which she tells the children from the board. sometimes she writes the observations which one of the children have made.) as no two teachers will have the same material for nature study, the reading material will not be multiplied here. gradually, as the pupils can stand it, the sentences are lengthened a little as necessary, and massed into paragraphs. the use of the "mother goose rhymes" as a means of enlivening the first year reading lessons is also treated as follows by mrs. lida mcmurry. (taken from _school and home education_ for october, .) many of the children on entering school are well versed in nursery rhymes. they enjoy repeating them. other children may not know them so well, but soon learn them from their classmates. teachers and pupils may have a happy time together with mother goose, and at the same time the pupils are learning to read without realizing that what they are doing is something that they are not accustomed to. i will suggest a few ways in which these rhymes may be made the basis for reading lessons:-- take this rhyme-- . dance, thumbkin, dance, dance, ye merrymen, every one; for thumbkin he can dance alone, thumbkin he can dance alone. the second, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas are like the first, only foreman, longman, ringman, and littleman are in turn substituted for thumbkin. the children first learn to act out each stanza as they recite it together. the thumb is held up and moved about as if dancing, as the first line is given. all the fingers dance as the second line is recited. the thumb dances alone as the third and fourth lines are repeated. the teacher then repeats the stanza alone, and the children's fingers accompany her. later, when the children have learned to act out the story well, as the teacher repeats it, the teacher writes the first line at the board, and, pointing to it, asks the children to do what the board directs. they cannot tell what it is, so the teacher says, "the board is talking to _thumbkin_," writing the name on the board as she says it. "what do you think it wants thumbkin to do?" pointing to _dance_ in the line on the board. the next line is written on the board. the children quite likely will guess rightly what it says, because of its setting. if not, the teacher will help them as at first. in the same way they connect the third and fourth lines with the oral expression of the same, and act them out accordingly. that the children respond readily to the directions as written is no proof, at first, that they know even most of the words in the lines. the teacher's test is a part of the play. to-day, instead of writing the first line, she writes the second. many get caught. they will be more alert another time. as they can never tell which line will appear first, they learn to discriminate by giving closer attention to the form of the words. sometimes the teacher writes the six names--thumbkin, foreman, etc., and merrymen, on the board. she points to the name or names of the one, or ones, that should dance. the children do not like to make mistakes in responding with the fingers. sometimes the teacher points to a name on the board, as foreman, and writes "dance alone," or "dance every one." the alert children see that the latter does not apply. the words are not drilled upon. the game, with variations sometimes, is played quite frequently, but never so long at a time that the children weary of it. three or four plays or games are given at a single recitation. the interests of the children are studied, and rhymes which they do not enjoy as reading material are dropped, and others substituted. the rhymes should often be repeated, just as they occur in "mother goose," that the children may not forget them. . eye winker. tom tinker. mouth eater. chin chopper. chin chopper. the children point to the parts of the face as they are named. they first learn to give the rhyme with its accompanying motion orally, then they respond to it as written on the board (tom tinker is the other eye). when they do this readily the directions are written out of their order. this tests the children's ability to distinguish one form from another. no child likes to give the wrong motion in response to a direction, _e.g._, point to his mouth when eye winker is called for. . the children, we will suppose, know a number of rhymes, as, _e.g._, a diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar. a little boy went into a barn. baa, baa, black sheep. rain, rain, go away, etc. the teacher writes the first line of one of these rhymes on the board and asks a child to give the rhyme. he cannot at first. later he will learn to recognize it; so with all the rhymes he knows. when he can give any rhyme called for in response to the first line as written at the board, another line (not the first) is written, and the child asked to give the rhyme of which it is a part. . is john smith within? yes, that he is. can he set a shoe? ay, marry, two. here a nail and there a nail, tick, tack, too. after the children have learned the above rhyme, acting it out, by imitating the voices of the two speakers, and by driving the nails, the two questions are asked at the board, and the children respond orally. sometimes the second question, slightly altered, is asked first, _e.g._, "can john smith set a shoe?" sometimes "who is within?" appears on the board. . old mother hubbard. there are many stanzas to this poem, a few of which the teacher will wish to omit, as those referring to the visits to the ale-house and the tavern. the pupils become perfectly familiar with the jingle, so they can with ease give it orally, then the teacher writes the first line of a stanza at the board and pointing to it asks a pupil to give the remainder of the stanza. the mistake is ludicrous if the wrong lines follow the first, and the pupils wish to avoid such a mistake. . there were two birds sat on a stone, fa, la, la, la, lal, de. one flew away and then there was one, fa, la, la, la, lal, de. the other flew after and then there was none, fa, la, la, la, lal, de. and so the poor stone was left all alone, fa, la, la, la, lal, de. the children act out this rhyme at first as they say it, later, silently, as they see what is called for at the board. any number may be substituted for _two_ in the first line, but when they come to the third line the number substituted for one should be such that only one will remain, _e.g._, there were _eight_ birds sat on a stone, _seven_ flew away, etc. the children are sometimes caught by the wrong number being told to fly. the children should not fly until they are sure that it is all right. . what are your eyes for? what are your ears for? what is your nose for? what is your tongue for? what is your mouth for? what is your hand for? what are your fingers for? what are your teeth for? what is your brain for? what is your heart for? these questions are read silently by the children, then answered orally in complete sentences, one child only answering at one time. the answers are so absurd when wrong that each child is careful to know what is asked. these are only a few of the ways in which "mother goose" may be used as reading material. each teacher will think out for herself ways in which these rhymes may be profitably and happily employed. mrs. lida mcmurry. chapter vii method in primary reading the problem of primary reading is one of the most complex and difficult in the whole range of school instruction. a large proportion of the finest skill and sympathy of teachers has been expended in efforts to find the appropriate and natural method of teaching children to read. all sorts of methods and devices have been employed, from the most formal and mechanical to the most spirited and realistic. the first requisite to good reading is something worth reading, something valuable and interesting to the children, and adapted to their minds. we must take it for granted in this discussion that the best literature and the best stories have been selected, and what the teacher has to do is, first, to appreciate these masterpieces for herself, and second, to bring the children in the reading lessons to appreciate and enjoy them. in the primary grades we are not so richly supplied with available materials from good literature as in intermediate and grammar grades. this is due not to difficulty in thought, but to the unfamiliar written and printed forms. the great problem in primary reading is to master these strange forms as quickly as possible, and find entrance to the story-land of books. for several years, however, primary teachers have been selecting and adapting the best stories, and some of the leading publishers have brought out in choice school-book form books which are well adapted to the reading of primary grades. we should like to assume one other advantage. if the children have been treated orally to "robinson crusoe" in the second grade, they will appreciate and read the story much better in the third grade. if some of grimm's stories are told in first grade, they can be read with ease in the second grade. the teacher's oral presentation of the stories is the right way to bring them close to the life and interest of children. in the first grade, as shown in the chapter on oral lessons, it is the only way, because the children cannot yet read. but even if they could read, the oral treatment is much better. the oral presentation is more lively, natural, and realistic. the teacher can adapt the story and the language to the immediate needs of the class as no author can. she can question, or suggest lines of thought, or call up ideas from the children's experience. the oral manner is the true way to let the children delve into the rich culture-content of stories and to awaken a taste for their beauty and truth. we could well wish that before children read mythical stories in fourth grade, they had been stirred up to enjoy them by oral narration and discussion in the preceding year. in the same way, if the reading bears on interesting science topics previously studied, it will be a distinct advantage to the reading lesson. children like to read about things that have previously excited their interest, whether in story or science. the difficulties of formal reading will also be partly overcome by familiarity with the harder names and words. our conclusion is that reading lessons, alone, cannot provide all the conditions favorable to good reading. some of these can be well supplied by other studies or by preliminary lessons which pave the way for the reading proper. this matter has been so fully discussed in the earlier chapters on oral work that it requires no further treatment here. folk-lore stories as reading exercises for first grade let it be supposed that a class of first-grade children has learned to tell a certain story orally. it has interested them and stirred up their thought. let them next learn to read the same story in a very simple form. this will lead to a series of elementary reading lessons in connection with the story, and the aim should be strictly that of mastering the early difficulties of reading. the teacher recalls the story, and asks for a statement from its beginning. if the sentence furnished by the child is simple and suitable, the teacher writes it on the blackboard in plain large script. each child reads it through and points out the words. let there be a lively drill upon the sentence till the picture of each word becomes clear and distinct. during the first lesson, two or three short sentences can be handled with success. as new words are learned, they should be mixed up on the board with those learned before, and a quick and varied drill on the words in sentences or in columns be employed to establish the forms in memory.[ ] speed, variety in device, and watchfulness to keep all busy and attentive are necessary to secure good results. [ ] first-class primary teachers claim that drills are unnecessary if the teacher is skilful in recombining the old words in new sentences. after a few lessons one or two of the simpler words may be taken for phonetic analysis. the simple sounds are associated with the letters that represent them. these familiar letters are later met and identified in new words, and, as soon as a number of sounds with their symbols have been learned, new words can be constructed and pronounced from these known elements. the self-activity of the children in recognizing the elementary sounds, already met, in new words as fast as they come up, is one of the chief merits of this early study of words. they thus early learn the power of self-help and of confident reliance upon themselves in acquiring and using knowledge. the chief difficulty is in telling which sound to use, as a letter often has several sounds (as _a_, _e_, _s_, _c_, etc.). but the children are capable of testing the known sounds of a letter upon a new word, and in most cases, of deciding which to use. the thoughtless habit of pronouncing every new word for a child, without effort on his part, checks and spoils his interest and self-activity. it does not seem necessary to use an extensive system of diacritical markings to guide him in these efforts to discriminate sounds. it is better to use the marks as little as possible and learn to interpret words as they usually appear in print. experience has shown decisively that a lively and vigorous self-activity is manifested by such early efforts in learning to read. it is one of the most encouraging signs in education to see little children in their first efforts to master the formal art of reading, showing this spirited self-reliant energy. in the same way, they recognize old words in sentences and new or changed combinations of old forms, and begin to read new sentences which combine old words in new relations. in short, the sentence, word, and phonic methods are all used in fitting alternation, while originality and variety of device are necessary in the best exercise of teaching power. the processes of learning to read by such board-script work are partly analytic and partly synthetic. children begin with sentences, analyze them into words, and some of the words into their simple sounds. but when these sounds begin to grow familiar, they are identified again in other words, thus combining them into new forms. in the same way, words once learned by the analytic study of sentences are recognized again in new sentences, and thus interpreted in new relations. the short sentences, derived from a familiar story, when ranged together supply a brief, simple outline of the story. if now this series of sentences be written on the board or printed on slips of paper, the whole story may be reviewed by the class from day to day till the word and sentence forms are well mastered. for making these printed slips, some teachers use a small printing-press, or a typewriter. eventually several stories may be collected and sewed together, so as to form a little reading-book which is the result of the constructive work of teacher and pupils. the reading lessons just described are entirely separate from the oral treatment and reproduction of the stories; yet the thought and interest awakened in the oral work are helpful in keeping up a lively effort in the reading class. the thought material in a good story is itself a mental stimulus, and produces a wakefulness which is favorable to imprinting the forms as well as the content of thought. expression, also, that is, natural and vivid rendering of the thought, is always aimed at in reading, and springs spontaneously from interesting thought studies. many teachers use the materials furnished by oral lessons in natural science as a similar introduction to reading in first grade. the science lessons furnish good thought matter for simple sentences, and there is good reason why, in learning to read, children should use sentences drawn both from literature and from natural science. reading in the second grade the oral lessons in good stories, and the later board-use of these materials in learning the elements of formal reading, are an excellent preparation for the fuller and more extended reading of similar matter in the second and third grades. when the oral work of the first grade has thus kindled the fancy of a child upon these charming pictures, and the later board-work has acquainted him with letter and word symbols which express such thought, the reading of the same and other stories of like character (a year later) will follow as an easy and natural sequence. as a preliminary to all good reading exercises, there should be rich and fruitful thought adapted to the age of children. the realm of classic folk-lore contains abundant thought material peculiar in its fitness to awaken the interest and fancy of children in the first two grades. to bring these choice stories close to the hearts of children should be the aim of much of the work in both these grades. such an aim, skilfully carried out, not only conduces to the joy of children in first grade, but infuses the reading lessons of second grade with thought and culture of the best quality. interest and vigor of thought are certain to help right expression and reading. reading, like every other study, should be based upon realities. when there is real thought and feeling in the children, a correct expression of them is more easily secured than by formal demands or by intimidation. the stories to be read in second or third grade may be fuller and longer than the brief outline sentences used for board-work in the first grade. besides, these tales, being classic and of permanent value, do not lose their charm by repetition. method by oral reading, we mean the giving of the thought obtained from a printed page to others through the medium of the voice. there is first the training of the eye in taking in a number of words at a glance--a mechanical process; then the interpretation of these groups of words--a mental process; next the making known of the ideas thus obtained to others, by means of the voice--also a mechanical process. the children need special help in each step. we are apt to overdo one at the expense of the others. . eye-training is the foundation of all good reading. various devices are resorted to in obtaining it. we will suggest a few, not new at all, but useful. (_a_) a strip of cardboard, on which is a clause or sentence, is held before the class, for a moment only, and then removed. the length of the task is increased as the eye becomes trained to this kind of work. (_b_) the children open their books at a signal from the teacher, glance through a line, or part of one, indicated by the teacher, close book at once and give the line. (_c_) the teacher places on the board clauses or sentences bearing on the lesson, and covers with a map. the map is rolled up to show one of these, which is almost immediately erased. the children are then asked to give it. the map is then rolled up higher, exposing another, which also is speedily erased--and so on until all have been given to the children and erased. . the child needs not only to be able to recognize groups of words, but he must be able to get thought from them. the following are some devices to that end:-- (_a_) suggestive pictures can be made use of to advantage all through the primary grades. if the child reads part of the story in the picture, and finds it interesting, he will want to read from the printed page the part not given in the picture. (_b_) where there is no picture--or even where there is one--an aim may be useful to arouse interest in the thought, _i.e._ a thoughtful question may be put by the teacher, which the children can answer only by reading the story; _e.g._ in the supplementary reader, "easy steps for little feet," is found the story of "the pin and needle." there is no picture. the teacher says, as the class are seated: "now we have a story about a big quarrel between a pin and a needle over the question, 'which one is the better fellow?' of what could the needle boast? of what the pin? let us see which won." (_c_) let all the pupils look through one or more paragraphs, reading silently, to get the thought, before any one is called upon to read aloud. if a child comes to a word that he does not know, during the silent reading, the teacher helps him to get it--from the context if possible--if not, by the sounds of the letters which compose it. as each child finishes the task assigned, he raises his eyes from the book, showing by this act that he is ready to tell what he has just read. the thought may be given by the child in his own language to assure the teacher that he has it. usually, however, in the lower grades, this is unnecessary, the language of the book being nearly as simple as his own. the advantage of having all the pupils kept busy, instead of one alone who might be called upon to read the paragraph, is evident. every child reads silently all of the lesson. time would not permit that this be done orally, were it advisable to do so. when the child gets up to read, he is not likely to stumble, for he has both the thought and the expression for it, at the start. while aiming to have the children comprehend the thought, the teacher should not forget, on the other hand, that this is the reading hour, and not the time for much oral instruction and reproduction. there are other recitations in which the child is trained to free oral expression of thought, as in science and literature. such offhand oral expression of his own ideas is not the primary aim of the reading lesson. its purpose is to lend life to the recitation. . steps and deal with preparation for the reading. up to this time, no oral reading has been done. now we are ready to begin. children will generally express the thought with the proper emphasis if they not only see its meaning but also feel it. suppose the children are interested in the thought of the piece, they still fail, sometimes, to give the proper emphasis. how can the teacher, by questioning, get them to realize the more important part of the thought? (_a_) the teacher has gone deeper into the meaning than have the children. her questions should be such as to make real to the children the more emphatic part of the thought; _e.g._ in the riverside primer we have, "poor bun, good dog, did you think i meant to hit you?" john reads, "do you think i meant to _hit_ you?" the teacher says, "i will be bun, john. what is it that you do not want bun to think?" ("that i _meant_ to hit him.") "but you did mean to hit something. what was it you did not mean to hit? tell bun." ("i did not _mean_ to hit _you_.") now ask him if he thought that you did. ("did you think i _meant_ to hit _you_?") (_b_) when the story is in the form of a dialogue, the children may personate the characters in the story. thus, getting into the real spirit of the piece, their emphasis will naturally fall where it properly belongs. (_c_) sometimes the teacher will find it necessary to show the child how to read a passage properly, by reading it himself. it is seldom best to do this--certainly not if the correct expression can be reached through questioning. many a teacher makes a practice of giving the proper emphasis to the child, he copying it from her voice. frequently, children taught in this way can read one piece after another in their readers with excellent expression, but, when questioned, show that their minds are a blank as to the meaning of what they are reading. in working for expression, a great many teachers waste the time and energy of the pupils by indefinite directions. the emphasis is not correctly placed, so the teacher says, "i do not like that; try it again, may." now, may has no idea in what particular she has failed, so she gives it again, very likely as she gave it before, or she may put the emphasis on some other word, hoping by so doing to please the teacher. "why, no, may, you surely can do better than that," says the teacher. so may makes another fruitless attempt, when the teacher, disgusted, calls on another pupil to show her how to read. may has gained no clearer insight into the thought than she started out with, no power to grapple more successfully with a similar difficulty another time, and has lost, partly at least, her interest in the piece. she has been bothered and discouraged, and the class wearied. sometimes when the expression is otherwise good, the children pitch their voices too high or too low. natural tones must be insisted upon. a good aid to the children in this respect is the habitual example of quiet, clear tones in the teacher. another fault of otherwise good reading is a failure to enunciate distinctly. children are inclined to slight many sounds, especially at the end of the words, and the teacher is apt to think: "that doesn't make so very much difference, since they are only children. when they are older they will see that their pronunciation is babyish, and adopt a correct form." this is unsound reasoning. every time the child says _las_ for _last_ he is establishing more firmly a habit, to overcome which will give him much difficulty. in the pronunciation of words as well as in the reading of a sentence, much time is wasted through failure to point out the exact word, and the syllable in the word, in which the mistake has been made. the child cannot improve unless he knows in what particular there is room for improvement. children in primary grades should be supplied with a good variety of primers, readers, and simple story books. in the course of their work they should read through a number of first, second, and third readers. much of this reading should be simple and easy, so that they can move rapidly through a book, and gain confidence and satisfaction from it. in each grade there should be several sets of readers, which can be turned to as the occasion may demand. it is much better to read a new reader, involving in the main the same vocabulary, than to reread an old book. this use of several books in each grade adds to the interest and reduces to a minimum the mere drills, which are to be avoided as much as possible. summary . let children read under the impulse of strong and interesting thought. (_a_) the previous oral treatment of the stories now used as reading lessons will help this thought impulse. (_b_) an aim concretely stated, and touching an interesting thought in the lesson, will give impetus to the work. (_c_) let children pass judgment on the truth, worth, or beauty of what they read. (_d_) clear mental pictures of people, actions, places, etc., conduce to vigor of thought. to this end the teacher should use good pictures, make sketches, and give descriptions or explanations. children should also be allowed to sketch freely at the board. . children should be encouraged constantly to help themselves in interpreting new words and sentences in reading. (_a_) by looking through the new sentence and making it out, if possible, for themselves before any one reads it aloud. (_b_) by analyzing a new word into its sounds, and then combining them to get its pronunciation. (_c_) by interpreting a new word from its context, or by the first sound or syllable. (_d_) by using the new powers of the letters as fast as they are learned in interpreting new words. (_e_) by trying the different sounds of a letter to a new word to see which seems to fit best. (_f_) by recognizing familiar words in new sentences with a different context. (_g_) see that every child reads the sentences in the new lesson for himself. . there should be a gradual introduction to the elementary sounds (powers of the letters). the first words analyzed should be simple and phonetic in spelling, as _dog_, _hen_, _cat_, etc. new sounds of letters are taught as the children need them in studying out new words. very little attention needs to be given to learning the names of the letters. there need be little use of diacritical markings in early reading. . many of the new words will occur in connection with the picture at the head of the lesson. place these on the board as they come up. if the teacher will weave these words into her conversation, they will give the children little future trouble. . all the different phases of the phonic, word, and sentence method should be woven together by a skilful teacher. . the close attention of all the members of the class, so that each reads through the whole lesson, should be an ever-present aim of the teacher. . children should be trained to grasp several words at a glance:-- (_a_) by quick writing and erasure of words and sentences at the board. (_b_) by exposing for an instant sentences covered by a screen. (_c_) by the use of phrases or short sentences on cardboard. (_d_) by questions for group thought. these tests should increase in difficulty with growing skill. . spend but little time in the oral reproduction of stories. practice in good reading and interpretation is the main thing. . children, from the first, should be encouraged to articulate distinctly in oral reading. let the teacher begin at home. . let the teacher cultivate a pleasing tone of voice, not loud or harsh. this will help the children to the same. . vigorous and forcible expression is secured:-- (_a_) by having interesting stories. (_b_) by apt questions to bring out the emphatic thought. (_c_) by dramatizing the scenes of the story. (_d_) by occasional examples of lively reading by the teacher. (_e_) by definiteness in questioning. chapter viii list of books for primary grades in selecting reading books for primary grades the purpose is to find those which will give the readiest mastery of the printed forms of speech. for this purpose books need to be well graded and interesting. primary teachers have expended their utmost skill upon such simple, attractive, and interesting books for children. pictorial illustration has added to the clearness and beauty of the books, so that, with the rivalry of many large publishing houses, we now have a great variety of good primary books to select from. the earliest and simplest of these are the primers, which, followed by the first readers, give the most necessary drills upon the forms of easy words and sentences. great care has been taken to give an easy regular grading so as to let a child help himself as much as possible. but as soon as children, by blackboard exercises and by means of primers, have gained a mastery of the simpler words and the powers of the letters, the mother goose rhymes, the fables and fairy tales (already familiar to the children in oral work) are introduced into their reading books in the simplest possible forms. the use of interesting rhymes and stories in this early reading is the only means of giving it a lively content and of thus securing interest and concentration of thought. good primary teachers have been able in this way to relieve the reading lessons of their tedium, and, what is equally good, have strengthened the interest of the children in the best literature of childhood. besides the choicest fables and fairy tales, many of the simpler nature myths and even such longer poems and stories as "hiawatha," "robinson crusoe," and "ulysses" have been used with happy results as reading books in the first three years. there are also certain collections of children's poems, such as stevenson's "child's garden of verses," field's "love-songs of childhood," sherman's "little folk lyrics," "old ballads in prose," "the listening child," and others, which may suggest the beauty and variety of choice literary materials which are now easily within the reach of teachers and children in primary schools. there is no longer any doubt that little folk in primary classes may reap the full benefit of a close acquaintance with these favorite songs, stories, and poems, and that in the highest educative sense the effect is admirable. in the following list the books for each grade are arranged into three groups:-- _first._ a series of choicest books and those extensively used and well adapted for the grade as regular reading exercises. _second._ a supplementary list of similar quality and excellence, but somewhat more difficult. they may, in some cases, serve as substitutes for those given in the first group. _third._ a collection of books for teachers, partly similar in character to those mentioned in the two previous groups and partly of a much wider, professional range in literature, history, and nature. some books of child-study, psychology, and pedagogy are also included. the problems of the primary teacher are no longer limited to the small drills and exercises in spelling and reading, but comprehend many of the most interesting and far-reaching questions of education. it is well, therefore, for the primary teacher to become acquainted not only with the great works of literature but with the best professional books in education. list of choice reading matter for the grades first grade--first series cyr's primer. ginn & co. cyr's first reader. ginn & co. riverside primer and first reader. houghton, mifflin, & co. nature stories for young readers (plants), d. c. heath & co. hiawatha primer. houghton, mifflin, & co. stepping stones to literature, book i. silver, burdett, & co. child life primer. the macmillan co. taylor's first reader. werner school book co. arnold's primer. silver, burdett, & co. the thought reader. ginn & co. sunbonnet babies. rand, mcnally, & co. nature's by-ways. the morse co. graded classics, no. i. b. f. johnson pub. co. graded literature, no. i. maynard, merrill, & co. first reader (hodskins). ginn & co. baldwin's primer (kirk). american book co. first grade--second series six nursery classics (o'shea). d. c. heath & co. verse and prose for beginners in reading. houghton, mifflin, & co. stories for children. american book co. rhymes and fables. university publishing co. the finch first reader. ginn & co. baldwin's first reader. american book co. heart of oak, no. . d. c. heath & co. choice literature, book i (williams). butler, sheldon, & co. child life, first book. the macmillan co. fables and rhymes for beginners. ginn & co. first grade--for teachers--third series a book of nursery rhymes (mother goose). d. c. heath & co. the adventures of a brownie. harper & bros. kindergarten stories and morning talks (wiltse). ginn & co. talks for kindergarten and primary schools (wiltse). ginn & co. hall's how to teach reading. d. c. heath & co. place of the story in early education (wiltse). ginn & co. methods of teaching reading (branson). d. c. heath & co. lowell's books and libraries. houghton, mifflin, & co. ruskin's books and reading. in sesame and lilies. lectures to kindergartners (peabody). d. c. heath & co. mother goose (denslow). mcclure, phillips, & co. boston collection of kindergarten stories. j. l. hammett & co. the study of children and their school training (warner). the macmillan co. the story hour (kate douglas wiggin). houghton, mifflin, & co. trumpet and drum (eugene field). scribner's sons. a child's garden of verses (robert louis stevenson). scribner's sons. treetops and meadows. the public school publishing co., bloomington, ill. songs from the nest (emily huntington miller). kindergarten literature co. the moral instruction of children (felix adler). d. appleton & co. children's rights (kate douglas wiggin). houghton, mifflin, & co. the story of patsy (wiggin). houghton, mifflin, & co. first book of birds (miller). houghton, mifflin, & co. second grade--first series nature stories for young readers (continued). d. c. heath & co. easy steps for little feet. american book co. classic stories for little ones. public school publishing co., bloomington, ill. verse and prose for beginners. houghton, mifflin, & co. cyr's second reader. ginn & co. stepping stones to literature, book ii. pets and companions (stickney). ginn & co. child life, second book. the macmillan co. nature myths and stories for little ones (cooke). a. flanagan & co. the preceding books are for second and third grades. around the world, book i. the morse co. graded classics, no. ii. b. f. johnson publishing co. graded literature, no. ii. maynard, merrill, & co. a book of nursery rhymes (welsh). d. c. heath & co. book of nature myths (holbrook). houghton, mifflin, & co. second grade--second series heart of oak, no. ii. d. c. heath & co. german fairy tales (grimm). maynard, merrill, & co. fables and folk lore (scudder). houghton, mifflin, & co. nature stories for young readers--animals. d. c. heath & co. danish fairy tales (andersen). maynard, merrill, & co. baldwin's second reader. american book co. choice literature, book ii (williams). butler, sheldon, & co. fairy tale and fable (thompson). the morse co. fairy stories and fables (baldwin). american book co. plant babies and their cradles. educational publishing co. Ã�sop's fables. educational publishing co. story reader. american book co. open sesame, part i. ginn & co. the above are excellent selections for second, third, and fourth grades. songs and stories. university publishing co. love songs of childhood (field). scribner's sons. second grade--for teachers poetry for children (eliot). houghton, mifflin, & co. the story hour (wiggin). houghton, mifflin, & co. story of hiawatha. houghton, mifflin, & co. round the year in myth and song (holbrook). american book co. old ballads in prose (tappan). houghton, mifflin, & co. st. nicholas christmas book. century co., new york. asgard stories (foster-cummings). silver, burdett, & co. fairy tale plays and how to act them (mrs. bell). longmans, green, & co. little folk lyrics (sherman). houghton, mifflin, & co. readings in folk lore (skinner). american book co. nature pictures by american poets. the macmillan co. squirrels and other fur-bearers (burroughs). houghton, mifflin, & co. seven great american poets (hart). silver, burdett, & co. early training of children (malleson). d. c. heath & co. comenius's the school of infancy. d. c. heath & co. krüsi's life of pestalozzi. american book co. development of the child (oppenheim). the macmillan co. the study of child nature (elizabeth harrison). published by chicago kindergarten college. listening child (thatcher). the macmillan co. history and literature (rice). a. flanagan & co. third grade--first series robinson crusoe. public school publishing co. golden book of choice reading. american book co. Ã�sop's fables (stickney). ginn & co. andersen's fairy tales, part i. ginn & co. seven little sisters. ginn & co. heart of oak, no. ii. d. c. heath & co. fairy stories and fables. american book co. child life, third reader. the macmillan co. grimm's german household tales. houghton, mifflin, & co. fables (published as leaflets). c. m. parker, taylorville, ill. around the world, book ii. the morse co. graded classics, no. iii. b. f. johnson publishing co. graded literature, no. iii. maynard, merrill, & co. grimm's fairy tales. educational publishing co. grimm's fairy tales (wiltse). ginn & co. nature myths and stories for little ones (cooke). a. flanagan & co. fairy tales in verse and prose (rolfe). american book co. third grade--second series arabian nights. houghton, mifflin. & co. hans andersen's stories. houghton, mifflin, & co. fairy tales in verse and prose (rolfe). harper & bros. stories mother nature told her children. ginn & co. andersen's fairy tales, part ii. ginn & co. open sesame, part i. ginn & co. judd's classic myths. grimm's fairy tales, part ii. ginn & co. the eugene field book (burt). scribner's sons. a child's garden of verses. rand, mcnally, & co. little lame prince (craik). maynard, merrill, & co. prose and verse for children (pyle). american book co. book of tales. american book co. third grade--for teachers stories from the history of rome. the macmillan co. friends and helpers (eddy). ginn & co. little lucy's wonderful globe (yonge). the macmillan co. robinson crusoe. houghton, mifflin, & co. arabian nights, aladdin, etc. maynard, merrill, & co. bird's christmas carol (wiggin). houghton, mifflin, & co. uncle remus (harris). d. appleton & co. fifty famous stories retold (baldwin). american book co. four great americans (baldwin). werner school book co. stories of great americans for little americans (eggleston). american book co. the story of lincoln (cavens). public school publishing co. among the farmyard people (pierson). e. p. dutton & co. the howells story book (burt). scribner's sons. the jungle book (kipling). century co., new york. old norse stories (bradish). american book co. little brothers of the air (miller). houghton, mifflin, & co. hans brinker (mary mapes dodge). century co. black beauty. university publishing co. tanglewood tales (hawthorne). houghton, mifflin, & co. wonder book (hawthorne). houghton, mifflin, & co. the story of the wagner opera. scribner's sons. thoughts on education (locke). the macmillan co. the education of man (froebel). d. appleton & co. childhood in literature and art (scudder). houghton, mifflin, & co. waymarks for teachers (arnold). silver, burdett, & co. hailman's history of pedagogy. american book co. series of select readers for the grades child life. the macmillan co. around the world. the morse co. baldwin's readers. american book co. graded classics. b. f. johnson publishing co. graded literature. maynard, merrill, & co. stepping stones to literature. silver, burdett, & co. lights to literature. rand, mcnally, & co. the heart of oak series. d. c. heath & co. choice literature. butler, sheldon, & co. methods in elementary education a series of educational books in two groups covering the general principles of method and its special applications to the common school by charles a. mcmurry, ph.d. _northern illinois state normal school, dekalb, illinois_ with f. m. mcmurry as joint author for method of recitation i. books of general method in education the three books in this group deal with the fundamental, comprehensive principles of education for the school as a whole, and include both instruction and management. ii. books of special method in common school studies. each school study is treated in a separate book, and the selection and arrangement of material, and the method of instruction appropriate to that study throughout its course, are fully discussed. illustrative lessons and extensive lists of books of special value as helps to teachers and schools are included. general method in education the elements of general method based on the ideas of herbart by charles a. mcmurry new edition, revised and enlarged. cloth. mo. pp. cents net, postage cents this volume discusses fully the controlling principles of our progressive modern education, such as the aim of education; the materials and sources of moral training; the relative value of studies in the school course; the nature and value of interest as a vital element in instruction; the correlation of studies; inductive and deductive processes as fundamental to all thinking; apperception, its close and constant application to the process of learning; the will, its training and function and its close relation to other forms of mental action. the book closes with an account of herbart and his disciples in germany, and a summary of their pronounced ideas and influence upon education. the method of the recitation new edition, revised and enlarged by charles a. mcmurry and frank m. mcmurry cloth. mo. pp. cents net, postage cents this book, as a whole, is designed to simplify, organize, and illustrate the chief principles of class-room method in elementary schools. a few important fundamental principles are carefully worked out as a basis. the essential steps, in the acquisition of knowledge in all studies, are worked out and applied to different branches. the developing method of instruction so much used in the oral treatment of lessons is worked out, and the method of careful and suitable questioning discussed. two chapters are given, consisting of illustrative lessons selected from the different studies and worked out in full, as examples of a right method. in these examples, and also in the discussions, the application of the principles of apperception, interest, induction, and deduction to class-room work are shown. the peculiar application of these various principles to different studies is carefully discussed. school and class management--in preparation special method in common school studies special method in the reading of complete english classics in the common schools by charles a. mcmurry cloth. mo. pp. cents, postage cents this discusses in a comprehensive way the regular reading lessons, the choice of stories, poems, and longer masterpieces, adapted to the needs of the various grades from the fourth to the eighth school year inclusive; the value for school use of the best literature, including complete masterpieces, both long and short; method in reading; and principles of class-room work. a descriptive list of more than four hundred books forms the last chapter. the list has been carefully made, and is designed to assist teachers and superintendents in selecting suitable reading material for the successive grades. special method in primary reading and oral work in story telling by charles a. mcmurry cloth. mo. cents net, postage cents the relation of oral story work to early exercises in primary reading is explained at length. a full discussion of oral methods in primary grades and a detailed account of primary exercises in reading are given. the use of games for incidental reading is also fully discussed and illustrated. special method in history by charles a. mcmurry new edition in preparation this book contains a course of study in history with a full discussion of methods of treating topics. the value, selection, and arrangement of historical materials for each grade are discussed, and illustrative lessons given. the relation of history to geography, literature, and other studies is treated, and lists of books suitable for each year are supplied. special method in geography by charles a. mcmurry new edition in preparation the entire course of study is laid out after a careful selection of topics. methods of class instruction are fully discussed, and illustrations are given of geographical topics treated in detail. the close relation of geography to other studies is shown, and the best lists of books supplied. special method in natural science by charles a. mcmurry new edition in preparation the history of science teaching in elementary schools is given. the basis for selecting the topics for a course of study, and the method of class instruction suitable to object study, experimentation, etc., are fully discussed. the book contains, also, a carefully selected list of the best books for the use of teachers and pupils. a course of study for the eight grades of the common school in preparation the macmillan company fifth avenue, new york boston chicago boylston st. - wabash ave. atlanta san francisco empire build'g - sansome st. produced from scanned images of public domain material from the google print project.) letters from a father to his son entering college by charles franklin thwing president of western reserve university new york the platt & peck co. copyright, by the platt & peck co. prefatory note. parts of the letters that make up this little book were read to my own college boys at the opening of a college year. they represent somewhat, but of course only a bit, of what i believe many a father would like to say to his own son,--as i to mine,--when he is entering the most important year of his college life--the freshman. those who first heard them,--even though obliged to hear,--seemed to suffer them gladly. they are, therefore, brought together, and sent out to fathers and to sons, and with a peculiar feeling of sympathy for both the parent and the boy at one of the crises of the life of each. c. f. t. western reserve university, cleveland. contents page i thought ii the essential gentleman iii health as an asset iv appreciation v scholarship vi the intellectual life vii the use of time viii culture ix college morals x weakness of character xi the genesis of success xii religion letters from a father to his son entering college my dear boy:--i am glad you want to go to college. possibly i might send you even if you did not want to go, yet i doubt it. one may send a boy through college and the boy is sent through. none of the college is sent through him. but if you go, i am sure a good deal of the college will somehow get lodged in you. you will find a thousand and one things in college which are worth while. i wish you could have each of them, but you can not. you have to use the elective system, even in the freshman year. the trouble is not that so few boys do not seem to know how to distinguish the good from the bad, but that so many boys do not know the better from the good and the best from the better. i have known thousands of college boys, and they do not seem to distinguish, or, if they do, they do not seem to be able to apply the gospel of difference. you won't think me imposing on you--will you?--if before entering college i tell you of some things which seem to me to be most worthy of your having and being on the day you get your a. b. the first thing i wish to say to you is that i want you to come out of the college a thinker. but how to make yourself a thinker is both hard to do and hard to tell. yet, the one great way of making yourself a thinker is to think. thinking is a practical art. it cannot be taught. it is learned by doing. yet there are some subjects in the course which seem to me to be better fitted than others to teach you this art. i've been trying to find out what are some of the marks or characteristics of these subjects. they are, i believe, subjects which require concentration of thought; subjects which have clearness in their elements, yet which are comprehensive, which are complex, which are consecutive in their arrangements of parts, each part being closely, rigorously related to every other, which represent continuity, of which the different elements or parts may be prolonged unto far reaching consequences. concentration in the thinker, clearness, comprehensiveness, complexedness, consecutiveness, continuity--there are the six big c's, which are marks of the subjects which tend to create the thinker. to attempt to apply each of these marks to many different subjects of the curriculum represents a long and unduly stupefying labor. apply them for yourself. different subjects have different worths for the students, but there are certain recognized values attached to each coin of the intellectual realm. mathematics and pure physics eminently represent the larger part of these six elements which i have named. mathematics demands concentration. mathematics is, in a sense, the mind giving itself to certain abstract truths. what is x^ but a form of the mind? mathematics demands clearness of thinking and of statement. without clearness mathematics is naught. it also represents comprehensiveness. the large field of its truth is pressed into its greater relationships. mathematical truth is complex. part is involved with part. it is consecutive. part follows part in necessary order. it is also continuous. it represents a graded progress. it is, however, to be remembered that the reasoning of mathematics is unlike most reasoning which we usually employ. mathematical reasoning is necessary. most reasoning is not necessary. that two _plus_ two equal four is a truth about which people do not differ usually. but reasoning in economics, such as the protective tariff; reasoning in philosophy, such as the presence or absence of innate ideas; reasoning in history; is not absolute. i have even wondered how far cambridge, standing for mathematics and the physical sciences, has helped to make men great. oxford is said to be the mother of great movements, and it is. here the wesleyan movement, and the tractarian movement and the social movement, as seen in toynbee hall, had their origins. cambridge is called the mother of great men. is there any relation of cause and effect, at cambridge, between its emphasis upon mathematics and the sciences and the great men whom she has helped to make? logic is the subject of a course which embodies the six marks i have laid down. it demands these great elements in almost the same ways in which mathematics demands them. logic, in a sense, might be called applied or incarnate mathematics. the man who wishes to be a thinker should be and is the master of logic. language, too, represents almost one half of the course of the modern college, and it represented more than one half of the course of the older college. what merits has the study of language for making the thinker? the study of languages makes no special demand on the quality of concentration, but the study does demand and creates comprehensiveness and clearness. the study represents a complex process and requires analysis. the time-spirit has worked and still works in languages unto diverse and manifold forms. languages are developed with a singular union of orderliness and disorderliness. the parts of a language are in some cases closely related. the greek verb is the most highly developed linguistic product. it is built up with the delicacy and poise of a child's house of blocks, yet with the orderliness of a greek temple. each letter represents a different meaning. augment, prefix, ending has its own significance. i asked a former chinese minister to this country what taught him to think. his succinct answer was "greek." in creating the thinker, the historical and social sciences have chief value in their complex relationships. select any period of history pregnant with great results. for instance, select the efflorescence of the greek people after the persian wars. what were the causes of this vast advance? take, for instance, the political and social condition prevalent for thirty years in america before the civil war. what were the causes of this war? or, take economic affairs--what are the reasons for and against a protective tariff? what are the limitations of such a tariff? such conditions require comprehensive knowledge of complex matters. from such mastery the thinker results,--the thinker of consideration and considerateness. he can perceive a series of facts and the relation of each to each. the law of values of these different subjects in making the thinker, is that the subjects which demand hard thinking are most creative. easy subjects, or hard subjects easily worked out, have little place in the making of a thinker. one must think hard to become a hard thinker. subjects and methods which are hard create the inevitable result. subjects which demand thinking only, however, sometimes are rather barren in result. one likes a certain content or concreteness in the thinking process. abstract thinking sometimes seems like a balloon which has no connection with the earth. if a balloon is to be guided, it must be held down to _terra firma_. the ricksha men in japan can run better if the carriage has a load. the bullet must have weight to go. a subject, therefore, which has content may quicken thinking and stimulate thoughtfulness. the thinker is not made, however, only by the subjects he studies. in this condition the teacher has his place, and especially the methods of teaching and the inspiring qualities of teaching which he represents, have value. the dead lift of the discipline of the mind is liable to be a deadening process. every subject needs a man to vitalize it for the ordinary student. every graduate recalls teachers of such strength. he holds them in unfading gratitude and often in deathless affection. ii the second thing i want to say to you is that i want you to be a gentleman. how absurd it is for me to write that to you. of course, you are, and, of course, you will be one. in the creation of the gentleman as well as of the thinker, the personal equation counts. in fact, it counts for more in the making of the gentleman. for in this making truth is less important than the personality. in the gentleman intellectual altruism and moral appreciativeness are large elements. one has to see and to understand the personal condition with which he deals. if he is dull, his conduct is as apt to give unhappiness as pleasure. in order to open the eyes of the heart, in order to create an intellectual conscientiousness, the study of great literatures must be assigned a high place. constant and complex needs to be such study. literature represents humanity. the humanities are humanity. literature is style and style is the man. the gentleman as a product represents the homeopathic principle. the gentleman makes the gentleman. certain colleges are distinguished by the type of gentleman which they create. it will usually be found, on observation or analysis, that colleges which are distinguished for the gracious conduct of their teachers toward their students are distinguished by the gracious bearing of their graduates. as a gentleman you will be a friend and will have friends. in this relation of friendship in its earlier stages there is no part of life in which it is more important for you to exercise the virtue and grace of reserve. be in no haste to make friends. friendships are growths, not manufactures. these growths, too, are like the elm and the oak, not like the willow. at this point lies all i want to say to you about joining a fraternity. if the men you want to be your intimate friends are members and ask you to join, accept. if the men you do not wish to be your intimate friends wish you to go with them, decline. do not join for the sake of a blind pool membership. such a membership is really a sort of social insincerity, a lie. iii in the assessment of academic values, give a high place to sound health. the worth is so great that very slight may be the paragraph i write you. in the "egoist," george meredith says, "health, wealth and beauty are three considerations to be sought for in a woman, who is to become the wife of sir willoughby." wealth and beauty are quite as much out of ordinary results of the education of the american college as health should be among those results. one may be sick, and through sickness become a saint; one may be sick and through sickness become a sinner. but one cannot be sick and at the same time be as good a worker as he would be if he were not sick. good workers the world needs, and, therefore, men of first-rate health the world needs. if one is to be a great worker, one must have great health. it is not for me to write as would a physician, but i may be allowed to say that in caring for health, one should not become self-conscious. let me further suggest:-- first--that you sleep eight hours. second--exercise at least a half an hour each day in the gymnasium. third--eat much of simple food; but not too much! fourth--don't worry. fifth--play ball much (base, foot, basket); but not too much! in a word, be a good animal. one of my old teachers once said to me after i was engaged in my work:-- "i am sorry to see you looking so well." "why?" "because every man has to break down three times in life. i broke down three times; professor hitchcock broke down three times; every man must break down three times, and the earlier the breaks come, the better." there is no need of any man's breaking down, if he will observe with fair respect the laws of sleep, exercise and food. iv i also desire that you should be a man of scholarly sympathy and appreciation. i can hardly hope you will be a scholar. yet you may. the scholar seldom emerges. if one out of each thousand students, entering the american college this year, should prove to be a scholar, the proportion is as large as one can hope for. for up to one in a thousand is as big a proportion as the world is prepared to accept. yet it is to be hoped that you and that most men should have appreciation and sympathy with scholarship. you should know what scholarship means: in work as toilsomeness, in method as wisdom, in atmosphere as thoroughness and patience, in result as an addition to the stock of human knowledge. if you be a laborer in one field, you should not seek, and i know you will not seek, to discount the existence of other fields, or despise the laborers in those fields. if you become an engineer, you will not condemn the classicist as useless. if you are a grecian, you will not despise the mechanical engineer as crass and coarse. one finds that the best men of any one field or calling are more inclined to recognize the eminence of the claims of other fields or callings. smallness spells provincialism, and provincialism spells smallness. i have heard one of the greatest teachers of chemistry say that if he were to make a boy a professor of chemistry, he would, among other things, first teach him greek. v the first principle of college life is the principle of doing one's duty. in your appreciation of scholarship, your first duty is to learn your lessons. i have known many college men who learned their lessons, who yet failed to get from the college all that they ought to get. but i have never known a man who failed to get his lessons, whatever else he may have got, to receive the full advantage of the course. the curriculum of every good college is the resultant of scores or of hundreds of years of reflection and of trial. it represents methods, content, purposes, which many teachers through many experiments of success and of failure have learned are the best forces for training mind and for forming character. but for the student to receive worthy advantage from these forces he is obliged to relate himself to them by hard intellectual attention and application. sir leslie stephen says that the cambridge teachers of his time were not given to enthusiasms, but preached common-sense, and common-sense said: "stick to your triposes, grind at your mill, and don't set the universe in order till you have taken your bachelor's degree." the duty of the american college student is no less evident. he is to stick to his triposes. his triposes are his lessons. among the greatest of all teachers was louis agassiz. a story has become classical as told by the distinguished naturalist, the late dr. samuel h. scudder, regarding the methods of the great teacher with his students. in brief the story is that mr. scudder on going to agassiz was told, "'take this fish and look at it. we call it a hæmulon. by and by i will ask you what you have seen.' ... in ten minutes i had seen all that could be seen in that fish.... half an hour passed, an hour, another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. i turned it over and around; looked it in the face--ghastly!--from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view--just as ghastly. i was in despair. at an early hour i concluded that lunch was necessary; so, with infinite relief, the fish was carefully replaced in the jar, and for an hour i was free. "on my return i learned that professor agassiz had been at the museum, but had gone, and would not return for several hours.... slowly i drew forth that hideous fish, and, with a feeling of desperation, again looked at it. i might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. my two hands, my two eyes, and the fish; it seemed a most limited field.... at last a happy thought struck me--i would draw the fish; and now with surprise i began to discover new features in the creature.... "he listened attentively to my brief rehearsal of the structure of parts whose names were still unknown to me.... when i had finished he waited, as if expecting more, and then, with an air of disappointment, 'you have not looked very carefully; why,' he continued most earnestly, 'you haven't even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the animal itself. look again! look again!' and he left me to my misery. "i ventured to ask what i should do next. "'oh, look at your fish,' he said, and left me again to my own devices. in a little more than an hour he returned and heard my new catalogue. "'that is good, that is good,' he repeated: 'but that is not all; go on.' and so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else or use any artificial aid. 'look, look, look,' was his repeated injunction." doctor scudder says that this was the best entomological lesson he ever had, and a lesson of which the influence extended to the details of every subsequent study. it is the duty of the college student to look at his fish, to thumb his lexicon, to read his textbook, to study his notes, to think, and think hard, upon the truth therein presented. of all the students in the world the scotch represent this simple duty the best. the men at edinburgh, glasgow, st. andrews and aberdeen toil mightily. the duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at least two elements of college life. one is self-indulgence and the other is athletics. self-indulgence is a general cause and constant. athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or less dominant. athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and human betterment. football, which is _par excellence_ the college game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man intellectual and the man ethical. but football is not a college purpose; it is a college means. it is a means for the promotion of scholarship, for the formation of manhood. when football or other forms of college sport are turned from being a method and a means into being ends in themselves the misfortune is lamentable. at a recent harvard commencement, professor shaler, than whom no man in harvard was more vitally in touch with all undergraduate interests, spoke of the harm wrought upon many students through their absorption in athletics. it cannot be denied for an instant that many men are hurt by giving undue attention to sports. of course many men are benefited, and, are benefited vastly, by athletics, but men who are harmed should at once be obliged to learn the lesson of learning their lessons. that is the chief lesson which they ought to learn. vi in the appreciation of scholarship is found the strain of intellectual humility. the scholar is more inclined to inquire than to affirm. he is more ready to ask "what do you think?" than to say "i know." he is remote from intellectual arrogance. humility means greatness. cockiness is a token of narrowness. the socratic spirit of modesty is as true a manner of wisdom as it is an effective method of increasing wisdom. the man who has an opinion on all things, has no right to an opinion on any one. this intellectual sympathy and appreciation should take on esthetic relations. you should be a lover of beauty as well as of wisdom. good books, good pictures, good music, good architecture, should be among your avocations. read a piece of good literature every day. see a good picture or a good copy of one every day. hear some good music every day. the chapel service may give it to you. and see a piece of good architecture every day. some of the college buildings can give it. alas! many do not. such visions and hearings will soak into your manhood. all this is only saying lead the life intellectual. you should not only be a thinker, you should be thoughtful. you should be a man of large thoughtfulness. you should be prepared to interpret life and all phenomena in terms of the intellect. many of our countrymen are intelligent. they know a great deal. they have gathered up information about many things. this information is desultory, unrelated. their minds are a brummagem drawer. here, by the way, lies the worthlessness of president eliot's list of books to the untrained mind. to the educated mind such books mean much; to the uneducated, little. yet, as a college man, you may know less than not a few uneducated people may know. i don't care. the life intellectual is more and most important. vii i also want you to go from the college a good combination of a good worker and a good loafer. to be able to loaf well is not a bad purpose of an education. the loafing that carries along with itself the freedom from selfishness, appreciation of others' conditions, and gentlemanliness, is worth commending. loafing that follows hard work and prepares for hard work is one of the best equipments of a man. loafing that has no object, loafing as a vocation, is to be despised. the late professor jebb wrote to his father once from cambridge, saying:-- "i _will_ read but not very hard; because i know better than you or any one can tell me, how much reading is good for the development of my own powers at the present time, and will conduce to my success next year and afterwards; and i will _not_ identify myself with what are called in cambridge 'the reading set,' _i. e._, men who read twelve hours a day and never do anything else; ( ) because i should lose ten per cent. of reputation (which at the university is no bubble but real living useful capital); ( ) because the reading set, with a few exceptions, are utterly uncongenial to me. my set is a set that _reads_, but does not only read; that accomplishes one great end of university life by mixing in cheerful and intellectual society, and learning the ways of the world which its members are so soon to enter; and which, without the pedantry and cant of the 'reading man,' turns out as good christians, better scholars, better men of the world, and better gentlemen, than those mere plodders with whom a man is inevitably associated if he identifies himself with the reading set." i rather like the loafing which young jebb indulged in, but i fear it is a type of the life which some college men do not follow. they are inclined to look upon the four college years as a respite between the labor of the preparatory school and the labor of business, or rather they may look upon the four college years as a life of professional leisure. i am glad you cannot, even if you wished to, and i know you do not wish to, think of college as either respite or leisure. whether the college is wise in allowing such loafing, it is not for me now to say, but i can trust you to be the proper kind of loafer as well as of worker. indeed, i want you to have good habits of working. in such habits the valuation of time is of special significance. for time is not an agent. it does nothing. as a power, time is absolutely worthless. as a condition, time is of infinite worth. mark pattison, the rector of lincoln college, said: "time seems infinite to the freshman in his first term." but let me add that to a senior in his last term time is a swiftly moving opportunity. the need of time becomes more and more urgent as the college years go. when jowett was fifty-nine years old, he wrote: "i cannot say _vixi_, for i feel as if i were only just beginning and had not half completed what i had intended. if i live twenty-five years more i will, _dei gratia_, accomplish a great work for oxford and for philosophy in england. activity, temperance, no enmities, self-denial, saving eyes, never overwork." on his seventieth birthday jowett made out what he called his scheme of life. it was this:-- eight years of work. year--politics, republic, dialogues of plato. years--moral philosophy. years--life of christ. year--sermons. years--greek philosophy; thales to socrates. i turn over the last pages of jowett's "life and letters," and i find a list of his works. is there a moral philosophy in the list? no. a life of christ? no. a treatise on greek philosophy? no. but i do find a volume of college sermons, published since his death, and also a new edition of his "plato." one of the most pathetic things in the volumes that cover his life is the constant reference to _agenda_--things he was to do. but the _agenda_ rapidly become _nugae_--impossibilities--and the reason was simply, as it ever is, the lack of time. to save time, take time in large pieces. do not cut time up into bits. adopt the principle of continuous work. the mind is like a locomotive. it requires time for getting under headway. under headway it makes its own steam. progress gives force as force makes progress. do not slow down as long as you run well and without undue waste. take advantage of momentum. prolonged thinking leads to profound thinking. steamers which have the longest routes seek deepest waters. let me also counsel you to do what must be done sometime as soon as possible. thus you avoid worry. you save yourself needless trouble and waste. you also have the satisfaction of having the thing done which is a very blessed satisfaction. i would have you spring to your work in the mood and the way in which j. c. shairp, in his poem on the "balliol scholars," spoke of temple:-- "with strength for labor, 'as the strength of ten' to ceaseless toil he girt him night and day: a native king and ruler among men, ploughman or premier, born to bear true sway: small or great duty never known to shirk, he bounded joyously to sternest work-- lest buoyant others turn to sport and play." therefore, do not be a slave. go at your job with enthusiasm. to get enthusiasm in work, work. work creates enthusiasm for work in a healthy mind. the dyer's hand is not subdued to its materials; it is strengthened through materials for service. viii you will soon learn, my son, that college men are, as a rule, sound in body, sane in mind, in heart pure, in will vigorous, keen in conscience, and filled with noble aspirations. such men usually interpret life, both academic and general, in sanity and in justice. yet, despite these happy conditions, there does prevail a danger of college men making certain misconceptions of college life. a misconception which is more or less common among students you will soon have occasion to see relates to the failure to distinguish, on the one side, knowledge from efficiency, and on the other, knowledge from cultivation. in the former time, the worth of knowledge, as knowledge, was emphasized in the college. the man who knew was regarded as the great man. to make each student an encyclopedia of information was a not uncommon aim. it is certainly well to know. scholarship is seldom in peril of receiving too high encomium. yet, knowledge is not power. sometimes knowledge prevents the creation, or retention, or use, of power. the intellect may be so clogged with knowledge that the will becomes sluggish or irregular in its action. knowledge, however, is always to be so gathered that it shall create power and minister to efficiency. the accumulation of information is to be made with such orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness, that these qualities shall represent the chief and lasting result of knowledge. facts may be forgotten, but the orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness in which these facts have been gathered are more important than the facts themselves, and these qualities should, and may, become a permanent intellectual treasure. these qualities are elements of efficiency. they are forces for making attainments, for securing results. the student, however, while he is securing the facts which lead to these qualities is in peril of forgetting the primary value of the qualities themselves. on the other side, the student is also in peril of failing to distinguish between knowledge as knowledge, and knowledge which leads to personal cultivation. what is cultivation, and who is the cultivated person? some would say that the cultivated person is the person of beautiful manners, of the best knowledge of life's best things, who is at home in any society or association. such a definition is not to be spurned. for, is it not said that "manners make the man"? manners make the man! that is, do manners create the man? that is, do manners give reputation to the man? that is, do manners express the character of the man? which of the three interpretations is sound? or does each interpretation intimate a side of the polygon? i know of a man put in nomination for a place in an historic college. the trustees were in doubt respecting his bearing in certain social relations. as a test, i may say, he was asked to be a guest at an afternoon tea. rather silly way, in some respects, wasn't it? i doubt if he to this day is aware of the trial to which he was subjected. the way one accepts or declines a note of invitation, the way one uses his voice, the way one enters or retires from a room may, or may not, be little in itself, but the simple act is evidence of conditions. for is not manner the comparative of man? i would not say it is the superlative. others would affirm that the cultivated person is the person who appreciates the best which life offers. appreciation is intellectual, emotional, volitional. it is discrimination _plus_ sympathy. it contains a dash of admiration. it recognizes and adopts the best in every achievement, in the arts of literature, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture. the cultivated person seeks out the least unworthy in the unworthy, and the most worthy in that which is at all worthy. the person of cultivation knows, compares, relates, judges. he has standards and he applies them to things, measures methods. he is able to discriminate and to feel the difference between the parthenon and the madeleine, between a poem of tennyson and one of longfellow. his moral nature is fine, as his intellectual is honest. he is filled with reverence for truth, duty, righteousness. he is humble, for he knows how great is truth, how imperative, duty. he is modest, for he respects others. he is patient with others and with himself, for he knows how unattainable is the right. he can be silent when in doubt. he can speak alone when truth is unpopular. he is willing to lose his voice in the "choir invisible" when it chants either the miserere or the gloria in excelsis. he is a man of proportion, of reality, sincerity, honesty, justice, temperance--intellectual and ethical. the college man is in peril of forgetting the worth of cultivation. knowledge should lead to cultivation, but, as in the case of securing efficiency, the mind of the student may be so fixed upon processes as to fail to recognize the importance of the result as manifest in the cultivation of his whole being. in the case of both efficiency and cultivation, the student is to remember there is no substitute. intellectual power cannot be counterfeited. any attempt, also, to secure a sham cultivation is foreordained to failure. ix the student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. as a student, he may crib in examination without compunction. as a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. in such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students. let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. this condition does create a distinct difference between academic and human ethics. let the distinction be given full credit. yet, be it at once and firmly said, a lie is a lie, and thieving is thieving. the blameworthiness may differ in different cases, but there is always blameworthiness. be it also said the public does not usually recognize the distinction which the student himself seeks to make. the public becomes justly impatient with, and more or less indignant over, the horseplay, or immoralities which students work outside, and sometimes inside, college walls. the student is to remember that before he was a student he was a man, that after he has ceased to be a student he is to be a man, and while he is a student he is also to be a man, and also before, after, and always he is to be a gentleman. such irregular conditions belong, of course, to youth as well as to the student. the irreverence which characterizes all american life is prone to become insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third power. the able man and true--student or not a student--of course presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. the academic experience proves to be a discipline, though sometimes not a happy one, and the discipline helps towards the achievement of a large and rich character. x another misconception made by the student is also common. it is a misconception attaching to any weakness of his character. the student is inclined to believe that there may be weaknesses which are not structural. he may think that there may be some weakness in one part of his whole being which shall not affect his whole being. he may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labor without making his moral nature thin, or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. he may think that he can play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes. he may imagine that he is composed of several distinct potencies and that he can lessen the force of any one of them without depreciating the value of the others. lamentable mistake, and one often irretrievable. for man is a unit. weakness in one part becomes weakness in every part. in the case of the body, the illness of one organ damages all organs. if the intellect be dull, or narrow in its vision, or false in its logic, the heart refuses to be quickened and the conscience is disturbed. if the heart be frigid, the intellect, in turn, declines to do its task with alertness or vigor. if conscience be outraged, the intellect loses force and the heart becomes clothed with shame. man is one. strength in one part is strength in, and for, every part, and weakness in one part results in weakness in, and for, every part. for avoiding these three misconceptions, the simple will of the college man is of primary worth. if he will to distinguish knowledge from efficiency, and knowledge from cultivation, if he will to know that the distinction between academic morals and human morals is not so deep as some believe, and if he will to believe in the unity of character, the student has the primary help for securing a sound idea and a right practice. xi i write to you, my boy, out of the experience and observation of thirty years in which i have followed as best i could the careers of graduates of many of our colleges. the other afternoon i set down the names of some of these graduates of the two colleges which i know best. among them were men who, fifteen or thirty years after their graduation, are doing first-rate work. they are lawyers, editors, physicians, judges, clergymen, teachers, merchants, manufacturers, architects and writers. as i have looked at the list with a mind somewhat inquisitive i have asked myself what are the qualities or conditions which have contributed to the winning of the great results which these men have won. the answers which i have given myself are manifold. for it is always difficult in personal matters to differentiate and to determine causes. in mechanical concerns it is not difficult. but in the calculation of causes which constitute the value of a person as a working force one often finds oneself baffled. the result frequently seems either more or less than an equivalent of the co-operating forces. the personal factor, the personal equation counts immensely. these values we cannot measure in scales or figure out by the four processes of arithmetic. be it said that the causes of the success of these men do not lie in their conditions. no happy combination of circumstances, no windfall of chance, gave them what they have achieved. if those who graduated in the eighth decade had graduated in the ninth, or if those who graduated in the ninth had graduated in the earlier time, it probably would have made no difference. neither does the name, with possibly a single exception, nor wealth prove to be a special aid. nor have friends boosted or pushed them. friends may have opened doors for them; but friends have not urged them either to see or to embrace opportunities. these men seem to me to have for their primary and comprehensive characteristic a large sanity. they have the broad vision and the long look. they possess usually a kind of sobriety which may almost be called washingtonian. the insane man reasons correctly from false premises. the fool has no premises from which to reason. these men are neither insane nor foolish. they have suppositions, presuppositions, which are true. they also follow logical principles which are sound. they are in every way well-ordered. they keep their brains where their brains ought to be--inside their skulls. they keep their hearts where their hearts ought to be--inside their chests. they keep their appetites where their appetites ought to be. too many men keep their brains inside their chests: the emotions absorb the intellect. too many men put their hearts inside their skull: the emotions are dried up in the clear air of thought. too many put both brains and heart where the appetites are: both judgment and action are swallowed up in the animal. but these men are whole, wholesome, healthy, healthful. they seem to represent those qualities which, james bryce says, archbishop tait embodied: "he had not merely moderation, but what, though often confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady balance of mind. he was carried about by no winds of doctrine. he seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be regarded. he knew how to be dignified without assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness." they are remote from crankiness, eccentricity. they may or may not have fads; but they are not faddists. not one of them is a genius in either the good or the evil side of conspicuous native power. they see and weigh evidence. they are a happy union of wit and wisdom, of jest and precept, of work and play, of companionship and solitude, of thinking and resting, of receptivity and creativeness, of the ideal and the practical, of individualism and of sympathy. they are living in the day, but they are not living for the day. they embody the doctrine of the golden mean. each of these men has also in his career usually more than filled the place he occupied. he has overflowed into the next higher place. the overflow has raised him into the higher lock. the career has been an ascending spiral. each higher curve has sprung out of the preceding and lower. from the attorneyship of the county to service as attorney of the state, and to a place on the supreme bench of the united states:--from a pastorate in a small maine city to a pastorate suburban, and from the pastorate suburban to a pastorate on fifth avenue:--from a professorship in an humble place to a professorship in largest relations:--from the building of cottages to the building of great libraries and museums. this is the order of progression. i will not say that any of these men did the best he could do at every step of the way. some did; some did not, probably. but what is to the point, each did better than the place demanded. he more than earned his wages, his salary, his pay. he had a surplus; he was a creditor. his employers owed him more than they paid him. they found the best way of paying him and keeping him was to advance him. such is the natural evolution of skill and power. the only legitimate method of advancement is to make advancement necessary, inevitable, by the simple law of achievement. the simple law of achievement depends upon the law of increasing force, which is the law that personal force grows through the use of personal force. hiram stevens maxim in the sketch of his life tells of his working in flynt's carriage factory at abbot, maine, when a boy of about fifteen. from flynt's at abbot he went to dexter, a large town, where he became a foreman. he presently went to a threshing machine factory in northern new york; thence to fitchburg, mass., where he obtained a place in the engineering works of his uncle. in this factory he says he could do more work than any other man save one. thence he went to a place in boston; from boston to new york, where he received high pay as a draughtsman. while he was working in new york he conceived the idea of making a gun which would load and fire itself by the energy derived from the burning powder. from work in a little place in maine, maxim, by doing each work the best possible, has made himself a larger power. furthermore, these men represent goodfellowship. they embody friendliness. the late robert lowe (viscount sherbrooke) was at one time esteemed to be the equal of john bright and of gladstone in oratory, and their superior in intellect. he died in unknown and unlamented. he failed by reason of a lack of friendliness. lowe was once an examiner at oxford. into an oral examination which he was conducting a friend came and asked how he was getting on. "excellently," replied lowe, "five men flunked already and the sixth is shaky." ability without goodfellowship is usually ineffective; good ability _plus_ good fellowship makes for great results. in this atmosphere of friendliness, these men are practising the golden rule. they are not advertising the fact. they do much in this atmosphere of friendliness for large bodies of people. they follow the sentiment which pasteur expressed near the close of his great career: "say to yourselves first: 'what have i done for my instruction?' and, as you gradually advance, 'what have i done for my country?' until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and to the good of humanity. but whether our efforts are or are not favored by life, let us be able to say when we come near the great goal: 'i have done what i could.'" they have done much for the individual, for the local neighborhood. they have given themselves in numberless services, boards, committees, commissions--works which count much in time and strength. these services constitute no small share of the worth of a commonwealth, of a community. to one relation of these men i wish especially to refer. this is their relation to wealth. some of these men are business men. wealth is one of the normal results of business. some of these men are professional men. wealth is not the normal result of professional service. but the seeking of wealth has not in the life and endeavor of these men played a conspicuous part. if wealth is the primary purpose, they keep the purpose to themselves. they do not talk much about it. but most of them do not hold wealth as a primary purpose. rather their primary and atmospheric aim is to serve the community through their business. the same purpose moves them which also moves the lawyer, the minister, the doctor. life, not living, is their principle. to one further element i must refer. it comprehends, perhaps, much that i have been trying to say to you, my son. these men kept, and are keeping themselves to their work. they do not waste themselves. they are economical of time and strength. the late provost pepper of the university of pennsylvania said (in a manuscript not formally published): "many can do with less than eight or even seven hours of sleep while working hard, provided they recognize the increased risk; that while running their engine they take more scrupulous care with every part of the machinery. machine must be perfect, fuel ditto; everything must be sacrificed to the one point of keeping the machinery running thus: subjection of carnal, emotional excesses; certainty that no weak spots exist; diet, especially too much eating, too fast eating; stimulants, tobacco, open-air exercise; cool-headed, almost callous, critical analysis of oneself, one's sensations and effect of work on the system; clear knowledge of danger lines; result, avoidance of transgressing, and immediate summons at right time." these men are men of self-restraint. they are like rivers having dams, keeping their waters back in order that the water may be used more effectively. they are free from entangling alliances. they are not men of one thing; they are often men of two, three, a dozen things. but one thing is primary, the others secondary. they may have avocations; but they have only one vocation. "this one thing i do." i have already quoted from pasteur. of him it is said by his biographer: "in the evening, after dinner, he usually perambulated the hall and corridor of his rooms at the École normale, cogitating over various details of his work. at ten o'clock he went to bed, and at eight the next morning, whether he had had a good night or a bad one, he resumed his work in the laboratory." his wife wrote to their children: "your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and in one word, continues the life i began with him this day thirty-five years ago." learn from the frenchman, my boy! keeping themselves at their one work these men embody a sense of duty. i find they have a conscience. their conscience is not worn outside, but inside, their bosom. they make no show of doing what they ought. they simply do what they are called upon to do--and that is all there is to it. it was said of a first scholar in an historic college that he was never caught working. these same men may, or may not be caught working, but they do work, and their work is a normal and moral part of their being. but your face, my son, is rather toward your own future than toward the past of other men. but your own future is as nothing save as it touches other men. therefore, do have an enthusiasm for man as man. enthusiasm for humanity has its basis in love for man as man, in a belief in the indefinite progress of man and in a determination to promote that progress. in a posthumous romance of hawthorne the heroine points out to her lover the service which they will give to mankind in successive endless generations. in one age, poverty shall be wiped out; in another, passion and hatred and jealousy shall cease; in a third, beauty shall take the place of ugliness, happiness of pain, and generosity of niggardliness. in reality, not in romance, every student is to feel a passion for human service. these toiling and tired brothers and sisters are to be loved, not with a mere emotional affection, but with a mighty will. one is to adopt the principle of gladstone and not of the marquis of salisbury in relation to humanity. the student also is to believe that the human brotherhood is capable of indefinite progress. the law of evolution makes the belief in human perfectibility easy; the principles of religion make the belief glorious. slow is the progress. one generation turns the jack-screw of uplifting one thread; but it is a thread. humanity does rise. linked with this love for man and the assurance of his progress the college man is to determine himself to advance this progress. whatever his condition, whatever his ability, he is to do his part. as is said in that noble epitaph to wordsworth, placed in the little church at grasmere, each is to be "a minister of high and sacred truth." i want you to come out from the college with a determination to do something worth while. it is rather singular how political ambitions have ceased among graduates. some say all ambition has ceased among college men. i do not believe it. the softer times may not nurse the sturdier virtues; but men are still men. the words which stevenson wanted put on his tombstone: "he clung to his paddle," and the words of george eliot: "don't take opium," and the words of carlyle: "burn your own smoke," are still characteristic of college men. men are still moved by the great things, and by such inspiration they are inspired great things to do. xii i am not, i think, going too far if i refer to one very personal matter, my son. i mean your relation to the supreme being. that being may be conceived under many forms, as love, as omnipotent force, as omniscient knowledge, as perfect beauty, as absolute right. the college man interprets the supreme being under at least one of these forms; and he may be able to interpret him under all of these forms. to this being he should relate himself. let the college man learn, and learn all; but he should not neglect to learn of the divine being. the college man should love, and love every object as it is worthy of loving; but he should not decline to love the supreme being. for he is supreme. the college man is to follow the wisest leadership, to obey the highest principles, to give himself to the contemplation of the sublimest; but his following, his obedience, his self-surrender are to bring him to and keep him with the being supreme. religion thus broadly interpreted makes a keen and mighty appeal to the college man. let the college man be religious; let not the college man have a religion. let religion be a fundamental element of his character, and not a quality of his changing self. his religion, like that of every other man, should first be human, not scholastic; first essential and natural, not arbitrary. be religious. it sounds almost goodish, but i know you do not think it such. be religious. relate yourself to something. relate yourself to some what. or relate yourself to some who: beyond whatever your eye sees or your hand touches. i do not care how you put it. if i were a buddhist, i would say, worship buddha. be what the great image at kamakura represents. if i were a mohammedan, i would say, follow the teachings of the koran, and pray. i am, and you are, a christian. therefore i say: love your god. follow the example of the christ. be one of that company who accept his guidance and are seeking to do his will in the bettering of the world. good-bye, dear boy, i have written too long, but it has done me good to write. if it does you a quarter of the good to read, i shall be grateful. good-bye. your father. https://archive.org/details/huxleyandeducat osbogoog huxley and education address at the opening of the college year columbia university september , by henry fairfield osborn ll.d., hon. d.sc, camb. da costa professor of zoology new york charles scribner's sons copyright, by henry fairfield osborn the de vinne press huxley and education "the stars come nightly to the sky; the tidal wave comes to the sea; nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high can keep my own away from me." --burroughs. the most sanguine day of the college year is the opening one: the student has not yet faced the impossible task annually presented of embracing the modern world of knowledge; his errors and failures of earlier years are forgotten; he faces the coming months full of new hope. how would my old master, huxley, address you if he were to find you in this felicitous frame of mind, sharpening your wits and your pencils for the contest which will begin to-morrow morning in every hall and laboratory of this great university? may i speak for him as i heard him during the winter of - from his lecture desk and as he kindly in conversation gave me of his stores of wisdom and experience? may i add from his truly brilliant essays entitled "science and education," delivered between and ? may i contribute also from my own thirty-seven years of life as a student and teacher, beginning in and reaching a turning point in when columbia enrolled me among its research professors? it was huxley's life, his example, the tone of his writings, rather than his actual precepts which most influenced me, for in he was so intensely absorbed in public work and administration, as well as in research and teaching, that little opportunity remained for laboratory conferences with his students. how i happened to go to him was as follows: unlucky--as they appeared to me at the time, but lucky as i look back upon them--were my own early flounderings and blunderings in seeking the true method of education. huxley has observed of his "voyage of the rattlesnake" that it is a good thing to get down to the bare bones of existence. the same is true of self-education. as compared with the hosts of to-day, few men in knew how to guide the graduate youth; the johns hopkins was still nascent; the creative force of louis agassiz had spent itself in producing the first school of naturalists, including the genius, william james. one learnt one's errors through falling into pitfalls. with two companions i was guided by a sort of blind instinct to feel that the most important thing in life was to make a discovery of some kind. on consulting one of our most forceful and genial professors his advice was negative and discouraging: "young men," he said, "go on with your studies for ten or twelve years until you have covered the whole subject; you will then be ready for research of your own." there appeared to be something wrong about this, although we did not know exactly what. we disregarded the advice, left the laboratory of this professor, and at the end of the year did succeed in writing a paper which subsequently attracted the attention of huxley and was the indirect means of an introduction to darwin. it was a lame product, but it was ours, and in looking back upon it, one feels with touchstone in his comment upon audrey: "a poor virgin, sir, an ill favored thing, sir, but mine own." i shall present in this brief address only one idea, namely, the lesson of huxley's life and the result of my own experience is that _productive thinking_ is the chief _means_ as well as the chief _end_ of education, and that the natural evolution of education will be to develop this kind of thinking earlier and earlier in the life of the student. one of the most marvelous of the manifold laws of evolution is what is called '_acceleration_.' by this law the beginning of an important organ like the eye of the chick, for example, is thrust forward into a very early stage of embryonic development. this is, first, because the eye is a very complex organ and needs a long time for development, and second because the fully formed eye of most animals is needed immediately at birth. i predict that the analogy in the evolution of education will be very close. productive thinking may be compared to the eye; it is needed by the student the moment he graduates, or is hatched, so to speak; it is now developed only in the graduate schools. it is such an integral and essential part of education that the spirit of it is destined to be 'accelerated,' or thrust forward into the opening and preparatory years. if the lines of one's life were to be cast afresh, if by some metempsychosis one were moulded into what is known as a "great educator," a man of conventions and platforms, and were suddenly to become more or less responsible for , minds and souls, productive thinking, or the "centrifugal method" of teaching, would not be postponed to graduation or thereafter, but would begin with the freshman, yes, among these humble men of low estate! it may be _apropos_ to recall a story told of president mccosh of princeton, a man who inspired all his students to production and enlivened them with a constant flow of humor. on one occasion he invited his predecessor, ex-president mclean, to offer prayers in the college chapel. dr. mclean's prayer was at once all embracing and reminiscent; it descended from the foreign powers to the heads of the united states government, to the state of new jersey, through the trustees, the faculty, and, in a perfectly logical manner, finally reached the entering class. this naturally raised a great disturbance among the sophomores, who were evidently jealous of the divine blessing. the disturbance brought the prayer to an abrupt close, and dr. mccosh was heard to remark: "i should think that dr. mclean would have more sense than to pray for the freshmen." as regards the raw material into which 'productive thinking' is to be instilled, i am an optimist. i do not belong to the 'despair school' of educators, and have no sympathy with the army of editorial writers and prigs who are depreciating the american student. the chief trouble lies not with our youth, nor with our schools, but with our adults. how can springs rise higher than their sources? on the whole, you students are very much above the average american. you are not driven to these doors; certainly in these days of youthful freedom and choice you came of your own free will. the very fact of your coming raises you above the general level, and while you are here you will be living in a world of ideas,--the only kind of a world at all worth living in. you are temporarily cut off more or less from the world of dollars and cents, shillings and pence. here huxley helps you in extolling the sheer sense of joy in thinking truer and straighter than others, a kind of superiority which does not mean conceit, the possession of something which is denied the man in the street. you redound with original impulses and creative energy, which must find expression somehow or somewhere; if not under the prevailing incurrent, or 'centripetal system' of academic instruction, it must let itself out in extra-academic activities, in your sports, your societies, your committees, your organizations, your dramatics, all good things and having the highest educational value in so far as they represent your output, your outflow, your centrifugal force. you are, in fact, in a contest with your intellectual environment outside of these walls. morally, according to ferrero, politically, according to bryce, and economically, according to carnegie, you are in the midst of a 'triumphant democracy.' but in the world of ideas such as sways italy, germany, england, and in the highest degree france, you are in the midst of a 'triumphant mediocrity.' paris is a city where _ideas_ are at a premium and money values count for very little in public estimation. the whole public waits breathless upon the production of 'chanticleer.' that walhalla of french ambition, 'la gloire,' may be reached by men of ideas, but not by men of the marts. is it conceivable that the police of new york should assemble to fight a mob gathered to break up the opera of a certain composer? is it conceivable that you students should crowd into this theatre to prevent a speaker being heard, as those of the sorbonne did some years ago in the case of brunetière? if you should, no one in this city would understand you, and the authorities would be called on promptly to interfere. a fair measure of the culture of your environment is the depth to which your morning paper prostitutes itself for the dollar, its shades of yellowness, its frivolity or its unscrupulousness, or both. i sometimes think it would be better not to read the newspapers at all, even when they are conscientious, because of their lack of a sense of proportion, in the news columns at least, of the really important things in american life. our most serious evening mentor of student manners and morals gives six columns to a football game and six lines to a great intercollegiate debate. such is the difference between precept and practice. american laurels are for the giant captain of industry; when his life is threatened or taken away acres of beautiful forest are cut down to procure the paper pulp necessary to set forth his achievements, while our greatest astronomer and mathematician passes away and perhaps the pulp of a single tree will suffice for the brief, inconspicuous paragraphs which record his illness and death. your british cousin is in a far more favorable atmosphere, beginning with his morning paper and ending with the conversation of his seniors over the evening cigar. as a cambridge man, having spent two years in london and the university, i would not describe the life so much as serious as _worth while_. there are humor and the pleasures of life in abundance, but what is done, is done thoroughly well. contrast the comments of the british and american press on such a light subject as international polo; the former alone are well worth reading, written by experts and adding something to our knowledge of the game. in the more novel subject of aviation we look in vain in our press for any solid information about construction. or take the practical subject of politics; the british student finds every great speech delivered in every part of the empire published in full in his morning paper; as an elector he gets his evidence at first hand instead of through the medium of the editor. i believe the greatest fault of the american student lies in the over-development of one of his greatest virtues, namely, his collectivism. his strong _esprit de corps_ patterns and moulds him too far. the rewards are for the 'lock-step' type of man who conforms to the prevailing ideals of his college. he must parade, he must cheer, to order. individualism is at a discount; it debars a man from the social rewards of college life. in my last address to columbia students on the life of darwin,[ ] i asked what would be thought of that peculiar, ungainly, beetle collector if he were to enter one of our colleges to-day? he would be lampooned and laughed out of the exercise of his preferences and predispositions. the mother of a very talented young honor man recently confessed to me that she never spoke of her son's rank because she found it was considered "queer." this is not what young america generates, but what it borrows or reflects from the environment of its elders. thus the young american is not lifted up by the example of his seniors, he has to lift it up. if he is a student and has serious ambitions he represents the young salt of his nation, and the college brotherhood in general is a light shining in the darkness. thus stumbling, groping, often misled by his natural leaders, he does somehow or other, through sheer force, acquire an education, and is just as surely coming to the front in the leadership of the american nation as the oxford or cambridge man is leading the british nation. our student body is as fine as can be, it represents the best blood and the best impulses of the country; but there may be something wrong, some loss, some delay, some misdirection of educational energy. bad as the british university system may be, and it has been vastly improved by the influence of huxley, it is more effective than ours because more centrifugal. english lads are taught to compose, even to speak in latin and greek. the greek play is an anomaly here, it is an annual affair at cambridge. there are not one but many active and successful debating clubs in cambridge. the faults with our educational design are to be discovered through study of the lives of great men and through one's own hard and stony experience. the best text-books for the nurture of the mind are these very lives, and they are not found in the lists of the pedagogues. consult your froebel, if you will, but follow the actual steps to parnassus of the men whose political, literary, scientific, or professional career you expect to follow. if you would be a missionary, take the lives of patterson and livingstone; if an engineer, 'the lives of engineers;' if a physician, study that of pasteur, which i consider by far the noblest scientific life of the nineteenth century; if you would be a man of science, study the recently published lives and letters of darwin, spencer, kelvin, and of our prototype huxley. here you may discover the secret of greatness, which is, first, to be born great, unfortunately a difficult and often impossible task; second, to possess the _instinct of self-education_. you will find that every one of these masters while more or less influenced by their tutors and governors was led far more by a sort of internal, instinctive feeling that they must do certain things and learn certain things. they may fight the battle royal with parents, teachers, and professors, they may be as rebellious as ducklings amidst broods of chickens and give as much concern to the mother fowls, but without exception from a very early age they do their own thinking and revolt against having it done for them, and they seek their own mode of learning. the boy kelvin is taken to germany by his father to study the mathematics of kelland; he slips down into the cellar to the french of fourier, and at the age of fifteen publishes his first paper to demonstrate that fourier is right and kelland is wrong. pasteur's first research in crystallography is so brilliant that his professor urges him to devote himself to this branch of science, but pasteur insists upon continuing for five years longer his general studies in chemistry and physics. this is the true empirical, or laboratory method of getting at the trouble, if trouble there be in the american _modus operandi_; but a generation of our great educators have gone into the question as if no experiments had ever been made. in the last thirty years one has seen rise up a series of 'healers,' trying to locate the supposed weakness in the american student: one finds it in the classic tongues and substitutes the modern; one in the required system and substitutes the elective; one in the lack of contact between teacher and student and brings in preceptors, under whom the patient shows a slight improvement. now the kind of diagnosis which comes from examining such a life as that of huxley shows that the real trouble lies in the prolongation to mature years of what may be styled the 'centripetal system,' namely, that afferent, or inflowing mediæval and oriental kind of instruction in which the student is rarely if ever forced to do his own thinking. you will perceive by this that i am altogether on your side, an insurgent in education, altogether against most of my profession, altogether in sympathy with the over-fed student, and altogether against the prevailing system of overfeeding, which stuffs, crams, pours in, spoon-feeds, and as a sort of deathbed repentance institutes creative work after graduation. how do you yourself stand on this question? is your idea of a good student that of a good 'receptacle'? do you regard your instructors as useful grain hoppers whose duty it is to gather kernels of wisdom from all sources and direct them into your receptive minds? are you content to be a sort of psychic _sacculina_, a vegetative animal, your mind a vast sack with two systems, one for the incurrent, the other for the outcurrent of predigested ideas? if so, all your mental organs of combat and locomotion will atrophy. do you put your faith in reading, or in book knowledge? if so, you should know that not a five foot shelf of books, not even the ardent reading of a fifty foot shelf aided by prodigious memory will give you that enviable thing called culture, because the yardstick of this precious quality is not what you take in but what you give out, and this from the subtle chemistry of your brain must have passed through a mental metabolism of your own so that you have lent something to it. to be a man of culture you need not be a man of creative power, because such men are few, they are born not made; but you must be a man of some degree of centrifugal force, of individuality, of critical opinion, who must make over what is read into conversation and into life. yes, one little idea of your own well expressed has a greater cultural value than one hundred ideas you absorb; one page that you produce, finely written, new to science or to letters and really worth reading, outweighs for your own purposes the five foot shelf. on graduation, _presto_, all changes, then of necessity must your life be independent and centrifugal; and just in so far as it has these powers will it be successful; just in so far as it is merely imitative will it be a failure. there is no revolution in the contrary, or outflowing design. like all else in the world of thought it is, in the germ at least, as old as the greeks and its illustrious pioneer was socrates ( - b. c.), who led the approach to truth not by laying down the law himself but by means of answers required of his students. the efferent outflowing principle, moreover, is in the program of the british mathematician, perry and many other reformers to-day. against the centripetal theory of acquiring culture huxley revolted with all his might. his daily training in the centrifugal school was in the genesis of opinion; and he incessantly practiced the precept that forming one's own opinion is infinitely better than borrowing one. our sophisticated age discourages originality of view because of the plenitude of a ready-made supply of editorials, of reviews, of reviews of reviews, of critiques, comments, translations and cribs. study political speeches, not editorials about them; read original debates, speeches, and reports. if you purpose to be a naturalist get as soon as you can at the objects themselves; if you would be an artist, go to your models; if a writer, on the same principle take your authors at first hand, and, after you have wrestled with the texts, and reached the full length of your own fathom line, then take the fathom line of the critic and reviewer. do not trust to mental peptones. carry the independent, inquisitive, skeptical and even rebellious spirit of the graduate school well down into undergraduate life, and even into school life. if you are a student force yourself to think independently; if a teacher compel your youth to express their own minds. in listening to a lecture weigh the evidence as presented, cultivate a polite skepticism, not affected but genuine, keep a running fire of interrogation marks in your mind, and you will finally develop a mind of your own. do not climb that mountain of learning in the hope that when you reach the summit you will be able to think for yourself; think for yourself while you are climbing. in studying the lives of your great men you will find certain of them were veritable storehouses of facts, but darwin, the greatest of them all in the last century, depended largely upon his inveterate and voluminous powers of note-taking. thus you may pray for the daily bread of real mental growth, for the future paradise is a state of mind and not a state of memory. the line of thought is the line of greatest resistance; the line of memory is the line of least resistance; in itself it is purely imitative, like the gold or silver electroplating process which lends a superficial coating of brilliancy or polish to what may be a shallow mind. the case is deliberately overstated to give it emphasis. true, the accumulated knowledge of what has been thought and said, serves as the gravity law which will keep you from flying off at a tangent. but no warning signals are needed, there is not the least danger that constructive thinking will drive you away from learning; it will much more surely drive you to it, with a deeply intensified reverence for your intellectual forebears; in fact, the eldest offspring of centrifugal education is that keen and fresh appetite for knowledge which springs only from trying to add your own mite to it. how your maxwell, herz, röntgen, curie, with their world-invigorating discoveries among the laws of radiant matter, begin to soar in your estimation when you yourself wrest one single new fact from the reluctant world of atoms! how your modern poets, maeterlinck and rostand, take on the air of inspiration when you would add a line of prose verse to what they are delving for in this mysterious human faculty of ours. regard voltaire at the age of ten in 'louis-le-grand,' the eton of france, already producing bad verses, but with a passionate voracity for poetry and the drama. regard the youthful huxley returning from his voyage of the 'rattlesnake' and laying out for himself a ten years' course in search of pure information. this route of your own to opinions, ideas, and the discovery of new facts or principles brings you back again to huxley as the man who always had something of his own to say and labored to say it in such a way as to force people to listen to him. his wondrous style did not come easily to him; he himself told me it cost him years of effort, and i consider his advice about style far wiser than that of herbert spencer. why forego pleasures, turn your back on the world, the flesh, and the devil, and devote your life to erudition, observation, and the pen if you remain unimpressive, if you cannot get an audience, if no one cares to read what you write? this moral is one of the first that huxley has impressed upon you, namely, _write to be read_; if necessary "stoop to conquer," employ all your arts and wiles to get an audience in science, in literature, in the arts, in politics. get an audience you must, otherwise you will be a cipher and not a force. pursuant of the constructive design, the measure of the teacher's success is the degree in which ideas come not from him but from his pupils. a brilliant address may produce a temporary emotion of admiration, a dry lecture may produce a permanent productive impulse in the hearers. one may compare some who are popularly known as gifted teachers to expert swimmers who sit on the bank and talk inspiringly on analyses of strokes; the centrifugal teacher takes the pupils into the water with him, he may even pretend to drown and call for a rescue. in football parlance the coach must get into the scrimmage with the team. this was the lesson taught me by the great embryologist francis balfour of cambridge, who was singularly noted for doing joint papers with his men. an experiment i have tried with marked success in order to cultivate centrifugal power and expression at the same time is to get out of the lecture chair and make my students in turn lecture to me. this is virtually the famous method of teaching law re-discovered by the educational genius of langdell; the students do all the lecturing and discoursing, the professor lolls quietly in his chair and makes his comments; the stimulus upon ambition and competition is fairly magical; there is in the classroom the real intellectual struggle for existence which one meets in the world of affairs. i would apply this very socratic principle in every branch of instruction, early and late, and thus obey the 'acceleration' law in education which i have spoken of above as bringing into earlier and earlier stages those powers which are to be actually of service in after life. there is then no mystery about education if we plan it along the actual lines of self-development followed by these great leaders and shape its deep under-current principles after our own needs and experience. look early at the desired goal and work toward it from the very beginning. the proof that the secret does not lie in subject, or language, but in preparation for the living productive principle is found in the fact that there have been _relatively_ educated men in every stage of history. the wall painters in the magdalenian caves were the producers and hence the educated men of their day. this goal of production was sought even earlier by the leaders of eolithic men , years ago and is equally magnetic for the men of dirigible balloons and aeroplanes of our day. it is, to follow in mind-culture the principle of addition and accretion characteristic of all living things, namely, to develop the highest degree of productive power, centrifugal force, original, creative, individual efficiency. through this the world advances; the neolithic man with his invention of polished implements succeeds the palæolithic, and the man of books and printing replaces the savage. the standards of a liberal mind are and always have been the same, namely, the sense of truth and beauty, both of which are again in conformity with nature. "beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." keats' _ode on a grecian urn_. the sources of our facts are and always have been the same, namely, the learning of what men before you have observed and recorded, and the advance only through the observation of new truth, that is, old to nature but new to man. the handling of this knowledge has always been the same, namely, through human reason. the giving forth of this knowledge and thus the furthering of ideas and customs has and always will be the same, namely, through expression, vocal, written, or manual, that is, in symbols and in design. it follows that the all round liberally educated man, from palæolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, _the man who follows his standards of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas_. this is the author's conception of a liberal education. one cannot too often quote the rugged insistence of carlyle: "produce! produce! were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in god's name! 'tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then." now note that whereas there are the above six powers, namely, truth and beauty, learning and observation, reason, and expression, which subserve the seventh, production or constructive thinking, and whereas the giving out of ideas is the object to be attained, only one power figures prominently in our modern system of college and school education, namely, the learning of facts and the memory thereof. it is no exaggeration to say that this makes up % of modern education. who are the meteors of school and college days? for the most part those with precocious or well trained memories. why do so many of these meteors flash out of existence at graduation? the answer is simple if you accept my conception of education. whereas it takes six powers to make a liberally educated man or woman, and seven to make a productive man or woman, only one power has been cultivated assiduously in the 'centripetal' education; whereas there are two great gateways of knowledge, learning and observation, only one has been continuously passed through; whereas there are two universal standards of truth and beauty, only truth has constantly been held up to you, and that in precept rather than in practice. for nothing is surer than this, that the sense of truth must come as a daily personal experience in the life of the student through testing values for himself, as it does in the life of the scientist, the artist, the physician, the engineer, the merchant. note that whereas you are powerless unless you can by the metabolism of logic make the sum of acquired and observed knowledge your own, that kind of work-a-day efficient logic has never been forced upon you and you are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of the _non sequitur_, the _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, the 'undistributed middle,' and all those innocent sins against truth which come through the illogical mind. "that man," says huxley, "has had a liberal education ... whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind." note that whereas you are a useless member of society unless you can give forth something of what you know and feel in writing, speaking, or design, your expressive powers may have been atrophied through insufficient use. in brief, you may have shunned individual opinion, observation, logic, expression, because they are each and every one on the lines of greatest resistance. and your teachers not only allowed you but actually encouraged and rewarded you for following the lines of least resistance in the accurate reproduction, in examination papers and marking systems, of their own ideas and those you found in books. may you, therefore, write down these seven words and read them over every morning: truth, beauty, learning, observation, reason, expression, production. in the wondrous old quilt work of inherited, or ancestral predispositions which make your being you may be gifted with all these seven powers in equal and well balanced degree; if you are so blessed you have a great career before you. if, as is more likely, you have in full measure only a part of each, or some in large measure, some in small, keep on the daily examination of your chart as giving you the canons of a liberal education and of a productive mind. remember that as regards the somewhat overworked word 'service' every addition in every conceivable department of human activity which is constructive of society is service; that the spirit of science is to transfer something of value from the unknown into the realm of the known, and is, therefore, identical with the spirit of literature; that the moral test of every advance is whether or not it is constructive, for whatever is constructive is moral. i would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career let it be nature. the ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; homer understood it well; solomon fathomed it; shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality. nature, studied since aristotle's time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebulæ to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing, and invigorating. of the two creative literary artists of our time, maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the 'blue bird,' with a delicious renewal of youth, while rostand turns to the barnyard. footnote: [ ] life and works of darwin. pop. sci. monthly, apr., , pp. - . (address delivered at columbia university on the one hundredth anniversary of darwin's birth, as the first of a series of nine lectures on "charles darwin and his influence on science.") the reform of education by giovanni gentile authorized translation by dino bigongiari with an introduction by benedetto croce new york harcourt, brace and company copyright, , by harcourt, brace and company, inc. printed in the u. s. a. by the quinn & boden company rahway, n.j. contents page introduction vii i. education and nationality ii. education and personality iii. the fundamental antinomy of education iv. realism and idealism in the concept of culture v. the spirituality of culture vi. the attributes of culture vii. the bias of realism viii. the unity of education ix. character and physical education x. the ideal of education xi. conclusion note shortly after trieste fell into italian hands, a series of lectures was arranged for the school teachers of the city, in order to welcome them to their new duties as citizens and officials of italy. the task of opening the series was assigned to giovanni gentile, professor of philosophy in the university of rome, who delivered the lectures which constitute the present volume. at my request signor gentile has rewritten the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local of the allusions which the nature of the original occasion called forth, and senatore croce has very generously contributed his illuminating introduction. the volume as it stands is more than a treatise on education: it is at one and the same time an introduction to the thought of one of the greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to the study of all philosophy. if the teachers of trieste were able to understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their chosen work, why should not the teachers of america? j. e. s. introduction the author of this book has been working in the same field with me for over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook--he a very young man, and i somewhat his senior--to shake italy out of the doze of naturalism and positivism back to idealistic philosophy; or, as it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed philosophy is always idealism. together we founded a review, the _critica_, and kept it going by our contributions; together we edited collections of classical authors; and together we engaged in many lively controversies. and it seems indeed as though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly re-establishing in italy the tradition of philosophical studies, thus welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive fury of the war and its afterclaps. by this i do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the result of a definite preconcerted plan. our work was the spontaneous consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spontaneous agreement of our minds. and therefore this common task, too, gradually becoming differentiated in accordance with the peculiarities of our temperaments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of division of labour between us. so that whereas i by preference have devoted my attention to the history of literature, gentile has dedicated himself more particularly to the history of philosophy and especially of italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a scholar too, and as a philologist. he may be said to have covered the entire field from the middle ages to the present time by his works on scholasticism in italy, on bruno, on telesio, on renaissance philosophy, on neapolitan philosophy from genovesi to galluppi, on rosmini, on gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from to . and though his comprehensive _history of italian philosophy_, published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections of it have been elaborated and cast in the various monographs which i have just mentioned. in addition to this, gentile has been devoting special attention to religious problems. he took a very important part in the inquiry into and criticism of "modernism," the hybrid nature of which he laid bare, exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty sincerity of the movement. his handling of this question was shown to be effective by the fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical _pascendi_, which brought upon modernism the condemnation of the church, availed themselves of the sharp edge of gentile's logical arguments, prompted by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness. finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will be remembered that gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of the positivistic school, and has also definitely criticised the educational theory of herbart. as far back as he published a monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's education can not but be the science of the spirit's development,--of its dialectics, of its necessity. indeed, we owe it to gentile that italian pedagogy has attained in the present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. in italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. and this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of gentile. his authority therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly. in addition to these differences arising from our division of labour, others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. identity is impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of life. there is never true identity except in the so-called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in poetry. and so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit--of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object--has developed a peculiar stress in gentile, for whom philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of thought; whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and concrete thinking--of historical thinking. so that while he strongly emphasises unity, i no less energetically insist on the distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the methodology of historical judgment. but of this enough, especially since the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary italian philosophy. i am convinced that the translation and popularisation of gentile's work will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the profound need of our times. for our age, eager and anxious for faith, is perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it may be secured--in pure thought. clear-sighted observers have perhaps not failed to notice that the world war, in addition to every thing else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. it is surely not the duty of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new faith of humanity--a new christianity or a new humanism, as we may wish to call it. such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from which ancient christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of romanticism. benedetto croce. rome, april, . chapter i education and nationality participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and studies of the universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real need of culture and of primary education. for the elementary school, by the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it alive. the training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. true it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the school which he directs and promotes. but nevertheless in consequence of those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas, rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. he looks upon this learning not as a developing organism, but as something definitely moulded and stereotyped. from this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice. since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. they are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its natural tendency to doubt. yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an examination of one's own sentiments, one's own character, and an inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously showers on us? the remedy against this natural tendency of the teacher's mind is to be found in the university, where in theory, and so far as is possible, in practice too, science is presented not as ready-made, definitely turned out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated manuals; but as inquiry, as research, as spiritual activity which does not rest satisfied with its accomplishments, but for ever feels that it does not yet know or does not know enough, aware of the difficulties which threaten every attained position, and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal them, and meet them squarely. this life, which is perpetual criticism, and unceasing progress in a learning which is never completed, which never aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful purpose of the university. here we must come, to restore freshness to our spiritual activities, which alone give value to knowledge, and wrest it from deadening crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. for this reason, it seems to me, special provision should be made in the university to satisfy the needs of school teachers. it is not a question of merely furnishing them with additional information which they might just as well get out of books. the university must act on their minds, shake them, start them going, instil in them salutary doubt by criticism, and develop a taste for true knowledge. the following chapters contain a series of university lectures, in accordance with these criteria, and delivered originally to the elementary teachers of trieste, now for the first time again an italian city. they constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity of culture, but to change its character. it is an attempt to introduce the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the halls of a university, to induce him to take part in the original investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our national learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our convictions as to what we should want italian science to be, the italian concepts of life and literature; as to what constitute the heirloom of our school, that sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers which makes us what we are, which gives us a name and endows us with a personality, by which we are enabled to look forward to a future of italy which is not solely economic and political, but moral and intellectual as well. and thus, because of the time, the place, the audience, and the subject, we are from the start brought face to face with a serious question,--a question which has often been debated, and which in the last few years, on account of the exasperation of national sentiment brought about by the world war, has become the object of passionate controversies. for if it has been frequently argued on one side that science is by nature and ought to be national, there has been no lack of warning from the other side as to the dangers of this position. for war, it was said, would, sooner or later, come to an end and be a thing of the past; whereas truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; it is error alone that is destined to pass and disappear. we were reminded of the fact that what is scientifically true and artistically beautiful is beautiful and true beyond no less than within the national frontier; and that only on this condition is it worthy of its name. this question therefore presents itself as a preliminary to our investigation, and it is for us to examine it. we shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will allow. we shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing science from culture, education from instruction. those who insist on these distinctions maintain that though a school is never national in virtue of the content of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be national in that it transforms science into culture, makes it over into an instrument with which to shape consciousness and conscience, and uses it as a tool for the making of men and for the training of citizens. thus we have as an integral part of science a form of action directed on the character and the will of the young generations that are being nurtured and raised in accordance with national traditions and in view of the ends which the state wants to attain. such distinctions however complicate but do not resolve the controversy. they entangle it with other questions which it were better to leave untouched at this juncture. for it might be said of questions what manzoni said of books: one at a time is enough--if it isn't too much. we shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin by clarifying the two concepts of nationality and of knowledge, in order to define the concept of the "nationality of knowledge." what, then, is the nation? a very intricate question, indeed, over which violent discussions are raging, and all the more passionately because the premises and conclusions of this controversy are never maintained in the peaceful seclusion of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at every moment in the very midst of the concrete interests of the men themselves who affirm or deny the value of nationalities. so that serious difficulties are encountered every time an attempt is made to determine the specific and concrete content of this concept of the nation, which is ever present, and yet ever elusive. proteus-like, it appears before us, but as we try to grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. it is visible to the immediate intuition of every national consciousness, but it slips from thought as we strive to fix its essence. is it common territory that constitutes nationality? or is it common language? or political life led in common? or the accumulation of memories, of traditions, and of customs by which a people looks back to _one_ past where it never fails to find itself? or is it perhaps the relationship which binds together all the individuals of a community into a strong and compact structure, assigning a mission and an apostolate to a people's faith? one or the other of these elements, or all of them together, have in turn been proposed and rejected with equally strong arguments. for in each case it may be true or it may be false that the given element constitutes the essence of a people's nationality, or of any historical association whatsoever. all these elements, whether separately or jointly, may have two different meanings, one of which makes them a mere accidental content of the national consciousness, whereas the other establishes them as necessary, essential, and unfailing constituents. for they may have a merely natural value, or they may have a moral and spiritual one. our birth-land, which nourished us in our infancy, and now shelters the bodies of our parents, the mountains and the shores that surround it and individualise it, these are natural entities. they are not man-made; we cannot claim them, nor can we fasten our existence to them. even our speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people. we may, abstractly, look upon our language as that one which was spoken before we were born, by our departed ancestors who somehow produced this spiritual patrimony of which we now have the use and enjoyment, very much in the same way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us by nature. in this same way a few, perhaps many, conceive of religion: they look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual personality. all these elements in so far as they are natural are evidently extraneous to our personality. we do dwell within this peninsula cloistered by the alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the mediterranean. but if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere across the atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula, we have preserved our nationality: italy has crossed the ocean in our wake. not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion, by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the same soul to the sound of one name, to the colours of one flag, to the summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers. and it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a nation. it is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness of that collective personality to which we feel we belong. nationality consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a nation's character. but this truth is still far from being recognised. its existence is not even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free and independent states and to secure recognition of a _de facto_ political personality on the strength of an assumed _de jure_ existence. this truth, however, was grasped by the profound intuition of mazzini, the apostle of nationalities, the man who roused our national energies, and whose irresistible call awakened italy and powerfully impelled her to affirm her national being. even from the first years of the _giovine italia_ he insisted that italy, when still merely an idea, prior to her taking on a concrete and actual political reality, was not a people and was not a nation. for a nation, he maintained, is not something existing in nature; but a great spiritual reality. therefore like all that is in and for the spirit, it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but always a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised--an action. the italians to whom mazzini spoke were not the people around him. he was addressing that future people which the italians themselves had to create. and they would create it by fixing their souls on one idea--the idea of a fatherland to be conquered--a sacred idea, so noble that people would live and die for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate good for which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which man can not live, outside of which he finds nothing that satisfies him, nothing that is conducive to a life's work. for mazzini nationality is not inherited wealth, but it is man's own conquest. a people can not faint-heartedly claim from others recognition of their nation, but must themselves demonstrate its existence, realise it by their willingness to fight and die for its independence: independence which is freedom and unity and constitutes the nation. it is not true that first comes the nation and then follows the state; the nation is the state when it has triumphed over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, which till then were hindering its formation. it is not therefore a vague aspiration or a faint wish, but an active faith, an energetic volition which creates, in the freed political power, the reality of its own moral personality and of its collective consciousness. hence the lofty aim of mazzini in insisting that italy should not be made with the help of foreigners but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of its own will. and truly the nation is, substantially, as mazzini saw and firmly believed, the common will of a people which affirms itself and thus secures self-realisation. a nation is a nation only when it wills to be one. i said, when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. it must therefore act in such a manner as to realise its own personality in the form of the state beyond which there is no collective will, no common personality of the people. and it must act seriously, sacrificing the individual to the collective whole, and welcoming martyrdom, which in every case is but the sacrifice of the individual to the universal, the lavishing of our own self to the ideal for which we toil. from this we are not, however, to infer that a nation can under no circumstances exist prior to the formation of its state. for if this formation means the formal proclamation or the recognition by other states, it surely does pre-exist. but it does not if we consider that the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment in a previously initiated process, and the effect of pre-existing forces already at work; which effect is never definite because a state, even after it has been constituted, continues to develop in virtue of those very forces which produced it; so that it is constantly renewing and continually reconstituting itself. hence a state is always a future. it is that state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very instant, and with all our future efforts bent to that political ideal which gleams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought, but as the irresistible need of our own personality. the nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own being as the state, considered as universal will, is one with our concrete and actual ethical personality. italy for us is the fatherland which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we are realising. we realise it in every instant of our lives, by our feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination, indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that will which is the state and which thus makes itself felt in the world. and this will, this state is italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the undying faith in ultimate triumph. this nation, which we all wish to raise to an ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even though we differ as to the means of attaining this end, is it not the substance of our personality,--of that personality which we possess not as individuals who drift with the current, but as men who have a powerful self-consciousness and who look upward for their destiny? if we thus understand the nation, it follows that not only every man must bear the imprint of his nationality, but that also there is no true science, no man's science, which is not national. the ancients believed, in conformity with the teachings of the greeks, that science soars outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes of mortals, beyond the current of history, which is troubled by the fatal conflicts of error, by falterings and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge. truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it and transcendent. this concept, after two thousand years of speculation, was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,--abstract from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. the modern world, at first with dim consciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate intuition than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, then with an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, has elaborated a concept which is directly antithetical to the classical idea of a celestial truth removed from the turmoil of earthly things. it has accordingly and by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty though it be, and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. it therefore creates its truth and its world. modern philosophy and modern consciousness no longer point to values which, transcending history, determine its movement and its direction by external finalities: they show to man that the lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is in his ever unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly strains upward towards its own ideal. science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of the intellect. it is an interest which invests the entire person, extols it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite development. science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore; it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he actuates his own humanity. and therefore science is no longer an adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. so that whenever science is as yet so abstract that it seems not to touch the person and fails to form it or transform it, it is an indication that it is not as yet true science. so we conclude thus: he who distinguishes his person from his knowledge is ignorant of the nature of knowledge. the modern teacher knows of no science which is not an act of a personality. it knows no personality which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from its ways of thinking and of feeling, from that greater life which is the nation. concrete personality then is nationality, and therefore neither the school nor science possesses a learning which is not national. and for this reason therefore our educational reforms which are inspired by the teachings of modern idealistic philosophy demand that the school be animated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the fatherland. chapter ii education and personality it is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant by _concrete personality_, and why the particular or empirical personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing more than an abstraction. ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and contained by the surface of our material body. we consider this body in itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. it seems to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. we look upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. one body then, one physical person, one moral personality--that moral personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the consciousness of the ego. and in fact when i walk i am not a different person from when i think. my ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether my mind inwardly meditates. impenetrability, which is possessed by matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism. from my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. what i am no one else can be, and i in turn cannot be confused with another person. those of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my spirit, as their bodies are from mine. my father, my brother are dead. they have vanished from this world in which i nevertheless continue to exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away. hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator. but no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely unaltered. our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. after we came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. and just as they had been able to exist without us, so shall we continue to live without them, and away from them develop our personality. for each one of us, according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his own particular destiny. every man makes of himself the centre of his world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally colours this world and conceives the universe. what is another man's sorrow to me? what part have i in his joys? and how can the science of aristotle or of galileo be anything to me, since i do not know them, since i cannot read their books, and am totally unfamiliar with their teachings? and the unknown wayfarer who passes by, wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions, for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? the hero's exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience. for every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. every one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be. this conception, which we ordinarily form of our personality, and on which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. for when we thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. i shall not here investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently contradictory manifestations. our task for the moment is to establish within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want them to be. in order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner life, i shall take as an example one of those elements which are contained in the concept of nationality, language. language it must be remembered does not belong _per se_ to nationality; it belongs to it in virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a determined content. we must now point out the abstract character of that concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it. that language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is quite obvious. through language we speak not to others only, but to ourselves also. speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,--it means self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb animals, but as rational beings, as men. man cannot think, have consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to himself. man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be defined as the speaking animal. the remark is as old as aristotle. man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man, actually existing. and he does not speak a general language, but a certain definite one. when i speak before a public, i can but use my language, the italian language. and i exist, that is i affirm myself, i come into real being, by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as i speak, and speak this language of mine. _my_ language, the _italian_ language. here lies the problem. were i not to speak, or were i to speak otherwise than i know how, i would not be myself. this manner of expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. but this speech which makes me what i am, and which therefore intimately belongs to me, could it possibly be mine, could i use it, mould it into my own life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body, having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in space? could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged exclusively to me, to what i have called my particular or empirical personality? a simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon of light, inwardly illumines my thought, and renders visible to me every movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively my own. it is that same language through which i grasp the ancient authors of italy. i read about francesca da rimini and count ugolino, and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. i read of petrarch's golden-haired laura, of ariosto's angelica, fair love of chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful medoro. i read of the cunning art whereby the florentine secretary, in his keen speculative discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of italy. i read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime concepts which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits, continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts of italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but ever the same. this is the language which i first heard from the dear lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly i made my own by studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute this which i call and feel to be my own people. yet i might want to break away with my speech from this glorious communion. i might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is exclusively mine, and surely i would thus accomplish something. i would produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the rule. for surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon. secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. such individuals, however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial character of their communications never may constitute a nation. an artificial jargon of this sort is however a language of some kind: it must be, since art imitates nature. it complies with the law that is immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. the jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated back into the common language. give a ciphered document to the cryptographer; by study and ingenuity--that is by the use of that very intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher--he discovers the key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the same national tongue. and again, words as they flow from the inspired bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. that language is the poet's own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. but if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the language is the language of the community. the inspired poet does indeed speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others because it is by its nature intelligible. in the conditions in which the poet finds himself when speaking, he must use that word and no other, and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could not help using, the same word. for his word is the word, the one that is required by the circumstances. and since he is a poet, a serious mind uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the desire of learning the poet's own intimate language. all this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far from separating men, unites them. it realises historically its universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation and of fusion which history may call into being. language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. what however must be ever present is the will by which man every moment of his life renovates his own personality. can the will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own will, exclusively his own? or is the will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own life while living the life of the nation? of course, in the abstract, as i have explained above, my will is particular. but we must be reminded that will is one thing, and faint wishing another. there is such a thing as real effective volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails; this latter we might call "velleity." real will does not rest satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its reality. and our being results not from velleities but from the real will. we are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we actually will to be. a velleity we might say is the will directed to an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is that which becomes effective. but, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really _wills_? i am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which i must obey. the transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of that law which the offender has refused to recognise. the state is supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the land which socrates, as plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. i, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its law in such a manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible. if i did so, i should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered. i then want what the law wants me to will. it makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view, a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular conscience. for it is the will of the state that determines the limits between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the individual. and there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which the constituent and legislative power of the state delimits the sphere subject to its sanctions. so that positively or negatively, either by command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by which the state establishes its reality. but the will of the state does not manifest itself solely by the enactments of positive legislation. it opens to private initiative such courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. but this concession has a temporary character, and the state is ever ready to intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. so that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the individual we discern the power of the state; and the individual is free to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. so that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being no need of such an expression. but since the essence of law is not in the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it, or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it, it follows that the law exists even though unwritten. in the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that i, as a citizen, have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the state, and i want anything only in so far as the state wants me to want it. could it possibly be otherwise? such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the very thought of it. for it would come to this,--that i exist and my state does not:--the state in which i was born, which sustained and protected me before i saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed to me this communion of life; the state in which i have always lived, which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which i support myself, and which i trust will never fail me even though it does change constantly. i could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which i am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country. i might balk and refuse to obey its laws. but acting thus, i would be indulging in what i have called velleities. my personality, unable to transform the will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by it. let us however assume for a moment that i might in the innermost depths of my being segregate myself. averse to the common will and to the law of the land, i decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. up to a certain point this hypothesis is verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes actual. but even then i do not act as a particular being: it is the universal power that acts through my personal will. for when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our actions are the direct results of our convictions,--of the necessity of our convictions. for every time we act, inwardly we see that such must be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. the saint who has no will but the will of god intuitively sees necessity in his norm. so does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous and therefore destined to fail. every criminal in transgressing the law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the enactments of the state. and in so doing he creates almost a state of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must exist because of certain good reasons, the excellence of which the criminal himself will subsequently realise. from the unfortunate point of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he thinks, could possibly take exception to it. his will is also universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. and what else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and substitutes a new state for the crushed commonwealth? in the same manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been able to overthrow. so then, i exercise my true volition whenever the will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon in reciprocal determinations. or perhaps better still, when the entire world wills in me. for my will, i shall say it once again, is not individual but universal, and in the political community by which individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality. for this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national personality. this conception is of fundamental importance for those of us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. for in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time immemorial. education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen, or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law which governs it. we teachers are all sincerely convinced that education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. for there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. it is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. by it more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his superior nature. animals do not educate: even though they do raise their young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members differentiated and reciprocally correlated. but we freely, by an act of our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social activity. man has been called a political or a social animal. he might therefore be considered also as an educating animal. for we do not merely educate the young ones, our young ones. education being spiritual action bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in constituting a complete social entity. and we not only train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their character, their culture. we also educate the adults, the grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of the roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. man always educates. but here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man does not behave in sole conformity with instinct; he does not teach by abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. he is fully aware of his own doings. he keeps his eyes open on his own function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible results. for man reflects. it is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children, brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never ceasing ascent. before the word came into being, the thing, as is usually the case, already existed. before there was a science and an incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of this science and therefore the justification of the chair. there was the intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying, "know thyself," was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore, unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question everything. what the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his mind. ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a higher station of learning and of art. our education is human, because it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always solve and have to keep solving for ever. this intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very lives we live as educators. as long as the freshness of our vocation lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul, unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with, and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform, of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth i have already affirmed. we teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces, staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. we shall continue to be educators only as long as we are able to feel that every instant of our life's work is a new instant, and that education therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an ever renewed solution. now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of education is this,--the task of the teacher to represent the universal to his pupils, the universal, of course, as historically determined. scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before the pupil's mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. and the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the common law. hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a personality in quest of itself. on one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing freedom, for the aim of education is to produce men; and man is worthy of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. our children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and advice. and we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us new things originally thought out by them. freedom then must be the result of education. but on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and abandonment of the pupil. the educator must awaken interests that without him would for ever lie dormant. he must direct the learner towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable obstacles that beset his progress. he must, in short, transfuse into the pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance create elements of the pupil's character, mind, and will. but the acts which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore have proved destructive of that very liberty with which the pupil was originally endowed. is it not true that people constantly attribute to early family influences and to environment--that is, to education--the good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man? this is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. the mind of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire zealously to watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual with a garment that is not adapted for him,--crush him under the weight of a leaden cape. the solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next chapter. but i must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of warning. my solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used as a key to open all doors. for as i have repeatedly stated, the value of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel released from the obligation of thinking. my solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which different people may, along more or less converging lines, approach their particular objectives. for the problem presents itself under ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a progressive interpretation of the concept which i am going to offer as an aid to its solution. no effort of thinking, once completed, will ever exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking more and more intensively. chapter iii the fundamental antimony of education a more precise determination must now be given to the problem, touched upon in the preceding chapter, which might be called the _fundamental antinomy of education_, understanding by "antinomy" the conflict of two contradictory affirmations, either one of which appears to be true and irrefutable. the two contradictory affirmations are ( ) that man as the object of education is and must be free, and ( ) that education denies man's freedom. they might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: ( ) education presupposes freedom in man and strives to increase it. ( ) education treats man by ignoring the freedom he may originally be endowed with, and acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it. each of the two propositions must be taken, not as an approximate affirmation, but as an exact enunciation of an irrefutable truth. therefore freedom here means full and absolute liberty; and when we speak of the negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, and as far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the pupil. let us first see precisely what is meant by this _freedom_ which we attribute to man. each one of us firmly even though obscurely possesses some conception of it. every one of us, even though unfamiliar with the controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of human life to face the difficulties that beset the concept of man's freedom, and must have been led to question, if not to deny outright, the proposition that man is free. but on the other hand, every one of us has to admit that the experience of life has confirmed the belief in our freedom which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity; and that faith, instinctive and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts of negation. by liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by which he moulds himself into his actual being and originates the series of facts in which every one of his actions becomes manifest. in nature, all facts, or, as they are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so interrelated as to constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition of its intelligibility. the condensation of the aqueous vapour in the cloud produces rain; but vapour would not condense without the action of temperature, nor again would temperature be lowered without the concurrence of certain meteorological facts which modify it, etc. but we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but himself the principles and the causes of his actions. so that whenever we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts as partaking of that moral value through which man's conduct is really human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate matter. we may in certain moments deny a man's humanity, and see in his conduct only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. in such moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. we do not even strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no impression on his obdurate consciousness. only through force can we defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the blind forces of nature. we then become aware that our soul refuses to recognise such an individual as a man. we esteem man to be such only when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when we are able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human, appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational activity. this reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the peculiar constituents of human personality. they cannot be imparted to man from the outside. they are in him from the very start even if only as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge of his acts. this knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing, and he knows also how his actions must be judged. and so all the causes that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own judgment. what is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour hatred against an enemy? and yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred. he must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. only when a man is capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love, only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely natural being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. whether man is equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. he must have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and thus affirms its existence. we make these demands on him; and as we extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human rôle, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness yielding to these forces. and the import of our blame is that he is responsible for not having the power which he should have had. it is of no importance that out of compassion, or through sympathy for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our censure. our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed, remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of evil. we surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through moral impotence--whether it be the craven submissiveness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute--commits an evil deed. we feel it our duty to watch over him and help him on the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies immersed. there is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial and inaccurate observations, dogmatically asserts that certain forms of criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity; and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most insignificant clash with other human beings. this is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which has spread throughout the world the fame of some italian writers. though their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the need of a more humane treatment of offenders,--more humane because rational and effective. their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and always for materialistic motives,--materialistic even though disguised under religious and theological robes,--have denied to man that power which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle of the entire watery mass. what force intrinsic to this drop could ever stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? man, they say, is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass of the universe. at times he may delude himself into believing that he has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own destiny. but alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the play of his representations,--representations which have not their origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. so that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents. i shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man. in our present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us, i believe, to cut the discussion short. a great german philosopher, who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in reality a place for man's freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it, corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul, invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. that is to say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a conscience which imposes a law upon us,--a law which, though not promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. this law is the moral law. it requires no speculative demonstration. the scrutiny of philosophers might not be helpful to it. it rises spontaneously and naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional respect. what sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in general, compelled him to do? the existence of duty implies a power to fulfil it. and the certitude of our moral obligations rests on the conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. we can answer the call of duty because we are free. this consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as sufficient. for this moral conscience, this certitude with which the moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. nothing hinders us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered by the philosophers of materialism. but the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the _raison d'être_ of moral law, as kant thought--for he is the philosopher to whom i alluded above;--no! freedom is the condition of the entire life of the spirit. and the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think, that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. for without freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at all,--not even of his materialistic views. this is the same as saying that the negation of liberty is unthinkable. a brief reflection will make this clearer. we speak to others or to ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations. let us suppose that ideas be present to our minds (as people have sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing them. such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not turn our gaze toward them. every object of the mind, that is, every thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the subject which is ready to affirm the object. and thought proper consists in this affirmation of the object by the subject. now, the subject, that is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in order that his action be truly his, and really human. in fact, we demand of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds. we evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should not entertain. in this way we indicate our conviction that the thought of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises, not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon his personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted them. we are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our search after truth. it has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the intellect. such distinctions are dangerous. but whether we call it will or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom of determination. and in the manner that every action aims at the good, because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in opposition to error and falseness. without the antithesis of good to evil there would be no moral action: without the antithesis of the true to the false there would be no cognition. but the existence of this antithesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing. should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. the materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is thereby stripped of all the value of truth. for he must be inwardly convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore cannot be thought. the negation of freedom leads to this _absurdum_, to this impossible thought, which is the thought that is being thought as such, and yet does not admit of being thought. man, in so far as he thinks, affirms his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. this observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom on a solid ground. freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from slavery. here indeed is the very crux of the problem. every one would readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence would then be reduced to a question of degree. but the fact is that freedom must be absolute or not be at all. matter, that is, every material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited; whereas the spirit--every spiritual act--is free because it is infinite, and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute. any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. the slave is such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it by the master's volition. the human spirit is not free in the presence of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be trespassed. the lower animal is not free because even if its actions seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original power and allows no individual creation. if there is a limit, there must be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. these consequences are summed up in the impossibility of _being all_, or in other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey therefore the untransgressable laws set by one's own nature. this necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature, this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature, to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is ransomed by the power of his freedom. the sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the phantom of his mind. he fails in his search, and his chisel remains, must need remain, inactive. the artist then in the utmost intensity of his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative power. but when we consider what the artist has created in the statue itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is material. the artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment, a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes; as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its physical weight. when we are able thus to spiritualise the statue--and we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art--then all limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of the artist disappear. for we see no longer the artist's phantasy, and then his arm, and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the marble and move it and sell it. there is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. but there is a higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on discovering our freedom. if we say, as the psychologists do, this is a soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. it is not possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. it is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. and the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with the determination of circumstances. man, according to this conception, will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything except of his own self. but there is a higher point of view than the one i have just described, and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,--this marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness at the advent of christianity and in the course of time made more and more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man's purposes without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. whosoever says: here is a body and there is a soul--two things, one outside of the other--such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought, that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity, an idolon, and a simple _ens rationis_, like so many other things that are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence. in speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is truly enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in space. for everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of issuing forth from it. we say that the brain is external to consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to which for a moment we supposed them to be external. we may start thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought; and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: "here my thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought"? thought halts only before mystery. but even then it thinks it as mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never really stops. such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it universal. at every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. in this life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite. education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in him a susceptibility of development,--educability, as we may call it. the learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. but thinking, we have already seen, signifies freedom. and not only is freedom presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in his work. as a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual activity are developed. for the development of thought is a development of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole being in relation to every other being. and this growth of power is what we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. it has been said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from his instincts. surely, education is the formation of man, and when we say man we mean liberty. here we stumble upon our antinomy. how are we to reconcile this presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the personality of the pupil? this interposition surely signifies that the disciple must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality. education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. the disciple who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord, but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously, as our vittorino da feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome compulsion. this pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he might be free, as free as god when as yet the world was not and he created it out of nothing by his joyous _fiat_, symbol of the loftiest spiritual liberty. for these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the authority of the teacher. therefore great masters who meditated on the subject of education, from rousseau to tolstoi, have exalted the rights of liberty, but have fallen into the opposite extreme of denying the duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and unrealisable ideal of negative education. but we must not cling to negatives. it should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. the school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. for this limitation is only apparent. apparent, however, when we deal with true education. for the school has for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. people have been led to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment, and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked in the face of pedantry. through this injustice, the school has been burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical discipline. in order to see whether education really limits the free activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which may not be after all a school. we must examine an institution at the moment and in the act which realises its significance--when the instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. such a moment should at least hypothetically be granted to exist. let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of giving lessons in italian. where is this something which i have called the italian language? in the grammar, perchance? or in the dictionary? yes, partly. provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the individual examples that together constitute the expressive power of the living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical classification; does not hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people. but more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word is and exists in the writers themselves. the teacher should there point it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to express most powerfully our common thoughts. to his students who are striving to learn the language--that is the writers--he reads for example the poems of leopardi. the poet's word, his soul hovers over the classroom, as the master reads. it penetrates into the minds of the pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. it becomes one with the soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using, truly enough, the words of leopardi, but of a leopardi who is peculiar to each of the listeners. under this spell, the pupil who hears the poet's word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect that this word is the echo of an echo? that he is under the influence of something repeated after a first utterance? our own experience answers: no! but if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by the teacher's voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their own but the master's, or rather, the poet's, then they would commit a serious blunder. for the word they intently listen to in their soul is their own, exclusively their own. leopardi does not impart any poesy to him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings, is unable to live his own poetry. and leopardi (or the teacher who reads him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his own leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. the master, as st. augustine long ago warned us, is within us. he is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated in his chair. for in so far as he is a real teacher, he is ever the object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. he is _our_ teacher, he is our very soul. the dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. we do notice it before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first word that comes to the pupils' ears from the lips of the teacher. the dualism however cannot be resolved if the master's word fails to reach the pupils' soul, but then under those circumstances there is no education. but even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased vigour. so that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the intentions of the teacher. a school without freedom is a lifeless institution. chapter iv realism and idealism in the concept of culture we found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass from the abstract to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. the universality of the individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the deeper and more speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his relationships. in like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of education. we were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. so that, far from limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive element of the pupil's spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite development. the same method of resorting to the concrete now leads us to the determination of a third essential element in the process of education. we have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,--of the latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as becoming identical with this same personality. we must now take up the connecting link between the two, that is, culture. by culture we mean the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course of time must pass from the teacher to the pupil. this spiritual content, in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and information; as formation of personal capacities and training of spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of conduct. it includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching, and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth. culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them. these two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as such they pertain to philosophy. but men in general constantly have recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising goes on outside of the schools of the specialists, who are few compared to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine concepts of philosophy. let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which is fundamental and original to the human mind. our whole life, if we consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on human life, represents the very condition of it. in order to live, to act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external world, we must, first of all, be born. our birth is the effect of a life which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads until it gathers all nature within itself. this nature existed before we were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. men draw their life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order that they might come into being. when nature will cease to provide these conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue to be. on this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come into existence, and among animals the human species. each of us, as he comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant, diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces, organised up to the most highly developed structures, man included. we find this nature, and we begin to study it. we examine its parts one by one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. for each one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its "laws." the aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and integrating one another, constitutes the natural world--reality--as it stands before us. with this external reality we strive to become acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. in this reality too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the means by which they may be satisfied,--the ratio, so to speak, between natural desires and controlled resources. we are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as passionately as we cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life, fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt ourselves to it. but if reality appears as constituted before us, as therefore conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this reality itself or any part of it. for all reality is thought by us as a connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this knowledge of ours. its whole process is therefore complete in objective nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror reality but can never be a part of it. this then is the primitive and fundamental concept that the human mind forms of reality. in consequence of it man feels that he is enclosed within himself: he knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geometrical figures and numbers; that he can generate ideas. but he also feels that between these ideal creations of his own, and the solid, sound, real living forms of nature, there is an abyss. he must, indeed, fall in with nature, in the process of generating other living beings of flesh and blood. he must avail himself of nature by first submitting to its unfailing laws, if he intends to give body, that is, real existence, to the ideal conceptions of his intelligence. on one side then we have thought; on the opposite side reality,--that reality, nature. this conception at a certain moment is transformed but not substantially changed. as we begin to reflect, we notice that this nature, as known to us, is not the real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in time and space, which we see before our eyes, an object perceptible by our bodily senses. we conclude then, that nature as known to us is an _idea_; that nature is one thing and the idea of nature another. and if we think this perceptible nature and have faith in its reality and in the reality of its determinations, this nature in which reality is made to consist is the nature which is within our thought,--the idea of nature; or in other words, thought considered as the content of our mind. this thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which we strive to become thoroughly acquainted with nature, and which we finally discover or at least ought to discover when we succeed in attaining true knowledge. we say that we know nature only when we are able to recognise an idea in nature: that is, an idea in each of its elements, and a system of ideas in the whole of nature. so that what we know is not really nature as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as disclosed to us by thought, as it exists in thought--i.e., the idea. and this idea must be real, otherwise nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be real. not only is it real, it is that reality itself which a moment ago we were led to think of as consisting in external perceptible nature. this reality makes the life of our thought possible, but it is not a product of this life. it is a condition and a prerequisite of thought, and as such it does not exist because we think it: but rather we are able to think it because it exists. it is eternal truth, at first unknown to man, then by him desired. in quest of it he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it from his eyes, without however hoping that it will ever entirely disclose to him its divine countenance. according to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has now become ideal. but even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger of error. whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought) is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life; it is truth pure and perfect. this idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to reality. this idea is reality itself idealised. it is to this idea, for instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even his life. this idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right which is not more or less trampled upon. this idea is before us when we consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is motionless, impassible, eternal. in its bosom then we must try to find everything that we want to accept as not illusory. but in substituting the conception of an ideal reality for the conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts, but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by abstracting it from our own thought. we, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know, to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world; we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such affirm our personality in the very act of saying _we_, we then are of less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die unknown to the foot that crushes them. we are nothing because we do not belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of doing or creating something original, something we might really call ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws. this conception of life, which i have given only in its barest outline, is a very common one. for thousands of years it has persisted in the philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest intellects of humanity. but humanity could not rest satisfied with a world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. for by nature we understand not only that reality which is in space and time, but also every reality which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. nor can it be considered as the product or result of a process; for it is immediate reality, original and immutable. in a world which is nature, man is an intruder, a stranger without rights, without even real existence. as a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he does not even exist. and his life, with all his aspirations, his needs, his claims, is but a fallacious illusion which will sooner or later collapse. man cannot help succumbing in a world where there is no place for him. therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessimism lowers over the consciousness that has stopped at this conception of reality. leopardi is the most eloquent expression of the intense misery to which man is condemned in such circumstances, or to which rather he condemns himself. he condemns himself because he has it in his power to conceive reality otherwise. for let him ponder seriously and he will succeed in convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of reality is absurd. philosophy has so demonstrated this truth, that he who now strives eagerly to attain a moral point of view in harmony with established principles can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can no longer assert that the world is nature, or that it is the eternal idea from which nature is derived and by which it is made intelligible. such views are no longer tenable. the teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims the right of forming souls, of arousing those powerful moral energies which alone empower man to live as a human being, may not, must not be ignorant of the fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of the world an abstract reality, presupposed by the human spirit and therefore anterior and indifferent to it, is a belief that has been superseded and surpassed by modern thought. the teacher too can easily grasp this view, for in gathering all the arguments by which, along different lines, the new conception of reality has been attained, we find that the whole matter reduces itself to a simple and very easy reflection. very easy in itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater part of us,--to the superficial thinkers, to the absent-minded, to those who lack the strength necessary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us by the truth which is derived from this reflection. for naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that we think nature, but do not ourselves exist; nature alone exists. we do not exist and yet we think, and we think of nature as existing. we do not exist and yet nature exists, of whose existence we have no other testimony than our thoughts. and if thought is a shadow, what will reality then be? the "dream of a shadow," in the words of the greek poet. is it possible for us to stop at this conclusion? is it possible for an inexistent thing to vouch for the existence of something which we know only from its attestations? such is the absurd position we are forced into when we assume that thought, in equipoise with reality, remains outside of it and leaves it out of its own self. we give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas to external things. by idealism on the other hand we mean that higher point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a reality which is not the reality of thought itself. for it reality is not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may eventually have the means of thinking it. reality is this very thought itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life of the real world. if it is not conceivable that such activity could ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality which we call material and assume to be external to thought is in some way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised by the activity of thought itself. for there is no way of thinking any reality except by setting thought as the basis of it. this is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not only of modern philosophy, but of consciousness itself in general, of that consciousness which was gradually formed and moulded under the influence of the deeply moral sentiment of life fostered by christianity. for it was christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh a truer reality,--not the world in which man is born, but that world to which he must uplift himself: that world in which he has to live, not because it is anterior to him, but because he must create it by his will: and this world is the kingdom of the spirit. in accordance with this conception there is, properly speaking, no reality: there is a spirit which creates reality, which therefore is self-made and not the product of nature. the realist speaks of external existence, of a world into which man is admitted and to which he must adapt himself. but the idealist knows only what the spirit does, what man acts. a nature, ever at work in the progress of the spirit, throbs in the soul of man, who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by its restless, unceasing motion. it is a world which is never created, because the entire past flows and becomes actual in that form which is peculiar to it and in which it exists, namely, the present,--history in the incessant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of self-production. on what side of the controversy should the teacher stand who means to absorb into his soul the life of the school? will he with the realists believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? or will he as an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to fulfil life? there are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and the idealistic. by the former we are led to imagine that man's spirit is empty, and that no nourishment can come to it except from the outside world, from those external elements which he can acquire because they exist prior to the activity by which he assimilates them. the latter, admitting only what is derived from the developing life of the spirit, can conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of this very life, and separable from it only by abstraction. it is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of educators to-day is realistic rather than otherwise. the ideal and therefore the historical origin of the school itself is intimately connected with the realistic presupposition. for the school begins when man for the first time becomes aware of the existence of a store of accumulated culture which should be protected from dispersion. grammar, for instance, exists before the notion of teaching it arises. men already possess a language when they make up their minds to teach it to their children. self-taught and inventive genius, by new observation and discoveries, gives rise to new disciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disciplines, determine to institute a school where they may be cultivated and handed down to the coming generations. in general then, first comes knowledge; then the school as a depository of it. it may be granted that the progress of learning is made possible or at least accentuated by educational institutions; but the fact remains that the school is founded on pre-existing knowledge. science, arts, customs must exist before they can be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must appropriate them as they are in themselves. the _iliad_ exists: homer sang: the poems attributed to him were collected into an epic from which we learn of the beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories that were dear to the ancient greeks, and every cultivated person to-day must derive from them his own spiritual substance. the teacher shows to his pupils how best to read, how to understand that epic which is a treasure of the past bequeathed not only to the modern greeks but to humanity in general. for we all profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same manner that every man that comes into the world enjoys the light and the heat of the sun which he surely did not kindle in heaven. the fact that culture, as the subject matter of education, exists before the exercise of that spiritual activity which can be educated only through its means, seems to the realist a condition without which the school cannot arise. only as culture develops and spreads does the school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civilisation, as culture becomes specialised, the school is correspondingly differentiated into institutions of ever-growing specialisation. for the school can but follow and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art,--of humanity in general in all it strives to perpetuate. all this evidently can be maintained only from the point of view of the realist. for him the school is concerned not with those that already know and therefore have no need of it, but for those who are still ignorant. for them it is instituted; it ministers to their needs, and is therefore adjusted in the direction in which it believes their spirit should be oriented. in the school of physicians, there is not medicine but the learning of it, for if the art of healing were already mastered as it seems to be in the case of the professors, there would be no need of a medical school. there is indeed the professor in the lecture room; but he is there only for the learners, and his rôle has no meaning except in relation to their needs. he is the possessor of science, and as such he teaches and does not learn. the school then is not the possession of culture, but the development of a spiritual life aspiring to this possession; and this aspiration is possible because of the existence of the teacher who has already mastered it, who possesses it, not as his own property, but as social wealth entrusted to him for the use of everybody. he himself is only an instrument of communication. culture antedates him; it does so even when he is the author of it. for it is not possible for him to impart it to others until he has first elaborated it himself, and not until the merits of his contributions have been in part at least recognised by the world. the school to the realist presupposes the library. the teacher needs books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot his pupils. in the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. for humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. in this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries. the pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born to the life of culture. at first he clings to the shore, dreads the water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with the element. who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? he must first be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible mass of the ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep. the student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful mind towards every volume, towards every subject. in the multitude of books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders, sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. he must choose. let him select, say, dante. he reads the _divine comedy_, the poem written by that great italian who has been dead these six centuries and now rests at ravenna, no longer mindful of his francesca, of his magnanimous farinata, of his kindly master brunetto, or of beatrice. dante created his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. his manuscript was copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions of copies were made. in one of these we now are able to find it, this divine poem, just as it was written,--for we want it exactly as it flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission of a comma. and this volume is an example of what exists in a library,--of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence communicate to their pupils!--something that belongs to the world, something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if they want to, just as they can get to know the stars and the plants, and all things of nature. the _divine comedy_ can be realistically conceived in respect to us who open the volume and prepare to read it, for the reason that it already exists and arouses our desire. if we had left it on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had exactly the same existence. what we find in the volume, as we read of that land of the dead which is much more living than all the living beings who surround us in our daily life, would all of it have been in that book, would have continued to be there, even if we had never opened it. but is it really so? if we reflect a while we shall see that this is not the case. the book contains exactly what we find there, what we are capable of finding there, nothing more, nothing less. different persons discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless obvious that for each individual the book contains only what he finds in it; and in order to be able to say that the book contains more than what a given reader discovers in it, it is necessary that some other person should find that something more; and that the text contains this additional beauty is only true for him who discovered it and for those who seek it after him. dante waited for centuries for de sanctis[ ] to appear and to disclose the meaning of francesca's words. therefore it has been said that to understand dante is a sign of greatness. abstractly considered, of course, the poet is what he is, but only in the abstract. in the concrete, dante is the author whom we admire and appreciate proportionately to our power. for as we read the poem in accordance with our training, and the development of our personality, dante is grafted on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on the contrary, is our very life; and before this life is realised, evidently none of those things can be found there which actually come into being in the process of its realisation. so that if we had not read the book, far from its being true that everything we found in it would still continue to be there, nothing would remain of what we find in it, absolutely nothing. we have said nothing of "what _we_ find." but if we consider the matter we shall see that what we find is everything; everything for me; everything for everybody. only that can come out of a book which the reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of getting out of it; and in consequence of these labours and in virtue of his soul he is able to say that a certain book has a content. in fact, to return to our example, the _divine comedy_ which we know, the only one which we can know, the only one which exists, is the one which lives in our souls, and which is a function of the criticism that interprets it, understands it, and appreciates it. that _divine comedy_ therefore did not close the circle of its life on the day when dante wrote the last line of the last canto; it continued to live, still continues to exist in the history, in the life of the spirit. its life never draws to a close. the poem is never finished. this is true of the poem of dante; it is true of everything which we conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who built up the patrimony of human culture. culture then is not before us, a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting to be revealed to us. culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the life of our spirit. abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived. it slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who passed away and created it once for all. it belongs to the past, to the things that have died. but the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that actuality which we call living memory, is history,--history constructed by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our abilities;--and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in which the past really survives, in which it is real. in the same way the only culture that can be bestowed upon the spirit, the only one that admits of being concretely taught and learned, the only one that can be sought, because it is the only one that really exists, is idealistic culture. it is not in books, nor in the brains of others. it exists in our own souls as it is gradually being formed there. it cannot therefore be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it consists in this very activity. this must be the faith of all those who cannot bring themselves to believe that they are strangers in this world, and that they have come here to exercise a function which is not their own. for the world in general, and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed when we arrive upon the scene. this is why human life has a value, why education is a mission. footnotes: [ ] francesco de sanctis, a great italian critic, whose "history of italian literature" is still unfortunately inaccessible in english. chapter v the spirituality of culture the idealistic conception of culture enables us to get an initial understanding of the spirituality of the school. this spirituality is surely felt by all those who live within the class-room; but it should be understood in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who wish to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme delicacy of the tasks performed and the words uttered by those who enter it with the sincere heart and the pure soul of the teacher. the school is obviously not the hall which contains the teacher and the pupils. these may have a hall, may even have the teacher, without yet possessing the school, which consists in the communication of culture. this culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent to the act which communicates it; it is not to be found in books, not to be looked for in an ideal transcendent world, not to be demanded of the teacher. it is only in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. it is there in the manner in which it is possible for it to be there, not comparable to any presumed form of pre-existing culture. the school gains its existence entirely in the soul of the learner. knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of the human spirit. i insist on this conception because i am well aware that the minds of many rebel against this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds may be. for they ask: what then is the learning which we ascribe to the master minds of humanity, now indeed dead but still active in their works? they also ask how we are able to think and account for that learning which we feel we are not originating, which we know we are re-acquiring for ourselves after it has many times been in the domain of others. can we really consider as non-existent what we as yet do not know, may perhaps never know, but which is none the less capable of being known? when we are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose learning surpasses our powers, are we the victims of an illusion? are we prevailed upon by ignorance and lack of reflection? and how then can we justify the cult which every civilised man consecrates to the mighty spirits--philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes--who added so much to the moral fund of humanity? was there not a dante six centuries back, who composed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, at a time when we, who now read it and bring it to life in our souls, were still so far removed from the entrance of this life? the answer to all these questions is very simple, so simple that we must be careful lest we miss its significance. all this lore of the past which we strive to preserve surely does exist; it does contain all the names which are sacred to the memory of humankind. the _divine comedy_ has been written and no longer awaits its dante. but this lore of the past, as we for brevity's sake call it, is nothing else than what _we think_ as such. history, as it unfolds itself from century to century, is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always transforming the old into the new; at no time, therefore, having anything but what is new, never being anything else but the new. in history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual creators of the past. with them we are a person that grows and develops, ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. our childhood has not completely passed away into nothing: it keeps returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes it, idealises it into poetry. if we consider this childhood as something that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this poetry that was yet to be written, that could not then be written, surely this infancy is quite dead; we should rather say that it never existed. but it does live as the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses feelings, and such feelings as are at a given moment the actual sentiment of the adult. once in the years long gone by a kindly word reached the depths of my soul. we all have heard in the years long gone by some such kindly words that in the mystery of our childish mind appeared as a revelation. such words as fall from the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender affection have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of rage, and of making us feel the gentle sweetness of that goodness which is made of love. we may since have forgotten that word, and the circumstances in which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that on that day our soul was modified and became endowed almost with a sixth sense. this sense has enabled us subsequently to perceive so many things that are beautiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of frequent use and increasing exercise, until it finally became the most potent organ of our moral personality. here too our development has been a constant acquiring with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it was converted into the present, and therefore annulled as past pure and simple. such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of its fragments. such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its universality. it is not therefore difficult to determine what is the past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. it is our own actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness. the past with its entire content is a projection of our actual consciousness, i.e., of the present. but we must not give this proposition a sceptical sense. as i have already pointed out, the present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. the past is one and the same thing with the present. the past _is_ the present in its inmost substance; and the present is the past that has matured. the grain of wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under the glebe. it lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. the seed as such was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, still is, still lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. where is it now? why, in whatever form it may now have assumed. it is the past in the present, as the present. so then, what is dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the italian language? he is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not fully acquainted with him. in this sense he lives in us, as the seed does in the ear of corn. i have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without fully understanding it. i wanted to make clear how impossible it is to separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. it is far from true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it. for fair renown begets love for the unseen person, as the poet reminds us and as experience often teaches. frequently we know of the existence and the beauty of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not therefore completely unknown to us. so also many of us desired to go to school long before we had seen the inside of a classroom. what is dearer than the joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? we look forward to that new life upon which we are about to enter in the company of our bigger brothers and of our older playmates. they have told us so many things about it. from their accounts and from the fond memories of our parents we already know the school before we approach it, and its pleasing aspects invite us into the classroom. for the same reason we search for books we have never seen, and we are drawn towards new studies and pursuits. there is no leaping from ignorance to knowledge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy. the transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morning twilight merges into the first glimmerings of dawn, which in turn fade away under the dazzling flashes of sunrise. and even from the midst of darkness we yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow present to our consciousness, already illumined by our thought, warmed by our sentiments. or, in other words, the culture which we do not yet possess, and which we expect to get at school, is already implanted in our mind, where it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, fused and confused with the life of our spirit. having now reached this point, can we define culture? i am inclined for a moment to assume the rôle of don ferrante in manzoni's novel.[ ] by pedantic ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be a contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature everything is either a substance or an accident." contagion, he then went on to prove, could neither be the one nor the other; therefore the plague was but an influx of the stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; and having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, and died cursing the stars like an operatic hero. let us follow for a moment in the footsteps of this pedant, whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has had nevertheless a glorious history, and one which manzoni himself admired. i say: we can think only and we do think only two kinds of reality,--person or thing. every one of us is naturally drawn to this distinction; and when we have formulated it, we feel more or less vaguely, more or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised within these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to think any reality whatsoever. the reason is this: if we think, if we act, if we live, we inevitably place ourselves in a situation such that we on one side are as centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and on the other side are the objects toward which our activity is directed and by which it is terminated. _we_ therefore as subject of the entire surrounding world; and _this world_ as the end of our thoughts and of our scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our practical activity; the world which is represented in our consciousness, and which we strive to dominate by our labours, and our reason. can there be anything else beside _us_ and what _we_ think? the world which we think and which we oppose to ourselves seems at first to contain different kinds of objects. there seem to be both persons and things; simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call _things_ which can never become subjects; and persons who at first are represented to us as objects of our knowing, of our love, and of our hatred, as ends of our activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are transformed before our eyes into knowing and acting subjects, who, in other words, become just exactly what we are. but when we really get to know these beings that surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then we cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and as solely endowed with that material objectivity which at first put them in the same category with the inanimate things, with plants and animals. we then find them close to us, very close: fused with our own spiritual substance. we feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we constitute that person of whose existence i am aware every time i say _we_: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject, the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. the subject which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or rather in behalf of the _one man_ in whom all single individuals are united and with whom they are all identified. then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, "we and what is before us," "we and the objects," "we and the world," we have a correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in reality one person. one _person_, and things innumerable! as we look about us, we find the horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quantities of objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. the world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which strike our senses. this world rushes impetuously into our mind at the beginning of our natural experience. and these material objects are many not only _de facto_ but also _de jure_. they must be, they cannot but be many if we are to consider them as material things. it is their peculiar nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multitude. a material thing means a thing occupying space. and space is made up of elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. for it is the very nature of space to be divisible. when it is narrowed down to a point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be space. its divisibility signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in the whole. in fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss could not but be felt in each single part. a book, considered as a material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves stitched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought together again so that they will compose the same book as before. an iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into parts. things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in another respect. plants, animals, all living organisms, considered simply as objects occupying space and as therefore having certain dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. trees are cut into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. but considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an organism is not divisible. if we do divide it, each component part ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. such a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so that the whole can never be reconstituted. the various parts of an organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others, forming with them a true and essential unity. if we however try to find out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small, after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within itself and vivifies. if unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material, it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could not then be the unifying principle itself. hence the vanity of the efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic mass, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical relationships, and their mechanism. a material being, organically constituted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit. but the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely every attempt at division. a poem may be considered in a certain way as material, and may accordingly be divided into various parts,--stanzas, lines, words. but it is clear that such a separation cannot have the value which we assign to the divisions of things material. for in their case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word, calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated from them, loses the meaning which it had in the context; or rather it loses every meaning, and consequently perishes. it is true that by conjectures we interpret even very small fragments of ancient poems. but we do so only in so far as we claim the possibility of restoring approximately the entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by which it may be restored to life. likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as so many bleeding limbs of living discourses, to which they must somehow or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they really were and what functions they had. multiplicity of parts in things of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity, from which every element of the multiplicity derives its origin, its substance, and its life, so that we may give to it a real meaning and a foundation. nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are assumed to be spiritual. we have already considered the unity whereby, for example, the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and therefore a particular individuality. we shall now consider another unity. he who really perceives a poem is not confronted by an observable thing, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less independent of human personality. poetry is only understood when in the flowing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm of its words we grasp a sentiment in its development, a soul's throb in a moment of its life, a man, a personality. the poetry of dante is very different from that of petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully distinct personality. any composition of these poets is understood and enjoyed only when we feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes one poetical personality from the other. a poet without individuality has no significance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet. but the real artist leaves his imprint more or less markedly in all his productions, so that in every given instance, over and beyond the variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul of the poet. a poem then is the poet; it is a person and not a thing. and the same can be said, as we can easily see, of all things that are commonly called spiritual. but in addition to things material, it seems that there are immaterial ones which do not pertain as one's own to any particular person. the ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial entities, not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various material things,--were once conceived as things by philosophers, and they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men. it is not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they be in themselves thinkable. as a matter of fact, they may or may not be thought, no differently therefore from any of the material objects which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order that our senses may perceive them. these ideas are many, in a manner corresponding to the material objects; and they are all different. they mirror, so to speak, the multiplicity of material things in whose semblance and likeness they were devised. there are horses in nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to recognise all the animals that belong to that species. there are dogs, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them. and there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies, as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron, copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity. it is impossible to set a limit to ideas, because it is not possible ever to stop dividing, distinguishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds itself throughout space. this boundless multitude of ideas, through which our mind can rove, surely has no spatial extension. but because of the necessity of conceiving any multitude as existing in some kind of space, it was thought proper to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one. in other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions properly so called. but whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive ideas as many, each one of them existing by itself, and susceptible of being thought independently of the others. in reality however we never succeed in thinking them except as bound together and forming a system, in such a way that no single one of them can be thought except by thinking the others with it. take man as an instance: each one of us has intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word of which we may not even know the meaning. in thinking the idea we must think something which is its content. if we know what man is, we must be able to attribute a content to the idea of man. we may say, as the ancients did, that man is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal, because he is the only animal capable of expressing the emotions of his soul by laughter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other words, he is the only animal who is conscious of what goes on within him. or perhaps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, and we think this idea when we have thought the idea of _animal_ and the idea of _reason_. but can the idea of animal be thought by itself alone? it, as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all consistency. and so the mind that begins to think one single idea is compelled, almost dragged, to pass on to another, then to a third, and so on indefinitely. it finds itself in the condition of the man who tried to grasp a single link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not have it except on condition of taking the whole chain. so it is with ideas. we may not be capable of encompassing all of them in one single thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are interlaced, twisted, and entangled. they form an infinite chain, in which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one, because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and never reach the last. is not this the nature of the ideas as we see them, as they constitute the field from which we must harvest all our possible thoughts? ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any space whatsoever. our imagination may present them to us as so many lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot be separated one from the other and placed side by side. as i have already said: when we think one, we think them all. or in any event we should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. so that to our thought ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that something which we call science, truth, knowledge. they are not a multitude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be unthinkable. their connection with and participation in an absolute unity come from the fact that they are the object of thought, and are therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered, correlated, organised, unified. in order that we may say that one idea contains another, or many others, we must analyse this first idea and define it. this first idea must be distinguished from the others, and they likewise among themselves. it is not therefore sufficient to say that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere possible contemplation. there must also be some one to analyse them, define them, and distinguish them. it is not enough to have the material of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material, turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something susceptible of being thought. ideas as things would in no way be related among themselves. but they do have that relationship which is generated by thought as it thinks them. thought generates this relationship not as a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and which is continuously changing and developing. no ideal, abiding science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore result from this relationship. it constitutes instead a science which is ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light of the system into which it closely binds them. ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and scattered multiplicity. nor are they a mass of concurrent elements. they are thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these many limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never definitely perfected. there are not then many ideas; there is one idea, which is thought. only in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought, which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge. they are an indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every other one so as to answer the questions which thought constantly propounds. they are the human person, not the persons; for we have already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak of many persons; concretely there is but one universal person which is not multiplicable. there are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and things, material and spiritual. at the most there is one person, man, and there are the material things which constitute this nature, as it occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much as we consider ourselves beings of nature. nothing beyond this can be conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a manifold reality, indefinitely divisible. here we might perhaps stop considering the special interest that called forth this inquiry. for no one could possibly suppose for a moment that culture could be placed in the midst of material things rather than in the spiritual reality which is a person. however, since the intimate nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet clearly revealed, we must continue our investigations, and give more attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final. i mean the division of the world into persons and things: the equipoise of spirit and matter. do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its parts, in everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? matter can in truth be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity, that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter. what then is the meaning of multiplicity? in absolute terms we call multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every relationship with them. the materialist conceived the world as an aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. in the world of pure quantity, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up and divided, without any alteration taking place within the individual unit itself. numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative. but the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an absurd one. in order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. let us take a and b, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it from itself. if a did not so exclude b, something of b would be found in a, and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative. irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in common with it. without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. but this action by which each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a relationship? every effort therefore tending to break up reality into parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity. neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number, which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number. we could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. but then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it could not be anything at all. or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthinkable. thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple, and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming multiplicity. it adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak, the reality which it thinks. for it materialises the reality when it conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into its own spiritual substance. matter is a manifold reality, without unity. what it is we already have seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in the world in the midst of a congeneric multitude. now, since pure multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract entities. thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent, only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which it contributes to the making of the object represented. thought therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception. objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it. for matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is actualised. things are what we in our own thought counterpose to ourselves who think them. outside of our thought they are absolutely nothing. their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us, for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity implies spiritual unity. this then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however their root in us. not in "us" as we are represented ordinarily in the midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular passions. no! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we think, and agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including ourselves as opposed to things. and he who fails to reach this profound source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap, may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism, but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. he cannot upon further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so absurd as to become unthinkable. the world then is in us; it is our world, and it lives in the spirit. it lives the very life of that person which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but oftener unsatisfied and restless. and there is the life of culture. it is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality. this is our conclusion. we shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the problems of education. footnotes: [ ] _i promessi sposi_ ("the betrothed"). chapter vi the attributes of culture from the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the fundamental propositions of pedagogy. but in as much as this conception of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the spirit are also derived from it. in fact, we separate pedagogy from the philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience. to determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour to define its attributes. this way we must follow if we are ever to acquire a thorough comprehension of the principles of the several theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the life of education itself in its effective development. the assertion that "culture is the human spirit" means nothing unless we first define this spirit and understand its attributes. we cannot possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a concept are the constituent attributes of the reality which we strive to conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these attributes. the following example, appropriate even though trite, will make my meaning clearer. physical bodies cannot be conceived without also conceiving gravity. gravity is then an attribute of the physical body, and as such it determines the concept of it. in the same way, to conceive the spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which are absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit. this inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seems at times to be losing ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties that beset its advance. it is true, no doubt, that human thought, driven by the irresistible desire to know itself, has made some headway towards mastering the concept of itself. philosophy has indeed progressed, and the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers of antiquity. but the assiduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and in need of further elaboration, and has been pushing its investigations to such depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness at the roadside. men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date. they have stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on towards a more distant goal. for while this long history of the endeavours by which man struggles onward towards the understanding of his own nature is the basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit, yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is the bewildering "selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte"[ ] from which it is difficult ever to issue. and therefore it is much easier, as dante once remarked, to teach those who are completely ignorant than those who have a smattering of philosophy. but to-day culture is so intimately connected with philosophical speculation that the greater part of educated men profess this or that system without being aware of it. and when such men do take up the study of philosophy _per se_, they no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the speculative candour, which would enable them to grasp the obvious, evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical proposition. this inquiry then is difficult. it demands either a long, methodic, laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundamental truth, rigorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all convictions formerly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if they contradict his truth. for he trusts that these perplexities, these difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be removed in virtue of that very thought to which he has confidently committed himself. this unflinching resolve is the courage of the philosopher, who has never feared to brave common sense, and single-handed to marshal against the multitude the array of his seemingly absurd assertions, which however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have subsequently contributed to redeem this very multitude from error,--from that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic, political, and moral destitution. because of this inflexible firmness the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin atmosphere to which he is uplifted by thought, and where at first he has the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air. we must then muster up courage and relinquish all the ideas which we once accepted, even though they still tempt us with superficial glitterings of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in contradiction with experience. for i too hold experience to be the touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. but i insist that we be careful lest we confound the mockery of the first puppet that dupes our imagination with genuine experience; that in as much as every man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with whatever concept he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our conception of it is. now i say that no concept of experience can be validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions. such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established that "we" are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation of our personality, a thing among things. our "self" is the deeper one by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is discernible. the reality of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of experience. for once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of as constituting this world otherwise than as this world which _we_ see, which _we_ touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of _our_ experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this experience without referring it to _us_ who have it not as an object of possession but as an activity which we exercise. so that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our "self." we may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity. against this reality of the profound "us" which is the genuine spiritual reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. they are difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and infinite, and really universal.[ ] alone, because in it all opposites must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false, life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,--all things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. formidable difficulties indeed! and they are the problems of philosophy. it would be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept from which they derive. it is the philosopher's task, it is the strict duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the positions which it has captured in its onward march. for to yield ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be indispensable, that is impossible. those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites us all in one sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they constitute a real school. what then is this one, infinite, universal reality? is this question truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past been declared to be? for, it has been argued, in order to give an answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality to which the answer is referred. we must think it and therefore distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think. or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must, somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the opposite of the subject. or again: the subject cannot think itself, because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is thought. but all these objections together with many others of the same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort to this kind of argument. these opponents, strangely enough, miss the most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be familiar. they fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," he cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship _subject-object_, which, because of this very abstractness, is devoid of all consistency. the _ego_ is called "subject," because it contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical with it. as a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself, and thus originatively realises itself. in order to be _i_, i must know myself, i must set my own self in front of myself. only thus i am i, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my world or of my thought. for if i should not objectify myself to myself, if in the endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, i were to retreat into the first term,--a purely abstract one,--of this relationship by which i posit myself, i should remain on the hither side of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which i am to realise myself. so then by this inner objectification the subject does not at all depart from itself. it rather enters into its own subjectivity, and constitutes it. surely man may, narcissus-like, make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed semblance already determined and crystallised. but in so doing, he materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought from his own intimate being. this self-conversion from person into thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we fail to do so. philosophy then, as the thinking of the spirit in its absolute subjectivity, is the spirit's own life. for the spirit lives by constituting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by acquiring consciousness of itself. and while philosophising then, we cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our _self_ and is called the spirit. we cannot dispense with this inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry into the attributes of culture. the examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us, without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry itself. for what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word "spirit," the _ego_, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultimate characteristic which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself, that is, to what in man is essentially human. if we examine all the other differences that have been assigned or could be found by which the spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we neglect the most profound characteristic of spiritual reality, viz., that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. every form of reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as conditioning this very consciousness. and when we say of the spiritual being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive then its spiritual being in a manner analogous to that by which we conceive material or bodily being,--externally visible, but internally unknown. and we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural, similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the spirit sets in opposition to itself. but the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its course, no predetermined inevitable lot. it has no fixed qualities, no set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can never trespass. the spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false, or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. to be or not to be man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did not _become_. man is not man by virtue of natural laws. he _becomes_ man. by man i do not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds, who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. man from the time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. he makes himself what he is the first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says "_i_,"--the "i" which never would have been uttered, had he not been aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and through his own determination. this freedom which is man's prerogative offers merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or self-making. for in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way which does not admit of being considered as man's prerogative. does not every living being _become_? the plant vegetates only because it too has an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other being could from the outside have conferred upon it. and yet the plant is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to the spirit. i might without further thought say that this conception of becoming, referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant does not _become_ for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. but i shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this reality. when so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide with the conception of freedom. becoming, then, can be taken in two ways, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _autonomous_ and the _heteronomous_. that is, the being which becomes may have the law of its becoming either in itself or outside of itself. becoming covers such cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is poured. but this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is, as the result of that act which is being performed by man. an heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause which produces it. the plant vegetates, and its vegetation is a development, a becoming. but could it grow without the rays of the sun, the moisture of the soil? the plant vegetates in consequence of its nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still when it was in its infinitely remote origin. it is evident therefore that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak, within a given plant. whether we call it nature or name it god, this law transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. but the becoming of man is autonomous. if he _becomes_ intelligent, that is, if he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not grasp. if he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of goodness. but in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. what does this autonomous becoming consist in? simply to notice its existence would never help us to understand it. every fact is intelligible only as an effect of a cause. and a cause is a cause on condition that it be a thing other than the effect. in order to understand the autonomous becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact, that is, as something done. a thing made presupposes the making; and from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings which we witness as mere spectators. the doing in which our autonomous becoming is detected is that one of which _we_ are not spectators but actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking activity. this then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our existence. it is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b, and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as thought. thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes. every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. only thought, only the spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty. but whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," the important thing is to avoid the mistake, which was general in the past and is still very common to-day, of separating this attribute of the spirit from the spirit itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is properly called the attribute. for example, we say that the triangle is a three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be able to distinguish and therefore to separate logically the idea of _triangle_ from the idea of _three-sided plane figure_. but a little reflection will make it evident that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing unless we at least think the plane trilateral figure. so that we do not really have two ideas, which however closely connected may yet be separated to be conjoined again: what we have is one single idea. and such is the agreement of the becoming and of the spirit, and in general of every attribute and of the reality to which it belongs. when we begin inquiring whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an erroneous track which will take us into a blind alley with no possibility of exit. all the unsurmountable difficulties encountered at all times by the advocates of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error of first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality may be for which freedom is claimed) and of subsequently propounding the question of its properties. for the spirit is _free_ in as much as it is nothing else than _freedom_; and the spirit "becomes" in as much as it is nothing else than "becoming," and this becoming cannot therefore be considered as the husk enveloping the kernel--the spirit. there is no kernel to the spirit: it is in no manner comparable to a moving body in which the body itself could be distinguished from motion, and would admit therefore of being thought as in a state of rest even though rest is considered impossible. the spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is motion without a mass,--a motion surely that cannot be represented to our imagination, for the very reason that motion is peculiar to the body and does not belong to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of bodies, and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. this idea of motion without a mass, baffling as it is to our imagination, is perhaps the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. in order to avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and therefore unpractical, we may resort to material expressions, and speak of the nature of the spirit as of a "thing" which becomes, and use such words as "kernel" and "husk." but we must never lose sight of the fact that this manner of speaking, which is appropriate for things, is not suitable for the spirit, and can be resorted to only with the understanding that the spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its whole being consists solely in its becoming. we are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the pedagogical interest of this reduction. culture, as the entire content of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing, and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. it does not exist in libraries or in schools, or in us before we go to school, or while we still remain within its walls, or after our nourished minds have taken leave of it. it is in no place, at no time, in no person. culture _is not_, because if it _were_, it would have to be some "thing," whereas by definition it is the negation of that which is capable of being anything whatever. it is culture in so far as it _becomes_. culture exists as it develops, and in no other manner. it is always in the course of being formed, it _lives_. but to understand this _life_, and in order to grasp more firmly this "idea" of culture which is a spiritual banner to rally educators, i must again bring up a certain distinction. culture, i said, lives (that is, it is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is entirely different from the life which biologically animates all living beings, ourselves included. the difference can be stated as follows: in the case of every other life, we can assert its existence in so far as we have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. it is always, however, different from us and from our knowing it; so much so that the possibilities of going astray are very great. but for the life of culture, which is the life of our spirit, we have no need of being informed by the experience of others, or even of ourselves. we live it. it is our very thought,--this thought which may indeed err in respect to what is different from itself, as not tallying with it; but which cannot possibly deceive us in regard to itself, since it is unable not to be itself. the life of culture is not a spectacle but an activity. nor is it activity for some and a spectacle for others. culture is never a show for any one. no person can ever know for his fellow being. what, for me, aristotle knows, is what i know of aristotle. culture,--this untiring activity which never for a moment turns into a spectacle for any of us, which ever therefore demands effort and toil,--could not avoid becoming a show and being made up into a "thing," could not escape the danger of dying as culture by degenerating into something anti-spiritual, fruitless, and material, if, while yet being activity, it were not at the same time in some way a spectacle to itself. this point demands careful consideration. it is not sufficient to say that culture, that thought is life, and not the thought of life. we will not attain the conception of culture by merely contrasting, as we have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with the life of others which we behold as spectators, or by opposing the life of ourselves as thinking beings to the life we possess as organic beings, to the life of our senses by which we are on a par with the other animals. the life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and subjectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, by analogy with life in a biological sense, as irreflective and instinctive, or, as they say, as simple intuition. but thought which though living is irreflective becomes indeed an active performance, a drama without spectators, but it also remains as a drama represented for spectators who are absent, and who should be informed of those things which direct experience had not placed before their eyes. and it is difficult to surmise who would impart to them this information if the house were empty. in other words, i mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that is, as thought itself. for that reason we can never effectively think it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought of as natural. who can say what the life of the plant is? to posit nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and therefore unthinkable. this perhaps would not necessarily be a serious drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. for would it not be sufficient to live it? why insist on _thinking_ its life? why demand a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? but there is a drawback, and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible life of thought. in fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we must first think it. but how could we think it, if the only possible life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which we think this irreflective life? so then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as i started out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. as a result of more careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. in it the actors play to themselves. it is self-conscious activity. it is activity perpetually watching over itself. and again: just as the becoming of the spirit would cease to be that one sole becoming which it actually is, were we to distinguish the spirit from its becoming, so the consciousness of spiritual activity would also become unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philosophers insistently do, between activity and awareness, between the performance and the show. the distinction here too arises from referring to the spirit, the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking of things. in the sphere of things, doing is one thing, watching the thing as it is done is another. but to us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be the very negation of this distinction between actor and spectacle, so that in saying that the actor is his own spectator we cannot introduce, within the unity in which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is excluded from the concept of the spirit. i have spoken of "motion without mass," turning a deaf ear to the claims of our imagination. now i shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws which govern our image-making; and i shall do so in order to make it very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is swept over by our imagination. i shall now call the spirit a gazing motion. the spirit's acting--its eternal process, its immanent becoming--is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself, which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit goes on constantly impersonating itself. _it is this very acting._ in accordance with the popular point of view which, as i have said, is shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. but if the spirit in that it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. the will which _qua_ will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. it is nature and not spirit. and a thought which _qua_ thought is not will, is, in respect to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. if there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to characterise the opposition between nature and spirit. should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is spirit a moving mass; should we, grounded on the naïve and primitive conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things, demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. we would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture. culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued. nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses us restlessly on a sick-bed. the spirit's life is not vexation but liberation from care. for the greatest of sorrows, leopardi tells us, is _ennui_, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do, and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very antithesis of the life of the spirit. the negation of this life,--the obstacles, the hindrances, the halts it encounters,--that is the source of woe. but life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our activity. another man's activity as the negation of our own is troublesome and exasperating. the music which we enjoy (and we are able to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. but the musical entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our work, irritates us. our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of displeasure to our hearts. culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a drudgery. it would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had realised itself without our efforts. but our effort, our work is this very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. work is not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. it is liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty asserts its being. work may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed. but in such cases it is not work which vexes us, but rather its opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. it follows then that the more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by pain. for as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a richer life. culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit, or better, its liberation and its beatification. as the realisation of the spirit's own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the source of blissfulness. but it must not be regarded as the fated, inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law. the building of a bird's nest, which is the necessary antecedent to generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the bird or a source of suffering. instinct leads the individual to self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. but not even this fact, vouched for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. so that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. it will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct, conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man's work. human occupation is personality, will, consciousness. the animal does not work. but culture we have said is work. for it is liberty, self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the development itself. culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and it is constituted solely by being developed. and what is more, as we shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint. to conclude then: culture _is_ (in its becoming) only to the extent that the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. it is a value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. the value which man assigns to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to _his_ own culture, and whose development coincides with the development of his own personality. what we ought to want is exactly what we do want; but we want just that which we ought to. the ideal, not the abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually working. and the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming. but work implies a programme, and spirit means "ideal;" and when we speak of culture we signify thereby the value of culture, of a culture which as yet is not but which must be. life is the life of the spirit as a duty,--as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. and culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose development our personality is pledged. so interpreted, culture, far from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph of our very freedom. on these terms only, culture is a growth, and the spirit a becoming. this attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute of becoming any more than "becoming" was superadded to "freedom." for just as becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. freedom is never true liberty unless it is a process, an absolute becoming; but becoming can only be absolute by being moral. and it is therefore impossible to speak of learning which is not ethical. it has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. but is the true a different category from the good? are they not rather one sole identical category? truth could be maintained in a place quite distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with an assumed external object. but now by truth we understand the value of thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we discover that morality is identical with it. for knowing is acting, but an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--duty. and in this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship truth with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral mission. the cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality, which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task which is the good. if we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of culture. footnotes: [ ] "forest savage, rough, and stern."--dante, _inferno_, i. . [ ] many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this universal as concrete and immanent. few, however, effectively fix their thought on that universality which alone is such, which alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. and so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality, the reality of thought. therefore i have here used the expression "really universal".--g. g. chapter vii the bias of realism educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and institutions on the basis of the conception set forth in the previous chapters. the subtle discussions required to make this conception clear must have convinced the reader that this work of educational reform could only succeed if preceded by such philosophical doctrines as have recently been evolved in italy and are now becoming the accepted faith of the newer generation. to this new belief the school must be converted, if it is ever going to conquer that freedom which has been its constant aspiration, and which seems to be an indispensable condition for its further growth. the faith of the modern man cleaves to a life conceived and directed idealistically. he believes that life--true life--is man's free creation; that in it, therefore, human aims should gain an ever fuller realisation; and that these aims, these ends will not be attained unless thought, which is man's specific force, extends its sway so as to embrace nature, penetrate it, and resolve it into its own substance. he believes that nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, yields readily to its will, not being _per se_ opposed or repugnant to the life and activity of the spirit, but rather homogeneous and identical with it. he believes, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained by amplifying, strengthening, and constantly potentiating our human energy, which means thinking, knowing, self-realising; and that self-realisation is not possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and unless it affirms itself as absolute infinite activity. this is the _kingdom of man_ prophesied at the dawn of modern thought. this is the work which science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and perfecting in the last three hundred years. this new spiritual orientation has to a certain extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along idealistic lines. this transformation, strange to say, has been effected in part by means of institutions which have arisen as a result of the recent development of industrial life and of the corresponding complexity in economic and social relations. these schools, because of their names, seem to be quite removed from the idealistic tendencies of modern civilisations. whether they be called technical, business, or industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact the result of a realistic conception of life. but such realism, we must remember, is far from being opposed to our idealism, and should not be compared with the realism which we have objected to. we should rather consider it as the most effective demonstration of the idealistic trend of our times. for these institutions are founded on the theory that knowledge increases man's power in the world by enabling him to overcome the obstacles by which nature, if ignored and unknown, would hinder the free development of civilisation in general, and of those individuals in particular in whom and through whom civilisation becomes actual. realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the idealistic conception of life and culture, was shown to be based on a conception of reality which exists totally outside of human thought and of the civilisation which is produced by it,--of a reality existing _per se_ in such a way that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, can be conceived which will have the power of bending this reality toward itself, of resolving it within itself. this realistic point of view is not different from the outlook of the primitive man who, awed by the might of nature, kneels submissively before its invisible power, which, he thinks, controls these forces. it is the accepted belief of the naïve and dreamy consciousness of child-like humanity; but it is none the less a conception which is opposed to the course constantly followed by civilisation. its dangers must be made very clear and its menace removed from the path of its triumphant enemy. to overcome this realistic point of view in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who must be in a position to recognise it, and to track it into whatever hiding places it may lurk. i intend therefore in this chapter to point out some of the most notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely stamped out, if we are really convinced of the spiritual character of culture and of its essential attributes. i shall here bring up again a consideration which i touched upon in the first chapter,--an idea which is the fundamental prejudice of the realistic theory of education in its antagonism to the profound exigencies of the free spiritual life which education should promote. i mean the idea of science (with a capital s),--that science which is imagined as towering over and above the men who toil and suffer, think and struggle in quest of its light and of its force; that science which would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, were it not for the fact that it does not exist. this science is looked upon as infallible, without crises, without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines, without parties, and without nationality,--without history in short; for history is full of these baser occurrences; and men, without a single exception, even the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all in some measure prone to err. the exceptions which are adduced to contradict this statement are so few, so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting distinctions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when we consider that even granting the infallible oracular character of some men's utterances, the fact remains that his listeners must undergo the process of understanding him, and in so doing they may go astray. so that from superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back instantly to human fallibility. infallible science, then, is not known, cannot be known to mankind; for the simple reason that we who constitute it are subject to error, and being ourselves prone to fail, we expose science to the same danger. if it does exist somewhere it surely is not in this world in which we live, thinking, knowing, and--creating science. this mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, segregated from all possible intercourse with thought, ever soaring in the pure air of divine essences, is yet the mother of a numerous offspring, the parent of countless daughters as virginal and as infallible as the mother herself. these are the particular sciences, bearing various names, but all of them equally worthy of the distinction of the capital s in the eyes of their realistic worshippers. this mythology is taught in the schools which too often are called, and without any figurative meaning, the shrines of learning. conceived as divinely superlative, as something which, though revealed historically by the successive discoveries of privileged minds, is none the less sharply distinct from the history of humanity, science descends into the school. there it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend to the heaven of truth. and so the school comes to be looked upon as a kind of temple, as the church where the inspired word of the sacred books is read and explained by those who have been chosen by the divinity to act as its interpreters, as preachers of the faith. with this religious conception of the school we connect the "mission" of the educator, whose task, when not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers who at all times have jeered at the teachers of divinity, has been surrounded by a glamour of religiosity. we see them encircled by that halo of distant respect which we naturally connect with those who, acting as intermediaries between us and the deity, are themselves transfigured and deified. the school then is looked upon as a temple in which the pupil receives his spiritual bread. but not so the home which the boy must leave, that he may satisfy his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. not so the street, where the small boys gather, drawn together by the irresistible need of pastime, by the sweet desire of frolicsome companionship, by the unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which there makes its way into the child's mind far off from the classroom, and lavishes upon it its own light, its portion of thought, its share of new experiences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of sympathetic spirituality. the custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is regarded as a divine, as the minister who imparts the consecrated elements of science, who leads the pupil to the "panem angelorum," as dante calls it. but our fathers and mothers are not so regarded,--they who were the first custodians of a greater temple, the world, to whose marvels they gradually initiated our growing minds; they who by the use of speech taught us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the best of schools will ever be able to teach us in the future; not our elder brothers to whom we always looked up in emulation, and from whom, even more than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and the words suited to our needs; not our grandmother, who long before our eager phantasy might roam through the printed pages, gently led us into fairyland, and there, in the enchantments of a magic world, disclosed to us that humanity which books and teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us. no! there are no altars to science except in the schoolhouse, and none but educators may minister to its cult. this mythological lore is not merely a harmless form of imagery, against which it might be pedantic to rebel. it is a real superstition, which has its roots deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy trunk, drains its sap, weakens it, deadens it. for when we have stripped this conception of education of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly religious and realistic thought, which is professed with firm adhesion of the mind and complete devotion of the soul, as the inviolable norm of the whole activity which pertains to the object of this norm itself. let us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the doctrine of methods, the so-called methodology, which is an important part of didactics, and a very considerable section in the whole field of pedagogics. the doctrine of methods comprises a general treatment, which corresponds to what we called the mother-science, and a particular treatment for the individual sciences. there is methodology of learning in general, and there are methodics for the several disciplines, or at least for each group of disciplines, into which learning is divided and subdivided in accordance with the logical processes adopted in any particular case, or in accordance with the objects of these disciplines. to each method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a teaching method, so that there is one general didactic method, and many special ones by which the general method is to be applied. but what is the method of a science if not the logical scheme or the form of a certain scientific knowledge? and, on the other hand, what can be known as to the form of anything, unless we have the thing itself before us in its form and with its contents? in order to define the form of a science, and say, for example, that it is deductive in mathematics and inductive in chemistry, we must first presuppose the existence of these sciences themselves. but in them form is never anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that content. this is made clear if we consider the methodologies which logicians presume to define in the abstract, and with no regard to the determined content of the corresponding sciences. we notice that they are able to present a successful exposition and formulation only by fixing the meaning of each formula by the use of examples, thereby passing from the abstract to the concrete, and showing the method to be within the concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to extract it. in the same way every philosophical system has its method; but whenever criticism has endeavoured to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order then to show how it has been applied in the construction of the system itself, it has been forced in every case to admit that the method already contained the system within itself, that it was the system itself. so that it would have no value whatsoever, it could not even be grasped by thought in its particular determinateness, if it were not presented as the natural form of that precise thought. no harmful results would follow, if this assumption merely implied the accepting of science and methods as existing by themselves previous to the learning of science by means of its respective method; if it resulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossibility of conceiving science and methods as existing outside of the human mind where they actually do live and exist. if this were all, we should merely take notice of it as a speculative error which affected only the solution of the particular problem in which it appeared. but in the life of thought, where everything is united and connected in an organic system, every point of which is in relation to every other point, there is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are felt in the whole system, and they react on thought as a whole. and since thought is activity itself,--life's drama, as we called it,--every error infects the entire life. let us then consider the consequences of this realistic conception of methodology. science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is one, immutable, unaltered: it is removed from the danger of error and of human fallibility, and protected from the alternate succession of ignorance and discovery; incapable therefore of progressing and of developing because it was complete from the very beginning, and is eternally perfect. but such a science is quite different from the one which grows in the life of culture, and is the free formation of the human personality. this one is ever changing, always admitting all possible transformations, different from individual to individual, and different also in the mind of the same person. it lives only on condition that it never fix itself, that it never crystallise, that it place no limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself and incessantly to develop. science as culture, as personality, is free, perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied. if we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only one sole, definite, immutable method,--one for everybody, and devoid of freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral evaluation. we should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as compelling as the laws of nature. but by obedience to such a principle, the spirit could not affirm itself: such compliance is surrender and abdication, not the realisation of some good. the most that could be said of it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which alienates us from a primitive good which is not ours, and not being ours cannot truly be good. a fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless dilemma: ( ) either refuse to submit, and thus save life at the cost of all that makes life worth living--_propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_ (which evidently would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives solely on condition that it recognise no pre-established laws, that it be free from the bondage of nature, that it create its own law, its own world, freely; and that, on the other hand, the _cause_ of living, what constitutes the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit's reality which realises itself in science, and therefore in the method of science). ( ) or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save its worth--_propter causas vivendi perdere vitam_ (which is absurd; for what is the worth of life if there is no life?). however that may be, the type of education that presupposes a certain ideal of knowledge previously constituted and ready to be imparted by the teacher to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, must follow a method, a unique one--the method of science, and therefore of the teacher, and therefore also of the pupil, whether the latter is capable of it or not. for it is tacitly assumed that science==method; science==teacher; science==pupil. on the strength of these equations the common term "science" should suffice to identify the first method, which is the one of science in itself, with the last, which is the method of science to be mastered by the pupil. but the above series of equations is false, because, admitting the first, the one namely on the basis of which we are now discussing, neither the second nor the third is possible without passing from realistic to idealistic science,--two very different things, as i have shown. even if we leave the teacher out of consideration, we shall have to remember that the pupil learns a science by making it his own,--a fallible science, which he may understand up to a certain point and no further. it will be one of the many sciences which have no one given method, but many of them, and the pupil can only avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising science by following that way which is very broad, very easy, and, alas, only too well beaten,--the royal road of non-learning, which is diligently upkept by all the schools which have to teach precise, well-defined science, and have a pre-established method by which to teach it. but, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a fictitious entity in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? and what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an abstract and mechanical method? this is true enough; but man learns to compromise with all deities, science included. this divinity, in order somehow to exist, must assume a few human traits without however renouncing her divine prerogatives. the fact that apollo held no communion with the pythian priestess did not remove the oracular sanctity from the delphic response. for man knows no deity other than the one which he is capable of conceiving with his soul, just as he knows no other red besides the one which he sees with his own eyes. science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is nothing but the science which _he_ knows. and he knows it because he has constructed it in the form in which he knows it: _fingit creditique_. but this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences i have deplored. for he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is only his own. it becomes therefore the content of the institution and determines its method. but a teacher who does not feel inclined to teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing between his ideal and his personality, he too _fingit creditique_. he believes that the school authority has erred, and that science, as he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines. but in his mind his science is not his own. it is, he is confident, that sovereign science which by his method and through his cult must enlighten the school over which he rules. and so at the point of arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. it works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act, namely, by going amiss. it fails and will always continue to fail, not so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its autonomous ethical becoming. a science, which is supposed to exist before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to trace its way back to the spirit. by presupposing science, teachers materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to be not theirs, but the pupils', for whom they work and in whose behalf the school was instituted. methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicuously reveal the realistic prejudices of school technique; and against these educators should constantly be on their guard. for these prejudices have, as vico would put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems to be definitely uprooted and completely done away with, only to reappear, alas! in a different form and with an ever renewed lease of life. the motive is the following: the school is created when people are conscious of a certain amount of knowledge already attained, well defined, and recognised as valuable. likewise man's value socially is estimated on the work done, and it is on the basis of this finished work that he is credited with the acquisition of a certain personality. this is assuredly no longer a becoming but a being; an existent thing, already realised, which, though a contradiction in terms for those of us who have mastered the concept of the attributes of the spirit, is not thereby condemned as accidental and disposed of once for all. for it is also true that culture, personality, science,--spiritual reality in short,--is a reality, and true it is that when we know it, we know it as already realised. we may indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for example, dante, dante himself, is _our_ dante, is "we." but yet this "we" looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular "we." it is truth; it is science. and before this divine truth, before this science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology, but--our experience, our life. thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. i meditate and inquire into the mystery of the universe unceasingly; but in the background of my inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges my exploring mind onward. mystery itself is not mystery unless it be known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. inquiry is therefore at once a research and a discovery. and this untiring activity, which knows neither sleep nor rest, is mirrored before its own eyes and lives in the fond contemplation of its reflected image, which image in its objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, is mobile. and no man ever felt so keenly the humility and meanness of his powers, no one ever presumed so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn by his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before himself, exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. and on the other hand we cannot but affirm our immortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals which impose upon us sentiments of humility. the error which we must victoriously contend against is not this ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is also the objectivity of all things). what we must fight against is mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in front of the object as soon as we get it. a deplorable failing indeed, since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it again. for the object, in short, does exist, but in the subject; and in order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of the subject. a textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living thing; and a living thing, that is, _spirit_, it will continue to be for the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by the author of the manual. for the manual, as a book intended for the teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor makes it. he, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as _his_ book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the living process of his personal thought. this done, he will have done but one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a teacher. for his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. so that we should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual, which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a _hand_-book, but a spiritual guide for the _mind_. unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils. teachers should carefully watch themselves. if the book begins to feel heavy in their hands, it is a sign that it is becoming a burden on the pupils' minds. it will end by stifling their mental life, unless its oppressive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened consciousness of the instructor. teachers should never for an instant become remiss in their loving solicitude for their school. when their book, the book they selected for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture for which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils' book, cherished by them as a thing of their own, intimately bound up with their persons, then it is high time to throw it away. for the moment a book loses its power to attract it instantly begins to repel. it then becomes an instrument of torture and a menace for the life of the youthful minds entrusted to the teachers' care. dictionaries and grammars go side by side with handbooks,--instruments of culture that are only too often converted into engines of torture. the abuse of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary instruction too, and teachers should know what such books are, and be enlightened as to their limitations. otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. a lexicon is a burial ground for the mortal remains of those living beings which we call human words, each one of which always lives in a context, not because it is there in bodily company, in the society of other words, but because in every context it has a special signification, being the form of a precise thought or state of mind, as we may wish to call it. a word need not be joined to other words to form that complex which grammarians call a sentence. it may stand alone, all by itself, and constitute a discourse, and express a thought, even a very great thought. the "_fiat_" of the book of genesis is an example. what is requisite is that the word, whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual expression of a soul. when joined to the soul a word, which materially is identical with countless other words uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar accents of the respective personalities, reveals its particular expression, is a particular word not to be ever compared with any of those countless ones materially identical with it. the biblical "_fiat_," repeated by men who feel within them the almighty word of the creator, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is always reinforced by richer tones, and will always continue to do so, as a result of the numerous ways that men have of picturing to themselves the deity, and in accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, and sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity may converge into the expression of a person's spiritual life. so that if, abstractly considered, it is the word that we read, always the same, in the sublime passage of genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of forms, as though an infinite number of words. but in dictionaries, words are sundered from the minds, detached from the context, soulless and dead. a good lexicon--and those that are put in the hands of pupils are seldom satisfactory--should always in some way restore the word to the natural context, enchase it, so to speak, in the jewel from which it was torn. it should never presume to give meanings of abstracted words, but ought to point them out as they exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy representatives of the language or of the literature. dictionaries so compiled do away partly with the objectionable abstractness, but are yet unable to conjure the dead from their tombs. their weakness and insufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context of a word, in which it lives concretely, and from which therefore it draws its meaning, is in reality not the brief phrase, which is all that historical dictionaries can quote, but rather the entire work of the author from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours it may possess and its own peculiar shade. and the whole work in turn can be understood only in connection with the boundless historical environments out of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where its thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their special significance. the insufficiency of the dictionary comes out even more clearly from another and more important consideration. an historical dictionary of the italian language will, for example, tell us how machiavelli used the word "virtue" (_virtù_), and by the examples adduced we should see or perhaps surmise the meaning of that word, the knowledge of which is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the mind of the cultured reader the thought of machiavelli is restored to life, and with it the concept which he was wont to express by the term "virtue." but idealistically speaking, is this word machiavelli's or is it ours,--a word belonging to us who are inquiring into his thoughts? it is ours, by all means, and for the reason that it belongs to _our_ machiavelli. unless we have then within us this our machiavelli, it is useless for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dictionary. in it surely we may find it, but as a dead body to be resurrected only by remembering that its life is not in the printed page but in _us_, and only in us. in our life everything will have to be resuscitated that is to become part of our culture. and the same applies to grammars. as people conceive them and use them, what are they if not a schematic arrangement of the forms by which words are joined so as to constitute speech? and how can we cut the discourse to the quick and extract these schemes, without at the same time destroying its life? the scheme is a "part of speech," and it is a rule. grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of speech, considered singly and collectively. but the grammatical scheme--part of speech or rule--abstracts a generic form from the particular expression in such a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, shall be the conjugation of many verbs but not of any determined one. the rule governing the use of the conditional is in the same way referred to every verb which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but to no one verb in a peculiar manner. but since no speech contains a verb which might present to us a verbal form which is not also the form of a determined verb, nor a conditional which does not point with precision to the action or occurrence subordinated to a condition, it is evident that the scheme places before us, not the living and concrete body of the speech, but a dissected and dead part of this body. i shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by the difficulties inherent in the normative character ordinarily attributed to grammatical schemes. i shall simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only if the example accompanies it; and the example always turns out to be a living discourse, within which therefore we meet again the scheme, but liberated from the presumed abstractness to which it had been confined by the grammarian. and i shall merely add that the grammatical norm, which in the realistic conception of grammar is presented as a rule, anteceding actual speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the speaking itself, which brings out its normative force only in the act itself of speaking. in spite of this, however, the majority of people consider grammar as an antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore to the life of the spirit. it appears to them as a reef on which the freedom of the personality must be driven in the course of its becoming, bearing down as it does on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon of actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. to them grammar is legislation passed by former writers and speakers, prescribing norms for those who intend to use the same language in the future. against this myth, and the consequent idol of grammar worshipped as a thing which has not only the right, but the means also, of controlling and oppressing the creative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be constantly on their guard, if they feel bound to respect and protect the spirituality of culture. neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind of misguided preceptive teaching should be allowed to introduce into the school the menace of realism which lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive systems. a precept is a mere historical indication, a sign which points to something that was done as to something that had to be done then and is to be done now. it was done and it was thought that it had to be done. but what was done cannot be done over again, and what was thought cannot again be thought. life knows no past other than the one which it contains within its living present. the precept has no value excepting as that precept which we in every single instance intuit, and which we must intuit, being spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of _our_ thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, in short, which is our becoming. if we look upon a precept as transcending this becoming, and as an antecedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore imperil our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to mean not simply the failure to foster the growth of the spirit, but a deliberate attempt to hinder and thwart its development and to blight the function of culture. one more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still be pointed out, and it will be the last. it is one of those time-worn devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the entire life of the school--the composition. teachers expect and demand that a predetermined and definite theme, as a nucleus of a thought organism, as _leit-motif_, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling principle for moral or speculative reflections, be developed by pupils who may yet have never given the topic a single thought, who may possibly be not at all attuned to that definite spiritual vibration, who may in short be quite removed from the line along which the theme should be developed. in the lower grades the line itself is marked, the entire contour is given, and the pupil's mind is arbitrarily encompassed within this fixed outline. these methods are now fortunately applied with diminished rigour and less crudely than before. but the fact remains that in all classes the teacher either assigns a theme at random, picking a topic from a casual reading or from among the whims of his rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and carefully studies the possibilities of a subject, and develops it to a certain extent before he assigns it; so that he naturally expects the pupil's treatment to conform to his own delineation; and he values the composition in proportion as it approaches the rough draft which he had previously sketched in his mind. here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty of a thought which is presupposed to thinking, which therefore binds it, strains it and racks it out of its healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live without freedom. the dangers are many that beset us in the practice of theme-composition, and not all of them of a merely intellectual character. there is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises, such as we have considered, not only jeopardises the formation of the intelligence by urging it along a line of false and empty artificiality to the postiche and the appliqué, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens the moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles them into a sinful familiarity with insincerity, which might perhaps become downright cheating. composition however in itself is not taboo for the idealist. like grammar and every other instrument of the teaching profession it must be converted from the abstract to the concrete. we should never demand of the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never unfairly expect of his mind what it cannot yet give. the boy must not be given a subject drawn from a world with which he is unfamiliar. but when the subject springs naturally from the pupil's own soul, in the atmosphere of the school, and as a part of the spiritual life which unites him to his teacher and to his classmates, then composition, like every other element of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an unfailing progress. for whatever has been frozen by the chill of realism, and has been consequently made unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be revived in the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, and be thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous and vigorous current of spiritual reality. chapter viii the unity of education having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the phases that are most harmful to education, i shall now proceed to discuss the fundamental corollary of the idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the ravages of realism. for, as i have already shown, the realistic conception of life and culture is by no means a minor error which could be corrected as soon as discovered. originating in a primitive tendency which impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase before it can freely emerge into the loftier consciousness of self and power (which is the conquest of idealism), this error again and again crops out of even the most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. so that if at any moment our higher reflection slackens its vigilance, the error creeps back into the midst of our ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and resumes its former sway over thought. it is not sufficient then to become aware of the faults of realism and of the prejudices in which it is mirrored; we must, in addition to all this, strengthen in our minds the intuition of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle, more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy of a faith which, after taking possession of our souls, shall become our life's character. we must therefore look intently at the significance of that principle which identifies culture with man's personality, notice its most important consequences, and set these up as the laws of education, since by education we mean the creation of a living culture which shall be the life of the human mind. the first and foremost of these consequences, the direct corollary of our proposition, is the concept of the _unity of education_. though often referred to, it has not yet been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been the aim of the work of teachers. neither theory nor practice--more intimately connected than is ordinarily supposed--shows as yet that this concept is understood and adequately appreciated. it is opposed with full force by the realistic conception which, keeping man distinct from his culture, and materialising this culture, naturally attributes to it, and to education in which it is reflected, that multiplicity and fragmentariness which is the characteristic of things material. this scrappiness of culture and of education is the error on which all the prejudices of realistic pedagogy are grounded. it is the enemy that must be vanquished in the course of the crusade that has been preached by idealism in its endeavour to liberate instruction from the deadly oppression of mechanism. but in order to combat this foe we must first know it: and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity of education which it antagonises with uncompromising opposition. if we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses, if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is broken up by divisions and subdivisions _ad infinitum_, exactly as though it were a material object, which because material possesses infinite divisibility. textbooks tell us that education is ( ) physical, ( ) intellectual, ( ) moral. then narrowing the subject down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific, literary, philosophical, religious, etc. again, artistic education will be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of the classification its corresponding method of teaching. it goes without saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study of zoology. and there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and hours, the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several educations. it is taken for granted that education, properly so called, will result from the ensemble of these particular educations--physical, intellectual, moral, etc.,--each one of which contributes its share to the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. and each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove to yield a crop of peaches. every part, self-contained and quite distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from itself. therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and there must accordingly be specialised teachers. and again each instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which compose his subject. the teacher of history, for example, when he takes up the french revolution, must forget the unification of italy, and treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of italian will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week, and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works themselves. so also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two parts of the teacher's work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power to maintain discipline is another. it is one thing to be able to keep the class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the pupils. discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real teaching comes after. for, it is argued, discipline has no cultural content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to call it, the development of real culture,--a disposition which is obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured. the recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to come. and if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we should have no school at all. there are teachers, in fact, who keep good discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of culture or because they are deficient in methods. all these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to consider their validity. and, in truth, it is because of this lack of consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our ways. this lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision in the handling of these concepts. they are formulated without much rigour with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too jarringly clash. first of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating discipline from education. what is often done is to distinguish discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education. mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. but this kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education--discipline and instruction--and their subordination to the generic concept of education are more easily formulated than comprehended. for if we should distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of development. but the relationship which exists between any two parts of instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which is different from it. we might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic of this absolute antecedence the establishment of the authority without which teaching, properly so called, cannot begin. but the objection to this would be that every moment of the teaching process presupposes a new authority, which can never be considered as definitely acquired, which is constantly being imposed anew, and which must proceed at every given instance from the effective spiritual action exercised by the teacher upon the pupil. in other words, i mean to say that no teacher is able independently of the merits of his teaching to maintain discipline simply and solely on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force of character, or any other suitable qualification. for whoever he may be, and whatever the power by which at the start he is able to attract the attention of his pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the teacher as he begins to impart information ceases to be what he was immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of his pupils an ever changing individual,--bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and therefore more or less worthy of that attention and that respect of which boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light and joy. the initial presentation is nothing more than a promise and an anticipation. in the course of teaching this anticipation must not be disappointed, this promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than fulfilled by the subsequent developments. the teacher's personality as revealed at the beginning must be borne out by all that he does in the course of the lesson. experience confirms this view, and the reason of it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us of the spirit that never _is_ definitely, but is always constituting itself, always _becoming_. and every man is esteemed and appreciated on the strength of what he shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue of the experience which we continue to have of his being,--a being which is the development in which he realises himself. so, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and in such a way that the teacher may proceed to build on it as on a firm basis without any further concern. and it is therefore difficult to see how we could possibly sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline from the duty of imparting instruction. nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. the difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming, and cannot be found. i maintain that were it possible for the teacher definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his work were done. he would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet a process and therefore a development. for what, in fact, is discipline? is it established authority? but this authority is the whole of education. for authority cannot be, as i have explained before, a mere claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the educating personality, and this action _is_ education. and when this education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax, education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the teacher's manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. and from the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment. if in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction, now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from experience that we should never get anywhere. as a matter of fact, the distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. for who is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a thing different from teaching? who is it that looks upon this problem as an insoluble one? only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline, frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not possibly be. and so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who, feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and study our movements. in the same way the spontaneous outburst of eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words--to substitute art for nature. the real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never bothers about these puzzling questions of pedagogical discipline. he teaches with such devotion; he is so close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, so full of life, that he is never compelled to face a recalcitrant, rebellious personality that could only be reduced by resorting to the peculiar means of discipline. the docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able teacher is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teachings; it is an aspect of it. it originates with the very act by which he begins to teach, and ceases with the end of his teaching. concretely, the discipline which good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the seriousness and inwardness of its own work. discipline, authority, and respect for authority are absent whenever it is impossible to establish that unique superior personality, in which the spiritual life of the pupils and of the teachers are together fused and united. whenever the students fail to find their ideal in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness of his spiritual personality, which does not rise to the ideal which at every moment is present in their expectations, then the order of discipline is lacking. but when this actual unity obtains--this unity which is the task of the teacher, and the aim of all education--then discipline, authority, and respect are present as never failing elements. this pedagogical problem of discipline would never have arisen if immature reflection had not distinguished two empirically different aspects of human personality, the practical and the theoretical, whereby it would appear that man, when he does things, should not be considered in the same light as when he thinks and understands, knows and learns. from this point of view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to the pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims at his theoretic activity. the former should guide the pupil, regulate his conduct as a member of that special community which we call the school, and facilitate the fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward himself. the latter, on the other hand, assuming the completion of this practical edification, proceeds to the mental formation of the personality, considered as progressive acquirement of culture. discipline in this system appears to be the morals of the school. i use the word morals in a very broad sense--just as morality might be considered as the discipline of society and of life in general. for everybody, it is argued, distinguishes between the character of man and his intelligence, between his conduct and his knowledge. the two terms may indeed be drawn together, but they also exist quite apart. so that a man devoid of character, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, may nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or as subtle as the serpent; whereas a moral man, through lack of understanding, may become the sport of rogues, and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the slightest accomplishments. for will is one thing, they say, and the intellect is another. the question of the abstractness of discipline impels us now to examine the legitimacy of this broader distinction, which does not simply concern the problems of the school, but extends to the fundamental principles of the philosophy of the spirit. under its influence, contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms of this ancient distinction between will and intellect, which rested on a frankly realistic intuition of the world. the philosopher who crystallised this distinction, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken up completely in the course of all subsequent speculation, was aristotle. a thoroughgoing realist, like all greek philosophers, he conceived reality as something external and antecedent to the mind which thinks it and strives to know it. when thought, whose function is the knowing of reality, is thus placed outside of this reality, it is evident that the knowledge to which it aspired never could have been an activity which produces reality. it was accordingly maintained that knowledge could not be more than a mere survey, a view of reality (intuition, theory), almost like a reflected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the real. but since it was evident that man as spiritual activity does produce a world of his own, for which he is praised if it is deemed good, but blamed if it is judged bad, it had to follow that there were two distinct aspects in human life: one by which man contemplates reality, the other by which he creates his own world,--a world, however, which is but a transformation of the true and original reality. these two aspects are the will and the intellect. it should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and which is the sole support of this distinction between will and intellect. we might say perhaps that though everything does indeed depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely spiritual reality is on one hand what is produced, the realisation of new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being. however, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be but mere knowing. for it is again faced by a reality--even though it has in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it--a reality which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of looking on. so we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never mere contemplation. what seems to be contemplation--that consciousness which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises itself--is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. for what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the multiplicity of its manifestations? we shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived externally, a motion in space caused by us. this external manifestation is quite subordinate and adventitious. the essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. this is the substance of the will, which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as i have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality. if intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent that there is no intellect which in its development is not development of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. this distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its content. it is indispensable, i maintain, that the educator have the reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. for the school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives no instruction at all. all the objections voiced on this score against education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that ought to integrate the truly educational function, are the result of this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character, and from moral personality. i wish here to call attention to one of the most controverted questions connected with popular education, because it brings out very clearly the impossibility of keeping moral education distinct from intellectual instruction. it is constantly asserted that the instruction of the common people, that real education which is the main purpose of the modern state, is not a question of mere reading and spelling; that these do not constitute culture, but are as means to an end, and ought never to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they are subservient. the school therefore, if it cannot shape men, should at least rough-hew them and give them a conscience, whereas now, it teaches but often does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. the optimism of educators in the eighteenth century, their promise that marvels would come out of elementary instruction propagated and spread by popular schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in the course of the last century by an ever-growing mistrust of instruction generally restricted to the notion of mere instrumentality. for in addition to other shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might be put to a very bad use; that elementary learning might be a dangerous thing if it were not accompanied by something that instruction pure and simple cannot give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the vigorous and uncompromising principles of moral rectitude. the hopefulness of that past optimism is fast yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation of the insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of life. there is a serious error in this frequent indictment brought against mere instruction as a means of attaining what is called culture. it proceeds from the attempt to separate something that was not meant to be separated. "what god hath united together, man shall not put asunder." and, in any event, a separation as illegitimate as this is not possible. superficially we may distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from moral training, cut off the means from the end, and separate the ability to read and write from what we are thereby enabled to read and write. in fact the letters of the alphabet are taught without teaching the syllables which they compose, and without the words that are made up of these syllables, and the thoughts that are expressed by these words, and man's life which becomes manifest and real in these thoughts. the elementary school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the elements. reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects called for by the school programme are taken up as mere elements with which the pupil is expected, later on, to compose his book of life, complete in all its sections. but in the meantime it is thought unwise to burden his youthful mind with the weighty and complicated problems that can be solved only by the experience of a more mature life. of course after he has gone forth from the school into the outer world the young man will look upon this elementary knowledge as the raw material of his future mentality. as he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accordance with his spiritual interests and in compliance with the contingencies of life, he will avail himself of this initial instruction, use it to further his progress towards this or that end, good or evil as the case may be. for intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made subservient either to noble impulses or to base motives. careful consideration, however, will show that the responsibility of a school for what is called moral insufficiency, but is in reality educational defectiveness, cannot be removed by this kind of considerations. the alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a series of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into which all the words of a language may be decomposed. the alphabetic symbol is effectively such when it is a sound, and it is sound when it is an image, or rather a concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind. the child begins to see the alphabet when he reads with it. up to that time he simply draws images or inwardly gazes at the semblance of the picture he intends to draw, but he does not read. as soon as the symbol is read, it becomes a word. that is why every spelling book presents the letters in the syllables and the syllables in the words. in this way they cease to be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become thoughts. they may be dim, vague, and mysterious; they may be sharply defined or they may blend and fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are in every given instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind of the child. these thoughts have in them the power to develop, to organise themselves and become a discourse. from the simple sentences and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer significance. from the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to the sturdy trunk, it is _one_ life and one sole process. the mind that will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the humble lowlands. and it first becomes conscious of its power to rise, when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book. the moment the child begins reading, he must of necessity read _something_. there is no mere instrument without the material to which it is to be applied. the infant who opens his eyes and strives to look cannot but see something. the "picture," insignificant for the teacher, has its own special colouring for the child's mind. he fixes his gaze on it; he draws it within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his fancies. such is the law of the spirit! it may be violated, but the consequences of transgression are commensurate with the majesty of this law. grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its contents, as something empty and abstract. the child is taught for instance that the letter _m_ in _mamma_ does not belong to that word (we call it a "word," and forget that to him at least it is not a word but his own mother). that letter _m_, we tell him, is found in other words, _mat_, _meat_, etc. we show him that it is in all of them, and yet in none of them. we therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in itself--the letter _m_. in the same manner we abstract the rule of grammar from a number of individual examples. we exalt it over them, and give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. and so for rhetoric, and so for logic. but in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. the differences between this and that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of expressing, of behaving, at first become slight, then negligible, then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic, to the empty, to the indifferent. it knows no longer how to fix the peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men's characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it becomes indifferent and sceptical. words lose their meaning; they no longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. things lose their individuality, and men their physiognomies. this scepticism robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. the fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. abstract education is no education at all. it is not even instruction. for it does not teach the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! all it gives is a new materialised and detached abstraction. the alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means but an end; it is not mere form but also content. it is not a weapon which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for evil motives. it is man himself. it is the human soul, which should already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read intelligently. and it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to be able to discover himself,--not himself in general, but that better self which the school gradually and progressively will teach him to find within himself. so considered, the alphabet is a powerful instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. it is education. for this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading, since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not _that_ one word, nor the word of _that_ one book. a word or a book will always be a mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. many, very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child's mind! books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals, and his heart and imagination with it. thus the child grows to be a man. instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. it is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of spiritual vitality. that culture, being material, has no unity, is fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any way transforming the recipient mind or becoming assimilated to the process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically. this mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the spirit. he who knows one hundred things has not a greater nor a different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. what merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? the merit would belong to the man who had accumulated the greater amount by a greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work, which is the developing process itself and the life of the human personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour to establish values. for as we have seen, nothing is, properly speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit. whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his experience and the extolment of his personality. the poet giusti has said: "writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to change people." reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. of course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are not the others, but first of all the author himself. the mere reading of a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through the incessant vibrations of its becoming. this then is the all-important solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and become transfused into our personality. and our personality in its act, in the act, i say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement, and therefore entirely conformant to its unity. the man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from the understanding of life, is called _homo unius libri_. we might just as well call him _homo omnium librorum_. for he who would read all books need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what it requires for the life that is suited to it. we should never add books upon books _ad infinitum_! it is not a question of quantity. what we need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which assuredly, as herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all of them radiating from a vital centre. and everything is in the centre, since everything originates there. education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. there is in truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for evil. this realistic education, which is substantially materialistic, extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality, and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the world, and consequently of man's responsibility. the antithesis between instruction and education is the antithesis between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing between a material and a spiritual conception of life. if the school means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could have many parts. we must learn to react against a system of education which, conceiving its rôle to be merely intellectualistic, and such as to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. unity ought to be our constant aim. we should never look away from the living, that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own world. chapter ix character and physical education the principle of educational unity which i have briefly tried to illustrate demands a further development in connection with the claims of physical culture. for after we have unified moral and intellectual discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit, whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the physical development as well as at the spiritual. for the pupil is not solely mind. he has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit, must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of the other. before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient greeks developed their athletic education, and which since the renaissance has for a different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical culture,--a theory which i do not at all oppose, but rather intend to reaffirm on the grounds of educational unity. this pedagogical principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the development of the mind. nor could it have been otherwise; for whether or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence, man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "i." education begins as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. the slave and the son are not supported and cared for--educated--as simple brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or instructions and build their will out of these,--the will which those in authority wish to be identical with their own. the superior commands and therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own. philosophy, as well as naïve and primitive mentality, considers man to be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says, of what he thinks; and also in that he is able to present himself to others, because he has first been present to himself. man is man in that he is self-consciousness. even the despicable tyrant who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent, capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an unconscious tool of his whims. the mother who tenderly nurses her sick child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. but that body is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of maternal affection. if in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and revulsion. it is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes, to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of every possible sympathy. education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity is possible only because men spiritually convene. matter, we have seen, nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. as soon as the multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in their organism spiritual activity shines forth. in the spirit is the root and possibility of every unification. it is spirit that unites men. education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. therefore it is now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education of the spirit. but as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way. it all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. the ancients made a great deal of physical culture, and the greek philosophers of antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music, including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. the ancients never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. when greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body, was sharply distinguished from another soul. that other soul was kept in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are bestirred. this natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body, which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can and ought to be educated. the soul which results from the organic process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated except in connection with the development and improvement of the body. human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as limiting spiritual activity. it was accordingly reduced to conceive this activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of nature. in a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical development in its own process. but with the advent of christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated from nature. the original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit which "is not of this world." and it is not in fact "of this world," if by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,--the world which confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality, spirit, christian humanity. man, in this christian conception, in this opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles which clip the wing of man's loftier aspirations and weigh him down into a beast-like subjection to instinct. he therefore tends to underrate physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. he does not completely neglect the question of the behaviour of man towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the opposition. but finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses, in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual salvation. he does then take the body into consideration, but simply to check its instincts and control its sensuous appetites. by the discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the spirit. evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in its own way. the haircloth of st. francis corresponds in fact to the club of hercules, and serves the same purpose. the monsters which are knocked down by the weapon which hercules alone could wield torment the saint of assisi also; only, they are within him. he even tames the wolf, but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness. these internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material body. if they were, the saint would not need to worry about them any more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder. but they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which, with the violence of its desires, the din of its harsh and fiercely discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. they are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to satisfy them he would have to part company with his lady poverty, and become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,--of wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of fortune, which comes as a friend and departs as an enemy. he would, in other words, return to a materialistic conception of life. his lernæan hydra is in the depths of his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the saviour in love and self-sacrifice. this monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. this discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if he followed natural impulses. for this more difficult manner of living, a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural means of the body. the system of physical culture which gives this stupendous endurance is called asceticism. but this system is an abstract one. man's life is not poverty, since it is work and therefore wealth. and the mind with its freedom cannot be conceived of as antagonistic to nature. for as body and as sense, in so far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature. antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits; for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude. the spirit is free only if infinite. it cannot have any obstructing barrier in its path. it can be conceived as freedom only after it has overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the effect of the activity of the spirit. it has no need therefore of walls within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the effort to renounce the outer world. this is not the way to conquer freedom. a liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure, constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow of freedom. the spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be revealed to it. nothing thinkable can be external to it. whatever presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself. this new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the italian renaissance, appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. superficially it might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. in reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to confirm and integrate the concept of christian spiritualism and to bring out its truth. greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all natural beings. the physical culture of the ancients is spiritual discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially body. modern physical education, at least from the time of vittorino da feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediæval ascetic would have it; but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature, induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of its will. so that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. our science is not merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather a science of man and of man in the universe, and therefore also of this nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the same way that every book that is read is spiritualised. this concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself gives concreteness to the christian conception of physical discipline. for it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won; to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it, now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming. modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction to the negative discipline inculcated by mediæval asceticism. we said that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. this proposition runs counter to common sense. but common sense as such cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its content. our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. if it were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. for all bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify ours and are somehow related to it. or to put it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this centre is our body. these first of all occupy space, but a space which no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. so that before we can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. it is the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. justly, therefore, the immanent sense, profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the _fundamental sentiment_ by our italian philosopher rosmini. for our body is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first, confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated part. we feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself. and it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this object which is the body. accurately, therefore, was the body defined by spinoza as _objectum mentis_, as object of consciousness. objectless consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness. the two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit. our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. it is within our own consciousness. and it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are able to understand how it happens that we ("we"--spiritual activity) act upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral personality. as we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with our own life's blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual life, making it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness? but our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. we remain what we are, even though mutilated. each part of our organism is ours, in that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our living being,--our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it therefore effectively constituted our being. the distinction between organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary occurrence. if our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that, in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a finger, or even of a hair. this hair then is a vital part, not because it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and absorbed in the distinct unity of our body. i shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. the organ of organs, as a great writer once said, is the hand, and we can look at it from two quite distinct points of view. we may place our hand on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting around us. we see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. in these circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a material object, separated from every essential relationship with us--with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. this is the external point from which we may view our hand. but there is another one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply another tool which is needed for our work. in these circumstances our right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing, which intention is our will to realise our personality in that determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that personality of ours which does that thing. our hand in this case coalesces so completely with our being that without it--the hand already trained to write--we could not be ourselves. abstractly, to be sure, we should be ourselves. but it is the same story over again. what exists is not the abstract but the concrete. and in the concrete, we, who are about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our self from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between "us" and our hand, between our will and our hand. since the hand now wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of writing. this writing which is read is thought, whereby the writer finds himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was penetrating into it more and more deeply. but in such a case and by the act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand, writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the new thought? it is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps or interruptions. it is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. the hand is ours because it is not distinguished from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs of our body nor from its material surroundings. this, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write: in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force of desire prompted by natural egoism. we are then what we want to be; not merely in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the extent that their being depends from their functions, and their functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action and our will. there is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we have to accept as a basis for further construction. but this limitation, imposed on the truths i mentioned above, must be accepted without in any way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of both its scientific and moral values. this warning is not merely helpful in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to shy and balk. it is true that there is a body which we did not give to ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the individual, empirically considered as such. in this sense i am not self-produced. the son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead. the man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature. but the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by _man_ (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. the particular man is man as he is being _thought_, who refers us to the _thinking_ man as to the true man. this true man is also an individual, not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. and in this man, parents and children are the same man. in it men and nature are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. we (each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large and to act in his stead. all our errors and all our sins are caused by substituting one in place of the other. and what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is present in the small with all his infinitude. personality as such, in its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and particular man. within those boundaries which are only visible from the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in itself and surmounting all limitations. the man born blind does not know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the eyes and the soul of the seeing man. but his soul pours out none the less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. and the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by the aid of the imagination. he even heals the wounds and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. so that in the depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating for himself a world of his own. we can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own. he shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. we must not consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and at the mercy of the passing instant. we must intently look upon that other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. we must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our life, spiritualised. when we have done all this we shall see how impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the former without the latter. nature may be dissociated from the natural man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. but such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not volta who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not michel angelo who transfigures marble and creates the moses. physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the spirit, but is itself education of the spirit. it is the fundamental part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. living means constructing one's own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). for as consciousness is, so is the body. there is no thinking which is not also doing. thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body besides. we may call it will, but then there is not one single act of thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word "will." without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing. what are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so much so that we can after all interrupt them. without the exercise of our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in the circle of life, would be annihilated. therefore _morale_, as they say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. it is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. for the same reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. the force of the will, the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. it is not temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the basis of temperament. if we reverse this proposition, every moral conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears ineffectual. don abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and cardinal federico borromeo is no longer right. character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible. character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object remains always the same throughout all these particulars. if in the course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason. rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all particulars that come under its sway. for the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. what we think is _that_ and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change. but the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in his body_. but body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of every ulterior development. this truth, vaguely accepted by common sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. for it is evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like character. farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though he held hell in contempt: giordano bruno, who amidst the flames that already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might. leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges "the unseemly hidden power." character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast thought. thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance, it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than a fixed and established manner of being. for organic endurance, which is really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development or in the bloom of an exuberant constitution, but rather in an indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation, which is the specific essence of spiritual being. this body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this body, by means of which thought is enabled to press on its vigorous development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment, and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm support of the next one;--this is man's character, which is not an attribute of the will considered as practical activity in contra-distinction to theoretic activity. character is an attribute of the spirit _qua_ spirit, without any adjectives. we may, if we will, distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the will from intellectual originality. but just as it is not possible to conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional continuity which constitute character, in the same way intelligence and ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of this object of intellectual activity, which again constitute character. if character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value, must be governed by an inviolable law. by spiritual steadfastness, which is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an ideal and constitutes his moral personality, whether he die for his country or whether he labour to bring light amid his thoughts. life in all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty. to conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as spiritual training and as formation of character. gymnastic exercise, therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly so-called. the teacher of physical education must always bear in mind that he is not dealing with _bodies_, bodies to be moved around, to be lined up, or rushed around a track. he too is training souls, and collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and advancement of mankind. if, in addition to his special qualifications, he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order, of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the title of educator. education then is either one or not effective. the assumption that there are many kinds of education leads to very disastrous results. education is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human spirit now from one side and now from the other. chapter x the ideal of education art and religion we have shown in the previous chapters the necessity of rigorously maintaining the unity of education, of resisting every attempt at separation, of opposing all systems which treat the various parts of education as though they could be kept distinct in practice and theory. there still remains a question which naturally arises at this juncture, and which we must try to answer. for true it is, some one might say, that moral and intellectual education are one and the same thing, and true it may be that education of the mind and culture of the body work for the same results; and it may also be admitted that education being formation, or development, that is, the becoming of the spirit, and the spirit consisting in its becoming or rather in becoming pure and simple, it follows that education means spirit and nothing more. but granting all this, was it really worth while? when we have attained this notion of the unity which is always the same, no matter under how many aspects it may present itself, what have we gained? have we here anything more than a word? one says "spirit," another might say "god," or "nature," or "matter," or some such thing, and there would not be much difference. it might well be that in the course of the inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, a way was found to invest our word with quite a different meaning; but still, after we have defined and distinguished the concept of the spirit from all the others, we have not progressed much. we may have the satisfaction of continuing to see before us this concept, with no possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, but how much will we know of the contents that this spirit is supposed to have? what are the principles that should govern this education, which has been clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free action, and therefore a selection enlightened by consciousness, by reflection, and by reason? this suggested objection is not a purely imaginary one. very often superficial critics, forgetting that pedagogical problems pertain to philosophy and are therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. in so doing they warn us that in idealistic pedagogics all particular and definite concepts vanish, and what remains is a vague confused indistinctness of no practical utility to the teacher. and truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic pedagogics were the demonstration that many concepts, ordinarily considered to be substantially different, are in reality identical, we should not hesitate to call such philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous. but in the first place we must notice that this assumed deficiency charged against us has partially been shown to be non-existent by the exposition of our doctrine, which reduces education to free spiritual becoming, and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational forms in the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, outside of which nothing is truly conceivable. for the defect of our system was assumed in connection with an exigency which divides itself into two parts, respectively corresponding to the form and to the matter of education. for many of the pedagogical errors which we have pointed out were seen to be imputable, not to the choice of an unsuitable content of education, but to the criterion adopted in treating this content. i have already spoken of my disinclination to accomplish a mere negative task; and in the last chapter, while denouncing the materialistic conception of physical education, i certainly did not spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other than the one which harasses the spirit and hinders its progress toward the ultimate good; and thereupon i tried to show that physical culture is spiritual education endowed with that self-same nature which belongs to education when considered as formation of the will and of the intellect. but this does not mean that our thesis reduces itself to a mere theoretic transvaluation or to a new abstract interpretation of our present educative system, which however in practice could not be affected by this purely theoretical difference of interpretation. i tried to make it clear that our conception is not devoid of practical import, and that it does lead to a reform in education and to a new orientation of the school. this was especially brought out in connection with physical culture in the preceding chapter, when i insisted on the necessity that physical instructors be trained in such a way that their mental equipment shall not be limited to notions that refer exclusively to the body in its physical limitations: but that in addition to physiology, anatomy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with those studies and disciplines that are more intimately connected with character, with the soul, and with the mind. but besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned education,--a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been taught by the followers of traditional pedagogical routine. whatever the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely, the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the souls of our pupils. there it gives rise not to incidents that are unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously, serious outlook on life, but to a process in which all is involved. the speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching. indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a failure to understand the precise nature of education. but the question of the content of education is a different one. having identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of the former. one of these determinations is historical in character; it advances as the history of the human mind progresses, assuming now this and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual interests. we who have censured the conception of pre-established programmes, as being most dangerous prejudices of pedagogical realism, could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the content of every possible form of education for all places and all times. the school, like every other form of education, develops; and as it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its concrete development. it would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with precision the limits and the scope of a pupil's culture. of all the culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. this will be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of the classroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination even on the part of the learner himself. away with pre-established programmes then of any description! spiritual activity works only in the plenitude of freedom. horace asks: _currente rota cur urceus exit?_ we answer: whether an _urceus_ or not, what always comes from the _rota_ is something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present. so every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development of the spirit. what we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith. for god will reveal himself to us; and god is the very spirit of ours which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines its own content. the other of the two determinations mentioned above is the _ideal_, or, as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the _transcendental_. it pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it passes through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore be styled the "determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the spirit." this content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form, and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. but _qua_ becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations. in them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced. under these varying modes and presentations it permanently abides as the indefectible substance of the spirit. this substance, this ideal spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of education. having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. but we must always keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally, they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in every concrete educative act. so that their synthesis and their complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its opposition to what i have called fragmentary education. our distinction then will turn out to be an exact logical analysis, which analyses only the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the synthesis. by analysing and by synthesising, by determining the spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of education. in making a rapid survey of this analysis, i must refer back to what was said of the attributes of the spirit,--that the spirit _is_ in that it _becomes_, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness, that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired. this act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean cognition, but a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object that very one who cognises. and this is the meaning of "i," identity of subject and object,--an identity, however, that because of its curious nature needs to be carefully examined. it was shown in a preceding chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality possible. here we observe the inverse: identity of subject and object means that in addition to the subject there is--nothing; it means therefore unity. and yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the identity of subject and object were not also the difference between them. to distinguish a from b, an initial, elementary minimum difference is required. it is the difference, called _otherness_, by which b is other than a. without this otherness there would not be a and b, but either a alone or b alone. the subject as it knows itself is certainly not another from the subject alone. but if it did not become _other_ to itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never know itself. to be object as well as subject implies the necessity of distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness between them. if it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is "_one_" and then is "_two_," we might state the situation in a different and perhaps simpler way. we might say that the subject would not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it were not both subject and object to itself. consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being real only as self-consciousness. this is the import of the identity of the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the one, which is but another way of stating it. we may insist as much as we want on the identity of the "i," but it will always be true that this "i" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. and conversely we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the subjective moment of the "i," whereby the "i" is set in opposition to all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. but behind the difference, identity is always to be found. man, the more he thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the object--the world he knows. the spirit's being is its alteration. the more it _is_,--that is, the more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to recognise itself in the object. it might therefore be said that he who increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object, which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from the secret source of its own becoming. thus it happens, as was said of old, that "he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." all human sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty. subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity, the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an object, nor its opposite. the two terms, each one for itself, isolated, are equivalent. but every time human thought has isolated them, whether striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively (god), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. the reality of the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the subject that has in itself the object as its actuality. it is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive alteration of the object is also the progressive alteration of the subject. at every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into the "other" or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the subject as well as the object is always new and always different. not because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute originality. this dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject, object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,--this is the eternal life of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the ideal contents of culture and education. the spirit's self-realisation is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their relationship. if of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would cease to be. this threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes it possible to have one without the others. on the strength of this triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as though each one of them could subsist by itself. so that commonly people believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening one's mind with religion or philosophy,--especially philosophy, which appears to be the bugbear of most poets. in the same way many philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. and how often has religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation! all of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things, each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it excluded the others. a superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable. but in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which is the property of all that is not spirit. art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. man becomes enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other inward summons. living without communication with the world, he refrains from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. he simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. this man is the artist, who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings. his subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously objectified itself. but this priority of the act, by which the artist is considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. if we relied on it, we could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual activity. to become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably becomes subject,--an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than a subject. that is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that form in art absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. it absorbs it _qua_ subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it entirely over to itself, reassumes it, and as pure subjectivity it cannot return to its object without passing through the moment of its opposition to the object,--the moment in which the subject is nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification. this is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes self-conscious, objectifies itself. so the poet as he dreams breathes life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives them reality. what is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which mature in that fantastic world of his--which is nothing more, as i have said, than his abstract subjectivity--are affirmed by him without any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy. this lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the tendency of the saint, who crushes and annihilates this same individuality in the face of his god,--that god who infinitely occupies his consciousness as the "other" in absolute alterity to him, so that the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. it sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective "otherness," of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. so he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before it. thus the saint's personality is nullified; or rather, it is actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of religion. it is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, in as much as it could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. it is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of religiosity. the mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of art,--a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers it. the life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion, from the subject to the object. it is impossible for the artist to realise his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world he has created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger world, out of which, empirically speaking, he is driven only by the needs of practical life, which awaken him and remind him of the existence of a wider world. in the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion in which the subject completely and effectually might annihilate itself. for in the measure that faith increases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's own nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object is all becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the energy of the spirit increases, of the spirit as the subject that has been powerful enough to create this situation. altars must be built in order that people may kneel in front of them. the concept of god, it, too, has a history. and from this history no word can be taken away on the assumption that it was immediately _revealed_. for there is no word which pre-exists as such before the act of him who cognises it. and to fix a dogma, that is, to rescue it from the flow of evolution, we should have to withdraw from the course of evolution the men themselves who are to accept it. nothing therefore is more impious than the history of religion, in the course of which man, now dragging his god down to the depths of his apparent misery, now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness, progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and joys. the process of mental development shows unwittingly, by the very acts of man's innocent piety, that god is _his_ god, that the life of the object is the same as the life of the subject. the nature then both of art and of religion implies a flagrant contradiction which comes to this,--that the subject to be subject is object, and the object to be object is subject. hence the torments of the poet and the spasms of the mystic. a perfect art and a perfect religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion which is not art, are two impossibilities. this does not mean that either art or religion can ever be superseded and left behind as two illusions, ancient and constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all value. the very contrary of this is true. just because there is no pure art, religion is eternal; and art is eternal, because religion cannot be attained in its absolute purity. the concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. it is a self-objectifying subject, and an object which becomes the subject in virtue of the subjectivity that alights on it as it realises it. the spirit is therefore a becoming. it is the synthesis, the unity of these two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately joined. and the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness both of art (reality of the abstract subject) and of religion (reality of the abstract object). it is philosophy. many definitions have been given of philosophy, and all of them true, because directly or indirectly they may, on the strength of what is expressed or what is understood, be reduced to the following definition: that philosophy is the spirit. if we say that it is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless pleonasm. for science, unless we distinguish in an absolute manner (which is impossible) one grade of determinateness from the other, is the same as consciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self-consciousness. if we say that philosophy is the science of reality in its universality, we lose sight of the fact that reality, for those who do not stray off into the maze of abstractness, _is_ the spirit. a definition which has never lost its value is that one which makes philosophy consist in the elaboration of concepts, that is, in the unification of all the concepts (those we possess, of course) into a coherent concept. this is an excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy is not obtained by stopping before abstractions, no matter what these abstractions may be. all particular things are abstractions, each one of which yields a concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, which must be brought together and unified, if we ever intend to think all things that are thought, and thus philosophise. the subject without the object as the artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract is the object which religion looks up to. we are accustomed, not without reason, to distinguish the life of the spirit from philosophy. but the reason, instead of destroying, confirms the identity between spirit and philosophy, and for the following cause. the spirit never being what it ought to be, we live acquiring consciousness of ourselves. but when we pause to ask ourselves if we have really obtained this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem of philosophy, we discover that we cannot answer in the affirmative. for answering is spiritual living, a living, therefore, which consists not in having self-consciousness but in acquiring it. so that philosophy does not arise from the need of understanding the life already lived, for the past is the realm of death; but rather from the much keener desire of living, of leading a better life, a true life, and of finally realising this spiritual reality which is our ideal. but when? can we believe that there is ever going to be a philosophy which will definitely fulfil the ideal? it is obvious that a pursuit of such philosophy would lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more intense living. this philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, esoteric classroom discipline, the professional privilege of a few specialists. it is rather the source from which this professional speculation derives its right to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of their human dignity, who hearken to the deeper utterances of their souls, who are able to see how much of their own self there is in this vast world which is being disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and timidly, are conscious of the divine power that resides in every human heart; who feel that this human heart, prone though it be to all baseness, is also capable of lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of enjoying the pure and lofty satisfactions which human phantasy ordinarily relegates to heaven. in the depths of every mind there is a philosophy: the mind itself is untiring speculation, which more or less successfully scales the height, but which is always turned upward to the summit whitened by the rising sun. life is made human by the rays of this philosophy. man is really man when he recognises an object which is the world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing absolves him from the duty of being in this world; of seriously being in it, which means working and coöperating towards reality by knowing reality and fulfilling the law. for in his freedom and power he can never divest himself of his own responsibility; he must therefore develop his capacity to the utmost value, and to that end work and work, think, and act as the centre of his world. this philosophy does not allow him either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his egoistic self, or to deny and sacrifice this self to an imaginary reality. this philosophy is never finished, never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very self, which to live must grow, and which must constitute itself as it develops. and therefore this philosophy cannot help being man's ideal, which is always being realised and which is never fulfilled. so, then, education, which aims at that concrete and truly real unity which is the life of the spirit, must always be moral, always spiritual, always philosophic. an invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit of grinning and scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing censure inflicted by the ideal on sloth, presumption, and cowardice. we might perhaps replace this word by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic and therefore inappropriate. i must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic education, i do not mean any special course in philosophy. though i believe that special philosophical training has an essential function in the curriculum of secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct towards higher studies a matured mentality, scientifically trained and humanly inspired, i yet hold that this special philosophical training can be effectual only if all education, from its very beginning, wherever that may be, has been philosophic. we must reflect that just as it is impossible for a man to be moral only at certain hours of the day, and in certain particular places, morality being the atmosphere without which the spirit cannot live, so that ethical teaching is distorted and deflected as soon as it is relegated to certain definite books, to be studied in connection with certain definite courses; in the same way this philosophy which is for us the ideal content of education, and therefore its ideal, cannot but be present in every real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in every throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. this general philosophic education naturally includes art and religion, which cannot be limited subject-matters of special courses of instruction, co-ordinated or subordinated to the other elements of the curriculum. only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences properly so called, may be freely moved in a student's schedule; they may be added or taken away, they may be grouped this or that way, and be variously distributed in accordance with the needs of the moment and the particular exigencies of the student or of man in general. for these sciences reflect in themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they too refer. and because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of art and of religion. for otherwise it will be merely material instruction, "informative education," which in reality is no education at all. during the revival of learning education was humanistic. its ideal was art. the historical life which corresponded to this ideal was the individualism of our italian renaissance. after the counter reformation, art, which is individuality in abstract subjectivity, was abandoned to itself, and inevitably decayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became barren in the imitations of classical art considered as final perfection, to which the individual might raise himself but beyond which he could not possibly proceed. art became thus the negation of originality, and of that subjective autonomy of which it naturally should be the most enhancing expression. so that classicism up to the romantic revolt remained the cultural form of a society submissive to the principle of authority and religiously oriented. these conditions favoured the study of the science of nature, which to the extent that it is governed by the naturalistic principle is a manifestation of religiosity. the devotee of natural science speaks in fact of his nature with an agnostic reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the worship of god. nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before which the subject, man, disappears. but as science progresses, the need of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is reintroduced, and the subject again reasserts itself. so the advancement of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines of naturalistic science. when naturalism opposed the claims of religion, it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. this influenced the scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and restored to it the consciousness of the moment of subjectivity which had been forgotten. the ideal of culture, which prevailed in the nineteenth century with the triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and therefore religion. it is now high time that the two opposed elements be joined and united, and that the school be neither abstractly humanistic in the pursuit of art nor abstractly religious and scientific, but that it be made what it is ideally, and what it is also in practice when it efficaciously educates--the philosophic school. * * * * * as each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will accordingly have his own education. but all paths converge to one point, where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone makes us men. and as we meet at this centre, we must understand each other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the language of the spirit. we are compelled by an irresistible need to live this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. but this end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete, acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the æsthete, or the superstitious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the pit under his feet. if we continue in this state, in which one man clings to the superstition of mathematics, another idolises entomology, a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than his own, then war will break out. not a disciplined war, governed by a law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery. the dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[ ] is traditional. but whether he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance. we want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. and the same for religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. otherwise we suffocate, and die stifled. for all these are things, but there is no life; and things oppress us and kill us. therefore let us spiritualise things by reviving the spirit. let us release it, that it may freely move in the organic unity of nature. let us train it so that its strength, agility, balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. and this is what i call philosophy. or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness and difficulty of attainment. for our demand for an educational reform, in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the greek philosopher. education is truly human when it has for its contents that ideal which i have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of the spirit, philosophy. footnotes: [ ] referring to the old phrase, _purus mathematicus, purus asinus_. chapter xi conclusion we may look upon the preceding chapters as a kind of general examination to which we submitted our consciences, by reflecting on the way we have always performed our duty as teachers, by considering our purposes, and by scrutinising the internal logic of our task. and our investigation has been eminently human, since indeed man's essence, we have now come to understand, is to acquire self-consciousness. the patriotic character of the event which was the immediate cause of this work induced me to show that the common spirit which brought us together was not a mere political sentiment, of which we should rid ourselves in crossing the threshold of the school. for we could not but bring into the classroom our own humanity and our living personality, in which the content of our teaching and of all education must live. this personality, however it may be considered, from whatever point of view it may be regarded, has no particular substance which is not also at the same time universal,--domestic as the case may be, or social, political, or whatever may be the phase in which it is determined in its historical development. and since, in this historical development of our universal personality, there is italy with her memories perpetuated by our immanent sentiment, by our immanent consciousness and by our immanent will, we could not possibly be ourselves were we not at the same time italian educators. and looking attentively at this universal foundation on which our own human value is supported--call it language, logic, law,--we were led to study the relationship existing between individuality, which is the aim of all forms of education, and this universal spirit which here intervenes as it does in every moment of the human life. it intervenes in education, as the science and the conscience and the entire personality of the teacher. this personality seems to be violently imposed upon the pupil in such a way as to check or hinder his spontaneous development; but we saw that the immediate logical opposition between teacher and learner gradually resolves itself into the unity of the spiritual process in which education becomes actual. education therefore appeared to us, not as a fact which is empirically observable, and which may be fixed and looked upon as subject to natural laws, but rather as a mystical formation of a super-individual spirituality, which is the only real, concrete personality actualised by the individual. in order to understand it, we had to liberate it from every kind of contact with culture in its materialistic acceptance; and we therefore insisted on the speculative inquiry into what we called the realistic point of view. we endeavoured to explain how and why culture is the very process of education, and the very process of the personality in which education takes place. this conception would have lacked the necessary support, had we not carried our investigation further, and shown that this culture in which the spirit unfolds itself is not the attribute of a mind existing amidst other minds and face to face with surrounding nature, but is instead the most genuine signification of all. for it is the life of the spirit in which everything gathers to find its support and become thinkable. man, as he is educated, is man rigorously considered as spirit,--spirit which is free, because infinite and truly universal in every one of its moments and attitudes. this the educator must intently consider if he wants to conceive adequately his task and its enormous responsibilities, which become evident when he reflects how in the monad of the individual, in the simple soul of the child entrusted to his creative care, the infinite vibrates, and a life is born at every instant, which thence throbs over the boundless expanse of space, of time, and of all reality. this adequate conception need not be elaborated into a complete system of philosophy. the educator must sense and grasp this infinite over which every word of his is carried, every glance of his, every gesture. as he enters the classroom, as he approaches the child, to whom not only _magna reverentia_ is due, but the very cult which is shown to things divine, he cannot but feel himself exalted; he cannot but be fully conscious of the difficulties of his lofty station, and of the duty of overcoming them. he must therefore dismiss from within himself all that is petty in his particular personality, all his preoccupations and passions, all his commonplace everyday thoughts. he must shake off the depressing burden of the flesh, which pulls him downward; and he will then open his soul to fortifying faith, to the ruling and inspiring deity. the man who is not capable of feeling in the school the sanctity of the place and of his work is not fit to be an educator. the spirituality of education becomes however an empty formula, and a motif for rhetorical variations, if on the one hand we do not possess the concept of the essence or of the attributes of the spirit, and if on the other we do not sharply expose those realistic prejudices of pedagogy which have been maintained in the field of education by the materialistic conception of man and by a tradition which is both unreflecting and alien to all radical criticism. i tried to satisfy both these exigencies rather by arousing the reflection and impelling it on its way than by escorting it on a journey which must be undertaken with due preparation. and finally, in the effort to provide ourselves with a motto, so to speak, and a rallying banner, i set forth the doctrine of educational unity--of the education which is always at all moments education of the spirit. for even physical culture is conceivable only as formation of the mind, and more properly of character. education, we saw, may be made actual in a thousand different ways, only always on condition that we observe the law which proceeds from its innermost essence and constitutes its immanent ideal. every education is good, provided it is education--philosophical, human, mind-stirring education; provided it does not bring atrophy to any necessary function of the spirit, does not crush the spirit under the weight either of things or of the divinity, nor excessively exalt it in the consciousness of its own personal power; provided it neither hurls it into the free abstract world of dreams nor fetters it in the iron chains of an inhuman reality; and provided it does not shatter it and scatter its fragments by the multiple investigations of things innumerable, the knowledge of which can never bring satisfaction. for it is the function of education to enable the centralising unity of the reflective spirit to become articulate and varied through the multiplicity of life and of experience, which is the actuality of the spirit itself. opposition to all abstractions, in behalf of the concrete spirit and of liberty--that is our educational ideal. the european library edited by j. e. spingarn this series is intended to keep americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of europe to-day, by means of translations that partake in some measure of the vigor and charm of the originals. no attempt will be made to give what americans miscall "the best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest will be eligible for inclusion. nor will the attempt be made to select books that merely confirm american standards of taste or morals, since the series is intended to serve as a mirror of european culture and not as a glass through which it may be seen darkly. all forms of literature will be represented, including fiction, belles lettres, poetry, philosophy, social and economic discussion, history, biography, etc.; and special attention will be paid to authors whose works have not hitherto been accessible in english. "the first organized effort to bring into english a series of the really significant figures in contemporary european literature.... an undertaking as creditable and as ambitious as any of its kind on the other side of the atlantic."--_new york evening post._ the world's illusion. by jacob wassermann. translated by ludwig lewisohn. two volumes. one of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age yet finds them wanting. people. by pierre hamp. translated by james whitall. with introduction by elizabeth shepley sergeant. introducing one of the most significant writers of france, himself a working man, in whom is incarnated the new self-consciousness of the worker's world. decadence, and other essays on the culture of ideas. by remy de gourmont. translated by william aspenwall bradley. the critical work of one of the great æsthetic thinkers of france, for the first time made accessible in an authorized english version. history: its theory and practice. by benedetto croce. translated by douglas ainslie. a new interpretation of the meaning of history, and a survey of the great historians, by one of the leaders of european thought. the new society. by walter rathenau. translated by arthur windham. one of germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents his vision of the new society emerging out of the war. the patrioteer. by heinrich mann. translated by ernest boyd. a german "main street," describing the career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university, business, and love. modern russian poetry: an anthology. translated by babette deutsch and a. yarmolinsky. covers the whole field of russian verse since pushkin, with the emphasis on contemporary poets. the reform of education. by giovanni gentile. with an introduction by benedetto croce. translated by dino bigongiari. a new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares with croce the leadership of italian thought to-day. christ. by giovanni papini. translated by dorothy canfield fisher. _in preparation._ the first biography of christ by a great man of letters since renan's. rubÃ�. by g. a. borgese. translated by isaac goldberg. _in preparation._ an italian novel of unusual insight, centering on the spiritual collapse since the war. the reign of the evil spirit. by c. p. ramuz. translated by james whitall. _in preparation._ a charming and fantastic tale, introducing an interesting french-swiss novelist. harcourt, brace and company publishers new york transcriber's note: boldface type is indicated by =equal signs=; italics are indicated by _underscores_. story lessons on character-building (morals) and manners. story lessons on character-building (morals) and manners by loÏs bates author of "kindergarten guide," "new recitations for infants," "games without music," etc. longmans, green, and co. paternoster row, london new york and bombay preface. although it is admitted by all teachers, in theory at least, that morals and manners are essential subjects in the curriculum of life, how very few give them an appointed place in the school routine. every other subject has its special time allotted, but these--the most important subjects--are left to chance, or taken up, haphazard, at any time; surely this is wrong. incidents often occur in the school or home life which afford fitting opportunity for the inculcation of some special moral truth, but maybe the teacher or mother has no suitable illustration just at hand, and the occasion is passed over with a reproof. it is hoped that where such want is felt this little book may supply the need. the stories may be either told or read to the children, and are as suitable for the home as the school. "the fairy temple" should be read as an introduction to the story lessons, for the _teaching_ of the latter is based on this introductory fairy tale. if used at home the blackboard sketch may be written on a slate or slip of paper. the children will not weary if the stories are repeated again and again (this at least was the writer's experience), and they will be eager to pronounce what is the teaching of the tale. in this way the lessons are reiterated and enforced. the method is one which the writer found exceedingly effective during long years of experience. picture-teaching is an ideal way of conveying truths to children, and these little stories are intended to be pictures in which the children may see and contrast the good with the bad, and learn to love the good. the faults of young children are almost invariably due either to thoughtlessness or want of knowledge, and the little ones are delighted to learn and put into practice the lessons taught in these stories, which teaching should be applied in the class or home as occasion arises. _e.g._, a child is passing in front of another without any apology, the teacher says, immediately: "remember minnie, you do not wish to be rude, like she was" (story lesson ). or if a child omits to say "thank you," he may be reminded by asking: "have you forgotten 'alec and the fairies'?" (story lesson ). the story lessons should be read to the children until they become perfectly familiar with them, so that each may be applied in the manner indicated. contents. .--morals. chapter page i. introductory story-- . the fairy temple ii. obedience-- . the two voices . (why we should obey.) the pilot . (why we should obey.) the dog that did not like to be washed . (ready obedience.) robert and the marbles . (unready, sulky obedience.) jimmy and the overcoat iii. loyalty-- . rowland and the apple tart iv. truthfulness-- . (direct untruth.) lucy and the jug of milk . (untruth, by not speaking.) mabel and fritz . (untruth, by not telling _all_.) a game of cricket . (untruth, by "stretching"--exaggeration.) the three feathers v. honesty-- . lulu and the pretty coloured wool . (taking little things.) carl and the lump of sugar . (taking little things.) lilie and the scent . copying . on finding things vi. kindness-- . squeaking wheels . birds and trees . flowers and bees . lulu and the bundle vii. thoughtfulness-- . baby elsie and the stool . the thoughtful soldier viii. help one another-- . the cat and the parrot . the two monkeys . the wounded bird ix. on being brave-- . (brave in danger.) how leonard saved his little brother . (brave in little things.) the twins . (brave in suffering.) the broken arm . (brave in suffering.) the brave monkey x. try, try again-- . the sparrow that would not be beaten . the railway train . the man who found america xi. patience-- . walter and the spoilt page . the drawings eaten by the rats xii. on giving in-- . playing at shop . the two goats xiii. on being generous-- . lilie and the beggar girl . bertie and the porridge xiv. forgiveness-- . the two dogs xv. good for evil-- . the blotted copy-book xvi. gentleness-- . the horse and the child . the overturned fruit stall xvii. on being grateful-- . rose and her birthday present . the boy who _was_ grateful xviii. self-help-- . the crow and the pitcher xix. content-- . harold and the blind man xx. tidiness-- . the slovenly boy . pussy and the knitting . the packing of the trunks xxi. modesty-- . the violet . modesty in dress xxii. on giving pleasure to others-- . "selfless" and "thoughtful". a fairy tale . the bunch of roses . edwin and the birthday party . davie's christmas present xxiii. cleanliness-- . why we should be clean . little creatures who like to be clean . the boy who did not like to be washed . the nails and the teeth xxiv. pure language-- . toads and diamonds. a fairy tale xxv. punctuality-- . lewis and the school picnic xxvi. all work honourable-- . the chimney-sweep xxvii. bad companions-- . playing with pitch . stealing strawberries xxviii. on forgetting-- . maggie's birthday present . the promised drive . the boy who remembered xxix. kindness to animals-- . lulu and the sparrow . why we should be kind to animals . the butterfly . the kind-hearted dog xxx. bad temper-- . how paul was cured . the young horse xxxi. selfishness-- . the child on the coach . edna and the cherries . the boy who liked always to win . the two boxes of chocolate . eva xxxii. carelessness-- . the misfortunes of elinor xxxiii. on being obstinate-- . how daisy's holiday was spoilt xxxiv. greediness-- . stephen and the buns xxxv. boasting-- . the stag and his horns xxxvi. wastefulness-- . the little girl who was lost xxxvii. laziness-- . the sluggard xxxviii. on being ashamed-- . the elephant that stole the cakes xxxix. ears and no ears-- . heedless albert . olive and gertie xl. eyes and no eyes-- . the two brothers . ruby and the wall xli. love of the beautiful-- . the daisy xlii. on destroying things-- . beauty and goodness xliii. on turning back when wrong-- . the lost path xliv. one bad "stone" may spoil the "temple"-- . intemperance .--manners. xlv. preliminary story lesson-- . the watch and its springs xlvi. on saying "please" and "thank you"-- . fairy tale of alec and his toys xlvii. on being respectful-- . story lesson xlviii. putting feet up-- . alice and the pink frock xlix. banging doors-- . how maurice came home from school . lulu and the glass door l. pushing in front of people-- . the big boy and the little lady li. keeping to the right-- . story lesson lii. clumsy people-- . story lesson liii. turning round when walking-- . the girl and her eggs liv. on staring-- . ruth and the window lv. walking softly-- . florence nightingale lvi. answering when spoken to-- . the civil boy lvii. on speaking loudly-- . the woman who shouted lviii. on speaking when others are speaking-- . margery and the picnic lix. look at people when speaking to them-- . fred and his master lx. on talking too much-- . story lesson lxi. going in front of people-- . minnie and the book . the man and his luggage lxii. when to say "i beg your pardon"-- . story lesson . the lady and the poor boy lxiii. raising cap-- . story lesson lxiv. on offering seat to lady-- . story lesson lxv. on shaking hands-- . reggie and the visitors lxvi. knocking before entering a room-- . the boy who forgot lxvii. hanging hats up, etc.-- . careless percy lxviii. how to offer sweets, etc.-- . how baby did it lxix. yawning, coughing and sneezing-- . story lesson lxx. how a slate should not be cleaned-- . story lesson lxxi. the pocket-handkerchief-- . story lesson lxxii. how to behave at table-- . (on sitting still at table.) phil's disaster . (on sitting still at table.) fidgety katie . (thinking of others at table.) the helpful little girl . (upsetting things at table.) leslie and the christmas dinner . cherry stones lxxiii. on eating and drinking-- . rhymes . rhymes lxxiv. finale-- . how another queen builded list of subjects alphabetically arranged. .--moral subjects. page all work honourable ashamed, on being bad companions boasting brave, on being carelessness cleanliness content copying destroying things, on ears and no ears exaggeration eyes and no eyes fairy temple finding things forgetting forgiveness generous, on being gentleness giving in, on giving pleasure to others, on good for evil grateful, on being greediness help one another honesty how another queen builded intemperance introductory story kindness kindness to animals laziness love of the beautiful loyalty modesty nails, the obedience obstinate, on being patience punctuality pure language self-help selfishness teeth, the thoughtfulness tidiness truthfulness try, try again turning back when wrong wastefulness .--manners. answering when spoken to banging doors cherry stones (see "how to behave at table") clumsy people coughing eating and drinking, on excuse me, please (see "going in front of people") going in front of people hanging hats up, etc. how to behave at table "i beg your pardon," when to say keeping to the right knocking before entering a room look at people when speaking to them manners offering seat to lady offer sweets, how to "please," on saying pocket-handkerchief, the preliminary story lesson pushing in front of people putting feet up raising cap respectful, on being shaking hands, on sitting still at table, on sneezing speaking loudly, on speaking when others are speaking, on spitting (see "how a slate should not be cleaned") staring, on talking too much, on "thank you," on saying thinking of others at table turning round when walking upsetting things at table (see "leslie and the christmas dinner") walking softly yawning .--moral subjects. i. introductory story. . the fairy temple. (the following story should be read to the children =first=, as it forms a kind of groundwork for the story lessons which follow.) it was night--a glorious, moonlight night, and in the shade of the leafy woods the queen of the fairies was calling her little people together by the sweet tones of a tinkling, silver bell. when they were all gathered round, she said: "my dear children, i am going to do a great work, and i want you all to help me". at this the fairies spread their wings and bowed, for they were always ready to do the bidding of their queen. they were all dressed in lovely colours, of a gauzy substance, finer than any silk that ever was seen, and their names were called after the colours they wore. the queen's robe was of purple and gold, and glittered grandly in the moonlight. "i have determined," said the queen, "to build a temple of precious stones, and =your= work will be to bring me the material." "rosy-wings," she continued, turning to a little fairy clad in delicate pink, and fair as a rose, "you shall bring rubies." "grass-green," to a fairy dressed in green, "your work is to find emeralds; and shiny-wings, you will go to the mermaids and ask them to give you pearls." now there stood near the queen six tiny, fairy sisters, whose robes were whiter and purer than any. the sisters were all called by the same name--"crystal-clear," and they waited to hear what their work was to be. "sisters crystal-clear," said the queen, "you shall all of you bring diamonds; we shall need so many diamonds." there was another fairy standing there, whose robe seemed to change into many colours as it shimmered in the moonlight, just as you have seen the sky change colour at sunset, and to her the queen said, "rainbow-robe, go and find the opal". then there were three other fairy sisters called "gold-wings," who were always trying to help the other fairies, and to do good to everybody, and the queen told them to bring fine gold to fasten the precious stones together. these are not =all= the fairies who were there; some others wore blue, some yellow, and the queen gave them all their work. then she rang a tiny, silver bell, and they all spread their wings and bowed before they flew away to do her bidding. after many days the fairies came together to bring their precious treasures to the queen. how they carried them i scarcely know, but there was a little girl, many years ago, who often paused at the window of a jeweller's shop to gaze at a tiny, silver boy, with silver wings, wheeling a silver wheel-barrow full of rings, and the little girl thought that perhaps the fairies carried things in the same way. anyhow, they all came to the queen bringing their burdens, and she soon set to work on the temple. "the foundations must be laid with diamonds," said the queen. "where are the six sisters? ah! here they come with the lovely, shining diamonds, which are like themselves, 'clear as crystal'. now little gold-wings, bring =your= treasure," and the three little sisters brought the finest of gold. so the work went merrily on, and the fairies danced in glee as they saw the glittering temple growing under the clever hands of the queen. she made the doors of pearls and the windows of rubies, and the roof she said should be of opal, because it would show many colours when the light played upon it. at last the lovely building was finished, and after the fairies had danced joyfully round it in a ring again and again, until they could dance no longer, they gathered in a group round the dear queen, and thanked her for having made so beautiful a temple. "it is quite the loveliest thing in the world, i am sure," said rosy-wings. "not quite," replied the queen, "mortals have it in their power to make a lovelier temple than ours." "who are 'mortals'?" asked shiny-wings. "boys and girls are mortals," said the queen, "and grown-up people also." "i have never seen mortals build anything half so pretty as our temple," said grass-green; "their houses are made of stone and brick." "ah! grass-green," answered the queen, smiling, "you have never seen the temple i am speaking of, but it =is= better than ours, for it lasts--lasts for ever. wind and rain, frost and snow, will spoil our temple in time; but the temple of the mortals lives on, and is never destroyed." "do tell us about it, dear queen," said all the fairies; "we will try to understand." "it is called by rather a long word," said the queen, "its name is 'character'; =that= is what the mortals build, and the stones they use are more precious than our stones. i will tell you the names of some of them. first there is =truth=, clear and bright like the diamonds; that must be the foundation; no good character can be made without truth." then the sisters crystal-clear smiled at each other and said, "we brought diamonds for truth". "there are =honesty=, =obedience=, and many others," continued the queen, "and =kindness=, which is like the pure gold that was brought by gold-wings, and makes a lovely setting for all the other stones." the little fairies were glad to hear all this about the temple which the mortals build, and gold-wings said that she would like above everything to be able to help boys and girls to make their temple beautiful, and the other fairies said the same; so the queen said they all might try to help them, for each boy and girl =must= build a temple, and the name of that temple is character. ii. obedience. . the two voices. there was once a little boy who said that whenever he was going to do anything wrong he heard two voices speaking to him. do you know what he meant? perhaps this story will help you. the boy's name was cecil. cecil's father had a very beautiful and rare canary, which had been brought far over the sea as a present to him. cecil often helped to feed the canary and give it fresh water, and sometimes his father would allow him to open the door of the cage, and the bird would come out and perch on his hand, which delighted cecil very much, but he was not allowed to open the door of the cage unless his father was with him. one day, however, cecil came to the cage alone, and while he watched the canary, a little voice said, "open the door and take him out; father will never know". that was a =wrong= voice, and cecil tried not to listen. it would have been better if he had gone away from the cage, but he did not; and the voice came again, "open the door and let him out". and another little voice said, "no, don't; your father said you must not". but cecil listened to the =wrong= voice; he opened the door gently, and out flew the pretty bird. first it perched on his finger, then it flew about the room, and then--cecil had not noticed that the window was open--then, before he knew, out of the window flew the canary, and poor cecil burst into tears. "oh! if i had listened to the =good= voice, the =right= voice, and not opened the door! father will be so angry." then the =bad= voice came again and said, "don't tell your father; say you know nothing about it ". but cecil did not listen this time; he was too brave a boy to tell his father a lie, and he determined to tell the truth and be punished, if necessary. of course his father was very sorry to lose his beautiful canary, and more sorry still that his little son had been disobedient, but he was glad that cecil told him the truth. now do you know the two things that the =wrong= voice told cecil to do? it told him ( ) not to obey; ( ) not to tell the truth. i think we have all heard those two voices, not with our ears, but =within= us. let us always listen to the =good= voice--the =right= voice. (blackboard sketch.) two voices:-- st. good, says, "obey," "speak the truth". nd. bad, says, "disobey," "tell untruth". (why we should obey.) . the pilot. you know that the country in which you live is an island? that means there is water all round it, and that water is the sea. england and scotland are joined together in one large island; and if you want to go to any other country, you must sail in a ship. a great many ships come to england, bringing us tea, coffee, sugar, oranges and many other things, and the towns they come to are called =ports=. london is a port, so is liverpool; and in the north of england is another port called hull. to get to hull from the sea we have to sail up a wide river called the humber for more than twenty miles. this river has a great many sandbanks in it, and there are men called =pilots= who know just where these sandbanks lie, and they are the ones who can guide the ships safely into port. one day there was a captain who brought his ship into the river, and said to himself, "i do not want the pilot on board, i can guide the ship myself". so he did not hoist the "union jack" on the foremast head, which means "pilot come on board"; and the pilot did not come. for a little time the good ship sailed along all right, but presently they found that she was not moving at all. what had happened? the ship was stuck fast on a sandbank, and the foolish captain wished now that he had taken the pilot on board. first he had to go out in the little boat and fetch a "tug-boat" to pull the ship off the sandbank, and then he was glad enough to have the pilot on board, and to let him guide the ship just as he liked. why could not the captain guide the ship? because he did not know the way. have you ever known children who did not like to do as they were told? who thought that =they= knew best--better than father or mother? they are like the foolish captain, who tried to guide his ship when he did not know the way. fathers and mothers are like the pilot, who knew which was the best way to take; and wise children are willing to be guided, for =they= do not know the way any more than the captain did. (blackboard.) =why= do we obey? because we do not know the way. the story and its teaching may be further impressed on the minds of the children by a sand lesson:-- place a blackboard or large piece of oil-cloth on the floor, and make an "island" in sand, and in the "island" form a large "estuary," with little heaps of sand dotted about in it, to represent sandbanks. the sailors cannot =see= the sandbanks, for they are all covered with water in the =real= river, so we will take a duster and spread it over these sandbanks. now, take a tiny boat and ask one of the children to sail it up the river, keeping clear of the sandbanks. the children will soon see that it cannot be done, and the "blackboard" lesson may be again enforced. (why we should obey.) . the dog that did not like to be washed.[ ] a lady once had a dog of which she was very fond. the dog was fond of his mistress also, and loved to romp by her side when she was out walking, or to lie at her feet as she sat at work. but the dog had one serious fault--he did not like to be washed, and he was so savage when he =was= put into the bath, that at last none of the servants dare do it. the lady decided that she would not take any more notice of the dog until he was willing to have his bath quietly, so she did not take him out with her for walks, nor allow him to come near her in the house. there were no pattings, no caresses, no romps, and he began to look quite wretched and miserable. you see the dog did not like his mistress to be vexed with him, and he felt very unhappy--so unhappy that at last he could bear it no longer. then one morning he crept quietly up to the lady and gave her a look which she knew quite well meant, "i cannot bear this any longer; i will be good". so he was put in the bath, and though he had to be scrubbed very hard--for by this time he was unusually dirty--he stood still quite patiently, and when it was all over, he bounded to his mistress with a joyous bark and a wag of the tail, as much as to say, "it is all right now". after this he was allowed to go for walks as usual, and was once more a happy dog, and he never objected to his bath afterwards. the dog could not bear to grieve his mistress; and how much more should children be sorry to grieve kind father and mother, who do so much for them. (blackboard.) =why= we obey:-- . because the "good voice" tells us. . because we do not know the way. . because it gives pleasure to father and mother. (ready obedience.[ ]) . robert and the marbles. a little boy named robert was having a game at marbles with a number of other boys, and it had just come his turn to play. he meant to win, and was carefully aiming the marble, when he heard his mother's voice calling, "robert, i want you". quick as thought the marbles were dropped into his pocket, and off he ran to see what mother wanted. (blackboard.) robert obeyed readily, cheerfully, quickly. (unready, sulky obedience.) . jimmy and the overcoat. i was in a house one day where a boy was getting ready to go to school. his bag was slung over his shoulder, and he was just reaching his cap from the peg, when his mother said, "put on your overcoat, jimmy; it is rather cold this morning". oh, what a fuss there was! how he argued with his mother, "it was not cold; he hated overcoats. could he not take it over his arm, or put it on in the afternoon?" many more objections he made, and when at last he =had= put it on, he went out grumbling, and slammed the door after him. can you guess how his mother felt? "unhappy," you will say. and do you think it is right, dear children, to make mother unhappy? i am sure you do not. little child with eyes so blue, what has mother done for you? taught your little feet to stand, led you gently by the hand, and in thousand untold ways guarded you through infant days: do not think that =you= know best, just obey, and leave the rest. you see jimmy thought that he knew better than his mother, but he did not. children need to be guided like the boat in the humber (story lesson ), for they are not very wise; and when we obey, we are building up our temple with beautiful stones. (blackboard.) =two= kinds of obedience:-- . ready, cheerful-robert. . unready, sulky-jimmy. which do you like best? footnotes: [ ] _animal intelligence_, romanes. [ ] games nos. and in "games without music" illustrate above story lesson. iii. loyalty. . rowland and the apple tart. perhaps you have never heard the word loyalty before, and maybe rowland had not either, but he knew what it meant, and tried to practise it. rowland was not a very strong little boy, and he could not eat so many different kinds of food as some children can, for some of them made him sick. among other things he was forbidden to take pastry. his mother, who loved him very dearly, had one day said to him, "rowland, my boy, i cannot always be with you, but i trust you to do what i wish," and rowland said he would try always to remember. one time he was invited to go and stay with his cousins, who lived in a fine old house in the country. they were strong, healthy, rosy children, quite a contrast to their delicate little cousin, and perhaps they were a little rough and rude as well. there was a large apple tart for dinner one day, and when rowland said, "i do not wish for any, auntie, thank you," his cousins looked at him in surprise, and the eldest said scornfully, "i am glad that =i= am not delicate," and the next boy remarked, "what a fad!" while the third muttered "baby". this was all very hard to bear, and when his aunt said, "i am sure a little will not hurt you," rowland felt very much inclined to give in, but he remembered that his mother trusted him, and he remained true to her wishes. this is loyalty, doing what is right even when there is no one there to see. (blackboard.) be true or loyal when no eyes are upon you. iv. truthfulness. (direct untruth.) . lucy and the jug of milk. "lucy," said her mother, "just run to the dairy and fetch a pint of milk for me, here is the money; and do remember, child, to look where you are going, so that you do not stumble and drop the jug." i am afraid lucy was a little like another girl you will hear of (story lesson ); she was too fond of staring about, and perhaps rather careless. however, she went to the dairy and bought the milk, and had returned half-way home without any mishap, when she met a flock of sheep coming down the road, followed by a large sheep-dog. lucy stood on the pavement to watch them pass; it was such fun to see the sheep-dog scamper from one side to the other, and the timid sheep spring forward as soon as the dog came near them. so far the milk was safe; but, after the sheep had passed, lucy thought she would just turn round to have one more peep at them, and oh, dear, her foot tripped against a stone, and down she fell, milk, and jug, and all, and the jug was smashed to pieces. lucy was in great trouble, and as she stood there and looked at the broken jug, and the milk trickling down the gutter, she cried bitterly. a big boy who was passing by at the time, and had seen the accident, came across the road and said to her: "don't cry, little girl, just run home and tell your mother that the sheep-dog bounced up against you and knocked the jug out of your hand; then you will not be punished". lucy dried her eyes quickly, and gazed at the boy in astonishment. "tell my mother a =lie=!" said she; "=no=, i would rather be punished a dozen times than do so. i shall tell her the truth," and she walked away home. lucy was careless, but she was not untruthful; surely the boy must have felt ashamed! you remember the fairy queen said that =truth= was the foundation of our beautiful temple (story lesson ), and the building will all tumble down in ruins if we do not have a strong foundation, so we must be brave to bear punishment (as lucy was) if we deserve it, and be sure to (blackboard) tell the truth whatever it costs. (untruth, by not speaking.) . mabel and fritz. this is a story of a dear little curly-headed girl called mabel, whom everybody loved. she was so bright, and happy, and good-tempered, one could not help loving her, and when you looked into her clear, blue eyes, you could see that she was a frank, truthful child, who had nothing to hide, for she tried to listen to the good voice, and do what was right. one day mabel was having a romp with her little dog, fritz, in the kitchen. up and down she chased him, and away he went, jumping over the chairs, hiding under the dresser, always followed by mabel, until at last he leaped on the table, and in trying to make him come down, mabel and the dog together overturned a tray full of clean, starched linen that was on the table. mabel had been giving fritz some water to drink a little before this, and in doing so had spilt a good deal on the floor, so the clean cuffs and collars rolled over in the wet, and were quite spoiled. mabel's mother happened to come in just when the tray fell with a bang, and as the dog jumped down from the table at the same moment she thought he had done it, and mabel did not tell that she was in fault, so poor fritz was chained up in his kennel, and kept without dinner as a punishment. mabel felt sad about it all the rest of the day, and when she was put to bed at night, and mamma had left her, she did not go to sleep as usual, but tossed about on the pillow, until her little curly head was quite hot and tired. then she began to cry. mabel was listening to the good voice now, and it said, "oh, mabel, =you= helped fritz to overturn the tray, and =he= got all the blame, how mean of you!" mabel sobbed louder when she thought of herself as being mean, and her mother hearing the noise came to see what was the matter. then mabel confessed all, and her mother said, "perhaps my little girl did not know that we could be untruthful =by not speaking at all=, but you see it is quite possible". i do not think mabel ever forgot the lesson which she learnt that (blackboard) there can be untruth without words. (untruth, by not telling all.) . a game of cricket. two boys were playing at bat and ball in a field. there was a high hedge on one side of the field, and on the other side of the hedge was a market garden, where things are grown to be afterwards sold in the market. the boys had been playing some time, when the "batter," giving the ball a very hard blow, sent it over the hedge, and =both= the boys heard a loud crash as of breaking glass. they picked up the wickets quickly, and carried them, with the bat, to a hut that stood in the field, and were hurrying away when the gardener came and stopped them, asking, "have you sent a cricket-ball over the hedge into my cucumber frame?" the boy who had struck the ball answered, "i did not see a ball go into your frame," and the other boy said, "neither did i". they did not =see= the ball break the glass, but they both =knew= that it had crashed into the frame, and though the words they spoke might be true, the lie was there all the same. supposing the sisters "crystal-clear" had brought to the fairy queen a diamond that was only good on one side, do you think she would have put it in the temple? no, indeed, she would have said it was only =half= true; and so we must put away anything that =looks= like truth, but is not truth. how wrong it is to make believe we have not done a thing, when all the time we have. dear children, be true all through! have you ever seen a glass jar of pure honey, no bits of wax floating in it, all clear and pure? let your heart be like that, =sincere=, which means "without wax, clear and pure". (blackboard.) a half-truth is as hateful as a lie. (untruth, by "stretching"--exaggeration.) . the three feathers. one day three little girls were talking about hats and feathers. the first girl said: "i have such a long feather in my best hat; it goes all down one side". then the next girl said: "oh! =my= feather is longer than that, for it goes all round the hat"; and the third girl said: "ah! but =my= feather is longer than either of yours, for it goes round the hat and hangs down behind as well". on the next sunday each of these little girls went walking in the park with her parents, wearing her best hat with the wonderful feather; it never occurred to =one= of them that she might meet the other two, but that is just what happened, and the three "long" feathers proved to be nothing but three =short=, little feathers, one in each hat! can you guess how =ashamed= each girl felt? you have seen a piece of elastic stretched out. how =long= you can make it, and how =short= it goes when you leave off stretching! each girl wanted to be better than the other, and to =appear= so, each "stretched" the story of her feather, just as the length of elastic was stretched, forgetting that (blackboard) when we "stretch" a story, we do not speak the truth. v. honesty. . lulu and the pretty coloured wool. the little children who went to school long years ago did not have pretty things to play with as you have--no kindergarten balls with bright colours, nor nice bricks with which to build houses and churches! there was a little girl named lulu who went to a dame's school in those far-off days, and most of the time she had to sit knitting a long, grey stocking, though she was only six years old. some of the older girls were sewing on canvas with pretty coloured wools, and making (what appeared to little lulu) most beautiful pictures. how she longed for a length of the pink or blue wool to have for her very own! the school was in a room upstairs, and at the head of the stair there was a window, with a deep window-sill in front of it. as lulu came out of the schoolroom one day to take a message for the teacher, and turned to close the door after her, she saw (oh, lovely sight!) that the window-sill was piled up with bundles of the pretty coloured wool that she liked so much. oh! how she wished for a little of it! and, see, there is some rose-pink wool on the top, cut into lengths ready for the girls to sew with! it is too much for poor little lulu; she draws out one! two! three lengths of the wool, folds it up hastily, puts it in her pocket, and runs down the stair on the errand she has been sent. but is she happy? oh, no! for a little voice says: "lulu, you are stealing; the wool is not yours!" for a few minutes the wool rests in her pocket, and then she runs back up the stair; the schoolroom door is still closed as lulu draws the wool from her pocket, and gently puts it back on the window-sill. then she takes the message and returns to her place in the schoolroom, and to the knitting of her long stocking, hot and ashamed at the thought of what she has done, but glad in her heart that she listened to the good voice, and did not keep the wool. had any one seen her? did any one know about it? yes, there were loving eyes watching little lulu, and the one who looked down was very glad when she listened to the good voice. do you know who it was? god our father sees us all, boys and girls, and children small; when we listen to his voice, angels in their songs rejoice. have _you_ heard that voice, dear child, speaking in you, gentle, mild? always listen and obey, for it leads you the right way. (blackboard.) do not take what is not yours. _note._--to the mother or teacher who can read between the lines, this little story (which is not imaginary, but a true record of fact) bears another meaning. it shows the child's passionate love for objects that are pretty, especially coloured objects, and how the withholding of these may open the way to temptation. let the child's natural desire be gratified, and supply to it freely coloured wools, beads, etc., at the same time teaching the right use of them, according to kindergarten[ ] principles. (taking little things.) . carl and the lump of sugar. there are some people who think that taking =little= things is not stealing. but it =is=. there was a little boy, named carl, who began his wrong-doing by taking a piece of sugar. then he took another piece, and another; but he always did it when his mother was not looking. we always want to hide the doing of wrong--we feel so ashamed. one day carl's mother sent him to the shop for something, and he kept a halfpenny out of the change. his mother did not notice it; she never thought her little boy would steal. so it went on from bad to worse, until one day he stole a shilling from a boy in the school, and was expelled. as carl grew older he took larger sums, and you will not be surprised to hear that in the end he was sent to prison, and nearly broke his mother's heart. . lilie and the scent. lilie's cousin had a bottle of scent given to her, and it had such a pleasant smell that one day, when lilie was alone in the room, she thought she would like a little, so she unscrewed the stopper, and sprinkled a few drops on her handkerchief. i do not suppose her cousin would have been angry if she had known, but lilie knew the scent was not hers, and she was miserable the moment she had taken it, and had no peace until she confessed the fault, and asked her cousin's forgiveness. i wish carl had felt like that about the piece of sugar; do not you? then he would never have taken the larger things, and been sent to prison. (blackboard.) little wrongs lead to greater wrongs. carl--sugar--money--prison. . copying. it was the christmas examination at school, and the boys were all at their desks ready for the questions in arithmetic. will jones's desk was next tom hardy's, and everybody thought that =one= of these two boys would win the prize. as soon as the questions had been given out, the boys set to work. tom did all his sums on a scrap of paper first, then he copied them out carefully, and, after handing his paper to the master, left the room. unfortunately he left the scrap of paper on which he had worked his sums lying on the desk. will snatched it up, and looked to see if his answers were the same. no! two were different. tom's would be sure to be right; so he copied the sums from tom's scrap of paper. it was stealing, of course; just as much stealing as if he had taken tom's pen or knife. besides, it is so mean to let some one else do the work and then steal it from them--even the =birds= know that. some little birds were building themselves a nest, and to save the trouble of gathering materials, they went and took some twigs and other things from =another bird's nest= that was being built. but when the old birds saw what the little ones had done, they set to work and pulled the nest all to pieces. that was to teach them to go and find their =own= twigs and sticks, and not to steal from others. of course will was not happy. there was a little voice within that would not let him rest, and when the boys kept talking about the arithmetic prize, and wondering who would get it, he felt as though he would like to go and hide somewhere, he was so ashamed. that is one of the results of wrong-doing, as we said before--it always makes us ashamed. at last the day came when the master would tell who were the prize-winners. the boys were all sitting at their desks listening as the master read out these words:-- "tom hardy and will jones have all their sums right, but as will's paper is the neater of the two, =he= will take the first prize". the boys clapped their hands, but will was not glad. the voice within spoke louder and louder, so loudly that will was almost afraid some of the other boys would hear it, and his face grew red and hot. at last he determined to obey the good voice and tell the truth, so he rose from his seat, walked up to the master, and said: "please, sir, the prize does not belong to me, for i stole two of my answers from tom hardy. i am very sorry." the master was greatly surprised, but he could see that will was very sorry and unhappy. he held out his hand to him, and said: "i am glad, will, that you have been brave enough to confess this. it will make you far happier than the prize would have done, seeing that you had not honestly won it." so the prize went to tom, and will was never guilty of copying again; he remembered too well the unhappiness that followed it. (blackboard.) copying is stealing. . on finding things. when lulu reached her fifteenth birthday she had a watch given to her. one afternoon she was walking through a wood, up a steep and rocky path, and when she reached the top she stood for a few moments to rest. looking back down the wood she saw a boy coming by the same path, and when about half-way up he stooped down as if to raise something from the ground, but the thought did not occur to lulu that it might be anything belonging to her. when she was rested she walked on until she came to a house just outside the wood, where she was to take tea with a friend. after tea they sat and worked until the sun began to go down. then lulu said, "i think i must be going home; i will see what time it is," and she was going to take out her watch, when, alas! she found it was gone. "oh, dear!" said she, "what shall i do? how careless of me to put it in my belt; it was a present from my brother!" then she suddenly remembered standing at the top of the path and seeing the boy pick something up. "that would be my watch," said she. and so it was. the boy had followed her up the wood, and had seen her go into the house, but he did not give up the watch. he waited until some bills were posted offering a reward of £ , then he brought the watch and took the sovereign. if he had been an honest boy he would not have waited, but would have given up the watch at once. we ought not to wish any reward for doing what is right. it is quite enough to have the happiness that comes from obeying the good voice. we cannot build up a good character without honesty. do right because you =love= the right, and not for hope of gain; a conscience pure is rich reward, but doing wrong brings pain. (blackboard.) when you find anything, try to discover the owner, and give it up at once. footnote: [ ] _kindergarten guide_, published by messrs. longmans. vi. kindness. . squeaking wheels. a lady was one day taking a walk along a country lane, and just as she was passing the gate of a field a horse and cart came out, and went down the road in the same direction as she was going, and oh! how the wheels did squeak! the lady longed to get away from the sound of them. first she walked very quickly, hoping to get well ahead; but no, the horse hurried up too, and kept pace with her. perhaps =he= disliked the squeaking, and wanted his journey to be quickly finished. then she lingered behind, and sauntered along slowly, but squeak, squeak--the hateful sound was still there. at last the cart was driven down a lane to the right, and now the lady could listen to the songs of the birds, the humming of the bees, and the sweet rustle of the leaves as the wind played amongst them. "how much pleasanter," thought she, "are these sounds than the squeaking of the wheels." i wonder if you have ever seen any little children who make you think of those disagreeable wheels? they are children who do not like to lend their toys, or to play the games that their companions suggest, but who like, instead, to please themselves. do you know what the wheels needed to make them go sweetly? they needed oil. and the disagreeable children who grate on us with their selfish, unkind ways, need =another= sort of oil--the oil of kindness. =that= will make things go sweetly; so we will write on the blackboard (blackboard) squeaking wheels need oil. children need the oil of kindness. . birds and trees. did you know that trees and birds, bees and flowers could be kind to each other? they =can=; i will tell you how. see the pretty red cherries growing on that tree. all little children like cherries, and the birds like them too. a little bird comes flying to the cherry tree and asks, "may i have one of these rosy little balls, please?" "yes, little bird," says the cherry tree; "take some, by all means." so the bird has a nice fruit banquet with the cherries, and then, what do you think =he= does for the tree? "oh!" you say, "a little bird cannot do =anything= that would help a big tree." but he can. when he has eaten the cherry he drops the stone, and sometimes it sinks into the ground, and from it a young cherry tree springs up. the tree could not do that for itself, so we see that (blackboard) birds and trees are kind to each other. . flowers and bees. when you have been smelling a tiger-lily, has any of the yellow dust ever rested on the tip of your nose? (let the children see a tiger-lily, or a picture of one, if possible.) look into the large cup of the lily, and there, deep down, you will see some sweet, delicious juice. what is it for? ask the bee; she will tell you. here she comes, and down goes her long tongue into the flower. "ah! mrs. bee, the honey is for you, i see. and pray, what have you done for the flower? nothing, i'm afraid." "oh, yes, i have," hums the bee. "i brought her some flower-dust (pollen) on my back from another tiger-lily that i have been visiting to make her seeds grow. when i dip down into the flower some of the 'dust' clings to me, so i take it to the next tiger-lily that i visit, and she is very much obliged to me." you see, dear children, how the flowers help each other, and how the bee carries messages from one to another; so if (blackboard) birds and trees, flowers and bees are kind to each other, much more should children be kind. . lulu and the bundle. do you remember the story of "lulu and the wool"? this is a true tale of the same little girl when she was grown older. lulu's home was at the top of a hill, and the road leading up to it was very steep. one summer evening, as lulu walked home from town, she overtook a woman coming from market, and carrying a heavy basket as well as a bundle which was tied up in a blue checked handkerchief. the poor woman stopped to rest just as lulu came up to her. "let me carry your bundle," said lulu. and before the woman could answer she had picked it up and was trudging along. "perhaps your mother would not be pleased to see you carrying my bundle?" sighed the woman. "some people think it is vulgar to be seen carrying parcels." "it is never vulgar to be kind," answered lulu. "that is what mother would say." so they walked on until they came to the cottage, and lulu left the grateful woman at her own door, and forgot all about it. some years after, lulu had been away from home, and, missing her train, she returned laden with parcels one dark, wet night. there was no one to meet her, no one to help to carry her parcels, and the rain was pouring down. she hurried outside to look for a cab, but there was not one to be had, so she began to walk up the hill. after going a very little way she stopped to rest, the parcels were so heavy; and just then a man came up and said: "give me your parcels, miss, they seem too heavy for you". and lulu, astonished, handed them to him. he carried them to the door of her mother's house, and hardly waited to hear the grateful thanks lulu would have poured out. have you ever heard these words: "give, and it shall be given unto you". i think they came true in this little story. do not you? let us all try to build a good deal of the "pure gold" of kindness into our "temple". vii. thoughtfulness. . baby elsie and the stool. if you place your hand on your head you will feel something hard just beneath the hair. what is it? it is bone. pass your hand all over your head and you will still feel the bone. it is called the skull, and it covers up a wonderful thing called the brain, with which we think, and learn, and remember. a little baby girl was toddling about the room one afternoon while her mother sat sewing. the baby was a year and a half old. she had only just learned to walk, and could not talk much, but she had begun to think. presently she noticed a little stool under the table, and after a great deal of trouble she managed to get it out. can you guess what she wanted it for? (let children try to answer.) she wanted it for mother's feet to rest upon. elsie could not =say= this, but she dragged the stool until it was close to her mother, and then she patted it, and said "mamma," which meant, "put your feet on it". was not that a sweet, kind thing for a one-year-old baby to do? you see she was learning to think--to think for others, and you will not be surprised to hear that she grew up to be a kind, helpful girl, and was so bright and happy that her mother called her "sunshine". if any one asked me what kind of child i liked best, i believe the answer would be this: "a child who is thoughtful of others"; for a child who thinks of others will not be rude, or rough, or unkind. who was it slammed the door when mother had a headache? it was a child who did not think. who left his bat lying across the garden path so that baby tumbled over it and got a great bump on his little forehead? it was thoughtless jimmy. do not be thoughtless, dear children, for you cannot help hurting people, if you are thoughtless; and we are in the world to make it happy, =not= to =hurt=. thoughtfulness is a lovely jewel; let us all try to build it into our "temple". . the thoughtful soldier. a great soldier, sir ralph abercromby, had been wounded in battle, and was dying. as they carried him on board the ship in a litter a soldier's blanket was rolled up and placed beneath his head for a pillow to ease his pain. "whose blanket is this?" asked he. one of the soldiers answered that it only belonged to one of the men. "but i want to know the name of the man," said sir ralph. he was then told that the man's name was duncan roy, and he said: "then see that duncan roy gets his blanket this very night". you see how thoughtful he was for the other man's comfort, so thoughtful that he did not wish to keep duncan's blanket even though he himself was dying. is it not true that "thoughtfulness" is one of the most beautiful of the precious stones that you build with. (blackboard.) be thoughtful. viii. help one another. . the cat and the parrot.[ ] a cat and a parrot lived in the same house, and were very kind and friendly towards each other. one evening there was no one in the kitchen except the bird and the cat. the cook had gone upstairs, leaving a bowl full of dough to rise by the fire. before long the cat rushed upstairs, mewing and making signs for the cook to come down, then she jumped up and seized her apron, and tried to pull her along. what could be the matter, what had happened? cook went downstairs to see, and there was poor polly shrieking, calling out, flapping her wings, and struggling with all her might "up to her knees" in dough, and stuck quite fast. of course the cook lifted the parrot out, and cleaned the dough from her legs, but if pussy had not been her kind friend, and run for help, she would have sunk farther and farther into the dough, and perhaps in the end would have been smothered. (blackboard.) if a cat can help a bird, surely boys and girls should help each other. . the two monkeys.[ ] a ship that was crossing the sea had two monkeys on board; one of them was larger and older than the other, though she was not the mother of the younger one. now it happened one day that the little monkey fell overboard, and the bigger one was immediately very much excited. she had a cord tied round her waist, with which she had been fastened up, and what do you think she did? she scrambled down the outside of the ship, until she came to a ledge, then she held on to the ship with one hand, and with the other she held out the cord to the poor little monkey that was struggling in the water. was not she a clever, thoughtful, kind monkey? the cord was just a little too short, so one of the sailors threw out a longer rope, which the little monkey grasped, and by this means she was brought safely on board. you will remember the story of the monkey, who tried to save her little friend, and remember, also, that (blackboard) children should help one another. . the wounded bird. there is a beautiful story about birds helping each other in a book[ ] which you must read for yourselves when you grow older. one day a man was out with his gun, and shot a sea-bird, called a tern, which fell wounded into the sea, near the water's edge. the man stood and waited until the wind should blow the bird near enough for him to reach it, when, to his surprise, he saw two other terns fly down to the poor wounded bird and take hold of him, one at each wing, lift him out of the water, and carry him seawards. two other terns followed, and when the first two had carried him a few yards and were tired, they laid him down gently and the next two picked him up, and so they went on carrying him in turns until they reached a rock a good way off, where they laid him down. the sportsman then made his way to the rock, but when they saw him coming, a whole swarm of terns came together, and just before he reached the place, two of them again lifted up the wounded bird and bore him out to sea. the man was near enough to have hindered this if he had wished, but he was so pleased to see the kindness of the birds that he would not take the poor creature from them. so we have learnt another lesson from the birds, and will write it down. (blackboard.) birds helped the wounded tern; we should help each other. footnotes: [ ] romanes' _animal intelligence_. [ ] romanes' _animal intelligence_. [ ] smiles' _life of edward_. ix. on being brave. (brave in danger.) . how leonard saved his little brother. have you ever known a little girl who cried whenever her face was washed? or a little boy who screamed each time he had a tumble, although he might not be hurt in the least? you would not call =those= brave children, would you? we say that people are brave when they are not afraid to face danger, like the men who go out in the life-boat when the sea is rough to try and save a crew from shipwreck; or the brave firemen who rescue the inmates of a burning house. perhaps you think it is only grown-up people who can be brave, but that is not so; little children can be brave also, as you will see from this story of a little boy, about whom we read in the papers not long ago, and who lived not far from london. some children were playing near a pool, when, by some means, one of them, a little boy named arthur, three years old, fell in. all the children, except one, ran away. (=they= were not brave, were they?) the one who remained was little arthur's brother, leonard. he was only five years old, but he had a brave heart, and he went into the water at once, although he could not see arthur, who had fallen on his back under the water, and was too frightened to get up. leonard had seen where he fell, and though he did not know how deep the water was, he walked in, lifted his little brother up, and pulled him out. it was all done much more quickly than i have told you. if leonard had run away to fetch some one, instead of doing what he could himself, his brother must have been drowned, because he was fast in the mud. i am sure you will say that =leonard= was a brave little boy, and we should not think that =he= cries when he is washed, or when he has a little tumble. leonard teaches us to (blackboard) be brave in danger. (brave in little things.) . the twins. what a fuss some children make when they are hurt ever so little, and if a finger should bleed how dreadfully frightened they are! a lady told me this story of two little twin boys whom she knew. their names were bennie and joey, and they were just two years old. one day as they were playing together bennie cut his finger, and the blood came out in little drops. now, the twins had never seen blood before, and you will think, maybe, that bennie began to cry; but he did not. he looked at his finger and said: "oh! joey, look! what is this?" "don't know," said joey, shaking his head. then they both watched the bleeding finger for a little, and at last bennie said: "i know, joey; it is =gravy=". he had seen the gravy in the meat, and he thought this was something like it. anyhow, it was better than crying and making a fuss, do you not think? (blackboard.) be brave in little things. (brave in suffering.) . the broken arm. it was recreation time, and the boys were pretending to play football, when a boy of six, named robin, had an awkward fall and broke his arm. the teacher bound it up as well as she could, and robin did not cry, though the poor arm must have pained him. he walked quietly through the streets with the teacher, who took him to the doctor to have the broken bone set, and when the doctor pulled his arm straight out to get the bones in place before he bound it up, robin gave one little cry; that was all. he is now a grown-up man, but the teacher still remembers how brave he was when his arm was broken, and feels proud of her pupil. (blackboard) be brave in suffering. . the brave monkey.[ ] did you ever hear of a monkey having toothache? there was a monkey once who lived in a cage in some gardens in london, and he had a very bad toothache, which made a large swelling on his face. the poor creature was in such great pain that a dentist was sent for. (a dentist, tell the children, is a man who attends to teeth.) when the monkey was taken out of the cage he struggled, but as soon as the dentist placed his hand on the spot he was quite still. he laid his head down so that the dentist might look at his bad tooth, and then he allowed him to take it out without making any fuss whatever. there was a little girl once who screamed and struggled dreadfully when she was taken to have her hair cut, and that, you know, does not hurt at all. let us learn from the monkey, as we did from robin, to (blackboard) be brave in suffering. x. try, try again. . the sparrow that would not be beaten.[ ] a sparrow was one day flying over a road when he saw lying there a long strip of rag. "ah!" said he, "that would be nice for the nest we are building; i will take it home." so he picked up one end in his beak and flew away with it, but the wind blew the long streamer about his wings, and down he came, tumbling in the dust. soon he was up again, and, after giving himself a little shake, he took the rag by the other end and mounted in the air. but again it entangled his wings, and he was soon on the ground. next he seized it in the middle, but now there were =two= loose ends, and he was entangled more quickly than before. then he stopped to think for a minute, and looked at the rag as much as to say: "what shall i do with you next"? an idea struck him. he hopped up to the rag, and with his beak and claws rolled it into a nice little ball. then he drove his beak into it, shook his head once or twice to make sure that the ends were fast, and flew away in triumph. remember the sparrow and the rag, and (blackboard) do not be beaten, but try, try again. . the railway train. if you had been a little child a hundred years ago, instead of now, and had wished to travel to the seaside or any other place, do you know how you would have got there? you would have had to travel in a coach, for there were no trains in those days. i am afraid the little children who lived then did not get to the seashore as often as you do, unless they lived near it, for it cost so much money to ride in the coaches. how is it that we have trains now? there was a man called george stephenson--a poor man he was; he did not even know how to read until he went to a night school when he was eighteen years old, but he worked and worked at the steam-engine until he had made one that could draw a train along. so you see that because this man and others tried and tried again, all those years ago, we have the nice, quick trains to take us to the seaside cheaply, and to other places as well. like the sparrow, george stephenson teaches us to (blackboard) try, try again. . the man who found america. a long, long time ago the people in this country did not even know there =was= such a place as america; it was another "try, try again" man that found it out. his name was christopher columbus, and he thought there must be a country on the other side of that great ocean, if he could only get across. but it would take a good ship, and sailors, and money, and he had none of these. he was in a country called spain, and he asked the king and queen to help him, but for a great while they did not. however, he waited and never gave it up, and at last the queen said he should go, and off he started with two or three ships and a number of sailors. it was more than two months before the new land appeared, and sometimes the sailors were afraid when it was very stormy, and wanted to turn back, but columbus encouraged them to go on, and at last they saw the land. they all went on shore, and the first thing they did was to kneel down and thank god for bringing them safe to land; then they kissed the ground for very gladness, and wept tears of joy. when columbus came home again, bringing gold, and cotton, and wonderful birds from the new country, he was received with great rejoicing by the king and queen and all the people. do not forget this lesson:-- (blackboard) try, try again. footnotes: [ ] romanes' _animal intelligence_. [ ] _ibid._ xi. patience. . walter and the spoilt page. walter was busy doing his home lessons; he wanted to get them finished quickly, so that he could join his playmates at a game of cricket before it was time to go to bed. he was nearly at the end, and the page was just as neat as it could be--for walter worked very carefully--when, in turning the paper over, he gave the pen which was in his hand a sharp jerk, and a great splash of ink fell in the very middle of the neat, clean page. "oh, dear!" cried walter, "all my work is wasted. i shall get no marks for this lesson unless i write it all over again; and i wanted so much to go out and have a game." however, he was a brave boy, and his mother was glad to notice that he set to work quietly, and soon had it written over again. when bedtime came, she said: "walter, your accident with the ink made me think of a story. shall i tell it to you?" "oh, yes, mother! please do," said walter, for he loved stories. . the drawings eaten by the rats. "there was once a gentleman (audubon) in america," said his mother, "who was very fond of studying birds. he would go out in the woods to watch them, and he also made sketches of them, and worked so hard that he had nearly a thousand of these drawings, which, of course, he valued very much. one time he was going away from home for some months, and before he went he collected all his precious drawings together, put them carefully in a wooden box, and gave them to a relative to take care of until he came back. "the time went by and he returned, and soon after asked for the box containing his treasures. the box was there, but what do you think? two rats had found their way into it, and had made a home there for their young ones, and the beautiful drawings were all gnawed until nothing was left but tiny scraps of paper. you can guess how dreadfully disappointed the poor man would feel. but he tells us that in a few days he went out to the woods and began his drawings again as gaily as if nothing had happened; and he was pleased to think that he might now make better drawings than before. it was nearly three years before he had made up for what the rats had eaten. this man must have possessed the precious jewel of patience. do you not think so?" "what is patience, mother?" asked walter. "the little scotch girl said it meant 'wait a wee, and no weary,'" said his mother; "and i think that is a very good meaning. it is like saying that we must wait, and do the work over again, if necessary, without getting vexed or worried." patience is a good "stone" to have in the temple of character. (blackboard.) patience means:-- wait, and not weary. xii. on giving in. . playing at shop. you have often played at keeping shop, have you not? winnie and may were very fond of this game, and when it was holiday time they played it nearly every day. one morning they made the "shop" ready as usual; a stool was to be the "counter," and upon this they placed the scales, with all the things they meant to sell. when all was ready, winnie stood behind the "counter," and said, "i will be the 'shopman'!" "no!" exclaimed may, "=i= want to be 'shopman'; let me come behind the 'counter'." but winnie would not move, then may tried to =pull= her away, and winnie pushed may, and in the end both little girls were crying, and the game was spoilt. were not they foolish? how easy it would have been to take it in turns to be "shopman," and that would have been quite fair to both little girls. i am afraid we sometimes =forget= to be =fair= in our games. we will tell winnie and may the story of the two goats. . the two goats. perhaps you know that goats like to live on the rocks, and as they have cloven feet (that is, feet that are split up the middle) they can walk in places that would not be at all safe for your little feet. one day two goats met each other on a narrow ledge of rock where there was not room to pass. below them was a steep precipice; if they fell down there they would soon be dashed to pieces. how should they manage? it was now that one of the goats did a polite, kind, graceful act. she knelt down on the ledge so that the other goat might walk over her, and when this was done, she rose up and went on her way, so both the goats were safe and unhurt. the goat teaches us a beautiful lesson on "giving in". (blackboard.) the two goats, sometimes it is noble to give way. xiii. on being generous. . lilie and the beggar girl. you will think "generous" is a long word, but the stories will help you to understand what it means. lilie was staying with her auntie, for her mother had gone on a voyage with father in his ship. one day lilie heard a timid little knock at the back door. she ran to open it, and saw standing outside a poor little girl about her own size, with no shoes or stockings on. she asked for a piece of bread, and lilie's auntie went into the pantry to cut it. while she was away lilie noticed the little girl's bare feet, and, without thinking, she took off her own shoes and gave them to her. when the girl had gone, auntie asked, "where are your shoes, lilie?" and she replied, "i gave them to the little girl, auntie. i do not think mother would mind." it would have been better if lilie had asked auntie before she gave away her shoes; but auntie did not scold her; she only said to herself, "what a generous little soul the child has". . bertie and the porridge. bertie was a rosy-faced, healthy boy. his mother lived in a little cottage in the country, and she was too poor to buy dainties for her child, but the good, plain food he ate was quite enough to make him hearty and strong. his usual breakfast was a basin of porridge mixed with milk, and one bright, sunny morning he was sitting on the doorstep, waiting until it should be cool enough for him to eat, when he saw a very poor, old man leaning on the garden gate. bertie felt sure the old man must be wanting something to eat, he looked so pale and thin, and being a generous-hearted boy, he carried down his basin of porridge to the old man, and asked him to eat it, which he did with great enjoyment, for he was very hungry. i think you will understand now what being generous means. we may do good by giving away things that are of no use to us, but that is not being generous. (blackboard.) we are generous when we go without things, that others may have them. xiv. forgiveness. . the two dogs.[ ] one day two dogs had been quarrelling, and when they parted at night, they had not made it up, but went to rest, thinking hard things of each other, i fear. next day, however, one of the dogs brought a biscuit to the other, and laid it down beside him, as much as to say, "let us be friends". i think the other dog would be sure to forgive him after that, and we are sure they would both be much happier for being friends once more. (blackboard.) if you quarrel, make it up again. xv. good for evil. . the blotted copy-book. gladys and dora were in the same class at school, and when the teacher promised to give a prize for the cleanest, neatest and best-written copy-book, they determined to try and win the prize. both the little girls wrote their copies very carefully for several days, but by-and-by gladys grew a little careless, and her copies were not so well written as dora's. gladys knew this quite well, and yet she longed for the prize. what should she do? there was only one copy more to be written, and then it would have to be decided who should get the prize. sad to say, gladys thought of a very mean way by which she might spoil dora's chance of it. she went to school one morning very early--no one was there; softly she walked to dora's desk, and drew out her neat, tidy copy-book, which she opened at the last page, and, taking a pen, she dipped it in ink, and splashed the page all over; then she put it back in the desk, and said to herself, "there, now, the prize will be mine". but why does gladys feel so wretched all at once? a little voice that you have often heard spoke in her heart, and said, "oh! gladys, how mean, how unkind!" and she could not =help= being miserable. presently the school assembled, and when the writing lesson came round the teacher said, "now, girls, take out your copy-books and finish them". dora drew hers out, and when she opened it and saw the blots her cheeks grew scarlet and her eyes filled with tears. just then she turned and saw gladys glancing at her in an ashamed sort of way (as the elephant looked at his driver when he had stolen the cakes--story lesson ), and dora knew in her heart that it was gladys who had spoilt her copy-book. but she did not tell any one, not even when the teacher said, "oh! dora, what a mess you have made on your nice copy-book!" but she was thinking all the time, and when she went home she said to her mother, "mamma, may i give my little tin box with the flowers painted on it to gladys?" "why, dora," said her mother, "i thought you were very fond of that pretty box!" "so i am," replied dora, "that is why i want gladys to have it; please let me give it to her, mother!" so dora's mother consented, and next morning gladys found a small parcel on her desk, with a scrap of paper at the top, on which was written, "gladys, with love from dora". dora was generous, you see; she returned good for evil, and gladys felt far more sorrow for her fault than she would have done had dora caused her to be punished. neither gladys nor dora won the prize, but gladys learnt a lesson that was worth more than many prizes, and dora had a gladness in her heart that was better than a prize--the gladness that comes from listening to the good voice. "good for evil" is a beautiful "stone" to have in your temple. (blackboard.) it is generous to return good for evil. footnote: [ ] romanes' _animal intelligence_. xvi. gentleness. . the horse and the child. gentleness is a beautiful word, and i daresay you know what it means. when you are helping baby to walk, mother will say, "be =gentle= with her," which means, "do not be rough, do not hurt her". a =gentleman= is a man who is gentle, who will not =hurt=. did you ever hear of a horse who could behave like a gentleman? here is the story.[ ] "a horse was drawing a cart along a narrow lane in scotland when it spied a little child playing in the middle of the road. what do you think the kind, gentle horse did? it took hold of the little child's clothes with its teeth, lifted it up, and laid it gently on the bank at the side of the road, and then it turned its head to see that the cart had not hurt the child in passing. did not the horse behave like a gentleman?" i have seen boys and girls helping the little ones to dress in the cloakroom at school, or leading them carefully down the steps, or carrying the babies over rough places; =this= is gentleness, and the gentle boy will grow up to be a gentle man. . the overturned fruit stall. you have seen boys playing the game of "paper chase," or, as it is sometimes called, "hare and hounds". one or two boys start first, each carrying a bag full of small pieces of paper, which they scatter as they run. then all the other boys start, and follow the track made by the scattered paper. a number of boys were starting for a "paper chase" one saturday afternoon, and, passing quickly round a corner of the street, some of them ran against a little fruit stall and overturned it. the apples, pears and plums were all rolling on the ground, and the old woman who belonged to the stall looked at them in dismay. the boys all ran on except one, and he stayed behind to help to put the stall right, and to gather up all the fruit. that boy was =gentle= and kind, and the poor old woman could not thank him enough. be =gentle= to the little ones, be =gentle= to the old, be =gentle= to the lame, to =all=-- for it is true, i'm told, that =gentleness= is better far than riches, wealth or gold. footnote: [ ] _heads without hands._ xvii. on being grateful. . rose and her birthday present. a little girl called rose had a kind auntie who sent her half a sovereign for a birthday present. rose was delighted with the money, and was always talking of the many nice things it would buy, but she never thought of writing and =thanking= her auntie. that was not grateful, was it? when we =receive= anything, we should always think =at once= of the giver, and express our thanks without delay. that is why we say "grace" before eating: we wish to thank our kind father above for giving us the nice food to eat. the days went by, and still auntie received no word of thanks from her little niece. then a letter came asking, "has rosy had my letter with the present?" rose answered this, and said she =had= received the letter, and sent many thanks for the present. but how ashamed she must have felt that she had not written before! it is not nice to have to =ask= people for their thanks or gratitude; it ought to be given freely without asking. . the boy who was grateful. little vernon's father had a tricycle, and one day he fixed up a seat in front for his little boy, and took him for a nice, long ride. vernon sat facing his father, and he was so delighted with the ride, and so grateful to his kind father for bringing him, that he could not help putting his arms round his father's neck sometimes, and giving him a kiss as they went along. vernon's father told me this himself, and i was glad to know that the little boy possessed this precious gift of gratitude, for it is a lovely "stone" to have in the temple we are building. (blackboard.) do not forget to be grateful for kindness; and do not forget to show it. xviii. self-help. . the crow and the pitcher. perhaps you have heard the fable of the crow who was thirsty. he found a pitcher with a little water in it, but he could not get at the water, for the neck of the jug was narrow. did he leave the water and say, "it is of no use to try"? no; he set to work, and found a way out of the difficulty. the crow dropped pebbles into the jug, one by one, and these made the water rise until he could reach it. (illustrate by a tumbler with a few tablespoonfuls of water in it. drop in some pebbles, and show how the water rises as the pebbles take its place.) if you have a steep hill to climb, or a hard lesson to learn, do not sit down and cry, and think you cannot do it, but be determined that, like the crow, you will master the difficulty. when you were a little, tiny child, your father carried you over the rough places, but as you grow older, you walk over them yourself. you do not want to be carried now, for you are not helpless any longer. but i am afraid there are some children who =like= to be helpless, and to let mother do everything for them. i once knew a girl of ten who could not tie her own bootlaces; =she= was helpless. and i knew a little fellow of six who, when his mother was sick, could put on the kettle, and make her a cup of tea; he was a =helpful= boy. it is brave and nice of boys and girls to help themselves all they can, and not to be beaten by a little difficulty. remember the sparrow and the rag (story lesson ), as well as the crow, and (blackboard) do not be helpless, but master difficulty as the crow did. xix. content. . harold and the blind man. do you know what it is to be contented? it is just the opposite of being dissatisfied and unhappy. little harold was looking forward to a day in the glen on the morrow, but when the morning came it was wet and cold, and the journey had to be put off. harold had lots of toys to play with, but he would not touch any of them; he just stood with his face against the window-pane, discontented and unhappy. after a time he saw an old man with a stick coming up the street, and a little dog was walking beside him. as they drew nearer, harold saw that the old man held the dog by a string, and that it was leading him, for he was blind. the discontented little boy began to wonder what it must be like to be blind, and he shut his eyes very tight to try it. how dark it was! he could see nothing. how dreadful to be =always= in darkness! then he opened his eyes again, and looked at the old man's face; it was a peaceful, pleasant face. the old man did not look discontented and unhappy, and yet it was far worse to be blind than to be disappointed of a picnic. harold had yet to learn that it is not =outside= things that give content, but something within. he could not help being disappointed at the wet day, but he could have made the best of it and played with his toys, as indeed he did after seeing the blind man. (blackboard.) be content and make the best of things. xx. tidiness. . the slovenly boy. of =all= the untidy children you ever saw leo must have been the worst. his hair was unbrushed, his boots were uncleaned, and the laces were always trailing on the floor. why did he not learn to tie a bow? (for full instructions, with illustrations, on the "tying of a bow," see _games without music_.) it must be very uncomfortable to have one's boots all loose about the ankles, besides looking so untidy. can you guess how his stockings were? they were all in folds round his legs, instead of being drawn and held up tight, and he had always a button off somewhere. the worst of it was that leo did not seem to =mind= being untidy. i hope =you= are not like that. do all the little girls love to have smooth, clean pinafores? and do the boys like to have a clean collar and smooth hair? and do all of you keep your hands and faces clean? then you are like the children in these verses. . the tidy boy:-- a tidy boy would not be seen with rough or rumpled hair, nor come to meals with unwashed hands and face; and he will care to have his collar clean and white, and boots must polished be and bright. . the tidy girl:-- and what about the tidy girl? all nice and clean is she, her pinafore is smooth and straight, her hair neat as can be; no wrinkled sock, or untied lace does this neat, tidy girl disgrace. . pussy and the knitting. i wonder if you have heard of pussy getting mother's knitting and making it all in a tangle. these are the verses about it:-- puss in mischief.[ ] . "where are you, kitty? where are you?--say. i've scarcely seen you at all to-day. . "you're not in mischief, i hope, my dear; ah! now i have found you. how came you here? . "that's mother's knitting, you naughty kit; oh! such a tangle you've made of it. . "'twas =that= which kept you so very still; mamma will scold you, i know she will." . then puss comes to me, and rubs her fur against my fingers, and says "purr, purr". . i know she means it to say, "don't scold," so close in my arms my puss i hold. . and then i tell her, my little pet, that mother's knitting she must not get. . the wool will never be wound, i fear; but mother forgives my kitty dear. i do not suppose that pussy would =know= she was doing anything naughty in tangling the wool, but a =child= would know, of course, that wool must be kept straight and tidy if it is to be of use. . the packing of the trunks. nellie and madge were two little girls getting ready to go for a visit to grandmamma. she lived many miles away, and the children were to go by train and stay with her for a whole month. their clothes were all laid on the bed ready for packing, and as mother wanted them to grow up =helpful= girls, she said they might put the things in the boxes themselves. so nellie and madge began to pack. nellie took each article by itself, and laid it carefully in the box without creasing, putting all the heavier things at the bottom, and the dresses and lighter articles at the top. when she had laid them all in, the lid just closed nicely, and her work was finished. then she turned to see what madge was doing. madge had not packed more than half her pile, and the box was full. "what shall i do?" she cried, "i =cannot= get them all in." just then mamma came up and said: "have you finished, children? it is nearly train time". her eyes fell on the box madge was packing, and she exclaimed, "oh! madge, you have put the clothes in anyhow, everything must be taken out!" madge had just thrown them in "higgledy-piggledy," instead of laying them straight, and they came out a crumpled heap. she was so hot and flurried, and so afraid of being late for the train, that she could hardly keep the tears back, but mamma and nellie helped to straighten the things, and to pack them neatly, and just as the cab drove up to the door the last frock was laid in the box, and the lid went down without any trouble. madge remembered to take more pains next time she packed her box. i was in a house one day, and when the lady opened a drawer to get something out, the articles in the drawer =bounced up= just like a "jack in the box," because you see, they had been put in anyhow, and then crushed down to allow the drawer to be closed. of course she could not find what she wanted. i hope none of =your= drawers are like a "jack in the box". i wonder if untidy people are lazy? i am afraid they are. a girl came home from school one day, and threw her wet cloak on a chair all in a heap, instead of hanging it up nicely on a peg. when she next wanted to wear the cloak, it was all over creases and not fit to put on. perhaps she thought that mother would see it on the chair, and hang it up for her, but a nice, thoughtful child would not like to give mother the trouble, would she? (blackboard.) be tidy and neat. footnote: [ ] _new recitations for infants_, p. . xxi. modesty. . the violet. two friends were walking along a country road, and as they went on one said: "i do believe there are violets somewhere on this bank, the air smells so sweet". the other lady replied that she did not see any; but, looking carefully, they at last found the leaves, and there, hiding away among them, was the little sweet violet, with its delicious scent. why does the little violet hide away? because she is =modest=, which means that she does not like to =boast=, or make a display of her pretty petals and sweet perfume. =modest= people do not like to talk of kind, noble or clever things they may have done; they prefer to =hide= their good deeds, and in this they are like the violet. . modesty in dress. there is another way in which children can be modest--they can be modest about dress. a child's dress is not so long as that of a grown-up person, because children want to romp and play about, but a =modest= child always likes its dress to cover it nicely, and will take care that no buttons are unfastened. one evening some children were playing about on the hearthrug, when one of them, a little girl named jessie, jumped up quite suddenly, and, with a blushing face, ran out of the room. the governess followed to see what was the matter, and jessie told her in a whisper that she was =so= ashamed, because in romping about her dress had gone above her knees. some people might say that jessie was =too= modest, but i do not think so; a nice little girl will always like to keep her knees covered. in america the children have much longer dresses than in our country, and they would think little girls very rude who were not as careful as jessie. you will think for yourselves of many other ways in which children can be modest. it is a good rule never to do =anything= that we would be ashamed for teacher or mother to see. xxii. on giving pleasure to others. . "selfless" and "thoughtful"--a fairy tale. "selfless" and "thoughtful" were sisters of the little "gold-wings" (story lesson ). i cannot tell you which of the two was the sweetest and best; they were =both= so lovable, for like "gold-wings" they were always thinking of others, and especially of how they could give pleasure to the sick and weak. one day, as they sat on a mossy bank in the fairy wood, "selfless" asked, "what shall we do next, sister?" and "thoughtful" made answer, "i have been thinking of little davie, who is so lame and weak; suppose i go to the kindergarten and try to get some one to be kind to him". "a good idea," replied "selfless," "and i will fly over the fields and see what can be done there; then in the moonlight we will meet, and tell each other what we have done." so they spread their pretty wings and flew away. * * * * * now it is night in the fairy wood, and in the silver moonlight the sisters rest again on the mossy bank and talk. . the bunch of roses. "i flew to the kindergarten," said "thoughtful," "you know davie used to attend there before he was ill. of course no one saw me, and as i hovered over the teacher's desk, little bessie, a rosy-cheeked maid, came up and laid a lovely bunch of crimson roses upon it for the teacher. the scent was so delicious i could not help nestling down into one of the roses to enjoy it better. the teacher picked up the flowers, not knowing i was there, and as she buried her face in the soft petals, to smell the sweet perfume, i whispered 'send them to davie'." "a smile instantly came over her face, and she said: 'bessie, a good fairy has whispered a kind thought to me; shall we send your pretty roses to davie?'" "'oh! yes,' said bessie, 'please let me take them to him with your love, for i gave them to you." "so the roses were taken to davie, and how happy they made him to be sure! and the =teacher= was happy because she had remembered poor davie, and =bessie= was happy to carry the flowers to him, so i came away glad, also; but what have =you= done, dear sister?" . edwin and the birthday party. then "selfless" answered:-- "i flew away over the fields, and there i saw a little boy, dressed all in his best clothes, speeding away across the field-path, and i knew that he was going to a birthday party, and that he was walking quickly so as to be in time; for there was to be a lovely birthday cake, all iced over with sugar; and little pieces of silver, called threepenny pieces, had been scattered through the cake, so of course edwin wanted to be there when it was cut up. "i saw a little girl in the fields, also, walking along the hedges looking for blackberries, and in trying to reach a branch of the ripe fruit that grew on the farther side of a ditch, the poor child overbalanced herself and fell in, uttering a loud scream. "edwin heard the scream and said to himself, 'i wonder what that is? i should like to go and see, but oh, dear! it will perhaps make me late for the party'. then the bad voice spoke to him, and said, 'never mind the scream; hurry on to the party," and edwin hurried on, but his cheeks grew hot, and he looked unhappy. "soon the child screamed again, and the good voice said, 'help! edwin, never mind self,' and with that he turned back, and ran to the place where the sounds had seemed to come from. he soon saw the little girl, who was trying to scramble up the steep side of the ditch, and could not; it needed the help of edwin's strong hands to give her a good pull, and bring her safely out. oh, how glad she was to be on the grass once more! edwin wiped her tears away, and told her to run home; then he made haste to the party with a light, glad heart, and he arrived just as they were sitting down to tea, so he was in time for the cake after all. but even if he had =missed= it, he would have been glad that he stayed behind to help the little girl." "what a nice boy," said "thoughtful". "did he tell the people at the party what he had done?" "oh, =no=," replied "selfless"; "his mother told him that people should =never boast= of kind things they had done, for that would spoil it." "true," said "thoughtful"; "but what did =you= do, dear "selfless"? it is not boasting to tell =me=." "i only helped edwin to listen to the good voice," replied "selfless," as she looked down on the moss at her feet. "a good work, too," said "thoughtful"; "and now, what shall we do next?" . davie's christmas present. "i have been thinking," said "selfless," "that christmas will soon be here, and how nice it would be if we could help the children at the kindergarten to think of davie, and make ready a christmas present for him." "a lovely idea," said "thoughtful"; "we will go to-morrow, for it wants only a month to christmas." next morning the two fairy sisters came to the kindergarten, and floated about unseen, as fairies always do. first they rested on the teacher, who was very fond of these unseen fairies, and she began to think of davie. "children," said she, "christmas will be here in a month; shall we make a present for little davie?" (do you know, i believe that doing kind things is like going to parties; when you have been to =one= party, you like it so much that you are glad to go to =another=, and when you have done =one= kind thing, it makes you so happy you want to do =another=.) bessie was the first to answer, and she said, "oh, yes, it would be lovely to make a christmas present for davie; do let us try". and all the children said, "yes, do let us try". "it must be something made by your own little hands," said the teacher. "think now, what could you do?" "we could make some little 'boats'[ ] in paperfolding," said one child. teacher said that would do nicely, and she wrote it down. another child said, "i could sew a 'cat' in the embroidery lesson," and bessie exclaimed, "please let me sew a 'kitten' to go with it," and the teacher wrote that down, and remarked that some one else might make the "saucer" for pussy's milk, in pricking. then others might make a "nest"[ ] in clay with eggs in it, and a little "bird" sitting on the eggs, suggested the teacher; and as the "babies" begged to be allowed to help also, it was decided that they should thread pretty coloured beads on sticks, and make a nice large "basket".[ ] "now," said teacher, "i have quite a long list, and we must begin at once." so they all set to work, and when breaking-up day came, davie's present was ready. there was a whole fleet of "ships," white inside and crimson outside. the pictures of "pussy" and her "kitten" were neatly sewn, and the "saucer" was white and clean, and evenly pricked, while the "bird" on its "nest" looked as pretty as could be, and the "bead basket" was the best of all--at least the =babies= thought so. i have no words to tell of the joy that the children's present brought to little davie, his face flushed with pleasure as the "boats" and other gifts were spread out before him; it was so delightful to think that the children had remembered =him= and =worked= for him. "selfless" and "thoughtful" sat once more on the mossy bank, and rejoiced that the plan had worked so well. if these little fairies and their sister "kindness" should ever suggest thoughts to =you=, dear boys and girls, do not send them away. they will speak to you through the good voice, and the happiest people in the world are the people who listen to the good voice. footnotes: [ ] _kindergarten guide_, boat, p. , no. . [ ] _kindergarten guide_, nest, p. , no. ; basket, plate , opposite p. , no. in fig. . xxiii. cleanliness.[ ] . why we should be clean. (show the children a sponge.) here is a sponge! what do we see all over the sponge? we see little holes. there is another name for these--we call them =pores=. (write "pores" on blackboard.) what comes out on your forehead sometimes on a hot day? drops of water come out. they come through tiny holes in the skin, so tiny that we cannot see them, and these also are called pores. once upon a time, long, long ago, there was to be a grand procession in a fine old city called rome, and a little golden-haired child was gilded all over his body to represent "the golden age" in the procession. when it was over the little child was soon dead. can you guess why? the pores in his skin had been all stopped up with the gilding, so that the damp, warm air could not get out, and that caused his death. you see, then, that we breathe with these little pores, just as we breathe with our nose and mouth, and if the pores were all closed up we should die. now you will understand why we have to be washed and bathed. what is it that the dirt does to your pores? it stops them up, so (blackboard) to be healthy, we must be clean. . little creatures who like to be clean. you know that pussy likes to be clean, and that she washes herself carefully, and her little kittens, also, until they are big enough to wash themselves; but there are other creatures, much smaller than the cat, who like to be clean. do you know what shrimps or prawns are? i daresay you have often eaten a shrimp! have you ever counted its ten long legs? on the front pair there are two tiny brushes, and the prawn has been seen to stand up on his eight hind legs, and brush himself with the tiny tufts on his front legs, to get all the sand away. is not that clever for such a little fellow? there is another creature, very much smaller than the prawn, that is particularly clean, though we do not like to have it in our houses. if the housemaid sees its little "parlour" in the corner of a room, she sweeps it away. you remember who it was that said: "will you walk into my parlour?" it was the spider, and it is the spider who is so very fond of being clean, that it cannot bear to have a grain of dust anywhere about its body. its hairs and legs are always kept perfectly clean. then there is the tiny ant, which is smaller than a fly, and it loves to keep itself nice and clean, so if (blackboard) shrimps and spiders and ants like to be clean, children should like to be clean. . the boy who did not like to be washed. sydney was a little boy who did not like to be washed. he disliked it as much as the little dog in story lesson no. . when the time came for his bath he screamed and kicked and made such a fuss that at last his mother said he should remain dirty for a while, and see what would happen. so sydney had no bath when he went to bed at night, neither was he washed in the morning. of course no one wanted to kiss him, or play with him, for he was not sweet and clean; he had to play all by himself in the garden. presently a carriage drove up and stopped at the garden gate; then a gentleman stepped out, walked up to the door, and rang the bell, which was answered by sydney's mother. "i have called to take your little boy for a drive," said the gentleman, "but i am in a great hurry; could you have him ready at once?" just then sydney peeped in at the door. oh! what a little blackamoor he was, not fit for any one to see! his mother had to explain to the kind gentleman how it was that he looked so dirty, and, as nothing but a bath and a whole suit of clean clothes would make him fit to go, he had to be left behind. poor sydney began to feel very sad and sorry now, and when the carriage had driven away he ran up to his mother, hid his little black face in her dress, and burst into tears. "oh, mother," he cried, "do make me a clean boy again; i will never be naughty any more when i am washed." sydney never forgot the lesson he had learnt that (blackboard) nobody likes children to be dirty. . the nails and the teeth. what a good thing it is that we have nice, hard nails to keep the tips of our fingers from being hurt! how sore they would get if it were not for those bright, horny nails, and how well they protect the finger-tips, which have to touch so many things! most of the nail is fast to the finger, but at the outer edge there is a little space =between= the nail and the finger, and if we are not careful this little space gets filled with dirt, and then the nail has a black band across the top, which looks very ugly. when the nails are long, the band is wider, and, although the dirt is =under= the nail, it shows on the outside, because the nail is transparent, that is, it can be seen through. do you like to have your hands clean? then there must be no black bands to disfigure the pretty, shining nails; our hands cannot be called clean if there is a little arch of dirt at the tip of each finger. ask mother to cut the nails when they get too long, then you can keep them clean more easily. men who do work that soils their hands very much like the chimney-sweep (story lesson ) cannot possibly keep their nails clean, but children can. there was once a little boy who had the funniest finger-tips i ever saw. the nails were so short that there was not the tiniest space between the outer edge and the fleshy part, and so the tip of each finger had grown out like a little round cushion, not at all pretty to look at. if the little boy saw any one noticing his hands, he would hide them away, lest he should be asked what it was that caused the finger-tips to look so funny. i wonder if =you= can guess the reason? it was because the boy bit his nails. what a horrid thing to do! was it not? and how do you think his mother cured him? she dipped the tips of his fingers in tincture of bitter aloes, so that when he put them in his mouth he might get the bitter taste, and leave off biting them. i once heard a gentleman say that =he= thought it was very rude to put a pencil or anything near the mouth, so what would he think of a child who put his =fingers= in his mouth, and bit his nails? baby may suck her little thumb sometimes, perhaps, because she does not know better, but sensible children will remember that it is rude to put fingers in mouth. (blackboard.) keep your nails clean. do not put fingers in mouth. can you think of anything else that should be kept clean besides the nails? in your mouth are two rows of beautiful little, white teeth. at least they =ought= to be white, but if we do not keep them clean, they often get discoloured and begin to decay and give us pain. we should each have a tooth-brush, and use it every day to cleanse the teeth, dipping it first in nice, clean water, and when the brushing is done, the mouth should be rinsed several times. the teeth should be brushed up and down from the gums (not from left to right), so that we may get all the particles of food from the tiny spaces between the teeth. if we do this regularly we shall not be likely to suffer much from toothache. two white rows of pearly teeth, what can prettier be? if you =keep= them clean and white, they are fair to see. (blackboard.) why we brush teeth:-- . to keep clean and prevent toothache. . to make them look nice. footnote: [ ] no. , "washing one's self" in _games without music_ might be appropriately used with above subject. xxiv. pure language. . toads and diamonds--a fairy tale. there was an old woman at a well, who, when a little girl came to draw water, asked for a drink, and the kind little maiden lifted the jug to the old woman's lips, and told her to take as much as she wished. then the old woman blessed her for her kindness, and said that whenever the child spoke, pearls and diamonds should fall from her lips. then another girl came to the well, and again the old woman asked to drink, but the girl said, "no! draw water for yourself". that was rude and unkind, was it not? the old woman, who was really the queen of the fairies, could not bless =this= girl for her kindness, because she had showed none, so she said that whenever the girl spoke, toads and vipers should fall from her lips. that is like the people who do not speak good, pure language; the bad words that fall from their lips are like toads and vipers. i hope you have never heard such words, but if you ever should, do not stop to listen, for wicked words are like the pitch that martin tried to play with (story lesson ); the person who says them cannot be pure and true, for bad words are not =clean=. a lady was travelling in a railway train one day, and several young men were in the carriage, who spoke and looked like gentlemen. but by-and-by they began to swear dreadfully, and the lady asked if they would be kind enough to say the bad words in greek or latin, so that she could not understand them. she did not want to hear the bad words, you see; they were like toads and vipers to her, because she loved what was pure and clean. (blackboard.) keep your language pure. do not listen to bad words. xxv. punctuality. . lewis and the school picnic. there was once a little boy called lewis, who had one bad fault--he was very, very slow; so slow, that i am afraid he was really lazy. he could do his sums quite well, but he was always the last boy to get them finished; and in a morning his mother had no end of trouble to get him off to school in time, he did everything so slowly. (read the following sentence very deliberately, and allow the children to fill in the adverbs): he got out of bed (slowly), dressed himself (slowly), washed himself (slowly), laced his boots (slowly), ate his breakfast (slowly), and walked to school at the same pace (slowly). now one day a gentleman came to the school, and told the teacher that he was going to take all the children in a boat down the river to have a picnic by the seaside. could anything be more delightful? the scholars clapped their hands for gladness, and talked and thought of nothing but the picnic. it was to be on the very next day, and they were to start from the school at nine o'clock in the morning. "lewis," said the teacher, "remember to be in time, for the boat will not wait!" the morning came, and lewis was called by his mother at seven o'clock. "there is plenty of time," said lewis, "i will lie a little longer;" and he did so. then his mother called again, and this time he rose, but he went through all his work as slowly as ever, and all the time his mother was telling him to "hurry up" or he would be too late. at last he is ready to start; but just as he leaves the house a bell is rung. "what is that?" says lewis; "it must be the bell of the steamer. i have no time to go round by the school; i must go straight to the pier," and off he ran. but, alas! by the time he reached the pier the boat was steaming off. he could see the children with their pails and spades waving their handkerchiefs in glee, and there was he left behind! i was telling this story to a little boy once, and when it came to this part he said: "oh, auntie! could not they get a little boat and take lewis to the steamer? it is so hard for him to be left behind." but you see, boys and girls, we =must= be left behind, if we are slow and lazy. i am glad to tell you, however, that lewis was cured of his fault by this disappointment. he really did try to get on more quickly afterwards, and he succeeded. at school he had his sums finished so soon that the teacher began to let him help the other boys who did not get on so well, and lewis was quite proud and happy. then he came to school so early that he was made "monitor," and had to put out the slates and books, ready for the others. so, after all, lewis grew up to be smart and quick, and not like the man you will hear of in another story (story lesson ), who grew worse as he grew older. (blackboard.) do not be slow and lazy, or you will be always "too late". xxvi. all work honourable. . the chimney-sweep. "mother," said little frank, "i saw a man walking along the street to-day with a bundle of brushes in his hand, and such a black face. i was careful not to touch him as i passed, he looked so dirty--quite a 'blackamoor'"! "ah!" said his mother, "that was a chimney-sweep; he cannot =help= being dirty, and my little boy ought to feel very kindly to him, for we should be badly off without such men." not many days afterwards there was a storm. how the wind blew and roared! all through the night it rattled the windows and whistled in the chimney. frank's mother went downstairs early in the morning to make a fire, but as soon as she lighted it, puff! the smoke came down the chimney, and filled the room, and she was obliged to let the fire go out. down came the children for breakfast, and frank cried: "is the fire not lighted, mother? i am so cold; and oh! the house =is= smoky." "i have tried to light a fire," said his mother, "but the smoke blows down the chimney. i think it needs sweeping; i shall have to give you milk for breakfast; there is no nice, hot coffee for you, because the fire will not burn." after breakfast frank's brother went to fetch the chimney-sweep, who soon came, and with his long brushes brought down all the soot, which he carried away in a bag. then the fire burned merrily, making the room look quite bright and cheerful, and frank said: "thank you, mr. chimney-sweep, for your good work. i will never call you 'blackamoor' again; and when i meet you in the street, i will not think you are too dirty to speak to." frank had learnt two lessons:-- (blackboard) . some work makes men black. . we must be kind to these men, for we need their work. xxvii. bad companions. . playing with pitch. you have seen the men at work mending the roads, and you know how sometimes they spread little stones all over the road, and then roll them flat with a steam-roller. but in some places the roads are laid with stones as large as bricks, and when these have all been placed together, the men take a large can with a spout, full of hot pitch, and pour it into the spaces between the stones to fasten them together. a little boy, named martin, was watching the men do this one day, and he said to himself, "i should like a piece of that black stuff; it has cooled now, and looks like a black piece of dough; i could make all sorts of shapes with it, and i do not believe it would soil my hands". so he picked up a length that lay near him, rolled it into a ball, and put it in his pocket. some of the tar stuck to his hands, and when he washed them it did not come off, but it was now school time, and away he went. when he came out of school, he put his hand in his pocket to get the tar, and oh, what a sticky mess it was! his pocket was all over tar, so was his hand, and when he reached home, his mother set to work to get it off, and it took her a long, long time. martin was mistaken in thinking he could play with the pitch and not get soiled. . stealing strawberries. when martin grew older he had some playmates who were not very good, and his mother said, "martin, i wish you would not play with those boys; i fear they will get you into trouble". "oh! no, mother," replied martin, "if they =wanted= me to do anything wrong i would not; i need not learn their bad ways if i =do= play with them." but his mother shook her head, for she knew better. some time afterwards the boys had a half-holiday, and martin went with his friends into the country. presently they came to a large garden, with a high wall round it, and the boys began to climb the wall. "where are you going?" asked martin. "oh!" said one of the boys, laughing, "a friend of ours owns this garden, and we are going to help him gather strawberries." there was a large bed of strawberries on the other side of the wall, and as soon as the boys were over, they began to pick and eat. what the boy had told martin was quite untrue--they were =stealing= the strawberries; but before very long the gardener spied them, and with one or two other men came upon them so quietly, that they had no time to get away, and every boy was made prisoner. the gardener locked them up in the tool-house until the owner came, and he took their names and addresses, and said they should be brought before the magistrates, as it was not the first time they had stolen his fruit. of course martin had not been with them the other times, but he was caught with them now, and can you imagine how dreadfully ashamed he felt, and how his cheeks burned when he thought of his dear mother, and the trouble it would be to her. when he reached home, he told his mother all that had happened, and begged her forgiveness. his mother was greatly distressed, and said: "you remember playing with the pitch, martin, when you were a very little boy--you thought you could handle it, and still keep clean, but you could not; so neither can you have bad companions without being mixed up in wrong-doing". (blackboard.) to mix with bad company is like playing with pitch. xxviii. on forgetting. . maggie's birthday present. it was maggie's birthday, and her father brought her as a present something that she had been wishing for a very long time. it was a beautiful yellow canary, and its little house was the prettiest cage imaginable, for it was made of brass wire, which was so bright that you could almost think it was gold. of course maggie was delighted. "it is just what i have been wishing for," said she; "i shall feed the canary myself, and give it fresh water every day; it is the prettiest bird i ever saw." for some weeks maggie remembered her little pet each day, and attended to all its wants, but there came a day when there was to be a picnic for all the school children, and maggie was so excited and glad about the picnic that she forgot all about feeding the bird. then next day there was hay-making, and she was in the field all day, and again forgot the poor bird. this went on for a few days, and when at last she =did= remember, and went to the cage, the bird was dead. maggie was full of grief, and cried until her head ached, but she could not undo the results of her forgetting. some people think it is a =little= fault to forget, but that cannot be, for we know well that "forgetting" often causes pain and suffering to others. (blackboard.) forgetting often causes pain. . the promised drive. daniel was a lame little boy. he could not walk at all, nor play about with the other children, so he was very puny and pale. his mother used to put his little chair near the door of the cottage where they lived, so that he could watch the people pass, and one day, as he sat there, a lady came by with a well-dressed little boy, and when she saw the pale-faced child she stopped and spoke to him, and then daniel's mother came to the door, and invited her to step inside the cottage. the lady's little boy was called emil, and he stood on the doorstep talking to daniel, while the two mothers spoke together within the cottage. emil, who was a kind-hearted little fellow, felt very sorry for the lame child, and when he found that daniel was never able to go any farther than the street where he lived, emil said: "i will ask my father to bring his carriage round and take you for a drive; i am sure he will, and then you can see the green fields and trees, and hear the birds sing". daniel's little face flushed with pleasure, and he said; "oh that would be lovely!" by-and-by the lady and her boy said "good-bye," and went away, and then daniel told his mother all that emil had said. "do you think he will come to-morrow, mother?" asked daniel. "perhaps not to-morrow, dear," replied she, "but some day soon maybe." so daniel sat at the door each day, and waited for the carriage, but it never came, and when he grew too ill to sit up he would still lie and listen for the sound of the wheels, and say: "i think it will come to-day, mother," but it never did. and do you know why? emil had forgotten to ask his father, and so daniel waited in vain for the drive. you see how much pain and disappointment can be caused by forgetting, and when you promise to do a thing and forget to =keep= the promise it is just like telling an untruth. you do not =intend= to speak what is not the truth, but you do it all the same. remember, then, that it is =not= a little fault to forget, and that those who do it are not building on the firm foundation of truth. (blackboard.) when we promise and forget, we are not true. _to the parent or teacher._--however culpable it may be to break promises to adults (and it is in reality nothing less than untruth), it is infinitely worse to break faith with children. an unredeemed promise is a sure way of shaking a child's confidence in truth and goodness. let us keep our word with the little ones at whatever cost. . the boy who remembered. little elsie had a big brother called jack, of whom she was very fond, and he was fond of elsie also. jack was about fifteen years old, and he was learning to be a sailor. when his ship came into port he used to come home for a few days, and then he would tell elsie all about the places he had seen. one time the voyage had been very long, and jack told elsie that when the bread was all finished they had had to eat sea-biscuits instead. "how funny," said elsie; "what are sea-biscuits like, jack?" "they are very hard and round and thick," replied jack. elsie said she would like to see one, and jack promised that when he went back to his ship he would send her one. it was not a great thing to promise, was it? but elsie felt very important when the postman brought her a little parcel a day or two after jack had left, and she was very glad when she opened it and found the promised biscuit. "there is one good thing about jack," exclaimed elsie, "he always does what he says." i think jack would have been pleased to hear elsie say that; it is one of the nicest things that =could= have been said about him. i hope it is true of all of us. (blackboard.) to forget is not a little thing. be true, and do what you say. xxix. kindness to animals. . lulu and the sparrow. as lulu came home from school one afternoon, she noticed three or four boys throwing stones at something--i hardly like to =tell= you what. it was a poor little brown sparrow that had somehow hurt its leg, and could not fly. however, this happened a great many years ago, and perhaps boys are less cruel now. lulu could not bear to see the poor bird treated so badly, and she asked the boys to give it to her. at first they laughed, and went on throwing the stones; but she continued to beg for it so earnestly, that at last one of the boys said, "let her have it". and lulu was only too glad to pick up the wounded bird and carry it home. she nursed and fed it carefully, and put it in a warm place by the fire; but, in spite of all her care, the sparrow died in a few hours. sometimes pain is necessary, as in story lesson ; we should never think of saying the dentist was cruel; rather we should say he was kind, because he saved the monkey from =further= pain. but when we cause pain that is =needless=, as these boys did, it is =cruel=. they were cowardly also. if the bird had been an eagle, with strong claws that could have hurt them in return, would they have stoned it? no; they chose a poor little sparrow that could not defend itself, and this was =cowardly=. then it was =unfair=. you do not like to be punished or found fault with if you have done nothing wrong; you feel it is not fair; neither is it fair to hurt a dumb animal that has done nothing wrong. . why we should be kind to animals. just think how many things animals do for us. where did the wool come from that makes your nice, warm clothes? (let children answer.) how do we get the coals to our houses--the coals that make the bright, hot fires? (ans.) what could we do without the brave, strong horses? i heard the other day of a man who did not give his horse enough to eat. what kind of man was he? (ans.) i would rather be like the arab, who loves his horse so much that he brings it into his tent, and shares his food and bed with it. where do we get our milk, butter and cheese? (ans.) then think of all the stories of animals in this book, who have done kind, clever things (and all these stories are true). if boys and girls would =think=, i am quite sure they would never be unkind to animals. . the butterfly. one day a boy was chasing a butterfly, cap in hand, and just as he had caught it, a bee stung him. he was so angry that he threw the butterfly down and trampled on it. was not that cruel? the butterfly had done him no harm, and the greatest skill in the world could not paint anything so delicate and beautiful as a butterfly's wing; and yet he destroyed that beauty. sometimes children will hunt spiders out of the crevices in the wall and torture them, and others will torment the little fly, or steal the bird's pretty eggs that the mother sits on with such care. all this is cruel and unkind. remember it is =not noble= to hurt. the truest gentleman is he who is full of kindness and gentleness and will not hurt anything. . the kind-hearted dog. have you ever seen children riding donkeys at the seaside? and have you noticed how the boys beat the poor things sometimes to make them go faster? i do not think a =kind= boy or girl would like to have a donkey beaten. i hope =you= would not. there was once a little dog who could not bear to see any creature beaten. if any one were ill-treating a dog he would rush up and bark quite angrily, and when he was driving in the dog-cart with his master, he always used to hold the sleeve of his master's coat every time he touched the horse with the whip, as if he would have said, "do not beat him, please". now, if a =dog= knows that it is not kind to hurt dumb creatures, we are sure boys and girls know. (blackboard.) to hurt animals is cruel, for the pain is needless. it is unfair, for they do not deserve it. it is cowardly, for often they cannot hurt you in return. xxx. bad temper. . how paul was cured. paul was a little boy who was very fond of having his own way, and when he could not get it he used to throw himself into the most dreadful tempers. he would take his pocket-handkerchief and tear it all to pieces in his rage, not to mention lying on the floor and kicking with his heels. one day his governess said to him, "paul, i will tell you a true story". paul sat down ready to listen, for he loved stories, so the governess began:-- "there was once a little boy, bright, honest and truthful, always ready to run messages for his mother, or to help a schoolmate with his lessons, he was so good-natured. but henry (for that was his name) had one great fault--he would get into violent passions when any one vexed him, and as he grew older his passion became stronger, and had the mastery of him more and more. he was a sailor, and as time went on he had a ship of his own, and was captain of it. henry could manage the ship well; he knew just how to turn the wheel to make her go east or west, and he knew also how to trim the sails to make the ship move swiftly along. if he could have controlled his temper as he did his ship, all might have been well. but he used to be very angry with the sailors when they did not please him, and one day when the cabin-boy had done something that vexed him, the captain in a fit of passion beat the poor boy so cruelly that he died. when the ship came home the captain was taken to prison, and in the end he lost =his= life for having taken the boy's life." the governess paused, and paul gazed up into her face with wide-open, anxious eyes. "is =that= what happens to boys who get into a passion?" he asked. "it happened to the captain," said she. "then i will never give way to passion again if it has such a dreadful ending," said paul, and the governess told me that he kept his word. (blackboard.) if bad temper gets the mastery, it leads to sad results. . the young horse. edgar was riding in the train with his mother one day. he sat next the window, as children like to do, so that he could see all that was going on. how the train speeds along! now passing through a tunnel, then out again into the sunshine; next it goes over a long row of arches built across a valley, and called a viaduct. "how high up we seem to be," said edgar; "see, mother, the river is down there ever so far below!" now they are passing through fields again, and there, looking over the hedge, is a beautiful young horse. but as the train whirls by, the horse runs off and scampers round and round the field. edgar watched him as long as he could see, and then he said: "what a lovely horse, mother! how i should like to ride him!" "the horse is of no use for riding yet, edgar," said his mother. "why?" asked edgar. "because he has not yet learnt to obey a rider," replied she; "the horse has to wear bit and bridle before he can be of use, and to learn by them to be controlled. a horse that could not be managed would run away with you, just as poor henry's temper ran away with him (story lesson )." bad tempers and bad habits are like wild horses: they take us where they will, and get us into sad trouble if we do not bridle them, so we must take care =not= to let the temper be master, but bridle it just as the horse-trainer bridles the horse. "i should think the horse does not like the bit and bridle at first," said edgar. "very likely not," replied his mother; "but he would not be the useful, patient animal that he is if he did not submit." (blackboard.) horse has to be held in by bit and bridle. we must bridle temper and bad habit. xxxi. selfishness. . the child on the coach. it was summer, and we were riding on the top of the coach through one of the loveliest parts of scotland. the coach had five seats with four persons on each, so you may easily find out how many people there were. on the next seat to ours sat a lady with a little spoilt boy, about four years of age, who was very hard to please, and very discontented and unhappy. you will not be much surprised to hear that presently he began to cry, for spoilt children often do that, but i do not think you could ever guess the =reason=. his mother was speaking to a lady on the seat behind, and when the child was asked, "what is the matter?" he said, "mamma is not attending to me when i speak to her," and =that= was why he cried. he wanted his mother to attend to =him=, to speak to him all the time, and that was selfish. he was only a very little child, but he thought too much of that ugly word--=self=, and that was why he was so discontented and unhappy. i knew another little child who was always wanting some one to play with her; she never tried to amuse herself, but was continually teasing her mother to join in her games. it is better to be like little elsie (story lesson ) who when only a year old thought of the comfort of others. . edna and the cherries. one day a lady called at a cottage where there lived a little girl, named edna, who was playing on the hearth-rug with another little girl, lizzie. the lady had come to see edna's grandmamma, but she had not forgotten that edna lived there, and she brought out of her basket a little paper bag full of ripe cherries, and gave them to the child. edna did not forget to say "thank you," then she took the little bag, put it on a chair, and peeped inside; she was only two years old, and could not have reached the table. as soon as she saw the pretty, red cherries, she toddled to her little friend, and holding out the bag, said, "lizzie some". when lizzie had taken a handful, she went to her grandmother, and said, "grandmamma some," and then with a shy, little glance at the lady, she placed the bag in her lap, and said, "lady some". last of all she helped her dear little self, and so we say that edna was =un=selfish, that means =not= selfish. baby edna did not know about the temple we all have to make, but she was building it just the same. perhaps "selfless" and "thoughtful" were helping her to find the stones! (blackboard.) think first of others, last of self. . the boy who liked always to win. we all like to win when we play games, and that is quite right, but johnny liked =so much= to win that he was cross and unhappy if any one else was winning, and did not enjoy the game at all; i am afraid that he even cheated sometimes to win. now all that was downright selfish; it reminds one of a story--a sort of fairy-tale--about minerva and arachne. arachne said to minerva, "let us see who can spin the best". so they began to spin, and when minerva saw that arachne was beating her at the spinning, she struck her on the head with a spindle, and turned poor arachne into a spider. it is a pity when people are so anxious to win that it makes them selfish. selfishness is an ugly stone to have in your temple, dear children. just as thoughtfulness is one of the most beautiful stones, so selfishness is one of the ugliest. try not to let it come into your lives at all. no one likes a selfish child, but everybody loves the child who =forgets= self and thinks of others. (blackboard.) try to be glad when others win, as well as when you win yourself. . the two boxes of chocolate. it was christmas time, and on christmas eve the children hung up their stockings as usual. next morning they were awake early, and eagerly turned out the stockings to see what they contained. among other things horace and stanley found that they each had a beautiful large picture-box full of lovely chocolate creams. after dinner on christmas day stanley brought out his box, and handed it round to everybody, and by the next day his chocolates were all finished. but horace hid his box away in a drawer, and kept going to it, and taking out a few at a time, so his chocolates lasted much longer than stanley's, and he ate them all himself, but we are obliged to say that he was rather selfish. "shared joy is double joy," and of the two boys we are sure that stanley would be the happier. shall i tell you a little secret? selfishness will spoil the =other= stones if you let it come into your temple, and as to the =gold=--the lovely gold of "kindness" that the little "gold-wings" brought--selfishness will =eat it all away= in time. i am sure we all hate selfishness; let us write down (blackboard.) we will not have the ugly stone "selfishness" in our temple. . eva.[ ] eva was not a very big girl, and her boots were generally cleaned by the older ones, but one day her mother said, "eva, i wish you would brush your own boots this morning, we are all so busy". "oh mother!" said eva, "you know it gives me a headache to brush boots, and i shall make my hands so dirty, and perhaps bespatter the floor with blacking as well." i am afraid eva was rather a spoilt little girl, and this had made her somewhat selfish. half an hour later her mother came into the room again, just as eva was lacing up her boots, and she inquired who had made them so bright and shiny. it was eva's elder sister, mary, and eva knew that her mother was not pleased, but nothing more was said. in the afternoon mary and her mother went out shopping, and eva hurried home from school, although she would have liked very much to stay for a while and play with the other girls. but she wanted to give mother a surprise. first she put the kettle on the fire, and then she laid the table all neatly and nicely, ready for tea. when everything was in its place, she went to the door several times to look for her mother and sister; at last she saw they were just turning the corner of the street, and eva ran along to meet them, and said, "come away, mother, tea is quite ready; i have been looking for you and mary ever so long". and dear mother knew what it all meant. it meant that eva had been listening to the good voice, and that she was sorry she had been so selfish in the morning. the good voice says (blackboard) don't be selfish. help all you can. footnote: [ ] see no. _new recitations for infants_, p. . xxxii. carelessness. . the misfortunes of elinor. elinor was a great anxiety to her mother, for she was always either tearing her clothes, or forgetting, or losing something--all because she was so careless. one day at tea elinor was taking the cup which her mother had just filled, but as she was not looking at it, nor taking any care, it tilted over and fell against a tall flower-vase that stood in the centre of the table. the vase was broken, and the tablecloth deluged with tea and water--all for want of a little care. another day elinor's mother gave her a shilling, and sent her to the shop for some fruit, but she lost the money, and returned empty-handed. coming home from school one day, she was poking her umbrella about in a little stream of water that the rain had made along the side of the road, when the tip of the stick caught in a grate and broke off, so the umbrella was spoilt. i could tell you many more things about poor careless elinor, but these are enough to show how bad it is not to take care. sometimes people have taken poison instead of medicine by being careless, and not noticing the label on the bottle; and sometimes a train has been wrecked, and lives lost, because the engine-driver was careless about noticing the signal. (blackboard.) do not be careless; it brings trouble. xxxiii. on being obstinate. . how daisy's holiday was spoilt. daisy's aunt had invited her to go and spend the day with her cousin violet, and to daisy, who lived in the town, it was a very great treat; for violet's father and mother lived at a farm, and when daisy went there, the two little girls spent the whole day out in the open air, climbing on the hay, playing "hide and seek" in the barn, or helping to milk the cows. the last time daisy went to the farm, however, she had taken cold, and her mother found that she had been playing without coat and hat, so on this occasion she said, "daisy, i want you to promise me that you will keep your outdoor things on when you are playing with violet, for the day is cold". daisy did not answer, and when her mother again asked her, she would not promise. the omnibus which was to take daisy to the farm would pass at nine o'clock, and the time was drawing near, but still daisy was self-willed and would not give in. (oh, daisy! that is =not= the good voice you are listening to, you will be sorry afterwards.) the omnibus came rumbling down the street, and daisy sprang up ready to go. "do you promise, daisy?" asked her mother; "i cannot let you go unless you do;" but daisy was still obstinate, and the omnibus went quickly past. a minute after she burst into tears, and cried, "i =will= promise, mother," but by this time the omnibus was too far on its way, and there was not another until two o'clock. at this time daisy was allowed to go, but what a pity that she should lose half a day's pleasure, and disappoint her cousin, as well as grieving her dear mother, all for the sake of wanting her own way. you remember what we said about mother knowing best in "obedience" (story lesson ). when we are obstinate, we want to please =ourselves= instead of some one else, so you can see that (blackboard) it is selfish to be obstinate; better give in; mother knows best. xxxiv. greediness. . stephen and the buns. it was breaking-up day at school, and the children were having buns and tea. each child had brought a clean pocket-handkerchief, and spread it on the desk for a tablecloth. then the teacher gave out the buns; nice large buns they were, with sugar on the top, and there were just a few left over, after one had been given to each child. next a cup of tea was placed on each desk, and the tea-party went on merrily. but why does stephen take such large bites, and fill his mouth so full? and why is he eating so quickly? see, his bun is finished now, and he is asking for another! "oh! stephie, naughty boy, you have gobbled up your bun as fast as you could, because you were afraid the buns left over would be used up before you asked for more. that was =greedy=." do not be greedy, boys and girls. never mind how hungry you are; eat slowly and nicely, and pass things to others. it is so selfish to think only of your =own= wants, and not to care how other people are getting on. "greediness" is an ugly word, and no one likes to see greedy children. (blackboard.) it is rude and vulgar to be greedy. xxxv. boasting. . the stag and his horns. have you ever seen a stag with its graceful, branching horns? there is a fable told of a stag who went to a pool to drink, and seeing himself reflected in the water, he said: "dear me, how beautiful are my horns; what a nice, graceful appearance they give to me! my legs are quite slender, and not at all beautiful, but my horns are handsome." when the hunters came, however, the stag found that his slender legs were very useful, for by means of them he could run away from his enemies, and if it had not been that his horns caught in the branches of a tree and held him fast, he might have escaped. you see how foolish it was of the stag to =boast= about his fine horns; and we are just as foolish when =we= boast of anything that we have, or of anything we can do. boasting often leads to untruth, as in (story lesson ) "the three feathers". it is always vulgar to pretend that we are better than our neighbours, and people who boast generally try to make one believe that they =are= cleverer or richer or better than somebody else. let us be like the modest violet, who hides her beauty, rather than be boastful and foolish, as the stag was. (blackboard.) it is foolish and vulgar to boast. xxxvi. wastefulness. . the little girl who was lost. a little girl wandered away from home one morning and got lost in a wood. she tried in vain to find the way home again, but she could not, and then she sat down and cried, for she was so tired, and oh! =so= hungry. she thought of the many crusts of bread and pieces of meat that she had often left on her plate at home, and how glad she would have been to eat them now. it was evening when her friends found her, and took her safely home; we will hope that she remembered that hungry day in the woods, and did not waste any more pieces of bread afterwards. if you think of the many poor people who have scarcely enough to eat, you will see how wrong it is to waste anything. when we have more than we need, let us give it to those who have not enough, and never forget that (blackboard) it is wrong to waste. xxxvii. laziness. . the sluggard. you will hear of a great king (in story lesson ) who had a throne of ivory overlaid with gold. when you are old enough to read the words he wrote (proverbs) you will find that he always kept his eyes wide open and noticed things. as the king was taking a walk one day, he passed by a vineyard, which is another name for a grape-garden, and he noticed that the wall was broken down. he looked farther, and saw that the vines were all trailing on the ground, instead of being tied up, and worse still, they were all grown over with nettles and thorns--the beautiful grape vines that give such rich, delicious fruit. "how is this?" thought the king, and he began to consider. "ah!" said he, "this vineyard belongs to the man who likes 'a little sleep,' 'a little slumber,' and who would rather fold his hands and go to sleep again than use them to work in his garden. and what will be the end of it all? he will soon be poor, and have nothing to eat, while his lovely grapes which would have sold for money if he had looked after them, lie there buried and spoilt by the nettles and thorns." it is quite right to sleep through the dark night, but this man slept in the daytime as well, instead of weeding his garden, and tying up the grapes, so we say he was a sluggard. what an ugly word it is! would =you= like to be a sluggard? no, indeed you would not. then remember this:-- (blackboard) never be lazy. xxxviii. on being ashamed. . the elephant that stole the cakes.[ ] far away in a country called india there are many elephants, which are used for hunting, and also for carrying burdens. one evening a driver brought his elephant home, and chained him to a tree; then he went a short distance away, and made an oven to bake his cakes for supper. you will wonder how this was done. first he dug a hole in the ground, in which to place his fuel, and when he had set the fuel alight, he covered it with a flat stone or plate of iron, and on this he put his rice cakes to bake. he then covered them up with grass and stones and went away. the elephant had been watching all this, and when the man was gone, he unfastened the chain which was round his leg with his trunk, went to the oven, uncovered the cakes, and took them off with his trunk and ate them. (perhaps he waited a little while until they cooled, for the elephant does not like his food hot.) then he put back the grass as before, and returned to the tree. he could not manage to fasten the chain round his leg again, so he just twisted it round as well as he could, and stood with his back to the oven as if nothing had happened. by-and-by the driver returned, and went to see if his cakes were ready. they were all gone, and the elephant was peeping over his shoulder to see what would happen next. the driver knew by his guilty look that =he= was the thief; the elephant knew he had done wrong and was ashamed. let us not do anything that we need be ashamed of. we know what is right better than the elephant, because we can think better. (blackboard.) do nothing that you need be ashamed of. footnote: [ ] romanes' _animal intelligence_. xxxix. ears and no ears. . heedless albert. "listen, boys," said the teacher, "i am going to tell you about a land across the sea, not much more than twenty miles from england--the sunny land of france." so he went on to tell them of the vines loaded with grapes, from which wine is made; of the apples growing by the roadside, and of the french people, how gay and merry they are, and how neatly the poor people dress. many more interesting things he told them, and then he said: "now, take your papers, and write down all that you can remember about france". the boys set to work, and soon all were very busy, except one--a boy named albert, who could not think of anything to write, and who, when the papers were collected had not managed to pen a single line. how was this, do you think? it was simply because he had =not attended= to the teacher when he was speaking, and so he could not remember anything that had been told him. one day, when albert was about ten years old, his mother sent him to a farm for some eggs. he had not been to the farm before, but his mother told him exactly which way to go, and if he had listened he could have found it easily. in about an hour albert came back, swinging the empty basket. he had not been able to find the farm. why? because he did not =attend= when his mother was telling him the way. you will readily see that a child who does not attend cannot learn much, and will never be bright and clever, nor of much use in helping others. (blackboard.) do not be heedless; listen and attend. . olive and gertie. olive and gertie were walking along a country road, and high up in the sky a lark poured forth his sweet song. "how beautifully that skylark sings," said olive; "it is worth while to come out into the country just to hear it." "i did not hear it," said gertie, swinging her parasol. "it is there, right overhead," exclaimed olive; "do look, gertie; it will drop like a stone when it gets nearer the ground." "oh! i cannot trouble to look up," replied gertie, "it makes my neck ache." by-and-by they passed a field of oats, nearly ripe, and as the wind swayed them to and fro, they made a pleasant rustling sound. "how nice it is to hear the corn as it rustles in the wind," said olive, "and listen, gertie, is not this a pretty tinkling sound?" olive had plucked one of the ears of oats, and was shaking its little bells close to her friend's ear. "it is nothing," said gertie. "to me it is lovely," replied olive, "and the tinkle of the harebells is just as sweet." then a bee went buzzing by, and olive liked to hear its drowsy hum, but gertie did not notice it. presently they were on the edge of the cliffs, and could hear the splash of the waves as they rolled in and broke on the beach. "surely you like to hear 'the song of the sea,'" said olive, but gertie made no reply--she was thinking of something else. do not be like gertie, who seemed as if she had "no ears," but, like olive, keep your ears open to all the sweet and pleasant sounds. the fire makes a pleasant sound as it burns and crackles in the grate, and who does not like to hear the "singing" of the kettle on the hob? how musical is the flow of the stream, and do you not love to hear the splash of the oars as they dip in the river? or the sound made by the bow of the boat as it cuts through the water? some people like to hear the "thud" of a great steamer as it ploughs its way through the sea, and everybody loves the sound of the wind as it whispers in the trees. the sounds that we hear in the fields and woods are called "voices of nature," let us listen to them, for they speak to us of god's love. (blackboard.) listen to the voices of nature; they speak of god's love. (let the children enumerate some of the pleasant "sounds" mentioned, and the teacher might then write them on the blackboard.) xl. eyes and no eyes. . the two brothers. have you ever heard of the "black country"? it is a part of england where there are many furnaces and iron-works, and a great deal of smoke; that is why it is called by this name. two boys, named francis and algie, lived in this district, for their father was an iron-worker, and one evening they went out for a long walk. they were away two or three hours, and when they returned their mother said: "well, boys, what did you see in your walk?" "nothing, mother," replied algie, "there is nothing pretty to be seen; it is all black and ugly." "ah!" said francis, "but there was the =sky=, and that was beautiful, for we were walking towards the sunset, and the colours were changing all the time. first the sky seemed to be all over gold, and then as the sun went down it changed to red; next when i looked there were shades of a lovely green or blue, which soon changed to dark red; it was the loveliest sunset i have ever seen." how strange it was that, although both boys had eyes, only one of them saw anything worth seeing! francis was the boy with "eyes," while algie was as though he had "no eyes". keep your eyes open, children, and try to see all that is beautiful. it is such a pity when people grow up and walk about without seeing anything. there is always something to see in the sky. sometimes it is all a lovely blue, with white, fleecy clouds floating across it, or piled up in curly masses; and at night it is of a deeper blue, and the stars come peeping out, reminding us in their beauty of goodness and god:-- thou who hast sown the sky with stars-- setting thy thoughts in gold. and the silver moon, which is always changing its shape, how lovely that is! do not forget to look for the beauty of the sky. . ruby and the wall. little ruby was not two years old, but she always noticed things, and tried to find out their names. one day when she was walking out with her auntie they passed a stone wall. ruby looked at it, and then glancing up said, "wall". "yes," said auntie. "what is the wall made of?" "coal," answered ruby quite seriously. (i suppose the blocks of stone reminded her of the same shape in the coals.) "no, it is not coal," said auntie. ruby was puzzled, and thought for a little, then she said, "wash it". you see she had never heard the word "stone," and as her little hands, when dirty, became lighter coloured with =washing=, she thought that stone must be "washed" coal. it was wrong, of course, but it shows you that tiny ruby used her eyes, and =thought= about things. (blackboard.) two kinds of eyes:-- . eyes that see--francis, ruby. . eyes that do not see--algie. xli. love of the beautiful.[ ] . the daisy. you have often gathered buttercups and daisies, but have you ever gazed into the daisy's yellow eye, and thought how wonderful it was? you will find that it is made up of many tiny flowerets, all packed closely together. and the fringe of white petals, tipped with pink, how beautiful =they= are! and so dainty that we might almost think they had been painted by the pencil of a fairy! and have you noticed the strong, green cup which closes round the petals at night, and keeps them all safe? you have held the pretty buttercup under your chin to make it look yellow, but have you ever looked carefully at the shining petals of gold? how smooth, and clear, and glossy they are! there was once a great, wise king, who was so rich that he had plates and cups of gold instead of china. he made a beautiful throne of ivory, with six lions on the one side and six on the other, and the throne was all overlaid with gold; how bright and glittering it would be! and then picture the king himself in his robes of state, seated on his gilded throne, how dazzling and beautiful it would all look! and yet the greatest teacher who ever lived--he who took the little children in his arms--said that the great king solomon, with his throne of ivory and gold, "in all his glory" was not so beautiful as the lily growing in the field. so you see the best of all beauty is close beside us, at our feet indeed, if we only have eyes to see it. dear little modest daisy, i love your yellow eye, i love the pink-tipped petals that round the centre lie; i love the pretty buttercup of lovely, shining gold; i love it, for it speaks to me, of wondrous love untold. you have heard of other beautiful sights and sounds in the story lessons that have gone before ( , ), and in the story lesson which follows you will learn =why= it is good to love all these beautiful things. footnote: [ ] the guessing rhymes, nos. to , headed "natural phenomena," in _games without music_, would follow this story lesson appropriately. xlii. on destroying things. . beauty and goodness. why do we hang pictures on the walls, and put plants in the windows? because we want to make the room look pretty. why do we love the flowers and the trees, the bright green fields and the waving yellow corn? why are we so glad to be near the sea, with its glorious, rolling waves, and to bask in the warm, bright rays of the sun? because they are =all= beautiful, and when we love what is beautiful it helps us to love what is good; and when we love =goodness= we love god, who gave us all this beauty. now you will see why it is so wicked to =destroy= beautiful things. when a boy carves his name on a tree, or breaks off its graceful branches, he =destroys= that which is good, instead of loving it; and how can he grow up gentle and true if he does not love beauty and goodness? sometimes people put iron railings round their gardens, and you will have noticed that they are often finished off with a pointed pattern at the top, to make them look pretty. when a boy comes along and knocks off the points, he makes the railings look =ugly= instead of pretty. he would never think of destroying the pictures that hang on the walls of his home, or of throwing the plants away that stand in the window, yet he destroys things that are =not his=, and that other people have put there to make their houses look nice. i am sure you will say this is not right; it is =downright wrong=, just as wrong as it would be for me to go and break that boy's slate, or to snap his wickets in two when he is wanting a game of cricket, and it is all for want of =thinking=. it is quite dreadful to know that so many cruel, unkind things are done, just because boys and girls do not trouble to =think=! but i hope that =you=, dear children, =will think=, and keep your little hands from spoiling anything. (blackboard.) it is wrong to spoil and destroy. xliii. on turning back when wrong. . the lost path. a boy named eric was coming home from school. there were two ways that he could take--one was a path through the fields, and the other was a winding road. it was winter time, and there was snow on the ground. eric chose the field path, for it was the shorter of the two, but he had not gone far when it began to snow very fast. the snow-flakes were so large, and fell so quickly, that there was very soon quite a thick carpet on the ground, and before long eric found that he could not see the path, and he scarcely knew where he was. if he had only turned round just then, he could have seen his own footprints in the snow, and following them, would have got back to the road safely, but he did not want to do this, so he went on and on until he was lost entirely, and had not the least idea as to which was the way home. then he determined to turn back, and try to reach the road, but where are his footprints? all covered up with snow. eric felt ready to cry, but he struggled on as long as he could, and then a great drowsiness came over him, and he fell down in the snow. it is just like that with wrong-doing, if we do not turn back at once, it becomes more and more difficult to find the path, and sometimes the wrong-doer loses it altogether. when eric did not come home from school his parents became very anxious, and his father accompanied by the dog went out to seek him. first he took the way by the road, then he came over the field-path, and the dog ran sniffing about in the snow, until he came to what looked like a white mound, and there was eric half-buried in the snow. you can imagine how pleased the father was when he had his boy safe in his arms, and how gladly he carried him home, for if eric had not been found quickly, he must have died. remember eric in the snow, and (blackboard.) when you have gone wrong, turn back at once. xliv. one bad "stone" may spoil the "temple". . intemperance. from all these story lessons you will see that there are a great many "stones" for the building of "character". but there is another thought, which is this: a =bad= "stone," =one= bad "stone" may spoil =all= the rest. you remember we said (story lesson ) that selfishness could spoil a character. and there is another fault--i think we ought to call it a sin--that spoils the character of many an up-grown person. i mean the sin of intemperance. you know what that is, do you not? when we say that people are intemperate, we generally mean that they take too much beer or wine, and i have known most beautiful characters spoilt by that bad "stone". when a man has lovely "stones" like kindness, unselfishness and truth in his temple, is it not a pity that these should be all eaten away by the dreadful sin of intemperance? even truth, the foundation, decays, and often the lovely temple of character tumbles all to ruins. what should you think is the best thing for children to do? is it not this? never =take= any of these things that =cause= intemperance, and then you will never be fond of them, and they will never get the mastery of you and spoil your character. (blackboard.) it is better not to take things that cause intemperance. .--manners. xlv. preliminary. (to be read first.) . the watch and its springs. you have heard the ticking of your father's watch, and have seen the hands on its face, but did you ever get a peep inside at the wonderful tiny wheels and springs? these are called the =works=, and if =they= are not right and true the hands and the face are of no use at all, because it is only when the =wheels= and =springs= work properly that the hands can tell the time correctly. it is just the same with us. if the =character= is true and good, it will not be difficult to be polite and nice in manner, for manners are the =outside= part of us (just as the hands and face are the outside parts of the watch). the kind, good thoughts =within=--in our hearts--will teach us how to behave. there is nothing that makes people so rude as thinking of self and forgetting the comfort of others; some call it "thoughtlessness," but we fear the true name is "selfishness". if we are =un=selfish and thoughtful for others, we shall not be likely to do anything that =hurts= people, and so we shall not be likely to be rude. in the story lessons on "manners" which follow, just see if you can find out what it is that causes each rude action. you will probably say that it is "=want of thought=" for others. (the writer would ask the teacher, or mother, who reads the following story lessons to the little ones to emphasise this fact in each--that =thought for others= induces nice manners, while "thoughtlessness" and "selfishness" invariably lead to rudeness. spoilt children, and those whose mothers are in the habit of doing everything for them, =miss= the training in "thoughtfulness for others" which is so essential to the building up of an unselfish character; and so the mother's intended kindness is in reality =not= kindness, seeing that it causes distinct loss to the child, _viz._, =loss= of those traits of character which are the most desirable, and which tend to the greatest happiness.) xlvi. on saying "please" and "thank you".[ ] . fairy tale of alec and his toys. alec was a merry little fellow, full of life and fun, and a great favourite with his aunties and uncles, who often gave him nice presents. the strange thing about alec was that he always forgot to say "thank you". no matter how beautiful the present, he would just take it and play with it, and return no thanks to the kind giver, until his mother reminded him how rude it was not to say "thank you". alec was not like little vernon (story lesson ), who was brimming over with thanks. one night as alec's mother was putting him to bed, she said: "alec, i have been reading some verses about a little girl who would not say 'please'. she would cry 'pass me the butter,' 'give me some cheese'. so the fairies, 'this very rude maiden to tease,' carried her down into the woods, among the butterflies and birds and bees, until she should have learnt better manners." alec listened with wide-open eyes fixed on his mother's face, but when she said, "i wonder what the fairies would do with a little boy who always forgets to say 'thank you,'" his eyes dropped, and he was very quiet while his mother was tucking him in his little cot. when she had gone alec thought to himself, "suppose the fairies should come and take all my toys away," then he fell asleep, and this is what happened. the fairies =did= come, and alec saw them. such funny little fellows they were, dressed in red, with funny little wings stuck out behind, and the funniest of little peaked caps on their heads. alec began to wonder about his toys, and sure enough they had come to fetch them. first they picked up a beautiful, long railway train, which was a present from aunt sophie. it took them all to lift it, there were so many carriages. (why do they not draw it along? thought alec.) up on their shoulders it went. would the peaked caps fall off? no, they were all tilted sideways, and the train was borne safely out. soon the funny little fairies came dancing in again, laughing and rubbing their hands as they looked all about. surely they were not going to take the noah's ark! =that= was uncle jack's present, and the animals were such beauties! but that did not matter to the fairies. slowly the ark was lifted on their shoulders; six fairies were on one side and six on the other; again the peaked caps were tilted sideways, and solemnly they all marched out. next time they pulled out a wooden horse, papa's gift, and alec saw that the fairies all jumped on its back, and then a funny thing happened--the horse walked out of its own accord. again and again they came in and bore away one precious toy after another, until there was nothing left but grandpapa's gift--the tricycle. surely they will leave that! alec never knew until now how much he loved his toys; but here they are again, and, yes! they are actually bringing out the tricycle. one sits on the saddle, one on each pedal, and all the rest on the handle-bar. now the pedals go round, and, strange to say, the funny little men do not fall off. the tricycle seems to go of itself, as the horse did. and now, oh dear! =everything= is gone, and alec thinks he is worse off than the little girl who was carried away by the fairies. morning comes! alec wakes and rubs his eyes; what has happened? oh! the toys! quick as thought he is out of bed, and off to the playroom in his night-dress. where are the toys? all there, just as he left them last night. "it was only a dream, then," said alec; "how glad i am that it is not true, but all the same i =will= remember to say 'thank you' in future," and he did. (blackboard.) always remember to say "please" and "thank you," not in a whisper, but loudly enough to be heard. footnote: [ ] nos. , and in _games without music_ are games that might be used in connection with above story lesson. xlvii. on being respectful. . if you should see the sailors on board ship when they are receiving orders from the captain, you will notice how polite and respectful they are. they never forget to say "yes, sir," or "no, sir," when he speaks to them. perhaps the captain was once a little cabin-boy himself, and he, in his turn, had to learn to be respectful to his captain. but it is not only on board ship that it is necessary to be respectful; children should always remember to say "sir" or "ma'am" when speaking to a gentleman or lady, wherever they may be. in france the word "madam" is used when addressing a lady, but in our country the "d" is mostly left out, and we say only "ma'am". (show the two words, "madam" and "ma'am" on blackboard.) no one thinks a boy or girl well-behaved who answers "yes," or "no"; it is blunt and rude. you can always say "sir" and "ma'am," even if you do not know the name of the person to whom you are speaking, and in answering your father or mother you should always say "yes, father," or "no, mother," as the case may be. (blackboard.) to answer "yes," "no"--it is blunt, and is rude, but "yes, sir" or "no, ma'am" are both right and good; "yes, father," "no, mother," polite children say, and these are good rules to remember each day. xlviii. putting feet up. . alice and the pink frock. you have often heard grown-up people say to little children, "behave nicely," or "mind your manners"; i wonder if you know just what they mean. there is a little word that describes people who have =not= nice manners--we say they are =rude=. try to find out who was rude in this story. one bright day in april little alice was dressed all ready for a birthday party. she had on a pretty, new pink frock, of which she was very proud, and over this she wore a cloak, but the cloak was not quite long enough to cover =all= the pretty dress, for which alice was not sorry. she was all the more pleased about the party because she had to go by train. it was only three miles, but alice thought that was quite a long journey for a little girl of ten to take all by herself. her mother brought her to the station, and when the train came up, alice jumped in and sat near the window, opposite to a tall, nicely-dressed boy. now before alice came into the carriage, what do you think the boy had been doing? he had been sitting with his feet up on the cushions opposite, and his boots were very muddy. can you guess the rest? poor alice sat down on the muddy patches left by the boy's dirty, wet boots, and her pretty pink frock was spoilt. can you tell who was rude in this story? "the boy was rude." what did he do that was rude? "he put his feet up." then we will say, "it is rude to put our feet up". the proper place for feet is the floor. what effect did the boy's rudeness have on alice? (or to younger children): how did the boy's rudeness make alice feel? it made her unhappy. then i think we might say that manners are =rude= when they make other people =uncomfortable= or =unhappy=. write on blackboard and let the children repeat the following:-- what is it to be rude? if in our work or in our play we take our friend's comfort away, and make him sad instead of gay, why that is to be rude. xlix. banging doors. . how maurice came home from school. how is it that boys and girls so often forget to close the door quietly? when maurice went out to school in the afternoon he knew that his mother had a headache, but by the time he came home he had forgotten all about it, and so he stamped in with his muddy shoes unwiped, leaving the front door wide open. his mother said, "close the door, maurice," and he gave it a great bang, which made her shudder. next he walked into the room, flung his bag on a chair, his cap on the floor, and his overcoat on the sofa. then he said in a loud voice, "well, mother, how's your head?" his poor mother felt almost too sad to answer him; she had so often told her little boy about hanging up his coat and other things, and had tried so hard to teach him to be gentle and polite, instead of rough and rude; but you see maurice was =thoughtless=, and did not remember the nice things he had been taught. take care, maurice! or you will have the ugly stone of "selfishness" in your temple. a boy who is not kind to his mother is the worst kind of boy, and will find it difficult to grow up into a good and noble man. . lulu and the glass door. when lulu was a little girl, she lived with her auntie and uncle. the front door of their house was made half of glass, and there was a shutter which covered the glass part of the door at night. lulu's auntie told her that when it was windy weather she must go round to the =back= door, lest the front door should get a bang, and some of the panes of glass be broken. i am afraid lulu did not always remember to obey her auntie, for one very windy morning she came home from school, and went as usual to the front door. she managed to open it and to get inside safely, then the door closed with a loud bang, for the wind was very strong, and it happened just as auntie had feared--a large pane of glass fell out of the door, and was shivered into a thousand pieces. auntie was very angry, and lulu was so unhappy, and cried so much that she could not eat her dinner. when her uncle came home and heard the story, and knew how sorry lulu was, he said: "oh, well, dry your tears, we will call and ask old james to come and mend the door, and my little girl must do what auntie tells her next time". so lulu trotted back to afternoon school, holding to the hand of her kind uncle, and they called to tell james to put a new pane of glass into the door. but lulu has not forgotten her disobedience, and the banging of auntie's door, although it is now more than forty years ago. (blackboard.) close doors softly. l. pushing in front of people. . the big boy and the little lady. the queen was in london, and as the time drew near when she was expected to drive through the park, many people stood on the sidewalk to see her carriage pass. a little lady who was walking through the park thought she would stand with the others to see her majesty, and as she was too short to look over the heads of the people, she found a place at the edge of the crowd near the roadway. by-and-by they heard a cheer in the distance, and knew that the queen's carriage had come out of the palace gates. at that very moment some one came pushing through the people, and before the little lady had time to speak, a great big boy brushed rudely past, and stood in front of her. the lady touched him on the arm, and he turned round, and saw that it was a friend of his mother's whom he had been treating so rudely. he raised his cap at once, and, blushing with shame, begged the lady's pardon, and took a place behind her. but if the lady had been a perfect stranger, it would have been equally wrong for the boy to act like that. it is always rude to push, whether we are entering a tramcar, a railway train, or going to some place of amusement; let us remember this:-- (blackboard) it is rude to push in front of people. li. keeping to the right.[ ] . when you have been walking down the street, has it ever happened that you could scarcely move for the people who are blocking up the causeway? that is because they do not keep to the right. in london, where the streets are so busy, it would be impossible to get along if people did not keep to the right. what accidents we should have in the streets if the drivers did not remember to keep to their proper side of the road, which is the left! and how often the ships at sea would go bumping against each other if they did not remember always to keep to the right in passing those that are coming in an opposite direction! if you are ever puzzled as to how you should pass people in the street (blackboard) keep to the right. footnote: [ ] no. , in _games without music_ illustrates above. lii. clumsy people. . i wonder if you know any boys and girls who are clumsy. i am always a little sorry for clumsy people; they seem to be so often in trouble. if the clumsy boy is allowed to collect the slates, he is sure to send some of them sliding on to the floor with a noise like thunder; or if he gathers the books in a pile it is sure to topple over, and the books are scattered in every direction. the clumsy people tread on our toes, step on a lady's dress and tear it maybe, or bump against baby's cot in passing and wake the little sleeper. do you think we could find out the secret of being clumsy? is not it for want of taking =care=? you remember elinor, in story lesson , how she upset her tea, broke the vase, and spoilt the tablecloth, all for want of =care=? it is the same with clumsy people--they forget to take care? the books and slates are not piled =carefully=, that is why they tumble; they bulge out here and go in there, instead of being smooth and straight on every side. if you do not want to be clumsy (blackboard) take pains, and be careful in all you do. liii. turning round when walking. . the girl and her eggs. have you ever seen a girl walking along the street with her head turned backwards, trying to look behind her as she goes? of course she does not walk straight, for she is not looking where she is going. it would be better if she =did= either look where she is going or turn quite round, and go where she is looking. a girl was coming along the street one day with a paper bag full of eggs, looking behind her all the time. a lady, who was walking in the opposite direction, tried to get out of her way, but as we said before, the girl could not walk straight when her eyes were turned backward, and as the lady stepped to one side to avoid her, the girl in her zigzag walk came to the same side and bumped up against the lady. crash! went the eggs, and a yellow stream ran down the pretty blue dress worn by the lady. what would the girl's mother say when her eggs were all wasted? this is a true story, and you will agree that the girl was very silly to walk along with her head turned round. you see we have no eyes behind our head, nor even at the side; they are at the front, so (blackboard) look where you are going. liv. on staring. . ruth and the window. there was once a girl named ruth, who was in many respects very well-behaved indeed. for instance, you would never hear her reply to her mother without saying "yes, mother," or "no, mother," and she never banged the door or came into a room noisily, but she had =one= fault that was really very bad. as ruth went on her way to school each day, she passed a house that had its dining-room window facing the street. the window was rather low, and every time that ruth went by she would walk slowly, and stare into the room all the time. if the people were at dinner it made no difference--she still gazed in. you will think this exceedingly rude, as indeed it was, but it is quite true nevertheless. one day a lady came to the school that ruth attended; she was driven there in her carriage, and remained talking to the teacher after the children had been dismissed. presently she said, "good afternoon," and left, and the teacher, happening to glance out of the window, was vexed to see that a number of the scholars had gathered round the carriage, and were staring in, and staring at the lady as she took her seat. next day the children were told how rude this was, and we hope that ruth learnt at the same time how rude it is to stare into people's houses. another day some japanese ladies came to the school to see the children drill; they were dressed so differently from english people, and looked so funny with their little slanting eyes, and their shiny, black hair dressed high, with no bonnet to cover it, that the children were tempted to stare again, but the teacher had told them that it would be rude to stare at the ladies. "you may glance at them," said she, "but do not keep your eyes fixed on them." it is natural to wish to look at curious things, but we can be careful to take our eyes away when we have glanced, so that we do not stare, and make the person uncomfortable, for you remember we said that anything was rude which caused people to be uncomfortable (p. ). there was a little boy in church who had just the same rude habit as ruth. he would sit or stand at the end of the pew, and turn his head round to see what was passing behind. he did not take just a little glance, and then turn his eyes back again--even that would have been rude--but he kept his gaze fixed behind for ever so long. do you know =why= we do not look about in church? it is because we go there to worship the great god, to hear of him, and think about him, and we cannot do this if we are looking about, and thinking of other things. why do we close our eyes when we pray? it is so that we may think of what we are saying; if we kept them open, we should be thinking of what we were =seeing= instead, should we not? (blackboard.) it is rude to stare. lv. walking softly. . florence nightingale. a long time ago there was a war, and the english soldiers went out to fight. many of the poor fellows were wounded, and a kind lady, who is now quite old, went from england to nurse the brave soldiers. her name was florence nightingale, and it is a name that everybody loves. the soldiers had never been nursed by a lady before, and she was so kind and gentle, they loved her more than i can tell you--so much, indeed, that they would kiss her shadow on the pillow as she walked softly through the rooms where they lay. if you have ever been in a hospital you will know how quietly the nurses move about. why is it? because a noise would disturb the poor sufferers. but it is not nice for people who are well either to hear children stamping about as if they would send their feet through the floor. have you noticed how softly pussy moves? it is because she walks on her toes. we have to wear shoes on our feet, and cannot help making a little noise, but we must remember to step on our toes, and move as quietly as possible. (blackboard.) try always to walk softly. lvi. answering when spoken to.[ ] . the civil boy. one day a lady was passing through a country village, and not being quite sure as to which was the right road to take, she went up to some boys who were playing on the green to inquire. "can you tell me, please, which is the way to east thorpe?" asked the lady. "yes, ma'am," said one of the boys, raising his cap, "you walk straight past the church, and then take the first road to the right." the lady thanked the boy, and bade him "good-day," and as he replied "good-day, ma'am," and again raised his cap, she thought to herself, "what a civil, polite boy! he is very poorly dressed, but he has the manners of a gentleman, and how nicely he answered when i spoke to him; i must tell dorothy about it." dorothy was the lady's little niece, and had been staying with her some time. one afternoon auntie had taken dorothy with her to call at the house of a friend, and when the lady spoke kindly to the little girl, and asked her name and where she lived, dorothy only smiled and looked foolish, and did not speak or answer. her auntie was very much surprised, and perhaps felt a wee bit ashamed of her little niece that afternoon. children should never be bold and forward, but they =should= look up and answer a question fearlessly and clearly when they are asked one; it is so foolish to simper and not speak. (blackboard.) always answer when you are spoken to. footnote: [ ] nos. , and in _games without music_ might follow above. lvii. on speaking loudly. . the woman who shouted. the train had just steamed into the railway station, when a porter opened the carriage door to let a lady step in--at least she =looked= like a lady, and was dressed most elegantly. her gown was of silk, over which she wore a rich fur-lined cloak, and her bonnet was quite smart with feathers and flowers. as she drew off her gloves, you could not help noticing that her fingers were covered with glittering rings. "surely she must be going to some grand concert, or to a party," thought we. but listen to what happened next! just before the train started she suddenly opened the carriage window, and leaning out as far as ever she could, shouted in a loud, rough voice, so loudly that all the people round could hear, "heigh! you porter there, is my luggage all right?" then she closed the window and sat down, and we felt that in spite of her finery she was a rude, rough woman, for a lady is gentle, and would never speak in a loud, coarse voice that grates on those who hear it. never speak too loudly either out of doors or elsewhere; keep always a soft, sweet voice. speak gently, for a gentle voice is loved, like music sweet; coarse tones and loud are out of place at home or on the street. lviii. on speaking when others are speaking. . margery and the picnic. it was holiday time, and margery had gone to play with her little friend helena poynter, who lived in the next street but one. they were in a little summer-house at the end of the garden, having a happy time with their dolls, and helena was telling margery that her father had promised to take them all for a picnic to the hills next day. they were to drive there in a coach, papa, mamma, helena, and her brothers, who were all at home for the holidays. just then helena's mamma came walking down the garden. "good-morning, margery," said she, and margery stood up at once and returned her greeting. "i have been thinking," said mrs. poynter, "that you would like to join our picnic to-morrow, and i am sure we could find room for one more on the coach." "oh! thank you, ma'am," said margery, "i should like it so much; i will run round and ask mother at once," and off she ran as fast as her little legs could carry her. margery came into the house bubbling over with the good news, and anxious to tell it all to her mother immediately, but she found that a lady had called and was talking to her mother, so she just waited quietly until the conversation was ended before she spoke a word, for margery knew that (blackboard) it is rude to speak when other people are speaking. you will see now why we sit quietly in church, or at an entertainment, or in a room when any one is singing or playing--it is because we do not wish to be rude, and it =is= rude to speak when any one else is speaking, or praying, or reading aloud, or singing, or playing music for us. you will like to know that margery was allowed to go to the picnic, and she enjoyed it very much. lix. look at people when speaking to them. . fred and his master. in a previous story lesson, no. , we spoke of a village boy who, you remember, answered the lady politely, when she inquired her way. his name was fred, and when a gentleman came to the school that fred attended one day, and said he wanted an office-boy, the schoolmaster called fred up to the desk. the boy looked so bright and honest, and said, "yes, sir" so politely, that the gentleman thought he would do, and the next week fred began his work. sometimes he had to sit at a desk and do writing; one morning as he sat thus, the master came in to speak to him. what do you think fred did? he rose from his stool at once, turned towards his master, and stood while he was speaking. the master was giving fred instructions about his work, and as soon as he had finished, fred looked up and replied, "yes, sir, i will attend to it". we have learnt two lessons from fred, what are they? (blackboard.) . to stand up when spoken to. . to look up when speaking to any one. lx. on talking too much. . one evening a number of friends met together at a little party. first they all had tea, and after tea was over they sat round the fire to talk, for some of them had not seen each other for a long time. but there was one lady there who had so much to say that scarcely any one else could get a chance to speak. she talked and talked nearly all the evening. sometimes we =expect= one person to speak all the time, as when we go to hear a lecture, or to listen to a sermon in church, but when people meet together for conversation, it is much pleasanter to hear =more= than one speak. another time three children were having dinner with some grown-up people, and a lady who was there told me that one of the children, a little girl about eight years of age, talked continually, so that even the grown-up people had scarcely an opportunity of speaking. so you see it is quite possible for people to be made uncomfortable by a child speaking too much, as well as by a child that refuses to speak at all (dorothy in story lesson ). perhaps you have been in a railway carriage where a little boy has never ceased asking questions and talking during the whole journey. years ago children used to be told that "they must be seen and not heard". we do not often say that now, but we must remember that it is rude to take up all the conversation, or even more than our share. i believe it is more than rude--it is selfish. we must learn to listen to other people as well as to talk ourselves. (blackboard.) do not be too fond of hearing yourself talk; learn to listen as well. lxi. going in front of people. . minnie and the book. one evening minnie sat at the table preparing her lessons. her father and mother, with an aunt who had called to see them, were seated at the hearth. in a little while minnie found that she required a book from the bookcase, which stood in a recess to the left of the fireplace, so she rose from the table, and, without speaking a word, walked in =front= of her aunt and in =front= of her father to reach the book. her aunt looked up in astonishment, and her father exclaimed: "minnie, how =rude= you are!" why was minnie rude? because she did not say "excuse me, please," both to her aunt and her father. we ought =not= to go in front of any one, if we can by any means avoid it; but, if it is impossible to get behind, we must never forget to say those little words which minnie so rudely forgot. . the man and his luggage. a gentleman was travelling in a railway train, and, as there was no one else in the carriage, he placed his portmanteau and other luggage on the rack =opposite= to where he sat instead of overhead. at the next station several people entered the carriage, and, when the gentleman wanted to get out, he was obliged to reach up in front of the people sitting opposite to get his luggage. but he did not forget to say, "excuse me, please". (blackboard.) when passing in front of others, or when reaching in front, always say "excuse me, please". lxii. when to say "i beg your pardon". . i was talking to a lady one day, and not happening to hear something that i said, she exclaimed in a loud voice, "=what?=" i was as much astonished as minnie's aunt was in story lesson , and quite forgot what i had intended to say next. what should the lady have said? she should have said, "i beg your pardon". perhaps she had forgotten herself just that one time. suppose you are sitting at table next to mother, who is pouring the tea; perhaps there is no bread and butter near enough for her to reach, and you do not notice that her plate is empty. she is obliged to ask you to pass her something, and as you do so you feel sorry that you have not done it =without= being asked, and you say, "i beg your pardon, mother". some people leave out the "=i=," and say "beg your pardon," or "beg pardon," but the proper words are, "i beg your pardon". . the lady and the poor boy. a young lady was hurrying down a street, and, as she turned the corner quickly, she nearly ran against a little ragged boy, but by putting out her arms she just managed to save him from being hurt. then she rested her hands on his shoulders, and said in a sweet voice: "i beg your pardon, my boy". the boy was greatly surprised that any one should beg =his= pardon; he had not been accustomed to have people speak politely to him, but the lady knew that it is just as important to be polite to a beggar as to a fine gentleman. we should, of course, try =not= to run against people, and be careful =not= to step on a lady's dress or on any one's toes, but if by accident we =do= make any of these blunders, we must remember to say, "i beg your pardon". (blackboard.) when you do not hear what is said to you, when you forget to pass a plate, when you bump against any one, when you hurt any one in any way, do not forget to say, "i beg your pardon". lxiii. raising cap. . why is it, do you think, that a boy raises his cap? it is to show respect to the lady or gentleman whom he is passing or speaking to. that was why the boy raised his cap to the lady in story lesson , and said "yes, ma'am;" he wished to show her respect. soldiers do not raise their caps to the general or captain; they salute (that is, they raise the forefinger of right hand to forehead), but it answers the same purpose--it shows their respect. why do men and boys take off their caps and hats when they enter a church or chapel? it is to show reverence to the god of all who is worshipped there. boys should always remember to raise their caps when a lady or gentleman bows or speaks to them, and also when they enter a house or other place, such as a church or chapel. lxiv. on offering seat to lady. . a number of soldiers were one day riding in a car, indeed the car was quite full of soldiers; and at the end there was a general, that is the man who is at the head of the soldiers. presently the car stopped, and a poor old woman entered, but there was no room for her to sit, and not one of the soldiers had the good manners to offer her his seat. so the woman walked to the end of the car where the general sat, that she might stand where she would not be in any one's way, but the kind general rose instantly, and gave her his place; that was courteous and kind of him, was it not? then several of the other soldiers stood, and asked the general to be seated, but he said: "no, there was no seat for the poor woman, so there is none for me". the soldiers were very much ashamed, and soon left the car. =why= did the general offer his seat to the old woman? for the same reason that the boy raises his cap--to show respect to her. you know how father takes care of mother and lifts heavy weights for her, and how brothers take care of sisters, and so if there is not room for everybody to sit, a man or boy will rise, and let a woman have his place; and they do all this partly because they are strong and like to do kind acts, and partly because it is nice and right to be courteous to women. but a kind woman does not like always to take the seat that is offered to her. the man may be old or weak, then the woman would say, "thank you, i will stand," for she sees that the man needs the seat more than she does. and if a man had been working hard all day (never sitting down at all maybe), and he should be coming home tired at night, in the train or tramcar, one would not like to let =him= stand, and give up his place. it is nice and polite for a man to =offer= his seat, and the lady should always say, "thank you," whether she takes it or not. a very old man entered a crowded railway carriage, and a young girl who was sitting near the door stood up at once and offered the old man her place, for she knew that he was too weak to stand. so you see that sometimes it is right for a girl or woman to give up her seat; we must not let the men do =all= the kind, polite actions. lxv. on shaking hands. . reggie and the visitors. one afternoon i called with a friend to see a lady at whose house i had not been before; she was very pleased to see us, and brought her little boy, reggie, into the room where we sat. "shake hands with the ladies, reggie," said his mother; but reggie refused, and hid his face in her dress. she explained that he was shy, and went on coaxing him to come and speak to us. after a great deal of talking and persuading, he consented to come and shake hands, =if= his mother would come with him. so she brought him across the room, and held out his hand, just as you hold out the arm of your doll, when you play at shaking hands with her. would =you= make all that fuss and trouble about shaking hands with any one? i hope not. it is so silly, as well as ill-mannered. after this reggie sat down in a little chair, and tried to put his feet up on a small table that was near--but you will not care to hear about such a badly-behaved little boy. and it was not very long before his mother had to take him from the room screaming, he was so tiresome and naughty. if reggie had tried to please his mother and her visitors, instead of his little =self=, everybody would have been much happier, and i am sure =he= would, for selfish people cannot be happy. think =first= of others, =last= of self, be friendly, kindly all around; shake hands with strangers, be polite, unselfish, sweet be always found. lxvi. knocking before entering a room. . the boy who forgot. a lady was sitting in a cottage one morning talking to the person who lived there, when suddenly, and without any warning knock, or even a little tap, some one lifted the latch noisily, and pushing the door wide open, burst into the room, asking, "what time is it?" the lady looked up to see who the rude intruder could be, and beheld a little, rosy-faced boy. she called him to her, and placing her hand on his shoulder said kindly: "my little fellow, do you not know that you should =knock= at a door before entering, and should say, '=please=, will you tell me the time?'" the boy hung his head and looked ashamed, but we hope he remembered what the lady said to him, and i hope also that none of you ever forget to (blackboard) knock at the door before entering a room. lxvii. hanging hats up, etc. . careless percy. you did not admire the boy (story lesson no. ) who threw his bag here, his cap there, and his coat somewhere else, did you? neither will you be likely to admire the little boy in this story. but come with me--i will take you into the bedroom of a boy named percy, who has gone to a party. i am afraid you can scarcely get inside though, for everything he has taken off is lying on the floor. his coat is flung behind the door, his collar lies inside the fender, and his trousers are beside the bed. he has been playing on the bed, you see, for it is all tossed, and one of the pillows has tumbled on the floor. let as take a peep into the nursery, where percy's play-things are. there is a railway train on the floor, just as he has been playing with it; and beyond the train, where he had made a huge castle with all the bricks he could find, the floor is all strewn over with bricks from the castle, which has tumbled down. who will pick up all these things, and tidy the two rooms that percy has left in such a dreadful state? his mother, maybe, who has so many other things to do. would =you= leave all your clothes scattered on the floor for some one else to pick up, instead of folding them neatly yourself? or would you like another to have the trouble of putting away all your toys? no, i am sure you would not. none of us want to be selfish, but if percy does not mind, =he= will grow up selfish, because he is not taking thought for others. hang up your cap and coat, and put away your toys, save mother all the work you can, dear little girls and boys. the recitation, "two little maids" (_new recitations for infants_) would follow this story lesson appropriately. lxviii. how to offer sweets, etc. . how baby did it. some one had brought baby a parcel of sweets. they were rather sticky, but baby did not mind that when the colours were so pretty! there were pink, blue, red and yellow sweets, and she was greatly pleased with them. baby was very kind and unselfish, so she wanted us all to share her sweets, and picking one out with her little chubby fingers, (which were not any too clean), she offered it to mamma. you see baby was very tiny, and had not yet learnt that sweets should always be offered in the paper or box, and not be touched by the fingers at all. but mamma explained this to her, and then baby lifted up the paper, and trotted round to everybody, holding it out, and saying, "please, take one". fruit and nuts should be offered in a plate or dish. it is not nice to touch with our fingers anything that we are offering to others. (blackboard.) always offer sweets in the paper or box. lxix. yawning, coughing, and sneezing. . i daresay you have sometime been in a room where a person was sleepy, and kept yawning continually. you know that by-and-by you begin to do the same yourself, and it is very disagreeable. a good plan is to run out of the room and bathe your face in cold water: that will soon make you feel bright again. it is not nice to yawn, because it makes other people feel sleepy, and we should never forget to cover the mouth with the hand: it is very rude to open the mouth wide, and not to put the hand in front of it. in coughing and sneezing, people should make as little noise as they possibly can. sometimes we hear coughing in church, and the minister can scarcely speak for the noise. a pocket-handkerchief will soften the sound a good deal, both in coughing and sneezing. these are only little things, but they can make others feel uncomfortable, and you remember we said that it was rude to do =anything= that caused people to be uncomfortable (p. ), so do not forget to (blackboard) cover the mouth when yawning; make as little noise as possible when coughing or sneezing. lxx. how a slate should not be cleaned. . you will have noticed that there is always moisture in your mouth. where do you think it comes from? perhaps you did not know that there were six tiny fountains in your mouth, two on each side the tongue, and one in each cheek. when you are well these little fountains pour out the fluid which keeps your mouth so nice and moist. sometimes when people are ill the little fountains do not flow, and the mouth is all dry and parched, and they are longing to drink all the time. the fluid that comes from the tiny wells is called saliva, and, when we eat, it mixes with the food in the mouth, and goes down with it into the stomach. but this is what i want you to learn, the saliva is never to be sent out of the mouth in the way that is called "spitting" (an ugly word, is it not?), and you must remember never to do this, not even when you are cleaning your slate. you may breathe on your slate, and rub it dry with your slate rag, though that is not a very nice way. the best plan of all is to have a damp sponge, as well as a slate rag, and a well-mannered child would have both. if there is anything in your mouth that needs to come away, take it out with your pocket-handkerchief, and remember that the proper way is to (blackboard) clean your slate with a damp sponge, and dry with a slate rag, not with a pocket-handkerchief. lxxi. the pocket-handkerchief. . guessing rhyme.[ ] you have me in your pocket, i'm square and white, 'tis true, and many things i'm used for by children such as you. (let children guess answer.--pocket-handkerchief.) there is moisture in the nose as well as in the mouth, and we keep a handkerchief in our pocket to take the moisture away, when it makes us uncomfortable. a nice, clean child will never be without a pocket-handkerchief, and he will use it =without having to be told=. in using a pocket-handkerchief, as in coughing and sneezing, we should make as little noise as possible, and we should try not to have to use it at table. if it is necessary to do so, we must turn our head away, as we should do if we were obliged to cough or sneeze. (blackboard.) use pocket-handkerchief without being told, making as little noise as possible. footnote: [ ] _games without music_, no. . lxxii. how to behave at table. (on sitting still at table.) . phil's disaster. phil was a little boy, and sat on a high chair at the table. he was very fond of tilting his chair backwards and forwards, which was not well-mannered, you will say. one dinner time, just as all the dishes had been placed on the table, and phil was tilting back as far as ever he could, it happened that the chair lost its balance, and fell over backwards, taking phil with it; and as he grasped the tablecloth in falling, he drew it with all the dishes on the top of him. many of the dishes were broken, and the dinner was all scattered and spoilt. surely phil would never tilt his chair again. . fidgety katie. have you ever sat at table with a child who was never still? such a child was katie! instead of waiting quietly until every one was served, she would fidget about on her chair, put her little fat arms on the table (which you know is a very rude thing to do), and move from side to side all the time. when at last she was served, her dinner would be quickly eaten, and then she was impatient to be gone, and kept asking mother if she might not leave the table, and go to her book or her play. now if katie had thought a little of others, she would not have made everybody uncomfortable by being so restless. when she was waiting to be served, and when she had finished, she should have sat quietly with her hands in her lap. these two stories teach us that (blackboard) we must sit still at table. (thinking of others at table.) . the helpful little girl. a very different child from restless katie (story lesson ) was hilda, whose mother had died, and left her little ones to the care of auntie. when the dinner-bell rang, hilda would run into the room, and see that all the chairs were in their places round the table, especially baby's, for he was much too little to bring his own chair. it was hilda who lifted baby into his place, and tied on his "feeder"; and when his plate was passed, she prepared his food, and took care that it was not too hot for him. hilda's bright eyes were always ready to see anything that was needed: "shall i pass you the salt, grandpapa?" "may i give you a little water, auntie?" no wonder auntie said that hilda was just like sunshine in the house, and the reason was that she thought so little of herself, and so much of those around her. let us try to be like hilda; she was much happier, i am sure, than restless katie, for there is nothing nicer than to bring sunshine into the lives of others, and this we do by being helpful. (blackboard.) think of others when you are at table; pass things and help all you can. (upsetting things at table.) . leslie and the christmas dinner we heard of people who were clumsy in another story lesson (no. ), and i am afraid leslie was a little like them. it was christmas day, and there was a large family party at grandmamma's, to which leslie and his mother were invited. the dinner-table looked beautiful with its snow-white cloth and shining silver, and its decorations of christmas roses and red-berried holly. the dinner-bell rang, and the guests took their places at the table. leslie bounced into the room, and was sitting down on the last chair, all in a hurry, when he somehow caught the tablecloth, and by dragging it upset the gravy, and sent it streaming all over the nice, clean cloth. leslie was very sorry, and his mother was so uncomfortable at the thought of his clumsiness, that i am afraid the dinner was spoilt for =her=. from leslie we learn to (blackboard) sit down carefully, so as not to upset anything. . cherry stones. if you were eating plum tart or cherry pudding, how should you manage with the stones? (let children try to answer.) when a little bird eats a cherry, he drops the stone on the ground; the bird has no spoon and fork to eat with, so that is the best thing he can do. one day a boy, named kenneth, was invited out to dinner, and one of the dishes was cherry tart. there was a custard pudding as well, but kenneth thought he would like cherry tart better, and he did not remember that the stones might be a difficulty until he began to eat it. he felt sure that it was not right to drop them out of his mouth on to the plate, and he could not think what else to do. he looked round the table, but no one else was taking cherry tart, or he might have noticed what another person did. at last he determined that he would keep all the cherry stones in his cheek until dinner was over, and put them out afterwards, when no one was looking. but presently some one told a funny little story, and, as kenneth could not help laughing with the rest, out came the cherry stones, to his great dismay. the best way is to separate the stone from the cherry on your plate with the spoon and fork, but if you cannot manage this, take the stone from your mouth with the spoon, and put it gently on the edge of the plate. everybody has to learn these things, and as no one had happened to tell kenneth, of course he did not know. lxxiii. on eating and drinking. . key e. {:s |d :m |m :m |l :r |r } . i must not fill my mouth too full, {:r |f :r |s :r |m :-- |-- } nor ver - y quick - ly eat, {:m |r :f |m :s |f :l |s } but take a small piece, chew it well, {:l |s :m |s :r |d :-- |-- } and fin - ish all my meat. . food should be carried to my mouth upon the fork, i see; the knife is used to cut, and ought not near the lips to be. . when pudding comes, the =point= of spoon within the mouth may go, but soup or broth is taken from the =side= of it you know. . without a noise i eat and drink, i must not spill my food, nor scald my mouth, nor make complaint, "this is not nice, not good". . key e. {|m :-- |m :m |f :f |f :-- } . small bites of bread we take, {|r :-- |r :r |m :s |s :-- } and chew it well be - fore {|l :-- |d :l |s :m |m :-- } we drink our tea or milk; {|m :-- |r :l |s :s |s :-- } we must not ask for more {|f :-- |r :l |s :m |s :-- } un - til we've finished quite, {|m :-- |r :m |d :d |d :-- } for that would not be right. . if handkerchiefs we use, or sneeze or cough, we try, when seated at our food, to do it quietly; and don't forget, i pray, to turn your head away. . when we have finished, then the knife and fork should lie together on our plate, and hands rest quietly within the lap,[ ] this wise, until mamma shall rise. (explain that children should not leave table until mother has done so, unless she gives them permission.) footnote: [ ] fold hands in lap. lxxiv. finale. . how another queen builded. a great many years ago, a little girl played in a garden in london. her father was dead, but she had a dear, good mother, who taught her to build for herself a good and beautiful character, for the mother knew that this would be a better thing for the little girl to have than gold or diamonds, because as the fairy queen told us, it =lasts for ever=. as time went on the little girl grew up, and became a great queen. she has been a queen now for more than sixty years, and i do not think there ever was so good a queen, and we are sure there never was one so dearly loved. the queen has a beautiful gold crown, and beautiful castles and palaces to live in, but these are not the things she values most. best of all, she has all those lovely jewels in her character that we have been speaking about, with "truth" for the foundation, and it is all woven round with the pure gold of "kindness"; these are the jewels that are more precious to the great queen than crowns and costly stones. do you know the name of this queen? it is our own queen victoria. why do we love her so much? not because she is a queen, simply, for queens have sometimes been wicked, but because she is good, and true, and kind, and these jewels make up the something that we call "character," which when built like this is more beautiful than the fairies' temple. and just think of it: =every= little boy and girl may build up a good, true character, which is the most precious thing you can have. the story lessons in this book have been written to help each one of =you= who hear them to build up this beautiful temple of character. the queen believes that a =good= "character" is the best thing in the world, and i want you all to think so too. a man who was put in prison for preaching wrote a beautiful book,[ ] which you will read when you are older, and in it there is this story. the story tells of a man who spent all his time raking up rubbish on the floor to find gold and other things, and =never once looked up=. but all the time there was an angel standing behind him with a beautiful crown in her hand, which she wanted the man to have, but he never saw it. that is like the people who think of nothing but =self=, instead of "looking up" and thinking of the beautiful "stones" that build up the "temple," which is such a good thing to have, just as the crown was, which the man did not see. let us look up and see all that is beautiful and good, so that we may become like god who made all these things. footnote: [ ] _pilgrim's progress._ * * * * * transcriber's notes: obvious punctuation errors repaired. page xiii, "another" changed to "another" (how another queen) page , word "on" added to text (mother had gone on) page , "thoughful" changed to "thoughtful" ("a lovely idea," said "thoughtful") page , "out" changed to "own" (own accord) [illustration: helpful donts] [transcriber's notes: the original text had some words superscripted on this page. those words have been surrounded by {curly braces} to signify this.] t{he} college freshman's don't book {in the} interests {of} freshmen {at} large especially those whose remaining {at} large uninstructed {&} unguided appears a worry {and} a menace {to} college {&} university society these remarks {and} hints are set forth by g. f. e. (a. b.) a sympathizer the illustrations by charles frank ingerson the decorations & initials by raymond carter [illustration] paul elder {and} company publishers ::: san francisco to h. h. c. together we were small frogs in that great academic puddle the oldest in our land and in memory of the polliwog stage i dedicate to you this plunge _copyright, by paul elder and company san francisco_ contents page as to the place as to settling down as to dress as to dining as to lectures and studies as to college organizations and friends as to things in general illustrations opposite helpful don'ts, _frontispiece_ page the weather is generally the _only_ thing about a college town not yet educated don't overdo the _decoration_ of your room don't dress too sporty don't monopolize the _conversation_ at the table don't fail to keep in mind the steps of _descent_ don't answer back if the coach _speaks harshly_ to you don't pawn your watch during your first year as to the place [sidenote: the college town] don't imagine that you _own_ the _college town_ from the moment you strike it. remember, there are prior claims, and you're not the _first_ squatter. [sidenote: its weather] _don't_ expect the college town to furnish you with good weather; because it won't. the weather is generally the _only_ thing about a college town not yet educated. of course, if you happen to have come from lapland or patagonia, and do not know what good weather is, the weather here _may_ suit you. the oldest inhabitants in a college town live to be very old; this is to be accounted for by the fact that they are kept alive by their curiosity to see _what_ kind of weather is going to develop next. [sidenote: the college sights] _don't_ forget that sight-seeing relatives and others coming on a visit to the college, _must_ see the library, the gymnasium, the dining hall, and the athletic field. these, and the campus, are generally all the sights there are. it is well to get this list carefully in mind _early_, as it saves you from a panic at the last minute. you often think that you will explore the place and get something _new_ to show people; but this you never do. the above list is a fairly accurate one, and it suffices. those whom you are guiding about always pretend they are _dreadfully_ interested and excited about every thing in turn. on your first trip as official guide, you yourself see a great deal; on your fiftieth, you try _not_ to. [illustration: the weather is generally the _only_ thing about a college town not yet educated] as to settling down [sidenote: your arrival] don't think that your _mere arrival_ at college has made you able to _relieve atlas_ in holding up the world. the world's idea of you at this point is, that you're something like a gold-fish just let loose in a glass globe. it _will begin to expect_ something of you when you're dumped into the big ocean. [sidenote: your residence] _don't_, if you can possibly side-step it, begin to live in a place which you do not like. the _blue-willies_ may lurk in the corners. many a _freshman_ changes his residence about the _mid-year_, because he has not made a careful selection at first. the moving often entails cracked wash-bowls, broken pictures and casts, stifled oaths, and a sense of _great unrest_ not appropriate to the season. [sidenote: your landlady] _don't_ treat your _landlady_ shabbily if you happen to live in a private house. some landladies are the best souls in the world. all of them are proud and _descended from the best early families_ (you have only to take _their_ word for this). though they are often inquisitive, their inquisitiveness often comes from their genuine interest in you. sometimes, _the more they know_ of your family history, _the less they will charge_ you for oil and gas, at the end of the month. [sidenote: her rights] _don't_ begin _too_ early in the term to make your landlady's house a _noisy abode_. she may get impatient and do something hasty, such as even demanding your key, payment and evacuation. in _such_ an event you see the full meaning of her appellation. whereas, before you may have thought that the word "land" in her title meant to _catch_, as to _land a fish_, you now see that it is primarily derived from her ability _to come down hard_ on a special occasion. [sidenote: the dusting lady] _don't_ be discouraged if you can't find anything in the right place after the _dusting lady_ has put things in order. it's a _way they have_. [sidenote: your room] _don't_ neglect taste in your room. how do you know but that somebody may judge you by the way you decorate your study? presumably, you were not _raised in a barn_, and there can be no _harm_ in letting the appearance of your room bear out this as fact. [sidenote: fitting it up] _don't_ try to make a _royal residence_ of your room. your taste may alter. a college man's taste often undergoes rapid and violent revolution _for the better_, within the first year. [sidenote: a word about rugs] _don't_ think that you must have turkish rugs. _generally_, a _freshman_ cannot tell the real article when he sees it. the man at the sale may try to make you believe they'll never wear out. never mind. you have only to _get_ them to know what he means. just get some old, reliable patterns. there is a secret connected with this. the older and dirtier they get, the more _oriental_ they look. you've no idea how much sweeping this saves. [sidenote: about bric-a-brac] _don't_ go in for a lot of fine china, the first term. how can _you_ tell but that your neighbors or visitors may not care as much for that sort of thing as you? remember, that in a room where costly china lies about in profusion, a "rough-house" may be a more expensive variety of entertainment than grand opera _with seats for the family_. [sidenote: about decorations] _don't_ get angry if a senior comes into your room and looks about and smiles. probably, he's only remembering that _he_ once decorated his room the way you now do yours. just _keep your eyes open_ when you go into older fellows' rooms. you'll soon learn that two crossed college flags, a vile plaster copy of the venus de milo, and a copy of the barye lion as _sole_ decorations may be lived down,--or later _pulled down_. if you wish to be _exceptionally_ original, don't go in for either the flags or the casts. yet, in following years, these things may become good old friends to remind you that _you_ were _once_ a freshman. [sidenote: about furniture] _don't_ overdo with respect to _furniture_, even if you can afford it; it _may_ make some of your visitors uncomfortable. if you _can't_ afford it, you'll be made uncomfortable yourself. [sidenote: the college color] _don't_ mistake the _color_ of your college. a good many freshmen do this;--it is especially pathetic, by the way, to see a freshman waving a flag which is _off-color_ at a big game. sometimes the mistake is attributed to color-blindness. this is a charitable interpretation. [sidenote: about that study-desk] _don't_ buy a roll-top desk or an iron safe during your first year. you know, you may not care to occupy one room _all through college_. we heard of one house having to be torn down, that a freshman might move out with his roll-top desk. not only this, but when he failed to find another place, a house had to be built up around his cumbersome furniture. it was a case of this or his _rooming in the desk_. [illustration: dont overdo the _decoration_ of your room] [sidenote: getting on] _don't_ think that you have fairly _got on_ to things while the tray of your trunk is still _unpacked_. [sidenote: taking a hazing] _don't_ look too sober if hazing happens to be in vogue, and the sophomores order you about. remember that you can make the affair either a _funeral_ or a _farce_; and it's pleasanter to be the leading man in a farce than to be the principal at a funeral. the best way to get along with sophomores is to take them good-naturedly. don't be nauseatingly saccharine, for that's _just_ about as bad as getting mad about it. just fool them into thinking you're _enjoying_ yourself, and they'll stop. [sidenote: a trick about receiving visitors] _don't_ neglect to _receive_ your _visitors_ as if you were glad to see them. this is not encouraging hypocrisy, inasmuch as the recommendation _need not include_ the laundryman or the tailor's collector. you couldn't fool _them_, anyway. it is not polite, when visitors come, always to be found with a green shade over your eyes. when a visitor calls, look as if you had just been waiting for some one to talk to. if you improve your time _between_ visitors, they ought not to cause you to waste any valuable time. [sidenote: musical temperance] _don't_ play the piano at all hours. have a regular time for practice; then your neighbors may _protect_ themselves. if you play the violin or the trumpet, _don't overdo it_; you are tempting fate. [sidenote: the proctor] _don't_ incur the anger of your proctor by noisy conduct or disrespect. proctors--especially young ones--are apt to feel their oats and to report you on slight provocation. but a friendly proctor is a friend worth having. as to dress [sidenote: varsity and prep-school fashions] don't wear your prep-school hat-band, or flash your high-school fraternity pin upon your almost manly chest. these are stock idiosyncrasies of the _freshman_. just remember that _school_ fashions do _not_ prevail at _college_. [sidenote: the "sporty" dresser] _don't_ dress too "sporty," during the first term. the effects you try to imitate at _this_ period of the game are apt to be only the superficial and amusing ones. [sidenote: a short word about long hair] _don't_ wear _long_ hair. hair, if left to grow as it listeth, may attain to a surprising length within a single season. the freshman year is _not_ the time to test the accuracy of this statement. wait till you are a sophomore; then you won't care to. remember that long hair is the _poet's_ privilege (though _not_ always _proof_ of a poet). to wear long hair, you had better take out a poet's license. in this respect a _dog-license_ will do if you fail to qualify as poet. [sidenote: whiskers and such] _don't_ feel it _incumbent_ upon you to wear a _beard_ or a _moustache_, if you happen to have raised one on the farm or in england, during the summer. whiskers are the _plus sign_ of _masculinity_. upper-classmen do not appreciate them in freshmen. [sidenote: about those sparklers] _don't_ wear too much _jewelry_; as an _over-amount_ of it suggests trips to places where they _loan money_. [sidenote: horsy ornaments] _don't_ affect stick-pins bearing large horses' heads or horseshoes, thinking these will demonstrate that you _keep a gig_. the horsy ornament connotes the coachman's white tie and the odor of the _stable_. [illustration: dont dress too sporty] [sidenote: that cane] _don't_ carry a _cane_ in your freshman year; something is _very_ likely to happen to it. [sidenote: that tall hat] _don't_ be found displaying a _tall hat_. a tall hat is a mighty nice thing for sister's wedding _at home_; but better _leave_ it there. its dignity is liable to fade, like the glory that was greece and the grandeur that was rome. it was only because those nations got _too chesty_, you remember, that the vandals of old worried them. [sidenote: crazy men--crazy clothes] _don't_ think that crazy or odd clothes are necessarily "college" clothes. lots of college men _do_ wear crazy clothes; but it isn't so much because they're college men, as because they're _crazy_. [sidenote: sane dress] _don't_ forget to dress neatly and up to your means. you owe it to yourself to dress as _well_ as you can. i don't mean that owing this to _yourself_ should necessitate your continually owing something to your _tailor_. you do not _owe_ it to yourself to _owe anybody_. as to dining [sidenote: your dining place] don't begin by resorting habitually to the quick lunch. nobody ever made _friends_ at a quick lunch, except with the waitresses. select a good place where there are lots of fellows whom you will see continually. you ought to pick out some good friends from among them. [sidenote: your table] _don't_ attempt, in a large dining hall, to get a place at a society, club, or athletic table for which you have _not yet qualified_. you are liable to _queer yourself_ from the start. [sidenote: table talk] _don't_ try continually to air the sum of _knowledge_ which you are just assimilating. there are _few_ things more pathetic than the first-year chemist who keeps asking you at table to "pass the nacl," or the fledgling psychologist who would try to prove that bread-and-butter is matter for _the mind_ and not for _the stomach_. [sidenote: local egotism] _don't_ keep telling how they do things in that part of the country which _you_ come from. the assumption is, that since you came to college, you are willing to _learn something_ of how they do things here. [sidenote: listening to others] _don't monopolize the conversation_ at the table, especially if there are older men around. you'll get yourself snubbed if you talk _too_ much about _yourself_. fellows don't care much whether your grandfather kept a brake and ten horses, or drove a "shay" over the _plank-road_. be a good listener. then, too, older men _like_ to be listened to. the chances are you will learn a _sight_ more by hearing them than they will by hearing _you_. [illustration: dont monopolize the _conversation_ at the table] [sidenote: knocking the grub] _don't_ continually _find fault_ with the things you have to eat. act as if you were used _to eating away from home_. half the time the jokes you make at the expense of the food come merely from an uncontrollable desire to air your wit. "knocking the grub" doesn't require _half_ so much brains or individuality as _shutting up_ about it. as to lectures and studies [sidenote: attendance at lectures] don't forget to attend a _large per cent._ of your lectures. the information dispensed in lectures is _often_ to be found _invaluable_ in passing the examinations. [sidenote: choosing courses] _don't_ let yourself be mesmerized into taking a lot of things you feel a positive _disinclination_ for. many a freshman has spoiled his first year in this way; and, failing to pass, has left _college_ and become a street-car conductor or a clerk. [sidenote: "snap" courses] _don't_ mistake the willingness to accept a "snap" course for a _startling aptitude_ for a subject. [sidenote: elective system] _don't_ abuse the _elective system_ if you are privileged to be at a college where it is employed. it is a system which presupposes your own _interest_ in your _intellectual welfare_. it is too easy to fill up with a lot of unrelated subjects. you may say, "but i desire a broad education." very good. did you ever go to a circus? there the prettiest feats are performed upon the broad, spacious back of _one_ horse. the rider gets the broadest-backed critter he can find that will keep moving. those who ride two and three horses _take a risk_. in college you may find that when you try to do the _intellectual split_, you're liable to _fall down between_ your horses. [sidenote: about meeting professors] _don't_ neglect any honest opportunities you may have to make friends with an instructor or a professor. meeting teachers represents a privilege and _not always_ necessarily a pull. as for knowing professors intimately, few do, except other professors. as for their knowing _us_ intimately, it might seem as if this seldom happens, until it comes time to expel us. [sidenote: malingering] _don't_ try to fool the college doctor into believing that you can't go to lectures, or are going to die, because you've sprained your left thumb. generally, the college doctor is a shrewd man, or he would _not_ be the college doctor. [sidenote: about required reading] _don't_ fail to make a list of the _required reading_ in any course. and do _some_ of it--say, a little more than will enable you merely to pass the exam. it is barely possible that the reading you have done in connection with your college courses will some day prove you an _educated man_. as for doing _all_ the reading that _all_ the professors require--well, a fellow _must_ sleep and eat. [sidenote: working for exams] _don't_ think that _exams_ can be passed without any preparation. it takes _some_. the _minimum_ has not yet been determined; nor has the _maximum_. the _middlemum_ has even been known to vary, according as the instructor imagines that the crowd _is_ or _is not_ taking the course as a snap. the _little birdies_ are _surely_ in league with the faculty. [sidenote: intellectual narcotics] _don't_ rely upon _special tutors_ to pass all your courses. it's lazy and not entirely self-respecting. when our friend gulliver went to laputa, he met certain teachers who gave their pupils small intellectual wafers. these they swallowed upon _empty stomachs_. as the wafers digested, the tincture mounted to the pupil's brain, bearing the proposition along with it. the same system of cramming exists today; only it _doesn't always work as advertised_. a fellow resorts to special tutors when he has lost confidence, and needs an _intellectual narcotic_. special tutors represent the drug-capsule of learning. _why_ be a _dope-fiend_? [sidenote: in the exams] _don't_ try in your _exams_ to make a hit by writing long papers. the _exam_ is _not_ an endurance contest. somehow, long papers don't take, unless there is _some sense_ in everything you have written. if you don't believe this, _try it and find out_. [sidenote: predigested information] _don't_ rely wholly upon _typewritten notes_ to get through your courses. many college professors show no quarter to those whom they ascertain to be addicted to this predigested form of information. often the professor's life-specialty is the tracing of literary works to their _sources_; so be careful. better take notes in lectures; if this serve no other purpose, 'twill keep you _awake_. [sidenote: putting off work] _don't_ put off that long piece of _written work_ till the night before it is due. a piece of work about which you have been warned months beforehand, can't be done between p.m. and a.m. here "_rush orders_," contrary to the rule, spoil. if you come up to the scratch as you should, in the matter of long pieces of written work, the instructor will almost forget how _dog-goned lazy_ you have been all along in the little things. [sidenote: idling] _don't idle_ away time to such an extent that you get a reputation as an idler, either among your friends, or with the members of the faculty. you'll find such a reputation hard to _live down_. notwithstanding the fact that everybody is _supposed_ to come by a love of learning in college, there are some things which the faculty will _not_ take for granted. with the faculty, the chronic idler will find that his name is _anathema_, or _dennis_ at least. [sidenote: the descent to avernus] _don't_ fail to keep in mind the flight of steps which represents the _descent_ from the plane of regular work. it goes something like this: _work_, _slack work_, _probation_, _special probation_, then, "i am sorry to inform you that the faculty has decided that you are no longer needed to ornament the college," etc. after which, it is the greased-slide, _down and out_, so to speak. in other words, you are about to feel the thrill of academic life along your keel for the last time. _facilis descensus averni_: avernus being the cold, cold world, and the bother of having to explain to one's relations and friends in the home town _how it all happened_. [illustration: dont fail to keep in mind the steps of _descent_] [sidenote: the college office] _don't_ show disrespect or contempt for the _college dean_, or for the retinue within his gates. once you "queer" yourself with the _college office_, you are on dangerous footing, and the _college degree_ you seek is no longer seen to be "constant as the _northern star_." keep the degree in mind; _hitch your wagon_ to it. but don't get _too_ ambitious in the way of degrees. we once heard of a fellow who was called up and given the _third degree_ by the faculty, without ever being graduated. as to college organizations and friends [sidenote: trying for things] don't hesitate to go out for _any teams_ or _papers_ or _musical clubs_ which you think you'd like to make. the mere _trying for things_ shows you're not a _dead one_. if you are good enough, you'll find these things mean more than you ever had thought they could; if you fail to make them, you'll never regret having tried. as you grow older, you will see that you _never_ could have done certain things you thought you could, and you'll have a first-rate opinion of your former self and your ambition. [sidenote: sorting out your interests] _don't_ be surprised or disappointed, if you find you have neither time nor inclination to keep up with everything you thought you would, when first coming to college. your interests naturally needed a _sorting out_. [sidenote: one way _not_ to make a team] _don't_ think that offering suggestions to an athletic _coach_ is the way to _make a team_. and don't answer back if the _coach_ speaks harshly to you; be thankful for _any_ of his attention, even if it be gruff. with some coaches, swearing is more than a liberal art; many think that the oftener they send their men to _hell_ during practice, the surer they are of sending them to _victory_ in the contest. [sidenote: about social clubs] _don't_, for heaven's sake, ask people how one ought to go about getting into _social clubs_. it isn't considered polite. just _why_, i can't tell you; but you'll _learn why_, some day, if you are the _right sort_. [sidenote: acquaintances and friends] _don't_ hesitate to accept all chances for _making friends_, especially among your class. don't think that you can always control the making of friends; you _can't_. friends are _heaven-sent_. hold the ones you make, and count yourself lucky if you make half a dozen _very_ good friends your first year. there is a difference between _acquaintances_ and _friends_, by the way, just as there is a difference between fellows to whom you'd casually offer a cigarette and those to whom you'd gladly offer your pocket-book. [sidenote: useless prejudice] _don't_ rely too much on _prejudice_ in deciding what certain fellows may or may not be good for. you _may or may not_ be right. _your_ standard may or may not be the only small stone on the seashore. [illustration: dont answer back if the coach _speaks harshly_ to you] [sidenote: about visiting] _don't_ invite everybody you meet to your room. it doesn't pay. but make a point of _accepting_ as many invitations as possible which come from men you like. visit any upper-classman who takes the trouble to offer you his hospitality. it may help you to _get on_, later. [sidenote: that hand-shake] _don't_ shake hands like a clam. the _flipper-shake_ is not popular, and may make you distrusted. you'll need a good _hand-shake_ all through college. [sidenote: the woman question: the questionable] _don't_ be one of those who continually pick up anything on the street that wears a bonnet and high heels. there are lots of girls who are willing, at any time, to be seen with a college man. _the varieties differ_. some are genuinely pretty; others wear the deliberate as distinguished from the natural complexion, being perhaps not so well preserved as carefully preserved. maybe you think it is great fun to take a partner into the small hotel dining-room with an "i-do-this-every-evening" kind of air. but you _may_ find out, after smoking your brandy and drinking your cigarettes, that it _isn't_ pleasant to be played for a "_good thing_." [sidenote: the unquestionable] _don't_, however, neglect any opportunity to meet ladies of your own station. you are _sure_ to require their society from time to time. the monastic life is not profitable for a man at college. the _purr of pretty women_ and the occasional exchange of _amicable nothings_ will preserve your social soul and keep the little _blood-pumping organ_ in good condition. [sidenote: the art of shutting up] _don't_ hesitate to hear other people's opinions. the world did not begin, nor will it end, with _you_. [sidenote: where success fails] _don't strut_ or _look patronizing_, if you happen to have success; it makes people feel sorry for you. [sidenote: the little things] _don't_ forget the _little_ things; fellows notice them. some will even judge you by the way you give or receive a match or cigarette. [sidenote: summing up the club problem] _don't_ imagine that your entire success in college will be finally measured by the number of clubs you make during your first year. always remember, that it is the standing of the ones you identify yourself with which counts. don't join _any_ final club or society until you _feel pretty sure_ you could not do _better_. as to things in general [sidenote: saving and wasting] don't expect to lay up a bank account by what you save from living inside your allowance. there are lots of unexpected things coming up which cost money. only be careful and choose the things that seem necessary. you can't _save_ much money; but you don't have to _waste_ a cent to live and be a gentleman. [sidenote: writing home] _don't_ forget to _write home_ once every so often. mama and papa are always glad to see the college-town postmark; and, like as not, papa is paying your way through college. think how you'd feel, if he forgot, sometimes, to send that _check_! [sidenote: when father comes to town] _don't_ treat _father_ or _uncle john_ shabbily if one of them happens in town unexpectedly. maybe _you'll_ have a son or a nephew in the old place one day; and then _you'll_ like to take a run out, once in a while, and see how things are getting on. [sidenote: showing off at home] _don't_ swagger when you go _home_ for your first thanksgiving or christmas vacation. it doesn't make your friends envious of you. it's apt to make them _sore_. [sidenote: running bills] _don't_ think that because you can charge things at almost any store in the college town, it is your duty to have your name on the books of _every_ firm. you don't need to back _every_ enterprise; besides, most every firm has a habit of rendering monthly bills, and a few of these make even a _fair allowance_ look washed out and _faded_. [sidenote: that automobile] _don't_ think that it is your father's duty to present you with an _automobile_. in father's day, it was _possible_ for a boy to go through college without one of these things. remember that it cost a few pence to repair them and run them;--or rather run them and then repair them; and father's twenty years in business have taught him a _few_ things. many a father would as soon buy his son an auto, but is not willing to _endow_ one. [sidenote: about pawning your watch] _don't_ pawn your watch or sleeve-links during your first year. this privilege is limited to upper-classmen who do society. a pawn-ticket is a _very_ compromising thing if found by some of your close relatives. you don't know what it is? it is a thin slip of paper somewhat resembling a check; only it weighs _more heavily on the mind_. no matter _how_ funny a story you make at home of pawning your grandfather's watch, the heads of the family _never_ see the joke. when you rake in the price of exchange for your pawned watch, it seems just like _finding_ money, _but_ when you pay it back out of a slim allowance at the end of the month, it seems like _losing_ the same amount, _plus_. [illustration: dont pawn your watch during your first year] [sidenote: getting hooked on] _don't_ buy _cigars_ in _wholesale_ quantities from mysterious-looking foreigners, who say they have just done a neat little job of smuggling from havana, and are willing to let you in on a _good_ thing. they may even flatter you by telling you that _you_ look trustworthy. they really mean that you look easy. it's _your_ move. [sidenote: beggars] _don't_ give money to able-bodied beggars. some may even speak good french or german. if you happen to be taking french or german, you will imagine that _you_ are the _only_ one in the world who can help them. but don't yield. as for crippled or blind and deaf beggars, help them now and then. you don't have to listen to their reminiscences of _life in a saw-mill_ to do this, unless you care for that sort of thing. [sidenote: questions of conscience--your own business] _don't_ kill your _conscience_ in regard to matters which you have been brought up to see in certain definite lights. if you think playing cards for money and the drinking of beer wrong, then _don't_ play and _don't_ indulge. you'll never be thought less of in college for hanging on to principle. just be sure that your principles are _worth_ sticking up for, and then _stick_. a wise old englishman puts it this way: "obey your conscience; but just be _sure_ that your conscience is not that of an _ass_." [illustration: the pasteboards] _don't_ get into the _little game_ too often. under certain conditions it's as easy as rolling off the decalogue. sometimes you get in because you're afraid others will think you are afraid to play. this is really not courage. a word more: when you're in, often the time when you _think_ you can't afford to stop is just the time when you _can_ best afford it. take this advice; it is better than that of _r. e. morse_. [sidenote: spending money] _don't_ keep _spending money_ for a lot of things that you would hardly care to itemize in the account you send to father. remember how he said, "i'll keep you decently, only i don't want college to make only a sport of my boy." sometimes, when you are pressed, you think of asking father to lend you money to be _paid back_ with interest, when you get _older_. don't be surprised if he refuses and asks, "_where's_ your collateral?" remember that the business world, hunting about for something to which to attach its respect and admiration, does _not_ single out the _undergraduate_ in _college_. [sidenote: earning money] _don't_ be ashamed of chances to _earn money_ in college, if you need it. more fellows earn their way through college than you have any idea of. college men have _lots_ of respect for a fellow who isn't ashamed to _work_. [sidenote: the dead game act] _don't_ be a sport or a snob. either is fatal. the _dead game act_ plays itself out sooner than those who work it suppose, and serves oftener to _point a weakness_ than _adorn a virtue_. [sidenote: imitating] _don't imitate_ the manner of some one else. when you try to be _like some one else_, you only succeed in being _unlike yourself_. people don't expect or want you to be like them. [sidenote: the fancy income pose] _don't_ pretend that you have a _fancy income_, if you haven't. it's a cheap, expensive pose. lots of fellows get money regularly from home. all they have to do, it would seem, is to rip open letters and sign their names on the back of what falls out. if you _aren't_ in this class, don't _pretend_ you are. it isn't _how much_ money you've got, but _how you make what you've got do_, that shows you up a good one. [sidenote: that bank account] _don't_ fail to keep one eye on that _bank account_. it _slowly_ and _surely_ dwindles. it needs watching especially, about the time the elms put on their new leaves, and the undergraduates their new flannel trousers. to end the year with an over-drawn bank account is risky. no fellow can afford to have his _credit_ go _below_ par. [sidenote: exercise] _don't_ neglect the _health_ habit. substitute the tennis racquet for the cigarette, one of these days, and note the _difference_. it may make you feel like a _king_ in the _pink_ of condition; after which you'll probably try it again, which won't hurt you a bit. [sidenote: jokes] _don't_ repeat _all_ the _jokes_ that come into your head. avoid especially jokes that may be old. many a fellow's popularity may hinge on the fact that he'll _listen_ to a funny story without insisting on telling another that isn't _quite_ so funny. [sidenote: showing off] _don't_, if you are from a large well-to-do preparatory school, talk too much about it, or think that the college must be run on the _same plan_ as your school. your views may not be _appreciated_. [sidenote: swaggering] _don't_ aspire to be taken for an upper-classman by cultivating a walk or a _swagger_ or an _air_. you can work this _so_ hard, that finally you are the only one deceived. [sidenote: rowdyism] _don't_ be rowdyish, or _get the reputation_ of being a drunken fellow. the _real_ fun you get out of _college_ need not be a continual round of batting. [sidenote: about being snubbed] _don't_ think it is always entirely the _other_ man's fault if he fails to speak to you. if you have not the ability to make an impression worth another's remembering, _look to yourself_. [sidenote: college habits] _don't_ be a _fool_. this is the sum and the substance of all that herein precedes. a fellow shows himself a fool or not a fool by his _habits_. _college habits_ are funny things. the sooner you form your college habits the _better_,--or _worse_. to put off the sensible resolve till the time of your last exam may be as useless as the call of the _doctor_ after the _minister_ has left. [sidenote: about being the ass] _don't_ imagine for a moment that coming to _college_ enables you to act in a superior way to others who have not enjoyed the same privilege. a _college_ career is a grand, good thing; but its _object_ is to enable you, if possible, better to _understand_ the world, not to _lift_ you at all above it. the world hates a fool; but a _college-bred fool_, it thoroughly despises. don't let your ears grow long, and don't bray. [sidenote: about being a gentleman] _don't_ imagine that the _college catalogue_, or even _this book_, can tell you _all_ the things you need to know concerning how to make a man of yourself. after all, its really _up to you_. look about, and be a gentleman. you say, "but these few remarks hardly _begin_ to solve the problem." and echo answers, "_verbum sap_." here ends the college freshman's don't book by g. f. e. (a. b.) a sympathizer. decorations and initials by raymond carter illustrations by charles frank ingerson published by paul elder & company and printed for them by the tomoye press under the direction of j. h. nash in the city of san francisco during the month of may and year nineteen hundred & ten * * * * * transcriber's notes: all of the illustration captions omit the apostrophe in the word "don't." this was retained. all other punctuation was corrected if wrong. page , "you" changed to "your" (your trunk is still) page , repeated word "to" deleted from text. original read (liable to _to fall down..._) page , "varities" changed to "varieties" (the varieties differ) transcriber's note: text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. * * * * * [illustration: feeding her bird mabel c----, aged , algona, washington] school credit for home work by l. r. alderman city superintendent of schools portland, oregon formerly superintendent of public instruction, state of oregon houghton mifflin company boston new york chicago the riverside press cambridge copyright, , by l. r. alderman all rights reserved the riverside press cambridge. massachusetts u.s.a to the memory of my father and mother who made their boys happy partners in the work of the home and farm preface it has been a surprise and a delight to me, as this book has been in progress, to learn of the many different ways that people have worked out these home credit plans. it has been as if i could see into many happy schoolrooms. letters from mothers and fathers boasting of the accomplishments of their children, have brought to me a little glow from the hearthsides of many homes. a father brought his boy--or rather the boy brought his father--up to see me and talk over what the boy was doing at home. the father boasted of the boy's fine garden, his big pumpkins, his watermelons that would attract the neighbors. johnny almost burst the top button off his vest with pride as his father praised him and patted him on the head. after this happy meeting, the father and the son got on the high wagon seat and rode home; and as i saw them going down the street, i could imagine what they talked about. such glimpses help to make a school man's life worth while; and i have had many of them as i have been writing this book. for the fact that this book exists at all, i am indebted to my wife, who has helped me with every part of it, and to mr. and mrs. c. c. thomason, of olympia, washington, who believed in the book from the first. mrs. thomason has also done much work on the book; she has gathered all the illustrative material, visiting many schools and writing many letters. she and my wife have done most of the organizing of material, and have gone over the manuscript together. to miss fanny louise barber, of the washington high school, portland, i am grateful for her careful reading and revision of several chapters. i owe thanks to mrs. sarah j. hoagland, of belt, montana, for the true and vivid stories she has sent me; and i am thankful to all the home credit teachers, with whom we have been corresponding, for their painstaking answers to our letters, as well as for the valuable plans that they have originated. l. r. alderman. portland, oregon, _november , _. contents part one i. introduction ii. mary iii. the spring valley school iv. what will become of the algebra? v. honoring labor vi. habit-building vii. that other teacher and that teacher's laboratory viii. stella and sadie ix. a story and letters from teachers part two i. illustrative home credit plans ii. home credit in high schools appendix index illustrations feeding her bird _frontispiece_ spring valley school picnic luncheon, spring valley joe in the garage work credited at school earning home credits o. h. benson potato club high school boys in railroad shops school credit for home work part one i introduction the child is a born worker; activity is the law of his nature. francis w. parker. this book is simply the narrative of the working-out of an idea. the idea first came to me from memories of my own home, where tasks were assigned to us children and were made to seem important. with my father, the work was always carried on in the spirit of a game, and the game could be made as interesting as any other game; in the meantime something was being done that was worth while. among many other memories there comes one of our laying a rail fence by moonlight, after a freshet had taken the other fence away; when the game was to get the line completed before the moon went down. i can still see father laying rail on rail, and enjoy his glowing enthusiasm at our accomplishment. the fence still stands. besides seeking to make the work interesting in itself, father had a device to put a value on time for his boys by giving us free time after the tasks were completed to do as we saw fit. the desire, after i became a teacher, to put myself in the enviable position of my father as an inspiring influence with children, was the motive that took my thoughts out of the schoolroom into the homes of my pupils. should not the school be simply a group of people come together for improvement, with the teacher as their best friend, ready to discuss and promote everything that seems worth while? we found it easy to talk at school about the things the children were concerned with out of school. one spring my pupils carried home, from our little boxes at school, cabbage plants and tomato plants to become members of their families for the summer. later we had a county school fair for the exhibition of the children's clear jelly and fine bread and vegetables and sewing and carpentry. the schools were trying to recognize "the whole child." this book is written in the hope that parents, teachers, and children may be helped to work together more joyously and harmoniously on the real problems of life. when i was teaching in the university of oregon in the spring of , i wrote and had published in the oregon papers the following article:-- we all believe that civilization is founded upon the home. the school should be a real helper to the home. how can the school help the home? how can it help the home establish habits in the children of systematic performance of home duties so that they will be efficient and joyful home helpers? one way is for the school to take into account home industrial work and honor it. it is my conviction, based upon careful and continuous observation, that the school can greatly increase the interest the child will take in home industrial work by making it a subject of consideration at school. a teacher talked of sewing, and the girls sewed. she talked of ironing, and they wanted to learn to iron neatly. she talked of working with tools, and both girls and boys made bird houses, kites, and other things of interest. recently a school garden was planned in a city and one of the boys was employed to plow the land. seventy-five children were watching for him to come with the team. at last he came driving around the corner. _he_ could manage a _team_. he drove into the lot, and a hundred and fifty eyes looked with admiration at the boy who could unhitch from the sled and hitch to the plow; and then as he, "man-fashion,"--lines over one shoulder and under one arm,--drove the big team around the field, all could feel the children's admiration for the boy who could do something worth while. and i have seen a girl who could make good bread or set a table nicely get the real admiration of her schoolmates. the school can help make better home-builders. it can help by industrial work done in the school, but as that is already receiving consideration by the press and in a few schools, i shall not in this short article treat of it. the plan i have in mind will cost no money, will take but little school time, and can be put into operation in every part of the state at once. it will create a demand for expert instruction later on. it is to give school credit for industrial work done at home. the mother and father are to be recognized as teachers, and the school teacher put into the position of one who cares about the habits and tastes of the whole child. then the teacher and the parents will have much in common. every home has the equipment for industrial work and has some one who uses it with more or less skill. the school has made so many demands on the home that the parents have in some cases felt that all the time of the child must be given to the school. but an important thing that the child needs along with school work is established habits of home-making. what people do depends as much upon habit as upon knowledge. the criticism that is most often made upon industrial work at school is that it is so different from the work done in the home that it does not put the child into that sympathetic relation with the home, which after all is for him and the home the most important thing in the world. juvenile institutions find that they must be careful not to institutionalize the child to such an extent that he may not be contented in a real home. in my opinion it will be a great thing for the child to want to help his parents do the task that needs to be done and to want to do it in the best possible way. the reason why so many country boys are now leading men of affairs is because early in life they had home responsibilities thrust upon them. i am sure that the motto "everybody helps" is a good one. but one says: "how can it be brought about? how can the school give credit for industrial work done at home?" it may be done by sending home printed slips asking the parents to take account of the work that the child does at home under their instruction, and explaining that credit will be given for this work on the school record. these slips must be used according to the age of the child, so that he will not be asked to do too much, for it must be clearly recognized that children must have time for real play. the required tasks must not be too arduous, yet they must be real tasks. they must not be tasks that will put extra work on parents except in the matter of instruction and observation. they may well call for the care of animals, and should include garden work for both boys and girls. credit in school for home industrial work (with the parents' consent) should count as much as any one study in school. to add interest to the work, exhibitions should be given at stated times so that all may learn from each other and the best be the model for all. the school fairs in yamhill, polk, benton, lane, wasco, and crook counties, together with the school and home industrial work done at eugene, have convinced me most thoroughly that these plans are practicable, and that school work and home work, school play and home play, and love for parents and respect for teachers and fellow pupils can best be fostered by a more complete coöperation between school and home, so that the whole child is taken into account at all times. after the home-credit schools of mr. o'reilly and mr. conklin were well under way, i received many inquiries about the home credit idea. as i was then state superintendent, i had a pamphlet printed by the state office, describing the workings of the plan, and had it distributed to oregon teachers. fifteen thousand copies were also printed for mr. claxton, commissioner of education, in the summer of , and distributed by the national bureau to superintendents and teachers throughout the united states. since this pamphlet has been out of print there have been many inquiries sent me about home credit, and i hope that this book may answer some of them. ii mary the brain and the hand, too long divorced, and each mean and weak without the other; use and beauty, each alone vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to a higher level.--g. stanley hall. the idea of giving school credit for home work first occurred to me when i was a high-school principal in mcminnville, oregon, in . often, in the few years that i had been teaching, i had felt keenly a lack of understanding between school and home. as i was thinking over this problem, and wondering what could be done, i chanced to meet on the street the mother of one of my rosiest-cheeked, strongest-looking high-school girls. i saw that the little mother looked forlorn and tired. there was a nervous twitch of the hand that adjusted the robes about the crippled child she was wheeling in a baby buggy. i had frequently noticed that mary, the daughter, who was one of the very poorest students in her class, was on the streets the greater part of the time after school hours. i thought, "what value can there be in my teaching that girl quadratic equations and the nebular hypothesis, when what she most needs to learn is the art of helping her mother?" in the algebra recitation next day i asked, "how many helped with the work before coming to school?" hands were raised, but not mary's. "how many got breakfast?" hands again, not mary's. "i made some bread a few days ago, bread that kept, and kept, and kept on keeping. how many of you know how to make bread?" some hands, not mary's. i then announced that the lesson for the following day would consist as usual of ten problems in advance, but that five would be in the book, and five out of the book. the five out of the book for the girls would consist of helping with supper, helping with the kitchen work after supper, preparing breakfast, helping with the dishes and kitchen work after breakfast, and putting a bedroom in order. surprise and merriment gave place to enthusiasm when the boys and girls saw that i was in downright earnest. when i asked for a report on the algebra lesson next day all hands went up for all the problems both in algebra and in home-helping. as i looked my approval, all hands fell again, that is, all hands but mary's. "what is it, mary?" i asked. "i worked five in advance," she replied with sparkling eyes: "i worked all you gave us, and five ahead in the book!" since that day i have been a firm believer in giving children credit at school for work done at home. we did not work home problems every day that year, but at various times the children were assigned lessons like the one mentioned, and scarcely a day passed that we did not talk over home tasks, and listen to the boys and girls as they told what each had achieved. the idea that washing dishes and caring for chickens was of equal importance with algebra and general history, and that credit and honor would frequently be given for home work, proved a stimulus to all the children, and especially to mary. her interest in all her school duties was doubled, and it is needless to say that her mother's interest in the school was many times increased as her heavy household cares were in part assumed by her healthy daughter. a few weeks after the first home credit lesson mary brought her luncheon to school. at the noon hour she came to my desk, opened her basket, and displaying a nicely made sandwich said, "i made this bread." the bread looked good, and must have been all right, for she ate the sandwich, and it did not seem to hurt her. she came again wearing a pretty new shirt-waist, and told me she had made it herself, and that it had cost just eighty-five cents. after mary graduated from high school she went out into the country to teach, and boarded with her uncle's family. her uncle's wife was ill for a while, and mary showed that she knew how to cook a fine meal, and how to set a table so that the food looked good to eat. she made herself generally useful. her uncle came to my office one day and told me that mary was the finest girl he ever saw, and that every girl like that should go to college, and that he was going to see that she went to college if he had to sell the farm to send her. she went to college, but it didn't take the farm to send her. iii the spring valley school an excellent result of the absence of centralization in the united states.... the widest possible scope being allowed to individual and local preferences, ... one part of our vast country can profit by the experience of the other parts. john fiske. kindly convey my blessing to that genius of a teacher in spring valley, the same to stand good till judgment day. wm. hawley smith. mr. a. i. o'reilly, in the school at spring valley, oregon, was the first to give systematic, certified credit for home work. he originated the idea of having a prize contest for credits, and put care for health and cleanliness on the list of home duties. dr. winship classifies new educational suggestions as dreams, nightmares, and visions. the remarkable success of mr. o'reilly in his home credit school should place his ideas in the "vision" list. spring valley is a rich farming district in polk county, oregon, about nine miles from salem. mr. o'reilly took the school in the fall of . he rented a farmhouse about half a mile away, brought his wife and little boys out from dakota, where he had served as county superintendent, and went to work building up his school. he gained great influence with the boys and girls, and was much respected and thoroughly liked by everybody. he noticed that on each big, well-developed farm in the neighborhood there was a great deal of work for the boys and girls to do, but that they did not as a rule do it with cheerfulness and interest. he wanted, if possible, to change their attitude of mind. so, with the hearty approval of his board of directors, he arranged to give school credit for home work. this was in the fall of . various tasks that the children ought to do he put into a list, and allowed a certain number of minutes credit for each one.[ ] the three children having earned the greatest number of credits at the close of the nine school months were to receive three dollars each, and the three next highest, two dollars. the money was to be allowed by the school board, and put into the savings bank to the credit of the prize-winners. [ ] the details of mr. o'reilly's plan are given in part two, pages - . every one of the thirty-three pupils in the school was enrolled in this new kind of contest. the registering of the credits each morning meant extra work for the teacher, but it brought extra results. the prospect of a bank account for the winners incited the children to learn for the first time something about banks and banking. there was a "we-are-doing-something" atmosphere throughout the school. [illustration: spring valley school, oregon, where home credits were given, - ] in answer to the query of some visitors if this giving of credit for home work did not interfere with school work, mr. o'reilly pointed to the record in the county spelling contest, in which his school had earned per cent that month. the county superintendent, mr. seymour, had announced that a banner would be given to his rural schools showing that they were standard schools as soon as they should meet certain requirements. these requirements were well-drained school grounds; school building properly lighted, heated, and ventilated; schoolhouse and grounds neat and attractive; sanitary outbuildings; walk made to building and outbuildings; individual drinking-cups; the purchase each year of one standard picture; thorough work on the part of teacher and pupils; the enrollment of every pupil in the spelling contest; and an average of per cent in attendance. spring valley was the first school in the county to receive the banner and become a standard school. the county superintendents of oregon were assembled at salem in january, , for the purpose of grading teachers' examination papers. they were much interested in what they heard of mr. o'reilly's work at spring valley and accepted with great pleasure the invitation of mr. seymour to visit the school. as that day in mr. o'reilly's school is significant, i wish to quote an article about it written by t. j. gary, superintendent of clackamas county. mr. gary's article was printed in one of the oregon city papers in january, . last saturday seventeen county school superintendents and the superintendent of public instruction drove through the wind and rain to spring valley, polk county, to attend a parent-teachers' meeting. why? because we had heard much of a new plan that was being tried out by the teacher, pupils, and parents of the school in that beautiful valley. did we go because it was a new plan? no. if we should try to investigate every new plan we would be going all the time. we went because we thought we saw a suggestion, at least, of a solution of two very important problems: "how to bring the school and the home into closer relation," and "how to make the boys and the girls in the country love their home." we arrived at the spring valley school at . a.m. and observed first a board walk from the road to the schoolhouse door and a well-drained school-yard free from all rubbish, such as sticks, pieces of paper, and so forth. upon entering the room we observed that the directors had made provision for the proper heating, lighting, and ventilation of the schoolroom. on the walls were three nicely framed pictures, the "sistine madonna," "the christ," and "the lions," all beautiful reproductions of celebrated works of art. the building was a modest one, much like many school buildings we find through the country, but there was about it that which said plainer than words can say it, "this is a well-ordered school." looking to the right, we saw on a partition wall, on the floor, and on the side wall, a variety of articles: aprons, dresses, doilies, handbags, handkerchiefs, kites, traps, bird houses, and various other things made by the boys and girls of the school. at the left in the other corner of the room were loaves of bread, pies, cakes, tarts, doughnuts, and other tempting things prepared by the girls and boys. the writer sampled various edibles, among them a cake baked by master z----, son of our ex-superintendent, j. c. z----. i can cheerfully say that it was the kind of cake that makes a man want more. these things were all of interest to us, but the one thing we were most curious to know about was the system the teacher had of giving credits for home work; not school work done at home, but all kinds of honest work a country girl or boy can find to do. pupils were given five minutes credit for milking a cow, five minutes for sleeping in fresh air, five minutes for taking a bath, and so on through the long list of common duties incident to home life in the country. the rule of the school is that any pupil who has earned six hundred minutes may have a holiday, at the discretion of the teacher. if the pupil asks for a holiday to use for some worthy cause the teacher grants it, providing it does not interfere too much with the pupil's school work. space will not permit my giving a more detailed account of the plan. i trust that enough has been given to show the principle involved. the teacher was subjected to volley after volley of questions from the superintendents, but was able to answer all of them with alacrity. the chairman called upon the parents to give their testimony as to the success of the movement. i cannot write here all that was said, but will give two statements as fair samples of all. one good motherly-looking country woman said: "before this plan was started i got up in the morning and prepared breakfast for the family, and after breakfast saw to the preparation of the children for school. now, when morning comes the girls insist upon my lying in bed so that they may get breakfast. after breakfast they wash the dishes, sweep the kitchen, and do many other things as well as make their own preparation for school. i think the plan is a success. my only fear is that it will make me lazy." one father said: "i have two boys--one in the high school and jack, here. it was as hard work to get the older boy out in the morning as it was to do the chores, and as jack was too young to be compelled to do the work, i let them both sleep while i did it. now, when the alarm sounds, i hear jack tumbling out of bed, and when i get up i find the fires burning and the stock at the barn cared for; so all i have to do is to look happy, eat my breakfast, and go about my business. yes, it is a great success in our home." at this point superintendent alderman said: "jack, stand, we want to see you," and jack, a bright, manly-appearing country boy of fourteen years stood blushing, while we looked our appreciation. one man told of the many things that his daughter had done, whereupon it was suggested that she might do so much that her health would be in danger. a pleasant smile flitted across the face of the father as he said, "daughter, stand and let these men see if they think you are injuring your health." a bright, buxom, rosy-cheeked girl--the very picture of health and happiness--arose while we laughed and cheered. to the question, "does this work interfere with the work of the school?" the teacher pointed to the record of the school in a spelling contest that is being conducted in this county, and read " per cent for this month; . per cent for last," and said, "no, i find that the children have taken more interest in their work and are making more progress than before." when alone, after time for reflection, i thought, "one swallow does not make a summer" and one school does not prove that this is a good plan. in spring valley the conditions are ideal,--a board of directors who do their duty, a citizenship that is far above the average, girls and boys from well-ordered homes of a prosperous people, a teacher who would succeed anywhere with half a chance, a wide-awake, sympathetic county school superintendent,--and yet i thought if this is good for the spring valley school, might it not be a good thing for all our schools? i have not reached a conclusion, but have had much food for thought, and am more than pleased with my experience and observation. what do you think about it, gentle reader? is it a passing fancy? a fad, if you please? or is it a means for training boys and girls to habits of industry and to a wholesome respect for honest toil? will it bring the home and the school into closer relation? and will it cause the country boys and girls to love their homes, to love the country with its singing birds, its babbling brooks, its broad fields and friendly hills? there was not a school in the state that responded better to any movement initiated by the state or county than the one in spring valley. every pupil was greatly interested in the boys' and girls' industrial and agricultural contest which oregon carried on that year for the first time. the children raised cabbage plants at school, protected from the cold by a tent that mr. o'reilly provided. they planned to sell them to the neighbors in order to get money for seeds, but were sadly disappointed, when they came to school one morning, to find that a cow had broken in during the night and destroyed almost every plant. the owner of the cow paid them the value of the plants, but they were never quite so happy over the fund as they would have been if the plants had been allowed to grow. six weeks before the end of the school year mr. o'reilly began making saturday trips to salem to arrange for the fair with which he intended to close the school. the merchants subscribed liberally for prizes both for the children's work and for the athletic events which mr. o'reilly had planned for the afternoon. a local piano house sent out a piano for the occasion, and an amusement company put up a merry-go-round, and stands for lemonade, ice-cream, and all the rest that goes with a first-class picnic. the picnic was held in the grove a short distance from the schoolhouse. mr. o'reilly and the neighbors had made a platform for which the children's work formed the background,--dresses, bird houses, fancy work, cakes, bread, and other articles,--and had made seats of rough lumber for the crowd. and a crowd it was, for the whole county was interested in the spring valley school. this was one of the first local fairs in connection with the county school fairs which were held throughout the state, and the awards were also to be made to the children who had earned the most credits in the home credit contest. [illustration: picnic luncheon cooked and served by spring valley children] we drove out from salem in automobiles. on reaching the grove we found it filled with teams tied everywhere, and many automobiles standing about. promptly at ten o'clock the school children marched down from the schoolhouse in an industrial parade, carrying things that they had made or raised in the garden. a pretty sight they were, as they took their places on the reserved benches in front, all in their best clothes, most of the girls in white dresses of their own making. the governor of oregon was there, and made the first address. at the close of his talk, the spring valley children sang in voices as clear as the birds, "there is no land like oregon," and were most heartily cheered. after the remainder of the addresses and songs came the most breathless part of the day, the awarding of the school-credit prizes for the year's work. a member of the school board read the list of winners, and took occasion to express the appreciation that the district felt for mr. o'reilly's work. he assured the audience that the people of the district considered the plan one of the very finest that they had ever known, for it put the children in the right attitude toward their work, and gave the parents the feeling that they were assisting in the work of the school. never in the history of the community had there been such a year. the judging of the industrial work was then carried on, while the spring valley home-credit girls set the long tables for the luncheon, which they had prepared without assistance from their mothers. we all envied the three women up on the platform tasting the cakes, and were glad when the ribbons were pinned on, for we knew then that the dinner would begin. the blue ribbon for cake-making by children under thirteen was awarded to a boy, arthur z----. the governor and i placed this lad between us at the head of the table, and he gave us very generous portions of the prize cake. this was mr. o'reilly's last day with the spring valley school. the next year he was chosen one of the rural school supervisors in lane county, and he is still there making an excellent record. a recent letter from him briefly takes up the later history of his spring valley winners in the home credit contest. he says:-- evangeline j---- was one of the winners. she is doing finely in high school, and still winning prizes at fairs. she leads her class in domestic science in the eugene high school. she has eighty dollars in the bank, sixty-one dollars and fifty cents earned from prizes. you know the home credit started her bank account with three dollars. golda b---- is another. she is attending the high school at sheridan. her standings are fine. she very seldom has to take examinations. she has about seventy-five dollars in the bank. jack s---- has finished the eighth grade, and is going to attend high school in eugene this year. his bank account is thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. mabel s---- has finished the grades and will go to high school in hopewell this year. her bank account is thirty-eight dollars. she has a piano her father got her, and is doing well in music. verda r---- attends high school in eugene this year. the other winners are still little ones, and are attending school in spring valley. iv what will become of the algebra? present interest is the grand motive power.--rousseau. an objection to the introduction of new subjects is that children are already overworked in school. there is, however, a precaution against overwork; it is making school work interesting to the children. to introduce new and higher subjects into the school program is not necessarily to increase the strain upon the child. if this measure increases the interest and attractiveness of the work and the sense of achievement, it will diminish weariness and the risk of hurtful strain. charles w. eliot. when i was county superintendent in yamhill county i used to talk much of the home credit plan in local institutes. one day when i was explaining how the plan worked, and how i had given credit in algebra for home activities, a teacher arose in the audience and said he was willing to go almost any length with me, but he thought it was going too far to give credit in algebra for what was not algebra. "is it not dishonest?" he asked, "and will it not teach dishonesty? besides, if you give credit in this way for things not algebra, _what will become of the algebra_?" this is an unsettled problem: what _will_ become of the algebra? true, mary got more algebra! i put this unsettled question alongside of another. i was arguing for the consolidation of schools in a little district near a larger district, and had tried to show that consolidation would be much cheaper, and would bring greater advantages, when a man stood up and said that he agreed in general with the plan but that it would not work in this district, "for," said he, "this district has a cemetery deeded to it, and if the district should lose its identity, _what would become of the cemetery_?" as these questions are similar, i put the algebra into the cemetery. i believe in algebra, but in order to teach algebra i believe it is first necessary to see to it that the child is in a constructive frame of mind. he should be in harmony with his surroundings. when mary became interested in her home, she was in a mood to work problems in advance. when her home was neglected, her algebra problems were all in arrears. even though we omitted the consideration of the health, the morals, and the working ability of the pupils, the home credit system would be justified as a part of the school work because of its revitalizing effect on the regular school work. the teacher who succeeds in touching the hidden springs of youthful interest is doing more for humanity than the man who discovers the much-sought-for method of bringing static electricity out of space. a child, or a man either for that matter, is a dynamo of energy when interested. many people think that children in school are overworked; in my opinion they are more often underinterested. one little lad of about five, taking a sunday walk with grown people, told his father that he was very tired, that his legs fairly ached, and that he would have to be carried or else camp right there. a member of the party (i wish i could remember his name, for he was a good child psychologist) said to the boy, "why, sure, you don't have to walk. i'll get you a horse." he cut a stick horse and a switch. the boy mounted at a bound, whipped his steed up and down the road, beating up the dust in circles around the crowd. by the time he reached home he had ridden the stick horse twice as far as the others had walked, and had not remembered that he was tired. my first trial of home credits convinced me that children would do better school work because of the plan. i have letters from many teachers through the northwest bearing me out in my opinion. i quote: "it stimulates to better work in school." "the teachers notice an improvement in school work along all lines." "it has helped to make our school, in some respects at least, as good as any in the county, according to the county superintendent's own word. a member of the board says the children have never made such progress since the school was built, and all say these children have never made so much progress before." tardiness is reported to be much less in home credit schools. a prominent western dairyman remarked that arithmetic had always been a hopeless subject for him. he declared that arithmetically he was "born short." a listener inquired if he had any trouble in keeping accounts, in figuring out the profits on each dairy cow, or in doing other problems connected with his farm. he replied very quickly, "no, not at all. i don't have any trouble with anything except arithmetic." home credits take into account the out-of-school mathematical activities. so the boy who has measured a cord of wood, laid out a garden plot, figured out the costs, income, and profits of feeding a pig for a year, or solved any problem that comes up on the farm, will be considered to have done something in arithmetic. from auburn, washington, comes a story of the effect of giving school credits for garage and shop work. joe, a boy of seventeen, who had attended high school for a year and a half, had earned only three academic credits, and his other work was below passing. the superintendent, mr. todd, called a conference with joe's parents and, to use his own expression, went after joe "with hammer and tongs." after much discussion, the superintendent finally asked the father and mother what the boy seemed most interested in outside of school. exchanging a troubled glance with his wife, the father said that as soon as joe got out of school he rushed straight to meade's garage. so the superintendent went to the garage, and found that joe could be taken into mr. meade's employment for the afternoons. again he called joe to his office, and said to him, "now, see here. you are going on with your regular subjects here in school, and in addition you are going to do some work down in meade's garage. mr. meade is going to grade your work and send in his report to me. if you make good there it will help out your record here. you will get pay for your work, too. you have got it in you to make good, and i know you will. what do you think about it?" "i think it's bully!" exclaimed joe. [illustration: joe in the garage, auburn, washington] joe had failed in his geometry, but as soon as he took the position at the garage his work in geometry improved. it was about christmas that he began working, and at the time of the report several months later he was doing well in his mathematics. the credit he received from the garage counted toward his marks for high-school graduation. mr. meade, incidentally, was very much pleased with his part in the transaction, and sent in his reports with religious regularity. not only joe, but some half dozen other boys in mr. todd's school at auburn are now "farmed out" in this manner, and work downtown under regular contract. they are mostly boys who had lost interest in school, and were at the dropping-out stage. mr. todd's plan is similar to the one in use at fitchburg, massachusetts. herbert m----, of minnehaha, washington, is such a busy boy at home that he does not have time to look at a book after he leaves school. this year, , mr. w. e. dudley, the principal of the minnehaha school, began to give credit for home work and allowed the credits obtained to be applied where most needed. the first month of school this year herbert's arithmetic grade was below per cent; his last month's grade in the same subject, without adding any credits, was above per cent. at first herbert needed his extra credits applied to his mathematics to obtain a passing grade. but for some cause his work in arithmetic has improved wonderfully. if you care to get up at five o'clock and go through the day with herbert it may open your eyes as to what an industrious boy of fifteen does at home. he is always up early, for before the day's work begins he milks two cows, feeds three "skim-milk" calves and eight head of cattle, pumps water for them, and feeds nine pigs. he is then ready for a hearty breakfast. one morning in march, herbert and his father agreed that harrowing was more important than going to school. so he worked five hours, harrowing four and a half acres. herbert did not lose credit at school, for his teacher approved of his morning's work, as he knew how important it was. he was at school before the one o'clock bell rang, had a game of ball with the boys, and was ready for his lessons of the afternoon. at four o'clock he hurried home, and this is what he did before he went to bed. first, he herded six cows for over an hour, milked two cows, fed his skim-milk calves, got in the wood, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, cleaned two barns, fed the eight head of cattle, pumped water for them, fed the pigs, and turned the separator ten minutes. while herbert has had some trouble with his arithmetic he does fine work in composition. at the children's fair at spokane in october, , he won fifteen dollars in cash for the best essay on caring for a skim-milk calf, and a pair of scales as second prize for an essay on how to handle a farm separator. here are herbert's prizes for three years: in at the county fair at vancouver, washington, he got the second award, a diploma, on his farm exhibit; in as first prize on farm exhibit he won a trip to the fair at puyallup; in at the clarke county fair he received ten dollars' worth of garden seeds as second prize on farm exhibit, fifteen dollars in cash for judging dairy cattle, while together with his parents he won seventy-five dollars for the best adult farm exhibit; and at the children's state contest, , he received the first prize, fifteen dollars, for the skim-milk calf essay. a boy in one of the portland, oregon, schools had trouble with his spelling, getting a mark of only - / on a scale of . soon after home credits were put into use by his teacher he came to her and anxiously inquired if he could help out his spelling grade with a good home record. the teacher graciously assured him that he could. the boy brought in each week one of the very best home record slips, and in some mysterious manner his spelling improved as his hours of work increased. he does not need his home record to help out his spelling grade now, for last month he received more than a passing mark, - / in his weak subject. the knowledge that there was help at hand relieved his nervousness, and gave him confidence. v honoring labor she ... worketh willingly with her hands ... and eateth not the bread of idleness. give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates. proverbs xxxi, , , . we are still paying a heavy price for slave labor; for instance, the idea that it is undignified to cook has come down through the ages of slaveholding, and has got into some people's blood. the school by taking into account home tasks can make them seem worth while and thus dignify their doing. many persons do not work because their ideals are made at school, and their heroes are those who did not win honor at labor, or, at least, the labor of these heroes is not emphasized. in the case of mary, the work she did at home transformed her from a heedless girl into a sympathetic helper. she had the idea that too many young people have, that it is more honorable to study algebra than to wash dishes or to cook a meal. the minute that she saw that they were considered equal she no longer held back from the home work, and when in a constructive frame of mind she not only did the home work but did her algebra too. there is not a normal american boy who shrinks from a piece of work because he thinks it is hard. on the contrary, he likes the man's job, and seeks out the hard things and tackles them. he avoids the things he thinks are not worth while. so it becomes a matter of the child's point of view whether he likes his work or not. too often it is the case that the child never hears it suggested that there is any merit in home work within itself. he has the idea that he goes to school to get an education, and works at home because he has to. many parents frankly tell their children that they should study well at school so they can make a living "without working." when we give home work its proper recognition, and the child comes to understand that there are different degrees of efficiency and skill in doing it, the work will take on a new color. many are the reports that have come in from parents in home credit districts saying, "there is nothing left for us to do in the way of chores. the children used to seem indifferent about the work, and did as little as they could. now the boys get up before we do instead of waiting to be called, rush downstairs to make the fires, and go at the chores, while the girls go into the kitchen and start breakfast." while youth is the time for play, yet children like to work too. since we have had the school gardens in portland we often find the playgrounds vacant, and the gardens near by well filled with children at work. we often hear that children should not have responsibilities; yet we find that the successful men of to-day are the ones that bore burdens early. a number of successful business men in portland were recently talking together of their boyhood days, and each one said that he had had to assume a great deal of responsibility before he was twelve years old. the importance of "percentages," "credits," "grades," or "standings" in the minds of school children, especially in the upper grammar classrooms, is surprising to a stranger. even the drawing teacher is begged to give marks. "but there are the drawings, arranged in the order of their merit, on the screen. they can see which are the best!" no, they want a mark. "to raise our standings," they say. [illustration: work credited at school, weston, oregon] of course, we all feel that "marks" in school have but a temporary purpose; that they are to furnish a motive to serve until a better motive can be substituted. home work may be encouraged at first by the wish for "higher standings," or a prize, or a holiday; but many other influences are likely to come in to keep it up. this is not the place to discuss the teaching without marks that is practiced in a few modern schools. in most schools the system of giving percentages is firmly established. the honoring of achievement in the schools, by marks or otherwise, has always been a great power in helping the school studies move along. but only part of the available energy has been used. there are vast reservoirs of power which may be put at the service of education and which as yet have scarcely been tapped. i hope the giving of marks will never be the main consideration with those who follow the home credit idea, but rather the giving of honor. too long have pupils' out-of-school industries been ignored at school as though they were something to be ashamed of. whether we give formal credit or not, let us give honor at school for home work. vi habit-building habit second nature? habit is ten times nature. the duke of wellington. habits plus ideals make character. the establishing of right habits in youth can best be done by coöperation of parents and teachers. so far as we take habit-building as our aim, education becomes definite and concrete. at the close of his famous chapter on "habit," william james says:-- could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habit, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.... let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. if he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. he can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.... young people should know this truth in advance. the ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together. one habit that works for success is industry. how easy it is for a bright boy or girl to get through school without acquiring anything like a habit of being industrious, even in learning book lessons! if he is quick-minded, as he has only to keep up with the average child, he needs little or no work to give him a good standing in his class. the alert child often gains all required information by merely listening to the other pupils. thus we often find failures among those bright pupils whom we expected to find successful, because they did not learn to dig and could do only what came easily. most occupations demand more than an acquiring attitude of mind. they demand vigorous exertion, and the seeing to it that the thing is done. but how is there to be any assurance that the child is forming habits of industry if there is not coöperation? the child tells the parent that he has to prepare his lessons and so he gets out of work at home; he makes the plea that he is tired out by home tasks so that he may not be given hard work at school. so he misses the work habit entirely. politeness--a show of consideration for the rights and feelings of others--is partly a habit. careful watching by parent and teacher is needed to establish this consideration as a permanent attitude of mind. it is with much pleasure that i note that many of the home credit cards bear the items, "cheerfulness," "kindness," "politeness," "keeping temper," "doing before told," "care of language," "courtesy to parents," and the like. and it is with very great pleasure that i receive letters from parents and teachers saying that the attitude of the children in these things is becoming a habit. [illustration: algona, washington, girl, aged , earning home credits elizabeth g---- and her mother have a small blackboard in the kitchen and here they keep a record of all the work elizabeth does] neatness and personal care are habits that mean much to any one. some grown people cannot help being neat. others apparently cannot be neat no matter how much they try. something is always wrong. it is a habit formed when young, perhaps before the age of twenty. in mr. o'reilly's list he included sleeping with window boards in, bathing, caring for the nails, brushing the hair, cleaning the teeth, and going to bed by nine o'clock. personal care has been given a place on the portland home credit record[ ] which is now used in some of the schools. algona, a home credit school about twenty miles from seattle, uses the portland personal care section, including bathing, brushing teeth, sleeping with open windows, going to bed before nine o'clock, and attending church or sunday school. in looking over the first home credit slips that came in, the algona principal found that nettie, a girl of thirteen, had earned just per cent out of the per cent given for a perfect record in the personal division. she had earned more than the required two hundred and ten minutes for the week in the regular work department at a hard round of preparing meals, washing dishes, sweeping, feeding the poultry, scrubbing, and so forth. but nettie had slept with her window closed, had not brushed her teeth, had not taken a bath, nor had she been in bed at the required hour. nettie was obviously unhappy over the grade her card received in comparison with the grades of her schoolmates. before the next report day she had in some way secured a toothbrush, that effective means of promoting civilization, and had made sufficient improvement in her personal care to secure per cent. her grade for the third week was per cent, and for the fourth, per cent. her fourth week's report showed a hot bath, toothbrushing twice a day, window open every night, and that she was in bed before nine every night but two. what her reform will mean to the entire family it is interesting to conjecture. [ ] for the portland home credit record card, see p. _ff._ "be careful about that voice, ella," directed a teacher. ella arose at her place, a thin, stooping girl of about thirteen. she read her passage of the lesson in a voice scarcely audible to the visitor across the room. a few minutes later the visitor was looking over some home credit report slips. "here is a girl who did not sleep with her windows open," she said. the teacher took the blank, studied it a minute, then replied, "this is the first time that child has brought in a home credit slip. do you recall my reminding a little girl about her voice? that is the girl, and this card may explain her voice quality." all the pupils except two in a little washington town learned to sleep with their windows open. upon inquiry it was found that one girl could not open her window, as it was made for admitting light only, being built solidly into the wall. in the case of the other child, the parents absolutely refused to endanger their daughter's health by letting her breathe night air, no matter how many faddists insisted that it was necessary! some members of a church were discussing the problem of the spirit of incipient immorality that they felt was prevalent among children in the neighborhood. a home credit teacher showed the speakers a number of the first report cards she had received, which disclosed the fact that very few of the pupils under her care were ever in bed before nine o'clock. a few months later she took occasion to display again her pupils' home credit cards and with pride pointed out that almost every child was going to bed early, before nine o'clock. "it had grown to be a habit with the children to be up late," she said. "the immorality talked of was not yet in actual existence among the children, but through their outside evening associates was gradually working itself in. the children had only to be reminded in a substantial way that it was not only desirable for them physically to retire early, but that they were to receive recognition in their school standing for so doing, and they at once happily complied." vii that other teacher and that teacher's laboratory we are just beginning to discover that the rural school has a fine laboratory for practical educational purposes, in the neighborhood environment of the school. with the development of scientific agriculture and domestic arts in many of our modern country homes this laboratory is constantly improving. _kansas state agricultural college bulletin, ._ there is a general idea among teachers that parents will not coöperate with them. this, i believe, is founded upon the assumption that because they cannot, as a usual thing, coöperate in textbook work they will not coöperate in other things. but both parents and teachers want the same results accomplished. if these are to be attained it means partnership work, the parent and that other parent, the teacher, working together; or one might say, the teacher, and that other teacher, the parent, working together. i have been surprised to find to what extent parents will coöperate with teachers if given a chance. mrs. brown goes to the schoolhouse on a bleak afternoon. she is greeted warmly by the teacher, miss smith, and given an arithmetic text to follow while the class recites. the lesson is on decimal fractions. now, mrs. brown didn't have decimal fractions during her school days, so the recitation is quite meaningless to her. she is glad when the class is over, and does not find time to visit school again that term. but if she is asked to prepare a luncheon for the picnic at the close of the year, or asked to assist in any social function at the schoolhouse, she spends her time for the school, and is glad to do it. in eugene, oregon, several years ago i found that the women of the city were enthusiastic in aiding the schools. thirty-two women gave up monday afternoon to teaching the girls sewing, while the boys had military drill. at a social center meeting at hover, washington, the suggestion was made that it would be well if one of the mothers would come to the school building occasionally to help the girls with their sewing, as the eighth-grade pupils would have to take an examination in the subject in may. so many mothers volunteered to undertake the task that a schedule was made out whereby a sewing period could be had every afternoon, and no mother be on duty oftener than every two weeks. at myrtle creek, oregon, domestic art work is carried on in this way: the teacher gives instructions in the work that is to be done; in cooking, for instance, recipes are given, talked over, and written down. the girls then go home, and actually do the work, and make a report to the teacher. they must have the signatures of their mothers for all the work they do. this is managed with a home credit report card. mrs. e. h. belknap, a progressive rural teacher near jefferson, oregon, said in a recent letter: "we learn how a cow can be fed and cared for, so as to produce the greatest amount of butter fat. that is well, but we regard it of far more value for the boy to go home, apply the knowledge learned, and produce the butter fat. he is now worth something to the world, and able to turn his education into dollars and cents at any time. the girl takes the book, and reads how to make butter. she goes home, tends the milk, churns, and makes the butter, learns how really to do the work. she has called the attention of the entire family to the amount and quality of her butter obtained from proper feeding and handling of the cow by the boy." and yet it is said that nothing can be done in the small school in domestic science because there is no equipment. in every home there is ideal equipment if we mean the equipment the children are to use. if we are preparing for life, why not use the equipment we must use in life? best of all, in using the home laboratory there is an immediate purpose. none of us can get much out of an exercise when it is done just for an exercise. there is the dinner to be cooked, the bed to be made, the ironing to be done; somebody must do it. and the dinner, the bed, and the ironing are to be put to the test by some one who sees real values. there is no doubt that one of the things schools most lack is purpose. it might be said that to stimulate a child to want to do things is only half the problem. "if children do things without expert instruction they may do them wrong, and thus get a faulty habit." but i think more than half of the problem is solved when we create the desire to do a thing. the greatest fault of present-day education is that we constantly try to teach a child how to do a thing without his desiring to do it, or even knowing the reason for doing it. on the other hand, i once knew a country girl who had never seen a domestic science equipment, and who lived in a community where there was no one housekeeper especially noted; yet with her strong desire to be a fine housekeeper she learned something good from each neighbor, and for excellent results, and for economy of time and material, her daily practice would put the average domestic science teacher to disadvantage. however i am not arguing that domestic science should not be taught at school; i certainly believe it should. but i do claim that it is worth while, and is absolutely necessary, first to create the desire to _do_ the things that are to be _taught_. to do things without a purpose is like trying to eat without an appetite. a pamphlet published by the kansas state agricultural college on "school credit for home work: the laboratory of the rural school," makes these practical points:-- could there possibly be a more favorable condition for teaching domestic arts than in the rural school from which the girl goes every evening to a busy home where she is needed to take part in the actual work of housekeeping? it is here that the girl has a chance to put into actual practice the things she has learned at school. here the home has the chance to realize immediately upon the investment it is making in the education of the girl. if sanitation, ventilation, sweeping and dusting, care of the sick, preparation of foods, care of milk, water supply and uses, bathing, care of health, sewing, proper clothing, etc., are taught in our schools, and if the laboratories are in the immediate neighborhood, and the girls and boys must go into them to stay overnight, they should be used. likewise, the vegetable gardens at the homes should be made the experimental plots for the school, after the best seeds have been selected, best methods of preparing, fertilizing, and planting the soil, best-known methods of cultivation and maturing the crops, have been taught. the actual experimental work should be carried out in the home gardens by the boys and girls. proper records can be kept, and the boys and girls will be anxious to get back into school, after the out-of-doors summer experiments, to compare reports, and renew another phase of their educational work. in agriculture the fields, stock, buildings, etc., about the schoolhouse should be studied and used. these are the real agricultural laboratory. the real problems of actual farming are present, and the methods of work and the ways of handling the fields and the stock are the available resources of the school as a part of its actual laboratory. in this connection study the dairy cows, the feeding of cattle, hogs, and horses, types and breeds of farm horses, cattle, hogs, and sheep. in every community there are many opportunities for type studies--such as fields of alfalfa or wheat or corn; a dairy herd; valuable and well-bred horses; beef cattle; hogs or sheep; a silo, or types of farm machinery, and farm buildings. it is natural for a child to want to assume home responsibilities, but there are many things that interfere unless a special effort is made. the school itself has been a great offender in weaning children from their homes and from natural living. this, of course, is not strange when we consider that the school started out to make lawyers and ministers, and not home-makers. yet one of the great needs of the time is to make people home-loving, and to have those wholesome habits that come from sharing home responsibilities. anything is worth while that will make the child once taste the joy of doing a useful thing well. viii stella and sadie through ignorance ye did it.--acts iii, . "let the school go on just as it has. what business is it of the school to meddle with the home work? of course most children do certain chores at home, but why confuse the work of the home with the work of the school?" have you heard this speech? i have heard it several times. does justice demand that we know what pupils do outside of school? must the teacher know home conditions in order to teach efficiently? i have in mind a true story that answers these questions and shows the injustice of teaching children when one knows little or nothing of their home life. i am sure most teachers have had similar experiences. in a certain schoolroom in a certain town i noticed one day two girls in the same class sitting near each other. the contrast between them was so great that i became interested in them, and found out something of their history and circumstances. stella, the younger one, eleven years old, was a perfect picture of rosy health. her brown hair was beautiful and most becomingly arranged. many women would have been delighted to wear such furs as she put on at the noon recess. well dressed and well nourished, she had the look of one much loved at school and at home, one to whom life was all happiness. stella is the only child of wealthy and doting parents. if we should follow her home we should find a well-kept modern house, and we should see that the mother who greets her at the door is just such a mother as we should expect for such a girl. while the evening meal is being prepared, her mother sits beside her at the piano, and helps with her practice, and when the father comes in, the three sing together until dinner is announced. after dinner her mother helps her with her least common multiple and greatest common divisor. they all discuss her composition and then her mother asks her to read aloud, and reads to her. promptly at nine o'clock she goes to bed in just the kind of room a little girl loves. the windows are opened to the proper width, the heat is turned off, she is kissed good-night, and is told, "mother loves you, and father will come in and kiss you when he comes home." in the morning at seven o'clock she is called by a very gentle voice, and told it is time for mother's angel to leave her dreams. her mother helps her dress, and brushes and braids her hair. "what will father's sweetheart have for breakfast this morning?" she will have grape-fruit and a poached egg on toast. after some fitting by the seamstress for a new dress to be added to her already full wardrobe, she is thoroughly inspected and is ready for school. she is given some flowers for the teacher, and is accompanied part way by her mother. she is early at school, her teacher kisses her, pats her cheeks, and stella is ready for the lessons, the lessons her mother helped her with the evening before. there she is, happy, radiant! now let us go home with the other girl. sadie is thirteen, but she looks much older notwithstanding her frail little figure. did i say home? be the judge. a few years ago her father and her aunt ran away together, leaving the mother with sadie and two younger children. the broken-spirited mother died after the desertion, and the father and aunt returned, were married, and took possession of the house and the three children. they now have a baby a year old. the family live in a tumbledown house at the edge of the city. on entering the house sadie receives no greeting from her stepmother-aunt, who is sitting by a dirty window reading. the child knows what work there is to do, and goes at it sullenly. after the meal, at which she scarcely has time to sit down, she has to do up the work, and then is sent on an errand. when she returns it is nine o'clock and she is hardly able to keep her eyes open. the least common multiple and the greatest common divisor are like greek to her. after she has tried to study a few minutes, her stepmother disturbs her by throwing her brother's stockings into her lap to be mended. when this task is completed, and the potatoes are peeled for breakfast, she goes upstairs. she tenderly draws the covers about her sleeping brother and creeps into bed beside her little sister. though she is very weary, her starved soul is comforted as she cuddles and kisses her sister before she drops to sleep. in the night she awakens, and thinking harry is again uncovered she slips over to his bed, like a little mother, and again adjusts the bedclothes. the baby awakens at five o'clock, and sadie is called and told to make a fire and warm the milk. she then gets breakfast, does the kitchen work, spreads up the beds, sews a button on her brother's coat, braids her sister's hair, and is late at school. she came in a few minutes late the morning i visited her room. the class was trying to make a record for punctuality, and had tied another room for first place until this morning when sadie's lateness set them behind. the teacher was provoked and reproved sadie. the pupils showed their scorn in many ways and said she was the cause of all but three of the tardy marks of the term. the teacher knew that the principal would ask her why she did not improve her tardy record. the pupils knew that their chances for a half-holiday were spoiled as long as "that sadie johnson" was in the room. this morning especially the teacher wished to make a good showing because she wanted a place in a larger city and hoped that i would recommend her. arithmetic was the first thing on the program. the principal had boasted of the work of his school in arithmetic. the work went beautifully, for stella led off with a perfect recitation. the pride of the whole class was evident, the teacher was hopeful. but wanting to see the work of all the pupils, i asked several questions, and at last called upon sadie. she didn't know, she stood abashed, and showed absolute lack of understanding of the subject. the principal was provoked. the teacher was plainly humiliated, and said in a tone that was low, but loud enough for sadie and several of the children to hear, "the girl is not only lazy, but feeble-minded." so it was the whole term. sadie was tortured each school day, condemned by the most powerful court in the world, her companions, led by her teacher. and the reason was that the teacher was teaching only the six-hour-a-day girl. one does not have to go to turkey to see examples of injustice and cruelty. but let us not be too critical of the teacher. she is tender-hearted and sympathetic. she weeps over the heroines in books, and has latent longings to be of service in the world. in this case she did not know the conditions that made sadie stupid. if she had been interested in the children's out-of-school work, and had had them tell her about it, she would have known that the frail little unkempt girl was compelled to do a woman's work at home besides trying to get her lessons. then she would have seen the tragedy in the child's appealing glance and have understood her. some people go through life without finding an opportunity to do justice, such as was this teacher's. in ministering to the soul-hunger of this little girl she might have given the service that she had dreamed of giving. it would have been the kind of service that is its own reward. ix a story and letters from teachers a story from nebraska, by mrs. sarah j. hoagland one spring found me in nebraska teaching a school of german and bohemian children, only two of whom spoke english. i boarded with a german family who lived about a mile from the school. in our walks to and from school i taught the children english. they and their father were born in nebraska, but at first none of them could speak english so that i could understand it, although i understood some of their german. the oldest boy--ten years old--lanky, with awkward gait, and fair, straight-standing hair, had a dogged, sullen look. it was a "home" look, especially when the father was around, but it left when he was trying to tell about birds or other interesting things. his telling me that he intended to work in town as soon as possible gave me a peep into his heart as regarded home. it was not a happy home. the father often drank, and at such times he was harsh and cruel. the mother was meek and subdued. she never had known how to do good housekeeping. she told me that when a girl in germany, being large and strong, she had had to work in the fields instead of learning housework. the farm was run down; the house was bare and unhomelike. the father's voice was often raised in upbraiding in "low dutch." he often had the children rounded up for punishment for starting fires or other mischief. the seven-year-old boy was more efficient, either in the home or out, than the ten-year-old boy. i noticed that he had a better head and intelligence. his efficiency was due to this, not to any better training. the mother often cried over the brutality of the father to the oldest boy. i determined to study the situation, and i found a remedy. i learned that the father could do practically nothing in arithmetic. he had attended school for his confirmation--a little reading in german being the only apparent result. so i taught the boy arithmetic, and after i had worked with him two hours every night for several months, he could do addition better than his father. it was wonderful to see the pride and dawning respect on the father's face as the boy figured correctly the weight of many wagon-loads of grain lately taken to the elevator. i knew then that the unreasonable whipping would tend to stop. i seldom see a father unreasonable with a boy he can be proud of at school. so the sky was clear for a time. but when the press of spring work came on and the father found he could not afford to employ help, he grew moody and was even savage again. he drank, and at times i was afraid of him myself. but i liked the mother. i knew she needed the board money for the children, and i wanted to see the case of the boy to a finish. so i stayed on. the lovely outdoor surroundings, too, made me want to stay. the orchard was beautiful--the finest in the neighborhood. the birds sang in a large maple at my window. this was a treat to a flat-dweller. since then i have ever loved the country. i often asked the mother what the father was saying to the oldest boy. i knew as far as the boy was concerned i could help the matter by influencing him. she said that the father was complaining that the boy was worthless as a worker. for one thing, he had milked and left the milk in the barnyard in order to play. the complaints kept pouring in on the patient mother. the father was working early and late to get abreast of the season's work. he forgot what sleep was, and grew thin and haggard and more and more savage. i felt that only some distinct advance would have effect on either father or boy. i asked if the boy could drive a horse. he couldn't. he could not work a single piece of the machinery on the farm. that is most unusual in nebraska, for the light soil can be worked by machinery which a boy can learn to run if he can also guide horses. the father would not teach the boy--had no patience with him. so the mother and i made our plans. she approached the father with the question of getting a team and machine for the boy. it happened to be a cornstalk cutter that was needed. the father consented, provided the mother would teach the boy! she had done such work, though she was not strong enough to do it this year. but i saw her that saturday toiling in the hot sun, walking up and down the rows, touching up the horses. the boy proved most apt. i soon saw him going up and down alone, still under his mother's eye, however. the boy seemed to grow two years in importance, self-reliance, and ambition in that day's work! this training was kept up out of school hours for some time, and the boy learned to work other machinery, the last thing a corn-planter. as soon as the father realized what the boy was doing, he was a transformed man. the knowledge that he had a helper seemed to clear the atmosphere. before this the boy had always kept out of the father's way. now he forsook the mother! it was "papa and me" from that time in his talk. this new attitude made it all the easier for the wife, for it was a relief from what had been her greatest trouble--having to stand between the two. the father's pride and confidence in his son kept on growing. in many ways he was just a good-natured big giant, but he turned like a bear on anything that annoyed him. i remember the first day the boy stayed out of school to work, how it seemed to me a deciding day in his life. i rarely like to see a child stay out of school, but that day i thought the industrial training much more important than anything i could teach the boy in those hours of school. he came regularly after the rush of work was over. a school in montana: mrs. hoagland's first letter to the author last september i heard your lecture on credit being given in school for home work. i have tried it lately after working the children up to grade. i started by getting acquainted with the homes, finding out what the children did and what they could do further. i made inquiries as to whether the children, in their play, left things around for the mother to pick up and so on. the spirit the work is done in counts, too, in credit given. the work must be done pleasantly and cheerfully; the mother must be asked for work; she is not to be hunting the child up to get him to do the work. one little girl of eleven made bread from beginning to end, never having tried it entirely before. she has an overworked mother. in another home i found the two older children took charge of a teething baby while the mother, an ex-teacher and rather delicate, did the housework. the little girl, six years old, could do dishes and otherwise help the mother. in another home the boy has grown to be the pride of his father's heart by forcing the father back into the chair, when he was weary, and doing the chores himself. one boy, his father told me two weeks ago, was growing as dependable as his brother five years older, and helped bring the cows, herd cattle from one field to another before and after school and on non-school days. there was much other work, light in itself, but wonderfully helpful to his father, that was taken charge of cheerfully. one child's father had a hired man. the boy did but little. he is eight years old and large. while visiting there, i saw his father bringing in coal. i told the boy he would find it necessary to look up work if he cared for credit. his mother visited school shortly after this; i was telling her of the idea and she said she now understood why bennie had started to clear the table several times, and so on. we had a very happy laugh over it. the boy hunts the eggs, gets in the wood and coal, makes the mash for the chickens, and helps wash the dishes. another child, aged thirteen, has to do much outside work, so she feels good over getting credit for it. it is a kind of pay that makes her days pleasanter. i believe each child richly deserves the credit i have given. the results have been to make the tie between the parents and myself stronger, and i am asked to come back next year. i have seen a gladder, prouder light in the parents' eyes concerning their children. it has helped to make our school in some respects without a superior in the county, according to the county superintendent's own word. a member of the board says the children never have made such progress since the school was built, and all say these children never have made as much progress before. they are learning, as far as i can teach them, the honor of labor and the beauty of being useful, willing, and dependable. i have had a hard battle to wage here for good, thorough work and application, but the right has won. i enclose a report that shows the kinds of work the children are in the habit of doing. i am the teacher who spoke to you about the new oats being brought into the dryland country. it is now being introduced into another part of montana where my homestead is. you will perhaps remember me. very sincerely, mrs. s. j. hoagland. bennie mccoy addison shirley _aged _ _aged _ dries dishes takes out ashes makes fire gets eggs pulled up sunflower stalks gets coal and kindling milks (some) feeds horses oats ( head) gets in coal and kindling cleans out barn gathers eggs milks cows sometimes brings in wood drives cattle carries ashes out harnesses up smashes big coal for stove hunts eggs turns churn waters horses feeds cats dries dishes gets chicken feed cooks (eggs, pancakes, coffee) feeds sitting hen sets table helps catch calves fries apples and bakes them gets clean hay for chicken nests peels potatoes clears table fries potatoes turns windmill[ ] feeds chickens slops hogs carries slop to hogs kills flies drives to town fixed his hand cart [ ] probably means turns the power on or off. johnnie mahoney lovilo murray _aged _ _aged _ feeds pig opens gate for calves hunts eggs gets kindling waters horse gets coal told where sow and her new pigs takes care of baby were when no one else could closes chicken-house door find them carries wood minds baby dries dishes hunts firewood leads horses to plow may mahoney aleen murray _aged _ _aged _ bakes bread washes and dries dishes washes dishes sweeps floor minds baby does simple ironing gets coal and water gets wood, water, and coal gathers eggs closes chicken-house door makes cake dresses baby gets cows tends baby waters horses pumps water susie marckino sewed a doll petticoat _aged _ sewed sleeves in waist for little brother cooks meals scrubs washes dishes irons scrubs cooks meals irons peels potatoes sews--made a waist and a baby takes out ashes dress dusts gets coal sweeps feeds chickens makes beds goes for horse airs bedding brings water milks cows gets hay and feeds horses feeds calf builds fires hays horses turns churn builds fires polishes stoves turns churn cares for young chickens feeds chickens dusts feeds sitting hens salts horses sets and clears table washes range rosie marckino polishes cutlery _aged _ does light washing prepares vegetables gets water did dishes with four-year-old sister when all else were gone a general little helper a letter from mrs. e. h. belknap, marion county, oregon i believe intensely in an education that teaches the boy or girl not only how the book says to do a thing, but how, by actual experience and practice, that thing is best worked out and brought to perfection.... in this district we have used home credits for two years. first, in order to make this a success, the teacher must believe in it, and must be a worker. we have given credits for everything from plowing to washing the baby for breakfast. as a result we have the little girls dressing their own hair for school, the older ones cooking breakfast, washing, ironing, etc. the boys plow, milk, clean stables, cut wood, feed horses, do all kinds of work for credits; _doing it, they have become interested in it, and before they knew it a habit has been formed of doing things at the right time in the right way_. it is truly wonderful what these children do. some of them walk three or four miles, and still earn hundreds of credits in a week. some of my girls milk as many as eight cows twice a day, and the boys plow and harrow acres of ground. they do the work gladly, too. monday mornings we give out blanks to be filled out, signed by parents, and returned the following monday morning. we always go over the cards carefully. _i call the names aloud, and the pupils report quickly. if extra work has been accomplished i always try to praise the effort. it is a happy hour when the reports are rendered._ at first we agreed that when any pupil earned six hundred or more credits he should be entitled to a holiday. thousands of credits have been earned, but no one has asked for the holiday! frequently, when the pupil has been ill, or forced to miss a day, he has asked that the credits be applied to blot out the absent marks, and this has always been granted. part two i illustrative home credit plans upon the demonstration of the success of the home credit plan in the spring valley school i began to hear of other oregon schools that had taken it up and were carrying it on successfully. during the school year - , three hundred and twenty-five teachers in oregon and in washington were giving school credit for home work, while the scheme had been adopted by some schools in other states. for the aid of those who may contemplate its use, the outlines of several plans that have been instituted are printed here, together with excerpts of letters we have received, and cards made out by pupils. these reports come from teachers who have used the scheme successfully in various forms. the daily report plans are given first, and the letters are arranged according to the frequency of the report from the home to the school. it will be noted that some teachers use a card that is supposed to last for a whole year, being returned to the teacher monthly as school cards are often returned to the parent monthly; others have cards that are marked daily, and last for only a week. some teachers use a contest plan of awards like mr. o'reilly's; others add credits to the average obtained in school subjects; and others do both. the first user of the parent-signed report, mr. o'reilly, used no cards, but had the children write little notes with lists of their labors every day for their parents to sign. a bulletin from the kansas agricultural college suggests that pupils should furnish the reports themselves over their own signatures.[ ] the only record of failure we have was in a school where monthly report cards were used, and no definite scheme of duties was laid down,--merely so many minutes of unspecified labor. i find that children are more interested when their performance of particular duties is recorded. [ ] see appendix. i should never advise the wholesale adoption of any one plan, but i would suggest that superintendents and teachers adapt plans to the needs of their districts. several schools have been reported where an enthusiastic principal has put the plan into operation throughout his school, regardless of the ideas of his teachers. i find that teachers never feel inspiration in a work that they do not want to undertake. therefore, it would be my suggestion that under no circumstances should a teacher be asked to use home credits unless she herself desires it. daily reports the following is the method which mr. a. i. o'reilly originated at the spring valley school, in - :-- _rules of the contest_ . no pupil is obliged to enter the contest. . any pupil entering is free to quit at any time, but if any one quits without good cause, all credits he or she may have earned will be forfeited. . parent or guardian must send an itemized list (with signature affixed) to the teacher each morning. this list must contain a record of the work each child has done daily. . each day the teacher will issue a credit voucher to the pupil. this voucher will state the total number of minutes due the pupil each day for home work. . at the close of the contest pupils will return vouchers to the teacher, the six pupils who have earned the greatest amount of time, per the vouchers, receiving awards. . contest closes when term of school closes. . once each month the names of the six pupils who are in the lead will be published in the county papers. . ten per cent credit will be added to final examination results of all pupils (except eighth graders) who enter and continue in the contest. . when a pupil has credits to the amount of one day earned, by surrender of the credits, and by proper application to the teacher, he or she may be granted a holiday, provided that not more than one holiday may be granted to a pupil each month. . forfeitures--dropping out of contest without cause, all credits due; unexcused absence, all credits due; unexcused tardiness, per cent of all credits due; less than per cent in deportment for one month, per cent of all credits due. . awards--the three having the highest credits, $ each; the three having second highest, $ each. awards to be placed in a savings bank to the credit of the pupils winning them. funds for awards furnished by the school district board out of the general fund. _list of duties with minutes credit allowed for each_ . building fire in the morning minutes . milking a cow " . cleaning a cow " . cleaning out the barn " . splitting and carrying in wood ( hours' supply) " . turning cream separator " . cleaning a horse " . gathering eggs " . feeding chickens " . feeding pigs " . feeding horse " . feeding cow " . churning butter " . making butter " . blacking stove " . making and baking bread " . making biscuits " . preparing breakfast for family " . preparing supper for family " . washing and wiping dishes (one meal) " . sweeping floor " . dusting furniture (rugs, etc., one room) " . scrubbing floor " . making beds (must be made after school), each bed " . washing, ironing, and starching own clothes that are worn at school (each week) " . bathing each week " . arriving at school with clean hands, face, teeth, and nails, and with hair combed " . practicing music lesson (for minutes) " . retiring on or before o'clock " . bathing and dressing baby " . sleeping with window boards in bedroom (each night) " . other work not listed, reasonable credit while it is sometimes more convenient to have printed record slips, it is not necessary. mr. o'reilly carried on the grading by having each child write out his home credit work on ordinary tablet paper. the great majority of home credit schools have used the plan in without any printing whatever. it affords the children practice in written expression. i give here two sample slips brought in by mr. o'reilly's pupils in the first home credit contest in the united states. _tora mortensen_ jan. , . prepared supper washed and wiped supper dishes made beds swept floor washed teeth was in bed at o'clock ------------ total hr. min. (signed) _mrs. emma savage._ _la vern holdredge_ april , . fed chickens minutes gathered eggs " split kindling " carried in wood " swept four floors " fed one horse " dried dishes " in bed before nine " april , . washed teeth. minutes swept three floors " put up lunch " ------------ total minutes (signed) mrs. holdredge. superintendent a. r. mack, of holton, kansas, has issued the following plan for daily reports and the issue of credit vouchers monthly, in bulletin form. notice that the pupil who is paid in money, or in any other way, for home work receives no credit. this card gives a very desirable emphasis to manners and personal care:-- _rules_ . no pupil is obliged to enter contest. . any pupil entering is free to quit at any time, but if any one quits without good cause, all credits he or she may have earned will be forfeited. . parent or guardian must send daily to the teacher an itemized list with signature attached; this list must contain the record of the work each child has done daily. . at the end of each week the teacher may read the number of credits due the pupil for that week. at the end of each month the teacher shall issue a credit voucher to the pupil giving the total number of credits due to the pupil up to date, for home work. . the pupil in each grade making the highest number of credits each month will receive an added credit of per cent of all credits due. . the school shall be divided into two divisions. the boy and the girl in each division in each building receiving the highest number of credits at the end of each half-year shall be awarded a suitable medal. . the boy and the girl in each division in each building receiving the second highest number of credits shall at their own option be awarded a medal or an additional per cent of credits already due. . ten per cent credit will be added to final examination results of all pupils who enter this contest before november , and continue in it until the end of the year. those entering school after november must enter contest before january , in order to receive examination credit. . pupils entering the contest before november or january will be given credit not only on final examination grades, but on monthly examination grades. . in case a pupil enters the contest after november or january , credits for home work will apply on monthly examination grades only. the following schedule has been adopted: grades of to , additional credit of half the amount between the grade and . grades of to , a credit of is given. grades of to , a credit of is given. grades of to , a credit of is given. below , no credit. . any pupil in the first three grades earning credits during a given month may have a quarter holiday. pupils in the fourth grade must make credits; pupils in the fifth grade must make credits; pupils in the sixth grade must make credits; pupils in the seventh and eighth grades must make credits for a quarter holiday. all holidays are at the discretion of the teacher; _provided_, that the pupil may not have more than one quarter holiday in any days, and _provided_, that the teacher thinks that it will not interfere with school work. in case deportment is below per cent, the holiday will be refused. . forfeitures-- (_a_) dropping out of contest without cause forfeits all credits due. (_b_) unexcused absence forfeits all credits due. (_c_) tardiness forfeits per cent of all credits due. (_d_) less than per cent in deportment in one month forfeits per cent of all credits due. (_e_) loss of temper forfeits credits. (_f_) bad table manners forfeit credits. (_g_) impoliteness to elders forfeits credits. (_h_) bad language at home forfeits credits. (_i_) discourtesy to parents forfeits credits. (_j_) unnecessarily soiling clothes forfeits credits. (_k_) unnecessarily tearing clothes forfeits credits. (_l_) report cards kept home days forfeits per cent credits and an additional credits for each succeeding day. (_m_) forgetting books forfeits credits per book. . once each month the names of the six pupils who are in the lead will be published in the holton papers. . a pupil who receives compensation for work done, whether he is paid in money or in any other way, shall receive no school credit for such work. _credit slip for primary to third grades, inclusive_ credits. . carrying in cobs or kindling . carrying in night wood for kitchen stove . feeding and watering chickens . dusting one room . making one bed . wiping dishes . washing dishes . setting table . cleaning teeth . combing hair . properly preparing for school (washing face, ears, neck, hands; cleaning teeth and finger nails) . dressing without help, buttoning shoes, etc . going to bed at or before p.m. . sleeping with window open each night . dressing younger child and washing its face . caring for younger children half-hour . proper use of handkerchief one day . cleaning mud or snow from feet . practicing music lesson minutes . cleaning snow from porch . cleaning snow from walks inside yard, each walk . scrubbing porch . mending stockings, per pair . filling the water bucket . returning report card on first day . returning report card on second day . polishing the shoes . getting home before . and remaining home minutes other work not listed, reasonable credit. _credit slip for fourth to eighth grades, inclusive_ credits. . building a fire in morning . milking a cow . cleaning out a barn . splitting and carrying in wood, hours' supply . bringing in kindling . bringing in coal, per bucket . filling water bucket . cleaning a horse . feeding and watering chickens . feeding pigs . feeding horse . feeding cow . blacking stove . making and baking bread . making biscuits . preparing breakfast for family . preparing supper for family . washing and wiping dishes, one meal . sweeping one room . dusting one room . making one bed . scrubbing one floor . making a cake . practicing music lesson half-hour . tending flowers in window . working in garden half-hour . cleaning snow from sidewalk . mending stockings, per pair . washing, starching and ironing own school clothes each week . bathing (each bath) . cleaning teeth . combing hair . properly preparing for school (washing face, ears, neck, hands; cleaning teeth and finger nails) . retiring at or before p.m . getting up at or before a.m . bathing and dressing baby . sleeping with window open each night . dressing younger child, washing its face, etc. . caring for younger child, each half-hour . home study, each half-hour . making pies, credits for the first and credits for each additional pie. . ironing one hour . running washing machine one hour . bringing cow from pasture, or blocks . bringing cow from pasture, or blocks . errands down town . carrying clothes . helping prepare the meal . pumping a tank of water . harrowing hours . carrying dinner . churning . dressing a chicken . returning report cards on first day . returning report cards on second day . polishing the shoes . getting home before . and remaining home minutes other work not listed, reasonable credit. _general rule_ for unlisted work credit will be given. one credit will be given for every two minutes' work. mr. n. v. rowe, the teacher at st. john, whitman county, washington, describes a novel plan:-- at first i used a credit card arranged after the order of a meal ticket. the plan was to have the card hold credits enough for one school day of minutes, arranged by 's, 's, 's, 's, 's, and 's. the idea is all right were it amplified so as to include a school week. the teacher has a punch, and punches or cancels credits as presented. i found this took too many cards for each pupil. some brought in as high as minutes in credits each day, and even more than that in some cases. at present i am using a plan similar to a grocer's manifolding or duplicating book where totals are forwarded each day. this saves time and in some ways is better than the ticket plan. the results have certainly justified the effort here. ( ) it lessens tardiness; ( ) it enlists the attention of parents quicker than anything else; ( ) it stimulates to better work in school; ( ) it creates a wholesome rivalry. i have heard the following objections to it: it requires too much time of a teacher already very busy; and pupils get a holiday when they ought to be at their studies. these objections are weak. the plan certainly has a sound pedagogic principle for its foundation. the children get but one holiday a month. in case a pupil is ill or necessarily absent for a day, it is very convenient to allow that as a holiday. this helps the attendance record wonderfully, and is perfectly legitimate, so far as i can see. we have been doing that way all the present year. bear in mind, we allow such as a holiday only when one has not been allowed already for that particular month. in the register i mark the initial "h" wherever a holiday is granted, and in this way i keep tab. at burnt ridge, near alpha, washington, in mrs. venona e. toman's school, a postal-card photograph is given as a little reward of merit for each credits earned. five credits are taken off for coming to school with neck and ears not clean. one hundred and twenty credits are given to the child who washes, starches, and irons her school clothes for the week. practicing music and studying lessons get ten credits for half an hour; but hard work, like sawing wood and making a garden, gets one credit for each two minutes. * * * * * the following is an excerpt from a letter from the burnt ridge teacher:-- i have the children keep their own records, telling them that i want them to learn to do their own business. then their mothers look over and sign their reports. without one exception the parents are pleased with the plan. the mothers tell me that the children hurry to get all done they possibly can before school time, as they want their credits to increase. one mother said there was more trouble now between her two girls because neither one _wanted help_ than there was before _when they wanted help_. i require that the work be done cheerfully. one mother said she believed her daughters sang about their work many times when they did not feel a bit like it. i notice myself, and others tell me that it is making a difference in the homes. i think this one of the best features that has been added to the school work. it teaches independence, thoughtfulness, and thrift. morning and evening record, weekly report marion county, oregon, uses a card issued by superintendent w. m. smith, which provides for a record of daily morning and evening home tasks, and a weekly report. this county forms an object lesson in the correct presentation of a subject of this kind. superintendent smith first picked out a teacher that he knew had initiative and was able to carry her people with her. he explained the matter to her in detail and kept in close touch with her work. her success was so pronounced that he thought that it was not necessary to make much effort to extend the plan into the surrounding districts; he knew it would spread of itself. and it did; like a prairie fire, he found it leaping over districts and catching in others, until now it is widely used in the county. the card is the result of much experience and a few conferences with some of mr. smith's best people. notice that honesty of record is emphasized; also observe the details of dairy work and the care of horses:-- [illustration: _home credit blank school............dis't no................teacher.............. name age grade object: to secure the cooperation of the home and the school_ ...day of|credits| monday | tuesday |wednesday|thursday | friday |total ... ..|for | | | | | | |each. |a.m. p.m.|a.m. p.m.|a.m. p.m.|a.m. p.m.|a.m. p.m.| +-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . bath | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . teeth | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaned | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | loaves | | | | | | | | | | | | of bread | | | | | | | | | | | | baked | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. of| | | | | | | | | | | | cakes | | | | | | | | | | | | baked | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. of| | | | | | | | | | | | meals | | | | | | | | | | | | prepared | | | | | | | | | | | | (alone) | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . wiped | | | | | | | | | | | | dishes | | | | | | | | | | | | (all for | | | | | | | | | | | | one meal)| | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . washed| | | | | | | | | | | | dishes | | | | | | | | | | | | (all for | | | | | | | | | | | | one meal)| | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . set | | | | | | | | | | | | the table| | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | gathered | | | | | | | | | | | | up dishes| | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | churning | | | | | | | | | | | | butter | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | making | | | | | | | | | | | | butter | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of rooms | | | | | | | | | | | | swept | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of rooms | | | | | | | | | | | | dusted | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of beds | | | | | | | | | | | | made | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | blacking | | | | | | | | | | | | stove | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | gathering| | | | | | | | | | | | the eggs | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . | | | | | | | | | | | | carried | | | | | | | | | | | | in the | | | | | | | | | | | | wood | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of fires | | | | | | | | | | | | built | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . split| | | | | | | | | | | | the wood | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . fed | | | | | | | | | | | | the | | | | | | | | | | | | chickens | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . fed | | | | | | | | | | | | the pigs | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of horses| | | | | | | | | | | | fed grain| | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | horses | | | | | | | | | | | | hayed | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | horses | | | | | | | | | | | | watered | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | horses | | | | | | | | | | | | bedded | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | cows | | | | | | | | | | | | milked | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | cows | | | | | | | | | | | | bedded | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | cow | | | | | | | | | | | | stalls | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaned | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- . no. | | | | | | | | | | | | of horse | | | | | | | | | | | | stalls | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaned | | | | | | | | | | | | +-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----- total reasonable credit may be given for other work. when the answer is yes or no as in and , etc., write for yes and leave blank for no. parent:--as one who insists upon absolute honesty being taught, my signature below certifies that to the best of my knowledge this report is correct. .................parent. ] * * * * * oscar. l. dunlap, principal of the school at salem heights, marion county, gives the following explanation of the way home credits were recognized in his school the first year:-- the first month we gave cash prizes; then this was abandoned and we allowed per cent to be added to each of any two subjects, and per cent to any one subject in the monthly tests. we give twelve questions (answer any ten) and those having per cent allowance need answer only eight questions, and so on. in my room the pupils work harder to earn the per cent allowance than they did to earn the cash prizes; for in this way every one receives a prize. some think this is a wrong way to give rewards. i was myself in doubt at first; but my pupils have actually worked harder during the past two months than during the six months before we adopted this plan. daily records, weekly reports in spokane county, washington, one hundred and thirteen teachers have used home credits during the school year of - . superintendent e. g. mcfarland became interested in the work that one of his rural teachers started on home credits at the opening of the schools in the fall of . mr. mcfarland obtained what information he could on the subject, and then worked out a plan. this made provision for a daily record for five days, and a weekly report. at his institute he presented the project to his teachers, and in january some eighty-one began the work. others soon followed. [illustration: o. h. benson potato club, moran, spokane county, washington the members are receiving school credits for club work carried out regularly. the president is "talking potatoes" to the members of the club] the spokane chamber of commerce sent out a story of spokane county's home credits to eight hundred and fifty of its correspondents in the united states and canada. for a while the superintendent's office was flooded with letters of inquiry relative to the plan. this shows the great interest taken everywhere in any movement calculated to better the child's school and home relationship. at a parent-teachers' meeting in spokane a committee was appointed to assist the principal of one of the schools in keeping the children off the streets. at that time it was arranged that credit at school should be given to all children off the streets after six o'clock, and to those who did not go to evening parties. below is the spokane county plan. _bulletin for teachers: home credits_ the following are the rules and reward offered for home work. this work is to be done during the school week. no one is compelled to enter this contest and the pupil may drop out at any time. all work must be voluntary on the part of the pupil. parents are requested not to sign papers for pupils if the work is not voluntarily and cheerfully done. the rewards for this work are:-- one half-holiday each month to the child who has earned one hundred or more home credits, and has not been absent or tardy for the month; also per cent will be added to his final examination. the pupil who earns one hundred or more credits each month but fails in perfect attendance will have the per cent added to his final examination. in addition, the board of directors may offer a prize to the pupil in each grade who shall have the greatest amount of home credits, and shall be neither absent nor tardy during the term, or from the adoption of these rules. _list of home credits_ personal cleanliness retiring before o'clock cleaning teeth feeding and watering chickens cleaning finger nails feeding and watering horses practicing music lesson feeding and watering cows dressing baby feeding and watering hogs washing dishes gathering eggs sweeping floor cleaning chicken house making bed going for mail preparing meal picking apples making a cake picking potatoes making biscuits bringing in wood for to-day churning splitting wood for to-day scrubbing floor bringing in water for to-day dusting grooming horse blacking stove milking cow darning stockings working in field delivering papers going for milk e. g. mcfarland, _county superintendent of schools._ the following statement is made by superintendent mcfarland as to the effect home credits had on attendance in - :-- we attribute the increase in our attendance this year in the schools of spokane county, outside the city of spokane, largely to the home credit system and our certificates for perfect attendance. while the enrollment was less than last year, yet our attendance was , days more. at the present rate of cents per day, the pupils earned for the county, from the state appropriation, nearly $ more than last year. with the same enrollment as last year the increase of apportionment would have reached approximately $ . the credit slip for the school week provides for a daily record of "chores or work done" from monday to friday inclusive. it does not contain a stated list of duties; the blanks are to be filled in by the child. the list of home credits is furnished each district, but the teacher uses her judgment in allowing credit for any chore peculiar to her locality. on page is given one of these blanks with the work itemized. note the evidence of cooperation between jessie and her mother. on the mornings when jessie gets the breakfast her mother dresses the baby, and _vice versa_. [illustration: _home credit work_ _dist. no......._ _name, jessie jones._ _age . grade th._ chores or work done | mon. | tues. | wed. | thur. | fri. -----------------------+------+-------+------+-------+------ washing dishes | | | | ... | ... sweeping floor | ... | ... | | | making cake | | ... | ... | ... | ... making bed | | | | | cleaning teeth | | | | | dressing baby | ... | | ... | | getting breakfast | | ... | | ... | ... music lessons | ... | ... | | ... | ... making biscuit | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | total for week | | | | | -----------------------+------+-------+------+-------+------ (signed) mrs. mary a. jones, _parent's signature_. ] * * * * * here is a letter from a little girl who earns home credits in a grown-up way:-- cheney, washington. april , . dear mrs. thomason: i am nine years old, and in the fourth grade. i think i will pass into the fifth grade. i like to go to school. my teacher is miss grier. i like her. we get home credits in our school. i haven't any pets, but i have a little sister and a little brother. they are twins, and were born on my birthday, june . their names are ruth and millard. they are awfully sweet and good, and i like them a good deal better than pets. i get credit at school for taking care of them. your little friend, clara louise peterson. report of clara louise for week ending may , :-- [illustration: _home credit work_ _dist. no. _. _name, clara louise peterson. age . grade th_. -------------------------------------------------------------------- chores or work done | mon. | tues.| wed. | thur.| fri. ---------------------------------+------+------+------+------+------ personal cleanliness | | | | | | | | | | cleaning teeth | | | | | | | | | | wiping dishes | | | | | | | | | | caring for baby | | | | | | | | | | carrying water | .... | | | | | | | | | sweeping floor | .... | | | | .... | | | | | gathering eggs | | | | | | | | | | going for mail | | .... | .... | .... | .... | | | | | making beds | .... | | | | | | | | | churning | .... | | .... | | .... | | | | | setting table | .... | | | | | | | | | retiring before nine o'clock | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------ total for week | | | | | | | | | | ---------------------------------+------+------+------+------+------ (signed) mrs. j. c. peterson, _parent's signature_. ] * * * * * superintendent mcfarland has received many letters of appreciation from teachers and parents in his county. one teacher writes:-- the system helps, in bringing the school and home closer together by letting the parents see that we count the practical duties of the house and of the farm of actual value in the training of the child. one father is encouraging his three boys to earn more than the required home credits by paying them a small sum of money for each additional five credits. another writes:-- the teachers have noted many cases of much improved personal cleanliness, which in itself has been a welcome reward. then, you know, improved morals go hand in hand with clean bodies. we are taking into account the fact that cleanliness on the part of one child usually forces another to clean up on account of the inevitable contrast. a parent writes:-- the home credit system is to my mind one of the most practical features that has been introduced into the public-school curriculum for some time. it teaches the children self-reliance, and encourages them to take the initiative when heretofore they have been indifferent or careless. its practical help to the parents is inestimable, as children in pursuit of "credits" take innumerable burdens from the parents' shoulders. this from another parent:-- regarding the home credit system of the public school, my sentiment as the parent of two boys attending school is that it is working fine. it makes my boys ambitious to earn as many credits as possible, and this system as laid out leads them to take interest in the practical duties of their home, thereby saving parents many a step, and training the boys for useful work. the home credit system also stimulates punctuality in attending school as well as personal neatness, and regular habits in going to bed at the right time. _it seems to me that this credit system to a great extent completes the purpose of the public school._ one teacher in spokane county has solved the problem of the rural janitor with home credits. like thousands of other girls teaching in country schools, she had difficulty in keeping the schoolhouse clean. beginning in january she offered school credit for outside work, and she included in her list the care of the schoolhouse. she reports that the room is kept perfectly now. the floors are swept, the woodwork dusted, the blackboards and erasers cleaned, water and wood supplied. this same teacher, miss lizzie k. merritt, says:-- it is not pleasant to work without appreciation. we all know that we make a short job of the unappreciated piece of work. we cannot expect a child to stay with a thing as long as an older person unless he sees a definite reward. i have found that home credits teach observation, accuracy, and punctuality. the following is an excerpt from a circular sent out by mr. harry f. heath, principal of the school at eveline, lewis county, washington, at the beginning of a home credit contest, stating his plan. this makes provision for a daily record for six days, a weekly report, and a voucher:-- _eveline public school_ eveline, wash., january , . dear patron:-- sometimes, in the rush of classes, we of the school forget about the home life of the scholar. and many times you of the home know but little of what is going on at school. in order to connect more closely for the pupil the influences of both home and school, i am planning this contest in home work for the next four months. in order that the contest may be successful, we ask the sympathy and aid of each parent. the parent is the judge of the amount of work done by the pupil, and upon the parent we depend for the accuracy of the reports. have the pupil prepare his or her own list of duties performed, ready for your signature, and make it your duty to see that the lists are accurate at all times, neither more nor less than the actual amount performed. all lists should be dated, and none will be accepted unless signed by you. the prizes will not be expensive, and will be given only as tokens of award. the real awards will be realized during the course of the contest as set forth by the rules. then follows the list of credits and the rules. a letter from mr. heath dated april , , tells the way in which he carried on the work this year. mr. heath says:-- in answer to your request for information about our home credits contest, i am sending some of the circulars which i used at the beginning, and also some vouchers made by the pupils which i use to give out weekly credits. i am also sending some sample slips of credits brought in by some of the pupils. these slips show credits for an entire week, which has proved to be the most satisfactory way to have the slips kept. a notebook kept by me of the weekly and monthly totals, as well as the holidays granted and forfeitures assessed, is all of the record that our system has required. two progressive business men of chehalis are furnishing inexpensive prizes in the form of books to go to the seven leaders in the contest at its close. four of the prizes will probably go to boys, but by the rules at least three are to go to girls. i find in this community that the boys have much more opportunity to earn credits than the girls. hence the rule. the contest has run for four months and is closing this week. it has been very well received in the community, a number of suggestions having come in from parents in the way of additional credits. one was a request that credits be given for daily reading of the bible, and the change was made. in my room, which is the highest in our two-room school, practically all of the scholars started, and of the thirty-four at that time in the contest about twenty-five are still enrolled, and the percentage would be larger if some of the beginners had not moved away. the contest was tried for a while in the lower grades but was not successful there. we limited the points that might be added to the general average to six in any one month, and most of the live contestants got their six every month. i got my ideas of the contest directly from mr. alderman's article, which i found in some paper. it has been on the whole very successful, and worth while. when i try this sort of work again, it will be on the plan of regular credits, not in contest form. i believe the spokane county plan as used this spring is one that would prove very satisfactory. the eveline "voucher" plan gives the pupil something to watch for. the first paragraph of mr. heath's letter explains the use of these vouchers. below are sample vouchers, and copies of slips made out by the pupils. the pupils rule the columns, and write out their own records, according to a published list which shows the value in minutes of each task. this work is good practice for the pupil in ruling lines and making neat cards, and it saves the cost of printing cards. the vouchers, which are taken home, enable each pupil to have at home, as well as at school, a record of the total amount of his work. [illustration: two hand-drawn vouchers] * * * * * [illustration: _home credits_ _alberta lemon_ _march -april _. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | mon. | tues. | wed. | thur. | fri. | sat. ---------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------ slept with window open | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaned teeth | | | | | | | | | | | | swept floors | | ... | | | | | | | | | | wiped dishes | | | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | washed separator | ... | | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | made beds | | | | | | | | | | | | dusted rooms | | ... | | | ... | | | | | | | got supper | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | wiped milk pails | | | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | peeled apples | | ... | ... | | ... | ... | | | | | | made lunches | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | washed milk pails | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | washed dishes | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | retired at | ... | | | | | ... | | | | | | mended garments | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | studied | | | ... | | ... | | | | | | | ironed garments | ... | ... | | ... | | | | | | | | helped with meal | ... | | | | ... | ... | | | | | | went errands | | ... | | | ... | | | | | | | scrubbed | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | took bath | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | | | | | | | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | --- | | | | | | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... ---------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------ mrs. a. c. lemon. ] * * * * * [illustration: _home credits_ _rosa c._ ---------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- | | | | | | ---------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- made fires | ... | ... | | | | ... | | | | | | preparing meals | | | | | | | | | | | | set table | | | | | | | | | | | | washed dishes | | | | | | | | | | | | wiped dishes | | | | | | | | | | | | washed milk pails | | | | | | | | | | | | carried in water | | | | | | | | | | | | turning separator | | | | | | | | | | | | washing separator | | | | | | | | | | | | fed pets | | | | | | | | | | | | ironing clothes | ... | | ... | | ... | | | | | | | making beds | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaned my teeth | | | | | | | | | | | | slept with window open | | | | | | | | | | | | retired before nine | | | | | | | | | | | | washed baby | | | | | ... | | | | | | | dressed baby | | ... | | ... | | | | | | | | sweeping floors | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | | | | | | ---------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total ... chas. f. conradi. ] the cowlitz county, washington, plan is a daily record for seven days and a weekly report. the rules governing the work are printed on the back of the credit card:-- [illustration: _work of home record_ _lavita fowler_ [_age _]. _for week ending march , ._ ----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------- | sun.| mon |tues.| wed.|thur.| fri.| sat.| +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | min.| min.| min | min.| min.| min.| min.| total ----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------- . work in garden | ... | ... | ... | | ... | | ... | | | | | | | | | . splitting and | | | | | | | | carrying in | | | | | | | | wood | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . milking | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of horses | | | | | | | | or cows | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . cleaning barn | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of poultry | | | | | | | | or pigs | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . turning separator | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . churning | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . sweeping or | | | | | | | | or dusting | | ... | | | | ... | | | | | | | | | | . washing or | | | | | | | | ironing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . preparing meals | ... | | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . washing dishes | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . bedroom work | ... | ... | | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | . sewing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . caring for little | | | | | | | | children | | | | ... | ... | ... | | . building fires | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . bathing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . brushing teeth | | ... | ... | | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . sleeping with | | | | | | | | open window | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . to bed by | | | | | | | | o'clock | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . attending church | | | | | | | | or sunday school | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | getting sister ready | | | | | | | | for school | ... | | | | | | ... | | | | | | | | | washing floors | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | | | | | | | | ----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- i certify that the above is a correct record. mrs. fowler, _signature of parent or guardian._ ] * * * * * _rules governing credit for home work_ to parents or guardians:-- the scheme of giving credit at school for work done at home by the pupils can be made successful only through your coöperation, and faithful report of the work done. every friday afternoon a home work record slip will be given each pupil. beginning with sunday all time spent by the pupils in home work should be entered in the proper place. each monday morning a slip filled in during the previous week should be returned to the teacher. this slip must be signed by the parent or guardian. extra work may be listed in the blank spaces. to secure credit at school for his work, the pupil should average eight hours a week, thirty-two hours a month, at real, honest, helpful labor that relieves the fathers and mothers of that amount of work. if this is done, the teacher will add three credits to the average gained by the pupil at the school during the month in his studies. additional credits will be given for more than thirty-two hours a month at the rate of one credit for every ten hours' work. please coöperate with your teacher in this plan for making work more worth while to the boy and girl. lucia jenkins, _county superintendent of schools_. in the district school, near bellingham, washington, taught by mrs. lou albee maynard, there is used a system of having the home credit accounts kept by pupils; the children call it the ruth and grace system. here is a plan that solves the problem, if it is a problem, of putting extra work on the teacher through home credits. not only is the teacher entirely relieved of the bookkeeping which the system requires, but the pupils are engaged in practical bookkeeping while they keep the records. checks are made out in regular bank-check form, and receipts are given. the ruth and grace system is thus described in a neat account written by emma ames, a pupil in the sixth grade:-- ruth and grace were girls who wanted to learn bookkeeping. in order to give them a chance we took up the credit system. at the end of each week the girls give us a slip of paper ruled and ready to be made out. the mothers sign it. each thing which we do counts so much. at the end of the week these slips are handed back to the girls, and we receive another. we also get a check telling how many credits we received the week before. when we make five thousand credits we then receive a composition book. smaller things are also given for fewer credits. the girls keep in their ledgers each person's work. so if any mistake is made they will have something to refer to. we call the system the ruth and grace system. the prize list is as follows:-- washing dishes...................... credits. wiping dishes....................... " sweeping............................ " making beds......................... " baking bread........................ " dusting............................. " scrubbing........................... " practicing music.................... " brushing teeth...................... " clean finger nails.................. " splitting kindling.................. " splitting wood...................... " carrying water...................... " milking cow......................... " feeding pigs........................ " feeding chickens.................... " feeding and bedding cows............ " slashing one hour................... " getting a meal...................... " taking charge of house.............. " charge for father one day........... " building fires...................... " sewing.............................. " making an apron..................... " carrying wood....................... " washing............................. " ironing............................. " the following letter from mrs. maynard explains the system further:-- i have been requested to report on our plan for giving credit for home work as we have tried it. one of my pupils has written a report of our system which explains our methods nicely. this has been only a trial, but i am so pleased with results that i intend to use it whenever there are older pupils who can do the bookkeeping, for it represents a great deal of work, and unless the school is a very small one the system would add too much to the already busy teacher's work. the girls who are represented by our firm carried on the work on a strictly business basis. they bought the work of the pupils as represented by the weekly reports. this work was then sold to me at a gain of per cent. the girls have worked out a simple system of double entry in six weeks. we, as a school, have spent an interesting and profitable time, keeping track of our work, and of their mistakes, and the various ups and downs of a business. we are planning a better schedule of wages, a bank in which to deposit our checks, and a store where the credits may be exchanged for little articles which represent the rewards; but this is all in the making, and may have to wait for another year, as our school term closes soon. this is a school whose average attendance is about sixteen. the people are progressive, and see that we have all modern appliances: gymnasium, school garden, bubbling fountain, sanitary toilets, and a good heating system are some of the good things our country school enjoys. some original features are included in a plan in operation in algona, king county, washington. the algona plan of grading is this: the actual number of minutes employed in doing the daily chores is registered. thirty minutes is allowed for church attendance. twenty-five per cent is given weekly for each of the personal care items, bathing, brushing teeth, sleeping with open windows, and going to bed before nine o'clock. half an hour's work must be done each day, else the pupil forfeits the work done that day. if at the end of a month the pupil has made an average of per cent on personal care, and has per cent on home work, his grade average for the month is raised per cent. for instance, if a boy should have the required per cent in the home credit department, and should have an average of per cent in his school subjects, his final grade for the month would be per cent. algona uses a book system of keeping the pupils' weekly home credit grades. the principal records the final grades for each week, after collecting the cards from his three assistants. he expects to substitute the card system for the book another year, using the same plan of record. below is given the plan for keeping the records, together with the work of one boy for a month:-- _leon noel's record in book_ -------------+---------------+---------------+--------------- week ending | minutes | personal care | leon noel -------------+---------------+---------------+--------------- february | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------+---------------+---------------+--------------- _home work record of_ _leon noel._ _for week ending february , ._ ------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- |sun. |mon. |tues.|wed. |thur.|fri. |sat. |total ------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. | ------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- . working in garden.. | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . splitting kindlings | | ... | | | | | | . bringing in fuel... | | | | | | | | . milking cow........ | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . care of horse...... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . preparing meals.... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . washing dishes..... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . sweeping........... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . dusting............ | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . bedroom work....... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . washing............ | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . ironing............ | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . care of baby....... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... . care of | | | | | | | | chickens........... | | ... | | | | | | . running | | | | | | | | errands............ | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | a. bathing............ | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | x | ... b. brushing teeth..... | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... c. sleeping with | | | | | | | | open windows....... | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... d. going to bed before | | | | | | | | o'clock.......... | x | x | x | x | ... | x | x | ... e. attending | | | | | | | | church or | | | | | | | | sunday | | | | | | | | school............. | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total........... | | | | | | | | ------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- i certify that the above is a correct record. (signed) mrs. c. d. french, _signature of parent or guardian._ a comparison of leon noel's home credit record on his slip with the record in the principal's book shows that while he has credits on the former he is credited with only the required on the record. c. c. calavan, the principal, expects to allow a holiday, or grant additional credit on school work another year, for credits above the half-hour a day. the children of the school at first insisted on making an hour's work the minimum for a day's credit, but mr. calavan decided to start conservatively. it will be noticed that leon noel lost three points in each of the last two weeks of february. this was because he was not in bed before nine every evening. mr. calavan says he is going to change his plan along this line next year, granting three or four evenings a month when a child may be in bed a little later than nine without forfeiting credits. he believes that a happy, wholesome evening, spent in play with companions, has a very valuable place in the child's development. sunday-school and church attendance has become popular in algona since school credit has been given for it. the little daughter in a non-church-going family had never attended any church services until it was brought out that the other children at school were getting credit for such attendance. the parents dressed the little girl for sunday school, and sent her off, determined that their child should not be left out in the home credit game. a boy's record was perfect, except that he did not have a church attendance recorded. on inquiry the principal found that albert's family was of the seventh day adventist faith, and that the boy was at church as regularly as saturday came. he was at once given credit. the children of the catholic faith are given credit for attending the catechism class that meets in the schoolhouse tuesday afternoons. "the people took hold," said mr. calavan. "the parent-teachers' association is enthusiastic over the plan, and is doing all possible to help. two decided results that home credits have brought about are that we have a much neater, better-kept class of pupils, and our boys are off the streets. several persons have remarked to me that the school was doing something with the boys, surely, for they all seemed to be busy after school." * * * * * the system introduced in portland, oregon, schools, is the daily record and weekly report plan. the following suggestions were sent out early in by the portland office:-- _suggestions for using the "home record slip"_ the regular monthly report card should contain two extra columns, one entitled "home work" and one "personal care," and in these columns the pupil should be marked on the scale of . one hundred per cent in the "home work" column would be secured by a daily record of not less than one half-hour of approved work for seven days each week. one hundred per cent in the "personal care" column would be secured by daily practice of numbers a, b, c, and d for seven days of the week, and for attendance upon some religious service. twenty per cent could be allowed for each number and twenty per cent for attendance at church or sunday school. the matter of bathing should not be interpreted to refer strictly to tub baths, since in large families daily tub baths are sometimes impracticable, and inability to make a good showing on the card would have a tendency to discourage. different plans of reward for a given number of minutes devoted to work during a week are outlined in the pamphlet, "school industrial credit for home industrial work." these, however, may be modified or enlarged to suit. all time, including the half-hour a day and the amount allowed for all other operations, should be counted toward a specified total necessary to earn the reward. these rules are printed on the back of each home credit record card:-- _rules governing credit for home work_ every friday afternoon a home work record slip will be given to each pupil. beginning with sunday, all time spent by the pupil in home work should be entered in the proper space. each monday morning a slip filled during the previous week should be returned to the teacher. the slip must be signed by the parent or guardian as an assurance that a correct record has been kept. any work not listed but of value to the parents may be counted, and the nature of the work specified in the blank spaces. at the close of the school month, when the report of school work is made out, in the column "home work," the pupil will be marked on the scale of for actual work of not less than one half-hour each day, and in the column "personal care" on the scale of for numbers a, b, c, and d, and for attendance at church or sunday school. in addition to credit on the report card, reward may be given at the option of the principal for a specified amount of time spent in useful work at home. for purpose of reward credit of five minutes a day will be allowed for each operation listed as a, b, c, and d, and twenty minutes for attendance at church or sunday school. the portland home work record slips are printed by the city office, and furnished to teachers who wish to use them. on pages , , and are given home credit records of portland children, showing the class of home work they are doing. a swift review of a child's record gives the teacher a pretty accurate estimate of his home environment. elsie g., whose card is shown, has kept weekly records of her work for more than a year. she and some of the other girls make it a practice to help miss wright, their teacher, enroll the records for the class. the method of crediting is extremely simple, but it seems to work. the pupils return the filled-out slips the first of every week; at the end of each month the girls count the slips, and for every pupil who has brought in four slips they register one credit in the book. miss wright looks over the cards as they come in, and often makes comment on the work, to the individual, or to the class as a whole. [illustration: _home work record of_ _elsie g----._ _for week ending december , ._ -------------------------+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- | sun. | mon.|tues.|wed. |thur.|fri. | sat.| +------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+total | min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. | -------------------------+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- . work in garden | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . splitting kindlings | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . bringing in fuel | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . milking cow | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of horse | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . preparing meals | ... | | | | | | | | | +| | | | | | . washing dishes | | | | | | | ... | | | | | | | | | . sweeping | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . dusting | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . bedroom work | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . washing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . ironing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of baby | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | a. bathing | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... | | | | | | | | b. brushing teeth | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... | | | | | | | | c. sleeping with | | | | | | | | open windows | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... | | | | | | | | d. going to bed before | | | | | | | | o'clock | ... | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... | | | | | | | | e. attending | | | | | | | | church or | | | | | | | | sunday | | | | | | | | school | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... +------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | | | | | | | | -------------------------+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- i certify that the above is a correct record. mrs. g. h. g----, _signature of parent or guardian._ ] * * * * * miss wright began this home credit work by taking sixteen of the printed slips and laying them on her desk. the boys left the room to go to manual training, and the girls then gathered around her desk and discovered the slips. "what are these?" they inquired, and they each wanted one to take home. there were just enough for the girls, but when the boys found out about it they clamored for slips, too. miss wright now leaves a pile of the blanks on her desk every friday, and most of the pupils take them. they used to ask to have the credit applied to raise their standings on their lowest studies (they are allowed, for instance, to increase a mark of seven in grammar to a mark of eight for one month), but now they seldom ask for the increase. they do their home work and record it with no other incentive than the satisfaction of having a record and the honor and approval of their parents, teacher, and schoolmates. the ten-year-old boy whose card is shown here goes on week-ends to the country, and brings in his record afterward with great pride to show the other fellows that he has cared for horses. [illustration: _home work record of_ _henry f. p----._ _for week ending , ..._ -----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- |sun. |mon. |tues.|wed. |thur.|fri. |sat. | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |total -----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- . work in garden | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . splitting kindlings| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . bringing in fuel | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . milking cow | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of horses | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . preparing meals | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . washing dishes | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . sweeping | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . dusting | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . bedroom work | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . washing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . ironing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of baby | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | feeding chickens | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | feeding rabbits | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | a. bathing | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ... | | | | | | | | b. brushing teeth | | | | | | | | ... | | | | | | | | c. sleeping with | | | | | | | | open windows | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | | | | | | | | | d. going to bed before | | | | | | | | o'clock | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | e. attending | | | | | | | | church or | | | | | | | | sunday | | | | | | | | school | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | -----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- i certify that the above is a correct record. flora h. p---- _signature of parent or guardian._ ] * * * * * we find many instances, like the following, where boys who at first had nothing to do, seemingly, but to get in the fuel, have begun to assist their mothers with the dishwashing, dusting, and cooking. not only does this work run up their list of credits at school, but it causes them to appreciate what mother has to do, gets them acquainted with their homes, and keeps them off the streets. and it has other uses for a boy. henry turner bailey says:-- away from home, as a lonely art student and young teacher in strange and home-sickening boarding houses, maybe i wasn't thankful to be able to sweep and dust, to wash and iron and cook, upon occasion, to sew on buttons, to darn, and to mend. but perhaps my keenest satisfaction came from my ability to make a bed. the boarding-house madonnas are not, as a rule, highly skilled in that gentle art. in view of my personal experiences i have often wondered why the advocates of domestic science are not more strongly co-educational. what is sauce for the goose seems to me worthy to be sauce for the gander,--certainly during the gosling stage. every boy should know how to sew, just as every girl should know how to whittle. every boy should know how to cook, just as every girl should know how to swim. skill in the elemental arts is a form of what henderson calls human wealth. all should participate.[ ] [ ] _school arts magazine_, may, . [illustration: _home work record of_ _harold r_----. _for week ending december , ._ -----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- |sun. |mon. |tues.|wed. |thur.|fri. |sat. | |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |min. |total ---- ------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- . work in garden | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . splitting kindlings| ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . bringing in fuel | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | . milking cow | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of horse | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . preparing meals | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . washing dishes | | | | | | | | ... | | | | | | | | . sweeping | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . dusting | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . bedroom work | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | . washing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . ironing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . care of baby | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | a. bathing | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | | | b. brushing teeth | x | ... | x | x | x | x | x | | | | | | | | | c. sleeping with open | | | | | | | | windows | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | | | | | | | | | d. going to bed before | | | | | | | | o'clock | x | x | x | x | x | x | --- | | | | | | | | | e. attending church or | | | | | | | | sunday school | x | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | | | | | | | | -----------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- i certify that the above is a correct record. mrs. f. m. r.----, _signature of parent or guardian_. ] * * * * * a portland woman, who is much interested in the schools, says:-- in looking over some of the cards i find that the child soon learns to do his "chores" in less time each week, that he may have more time for other work or play, and yet fill out his record card. this is a great help to the parents. i know one boy who cannot be induced to go out to an evening affair because he wants to get to bed before nine o'clock so that his record card will be perfect. how soon could we dismiss the juvenile court if we could get all children to feel like that! it is worth while to try. in polk county, oregon, the system has been introduced into rural schools with marked success. the plan here comprises a daily record, and monthly reports. below are excerpts from an article written for the _oregon teachers' monthly_, by mr. r. g. dykstra, who used home credits in his rural school at suver, polk county, in - . i should like to direct especial attention to his testimony on the tardiness record of the district; also to his plan of allowing credit for a long walk to school. with the following exceptions i carried out the work as started in the spring valley school last year: i required the pupils to get eight hundred minutes' credit before taking the holiday instead of six hundred; the number of minutes' credit for milking cows was increased from five to fifteen for each cow and a reasonable amount of credit was allowed for all work not named in the list of chores; children living over a mile and a half from school were allowed credit for the distance they had to walk in proportion to the others, and per cent instead of was added to the end of the year on their final school averages for the carrying on of the work. only two prizes were offered by the district, three dollars and two dollars respectively. children seldom took advantage of the holiday given for eight hundred minutes' credit unless it was used for sickness or unavoidable absence, as they were encouraged in the knowledge that a day lost was a day's work lost as well. tardiness on the part of any pupil doing the work meant a loss of so many credits already accumulated. it would be impossible to enumerate the many things this work has done for this community, but the following facts may prove interesting to the reader. during the year of - , without home credit work, this school had a record of per cent in attendance and tardies. for the year - just closed, the record is per cent in attendance and tardies. part of the home credits given have been for proper care of body, sleeping with windows open, care of teeth, hair, etc., and the result of these requirements has been the showing of a healthier appearance on the part of nearly all the pupils. the parents of the district claim that the children are doing more work at home than they ever did before, and the people feel that their children are getting an education that will be of value to them and that the money is being well spent in this kind of work. the card issued by county superintendent seymour is here reproduced filled out by a pupil. it shows daily records for two weeks on each side of the card. the five school days only are counted. [illustration: _home credit card_ _north dallas school, polk county, oregon._ _blanks to be filled in each day. parents sign before returning it to teacher. blanks to be returned each month and a new one secured._ _edwin b----._ _february, , ._ _pupil's name._ _month._ m. t. w. t. f. total m. t. w. t. f. total building fire milking each cow daily cleaning barn, each animal carrying wood splitting wood turning separator cleaning separator churning butter working butter cleaning horse feeding chickens feeding pigs feeding horse feeding cows blacking stove making bread getting breakfast getting supper washing dishes sweeping floor, each room cleaning house, each room scrubbing floor, each room making beds, each washing clothes ironing clothes bathing arrive at school clean music lesson bed at p.m. gathering eggs cleaning teeth cleaning finger nails sleeping with window open making pies cleaning and filling lamps errands reading book home distance school, over half-mile total teacher and pupils to go over list and agree on time for each thing. distance from school more than one-half mile to be given credit for. any work not listed that is creditable teacher will give credit for. mr. and mrs. w. h. b----, signature of parents. ] * * * * * the card given on pages and came from miss veva burns, the teacher at north dallas, with the following letter, dated april , :-- i am pleased to explain the home credit system as we use it. i am sending some of the cards filled out by the pupils. we secure these cards from mr. seymour, the county school superintendent, and are allowed to use them as we think best.... we have a two-room school, and have divided it into two divisions, the smaller pupils having five thousand credits as their aim, while the larger ones work for ten thousand. of course the number to be obtained would vary with the opportunity the children would have to earn credits. on the average, it takes our pupils about three months to earn the required number. when they have secured the number, some prize, such as a book, is given, and they are allowed to start again. then, at the end of school, the one who has earned the most is given a special prize. also, mr. seymour allows us to give ten points on each child's lowest grade, at the close of school, if he has kept up his home credit work during the school year. some teachers give a holiday as a reward instead of a prize. the cards are taken home by the pupils and filled out each evening. if the pupils are too small to attend to the cards, some member of the family looks after them. we see to it that the system is thoroughly understood by each family. as each card is filled out, it is returned to us. we have a school of over sixty pupils, and all but four are working on the credit system. we did not urge any one to take it up, but allowed them to decide for themselves. this letter is from miss miriam h. rarey, who has taught near dallas, in :-- work done on saturdays and sundays does not count with the exception of bathing. pupils, as a rule, when they bathe at all, bathe on saturday. so i told them they could take thirty minutes' credit for that, and put it down in friday's space, in the hope that it would induce them to bathe at least once a week. it worked pretty well with some of the pupils, but others would rather do without the credits than do anything so unusual. when a pupil gets five thousand credits (every minute counts one credit) he gets his grade on his poorest study raised per cent, or if he does not need that, he gets a holiday without being marked absent. the pupils have all worked pretty hard for credits, and only a few have asked for holidays. the people in the district have all been pleased with the results of home credit and i think it is a good thing. i have seventeen pupils, and they are all using home credits. the idaho plan as sent out by the state superintendent, miss grace m. shepherd, in a bulletin to teachers is as follows: miss shepherd issued two mimeographed sheets, one of rules, and one a list of credits. the blank has a place for a daily record and a report for several weeks. _rules governing home work_ . no pupil is obliged to enter the contest. . parent must sign statement of work done by pupil. . contest closes when school term closes. . unexcused absence forfeits all credits. unexcused tardiness forfeits per cent of credits per month. less than per cent deportment, per cent of all credits forfeited. . suggested awards: names of the six highest at the close of school will be published in a county paper. three highest at the close of school to be offered prize by the school board or some citizen. five per cent credit to be added to final examination results of all pupils who enter and continue in the contest. _urge the hearty coöperation of the parents_. [illustration: _record of home credit work_ _month beginning_ ........................ _ending_................ ..................... _school_ ...................... _county_ pupils or parents will fill in the following blanks each day and return to the teacher each month signed by the parent_. ------------------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+-- |m.|t.|w.|t.|f.|m.|t.|w.|t.|f.|m.|t.|w.|t.|f. ------------------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+-- rising morning without | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | being called m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | building fire in | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | morning m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | milking m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaning barn m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaning each horse m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | feeding pigs m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | feeding horses m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | feeding chickens m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | feeding cows m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | bringing fuel for | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | the day m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | getting breakfast m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | washing and wiping | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | dishes m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | sweeping floor m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | scrubbing floor m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | making beds m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | making and baking | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | bread m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | dusting a room m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | caring for younger | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | children full time | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | washing and ironing | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | school clothes m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | bathing m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | cleaning teeth and | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | finger nails m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | bed at : p.m. m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | sleeping with | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | window open m. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | total | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ------------------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+-----+--+-- ............................................. _signature of parent._ ] * * * * * in charleston, washington, superintendent h. w. elliott, of the city schools, put into successful operation, in - , a plan with several special features, to which i am glad to call attention. the plan comprises daily markings by the tally system, monthly reports, cash prizes to those showing the largest number of home credits, and some reward to every pupil with credits above a certain specified number. for the purpose of raising a fund to meet the cash prizes, his school gave a play; and an autumn fair, in october, was arranged for the distribution of the prizes for both school and home work. the credit card is different from any other; it seems to be the most simple of all the monthly systems. [illustration: _how to keep the credits in the home_ _for every duty the child has done put down | after the name of the duty the child has performed. example:_ _cutting wood_ ||||| ||||| ||||| | _taking bath ||||| ||||| || this is to indicate the number of times._ all that are credits all that are credits canning jar of fruit........... music practice ( min.).......... making and baking cake......... milking cow....................... making and baking pie.......... crocheting (hour)................. sweeping room.................. cleaning basement................. making bed..................... making apron...................... setting table.................. keeping front yard clean.......... dusting furniture.............. keeping back yard clean........... making handkerchief............ keeping sidewalk clean............ making any other thing......... keeping alley clean............... keeping room ventilated........ keeping steps and porch clean..... splitting kindling............. politeness to seniors............. cutting wood................... table etiquette................... bringing in fuel............... blacking stove................. all that are credits scrubbing room................. running errands................ up first and building fire........ taking care of birds........... sprinkling lawn ( h.)............ washing teeth.................. clerking in store ( h.).......... taking bath.................... driving team ( h.)............... in bed by nine................. helping with freight ( h.)....... up by seven.................... making and baking bread........... helping others dress........... attending sunday school........... brushing clothes (self)........ attending church service.......... polishing shoes (self)......... feeding cow or other animal.... all that are credits gathering eggs................. at school with clean washing clothes ( h.)............ hands...................... ironing clothes ( h.)............ face....................... taking care of baby ( h.)........ teeth...................... preparing meal (family)........... nails...................... cleaning barn..................... hair combed................ cleaning henhouse................. carrying papers................... all that are credits making dress (self)............... cutting half rick of wood......... spading up sq. ft. garden..... total........................ send in report on or before the th of each month. ] * * * * * mr. elliott sent out a mimeographed sheet explaining the rules to be observed in the contest, giving a list of the credits, and also a list of the articles to be exhibited at the fair. the rules, and the list of articles are given here. _rules_ all boys and girls now in one of the eight grades of the charleston public schools, district no. , may enter in one of the four classes; d, first grade; c, d and d; b, th and th; a, th, th, and th. home credits for each month must be reported to the school for record on or before the th of each month. records to be confidential. we hope that every home will enter into this, and that the _parent will be very careful and conscientious in the marking_. credits to be kept by parents. _a list of articles to be exhibited_ for school fair exhibit--to be determined by judges _household economics_-- . domestic science: best loaf of bread, cake, pie, dozen cookies, dozen doughnuts. . domestic art: best made plain dress, plain apron, shirt-waist, sofa pillow, handkerchief, patchwork pillow, darning or repairing specimen. . canning: peas, peaches, apples, pears, cherries, string beans. _agriculture_-- best ears of corn, potatoes, selected apples, carrots, onions, turnips, squash, pumpkin, raised by pupil. _horticulture_-- nasturtiums, pansies, sweet peas, each sprays; asters, dahlias, chrysanthemums, each sprays--raised by pupil. best roses cared for by pupil. _poultry_-- best cockerel, or pullet, or cockerel and pullet reared from a setting of eggs. _manual training_-- best mechanical drawing, joined work, tabouret, small piece of furniture, large piece of furniture, basket, bookbinding, etc. _school work_-- what teachers see fit to make it--drawing, etc. _music_-- best played selection on piano, violin, cornet, or other instrument: or orchestra or band: solo singing or chorus. in band or orchestra work pupils may be judged collectively or singly. same judgment for all chorus work. something more may be added later. yours for a good fair, the teachers. h. w. elliott, city superintendent. mr. elliott writes: "i believe there is nothing that will link the home and school more closely than the system of credits. there is one danger, however, of cultivating dishonesty on the part of the over-anxious one. this we watch, but this tendency is sometimes noticeable. occasionally we find a youngster attending sunday school or church fifteen or twenty times a month." examples of the scheme of a weekly record with monthly report are plans in operation in jackson county, and in weston, umatilla county, oregon. the rules and schedule following were published by mr. j. percy wells, county superintendent of jackson county. _rules governing home credit work_ . no pupil shall be required to enter the home credit contest, and any pupil shall be free to quit the contest at any time, but if any one quits without good cause, all credits earned shall be forfeited. . once each month the parent or guardian shall send to the teacher, with signature affixed, an itemized statement containing a record of the work each child has done during the preceding month. the child may make out the list, but the parent or guardian must sign the same. . at the end of each school month the teacher shall enter on the pupil's report card the total number of credits for home work during the month, as certified to by the parent or guardian. . any pupil who has earned at least two hundred credits for home work during any school month shall be entitled to have per cent added to his grade in any subject, or distributed among several subjects, and per cent additional for each twenty additional credits up to four hundred credits. . all pupils who shall have earned four hundred credits or more during any month shall be entitled to a half-holiday, and shall have their names entered on a roll of honor. . forfeitures--dropping out of contest without cause, all credits earned; unexcused absence, all credits due; unexcused tardiness, per cent off all credits due; less than per cent in deportment for any month, per cent off all credits due. these rules may be modified by teachers to suit local conditions. if the half-holiday system of awards is not satisfactory, some other system may be substituted. _to parents and guardians_: in this plan for giving school credit for home work it is not the intention of the school to intrude upon the domain of the home, but to coöperate with the home in the interest of the boys and girls. here is a splendid chance for the school and the home to come closer together, and we believe both will be improved thereby. [illustration: _home credit schedule, school district no. jackson county, oregon_ _name of pupil, goldie trefren. age, . grade, th. month ending march , _ ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- |credits| st| d | d | th| total | |week|week|week|week| ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- building fire | [ ] | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- milking cow | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- splitting and carrying | | | | | | in wood ( hours' supply) | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- turning cream separator | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- grooming horse | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- gathering eggs | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- feeding chickens, pigs, horse, or cow | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- churning or making butter | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- blacking stove | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- making and baking bread | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- making biscuits | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- preparing meal for family | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- washing and wiping dishes | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- sweeping floor, each room | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- dusting furniture, each room | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- scrubbing floor, each room | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- making bed (after school) | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- washing, starching, and ironing own | | | | | | clothes, worn to school each week | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- bathing, each bath | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- arriving at school with clean hands, | | | | | | face, teeth, nails, and hair combed | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- practicing music at least minutes | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- retiring on or before o'clock | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- bathing and dressing baby | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- sleeping with windows open or with | | | | | | window-boards | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- work not listed, per hour | | | | | | ----------------------------------------+-------+----+----+----+----+------- total l. s. trefren, _parent or guardian_ [ ] a task counting done each day, gives seven credits for the week. ] * * * * * the following letter, dated april , , is from mrs. bertha mckinney, of a district near ashland, jackson county. pupils of the first, second, and third grades, who have earned two hundred credits in a month have a half-holiday. those of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades must have earned three hundred credits to entitle them to the half-holiday, and of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, four hundred credits. when all have the required number of credits, all have the half-holiday. i have twenty pupils, and all are doing the home credit work. i keep the record of the credits earned in a notebook, and place the number earned by each pupil on the monthly report card. i think the plan a good one, though in a few cases the parents are not careful enough with their part; that is, they sign the blank form, then the child can put down any number he pleases. i have had only one such case. superintendent joel o. davis, of weston, tells of the manner in which his school began to use home credits:-- the opportunity came in october of last year, when an unexpected influx of pupils made it necessary for us to engage an extra teacher and adopt a departmental plan for the fifth to eighth grades inclusive. this made it necessary for those grades to prepare two lessons at home, thus making the required home reading a burden. i at once offered these students the choice of reading the required books, and writing the reviews, or making the points by home work, under the conditions as shown by the accompanying card. nearly every child accepted the home work plan, and went to work enthusiastically. on the opposite page is one of the weston credit cards, filled out by a pupil, crete allen:-- _home work record, weston public school_ credits will be given for the performance of the following named duties when this card is returned, at the end of the month, properly signed by the parent or guardian. these credits will be accepted in place of the home reading heretofore required, at the rate of points for each book. the parent must check the work each day as performed. any evasion or falsification of the record will forfeit all claim to credit. to obtain credit each duty must be performed by the child unaided by others, and must be well and satisfactorily done. no credit will be given for work that is paid for by the parent or others. parents are requested to see that the above conditions are complied with and to encourage thoroughness and truthfulness by using care in recording so as to give no unearned credits. make one mark, and only one, for each duty each day.[ ] [ ] all the marking is done by tallies, thus: ||||| ||||| ||||| |||| the reproduction on page permits only the use of figures, to indicate the total tally marks. [illustration: -------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- | st | d | d | th |total | week| week| week| week| -------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- . carrying wood | | ... | ... | | | | | | | . feeding horse | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | | | | | . feeding cow | | | | | | | | | | . feeding pigs | | | | | | | | | | . feeding chickens | ... | ... | | | | | | | | . milking cow | | | | | | | | | | . cleaning stable | | | | | | | | | | . washing dishes | | ... | ... | ... | | | | | | . drying dishes | | | ... | ... | | | | | | . making bed | ... | | ... | | | | | | | . sweeping room | | ... | ... | | | | | | | . setting table | | | | | | | | | | . clearing table | | | ... | | | | | | | . tidiness | | | | | | | | | | . brushing teeth | | | | | | | | | | . cleaning nails | | | | | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----- total | ... | ... | ... | ... | -------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- no. includes general tidiness, hanging hat and coat, putting away clothes, shoes, stockings, etc., and will be given more credit than any other one duty. parents should use care in marking this number, as the aim is to inculcate habits of neatness and thoughtful consideration of others. this end can easily be defeated by careless or unfair marking. i hereby certify that the above record is true and correct. mrs. j. e. allen (_parent or guardian._)] * * * * * at the close of a later letter mr. davis wrote:-- from my experience with this experiment i feel that the plan is worth all it costs and more, that it should be extended to include all the grades, that modifications to meet the needs of different communities can easily be made, and that the pupils and patrons of any district will appreciate and support some such plan if it is carried out faithfully. i kept a ledger account with every child, and at the end of the month posted a bulletin exhibiting the condition of each pupil's account. the interest was shown by the manner in which they gathered about the board and compared their credits. some of the comments upon some lazy boy's or girl's lack of effort were rather caustic, but served as effective spurs to the delinquent. in pend oreille county, washington, six weeks is the unit of time for credit records. miss hester c. soules, the county superintendent, has issued the following circular:-- the home we work together the school school credit for home work in order that the school and home may unite forces, that the school may help in establishing habits of home-making, and that our boys and girls may be taught that their parents are their best friends and need their help, the following system of credits has been devised for use in the schools of pend oreille county. _certificate of promotion with distinction_ any pupil who has completed the work of his grade in a satisfactory manner is entitled to promotion with credit to the next higher grade, provided he obtains points for home work. he is entitled to promotion with honor if he earns points. six weeks' faithful and regular performance of the home duties listed below will entitle the pupil to credit as indicated. points . sawing, splitting, and carrying in wood and kindling . building fires or tending furnace . caring for horse or cow and doing other barn chores . caring for poultry and gathering eggs . working in the school or home garden, or on the farm . delivering milk or carrying water . running errands cheerfully . doing without being told . mowing the lawn . feeding pigs . making a bird-house and feeding the birds . making useful piece of woodwork for the home . cleaning barn . churning . turning cream separator . retiring at nine o'clock or before . bathing at least twice each week . sleeping in fresh air . getting up in the morning without being called . preparing one meal alone daily for the family . blacking stove . helping with the breakfast, and with the dishes after breakfast . preparing smaller children for school . not being tardy . cleaning teeth daily . making own graduating dress--eighth grade . writing weekly letter to some absent relative--grandmother preferred . reading and reporting on one approved library book . reading aloud fifteen minutes or longer each night to some member or members of the family circle . practicing music lesson thirty minutes daily . building fence, rods fence may be built at intervals during any one period of six weeks. . clearing / acre of land land may be cleared any time during the school year and at different times provided the / a. is completed before school closes. . care of younger children . raising one fourth acre of vegetables . taking sole care of plants and flowers . sweeping floor and dusting furniture . making beds . mopping and caring for kitchen . scouring and cleaning bath tub and lavatory . helping with the washing . sprinkling and ironing clothes . making and baking bread, biscuits or cake. exhibit . setting table and serving . helping cook supper and helping do the dishes after supper . doing own mending . learning to knit or crochet . raising six varieties of flowers . making piece of hand-work for the home ---- total _certificate of promotion with distinction_ ---- having completed the work of the ---- grade in the pend oreille county schools, in a satisfactory manner, and having earned ---- points in our home and outside industrial work plan, is hereby promoted to the ---- grade with ---- ---- and is commended for industry, fidelity to home and cheerful helpfulness. given at newport, washington, this ---- day of ----, . --------------------- ----------------- _superintendent_. _teacher_. the city of los angeles, california, uses a plan of marking home work on the report card and giving no other incentive. notice that a certain number of minutes daily for ten weeks is the unit, and that the number of minutes varies according to the age of the child. observe the emphasis on care of yards and streets, also on care of little brothers and sisters. _report of committee on home credits, los angeles schools_ the committee on home credits makes these recommendations:-- . that the "home credits" be not used as a substitute for other work, and also that they be not applied to increase the grade of other subjects except as any work well done necessarily improves all work of the child. . that the words "home credit" be written on the new cards just published, and that in the future these words be printed as a regular part of the card, with space for inserting the number of credits. . that in the several grades the following constitute one credit:-- (_a_) first and second grades, minutes of daily work for weeks. (_b_) third and fourth grades, minutes of daily work for weeks. (_c_) fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, minutes of daily work for weeks, and that multiples of such work in , , minutes be allowed so that a child may earn several credits each ten weeks. . that the following subjects be selected for the initial trial of the plan:-- . taking care of the baby. . bathing baby. . washing or wiping dishes. . washing or ironing clothes. . washing windows. . scrubbing floor. . sweeping floor. . setting table. . dusting and putting room in order. . sweeping or cleaning yard. . sweeping sidewalk. . cleaning street in front of home. . care of garbage can. . getting meals. . making beds. . mending clothes. . making new or making over old clothes for family. . working in shop or store. . working in and caring for garden. . running errands, going to market, store, etc. . driving delivery wagon. . selling papers. . taking little brothers and sisters to school, clean and on time. . clean hands, faces, clothes. . clean heads. . raising poultry or rabbits. . any other outside work peculiar to particular district if approved by supervising superintendent. weekly records, three or more months' reports mr. f. w. simmonds, superintendent of city schools, lewiston, idaho, has instituted a plan for daily and weekly records with a report for three months, which he writes is "working out most successfully." the statement of his particular scheme which he gives in his home credit record folder is accompanied by an excellent presentation of the nature and scope of the home credit plan in general:-- _a plan for school and home coöperation_ one of the vital problems of school administration to-day is that of securing closer coöperation between school and home life. when the child learns that _education is living and working the best way_ he has made considerable progress on the educational road. our school curriculum should encourage this wholesome attitude toward the everyday tasks. children must have time for real play and plenty of it, but let us not forget that real work is also a part of the child's rightful heritage, and that when rightly directed, children like to work--they are eager to take part in some of the real activities of life. however, they must not be permitted to attempt too much--a reasonable amount of _work well done regularly_ and suited to the child's age and ability is what is desired. _filling out this card is optional with the parent_, no grade on the quality of the work done by the child is asked for, merely the approximate time regularly devoted to that task. note the time; one half-hour, one hour, two hours, etc., in the proper column on this card. your filling out and signing this card will assure us that the work was well done, regularly and satisfactorily. the work may include any one or more of the multitude of home tasks, or any work done regularly, as sewing, ironing, washing dishes, preparing meals, baking, cutting kindling, gardening, milking, caring for poultry, feeding stock, making beds, music lessons, tending furnace, etc. some tasks occur daily (others weekly, as regular saturday chores, music lessons and the like). nothing less than a _half-hour_ is to be recognized, though two or more tasks may be grouped to make a half-hour daily or weekly. the average child will be anxious to figure his home service in the large; but a reasonably conservative "statement of account" will have a greater disciplinary value, and will make for efficiency. the _unit_ of home credit will be _one half-hour's daily work throughout the month_. time spent on regular weekly tasks will be adjusted by the teacher to this basis. if the work in quantity, quality and regularity is deemed worthy, the teacher will credit the pupil with the number of home credits earned, which will be added to the pupil's standing at the end of the semester in determining promotion. each _unit_ of credit in home work will have the effect of raising a monthly grade in some subject one step as from _poor_ to _fair_, or _fair_ to _good_, etc. by means of home credits, a pupil has an opportunity to raise his promotion standing to "promoted with honor," or "promoted with highest honors" as the case may be, if he should lack a point or two, and have earned enough home credits to offset this. in the borough of the bronx in new york city, mr. frederick j. reilly began to give school credit for home work in the fall of . he issues two cards of different colors, one for the girls and one for the boys. the cards are alike except for the words "he" and "she." notice that the cards are well planned for use in city homes. at present they are used by the children of seventh and eighth grades. mr. reilly says, "the important thing is not the amount of credit the child receives in school, but rather the amount of influence this may have upon the training of the child at home." [illustration: public school , the bronx frederick j. reilly, principal _home record of_.......... _class_........ _term, _........ =========================================================================== this record card is part of an effort to bring the home and the school closer together; pupils will receive credit in school for the things they do at home. parents are invited to answer any or all of these questions as they see fit, leaving blank any that they prefer not to answer. there is nothing compulsory about this: children will not lose in class standing if the parents do not choose to fill out this card. _please return the card in the envelop, sealed_. =========================================================================== answer i to v, yes or no | st mo.| d mo.| d mo.| th mo. ---------------------------------------------+-------+------+------+------- i. does he get ready for school on time, | | | | without constant urging? | | | | ---------------------------------------------+-------+------+------+------- ii. is he careful about having his hair, | | | | neck, hands, shoes, etc., _clean_? | | | | ---------------------------------------------+-------+------+------+------- iii. does he keep his books, clothes, etc., | | | | in the places assigned for them? | | | | ---------------------------------------------+-------+------+------+------- iv. does he prepare his school work at a | | | | regular time and without constant | | | | urging? | | | | ---------------------------------------------+-------+------+------+------- v. does he go to bed regularly at a | | | | reasonable hour? | | | | =========================================================================== answer vi to x more fully ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- vi. is he willing and helpful in | st mo. little household duties? what +-------------------------------------- does he do regularly for which | d " he deserves credit? +-------------------------------------- | d " +-------------------------------------- | th " ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- vii. does he attend faithfully to | st mo. any extra lessons, as music, +-------------------------------------- dancing, gymnasium, religious | d " instruction, etc.? if so, what? +-------------------------------------- | d " +-------------------------------------- | th mo ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- viii. has he any hobby at which he | st mo. spends a considerable part of his +-------------------------------------- time, as music, drawing, | d " photography, electricity, gardening,+-------------------------------------- collecting, etc.? | d " +-------------------------------------- | th " ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- ix. does he read much? | st mo. what does he read? +-------------------------------------- | d " +-------------------------------------- | d " +-------------------------------------- | th " ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- x. does he do anything else, not | st mo. already mentioned, for which he +-------------------------------------- deserves credits? | d " +-------------------------------------- | d " +-------------------------------------- | th " ------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- signature of parent: st mo......................... d mo......................... d mo......................... th mo......................... ] * * * * * superintendent e. b. conklin, of ontario, malheur county, in , was the next in oregon after mr. o'reilly to send a letter to parents, and to arrange for giving credits on home work. on page are the inside pages of the folder that mr. conklin devised; it was the first of the printed home credit report cards. notice the entries of manners, of "doing before told," and of "kindness to animals." * * * * * mr. e. g. bailey, superintendent of ontario, - , writes that they have been using home credits continuously there, and that the system has proved to be a wonderful help. "it gets parents and teachers together as nothing else can, and gives the superintendent a show. the home work is to the teacher what the school work is to the parent. the teacher is enabled to get an insight into the home life of the pupil, which in turn enables her the better to deal with whatever situation may arise. in the main the parents make an effort to let the teacher know what the pupils are doing at home. we have very few failures from parents not doing their duty in this matter; where they fail, we refuse to send any report home. since adopting the system our attendance has been better, and the punctuality has been better; in fact, things have been greatly improved in every respect." [illustration: ------------------------------------------------------------------- e--excellent. g--good. -------------------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- sewing and mending.................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | bread-making........................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | general cooking..................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | setting and serving table........... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | washing and wiping dishes........... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | washing and ironing................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | sweeping and making beds............ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | mopping and care of kitchen......... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | care of younger children............ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | making fires........................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | getting water, coal, kindling, etc.. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | feeding stock or poultry............ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | milking cows........................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | barn or yard work................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | garden or field work................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | errands............................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------- f--fair. p--poor. -------------------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- cheerfulness, kindness.............. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | order and care of clothes........... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | cleanliness, bathing, etc........... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | table manners....................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | politeness.......................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | keeping temper...................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | doing before told................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | care of language.................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | at home--off streets................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | courteous to parents................ |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | kindness to animals................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | care of playthings.................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | home study.......................... |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... | | | | | ambition to succeed................. |.....|.....|.....|.....|..... -------------------------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+----- ] * * * * * early in december, , a large meeting in the interest of social center work was held in roslyn, washington. at this meeting the city superintendent, linden mccullough, explained the school credit for home work idea. he advised that a vote be taken as to whether the schools of that town should adopt the plan. the vote showed that parents, teachers, and pupils were enthusiastic over the idea and eager to try it. the woman's club of the city volunteered to assist in every possible way. the following from letters from mr. mccullough gives the result of the trial:-- seventy-five per cent of our seven hundred and fifty pupils are taking advantage of the scheme. our truant officer says that every parent he has talked with has praised the plan, for the reason that all the children do their chores with more spirit. our police officers have noticed a falling-off in the number of children on the streets; so much so that juvenile court cases are much fewer in number. the teachers notice an improvement in school work along all lines. one boy in the fourth grade who was disagreeably indifferent about his personal care now takes baths regularly, and always brushes his hair, and keeps his clothing clean and neat. roslyn has a large number of foreign people. teachers in the first three grades say that parents of foreign children do not grasp the idea very well, but that older brothers and sisters explain its workings, and attend to keeping tab on the reports of the little children. on the next two pages is a copy of the roslyn folder. notice the entries of mending, cleaning yard, putting away playthings, work done for wages, work "in father's place of business," home study (school work), and reading good books. [illustration: _home credit report card, roslyn public schools_ _name of pupil_ ...... _teacher_ ....... _grade_ ... ----------------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+----- |first|second|third|fourth|fifth |month|month |month|month |month ----------------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+----- | | | | | caring for cows.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | caring for chickens.............. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | caring for horses................ |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | caring for hogs.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | cleaning barn or yard............ |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | washing dishes................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | sweeping......................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | washing and ironing.............. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | running errands.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | caring for baby.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | washing face and hands........... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | combing hair..................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | cleaning teeth................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | going to bed at.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | arising at....................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | sewing........................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | making beds...................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | peddling milk or papers.......... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | scrubbing........................ |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | knitting......................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | mending.......................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | cleaning house................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | cleaning yard.................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | putting away playthings.......... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | baking........................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | carrying kindling................ |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | carrying coal.................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | making fires..................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | splitting wood................... |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | washing windows.................. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | work done for wages.............. |.....|......|.....|......|..... | | | | | work, father's place of business. |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | caring for flowers............... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | shoveling snow................... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | home study, school work.......... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | reading good books............... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | cooking.......................... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | gardening........................ |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | practicing music lesson.......... |.....|......|.....|......|...... | | | | | odd jobs......................... |.....|......|.....|......|...... ----------------------------------+-----+------+-----+------+------ ] * * * * * in wilbur, washington, a scheme providing for a credit report for the semester is in successful operation. here superintendent e. o. mccormick carries on the plan by means of two report cards, the one sent from the school to the home, the other from the home to the school, every six weeks. the home card is reproduced below. [illustration: _report card from the home to the school_ _for_............................ _name._ ......................................... _parent or guardian._ _first semester_ -----------------------+-----------------+----------------+---------------- period | | | -----------------------+--------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------- subjects |average |quality |average|quality |average|quality |time |of work,|time |of work,|time |of work, answer yes or no |spent |good, |spent |good, |spent |good, |daily |fair, |daily |fair, |daily |fair, | |poor. | |poor. | |poor. -----------------------+--------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------- sleeping with open | | | | | | window | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | | | | | | keeping temper | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | | | | | | washing teeth | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | | | | | | time in recreation | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | | | | | | off streets | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... | .... -----------------------+--------+--------+-------+--------+-------+-------- this report sent to the teacher when the report card is returned to the school will help raise the standing of your child in its school work. e. o. mccormick, _supt_. the following subjects are of a suggestive nature; you may use as many as may be applicable to your child. others not listed may be used. write in the blank spaces on the front of this card those subjects under your observation. sawing wood. washing dishes. care of house. care of cows. making beds. sweeping. ironing. in bed by nine (yes or no). building fire in mornings. care of chickens. churning. making bread, biscuits, etc. preparing meals for family. blacking the stove. any work or interest in home as shown by the child should be noted on the front of the card, under the list of subjects. * * * * * mrs. elizabeth sterling, of clarke county, washington, was one of the first county superintendents to get out a card suitable for use throughout her schools. she strongly urged the teachers of her county to try the plan, and in eighty-five teachers were operating it. this card provides a record for the whole school year, with a general average for the nine months. to secure credit the pupil is required to average eight hours per week, or thirty-two hours per month, at "real honest, helpful labor that relieves the father and mother of that amount of work." this done, the teacher is to add three credits to the average gained by the pupil at the school during the month of his or her studies. additional credits are to be given for more than thirty-two hours per month at the rate of one credit for every ten hours' work. the parent or guardian is cautioned to keep track of the number of hours that the boy or girl actually spends per week at any of the kinds of work named on the credit report card, or any other real work that is not there listed. the printed list comprises:-- milking. churning. turning separator. caring for horses. caring for cows. caring for pigs. caring for poultry. cleaning barn. splitting wood. carrying in wood. gardening. cooking. baking. washing. ironing. sweeping. dusting. sewing. running errands. making beds. washing dishes. building fires. caring for little children. ii home credit in high schools several high schools have sent us reports of their plans for giving credit for work outside of school. some of these schools use plans that differ considerably from those of the elementary schools where the movement began; they lay emphasis on improvement in work, and to this end they require that all the work be supervised by the teachers of home economics, agriculture, commerce, or manual training. other high schools try to encourage the habit of industry, no matter what the kind of work, and offer credit for such tasks as running errands, delivering groceries, or carrying a paper route. in my opinion both ideas are good; there is no end to the possibilities of developing skill in home work under the instruction of one who really knows how to do it, and there is also great value in the encouragement of faithful industry in routine tasks. [illustration: auburn, washington, high school boys in railroad shops this is good school equipment. it cost $ , ] descriptions of parts of the work of a few high schools are given here. in the high school of santa monica, california, two credits for home work are allowed out of the total of sixteen required for graduation, and pupils with a certain average standing who earn eighteen credits, two of them for home work, may graduate _cum laude_. below is given a list of tasks for which school credit will be allowed:-- _one-half credit per year_:-- regular music lessons, instrumental or vocal, under a competent instructor. making own clothes for school. doing family darning and mending. preparing one meal a day for a year. carrying paper route. _one-half credit for half-time for a year, or for full time for summer vacation_:-- clerking in store, bank, or office. cement work, or work in any local trades or industries. regular work on a farm. _one-half credit_:-- raising one-fourth acre of potatoes, melons, onions, strawberries, or similar products. employment in a dressmaking or millinery establishment for summer vacation. _one-fourth credit per year each_:-- sleeping for one year in the open air. retiring at p.m. five days per week for one year. taking a cold bath every morning five times per week on an average for one year. walking three miles per day for a year. credit will be given for the following according to the amount of work:-- public speaking or reciting. reading aloud to family or to invalids. horticulture. gardening. poultry-raising. bee-culture. taking care of cows or other animals. general dairy work. sewing for the family. doing the family laundry. house-cleaning, bed-making, dish-washing, or any other useful work about the house. getting younger children ready for school every day. caring for a baby. nursing the sick. making a canoe or boat. taking full care of an automobile. perfecting any mechanical contrivance for saving labor about the home. recognizing and describing twenty different native birds, trees or flowers. summer vacation travel with written description. playing golf or tennis. sea-bathing and swimming. keeping a systematic savings bank account, with regular weekly or monthly deposits. keeping a set of books for father or some merchant. doing correspondence for father or other business man. running errands. delivering groceries. singing in church choir. teaching in sunday school. carpentry work. cabinet-making, furniture construction. working as forest ranger. [illustration: santa monica high school date ........................ .... i hereby declare my intention of earning ...... credits for home or outside work by doing ............................................................. ........................................................................... signature of pupil ..................................... i approve of the above and agree to observe and certify to the quantity and quality of work performed. signature of parent .................................... i hereby certify that ........................ has faithfully performed the above work, spending on the average ...... minutes per day for ....... days and is in my judgment entitled to ...... credits. signature of parent or employer .................................. credits granted ............... prin....................................... ] * * * * * in the high school at st. cloud, minnesota, great attention is paid to vacation work as well as to work done during the school year. at the beginning of the fall term the following questionnaire is sent to high school pupils, and to elementary pupils above the fourth grade: _vacation report--grades five to twelve_ school. note--teachers are requested to have pupils fill out this blank carefully. it is very important. explain each question. caution children not to over- or under-estimate. . name ............. age ............. grade or class ................ . did you help at home during the summer vacation? .................... . did you take music lessons? ..... travel? ..... attend summer school? . did you do any work along the line of agriculture, horticulture, gardening, bee-culture or poultry-raising? if so, what? ............. ........ estimate carefully the net profit ................... $..... . did you have a flower garden? .............. name six or more of the leading flowers that you raised. .................................... ..................................................................... ..................................................................... . name wild flowers, birds, or trees you have observed this summer. flowers ............................................................. birds ............................................................... trees ............................................................... . what pieces of hand-work, if any, did you do during vacation? wearing apparel ..................................................... household art ....................................................... wood ......................... iron.................................. cement .............. give estimated value of such hand-work $....... . what electrical contrivance or other home accessory did you make to save your mother work? ...................................... . which of the following home tasks did you do this summer? prepare one meal alone daily? ...... bake the bread? ................ bake a cake? ....................... make the beds? ................. do the washing? .................... do the ironing? ................ . are you sleeping in the open air or with open window? ............... . can you swim feet or more? ..... did you learn this summer? ..... . were you employed elsewhere than at home? ........................... . state kind of work done ............ employer ....................... . number of weeks employed ........... amount earned per week. $....... . total amount of cash earned during vacation. $....... . fair estimate of the value of your home work. $....... . total cash value of your summer work (items and ). $....... . have you a savings bank account? ... amount of your deposit. $....... principals ascertain amount of deposit for lower grades. $....... the financial results of this vacation work are summarized as follows:-- _total_ _deposit_ _cash_ _home work_ _earnings_ _in bank_ high school $ , . $ . $ . $ . total for city , . . . . highest individual earnings -- high school $ . " " " -- grades . average " " -- high school . highest " deposit -- " " . " " " -- grades . pupils may graduate with honor from the st. cloud high school by attaining certain standings and by offering two credits for home or continuation work. one of the sixteen credits required for regular graduation may be a credit for home or continuation work. the list of credits is divided into two parts, outside work and home work. among the many outside activities mentioned in the st. cloud list, we find:-- literary society work, or rhetoricals, debate, public speaking, or expressive reading, one-fourth unit per year. granite or paving-block cutting, or work in any of the local trades, shops, factories, or industries, one-fourth unit for each summer vacation. steady work on a farm, followed by a satisfactory essay on some agricultural subject, one-fourth unit for three months. raising one-fourth of an acre of onions, tomatoes, strawberries, or celery, one acre of potatoes, two acres of pop corn, five acres of corn or alfalfa, one-fourth unit. running a split road drag or doing other forms of road-building for three months, one-fourth unit. judging, with a degree of accuracy, the different types of horses, cattle, and hogs, one-fourth unit. "see minnesota first" trip under approved instructor, with essay, one-fourth unit. among the home tasks are mentioned:-- shingling or painting the house or barn. making a canoe or boat. swimming feet at one continuous performance. cooking meat and eggs three ways and making three kinds of cake. exhibit. doing the laundry work weekly for three months. recognizing and describing twenty different native birds, trees, and flowers. the ames, iowa, high school course outlines out-of-school work in three departments: agriculture, manual training, and home economics. i quote from the home economics prospectus:-- unless the work is ... made to connect with the work in the home it loses much of its vitality. our aim is to relate the home and the school and permit each to contribute its share in making the work vital, really worth while. the girl ... may carry into the home some new ways of working, and there will be an exchange of ideas between mother and daughter as to hows and whys ... that will result beneficially to both. as the girl carries these ideas and discoveries back into the school we shall be able to know better the needs of home and social life, and hence so plan our work that it may "carry over" into her out-of-school life. a total of two credits to apply on graduation may be earned in home economics at the ames high school. three hundred points equal one credit. two hundred points each are offered for cookery, general housework and sewing. cooking is to be done for the family at home, and whenever possible a sample brought to the school for examination, together with the recipes giving itemized cost, and a signed statement that the entire work was done by the girl herself. a list of things to be cooked is given: ten dishes are required, the other five are to be chosen from the list. the list for the first year follows; dishes required are marked with a star and receive seven points credit, the others receive six points. some fresh vegetable cooked and served in a white sauce. potatoes in some form. tapioca. rice. macaroni. muffins. *baking powder biscuit. *plain cake, with or without frosting. *drop cookies. *rolled cookies. *pastry. *gelatin with soft custard. cottage cheese. scalloped dish. custard, or some kind of custard pudding (bread, rice, tapioca). steamed brown bread. *prune whip. } marguerites. } one of these required; either may be chosen. fondant candies. salad with cooked or french dressing. *sandwiches--three kinds of filling. *bread. *baked beans. general housework includes making girl's own bed each day; daily and weekly care of bedroom, helping with general housework one-half hour each day and one hour on saturdays (sweeping, dusting, ironing, washing dishes, washing windows, etc.). the total credit for this is - / points for one month. in the course in sewing, the home work is brought to school for examination and grading. the list for second year sewing follows:-- one-third credit-- points, open to girls who are taking, or who have completed second year sewing. princess slip points. house dress shirt waist woolen skirt made-over dress nice dress the high school at north yakima, washington, gives credit for work in music under approved teachers; for practice-teaching (coaching) by normal students in the grades; and for work in agriculture. the summer work in agriculture is planned before the close of the school in the spring. each pupil informs the instructor in agriculture as to the kind of work he intends to do. the instructor visits each pupil several times during the summer, discussing methods of work, results, etc., with him and his employer, and designating pamphlets, bulletins, and magazine articles for him to read. in , fifty-four pupils applied for credit for work in agriculture. _rules for summer agricultural work in north yakima, washington_ . students may earn one credit in agriculture toward graduation by work completed outside of school during the vacation period. . at least hours of work must be completed before any credit will be given. . complete records and systematic reports kept by the applicant, giving all information required, and signed by the parent or employer, shall be filed with the instructor in agriculture every two weeks. . applicants shall secure such information as a result of reading, study, and questioning experienced workers, as may be necessary to convince the instructor in charge that the work has been of sufficient educational value to justify the granting of a credit. . pupils wishing to receive credit for this work shall make application for the privilege before beginning the work. lists of reference books, kinds and character of notebooks, shall be designated by the instructor in agriculture. . an examination covering the work may be given by the school authorities. . work may be done along the following lines: _a._ vegetable gardening work; keeping results of work done in complete form. _b._ feeding of stock, poultry, etc.; keeping records of foods used, amounts and results obtained. _c._ thinning, picking, packing, marketing, cultivation and irrigation of fruits, etc. _d._ eradication of blight, other orchard diseases and pests; complete records of attempts to reduce damage done by these causes. _e._ growing of cereal, grass, or forage crops. _f._ keeping records of dairy animals; milk testing records for monthly periods. _g._ care of bees, handling of honey, etc.; complete records. appendix kansas agricultural college bulletin mr. john c. werner, of the college extension division of the kansas state agricultural college, wrote in a very valuable bulletin entitled "school credit for home work," the essential features of which are given.[ ] notice that he recommends that pupils furnish the reports themselves over their own signatures, as putting them on their honor is considered valuable, and in justice due them. [ ] for other quotations from this bulletin, see pages , , and . in a letter mr. werner says: "my idea of giving credit is to use the old laboratory method of requiring the student to do a reasonable amount of work in a reasonable length of time. this allows for many of the variable factors that enter into the problem; i think it is better than to give so many points of credit for each piece of work done." in the first six grades of the elementary school, where so much depends upon using the child's knowledge which he has gained from actual experiences about home, and the environment with which he comes in contact which is really a part of himself, we have the best basis for his further education. in these grades it will be raising and not lowering our standards when we give credit for home work and add it to the school credits for passing grades. all of the subjects of these grades should be so closely affiliated with the home life of the child as to warrant our doing this. it is so important that the child be engaged in the actual doing of things that the perfect grade of per cent should be divided into two divisions: ( ) a maximum of per cent for school work. ( ) a maximum of per cent for home work when proper records and reports are kept. in the seventh and eighth grades and in the high school, work corresponding to the age and ability of the pupils should be introduced and made part of the laboratory work, giving two fifths of a unit of credit. here written reports of the operations performed should be worked out by the pupils and presented as class work. classes should visit the dairy barns, feeding pens, gardens, corn or grass fields, orchards, etc. pupils should carry on considerable individual home work, which should continue throughout the summer as well as winter season. this credit should be counted in agriculture, domestic arts and manual-training courses. the various contests among the boys and girls, that are conducted in all parts of the state, certainly should be counted worthy of school credit. these contests are directly or indirectly under the auspices of the agricultural college, and numerous bulletins are sent to the contestants. many children actually receive in these contests almost the equal of a year's course in school. _suggestive list of subjects for credit for home work_ . _agriculture_ milking cows. feeding horses. cleaning cow barns. cleaning horse barns. feeding cows. feeding sheep. feeding beef cattle. feeding hogs. feeding poultry. watering stock. churning. turning separator. tending fires. running errands. digging potatoes. hitching and unhitching horses. beating rugs. hauling feed. pumping water. cutting wood. carrying in fuel. getting the cows. gathering eggs. tending to the poultry house. tending pig pen. bedding of stock. preparing kindling. miscellaneous. . _domestic arts_ preparing meals. making biscuits. baking bread. baking cake. baking pie. washing clothes. ironing clothes. caring for baby. overseeing home while mother is away. scrubbing floor. washing dishes. wiping dishes. making beds. sweeping the house. dusting rugs. airing bedclothes. ventilating bedroom. dressing the baby. canning fruit. caring for milk. sewing. dusting furniture. care of self. making dress. making apron. care of teeth. setting the table. care of sick. miscellaneous. . _manual training_ making farm gate. making peck crate. making chair. making clothes rack. making pencil sharpener. making t-square. making towel roller. making ruler. making picture frame, halved together joints, end and center. making mortise and tenon joint. making bookrack. miscellaneous. making ax handle. making hayrack. making ironing board. making cutting board. making tool rack. making staffboard liner. making vine rack. making sandpaper blocks. making mail box. open mortise and tenon joint (end). making halving joint, or angle splice joint. making feed hopper. making whippletree. making wood rack. making bench hook. making coat hanger. making nail box. making table. making flower-pot stand. making key board. making pen tray. making mortise and tenon joint (center). making dovetail joint. making panel door. making work bench. . _home contests_ corn acre contest. poultry and pig contest. sewing contest. potato plot contest. tomato contest. canning contest. garden contest. bread-baking contest. miscellaneous. _plan for allowing credit_ it is absolutely essential in taking up this work that the teacher make a careful survey in her neighborhood of the kinds of home work that the pupils have opportunity to do. the pupils should be put on their honor in reporting their work, and the teacher must work out the amount of credit time the various items are to receive, and from the pupils' reports grade the work. a large number of items should be included and given their relative weight. quality as well as quantity must be judged by the teacher. this supplies a working basis for coöperation between home and school. besides the credits earned in the particular subjects of agriculture, domestic arts and manual training, where hours will add two fifths of a unit, other work may be given some additional credit up to say per cent, as physiology and geography. it is also possible that subjects such as english and arithmetic may be so correlated as to be at least partially considered in connection with the agriculture, domestic arts, and manual training by the composition required and the problems furnished. it is not expected that any boy or girl will enter all of the contests. contests which require hours' work should be given two fifths of a unit credit in the subject to which it belongs. if the child in the contest is below the seventh grade, the work should add to his entire school grade up to per cent. the fairness of this plan will appeal to the boys and girls, for the girl or boy who has third, fourth or fifth place in the contest deserves credit as well as the one who wins first place. it is the object in the credit for home work both to recognize and give credit because of the educational value to the child of such work which he does with his hands, and it is also hoped to develop the child into a better worker, so that the work performed will be constantly of a higher order as the child grows older. in other words, we have a constantly changing variable as the child grows older as to the time necessary to do certain work, and the proficiency with which the work is done. speed in doing things is not the only consideration, and yet all work should be done with reasonable dispatch. in inaugurating this work it seems that the ordinary laboratory method for giving credit is quite as well adapted to home laboratory work as it is to school laboratory work. if the perfect grade, per cent in the elementary school in grades to , inclusive, be divided into two parts, i.e., a maximum of per cent for school work and a maximum of per cent for home work for all pupils who desire to do the home work, then one tenth of the number of hours in the school year may be taken as the basis for credit. counting the double period, as should be done, hours or hours per week would be the required time for the nine-months' term of school to receive full credit. the pupil would, therefore, need to work at home six hours per week. this work should be scattered throughout the week as evenly as possible, with the opportunity of doing not to exceed three hours' work in any one day, as, for example, on saturday. as in the laboratory system, the pupils, regardless of the overtime put in, could only receive full credit for any year. pupils who do not have the chance for home work will not be affected in their work, as the usual method of grading will apply to them. conditions must determine the time necessary for any given piece of work. for example, if one boy feeds a team of horses in ten minutes, another in fifteen minutes, another in five minutes, and another in thirty minutes, under similar conditions, perhaps one boy is working too rapidly and another too slowly. from such reports it seems that twelve to fifteen minutes should be allowed for feeding a team of horses. the best and most profitable division of time for the home work would be about thirty minutes, both morning and evening, each day. during these work periods different things should be done, and during the year it is to be hoped that a large variety of different kinds of work may be included. if the home is in sympathy with the child's work it can help very materially in setting tasks for the child that are of the most profitable nature. _reports to teachers_ the pupils should furnish the reports themselves over their own signatures for the home work. putting them on their own honor is valuable and in justice is due them. since results must be produced in most kinds of work, the teacher can judge quite accurately as to the value of work. [illustration: _illustrative report card_ _weekly report home work._ _date_.................... _elementary school_. _pupil_................... ----------------+---------------+-------------------------------------------- | | time spent each day. | +------+-------+-------+-------+-------+----- work. |remarks. | | | | | | | | m. | t. | w. | t. | f. | s. ----------------+---------------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+----- feeding horses. | team, twice | | | | | | |each day | | | | | | ----------------+---------------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+----- cut wood | / cord, stove| | | | | | |length | | | | | | ................|...............|......|.......|.......|.......|.......|..... | | | | | | | ................|...............|......|.......|.......|.......|.......|..... | | | | | | | ................|...............|......|.......|.......|.......|.......|..... ----------------+---------------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+----- ] * * * * * credit for seventh and eighth grades and high school grades should be allowed for efficient home work when properly reported as laboratory requirement in agriculture, domestic arts and manual training. in these grades all careful, systematic work during the summer season, as well as the regular school year, such as corn acre, garden, potato plot, tomato, poultry, pig, canning, sewing, cooking, and butter-making contests, should be used for laboratory credit. of course accurate records of the work must be made at the time the work is performed. schools that have an agricultural teacher during the entire year will directly supervise this work. in other schools the reports will be used as part of the next year's regular class work. suitable report blanks should be used by the pupils and kept in laboratory notebook form. the pupils of seventh, eighth and high-school grades who do hours of acceptable home work should be given two fifths of a unit of credit in the subjects of agriculture, domestic arts, or manual training. here again the pupil should do some different kinds of work and make the experience somewhat varied. in the home laboratory the teacher will determine a standard amount of work of any kind to be performed in a given time. california report on outside activities at the january, , meeting of the california teachers' association the following report on credit for work done outside of the school was submitted by mr. hugh j. baldwin:-- _credit for work done outside of school_ fulfilling the wishes of this organization, your committee sent communications to the heads of departments of large manufacturing and commercial interests, to managers of railroads and educational institutions, requesting information on lines of work upon which you wished a report. not only were the circulars answered promptly, but, in many cases, the answers were remarkable. some of them suggested in definite language how outside activities might be made harmoniously supplemental to our regular school work, better articulated therewith than had been planned. * * * * * many strong reasons were given; one of the most potent was that the innovation would change the present attitude of the average person towards labor--in other words, to dignify the labor of the land, to honor and respect the woman who can prepare nourishing food in the kitchen or the man who can contribute to the world's wealth from his garden. another strong thought from this compilation of opinions resulted in the contrast between the systems of american and german polytechnic or manual training education. the german schools secure the coöperation of the factories and shops and stores where there is particular industrial training given, all without cost to state or municipality for the tuition. on the other hand, in the united states, the only manual training that has been attempted by the school authorities has been at greater expense to the people. in communities where there is no special educational industrial training the subject of this committee work is very important. "outside activities," or credit on school reports for work done by school children at home, has now a place in the course of study of san diego county. the plan has passed from the experimental stage, having been given a thorough tryout in all the schools. from all parts of the county reports have come full of enthusiasm telling of the excellent working of the plan. to be sure there are a few adverse reports. we find that communities largely mexican in complexion evince little interest in the plan. index agriculture, , , , , , , . alderman, superintendent, . algebra, , , , , , . algona, wash., , , . ames, iowa, - . arithmetic, , , , , , . ashland, ore., . auburn, wash., , . bailey, e. g., . baldwin, hugh j., . banks and banking, . banner, school, , . bathing, , , , , . belknap, mrs. e. h., letters, , , , . bellingham, wash., . benton county, ore., . blanks, home credit. _see_ cards. bread-making, , , . bulletin for teachers, spokane county, ore., , . burns, miss veva, . burnt ridge, wash., , . cake-making, , . calavan, c. c., , . california report on outside activities, , . canning, . cards, home record, - . care of language, . certificate of promotion with distinction, - . charleston, wash., , . cheerfulness, . cheney, wash., . chores, , , , , . church attendance, , , . clackamas county, ore., , , . claxton, mr., commissioner of education, . cleaning yard, . cleanliness, . commerce, . conklin, superintendent e. b., , . consolidation of schools, . contests, rules of, - , , , , , , , - ; for summer agricultural work, , . _see_ prizes. cooking, , , , , , . coöperation, of parents and teachers, , - ; plan for school and home, - . courtesy to parents, . cowlitz county, wash., . credit for home work, system of, author's article on, - ; the case of mary, - ; in o'reilly's school, - ; revitalizing effect of, - ; honors labor, - ; illustrative cards of, - ; in high schools, - . credits, prizes for, - , - , , , , , , , . credit-vouchers. _see_ vouchers. crook county, ore., . daily reports, - . dallas, ore., . davis, superintendent joel o., , . dish-washing, , , . "doing before told," , . domestic arts, , , , . domestic science, , , , . drawing, , . dudley, w. e., . dunlap, oscar l., . dykstra, r. g., . elliott, superintendent h. w., , , . eugene, ore., high school, . eveline, wash., . fairs, school, - , , . farm labors, , - , . feeding the poultry, . fitchburg, mass., . forfeitures, , . garage work, , . gary, t. j., article by, on o'reilly's school, - . general housework, , . geometry, . grades, . habit-building, - . harrowing, . health, care for, home duty, . heath, harry f., - . high schools, home credit in, - . history, . hoagland, mrs. sarah j., story by, - ; letter from, - . holidays, , , , , , , , , . holton, kansas, . home contests, . _see_ contests. home credit plans, illustrative, - . _see_ plans, rules. home economics, , , , . home study, . home work, newspaper article on, by author, - ; inception of idea, ; spring valley school, - . _see_ plans. hopewell high school, . horticulture, . housekeeping, . hover, wash., . idaho plan, . illustrative home credit plans, - . immorality among children, . industrial work, , , . industry, . interest in work, . jackson county, ore., , , . james, william, quoted on habit, . jefferson, ore., . jenkins, lucia, . kansas state agricultural college, ; bulletin, , - . keeping temper, . kindness, ; to animals, . king county, wash., . labor, honoring, - . "laboratory of the rural school, the," , . lane county, ore., , . letters, from teachers and school officials: mrs. hoagland, - , , ; n. v. rowe, , ; mrs. toman, ; o. l. dunlap, ; mcfarland, ; miss merritt, ; h. f. heath, - ; miss jenkins, , ; mrs. maynard, , ; miss burns, , ; miss rarey, ; mrs. mckinney, ; j. o. davis, - ; linden mccullough, , ; j. c. werner, ; other teachers, ; from parents, , ; from pupils, , , ; from a portland woman, . lewis county, wash., . lewiston, idaho, . los angeles, cal., - . mack, a. r., . making garden, . malheur county, ontario, . manners, . manual training, , , , . marion county, ore., a letter from, , ; card system of, , . marks, . mary, the story of, - . mathematics, . _see_ algebra, arithmetic, geometry. maynard, mrs. lou albee, , . mccormick, superintendent e. o., . mccullough, linden, . mcfarland, e. g., , , . mckinney, mrs. bertha, . mcminnville, ore., . mending, . merritt, miss lizzie k., . military drill, . milking, . minnehaha, wash., . montana, a school in, - . music, , . myrtle creek, ore., . neatness, . nebraska, a story from, - . new york city, . north dallas school, polk county, ore., , . north yakima, wash., - . ontario, . oregon, university of, ; teachers in, ; mr. o'reilly's school at spring valley, , - ; home credit schools in, . oregon city, . _oregon teachers' monthly_, . o'reilly, a. j., home credit school of, , - , ; his method of daily reports, - . parents, and teachers, coöperation between, , - , ; letters from, , . pend oreille county, wash., . percentages, . personal care, , , , , . plan for school and home coöperation, - . plans, illustrative home credit: spring valley school, - ; holton, kan., - ; st. john, wash., , ; burnt ridge, wash., , ; salem heights, wash., ; spokane co., , ; eveline, wash., - ; cowlitz co., wash., - ; district school, wash., - ; algona, wash., - ; portland, ore., - ; polk co., ore., ; suver, ore., - ; north dallas, ore., , ; near dallas, ore., ; idaho, - ; charleston, wash., - ; jackson co., ore., - ; weston, ore., , - ; pend oreille co., wash., - ; los angeles, cal., - ; lewiston, idaho, - ; the bronx, new york city, - ; mr. conklin's, ; ontario, - ; roslyn, wash., - ; wilbur, wash., , ; clarke co., wash., , ; santa monica, cal., - ; st. cloud, minnesota, - ; ames, iowa, - ; north yakima, wash., - ; mr. werner's, - . politeness, . polk county, ore., , , , . portland, ore., , , - . portland home credit record, . practice-teaching, . practicing music, . prizes, for credits in home work, - , - , , , , , , , . purpose, lacking in schools, . putting away playthings, . rarey, miss miriam h., . reading good books, . record cards, - . reilly, frederick j., . report of committee on home credits, los angeles, - . reports, daily, - . responsibilities, , . roslyn, wash., . rowe, n. v., . rules of contests, - , , , , , , , - ; for summer agricultural work, , . running errands, . sadie and stella, - . st. cloud, minnesota, - . st. john, wash., . salem, ore., , , , . salem heights, ore., . santa monica, cal., - . sawing wood, . school and home coöperation, - . "school credit for home work," . schoolhouse janitor, . schools, consolidation of, . scrubbing, . sewing, , , , . seymour, superintendent, , , , . shepherd, miss grace m., . sheridan high school, . shopwork, . simmonds, f. w., . sleeping with window open, . slips, home credit. _see_ cards. smith, w. m., . soules, miss hester c., . spelling, , ; contest, , , . spokane, wash., , , . spokane chamber of commerce, . spokane county, wash., , , , . spring valley, ore., mr. o'reilly's school at, , - , - . standings, . stella and sadie, - . sterling, mrs. elizabeth, . suggestions for using "home record slip," , . sunday school attendance, , . suver, polk county, ore., school at, . sweeping, . tardiness, , , , . teachers, and parents, coöperation between, , - ; a story from, - ; letters from, _see_ letters. tidiness, . todd, mr., - . toman, mrs. verona e., , . toothbrushing, - , . umatilla county, ore., . vacation report, , . vancouver, wash., . voice, care of, . vouchers, , - . walking, credit for, , . wasco county, ore., . washing dishes, , . washington, home credit schools in, . weekly reports, , . wells, j. percy, . werner, john c., . weston, ore., , , . weston public school, . whitman county, wash., . wilbur, wash., . winship, dr., . work, done for wages, ; in father's place of business, . _see_ labor. yamhill county, ore., , . * * * * * transcriber's note: minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. the illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs. mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. the cover for the ebook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. rather than |||||, tally marks in the book are four upright bars with the fifth bar crossing the other four diagonally. see footnote , and pages and . in addition to obvious errors, the following changes have been made: . page : the word "a" was added in the phrase: "a lonely art student" . page : transposed words "be will" were corrected to "will be" in the phrase: "will be improved" the playwork book the playwork book by ann macbeth with diagrams [illustration] new york robert m. mcbride & company _printed in the united states of america_ published october, contents page introduction a woolen ball another woolen ball a sprig of flowers a skipping rope a sucker golliwogs the meal sack an emery cushion rat-tail knitting a peep-show picture cup and ball storks a cork doll a rabbit a cork horse an engine and tender a chest of drawers a cradle a doll's table a doll's bed a doll's chair another doll's chair necklaces a hat band a fan a pin-wheel or whirligig a tin wheel or buzzer a wooden mill a feather wheel an air propeller a reversing propeller a waterwheel and shute a pop-gun a whistle a long whistle a squeaker a buzzer a clapper a telephone a drum a megaphone rush furniture rush whip rush rattle paper beads fish bone tea-set a rush or raffia bag the harvest plait doll's furniture a wheelbarrow a fern basket a doll's stool a doll's stool of feathers a porter's hand barrow a crane a top a teetotum bow and arrow a dart a crossbow a catapult a target a raft a canoe a ship a propeller a doll a brownie kites a monkey on a stick a dancing lady a model aeroplane a farmyard a doll's house the playwork book far enough below the surface, in every one of us there lives, very often almost forgotten, the child, who, like peter pan, "never grows up." it is this everlasting child in us that keeps the keys which open for each his kingdom of heaven, and sad it is for those of us who have lost sight of the keeper of the keys. the sweetest and loveliest things in our lives are the simplest things. they do not abide in the excitable enjoyment of luxuries and entertainments to be bought with money; they lie in the living and eternal interest of the homeliest things of daily life, wherever people are simple, and sincere of heart, and full of loving, kindly thought and care for the concerns of others; where people do things themselves instead of paying for them to be done; where wealth is counted in love, in thoughtfulness, and in interest in other people, and not in many possessions. these things are the heritage of all children, and we are happy if we can carry our heritage with us through our life; for this indeed is to be of the kingdom of heaven. a child who is unspoiled by the false and ignorant estimates of others with regard to the rank and standing of those among whom he lives, is perhaps our truest socialist. he comes into the world possessing nothing, so far as he is aware, save his own identity; he knows no distinction of class; his ideas of rank are based solely on the beauty, charm, and kindness which are in due proportion the characters of those he lives with. he makes his own little kingdom if he is encouraged to work it out, or play it out, for himself; and happy is the child and happy is the parent of that child who learns to play independently, and to gather together his kingdom, without a continual cry for assistance from others. here is one of the first great landmarks in education, and a child who is unspoiled by too many possessions in the way of toys will be one well provided, for his mind should at once move to create these possessions for himself. this power to create, this moving of the spirit to make something out of chaos, is in all healthy human beings, and it is the happiest faculty we have. it is, in fact, one of the most vital sides of religion in us, and perhaps the most important to us. it brings us into direct kinship with the great creator of all things. this moving of the holy spirit over the chaos of the world, in our businesses, in our workshops, in our shipyards, in our buildings, in all craftsman's work in our factories, is probably never realized by the churchmen among us, and only vaguely apprehended by the educational authorities. yet does not this very power of creative thought amongst even the humblest of us constitute religion of the most living vitality? this holy spirit moving, and living, and creating anew in every trade and craft, and in every place where men are busy, should be better realized by us, and more respected; we should then be better men and women. the inventive minds among us are indeed our prophets, answering to the call of those whose labor is too long and heavy, and producing what will lessen the burden. answering again the call for more light, more beauty, more music in the world, and producing our arts and our playgrounds, our games, our schools and colleges. answering again the call for freedom from pain, and we have our hospitals, and our great doctors, and all who work for the betterment of the world. here is the real and living church of god on earth. they say we are leaving the churches behind us. say rather that the church is more with us, and all are its ministers who are working for the world's welfare. we rebuke far too often that habit of children of asking questions. we say, "be quiet," and "you will see some other day"! yet it is by questions that the child shows most his interest in life, and his inclinations and desires and tendencies. we instruct a child for years in the writings, doings, sayings, and contrivings of others who have gone before us. how rarely do we realize that in these little ones there may be as great, or greater, light within, only needing care and encouragement to develop and flame up, and show its creative strength? it is sad to think how often these little lights are snuffed out in their first flickerings by the thoughtless things we say, by the foolish way we tease them at the slightest sign of independent thought, by our ignorant habit of commending and praising those who give up their independence, and conform to the commonplace habits and customs we have adopted as convenient. many very young children show astonishingly developed faculties in certain directions even before they can express themselves in speech. i know a little boy who, in his second year, showed such an interest in machinery that his elder relatives had to learn the parts of a locomotive engine in order not to betray their own ignorance; and over and over again we see the faculties of the creative mind so strong in young children that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that they have not some previous experience to draw upon. especially is this the case in music and the arts, for here there is perhaps less dependence on tools and previous technical training required, than in other constructive work. but it is sad to see, and very common also, that these bright beginnings too often flicker out, not because the spirit is lacking, but because these children are only too often driven to hide their lights, because they feel conspicuous, are teased, and rebuked, and chidden for their non-conformity, and are made to feel themselves outcasts if they pursue the way their spirit tends to lead them; and they lose their light, these finer little spirits, and subside into the twilight of mediocre minds. it is indeed difficult, in these times of over-crowded schools and over-worked teachers, to foster and develop the personalities of these little ones, but we all look to a time when education may be a stronger force among us, more respected and more desired, when those who teach in our elementary schools may be the finest men and women we have, those of the greatest hearts, and the widest understanding (for into their hands we place the most precious thing we have); a time, when, realizing that the laborer is worthy of his hire, we must also be brought to realize that the hire must be worthy of the laborer. we become more and more socialistic in our community life in these days, and a child is now so little left to the charge of his mother that his life, almost from babyhood upwards, is just a passing on from one trained hand to another till he is able to support himself independently, and often long after that. his years of school grow longer and busier, and now even his playtime is to be more closely guarded and supervised. yet it is to be hoped that here the guarding and supervising will be specially directed to preserving his independence and his choice of leisure occupation. games are good for all, yet playtime should emphatically not be all games: this is where our public schools have failed us; they have given too much importance to games, and almost none to private enterprise in constructive play. in the little contrivances of children lie the germs of vast mechanical and artistic enterprises. the marvelous crafts passed on to us from ancient days in every land were never the result of training in schools, they partook more of the qualities of what i would call "constructive play," passed on from parent to child, each new thing a little different from any other, changing and varying in every age, yet all through a pleasure and a joy to their makers. our trades and our crafts have all their beginnings in the immature constructions we make as children. we build houses, we furnish them, we make instruments of music (and un-music), we make ships, we fashion vessels of clay, and wood, and metal; we weave and we paint; we dimly foresaw the days when men should fly like birds, and we made kites. all this went on for countless generations, and then we laid captive the steam and the electric current, and lo! a change; all things are possible. yet we have had a set back; we have forgotten awhile that the spirit in all of us is greater than the machine. we have allowed our machines to make our toys, and instead of being toy-makers our children have to some extent become toy breakers, not because they are really trying to destroy, but because they have the right and natural desire to see how a thing is made. it is not enough, however, to know this; it is very essential that a child should make for himself, and the probability is that if the thing is easily bought he will not take the trouble to make it. he will be inclined to take it for granted that just because it is a "commercial" article, a thing to be bought in a shop, he cannot make it. toys imported from abroad have been so plentiful and so cheap of late years that the children of to-day rarely attempt to make them for themselves, and they are immensely the poorer, intellectually speaking, for the lack of this necessity to make them. it is for this reason that i have gathered together a small collection of the contrivances of past generations, and the present generation too, not in order that they serve as mere subjects for copy, but because in making such things children develop ideas for improving upon them, and for making new things. this little collection of works and enterprises is brought together as a suggestion for what scottish folk so aptly call "ploys," which the children may undertake without much help or instruction. later on it may be possible to collect a more mature series of suggestions for recreative work in evening schools and continuation classes. there are people everywhere whose work during the day is so taxing that they cannot continue to strain mind and hand at the usual subjects given in evening schools, and yet they can learn to employ their leisure time very profitably by work which does not demand either mental strain, nor highly developed skill, nor any elaborate outfit, nor noisy methods of construction. it must be truly "leisure" work, and be planned to give refreshment and stimulation and "play" to weary brain and body. such gentle fireside crafts as the decoration of pottery, and coarse and effective needlework are delightful to practice of an evening, and need give no trouble to the tidy and anxious marthas of the household. no evenings are more pleasant than those i have spent with friends all busy at quiet crafts round the hearth, chatting a little, or listening to a reader, or singing simple songs in parts, and with no accompaniment of instruments. constructive design for either of these two crafts is a delightful thing for either men or women of any age. we are never too old to learn to design patterns so long as our hands are able to guide a pen. for what is writing but pattern. each of us writes his or her name to an individual design, easily recognized so soon as our hand has learned to control our instrument. patterns for these simple crafts should therefore emanate from the minds of the workers themselves, and should never be copied if it is possible to avoid it. this spirit of creativeness and invention should find a special period for its development in the day's time-table, and it would be immensely helpful and interesting if teachers would make collections of "outstanding" productions from the children, and if little loan collections of these might travel round from place to place. the children themselves are always intensely interested in seeing such things--and sometimes the older folk who have not forgotten to be children are even more so. i have always urged that craft-work from our various educational centers should go "on tour" in this way, and i keep a large quantity of needlework which shows individuality, from all sorts of schools, going round the country. this usually is shown to teachers only, which limits its sphere, for the children themselves show a most enthusiastic interest in it, and whenever i have shown such work to children in elementary schools, the chorus of excited little voices usually repeats, "oh, i could do that," which is exactly what is needed for a good beginning. how charming it would be if municipalities would have in every museum a section of "modern craft work," independent of the collections of antiquities we store up. for we also have beautiful things being created amongst us, no less beautiful because they result from the demands of modern needs and usages. new habits of life produce new demands, and children quickly catch new ideas and adapt themselves to the use of hitherto unknown materials. this is especially the case in cities, and the suggested constructions for the playwork subjects in this book are almost all made out of the waste materials the children may readily find at hand, and they are put together as far as possible, without any particular need for skill, and with the fewest and simplest of tools. in the country there is always an immense wealth of superfluous material to play with, and the country child has a far greater treasury from which to supply the need of hand and mind than his neighbor of the city. imagination can find an immensity of outlet and opportunity, even in the neighborhood of cities. i remember well my village of cave dwellings which i carefully hollowed out beneath the spreading roots of trees--very dirty trees--in a suburban wood in a lancashire town. the caves were furnished with stones and twigs, and populated with earwigs or any creeping thing to be found and housed there. later i owned an island in a westmorland lake, and had a beautiful house of woven branches of the growing rowan trees, with a garden planted with ferns and wild flowers among mossy bordered paths. and again, my sisters and brothers and i made fine wigwams of the branches of young oak and hazel trees found in those lakeland woods; they were tied together at the top with the fibrous stems of honeysuckle, spread tentwise at the base, and heaped outside with a covering of dead bracken and dry leafy twigs. in town too, for wet days there was always the house under the table, walled in with table cover and blankets: delightful dwellings all, and happy little "homes" to live in, for any place is a "home" to us when we look back to it with happy memory. and the garlands we made of daisies and red clover, thick as a man's arm and plaited strongly together, with which we decked the clothes-props on the drying green, and made them into maypoles! we remember the joy these things gave, chiefly because we made them; we remember them far better than the games we played, or the entertainments we went to. at school again, my best personal experience, and one that i have found valuable above all the other education i got, was not the lessons i learned from books; i have forgotten almost all i got from them. it was the great days when we had plays in school, and i was allowed to devise, and practically direct the whole making of the stage properties. a great time that. we made armor, and weapons, and crowns, and garments, and wings, and scenery. we had no assistance from teachers for this, and i know it taught me more than any of my teachers did. during school days i did not learn to draw because i had a drawing lesson once a week, and painfully and carefully drew perspectives of chairs and schoolrooms and other dull things. i learned to draw because i loved to scribble in my lesson books princes and princesses, and fairies, and because i had few playthings, and was always making and decorating little gifts for other people. this practise of decorating the things we make is really far the best way to teach drawing to either children or others. we make our education in drawing a far too limited affair by directing it to a pictorial issue alone, and drawing is a far wider subject than concerns picture-making solely. if we go into our museums, we see from the ancient handicrafts left to us by primitive peoples, that in the beginning all art was purely applied to useful things. the clay jar modelled in the hands alone, with its lines and curves just emphasized with a few scratches or impressions made with a stick or a bone, what is this but just play? and yet it is art also and the art adds immensely to the value of that jar. so also to-day, if any child takes a piece of clay and makes a vessel by hand, the very same thing is produced. i have seen little pots made in schools which it is difficult to distinguish from some of those of ancient egypt or peru in our museums. they are not one whit less artistic, and yet the art is quite unconscious, the child was only "playing" with the clay. we would be much the richer, commercially speaking, if schools would only take up this different side of art teaching--making patterns, instead of pictures. i am not condemning the drawing of pictures, but i am urging that pattern-making--constructive design in actual material, not on paper--should come first. pattern is the mathematics of art, and it can develop the mathematical faculties far more widely than mere mental calculations can. it must be learned by wise gradations, and the learner must never be allowed to get out of hand or run riot with over-elaboration. if we can teach the children in their drawing lessons to decorate the useful articles they need for the home, we shall give a great impetus to the commercial arts. for example, if a child has one lesson at decorating a piece of pottery with a brush dipped in glaze paint and decorates it with nothing but a line of dots or strokes, he can have this fired and fixed and use it, and he also at once looks at every china shop with a sharply discriminating eye. in a very short time he will be able to choose between good decoration and bad, he will understand economy in production, he will very soon demand from the trade a higher class of design, and he will be willing to pay for better design because he understands the working of it. the fashion for amateurs to practice photography did not do harm to the professional photographer, as was feared at first; it raised the standard of professional work, and brought more custom, and not less, to the professional worker. and this holds good in all work, the more widely and thoroughly it is "understanded of the people," the more desirable do the people find it. there is a great education before art teachers, and they must realize that they must come into touch with science and mathematics and general constructive work. they must watch the changing needs and fashions of the day, and realize that not only in classic times was the art of the people a beautiful and desirable thing. they must realize, too, that in this twentieth century our hands are extending their powers, and that by the use of machines we are reaching a far larger public than unaided hands could do. the artist has spent two or three generations bewailing the machine; he forgot that no machine can, of its own powers, be artistic or inartistic. he left the machine alone, and therefore the machine-work has fallen into discredit. the artist craftsman is too often too conscious of his art, and does not subordinate himself sufficiently to modern ways and conditions. it is not the fault of the machine that much of our manufactured output is inartistic, it is the fault of the artist that he has not managed to control the machine. first and foremost, however, we must have some change in the training of artists, and must direct their attention to utility, rather than pictorial work. it is difficult to count the outlets possible to the decorative craftsman, provided he understands modern machinery and commercial demands. this training in handicraft begins, very rightly and naturally in the kindergarten schools, but there, unfortunately, it stops short. now what we want to do is to plan out for our growing children such crafts as will develop intelligence and skill of hand, without demanding too great physical strength or technical training, and without undue expenditure of money upon materials and outfit. for the younger children the easiest media to work in are clay and needlework. the clay-work should be directed to the most permanent and useful things that can be produced; pottery and tiles can be very easily made, and are very permanent if they are glazed and fired and decorated, and this can be done at very little expense. needlework must be taught so that the worker develops intelligence and independence, and is no longer made to sew the multitudes of fine stitches which were once considered necessary, and which made the girls mere unthinking machines. there are endless new ways to be followed out in the sewing and embroidery and construction of garments and household textiles. even the rather mechanical knitting is probably only in its infancy as yet, and we may see it do great things, and play a more beautiful part in our textile arts. to reform and renew the vitality of all these things we must realize that they have all their beginnings in the playwork of the little child, and that simply because the little child has no traditions to unlearn, and is therefore independent enough to think out new devices in his play, so must we all keep before us the fact that we have that light within us which is above, and independent of, traditions. if we can see any way in which any work can be improved or altered, or beautified by some change in its treatment, we must be bold to try it, for only by courage and bravery of thought does the work of the world keep itself fresh and ever renewed and changing towards better things. never be afraid that because you have not tried to do a thing you will be unable to do it. if the thought of doing it has come to you, it is a sign that some power is there, at any rate, and the impulse to improve and change a thing for the better is just that creative impulse stirring within, which i have pleaded for. whose is that impulse? not our own entirely. then surely if it is good, we do right at least to try to carry it out. it is the mind that changes matter, but it is not your mind nor mine, though it is in our charge. and happy is he who has faith to listen and give it force and visible expression. there are in this little book things that many of the wiser folk shake their heads over--catapults for instance. yet i have put them in; for surely if we older folk had not enjoyed our catapults we should probably have been sadder folk, as well as wiser. all children may some day or other handle instruments of offense and destruction, and it is part of their legitimate education to learn to do no harm with them, so i have put in the catapult. i enjoyed playing with mine, and i do not think i ever broke anything with it, i do not even remember hitting anything i aimed at, and probably this is the average experience. i have not attempted to enter into any lengthy suggestions as regards making boats, or other toys requiring much patience and skill and knowledge of tools. boat-making is a most interesting thing for both boys and girls, and can be carried to great perfection by them, if they have perseverance. i see no reason why the making of model boats and mechanical toys should not be the special work of boys' manual classes, nor is there any reason why a great quantity of the craft-work and needlework in day and evening schools should not be commercialized, and disposed of by the educational authorities, both to the advantage of the teachers and the pupils. one field alone--that of providing souvenirs for sale to tourists--is a large one, and is at present open to the schools. tourists do not come here with any desire to buy souvenirs made abroad; they would greatly prefer things with a local flavor, and preferably small and portable. i know from personal experience how immensely such a market encourages students to work at their classes in the evenings. we could keep the evening schools packed with students if they realized that their work, done in leisure hours, had some prospect of bringing in a return instead of involving outlay alone. this also is playwork; and though this small book deals only with such playwork in its infancy, yet it must be emphatically urged that it develops into great things, things that the nation needs, and which can only come to their full development because the nation's children have learned to play. my thanks are due to my grandfather, grandmother, and my father and mother, and to my nurses whose names i have forgotten, but from whom i learned to make many things. also to mrs. grisedale, mrs. wear, mrs. fry, mrs. fellows, miss allright, miss worsdell, miss douglas, miss arthur, mr. j. t. ewen, h.m.i., mr. forrester wilson, and to norman guild, for many suggestions, and for their very practical help. a woollen ball materials required:-- a small strip of thick cardboard, a small piece of string, wool, scissors. [illustration: figs. and .] this is the easiest of all the things one can make in wool. take a narrow piece of stiff cardboard, or a flat stick about five inches long and about one inch wide, and make a slit at each end: between these two slits stretch a piece of thin string and then, about the middle of the strip of cardboard, wind the wool over and over till it is like a ball. do not allow the wool to spread too far along the cardboard. when the ball of wool is two, or two and a half inches in diameter, loosen the string from the slits, and slip out the cardboard carefully from the ball; you will not have a bundle of wool with a string running through all the loops. tie the string up tightly and knot it well, then take your scissors and cut the loops as in figure . after all the loops are cut you will have to clip all the loose ends, till they are about even in length, and the bundle will now be a nice regular shape. this is a somewhat wasteful way of making a ball, and should only be used by very little children with waste wool or cotton yarn. it teaches them, however, a very useful thing--to wind wool evenly, and to cut and trim it. another woollen ball materials required:-- two used postcards or pieces of thin cardboard, a strong darning needle, odd pieces of bright-colored wools, scissors. [illustration: figs. and .] a very much better way to make a woollen ball, but more difficult, is shown in figures and . here you must first have a piece of fairly stiff cardboard and on it lay a teacup or tumbler with the rim on the cardboard. draw with a pencil, or scratch with the scissors round the rim so that you have a circle about three and a half or four inches across on it, and cut these circles out. then take some smaller circular thing, a quarter, or something about that size, and place it carefully in the center of each of your larger circles, and cut out the smaller circle like a hole in the middle of the bigger one. now take some wool--you can have it of many bright colors, and if you have any old woollen knitted things which you do not need you can unravel them. slip one end of your wool through the hole of both pieces of cardboard when they are laid together, tie it in a knot, and with your fingers at first, and later with a darning needle, keep winding the wool through the hole and over and over the cardboard until it is all covered. go on winding it through the hole, until the hole is so full that even your needle will not push through. then you must take sharp scissors and carefully cut the wool at the outer edge of this round cushion you have wound, till the scissors cut into the cardboard, so that you can slip one point between the two cards and cut right round the circle. you must be careful not to let the wool be pulled out of the hole through which you have threaded it. now take a piece of thin strong string, slip it round between the two cardboard circles, wind it two or three times, and tie it very tightly. next, carefully tear away your two cardboard rounds and you will have a fine firm ball, which only needs cutting and trimming with the scissors into an even shape. you can make this ball look very pretty by arranging your wool as you wind it into different layers of varying color or make a quarter of your circle of one color and the next quarter of another, and so on. small balls made like this make pretty pompoms for shoes and hats, and tassels on bags, or they can be fixed on drawstrings in underclothing, to prevent them coming out. a sprig of flowers materials required:-- a little thin cardboard, wools of various bright colors, milliner's wire, a small darning needle, scissors. [illustration: figs. to .] this can be made very much as the second woollen ball is made. you take a circle of cardboard again, but rather a smaller one about two inches across (a small ink bottle or an egg-cup would give about the right size); and cut in it a round hole about as big as a dime. wind bright-colored wool through the hole and over the cardboard very evenly, using a darning needle because it is such a small hole. wind on wool until all the cardboard is covered evenly. then take a piece of wire about six inches long, or a hairpin will do if straightened out. you can do this by holding the ends tightly in each hand and rubbing the pin backwards and forwards against the edge of a table. at one end of the wire bend it, so that it makes a little loop, the smaller the better. now begin with green wool to wrap round the wire, covering in the loop first, and when you have covered in the whole loop wind the wool over the end of the bent piece again, and bind it tightly to the other portion, and go on down the wire for some distance. with another hairpin (not straightened out this time, but bent as much to a point as possible) or another piece of wire bent like a v, tie the green wool at the bend, and wind in and out from one side of the wire to the other, first letting the sides go wide from each other and then gradually tightening them together, till you have them closed again and they become a leaf shape. bind this leaf into the first wire stem, and add more leaves if you wish. now wind over the first two fingers of your left hand some yellow or dark-colored wool about a dozen times, and take the end of the wool and tie it through when you withdraw your fingers, as in making the first woollen ball. hold these loops tight from this knotted part, and wind the end of the wool round till it is like figure , a little tassel; take your darning needle and sew this tassel into the hole in the circle of cardboard so that it makes a center for your flower, and sew the cardboard flower to the loop at the end of the wire. you can make two or three small tassels for this center if you like, and bind them first around the loop so that they fill up the hole in the cardboard quite tightly. more tassels can be made and tied to wires and bound into the main wire stem like little buds. these sprigs look very pretty when worn in hats, and they will not spoil with the rain: you can also put a large spray in a vase when you cannot get real flowers. a skipping rope materials required:-- some cheap thin string or cotton waste, some small twigs, a pencil or penholder, a strong hook fixed in a wall. [illustration: figs. to .] take three or four lengths of thin string--a very cheap quality will do--about three yards long, and tie them into a knot close to each end. be sure that every separate piece is of the same length. then take one knotted end and slip the knot round a hook in the wall, not too high up; a curtain hook will do very well, or any other knob or projecting thing which will allow a very small loop to slip off and on, and which will hold firmly. into the other end, at the knot, slip a pencil or penholder, and hold the strand of strings or threads with the left thumb and forefinger loosely, just beyond the place the pencil is slipped into it, as in figure . with the right hand first finger hit the pencil round and round away from you, _downwards_, keeping it whirling so that the long strand becomes twisted. do not hold too tight with the left hand, but be sure to keep the strands taut from the hook where they are fastened. keep on whirling until the strand is twisted so tightly that it begins to go into kinks. then get somebody to catch the strand about the middle, and keeping it carefully taut all the time walk round until you bring the pencil end up to the hook, and slip the strand from the pencil on to the hook. then take the pencil to where the strand is being held in the middle and slip it into the doubled end, and holding it as tightly as possible from the hook, as before, whirl the pencil in the opposite direction, towards you, _upwards_, as in figure . this will make a beautiful cord. the pencil can be slipped out now, and the ends on the hook must be knotted together so that the cord will not unravel. this is called a "twofold cord," and it can be made in two colors if you divide the length before the first twisting into two equal lengths of differently colored threads. a "threefold cord," can be made in the same way, but it must be folded into three different lengths before the second twisting, and three different colors may be introduced. a threefold cord is much fuller and firmer than a twofold one. cords can be made of wool or silk or any kind of thread, and must be made of few or many strands according to the thickness required, and according to the thickness of the strands used. thin woollen cords are very nice to run into woolen garments as drawstrings, or into bags; thick ones made of knitting yarn are splendid for dressing-gowns, and the ends can be finished off with tassels. if you make a skipping rope in this way you will want a firm handle at each end, and you can make it by getting three or four small sticks or twigs, and laying them close to each end round your cord. then bind these round, at both ends of your skipping rope, with firm twine. next take the end of the rope which projects beyond the twigs, and double the strands back along the twigs for a short distance, and bind them down again and cut away any superfluous length, and knot your binding string firmly. this will make a very pretty little handle, especially if you can get pretty greenish twigs with the bark on them and tie with colored threads or twine. figure . a sucker materials required:-- a small piece of thick leather, strong string, scissors or penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this is a very interesting toy to play with. it is very simple to make: all it needs is a round piece of fairly thick leather about four inches across. cut this into a perfect circle with a knife, if the leather is too thick to cut with scissors, and in the very middle bore a small hole and put through this a piece of strong string, about a yard long, and tie a knot in this so that it will not slip through the hole. now soak your leather in water till it is very soft and damp, and keep it in this condition whenever you use it. by dropping the round of damp leather quickly on to the surface of a smooth stone you will be able to lift and carry quite large stones. you must be sure to drop the sucker on to the smooth surfaces, because if there are any little crevices under the sucker the air in them will prevent suction. golliwogs materials required:-- colored wools, a little string, cotton, or silk, and a tiny piece of tape; a large-eyed needle, scissors. [illustration: figs. to .] these golliwogs are made of tassels of wool. first wind your tassel over your fingers much as you wound it for the first woollen ball on the cardboard. then cut the loops, and tie very tightly with several turns of strong cotton or silk close to the end, and again about half an inch lower. this forms the head, and the ends at the top can be trimmed into a top knot. below the head, divide off a small portion on each side for the arms, and tie each of these again about half way down, and cut off just below the tied portion, where the dotted line is in figure . tie also for the waist at the double dotted line, and then, if legs are required, divide the remaining part of the tassel into two, and tie at the feet. take a needle with thread or wool of a different color from that you have used for the golliwog, and stitch in eyes and nose. figure makes a very good zulu chief, if he is made in black wool. figure is a red cross nurse. she can be made in light blue or gray wool, and her cap and apron are made of a small piece of tape, each sewn with a red cross. her cap must be folded and stitched up the back like figure , and her neck, wrists, and belt must be wound with white thread. the little turban golliwog, figure , has his headdress made of a short bundle of wool of another color pushed through the folded loop of wool which forms his head. his arms also can be a separate bundle of strands pushed through the body portion. the meal sack materials required:-- a tiny piece of calico, white cotton, cotton wool, scent powder or lavender flowers, several apple pips, needle and thread, and scissors. [illustration: figs. to .] this makes a very pretty scent bag or pincushion. take a small piece of calico or any cotton scrap, about three inches wide and six inches long, and fold it across the middle. take a needle and cotton and tack it up the sides, and down again, if you cannot make small stitches, keeping both rows of stitches very close together. now fray out the threads at the ends of your strip, and turn the bag inside out. you can fill it with lavender if you like, or stuff it with cotton wool and some powdered scent; or you can stuff it quite tight with bran instead, and make a pincushion of it. tie the opening up tightly with strong thread, figure . now take one or two pips from an apple or an orange, to make a mouse: if it is an apple pip take a penknife and scratch out eyes and ears, as in figure . if you use an orange pip you can ink in the eye and the ear. now stitch your little mouse on to your meal sack, and it will be a very dainty little gift to put by for christmas. you can also make pretty sets of scent bags out of bits of ribbon or silk patterns from the dressmaker's, or cut off any old scraps of thin materials you find. make six little bags of different colors and stuff with cotton wool and scent, and tie round the neck of each the end of a piece of narrow baby ribbon; tie the first bag with a piece nine inches long, and each of the other bags should have a ribbon a little longer than the last. then tie all the loose ends of the six ribbons together with a bow of ribbon, and you will have a charming cluster of sachets to hang in a wardrobe. an emery cushion materials required:-- a tiny piece of red ribbon or silk, a tiny piece of calico or cotton material, strong red cotton thread, yellow or silk thread, green wool, a little emery powder, a tiny piece of hard soap or wax candle, scissors, and crewel needle. [illustration: figs. to .] to make this you must get a little bright red material about three inches square and a little thin cotton material the same size. lay both together and fold them diagonally across from corner to corner with the red material inside, and with fine thread and needle and very small stitches sew it from the two loose corners up to the point where it is folded, so that it forms a triangular bag. now the bag should be folded over so that you can measure off on the diagonal fold the same length as the stitched seam, and cut away the extra material as in figure . now take some hard soap, or a piece of wax candle, and rub it hard all over the cotton material in order to prevent your emery stuffing getting out, trim off any extra thickness of material at the point, and turn the bag red side out and run it very finely round the opening with strong needle and thread. draw the thread up a little, as in figure , and now take your emery powder and fill up tight with that. if you cannot get emery get some fine dry sand, or you can even pound up some cinders out of the fire, and fill your little bag very tight with the powder you make, and draw up the thread and stitch it very close. next you must take your green wool or silk, and make long loop stitches all round the top until all the opening and the gathered up portion is neatly covered with these stitches, like sepals on a flower. stitch on a little cord or loop of ribbon, and with a yellow thread make even stitches all over your little bag, till it looks just like a strawberry--figure . rat-tail knitting materials required:-- a large cork, large reel, or a small piece of a narrow cardboard roller, strong pins, preferably those known as "laundry pins," a small crochet hook, colored wools. [illustration: fig. .] this is known as rat-tail knitting, or cork or bobbin work. it can be made either by boring a hole in a large flat cork and setting seven or eight pins in round this hole, or by setting the pins into a reel with a large hole, but i have found the best thing is to get a small tube of cardboard such as paper is rolled on (out of a toilet roll, for instance), and to stick the pins firmly into the cardboard, as in figure . five or six pins will do. take colored wool and loop it once round each pin, then wrap it very loosely once round the whole circle of pins, and, with another large pin or a small crochet hook, lift each loop up and over the last wrap of the thread, and over the head of the pin. do this right round the circle of pins, so that you have now a second series of loops made from the thread which was wrapped round above the first ones, while the first loops have begun to descend into the tube. work round and round till the end of your knitted rat-tail appears out of the tube at the lower end. you can knot on lengths of wool of other colors and make very pretty reins with them. you can, if you like, work with two differently colored threads, all the time using one color for the loops you lift, over a wrap thread of another color, alternating as you work round and round your circle. this is really just the way a knitting-machine works, very much simplified. you can do the same on a larger scale with a wooden ring into which pegs of wood are inserted, and this will make quite a large woollen muffler. a peep-show picture materials required:-- a small piece of glass from an old photograph-frame, some firm brown or colored paper, any tiny flowers, leaves, etc., a piece of stamp paper. [illustration: fig. .] collect a tiny bunch of the smallest flowers you can find, daisies, buttercups, violets, even little weeds like chickweed, and small grasses, clover leaves, or sprays of moss; tie them very loosely in a little bunch. now lay your piece of glass down on your paper (the paper may be any color, but the blue sugar-bag paper looks very pretty.) take your little bunch of flowers and arrange it flat on the glass, with the faces of the flowers pressed against the glass, and the leaves and moss pressed flat on top of them. put the prettiest side of them next the glass. when all the surface of the glass is fairly well covered fold the paper over the flowers so that it makes a neat parcel, and fasten down the corners of the parcel with stamp paper. then turn your parcel over, and round three sides, about half an inch from the edge, cut a neat line, so that the paper will now lift like a flap and show your very pretty picture. seaweeds can be used instead of flowers--and if so, they should be arranged on the glass in a dish of water and floated into place. cup and ball materials required:-- a piece of thin cardboard about eight inches square, scraps of tissue paper, string, odd scraps of veiling, net, or thin silk or muslin, paste or mucilage, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] this is a very good toy to play with, and can be easily made. get a piece of cardboard about six inches square and draw a line from corner to corner and cut it across. then roll this triangle of cardboard into a long cone shape, about two and a half inches wide at the open end, and with a strip of thin gummed paper across the overlapping edge fix it down tight, so that it will not open out again. with the scissors trim the open end to an even round. next take a large piece of tissue or any other thin soft paper, and roll it into a neat round ball, which must loosely fit the opening of the cone. wind a thread of wool over it in one direction, and another so that it keeps its shape. now, if you can get a piece of a black veil, or some very thin soft net or muslin, cover over the ball so that it looks quite neat and round and even, and stitch a thin string about eighteen inches long to it. you can now cover the cup also with the veiling if you wish to, and if so, leave about three inches over at the open end, which must be drawn together, and the draw thread then pushed down inside the cone and fastened off at the closed end. it can have a little cork put in to fill it up. put the end of the string through a hole near the opening of the cone and your cup and ball is finished. storks materials required:-- large flat corks, ordinary bottle corks, large and small. hairpins, burnt matches, small feathers, penknife. [illustration: fig. .] first, for the body of the big stork get a good large cork, and with a penknife cut it into a longish egg shape; then another small cork must be cut almost round for the head. for the base the stork stands on one of the large corks out of pickle jars does best, but if you cannot get one take several pieces of thick cardboard and paste them together, or take the lid of a small cardboard box and make holes for the ends of the legs in it, and after pushing the ends of the hairpins through, run them into small pieces of cork, so that they will keep in place when standing. now get a burnt match and sharpen it at either end, and push one end of it into the head, and the other into the body, and set the legs into place in the body also. use hairpins that have no waves or angles in them, so that the bend of the pin makes the right bend for the leg. make the beak of two matches, trimmed to a sharp point, and you can use a tiny black bead for the eyes, or draw them with ink. the feathers for the crest and wings and tail must be stuck into holes, after having a little mucilage put on the end of the quill. a rabbit materials required:-- large cork, tiny piece of brown paper, a fragment of cotton wool, needle, strong thread, penknife, scissors. [illustration: figs. and .] this also is of cork, shaped out to rather a point at the head and cut flat underneath. cut little nicks on each side to define the feet. the ears are of brown paper cut like figure , with corners folded over and glued or put on with a stitch of strong linen thread, small dot of ink or a small bead makes the eye. a cork doll materials required:-- flat cork, two bottle corks, burnt matches, a tiny piece of thin cotton material, the same of white paper and of colored ribbon, a large; pin, a little black or brown wool, needle, mucilage. [illustration: figs. and .] the body is a nice smooth cork and the pinafore is a piece of white paper tied on with the piece of ribbon the arms and legs are matches sharpened and well pressed in; it is best to have their points glued. the head is a small cork covered with a piece of white cotton material cut in a circle and tied tightly at the neck. draw in the eyes, nose, and mouth with a soft black pencil, or paint them with rather dry water-color paint. take dark wool and make large loose stitches for the hair, and then run through, from crown to neck, a large strong pin to fix the head to the body. the frill of material below the place the head is tied on makes a neat tucker when it is arranged nicely. for each foot lay a little piece of match on the base of cork, where the leg is stuck into it, and glue it down. a cork horse materials required:-- a flat cork, and one large and one small bottle cork, burnt matches, black wool, a little black tape, a tiny piece of colored paper, needle, scissors, penknife. [illustration: fig. .] use a nice smooth cork for the body, and cut out a little saddle in colored paper, and glue it into place, bind it round with a piece of tape or ribbon for the girth, and you can make little stirrups out of wire or silver paper and hang them on from this. the head is a small cork out of a medicine bottle, with brown paper ears, cut just like the rabbit's but much smaller and with only one fold. the mane is of loops of black wool sewed on to tape, and bound firmly down to the match that makes the neck. the tail is also of black wool, and the stand or base can be either a cork or box lid; if it is the latter the legs must be glued into holes carefully cut to fit them. an engine and tender materials required:-- one large bottle cork and several small ones, one matchbox, large strong pins, preferably "laundry" pins. [illustration: fig. .] use a large cork for the engine and a portion of a small cork for the funnel. the dome can be made of the remaining piece of the latter and must be rounded at one end. pin both onto the boiler portion. the wheels are slices of cork set into place with pins. the tender is a matchbox with the sides cut down at one place to make the entrance, and another matchbox makes the windscreen. to make the wheels of the tender hold steady, cut long slices of cork the width of the matchbox, and run the pins into these after piercing the sides of the box, as seen in the top view of the engine. a chest of drawers materials required:-- a number of empty matchboxes, a number of shoe buttons, colored or brown paper, mucilage. [illustration: fig. .] this is a very neat chest of drawers, or writing-desk, made of matchboxes; it also makes very good furniture for a toy grocer's shop. have all your matchboxes of one size and color, and fix them all together in their outer cases with mucilage. next get a piece of pretty colored paper (pieces of flowered wall-paper look very nice, or blue paper of a sugar bag), and glue this round the ends and top of your chest of drawers. now in the end of each box cut a small hole and push through it the shank of a shoe button, and peg this through with a tiny slip of wood or a roll of paper, so that it holds quite firm. glue on to the bottom of your chest of drawers some buttons without shanks, or wooden button moulds, to form the feet. a cradle materials required:-- an empty matchbox, a cork, needle and thread, scissors, mucilage, penknife. [illustration: fig. .] use an empty matchbox, and on the bottom glue two halves of a slice of cork for rockers. for the hood take the outer case of the matchbox and unfasten it where it is joined, and cut off a lengthwise strip about three-quarters of an inch wide, using one of the corners of this for the peak of the hood. take a needle with strong thread, and with two large firm stitches fasten this strip to each side of the box, taking care to make the hood a nice even shape. now you can take a little muslin and lace and sew it on for little curtains and frills, to trim the cradle with, and roll some scraps of material up to make a neat mattress and pillow. a doll's table materials required:-- a small box lid of cardboard, large reel, mucilage. [illustration: fig. .] this table is made of a round box lid fixed with mucilage on to a spool. a square lid will do equally well. a doll's bed materials required:-- small cardboard box and lid, needle and thread, lace or ribbon, small piece of wadding and muslin, or a piece of thin material, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] first cover the bottom of the cardboard box with a layer of soft material or wadding, with thin cotton over it, and take large tacking stitches to fasten this down. next fix on your canopy by setting the lid upright on to the end of the box, and glue or fix it into place with stationers' paper clips or large stitches. trim the canopy round the top with a little frill of lace or muslin, and put the same, as a valance, round the bed portion. you can also add curtains at each side of the canopy, and, if you want a footboard, that also can be fixed across the bottom with big stitches or paper clips before the valance frill is sewed on. you can make quite large beds in this way, and if you have not a very pretty box you can trim it up with pieces of wall-paper pasted inside the canopy. a doll's chair materials required:-- slice of cork or a chestnut, large strong pins, colored wool. [illustration: fig. .] the seat is a slice of cork or a chestnut, and the legs and back are made of pins, the large ones called "laundry" pins are the best. wind pretty wool in and out between the pins to make the back look like a nice cushion. you can cover the cork seat with a piece of colored material if you wish. another doll's chair materials required:-- small piece of thin cardboard or post card, small piece of pretty material, a spool, needle and thread, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] this chair is harder to make than the last one. first cut a piece of cardboard or two pieces of old post cards to the shape marked a. it must be large enough to allow it to reach halfway round the top of a reel at its widest part, where the corners are. now tack on to this a piece of velveteen or any other pretty material, so that the edges turn over to the wrong side of the cardboard. on the second piece of card take the material only down just a little below the two corners of the cardboard, and you need not turn it in on the straight edge between these corners. tack both cards together with the material outside, and overseam or topsew them as shown in figure a. next take your reel and bind tightly over each end of it a round piece of material, and then take a narrow strip of material or ribbon, and turn in the edges and wrap it round the reel as in b, and tack the strip into place very tight. now fix on the back as in c with neat little stitches, and your chair is finished. necklaces materials required:-- needles, strong thread of linen or silk, seeds, beads, acorn cups, daisies. [illustration: figs. to .] these are some of the necklaces you can make of things you find in the country, or of seeds you come across. figure is made of rose hips threaded together. if you want to make the cross or pendant, you can use a few small beads so that your radiating hips will hold more steadily. these will hold better into place if you put a strong surrounding line of stitches into them. figure is of melon seeds or sunflower seeds, either will do. figure , of the same, but threaded twice through each seed, with a tiny bead between and a pendant loop of seeds and beads below. figure is a snake made of acorn cups. begin at the head (with is a large acorn with the shell cut to make eyes and mouth), and thread through the mouth, then thread on your biggest acorn cups, gradually choosing smaller and smaller ones till you get to the tail, where it should be finished with a tassel. [illustration: fig. .] figure is the prettiest daisy chain. the stems are nipped off and the daisies threaded through the center. this makes a very beautiful wreath. [illustration: figs. to .] a hatband materials required:-- small autumn leaves, broad tape or carpet binding, needle and thread. pick up the prettiest leaves which are nearly the same in size. use a thread of brown mending yarn and carefully sew the leaves down on to a piece of broad tape or carpet binding. after you have finished the sewing press the hatband for some days under a pile of newspapers or heavy books, so that the leaves will dry flat. a fan materials required:-- large leaves of spanish chestnut, smaller leaves, thin cardboard, needle and brown silk or wool. this fan is made of the large leaves of the spanish chestnut; you can pick these up already beautifully dry and flat in the woods in autumn. get about twenty of the same size, and cut a semicircle of firm cardboard and sew them on to it, so that the fan holds very firm, then over your stitches sew on smaller leaves of varying colors. you will find this makes a most beautiful ornament for your mantelpiece. * * * * * figures to are _windmills_, some very easy and some more difficult, but all very interesting toys. a pin-wheel or whirligig materials required:-- a square of stiff writing paper, an old penholder, skewer, or a straight twig, a strong pin or a slim upholstery nail with a large head, scissors. [illustration: figs. to .] this pinwheel is made of a piece of firm writing paper. cut the paper into a perfect square, and fold it diagonally from corner to corner and smooth out again, then cut along your folds to within an inch of the center. now cut a tiny round of strong paper or a piece of a postcard about half an inch across and take a strong short pin and put it through the middle. then push your pin through each right-hand corner of your square of writing paper, and lastly through the center of the square, and take a piece of stick or a penholder and push the point of the pin in till it is halfway in. you will find your windmill will turn as you run, if you hold it out straight in front of you. if you can get two good sticks you can use a long one as the upper part of a weather vane. rut a nail through, rather nearer your pinwheel than the middle of the stick. at the other end make a long slit and put in a paper tail, so that the pinwheel will keep its head to the wind. fix your nail into the end of the other stick, and set the stick upright in the ground as in figure . a tin wheel or buzzer materials required:-- a circle of thin tin or a tin lid, a stick of soft wood, an upholsterer's nail, tin cutters. [illustration: fig. .] this windmill is made of tin; this is rather difficult to cut unless your hands are strong, but sometimes you can get very thin tin or brass from kindergarten stores, and it is quite easy to make it of this. draw a circle about four inches across on the tin, round a jam pot or some such thing to give you a good even circle, and cut this out with the scissors. now take a ruler and scratch lines across your circle, at right angles first, so that you have your circle divided into quarters; now divide these quarters again into three or four divisions, and draw a smaller circle on your tin about three quarters of an inch, or less, from the outer edge. now make a clean cut with the scissors from the edge to the inner circle along each line. the tin will always bend in one way as you do this, and you must leave the little divisions bent very evenly. make a hole in the center of your wheel and fix it strongly with a nail into a stick. you will find you can hardly hold your windmill if you stand with it facing a steady wind. this windmill is a grand one to go. a wooden mill materials required:-- two narrow strips of thin, soft wood, a stick for a holder, a screw, penknife, gimlet. [illustration: figs. and .] this is a wooden mill and it requires some care and skill to make it. it can easily be made with a penknife out of two pieces of thin, soft wood. first you must cut a neat socket across each piece of wood in the center, halfway through its thickness. the socket must be exactly the same width as your piece of wood, so that when you set each piece socket to socket they fit exactly. now with an awl or pricker make a neat hole in the center of the two pieces when they are fitted together. next you must shave away with your penknife the right-hand edge of each of the "arms" or "sails" of your windmill, graduating the shaving evenly from the left-hand edge, where it is thick, to a fine blade at the right-hand edge. now fit together the two halves and put a nail through the hole and fasten it into the end of a stick. if the nail is apt to split the stick you can put a reel on to the end of it and fix the nail into the stick through the hole of the reel. it is a very good thing to put your nail through a large glass bead between the windmill and the stick. a feather wheel materials required:-- four large quills, a piece of firm cardboard, a cork, a box for a gas mantle, a straight stick or old penholder, paper, mucilage, needle and strong thread. [illustration: fig. .] this windmill is made of goose quills, or any other large strong quill; these must be chosen with the wider webbing of the feather all on the same side, and must be the same size. cut a circle of firm cardboard and lay each quill with its point in the middle of this circle and stitch them firmly down at right angles to each other. glue the wrong side of the cardboard on to a reel or a piece of cork, and fix this on the end of a small stick or penholder. now take a small cylindrical cardboard box--those used for gas mantles are excellent--and bore holes through opposite sides of this, about halfway down. push the stick through and fix into a slit at the end of it a "tail" of paper or cardboard. take another piece of cardboard and shape it into a cone, exactly as in figure for the cup and ball. cut a hole in the bottom of your box and fit it on to the end of the cone, which must be cut down to allow the stick to pass clear of the end of the cone. materials required:-- a narrow strip of soft wood, a cork, four luggage labels or post cards, a penholder, strong glue, a penknife, an upholsterer's nail, a gimlet. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of two pieces of wood socketed as in figure , and with slits made in each end into which a luggage label is inserted. use glue to hold these firm, and also to stick on to the center of the cross of wood a slice of cork, pierce a hole through the cork and the cross of wood, and through it run a nail with a fairly large head. now make a hole at each outer left-hand corner of each label and, loop through this with a needle and a firm thread. tie the thread round the nail and run the nail into your stick. an air propeller materials required:-- a piece of soft wood three-quarters of an inch thick and about six or seven inches long, a gimlet, a soft wood skewer, penknife, sandpaper. [illustration: fig. .] this is a little air propeller which is rapidly whirled between both hands and released: if properly done it should return to the hands. the propeller is cut out of wood on the same principle as in figure , but it may be of thicker wood with a greater amount of angle to the blades. the stick must be carefully fitted to the hole in the blades and must be thicker at the other end. both blades and stick should be well smoothed with sandpaper. a reversing propeller materials required:-- two pieces of wood as above, also two larger round sticks, such as are used to roll paper upon, a cork, two long nails, a piece of thin tin or cardboard for the tail. [illustration: fig. .] this windmill is made of two propellers cut like figure , but with the bevelling of the blades of one reversed so that it will turn in the opposite direction. a piece of wood or cork or a bead may be put between each propeller. the tail may be made of cardboard or tin. a waterwheel and shute materials required:-- smooth straight twigs about half an inch thick, a thin wooden sweet-box or other light wooden box, two small pieces of white soft wood, about one-third of an inch thick and five inches long and one inch broad, a piece of thick wire, small tacks, pliers, a gimlet, small staples, strong thin string. [illustration: fig. .] this is a waterwheel with a watershute, and it turns a crank and has a little man attached. the waterwheel has flat blades with no bevelling, and a thick wire is inserted through its axis. this wire should be bent with pliers to form the cranks. set up crosswise into the ground some strong twigs tied firmly into position with strong twine. if there is a handy little stream it should be diverted to run a channel into your watershute, which should be of two flat pieces of wood nailed together at right angles; this can also be supported on trestles. set the shute so that the end is above the blade of the waterwheel and allows the water to fall on it with sufficient force to turn it round. the man may be cut with a fret-saw in three ply wood, and small staples should be run loosely through the holes at the ankles into a thicker piece of wood which acts as a base, so that with the movement of the crank he will appear to be turning the wheel. fasten arms and legs to the body with a thick wire which works loosely in the holes, or with a thin nail which may be bent over at the point. a pop-gun materials required:-- a large goose quill, a small twig, a slice of raw potato, a penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this is a most simple little toy and very easy to make. get a large quill feather with as wide and strong a quill as you can, and cut it off where the quill is thickest. then get a little stick or branch, preferably a little bent at the thicker end, and peel and smooth it, so that it will fit nicely into the quill with the thicker bent end projecting. this makes the ramrod, but it must be fitted into the quill so that it reaches only within half an inch of the pointed or smaller end. now take a slice of raw potato about half an inch thick or a little more, and into it push the wider end of the quill so that it takes out a neat round piece of the potato. with the ramrod gently push this first "bullet" to the smaller end of the quill and take out another slice from the potato with the wide end. now quickly and smartly push in your ramrod and you will find your first bullet shoots off splendidly, leaving your second one at the point of the quill ready for the next shot. large popguns can be made with a piece of tin tubing, or even cardboard rollers and corks used as bullets. the ramrod must be padded with cotton wrapping in order to fit the tube closely. a whistle materials required:-- a short piece of smooth sycamore, willow, cherry, or holly branch, a pea, a penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this can be made of sycamore cherry, holly, or willow branches, where there is a fairly thick coating of sappy bark outside the firm woody fiber. choose a piece about four inches long without knots and as smooth as possible. now by tapping patiently and wetting the wood occasionally loosen the bark from the hard wood so that it will at last slip off like a tube; this requires care and gentle handling. now take the hard wooden core and cut into it, from the middle to within half an inch of one end, a deep curving cavity, and from this to the other end cut off a shallow horizontal slice. this core can now be slipped into the tube of bark again and a neat semicircular hole cut in the latter above the cavity in the core, and you will find this an excellent whistle. scottish children put a small pea into the cavity before replacing it into the tube of bark to make it "birl" when blown--this is a great improvement. a long whistle materials required:-- a piece of hollow bamboo about eight inches long, a cork, a penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this is another whistle made of a short length of bamboo cane, which is hollow, cut just below one of the "knots" or divisions where the hollow tube is blocked by a solid wall of the wood. if you cannot get this, block one open end of your hollow tube of wood with a cork, and for the other cut a piece of cork or wood to fit, with a slice off to leave an opening into the tube. now cut semicircular holes in your tube at intervals. these will each produce a different note if the others are stopped with the fingers, and with care a regular sequence of the notes of a scale can be planned. this sequence will depend on the size of the tube--its length, and the distance between the holes. a squeaker materials required:-- a large goose quill, a penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this squeaker is made from a piece of a quill. make a neat cut close to the small end of the quill about three quarters of an inch long. when this is held well inside the mouth it will make a most alarming squeak when blown into. a buzzer materials required:-- a large button or small round of leather or thin tin, a piece of strong thin string, strong scissors. [illustration: fig. .] this can be simply made by threading a large button on a string, so that when the ends are knotted together it makes a loop about twelve to fifteen inches long. keeping the button in the middle of the doubled length of string insert the first and second fingers of each hand into the looped ends, and rapidly whirl the button round till the string gets a considerable twist on it. now by alternately slacking and tightening the string the button will whizz round with a slight humming noise. if a piece of tin with notched edges (as in figure of a windmill) is used, it will hum very loud. a piece of heavy lead foil, or a piece of firm leather cut into a round and notched at the edge can be used. a clapper materials required:-- a fowl's merrythought or wishbone, a small slip of thin wood, a piece of strong string, penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of a fowl's wishbone or merrythought. tie across from end to end of the bone a loop of string, and into this insert the end of a thin piece of wood about four inches long and three quarters of an inch wide. slip this in till the string is about the middle, then turn it round several times till the string is twisted fairly tight without bending the ends of the bone too much. now slip the wooden strip along till the string is about an inch from the end of it and let it go. the twisting of the string will bring the wood down against the angle of the bone with a smart clap. a telephone materials required:-- two gas mantle boxes, a piece of thin bladder or greaseproof paper, many yards of thin twine. [illustration: fig. .] this can be made of two of the boxes used for incandescent gas mantles; the box for the larger inverted mantles is best. remove the lids from each end and cut off the rims carefully, so that you have two neat rings of cardboard. slip one of these on to one end of each box and over each rim tightly tie a circle of greaseproof paper--such as is used for covering jam pots or parcelling butter. better still, use a piece of bladder from the butcher's. fasten this down very tight and firm, and through the middle of each paper or bladder insert and knot the end of a fine piece of string which can be ten or more yards in length. if this is held taut without touching anything between the two boxes, you can whisper from end to end and the voice will be heard quite distinctly. a drum materials required:-- a gas mantle box, strong greaseproof paper or a piece of bladder, thin colored string. [illustration: fig. .] a little drum can be made of these gas mantle boxes in the same way. stretch the bladder or paper of oiled silk tightly across each end, and lace strong threads from edge to edge of each piece of bladder or paper or silk, so that each lies evenly, then bind the edges down with twine above the stitches; the rims of the lids can now be slipped on to make it look neat. for a drumstick, wind a ball of cotton wool or tissue paper on the end of a stick and cover with a round of silk or bladder also, and bind it tightly on to the stick. a megaphone materials required:-- a piece of thin cardboard fifteen or eighteen inches square, gummed paper or thin tape, paste or mucilage, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of a piece of cardboard about fifteen inches square. insert a pair of compasses at one corner, and from the one corner to that diagonally opposite describe a part of a circle and cut along the line marked. now bend the cardboard over into a conical trumpet shape, and overlap the sides where they join, about an inch. lay over this join a broad strip of cloth or paper pasted or glued firmly; you can put pins through the cardboard till this is set into place and dried. now at the pointed end of the cone cut a mouthpiece wide enough to speak easily into; this will need a hole about three inches wide. when you speak into this megaphone your voice will carry a long distance--a quarter of a mile on a quiet evening--and it will give great fun to watch the effect on people who are walking at some distance in the country. for convenience in holding you can paste on to the outside a loop or handle of tape, but do not push this through the cardboard as it is important that there should be nothing projecting inside the trumpet of the megaphone. rush furniture materials required:-- green rushes, green wool or thick cotton thread. [illustration: figs. and .] this chair and table are made of the green rushes from the marshes, and are very pretty things to make. for the little chair, first take the bundle of rushes which forms the curved back, and curve it into place and tie it round here and there with a little wool to keep it firm while the seat is being made. this will be better described by the diagram than by words. each rush composing the seat must be added successively from the back towards the front, and when arranged, and the ends turned back or forwards to form front and back legs, stays can be made of single rushes and all carefully bound in neatly with wool; wool holds much more firmly than cotton thread. the table, figure , is made in the same way. rush whip materials required:-- green rushes. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] the whip is the easiest thing you can make of rushes. it is bound at intervals with wrapping of the rushes themselves. rush rattle materials required:-- green rushes, small round pillbox. this is made on the same lines as the whip, but the bundle or sheaf of rushes is opened out and made to surround a small cardboard box with a pebble or a pea in it, and another rush laced round to keep it in place. the diagram will show how to complete it; very tight firm binding is needed: it is better to do it with wool rather than with rushes. paper beads materials required:-- colored paper, wall-paper or magazine covers, a knitting needle, scissors, a ruler, mucilage. [illustration: fig. .] this shows how to make beads of various shapes out of paper; it can be of any color. to make the long pointed beads marked a, take a ruler and rule on your paper lines as in b, and if the paper is thin they should be strips about twelve inches long, and the wider end of the wedge can be one inch or one and a half inches. the strip must taper to a point at the other end. now take the wide end of your strip and roll it very tightly and evenly round a steel knitting needle with the colored side out, and fix down the point neatly with mucilage as in the darkened portion in the diagram. smaller beads of various shapes can be made, but all on the same method. leave the beads on the knitting needle till the mucilage is quite dry, and give them a coat of clear varnish. such beads look well also with blobs of paint or gilt on them. fish bone tea set materials required:-- large and small vertebrae of codfish, a little gilt and water color paint. [illustration: fig. .] this little tea set is very dainty and is made of the separate vertebrae or backbones of large flat fish. when the bones are soft after boiling, they can be easily bent or cut into the required shapes, and the different sizes of bones used for cups or tea pot can be decorated with little patterns in gilt paint or water-colors. a rush or raffia bag materials required:-- green rushes or raffia, fine string, a small piece of cardboard, a tape needle. [illustration: fig. .] this is a little bag made of raffia or rushes, woven on to a warp of string. the string should first of all be wound very loosely on to cardboard, and if necessary slits or notches can be cut in it to hold the string firm. now take your rush or raffia and darn up one side of the card and down the other and back again, leaving one long side of the card free. you can weave one thread up and one down, or one thread up and two down as you please. when the weaving is finished draw out the cardboard and decorate your bag with little tassels, and add plaited handles. the harvest plait materials required:-- two long stems of straws, or stalks of oats, barley or wheat, with ears left on, a little thread. [illustration: fig. .] this is made by scottish children to wear in their hats at harvest time. take two long firm straws with the ears on them and tie them together firmly just below the ears. now flatten out each straw and bend one across the other, and the first across that again, making each fit close and fold evenly at the bend. you will find this holds quite firmly, when tied at the end, and makes a very pretty ornament. the same plait can also be done with strips of paper an inch wide, and used as a decoration at christmas. dolls' furniture materials required:-- some branches of willow, freshly cut, some laundry pins, a penknife, a little broad tape or carpet binding, needle and thread. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] these little chairs and stools can be very neatly made of willow or privet branches, or any twigs where there is a small core of soft pith which will allow a strong pin to fit in exactly. all the lengths for the various legs and spars of each article must be measured and cut very accurately before beginning to put them together; use a very sharp penknife to do the cutting. the pins used should be fairly strong ones. in the diagrams a broad piece of tape or ribbon has been stretched tightly round the spars back and front, and its end stitched together underneath, but this is not necessary. two or more spars can be set across to form the seat, only if too many pins are pushed through one spar there is a tendency for it to split. a wheelbarrow materials required:-- a piece of cork or a button mould, an empty matchbox, matches, needle and strong thread, a tiny piece of wire. [illustration: fig. .] a little wheelbarrow can be nicely made out of a match or cardboard box. the legs and handles are of matches, and may be fixed on with mucilage and held steady with large strong stitches. the support for the wheel is made of a strip taken from the lid of the matchbox and narrowed at one end where it supports the wheel. the wheel may be made of a slice of cork or a button mould fixed on with a piece of wire bent into a knot at each end to prevent it being pulled through the support. a fern basket materials required:-- fresh-cut willow twigs, laundry pins, four large beads. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of fairly thick twigs cut carefully in the same way as figure , and pinned firmly together. beads or small buttons can be fixed on for feet. the basket should be entirely lined with pretty moss, and then the earth put in and ferns planted in it. it must be kept very moist, and can be hung from the roof if preferred. a doll's stool materials required:-- the fireproof base of a gas mantle, a tiny piece of cardboard, a little wadding and a tiny piece of silk or velvet, mucilage or needle and thread. [illustration: fig. .] this is made from the earthenware support for a gas mantle. take a piece of cardboard and draw round the circle of the mantle support on it, and cut it out. then with a padding of tissue paper or wadding and a piece of pretty material make a neat cushion, using the cut-out circle of cardboard as a foundation; stitch or glue this neatly on the under side and fix it on to the support. a doll's stool of feathers materials required:-- four or five quills from a chicken's wing, some very fine pins, a little thread, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of small quill feathers and is very pretty. use feathers which are large enough to hold a pin inside their hollow tubes. cut off a thick piece of quill for each of the four legs and entirely strip them of webbing. cut and strip rather thinner ones for the spars to support these, and fix as in fig. , using very slender pins. if the quills used for legs are strong enough, the feathers for the sea may be pinned on also, but if they are inclined to split, those for the seat must be lashed on, and therefore must be cut so that they project at the ends beyond the legs. cut each of these like a in the diagram, so that the webbing is cut straight across at the end furthest from the point of the quill. fix each of these four quills into place with the webbing overlapping the sloping end of the quill in front of it. a porter's handbarrow materials required:-- a wooden sweet box, a fret saw and sharp penknife, a reel, small tacks, upholsterer's nails. [illustration: fig. .] this can be made of nice pieces of soft wood such as are used for grocers' sweet-boxes or fruit boxes. cut the two long sides with a saw and bevel them off in a curve to form the handles--they should be six to eight inches long. the crosspiece at the end should be about three inches, and also the two crossbars. fasten the sides to the end about the middle of the latter, so that a piece projects below the sides wide enough to support the wheels--these should be made of a reel cut in half and fastened on with a large-headed nail. smooth all down with coarse sandpaper. a crane materials required:-- a wooden sweet box, three large reels, one small one, tacks, upholstery nails, string, mucilage, a fret saw, a large coat hook. [illustration: fig. .] this should also be made of a box of soft wood from the grocer. the semicircular sides should be about four inches long, where they are fastened to the base; they may either be glued or nailed on to this. the base should be about seven inches long and three inches wide. before fastening on the side-pieces bore a hole at the end of each to insert the thick wire which turns the large reel used to wind the cord, and also set in the tacks which support the crane at each side. the sides of the crane should be about three quarters of an inch wide at the lower end, and should taper to about half an inch at the other end; they should be about seven inches long. near the lower end use another smaller reel or a block of wood as a stay to hold the sides of the crane; it should be of such a size as to hold the ends of the crane firmly between the nails in the sides of the base. at the other end set in a very small reel, with a long slim nail, so that it will easily turn on it. now take a good strong dressmaker's hook, such as is used for coats or mantles, fasten it to a length of strong string, and wind one end round the large reel, setting the hook end over the end of the crane. a top materials required:-- a large reel, a skewer or penholder, a fret saw, a penknife. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of a large reel cut in half and the roller portion cut away into a point with a penknife. the pin is made of a wooden skewer or penholder with the point projecting slightly beyond the cut portion of the reel. these are very good tops and spin very steadily. a teetotum materials required:-- a small block of soft wood, an old penholder, a sharp penknife, a gimlet. [illustration: fig. .] this is made from a square block of wood cut sharply to a point with a peg sunk well into a close-fitting hole. each flat side of the top has on it a letter or a number, and the game is to spin it round, and according to which letter or number falls upward each player takes or makes so many counters to the pool. the letters generally used are-- p==pay one, n==nothing, t==take one, w==win all. beans or counters are usually played for. bow and arrow materials required:-- a branch of pliable smooth wood, strong twine, a penknife, two goose quills. [illustration: figs. and .] take a smooth even branch of willow, cane, or other pliable wood about three quarters of an inch thick and about two feet or two and a half feet long, and round the smaller end cut a shallow groove about one and a half inches wide, and about half an inch from the end. about one inch from the thicker end cut a notch sloping inwards towards the middle of the stick just deep enough to hold firm a piece of strong string. next bind round about four inches at the middle of the stick with string, laying the end of the string along the stick, so that the binding will cover it all but three inches. bind the four inches very closely, and tie the end of the binding to the spare end of the string and knot it and cut away the ends. now bind over in the same way, round the groove at the end of the stick, and knot the free end of the string to the spare end under the binding, and stretch the free end of the string very taut, so that the stick bends a little. make a loop in the end of the string which can be easily slipped in and out of the notch at the other end of the bow. when not in use keep the looped end loose from the notch. the arrows must be of very straight light sticks or thin bamboo, and must be scraped or sandpapered perfectly smooth. at the point cut a long slit, and into it slip a long and very slender nail, and bind it round across the notch with strong linen thread. you can file off the head of the nail. at the other end make a similar but longer notch, and into it slip a portion of a quill feather with one side of the webbing practically cut away. arrange both pieces of the quills so that they project the same distance at each side from the wooden shaft. bind round the arrow with linen thread both above and below the quills, and at the extreme end deepen the mouth of the notch so that it makes a groove into which you can fit the string of the bow. a dart materials required:-- a six-inch stick of soft wood, a long nail, pincers, a file, a piece of stiff writing paper, a penknife or fret saw. [illustration: fig. .] this dart is made of a piece of soft wood about six inches long, and into the sharpened end a slim long nail is driven; the head may be nipped or filed off so that the point will stick into the ground or into a target. across the other end cut or saw two notches at right angles, for about one inch down, and fit into these a square of paper folded neatly into "diagonals and diameters"--this makes the "feathering" of the dart. smooth the dart with sandpaper. a crossbow materials required:-- a bow-stick of pliable wood, strong string, a smooth lath of thin wood, a fret saw, an awl, a penknife, a long nail. [illustration: figs. and .] this bow is made somewhat more elaborately than in figure , and shoots off pebbles or bullets. the bow itself must be tapered evenly towards either end, and in the middle it must be bevelled flat for about two and a half inches at one side, and a slight groove run right round the stick at either end of the bevelled portion. next take a thin lath or flat thin piece of wood, a quarter of an inch thick and rather less than the length of the bow. taper it from two and a half inches wide at one end to one and a half at the other, and lay the broad end across the flattened portion of the bow with about one inch projecting. mark on the crosspiece the width of the bow-stick and cut into each side of the crosspiece a deep sharp nick, leaving about one inch between each opposite set of nicks. now draw your bow to the full extent of its curve without running the risk of breaking it, and mark on the crosspiece where the bowstring crosses it when the bow is drawn, and here cut a narrow slot right through the crosspiece. into this insert a trigger as in figure . the trigger must be of wood and should curve at one or both ends, and should be pinned through into its slot with a long thin nail, in such a position that the curved end will broad end across the flattened portion of full, and will lie well into the slot when the string is released. now bind the crosspiece on to the side of the bow by strings fitting tightly into the four nicks and running round the grooves round the bow-stick. this will leave the crosspiece free of any bindings which might interfere with the bullet or "quarrel" as it leaves the bow. a catapult materials required:-- a forked branch, strong round elastic, a scrap of leather, fine string, penknife, scissors. [illustration: fig. .] take a firm forked branch about three quarters of an inch thick, or a little less, and trim the two forks evenly, and run a groove about three quarters of an inch wide round each, near the end. into these bind very tightly two pieces of very strong round elastic about five inches long. next take a firm piece of leather about one inch wide and two inches long, trim it away at the corners, and make a hole at each end into which insert the free ends of the elastic, turning them back on themselves and binding firmly. it may be well to mention that there are very strict police regulations about shooting with bows and catapults, and those who use them must only do so away from houses or traffic. a target materials required:-- a bandbox, thin paper, string, scissors, ink, and paintbrush. [illustration: fig. .] a very simple target may be made by using a round bandbox and stretching over its open mouth a piece of newspaper, which may be kept in place by slipping over it the rim taken off the lid. mark roughly on this the "bull's eye" in ink, and hang up the box by means of loops of string through the side. the newspaper can be renewed as often as is necessary. a square box will do just as well. a raft materials required:-- a quantity of reeds or thin straight twigs, a piece of cork, strong string. [illustration: fig. .] this is made of dry reeds or any other light straight sticks--bamboo is good. it may be made of any size and may even be made large enough to carry one or more persons, if the size and strength of the branches and lashings is duly proportioned, but for a toy reeds will do nicely. lay down first the crossbar beneath the raft and then space out the raft itself to fit it, leaving a little space between each reed. take a strong thin string and fasten it with a tight loop over the end of the first reed, turn it down and round the lower cross-spar, and then up and around the upper one, and lay in the next reed, and so on. when the first row of lashings is done lay on the second pair of crossbars, and if there is any difficulty about lashing the string a large darning-needle may help you, but if the lashing is done in the right direction this is not needful. if a mast is wanted, a reel, or a cork with a hole in it, may be lashed down to the raft as in the diagram, and the mast can be set firmly into this. a canoe materials required:-- some cheap cloth or shelving, some "basketry cane," soft string or fine tape, scissors, penknife, a large strong needle. [illustration: fig. .] the best material for this is thin shelving cloth and it must be made at least twelve inches long. double your shelving cloth, and outline on it the pattern of the side of the canoe, which should be cut in brown paper; this must be quite straight at the upper sides, not curving as it appears in the drawing. lay the paper pattern with the line of the bottom of the canoe at the fold of the oilcloth. now take two long pieces of cane, such as is used for basket-work, and with a large needle, and very thick thread, lash each length of cane along the outsides of the boat from end to end, keeping the shiny side of the cloth outwards. a short thick tapestry needle is best, and the lashing must be steady and even, but if it is difficult to stitch through the cloth an awl or pricker can be used to make the holes before beginning to stitch. now take another piece of cane and bend about one inch at one end and lash this bent portion to the side of the boat about one-third of the way along the "gunwale" where it is already lashed, and lash it over firmly to this on the inside of the boat. bend the cane now across to the opposite side of the canoe and meantime tie tightly together the ends of the cane that is lashed from end to end of the boat, and set in this crosspiece so that it keeps the two sides of the boat apart at the right angle. fix in the second crosspiece likewise, and then lash the open ends of the boat firmly together. the canoe should be rather wide and shallow, or it will be inclined to lie on its side unless ballast is added by weighting it at the bottom. if weight is needed the best thing for this sort of boat is one or two of the heavy lead buttons to be had at a tailor's for weighting garments; they can be lashed on with strong thread through the holes. quite large canoes can be made in this way, and if a tight "decking" of thin waterproof material be stretched across at both ends from the crosspiece it makes a vessel almost identical with the eskimo "kayak" which used to be used round the coasts not so very long ago. a ship materials required:-- a block of soft wood ten or twelve inches long, about three inches wide and two inches deep, nine post cards, three skewers or old wooden knitting-pins, a cork, a piece of heavy wire, dressmakers' eyelets, some small staples, fine string, a gimlet, a sharp penknife, small tacks, scissors, mucilage. [illustration: fig. .] this is the simplest sort of a ship to model in wood; all wooden boats require carefulness in their modelling and balance. this can be made from six to twelve inches long, and in soft wood. let your block of wood be about four times its width, roughly speaking. rule a line up to center of your block to mark the keel and cut away from this with a very sharp knife to the curving outlines of the deck which must be drawn on the top side of the block. it would be impossible, in the space allowed for diagrams, to give details for modelling the body of the boat, but any boy can shape it if he is careful and observes, from pictures or actual boats or models, how to do it. when the body of the vessel is shaped and smoothed down with a file and sandpaper, take a piece of heavy thick wire, and bend it at either end and sharpen the ends into points with a file and hammer it into the keel; or, if preferred, a deep groove may be cut with a gouge and a strip of lead inserted. the rudder suggested here can be made either of wood, or of a double piece of tin with a piece of thick wire hammered in at the fold and left with one end projecting, so that it fits through a hole in the stem and forms a tiller. the rudder must have a hole pierced at the lower corner, and into this fix a small staple which must work loosely in its hole, and after the rudder is fixed in position this staple must be hammered into the stern of the boat. figure a shows the stern end with rudder fixed into place. next cut a bowsprit of wood and with two staples fix it firmly on to the deck. take three pieces of cork or three half reels, and glue or nail them to the deck--this will make a good hold for the masts. then along each side of the boat at intervals fasten on a strong dressmaker's "eye" (for a hook) with its two small loops bent so that they overlap; the nail can be set through this. these eyelets are meant to hold the "stays" which keep the masts steady. now take nine postcards, and about half an inch from the edge in the middle of each long side cut neatly a hole big enough to slip your masts through, with a strong needle, a piece of strong thin string or stout linen thread, knotting it with a large knot at the end. lay the post cards flat so that they just touch and set the mast through the holes--a long wooden knitting-pin makes a capital mast--and the knob can be left on to finish it at the top. about one inch or more above the top sails make a slight groove round the mast, and round this bind tightly the threads laced through the cards, tightened so that each card bends a little; carry down these threads or stays now to the eyelets and fasten them firmly. take another stay to the bowsprit and lash it down and carry it on to meet the front of the keel, and fasten it in with a tiny tack or a pin. gum on small paper flags to the masts. this makes quite a good little sailing ship and it is not difficult to make. a propeller materials required:-- a slip of thin wood, a small strip of tin, strong round elastic, strong tin cutters, a penknife or fret saw, an awl. [illustration: fig. .] this is a little propeller which with certain alterations can be fixed to any boat. take a piece of tin, as in figure a, and pierce it with two holes and file them quite smooth, and slightly bend either end left and right from the holes. now take a piece of thin wood cut as in the diagram, with a long wide slot, so that it forms a sort of fork, and with screws or tacks hammer this on to the stern of your vessel at the two holes, so that it projects with the whole fork clear of the vessel. now thread strong elastic through the holes in the tin blades of the propeller with the ends knotted firmly, making a double loop, each end looping over the respective forks. twist this tightly round on the same principle as in the making of the wishbone clapper, and when the twist is released it will propel your boat a considerable distance either backwards or forwards according to the direction the thread is twisted. a doll materials required:-- an old knitted stocking or pair of cotton gloves, two shoe-buttons, strong thread, some brown or black mending yarn, tissue paper, wadding, scissors, darning-needle. [illustration: fig. .] this doll is made of old stockings or old knitted or woven gloves. if only black stockings can be got it can be a nigger doll, or it can have its face alone made of light-colored glove. the stuffing must be of tissue paper roughly shaped to the right size and wrapped round with some yarn to keep it shapely, or this may be again wrapped round with a layer of cotton wadding. shape the arms and legs separately, and fasten over the knitted covering very neatly with big, but firm, stitches. stitch a line right through at the wrists and flatten out the hands, and make lines of stitching to mark the fingers and the line of the toes: make a sort of "dart" where the leg bends at the ankle. for the head--put an extra wad of soft padding under the face portion so that it is very soft and bulgy, and stitch firmly into this two shoe-buttons for eyes. take a large darning-needle and take your stitches right through the head to the back; use very strong doubled linen thread. the knitted covering used for the head may be all gathered into the back and simply flattened roughly into place with big stitches, as you will cover it with "hair" later on. now take your needle through again and make the two tiny stitches for the nostrils, and pull these stitches back very tight also. two more stitches form the mouth with a wee one below to make a hollow below the lips. now firmly stitch the head into place, and with brown or black knitting or mending yarn carefully make large stitches radiating from the crown of the head to the forehead: do not pull these tight, and use double wool if you like. make long loose loops of wool all round the back of the head and above them stitch as before into the crown. this makes a really very good doll if it is carefully made, and not too hurriedly done. a brownie materials required:-- a pair of old kid or leather gloves, tissue paper, flat milliner's wire, strong thread of the color of the gloves, stamp-paper, ink or water color paint, scissors, strong needle. [illustration: fig. .] this is a very jolly little fellow, and he is made of old kid gloves. his head and body are stuffed with tissue paper. the head is just wrapped with a square piece cut from the wrist of the glove neatly gathered in at each side and tightly tied. the loose ends must then have each one corner trimmed off in a sloping line towards the neck; this forms his flappy pointed ears. now get two tiny rounds of gummed stamp-paper and ink on each an eyeball, only partially covering the paper, and gum these on for the eyes, and with pen or paintbrush put in his mouth and nose. you can give him a very woeful expression if you make his mouth turn down. cover his body with the back of the gloves, so that the three "points" or rows of stitching make a trimming for his jacket. the legs and arms are made of slips of the kid stitched carefully over the flat wire used by milliners. the ends of the strips are left free and cut to a pointed flap to form feet and hands. stitch limbs and head very firmly into place and bend at elbows and knees. this brownie can be made to sit down and take many different positions; he is a very lifelike little doll. you can also make him a wee nightcap out of a knitted glove and put a feather in it, and dress him with a little cloak. kites materials required:-- thin straight sticks of canes, strong paper or thin cotton material, strong thin string, strong paste, large-eyed needle. [illustration: figs. to .] these are several of the commoner and easier kites to make. they are usually made of paper pasted over the frame, but it is in all cases better if children will take the trouble to make their kites of thin cotton material and tack or baste it into place with large neat stitches; this really takes very little more time than pasting. the frames in every case should be of the lightest and straightest sticks possible to find. you can sometimes get very good ones which are used in strengthening cardboard boxes, or if you do not mind spending a few cents the narrow slips of wood used in making picture-frames are the very thing and any picture-framer can supply them. perhaps the most usual kite is that shown in figure . the two cross-sticks are first firmly lashed in position and the ends notched and tightly fixed in place with tight "stays" of string. now cut your paper or cloth at least two inches wider all round than the outline of your framework, cutting away the angles at the corners, so that you have a neat flap to turn over all round. never use gum or mucilage for a kite, good strong paste is best, if it is to be made of paper. now at the three points where your "balances" are to be attached to the kite, paste on a little square patch of cloth so that the string or "balance" as it is called does not tear the fabric or paper, and fasten the ends of your two strings through the two upper patches and knot it firmly round your wooden framework. the loose ends of your balances must now be run through the third patch and fastened to the vertical spar of the frame. the string of the kite is fastened round these balances by a slipknot. next add the tail, which needs careful adjustment to the weight of the kite; it can be weighted with rolls of paper at intervals, or little bundles of fresh grass. scottish boys often weight it at the end with a "divot" which is a little piece of actual turf, both grass and root, all together. figures and are another form of kite most commonly used in scotland. this needs only one straight spar of wood, and the curved "bow" at the top can be made of light cane, such as is used for basket-making; or what is very good, if enough can be got, is a length of flat steel such as is used in lady's corsets. fasten the "bow" to the spar by lashing it into a notch or groove at the top and bend it evenly and fasten it firmly by stays of string as in figure , both across and to the end of the spar. now lay on to your paper or cotton material and cut it out as before in figure , with a good turnover to paste or stitch down, and add the patches where the balances are attached. these kites look very gay if a tassel of colored paper or wool is added at each end of the bow. figure is a very good kite to make if a really large one is wanted. the two long cross-spars of wood must be notched to fit each other about one-third of their length from the top of the kite, and stays of string must be so arranged that they spread about twice as wide at the bottom as they do at the top. this kite must have four patches to insert its balances through and the slipknot of the kite-string is fixed around both. another "balance" should be fixed from the lower corners of the kite from which the tail is hung. this is a very steady kite. figure --a box kite. this is a comparatively modern form of kite and looks very complicated. it is really less so than it looks. take two long narrow strips of thin cotton material about eight inches wide and four and a half feet long (this is for a kite about thirty inches long). have four straight thin spars of wood about thirty inches long, and after joining the two ends of your strips of cloth together make at intervals a narrow "casing" into which insert the ends of your spars. you can either place the casings at equal distances on your material, or you can arrange it so that the open ends of your kite form oblongs. now have four flat spars of thin wood measured to make diagonals at each "box" end of your kite, and bore a tiny hole in the middle of each to insert a pin when the kite is stretched. at the ends of these diagonals cut a rectangular notch to hold the spars apart, tie the kite-string considerably nearer one end of the kite than the other, or you can attach a balance and fix on the kite-string by a slipknot. this kite needs no tail, and can be folded and rolled away by slipping out the diagonal spars. figure --a round box kite. [illustration: figs. and .] this can be made of very strong brown paper pasted so as to form a wide tube, like a large paper bag with the bottom cut out. only two spars are needed. inside the paper tubes arrange near each edge a circle of cane, as is used in basket-work or for stretching out the crown of a cap. set this into place and lace through the paper a strong string and lash the cane through to the spar. this should hold quite steady if it is well done, but it can, of course, have a third straight spar if necessary. attach the string as in the other box kite. [illustration: figs. to .] figures , , --a plane kite. this is a most beautiful and graceful kite and combines the box kite and the older varieties. the box portion is made with casings run into the cotton material at equal intervals so as to form a three-sided box. fix in your three spars, all equal in size, and along each side fix a plane, or wing, of thin cotton material; it can be of another color and looks very gay if this is done. make a little bag or pocket at the outer corner of each wing, and into this insert the ends of the fourth spar, so that the latter may be slipped out and the kite folded up. the string should be attached near the "nose" of the kite. it needs no tail. a monkey on a stick materials required:-- some thin three-ply wood, two long knitting-pins, two small reels, a piece of hat wire, some small staples, pliers, an awl, a fret saw, water color paints and brushes, mending wool. [illustration: fig. .] draw your monkey carefully on the three-ply wood, the body and limbs all separate, and a thin stump on to which the tail must be fastened. with the awl pierce tiny holes through arms, body, and legs, where they are attached, and insert a piece of wire, and with the pliers turn a small close knot in it on each side to prevent it coming out. small wire paper clips will do instead if they can be got. now saw off the rims of your two reels--they must be the same size--and into one of your reels fasten two staples over the pin and into the reel, so that they hold the pin very tightly, catching the pin just at one end. with another staple through each hand fasten the arms of your monkey to this reel, and slip the other reel round the same knitting-pin and extend your monkey to its fullest length, and now fix the other knitting-pin to the second reel so that its point projects a little way through the first reel. keeping the monkey stretched to its fullest length fasten his feet with staples to the second reel, and be sure that the limbs work quite loosely in these staples. now with mending yarn make a tassel and fasten it to the end of your hat wire, and wrap the wire all the way up with it almost to the end. then proceed to lash the wire to the stump of the tail and bend the tail in a nice curve; this will vibrate when your monkey is worked up and down. a dancing lady materials required:-- strong heavy white cardboard or thin wood, sharp knife or fret saw, crinkled paper, water color paints, a tiny portion of a quill, a tiny roll of tin or lead foil, small fine pins or wire, a small piece of narrow ribbon, a little writing paper, mucilage, string, scissors, pliers. [illustration: fig. .] this dainty little figure can be made to dance along a double string and can be very pretty. cut out the body and legs and arms all separately; they may be drawn on white paper, or cut out and pasted on to the cardboard. if you find it difficult to make a pretty face, a suitable one may be cut from some picture post card and pasted on. the arms and legs must be fastened on to the body with a little wire which should be run through a tiny bead and twisted so that it does not come out. roll the lead foil into a little long weight and stitch one down to the lower portion of the body both at the back and front. the crinkled paper skirt must be gathered on a draw-thread with a needle and tied evenly and tightly round the waist and fastened neatly with a little ribbon sash. through the stomach of the little figure insert a tiny length of the quill of a feather and glue it into place; let it project towards the back more than the front. through this quill run your string doubled so that there is a long loop both back and front and be sure that the string works easily through the quill. a portion of a tiny reel will do instead of a quill if it is glued on to the back. the object of the quill or reel is to form a tube, so that the figure will slip along this when the string is slackened, but that it will hold firm whenever the string is tightened. the weights must be heavy enough to make the figure balance and run downwards as the string is sloped. a pair of butterfly wings can be cut out of writing paper and painted and fastened to the back. a little garland of everlasting flowers or moss or beads can be fastened to the hands if you wish to do so. a model aeroplane materials required:-- soft white wood, laundry pins, thin cardboard, a tiny piece of mica, mucilage. [illustration: fig. .] this model was made by a boy of eleven and is most beautifully proportioned and put together. the body and wings and floats and little boats are all made of the white wood, well smoothed with sandpaper; the steering-gear is of cardboard. the propeller is made of mahogany and the tiny wind-screens of semicircles of mica. all is put together with "laundry" pins. the ailerons on the upper planes are held by strips of narrow tape. a farmyard such toys as this can only be suggested very briefly, but children with any common sense and imagination can make most elaborate and delightful collections. [illustration: fig. .] the box used for the byre or stable is only one of many more elaborate buildings that can be made. the dwelling house of larger boxes, the barns, the haystacks, the pigsty, the chicken coop, troughs, and such things can all be made of larger or smaller boxes. buildings can be thatched with straw, rushes, hay; or corrugated paper may be put on the roof. the palings here are made of matches set into posts of wooden pegs, much like those used by gardeners to label plants. trees and flowering plants can be made by getting small bushy bare twigs and wrapping their branches with moss, or fastening on everlasting flowers of gay dyed colors. old sponges may be dyed green and cut up and fixed in the branches. a reel sawed in two makes a good plant pot for these. the sheep illustrated here is made of a cork, with legs of matches. its head is a tiny bean fixed to the cork with a pin, both neck and body are wrapped in cotton wool, and it is neatly fastened on with white mending yarn. the lamb is made of a large bean and a small one, with legs of pins; the beans must be soaked before setting in the pins. noah's ark animals can be used to increase the live stock of the farm. fields can be made of green crinkled paper, and a piece of glass or a tiny mirror can be used to make a pond. carts, barrows, and farm implements can be made of all sorts of things, and clever children can really make wonderful farms. windmills and other simple machines can be introduced also. a doll's house these can be made of bandboxes or orange-boxes and can be either very simple or as elaborate as you please. if cardboard boxes are used, figure shows how it can most easily be arranged to give the pitch of the roof. one story may be piled on another so that the house can be enlarged at will. doors and windows are easily cut in the cardboard boxes. the windows can also be glazed if you get a few rolls of cinematograph film and fit and paste it on, but children must be warned that this is very inflammable and it is dangerous to bring it near the fire or gas. the inside of the rooms may be papered, and on the walls little pictures may be pasted. the illustrated catalogues from furniture shops can often be cut up, and the diagrams of doors, etc., cut out and pasted on the doors of your house. figure shows a sitting-room and a little shop or kitchen. in the latter the counter and dresser are made of matchboxes. the shelves are of strips of cardboard with uprights of cane, wire, or knitting-needles. the fireplace in the sitting-room can be made of a lid of a cardboard box stitched to the wall, and in it another box (a matchbox, for instance) can be set to make the grate. a good table can be made as in figure , which is made by using a lid of a small box, and to the inside of its corners glueing the legs, and then the larger top of thick cardboard can be fixed on with mucilage. the little shields for the corks of bottles, made of pleated lead foil, make very pretty pots and kitchen vessels in such little houses. rugs can be woven of wool and string, and cushions, etc., to furnish the place. but there is no end to the things a child can make for a doll's house if imagination is encouraged to work the hands. [illustration: figs. to .] other "community toys" can be made--railway stations, signals, and signal-boxes are very popular; a market place with its little tented stalls is charming. the houses we see in pictures of foreign lands give great interest, and many are so easy to make that it is quite possible to illustrate the history of home building by means of a series of toy houses. the darker side of life has even invaded our nurseries, and they too have shown the games of the trench and the guns: and it will be good to plan in our playwork now for the rebuilding of the world in the ways of peace, for it is these children of ours who must lead the world back or forward, for better or for worse. all the world is in their hands, though the hands may not yet be strong for more than the making of toys. we older children do but play other games with more serious intent, yet all the same the difference between the game and the business is but a difference of degree. the end transcriber's note -plain print and punctuation errors fixed. learning to be a schoolmaster by thomas r. cole superintendent of schools, seattle formerly assistant state superintendent of schools, village school superintendent, and city high school principal new york the macmillan company all rights reserved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ copyright, , by the macmillan company. set up and electrotyped. published august, . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ foreword in "learning to be a schoolmaster" the author has related some of his personal experiences, which he trusts will be suggestive to those who are just entering the teaching profession. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ table of contents i. entering the teaching profession ii. getting a position iii. before school opens--after getting the first superintendency iv. teachers' meetings v. meeting with the school board vi. school activities vii. the janitor--his relation to the school viii. how the principal can help the teacher ix. the school and the community ------------------------------------------------------------------------ entering the teaching profession little did i think, during my college days, that i should ever become a teacher. it would have made me unpopular to have said so, even if i had had any designs in that direction. my college mates, who were planning to be lawyers, engineers, or commercial men of prominence, considered teaching creditable only as a "fill in job." i joined them in their happy aspirations and tried to think i was preparing for something. just what that "something" was, i was unable to say. finally the day of graduation arrived. i was ready to go out into the world with a college diploma, but was unprepared for a definite position. my false aspirations had failed, and i was looking hopelessly about for something to do that would save my pride. i must not accept just a mere job, and to escape that humiliation i became a teacher. it certainly was not a very creditable manner for a young man to enter a profession, to say nothing of the doubtful compliment of such an entry to the teaching profession. such a confession, however, could be made by many of my associates of fifteen years ago. the situation that confronted me after deciding to become a teacher _temporarily_, and two ways of meeting it, can be illustrated by the experiences of two young men who entered the teaching profession under similar conditions. a few years ago i made a trip to a neighboring state to visit a friend who was engaged in farming. on a sunny july morning i arrived in an enterprising village a few miles from his home. while sitting on the porch of the hotel waiting for my friend, i met a man whom i had known years before. he recognized me. after stating that he was president of the local board of education, he invited me to go out to their school building, which was being remodeled. one of the first rooms that we visited was the study hall. we found the janitor busily engaged in arranging the seats. he said he didn't know just which way the desks should face, as no one had told him, but he remembered that the pupils needed plenty of light, so he was facing the desks toward the side of the room which had the most windows. we then went to a room set apart for manual training work. there was one bench in evidence and mr. ---- told me that the board had not decided on the kind of benches or tools to buy, as the superintendent had not said in what grades the manual training work would be offered. "in fact," he said, "the superintendent forgot to tell us anything about the building equipment before he left for his vacation." we next visited a room which, he explained, might be used for a gymnasium; but, since the superintendent had made no plans for using it, they were leaving it unfinished. we looked through some of the grade rooms which had been in use for years. the seating was in bad condition, as little or no care had been taken to keep the proper distance between the desks and the seats. some of the third grade seats were out of alignment at least four inches. i pointed out the irregular distances between the seats and the desks and asked my guide if it were due to the different sizes of the children. he said, "i think so." i made no comment, as remarks were unnecessary. as we left the building he said, "i guess our superintendent is more interested in something else than he is in his job here." this statement proved true. now for the second young man i have in mind. at one time it was customary for me to represent the state superintendent's office at county school board meetings that were held during the summer months in the different parts of one of the leading middle western states. on this particular trip, i was forced to stop over in a small town for about two hours, in order to make connection with the train that would take me to my destination. i was now really interested in education and thought it would be well to visit the school building. the first thing to attract my attention was the well-kept lawn, with flower beds along the walk that led from the street to the building. this was somewhat unusual for a school yard. i noticed that the front door was open, and entered the building. after looking through the well-kept lower rooms, i ascended the stairs to see the high school portion of the building, which contained eight rooms. upon reaching the second story landing, i heard some hammering in one of the rooms and proceeded to locate it. i soon found myself confronted by a young man about twenty-five years of age, whose face gave the expression of accomplishment. he enthusiastically told me that he was interested in the agricultural conditions in the surrounding districts, and was preparing boxes and equipment to offer a course in agriculture to the boys in and out of school who might wish to elect it. "the course," he said, "will be offered outside of the regular school hours, at a time that will be best suited to those who may wish to attend. i hope to make it an evening class, and that the fathers may also become interested." he told me about the short summer course he had taken at the state agricultural school and the help that he expected to get from the dean through booklets and suggestive lessons. he then invited me to go through the rooms of the building. when we reached the fifth and sixth grade room he said, "in this room i have corrected a condition that caused the failure of one or more teachers. when i was elected here a year ago, the president of the board told me they had been unfortunate for years in securing a satisfactory fifth and sixth grade teacher. the teachers had all failed because they were unable to maintain good order. i was asked to secure a teacher for the room, which i did, after careful investigation. it was less than three weeks, however, after the semester started, when the restlessness of the pupils became apparent. i was at a loss to know the source of the trouble until a bulletin from the state superintendent's office reached me, which gave suggestions as to the care and equipment of school grounds and buildings. i noticed in this bulletin that the correct distance between no. seats is twelve inches. i thought immediately of our troublesome fifth and sixth grade room. it took me but a few moments to discover that the distances between the seats in this room ranged from twelve to fifteen inches. i observed how the pupils were forced to sit on the edges of the seats in order to work at the desks and soon became tired and restless. the desks were changed immediately and the "teacher problem" in this room was solved. that experience was a lesson to me, and since then i have given much time and attention to making the building attractive and comfortable for the teachers and pupils." it was quite evident, as we went from room to room, that he had put the lesson into practice. i shall never forget that young man. three years later he was at the head of one of the largest consolidated high schools in the state, and when i met him at the meeting of the department of superintendence in detroit in he told me that he had recently been appointed to take charge of one of the state agricultural schools. one man had made school teaching a _job_; the other had made it a _profession_. getting a position many young men and women enter the educational field without giving due consideration to the type of work they are best fitted to do. a large percentage of the teacher failures belongs to this class. i am often interviewed by candidates who are seeking positions. when i ask them the kind of work they can do the best, i occasionally receive the reply, "in what grades do you have the greatest number of openings?" others will say, "i am prepared to teach any of the grades. i have no preference, for i am as good in one as i am in another." in the case of some candidates the last statement is likely to be true. boards of education usually grade applicants on three main points: personality, preparation, experience. the first two, every candidate who has completed a normal school or college course possesses to a greater or less degree. the third must be gained by actual work in teaching. a pleasing yet forceful personality is one of the leading factors in any teacher's success and it should be cultivated to the greatest possible degree. i feel that i was influenced in a large measure to complete my high school education by the attractive personality of the principal of our village school. his predecessor by harsh and dictatorial discipline had driven many boys out of school, and i came near being one of them. i found my ideal in the principal who succeeded him; and when i meet the inspirational teacher--the teacher with a personality that attracts young people--i can see the picture of that splendid young man who gave me the first real desire for an education. a teacher should always be desirous of making a good personal impression, yet i have seen young women seeking positions waiting at the big counter in the superintendent's office who were dressed more suitably for a social function than for a business call. not long ago we were greatly in need of a commercial teacher. a young woman of otherwise good qualifications made application. her attire was somewhat extreme and we decided it would be well to have her visit the principal of the school who needed the teacher. he reported that he could not use a teacher to instruct young men and women in commercial work who lacked one of the first requisites of business--"dress sense." the time is rapidly drawing to a close when mediocre preparation will be accepted in the field of education. the teacher for elementary or high school work must first secure a good general education. specializing in one or more subjects based upon a fragmentary educational foundation is the cause of many failures in the teaching profession. one of the chief weaknesses of such teachers has usually been found to be in english. in reading applications i have often noticed statements of this character given by one of the references: "mr. ---- is good in his particular subject, but his use of english is so bad that i cannot recommend him for a position where he comes in contact daily with young people." "i can recommend miss ---- for a position, as for example penmanship teaching, but that is the only thing she can do as her educational vision is very limited." after a teacher has secured adequate general education and finds his "bent," he should then give particular attention and study to his chosen field. a teacher, however, should never cease to utilize every opportunity of broadening his general education. to do so means a narrowing of his viewpoint and the power of associating his special subject with the larger field of education. in filling out application blanks teachers are sometimes careless in giving the information requested. failure to do this often results in obtaining little or no consideration for the position desired. the references named should be responsible persons who know of the applicant's real qualifications and teaching work. it is always well for an applicant to secure the permission of the people chosen as references before using their names. a superintendent is much more likely to understand a teacher's motive for applying elsewhere if he has been interviewed. when the motive is understood, he is in a better position to serve the applicant as well as the officials to whom the applicant has applied. the large majority of superintendents encourage their teachers to feel that they want them to improve professionally and are ready to assist them in doing so. not long ago a young man came to see me about a promotion. i asked him in what line of work he was best fitted for advancement. he said he didn't know, but he wanted the job that paid the most money. it was interesting to note his idea of the teaching profession as contrasted with that of a young woman who had interviewed me a short time before concerning a possible opening in one of the high schools. she had taught for two years and realized the need of further specialization in her chosen field. to obtain this training, she had spent a year's time and her savings in taking post-graduate work. i was interested in the frank statement that she gave concerning her teaching experience, which she confessed had been very ordinary in character. it was also pleasing to note the feeling of gratitude she had for those who had encouraged her to take the post-graduate training. we had no opening for her at that time, but i took her name and address in order that she might be considered for vacancies that might occur later. it so happened that a few days later a superintendent from a near-by town called to see me, and stated his need of a high school teacher who could teach mathematics, english, and history. it was quite a range of work, but i thought of my visitor of a few days before and made an appointment for her to meet this superintendent. after the interview was over, she came in with tears in her eyes, to tell me that she had declined the offer. she said she was financially much in need of a position, but she could not again go into a classroom to teach work in a department that she was ill prepared to handle. a short time later one of our teachers resigned. the place was given to this young woman. she has proved to be one of our best classroom teachers, and has been an inspiration to the other instructors in her department. self-examination and study had caused her to realize the real strength, as well as the limitations, of her teaching power, and she made the most of it. before school opens--after getting the first superintendency four years as a high school teacher had given me an opportunity to study the educational field. during that time i had made a practice of attending county, sectional, state, and, whenever possible, national teachers' meetings, so that i might become acquainted with current school problems and with the men and women who were educational leaders. after considering carefully my possible qualifications for administrative work, i decided that to secure the superintendency of schools in a small town was the proper educational step for me to take. by an application through regular channels i succeeded in being elected to the coveted position and thereby gained what i was seeking--administrative opportunity. as the election had been given me without a personal application, i decided to invest eighteen dollars in a trip to my new field of labor during the spring vacation, so that i might get acquainted with the general school situation. the first important discovery that i made was that the superintendent who was leaving had the ill will of a part of the community, but still had the loyal support of the teachers. my problem was to get his coöperation so that i could enter the work with as little friction as possible, and to obtain general knowledge of his plans of school administration. both these factors were very essential to a succeeding superintendent. he gave me the coöperation and information most willingly--a service which i have never ceased to appreciate. i met the members of the board as individuals and was received very cordially by them. no doubt they were interested in seeing me and appreciated the interest i showed in getting acquainted with the work in advance. we moved to the town during the middle of august. as soon as we became settled, my attention was turned to the work of the new position. i had already given a close study to the grade and high school programs and course of study. copies of the different courses of study offered in well-organized neighboring schools were also obtained in order that i might get a broader view of the school conditions in that section of the state. ten days before the opening of school i placed a notice in the town paper inviting all the high school pupils who had attended school the year before to call at the building and see me. a considerable number responded to this request, and through these pupils i received a large amount of valuable information. one of my first tasks was to prepare a high school program which would permit the pupils to carry the work that they should pursue in accordance with their chosen courses of study. we had only three teachers for the high school, including myself, which narrowed the range of subjects that might be offered each semester. before attempting to make a program i compiled a list of names of all the pupils who had attended high school the year before, with the lists of the subjects each pupil had completed. i then made a statement of the subjects that each pupil should take during the ensuing year. this gave the necessary information for making a program. when school opened each pupil was given a slip of paper showing the credits he had made to date and the subjects for which he was to register. by checking carefully, all conflicts were eliminated and the first day of instruction went off without delay or friction. this was worth much to the school and to me. not all my time, however, was given to the making of a high school program. i prepared a tentative time schedule for the subjects in the elementary grades. this schedule, with a few minor changes, was afterward adopted by the grade teachers. the business side of the school was especially interesting to me. i believed then, and still believe, that a successful superintendent must be a close student of school costs. he must know and keep constantly in mind the amount of money available for school expenses and be able to recommend how that money can be expended to the best advantage. too often the superintendent, by the nature of his tenure, is forced to plan only for the one year--a policy that is wasteful to the district and harmful to the general efficiency of the school. in order to secure a comprehensive idea of the school supplies on hand and what would be needed, i asked the janitor to assist me in making a complete check of all the books and supplies in the building. this work proved very helpful to me later and was alone worth the two extra weeks i had given to my new position. with the school program made, supplies checked, and a good preliminary acquaintance with the board members and school conditions, i left the building on friday evening preceding the opening of school feeling _ready_ for the year's work to begin. teachers' meetings a teacher said to me recently, "i wish mr. ---- had remained at a---- as superintendent. we always had splendid teachers' meetings when he was with us." this comment interested me and i asked her the character of the meetings. she replied, "we had regular sectional meetings once a month and a general teachers' meeting every six weeks. the sectional meetings were for the purpose of giving and getting definite suggestions that would be helpful to the teachers of each individual group. the general meeting was always a happy gathering. mr. ---- would make his message cheerful and inspirational and we left those meetings _with a spirit of wanting to do more than we had ever done before_." what this young woman said is true. teachers want meetings that give something _tangible_ and _definite_ to assist them in their work. the first teachers' meeting that i ever conducted was held about a library table where we could all look at one another and get the feeling of fellowship. a few definite points that the teachers needed to know on the _first day_ of school were prepared and everything else was left for subsequent meetings. it was my business to help the teachers get started and lighten a part of their regular work, rather than to add to their burden things unnecessary at that time. one of the best talks i ever heard delivered by a superintendent was given to the new teachers a few years ago at the opening of the school year. he gave the teachers a hearty and sincere welcome and told them nothing about what their duties were to be. he advised them to _say but little_ at first about what they had done at their former places, but urged them to "_listen_ and to _learn our ways_ and then, with that knowledge in mind, to help by suggestions to make our schools better." how very differently is such a welcome received by teachers from that given by a superintendent who feels that he must place before the teachers, at the first meeting, an outline in detail of what is expected throughout the year! the latter plan was unfortunately followed by a superintendent of my acquaintance. he went to his new position in ample time to get the school conditions well in hand and everything boded well for his future. his first teachers' meeting, however, ruined his chances of succeeding in that place. as one teacher reported, "he talked about everything in the educational catalog that had nothing to do with the opening weeks of school, and the teachers left the meeting with an adverse opinion concerning him that he was unable to change." the meetings he held throughout the year were of the same rambling type. the result was that he failed to secure the cooperation of his teachers and was asked to resign at the close of the year. this is an example of one who knew much--talked much--but gave little assistance of any constructive value to his teachers. as a superintendent i always found it profitable, after the school year was well started, to hold sectional meetings for teachers of the lower grades, intermediate grades, grammar grades, and high school. each section met every two weeks about a table and took up definite topics of the teachers' own choosing. the result was that our course of study and the methods of work were constantly being improved _and the teachers were causing the improvement_. a general meeting for all the teachers was held from time to time when a good speaker could be secured or when i wished to present a phase of school work that should be understood by all. during the past year a series of meetings of the english teachers in one of our high schools demonstrated what can be accomplished if the topics for discussion are of a concrete nature. the teaching of the english classics has been somewhat varied in plan and the results accomplished have not always been satisfactory. the english teachers realized this and suggested that we make the classics the subject of professional study for the year. the classics selected were: lady of the lake, ivanhoe, old testament stories, silas marner, idylls of the king, birds and bees, clive and hastings, and emerson's essays. a teacher was chosen to discuss each of the classics according to the following outline: . spend thirty minutes in explaining the methods used and the results expected in the teaching of the classic. . provide a written outline which gives the main points a teacher should keep in mind in teaching the classic, copies of the outline to be provided for distribution at the time of the meeting. . be prepared to make a typical assignment of a lesson in teaching the classic. . state where supplementary material can be obtained to aid in teaching the classic. . answer questions. at the conclusion of the year the general expression of the english teachers was that the meetings held were among the most profitable professional gatherings that they had ever attended. the same definite plan could well be followed with other subjects. there is still another type of meeting of even greater importance to the superintendent and teachers. that meeting is the personal talk that the superintendent should have with each teacher, as often as possible, to enable him to learn how her work is getting on and the difficulties she is meeting, and to welcome any suggestions she has to make. such talks will give a superintendent a key to the real school situation, and the teacher will appreciate his close, personal interest as shown by his suggestions and encouragement. meeting with the school board a few days previous to the opening of school at ----, a member of the school board dropped in one morning to see me. in the course of the conversation he said that the board would meet the second evening after the opening of school, and invited me to be present, if i cared to come. i thanked him for the invitation and assured him that i should be glad to attend the meeting. at the teachers' meeting on the saturday before the school opened, i gave each teacher a blank, and asked for a report at the close of the first day of school, somewhat as follows: . number of pupils enrolled. . number of boys and number of girls and their respective ages. . number of pupils who were attending school for the first time. . supplies, if any, that were needed immediately. from this information, which was easily obtained by the teachers, i compiled a definite report which showed the school attendance the first day compared with the opening days of the two previous years; the grades having largest number of retarded pupils; and the extra supplies that would soon be needed. the report concluded with a brief statement of my appreciation of the hearty coöperation that i had received from the teachers and pupils. i wrote the report very carefully and placed it in my pocket, hoping that it might be presented at the board meeting. the first board meeting meant much to me, for i was desirous of having the members feel that the success of the school depended very largely upon having the administrative head take an active part in the deliberations. i was present promptly at eight o'clock, the time set for the meeting, and the gentleman who had invited me explained to the other members how i happened to be present. before the close of the meeting, the president of the board asked how i liked the place and how many i had found it necessary to "strap" the first day. i replied that i was well pleased with the school conditions, and that if there were no objection i would like to read a short report that might be of some interest to the board. there was no objection and i read the report. at the conclusion of the reading, one member of the board said, "by jimminy, i have been on this board for seven years and that is the first time i have ever heard a report like that. i move, mr. chairman, that we thank the superintendent for bringing in the report, that we file it with the secretary, and that we extend a standing invitation to him to attend all our meetings." the vote in favor of the motion was unanimous. i went home that evening feeling that i had been well repaid for the time spent in compiling the report. from that time on i made a regular monthly report at the board meetings, which resulted in the extension of my authority. i was soon permitted to order supplies when needed, if the requisitions were approved by the secretary of the board. this was a great help to the school. it saved much delay, and we always knew what we could get and when we could expect it. the teachers often spoke of how much more definitely they could plan their work. great care was exercised to purchase only such supplies as were needed, and we turned in many of the worn-out books as partial payment for new texts. hence, at the end of the year the cost of school supplies had been cut nearly in half as compared with that of the previous year. it was a matter of pleasure to have the board realize that a superintendent might be a business man as well as an educator. the next extension of authority was in regard to the employment of teachers. it had been the general policy of the board to engage and discharge teachers without consulting the superintendent. i anticipated this by making, at the end of the fourth month, a report as to the general efficiency of the teachers. not a word was written in the report that _the individual teacher concerned did not know_. the members of the board expressed themselves as being much pleased with the teacher report idea and i was told that i would be asked to recommend the teachers when the time came for their election. this confidence of the board was a great inspiration to me, and helped me more than anything else to decide that i would remain a schoolmaster. my experience with the board in another community is equally suggestive. during the five years previous to my superintendency at this place, the board had voted against the introduction of manual training each time it came up for discussion. i was interested in having manual training introduced, but before making a formal request of the board, i decided to give the subject a very careful study. i spent a number of saturdays going from town to town to inspect the manual training equipment and courses of study. at that time, manual training was very much in the experimental stage, and i found something new at each place. after settling upon the plan that i considered best suited to our accommodations, i arranged to have an evening meeting of the parents at the school building where an exhibit of the regular school work was displayed in each room. during the evening a talk was given on the topic of manual training by a neighboring superintendent, who was especially well qualified to discuss the subject. i wanted to create a public sentiment in favor of manual training before asking the board to introduce it into the school system. at the next regular board meeting i presented a definite, written plan for the introduction of manual training, stating the space in the building for it, the grades that would be given the work, the number of times per week that it would be offered, and the cost of the benches and tools. without a moment's hesitation, the leading member of the board said, "i have objected to the introduction of manual training for five years, not because i was opposed to the subject but owing to the fact we never had a report made to us as to its cost, where it could be placed in the building, or the grades in which it would be offered. i move that the recommendation be adopted and the material purchased as designated in the report." the motion was adopted without a dissenting vote. i have had many other experiences with school boards similar to those cited above. school boards have not always purchased everything that i have requested, but i have found in the vast majority of cases that if the board has faith in the superintendent and feels that _he knows what he wants, and what he will do with it after he gets it_, he will not have much difficulty in obtaining what the school really needs. too many superintendents go to board meetings with no definite report as to what is being done in the schools or what is really needed to make them efficient. this inability or failure to assume leadership causes the board to lose confidence in the superintendent, and soon reacts detrimentally upon the school system. school activities not long ago a teacher asked me in what manner a person with executive ability has the best opportunity of showing it. i replied, "ask your principal for the privilege of taking charge of some school activity." i dare say more principals and superintendents have been found through their ability to handle student activities than in any other way. too often teachers who are really capable of doing executive work object to this extra duty and thereby miss the opportunity of demonstrating their real capacity for leadership. they also lose at the same time one of the most fruitful and pleasant experiences in school work. i could give many illustrations of teachers who have "found themselves" through being associated with student enterprises. some superintendents feel that student activities are a waste of time, and in a measure this is likely to be true unless the activities are carefully supervised. in one of the towns where i was superintendent, the school had had no student activities during the preceding year except football and baseball. the teams had been coached by an outsider who was intensely interested in having a winning team but cared little for the value of athletics to the boys or to the school. with this condition in mind, i called the boys together and asked them how it would appeal to them if we formed an athletic association and had rules governing athletics similar to those followed in the larger towns in that vicinity. the boys agreed to the plan and elected a committee to prepare a set of rules that were to be submitted to them for approval. after a couple of meetings, the committee outlined the rules in accordance with the general high school athletic regulations, and they were formally adopted. the results of the formation of the association were threefold: first, good scholarship and deportment were required of all pupils who participated in athletics. second, no money could be expended except with the approval of the faculty adviser. third, the coaching of all athletic teams was placed under the direction of the superintendent. the last point did not necessarily eliminate the assistance that might be secured from outside coaches, provided they were made directly responsible to the school. the new plan for athletics worked splendidly with the exception of a few vigorous protests from boys who were debarred from playing on account of poor scholarship. sufficient money was saved during the year to pay back the amount that had been advanced for athletic supplies and we were able to complete equipments for first and second football teams for the succeeding fall. the boys were proud of this accomplishment and when i occasionally hear from some of them, they often remark, "_we_ put ---- on the map in athletics." the second activity needed was a "literary society." there had been no such organization in the school for five years. the janitor told me that the last literary society had ended in a "rough-house" and he hoped that was the end of it for all time. he further declared he was not in favor of coming to the building in the evening. i told him that we would attend to the opening and closing of the building if we started the organization, and that i hoped we could get along without any rough-housing. the pupils in ---- had little or no opportunity for group evening entertainment and heartily welcomed the suggestion of forming a literary society. officers were elected with the understanding that they would be given full charge of the organization, subject to the regulations of the faculty adviser. meetings were held twice a month on friday evenings at : . no program was arranged that required more than one and a half hours' time. it usually consisted of a debate, music, school news, and readings. the school auditorium held about people and on many occasions the room would be crowded in order to accommodate those who wished to attend. many of the parents made it an opportunity for meeting the teachers. it might be mentioned that the janitor never missed a meeting and was one of the most interested listeners. after getting the athletic association and literary society organized, i interviewed the editors of the two local papers relative to getting some space for school news. both were glad to publish any information concerning the school that i might wish to furnish. student editors were then elected for the different high school classes and the upper grade rooms. the news items were given to me on wednesday of each week to be edited and sent to the papers. the school news had its immediate effect, and greater interest was taken in the school by the pupils and patrons. the literary programs which appeared in the papers every two weeks gave much prominence to that activity. the newspaper publishers were not slow to see the effect the school news had in increasing their subscriptions, so we all had reason to be pleased with the results of the enterprise. there are many other valuable school organizations that have not been mentioned. the number of activities should depend largely on the size of the school. the real purpose and local value of each activity should be given careful consideration before it is organized. much harm can come from poorly supervised student enterprises or from a student organization that is permitted to take more of the time of pupils and teachers than is justified. the time for the preparation of plays should be limited and the work should be distributed among as many pupils as possible. the centering of effort on one debating team or on a first athletic team may help, or the showing that a school will make against competitors (although i doubt it), but such a plan will not develop the power and training within the school that should be desired. i quote the following from a report of a seattle high school principal regarding extra-curricular activities: "the extra-curricular activities in a high school can be divided into two classes, the minor and the major activities. the minor activities are such as arise out of a desire to vitalize certain studies; the science club, the short story club, the french club are illustrations. for the most part these meet only once or twice a month for an afternoon program in which students who are interested participate themselves or occasionally invite some outsider to take part. teachers desiring to stimulate greater interest in their specialties are usually enthusiastic supporters of such clubs. the programs are informal, held after school and requiring comparatively little effort on the part of the teachers; and those teachers who are alive to their work welcome the opportunities which these small clubs offer in the way of stimulating interest and adding zest to studies. "furthermore, these informal gatherings afford teachers and students an opportunity to meet outside the classroom and become better acquainted, which is always an important factor in successful school work. no teacher worthy of the name is averse to such organizations. it is difficult to find a single objectionable feature in them. of course, they require some after-school time occasionally, and some planning on the part of the responsible adviser. no conscientious teacher begrudges this extra time and effort and every enterprising teacher finds enough in them to compensate him liberally for his efforts. "the major activities such as class organizations, glee clubs, dramatic clubs, athletic associations, boys' and girls' clubs, the school paper, the senior ball, the junior prom, and the interschool debates offer more problems in the nature of care. they take in larger groups, are more formal or more pretentious, and demand a larger amount of time from teachers directing them. not only that, but they also require a larger organizing capacity on the part of the advisers. not all teachers can assume sponsorship for such organizations. "these activities are to the school what the fourth of july parade, the elks' big-brother picnic, and the wayfarer are to the city. a city could get along without these activities and save itself a deal of hard work and expense. but enterprising men consider them worth ten times the effort and expense to the community as a whole. some undesirable features follow in the wake of all these large city enterprises. streets become congested, the police have to do double duty; there may be some accidents, some thefts, some people overworked. but in life unpleasant things are organically connected with the pleasant and if you would have the one you must have at least some of the other. "in like manner the major school activities benefit the entire school. they have the effect of welding the large school into something like a homogeneous unit. they develop school pride and school interest. a large school can no more get along without these and be a live institution than can a church without its young peoples' societies and programs, its men's club suppers, and its ladies' aid societies and be a live church organization. "but aside from welding the school into a unit of effort and purpose, these organizations, like the minor activities, serve to socialize the institution, to bring pupils and teachers together in a way that the classroom does not afford, to 'bring out' students, to discover latent talents, and to spur students on to a maximum standard of excellence. "aside from their socializing value, these organizations have an ethical purpose. group interests are developed through them which teach pupils to work together for a common end. school enthusiasm and loyalty are developed which broaden in later years to interest in and loyalty to community and nation. "teachers have not introduced these activities as a rule. they came in response to a recognized need. no more can teachers put them out. they can, however, help to direct them into proper channels, supervise them, and keep them within proper bounds, all of which is a task worthy of a real teacher. those instructors who can recall the turbulent days of the secret societies and cliques, of the unsupervised and unmanaged athletics, have no doubt that progress has been made, and are ready to help to keep up the good work. "the objectionable features of the major activities are naturally more pronounced. it is easy to make too much of such activities, to make them too pretentious, to consume too much time with them so that they sometimes interfere with the curricular work of the school. as a rule principals and teachers strive to keep these activities within reasonable bounds. sometimes they find themselves involved in a bigger undertaking than they planned for. however, unbounded american enthusiasm is in no small measure to blame for the overdoing of some of these activities. "organized athletics in all schools are here to stay. in fact a much larger participation is noticeable each year. even grammar schools, churches, business houses, and other corporations have their teams. athletics, however, beneficial as they are, can be overdone and in some respects are being overdone. so with all the other extra-curricular activities. they must be properly directed and sanely managed. this sane management and proper direction must be encouraged by the public as a whole. "necessarily, too, such activities as have proved their worth will have to be provided for by the employment of teachers who are capable of handling them and wherever they are a large drain on the adviser's time and effort, that, too, must be taken care of. improvements and adjustments in looking after these activities are sure to come as the result of increased experience. that there is much room for improvement along these lines no one doubts. let those who have experience and can offer constructive suggestions do so freely. their suggestions will be gladly received, for nowhere in the high schools of the country has that problem been solved. "there is another form of organization commonly associated with high school activities for which the high school management is in no wise responsible and over which it claims no jurisdiction. it is the social and club dances managed entirely outside of the schools and chaperoned or patronized by people not connected officially with the schools. these purely social activities are the most time-consuming and costly of all. many of these formal and informal functions occur every week in the long dancing season, and because they are patronized by boys and girls of high school age are mistakenly called high school functions. many parents are deceived into the belief that the schools are sponsoring these club dances. for these the schools assume no responsibility and should not be blamed." the janitor--his relation to the school a few months ago the vice-president of a large manufacturing establishment invited me to accompany him and the president on a trip to their factories. having heard that the president of the company was a self-made man, i was anxious to learn something about his plan of business administration. when we reached the office of the first plant, i was impressed with the cordial greeting the president gave to _all_ the employees. their attitude toward him was equally cordial. i recognized one of the clerks, who was a former school pupil, and made use of the acquaintance to ask some questions concerning the management of the factory. he said, "we feel like a family here. mr. ---- gets everyone from the errand boy to the manager to take a personal interest in the business." as i went about the big establishment with one of the workmen, i was impressed with the truthfulness of the statement. that evening when i was conversing with the president, i mentioned the fine coöperative spirit that i had noticed among his men. he said in reply, "i learned a long time ago as a day worker that in order to get the largest returns from your men, you must treat them all well and feed them well. some managers forget, in these days of keen competition, that the lowest salaried employees are often the persons who make a business a success or a failure." i thought how simple was his formula of success, yet how few possess the inspirational power of leadership to follow it successfully. the same principle applies equally well to the school business. i shall never forget the august morning that i reported at one school building to begin my duties as superintendent. i had not seen the janitor, and proceeded to air the office, dust the chairs and desk, and get the place in readiness for work. the noise attracted the attention of the janitor, who finally appeared at the door, and after giving me a cold, casual inspection, introduced himself by saying, "i am the janitor," and left the room before i could engage him in conversation. i had heard of him before--how he considered the superintendent nothing more than a boss whom he must endure. it was no surprise to me, therefore, when he left the room without waiting to become acquainted or offering to assist in the house cleaning. later he brought to the office some mail that had been accumulating during the summer. i thanked him and asked him to be seated. we talked over a few matters of interest and then made a trip through the building. i carefully avoided saying anything about the janitor's duties. before leaving that afternoon, he met me in the lower hall and said it was not customary to keep the office cleaned during the summer, but if i intended to be at the building again before the school opened, he would sweep it out. i told him that i had a few things that i should like to do during the two weeks' interval before the opening of school, and would probably be at the building daily, but i could easily look after the cleaning of the office during that time. he looked at me with some astonishment. i don't know whether it was due to the statement that i expected to have something to do at the building for two weeks before school opened, or because i was willing to clean the room. he said nothing and, with a "good evening," we parted at the end of the first day--with the question of _coöperation_ or _no coöperation_ somewhat unsettled in the janitor's mind. when i reported for work the next morning the office had been thoroughly cleaned, which i considered quite a victory. as the janitor did not make his appearance during the forenoon, i went in search of him to inquire about some record books. he then proceeded to tell me what he thought of the teachers and superintendents in general and how i would do well if i could find anything, and showed me a closet in a teacher's room that was filled with a pile of books, supplies, and record sheets. i listened to what he had to say, and then suggested that it might be well if we put some shelves in the closets, and arranged all the books and supplies in an orderly manner before the teachers reported for work. i told him i was interested in what the closets contained, and if he would build some shelves, i would do the rest. he was sure that the shelves would do no good, and that his time and mine would be wasted. we said nothing more about it at that time, but the next day i started on a closet-cleaning crusade. i do not know when i have received greater value for the time spent. two days of work gave me an educational and business insight into the school that was invaluable. i learned the courses of study and the texts that were used in all of the grades. after three days' delay, the janitor decided that i had done a fairly good job, and that he would put in the shelves. i gave him some assistance and the books and supplies were listed, recorded, and put into place. this work was appreciated by the teachers, even though we had entered their private domain, and, i dare say, gave them a feeling that good housekeeping would be expected throughout the year. the janitor had now learned to know me fairly well. he found that we could work together, and by the time that school opened we were quite friendly. i was amused some months later when a teacher told me of the account the janitor had given her and the other teachers at the opening of school, of the new superintendent. when i reported at the end of the year the splendid services the janitor had rendered, the members of the board were so well pleased with the change in "rosy" that they raised his salary for the ensuing year. i am not sure but that the raise in salary pleased me more than it did him. the help that i received from this janitor throughout the year is no exception to the general rule. i do not wish to give the impression, however, that all the janitors with whom i have worked have been efficient, but i do wish to say that i have received from each of them a much greater degree of coöperation when i caused him to feel that i was his _co-worker_ and not his boss. how the principal can help the teacher the principals of our city schools have for two years been carrying on a series of monthly evening meetings which have proved to be highly interesting and instructive. the topics chosen have been along lines that directly affected the work they are doing. one of the meetings was devoted to the subject "how the principal can help the teacher." the topic was assigned to two principals, who prepared questionnaires which were sent to all the teachers in the city. the questions asked were along three lines: ( ) what can the principal do to help the teacher in a professional way? ( ) what can the principal do to help the teacher in an administrative way? ( ) what can the principal do in making his personal relationship to the teacher more effective? replies were received from about fifty per cent of the teachers and were classified as follows. percentages indicate the number of teachers giving the replies which they follow: i. in a professional way. . assistance with the exceptional child, %. . interpretation of the course of study, %. . as a professional leader, %. a. the recommendation of good professional literature, %. b. sound advice, %. c. assistance by teaching, %. ii. in an administrative way. . furnishing supplies and equipment, %. . definite directions, %. . distribution of building load, %. . regime so planned that interruption of classroom instruction is minimized, %. . management of halls, basements, and playgrounds, and of difficult disciplinary cases, %. . teachers' meetings, %. iii. in personal relationships. . the higher human qualities, %. . constructive criticism, %. . poise, %. . helping teachers in self-analysis and mannerisms, %. i shall discuss briefly some of the main suggestions made by the teachers. i. how the principal can help the teacher in a professional way. a. _assistance with the exceptional child._ in these replies it will be noted that thirty-seven per cent of the teachers advocated assistance with the exceptional child. this gives further emphasis to the need of greater attention being given to the classification of pupils in the public schools. the use of tests and measurements has demonstrated the wide range of abilities that can usually be found in different pupils of the same grade. the teacher with from thirty-five to forty-five pupils must handle the work of her room more or less in groups, which often fails to reach the retarded or the accelerated pupil. too often the teacher through her efforts to give extra assistance needed by the backward pupils gives them a disproportionate amount of time. the entire class suffers from such a procedure. it is unfair to the ninety per cent of pupils of average ability to have one fourth of the teacher's time given to the other ten per cent of the pupils in the room. how to care for the special pupil is a difficult problem. no plan thus far advanced seems to meet it entirely. the ungraded room with an auxiliary teacher has proved to be fairly satisfactory in schools sufficiently large to justify such an arrangement. the principal in the smaller school as well as in the larger must give greater attention to the use of intelligence tests as an aid in classifying the pupils so that they can be better graded according to their ability. no teacher should be required to keep a pupil in her room indefinitely who is not mentally able to do the work or who is a constant disturber. the "ninety and nine" who "can do" are more important to save than the one lost sheep who may never be able "to do" if saved. b. _interpretation of the course of study._ twenty-nine per cent of the teachers called attention to the need of greater assistance in interpreting the course of study. i am not surprised to get this expression from the teachers, as they are sometimes given at the opening of the term a new course of study with little or no explanation of the plan back of it or how it is to be administered. i question if any course of study entirely new in content should be put into operation until the teachers have had at least a semester's time to study it thoroughly and get explanations from those who have been instrumental in working it out. a good illustration of the difficulty in getting satisfactory results from plans new to the teachers has been demonstrated by some of the results obtained with the problem and project methods. it is very easy for a supervisor to pick out some good problems and illustrate them before the teachers and thus leave the impression that all topics can be handled in a similar manner. the teacher goes back to her classroom and attempts to follow the directions given. some of the teachers have gone so far as to attempt to make every lesson in geography or history a problem lesson regardless of the nature of the topics to be covered or the reference material or textbook assistance that is available. the results from such a procedure are certain to lead to a poorly connected, piecemeal knowledge by the pupil of the subject as a whole. a semester of practical study of the problem method for any given subject before introducing it would give the teachers, and i dare say the supervisors, a better knowledge of what can reasonably be expected to be accomplished. it is this failure to be able to reach that visionary goal that discourages teachers and causes them to lose confidence in many methods that are excellent in themselves if they are used with moderation and sense. after a course of study has been in operation for a few months it is well to ask some of the teachers who have been the most successful in getting satisfactory results to explain what they have done and how they have done it. small groups can then discuss such a report with much profit to all. i have never experienced any difficulty in getting large attendance at a teachers' meeting if the program provided concrete help for the group in the work they were doing. this is indeed a rich field for the principal to cultivate. supplementary books are often purchased and sent to the teachers as a means of interpretation of a subject. they, too, need explanation and discussion. c. _as a professional leader._ the desire for professional leadership is coupled with the need of interpretation of the course of study. there is probably no more damaging contribution to the teaching profession than the presence now and then of school executives who give but little, if any, of their time to the professional inspiration of the teacher. the teachers in a building with such a principal in charge soon lose their spirit of wanting to serve and become a part of a routine business organization. the lack of holding power of such a school is soon apparent. some principals and department heads feel that they make a sufficient contribution professionally when they say to a new teacher, "i am glad you are to be with us. if you have any trouble, come and see me." this is one of the best invitations one could possibly give to get a teacher to remain away. the best evidence that a principal can show that he wishes to help the teacher is really to help her, and, best of all, to find means to help her without being asked. not long ago a teacher who wished a transfer came to see me. he said, "i have been in ---- building for five years, during which time i cannot recall having received any professional suggestion from the head of the department. he sees that i have ample supplies and textbooks, but that is merely routine work. what i need is to be encouraged and shown how i can grow." i wonder how many teachers have had a similar experience. two years ago i visited an algebra teacher who happened to be assigned to a portable building. he had five classes daily in the same subject. i had known this teacher for a number of years and had regarded him as an average instructor. on this visit i said, "you are out here by yourself and i would like to see what kind of record your pupils can make at the end of the year in the competitive tests which will be given to the algebra pupils in all the city high schools." his face brightened and he said, "all right, i welcome the invitation." six months later the test was given and his five classes of pupils made more a and b grades than all the algebra pupils combined in any other one building of the city. to-day, this teacher is easily one of our best instructors in mathematics, and he has recently prepared suggestions as to the teaching of mathematics by the supervised study method which have proved to be of great assistance to the other teachers. he simply caught the spirit; his pupils also caught it, and the results were assured. it did not require professional suggestion to arouse this teacher, but rather a real chance of recognition to show what he could do. ii. in an administrative way. a. _furnishing supplies and equipment._ one half of the teachers have apparently suffered from the delay that so often occurs when school material is not ready when it is needed. sometimes conditions arise due to the shifting of pupils or other unforeseen difficulties which make a delay in the furnishing of supplies and equipment unavoidable. in the large majority of cases, however, there is no excuse for the delay other than "order too late," "board held up requisitions for investigation," "copy of outlines not ready to be printed," etc. no efficient business establishment would make a practice of permitting highly paid help to remain idle a part of the time waiting for necessary material. in the schools the loss is much greater than in business because it affects the work of the pupils, who form bad habits early in the semester which are hard to correct later on. some principals make a practice of keeping their stock rooms in perfect order. pupils often assist in this work. this makes it possible to keep a close check on where material can be found and how soon the supply will be exhausted. such a spirit of order is contagious and teachers and pupils are unconsciously encouraged to give greater attention to the proper use of school material. thousands of dollars are saved annually in some school systems having free textbooks and supplies by the careful checking and transferring of the supplies. we must not forget that some of the most valuable lessons for the girls and boys come from experiences gained in other avenues than those learned from textbooks. b. _definite directions._ the lack of a well-defined plan of administration is called to the attention of the principal by one third of the teaching force. it is sometimes astonishing to note how little some of us practice what we preach to the pupils and the teachers about the need of being punctual and definite in the work to be done. not long ago, a questionnaire was sent to the teachers of the high schools asking for suggestions for the handling of school activities. one of the outstanding replies was--"make a definite schedule for activity needs and assemblies." one teacher stated it as follows: "i will plan my work with the classes for tomorrow with the expectation of having a full period for its recitation and development. on the following day, without a moment's notice, the bell is likely to ring for an assembly which will mean a shortening of all the forenoon periods about one half. my plan of work for the day is practically ruined and the worth of the period to the class is lost." while it is not always possible to foretell the time of an assembly or school meeting, it is generally known by the principal a day or more in advance. a knowledge of the schedule of such meetings on the part of all the teachers a month in advance would often save much confusion and embarrassment. rules covering tardiness, the issuance of report cards, school discipline, and general building routine should be definitely understood by all. much of the friction between teachers often arises from lack of well-understood building rules or of enforcement of rules that have been made. iii. in personal relationships. a. _the higher human qualities._ the last item of the three main suggestions by the teachers was the subject of the greatest unanimity of opinion. the human element is one of the greatest prerequisites to successful leadership. time and again i have heard teachers say, "i do not want to ask mr. ----. may i take the matter up with mr. ----, for he is much more approachable?" the irate parent is usually quickly calmed when he is met with a feeling of friendly welcome that puts him at ease. it is hard for the majority of people to tell their troubles to anyone, much more so to tell them to a superior in authority who has an outward coat of formality that is difficult to penetrate. too much of the principal's time is often given to looking for the difficulties that arise in the administration of a school with a view to checking them. this naturally gives the teacher the impression that such a principal is always looking for trouble, and he is not, as a rule, a welcome visitor. the principal should endeavor to find something the teacher is doing that is worth while and to give it the proper recognition. no principal, however, can see what to commend unless he keeps closely in touch at all times with the work the teachers are doing. idle flattery is far worse than no praise at all. the kind word or a pleasant "good morning" sincerely spoken by the teacher has always meant much to me. why should not a similar expression on the part of the principal be equally refreshing to her? it is one of the biggest dividend-paying investments a principal can make. try it! the school and the community never before in the history of america has the public school been such an important factor in the life of the child. in fact, to some extent it has become too great a factor and the home has permitted or even forced the school to take over certain responsibilities that cannot well be delegated. the high school enrollment is gaining at a tremendous pace and with the rapid growth comes the problem of greater diversity of student ability to serve. twenty years ago the best of the students in the elementary schools continued their education in the high school. this made a much simpler problem in the providing of courses of study and equipment. to-day, however, many of the children who enter the high schools are able to pursue only such subjects as will fit them for industrial or commercial occupations. unless a reasonable amount of such work is provided, these pupils soon drop out of school and add to the large army of untrained workers. the adjusting of boys and girls to proper vocations is one of the big problems confronting the home and the school. the patron often fails to understand what the school has to offer and the pupil, with little or no definite knowledge as to what he is best fitted to do, struggles along hoping that through the aid of the school he may find himself. in fact, this country's future depends to a considerable degree upon the educational adjustment that can be made for its boys and girls during the upper grade and high school period of their lives. it is no wonder, then, that vocational guidance departments, trade schools, part-time schools, and continuation schools have come into prominence during the last decade. one of the first things to be done in any community is to study the industrial and commercial conditions in that locality and then attempt to offer such special subjects as the district can afford. the students must be encouraged to learn what the requirements are for certain vocations. some schools have provided special courses of study along vocational lines, while others use student club organizations as a means of giving information to the pupils. a good example of the club organization was worked out recently in one of our high schools. the eight hundred high school boys in attendance were divided into three groups. one group consisted of those interested in the study of opportunities offered by the different professions; the second group, those interested in commercial work; and the third group, those who wished to enter the industrial and engineering field. one of these groups met each week on tuesday morning, forty-five minutes before the opening of school. an outside speaker, actually engaged in one of the vocations, would address the meeting and answer questions. special provision was made to see that the speaker gave the information needed, and he was asked to answer the following questions: . how did you happen to enter the profession? . what are the advantages that you have experienced in your profession? . what are the disadvantages that you have experienced in your profession? . what is the remuneration in your profession? . if you were to attend high school again, to what subjects would you give special attention in order to make yourself better fitted for your profession? the interest that was created by these meetings and the value of the work accomplished went beyond the expectations of the principal. many of the pupils changed their programs for the succeeding term so that they might select subjects that would fit them better for the vocations they expected to follow. other pupils stated that it was through what they had learned at the meetings they had decided to change the vocation they had previously had in mind. many of the student difficulties are due to the unfamiliarity of the parent with what the school has to offer. i recall one instance in which a gentleman called at the office and openly criticized the high school for not offering work whereby his daughter could learn something that would be useful to her in earning a living. i listened to his complaint, and then asked him if he would spend five minutes in going about the building with me. he refused at first to do so but finally consented to my request. i took him to the sewing rooms, the cooking rooms, the art rooms, and finally to the typewriting and office-practice rooms. he was astonished to see that the very subjects he was criticizing the schools for not offering were available at any time for his daughter if she wished to take them. he apologized for his attack on the school and assured me that henceforth he would give attention to the work his daughter pursued in school. a few years ago the mayor of the city was invited to address the pupils at an assembly. at the conclusion of the program i asked him to spend a few minutes viewing the work offered in the school. after some hesitation he accepted the invitation, and before he left the building he said, "i am ashamed to say it, but i have lived in this city for twenty years and this is the first time that i have had any idea of the work that our high schools are offering. i feel very much better prepared now to champion the cause of education." it is easy for some patrons to feel that a high school education is useless because now and then they see a boy or girl fail in a position who had previously had some high school training. they forget that the high school of to-day is called upon to serve a much more diversified group of pupils than ever before, and it is not always able to determine in every case just the type of work that the boy or girl needs in order to make a success in life. the schools are making strenuous efforts to give each individual pupil a chance to adjust himself to a vocation. the junior high school organization, classification of pupils according to ability, tests and measurements, and vocational guidance are all means to this end. the schoolmaster of tomorrow must realize that there is much good in the education of the past, but that the changing conditions in our social and industrial life must be met with similar readjustments in the program of education. images of public domain material from the google print project.) pedagogical anthropology [illustration: maria montessori] pedagogical anthropology by maria montessori author of "the montessori method" translated from the italian by frederic taber cooper _with illustrations and diagrams_ [illustration] new york frederick a. stokes company mcmxiii _copyright_, , by frederick a. stokes company _all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign_ _languages, including the scandinavian_ _july, _ the·maple·press·york·pa· to my mother renilde stoppani and my father alessandro montessori on the occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary of their unclouded union, i dedicate this book, fruit of the spirit of love and contentment with which they have inspired me preface for some time past much has been said in italy regarding pedagogical anthropology; but i do not think that until now any attempt has been made to define a science corresponding to such a title; that is to say, a method that systematises the positive study of the pupil for pedagogic purposes and with a view to establishing philosophic principles of education. as soon as anthropology annexes the adjective, "pedagogical," it should base its scope upon the fundamental conception of a possible amelioration of man, founded upon the positive knowledge of the laws of human life. in contrast to general anthropology which, starting from a basis of positive data founded on observation, mounts toward philosophic problems regarding the _origin of man_, pedagogic anthropology, starting from an analogous basis of observation and research, must rise to philosophic conceptions regarding the _future destiny_ of man from the biological point of view. the study of congenital anomalies and of their biological and social origin, must undoubtedly form a part of pedagogical anthropology, in order to afford a positive basis for a universal human hygiene, whose sole field of action must be the school; but an even greater importance is assumed by the study of _defects of growth_ in the normal man; because the battle against these evidently constitutes the practical avenue for a wide regeneration of mankind. if in the future a scientific pedagogy is destined to rise, it will devote itself to the education of men already rendered physically better through the agency of the allied positive sciences, among which pedagogic anthropology holds first place. the present-day importance assumed by all the sciences calculated to regenerate education and its environment, the school, has profound social roots and is forced upon us as the necessary path toward further progress; in fact the transformation of the outer environment through the mighty development of experimental sciences during the past century, must result in a correspondingly _transformed man_; or else civilisation must come to a halt before the obstacle offered by a human race lacking in organic strength and character. the present volume comprises the lectures given by me in the university of rome, during a period of four years, all of which were diligently preserved by one of my students, signor franceschetti. my thanks are due to my master, professor giuseppe sergi who, after having urged me to turn my anthropological studies in the direction of the school, recommended me as a specialist in the subject; and my free university course for students in the faculty of natural sciences and medicine was established, in pursuance of his advice, by the pedagogic school of the university of rome. the volume also contains the pictures used in the form of lantern slides to illustrate the lectures, pictures taken in part from various works of research mentioned in this volume. acknowledgment is gratefully made to the scientists and scholars whose work is thus referred to. i have divided my subject into ten chapters, according to a special system: namely, that each chapter is complete in itself--for example, the first chapter, which is very long, contains an outline of general biology, and at the same time biological and social generalisations concerning man considered from our point of view as educators, and thus furnishes a complete organic conception which the remainder of the book proceeds to analyse, one part at a time; the chapter on the pelvis, on the other hand, is exceedingly short, but it completely covers the principles relating to this particular part, because they lend themselves to such condensed treatment. far from assuming that i have written a definitive work, it is only at the request of my students and publisher that i have consented to the publication of these lectures, which represent a modest effort to justify the faith of the master who urged me to devote my services as a teacher to the advancement of the school. maria montessori. contents (_the figures in parenthesis refer to the number of the page_) introduction modern tendencies of anthropology and their relation to pedagogy the old anthropology( )--modern anthropology( )--de giovanni and physiological anthropology( )--sergi and pedagogic anthropology( )--morselli and scientific philosophy( )--importance of method in experimental sciences( )--objective collecting of single facts( )--passage from analysis to synthesis ( )--method to be followed in the present course of lectures( )--limits of pedagogical anthropology( ). the school as a field of research( ). chapter i certain principles of general biology the material substratum of life( )--synthetic concept of the individual in biology( )--formation of multicellular organisms( )--theories of evolution( )--phenomena of heredity( )--phenomena of hybridism( )--mendel's laws( ). the form and types of stature the form( )--fundamental canons regarding the form( )--types of stature, macroscelia and brachyscelia; their physiological significance( )--types of stature in relation to race( ), sex( ), and age( )--pedagogic considerations( )--abnormal types of stature in their relation to moral training( )--macroscelia and brachyscelia in pathological individuals (de giovanni's hyposthenic and hypersthenic types)( )--types of stature in emotional criminals and in parasites( )--extreme types of stature among the extra-social: nanism and gigantism( )--summary of types of stature( ). the stature the stature as a linear index( )--limits of stature according to race( )--stature in relation to sex( )--variations in stature with age, according to sex( )--variations due to mechanical causes( )--variations due to adaptation in connection with various causes, social, physical, psychic, pathological, etc. ( )--effect of light, heat, electricity( )--variations in growth according to the season( )--pathogenesis of infantilism( )--stature affected by syphilis ( ), tuberculosis( ), malaria( ), pellagra( ), rickets( )--moral and pedagogical considerations( )--summary of stature( ). the weight the weight considered as total measure of mass( )--weight of child at birth ( )--loss of weight( )--specific gravity of body( )--index of weight( ). chapter ii craniology the head and cranium( )--the face( )--characteristics of the human cranium( )--evolution of the forehead; inferior skull caps; the pithecanthropus; the neanderthal man( )--morphological evolution of the cranium through different periods of life( )--normal forms of cranium( )--the cephalic index( )--volume of cranium( )--development of brain( )--extreme variations in volume of brain( )--nomenclature of cranial capacity( )--chemistry of the brain( )--human intelligence( )--influence of mental exercise( )--pretended cerebral inferiority of woman( )--limits of the face( )--human character of the face( )--normal visage( )--prognathism( )--evolution of the face( )--facial expression( )--the neck( ). chapter iii the thorax anatomical parts of the thorax( )--physiological and hygienic aspect of thorax ( )--spirometry( )--growth of thorax( )--dimensions of thorax in relation to stature( )--thoracic index( )--shape of thorax( )--anomalies of shape( )--pedagogical considerations: the evil of school benches( ). chapter iv the pelvis anatomical parts of the pelvis( )--growth of pelvis( )--shape of pelvis in relation to childbirth( ). chapter v the limbs anatomy of the limbs( )--growth of limbs( )--malformations: flat-foot, opposable big toe( ), curvature of leg, club-foot( )--the hand( )--chiromancy and physiognomy; the hand in figurative speech; high and low types of hand( )--dimensions of hand( )--proportions of fingers( )--the nails( )--anomalies of the hand( )--lines of the palm( )--papillary lines( ). chapter vi the skin and pigments pigmentation and cutaneous apparatus( )--pigmentation of the hair( )--of the skin( )--of the iris( )--form of the hair( )--anomalies of pigment: icthyosis, birth-marks, freckles, etc.( )--anomalies of hair( ). morphological analysis of certain organs (stigmata) synoptic chart of stigmata( )--anomalies of the eye( )--of the ear( )--of the nose( )--of the teeth( )--importance of the study of morphology( )--significance of the stigmata of degeneration( )--distribution of malformations( )--individual number of malformations( )--origin of malformations( )--humanity's dependence upon woman( )--moral and pedagogical problems within the school( ). chapter vii technical part the form( )--measurement of stature( )--the anthropometer( )--the sitting stature( )--total spread of arms( )--thoracic perimeter( )--weight( )--ponderal index( )--head and cranium( )--cranioscopy ( )--craniometry( )--cephalic index( )--measurements of thorax( )--of abdomen ( ). the personal error need of practical experience in anthropology( )--average personal error( )--susceptibility to suggestion( ). chapter viii statistical methodology mean averages( )--seriation( )--quétélet's binomial curve( ). chapter ix the biographic history of the pupil and his antecedents biographic histories( )--remote antecedents( )--near biopathological antecedents( )--sociological antecedents( )--school records( )--biographic charts( )--psychic tests( )--typical biographic history of an idiot boy( )--proper treatment of defective pupils( )--rational medico-pedagogical method( ). chapter x the application of biometry to anthropology for the purpose of determining the medial man theory of the medial man( )--importance of seriation( )--de helguero's curves( )--viola's medial man( )--human hybridism( )--the medial intellectual and moral man( )--sexual morality( )--sacredness of maternity( )--biological liberty and the new pedagogy( ). table of mean proportions of the body according to age( ). tables for calculating the cephalic index( ). tables for calculating the ponderal index( ). general index: a. index of names( ). b. index of subjects( ). introduction the modern tendencies of anthropology and the relation that they bear to pedagogy human hygiene =the old anthropology.=--_anthropology_ was defined by broca as "the natural history of man," and was intended to be the application of the "zoological method" to the study of the human species. as a matter of fact, as with all positive sciences, the essential characteristic of anthropology is its "method." we could not say, if we wished to speak quite accurately, that "anthropology is the study of man"; because the greater part of acquirable knowledge has for its subject the human race or the individual human being; philosophy studies his origin, his essential nature, his characteristics; linguistics, history and representative art investigate the collective phenomena of physiological and social orders, or determine the morphological characteristics of the idealised human body. accordingly, what characterises anthropology is not its subject: _man_; but rather the method by which it proposes to study him. the selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature. zoology has a well-defined point of departure, that clearly distinguishes it from the other allied sciences: it studies the _living_ _animal_. consequently, it is an eminently synthetic science, because it cannot proceed apart from the _individual_, which represents in itself a sum of complex morphological and psychic characteristics, associated with the species; and which furthermore, during life, exhibits certain special distinguishing traits resulting from instincts, habits, migration and geographical distribution. zoology consequently includes a vast but well-defined field. fundamentally, it is a _descriptive_ science, and when the general character of the individual living creatures has been determined, it proceeds to draw comparisons between them, distinguishing genus and species, and thus working toward a _classification_. down to the time of linnaeus, these were its limits; but since the studies of lamarck and charles darwin, it has gone a step further, and has proceeded to investigate the _origin_ of species, an example that was destined to be followed by botany and biology as a whole, which is the study of _living things_. when anthropology attained, under broca, the dignity of a branch of the natural sciences, the evolutionary theory already held the field, and man had begun to be studied as an animal in his relation to species of the lower orders. but, just as in zoology, the fundamental part of anthropology was _descriptive_; and the description of the morphology of the body was divided, according to the method followed, into _anthropology_, or the method of _inspection_, and _anthropometry_, or the method of measurements. by these means, many problems important to the biological side of the subject were solved--such, for instance, as racial characteristics--and a classification of "the human races" was achieved through the evidences afforded by comparative studies. but the descriptive part of anthropology is not limited to the inspection and measurement of the body; on the contrary, just as in zoology, it is extended to include the _habits_ of the individual living being; that is to say, in the case of man, the language, the manners and customs (data that determine the _level of civilisation_), emigration and the consequent intermixture of races in the original formation of nations, thus constituting a special branch of science properly known by the name of _ethnology_. in this manner, while still adhering rigorously to zoological methods, anthropology found itself compelled to throw out numerous collateral branches into widely different fields, such as those of linguistics and archæology; because man is a _speaking animal_ and a _social animal_. one strictly anthropological problem is that of the origin of man, and its ultimate analogy with that of the other animal species. hence the comparative studies between man and the anthropoid apes; while palæontological discoveries of _pre-human_ forms, such as the pithecanthropus, were just so many arguments calculated to bring the human species within the scheme of a _biological philosophy_, based upon evolution, which held its own, for nearly half a century, on the battle-ground of natural sciences, under the glorious leadership of darwin. yet, notwithstanding that it offered studies and problems of direct interest to man, anthropology failed to achieve popularity. during that half century (the second half of the nineteenth), which beheld the scientific branches of biology multiply throughout the entire field of analytical research, from histology to biochemistry, and succeeded especially in making a practical application of them in medicine, anthropology failed to raise itself from the status of a pure and aristocratic, in other words, a superfluous science, a status that prevented it from ranking among the sciences of primary importance. as a matter of fact, while zoology is a required study in the universities, anthropology still remains an elective study, which in italy is relegated to three or four universities at most. the epoch of materialistic philosophy and analytical investigation could naturally hardly be expected to prove a field of victory for _man_, the intelligent animal, and nature's most splendid achievement in construction. the impressive magnificence of this thought, that bursts like pent-up waters from the results of positive research into _man_ considered as a _living_ individual, was forced to await the patient preparation of material on which to build, such as the gathering of partial and disorganised facts, which were accumulated through rigorous and minute analyses, conducted under the guidance of the experimental sciences. it was in this manner that anthropology slowly evolved a method and, by doing so, raised itself to the rank of a science, without ever once being utilised for practical purposes or recognised as _necessary_ as a supplemental or integral element of other sciences. one branch of learning which might have utilised the important scientific discoveries regarding the antiquity of man, his nature considered as an animal, his first efforts as a labourer and a member of society, is pedagogy. what could be more truly instructive and educative than to describe to children that first heroic robinson crusoe, primitive man, cast away on this vast island, the earth, lost in the midst of the universe? mankind, weak and naked, without iron, because it still remained mysteriously hidden in the bowels of the earth, without fire because they had not yet discovered the means of procuring it; stones were their only weapons of defense against the ferocious and gigantic beasts that roared on all sides of them in the forests. the rude, splintered stone, the first handiwork of intelligent man, his first instrument and his first weapon, could be prepared solely from one kind of mineral, of which the local deposit began to fail--a state of things which, let us suppose, occurred on some ocean island. thereupon the men constructed a small boat from the bark of trees, and sped over the waters, in search of the needed stone, passing from island to island, with scanty nourishment, without lights in the night-time, and without a guide. these marvelous accounts ought to be easily understood by children, and to awaken in them an admiration for their own kinship with humanity, and a profound sense of indebtedness to the mighty power of labour, which to-day is rendered so productive and so easy by our advanced civilisation, in which the environment, thanks to the works of man, has done so much to make our lives enjoyable. but pedagogy, no less than the other branches of learning, has disdained to accept any contribution from anthropology; it has failed to see man as the mighty wrestler, at close grips with environment, man the toiler and transmuter, man the hero of creation. of the history of human evolution, not a single ray sheds light upon the child and adolescent, the coming generation. the schools teach the history of wars--the history of disasters and crimes--which were painful necessities in the successive passages through civilisations created by the labour and slow perfectioning of humanity; but civilisation itself, which abides in the evolution of labour and of thought, remains hidden from our children in the darkness of silence. let us compare the appearance of man upon the earth to the discovery of the motive power of steam and to the subsequent appearance of railways as a factor in our social life. the railway has no limits of space, it overruns the world, unresting and unconscious, and by doing so promotes the brotherhood of men, of nations, of business interests. let us suppose that we should choose to remain silent about the work performed by our railways and their social significance in the world to-day, and should teach our children only about the accidents, after the fashion of the newspapers, and keep their sensitive minds lingering in the presence of shattered and motionless heaps of carriages, amid the cries of anguish and the bleeding limbs of the victims. the children would certainly ask themselves what possible connection there could be between such a disaster and the progress of civilisation. well, this is precisely what we do when, from all the prehistoric and historic ages of humanity, we teach the children nothing but a series of wars, oppressions, tyrannies and betrayals; and, equipped with such knowledge, we push them out, in all their ignorance, into the century of the redemption of labour and the triumph of universal peace, telling them that "history is the teacher of life." modern anthropology: _cesare lombroso and criminal anthropology._ _the anthropological principles of moral hygiene._--the credit rests with italy for having rescued anthropology from a sort of scientific olympus, and led it by new paths to the performance of an eminent and practical service. it was about the year that cesare lombroso applied the anthropological method first to the study of the insane, and then to that of criminals, having perceived a similarity or relationship between these two categories of abnormal individuals. the observation and measurement of clinical subjects, studied especially in regard to the cranium by anthropometric methods, led the young innovator to discover that the mental derangements of the insane were accompanied by morphological and physical abnormalities that bore witness to a profound and congenital alteration of the entire personality. accordingly, for the purposes of _diagnosis_, lombroso came to adopt a _somatic_ basis. and his anthropological studies of criminals led him to analogous results. the method employed was in all respects similar to the naturalistic method which anthropology had taken over from zoology; that is to say, the _description_ of the individual subject considered chiefly in his somatic or corporeal personality, but also in his physiological and mental aspect; the study of his responsiveness to his environment, and of his habits (_manners and customs_); the grouping of subjects under _types_ according to their dominant characteristic (_classification_); and finally, the study of their origin, which, in this case, meant a sociological investigation into the genesis of degenerate and abnormal types. thus, since the principles of the lombrosian doctrine spread with a precocious rapidity, it is a matter of common knowledge that criminals present anomalies of form, or rather morphological deviations associated with degeneration and known under the name of _stigmata_ (now called _malformations_), which, when they occur together in one and the same subject, confer upon him a wellnigh characteristic aspect, notably different from that of the normal individual; in other words, they stamp him as belonging to an inferior type, which, according to lombroso's earlier interpretation, is a reversion toward the lower orders of the human race (negroid and mongoloid types), as evidenced by anomalies of the vital organs, or internal animal-like characteristics (pithecoids); and that such stigmata were often accompanied by a predisposition to maladies tending to shorten life. side by side with his somatic chart, lombroso painstakingly prepared a physio-pathological chart of criminal subjects, based upon a study of their sensibility, their grasp of ideas, their social and ethical standards, their thieves' jargon and tattoo-marks, their handwriting and literary productions. and, by deducing certain common characteristics from these complex charts, he distinguished, in his classic work, _delinquent_ _man_, a variety of types, such as the _morally insane_, the _epileptic_ _delinquent_, the _delinquent from impulse or passion_ (irresistible impulsion), the _insane delinquent_, and the _occasional delinquent_. in this way, he succeeded in classifying a series of types--what we might call _sub-species_--diverging from the somatic and psycho-moral charts of normal men. but the common biopathological foundation of such types (with the exception of the last) was _degeneration_. we may well agree with morselli that, in many parts of his treatise, lombroso completed and amplified morel, whose classic work, _a study of the degeneration of the_ _human species_, was published in france at a time when lombroso had hardly started upon his anthropological researches. both of these great teachers based their doctrine upon a naturalistic concept of man, and then proceeded to consider him, through all his anomalies and perversions, in relation to that extraneous factor, his environment. morel, indeed, considers the _social_ causes of degeneration, that is to say, of progressive organic impoverishment, as more important than the individual phenomena; they act _upon posterity_ and tend to create a human _variety_ deviating from the normal type. such causes may be summed up as including whatever tends to the organic detriment of civilised man: such (in the first rank) as _alcoholism_, poisoning associated with professional industries (metallic poisons), or with lack of nutriment (pellagra), conditions endemic in certain localities (goitre), infective maladies (malaria, tuberculosis), denutrition (surménage). it may be said that whatever produces _prolonged_ _suffering_, or whatever we class under the term _vices_, or even the neglect of our duties, chief among which is that of _working_ (parasitism of the rich), or any of the causes which _exhaust_, or _paralyse_, or _perturb_ our normal functions, are causes of degeneration, of impoverishment of the species. such is the doctrine which underlies the etiological concept of abnormal personality in psychiatry as well as in criminology, or points the way to its bio-social sources. accordingly, just as general anthropology sought to investigate the origins of races or that of the human species in the very roots of life, so criminal anthropology searches the origins of defective personality in its social surroundings. the ethical problems which are raised by such a doctrine cannot fail to be of interest to us. the lombrosian theories, by raising these problems, have not only shaken the foundations of penal law, but have even brought about a moral renovation of conscience. we will leave to the jurists the great civic labor resulting from having brought the _individual_ as well as the _crime_ under consideration, in relation to the social phenomenon of delinquency--in other words, of having substituted an anthropological for a speculative attitude. whether the delinquent should be cured, or simply isolated, or even subjected to punishment; whether the prison should be transformed into an asylum for the criminal insane; whether the penal laws should be reformed on principles of a higher order of civil morality: these are problems which interest us only secondarily. what does interest us directly as educators is the necessity of _laying our course_ in accordance with the standard of social morality which such a doctrine reveals and imposes upon us: since it is our duty to prepare the conscience of the rising generation. and, furthermore, to consider whether the organisation of our schools and of their methods is in conformity with such social progress. if we cast a general glance at social ethics, from the primitive beginnings of human intercourse, we witness the _evolution of the_ _vendetta_. there was, first, the individual vendetta. it was a form of primordial _justice_, with which were associated the sentiments of dignity, honour and solidarity; the injured party avenged himself by slaying; and the family of the slain retaliated by a new vendetta against the family of the slayer; and thus from generation to generation the tragic heritage continued to be handed down. even now, in certain districts of civilised countries there exist survivals of these primitive forms of justice. in such cases, the slayer is held to be, not only _honourable_ but _virtuous_. analogously, in course of time, the individual vendetta, regulated by special formalities, developed into the _duel_ for a point of _honour_. at a more advanced period, in the course of the organisation of society, the task of vengeance was taken away from the individual, and the social administration of justice was established. thereafter, the act of an offender was _punished_ by the people collectively, and the victims of the act had no other recompense from society than that of a sense of satisfied hatred. but throughout all civil progress, from the most primitive forms of society down to our own times, there persisted, as a fundamental principle, the concept of vengeance, coupled with the two great moral principles, individually and collectively, of human society: _honour_ and _justice_. the naturalistic concept introduced by the lombrosian doctrine, namely, _living man_ entering as a concrete reality into the midst of abstract moral principles, shatters this association of ideas, and by so doing prepares the way for a new order of things--which is not a process of evolution, but the beginning of an epoch. vengeance disappears in the new conception of the defense of society and of an active campaign for the progress of humanity; and it ushers in an epoch of redemption and of solidarity, in which all limitations of human brotherhood are swept away. the theories of morel and lombroso have resulted in calling the attention of civilised man to all the types of the _physiologically_ _inferior_; the mentally deficient, epileptics, delinquents; shedding light upon their pathological personality, and transforming into interest and pity the contempt and neglect that were formerly the portion of such creatures. in this way science has accomplished in their behalf a work analogous to that of certain saints on behalf of lepers and sufferers from cancer in the middle ages. at that epoch, and even down to the beginning of modern times, the sick were abandoned to themselves and languished, covered with sores, in the midst of the horrors of infection; lepers were universally shunned, and their bodies decomposed without succor. it was only when these miserable beings began to awaken pity, in the place of loathing and repulsion, and to attract the charity of saints, instead of spreading panic among egoists and cowards, that the _care_ of the sick began upon a vast scale, with the foundation of hospitals, the progress of medicine, and later of hygiene. to-day those purulent plague-spots of the middle ages no longer exist; and infection is being combated with progressive success, in the triumph of physical health. yet, we are standing to-day on the selfsame level as the middle ages, in respect to moral plague-spots and infections; the phenomenon of _criminality_ spreads without check or succor, and up to yesterday it aroused in us nothing but repulsion and loathing. but now that science has laid its finger upon this moral fester, it demands the cooperation of all mankind to combat it. accordingly we find ourselves in the epoch of _hospitals_ for the morally diseased, the century of their treatment and cure; we have initiated a social movement toward the triumph of _morality_. we educators must not forget that we have inaugurated the _epoch_ of _spiritual health_; because i believe that it is we who are destined to be the true _physicians_ and _nurses_ of this new _cure_. from the middle ages until now, the science of medicine has slowly been evolving for us the principles required to guarantee our bodily health; but we know very well that while cleanliness and hygiene are _signs_ of civilisation, it is its moral standard that establishes its level. this moral solidarity is something which it is our duty to understand thoroughly, if we wish to undertake the noble task of educators in the twentieth century, which was prepared in advance by the intensive intellectual activity of the century of science. granting the social phenomenon of _crime_, we ought to ask ourselves: where does the fault lie? if we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the _causes of degeneration_ and disease have filtered. accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault: or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to _foster_ or to _tolerate_ such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiological pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity. the idea is not a new one: all great truths were perceived in every age by the elect few; the fundamental principles of the doctrine of lombroso are to be already found in greek philosophy and in that of christ; aristotle, in his belief that there is some one particular organism corresponding to each separate manifestation of nature, foreshadows the concept of the correspondence between the morphological and psychic personality; and st. john chrisostom expounds the principle of moral solidarity in the collective responsibility of society, when he says: "you will render account, not only of your own salvation, but of that of all mankind; whoever prays ought to feel himself burdened with the interests of the entire human race." now, if it is not yet in our power to achieve a social reform based on the eradication of degenerative causes--since society can be perfected only gradually--it is nevertheless within our power to _prepare the conscience_ for acceptance of the new morality, and by _educational_ means to help along the civil progress which science has revealed to us. the honest man, the worthy man, the man of honour, is not he who avenges himself; but he who works for something outside himself, for the sake of society at large, in order to purify it of its evils and its sins, and advance it on its path of future progress. in this way, even though we fail to prepare the material environment, we shall have prepared _efficient men_. in addition to this momentous principle of social ethics, the lombrosian doctrines confront us squarely with the philosophic question of liberty of action, the controverted question of stuart mill, namely that of "free will." the libertarians admit the freedom of the will as one of the noblest of human prerogatives, on which the responsibility for our acts depends; the determinists recognise that the act of volition obeys certain predetermined _causes_. now the lombrosian theories find these _causes_, not after the fashion of the pythagoreans, in cosmic laws or astrology, but in the _constitution of the organism_, thus serving as a powerful illustration of that _physiological determinism_, under whose guidance modern positive philosophy draws its inspiration.[ ] in the case of criminality, the actions of the degenerate delinquent are dependent upon a multiplicity of internal factors, that are almost necessarily governed by special predispositions. but, also in accordance with the lombrosian doctrine, there are external factors which concur in determining acts of volition, factors relating to the environment, studied in accordance with rather vast conceptions: the actions of the individual are determined in advance by that social intercourse in which the great phenomena of any given civilisation have their necessary origin--phenomena such as crime, prostitution, the grade of culture accessible to the majority, the character of industrial products, the limits of general mortality. now, just as there are necessary fluctuations in the tables of mortality, so also there are fluctuations in the quantity and quality of those individual phenomena that are looked upon as crimes: and in the one case no less than in the other, those who are predisposed are the ones in whom occurs the necessary outbreak of phenomena having their origin in society. this constitutes in criminology, as well as in psychiatry, the resultant of all etiological concepts, pertaining to the interpretation of individual phenomena. it is precisely the same concept as that so exhaustively demonstrated by quétélet, with the aid of european statistics, in his _social physics_, and it has come to represent in modern science that fundamental concept which was to be found in all the great religions, of the dependence of the individual upon a governing force that is superior to him. this interpretation of individual phenomena cannot be ignored in the great problems of education; because the more literally we interpret the doctrine here set forth, just so much the less trust must be placed in the efficacy of education as a modifying influence upon personality, while it will acquire new importance as a co-worker in the interpretation of social epochs and individual activities, over which it should exercise a watchful guidance. but meanwhile it is of interest to us to note how the anthropological movement, introduced with great simplicity of method, without any scientific or philosophical preconceptions, has led the investigations of psychiatry into vast and unsuspected fields of social ethics, bringing into practice fundamental reforms, analogous to those relating to penal law. _achille de giovanni and physiological anthropology; anthropological_ _principles of physical hygiene._--another practical development of anthropology is that instituted by professor de giovanni, who has introduced into his medical clinic at padua the anthropological method in the clinical examination of patients. he applies the well-known naturalistic procedure, namely, the description of individuals, their classification into types, according to common fundamental characteristics, and the etiological study of their personality. but while lombroso took note of malformations solely in relation to other symptoms of degeneration, de giovanni has established a strictly physiological basis for his investigations. accordingly, he considers the human individual in his entirety, as a _functionating organism_, and he regards all inharmonious bodily proportions as signifying a necessary predisposition to certain determined forms of illness. with this end in view, he does not concern himself about single malformations, such for example as prognathism, the frontal angle, etc., but rather with the general relations of development between the bust which contains the organs essential to vegetative life, and the limbs; and from the external morphology of the bust, determined by measurements, he seeks to establish the reciprocal relations in development within the visceral cavities: "the proportions of the human body depend upon the development of its organs; and equally with its proportions, the whole physiological strength of the body depends upon its organs taken collectively." whoever has a defective chest capacity not only possesses a smaller allowance of organs fitted for respiration and circulation of the blood, but as a result of such anomaly of development he is also predisposed to attacks of special maladies, such for example as chronic catarrh of the bronchial tubes or pulmonary tuberculosis. whoever, on the contrary, is overdeveloped in abdominal dimensions, will be subject to disturbances of the digestive system and of the liver. in his classic work, _morphology of the human body_, de giovanni proceeds to elaborate a doctrine of temperaments, and of their several predispositions to disease, the tendency of which is to transfer the basis of medicine from a study of diseases to that of the individual patients, and to revive in modern days the ancient concepts of the greek school of medicine, which from the time of hippocrates and galen drew up admirable charts of the fundamental physical types. in place of the ancient classification of temperaments into _nervous_, _sanguine_, _bilious_ and _lymphatic_, we have to-day as substitutes, according to the school of de giovanni, morphological types that are very nearly equivalent, and in which the predominant disorders are respectively diseases of the heart, the nervous system, the liver and the lungs. in short, the result of this theory has been to establish an internal factor of predisposition to disease, analogous to that established by lombroso as a predisposition to the phenomena of crime. and even here the mesogenic factors, that is, the influence of environment, must be taken into consideration: but environment acts equally upon all individuals: nearly everyone encounters, in his surroundings, that nerve-strain which leads to cardiac disorders and to neurasthenia; almost everyone encounters the bacilli of tuberculosis; the causes of general mortality are dictated by the very conditions of civilisation. but among the vast majority who pass unharmed along the insidious paths of adaptation, only a few fall victims to the particular disease to which some special anomaly of their organism predisposes them. in this way we can understand how it happens that certain ones have reason to dread a cold that will develop into bronchitis, and others on the contrary must guard themselves from errors in diet which will lead to intestinal disorders. the part of de giovanni's theory which is of special interest is that which leads to a consideration of the _ontogenetic development_ _in relation_ to the anomalies of the physio-morphological personality: "at every epoch of life this principle is applicable: namely, that the reason for a special predisposition to disease is to be found in a special organic morphology. the individual is in a ceaseless state of transformation, and consequently at different periods of his life he may show a susceptibility to different diseases." a person who is predisposed to suffer continually from some complaint during his adult years, was usually unwell during the greater part of his childhood, although from some other disease; and with this as a basis, a scientific system of observation could speak prophetically regarding the physio-pathological destiny of a child. it is known, for example, that children subject to scrofula are predisposed to arrive at maturity with an undeveloped chest and a tendency to pulmonary tuberculosis. from our point of view as educators, the doctrine of temperaments, and of their respective predispositions to disease, offers a deep interest, the nature of which is made evident by the author of the theory himself: for he points out that the period of childhood is the one best fitted in which to combat the abnormal predispositions of the organism, wisely guiding its development, to the final end of achieving an ideal of health, which depends upon the harmony of form and consequently of functions, in other words, upon the full attainment of physical beauty. here also, as in the lombrosian doctrines, etiology fulfils the lofty task of throwing light upon the causal links between the biosociologic causes and the congenital anomalies of the physiological personality. the hereditary tendencies to disease, the errors of sexual hygiene, especially those regarding maternity, reveal to us the principal causes of that accumulation of imperfections that oppress and deform the average normal human being. it is because of such errors and such ignorance that hardly any of us attain that harmonic beauty that would render us immune to the treacheries of environment, and enable us to achieve, in the triumphant security of good health, our normal biological development. it is not too much to say, that it is etiology which, applied to the lombrosian doctrines, reveals the _faults of society_, the _sins of the world_, and, applied to the theories of de giovanni, reveals its _errors_; and that from the two together there results a sort of ethical guide leading toward the supreme ideal of the _purification of the world_ and the _perfectionment of the human species_. these are ideals which were in part cherished by the greeks, who made their system of education the basis of their physical development. such physiological doctrines are precisely what we also need to round out our plan for a _moral education_. _giuseppe sergi and pedagogic anthropology: anthropological_ _bases of human hygiene._--it is also an italian to whom we owe that practical extension of anthropology that leads us straight into the field of pedagogy. it was my former teacher, giuseppe sergi, who, as early as , defended with the ardor of a prophet the new scientific principle of studying the pupils in our schools by methods prescribed by anthropology. like the scientists who preceded him, he was thus led to substitute (in the field of pedagogy) the human individual taken from actual life, in place of general principles or abstract philosophical ideas. as a matter of fact, while the doctrines of lombroso and de giovanni are profoundly reformatory, they nevertheless offer us nothing more substantial than certain new ideals of morality and social improvement. but the really practical field in which these ideals might in a large measure be realised is the _school_. what progress would result for humanity if, on the basis of these new ethical principles, we contented ourselves with transforming our prisons into insane asylums? such scanty fruit might well be compared to the mercy of that mediæval lordling who, out of consideration for a gentleman, commuted his sentence from hanging to decapitation. and scanty fruit would also be reaped by the science of medicine if, in its new anthropological development, it should content itself merely with diagnosing the personality of the patient, in addition to the disease; that is to say, for example, if, instead of telling a patient that his attack of bronchitis would be cured within twenty days, it should go on to predict, on the basis of the morphology of his body, that he would infallibly fall ill every year, until such time as pulmonary tuberculosis should put a fatal ending to his days. on the contrary, behind the light of ideality that shimmers through and across these doctrines, we perceive our plain duty to trace out a path that will lead to a regeneration of humanity. if some practical line of action is to result, it will undoubtedly have to be exerted upon _humanity in the course of development_, in other words, at that period of life when the organism, being still in the course of formation, may be effectively directed and consequently corrected in its mode of growth. accordingly, the possible solution of the most momentous social problems, such as those of criminality, predisposition to disease, and degeneration, may be hoped for only within the limits of that space which society sets aside for guiding the new generations in their development. in the school, we have hitherto retained, almost as a principle of justice, a leveling uniformity among the pupils: an abstract equality which seeks to guide all these separate childish individualities toward a single type which cannot be called an idealised type, because it does not represent a standard of perfection, but is on the contrary a non-existent philosophical abstraction: the _child_. educators are prepared for their practical services to childhood, by studies based upon this abstract infantile personality; and they enter upon their active work in school with the preconception that they must discover in every pupil a more or less faithful incarnation of the said type; and thus, year after year, they delude themselves with the idea that they have understood and educated _the child_. now, this supposed uniformity cannot exist in the children of a human race so varied that it can produce, at the selfsame time, a musolino[a] and a luccheni,[ ] a guglielmo marconi and a giosue carducci. all the different social types of men who labor with their hands and with their brains, the transformers of their environment, the producers of wealth, the directors of governments, equally with the undistinguished crowd of parasites, the enemies of society, all lived together in childhood, sitting side by side, upon the same school benches. it was in that the first italian pedagogical congress was held in turin, and was attended by about three thousand educators. under the spur of a new passion, that made me foresee the future mission and transformation of a chosen social class, setting forth upon a glorious task of redemption--the class of educators--i attended the congress. i was at that time an interloper, because the subsequent felicitous union between medicine and pedagogy still remained a thing undreamed of, in the thoughts of that period. we had reached the third day of our sessions, and were all awaiting with interest an address by professor ildebrando bencivenni, who was announced to speak upon the theme of "the school that educates." the discussion of this subject was expected to constitute the substantial work of the congress, which seemed to have been called together chiefly in order to solve the problem of the greatest pedagogic importance: _how to give a moral education_. it was that very morning, just as the session was opening, that the frightful news burst upon us like a thunderbolt, that the empress, elizabeth of austria, had been assassinated, and that once again an italian had struck the blow! the third regicide in europe within a brief time, that was due to an italian hand! the entire public press was unanimously stirred to indignation against the educators of the people; and as a demonstration of hostility, they all absented themselves that day from participating in the congress. there was something approaching a tumult in the ranks of teachers; inasmuch as they felt themselves innocent, they protested against the calumny of the newspapers in thus unjustly holding them responsible. amid the intense silence of the assembly, bencivenni delivered a splendid discourse regarding the reform of educative methods in the school. next in order, i took the platform and, speaking as a physician, i said: it will be all in vain for you to reform the methods of moral education in our schools, if you do not bear in mind that certain individuals exist, who are the very ones capable of committing such unspeakable deeds, and who pass through school without ever once being influenced in any manner by education. there exist various categories of abnormal children, who will fruitlessly go through the same grade over and over again, disturbing the routine and discipline of the class: and in spite of punishments and reprimands, they will end by being expelled without having learned anything at all, without having been modified in any manner. what becomes of these individuals who, even in childhood, reveal themselves as the future rebels and enemies of society? yet we leave such a dangerous class in the most complete abandonment. now, it is useless to reform the school and its methods, if the reformed school and the reformed methods are still going to fail to reach the very children who, for the protection of society, are most in need of being reached! any method whatever suffices to fit a sane and normal child for a useful and moral life. the reform that is demanded in school and in pedagogy is one that will lead to the protection of _all_ children during their years of development, including those who have shown themselves refractory to the environment of social life. thus i laid the first stone toward the education of mentally deficient children and the foundation of special schools for them. the work which followed forms, i think, the first historic page of a great regeneration in the whole class of teachers and of a profound reform in the school; a question so momentous that it spread rapidly throughout all italy and was followed by the establishment of institutes and classes designed expressly for the deficient; and, most important of all, by the universal conviction which it carried, it also constituted the first page of pedagogy reformed upon an anthropological basis. this is precisely the new development of pedagogy that goes under the name of _scientific_: in order to educate, it is essential to know those who are to be educated. "taking measurements of the head, the stature, etc." (in other words, applying the anthropological method), "is, to be sure, not in itself the practice of pedagogy," says sergi, in speaking of what the biological sciences have contributed to this branch of learning during the nineteenth century, "but it does mean that we are following the path that leads to pedagogy, because we cannot educate anyone until we know him thoroughly." here again, in the field of pedagogy, the naturalistic method must lead us to the study of the separate subjects, to a description of them as individuals, and their classification on a basis of characteristics in common; and since the child must be studied not by himself alone, but also in relation to the factors of his origin and his individual evolution--since every one of us represents the effect of multifold causes--it follows that the etiological side of the pedagogical branch of modern anthropology, like all its other branches, necessarily invades the field of biology and at the same time of sociology. among the types which it will be of pedagogic interest to trace in school-children, we must undoubtedly find those that correspond to the childhood of those abnormal individuals already studied in lombroso's _criminal anthropology_, and in de giovanni's _clinical morphology_. nevertheless, it is a new study, because the characteristics of the child are not those of the adult reduced to a diminutive scale, but they constitute _childhood_ characteristics. man changes as he grows; the body itself not only undergoes an increase in volume, but a profound evolution in the harmony of its parts and the composition of its tissues; in the same way, the psychic personality of the man does not grow, but evolves; like the predisposition to disease which varies at different ages in each individual considered pathologically. for all those anomalous types which to-day are included under the popular term of _deficients_, for the pathological weaklings who reveal symptoms of scrofula or rickets, there is no doubt that special schools and methods of education are essential. we teachers would like, through educative means, to counteract the ultimate consequences of degeneration and predisposition to disease: if criminal anthropology has been able to _revolutionise the_ _penalty_ in modern civilisation, it is our duty to undertake, in the school of the future, to _revolutionise the individual_. and by achieving this ideal, pedagogic anthropology will to a large extent have taken the place of criminal anthropology, just as schools for the abnormal and feeble, multiplied and perfected under the protection of an advanced civilisation, will in a large measure have replaced the prisons and the hospitals. we owe to the intuitive genius of giuseppe sergi the conception of a form of pedagogic anthropology far more exact in its methods of investigation than anything which had hitherto been foreshadowed. this master takes the ground that a study of abnormal and weakly children is a task of absolutely secondary importance. what is imperative for us to know, he claims, is _normal humanity_, if we are to guide it intelligently toward that biological and moral perfection, on which the progress of humanity must depend. if general pedagogy is destined to be transformed under a naturalistic impulse, this will be effected only when anthropology turns its investigations to the normal human being. educators are still very far from having a _real knowledge_ of that collective body of school-children, on whom a uniformity of method, of encouragement and punishment is blindly inflicted; if, instead of this, the child could be brought before the teacher's eyes as a _living individuality_, he would be forced to adopt very different standards of judgment, and would be shaken to the very depths of his conscience by the revelation of a responsibility hitherto unsuspected. let us take one or two examples; let us consider, among the pupils, one child who is very poor. studied by the anthropological method, he is revealed, in every personal physiological detail, as an inferior type. the child of poverty, as niceforo has well shown, is an inferior in stature, in cranium, in weight, in muscular and intellectual strength; and the malformations, resulting from defects of growth, condemn him to an æsthetic inferiority; in other words, environment, mode of living, and nutrition may result in modifying even the relative _beauty_ of the individual. the normal man may bear within him a germ of physical beauty inherited from parents who begot him normally, and yet this germ may not be able to develop, because impeded by environment. accordingly, physical beauty constitutes in itself a class privilege. this child, weak in mind and in muscular force, when compared with the child of wealth, grown up in a favorable environment, shows less attractive manners, because he has been reared in an atmosphere of social inferiority, and in school is classed as a pariah. less good looking and less refined, he fails to enlist the sympathy which the teacher so readily concedes to the courteous manners of more fortunate children; less intelligent himself, and unable to look for help from parents who, more than likely, are illiterate, he fails to obtain the encouragement of praise and high credit marks that are lavished upon stronger children, who have no need of being encouraged. thus it happens that the down-trodden of society are also the down-trodden in the school. and we call this justice; and we say that demerit is punished and merit is rewarded; but in this way we make ourselves the sycophants of nature and of social error, and not the administrators of justice in education! on the other hand, let us examine another child, living in an agreeable environment, in the higher social circles; he possesses all the physical attraction and grace that render childhood charming. he is intelligent, smiling, gentle-mannered; at the cost of small effort he gives his teacher ample satisfaction by his progress, and even if the teacher's method of instruction happens to be somewhat faulty, the child's family hasten privately to make up for the deficiency. this child is destined to reap a harvest of praise and rewards; the teacher, egotistically complacent over the abundant fruit gathered with so little effort, and the moral and æsthetic satisfaction derived from the fortunate pupil, gives him unmeasured affection and smooths his whole course through school. but if we study the rich, intelligent, prize-winning child carefully, we find that he, too, is not perfect in his anthropological development; he is too narrow-chested. this is the penalty of the rich and the studious; every privilege brings its own peril; every benefit contains a snare; every one of us to-day, without the light of science, runs the risk of diminishing our physiological equilibrium, by living in an environment that contains so many defects. the child of luxury, living continually indoors, diligently studying in his well-warmed home, under his mother's vigilant eye, is impeding the development of his own chest; and when he has completed his growth and his education, will find himself with insufficient lungs; his physical personality will have been permanently thrown out of equilibrium by a defective environment. this highly cultured man may some day find himself urged on to big endeavour; his intelligence will create vast ideals, but he will not have at his disposal the physical force that is so strictly associated with the power to draw from the surrounding air a sufficient quantity of oxygen by means of respiration. the spirit is ready, but the flesh is weary; and all his ambitious hopes may be shattered in the very flower of life by pulmonary tuberculosis, to which he has himself created an artificial predisposition. it is our duty to understand the individual, in order to avoid these fatal errors; and to arise to higher standards of justice, founded upon the real exigencies of life--guided by that spirit of love which is essential to the teacher, in order to render him truly an educator of humanity. love is the essential spirit of fecundity whose one purpose is to beget life. and in the teacher, love of humanity must find expression through his work, because the very purpose of love is to create something. accordingly, this spirit of fecundity ought to produce the teacher's _mission_, which to-day is the mission of reforming the school and accepting the proud duty of universal motherhood, destined to protect all mankind, the normal and abnormal alike. this is a reform, not only of the school, but of society as a whole, because through the redeeming and protective labours of pedagogy, the lowest human manifestations of degeneration and disease will disappear; and, more important still, it will make it henceforth impossible for normal human beings, conceived from germs that promise strength and beauty, little by little to lose that beauty and strength along the rough paths of life, through which no one has hitherto had the knowledge to guide them. "in the social life of to-day an urgent need has arisen," says our common master, giuseppi sergi, "a renovation of our methods of education and instruction; and whoever enrolls himself under this standard, is fighting for the regeneration of man." _enrico morselli and scientific philosophy._--among the names of italian scientists that must be called to mind, in discussing the modern developments of anthropology, a special lustre attaches to that of enrico morselli, who has earned the right to call himself the critic, or rather, the philosopher of anthropology. notwithstanding that he has made his name famous in the vast field of psychiatry, this distinguished genoese practitioner has found time to assimilate the most diverse branches of science and the most widely separated avenues of thought, qualifying himself as a _critic_, and systematising experimental science on the lines of scientific philosophy. his great work, _general anthropology_, is developed on synthetic lines, embracing in a single scientific system all the acquired knowledge of the past two centuries, and may rightfully be called the first treatise on philosophic anthropology. while the experimental sciences, by collecting and recording separate phenomena, were gradually preparing, throughout the nineteenth century, a great mass of analytical material, chosen blindly and without form, they apparently engendered a new trend of thought positively hostile to philosophy: the _odium antiphilosophicum_, as morselli calls it. and conversely, the speculative positivism of ardigo remained throughout its development a stranger to the immediate sources of experimental research, and adhered strictly to the field of pure philosophy. it remained for morselli to perceive that the scientific material prepared by experimental science was in reality philosophical material, for which it was only necessary to prepare instruments and means in order to systematise it and lead it into the proper channels for the construction of a scientific philosophy. throughout the whole period of his intellectual activity, morselli sought to unite experimental science and philosophy, by taking his content from the former and his form from the latter. to gather and catalogue bare facts could not be the scope of science; such labour could result only in sterilising the mind. "the human mind," says morselli, "does not stop at the objective study of a phenomenon and its laws; it wants also to fathom their nature; the how does not content it, but it must also have the _wherefore_." it must mount from facts to synthesis, constantly achieving a new and fuller understanding. but what determines the content of philosophy is not speculative thought, but facts that have been collected _objectively_. such is the view of enrico morselli, expressed in the introduction to his _review of scientific_ _philosophy_: "we think the moment has come for professional philosophers to allow themselves to be convinced that the progress of physical and biological sciences has profoundly changed the tendencies of philosophy; so that it is no longer an assemblage of speculative systems, but rather the synthesis of partial scientific doctrines, the expression of the highest general truths, derived _solely_ and _immediately_ from the study of facts. on the other hand, we hope also that in every student of the separate sciences, whether pure or applied, the intimate conviction will take root that no science which applies the method of observation and experiment to the particular class of phenomena which form its subject, can call itself fully developed so long as it is limited to the collection and classification of facts. scientific dilettantism of this sort must end by sterilising the human mind, whose natural tendency is to advance from observed phenomena by successive stages to the investigation of their partial laws, and from these to the research of more and more general truths. but philosophy, thus understood, can never confine itself within the dogmatism of a system, but rather will leave the individual mind free to make constant new concessions, in the pursuit of the truth. "the human mind is condemned to search forever, and perhaps never to find, the ultimate solution to the eternal problem which it offers to itself; accordingly, let it keep itself at _liberty_ to accept to-day as probable, a solution which further researches or newly discovered facts will compel it to reject to-morrow in favor of another. we must admit that in philosophic concepts there is a constant evolution, or rather natural selection, thanks to which the strongest concepts, those best constituted, those that are fitted to make use of scientific discoveries with the broadest liberality, are predisposed to prove victorious or at least to hold their own for a long time in the struggle."[ ] it is this _liberty_ that makes it possible for us to pursue experimental investigations, without fear that our brains may become sterile. and by liberty we mean the readiness to accept new concepts whenever experience proves to us that they are better and closer to the truth which we are seeking. even though the absolute truth were never reached, the experimental method is the path most likely to lead us toward it step by step. accordingly, what we should demand of investigators is not a creed, a philosophic system, but "_the objective method in their_ _researches and in the sources of their inductions_." for this is the way to train the workers and philosophers of experimental science. and the same lines must serve us for building up a philosophy capable of shaping a regenerated method of pedagogy. the method the determining factor in anthropology is the same that determines all experimental science: the _method_. a well-defined method in natural science applied to the study of living man offers us the scientific content, which we are in the course of seeking. the content bursts upon us as a surprise, as the result of applying the method, by means of which we make advances in the investigation of truth. whenever a science prescribes for itself, not a content but a method of experimenting, it is for that reason called an _experimental_ science. it is not easy for those who come fresh from the pursuit of philosophic studies to adapt themselves to this order of ideas. the philosopher, the historian, the man of letters prepare themselves by assimilating the _content_ of one particular branch of learning; and thereby they define the boundaries of their individual knowledge and close the circle of their individual thought, however vast that circle may be. indeed, the elaboration of human thought, the series of historic deeds, the accumulated mass of literature, may offer immense fields; but after the student has little by little assimilated them, he cannot do otherwise than contain them within him precisely as they are. their extent is limited by the centuries that cover the history of civilised man, and it is invariable, since it exists as a work accomplished by man. experimental science is of an entirely different sort. we must look upon it as a _means_ of investigation into the field of the infinite and the unknown. if we wish to compare it to some branch of learning that is universally familiar, we may say that an experimental science is similar to _learning to read_. when as children we learn to read, we may, to be sure, estimate the effort that it costs us to master a mechanical device; but such a mechanical device is a means, it is a magic key that will unlock the secrets of wisdom, multiply our power to share the thoughts of our contemporaries, and render us dexterous in despatching the practical affairs of life. thus considered, _reading_ is a branch of learning that has no prescribed limits. it is our duty to learn to read the _truth_, in the book of _nature_; i. by collecting separate facts, according to the objective method; ii. by proceeding methodically from analysis to synthesis. the subject of our research is the individual human being. . _the objective collecting of single facts._--in the gathering of data, our science makes use of two means of investigation, as we have already seen: observation or _anthroposcopy_; and measurement or _anthropometry_. in order to take measurements, we must know the special _anthropometric instruments_ and how to use them; and in making observations, we must treat ourselves as instruments, that is, we must divest ourselves of our own personality, of every preconception, in order to become capable of recording the real facts _objectively_. for since our purpose is to gather our facts from nature and await her revelations, if we allowed ourselves to have scientific preconceptions, we might distort the truth. here is the point which distinguishes experimental science from a speculative science; in the former, we must banish thought, in the latter we must build by means of thought. accordingly _at the moment_ _when we are collecting our data_, we must possess no other capacity than that of knowing how to collect them with extreme exactness and objectivity. accordingly we need a _method_ and a mental preparation, that is, a _training_ which will accustom us to divest ourselves of our own personalities, in order to become simple _instruments of investigation_. for instance, if it were a question of measuring the heads of illiterate children and of other children of the same age, who are attending school, in order to learn whether the heads of educated children show greater development, we need not only to know how to use the _millimetric scale_ and the cranial calipers which are the instruments adapted to this purpose; we need not only to know the _anatomical points_ at which the instruments must be applied in the manner established by the accepted method; but we need in addition to be _unaware_, while taking the measurements, whether the child before us at a given moment is educated or illiterate because the preconception might work upon us by suggestion and thus alter the result. or again, to take what in a certain sense is an opposite case, and nevertheless analogous, we may undertake a research into some absolutely unknown question, as for instance, what are the psychic characteristics of children whose development has kept fairly close to the normal average, and of those whose anthropological measurements diverge notably from the average: in such a case we ought to measure all the children, make the required psychological tests separately, and then compare the results of the two investigations. a woman student in my course, last year, undertook precisely this sort of investigation, namely, to find out what was the standing in school of children who represent the normal average anthropological type, that is to say, those whose physical development had been all that was to be desired: and she found that normal children are _vivacious_ (happy), _very intelligent_, but _negligent_; and consequently their number never includes the _heads of the classes_, the _winners of prizes_. in addition to gathering _anthropological data_, which requires a special _technique_ of research, we need to know how to proceed to interpret them. we are no longer at the outset of our observations. no sooner was the method established, than there were a multitude of students in all parts of the world capable of objective research, that is to say, of anthropological investigations. the sum total of all these researches forms a _scientific patrimony_, which needs to be known to us, in order that our own conclusions may serve to complete those of other investigators, who have preceded us, and thus form a contribution to science. in other words, there have already been certain _principles_ established and certain _laws_ discovered, on an experimental basis; and all this forms a _true_ and fitting content of our science. it will serve to _guide_ us in our researches, and to furnish us with a _standard_ _of comparison_ for our own conclusions. thus, for example, when we have measured the stature of a boy of ten, we have undoubtedly gathered an individual anthropological fact; but in order to interpret it, we must know what is the average stature of boys of ten; and the average will be found established by previous investigators, who have obtained it from actuality, by applying the well-known method of measuring the stature, to a great number of individuals of a specified race, sex, and age, and by obtaining an average on the basis of such research. accordingly, we ought to _profit from_ the researches of others, whenever they have been received, as noteworthy, into the literature of science. nevertheless, the patrimony which science places at our disposition must never be considered as anything more than a _guide_, an expression of universal collaboration, in accordance with a uniform method. we must never _jurare in_ _verba magistri_, never accept any master as infallible: we are always at liberty to _repeat_ any research already made, in order to verify it; and this form of investigation is part of the established method of experimental science. one fundamental principle must be clearly understood; that we can never become anthropologists merely by reading all the existing literature of anthropology, including the voluminous works on kindred studies and the innumerable periodicals; we shall become anthropologists only at the moment when, having mastered the method, we become investigators of _living human individuals_. we must, in short, be _producers_, or nothing at all; assimilation is useless. for example, let us suppose that a certain teacher has studied anthropology in books: if, after that, he is incapable of making practical _observations_ upon his own pupils, to what end does his theoretical knowledge serve him? it is evident that theoretic study can have no other purpose than to guide us in the interpretation of data gathered directly from nature. our only book should be the living individual; all the rest taken together form only the necessary means for reading it. . _the passage from analysis to synthesis._--assuming that we have learned how to gather anthropological data with a rigorously exact technique, and that we possess a theoretic knowledge and tables of comparative data: all this together does not suffice to qualify us as interpreters of nature. the marvellous reading of this amazing book demands on our part still other forms of preparation. in gathering the separate data, it may be said that we have learned how to _spell_, but not yet how to read and interpret the sense. the reading must be accomplished with broad, sweeping glances, and must enable us to penetrate in thought into the very synthesis of life. and it is the simple truth that _life_ manifests itself through the living individual, and in no other way. but through these means it reveals certain general properties, certain laws that will guide us in grouping the living individuals according to their common properties; it is necessary to know them, in order to interpret individual differences dependent upon race, age, and sex, and upon variations due to the effort of adaptation to environment, or to pathological or degenerative causes. that is to say, certain general principles exist, which serve to make us _interpreters_ _of the meaning_, when we read in the book of life. this is the _loftiest_ part of our work, carrying us above and beyond the individual, and bringing us in contact with the very fountain-heads of life, almost as though it were granted us to materialise the unknowable. in this way we may rise from the arid and fatiguing gathering of analytical data, toward conceptions of noble grandeur, toward a _positive philosophy of life_; and unveil certain secrets of existence, that will teach us the moral norms of life. because, unquestionably, we are _immoral_, when we disobey the laws of life; for the triumphant rule of life throughout the universe is what constitutes our conception of beauty and goodness and truth--in short, of divinity. the technical method of proceeding toward synthesis, we may find well defined in biology: the data gathered by measurement can be grouped according to the statistical method, be represented graphically and calculated by the application of mathematics to biology: to-day, indeed, _biometry_ and _biostatistics_ tend to assume so vast a development as to give promise of forming independent sciences. the _method_ in biology, considered as a whole, may be compared to the microscope and telescope, which are instruments, and yet enable us to rise above and beyond our own natural powers and come into contact with the two extremes of infinity; the infinitely little and the infinitely large. _objections and defences._--one of the objections made to pedagogical anthropology is that it has not yet a completely defined content, on which to base an organic system of instruction and reliable general rules. it is the _method_ alone that enables us to be eloquent in defence of pedagogic anthropology, against such an accusation. for the accusation itself is the embodiment of a conception of a method differing widely from our own: it is the accusation made by speculative science, which, resting on the basis of a content, refuses to acknowledge a science that is still lacking and incomplete in its content, because it is unable to conceive that a science may be essentially summed up in its method, which makes it a means of revelation. how could we conceive of the _content_ of pedagogic anthropology otherwise than as something to be derived by the experimental method from the observation of _school-children_? and where could we conceive of a possible laboratory for such a science, if not in the school itself? the _content_ will be determined little by little, by the application of the anthropological study to school-children in the school, and never in any other manner. now, if it were necessary to await the completion of a content before proceeding to any practical application, where could we hope to get this content from--especially since we look for no help either from speculative philosophy or divine revelation? when a _method_ is applied to any positive science, it results in giving that science a new _direction_, that is to say, a new avenue of progress: and it is precisely in the course of advance along that avenue that the content of the science is formed: but if we never made the advance, the science would never take its start. thus, for example, when the microscope revealed to medicine the existence of micro-organisms, and bacteriology arose as the positive study of epidemiology, it altered the whole procedure in the cure and prophylaxis of infective maladies. prior to this epoch people believed that an epidemic was a scourge sent by divine wrath upon sinners; or else they imagined it was a miasma transported by the wind, which groves and eucalyptus trees might check; or they pictured the ground ejecting miasmatic poisons through its pores:--and humanity sought in vain to protect itself with bare-foot processions and religious ceremonies, attended by jostling throngs and cruel flagellation; or else they betook themselves to the shade of eucalyptus trees, in the midst of malarial lowlands. entire cities were destroyed by pestilence, and malarial districts remained uncultured deserts, because entire populations, in the brave effort to perform their work, were destroyed by successive impoverishment of the blood. it is bacteriology that has put to flight this darkness of ignorance that was the herald of death, and has created the modern conditions of environment, which, by a multitude of means, defend the individual and the nation from infective diseases; so that to-day civilised society may be said to be advancing toward a triumph over death. but the microbes have not all of them been discovered; bacteriology and general pathology are still very far from having completed their _content_. if we had been obliged to wait for such completion, we should still be living quite literally in the midst of mediæval epidemics; or, to state the case better, where in the world would the science of medicine ever have attained its new content? for it has been building it up, little by little, _by directing_ _medicine upon a new path_. it was the introduction of this new method of investigating the patient and his environment that experimentally reaped the fruit of new etiological discoveries, and new means of defence: the microscope became perfected because it came into universal use in practice; bacterial cultures owe their perfectionment to the fact that they became the common means of investigation for the purpose of diagnosis; just as tests in clinical chemistry have become perfected through practical use. without which, who would ever have perfected the microscope, or the science of bacteriology? in a word, whence are we to get the content of any positive science, if not from practical application? a direction and an applied method represent a triumph of progress; and in progress, a _content_ cannot have defined limits. we do not know its goal; we know only that at the moment when it finds its goal, it will cease to be _progress_. it is many years since medicine abandoned the speculative course, and we see it to-day hourly enriching itself with new truths; its triumphal march is never checked, and it moves onward toward the invasion of future centuries. in the wake of its progress, that frightful phenomenon which we call _mortality_ tends to fall steadily to a lower level; giving rise to the hope that through future progress it will cease to be the mysterious, menacing fate, ever watchful and ready to sever the invisible threads of human life. these threads are to-day revealing themselves as the resistant fibres of a fabric; because, humanity by engaging collectively in the audacious search after truth, and by thus protecting the interests of each individual through the common interests, has succeeded in offering a powerful resistance to the mysterious sheers. accordingly, we may say that the substitution to-day of an anthropological development of pedagogy, in the place of a purely philosophical and speculative trend, does not offer it merely an _additional content_, an auxiliary to all the other forms of teaching on which it now comfortably reposes; but it opens up new avenues, fruitful in truth and in life; and as it advances along these avenues, regenerated from its very foundations upward, it may be that pedagogy is destined to solve the great problem of human redemption. the method to be followed in these lectures lastly, just one more word regarding the didactic method that i intend to follow, in delivering this course of lectures. from the purpose already stated, it follows that this course in anthropology must be eminently practical. of the three weekly lectures, only one will be theoretical; that is to say, only one in which i shall expound the _content_ of our science; a second lecture will treat of the _technique of the method_; that is to say, i shall devote it to describing the practical way of gathering anthropological data, and how we must study them and re-group them in order to extract their laws; and finally, the third lecture will be _practical_ _and clinical_; i shall devote it to the collection of anthropological data from human subjects, and little by little i shall try to work toward the individual study of pupils, until we reach the compilation of biographic charts. at the lectures of the third type, we shall have present subjects who will be, for the most part, normal, but some of them will be abnormal, and all will be drawn from the elementary schools of rome. finally, in further illustration of our course, we shall make excursions, visiting certain schools that offer some particular interest from our scientific point of view; to the end that we may supply what is lacking and what is needed to complete a university course in scientific pedagogy, namely a "pedagogical clinic," where pupils of the widest variety of types might be educated, and where it might be possible to lay practical foundations of a far-reaching reform in our schools. accordingly, i shall repeat myself three times, in these lectures; first, by setting forth the scientific content, secondly, by expounding the methods of investigation, and thirdly, by applying in practice what i have already taught in theory. the didactic method of repeating the same instruction under different forms, is also a feature of scientific pedagogy, because it represents the method by which positive science must be taught and acquired; and furthermore, it is the method that deserves to be applied wherever instruction of any sort is to be given. hitherto, we have not learned how to study; we know only, or at least the majority of us do, how to absorb the contents of books. the only true student is the scientist, who knows how to _advance slowly_; we educators on the contrary plunge in a dizzy, headlong rush, through all acquirable knowledge. to study is to look steadily, to stand still, to assimilate and to wait. we should study for the sake of creating, since the whole object of taking is to be able to give again; but in this giving and taking we ought not to be mere instruments, like high-pressure suction pumps; in work of this sort we ought to be _creators_, and when we give back, to add that part which has been _born and developed_ within us from what we acquired. it is wise to give our acquired knowledge time not only to be assimilated but also to develop freely in that fertile psychic ground that constitutes our innermost personality. in other words: assimilate by every possible means, and then wait. in order to start from a point of established knowledge, let us consider what is meant by _meditation_: to meditate means to isolate one's thoughts within the limits of some definite subject, and wait to see what that subject of its own accord may reveal to us, in the course of assimilation. the jesuits succeeded in winning souls merely by encouraging the people to meditate; meditation opened up an unsuspected inner world, which fascinated the type of person accustomed to flit lightly in thought across a multitude of diverse matters; and under the spell of such fascination, their consciences could attribute to nothing less than some occult power, what was really the application of a great pedagogic principle. there is a great difference between reading and meditating: we may read a voluminous novel in a single night; we may meditate upon a verse of scripture for an entire hour. anyone who reads a novel in a night undoubtedly squanders his physical powers, like a wind that passes over arid ground; but one who meditates assimilates in a special manner that surprises the meditator himself, because he feels something unforeseen coming to life within him, just as though a seed had been planted in fertile soil and, while remaining motionless, had begun to germinate. accordingly, the act of holding acquired knowledge within ourselves for a period of time results in self-development; superficial learning, on the contrary, means the exhaustion of our personal resources. we become steadily more exhausted and more inefficient, through too much study; and instead, we ought to become all the time more flourishing and more robust, if we studied in the proper way: and this is because we squander our psychic powers, instead of acquiring new energy. the consequence of this mistaken method is that we rapidly forget all that we have learned. everything is acquired at the cost of effort; what we need is to labor patiently, in order to acquire in the real sense. to-day it is the fashion to study in order to enter upon that particular business or profession that is destined to be our life's work; what we ought to do instead, is to devote our energies to the conquest of thought and the elevation of the spirit. the didactic method that i am trying to illustrate is not a new one; it dates back to the first precursors of scientific pedagogy. half a century ago, a marvellous work on pedagogy, based on similar principles, was issued from the press; it was the method elaborated by séguin, based on thirty years of practical experience in the education of idiotic children. such a system cannot be foreign to the interests of schools intended for average, normal children, because it is not a specialised method, like that for deaf-mutes or for the blind. being designed for the mentally deficient, this method applies to any class of undeveloped beings who are striving to grow bigger; we may even apply it to ourselves, and thereby increase our own mental stature. in short, pedagogically considered, it is a rational method. perhaps it is already familiar to a good many of you; but an example or two will serve to illustrate it. let us suppose that we have to impart a lesson in history to a deficient pupil: first of all, a picture is shown him, representing an historic fact; then the same fact will be shown him in as many different ways as possible--through the cinematograph, for example. finally it will be acted on the stage; and in this case, it is the children themselves who prepare the setting and endeavor, to the best of their ability, to impersonate the historic figures. now, it is precisely at the moment when they are reproducing the scene that these children _feel it_, and it is only then that they _learn_. but this is not peculiar to deficient children: the same path is the common path for all; it is necessary for all of us to assimilate mentally and to feel, before we can say: i have learned. if there is a latent tendency in the mind of a normal child to love historic happenings, then he will love them, and thus reveal to his teacher one of his intimate and secret tendencies; in other words, we shall have developed a taste, of which the hidden germs already existed. perhaps it was in some such way that sabatier succeeded in realising the environment and the life of st. francis of assisi. let us suppose, again, that we have to teach a child what is meant, in geography, by a mountain, a lake, or an island. according to séguin's method, we should take the child out into the garden, and make him construct a miniature mountain with earth, a lake with water, etc., than make him trace their geographical outline with chalk, then make him paint them in oils or water-colours, so that in the end he will have, as the result of his handiwork, a little monument, so to speak, of the acquired lesson. it is only after a child has worked that he begins to learn and to be interested. does not everyone know that, as between the one who receives, and the one who confers a favor, it is the latter who cares the more, because he has done something? the next step is to take the pupil to the top of some hill, so that he may see with his own eyes the things that we have taught him in the garden and through the medium of work; and in the silent contemplation of nature, it may happen that a normal child will hear the call of her mysterious voice, and reveal a dormant tendency to become some day, perhaps, a geographer, or an explorer, like the duke of the abruzzi; or perhaps he will feel that lure of nature which, some day or other, when he reaches maturity, will lead him to investigate the secrets of the earth and of meteorological phenomena, even to the point of such heroic sacrifice as was exemplified by professor matteucci, during the eruption of vesuvius. repeating the same things over and over, keeping the mind fixed upon the selfsame lesson, teaching how to reproduce objects by the work of the hands, bringing the pupil into direct contact with the object that he is desired to study, such is the true way to enable him to learn. the man who has been educated according to this method has not fruitlessly expended his energy in fatiguing study; he has preserved his forces unimpaired; indeed, if anything, they are all the sounder and more flourishing. by such a system of education, we launch upon the world a sturdy generation, imbued with that living energy, that constitutes the one and only mainspring that really makes the world move. accordingly this is the method that we shall follow: studying, repeating, working experimentally: the subject of our study is humanity; our purpose is to become teachers. now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a _mission_. the limits of pedagogical anthropology in concluding this preamble, it may be well to define the form of study and the purposes of pedagogical anthropology; in order to distinguish it clearly from general anthropology and from the allied branches of applied anthropology (criminal and medical anthropology). pedagogical anthropology, like all the other branches of anthropology, studies man from the naturalistic point of view; but, unlike general anthropology, it does not concern itself with the philosophic problems related to it, such, for instance, as the origin of man, the theories of monism or polygenism, of emigration, and classification according to race; problems which, as everyone knows, are difficult of solution, and which constitute the pivot on which biological anthropology revolves. thus, for example, bacteriology has its origin in biology, in so far as it has certain orders of living organisms for the subject of its research; but it well nigh ignores the problems of biological philosophy associated with them, such as the origin of living matter and of the primitive cell; the fixity or variability of monocellular species; the possibility of life in the isolated nucleus (the microbe), or in the isolated protoplasm (the monera), but it devotes itself to the direct study of microscopic organisms, both in themselves alone and in their influence upon their environment; in short, bacteriology has for its purpose the acquirement of that practical knowledge necessary for a successful campaign against the causes of infective maladies, and for rendering infected districts sanitary. in much the same way, pedagogical anthropology, considered as a form of study, departs from general anthropology. it studies man from two different points of view: his _development_ (ontogenesis), and his _variations_. since many causes concur in producing variations in the individual during his development (social causes, pathological causes, etc.), we have to take into consideration, and frequently invoke the aid of subsidiary sciences (sociology, pathology, hygiene). _variations_ constitute the most important subject of inquiry in pedagogic anthropology, just as _fixed characteristics_ constitute the essential matter of research in general anthropology: because the latter endeavours, by the help of fixed characteristics, to trace back to the origin of species, while the former tries, through the help of variable characteristics, to discover a way for the future perfectionment of the human species and the individual: indeed, this is precisely what constitutes the practical purpose of its application to pedagogy. in comparison with criminal and medical anthropology, pedagogic anthropology differs substantially in its declared intentions. these other two kindred branches endeavour to _diagnose_ the personality of the individual; we must admit that both psychiatry and general medical practice profit by the application of anthropology to the extent of securing greater accuracy in diagnosis and prognosis; but whenever the study of a patient's _personality_ sheds light upon decisions of this sort, it generally follows that the personality is fixed and unalterable. for instance, when, in medical practice an individual _constitution_ is shown to be fatally predisposed to certain definite diseases, that is precisely one of the cases where medical _treatment_ is most impotent; and the same may be said when, in the practice of criminal law we find a defendant whose personality is profoundly degenerate. it follows that the application of these new anthropological methods is substantially diagnostic; furthermore, they are limited to special classes of human beings, to those who are physiologically the most impoverished, such as criminals and the diseased. pedagogic anthropology, on the contrary, embraces _all humanity_; but it pays special attention to that part of it which is psychologically superior: the normal human being. its purpose is none the less diagnostic; but it regards diagnosis as constituting a _means_, and not merely indicating an end; because the end projected by pedagogic anthropology is a far-reaching and rational system of _hygiene_. more than that, the proposed system is the one true one, a hygiene that pays more attention to the man himself than to his environment; striving to perfect him in his physiological functions, or to correct any tendency to abnormal and pathological deviations. it follows that, in pedagogic anthropology, the direction taken by the naturalistic study of man is predominantly _physiological_. in the same manner as the other two kindred branches of anthropology, this branch which has joined forces with pedagogy has severed connection with the original parent stock of general anthropology, and abandoned its dogmatisms and to a large extent its phraseology. criminal anthropology, for example, shows great daring and scant accuracy in its affirmations and its researches; and to a large extent it has acquired a nomenclature of its own; and medical anthropology lays down laws that general anthropology never took into consideration, and neglects to bestow particular attention upon the _head_, which formed the object of fundamental research in general anthropology. in the same way, pedagogic anthropology has had to emancipate itself from the general science from which it has sprung, in order to proceed unhampered along the practical line of research, which consists essentially in a study of the pupil and the compilation of biographic charts, from which a fund of material will result, destined to enrich the scientific content of this branch of learning. but since the study of the pupil must not be morphological alone, but psychological as well, it is necessary for anthropology to invoke the aid of experimental psychology, in order to achieve its purpose. now it is essential to psychology, no less than to pedagogic anthropology, to study the reactions of the physiological and psychical personality of the child in the environment which we call _school_. consequently it is reserved for the teacher to make a large contribution to these two parallel sciences, which are coming to assume the highest social importance. it follows further that pedagogic anthropology differs from the other two allied branches in its practical applications; the progress of criminal and medical anthropology requires, as a matter of fact, only the labors of _medical specialists_; in the case of pedagogic anthropology there is equally a need of _medical specialists_, to whom the _diagnosis_ and the _treatment_ of abnormal pupils must be entrusted, as well as the _hygiene_ of their development; but in addition to these, the teachers also are summoned to a vast task of observation, which, by its continuity, will supplement and complete the periodic observations of the physician. furthermore, the _teacher_ will acquire under the guidance of anthropology certain practical rules in the art of educating the child; and it is this especially that makes the anthropological and psychological training of the modern teacher so necessary. the school constitutes an immense field for research; it is a "pedagogical clinic," which, in view of its importance, can be compared to no other gathering of _subjects_ for study. thanks to the system of compulsory education, it gathers to itself every living human being of both sexes and of every social caste, normal and abnormal; and it retains them there, throughout a most important period of their growth. this is the field, therefore, in which the _culture of the human race_ can really and practically be undertaken; and the joint labour of physician and teacher will sow the seed of a future _human hygiene_, adapted to achieve perfection in man, both as a _species_ and as a _social unit_. footnotes: [ ] from a work by e. morselli: _cesare lombroso and scientific philosophy_. [ ] musolino was a brigand, and luccheni an anarchist and regicide. [ ] from a study by prof. e. troilo, _enrico morselli as a philosopher_. in the volume by morselli, milan: vallardi, . chapter i certain principles of general biology in order to _understand_ the practical researches that must be conducted for anthropological purposes, it is necessary to have an adequate preparation in the science of biology. the _interpretation_ of the data that have to be gathered according to technical procedure, demands a _training_; and this training will form our subject in the theoretic part of the present volume. the limits, however, not only of the book itself, but of pedagogic anthropology as well, preclude anything more than a simple general outline; but this can be supplemented by those other branches of study which are either collateral to it or constitute its necessary basis (_i.e._, general biology, human anatomy and physiology, hygiene of environment, general anthropology, etc.). the material substratum of life the synthetic concept of the individual in biology according to the materialistic theories of life, of which haeckel is the most noted supporter, _life_ was derived from a form of matter, protoplasm, which not only has a special chemical composition, but possesses further the property of a constant molecular movement of scission and redintegration; vital metabolism or interchange of matter, by which the molecules are constantly renewed at the expense of the environment. it was huxley who defined protoplasm as the _physical basis_ of life; and, as a matter of fact, life does not exist without protoplasm. but schultze and haeckel carried this doctrine further, to the point of maintaining that a minute particle of protoplasm was all that was needed to constitute life; and that such a particle could be formed naturally, whenever the surrounding conditions were favorable, like any other inorganic chemical substance; and in this way the materialists endeavoured, with great ingenuousness, to maintain the _spontaneous origin_ of life. and when haeckel thought that he had discovered the _moneræ_ or living cells composed of a single particle of protoplasm, he held that these were the first species to have appeared on earth. but the further researches of physiologists and the improvements in the technique of the microscope proved that protoplasm does not exist independently in nature; because living cells are always a combination of protoplasm and a nucleus. if the nucleus is extracted from a radiolarium, the latter mortifies, and the protoplasm also dies; if an _amoeba_ is severed in such a manner that one part contains nucleus and protoplasm and the other protoplasm alone, it will be found that the latter part mortifies and dies, while the first part continues to live. if an infusorium is divided in such a way that each of the separate sections contains a part of the nucleus and a part of the protoplasm, two living infusoria are developed similar to the original one. experiments of this kind, to which verworn has given high authority, serve to prove that life does not exist except in cells divisible into protoplasm and nucleus. further discoveries confirm this theory, as for instance the presence of a nucleus in hemocytes or red blood corpuscles, which were formerly believed to be instances of anuclear cells; and the discovery of protoplasm in microbes, which had formerly been considered free nuclei. now, when we have an independent living cell, it represents an _individual_, which not only has, as a general feature, this primitive complexity of parts, but also certain special characteristics of _form_, of reaction to environment, etc., that mark the _species_ to which this particular living creature belongs. accordingly, we cannot assert, without committing the error of confining ourselves to a generic detail, that life originates in protoplasm or in a combination divisible into protoplasm and nucleus; we should say that _life_ originates in living _individuals_; since, aside from abstract speculation, there can be no other material substratum of life. such a doctrine is eminently _synthetic_, and opens the mind to new conceptions regarding the _properties_ that _characterise_ life. formerly when life was defined as a form of matter (protoplasm) subject to constant movement (metabolism), only a single general property had been stated; for that matter, even the stars consist of matter and movement; and, according to the modern theory of electrons, atoms are composed of little particles strongly charged with electricity and endowed with perennial motion. accordingly, these are universal characteristics, and not _peculiar_ to life; and _metabolism_ may be regarded as a _variation_ of such a property, which is provoked by, or at least associated with the phenomenon of life. the properties which are really characteristic of life have been summed up by laloy in two essential groups; _final causes_ and _limitations of mass_, or, to use a term more appropriate to living organisms, _limitations of form and size_. the term _final causes_ refers to a series of phenomena that are met with only where there is life, and that tend toward a definite purpose or _end_. living organisms take nutriment from their environment, to the _end_ of assimilating it, that is, transforming it from an inert, indifferent substance into a substance that is a living part of themselves. this phenomenon is undoubtedly one of the most characteristic. but there are still other forms of _final cause_, such for example as the transformation of the fertilised ovum into the fully developed individual, predetermined in its essential characteristics, such as form, dimensions, colour, activities, etc. there are ova that to all appearances are exactly alike; the human ovum itself is nothing more than a simple cell composed of protoplasm and nucleus, measuring only a tenth of a millimeter (= / inch); yet all these ovum cells produce living organisms of the utmost diversity; yet so definitely predetermined that, if we know to what species the ovum belongs, we are able to predict how many bones will compose the skeleton of the animal destined to develop from it, and whether this animal will fly or creep upon the ground, or rise to take a place among those who have made themselves the lords of the earth. furthermore, knowing the phases of development, we may predetermine at what _periods_ the successive transformations that lead step by step to the complete development of the individual will take place. another form of _final cause_ is seen in the _actions_ of living creatures, which reveal a _self-consciousness_; a consciousness that even in its most obscure forms guides them toward a destined end. thus, for example, even the infusoria that may be seen through a microscope in a drop of water, chasing hither and thither in great numbers, avoiding collision with one another, or contending over some particle of food, or rushing in a mass toward an unexpected ray of light, give us a keen impression of their possession of consciousness, a dim glimmering of self-will, which is the most elementary form of that phenomenon that manifests itself more and more clearly, from the metazoa upward, through the whole zoologic scale: the _final cause_ of psychic action. again, in multicellular organisms there are certain continuous and so-called _vital_ phenomena, which some physiologists attribute to cellular consciousness: for example, the leucocytes in the blood seem to obey a sort of glimmering consciousness when they rush to the encounter of any danger threatening the organism, and ingest microbes or other substances foreign to the blood; and it is also due to a phenomenon that cannot be explained by the physical laws of osmosis, that the erythrocytes or red blood corpuscles and the plasma in the blood never interchange sodium salts for those of potassium; and lastly the cells of each separate gland seem to _select_ from the blood the special substances that are needed for the formation of their specific products: saliva, milk, the pancreatic juice, etc. still another manifestation of _final cause_ is the tendency exhibited by each living individual to make a constant struggle for life, a struggle that depends upon a minimum expenditure of force for a maximum realisation of life, thanks to which life multiplies, invades its environment, adapts itself to it, and is transformed. another fundamental synthetic characteristic of life is the limitation of _form and size_ that is a fixed and constant factor in the characteristics of each species; the body of the living individual cannot grow indefinitely. living creatures do not increase in quantity by the successive _accumulation_ of matter, as is the case with inorganic bodies, but by _reproduction_, that is, the multiplication of individuals. through the phenomenon of reproduction, life has a share in the eternity of matter and of force, that is, in a universal phenomenon. but what distinguishes it is that the individual creatures produced by other living individuals form, each one of them, an _indivisible element_ in which life manifests itself; and this element is _morphologically fixed_ in the limits of its form and size. the peculiarities which are attributed to the chemical action of protoplasm are of an analytic character, so far as they concern the fundamental characteristics of life. the constant interchange of matter, namely, _metabolism_, constitutes undoubtedly a phenomenon peculiar to living matter, protoplasm; but protoplasm _does not exist_ apart from living organisms. and what constitutes its chief characteristic is that, when brought into contact with it, inert substances are assimilated, _i.e._, they become like it, or rather, are transformed into _protoplasm_; mineral salts such as the nitrates or nitrites of sodium and potassium are transformed in the case of plants into living plasma capable of germinating either into a rose bush or a plane tree or a palm, and inert organic substances such as bread or wine are transformed into human flesh and blood. so that the phenomenon of _assimilation_ outweighs, as a characteristic of life, the molecular chemical action through which it is accomplished. since _metabolism_ does not occur in nature as a chemical phenomenon, and cannot be produced artificially, but is found only in the matter composing living organisms, it follows that life is the cause of this form of dynamic action, and not that this dynamic action is the cause of life.[ ] even the latest theory, developed especially by ludwig in germany--that protoplasm contains a separate _enzyme_ for each separate function appointed to a particular task--amounts to nothing more than an analysis of the living organism. the formation of multicellular organisms we cannot say that the _cell_ is the element of life, because, in an absolute sense, it is not alive; it lives only when it _constitutes_ _an individual_. even the brain cells, the muscular fibres, the leucocytes, etc., are cells; but they _do not live independently_; their life depends upon the living individual that contains them. we may, however, define the cell as the means, the morphological material, out of which all living organisms are formed: because, from the algæ to the orchids, from the coelenterata up to man, all complex organisms are composed of an accumulation of those microscopic little bodies that we call cells. the manner of union between the cells in the most primitive _living colonies_, whether vegetable or animal, is analogous to that followed in the segmentation of the ovum in its ontogenetic (_i.e._, individual) development. but the _manner of construction_ differs notably, as between _animal_ and _vegetable_ cells. vegetable cells, on the one hand, have a resistant and strongly protective membrane; animal cells, on the contrary, have either a very thin membrane or none at all. vegetable cells, as though made _venturesome_ by their natural protection, proceed to invade their environment in colonies--in other words, the cells dispose themselves in series of linear ramifications--witness the formation of primitive algæ; and analogously the expansion of the higher types of vegetation into their environment, with branches, leaves, etc. and just as though the vegetable cell acquired self-confidence because it is so well protected, it becomes stationary and strikes its roots into the soil. to this same fact of cellular protection must be attributed the inferior sensibility and hence the permanent state of obscured consciousness in vegetable life. this protection against the assaults of environment, and the consequent lack of sensibility, constitute from the outset an inferior stage of evolution. animal cells have an entirely different manner of forming themselves into colonies; acting as though they were _afraid_, they group themselves in the form of a little sphere, enclosing their environment within themselves, instead of reaching out to invade it; and subsequent developments of the animal cell consist in successive and complex _invaginations_, or formations of layers, one within another--instead of ramifications, after the manner of vegetable cells. accordingly, if we advance from that primitive animal type, the volvox, consisting of a simple group of cells arranged spherically, like an elastic rubber ball, to the coelenterata, we meet with the phenomenon of the first invagination, producing an animal body consisting of _two layers_ of cells and an internal _cavity_, communicating with the exterior by means of a pore or mouth. the two layers of cells promptly divide their task, the outer layer becoming _protective_ and the inner _nutritive_; and in consequence of their different _functions_, the cells themselves _alter_, the outer layer acquiring a tougher consistency, while the inner remains soft in order to absorb whatever nutriment is brought by the water as it passes through the mouth. in this way, there is a division of labor, such that all the external cells protect not only themselves, but the whole organism; while the internal cells absorb nutriment not only for themselves but for the others. this is the simplest example of a process that becomes more and more complex in the formation of higher organisms; in adapting themselves to their work, the cells become greatly modified (formation of tissues) and perform services that are useful to the entire organism. and at the same time, because of the very fact that they have been differentiated, they become dependent upon the labors of others, for obtaining the means of subsistence. similar laws seem to persist even at the present day in the formation of _social organisms_, in human society. during the development of the embryo, all animals pass through similar phases; and to this man is no exception. [illustration: fig. .--human ovum, magnified. _a._ vitelline membrane; _b._ vitellus; _c._ germinal vesicle.] he traces his origin to an ovum-cell formed of protoplasm, nucleus and membrane, measuring only a tenth of a millimetre, yet vastly large in comparison with the spermatic cell destined to fertilise it by passing through one of the innumerable pores that render the dense membrane penetrable. [illustration: fig. .--first segmentation of a fertilised ovum.] [illustration: fig. .--a morula as seen from the outside.] [illustration: fig. .--an egg and spermatozoon of the same species, about to fertilise it. note the difference in the proportional size of the two cells.] after the ovum-cell is fertilised, it constitutes the _first cell_ of the new being; that is, it contains _potentially a man_. but as seen through the microscope, it is really not materially anything more than a microscopic cell, undifferentiated, and in all things similar to other independent cells or to fertilised ovarian cells belonging to other animals. that which it contains, namely, _man_, often already predetermined not only in _species_, but in individual characteristics--as, for instance, in degenerative inferiority--is certainly not there in _material_ form. at an early stage of the embryo's development, it exhibits a form analogous to that of the volvox; namely, a hollow sphere, called the _morula_; and subsequently, by the process of invagination, two layers of cells, an inner and an outer, are formed, together with the first body cavity, destined to become the digestive cavity, and also a pore corresponding to the mouth. this formation has received the name of _gastrula_ (fig. , facing page ), and the two layers of cells are known as the _primary_ _layers_, otherwise called the _ectoderm_ and the _entoderm_. to these a third intermediate layer is soon added, the _mesoderm_. these three layers consist of cells that are not perceptibly differentiated from one another; but _potentially_ each and every one contains its own special _final cause_. in each of the three layers, invaginations take place, furrows destined to develop into the nervous system, the lungs, the liver, the various different glands, the generative organs; and during the progress of such modifications, corresponding changes take place in the elementary cells, which become differentiated into _tissues_. from the ectoderm are developed the nervous system and the skin tissues; from the entoderm, the digestive system with its associate glands (the liver, pancreas, etc.); from the mesoderm, the supporting tissues (bones and cartilage) and the muscles. but all these cells, even the most complex and specialised, as for example those of the cerebral cortex, the fibres of the striped muscles, the hepatic cells, etc., were originally _embryonic_ cells--in other words, simple, undifferentiated, all starting on an equal footing. yet every one of them had within it a predestined end that led it to occupy, as it multiplied in number, a certain appointed portion of the body, in order to perform the work, to which the profound alterations in its cellular tissues should ultimately adapt it. like children in the same school, these embryonic cells, all apparently just alike, contain certain dormant activities and destinies that are profoundly different. this unquestionably constitutes one of the properties of life, namely, the _final cause_; it is certainly associated intimately with _metabolism_ and _nutrition_, considered as a means of _development_ and not as a cause. upon _metabolism_, however, depends the more or less complete attainment of the _final cause_ of life. in man, for example, strength, health, beauty, on the one hand, degeneration on the other, stand in intimate relations with the _nutrition_ of the embryo.[ ] =the theories of evolution.=--at the present day, there is a general popular understanding of the fundamental principles involved in the mechanical or materialistic theories of evolution which bear the names of lamarck, geffroy-saint-hilaire, and more especially the glorious name of charles darwin. according to these theories, the environment is regarded as the chief cause of the evolution of organic forms. charles darwin, who formulated the best and most detailed theory of evolution, based it on the two principles of the _variability_ of living organisms, and _heredity_, which transmits their characteristics from generation to generation. and in explanation of the underlying cause of evolution, he expounded the doctrines of the _struggle for existence_ and the _natural selection_ of such organic forms as succeeded to a sufficient degree in adapting themselves to their environment. whatever the explanation may be, the substantial fact remains of the _variability of species_ and the successive and gradual transition from lower to higher forms. in this way, the higher animals and plants must have had as antecedents other forms of _inferior species_, of which they still bear more or less evident traces; and in applying these theories to the interpretation of the personalities of human degenerates, he frequently invoked the so-called principle of _atavism_, in order to explain the reappearance of atavistic traits that have been outgrown in the normal human being, certain anomalies of form more or less analogous to parallel forms in lower species of animals. there are other theories of evolution less familiar than that of darwin. naegeli, for instance, attributes the variability of species to _internal_, rather than external causes--namely, to a spontaneous activity, implanted in life itself, and analogous to that which is witnessed in the development of an individual organism, from the primitive cell up to the final complete development; without, however, attributing to the progressive alterations in species that predestined final goal which heredity determines in the development of individual organisms. the internal factor, namely life, is the primary cause of _progress_ and the _perfectionment_ of living creatures--while environment assumes a secondary importance, such as that of _directing_ evolution, acting at one time as a stimulus toward certain determined directions of development; at another, permanently establishing certain useful characteristics; and still again, effacing such forms as are unfit. in this way the external causes are associated with evolution, but with very different effects from those attributed to them by darwin, who endowed them with the creative power to produce new organs and new forms of life. naegeli compared the internal forces to invested capital; it will draw a higher or lower rate of interest, according as its environment proves to be more or less favourable to earning a profit. the most modern theory of evolution is that of de vries, who, after having witnessed the spontaneous and unforeseen transformations of a certain plant, the oenohtera lamarckiana, without the intervention of any external phenomenon, admitted the possibility of the unexpected occurrence of other new forms, from a preexistent parent form--and to such phenomena he gave the name of _mutations_. it is these _mutations_ that create new species; the latter, although apparently unheralded, were already _latent_ in the germ before they definitely burst into life. consequently, new species are formed potentially in the germinating cells, through spontaneous activity. the characteristics established by _mutations_ are hereditary, and the species which result from them persist, provided their environment affords favourable conditions, better suited to them than to the preexisting parent form. accordingly new species are _created_ unexpectedly. de vries draws a distinction between mutations and variations, holding that the latter are dependent upon environment, and that in any case they constitute simple _oscillations of form_ around the normal type determined in each species by mutation. species, therefore, cannot be transformed by external causes or environments, and the mechanism of transformation is not that of a succession of very gradual variations, which have given rise to the familiar saying: _natura non facit saltus_. on the contrary, what produces stable characteristics is a _revolution_ prepared in a latent state, but unannounced in its final disclosure. a parallel to this is to be found, for example, in the phenomena of _puberty_ in its relation to the evolution of the individual. now, when a species has once reached a fixed stability as regards its characteristics, it is _immutable_, after the analogy of an individual organism that has completed its development; henceforth its further evolution is ended. in such a case, the oscillations of variability are exceedingly limited, and adaptation to new environments is difficult; and while a species may offer the appearance of great strength (_e.g._, certain species of gigantic extinct animals), it runs the risk of dying out, because of a lower potentiality of adaptability; or, according to the theory of rosa, it may even become extinct spontaneously. accordingly it is not the fixed species that continue the process of _evolution_. if we compare the tree of life to a plant, we may imagine evolution as soaring upward, sustained by roots far below; the new branches are not put forth by the old branches, but draw their sustenance from the original sources, from which the whole tree draws its life. when a branch matures and flowers, it may survive or it may wither but it cannot extend the growth of the tree. furthermore, the new branches are always higher up than the old ones; that which comes last is the highest of all. thus, the species which are the _latest_ in acquiring a stable form are the highest up in the biological scale, because the privilege of carrying forward the process of evolution belongs to those species which have not yet become fixed. an apparent weakness, instability, an active capacity for adaptation, are consequently so many signs of _superiority_, as regards a potential power of evolution--just as the nudity and sensibility of animal cells, for example, are signs of superiority, as compared with vegetable cells--and of man, as compared with the lower animals. in order to show that the inferiority of a species is in proportion to its precocity in attaining fixed characteristics, rosa conceived the following striking comparison. two animals are fleeing, along the same road, before an advancing flood. one of the two climbs to the top of a neighboring tree, the other continues in its flight toward a mountain. as the level of the water rises, it threatens to isolate and engulf the animal now stalled upon the tree; the other animal, still fleeing toward the heights, reaches, on the contrary, a higher and more secure position. the animal on the tree stands for an inferior species that has earlier attained a fixed form; the other represents a higher species that has continued to evolve; but the animal upon the mountain never was on the tree at all, because, if he had mounted it and become caught there, he would have lost his chance of continuing on his way. in other words, the _higher_ species never was the _lower_ species, since the characteristics of the latter are already fixed. some eloquent comparisons might be drawn from the social life of to-day. we are all of us spurred on to choose as early as possible some form of employment that will place us in a secure and definite place at the great banquet of existence. the idea of continuing to follow an indefinite and uncertain path, leading upward toward the heights is far less attractive than the safe and comfortable shelter of the shady tree that rises by the wayside. the same law of inertia applies to every form of life. biological evolution bears witness to it, in the _forms_ of the different species; social evolution, in the _forms_ of the professions and trades; the evolution of thought, in the _forms_ of the different faiths. and whoever first halts in any path of life, the path of study, for instance, occupies a lower place than he who continues on his road. the salaried clerk, armed only with his high-school certificate, has an assured income and the pleasures of family life, at a time when the physician, with an independent profession, is still struggling to establish a practice. but the obscure clerk will eventually hold a social position below that of the physician; his income will always be limited, while the physician may acquire a fortune. now, the clerk, by _adapting_ himself to his bureaucratic environment, has acquired certain well-defined characteristics; we might even say that he has become a representative type of the _species_, clerk. and the same will be true of the physician in his independent and brilliant life as high priest of humanity, scientist and man of wealth. both men were high-school students, and now they are two widely different social types; but the physician never represented the type of clerk; or, in other words, he did not have to be a clerk before he could be a physician; on the contrary, if he had been a clerk, he never could have become a physician. it is somewhat after this fashion that we must conceive of the sequence of species in evolution. it follows that man never was an anthropoid ape, nor any other animal now living around us. nor was the man of the white race ever at any time a negroid or a mongolian. consequently, the theory is untenable which tries to explain certain morphological or psychic malformations of man, on the principle of atavism--because no one can inherit if he is not a descendant. so, for example, reverting to our previous comparisons, if the animal on the mountain should climb a tree, or if the physician should become pedantic, this would not prove that the animal from the mountain was once upon a time the animal in the tree, nor that the physician recalled, by his eventual pedantry, certain bygone days when he was a clerk. the theories of evolution seemed for a time to illumine and definitely indicate the origin of man. but this illusion has so far resulted only in relegating to still deeper darkness the truth that the biologists are seeking. we do not know of whom man is the son. even the earlier conceptions regarding the mechanics of evolution are essentially altered. the mystery of the origin of species, like that of the mutability of forms, has withdrawn from the forms that are already developed, and taken refuge in the _germinal cells_; these cells in which no differentiation is revealed, yet in which the future organism, in all its details, exists in a potential state; in which, we may even say, _life exists independent of matter_, are the real _laboratorium vitæ_. the individual, in developing, does nothing more than _obey_, by fulfilling the potentiality of the germs. the direction of research has shifted from the individual to its germs. and just as the early darwinian theories evolved a _social ethics_, seemingly based upon the facts of life, to serve as a guide in the _struggle for existence_, so in the same way, to-day, there has arisen from the modern theories a new _sexual ethics_, founded upon a biologic basis. =the phenomena of heredity.=--the most interesting biological researches of to-day are in regard to the hereditary transmission of characteristics. to-day the phenomena of heredity are no longer absolutely obscure, thanks to the studies of mendel, who discovered some of its laws, which seemed to open up new lines of research prolific in results. yet even now, although this field has been invaded by the most illustrious biologists of our time, among others, de vries, correns, tschermack, hurst, russell, it is still in the state of investigation. nevertheless, the _general trend_ of researches relative to mendel's laws is too important to permit of their enlightening first steps being neglected by anthropology. the first phenomena observed by mendel, and the ones which led him to the discovery of the laws of heredity which bear his name, were revealed by a series of experiments conducted with peas. _exposition of the phenomena of hybridism._--if two strains of peas are crossed, one of them having red flowers and the other white flowers, the result in the first generation is, that all the plants will have red flowers, precisely similar to those of one of the parent plants. accordingly, in hybridism, the characteristic of one of the parents completely hides that which is antagonistic to it in the other parent. we call this characteristic (in the case cited, the red flowers), _dominant_; in distinction to the other characteristic which is antagonistic to the first and overcome by it; namely, the recessive characteristic (in the present case, the white flowers). this is the law of prevalence, and constitutes mendel's first law, which is stated as follows: _mendel's first law_: "when antagonistic varieties or characteristics are crossed with each other, the products of the first generation are all uniform and equal to one of the two parents." this result has been repeatedly reached in a host of researches, which have experimentally established this phenomenon _as a law_. thus, for example, if we cross a nettle having leaves with an indented margin, with a nettle having leaves with a smooth margin, the product of the first generation will all have leaves with indented margins, and apparently identical with the parent plant having indented margins, in other words, having the characteristic that has proved itself the dominant one (russell). these phenomena discovered by mendel have been observed in many different species of plants, such as wheat, indian corn, barley and beans. they have also been verified in certain animals, such as mice, rats, rabbits, caveys, poultry, snails, silk-worms, etc. one of the most typical experiments was that of cuénot, who, by crossing ordinary mice with jumping mice, obtained as a result a first generation composed wholly of normal mice; the characteristic of jumping was thus shown to be recessive. notwithstanding that the first generation is apparently in every way similar to the parent with the dominant character, there is in reality a difference. because, if we cross these hybrids _together_, we meet, in the second generation, with the following phenomenon: to every three individuals possessing the dominant character, one is born having the recessive character. to go back to mendel's first example, that of the peas with red flowers (dominant) and with white flowers (recessive), we find, by crossing together the hybrids of the first generation, that for every three plants with red flowers, there is one plant with white flowers. and similarly, the crossing of hybrid nettles with indented leaves will result in a second generation composed of three plants with indented leaves to every one with smooth-edged leaves (see fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] that is, the characteristics which belonged to the first two parents all survive, even though in a latent form, in the descendants; and they continue to differentiate themselves in well established proportions. in one offspring out of four, the characteristics of the grandfather, which have remained dormant in the father, once more reappear. this intermittent heredity of characteristics, that are passed from grandfather to grandson, overleaping the father, is one of the best-known laws of _pathological_ _heredity_ in man; and it is called _atavistic heredity_, to distinguish it from _direct heredity_, which denotes the transmission from parent to offspring. but no explanation had ever been found for this sort of phenomenon. undoubtedly, it must be connected with the phenomena of mendelism. accordingly, in the second generation mendel's second law has been established, the _law of disjunction_, which is stated as follows: _mendel's second law_: "in the second generation obtained by reciprocal fertilisation of the first hybrids, three quarters of the offspring will exhibit the dominant character, and one quarter the recessive." _mendel's hypothesis, designed to explain the phenomena of_ _heredity._--mendel's great service is to have conceived a hypothesis that seems to have disclosed the key adapted to unlock all the secrets of heredity. while the body of an individual is the resultant of forces so mutually exclusive that the appearance of one characteristic means the disappearance of its antagonist; _in the development of_ _the sexual cells the two antagonistic characters are distributed in equal_ _proportion_. that is to say, one-half of the male cells contain the dominant character, and one-half the recessive; and the same holds true for the female cells. the characters of the two parents, in other words, never _merge_ in the reproductive cells, but are distributed _in equal measure_, independently of the question whether they are dominant or recessive. thus for example: in the case already cited of the first hybrid generation of the peas with red flowers, in every one of the plants, without distinction, half the pollen has potentially the red character and half has the white; and in the same way the female cells have, half of them a red potentiality and half of them a white. such hybrids of the first generation, therefore, although apparently similar to the parent with red flowers, _differ in their germinative powers_, which are not made apparent in the individual. and the same may be said of hybrid nettles with indented leaves, etc. granting mendel's hypothesis, we have on the one hand pollen and on the other seed ready to come together in every manner included within the range of possible combinations; the _individual_ is, in its characteristics, nothing else than the product of a combination which must necessarily manifest itself in accordance with the well-known mathematical laws of _probability_. for instance, let us proceed to diagram the possible disposition of the sexual cells of the hybrids of peas, all of them having red flowers. in terms of percentage, they will give, out of every hundred, fifty red and fifty white. _p_ = pollen; _o_ = ova; _r_ = red, dominant; _w_ = white, recessive: the possible number of combinations between the pollen grains and the ova are four; namely, _rr_, _rw_, _wr_, _ww_. but where a dominant characteristic encounters a recessive (_rw_, _wr_), the recessive disappears, to make way in the individual for the dominant characteristic alone. the definitive result is three individuals of dominant character, to one of recessive character. [illustration: fig. .] nevertheless, the hybrids of dominant character are not all equal among themselves. those belonging to the combination _rr_, indeed, are _permanent_ in character and in all respects alike, and they reproduce the original red-flower progenitor. the other red-flower hybrids, belonging to the groups _rw_ and _wr_ are, on the contrary, similar to the hybrids of the first generation and contain reproductive cells differentiated in character; such hybrids, if reciprocally fertilised, will again give three dominant offspring to every one recessive; that is, they will obey the law of disjunction. the hybrids belonging to the fourth group, on the contrary, are constant, like those of the first group, and are permanently of recessive character; and they will reproduce the original progenitor with white flowers. the same results may be attained with nettles with smooth and indented leaves, and with all other types of plant and animal life that obey the laws of mendelism. the figure given actually represents the third generation of nettles; from a combination corresponding to _rr_, there result only indented leaves, and from another combination corresponding to our _ww_ there result only smooth-edged leaves, and from the two mixed groups there come three offspring with indented leaves to every one with smooth leaves. it is possible to represent, by means of a general diagram, the mathematical succession of characteristics in hybrids, after the following manner; denoting the dominant character by _d_, and the recessive by _r_. [illustration: first crossing of individuals with antagonistic characters. first generation of hybrids, all alike, and similar to the progenitor _d_ (dominant). second generation: for each recessive there are three dominant: but of these only one is permanent. third generation: disjunction of the hybrid groups takes place and new permanent groups are formed. fig. .] in each successive generation, provided the fertilisation takes place only between uniform individuals, as indicated in the diagram, and as may be effected by actual experiment with plants, groups identical with the original progenitors will continue to be formed, through successive disjunction of the hybrids; the sexual phenomenon operating in obedience to the laws of probability. an effective experiment, that anyone may repeat for himself, is the one originated by darbishire. he took two boxes, typifying respectively the male and female organ, and placed in them black and white disks of equal size, so distributed that each box contained fifty disks of each colour. after mixing these disks very carefully, he proceeded to take _at random_ one disk at a time alternately from each box; and he piled up each pair of disks in such a manner that the black ones should be on top and the white underneath. the result was that for every three black disks on top of the piles there was one white disk; but of the black groups one consisted of two black disks, while in the other two the lower disk was white. this is simply one of the many games dependent on the laws of probability. now, supposing that instead of one, there are two characteristics that are in antagonism; in that case, we have the occurrence of double hybridism (dihybridism). let us take the strains of peas already considered, but let us choose for observation the character of their seed. one of the plants has round seed and yellow cotyledons; and the other angular seed and green cotyledons. these two characteristics, therefore, are both inherent in the seed; condition of surface (rough, smooth), and colour (green, and yellow). after fertilisation, mendel's first law, that of the prevalence of the dominant character, will operate, and all the plants of the first generation will have round seed and yellow cotyledons. hence these are the dominant characteristics, which we will represent by capital letters: _r_ (round), _y_ (yellow), to distinguish them from the recessive characteristics, which we will designate with small letters: _a_ (angular), and _g_ (green). according to mendel's hypothesis, all these hybrids with round seed and yellow cotyledons, contain sexual cells of opposite potentialities, numerically equal and corresponding to the antagonistic characters of the parent plants. that is, they must have in their pollen grains and their ovarian cells all the possible combinations of their different potentialities. they should produce in equal quantities: pollen grains (_p_) with round seed and yellow cotyledons: _r y_ " " green " _r g_ angular " yellow " _a y_ " " green " _a g_ ovarian cells (_o_) with round " yellow " _r y_ " " green " _r g_ angular " yellow " _a y_ " " green " _a g_ the total number of combinations that may result is sixteen; that is, each one of the four combinations of pollen may unite with any one of the ovarian cells; thus constituting four groups of four. and these groups represent the combinations (of pollen and ova) capable of producing individuals: _r y - r y = r y | a y - r y = r y_ _r y - r g = r y | a y - r g = r y_ _r y - a y = r y | a y - a y = a y_ _r y - a g = r y | a y - a g = a y_ _-----------------|-----------------_ _r g - r y = r y | a g - r y = r y_ _r g - r g = r g | a g - r g = r g_ _r g - a y = r y | a g - a y = a y_ _r g - a g = r g | a g - a g = a g_ [illustration: fig. .] every time that a dominant characteristic encounters a recessive one (_r_ with _a_ or _y_ with _g_), it overpowers and hides it: consequently the results of the different combinations are quite definitely limited as determining forms of different individuals. in fact, the results of the sixteen combinations are as follows: _r y | r y_ _r y | r y_ _r y | a y_ _r y | a y_ _---------_ _r y | r y_ _r g | r g_ _r y | a y_ _r g | a g_ that is to say, the only forms which occur are the following: _r y, r g_ _a y, a g_ whose relative probability of occurrence is: _r y_ times in = . % _r g_ times in = . % _a y_ times in = . % _a g_ time in = . % now, as a result of actual experiment, the forms obtained show the following relative percentage: results of experiments according to the combinations with plants and laws of probability _r y_ . % . % _r g_ . % . % _a y_ . % . % _a g_ . % . % the correspondence between these figures is close enough to warrant the acceptance of mendel's hypothesis as the true interpretation of the phenomena that are shown to take place within the sexual cells; the germinal cells of the hybrid contain potentialities belonging to one or the other only of the parents, and not to both; one-half of the cells contain one of these potentialities, and the other half the other potentiality. but in the phenomena of hybridism, we have seen the results of another fact which determines mendel's third law; the _law of_ _the independence of characteristics_. that is, that while the original progenitors had angular seed and green cotyledons, and round seed and yellow cotyledons, certain hybrid plants inherited the round seed of the one and the green colour of the other; or the angular seed of the one and the yellow colour of the other. in the same way, it may happen, for example, that the colour of one plant may combine with the height of another, etc. that is, that each separate characteristic of the progenitor is independent and may combine with the characteristics of the other progenitor--even to the point of separating the colour from the form, as in the case cited. what we find in hybrids, then, is not a separation into two types of generative cells, considered as united and complex entities; but every separate germ cell may _break up_ into as many different potentialities as there are separate characteristics in the individual; and that, too, not only as regards the separate minute parts of the individual body, but, within the same organ, as regards the shape, colour, character of the surface, etc. such phenomena of mendelism cannot as yet be generalised; yet it has already been established by a host of experiments that a great number of characteristics obey the laws of mendel, such, for example, as the character of the hair or plumage; the gradations of colour, the abundance or absence of hair; physical malformations, such as cerebral hernia in poultry; the character of locomotion, as in the jumping mice: and even normal physiological attributes connected with the epoch of maturity in certain plants. but the manner in which the dominant character asserts itself is not always uniform. there are times when a _fusion_ of antagonistic characters takes place. thus, for example, when two varieties of the _mirabilis jalapa_ are crossed, one having red flowers and the other white, a fusion of the colours takes place in the first generation, and _all_ the plants have pink flowers. in the second generation we get, for every plant with red flowers, two with pink flowers and one with white. that is, the law of disjunction has again asserted itself, but the individual hybrids merge their antagonistic attributes, which remain, nevertheless (as their differentiation proves), separate one from the other in the sexual cells. another phenomenon observed in individual hybrids is the _intermingling_ of characteristics. for instance, there are cases where the flowers of a hybrid produced by a plant with red flowers and another with white are _variegated_ with red and white stripes. accordingly, the transmission of antagonistic attributes through the individual may be divided into three different methods: { exclusive. transmission { by fusion. { by intermingling. in the first case, the character of one of the parents is transmitted intact; in the second, the formation of a new characteristic results, constituting a form more or less nearly midway between those from which it comes and whose fusion it represents; in the third case (which is very rare and seems to obey mendel's laws in quite an uncertain way), the result is a _mosaic_ of the fundamental attributes. of special interest to us are the two first methods of hereditary transmission of characteristics. even before mendel's discoveries, anthropologists had observed that in the intermixture of races certain human attributes remained _distinct_ while others _merged_. in the first case they called the individuals _hybrids_, and in the second case they called them _metics_. take, for example, the colour of the skin when black and white merge in the so-called _mulatto_. other characteristics, instead of merging, intermingle, as for instance those that are internal or related to the skeleton, and those that are external or related to the soft tissues and the skin. it may happen, for example, that where one race has an elongated head and black hair and another has a round head and blond hair, the result of their union will be hybrids with elongated heads and blond hair or _vice versa_. similarly, if one of the parents is tall of stature and fair complexioned, and the other of short stature with a dark skin, these characteristics may be interchanged in the hybrids. a very common occurrence, as regards the colour of the hair, is the _fusion_ of blond and brunette into chestnut; while parents with chestnut hair may have either fair-haired or dark-haired children. in his book entitled _human races and varieties_, sergi says in regard to hybridism: "it is impossible to ignore human hybridism, which, for that matter, has been demonstrated under various forms by all the anthropologists; america, in itself alone, offers us a true example of experimental anthropology in regard to this phenomenon. already the result of investigations shows that human hybridism is multiform among all the peoples of the earth; but what is best known of all is the exchange of external characteristics and their intermingling with the internal; that is, the combination of external characteristics of one type with internal characteristics of another type. it is easy, for instance, to find cases in which a certain colour of skin and hair, with the special qualities proper to them, are found combined with peculiarities of the skeleton that do not rightfully belong to types of that particular colouring, and _vice versa_; and this same phenomenon may be observed regarding certain separate attributes, and not all of them--such as the stature, or the face with its outer covering of soft tissues, or the shape of the skull alone. "if we observe our european populations, that call themselves a white-skinned race, but whose whiteness has many different gradations, we are convinced of the great _intermixture_ of characters, and, what is more, a varied mixture resulting in a great variety of individual types, consisting of characters differing widely from one another. it requires a very accurate and very minute analysis to distinguish the different elements that are found in the composition of ethnic characters in individuals and peoples. undoubtedly these intermixtures and combinations of character differ in their constituent elements and in the number of such elements in the different nations, according to whether we study those of the south, or the centre, or the north of europe; and this results from different degrees of association with mongrel races. "but a more important fact, and one that seems to have escaped the attention of anthropologists, is the _absence of fusion_ of internal and external characteristics in the product of such intermixture. we find only a positional relationship between the different ethnic elements, a syncretism or superposition of characteristics, and a consequent _readiness to disunite and form other unions_. this phenomenon has already been demonstrated in america, on a mass of evidence; but it is apparent also in europe, among the peoples that are seemingly most homogeneous, if by careful observation we _separate the characteristics_ that constitute the ethnic types; and not only the types, but the individuals belonging to the different peoples." and in the following passage, sergi expresses himself still more clearly: "from my many observations, it follows, further, that human hybridism, or meticism, as others choose to call it, is a syncretism of distinct characteristics of great variety, and that these do not modify the skeletal structure or the internal characteristics, excepting by way of individual variation; it may happen that separate parts of the skeleton itself acquire characteristics peculiar to themselves. the stature, the chest formation, the proportion of the limbs, may all be in perfect correlation and be united with external characteristics of diverse forms, as for instance with different forms of cranium, or the cranium may be associated with different facial forms, and conversely. furthermore, the _forms adapted_ _separately_ and in part in hybrid composition _remain unvaried in_ _their typical formation_. the face retains its typical characteristics in spite of its union with different forms of cranium; and similarly the cranium preserves its architectural structure when combined with different types of face. the stature maintains its proportions in spite of combinations with diverse cranial and facial types, and in spite of varied colours of skin and hair." the foregoing page, that i have borrowed from this masterly investigator, is most eloquent testimony that, in regard to the phenomena of hybridism, man also comes within the scope of mendel's laws. there is something wonderful in the power of observation and intuition shown by sergi, who, running counter to the convictions of the majority of anthropologists, arrived through these conclusions at a _truth_ the key to which was destined to be discovered later on through studies, very far removed from anthropology, such as were pursued by the botanists mendel and de vries. while mendel was led by his _experiments_ to the discovery of the laws based upon his ingenious hypothesis, sergi was drawn simply by _observation_ to conclusions that to-day are confirmed by experience. and from difficult observations of _single_ _characteristics taken separately_, sergi demonstrated, in his ingenious studies, their _persistence_ through innumerable generations; while, through the identification of separate characteristics, he achieved that brilliant analysis of the races which revealed to his anthropological insight that the european varieties of man originated among the peoples of africa and asia. unquestionably, the laws of mendel confirm what hitherto were considered, in the scientific world of europe, simply as the individual hypotheses of sergi, but which american anthropologists recognise and welcome as a scientific truth, brilliantly observed and expounded by the italian anthropologist. thus, through single characteristics, through _particularities_, we may read the origins of races; and recognise which are the constant characteristics and which the transitory ones. accordingly, let us keep these principles in mind, as we proceed further in our investigation of the phenomena of heredity. mendel's laws, however much they may be discredited or illuminated by further experience, serve in the meanwhile to give an absolutely new conception of the individual and to shed light upon many obscure problems relating to heredity. the individual is the product of a combination of germ potentialities, which, in the case of hybrids (and consequently always in the case of man, who is the product of racial intermixture), meet in accordance with the mathematical laws of probability. one might almost conceive of a _formula_, or, better yet, a calculation, in accordance with which the _individual_ resulting from any given germs might be predetermined; if it were not for the fact that the calculations would become infinitely complicated through the multiplication of characteristics. with only ten pairs of characteristics it is already possible to form upward of kinds of germinal cells and these give rise to , , different combinations. furthermore, through the law of dominant characteristics, the combinations of germs would produce in the descendants varieties distinguishable by their external appearance, and , differing only internally, that is, in their germinal cells. there remains, however, one general principle: the individual contains not only his personal attributes, but also other attributes which belonged to his ancestors, and which are latent in him, and may reappear in his descendants. consequently, if the individual is a hybrid, he must be interpreted _not only through himself alone,_ _but through the history of his family_; and the characteristics which he may transmit are not those of his own body, but those of his origin. the individual body is nothing more than a "temporary expression" of those germinal characteristics which have united to give it consistency; but the complex transmission of characteristics rests wholly with the germinal cells. the problem of heredity is transferred from the individual and from the series of individuals, who are simple and transitory products of combinations, to the sexual cells and their potentialities. and this is unquestionably an absolutely new scientific concept, and a _revolutionary_ one as well, capable of drawing in its wake a lengthy evolution of thought. since the _germinal potentialities_ determine the single characteristics, they may be considered as the _atoms_ of the biologist. "the field of investigation," says bateson, "does not appear to differ greatly from that which was opened to the students of chemistry at the beginning of the discovery that chemical combinations are governed by definite laws.... in the same way that the chemist studies the properties of every _chemical substance_, the characteristics of organisms ought to be studied, and their composition determined." (_first report_, p. .) this brings us to two widely diverse facts that demand consideration: first, the subdivision of antagonistic characteristics in the germinal cells that form, so to speak, the atomic and chaotic substratum of characteristics--characteristics that combine according to the mathematical laws of probability; and, secondly, the _dominance_ of characteristics, or else their fusion, which, independently of anything that may happen in the germinal cells, serves to determine and define the individual. what sort of characteristics are the dominant ones? according to the latest researches of mendelism, the dominant characteristics are those acquired latest in the course of evolution, in other words, the _youngest_, or, if you prefer, the _most highly_ _evolved_. accordingly, in hybrids, the most perfected characteristics and forms are the ones that triumph in the end. this is quite a new principle. hitherto it was held that the _pure_ species or race was the most perfect; and the hybrid or bastard was under a cloud of contempt. and, as a matter of fact, the first crossings of different races may result in some combinations lacking in harmony, and calculated to sanction the old-time conception of the æsthetic inferiority of the bastard. but it is necessary to leave time for new generations and further crossings, in order that _all of the more highly evolved characteristics_ may unite and end by triumphing in reciprocal harmony. this the followers of mendel cannot yet give us, because it would require decades or centuries, according to the species, to produce experimentally such æsthetic forms of hybridism. but in the human race we have an experiment already accomplished, which actually shows us the _æsthetic triumph_ achieved in the region where the races have for the greatest length of time been crossed and recrossed, through the agency of the most ancient civilisation: the europeans surpass in physical beauty the people of any other continent; and the neo-latin races, the most ancient hybrids of all, seem to be nearing the attainment of the greatest æsthetic perfection. in fact, when i was engaged in compiling an anthropological study of the population of latium, in accordance with sergi's principles, and was making a most minute examination of all the different characteristics and their prevalence, as a possible basis for a delineation of the fundamental racial types, i found that complete beauty is never granted to any one race, but distributed among different races: "as a result of my labours, i find perfect artistic proportion as to certain facial features, in a race having inferior hands and feet; and, _vice versa_, i find facial irregularities in the race having the smallest extremities, and the most artistically proportioned hands. what we now consider as standards of human beauty, and delight in bringing together artificially in a single figure in a work of art, are found in nature scattered and distributed among different races." (see _physical characteristics of young women of latium_, p. .) upon the combination of all the different points of beauty in a single individual depend quétélet's biological theories of the medial man (l'homme moyen), lately revived and extensively developed by viola. the new importance acquired by the reconstruction of the _medial man_ is due precisely to the fact that the new method of reconstructing him is by bringing together all the single characteristics taken separately and worked out mathematically according to the laws of individual variations that behave precisely like those of probability. (see _biometry and the theory_ _of the medial man_.) viola considers, in its relation to the physiological laws of _health_, the combination in a single individual of the maximum number of average characteristics, which at the same time are the characteristics numerically prevalent in individuals (dominant characteristics?). the man who accumulates the greater number of average characteristics, escapes diseases and predisposition to disease; he is consequently sounder and more robust and _handsomer_. de giovanni, on the contrary, through an ingenious conceit, bestows the name of _morphological combination_ upon the union in a single individual, of parts that are mutually inharmonic and incapable of performing their normal functions together, in consequence of which such an individual's morphological personality is predisposed to special maladies. accordingly the meeting and union of germinative potentialities may be either more or less propitious; as for instance the result sometimes produced by the combination of a platyopic (broad) face and an aquiline and extremely leptorrhine (narrow) nose; in other words, combinations that are discordant from the æsthetic standpoint, but harmless as regards health; or again, there may be a lack of harmony between the internal organs, incompatible with a healthy constitution. there may even exist malformations due to the meeting of forms that clash violently; each of which parts may be quite normal, when considered by itself, but cannot adapt itself to the other parts with which it is united. it is as though the dominant characteristic in respect to an organ had been overpowered by another, which ought on the contrary, in this special case, to have been recessive. it is precisely on this question of the dominance of characteristics that the researches of the mendelists are at present being expended. it has been observed in the course of experiments that there exist certain special _correlations between potentialities_, in consequence of which certain characteristics must always go together; as, for example, when two characteristics, having once been united, must continue to recur together, although they each exist separately. these laws, which are not yet clearly determined, may serve to explain the final harmony of the sum total of individual attributes. but in general the _dominance_ of characteristics is not absolute, but subject to many causes of variation, associated with environment. thus, for example, just as a change in nutrition of a young plant will result in a different height, it is also possible in the mechanics of reproduction that the original relations of germs may be altered by external causes, and the dominant characteristics be made recessive.[ ] many deviations are attributable to the influences that act upon the germinative cells of hybrids, after the latter have already been determined in their potentiality; thus for example when certain germinal cells are less resistant during maturation; or again when _combinations_ between potentialities are difficult to achieve. that is to say, there may exist certain phenomena associated with environment, thanks to which mendel's natural laws concerning the dominance of characteristics may become inverted. another fact of great significance is this: that, in the course of extensive experimental plantings, for the purpose of verifying the laws of mendel, a widespread sickliness and mortality occurred among cryptograms, at the expense of the plants of recessive character; which would go to prove that a lower power of resistance accompanies the appearance of recessive characteristics. the dominant characteristics accordingly are not only the most highly evolved, but they also possess a greater power of resistance. so that, to-day, the dominance of the strong tends through the workings of the phenomena of mendelism, to do away, little by little, in the course of generations, with characteristics that are weak or antiquated. this has an important bearing upon human pathology, because it opens the way to hope for a possible regeneration in families branded with hereditary disease. the germinal potentialities that contain beauty and strength seem predestined to that predominance which will achieve the triumph of life in the individual. to learn the laws of the union, in one individual and definitive unity, of the infinite dominant and recessive potentialities that must encounter one another in the mysterious labyrinth in which life is prepared--therein lies the greatest problem of the present day. it is that which should constitute our guiding purpose. form and types of stature the form.--fundamental cannons regarding the form.--types of stature, macroscelia and brachyscelia; their physiological significance.--types of stature in relation to race, sex, and age. a few years ago, when anthropology first began to be studied, the skull was taken as the point of departure; because in the analytical study of the human body it represents the principal part. indeed, the same thing was done by lombroso, when he applied anthropology to the practice of psychiatry and later to the study of criminals. it is a matter of fact that degenerative stigmata of the gravest significance are to be found associated with the skull; and this he could not fail to take into account, because of its bearings upon criminal anthropology. but to-day anthropology is reaching out into vaster fields of science and striving to develop in diverse directions, such as those of physiology and pathology; and revolting from the collection of degenerative details, it undertakes to study normal man in regard to his external form as related to his functional capacity, or else the man of abnormal constitution, who in his outward form reveals certain predispositions to illness; and starting on these lines, it proposes to investigate principally the metamorphoses of growth, through the successive periods of life. from this new point of view, it is not any single malformation, but the individual as a whole in the exercise of his functions, who assumes first importance. the study of the cranium (formerly so important as to be the basis of a special science, craniology), becomes only one detail of the whole. as a matter of fact, the brain, which is what gives the cranium its importance, is not only the immediate organ of intelligence, but it is also the psychomotor organ; and as such exercises control over all the striped muscles, and is morphologically associated with the development and the functional powers of the whole body. it follows that, the larger the body, the bigger brain it needs to control it, independently of the question of intelligence. therefore the first point of departure should be eminently synthetic, and should include the morphological personality considered as a whole. one of the properties of living bodies is that of attaining a determinate development, whose limits, both in regard to the _quantity of its mass_ and the _harmony of its form_, are defined by that biological final cause which is implanted in the race and transmitted by heredity. consequently every living creature has determinate limits: and these constitute a fundamental _biological_ property. the causality of such limits has not yet been determined by scientific research; nevertheless it is a phenomenon over which we must pause to meditate. if the philosopher pauses to contemplate the immensity of the ocean from the sea shore, marvelling that the interminable and impetuous movement of the waves should have such exact and definite limits that it cannot overpass by so much as a metre the extreme high-water line upon the beach, we may similarly pause to meditate upon the material limits that life assumes in its infinitely varied manifestations. from the microbe to the mammal, from the lichen to the palm, all living creatures have inherited these limits, which permit the zoologist and the botanist to assign to each a _measure_ as one of its descriptive attributes. this is the first attribute which we must take into consideration in the study of anthropology: namely, the _mass_ of the body, and together with the mass, its morphological _entirety_. the italian vocabulary lacks any one word which quite expresses this idea, [and in this respect english is scarcely more fortunate[ ]]. the stature which represents to us the most synthetic measure of the body in its entirety (a measure determined by the vertical linear distance between the level on which the individual's feet are placed, up to the top of his head as he stands erect), does not represent the entire body in the sense above indicated. it may rather be considered as a _linear index_ of this entirety. the french language, on the contrary, possesses the word _taille_, which may be rendered in italian by the word _taglia_ [and in english by the word _form_[ ]], provided that we understand it to signify the conception of the whole _morphological personality_. no single measurement can express the form; the weight of the body, indeed, may give us a conception of the _mass_ but not of the _shape_; and the latter, if it needs to be determined in all its limits, requires a series of measurements, mutually related, and signifying the reciprocal connection and harmony of the parts with the whole; in other words, a _law_. we may establish the following measurements as adapted to determine the form, in other words, as _fundamental laws_: the _total stature_, the _sitting_ _stature_, the _total spread of the arms_, the _circumference of the thorax_, and the _weight_. of these measures, the two of chief importance are the stature and the weight, because they express the linear index and the volumetric measure of the entire body. the other measurements, on the contrary, analyse this entirety in a sweeping way: thus, the sitting stature, in its relation to the total stature, indicates the reciprocal proportions between the _bust_ and the _lower limbs_; the perimeter of the chest records the transverse and volumetric development of the bust; and the total spread of the arms denotes a detail that is highly characteristic in the case of man: the development of the upper limbs, which, while they correspond to organs of locomotion in the lower animals, assume in the case of man higher functions, as organs of labour and of _mimic_ speech. such measurements constitute a _law_, because they are in constant mutual relationship, when the normal human organism has reached complete development. the stature, in fact, is equal to the total spread of the arms; the circumference of the thorax is equal to one-half the stature, and the sitting stature is slightly greater than the perimeter of the chest. as regards the weight, it cannot be in direct proportion to any linear measure; nevertheless, an empirical correspondence in figures has been noted that may be recorded solely for the purpose of aiding the memory: the normal adult man usually weighs as many kilograms as there are centimetres in his stature, over and above one metre (for instance, a man whose height is . metres will weigh kilograms, etc.). to make these laws easier to understand, we may resort to signs and formulæ. thus, if we denote the stature by _st_, the total spread of the arms by _ts_, the circumference of the thorax by _ct_, the essential or sitting stature by _ss_, and the weight by _w_, we may set down the following formulæ, which will result in practice in more or less obvious approximations: _st_ = _ts_; _ct_ = _st_/ ; _ct_ = _ss_ and for the weight, the following wholly empirical formula: _w_ = _kg_(_st_- m.). _stature._--among all the measurements relating to the form, the principal one is the stature. it has certain characteristics that are essentially human. what we understand by stature is the height of a living animal, when standing on its feet. let us compare the stature of one of the higher mammals, a dog for instance, with that of man. the stature of the dog is determined essentially by the length of its legs, while the spinal column is supported in a horizontal position by the legs themselves. such is the attitude of all the higher mammals, including the greater number of monkeys, notwithstanding that these latter are steadily tending to raise their spinal column in an oblique direction, in proportion to the lengthening of their forelimbs, which serve them as a support in walking--a form of locomotion half way between that of quadrupeds and of man. man alone has permanently acquired an erect position, that renders the bust ( = sum of head and trunk) vertical, and leaves the upper limbs definitely free from any duty connected with locomotion, thus attaining the full measure of the human stature, which is the sum of the bust and the lower limbs. thus, we may assert that one fundamental difference between man and animals consists in this: that in animals the spinal column does not enter into the computation of stature; while in man, on the contrary, it is included in its entirety. consequently, in man the stature assumes a characteristic and fundamental importance, because part of it (that part relating to the bust) represents, as a linear index, all the organs of vegetative life and of life in its external relations. if we examine the human skeleton in an erect position (fig. ), it shows us the varying importance of the different parts of its structure, according as they are destined to protect, or simply to sustain. at the top is the skull, an enclosed bony cavity; and this arrangement indicates that it is designed to contain and protect an organ of the highest importance. by means of the occipital foramen, this cavity communicates with the vertebral canal, also rigorously closed, that is formed by the successive juxtaposition of the vertebræ. such protective formation is in accord with the high physiological significance and the delicate structure of the organs of the central nervous system, which represent the supreme control over physiological life and over the psychic activities of life in its external relations. below the skull, the structure of the skeleton is profoundly altered; in fact, the framework of the thorax is a sort of bony cage open at the bottom; still, the external arrangement of the bones renders them highly protective to the organs they enclose, namely, the lungs and the heart--physiological centres, whose perpetual motion seems to symbolise the rhythm and consequently the continuity of life. [illustration: fig. .] continuing to descend, we come to a sort of hollow basin, the pelvis, which seems merely to contain, rather than protect, the abdominal organs: the intestines, kidneys, etc. such a structure seems to be in accord with the minor physiological importance of these organs, whose function (digestion) is periodic and may be temporarily suspended, in defiance of physiological stimuli, without suspension of life. in the lower part of the skeleton, on the contrary, the arrangement between the soft and bony tissues is inverted: the long bones of the limbs constitute the inner part; and they are covered over with thick, striped muscles, organs of mechanical movement for the purpose of locomotion. here the function of the skeleton is exclusively that of support, and in its mechanism it represents a series of levers. accordingly, the structure of the skeleton also shows us how the stature is composed of parts that differ profoundly in their physiological significance; life as a _complete whole_, the _living man_, is contained within the _bust_, which holds the organs of the individual, vegetative life; those of life in relation to its environment, and those of life in relation to the race, namely, the organs of reproduction. deprived of arms and legs, man could still live; the limbs are nothing more than appendages at the service of the bust, in all animals; they serve to _transport_ the bust, that is, the part which constitutes the real living animal, which without the limbs would be as motionless as a vegetable, unable to go in pursuit of nourishment or to exercise sexual selection. the embryos of different animals, of a dog, a bat, a rabbit and of man (as may be seen in fig. ) show that the fundamental part of the body is the spinal column, which _limits_ and _includes_ the whole animal in the process of formation. if we next examine the embryonic development of man, as shown in fig. , we may easily see how the limbs develop, at first as almost insignificant appendages of the trunk, remaining hidden within the curve of the spinal column; and even in an advanced stage of development ( th week), they still remain quite accessory parts in their relation to the whole. having established these very obvious principles, we may ask ourselves: of two men of equal stature, which is physiologically the more efficient? evidently, that one of the two who has the shorter legs. in other words, it is of fundamental importance to determine the reciprocal relation, in the stature, between the bust and the lower limbs, that is, between the _height of the bust_ and the _total_ _height of the body_. [illustration: fig. .--gastrula of a sponge. external surface. internal section. (showing the inner and outer primary layers, and the mouth orifice.)] [illustration: fig. . dog. bat. rabbit. man. (from the work by e. haeckel: _anthropogeny_.)] [illustration: fig. . four skeletons of anthropoid apes. man.] the height of the bust was called by collignon the _essential_ _stature_, a name that indicates the biological significance of this measurement. it may, however, also be called the sitting stature, from the method of taking the measure, which equals the vertical distance from the level on which the individual is seated to the top of his head. the other is the total stature. [illustration: fig. . days, weeks, weeks, etc. (natural size).] accordingly, in anthropology we may define the physiological efficiency of a man by the relation existing between his two statures, the total and the essential. if we reduce the total stature (which for the sake of brevity we will call simply the _stature_) to a scale of , we find that the essential stature very slightly exceeds , oscillating between - ; yet it may fall to and even lower, or it may rise above . in such cases we have individuals of profoundly diverse types, whose diversity is essentially connected with the proportional differences between the several parts of their stature. hence, we may distinguish the _type of stature_; understanding by this, not a measure, but a _ratio between measures_, expressed by a number; that is, "_the type of stature is the name given to the ratio_ _between the essential stature and the total stature reduced to a scale_ _of _." the number resulting from this ratio, since it indicates the ratio itself, is called the _index of stature_ (see "technical lessons: on the manner of obtaining and calculating the indexes"). manouvrier has distinguished the type with short limbs and preponderant trunk, by the name of _brachyscelous_; and those of the opposite type, that is, with long legs, by the name of _macroscelous_; reserving the term _mesatiscelous_ to designate the intermediate type. these types differ not only in the reciprocal relation between the two statures, but in all the recognised _laws of the form_. the brachyscelous type has a circumference of chest in excess of half the stature, because the trunk is more greatly developed in all its dimensions; and the total weight of the body exceeds the normal proportion in relation to the stature. the contrary holds true of the macroscelous type; their trunk, being shorter, is also narrower, and the circumference of the chest can never equal one-half the stature, while the total weight of the body is below the normal. canons of form passing next to a consideration of the total spread of the arms, since there is an evident correspondence between the upper and lower limbs, it follows that in the brachyscelous type the total spread is less than the stature, while in the macroscelous it surpasses it to a greater or less degree, according to the grade of type; the two types consequently differ in the level reached by the wrist, when the arms are allowed to hang along the sides of the body. this is a very interesting fact to establish, since at one time it was held that excessive length of arm was an atavistic feature, in other words, an anthropoid reminder. to-day, since the old interpretation of the direct descent from species to species has been abandoned in the light of modern theories of biological evolution, we can no longer speak of _atavistic revivals_. it is true that the anthropoid apes, as may be seen in fig. , have extremely long forelimbs, and that man is characterised by the shortness of his arms, free to perform work and obedient instruments of his brain. but if it happens that certain individual men have excessively long arms, even if they should coincide with an inferior capacity for work and social adaptation, such a simple coincidence must not be interpreted by the laws of cause and effect. the modern theories of evolution tend to admit between the anthropoid apes and man, only a common origin from lower animals not yet fixed in a determined species. so that in phylogenesis men are not considered as the children or grandchildren of apes, but rather their brothers or cousins of a more or less distant degree; and their resemblance must be attributed to a parallel evolution. consequently, it is not possible to speak of _direct transmission_ of characters. therefore, we must interpret an excessive length of arm, or an excessive shortness, after the same fashion, namely, in its relation to the _type of stature_, or to the established _canons of the form_--in other words, as a detail of individual human types. let us sum up the three canons in the following table: --------------------------------------------------------------------- mesatisceles | brachysceles | macrosceles --------------------------------------------------------------------- st = ts | st > ts | st < ts | | ss = st/ | ss > st/ | ss < st/ | | ct = st/ | ct > st/ | ct < st/ | | w = k(st- m.) | w > k(st- m.) | w < k(st- m.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- from these measurements are derived certain types of _individuality_ which we may now describe in detail. the _brachyscelous type_ has an excess of bust, consequently a preponderance of _vegetative life_; the great development of the abdominal organs tends to make a person of this type a _hearty_ _eater_, a man addicted to all the pleasures of the table; his big heart, abundantly irrigating the body, keeps his complexion constantly highly coloured, if not plethoric. we can almost see this man of big paunch, corpulent, with an ample chest, fat, ruddy, coarse, and jolly; an excess of nutriment and of blood-supply are favourable to the ready accumulation of adipose tissue, and as the body constantly grows heavier it steadily becomes more difficult for the undersized legs to support it; so that inevitably this man will tend to become sedentary, and he will select a well-spread table as his favourite spot for lingering. whatever elements of the _ideal_ the world contains, will escape the attention of this type of man, who is far more ready to understand and engage in _commerce_, which leads by a practical way to the solution of the material problems of life. in the other _type_, on the contrary, the macroscelous, the organs of vegetative life are insufficient and the central nervous system is defective. such a man feels, even though unconsciously, that the abdominal organs are incapable of assimilating sufficient nutriment, and that his lungs, unable to take in the needed quantity of oxygen, render his breathing labourious. his small heart is inadequate for circulating the blood through the whole body, which consequently retains an habitual pallor; while the nervous system is in a constant state of excitation. we can almost see this man, so tall and thin that he seems to be walking on stilts, with pallid, hollow cheeks and narrow chest, suffering from lack of appetite and from melancholia; nervous, incapable of steady productive work and prone to dream over empty visions of poetry and art. the man of this type is quite likely to devote his entire life to a platonic love, or to conceive the idea of crowning an ideal love by committing suicide; and so long as he lives he will never succeed in escaping from the anxieties of a life that has been an economic failure. it is interesting to examine the types of stature from different points of view: such, for example, as the height of stature, the race, the sex, the age, the social conditions, the pathological deviations, etc. _the types of stature according to the height of the total stature._--there exists between the bust and the limbs a primary relation of a _mechanical_ nature, already well known, even before manouvrier directed the attention of anthropologists to the types of stature. when one individual is very tall and another is very short, the consequence of this fact alone is that the taller of the two has much longer limbs as compared with the shorter. this is because, according to the general laws of mechanics, the bust _grows less_ _than the limbs_ and is _subject to less variation_. but notwithstanding this general fact, other conditions intervene to determine the comparative relations between the two portions of the stature. indeed, manouvrier exhibits, within his own school, specimens of equal stature but of different types; and furthermore, he notes that the inhabitants of polynesia are of tall stature and have a long bust, while negroes, who are also of tall stature, have a short bust. _types of stature according to race._--among the characteristics of racial types, present-day anthropology has included the reciprocal proportions between the two statures. this means that the medium type in the different races is not always contained within the same limits of fluctuation in regard to stature: but some races are brachyscelous, others are macroscelous, and still again others are mesatiscelous. the most brachyscelous race is the mongolian, prevalent in the population of china; the most macroscelous is the australian type that once peopled tasmania. other races, as for example the negroid, while in a measure macroscelous, approach nearer to the mesatiscelous type, characteristic of the population of europe. let us examine the psycho-ethnic characters of these various peoples. the chinese are the founders of the most ancient of all oriental civilisations, and have established themselves in a vast empire, solid and stable in its proportions, as well as in the level of its civilisation. it would seem as though the chinese people, having accomplished the enormous effort of raising themselves to a determined civic level, were no longer capable of advancement. individually, they have a singularly developed spirit of discipline, and are the most enduring and faithful workers; it is well known that in america the chinese mongolian does not fear the competition of labourers of any other race, because no others can compete with him in parsimony, in simple living, and in unremitting toil. the tasmanians constituted a people that was considered as having the lowest grade of civilisation among all the races on earth. even english domination failed to adapt them to a more advanced environment, and their race was consequently scattered and destroyed. accordingly, we find associated with extreme macroscelia (tasmanians) an incapacity for civic evolution; and with the corresponding extreme of brachyscelia an insuperable limitation to civic progress. consequently, the triumph of man upon earth cannot bear a direct relation to the volume of the bust, or in other words, we cannot assume that the man most favourably endowed on the physiological side is the one who has the largest proportion of viscera. as a matter of fact, the conquering race, the race which has set no limit to the territory of its empire nor to the progress of its civilisation, is composed of white men, whose type of stature is mesatiscelous, that is to say, representative of _harmony_ between its parts. this conception will serve us in establishing a fundamental principle in morphological biology: namely, that perfectibility revolves around a centre, which represents a perfect equilibrium between the various parts constituting an organism. hence, in order to determine the deviations of the individual type, we must always start from those central data, which represent, as the case may be, normality or perfection. even among the populations of europe, and within the italian people themselves, fluctuations occur in the degree of mesatiscelia, approaching to a greater or less degree the eccentric forms of brachyscelia or macroscelia; and such fluctuations are an attribute of race. we should draw a distinction between a people and a race. the term race refers exclusively to a biological classification, and corresponds to the _zoological species_. on the other hand, we mean by a people a group of human individuals bound together by political ties. peoples are always made up of a more or less profound intermixture of races. it is well known that one of the most interesting and difficult problems of ethnology is that of tracing out the original types of races in peoples that represent an intermixture centuries old. without entering too deeply into this question, which lies outside of our present purpose, it will suffice to point out that in the people of italy it is possible to trace types of races differing from one another, yet so closely related as to render them apparently so similar that they might almost be regarded as a single race. now, in an anthropological study of mine on the young women of latium, i succeeded in tracing, within the confines of that region, different racial types that show corresponding differences in degrees of mesatiscelia. thus, for example, in castelli romani there exists in an almost pure state a dark-haired race, short of stature, slender, elegantly modelled in figure and in profile, and showing within the limits of mesatiscelia a brachyscelous tendency, in contrast with another race, tall, fair, massive, of coarse build, which within the limits of mesatiscelia shows a macroscelous tendency, and which is found in almost pure groups around the locality of orte, that is, on the boundaries of umbria. it is interesting to note the importance of researches in ethnological anthropology conducted in small centres of habitation. if it is still possible to trace out groups even approaching racial purity, they will be found only in localities offering little facility to emigration and to the consequent intermixture of races. the fact that we still find in castelli romani types so nearly pure, is due to the isolation of this region, which up to yesterday was still in such primitive and rare communication with the capital as to permit of the survival of brigandage. on the contrary, in localities that have attained a higher civic advancement, and in which the inhabitants are placed in favourable economic and intellectual conditions, the facilities of travel and emigration will very soon effect an alteration in the anthropological characters of the race. hence it would be impossible, in a cosmopolitan city like rome, to accomplish any useful studies of the sort that i accomplished in the district of latium, and which led me to conclude that in the small and slender race of castelli romani we may trace the descendants of the ancient conquerors of the world: descendants that belong to one variety of the great mediterranean race, to whom we owe the historic civilisations of egypt, greece and rome. it would seem that this race, disembarking on the coast of latium, must have driven back, among the apennines, the other race, blond and massive, whose pure-blooded descendants are still found in numerical prevalence at orte, an ancient mediæval town and a natural fortress from the remotest times, through its fortunate situation on the crown of a rocky height, that easily isolates it from the surrounding country (see the ancient history of the town of orte). accordingly, within the limits of mesatiscelia, it appears that the race which in early times won the victory was the more brachyscelous, _i.e._, the one which had the larger bust, and consequently the larger brain and vital organs. in other words, within the limits of normality, brachyscelia is a physiologically favourable condition. _variations of type of stature according to social conditions._--independently of race, and from such a radically different point of view as that of the _social condition_, or adaptation to environment, we may still distinguish brachyscelous and macroscelous types. brachysceles may readily be met with among the labouring classes, habituated from childhood to hard toil in a standing position, thus interfering with a free development of the long bones of the lower limbs; while the macroscelous type will be found among the aristocratic classes, whose members, spending much time sitting or reclining, give the long bones an opportunity to attain their growth (mechanical theories of stature). without stopping to discuss the suggested causes of such differentiation in types, we may nevertheless point out that the brachyscelous type is eminently useful to society, constituting, one may say, the principal source of economic production, while the macroscelous and unproductive type settles comfortably down upon the other like a parasite. but the progress of the world is not due to the labouring class, but to the men of intellect, among whom the prevailing type is the medium, harmonic type, with mesatiscelous stature. _types of stature in art._--the existence of these different individual types, which combine a definite relationship of the parts of stature with the complete image of a well-defined individuality, was long ago perceived by the eye, or rather by the delicate intuition of certain eminent artists. these immortalised their several ideals, investing now the one type and now the other with the genius of their art. thus, for example, rubens embodies in his flemish canvases the brachyscelous type, robust and jovial, and usually represents him as a man of mighty appetite revelling in the pleasures of the table. botticelli, on the contrary, has idealised the macroscelous type, in frail, diaphanous, almost superhuman forms, that seem, as they approach, to walk, shadow-like, upon the heads of flowers, without bending them beneath their feet and without leaving any trace of their passage. accordingly, these two great artists have admirably realised, not only the two opposite types of stature, but also the psychic and moral attributes that respectively belong to them. but it was not granted to these artists to achieve the supreme glory of representing perfect human beauty in unsurpassed and classic masterpieces. the art of greece alone succeeded in embodying in statues which posterity must admire but cannot duplicate, the medial, normal type of the perfect man. _variations of stature according to sex._--it is not always necessary to interpret the type of stature in the same sense. even from an exclusively biological standpoint, it may lend itself to profoundly different interpretations. thus, for example, the type of stature varies normally according to the sex. woman is more brachyscelous than man; but the degree of brachyscelia corresponds to a larger development of the lumbar segment of the spinal column, which corresponds to the functions of maternity. in fact all the various segments of the spinal column show different proportions in the two sexes. as we know, the spinal column consists of three parts; the cervical (corresponding to the neck), the thoracic (corresponding to the ribs), and the abdominal, including the os sacrum and the coccyx. now, manouvrier, reducing the height of the spinal column to a scale of , expresses the relations of these different parts in the two sexes as follows: ------------------------------------------------------- segments | men | women ------------------------------------------------------- cervical | . | . | | thoracic | . | . | | lumbar | . | . | | sacro-coccygeal | . | . ------------------------------------------------------------ in woman the thoracic segment is shorter and the abdominal is longer than in man; but the total sum in woman is relatively greater in proportion to the whole stature. in a case like this we have no right to speak of a morphological or psychosocial superiority of type; nor would a fact of this sort have any weight, for example, in establishing the anthropological superiority of woman. nevertheless, it may be asserted that, if the day comes when woman, having entered the ranks of social workers, shall prove that she is socially as useful as man, she will still be, in addition, the mother of the species, and for that reason preeminently the greater producer. now, it is beyond question that this indisputable superiority is in direct relation with the type of stature. but without insisting unduly on a point like this, we should note the connection between the brachyscelous type and the tendency shown by women to accumulate nutritive substances, adipose tissue; consequently, as compared with man, she is the more corpulent--as are all brachysceles as compared with macrosceles. _types of stature at different ages._--another factor that influences the types of stature is the _age_; or rather, that biological force which we call _growth_. growth is not an augmentation of volume, but an alteration in form; it constitutes the _ontogenetic_ evolution, the development of the individual. the child, as it grows, is transformed. if we compare the skeleton of a new-born child with that of an adult, we discover profound differences between the relative proportions of the different parts. the child's head is enormously larger than that of the adult in proportion to its stature; and similarly, the chest measure is notably greater in the child. if we wish to compare the fundamental measurements of the new-born infant with those of the adult, we get the following figures, on a basis of for the total stature: ------------------------------------------------------------------- | | adult | child at birth ------------------------------------------------------------------- total stature | essential stature | | | | | = | perimeter of thorax | | | | | | height of head | | ------------------------------------------------------------------- [illustration: fig. .] accordingly, the child has to acquire, in the course of its growth, not only the dimensions of the adult, but the harmony of his forms; that is, it must reach not only certain determined limits of dimension, but also a certain type of _beauty_. among the fundamental differences between the new-born child and the adult one of the first to be noted is the reciprocal difference of proportion between the two statures. the child is ultra-brachyscelous, that is, he presents a type of exaggerated brachyscelia, calling to mind the form of the human foetus, in which the limbs appear as little appendages of the trunk. in the course of growth, a successive alteration takes place between the reciprocal proportions of the two parts, so that the lower limbs, growing faster than the bust, tend to approach the total length of the latter. godin has noted that during the years before puberty the lower limbs acquire greater dimensions, as compared with the bust, than are found in the fully developed individual; in other words, at this period a rapid growth takes place in the long bones of the lower limbs, and accordingly at this period of his life the individual passes through a stage of the macroscelous type. immediately after puberty, there begins, in turn, an increase in the size of the bust, which regains its normal excess over the lower limbs, thus attaining the definite normal type of the adult individual. after the age of years, by which time these metamorphoses have been completed, the individual may increase in stature, but the proportions between the parts will remain unaltered. in fig. we have a graphic representation of the relative proportions between the height of the bust and the length of limbs at different ages, the total stature being in every case reduced to . the upper portion of the lines represents the bust, and the lower portion the limbs, while the transverse line corresponding to the number indicates one-half of the total stature. from such a table, it is easy to see how the bust, enormously in excess of the limbs at birth, gradually loses its preponderance. it was drawn up from the following figures calculated by me: types of stature according to age in years ---------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--- at birth | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ---------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ---------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--- godin furnishes the following figures, relating to the type of stature at the period preceding and following puberty: ratio of sitting stature to total stature reduced to scale of (godin) ------------------------------------------------------------- age | - / | | - / | | - / | | - / | | - / ------|------|----|------|----|------|----|------|----|------ ratio | | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------- hrdlicka has calculated the index of stature for a thousand white american children and a hundred coloured, of both sexes, and has obtained the following figures, some of which, based upon an adequate number of subjects, ( - years) are what were to be expected, while others, owing to the scarcity of subjects (under and above years) are far less satisfactory: proportion between the sitting stature and the total stature (american children) ----------------------------------------------------------------- age in| number of | males,|females,| number of | males, |females, years|subjects of| white | white |subjects of|coloured|coloured | each age | | | each age | | ------+-----------+-------+--------+-----------+--------+-------- | -- | -- | -- | | . | . | -- | -- | -- | | -- | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | . | | . | -- | | . | . | -- | -- | -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- which goes to prove (in spite of the inaccuracies due to the numerical scarcity of coloured subjects of any age) that the females are more brachyscelous than the males; and that the blacks are more macroscelous than the whites. the above table of indices of stature was worked out by hrdlicka from the following measurements: sitting stature --------------------------------------------------- age in | males, | females, | males, | females, years | white | white | coloured | coloured -------+----------+----------+----------+---------- | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | -- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -- | | | -- | -- --------------------------------------------------- total stature --------------------------------------------------- age in | males, | females, | males, | females, years | white | white | coloured | coloured -------+----------+----------+----------+---------- | -- | -- | | | -- | -- | -- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -- | | -- | -- | -- | -- | | -- | -- --------------------------------------------------- the following chart, prepared by macdonald, on the growth of the total stature and the sitting stature of male white children, born in america, gives a very clear idea of the rhythm of each of the two statures. the sitting stature increases quite slowly, and its greatest rate of growth is immediately after puberty (from to years) (fig. ) [illustration: mac donald. fig. .] lastly, in order to make this phenomenon still more clear, i have reproduced an illustration given by stratz, consisting of a series of outlined bodies of children representing the proportions of the body at different stages of growth; and not only the proportions between the bust and the lower limbs, but also between the various component parts of the bust, as for instance the head and trunk. the transverse lines indicate the changes in the principal levels: the head, the mammary glands, and the bust (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] the different types of stature at different ages deserve our most careful consideration, yet not from the point of view already set forth regarding the different types in the fully developed individual. in the present case for instance, we cannot say of a youth of sixteen that, because he is macroscelous he is a weakling as compared with a boy of ten who is brachyscelous; nor that a new-born child represents the maximum physical potentiality, because he is ultra-brachyscelous. our standards must be completely altered, when we come to consider the various types as stages of transition between two normal forms, representing the evolution from one to the other. at each age we observe not only different proportions between the two fundamental parts of the stature, but physiological characteristics as well, biological signs of predispositions to certain determined maladies, and psychological characteristics differing from one another, and each typical of a particular age. from the purely physical and morphological point of view, for example, a child from its birth up to its second year, the period of maximum brachyscelia and consequent visceral predominance, is essentially a _feeding_ animal. after this begins the development of psychic life, until finally, just before the attainment of full normal proportions, the function of reproduction is established, entailing certain definite characteristics upon the adult man or woman. in accordance with its type of stature, we see that the child from its birth to the end of the first year shows a maximum development of the adipose system together with a preponderance of the digestive organs; while the adolescent, in the period preceding puberty, shows in accordance with his macroscelous type of stature, and reduction in the relative proportion of his visceral organs, a characteristic loss of flesh. these evolutionary changes in the course of growth having been once established, it remains for us to consider the individual variations. the alterations observed at the various ages, or rather, the notable characteristics of each age, serve as so many fundamental charts of the normal average child; and we may consider each successive type of stature, from the new-born infant to the adult man, in the same light as we do the average type of the mature mesatiscelous type. in the case of the latter, we found that both above and below the medium stature, there were a host of individual types departing more or less widely from it, and tending toward brachyscelia on the one hand and toward macroscelia on the other, thus constituting the oscillations of type in the individual varieties. similarly, in the case of the medium type of each successive age we may find brachyscelous or macroscelous individuals whose complex personal characteristics may be compared to those already observed in the adult, and may be summed up as follows: that the macroscele is a weakling; and that the brachyscele may be, according to the degree of variation, either a robust individual or an individual that has been arrested in his morphological development, and retained the type of a younger age. _pedagogic considerations._--from the above conclusion, we may deduce certain principles that can be profitably applied to pedagogy, especially in regard to some of the methods suited to our guidance in the physical education of children. let us begin with the happy comparison drawn by manouvrier, who describes an imaginary duel with swords between a macroscelous and a brachyscelous type. the duel, according to social conventions, must take place under equal conditions: hence the seconds take rigorous care in measuring the ground, the length of the swords, and determine the number of paces permitted to the duelists. but since they have forgotten the anthropologic side, the conditions are not entirely equal: by having a longer arm, the macroscele is in the same position as though he had a longer sword; and because he has a greater development of the lower limbs, the established number of strides will take him over a greater space of ground than his adversary. consequently, the conditions as a matter of fact are so favourable to the macroscele, that is, to the weaker individual, that the latter has a greater chance of victory. the brachyscele might, to be sure, offset this by a different manoeuvre depending on his superior agility; but both he and the macroscele were trained in the same identical method, which takes into consideration only the external factor, the arms of defence, and the immutable laws of chivalry. well, something quite similar happens in the duel of life, which is waged in school and in the outside social environment. we ignore individual differences, and concern ourselves solely with the _means_ of education, considering that they are just, so long as they are equal for all. the fencing-master, if he had been an anthropologist, might have counteracted the probability that the stronger pupil would be beaten by the weaker, by advising the brachyscele always to choose a pistol in place of a sword, or by teaching him some manoeuvre entirely different from that which affords the macroscele a favourable preparation for fencing. and in the same way, it is the duty of the school-teacher to select the _arms_ best adapted to lead his pupil on to victory. that is, the teacher ought to make the anthropological study of the pupil precede his education; he should prepare him for whatever he is best adapted for, and should indicate to him the paths that are best for him to follow, in the struggle for existence. but, aside from general considerations, we may point out that something very similar to the above-mentioned duel takes place in school when, in the course of gymnastic exercises, we make the children march, arranging them according to their total height. we expect them to march evenly and walk, not run, yet we do not trouble to ask whether their legs are of equal length. when we wish to know which of our pupils is the swiftest runner, we start them all together, macrosceles and brachysceles alike, neglecting to measure their lower limbs, the weight of their bodies, the circumference of their chests. then we say "bravo!" to the macroscele, that is, the pupil who is most agile but at the same time the weakest, and we encourage him in a pride based upon a physiological inferiority. when we practise exercises of endurance, we find that certain children weary sooner, suffer from shortness of breath, and frequently drop out of the contest, in which the victory is reserved for others. the latter are the brachysceles, who have big lungs and a robust heart at their disposal. in this case we say "bravo!" to the brachysceles. then we try to arouse a noble rivalry between the two types, encouraging emulation, and holding up before the brachyscele the example of the macroscele's agility, and before the macroscele the example of the brachyscele's endurance--and perhaps we reward the two types with different medals. such decisions by the teacher evidently have no such foundation in justice as he supposes; the diverse abilities of the two types of children are associated with the constitution of their organisms. a modern teacher ought instead to subject the brachyscelous child to exercises adapted to develop his length of limb, and the macroscelous to gymnastics that will increase the development of his chest; and he will abstain from all praise, reward, exhortation and emulation, that have for their sole basis the pupil's complete anthropological inefficiency. "_the judgment passed by the teacher in assigning rewards and_ _punishments is often an unconscious diagnosis of the child's_ _anthropological personality._" similar unconscious judgments are exceedingly widespread. manouvrier gives a brilliant exposition of them in the course of his general considerations regarding the macroscelous and brachyscelous types. a brachyscelous ballet-dancer, all grace and endurance in her dancing, thanks to the strength of her lungs, can never be imitated in her movements by a macroscelous, angular woman, with legs ungracefully long. the latter, on the contrary, wrapped in a mantle, may become the incarnation of a stately matron, extending her long arms in majestic gestures. yet it often happens that the stately actress envies and seeks to imitate the grace of the dancer, while the latter envies and emulates the grave dignity of the actress. in any private drawing-room the same thing occurs, in the shape of different advantages distributed among persons of different types. _there are some gestures that are inimitable because they_ _are associated with a certain anthropologic personality._ every one in the world ought to do the things for which he is specially adapted. it is the part of wisdom to recognise what each one of us is best fitted for, and it is the part of education to _perfect_ and _utilise_ such predispositions. because education can _direct_ and _aid_ nature, but can never transform her. manouvrier is constantly observing how the macroscelous and brachyscelous types are adapted to _different kinds_ of social labour; thus, for example, the macroscele will make an excellent reaper, because of the wide sweep of his arms, and he is well adapted to be a tiller of the soil; while the brachyscele, on the contrary, will succeed admirably in employment that requires continuous and energetic effort, such as lifting weights, hammering on an anvil, or tending the work of a machine. in the social evolution now taking place, the services of the macrosceles are steadily becoming less necessary; intensive modern labour requires the short, robust arm of the brachyscele. such considerations ought not to escape the notice of the teacher, who sees in the boy the future man. he has the high mission of preparing the duelists of life for victory, by now correcting and again aiding the nature of each. and the first point of departure is undoubtedly to learn to know, in each case _le physique du role_. abnormal types of stature and general principles of biological ethics abnormal types of stature in their relation to moral training.--macroscelia and brachyscelia in pathologic individuals (de giovanni's hyposthenic and hypersthenic types).--types of stature in emotional criminals and in parasites.--extreme types of stature among the extra-social classes: nanism and gigantism. let us start from a picture traced in the course of the preceding lessons; the types of stature as related to race. the chinese, being brachyscelous, ought to be hearty eaters; instead, they are the most sparing people on earth. such parsimony, equally with religion and social morality, may be considered as a racial obligation. the whole life of the chinese is founded upon duty: fidelity to religion, to the laws, to the spirit of discipline, to the spirit of _sacrifice_, which always finds the chinese citizen ready to die for his ethics and for his country, are strong characteristics of these invincible men. their whole education rests solely upon a _mnemonic_ basis; and their laws, which are highly democratic, make it possible for anyone to rise to the highest circles, provided he can pass the competitive examinations. in other words, the laws aid in the _natural_ selection of the really strong, and regard favouritism as a crime against the state. on such individual and national virtues is founded the survival of the race and of the massive empire. if to-morrow the chinese should renounce his creed, become a _glutton_, a pleasure-seeker, and follow the instincts of nature, he would be advancing in mighty strides on the path that leads to death. accordingly, what we call _virtue_ may have a biologic basis, and represent the _active force_ that tends to correct the defects of nature. we can conceive of a _type_ of man, whose _life_ is associated with sacrifice; and whose path of evolution is necessarily limited, first because his personality is imperfect, secondly because a part of his individual energy is necessarily expended in _conquering_, or if you prefer, in _correcting_ his own nature. evolution ought to be free; but instead, such a type is necessarily in bondage to _duty_, which stops its progress. accordingly, the civilisation of china remains the civilisation of china; it cannot invade the world. the european on the contrary has no such racial virtues; whatever virtues he has are associated with transitory forms of civilisation, and are ready to succeed one another on the pathway of unlimited progress. the race can permit itself the luxury of not being virtuous on its own account; its biological conditions are so perfect, that they have reached the _fullness of life_. if virtue is the goal of the chinese, happiness is the goal of the european. the _race_ may indulge freely in the joys of living; and dedicate its efforts solely to the _unlimited progress of social civilisation_, and to the conquest of the entire earth. the tasmanian, on the other hand, sparing by nature, lacking sufficient development of the organs of vegetative life, avoids every form of civilisation, and precipitates himself, an unconscious victim, upon the road to death. his natural parsimony, the scantiness of his needs, have prevented him from ever feeling that _spur_ toward struggle and conquest which has its basis in the necessities of life. neither virtue, nor felicity, nor civilisation, nor survival were possible to that race, whose extermination began with the first contact with european civilisation. hence we may draw up a table that will serve to make clear certain fundamental ideas that may prove useful guides along our pedagogic path: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- biological types | brachysceles | mesatisceles | macrosceles ------------------+---------------+-----------------+----------------- races and peoples | chinese. | europeans. | tasmanians. civilisation | stable | changeable | outside the | civilisation,| civilisation, | pale of | but limited. | with unlimited | civilisation. | | powers of | | | evolution. | psycho-moral types| high ideal of | happiness. | insensibility. | virtue and | | | sacrifice. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- we ought to strive for the supreme result of producing men who will be _happy_; always keeping clearly before us the idea that the happy man is the one who may be spared the effort of thinking of himself, and dedicate _all_ his energies to the unlimited progress of human society. the preoccupation of _virtue_, the _voluntary_ _sacrifice_ are in any case forces turned back upon themselves, that expend upon the individual energies that are lost to the world at large; nevertheless, such _standards of virtue_ are necessary for certain inferior types. there exist, besides, certain individuals in rebellion against society, outcasts whose lives depend upon the succor of the strong, or may be destroyed by their adverse intervention, but in any case have ceased to depend upon the will of the individuals themselves. between two inferior types the one with the better chances is the one with the larger chest development; apparently, in the case of biological deviations, _melius est abundare quam deficere_. accordingly, let us draw up a chart. human perfectionment tends toward _harmony_. if we wish to represent this by some symbolic or intuitive sign, we could not do so by a mere line; because perfection is not reached by the quantitative increase of favourable parts; robustness, for instance, cannot be indefinitely increased by augmenting the degree of brachyscelia; nor can intelligence be increased by augmenting the volume of the head; but perfection is approached, in the race and in the individual, through a _central harmony_. it is accordingly in the direction of this centre that progress is made; and whoever departs furthest from this centre, departs furthest from perfection, becomes more eccentric, more untypical, and at the same time also loses the psycho-moral potentiality to attain the highest civic perfection. in fig. , we have a graphic representation in three concentric circles. [illustration: fig. ] let us begin by considering the middle circle, that of the abnormals. here we have inscribed, as psycho-moral and physio-pathological traits, abstemiousness, _anti-social tendency,_ _predisposition to disease_. abstemiousness represents a _corrective_, without which the individual tends toward an anti-social line of action and contracts diseases. abstemiousness is present within the circle of abnormal human beings, as a more or less attainable ideal; but it must be regarded as the pedagogic goal, when the problem arises of educating an untypical class of individuals. in other words, there are certain abnormal individuals who, if they are not to turn out criminals, must exercise a _violent corrective_ _influence over their psycho-physical personality_, and they must be trained to do so; for it is an influence unknown to the normal man, who not only has no inclination to commit a crime, but recoils from doing so, and on the contrary may arise to degrees of moral perfection that are inconceivable to the abnormal man. consequently, in order to maintain a relatively healthy condition, certain abnormal individuals are constrained to submit themselves to a _severe hygienic régime throughout their entire life_; a régime useless to the normal man, who indulges naturally in all the pleasures which are consistent with the full measure of physical health, and which remain forever unknown, and unattainable, to the abnormal individual organically predisposed to disease. such self-restraint we may call the _culte of virtue_, a necessity only to certain categories of men; and we may also call it the _virtue of inferior individuals_. it applies and is limited almost wholly to the individual. meanwhile, there is the normal man's high standard of virtue, which is an indefinite progress toward moral perfection; but the path it follows lies wholly in the direction of society collectively, or toward the biological perfectionment of the species. in life's attainment of such a triumph, man both feels and is _happy_ rather than virtuous. the separation between the circles, or rather between the different categories of individuals, the normal and the abnormal, is not clear-cut. there always exist certain imperceptibly transitional forms, between normality and abnormality; and furthermore, since no one of us is ideally normal, no one who is not abnormal in _some one thing_, it follows that this "some one thing" must be corrected by the humbling practice of self-discipline. at the same time it is rare for a man to be abnormal in all parts of his personality; in such a case he would be outside the social pale, a monstrosity; the high, collective virtues can, therefore, even if in a limited degree, illuminate the moral life of the abnormals. st. paul felt that it "is hard to kick against the pricks"; and the _picciotto_ of the camorra feels that he is obeying a society that protects the weak. it is a question of _degree_. but such a conception must lead to a separation in _school_ and in method of education, for the two categories of individuals. abnormal types according to de giovanni's theory certain very important pathological types have been distinguished and established in italy by de giovanni, the paduan clinical professor who introduced the anthropological method into clinical practice. through his interesting studies, he has to-day fortunately revived the ancient theory of temperaments, explaining them on a basis of physio-pathological anthropology. de giovanni distinguishes two _fundamental types_; the one _hyposthenic_ (weak), the other _hypersthenic_ (over-excitable); these two types obey the following rules: morphologically considered, the hyposthenic type has a total spread of arms greater than the total stature and a chest circumference of less than half the stature: these data alone are enough to tell us that the type in question is _macroscelous_; as a matter of fact, the chest is narrow and the abdomen narrower still. de giovanni says that, owing to the scant pulmonary and abdominal capacity the organs of vegetative life are inadequate; the heart is too small and unequal to its function of general irrigator of the organism; the circulation is consequently sluggish, as shown by the bluish network of veins, indicating some obstacle to the flow of blood. the type is predominantly lymphatic, the muscles flaccid, with a tendency to develop fatty tissues, but very little muscular fibre; there is a predisposition to bronchial catarrh, but above all to pulmonary tuberculosis. this _hyposthenic type_, which corresponds to the _lymphatic temperament_ of greek medicine, is in reality a macroscelous type somewhat exceeding normal limits and therefore physiologically inefficient and feeble. the following is de giovanni's description: _morphologically._--deficient chest capacity, deficient abdominal capacity, disproportionate and excessive development of the limbs; insufficient muscularity. _physiologically._--insufficient _respiration_, and consequent scanty supply of oxygen (a form of chronic asphyxia of internal origin), insufficient _circulation_, because the small heart sends the blood through the arteries at too low a pressure; and this blood, insufficiently oxygenated, fails to furnish the tissues with their normal interchange of matter, and therefore the assimilative functions in general all suffer; finally, the venous blood is under an excessive pressure in the veins, the return flow to the heart is rendered difficult and there results a tendency to venous hyperemia (congestion of the veins), even in the internal organs. this is accompanied by what de giovanni calls _nervous erethism_ (in contradistinction to _torpor_), which amounts to an abnormal state of the central nervous system, causing predisposition to insanity and to various forms of neurasthenia (rapid exhaustion, irritability). this type is especially predisposed to maladies of the respiratory system, subject to bronchial catarrh recurring annually, liable to attacks of bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia, and easily falls victim to _pulmonary tuberculosis_. here are a few cases recorded by de giovanni.[ ] (it must be borne in mind that the total spread of the arms, _ts_, ought to equal the total stature, _st_. the measurements are given in centimetres.) f. m.--_st_ ; _ts_ .--extremely frail; frequent attacks of hemorrhage of the nose; habitually pale and thin. certain disproportions of the skeleton, hands and feet greatly enlarged; extreme development of the subcutaneous veins. _pulmonary tuberculosis_. a. m.--_st_ ; _ts_ .--nervous erethism; from the age of twelve subject to laryngo-bronchial catarrh; every slight illness accompanied by fever; habitually thin. _pulmonary_ _tuberculosis_. f. m.--_st_ ; _ts_ ; _ct_ .--lymphatic, torpid, almost chronic bloating of the abdomen. enlargement of the glands; scars from chilblains on hands and feet. _primary tuberculosis of_ _the glands, secondary tuberculosis of the lungs._ a. m.--_st_ ; _ts_ .--extreme emaciation, heart singularly small. _chronic bronchial catarrh._ if it is important for us, as educators, to be acquainted with this type in the adult state, it ought to interest us far more during its _ontogenesis_, that is, during the course of its individual evolution. since, in the process of growth, man passes through different _stages_, due to alteration in the relative proportions of the different organs and parts, it follows that this hyposthenic type correspondingly alters its _predisposition to disease_. its final state, manifested by various defects of development, gave unmistakable forewarnings at every period of growth. in early infancy symptoms of rickets presented themselves, and then disappeared, like an unfulfilled threat: dentition was tardy or irregular; the head was large and with persistent nodules. this class, as a type, is weak, sickly, easily attacked by infectious diseases, tracoma, purulent otitis. when the first period of growth is passed, _glandular_ symptoms begin, with liability to sluggishness of the lymphatic glands (scrofula) or persistent swelling of the lymphatic ganglia of the neck. this is supplemented by bronchial catarrh, recurring year after year; finally intestinal catarrh follows, accompanied in most cases by loss of appetite. such conditions are influenced very slightly or not at all by medical treatment. during the period of _puberty_, _cardiopalmus_ (palpitation of the heart) is very likely to occur, often accompanied by frequent and abundant epistasis, or by the occurrence of slight fever in the evening, and by blood-stained expectorations, suggestive of tuberculosis. the patient is pale (oligohæmic), very thin, and shoots up rapidly (preponderant growth of the limbs); he is subject to _muscular asthenia_ (weakness, exhaustibility of the muscles) and to various forms of nervous excitability. these symptoms also (some of them so serious as to arouse fears, at one time of rickets and at another of tuberculosis), are all of them quite beyond the reach of medical treatment (tonics, etc.). now, a fact of the highest importance, discovered by de giovanni, is that of _spontaneous corrections_, that is, the development of _compensations_ within the organism, suited to mitigate the anomalous conditions of this type, and hence the _possibility of_ _an artificial intervention_ capable of calling forth such compensations. such intervention cannot be other then _pedagogic_; and it should consist in a rational system of gymnastics, designed in one case to develop the heart, in another the chest, in another to modify the intestinal functions or to stimulate the material renewal of the body; while every form of overexertion must be rigorously avoided. "i think that we should regard as an error not without consequences what may be seen any day in the gymnasiums of the public schools, where pupils differing in bodily aptitude, and with different gymnastic capacity and different needs are with little discernment subjected to the same identical exercises, for the same length of time. "and day by day we see the results: there are some children who rebel outright against the required exercise which they fear and from which they cannot hope to profit, because it demands an effort beyond their strength. some have even been greatly harmed; so that one after another they abandon these bodily exercises, which if they had been more wisely directed would assuredly have bettered their lot. [illustration: fig. . fig. . brachyscelous type (from viola).] [illustration: fig. . fig. . macroscelous type (from viola).] "experience also teaches that one pupil may be adapted to one kind of exercise and another to another kind. accordingly a really physiological system of gymnastics requires that _those_ _movements and those exercises which are least easily performed should_ _be practised according to special methods, until they have strengthened_ _the less developed functions_, without ever causing illness or producing harmful reactions.[ ]" so that the final results are an improvement in the morphological proportions of the organism, and consequently a correction and improvement in the relative liability to disease. the other fundamental pathological type described by de giovanni is the _hypersthenic_ (second morphological combination), corresponding in part to the _sanguine_ temperament of greek medicine, and in part to the _bilious_ temperament. in this type the total spread of the arms is generally less than the stature, and the perimeter of the chest notably exceeds one-half the stature. consequently we are dealing with the _brachyscelous_ type. this type has a greatly developed thorax, a _large heart_, an excessive development of the intestines; hence he is a hearty eater, subject to an over-abundance of blood; he is over-nourished, the ruddy skin reveals an abundant circulation, there is an excess of adipose tissue and a good development of the striped muscles. such a constitution accompanies an _excitable_, _impulsive_, _violent_ disposition, and conduces to diseases of the heart. "this type is characterised in general by robustness and a liability to disorders of the central circulatory system."[ ] but there are still other forms of disease that await the individuals of this class, such for example as disorders affecting the interchange of organic matter (diabetes, gout, polysarcia = obesity) and attacks of an apoplectic nature. in the case of acute illness individuals of this class suffer from excess of blood and may be relieved by being bled. they are readily liable to bloody excretions. here are a few cases illustrating this _morphological combination_, which is characterised by an exorbitant chest development (it must be borne in mind that the circumference of the thorax, _ct_, should equal one-half the stature, _st_). p. a.--_st_ ; _ct_ .--endocarditis; insufficient heart-action. z. c.--_st_ ; _ct_ .--cerebral hyperemia of an apoplectic nature. hypertrophy of the left ventricle of the heart. _polysarcous_ (gluttonous) _eater_. b. g--_st_ ; _ct_ .--diabetic, obese, subject to diabetic ischialgia (neuralgia), frequent recurrence of gravel in the urine. _tendency to excesses of the table._ d. g.--_st_ ; _ct_ .--polysarcia, the first symptoms of which appeared in early youth. at the age of sixteen, suffered from all the discomforts of obesity. shows atheroma (fatty degeneration) of the aorta, irregular heart-action, hypertrophy and enlargement of the heart. in this brachyscelous type it may happen either that the whole trunk (that is, both the thoracic and abdominal cavities) is in excess, or else that the excessive development is confined to the abdomen. this latter case is very frequent, and may easily be found even in early childhood. such children are hearty eaters, are very active and, for this reason, the pride and joy of their parents. nevertheless, there are many signs that should give warning of constitutional defects; constant digestive disturbances (diarrhoea), frequent headaches, pains in the joints, apparently of a rheumatic character, tendency to pains in the liver which is excessively enlarged; excess of adipose tissue; a tendency to fall ill very easily, of maladies that are almost always happily overcome (but the truly robust person is not the one who recovers from illness, but the one who _does not become ill_), and finally an excessively lively disposition, irritability and above all, _impulsiveness_. such individuals ought, like the macrosceles, to live under the necessary and perpetual tyranny of a hygienic régime, adapted to correct or to diminish the morbid predispositions associated with the organism. a special dietetic, a regular hydrotherapic treatment, a moderate gymnastic exercise designed to _direct_ the child's motive powers, and thus to prepare the _man_ for that form of existence to which it is necessary for him to subject himself, if he does not wish to shorten his own life, or at least his period of activity--all these things are so many duties which the _school_ ought in great part to assume. in this way we have briefly considered the _abnormal_ types of brachyscelia and macroscelia, which by their very constitution are _predisposed_ to incur special and characteristic forms of disease, which may be avoided only by subjecting the organism to a special hygienic regimen. _men cannot all live according to the same rules._ types of stature in criminals in these latter times, some very recent researches have been made by applying de giovanni's method to the anthropological study of criminals, especially through the labours of dr. boxich. he has found that the great majority of parasitic criminals, thieves for example, are macrosceles. they exhibit the stigmata already revealed by lombroso: great length of the upper limbs, with elongated hands; furthermore, a narrow chest and a small heart, insufficient for its vital function; such individuals are singularly predisposed to pulmonary tuberculosis, and hence in their physical constitution they are already stamped as organisms of inferior biological value--having little endurance and almost no ability as producers--consequently they are forced to live as they can, that is like parasites, profiting by the work of others. on the contrary, the great majority of criminals of a violent character present the brachyscelous type: the thorax is greatly developed, the heart hypertrophic, the arterial circulation superabundant. this class of criminals, including a large proportion of murderers, have a special tendency to _act from impulse_, corresponding to their large heart which sends an excess of blood pulsing violently to the brain, obscuring the psychic functions; or, in the speech of the people, such a man has "lost his reason," "the light goes from the eyes when the blood goes to the brain." here are some notes regarding these two different types: we will select as measures of comparison the stature and the weight, bearing in mind that in the macrosceles the weight is scanty and that the opposite is true of the brachysceles, while normally there ought to be a pretty close correspondence between the weight in kilograms and the centimetres of stature over and above one metre. types of non-violent criminals (_parasites_) case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . farm steward, three years' sentence for theft. pallid complexion, visible veins, scant muscles. heart small and weak, pulse feeble and slow. case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . baker, comfortable financial circumstances, has received a number of sentences for theft, amounting altogether to ten years. is twenty-four years of age. cyanosis of the extremities (bluish tinge, due to excessive venous circulation). cardiac action feeble. scant muscles. case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . peasant. straitened circumstances. four years' sentence for theft. rejected by the army board for defective chest measurement. dark complexion. extensive acne. scant muscles. bronchial catarrh. has had hemoptysis (spitting of blood). cardiac action weak. pulse very feeble. case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . book-binder. prosperous circumstances. four years' sentence or thereabouts, for theft; age, twenty-four. conjunctivitis and blepharitis from early childhood. frontal and parietal nodules prominent. muscles scant; cardiac action weak; lymphatic glands of the neck enlarged. the following is an example of the typical thief:[ ] _st._ ; _wt._ .--exceedingly small heart, feeble cardiac action. suffers from chronic bronchial catarrh. cranial nodules very prominent. began as a small child to steal in his own home, and since then has received sentence after sentence for theft, up to his present age of twenty-nine. types of violent criminals (_assault_, _mayhem_, _homicide_) case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . peasant. good financial circumstances. condemned to thirty years in prison for homicide. well-developed muscles. blood vessels congested. strong heart action; the pulsation extends as far down as the epigastrium. ample pulse. case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . shoemaker. bad financial circumstances. condemned to fifteen years' imprisonment for homicide, after having been previously convicted three times for theft. the chest circumference exceeds one-half the stature by centimetres. subject to frequent pains in the head. good muscles. corpulent. full pulse. (it should be noticed that the florid complexion, accompanying this type of stature, persists in spite of straitened circumstances!) case no. .--_st._ ; _wt._ . turner in iron. comfortable circumstances. sentenced to thirty years in prison after one previous conviction for criminal assault. ruddy complexion. veins not visible. abdomen very prominent. gastrectasia (dilation of the stomach). entire cardiac region protuberant. laboured breathing. cardiac action abundant. hence we perceive, in the etiology of crime, the importance of the organic factor, connected directly with the lack of harmony in the viscera and their functions, and consequently accompanied by special morbid predispositions. as a result of this line of research, criminality and pathology are coming to be studied more and more in conjunction. for that matter, it was already observed by lombroso that in addition to the various external malformations found in criminals, there were also certain anomalies of the internal organs, and a widespread and varied predisposition to disease. in short, his statistics reveal a prevalence of cardiac maladies and of tuberculosis in criminals, as well as a great frequency of diseases of the liver and the intestines. extreme or infantile types, nanism and gigantism, extra-social types whenever the disproportion between the bust and the limbs surpasses the extreme normal limits, the whole individual reveals a complex departure from type. thus, for example, in connection with extreme _brachyscelia_, there exists a characteristic form of nanism (dwarfishness), called _achondroplastic nanism_, in which, although the bust is developed very nearly within normal limits, the limbs on the contrary are arrested in their growth so as to remain permanently nothing more than _little appendages_ of the trunk. this calls to mind the foetal form of the new-born child, and the resulting type, because of this morphological coincidence, is classed among the infantile types. achondroplastic nanism is associated with a _pathological_ deformity due to foetal rickets. it is not only the child after birth, but the foetus also which, during its intrauterine life, may be subject to diseases. rickets (always a localised disease, usually attacking some part of the skeleton) in this case fastens upon the enchondral cartilages of the long bones. as we know, the long bones are composed of a body or _diaphysis_ and of extremities or articular heads, the _epiphyses_. now, these different parts, which form in the adult a continuous whole, remain separate throughout the foetal and the immediate post-natal period: so that the heads of the humerus and the femur, for example, in the case of the new-born child, are found to be joined to the _diaphysis_ by cartilages (destined to ossify later on), which are the chief seat of growth of the bones in the direction of length. well, in these cases of pre-natal rickets, the union of the bony segments takes place prematurely, and since the bones can hardly grow at all in length, they develop in thickness, and the result is that the limbs remain very short and stocky. meanwhile the bust, the bones of which have in no way lost their power of growth, develops normally. now, these dwarfs, who have abundant intelligence, because they have the essential parts of stature in their favour, constituted the famous jesters of the mediæval courts, whose misfortune served to solace the leisure hours of royalty. paolo veronese went so far as to introduce a dwarf buffoon, of the achondroplastic type, into his famous painting, _the wedding at cana_. conversely, in connection with an exaggerated _macroscelia_, we have gigantism. ordinarily, a giant has a bust that is not greatly in excess of normal dimensions. the limbs, on the contrary, depart extremely from the normal limits, in an exaggerated growth in the direction of length: so much so that the bodies of giants present the appearance of small busts moving around on stilts. nevertheless, many different forms of gigantism occur. the pathology of this phenomenon is quite complex; but we can not concern ourselves with it here. it is a scientific problem of no immediate utility to our pedagogic problems. dwarfs and giants, whatever their type and their pathological etiology, constitute extra-social individuals, who have been at all times excluded from any possibility of adaptation to useful labour, and employed, whether in the middle ages or in the twentieth century, to a greater or less extent as a source of amusement to normal beings, because of their grotesque appearance, either at court or in the theatres, or in moving pictures, or (in the case of giants) as figures suited to adorn princely or imperial gateways. these individuals are as completely independent of the social conditions of the environment in which they were born as if they were extraneous to humanity. in relation to the species, they are _sterile_. from the biological side, a consideration of these types serves merely as an illustration of an important law: _the essential part_ _of the organism_ (the vertebral column) is _less variable_ than the accessory parts (the limbs). summary of the types of stature according to the relative development of bust and limbs we have distinguished three types, the macrosceles, the brachysceles and the mesatisceles, within their respective limits of oscillation. since the type of stature gives us a proportion between the different parts of an individual, it constitutes a fundamental criterion for a morphological judgment of the personality. that is, it leads to a diagnosis of the individual constitution, with which are associated not only the "character" but also certain predispositions to disease. a knowledge of these _types_ shows us the necessity we educators are under of taking into consideration the individual pupils, each of whom may have separate needs, tendencies and forms of development; and of demanding separate _schools_, in which even the _methods_ _of moral education_ must differ. because men are not only not all adapted to the same forms of work, but they are not even all adapted to the same standards of _morality_. and since it is our duty to assume the task of aiding the _biological development_ and the _social adaptation_ of the new generations, it will also be part of our task to _correct_ defective organisms, and at the same time to correct the types of mental and moral inferiority. in the following chart we may summarise the points of view from which we have studied the types of stature: synoptic chart types of { macrosceles {long legs, short bust. stature { brachysceles {short legs, long bust. { { / mongols (brachysceles). { { { tasmanians (macrosceles). { { { dark mediterranean race { { { (mesatisceles tending { { race { toward brachyscelia). variations in { { { blond race (mesatisceles types of { normal { { tending toward macroscelia). stature { { / woman more brachyscelous. { { sex \ man more macroscelous. { { { childhood brachyscelous. { { age { old age macroscelous. { / de giovanni's { macrosceles { { hyposthenic { predisposed to { pathologically{ types { tuberculosis. { abnormal. { de giovanni's { brachysceles predisposed variations in { { hypersthenic { predisposed to types of { { types. { diseases of stature { { { the heart. { criminals. / macrosceles......parasites. { \ brachysceles.....violent. { infantile / achondroplastic nanism. { types \ gigantism. summary of the scientific principles illustrated in the course of our discussion _biological laws._--_a._ growth is not only an augmentation in volume, but also an evolution in form. _b._ the more essential parts vary less than the accessory parts in the course of their transformations. _the index._--the index is the mathematical relation between the measurements belonging to the same individual, and as such it gives us an idea of the _form_; since the form is determined by the relations between the various parts constituting the whole. the stature while the figure and the type of stature tend to delineate the _individual_ considered by himself, the different measurements considered separately may guide us in our study of individuals in their relation to the race and the environment. among the measurements of the _form_, we will limit ourselves to a study of the _stature_ and the _weight_, which serve to give us respectively the linear index of development and the volumetric estimate of the body taken as a whole. we shall reserve the study of the other measurements, such as the total spread of the arms and the perimeter of the thorax, until we come to the analytical investigation of the separate parts of the body (limbs, thorax). the _stature_ is expressed by a _linear measure_ determined by the distance intervening in a vertical direction between the plane on which the individual is standing in an erect position and the top of his head. it follows that the _stature_ is a measurement determined by the _erect position_; on the other hand, when a man is in a recumbent position, what we could determine would be the _length_ of body, which is not identical with the stature. in fact, a man on foot, resting his weight upon articulations that are elastic, and therefore compressible, is a little shorter than when he is recumbent. if we examine the skeleton (see fig. ), we discover that the single synthetic measure that constitutes the stature results from a sum of parts that differ greatly from one another. to be specific, it is composed of the long and short bones of the lower limbs; of flat bones, such as the pelvis and the skull; of little spongy bones, such as the vertebræ; all of which bones and parts obey different laws in the course of their growth. furthermore, intervening between these various bones are _soft_, elastic parts, known as the articulations, which, starting from below, succeed each other in the following order: . _calcaneo-astragaloid_, between the _calcaneus_ and the superimposed _astragalus_. . _tibio-astragaloid_, between the _astragalus_ and the superimposed _tibia_. . of the _knee_, between the _tibia_ and the _femur_. . of the _hip_, between the _femur_ and the _os innominatum_. . _sacro-iliac_, between the _os iliacum_ and the _sacrum_. . _sacro-vertebral_, between the _sacrum_ and the _last lumbar vertebra_. . of the _vertebræ_, consisting of intervertebral disks, that is to say interposed between the vertebræ, which include the following: _ lumbar,_ _ thoracic, cervical_. . _occipito-atloid_, between the first cervical vertebra, called the _atlas_ and the _os occipitale_ of the cranium. accordingly, there are _thirty_ articulations in all; and of these, are the intervertebral disks, which constitute, taken together, a fourth part of the complex height of the vertebral column. furthermore, the height of the body cannot be considered simply the _sum_ of the component parts, since these are not superimposed in a straight line. as a matter of fact, if we examine the vertebral column, we see that it is not straight as in the case of animals, but exhibits certain curves that are characteristic of the _human species_, and must be taken into consideration in their relation to the _erect position_. in fact, the vertebral column presents two curvatures, the one _lumbar_, and the other _cervical_, which together give it the form of an s. these curvatures are _acquired_ along with the _erect position_, and are not innate; one of the points of difference between the skeleton of the new-born child and that of the adult is precisely this, that the former has a _straight_ vertebral column. a fact of no small importance to note, since in the _course of_ _growth_ a certain _determined_ form of normal curve, and no other, ought to establish itself; otherwise, _abnormal deviations_ in the vertebral column will become established. and for the very reason that it is _plastic_ and _destined_ to assume a _curve_, the vertebral column may very easily be forced into exaggerating or departing from its morphological destiny. in such a case, the resulting stature would be _inferior_ to what it should normally have been. accordingly, the stature is the resultant of the sum of _anatomical_ _parts_ and of _morphological conditions_. hence it is a _linear index_ not only of _biological man_, that is, of man considered in relation to his racial limitations; but also of social man, that is, of man as he has developed in the struggle for adaptation to his environment. _the limits of stature, according to race._ stature is an anthropological datum of great _biological_ value, since it is a definite _racial_ characteristic and is preserved from generation to generation by _heredity_. the first distinguishing trait of a race is the height of the body in its natural erect position. it is also the first characteristic that strikes us when a stranger comes toward us for the first time. and that is why we make it the leading descriptive trait: a person of tall, or of low stature. if, for a moment, we should picture to ourselves the legend of noah's ark--quite incredible, because emigration and embarkation of all the known species would have required more than a century of time (it is enough merely to think of the embarkation of the tortoises and the sloths!), and the necessity of an ark as big as a nation, what must inevitably have struck noah and his sons would have been the _stature_ of the individuals belonging to each separate species. the _stature_ is the linear index of the limit of mass. among the human races the variations in stature are included between fairly wide oscillations: coming down to facts, the average stature of the akkas is . m. ( ft. - / in.) for the males; and that of the scotchmen of galloway is . m. ( ft. - / in.). accordingly between the average heights of the two races that are considered as the _extremes_, there is a difference of cm. ( - / in.); but since the averages are obtained from a complex mass of normal measurements, some of which are _above_ and others necessarily _below_ the average itself, we may assert that the "_normal human individuals_" may differ in stature to an extent of more than half a metre; the oscillations of normal individuals on each side of the racial average being estimated at about cm. ( . in.). if we should see a little akka ft. in. ( . m.) in height alongside of a scotchman ft. ( . m.) high we should say "a _dwarf_ beside a _giant_." but such terms are _pathological_ and should never be employed to indicate _normal individualities_. as a matter of fact dwarfs and giants are as a class extra-social and sterile; normal individuals, on the contrary, represent the physiopsychic characteristics of their respective races. consequently we may say that normal people have a _low stature_, or a _high stature_; or if it is a question of extremely low stature (such as that of the akkas) we may make use of the term _pigmies_ or of the _pigmy race_, in speaking of such individuals. sergi has proved the existence, among the prehistoric inhabitants of europe, of various pigmy races. in the field of anthropology the scientific terminology ought always to be based upon certain determined limits. the authorities indicate the normal extremes of individual stature, beyond which we pass over the into realm of _pathology_, incompatible with the survival of the species; and even in the pathological cases they determine the extreme limits, obtained from the individual monstrosities that have actually existed in the course of the centuries, and that seem to indicate the furthest limits attained by the human race. deniker, in summing up the principal authorities, assigns the following limits: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |normal statures, range of oscillations among the races| |-------|----------------------------------------------| statures|lowest |exception-|extreme|extreme |exception-|highest|statures less |indi- |ally low |low |high |ally high | indi- |from than |vidual |individual|racial |racial |individual|vidual | m. . m. | | stature |average|average | stature |extreme|upward --------+-------+----------+-------+--------+----------+-------+--------- nanism | . m.| . m. | akkas |scotch- | . m. | . m.|gigantism | | | . | men of | | | | | | m. |galloway| | | | | | | . m.| | | ----------------|-------------------------------------------------------- the pathological extremes that would seem to indicate the limits of stature compatible with human life would seem to be on the one hand the little female dwarf, hilany agyba of sinai, described by jaest and cited by deniker,[ ] inches high ( . m.--the average length of the italian child at birth is . m. = - / in.), and on the other, the giant finlander, caianus, cited by topinard[ ], ft. - / in. in height ( . ); the two extremes of human stature would accordingly bear a ratio of : . on the other hand, quétélet[ ] gives the two extremes as being relatively : --namely, the swedish giant who was one of the guardsmen of frederick the great, and was . m. tall ( ft. in.); and the dwarf cited by buffon, . m. in height ( - / in.). when there is occasion for applying the terms _tall_ or _low_ stature to individuals of our own race, it is necessary at the same time to establish limits that will determine the precise meaning of such terms. livi[ ] gives as the average stature for italians . m. ( ft. in.), and speaking authoritatively as the leading statistician in anthropology, establishes the following limits: stature of italians (livi) averages determining the terminology of stature -----------------------+-------------------------+-------------------- . m. and below, low | . m. and all between | . m. and above, statures. | . - . , mean statures| tall statures. -----------------------+-------------------------+-------------------- the individual extremes among the low statures tend to approach the average stature of the japanese race ( . m.), and those among the high statures approach the anglo-saxon average (the scotch = . m.) there is much to interest us in studying the _distribution_ of statures in italy. in livi's great charts, he has marked in _blue_ those regions where the prevailing percentage of stature is high ( . m. and upward), and in red those where the low statures prevail ( . m. and below); and the varying intensity of colouration indicates the greater or lesser prevalence of the high or low statures. thus it becomes evident in one glance of the eye that tall statures prevail in northern italy and low statures in the south; while the maximum of low stature (indicated by the most intense red) is found in the islands, and especially in sardinia. in the vicinity of the central districts of italy (the marches, umbria, latium) the two colours fade out; this indicates that here all notable prevalence of stature, either tall or low, ceases; consequently we have here, as the prevailing norm, the mean stature ( . m.). anyone wishing to analyse the natural distribution of stature, has only to study these charts by livi, which are worked out with great minuteness. if a study of this sort, extending over the entire peninsula, seems too great an undertaking, it is at least advisable for a teacher to acquaint himself with the _local distribution_ of stature; in order that when it becomes his duty to judge of the stature of pupils in his school he will have the necessary idea regarding the _biological_ (racial) _basis_ on which so important an anthropological datum can oscillate. livi's charts, based upon the male stature, correspond almost perfectly with my own regional charts based upon the _average_ _statures_ of the women of latium. both livi and i find that in the region of latium the tall statures prevail north of the tiber, especially toward the confines of umbria; while the lowest statures are found in the neighbourhood of the valley of the tiber, toward the sea (castelli romani). that is to say, the stature becomes lower from north to south, and from the mountains toward the sea. furthermore, there exist certain nuclei of pure race, such as at orte and in castelli romani, where we may find the extremes of average stature, which for women are found to be . m. at orte, and . m. at castelli romani; while the extreme individual statures, according to my figures, oscillate between . m. (castelli) and . m. (orte). it would be helpful to the teachers of rome and latium, if they would acquire some idea regarding the racial types of the district, by studying my work on the _physical characteristics_ _of the young women of latium_, which is the only work on regional anthropology taken directly from life that so far exists in anthropologic literature.[ ] _the stature in relation to sex._--it is sufficient to point out that the stature varies normally between the sexes, so that the average figures differ by about centimetres (nearly in.) in the direction of a lower stature for woman. variations in stature through the different ages notwithstanding that growth is an evolution, it manifests itself also by an _absolute augmentation of mass_; and the linear index of such augmentation is given by the _growth in stature_, or by its variations at different ages. this exceedingly important measurement ought to be taken in the case of all pupils; and undoubtedly in the course of time anthropometry will form a part of our school equipment; because, by following the increase of stature in a child, we follow his physical development. in chapter vii, in which the technique of the stature is discussed, there is a graphic representation of the annual increase of stature in the two sexes; the upper parabolic line refers to the male sex, and the lower one to the female. on the vertical line are marked the measures of growth, from the base upward, and on the horizontal line the ages. all the dotted vertical lines which rise from the horizontal, each corresponding to a successive year of life, and stop at the parabolic line, represent the relative proportion of stature from year to year; while the parabola which unites the extremities of such lines may be regarded as a line drawn tangent to the top of the head of an individual through the successive periods of his life. if we analyse this table, we find that the greatest increase in stature takes place during the first year; in fact, a child which at birth has an average length of body of . m. for males, and . m. for females (the new-born child does not have _stature_, but only _length of body_, since it has not yet acquired an erect position) has by the end of the first year augmented the length of body by centimetres, which gives an average length of . m. in no other year of life will the stature acquire so notable an increase; it is very important for mothers to watch the growth of the child during this first year of its life; and the following figures may be useful for comparison: it will be seen that the maximum increase takes place during the first four months--especially in the first month ( cm. = . in.) the rate diminishing from this point up to the fourth month ( cm. = . in.), after which the monthly increase remains steadily at one centimetre ( . in.). [illustration: fig. .--new-born child, seen from in front and from behind. (stratz.)] [illustration: year. months. months. at birth. fig. --skeleton of a child from birth to the age of one year.] growth in length of body during the first year of life (from figueira) --------------+-------------------+----------------- age in months | length of body in | monthly increase | metres | --------------+-------------------+----------------- | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | | . | --------------+-------------------+----------------- the same facts appear from the combination picture given by stratz, showing an infant's skeleton at four-month intervals from birth to the end of the first year. during the second year of life, the increase in stature is about one-half that of the preceding year, that is, about cm. ( in.), so that at the end of the second year the child attains a height of about cm. ( - / in.). after this, the annual increase diminishes in intensity (see "figures of the increase of stature according to quétélet and other authors," in the technical part, chapter vii), as is shown by the horizontal dotted lines, which, starting from a vertical line at points corresponding to the height of various statures, represent by the intervals of space between them the successive growth from year to year. this increase is not regular, but proceeds by periodic impulses that in early childhood seem to recur at intervals of three years. thus for example the increase between - years of age is successively , , cm. between - years of age is successively , , cm. between - years of age is successively , , cm. between - years of age is successively , , cm. accordingly we have a _triennial rhythm_, decreasing throughout the whole period of childhood; the maximum increase is in the first triennium, the second and third periods of three years correspond exactly, while the last period shows a lowered rate of increase. at this point the period of approaching puberty begins ( years for boys), after which the rate of increase becomes more rapid than it had been during the second or third period, attaining its maximum during the years - ; to be specific, the rate from to is successively , , , , , cm. when the period of puberty is ended ( years), the rate of growth is much slower; in fact, during the two following years ( to ) it hardly attains one centimetre. nevertheless, the stature continues to increase up to the twenty-fifth year; according to quétélet's figures, the average male stature at the age of eighteen is . m. (in belgium) and at twenty-one it is . m. from twenty-five to thirty-five the stature remains stable; this is the adult age, the full attainment of maturity; at the age of forty the period of involution insensibly begins, and after fifty in the case of women, and sixty in the case of men, the stature begins insensibly to decrease; a decrease which becomes more marked with the advance of age, corresponding to an anatomical diminution of the soft parts interposed between the bones in the sum of parts that make up the stature; more especially the intervertebral disks; and in connection with this phenomenon the vertebral column tends to become more curved. according to quétélet's figures, at the age of eighty the average male stature is . m. ( ft. - / in.), a stature corresponding to that of the age of sixteen. accordingly, the variations in stature throughout the different periods of life are neither a _growth_ nor an _evolution_, but a _parabolic_ _curve_, including _evolution and involution_. this curve represents the true _human stature_; the measurements taken successively from year to year representing nothing more than transitory _episodes_ in the individual life. _man_, as he really is, we may represent by portraits taken successively from time to time, from his birth until his death; the occasional photograph which it is the custom to have taken represents nothing; following no rule, it seizes a fugitive instant in the life of an individual, who is never a fixed quantity but is constantly in transition during the whole course of his existence. so that the habit of taking a picture annually on a child's birthday is an excellent one if we wish to preserve a true likeness; and this practice is recommended in pedagogic anthropology, when it is desired to preserve the biographic history of the pupil. it is interesting to study, side by side with the growth of stature and the marked rhythms and periods that constitute its laws, the phenomenon of general mortality in its relation to age. lexis gives the following curve of general mortality: the horizontal line marks the years and the vertical line the corresponding number of deaths, while the curved line shows the _progress_ of mortality, and the highest points in the curve indicate the maximum mortality. it is highest of all during the first year and in general during early childhood, and is steadily lowered to a point corresponding to the ages from ten to thirteen, after which it rises again. [illustration: fig. .--curve of general mortality (lexis).] let us examine the curve up to this point, since it has a bearing upon our school work. we can prove that the _maximum mortality_ corresponds to the maximum individual growth; in other words, an organism in _rapid evolution_ is exposed to death, its powers of immunity to infective diseases are weakened; it constitutes what in medical parlance is known as a _locus minoris resistentiæ_. in that period of _calm_ in growth, which would seem to be a _repose_ preceding the evolution of puberty, mortality is at the lowest; only to rise again rapidly _during the period of puberty_; while the rise becomes less rapid after the eighteenth year, notwithstanding that after that age mankind in general are exposed, in their struggle for existence, to many causes of death that did not exist during the preceding years. toward the age of seventy the line of mortality attains another apex, because the age of _normal death_ is reached; after which it drops precipitously because of the lack of survivors. from these facts we may deduce certain very important principles that throw useful light upon pedagogy: there are certain _ages at which even the strong are weak_; and their weakness is of such a nature that it _exposes the individual to death_. now, whenever the phenomenon of _mortality_ occurs it is always an indication of _impoverishment in the survivors_. for example, of every one person that dies, many persons have been ill who have recovered from their illness; but there are still many others who, although they did not actually fall ill, were weakened even though they passed through the peril unharmed. in short, for each death, which represents a _final disaster_, there are many victims. and whenever there is a rise in the phenomenon of mortality in connection with any one age, it is our duty to give special attention to those individuals who are not only weak in themselves, but whom the _social causes affecting_ them tend to weaken still more and push onward toward illness and death. whenever there are many deaths, there are undoubtedly also _many sufferers_. now, in pedagogy we have no criterion to guide us in this matter of _respecting the weaknesses characteristic of the various ages_, as, for example, that of early infancy and of the age of puberty. with the most cruel blindness we punish and discourage the lad who, having reached the age of puberty, no longer makes the progress in his studies that rendered him the brilliant champion during the period of physiological repose in his growth; and instead of regarding this as a psychic indication of a great physiological transformation that it is necessary to protect, we urge on the organism to _enforced effort_, without even suspecting that, in proportion to the degree of resistance of our pupil, we may be doing our share to induce in him a permanent weakness, or an arrest of development, or disease and death. our responsibility as educators is great, because we have the _threads of life_ entrusted to our care; man represents a continuous transition through successive forms, and each following period has been prepared for by the one preceding. whenever we have the misfortune to concur in _weakening a_ _child_, we touch that parabolic line traced in the graphic chart of stature, and standing as an index of the life of the body, and we give it a shock throughout its whole length; it may either be shattered or be brought down to a lower grade. but the life of an individual does not contain merely that _individual alone_; the cycle of the stature with its violent period of puberty and the perfect physiological repose corresponding to the years from to , or even , indicates the _eternity of the individual_ _in the species_: his maturity for reproduction. man in his progress through the different levels of height, as indicated on the graphic chart of stature, does not pass through them without reproducing himself, save in exceptional cases; he commences the ascent alone, but in his descent he attains the majesty of a creator who leaves behind him the immortal works of his own creation. well, even the capacity of _normal reproduction_, and of begetting a strong species, is related to the _normal cycle of life_: whoever weakens a child and puts a strain upon the threads of its existence, starts a vibration that will be felt throughout posterity. the parabolic cycle of stature shows us which is the most favourable period for the reproduction of the species; it is undoubtedly that period that stands at the highest apex of the curve, and at which the organism has reached an almost absolute peace, as if forgetful of itself, in order to provide for its eternity. when it has completed its period of _evolution_, during which the organism shows that it has not yet matured; and before the commencement of involution, in which period the organism is slowly preparing for departure--that is the moment when man _may_ or rather _ought_ to procreate his species. careful forethought not to produce immature or feeble fruit, will form part of the coming man's regard for his posterity. a new moral era is maturing, that is giving birth to a _solidarity_, not only between all living beings, but including also those future beings who are as yet unborn; but for whose existence the living man of to-day is preparing through his care of his own strength and his own virtue. to have intentionally begotten a son better than himself will be a proud victory for the man who has attained the higher sexual morality; and such pride will be no less keen than that of the artist, who by perfecting his marvelous talents has created a masterpiece. the statistics collected by quétélet demonstrate that "too precocious marriages either occasion sterility or produce children that have a smaller probability of living." they prove furthermore that the number of children who die is largest in marriages contracted at the age of sixteen or earlier, and becomes lowest among the children born of marriages contracted between the years of and . during these years also the parents are most fertile: as is shown by the following tables: sandler's figures based on the families of english peers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | percentage of | | age of parents |deaths of children| average births to| percentage of at marriage | before attaining | each marriage |births to each | marriageable age | | death ---------------+------------------+------------------+---------------- years | | . | . - years | | . | . - years | | . | . - years | | . | . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- age at the time | percentage of deaths | average number of births of child's birth | to each birth | in one year of marriage -----------------+----------------------+----------------------------- years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . ----------------------------------------------------------------------- the results of a recent research show that famous men have hardly ever been the first-born, and that the great majority were begotten of parents who were at the time between the ages of and years. _variations of stature with age, according to the sexes._--the general laws of the growth and involution of stature are pretty nearly the same for the two sexes. the female stature, beginning at birth, averages throughout life somewhat less than the male. but since the development of puberty takes place earlier in woman than in man, the female child manifests the characteristic increase in stature at an earlier age than the male; consequently at that age (about eleven) she overtakes him, and for the time being both boy and girl are equal in stature. but as soon as the boy enters upon the period of puberty, he rapidly surpasses the girl, and his stature henceforth steadily maintains a superiority of about ten centimetres (nearly four inches), as is shown by the deviations between the two parabolic curves, representing the variations of stature in the two sexes. even the involution of stature occurs precociously in women, as compared with man. variations in stature due to mechanical causes of adaptation to environment _variations due to mechanical causes. transitory and permanent_ _variations. deformations._--the individual stature is not a fixed quantity at all hours of the day; but it varies by several millimetres under the influence of mechanical causes connected with the habits of daily life. in the morning we are slightly taller than at night (by a fraction of a centimetre): in consequence of remaining on foot a good deal of the time during the day, our stature is gradually lowered. this is contrary to the popular belief that "while we stand up our stature grows." as a matter of fact, in the erect position the soft tissues that form part of the total stature are under constant pressure; but being elastic, they resume their previous proportions after prolonged rest in a horizontal position. consequently at night, especially if we have taken a long walk, or danced, we are shorter than in the morning after a long sleep; the act of stretching the limbs in the morning completes the work of restoring the articular cartilages to their proper limits of elasticity. nevertheless, according to the mechanical theory accepted by manouvrier, persons who are habituated from childhood to stand on foot much of the time (labourers) interfere with the free growth of the long bones in the direction of length and at the same time augment the growth in thickness; hence the skeleton is rendered definitely shorter in its segments as well as in its bones (_i.e._, a shallower pelvis, shorter limbs, etc.). the result is a stocky type with robust muscles: the _europlastic type_, which is found among labourers. on the contrary, a person who spends much time reclining on sofas among cushions, and taking abundant nutriment, is likely to tend toward the opposite extreme; bones long and slender, the skeleton tall in all its segments, the muscular system delicate; this is the _macroplastic_ or aristocratic type. according to manouvrier, when a person has a long, slow convalescence after a protracted infectious malady such as typhoid, recumbent much of the time and subjected to a _highly nutritive_ diet, it may happen, especially if he has reached the period of puberty at which a rapid osteogenesis naturally takes place in the cartilages of the long bones, that he will not only become notably taller, but will even acquire the macroplastic type. the macroplastic type is artistically more beautiful, but the europlastic type is physiologically more useful. it is not only the erect position that tends to reduce the stature, but the sitting posture as well. in fact, whether the pelvis is supported by the lower limbs or by a chair, the intervertebral disks are in either case compressed by the weight of the bust as a whole. if, for example, children are obliged, during the period of growth, to remain long at a time in a sitting posture, the limbs may freely lengthen, while the bust is impeded in its free growth, and the result may be an artificial tendency toward macroscelia. this is why children are more inclined than adults to throw themselves upon the ground, to lie down, to cut capers, in other words to restore the elasticity of their joints, and overcome the compression of bones and cartilages. accordingly, such variations of stature recur habitually and are _transitory_, and since they are associated with the customary attitudes of daily life, they are _physiological_. but if special causes should aggravate such physiological conditions, and should recur so often as not to permit the cartilages to return completely to their original condition, in such a case _permanent_ _variations_ of stature might result, and even _morphological_ _deviations_ of the skeleton. for example, a porter who habitually carries heavy weights on his head, may definitely lower his stature; and in the case of a young boy, the interference with the growth of the long bones through compression exerted from above downward, may produce an actual arrest of development of the limbs and spinal column, presenting all the symptoms of rickets. witness certain consequences of "child-labour" chief among which must be mentioned the deformities of the _carusi_ [victims of child-labour, who from an early age toil up the succession of ladders, bearing heavy burdens of sulphur from the mines below.[ ]] in the sicilian sulphur mines.[ ] as a general rule, all _cramped positions that_ _are a necessary condition of labour, if they surpass the limits of resistance_ _and elasticity of_ the human frame, and especially if they operate during periods of life when the skeleton is in process of formation, result in deformities, and when the skeleton is deformed, the internal organs and hence the general functional powers of the whole organism, suffer even greater alteration. [illustration: fig. .--vincenzo militella of lereata, a sicilian caruso.] [illustration: fig. .--aged field labourer.] [illustration: fig. . fig. . attitude of woman working in the rice fields as seen from the right and left sides.] [illustration: fig. .--a gang of eight workers in the rice fields.] consider the postures that miners must endure, or as pieraccini phrases it, their "disastrous attitudes." the transport galleries are ordinarily too low to permit a man of average height to walk erect; along these galleries little transport-wagons are run by hand, excepting where the carrying is done on the backs of the men themselves. "even in the front of the advance tunnels and in the galleries that are being worked, miners are to be seen in the most incongruous attitudes. these anomalous positions of the body maintained throughout long hours of toil react upon the functional action of the heart and lungs, upon the stomach and intestines in the proper performance of their tasks, and result in producing hernia, varicose veins and eventually deformities of the skeleton (vertebral column, thorax)."[ ] field labourers also (fig. ) become permanently deformed, with diminution of stature, from remaining too long bent over in the act of hoeing or reaping. but a still more painful labour is that of the women in the rice fields during the period when the weeding is done. the position necessitated by this work requires a strained and prolonged dorsal flexion of the vertebral column, accompanied by a strain on the lower dorsal nerves; great _elasticity_ is required to endure a position so painful and so apt to induce _lumbago_; only young women can endure it, and even they become deformed, and suffer seriously from anemia, intestinal maladies and diseases of the uterus, which predispose them to abortion or sterility (figs. , , ). stone breakers also contract painful diseases and deformities from their work. they are constantly bowed over their task, performing a rhythmic, alternating movement of flexion, extension and torsion of the trunk upon itself, while at the same time there is a slight undulation in a backward and forward direction, accompanying the rising and falling of the arm holding the hammer. these movements of extension and flexion of the trunk involve the whole vertebral column, while the pelvis remains practically motionless. "at the end of the day they rise from their task bowed over and they walk home bowed over, holding the vertebral column rigid; any attempt to force the trunk into an erect position is extremely painful. in the morning they return to their work with their loins still aching." and among these stone breakers there are young men, some of them mere boys! and when we think that these injurious _attitudes_ are coupled with malnutrition, we must realise the extent of the organic disaster that accompanies diminution of stature as a result of adaptation to labour. we are naturally horrified at such conditions enforced upon a certain portion of humanity; and we pray for a time to come when machinery will have universally replaced human labour, in transportation, in stone-breaking, and in reaping, and when children will be spared from hard and deforming toil. but how is it that while we are so sympathetic regarding conditions at a distance from us, we remain unconscious of similar conditions, that are close beside us, and of which we are the directors, the cruel enforcers, the masters? in the near future, i hope that people will tell with amazement, as if citing a condition of inferior civilisation, how the school children, up to the opening of the twentieth century represented one category of those "deformed by prolonged and enforced labour in injurious positions!" such studies in _school hygiene_ as deal with the type of school benches, designed to minimise the danger of deformities of the vertebral column in children--will, i hope, be regarded by the coming generations with the most utter amazement! and the school benches of to-day will find their place in _museums_, and people will go to look at them as if they were relics of bygone barbarism, just as we now visit the collections from old-time insane asylums, of series of complicated instruments of wood and iron that in bygone centuries were considered _necessary_ for maintaining discipline among the insane. what in the world would we say, if somebody should propose, in order to obviate the deformities and physiological injuries of labourers, that certain mechanisms should be applied to them individually for the purpose of diminishing the harm? imagine a law being proposed, to the effect that all miners should be obliged to wear trusses, to keep their viscera from breaking loose, as a result of prolonged compression! what would we think of such reforms and such a path toward an orthopedic state of society? our way toward progress and higher civilisation is a very different one. to remove man from torturing toil that twists the bones and undermines the health--such is the goal that it is our duty to set before us! for the deformed vertebral column is the _extreme_ sign of a great accumulation of evils; the internal organs are correspondingly affected with disorders fatal to the entire organism; but even greater is the corresponding harm done to the human soul! what we want is not only that the bones shall not be thrown out of their eurhythmic harmony, but that the souls of the labourers shall be freed from the inhuman yoke of slavery (progress can consist solely in a radical alteration of the _form of labour_). so far as concerns the school, which is not limited to a few categories of human beings, but is extended to _all_, _by requirements_ _of law_, is it not possible for us to adopt a different attitude of mind? the established fact that the pupils may even deform their skeletons in the course of their work, goes to prove that this work contains some _error in principle_ that is fatal to successive generations; and so long as this principle is maintained, we may assert a priori that even if, with the help of school benches as complicated and as costly as orthopedic machines, we should succeed in checking the deformation of the vertebral column, we should fail to check the deformation of the soul. because whoever is condemned to labour that deforms is a slave. and as a matter of fact we employ coercive means, "rewards and punishments," to enforce upon children a condition that in their eyes amounts to serving their first sentence. it is not the school bench, but the _method_ that needs reforming; it is not the ligaments of the spinal column, but _human life in_ _evolution_ that we ought to respect, and _lead toward the attainment_ _of perfection_! amid the many banners of liberty that have been raised in these latter times, one is still missing--one which we ought to seize upon as the standard of our cause: the liberty of the new generation, which is groaning in the slavery of compulsory education, upon iron-bound benches, emblematic of chains! i foresee, in a radical reform of pedagogic methods, the practical possibility of taking as guiding principles the _individual liberty_ _of the pupil_ and a _reverential regard for life_. and i affirm this all the more loudly, because i have applied such a method with indisputable success in the "children's houses," obtaining prodigious results in the health and happiness of the children, perfect discipline in the classes, marvelously rapid progress in studies, and a surprising awakening of souls, a passionate love for the work. variations due to adaptation in connection with causes of various kinds--social, physiological, physical, psychic, pathological, etc. =physiology and social conditions.=--_nutrition._--one of the effects of environment, of the highest importance in its relation to the development of stature, is nutrition. in order to attain the maximum development as biologically determined by heredity in a race, sufficient nutriment is the first necessity. it is a familiar fact that material or physiological life consists essentially in the exchange and _renewal of matter_, or in _metabolism_, which is also a renewal of vital force. the living molecules are continually breaking up, thus expressing in an active form forces that had accumulated in a potential form, and eliminating the rejected matter; only to form again by means of new matter, containing potential forces. this breaking up and renewal constitutes the material of life, that never pauses in its molecular movement; the cessation of renewal of matter is death, that is, scission without reparation; consumption without renewal; and consequently a rapid disintegration of the body. living matter consists in metabolism, and is consequently directly related to the nutritive substances which renew the elements necessary for continual redintegration. we may disregard certain individual potentialities, of a purely biological nature, and that are capable of manifesting vital forces of varying degrees of intensity: but it may be asserted as beyond question that every living being, if he is to live according to his biological destiny, has need of sufficient nutrition. this is not the same as saving that the food determines the life of an individual in its final development, in the sense that by eating in excess one may attain the stature of a giant, or an imbecile become intelligent or a man of talent become a genius. we all bear within us, in that fertilised germ that constituted the first cell of our organism, predetermined biological conditions, on which depend the physical limits of our body, as well as those of our psychic individuality. but in order that this germ may develop in accordance with its potentiality, it is necessary that it shall obtain the requisite material from its environment. because otherwise--and here the relation is direct--neither the volumetric development nor the morphological development can be accomplished, nor the psychic potentiality express itself; in other words, the stature will be undersized, in a body defrauded of the degree of beauty potential in the germ, and the muscular forces, in common with those of the brain, will remain at a level of development below that which nature had intended. consequently, to deprive children of their requisite nutriment is stealing from life, it is a _biological crime_. while we live, we must eat; and while we labour, that is, while we expend the vital forces, it is necessary to repair them. the schools should establish a system of luncheons for the pupils; this is a principle that has already been generally recognised and is already bearing fruit. there was a time when a good appetite was regarded as a _low_ _material instinct_; it was also the time when people sang the praises of _spirituality_, but actually indulged in banquets of lucullian lavishness. the vice of the palate and the physiological need of nourishment were included under one and the same disdain. to-day science has shed its light upon the true conception of nutrition and holds it to be the _first necessity_ of life, and consequently the first social problem to be solved. from this point of view, food is not a vulgar material thing, nor the dinner-table a place of debauchery. indeed, there is nothing which affords better proof of immateriality than the act of eating. in fact, the necessity of eating is itself a proof that the matter of which our body is composed does not endure but passes like the fleeting moment. and if the substance of our bodies passes in this manner, if life itself is only a continual passing away of matter, what greater symbol of its immateriality and its spirituality is there than the dinner-table? "... the bread is my flesh and the wine is my blood; do this in remembrance of what life really is." something similar to this is being accomplished to-day by science in regard to the sexual relations. we are accustomed to consider the sexual instincts as something contemptible, material and low, praising abstinence, and leaving these instincts wholly out of consideration in the course of education, as though they were something degrading, or even shameful. and undoubtedly our sexual abuses are shameful, and shameful also is the barbaric tolerance of the masses regarding prostitution, seduction, illegitimacy and the abandonment of new-born children. it is criminal abuse that makes us despise sexual relations, just as at one time excesses of the table made us despise nutrition. but the day will come when science will raise to the dignity of a new sexual morality the physiological function which to-day is considered material and shameful--and that comprehends the most sublime of human conceptions. in it are to be found the words which ancient races deposited in their religious tabernacles: creation, eternity, mystery. and in it are also to be found the most sublime conceptions of modern races: the destiny of humanity, the perfectionment of the human species. accordingly, we must to-day regard the serving of food in the schools as a necessity of the first order; but it is well, in introducing it into the schools, to surround it with that halo of gladness and of high moral significance that ought to accompany all manifestations of life. the _hymn to bread_, which is a human creation and a means of preserving the substance of the human body, ought to accompany the meals of our new generations of children. the child _develops_ because the substance of his body passes away, and the meals that he eats symbolise all this: furthermore, they teach him to think of the vast labour accomplished by men who, unknown as individuals, cultivate the earth, reap the grain, grind the flour, and _provide_ for all men and for all children. where they are and who they are, we do not know; the bread bears neither their name nor their picture. like an impersonal entity, like a god, humanity provides for all the needs of humanity: and this god is labour. if the child is destined some day to become himself a labourer, who produces and casts his products to humanity without knowing who is to receive his contribution toward providing for humanity, it is well that as he lifts his food to his lips he should realise that he is contracting a debt toward society at large, and that he must give because he takes; he must "forgive debts as his have been forgiven"; and since life is gladness, let him send forth a salutation to the universal producing power: "our father, give us our daily bread!" the providence of human labour rules over our entire life; it gives us everything that is necessary. the god of the universe, in whose train come cataclysms, is not more terrible than the god, humanity, that can give us war and famine. while we give bread to the child, let us remember that man does not live by bread alone: because bread is only the material of his fleeting substance. the system of furnishing meals in school constitutes a chapter of _school hygiene_ that cannot directly concern us. nevertheless, there are three rules of this hygiene which should be borne in mind: children should never, in any case, drink wine, alcoholic liquors, tea or coffee--in other words, stimulants, which are poisons to their childish organisms. on the other hand, children need _sugar_, because sugar has a great formative and plastic power; all young animals have sweetish flesh because their muscles, in the course of development, are extremely rich in sugar. the method of giving sugar to children should be as simple as possible, such, for instance, as is endorsed by the very successful english system of hygiene for children, which recommends freshly cooked fruits, sprinkled with sugar or served with a little syrup. but the substantial nourishment for young children should consist of _soup_ or _broth_ served hot, since heat is as essential as sugar for organisms in the course of evolution. the english recommend soups made of cereals and gluten, in which it is never necessary to use soup stock, just as it is never necessary to use meat in children's diet. that nutrition has a noteworthy influence upon growth, and therefore upon the definitive limits of stature, is exhaustively proved by statistics. in his brilliant studies of the poorer classes, niceforo has collected the following average statures:[ ] ----------+--------------------- age | stature | (in centimetres) +--------------------- | children +--------------------- | rich | poor ----------+----------+---------- years | | years | | years | | years | | years | | years | | years | | years | | ----------+----------+---------- from which it appears that, in spite of the strong biological impulse given by the attainment of _puberty_, the children of the poor continue to show a stature lower than that of the well-to-do. ales hrdlicka has compiled the following comparative table of the poor or orphaned children received into the asylums, and the pupils of the public schools in boston: ----------------------------------------------------------------- stature of american children: ( ) in asylums; ( ) in boston public schools ----------------------------------------------------------------- boys -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- age | | | | | | | | | | | | in | | | | | | | | | | | | years| | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- ( ) | | | | | | | | | | | | -- ( ) | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- girls -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- ( ) | -- | -- | | | | | | -- | -- | | -- | -- ( ) | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- even after reaching the adult age these differences are maintained, as may be shown by the following statistics taken from various authorities: ----------------------------------------------------------------- average statures obtained from soldiers (in centimetres) -------------------------+---------------------+----------------- italians | english | french -------------------------+---------------------+----------------- students and |professional men |students professional men |merchants |domestics tradesmen |peasants |day labourers peasants |city employees | ----------------------------------------------------------------- from which it appears that while in italy the class of labourers having the lowest stature is the peasant class, which lives under the most deplorable economic conditions, in england on the contrary it is the workers in the cities who live under worse economic conditions than the peasantry, it being well known that the english peasant is the most prosperous in the agricultural world. according to livi, it is nutrition which causes the differences of average stature that are usually to be found between different social classes, and those between the inhabitants of mountains and of plains, or between the dwellers on the mainland and on the islands. in general the mountain-bred peasants have a _lower_ stature than those of the plains; and this is because the means of procuring food are fewer and harder in mountainous regions. similarly, the islanders, because of less ready means of communication, have less likelihood than those on the mainland of obtaining adequate nutrition. the same may be said regarding the differences found between the statures of cultured persons and of the illiterate, to the disadvantage of the latter (the poorer classes). students show the tallest stature of all, because they have in their favour the joint effect of the two chief factors of environment that influence this anthropological datum: _mechanical causes_ and _nutrition_. a sedentary life, and above all a hearty diet both contribute to the tall stature of students, doctors, and members of the liberal professions. in this respect, the average figures of all the authorities agree, as appears from the following tables:[ ] livi: , italian soldiers -------------------------------+--------------- professions and callings |average stature | in centimetres -------------------------------+--------------- students and professional men | . small shopkeepers and the like | . peasants | . blacksmiths | . carpenters | . masons | . tailors and shoemakers | . barbers | . butchers | . carters | . bakers | . day labourers in general | . -------------------------------+--------------- ----------------------------------------------- professions and employments |average stature | in centimetres -------------------------------+--------------- professional men | . merchants and tradesmen | . peasants and miners | . city labourers | . sedentary workmen | . prisoners | . insane | . ------------------------------------------------ oloriz: conscripts from the city of madrid ------------------------------------------------- professions and employments |average stature | in centimetres ---------------------------------+--------------- liberal professions | . including: | students | . other professions | . workmen employed in the open air| . workmen employed in closed rooms| . including: | tailors, hatters and the like | . shoemakers | . ------------------------------------------------- conditions of nutrition, which are always accompanied by a combination of other hygienic conditions all tending toward the same effects, have also an influence upon the development of puberty. puberty is retarded by malnutrition. as a result of an inquiry made among the inmates of the pia barolo society, which offers an asylum to reformed prostitutes, marro[ ] records that out of ninety rescued girls only those above the age of fourteen had begun to menstruate: notwithstanding that the normal period for the development of puberty in italian women is between the years of twelve and thirteen. furthermore, among the girls above the age of fourteen, menstruation had not yet begun in all cases; on the contrary, a large proportion of them still failed to show the phenomena of puberty: --------------------------------------------------- age in years | whole number | number menstruating -------------+--------------+---------------------- - | | - | | - | | - | | --------------------------------------------------- all the rest (thirty in number) menstruated for the first time after the age of eighteen. among those in whom menstruation had appeared earlier, the order of appearance was as follows: years number when we consider that we are dealing with _rescued_ girls, we may conclude that direct sexual stimulus does not facilitate the normal development of puberty, but on the contrary, in conjunction with other causes, _retards it_. accordingly, we must not confound the _normal development of the organism_ with its disorders: whatever aids the natural development of life is useful and healthy. there may be conditions _unfavourable_ to the development of puberty, which are favourable to the development of sexual vices (see, further on, the other causes influencing puberty, and moral conditions in colleges). in his work above cited, marro compares his figures obtained from the pia barolo society with those of dr. bianco[ ] taken from young girls in city institutes representing young women in easy circumstances: --------------+-----------------+------------------------- date of first |girls in the pia | girls in city institutes menstruation. | barolo society. | for the wealthy classes. | percentage | percentage --------------+-----------------+------------------------- years | . | ---- years | . | . years | . | . years | . | . years | . | . years | . | . years | . | . years | . | . --------------+-----------------+------------------------- it should be noted that the cold climate of turin retards puberty (see below): but the above table clearly shows the precocious puberty of young women in easy circumstances; in the great majority, in fact, it occurs between the ages of twelve and fourteen, with thirteen for the average; on the other hand, the majority for reformed prostitutes is between fourteen and sixteen, with fifteen for the average. besides labour and nutrition, there are other factors that contribute to the development of stature (which we regard as an index to the entire mass of the body). such factors are: physical conditions--heat, light, electricity _thermic conditions._--among the physical conditions which may have an influence upon the stature, the _thermic_ conditions ought to receive first consideration. it is a principle demonstrated by nature that organisms in the course of evolution have need of heat. even the invertebrates, as for example the insects, develop during the heat of summer; and the eggs of the higher vertebrates such as the birds, develop their embryo by means of the maternal warmth. in placental animals the development throughout the whole embryonic period takes place within the maternal womb, in the full tide of animal heat. in order to preserve life in premature babies, that is, in those born before the expiration of the physiological term of nine months, _incubators_ have been constructed, an oven-like arrangement in which the child may be maintained at a temperature considerably higher than would be possible in the outside air; the term is also specifically used of the structures in which fertilised hens' eggs are kept during the required period of time until the chickens are hatched. accordingly it is a principle taught us by nature that organisms in the course of evolution have need of heat. the most luxuriant vegetation, the most gigantic animals, the most variegated birds belong to the fauna and flora of the tropics. how is this physiological law, which nature expresses in such broad, general lines, to be interpreted by us in the environment of the school? it is well known that in this regard there are two conflicting opinions. there are some who would go to excessive lengths in protecting small children from the cold, by dressing them entirely in woolen garments and keeping their apartments well heated; others on the contrary assert that the _physiological_ _struggle of adaptation_ to the cold invigorates the infant organism, and they advise that the child's body should never be completely protected, as for example that the legs should always be left bare, that the child should be lightly clad, that his apartments should not be heated, etc. furthermore, it used to be held in the pietistic schools, and still is to some extent, that _warmth_ had a demoralising influence, inasmuch as it tended to enervate both mind and body. we educators cannot fail to be interested in such a discussion. as often happens in physiological arguments, the two opposite contentions each contain a part of the truth. in order to get at the truth of the matter, it is necessary to distinguish two widely separated facts: on the one hand, _physiological exercise in the form_ _of thermal gymnastics_, and on the other, the _development of organisms_ _in a constantly cold environment_. to live constantly warm, protected either by clothes or by artificial heat, so that the organism remains always at a constant temperature, is not favourable to growth, because it deprives the organism of the physiological exercise of adapting itself to variations in external temperature, an exercise which stimulates useful functions. by perspiring in summer, we cleanse our system of poisonous secretions, and by shivering in winter we give tone to our striped muscles and to our internal organs, as is proved by our gain in appetite. anyone who wishes to be kept on ice in summer and to transform his apartment into a hot-house in winter, robs himself of these advantages and enfeebles his system. the apparent _comfort_ is not in this case a real physiological enjoyment but a _weakness of habit_ that is accompanied by a loss of physiological energy. what makes us robust is a rational exercise of all our energies. _thermal gymnastics_ is consequently useful. it consists in exposing a healthy, resistant organism to changes in temperature, trusting to our physiological resources for the means of defense. thus, for example, a child who is well fed and well protected from the cold for many hours of the day in the well-heated family apartment, can go out with bare legs into the snow; and doing so will make him more robust. in the same way, the ancient romans exposed themselves in their hot baths to the steadily increasing temperature of the _calidarium_, up to the point of degrees ( fahrenheit), and then still perspiring flung themselves into a cold plunge. and it is a familiar fact that afterward they held lavish banquets in these same baths. such exercise which in classic times gave vigour to the race that made itself master of the world may be summed up as follows: "_thermic_ _gymnastics_" of organisms "well nourished and strong." our own boatmen also throw themselves into the river in midwinter, half nude, and half nude they ply their long poles. they expose themselves to the cold, in the same way that they might raise a weight of many pounds with their robust arms, for _gymnastic_ _exercise_. but all this differs radically from living continually in a cold temperature. it is a very different thing from the life of a child of the lower classes, who goes bare-foot in winter, clad in a few scant rags, half frozen in his wretched tenement, and unable to obtain sufficient nourishment to develop the needed heat-units. he is already deficient in bodily heat because of malnutrition, and the effects of cold are cumulative. in this case it is not a question of _thermic exercise_ but of a permanent _deprivation of heat_, in individuals who are already suffering from an _insufficient development_ _of heat-units_. consequently the organism is enfeebled--it grows under unfavorable conditions--and the result is a permanent diminution of development. whoever grows up, exposed to cold after this fashion, has, in the average case, a lower stature than those who grow up in the midst of warmth, or in the practice of that healthful exercise which constitutes the ideal: _thermic_ _gymnastics_. the contradictory ideas that are held as to the efficacy of heat in regard to growth, are due to a large extent to a prejudice which amounts to this: heat is effective in promoting the evolution of life as a whole, and consequently the development of that part of life that is centred in the organs of reproduction; from which comes the wellnigh antiquated theory that artificial heat should be banished from the schools, as one of the factors leading to immorality! it is true that _warmth_ accelerates the development of puberty; but who is there in this twentieth century who can still conceive the idea that it is a moral act to silence the forces of nature? good nourishment also leads to a more precocious puberty; and the same is true of the repeated psychic stimulus produced by various forms of intellectual enjoyment, by conversation, and by social intercourse with individuals of the opposite sex. accordingly, if it were a moral act to retard the development of puberty and to produce a general impoverishment of sexual life, the moral measures to be taken in education would be cold, malnutrition, and the isolation of the sexes in the schools, which, as a matter of fact, form the stumbling-block of environment in our colleges. but it is well known that all this leads on the contrary to moral and physical degeneration! as has already been said, the normal physiological development stands in counterdistinction to immoral habits; consequently, whatever is an aid to physiological development is in its very nature moral. in warm climates the first manifestations of puberty occur precociously in man as well as in woman; and with them come all the transformations that are associated with puberty, among others the rapid increase of stature. in cold climates, on the contrary, such manifestations are more tardy. the women of lapland are latest of all to develop. with them, menstruation begins only at eighteen, and they are incapable of conceiving under the age of twenty, while the period of the menopause (involution of sexual life) is correspondingly early; in other words, the entire period of sexual life is shortened. furthermore, the fertility of the women of lapland is low; they cannot conceive more than three children. but if these same women leave lapland and make their home in civilised countries, as for example in sweden, they have a more precocious sexual life, as well as longer and more fertile, and altogether quite similar to that of the swedish women.[ ] cabanis[ ] notes that even in cold climates, when young girls spend much of their time in the vicinity of stoves, menstruation begins at about the same age as in women who live on the banks of the ganges--as is the case with the daughters of wealthy russians, whose development is quite precocious. in arabia, in egypt, and in abyssinia the women are frequently mothers at the age of ten, menstruation having begun at the eighth year. it is even said that mahomed married radeejah when she was only five and that he took her to his bed at the age of eight. the religious laws of india permit the marriage of girls when they are eight years old. consequently it is true that _heat_ has an influence upon the development of the organism independently of other influences; in fact, heat acts both in the form of _climate_, that is, in a natural state, and also in an artificially warmed environment. it is also one of the causes of the different degrees of growth in _stature_ through the successive seasons (see below). in conclusion: it is enjoined upon us, as a hygienic necessity, to heat the schools in winter, especially the schools for the poorer classes; it means more than increased vigour, it may even mean giving _life_ to some who otherwise would pine away from deprivation of heat-units, a condition most unfavourable to organisms in the course of evolution. _photogenic conditions._--light also has a perceptible influence upon growth: it is a great physiological stimulant. at the present day, physical therapy employs _light baths_ for certain forms of neurasthenia and partial enfeeblement of certain organs; and some biological manifestations, such as the pigments--and similarly the chlorophyl in plants and the variegated colouring of birds--receive a creative stimulus from light. light contains in its spectrum many different colours, which act quite differently upon living tissues; the ultra-violet rays, for instance, kill the bacilli of tuberculosis and sometimes effect cures in cases of cancer. psychiatrists and neuropaths have demonstrated that many colours of light have an exciting effect, while others, on the contrary, are sedative. hence there has arisen in medicine a vast and most interesting chapter of _phototherapy_. in regard to the phenomena of growth, it has been noted that certain coloured lights are favourable to it, while certain others, on the contrary, diminish or arrest it, as the red and the green. phototherapy ought to concern us as educators, especially in regard to schools for the _benefit_ of nervous children: a periodic sojourn in a room lit by _calming colours_ might have a beneficent effect upon epileptic, irritable, nervous children, in place of the debilitating hot bath, or, worse yet, the administration of bromides; while light-baths would be efficacious for weak and torpid children. but for normal children we must consider the light of the sun as the best stimulant for their growth. a sojourn at the sea-shore, so favourable to the development of children, is now believed to owe its beneficial effects to the fact that the child, playing half naked on the sea-shore, bathes more in the sunlight than he does in the salt water. gymnastics in the sun, while the body is still only half dry, is what the younger generations should practise on a large scale, if they would bring about the triumph of physiological life. we must not forget this great principle when, by planning home work for the pupils, we practically keep them housed during the entire day, keeping them for the most part employed in writing or reading; in other words, using their sense of sight, which, if it is to be preserved unharmed, demands a _moderate light_. the eye ought to rest its muscles of accommodation, and the whole body be exposed to the full light of the sun during the greater part of the day. let us remember that often the children of the poor live in a home so dark that even in full mid-day they are obliged to light a lamp! let us at least leave them the light of the street, as a recompense for wretchedness that is a disgrace to civilisation! according to certain experiments conducted in rome by professor gosio, the light of the sun has an _intensive_ effect upon life. living creatures reared in the solar light grow and mature _earlier_, but at the same time their life is shortened; that is, the cycle of life is more intense and more precocious; conversely, in the shade the cycle of life is slower, but of longer duration. a plant matures more quickly in the sun, but its stature is lower than that of a plant in the dark, which has grown far more slowly, but has become very tall and slender and lacking in chlorophyl. similarly, as is well known, the women in tropical countries attain a precocious puberty, while conversely those of the north attain it tardily; and this fact must be considered in relation to the influence of the sun. a life passed wholly in the sunlight would be too intense; an organism that is exposed a few hours each day to the rays of the sun is invigorated; the interchange of matter (metabolism) is augmented; all the tissues are beneficially stimulated. for this reason sun baths are employed for paralytic and idiot children, and consist in exposing the body of the child, reclining upon its bed and with its head well protected, to the direct rays of the sun for several hours a day; this treatment is found to be most efficacious in giving _tone_ to the tissues and improving the general condition of the system. _variations in the growth of stature according to the seasons._--one proof of the beneficent influence of heat and sunlight upon the growth of the organism, is afforded by the variations in the rate of growth according to the seasons. every individual grows more in summer than in winter. daffner gives the following figures relative to the increase in stature according to the seasons: ----------+-------+--------------------------+-------------------- | | stature | increase number of | age in| in centimetres | in centimetres subjects | years+--------+-------+---------+-------------------- | | october| april | october |winter|summer|entire | | | | | | | year ----------+-------+--------+-------+---------+------+------+------ | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . | - | . | . | . | . | . | . ----------+-------+--------+-------+---------+------+------+------ in the "children's houses," i require a record of stature to be made month by month in the case of every child, the measurement being taken on the day corresponding to the day on which he was born in the month of his birth; in addition to which i keep a record of the total annual increase. the ages of these children vary between three and four years, and they all belong to the poorer social classes. monthly average increase in stature in the "children's houses" (in millimetres) ------------------------------+------------------------- cold months | warm months ---------+---------+----------+-----+------+------------ december | january | february | may | june | july | | | | | ---------+---------+----------+-----+------+------------ another factor of growth is _electricity._--one of the most interesting discoveries of recent date is that of the influence of terrestrial electricity upon the growth of living organisms. a series of experiments were made, by isolating cavies (a species of small indian pig) from terrestrial electricity, and as a result they were found to be retarded in growth and to develop very imperfectly, much as though they had been suffering from rickets. in short, they manifested an arrest of organic development. if, in electro-therapy, an electric current is applied to the cartilages of the long bones in children whose limbs have apparently been arrested in development, the result is a rapid increase in length, amounting to a luxuriant _osteogenesis_. since we know that the electric current can stimulate the nerve filaments and the fibres of the striped muscles when they have been rendered inactive from the effects of paresis or even of paralysis, we realise that _electricity_ can exert an influence over the entire physiological life of an organism. we live not only upon nutriment, air, heat, and light, but also upon a mysterious, imperceptible force, that comes to us from the mother earth. in addition to the biological potentialities which control the development of every individual, all living creatures owe something of themselves to their environment. _space._--an empirical contention, without scientific value, but nevertheless of some interest, is that there is an ultimate _relationship_ between the dimensions of living bodies and the _territorial space_, that is, the environment in which they are destined to live. in view of the innumerable varieties of living creatures, such an assertion would seem to be utterly unfounded. but as a matter of fact we see that while inorganic bodies can increase indefinitely in dimension, living creatures are limited in form and size. this fact undoubtedly has some primal connection with properties innate in corporeal life itself; in fact, in order to attain its appointed end, life requires the services of certain very small microscopic particles called _cells_. but the aggregations and combinations of cells in living organisms are also limited in their turn, and no matter how willingly we would attribute the greatest share of causation to biological facts, nevertheless, as always happens in life, we cannot wholly exclude _environment_. both animals and men that are bred on vast continents (chinese, russians) have tended to produce races of powerful and giant build: in islands, on the contrary, the men and the animals are of small size; it is sufficient merely to cite the men and the little donkeys of sardinia, the small irishmen who furnish jockeys for the race-track, and the small irish horses or _ponies_ that serve as saddle-horses for the children of the aristocracy the world over. there is a harmony of associations, as between the container and the contained, between environment and life, notwithstanding that as yet science has not made serious investigations in regard to it. voltaire, in his _micromega_, avails himself of this intuitive conception to create the material needed for his satire; he talks amusingly of the inhabitant of the planet sirius, who was eight leagues in height and at four hundred years of age was still in school, while the inhabitant of saturn was a mere pigmy in comparison, being scarcely a thousand rods tall--in fact, the inhabitants of saturn could not be otherwise than pigmies in comparison, since saturn is barely nine hundred times larger than the earth. gulliver makes use of similar standards in his _travels_, which are read with so much delight by children. =psychic conditions.=--_psychic stimuli._--accordingly many chemical and physical factors associated with the environment concur in aiding _life_ in its development. from the light of the sun to the electricity of the earth, the whole environment offers its tribute to life, in order to cooperate in life's triumph. but, in the case of man, in addition to these widely different factors, there is still another distinctly human factor that we must take into consideration and that we may call the _psychic stimulus of life_: we may scientifically affirm the bible statement that "man does not live by bread alone." without reverting to the basic physiological explanations of the emotions, as given by lange and james, we may nevertheless assert that sensations of pleasure stimulate the renewal of bodily tissues and consequently promote health, happiness, and strength; while, on the contrary, painful events produce physiological effects depressing to the tone of the nervous system and to the metabolic activity of the tissues. but it is precisely these metabolic phenomena that hold the key of life, and an organism in the course of evolution depends directly upon them. this problem concerns pedagogy in a very special way: when we have given food to the children in our schools, we have not yet completed our task of _nourishing_ these children; for the phenomena of nutrition which take place in the hidden recesses of their tissues are very different from a simple intestinal transformation of aliments, and are influenced by the psychic conditions of the individual pupil. great workers not only need abundant nutriment, but they require at the same time a series of stimuli designed to produce "pleasure." the pleasures of life, necessary to human existence, include more than _bread_. in the history of social evolution there exist, side by side with the _productions of labour_, an entire series of _enjoyments_, more or less elevated, that constitute the _stimului_ to production, and hence to evolution, and more profoundly still, to life itself. the further man evolves and the more he produces, the more he ought to multiply and perfect his means of _enjoyment_. without stimuli, nutrition would grow less and less till it ended in death. every-day experience in the punishment of criminals gives us proof of this. confinement to a solitary cell is nothing else than a complete deprivation of psychic stimuli. the prisoner does not lack _bread_, nor air, nor shelter from the elements, nor sleep; his whole physiological life is provided for, in the strict material sense of the word. but the bare walls, the silence, the isolation from his fellow men in utter solitude, deprive the prisoner of every stimulus, visual, oral and moral. the consequences are not merely a state of hopelessness, but a real and actual _malnutrition_ leading to tuberculosis, to anemia, to death from atrophy. we may affirm that such a prisoner _dies_ _slowly of hunger due to defective assimilation_; the solitary cell is the modern donjon, and far more cruel than the one in which ugolino died within a few days, so much so that solitary confinement, being incompatible with life, is only of short duration. labour, love, and sensations apt to stimulate ideas, that is, to nourish the intelligence, are necessities of human life. this is further proved by observations made regarding the development of puberty. psychic stimuli may render such development precocious, and, on the contrary, their absence may retard it. jean jacques rousseau relates in _Émile_ that at friuli he encountered young people of both sexes who were still undeveloped, although they were past the usual age and were strong and robust, and this he attributed to the fact that "owing to the simplicity of their customs, their imagination remained calm and tranquil for a longer time, causing the ferment in their blood to occur later, and consequently rendering their temperament less precocious."[ ] recent statistical research confirms the intuitive observation of that great pedagogist; the women in the environs of paris attain puberty nearly a year later than those who live in the city; and the same difference is observed between the country districts around turin and those of the city itself. all this goes to prove the fact of psychic influence upon physiological life: psychic excitation, experienced with _pleasure_, by developing healthy activities, aids the development of physical life.[ ] these principles must be taken under deep consideration when it comes to a question of directing the _physiological growth_ of children. fenelon relates a fable about a female bear who, having brought into the world an exceedingly ugly son, took the advice of a crow and licked and smoothed her cub so constantly that he finally became attractive and good-looking. this fable embodies the idea that _maternal love_ may modify the _body of the child_, aiding its evolution toward a harmony of form by means of the first psychic stimuli of caresses and counsel. nature has implanted in the mother not only her milk, the material nourishment of her child, but also that absolutely altruistic love which transforms the soul of a woman, and creates in it moral forces hitherto unknown and unsuspected by the woman herself--just as the sweet and nourishing corpuscles of the milk were unknown to the red corpuscles of her blood. accordingly, the nature of the human kind protects the _species_ through the mother in two ways, which together form the complete nutrition of man: aliment and love. after a child is weaned, it obtains its aliment from its environment in more varied forms; and it also obtains from its environment a great variety of psychic stimuli, calculated not only to mould its psychic personality, but also to bring its physiological personality to its full development. i have had most eloquent experience of this in the "children's houses" in the san lorenzo quarter of rome. this is the poorest quarter in the city, and the children are the sons and daughters of day labourers, who consequently are often out of work; illiteracy is even yet incredibly frequent among the adults, so much so that in a very high percentage of cases at least one of the parents is unable to read. in these "children's houses" we receive little children between the ages of three and seven, on a time schedule that varies between summer, from nine to five, and winter, from nine to four. we have never served food in the school; the little ones, all of whom live in their own homes, with their parents, have a half hour's recess in which to go home to luncheon. consequently we have not _in any way influenced their diet_. the pedagogic methods employed, however, are of such sort as to constitute a gradual series of psychic stimuli perfectly adapted to the needs of childhood; the environment stimulates each pupil individually to his rightful psychic development according to his subjective potentiality. the children are _free_ in all their manifestations and are treated with much cordial affection. i believe that this is the _first time_ that this extremely interesting pedagogic experiment has ever been made: namely, to _sow the seed_ in the consciousness of the child, leaving free opportunity, in the most rigorous sense, for the spontaneous expansion of its personality, in an environment that is _calm_, and warm with a sentiment of affection and peace. the results achieved were _surprising_: we were obliged to remodel our ideas regarding child psychology, because many of the so-called instincts of childhood did not develop at all, while in place of them unforeseen sentiments and intellectual passions made their appearance in the primordial consciousness of these children; true _revelations_ of the sublime greatness of the human soul! the intellectual activity of these little children was like a spring of water gushing from beneath the rocks that had been erroneously piled upon their budding souls; we saw them accomplishing the incredible feat of despising _playthings_, through their insatiable thirst for knowledge; carefully preserving the most fragile objects of the lesson, the tenderest plants sprouting from the earth--these children that are reputed to be vandals by instinct! in short, they seemed to us to represent the childhood of a human race more highly evolved than our own; and yet they are really the same humanity, marvelously guided and stimulated through its own natural and free development! but what is still more marvelous is the astonishing fact that all these children are so much improved in their general _nutrition_ as to present a notably different appearance from their former state, and from the condition in which their brothers still remain. many weakly ones have been organically strengthened; a great many who were lymphatic have been cured; and in general the children have gained flesh and become ruddy to such an extent that they look like the children of wealthy parents living in the country. no one seeing them would believe that these were the offspring of the illiterate lower classes! well, let us glance over the notes taken upon these children at the time when they first entered the school; for the great majority, the same note was made: need of tonics. yet not one of them took medicine, not one of them had a change of diet; the renewed vigour of these children was due solely to the _complete satisfaction_ _of their psychic life_. and yet they remain in school continually from nine till five through eleven months out of the year! one would say that this was an excessively long schedule; yet what is still more surprising is that during all this period the children are continually _busy_; and even more remarkable is the report made by many of the mothers to the effect that after their little ones have returned home they continue to busy themselves up to the hour of going to bed; and lastly--and this seems almost incredible--many of the little ones are back again at school by half past eight in the morning, tranquil, smiling, as though blissfully anticipating the enjoyment that awaits them during the long day! we have seen small boys become profoundly observant of their environment, finding a spontaneous delight in new sensations. their stature, which we measure month by month, shows how vigorous the physiological growth is in every one of them, but particularly in certain ones, whose blood-supply has become excellent. such results of our experiments have amazed us as an unexpected _revelation_ of nature, or, to phrase it differently, as a _scientific discovery_. yet we might have foreseen some part of all this had we stopped to think how our own physical health depends far more upon happiness and a peaceful conscience than upon that material substance, bread! let us learn to know _man_, sublime in his true reality! let us learn to know him in the tenderest little child; we have shown by experiment that he develops _through work, through liberty, and through love_; hitherto, in place of these, we have stifled the splendid possibilities of his nature with irrational toys, with the slavery of discipline, with contempt for his spontaneous manifestations. man lives for the purpose of learning, loving and producing, from his earliest years upward; it is from this that even his bones get their growth and from this that his blood draws its vitality! now, all such factors of physiological development are _suffocated_ by our antiquated pedagogic methods. we prevent, more or less completely, the development of the separate personalities, in order to keep all the pupils within the selfsame limits. the perfectionment of each is impeded by the common level which it is expected that all shall attain and make their limit, while the pupils are forced to _receive_ from us, instead of producing of their own accord; and they are obliged to sit motionless with their minds in bondage to an iron programme, as their bodies are to the iron benches. we wish to look upon them as machines, to be driven and guided by us, when in reality they are the most sensitive and the most superb creation of nature. we destroy divine forces by slavery. rewards and punishments furnish us with the needed scourge to enforce submission from these marvelously active minds; we encourage them with rewards! to what end? to winning the prize! well, by doing so we make the child lose sight of his real goal, which is knowledge, liberty and work, in order to dazzle him with a prize which, considered morally, is vanity, and considered materially is a few grains of metal. we inflict punishments in order to conquer nature, which is in rebellion, not against what is good and beautiful, not against the purpose of life, but against us, because we are tyrants instead of guides. if only we did not also punish sickness, misfortune and poverty! we are breakers-in of free human beings, not educators of men. our faith in rewards and punishments as _a necessary means_ to the progress of the children and to the maintenance of discipline, is a fallacy already exploded by experiment. it is not the material and vain reward, bestowed upon a few individual children, that constitutes the psychic stimulus which spurs on the multifold expansions of human life to greater heights; rewards degrade the grandeur of human consciousness into vanity and confine it within the limits of egotism, which means perdition. the stimulus worthy of man is the joy which he feels in the consciousness of his own growth; and he grows only through the conquest of his own spirit and the spread of universal brotherhood. it is not true that the child is incapable of feeling a spiritual stimulus far greater than the wretched prize that gives him an egotistical and illusory superiority over his companions; it is rather that we ourselves, because already degraded by egotism, judge these new forces of nascent human life after our own low standards. the small boys and girls in our "children's houses" are of their own accord distrustful of rewards; they despise the little medals, intended to be pinned upon the breast as marks of distinction, and instead they actively search for objects of study through which, without any guidance from the teacher, they may model and judge and correct themselves, and thus work toward perfection. as to punishments, they are depressing in effect, and they are inflicted upon children who are already depressed! even in the case of those who are adult and strong, we know that it is necessary to encourage those who have fallen, to aid the weak, to comfort those who are discouraged. and if this method serves for the strong, how much more necessary it is for lives in the course of evolution! this is a great reform which the world awaits at our hands: we must shatter the iron chains with which we have kept the intelligence of the new generations in bondage![ ] =pathological variations.=--among the factors that may have a notable influence upon the stature are the pathological causes. aside from those very rare occurrences that produce gigantism, it may be affirmed that pathological variations result in general in an arrest of development. in such a case it may follow that an individual of a given age will show the various characteristics of an individual of a younger age; that is, he will seem younger or more childish. in such a case the stature has remained on a _lower_ level than that which is normal for the given age; and this in general is the most obvious characteristic, because it is the index of the whole inclusive arrest of the physical personality. but together with the diminution of stature, various other characteristics may exist that also suggest a younger age; that is, the entire personality has been arrested in its development. it follows, in school for example, that such pathological cases may _escape_ the master's attention; he sees among his scholars a type that is apparently not abnormal, because it does not deviate from the common type, in fact is _quite like_ other children; but when we inquire into its age, then the anomaly becomes evident, because the actual age of this small child is greater than his apparent age. a principle of this sort announced in these terms is perhaps too schematic; but it will serve to establish a clear general rule that will guide us in our separate observations of a great variety of individual cases. this form of arrested development was for the first time explained by lasegue, who introduced into the literature of medicine or rather into nosographism, the comparative term of _infantilism_. infantilism has been extensively studied in italy by professor sante de sanctis, who has written notable treatises upon it. i have taken from his work _gli infantilismi_, the following table of _fundamental_ characteristics necessary to constitute the _infantile_ _type_. . stature and physical development in general below that required by the age of the patient. . retarded development or incomplete development of the sexual organs and of their functions. . incomplete development of intelligence and character. in order to recognise infantilism, it is necessary to know the dimensions and morphology of the body in their relation to the various ages, and to bear in mind that in young children sexual development either has not begun or is still incomplete. _dimensions and morphology of the body at the various ages._--what we have already learned regarding stature will give us one test in our diagnosis of infantilism: the increase of stature and the transformations of _type of stature_ concur in establishing the dimensions and the morphology of the body (see stature, types of stature, diagrams). a sufferer from infantilism will have, for example at the age of eleven, a stature of centimetres and a statural index of , while the average figures give: ----------------------------- age |stature | index ----------+---------+-------- years | | years | | years | | years | | years | | ----------------------------- consequently, in such a case the eleven-year-old patient would have the appearance of a child of seven, not only in stature but also in the relative proportions of his body. (and if we examined him psychically, we should probably find his speech was not yet perfected, that he showed a tendency toward childish games, a mental level corresponding to the age of seven or thereabouts; in school the child would be placed in the first or second elementary grade.) accordingly the anthropological verdict of infantilism must not be based upon limits of measurement alone, but also upon the _proportions_ of the body. every age has its own morphology. now, such changes are found not only in the reciprocal relations between the bust and the limbs, but also between the various parts of the bust, as we shall see when we come to an analytical study of the morphology of the head, the thorax and the abdomen; the detailed anthropological examination of the individual patient will furnish us with further accompanying symptoms helpful in establishing a diagnosis. further on we shall give a summarised table of the morphology of the body from year to year (laws of growth); and of the most notable and fundamental psychological characteristics of the different years of childhood; so that a teacher may easily derive from it at a glance a comprehensive picture that will aid in a diagnosis of the _age_, and hence of the arrest of development, in subjects suffering from infantilism. before entering upon the important question of pathogenesis in its relation to infantilism, i will reproduce a few biographic notes of _infantile types_, taken from various authorities: giulio b. was brought to the clinic because of his continued love for toys, notwithstanding his age. at seventeen and a half he retained the manners, the games and the language of a child of between ten and twelve. in appearance, he gave the impression of being between thirteen and fourteen, and was as well proportioned as a lad of that age. his stature was . meters (at thirteen the average stature is . m. and at fourteen it is . m.; while at seventeen it ought to be . m.) and his weight was kilograms (at fourteen the weight is k. and at seventeen it is k.). his appearance was lively, intelligent, but on the whole childish. his genital organs were like those of a boy of twelve (fig. ). the patient understood all that was said to him, he could read, write and sing, but could not apply himself to any serious occupation; he did not read the papers, but would amuse himself by looking at pictures in illustrated books; he could play draughts, but was equally pleased when playing with children's toys. during his stay at the clinic he was several times punished for childish pranks: he filled his neighbour's chamber vessel with stones, and amused himself by making little paper boats and sailing them in the urine, etc. he was employed as a page at an all-night café; his age permitted him to perform this work forbidden to children, while his appearance rendered him fitted for the task. when questioned discreetly regarding his sexual functions, or rather his sexual incapacity, he understood at once, and expressed in a childish way his deep regret, because he had heard it said that "that was why they wouldn't let him serve in the army." vittorio ch. is twenty-two years old and looks about eight or ten. stature . metres (average stature for the age of seven being . m.; for eight, . m.). has no beard, nor any signs of virility; genital organs like those of a child. his intelligence is alert, but does not surpass that of a boy of ten. he speaks correctly, can read, write and sing; plays draughts, but does not disdain children's toys, and prefers looking at pictures in illustrated books to reading the daily papers. after the death of the patient, it was found, as a result of the autopsy, that the epiphyses of the long bones had not yet united with the diaphyses, and that the bones of the skull were still as soft as those of a child (fig. ). here is another case, taken from moige:[ ] it is the case of a young working girl, presenting all the appearance of a child of twelve or fourteen; she had not yet attained puberty, although she was thirty years of age. no external sign gave evidence that she was undergoing the sexual transition that should give her womanhood. her breasts were reduced to the mere nipple, as in infancy. her voice was weak. this woman was hysterical and subject to frequent attacks of convulsions. her mental condition remained infantile. she was gentle, docile, timid and apprehensive; she was destitute of coquetry or sense of shame. [illustration: fig. .--boy, seventeen and one-half years old.] [illustration: fig. .--young man, twenty-two years old.] [illustration: fig. .--idiotic cretin, age years, stature . m.] [illustration: fig. .--an example of myxedematous infantilism.] [illustration: fig. .--a group of cretins in the valley of aosta (piedmont). the alteration of the thyroid gland is of endemic origin.] renato l.,[ ] age twenty-nine; stature . m. (average stature at the age of ten, . m.; at eleven, . m.) weight, kilograms (average weight, age of twelve, k.). it appears from his history that he developed normally up to the age of nine, after which period an arrest of development occurred, both physical and psychic. an arrest of the genital organs dates back also to early childhood. his intelligence is that of a backward child; he has never been able to read or write, but can count up to . he has never been able to learn a trade, but shows some talent for drawing. his criminal instincts seem to be especially developed. he spends whole hours, turning over the leaves of popular illustrated novels, and whenever he comes across a picture representing a homicide or an assassination, he utters loud exclamations of delight. he has only one passion, tobacco, and only one object of adoration, ravachol. very violent, extremely irritable; when he is angry, he would kill someone, if, as he says, "he had the strength for it." although, as a rule, he docilely obeys the orders given him, it is because he is "afraid of being scolded." his ideal is to be able some time to obtain refuge in the hospice de bicêtre. from de sanctis's work, _gli infantilismi_, i obtain the following data, that are very suggestive on the anthropological side, regarding a case of infantilism observed by the professor in his asylum-school for defective children, in rome. vincenzo p., seven years of age. father in good health and of good character. mother small, thin, weak, underfed; has had nine children, of which five are living, all feeble. vincenzo was born in due time, birth regular; had five wet-nurses; cut his teeth at the normal intervals; began to walk at the end of the second year and to speak at the end of the first. according to his mother, all went well until the fourth year. at this period, vincenzo became very troublesome and ceased to "grow taller." later on he was sent to the communal school, but the director of the school in the via ricasoli, seeing how undersized and backward he was, sent him to the asylum-school for defective children. in appearance the child is eurhythmic, excepting that the head appears a little _too big_ in proportion to the rest of his body; but it is not of the hydrocephalic type (an infantile characteristic). he is slightly asymmetric, the postero-inferior portion of the right parietal bone being more depressed than that of the left (infantile plagiocephaly). ---------------------------------------+------------------------------ measurements | age at which the -------------------+-------------------+ measurements of of the child |normal measurements| vincenzo would |at the age of seven| be normal -------------------+-------------------+------------------------------ stature, . m. | . m. |three years, stature, . m. weight, . kg. | . kg. |two years, weight, kg. circumference of | . m. |four years, circumference of chest, . m. | | chest, . m. vital index, | vital index, |two years, vital index, . -------------------+-------------------+------------------------------ the bust is _greatly developed_ in comparison with the lower limbs, which are unquestionably short. (the sitting stature was not taken, but this note, recorded from simple observation, reminds us of the enormous difference between the indices of stature at the age of two or three and at the age of seven: index at two years= ; at three= ; at seven= .) but although we lack the index of stature, we may make use of the vital index, which is given by the proportion between the circumference of the chest and the stature, and consequently gives us an index of the morphology of the bust in its relation to the whole personality; thus we find that the vital index corresponds in the present case to that of a child of two, as is also true of the weight, so that we may deduce that the index of stature was probably about - . he shows no impairment as to external sensations; on the other hand, internal sensations, such as satiety, illness, etc., are blunted. his power of attention seems sufficient, both at play and in school and when questioned. neither does his memory show anything abnormal. emotionally, he is below the normal level; he says that he is afraid of thunder; occasionally he shows annoyance when disturbed; but it is equally certain that he never becomes angry, never turns pale and never blushes, as the result of any excitement. he is of an indifferent disposition and is passive in manner; he is good natured, or rather, a certain degree of apathy makes him appear so. all things considered, his mental development may be described as that of a three-year-old child; only that he differs from children of that age in his lack of vivacity and in his complete development of articulate speech (it should be noted, in regard to the diagnosis of age made by so distinguished a psychologist as de sanctis, that he judged the child to have a psychic development corresponding to the age of three years); while we, studying the general measurements of the body, determined that they correspond to three different ages, namely, two, three and four the average of which is precisely three; while the stature, which is the index of development of the body as a whole, corresponds almost exactly to that average of three years ( . m., . m.). _pathogenesis of infantilism._--at this point it might be asked: why do we grow? we hide the mechanism of growth under very vague expressions: biological final causes, ontogenetic evolution, heredity. but, if we stop to think, such expressions are not greatly different from those which they have replaced: the divine purpose, creation. in other words, a causal explanation is lacking. but positive science refuses to lose itself in the search after final causes, in which case it would become metaphysical philosophy. nevertheless, it may pursue its investigations into the genesis of phenomena, whenever the results of experiments permit it to advance. so it is in the case of growth; certain relatively recent discoveries in physiology have made it possible to establish relations between the development of the individual and the functions of certain little glands of "internal secretion." now, the discovery of these relations is certainly not a causal explanation of the phenomenon of growth, but only a profounder analysis of it. hitherto, we have considered the organism in regard to its chief visceral functions: in speaking of macroscelia and of brachyscelia, we considered the different _types_ in relation to the development of the organs of vegetative life and the organs of external relations: the central nervous system, the lungs, the heart, the digestive system. our next step is to enter upon the study of certain little organs, which were still almost ignored by the anatomy and physiology of yesterday. these organs are glands which, unlike other glands (the salivary glands, the pancreas, the sudoriferous glands, etc.), are lacking in an excretory duct, through which the juices prepared for an immediate physiological purpose might be given forth; and in the absence of such excretory tubes, their product must be distributed through the lymphatic system, and hence imperceptibly conveyed throughout the whole organism. one of these glands, the one best known, is the _thyroid_; but there are others, such, for example, as the _thymus_, situated beneath the sternum, or breast-bone, and much reduced in size in the adult; the _pineal gland_ or hypophysis cerebri, situated at the base of the encephalon; the _suprarenal capsules_, little ear-shaped organs located above the kidneys. up to a short time ago, it was not known what the functions of such glands were; some of them were regarded as atavistic survivals, because they are more developed in the lower animals than in man, and consequently were classed with the vermiform appendix as relics of organs which had served their functions in a bygone phylogenetic epoch and remain in man without any function, but on the contrary represent a danger through the local diseases that they may develop. the cerebral hypophysis was in ancient times regarded as the _seat of the soul_. these glands are very small; the largest is the thyroid, which weighs between thirty and forty grams ( to - / oz.); the suprarenal glands weigh four grams each (about grains); the hypophysis hardly attains the weight of one gram. the importance of these glands began to be revealed when antiseptic methods rendered surgery venturesome, and the attempt was made (in ) to remove the thyroid gland. after a few weeks the patient operated on began to feel the effects of the absence of an organ necessary to normal life: effects that may be summed up as, extreme general debility; pains in the bones and in the head; an elastic swelling of the entire skin; enfeebled heart action, and anemia; and on the psychic side, loss of memory, taciturnity, melancholy. after the lapse of some time the patient showed such further symptoms as the shedding of the cuticle of the skin, whitening of the hair and _facies cretinica_. but when sick undertook to operate upon the thyroid of a child of ten, the deleterious effects of interrupting the above-mentioned function of the gland manifested itself in an _arrest of_ _development_; at the age of twenty-eight the patient operated on by sick was a cretin (idiotic dwarf) . metres tall (average stature at age of ten= . m.). since that time certain diseases have been recognised that call to mind the condition of patients who have undergone an operation for removal of the thyroid glands, and in which the subjects have suffered from _hypothyroidea_, or insufficient development of the thyroid. such individuals were characterised by _nanism_, solid edema of the skin, arrest of psychic development, and absence of development of puberty; this malady has taken its place in medical treatises under the name of myxedema; and, when serious, is accompanied by _nanism_ and myxedematous idiocy. but in _mild_ _cases_ it may result in a simple myxedematous infantilism. the other glands of internal secretion are also associated with the phenomena of growth. first in importance is the _thymus_ which is found highly developed in the embryo and in the child at birth, and thereafter diminishes in volume, until it almost disappears after the attainment of puberty. in the psychological laboratories of luciani, at rome, the first experiments were conducted upon dogs, for the purpose of determining what alterations in growth would result as a consequence of the removal of the thymus. the dogs thus operated on were weak; furthermore they became atrophied, accompanied by roughness of the skin and changes in pigmentation. after this, experiments were made in the pediatric clinic at padua, under the direction of professor cervesato, in the application of thymic organotherapy (that is, the use of animal thymus as medicine) with notable success in the case of atrophic children (infantile atrophy occurs in early infancy; this form is known popularly in italy as the "monkey sickness." nursing children become extremely thin, cease to grow in length, the little face becomes elongated and skeleton-like, and is frequently covered with a thick down). stoppato also obtained analogous results in infantile atrophy and anemia. hence it is evident that the very rapid growth in the embryo is associated with the functional action of the thymus. and this is also true of the very rapid growth during the first years of a child's life. the pituitary gland, or cerebral hypophysis, has also functions associated with the general nervous tone and trophism (or nourishment) of the tissues, and especially of the osseous system. there is a disease known as acromegalia (marie's disease) which is characterised by an abnormal and inharmonic growth of the skeleton, especially in the limbs and the jaw; the hands and feet become enormously enlarged, while the jaw lengthens and thickens (an unhealthy formation on which the common people of italy have bestowed the name of "horse sickness," because of the appearance assumed by the face). such patients complain of general and progressive debility of their psychic activities. in such cases, an autopsy shows an alteration of the pituitary gland, often due to malignant tumors (sarcoma). the suprarenal capsules also bear a relation to general trophism and particularly to the pigmentation of the skin. it was already noted by cassan and meckel that the negro races show a greater volumetric development of the suprarenal capsules; when in addison for the first time discovered a form of disease associated with alterations of the suprarenal capsules, characterised by an intensely brown colouration of the skin (bronzed-skin disease), general debility of the nervous and muscular systems, progressive anemia and mental torpor; the malady ends in death. in the case of animals operated on for physiological experiments, not one of them has been able to survive. some interesting observations have been made by zander on the connection between the development of the nervous system and the suprarenal glands. he found that there was an insufficient development of these glands in individuals having teratological (monstrous) mis-shapements of the brain, as in the case of hemicephalus (absence of one-half the brain), cyclops, etc. there exists between all the ductless glands, or those of internal secretion, an organic sympathy: in other words, if one of them is injured the others react, frequently to the extent of assuming a vicarious (compensating) functional action. what their functional mechanism is, that is, whether the secretions act as formative stimulants or enzymes, ferments of growth, or whether as antitoxins to the toxins elaborated by various organs in the process of regression, is a question still controverted and in any case cannot enter within the limits of our field. it is enough for us to know that the general growth of the organism and its morphological harmony, depend not only as regards the skeleton, but equally in relation to the cutaneous system and its pigmentation, the development of the muscles, the heart, the blood, the brain, and the trophic functions of the nervous system, upon some formative and protective action of all these little glands of "internal secretion," with which are associated the _psychic activities_ and even the life itself of each individual, as though within the embryonic crucible there must have been certain substances that acted by stimulating the genetic forces and directing the trophism of the tissues toward a predetermined morphology. to-day it is held that even the _mother's milk_ contains these formative principles, or _enzymes_, suited to stimulate the tissues of her own child in the course of their formation; consequently, it produces results which no other milk in all nature can replace. alterations in these glands of "internal secretion" may therefore produce an arrest of development--and, in mild cases, forms of infantilism. but the gland which in this connection is of first importance is the _thyroid_. now there is one form of arrest of the trophic rhythm of growth which may be due to _hereditary causes_ effecting the formative glands (myxedematous infantilism), or to exceptional causes occurring in the individual himself in the course of formation, either at the moment of conception, or at some later moment, as may happen even during the period of infancy (dystrophic infantilism of various origin). in all these cases, however, according to hertoghe, the exceptional causes, deleterious to growth, would first of all exercise their influence upon the glands of internal secretion and especially upon the thyroid. in order to make clear, in connection with such complex pathological problems, the cases which are important from the point of view of pedagogy and the school, let us divide them into: _myxedematous infantilism_, due to congenital insufficiency of the thyroid gland from hereditary causes, and _dystrophic infantilism_, associated with various causes deleterious to individual development--and acting secondarily upon the glands of internal secretion (syphilis, tuberculosis, alcoholism, malaria, pellagra, etc.). _myxedematous infantilism_ is characterised by short stature, by excessive development of the adipose system, and by arrest of mental development (including speech). such _infantiles_ very frequently have a special morphology of the face, that suggests the mongol type, and characteristic malformations of the hands (little fingers atrophied). when treated with extracts of the thyroid glands of animals, they improve notably; they become thinner, they gain in stature, their mentality develops to the extent of permitting them to study and to work. certain mongoloids treated by de sanctis in the asylum-school at rome were improved to the point of being able to attend the high-school and therefore were restored to their family and to society as useful individuals--all of which are facts that are of singular importance to us as educators! medical care working hand in hand with pedagogy may save from parasitism individual human beings who otherwise would be lost. we ought to be convinced from such evidence of the necessity of _special schools_ for deficients, wholly separated from the elementary schools, and where _medical care_ combined with a specially adapted pedagogic treatment may transform the school into a true "home of health and education." the plan of a "school with a prolonged schedule of hours," including two meals and a medical office, as was conceived and organised by prof. sante de sanctis in rome, has been proved to answer admirably to this social need; because without wholly removing the children from their families, and therefore without exposing them to the disadvantages of a boarding school, it provides them with all the assistance necessary to their special needs. _dystrophic infantilism._--given a case of infantilism, discoverable by the teacher through the general measurements of the body and psychic examination, it is interesting to investigate the deleterious _causes_. it may be the result of _poisoning_, as for example from _alcohol_. alcohol has such a direct influence upon the arrest of development that in england jockeys are produced by making the lads drink a great deal of alcohol. children who drink alcohol _do not grow in_ _stature_, and similarly the embryo grows in a less degree when the mother indulges in alcohol during pregnancy; some swiss women deliberately resort to this means, in order that a smaller child may lessen the pain of childbirth. but alcohol not only diminishes the stature, but destroys the harmony of the different parts; that is, in the development of the body it arrests both the volumetric and the morphological growth. furthermore, alcohol produces in children an arrest of mental development. an acquaintance with this principle of hygiene should be looked upon by the teacher less as a piece of special knowledge than as a _social duty_. from the point of view of the educator, the fight against alcoholism should have no assignable limits! it would be vain for him to perfect his didactic methods in order to _educate a child that drank_ _wine or other still worse alcoholic liquors_. it would be better if the efforts which he meant to dedicate to such educative work could be all turned to a _propaganda_ directed toward the parents of such children, or toward the children themselves, to induce them to abstain from so pernicious a habit! we may also consider in the category of _poisonings_ certain chronic maladies which act upon the organism with special toxic (poisonous) effects. in the foremost rank of such maladies belongs _syphilis._--this disease is ranked among the principal causes of _abortion_; in other words, the foetus which results from a syphilitic conception lacks _vitality_, and often fails to complete the cycle of intrauterine life. but even granting that the foetus survives and attains its complete development, the child after birth _grows_ tardily, and very often remains an _infantile_. it is well known that syphilis has been transmitted to new-born infants at the time of birth, in consequence of which these infants may in turn transmit syphilis to their wet-nurses. in such cases they are really _sick_ and need medical treatment from the hour of their birth. just as in the adult patient, syphilis has several successive stages, an acute primary stage, with plain manifestations of hard ulcers, erythema diffused over the skin of the entire body, glandular infiltrations, etc., and then secondary and tertiary manifestations that eventually become chronic and exhibit almost imperceptible symptoms; so in the case of children, syphilis may be transmitted in various degrees of virulence. in the acute stage the result will be abortion or the child will be still-born, or else the new-born child will plainly exhibit ulcerations and erythema, but at other periods of the disease, the child may bear far less evident signs of its affliction, as for instance a special form of corrosion in the enamel of its teeth; the _cervical pleiades_ or enlargement of certain little lymphatic glands like the beads of a rosary, distinguishable by touch in the posterior region of the neck; certain cranial malformations (prominent nodules on the parietal bones, parrot's nodes); and in the child's whole personality an under-development in respect to its age. in cases like these the teacher's _observations_ may be of real social value, because the child has shown no symptoms of such a nature as to cause the parents to have recourse to a physician, and it is the child's _scholarship_ (using the word in the broad sense of the _way in which the child reacts in the environment_ _of school_, the profit he derives from study, etc.) that may reveal an abnormal development to an intelligent teacher. the first indication is a _stature below what is normal at a given_ _age_. such observations ought to be obligatory upon teachers who are in sympathy with the new ideas, for they alone can be the arbiters of the rising generations. it is being said on all sides, to be sure, with optimistic assurance that argues a deficiency of critical insight and common sense, that an adequate _education of_ _the mothers_ ought to enlighten all women in regard to the laws of growth in children and the abnormalities that are remediable. but of what class of mothers are we supposed to be speaking? certainly not of the great mass of working women and illiterates! certainly not of the women who have been constrained to hard toil from childhood up, and later on condemned to abortion because of such unjust labor, while their spirit is brutalized and their memory loses even the last lingering notion of an alphabet! it will always be easier and more practical, in every way, to enlighten twenty-five thousand teachers regarding these principles than to enlighten many millions of mothers; not to mention that if we wished to enlighten these mothers in a practical way regarding the principles of the hygiene of generation, we should still have to invoke the services of that very class whose assigned task in society is precisely that of educating the masses! the teacher can and should learn at least how to _suspect_ the presence of hereditary syphilis in his pupils, in order to be able to invoke the aid of the physician, leaving to the latter the completion of the task, namely, the eventual cure. it is well known that iodide of potassium and its substitutes, especially if used at an early stage, can _cure_ syphilitic children and therefore save innocent boys and girls from eventual definite arrest of development and from all the resultant human and social misery. another cause that is deleterious to development is _tuberculosis._--although it has now been demonstrated that tuberculosis is not hereditary, as an active disease--that is, we cannot inherit in our organism localised colonies of the tuberculosis bacillus, because the bacilli cannot pass through the placenta into the foetus during the period of gestation--nevertheless a _predisposition_ to infection from the bacillus can be inherited. a predisposition which consists in a special form of weakened resistance of the tissues, rendering them incapable of immunity, and a skeletal formation which is distinguished by a narrowness of the chest, and a consequent smallness of lungs, which, being unable to take in sufficient air, constitute a _locus minoris resistentiæ_ (locality of less resistance) to localisation of the bacilli. now, since our environment is highly infected by the bacilli of tuberculosis, we must all necessarily meet with it, we must all have repeatedly received into our mouths and air passages koch's bacilli, alive and virulent; and yet the strong organism remains immune, while the weak succumbs. consequently those who are predisposed by heredity are almost fated to become tuberculous, and in this sense the malady presents the appearance of being truly hereditary. but such organic weakness in a child predisposed to tuberculosis is manifested not only by possible attacks of various forms of the disease localised in the glands (scrofula) or the bones, but also by a _delayed development of the whole personality_. now, the environment of school and the educative methods still in vogue in our schools, not only are not adapted to correct such a predisposition, but what is more, the school itself _creates_ this predisposition! in fact, the sitting posture--or rather, that of stooping over the desk, to write--and the prolonged confinement in a closed environment, impede the normal development of the thorax and of all the physical powers in general. many a work on pedagogic anthropology has already shown that the _most_ _studious scholars_, the _prize-winners_, etc., have a wretched chest measure, and a muscular force so low as to threaten ruin to their constitutions. consequently, children who are predisposed to tuberculosis ought unquestionably to be _removed_ from our schools and cared for and educated in favourable environments. while we are still impotent in the face of fatalities due to this deplorable disease, we are not ignorant of the means needed to save a predisposed child and transform him into a robust and resistant lad. such knowledge, to be sure, was applied to _mankind_ only as a second thought; for the first men to apply and then to teach such means of defence were the owners of cattle and the veterinaries. the owners of cattle discovered that if a calf was born of a tuberculous cow, it could be saved and become an excellent head of cattle, if only it was subjected to a very simple procedure; the calf must be removed from its mother and given over to be nursed by another cow in the open country; and it must remain in the open pastures for some time after it its weaned. by taking similar precautions in the case of children, it has been shown that the son of a tuberculous woman, if entrusted to a wet-nurse in the _open country_, and brought up on an abundance of nourishing food until his sixth year in the freedom of the fields, can be made as robust as any naturally sound child. from this we get the principle of _schools in the open air_, or of _schools in the woods_, or _on the sea-shore_, for the benefit of weak, anemic children, predisposed to tuberculosis. such a sojourn constitutes the "school-sanatorium," the lack of which is so grievously felt by the parents of feeble children, and that might so easily be instituted in our mild and luxuriant peninsula, so rich in hillsides and sea-coast! _malaria._--one of the chief causes of mortality and of biological pauperism in many regions of italy is _malaria_. this scourge rages even to the very gates of rome. the country folk of these abandoned tracts pine away in misery and at the same time in illiteracy, while their blood is impoverished by disease, and a notable percentage of the children are _victims of arrested development_. these unfortunates, forgotten by civilisation, are destined to roam the fields, bearing with them, till the day of their death, a deceptive appearance of youth, and an infantile incapacity for work, an object-lesson of misery and barbarity! among the means of fighting malaria, the spread of civilisation and the school ought to find a place. even the quinine given freely by the government is distributed with difficulty among these unhappy people, brutalised by hunger and fever; and some message from civilisation ought to precede the remedy for the material ill. a far-sighted institution is that of sunday classes founded by signor celli and his wife in the abandoned malarial districts. in these classes, the teachers from elementary schools give lessons every sunday, spreading the principles of civic life, at the same time that they distribute quinine to the children. if we stop to think that wherever malaria is beaten back, it means a direct conquest of fertile lands and of robust men, and hence of wealth, we must realise at once the immense importance of this sort of school and this sort of struggle, which may be compared to the ancient wars of conquest, when new territories and strong men constituted the prize of battles won, and the grandeur of the victorious nations. _pellagra._--pellagra is still another scourge diffused over many regions of italy. it is well known that this disease, whose pathological etiology is still obscure, has some connection with a diet of mouldy grain. pellagra runs a slow course, beginning almost unnoticed in the first year, with a simple cutaneous eruption, which the peasants sometimes attribute to the sun. the second year disturbances of the stomach and intestines begin, aggravated by a diet of spoiled corn; but it is usually not until the third year that pellagra reveals itself through its symptoms of great nervous derangements, with depression of muscular, psychic and sexual powers, together with _melancholia_, amounting to a true and special form of psychosis (insanity) leading to homicide, even of those nearest and dearest (mothers murdering their children) and to suicide. this established cycle of the disease is not invariable. instead of representing successive _stages_, these symptoms may often be regarded merely as representing the _prevailing_ phenomena in various forms of pellagra; in any case, it constitutes a malady that runs a slow course during which the same patient is liable to many relapses. while the malady is running its course, the patients may continue their usual physiological and social life, and even _reproduce_ themselves. so that it is not an infrequent case when we find mothers, _suffering from pellagra_, nursing an offspring generated in sickness and condemned to manifold forms of _arrested development, both_ _physical and mental_. against a disease so terrible that it strikes the individual and the species, it is now a matter of common knowledge that there is an exceedingly simple remedy: it consists in a strongly nitrogenous diet (i.e. meat) and that, too, only temporarily. in fact, in the districts where the pellagra rages, various charitable organisations have been established, among others the economic _kitchens_ for mothers, which by distributing big rations of meat effect a cure, within a few months, not only of the sick mothers but of their children as well. the real battle against pellagra must be won through _agrarian_ _reforms_: but in the meantime the local authorities could in no small degree aid the unhappy population with their counsel, by enlightening the peasants regarding the risks they run, as well as by informing them of the various forms of organised aid actually established in the neighbourhood and often unknown to the public or feared by them, because of the ignorance and prejudice with which they are profoundly imbued! _pauperism_, _denutrition_, _hypertrophy._--we may define all the causes hitherto considered that are deleterious to growth, as _toxical_ _dystrophies_, since not only alcohol, but the several diseases above discussed--syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, pellagra--produce forms of chronic intoxication. but besides all these various forms of dystrophies, we may also cite cases of infantilism due purely to defective nutrition, and family poverty. physiological misery may produce an arrest of growth in children. but just as denutrition associated with pauperism (social misery, economic poverty, lack of nourishment) may cause an organism in course of development to arrest its processes of evolution through lack of material, the same result is equally apt to be produced by any one of a great variety of causes liable to produce organic denutrition, physiological poverty. for example, too frequent pregnancies of the child's mother, which have resulted in impoverishing the maternal organism, causing deficiency of milk, etc. _infant illnesses._--in the same way, organic impoverishment is caused by certain maladies of the digestive system which impede the normal assimilation of nutritive matter: dysentery, for instance; and the effects may be still more disastrous if symptoms of this kind are accompanied by feverish conditions, as in typhus. there are cases, however, in which the arrest of development is not to be attributed to some wasting disease, or to the denutrition resulting from it; but rather to some acute illness occurring in early childhood (pneumonia, etc.), after which the child ceased to progress in accordance with his former obviously normal development. _anangioplastic infantilism._--another form of infantilism is associated with a malformation of the heart and blood-vessels, that is to say, the heart and aorta together with the entire circulatory system are of small dimensions; the calibre of the arteries is less than normal. in such a case the restriction of the entire vascular system and the scantiness of circulation of the blood constitute an impediment to the normal growth of the organism. although in such cases the explanation of the cause of the phenomenon is purely mechanical, nevertheless such abnormality of the heart and veins is to be classed as a teratological (monstrous) malformation, determined by original anomalies of the ductless glands, similar to what is found in cases of cephalic and cerebral monstrosities. in this form of infantilism the patient shows not only the usual fundamental characteristics already noted, but also symptoms of _anemia_ as obstinate to all methods of treatment as _chlorosis_ is; in addition to which they often show congenital malformations of the heart, in every way similar in their effects to valvular affections such as may result from pathological causes (chief of which are mitral and aortic stenosis, which consist of a stricture of the valves connected with the left ventricle of the heart). accordingly, children who show forms of mitral infantilism are inferior to their actual age not only in their whole psychosomatic appearance, but they are noticeably weak, pale and suffering from shortness of breath and disturbances of the circulation. in such cases, neither pedagogy nor hygiene can counteract the arrest of development; but it is well that the attention of teachers should be called to such cases, in order that cruel errors may be prevented, which would unconsciously do additional harm to individuals already burdened by nature with physiological wretchedness. in conclusion: the normal growth of the organism is _associated_ with the functional action of certain glands known as glands "of internal secretion," such as the thymus and thyroid, first of all, as well as the suprarenal capsules and the cerebral hypophysis. this group of _formative_ glands presides not only over the entire growth of the body, but also over the intimate modeling of its structure; so that a _lesion_ or _deficiency_ in any of them results not only in nanism and an arrest of mental development, but in various forms of general dystrophy. that the organism is associated in the course of its transformations with the functional action of specific glands is shown by the _development of puberty_, which consists in a series of transformations of the _entire organism_, but is associated with the establishment of functional activity of glands that were hitherto immature: the genital glands (ovaries, testicles). these glands also are functionally in close sympathy with the entire group of formative glands: so much so that, if the glands of internal secretion are injured, the genital glands usually fail to attain normal development (infantilism). now, the transformations which take place in the organism at the period of puberty might be produced at other periods if the functional action of the generative glands should show itself at a different epoch. that is, these transformations are not associated with the _age of the_ _organism_, but with the development of specific glands. there are cases of the genital glands maturing at abnormal ages; or of local maladies that have hastened the appearance of the phenomena of puberty in children of tender years. a notable case is that described by dr. sacchi,[ ] of a nine-year old boy, who had grown normally up to the age of five and a half, both in his physiological organism and in his psychic personality. at the age of five and a half, the child's father noticed a physical and moral alteration; the child's voice grew deeper, his character more serious, and the skeletal and muscular systems grew rapidly, while on certain portions of the body, as for example on the face, a fine down appeared. at the age of seven the child had attained a stature that was gigantic for his age; he was very diligent and studious and did not care to play with his comrades. at nine, he had a stature of . metres (the normal stature being . ), a weight of kilograms (normal = ); his muscles were highly developed, his powers of traction and compression being equal to those of a man; his chin was covered with a thick beard five centimetres long. when he was examined by a physician, the latter discovered a tumor in the left testicle. after an operation, the child lost his beard and regained his childish voice; his character became more timid and sensitive; he began once more to enjoy his comrades and take part in boyish games. his muscular force underwent a notable diminution. _rickets._--it is important not to confound any of the various forms of infantilism with _rickets_. rickets is a well-defined malady whose special point of attack is the osseous system in course of formation; but it leaves the nervous system and the genital system unimpaired. the sufferer from rickets may be a person of intelligence, capable of attaining the highest distinctions in art or in politics; he is normal in his genital powers, so that he is capable of normal reproduction, without, in many cases, transmitting any taint of rickets to his descendants. nevertheless this disease, like all constitutional maladies, occurs only in individuals who are _weakly_. among the characteristics of rickets, the one which assumes first importance is _inferiority of stature_ in comparison with the normal man. in this connection i quote the following figures from bonnifay:[ ] -------------------------------------------------- age | stature in centimetres | rachitic children | normal children -------------+-------------------+---------------- months | . | . years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . - years | - | . - years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . - years | . | . -------------------------------------------------- but together with diminution of stature there exist in rickets various _deformities_ of the skeleton, especially in the bones of the cranium, in the vertebral column and in the frame of the thorax; although even the pelvis and the limbs have been known to show the characteristic deformities. an objective knowledge of the first symptoms of rickets ought to be regarded as indispensable on the part of mistresses in children's asylums, and in any case to form an important chapter in pedagogic anthropology. for it is well known that in the early stages of _rickets_ the child may be so guided in its growth as to save it from deformities of the skeleton, even though a definite limitation of the stature may not be _prevented_. that is to say, that through the intervention of hygiene and pedagogy the rachitic child may be saved from becoming a _cripple_ or a _hunchback_, and will simply remain an individual of _low stature_; with certain signs and proportions of the skeleton indicative of the attack through which he has passed. even in very severe cases it is at least possible to minimize the deformity of the thorax and the curvature of the vertebral column. the precursory signs of rickets in a child are: a characteristic _muscular weakness_, frequently accompanied by excessive development of adipose tissue, giving an illusory impression of abundant nutrition; delay in the development of the teeth and in locomotion, which from the very beginning may be accompanied by curvature of the long bones of the legs. the bregmatic fontanelle of the cranium closes later than at the normal period, and is larger than in normal cases, just as the entire cerebral cranium is abnormally developed in volume, while the facial portion remains small, especially in regard to the jaw bones. one of the most salient characteristics, however, is the peculiar enlargement of the _articular heads_ of the long bones, easily recognizable in the size of the _wrists_; the enlargement is also found in the extremities of the ribs, which at their points of union on each side of the sternum form a succession of little lumps, like the beads of a rosary. in conjunction with these characteristics, it is to be noted, at all ages, as appears from the figures given by bonnifay, that there is a notable _diminution of stature_. the _treatment_ of rickets is _medical_ and _pedagogical_ combined. children of this type should be _removed_ from the public school, where the school routine might have a fatally aggravating effect upon the pathological condition of such children. in fact, gymnastics based upon marching and exercising in an erect position, together with a prolonged sitting posture, are likely to produce weaknesses of the skeleton and deformities, even where there are no symptoms of rickets! the establishment of _infant_ asylums for rachitic children is one of the most enlightened movements of the modern school. we italians are certainly not the last to found such institutions, and padua possesses one of the oldest and most perfect asylums of this sort of which europe can boast. asylums for rachitic children ought to have a special school equipment, so far as concerns the _benches_ and the apparatus for _medical and orthopedic gymnastics_; furthermore they should be provided with a pharmaceutical stock of remedies suited to building up the osseous system and the organism in general; and a school refectory should be provided, adapted to the condition of the children. the methods of instruction should rigorously avoid any form of _fatigue_, and instead provide the child with psychic stimuli designed to overcome a sluggishness due to the mental prostration to which he is for the most part subject. as regards their situation, these asylums for rachitic children may be advantageously located upon the _sea-coast_. _the stature of abnormals._--the name of abnormals is applied to the entire series of individuals who are not normal: hence the categories already considered (infantilism, gigantism, rachitis) are included by implication. the group of abnormals, however, includes besides a long series of other classes, neuropathics, epileptics, and degenerates. under the head of abnormals may also be included those who are abnormal in character, such as criminals, etc. it is not irrational to group together the different types of abnormals, for the purpose of anthropological research, in contrast with those who are normal. in america, for instance, such studies are conducted on a large scale, precisely for the purpose of showing the _deviation_ of abnormal dimensions of the body from normal dimensions, not only in the definitive development of the body, but also during growth. the abnormals depart from the mean measurements, now rising above and again falling below, as though they were intermittently impelled by the biological impulse of their organism, which at one time manifests a hypergenesis and at another a hypogenesis. a clear illustration of these facts is afforded by macdonald's diagram (see page ): the solid line which rises regularly represents the growth in stature of normal individuals; the dotted line which forms a zig-zag, now rising rapidly above the normal line and then falling very much below it, represents the growth in stature of the abnormals. naturally such a chart must be interpreted by comparison with the standards of mean measurements gathered at successive ages from a large number of different children. it shows that normal children are nearly uniform among themselves, and in relation to the years of their growth: while abnormal children differ greatly one from another and do not accord with the mean stature of the age they represent. regarding the stature of _criminals_ there can be nothing special to say: _criminals_ do not represent an anthropological entity. they belong to a large extent, whenever the criminal act has a psychophysiological basis, to various categories of _abnormals_. from the victim of rickets to the infantile, to the submicrocephalic, to the ultra-macroscele or ultra-brachyscele, all abnormal organisms may contribute to the number of those predisposed to the social phenomenon of criminality. and it is for this reason that we may say in general that the stature of abnormals is sometimes above and sometimes below the normal, but with a prevailing tendency to fall below. _moral and pedagogic considerations._--the objection may be raised that a medico-pedagogic system of treatment, designed to prevent a threatened arrest of development or to minimise its progressive symptoms, demands on the part of society an excessive effort, out of proportion to the end in view. to cure or ameliorate the condition of the weak may even be regarded as a principle of social ethics that is contrary to nature, whose laws lead inexorably to the selection of the strong and to the elimination of all those who are unfitted for the struggle for life. sparta has furnished us with a practical example that is very far from the principles which scientific pedagogy is to-day seeking to formulate as a new necessity of social progress. [illustration: mac donald _stature of normal persons_ _stature of abnormal persons_ fig. .] but we are too far removed from the triumphant civilisation of greece, to recur to the authority of her example: the principle sanctioned to-day by modern civilisation, that of "respect for human life," forbids the violent _elimination_ of the weak: mount taygetus is no longer a possible fate for innocent babes in a social environment the civic spirit of which has abolished the death penalty for criminals. consequently, since the weak have a right to live, as many of them as naturally survive are destined to become a burden, as parasites, upon the social body of normal citizens; and they furnish a living picture of physiological wretchedness, a spectacle of admonitory misery, inasmuch as it represents an _effect_ of social causes constituting the collective errors of human ethics. ignorance of the hygiene of generation, maladies due to the vices and the ignorance of men, such as syphilis, other maladies such as tuberculosis, malaria and pellagra, representing so many scourges raging unchecked among the people, are the actual causes that are undermining the social structure, and manifesting themselves visibly through their pernicious fruit: the birth of weaklings. to forget the innocent results of such causes, as we forget the causes themselves, would be to run the risk of plunging precipitously into an abyss of perdition. it is precisely these disastrous effects upon posterity that ought to warn us and shed light upon the errors through which we are passing lightly and unconsciously. accordingly, to gather in all the weaklings is equivalent to erecting a barrier against the social causes which are enfeebling posterity: since it is impossible to conceive that if the existence of such a danger were once demonstrated, society would rest until every effort had been made to guard against the possibility of its recurrence. in addition to such motives for human prophylaxis, a more immediate interest should lead us to the pedagogic protection of weak children. the establishment of special schools for defective children, sanatarium-schools for tuberculous children, rural schools for those afflicted with malaria and pellagra, infant asylums for rachitic children, is a work of many-sided utility. they constitute a fundamental and radical purification of the schools for normal children: in fact, so long as intellectual and moral defectives and children suffering from infantilism and rachitis intermingle with healthy pupils, we cannot say that there really exist any _schools_ _for normal children_, in which pedagogy may be allowed a free progress in the art of developing the best forces in the human race. still another useful side to the question is that of putting a stop to the physiological ruin of individual weaklings. very small would be the cost of schools for defective children, asylums for the rachitic, tonics, quinine, the iodide treatment, school refectories for little children afflicted with hereditary taints and organic disease: very small indeed, in comparison to the disastrous losses that society must one day suffer at the hands of these future criminals and parasites gathered into prisons, insane asylums and hospitals, in comparison to the harm that may be done by one single victim of tuberculosis by spreading the homicidal bacilli around him. it is a principal of humanity as well as of economy to _utilise_ all human forces, even when they are represented by beings who are apparently negligible. to every man, no matter how physiologically wretched, society should stretch a helping hand, to raise him. in north america the following principle has the sanction of social custom: that the task of improving physiological conditions and at the same time of instilling hope and developing inferior mentalities to the highest possible limit constitutes an inevitable human duty. accordingly it remains for the science of pedagogy to accomplish the high task of human redemption, which must take its start from those miracles that the twentieth century has already initiated in almost every civilised country: straightening the crippled, giving health to the sick, awakening the intelligence in the weak-minded--much as hearing is restored to the deaf and speech to the mutes--such is the work which modern progress demands of the teacher. because such straightening of mind and body naturally lies within the province of those who have the opportunity to give succor to the human being still in the course of development; while after a defect has reached its complete development in an individual, no manner of help can ever modify the harm that has resulted from lack of intelligent treatment. the prevention of the irremediable constitutes a large part of the work which is incumbent upon us as educators. summary of stature we have been considering _stature_ as the linear index of the whole complex development of the body, taking it in relation to two other factors, the one internal or biological, and the other external or social. these two factors, indeed, unite in forming the character of the individual in his final development; and in each of them education may exert its influence, both in connection with the hygiene of generation and through reforms instituted in the school. in the following table are summed up the different points of view from which we have studied stature in its biological characteristics and in its variations: varieties {ethnic varieties {stature in different races; extreme limits. of stature { and limits of {stature of the italian people; and its { oscillation { geographical distribution. { {limits of stature: medium, tall, low. {biological {difference of stature in the sexes. { varieties {stature at different ages (growth). {mechanical {transitory or physiological. { {permanent, often caused by variations {variations { {deformities (causes: the in stature { due to { {attitudes required by the work.) { adaptation { { {physiological {nutrition. { {physical {heat. { { {light. { { {electricity. { {psychic {psychic stimuli. {myxedematous. {pathological {infantilism { { variations { {dystrophic {from alcohol. { { { {from syphilis. { { { {from tuberculosis. { { { {from malaria. { { { {from pellagra. { { {hypotrophic {denutrition. { { {anangioplastic { {rachitis summary of the scientific principles illustrated in the course of the exposition of our subject when an anthropological datum is of such fundamental importance as the _stature_, its limits of oscillation must be established, and its terminology must be founded upon such limits expressed in figures that have been measured and established by scientists (medium, tall, low). the stature is the most important datum in pedagogic anthropology, because it represents the linear index of the development of the body, and for us educators is also the _index_ of the child's normal growth. _biopathological laws._--in cases of total arrest of development of the personality (infantilism) the first characteristic symptom usually consists in a diminution of stature in relation to age; the morphological evolution, as well as the psychic, fails to progress in proportion to the _age of the subject_; but it corresponds to the mean bodily proportions belonging to the age which would be normal for the actual stature of the subject. =weight= the _weight_ is a measure which should be taken in conjunction with the stature; because, while the stature is a linear index of the development of the body, the weight represents a _total measure_ _of its mass_; and the two taken together give the most complete expression of the bio-physiological development of the organism. furthermore the weight permits us to follow the _oscillations_ of development; it provides educators with an index, a level of excellence, or the reverse, of their methods as educators, and of the hygienic conditions of the school or of the pedagogic methods in use. the fact is, that if a child is ill, or languid, etc., his stature remains unchanged; it may _grow more slowly_, or be arrested in growth; but it can never diminish. the weight, on the contrary, can be lost and regained in a short time, in response to the most varied conditions of _fatigue_, of _malnutrition_, of _illness_, of _mental_ _anxiety_. we might even call it the _experimental datum_ of the excellence of the child's development. another advantage which the measure of weight has over that of stature is that it may serve as an _exponent of health_ from the very hour of the child's birth; while _stature_ does not exist in the new-born child, and begins to be formed (according to the definition given) only after the first year of its life, that is, when the child has acquired an erect position and the ability to walk steadily. _variations._--weight is one of the measures that have been most thoroughly studied, because it is not a fruit of the recently founded science of pedagogic anthropology; but it enters into the _practice_ of pediatricians (specialists in children's diseases) and of obstetricians (specialists in childbirth), while even the general practitioner can offer precious contributions from his experience. according to winckel, and practically all pediatricians agree with him, "the weight of a child, if taken regularly, is the best thermometer of its health; it easily expresses in terms of figures what the nursing child cannot express in words."[ ] the new-born child weighs from three to four kilograms; but oscillations in weight from , to , grams are considered normal. some obstetricians have noted weights in new-born children that are enormous, true gigantism, which, however, while possible, are altogether exceptional; nine and even eleven kilograms. the oscillations in weight of the child at birth, within normal limits, may have been determined by general biological factors, as for example the sex (the female child weighing less than the male), and the race (especially in regard to the stature of the parents): but the factors which influence the weight of the new-born child in a decisive manner are those regarding the _hygiene of generation_. . "the children which have the greater weight are those born of mothers between the ages of twenty-five and thirty." (mathews duncan.) let us recall what we have said regarding stature; at the end of the twenty-fifth year, that is, at the end of the period of growth, man is admirably ripe for the function of reproduction; and we ought further to recall the views cited regarding the mortality of children conceived at this age which is so favourable to parenthood; and finally the note in regard to celebrated men, almost always begotten at this age. . "first-born children have in general a weight inferior to that of those born later ( , first-born children gave an average of , grams: while , born of the second or subsequent conceptions gave an average of , gr.)" (ingerslevs). let us remember that celebrated men are scarcely ever the _first-born_. . "very short intervals between successive pregnancies interfere with this _progression_ in weight; long intervals on the contrary do not interfere with it" (wernicke). in other words, too frequent pregnancy is unfavourable to the result of the conception. . "mothers who, at the birth of their first child weigh less than fifty-five kilograms and are under twenty years of age, have children of inferior weight, who are less predisposed to normal growth" (schafer). let us recall what we have said regarding the _form_ and the scanty weight in the case of macrosceles; and also in regard to the age of procreation in its relation to stature. . "women who toil at wearisome work up to the final hour give birth to children inferior in weight to those born of mothers who have given themselves up to rest and quiet for some time before the expected birth" (pinard). all these considerations which refer to _normal individuals_, represent a series of hygienic laws regarding _maternity_, which may be summed up as follows: excellence in procreation belongs to those mothers who have already attained the age at which the individual organism has completed its development, and before it has entered upon its involutive period; the mother must herself have a normal weight; the pregnancies must be separated by long intervals; and during the last weeks of pregnancy it is necessary that the mother should have the opportunity of complete rest. the increase in weight of the new-born child during the first days of its life, may constitute a valuable prognostic of the child's life. that is to say, through its successive gains it reveals the vitality, the state of health of this new human being. here also the pediatrists can furnish us with valuable experimental data, which serve to formulate the "laws of growth." these are: . from the moment of a child's birth, throughout the first two days, it suffers a loss in weight of about grams, due to various causes, such as the emission of substances accumulated in the intestines during the intrauterine life (meconium), and the difficulties of adaptation to a new environment and to nutrition. but by the end of the first week a normal child should have regained its original weight; so that after the seventh day the normal child weighs the same as at the moment of birth. on the contrary, children born prematurely, or those having at the time of birth a weight below the average, or those that are affected with latent syphilis, or are weak from any other cause whatever, regain their original weight only by the end of the second week. accordingly, in one or two weeks the family may form a prognosis regarding future life of the new-born child: a matter of fundamental and evident importance. furthermore, an antecedent detail of this sort may be valuable in the progressive history of subjects who, having attained the age for attendance at school, come to be passed upon by the teachers. to this end, in the more progressive countries, the _carnet_ _maternel_, or mother's note-book, has begun to come into fashion, for the use of mothers belonging to the upper social classes (as, for instance, in england): it consists of a book of suitable design, in the form of an album, and more or less _de luxe_ in quality, in which the most minute notes are to be registered regarding the lives of the children from the moment of their birth onward. various authors, especially in france, now give models for the _maternal_ _registration_ of the child's physiological progress; true _biographic_ _volumes_ that would form a precious supplement to the _biographic_ _charts_ of the schools: and the efforts of the family would round out and complete those of the school for the protection of the lives of the new generations. such assistance, however, is only an _ideal_, because nothing short of a great and far distant social progress could place _all_ mothers (the working women, and the illiterate of italy) in a position to compile their _carnet maternel_. auvard advocates, for registering the weight of the child during the first days of its life, a table in which the successive days from the first to the forty-fifth are marked along a horizontal line, while a vertical column gives a series of weights, with -gram intervals, covering a range of grams, the multiples of a hundred being left blank, to be determined by the actual weight of the child and filled in by the mother or whoever takes her place. [illustration: fig. .] in such a table, the graphic sign indicating the changes in weight ought to fall rapidly and rise again to the point of departure by the seventh day, _if the child is robust_. another law of growth which may serve as a prognostic document in the child's physiological history is the following: . "children nourished at their mother's breast double their weight at the fifth month and triple it at the twelfth." in other words, before the middle of its first year a healthy child, normally nourished, will have doubled its weight. on the contrary, "artificial feeding retards this doubling of weight in children, which is attained only by the end of the first year; so that the weight is not tripled until some time in the course of the second year." and this gives us pretty safe principles on which to judge of the personality in the course of formation, at an epoch when stature does not yet exist. undoubtedly a great moral and social progress would be accomplished through a wide dissemination of very simple and economical _carnets maternels_; which should contain not only tables designed to facilitate the keeping of the required records, but also a statement of the laws of _infant hygiene_; or at least, simple and clear explanations of the significance of such phenomena, in relation to the life and health of the child; and also as to the causes which produce weakness in new-born children; or in other words, advice regarding the fundamental laws of the hygiene of generation. all that would be needed, in such case, would be a progressive exposition by means of the _carnets_, through lessons made as simple and as objective as possible, such as the weighing of small babies, to make the much desired "education of the mothers" both possible and practical. but without this practical means; without this new sort of syllabarium on hand, to serve as a constant and luminous guide for married women, i do not believe that we shall have much success with the scattered lectures, obscure and soon forgotten, that at present are being multiplied in an attempt to reach the mothers of the lower classes. in conclusion, i note this last contribution that comes to us from the pediatrists: . "there are certain maladies that cause a daily and very notable loss in weight"; they are the intestinal maladies; there may be an average loss of from to grams a day; but even in cases of simple loss of appetite (dyspepsia) the weight may decrease by about grams a day. but when a child suffering from acute febrile intestinal trouble (cholera infantum), loses a tenth of his weight in twenty-four hours, the illness is mortal. now from the point of view of the educator this fact ought to be of serious interest, because we very frequently find among the recorded details of sickly children, or those suffering from arrested or retarded development, a mention of some _intestinal_ malady incurred in early infancy. still one further observation: meunier has noted a fact of extreme importance: that while children are passing through the period of incubation of an infectious disease, and before they show _any symptoms_ likely to cause a suspicion of the latent illness, they sustain a _daily loss in weight_, from the fourth or fifth day after exposure to contagion until the appearance of decisive symptoms. in children between one and four years old, the daily loss is about fifty grams, and the total about ; but such a loss may rise as high as gr. the most numerous observations were taken in cases of _measles_. now, there is no need of explaining the prophylactic importance of observations such as these! a child who for a period of twenty days is in a state of incubation, is called upon to struggle, with all the forces of immunity that his organism possesses, against a cause of disease which has already invaded him; yet no external sign betrays this state of physical conflict. consequently, the child's organism _continues_ to sustain the customary loss of energy due to the activities of its daily life, and by doing so lessens its own powers of immunity. to prescribe rest, if nothing more, for a child suspected of passing through the period of incubation would in many cases mean the saving of a life, and at the same time would protect his companions from infection, which is communicable even during the period of incubation. in our biographic records of defective children, which include the great majority of the weakly ones, we find in many cases a _characteristic tendency to relapses_ in all kinds of infective diseases, from which they regularly recovered. such organisms, feeble by predisposition, yet sufficiently strong to recover from a long series of illnesses, were _exhausted in respect to those biological forces_ on which the normal growth of the individual depends, by this sort of internal struggle between the organic tissues and the invading microbes. no scheme of special hygiene for children of this type can help us, either in the home or at school; the _daily variations_ _in weight_, on the contrary, might constitute a valuable guide for the protection of such feeble organisms; at the first signs of a diminution in weight, such children ought to be subjected to absolute repose. the use of the weighing-machine, both at home and in school cannot be too strongly recommended. in america the pedagogic custom has already been established of recording the weight of the pupils regularly once a month; but instead of once a month, the weight ought to be taken _every day_. the children might be taught to take their own weight by means of self-registering scales, and to compare it with that of the preceding day, thus learning to keep watch of themselves: and this would constitute both a physical exercise and an exercise in _practical living_. the weight may be considered by itself, as a measurement of the body; and it may be considered in its relation to comparative mean measurements given by the authorities; just as it may also be considered, in the case of the individual, in its relation to the stature. _a._ the weight, taken by itself, is not a homogeneous or rigorously scientific measurement. in the same manner as the stature, it represents a sum of parts differing from one another, the difference in this instance being that of specific gravity. as a matter of fact, it makes a great difference whether a large proportion of the weight of an individual is adipose tissue, or brain, or striped muscles. each of the various organs has its own special specific gravity, as appears from the following table: ------------------------- specific gravity ----------------+-------- tubular bones | . spongy bones | . cartilage | . muscles {from | . {to | . tendons | . epidermis {from | . {to | . hair {from | . {to | . liver | . kidneys | . brain | . cerebrum | . cerebellum | . adipose tissue | . ------------------------- all these specific gravities are low; we weigh but little more than water; and for that reason it is easy for us to swim. but because of the difference in their composition, the _total weight of_ _the body_ gives us no idea of its constituent parts. take for example the question of increase in weight. we can compare the mean figures given by the authorities with the ascertained weight of some particular child of a given age, so as to keep an empirical check upon the normality of its growth. but since we know that an individual in the course of evolution undergoes profound alterations in the volumetric proportions of the different organs in respect to one another, we cannot obtain from the total weight any light upon this extremely important alteration in proportions. thus, for example, quétélet gives the following figures of increase in weight for the two sexes: ------------------------------------------ weight | weight --------------------+--------------------- age | males |females| age | males |females | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | -- | . | . | | . | . | . | . | -- | -- | -- | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | -- | -- | -- ------------------------------------------ increase in weight of body according to sutils ------------------------------------ age |weight of body | increase | in grams | ----------+---------------+--------- at birth | | -- month | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | months | | ------------------------------------ but these figures give no idea of the laws of growth that govern each separate organ, and that have been studied by vierordt. according to this authority, the total weight of the body increases nineteen-fold from birth to complete development. certain ductless glands, on the contrary, _diminish_ in weight in the course of growth; the thymus, for instance, is reduced to half what it weighed originally. furthermore, the various organs all differ in such varying degrees, as compared with their respective weights at birth, that it facilitates comparison to reduce the weight of each separate organ to a scale of . on this basis we find that when complete development is attained, the eyes weigh . ; the brain . ; the medulla oblongata (spinal marrow) ; the liver ; the heart ; the spleen ; the intestines, stomach and lungs ; the skeleton ; the system of striped muscles . and these widely different augmentations are not uniform in their progress, nor is the complete development of each organ attained at the same epoch. as a matter of fact, the brain acquires one-half its final weight at the end of the first year of age; the organs of vegetative life attain half their weight at the beginning of the period preceding puberty (eleventh year). to offset the lack of indications regarding such increases in weight, we have a guide in the _morphology_ of growth, which reveals how differently the various parts of the body develop. however empirical it may be from an analytical point of view, the datum of weight is a valuable index, and represents, _taken by_ _itself_, a synthetic anthropological measure of prime importance. it obeys certain laws of growth which are themselves of great interest; namely, there exist two periods of rapid growth: at birth and during puberty; while at various periods in childhood, between the ages of three and nine, there are alternations of greater and lesser growth analogous to those already noted in relation to stature. accordingly, the weight confirms the fact that the organism does not proceed uniformly in its evolution, but passes through _crises_ _of development_ during which the forces of the organism are all devoted to its rapid transformation; such periods represent epochs at which the organism is more predisposed to maladies, more subject to mortality and less capable of performing work (compare the observations already made in relation to stature). _index of weight._--accordingly, weight and stature stand in a certain mutual relationship, but the correspondence between them is not perfect. in the study of individual physiological development it is necessary to know the anthropological relation between weight and stature; in other words, the ponderal index. without this, we cannot get a true idea of the weight of an individual. for instance, if two persons have the same weight, kilograms for example, and one of them has a stature of . metres and the other of . m.; it is evident that the first of these two will be very thin, because his _weight is insufficient_, while the second, on the contrary, will have an _excessive weight_. a stout, robust child will weigh less, in an absolute sense, than an adult man who is extremely thin and emaciated; but relatively to the mass of his body, he will weigh more. now this relative weight or index of weight, the _ponderal index_, gives us precisely this idea of relative _embonpoint_, of the more or less flourishing state of nutrition that any given individual is enjoying. hence it is a relation of great physiological importance, especially when we are dealing with children. the calculation of the ponderal index ought to be analogous to that of other indexes; what has to be found is its relation to the stature reduced to a scale of . in this case, however, we find ourselves facing a mathematical difficulty, because _volumetric_ measurements are not comparable to linear measurements. consequently it is necessary to reduce the measurement of weight by extracting its cube root, and to establish the following equation: _st_:[*cube root](_w_) = :_x_ whence _pi_ = ([*cube root](_w_))/_s_ the application of this formula necessitates a troublesomely complicated calculation, which it would be impracticable to work out in the case of a large number of subjects. but as it happens, tables of calculations in relation to the ponderal index already exist, thanks to the labours of livi[ ] and it remains only to consult them, as one would a table of logarithms, by finding the figure corresponding to the required stature, as indicated above in the horizontal line, and the weight as indicated in the vertical column. some authors have thought that they were greatly simplifying the relation between weight and stature by calculating the proportional weight of a single centimetre of stature and assuming that they had thus reduced the relation itself to a ratio based upon a single linear measurement (one centimetre), analogous to the ratio established by the reduction of the total stature to a scale of . but evidently such a calculation is based upon two fundamental errors, namely: first, no comparison is ever possible between a linear measure and a measure of volume; and secondly, the relation which we are trying to determine is that between synthetic measurements, _i.e._, measurements of the whole, and not of parts. [illustration: fig. .] in the aforesaid method of computing (which is accepted by such weighty authorities as godin and niceforo), the number expressing the weight in grams is divided by the stature expressed in centimetres, and the quotient gives the average weight of one centimetre of stature expressed in grams. this method, which sounds plausible, may easily be proved to be fallacious, by the following illustration, given by livi in his treatise already cited (fig. ). the two rectangles _a_ and _b_ represent longitudinal sections of two cylinders, which are supposed to represent respectively (in _a_) the body of a child so fat that he is as broad as he is long (the rectangle _a_ is very nearly square), and (in _b_) that of a man of tall stature and so extremely thin that he very slightly surpasses the child in the dimensions of width and thickness (note the length and narrowness of rectangle _b_). evidently the ponderal index of _a_ is very high and that of _b_ is very low. but if we calculate the _proportional weight_ of one centimetre of stature, it will always be greater in the man than in the child, and consequently we obtain a relation contrary to that of the ponderal index. let us make still another counterproof by means of figures; let us take an adult with a stature of . metres and a weight of kilograms; and a three-year-old child . m. tall and weighing kg. (the normal weight of a child of four). in the case of the adult one centimetre of stature will weigh / grams = grams; while one centimetre of the child's height will weigh / = grams. in other words, one average centimetre of the child's stature weighs less than one centimetre of the adult, as it naturally should, while the ponderal index on the contrary is . in the case of the adult, and . in that of the child. the reciprocal relations between stature and weight vary from year to year. in babyhood, the child is so plump that the fat forms the familiar dimpled "chubbiness," and bichat's adipose "fat-pads" give the characteristic rotundity to the childish face; while the adult is much more slender. a new-born syphilitic child which, with a normal length of centimetres, weighed only two kg.--and consequently would be extremely thin--would have the same identical ponderal index as an adult who, with a stature of . m., weighed kg. the _evolution_ of the ponderal index forms a very essential part in the _transformations_ of growth; and it shows interesting characteristics in relation to the different epochs in the life of the individual. in this connection, livi gives the following figures, for males and for females; from which it appears that at some periods of life we are _stouter_, and at others more _slender_; and that men and women do not have the same proportional relation between mass and stature. --------------------------------------------------- indices | indices -------+-------+---------+--------+-------+-------- age in | males | females | age in | males | females years | | | years | | -------+-------+---------+--------+-------+-------- | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | -- | -- | -- | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | -- | -- | -- --------------------------------------------------- it may be said in general, so far as regards the age, that the following is the established law of individual evolution: during the first year the ponderal index increases, after which it diminishes up to the period immediately preceding puberty (eleventh year for males, tenth year for females), the period at which boys and girls are exceedingly slender. after this, throughout the entire period of puberty, the ponderal index seems to remain remarkably constant, oscillating around a fixed figure. at the close of this period (seventeenth year for males, fourteenth for females), the ponderal index resumes its upward course (corresponding to the period in which the transverse dimensions of the skeleton increase, and in which the individual, as the phrase goes, _fills out_), and it continues to rise well into mature life (the individual _takes on flesh_); until in old age, the ponderal index begins to fall again (the soft tissues shrink, the cartilages ossify, the whole person is shrunken and wasted.) [illustration: fig. .] women, during their younger years are on a par with men in respect to the ponderal index, but in later life surpass them, because of woman's greater tendency toward _embonpoint_, since she is naturally stouter and plumper than man, who is correspondingly leaner and more _wiry_. the following diagram indicates the progressive evolution and involution of the ponderal index throughout the successive stages of life: the ponderal index has revealed certain physiological conditions in pupils that are extremely interesting. some authors had already noted that the ponderal index was higher in _well-nourished_ children (binet, niceforo, montessori); but last year one of my own students, signorina massa, in a noteworthy study of children, all taken from the same social class and quite poor, and who did not attend the school refectory or have the advantage of any other physiological assistance, established the fact that the more _studious_ children, the _prize winners_, have a lower _ponderal index_ and a _muscular_ _force_ inferior to that of the non-studious (negligent) pupils. that the development of the ponderal index stands in some relation to the muscular force, might already have been deduced from the fact that the greatest increase of weight is due, in the evolution of the individual, to the system of striped muscles. studious children, accordingly, are sufferers from _denutrition through_ _cerebral consumption_; furthermore, they are weakened throughout their whole organism; in fact, i discovered, in the course of researches made among the pupils in the elementary schools of rome, that the _studious_ children, those who _received prizes_, had a _scantier_ chest measurement than the non-studious. this goes to prove that school prizes are given at the cost of a useless holocaust of the physiological forces of the younger generations! that the ponderal index has an eminently physiological significance, is further shown by the following comparative figures between normal and weak-minded children. the stature, which is biologically significant, is lower in the weak-minded; but their ponderal index is greater when they are well fed, as in the asylums in paris. accordingly, the sole cause of the physical inferiority of studious children is _study_, _cerebral fatigue_. bio-physiological differences between normal and weak-minded children (simon and montessori: based on children from to ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | weight in kilograms| average stature | ponderal index |--------------------+--------------------+------------------- age |weak-minded |normal |weak-minded |normal |weak-minded |normal ----+------------+-------+------------+-------+------------+------ | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | | . ------------------------------------------------------------------ it should be noted that in the foregoing table the normal children include both the studious and the non-studious. footnotes: [ ] see further, as to these fundamental ideas: laloy, _l'Évolution de la vie. petite encyclopédie_ _du xx siècle_; claude bernard, _leçons sur les phènomènes de la vie_; le dentu, in _la matière vivante, et théorie nouvelle de la vie_; luciani, _fisiologia umana_, in the first chapter: "material substratum of vital phenomena." [ ] consult: haeckel, _anthropogenie_; e. perrier, _les colonies animales et la formation_ _des organismes_; richet, _l'effort vers la vie, et la théorie des causes finales_. [ ] correns: _concerning the laws of heredity_. [ ] translator's note. [ ] translator's note. [ ] de giovanni, _op. cit._, p. . cases referring to the first morphologic combination. [ ] de giovanni, _op. cit._ [ ] de giovanni, _op. cit._ [ ] boxich, _contribution to the morphological, clinical and anthropological study of_ _delinquents_. [ ] deniker, _races et peuples de la terre_. [ ] topinard, _elementi di antropologia_. [ ] quÉtÉlet, _proporzioni medie (mean proportions)_. [ ] livi, _antropometria militare (military anthropometry)_. [ ] montessori, _caratteri fisici delle giovani donne del lazio._ [ ] translator's note. [ ] fig. and those following it, dealing with deformities resulting from labour, are taken from pieraccini's great work, _the pathology of labour_. [ ] pieraccini, _op. cit._ [ ] alfredo niceforo, _les classes pauvres_ (the poorer classes). [ ] taken from livi: _on the development of the body in relation to the profession and the_ _social condition._ rome, voghera, . [ ] marro, _puberty_. [ ] cited by pagliani, _human development, according to age, sex, etc._ [ ] raciborski, cited by marro, _puberty_. [ ] _idem._ [ ] rousseau, _Émile_, cited by marro. [ ] it should be noted that sexual precocity or vice retards the development of puberty, while healthful psychic stimuli are favourable to it. hence it was a right instinct that led us to give the name of sin and vice to what retards the normal development of life, and virtue and honour to what is favourable to it.--author's note. [ ] compare _the method of scientific pedagogy applied to infantile education_ _in the "children's houses,"_ montessori: casa editr. lapi, . [ ] moige, _nouvelle iconographie de la salpétrière_, . [ ] apert, _op. cit._ [ ] cited by marro. [ ] cited by figueira, _semejotica infantile_, p. . [ ] cited by figueira (rio janeiro) in his volume, _elementi di semejotica infantile_, . from this volume, which contains the result of the most modern investigations in pediatry, i have taken a number of data regarding the weight of children. [ ] livi: _antropometria_. chapter ii craniology having finished the study of general biological questions and of the body considered in its _entirety_, we may now pass on to analyse its separate parts, treating in connection with each of such parts the social and pedagogic questions which may pertain to it. the _parts_ of the body which we shall take under consideration are: the _head_, the _thorax_, the _pelvis_ and the _limbs_. _the head._--when we pass from the body as a whole to a more particularised study of the separate parts, it is proper to begin with the head because it is the most important part of the whole body. the older anthropology, and biological and criminal anthropology as well were very largely built up from a study of the head; a study so vast and important that it has come to constitute a separate branch of science: _craniology_. the fact is that the characteristics manifested by the cranium are chiefly in the nature of _mutations_ rather than _variations_, and consequently the anthropological data relating to the cranium correspond more directly to the characteristics of the species, or in the case of man, to the characteristics of race. hence they are of special interest to the general study of anthropology. but when these imitative characteristics, which are naturally constant and have a purely biological origin, undergo _alterations_, they are to be explained, not as variations, but as _pathological deviations_; and for this reason criminal anthropology has drawn a very large part of its means of diagnosis of _anomalies_ and of _degeneration_ from malformations of the cranium. furthermore, the cranium together with the vertebral column represents not only the characteristics of species, but also those of the _genus_; in fact, it corresponds to the cerebro-spinal axis, which is the _least variable_ part of the body throughout the whole series of vertebrates; just as, on the contrary, the _limbs_ represent the _most variable_ part. indeed, if we study separately the cranio-vertebral system and the limbs, through the whole series of vertebrates, we shall discover _gradual_ alterations in the former, and sudden wide alterations in the latter. the cerebro-spinal axis (and hence the cranio-vertebral system) shows from species to species certain progressive differences that suggest the idea of a gradual sequence of modifications (from the amphioxus to man) to which we could apply the principle, _natura non facit saltus_: while the limbs on the contrary, even though they preserve certain obvious analogies to the fundamental anatomic formation of the skeleton, undergo profound modifications--being reduced in certain reptiles to mere rudimentary organs, developing into the wing of the bird, the flying membrane of the bat, and the hand of man. since it is not only a characteristic of species and race, but of _genus_ as well, the cranium constitutes one of the most _constant_ anatomical features. for the same reason it is less subject to _variations due to environment_, and from this point of view offers slight interest to pedagogic anthropology. but since the cranium contains the organ on which the psychic manifestations depend, we have a deep interest in knowing its human characteristics, its _phases of development_, and its normal limits. head and cranium the term _head_ is applied to the living man; the _cranium_, from which this branch of science takes its name, is the _skeleton of the_ _head_. the cranium is composed of two parts, which may be virtually separated, in the lateral projection, by a straight line passing through the external orbital apophysis and extending to the auricular foramen, thus separating the facial from the cerebral portion of the cranium. hence the _cranium_ is the skeleton of the head in its entirety, and is divisible into the _cerebral cranium_ and the _facial cranium_. _the cranium._--the cranium is a complex union of a number of flat, curved bones united together by means of certain very complicated arborescent sutures, and forming a hollow osseous cavity of rounded form. i will briefly indicate the bones which form its external contour. on the anterior part is the _frontal_ bone, terminated by the suture which unites it to the two parietal bones: the _coronal suture_; while the two parietal bones are joined together by the _median_ or _sagittal suture_, which forms a sort of _t_ with the other suture. on the posterior side is the _occipital bone_, which is also joined to the two parietal bones, by means of the occipital or _lambdoidal_ suture. below the two parietal bones, in a lateral direction, are the _two temporal bones_; and between the temporal and parietal bones are situated the _great wings of the sphenoid_. the main body of the sphenoid is at the base of the cranium. besides these there is another, internal bone, the _ethmoid_. _the face._--the skeleton of the face is composed of fourteen bones; some of these are external and lend themselves to measurement; others which are internal and hidden contribute to the completion of the delicate scaffolding of this most important portion of the skeleton. the principal bones of the face are: the two _zygomatic_ _bones_ (articulating with the temporal, frontal and maxillary bones); the two nasal bones (articulating with the frontal and with the ascending branch of the maxillary, and uniting above to form the bridge of the nose; this is a bone of great importance in anthropology, because it determines the naso-frontal angle and the formation of the nose); the two upper maxillary bones, or upper jaw (articulating together in front to form the subnasal region; laterally with the zygomatic bones; above with the nasal bones; internally with each other, to form the palate, and posteriorly with the palatine bones); the _mandible_ or lower jaw (a single bone, and the only movable bone in the cranium), articulating with the temporal bones by means of a condyle, and the separate parts of which are distinguished as the _body of the mandible_ and the _ascendant branches_, which are united to the cranium. [illustration: fig. .--note the line of division between the cerebral and facial cranium; in addition to this the sutures are shown which divide the frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal bones. pd. coronal suture; dl. sagittal suture; al. lambdoidal suture.] the bones of lesser importance, which are interior and hidden are: the two _lacrymal_ bones (situated at the inner angle of the orbitary cavity), the _vomer_ or osseous septum of the nose; the two bones in the nose which lie on each side of the vomer and are known as the _turbinated bones_ (_concha nasalis_); and the two palate bones (which form the backward continuation of the palatine vault constituted by the maxillary bones). _human cranium and animal cranium._--the dividing line between the cerebral and facial cranium is of great importance in anthropology, because the relative proportions between these two parts of the cranium form a human characteristic, contrasting widely with the animal characteristics; and they offer a simple criterion for determining the higher or lower type of the human cranium. (compare in this connection fig. , skulls of the higher mammals and of man.) [illustration: fig. .] the illustration represents a number of different animal skulls; and at the top are two human skulls, the one of an australian and the other of a european. it will be seen that the proportions between the facial and cerebral portions are very different; in the animals, even in the higher orders such as the _primates_ (orang-utan, gorilla, etc.), the _facial_ and _masticatory_ parts predominate over the cerebral. one might even say that the skeleton gives us at a glance the characteristic psychological difference; the animal _eats_, man _thinks_; that is, the animal is destined only to vegetate, to feed itself; man is an entirely different species; he has a very different task before him; he is the _creative being_, who, through thought and labour, is destined to subjugate and transform the world. there are still other characteristic differences between the animal and the human skull. the cerebral cranium of the ape is not only smaller but it is furnished with strong bony ridges, to serve as points of attachment for powerful muscles intended to protect the cranial cavity. the human skull is completely devoid of such ridges; it is perfectly smooth, with delicate contours; it might be described as "frail and naked"; for the word nakedness precisely expresses the _absence_ of those defences with which the cranium of the anthropoid ape is so abundantly provided. accordingly, the human cranium is _undefended_ by soft tissues; and even the bony walls themselves are far from thick. if we take a transverse section of the bones of the cranium, we find that they are formed of two very thin layers of bone united by a porous, osseous substance; the external layer is in direct contact with the muscles of the scalp, and the internal layer with the brain. these two layers differ widely in their degree of elasticity: the external layer is so elastic that if it receives a bruising blow (provided this is not so heavy as to surpass its limits of elasticity) it will yield even to the point of touching the inner layer and then spring back to its original position without leaving any perceptible trace of the blow received (this is especially true in the case of infants),[ ] while the inner layer is so unelastic as to appear almost as brittle as _glass_: so much so, for example, that the indirect shock of the same contusion may cause it to splinter into fragments, which may either penetrate the substance of the brain, or produce hemorrhages, or inflammatory reactions in the meninges--and sometimes may constitute the sole cause of epilepsy, and various forms of inflammation of the brain (even resulting in idiocy), and sometimes of meningitis and death. contusions on the heads of children, and in general blows resulting from falls or other causes, must be taken into serious consideration, in the history of the individual, even though they have left no profound traces _externally_. this human characteristic of nakedness, of the _absence_ of powerful bodily defences, is not limited to the head alone, but is diffused over the entire morphological organism. man, considered as an animal, is weak; he is born naked and he remains naked, and destitute of those natural defences which explain the endurance and the survival of other species; neither the fur nor the plumage of mammals and of birds nor the bony shields of reptiles and scales of fishes serve as defences for this vertebrate, who has raised himself to the highest eminence in the zoological scale; neither the muscular strength and powerful teeth of the felines, nor the talons of the birds of prey have been his arms of conquest. nevertheless, man who has conquered the earth and overcome all his powerful biological enemies, owes his survival, equally with all other living creatures, to his victory over other animals and over his environment. wherein lies the special strength of this little, feeble being, who has become the lord of the earth? it lies in his brain. the arms of this conqueror are wholly psychic. it is his intelligence which has prevailed over the might of other animals and enabled him to acquire the means of adapting himself to his environment, or else of adapting his environment to himself. his intelligence, which sufficed him as a weapon with which to achieve victory in the struggle for existence, is also the means which still permits him to continue on the road toward self-perfectionment. the morphological importance attached by anthropologists to the cerebral cranium depends precisely upon this: that it is the envelope of the _brain_. if we examine the interior of the human cerebral cranium, we find that it has adapted its bony contours so faithfully to those of the soft tissues that it bears the imprint of the various parts of the brain (cerebrum, cerebellum), the convolutions, and even the blood-vessels of the meninges. accordingly, a study of the cerebral cranium amounts to an indirect study of the brain itself. _characteristics of the human cranium._--the characteristics of the human cranium are all associated with the great development of the volume of the brain. let us assume that we have an elastic vessel, representing in form an animal cranium, open at the base through an orifice corresponding to the occipital foramen. if we inflate this vessel, it will not only begin to enlarge at the expense of its folds (ridges), and to stretch and distend its walls (thinness and fragility of the cranial bones); but furthermore it will undergo a change in form, acquiring a more pronounced rotundity and _pushing upward_ in its anterior part above the face. this part, rising erect above the face, and determined by the volume of the brain, is the _forehead_. animals do not have an erect forehead; their orbits continue backward in an almost horizontal line, giving them an extremely receding brow. corresponding to this preponderance of the cerebral portion, the facial portion _retires_ below the brow, the mandibles do not extend beyond the anterior axis of the brain, and are so far diminished in volume that they assume, as compared with animals, a new function; in short, the mouth is no longer merely the organ of mastication, but also the organ of speech; its animal part has been spiritualised. _the evolution of the forehead.--inferior skull caps; the skull_ _of the pithecanthropus; the skull of the neanderthal man._ the forehead is so distinctly a human characteristic that mankind has not needed the help of anthropology in order to realise its importance--and as a sign of superiority, nobility or sovereignty, has placed upon the forehead the crown of laurel, or the crown of nobility or kingship. has the forehead always been a human characteristic, or have we acquired it little by little? such a problem is associated with the evolution of the brain. there are in existence certain remains of the skeletons of primitive men, which show them to have possessed a cerebral cranium inferior in volume to that now attained by the human species; and in these remains the forehead is also profoundly different from that of to-day, in that it is much lower and slants backward, while the supraorbital arches are very prominent. such is the evidence of the "cranial caps," discovered in the early geological strata. in the tertiary strata of the island of java, which in that remote epoch of the earth's history must, together with sumatra, have formed part of the continent of asia, which is considered as the "laboratory of races," a skull was found by dubois which raised the problem whether it should be classed as that of an ape superior to those now existing, or of a primitive man. prior to this discovery, it had been maintained that man did not make his appearance until the quaternary period. this supposed primitive man was called by his discoverer the pithecanthropus, _pithecanthropus_ _erectus_. remains that are unquestionably human occur in the quaternary period, in which however skeletons are very rare, as compared with relics of human labour or social life, relics which are found scattered everywhere throughout asia and europe as well (chipped flints). the various remains of skeletons show us skulls much inferior to those of modern man, but superior to that of the pithecanthropus. in treatises of general anthropology reproductions are given of human crania known as the spy or neanderthal type, belonging to the epoch when the gigantic mammoth still roamed the earth. the forehead is very low and receding and the orbital arches are enormously developed; while the cerebral capacity calculated from the cranial dimensions is inferior to that of modern man. consequently, as the brain increases in volume in the course of the revolution of the race, the cranium not only shows a corresponding volumetric increase, but at the same time _alters its form_, thus producing the _forehead_ which little by little rises from a receding to an erect position, and becomes high where it was formerly low, while at the same time the prominent orbital arches disappear. accordingly, we may consider the forehead as the _skeletal_ _index_ of the cerebral volume, and hence of the relative anthropological and intellectual superiority. in addition to its above-mentioned value, it also furnishes us with a biological principle of much importance: the relation _between_ _the volume and form_ of the cranium. while the volume has a significance that is _relative_ to the mass of the body, the significance of the form is _absolute_. let us examine these two skulls: normal human skulls of our own epoch; one of the celtic race (fig. ) and the other sardinian (fig. ); that of the celtic race is much larger and rounder; that of the sardinian is very much smaller and more elongated. if we were considering only the _volume_, we might say that it was simply a case of a _microcephalic_ and a _macrocephalic_: two terms (microcephaly and macrocephaly) that fall within the province of pathology. on the contrary, these two skulls are normal, but they belonged to individuals characterized by differences of race; the one (small skull) having a low stature; the other (large skull) having a tall stature. the volume of the head therefore bears a relation to that of the body; the volume has a _relative_ significance. but the form in both of them reveals a state of normality; the two skulls have a high and erect forehead, and exhibit in their whole contour a fine and regular development. therefore the _form_ has an _absolute_ significance. it even proves to us the _normality_ of the volume, a fact which could not be determined by the volume alone. another mechanical correspondence between volume and form is disclosed when we compare the skull of a new-born child with that of an adult. the skull of the new-born child is much smaller in volume; but the form shows the relatively enormous volumetric development of the brain; in fact the skull is protuberant and the forehead bulges forward above the face (_front bombé_), while corresponding to this index of cerebral development is the enormous preponderance of the cerebral cranium over the facial cranium, which is so small as to be almost reduced to a simple rudiment. hence the form by itself alone reveals the infantile character of the cerebral volume, which, in relation to the bulk of the body is of far greater dimensions than in the adult. in fact, if a child simply increased in volume and its growth was not the sum total of a morphological evolution, the adult man would become a monster; his macrocephaly would be so exaggerated that his neck could not sustain the weight of the head (if the relations between the proportions in infancy were maintained through life the adult man would have a head with a perimeter of centimetres, = ft. in.). aside from its mechanical relations to the volume, the _form_ has characteristics dependent upon biological factors, such as the _sex_ and the _race_. the female cranium in fact has a straighter forehead than the male and the orbital arches are absolutely wanting, while the entire surface of the cranium is smoother and more rounded. similarly, the different races exhibit _forms_ determined by biological factors and not by mechanical causes--for instance, the degree of dolichocephaly (elongated cranium) and of brachycephaly (short cranium). hence the form is life's manifestation not only of the characteristics proper to the species, but also of the mechanical adaptations demanded by the material composing the body. it may be said that the _volume_ and the _form_ of the cranium are dependent upon two different biological potentialities: the volume is mainly determined by the cerebral mass; the form, on the contrary, is mainly determined by the bony structure--no matter how completely form and volume coincide in their reciprocal mechanical relations. that is, the attainment of a given volume of head depends upon the development of the brain; the bone follows this development passively, is the index of it, the skeletal representation of it, but never the determining factor. at one time it was thought, on the contrary, that a precocious ossification of the cranial cavity would arrest the development of the brain; _microcephaly_ was believed to be caused by a precocious closing of the sutures of the cranial bones; and there was a certain period when the surgical treatment of microcephaly consisted in the removal of a portion of the cranial bone, in order to allow the brain to develop freely. [illustration: fig. . fig. . dividing line in human skull, as compared with that of gorilla.] [illustration: fig. .--rounded ellipsoidal cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--brachycephalic cranium (vertical norm)] [illustration: fig. .--remains of spy cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--brachycephalic cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--egyptian cranium, st dynasty, ovoid type.] [illustration: fig. .--dolichocephalic cranium, from lateral norm.] but the failure of such attempts afforded additional proof of the fact that the volumetric development of the cranium depends upon the brain alone. if a precocious or abnormal suture occurs in the cranial bones, there does not follow an arrest of development, but simply a _malformation_; which is precisely in proportion to the potentiality of the brain, which grows less where the suture has been formed, and in compensation grows more than normally where the conditions of the bones permit of cerebral expansion; and a deformity results. microcephaly on the contrary shows inferiority of form (smallness, receding forehead, etc.), but not _malformation_. _anomaly of form_, therefore, results only from anomaly of skeletal development, and is frequently found in conjunction with a _normal development of the brain_. consequently _malformations_ of the cranium do not have the grave significance of biological inferiority or of degeneration that they were at one time believed to have; but frequently they must be considered in connection with pathological conditions resulting for the most part in delayed development in the embryo or in early infancy, producing a thickening of the bone, or a partial suturation of the points, or parts, or of the entire suture (punctiform synostosis, partial or total); sometimes the sutures remain unaltered, and the deformation must be attributed to various disturbances connected with the nutrition of the skeleton in the course of intrauterine evolution (hereditary syphilis, denutrition of the mother during pregnancy, etc.). in short, a cranium that is abnormal in form is an indication of pathological occurrences or of physiological errors that have resulted in altering the normal growth of the individual. there are many anomalies in the form of the cranium, but here we will cite only the two principal ones, because they are the most frequent and most likely to be encountered in individuals whose growth has been retarded (from lack of nutrition) and consequently constitute signs of physiological inferiority often associated with social caste. these two forms are: scaphocephaly and plagiocephaly. the scaphocephalic cranium (figs. , ), is characterised by being very narrow and flattened laterally; while the forehead and the occiput project in front and behind, the two parietal bones meet above almost in an angle, so that, if it were turned upside down, the vault of the cranium would have the appearance of the hull of a ship. the _plagiocephalic_ cranium is a cranium which is unsymmetrical in respect to its longitudinal axis; that is, it is not equally developed on the right and on the left. as a matter of fact, our bilateral symmetry is an ideal standard rather than an absolutely attainable reality; we are all of us a little larger on one side and a little smaller on the other, but to so slight a degree as to escape superficial observation, so that in general we have _apparently_ a bilateral symmetry--that is, we appear to be symmetrical according to the testimony of our senses; but a more delicate examination proves that this is not true. plagiocephaly therefore represents an exaggerated case of a normal fact. plagiocephaly may be simple or compound; it is simple when the asymmetry is partial; namely, when it is confined to the anterior or posterior portion; it is compound when it is total; and in such case we find a complete diagonal correspondence: for instance, if the right nodule in the frontal region is more prominent, the left nodule is more prominent in the left occipital region, or _vice versa_. in general it may be said that the various forms of _plagiocephaly_ are produced by asymmetry of the _nodules_ or of the _flattened_ surfaces of the cranium. even in the case of _microcephaly_ and of _macrocephaly_, which are substantially anomalies of _volume_, we find corresponding characteristic abnormalities of form. the microcephalic cranium is of inferior type, suggesting that of the ape--in other words, it is a cranium which has mechanically adapted itself to a brain of inferior volume: the macrocephalic cranium, especially if the abnormality is due to _rickets_ or to _hydrocephaly_, calls to mind the infantile type of cranium; it has the characteristic bulging forehead, while mechanical adaptation frequently renders it very round (pathological brachycephaly). we will take up this question again when we come to speak in particular of _malformations_ and to describe the technical methods of cranioscopy. what more particularly concerns us now is a consideration of the _normal_ form of the cranium and its morphological evolution. [illustration: fig. .--cranium of new-born child (lateral norm).] [illustration: fig. .--cranium of new-born child (vertical norm).] [illustration: fig. . fig. . scaphocephalic cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--cranium of new-born child seen from above, showing polyhedric contour due to nodules of ossification; fontanelle of the bregma; and suture dividing the two frontal bones.] [illustration: fig. .--ellipsoides (classified by sergi).] =the morphological evolution of the cranium through the= =different periods of life.= _embryogeny. order of appearance of_ _the points of ossification and of synostosis of the sutures._--in its successive transitions through the different periods of life, the cranium not only acquires successively greater volume, but it assumes forms corresponding to the different grades of morphological evolution. we may group its transformation under five different periods: . from conception until birth (embryonic evolution); . from birth until the end of the third year (infantile evolution); . from three years old until twenty (youthful evolution); . from twenty to forty (adult age); . from forty to the end of life (involution). _first period._--in the earliest stages of intrauterine life the cranium consists of a membranous skin, enclosing the primitive cells of nerve tissue constituting the brain; it has a cartilaginous basal part, destined later to form the _base_ of the skull (basioccipital and basisphenoid bones). but all the rest (the vault or cap of the cranium) remains in a membranous state, so that at this period the head of the embryo has not yet acquired a definite form. [illustration: fig. .--cranium of new-born child. showing nodules and fontanelles.] in the second month of intrauterine life the phenomena of ossification have already begun to take place; that is, a fine network has formed, spreading over almost the entire surface, which proceeds to fill up its interstices with calcareous salts. this process, however, is more rapid and more intense at certain points (points of ossification), from which it cannot properly be said that the ossification _radiates_, but rather that at these points the general process is intensified and concentrated. there are five principal points of ossification: two frontal, two parietal and one occipital, which appear clearly defined and projecting like nodules, imparting to the cranium, when seen from above, a pentagonal form, which is the normal form of the infant cranium. _second period._--at birth the cranium has not yet completed the process of ossification, nor are the normal number of bones that will eventually compose the adult cranium, as yet definitely determined. therefore the cranium of the new-born child has three distinct characteristics: . it is not yet uniformly rounded, but polyhedral because of the noticeable prominence of the five primitive nodules or centres of ossification ( frontal, parietal, occipital, figs. , ). . since the process of ossification of the bones is not yet completed, certain membranous portions or _cranial fontanelles_ still remain, which are especially wide at the points where several bones meet. the principal fontanelle is that of the bregma (at the juncture of the two frontal with the two parietal bones, quadrangular). next comes that of the lambda, which is much smaller (juncture of the two parietal bones with the occipital, triangular), and lastly the fontanelles of the asterion and the pterion, on opposite sides of the temporal bones, the former being situated behind and the latter in front. . since the process of ossification is incomplete, the fusion of bony portions into entire bones, such as they are destined to be when complete development is reached, has not yet been accomplished; that is to say, certain bones of the cranium are still divided into several portions. for example, the frontal bone in the new-born child is composed of two bones, separated by a longitudinal suture that is destined to disappear, and the occipital bone is composed of four parts, namely, the base, the squama and the two condyles (basioccipital, exoccipital and superoccipital bones). during the first period of three years, while the brain is increasing notably and rapidly in volume, the cranium undergoes various and interesting transformations. the pentagonal form of the cranium tends steadily to become rounder, because the primitive nodules are diminishing, or even disappear, although in this regard many individual varieties result; and the processes of ossification reach their completion. this is the most important period of growth, during which the individual development of the perfect cranial form may be attained, provided the rhythm of growth between the brain and its envelope remains harmonious; or again, certain deformations may be definitely established, owing to the intervention of some pathological condition or a disturbance of nutrition, altering either the internal volume or the normal process of ossification of the bony covering. the first closing of the fontanelles takes place, in our race, in those of the asterion (posterior to the temporal bones), and next in those of the pterion; and it sometimes happens, as an anomaly of growth that leaves no external trace in the living man, that a little bone is formed, duplicating the shape of the fontanelle itself; such little bones, very common in abnormal crania, are called _wormian_ _bones_. they may occur in connection with any of the fontanelles, but especially with that of the bregma. [illustration: fig. .--cranium of adult with abnormal medio-frontal suture.] the fontanelle of the lambda generally closes during the first year; and the last of all the fontanelles to close is the largest, which is situated toward the front of the head, at the _bregma_, and is well known, even by the common people, and can easily be felt upon a child's head; it generally closes toward the end of the second year; and its characteristics may furnish valuable indications of abnormality or insufficiency of the child's development. for example, if it diminishes and disappears ahead of time, this may constitute the first symptom of _microcephaly_, or at all events, of submicrocephaly (_i.e._, a case of microcephaly that is not very pronounced). on the contrary, when this fontanelle remains dilated and delays its normal closing, this is a sign of organic weakness and debilitating disease (cachexia, rickets, myxedema). furthermore, the fontanelle in question may alter its characteristic appearance in certain forms of sickness. in the case of hydrocephaly it becomes distended, while in enteritis, on the contrary, in which the organism parts with a large proportion of liquid, it becomes depressed. the _sutures_ also undergo notable changes during this period of life. the first to become effaced is the metopic or medio-frontal suture, which is destined to close and form a single bone; by the end of the first year it is obliterated throughout the middle third of its length, and thereafter the process of suturation spreads upward and downward until it is completed at the end of the second year (welcker, haeckel, humphry). sometimes, however, this suture is not obliterated until very late, and there are anomalous cases where it has remained throughout life, giving the forehead a characteristic form (pronounced frontal nodules and a slight palpable furrow along the medial line of the forehead). during this same time a fusion has also taken place between the occipital squama and the two lateral or condyloid portions; but the resultant whole still remains separated from the _corpus_ or _base_ of the occipital bone, which will not become welded into one solid piece with the rest before the age of seven years. at the age of three, the ossification of the cranial vault has been completed. in place of being depressed and protuberant, as it was at birth, the cranium has grown upward and forward in the frontal region, assuming an almost definitive form; the volume of the cranium has at the same time undergone an exceedingly rapid growth, attaining proportions very near to those of an adult. from the age of three onward the head grows slowly, and its transformations are much slighter and fewer. the cranial capacity which at birth is cubic centimetres, becomes at the age of three, , , at the age of fifteen, , , and in the adult, , cu. cm. respectively. accordingly we might say that at the age of three a sort of repose has been established in the growth both of the the brain and of the cranium; this is the age at which an awakening begins in the child of that intelligence which is to put him in touch with the external world, and it is also the age at which he may begin his education in school. _third period._--there follows a slow and parallel growth of both brain and cranium. the ossification of the cranium itself reaches completion. at the age of seven the occipital is definitely solidified into a single bone and between the years of fifteen and twenty the body of the sphenoid also becomes welded to the occiput. this process of synostosis begins from the interior of the cranium, and only subsequently manifests itself externally. consequently, the basilar suture closes at the time when the last large molars, the so-called "wisdom teeth," appear. after this period, the base of the cranium can no longer undergo any sort of growth, and in the case of uneducated persons the complete development of the cranium is definitely accomplished. _fourth period._--but in the case of cultured persons, those who form the class of brain-workers, the brain continues to grow, although extremely slowly, up to the age of thirty-five or even forty, thanks to the sutures which still remain completely intact and which still make an expansion of the bony envelope possible. after this comes the beginning of the _fifth period._--the period of involution, during which the synostosis (closing) of all the cranial sutures will successively occur, until in advanced old age the cranium becomes composed of a single bone, just as in the embryo it was formed of a single membrane. the synostoses which occurred in the early periods had an evolutive significance and were associated with the growth of the body and the intelligence. these later synostoses, on the contrary, have an involutive significance and are associated with the physiological decay of the organism and at the same time with that of the psychic activities. the first point at which synostosis takes place is in the region of the obelion, that is, near the middle of the suture which, unites the two parietal bones; shortly afterward, the fronto-parietal sutures begin to unite along the pterion. at the age of forty-five, the obeliac synostosis has progressed as far as the lambda, and that of the fronto-parietal suture to the bregma; and at fifty the ossification is very nearly accomplished, at least on the right-hand side (according to broca's series of crania). at seventy the squama of the temporal bone unites with the parietal, and at eighty the entire cranium has become a single bone. these processes are subject to no small number of individual variations; there have been cases of persons who, although very old, still preserved many of their cranial sutures intact and their psychic activities remained correspondingly alert (men of genius). conversely, the closing of the sutures sometimes begins as early as the thirty-fifth year. a diagnosis of age, as determined by the skeleton, is consequently only approximate. during the periods of growth the cranium may exhibit transitory anomalies; it is very common to encounter in the heads of children of the lower social classes, who are consequently subject to denutrition, _malformations_ which represent various degrees and forms of _plagiocephaly_, and which subsequently disappear completely, as the development of the cranium advances. anomalies of form must therefore be judged differently in the case of the child than in that of the adult. it may even happen that the five primitive nodules persist for a long time and even remain as a definitive form of the adult cranium constituting, according to sergi, a distinct variety, the _pentagonal_ cranium. but this is quite rare. from the frequency with which this form is to be observed in schools attended by children of the poorer classes, it is better to regard it as due to a delay in morphological evolution, which will probably disappear later on. normal forms of the cranium we are indebted to sergi for an exact knowledge of the _normal_ _forms_ of the cranium. such forms are racial characteristics and are _invariable_, as sergi has succeeded in proving by a comparison of the most ancient forms of the cranium with recent forms. accordingly this authority takes the cranial formation as the basis for his classification of races. we have no direct interest, so far as concerns the special scope of our own science, in the value of this theory of classification--a theory, by the way, already divined, although very imperfectly and under a different form, by french and german anthropologists. sergi's studies of cranial forms interest us solely as a diagnostic test of _normality_ as compared with _abnormality_. for it is due to these researches that certain forms that used to be considered pathological, have come to be recognised as normal. the _normal forms_ of the cranium may be grouped, according to sergi, under nine primary varieties, each of which includes _sub-varieties_. these nine varieties are named as follows: i. ellipsoid; ii. ovoid; iii. pentagonoid; iv. rhomboid; v. beloid; vi. cuboid; vii. sphenoid; viii. spheroid; ix. platycephalic. [illustration: fig. .--_ellipsoides depressus_ cranium.] i. _ellipsoid_ (fig. ).--this form is recognised by inspecting the cranium according to the vertical norm (see in the chapter on _technique_ the method of cranioscopy). the cranial contour recalls an ellipse in which no trace of the nodules remains, and in which the occiput is not in the least flattened; while the anterior half of the cranium closely corresponds to the posterior half. the sub-varieties are differentiated by their greater breadth and length, by the form and protrusion of the occiput, and also by the height of the cranium measured vertically. [illustration: fig. .--ellipsoid cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--ovoid cranium.] accordingly, the sub-varieties have a binominal nomenclature indicating, in addition to the fundamental characteristic (variety) the qualitative characteristic of the sub-variety (_e.g., ellipsoids_ _depressus_; compare fig. , showing a cranium seen laterally). ii. _ovoid._--this form of cranium, seen from above, is that of an ovoid, with the broader portion corresponding to the parietal bones, at the point where the characteristic embryonal nodules are situated. the protrusions of the parietal bones are apparent (swellings) but not angular (nodules). the occiput protrudes and is broad (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .--pentagonoid cranium.] [illustration: fig. .--rhomboid cranium.] iii. _pentagonoid._--in this form, persistent traces of the five primitive embryonal nodules are still plainly visible, giving the contour of the cranium, when seen vertically, the appearance of a pentagon. the protuberances, however, are quite smooth and not pointed, as in the embryonal cranium. [illustration: fig. .--beloid cranium.] iv. _rhomboid._--this form is similar to the pentagonoid, excepting that the parietal breadth is much more notable in proportion to the forehead, which is much narrowed and has lost its nodules. [illustration: fig. .--ovoids (classified by sergi).] [illustration: fig. .--pentagonoides acutus (sergi's collection).] [illustration: fig. .--beloides lybicus (classified by sergi).] [illustration: fig. .--platycephalus orbicularis (classified by sergi).] [illustration: fig. .--platycephalus ovoidalis (classified by sergi).] [illustration: fig. .--spheroidal cranium, vertical norm (sergi's collection).] v. _beloid._--the beloid, or arrow-head cranium is like the ovoid with the occiput more flattened, so that the widest portion is further back than in the ovoid; toward the front it becomes narrower, constituting altogether an admirably shaped type of head. [illustration: fig. .--cuboid cranium.] vi. _cuboid._--this form is most clearly perceived when the cranium is seen either sidewise or from the rear. not only the face, but the lateral and occipital walls as well are flattened; so also is the forehead, which in general is quite vertical. vii. _sphenoid_ (cuneiform).--the broadening between the two parietal bones is usually far back and very evident, while the cranium narrows toward the front. the occiput is flattened. [illustration: fig. .--sphenoid cranium.] viii. _spheroid._--seen vertically, it presents the appearance of a very broad ellipse; all the curves tend to become spherical. the forehead, however, is not notably vertical. ix. _platycephalic._--the fundamental characteristic of this type of cranium is that it is flattened on top, or rather, since such flattening cannot be absolute, the arch of its vault is a segment of a circle of very large diameter (sergi), with the result that this cranium has the appearance of being very low vertically and very broad laterally. when seen vertically it may present a wide variety of contours, ellipsoid, ovoid, pentagonoid, etc., but its distinguishing characteristic remains that of the flattened vault. [illustration: fig. .--spheroid cranium.] =sub-varieties.=--_sphenoids_ _trapezoids_, or _trapezoid cranium_. observed from the vertical norm, this form appears as a variety of the _sphenoid_; and when seen laterally it is characterised by the lines of its contour forming a _trapezium_. starting from the vertex of the cranium one line slants toward the forehead and another toward the occiput, which is very massive. in the figure given below, the quadrangle drawn in solid lines serves to indicate the correct position of the cranium, while the trapezium formed of dotted lines gives us its characteristic form. [illustration: fig. .--trapezoid cranium.] among the forms described by sergi, are several which were formerly held to be abnormal, such, for instance, as the _platycephalic_ _cranium_ and the _pentagonoid_. similarly, when the surfaces of the cranium showed a tendency toward flatness, or when there were cranial protuberances, even though these were destined to disappear, they were regarded as malformations. before this high authority offered us his guidance, there were certain forms, frequently encountered, that it was difficult to define, for example, the trapezoid cranium, which often presents a notable vertico-occipital flattening, with the vertex notably higher than the forehead. there are also certain forms of cranium having the frontal region more restricted than the parietal region, or slanting down from a much elevated vertex, which have been proved to be _normal forms_; while still another error previously made was that of trying to judge the _forehead_ on the criterion of a single model, deviations from which were much too readily relegated to the category of abnormalities. the most regular and beautiful forms, and the ones that are commonest in our racial stocks are the ellipsoid, ovoid and sphenoid. in my work on the women of latium, precisely one of the points that i noted was the frequent occurrence of certain sub-varieties of the _ellipsoid_ and the _sphenoid_. in order to recognise the _forms of the cranium_, a certain training is necessary which each one must acquire for himself. observations of the cranium will make it easier to judge of the form in relation to the _head_, at least, when the latter is not too much hidden by the hair, as often happens in the case of young children. a knowledge of the _normal_ forms of the cranium will also guide us in our judgment of many abnormal forms, which very often present the appearance of _exaggerations_ of normal types. thus, for example, the _acrocephalic_ cranium (much raised in the parieto-lambdoideal region and sloping forward toward the brow, while the occipito-lambdoideal region is flattened) recalls the _trapezoid_; and the clinocephalic cranium (in which the coronal suture forms a slight girdle-like indenture and divides the contour of the cranium, when observed along the vertical norm, in two curves, a lesser anterior and a greater posterior curve, resembling a figure of ) recalls certain varieties of ovoid cranium described by sergi. this brings us to a principle that is very interesting to establish, namely, that frequently _anomalies_ represent _exaggerations_ of the racial or family type. the cephalic index retzius was the first to take the _cranium_ under consideration as a basis for a classification of the human races; and he attempted to determine a concept of its _form_ by means of a numerical formula expressing the relation between the length and width of the cranium (cephalic index). thus he distinguished the races into _brachycephalics_, or those having a short head; and _dolichocephalics_, or those having a long head. following retzius, who may be regarded as the founder of craniology, broca adopted, completed and expanded this method, deriving from the cranium, or rather from the particular character given by the cephalic index, a _key_, as it were, suited to unlocking the intricate mysteries of hybridism among the human races. consequently the cephalic index was not confined, as regards its importance, within the same limits as all the other indexes, but was raised by the french school, warmly seconded by italian anthropologists, to the dignity of a fundamental determinant of the _ethnic type_, as definitely as, for example, the vertebral column serves as basis for a classification including all species of vertebrates. the germans refused to accept the cephalic index as determining the classification of races; but while seeking to prove themselves independent of it, they continued to regard the _form of the cranium_ as a basis of classification (rütimeyer, von höller, and to-day virchow), but without ever having identified, as sergi has now done, existing _forms_ as normal types of race. the _cephalic index_ is obtained by the well-known formula expressing the relation between the _maximum transverse diameter_ of the skull (see "technique") and the _maximum longitudinal diameter_ reduced to , and is expressed as follows: ci = ×d/d (the cephalic index is equal to a hundred times the lesser diameter divided by the greater; in the present case the lesser diameter is the transverse). this _proportion between linear measurements_ cannot properly sum up the _form_ of the cranium. we can, for example, conceive of a microcephalic cranium having a normal _cephalic index_, since the relation between the two maximum diameters necessary for deducing the index, does not tell us, for example, either the dimension of the cranium or the form of the forehead. if, for instance, we should imagine a photograph of a cranium enlarged a hundred diameters, the reciprocal relations between the length and the width would still remain unchanged. in order to demonstrate that the cephalic index does not determine the form of the cranium, sergi makes use of a number of different geometric figures, such as a triangle, an ellipse, a trapezoid inscribed within equal rectangles, and which consequently have an equal base and equal altitude, that is, the same proportion between length and width. it follows that skulls corresponding more or less closely in shape, trapezoidal, trigonocephalic, ellipsoidal, plagiocephalic, and hence both normal and abnormal, can be expressed by a cephalic index having the same identical figures. but, although the cephalic index is far from being _descriptive_ in regard to the form of the cranium, it constitutes an anthropological datum that has two advantages: . it depends upon measurements and is therefore accessible to those who, not being anthropologists, lack the trained eye that can distinguish with careful accuracy the true _forms_ of the cranium in their manifold variety. furthermore, since the measurement of maximum diameters is sure and easy and may be obtained with exactness, regardless of the thickness of the hair, it may be applied in anthropological research to all subjects. . the cephalic index, even if it does not give us the form, does give us a fact which has a bearing upon the form, namely, whether the cranium is long or short; in other words, it substantially represents the most real and evident difference between the different types of cranium. and since the cranium has a visibly spheroid form, that is, with smooth and rounding surfaces, and constantly adheres to this generic delineation, the fact of being longer or shorter introduces a definite differentiation into the general and accepted form, and gives a very simple and concise indication of it, that conveys the idea more clearly than a description would. granting the _practicality_ of this line of research, the cephalic index may also be accepted as an index of form, so long as there is no intention of going deeply into minute differentiations for systematic purposes. professor sergi himself, author of the system that forms the basis of the study of cranial forms, urged me to exclude from a practical course in pedagogic anthropology the classification of forms, limiting the concept of form to that included in the cephalic index. the cephalic index has the additional advantage of having been extensively studied and consequently of having an abundance of mean averages for comparison that are of great practical use. furthermore, the idea it gives regarding the cranium by means of one simple figure serves to convey certain fundamental principles with great clearness. in dealing with figures that determine an anthropological datum of such high importance, it is necessary to define its limits and its nomenclature. various authors have introduced their own personal classification of the cephalic index, and no small confusion in nomenclature has resulted; so much so that a need was felt of establishing a uniformity of numerical limits and of the relative terminology, in other words, of simplifying the scientific language. accordingly, a congress was held at frankfort in , at which the following nomenclature was established by international agreement: cephalic index.--_nomenclature established at frankfort_ dolichocephalia = and below mesaticephalia = from . to . brachycephalia = from to hyperbrachycephalia = . and above. previous to this, the most widely varied classifications were in use, and the leading authorities had all introduced into the literature of the subject their own personal classifications. here are some of the more important: broca: dolichocephalics = and below subdolichocephalics = from to subbrachycephalics = from to . brachycephalics = . and above. ranke: dolichocephalics = . mesaticephalics = from to . brachycephalics = and above. kollman: dolichocephalics = . and below mesaticephalics = from to . brachycephalics = from to . hyperbrachycephalics = and above. retzius and davis: dolichocephalia = and below brachycephalia = and above. topinard: { and below = ultradolichocephalics. { \ { } { } true dolichocephalics. { } dolichocephalics { / { \ { } { } subdolichocephalics. { } { } { \ { / true mestaicephalics mesaticephalics { (_mean average._) { \ { / submesaticephalics { } { } { } subbrachycephalics. { } { / brachycephalics { \ { } true brachycephalics. { } { } { / { and above = ultrabrachycephalics. it remains to determine the extreme _limits of oscillation_ of the index, both in relation to the normal mean and in relation to the fluctuations of this important ethnic datum in a given population. topinard, as we have seen, gives as his mean figures for the extreme normal limits among the human races and . deniker gives, as his mean averages for the human races, the following figures: for dolichocephaly, . (natives of the caroline islands; australia); for brachycephaly, . (the ayssori of the transcaucasus; asia).[ ] but we know that a mean is obtained from figures either greater or smaller than the mean itself, so that the limits of _individual variation_ must exceed that of the given figures. accordingly the oscillation of the normal cephalic indices may be given as ranging from to . in regard to abnormalities (extreme human limits of the cephalic index) the authorities give for dolichocephaly (scaphocephaly) and for brachycephaly (in which case the cranium is round and known as _trochocephalic_; it is met with among the insane). between oscillations of such extremely wide range in the normal cephalic index, the number chosen as a medial figure to serve the purpose of dividing the dolichocephalics from the brachycephalics is that of , which is included within the division of brachycephaly. in spite of the nomenclature established at frankfort, there is a distinct scholastic advantage, because of the greater simplicity of memorising and fixing the idea, in reverting to the nomenclature of retzius, who classes as brachycephalics all crania from upward, and as dolichocephalics all those below . it is certainly strange to class all crania from to without distinction as brachycephalics, and then to alter the name and call a cranium with an index of . a dolichocephalic. it has been found that there is always a slight difference between the index taken from measurements of the cranium and that obtained from measurements of the _head_. according to broca, it is necessary to subtract _two units_ from the cephalic index taken from a living person, in order to obtain that of the cranium; thus, for example, if the cephalic index (taken from life) is , the cranial index (taken from the skeleton) would be . such differences are due to the disposition of the soft tissues. consequently, even according to the simple subdivision of retzius, a person who was brachycephalic during life, would become dolichocephalic after he was dead. but this is what always happens in biology, whenever we try to establish _definite_ limits. life undergoes an insensible transition through successive limits and forms, and this fact constitutes the grave difficulties and the apparent confusion of biological systems. in determining degrees of difference, it is necessary to have recourse constantly to _special methods_, which teach us to recognise general properties and to use them as a basis in dividing living creatures into separate groups (see in the section on _method_, "mean measurements and formation of series in relation to individual variations"). hence, for mnemonic purposes, we need remember only the single number, . but if we wish to adopt the nomenclature of frankfort, it is necessary to keep in mind two figures denoting limits, (inclusive) for dolichocephaly, and (inclusive) for brachycephaly. mesaticephalics dolichocephalics brachycephalics ultra these constitute, as it were, two centres, beyond which, on this side and on that, we may picture to ourselves the _individual variations_ drawn up in martial line. in this case, the space between and , in other words, the limits of mesaticephaly, may be interpreted as due to oscillations between dolicho- and brachycephaly according to the laws of variability, which is analogous to what takes place in the case of oscillations in the opposite direction ( - dolichocephaly; - brachycephaly). from this point of view, these two numbers, and , constitute _median centres_ of two different types. but according to broca and his school--and this view is accepted by many anthropologists--mesaticephaly should be regarded as constituting a _fusion_ of the two other types, the brachy- and dolichocephalic, whence it follows that mesaticephalics would be _hybrids_. other authorities, on the contrary, exaggerating the conception of the fixity of the cephalic index in a given race, admit the existence of mesaticephalic races. [illustration: fig. . map of the cephalic index in italy.] but it has been observed that the greater number of mesaticephalics are to be found in regions where dolichocephaly prevails; in certain districts of africa, as for example, in somaliland, not a single brachycephalic exists, yet none the less the mesaticephalics are numerous. accordingly, mesaticephaly may be classed with _dolichocephaly_ and regarded as one of its variations, while it seems to be independent of brachycephaly. therefore the nomenclature of retzius may for many good reasons be chosen and adopted in our schools. in conclusion, we shall regard the brachycephalics and dolichocephalics as the two fundamental types; and shall adopt the figure , included among the brachycephalics, as the limit of separation. the different grades of dolicho- or brachycephaly are to be determined by _mean averages_, and the oscillations due to individual variations, by _series_. hence it is important to determine the _mean average_ and the oscillation of the cephalic index for the different races; and this is of interest to us as educators, in order to establish the limits of _normality_. the practical method of studying the cephalic index is according to geographical distribution. here are a few general data of the cephalic index relative to its distribution: the most dolichocephalic of all peoples are found in melanesia, australia, india and africa. in the fiji islands the mean cephalic index is ; in the caroline archipelago it is ; in various regions of india, ; that of the hottentots, ; of the bantus, . belonging to the dolichocephalics or mesaticephalics are the populations of the extreme south of europe (mediterranean race) and at the extreme north (english, scotch). on the contrary, the races of western europe and of central asia are brachycephalic (celts, mongols). the most brachycephalic of all these peoples are met with in the transcaucasus; their mean average is . . there also exists a notable brachycephalic type in france (savoyards, . ; inhabitants of the upper loire, . ); also in dalmatia, , while the lapps of scandinavia are also ultrabrachycephalic, . . on very general lines, it may be said that the dolichocephalics are the eurafrican races (including the mediterranean race, with which the first civilisations are associated: egyptian, greek and roman) who migrated from the mediterranean basin into europe; and the brachycephalics are the eurasian races, who on the contrary migrated from continental asia across western europe (the aryans). as far as regards italy, its population is by no means evenly constituted. the median index given by livi for italy, deduced from observation of more than , subjects is ; in regard to regional distribution, the results are shown in the following table: piedmont . emilia . venctia . lombardy . umbria . marches . liguria . tuscany . campania . abruzzo and molise . latium . basilicata . apulia . sicily . calabria . sardinia . let us remember that if the cephalic index were measured directly from the cranium, the result would be one or two units less, hence the mean average of the cranial index would be about . the accompanying map represents still more clearly the geographical distribution. the results show that in piedmont, in emilia, and in northern italy in general the inhabitants are more brachycephalic; while in the south and more especially in the island possessions we find the more dolichocephalic part of the population. the highest degree of dolichocephaly is found in sardinia. but if, instead of the cartographic summary herewith reproduced, we could examine the exhaustive one with which livi has illustrated his great work on anthropometry, we should discover that the distribution does not follow the great _regional lines_; but that as a matter of fact certain _human groups_ exist, isolated like little islands, which have a cephalic index in marked contrast to that of the remaining population of the same region. thus, for example, at lucca, in the midst of a brachycephalic population, there is a pronouncedly dolichocephalic group; and in the midst of the dolichocephalic population of abruzzo and the neighbouring provinces, there exists at chieti a strongly brachycephalic group. besides these and similar groups contrasting with the regional type, there exist a multiplicity of differences, from one successive boundary line to another, so that the _limits_ _of the cephalic index_ may be determined with great minuteness in the various regions. livi's large charts lend themselves with great clearness to this sort of analytical study, which would be found to be very profitable to teachers. it is also quite instructive to compare the different charts representing various anthropological data of ethnical importance; such, for example, as that of the distribution of stature and that of the distribution of pigmentation. these data are regarded by anthropologists as attributes of race. well, in these three charts it is evident at the first glance that there is a notable resemblance in distribution, so much so than an eye untrained to observation would be likely to confuse them. the cephalic index, the stature, the colour of the skin are consequently of almost uniform distribution. corresponding to the most pronounced brachycephaly, we have the tallest stature and the fairest complexion; corresponding to the most pronounced dolichocephaly, we find instead the lowest stature and the most brunette types. such an accumulative coincidence, in certain communities, of characteristics, in contrast to those that are found combined in certain other communities, reveal the existence in italy of _two different races_. one of these races seems to have descended from over the alps; the other, to have landed on the shores of the mediterranean. the first belong to the eurasians; the second to the eurafricans. in my work upon the population of latium, the mean cephalic index obtained by me is . the distribution according to the localities studied affords the mean averages noted in the following table, in which i have also recorded the maximums and minimums, and the percentage of brachycephalic and dolichocephalic individuals who contributed to the given means: cephalic index among the people of latium (according to montessori) -------------------------------------------------------------------- |mean | | | dolicho- |brachy- provinces |cephalic |minimum |maximum |cephalics, |cephalics, |index | | |per cent. |per cent. ----------------+---------+--------+--------+-----------+----------- rome | | | | | _castelli romani_ | | | | | -- tivoli | | | | | velletri | . | | | | frosinone | . | | | | civitavecchia | . | | | | bracciano | | | | | _orte_ | . | | | | acquapendente | . | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------- the results show a preponderance of brachycephalics or of dolichocephalics in the places where the mean cephalic index is respectively highest for brachycephaly (orte) or for dolichocephaly (castelli romani). furthermore, the extreme maximum and minimum figures are found to be included in these groups ( at orte and at castelli). it should be noted that at castelli romani the mean average is mesaticephalic ( ), notwithstanding the absence of brachycephalics; this average is based on figures showing an extremely pronounced dolichocephaly (ranging to !). the groups at castelli and at orte also showed characteristics in respect to stature (see page ); at orte the mean stature is . m., with a maximum of . m. (very tall statures for women), and at castelli the mean stature is . m., with a minimum of . m. (low statures). similarly, in regard to pigmentation, i found at orte a prevalence of blonds, and at castelli of brunettes. hence the conclusion may be drawn that at castelli and at orte there exist groups of human beings who are of almost pure race, in the midst of a population in which racial types have become attenuated or hidden; but in centres like these we still find persistent testimony as to the ethnic factors that combined to form the people of latium: the one, a blond, tall, brachycephalic race; the other, dark, small, and dolichocephalic. _the cephalic index at different ages of life._--another quality that renders the cephalic index of great importance is that it remains constant in the course of growth, since the two maximum diameters, the antero-posterior and the transverse, increase at very nearly the same rate, excepting during the earliest years, at which time the length of the cranium increases slightly more than the width. according to some authorities it is in the second year, according to others it is in the fourth or seventh, that the cephalic index becomes constant (binet, deniker, pearson, fawcette, ammon, johannson, and westermarck). the following table is one that i have drawn up on the basis of quétélet's figures: cephalic index --------------------------------------------------- age | males |females| age | males |females ---------+-------+-------+---------+-------+------- at birth | | | years| | year | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | years| | years | | | --- | -- | -- --------------------------------------------------- since it has been observed that the cranium in the course of its growth may assume forms, amounting even to apparent malformations (due chiefly to "bumps," either symmetrical or asymmetrical), which disappear during the evolution of the individual, the _cephalic index_, for _the very reason_ that it does not represent a faithful description of the form, gives us precious aid in judging the cranium of the child, because it _accurately determines the proportions_ _between length and breadth_ which are destined to persist even in the adult, and hence serve to give, even in infancy, a sure indication of the ethnic type to which the child belongs. [illustration: per cent. negro children children born in syria children born in russia children born in germany fig. .] we owe to dr. ales hrdlicka the extremely important graphic chart, which i will proceed to summarise, of the cephalic indices of children of various races: the central dotted line corresponds to the index : consequently the brachycephalics are indicated on the right, and the dolichocephalics on the left (fig. ). in the case of italy, the graphic line extends between the two extreme figures of and , which are precisely the extreme limits that we have already noted for individual adults, in the case of the women of latium: moreover, the curve is perceptibly symmetrical, although the brachycephalics are in the majority; a fact already established by livi's mean averages. one might say that this curve was a graphic representation of livi's two-colour method in his map of the cephalic index: one-half of italy is brachycephalic and the other half is dolichocephalic; but since brachycephaly prevails in the northern half, a wider extent of territory is occupied by brachycephalics. in america, where emigration brings every variety of humanity, the curve is even more symmetrical, and rests on a broader basis, representing widely separated extremes. ireland also shows a very perceptible symmetry, the population being a mixture of celts (brachycephalics) and of scotch (northern blond dolichocephalics). in germany there is a prevalence of brachycephalics; we are here approaching the eastern regions from which the eurasian race came through emigration. here the slavs and celts (brachycephalics who immigrated into europe at various epochs) are intermingled with a notable percentage of dolichocephalics (teutons). [illustration: per cent. children born in ireland white children born in america children born in italy fig. .] but in russia, a region still further east, and similarly in syria, we find an almost pure race: the curves lie wholly within the field of brachycephaly. on the contrary, the dark-skinned children given in the last chart, and belonging to african races and tribes of american indians, are all of them _dolichocephalic_. according to binet and other writers, the _cephalic index_ and the _cranial volume_ are the two anthropological data on which the criterion of _normality_ of children's heads must be based. when we observe a child's head which is apparently malformed, we cannot call it _abnormal_; it is not abnormal unless it has a volume notably too small (submicrocephaly, microcephaly) or too large (rickets, hydrocephaly); and a cephalic index exceeding the normal limits, in other words, _exaggerated_ (scaphocephaly, trochocephaly, pathological brachycephaly occurring in hydrocephalics). the volume of the cranium the volume of the cranium owes its importance, as we have already seen, to the fact that the cranium represents the _envelope_ of the brain, and is consequently normally determined, as regards its dimensions, by the cerebral volume. accordingly, in normal cases, when we speak of the cranial volume, we are speaking by implication of the _cerebral volume_; and all anthropological questions regarding the volumetric development of the cranium in reality have reference to the brain. in abnormal cases, on the contrary, it may happen that the bony covering is not a skeletal index of the brain; in fact, pathological cases may occur analogous to those we have already observed in discussing the etiology of cranial malformations, in which the flat bones of the cranial vault undergo a notable thickening, so that as a result the greater volume of the cranium is due to the increased quantity of bony substance, and not of brain tissue, and is very heavy, so that it readily droops over upon the shoulder: _pachycephalic_ cranium. another cause for lack of correspondence between the cerebral and the cranial volume may be the abnormal production of cerebro-spinal fluid within the brain: _hydrocephalic_ cranium. =the development of the brain.=--in the earliest period of embryonal life, the brain consists of a single vesicle, the continuation of which forms the spinal marrow: later on, this vesicle divides into three superimposed vesicles which represent respectively the embryonal beginnings of the anterior, middle and posterior brain; continuing their development, the anterior and posterior brains each divide in turn into two other vesicles, so that there result in all five primitive vesicles of the brain, superimposed one upon another (see fig. ); the anterior vesicle which is destined to grow enormously, dividing into two parts, right and left, with a longitudinal division, will constitute the cerebral hemispheres; the second vesicle will constitute the optic thalami; the third vesicle, the corpora quadrigemina; the fourth vesicle, the cerebellum, and the fifth vesicle, the medulla oblongata. when complete development is attained, the cerebral hemispheres completely cover the other parts of the brain, besides which they themselves are covered over with a multiplicity of folds constituting the _convolutions_. if we take a cross-section of the hemispheres, we find that they consist of an outer layer of _gray_ matter formed of nerve cells, and of a central mass of _white_ matter, formed of fibres. [illustration: fig. . brain of a human embryo after the fourth week.] the study of the convolutions is quite important from the anthropological standpoint, because their number is not identical in the different branches of the human race, and also because they differ both in number and in arrangement from the convolutions in the brain of the anthropoid apes. but however interesting they may be, considered as differentiating characteristics, we cannot linger over a study of this kind, which has a purely theoretic importance, and for the present cannot be applied in any practical and direct way to our problems of pedagogic anthropology. it will be sufficient to note rapidly that at the present time the study of the _convolutions_ has received a new impulse through the labours of certain distinguished investigators, among whom we must once more include dr. sergio sergi. instead of studying the surface convolutions, dr. sergi studies the internal folds which are disclosed by separating the lips of the cerebral fissures; and from these he draws deductions which to a large extent correct those made by previous scientists, in regard to the eventual ancestry of the different species, the marks of biological superiority or inferiority, the differences in the brain due to sex, etc. the surface fissures which divide the cerebral hemispheres into convolutions are shown in the two accompanying figures (figs. and ), the first of which shows the outer side of the hemispheres, and the second the inner side. of chief importance to us is the arrangement of convolutions and furrows on the outer surface of the hemispheres. the points to be noted are the following: the two great fissures, rolando's, running longitudinally, and silvius's running transversely, which, together with the perpendicular fissure, divide the hemisphere into four lobes: the _frontal_ lobe and the _parietal_ lobe, situated respectively in front and behind rolando's fissure; the _temporal_ lobe, situated below silvius's fissure, and lastly, the _occipital_ lobe at the posterior apex of the hemisphere. [illustration: fig. .--cerebral hemisphere; external face.] in the third frontal convolution are situated broca's centres, which are believed to be the seat of articulate speech; while along rolando's fissure, in the ascendant convolutions, is the locality designated by physiologists as the motor centres. the occipital lobe is the location of the zone of sight; and the temporal lobe, that of hearing. it is important for us to observe the volume of the brain, and therefore that of the head, in relation to the rest of the body; it is enormous in the embryo; and even at birth and during childhood the head is quite voluminous as compared with the body, as appears from the diagram in fig. , in which a new-born child and an adult man are reduced to the same scale, each retaining his relative bodily proportions. in fig. a new-born child is shown in two positions: from the front and from behind; the head is very large and the cranial nodules are plainly visible. figs. and represent the same child at the age of six months and a year and a half; in the first picture the head is still very large as compared with the body, and the forehead protrudes (infantile forehead); in the second, the proportion between head and body has already altered. a knowledge of the laws governing the growth of the brain is of particular importance in relation to pedagogic anthropology. [illustration: fig. .--cerebral hemisphere, internal face.] within the last few years anthropologists have established certain principles that are well worthy of notice: . the child's head is normal when its _volume_ and _cephalic index_ come within the limits of normality (even if the shape appears abnormal: simon, binet, etc.). . when the volume of the head is too small it frequently indicates psychic deficiency; when it is too large, even up to the age of twenty years, it indicates a predisposition to precocious mortality (see below). very frequently when the size of the head is larger than normal and is not due to pathological causes (rickets, hydrocephaly, etc.), it is associated with an excessive development of the brain, and also with an intellectual precocity. a high percentage of this type die before reaching the age of twenty years; and this fact confirms the popular belief that children who are too intelligent or too good cannot live long. this indication alone ought to be sufficient to prove the pedagogic importance of the cerebral volume. the researches made by various authors in regard to the growth of the brain are not rigorously in accord as to the _limits of volume_: but they do agree as to the _rhythm of growth_. welcker gives the following figures: weight of the brain in grams (according to welcker) ------------------------------ age | males | females ------------+-------+--------- at birth | | two months | | one year | | three years | , | , ten years | , | , accordingly, the weight of the brain is doubled before the end of the first year; according to massini it is very nearly doubled at the end of the first six months: massini's figures as to the weight of the brain -------------------------------------------------- age |total weight| increase ---------------------------+------------+--------- at birth | | } first month | | } from first to third month | | from third to sixth month | | } from sixth month to year | | } [illustration: fig. .--spheroidal cranium lateral norm (sergi's collection).] [illustration: fig. .--spheroids typicus (from sergi's collection).] [illustration: fig. .--a child six months old.] [illustration: fig. .--the same child a year and a half old.] it follows from these figures that by the end of the sixth month the weight of the brain is already very nearly doubled; but the maximum growth takes place between the ages of one month and three, after which it shows a notable diminution of rate. but while the weight of the whole body is increased threefold by the end of the first year, that of the brain is very far from being tripled, since the rate of growth is still further diminished during the second six months; in fact even according to welcker the weight at the end of the first year has little more than doubled. accordingly the rhythm of cerebral growth is not identical with that of the increase in weight of the body taken as a whole. according to massini, the relation between the cerebral weight and the weight of the body, at the various successive ages, is as follows: relation between weight of brain and total weight (according to massini) ----------------------------------------------------------- age | brain | body | age | brain | body --------------------+-------+------+---------+-------+----- at birth | | | years | | first month | | | years | | from first to third | | | | | month | | | | | to sixth month | | | | | to one year | | | years | | ----------------------------------------------------------- in other words, the body grows more rapidly than the brain, and consequently, than the head: a fact which results in the different proportions already noted between head and body. the rhythm of brain growth considered by itself has been set forth in a most noteworthy and accurate fashion by boyd, based on the study of about two thousand cases; from the figures given by boyd, i have calculated the amount of increase from period to period, as well as from year to year, the whole result being set forth in the following table: rhythm of growth of brain (_males_: according to boyd) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |weight|difference|difference| |proportion age | in | for each | for each | relative|to maximum |grams | period | year | epoch | reduced | | | | | to -----------------------+------+----------+----------+---------+---------- at birth | | -- | -- | -- | . from birth to months | | + | -- | -- | . from to months | | + | -- | -- | . from months to year| | + | + | st year | . from to years | | + | + | d year | . from to years | , | + | + | d- th| . from to years | , | + | + | th- th| . from to years | , | + | + | th- th| . from to years | , | + | + | th- th| . from to years | , | -- | -- | -- | . from to years | , | + | + . | th- th| . from to years | , | - | - . | th- th| . from to years | , | - | - . | th- th| . from to years | , | - | - . | th- th| . from to years | , | - | - . | th- th| . from to years | , | - | - . | th- th| . ------------------------------------------------------------------------- in the above table, the first column of figures gives the _mean_ _average weight_ of the brain, obtained by direct observation of individual subjects; while from all the others the rhythm of cerebral growth and involution throughout the successive periods of life may be computed. we see that the maximum growth takes place in the first years of life, the intensity is greater in the first year than in the second, and greater in the first three months than in those that follow. already at the end of the first year the brain has surpassed one-half of the maximum weight which the individual is destined to attain in adult life (last column: proportions computed on scale of ). a notable rate of increase continues up to the age of four, after which it moderates, but receives a new impulse at about the fourteenth year (period of puberty); hence it appears that at this important epoch of life the _brain_ not only shares the general rapid growth of the body, but that by the end of the fourteenth year the brain has _already practically completed its development_; in fact, assuming that represents its complete development, the weight of the brain is already . ; and at thirty it will be only . . by studying the above table we can obtain a clear analysis of these phenomena. for women, boyd gives the following figures: the growth of the brain in women (figures given by boyd) -------------------------------------------------- | |proportion to the age | weight | maximum reduced | | to -----------------------+--------+----------------- at birth | | . three months | | . from to months | | . from months to year| | . from to years | | . from to years | | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . from to years | , | . -------------------------------------------------- the rhythm of growth of the female brain is analogous to that of the male, except for the more precocious attainment of the maximum weight, which corresponds to the more precocious evolution of the female organism. it should be noted that in the tables above cited the maximum is actually given as occurring at the age of twenty; and that after this period the weight diminishes again, subsequently increasing up to an age that varies according to the sex. but this maximum at the age of twenty must be considered as one of the false results of mean averages; and it must be explained on the ground that after the twentieth year the death rate has eliminated a series of individuals whose heads were abnormally large, and that a majority of the survivors were those whose heads had developed within normal limits. this fact is further confirmed by wagner's figures, cited by broca: mean weight of the brain (according to wagner) -------------------------------------- age | men | women --------------------+--------+-------- under years | | , from to years | , | , from to years | , | , from to years | , | , from to years | , | , from to years | , | , above years | , | , here again we have a false maximum at twenty, which nature subsequently corrects through mortality. from such knowledge we obtain certain important rules of hygiene. the normal brain which exceeds the common limits of volume is not, in an absolute sense, _incompatible_ with life. we need only to call to mind certain men of genius who had the brains of a giant. accordingly a brain which exceeds the limits _demands of the_ _individual who possesses it_ that he shall live according to certain special rules of hygiene. children and young people who are _too intelligent_, _too good_, in other words, children of the elite class demand a special treatment, just as much as any other class of beings that pass beyond the bounds of average normality. parents and teachers ought to be enlightened in regard to these scientific principles; the growth of individuals who are exceptional in regard to their intelligence and their emotions, should be supervised as though it were something precious and fragile. such individuals are destined to be more subject than others to _infective_ _maladies_, which frequently prove fatal, developing symptoms of meningitis and cerebral affections. consequently a hygienic life, _psychic repose_, an avoidance of emotional excitement, moderate physical exercise in farm or garden, a prolonged stay in the open country, might be the salvation of children of this type, who often are over-praised and over-stimulated by friends and relatives, and consequently subjected to continual excitement and _surménage_ to a degree destructive to their health. =extreme individual variations of the volume of the brain.=--in regard to individual variations, the authorities give various figures, from which the following have been selected as most noteworthy for their accuracy of research: normal extremes of individual variations in the volume of the brain ----------------------------------------------------------- | age: from to years| from to authors |-------------------------+----------------------- | maximum | minimum | maximum | minimum ---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- calori | , | , | , | , bischoff | , | , | , | , | | | | | _without distinction of age_: broca | maximum | minimum | , | , ----------------------------------------------------------- these figures refer to individuals belonging to european races. _comparison with the brains of apes._--the brain of the great anthropoid apes (chimpanzee, orang-utan, gorilla), whose total weight of body is comparable to that of man, weighs on an average grams, and the greatest weight which it can attain is gr. _specific gravity of the human brain._--in normal individuals, the average specific gravity is . ; in insane persons it is slightly higher: . . _the relation between the weight of the brain and the cranial_ _capacity: figures given by lebon_: weight of the brain cranial capacity in in grams cubic centimetres , , , , , , , , _figures given by manouvrier_: weight of the brain cranial capacity in in grams cubic centimetres , , , , , , , , =increase in the volume of the brain.=--studies regarding the growth of the head, although not yet complete, have gone sufficiently far to give us some useful ideas. in regard to the volume in a general sense, the _cranium in its growth obeys the cerebral_ _rhythm_. we shall speak in the section on _technique_ of the methods of measuring the head: at present it will suffice to point out that the measurements may be made directly upon the cranium, and the _cranial capacity_ calculated directly from the head: and that the _maximum linear measurements_ are sufficient to indicate the volume--such measurements being the three maximum diameters, _longitudinal_, _transverse_, and _vertical_, and the _maximum circumference_. even the forehead, as an index of the general volume of the brain, is of interest in researches relating to the volumetric growth of the head. regarding the growth of the several cranial dimensions, the most accurate and complete knowledge is furnished by binet's researches among the school-children of paris ( ). this author has made special investigations into the _rhythm_ of growth of the cranium and of the face, with special reference to the period of _puberty_. the following are the mean averages obtained by him, relative to the three diameters corresponding to the three maximum dimensions of the head: mean averages of cephalic measurements taken upon children of different ages (binet: _from the schools of paris_) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | kinder- |lower primary schools |upper pri- |normal | gartens | |mary schools|schools |-----------+-----------------------+------------+------- measurement | | | | | | | | | |years|years|years|years|years|years|years| years| years ---------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------ antero-post. diameter| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . transverse diameter | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . vertical diameter | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- it is evident that these figures contain inaccuracies, especially in regard to the vertical diameter (where the subsequent two-year period gives a smaller measurement than the preceding) due to the fact that the averages were obtained from an insufficient number of subjects or from subjects differing too widely in intelligence (from schools of different grades). for this reason binet summarises the differences in growth, that is, the increase in relation to the diameters, under broad groups (six year groups, from four to ten years, and from ten to sixteen), in order to determine whether puberty exerts a sensible influence upon the cranial growth. the result is contained in the following table: increase of the three maximum diameters of the head in millimetres from four to eighteen years of age --------------------------------------------------------------------------- age in years: from -- to -- | - ; - ; - | - ; - ; - | - ----------------------------+----------------+---------------------+------- antero-posterior diameter | . ; . ; . | . ; . ; | . | \-----------/ | \------------/ | | \/ | \/ | | . | . | transverse diameter | . ; . ; . | . ; . ; . | . | \-----------/ | \------------/ | | \/ | \/ | | . | . | vertical diameter | . ; . ; . | . ; . ; . | . | \-----------/ | \------------/ | | \/ | \/ | | . | . | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- from which it appears that there exists, in regard to the head, a puberal acceleration of growth. these conclusions of binet are indirectly confirmed by the researches of vitale vitali regarding the development of the forehead in school-children; since it is well known that the forehead represents the index of the general growth of the cerebral cranium. vitale vitali based his observations upon school-children and students between the ages of ten and twenty. he not only measured the width of the forehead (_frontal diameter_; see _technique_), but also measured its height, obtaining the percentage of its relation to the width (frontal index). these are his figures: frontal index and diameter according to age (vitale vitali: researches among scholars and students from to years old) ------------------------------------------ age | frontal | frontal | amount of | index | diameter | increase ---------+----------+----------+---------- years | . | . | -- years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . ------------------------------------------ accordingly, between the years of fourteen and sixteen there is a puberal acceleration of growth, accompanied by an elevation of the forehead (high frontal index). vitali gives, as extreme limits of the frontal index, and . but in order to give a better illustration of the author's figures, his own words may be quoted: "it appears from our observations that the forehead begins to develop in notable proportions during the fourteenth year, and that the development of the frontal region as compared with the parietal region continues to augment up to the sixteenth year; after this it still increases, but only by a few millimetres, until the end of the sixteenth year. the cephalic development is completed between the sixteenth and eighteenth years. this observed fact is of great importance in relation to the development of the intellect." the most complete figures at the present time on the growth of the brain, are those of quétélet, which follow its development from birth until the fortieth year. they are summarised in the following table: increase in the circumference of the brain and in its three maximum diameters (according to quÉtÉlet) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | maximum diameters age |circumference |------------------------------------------------ |in millimetres | antero-post. | transverse | vertical ---------+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------- | men | women | men | women | men | women | men | women at birth | | | | | | | | year | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | years | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- it appears from the foregoing table that after the twenty-fifth year the growth of the cranium practically ceases in all directions. in regard to the rhythm of growth, the problem is rendered clearer by the following table, which gives the annual increase: annual increase in the maximum cranial measurements in males (from figures given by quÉtÉlet) --------------------------------------------------------- age| circumference | antero-post. | transverse | vertical | | diameter | diameter | diameter ---+---------------+--------------+------------+--------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --------------------------------------------------------- it appears from the above table that the total growth of the cranium takes place to a notable extent during the early years of life; as regards the diameters, the longitudinal diameter grows faster during the first few months than the transverse; but after the first year, the two maximum diameters which determine the cephalic index increase in very nearly the same proportion (constancy of the cephalic index throughout life). the vertical diameter on the contrary undergoes a relatively much greater increase than the two others, since, although much shorter than the transverse, it nevertheless overtakes and surpasses it in its absolute annual increase. this corresponds to the fact that the first two diameters are indexes of growth relative to the base of the cranium, while the vertical diameter is the index of expansion of the cranial vault, which more directly follows the growth of the brain and elevates the forehead as it pushes upward. quétélet's figures, however, fail to show in the rhythm of growth that puberal acceleration which has been observed to take place in the growth of the brain. this contradicts the researches of vitali and also those of binet. similar studies have been made a number of times during the last few years, especially in america, but with english tables of measurement, and with little uniformity in the results obtained by the different investigators. among the most recent and most complete figures should be cited those of bonnifay[ ] in which however the measurement of the vertical diameter is lacking, or in other words the third element needed, in conjunction with the dimensions of length and breadth, to give the volumetric factors. cranial measurements at different ages (according to bonnifay) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | absolute figures | amount of increase |--------------------------+-------------------------- age from -- to -- |circum-| antero- | trans- |circum-| antero- | trans- |ference|posterior| verse |ference|posterior| verse | | diameter|diameter| | diameter|diameter --------------------+-------+---------+--------+-------+---------+-------- birth to days | . | . | . | -- | -- | -- days to months| . | . | . | . | . | . months to months| . | . | . | . | . | . months to year | . | . | . | . | . | . year to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | -- | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . years to years| . | . | . | . | . | . -------------------------------------------------------------------------- among the linear measurements of the cranium, the one which serves to give the most exact index of volume is the _maximum_ _circumference_. this index, nevertheless, is not a perfect one, in the same sense that the _stature_, for instance, is a perfect index in respect to the body, because in the case of the cranium another element enters in: the form. the cranial circumference of an extremely brachycephalic cranium (almost circular) may contain a larger surface (and consequently include a larger volume), than a maximum circumference of the same identical measure, which belongs to an extremely dolichocephalic cranium (approaching the shape of an elongated ellipse). this may be easily understood if we imagine a loop of thread laid out in the form of a circle: if we pull it from two opposite sides, the enclosed area diminishes until it finally disappears as the two halves of the thread close together, while the length of the thread itself remains unaltered. nevertheless, the maximum circumference still remains the linear index best adapted to represent the _volume_; indeed, the authorities take its proportional relation to the stature as representing the reciprocal degree of development between head and body at the different successive ages. here are the figures which daffner gives in this connection: development of the stature and of the cephalic perimeter from birth to the age of eleven years ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | males females --------+--------------------------------------------------------------- number | |stature| cranial | number | |stature| cranial of | age | in |perimeter,| of | age | in |perimeter subjects| | cms. | cms. |subjects| | cms. | cms. --------+--------+-------+----------+--------+--------+-------+--------- |at birth| . | . | |at birth| . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . | . | . | . | | . | . | . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ development of the stature and of the cephalic perimeter between the years of and ------------------------------------------------------------ number of subjects | age | stature in | cephalic perimeter | | centimetres| in centimetres -------------------+-------+------------+------------------- | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ------------------------------------------------------------ one very important research made by daffner is in reference to the maximums and minimums that are normal for each successive age. this is extremely useful for the purpose of diagnosing the _morphological normality in relation to the age_. he naturally bases his figures upon subjects studied by him personally, who altogether form an aggregate number of , , and are not always sufficiently numerous when distributed according to their ages. nevertheless, in the great majority of groups, especially those including the younger children, the number of subjects is sufficient and even superabundant. at all events, daffner's researches may serve as a valuable guide in the researches that lay the foundation for diagnosis; and every future investigator will find it an easier task, under such guidance, to make his own contribution to it and to correct those inaccuracies which (for certain epochs) are to be attributed to an insufficient number of subjects. daffner distinguishes, for each year, a _maximum_ and a _minimum_ both for the stature and for the cephalic perimeter; but since the person having the maximum stature does not always have the maximum cephalic perimeter, and _vice versa_, the author indicates, in connection with the maximum and minimum figures, the other of the two measurements which, as a matter of fact, corresponds to them in each given case. individual variations maximums and minimums of stature and of cranial circumference ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | measurements |maximum (m.) |measurements occurring | s.--stature |and |in combination with age | cc.--cranial |minimum (m.) in |the m. or m. | circumference |millimetres |measurements -----------+-----------------+----------------+----------------------- | males from birth to the age of eleven years | at birth |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). ________ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = , , ). | {m. = |(cc. = , , ). -----------+----------------------------------+----------------------- year |cranial circumf. {m. = | ______ | {m. = | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+----------------------------------+----------------------- years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). _______ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+----------------------------------+----------------------- years |cranial circumf. {m. = | _______ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = , ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+----------------------------------+----------------------- years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). ------- | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = , ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). ------- | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). ----- | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). _____ | {m. = |(s. = , ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = , ). _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). ______ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). -----------+-------------------------------------+------------------------ years |cranial circumf. {m. = |(s. = ). _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | {m. = |(cc. = ). note. ----- indicates that the number of subjects is abundant. _____ indicates that the number of subjects is sufficient. ..... indicates that the number of subjects is scarce. females from birth to the age of eleven years ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | measurements |maximum (m.) |measurements | observations | s.--stature |and |occurring in | age | cc.--cranial |minimum (m.)in|combination with | | circumference |millimetres |the m. or m. | | | |measurements | --------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ at birth.|cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). |(the most frequent _________| {m. = |(s. = ). |s. was mm. |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). |combined with cc. | {m. = |(cc. = , ).| = , .) ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ year |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ) | ...... | {m. = |(s. = , ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | ______ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _______ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _______ | {m. = |(s. = , ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | ------- | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). |(the maximum s. | {m. = |(s. = ). | was found in a |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | child of years | {m. = |(cc. = ). | and months; | | | the next highest | | | stature was | | | mm., cc. ; | | | another little | | | girl of years | | | and months had | | | s. = ; cc. = | | | ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years. |cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | ________ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years..|cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years..|cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years.|cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). | |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | | {m. = |(cc. = ). | ---------+----------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------ years.|cranial circumf.{m. = |(s. = ). | _____ | {m. = |(s. = ). |(the next higher |stature {m. = |(cc. = ). | s. was , with | {m. = |(cc. = ). | a cc. of ). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ extremes between the ages of and years (the figures here given are less exact, because of the great scarcity of subjects) -------------------------------------------------------------- | measurements |maximum (m). |measurements that |s. = stature |and |occur in conjunction age. |cr. = cranial |minimum (m.) |with m. and m. |circumference |in millimetres| measurements ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). ..... | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). _____ | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). _____ | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). ---------+----------------+--------------+-------------------- years |cranial circumf.{m. = | (s. = ). | {m. = | (s. = ). |stature {m. = | (cc. = ). | {m. = | (cc. = ). -------------------------------------------------------------- _nomenclature relating to cranial volume. anomalies._--(in regard to the method of directly measuring or calculating the cranial capacity, and of taking and estimating the measurements of the skull, see the section on _technique_.) _limits._--the cranial capacity, according to deniker, has normally such a wide range of oscillation that the minimum is fully doubled by the maximum, the limits being respectively , and , cubic centimetres--these figures, however, including men of genius. furthermore, the mean average capacity oscillates between limits that change according to race--not only because the cerebral volume may of itself constitute an ethnic characteristic (superior and inferior races) with which the _form of the forehead_ is usually associated, but also because the cranial volume bears a certain relation to the _stature_, which is another factor that varies with the race. deniker gives the following mean averages of oscillations: europeans from , to , cu. cm. negroes from , to , cu. cm. australians, bushmen from , to , cu. cm. the average difference of cranial capacity is cubic centimetres less in woman than in man. the following nomenclature for oscillations in cranial capacity was established by topinard, based upon the figures and methods of broca: macrocephalic crania from , cu. cm. upward large crania from , to , cu. cm. medium or ordinary crania from , to , cu. cm. small crania from , to , cu. cm. microcephalic crania from , cu. cm. downward to-day, however, the terms _macrocephalic_ and _microcephalic_ have come to be reserved for _pathological_ cases. virchow has introduced the term _nanocephalic_ to designate normal crania of very small dimensions; while sergi has adopted a binomial nomenclature, calling them _eumetopic_ microcephalics, which signifies _possessed of a fine forehead_: since, as we have seen, it is precisely the shape of the forehead which determines normality. and in place of _macrocephalic_, we have for very large normal crania the new term _megalocephalic_. pathological terminology includes the following nomenclature: macrocephaly, sub-macrocephaly, submicrocephaly, microcephaly. microcephaly may fall as low as cubic centimetres; macrocephaly may rise as high as , cubic centimetres, and at these extremes the volume alone is sufficient to denote the anomaly. but in many cases the volume may fall within the limits of normality; in such cases it is the _pathological form_ and an examination of the patient which lead to the use of the term submicrocephalic in preference to that of nanocephalic, etc. the volume, taken by itself, if it is not at one of the extreme limits, is not sufficient to justify a verdict of abnormality. the terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of _macrocephaly_. in rickets, for instance, macrocephaly may occur in conjunction with a normal or even supernormal intelligence (leopardi). microcephaly, on the contrary, could never occur combined with normal intelligence, since it is a sign indicative of _atrophy of the_ _cerebro-spinal_ axis and diminution or, as brugia phrases it, dehumanization of the individuality. [illustration: fig. .--growth of cranial circumference.] in all the widely varied series of pathological and degenerate individuals who are included under the generic names of "deficients" and "criminals," there is a notable percentage of crania that are abnormal both in volume and in form; the percentage of crania with normal dimensions is less than that of the crania which exceed or fall below such dimensions, and among these there is a preponderance of _submicrocephalic_ crania: a morphological characteristic associated with a partial arrest of cerebral development, due to _internal_ _causes_ and manifested from the earliest period of infant life. the accompanying chart (fig. ) demonstrates precisely this fact. it represents the growth of the cranium in normal and in abnormal children. the abnormal are at one time superior and at another inferior to the normal children; but their general average shows a definite inferiority to the normal. lombroso established the fact that among adult criminals there is an _inferiority_ of cranial development, frequently accompanied by a stature that is normal, or even in excess of normality. quite recently, binet has called attention to a form of _submicrocephaly_ acquired through external causes, which is of great interest from the pedagogic point of view. blind children and those who are deaf-mutes have, up to the seventh or eighth year, a cranium of normal dimensions, but by the fourteenth or fifteenth year the volume is notably below the normal, and this stigma of inferiority remains permanently in the adults. this fact, which is of very general occurrence, is attributed by binet to a deficiency of sensations, and consequently a deficiency of certain specific cerebral exercises. this whole question has a fundamental interest for us as educators, because it affords an indirect proof that _cerebral exercise_ _develops_ the brain, or in other words, that education has a physical and morphological influence as well as a psychic one. this question, coupled with that of the influence of _alimentation_ upon the development of the head, leads to the conclusion that a two-fold nutriment is necessary for the normal development of man: _material_ nutriment and nutriment of the _spirit_. it follows that education must be considered from two different points of view: that of the progress of civilisation, and that of the perfectionment of the species. in regard to variations of cranial volume, just as in the case of variations of stature, there are a number of different factors which may be summed up in such a way as to afford us certain determining characteristics of _social caste_. delicate questions these, which we may sum up in a single question equally delicate, that lends itself to a vast amount of discussion; namely, what is the relation between the _volume_ of the brain and the development of the intellect? _individual variations of cerebral (and cranial) volume. relation_ _between the development of the cerebral volume and the development_ _of the intelligence._--the series of arguments in reference to the _cerebral volume_ ought to be considered independently of the biological and biopathological factors which we have up to this point been considering; namely, race, sex, age, degeneration and disease. that is to say, in normal individuals, other conditions being equal, volumetric differences of the brain may be met with, analogous to those other infinite individual variations, in which nature expresses her creative power, even while preserving unchanged the general morphology of the species. it is due to this fact that the innumerable individuals of a race, while all bearing a certain resemblance to one another, are never any two of them identically alike. variations of this sort, which might be called biological individualisations, are in any case subject to the most diverse influences of environment, which concur in producing individual varieties. this is in accordance with general laws which are applicable to any biological question whatever, but that in our case assume a special interest. there are certain men who have larger or smaller brains; and there are men of greater or of less intelligence. is there a quantitative relation between these two manifestations, the morphological and the psychic? everyone knows that this is one of those complicated, much discussed questions that spread outside of the purely scientific circles and become one of the stock themes of debate among classes incompetent to judge; consequently it has been colored by popular prejudice, rather than by the light of science. it is well that persons of education should acquire accurate ideas upon the subject. if the volume of the brain should be in proportion to the intellectual development, argues the general public, what sort of a head must dante alighieri have had? he would have had to be the most monstrous macrocephalic ever seen upon earth. and on the basis of this superficial observation, they wish to deny any quantitative relation whatever between brain and intelligence. and yet it is this same general public that keeps insisting: woman has less intelligence than man, _because_ she has a smaller brain. a single glance up and down the _zoological scale_ suffices to show that throughout the whole animal series a greater development of brain is accompanied by a correspondingly greater development of psychic activity; and that there is a _conspicuous_ difference between the human brain and that of the higher animals (anthropoid apes), corresponding to the difference between the level of man's psychic development and that of the higher mammals; and this justifies the assertion that, _as a general rule_, there is a quantitative relation between the brain and the intellect. this suggests the thought that the perfect development of this delicate _instrument_, the brain, demands a variety of harmonious material conditions, among others the _volume_, in order to render possible the conditions of psychic perfection. from this premise, we may pass on to a more particularised study of the _material conditions_ essential to the superior type of brain. the volume is the quantitative index; but the _quality_ may be considered from various points of view, which may be grouped as follows: i. _the general morphology of the brain_ in reference to: (_a_) the harmonious, relative volumetric proportions between the lobes of the brain (namely, the proportion between the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes). it was formerly believed that a superior brain ought to show a prevalence of the frontal lobes, since a lofty forehead is a sign of intellect; but it was afterward established that there is no direct relation between the development of the forehead and the development of the frontal lobes; a higher forehead results from a greater volume of the entire cranial contents; the superior brain, on the contrary, is that in which no one lobe prevails over another, but all of them preserve a reciprocal and perfect harmony of dimensions. (_b_) the form, number and disposition of the cerebral convolutions, and of the folds of the internal passage (sergio sergi). (_c_) the form, number and disposition of the cells in the cortical strata of the brain, and the proportion between the gray matter and the white, that is to say, between the cells and fibres; in short, the histological structure of the brain. ii. the _chemistry_ of the brain: (_a_) the chemical composition of the substances constituting the brain, which may be more or less complicated. (recent studies of the chemical evolution of living organisms have demonstrated that the atomic composition is far more complex in the higher organisms.) (_b_) the intimate interchange of matter in the cerebral tissues, in connection with their nutrition. (_c_) the chemical stimuli coming from the so-called glands of internal secretion (thyroid, etc.). all these conditions concur in determining the _quality_ of the cerebral tissues. in its ontogenetic evolution, for example, the brain does not merely increase in volume, and its development is not limited to attaining a definite morphology; but its intimate structure and its chemical composition as well must pass through various stages of transition before attaining their final state. we know, for example, that the myelination of the nerve fibres takes place upward from the spinal marrow toward the brain, and that the pyramidal tracts (voluntary motor tracts) are the last to myelinate, and hence the last to perform their functions in the child. the consistence of the cerebral mass and its specific gravity also differ in childhood from that of the adult state. the evolution of the brain is therefore a very complex process; and this process may not be fully completed (for instance, it may be completed in volume, but not in form or chemical composition, etc.). consequently, just as in the case of volume, there may be various qualitative conditions, such as would produce organic inferiority. but supposing that qualitatively the evolution has been accomplished normally, where there is greater cerebral volume, is there a correspondingly greater intellect? at this point it is necessary to take into consideration another series of questions regarding the brain considered as a _material_ _organ_, and having reference to the relation between the volume of the _brain_ and that of the _stature_. the brain must govern the nerves in all the _active parts_ of the body, especially the striped muscles, which perform all voluntary movement. consequently the cerebral volume must be in proportion, not only to the intellectuality, but also to the _physical_ _activity_. evidently, a greater mass of body demands a greater nervous system to give it motive power. the biological law is of a general nature: if the brain of a rat weighs centigrams, that of an ox weighs grams, and that of an elephant , grams. _"the absolute volume of the brain increases with the total volume_ _of the body."_ but this correspondence is not proportional. there are two facts that alter the proportions. one of these is that the mass of the body increases faster than the brain, throughout the biological series of species, so that the smaller the body the greater the proportional quantity of brain. just the opposite from what was found to hold true for the absolute weight. it may be affirmed as a biological law that "_the relative volume_ _of the brain increases as the size of the body diminishes_." for instance, the tiny brain of a rat is a d part of the total volume of its body; the brain of an ox, on the contrary, is a th part. consequently we may say that the little rat has relatively a far larger brain than the huge ox. and the same thing holds true among men; those of small build have a proportionately larger brain than those of large build. a second fact which alters the absolute proportion between the volume of brain and the volume of body has reference to the "_functional capacity_" of the active parts. the muscles which are capable of the best activity and the greatest agility are the ones more abundantly stimulated through their nerves than those which are capable only of slow and sluggish action. the same may be said of the organs of sensation; the more highly the sensibility is developed, the larger are the corresponding nerves, and consequently the greater is the corresponding quantity of cerebral cells. accordingly the animal which is nimblest in its movements, and most capable of sensations has in proportion to this greater _functional activity_ a greater cerebral volume. in this same way we may explain the enormous difference in relative brain volume between the extremely active, sensitive and intelligent little beast which we call the rat, and the sluggish and stupid animal which we call the ox. consequently this _functional activity_ has a correspondingly greater volume of brain, without a correspondingly greater volume of the various highly sensitized organs. in such a case it may be stated as a general law that "_the relative volume_ _of the brain is in direct proportion to the intelligence (or, more broadly,_ _to the functional activity), while the absolute volume is in direct relation_ _to the total mass of the body_." man has a cerebral volume of , cubic centimetres, a volume equal to a fortieth part of the whole body. consequently he has a brain twice the actual size of that of the ox, while considered in its relation to bodily bulk, he has more brain than the smallest rat (man = / ; rat = / ). a volume so far exceeding the proportions found in animals, is beyond doubt directly related to _human_ _intelligence_. _relation between cerebral and intellectual development in man._--this ends our examination of the generic question of the relation between cerebral volume and intellect. granting these biological principles, and wishing to apply them to normal man, let us go back to our first question: "do persons of greater intelligence have a greater cerebral volume, and consequently a larger head?" there is an extensive literature upon this question, the tendency of which is to decide it affirmatively. parchappe has made a comparative study between writers of recognized ability and simple manual workers, and has found that the former have a development of the head notably in excess of the latter. broca took measurements, in various hospitals, of the heads of physicians and male nurses, and found a greater development of head in the case of the physicians. lebon made a study of cranial measurements in men of letters, tradesmen, the nobility and domestic servants, and found the maximum development among the men of letters and the minimum among the servants. the tradesmen, who at all events are performing a work of social utility, stand next to the men of letters; while the aristocrats show some advantage over the domestics. bajenoff took his measurements from famous persons on the one hand and from convicted assassins on the other, and found a greater head development among the former. enrico ferri has made similar researches among soldiers who have had a high-school education and those who are uneducated, and has found a more developed cranium among the educated soldiers. i also have made my own modest contribution to this important question, by seeking to determine the difference in cranial volume between the school-children who stand respectively at the head and foot of their class, and have found among children of the age of ten a mean cranial circumference of millimetres for the more intelligent and of only millimetres for the less intelligent. similar results were obtained by binet in his researches among the elementary schools of paris. he found among children of the age of twelve that the brightest had a mean cranial circumference of millimetres and those at the foot of their class a mean of only millimetres. the following table gives a parallel between these various cranial measurements: cranial measurements (in millimetres)[ ] binet children in the elementary schools of paris, from to years of age montessori children in the elementary schools of rome, from to years of age ------------+----------------------------+---------------------------- | binet's figures | montessori's figures +-----------+--------+-------+-----------+--------+------- measurements|pupils |pupils |differ-|pupils |pupils |differ- |chosen |chosen | ence |chosen |chosen | ence |for intel- |as | |for intel- |as | | ligence |backward| | ligence |backward| ------------+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+--------+------- maximum cir-| | | | | | cumference | | | | | | of cranium.| | | + | | | + length of | | | | | | cranium | | | + | | | + breadth of | | | | | | cranium | . | . | + . | | | + height of | | | | | | cranium | . | | - . | | | + minimum | | | | | | frontal | | | | | | diameter. | | | + | | | + height of | | | | | | forehead | | . | + . | | | + ------------+-----------+--------+-------+-----------+--------+------- by calculating the cranial capacities according to broca'a method, i obtained: { in the best pupils chosen cu. cm. cranial capacity { the worst pupils chosen cu. cm. from all these manifold researches above cited, we can reach no other conclusion than that individuals of greater intelligence have a larger quantity of brain; or else that individuals with a greater quantity of brain are more intelligent. there is a subtle distortion of this principle, which many sociological anthropologists have taken as their starting-point, especially in germany, in their attempt to establish a biological basis for the schopenhauerian theories of friedrich nietzsche. according to these, the persons who have acquired high social positions are biologically superior (possessing a greater cerebral mass), and the same may be said of conquering races as compared with the conquered. differences in caste are to be explained in the same way, and on this ground nature sanctions the social inferiority of woman. this is a question of the greatest importance, which merits a vast amount of discussion. _what sort of man is the most intelligent?_--straightway, a first serious objection suggests itself: what sort of persons are the most intelligent? are they really those who have attained the higher academic degrees and the most eminent social positions? consequently, is the prime minister more intelligent than the assistant secretary of state, and the latter more intelligent than the head of a department, and he again than the door-keeper? are literary productions and the acquisition of laurels reliable tests of intelligence? is this man a doctor because he is more intelligent, and that man a hospital attendant because he is less intelligent? it is evident that there exist in the social world certain privileges of caste, which may raise to the pinnacle of literary glory or to a clamorous notoriety certain persons who owe their rise to favoritism and trickery; or at least, so-called "literary fame" must be dependent upon the possibility of getting writings published, which another man perhaps would have had no way of bringing before the public so as to make them known and appreciated; just as, on the other hand, there are men of genius who are destined to feel their inborn intelligence suffocating under the cruel tyranny of existing economic conditions, which punish pauperism with obscurity and hold protection and favours at a distance. a thousand various conditions of our social environment hinder powerful innate activities from finding expression and attaining elevated social positions. now, when we start to measure these different categories of persons, shall we measure the more or the less fortunate individuals, those more or those less favoured by economic conditions of birth and environment, or shall we measure those persons who are actually the more and the less intelligent? and even in school can we be sure that the child whom we judge the most intelligent is actually so? studies in experimental psychology made in quite recent times of men whose works justify their being placed in the ranks of geniuses, have shown that these men of genius were never, in their school-days, either at the head of their class, or winners of any competitions. consequently, we have not yet learned the means of _judging intelligence_. if we stop to think of the way in which the intelligence of pupils was judged up to only a few years ago, according to pedagogic methods that were a remnant of the pietistic schools, this will help us to form some idea. the more intelligent ones were those best able to recite dogmatic truths from memory. and even to-day we have not advanced very far above that level. as a general rule that pupil is considered the most intelligent who best succeeds in echoing his teacher and in modeling his own personality as closely as possible upon that of his preceptor. this fact is so well known that it has come to be utilised as one of the clever tricks for obtaining higher marks even in university examinations, and for winning competitions; it is known that the prize is reserved for the student who can repeat most faithfully and proclaim most eloquently the master's own ideas. here is precisely one of the most fundamental problems offered by scientific pedagogy: how to diagnose the human intelligence, and distinguish the person who is intelligent from the person who is not. a difficult task, or rather a difficult problem. _the influence of economic conditions upon the development of_ _the brain._--certain factors, due to environment, exert an influence upon the development of the cerebral volume; this fact opens up another whole series of interesting questions. among the factors due to environment, the leading place is held by _nutrition_, dependent upon economic conditions. niceforo contends that among the various social classes, those who can obtain the best nourishment have the greatest development of brain, and consequently of head. he offers in evidence the figures summarised in the following table: circumference of the heads of -------------------+---------+---------------+--------- | | sons of small | boys of the age of | rich | tradesmen and | poor | | clerks | -------------------+---------+---------------+--------- years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . years | . | . | . -------------------+---------+---------------+--------- in short, there is a gradation of cranial volume corresponding to the economic status in society. this is a condition easy to understand: we simply find repeated in this particular the same thing that we have already seen happen to the body as a whole; the organism in its entirety and consequently each separate part of it--if it is to develop in accordance with its special biological potentiality and so attain the limits of finality set for it--must receive nourishment. it is only natural that children who, during their period of growth, are deprived of sufficient and suitable nutrition should remain inferior in development to those who had the advantage of an abundance of the proper kind of food. the influence of the economic factor is indisputable. consequently, reverting once more to the studies above cited, may we not conclude that the man of letters, the physician, the person of distinction have a greater development of head than the manual labourer, the hospital attendant, the illiterate, simply because it was their good fortune to obtain better nutriment, through belonging to the wealthy social classes? _the influence of exercise upon cerebral development._--the second interesting question is in reference to the influence which _exercise_ may have upon the development of the brain. as early as broca investigated this question in a classic work: _de l'influence_ _de l'éducation sur le volume et la forme de la tête_ ("the influence of education on the volume and form of the head"), in which he arrived at the following conclusion: that a suitable exercise (intellectual culture, education, hygiene) does have an influence on the development of the brain, in the same way as with any other organ, as, for example, the striped muscles, which gain in volume and strength and beauty of form through gymnastic exercise. "consequently," exclaims broca enthusiastically, "education not only has the power of rendering mankind _better_; it has also the marvellous power of rendering man superior to himself, of enlarging his brain and perfecting his form!" _"popular education means the betterment of the race."_ accordingly we might say, relying on the above-mentioned studies, that the man of letters, the physician, the person of distinction have a more highly developed head than the manual workman, the hospital attendant and the illiterate, because they exercised their brain to a greater extent, and not because they were more intelligent. this, however, is a question which differs profoundly from that which we were previously considering, nutrition, because in this case exercise, in addition to developing the organ, gives its own actual and personal contribution to the intelligence. therefore, we are able to be creators of intelligence and of brain tissue, which in turn becomes the creative force of our civilisation. a system of instruction which, in place of over-straining the brain, should aid it to develop and perfect itself, stimulating it to a sort of auto-creation, would truly be, as broca says, "capable of rendering man superior to himself." this is what is being sought by scientific pedagogy, which has already laid the foundation of "cerebral hygiene." we are still very far to-day from realising this highest human ambition! we do not yet know the basic laws of the economy of forces that would lead to a stimulation of the human activities to the point of creation; on the contrary, we are still at a primitive period, in which many of the environing conditions interfere, to the point of preventing the human germ to attain its natural biological finality. in short, we know how to obtain artificially an arrest of development; but we have not yet learned the art of aiding and enriching nature! _the influence of the biological factor upon cerebral development._--what conclusion ought we to reach from what has been said up to this point? upon what does the cerebral volume depend, in all its individual variations, resting on the common biological bases of race, normality and sex? is individual variation due solely to causes of environment, such as nutrition and exercise? and does it follow that it is not dependent upon _biological potentialities_ more or less pronounced in separate individuals--in short, upon different degrees of intelligence? in the presence of such a multiplicity of questions we must proceed, not to a selection but to a sum. every biological phenomenon is the result of a number of factors. the development of the brain depends in precisely the same way as the development of the whole body or of a single muscle, upon the combined influence of biological factors determining the _individual variability_, and of factors of environment, principal among which are nutrition and exercise. a suitable diet aids growth, and so also does a rational exercise; but underlying all the rest, as a _potential_ cause, is the biological factor which mysteriously assigns a certain _predestination_ to each individual. the environment may combat, alter, and impede what nature "had written upon the fertilised ovum;" but we cannot forget that this _scheme_, pre-established by the natural order of life, is the principal factor among them all, the one which determines the "_character of the individual_." now, on the basis of this influence of the biological factor upon the cerebral development, we may affirm that: to greater intelligence there corresponds a brain more developed in volume. what gives us proof of this is the brain of the exceptional man--of men of genius, who frequently have heads of extraordinary volume. persons of high celebrity, and not those, for example, who have become known through some recent discovery in the field of positive science--since a piece of good fortune may coincide with a normal cranial volume--but the true creative geniuses who have left the deep imprint of themselves upon their immortal works, have generally had a cerebral volume that was truly gigantic: the poetic brain of the great schiller weighed , grams, that of cuvier, the naturalist, , grams, that of the great statesman, cromwell, , grams, and lastly, that of byron, , grams. the brain of the normal man weighs about , grams. consequently, these are extraordinary volumetric figures that could not be acquired, either by much eating, or by being educated according to the scientific means of the most advanced pedagogy; they are due to the extraordinary biological potentiality of the man of genius. in these extraordinary heads the exceptional volume is combined with a characteristic form: they always have a more than normal development of the forehead. even in the course of biological evolution, as we have already seen, in the higher species a greater cerebral volume has a correspondingly broader and more erect forehead. if we examine portraits of men of genius, what strikes us chiefly in them is the high and spacious brow, as though men of genius, in comparison with the rest of us, were representatives of a superior race. but if the portrait shows the face taken in profile, it will be easily observed that the _direction_ of the forehead is not vertical, but even slightly recessive; that is, it preserves the characteristic male form, with the vault slightly inclined backward and the orbital arches slightly pronounced. _the pretended cerebral inferiority of woman._--one final argument, which is of interest to us, is the great question of the relation between cerebral volume and intelligence in woman. because, as you know, there is a very widespread belief of long standing that is confirmed in the name of science: that woman is biologically, in other words totally, inferior, that the volume of her brain is condemned by nature to an inferiority against which nothing can prevail. just as our perfected pedagogy, excellent alimentation and improved hygienic conditions could never endow a normal man with the brain of a genius, in the same way, so it is said, it is impossible ever to augment the size of the brain of woman, who is necessarily condemned to resign herself to remain in that state of social inferiority to which she is now reduced and from which she would in vain attempt to emancipate herself. names as famous as that of lombroso[ ] which are associated with the progress of positive science, lend the weight of their authority to this form of condemnation! and it is not easy to do away with this sort of prejudice, which has slowly been disseminated among the people under the guise of a scientific theory. but to-day there are scientists who have been impelled to make certain extremely minute, impartial and objective studies, without any preconception on the subject--such men as messedaglia, dubois, lapique, zanolli, and manouvrier--who, by calculating the cerebral mass, at one time in comparison with the whole body, at another with the surface of the body, and still again with the various active or skeletal parts of the organism--have arrived at an opposite conclusion: namely, that they can demonstrate a greater development of brain in woman. among these scientists it gives me pleasure to name before all others manouvrier--one of the most gifted anthropologists of our day--who has devoted twenty years to an exceedingly minute study of this problem. here in brief outline are his method of procedure and his conclusions. that the cerebral volume should be considered in its relation to the stature is a familiar principle; but a comparison between man and woman based solely upon such a proportion, continues to maintain the cerebral inferiority of woman. have we, however, the right to compare a volumetric measure (the cerebral mass) with a linear measure (the stature)? such a comparison is a mathematical error, as we have already technically proved. accordingly we find that manouvrier compares the brain with the mass of the whole body, its entire bulk; and he analyzes this entire bulk, considering separately its active parts, without troubling himself about their functional potentiality. he deduces from them certain figures and proportions; more than that, he forms a sort of index, which might be called the "index of sexual mass," between woman (minor mass) and man, reduced to a scale of --which may be summed up in an equation: man: = woman:the following percentual analyses: stature and weight of body . weight of brain . weight of skeleton (femur) . co exhaled in twenty-four hours . vital capacity (at age of eighteen) . strength of hands . strength of vertical traction . hence it is evident, that, in comparison with her actual organic mass, woman differs from man far more than is indicated by the differences in stature and in bodily weight. instead of taking all these various separate mean measurements, let us take one single comprehensive mean resulting from them: woman:man = : ; there we have the proportion. now, manouvrier proceeds to reduce all the separate measurements of man from to , and calculates how much brain man would lose if he were reduced to a mass having feminine limits; he finds that the loss would be grams. woman on the contrary has only grams of brain less than man. consequently the cerebral volume of woman is superior to that of man! this is an anthropological superiority which is further revealed in the more perfected form of the cranium, insomuch as woman has an absolutely erect forehead and has no remaining traces of the supraorbital arches (characteristics of superiority in the species). thus, we have a contradiction between existing anthropological and social conditions: woman, whom anthropology regards as a being having the cranium of an almost superior race, continues to be relegated to an unquestioned social inferiority, from which it is not easy to raise her. _who is socially superior?_--but here again we may ask, as we did regarding the question of intelligence: what constitutes social superiority? and in our social environment who is superior and who is inferior? [illustration: fig. .--leptoprosopic face.] [illustration: fig. .--chameprosopic face.] [illustration: fig. .--lina cavalieri.] [illustration: fig. .--maria mancini.] social superiority, like moral superiority, is the product of evolution. in primitive times when men, in order to live, were limited like animals to gathering the spontaneous fruit of the earth, according to the poetry of the biblical legend, and according to what sociology repeats to-day, the superior man was the one of largest stature, the giant. people paid him homage because he was the most imposing, without troubling themselves to ask whether, or not, he might be insane. in this way saul was the first king. when the time came that men were no longer content to live on the spontaneous fruit of the earth, but were forced to till the soil, then a new victory was inaugurated, the victory of the more active and intelligent man. david killed goliath. this great bible story marks the moment when the superiority of man came to be considered under a more advanced and spiritual aspect. when the men who cultivated the earth began to feel the need of other neighbouring lands and became conquerors, then the soldier was evolved, until in the middle ages there resulted such a triumph of militarism that the nobles alone were conquerors in war; and the persons who to-day would be called superior, the men of intellect, the poets, were considered as feeble folk, despicable and effeminate. in our own times, now that the great conquests of the earth have been made and the victorious people consequently brought into harmony, the moment has come for conquering the environment itself, in order to wring from it new bread and new wealth. and this is the proud work of human intelligence which creates by aiding all the forces of nature and by triumphing over its environment; thus to-day it is the man of intelligence who is superior. but it seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanity; an epoch in which an assured peace will promote the brotherhood of man, while morality and love will take their place as the highest form of human superiority. in such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. perhaps in this way the reign of woman is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects man always has yielded woman the palm. face and visage _the limits of the face._--the face is that part of the head which remains when the cranial cavity is not considered. to attempt to separate accurately, in the skeleton, the facial from the cerebral portion would involve a lengthy anatomical description; for our purpose it is enough to grasp the general idea that the face is the portion _situated beneath_ the forehead, bounded in front by the curves of the eyebrows, and in profile by a line passing in projection through the auricular foramen and the external orbital apophysis (fig. , page ). it is customary during life to consider the entire anterior portion of the head as constituting one single whole, bounded above by the line formed by the roots of the hair, and below by the chin. this portion includes actually not only the face but a _portion of the_ _cerebral cranium as well_, namely, the forehead; it bears the name of the visage and is considered under this aspect only during life. _human characteristics of the face._--one characteristic of the human cranium, as we have already seen (fig. ), as compared with animals, is the decrease in size of the face, and especially of the jaw-bones in inverse proportion to the increase of the cranial volume. "man," says cuvier, "is of all living animals the one that has the largest cranium and the smallest face; and animals are stupider and more ferocious as they depart further from the human proportions." in man, the cranium, assuming that graceful development which is characteristic of this superior species, surmounts the face, which recedes below the extreme frontal limit of the brain. the different races of mankind, however, do not all of them attain so perfect a form; in some of them the face protrudes somewhat in advance of the extreme frontal limit, and in such cases we say that it is prognathous. thus the relations in the reciprocal development between cranium and face are different in animals and in man; as they also are in the various human races. cuvier gives some idea of these proportions by comparing the european man with animals, by means of the following formulas which he has obtained by calculating approximately the square surface of a middle section of the head: _cranium:face_ = european man : (cranium four times the size of the face) orang-utan and chimpanzee : lower monkeys : carnivora : ruminants : hippopotamus : horse : (the reverse of man) whale : [illustration: fig. .--portrait of the _fornarina_ (raphael sanzio) rome: barbarini gallery.] [illustration: fig. .--triangular face.] [illustration: fig. .--ellipsoidal face.] [illustration: fig. .--long ovoid face.] but no general law, no systematic connection can be deduced from such relative proportions. they serve only to demonstrate a characteristic. upon this characteristic depends preeminently the _beauty_ of the human visage. if we are considering the _visage_ from its æsthetic aspect and wish to compare it with the muzzle of animals, we may say that in regard to its proportions it is as though the muzzle had been forced backward from its apex, while the cranium had swelled, through the increase of its vertical diameter. the muzzle is formed of the two jaws alone, on the upper of which the nose is located horizontally; there is neither forehead nor chin along the vertical line of the visage. as the jaws recede and the cranium augments, the forehead rises, the nose becomes vertical, and when the mandible has retreated beyond the frontal limit, the wide yawning mouth has been reduced in size, while a new formation has appeared below it--the chin. by this, i am trying merely to draw a comparison which i trust will be of service by suggesting a didactic method of illustrating the reduction of an animal's muzzle to human proportions. whatever forms a part of the _visage_ bears the morphological stamp of humanity: the forehead, the erect nose and the entire region of the mandible, which contains the principal beauty of the human face. the narrow opening of the lips, mobile because so richly endowed with the muscles that unite in forming it, is quite truly the charming and gracious doorway of the organs of speech, which by shaping the internal thought into words are able to give it utterance; while the winning _smile_ allures, captivates and consoles, thereby accomplishing an eminently _social_ function; and sociability is inseparable from humanity. the animal mouth, on the contrary, is the organ for seizing food, the organ of mastication, and, in felines, a weapon of offence and a means of destruction. tarde says: "the mandibles seem to shape themselves in accordance to the degree of intelligence; they become more finely modeled in proportion as the two social functions of speaking and smiling acquire a greater importance than the two individual functions of biting and masticating." and mantegazza says: "cruelty has localised its imprint around the mouth, perhaps because killing and eating are two successive moments of the same event." the normal visage the visage is that part of the body which is preeminently human; being richly endowed with muscles, it represents the "mirror of the soul," through the expressions that it assumes according to the successive sentiments, passions and transitions of thought. the visage is a true mine of individual characteristics, by which different persons may be most easily and clearly distinguished from one another; while at the same time it bears the stamp of the most general characteristics of race, such as the form, the expression, the tone of complexion, etc., in consequence of which the face has hitherto held the first place in the classifications of the human races. even the peoples of ancient times, such as the egyptians, made a physiognomical study of individual characteristics, founding a sort of empirical science that sought to read from the physiognomy the sentiments of the soul, the tendencies of character and the destiny of man. the visage also contains the greatest degree of attraction and charm, constituting that physical and spiritual beauty by which one person arouses in others feelings of sympathy and love. oriental women cover their faces with thick veils through modesty, because the face reveals the entire feminine individuality, while the rest of the body reveals only the female of the human species, a quality common to all women. the visage includes many important parts, which, by developing differently alter the physiognomy; the forehead, index of cerebral development, surmounts the face like a crown, revealing each individual's capacity for thought; furthermore, the visage contains all the organs of specific sense: sight, hearing, smell and taste, and hence all the "gateways of intelligence." the organs of mastication, whose skeleton consists of the maxillaries and the zygomata which reinforce and anchor the upper maxillary, are the parts that constitute by far the greater portion of the facial mass. in fact, their limits (breadth between the two zygomata; breadth between the external angles of the mandible, chin) are the determining factors of the contour and general form of the face, which is completed by the soft tissues. _forms of face._--the first distinction in facial forms is that which is made between _long_ or _leptoprosopic_ faces and _short_ or _chameprosopic_ faces. figs. and (facing page ) represent two faces having the same identical breadth between the zygomata or cheek-bones; the profound difference between them is due to their different height or length of visage. [illustration: fig. .--tetragonal face (parallelepipedoidal).] [illustration: fig. .--pentagonal leptoprosopic face.] [illustration: fig. .--pentagonal mesoprosopic face.] [illustration: fig. .--face of inferior type prominence of the maxillary bones (prognathism).] the precise relation between height and breadth constitutes the _index of visage_, which is analogous to the index that we have already observed for the cranium. normally there is a correspondence in form between the cranium and the face; dolichocephalics are also leptoprosopic; and brachycephalics are chameprosopics; normally, also, mesaticephaly is found in conjunction with mesoprosopy; but owing to the phenomena of hybridism or pathological causes (rickets), it may also happen that such correspondence is wanting; and that we have instead, for instance, a leptoprosopic face with a brachycephalic cranium or _vice versa_. accordingly, _long_ and _short_ faces are characteristics of race almost as important as the cephalic index. but leptoprosopy and chamaeprosopy are not in themselves sufficient to determine the _form_ of the face. on the contrary, in the case of living persons it is necessary also to take into consideration the _contour of the visage_, which contains characteristics relating to race, age and sex. the races which are held to be inferior have _facial contours_ that are more or less angular; those that are held to be superior have, on the contrary, a rotundity of contour; men have a more angular facial contour, in comparison with that of women; while children have a contour of face that is distinctly rotund. the angularities of the face are due to certain skeletal prominences, owing either to an excessive development of the zygomata (cheek-bones), or to a development of the maxillaries, which sometimes produce a salience of the lower corners of the mandible, and at others a prominence of the maxillary arch (prognathism). accordingly, the facial contours may be either rounded or angular, and that, too, independently of the facial type; because in either case the visage may be either _long_ or _short_. depending upon the rounded facial contours, the visage may be distinguished as ellipsoidal or oval; we may meet with faces that are _long_, _short_ or _medium ellipsoids_ (leptoprosopic, chameprosopic, mesoprosopic faces), even to a point where the contour is almost circular: the _orbicular face_. similarly, the oval faces may be classified as _long_, _short_ and _medium ovals_. the so-called typical _roman visage_ is mesoprosopic, with an ellipsoidal contour. the faces of cavalieri and of the _fornarina_ (figs. , ), celebrated for their beauty, are mesoprosopic ovals--and the exceptionally beautiful face of maria mancini is a mesoprosopic ellipse (fig. ). countenances with rounded and mesoprosopic contours belong to the mediterranean race, and the more closely they come to the _mean average_ of that type and to a _fusion_ of contours, the more _beautiful_ they are. faces with angular contours may be: _triangular_ (due to prominence of the cheek-bones, or zygomata, and of the chin); _tetragonal_, further subdivided into _quadrangular_ (chameprosopic) and parallelepipedoidal (leptoprosopic, due to prominence of zygomata and corners of mandible); and polygonal, which may be either _pentagonal_, formed by the protrusion of the zygomata, the angles of the mandible, and the chin; or hexagonal, formed by protrusion of the frontal nodules, the zygomata and the angles of the mandible. there may occur, in certain types of face, a very notable prevalence of one part over another, so much so as to produce sharply differentiated and characteristic physiognomies. thus, for example, a prevalence of forehead characterises the higher and superior type of the _man of genius_ (compare the portrait of bellini or of darwin). on the other hand, a prevalence either of the cheek-bones, or the lower jaw, or the angles of the mandible, together with an accompanying powerful development of the masticatory muscles, produce three different types, all of them chameprosopic, which represent, in respect to the face, inferior racial types, differing from one another, but which are frequently met with (at least to a noticeable extent) even among our own people, as types of the lower-class face, precisely because of the preponderance of the coarser features. combined with the general type of face, there are certain specified particulars of form of the separate parts; as, for example, in the case of the ellipsoid or ovoid types of mesoprosopic face, which seem to have attained the most harmonic _fusion_ of characteristics, and consequently the highest standard of beauty, the eyes are very large and almond-shaped (the _fornarina_, maria mancini, cavalieri); angular faces are characterised by a narrow, slanting eye, through all the degrees down to that of the mongolian; faces of low type have an eye characterised less by its form than by its smallness. the nose also shows differences; it is long and narrow (leptorrhine) in the more leptoprosopic faces, and short, broad and fleshy (platyrrhine, flat-nosed) in chameprosopic faces, especially in the _lower types_; in mesoprosopic faces it assumes its proper proportions, and occurs as the last detail or crowning touch of harmony in the perfect faces of the above-mentioned women. [illustration: fig. .--hexagonal face.] [illustration: fig. .--tetragonal face (square).] [illustration: fig. .--faces of inferior type (cheek bones prominent).] [illustration: fig. .] when one starts to make the first draft of an ornamental design, it often happens that the proportional relations are based upon certain _geometric figures_ that might be called the skeleton of the ornamental design that is being constructed from them. accordingly, when an artist wishes to judge of the harmony of proportions in a drawing, a painting, or a statue, he often reconstructs with his eye a geometrical design that no longer exists in the finished work, but that must have served in its construction. in short, there exist certain secret guiding lines and points which the eye of the observer must learn to recognise, to trace and to judge. this is the way that we should proceed in studying the facial profile. let us take or assume a person with the head _orientated_ (_i.e._, with the occipital point resting against a vertical wall, and the glance level). the line uniting the point of the tragus (the little triangular cartilage projecting from the auricular foramen), with the juncture between the nasal septum and the upper lip, ought, in the case of an æsthetically regular face, to be _horizontal_. we may call this line the line of _orientation_. if it proves not to be horizontal, but oblique, slanting either forward (long nose) or backward (short nose), this in itself denotes an irregularity which is plainly perceptible, even to the casual observer. but it is only in exceptional cases that this line is not horizontal; its horizontality constitutes the _norm_, in our hybrid races. naturally, it is horizontal only when the head is _orientated_ in the manner above stated. hence in normal cases its horizontality is an _index_ of the orientation of the head. the orientated head is perfectly upright; and the line in question marks its _level_. everyone knows that this position of the head is known as that of "attention" and constitutes the position which formerly only soldiers, but now school children as well, must assume as a sign of salutation and respect toward their superiors. it is also the anthropologically normal attitude (as we may see in statuary). and it is a known fact that it is a position exceedingly difficult to assume intentionally with absolute accuracy. in fact, it corresponds to an attitude which has to be called forth by some inward stimulus of emotion, and for this reason i would call it the "fundamental psychological line." the man who is conscious of his own dignity, or who hopes for his own redemption; the man who is free and independent involuntarily holds his head orientated. it is not the vain man, or the proud man, or the dreamer, or the bureaucratic official, whose head assumes this _involuntary_ _horizontal level_ that is characteristic of the most profound sentiments known to humanity; persons of such types hold their heads slightly raised and the line shows a slight backward slant. the man who is depressed and discouraged, the man who has never had occasion to feel the deep, intimate and sacred thrill of human _dignity_, has on the contrary, a more or less forward slant in the psychological line of orientation. look at fig. , which shows a very attractive group of _ciociari_ or neapolitan peasants. the man, or rather the beardless youth who is just beginning to feel himself a man, and therefore hopes for independence, holds his head proudly level; but the very pretty woman seated beside him holds her head gracefully inclined forward. for that matter, this is woman's characteristically _graceful_ attitude. she never naturally assumes, nor does the artist ever attribute to her the proud and lofty attitude of the level head. but this graceful pose is in reality nothing else than the pose of slavery. the woman who is beginning to struggle, the woman who begins to perceive the mysterious and potent voice of human conflict, and enters upon the infinite world of modern progress, raises up her head--and she is not for that reason any the less beautiful. because beauty is enhanced, rather than taken away, by this attitude which to-day has begun to be assumed by all humanity: by the laborer, since the socialistic propaganda, and by woman in her feministic aspirations for liberty. similarly in the school, if we wish to induce little children to hold their heads in the position of orientation, all that is necessary is to instil into them a sense of liberty, of gladness and of hope. whoever, upon entering a children's class-room, should see their heads assume the level pose as if from some internal stimulus of renewed life, could ask for no greater homage. this, and nothing else, is certainly what will form the great desire of the teacher of the future, who will rightly despise the trite and antiquated show of formal respect, but will seek to touch the souls of his pupils. [illustration: fig. .--a group of roman peasants.] to return to our lines, it follows that the level orientation is the true human position for the head; it ought never to be abased nor carried loftily, because man ought never to make himself either slave or master; it is the _normal line_, because it should be that of the accustomed attitudes; because man cannot normally be perpetually meditating, with his gaze upon the ground, as if forgetful of himself and of his social ties; nor can he forever gaze at the heavens, as though drawn upward by some supernal inspiration. the normal attitude is that of the thinking man, who cannot lean either in the one direction or the other, because he is so keenly conscious of being in close connection with all surrounding humanity; and he looks with horizontal gaze toward infinity, as though studying the path of common progress. now, if from the _metopic_ point of the forehead, we drop an imaginary perpendicular to the line of orientation, it ought to form, in projection, a tangent to the point of attachment of the nostrils. observe the two lines traced on the profile of pauline borghese. this line, if prolonged, passes slightly within the extreme angle of the labial aperture, and forms the limit of the chin (see the portrait of cavalieri, fig. ). in this case the profile is eurygnathous. when the line does not pass in the aforesaid manner, but the facial profile protrudes beyond it, we have a case of _prognathism_, which may be total, when the whole face projects; maxillary when the mandibles project, nasal when it is only the nose that projects, and mental (or _progeneism_) when it is only the chin that protrudes. figures , and represent forms of normal prognathism (related to race, figs. , ), and of pathological prognathism (fig. , form associated with microcephaly). these two microcephalic profiles call to mind the muzzle of an animal; there is no erect forehead, the orbital arch forming the upward continuance; the nose is very long and almost horizontal to the protruding jaw; the fleshy lips constitute in themselves the anterior apex of the visage; while the chin recedes far back beneath them. but leaving aside these exceptional profiles, which serve by their very exaggeration to fix our conception of _prognathism_, let us examine the series of profiles in fig. , which include some forms more or less peculiar, and others that are more or less customary, of prognathism; forms that serve to characterise the physiognomy. [illustration: fig. .--( ) orthognathous face; ( ) prognathism limited to the nasal region; ( ) prognathism limited to the subnasal region; ( ) total prognathism, including the three regions, supra-nasal, nasal and subnasal; ( ) exaggerated total prognathism, accompanied by mandibular prognathism; ( ) the same in a child; ( ) very marked prognathism, but due entirely to the prominence of the supra-nasal section, resulting in an apparent orthognathism (male of tall stature); ( ) opposite type to the preceding: pronounced prognathism not extending to the supra-nasal region (feminine type); ( ) misunderstood greek profile (incorrect) resulting in a notable prognathism; ( ) correct greek profile, i.e., conforming to that of greek statues, and incompatible with prognathism.[ ]] manouvrier, analysing the forms of prognathism from the point of view of physiognomy and cerebral development, notes that varieties and seem to him to correspond to a more or less serious cerebral development; variety , very frequent in france and more particularly, according to the author, among the jews, is not incompatible with a high cerebral inferiority. variety , more frequent in the feminine sex, is found in conjunction, sometimes with a weakly skeletal system, and frequently with rickets and cretinism; nevertheless, beethoven showed an approach to this profile. variety indicates on the contrary an extremely vigorous development of the skeleton, with the qualities and defects commonly associated with great physical strength; variety is regularly associated with tall stature; in fact, in this case the prognathism is determined by excessive development of the frontal bone-sockets. it is this development, prevalent in the male sex, that renders subnasal prognathism much rarer in man. as a matter of fact, the feminine type of prognathism shown in no. is not greater in degree than the male type, no. . variety shows us a form of _prognathism in art_, due to a false interpretation of the greek profile; it is commonly believed that in the greek profile the frontal line is a continuation of that along the bridge of the nose, and hence we frequently meet with commemorative medals, etc., bearing the monstrous profile shown in no. , with pronounced prognathism and receding forehead. the true _greek_ profile is shown in no. , but we can better analyse it by studying the profile of the discobolus (fig. ) and of antinoous (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .--head of pauline bonaparte borghese (rome, borghese museum).] [illustration: fig. .--profiles of microcephalics.] the lines of the facial angle have been traced upon the profile of the discobolus, but the profile of antinoous has been left untouched, in order that we may trace the same lines upon it in imagination, and thus judge of its perfect beauty (facing page ). let us first examine these two greek profiles, without stopping to analyse their separate characteristics, but considering them from the more general point of view of the facial profile in general. reverting, instead, for our analytical study to the schematic figure shown in fig. , we see that it also shows the line of the facial profile, that of orientation and the vertical, and that these lines form certain right-angled triangles; the right angle _mpa_ is not the facial angle, any more than the corresponding angle shown in the discobolus is the facial angle. it is said that greek art considered the right angle as the perfect facial angle; but that is not true. in order to obtain the facial angle it is necessary to draw a third line (_ms_) which extends from the metopic point to the point of attachment of the nasal septum to the upper lip; this is the line of the facial profile, and the angle _msa_ is the facial angle. it is never a right angle (see the discobolus), but it approaches very closely to a right angle. let us examine the triangle _mps_, bounded by the vertical, the line of profile and the line of orientation; it is right-angled at _p_. hence, the sum of its other two angles must be equal to one right angle; but the upper angle, corresponding to the nasal aperture, is of only °, and consequently the facial angle is °. the facial angle of the discobolus also, like that of antinoous, like that of the _normal human visage_, is °. [illustration: fig. .] examine further this fig. ; in it the line of the facial profile, extending from the metopion to the septo-labial point also passes through the point corresponding to the attachment of the base of the nose (nasion). the figure is schematic; but anyone who will trace it in imagination upon the profile of cavalieri, or on that of the seated woman in the group of neopolitan peasants, or on any of the classic profiles known in art as the roman profile, will find that the nasal line, connecting the supra- and subnasal points, coincides with the line drawn from the subnasal point to the metopion. but if we observe the greek profile of the discobolus, we shall find that the line of profile does not coincide with the base of the nose, but passes behind it. this is the real characteristic difference between the _roman_ and the _greek_ profile: in the greek profile, the root of the nose is attached further in front of the metopico-subnasal line, and this is due to the special form of the greek forehead, which, instead of being slightly flattened at the glabella, as in the equally beautiful roman forehead, is rounded to such a degree that the transverse section of the forehead follows a circular line. hence, it results that the metopic region of the forehead is more prominent and the nose straight, and hence also the line of the forehead is a perceptible continuation of that of the nose (compare the antinoous). this unique and essential difference between the greek and the roman profile has not hitherto been pointed out, so far as i am aware; it is indicated by just one of the facial lines, the one which forms an angle of ° with the line of orientation. i had an opportunity to observe these differences in my study of the women of latium, which i pursued side by side with a study of the statues in the museums of rome, under the guidance of distinguished art specialists; nevertheless, they had none of them ever defined by mathematical lines the sole difference between the two classic types. the habit of tracing these imaginary lines renders us far more keen in recognising any and every degree of prognathism, even the least perceptible, and any other imperfection of the profile, than the most complicated system of goniometry would make us. for instance, examine the profile of pauline borghese; it is certainly not prognathous, since the vertical line reveals a most impeccable orthognathism. but let us trace the nasal line: it meets the vertical line before reaching the metopic point; in order to meet it at this point, the nose would have had to be narrower from front to back; in that case the profile of pauline borghese would have been a perfect roman profile; but the imperial stigma of the napoleonic house deprived the beautiful princess of the privilege of perfect classic beauty. in my studies of the women of latium, in addition to the greek and roman forms of profile which are very frequent (the former distinguished by the morphological peculiarity of having no definite naso-frontal angle nor metopic flattening of the forehead) i found a third profile, less frequent yet quite characteristic, among the representatives of the mediterranean (eurafrican) race. it is worthy of note (figs. , ). first of all, the forehead has a slight transverse depression along its middle line, and the mandible is slightly elongated; but if we draw our imaginary vertical line from the extreme forward point of the brow, we find that none of the forms of prognathism is involved, and that the auriculo-subnasal line is horizontal. this is the type that has been described by sergi as egyptian; and the young woman, shown in profile, really does suggest a reincarnation of the proud beauty of the daughters of pharaoh; the somewhat fleshy lips and the form of the eyes, not almond-like, but very wide and horizontal, complete the characteristics of the type immortalised in egyptian art. in the normal profile two forms can be distinguished which are associated with the two general forms of leptoprosopic and chameprosopic face, and hence also with the dolichocephalic and brachycephalic forms of cranium. in the one case, the features are more elongated and seem to be more depressed laterally, with the result that the profile is more refined, the visage narrower, along the longitudinal line; in this case the profile is _proopic_ (as, for example, in the aforesaid egyptian profile and in the elongated ovoidal english face, fig. ); aristocratic faces of the finer type are proopic. on the other hand, broad faces are anteriorly flattened to such an extent that the flatness shows even in the profile: _platyopic_ _profile_. [illustration: fig. .--the discobolus by miron (rome, vatican museum).] [illustration: fig. .--head of statue known as the _capitoline antinoous_ (rome, capitoline museum).] [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] these general forms are associated with certain special forms of the separate organs. thus, for example, in proopic faces the palate is narrow, long and high; in platyopic faces, on the contrary, it is broad, low and flat; and the teeth corresponding to them may present a widely different appearance (long, narrow teeth; broad teeth). _low types and abnormal forms._--low types, as we have already noted, depend upon the development of the face in its least noble parts (those of mastication); prominence of the cheek-bones and maxillary angles, great development of the upper and lower jaw (prognathism). these conditions are frequently accompanied by a low, narrow, or receding forehead, indicating a scanty cerebral development. lombroso found a great prevalence of similar forms among criminals; but recent studies have disclosed the fact that such forms of facial development are in some way related to the environment in which the individual has developed, so much so that, on the basis of these morphological characteristics, we might almost succeed in delineating the physiognomies distinguishing the different _social castes_. in fact, while the aristocratic face is ellipsoidal and proopic, that of the peasant is characterised by a pronounced wideness between the cheek-bones, and that of the city labourer by a peculiar development in the height of the mandible. thus the peasant has a broad face, and the city workman a somewhat elongated face, with very pronounced maxillary angles. a real and important abnormality which indicates a deviation from every type of race or caste is _facial asymmetry_ or _plagioprosopy_, analogous to plagiocephaly, and frequently associated with it. it is necessary, however, in the case of the face, to distinguish instances of _functional asymmetry_, due to unequal innervation of the muscles in the two sides of the face; either from some cerebral cause, or from some local cause affecting the facial nerves. in such cases, the trophic state of the muscles and their contractibility being unequal, there is a resultant asymmetry, especially evident in the play of facial expression. this form of asymmetry must necessarily be limited to the soft tissues and be due to a pathological cause; consequently it should not be confounded with the asymmetry due to a different skeletal development of the two sides of the face, an abnormality analogous to plagiocephaly, which is met with among degenerates as a stigma of congenital malformation. we owe to brugia a most admirable method for demonstrating the high degrees of facial asymmetry which sometimes reach such an extreme point as to give the two halves the appearance of having formed parts of two different faces. this is precisely what brugia shows by the aid of photography, uniting each half with a reversed print of itself, making the two prints coincide along the median line. the result is that every asymmetric face gives two other faces formed respectively from one of the two inequal halves, and presenting profoundly different aspects. other abnormalities are revealed by the _facial profile_. they are due either to total or partial prognathism (already analysed), or to orthognathism, where the facial angle equals or exceeds a right angle; such a profile occurs in cases of _hydrocephaly_ or of _macrocephaly_ in general, usually resulting from infantile arrest of development. _the evolution of the face._--the human countenance, that is so marvellously beautiful in our superior hybrid races, passes, during its embryonal life, through many forms that are very far removed from such perfection. figures , , and represent the evolution of the face in animals and in man: and the complete evolution of a woman's face from the embryo during the first weeks of its formation to the attainment of old age. the embryonal face, as may be seen even better in animals than in man, is surmounted by the brain divided and differentiated into its superimposed primitive vesicles; furthermore, it consists of one single, widespread cavity, at the sides of which may be discerned two diminutive vesicles or bulbs, which are offshoots of the brain and constitute the first rudiments of the eyes. in studying a more advanced stage of development, we may note in what constitutes the upper lip of this wide facial cavity, two _nasal ducts_ or furrows, which are the first indications of the nose. the principal differentiation which takes place in the face consists of the development from its two lateral walls on left and right, of two thin plates or laminæ that advance across the cavity itself, in its anterior portion, and proceed to unite in a median ridge, the _raphe palati_; this constitutes the formation of the palatine vault, which is destined permanently to divide the single cavity into two cavities--an upper or nasal, and a lower or buccal cavity. if this process of formation is not completed, the result is a grave abnormality, the cleft palate, popularly known in italy as a "wolf's throat," and consisting in the fact that the nasal and buccal cavities to a greater or less extent open into each other; this abnormality, due to an arrest of embryonic development, is almost always accompanied by a hare-lip. simultaneously with the formation of the palatine vault, another and vertical septum is formed, which divides the upper cavity into two halves, right and left. this division, however, is limited to the anterior portion; the three cavities thus formed have no such division in the rear, but all three open into the gullet or oesophagus, which represents the only relic of the single original cavity. the maxillary bones are formed in a manner analogous to that of the nasal and palatal septa, through extroversions destined to become ossified. it is not until later that the _external nose_ is formed (middle of the second month of embryonal life). after this, the evolution of the embryo becomes evidently a _perfectionment_ and a _growth_, rather than a transformation. in the _new-born child_ the face is extremely small in comparison with the cerebral cranium. if we compare the head of an adult with that of an infant, and draw the well-known line of separation between the facial and the cerebral cranium, the difference in the reciprocal proportions between the two parts at once becomes apparent. the infant's face seems like a mere _appendix_ to its cranium; and the mandible is especially small; in fact, very young children remain much of the time with their mouth open and the under lip drawn back behind the upper. [illustration: fig. .--face of inferior type. prominence of angles of jaw (gonia).] [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. . fig. . _a_, eye; _v_, anterior brain; _m_, middle brain; _s_, frontal process; _h_, nasal septum; _o_, _u_, _h_, _d_, _r_, primitive embryonal formations, explained as being _branchial_ (_i.e._, gill) arches; _z_, tongue; _g_, auditory fissure. note the analogy between the different parts of the head in animals and in man; every species, however, has special embryonal characteristics.] consequently, the growth of the face obeys laws and rhythms differing from those of the cranium, in comparison to which the face is destined to assume very different proportions by the time that the adult age is reached. the face grows _much more_ than the cranium. in its characteristic infantile form, the face is quite round (short and broad), and, when the child is plump, it often happens that at birth the face is broader than it is long. seen in profile it is _orthognathous_, and this orthognathism endures throughout early infancy, because the profile still remains in retreat behind the plane of the protruding forehead; i.e., the facial angle exceeds a right angle, and the mandibular region is further back than the nasal (compare profile of infant). in the course of growth it may be said in a general way that the facial index diminishes; that is, the numerical proportion between width and height becomes lowered as the face lengthens; while the facial angle changes from somewhat more than a right angle to a right angle, and finally to an acute angle of °. in order to obtain an exact idea of the transformations of the face, children should have their pictures taken, full face and profile, on every birthday, as is already customary in england for the purposes of the _carnet maternel_, the "mother's note-book." in the illustrations facing this page we have portraits of the same person taken at successive ages (figs. , , , ), _i.e._, at the age of six months, one year and a half, seven, and lastly twelve years; it will be seen that the face has steadily lengthened. in this case the individual happens to be noticeably leptoprosopic; but observe the rotundity of the infantile face at the age of six months. an analogous observation may be made in the case of the girl represented in figs. and , at the age of ten months and thirteen years respectively. even in the case of abnormal children the same law holds good; an examination of the three pictures of an incurable idiot boy, taken at the ages of six, eleven, and sixteen years (figs. , , facing page ), shows that the face, from being originally rotund has become elongated.[ ] we owe to binet the most exact and complete studies that exist in anthropologic literature on the subject of the growth of the face. he has made a great number of facial measurements, both of children and young persons of the male sex, from four to eighteen years of age, taking the measurements at intervals of two years. the measurements chosen by binet are all the possible distances that will serve to give the various widths of the face, the distance of the ear from the various points of the profile, and the heights of the various segments; namely (for an exact understanding of these measurements, see section on _technique_), auriculo-mental diameter, auriculo-nasal diameter, auriculo-subnasal diameter, auriculo-ophryac diameter, auriculo-metopic diameter, frontal diameter, biauricular diameter, bizygomatic diameter, length of nose, length of chin, subnase-mental distance, height of forehead.[ ] binet's conclusions are as follows: the growth of the whole head may be divided into three rhythms: that of the cerebral cranium, that of the face apart from the nose, and that of the nose. if the total development of the cerebral cranium from the fourth to the eighteenth year shows a proportion of per cent., the facial development shows an increase of per cent. and that of the nose per cent. consequently the face increases twice as much as the cranium, and the nose three times as much. in the growth of the face, however, the transverse dimensions must be distinguished from the longitudinal dimensions, because the _facial index_ varies greatly according to the age. the width of the face follows very nearly the same rhythm as the cranium, never exceeding the latter's proportional increase; the length of the face, on the contrary, follows the special rhythm of the growth of the face, which lengthens far more than it broadens. if we consider the distances of the various points in the profile from the auricular foramen, we find that these distances show a greater increase in proportion as the points in question are further from the forehead and nearer to the chin. the central section (the nose) and the mandible are the portions which contribute most largely to the increase in length of the face. while in the case of the cranium there is a _very slight_, and often imperceptible puberal acceleration of growth, the puberal transformations of the head are, on the contrary, most notable in respect to the face. the entire region of the upper and lower jaws, but more especially the lower, undergoes a _maximum increase during the period_ _of puberty_. in regard to the nose, its rapid growth begins at the time immediately preceding puberty; that is, it undergoes a _prepuberal_ _maximum increase_. when a boy is about to complete his sexual development, the nose begins to gain in size. the puberal growth of the mandible has long been a familiar fact, and bears a relation to the development of the sexual glands. a special characteristic noted by binet and by myself is that the height of the lower jaw in boys who have reached the prepuberal stage is greater in the boys who are least intelligent; just as in the case of these boys the nose is less leptorrhine and the face less broad. this means that at the period of puberty the most intelligent boys not only have a greater development of head, but also certain distinctive facial characteristics. they should have, for instance, a more ample forehead, a broader face, especially in the bizygomatic diameter (between the cheek-bones), and a leptorrhine nose (infantile leptorrhine type). the backward boys, on the contrary, have a longer face, accompanied by a higher mandible and a flat or "snub" nose. here are the comparative figures: [illustration: fig. .--a child at six months.] [illustration: fig. .--the same child at a year and a half.] [illustration: fig. .--a seven-year-old boy.] [illustration: fig. .--the same boy at the age of twelve.] facial measurements binet children from the elementary schools of paris from to years of age montessori children from the elementary schools of rome from to years of age --------------+--------------------------+-------------------------- | binet's figures | montessori's figures +---------+--------+-------+---------+--------+------- measurements |brightest|backward|differ-|brightest|backward|differ- | pupils | pupils | ence | pupils | pupils | ence --------------+---------+--------+-------+---------+--------+------- minimum | | | | | | frontal | | | | | | diameter | | | | | | height of | | | | | | forehead | | . | . | | | mento-subnasal| | | | | | distance | | . | . | | | bizygomatic | | | | | | diameter | . | . | . | | | bigoniac | | | | | | diameter | . | . | . | | | --------------+---------+--------+-------+---------+--------+------- comparative facial measurements obtained from the brightest and the most backward pupils in the schools of rome (montessori) ------------------------+-----------+----------+----------- measurements and indices| brightest | backward | difference in millimetres | pupils | pupils | ------------------------+-----------+----------+----------- height of mandible | mm. | mm. | mm. length of nose | mm. | mm. | mm. width of nose | mm. | mm. | mm. nasal index | mm. | mm. | mm. ------------------------+-----------+----------+----------- these results would seem to prove that there are high and low _infantile_ types of face, analogous, let us say, to types of social caste; and in school life they correspond to the castes of the _intelligent_ and the _backward_ pupils. intelligent children tend to preserve the infantile form of face more intact (broad and short) or rather, if we extend our researches to pupils who have reached the prepuberal age, we may conclude that intelligent pupils develop according to the normal laws--the growth is confined to the nose; backward children invert the order of growth--the lower jaw is already enlarged before the nose has even begun the acceleration of puberal growth. this difference remains permanent in the adult, and we have in consequence _low_ types of face characterised by a flat nose and heavy lower jaw. =facial expression.=--the study of the human face cannot be limited to a consideration of the form alone; because what gives character to it is the _expression_. internal thought, sensory impressions and all the various emotions produce responsive movements of the facial muscles, whose contractions determine those _visible phenomena_ corresponding to the inner state of mind. the teacher ought to understand facial expression, just as a physician must train himself to recognise the _facies_ corresponding to various diseases and states of suffering. the study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology, because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic. the facial muscles may be divided into two zones: one of which comprises the frontal and ocular region, and the other the buccal region; corresponding to which are the two upper and lower branches of the frontal nerve. accordingly we may speak of a frontal or higher zone of expression and of an oral or lower zone. the expressions of pure thought (attention, reflection) group themselves around the forehead; those of emotion, on the contrary, call forth a combined action of both zones, and frequently irradiate over the entire body. but as a general rule the man of higher intelligence has a greater intensity of frontal expression, and the man of low intelligence (uneducated men, peasants, and to a much greater degree, imbeciles, idiots, etc.) have a predominance of oral expression. in children the frontal zone has slight mobility, and the oral zone has a preponderance of expression; infantile expression, however, is diffuse and exaggerated and is characterised by _grimaces_. undoubtedly there are certain restraining powers, which develop in the course of time and serve to limit and definitely determine the facial expressions. [illustration: fig. .--profile of a child.] [illustration: fig.-- . a child of ten months.] [illustration: fig. .--the same, years old.] as for the mechanics of expression, they consist of the facial nerve, and the surface muscles stimulated by it, which are: the _frontal muscle_, which covers the entire forehead and merges above into the epicranial aponeurosis; the _superciliary_ _muscle_ extending transversely along the superciliary arch and concealed by the _orbicular muscle of the eyelids_ (_m. orbicularis palpebrarum_), which surrounds the eye-socket like a ring; the _pyramidal_ muscle (_m. pyramidalis nasi_), which is connected with the point of origin of the frontal muscle at the inner angle of the eyebrow, and separates below into four symmetrical fasciæ, two of which are attached to the _ala_ or wing of the nose, and the other two to the upper lip. [illustration: fig. .--the muscles of the head and face.] a group of very delicate muscles controlling the sensitive movements of the wings and septum of the nose (_m. compressor narium_, _m. depressor aloe nasi_, _m._ _levator aloe nasi_, _anterior_ and _posterior_, and _m. depressor septi_) have their points of attachment around the nasal _aloe_ (just above the upper incisor and canine teeth). there is a great wealth of muscles surrounding the mouth; no animal, not even the anthropoid ape, is equipped with so many muscles; it is due to them that the human mouth is able to assume such a great variety of positions. the greater number of these muscles are arranged like radii around the mouth; and there is one which, unlike the rest, surrounds the oral aperture like a ring. the radiating muscles, descending from the sides of the nose down along the chin are: the levator muscle of the upper lip (_m. levator labii superioris_, starting from the bony margin below the infraorbital foramen); the levator muscle of the angle of the mouth (_m. levator anguli oris_, starting from the fossa of the upper maxilla); the large and small zygomatic muscles (starting from the anterior surface of the malar bones); the risorial muscle (_m. risorius_), the smallest of all the facial muscles, which has its origin in the soft surface tissues (aponeurosis parotido-masseterica); the depressor muscle of the mouth angle (_m. depressor anguli_ _oris_, or _m. triangularis_) originating on the lower margin of the maxilla; the depressor muscle of the lower lip or quadratus muscle of the chin (_m. quadratus labii_ _inferioris_ or _quadratus menti_, also originating on the lower maxilla); the levator muscle of the chin (_m. levator menti_) between the two _musculi quadrati_, also has its origin in the lower maxilla; the buccinator muscle, hidden beneath the preceding, has its origin behind the molar teeth in the alveolar process of the two maxillæ, and extends horizontally, terminating in the two lips, in such a manner that its two fasciæ; partly cross, so that the upper fasciæ of the muscle starting from the mandible extend to the upper lip, and the lower fasciæ of the muscle starting from the maxilla extend to the lower lip. consequently the contraction of this muscle stretches the angles of the mouth in a horizontal direction only; it is the most voluntary of all the muscles, and plays a greater part than the others in forced laughter; in consequence it robs this movement of its characteristic charm. lastly we must note the _orbicular_ muscle of the lips (_m. orbicularis oris_ or _sphincter oris_), which constitutes the fleshy part of the lips and surrounds the oral aperture like a ring. the contraction of these muscles produces antagonistic motorial action; for instance, the orbicular muscle tends to close the mouth into a circular orifice; the various muscles which radiate from the corners of the mouth (especially the buccinator) tend, on the contrary, to enlarge and stretch it in a transverse direction; certain muscles tend to raise the mouth, and others to lower it. accordingly, there results a _play_ between the muscles of expression and upon their continual antagonism depend the changing expressions of the human countenance. here are a few of the principal facial expressions, described in a masterly manner, and for the first time, by charles darwin:[ ] _expression of sorrow._--the muscles that are principally brought into play are the superciliary, the frontal and the triangular or depressor muscles of the lips; the eyebrows are furrowed, being drawn upward by the action of the frontal muscle; this, however, cannot contract completely because drawn downward laterally by the superciliary muscles, and hence the forehead wrinkles only at its middle point and together with the slanting eyebrows assumes a shape that suggests three sides of a quadrilateral. [illustration: fig. .--a six-year-old boy.] [illustration: fig. .--the same, eleven years old.] [illustration: fig. .--the same, sixteen years old.] simultaneously there is a drooping of the corners of the mouth, which, when exaggerated in infancy, forms the characteristic and charming _grimace_ of a child who is on the point of crying. accordingly, sorrow draws the frontal zone upward, and the labial zone downward; in other words, it _lengthens_ the face. _expression of pleasure._--on the contrary, _laughter_ and _happiness_ shorten the face; all the muscles are brought into play that stretch the corners of the mouth, as well as those which raise the upper lip, in consequence of which the upper teeth are disclosed. the frontal zone remains in repose; excepting that there is a contraction of the orbicular muscle of the eyelids, especially in its lower portion; the lower lid is drawn upward and the skin is puckered at the external angle of the eye; the lachrymal gland is compressed, the circulation of blood stimulated, as always results from every expression of joy, the secretion of the gland is increased, and consequently a few tears are readily shed. the eye, grown smaller and half hidden, shines brilliantly, because moistened from without and irrigated from within by an abundant flow of blood. _expression of various emotions_: _anger._--during _anger_ the superciliary muscles prevail in exceedingly energetic action, drawing the forehead strongly downward, wrinkling it vertically, and also producing transverse wrinkles on the nose. in the labial zone the orbicular muscle is intensely active, and the lips contract. when anger endures for a long time, the condition above described diminishes in intensity, leaving only a slight frown, while the closed lips protrude in tubular form. an expression usually described by the terms, to _sulk_ or _pout_. this is the way in which little children express their displeasure; and the pouting lips sometimes rise clear to the tip of the little nose, in sign of proud defiance. this form of grimace is common to the children of every race: it has been observed in the children of hottentots and chinese, as a sign of prolonged anger and ill humor. hence the contraction of the mouth is a characteristic sign of anger; and when the emotion is very strong, even the masticatory muscles may enter into play, causing a _grinding of the teeth_. _surprise._--in _surprise_, on the contrary, the entire labial zone is in repose, and there is complete and free contraction of one muscle alone, the frontal; consequently it produces longitudinal lines across the entire forehead, uplifting the eyebrows, which passively follow the elevation produced by the frontal muscle, forming two arches around which the wrinkles of the forehead form themselves in parallel lines. the eyes in consequence are stretched to their widest. the oral zone is so far relaxed that the lower jaw droops in obedience to gravity and the mouth gapes open: _bouche béanie_. sometimes a less intense degree of surprise fails to do away with the contraction of the orbicular muscle of the lips, which, without being actively contracted, but simply because relieved from the interference of antagonistic muscles, closes the mouth in a rounded or tubular aperture. this same facial expression, which is a very striking one, exists in all races. when children are still too young to contract the frontal muscle completely, they show surprise by a gaping mouth, and a puckering of the entire forehead, in place of the transverse furrows. _expression of thought._--in addition to the expressions of the emotions, the authorities describe those due to thought, and give special consideration to the expression of _external_ or sensory _attention_, and _internal attention_ (reflection, meditation). the young child is capable of intense sensorial attention, which is manifested especially in visual attention. i have been able to make many observations in the "children's houses," where children two or three years old take part in games that demand attention, comparison, and the exercise of reason, without tiring their minds or encountering any great difficulty. these children wrinkle their foreheads and hold their mouths slightly open. this is the expression also noted by darwin, and the one which notoriously produces those vertical lines in the middle of the forehead, known as the _lines of thought_. when these children are obliged to make an effort of thought or when they are for any reason troubled and anxious, slight contractions pass across their foreheads, like a continuous succession of broken shadows (darwin).[ ] it should be noted that in any case a contraction of the eyebrows during intellectual work denotes _effort_, a _difficulty_ to be overcome. pure thought, by itself alone, produces no such contractions. the contemplative man, absorbed in profound meditation, shows a face overspread with serenity, due to muscular repose; the gaze is fixed upon the void, and the head, as though no longer sustained by the relaxed muscles, is inclined forward. if his eyes retain steadfastly the same original direction, even after the body has dropped forward, they give the impression of being turned on high. such is the expression of the man sunk in profound thought, so long as his thought follows an uninterrupted course. but when a difficulty arises, see how he begins to knit his brow. it is the difficulty which has arisen, and not the course of his thoughts, that has produced this muscular reaction. the movement is similar to what occurs in the case of any difficulty to overcome, as, for instance, the threading of a needle. consequently the wrinkles of thought are the wrinkles of the _fatigue of thought_. the mystics, who are purely contemplative thinkers, and not solvers of difficulties, have a forehead without lines. similarly in art, the faces of the madonna or of the saints have an intense expression of thought in their gaze, but the serene countenance shows neither contractions nor lines. de sanctis[ ] has made some interesting observations regarding the facial expression of the mentally deficient. they have a singular difficulty in contracting the frontal muscle even at the age of eleven or twelve years; even when urged by example and command, they frequently do not succeed in contracting the forehead. labial expression, on the other hand, is much more developed, and frequently attention is indicated by a contraction of the orbicular muscle of the lips into a circle; and surprise is shown in the same way. in general, however, what characterises the face of the imbecile, the idiot, the epileptic, is its _immobility_: hypomimia or amimia. there are, however, frequent cases of cerebrophlegia (a progressive malady of the brain occurring during the early years of childhood), in which exaggerated contractions of the face occur as the result of the least mental effort. the french give the name of _grimaciers_ to children who show such symptoms; from pathological causes they exhibit a hypermimia that transforms their facial expressions into grimaces. furthermore, there are certain degenerate children in whom the muscular reactions do not correspond to the normal expression of their feelings; for example, they exhibit sorrow when they mean to show attention, etc. in such cases the play of the opposite and contradictory facial muscles has become perverted: _dismimia_. one of the most frequent occurrences among the abnormal is asymmetry of the facial expressions; the muscles contract more on one side of the face than on the other. this symptom, however, in a mild degree, is met with also in normal persons. from what has been said, it is evident that for the examination of the face we must depend, if not exclusively, at least far more upon anthroposcopy than upon anthropometry; and since the minute description required is too difficult and too lengthy a task, especially as regards the _facial expressions_ (which are so characteristic of the individual) it is necessary in pedagogic anthropology to resort to photography. the instantaneous photograph, in all progressive countries, is already within the reach of mothers. it ought also to form part of the equipment of our schools. the neck the neck is a part which is anatomically of much importance, but not of equal importance from the anthropological side. the skeleton of the neck is formed of the seven cervical vertebræ. notwithstanding that in all the higher vertebrates the neck is constituted of the same number of vertebræ, it can assume the most varied dimensions, all the way from the giraffe to the whale. similarly, at the different ages of man it is at one time barely indicated and almost wanting altogether, as in the new-born child, and again long and flexible, as in the lovely women of some of the higher races. godin has observed that the maximum increase of the neck takes place between the fourteenth and sixteenth year, _i.e._, at the epoch of puberty; but at the fourteenth year it undergoes such a rapid increase that it surpasses proportionally the puberal increase of the total stature. this is shown in the following table: proportion of length of neck to the stature reduced to age in years: - / - / - / - / - / proportions: consequently the proportion between neck and stature is a datum that tends strongly to remain a _fixed_ quantity. the result, however, is different if we study the proportion between the neck and the vertebral column as a whole. proportion of length of neck to the trunk reduced to age in years: - / - / - / - / - / proportions: accordingly it is about one-third of the trunk. the circumference of the neck is also taken, for it shows whether the neck is _slender_ or _thick_; and this often bears a relation to the degree of development of the thyroid gland. in my work upon the women of latium i have shown that the small, dark women have a longer and more flexible neck than those who are fair and of tall stature. therefore this is a racial difference, similar to the difference we have already noted for _types of stature_. the macrosceles have a long and slender neck, and the opposite is found in the case of the brachysceles; consequently, a very long neck is an indication of a weak constitution. footnotes: [ ] see the application to pathological surgery of this anatomo-physiological condition of the cranium, as given by tillaux, _anatomia topografica_. [ ] broca gives, not as mean averages, but as extreme limits, . for dolichocephalics (tasmanians) and for brachycephalics (natives of the sandwich islands). [ ] bonnifay, _on the development of the head from the point of view of cephalometrical_ _measurements taken after birth_. thesis, lyons, . [ ] montessori, _sui caratteri antropometrici in relazione alle gerarchie dei fanciulli nelle_ _scuole_, p. . ("anthropometric characteristics in relation to the grading of children in schools"). [ ] lombroso (who died while this book was in press) defended the principle of the innate inferiority of woman and regarded her, in comparison with man, as a case of infantile arrest of development. [ ] the above elucidation and illustrations of the face are taken from manouvrier, _cephalométrie anthropologique_. [ ] from thuliÉ, _le dressage des jeunes dégénérés_, page . [ ] binet, _le croissance du crâne et de la face chez les normaux entre et ans_. [ ] charles darwin, _the expression of emotions in man and animals_. [ ] charles darwin, _op. cit._ [ ] sante de sanctis, _la mimica del pensiero_ (the expression of thought). chapter iii the thorax we have already had occasion to point out, in connection with the _types of stature_, the importance of the thorax. the relation of the thoracic perimeter (circumference of the chest) to the total stature (see chapter on _technique_) was called by goldstein the _index of life_, in order to indicate that the organic resistance of any individual depends upon the proportional relation between the thorax and the whole body; whoever has a narrow chest is liable to pulmonary tuberculosis, and in his physiological entirety is a weakling (see chapter on _macroscelous and brachyscelous_ _types_). _anatomical parts._--anatomically the thorax is determined in height by the twelve dorsal or thoracic vertebræ, which are characterised by having a transverse apophysis, which articulates with the twelve pairs of ribs, forming the _thoracic cage_, or chest. the first seven pairs of ribs articulate in front, by means of cartilages, with the lateral margins of a flat bone, the sternum or breast-bone, which is formed of three pieces: the _manubrium_ uppermost, then the _corpus_, then, lowest of all, the _ensiform_ (sword-shaped) _process_. the manubrium and the corpus form, at their juncture, an angle more or less marked, according to the individual, and the lateral articulation of the second rib corresponds to this angle. in the new-born child the sternum is a cartilage with points of ossification arranged longitudinally like the beads of a rosary. the seventh vertebra articulates laterally at the point at which the ensiform process is attached to the corpus of the sternum. the next three ribs ( th, th and th) are articulated together and with the seventh by means of cartilaginous arches; the last two pairs of ribs ( th and th) are free or _floating_. at the top, the thoracic cage is reinforced by the _thoracic girdle_, which serves also to afford articulation for the upper limbs, and which consists of the _clavicles_, in front, and of the scapulæ, behind. the clavicles are long bones placed in an almost horizontal position above the thorax, and they determine the _width_ of the chest; at the inner extremity they articulate with the manubrium of the sternum and at the outer extremity they are attached to the acromial process of the scapulæ. the scapulæ are flat bones which are attached to the posterior surface of the thoracic frame, on which they are freely movable, covering a tract extending from the second to the seventh rib. at their upper and outer extremity they are provided with two bony processes; namely, the _acromion_, already mentioned, which contains the points of maximum width of the shoulders, and the _coracoid process_, which terminates anteriorly and, together with the acromion, overhangs the articulation of the humerus with the body of the scapula. powerful muscles clothe the thoracic frame, serving partly in the movements of respiration and partly in the movements of the upper limbs. it may suffice to mention, among the muscles situated posteriorly, the _cucullaris_, the great dorsal (_m. longissimus_ _dorsi_), the rhomboids of the scapulæ (_m. rhomboideus major_ and _minor_), and the _serratus posterior_ of the ribs; anteriorly, the large and small pectoral and the great _serratus_; beside which there are the intercostal muscles, extending from rib to rib and taking part in the movements of respiration. but the most important muscle is the _diaphragm_, which completely closes the thoracic cavity, rising into it in a convex vault and separating it from the abdomen; this constitutes the most active of all the muscles which participate in the movements of respiration. the thoracic cavity, thus determined, encloses the two most important viscera of vegetative life--the heart and the lungs. the heart is a muscle shaped like a pear or cone, having its base turned upward, and its apex or point turned downward and outward toward the left, corresponding to the fifth intercostal space; it is divided, as is well known, into four cavities, and constitutes the _great motor power_ of the circulation of the blood. the lungs are two in number, right and left, and surround the heart, completely filling the thoracic cavity. the lungs are divided into superimposed _lobes_, three in the right and two in the left lung; they are composed essentially of infinitely small ramifications of the bronchi, resolving into tiny series of chambers, the _pulmonary alveoli_ or air-cells. these alveoli, consisting of a single layer of extremely small cells, are surrounded by a dense network of capillary tubes, through which takes place the interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. it has been calculated that if we should estimate and sum up the internal surfaces of the pulmonary alveoli, or, what comes to the same thing, if we should spread out and join together the alveolar walls of the lungs, they would have a superficial area of square metres. this area might be compared to the foliage of a great human tree (respiratory surface). _physiological and hygienic aspect._--the importance of the thorax is physiological, because it contains the highly important viscera of vegetative life; but this importance is especially associated with the lungs. the lungs are the organs that acquire the oxygen from the outside environment, and this oxygen, when taken up by the hemoglobin in the blood, will serve to oxygenate the tissues of the entire organism, and thus aid in the processes of cellular metabolism. a large supply of oxygen stimulates this interchange of matter, not only because the organism as a whole is enriched in the substance essential to this process (oxygen), but because the heart responds to the increased activity of the lungs by more energetic pulsations calculated to set the blood circulating in far greater quantities. it is no exaggeration to say that our whole physiological life is enclosed within the thorax, because the digestive system does nothing more than prepare a blood that is unfitted to irrigate the tissues for the purpose of supplying them with nutriment; it is only after this blood has passed through the lungs that it is transformed into _oxygenated blood_ and is adapted to assimilation. consequently the intestines prepare nothing more than the _raw material_, and it is the lungs which perform the service of perfecting it; while the heart drives it through its circuit into contact with all the tissues of the organism. whoever has inadequate lungs is for that reason alone a person who necessarily receives insufficient nutriment (thin and weak macroscele), and frequently is also a melancholiac. melancholia accompanies every form of physiological decadence. on the contrary, persons with ample lungs are generally serene of spirit and joyous. in fact, the emotion of joy is at the same time both the cause and the consequence of an active circulation of oxygenated blood (florid or ruddy complexion). certain experiments conducted with birds have proved that if free oxygen is introduced under an air-bell in which the birds have been enclosed, they gradually become more and more excited, singing and fluttering as if possessed by a frenzy of joyousness. it is a fact that we often rid ourselves of a fit of melancholy by taking a walk in the open air; persons possessed of good lungs feel within themselves a vital potentiality that perceptibly aids them to make what we call an "effort of will"; when sorrow befalls them, or overexertion has exhausted their strength, persons of this type feel some force spring up within them that seems to give them fresh hope and courage. it is their oxygenated blood, which neither weariness nor depression of spirit can stay in its luxuriant course; the man of weak lungs, on the contrary, is mentally depressed, because his physiological life has slowed down; and, instead of aiding him, it is his physiological life which demands of him a genuine effort of will to reestablish its equilibrium. accordingly, those persons who have a well-developed chest are certainly the healthiest and the happiest. but this is not the only pulmonary function; the lungs are also the _organs of speech_. in fact, while speech is manufactured in the brain and the cerebral nerves that stimulate the organs of the spoken word, it requires also its "driving power," that is to say, air, in order to obtain utterance; and it is the lungs to which singers and speakers alike owe the physical strength of their voice. even the respiratory rhythm has a great influence upon speech. the spoken word requires a most complicated mechanism, and among the details of this mechanism, by no means the least important are the acts of _inspiration_, by which the air is received into the lungs, and of _expiration_, by which it is expelled, simultaneously with all the other movements producing speech. indeed, we know that when speech is further complicated by the act of singing, it becomes necessary to _study special rules_ for breathing; in short, to _educate the voice_. now, why do we not also educate the voice for its ordinary task of the spoken language? speech is one of the marvels that characterise man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature. through the voice, the lawyer defends the innocent, the teacher educates the new generations, the mother recalls her erring son to the path of virtue, lovers unite their souls, and all humanity interchanges ideas. if intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested. we trouble ourselves to educate the voice only for the purpose of singing, and neglect the spoken word. we do not stop to think that _singing_ appeals only to the senses and emotions, while speech appeals to the emotions and the intellect, and therefore charms and at the same time convinces. anyone who has heard that wonderfully gifted speaker, ofelia mazzoni, expounding our great poets to the labouring classes at the people's university in milan, rousing the slumbering intelligence of the working man, will understand what an immense educative force we are neglecting. in a century in which we speak of an intellectual reawakening and a brotherhood of man, we have forgotten the _voice_! yet in this new era of humanity that is learning brotherly love and striving for peace, the voice plays a part analogous to that of the trumpet-call in the centuries consecrated to war. as a matter of fact, our schools so far neglect defects of speech that it is not uncommon to hear a stammerer undergoing examinations for a degree in jurisprudence. the fact that an otherwise cultured man lisps or stammers is treated by us as quite an indifferent matter, just as among savage tribes a king may have unclean nails without anyone observing the fact. yet it is now known that stammering may usually be cured by a systematic training in the art of breathing. respiratory gymnastics ought to constitute one of the principal courses of instruction in schools for children. i have introduced it into the "children's houses," among children between the ages of four and six, combining it with a special instruction in written language (letters of the alphabet), designed to _educate_ _the movements_ of the organs of speech, without worrying or tiring the children, and this method has borne such good results that our little ones, by the time they are five years old, have lost nearly all their defects in pronunciation. =spirometry.=--the _pulmonary capacity_ may be measured directly by means of an instrument called the _spirometer_; the breath must be strongly expelled through a tube opening into a hollow cylinder, thus raising a graduated piston contained in it; and, by reading the figure indicated on the piston-rod, we learn the volume of air expelled from the lungs. such an instrument is better adapted for use by adults than by children; and if it should ever come to be introduced into the schools, it should not in any case be used below the elementary grades. the person who is going to measure the capacity of his lungs by means of the spirometer, begins by drawing in an unusually deep or _forced inhalation_; then, after holding his breath for a moment, he proceeds to expel into the rubber tube all the air in his lungs, in a _forced exhalation_. in an exercise of this sort, all the difficulties of respiratory gymnastics are successively surmounted--inspiration, respiratory pause, expiration. in fact, in accomplishing the _forced inspiration_, all the pulmonary alveoli must be dilated to the maximum extent, and at the same time the thorax must reach its _maximum dilation_. this is a very different matter from normal inspiration, which does not completely dilate the alveoli. as a matter of fact, the _tidal air_ or _air of respiration_, _i.e._, the air taken in and expelled in each normal respiration, is about cubic centimetres; but the sum total of air habitually contained in the lungs is made up of two quantities: first, that which may be emitted by a _forced expiration_, the _supplemental_ _or reserve air_, amounting to , cubic centimetres; and secondly, the air which cannot ever be emitted, because no amount of effort could completely expel all the air from the lungs; _residual air_ or _respiratory residuum_ amounting to , cubic centimetres. to recapitulate, the average pulmonary capacity is the sum of the following average quantities of air: _residual air, or respiratory residuum_ (which can never be expelled from the lungs) = cu. cm. respiratory reserve (which can be expelled by a forced expiration) = cu. cm. tidal air = cu. cm. complementary air (which can be drawn in by a forced inspiration) = cu. cm. accordingly, the total pulmonary capacity is about , cubic centimetres, or five litres. but in normal respiration, the capacity is less, _i.e._, about , cubic centimetres, the air due to a forced inspiration not being included. therefore, in each normal respiration a half litre of pure air (assuming that it is pure) is introduced and mingled with the vitiated air already within the lungs; and since, in expiration, a third only of this cubic centimetres is eliminated, it follows that cubic centimetres are mingled with the , cubic centimetres; in other words, that only one-tenth of the air is renewed in each _normal_ act of respiration. a very energetic forced _inspiration_ may draw into the lungs, in addition to the customary cubic centimetres, an additional , cubic centimetres of pure air, _complementary air_. in this case the lungs contain upward of , cubic centimetres of air. the _forced expiration_ which follows upon this extra deep inhalation _purges_ the lungs of the vitiated air which has formed there. in this way we complete an exercise that is eminently hygienic. now, these spirometric movements are fraught with difficulties: . the forced inspiration, deep enough to extend the alveoli, may be more or less complete. if a cloth wrung out in cold water is laid across the shoulders, the _inspiration_ which follows as a result of reflex action is far deeper than that produced by an act of will; this proves that the lungs can be dilated to a point beyond that which seems to us to be the extreme limit, and therefore that _with_ _practice_ we may learn to dilate our lungs still further. . when the attempt is made to _hold the breath_ after a forced inspiration, almost everyone at the first trials will allow more or less of the air to escape; that is, they will discover themselves incapable of controlling their own organs of respiration; therefore, a gymnastic exercise for acquiring such control is necessary. this is the exercise which will make us masters of the movements required to produce vocal sounds at pleasure. . a slow expiration so controlled as to give time for the air to penetrate into the spirometer, is accomplished, though somewhat unevenly, the first few times, and is perfected with practice. it results from the above that: . we take in less air than we are able to take in; . part of this air is lost outside the spirometer; consequently the spirometer registers a pulmonary capacity below that which the lungs actually have; and we shall find that, with _practice_, the volumetric figure will successively augment. but the pulmonary capacity has not augmented in proportion; it is only that _practice has perfected_ the respiratory movements. accordingly, the spirometer may serve as an instrument to test the progress made in respiratory gymnastics, and, in the case of those who have already become _skilful in its use_, it becomes a really valuable instrument for measuring the respiratory capacity. when we remember that a portion of the air, _i.e._, , cubic centimetres, never issues from the lungs, it follows that the _respiratory_ _capacity_ is less by , cubic centimetres than the _pulmonary_ _capacity_, which, as we have seen, is on an average upward of , cubic centimetres ( , ) in the adult man. hence, the spirometer directly measures the _respiratory capacity_, and only indirectly the pulmonary capacity. when women measure their lungs by means of the spirometer, they have difficulty in registering , cubic centimetres, and men have difficulty in attaining , cubic centimetres. instead of which, a man ought to be able to register between , and , cubic centimetres. what keeps the lungs healthy is an abundant aeration with air rich in oxygen, and not impure with carbon dioxide and other poisonous gases. when the pulmonary air-cells are insufficiently dilated, they are predisposed to attack by the bacillus of tuberculosis. indeed, pulmonary tuberculosis usually begins at the _apexes of the lungs_, which are less thoroughly aerated, and also usually attacks persons with narrow chests. the _treatment_ of tuberculosis is eminently a _fresh-air treatment_; tuberculous patients may be benefited and even cured in a remarkable percentage of cases ( per cent.) if they are exposed day and night to the open air. in this way the relation between free respiration and pulmonary health is demonstrated. in america at the present time the hygienic rule of sleeping at night, winter and summer, with the windows open, is gaining ground, and even the practice of sleeping in the open air. and the various forms of _sport_ also have the beneficial effect of bringing those who indulge in them into a healthy contact with fresh air, which civilised man has shown a fatal tendency to abandon. the same exercise which dilates the lungs (the contents) also dilates the thorax (the container). the result is that man ends by acquiring the thorax corresponding to his vocation, or in other words, a thorax corresponding to the life that he leads in consequence of the form of work to which he devotes himself. shepherds in mountain districts and mountain peasants have the largest thorax, notwithstanding, as we have seen, that they are more scantily nourished. in cities, the maximum average circumference of chest is found among the cart-drivers, and the minimum among university students and in general among those who have grown up in an inclosed environment, with the thorax artificially cramped by the position assumed while writing or reading at a desk; yet this is the class of persons who have abundant nutriment. consequently, we find a division of air and bread between different social castes; those who have air, do not have bread, and they possess large lungs, out of proportion to bodies which, being underfed, have been unable to grow; and those who have bread do not have air, and they possess lungs that are insufficient for the needs of bodies that have grown under the influence of abundant nutrition. consequently, all civilised men are physiologically out of equilibrium, and their physical health is lessened. but those who suffer most from this loss of equilibrium are the _studious_ class, who have nourished themselves upon hopes and opened their minds to great ideas, and deluded themselves into undertaking big enterprises; but in real action they find that they are weak, and that they easily fall into discouragement and depression, and when their will-power forces them onward, their organism responds with nervous prostration and melancholia. it is a sad fact that at the present day the best energies of man reach maturity possessed of insufficient lungs, and consequently liable to break down in health, energy and strength. a large part of the _studious_ class, such, for instance, as the teachers, are at the present day devoting themselves to a form of work which is not a pulmonary exercise, but pulmonary _destruction_. we must remember that healthy exercise of the lungs should take place in the open air, and consists of indrawn breaths deep enough to _dilate_ the air-chambers. instead of this, the teacher _speaks_, which means that he makes _forced expirations_, during many hours in an enclosed environment and in an assemblage of persons who, for the most part, are far from clean. the bacillus of tuberculosis finds in the teacher its favourite camping-ground. in fact, statistics indicate that the maximum mortality from tuberculosis is among teachers; higher even than among nurses. it is really distressing to think of the ignorance of hygiene in which our schools are even yet steeped, so that they seem forgetful of the body, in their pursuit of a spirit that eludes them and that, as a matter of fact, is not being educated in anything approaching a rational manner. when we enter a class-room, we see rows of benches constructed like orthopedic machines, to the end that the vertical columns of the pupils shall not be distorted during their enforced labour; and the thought arises: this is the spot in which the teacher becomes a consumptive for the sake of transforming the children into hunchbacks. what is the reward of so great a sacrifice? what sort of a preparation in ideals and in character are they giving to the new generations through such disastrous means? what are the obstacles which they are being taught, through so much suffering, to surmount and to conquer? what, in short, is the spiritual gain achieved at the cost of so great an impoverishment of the body? the answering silence that greets these questions indicates that we have a great mission to accomplish. anthropological studies made upon pupils have demonstrated that school-children rarely attain a sufficient chest development. i also have made my modest contribution, proving that the brightest scholars, the prize-winners, etc., who, as a general rule, also enjoy an advantage in social position, have a _narrower chest measure_. among the children that are recognised as the brightest in their classes, i have been able to distinguish two categories: those who are exceptionally intelligent, and those who are exceptionally studious; the former have a better chest development than the latter. signorina massa, one of my pupils at the university, in the course of kindred studies made among pupils of a uniform social grade (the poorer classes) observed that the _best_ and _brightest_ scholars, etc., have a chest circumference and a muscular strength notably inferior to the children who are not studious. there can be no doubt that an assiduous application to the study table impoverishes the organism and above all impedes the normal development of the thorax. this fact has a really overwhelming importance. study the tables of mortality in italy for infective diseases, _i.e._, those diseases in which mankind meets the assault of the microscopic invader either with a strong constitution, or with one already predisposed to defeat. the most dreaded diseases, such as diphtheria, typhoid, measles and scarlet fever are all grouped together under a mortality oscillating between five and twenty-five thousand deaths a year. but bronchitis and pneumonia each cause a mortality that ascends to between seventy and eighty thousand deaths; in this group it is evident that we must take into consideration, not only the infected environment, but also the organic predisposition. every man and woman has been prepared, by their years in school, to have in the form of a narrow chest and an insufficient development of the organs of respiration, a _locus minoris resistentiæ_. whoever talks of the _war against tuberculosis_ ought first of all to investigate the school and its pedagogic methods. =anthropological aspect.= _growth of the thorax._--in the course of its growth the thorax undergoes an evolution, not only in itself, but also in its relation to the vertebral column. [illustration: fig. .] the nature of the transformations undergone by the skeleton of the trunk in relation to its different parts is substantially as follows: in the child at birth the vertebral column is straight, and the thorax is higher up than in the adult; the pelvis, on the contrary, slants forward and downward. in the adult the vertebral column is curved in the form of an s, showing the two-familiar dorsal-lumbar curves, and the axes of the thorax and pelvis are more perceptibly horizontal; in short, in the course of growth a _descent of the thorax_ has taken place, together with a _rotation_ of the pelvis (fig. ). a. _descent of the thorax._--this is the chief of these characteristics: the thorax descends in the course of its growth. in the new-born child the upper edge of the manubrium of the sternum is in juxtaposition to the body of the first dorsal vertebra, while in the adult it is situated on a level with the lower edge of the second vertebra. even the tendinous arch of the diaphragm has shifted, being lowered by the space of a vertebra; it is situated between the eighth and ninth vertebræ in the child at birth, and between the ninth and tenth in the adult. the outside characteristics are in correspondence with this fact; the shoulders descend in the course of growth. in the adult, the acromia or points of the shoulders are on a lower level than the incisura or cleft in the sternum (which is visible at the anterior base of the neck, and may be felt as an indented half-moon); while in the new-born child, on the contrary, the shoulders are higher up than the upper extremity of the sternum. another external characteristic of the descent of the thorax is the change in position of the nipples at successive ages; the mammary papillæ of the adult correspond to the level of the lower extremity of the sternum, and are situated respectively at the central points of the two halves of the thorax; in the new-born child, on the contrary, the mammary papillæ are further apart and higher up. [illustration: fig. .--a = vertex of triangle; b b' = extremities of base, corresponding to the two nipples.] these characteristics of the _descent_ of the thorax are fully established in the period of puberty and are of great importance, since, if not completed, they indicate cases of arrest of development or _infantilism_. quétélet has made a study of the _triangulation_ of the thorax (fig. ). if the two nipples and the sternal incisura are connected by straight lines inclosing an isosceles triangle _abb´_, the length of the base in the new-born child is millimetres, and that of the sides _ba_, _b´a_ is millimetres, and the height millimetres. in the adult the dimensions are as follows: _bb´_ = millimetres; _ab_, _ab´_= millimetres; and the height = millimetres. comparing the measurements of the child at birth with those of the adult, we find that the base in the adult is . times, and the side . times that of the child; in other words, the sides of the triangle increase far more than the base, and its height in the adult (representing very nearly the entire height of the sternum), is . times that in the new-born child. consequently, in the course of its transformation the thorax not only descends, but it is also lengthened in the adult, as compared with the form that it had at birth. b. _dimensions of thorax in relation to stature._--besides its _descent_, there is a second transformation of the thorax, in regard to its volumetric relations to the rest of the body. the perimeter of the thorax and the circumference of the head are pretty nearly equal in the new-born child; if anything, the circumference of the thorax is a _trifle less_ than that of the head; but when it equals it, this is a sign of _robustness_. in the majority of cases it is not until the second year or thereabouts that the two circumferences become equal. if, however, such inequality should still persist after the child had entered upon the third year, it would constitute a sign of _rickets_ (head too large, chest too narrow). as to the relations between the thoracic circumference and the stature, it is found that in the child at birth the thoracic circumference exceeds one-half the stature by about centimetres. if the difference is less than centimetres it is a sign of feeble constitution, if it is greater than (for instance, centimetres) it is a sign of great robustness. this difference disappears little by little; at the age of five years it is already reduced to between and centimetres; at the age of fifteen, the period of puberty, it has wholly disappeared, and the well-known relation between the stature and the circumference of the thorax has become established; the thoracic circumference is equal to one-half the stature (see chapter on _form_), and this constitutes goldstein's _vital index_: _vi_ = ( ×_tc_)/(_s_) as early as , pagliani published some studies of children, which reveal the _physiological_ importance of the dimensions of the thorax; watching the lives of infants whose measurements he took at the foundling asylum, he observed that the _mortality_ of infants is quite rare when they exceed the above proportions between circumference of chest, head, and stature. from a study of infants, fraebelius has drawn the following conclusions: i. mortality per cent.; circumference of thorax greater than half the stature by . centimetres; circumference of thorax less by . centimetres than perimeter of cranium. ii. mortality . per cent.; circumference of thorax greater by centimetres than one-half the stature; circumference of thorax less by . centimetres than circumference of cranium. iii. mortality . per cent.; circumference of thorax greater by . centimetres than one-half the stature; circumference of thorax less by . centimetres than the cranial circumference. the thorax in children of five years and upward ought to be larger by a few centimetres (not more than from to ) than one-half the stature. _c. transformations of the thorax considered by itself: alterations_ _in shape._ _thoracic index._--lastly, the thorax changes its shape in the course of growth. in the new-born child it is very prominent in front, and narrow laterally; in the adult, on the contrary, it is more flattened in its antero-posterior dimension and wider transversely. consequently the transformation consists in a notable difference in the proportion between the width and depth of the chest, that is, between the antero-posterior and the transverse diameters (see chapter on _technique_). this proportion constitutes the _thoracic_ _index_, which is expressed by the following formula: _ti_ = ( a-_pd_)/_td_ and this formula gives an idea of the _shape_ of the thorax. in the child at birth the antero-posterior diameter is very nearly equal to the transverse; accordingly, the index, at birth, oscillates between and . in the adult, however, the thoracic index is on an average ; the transverse diameter therefore increases much more than the antero-posterior diameter. according to quétélet, while the transverse diameter multiplies threefold in the course of its growth, the antero-posterior merely doubles ( . ); in addition to this the thorax also lengthens, as we have already seen. _proportion, shape and dimensions of the thorax._--in the adult normal man we find the following proportions: the distance between the mammary papillæ is about equal to the antero-posterior diameter of the thorax (hence the papillæ indicate the depth of chest) and is also perceptibly equal to one-half the breadth of the shoulders (measured between the two acromia), which, by the way, is the maximum transverse dimension of the skeleton. this maximum dimension (the biacromial distance) may be regarded as an index of the skeletal development; and godin takes its proportion to the _transverse thoracic diameter_ (the horizontal distance between the two vertical lines drawn from the arm-pits, in the plane of the mammary papillæ, see chapter vii, _technique_) in order to estimate the proportional relation between the skeleton and the organs of respiration. since in the course of growth the thorax _broadens_, that is, the transverse diameter increases more than the antero-posterior, we should expect to find that in the course of evolution, the difference between the transverse development of the skeleton and the lateral development of the thorax steadily diminishes. it happens, on the contrary, that from the age of ten years onward, during the whole puberal development, the transverse diameter of the thorax steadily becomes less, as compared with the breadth of the shoulders, so much so that if the difference was at first millimetres, it becomes finally millimetres. according to godin, this indicates that the thorax does not obey the harmonic laws of the development of the skeleton as a whole, but that, owing to causes of adaptation (the school!) it remains definitely inferior to the development which it might have attained, and consequently results in throwing the organism _out of its physiological equilibrium_. in fact, if we make men raise their arms, especially men of the student class, a certain hollowness, which is æsthetically displeasing, is revealed along the sides of the thorax. this deficiency is corroborated, according to godin's studies, by his observation of another correspondence in the measurements of the thorax. in addition to the customary measurements, godin introduced, besides the well-known and classic _thoracic perimeter_--which is the circumference taken in the horizontal plane passing through the nipples--two other circumferences: one of them higher up, the _subaxillary circumference_, which includes a large proportion of the pectoral and dorsal muscles; and the other lower down, the _submammary circumference_, which determines solely the measurement of the thoracic skeleton, since the intercostal muscles are practically the only ones which descend to this level. these two circumferences are to be considered together, according to godin, as expressing the relation between the organs of respiration and the muscular mass. in complete repose, the subaxillary circumference is much greater than the submammary; but at the moment of _maximum inspiration_ the latter should become equal to the former; hence, the difference between the submammary circumference in repose and during inspiration furnishes an indirect index of the _respiratory capacity_, and the subaxillary circumference is a test of individual capacity. godin notes that inspiration _almost never_ succeeds in attaining an equality between the two circumferences. _shape of the thorax._--in regard to the shape, which stands in relation to the _thoracic index_, it is found to vary according to individual _types_; in fact the index itself, although showing a mean average of , oscillates between the extremes of and . as a general rule, the brachycephalic races have a deeper thorax, _i.e._, having a cross-section of more rounded form; the dolichocephalics, on the contrary, have a more flattened thorax in the antero-posterior direction (these races, such as the negroes, are more predisposed to contract pulmonary tuberculosis). consequently there is a correspondence in _type_ between the head and the thorax. in the measurements taken by me among the women of latium the results show that the brachycephalics had an average depth of thorax amounting to millimetres and the dolichocephalics only millimetres, while the transverse diameters were very nearly equal: millimetres in the brachycephalics, and millimetres in the dolichocephalics. hence, the resultant thoracic index of for the brachycephalics and for the dolichocephalics. such differences in the index indicate also differences in the formation of the thorax: that it is more or less flattened in the dolichocephalics, and more prominent in the brachycephalics. there is a corresponding diversity of form in the breasts of the women: the dolichocephalic races have more elongated breasts (pear-shaped), the brachycephalics more rounded. the shape of the thoracic section is at the present time taken into careful consideration, especially in medicine, because it is apt to reveal predispositions to diseases. it may be obtained by the aid of the cyrtometer (see chapter on _technique_). at the present day, however, exceedingly complicated instruments have been constructed, which, by the aid of recording indexes, give a direct representation of the shape of the thoracic perimeter, together with its modifications and respiratory oscillations. since these instruments are, for the present, very far removed from widespread practical use, we may adopt as an excellent method for determining the shape and, at the same time, the dimensions of the thorax, that of maurel, in his research regarding "the square surface of the thoracic section." having determined the anthropometric points, maurel passes strips of metal (stiff enough to retain the shape given them) around the thorax, after the fashion of a tape-measure, first around one half, and then around the other. next he places these metal strips (_still retaining the shape given_ _them_ by contact with the thorax), upon a sheet of especially prepared paper, marked in squares, and traces upon it the _inner outline_ _of the strips_. the two halves must be made to coincide in such a manner as to reproduce faithfully the thoracic section, both in form and in dimension. by adding up the squares contained within the outline we obtain the area of the section. [illustration: fig. .] this method is the only really rational method for studying the thorax; and its simplicity, practicality and graphic representation recommend it as a valuable aid to pedagogic anthropology. there is, for example, an abnormal form of thorax, which i have very often met with in deficient children. it consists in an exaggerated curve of the posterior costal arches, which consequently form a very sharp angle with the vertebral column, which is notably indented, while the sternum is also depressed in a groove, and occupies a plane posterior to that of the ribs. the section of the thorax, in this case, approaches the form of a figure ; and the thoracic perimeter would not represent the true measurement because it would include the empty spaces left by the front and back depressions. the thoracic index would also give a false idea of the facts, because the antero-posterior diameter would be nowhere so short as at the centres of measurement for this diameter. the only method for representing the true shape and area of this type of thorax is that employed by maurel. _anomalies of shape._--in addition to the preceding anomaly, very frequent in degenerates, and associated with a _deficient development_ _of the lungs_ and with physical weakness, there are numerous other anomalies. among others, those that principally deserve attention are the funnel-shaped or _consumptive thorax_, in which the longitudinal diameter is excessive; the thoracic frame is greatly elongated and the ribs descend to a very low level; this type of thorax is frequent in neuropathic women, and, according to féré, is associated with degeneration. the opposite form is the _barrel-shaped thorax_, in which the prevailing diameter is the antero-posterior; it is very prominent and is frequently met with in persons who are subject to forms of asthma, maladies of the heart, etc. the _bell-shaped_ thorax is similar to the preceding, but is characterised by an accompanying exceptional brevity of the longitudinal diameter, which causes it to resemble the infantile thorax (arrest of morphological development). the _grooved_ thorax is the one described above as common among the mentally deficient. a considerable importance attaches to a form of thorax distinguished by the _shortness of the clavicles_, in consequence of which the chest remains flat, paralytic or _flat thorax_ (_habitus phthisicus_). the flattened appearance is due to the fact that the chest cannot rise in front, and the shoulders, being cramped by the shortness of the clavicles, curve forward, while the scapulæ stand out from the plane of the back and spread themselves like wings (scapulæ alatæ). i have met with this form in deficients, accompanied by such _laxity of articulations_, that it was possible to grasp the points of the shoulders and draw them together until they very nearly met in front. this form of thorax is characteristically predisposed to pulmonary tuberculosis, and is frequently met with in the macroscelous types. the commonest deformities of the thorax are those associated with _rachitis_. one of the forms regarded as being rachitic in origin is the _keel-shaped_ _thorax_, in which the sternum is thrust forward and isolated along its median line, like the keel of a boat. but the thoracic deformities due unquestionably to rickets are of the well-known types that go popularly under the name of _hunchback_, and are accompanied by curvatures of the vertebral column. the first admonitory symptoms are shown by the so-called _rachitic rosary_, _i.e._, by the small swellings due to enlargement of the ends of the ribs at their point of attachment to the sternum. subsequently, the softened ribs become misshapen in various ways, especially from the fourth rib downward, the upper ribs being fastened and sustained by the thoracic girdle and by the muscles. the curvatures of the vertebral column which accompany rickets are _scoliosis_ or lateral deviation (frequent in school-children) and _kyphosis_, or deviation in a backward curve; for the most part these two curvatures occur together, so that the vertebral column is thrust outward and at the same time is twisted to one side: _kyphoscoliosis_. =pedagogical considerations.=--the following considerations are the natural sequence of what has been said above. deficiency of the thorax is one of the _stigmata_ left by the school, which in this way tends to make the younger generations feeble and physiologically unbalanced. the exaggerated importance which is given to the _school_ _benches_ for the purpose of avoiding deformities of the vertebral column deserves to be put aside and forgotten, as an aberration of false hygiene. the bench will not prevent restriction of the thorax; before reaching the critical point which the improved school bench is intended to prevent, many impoverishments of the organism, fatal to robustness and health, and often to _life itself_ (predisposition to tuberculosis!) have been incurred; and there is no other remedy to obviate them than a _reform in pedagogic methods_. the admonitory fact that neglected, despised, half-starved children have an enormous _advantage_ in the development of the thorax over the more intelligent children who are well-fed and carefully guarded, and solely because the former are free to run the streets, ought to point the direction in which we should look for means of helping the new generations hygienically. they have need of free movement and of air. the recreation rooms which tend to keep the children of the street shut up indoors even during recess are taking from the children of the people the sole advantage that still remained to them. try to realize that these children are obliged to sleep in dark, crowded environments, and that every night, during the period of sleep, they suffer from such acute poisoning by carbon dioxide that they frequently awaken in the morning with severe pains in the head. the life of the streets is their salvation. we condemn children to death, under the delusion that we are working for their moral good; a perverted human soul may be led back to righteousness; but a consumptive chest can never again become robust. let those who talk of education and morality and similar themes be sure that they are benefactors and not executioners, and let those who wish to do good seek the light of science. curvatures of the vertebral column, such as lordosis and kyphosis, cannot be considered solely in relation to the thorax, but in relation to the pelvis as well, because, especially in lordosis, the lumbar vertebræ are also involved, while the pelvis also suffers a characteristic deformity. chapter iv the pelvis _anatomical note._--the five lumbar, the five sacral and the four coccygeal vertebræ constitute the lumbar and sacro-coccygeal section of the vertebral column. [illustration: fig. .--skeleton of pelvis, seen from above.] the _sacrum_, formed by the union of the five sacral vertebræ, appears in the adult in the form of a bone that narrows rapidly from above downward in a general curve whose convex side is turned inward. the coccyx has the importance of being a real and actual caudal appendage, reduced in man to its simplest anatomical expression. on each side of the sacrum the two ossa innominata or hip-bones are attached, constituting a sort of massive girdle (cintura pelvica), serving as point of attachment for the lower limbs, while at the same time it sustains the entire weight of the body and the abdominal viscera. these two bones are made up of three separate parts: an upper part, very broad and rather thin (the ilium, which constitutes the flank or hip), one in front (the os pubis), and a third behind, quite massive, and shaped like the letter v (the ischium). the two ossa innominata and the os sacrum form the pelvis or pelvic basin, a broad cavity with bony walls that are by no means complete, within which are a portion of the digestive organs and a considerable part of the organs belonging to the genito-urinary system. the pelvis supports the vertebral column and is in turn supported by the lower limbs, in quite marvellous equilibrium. the maximum sexual differences of the skeleton are in relation to the pelvis; in woman the iliac bones form a far ampler basin; in man, the pelvis is higher and more confined and formed of more solid bones; but it is not broader. but where the difference is most apparent is in the pelvic _aperture_ (see fig. ) which divides the pelvis into two parts, the upper or great pelvis and the lower or small pelvis. this aperture has distinguishing marks that differ widely between the sexes; in woman it is rounder, in man it is more elongated from front to back and is narrowed toward the pubis. one of the most important points of measurement in anthropology and in obstetrics is the extreme anterior apex of the superior border of the ilium or _crista iliaca antero-superior_. the woman in whom this dimension (the bis-iliac) is less than millimetres cannot give birth naturally; similarly the woman who has a prominent os pubis (due to rachitis) will owe the attainment of maternity to the intervention of surgery, and perhaps even of the cæsarean operation. there are also many ethnical differences in the pelvis: brachycephalics (the mongolian race) have a broader and shallower pelvis than the dolichocephalics, who, on the contrary, have a deeper and narrower pelvis (the negroes). the same thing is met with, notwithstanding its intermixture, in our own race: blond, brachycephalic women have a wider pelvis than brunette, dolichocephalic women. accordingly, cranium, thorax and pelvis correspond in one and the same ethnic type. the abdomen extends from the arch of the diaphragm to the lower extremity of the pelvis. it contains all the viscera of alimentation: the digestive system together with the glands belonging to it; the liver and pancreas, besides the renal system and, in women, the organs of generation (uterus and ovaries). the diaphragmatic arch, having its convex side uppermost, enters the thoracic frame as far as the first dorsal vertebra. the intestinal mass is more noticeable and prominent in persons having a narrow pelvis; in children, for example, the abdomen is very prominent. _growth of the pelvis._--in the skeleton of the new-born child the pelvis differs from that of the adult in two particulars: _height_ and _direction_. the pelvis is low in the new-born child and higher in the adult. the central axis is more oblique from front to back (in the higher mammals the axis of the pelvis is almost central); in the adult, on the contrary, this axis tends to straighten up, to the point of becoming nearly vertical, in relation, that is, to the erect position of man. hence in the course of growth the pelvis not only becomes proportionally higher, but it undergoes a rotary movement around the cotyloid axis; this movement has the effect of elevating the pubis and bringing the ischium forward. [illustration: fig. .] the vertebral column rests upon the sacrum, which is the retro-cotyloid portion of the pelvis, and its pressure tends mechanically to straighten the pelvis (see diagram, fig. ). this process of straightening has certain limits, and is dependent upon the _form of curvature_ of the vertebral column; if this is exaggerated, as in lordosis, the weight is thrown further forward, almost over the cotyles; consequently, the elevation of the pelvis is not properly accomplished (low pelvis found in lordotics). if, on the contrary, the lumbar curvature is wanting or reversed (kyphosis), the pressure of the column is thrown backward and the straightening up of the pelvis is exaggerated (high pelvis found in kyphotics). independently of pathological deformities, there are various forms of lumbar curvature in the vertebral column that are normal oscillations, or oscillations acquired through adaptation. an exaggerated lumbar curvature or saddle-back is found in children accustomed to carry heavy loads upon their shoulders; a diminished curvature is found in children constrained to remain in a sitting posture for many hours a day. the sitting posture tends to cancel the lumbar inward curve; consequently, while children are in school they are promoting the elevation of their pelvis. the elevation of the pelvis proceeds rapidly at the fifteenth year, during puberty, when the muscular masses become more solid. a woman is not fitted for motherhood, even if physically developed, so long as her pelvis has not rotated normally. but if the rotation is exaggerated (due to prolonged sitting posture during years of growth), this is very unfavourable to normal childbirth. in rickets, associated with kyphosis, there is a form of exaggerated rotated pelvis (pubis high). the laborious "modern" childbirth, and the dangerous childbirth in the case of women who have devoted much time to study, must be considered in connection with these artificial anomalies. _free movement_ and gymnastics have for this reason, in the case of women, an importance that extends from the individual to the species. chapter v the limbs the study of the limbs is of great importance, because, although it is the special province of the bust to contain the organs of vegetative life, it is the limbs which render it useful. in fact, it is the lower limbs which control our locomotion and the upper limbs which execute the labour of mankind. one characteristic of man, equally with that of standing in an erect position, supported only on the lower limbs, is the independence of the upper limbs, which are raised from the ground and relieved of the function of locomotion--a function that still continues in all other mammals, excepting the anthropoid apes, whose upper limbs are extremely long and barely escape the earth, and serve the animal merely as an aid and a support in walking. the birds, although supported on their hind limbs alone, nevertheless have their fore limbs assigned to the sole office of wings for the transportation of their bodies. consequently, the free and disposable upper limb, peculiar to mankind, would seem to mark a new function in the biologic scale--human labour. _anatomy of the skeleton of the limbs._--in contrast to the bust, the limbs have an internal skeleton, adapted solely to the function of support (not of protection). the bones are covered with masses of striped muscles, which have as their special function voluntary movement, that is to say, obedience to the brain. the upper and lower limbs correspond numerically, and the arrangement of the bones is analogous; and this holds true for all the higher vertebrates. the nearest bones, those that are attached to the trunk, are single in all four limbs. then, just as though branching out, they next double in number, and then multiply successively as we approach the extremities of the limbs. thus the forearm and the lower leg have two bones, and the hands and feet have many. in the upper arm we have the humerus, in the thigh the _femur_, in the forearm the _ulna_ and _radius_ (the ulna is situated on the same side as the little finger and the radius on that of the thumb), in the lower leg the _tibia_ and _fibula_. then come the many short bones (eight in the carpus and seven in the tarsus) which in the hand form the wrist or _carpus_, and in the foot the ankle or instep, the _tarsus_. these are followed by other long bones (five in the hand and five in the foot), which constitute the _metacarpus_ and _metatarsus_, and these in turn by the long bones of the _phalanges_ (fingers and toes), which grow successively smaller toward the extremities and are successively named _proximal_, _middle_ and _distal_ _phalanges_ (_phalangettes_). these last are missing in the thumb and the big toe. in conjunction with the last phalanges, the fingers and toes are protected by nails. _the growth of the limbs._--recent studies, conducted principally by godin in france, author of the classic work upon growth, have demonstrated that the long bones of the limbs obey certain special laws of biologic growth. while a long bone is growing in length it does not grow in width or thickness, and while it is increasing in thickness it does not gain in length; hence the lengthening of the bones takes place in alternate periods; during the period of repose relative to growth in length, the bone gains in thickness. i have already explained, in connection with the stature, that we owe the growth of the long bones to a variety of formative elements, the cartilages of the epiphyses, which control the growth in length of the long bones, and the enveloping membrane of the body of the bone, the periosteum, which presides over the growth in thickness. the above mentioned alternation in the growth of the bones must therefore be attributed to an alternation in the action of these various formative elements of the bones. in the case of two successive long bones (for example, the humerus and radius, the femur and tibia, the metacarpus and phalanges, etc.), they alternate in their growth; while one of them is lengthening, the other is thickening; consequently the growth of a limb in length is not simultaneous in all the bones, but takes place alternately in the successive bones. during the time when the growth devolves upon the longest bone, the limbs show the greatest rate of increase in length, and when, on the contrary, it devolves upon the shortest bone, the growth is less; but in either case it continues to grow. the growth of the long bones of the limbs proceeds by alternate periods of activity and repose, which succeed each other regularly. these periods of activity and repose occur inversely in each two successive bones. the periods of repose from growth in length are utilised for gain in thickness, and reciprocally. the long bones lengthen and thicken alternately, and not simultaneously. it is only at the age of puberty (fifteenth year) that a complete simultaneity of growth takes place, after which epoch the growth in stature and length of limb diminishes, yielding precedence to that of the vertebral column. when the complete development of the bodily _proportions_ is attained (eighteenth year), the length of the lower limbs is equal to one-half the stature. when the upper limbs are extended vertically along the sides of the body, the tip of the middle finger reaches the middle point of the thigh, while the wrist coincides with the ischium (hip-bone). the total spread of the arms is, on an average, equal in length to the stature. the proportions between the lower limbs and the bust, resulting from the attainment of complete individual development, determine the types of stature: _macroscelia_ and _brachyscelia_. since the order of growth as between the two essential portions of stature is now determined, we are able to interpret macroscelia as a phenomenon of infantilism (arrested development of the bust). _malformations. excessive development of the nearer and remoter_ _segments._--but there are other proportions that are of interest to us, within the limbs themselves. even between the nearer and remoter portions of the limbs there ought to be certain constant relations (indices) that constitute differential characteristics between the various human races and between man and the ape. if the humerus or upper arm is taken as equal to , the radius or forearm is equal to in the european, while in the negro it is equal to about . furthermore, it is a well-known fact that excessive length of the forearm is an ape-like characteristic. consequently, the measurement of the segments of the limbs is important, and it is made with a special form of calipers; when the index of the segments deviates from the accepted normal figure, this constitutes a serious _anomaly_, frequently found in degenerates, and it often happens that an excessive development of the remoter segments, the bones of the extremities, explains the excess of the total spread of the arms over the stature, unassociated with the macroscelous type. _absence of calf._--in addition to this fundamental deviation from normality, there are other malformations worthy of note that may occur in the limbs. such, for example, is a deficiency or absence of the calf of the leg. the well-turned leg, which we admire as an element of beauty is a distinctive human trait most conspicuous among the races that we regard as superior. among the more debased negro races the leg is spindling and without any calf; furthermore, it is well known that monkeys have no calves, and still less do they exist among the lower orders of mammals. _flat feet._--another important malformation relates to the morphology of the feet. everyone knows the distinctive curve or arch of the foot, and the characteristic imprint which it consequently leaves on the ground. sometimes, however, this arch is missing, and the sole of the foot is all on the same plane (flat foot). the dark-skinned natives of australia have flat feet as one of their racial characteristics; in our own race it constitutes an anomaly that is frequent among degenerates. flat feet may also be acquired as the result of certain employments (butler, door-keeper, etc.), which compel certain individuals to remain much of the time on foot. but in such cases the deformity is accompanied by a pathological condition (neuralgic symptoms and local myalgia). like all malformations, this may have special importance in connection with infantile hygiene (the position of the pupil, the work done by the children, etc.). _opposable big toe._--another malformation combined with a functional anomaly, that is never met with as a deformity resulting from adaptation, is the opposable big toe. sometimes the big toe is greatly developed and slightly curved toward the other toes, and capable of such movement as to give it a slight degree of opposability; hence the foot is prehensile. this characteristic, regularly present in monkeys, is so far developed in certain degenerates as to make it possible for them to perform work with their feet (knitting stockings, picking up objects, etc.); so that this class of degenerates, who are essentially parasites, solve the problem of supporting themselves by trading on the curiosity of the public, so that, by straining a point, we might bestow upon them the title of _foot labourers_. _loose and stiff joints._--anomalies may also occur in connection with the articulation of the joints. it sometimes happens that they are extremely loose and weak, and allow the bones an excessive play of movement; and, if the lower limbs are thus affected, it increases the difficulty of maintaining equilibrium when standing erect or walking. on the other hand, it may happen that the articulations are too stiff, and consequently render many movements difficult, especially if through an anomalous development of the outer coating of the bone, it results in congenital ankylosis. _curvature of the legs._--a special importance attaches to certain alterations undergone by the heads of the bones which contribute to the formation of the knee, because of the curvature of the leg which results from them (rachitis, paralysis). the leg may become bowed outward or inward; when it is bowed inward (knock-knees, _genu valgum_), the knees strike together in walking; when, on the contrary, it is bowed outward, the result is bow-legs (_genu varum_), known popularly in italy as "legs of hercules," a deformity which in a mild degree may also result from the practice of horse-back riding. _club-foot (talipes)._--other deviations from the normal position occur in connection with the foot. certain paralytic children (little's disease) walk on the fore part of the foot (_talipes equinus_, "horse's foot"); in some cases the foot is also turned inward, and consequently such children cross their legs as they walk (_talipes_ _equino-varus_). the hand _chiromancy and physiognomy. the hand in figurative speech._ _the high and low type of hand._--the hand is in the highest degree a human characteristic. it is man's organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth. the hand has always claimed the attention not only of scientists but of all mankind without distinction. attempts have been made to discover the secrets of human personality from the hand, and a whole art has been built up, called _chiromancy_, which endeavours to read from the hand man's destiny and psychic personality, just as _physiognomy_ was the art of interpreting the character from the face. chiromancy was an accredited art as far back as the days of ancient greece, and it also had a great vogue in the middle ages; while to-day it is out of date and superseded, or perhaps is destined to rise again in some new form, just as physiognomy has risen again in the study of "expressions" of the face and the imprints which they leave behind them. scientists also have made the hand the object of their careful consideration; and the result of their researches shows that the hand really does contain individual characteristics that are not only interesting but, up to a certain point, are revelations of personality. a written word, a clasp of the hand, may furnish documents for the study of the individual. graphology, for instance, is naturally related to the functional action and to the characteristics of the hand itself. gina lombroso has recently made a study of the _hand-clasp_ in its relation to character; when a haughty person offers his hand, he has the appearance of wishing to thrust you from him; the miser barely offers the tips of his fingers; the timid man yields a moist and chilly hand to your touch; the loyal friend makes you feel the whole vigor of his hand in its cordial pressure. in the gesture we have an individual form of linguistic expression. consequently, man reveals himself, not alone through his creative part, the head, but also through its obedient servant, the hand. "the hand is gesture, gesture is visible speech, speech is the soul, the soul is man, the soul of man is in the hand." furthermore, we can judge from the hand whether a man is fitted for work or not; and it is to work that the hand owes its human importance. the first traces of mankind upon earth are not remains of skeletons, but remains of work--the splintered stone. the whole history of social evolution might be called the history of the hand. to say that the hand is the servant of the intelligence is to express the truth in too restricted a way, because the intelligence is nourished and developed through the products of the hand, as by degrees the work of the latter transformed the environment. hence, the history of our intellectual development, like that of our civilization, is based upon the creative work evolved by the collaboration of hand and head. and so, in the orphan asylums, we have the children sing the hymn to the hand, which is a hymn to labour and to progress: "our hand is good for every task." all the solemn acts of life require the cooperation and sanction of the hand. we take oath with the hand; marriage is performed by uniting the hands of the bridal pair; in proof of friendship or to seal a compact, we clasp hands. the word hand has come to be often used in a symbolic sense in many expressive phrases possessing a social and moral significance: "take heed that the hand of the lord does not fall upon you;" "pilate washed his hands;" "to put oneself into another's hands;" "to have a lavish hand;" "to sit with idle hands" or "with the hands in the pockets;" "one hand washes the other;" "to have a hand in the pie;" "to turn one's hand to something;" "to lend a final hand;" "to speak with the hand on the heart;" "to believe the evidence of one's hands," etc. and this high and symbolic significance given to the hand dates back even to bible times: solomon says: "the length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour" (_prov._ , ). and moses: "therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your soul and bind them for a sign upon your hand" (_deut._ , ). attempts have recently been made to describe the "psychological types" of the human hand. zimmermann, for instance, studies two types of hand: the _high type_, delicate, small, slender, with rounded, tapering fingers, and convex nails; a hand which would indicate a fine sensibility, delicate and refined sentiments, a well balanced mind, a high degree of intelligence, a strong and noble character. and there is the _low type_, coarse, short and stocky, with thick fingers and flat nails; an index of sluggish sensibilities, vulgar sentiments and a low order of intelligence, a weak will and apathetic character. in accordance with the theories of mechanics, the type of hand has been considered in relation to its organic use and morphological adaptation. in general, the hand used in the coarser forms of work is of the low type; the high type of hand is that required for nimble and fine movements, in which there is need of the successive concurrence of all those delicate little groups of muscles which are able to act independently and thus give to this organ the marvelous and subtle variety of movements which distinguish it. in regard to dimensions, the large, heavy hand would betoken use, and the little hand _disuse_. therefore, the small hand may be considered as a stigma of parasitism, a distinction which at the present day has lost its nobility. excepting in so far as the "brain workers," who make themselves useful without employing their hands, may still show a distinctive smallness of these members. we should not, however, adhere solely either to the psychological theory of the hand, or to the theory of adaptation; it is necessary to consider the characteristics of the hand from several different points of view. _dimensions._--the dimensions of the hand bear a constant relation to the stature and to certain partial dimensions of the body, while the various parts of the hand preserve constant reciprocal proportions. as far back as in the time of vitruvius it was known that the human hand is related to the stature in the proportion of to . this is a very important fact to know, because the proportion varies in the inferior races and in the anthropoid apes, the descent in the scale showing a corresponding increase of length of hand relatively to the stature. thus, for example, in the mongolian races the proportional length of the hand is . , and in the higher apes it equals . consequently too long a hand is in itself an anomaly that indicates a low type of man; it is to be classed with those anomalies that were formerly regarded as atavistic reversions, phenomena of absolute retrogression in the biological scale. _relations between the hand and the other dimensions of the body._--the closed fist, taking the extreme outside measurement between the metacarpophalangeal articulations, corresponds to the breadth of the heart. the length of the hand corresponds to the height of the visage, and also to the distance intervening between the sternal incisura and the auricular foramen; it is also equal to the distance between the two nipples, and therefore also corresponds to the depth of the chest. there may be hands which are either excessively large or much too small, and that are really marks of degeneration. an excessive volume of these members is called _megalomelia_, and an excessive smallness _oligomelia_. we may encounter an extremely small hand quite as often in the son of an alcoholic labourer as in the son of a degenerate aristocrat; frequently men whose parents were mentally deficient have small, delicate, almost effeminate hands. _the proportions between the various segments of the hands._--the length of the middle finger, measured from the digito-palmar _plica_ or fold, ought to equal the length of the palm. hence the index of the palm should be the proportion between the length of the palm itself and the length of the middle finger. this proportion is of importance because it has certain human characteristics; as a matter of fact, in the anthropoid apes the metacarpus is much longer than the fingers and the palm has a far lower index than that of man. in degenerates (thieves) the hand is frequently narrow and long. _the proportions of the fingers._--if the first and second articulations of the fingers are flexed, leaving the third extended, we find that the extremity of the middle finger reaches to the point where the thenar and _hypothenar_ eminences (fleshy prominences at base of palm) are nearest to each other. this basic point is only approximate and serves to tell us whether the middle finger is normal. the middle finger serves as a measure for the others, as follows: the _index-finger_ reaches to the base of the nail of the middle finger. the _thumb_, to the middle of the first phalanx of the middle finger. the _ring finger_, to the middle of the nail of the middle finger.[ ] the _little finger_, to the third articulation of the ring finger. it often happens that the development of the ulnar side of the hand--the little finger, or both little and ring finger together--is defective. sometimes the little finger is not only extremely small, but a special malformation renders it shorter still when the hand is open; the second phalanx remains flexed, and cannot be extended. combined with the shortness of such fingers there is also an extreme slenderness--_cubital oligodactylia_. it is a far rarer thing to find similar anomalies in the case of the index-finger. the thumb, on the contrary, is sometimes extremely short, in consequence of which it has slight opposability. _functional characteristics._--what characterises the functional action of the human hand is the opposability of the thumb. there ought to be a perfect movement of opposability of the thumb in respect to all the other fingers; but many imbecile children accomplish this movement imperfectly. the mobility of the thumb is associated with a group of muscles situated at its base which forms the great tenar eminence of the palm, opposite which, in corresponding relation to the little finger is the small hypothenar eminence. an insufficient development of these palmar eminences represents a serious malformation, which entails functional disturbances. the hand of the monkey is flat. _the nails._--we have already seen that in the high type of hand the nails should be convex and long, and that in the low type, on the contrary, they are short and flat. the normal nail should extend to an even level with the fingertip. manual labour should normally serve the purpose of keeping the nails worn down; but we, who are not hand-labourers, must use the scissors, in order to maintain the normal state. for, if they were not worn down, the nails would attain an enormous length, like the nails of certain kings of savage tribes, who as a badge of authority have such long nails that their hands are necessarily kept motionless; these kings must in consequence be waited on, even for the smallest need, and actually become the slaves of their own nails, which might be shattered by any sudden movement on the part of their royal possessor. long nails, therefore, are a sign of idleness, while at the same time they demand a great deal of attention. accordingly, let us repudiate the fashion of long nails. as a form of anomaly, we sometimes meet with nails of such exaggerated length that they have the aspect of claws--_onychogryposis_; or, again, an almost total absence of nails, which are reduced to a narrow transverse strip--this characteristic is often found in idiots, and is aggravated by the fact that from childhood such persons have had the habit of "biting their nails." sometimes the nails are exceedingly dense, or actually consist of several superimposed layers, so rich in pigment that they lose their characteristic transparency. this condition is due to trophic disorders of the nails. _teratology and various anomalies._--there are certain monstrosities that sometimes occur in connection with the hand, such as _hexadactylism_ and _polydactylism_, or hands with six or more fingers; or else hands with less than five fingers--_syndactylism_. there may even be a congenital absence of a phalanx, with a consequent notable shortness of the finger--_brachydactylism_. another sort of anomaly frequently found in deficients consists of an excessive development of the interdigital membrane, to the extent of giving the hand the appearance of being web-fingered. an anomaly of minor importance consists in a distortion of the fingers; the little finger has one of its phalanges turned backward. all the fingers ought to be in contact throughout their whole length, and not leave open spaces between them. _lines of the palms._--the lines of the palms, which used to be of so much importance in chiromancy, are now taken into consideration even in anthropology, being studied in normal and abnormal man, and also in the hands of monkeys. the lines of the palms are three in number. the one which follows the curve of the tenar eminence is known in chiromancy as the line of life, and, if long, deep and unbroken, was supposed to denote good health and the prospect of a long life; in anthropology it is called the _biological line_. the second crease, which ought to meet the former between the thumb and the index-finger, is the line of the head, or _cephalic line_, and in chiromancy its union with the line of life was supposed to denote a well-balanced character. the line highest up, which begins between the index- and middle finger and extends to the extreme margin of the palm, is the line of the heart or the _cardiac line_, which in chiromancy is supposed to indicate the emotional development of the individual. these lines taken together form a semblance of the letter m, and are characteristically and gracefully curved. it is considered as an anomaly, to be met with among degenerates and even in mongoloid idiots, to lack any of these lines (numerical reduction) or to have their arrangement distinctly horizontal, and reminiscent of the hand of the monkey. if we trace backward in the zoological scale, we find as a matter of fact that to begin with, there were no lines in the palms, and then there appeared a single crease high up, such as we still find in the cebus. in the human hand carrara has recently made a study of these anomalies, distinguishing several types. in the first type there is a single transverse furrow. in the second type there are two furrows which, however, follow a definitely straight and horizontal direction and consequently are parallel. in a third type a single transverse furrow is associated with a very deep longitudinal furrow running from the carpus to the base of the index- and middle finger--a form that carrara has found only in criminals. nevertheless, many idiots exhibit a similar longitudinal furrow, due to a peculiar development of the palmar aponeurosis. [illustration: fig. .--imprint of human hand, showing papillary lines on palm and fingers.] the disposition of the furrows in the palm is not strictly symmetrical in the two hands; in fact, it is said in chiromancy that the right hand represents our natural character, and our left hand the character which we have acquired in the course of living. _papillary lines._--for some time past the papillary lines have been attracting the attention of students, in regard to their earliest appearance (in the zoological scale), their disposition and complications. they were already spoken of by malpighi and purkinje. alix has investigated the first appearance, in the animal scale, of these lines in the thoracic and pelvic limbs, and concludes: "the greater or lesser development of the papillary lines seems to bear a relation to the higher or lower position of the group to which the animal belongs, the perfection of its hand and the degree of its intelligence." morselli has studied the disposition of these lines in monkeys. we know that the papillary lines bear a relation to the exquisite delicacy of the sense of touch. the primates (higher apes) have on their finger-tips patterns that are far simpler than our own, resembling geometric figures, among which the principal ones are the triangle, the circle, and forms resembling the cross-section of an onion. in the normal human hand, on the contrary, it should be impossible to distinguish any closed figure. the resulting designs, which are very fine and complicated, are not uniform on all the fingers, but differ from finger to finger in proportion to the degree of evolution in a given hand. for example, there is a certain uniformity of design in cases of arrested mental development (imbeciles, epileptics, etc.). this variety of designs produces individual characteristics which are utilized in criminal anthropology for purposes of identification; hence, it is highly important to be able to take impressions of the papillary lines. professor sante de sanctis has quite recently invented a practical method of preserving papillary imprints by the aid of photography. footnotes: [ ] many authorities maintain that the normal relation between the index and ring finger is the reverse of that given above; abundant examples occur in favor of each of these views. chapter vi the skin and the pigments _pigmentation and cutaneous apparatus._--the outer covering of the body possesses an importance that is not only physiological, as a defense of the living animal, but biological and ethnical as well. in fact, the covering of the body frequently constitutes a characteristic of the species, and we may say that it constitutes to a large extent the æsthetics of coloration, supplementing that of form. in the covering of the body there are in general certain appendages which include the double purpose of defense and attraction, as, for example, the scales of fishes, the quills of the porcupine, the marvellous plumage of certain birds, the furry coat of the ermine. man, on the contrary, is almost completely deprived of any covering of the skin, and is conspicuous among all animals as the most defenseless and naked. consequently, the characteristics of the skin itself, quite apart from any covering, assume in man a great ethnic importance, especially as regards his pigmentation. in fact, it is well known that the fundamental classifications of the human races due to blumenbach and linnaeus are based upon the cutaneous pigmentation (white, black, yellow races, etc.). this is because it is a recognised fact that the pigmentation is biologically associated with race, and hence inalterable and hereditary, in the same way, for example, as the cephalic index; although we must not forget the modifications of pigment through phenomena due to adaptation to environment. this would lead us into scientific discussions which would here be out of place, since they have no immediate importance to us as educators. it may suffice to indicate that the distribution of racial colour should not be studied in relation to temperature and the direction of the sun's rays, but rather in connection with the history of human emigration; because, while as a matter of fact it is true that there are races at the equator which are darker and races near the poles which are fairer, it is also true that the esquimaux, for instance, are a dark race, while in lybia there are types of ashen blond, which is the palest blond in the whole range of human pigmentation. the pigment is distributed throughout the skin, the cutaneous appendages and the iris. in the skin, the distribution is not uniform, there being some regions of the body that have more, and some that have less; it is localised in the malpighian mucous layer, _i.e._, the granular, germinative layer of the epidermis, which rests directly upon the papillæ of the derma or corium. the derma, being abundantly supplied with blood-vessels, if seen by itself would appear red; but this color, due to the blood, is concealed to a greater or less extent by the epidermis, according as the latter contains more or less pigment. in the iris of the eye and in the piliferous appendages of the skin, among which we must, from the anthropological point of view, give chief place to the hair of the head, the pigment tends to accumulate, producing a constantly deeper shade. pigmentation constitutes an eminently descriptive characteristic, and consequently, in all attempts to determine it, must be subject to all manner of oscillations in judgment on the part of the observer; yet, because it also constitutes an ethnical characteristic, it deserves to be determined with precision. to this end we have in anthropology _chromatic charts_, corresponding not only to the various shades of the skin, but also to those of the piliferous appendages and of the iris. they consist of a graduated series of colour-tones extending over the entire possible range of the real colours of pigmentation in human beings; and every gradation in tone has a corresponding number. when we wish to use the charts practically, for the purpose of determining accurately the precise degree of pigmentation of a given person's hair, we need only to compare the tone of the hair with the colours of the chart, and, having identified the right one, to note the corresponding number. for instance, we may record: "pigmentation of hair = br. (_i.e._, no. in broca's table). or, again, if we are making a more complex study of all the children in a certain school, we may say: "the chestnut tones ( , , br.) constitute per cent., the remaining percentage consists of the blond shades ( , , br.). and in the case of the skin and the iris the procedure is analogous. by this means the investigation is objective and accurate. as a rule, the three pigmentations are determined in accordance with a reciprocal correspondence. the light colourings, as well as the dark, generally go together; _i.e._, a person having blond hair has also light eyes and a fair skin, and _vice versa_--in other words, the entire organism has either a greater or less accumulation of pigment in all its centres of pigmentation. furthermore, these anthropological characteristics are accompanied by others of equal ethnical importance, such as the stature, the cephalic index, etc.; and all of them combine to determine an ethnic type in all its complex morphology. in this, as in all other anthropological data, it is necessary to determine the limits between which it may oscillate. in the races of mankind, the colour of the skin ranges from a black brown to a gray brown, to brick red, to yellow, and to white; but among the population of italy, and among europeans in general (excepting certain localised groups, like the lapps, etc.), the variation is confined within the limits of the so-called white tones, that is, from brunette to a sallow white, a rosy white, or a florid red, with each of which tints there are special corresponding grades of pigmentation for hair and eyes, and also, on broad, general lines, different ethnical characteristics oscillating within our normal limits of stature and cephalic index. all of which may be summarised in the following table: -------------------------------------------------------------------- pigmentation | | ------------------------------------| stature | cephalic index skin | hair | iris | | --------------+----------+----------+--------------+---------------- brunette | black |black |medium or low |dolichocephalic, yellow-white }| light |chestnut |medium or high|brachycephalic pink-white }| chestnut| and blue.| | }| & blond.| | | florid red | red |gray |(outside of ethnical | | |characteristics: the red colour | | |of the hair is abnormal) -------------------------------------------------------------------- in which we have also included the abnormal colour of red hair, which plays a part in the actual colour scale of italian pigmentation: not, however, as a racial characteristic, but rather as a deviation. in addition to the oscillation of limits, we should also study in any given population the geographic distribution of a definite anthropological datum. this must also be done in the case of the pigments. among livi's splendid charts, there is one regarding the distribution of the brunette type in italy. from this it appears that the greatest prevalence of the brunette type is in sardinia and calabria, and that in general there is a prevalence of the dark types in the southern districts; while the lowest percentage of brunettes is found in piedmont, lombardy and venetia, and in general the number of brunettes is less in northern and central italy. the relative distribution of other ethnical data should be noted, such as the stature and the cephalic index, in the corresponding charts. by combining these results, we find that in the north of italy the prevalent type is blond, brachycephalic, and of tall stature; while in the south it is a dark, dolichocephalic type, of low stature. this is what i succeeded in showing in my work upon the women of latium, in which i sought to complete the details of these two ethnic types. in latium there is a prevalence of the dark, dolichocephalic type of low stature, a type that is still almost pure at castelli romani; this type is fine, slender and delicate in formation, and corresponds to sergi's mediterranean stock, to which are due the great egyptian and græco-roman civilisations. the other race is blond, tall and brachycephalic, and has only a scanty representation in southern latium, but is prevalent in an almost pure form in the neighborhood of orte. this type is much coarser and more massive in its formation, with a euriplastic skeleton, and corresponds to sergi's eurasian race that immigrated from the continent. * * * * * in general, we may say that it is foreordained in our biological destiny not only what form, but also what colouring we ought to attain in the course of our individual evolution, when we finally arrive at mature development. _the pigments during growth._--in the course of individual evolution, it is not only the form that becomes modified, but the pigments as well. we know, for example, that children are more blond than adults. transformations in regard to the pigments occur, however, more especially at the period of puberty. _pigmentation of the hair._--the colour of the hair becomes darker in the course of growth, changing from light chestnut to dark, from blond to light chestnut, from dark to black, from light auburn to fiery red. sometimes this darkening of the hair is accompanied by a change in tone (from blond to chestnut); at other times it consists in an _intensification_ of the original colour through an increase of pigment, which _fixes_ and _defines_ a colour that was previously indefinite. in children who were ill or ailing during their early years, in other words, weakly children (through denutrition, exhausting illnesses, overexertion), this phenomenon is imperfectly achieved, just as their growth as a whole is imperfectly achieved. the consequence is that these weaklings retain a paler and less decided pigmentation, which explains the fact that statistics show a greater proportion of frail, rachitic, tuberculous and mentally deficient persons among the blonds than among the brunettes; but it is among that class of blonds whose light colour represents an arrest of development (suppressed brunettes). social conditions also exert an influence upon the colour of the hair; a larger number of blonds and of lighter and more indefinite blonds are to be found in the schools for the poor than in those for the rich; also a larger number in country schools, where the poverty is greater, than in city schools. consequently we may conclude that there are two classes of blonds: that which is associated with a racial type, and that which is the consequence of arrested development. the first type has a vivid, uniform and decisive colour tone, accompanied by physiological robustness; the second is indefinite in colour tone and lacks uniformity--for example, the more exposed parts of the body are paler, and the hair varies in tone, some locks showing greater intensity of colour than others. this is especially noticeable in frail young girls from the country, where the sun discolours the surface layer of hair. in this connection it should be remembered that in those geographical regions where the rays of the sun are most nearly perpendicular, the pigments are, on the contrary, darker and that the skin becomes bronzed under the ardent kiss of the sun. but while the sun intensifies the tints that are strong with life, it destroys those that are weak and moribund, just as it does in the case of lifeless fabrics, which become bleached out by the action of the solar light. accordingly the pigments give us an important test for judging the robustness of the body; the blonds who are the product of arrested development of brown tones that have not been attained because of weakness, are frail in health and physical resistance, which is the basis of the popular belief that vigorous wet-nurses must be brunettes. as a matter of fact, in our own population of latium the brunette type prevails over the blond by a percentage of per cent.; and it may be that a blond roman wet-nurse is a weakly creature, just as a roman red wine is in all probability a white wine that has been coloured. * * * * * _pigmentation of the iris._--in regard to the coloration of the eyes, a change often takes place at puberty which is the opposite to that already noted in regard to the hair: _the eyes become more_ _uniformly light_; this happens in the majority of cases. in the coloration of the eyes it is necessary to distinguish two factors, the _uvea_ and the _pigment_. the iris has a fundamental and uniform light colour (due to the _uvea_) which oscillates, according to the individual, between blue and greenish. in this layer the pigment is deposited; it may be more or less intense in tone, shading from yellow to a dark maroon. when the pigment is wanting or is very scant, the fundamental blue or greenish colour of the uvea is apparent. in little children the pigment is distributed over the uvea in a manner by no means uniform, in little masses or spots that are usually of a mixed colour, so that the colour of the iris in infancy may be uncertain. at puberty a uniform distribution of the pigment already accumulated takes place; but rarely an intensification. hence the colour becomes more decided, but not deeper, as godin has recently succeeded in proving. _pigmentation of the skin._--in the colouring of the skin it is necessary to distinguish between that which is due to the blood and that which is due to the pigment. the blood, whose colour shows transparently through the layers of the epidermis, produces the various pinkish tones. the pigment, deposited in all races of mankind under the malpighian layer, produces the various brownish tones. the quantity of cutaneous pigment is a constant _racial_ factor--a hereditary factor. nevertheless, in certain individuals, it may be influenced by external agents (sunshine, heat) which tend to cause it to vary; such alterations produce _individual varieties_, and also variations in coloration of the skin between the covered parts of the body and those exposed to the sun or to atmospheric action in general; these variations, one and all, are not hereditary. at puberty the pigment is increased in certain portions of the body in connection with the generative functions which become established at that time. besides this, the general pigmentation is intensified; children are whiter than adults. _the skin and the hair during the evolution of the organism._--in the case of the hair also, the pigment does not remain a constant quantity throughout the different periods of life. grey hair is a normal sign of the decadence of an organism which has entered upon its involution. as is well known, the hair of the head, the beard, and in general all the piliferous appendages turn white, beginning in the regions where the hair is most abundant, _i.e._, on the head. in some men, however, the hairs of the beard are the first to turn grey; this is not perfectly normal, it is an _inferior_ manner of growing old. a german proverb says, that he who works much with the head (the thinking class) turns grey first in his hair, and that he who works much with his mouth (the hearty eater) turns grey first in his beard. the skin also gives manifest signs of decadence in the form of _wrinkles_. these serve up to a certain point as documentary evidence of the life which the individual has led and the _high_ or _low_ _type_ to which he belongs. just as in the case of grey hair, it is the class of thinkers who have the most wrinkles on their forehead; those who were given over to baser passions, such as called for labial rather than frontal expression, have on the contrary, more wrinkles around the mouth. we know how the peasant class has a veritable halo of wrinkles around the mouth. thinkers, on the contrary, have a single vertical furrow in the middle of the forehead: the line of thought. the transverse lines on the forehead are parallel and unconnected. faces with precocious wrinkles may be met with, even in children (denutrition, mental anxiety, dystrophic conditions); and conversely, there are faces which have been preserved unwrinkled up to an advanced age (especially in the case of women of the aristocracy, in whom it may happen that neither suffering nor mental effort has left its traces on their lives). _pigmentation of the hair._--this anthropological datum merits special consideration, since it plays so large a part in the æsthetics of the human body; and also preserves certain constant characteristics that serve to differentiate the races. in a study of the hair it is necessary to consider the _quantity_, the _disposition_ and the _form_. abundant, strong, sleek hair is in physiological relation to robustness of body. thin hair, on the contrary, or hair that is easily extirpated at the slightest pull, or dry hair, indicate insufficient nutrition, which may also be connected with dystrophic or pathological conditions (hereditary syphilis, cretinism). the normal disposition of the hair is characteristic, but it may assume a number of individual variations, as has recently been shown by dr. sergio sergi, son of our mutual instructor giuseppe sergi (sergio sergi, _sulla disposizione dei capelli intorno_ _alla fronte_--"the disposition of the hair upon the forehead"--acts of the società di antropologia, vol. , no. ). the hair, after forming a single whorl or _vortex_, corresponding to the _obelion_, flows over the forehead in either two or three divisions, the _lines of the parting_ (either lateral lines or a single central line) corresponding to the natural divisions of the flowing hair. across the forehead the hair ceases at the line of _the roots_, which crowns the face cornice-like; it is a sinuous line and rises at the sides in two points, corresponding to the natural partings of the hair. the hair stops normally at the boundary-line of the forehead, which together with the face forms the _visage_, leaving bare that part which in man corresponds to that portion of the frontal bone that rises erect above the orbital arches, _i.e._, the human portion of the forehead. the form of the hair is an ethnical characteristic. among our european populations the extreme forms are wanting, namely, _smooth_ hair (stiff, coarse, sparse hair peculiar to the red and yellow races, such as the american indian, esquinaux, samoyed and chinese), and _kinky_ hair (wooly hair, curling in fine, close spirals, such as is found in all its variations among the australians and the african negroes). consequently, we cannot use the words _smooth_ or _kinky_ for the purpose of qualifying the forms of hair found in our populations. we may, however, meet with _straight_ hair (not _smooth_), or _curly_ hair (not _kinky_). in addition to these forms, which among us represent the extremes, there are also two other forms--namely, _wavy_ hair (in ample curves) and _spiral_ hair (forming much narrower curves, the so-called ringlets). corresponding to these various qualities of hair, there are essential differences in the physical structure of the stem or shaft of the hair itself. if we make transverse sections of hair and examine them under the microscope, we find that the resulting geometrical figures are not all equal: the forms of the sections oscillate between rounded and ellipsoidal forms. furthermore, there are races in which we may find hair having a circular section (_smooth_ hair) and there are others in which we may find, on the contrary, an extremely elongated elliptical section (_kinky_ hair); in the first case the hair is a long, bristly cylinder; in the second, it is a ribbon with a tendency to roll up. [illustration: fig. .] in general, the straighter the hair is, the nearer its cross-section approaches a perfect circle; and the more curly it is, the nearer its cross-section approaches an elongated ellipse. the accompanying examples are drawn from the results of my own study of the women of latium; they represent five microscopic preparations. the figure in the middle (no. ) represents _straight_ hair; the two figures, no. and , are from curly hair; no. is wavy hair, and no. , close-curled hair, or ringlets. thus we see how widely the sections of hair differ according to the relative degree of curliness; and conversely, how identical the two sections, nos. and are, both of them taken from equally curly hair, although from different heads. straight hair has an almost circular section, although, slightly elliptical; this proves that really straight hair does not exist; in fact, even when it attains the maximum degree of smoothness, it retains a tendency to curl, which is shown, if in no other way, by the readiness with which it acquires a waviness, if habitually kept braided. there is no other section so perfectly circular as that of the red races, thus demonstrating the bristle-like rigidity of the smooth type of hair. wavy hair is that which, in the form of its section, approaches most nearly to straight hair; it is a slightly elongated ellipse (no. ). _anomalies relating to the pigment, the skin and the piliferous_ _appendages: pigment and skin._--there are certain congenital anomalies of the skin, occasionally to be met with, among which i make note of the following principal ones: _a. anomalies due to hypertrophy of the pigment and the corium:_ _ichthyosis._--the surface of the skin presents large, raised, irregular patches of various dark colours tending to maroon. _b. anomalies due to hypertrophy of the pigment_: . _nævi materni_: dark isolated spots (moles, birth-marks). . _freckles_: small, light brown spots, no larger than the head of a pin, scattered over the body, principally on the chest and face. . _melanosis_: the entire skin has a dark appearance, similar to that of the lower races of mankind, but especially on the face and hands. _c. anomalies due to atrophy of the pigment. albinism._--the skin presents an appearance of milky whiteness; even the hair is white, and the iris of the eye is red. _wrinkles._--the wrinkles of the face are deserving of attention, as being a detail of noteworthy importance. in regard to wrinkles, two points should be noted; a. precocity; b. anomalies. _a. precocity of wrinkles._--this is an indication of rapid involution, and is frequently met with in degenerates. idiotic children often show a flabby, shrivelled skin, overstrewn with a multitude of wrinkles that give them the aspect of little old men. _b. anomalies_: the following are to be specially noted: . transverse wrinkles on the nose, frequent in flat-nosed idiots. . wrinkles on the forehead; in normal persons these are interrupted and broken, they are not quite parallel, nor perfectly horizontal, nor very deep. in degenerates it is frequently noticed that the wrinkles on the forehead form one continuous horizontal line, extending completely across it; sometimes it is so deep that it seems to divide the forehead transversely into two parts. the various wrinkles, straight and unbroken, are quite parallel. . the zygomatic (cheek-bone) wrinkles and the wrinkles around the mouth are extremely deep in mentally defective adult and aged persons, and also in criminals, whose facial expression is especially active in the region of the nose and mouth, which constitute the least contemplative portion of the face. _anomalies of the hair.-- . quantity._--the quantity of hair may be excessive--_polytrichia_, a mark of degeneration easily to be met with among delinquents and prostitutes; or there may be a scarcity of hair--_atrichia_, among neuropaths, feeble-minded and cretins. sometimes, precocious baldness occurs, as a result of defective nutrition of the skin. [illustration: fig. .--showing various types of the line of roots of the hair.] _ . disposition._--we should note: a. the line of roots of the hair; b. the vortices. _a. line of roots._--this may be situated _too_ _far down_ upon the forehead, in which case it gives a false impression of a low forehead, or _too far back_, in which case it gives a false impression of a high forehead. note in addition the form of the line of roots; it ought to be, as we have already said, sinuous; sometimes, on the contrary, this line is straight, and forms a uniform curve, without sinuosity, across the forehead (imbeciles); at other times it descends in a peak at the middle point of the forehead. _b. vortices._--normally, there ought to be one central whorl or vortex over the sinciput. abnormally it may happen: that the vortex is misplaced--above, below or laterally; that the vortex is double; that there are also vortices along the frontal line of roots, or near this line. _ . form._--it sometimes happens that we find in degenerates forms of hair that are normal in inferior races, _i.e._, smooth hair, or kinky, wooly hair. _grey hair._--sometimes in the case of degenerates or those suffering from dystrophy, a precocious greyness occurs (grey-haired young men, children with white hair); or a partial congenital greyness (clumps of white hair). no form of grey hair, however, should be confused with albinism. _anomalies relating to the eyebrows and the beard. the eyebrows._--various anomalies may occur, in respect to the quantity of hair, and the form of the eyebrows. the hairs may be too abundant or too scanty. the form may be _oblique_, in degenerate mongoloid types. a notable anomaly consists in a union of the eyebrows, which meet and form an unbroken line across the region of the glabella. the "united eyebrows" constitute a grave sign of degeneration, and are popularly regarded in italy as a mark of the "_jettatura_" or "evil eye." _beard._--it may be very thick or very thin. too thick a beard is important, especially if the hairs are also abundant on the cheeks and even on the forehead, a characteristic that is frequently accompanied by an abundant growth of hair over the entire body (general hypertrichosis). a thin beard and moustache may constitute a normal characteristic in certain races, such as the kaffirs and other african negro tribes; as also in the chinese. in our own race, on the contrary, it is an abnormal characteristic, which has been interpreted as a sexual inversion (feminism) and is met with frequently among thieves. morphological analysis of certain organs (stigmata) in our morphological analysis of certain organs, we shall have occasion to enumerate a number of separate _malformations_, to the study of which criminal anthropology has devoted much attention. since many of these are met with in children, we will make a rapid enumeration of them, but must keep in mind that the ability to distinguish the abnormal form from the normal requires practice in the actual observation of subjects, while mere verbal descriptions may lead to false and confusing impressions. synoptic chart { position { rima palpebrarum / high type { or eye-slit \ low type eyes { size of eye-ball { macrophthalmia { microphthalmia { exophthalmia { sclerotic coat { { miosis { foramina (pupils) { mydriasis \ anisocoria { asymmetrics / position { \ form ears { { wildermuth's ear { { embryonal ear { malformations { morel's ear { handle-shaped ear { crumpled ear \ canine ear, etc. / leptorrhine { types { platyrrhine nose { \ mesorrhine { / flat { anomalies { crooked \ trilobate / simian mouth { lips { negroid mouth { \ hare-lip, etc. { / number buccal { { dimensions apparatus { teeth { form { { diastemata { \ irregular position { tongue / macroglossia { \ microglossia { palate / ogival (pointed arch) \ cleft _generalities._--passing on to a more minute study of form, we shall have to invade the field of human æsthetics. the proportions of the body are all determined, in respect to their harmony; and especially admirable is the harmony existing between the principal parts of the human physiognomy. artists know that in a regular face the length of the eye is equal to the interocular distance, or to the width of the nose, while the latter stands to the width of the mouth in a ratio of to . the length of the external ear remains, at all ages, exactly equal to the sum of the width of the two eyes. the eyes and the external ears grow but little, consequently they are relatively quite large in children. the nose and mouth, on the contrary, grow much more, and hence appear quite small in infancy. the growth of the face, like that of the whole body, is an evolution. among all the harmonies of the human body, that which can undergo the greatest numbers of alterations in the course of its evolution is the reciprocal harmony between the parts of the face. there are more children than grown persons with beautiful faces, because the efforts of adaptation to environment, or congenital biological causes, or pathological causes may easily alter the evolution of the face. we will take a rapid glance at the principal morphological anomalies likely to be encountered in connection with the face. all the malformations that we are about to enumerate are still included under the generic name of _stigmata_, and they may be _degenerative stigmata_ (congenital anomalies), _pathological stigmata_ (acquired through disease), or _stigmata of caste_ (caused by adaptation to environment). _anomalies relating to the eye._--the eyes may be too far apart (usually in broad, square faces of the mongolian type), or too near together (for the most part in long narrow faces, with a hooked nose). _rima palpebrarum (eye-slit)._--a straight, narrow slit (low type); an oblique slit (mongolian eye). _size of eye-ball._--the eye-ball may be too large (_macrophthalmia_) and hence often protrudes from the socket (_exophthalmia_); or it may be too small and deep-sunken (_microphthalmia_), or asymmetrical in size (one eye-ball larger than the other). _direction.--strabism_ (inward, outward, mono-lateral, bilateral). _sclerotic coat._--it may be injected with blood (delinquents), or partly covered over by an abnormal development of the semilunar _plica_ or fold of the palpebral conjunctiva. _pupillary foramina._--the two foramina of the pupils ought to be equal in size, circular and with a clearly marked contour. but under various conditions of age and ill health the size as well as the equality of the pupils may vary. as regards the size of the pupils: when the pupillary foramina are too small, this constitutes _miosis_--a condition frequently found in certain serious nervous diseases (locomotor ataxia, paralytic dementia), and in chronic opium poisoning; it is frequent in meningitis. in old persons miosis is a normal condition. when, on the contrary, the foramina of the pupils are too large, this constitutes _mydriasis_ (poisoning from atropine, intestinal diseases, etc.). in addition to these, there is _anisocoria_, when the two foramina are unequal (neurasthenia, chronic alcoholism, first stage of paralytic dementia). _form of the pupillary foramen._--it is not always round, sometimes it is oval (cat's-eye). frequently the form of the pupil is permanently altered as the result of a surgical operation. thus, the contour of the pupil may be broken instead of clear cut; in verifying this phenomenon it is important to inquire whether the subject has suffered from any progressive disease of the iris, such as might produce the same condition. _anomalies of the ear._--while in the case of animals the external ear is greatly developed, movable and detached from the cranium, in man it is reduced in size, immovable and attached to the cranium. two measurements are taken of the ear, the length and the width, and by means of the usual formula we obtain the index of the ear, which for the european race is about per cent. this index has a certain importance because we find that the proportion of width to length steadily increases as we descend through the inferior human races, down to the ape, and the same increase continues if we descend through the different grades of the simian order. this is to a large extent a result of the fact that, in the descent from man to ape, the lobule of the ear, which is essentially a human form, steadily diminishes, until it finally disappears. from this it may be concluded that there exist minute zoological differences other than generic between man and animals. as to malformations of the human ear, which may consist of shortness or absence of the lobule (formerly interpreted as a simian inheritance) they are to-day attributed to physiological causes. an abundant circulation produces an ample and _fleshy_ lobe; in oligohæmic constitutions (deficiency of blood) the lobe is delicate, pale and even atrophied. brachysceles often have a big lobe, and macrosceles, predisposed to phthisis, often have no lobe. in regard to the external ear we should observe: . _symmetry._--the ears should be symmetrical: a. in respect to their position. b. in respect to the more or less pronounced divergence of the ears from the cranium. c. in respect to their form. a. _position._--we must look for this form of asymmetry by observing the cranium according to the occipital norm. the asymmetry may be caused by one of the ears being placed _too high up_ or _too far back_ in respect to the other, or both asymmetries may occur together. b. the asymmetry due to divergence is observed from two norms, the facial and the occipital. c. asymmetry of _form_ is perceived by observing successively the two external ears according to the lateral norms; their morphological aspect should correspond on the two sides. . _anatomy and malformations of the external ear._--a preliminary anatomical note is necessary. the external ear consists of various parts, which were first studied and named by fabricius of acquapendente: . _the helix._--this is the outermost fold of the ear; it takes its origin above the auricular foramen in a root starting from the inside of the concha and rises upward, to descend again describing a regular helix; and it terminates in the _lobule_. at the point where the helix bends downward to form the descending branch, a small cartilaginous formation can be discerned by the sense of touch; this is the _darwinian tubercle_. . the _antihelix._--this originates in two roots under the ascending branch of the helix and terminates in the _antitragus_; it is a cartilaginous formation. . _the auricular fossa._--this divides the helix from the antihelix. . _the tragus._--this is a little triangular cartilaginous formation situated in front of the auricular foramen. between the tragus and the antitragus is the _intertragical fossa_. . _the concha._--this is the concavity, the internal fossa of the auricle, which leads to the channel of the internal ear. instances may be found of _malformation_ of each and all of these various parts of the ear, which may be excessively developed, or almost wanting, or altered in form. _the helix._--the over-folding of the cartilage may be wanting, leaving the margin of the auricle straight; this form is met with in the mongolian race, but among us it is a malformation (morel's ear). it is a more serious malformation if it occurs combined with excessive development of the darwinian tubercle; in this case the auricle assumes a really animal-like aspect ("canine ear"). the helix may originate within the concha from a root so prolonged that it divides the concha itself into two parts, an upper and a lower. the helix may be greatly developed and sharply divergent from the cranium--handle-shaped ear; or it may be bent at an angle at the upper outer margin--_embryonal_ _ear_. the _lobule_ is, as we have already said, an essentially human formation, and as though man were conscious of this fact and proud of it, it is customary in all races to adorn it with ear-rings, to such an extent that in india and in cochin-china the lobe is burdened with ornaments of great weight, in consequence of which it has continued to develop until it almost touches the shoulder. the lobule may be attached to the cheek (sessile lobule). the antihelix may be so developed as to rise in front of the helix--_wildermuth's_ _ear_. another important malformation connected with the ear, which is commonly found in idiots, is a prolongation and restriction of the intertragical fossa into a fissure (_fissura intertragica_). the tragus ought normally to exceed the antitragus in dimensions. _anomalies of the nose._--the nose presents very numerous individual varieties, even among normal individuals. in the european race we distinguish the straight nose (italian), the aquiline, the retroussé (french), the sinuous, etc. but in all these forms one characteristic remains more or less constant: the aperture of the nostrils is long and narrow, or rather its length exceeds its width (the nostrils are thin and mobile, the skeleton of the nose projects above the plane of the face). in the other races of mankind, on the contrary, two other types of nose are distinguished in respect to this characteristic: . the aperture of the nostrils is round (the nostrils themselves are fleshy, the base of the nose somewhat flattened)--_mesorrhine nose_, characteristic of the mongolian race, and found repeatedly in mongoloid idiots; . the aperture of the nostrils is broadened, _i.e._, the width exceeds the length (the nose is flattened and almost level at the base, and furrowed for the most part with transverse wrinkles, the nostrils are exceedingly fleshy and immobile)--_platyrrhine nose_, peculiar to the african and australian races. corresponding to the external form of the nose there is also a difference in the skeleton in relation to the _piriform aperture_ and the naso-labial duct; the external form of the nose is really dependent upon the skeleton consequently, the above-mentioned nomenclature applies also to the piriform aperture of the cranium (see _skeleton of the face_). the flat nose is found as a malformation in idiots, and is usually accompanied by prognathism. other important malformations relating to the nose are the development of a tubercle at the tip--_trilobate nose_, frequent in _low types of idiots_; and the _tip of the_ _note bent sideways_ (usually toward the left); this form occurs in leptorrhine noses and is considered to be a stigma of criminality (thieves). _anomalies relating to the buccal apparatus._--malformations occur in relation to the lips, the teeth, the tongue and the palate. _the lips._--the european type of lips is well known both as regards their proportions and their lines of contour which determine the distinctive form. sometimes this graceful modeling is wanting; the contour of the lips is formed of almost horizontal lines, the oral aperture is very wide, and has the appearance, especially when laughing, of being edged by a perfectly uniform, narrow line, thus resembling the mouth of a monkey. at other times we meet with thick, fleshy lips, slightly pendulous, like those of the black races, especially the hottentots and australians; it is a malformation frequent among idiots, and occurs together with prognathism and the flattened nose. another notable form is that in which the lips are not only thick and fleshy, but the internal tissues are so abnormally developed that they protrude from the oral orifice in a slight prolapsus; this form of lips is quite characteristic of myxedematous idiots. finally, we may meet with the so-called hare-lip, or lip divided in the middle, signifying an arrest of embryonal development and frequently accompanied by a cleft palate and a double uvula (see _development of the face_). _the teeth._--there is nothing new to tell of the characteristic forms of the teeth--the incisors, the canines, the premolars, and the molars--nor of their regular placement in a single row corresponding to the curve of the maxilla and the mandible. i shall therefore merely give the two dental formulæ corresponding to the two dentitions of man. first dentition, or "milk teeth": -- -- -- -- -- -- = teeth incisors canines premolars second or final dentition: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- = teeth incisors canines premolar molars in relation to the teeth there are a great number of anomalies which may occur, in number, in position, in size and form, and these anomalies are so frequent that we may say the _smile_ stigmatizes the degenerate. frequently it is the most evident stigma of the whole face; so much so that this same smile which adds so much charm to the normal human countenance becomes ugly and repulsive in degenerates. _anomalies in number of teeth._--sometimes there are more than teeth, owing to the presence of certain _supernumerary teeth_; these will be found to occur most frequently in the case of the canines, next in that of the incisors, and lastly in that of the premolars. [illustration: fig. .--mongolian eye.] [illustration: fig. .--embryonal ear.] [illustration: fig. .--decayed teeth.] [illustration: fig. .--worn-down teeth.] [illustration: fig. .--example of a worn-down tooth.] [illustration: fig. .--handle-shaped ears.] sometimes the number of teeth is less than , in which case it is necessary to distinguish two cases of very different significance: first, the last molars ("wisdom teeth") may be wanting; secondly, some of the other teeth may be wanting (incisors, canines, or premolars). the last molar is of no use whatever to man, because it does not enter into the service of mastication, and it is tending to disappear. we may even predict that the day is coming when mankind will no longer have wisdom teeth, and the human dental formula will be as follows: -- -- -- -- ---- ---- ---- ---- = teeth -- -- -- -- incisors canines premolar molars the absence of useful teeth, on the contrary, is a grave sign of degeneration, and one which leaves wide spaces between two adjacent teeth (wide diastemata). the _diastema_, or space left between adjacent teeth, is of great importance. there are various causes for this stigma. besides the one already mentioned, due to congenital absence of a tooth (broad diastema), another recognized cause is an _anomalous placing_ of the teeth (narrow diastema). the significance of this is not always the same: for example, the diastema between two upper incisors indicates a very slight anomaly of embryonal development, and, some people think, gives a sympathetic charm to the smile. on the contrary, a diastema occurring at the side of a canine tooth signifies a congenital malformation. at other times such anomalous spaces may be due to the fact that the teeth have remained small, or happen to have worn away laterally and present an almost filiform or thread-like aspect (diastemata due to microdontia resulting from syphilis or various dystrophic conditions). the _form_ of the teeth demands consideration next in order of importance. sometimes we encounter cases of teeth that are all nearly alike in form; they have lost that morphological differentiation which already existed in the anthropoid apes; there is an insensible transition from the incisors, all exactly equal in form and dimensions, to the premolars, which also present the same appearance, passing over a tooth which it would be difficult to define either as incisor or premolar (the canine tooth). usually in such uniform dentition there are slight diastemata. this condition, however, is not frequently met with; it is much more usual to find this anomaly occurring only in part; the incisor teeth are all equal, or else the canine resembles an incisor or a premolar. in combination with this characteristic, it often happens that there is a diastema next to the canine. in regard to size, the teeth may be too large, _macrodontia_, or too small, _microdontia_. microdontia may be due to a true and actual arrest of development of the teeth (white teeth, small and narrow, often all very much alike), or to a kind of _corrosion_ of the teeth due to congenital dystrophism (syphilis). in this case the teeth are ground down and _worn away_ either horizontally or laterally (filiform teeth), or again the cutting edge of the tooth is not horizontal in the two upper canines, but oblique, so that the teeth have the appearance of being broken. often the teeth are furrowed transversely with yellow streaks corresponding to a lack of development of the enamel. finally, the teeth may present various anomalies of position, which may be grouped under three heads: a. narrow teeth, so placed as to leave slight intervals between them. b. isolated teeth, planted outside the common line, or else transversely instead of horizontally. c. the dentition does not follow the regular curved line, but shows various sinuosities, usually bending in at the point corresponding to the canine tooth. _the tongue._--the tongue may present morphological anomalies of great importance, since they are the cause of many defects of speech. sometimes the tongue is too big--_macroglossia_, in which case it cannot move freely within the buccal cavity and even finds difficulty in remaining within the mouth, but projects between the lips, contributing in no small measure to giving the face an imbecile expression. at other times it is too small--_microglossia_. a deficient or excessive development of the lingual frenulum may also interfere with the movements of the tongue (tongue-tie). _the palate._--it is a frequent experience to meet with idiots having an _ogival_ or gothic-arched palate, with the vault much curved and narrow, such as is met with in animals and similar in section to a gothic window. a special bony ridge or crest may also occur along the _raphe_ or median line. lastly, the palatine vault may be divided in two (cleft palate), a form frequently accompanied by a double uvula; this stigma may also be one of the causes of defective speech, so frequently met with in deficient children. the palate normally presents a diversity of forms: narrow and high, or broad and low--forms associated with the general type of head (dolichocephalic, high palate; brachycephalic, low palate) and especially with the type of face, as we have already seen in treating of the latter. =importance of the study of morphology.=--the study of morphology is of high importance in biology, and even more so in anthropology. and since the organism is a harmonic whole, in which the parts and their functions are closely interrelated, any external anomaly leads us to assume that there are corresponding anomalies of the internal organs, and hence, functional anomalies; hence also, in man, psychic anomalies. and conversely, if perfection of form has been attained, it leads us to assume that the entire organism is perfect in its internal organs as well, and in its complex physical and psychic functional action. "assure yourselves and one another," says lelut in his _cadre_ _de philosophie et de l'homme_, "that wherever you see a change in the body, you will have to search for a corresponding change in the intelligence. assure yourselves that you will have to establish this correlation throughout the entire scale, from the lowest degradations of imbecility to the highest achievement of genius, from the clearest and strongest mentality to that which is most profoundly and irremediably disordered." this correlation between the morphological and the psychic personality must be sought throughout the entire scale of human variations, from the genius to the most degraded of imbeciles, from the strongest and most upright character to that which is most profoundly perturbed. hence morphology constitutes a fundamental part in the study of human personality. the principle of this aforesaid correlation was at first exemplified in the field of biological science only by abnormal persons, whose noticeable deviations from the customary limits, both in the external form of the body and in their psychic manifestations, gave proof of the phenomenon by exaggerating it. in his classic work, _traité des dégénérescences_, morel asserts that "the study of physical man cannot be isolated from the study of moral man." but in our own day, the theory has been marvellously illuminated and popularised by cesare lombroso, and precisely on its pathological side. the lombrosian theories were so rapidly popularised even before they were fully matured, that it seemed as though the spirit of the times was ripe to receive them, and had awakened to greet the new order of thought, after having long slumbered over the old; thus they wrought a revolution in the field of law and morality, and even laid a foundation for the erection of a new pedagogy. or to state it better, they again brought to light certain principles of truth that had been understood even from the most ancient times. for the principles proclaimed by lombroso are in their general line certainly nothing new nor suddenly derived from a study of modern civilization; the belief that a physical stigma represents a moral stigma is exceedingly ancient. in the bible we find solomon saying: we may read the heart in the face. homer describes the malignant thyrsites as having a narrow forehead and ferret-like eyes. caesar feared only those conspirators who were pale and lean. in the middle ages there was a law which held that in case of doubt as to which of two men was guilty, the uglier looking one should be hanged. and this same principle has been established from time immemorial in the current wisdom of the people, as is demonstrated by proverbs, which are like laws graven upon stone, and have been gathered experimentally through the repeated observation of successive generations. the proverbs tell us of the physical stigmata of the wicked: "beware of those who bear the mark of god;" "the bristles prove the brute." even in art, degenerative stigmata are introduced to represent the malevolent. the satyrs are represented as being of the microcephalic type. the devil was formerly represented as having goat's feet and a tail; michelangelo pictures him with a narrow, receding forehead and pointed ears. to-day all this is shown to be true. the truth, and sometimes the intuitive semblances of truth in their relation to outward phenomena, have the most ancient and diffuse history, because, since they always existed, they were analogously interpreted by the intelligence of man. and this is proved by the glorious discoveries of positive science, which we may trace back to far distant foreshadowings; what was in danger of being lost has been born again with an overpowering fertility. the great theories of darwin regarding evolution were already perceived by herodotus. the cycle of indestructible material, proclaimed by greek philosophy, formed the palpitating heart of the teachings of giordano bruno; and in our day it formed the fascinating halo of materialism which illuminated the face of my own teacher, jakob moleschott. now, the fact that it is not new demonstrates that the lombrosian theory explains phenomena which really exist, since they came under the observation of man from the earliest times. and the fact that this theory has become popularised tells us that the times were ripe to fertilise its renovating principles into practical action. for where is it that we find the triumphant success of science? the attainment of its most profound purposes? we find it wherever science achieves something that is practical and useful for all mankind. because, so long as anything is merely perceived or looked into, or even deeply studied, it never attains the apogee of its scientific glory and dignity unless it finds some means of benefiting and ameliorating humanity. lombroso grasps a principle and turns it into a benefit; and he sends it broadcast throughout human society, to purify society of the spirit of personal vengeance. garibaldi redeems an oppressed people and saves the oppressors from the burden of being unjust and tyrannical, through a work of humanity which has no national boundary; lombroso, by means of his new scientific and moral principle, effects a world-wide redemption of a despised and outcast class, and saves us from the iniquitous burden of social vengeance. two great deeds of heroism, one of the heart and the other of the brain; two great works of redemption. nevertheless, the principle of a morphological and psychic relationship was not wholly wanting in examples of practical application. not, however, in the case of man; but in regard to animals it had been utilised for a long time back. for instance, when a horse cannot be broken by ordinary methods, the veterinary is called in, and he either discovers some ailment and prescribes a treatment, or else be studies the conformation of the forehead and the nasal bones, and if they are abnormal, he declares that the horse is absolutely untameable. in india the natives are afraid of the solitary elephant with a narrow forehead, for they know that he is ferocious. to-day we know that many children who can be taught nothing in the public schools are really sick children, in whom anomalies of character coincide with morphological anomalies; and we are beginning to replace the old custom of blind and brutal punishment with a personal interest that leads us to invoke the aid of the physician and to establish special schools for the mentally deficient. we may say that this new and reforming principle of pedagogics and the school, which transforms punishment into medical care and creates special educational institutions which are at the same time sanatoriums, constitutes the pedagogical application of the lombrosian theories and accomplishes that social task which was foreordained to emanate from the lofty brain of lombroso. in its special application to pedagogics, anthropology aids in the difficult task by its diagnosis between the _normal_ and the _abnormal_ child. but the contribution of anthropology to pedagogics is vastly wider than this. in this restricted sense of diagnosis, it accomplishes, to be sure, a complete reform of the penal sciences, but it is very far from doing like service to the science of pedagogy. scientific pedagogy must concern itself before all and above all, with _normal_ individuals, in order to protect them in their development under the guidance of biological laws, and to aid each pupil to adapt himself to his social environment, _i.e._, to direct him to that form of employment which is best suited to his individual temperament and tendencies. in this new task, anthropology not only studies the individual, but also gives real and personal contributions to the solution of many pedagogic problems; among others, that relating to study after school hours; to rewards and punishments; to physical training, elocution, etc.; while, by regarding the children as the _effects_ of biological and social causes, it establishes new and enlightening standards of morality and justice, and reveals to educators responsibilities not hitherto conceived. it will suffice to call to mind the fact that the most studious children, and therefore those who receive the greatest amount of praise and prizes, show a deficiency in weight, in chest development, and in muscular force; consequently, a physiological impoverishment the blame for which must be attributed to an ignorance of hygiene and of anthropology, such as still persists throughout the whole field of pedagogy; an ignorance which leads the teacher to encourage by his praises the impoverishment of the best forces that reveal themselves in the school (the most intelligent and studious children) in an age when social industries, multiplied and grown to a giant size, demand the cooperation of a vigorous race, and to inspire by rewards and praise a sentiment of superiority and of vanity in an age that is dominated by the sentiment of universal equality and brotherhood. the teacher ought, on the contrary, to appoint himself the defender of the race, and to demand, among his other rights, that of making such social reforms and such reforms in the school and in pedagogies as may be necessary to the accomplishment of his purpose, which is the attainment of the highest degree of civilisation and of prosperity. but this subject would lead us to repeat principles on which we have already insisted; it will suffice to reassert that the tendency of anthropology is undoubtedly toward a reform in the school and the opening of a new era in pedagogy. _the significance of the so-called physical stigmata of degeneration._--we have studied so many congenital malformations and pathological deformations that a synthetic statement of their significance becomes necessary. all the more so, because certain principles in this connection, already widely circulated among the general public, have now been rejected by science. one of these principles refers to the so-called _atavism_ and formed part of the original lombrosian doctrines: but blessed is the scientist who is obliged to correct himself, for that means that his brain is still fertile. certain morphological anomalies call to mind forms of the inferior races and species, from which, according to the original darwinian doctrine of evolution, the human species had descended in a direct line: hence the term "_atavistic survival_." it will suffice to mention the receding forehead that calls to mind the neanderthal cranium, the long simian arms, the prognathism distinctive of the inferior human races and of animals, microcephaly which suggests the crania of anthropoid apes, the mongoloid eyes and protruding cheek-bones, which recall the yellow races; the "canine" ear, the wooly or smooth hair, polytrichia, the dark skin, etc. now, all this assemblage of stigmata which went under the name of _atavistic_, or _absolute retrogression_, were held to be in almost direct relation to _degeneration_. degeneration was supposed to revive in us forms that had been superseded in the course of evolution, and hence also psychic states that had also been superseded in the history of the human race; it is well known that, according to lombroso, a criminal might be defined as a savage, a barbarian born among us, yet still having within him his particular instincts of theft and slaughter. to-day, since the original interpretation of the darwinian theory has been discarded, with it have fallen all those deductions which medicine and sociology were in too great haste to draw, in order to make scientific application of them. in conclusion, the principle remains firmly established of a correlation between physical and psychic anomalies, which forms the very essence of the lombrosian theory. what science wishes to-day to correct is the _atavistic_ interpretation of stigmata and of types of degenerates. this takes nothing away from the brilliant record of lombroso, who interpreted biological and pathological phenomena in the selfsame light that shed glory upon ernest haeckel, namely, the darwinian theory. in the first enthusiasm of that luminous flame which had wrought a reawakening of thought throughout all europe and the civilised world lombroso tried to explain _according to the letter_ what could properly be explained only according to the spirit; that is to say, in accordance with a very broad principle (evolution and the successive formation of species) which had been divined but not yet demonstrated. we ought to have recourse, in interpreting congenital (degenerative) malformations to explanations analogous to those in the case of acquired deformations, _i.e._, to pathological explanations. we find ourselves in all these cases in the presence of pathological phenomena affecting either the _species or the individual_. on the strength of analogies shown by certain malformations, the tendency to-day is to consider them as "_arrests of development_" or phenomena of _infantilism_, such, for example, as macrocephaly, macroscelia, nipples or shoulders placed too high, nose tending to flatness, handle-shaped ears, etc.--a whole series of stigmata which go by the name of _stigmata of relative retrogression_. meanwhile there are other malformations which merely deviate from the normal form (morselli's "simple deviation"), and they may deviate either in the way of an excess (hyperplasia), or of a deficiency (hypoplasia), as, for example, macroglossia, microdontia, macro- and microphthalmia, etc.; or they may deviate in a true and actual sense (paraplasms), as, for example, in the various asymmetries (plagiocephaly, plagioprosopy, etc.). this whole group of above-mentioned stigmata, which seem to have a congenital origin, or, rather, to be connected in a general way with growth itself, are called _malformations_, to distinguish them from _deformations_, which evidently have an acquired origin, especially from pathological causes, such, for instance, as rachitis and forms of paralysis which arrest the development of a limb, etc., resulting in functional and morphological asymmetry. distribution of malformations malformations (associated, as we have said, with individual development) may be found in all individuals who, through various causes (degeneration, disease, denutrition, defects of adaptment), have undergone any alteration in development. and, since we have not yet acquired a recognised standard of _morality_ _of generation_, and the social environment, including the school, weighs heavily upon humanity in the plastic state, who is there without malformation? complete normality is a _desideratum_, an ideal toward which we are progressing, and, we might add, it is the battle-flag of the teacher. accordingly, all men have malformations. it is interesting to see how they are affected by variations in age and social condition, and how they are distributed among normal persons and degenerates, in order to measure the extent of their contribution to the diagnosis between normal and abnormal man. [illustration: fig. .--percentage of stigmata among the peasantry, the labouring class and the wealthy class, for children and adults.] on the basis of notes taken from an important work by rossi,[ ] i have drawn up the following table, relating to malformations based upon a comparative study of children and adults, grouped under three different social conditions--peasants, city labourers and persons of the wealthy class. at the further extremity of the horizontal lines will be found the figures recording the number of times that any one anomaly occurs in a hundred instances. the other indications are explained in the figure itself. from this it is apparent that anomalies of the cranium are much more rare than those of the face, both in children and in adults. but in children the anomalies of the cranium (and this includes the cases of plagiocephaly), are much more frequent than in adults in all social classes; this shows that in the course of growth the malformations of the cranium have to a great extent disappeared. in regard to the face, on the contrary, or, at least, in regard to certain malformations of the face, the opposite holds good; the mandible and the zygomata, or, in general, that part of the face which grows rapidly during the period of puberty, show more anomalies in the case of adults than in the case of children. this shows us that a face which is still beautiful in childhood may acquire malformations in successive periods of growth. in simpler words, the facts may be expressed as follows: that the cranium _corrects_ itself and the face _spoils_ itself in the course of growth. but in the case of facial asymmetries the same thing occurs that we have already seen in regard to plagiocephaly; it is more frequent in children, hence asymmetries are infantile stigmata. [illustration: fig. .--two small examples of morel's and wildermuth's ear.] some important characteristics are to be noted regarding the handle-shaped ear; all children have ears proportionally larger than those of adults and the _handle-shaped_ form is very frequent in normal children, regardless of the social condition to which they belong. this malformation _corrects_ _itself_ in the course of growth, being far less frequent in adults of the wealthy class and even among the labouring classes; but among the peasantry it remains permanently, almost as though it were a _class stigma_. although the mechanical theories are in disrepute as an interpretation of morphological phenomena, nevertheless it is worth while to note the singular frequency of this stigma in peasants, in connection with the habit of straining the ear to catch the faintest sounds, distant voices, echoes, etc., for which the _senses_ of peasants are extremely acute. the greater frequency of prominent superciliary arches in adult peasants and labourers may also be considered in relation to a defective cerebral development, connected, perhaps, with illiteracy, etc.; furthermore, the superciliary arches, together with a more than normal development of the jaw bones, are stigmata which usually occur together as determining factors of an _inferior_ _morphological type_. the fact also that an excessive development of the mandible, unlike other malformations, is found with the same frequency among adults of the peasantry and the labouring class, gives to this anomaly the significance of a _stigma of the poorer_ _classes_. it should be remembered that children of inferior intelligence have a deeper mandible. what is quite interesting to know, in addition to the frequency of stigmata at various ages and in the various social conditions, is the _number_ of them that may coexist in the same individual. it was already asserted by lombroso that a single undoubted malformation was not enough to prove degeneracy, but that it depended upon the number of stigmata existing simultaneously in the same individual. now, confining our attention to _normal individuals_, we find, according to rossi, that the individual number is less among the well-to-do than among the poor; and that it is less among the peasantry than among the working class. the working class in the cities are accordingly in the worst condition of physical development. furthermore, children always show a greater number of individual malformations than adults. individual number of morphological anomalies +---------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | | adults: to every | children: to every | |number of| individuals | individuals | +anomalies+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ | |labourers|peasants|well-to-do|labourers|peasants|well-to-do| +---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ | ... | | | | ... | ... | | +---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ | - | | | | | | | +---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ | - | | | | | | | +---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ | - | | ... | ... | | | | +---------+---------+--------+----------+---------+--------+----------+ from which it appears that only per cent. of the labouring class are without malformations, while the peasantry and the well-to-do have from to per cent. among normal adults there is a preponderance of persons having - stigmata; while those having - stigmata are more frequent than those without any at all. excepting for a few labourers, there are no normal persons with - malformations; in fact, this is the number of coexisting malformations that is held to be the _test of degeneration_, the sign of an abnormal morphological individuality. among children, on the contrary, this individual number of malformations ( - ) occurs, _even in the wealthy classes_, so that the child and the adult cannot be judged by the same standards. the prevailing number of stigmata among children is - . therefore, in the course of growth, many of these malformations are eliminated. it should be noted that children without malformations are found only among the prosperous classes and in a rather small percentage ( per cent.). accordingly, social conditions bring about a difference not only in robustness, stature, etc., but also in the degree of beauty which the individual is likely to attain. the social ideal of the establishment of justice for all mankind is consequently at the same time a _moral_ and _æsthetic_ ideal. another parallel that it is interesting to draw is that between the most unfortunate social class (the working class) and the degenerates. we have seen that the working class has the highest individual number of stigmata. rossi compares them with two other categories of persons who are strongly suspected of being degenerates, or who at least must include a notable proportion of degenerates among their number, namely, _beggars_, as regards the adults, and _orphans_, as regards the children. these classes differ in the general frequency of malformations; in fact, the chronic anomalies, taken collectively, give per cent. for the labouring class and per cent. for beggars. but the difference becomes strikingly apparent when we come to consider the _individual number_ of stigmata. +---------+---------------------+-------------------+ |anomalies|labourers (per cent.)|beggars (per cent.)| +---------+---------------------+-------------------+ | - | | | +---------+---------------------+-------------------+ | - | | . | +---------+---------------------+-------------------+ and still greater is the difference between the children of labourers and the orphan children. frequency of anomalies in children (percentage) anomalies labouring class, orphans, degeneration pauperism cranial anomalies in general forehead very low . alveolar prognathism enlarged mandible plagiocephaly . prominent cheek-bones . facial asymmetry . anomalies of teeth . we see therefore that _degeneration_ exerts a most notable influence upon morphological anomalies; it is far more serious than external (social) conditions. dr. ales hrdlicka, studying the distribution of malformations and deformations among poor children who were inmates of a large new york orphan asylum ( males and females) distinguishes the morphological anomalies into three categories: those that are congenital (degeneration); those acquired through pathological causes (diseases), and those acquired through the circumstances of social adaptment, or, as the author expresses it, through _habit_. and to these he adds still another category of stigmata the causes of which remain uncertain. if we examine the following extremely interesting table, we see at once that in the case of children the anomalies of form are associated with _degeneration_ and with _disease_, because the anomalies _acquired_ individually by the child as the result of personal habits are comparatively so few in number as to be quite negligible, and all of them are exclusively in reference to the trunk; in other words, a result of the position assumed on school benches. as between degeneration and disease, the proportion of anomalies caused by the former is considerably more than double. hence, the great majority of malformations have their origin, so to speak, _outside of the individual_, the responsibility resting on the parents. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- organs | anomalies in +-------------------------------+------------------------------- regard to | males | females which +-------+-------+--------+------+-------+-------+--------+------ the |congen-|patho- |acquired|cause |congen-|patho- |acquired|cause anomalies | ital |logical|through |uncer-| ital |logical|through |uncer- occur | | |habit | tain | | |habit | tain ------------+-------+-------+--------+------+-------+-------+--------+------ head | | | | | | | | periosteum | | | | | | | | hair | | | | | | | | forehead | | | | | | | | face | | | | | | | | eyes | | | | | | | | ears | | | | | | | | teeth | | | | | | | | gums | | | | | | | | palate | | | | | | | | uvula | | | | | | | | body (bust) | | | | | | | | limbs | | | | | | | | genital | | | | | | | | organs | | | | | | | | ------------+-------+-------+--------+------+-------+-------+--------+------ totals | | | | | | | | percentage| | | | | | | | the greatest number of anomalies due to degeneration occur in connection with the _ear_, and the _genital organs_, and next in order come those of the _palate_, the _teeth_ and the _limbs_. the maximum number of anomalies due to _pathological causes_ are in connection with the _head_, and principally with the _face_; after that, with the _palate_, and then with the _bust_. the anomalies most difficult to diagnose seem to be those relating to the gums, the palate and the uvula, in regard to which it is not easy to determine whether they are due to degeneration or to disease. in order that we may have a clear understanding regarding _malformations_, it is well to insist upon still another point: malformation does not signify _deviation_ from a type of ideal beauty, but from _normality_. now, there are normal forms which are very far from beautiful and which are associated with race. for instance, prognathism, ultra-dolichocephaly, a certain degree of flat-foot, prominent cheek-bones, the mongolian eye, etc., are all of them characteristics which are regarded by us as the opposite of beautiful, but they are normal in certain races (therefore practical experience is indispensable). these principles which, when thus announced, are perfectly clear, must be extended far enough to include that sum total of individuals whom we are in the habit of calling _our race_. that we are hybrids, still showing more or less trace of the racial stocks which originally concurred in our formation, is well known, but not clearly enough. the _primitive races_ are more or less evident in different centres of population; for instance, in the large and promiscuous cities, hybridism tends more or less completely, to _mask_ the _types_ of race, producing individual uniformity through an intermixture of characteristics that renders all the people very much alike (civilised races). these are the individuals who form the majority of the population, and whom we are in the habit of regarding as being _normally formed_. but when we get away from the big centres it may happen, and indeed does happen, that the primitive racial forms or types become more apparent; thus, for example, i found in latium almost pure racial types at castelli romani (dolichocephalics, brunette type, short stature), and at orte (brachycephalics, blond type, tall stature); the nuclei of population at castelli were especially pure. now, as a result of a highly particularised series of observations i found _normal forms that were not_ _beautiful_ in each of these races; thus, for example, in the brunette race, while the face is extremely beautiful and delicate, the hands are coarse, the feet show a tendency toward flat-foot, the breasts are pear-shaped, pendent and abundantly hairy; in the blond type, on the contrary, while the facial lineaments are coarse and quite imperfect, the hands, feet and breasts are marvellously beautiful. accordingly, the marks of beauty are distributed in nature among the _different_ _races_; there is no race in existence that is wholly beautiful, just as there is no individual in existence who is perfect in all his parts. furthermore, since there is for every separate characteristic a long series of individual variations, both _above_ and _below_ (see chapters on _biometry_ and _statistical methodology_), it is very easy to assume that we are on the track of a malformation, when it is really a matter of racial characteristic. and this is all the more likely to constitute a source of error, because the school of lombroso promulgated the morphological doctrine that a degenerate sometimes shows an _exaggeration_ of ethnical characteristics. thus, for example, we meet with ultra-brachycephalics and ultra-dolichocephalics among the criminal classes. let us suppose that a teacher who has made a study of anthropology receives an appointment in one or another of the castelli romani. among the _normal_ individuals studied by me, certain ones showed a cephalic index _of_ . now, a teacher accustomed to _examine_ the crania of city children and to find that the limits range more or less closely around mesaticephaly, would be led to assume that he was in the presence of an _abnormal_ individual. now, in the places where morphological characteristics of race are most persistent, the _social forms_ are primitive, and so also are the sentiments, the customs and the _ethical level_, because _purity of race_ means an absence of hybridism, _i.e._, an absence of intimate communication with human society evolving in the flood-tide of civilisation. consequently, in addition to the above-mentioned characteristic (ultra-dolichocephaly), the individual would probably show an intellectual inferiority, an inferiority of the ethical tense, etc., and this would serve to strengthen the teacher's first impression. but the normal _limits of growth_ for a given age, the absence of real and actual malformations (for instance, in this case there is probability of facial beauty, etc.), would cause him very quickly to correct his first judgment with a more thoughtful diagnosis. therefore a study of local ethnical characteristics would be very useful as a basis for pedagogical anthropology, as i have tried to show in one of my works (_importanza della etnologia_ _regionale nell'antropologia pedagogica_, "the importance of regional ethnology in pedagogical anthropology"). and this also holds good for the interpretation of true malformations. we have hitherto been guided in our observation of so-called stigmata by analytical criteria, that is, we have been content with determining the single or manifold malformations in the individual without troubling ourselves to determine their _morphological genesis_ or their _genesis of combination_. for example, the _ogival palate_ is a well-known anomaly of form, but in all probability it will occur in an individual whose family has the _high and narrow_ _palate_ that is met with, for instance, as the normal type among the dolichocephalics of latium; the same may be said in regard to flat-foot, etc. multifold diastemata and macrodontia will, on the contrary, be more easily met with in families whose palate is wide and low (brachycephalics). and just as certain normal forms or characteristics are found in combination in a single individual (for instance, brachycephaly, fair hair, tall stature, etc.), so it is also in the case of stigmata, which will be found occurring together in one individual, not _by_ _chance_, but according to the laws of morphological combination, and probably as an _exaggeration_ of (unlovely) characteristics which belong, as normal forms, to the family or race. there are already a number of authorities on neuropathology, de sanctis among others, who have noted that there is an _ugly family type_ which sometimes reproduces itself in a sickly member of the family, in such a way as to exaggerate pathologically the unlovely but normal characteristics of the other members, and furthermore, that an exaggeration of unlovely characteristics may increase from generation to generation, accompanied by a disintegration of the psychic personality. consequently, a knowledge of the morphological characteristics which in all probability belong to the races from which the subjects to be examined are derived, has a number of important aspects. the literature of anthropology is certainly not rich in _racial_ studies, consequently, i feel that it will not be unprofitable to summarise in the following table the characteristics that distinguish the two racial types encountered by me among the female population of latium. table of the differential characteristics of the two racial types _brunette dolichocephalics and blond brachycephalics_ ---------------+---------------------------+-------------------------- organs to |dolichocephalic, brunette |brachycephalic, blond type which the |type of low stature |of tall stature characteristics| | refer | | ---------------+---------------------------+-------------------------- visage. |elongated ellipsoidal or |rounded, broad; coarse |ovoidal; fine, delicate |features; contour |lineaments, rounded |frequently angular, |curves, softly modeled. |especially around the | |cheek-bones. | | eyes. |large, usually |not so large, the form |almond-shaped; |frequently tending to the |pigmentation brown, |oblique; the contours of |shading from black to |the inner angle of the |chestnut. |eye less clear-cut, owing | |to the plica epicantica. | |pigmentation light gray, | |blue. | | nose. |very leptorrhine; nostrils |leptorrhine, tending |delicate and mobile. |toward mesorrhine; | |sometimes the nose is | |fleshy, nostrils thick and | |slightly movable only. | | mouth. |labial aperture small, |labial aperture wide, lips |lips finely modeled and |frequently fleshy, and not |very red |well modeled. | | teeth. |small, with curved |teeth large and flat, |surface, gleaming, almost |enamel dull; difference |as wide as long, not |between incisors, canines, |greatly dissimilar, "like |etc., sharply marked. |equal pearls." | | | palate. |very high and narrow |flat and wide. |(ogival). | | | profile. |proopic. |platyopic. | | ear. |finely modeled, small, |often irregular, large, |delicate. |thick. | | frontal line |very distinct; forehead |indistinct; forehead of roots of |small. |protuberant. hair. | | | | neck. |long and slender, flexible.|short, more or less stocky. | | thorax. |flattened in |projecting forward. |antero-posterior direction.| | | breasts. |position low, form tending |position high, breasts |to pear-shape; nipples |round; nipple prominent, |slightly raised, aureole |aureole small and |broad; often hairy between |rose-colored; always |the breasts. |hairless. | | pelvis and |high and narrow; the |low and broad; the abdomen abdomen. |abdomen becomes prominent |does not become prominent. |toward the thirtieth year, | |even in unmarried women. | | | lumbar curve. |slightly pronounced; |quite pronounced; position |position of buttocks low. |of buttocks high. | | limbs. |distal portion slightly |distal portion slightly |shorter (as compared |longer (as compared with |with the proximal) limbs |the proximal); limbs well |slender. |endowed with muscles. | | hands. |coarse; palm long and |delicate, palm broad, |narrow; fingers short. |fingers long. | | fingers. |short, thick, with |long, tapering; nails with |flattened extremities; |deep placed quicks, rosy |nails flat, not very pink |and shinning. |nor very transparent. | | | palmar and |coarse; frequently with |very fine, rosy and with digital papillæ|geometric figures on the |open designs. |finger tips; pallid. | | | feet. |big; form tending to |small, much arched. |flatness. | | | body as a |slender; slight |beautiful; strong muscle. whole. |muscularity. tendency |no tendency toward too |toward stoutness in old |much flesh. furthermore, |age with deformation of |the body preserves its |the body. |contours. | | complexion. |brunette and dark. |white. | | color of hair. |black to chestnut. |blond. | | form of hair. |short, always wavy |long, straight, section |or curly, fine with |slightly elliptical and |ellipsoidal section. |sometimes almost round. | | hair on body. |growth of hair sometimes |the surface of the body is |found on thorax and on the |hairless. |legs. | ---------------+---------------------------+-------------------------- =the origin of malformations during development.=--malformations are a morphological index, and we have already shown that there is a relation between the physical and the psychical personality. a defective physical development tells us that the psychic personality must also have its defects (especially in regard to the intelligence). not only degenerates, but even we normal beings, in the conflict of social life, and because of our congenital weaknesses, have felt that we were losing, or that we were failing to acquire the rich possibilities latent in our consciousness, and that vainly formed the height of our ambition. and when this occurred, the body also lost something of the beauty which it might have attained, or rather, it lacked the power to develop it. in the words of rousseau, "our intellectual gifts, our vices, our virtues, and consequently our characters, are all dependent upon our organism." nevertheless, this interrelation must be understood in a very wide sense, and is modified according to the period of embryonal or extrauterine life at which a lesion or a radical disturbance in development chances to occur. in a treatise entitled _the problems_ _of degeneration_, in which the most modern ideas regarding degeneration are summed up, and new standards of social morality advocated, brugia gives a most graphic diagram, which i take the liberty of reproducing. [illustration: fertilized ovum embryo foetus and new-born child child] from the little black point to the big circle are represented the different stages of embryonal and foetal development, until we reach the child. in a we have the fertilized ovum. here it may be said that the new individual does not yet exist; we are at a transition point between two adults (the parents) and a new organism, which is _about to develop_. now comes the embryo, which may be called the new individual in a _potential_ state; then the foetus, in which the human form is at last attained; and lastly the child, which will proceed onward toward the physical and spiritual conquests of human life. but so long as an individual has not completely developed, deviations may occur in his development; but these will be just so much the graver, in proportion as the individual is in a more plastic state. we should reserve the term _degeneration_, real and actual, to that which presupposes an alteration at a, _i.e._, at the time of conception. an alteration all the graver if it antedates a, that is to say, if it preexisted in the ovum and in the fertilizing spermatozoon, _i.e._, in the parents. in this case, there is no use in talking of a direct educative and prophylactic intervention on behalf of the individual resulting from this conception; the intervention must be directed toward all adult individuals who have attained the power of procreation. and in this consists the greatest moral problem of our times--sexual education and the sentiment of responsibility toward the species. all mankind ought to feel the _responsibility_ toward the posterity which they are preparing to procreate and they ought to lead a life that is hygienic, sober, virtuous, and serene, such as is calculated to preserve intact the treasures of the immortality of the species. there exist whole families of degenerates, whose offspring are precondemned to swell the ranks of moral monsters. these individuals, who result from a _wrongful conception_, carry within them malformations of the kind known as degenerative, and together with them alterations of the moral sense that are characteristic of degenerates, that is to say, they will be unbalanced (through inheritance) in their entire personality. something similar will happen if such a lesion befalls the embryo, _i.e._, while the individual is still in the potential state (lacking human form). in the foetus, on the contrary, _i.e._, the individual who has attained the human form but is still in the course of intrauterine development, any possible lesion, and more especially those due to pathological causes, while they cannot alter the entire personality, may injure that which is already formed, and in so violent a manner as to produce a _physical_ _monster_, whose deformities may even be incompatible with life (_e.g._, cleft spine or palate, hydrocephaly, little's disease, which is a form of paralysis of foetal origin, and all the teratological (_i.e._, monstrous) alterations). that is to say, in going from a to c we pass from _malformations_ to _deformations_; from simple physical alterations of an æsthetic nature to physical monstrosities sometimes incompatible with life itself; while in regard to the psychic life, we find that the remoter lesions (in a) result for the most part in anomalies of the moral sense, while those occurring later (b, c) result for the most part in anomalies of the intellect. so that at one extreme we may have moral monsters, with malformations whose significance can be revealed only through observation guided by science and at the other extreme, physical monsters, whose moral sense is altered only slightly or not at all. those who suffer injury at a may be intelligent, and employ their intelligence to the malevolent ends inspired by moral madness; those who suffer injury at c or d are harmless monsters, often idiots, or even foredoomed to die. the peril to society steadily diminishes from a to c, while the peril to the individual steadily augments. over all these periods so full of peril to human development and so highly important for the future of the species, we may place one single word: =woman.=--throughout the period that is most decisive for its future, humanity is wholly _dependent upon woman_. upon her rests not only the responsibility of preserving the integrity of the germ, but also that of the embryonal and foetal development of man. the respect and protection of woman and of maternity should be raised to the position of an inalienable social duty and should become one of the principles of human morality. to-day we are altogether lacking in a sense of moral obligation toward the species, and hence lacking in a moral sense such as would lead to respect for woman and maternity--so much so, indeed, that we have invented a form of _modesty_ which consists in concealing maternity, in not speaking of maternity! and yet at the same time there are sins against the species that go unpunished, and offenses to the dignity of woman that are tolerated and protected by law! but even after the child is born and has reached the period of lactation, we should still write across it the words _woman_ and _mother_. the education and the responsibility of woman and of society must be modified, if we are to assure the triumph of the species. and the teachers who receive the child into the school, after its transit through society (in the form of its parents' germs) and through the mother, cannot fail to be interested in raising the social standards of education and morality. like a priesthood of the new humanity, they should feel it their duty to be _practitioners_ of all those virtues which assure the survival of the human species. _moral and pedagogic problems within the school._--children when they first come to school have a personality already outlined. from the unmoral, the sickly, the intellectually defective to the robust and healthy children, the intelligent, and those in whom are hidden the glorious germs of genius; from those who sigh over the discomforts of wretchedness and poverty to those who thoughtlessly enjoy the luxuries of life; from the lonely hearted orphan to the child pampered by the jealous love of mother and grandmother:--they all meet together in the same school. it is quite certain that neither the spark of genius nor the blackness of crime originated in the school or in the pedagogic method! more than that, it is exceedingly probable that the extreme opposite types passed unnoticed, or nearly so, in that environment whose duty it is to prepare the new generations for social adaptation. from this degree of blindness and unconsciousness the school will certainly be rescued by means of the scientific trend which pedagogy is to-day acquiring through the _study of the pupil_. that the teacher must assume the new task of _repairing_ what is wrong with the child, through the aid of the physician, and of protecting the normal child from the dangers of enfeeblement and deformation that constantly overhang him, thus laying the foundations for a splendid human race, _free to attain_ its foreordained development--all this we have already pointed out, and space does not permit us to expand the argument further. but, in conclusion, there is one more point over which i wish to pause. if the lombrosian theory rests upon a basis of truth, what attitude should we pedagogists take on the question of moral education? we are impotent in the face of the fact of the interrelation between physical and moral deformity. is it then no longer a sin to do evil and no longer a merit to do good? no. but we have only to alter the _interpretation_ of the facts, and the result is a high moral progress pointing a new path in pedagogy. there are, for example, certain individuals who feel themselves irresistibly attracted toward evil, who become inebriated with blood; there are others, on the contrary, who faint at the mere sight of blood and have a horror of evil. there are some who feel themselves naturally impelled to do good, and they do it in order to satisfy a personal desire (many philanthropists) thus deriving that pleasure which springs from the satisfaction of any natural need. in our eyes, all these individuals who act instinctively, though in opposite ways, deserve neither praise nor blame; they were born that way; one of them is physiologically a proletarian, the other is a capitalist of normal human ability. it is a question of birth. when the educator praised the one and punished the other, he was sanctioning the necessary effects of causes that were unknown to him: "but still, whence cometh the intelligence of the first notions man is ignorant, and the affection of the first allurements which are in you as instinct in the bee to make its honey; and this first desire merit of praise or blame containeth not." (dante, _longfellow's translation_.) the instinctive malefactor is not to blame, the blame should rest rather upon his parents who gave him a bad heredity; but these parents were in their turn victims of the social causes of degeneration. the same thing may be said if a pathological cause comes up for consideration in relation, for instance, to certain anomalies of character. analogously, he who is born good and instinctively does good deeds, deriving pleasure from them, deserves no praise. there is no vainer sight than is afforded by a person of this sort, living complacently in the contemplation of himself, praised by everyone, and to all practical intent, held up as a contrast to the evil actions of the degenerate and the diseased who act from instinct no more nor less than he does himself. the man who is born physiologically a capitalist assumes high moral obligations; he ought to discipline his nature as a normal man in order to make it serve the general good. and this is not to be accomplished through an _instinct_ to do good, which acts at haphazard, but through the _deliberate_ _will_ to do good, even if the requisite actions bring no immediate satisfaction, but even involve a sacrifice. society will be ameliorated and rendered moral through the harmonious efforts of good men, trained for the social welfare. man will become good only when his goodness costs him a voluntary effort. hence it will be necessary not to limit ourselves, as has been done in the past, to admiring the man who is born good, but to educate him so as to render him thoughtful, strong and useful; not to condemn the sinner, but to redeem him through education and through a sense of fellowship in the common fault, which is the scientific form of pardon. the degenerate, who succeeds in conquering his sinful instinct and in ceasing to do harm, the normal man who renders himself morally sublime by dedicating his splendid physiological inheritance to the collective good, will be equally meritorious. but what a moral abyss gapes open to divide them! because it is a short stride at best that the physiological proletariat can take, while for the soul of the normal man an untrammelled pathway lies open toward perfection. accordingly the new task of the teacher of the future is a multifold one. he is the artificer of human beauty, the new modeler of created things, just as the sublime chisel of greek art was the modeler of marbles. and he prepares for greater utilisation the physiological and intellectual forces of the new man, like a greek deity scattering broadcast his prolific riches. but above all he prepares the souls for the sublime sentiment which awaits the humanity of the future, glorying in the attainment of peace, and then indeed he becomes almost a redeemer of mankind. footnotes: [ ] rossi, _anthropological anomalies in their relations to social conditions and to degeneration_. chapter vii technical part in a book the technical part can serve only to point the way, because the acquirement of technique demands _practical experience_. the technique of anthropology consists, essentially, of two principal branches: . the gathering of anthropological data by means of measurements (anthropometry) and by inspection (anthroposcopy); . the formulation of laws based on these anthropological data. anthropometry requires a knowledge: a. of anthropometric instruments; b. of the anatomical points of contact to which the instruments must be applied. for beginners it will be found helpful to mark upon the subject the anthropometric points of contact by means of a dermographic pencil. in anthropology so large a number of measurements are taken, both from life and from skeletons, that a minute description of them all would demand a separate treatise. we shall limit ourselves to indicating such measurements as it has been found of _practical_ _utility_ to take in school. the form in the theoretic part of this work we emphasized the word _form_, representing the body as a whole and embodying the conception of relationship between the proportions of the body, tending to determine the morphological individuality. from the normal point of view the two individualities which are most interesting and worthy of comparison are those of the _new-born child_ and the _adult_ (see fig. and its eloquent testimony). in these two individualities the greatest possible prominence is given to those differences of proportion between bust and limb on which all the various measurements of the form depend: the _standing and sitting stature_; _the total spread of the arms_; the _weight_; the _circumference of the thorax_ (see "theoretic lessons on the form"). with the theory recalled to mind we may now pass on to the _practical procedure for obtaining these various_ _measures_. among them the most important is the _stature_, whose cycle is represented in fig. . the theoretic section of this book devotes special attention to the stature in a separate chapter following that on the form. it is well to have in mind the general principals before taking up the technique of the separate measurements. _stature._--the stature is the distance intervening between the plane on which the individual stands in an erect position and the top of his head. [illustration: fig. .--_new-born child_ and _adult man_ reduced to the same height and preserving their relative bodily proportions. the head of the new-born child is twice the height of that of the adult and extends downward to the level of the latters's nipples. the pubes of the adult correspond to the navel of the new-born child; and the pubes of the child to the middle of the adult's thigh.] _technical procedure._--it is necessary to know how to place the subject in an erect position, heels together and toes turned out, shoulders square, arms pendent, head orientated, _i.e._, occipital point touching the wall, gaze horizontal. in measuring the individual stature it is customary to use an instrument called an anthropometer (fig. ). it consists of a horizontal board on which the subject stands, a stationary vertical rod marked with the metric scale against which the subject rests his back, and another small movable rod perpendicular to the first and projecting forward from it; this is lowered until it is tangent to the apex of the cranium; and the scale upon the upright rod gives the number corresponding to the stature. [illustration: fig. .--diagram representing the cycle of stature of man (unbroken line) and woman (dotted line), from birth to the end of life.] certain anthropologists are now trying to perfect the anthropometer (mosso's school). and, indeed, how is it possible to bring the entire person posteriorly in contact with the vertical rod of the anthropometer? the rod is straight while the body follows the curves of the vertebral column and the gluteus muscles. accordingly, professor monti, an assistant to professor mosso, has proposed a new anthropometer which, in place of the single rod at the back, has a pair of rods, so that the more prominent portions of the body may occupy the intermediate space; a similar anthropometer was already in use for measuring kyphotics. [illustration: fig. .--anthropometer.] [illustration: fig. .--a square.] at the present day there are exceedingly complicated and accurate anthropometers which comprise, in addition, instruments for obtaining various other measurements, such as the thoracic and cephalic perimeters, etc. but these are very costly and not practical for use in schools. their use is confined chiefly to medical clinics, as, for example, viola's anthropometer, which is used in professor de giovanni's clinic. broca recommends to travelers an anthropometer consisting of a graduated rod with a movable index attached. by means of this a series of distances from the ground can be measured, and consequently various partial heights of the body, from the ground to the top of the head, from the ground to the chin, to the pubis, to the knee, etc., but grave errors may be committed and its use is not advisable so long as we have within reach a universal anthropometer. the universal anthropometer consists essentially of two planes perpendicular to each other; now we may say that in every room, in the meeting of two planes, the floor and the wall, we have an anthropometer. there is no reason why we should not make use of this simple means! placing the child in an erect position with the body touching the wall throughout its whole length, we place a perfectly horizontal rod tangent to the top of the head, we make a mark upon the wall, and then with a millimetric measure we take the distance between the mark and the floor, and this gives us the stature. two difficulties are met with, first, that of holding the rod horizontally on the top of the head, and secondly, that of measuring the distance in a perfectly vertical line. in the first difficulty a carpenter's square may help us or, if there is a school of manual training within convenient reach it is easy to have a little instrument constructed (fig. ) consisting of two planes perpendicular to each other, one of which should be held tangent to the head while the other is pressed against the wall (carpenter's square). as regards the vertical measurement, a plumb line may be used, but it is more practical to trace upon the wall that we mean to use for such measurements, a design consisting of a vertical line on which a mark may be made at the height of one metre from the floor in order to simplify the task of measuring. it is better if the millimetric tape is made of metal, so that it will not vary in length; but even a tailor's measure of waxed tape may answer the purpose if it is new and has been tested with a metallic measure or an accurate metre rule. the height of the stature is taken _without the shoes_, and it is necessary to state at what hour of the day the measurement is made, because in the morning we are taller (though by only a few millimetres) than we are in the evening. the stature may also be taken in a recumbent position (length of body), and in this case will be longer by about one centimetre. consequently in giving the measure of stature it is necessary to state in what position the subject was placed, by what method the measurement was taken (whether with an anthropometer or not) and at what hour of the day the measurement was made. it is not necessary to say that the subject was required to remove his shoes, since that is taken for granted. _sitting stature._--besides the stature taken on foot, the sitting stature (height of bust) is also taken by an analogous process. it is the distance between the plane on which the individual is seated and the vertex of his head. the subject should be seated upon a wooden bench having a horizontal plane and should place his back in contact with the wall; just as in the case of the preceding measure the shoes had to be removed, in the present case the clothing is discarded, leaving only the light underwear (fig. ). with the aid of the square we find the point corresponding to the vertex of the head and with the millimetric measure we obtain the distance on the wall between this point and the plane of the bench. [illustration: fig. --( ) sitting stature. ( ) standing stature. (method of taking measurements with the anthropometer.)] _index of stature._--we know that these two measures are extremely important for ascertaining the type of stature, _i.e._, _macroscelia_ and _brachyscelia_, determined by the proportion between the sitting stature and the total stature reduced to a scale of , that is, the relation of the bust to the total height of the individual. let us remember in this connection that the bust should be a d or d part of the total stature and that below down to , it is macroscelous, and that above , up to , it is brachyscelous. having obtained the two numbers corresponding to the two statures, _e.g._, stature . m., bust . m., how are we to find out the percentual relation between the two measurements? first, we form an equation: : = _x_: . from which we obtain _x_ = ( × )/ = this stature is of the normal average type, that is, it is mesatiscelous; but the mesatiscelia is high (in comparison with the other measurement that is also mesatiscelous, namely, ), in other words, it is _brachy-mesatiscelous_. note the formula which gives us the value of _x_. if we substitute general symbols in place of the concrete values, we may say that _x_ is equal to one hundred times the lesser measurement (_m_) divided by the greater measurement (_m_). if, in place of _x_, we substitute _i_, signifying index, we may draw up the following general formula of indices: _i_ = ( ×_m_)/_m_ this formula of relations between measurements is of wide application in anthropology and is fundamental. indices of every measurement are sought for. the one given above is the index of stature, and it determines the _type_ of stature. all the other indices are calculated by similar procedure. [illustration: fig. .--method of measuring the total spread of arms.] _total spread of the arms._--this measurement is taken quite simply. the subject must place himself with his arms outstretched in a horizontal direction and on a level with his shoulders. the measurement corresponds to the distance intervening in a horizontal line from the tip of one middle finger to the other (fig. ). a specially constructed anthropometer may be used for this measurement. it has a long horizontal rod adjustable perpendicularly, so that it may be placed on a level with the shoulders of the subject to be measured. this rod forms a cross with the other vertical rod with which the subject should be in contact. the arms are then extended along the cross rod which is marked with a millimetric scale. but this greatly complicates the anthropometer, and hardly any anthropometer possesses this attachment. this measure may be successfully taken with the very simple aid of the wall. the only difficulty offered is that of securing a perfectly horizontal position for the arms. for this purpose horizontal lines, which either happen by chance to be upon the wall or which may be drawn on purpose, will be of assistance. in order to have guiding lines suited to different statures, several horizontal lines may be drawn intersecting the vertical line already traced for guidance of the millimetric tape measure used in taking the stature. _thoracic perimeter._--the thoracic perimeter is taken on the nude thorax, in an erect position and with the arms hanging beside the bust, by applying the millimetric measure in such a way that its upper margin passes just below the nipples. the tape measure should completely encircle the thorax in a horizontal plane passing through the mammary papillæ. since the thorax is in constant motion, we must observe the oscillations of the tape measure and obtain the average; or else we may take the measurements during the state of expiration (repose). in giving the figure it is necessary to specify the procedure followed. _vital index. index of life._--index of life is the name given to the proportion between the stature and the thoracic perimeter. it ought to be equal to , _i.e._, _tp_ = _s_/ _vi_ = ( ×_tp_)/_s_ = (normal). _weight._--the weight of an individual is taken by means of ordinary _scales_. in order to obtain the weight of the nude person, the clothing may be weighed separately and their weight subtracted from the total weight of the clothed person. the weight should be taken before eating, in order that unassimilated alimentary substances may not alter the real weight of the subject. if this method cannot be rigorously followed out, it should be specified how much clothing the subject retained, whether he had eaten, etc. _ponderal index._--stature and weight are the most synthetic and comprehensive measurements of the form. but we need a clear proportion between these two measures to tell us whether an individual weighs more or less _relatively_ to his _stature_. it may happen, for instance, that a stout person of short stature actually weighs less than another person who is tall and thin; but relatively to his stature he may on the contrary be heavier, that is, he may have a higher _ponderal index_. a robust and plump child will weigh in an absolute sense less than an adult who is extremely thin and emaciated; but relatively to the mass of his body he weighs more. now this relative weight or index of weight (ponderal index) gives us precisely this idea of _embonpoint_, of the more or less flourishing state of nutrition in which an individual happens to be. but linear measurements such as the stature cannot be compared with volumetric measurements, such as the weight. hence it is necessary to reduce the volumetric measure--the weight--to a linear measure, which is done by extracting the cube root from the number representing the weight. then the root of the weight may be compared to the stature reduced to a scale of . by forming a general proportion, in which _w_ represents the weight of a given individual, and _s_ the corresponding figure of his stature, we obtain: _s_:[*cube root](_w_):: :_x_ (where _x_ represents the ponderal index) hence _pi_ = ( ×[*cube root](_w_))/_s_ the application of this formula would necessitate some rather complicated calculations, which it would be inconvenient to have to repeat for a large number of subjects. but there are tables of calculations already compiled, which are due to livi, and which are given, together with other tables, in livi's own work, _anthropometry_ (hoepli). these are numerical tables, to be read in the same manner as tables of logarithms. at the top, in a horizontal direction, the stature is given in centimetres, while in the vertical column the weight is given in kilograms. the calculation of all the ponderal indices has been worked out, in relation to every possible stature and weight. if we look up the ponderal index corresponding to the figures already cited in illustration (see p. ), we find that for the adult the _pi_ = . , and for the child the _pi_ = . ; _i.e._, considered relatively the child weighs more in the given case. this is the true and accurate technical method of finding the relative proportion between weight and stature. accordingly, we have now learned to take all the measurements relative to the form, to calculate from them the more important indices (or proportions), such as the index of stature, the index of life, and the ponderal index. we have also learned to understand and to consult the tables of anthropological calculations. the cranium _the head and cranium._--let us bear in mind the fact that the word _head_ is used in speaking of a living person, and _cranium_, of a skeleton. the science which makes a study of the cranium is called craniology. the cranium and the head may be studied either by observing the external form--_cranioscopy_ or _cephaloscopy_; or else by taking measurements--_craniometry_ or _cephalometry_. craniology makes use equally of cranioscopy and of craniometry: in fact, if cranioscopy alone were used, certain anomalies might escape attention, because we can recognise them only by measuring the head; and conversely, if we confined ourselves to craniometric researches, we might miss certain anomalies of form, which we become aware of only by attentively observing the cranium. frequently craniometry serves to verify cranioscopy. for example, a cranium may appear to the eye too large or too small, but certainly if we measure the cranial circumference with a tape-measure we shall have an accurate decision of a case which may well be a simple optical illusion. indeed, we all know how easy it is to give an erroneous judgment, relying only on our senses; for the personal equation enters very largely into judgments of this sort. for instance, a person of low stature easily judges that other men are tall, and _vice versa_. to the eye of the italian or the frenchman, the hair of young english girls is a pale blond; to the scandinavians of the north it is a warm blond. if two men possessed of different æsthetic tastes and in different frames of mind wish to describe one and the same garden they will give two widely different descriptions which will reveal far more of their individual impressions and moods than of the actual characteristics of the garden described. it is easy to understand how important it is in scientific descriptions to exclude completely the influence of the observer's personality. in the cranioscopic study of a cranium, for instance, the precise characteristics of that cranium are what must be found and nothing else whatever, no matter who the student is nor in what part of the world he is working. but in order to achieve this result it is not enough to take observations; it is also necessary to know how to observe, and in observing to follow a scientific method. _cranioscopy._--cranioscopic methods require that the skull shall be observed from several sides. blumenbach, who studied crania by observing them from the vertex, divided them into ovoid, rhomboid, etc., while camper, on the other hand, studying them in profile, classified them as flat, elongated, etc., and the conclusions of the two scientists were irreconcilable. [illustration: fig. .--facial norm.] [illustration: fig. .--occipital norm.] [illustration: fig. .--lateral norm.] the cranium must be observed from above, from the front, in profile and from the occipital part; and in such a manner that the observer's glance shall fall perpendicularly upon whichever cranial side is under observation. hence it is said that the observation is made according to the norm, _i.e._, according to the perpendicular, and there are four _norms_ in cranioscopy--_vertical_, _frontal_, _lateral_, and _occipital_. in this way we may be sure that no anomaly of form will escape the eye. there are innumerable anomalies of form. we will indicate only the principal ones. in order to detect all the anomalies that may occur in a cranium it is necessary to observe it according to all the norms, each one of which may reveal a different set of anomalies. a. _vertical norm._--the word _norm_, as we have already said, has here the signification of perpendicular. to look at a cranium according to the vertical norm means to let our glance fall perpendicularly upon the vertex of the cranium. we may do this in one of two ways, either by raising our head above that of the subject of inspection, in such a way that our glance falls vertically upon it, or by bending back the head of the person to be observed until the crown of his head becomes perpendicular to our gaze. this norm is taken by placing oneself behind the person to be observed, who, if an adult, should be seated while the observer remains standing; and by taking the head to be examined between the two hands in such a way that the extended thumbs and index-fingers form a horizontal circlet around the cranial walls. this is the most important of the norms, not only because it reveals the most important normal forms already described in the text, but also the greater number of anomalies such as are indicated below. . _crania with rectilinear perimeter._--it may happen that the line bounding the cranial vault is not curved but formed of broken straight lines from which various geometrical figures result, producing crania known as trigonocephalic, pentagonoid, parallelopipedoid, etc. the most important among these and among all the abnormal forms is the trigonocephalic cranium, having the base of the triangle toward the occiput and the vertex toward the forehead. the result of such formation is that the frontal region is restricted, a circumstance of obvious gravity. the infantile cranium is normally pentagonoid; the persistence of this form in the adult is a sign of arrested development, but not serious. sergi does not admit this form among the anomalies when the nodules are but slightly emphasised. . _asymmetrical and plagiocephalic crania._--the sagittal plane divides the cranium into two unequal halves. the asymmetry may be either frontal, in which case one frontal nodule is more prominent than the other--anterior plagiocephaly, or else parietal, in which case one of the parietal nodules is more prominent than the other--posterior plagiocephaly. these are the two forms of simple plagiocephaly. it may happen that there is simultaneously an anterior and posterior asymmetry, and in such a case it generally happens that if the more prominent frontal nodule is on the right, the more prominent parietal nodule is on the left, so that the two more prominent nodules correspond in a diagonal sense. this is compound plagiocephaly. plagiocephaly is extremely common; if very apparent, it constitutes a grave defect, but not if only slight. for that matter, it would be difficult to find a cranium rigorously symmetrical, even among normal persons. . _crania with curved and symmetrical lines_, but in which the perimeter consists not of a single ellipsoidal curve, but of two curves. a. _clinocephalic cranium._--the coronal suture has a girdle-like furrow, in such fashion that there result an anterior and a posterior curve which together form a sort of figure . this anomaly may be perceived also from the lateral norm. b. _cymbocephalic cranium._--- there is a girdle-like furrow along the sagittal line, so that the cranium has the appearance of being divided into two pockets, one on the right hand and the other on the left. b. _lateral norm._--the observer must stand at the side of the subject to be observed and look at him perpendicularly to the profile. we remain standing while we look if the subject is an adult and is standing up, but we sit down if the subject is a child and is standing; and we determine the vertical position by moving the subject's head as the occasion requires. i note, as seen from this norm, two anomalies in which the ellipsoidal uniformity outlining the profile of the cranium is altered. a. _oxycephalic cranium._--the line of the profile is noticeably raised at the bregma, from which the anterior part of the cranium continues to rise, almost in the direction of the forehead, instead of curving backward. in its entirety this anomalous cranium has the form of a "sugar loaf." b. _acrocephalic cranium._--the line of the profile, on the contrary, is not raised until near the lambda. c. _occipital norm._--the observer places himself behind the subject and gazes perpendicularly at the occipital point. d. _frontal norm._--the observer stands in front of the subject and gazes at him on a level with the forehead. i may point out only one very important anomaly seen from this norm. a. _scaphocephalic cranium._--the lateral parts of the cranium are flattened to such a degree that the vault is extremely narrow along the sagittal line (see figs. and ). _craniometry._--the _volume_ of the cranium is of high importance because it bears a relation to that of the brain. in the studies which have been made relative to the correspondence between physical and intellectual development, the measurement of the cranial volume comes first in order. in measuring the cranium it is necessary to use: a. _the millimetric tape measure_, b. _the craniometric calipers_, c. _the compass with sliding branches_, d. _the double square_. in order to facilitate the task of measuring and to secure uniformity it is necessary first to locate the craniometric points to which it will be necessary to apply the instrument. these craniometric points are easily located on the cranium, where a great number of them have been studied. in the case of a living person, on the contrary, these points are reduced to a small number because of the difficulty of accurately locating them. the points on the vault of the cranium, along the sagittal line, are: . the _nasion_ (point of union of the nasal and frontal bones). . the _ophryon_ (middle point of the line tangent to the two superciliary arches, a line corresponding to the horizontal drawn transversely across the forehead and passing through the two points on the temporal lines which are nearest to the median line. this point lies in an important region of the forehead, situated between the two eyebrows--the glabella. the central point of the middle region of the forehead above the glabella is called the _metopion_). . the _bregma_ (point of juncture between the coronal and sagittal suture). . the _vertex_. . the _lambda_ (point of juncture between the sagittal suture and the occipital or lambdoid suture). . the _occipital point_. . the _inion_ (situated at a level midway between the occipital point and the occipital foramen). laterally we have these other craniometric points: . the _external orbital apophysis_ (formed from the frontal bone). . the _supra-auricular_ point. . the _auricular point_ (corresponding to a little depression which may be felt just below the tragus and in correspondence with the zygomatic arches). . the minimum _frontal point_ (a bony angle which may be felt about centimetre above the external orbital apophysis, along the temporal line). on a living person the following points can easily be located: along the sagittal line: . the _nasion_. . the _ophryon_. . the _vertex_. . the _occipital point_. laterally: . the _external orbital apophysis_. . the _supra-auricular point_. . the _auricular point_. . the _minimum frontal point_. now, with these points as guides it becomes practical to measure the various curves and diameters of the cranium. the curves are measured by means of the millimetric tape; the diameters by means of the calipers. there are various curves; we shall confine ourselves to considering only the following: the _maximum circumference_, which is obtained by passing the tape across the ophryon, the occipital points and the supra-auricular points, beginning to apply it at the ophryon. its measure varies from to mm. in man and from to mm. in woman, if taken from the skull. in the case of a living person mm. should be added. if we find a circumference greater than normal, we are beginning to enter upon the anomaly which goes by the name of _macrocephaly_. if, on the other hand, the maximum circumference is notably smaller, we are entering upon the anomaly of _microcephaly_. _measurement of diameters.--maximum antero-posterior diameter._--with the left hand place one branch of the calipers upon the glabella; the other extreme point is to be sought tentatively along a vertical line dividing the occiput in two halves. partially close the calipers by means of the screw and then make trial by raising and lowering the posterior branch. it ought to move with a slight friction. this is the classic diameter which measures the maximum length of the cranium and which, as we have seen, it is customary to compare with the width in order to obtain the cephalic index. in the adult man it normally oscillates between and mm. [illustration: fig. .--inspecting cranium (lateral and vertical norms).] _maximum transverse diameter._--this measures the width of the cranium. the investigator places himself in front of the subject in order to keep the compass quite horizontal through the guidance of the eyes. the maximum distance is found by experimenting. it normally corresponds very nearly to the supra-auricular points. in children this diameter is frequently situated higher up toward the parietal nodules; in men of tall stature, in whom the cranial vault is generally slightly developed, this diameter may be found, on the contrary, lower down, near the mastoid apophyses. if this diameter occurs similarly low down in children, a notable growth in stature may be prophesied (manouvrier); and if inquiry is made it will be found that the parents are very tall. this diameter measures, in the adult, from to mm. _vertical diameter._--this measures the height of the cranium from the occipital foramen to the bregma. this diameter cannot be measured directly excepting on a skull; in the case of a living person its projection is taken, which, though far from accurate, is given by the distance between the vertex and the external auditory meatus. it is necessary to use the double square. the horizontal branch is placed tangent to the vertex, its direction should be perceptibly parallel to the transverse orbital line, the graduated vertical branch should pass over the auricular foramen. the required number may be read, corresponding to the point of the tragus. the height of the cranium is exceedingly important; its variations produce variations in the physiognomy. in the first period of childhood, the cranium is very low in comparison to its width; this is also true of dwarfs. in these cases the width of the cranial vault is large in comparison to that of the base; a low cranium bulging above is distinctive of babies and dwarfs. in the adult this diameter measures from to mm. among the other measurements which an taken on the cranium, the following may be cited: the _antero-posterior metopic diameter_: from the metopic to the occipital point. in children it is sometimes the maximum longitudinal diameter. the _ophryo-iniac diameter_ from the ophryon to the inion. the _minimum frontal diameter_: between the two minimum frontal points. the _maximum frontal diameter_: between the two external orbital apophyses. the _bistephanic diameter_: between the two stephanic points. the _bitemporal diameter_: this is the greatest width of the cranium between the verticals passing through the base of the tragus. the _biauricular diameter_: the craniometrical points are in front of, and a little below, but very near to the upper insertion of the auricle. they are little depressions that can be felt, as we have already said, by applying the finger along the upper edge of the root of the zygomatic arch. _height of forehead_: from the ophryon to the roots of the hair. circumferences and curves: _anterior semicircle._--the tape is applied from one supra-auricular point to the other, passing through the ophryon; it corresponds to the anterior part of the maximum circumference. manouvrier measures it in correspondence to the verticals erected from the tragus. _posterior semicircle._--this is obtained by subtracting the anterior semicircle from the whole circumference. _vertical curve of the head._--the tape passes through a plane that is vertical to the orientated head, starting from the supra-auricular points or from the tragus, according to different authorities. _cephalic index._--this is the proportion between the _maximum_ _transverse_ and _longitudinal_ diameters. it is obtained by applying the familiar formula: _ci_ = ( ×_d_)/(_d_) in which _d_ represents the transverse diameter and _d_ the longitudinal. the index represents the percentual relation between the two diameters, and is obtained from the formula by reducing the greater diameter to a scale of , as follows: _d_: = _d_:_x_, _whence_ _x_ = ×_d_/_d_ instead of working out the calculations, we may find the required index in the tables already compiled. _volume._--the volume of the cranium cannot be taken directly, except in the case of a skull. after the various osseous foramina have been closed, the cranial cavity is filled through the occipital foramen with any one of a number of substances (millet, shot, water, etc.), which is afterward measured. the method of taking this measurement is practised on a facsimile of a cranium already calculated, and usually made of metal. but in the case of a living person the direct calculation of the volume is impossible. nevertheless various empirical methods have been sought for obtaining this measurement, even though imperfect and approximate. recently renewed use has been made, especially in france, of an approximate calculation made by means of broca's cubic index. the volume of the cranium is equal to half the product of the three diameters, divided by an index which varies according to age. this index is as follows: / men . adults from years upward. \ women . / men . young persons from to years. \ women . / men . young persons from to years. \ women . / - years . children of both sexes. { - years . \ years and below . an index of cranial development is afforded by the maximum circumference. the average volume of the normal adult cranium is about , cubic centimetres: _mesocephalic cranium_. when the cranium is much inferior in volume, it is called _microcephalic_ (from , down to cubic centimetres). when on the contrary it is much superior (from , up to , cubic centimetres), it is called _macrocephalic_ or _megalocephalic_. for the face, the following craniometric points should be noted: along a longitudinal line: . the _nasion_ (point of meeting of the nasal and frontal bones). . subnasal point (meeting of nasal septum with upper maxilla). . _upper alveolar point_ (between the two upper incisors at their point of insertion). . _lower alveolar point_ (point corresponding to the above, in the lower maxilla). . _mental point_ (middle point of the chin). the following craniometric points are situated laterally. . _auricular point_ (corresponding to the auricular foramen; in living persons it is situated on the tragus). . _malar point_ (on the malar bones). . _zygomatic point_ (corresponding to the zygomatic arches). . gonion or goniac point (angle of mandible). the face also may be studied by inspection--_prosoposcopy_; and by measurement--_prosopometry_. _prosoposcopy._--we proceed to inspection according to two norms: a. facial norm; b. lateral norm or norm of profile. a. _facial norm._--if it is a question of a living person, we make complete inspection of the visage, from the roots of the hair to the chin. first of all we direct attention to the forehead, which will give us an index of the development of the anterior region of the brain; next, we observe whether a plane passing longitudinally through the median line would divide the face into two equal halves (facial symmetry). from an æsthetic point of view, the three following vertical distances ought to correspond in length: _height of forehead_ (from the roots of the hair to the nasion). _length of nose_ (from the nasion to the subnasal point). _labio-mental height_ (from the subnasal point to the point of the chin). and in regard to width the three following horizontal distances ought, according to the æsthetic laws of art, _very nearly_ to correspond (especially in the female face): _width of forehead_, between the two external orbital points. _bimalar width_, between the two malar points. _bigoniac width_, between the two gonia. it should be remembered that the standards of _beauty_ do not necessarily coincide with those of _normality_. b. _lateral norm._--in observing the face according to this norm, three facts should be chiefly noted: . the relative volumetric development between facial and cerebral cranium. . the direction of the forehead, which, in the normal profile, ought to be vertical. . whether the facial profile protrudes or not beyond the extreme anterior limit of the forehead. _prosopometry._---many forms of measurements are taken on the skeleton of the face and many total and partial indices are obtained, such, for instance, as the facial index, the orbital index, the nasal index, etc. measurements of diameters and angles are also taken on the face of the living subject and indices are obtained. we, however, shall limit ourselves to indicating only those measurements which are taken most frequently in our special field of application. the diameters and the height of the face are obtained by the _craniometric calipers_ and _mathieu's compass with sliding branches_; the facial angle is measured in projection by means of the _double_ _square_; and directly, by the _goniometer_. one mode of measuring the facial angle in projection is that of drawing the facial profile with the help of special instruments; or else of taking a photograph in perfect profile and tracing and measuring the facial angle on the picture. _principal linear measurements:_ =total length of visage:= from line of hair root to point of chin. =total length of face:= from the nasion to the point of the chin. _length of the nose:_ from the nasion to the subnasal point. _height of mandible:_ from the upper edge of the lower incisors to the lower edge of mandible. _subnase-mental height:_ from the subnasal point to the point of the chin. =bizygomatic diameter:= between the two bizygomatic arches. _bimalar diameter:_ between the two malar points. =bigoniac diameter:= between the two gonia. _biorbital diameter:_ between the two external borders of the orbits. _gonio-mental distance:_ from the goniac point to the point of the chin. _auriculo-frontal radius:_ from the tragus or from the auricular point to the ophryon. _auriculo-subnasal radius._ _auriculo-mental radius._ (the last four measurements, if compared right and left, give an index of facial _symmetry_; the radii when compared together serve as an indirect measure of prognathism.) _width of nose_ between the external borders of the nostrils (the branches of mathieu's compass are placed tangent to the nostrils). (the index of the nose is obtained from the length and breadth, by applying the well-known formula of indices; the nose thereupon receives various names--leptorrhine, mesorrhine, platyrrhine). _width of orbit:_ from the inner extremity of the ocular _rima_ (eye-slit) to the external border of the orbit. _width of the ocular rima:_ between the two extremities of the _rima_. _width of the labial rima:_ between the two extremities of the _rima_. _length of the ear:_ from the highest upper edge of the auricle to the lower extremity of the lobule. _index of the ear:_ this is obtained, by the well-known formula, from the length and breadth. the normal index is ; the types of ear above are _low_ types. anthropologists obtain the facial index from the skeleton, especially for the purpose of determining the proportion of the face in human remains found in the geological strata. in such crania the mandible is wanting, and the teeth are wanting. consequently, there are several ways of computing the facial index, because, while the transverse or bizygomatic diameter, which is considered as the lesser diameter, always remains constant, the longitudinal, which is considered as the greater, varies. the longitudinal diameter is calculated sometimes from the ophryon to the chin, at others from the ophryon to the point of insertion of the two upper middle incisors. in the first case it is now less, and again greater than the bizygomatic diameter; in the second case, it is always less, and the resulting facial index is notably greater than . the most usual formula for the facial index is the following: _fi_ = (bizygomatic diameter× )/(ophryo-mental diameter) on the basis of which pruner bey gives the following mean averages according to race, for the general facial index: arabs . chinese . hottentots . tasmanians . laplanders . this index is not exact and constant, like that for the cranium; in fact, in case a person loses his teeth the index is altered. at the present day, especially in the french school, the anterior or total facial index is taken into consideration, in which the vertical diameter is measured from the vertex of the head to the chin (collignon), and, consequently, the index is always less than . the following is the nomenclature that results for the anterior facial index: leptoprosopics and below mesoprosopics from to chameprosopics and above if we take for the measure of _length_ that of the _visage_, _i.e._, the distance between the middle point of the frontal line of roots of the hair and the chin, we obtain indices that are higher by than those of the french school, namely: leptoprosopics and below mesoprosopics from to chameprosopics and above in many cases this index differs in the individual by as much as from the cranial index, as i proved in my work on the population of latium. consequently, anyone who has a cranial index of ought to have a _visage index_ of , etc. contrary to what happens in the case of the cranium, the index of the face varies according to the age, the face being very short in childhood, and much longer in the adult. _angles._--the angles distinguished by anthropologists are so numerous that it is impossible for us to take them all under consideration. in the case of a living person, the angles may be measured directly with the aid of broca's _goniometer_; the transverse branch passes across the subnasal point; the two antero-posterior branches are inserted, with the buttons with which they terminate, into the external auricular canals; the vertical branch, swinging on a hinge, is adjusted in such a way that the little rod which it carries at the end rests upon the ophryon. this complicated instrument resembles an instrument of torture and could not be applied to children; furthermore, it is difficult to adjust, and consequently the angles that it gives are inexact: every muscular contraction causes the angle to vary. for this reason the goniometer is impracticable. if, by means of an instrument we trace the projection of the facial profile, the facial angle may be taken on such a drawing; it may also be traced and calculated on a photograph taken in profile. broca's angle is that included between the auricular foramen, the subnasal point and the ophryon. camper's angle is that included between the auricular foramen, the point of insertion of the upper incisors and the metopic point. we, on the contrary, in _judging_ of the facial angle, or rather of the existence and degree of prognathism, have resorted to _inspection_, aided by certain facial lines, namely (fig. ): _a._ _vertical facial line._--if the subject holds his head level, with the occipital point in contact with a vertical rod, and his gaze fixed straight before him, then what we call the vertical line is the line perpendicular to the horizontal direction of the gaze, and tangent to the extreme anterior limit of the brain. this line, in the perfect human face, is perpendicular to the horizontal line uniting the auricular point with the subnasal point, and hence forms a right angle with it. _b._ _line of facial profile._--this is the line uniting the nasal point with the subnasal point. this line is never vertical, and therefore cannot form a right angle with the auriculo-subnasal line, but forms an angle that approximates more or less nearly to a right angle ( °): this is the _facial angle_. transversely there is only one line for us to consider, and it has already been noted: _c._ the _auriculo-subnasal line_, or _line of orientation_. _facial norm._--our attention should be directed, as we have already said: . _to the forehead._ this, if anomalous, may be: broad (if greater than mm.). narrow (if less than mm.). high (if over mm.). low (if under mm.). . _to the symmetry of the face._--if the face is notably asymmetrical, in respect to a plane dividing it longitudinally, the fact is at once perceptible. but a slight asymmetry may fail to be detected either by measurements (trago-mental diameters) or by inspection. consequently, it will be well to follow certain practical rules in making this observation. observe first of all the median line of the face: the bridge of the nose, the nasal septum, the upper labial furrow and the point of the chin ought all to lie in the same vertical line; very often a slight deviation of the nasal septum above the upper labial furrow will betray the asymmetry; furthermore, the two naso-labial _plicæ_ or folds should be noted, for they ought to be symmetrical in _direction_ and in _depth_; lastly, we must observe the symmetry of the zygomatic prominences. we shall often discover three concurrent facts: a slight deviation in the median line of the face usually corresponding to the nasal septum; a greater depth of one of the naso-labial plicæ; and a greater prominence of the zygoma and the cheek on the same side. our attention should next be turned to the correspondence required by æsthetics between the following three diameters: minimum frontal. bizygomatic. bigoniac. a very notable difference between these distances may also lead to the discovery of anomalies. sometimes we may discover, even by inspection alone, a notable narrowness of the frontal diameter, as compared with the other two. the _bizygomatic_ diameter may show an exaggerated development, and this is frequently accompanied by a hollowness in the temporal and upper maxillary regions and by a beak-like prognathism (prominence of the middle portion of the upper maxilla); at other times this degenerative sign calls our attention to the mongoloid type. the _bigoniac_ diameter may also show an exaggerated development due to the enormous volume of the mandible (criminaloid type--lombroso's assassin type). it is necessary to supplement our observation with the measurement of these three diameters, because it may very often appear to the eye that the minimum frontal diameter is below the normal, merely by comparison with the other two diameters which are overdeveloped; while when measured, it may turn out to be normal. or, conversely, the other diameters, the bizygomatic or bigoniac, although actually normal, may appear overdeveloped, because of the shortness of the minimum frontal diameter (see "faces of inferior type.") meanwhile we must not forget that the following are signs of grave degeneration: _a._ the minimum frontal diameter less than mm. (the gravity of this is increased if at the same time the other two diameters are found as described in _b_). _b._ the other two diameters greater than mm. (lombroso's born delinquents, assassin type). _lateral norm, or norm of profile._--our attention ought to be directed, as we have already said: . to the direction of the forehead. if abnormal, this may be: _a._ receding; _b._ _bombé_. the receding forehead is an indication of an incomplete or defective development of the frontal lobe of the brain; we find the forehead notably receding in the microcephalic type. the _bombé_ forehead is characteristic of hydrocephaly, but may occur also in the scaphoid cranium. when the forehead is bombé, the facial angle becomes equal to or greater than a right angle, because the face recedes beneath the extreme anterior boundary of the brain; in this case we have the opposite case to prothognathism, namely, _orthognathism_. . our attention should next be directed to the facial profile, in order to observe the form and degree of _prognathism_. the authorities distinguish three principal forms of prognathism: _a._ _prognathism_ properly so-called: prominence of the upper maxilla as a whole. _b._ _prophatnia._--prominence of the alveoli. _c._ _progeneism._--prominence of the mandible--the lower dental arch projects in front of the upper. measurements of the thorax principal anthropometric points: _acromial_ point; _sternal fossa_; _xiphoid_ point; _mammillary_ points. =measurements.=--_thoracic circumference._--already described among the measurements of the form. recording instruments are now made that are exceedingly complicated and quite costly, that register the movements of respiration; they are used in medical clinics, but would be of little practical use in our schools. _axillary and submammary circumference._--taken as above, but at different levels. _biacromial diameter._--this is taken by means of special calipers called a _thoracimeter_ or _pelvimeter_, because it is used to obtain the big measurements of the body (thorax and pelvis). the two buttons at the ends of the branches are applied to the acromial points, while the measurer occupies a position in front of the subject to be measured. _transverse thoracic diameter._--the buttons of the thoracimeter are applied on a level with the mammary papillæ, along the axillary lines (vertical lines descending from the centre of the arm-pits). _antero-posterior thoracic diameter._--this is also taken at the level of the nipples: the branches are applied anteriorly on the sternum and posteriorly on the vertebral channel. these two diameters serve to furnish the thoracic index: ti = ( ×_d_ (antero-posterior))/(d (transverse)) _spirometer._--the subject takes a maximum inspiration and retains his breath until he has exactly fitted his mouth to the apparatus; then he emits all his breath in a forced expiration. this causes the index to rise, and the amount may be read upon it. _sternal length._--from the xiphoid point to the sternal fossa. _bimammillary diameter._--distance between the two nipples. =abdomen.=--it would be really difficult to take measurements of the abdomen in the school. the principal anthropometric points to remember are the _umbilical_ point, the two _antero-superior_ _iliac_ points, the _pubis_. the distances which it would be useful to take are the following: _xipho-umbilical_ and _umbilico-pubic_ distances, which give an idea of the upper development (liver) and lower development (intestines) of the abdomen, and the _biacromial_ diameter which measures the width of the pelvis. [illustration: fig. .] _limbs._--in the case of the limbs also it is by no means easy or practicable to take many measurements. consequently it should be sufficient to indicate that there are a great number of different measurements for every different segment of the limbs. there are two principal instruments needed for this: a large compass with adjustable branches, for the long segments, and a small compass for the short segments. with the large compass we measure the length of the upper arm and forearm, the length of the thigh and shin, the length of the foot. with the small compass we measure the total length of the hand, its width, the length of the fingers and of the digital segments, etc. the circumference of the limbs is taken with the ordinary metallic tape. in order to fulfil the present-day scope of pedagogic anthropology, it is sufficient to take only a few measurements (the form and the head), but it is necessary to take them with great accuracy, and above all, to _verify_ one's personal ability as a measurer, so that everyone who wishes to try the experiment may have a reliable method of testing himself. to this end it is necessary to know how to calculate one's own special _personal error_. =the personal error= in anthropometry, a knowledge of the anthropometric points, the instruments to apply to them, their use and their interpretation, is not sufficient. there is need of prolonged experience in accordance with the accepted method and under a practical guide. as a matter of fact, the degree of accuracy with which a measurement is taken is always relative, no matter who takes it, but in the case of a person who has had no practice this relativity may present so wide a margin as to be practically useless. to obtain an approximate figure of a measurement means nothing, unless the figure is supplemented not only by a statement as to which of the _accepted methods_ was used in taking it, but also by a minute description of the manner in which this method was carried out. it is necessary to bear in mind: . that the ability to find the anthropometric points implies a certain knowledge of anatomy; it is a practical research, to be made under the guidance of a teacher, while the actual finding of the points as well as the taking of the measurements, should be left to the learner. . that the manner of applying the instruments is not without effect upon the resulting figure: for example, if the compass is held horizontally in measuring the frontal diameter, the result is different from what it would be if the instrument were held vertically. if the compass is held by the extremities of the branches, the diameter is slightly different from what it would be if the compass was held by the handle. accordingly, it is necessary to describe minutely how we are accustomed to hold the instruments. . that the resulting figure differs according to whether or not the screw has been turned, or whether it has been read _in position_, or by approaching the instrument to the eye. . that when an instrument is old, it registers different results from those it gave when new; consequently, it is necessary to _verify it_, before proceeding to take a series of measurements. hence it is proper to state not only precisely what instrument is used, but also that the precaution has been taken to verify it. but what is still more important is to find out one's own _personal_ _data_. if the same measurement is taken twice under precisely similar conditions, the same figure is hardly ever obtained both times; everyone, even the most experienced, has his own _personal_ _error_. by practice the amount of this error may be steadily lowered, but cannot be eliminated. constant figures are an evidence of dishonesty, of mere _copying_; they are almost certainly not authentic. it is important to know one's own _average error_. it is calculated as follows: let us suppose that successive attempts have resulted in the following figures relative to the same measurement: , , , , the mean average of these numbers is ( + + + + )/ = let us see how the values obtained differ in respect to : - , , + , + , - = differences from the mean average figure. we now take the average of these differences, disregarding the plus and minus signs: ( + + + + )/ = / = . = mean average error the personal mean error is a datum that it is necessary to know in order to give value to any measurements that we may wish to give forth. in taking the various test measurements for the purpose of calculating one's personal error, it is well to use the precaution of not taking them twice at the same sitting, but after an interval of time, not only so that all marks will have disappeared that may have been left upon the skin by the instrument in the act of measuring, but also that the preceding figure will have faded from our memory. accordingly, the measurements should be repeated on successive days and if possible under the same conditions of _time_ and _place_. it is well to make a careful choice of the time and place, because these also have their effect upon the figures. it will be observed that if the measurements are made in a well-appointed place, with a steady light, without noises, in short, without disturbing causes, the personal error is much more easily decreased, i.e., the measurements are more exact, because the measurer can better concentrate his attention. even the hour of the day has an influence upon the figures. it is known that none of us has the same ability to perform our various tasks at all the different hours of the day; for instance, it is not a matter of indifference whether we ask the pupils in a school to solve a problem at one hour of the day rather than at another. this is true of all occupations, and hence also of anthropometry; there are certain hours of the day at which fewer errors in measurement will be made, independently of the state of fatigue. consequently, it is well to know this individual datum, and to tell at what hour and in what environment the measures have been taken. the figures are of more value if they have been compared with the results of other observers; it is necessary, after we have found our own average error, to select, for the purpose of verifying our results, some other observer, of similar experience to our own, and whose personal error is also known. here it is necessary to take into consideration still another factor--one's personal susceptibility to suggestion. if we have confidence in the person through whom we verify our figures, we are inclined to obtain figures equal to his own. we have only to compare our earlier figures with those since we began to use him as a test, in order to see _whether_, and _to what extent_ we are influenced by suggestion. hence, to obviate this danger it is necessary to obtain our respective figures without communicating them to each other. it will also be necessary to take precautions not to be influenced by suggestion under any other circumstances. for instance, we are in hopes, while taking a series of measurements of school children, that we shall be able to prove that the heads of the more intelligent are larger than those of the less intelligent. in order that the figures shall be free from alterations due to suggestion, it is necessary that the measurer, while actually taking the measurements, shall be unaware which children are better and which are worse, from the intellectual point of view. the personal error cannot be calculated in regard to a single measurement and then applied to all the others, but it must be worked out anew for every separate measurement; it oscillates variously, as a matter of fact, in relation to the longer and shorter diameters, the cranial measurements, and the measurements of the trunk and the limbs. we are sufficiently skilled to take measurements when we have attained for measurements of cranial diameters a mean error of from to mm., for the vertical cranial diameter one of mm., and for the stature, one of from to mm. finally, in anthropometry, theory is of no value without a long and intelligent practice, constituting an actual and personal education in anthropometric technique. all anthropometric figures have a relative value dependent upon the extent of this education in the individual investigator. this is a case in which it may be said that the figures are worthless without the _signature_. chapter viii statistical methodology having taken measurements with the rigorous technical precision that is to-day demanded by anthropometry, we should know how to extract from these figures certain _laws_, or at least certain statistical conclusions. there are two principal methods of regrouping the figures:--_mean_ _averages_ and _seriations_. =mean averages.=--averages are obtained, as is a matter of common knowledge and practice, by taking the sum of all the figures and dividing the result by the number of data. the general formula is as follows: (a+b+c+d)/( + + + ) when comparative figures are given, as, for example, those recorded by quetélét for the stature, the diameters of the head, etc., such figures are always mean averages. such averages may be more or less general. we might, for example, obtain a mean average of the stature of italians, and this would be more general than the mean stature for a single region of italy, and this again more general than the mean stature for a city, or for some specified social class, etc. it is interesting to know how the mean will be affected, according to the number of individuals examined, because it is obvious that the mean stature of italians cannot be based upon measurements of _all_ italians, but upon a larger or smaller number of individuals. now, if we take various different numbers of individuals, shall we obtain different mean statures? and if so, what number of subjects must we have at our disposal in order to obtain a constant medial figure, and hence the one that represents the _real mean average_? it has been determined that a relatively small number will suffice to give the mean, if the measurements are taken with uniform method and from the same class of subjects (sex, age, race, etc.); for the cranium, subjects are sufficient, and for the stature, subjects. this method furnishes us with an abstract number, insofar as it does not correspond to any _real individual_, but it serves to give us the synthetic idea of an entirety. in anthropology we need this sort of fundamental synthesis before proceeding to individual analysis for the purpose of interpreting a specified person. now, it is evident that the figures representing the mean stature for each region in italy give us a basis for judging of the distribution of this important datum, while an accumulation of a hundred thousand individual figures would lead to nothing more profitable than confusion and weariness. the following table, however, is quite clear and instructive: mean stature in italy (according to departments) ------------------------------- departments |stature in |centimetres -------------------+----------- piedmont | . liguria | . lombardy | . venetia | . emilia | . tuscany | . marches | . umbria | . latium | . abruzzi and molise | . campania | . apulia | . basilicata | . calabria | . sicily | . sardinia | . ------------------------------- yet the interpretation of such a table is not simple; it is necessary to read the numbers, to remember them in their reciprocal relation; and it demands effort and time to acquire a _clear and_ _synthetic_ idea of the distribution in italy of this one datum, _stature_. on the other hand, we must lose as little time and spare our forces as far as possible. the value of positive methodology lies in the extent to which it accomplishes these two subjects. geographical charts serve the purpose of this desired simplification. let us take an outline map of italy, divide it into regions, and _colour_ these different regions darker or lighter, in proportion as the stature is higher or lower. the gradations and shadings in colour will tell us at a single glance, and without any fatigue on our part, what the table of figures reveals at the cost of a very perceptible effort. little squares must be added on the margin of the chart, corresponding to the gradations in colour, and opposite them the figures which they respectively indicate--after the fashion in which the scale of reduction is given in every geographical map. in this way we may _study_ these charts, and their examination is pleasant and interesting, while it successfully associates the two ideas of an "anthropometric datum" and of a "region," a result which a series of figures, pure and simple, could not achieve. we have seen livi's charts of italy, both for stature and for the cephalic index. analogous charts may be constructed for all the different data, for example, the colour of the hair, the shape of the nose, the facial index, etc. in the same manner we may proceed to a still more analytical distribution of anthropometric data among the different provinces of a single _region_. for example, i myself prepared charts of this sort for the stature, the cephalic index and the pigmentation of the population of latium. sometimes we want to see in one single, comprehensive glance, the _progress_ of some anthropological datum; for instance, in its development through different ages. quétélet's series of figures for growth in stature, in weight, in the diameters of the head, the cranial circumference, etc., offer when read the same difficulty as the similar tables of distribution according to regions. on the contrary, we get a synthetic, sweeping glance in _diagrams_, such as the one which shows the growth of stature in the two sexes. the method of constructing such diagrams is very simple, and is widely employed. when we wish to represent in physics certain phenomena and laws; or in hygiene, the progress of mortality through successive years, etc., we make use of the method of diagrams. let us draw two fundamental lines meeting in a right angle at _a_ (fig. ): _as_ is known as the _axis of the abscissæ_; _ao_, the _axis of the ordinates_. we divide each of these lines into equal parts. let us assume that the divisions of _as_ represent the years of age, and those of _ao_ the measurements of stature in centimetres; and since the new-born child has an average height of cm., we may place as the initial figure. from the figure _o_ (age) and from cm. (measure), we erect perpendiculars meeting at _a_, where we mark the point. at the age of one year the average stature is about cm., accordingly we erect perpendiculars from (age) and from (measure), obtaining the point _c_. since the stature at two years is about cm. the same procedure gives us the point _e_. since the stature at the age of three is about cm., i erect the perpendicular from a level slightly higher than half-way between and , obtaining the point _i_; and so on, for the rest. meanwhile we begin to be able to see at a glance that the stature increases greatly in the first year and that thereafter the intensity of its growth steadily diminishes. [illustration: fig. ] if we unite the points thus constructed, the line of representation is completed. the verticals _a_, _c_, _e_, etc., are the _ordinates_, and the horizontals _a_, _c_, etc., are the abscissæ of the line of representation; and since it is constructed along the intersections of these lines, they are for that reason collectively called _coordinates_. it is usual in constructing these diagrams to mark the coordinates in such a way that they will not be apparent, instead of which only the axes and the line representing the development of the phenomenon are shown (fig. ). sometimes a different method of representing the phenomenon graphically is followed, namely, by tracing the successive series of distances developed on the ordinates (fig. ); in which case the characteristic arrangement of the lines causes this to be known as the _organ-pipe_ method. [illustration: fig. .] [illustration: fig. .] the diagram for the growth in stature, given earlier in this volume, is constructed according to the method shown in fig. . when there are a great number of data to represent, which overlap and interweave, this method of graphic representation still lends itself admirably to the purpose; in such a case we shall have a number of broken lines, either parallel or intersecting, which may be distinguished by different colours or different methods of tracing (dots, stars, etc.), so that they may interweave without becoming confused, thus giving us at a glance the development of several phenomena at once (for example, total stature and sitting stature, length of upper and lower limbs, in one and the same diagram). for the purpose of practice, a graphic representation of the changes in ponderal weight through the different ages may be constructed in class. the figures for stature and weight at each age should be read aloud; one student can find the corresponding _ponderal index_ in the tables, while another constructs the graphic line upon the blackboard. in this manner we can see better than by reading the figures, how the ponderal index increases during the first year and becomes much higher during early infancy; and then how it diminishes up to the age of puberty, holding its ground with slight oscillations during the puberal period; after which it again increases when the individual begins to _fill out_ after the seventeenth year, and once again later when he takes on flesh, to fall off again during the closing years, when old age brings lean and shrunken limbs. seriation.--another method of rearranging the figures is that of _seriation_. let us assume that we are taking the average of a thousand statures, or of hundreds of thousands. we will try to find some means of simplifying the calculation. since the individual oscillations of stature are contained within a few centimetres and the individuals amount to thousands, large numbers will be found to have the same _identical_ statures. accordingly, let us rearrange the individuals according to their stature, obtaining the following result: ----------------------------------------------- stature in metres | number of individuals ---------------------+------------------------- . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | ------------------------------------------------ by multiplying the . by , . by , etc., and by adding the results, we shall have simplified the process for obtaining the sum total which must then be divided by the number of individuals. well, while doing this for the purpose of simplifying the calculation, we have hit upon the method of distributing the individuals in a _series_, that is, we have regrouped the corresponding figures according to _seriation_. seriation has been discovered as a method of _analysing_ the mean average, and it demonstrates three things: first, the extent of oscillations of anthropologic data, a thing which the mean average completely hides,--indeed, we have seen in the case of the cephalic index the mean averages oscillate between and , when calculated for the separate regions, while, in the case of individuals, the oscillations extend from to ; secondly, it shows the numerical prevalence of individuals for the one or the other measurement; third, and finally, seriation reveals a law, to us, namely, that the distribution of individuals, according to anthropological data, is not a matter of chance; there is a prevalence of individuals corresponding to certain average figures, and the number of individuals diminishes in proportion as the measurements depart from the mean average, equally whether they increase or diminish. i take from livi certain numerical examples of serial distribution: ------------------------------------------------ stature in inches | number of observations ---------------------+-------------------------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------ although these figures are not rigorously exact, there is a certain numerical prevalence of individuals in relation to the stature of inches, and above and below this point the number of individuals diminishes, becoming very few toward the extremes. the lack of exactness and of agreement in serial distribution is due to the numerical scarcity of individuals. if this number were doubled, if it were centupled, we should see the serial distribution become systematised to the point of producing, for example, such symmetrical series as the following: , , , , , , --- , , , ----- ------ , , ----- , , , , , , this law of distribution is one of the most widespread laws; it ordains the way in which the characteristics of animals and plants alike must behave; and the statistical method which is beginning to be introduced into botany sheds much light upon it. [illustration: fig. .] this law may be represented graphically by arranging the anthropologic data on the abscissæ (_e.g._, those of stature), and the number of individuals on the ordinates. in such cases we have a curve with a maximum central height and a symmetrical bilateral diminution (fig. ): this is the curve of quétélet. or better yet, it is known as _quétlét's binomial curve_, because this anthropologist was the first to represent the law graphically and to perceive that its development was the same as that so well known in mathematics for the coefficients in newton's binomial theorem. newton's binomial theorem is the law for raising any binomial to the _n_th power, and is expanded in algebra as follows: (_a_+_b_)^{_n_} = _a_^{_n_}+ _na_^{(_n_- )}_b_+ (_n_(_n_- )/ )_a_^{(_n_- )}_b_^{ }+ ((_n_(_n_- )(_n_- ))/( . ))_a_^{(_n_- )}_b_^{ }+ ((_n_(_n_- )(_n_- )(_n_- ))/( . . ))_a_^{(_n_- )}_b_^{ }+ ((_n_(_n_- )(_n_- )(_n_- )(_n_- ))/( . . . ))_a_^{(_n_- )}_b_^{ }+ ... + _b_^{n} substituting for _n_ some determined coefficient, for example, , the binomial would develop, in regard to its coefficients, after the following fashion: (_a_+_b_)^{ } = _a_^{ }+ ×_a_^{ }_b_+ (( . )/ )_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . )/( . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . )/( . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . )/( . . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . . )/( . . . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . . . )/( . . . . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . . . . )/( . . . . . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . . . . . )/( . . . . . . . ))_ab_^{ }+ _b_^{ }. whence it appears that, after performing the necessary reductions, the coefficients following the central one diminish symmetrically in the same manner as they increased: that is, according to the selfsame law that we meet in the anthropological statistics of seriations. indeed, here is the binomial theorem with the reductions made: (_a_+_b_)^{ } = _a_^{ }+ ×_a_^{ }_b_+ (( . )/( ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . )/( . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . )/( . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . . )/( . . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . . )/( . . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . . )/( . ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ (( . )/( ))_a_^{ }_b_^{ }+ ×_ab_^{ }+_b_^{ }. and after calculating the coefficients, we obtain the following numbers in a symmetrical series: this is why the curve of quétélet is called _binomial_. let us assume that we wish to represent by means of quétélet's curves, two seriations, for instance in regard to the stature of children of the same race, sex and age, but of opposite social conditions: the poor and the rich. these two curves of quétélet's, provided that they are based upon an equal and very large number of individuals, will be identical, because the law itself is universal. only, the curve for the rich children will be shifted along toward the figures for high statures, and that for the poor children toward the low statures. [illustration: fig. .] at a certain point _a_ the two curves meet and intersect, each invading the field of the other: so that within the space _abc_ there are individual rich children who are shorter than some of the poor, and individual poor children who are taller than some of the rich: _i.e._, the conditions are contrary to those generally established by the curve as a whole. this rule also, of the intersection of binomial curves, is of broad application; whenever a general principle is stated, _e.g._ that the rich are taller than the poor, it is necessary to understand it in a liberal sense, knowing that wherever we should descend to details, the opposite conditions could be found (superimposed area _abc_). for all that, the principle as a whole does not alter its characteristic, which is a differentiation of diverse types (for example, the tall rich and the short poor). the same would hold true if we made a comparison of the stature of men and women; the curve for men would be shifted toward the higher figures and that for women toward the lower, but there would be a point where the two curves would intersect, and in the triangle _abc_ there would be women taller than some of the men, and men shorter than some of the women. the differences have reference to the numerical _majority_ (the high portions of the curves) which are clearly separated from each other, like the tops of cypress trees which have roots interlacing in the earth. now, it is the _numerical prevalence_ of individuals, in any mixed community, that gives that community its distinctive type, whether of class or of race. if we see gathered together in a socialistic assemblage a proletarian crowd, suffering from the effects of pauperism, the majority of the individuals have stooping shoulders, ugly faces and pallid complexions; all this gives to the crowd a general aspect, one might say, of physical inferiority. and we say that this is the type of the labouring class of our epoch in which labour is proletarian--a type of caste. on the other hand, if we go to a court ball, what strikes us is the numerical prevalence of tall, distinguished persons, finely shaped, with velvety skin and delicate and beautiful facial lineaments, so that we recognise that the assemblage is composed of privileged persons, constituting the type of the aristocratic class. but this does not alter the fact that among the proletariat there may be some handsome persons, well developed, robust and quite worthy of being confounded with the privileged class; and conversely, among the aristocrats, certain undersized individuals, sad and emaciated, with stooping shoulders and features of inferior type, who seem to belong to the lower social classes. for this same reason it is difficult to give _clear-cut_ limits to any law and any distinction that we meet in our study of life. this is why it is difficult in zoology and in botany to establish a system, because although every species differs from the others, in the salience of its characteristics and the numerical prevalence of individuals very much alike, none the less every species grades off so insensibly into others, through individuals of intermediate characteristics, that it is difficult to separate the various species sharply from one another. it is only the treetops that are separate, but at their bases life is intertwined; and in the roots there is an inseparable unity. the same may be said when we wish to differentiate normality from pathology and degeneration. the man who is clearly sane differs beyond doubt from the one who is profoundly ill or degenerate; but certain individuals exist whose state it would be impossible to define. now, while seriations analyse certain particularities of the individual distribution, by studying the actual truth, mean averages give us only an abstraction, which nevertheless renders distinct what was previously nebulous and confused in its true particulars. the synthesis of the mean average brings home to us forcibly the true nature of the characteristics in their general effect. the analysis of the seriation brings home to us forcibly the truth regarding this effect when we observe it in the actuality of individual cases. "when, from the topmost pinnacle of the duomo of milan or from the hill of the superga," says levi in felicitous comparison, "we contemplate the magnificent panorama of the alpine chain, we see the zone of snow distinguished from that free from snow by a line that is visibly horizontal and that stretches evenly throughout the length of the chain. but if we enter into the alpine valleys and try to reach and to touch the point at which the zone of snow begins, that regularity which we previously admired disappears before our eyes; we see, at one moment, a snow-clad peak, and at the next another free from snow that either is or seems to be higher than the former." now, through the statistics of mean averages, we are able to see the general progress of phenomena, like the spectator who gazes from a distance at the alpine chain and concludes that the zone of snow is above and the open ground is below; while, by means of seriation, we are in the position of the person who has entered the valley and discovers the actuality of the particular details which go to make up the uniform aspect of the scene as a whole. both aspects are true--just as both of those statistical methods are useful--for they reciprocally complete each other, concurring in revealing to us the laws and the phenomena of anthropology. chapter ix biographical history of the pupil and his antecedents the child, like every other individual, represents an _effect_ of multifold causes: he is a product of _heredity_ (biological product) and a product of society (social product). the characteristics of his ancestors, their maladies, their vices, their degeneration, live again in the result of the conception which has produced a new individual: and this individual, whether stronger or weaker, must pass through various obstacles in the course of his intrauterine life and his external life. the sufferings and the mistakes of his mother are reflected in him. the maladies which attack him may leave upon him permanent traces. finally, the social environment receives the child at birth, either as a favoured son or as an unfortunate, and leads him through paths that certainly must influence his complex development. all of the preceding and theoretic parts of this volume which took up each characteristic for separate consideration, have already explained all that it is necessary to know in order to interpret the characteristics present in a given individual, and the more or less remote causes which contributed to them. we may now _apply_ our acquired knowledge to individual study, by making investigations into the antecedents of the child and recording his _biographic history_. it forms a parallel to the _clinical history_ which is recorded in medicine: and it leads to a diagnosis, or at least to a scientific judgment regarding the child. although this biographic part is eminently practical, certain principal points of research may be indicated for the purpose of guiding the student. but no one will ever make a successful study of medical pedagogy unless he will _follow_ the practical lessons dedicated to the individual study of the scholar, and make a practice of personal observation. in the pedagogical school of rome, we provide _subjects_, taken from the elementary schools or from the asylum school of de sanctis for defective children. and we read their biographical history in regard to their antecedents, and then make an objective examination of them, frequently extending it to an examination of their sensibility and their psychic conditions and enquiring into their standard of scholarship. from these lessons based upon theory, profitable discussions often result; and they certainly are the most profitable lessons in the course. a biographical history is essentially composed of three parts: the _antecedents_, which comprises an investigation of the facts antedating the individual in question; _the objective examination_, which studies the individual personally; and the _diaries_, _i.e._, the continued observation of the same individual who has already been studied in regard to himself and his antecedents. the objective examination and the diaries cannot be considered solely in the light of anthropology, because they chiefly require the aid of psychology. but even anthropology makes an ample and important contribution, first, in the form of an objective morphological examination, the vast importance of which has already been shown; secondly, because it gives us a picture of the biologico-social personality which it is necessary to compare with the _reactions_ of the subject in question, with his psychic manifestations, his degree of culture, etc.; and upon this comparison depends the chief importance of the individual study of the pupil. accordingly, in addition to an examination of the individual, anthropology ought to concern itself also with the conditions antedating the individual; therefore, it traces back to the _origins_ (antecedents), while psychology reserves for itself the principal task of _following the psychological development_ of the subject in his school life (diaries); a task in which it will nevertheless go hand in hand with anthropology since the latter must follow at the same time the physio-morphological development of the subject himself. accordingly, the gathering of _antecedent_ statistics is the task of anthropology. the antecedent statistics may be called the _history of the genesis_ of the individual; the manner of collecting them is by means of _enquiries_ that are generally made of the child's nearest relations (the mother) or of the teachers who have superintended his previous education. the enquiries are conducted under the guidance of a certain system of which we give the following outline: anamnesis: / remote / ascendant { \ collateral biopathological { / conception { { pregnancy { / mother { delivery \ near { \ lactation { / dentition / first development of { locomotion { \ speech \ child { maladies incurred { / character { maternal opinions { intelligence \ of child \ etc. / vocation of parents sociological { their morality { their culture \ their care of their children school record { opinions of teachers, history of previous schooling. we may distinguish biopathological antecedents, which have regard to the organism of the child as a living individual; sociological antecedents, having regard to the social environment in which the child has grown up and which contributes to the formation of his psycho-physical personality; and scholastic antecedents or _scholarship_, regarding the previous schooling of the child under examination. the biopathological antecedents are certainly of fundamental importance. they are called _remote_ when we refer to the hereditary antecedents of the subject, and _near_ when we have reference to his personal antecedents. =remote antecedents.=--these include an investigation regarding the ancestors, the brothers and sisters, and the collateral relations. the age of the parents (since we know that too immature or too advanced an age, or a disparity in age between the parents may result in the birth of weak children). degree of relationship between the parents (since we know that the offspring of parents related to each other may be weak). maladies incurred by them or prevalent in their families, incidental vices of the parent (since we know that constitutional maladies, such as syphilis, tuberculosis, gout, pellagra, malaria, mental and nervous diseases, etc., _alcoholism_ or an irregular life of excesses, may lead to the procreation of degenerates). furthermore, since it is known that according to the laws of collateral heredity, maladies may reappear in nephews which previously occurred in uncles and not in the parents, information should be sought, so far as possible, from all members of the family. information regarding the brothers of the subject offers an interest of a very particular kind, because this gives us an insight into the generative capacity of the parents: for instance, if there were abortions, children who died at an early age of convulsions, meningitis, etc., this argues unfavourably for the normality of the subject. =near biopathological antecedents:= _mother, child._--our inquiries should centre first of all upon the mother, in order to know the conditions of conception, pregnancy, delivery and lactation, in the case of the child under examination, because we know that frequently an error at the time of conception may produce a degenerate or a weakling. for example, a child generated in a state of physical or mental exhaustion--_e.g._, after a long trip on a bicycle, or after passing an examination--may be born feeble, predisposed to nervous diseases (idiocy, meningitis), just as he may be born abnormal (epilepsy, anomalies of character, criminal tendencies) if generated by the father during an alcoholic excess, or by the mother while suffering from hypochondria, illness, etc. the history of the pregnancy is also of interest: whether it proceeded regularly to the close of the nine months, whether the mother suffered especially from mental anxiety, illness or received any blow on the abdomen. other causes which may affect the health of the child have reference to birth and to lactation. if the delivery requires an operation, it may, for instance, deform the skull; while a hired wet-nurse, or artificial feeding are more or less apt to cause deterioration in the child. having completed this first enquiry, we pass on to consider the child itself, from the time of birth onward, lingering especially over its early development and more particularly over the _cutting_ _of the teeth_, _learning to walk_ and _learning to speak_, which are the three first obstacles to infantile development. the healthy child overcomes them according to normal laws, while the child of tardy development shows the first characteristic anomaly in these three fundamental points of its early existence (tardiness of development, incomplete and defective development, development accompanied by diseases, etc.). usually a tardiness in the development of the teeth denotes general weakness and more especially skeletal weakness (rachitis, syphilis); tardiness in learning to walk may occur in connection with the above-named causes (weakness of the lower limbs); or with difficulty in attaining an equilibrium (of cerebral origin; witness the case of idiots who, without being paralytic, cannot walk, because they cannot _learn how to walk_); or with paresis, more or less partial or diffused, of the muscles controlling the act of walking (infantile paralysis, little's disease, etc.). a tardy development of speech is sometimes found together with a notable intellectual development and the child will not begin to speak until he can express thoughts and speak well; but more frequently such delayed development is due to partial _deafness_; or it originates in the association centres of the brain (the idiot child cannot _learn_ to speak). it will also be helpful to know whether the child was ever ill. it is very important in this connection to find out whether the child ever suffered from infantile eclampsia in early life (convulsions, or "fits" as the mothers of the lower classes call them). this is an indication of a cerebral malady which leaves behind it permanent alterations of the brain and of its functions. the child may be an idiot, or may belong to one of the various catagories of children who go under the name of defectives; or he may be abnormal in character (cerebroplegic forms). another important fact to record is nocturnal _enuresis_ (loss of urine during sleep subsequent to the normal age); this is considered by some authorities as a pre-epileptic state--that is, a child that suffers such losses may in the future become subject to epilepsy, and quite probably, if studied, will show various anomalies of the nervous system, such, for example, as too deep sleep, slowness of intelligence, etc. repeated attacks of _infective diseases_, even though they are survived, also denote organic weakness, with facile predisposition to infective agencies--in other words, deficient powers of immunity. prolonged intestinal maladies or typhus in the early months (denutrition from pathological causes, exhaustive diseases) may, in themselves, be the cause of the child's enfeeblement and its consequent arrest in development. but in the interpretation of such observations, the physician should be the guide and the direct judge. the most salient symptoms in regard to the child--intelligence, conduct, character, endurance, etc.--are, for the most part, expressed with great clearness by the mothers. prof. de sanctis, for example, has noted that the mother's first words might serve the purpose of a diagnosis; for instance, the mother says of an idiot child: "he doesn't understand," of a child retarded in development, "he is stupid," of an abnormal child, "he understands but he is bad." accordingly, prof. de sanctis begins his diagnostic researches by registering the _maternal judgments_, because the mother is _struck_ by the salient characteristics of her child; and even if she is uneducated she always finds concise and effective phrases to express her judgment. to the end of rendering the research into antecedents surer and more complete so far as regards the personal antecedents of the child, certain anthropological tablets are being introduced to serve as _maternal diaries_. in this way the mothers have a guide for studying their children, and this forms one of the first practical attempts toward the "education of the mothers." here is a form of chart for keeping a record of the dentition. the significance of the letters is as follows: _u. r._: upper right, _i.e._, the right half of the upper jaw. _u. l._: upper left. _l. r._: lower right. _l. l._: lower left. (the fact must be borne in mind that in the first dentition there are twenty teeth.) first dentition ------------------------------------------------------------- | dates | teeth |------------------------------------| observations | of first | of complete | of | |appearance | development | shedding | --------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------------- u. r. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | u. l. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | l. r. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | l. l. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------- in this way we have an analytical and exact chart of the development of the teeth. analogous tables are made for the second dentition, for the growth of the stature, for increase in weight, for certain physiological notes, etc. when the first period of growth is ended, the mother's note-books contain annual notes, like the following: year .... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- date |jan-|feb- |march|april|may|june|july|august|sept-|oct-|nov- |dec- |uary|ruary| | | | | | |ember|ober|ember|ember weight | | | | | | | | | | | | stature| | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- special annual diaries are now employed for keeping a minute record of maladies incurred, symptoms, treatment, etc. these note-books, similar to those hitherto kept by ladies for their house accounts, or for sentimental notes, would be of great service and aid to pedagogic anthropology, even though their use could not be extended to all mothers (the mothers of the proletariat, immoral women, etc., either could not or would not give similar contributions). the institution of "children's houses," if more widespread, could easily facilitate the _education_ _of the mothers_ and the diffusion of "maternal note-books" throughout all grades of society. but at most these mother's diaries furnish us only with notes of the near antecedents and not of the remote, which are of extreme importance. =sociological antecedents:= _vocation, morality, culture._--before all else, in inquiring into the sociological antecedents, it is necessary to know in what sort of an environment the child has grown, and whether it is an environment favorable, or otherwise, to his physical, psychic, intellectual and moral development. this is an exceedingly important matter to determine for the purposes of a clinical history, since the child's moral conduct and the profit derived from study depend to a large extent upon the environment in which the child has grown and lived. to this end inquiries should be made into the economic circumstances of the child's parents, their vocation, moral standards and degree of education, and also into the child's mode of life, whether with the parents or other relations, or with persons not related to him, whether he plays in the street, keeps company with street children, etc. =school record:= _judgments of teachers._--this is the history of the pupil as made by his teachers, beginning with the first day that he enters school. the judgments of teachers, although not always so precise and so fair as those of mothers, nevertheless have an importance of their own. inquiry should be made into the child's conduct in school and the profit he derives from his studies. _illustrative cases._--there are, for example, certain families so infected with a degenerative or pathological taint that the remote antecedents are sufficient in themselves to stigmatise the biological condition of an abnormal subject. this may be seen in the genealogy of the misdea family (taken from lombroso's work): _grandfather_: michele misdea (not very intelligent, but very active) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | | | | st uncle nd uncle d uncle th uncle misdea the guiseppe domenico cosimo michele father (alcoholic, (imbecile) (eccentric (quick-tempered (semi-imbecile) spendthrift, married and killed in a to an hysterical violent) quarrel) woman, one | of whose brothers ------------------------------------------------------- was a brigand and | | | | another a thief). st cousin d cousin d cousin th cousin | (idiot) (madman) (imbecile) (imbecile) | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | st brother d brother d brother th brother th brother cosimo salvatore (sane) (alcoholic) (incorrigible) (obscene, misdea epileptic, drunkard, convicted of assault). | grandson (obscene) similarly extraordinary is the genealogy of ada türcker, an alcoholic, thief and vagabond, born in , a large part of whose numerous descendants it has been possible to trace. out of the individuals derived from this degenerate woman, the lives of no less than have been followed up, and among these are included mendicants, inmates of asylums, prostitutes, criminals, and murderers, who altogether cost the state upward of seven million francs! besides families like these there are others infected with a pathological taint, in which phthisis and gout alternate with epilepsy and insanity. then again there are other families in which the pathological taint is scarcely perceptible, as for example, the family of an epileptic child with criminal tendencies, personally studied by me; all the members of this family are long-lived and enjoy good health; the father alone is a sufferer from articular rheumatism. lastly there are families in which there is no sign of pathological or degenerative weakness; and in such cases we say that there is nothing noteworthy in the genealogy, and the near antecedents assume the highest degree of importance. the study of antecedents not only has a scientific importance, in so far as it contributes to a knowledge of anthropological varieties of mankind (due to adaptation); but it also has an immediate pedagogic importance through its useful application to the school. lino ferriani is the first jurist to investigate the antecedents of juvenile delinquents, by gathering notes not only regarding their parents, but also in regard to their own _school standing_ (by consulting the teachers in the schools where these juvenile criminals received their education!). i have extracted from his volume on "precocious and senile delinquency" the following statistics of the physico-moral condition of the parents: convicted of crimes against property , convicted of crimes against the person addicted to wine , women leading meretricious lives doubtful reputation , very bad reputation good reputation industrious , semi-idle , idle , sentenced for drunkenness , sentenced for offences against public morals alcoholics , confined in lunatic asylums mothers deflowered before the age of , couples separated through fault of the husband couples separated through fault of the wife couples separated through fault of both parties among these notes there is a numerical preponderance of _idlers_ (the idle and semi-idle: degenerates are weaklings who cannot work and who shun work; their only form of work is crime, which is an attempt to reap the fruit of other people's industry) and alcoholism (addicted to wine, alcoholics, and those sentenced for drunkenness; this also is a stigma of degeneration: weaklings have recourse to alcohol, because it gives them an illusion of strength). furthermore, the majority show, through crime and prostitution, that they belong to the class of social parasites. in regard to the psycho-physical characteristics of juvenile offenders, ferriani gives these principal notes: nervous , habitual liars , fond of wine and gluttonous , proud of delinquency , blasphemers , cruel to animals , excessive emaciation , long hands , unreliable workers , without interest in life , desirous of authority , scrofulous rachitic and syphilitic vindictive timid and cowardly obscene cruel to parents cruel to companions and now we come to the most interesting part of all, namely, the notes taken by teachers where these children went to school. _boys._--age from ten to twelve years. characteristic notes on children in regard to bad conduct: humiliating poorer companions absolute refusal to obey corrupting companions mutilating books of poor companions spirit of rebellion malicious and headstrong resentful of routine stealing food at expense of companions abnormally spiteful impertinent answers proud of inventing misdeeds stealing from companions and teacher (school stationary, etc.) calumniating companions desire to play the spy obscene writings in toilet room obscene writings in copy-books obscene actions in the school-room obscene writings on the benches violence with a weapon (pen-knife) bullying smaller boys feigning loss of speech for a month, to avoid reciting lessons blaspheming afraid of everything and savagely vindictive frequently absent from school, to play games of chance spirit of destruction spirit of contradiction _girls._--age from ten to twelve years. characteristic notes on children in regard to bad conduct: soiling the clothing of their companions abnormally spiteful intense envy frequent absence from school, to play games of chance tyranny immoderate vanity spirit of rebellion insolent answers absolute intolerance of supervision damaging the school furniture slandering the teacher slandering school-mates theft, limited to pens lascivious love-letters constantly speaking ill of her mother attempts to make school-mates unhappy unkindness toward animals unkindness toward old persons unkindness toward small children obscene writings in the toilet room harmful anonymous letters hatred of beautiful things spirit of contradiction corrupting companions thefts in school mutilating the clothing of companions the prevailing faults among the boys are: theft, obscene actions, tyranny over the weak; and among the girls: slander, extreme envy and lascivious love-letters. if we compare the notes regarding the parents with those relating to the children, we find a connection amounting to that of cause and effect. we might almost say that the phenomenon revealed to us in school through the teachers' notes concerns not so much the pupil himself as his past history. to keep this sort of record of misconduct, so damnatory to the pupils in question, would be worse than useless, if we were unable to trace back their source to the presumable causes which determined them. there is an intimate relation between the environment and the products of that environment. if we should read the notes relating to the children who receive prizes for good conduct, and who are held up as moral examples, we could trace back and find the cause of these notes in a favourable family environment; hence, the qualities which we praise in the child are not a merit peculiar to the child, but are due to causes, of which the pupil himself is merely the fortunate epilogue. and passing from studies taken from works of criminal anthropology to examples contained in works of pedagogic anthropology (these works all being based upon the same scientific standards), i am happy to cite a work which has even earned the praise of lombroso: _notes on infantile psycho-physiology_, written by professor calcagni. notwithstanding that this book of menotti calcagni's is inspired by the most advanced pedagogic conceptions, so that it well deserves to be cited in its entirety with much profit, i shall avail myself only of the part which particularly interests me at the present moment. it is the part containing the data collected and arranged by the author in a series of tables, in the form of a brief clinical history, of each pupil in the class studied by the author. i shall pass over the statistical tables concerning the personal examination of the pupils (anthropological, physiological, etc.), and confine myself to just two tables: one in regard to the examination into the pupil's antecedents (name and surname; day of birth; place of birth; age of father; age of mother; vocation of father; vocation of mother; conditions of home environment, hygienic, economic and moral; conditions of other members of the family; maladies and casualties incurred by the parents before and after the procreation of the child; defects and vices of parents, and details regarding their psychic constitutions; conditions and accidents during pregnancy, birth and puerperal period; illnesses incurred by the child); the other in regard to the pupil's previous school record (name and surname; pupils enrolled at beginning of the year; those transferred to other classes; those promoted without examination; those promoted after examination; those permitted a second trial; those not admitted to examination; those dropped from their class, and for how many different years). i select from these the notes referring to the children _promoted without_ _examination_ and those _not admitted to examination_; _i.e._, the privileged ones before whom an obstacle has been withdrawn which the majority must surmount before continuing on their path in life: go forward in peace, you favoured ones! and those who are not even allowed a chance to overcome the obstacle: turn back, you to whom the path of other men is closed! and i read these notes relative to those _promoted without examination_: "father shoemaker, mother dress-maker, home orderly, frugal and clean; brothers labourers;"--"f. professor of chemistry, m. housekeeping, condition of environment excellent, brothers studious;"--"f. assistant engineer, m. keeps house, conditions of environment good, deaths in family from acute diseases;"--"f. country tradesman, m. keeps house, conditions of environment excellent, very religious family;"--"f. man of means, m. housekeeping, conditions of environment excellent, brothers studious;"--"f. machinist, m. keeps the house, home somewhat damp because of adjoining garden; much anxiety on the part of the mother regarding the children, because her first husband was a consumptive, and the seven children she had by him all died. children of second marriage all healthy; but the pupil in question frequently had attacks of fever;"--"f. cab-driver, m. keeps house, economic and moral conditions satisfactory;"--"f. antiquarian, m. keeps house, condition good;"--"f. manager of a lottery office, m. keeps house, economic conditions of the very best, moral conditions good," etc. and here are a few notes on the pupils _not admitted to the examinations_: "father itinerant vendor, mother keeps house, home exceedingly dirty, utmost indifference regarding the children and their education. insufficient nutriment for the mother both before and after the child's birth;"--"f. cobbler, m. wash-woman, poverty, squalor, and indifference, dwelling gloomy and cramped;"--"f. mason, m. dead, dwelling gloomy and unhealthy, through lack of supervision, giacinto often runs away from home and goes to play on the banks of the tiber; the mother died of tuberculosis; the father is an alcoholic; the child was brought up by a wet-nurse, etc." to recapitulate: in the case of children promoted without examination there is an absolute prevalence of the most favourable social and biologico-moral conditions, while the opposite holds true of the children excluded from examinations. finally, in my own modest work on children adjudged to be the highest and the lowest in their classes, i arrived at some very eloquent conclusions. in the case of children who stand at the foot of their class, the prevailing conditions are not only an unhealthy home but an over-crowded one, with ten or twelve persons sleeping in a single room. on the contrary, in the case of the children standing at the head of their class, the homes are for the most part roomy, comfortable, well-aired and hygienic. in regard to nutrition, the children who have the lowest standing are those who go to school without their breakfast and who go from the school to the street without having had their luncheon. those who stand first, on the contrary, bring with them a luncheon that is sufficient and sometimes over-lavish; and after school, they return home, with the assurance that food, care and comfort await them. the parents of these leaders of their class belong nearly all of them to the liberal professions or the more favoured crafts and trades; consequently the pupils enjoy a more comfortable and respectable environment, a higher standard of culture, a mother who can aid them in their lessons, and who, equally with the father, watches with solicitous care over her children's education. the others, the dullest pupils, go at the close of school into the street, or else--although fortunately very few of them do so--return directly to the wretchedly cramped quarters that they call home. consequently it is not enough to recognise the fact that in school we have to deal with the more intelligent pupil and the less intelligent, with the moral and the immoral, the highest and the lowest; these are effects, the causes of which it is our duty to discover; and that is what the study of antecedents does for us. here begins the far-sighted task of the teacher, who no longer praises the pupil who is a product of fortunate causes, nor blames the unfortunate one heavily handicapped by a destiny which is in no way his fault; but he gives to all an affectionate and enlightened care, designed to correct and reform the reprobates and raise them to the level of the chosen few, thus working for the brotherhood and the amelioration of all mankind, and devoting special attention to those that need it most. the study of antecedents is what contributes most to the interpretation of personality. it is needful, however, that it should be sufficiently thorough; and to this end a certain order of interrogation should be followed. physicians are well acquainted with this order, from the habit they have acquired of taking the antecedents of the patient in their clinical practice; but for making biographic charts for schools, a _guide_ is needed for the use of whoever puts the questions. besides, the biographical history is based on different principles from those of the clinical history (_e.g._, the moral status of the parents, their degree of culture, etc., which are not taken into consideration, in treating a patient). consequently, the blank forms of biographic charts contain suggestions that are likely to prove helpful in conducting an inquiry into antecedents. among such models, i have selected that of pastorello, because it is one of the most complete, and also because it was compiled by an educator (see page ). nevertheless, the inquiry into his antecedents is only a preparation for the scientific study of the pupil in his present state; a study which should _follow_ the pupil through his daily life (diaries) and thus constitute his complete _biographical history_. having collected the antecedent details, we pass on to the objective anthropological and psychic examination of the pupil: beginning with the anthropological, which it is more important to secure first; since the psychic examination will produce better results after a _prolonged observation of the subject_ (diaries, school records). in the anthropological examination it is customary to begin by taking the principal measurements (total stature, sitting stature, weight, thoracic perimeter, perimeter of the head, and its two maximum diameters) which furnish the data needed to give a fundamental idea of the child's physiological constitution and racial type, and to determine the normality of his growth. many other measurements may be taken (spirometry, dynamometry), according to the custom of the school, and, in private schools, according to the object which the principal has in view, in the way of contributions to science. for instance, in a school for defectives the examinations as to general sensibility, speech, muscular strength have an importance of the first order, and equally important is the accurate and minute inspection of the different organs, for the purpose of discovering possible malformations. there are various special objects to be attained by gathering anthropological data, and accordingly every school based upon modern scientific principles has its own "biographical chart" drawn up according to special forms containing the necessary measurements and observations, and the examiner has only to follow the directions of this guide and to fill in the required information obtained from the individual pupil. inquiry into antecedents in pastorello's biographic chart ---------------------------------------------------------------------- general information regarding pupil's family ---------------------------------------------------------------------- name and surname of parents _father_......................................................... _mother_......................................................... _what degree of relationship, if any, exists between the parents?_ ...................................................................... _at what age did the parents contract marriage?_................. _how old were the parents at the time of the child's birth?_..... state of health _father_......................................................... _mother_......................................................... _from what diseases have the relatives of the pupil died?_ ...................................................................... _have there been any predominant_ _diseases in the family?_ ...................................................................... education _father_......................................................... _mother_......................................................... employment _father_......................................................... _mother_......................................................... ancestry _father_......................................................... _mother_......................................................... moral and financial condition of the pupil's family _is the family interested in the education of the children?_ ...................................................................... family habits, eccentricities and vices ...................................................................... here, for instance, is the anthropological form used in the great orphan asylum in new york: new york juvenile asylum anthropological examination and measurements.--_no. of page_ ------------------------------------ date of entrance sex age date of birth name total stature sitting stature total spread of arms weight prehensile strength, right hand prehensile strength, left hand power of traction {antero-posterior diameter thorax {transverse diameter maximum circumference of head maximum antero-posterior diameter maximum transverse diameter minimum frontal diameter height of head inspection: cranium face eyes ears gums teeth palate uvula strabismus limbs body genitals lung heart special notes ------------------------- this form has signs of _modernity_: in fact, it concedes the greater part of the research that is to be made in the first objective examination to anthropological observations, limiting the observations of a physiological nature to those of muscular strength--it being well known that all _functions_ in general, and especially the _psychic_ _functions_, cannot be determined with reliable accuracy except after repeated and prolonged observations. furthermore, the modern tendency in anthropologic research is revealed by the preference given to measurements of the body in its entirety, giving first place to those of the _bust_ and _limbs_, from which the important ratio of their development is obtained (standing and sitting stature, total spread of the arms), and the _weight_. furthermore, there is a notable _absence of measurements of the face_, measurements which it is the modern tendency to abandon where the subjects of research are children, since in this case they have no physiological or ethnical importance, because the face of the child _varies from year to_ _year_, and has no _fixed_ index like that of the cranium. a study of the facial measurements might be of importance as contributing to a knowledge of the evolution of the face through successive years; but such knowledge can be obtained, so far as is needed, from "special studies and researches," without making _obligatory_ a form of research that is both troublesome and dangerous (the application of pointed instruments to the faces of children). the best method of examining the face is by photographing the full face and the profile at intervals of one year. accordingly, the biographic form used in the "children's houses" contains only questions of an anthropologic nature of importance in relation to growth (see the form of the biographic chart of the "children's houses," page ). the greatest importance attaches to the _stature_ and _weight_. indeed, while all the required measurements are taken _once a year_ on the occasion of the child's birthday, the total stature and the weight are taken once a month upon the day of that month corresponding to the child's birthday. the numerous other physio-pathological and psychic notes, the examination in regard to speech, etc., are obtained partly from the diaries and partly from the physician, according to the necessities of individual cases. the photograph should complete the examination of the pupil. the methods of observation adopted in the "children's houses" represent, i think, the ideal method for the accurate recording of individual characteristics. since the pedagogical methods there employed are themselves founded upon the "spontaneity" of the manifestations of children, it may be said that they represent the technical and rational means of proceeding to a psychic examination of the child. i cannot linger upon this point, because the question deserves a special investigation; but it must suffice to point out that in order to render biographic charts a necessary adjunct to the management of schools, so as to offer a real aid to the teacher and not to have them mean to her (as happens to-day only too frequently!), "just so much more work," the immediate utility of which is doubtful, it is essential that the _pedagogic methods of instruction_ should be changed. so long as a child is required to perform certain definite acts, he will reveal nothing of himself beyond responding, in so far as he is capable, to the requirements of his environment; and any attempt to make psychological deductions from such response would contain profound errors. anthropological form used in the "children's houses," in rome and milan _no._............... _date of enrollment_............. _name and surname_..................................... _age_......... _name of parents_........................... _age_: _m_......_f_...... _vocation_............................................................ _hereditary antecedents_.............................................. ...................................................................... _personal antecedents_................................................ ...................................................................... anthropological notes ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | cranium total | |thoracic|essen- | index | pon-|------------------------- stature|weight|circumf.| tial | of |deral| cir-|a.-p.|transv.|ceph- | | |stature|stature|index|cumf.|diam.| diam. |alic | | | | | | | | |index -------+------+--------+-------+-------+-----+-----+-----+-------+----- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- _physical constitution_................................................ _muscular development_................................................. _color of complexion_.................................................. _color of hair_........................................................ notes.................................................................. nevertheless, the earlier forms of biographic charts, and even the modern ones _in general use in italy_ (!) frequently contain minute requirements for psychic examination in relation to such points as memory, attention, perception and intelligence. and even less satisfactory are the requirements in the charts regarding the examination for _sensibility_--namely, ability to distinguish colours, sense of touch, smell, etc.; because the pedagogic methods in vogue in school (and this applies to-day to all our schools) make no provision for a rational exercise of the senses, nor for instruction in the nomenclature relating to them. an examination of the senses for the purposes of the biographic chart should at most be limited to a test of their _acuteness_, forming an inquiry analogous to that of _sensibility to pain_. for an inquiry into the power to discriminate between various sensations ceases to be a simple examination of the senses, and becomes a combined test of psychic powers and of the degree of culture attained (the degree to which the senses have been trained). furthermore, it is well known that a psychical examination demands preparation on the part of the person to be examined, complete repose from all emotion, isolation of the senses, etc., the preparation depending upon the special research which it is desired to make; all of which is absolutely opposed to the _aggressiveness_ of the tumultuous examination conducted by an investigator whose chief aim is to fill in the blanks upon the biographic charts. the psychic examination of a pupil is a task to be accomplished slowly, by watching the child's behaviour, in the course of its _daily life_ under the eye of an intelligent and trained observer. nevertheless, it is sometimes necessary, especially in schools for defective children, to form at once a comprehensive first impression of the psychic condition of a given child; it furnishes the observer with a needed point of departure, and abridges the long and difficult task of a psychological study of the pupil, to be made in the course of the ensuing year. in such a case, the biographical form should not contain such general topics as the following: memory, sense of place and time, judgment, moral sense, etc., but a series of very simple _questions_ to be put by the examiner to the pupil, the replies to which must be recorded _accurately_, without alteration in any manner, but reproducing their incorrectness of speech, their hesitations, etc. in this way such a form of inquiry constitutes not only a first psychical examination, but also a first examination as to defects of speech, which is of much value and reproduces quite exactly the state of the subject at a given moment. on the contrary, the sort of results obtained according to the older method, _e.g._: _memory_, poor; _intelligence_, sufficient; _attention_, easily aroused, etc.; were practically worthless, especially in absence of any knowledge of the competence of the person who formulated these judgments. here is an example of a series of questions to be used as a psychic test, prepared by professor sante de sanctis, and included in the biographic charts of the asylum-school for defective children at rome: . what is your name? . how old are you? . what is your mamma's name? . have you any brothers? . have you any sisters? . what is your father's business? . is your father (or mother) old or young? . at what age is one old? . how do you know that a man is old? . what is this? (a couch in the corridor). . what is it for? . what is this? (a table). . what is it for? . do you always feel well? . are you hungry? . when are you hungry? . do you ever dream at night? . what do you dream? . what time is it now, more or less? . what year is it? . what month is it? . what season of the year? . what day of the month is it? . what day of the week? . where do you live? . where are you at the present moment? . what are these? (two books or two pictures) and which of the two is the larger? . which of these three glasses has the most water in it? . which will weigh the most and which the least of the three? . how many persons are there in your home? . is your home large or small? . how many rooms are there? . whom do you love most? . what would you do if (the person named) were hungry? . what would you do if he were very sick? . or if he died? . do you love some playmate, or some friend? why do you love him? . do you hate anyone? why? . do you know the meaning of right and wrong? . do you know the meaning of rewards and punishments? out of all the existing forms of biographic charts i have selected four in their entirety; two are historical: . the first form for the individual examination of the pupil ever published in any treatise on pedagogy; and . the first form printed in italy by the city authorities with the intention of having it introduced into the elementary schools. the first of these is the biographic chart proposed by séguin in his pedagogic treatise relating to the education of idiots (_traitement moral, hygiene, et éducation_ _des idiots_, ); the second is the one proposed by sergi for the communal schools of rome, and printed by the commune with the intention ( ), never actually carried out, of introducing it into the schools; at all events, this is the first historic document representing an idea twenty years in advance of the time when the idea itself was destined to begin to be popularised. here are the two forms in question: =séguin's form.=--this follows out all of séguin's pedagogical ideas, and all of his didactic methods; it is a guide for the physician, and a minute guide for the teacher who intends to adopt the séguin methods of education. séguin calls his biographic chart a "monographic picture," and divides it into five paragraphs, the fifth of which deals with the pupil's antecedents. monographic picture (_séguin_) i. _portrait (objective morphological examination)_ age. sex. temperament, health. illnesses, accessory infirmities. detailed configuration of the cranium. configuration of the face. proportional relation between cranium and face. inequality of the two sides of cranium and face. hair, skin. proportional relation between the trunk and the limbs. inequality of the two sides of the trunk and limbs. general attitude of the body. attitude of the head. attitude of the trunk. attitude of the lower limbs. attitude of the upper limbs. attitude of the hand and fingers. configuration of the organs of speech, and their possible relation to the organs of generation; dentition. configuration of the thorax. state of the vertebral column. state of the abdomen. ii. _physiological examination_ activity, general and applied. apparent state of the nervous system. general irritability of the nervous system. irritability of special groups of nerves. cries, groans, singing, muttering, etc. the change which certain stimulants such as cold, heat, electricity, odours, etc., produce upon irritability and sensibility, general or special. probable state of the brain. voluntary articular flexions. locomotion. positions, recumbent, seated, standing, walking, ascending, descending. running. jumping. grasping objects. dropping objects. catching objects. throwing objects. ability to dress, eat, etc., without aid. probable state of the spinal marrow. probable state of the organic nerves. probable state of the sensory nerves. probable state of the motor nerves. difference of action between the sensory nerves and the motor nerves. inequality of action of the motor nerves and sensory nerves on the two sides of the body. the muscular system, contractibility of muscles, and condition of sphincter muscles in particular. muscular movements. voluntary movements. automatic movements depending on the condition of the sympathetic nerve. automatic movements depending on the state of the central nervous system. spasmodic movements. coordinated and disassociated movements. sense of touch. sense of taste. sense of smell. sense of hearing. sense of sight. erectility. the voice, abnormal tones. speech. assimilative functions. unnatural appetites. manner of taking food. mastication. swallowing. digestion. evacuation of fæces and urine, voluntary or involuntary; other excretions, saliva, nasal mucus, tears, sebaceous humor, sweat, perspiration, etc. pulse. respiration. sleep. iii. _psychic examination_ attention. sensorial perception. intellectual perception. deduction. coordination. inventiveness. unrelated memories. foresight and forethought. to what extent are these intellectual operations, when they exist, applied to concrete phenomena, mixed phenomena (_i.e._, concrete and abstract) and to ideas of a moral nature? are the general ideas of time, space, conventional measurements, relative value, intrinsic or arbitrary, understood and applied in actual daily life? comparison. judgment. reflection. have the ordinary rudiments, such as the alphabet, reading, writing, drawing, arithmetic, been taught to the pupil or not, and can they be taught in his present state? have his attitude toward music and mathematics, enjoyment of singing, irresistible desire to sing, been brought about naturally? has he a perception of the physical proportion of bodies, such as colour, form, dimensions, relations between the parts to form a whole? iv. _examination regarding instincts and sentiments_ instinct of self-preservation. instincts of order, readjustment, preservation and destruction of objects. aggressiveness, cruelty. instinct of assimilation and possession. is the child obedient or rebellious, respectful or impertinent, affectionate or cold, rude or courteous, grateful, jealous, merry or sad, proud, vain or indifferent, courageous or cowardly, timid or venturesome, circumspect or thoughtless, credulous or suspicious? has the child a sense of abstract right and wrong or only in relation to a small number of acts that concern himself? does the child show spontaneity an active will--the kind of will which is the initial cause of all human actions producing intellectual or social results? has the child only a negative will associated with instincts and does he protest energetically against any extraneous will that tends to compel the idiot to concern himself with social or abstract phenomena? finally, in what direction and within what limits has the idiot passed beyond the boundaries of his ego in order to enter into physical, instinctive, intellectual and moral communication with the phenomena which surround him? v. _etiology_ origin of father and mother. their constitution. hereditary diseases. place of residence at the time of the child's conception, gestation, birth and lactation. possible causes of idiocy. circumstances worthy of note during conception. circumstances worthy of note during gestation, delivery, lactation. serious illnesses of the child during the first year. infirmities and illnesses from the first year down to the first symptoms of idiocy. progress, retrogression or stationary state from the child's birth down to the time of examination. if we realise that this model for a biographic chart was proposed more than one-half a century ago, it makes us marvel at the modern spirit of its concepts: it actually considers the relation between the development _of the trunk and of the limbs_, the _mimic_ _attitudes of the body_, the _constitution_, etc., all of which concepts are foreign to the studies of the medical clinics from which séguin must have drawn his inspiration, since even to the present day the tendency in the clinics is toward purely analytical investigation, with the exception of professor de giovanni's clinic. in the model proposed by sergi, the examination was required to be made twice: first upon the reception of the pupil, and again at his departure with the modifications shown below: biographical chart for schools (sergi) table i.--_physical observations_ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- on entering school | on leaving school | class year | class year ----------------------------------+----------------------------------- . name. | . name . age. | . age . birthplace. | . birthplace. . parentage (father and mother).| . parentage (father and mother). . vaccination. | . vaccination. . stature. | . stature. . weight. | . weight. . pulmonary capacity. | . pulmonary capacity. . muscular force. | . muscular force. . general state of health. | . general state of health. . past illnesses. | . past illnesses. . anomalies, deformities. | . anomalies, deformities. . head, horizontal circumference| . head, horizontal circumference. . head, maximum length. | . head, maximum length. . head, maximum width. | . head, maximum width. . cephalic index. | . cephalic index. . face, length. | . face, length. . face, width. | . face, width. . facial index. | . facial index. . hair, colour, form. | . hair, colour, form. . eyes, colour. | . eyes, colour. . skin, complexion. | . skin, complexion. . incidental remarks. | . incidental remarks. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- biographical chart for schools (sergi) table ii.--_psychological observations_ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- on entering school | on leaving school | class year | class year ----------------------------------+----------------------------------- . sight, acuteness, far- or | . sight, acuteness, far- or near-sighted. | near-sighted. . sense of colour, normal, | . sense of colour, normal, defective. | defective. . hearing, acuteness. | . hearing, acuteness. . sense of touch, acuteness. | . sense of touch, acuteness. . intelligence, quick or slow. | . intelligence, quick or slow. . perception, rapid or gradual. | . perception, rapid or gradual. . memory, tenacious or short. | . memory, tenacious or short. . attention, easily aroused or | . attention, easily aroused or not. | not. . speech, rapid or slow. | . attention, how long sustained. . speech, pronunciation perfect | . attention, progressive or imperfect. | weariness. . speech, stammering. | . speech, rapid or slow. . emotional sensibility, dull | . speech, pronunciation perfect or easily assumed. | or imperfect. . conduct and character at home.| . speech, stammering. . affection for parents. | . emotional sensibility, dull or . taciturnity or loquacity. | easily assumed. . preferences during free hours.| . conduct and character in school. . caprices, eccentricities. | . friendships in school. . unusual incidental | . taciturnity or loquacity. occurrences. | . preference during free hours. | . caprices, eccentricities. | . unusual incidental occurrences. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- the two other biographic charts that deserve specific mention are, unlike the above, charts in actual use, since they have both been recently introduced into practical service. the first, which i reproduce in entirety, is the one adopted by the commune of bologna for its schools; the second is the one introduced, for the purpose of studying the inmates, into the government reformatories, of italy, that have recently been transformed into educational institutions, into which a number of important reforms have been introduced, through the influence of scientific pedagogy--among others, these biographical charts and the anthropological researches connected with them. biographic chart for elementary schools: district of _year_ -- _class_ commune of bologna office x.--hygiene _biographic chart of the pupil_ _name and surname_............................................... _age_............................................................ _place of birth and residence_................................... _parents' place of birth and vocation_........................... the teacher. * * * * * state of skin, of the subcutaneous tissue, the muscles, the lymphatic glands { horizontal circumference head { maximum width { maximum length cephalic index face { height { width facial index hair / colour \ form { keenness of sight { hypermetropia eyes { myopia { colour sense { colour of iris hearing, acuteness { form teeth { number decayed { number missing anomalies of development weight { at the beginning, of body { at the end of the year total spread of arms stature pulmonary capacity the physician * * * * * illnesses incurred during the school year............................. total number of absences.............................................. number of absences on account of illness.............................. profit derived from instruction....................................... conduct and character in school....................................... affection toward parents and school-mates............................. special observations.................................................. the master the biographic chart of the reformatories is among the most complete; nevertheless, it is based upon antiquated methods for the study of the individual, including, for instance, the facial index and ignoring that of the stature; and limiting the psychic examination to abstract notes (reflection, attention, etc.). it constitutes, however, an anthropological _record_, for it follows the child throughout his whole residence in the reformatory. what is called, in the chart in question, the moral account, corresponds to our _third subdivision_ in biographic histories, in so far as it represents a summary of the daily records. under this head mention is made of the moral balance, and the notes tell us that it is founded upon "_punishments_" and "_rewards_." in so far as they treat of disciplining children, these notes are not to be taken as a model; they are evidently a relic of antiquated educative methods that have survived amid the efforts of a new scientific movement. there is no mention made of medical treatment bestowed upon the children, who may very often owe their so-called _moral_ anomalies to a pathological condition which must frequently be _aggravated_ by punishments. it is well known that many normal children have periods of agitation which is manifested by the most various kinds of action (impulsiveness, sexual excesses, rebellion), followed by periods of calm during which the child exhibits the opposite characteristics (industriousness, obedience, etc.). the biographic chart is quite likely to show a record of punishments and rewards corresponding to these contrasted periods; and in this respect it follows antiquated pedagogic methods, which are precisely what need to be reformed under the light of science. an illustration of this is contained in the biographic history of an idiot boy in the asylum of the _bicêtre_, a report of which is given below: the periodic _anomalies of character_ in the boy should be noticed. many epileptic children do not have convulsions, but exhibit instead anomalies of character which become permanent and are naturally aggravated by fatigue and punishment; and the great majority of such children pass eventually into reformatories. in the forms customarily used for biographic charts, there is liberal provision for daily notes. accordingly, in the biographic chart of the child in question there are a number of blank pages on which _casual notes_ have been entered (diary). every fact deserving of notice has been entered; facts of a physio-pathological nature, such as illnesses, strength, endurance in running, appetite, outbursts of anger without cause; school-notes regarding the progress attained by the child in school, especially when he has overcome serious difficulties, correction of incidental defects of speech, etc., and notes of a psycho-moral nature regarding acts committed by the child, tending to show the state of his feelings. the master has a general register which may be compared to the _daily entry book_ used in book-keeping, and in which all the _notes of the day_ are entered. days and even months frequently pass without any entry being made in regard to some particular child. from this general register the master later draws up individual _summaries_ which are then transcribed into the corresponding biographic history of each child. once in so many years all the measurements and observations are repeated in their entirety (_e.g._, at the most important periods of growth with especial study of the epoch of puberty). when the child is definitely discharged from the school, a general summary is drawn up; in such a case the _biographic chart_ represents that individual's _own personal history_; a human and social document of the highest interest to anyone who wishes to _know himself_, and continue his own self-education! it might serve as a useful guide to a man of intelligence. these registers and biographic charts may be compared to the record of points and the report cards that are in use to-day in the schools. even the report cards which are obtained through a fatiguing process of _averages_ represent a summary of notes taken every day by the teacher (although not every day for _every_ pupil). but the report card is of no practical use to the man who wishes to draw up a faithful record of the education he has received that will serve to _guide him through life_. since there do not yet exist any complete biographic histories relating to normal children, i shall reproduce one of an idiot boy who was received into the great paris hospital for defectives; this history is interesting because it is the result of the methods of séguin who was the founder of the anthropological movement in pedagogy; it would be still more interesting if we could offer the complete history of a normal man or of a wayward boy redeemed by education. but let us hope for this in the near future! the summary of the history which i here reproduce does not contain the objective examination of the boy at the time of his reception; because that would only be a repetition of what has already been described, while the part which it now interests us to illustrate is that containing the summaries of the diaries. the antecedents, however, are given because they are indispensable for an understanding of the patient's personality. summary of the biographic history of an idiot boy _admitted at the age of years, and dismissed at the age of _ outline: father an alcoholic.--mother subject to migraine.--no consanguinity between the parents. equality of ages (difference of two years).--a sister died of convulsions.--conception during an alcoholic excess on the part of the father.--albuminuria during pregnancy.--the child cried both night and day.--twitchings of the body and head.--did he ever have convulsions?--fits of anger.--at the time of admission, he could neither speak nor walk (july , , age years).--the child has involuntary emissions of fæces and urine (is uncleanly). _september_, .--the child has learned to walk. .--development of speech.--the child is beginning to give notice of its natural necessities. .--the child is no longer uncleanly.--the twitchings of head and body and the fits of anger have diminished. - .--progressive improvement, with alternate progressive and stationary periods. .--description of the patient. - .--physical and intellectual evolution.--progress in studies.--acquirement of a trade.--results. _remote antecedents._ (notes furnished by the mother.)--_father:_ years old, tailor's cutter, large, strong, of calm temperament, a smoker; numerous _excesses of alcoholic beverages_, especially absinthe--as many as eleven a day; venereal excesses; came home intoxicated almost every day; never had convulsions in infancy, nor any nervous shock; suffered only from eczema. no syphilis.--_father's family:_ paternal grandfather a mason, sober, died of heart disease. paternal grandmother, of calm temperament, enjoyed good health. no other information regarding paternal ancestry.--_mother:_ years old, seamstress, good health, regular features; no convulsions in infancy. menstruated at age of years, married at . suffered from migraine since she was nine years old. these headaches lasted three days and occurred at the menstrual periods, ceasing throughout pregnancy and lactation. the symptoms were: headache, buzzing in the ears, to the point of deafness, and vision of sparks before the eyes. the attacks terminated with vomiting. _mother's family:_ father sober and in good health; mother died of influenza. no information regarding either the ascendant or collateral branches; but there seem to have been no other cases of nervous disease in the family. no consanguinity, no disparity in ages. _brothers_ _and sisters of the patient:_ the mother of d---- had five children; the first, a boy ten years and a half old, intelligent, no convulsions; the second, a girl, died at fourteen months, after having convulsions that continued for eight days; the third, a girl, seven years old, intelligent, no convulsions; the fourth, the patient in question; the fifth, a girl, born after d----'s admission to the asylum; she is intelligent and healthy, no convulsions. _near antecedents._ the child's mother is convinced that the conception took place during _alcoholic_ intoxication. pregnancy was accompanied by generalised oedema from the fifth month onward, due to albuminuria. no _eclampsia_. no fainting fits, etc. delivery timely, difficult, but accomplished naturally. the child at birth was strong and not asphyxiated. was nursed by the mother for the first two months, after which he depended upon hired nurses and artificial feeding (was sent to the country where he was fed chiefly from the bottle). was returned to the mother at the age of eleven months; could not walk; would eat anything within reach of his hands, coal, excrements. cried continually, day and night, to the great disturbance of the neighbours. cut his first tooth at five months; and at the age of three years the first dentition was not yet completed. has a habit of swaying his body forward and backward; beats his head against the wall, the chairs, etc., and strikes his forehead with his clenched fist. has habitual constipation. is extremely affectionate, loves to be caressed. yet he will bite anyone who approaches him, including his brothers and sisters. it cannot be learned whether when he was staying with the wet-nurse he ever had convulsions. it is certain that he had none after his return to the family. the habit of _onanism_ dates from the time of his return from the nurse. vaccinated at months, slight attack of varioloid at the age of two years; no other infectious diseases. no manifestation of scrofula; no traumatism. _objective examination of the patient_ (omitted).--the _history_ is accompanied by eight photographs of the boy, taken respectively at the ages of , , , , , , and years, three of which, namely, those taken at the ages of , and , are reproduced on page . diaries _july ._--he is uncleanly (emissions of fæces and urine). does not know how to behave at table; when he eats he spills his food over his clothing. is gluttonous but not voracious; he does not steal the food of his companions, but he protests when he sees food given to others and not to him. is mistrustful, hides his bread for fear that it will be taken from him; and if any one takes notice of this, he utters a cry of rage. he is affectionate, very timid, jealous, obstinate, grumbling, somewhat sullen, seldom laughs. although weak, he fights his companions and frequently falls into _fits of_ _anger_; then he flings himself on the floor and beats his head against the furniture. he sways his body forward and backward. his _power of speech_ is limited to three words: _papa_, _mamma_, and _no_. he is able to make himself understood when he wants anything. _august-september._--two slight attacks of ophthalmia. the child has now learned to walk. _january-march, ._--otitis (inflammation of the ear). _august._--the ability to speak is developing progressively. he has begun to give notice of his natural necessities; is seldom uncleanly, so that it is now possible to let him wear trousers. the habit of balancing his body back and forth is tending to disappear. the accesses of anger have become rarer. he is less jealous and plays indiscriminately with his companions. _january, ._--the improvement continues. d---- is now very attentive in school. when out walking he takes an interest in the things he sees and asks for explanations. is doing well in the first gymnastic exercises. makes a good appearance. _march._--d---- has now become altogether cleanly. furthermore, he knows how to wash, dress and undress himself alone. at table, can handle his spoon and fork quite properly, but cannot yet manage his knife. is less gluttonous; his speech is fully developed. although he cannot keep still in school and constantly changes his position, he has succeeded in learning to know his letters, the different colours, etc., can count up to , and can name the greater part of the objects contained in the boxes used for object lessons. the balancing of the body has completely disappeared. d---- has a tendency toward onanism. accesses of anger an still noted, during which he is very vulgar. _december._--condition stationary. misconduct in class, frequent fits of anger, during which he abuses everyone and strikes his smaller comrades. _march, ._--d---- is calmer and does better work. can count up to sixty. his general knowledge has increased. can tell his age, his name, the name of his parents, what their employment is, where they live, etc. _april, ._--the improvement continues. his behavior is better. has learned the names of materials, of plane surfaces, of solids; can distinguish vowels from consonants. it has been impossible to induce him to trace simple strokes even upon the blackboard. _december._--is more diligent and has taken a fancy to writing. _january-june, ._--is in the infirmary on account of anal ulcers. _december._--notable improvement in general knowledge. has begun to write certain letters in his copybook. _december, ._--d----'s conduct is good. he is no longer disorderly; and if at times it is necessary to reprove him, he recognises his fault, cries, and promises to do better. he fears above all that his misconduct will be reported to his mother. has a fairly accurate notion of right and wrong, is no longer so extremely jealous and shows affection for his comrades. has learned to write syllables well; is able to copy short paragraphs; can do simple sums in addition; gives clear answers to questions. walking, running, jumping, going up and down stairs have become easy for him. the child uses his fork and knife at table; chews his food well, does not suffer from any digestive disturbance. is orderly, and attends to himself in all details of his toilet. _april , : objective examination._--the child's face has a uniformly ruddy complexion; lips full-blooded; skin smooth, without scars or eruptions, excepting a slight scaliness due to eczema. two small ganglia in the left submaxillary region, but no others in any other locality. cranium symmetrical; volume and form normal. frontal and parietal nodules slightly prominent; occipital nodule quite prominent (pentagonoid cranium). hair light blonde, abundant, fine, growing low upon the forehead. posterior vortex normal, forehead wide, but not high. visage oval; with a slight depression of the nostril and corner of the mouth on the right side; has on the whole an intelligent expression; it is mobile and reflects the moods and feelings natural to boyhood. the superciliary arches are only slightly arched. the eyebrows are chestnut in colour and scanty; the lashes are abundant and long. iris dark blue; pupils equal in size and react under the influence of light. no functional disturbance, and no lesion in regard to the eyes. field of vision normal. d---- recognises all the colours. nose small, and straight, with a pronounced aperture of the nostrils. zygomata regular, without exaggerated prominences; naso-labial furrows barely indicated. aperture of mouth very wide and habitually half open. lips thick and slightly drooping. tongue normal. palatine vault distinctly ogival. tonsils enlarged; the boy is subject to tonsillitis. all these parts show quite a blunted sensibility, which permits of an examination of the pharynx, without causing nausea. chin rounded, without indentation. ears long and thick, the outer edge is normal, including the fold of the helix; the ears protrude conspicuously from the cranium and are very peculiar in shape; namely, the upper two-thirds of the external ear form with the lower one-third an obtuse angle of such nature that the _concha_ or shell really represents the outline of a very deep and almost hemispherical sea-shell. the lobule is thick, regular, and notably detached. the ear is the seat of frequent attacks of erythema, complicated by swelling. neck rather short and quite stout; circumference centimetres. the lobes of the thyroid glands are plainly palpable to the touch. _thorax and abdomen._--no notable peculiarities. auscultation and percussion show that the internal organs are normal. body is hairless. genital organs are normal. the upper and lower limbs are normal in all their segments. _icthyosis_ of the skin on thighs and knees. general sensibility normal; usual physiological reflex actions. _treatment._--regular application of the medico-pedagogical method: tonics during the winter; hydrotherapy annually, from the first of april to the first of november. _april ._--the mother, finding the child much improved, takes him home on leave (march) and later (end of april) requests his dismissal, which is granted reluctantly, in the fear that the boy may lose part of what he has so laboriously gained. _may , ._--the boy, having become insubordinate and not making satisfactory progress in the public school (to which he was sent, so that he would not be present at the scenes between the mother and the father, who is habitually intoxicated), has been sent back to the asylum. _june._--the physical evolution continues. the child is very timid and sensitive, cannot bear to be reproved and cries when he is corrected. reads fluently, but without expression. has begun to write familiar words from dictation. during his absence from the asylum he learned to know the numbers and to do simple examples in addition and subtraction. _treatment:_ school work; gymnastics; hydrotherapy. _july._--d---- is at present conducting himself in a way difficult to control; he plays ill-natured jests upon his companions; places needles and tacks in seats; during the assembly he amuses himself by sticking little pins into the backs of the girls who sit in front of him. _december._--the boy is very lazy, and often refuses to read or to do his tasks; he grins and sneers if he is corrected. but he carries out very well all the movements in the lower gymnastic course. has been sent to the _tailor's work-shop_ and seems to have taken a fancy to the trade. _april, ._--d---- has become quite reasonable, does good work in school, does not like to be inactive, has ceased to grin and sneer. his writing has improved; his reasoning power is good; he is careful of his clothes to the point of vanity; eats with propriety, has ceased to bolt his food; yet it is still noticed that he has a tendency to appropriate the wine of his companions. _june._--d---- is passing through a bad period; he laughs at everything that is said to him, is very obstinate, annoys his comrades, tears up copy-books, breaks pens, etc. is careless regarding his clothing; makes a disturbance at night in the dormitory. _december._--same state. tries to smoke; is unwilling to do any work; laughs at everybody; dresses with great carelessness; it is necessary to compel him to wash his hands and face. no sign of _puberty_. _december, ._--notable improvement; d---- reads quite readily, writes quite well, recognises all ordinary objects, their use, and their colour; has a conception of time. is docile, neat, industrious in school work, is attentive to explanations and understands them. in the work-shop he continues to show progress. _january-june, ._--the improvement continues; d---- has begun to learn the multiplication table; he is well-mannered and scrupulous in his behaviour; excellent in gymnastics. in the tailor's work-shop he makes marked progress; he has already learned to put together an entire garment by himself, and he knows how to use the machine. from time to time he has periods of indolence; and this happens more often in the work-shop than in the class. _puberty._--a slight down has begun to appear upon his upper lip. _july ._--according to the night nurse, d---- had an attack of epilepsy during the night; he never had one before, and he has not had one since. _july ._--troubled sleep, nightmare, unintelligible and threatening words. _january, ._--very notable improvement in class. the boy profited above all from the _lessons about natural objects_, in which he takes much interest. from time to time he shows a tendency to dissipation and gambling. is docile, cleanly, and neat in personal appearance to the point of vanity. the master of the work-shop is very much pleased with him; he works well with the machine. is doing well in gymnastics and in singing. _puberty._--his beard has begun to grow even on his cheeks. _june._--hand-writing, far from improving, seems to be growing worse. on the contrary, it is noticed that he has made progress in arithmetic. can perform all four primary operations and has begun to solve easy problems. his general knowledge has improved. has become a good tailor's workman. _january-june, ._--the boy prefers the work-shop to the school and for some time the mistake has been made of leaving him wholly in the work-shop. _december._--same state from point of view of his studies; character docile, conduct good, personal care and neatness satisfactory. works well and rapidly in the work-shop; can make complete suits of clothing; uses the machine dexterously; is beginning to cut out garments. _puberty_ complete, no onanism. the right eyelids are less widely open than the left by nearly a quarter. the patient says that he does not see so well with the right eye as with the left, and cannot distinguish with it even large letters unless they are very near. table of weight and stature ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | -----------+----+-------------+-----------+-----------+---------+------ meas- |jan-|jan- | july |jan-| july |jan- |july|jan-|july|jan- urements |uary|uary | |uary| |uary | |uary| |uary -----------+----+------+------+----+------+------+----+----+----+------ weight in | | | | | | | | | | kilograms.| | . | . | | . | . | | | | . stature in | | | | | | | | | | metres. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- measurements of the head in centimetres ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | | | | |----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- |jan-|jan-|jan-|jan-| |jan-| |jan-| |jan- |uary|uary|uary|uary|july|uary|july|uary|july|uary ---------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- maximum horizontal | | | | | | | | | | circumference. | . | . | . | | | | | | | anterior semi- | | | | | | | | | | circumference. | | | | | | | | | | distance from the | | | | | | | | | | occipito-allantoid | | | | | | | | | | articulation to | | | | | | | | | | the root of nose. | | | | | | | | | | maximum antero- | | | | | | | | | | posterior diameter.| . | . | . | | | | | | | maximum biauricular | | | | | | | | | | diameter. | | | | . | . | . | . | . | . | maximum biparietal | | | | | | | | | | diameter. | . | | | . | . | . | . | . | . | . maximum bitemporal | | | | | | | | | | diameter. | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | | . | . | medial height of | | | | | | | | | | forehead. | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- in the antecedents of this patient, the only suggestions of degeneration are the _alcoholism_ of the father and the fact that conception took place in a state of intoxication. the mother's migraine might also be considered as a nervous malady amounting to a family taint, but cannot be held responsible for so grave an abnormality as idiocy. consequently, it remains beyond doubt that the most interesting antecedent fact to be considered in this case is the _conception_ _during alcoholic intoxication_. the individual we are studying is a sick person; this is shown by _ptosis_ (drooping eye-lid), the recurrent periods of agitation, the epileptic convulsion in the night detected by the night nurse. it is interesting to observe in the photographs of the child, the alteration of expression between the periods of calm and those of agitation; in the latter the face is asymmetrical and shows contractions in the left facial region, while the right side is paretic; the paresis is also manifested by _ptosis_ (drooping lids). during the periods of calm, on the contrary, the left side also is atonic. in the course of the history the differences in the child's conduct in the two states are well described. during the periods of calm, the child is attentive, docile, careful of his dress, timid, and makes progress in his studies; during the periods of agitation he is unstable, rebellious, careless, unkind to his comrades, and makes no progress whatever. at the beginning, there were no periods of calm at all; furthermore, the child had every appearance of being an idiot; medico-pedagogic treatment rendered longer and more frequent, and finally permanent, these periods of calm, during which the child's intellectual redemption became possible. the treatment did not consist solely in the _education of an idiot_, but also in the _cure of a sick child_. "at the time of admission," according to the _observations_ in the record, "the diagnosis was _retarded mentality_, and that only in relation to primary instruction, because in regard to matters of common knowledge and manual work, the patient comes very near to a normal lad of average intelligence." such a surprising _transformation_ of an individual is certainly deserving of admiration; but this diligently compiled study is not yet quite completed. as a matter of fact, when the education of d---- was begun, observations regarding types of stature were not yet made; but his photographs show that he was an exaggerated macroscelous type. the trade adopted by d---- which will oblige him to sit with his chest bowed over the machine, or in a kneeling position while he sews, will in all probability drive him straight along the road to tuberculosis, a malady to which his organism has singularly predisposed him. it would be interesting to follow further the history of this patient, who has been transformed from an idiot into a skilful and industrious workman. the society, which under the guidance of science, achieved his difficult redemption, has perhaps at the same time condemned him to death. the modern standards of pedagogical anthropology would have furnished a more far-sighted guidance in the choice of a vocation. meanwhile, however, this history reported by thulié is a luminous demonstration of the folly of rewards and punishments; the only forms of intervention during the periods of agitation, which lasted for entire months, during which the boy was continually unruly, impulsive, malicious, reckless, and incapable of work, were tonics, hydrotherapy and kindly treatment. "punishments" would have cruelly wrecked the life of a human being who was naturally gentle, affectionate, and capable of diligent work and permanent improvement. something similar ought to be attempted in the reformatories. the boys who are regarded as incorrigible are frequently _sick_ boys, with an hereditary degenerative taint, and need to live in a tranquil environment and to receive medical treatment. the biographic charts of the reformatories give no evidence that this educative movement has as yet been understood. they show that _punishments_ are still regarded as possessing a corrective efficacy, because the conception that the so-called delinquent children may be a pathological product and a result of disastrous family and social conditions, has not yet penetrated with sufficient clearness. but progress along this path is surely bound to come as a result of the experience which this principle of reform has made possible. the biographic charts have unquestionably laid the foundations of a new edifice in pedagogy. _scientific pedagogical advantages of biographic histories:_ . the biographic chart takes the place of the report cards and records of the relative marks of merit and demerit; for while these records and reports constituted a statement of _effects_, altogether empirical, the biographic chart _investigates the causes_ and in this way furnishes pedagogy with a scientific basis. there is no need of further demonstration. the principal consequences of the above indicated progress are two in number. . the biographic chart, replacing the earlier classifications, raises the teacher's standard of culture by directing him along a scientific path, associates the teacher's work with that of the physician, and makes the teacher a far-sighted director of the development and perfectioning of the new generations. . the biographic chart includes a new educative movement which abolishes rewards and punishments. on this third point much might be said, since it touches upon one of the fundamental doctrines of pedagogical progress. but since this is not a treatise upon scientific pedagogy, it is necessary to limit the exposition to a few fundamental points. in fact, it will be sufficient to speak of cases in which education is most difficult and where the rewards and punishments are unavailing--for these will include all simpler cases. a luminous example is furnished by the education of _new-born infants_. of all human beings they used to be the most troublesome because of the impossibility of educating them by the old-fashioned methods. they cried at all hours of the day and night, making a slave of the mother or whoever took her place. to-day, babies are quiet; it is marvelous to go through the infant ward in the obstetrical clinic of rome; absolute silence reigns there, and yet if we lift up the white curtains of the cribs, we see the little ones lying with their eyes wide open. a deeper knowledge than was formerly had of the _hygiene of_ _the child_ has enabled us to interpret his needs, and when these are satisfied, the child is tranquil. bodily cleanliness, liberty of movement, prolonged repose in the crib, and _rational feeding_ have obtained this remarkable result of silencing the baby, of rendering it more robust and of liberating the mother from the slavery of her mission. the classic cry of the child in swaddling bands was a protest against the suffering which ignorance imposed upon him. to-day the little one, lying tranquilly in his crib, begins to exercise his senses earlier and more easily, a ray of light strikes him and attracts his attention, and with this his education has begun, while formerly the suffering due to indigestion kept him for a much longer time a stranger to the external world. the same thing may be repeated for every year of childhood. often what we call _naughtiness_ on the part of the individual child is _rebellion_ against our own mistakes in educating him. the coercive means which we adopt toward children are what destroy their natural tranquility. a healthy child, in his moments of freedom, succeeds in escaping from the toys inflicted upon him by his parents, and in securing some object which arouses the investigating instinct of his mind; a worm, an insect, some pebbles, etc.; he is silent, tranquil and attentive. if the child is not well, or if his mother obliges him to remain seated in a chair, playing with a doll, he becomes restless, cries, or gives way to convulsive outbursts ("bad temper"). the mother believes that educating her child means forcing him to do what is pleasing to her, however far she may be from knowing what the child's real needs are, and unfortunately we must make the same statement regarding the school-teachers! then, in order to make him yield to coercion, she punishes the child when he rebels and rewards him when he is obedient. by this method we _drive a child by force_ along paths that are not natural to him. in the same way, absolute governments employed public entertainments and the gallows, in order to compel the people to act and think according to the will of their sovereign; indeed, they were considered as indispensable means of good government. to-day we have come to realise that such means are more or less adapted to the successful crushing of a people's spirit, but not to governing them well. the reign of _liberty_, which leaves men the opportunity to give expression to their own powers and above all to their own thoughts, is doing away with festivals and executions; and it is not until this is accomplished that men can be really well _governed_. something similar is going to take place in the schools. but here, since the children are incapable of understanding _what they ought to do_ for their own best good, science _studies them_ in order to assist their natural needs. i believe that we must greatly modify our ideas regarding infant psychology, as soon as trained psychologists begin to observe the spontaneous manifestations of children, to the end of encouraging their tendencies. having applied scientific methods in the "children's houses," we were amazed at the behaviour of those little children; for instance, they showed contempt for toys, while they loved objects on which they could exercise their free powers of reason. _intellectual exercise is the most pleasing_ of all to the small child if he is in good health. indeed, we already know that children break their toys in order to see how they are made inside; this shows that the exercise of their intellect interests them more than playing with an object that is often irrational. but children are not, as is generally believed, naturally destructive; on the contrary, their instinct is to _preserve_. this is seen in the way in which they save little objects that they have acquired by themselves; and in the "children's houses," we have also seen it in the way that they preserve unharmed even the most trivial scrap of paper, although free to tear it up, so long as that scrap of paper helps them to exercise their thoughts. here we see the great difference between the healthy, normal child who employs himself in the way that pleases him, and is attentive and tranquil; and another child who, equally healthy and normal, is obliged to do what other people wish him to do, and is restless, and troublesome and cries. to aid the physical development of the child under the guidance of natural laws is to favour his health and his growth; to aid his natural psychic tendencies is to render him more intelligent. this principle has been intuitively recognised by all pedagogists, but the practical application of it was not possible, excepting under the guidance of scientific pedagogy, founded upon a direct knowledge of the human individual. _to-day it is possible for us to establish a régime of liberty in our schools, and_ _consequently it is our duty to do so._ whenever a child exhibits anomalies of character that do not signify rebellion against irrational methods of education, and are not expressions of a struggle for liberty, he represents the unhappy effect of some pathological cause, or of some _social error_, that has only too fatally accomplished its corruptive task. this is what the biographic history will reveal! as a general rule, a bad child should be taken to see a physician, because it is almost certain that he is a sick child. but the _treatment_ of such maladies is very often mainly pedagogical; curative pedagogy, however, must absolutely abolish _punishment_. we now know as a fact absolutely established in sociology that the fear of punishment, of torture and even of death does not avail to diminish crime, nor the imperious manifestation of human passions. brigandage is not repressed by cutting off heads, but by civilisation in all its forms of industry, intercommunication, etc. and this principle is especially true in the case of children; harshness of methods and severity of punishment will not avail to inculcate, and still less to create, goodness. man is conquered through kindness and gentleness; among all the beatitudes, that of inheriting the earth (_i.e._, of winning over their fellowmen) is given to the _meek: blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth_. we know that hypocrisy, adulation and seduction are criminal means by which man seeks to deceive his fellow men to his own profit; but they are based upon gentleness; it would never occur to anyone to seduce and to conquer hypocritically, with the help of violence. because the weak point in man, that to which he is most susceptible, is gentleness, praise, caresses. we have seen that the psychic stimulus needed to augment human activity, to arouse an apathetic person to action, and even to produce a condition of flourishing growth in a child, is the pleasant stimulus of kindness and caresses. the mother's caress, like the mother's milk, is a means of stimulating the child to a more complete nutrition and vitality. and the entire category of physiological weaklings, such as the defectives, epileptics and criminals, have a proportionately greater need of such stimulus than normal individuals; consequently, how can coercion ever be expected to restore such unbalanced personalities to their proper equilibrium? those whom we have been in the habit of oppressing with severity and punishment are the very ones most in need of the stimulus of affection. indeed, it is only the strong man and the hero who can pass unscathed through persecution; the weak are left broken, down-trodden, or slain. _sursum corda._--always strive to uplift, never to depress. a beautiful theory and a humane idea. but is it practicable, and to what extent? in short, what can be done practically, for instance, in the exceedingly difficult case of juvenile delinquents, in order to correct their evil tendencies and save them from their waywardness, without coercion? but what are evil tendencies of the mind? with that one phrase we are trying to embrace and ostensibly bind together a quantity of widely different effects. the study of the individual should suggest to us the particular method of education required by him. meanwhile, in regard to the question of juvenile delinquents, a wide road leading straight back to first causes, has been opened by the _pathological_ factor. who, for instance, does not know that the conduct and the sentiments of an individual may become unbalanced through the effects of poison or disease? this takes us at once into the field of nervous or mental pathology: the first symptom of _paralytic dementia_ is not the trembling, or alteration of speech, or interruption of certain reflex actions, or muscular weakness, nor the real and actual delirium. the symptom which first manifests itself as an indication of profound disturbance in the personality of the unfortunate victim of this cruel disease is an almost unheralded alteration of the natural character and conduct. the man who hitherto has been a good husband and father, becomes a profligate, spendthrift and gambler; the man who has hitherto been most scrupulous in his language and in his sexual conduct becomes foul-mouthed and obscene; the man who was a kind and affectionate husband becomes violent and aggressive toward his wife. anyone wishing to consider these preliminary symptoms of paralytic dementia as _evil tendencies of the mind_, would strive in vain with appropriate sermons, reproofs and punishments to make the sick man _repent_ and come back to his former state! let us pass on to another example. there is no one who is not aware of the effects of alcohol. there are persons who, when in a state of intoxication, commit actions that are worse than reprehensible, even criminal; actions which the individual himself deplores as soon as the poisonous effects have passed away. kind-hearted persons go so far as to maltreat their own children, even when they are little babies; they commit violent and degrading acts that often make them shed tears of repentance as soon as they become aware of them. well, if we should try to make such a person understand, while he is still in a state of intoxication, that his actions are improper, it would be wasted effort. it is better to let the matter pass, or else to give him treatment for his alcoholic condition, which is the cause of his misconduct. and passing on to another class of cases, does not everyone know that when people are afflicted with a diseased liver, their character alters, they become jealous, quarrelsome, hypochondriac, melancholy? it would be useless to tell such persons that they were formerly more tractable and morally superior; they are already sufficiently afflicted without having us, who are in good health, aggravate them with our useless preaching. and analogously, it is well known that when hysteria attacks a woman it may transform her from a virtuous and modest person to an unhappy creature, compelled by her physical condition to forget herself and compromise the unquestioned propriety of her past life; or again, it may change her from a gentle soul to an insupportable fury, or it may actually develop into such pronounced delirium as to necessitate her confinement in an insane asylum. in this case also, it is the malady that demands treatment, since it is the sole cause of the sad manifestations of a change in character. now, the pathological cause most frequently associated with criminal manifestations, is undoubtedly epilepsy. lombroso himself attributed a vast influence to this etiological factor of criminality; and every day this far-sighted intuition of the master is confirmed and made clearer. the epileptic is not always a criminal, nor does the criminal always show the classic convulsive symptoms. there are cases of epilepsy in which the symptoms are attenuated or latent or replaced by different but equivalent symptoms. it is frequently necessary to diagnose an _epileptic character_ from impulsive tendencies and from long protracted nocturnal _enuresis_ in childhood. de sanctis has lately been able to prove in his hospital practice that there are many children who have unmistakable epilepsy of the classic type, with violent accesses, but without criminal tendencies; at a certain age the convulsions cease, the patient is apparently cured: but he has become a criminal. on the other hand, there are children with immoral tendencies, destructive, violent, incorrigible; one would say that these were clear cases of predisposition to crime; all at once a genuine epileptic attack occurs, followed by other repeated attacks; the criminal tendencies disappear; the patient is simply an epileptic. in these cases, we have successive forms of epileptic equivalence. in the majority of cases, therefore, the proper course would be to _treat_ the patient for epilepsy, as being the cause of the apparent "evil tendencies of mind." and hence one notable side of the great problem of the moral education of juvenile criminals is transformed fundamentally into this other problem: "can epilepsy be treated and cured?" up to the present, the treatment of epilepsy is a problem. while therapeutics prescribe bromides and warm baths, pedagogy is to-day following a very different course with a combined treatment of hygiene and education. benedickt, and following him, the principal authorities among medical specialists, are at present condemning the use of depressing bromides, which hide the attacks as an anesthetic hides pain, but do not cure them. the cure, says benedickt, depends upon hygienic life in the open air in order to absorb the poisons, and upon graded work, provided, however, that the malady is still recent and has not assumed a chronic form. two principles of much importance: the malady must be of recent occurrence! consequently, it is only in the _period of childhood_ that we can attempt the treatment of the great majority of those predisposed to crime, with any hope of effecting a cure! a declaration of tremendous interest for the defense of society. but the treatment must be _pedagogic_. accordingly, we have returned to the point of departure. we began by asking: "how are we to educate them"? a course of reasoning led us along this different road, "it is necessary to give them treatment." but the treatment consists in educating them. well, from all this we can so far extract one unassailable principle; in their education all coercive measures must be absolutely abolished, because nervous and convulsive maladies are most successfully treated with gentleness and quiet; it is evident that all emotion, all fear, all nervous exhaustion, all punishment in short, no matter how mild or just it may be, would seem to be _prohibited_ in pedagogic treatment. accordingly, it is necessary to approach the question anew; what is needed is to set the nervous system in order, to calm it, to restore its equilibrium. benedickt says: this is to be achieved _through work_, rationally measured and graded; hence, manual training, as organised, for example, in the reformatory of san michele, constitutes of itself a moral cure; it concurs in readjusting the nervous system by reinforcing it. however, we must not generalise over such complex questions; if the pathological factor, and more especially epilepsy, constitutes a great centre of _biologic_ _causes_ producing individuals predisposed to crime, we cannot conclude that there is a constant correspondence between epilepsy and criminality. but there is no doubt that among these predisposed we shall almost always find some who are suffering from a taint, or from dystrophy, due to tuberculosis or syphilis; in short, the _minus habens_, the physiological proletariat. the benefit wrought by education consists not only in contributing to the real and actual cure, as in the case of epilepsy; but also in the corrective, as well as curative, effect upon the personality. the abnormal mentality which generally accompanies degenerate or epileptic conditions requires special methods of education, which in many cases must absolutely exclude all forms of coercion. mental hygiene, an abundance of psychic stimulus, partly intellectual (chiefly through objective demonstration) and partly moral (in the form of praise and gentle caressing treatment), are indispensable accompaniments of such education. an abnormal mentality almost always accompanies defects of the mind; from the hypochondriac or the epileptic to the imbecile and the idiot, the abnormal mentality builds itself up from inaccurate perceptions, and hence more or less from illusions; a deficiency of reasoning power or a half delirious condition completes the fatal organisation of a mode of thought which renders such an individual unfitted for his environment. we have seen an example of this in the boy whose clinical history was read in class; his perceptions were inexact, consequently colours, odours, and sounds reached him in a manner somewhat different from our perception of them; his mental world must therefore be differently constructed from ours. defectives frequently pass by objects without obtaining any impression of them, or else transform what impression they do get into a false idea. even their sensations of touch and pain are different from the normal. hence, they do not feel as we do, and are often inaccessible to the anguish of pain which refines human nature by sometimes raising it to the point of heroism. and because we have learned through our own sufferings to understand the meaning of pity, altruism and solidarity, these unhappy beings differ from us even in their relation to society. their scanty powers of logic lead them to fall openly into errors, which provoke vindictive retaliation on our part that tends in the ultimate analysis to isolate these unfit beings from social intercourse. to us, their whole conversation is a series of falsehoods, because it does not correspond to what we ourselves see and feel. an understanding between them and us becomes steadily more difficult, in proportion as we continue to perfect ourselves in our individual evolution, while their unhappy state is steadily aggravated through the formidable struggles and persecutions which they meet in an environment to which they are unadaptable. for instance, we saw that one of the boys who has been studied in class, had committed his most reprehensible acts as a result of false logic. "why do you kill all the pigeons?" "to make them keep still." "why do you beat your little sister?" "because she won't work like the others." (the sister in question was only eighteen months old!) well, he showed in this way that he had learned something from the corrections that he had received. they had punished him so much for being restless, and so much because he did not want to work, that he finally applied his acquired zeal to correcting others in the way that his defective logic dictated. and similarly, after seeing how they weigh objects with a steel-yard--also a form of work--it occurred to him to stick the hook into his little sister, in order to weigh her; and having learned that useful work is paid for in money, which serves to buy the necessities of life, he stole all the money that he could find at home, and gave it to the motormen on the tram-cars, who in his opinion perform the most useful work in the world. i once had occasion to study a paranoiac patient in the asylum for the criminal insane, who had spent twenty years in prison before his insanity became so pronounced as to cause his removal from one place of restraint to the other. he had killed his betrothed, out of jealousy, so he said, but he narrated the tragic deed with a fullness of detail and a readiness of phrase--his lurking in ambush, the unfortunate girl's approach, her fall under the blows of the cobbler's knife--that proved the cold-blooded calculation with which the crime was committed. this man was convinced that he possessed such oratorical gifts that if he had pleaded his own case in place of his attorney, the persuasive magic of his eloquence would have resulted in his acquittal. the lawyer had advised him not to speak and the prisoner was sentenced to a term of thirty years. the appeal to the court of cassation was denied. the result was that in his desperation at the failure of his defence, and more particularly because he had lost the chance of showing his oratorical powers in public, he conceived the idea that the only way by which he could come into court again, and speak for himself, and _force_ _them to acquit him_, was to commit another murder. and he actually sprang at his lawyer's throat, armed with a nail, meaning to kill him. thus we see how paranoiac delirium, and defective reasoning powers, sad evidences of pathological conditions, combined to create the most cynical and repellant of all criminal types. accordingly the _treatment_ of the pathological condition, and the education of the _mentality_ in children who are thus predisposed, constitute a great work on behalf of the defence of society. well, this is precisely what scientific pedagogy is trying to do, through a rational education of the senses: to correct false perceptions and straighten out the warped and twisted mentality of abnormal children; and little by little, through repetition of the same lessons under different forms, and the establishment of a cooperation of all the senses, the perception of objects tends to approach nearer and nearer to the normal. meanwhile, hygienic or medical treatment may be used to correct the accompanying physical defects. accordingly, we are able to modify an abnormal personality by means of rational medico-pedagogic treatment; and it is by this means alone, and not through destructive coercion, that we may hope to approach the greatly desired goal. lastly, it is also necessary, in the etiology of crime, to take into consideration the environment, the bad example, the brutality, the absence of affection, all of which are things which might well pervert the mind of even a normal individual; and when such conditions exist, the removal of the transgressor to a different environment where he may have the benefit of physical, intellectual and moral hygiene, may result in completely transforming him. in these sad cases nothing short of the profoundest love will serve to redeem and even transform into a hero the man who has fallen into evil ways through misfortune. no one can any longer believe that coercive measures should be added to the cruelty of the environment which oppresses the _transgressor_. if he has gone astray in the midst of sorrow it will be only through consolation that he can be born again to a new life; if he lost the straight path amid arid wastes, nothing short of a purifying and assuaging spiritual water will enable him to recover his path. as a sign of our humanity let us keep a smile upon our lips and our hearts free of all harshness of offense or defense; our weapons are intelligence and love and it is only by these weapons that we can become conquerors. but, it may be answered, granted that the education of abnormal persons, and more especially juvenile delinquents, constitutes a complex work in which medicine, a special environment, and the methods of scientific pedagogy contribute harmoniously through diverse ways to the ultimate goal: yet in actual practice how are we to intervene to render docile these rebels whom society itself, with all the forces at its disposal, recognises as dangerous and condemns to isolation? in short, it is argued, a more direct method will be required for their moral education; a clear-cut method to offset that equally direct form consisting of coercion and punishment that are now the consequence of the reprehensible act. under all the conditions to be considered in regard to the biopathological factors and the social environment, there still remains another element and the most evident of all, namely, the immediate and practical influence exerted directly upon the minds of wayward children. we may say quite truly that beneath the pathological facts and the social injustices, there exists something more profound which, for the sake of simplicity we may call the _soul of humanity_. something which responds from soul to soul, which may be aroused from the depths of subconsciousness like a surprise, which may be touched and reveal itself in an outburst of affection previously hidden and unsuspected. unknown profundities of the spirit, that seem to merge into the eternity of the universe itself and unexpectedly produce new forms as in a chemical reaction. and this is what we really mean by "moral education." well, in order to accomplish such a lofty work, we do not need to find a _method_. method is always more or less mechanical. here, on the contrary, is the supreme expression of human life--an evocation of the superman. what we need to find is not a method, but a _master_. séguin, in his glorious treatise on scientific pedagogy, dedicates a chapter to the training of the teacher of defective children. the teacher of abnormal pupils is not an educator, he is a _creator_; he must have _been born_ with special gifts, as well as to have perfected himself for this high task. he ought, says séguin, to be handsome in person, and strong as well, so that he may attract and yet command; his glance should be serene, like that of one who has gained victories through faith and has attained enduring peace; his manner should be imperturbable as that of one not easily persuaded to change his mind. in short, he ought to feel beneath him the solid rock, the foundation of granite on which his feet are planted and his steps assured. from this solid base, he should rise commandingly, like a magician. his voice should be gentle, melodious, and flexible, with bursts of silvery and resounding eloquence, but always without harshness. séguin describes the methods by which the teacher should educate his own voice, speech and gesture; he should take a course in facial expression and declamation, like a great actor who is preparing to win favor of the select and critical public of the proudest capital. for, as a matter of fact, he must attract the minds and souls of human beings who are almost inaccessible, beings who form whole armies in the world, entire peoples, they are so numerous; powerful human armies that threaten society with terrible punishment and bring about cruel executions. but the perfect teacher must possess something more than physical beauty and acquired art; he must have the loftiness of a soul ardent for its mission; yet even this may be cultivated and perfected. the teacher must "perfect himself" in his moral nature. there are men, who from the moment they make their appearance, exert a sort of fascination; everyone else becomes silent in their presence. it is almost as though some natural fluid emanated from them and spread to the others, so profoundly does everyone feel the attraction. when such a man speaks, the words seem, as if by magic, to touch the profoundest recesses of the heart. hypnotists and magicians! conquerors of souls! valiant souls themselves; souls with a great mission! well, this is more or less what is demanded of the teacher of abnormal children. he ought to be conscious of his personal dignity and human virtue, and of a sincere love for the children whom it is his task to redeem; his own greatness must overcome their wretchedness. and if he continues to perfect himself and to mount toward the moral altitudes, cultivating at the same time a love for his own mission, he will, as if by magic, become an educator; he will feel that a magic power of suggestion goes forth from him and conquers; the work of redemption will then seem to accomplish itself like a conflagration which has been kindled from some central point and spreads in rolling flames through the dried undergrowth. undoubtedly, the guidance of science is not everything to a teacher; the better part is given him through his own moral perfectionment. . the biographic history completes the individual study of the pupil and prepares for his diagnosis: combining, to this end, the work of the school with that of the home. sergi, in his memorable work, _first steps in scientific pedagogy_, expresses himself as follows: "_the biographic chart is a methodical_ _means for learning to know the body and spirit of the pupil through_ _direct observations_.... and, since pupils may be classified according to tendencies, character and intelligence, the master may rationally divide them into various groups, to which he will give varied treatment, according to the direction in which each group shows the greatest need of education.... and he will place himself in closer association with _the pupils' families_, who should communicate to him their earliest observations regarding the physical and psychological nature of their children." as a matter of fact, the anthropological movement, through the inquiries necessitated by the compilation of biographic charts, often proves illuminating to the members of the family, in regard to facts and conditions of which they had hitherto remained ignorant (sexual hygiene); in regard to the view they should take of their own children (those who had been regarded as "bad," and who were really ill), in regard to the way they should watch over them and take care of them, etc. hence it has made a beginning of the practical application of a pedagogic principal that hitherto has only been abstractly visioned, of coordinating the educative work of the family with that of the school. a pedagogic institution which practically realizes this conception, which was hitherto only a utopian dream of pedagogy, is the "children's house;" because by having school in the home and by having teachers and mothers living together, it results in harmonizing the environment of the family with that of the school, for the furtherance of the great mission of education. . the biographic chart will furnish everyone with a document capable of guiding him in his own subsequent self-education. sergi says further in the work above quoted: "the biographic chart should become a _precious document to_ _every man_, if the sort of record of which i speak were continued through a series of years, from the kindergartens upward through the entire course of the secondary schools, because it would contain, in compact and methodical form, the history of his physical and mental life, and he would find it of inestimable advantage both in practical life and in his various social relations." . "lastly, the biographic chart with its gathering of positive data, prepares a great body of scientific material which will be useful, not alone to pedagogy, but also to sociology, medicine, and jurisprudence." and in the same aforesaid work, sergi adds: "if, for example, we should gather" (under the guidance of his biographic chart) "biographic notes in the city of rome alone and in the elementary schools for both sexes, we should have for a single year, an average of fifty thousand observations, taken on entering and leaving school; if we could have them throughout the whole course of elementary instruction, the number of observations would amount to two hundred and fifty thousand. "then we should be able to see _in every social class all the_ _individual variations in physical and physiological condition which_ _contribute to the development of the intelligence and to the manifestations_ _of sentiments which play an active part in practical life._ _and all this would have a value of a sociological character._" this conception of sergi's is precisely one of the scientific aspects of biographic histories that is of the highest importance, provided that they could be recorded in so simple a manner as to render the researches practically possible, and provided, also, that they could be gathered with _a scientific uniformity of_ _method_ designed to render international researches harmonious. we are certainly still very far removed from the time when international pedagogical congresses will be held for the purpose of establishing a single model form of biographic chart for each of the various grades in school; and also an agreement as to the technical method of taking the anthropological measurements! before arriving at this point it will be necessary to make many tentative efforts and experiments. but a truly scientific sociology, as well as pedagogy, ought to emanate from such a study of _human beings in the course of formation_, because such an enormously large number of observations as could be gathered in school, will reveal to us the biologico-social mechanism through which those activities are formed that are destined to promote the progress of humanity and civilisation (the new generations). medicine and the biological sciences in general entered upon a new era of exceedingly rapid progress when the microscope made possible the study of _histology_ and _bacteriology_; well, the researches _in regard to the individual_ constitute the histology and bacteriology of social science! when le play, in his great work, _les ouvriers européens_, instituted the "family monograph," i.e., the study of household accounts as a basis for "positive sociology," he was considered as the founder of a true social science. because the true needs of men, the mechanism through which are determined the various personalities that afterward _react upon society_ as _creative or destructive_ forces, can be discovered only through studying minutely such needs and mechanisms, individual by individual, family by family. if le play's method, and consequently _positive social science_, have not as yet made much progress, this is because of the _difficulty of_ _penetrating within the family in order to study it_. from the bio-psychological point of view, if not from that of the family account book, the biographic chart of the schools is nevertheless a practical means of contributing to social histology; it is a field open to research and one which must be crossed by _every one_ of the individuals who constitute society. furthermore, it constitutes a foundation for social embryogeny; because in the school we may study the _genesis of separate individuals_; the causes which molded their congenital personality, and those which brought about its definitive formation. in the words of le play, indorsed by bodio, this is the only positive material from which the _legislator_ may draw his inspiration in order to become a true dispenser of justice to the people and to conduct the far-sighted reforms that are really necessary for the welfare of society. consequently, the anthropologic movement in pedagogy marks an aspect of scientific reform which is universal. a direct contribution to pedagogy and at the same time to scientific sociology is given by the biographic charts in the "children's houses." since this is a case of _school within the home_, where the mistress, being domiciled with her scholars, has them under her charge from the age of two or three years, and where there is a permanent resident physician to aid in the compilation of the biographic charts, it is evident that there is a chance of practically applying both the pedagogic plans for studying the pupil, and the social plans of le play, who by means of family monographs based upon the family account book, proposed to obtain nothing more nor less than an index of morality, culture, and individual needs! and as a matter of fact, the _manner of spending the_ _salary_, the savings, the squanderings, the purpose for which money is spent, whether it is for low vices, or for vanity, or for æsthetic or intellectual pleasures in general, etc., reveal the state of _civilisation and morality_ in which people _live_. in the "children's houses" such a study of the family is easy because it is revealed of its own accord, since the families are in contact with the school; consequently, these "children's houses" may serve to lay a true and practical foundation for _embryogenesis_ and social histology. in short, the importance of research regarding the individual goes far beyond the school; it leads the way to every kind of social reform. even medicine, like every other science, is going to build up a firmer scientific basis through the help of the biographic charts of the schools: professor de sanctis has drawn up models for examinations, mainly of a medical nature, to be used in his asylum-schools for defectives; and by thus following the development of the pupils, he has succeeded in throwing positive light upon the biopathological mechanism through which an abnormal psychopathic or neuropathic personality develops; while psychiatry or neuropathology formerly recorded nothing more of such an abnormal personality than the episode of the moment at which the adult patient presented himself at the clinic. even the individual criminal has now come to be studied in relation to his genesis, and jurists who are seeking a scientific basis for their enactments, should not neglect the individual studies that are being compiled in the schools for defectives. the biographic chart introduced into the government reformatories in italy will also furnish a direct contribution to social histology, in regard to the genesis of criminal personalities. consequently, the reform which has begun with the introduction of an anthropological movement into the school and the establishment of biographic charts, is nothing less than a reform of science as a whole. medicine, jurisprudence, and sociology as well as pedagogy, are laying new foundations upon it. chapter x the application of biometry to anthropology for the purpose of determining the medial men _theory of the medial man._--_measurements_ are used not only in anthropology but in zoology and botany as well; that is, they are applied to all living creatures; therefore anthropometry might to-day be regarded as a branch of _biometry_. the measurements obtained from living beings, and the statistical and mathematical studies based upon them, tend to determine the _normality_ of characteristics; and when the biometric method is applied to man, it leads to a determination of the normal dimensions, and hence of the _normal_ forms, and to a reconstruction of the _medial man_ that must be regarded as the man of perfect development, from whom all men actually existing must differ to a greater or less extent, through their infinite normal and pathological variations. this sort of touch-stone is of indisputable scientific utility, since we cannot judge of _deviations_ from the norm, so long as normality is unknown to us. in fact, when we speak of normality and of anomalies, we are using language that is far from exact, and to which there are no clear and positive corresponding ideas. whatever has been accomplished in anthropology up to the present time in the study of the morphology of degenerates and abnormals, has served only to illustrate this principle very vaguely--that the _form_ undergoes alteration in the case of pathological individuals. it is only now that we are beginning to give definite meaning to this principle, by seeking to determine what the _form_ is, when it has not undergone any alteration at all. from this fundamental point a new beginning must be made, on more certain and positive bases, of the study of _deviations from normality_ and their etiology. as far back as , quétélet, in his great philosophical and statistical work, _social physics or the development of the faculties_ _of man_, for the first time expounded the theory of the "medial man," founded on statistical studies and on the mathematical laws of errors. he reached some very exact concepts of the morphology of the medial man, based upon measurements, and also of the intellectual and moral qualities of the medial man, expounding an interesting theory regarding _genius_. but inasmuch as quétélet's _homme moyen_ was, so to speak, at once a mathematical and philosophical reconstruction of the _non-existent perfect man_, who furthermore could not possibly exist, this classical and masterly study by the great statistician was strenuously combatted and then forgotten, so far as its fundamental concepts were concerned, and remembered only as a scientific absurdity. the thought of that period was too analytical to linger over the great, the supreme synthesis expounded by quétélet. mankind must needs grow weary of anatomising bodies and tracing back to origins, before returning to an observation of the whole rather than the parts, and to a contemplation of the future. in fact, the thought of the nineteenth century was so imbued with the evolutionary theories as set forth by charles darwin, that it believed the reconstruction of the _pithecanthropus erectus_ from a doubtful bone a more positive achievement than that of the _medial man_ from the study of millions of living men. but to-day the researches that we have accomplished in the biological field regarding evolution, regarding natural heredity, regarding individual variability, are leading biology as a whole toward eminently synthetic conclusions; and studies which remained neglected or which were combatted in the past, are beginning to be brought into notice and properly appreciated: such studies, for instance, as mendel's theory and that of quétélet. galton, pearson, davenport, dunker, heinke, ludwig, and above all others de vries, are in the advance guard of modern biological thought. but beyond all these scientists, there is one who has an interest for us not only because he is an italian, but because he has reestablished quétélet's ancient theory of the _medial man_, under the present-day guidance of biometry: i mean prof. giacinto viola. _the importance of seriation._--under the statistical method, the basis of biometry is furnished by a regrouping of measurements in the form of series. we have seen that quétélet's binomial curve represents the symmetrical distribution of subjects in relation to some one central anthropometric measurement. let us suppose, for instance, that the curve here described represents the distribution of the stature. if we mark upon the abscissæ the progressive measurements, . ; . ; . ; . ; . ; . , etc.... . ; . ; . ; . ; . ; . , and on the axis of the ordinates the number of individuals having a determined stature, the path of the curve will show that there is a majority of individuals possessing a mean central measurement; and that the number of individuals diminishes gradually and symmetrically above and below, becoming extremely few at the extremes (exceptionally tall and low statures). when the total number of individuals is sufficiently large, the curve is perfect (curve of errors): fig. . [illustration: fig. .--the highest part of this curve corresponds to the medial centre of density.] in such a case, the _general mean_ coincides with the _median_, that is, with the number situated at the centre of the basal line, because, since all the other measurements, above and below, are perfectly symmetrical, in calculating the mean average they cancel out. there is still another centre corresponding to the mean: the _centre of density_ of the individuals grouped there, because the maximum number corresponds to that measurement. accordingly, if, for example, in place of half a million men whose measurements of stature, when placed in seriation, produced a perfect binomial curve, we had selected only ten men or even fewer from those corresponding to the median line; the general mean stature obtained from those half million men and that obtained from the ten individuals would be identical. for we would have selected _ten individuals_ possessing that mean average stature which seems to represent a _biological_ _tendency_, from which many persons deviate to a greater or less extent, as though they were erroneous, aberrant, for a great variety of causes; but these aberrant statures are still such that by their excess and their deficiency they perfectly compensate for each other; so that the mean average stature precisely reproduces this _tendency_, this centre actually attained by the maximum number of individuals. supposing that we could see together all these individuals: those who belong at the centre being numerically most _prevalent_, will give a definite _intonation_ to the whole mass. anyone having an eye well trained to distinguish differences of stature could mentally separate those prevalent individuals and estimate them, saying that they are of _mean_ _average stature_. this curve is the mathematical curve of errors; and it corresponds to that constructed upon the exponents of newton's binomial theorem and to the calculation of _probability_. it corresponds to the curve of errors in mathematics: for example, to the errors committed in measuring a line; or in measuring the distance of a star, etc. whoever takes measurements (we have already seen this in anthropometrical technique and in the calculation of personal error) commits errors, notwithstanding that the _object to be measured_ and the individual making the measurements remain the same. but the most diverse causes; nerves, the weather, weariness, etc., causes not always determinable and perhaps actually more numerous than could be discovered or imagined, all have their share in producing errors of too much and too little, which are distributed in gradations around the real _measurement_ of the object. but since among all these measurements taken in the same identical way we do not know which is the true one; the seriation of errors will reveal it to us, for it causes a maximum number of some one definite measurement (the true one) to fall in the centre of the aberrations that symmetrically grade off from the centre itself. viola gives some very enlightening examples in regard to errors. suppose, for instance, that an artist skilled in modeling wished to reproduce in plaster a number of copies of a leaf, which he has before his eyes as a model. the well-trained eye and hand will at one time cause him to take exactly the right quantity of plaster needed to reproduce the actual dimensions of the leaf; at another, on the contrary, he will take more and at another less than required. by measuring or superimposing the real leaf upon the plaster copies, the sculptor will be able to satisfy himself at once which of his copies have proved successful. but supposing, on the contrary, that the real leaf has disappeared and that a stranger wishes to discover from the plaster copies which ones faithfully reproduce the dimensions of the leaf? they will be those that are numerically most prevalent. the same thing holds true for any attempt whatever to attain a _predetermined object_. for example, shooting at a mark. a skilful marksman will place the maximum number of shots in the centre, or at points quite near to the centre; he will often go astray, but the number of errors will steadily decrease in proportion as the shots are more aberrant, _i.e._, further from the centre. if a marksman wished to practise in like manner against some wall, for example, on which he has chosen a point that is not marked, and hence not recognisable by others, this point _thought_ of by the marksman, may be determined by studying the cluster of shots left upon the wall. in the same way an observer could determine the hour fixed for a collective appointment, such as a walking trip, by the manner in which the various individuals arrive in groups; some one will come much ahead of time because he has finished some task which he had expected would keep him busy up to the hour of appointment; then in increasing numbers the persons who come a few minutes ahead of time because they are provident and prompt; then a great number of people who have calculated their affairs so well as to arrive precisely on time; a few minutes later come those who are naturally improvident and a little lazy; and lastly come the exceptional procrastinators who at the moment of setting forth were delayed by some unexpected occurrence. causes of error in the individual and in the environment interfere in like manner with the astronomer who wishes to estimate the distance of the stars and it is necessary for him to repeat his measurements and calculations on the basis of those which show the greatest probability of being exact. accordingly, such _distribution_ of errors is _independent_ of the causes which produce them and which, whatever they are, remain practically the same at any given time, and consequently produce constant effects and symmetrical errors; but it is dependent upon the fact of the existence of some pre-established thing (a measurement, the dimensions of an object to be copied, an appointed hour, the centre of a target, etc.). in short, whenever a _tendency_ is established the _errors_ group themselves around the objective point of this tendency. in the case of anthropometry, as for instance, in the curve of stature given above, we find that the resulting medial stature was _predetermined_, _e.g._, _for a given race_; but many individuals, for various causes, either failed to attain it or surpassed it to a greater or less extent; and therefore in the course of their development they have acquired an erroneous stature. consequently, this medial stature which still corresponds to the mean average of a very large number of persons, is the stature that is biographically pre-established, the normal stature of the race. if we select individuals presumably of the same race and in sound health, the serial curve of their statures ought to be very high and with a narrow base, because these individuals are _uniform_. when a binomial curve has a _very wide_ basis of oscillations in measurements, it evidently contains elements that are not uniform; thus, for example, if we should measure the statures of men and women together, we should of course obtain a curve, but it would be very broad at the base and quite low at the centre of density; and a similar result would follow if we measured the statures of the rich and the poor without distinguishing between them. since normal stature, including individual variations, has an exceedingly wide limit of oscillation (from . m. to . m.), if we should measure all the men on earth, we should obtain a very wide base for our binomial curve, which nevertheless would have a centre of density corresponding to the median line and to the general mean average. now this mean stature, according to quétélet, is the mean stature of the european; and it is that of the _medial man_. but if we should take the races separately, each one of them would have its own binomial curve, which would reveal the respective mean stature for each race. in the same way, if we took the complex curve of all the individuals of a single race, and separated the men from the women, the two resulting groups would reveal the _mean average male stature_ and the _mean average female stature_ of the race in question. an analogous result would follow if we separated the poor from the rich, etc. every time that we draw new distinctions, the base of the curves, or in other words the limits of oscillation of measurements, will contract, and the _centre of density_ will rise; while the intermediate gradations (due, for example, to the intermixture of tall women and short men; or to the overlapping standards of stature of various kindred races, etc.), will diminish. in short, if we construct the binomial curve from individuals who are uniform in sex, race, age, health, etc., it not only remains symmetrical around a centre but the eccentric progression of its groups is steadily determined in closer accordance with the order and progression of the exponents of newton's binomial. however, a _symmetrical grading off_ from the centre is not the same thing as a symmetrical grading off from the centre _in a predetermined_ _mode_, _i.e._, that of the binomial exponents. the binomial symmetry is obtained through calculations of mathematical combinations. now, if the _fact_ of the centrality of a prevailing measurement is to be proved in relation to the predetermination of the measurement itself: for example, in regard to _racial heredity_, and hence is a fact that reveals _normality_, the manner of distribution of errors--namely, in accordance with calculations of _probability_--might very well be explained by mendel's laws of heredity, which serve precisely to show how the prevailing characteristics are distributed according to the mathematical calculation of probabilities. accordingly, the _normal characteristic of race_ would coincide with the dominant characteristic of mendel's hereditary powers. the characteristic which has been shown as the stronger and more potent is victorious over the recessive characteristics that are latent in the germ. meanwhile, however, there are various errors which, artificially or pathologically, cause a characteristic, which would naturally have been recessive, to become dominant, or, in other words, most prevalent. [illustration: fig. .--the shaded portion represents the eccentricity of the curve, due to the presence of cretins.] whenever a binomial curve constructed from a large number of individuals is found to be eccentric; and shows, _e.g._, in the case of stature, a deviation toward the low statures, it reveals (see de helguero's curves) the presence of a heterogeneous intermixture of subjects, for example, of children among adults, or, as in the case demonstrated by de helguero, an intermixture of _pathological individuals_ with normal persons (fig. ). the binomial curve obtained by de helguero from the inhabitants of piedmont included, as a matter of fact, a great number of _cretins_; they formed within the great normal mass of men, a little mass of individuals having a stature notably inferior to the normal. by correcting the eccentric curve on the left of the accompanying figure, and by tracing a dotted line equal and symmetrical to the right side, we obtain a normal binomial curve; well, this curve will actually be reproduced if we subtract all the cretins from the whole mass of individuals. the section distinguished by parallel lines represents that portion of the curve which departs from the normal toward the low statures, and is due to the cretins; it may be transformed into a small dotted binomial curve at the base, which is constructed from the statures of the cretins alone. accordingly, the symmetrical binomial curve gives us a _mean_ _average value_ in relation to a specified measurement. what has been said regarding stature serves as an example; but it may be repeated for _all the anthropometric measurements_, as viola has proved by actual experiment. the sitting stature, the thoracic perimeter, the dimensions of an entire limb or of each and every segment of it; every particular which it has seemed worth while to take into consideration, comports itself in the same manner; and this is also true of all the measurements of the head and face. that is to say, if we make a seriation of measurements relating to the sitting stature of an indeterminate number of individuals, we find a numerical prevalence of those corresponding to the medial measurement marked upon the axis of the abscissæ; and the number of individuals will continue to decrease with perceptible symmetry on each side of the centre, _i.e._, toward the higher and lower statures. if we take into consideration the significance of the sitting stature, this binomial curve relates to individuals who possess a normal physiological mass (the bust; centre of density) and to individuals who fall below or exceed that mass. we have already, in speaking of the types of stature, taken the bust under consideration in relation to the limbs, in order to judge the more or less favourable reciprocal development; but here we obtain an _absolute datum of normality_, independent of proportional relations to the body as a whole; _in other words, there_ _exists a physiological mass_ for the human body which is _normal_ in itself. the individuals whose sitting stature corresponds to the medial measure of the binomial curve, are precisely those who have the normal development of bust. the same thing repeats itself in the case of the thoracic perimeter, or the weight, or the length of the leg, or the cranial circumference, etc. hence we have a means of obtaining the _normal medial measurements_ by the seriation of a number of measurements actually obtained from living individuals the number of whom should be sufficiently large to enable us to construct a perceptibly symmetrical and regular binomial curve. such medial measurements, although they correspond to the true mean average (as we have already seen), are not for this reason _unreal_, like arithmetical means which represent a synthetic entirety that does not correspond to the single individuals actually existing; the medial measurements obtained by seriation are, on the contrary, measurements that really belong to living individuals; namely, to that group of individuals that possess this particular measurement. therefore, it is not a combination, or fusion, or abstraction. * * * * * but individuals who have one medial measurement, do not necessarily have all the other medial measurements; that is to say, the individuals who find that they belong on the medial abscissæ in relation to stature, do not find themselves similarly placed in relation to the sitting stature, or the thoracic perimeter, or the weight, or the cranial circumference, etc. indeed, it is _impossible_ that all the bodily measurements of the same individual should be _medial measurements_: or, to express it better, there has not been found up to the present among living individuals, in the whole wide world, a man so constructed. such a man would represent anthropologically the _medial man_. it is also very rare to find a man quite lacking in medial measurements: everyone has a few central measurements and certain others that are eccentric. at the same time it must be admitted that there are men who have many, and even a large majority, of the central measurements; while the rest of their measurements are eccentric or paracentral. one of the objections which used to be made was that if we should wish to unite all the medial measurements, they would not fit together, or rather, that a man could not be constructed from them; but that the result would be a monstrosity. nevertheless, this assertion or objection has proved to be absolutely fantastic and contrary to the actual fact. professor viola has observed that men who have a very large number of medial measurements are singularly _handsome_. more than that: the medial man reconstructed from medial measurements really gathered from living persons, has the identical proportions of the famous statues of greek art. here, for example, in figs. and , facing page , we have the medial man and the apollo; even to the eye of the observer, they show a marked similarity in proportions. the medial man is very nearly the portrait of an exceedingly handsome young roman, studied by viola; this person possessed a great majority of the mean average measurements; but some of his measurements did not correspond to the normal averages, and accordingly viola had them corrected by an artist under the guidance of anthropological biometry; and the figure thus corrected is represented in the drawing here given. well, this drawing corresponds perfectly to the proportions of the apollo. consequently, the mean average measurements do not pass unnoticed; it is not alone the anthropological instrument or mathematical reconstruction that reveals them; when presented to the eye of the intelligent man, they _notify him that_ they exist, they arouse in him an _æsthetic emotion_, they give him the alluring impression of the _beautiful_. when the mean average measurements are found accumulated in large numbers in the same person, they render that person the centre of a mysterious fascination, the admiration of all other men. now, this coincidence of the _beautiful_ with the average is equivalent to a coincidence of the beautiful with _normality_. "this unforeseen demonstration," says viola, "throws a vivid light upon the hitherto obscure problem of the æsthetic sense.... if a man evolves according to normal laws, his proportions arouse an exceptional æsthetic enjoyment." anyone having an eye trained to recognise the _beautiful_, is able through his æsthetic sensations, to pick out _normality_ from the great crowd of biological errors, which is precisely what the scientist does with great weariness of measurements and calculations. in fact, the great artists recognise the _beautiful parts_ of a number of beautiful individuals, and they unite them all together in a single work of art. the greeks did this, they reconstructed the medial man, on a basis of actual observation, and by extracting all the normalities, all the measurements most prevalent in individuals, and forming from them a single ideal man. the greek artists were observers; we might call them the positivists in art. their art is supreme and immortal, because they simultaneously interpreted what is _beautiful_ and what is _true_ in life. in short, medial measurements are true measurements, actually existing in individuals. no one can acquire a true æsthetic taste by contemplating works of art. the æsthetic sense is trained and refined by observing the truth in nature and by learning to separate instinctively the normal from the erroneous. no other form of art reproduces the _subject_ so faithfully as the greek; medieval and modern artists have incarnated their own personal inspiration, without training themselves to that accurate observation which refines the sense of the _beautiful_, when we are in the presence of the _truth_, represented by normality, which is the triumph of life. accordingly, we may reconstruct the _medial man_ from the truth as found in nature. within the wide scale of individual variations we pass from men possessing few medial measurements (ugly men) to men possessing many of them (handsome men), and even a majority of such measurements (extremely handsome). our sensation in the presence of the ugly man is repulsion, _biological_ _pain_; in the presence of the handsome man we feel an æsthetic contentment, _biological pleasure_. in this way we take part in the mysterious failures and triumphs of nature, as children in the great family of life. now, as viola says, the individual variations that group themselves symmetrically around the medial measurement may be divided into _groups_ or _types_, _e.g._, central, paracentral and eccentric, both above and below the mean.[ ] such types are considered by viola chiefly from the _pathological_ point of view, or rather, that of the _physical constitution_ and relative predisposition to disease. it is only the central type that has such perfect harmony of parts as to embody the perfection of strength and physical health; as the type diverges from the centre, it steadily loses its power of resistance and becomes less capable of realising a long life. [illustration: fig. .--viola's medial man.] [illustration: fig. .--apollo.] since the measurements are extremely numerous, it is necessary, in order to proceed to a separation of types, to select some one measurement to be regarded as fundamental, and in respect to which all others have a secondary importance; and such a measurement is found in the one which is associated with the development of the physiological man; namely, the _sitting stature_. in the centre there is the medial measurement; little by little, as we withdraw from the centre, we approach on the one side toward macroscelia and on the other side toward brachyscelia. it is possible to determine to within a millimetre the _normality_ of any measurement whatever. when this fundamental datum has once been accepted as a _basis_ for the construction of _types_, let us assume that we next add another and secondary measurement; for instance, that of the lower limbs. by the method of seriation we obtain a measurement that is _absolutely normal when considered by itself_; it is the central measurement. a perfectly formed and healthy man ought to possess both the medial sitting stature and the medial length of lower limbs; in actual cases, however, it is difficult to find so favourable a union, and the two series of measurements _combine_ in various ways; showing a tendency, however, to unite in such a way that a short bust goes with long legs, and _vice_ _versa_. the degree to which this rule is carried out produces two types that steadily tend to become more eccentric; they are the macroscelous and brachyscelous types, or, as de giovanni calls them, _morphological combinations_. we have only to calculate the _type of stature_, and that also groups itself according to the binomial curve; and thus gives us a gradation of the _combinations of parts_. viola notes that the paracentral individuals show characteristics quite different from those of the eccentrics; their constitution is more favourable, and they differ in respect to their characteristic proportions between thorax and abdomen, and in certain other physiological particulars that are of pathological importance. in this way a _method_ has been built up for determining mathematically the one absolute normality; as well as the anomalies in all their infinite variety, which may, however, be regrouped under _types_, on the basis of their eccentricities. here then we have, thanks to viola, and under the guidance of the glorious school of de giovanni, a pathway indicated, that is exceedingly rich in its opportunities for research, and that may advance the importance of anthropometry side by side with that of biometry, the development of which is to-day so earnestly pursued, especially in england. * * * * * one of the objections which may be raised to the theory of the medial man is that there cannot be any one perfect, human model because of the diverse races of mankind, each with its own established biological characteristics. for instance, i believe that i have proved that what we consider as _beautiful_ is distributed among _different races_; in other words, perfect beauty of all the separate parts of the body is never found united in any one race, any more than it is in any one person. the women of latium who are dark and dolichocephalic have most beautiful faces, but their hands and feet are imperfect; the brachycephalic blondes, on the contrary, are coarse-featured, while their hands and feet are extremely beautiful. the same may be said regarding their breasts and certain other details. furthermore, the stature of the dolichocephalics is too low as compared with what is shown to be the _average stature_, while the brachycephalics are similarly too tall. nevertheless, it is _extremely_ _difficult_ to discover racial types of such comparative purity as to establish these differences: it was by a lucky chance that i succeeded in tracing out, at castelli romani and at orte, certain groups of the races that were very nearly pure. the rest of the population are, for the most part, hybrids showing a confused intermingling of characteristics. in fact, pure _types of race_ no longer exist, least of all where civilisation is most intense. in order to speak of _types of race_, it is necessary to go among barbaric tribes; and even this is a relative matter, because all the races on earth are more or less the result of intermixture. yet in civilised countries an occasional group of pure racial stock may be discovered in isolated localities, as though they had found refuge, so to speak, from the vortex of civilisation which is engulfing the races. throughout the history of humanity we may watch this absorption of racial and morphological characteristics, and the formation of more and more intimate intermixtures, leading to the final disappearance of the original _types of_ _race_. when a primitive race emigrated, when men crossed over from africa to the european coast of the mediterranean, or aryans from oriental asia traversed the mountains and steppes of russia and the balkan countries, they were on their way to conquer territory and to subjugate peoples, but they were also on their way to lose their own type, the characteristics of their race. yet even this sacrifice of _race_ was not without compensation: indeed, it seems as though the _race_ loses through hybridism a large part of its _ugly_ characteristics, but retains and transmits for the most part the characteristics that are pleasing. unquestionably, the more civilised peoples are better looking than the barbarians, although the history of emigration would seem to indicate an almost common racial origin. when we remember that in human hybridism the result is not always a true and complete _fusion_ of characteristics, but for the most part an intermixture of them--so that, for example, the hybrid has the type of cranium belonging to one race, and the stature belonging to another race--we have the explanation of the fact that throughout thousands of years certain morphological characteristics have remained fixed, to such an extent as to permit anthropologists to use them as a basis upon which to trace out the origins of races. but these characteristics, while fixed in themselves, are _interchanged_ among individual hybrids, who form more or less felicitous _combinations_ of characteristics belonging to several races. when we recall what was said in this regard concerning heredity (general biological section) it is necessary to conclude that mendel's law must be invoked to explain the phenomenon. human hybridism, like all hybridism throughout the whole biological field, falls under this law. but there is still another phenomenon that should be noted: civilised men, who are the most hybrid of all hybrids upon earth, have formed a _new type_ that is almost unique, the _civilised race_, in which one and all resemble one another. it is only logical to believe that, in proportion as facilities of travel become easier and intermarriage between foreign countries more widespread, it will become less and less easy to distinguish the englishman from the frenchman, or the russian or the italian; provided that the various hybridisms in the respective countries have developed an almost uniform local type, so that the general characteristics of french hybridism may be distinguished from those of english hybridism, etc. even these local hybrid types, determining, as it were, the physiognomy of a people, will disappear when europe finally becomes a single country for civilised man. in short, we are spectators of this tendency: a fusion or intermixture of characteristics that is tending to establish one single human type, which is no longer an original racial type, but the _type of civilisation_. it is the unique race, the _resultant human_ _race_, the product of the fusion of races and the triumph of all the elements of beauty over the disappearance of those ugly forms which were characteristic of primitive races. are the dominant forces in the human germinative cells those which bring a contribution of beauty? one would say "yes," on the strength of the morphological history of humanity. there is no intention of implying by this that humanity is tending toward the incarnation of perfectly beautiful human beings, all identical in their beauty; but they will be harmonious in those skeletal proportions that will insure perfect functional action of their organism. harmony is fundamental; the soft tissues, the colour of hair and eyes, may upon this foundation give us an infinite _variety_ of beauty. "even in music," says viola, "so long as the laws of harmony are respected, there are possibilities of melodic thoughts of infinite beauty in gradation and variety; but the first condition is that the aforesaid laws shall be respected." the soft and plastic tissues are like a _garment_ which may be infinitely varied: because life is richer in normal forms than in abnormal; richer in triumphs than in failures; and hence more impressive in the varieties of its beauties than in its monstrosities. such philosophic concepts of the _medial man_ are exceedingly fertile in moral significance. the ugly and imperfect races have gone on through wars, conquests, intellectual and civil advancement unconsciously preparing new intermarriages and higher forms of love, which eliminated all that is harsh and inharmonic, in order to achieve the triumph of human beauty. in fact, quite aside from the heroic deeds of man, the constructor of civilisation, we are witnessing the coming of the unique man, the man of perfect beauty, such as phidias visioned in a paroxysm of æsthetic emotion. a living man who incarnates supreme beauty, supreme health, supreme strength: almost as though it were christ himself whom humanity was striving to emulate, through a most intimate brotherhood of all the peoples on earth. * * * * * on the analogy of the medial morphological man, quétélet also conceived of the _medial intellectual man_ and the _medial moral_ _man_. the medial intellectual man is closely bound to the thoughts of his century; he incarnates the prevailing ideas of his time; he vibrates in response to the majority. he is to his nation and century, says quétélet, "what the centre of gravity is to the body--namely, the one thing to be taken into consideration in order to understand the phenomena of equilibrium and movement." considered from the ideal side, the medial man ought to centralise in himself and keep in equilibrium the movement of thought of his period, giving it harmonic form, in works of art or of science. and it is the capacity for accomplishing this work of synthesis that constitutes the _inborn quality_ in the man of genius. he does not create; he reassembles in one organism the _scattered_ _members_, the medial vibrations of the crowd; he feels and expresses all that is new and beautiful and great that is in process of formation in the men who surround him, who are frequently unconscious of the beauty which is in them, just as they are unconscious of having those normal predetermined measurements of their bodies. but whenever they discover in a creation of thought _something of themselves_, they are stirred to enthusiasm at recognising this something belonging to them as forming part of a harmonious whole: and they applaud the work of art or of science which has stirred their enthusiasm. the medial intellectual man who has produced it is a beneficent genius to humanity because he aids its upward progress by appealing to the better part in each individual. now, there has never existed a medial intellectual man who sums up all the thought of his time: just as there does not exist a living man so beautiful as to incarnate all the medial measurements. but the man of genius is he who does embody the greater part of such ideas: and he produces a masterpiece when he succeeds in shedding his own individuality in order to assume what is given him from without. goethe said that it was not he who composed _faust_, but a spirit which invaded him. and the same thought is expressed in the autobiographies of many men of genius. a well-known writer told me that it sometimes happened to him, while he was writing, to forget himself completely; at such times he no longer wrote the truth as he saw and felt it consciously, but transmitted pure and unforeseen inspiration. such portions, said this author, are judged by the public as containing the greatest degree of beauty and truth. when a great orator thrills a crowd, he certainly does nothing more than repeat what is already in the thoughts of each member of that crowd; every individual present had, as it were, in his subconsciousness, the same thought that is expressed by the orator, which was taking form within him but had not yet _matured_ and which he would not have had the knowledge or the ability to express. the orator, as it were, matures and extracts from him that new thought which was taking shape within him; his better part, which after light is shed upon it will have the power to elevate him. but no orator could ever persuade a crowd with ideas that do not already exist in that crowd, and which consequently, are not part of the truth of their age. the orator is like the centre of gravity, inasmuch as he gives form and equilibrium to the scattered and timid thought of the crowd. carducci[ ] says "the art of the lyric poet consists in this: to express what is common to all in the form in which he has created it anew and specially in his mind; or rather to give to the thought which is peculiar to himself an imprint of universal understanding, so that each one looking into it may recognise himself." * * * * * when we think of the brilliant concept of the medial man, we behold a fundamental and profound principle: the necessity of hybridism and consequently of a profound intermixture of races; all of which goes side by side with the spread of civilisation, and the increased facilities of traveling and of communication between different communities. connected with these material advantages is the moral progress which leads to a realisation of perfect brotherhood between men that is rendered steadily more possible by environment, and is sanctioned little by little by laws and customs; whereas at the start it was only an ethical or mystical theory. while the physical formations of the races are becoming merged, the racial customs are also blending and disappearing in a single civilisation, in one sole form of thought. if, at one time, the powerful race was the one united to its territory, faithful to its customs, adhering to its moral code and its religion, all this melts away in the presence of universal hybridism which actually means the birth of a new generation of men and a new outlook upon life. when we contemplate the morphologically medial man, he seems to stand as a symbol of unlimited universal progress. his realisation seems to demand very lofty standards of morality and civilisation. whereas, on the contrary, the survival of types and of customs and sentiments peculiar to separate races, is the expression of local conditions that are inferior both in morality and in civil progress. as for the innumerable _paracentral errors_ which form to-day a large proportion of individual varieties, they are due directly to the imperfection of the environment, which does not permit of the natural development of human life, and consequently interferes through a wide range of methods and degrees with the development of ideal normality. hence, the extreme eccentric errors are the consequence of diseases and far-reaching social imperfections which lead to genuine deviations from the normal, including _pathological_ and _degenerate malformations_, and associated with them the lowest forms of individual degradation, both intellectual and moral. all the paracentral errors and malformations are a physical burden which retards the perfectionment of man. admitting that hybridism will eventually result in complete beauty, it will be greatly delayed in its attainment through the accumulation of errors that surround the characteristics of race. they form a heavy ballast, if the phrase may be permitted, that impedes the progress of its ascension. consequently, the long awaited social progress which is gradually bringing about the "brotherhood of man" is not in itself sufficient for the attainment of the ideal mean. there are certain errors that must more or less necessarily be encountered along the pathway of humanity; and that act either directly or indirectly upon posterity, deforming and destroying its resistance to life; and it is these that must be taken under consideration, because they delay the normal progress of human society. they are conscious and well recognised errors; hence up to a certain point the _active_ agency of man may combat them and succeed little by little in mitigating them and overcoming their disastrous influence upon biological humanity. there are, in general, two influences developing and promoting that improvement which leads toward the _medial man_: in proportion as the real and practical intermarriage of races approaches its realisation, social errors diminish; and as the brotherhood of humanity is promoted, it leads to social reforms by which the "sins of the world" are little by little overcome. but these may also be _actively_ combated; and in this direction education has a task of inestimable importance to civilisation. we ought to know not only the thought of our century, which is the luminous torch in the light of which we advance along the path of progress; but also the _moral needs_ of our time, and the errors which may be conquered through our conscious agency. to know "the faults of our century," which are destined to be conquered in the coming century, and to make preparation for the victory--such is our moral mission. the ethical movement of human society has continued to advance from conquest to conquest, and in looking backward the more civilised part of mankind have been horrified at the conditions that have been outgrown and have called them "barbarous." thus, for example, slavery was an unsurmountable obstacle to progress, and had to be crushed out by civilisation; the license to _kill_ is also a form of barbarism which to-day we are boasting of having just outgrown--or, at least, of having reached the final limit of its duration. in early times it was not only permissible to kill, but in many of its forms murder was considered honourable, as, for instance, in wars and in duels; it was also one form of justice to kill for vengeance, either social or individual; the condemnation to death of a criminal, the murder of an adulterous wife, the murder of anyone who has attacked the _honour_ of the family, all this seemed just in the past. lastly, murder was committed for pure diversion, as in the auto-da-fè and in the games of the circus. our civic morality seems to have attained its extreme altitude in having sanctioned the inviolability of human life; and the present-day struggle against the death penalty, against war, against revolutions, against uxoricide, in the case of adultery, and against duelling, shows us the triumph of a new and loftier conception of humanity in the upward progress of man. the intermixture of races and the intermingling of national interests, have aroused a sort of collective sentiment actually existing as a normal form of conscience, namely, "human solidarity." but we are still in a state of complete _barbarity_, still sunk in the most profound unconsciousness, all of us partners in the same great sin that threatens the overthrow of so-called civilised humanity; namely, _barbarity toward the species_. we are ignorant, we are almost strangers, in regard to our _responsibility_ toward those who are destined to issue from us as the continuation of humanity downward through the centuries; those who form the ultimate scope of our biological existence, inasmuch as each one of us is merely a connecting link between certain portions of past and future life. we are all so engrossed with the progress of our environment and of the ideas embodied in it, that we have not yet turned our attention inward toward ourselves: toward _life_. this solidarity which we recognise as existing among men at the present moment, ought to be extended to the men of the future. and since the species is closely bound up in the individual who is destined to reproduce it, this gives us at once the basis for a code of _individual moral conduct_, such as would assure to everyone the integrity of the fruit of his own reproduction. sexual immorality which is the stigma of the barbarity of our times, entails the most ignominious form of slavery; the slavery of women through prostitution. and emanating from this form of barbarity, the slavery has expanded and spread to all women, more or less oppressive, more or less conscious. the wife is a slave, for she has married in ignorance and has neither the knowledge nor the power to avoid being made the instrument for the birth of weakly, diseased or degenerate children; and still more deeply enslaved is the mother who cannot restrain her own son from degradations that she knows are the probable source of ruin of body and soul. we are all silently engaged in an enormous crime against the species and against humanity; and like accomplices we have made a tacit agreement not to speak of it. indeed, the mysterious silence regarding sexual life is absolute; it is as though we feared to compromise ourselves in the sight of that great and powerful judge, our own posterity; we hide under an equal silence the good and the bad in relation to sexual life. this sort of terror goes by the name of shame and modesty. such an excuse for silence certainly sounds like pure irony, coming as it does in the full midst of the orgy, at a time when we all know that every man is laden with his sins, and that we are all either accomplices or slaves in the common fault. it would seem that a race so modest as to blush at the mere mention of sexual life ought to be eminently chaste, and far removed from the age of foundling asylums and houses of ill fame; the age in which infanticide exists as proof of absolute impunity in regard to sexual crimes. what we call shame and modesty, is in reality not shame or modesty in regard to sexual acts and phenomena, but only in regard to sins against them. these acts and phenomena, being directly related to creation and the eternity of the species, ought to be regarded by men as in the nature of a lofty religious culte, equally, for instance, with that which from the earliest prehistoric times placed the symbol of maternity, _the mother and the child_, side by side with the _scythe_, symbol of labour, in places of worship. we cannot admit that _love_, sung by the poets as a divine sentiment, is the moral exponent of unworthy and shameful acts. it is the error, the perversion of sexual life, the source of degeneration, of degradation and of the death of the species, that makes us keep silent, conceal and blush with shame. in reality, all this ought to stir us, not to embarrassment and shame, but to a formidable rebellion, a sharp awakening of conscience, a redemption from a state of inferior civilisation. it was a barbarous sovereign who, in the delusive hope that it would cure him of eczema, caused the throats of little children to be cut, so that he might immerse himself in the warm bath of their blood. to-day anyone who would sacrifice the lives of children to allay the itching of his own skin, would be in our eyes a monster of criminality. and yet almost equally criminal are the men of our time, lords, in a barbaric sense, of sexual life; and we silently acquiesce in customs which in the future centuries will perhaps be remembered as a monstrous barbarism. the whole moral revival which awaits us, revolves around the struggle against the sexual sins. the emancipation of woman, the protection of maternity and of the child, are its most luminous exponents; but no less efficacious evidences of such progress are all the efforts directed against alcoholism and the other vices and diseases which are reflected in their unhappy consequences to posterity. there is just one side of the question that has hitherto been scarcely touched at all, and that is the chastity of man and his responsibility as a father; but even this has already come to be felt as an imperative necessity for progress. in place of reducing other human beings to slavery and prostituting them; instead of betraying them and shattering their lives by seduction and the desertion of their offspring, the man of the future will choose to _become chaste_. he will feel that otherwise he is dishonoured, morally lost. man will not be willing to be so weak as to confess himself dragged down to degradation and crime because unable to conquer his own instincts; man who has nothing but victories on the credit side of his history, and who even succeeded in overcoming the greatest of all his irresistible instincts, that of self-preservation, in showing himself capable of going into combat and dying for the ideals of his fatherland. man is capable of every great heroism; it was man who found a means of conquering the formidable obstacles of his environment, establishing himself lord of the earth, and laying the foundations of civilisation. he will also teach himself to be chaste, within sufficiently narrow limits to guarantee the dignity of the human race and the health of the species; and in this way he will prescribe the ethics for the centuries of the near future: _sexual_ _morality_. there are customs and virtues, lofty ethical doctrines that stand in direct accord with the conservation and the progress of life. bodily cleanliness, temperance in drink, the conquest of personal instincts, human brotherhood in the full extent of the thought, the feeling, and the practice, chastity; all these are just so many forms of the defense of life, both of the individual and of the species. to-day, in hygiene, in pathology and in anthropology, science is showing us the truth through positive proofs, through experiments and statistics. but these virtues which are paths leading to _life_, are simply being reconfirmed by science; just as they are being little by little attained by civil progress, which prepares their practical elements; but they were always intuitively recognised by the human heart: nothing is older in the ethics of mankind than the principal of brotherhood, of victory over the instincts, of chastity. only, these virtues, _intuitively perceived_, could not be universally _practised_, because universal practice demanded time for preparation. but they survived partly as affirmations of absolute virtue and partly as _prophesies_ of a future age and were considered as constituting the _highest_ good. just as the æsthetic sense led to the recognition of _normality_ at a time when this scientific concept was very far from being understood as it is to-day; in the same way the ethical and religious sense was able to feel intuitively and to separate from customs and from sentiments belonging to an evanescent form of transitory civilisation or from the temporary racial needs, those others that relate fundamentally to the biological preservation of the individual and the species and the practical attainment of human perfection. and while the medial intellectual man or the artistic genius combines wholly or in part the thoughts of his time, the medial moral or religious man sums up the guiding principles of life which everyone feels profoundly in the depth of his heart; and when he speaks to other men it seems as though he instilled new vigour into the very roots of their existence, and he is believed, when he speaks of a happier future toward which humanity is advancing. if the intellectual genius is almost a reader of contemporaneous thought as it vibrates around him, the religious genius interprets more or less completely and perfectly the universal and eternal spirit of life in humanity. accordingly, the medial men incarnate the _beautiful_, the _true_, and the _good_: in other words, the theories of positivism arrive at the selfsame goals as idealism, those of poetry, philosophy and art. by following the path of observation, we reach a goal analogous to that sought along the path of intuition. the theory of the medial man constructed fundamentally upon positive bases of _measurements_ and _facts_, represents the limit[ ] of perfection of the human individual associated with the limit of perfection of _human society_, which is formed in a two-fold way: a close association between all human beings, or the formation of a true social organism (complete hybridism in body; human brotherhood in sentiment), and the steadily progressive emancipation, of every individual member from anxiety concerning the _defense of life_, in order to enjoy the triumph of the _development of_ _life_. all that was formerly included under _defense_ will assume collective forms of a high order (repressive justice replaced by more varied forms of prevention: which have for their final goal a widespread education and a gradual amelioration of labour and social conditions); and in this _reign of peace_ there will arise the possibility _of developing all_ the forces of life (biological liberty). in such a conception, the individual organism depends more and more upon the social organism: just as the cells depend upon the multicellular organism; and we may almost conceive of a new living entity, a _super-organism_ made up of humanity, but in which every component part is allowed the maximum expansion of its personal activity emancipated from all the obstacles that have been successively overcome. this conception of _biological_ _liberty_, in other words, the triumph of the free and peaceful development of life, through the long series of more or less bitter _struggles and defenses of life_, constitutes, in my opinion, the very essence of the new pedagogy. and the evolution of modern thought and of the social environment can alone prepare for its advent, perhaps at no distant day. footnotes: [ ] viola, _the laws of morphological correlation of the individual types_. [ ] cited by viola. [ ] limit, in the mathematical sense. tables summarizing the mean proportions of the body according to age _useful for judging of normal development and incidentally for_ _diagnosing forms of infantilism:_ _preceded by_ figures (from quÉtÉlet) giving the _growth of stature_ _in man and in woman (it being well known that the stature_ _is the fundamental measurement for forming the aforesaid_ _judgments)_. ------------------------- age | males | females ------+---------+-------- | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . ------------------------- { length of body . m. { weight kg. new-born child { maximum cranial circumference mm. { circumference of thorax mm. { index of stature { ponderal index . -- --------------------------------------------------------- age in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | | | . ponderal index | . | . | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | --------------------------------------------------------- age in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | | . | . ponderal index | . | . | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- age in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | . | . | . ponderal index | . | | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+-------- age in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+-------- stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | . | . | ponderal index | . | . | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------ ages in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------ stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | . | . | . ponderal index | . | . | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- age in years | | | ---------------------------------+-------+-------+------- stature in metres | . | . | . index of stature | | | weight in kilograms | . | . | . ponderal index | . | . | . maximum circumference of head in | | | millimetres. | | | --------------------------------------------------------- tables of calculations i tables for calculating the cephalic index calculations of the cephalic index antero-posterior diameters from to mm.; bilateral diameters from to mm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bilateral | diameters | antero-posterior diameters, in millimetres in milli- |----------------------------------------------------------- metres | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the cephalic index antero-posterior diameters from to mm.; bilateral diameters from to mm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bilateral | diameters | antero-posterior diameters, in millimetres in milli- |----------------------------------------------------------- metres | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the cephalic index antero-posterior diameters from to mm.; bilateral diameters from to mm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bilateral | diameters | antero-posterior diameters, in millimetres in milli- |----------------------------------------------------------- metres | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ii tables for calculating the ponderal index calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to| kilograms. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- statures from to centimetres; weights from to| kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | --| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- calculations of the ponderal index statures from to centimetres; weights from to kilograms -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- w k| e i| i l| g i o| h n g| t r| s a| statures in centimetres m|-------------------------------------------------------------------------- s|| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- index (_a.--names_) agyba, hilany, alix, ammon, aristotle, auvard, alfred, bajenoff, n., bateson, william, beethoven, ludwig v., bellini, bencivenni, ildebrando, benedickt, bianco, bichat, xavier, binet, alfred, , , , , , , , , , , , bischoff, theodor l. w., blumenbach, johann friedrich, bonnifay, jules, , , borghese, pauline, , botticelli, sandro, boxich, g. t., , boyd, , broca, paul, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , brugia, raffaele, , , bruno, giordano, buffon, byron, lord, cabanis, caianus, calcagni, menotti, calori, camper, , carducci, giosue, , carrara, mario, cassan, cavalieri, lina, , celli, cervesato, collignon, rené, , correns, cromwell, oliver, cuénot, lucien, cuvier, , daffner, franz, , , dante, , darbishire, darwin, charles, , , , , , , davenport, charles benedict, de giovanni, achille, - , , , , , , , , deniker, joseph, , , , , , de sanctis, sante, , , , , , , , , , , dubois, eugène, , duncan, dunker, fawcette, fenelon, féré, ch., ferri, enrico, ferriani, lino, figueira, fernandes, fraebelius, galton, francis, garibaldi, giuseppe, geffroy-saint-hilaire, Éttienne, godin, paul, , , , , , goethe, goldstein, , gosio, haeckel, ernst heinrich, , , heinke, helguero, fernando de, herodotus, hertoghe, höller, von, homer, hrdlicka, ales, , , , humphry, huxley, hurst, c. c., ingerslevs, jaest, james, william, johannson, koch, robert, kollman, laloy, lamarck, , lange, lapique, louis, lasegue, lebon, , lelut, leopardi, le play, , lexis, linnaeus, , livi, ridolfo, , , , , , , , , , , , lombroso, cesare, - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , lombroso, gina, luccheni, luciani, luigi, ludwig, macdonald, , mahomed, malpighi, marcello, mancini, maria, manouvrier, léon, , , , , , , , , , , , mantegazza, paolo, marconi, guglielmo, marro, antonio, , , massa, signorina, , massini, , maurel, , mazzoni, ofelia, meckel, mendel, gregor, , , , , , , , , , , messedaglia, meunier, michelangelo, mill, john stuart, misdea, michele, moige, moleschott, jakob, monti, morel, , morselli, enrico, , - , , mosso, angelo, musolino, naegeli, karl wilhelm von, , newton, sir isaac, niceforo, alfredo, , , , , nietzsche, friedrich, oloriz, pagliani, , parchappe, pastorello, pearson, karl, pieraccini, , pinard, purkinje, quÉtÉlet, lambert adolphe-jacques, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ranke, retzius, anders adolph, , , , , rosa, , , rossi, , , rousseau, jean jacques, , rubens, russell, rütimeyer, louis, sacchi, sandler, schafer, schiller, schultze, séguin, Édouard, , , sergi, giuseppe, - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , sergi, sergio, , , sick, , simon, stoppato, stratz, , tarde, thulié, henri, topinard, paul, , , , tschermack, e., türcker, ada, veronese, paolo, verworn, vierordt, viola, giacinto, , , , , , , , virchow, rudolf, , vitali, vitale, , vitruvius, voltaire, vries, hugo de, , , , wagner, welcker, hermann, , , wernicke, westermarck, winckel, zander, zanolli, velio, zimmermann, index (_b.--subjects_) abdomen, measurements of the, abnormal types of man, abortion due to syphilis, akkas, stature of the, - acromegalia, addison's disease, albinism, anatomical points, , , , , anger, expression of, angles, facial, , - anomalies of buccal apparatus, of ear, - of eye, of eyebrows and beard, of hair, of nose, - of pigment, of teeth, of thorax, , of wrinkles, antecedents of pupil, _et seq._ near biopathological, remote, sociological, anthropological form used in new york juvenile asylum, anthropology, criminal, - defined, physiological, - technique of, - anthropometer, - ape, brain of, arms, total spread of, , , , arrest of development, - , due to alcohol, due to infant illnesses, due to malaria, - due to pellagra, due to rickets, due to syphilis, asymmetry, cranial, , facial, , , , functional, biographic chart, commune of bologna, of italian reformatories, pastorello's, sergi's, biographic history of pupil, pedagogical advantages of, of an idiot boy, _et seq._ birth-marks, brachycephalic races, brachydactylism, brachyscelia, - brain, chemistry of, convolutions of, - embryonal development of, - morphological normality in relation to age, rhythm of growth of, - volume of, weight of, brunettes, suppressed, buccal apparatus, anomalies of, calf of leg, absence of, carnet maternel, - , cells, animal, vegetable, cephalic index, - at different ages, for italy, nomenclature, - cephalometry, cephaloscopy, cerebral development, influence of biological factor upon, influence of economic conditions, influence of exercise, cerebral hypophysis, , cervical pleiades, chameprosopic face, , chiromancy, , childbirth, dangerous modern, children's houses, - , , - , , , , , chinese, civilization of, - psycho-ethnic character of, chromatic charts, broca's, circumference, axillary, of cranium, - , submammary, of thorax, , club-foot, convolutions of the brain, - coordinates, craniology, - craniometric points, - craniometry, , cranioscopic norms, - cranioscopy, cranium, animal, bones of human, - characteristics of human, - measurements of, - morphological evolution of, of new-born child, normal forms of, ossification of, - varieties of: acrocephalic, , beloid, clinocephalic, , cuboid, cymbocephalic, ellipsoid, ovoid, - oxycephalic, pentagonoid, plagiocephalic, , platycephalic, rhomboid, scaphocephalic, , sphenoid, spheroid, trapezoid, trigonocephalic, volume of, - , criminals, non-violent, types of, - violent, types of, stature in, types of, , cubic index, broca's, curves, de helguero's, deformations, definition of, due to field labour, due to mining, due to school benches, , , , due to stone-breaking, degeneration, signs of: abnormal frontal diameters, kinky hair, polytrichia, precocious wrinkles, united eyebrows, social causes of, dentition, record of first, diameter, biacromial, bigoniac, , bimammillary, bizygomatic, , of cranium, maximum antero-posterior, diameter of cranium, maximum transverse, minimum frontal, vertical, of thorax, antero-posterior, transverse, diameter of cranium, increase of maximum, measurement of, diastemata, diet of children, dimensions of the body at different ages, - dismimia, dolichocephalic races, dystrophies, toxical, ear, anatomy of, anomalies of, - handle-shaped, morel's, wildermuth's, education of new-born child, electricity, effect on growth of stature, embryo, development of human, , embryonal face, environment, adaptation to, influence of, enzymes, , ludwig's theory of, epilepsy, a factor in criminality, treatment of, error, personal, - , eurafrican race, , eurasian race, , , evolution, theories of, - exophthalmia, experimental sciences defined, expression, facial, et seq. extra-social types, - eye, anomalies of, mongolian, eyebrows, oblique, united, face, chameprosopic, embryonal, evolution of, human characteristics of, leptoprosopic, limits of, _et seq._ mesoprosopic, orbicular, skeleton of, - symmetry of, facial norm, family monograph, le play's, final causes, - fingers, proportion between, flat-foot, fontanelles, cranial, form, the, - , - canons of the, et seq. definition of, fundamental laws of, freckles, frontal index, galloway, stature of scotchmen of, - gastrula, generation, hygiene of, , genius, man of, , , germinal potentialities, , gigantism, glands of internal secretion, - , , goniometer, broca's, gray hair, , precocious, growth, defined, effect of psychic stimuli on, - need of heat for, of brain, due to alimentation, due to cerebral exercise, in woman, rhythm of, , , of head, rhythms of, of limbs, of neck, of pelvis, of stature, - of thorax, hair, curly, , form of, - kinky, , pigmentation of, - , smooth, vortices, wavy, , hair-roots, line of, hand, the, - dimensions of, functional characteristics of, in figurative speech, - in relation to other dimensions of the body, psychological types of, heart, the, heredity, phenomena of, hexadactylism, hybridism, human, - , , , , , phenomena of, - hygiene of generation, , hymn to bread, hypermimia, hypersthenic type, de giovanni's, - hyposthenic type, de giovanni's, - hypothyroidea, ichthyosis, index, cephalic, - , of ear, facial, - of nose, ponderal, of segments of limbs, of sexual mass, thoracic, , of visage, vital, , indices, formula of, individual liberty of pupil, infantile atrophy, types, - infantilism, - due to alcohol, - anangioplastic, due to denutrition, dystrophic, - hereditary causes of, hypertrophic, myxedematous, , - pathogenesis of, _et seq._ due to syphilis, , due to tuberculosis, intelligence, human, what it is, human, how to diagnose it, cerebral volume in relation to, invagination of cells, iris, pigmentation of, italians, stature of, - japanese, stature of, joints, loose and stiff, juvenile delinquents, antecedents of, psycho-physical character of, teachers' notes on, knock-knees, kyphosis, , latium, young women of, , , , , leg, calf of, curvature of, leptoprosopic face, liberty of children, light, effect on growth of stature, , limbs, the, - growth of, index of segments of, malformations of, measurement of, limitations of mass, - little's disease, , livi's charts, , lordosis, , lungs, the, - macrocephaly, macrodontia, macroglossia, macroplastic type, macroscelia, , - malformations, - distribution of, - of cranium, - of limbs, origin of, synoptic chart of, marie's disease, marriage, proper age for, precocious, maternal diaries, mean averages, measurement of abdomen, of cranium, - of face, - of limbs, - of stature, - of thorax, of total spread of arms, medial man, theory of the, , - mediterranean race, , , , , melanosis, mendel's laws, - mesoprosopic face, metabolism, - , method, importance of, in experimental sciences, - methodology, statistical, - microcephaly, microdontia, microphthalmia, mongolians the most brachyscelous race, monkey-like traits: flat hand, lack of certain lines in palm, monkey-like, long forearm, thin lips, morphological adaptation of hand, combinations, de giovanni's, evolution of cranium, morphology of body at various ages, - of the brain, importance of, mortality, curve of general, infant, in relation to vital index, in italy, morula, mother's love, psychic stimulus of, multicellular organisms, formation of, - muscles of head and face, - of thorax, mutations, de vries' theory of, myxedematous idiocy, nails, the, nanism, achondroplastic, - neanderthal skull, neck, the, - norm, facial, frontal, lateral, occipital, of profile, vertical, nose, anomalies of, - nutrition, influence of, on school children, oligodactylia, onycogryposis, orientation, line of, orthognathism, , ovum, human, palate, cleft, ogival, , palms, lines of the, papillary lines, paralysis, infantile, parasites, social duty towards, parasitism, stigma of, , peasant, class stigma of, , , pedagogical method, need of reform in, , , pellagra, symptoms of, pelvis, - growth of, rotation of, sexual differences in, skeleton of, personal error, - , photogenic conditions, - phototherapy, pia barolo society, pigments, the, - during growth, pigmentation of hair, of iris, of skin, pigmy races, pithecanthropus, skull of, plagiocephalic cranium, , plagioprosopy, , platyopic profile, playthings, children's natural contempt for, pleasure, expression of, necessary to human existence, polytrichia, polydactylism, ponderal index, evolution of, , method of computing, - pregnancy, too frequent, profile, egyptian, greek, low types of, norm of, proopic, roman, progeneism, , prognathism, , , prophatnia, prosopometry, - prosoposcopy, - protoplasm, psychic stimuli, effect on health of children, test, de sanctis', puberty, change in pigments at, , growth of jaw at, of limbs at, of nose at, influence of climate on, - of cold on, of direct sexual stimuli on, of heat on, of nutrition on, - of psychic stimuli on, , , repose preceding, of russian girls, of women of lapland, relation of growth of brain and face to, pulmonary capacity, - quÉtÉlet's binomial curve, race, eurafrican, , mediterranean, , , , , rachitic rosary, racial types in europe, different characteristics of two principal, rewards and punishments, fallacy of, , - , , , rhythm of brain growth, - of facial growth, of stature, triennial, rickets, , , - , , , , foetal, school benches, deformations due to, , , , records, school-sanatorium, scientific philosophy, morselli's, sea-shore, benefit to children, - seriation, importance of, sexual education, function, dignity of the, morality, , , - sitting stature, - at different ages, skeleton, human, - articulations of, of face, - of limbs, of pelvis, skin, the, - solitary confinement, sorrow, expression of, space, empirical relation to stature, specific gravity, of body, of brain, spirometry, - , stature, - of abnormals, according to sex, _et seq._ of american children, brachyscelous type of, cycle of, definition of, , , in relation to dimensions of thorax, - effect of nutrition on, - of erect position on, of heat on, - essential, mean average, of european, growth in, during first year, - index of, , , involution of, of italians, mean average, stature, livi's charts of, - macroscelous type of, maximums and minimums, compared with cranial circumference, - measurement of, parabolic curve of, , pathological variations of, - of rachitic children, racial limits of, - in relation to sex, - rhythm of, summary of, - terminology of, total, at different ages, triennial rhythm of growth of, - types of, _et seq._ abnormal, according to age, in art, according to race, according to social conditions, summary of, - variations in, according to age, - according to seasons, due to mechanical causes of adaptation, - night and morning, transitory, sterility of dwarfs and giants, due to precocious marriage, due to work in rice-fields, stigmata of degeneration, among beggars, among orphans, stimulants poisons for children, studious children, denutrition of, physical inferiority of, , , , sun-baths, superiority, social, of women, moral, suprarenal capsule, , surprise, expression of, - syndactylism, syphilis, abortion due to, symptoms of, - tasmanian, civilization of, - most macroscelous race, teacher of the future, the, of abnormal pupils, responsibility of the, teeth, anomalies of the, first and second dentition, temperaments, de giovanni's doctrine of, - thermal gymnastics, - thermic conditions of schools, - thoracic index, perimeter, thorax, the, - anatomical parts of, - anomalies of shape of, descent of, dimensions of, in relation to stature, , growth of, measurement of, physiological importance of, shape of, triangulation of, thought, expression of, thymus gland, , thyroid gland, - toe, opposable big, tongue, the, total spread of arms, tuberculosis, type of civilized man, uvula, double, vertebral column, normal curves of, - visage, index of, normal, roman, vital index, , voice, education of the, - warmth, fallacy of demoralizing effect of, - weight, the, - , of brain, the, as exponent of health, of new-born child, of child, effect of too frequent pregnancy on, of child, effect of mother's age on, child's gain in, and growth of separate organs, comparative, child's loss in, significance of, increase according to sex, women, fallacy of pretended cerebral inferiority of, wrinkles, anomalies of, precocity of, , transcriber's notes: simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors were corrected. punctuation normalized. anachronistic and non-standard spellings retained as printed. simple division equations with numerators over denominators were reformatted as numerators/denominators. if multiple terms are involved then parenthesis were added, e.g. (numerator +numerator )/(denominator +denominator ). equations involving roots are indicated by [*square root] followed by the expression under the root bar in parenthesis, e.g. [*cube root]( )= . centimeters in tables abbreviated as cm. italics markup is enclosed in _underscores_. bold markup is enclosed in =equals=. superscripts are indicated with a single caret (^) followed by the superscripted text surrounded by curly braces { and }. transcriber's note: superscripts are indicated by the caret character, as in "xvii^e" and " ^o". italic text is indicated by _underscores_; boldface text is indicated by =equals signs=. loyola. the great educators edited by nicholas murray butler loyola and the educational system of the jesuits by the reverend thomas hughes of the society of jesus new york charles scribner's sons copyright, , by charles scribner's sons. preface. in the following work on the educational system of the jesuits, i have endeavored to present a critical statement of the principles and method adopted in the society of jesus. the effort to explain the sources, process of development, and present influence of the system within and without the order, has made of the first part a biographical and historical sketch, having for its chief subject the person of the founder; while the details and the pedagogical significance of the various elements in the method appear, in the second part, as a critical analysis of the _ratio studiorum_. the educational literature which treats of this system is very extensive. various estimates and conclusions have been arrived at, on the merits of documents frequently referred to, for an exposition of the meaning and philosophy of the system. hence, with the view of facilitating a clear and comprehensive judgment on the subject, i have thought it not inadvisable to quote accurately from such documents, omitting none which bore upon the matter, if only they were within reach. it so happens that, at present, a large number of the sources, regulations, and commentaries, heretofore rare and altogether out of reach, have been rendered easy of access, being embodied in the great work, _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_, which is already beyond its tenth volume. three of the volumes so far issued are upon the jesuit system; they have been compiled by the late rev. g. m. pachtler, s. j. if the three or four volumes, which still remain to be issued by the rev. bernard duhr, s. j., had been available, they too could have been laid under contribution for examples and illustrations. but perhaps the theme will appear sufficiently illustrated as it is. besides the original documents, i have used no less authentic an exponent than that which the maxim of law approves: _consuetudo, optima legis interpres_, "custom, which is the best interpreter of law." while all that is oldest and most authentic has thus been made use of in explaining the _ratio studiorum_, the actual condition of pedagogics to-day is new, and so is the state of the question involved. hence, to satisfy the requirements of the present, reference has been made not exclusively either to the customs or the learned documents of a former age. in a word, the object aimed at has been to indicate the chief traits which are characteristic of the system, and which may be suggestive in the development of pedagogical science. whether such an object has been attained, so as to meet many questions which may possibly arise, and to satisfy the desire which actually exists, it will be for others to decide. thomas hughes, s. j. st. louis university. contents. page preface v part i. educational history of the order. chapter i. introduction chapter ii. knight, pilgrim, and scholar chapter iii. the university of paris. rome chapter iv. colleges as proposed in the jesuit constitution chapter v. colleges founded and endowed chapter vi. the intellectual scope and method proposed chapter vii. the moral scope proposed chapter viii. ignatius administering the collegiate system. his death chapter ix. subsequent administrations part ii. analysis of the system of studies. chapter x. aquaviva. the ratio studiorum chapter xi. _formation of the master._ his courses of literature and philosophy chapter xii. youthful masters chapter xiii. the courses of divinity and allied sciences. private study. repetition chapter xiv. disputation. dictation chapter xv. _formation of the scholar._ symmetry of the courses. the prelection. books chapter xvi. the classical literatures. school management and control chapter xvii. examinations and graduation. schedule of grades and courses chapter xviii. conclusion bibliographical appendix part i. educational history of the order loyola and the educational system of the jesuits chapter i. introduction. a learned and elegant work, which narrates the rise and progress of christian schools, from the sixtieth year of the christian era onwards, ends its long journey at the date of the reformation, and takes leave of its varied subject, and of its lines of christian scholars, in these words: "we leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of catholic christendom were passing into the hands of a great religious order, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of christian education."[ ] two centuries and a half later, when the society of jesus had run a long course, from the date of the reformation which had seen it rise, up to the eve of the revolution which beheld it extinct, a general of the order, ignatius visconti, addressing the provincial superiors over the world, takes note of a new stage in the process of educational development: "the taste for letters now," he says, "is more keen and exquisite, and the number of literary schools has increased so much, that ours may no longer appear so necessary. for i may mention the fact that, besides our schools of polite letters, there were, for a long while, either none or very few. so that parents were forced to send their children to us, even if otherwise they did not want it."[ ] this refers in a quiet way to what leopold von ranke states with more emphasis. speaking of grammar classes, the german historian says: "here also the jesuits succeeded to admiration. it was found that young people gained more with them in six months, than with other teachers in two years. even protestants removed their children from distant gymnasia to confide them to the care of the jesuits."[ ] ranke narrates in the same place how it was "toward the universities above all that the efforts of the jesuits were directed." and he describes what the results were in germany. d'alembert writes of their progress in france: "hardly had the company of jesus begun to show itself in france, than it met with difficulties without number, in the endeavor to establish itself. the universities especially made the greatest efforts to keep the new-comers out. it is difficult to decide whether this opposition is a praise or a condemnation of the jesuits who stood it. they announced gratuitous teaching; they counted among their number celebrated and learned men, superior perhaps to those whom the universities could boast of," etc.[ ] speaking of the protestants in the netherlands, a chronicle, which reviews the first century of the order's existence, records that "the jesuit schools were expressly interdicted, under severe penalties, to all members of the protestant communities. even in a twelve-year truce which the order partially enjoyed, a monthly fine of one hundred florins was still imposed upon all delinquents, or on their parents, who persisted in patronizing the jesuit schools. to escape the fine, parents sent their children under an assumed name.[ ] in every country, the same drama of struggle and contest evolved itself through two and a half centuries, till a momentous scene was witnessed. it was a scene of such a kind as seldom has occurred in history; and never certainly was any similar event thrown into such relief by the sequel. the event which i refer to was a universal and instantaneous suppression of the order; with consequences following thereupon which were exceptional, both in the world that witnessed it, and in the subject-body that suffered it. the sequel in the world at large was that, a few years later, at the close of the eighteenth century, there broke out the great revolution under the leadership of men, of whom scarcely one had been more than seven years of age at the date of the jesuits' expulsion.[ ] they represented in france the first generation which had not been educated by the society. the remote causes which overwhelmed the order were the same that ushered in the revolution. but, among the immediate causes, assigned by historians to account for the precise form which the great convulsion assumed, and for the date at which it occurred, is placed the dissolution of this order. according to the count de maistre, who speaks of the political sentiment of his own times, all observers agreed that the revolution of europe, still called the french revolution, was impossible without the preliminary destruction of the jesuits. and, in keeping with this, it was equally a subject of observation, as being a palpable historical fact, that during two centuries the jesuits had formed in their college at paris, the élite of the french nobility; and that, only a few years after the expulsion of the jesuit masters, the same college turned out the robespierres, camille desmoulins, tallien, noël, fréron, chénier, and other such demagogues. this college of clermont, or louis-le-grand, from which the jesuits were expelled in , had been immediately occupied by the university of paris. the revolution broke out twenty-seven years later. another sequel, not heard of before in history, affected the society itself. europe, having gone through the violent commotions which changed the old order of things into the new, reached the beginning of this nineteenth century, and found the society alive again. this was in defiance of a political maxim, which we may admit with baron von hübner, that in politics, in the affairs of states, in the life of all great social institutions, when once death supervenes, there is no resurrection. and now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the same forces of repulsion and attraction, of devoted love on the part of friends, of intense hatred on the part of enemies, have been seen operating as always before. it has become a commonplace in the philosophy of history,--this hatred which has been sworn against the order of jesus, and the multitude of enemies whom it has made. one explanation suggests itself to the viscount de bonald,--the presence in it, he thinks, of something good; of that good which, as it alone is the object of the most ardent love, can alone become the object of the intensest hate; and therefore has always made persecutors and martyrs. the purpose of this book is to give an historical sketch, with a proportionate analysis, of the educational development effected through the society of jesus. others have taken different fields of jesuit history to survey, either general and comprehending all the paths of external and internal activity, or particular and comprising only parts of the history. some of these particular views, especially in later years, are in the line of studies, and are most valuable contributions to the history of pedagogic development. none of them, however, happens to coincide with the scope, purpose, and form which have been designated for this; as the series to which it belongs, the editor in charge, and the country for which it is intended, sufficiently indicate. the subject then is the educational system of the jesuits, that system which technically is called the _ratio studiorum_. it requires no literary nor historical ingenuity to centre all that has to be said about it in the personality and character of st. ignatius of loyola. i shall draw upon jesuit sources of information, except when it will be necessary to state results, or give estimates, which imply commendation. then i shall quote freely from sources outside of the order. otherwise, for the purpose of explaining and analyzing domestic matters, these extraneous references would be imperfect indeed. the situation, which met the military view of the cavalier, lately the knightly captain of loyola, was a new one, on an old field of battle. the demand, which it seemed to make upon tactical resources, was as intense as the political and religious crisis which created the situation. from the year till , while ignatius was prospecting the scene in europe, and preparing to take an active part in it, he had time and the opportunities for observing, what precisely, at that epoch, were the accumulated results of all the christian ages gone before; and why the results just then were only what they were. the issue appeared fatally determined by social conditions around, which more than neutralized the christianity visible. education, in particular, was laboring under the action of causes, which had begun to operate several centuries earlier, and which were then evidently working themselves out to one final effort. that was the undermining of christian education. in this respect, it was the same question which had confronted the augustines, the basils, and jeromes, of one thousand years before. but it was a different state of the question. augustine, the brilliant youth of hippo regius in africa, will serve as an instance of what the issue then had been. he had made himself master of the very best results, which the public schools of the time were able to accomplish in the most gifted of minds. but he had lost his virtue. he lived to complain with bitterness, that it was accounted a grievous error to pronounce _homo_ "a man," without the "h," but it was no error at all to hate a man, signified by the word, _homo_. the consequence with him was that, when he became a bishop of the church, he met the need of providing a christian education, by instituting in his own house a kind of school, for the moral and spiritual education of his clergy. thus arose the cathedral or canonical school. so too, the cloistral schools came to flourish in the abbeys and the monasteries. and, even if these two kinds of educational centres had not also been, as they really were, in the middle ages, the preordained means for the salvation of learning in europe, they would still have had reason enough for their existence, in the paramount necessity of continuing, for the tender age of youth, the ministry of a virtuous education. events took a new turn with the rise and progress of the university system. at first, the universities were mostly annexed to cathedral churches. as they developed, the cloistral influence waned. and again, as they developed still more, they presented phenomena which originated the subsequent system of the jesuits. from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, as many as sixty-six of these universities were in existence; sixteen of them are credited to germany; about as many to france; and the rest to italy, spain, and other nations. it is not within my province to describe their formation, or the order of their foundation. they received their charters from the popes, who used their power thus, and showed it under a form, which no age will be apt to depreciate; least of all, our own. addressing these habitations of "general studies" with the appellative, _universitas vestra_, the sovereign pontiffs sent them on their course, and encouraged them in every line of theology, law, or medicine; whether all these lines were followed in each centre, or respectively some here, some there. orleans, bourges, bologna, modena professed law, either as their specialty, or as their distinguishing faculty; montpellier, salerno, medicine; padua, the liberal arts; toledo, mathematics; salamanca, and, above all, paris, general culture, philosophy, and theology. these universities became such well-springs of learning, that for theology the bishops' seminaries practically ceased to exist; and, to acquire the general culture of the times, the children of the faithful no longer turned to the monastic schools. nay, in quite a contrary sense, the clergy and the monks themselves, in pursuit of the best learning that the age could give, left their cloisters for a while, and betook themselves to the universities. they followed up that step by settling down there. paris beheld the great old orders of augustinians, benedictines, carthusians, the carmelites, the bernardines, all establishing monasteries or colleges; no otherwise than the newest order of trinitarians, which was chiefly made up of university men. two institutes arose, those of the dominicans and franciscans; who with men at their head, like st. thomas aquinas and st. bonaventure, placed themselves right in the heart of these intellectual centres; and they became bulwarks of sound learning, as opposed to the inanities of a false scholasticism. they kept the leaven of religion and virtue in the midst of what was not quite a perverse generation, but was most certainly, from whatever side we view it, a very dubious multitude, belonging, it is true, to a christian generation. consider the , at bologna, which was the centre for law studies; the , at oxford; or the , , all at one time studying, or reckoned to be studying, in paris, the acknowledged centre for theology. an indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery for indiscriminate license. whatever might be the vigilance of the church, or however strenuous the exercise of legitimate authority, nothing in the usual course of human society could prevent its becoming a prolific soil for the propagation of every species of error. and, as during three hundred years the intellectual and educational powers of europe followed this course, the law of evolution asserted itself in many directions. on the one side, those tens of thousands of christian youths, who were aiming at all the posts of influence in church and state, and who, entering their native university, or journeying to foreign ones, began life there at as early an age as twelve or fourteen years, to remain in this environment some nine or twelve years more, became, as was natural, the living, swarming members of a state of society so dissolute, that successive occupants of the papal see depicted the condition of things as one of moral contagion. in the manner of thought and mind which prevailed, no form of theoretic error was wanting. in philosophy, there was scepticism; in theology, heresy; while, in politics, cæsarism and absolutism became rife. then, at the end of the fifteenth century, the renaissance came; and one of the first things, which it expressly and formally did, was to renew in life, art, and politics, the same old paganism, upon the ruins of which, so many centuries before, christianity had begun its upward and laborious ascent. newly fashioning then much of what was old, christianity had augmented all this with so much which was new, that in a thousand years it had made a renaissance possible. and now the form of this renaissance threatened its own ascendancy in morals and in life. on the other hand, the old spirit of conservatism in religion, and of preservation in the matter of morals, maintained itself for a time, through those bodies of religious men and clergymen, who had left the cloister or the seminary, to take up their abode in the secular seats of learning. it was this spirit which originated the latest and best development of the universities, that of the "college" system, established in their midst. salamanca had twenty colleges; louvain, forty; paris, fifty. still, in the final issue, there was now scarcely any reserve force of cloistral or episcopal learning behind the universities, and outside of them. and the religious and the clergy themselves, who at best were not a little out of their element from the moment they migrated into the secular environment, conformed insensibly to the conditions in which they found themselves, and so far ceased to be the power they had been. witness, in the time of ignatius, the paris university, as described by contemporary records. "it was fallen from its ancient splendor. the bonds of discipline had been gradually relaxed; studies were abandoned; and with masters, as with scholars, all love of letters, and respect for the rule, had given place to sombre passions, to political hate, to religious fanaticism and dissolute habits."[ ] here then we have two elements in the educational condition of europe, which explain the rise of the jesuit system. one was the positive, concrete fact, embodied in that great developed system of university learning. the other was a negative element, the decline therein of the essential moral life. these two factors are not mere antecedents in the order of time, as being only prior to the method of loyola. one of them, the university system, supplied the very material out of which his method and matter were taken; yes, and the men themselves, the jesuits who applied the principles of reform to education. the other factor, which i have called negative, that decline of the essential moral life, was the adequate occasion, which prompted ignatius to approach the question of education at all. for we may say with confidence that, if the universities of the sixteenth century were still doing the work which originally they had been chartered to do, the founder of the society of jesus would not only have omitted to draw out his system as a substitute for them, and as an improvement upon them, but he would have done, what he always did with anything good in existence; he would have used what he found, and have turned his attention to other things more urgent. he did use these university centres for his own young men, until he had better educational institutions, and a better method of his own in progress. hence the educational problem, when it falls under the notice of ignatius, presents itself as the identical one of old, that of moral regeneration. but it is a different state of the same question. in circumstances rendered acutely critical by the agitations of the epoch, social, moral, and religious, it was a favorite contemplation of his to look with compassion on men living like the blind, dying, and sinking into eternal depths; on men talking, blaspheming, reviling one another; on their assaulting, wounding, slaying one another; and all together going to eternal perdition.[ ] it was from this moral point of view that he descended into the arena of education. but before he can teach men, or mould teachers of men, or even conceive the first idea of legislating for the intellectual world, he must himself first learn. there are two fundamental lessons which he does learn, and they go to form him. one is that, among all pursuits, the study of virtue is supreme; the other, that, supreme as virtue is, yet, without secular learning, the highest virtue goes unarmed, and at best is profitable to oneself alone. he learns these two lessons, not only in theory, but in practice. to accomplish the purpose of the latter, he takes his seat upon the scholars' bench, and begins to learn with little children. though he may not meet with brilliant success in the art of learning, still in the art of understanding what learning is, and in the lessons of experience, he becomes a finished scholar. he remains even then too much of a chevalier to give up a cherished idea of his about a spiritual crusade in the east. and it is only when thwarted in this project that, like a true knight, he simply turns to another side of the field. he stays in the west. he is still the captain of a company. but he becomes also a legislator among doctors; and, amid his other works, he effects an educational reform. in his whole campaign, we may discern two characteristics in the spirit of his movements. one is that of defence, the other that of advance. his method of defence showed itself in the reassertion of old principles, in the conservatism of morals,--a plan of campaign, which determines the whole frame of mind, and the social construction of the company. it rests on the principle of upholding what is, and not moving the ancient landmarks. on the other hand, his advance is towards the solution of the highest questions which can interest mankind. these formed part of the very object and direction of the order's march. and so it came to pass, that his company drew to itself that class of minds which are most powerfully arrested by the prospect of solving such questions, especially when times are agitated. his times were agitated, if any ever were, more so than our own, when the same questions still must dominate. his were times of wars with turks in the east, and with christians at home; of battles lost and won, with their effects reaching into every household; of royal and imperial administrations confused and overthrown; of new opinions without number; of the church losing ground along the whole line of the frontier, and withal new worlds looming over an horizon, where from the beginning of time the unknown had brooded in absolute darkness. at such a moment, "defence and advance," or as the papal authority expressed it in the solemn instrument which chartered his institute, _defensio ac propagatio fidei_, were stirring watchwords to men of parts, who felt restive under the inactivity and inefficiency of older methods, on older lines. i will not pause to say, that the personal poverty and exact obedience, required in the new service, presented no obstacles to the minds and characters which were otherwise attracted to his standard. the antecedents of all antiquity seem to show that such conditions, to such minds, are rather an inducement than a check. and if one takes notice that to this was added, in the order of jesus, an absolute equality, whereby every formed member binds himself to accept no dignity within or without, or, at least, to affect no dignity at home or abroad, which will prejudice his full franchise as a member, then, perhaps, the attractiveness of such a life, the conservatism and intense concentration of the order, as well as the alacrity and endurance manifested in the service, will not appear inexplicable to the minds of this age, in which, under a very different form, the same equality is called liberty, is made to construct republics, to bring down monarchies, and develop some of the most potent agencies for unfolding the energies of men. yet the liberty of this latter equality reflects but faintly, and as from a broken surface, the freedom of him, who having liberated himself from the shackles of the world, and from all solicitude as to his movements, office, and place, finds in turn, as the german historian expresses it, "his own personal development imposed upon him";[ ] and, in the firm companionship of one aim, formation, and life, enjoys the manifold support and ready sympathy of individualities as developed as his own. i shall narrate, in the first part, the facts of ignatius' career, so far as to indicate the stages of that magisterial art, by which he himself was formed, and which then he reformed in the jesuit _ratio studiorum_. in the second part, i shall sketch briefly the history of the _ratio_ itself, and analyze the system as a theory and practice of education. chapter ii. knight, pilgrim, and scholar. the story of the cavalier wounded on the ramparts of pampeluna has often been told. loyola was not at the moment governor of the city, nor in any responsible charge. but official responsibility was not necessary for him to see the path of duty and follow it. as one bound to the service of his sovereign by the title of honor and nobility, he retired to the citadel, when the town surrendered; and then, when the ramparts began to give way under the cannonading, he stood in the breach. a ball shattering the rock laid him low, maimed in both his limbs. at once the defence collapsed. cared for chivalrously by those whose arms had struck him down in battle, he was transported with every delicate attention to his castle of loyola. it was found that one of his limbs had been ill set. he had it broken again, to be set aright. meanwhile, instinct with all the ambition of a knight, belonging to a chivalrous nation in an age of chivalry, he was not insensible to the charms of society and affection. and, out of a sensitive care for his personal appearance, he must needs have a protruding bone, which still threatened to mar his figure, sawed off while he looked on. in the loneliness and tedium of a sick-room, he whiled away the hours by dreaming of his ambitions and his aspirations, and he sought to feed them with suitable nourishment. he wanted a romance to read. there was none to be had. so, instead of the novel which was not forthcoming, he took what they gave him, the life of christ, and the lives of some who had served christ faithfully. the soldier of the field and of blood felt the objects of his ambition change; he became a soldier of the spirit and eternal life. and, after the experiences of his bed of pain, and the protracted communings with another world, he arose another man; he went forth a knight as ever, but not on an expedition terminating as before. an evening and night spent in the sanctuary of montserrat, as once before he had passed a vigil of arms, when dubbed a chevalier by the king of navarre; a morning begun with the holy sacrifice attended and holy communion received, opened to him a new era; and he went forth, bound now by a new oath of fealty to the service of the king of heaven. at the side of the altar in this sanctuary of montserrat, the abbot of the monastery, eighty-one years later, committed to a marble tablet the record of this event, for the perpetual memory of the future: "blessed ignatius of loyola here, with many prayers and tears, devoted himself to god and the virgin. here, as with spiritual arms, he fortified himself in sack-cloth, and spent the vigil of the night. hence he went forth to found the society of jesus, in the year mdxxii." he first looked about him to find a retreat, and immerse himself in the contemplation of time and eternity. it was a saturday. john sacrista pascual tells us that his mother, a devout lady of manresa, was in the church that morning; and, accompanied by two young men and three women, she was at her devotions in the chapel of the apostles. a young stranger came up and accosted them. his clothing was of very common serge; for ignatius had given away his knightly robes to a poor man. the youth looked like a pilgrim. he was not tall; he was fair in complexion and ruddy in cheek. his bare head was somewhat bald. altogether he was of a fine and grave presence, and most reserved in look. he scarcely raised his eyes from the ground. coming up, he asked if there were a hospital anywhere which might serve him for shelter. regarding his noble and fair features, the lady, as became a christian woman, offered her services; if he would follow her company, she would provide for him, in the best way possible. courteously and thankfully he accepted her offer, and followed the party as they left the sanctuary. they proceeded slowly; for they noticed that he was lame. however much they urged him, they could not induce him to ride upon the ass. three leagues away from montserrat, they arrived at the little town of manresa; and he took up his residence in the common hospital for the poor and pilgrims. whatever alms or food was henceforth sent him first went to others, whom, in these matters, up to the end of his life, he always considered to be more in need than himself. he now entered on his probation of christian virtue. in the mind of the catholic church, the degree of virtue which he practised is that accounted heroic. as it is not for me to dwell on it here, i will pass it over with one remark. that which is accounted ordinary christian virtue, resting as it does on faith and hope, on principles not barely natural but supernatural, is not very intelligible to the world at large. still less the heroic degree of the same. both however claim to be estimated by their own proper motives and principles. when they enter into the very subject, which the biographer means to treat, it appertains to his art not to ignore the objective motives and reasons of things, as they operated in his subject. in the shortest monograph, like the present, we cannot separate from the work, which he did, the man who did it. and the man is made by his motives. it were bad literary art to describe feats, which are confessedly great, and not to find motives which are proportionate. ignatius, after a year more or less spent at manresa, took his pilgrim's staff and journeyed on foot to italy, and thence to the holy land. it was in the spirit of the old crusaders, whose chivalry had a charm for him up to the day many years later, when, with his first associates of the company, he endeavored once more to cross over from italy to palestine. had he succeeded on this later occasion, he would most probably never have known the others who attached themselves to him; nor might history have busied itself with him or with them. at the date of his return from the holy land, we find that he has advanced already to the second lesson in the development of his future. it is, that mature in years as he is, and full of desires for doing good to his neighbors, yet neither does mere piety place in his hands the instruments for such work; nor, if study alone can give the means of apostolic zeal, can he consider himself exempt from the law, that he must labor to acquire what are only the results of labor. he was thirty-one years of age, when he betook himself, after his night's vigil, to the cave of manresa. he is two years older now. so, at the age of thirty-three, he sits down on the school-bench at barcelona, and begins his latin declensions. begrudging his studies the time which they demand exclusively, he mistakes the situation, and allows himself the exercises of an apostolic life. at his age, even supposing his earlier pursuits to have been more in harmony with his present life of letters, he is not an apt pupil. however, he labors conscientiously. after two years spent at grammar, he is judged by his teacher, who takes a lenient view of the case, to be competent for approaching his higher studies. he himself was dubious. his friends recommended him to ascend. he still hesitated. but, receiving the same favorable opinion from a theologian whom he consulted, ignatius acquiesced, in accordance with his unvarying rule, to follow competent direction. how unfortunate this step was for the happy progress of his studies, but how advantageous for his experience as a future legislator, i shall proceed to show. leaving barcelona for alcalà, he meant to enjoy the best advantages which a great university could afford. he lived on alms as ever; and others lived on the alms which he received. it was the year . he entered upon the study of logic, using the summa of di soto; also the physics of aristotle; and he pursued besides the master of sentences. he had stayed only a year and a half in this rich variety of pursuits, scholastic as well as apostolic, when the novelties apparent in his manner of life ended by making him a suspected character to the ecclesiastical authorities. to a few, among the population of the city, his fruitful zeal made him distinctly odious. the result was a juridical process against him, which issued in a complimentary verdict, the vicar of the diocese pronouncing him and his companions quite blameless. but restrictions were imposed regarding his future ministrations, since ignatius was not yet in holy orders. during a term of four years he was not to preach. after that time, his progress in studies would enable him to honor that important ministry, without giving offence. this was a deathblow to the aspirations of the student. he made up his mind to go elsewhere, to the famous university of salamanca; and he turned his back on alcalà. the time was soon to come for a pleasant revenge; and apparently he knew of it long before it came. just six years after the foundation of his order, when he sent francis villanova to open a house at alcalà, not only did he find men of the university embracing his institute, but, two years after that, the whilom persecuted pilgrim received, in a single twelvemonth, thirty-four doctors into the society, all from that one seat of learning. the mere passing by of francis borgia, duke of gandia, who had become an humble follower of ignatius, made the choicest spirits flock to his standard; and, all over spain, colleges sprang up as if from the soil. in salamanca, where likewise he and his were to figure in the future, the personal history of ignatius is briefly told. in ten or twelve days after his arrival, he was thrown into chains. he spent twenty-two days in prison. when released, with the same commendation for himself and his doctrine as he had received at alcalà, but with a similar restriction on his action, he thought it was not worth his while to repeat the same experiences at the same cost. so, in spite of all the eloquence of dissuasion brought to bear on him by friends, he took a new departure, which seemed plausible to him, and therefore feasible. he would try his fortunes in another land, and continue his studies in the greatest philosophical and theological centre of the world, the university of paris. to any one who judged of things by an ordinary standard, the project was not feasible. war was raging between spain and france; the roads were infested with hostile soldiery; many murders and robberies, committed on the persons of travellers, were recently reported. but these and other considerations of the kind had no weight with loyola, to stay him in a course once deliberately adopted. accepting some alms from friends at barcelona, to obtain on the way the necessaries of life, he accomplished on foot the whole journey from barcelona to the french capital; where he arrived at the beginning of february, a.d. . he has now had experience of prisons and chains, on the charge of teaching error, or of being a dangerous enthusiast. one of the calmest and coolest of men, who never acted, but he first calculated, and who never allowed himself to approach a conclusion, without first freeing himself from all bias and impulse, he had suffered repeated arrest for setting people beside themselves, for moving them to give up all they had in behalf of piety, or charity, and inducing them to go and live on alms themselves; nay, perhaps throw in their lives, talents and acquirements, to serve others gratis. the founder of the jesuits, himself the first of an order which has the reputation of being the staunchest upholder, as well of authority in every rank of society, as of the truths taught by the catholic church, was put in chains, or arraigned by the ecclesiastical authorities almost wherever he appeared, though always acquitted as blameless. in a letter written at a subsequent period of his life to king john iii of portugal, ignatius sums up his experiences, as including two imprisonments, at alcalà and salamanca; three judicial investigations, at alcalà, salamanca, and paris; later on, another process at paris; then one at venice; finally another at rome;--eight investigations about this one man in spain, france, and italy.[ ] wherever he came, in after life, it passed as a proverb among the fathers, that his appearance was the sure harbinger of a storm, soon to break out against them somewhere, in the social or religious world. he braved all this fury in his own manner, weighing as deliberately every word he spoke, and measuring every step he took, as when he had stood in the breach of the ramparts at pampeluna. but his personal experience made him commit to the sacred keeping of the "spiritual exercises" an important principle of liberal and humane prudence. it is couched in the first words of his little book, to guide teacher and learner alike. he says:-- "in the first place, it is to be supposed that every pious christian man should be more ready to interpret any obscure proposition of another in a good rather than a bad sense. if, however, he cannot defend the proposition in any way, let him inquire of the speaker himself; and, if then the speaker is found to be mistaken in sentiment or understanding, let him correct the same kindly. if this is not enough, let him employ all available means to render him sound in principle and secure from error." how far the personal experiences of its founder attached by a law of heritage to his order, i can hardly undertake to describe. but, just for the sake of completing the family picture, i will mention the heads of a doleful list, which an historian of the society catalogues. he enumerates, as objects of attack and misrepresentation, the founder himself, the name of the society of jesus, the dress, rules, manners, books, doctrine, schools, sermons; the poverty, obedience, gratuitous service of the jesuits; that they affected a kind of literary empire, under the spur of an intolerable ambition; that they were lightly tinctured, and had just sipped of many things, of which they had nothing solid to offer; yes, that they wanted to have it believed there was no sanctuary of the muses, no shrine of sacred or human wisdom in existence, outside of their own colleges; that, from these offices of theirs, all arts and sciences came forth, done up in the best style. "in fine, whatever they do or don't do, granted that there are many false charges which their enemies concoct against them,--things too extreme to be believed,--granted that they are acquitted of many vices laid to their account, never certainly will they escape the suspicion, at least, which these charges excite."[ ] we believe it. there is a good homely english proverb which expresses the very same idea--about the happy adhesiveness of a clayey compound when cleverly thrown. this retrospect of history was taken, exactly one hundred years after the foundation of the order. the story had begun some thirteen years before it was founded. when ignatius became a responsible leader with associates, he had recourse more than once to the process of justice, to clear his reputation in full form. but, beyond the cases which rendered such defence prudent and necessary, his practical policy was expressed in a practical maxim, which after him his successor, james laynez, had often in his mouth: _deus faxit ne unquam male loquantur et vera dicant!_ "god grant they never talk ill of me and be saying the truth!" indeed, as there is no use in trying to change men, for they will never be born anew, ignatius looked rather in another direction for the solution of difficulties; expecting that troubles, which defied other treatment, might still not survive their authors. speaking of a powerful adversary, who was raising a great storm at toledo and alcalà, and whom it took the royal council and then a brief from the pope to quell, ignatius said of him to ribadeneira: "he is old, the society is young; naturally the society will live longer than he will." the same dignitary, suppressed though he was, rose again in violent opposition. whereupon jouvancy makes the apt remark: "so difficult is it for even the most eminent men, and so rare a thing, when once they have conceived a notion, to get it out of their heads again!"[ ] no, men are not born anew. it is time now to contemplate ignatius of loyola at paris, where some of the most precious elements in his educational experience are to be acquired. chapter iii. the university of paris. rome. voluntary poverty, the austerest manner of life, the ungrateful labor of studies, and the perpetual self-discipline of a mind like his, ever bent on lofty thoughts and endeavoring to dominate the very first movements of his soul, all these conditions, added to the climate and the nature of the situation in which ignatius found himself at paris, brought such a strain to bear on his broken-down constitution, that, to keep up his course at all, he had to interrupt it awhile, and give some relief to his overtaxed body, or, as he held it to be, his "beast of burden." and what about the studies themselves? if they had been a brilliant success thus far, they could scarcely have outlived such conditions of existence. as it was, they were as good as if they had never begun; or somewhat worse. he had gone about them the wrong way. whatever solidity of learning he had kept objectively in view, something else, equally important with solidity, had been unwittingly omitted. that was a good method. logic, philosophy, and theology, all taken up together, and with such compendious haste, now went together in his mind like a machine out of joint; and his speed was _nil_! the latin language itself, the indispensable vehicle of all learning, was just so far possessed by him as to show him that, to be of any real use, it had better be commenced all over again. here his character asserted itself. and in no particular of his life is he more like himself, more thorough, more of a brave cavalier, "governing himself, in great things and small, by reasons most high," than when, having little facility for such pursuits, and less inclination, he makes up his mind, after a short breathing spell, to sit down again at the age of thirty-seven years, and resume his latin declensions! in the college of montague, he spends about two years acquiring this tongue. meanwhile, he tries various plans to find wherewithal to live. i need not dwell on the nature of this great centre into which ignatius had penetrated, an unknown stranger, just one of its tens of thousands of scholars. it had more than two scores of colleges. to this, the queen of universities, though she was going to be no kind alma mater to him and his order, still the recollections of loyola in his future legislation would always turn back with reverence. his first professors for the roman college, the typical institution of the society, would be taken from those of his men who were doctors of this university. and, whatever might be the moral condition and the religious lassitude of the university men, as compared with this penniless stranger, in , occasions were to come in after times, when they showed themselves not unworthy of the enemy whom they fought to the death. when the plague of made a desert about them, the university men and the jesuits, otherwise never seen together, save in the lists and face to face, now were everywhere, and fell fast, side by side on the field of christian charity. for the understanding of the jesuit system, in its origin and its form, attention must always be paid, in the first place, to the kinship subsisting between it and the paris university. there are, besides, many other degrees of relationship, which do not go unacknowledged, in the formation of the _ratio studiorum_. the system of the english universities may be recognized in the line of ancestry. whatever was best anywhere enters the pedigree; as lord bacon takes note, when delivering himself like a good philosopher, but also like a good protestant, he eulogizes and stigmatizes in the same breath: "the ancient wisdom of the best times," he says, "did always make a just complaint, that states were too busy with their laws, and too negligent in point of education; which excellent part of the ancient discipline hath been in some sort revived, of late times, by the colleges of the jesuits; of whom, although in regard of their superstition i may say, '_quo meliores, eo deteriores_'; yet in regard of this, and some other points concerning human learning and moral matters, i may say, as agesilaus said to his enemy pharnabaus, '_talis quum sis, utinam noster esses_.'"[ ] in the university of paris, then, as his real alma mater, ignatius commenced his course of philosophy in the year . he finished it by standing successfully the severe examination, called _examen lapideum_, "the rocky test," considered the most searching of all in the paris academy. he thus became a master of arts, after easter, a.d. ; having become licentiate in the previous year. particulars about his four examiners in the "rocky test," his graduation, the degrees of his companions, with the dates, as found in the paris records, are given by the bollandists.[ ] he now entered on his theological studies. it was evident that the obstructions, which had thwarted so many of his efforts heretofore, were disappearing one by one. and more than that; the means were being placed in his hands for the great work before him. these means were a company of men. he was in the midst of a devoted little band, each one of whom he had won individually. they were peter lefèvre and francis xavier; james lainez and alphonsus salmeron, both of them mere youths; there were claude le jay, john coduri, nicholas bobadilla, simon rodriguez; and lastly, the only one who at this time was a priest among their number, pasquier brouet. among these, never at their head though considered a father by all, never leading the way, though on that account showing himself the more effectively a leader, ignatius was all in all to each one of them. he had previously acquired some valuable experience in selecting and forming companions. but such as had gathered round him in spain were no longer with him. each one of his present party was a picked man. when six of them were sufficiently advanced, he and they held a solemnity, which was the real birthday of the society of jesus. on the fifteenth day of august, , they took a vow, in the church of the blessed virgin, at montmartre in paris. they bound themselves to renounce all their goods by a given date, and betake themselves to the holy land; failing in that, they would throw themselves at the feet of the sovereign pontiff, and offer him their absolute service. meanwhile they pursued their studies; and, as each of the two following years brought round the fifteenth day of august, it found them in the same place, and with the same solemnity, and with an enlarged number, renewing this vow. the legal birthday of the order came only with the papal charter on september , . i shall pass over the movements of loyola, when bidden to go and recuperate in his native climate. he returned to spain, in , leaving his companions to study till ; and he settled the affairs of his young spanish associates at their homes. all, when the time came, disposed of their goods in a summary way. they gave to the poor, reserving nothing, except what would pay their way to venice, and thence to the east. their principle was, _dispersit, dedit pauperibus_, "he hath distributed, he hath given to the poor." besides this, xavier, at the date appointed, gave up the last stage of his theological studies, and resigned the glory of receiving the doctor's cap in paris; the brilliant young professor sacrificed the one thing which had appealed most powerfully to his ambition and imagination. laynez was recuperating from a severe illness, and could do scarcely more than move. nevertheless they are all in venice, when the early spring of arrives. ignatius himself, meeting them there, has accomplished the work which faced him thirteen years before, and which he had taken in hand with his latin grammar. he is now forty-six years of age. there are three lines of activity, in which the ability and energy of ignatius loyola stand out before the world. one is the capacity he showed as a governor or leader of men; another is a similar competency to direct souls in the spiritual life; the third is that, which we are considering at present, his legislative genius in the intellectual order. admitting the innate talent which must have been the basis and foundation of his gift for governing, we may affirm of all the rest, that the best part of his sagacity and tact had been acquired by personal experience. he learnt how to act by suffering. he perfected his natural gift of guiding and commanding by first submitting to all the contingencies of human life. we may develop the meaning of this in the present matter, pedagogy; and the meaning of it will help to unfold the subject. in quest of the necessaries of life, he spent intervals of his studious career in travelling from paris to a great distance. he found himself returning each year to belgium, always on foot: he visited rouen, and even reached london, to address the spanish merchants there. it does not seem to have been parsimony on their side that kept him in such straitened circumstances. it was his principles which were not all in keeping with his conditions of life. he was endeavoring to combine the life of a student with absolute poverty; and he aggravated the inconveniences of such a state of dependence by placing no limits to the exercise of his charity. it was his deliberate choice; for he fed his mind continuously upon the life and example of the king, to whom he had sworn his service, christ poor and in labor from his youth. he spoke afterwards from the wisdom of experience, when he said, that in absolute penury the pursuit of science cannot easily subsist, and the culture of the mind is impeded by the duties of providing for the body. hence he legislated that, though poverty was to be the basis of his institute, still the members, as long as they were engaged in studies, should be set free from all care of seeking the means of subsistence. he had endeavored to combine a life of apostolic ministrations, though not yet a priest, with that requisite absorption of mind, which alone can warrant scholastic success. and he saw what it had come to. the very esteem and love, which he entertained for the exercises of the higher spiritual life, interrupted with intrusive thoughts that application to study, which was the duty in hand. in order that no such intrusion of even the most sacred pursuits should obstruct the onward progress of the members in learning, he defined by rule the measure of such occupations, as long as study was the main duty. diseases weakened him. therefore he took the greatest pains to protect the health of the members. while he lived, he did this with a personal and paternal solicitude. in his institute, he provided the same for the future. on commencing his studies, he embraced many branches at the same time; and he had suffered all the consequences of disorder. grasping at too many things, he lost all; and he had then to retrieve all with loss of time. to obviate any recurrence of such costly experiences, he provided that the courses followed in the society should have nothing disordered in them, nothing mutilated or curtailed; everything was to be in method and system; until, system and method having been carried out in every line, and the special good of each department having been secured sufficiently for the general plan, specialized perfection should be consulted, after all that; and this was to be the appointed life of individuals, while a rounded and complete education remained the culture of all. once in later years he let fall these words, relative to his early experience: "he would very much question whether another but himself, having to struggle with so many difficulties and obstacles in the course of his studies, would have given so long a time to the acquisition of the sciences."[ ] thus then was he oppressed with poverty, without the satisfaction of acting under orders; suffering so many diseases, and yet looking neither to honor, dignity, nor other human reward, such as is wont to draw men on, and animate them under fatigue; finding no pleasure nor satisfaction in the life of studies, an inducement which is so great an alleviation to mortals in the work before them. and, in all these respects, he was quite unlike the very men whom he singled out, and enlisted in the new service of devotion; unlike francis xavier, who had seen with perfect indifference all his brothers take to their ancestral profession of arms, or to a courtier's life, while he himself, with the whole force of an ambitious soul, ran on successfully and brilliantly in his chosen career, as a professor; unlike laynez and salmeron, whose extraordinary gifts had made them doctors of philosophy and divinity, while still, in age, little more than mere youths; very unlike by nature to the gentle make of lefèvre, who began life as a shepherd boy, and ever retained a pastoral sweetness of character. unlike all of them, loyola, a soldier born and bred, and still true to his profession, discarded every consideration of taste, comfort, and convenience, in view of one objective point to be reached: through thirteen years he struggled towards it; and, when that time of probation was over, he was a marked man. according to the law, that like attracts like, and like begets like, he was surrounded by a company of marked men, few if you count their number, many if you consider the type. his name was widely known, and favorably so. when he had been paying five times over the price of his daily bread, by travelling to belgium, to rouen, and london, and collecting there some spanish florins, the event seemed to show that he had been but opening the door, here and there and everywhere, for his colleges and universities in the future; albeit, if they came, adversaries came too, in proportion. but clouds and storms purify the air. when they come again, they will still leave the air the clearer for their coming. if the laws of human conduct are consistent in one way, they are consistent in another. the disturbance comes, but it does its work and goes. m. cretineau-joly, the popular french historian in our own times, speaking of events at a later juncture in the life of loyola, makes the following observation: "loyola," he says, "could apply to himself admirably well that proverb which says, 'when a spaniard is driving a nail into the wall, and his hammer breaks, the spaniard will drive the nail in with his head!'" loyola would have his idea go through at any cost. we shall now follow him to italy and rome. in the year , rome was not quite the luxurious capital which had fallen under the sword of the constable of bourbon. the eternal city, whose papal sovereigns have left it on record from time immemorial, that in no part of the world were they less recognized as lords than in their own city, had undergone a purification, which differed, not substantially, but only in its consequences, from what was called for, over half the countries of europe. the riches, the luxury, the idleness, which elsewhere resulted in a complete change of religious history for many of the northern nations, had here brought about a catastrophe which sobered minds. and no longer an exclusive absorption in elaborate sloth prevented a large portion of the influential element here from doing honor to the queen of european civilization, by doing good to the world. all roads still led to rome. thence too all roads diverged. it was still true, that whatever commanded this centre could reach out, if only by the force of prestige, to the uttermost limits of the civilized domain. whatever this venerable source of authority chartered to go on its way, in strength and benediction, had reason to behold, in the privilege so bestowed, the auspicious opening of a useful career, intellectual or moral. it is so to-day, though not in a temporal sense. the charter, or confirmation, or bull, which conveys the recognition of the church's head to a project, a cause, or an institute, bestows thereupon a moral power which naturally transcends every franchise in the gift of the most powerful governments. compared with it, they are local. and, standing no comparison with it, under a moral aspect, they do not pretend to such a power as touches the inner conscience of nations. when therefore ignatius turned to the great rome, he was like the skilful commander whom he describes in a certain place; he was possessing himself of the vantage-ground, taking the citadel. it would be more correct to say, as all history avers, that he meant to defend that citadel, the see of rome. he had waited nearly a year at venice, to carry out his project of voyaging to jerusalem. war made that impossible. now, in accordance with the express proviso in their vow, he and his companions repaired to rome, and offered their services to the spiritual head of christendom. to win approbation for a new religious institute was no easy matter; then less than ever. the recent occurrences in the north had been due to this, among other moral causes, that the later history of certain religious orders, which centuries before had begun one way, latterly had taken a novel and fatal turn. still, in spite of criticism and hostility, chiefly in the high places, ignatius received at length the approving word of the pope; and his institute was chartered with a bull of confirmation. henceforth, the evolution of events belongs to general history. what concerns us, in this chartering of the plan and institute of ignatius loyola, is the new character it gave to education, and the epoch it made in the intellectual history of the world. to explain this matter, we may follow briefly the deliberations which the fathers held, and in the course of which, among other conclusions, they came to decide upon reëstablishing education. it was the fourth of may, , a year and a half before their services were finally accepted by the pope. such of the ten members as were then in rome occupied themselves, after the labors of the day, in nightly deliberations, which were protracted during three months. they decreed, among other things, that they should teach boys and uncultured persons the necessary points of christian doctrine, at least once a year, and for a definite time. this decree obviously is not about that secondary and superior education of youth, which is our subject; neither does it concern primary education, of which there is nowhere question in the institute of the jesuits. but, as the constitution subsequently drawn up says, "this work of charity, in the divine service, is more likely to be consigned to oblivion, and to pass into disuse, than other duties more specious in their character, as preaching," etc.[ ] teaching christian doctrine pertains to the duty of those who have the ordinary care of souls. no duty of this kind, as belonging to the ordinary sphere of the church's clergy, would ignatius assume as characteristic of his own institute, except this one. he was, indeed, more than ready to throw in his contribution of personal zeal and charity, for the furtherance of all kinds of benevolence and beneficence. personally, at the cost of untiring activity, he sowed, as genelli well observes, the first seeds of those ameliorations in social life, and of those humane institutions, which are so marked a feature of later ages.[ ] he was an original benefactor of humanity at the turning-point of modern history, which has since become an era of social organized beneficence. urban viii solemnly testifies, that ignatius organized homes for orphans, for catechumens, for unprovided women; that the poor and the sick, that children and the ignorant and prisoners, were all objects of his personal solicitude.[ ] these works of zeal and charity became, in subsequent years, the specific reasons of existence for various other communities, which rose in order and in number. but he did not adopt them as specific in his institute; nor did he assume as characteristic anything within the province of the ordinary parochial clergy, except the teaching of christian doctrine to boys and uncultured persons. the rest he attended to, while not provided for; ready to drop them, when provision should be made for them. but he did assume five works, which were outside of the ordinary lines; and, among them, is the subject of our study, the education of youth.[ ] as the selection of all these specialties for his institute reveal the commander's eye resting on a field, where many issues were being fought out, so, in particular, his selection of education as a specialty betrayed the same masterly thought, in the institutions he projected, in the scope he proposed, and, above all, in the formation of his teachers. there had been, among the fathers deliberating, a difference of opinion, with respect to christian doctrine. bobadilla had dissented from making that work the subject of a special vow; and the others deferred to him. but there was unanimity with regard to every other topic of deliberation, including this one, "the education of youth, having colleges in universities."[ ] as defined by jesuit authors, the education of youth means the gratuitous teaching of letters and science, from almost the first beginnings of grammar up to the culminating science of sacred theology, and that for boys and students of every kind, in schools open to all.[ ] evidently these university men, who were engaged in drawing up the institute, considered that, if the greatest professor's talents are well spent in the exposition of the gravest doctrines in theology, philosophy, and science, neither he, nor any one else, is too great to be a schoolmaster, a tutor, and a father, to the boy passing from childhood on to the state of manhood,--that boyhood which, as clement of alexandria says, furnishes the very milk of age, and from which the constitution of the man receives its temper and complexion. it is requisite here to observe, that there was no such thing in existence, as state education. two reasons may briefly be mentioned for this, one of them intrinsic to the question, the other an historical fact. the intrinsic and essential reason was the sacred character of education, as being an original function, belonging to the primary relations of parents and child. states, or organized commonwealths, come only in the third or fourth degree of human society. it was much later, in that short interval between the extinction of the society of jesus and the outburst of the french revolution, that new theories came to be proclaimed, as la chalotais did openly proclaim them, of a bald and blank deism in social life, and therefore of secularizing education. between deism and secularization the connection was reasonable. for, if the rights of god went by the board, there was no reason why the rights of parents and children should remain. all alike, the persons and "souls of men,"[ ] fell back into the condition in which christianity had found them; they became chattels of the state, mannikins of a bureau in peace, "food for powder" in war. the other reason was an historical fact. for all the purposes of charity, mercy, and philanthropy, there were powers in existence, as part of the normal religious life of general christian society. they were the same powers that had made christendom, and had carried it on so far as the christian world, the same to which we owe the civilization of to-day. more than that. as there is not a single work of charity or mercy, say st. thomas aquinas, which may not be made the object of an institution, religious men or women devoting their lives as a service to god, in a special service towards their neighbors; so, in point of fact, there were very few such objects which had not originated some service of religious self-consecration in their behalf. now, as operating on education in particular, the powers in the world were, as they had been, almost entirely clerical or religious. in the universities, there were clergymen and religious. all the great institutions had the religious cast about them. the old ones have it still. traces of it hang about oxford and cambridge. the church founded them and supervised them. kings protected them. and the highest outcome of their schools was divinity in its widest sense; that is to say, the triple knowledge of god, and of man as signed with the light of god's countenance, and of nature as bearing the impress of god's footstep. as it was in the universities, so, outside too, all pedagogic influence had rested with religious men. but no one of all these religious powers was bound by its constitution to this labor of education, which loyola now, formally and expressly, assumed as part of his work. it is at this stage of history, that education enters into the fundamental plan of a religious order. this is a fact, and an epoch, of prime importance in pedagogics. for, inasmuch as education entered thus into the plan of a religious order, it became the vocation of a moral body, which, while incorporated like other bodies, did not confine itself, like single universities, to limited circumstances of place; it was a body diffusive. and so with regard to conditions of time; though all corporations give an assurance of perpetuity, a diffusive body like this does more; it multiplies the assurance, in proportion to its own diffusiveness. and again, inasmuch as the body which undertook the work of education was a religious one, bound to poverty, it guaranteed that the members would endow the work, at their own cost, with that which is the first, the essential, and most expensive endowment, among all others,--the labors, the attainments, and the lives of competent men, all gratuitously given. this endowment, which is so substantial, is besides so far-reaching, that no other temporal foundation would be needed, were it not that the necessaries of life, and the apparatus for their work, are still necessary to living men, even though they live in personal poverty. thus then it was that ignatius took in charge the secondary and superior education of the christian world, as far as his services should be called for: he threw into the work the endowment of a religious order. this, as the sequel proved, meant the whole revival of learning. lord bacon bears witness to it in a few words, when he says, that the jesuits "partly in themselves, and partly by the emulation and provocation of their example, have much quickened and strengthened the state of learning."[ ] father daniel gives some of the details in a summary way. he says: "the exclusively university régime of the late centuries replaced, for a notable portion of students, by a scholastic discipline much more complete; scholastic philosophy and theology renovated, through the care applied to prevent young men from throwing themselves too early into the disputes of the schools; in fine, literature and grammar resuming the place they had lost in the twelfth century, and, over and above that, enjoying the new resources created for their use by the renaissance; all this i call a capital fact in the history of the human mind, and even in the history of the church."[ ] after the time of ignatius, other religious congregations, fortified with their own special means for respective departments of activity, entered upon the same general field of work. they were the oratorians, the barnabites, the fathers of the pious schools, the brothers of the christian schools, and others whose names may occur in the course of this essay. and, for the education of women, inferior and superior alike, congregations of devoted religious women came into being, and opened their convents to supply the best and highest culture. for fear that, in the execution of this plan, and in their other enterprises of devotion and zeal, any secondary intentions or results, with regard to power and office, might mar the purity of the work and defeat the main object, the same men, whose future under the generalship of such a leader was about to open as one of transcendent influence in the civilized world, bound themselves by vow never to accept any dignity or office in the church. naturally they should keep aloof from affairs of state. in fact, it would be incompatible with their own purposes of literary and scientific competence, to leave themselves at the mercy of other men's views, and be drafted into posts outside of the institute, and be placed in an impossible situation for working out the specific end intended. it would be suicidal too. just when a man was capable of continuing his kind, he would be lost to the body, and be rendered incapable thereby of propagating his own type of eminence. besides, without touching upon the inner reasons of the spiritual life, which made this resignation of all honors desirable, it is a fact standing out in clear relief, as history sketches the marvellous fecundity of an order requiring such a high level of attainments, that many of the choicest souls have felt specially attracted to a kind of life, which at one and the same time satisfied their ideas of christian perfection, and cut them off from all the paths of worldly glory. and now, to mention in the last place another point, which is equally important for understanding the educational history of the order, and to the general mind is equally obscure with some of those mentioned already, there was introduced the principle of religious obedience. it was sanctioned by a unanimous vote.[ ] the fathers had concluded the first deliberation, whether they should form a society at all; and they had decided in the affirmative sense.[ ] then the question took this phase. if they were to found a closely-knitted society, they could do so only by assuming a strict bond. that was none other than a strict obedience. on this head, as on all others that came in order, they began the deliberation by reasoning, one day, in an adverse sense, all having prepared their minds to emphasize every objection which they could find against it. the day following, they argued in a positive sense. the motives in favor of strict obedience won their unanimous assent. they were such as these:-- if this congregation undertook the charge of affairs, and the members were not under orders, no one could be held responsible for an exact administration of the charge. if the body were not bound together by obedience, it could not long persevere; yet this was their first intention, to remain associated in a permanent body. whence they concluded that scattered as they would be, and already had been, in assiduous and diverse labors, they must be united by a strict principle of subordination, if they were to remain such a body. another argued thus: obedience begets heroism of virtue; since the truly obedient man is most prompt to execute whatever duty is assigned him by one, whom, as by a religious act, he regards as being in the place of god, and signifying to him god's will: wherefore obedience and heroism go together. this reasoning seems to be enforced by the history of all great nations, in the crises of their military and other public affairs. but, as is clear, the principles of religious obedience are of a different order; they are on a higher plane; and they reach much farther in time and eternity, than those of obedience elsewhere. here then we discern, sufficiently for present purposes, the meaning and historical location of this institute. the members have cut themselves off from the possession of all private property, by the voluntary engagement to poverty, and thereby they have prepared the endowment, on which education will chiefly rest,--that is to say, the endowment consisting of the men to teach, and their services tendered gratis. position and dignity are alike rendered inaccessible by an express vow of the members professed. obedience keeps the organization mobile as a company of trained soldiers. and, if any observant mind, well acquainted with the course of human affairs, detects in these principles some reasons for success, normal, habitual, and regular, in the face of unnumbered obstacles, and of unremitting hostility, his view will be singularly corroborated when he rises to a plane higher, and regards the same principles as "religious," carrying with them the sanction of divine worship; which i should be loath to call "enthusiasm," much less "fanaticism." these sentiments are never very prudent, nor enlightened, nor cool; they are either very natural or are short-lived. a mild fever of fanaticism can scarcely produce high results; and a high fever of the same can scarcely last three hundred and fifty years, with perpetuity still threatening. but i would call this phenomenon, in its origin, religious devotion; in its consequences, a supernatural efficiency; and, taking it all in all, that which is called a grace of vocation. on the th day of september, , the society of jesus received from the see of rome its bull of confirmation, by which it became a chartered body of the church. while these pages were being penned, the th day of september came by, . it was the anniversary of that foundation, three hundred and fifty years ago. chapter iv. colleges as proposed in the jesuit constitution. the written rule about the system of education is found in a double stage of development. the first is that in which loyola left it: it gives us the outline. the second is that in which aquaviva completed it: this presents us with the finished picture. likewise in the historical course of administration out in the world, the development is twofold. it runs its first course from loyola to aquaviva, while experience was still tentative. its second course was subsequent to aquaviva, when experience, having gathered in its results, had only to apply the approved form. this was subject thenceforth to none but incidental changes, as times and places change. and, for these contingencies, the application remained expressly and always pliable. hence, whatever was embodied in the _ratio studiorum_, as completed, had been the result of the most varied experience before legislating, an experience in the life of the order extending over fifty-nine years. whatever this universal experience had not yielded as a positive result, or as applicable to all places, was not embodied. teachers are different; national customs vary; vernacular tongues are not the same. with regard to these mutable elements, the maxim of the order in studies, in teaching, in conducting colleges, was the same as that which it proposed to itself in the various other functions of practical life. an exponent of the institute states the maxim thus: "one should have a most exact knowledge of the country, nation, city, manner of government, manners of the people, states of life, inclinations, etc.; and this from histories, from intercourse, etc."[ ] general indications alone are given with regard to these variable factors. the same is done with respect to new sciences, which from the time of the renaissance were felt to be approaching and developing. subsequent legislation arises to meet them as they come. while the fathers were carrying on the same deliberations to which i referred in the preceding chapter, a resolution was taken to leave the drafting of a constitution in the hands of those who should remain in italy. circumscribing the task still more, they decided to appoint a committee of two, who should address themselves to this work, and report to the rest. the general assembly when convened would issue the final decree. whatever that should be, such of those present as might then be absent hereby endorsed it beforehand. their small number of ten was already reduced to six members present, the other four being scattered in divers countries. they designated as a commission fathers ignatius and john coduri. soon afterwards coduri died, and the rest were distributed through the countries of europe, africa, and the far east. during the following years, laynez, who was for some time provincial of italy, remained more regularly than the rest within the reach of ignatius. for this reason, therefore, besides several others, we may understand why ignatius paid such a high tribute to this eminent man, when he said, as ribadeneira tells us, that "to no one of the first fathers did the society owe more than to laynez." whereupon the historian sacchini observes: "this, i believe, he said of laynez, not only on account of the other eminent merits of so great a man, and, in particular, for devising or arranging the system of colleges; but most especially because the foundations, on which this order largely rests, were new, and therefore likely to excite astonishment; and laynez, having at command the resources of a vast erudition, was the person to confirm and commend them to public opinion. and that this praise was deserved by laynez will appear less dubious to any one who considers that other period also, during which he was himself general; if one reckons how many points, as yet unshaped and inceptive, in the management of the society, were reduced to form and perfected by laynez; how widely it was propagated and defended by him."[ ] but to return to ignatius. after ten years of government, he gathered together in rome such of the first fathers as could be had, besides representatives from all the provinces. forty-seven members were present. he submitted to them, in general assembly, the constitution as now drawn up, and as acted upon in practical life, during those ten years. the jesuits present did not exhaust the number of those whose express opinions were desired. that not a single one of the principal fathers might be omitted in the deliberation, he sent copies of the proposed code of laws to such as were absent. with the suggestions and approbations received from all these representative men he was not yet content. two more years had elapsed when, having embodied the practical results of an ever-widening experience, he undertook to promulgate the constitution, by virtue of the authority vested in him for that purpose. but he only promulgated the rule; he did not yet exercise his authority to the full, and impose it as binding. he desired that daily use might bring out still farther, how it felt under the test of being tried, amid so many races and nations. thus came and went; and he waited, until the whole matter should be revised and approved once more by the entire society in conclave. his death intervened in . two years later, representatives from the twelve provinces of the order met together, and elected james laynez as successor to father ignatius. examining once more this constitution in all its parts, receiving the whole of it just as it stood with absolute unanimity, and with a degree of veneration, they exercised the supreme authority of the order, and confirmed this as the written constitution of the society of jesus. by this act nothing was wanting to it, even from the side of papal authority. yet, that every plenitude of solemnity might be added to it, they presented it to the sovereign pontiff, paul iv, who committed the code to four cardinals for accurate revision. the commission returned it, without having altered a word, from that time, whatever general legislation has been added, has entered into the _corpus juris_, or "institute" at large, as supplementing or explaining the "constitution," which remains the fundamental instrument of the institute. in the constitution there are ten parts. the fourth is on studies. in length, this fourth part alone fills up some twenty-eight out of one hundred and eleven quarto pages in all, as it stands printed in the latest roman edition. the legislation about studies is thus seen to be one-fourth of the whole. it has seventeen chapters. in one of them, on the method and order to be observed in treating the sciences, the founder observes that a number of points "will be treated of separately, in some document approved by the general superior." this is the express warrant, contained in the constitution, for the future _ratio studiorum_, or system of studies in the society of jesus. in the meantime, he legislates in a more general way. and he begins with a subject pre-eminently dear to him, the duty of gratitude. since corporations are notoriously forgetful, and therefore ungrateful, he lays down in the first place the permanent duty of the order towards benefactors: then he continues with other topics. they stand thus:-- the founders of colleges; and benefactors. the temporalities of colleges. the students or scholastics, belonging to the society. the care to be taken of them, during the time of their studies. the learning they are to acquire. the assistance to be rendered them in various ways, to ensure their success in studies. the schools attached to the colleges of the society, i.e. for external students not belonging to the order. the advancement of scholastics, belonging to the order, in the various arts which can make them useful to their neighbor. the withdrawal of them from studies. the government of colleges. on admitting the control of universities into the society. the sciences to be taught in universities of the society. the method and order to be observed in treating the foregoing sciences. the books to be selected as standards. courses and degrees. what concerns good morals. the officials and assistants in universities. reserving the pedagogic explanation for the next part of this essay, i shall here sketch some of the more general ideas running through the whole legislation of ignatius of loyola; and, first, in the present chapter, i shall begin with his idea of colleges. choosing personal poverty as the basis on which to rest this vast enterprise of education, he did not therefore mean to carry on expensive works of zeal, without the means of meeting the expense. obviously, it is one thing not to have means, as a personal property, and therefore not to consume them on self; it is quite another, to have them and to use them for the good of others. the most self-denying men can use funds for the benefit of others; and can do so the better, the more they deny themselves. it was in this sense that, later on in the century, cardinal allen recognized the labors and needs of the english jesuit, robert parsons, who was the superior and companion of edmund campian, the former a leading star of oxford, the latter, also an oxford man, and, as lord burghley called him, "a diamond" of england. since queen elizabeth was not benign enough to lend the jesuits a little building-room on english soil, but preferred to lend them a halter at tyburn, parsons was engaged in founding english houses of higher studies in france and spain, at valladolid, seville, lisbon, eu, and st. omer. cardinal allen sent a contribution to the constructive jesuit, writing, as he did so: "apostolic men should not only despise money; they should also have it." and just in this sense was ignatius himself a philosopher of no utopian school. so we may examine, with profit, the material and temporal conditions required in his institute, for the establishment of public schools and universities. i shall endeavor to put these principles together and in order.[ ] first, there should be a location provided with buildings and revenues, not merely sufficient for the present, but having reference to needful development. secondly, these material conditions include a reference to the maintenance of the faculty. the means must be provided to meet the daily necessities of the actual professors, with adequate assistance of lay brothers belonging to the order; also to support several substitute professors; besides, to carry on the formation of men, who will take the places of the present professors, and so maintain the faculty as perpetual; moreover, to "provide for some more scholastic students of the order, seeing that there are so many occupied in the service and promotion of the common weal." these conditions also include "a church for conducting spiritual ministrations in the service of others."[ ] carrying out this idea, laynez, in , promulgated a rule or "form regarding the acceptance of colleges." he laid down the conditions, on which alone the society would take in charge either a latin school, requiring a foundation for twenty jesuits; or a lyceum, with fifty persons; or a university, with seventy.[ ] twenty-four years later, father aquaviva drew up a more complete and a final "form," distributing colleges into the three classes, the lowest, the medium, and the highest. the lowest must have provision made for professing in the departments of grammar, humanities, rhetoric, languages, and a course of moral theology;--fifty jesuits to be supported. the medium class of colleges consists of those whose founders desire, in addition to all the foregoing departments, a triennial course of philosophy, which begins each year anew; eighty persons to be supported. the highest class is that of the studium generale, or university, in which, besides the above, there are professed scholastic theology, sacred scripture, hebrew; one hundred and twenty persons to be provided for. however, the countries of the indies, as well as the northern countries of europe, were not, for the present, brought under this ordinance.[ ] thirdly, the locality is to be such that, in the ordinary course of events, there should be no prospective likelihood of a deficiency in the concourse of students, and those of the right kind. as, on the side of the jesuit province, its educational forces are kept at least equal to the posts which it has undertaken to fill, so, on the side of the population, the prospect should correspond to this undertaking, and give assurance of filling the courses. hence it was only in larger cities or towns that ignatius contemplated the foundation of colleges; as the distich has it, contrasting the different fields of activity chosen by different orders in the church:-- bernardus valles, montes benedictus amabat, oppida franciscus, magnas ignatius urbes. that is to say, "the monks of clairvaux loved their valleys; the benedictines their mountain-tops; the franciscans the rural towns; ignatius the great cities." this was the more obviously his idea, as we find him reluctantly granting permission for ministerial excursions through a country, if thereby the fathers' influence in a great city be likely to suffer. he writes to father kessel, the rector at cologne, where as yet the society had no college of its own, that "under the circumstances he approves of kessel's making a short excursion through the province, provided he and his companions are not long absent from the city, and do not sacrifice the main thing to what is accessory; but he does not give them permission to fix their abode out of the town, because places of less importance afford fewer occasions of gathering the desired fruit: and, besides, they must not leave so famous a university; their exertions will be more useful for the good of religion, in forming scholars to become priests and officers of the state, than all the pains they may bestow on the small towns and villages."[ ] again, when in he had accepted the donation of a church, buildings, and gardens at tivoli from louis mendosa, he found the place not suited to the convenience of scholars; it was too near rome, and yet too far; subsequently, the institution had to be transferred within the city."[ ] fourthly, in addition to these material and local conditions for the normal conduct of colleges, it is supposed that the external relations of political society are so far favorable, as at least to tolerate freedom of action on the part of this educational institute. such toleration was, as a general rule, not only the least that could be asked for, but the most that was enjoyed. these are the chief conditions, material and temporal, which ignatius requires. they give him a footing to commence his work, and allow the animating principles of his institute to come into play. the animating principles, to which i refer, may be reduced to three brief heads: first, an intellectual and moral scope, clearly defined, as i shall explain in the following chapters. secondly, the distinct intention to promote rather the interests of public and universal order and enlightenment, than a mere local good of any city, country, province. thirdly, a tendency in the intellectual institution itself to become rather a great one than a small one, with more degrees of instruction, more and more eminent professors, a greater number of the right kind of scholars.[ ] as to the forces available for all this, and the proportion of colleges to be manned in perpetuity, the mind of ignatius was most express, and became more fixed from day to day. "cut your cloak according to your cloth," he said to oliver manare, when the latter, on going to establish a college at loretto, asked how he should distribute his men. ignatius preferred to refuse princes and bishops their requests, excusing himself on the score of limited resources, than compromise the reputation of the society, by an ill-advised assent.[ ] and he said, as polanco his secretary tells us, that "if anything ought to make him wish to live a longer time, it was that he might be severe in admitting men into the order."[ ] he did not want to have many members in the society; still less, too many engagements. having stated thus briefly the material conditions required by ignatius, and the animating principles or motives which determined him, we are in a position to discern more distinctly the central object of his attention, that for which the material conditions were provided, that by which the ultimate objects were to be attained. it was the teaching body, the faculty, the "college," properly so called. the "college" was the body of educators who were sent to a place. for them the material conditions did but supply a local habitation, subsistence, books, apparatus. the very first decree quoted by pachtler, from the first general assembly, uses the term "college" in this sense: "no college is to be _sent_ to any place," etc.[ ] it is only by derivation from this meaning that the term is applied to the buildings and appointments. it is the body of men that makes the institution. it is this also which makes the institution perpetual; and therefore must itself be so; and must have the material conditions provided for continuing itself, by means of a constant stream of younger men under formation, who will perpetuate the same work. now it would be an ideal conception of practical life to be looking for virtuous and erudite men, _viri boni simul et eruditi_, as ignatius calls them, ever pouring into the order, straight from the chairs of universities, from benefices, and posts of leisured ease; and, armed already with the full equipment of intellectual and moral endowments, presenting themselves and their services thenceforth, under the title of absolute poverty, to cities, provinces, and countries, which never had anything to do with their formation. "these men," says ignatius, "are found to be few in number, and of these few the majority would prefer to rest, after so many labors already undergone. we apprehend that it will be difficult for this society to grow, on the mere strength of those who are already both good and accomplished, _boni simul ac literati_; and this for two reasons, the great labors which this manner of life imposes, and the great self-abnegation needed. therefore, ... another way has seemed good to adopt, that of admitting young men, who, by their good lives and their talents afford us ground to hope that they will grow up into virtuous and learned men, _in probos simul ac doctos viros_; of admitting also colleges, on those conditions which are expressed in the apostolic briefs, whether these colleges be within universities, or independent: and, if within universities, whether these institutions themselves are committed to the care of the society, or not.... wherefore, we shall first speak of the colleges; then of the universities," etc.[ ] there were never wanting men of the former kind, already accomplished and of tried virtue, who offered themselves for this service of a lifetime. a noteworthy testimony to their numbers may be found in a dispute with philip ii of spain, who objected to any moneys leaving the jesuit provinces of his realm, for the service and maintenance of the great central college in rome; and this, notwithstanding the fact that spanish members were being maintained and formed there. the general assembly, gathered in rome, , discussed the difficulty; and one of the circumstances mentioned was this: "the provinces of spain did not need the assistance of the roman college as much as others; since many entered the society, already mature in age and accomplished in learning, so that they could be employed at once in public positions; nor had they to be taught, but they were able to teach others.... it was finally recommended that, to lessen the burden of expense on the roman college, and in order that fewer scholastics need be called to rome, each province, as soon as convenient, should organize a general university; especially as there was already a sufficiency of students (members of the order) and, besides, of professors."[ ] this was only twenty-six years after the foundation of the society. but, even with all the advantages accruing from these large contingents of learned men already formed, the idea of ignatius, to train young men within the order, was more practical for the formation of faculties; and it carried the general efficiency much further. powerful and effective as the most pronounced personalities may be, when each striking character goes forward into the open field of battle and leads the way, they are not more powerful than when also qualified to move in the steady and regular march of the trained forces. father montmorency, referring to the strength which comes of uniformity, sociability, and harmony, said, _homo unus, homo nullus_, "a man alone is as good as no man at all." ignatius then, having perpetuity and development in view, and therefore the steady and trained development of talented and virtuous young men, would not accept foundations, except on the basis of endowment, just described. he had not learned in vain the lessons of barcelona, alcalà, salamanca, and paris. how wisely he acted is shown by the troubles, which later legislation reveals, upon this very point of inadequately endowed colleges. the questions of ill-endowed colleges, small colleges, too many colleges for the forces of a province, are all excellently discussed and settled in the general assembly, which, in , elected francis borgia to succeed laynez. and "on the same day," says sacchini, "the fathers set the example of observing the decree which they had just made, with the same degree of severity with which they had made it; for, the letters of several bishops and municipalities being read, in which foundations for five colleges were offered, they decided that no one of them should be admitted; and, besides, they gave the new general full authority to dissolve certain colleges already existing."[ ] in a similar vein, this was the theme of an elegant apology delivered before king stephen by father campano, provincial of poland, who requested the king to desist from urging on the society the multiplication of its institutions.[ ] a tuition-fee paid by the scholar to the professor, or to the institution, was nowhere contemplated. at dijon, where bossuet was afterwards a pupil, the magistrates when offering a college, in , desired to supplement an inadequate endowment, by requiring a fee from the students. in the name of the order, father coton, the king's confessor, remonstrated; and henri iv himself wrote to the parliament of bourgogne, desiring another arrangement to be made; which was accordingly done.[ ] the foundation was always to be received as a gratuitous donation, for which the order owed permanent gratitude. in turn, thenceforward, it gave gratuitously, and allowed of no recompense. "no obligations or conditions are to be admitted that would impair the integrity of our principle, which is: to give gratuitously, what we have received gratis."[ ] thus then the faculty, a competent and a permanent one, is installed. it is not one conspicuous for leisured ease. professors and scholastics alike are working for a purpose. they are a "college," in the sense of the society of jesus. yet, if there is not leisured ease, but a life of work and self-denial, the system has been found to result in all the consequences which may be looked for in literary "ease with dignity"; and perhaps in more, since no one does more, than he who, in his own line, has as much as he can well do, and do well. system and method, the great means for making time manifold, become so absolutely necessary; and the singleness of intention in a religious life intensifies results. then, after the general formation has been bestowed, in the consecutive higher studies of seven or nine years within the order, the plan of ignatius leaves open to individual talents the whole field of specialties, in science and literature. hence, to speak of our own day, secchi or perry devotes himself to astronomy, garucci to archæology, strassmeyer to oriental inscriptions, the de backers and sommervogel to bibliography, others to philology, mathematics, and the natural sciences; while five hundred and more writers follow the lines of their own inclinations, either for some directly useful purpose, or because their pursuit is in itself liberal. chapter v. colleges founded and endowed. what was the response of the christian world, when it had become alive to the nature of this new power in its midst, and to the proposal which the new power made? what did the answer come to, in the way of providing temporalities, necessary and sufficient? strange enough! loyola's own short official lifetime of fifteen years does not appear to have been too short, for the purpose of awakening the world with his idea; which, like a two-edged sword of his own make, not only aroused the keenest opposition at every thrust, and at his every onward step, but opened numberless resources in the apostolic, the charitable, and educational reserves of human nature. this man, who had inserted in the authentic formula and charter of his institute that watchword of his movements, "defence and advance"; who had taken the whole world for the field of his operations, in defending and advancing; this cavalier of a new military type, who had only to show himself upon the field to gather around him the flower of youth as well as mature age, from college and university, from doctor's chair and prince's throne, left behind him, as the work of fifteen years from the foundation of the order, about one hundred colleges and houses, distributed into twelve provinces. the territorial divisions were named, after their chief centres, the provinces of portugal, castile, andalusia, aragon, italy, naples, sicily, upper germany, lower germany, france, brazil, and the east indies. individuals under his orders had overrun ireland, penetrated into scotland, into congo, abyssinia, and ethiopia. the east indies, first traversed by francis xavier either on foot, or in unseaworthy vessels, signified the whole stretch of countries from goa and ceylon on the west, to malacca, japan, and the coast of china on the east. some of this activity might be credited to apostolic zeal alone, were it not that, wherever the leaders advanced into the heart of a new country, it was always with the purpose, and generally with the result, that the country was to be occupied with educational institutions. de backer notes this in another connection, when, in the preface to his great work of bibliography, "the library of writers of the company of jesus," he says: "wherever a jesuit set his foot, wherever there was founded a house, a college, a mission, there too arose apostles of another class, who labored, who taught, who wrote."[ ] what this means, with regard to its strategic value, there is no need of our being told. the duke of parma, writing, in , from the seat of war in the netherlands to philip ii of spain, said: "your majesty desired that i should build a citadel in maestricht; i thought that a college of the jesuits would be a fortress more likely to protect the inhabitants against the enemies of the altar and the throne. i have built it."[ ] sixty years later, after the long generalship of aquaviva, who during years governed the order with the ability of another ignatius, the number of colleges was . well might his immediate successor, mutius vitelleschi, writing to the whole society about the education of youth, speak of the "beautiful and precious mass of gold, which we have in our hands to form and finish."[ ] one hundred and fifty years after the death of ignatius, the collegiate and university houses of education numbered . two hundred years after the same date, when the order was on the verge of universal suppression, under the action of university men, parliamentarians, jansenists, philosophers, and of that new movement which was preparing the revolution, the jesuit educational institutions stood at the figure, . the colleges covered almost the whole world, distributed into provinces, besides missions in the less organized regions of the globe.[ ] if we look at these institutions of secondary and superior education, under the aspect of their constitution, that is to say, of their scope, their system, the supreme legislative and executive power which characterized them, we find that they were not so much a plurality of institutions, as a single one. take the colleges of france alone.[ ] in one sense, these may be considered as less united than the colleges of the paris university, for the paris university was in one quarter of a city, which offers a material unity; these, on the contrary, were spread over the whole of france, presenting the characteristics of "national" education; just as the were over the whole world, a cosmopolitan system. but, regarded in their formal and essential bond, they were vastly more of a unit, as an identical educational power, than any faculty existing. no faculty, whether at paris or salamanca, rome or oxford, ever possessed that control over its , , or even colleges, which each provincial superior exercised over his , , or , and the general over more than , with , members in the order. in the one general lay the power of an active headship; from him the facultative power of conferring degrees emanated; and he had one system of studies and discipline in his charge to administer, with a latitude of discretion according to times, places, and circumstances. as to the numbers of students, and the general estimate to be formed of them, i will record such data as fall under the eye, while passing rapidly over the literature of the subject. in rome, the colleges attending the classes of the roman college numbered, in , students. father argento, in his apology to the states at klausenburg, in , mentions that the schools in transylvania were frequented by the flower of the nobility; and, in his "history of the affairs in poland," dedicated to sigismund iii, he attests that from to , youths, chiefly of the nobility and gentry, frequented the gymnasia of the order in poland. at rouen, in france, there were regularly . at la flèche there were during a century; being boarders, the other finding accommodation in the village, but always remaining under the supervision of the faculty. throughout the seventeenth century, the numbers at the college of louis-le-grand, in paris, varied between , , and ; including, in the latter number, boarders. in , only a few years after the restoration of the society by henri iv, the one province of paris had, in its colleges, , students; which would give an average of nearly to a college. cologne almost began with students,--its roll in . dilingen in had ; in its _convictus_, of the boarders were religious, besides other ecclesiastics; the next year, out of _convictores_ or boarders, were religious of various orders, the secular priesthood being represented among the students generally. at utrecht, during the first century of the order's existence, there were scholars; at antwerp and brussels each, ; in most of the belgian colleges, . as to spain and italy, which first saw the society rise in their midst, and expand with immense vigor all over them, i consider it superfluous to dwell particularly upon them. in many of the capitals and important centres throughout europe, there were separate colleges for nobles. elsewhere the nobility were mixed with the rest; thus nobles and more were attending the jesuit schools in paris. it was studiously aimed at by the order to eliminate, in matters of education, all distinguishing marks or privileges. thus father buys endeavors, in , to reduce the practice at dilingen to the custom of the other colleges in the upper german province.[ ] most of the papal seminaries founded by gregory xiii, at vienna, dilingen, fulda, prague, gratz, olmütz, wilna, as well as in japan and other countries, were put under the direction of the society; as pius iv did with his roman seminary; and st. charles borromeo with that of milan. not knowing what the absolute average really was in these institutions, we may still form some idea of what the sum total of students must have been at its lowest figure. for this purpose, we can take an average which seems about the lowest possible. i have not met with any distinct mention of a college having less than scholars. there are indeed frequent complaints in the general assemblies, regarding what are denounced as "small" colleges. however, it seems clear from numerous indications, as, for instance, from the encyclical letter of the general paul oliva,[ ] that these colleges were called small, not primarily on account of an insufficient number of students, but because of insufficient foundations, which did not support the professors actually employed. a document for the rectors notes that "thus far almost all the colleges, even such as have received endowments, suffer want regularly, and have frequently to borrow money."[ ] hence we may be allowed to take, as a tentative average, students to a college. at once, we rise to a sum total of more than , students in these collegiate and university grades, all being formed at a given date under one system of studies and of government, intellectual and moral. if statistics, in that nicely tabulated form which delights modern bureaus, have failed us as we run over the whole world to decipher the indications, there is yet another view which we may catch of the same subject, and one that is equally valuable. it is the multitude of nations into which this educational growth ramified. at goa, in hindustan, the seminary, which was inferior to none in europe, had for its students, brahmins, persians, arabians, ethiopians, armenians, chaldeans, malabari, cananorii, guzarates, dacanii, and others from the countries beyond the ganges. japan had its colleges at funai, arima, anzuchzana, and nangasaki. china had a college at macao; and later on many more, reaching into the interior, where the fathers became the highest mandarins in the service of the emperor, and built his observatory. towards the close of the eighteenth century a large number of colleges were flourishing in central and south america. all of these disappeared, when the order was suppressed. the youth, who could afford to obtain the education needed, went over to europe, whence they returned, a generation quite different from what had been known of before. they returned with the principles of the revolution. and the whole history of central and south america has changed, from that date onwards, into a series of revolutions, which are the standing marvel of political scientists to our day. to consult a graphic representation of how this educational order looked on the map of the world, one may glance into the ninth volume of the _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_. there father pachtler, as in his other volumes of the series, sketches only the german "assistency" of the society of jesus. the five assistencies of the order served the purposes of government, by grouping many provinces together into larger divisions. in , the german assistency comprised nine out of thirty-two provinces. the nine in question are those of flandro-belgium, french belgium, the lower rhine, the upper rhine, upper germany, bohemia, austria, poland, lithuania. the map at the end of father pachtler's volume represents all this country, with the towns marked differently, according as they contained either universities of the order, or colleges, or _convictus_, that is, boarding-colleges, or seminaries, or residences. the chronological order of their rise is presented in a table at the beginning of the same volume, with a note to indicate more in particular the grade or amplitude of each, as being a _studium generale_, otherwise called university or academy, a college or a gymnasium, as well as the annexes of each, in the shape of one or more _convictus_, one or more episcopal or papal seminaries, a college of nobles, a _convictus_ for poor scholars. by means of this map, a graphic presentation is afforded of one assistency, from which, by a proper extension, the whole world may be portrayed to the imagination. in , within the limits of this map, there were colleges, seminaries, residences, novitiates, missions, professed houses.[ ] the universities here spoken of, otherwise called _studia generalia_, or academies, are quite typical, a special jesuit development of the mediæval style. an exact and official form, drawn up for the university of gratz, may be found in the same _monumenta_.[ ] as father pachtler remarks, it shows at a glance the inner working of a jesuit university, and the general system prevailing over the whole society. he entitles the document: "_ordnung einer ausschlieschlich von jesuiten geleiteten universität_," or "_einer selbständige universität, _." the latin title is: "_forma et ratio gubernandi academias et studia generalia s. j._" it was the compilation of father john argento. upon this basis of the amount of work done, as well as its intrinsic character, shown by the results, i was going to draw some inferences with regard to the amount of the temporal endowments, which must have been required to support such a vast organization, and must have been vested in the order by the christian world. one might compare the work done with what oxford accomplishes; and, seeing that the latter university supplies the facilities for higher education, and that far from gratuitously, to only a couple of thousands among the nobility and gentry, then, since it spends upon this an annual revenue of $ , , , how much would be required to conduct the education of a quarter of a million of students? our arithmetic would feel oppressed by the calculation. but the calculation is not necessary. it is quite evident that religious poverty gave the key to the situation,--poverty, self-abnegation, the resignation of all temporal considerations in life, by men who had no families to provide for, no station to acquire; who had themselves given up every station, from that of the clerical benefice, or the liberal and martial careers, to ducal coronets, princedoms, and even royalty; men therefore, who were bestowing with themselves, and in themselves, the essential endowment of education upon the world, and who needed only to have that supplemented with the few temporal necessities still remaining. and the conclusion to be drawn seems to be this. the christian world, whether ruler or people, republic or municipality, was making a safe and lucrative investment, whether at home or abroad, in the midst of civilization or of barbarism, when it consigned the absolute use of sufficient temporalities to a world-wide faculty, inspired by the sentiment of religious devotion. for what is the object of any religious society whatsoever? it is to complete in each of its members the duties of the man, the citizen and the christian, with other duties called "religious," which, correlative with the former, are nevertheless distinct from them. they are duties which presuppose the moral virtues, the civil and christian virtues, and tend to complete them with the highest qualities to which perfect christianity aspires, those of self-devotion and religious self-consecration. hence the experiences, making a drama and a tragedy, when the society abruptly disappeared. supposing even that enough of competent men, with all personal requirements, could have been found to fill the void, what of their salaries and support? take an instance. the revenues, which at bourges had been enough for the support of thirty jesuits, were found, after the suppression of the order, not to afford an adequate compensation for ten secular professors.[ ] frederic ii of prussia, sending an agent to negotiate with pius vi about retaining the order in his states, expresses himself thus in a letter to voltaire: "the surest means (to perpetuate a series of professors) is to preserve a seminary of men destined to teach. in studying the sciences, they fit themselves for the office of instructing. it would be no easy task to fill instantaneously a vacancy left by a skilful professor. if the education of ordinary citizens be necessary, the training up of instructors must be no less so." and then, coming to the point before us, the king continues: "besides, there are reasons of economy for preferring such a body of men to mere secular individuals. the professor taken from the latter class will cost more, because he has a greater number of wants. it is needless to remark that the property of the jesuits would not be sufficient to remunerate their successors; and that revenues, which pass over to the administration of the government, always suffer diminution."[ ] speaking of ganganelli, pope clement xiii, who was under pressure from various quarters to make him suppress the order, frederic writes to voltaire in : "for my own part, i have no reason to complain of him; he leaves me my dear jesuits, whom they are persecuting everywhere. i will save the precious seed, to give some of it, one day, to those who should wish to cultivate a plant so rare."[ ] the testimony of documents is uniform upon the poverty of these men, whom protestant historians like grotius, robertson, and others marvel at, for the authority they possessed in the world, for the purity of their lives, their success in teaching, and their art of commanding with wisdom as they themselves obeyed with fidelity. their life was one of straitened circumstances and self-abnegation. we may see it illustrated in dilingen.[ ] or again, at the great royal college, founded by henri iv at la flèche, where three hundred boarders were supposed to be paying their own expenses, as _pensionnaires_, we find louis xiii issuing a royal decree that his magistrates are to prosecute "les rétardataires et les récalcitrants par toutes les voyes raisonnables," persons who did not pay the expenses of their own children, but left that interesting occupation to the college. with all that, says rochemonteix, nothing came of it, neither of the royal injunctions, nor of judicial suits; things went on the same way, "the parents paying badly, and the treasurers lamenting."[ ] i will close this chapter with one case, because it serves to emphasize a particular sequel of the suppression; that is, the revival of a tuition-fee. a recent author, writing in , tells the history of the college of saint-yves at vannes, in brittany. he sums up its revenues at livres. placed in the hands of the order, this college, in , that is, seven years after the society had assumed charge, directed students; later on, ; and then . in , the faculty consisted of thirteen members, besides the four fathers engaged in the adjoining house of retreats. all rendered various services, as is usual in a college of jesuit instructors. to these we must add the requisite complement of the faculty, at least half as many more lay assistants, belonging to the order, and to the same local community. here then are twenty-two at the least, subsisting on livres a year; and meanwhile providing their house, their library, their physical cabinet, which was fully fitted up with all necessary instruments, and their observatory.[ ] "the moment after the suppression," he goes on to say, "it was quite another affair! ten secular professors cost , livres for their salaries alone!" the author gives the list of their salaries. "to reëstablish equilibrium, one of the first acts of the parliament was to exact from each scholar a tuition-fee of twelve livres; and yet they complained, they could not make ends meet." observe, a tuition-fee! on the day after the suppression, they begin to undo the very work, which, two hundred and thirty years before, the order had begun to do at its birth, spreading education gratuitously, without drawing on pupils, or drawing on the public treasury. well might the general vincent caraffa say, in the time of the thirty years' war, "we abound rather in men than in revenues." and he says so, in the same breath and in the same sentence, in which he is asking priests to offer themselves for life to the work of teaching the lower branches, a work which he calls laborious, in times which he specifies as disastrous, and in circumstances which he describes as having no provision made for the means of living.[ ] this brief sketch will go to show how the christian world did, indeed, meet the proposal of the order, and found seven hundred colleges. but it also shows how the order endowed the world, and had even to make good, with its personal heroism, the defects in many of the foundations. chapter vi. the intellectual scope and method proposed. as the second part of this book is intended to be a pedagogic analysis of the mental culture imparted, i need not sketch here, save in a general way, the intellectual scope proposed by ignatius of loyola, and the method which he originated. both scope and method vary somewhat, according as the students contemplated are respectively external to the order, or members of it. the latter are to be qualified for becoming future professors, even though, in point of fact, only a certain proportion of them become so. studious youth in general, including ecclesiastics and religious of the various orders, are considered by ignatius as distributed amid two kinds of educational institutions. one of these he calls the public school; the other, a university. the first is that which extends, in its courses, from the rudiments of literature up to the lower level of university education. he says: "where it can conveniently be done, let public schools be opened, at least in the departments of humane letters."[ ] in a note, he explains that moral theology may be treated in a gymnasium of this kind. father aquaviva, in , puts this kind of school down as the lowest of three ranks of colleges; and sums up the courses as being those of grammar, humanities, rhetoric, languages, and moral theology.[ ] he also explains why the lowest jesuit curriculum must fill these requirements, "in order that the society be not defrauded of the end it has in view, which is, to carry the students on at least as far as mediocrity in learning, so that they may go forth into their respective vocations, ecclesiastics to their ministry, lay students to their own work in life, qualified in some degree with a sufficiency of literary culture."[ ] this curriculum served also the purpose of those, who, while members of the order, were for some reason dispensed from the full course of studies.[ ] if any grades are wanting in a college, it must be the lower ones which are omitted, the higher being retained.[ ] ignatius goes on to limit the courses in a gymnasium of this kind: "let not higher sciences be treated here; but, to pursue them, the students who have made due progress in literature are to be sent from these colleges to the universities.[ ] passing on to universities of the order, he defines for their scope, first, in behalf of those who are to be ecclesiastics, scholastic theology, holy scripture, and positive theology; secondly, for all students, humane letters, latin, greek, hebrew, and other such languages as chaldaic, arabic, and indian, subject to the demands of necessity or utility; moreover, logic, physics, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and mathematics. all these departments are to be provided for by professors of the order. if the departments of civil law and medicine are added, they will be conducted by professors not of the society.[ ] as to the scholastic members of the society, their mental culture in the order begins, of course, where their collegiate curriculum had closed, that is, at the end of their classical course. their studies henceforth are defined by two objects; one, that of professing, as formed jesuits in the future, what they are studying now; the other, that of being differentiated, according to talent and circumstance, into preachers, writers, directors of consciences, or managers of affairs. in view of this two-fold object, all the examinations, arranged for members of the order in the advanced courses, are regulated by one standard, that the jesuit scholastics must be found competent, at each stage, to teach the course in which they are being tested. accordingly, they review their previous literary acquirements, in all the lines which the society regularly professes; then, during three years, they apply exclusively to philosophy and natural sciences; and, four years more, to divinity and allied sciences.[ ] this protracted course, therefore, as given more in detail by the subsequent _ratio_, consists of poetry, rhetoric, and literature; mathematics, physics, and chemistry; logic, ontology, cosmology, psychology, and natural theology; ethics, natural, social and public right, moral theology, canon law, ecclesiastical history, scholastic theology, hebrew, sacred scripture. the courses are to be pursued either in the same classes which external students attend, or, in their own university classes, when a general house of studies is formed as a "scholasticate." in both cases, they have seminary exercises of their own, beyond what is required in the most condensed university courses. those whom health and excellence have approved at every step are ordinarily to be withdrawn from studies, "when the course of arts has been finished, and when four years have been spent on theology."[ ] specialties are to be cultivated.[ ] subsequent legislation places these specialties in the interval between the arts and theology; and, again, after the latter. this, in brief, is the practical idea of the professorial seminaries, philological, philosophical, scientific, and theological, through which the stream of future professors is continually passing. each one is subject, at every stage, to examination tests which include the most distinct reference to professorial capacity. the technical standard in the examinations is that of "surpassing mediocrity," which term is accurately defined, as we shall see later, when analyzing the _ratio_.[ ] while the depleted ranks of the professorial body are thus regularly supplied, it is clear that more services remain available in the order at large, than the single purpose of education would at any time require. but this only serves the wider scope which the society has in view, much wider than education taken alone. and ignatius makes mention of this expressly when he says, that the scholastic students "may never come to profess the learning which they have acquired"; still "they are to consider that labor of studies as a work of great merit in the sight of god."[ ] so much for the widest and highest intellectual objects aimed at in these studies. looking down now to its lowest limit, we perceive that education, as imparted by the society to the external world, is to begin not below "the rudiments of grammar, in which boys must already be versed; they must know how to read and write; nor is any allowance to be made in favor of any one, whatever be his condition of life; but those who press these petitions upon us are to be answered, that we are not permitted" to teach the elements. this is the ordinance of aquaviva, in , and he simply refers to the constitution.[ ] he also notes, in the same document, that the new _ratio studiorum_ elevates every grade, as it stood at that date, one year higher than it had been before. the document is from the german archives. pachtler observes that most of the latin schools, particularly in protestant germany, took children up from the alphabet.[ ] the effect of the jesuit system was that of a constant upward trend to what was higher, more systematic, and complete. this brings us to the question of method. here a number of elements occur, some of them essential, many of them subordinate. these latter, at least, were the products of ingenuity and industry on the part of the teaching body, and were productive of industry and life on the part of scholars. to illustrate the whole matter, i will refer to authors who were addressing the world, soon after the society had taken its stand as an educational power, and when its institutions were conspicuous to the eyes of all. first comes classification, which was an essential feature of the jesuit system. ribadeneira, the intimate friend of ignatius, when writing the life of loyola, in the year , and describing the work of the order, now forty-fours years old, observes: "elsewhere one professor has many grades of scholars before him; he addresses himself at one and the same time to scholars who are at the bottom, midway, and at the top; and he can scarcely meet the demands of each. but, in the society, we distinguish one rank of scholars from another, dividing them into their own classes and orders; and separate professors are placed over each."[ ] the division of classes, a thing so natural to us, was in those times a novelty. there were practically only two degrees of teaching; one superior, embracing theology, law, and medicine; the other preparatory. the preparatory instruction had already been tending towards the later system of grading; the term "class" was an expression of the renaissance. father rochemonteix, speaking of the paris university, notes that the first authentic act, in which the term is used, dates from .[ ] from , the division of studies, by means of classes, was already being accomplished. still there was no definite number of grades. the study of literary models was defective. grammar was beclouded with the subtleties of dialectics, to the great prejudice of written composition, as well as of the reading and imitation of models.[ ] now it will be observed that ignatius was studying in the university of paris from to ; and his companions remained till . by the time he published the constitution as a rule of guidance, he had become surrounded by men, who were not merely graduates of universities, but had been doctors, professors, and rectors in portugal, spain, france, italy, belgium, germany. one consequence was that ignatius, from the very beginning, formulated a complete system of graded classes. he relegated dialectics to its proper field, philosophy and theology. and, bringing into prominence the reading of authors, and the practice of style in imitation of the best models, he defined a method. this, after being elaborated during forty years, was then found to be not only new, but complete, and good for centuries to come. it arranged courses in a series, having reference to one another; it coördinated definite stages of the courses with definite matter to be seen; and, in the lower branches it distributed the students, with their respective portions of the matter, into five grades, classifying precepts, authors, and exercises, as proportioned to each successive grade. nothing more familiar to ourselves now; nothing newer to the world then! this was the _ratio studiorum_. the grades of the gymnasium may include several divisions, according to the number of students; but the grading itself remains fixed, and leaves no element, either of actual culture, or of future developments, unprovided for, or without a location. nor do these grades mean five years. they mean a work to be done in each grade, before the next is taken up. on this, the mind of ignatius was most explicit. as an almost universal rule, they never mean less than five years. and, for one of them, the grade of rhetoric, in which all literary perfection is to be acquired, the system contemplates two and even three years. in this point, too, we may note a characteristic view of ignatius. it is that the longer term, whenever provided, whenever prescribed, urged, and insisted upon, is always for the talented student, the one who is to become eminent. to use his own words, when laying down the rules in this matter for the rector of a university, his full idea will be carried out, when "those who are of the proper age, and have the aptitude of genius, endeavor to succeed in every branch and to be _conspicuous therein_."[ ] to enumerate now some of the subordinate elements in the jesuit method, i will quote from the same author, ribadeneira. he says, speaking of young scholars: "many means are devised, and exercises employed, to stimulate the minds of the young--assiduous disputation, various trials of genius, prizes offered for excellence in talent and industry. these prerogatives and testimonies of virtue vehemently arouse the minds of students, awake them even when sleeping, and, when they are aroused and are running on with a good will, impel them and spur them on faster. for, as penalty and disgrace bridle the will and check it from pursuing evil, so honor and praise quicken the sense wonderfully, to attain the dignity and glory of virtue." he quotes cicero and quintilian to the same effect.[ ] this was not to develop a false self-love in young hearts; which would have been little to the purpose with religious teachers. "let them root out from themselves, in every possible way, self-love and the craving for vain glory," says the oldest code of school rules in the society, probably from the pen of father peter canisius himself.[ ] what is appealed to, is the spirit of emulation, and that by a world of industries; which, disguising the aridity of the work to be gone through, spurs young students on to excellence in whatever they undertake, and rewards the development of natural energies with the natural luxury of confessedly doing well. in the dry course of virtue and learning, satisfaction of this kind is not excited in the young, without a sign, a token, a badge, a prize. then they feel happy in having done well, however little they enjoyed the labor before. honorable distinctions well managed, sometimes a share in the unimportant direction of the class, brilliancy of success in single combat on the field of knowledge, of memory, or of intellectual self-reliance, the ordered discrimination of habitual merit, all these means and many others keep the little army in a condition of mental activity, and sometimes of suspense; "and if not all are victorious, all at least have traversed the strengthening probation of struggle."[ ] in all the courses of belles-lettres, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, the institutions called "academies" gather into select bodies the most talented and exemplary of the students. the young _littérateurs_, or philosophers, having their own officials, special reunions, and archives, hold their public sessions in presence of the other students, the masters, and illustrious personages invited for the occasion. in their poems, speeches, dialogues, they discuss, declaim, and rise to great thoughts, and to the conception of great deeds. civil discords are not the subject of their debates, but the glories of their native country, its success in arms, all that is congenial to the young mind and fosters the sentiment of love of country. among the students of rhetoric, forensic debates and judicial trials are organized; "and when the advocates of both sides have pleaded their cause in one or two sessions of the court, then," says a document i am quoting from, dated , "the judge, who has been elected for the purpose, will pronounce his judgment in an oration of his own; this will be the brilliant performance; and, to hear it, friends will be invited, and the doctors of the university and all the students will be in attendance."[ ] in the programme for the distribution of rewards, there is described an interesting element, _puer lepidus_, "a bright young lad," and what he is to do and how he is to bring out the name of the victor, "whereupon the music will strike up a sweet symphony."[ ] at another time, a set of published theses are defended against all comers by some philosopher or theologian. and, while games and manly exercises outside develop physical strength, gentility of demeanor and elegance of deportment have the stage at their service inside, for the exhibition of refined manners. in all this, princes and nobles, future men of letters and of action, are mingling in daily life, in contest and emulation, with sons of the simplest burghers. descartes[ ] notes these points sagaciously, when he recommends to a friend the college of la flèche: "young people are there," he says, "from all parts of france; there is a mingling of characters; their mutual intercourse effects almost the same good results as if they were actually travelling; and, in fine, the equality which the jesuits establish among all, by treating just in the same way those who are most illustrious and those who are not so, is an extremely good invention."[ ] as the new sciences came into vogue, they received at once the freedom of this city of intellect; and here they received it first. it has been said, indeed, that the society of jesus, "obstinately bound to its formalism, refused to admit anything modern, real, and actual, and that the national languages and literatures, as well as the new developing sciences, fared ill at its hands." this statement, as far as it concerns france, is examined by father charles daniel, who to other valuable works of his own has added the neat little essay called, _les jésuites instituteurs de la jeunesse française, au xvii^e et au xviii^e siècle_.[ ] as to germany, we shall see indications enough on all these subjects in the _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_. for all countries there is a sufficiency of information, in the mere text of the _ratio studiorum_, in jouvancy's classic commentary thereupon, _de ratione discendi et docendi_, and other authentic documents, besides the actual practice visible in the colleges. but the whole question about the vernacular tongues, as if they were kept out of the colleges by latin and greek, is so far an anachronism for the dates and epochs, regarding which some moderns have agitated the question, that i shall tell a little anecdote, which will not be so much of a digression, but that it will place us back just where we are at present. in , lord bacon published his two books on the advancement of learning. the work is considered the first part of his "novum organum." he undertakes to "make a small globe," as he says, "of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as he can discover.[ ] his subject is identical, as far as it goes, with the much more extensive and exhaustive work of father anthony possevino, a famous jesuit, who had published, twelve years before, the results of twenty years' travel and observation, while fulfilling, in many countries, the important duties of apostolic legate, preacher, professor. i have two editions of his great tomes before me. the first is that of rome, ; the other that of venice, ; this latter is called "the most recent edition."[ ] the only indication which i discern of bacon's not having profited by possevino is this, that he says: "no man hath propounded to himself the general state of learning to be described and represented from age to age."[ ] now, as this is saying too much, for it just indicates what possevino's labors had been showing to the world during twelve years, i must conclude that there is no assurance whatever, but that bacon profited by possevino: he seems merely to have gone over the same ground in english, and done justice to the subject, in his own peculiar way. accordingly, he did it what justice he could, in english. three years later he writes to dr. playfer, margaret professor of divinity in the university of cambridge, requesting that the doctor would be pleased to translate the work into latin; and his lordship promises eternal gratitude. what reasons does the noble author urge for this request? two reasons, of which the first is very noteworthy for our purpose:--"the privateness of the language, wherein it is written, excluding so many readers!" and the second is almost as worthy of note:--"the obscurity of the argument, in many parts of it, excluding many others!"[ ] here we have our domestic classic author, in the year , endeavoring to get out of his narrow cell, the "privateness of the english language," into the broad world of the literary public, where the jesuit with his tomes was enjoying to the full his literary franchise. this does not look as if the colleges, at that time, kept the languages down, but rather that they had in their gift the full freedom of the literary world, and sent students forth to walk abroad at their ease there, where bacon humbly sued for admission! i was going to quote from possevino, describing in a graphic way the daily intellectual life of the great roman college, with its two thousand and more students, besides the great body of professors. but my limits forbid me to do more than refer to it.[ ] there are two views which may be taken of a coin, and its stamp. one is taken direct, looking at it in itself; the other is indirect, observing the impression it leaves in the mould. it leaves a defined vacancy there. what kind of vacancy was left in the intellectual culture of europe, when this intellectual system was suddenly swept away? before the suppression of the society, some of the institutions, which had thriven at all, had been inspired by a healthful rivalry. they found, when the society was gone, that part of their life decayed. and, while they themselves began to languish, the place of the jesuits they could not fill. of some others, who lived a life barely discernible, we are given to understand, that their vitality consisted in the effort to keep the jesuits out. i will take an instance from bayonne. a work has just been published on the municipal college of bayonne, by the censor of studies, in the lyceum of agen.[ ] in seventy pages, which concern transactions with the jesuits,[ ] the author, in no friendly tone, narrates the entire history from the documents of the jansenist party. i will imitate this example of his so far as to narrate the following entirely in his own words. beginning his last chapter, entitled "reform and conclusion," he says in a tone somewhat subdued, but not more so than his subject:[ ] "this then was the college of bayonne, which, for a few years more, prolonged an existence ever more and more precarious; and it was finally closed in , in spite of several generous efforts at restoring it. "but already," he continues, "for thirty years, a great literary event had been accomplished in secondary education. a decree of the parliament of paris, dated the th of august, , had pronounced the expulsion of the 'ci-devant soi-disants jésuites'; which decree was this time definitively executed. now the jesuits, in their five provinces of france, possessed then nearly a hundred colleges. judge of the immense void which was suddenly created in the secondary instruction of the province, ill prepared for so abrupt a departure! there was a general confusion, and a concert, as it were, of complaints and recriminations. where get the new masters?... the disciplinary and financial administration of the colleges, left vacant by the jesuits, was confided to the bureaus, that is to say, assemblies composed of the archbishop or bishop, the lieutenant general, the king's proctor, and the senior alderman.... every one soon felt the inconveniences of this system. the municipal officers of the cities, the bureaus themselves hastened to petition the king, that their colleges might be confided to religious communities. thus it was that the greater part of the old jesuit colleges fell into the hands of the benedictines and bernardines, of the carmelites and minims, of jacobins and cordeliers, of capuchins and recollects, of doctrinaires and barnabites, and above all, of the oratorians. but all these religious, except the oratorians, fell far short of the jesuits. the greater part had not even any idea of teaching, etc." then the author devotes a heavy page to the novel systems which were introduced. he closes the paragraph sadly: "all this agitation," he says, "was unfortunately sterile; and, as i have just said, secondary instruction, on the eve of the french revolution, had not taken a step forward during fifty years." chapter vii. the moral scope proposed. sweet is the holiness of youth, says chaucer. nor less grateful to the eye are those gentle manners of youth, which another bard portrays as impersonated in his "celestial lights," who say:-- we all are ready at thy pleasure, well disposed to do thee gentle service.[ ] christian morals and christian manners make the perfect gentleman. plato had put it down that "he who hath a good soul is good"; and he insisted that no youth, who has had a personal acquaintance with evil, can have a good soul. he did not mean that a youth must be ignorant of what temptation is. there is no hot-house raising in this world which will keep off that blast. every child, while keeping on the royal road of innocence, has enough in himself, and in the choicest of surroundings, to know the realities of life and its warfare. but plato refers to a personal experience of the by-ways, which are not virtue, and which it is not necessary to travel by, in order to know enough about them. the educational means, the industry, the vigilance, which have for a result the preservation of youth in the freshness of innocence, signify a medium of respiration which is kept pure, and a moral nutriment which is good and is kept constantly supplied, until tender virtue has risen steadily into a well-knit rectitude, and is able thenceforth to brave manfully the incidental storms of life. for this moral strengthening of character, no less than for the invigorating of mental energies, the system of ignatius loyola prescribes an education which is public,--public, as being that of many students together, public as opposed to private tutorism, public, in fine, as requiring a sufficiency of the open, fearless exercise both of practical morality and of religion. since the time of ignatius, dupanloup has observed on this subject:-- "i have heard a man of great sense utter this remarkable word. 'if a usurping and able government wanted to get rid of great races in the country, and root them out, it need only come down to this, that it require of them, out of respect for themselves, to bring up their children at home, alone, far from their equals, shut up in the narrow horizon of a private education and a private tutor.'"[ ] the youthful material, on which the jesuit system had to work, may be described from two points of view. there were home conditions; and there were conditions too of the educational system, which was commonly prevalent in those centuries. as to the circumstances of polite society at the boys' homes, charles lenormant, speaking of those times, tells us that "it was the privilege of a gentleman to have from his infancy the responsibility of his own actions. the fathers of families were the first to launch their sons into the midst of the perils of the world, even before the age of discernment had begun."[ ] even when boys' homes effect no positive harm, still, only too often, they answer this description, that they undo the best of what the school training is endeavoring to effect, by the discipline of subordination and the practice of obedience. it was this state of things which made the german jesuits, in spite of themselves, petition for the requisite authorization to open boarding colleges in the north, as had already been done in portugal and elsewhere. reluctantly the authorization was given by the general assembly.[ ] these _convictus_, or _pensionnats_, were known to make great inroads on the time of the fathers, on their study, their religious retirement, and especially on that immunity of theirs from financial transactions, which they enjoyed as religious. the constitution of ignatius offers no more than a bare foothold for the introduction of these colleges.[ ] yet they have proved to be the most prolific nurseries of the eminent men, whom the society has sent forth into all the walks of life. not at home alone were effeminacy and dissoluteness to be feared. there were conditions of life in the university system of the sixteenth century, which seemed considerably worse than those already described in the first chapter of this book. possevino, who had spent ten years in the midst of the religious turmoils of france, and ten more in papal legations to germany, poland, hungary, transylvania, russia, muscovy, sweden, and gothia, and, after that, four more years in visiting the universities throughout europe, notices that there were five ways, whereby a general corruption of society had come about. first, he mentions the dissemination of bad books. secondly, "the omission of lectures; or, when lectures were held, such disturbances during them, with noise and yells, that there scarce remained an appearance of human, let alone of christian, society. thirdly, factions. fourthly, sensuality, to which cause must be referred that atrocious kind of iniquity, whereby the very walls of the schools were defiled with writing and the vilest pictures;[ ] so that the tender age, which had come innocent, must go away more polluted with crime, than imbued with learning, becoming hateful to god himself. fifthly, an aversion for divine worship, inasmuch as disputations and graduating festivities and lectures have constantly been transferred to those days and those hours, when by divine precept public worship is due."[ ] the means organized by ignatius into a method of moral education i will sketch in the words of his contemporaries. ribadeneira, his biographer, says: "those means are employed by our masters, whereby virtue is conceived in the hearts of the pupils, is preserved and augmented. they are morning prayer, for obtaining grace from god not to fall into sin; night prayer and a diligent reflection on all the thoughts, words, and actions of the day, to do away by contrition of heart with all the faults committed; the attentive and devout hearing of mass every day; frequent and humble confession of sins to a priest; and if they are old enough, and great devotion recommends it, and their confessor approves of it, the reverent and pious reception of the body of our lord jesus christ; teaching and explaining the rudiments of the christian faith, whereby the boys are animated to live well and happily. besides, great pains are taken to know and root out the vices of boyhood, especially such as are somehow inborn and native to that age."[ ] here, by the way, the reader may advert to the fact that the confessional, of which mention is made, never comes in as part of the external means of moral development; nor is a superior ever the confessor of those under his charge, except when desired to be so by the free choice of the subordinate himself. a general law of the catholic church ordains it thus. loyola's biographer goes on to the various means, whereby, in such a multitude of young persons, the bad element, which unfortunately will never die, is either suppressed and kept at its lowest stage of a struggling vitality, or else, if it happens to shoot up, is weeded out. the garden will be none the poorer for that. nil dabit inde minus! there are, moreover, the division of students into categories and ranks, with their own officers from among the boys themselves; the degrees of honor and preëminence assigned to good conduct and virtue; especially the pious societies or sodalities, into which none are admitted save the most studious and virtuous among the youths; and that with a discrimination in favor of superior merit, even among such as answer the general description. the sodalities of the society of jesus, as the subject of a study upon the management of youth, and indeed upon the cultivation of all ranks in christian society, from peer and field marshal and viceroy, down to the little boy beginning his career at school, would deserve a special discourse for themselves. i will continue now from possevino, describing the roman college, which was an object of daily observation to the capital of the christian world.[ ] "here," he says, "you have two thousand youths, among whom reigns a deep silence; there is no commotion. in the classes there is no reading of profane author or poet, who might inoculate the mind with defilement." i may remark that ignatius had, from the very first, begun the method of expurgating authors, a task which was then carried on with diligence by the literary men of the society. our author resumes: "a hundred daily occasions of sin and idleness are precluded; a continuous series is going on of lectures, repetitions, disputations, conferences." then he portrays, as visible there in every-day life, many of the features which ribadeneira has mentioned. while idleness was under a ban, vacation was not debarred. its principles, however, were defined on new lines. there was a sufficiency of rest to be provided; but then no new intermissions were to be granted. the "sufficiency" would appear spare luxury to our looser times.[ ] "one week of doing nothing," say the fathers of upper germany to the general aquaviva, "is more hurtful to students, than four weeks in which some literary exercise is kept up"; and "parents take very much amiss this state of idleness, if the boys remain on our hands."[ ] in all this, there was no question of making religious men of the students. it was a question only of religious making men of them. father george bader, provincial of upper germany in , left it in his instructions for the management of the convictus, at dilingen, that "the prefects were not to despair or despond, if they did not see at once, or in all, the improvement desired; nor were they to require the perfection of religious from them, nor introduce among them such practices of life, as elsewhere the students could not keep up in their calling; but the directors should be content with having a manner of life followed, which was ordinary, virtuous, and pious."[ ] according to this idea, the religious teacher being a man, a citizen, and an ecclesiastic, his educational industry has produced its effect, when it has made accomplished men, worthy citizens, competent ecclesiastics, or religious; "when in the school," says ribadeneira, "as in an arena, the students, foreshadowing the future, practise already, in their own way, those same virtues and duties, which in maturer years they will exhibit, in the management of the republic."[ ] the rich material of the youthful mind and soul receives the manifold influence which the teacher's mind and heart possess; and receives it after the manner of the recipient, according to his future vocation. what the jesuit professors, in fact, were like, those who in after years showed themselves but little friendly to the order did not omit to testify. "during the seven years," says voltaire, "that i lived in the house of the jesuits, what did i see among them? the most laborious, frugal, and regular life, all their hours divided between the care they spent on us and the exercises of their austere profession. i attest the same as thousands of others brought up by them, like myself; not one will be found to contradict me. hence i never cease wondering how any one can accuse them of teaching corrupt morality.... let any one place side by side the 'provincial letters' and the sermons of father bourdaloue; he will learn in the former the art of raillery, the art of presenting things, indifferent in themselves, under aspects which make them appear criminal, the art of insulting with eloquence; he will learn from father bourdaloue, that of being severe to oneself, and indulgent toward others."[ ] history is uniform in bearing witness that the general effects of their teaching corresponded to the example of these professors, in spite of the fact, as cretineau-joly puts it, that even from the hands of religious men the impious can still come forth, as, in the school of the wise, dunces and dolts may still be found.[ ] man is still and always free. however, if it follows thence, that not only a positive, but a negative result may always be expected; such a double result may be set off by two consoling reflections, which i will mention, in order to complete the picture of this education in practice. the first is, that since, from the school of virtue and religiousness, vice can still issue forth, and, as the general vitelleschi says, a good education, though almost omnipotent, may, like the morning dew, evaporate and be lost in the first heat of manhood's passions,[ ] what would be the results of the system, if it had less piety to enlighten, or less of an organized practice of virtue to confirm, the minds and hearts of the young? another reflection is this: that human nature, however erratic by defect of will, still remains beautiful, thanks to the original gift of god. whence it comes, that impiety is found beautifully inconsistent; and, in its lucid intervals, it makes the due acknowledgment, as he did, who once said:-- o thou, that with surpassing glory crowned, look'st from thy sole dominion ... to thee i call.... to tell thee how i hate thy beams, that bring to my remembrance from what state i fell.[ ] the society of jesus has many a time been elegantly blessed and cursed by the same eloquent lips and pens. the secret of this magisterial ascendency, as ignatius of loyola projected it, was to be found in the masters' intellectual attainments, which naturally impressed youthful minds; and also in a paternal affection which, of course, won youthful hearts. does anything more seem necessary for the full idea of authority? the committee appointed by the canton of fribourg, for restoring the fathers to their old college in , mention as one reason for having done so, that "the will cannot be chained; it will not submit to restraint. you can win it, but not subjugate it." and they speak of that "most lively attachment" ever abiding in the hearts of students towards members of the order, which they have known as the cradle of their youth.[ ] the same father bader, whom i have quoted before, defines where authority lies, when he says: "let not the prefects consider their authority to consist in this, that the students are on hand in obedience to their nod, their every word, or their very look; but in this, that the boys love them, approach with confidence, and make their difficulties known." speaking of penalties, he goes on: "the pupils should be led to understand that such reprehensions are necessary and are prompted by affection; and let it be the most grievous rebuke or penalty for them to know that they have offended their prefect."[ ] thus, in the education of the sixteenth century, there came into play a gradual reaction against the harshness and brusquer manners of earlier times. speaking of conversation with the students, the general vitelleschi, in , gives characteristic directions: "it will be very useful if from time to time the professors treat with their auditors, and converse with them, not about vain rumors and other affairs that are not to the purpose, but about those which appertain most to their well-being and education; going down to particulars that seem most to meet their wants; and showing them, in a familiar way, how they ought to conduct themselves in studies and piety. let the professors be persuaded that a single talk in private, animated with true zeal and prudence on their part, will penetrate the heart more and work more powerfully, than many lectures and sermons given in common."[ ] here then i have touched on the secrets of success, those principles which commanded esteem, and shed about the order an unmistakable halo of educational prestige. chapter viii. ignatius administering the collegiate system. his death. the first two colleges were established in the same year, ,--one of them in the royal university at coimbra in portugal, the other at goa in hindustan. though they were organized at an early date, only two years after the foundation of the order, when as yet no system had been formally adopted, nevertheless these two first colleges, a good many thousands of miles apart, were found to have been established in precisely the same way. francis xavier, having been assigned to the apostolic ministry in the east, began a university there, in which all the sciences and branches were professed, just as in the european colleges. this became the base of operations for japan, china, persia, ethiopia, and the other nations of the east. forty years later, there were as many as one hundred and twenty jesuits in the college. in , ignatius had a select body of fifteen or sixteen young men studying in paris; others he had placed in padua or elsewhere. he availed himself of the actual universities until such time as he should have his own. war breaking out between the emperor charles v and the french king francis, all spaniards and belgians were ordered out of france. such as were italians remaining in paris, the other young jesuits crossed the frontier to louvain, under the charge of father jerome domenech. there the latin oratory of the youth, francis strada, whom lefèvre, on his way through belgium, supplied with matter for his orations,[ ] helped to build up the order rapidly with two kinds of men, talented youths, who were captivated by the things they saw and heard, and men already eminent, who were equally attracted by the scope of the new institute. in the young strada preaching and the eminent lefèvre going out of his way to subsidize him with matter, we catch a family glimpse of that intensified force which can be developed in a closely bound organization. conspicuously wanting in gifts of presence and of learning, francis villanova, sent by ignatius to the university seat of alcalà, won such an ascendency there by his other qualities as a priest, that a commodious and flourishing college was soon founded. father jerome domenech endowed one in his native city of valentia, . lefèvre and araoz, following awhile by royal request in the suite of the princess mary, daughter of the portuguese king, and queen of the spanish king, founded a college at valladolid. in gandia, his own duchy, francis borgia erected and richly equipped a university, which was the first placed in the hands of the society. colleges at barcelona, bologna, saragossa, arose within the next two or three years; also at messina, palermo, venice, and tivoli. it is evident that ignatius had a world of administration already on his hands. as early as march , , he had excused himself from granting an application, because of "much pains he was taking in sending some to the indies, others to ireland and to parts of italy." now, though his forces were increasing, yet he was husbanding them; and even so, while refusing many applications, he seemed to be everywhere. but this need not be so much a matter of wonder, if we consider that it is the right place, and the right move at the proper time, that commands other places, movements, and times. at the death of lefèvre, in , the onward movement of these select men, coming in contact, either friendly or adverse, with every actual power in europe, was so impressive for its strategic completeness, and so far-reaching in its results, that, as an historian remarks, "these ten men, so ably chosen, had accomplished to their entire satisfaction, in less than six years, what the most absolute monarch would not have ventured to exact of the most blind devotedness."[ ] hardly had lefèvre departed this life, when his place was taken by the last man whom he had dealt with, francis borgia, duke of gandia, the friend and cousin of the emperor charles v. still wearing his ducal robes, until his temporal affairs could be settled, he came to rome in . he founds the roman college, which is the centre and type of all jesuit colleges. it was begun on february th, , at the foot of the capitol, with fourteen members of the order, and father john peltier, a frenchman, at their head. doubling this number in the following september, the college moved to a larger building. the professors taught rhetoric, and three languages, hebrew, greek, and latin. in , the entire course of philosophy and theology was added. the number of jesuit students among the auditory amounted, in this year, to sixty, and, in the following year, to one hundred. a few years later, vittoria toffia, niece of paul iv, and wife of camillo orsini, provided the institution with a splendid property. thenceforth, the number of jesuit students alone was as high as , brought together from sixteen or more different nations, most of them familiar with many languages, all speaking by rule the tongue of the country in which they were residing, and all competent to speak and teach in the one universal and learned language of the time, the latin tongue. of students not belonging to the order, nearly twenty colleges are enumerated, at some periods, as following the courses of this central roman college. they included the colleges of the english, the greeks, the scotch, the maronites, the irish, and the neophytes; the colleges named capranica, fuccioli, mattei, pamfili, salviati, ghislieri; the german college and the college gymnasio; also the roman seminary. of the students counted, as following the courses at a given time, were in theology. the most eminent professors filled the chairs, in successive generations; theologians like suarez and vasquez, commentators like cornelius a lapide and maldonado, founders or leaders in the schools of national history like mariana and pallavicini; clavius, reformer of the gregorian calendar; kircher, universal in all exact sciences; and so of the rest; while the cycle of colleges over the world remained provided with their requisite forces, and maintained their own prestige.[ ] the emblem of this institution was theology, enthroned, as it were, in a temple of imposing proportions. at her right and left two maids of honor stand; they are the natural sciences. one of them, representing mathematics, is placing the celestial sphere under the feet of the august goddess seated; the other, representing physics, is subjecting, in like manner, the orb of the earth. the legend attached reads: _leges impone subactis_. in forty or fifty years such an investment of talent, character, and virtue, had been made, by management within the order, and by that power to which ignatius always appealed, divine providence, that rome had seen pass through this house the most distinguished men of the age, in every line of intellectual life, of moral eminence, and of all that could elevate the thoughts of noble and generous minds. for the young, in particular, three characters came, figures that were to fill the niches and terminate the aisles of contemplation, as the ideal choice of the bloom of youth--stanislaus kostka, a young polish noble of seventeen, aloysius gonzaga, an italian prince of twenty-three, and john berchmans, a flemish burgher of twenty-two. being what they were, and leaving this life at such an age, they have appropriated in the catholic church the honors of the young. with regard to germany, it is with a classic touch, as of cæsar's style, that an historian introduces the subject thus: _germania, quo gravius laboravit, hoc studiosius adjuta est; ignatio nulla regio commendatior_.[ ] nor will the association be considered far-fetched, if, substituting for cæsar's pen and cæsar's sword, loyola's legislation for letters and his strategic tactics, one catches a suggestive idea, on the present topic, from that statue of the same roman general, which represents him as holding in one hand a sword, and in the other a pen, with the words inscribed underneath, _ex utroque cæsar_. of the services of those nine men, with whom he founded the order, he spent a large part upon germany. lefèvre was there, le jay, bobadilla, salmeron, laynez; not to mention the great canisius (de hondt), a young man already in the field, who was to stay there for half a century. it is of these men and their work that ranke writes: "of what country were these, the first of their order amongst us? they were natives of spain, italy, the netherlands. for a long time, even the name of their society was unknown, and they were styled the spanish priests. they filled the chairs of the universities, and there met with disciples willing to embrace their faith. germany has no part in them; their doctrine, their constitution, had been completed and reduced to form, before they appeared in our midst. we may then regard the progress of their institute here, as a new participation of latin europe in german europe. they have defeated us upon our own soil, and wrested from us a share of our fatherland."[ ] in concert with the duke of bavaria and the emperor ferdinand, ingolstadt and vienna became the two first centres of operations. ingolstadt was indeed destined to become soon one of the most representative universities of the company, and the german centre of what has been called the "counter-reformation."[ ] but ignatius would not accept it, without the clearest enunciation of some fundamental principles in the educational work of his institute. i will mention them. first, the condition of all higher studies, and of lower studies as well, was such, that, as ignatius said, it was useless to begin with the top, which without a good foundation will never stand. the disappointment of individual hopes and of general expectation would be the only result, with demoralization for the future. let literature, he said, and philosophy be gone through satisfactorily; then theology may be approached. literature must come first of all. hence polanco, the secretary of ignatius, writes to the duke of bavaria, in , that the "jesuits must begin by undertaking preparatory teaching, with professors capable of inspiring their young students, little by little, with a taste for theology."[ ] secondly, we may recall to mind what was mentioned before,[ ] that ignatius provides for law and medicine in his universities, but the professors of these departments are to be taken from without the order. now, quite as a counterpart to this, we find him declaring to the duke of bavaria, that it is at variance with his plan to lend any professors or lecturers of the order for work outside of jesuit institutions. therefore a college must be founded for them, or the duke cannot have them. the reason for this reserve is not hard to discern. in an organization like his, there are no men at large to lend. and, were the most eminent men assigned for work outside of the jesuit colleges and universities, the younger generation of the order would practically be debarred from the influence of their type of eminence. and again, if there were eminent men laboring in a country, without the stable abode of a jesuit college in the same place, there would be no propagating the distinctive work of the order itself, by means of the men of that country. yet, as he projected a native clergy for germany, so he intended native jesuits for the germans. besides, it does not seem possible to accept of a chair outside, except on the basis of some pecuniary consideration for the individual professor. now this is a situation which he does not accept. a professed father is not to sacrifice his religious life and independence, bound to a work outside of the order's own houses, and that for a valuable consideration. ignatius accepts of no obligations to fill chairs, save as accepting universities, which contain those chairs.[ ] and, as to pecuniary considerations, his principle is, _gratis accepistis, gratis date_; "give freely what you have freely received." to this cardinal principle the statutes of so many universities, if not of all, in which a jesuit college conducted any of the faculties, distinctly refer, as the ground for exempting religious of the society from all pecuniary charges, incidental to university affairs.[ ] no ingenious compromise was admitted which tended to relax this principle, regarding a pecuniary consideration.[ ] on the contrary, the most legitimate and ample revenues offered were not accepted as a recommendation for a university, if there were any conditions whatever not in keeping with the institute.[ ] the german college in rome was founded by ignatius, to form german ecclesiastics for the germans. at that time benefices and parochial cures, in the german emperor's dominions, were generally vacant for want of priests. it soon came to pass that priests were found to be in waiting, for want of benefices. it was not merely for the ordinary cure of souls that this college received so much attention from loyola. true to himself, ever contemplating something eminent,--_rarum et eximium facinus_, as he said once to the scholastics of coimbra, "that rare and excellent achievement; which is worth more than six hundred common ones,"--he was founding a seminary for preachers, professors, prelates. if the students sent from germany, to be admitted and supported on this foundation, are not noblemen, "at all events," writes ignatius in , "let nobility of soul not be wanting to them."[ ] this is the institution which caused so much vexation to non-catholic germany. it renovated the priesthood. thus, then, in a short official career of sixteen years, ignatius had the gratification of seeing a new and vast educational policy crowned with success. in spite of the active opposition which powerful interests in rome led against him--and a vigorous siege from the side of the schoolmasters was not to be despised, nor should it fail to be recorded,--in spite of the desperate hostility of the sorbonne, which was but beginning its war upon the society in france, with storms at toledo and saragossa flanking his movements in spain; in spite of the open war with heresy in protestant germany, where acrimony, distilled to its last degree of concentration, was to embitter history, till the days of ranke and janssen should come, and begin to vindicate the truth of history; thanks to the labors of ignatius, the monopoly of education was being broken down; the old universities were no longer either the sole depositories of superior instruction, or the arbiters of the intellectual life of europe; and all the best learning, which the most accomplished men could impart, was now being given gratuitously, and in as many centres of educational activity as the society was allowed to create. and, whereas it is put down to the credit of germany, that sixteen of the old universities had arisen on its soil, now, in the german assistency of the society, there arose more than sixteen jesuit universities, besides two hundred colleges. and, in virtue of papal charters, it was already an accomplished fact, that all the powers of universities, with regard to the degrees of bachelor, master, licentiate, and doctor, were vested in the head of the order, who could delegate the same to subordinate superiors.[ ] no wonder all the faculties of christendom considered the order an intruder and an aggressor. it might be considered so to-day. free and universal education was at the doors of all. we, men of the nineteenth century, may flatter ourselves that it was the spirit of our age which breathed upon the order of jesus, three centuries before the time. perhaps so. but we shall have to wait a few centuries more, even beyond the nineteenth century, before we come to such education given universally and given gratuitously. for it is one of the most palpable characteristics of all educational and other philanthropy which we know of, that it is an extremely expensive thing. let us now close our sketch of the great educator, saint ignatius of loyola. all the particulars of his death have been preserved for us by those who were with him at the last. they were not his first companions. of these, the few who survived at the present date, sixteen years after the foundation of the society, were scattered in various climes. the members with him were john polanco, his polished secretary, andré frusis, a frenchman, one of the most gifted of linguists and of _littérateurs_, christopher madrizi, a university doctor of alcalà, and jerome nadal, whom in paris, long before, ignatius had endeavored to enlist in the service of his institute; but nadal had rejected all overtures, pointing to the bible under his arm, and saying he wanted no other institute save that. he was a man of the first quality in judgment and the governing cast of mind. later on, when the exploits of saint francis xavier in india and japan had become the talk and admiration of europe, nadal entered the order, so cautiously that one might say he did it reluctantly; yet he did it. his subsequent career showed that he had made a mistake, when he missed a place in the very first ranks. others were close by. laynez lay in a sick-room; as was thought, on his death-bed; mendoza too, and martin olave. the latter, some thirty years before, was a boy whom ignatius met, when as a poor pilgrim he reached alcalà from barcelona, to take up his university studies. the boy gave him an alms, the first received by ignatius in that city. time had passed since then. the boy had become a master of arts, and, in , a doctor of the paris university, remarkable in many ways for virtue and learning. now, a man of mature age and great authority, he had embraced the institute of ignatius. he alone of the invalids died immediately after his master in religion. the latter, on july the th, told them he was about to die. but, diseases having preyed upon him for years, the physicians did not confirm what he said; and father ignatius made no more statements on the subject. he spent the evening in his usual manner, transacted some business with perfect serenity of mind, and then was left alone till the morrow. the morrow is just dawning, when they find him breathing his last. he declines to accept any potion. joining his hands together, with his eyes fixed heavenward, and pronouncing the name of "jesus," the founder of the society of jesus passes away from this life, in the professed house at rome. it was the thirty-first day of july, . he was sixty-five years of age. thirty-five years had passed, since the knight of the king of navarre had, with such solemnity, changed his garb, hung up his sword and poniard in the sanctuary of montserrat, and vowed himself to be a knight in the kingdom of christ. all the time since then he had spent in extreme poverty, in the practice of austerity, in the laborious travels of a pilgrim, in the more laborious pursuit of letters, under the stress of persecution, prisons, and chains, and under the relentless fatigue of a universal foresight, vigilance, and administration. he had proved himself a leader and commander of men, as nature had made him to be, and as history shows that he was. in an especial manner, he is famous for his prudence. approaching every enterprise with the most varied and exhaustive deliberation, spending forty days of meditation on determining a single point of the constitution, throwing upon his premises every kind of light from consultation and advice, and having habitually in his room, for reference, only two books, the new testament, and the imitation of christ, he thought out every plan to the last degree of definiteness and consistency. having once reached such a definite conclusion, he was not easy to move thenceforth out of the direction taken. quite otherwise. with the utmost vigilance, he applied himself and he applied all the means, whether they were persons available or measures necessary, to the execution of his purpose. even when, as often seemed to be the case, he was starting from principles other than those of ordinary human foresight, apparently from a pure trust in divine providence, he did not exempt himself from applying, with the same circumspection and diligence as ever, the means adequate to execute what he had begun. waiting fourteen hours, and fasting withal, in the ante-chamber of a prince, lest the propitious occasion should slip, writing out the same letter twice, thrice, and oftener, lest the right thing should not be said in the right way, and sending out thirty letters in one night, he exhibited, in the administration of great things and small, what had marked all his previous deliberation, the highest degree of consummate prudence and of practical perfection. if, in all this, there are many eminent qualities to admire, there is a resultant fact more marvellous still. he did his work so that it went on without him. and hence, if, whenever he happened to be anywhere on the field of action, account had to be taken of such a man, it will not perhaps appear singular that his order too, even when ostracized and expatriated, is taken into account, if it is anywhere visible on the social horizon. while i am writing this, three hundred and fifty years after his time, the bundesrath, on closing the kulturkampf, and admitting all the exiled orders of the catholic church back into the empire of germany, makes an exception of the jesuits. it bans the order of jesus, and gives no reason, beyond the palpable fact that the order is what it is. evidently, ignatius of loyola did his work so as to make it go on without him; and go on just as he made it. chapter ix. subsequent administrations. according to a contemporary chronicle for the year , the first announcement of the death of ignatius caused such a profound sentiment of grief in all members of the order, that a degree of stupor seemed for the moment to possess them. but this was only temporary. it was followed by a marked alacrity of spirit appearing everywhere. the society was beginning its course.[ ] in the first general assembly, father james laynez was elected to succeed the founder, in the office of general superior. the matters which concerned the assembly in its legislation, and the new general in his administration, were the proper temporal foundation of colleges, the admission of _convictus_ or boarding-colleges, and other questions, which may be noted in the _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_.[ ] laynez governed the order during nine years, till . father francis borgia, who had resigned his dukedom, and by this example led charles v to seek repose in the monastery of st. yuste, was elected third general. his virtues and his presence, wherever he appeared, exercised such a magic influence that, when he had merely passed through spain, colleges had sprung up as from the soil. three provinces had been formed in that country alone, within thirteen years from the foundation of the society. but this multiplication of colleges, often not sufficiently endowed for their future development, was already seen to be one of the threatened weaknesses of the company. the special legislation passed at the time of his election regarded the proper establishment, in every province, of philological, philosophical, and theological seminaries, for the formation of professors.[ ] instead of the proportionate number of jesuit students being supported on each collegiate foundation, this legislation, and much more that followed later, ordained a system of concentration in seminaries of humane letters, philosophy, science, and divinity, which were conducted respectively by corps of eminent professors selected for the purpose, and were maintained either on some munificent foundation specially made for this object, or by a due proportion of the other collegiate foundations. at this date it was that colleges for the formation of diocesan clergy, or "bishops' seminaries," as they are commonly called, were coming into existence, in accordance with the decrees of the council of trent. the manner of admitting them, as annexed to colleges of the society, and thereby availing themselves of the jesuit courses, was regulated by this assembly. in no case were they to be provided with a corps of professors distinct from the faculty of the college. in father everard mercurian, a belgian, was elected to succeed saint francis borgia. he was sixty-eight years old at the time of his election, and lived eight years after. he drew out of the constitution various summaries of rules for the guidance of the chief officers in the society. those which concern studies are given in a few pages of the monumenta.[ ] at his death, a young man thirty-seven years old, who had entered the order only about twelve years before, was elected to succeed him. this was claudius aquaviva, son of prince john aquaviva, duke of atri. he was a man who, for his superior executive abilities and his services rendered to the order in times most critical, has been regarded as a second founder. as to what his administration saw effected in the matter of education, the _ratio studiorum_ bears witness. he governed the society during thirty-four years. mutius vitelleschi, one of the mildest and gentlest of men, but not on that account ineffective in his government, succeeded aquaviva, filling a term of thirty-one years, from to . various pedagogic interests occupied the attention of the general assembly, by which he was elected; in particular, the promotion of humane letters, the means of supplying professors, and the searching character of the examinations ordained, at every step in their studies, for the members of the society. the farther the society advanced in history, the less there was of new legislation. the tension grew on the side of administration; and the urgency shown by general assemblies evinces this. the philological seminary was developed for the junior scholastics; and a classic form drawn up for it by jouvancy. as distinguished talents for preaching and governing were treated with the special favor of being allowed to compensate for some deficiencies, in the qualifications requisite for the degree of profession in the order, so special legislation provided for similar eminence in literature, in oriental languages, in greek and hebrew. mathematics had, from the first, been a department of activity native to the energies of the company. the schools of geography and history developed in the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. the school of modern physics then asserting itself, and running so close upon the field of metaphysics, was subjected to regulations in the assemblies of and . after the restoration of the order, social and educational circumstances being so immensely altered, the whole ground had to be surveyed again, with a view to adaptation; the curriculum had to be expanded, and, where necessary, prolonged to meet the growing demands of the exact sciences; and an indefinite number of specialties to be provided for, by the selection and fostering of special talents. these special lines are, in the terms of the latest general assembly, "ancient languages, philology, ethnology, archæology, history, higher mathematics, and all the natural sciences." we are thus brought down, in the history of general legislation, to the very recent date, , less than ten years ago. meanwhile the generals, on whom rested the burden of supervising all this, discharged the functions of administration. father vincent caraffa promoted and urged on the pursuit of belles lettres, and defined positions in mathematics. father francis piccolomini, in a general ordinance for all the higher studies, defined the stand to be taken by professors, as representing the society itself in their chairs; so, too, father goswin nickel, with reference to certain new issues. both he and his successor, paul oliva, had to face the new contingencies which arose from the charges of the jansenists against what they called the loose moral teachings of the jesuits. father oliva stimulated the pursuit of excellence in humane letters, in the greek, hebrew, arabic, and chaldaic languages. positions of descartes, leibnitz, as well as of certain others in philosophy and theology, were animadverted upon by the generals tamburini and retz. father ignatius visconti urged again the pursuit of perfection in literary matters, and in the manner of conducting the schools of literature. and the general aloysius centurione, shortly before the suppression, laid down the clearest principles with respect to the study of moral theology, and the examinations therein. since the restoration of the order, fathers roothaan, beckx, and the actual general, anthony m. anderledy, have devoted their own attention and directed that of the society to the ways of accepting, with undiminished energy, the altered and unfavorable situation, in which the present century has placed the order, and hampers the revived institute. for this immense organization had been almost entirely destroyed by the stroke of a pen--the signature of clement xiv given in pencil. they dispute whether he gave it at all; or, at least, whether he meant it. howsoever that be, the order, which had been erected on the principle of obedience, received the word and disappeared. the rock on which it had set its foot became the altar of a sacrifice; and that a sacrifice offered without a struggle or a remonstrance, to betray any change in the spirit, with which ignatius, two hundred and thirty-three years before, had vowed obedience to the vicar of christ. an epigram had been written, on the occasion of the first centenary, under a picture of archimedes and his lever; archimedes is getting a foothold for his lever to move the world; and beneath is the epigram:-- fac pedem figat, et terram movebit. its footing was now taken away, and it vanished from the world. while the catholic bourbon courts were thus successful in accomplishing a manoeuvre, which at fitful intervals they had essayed heretofore, the schismatical empress, catherine ii of russia, denounced it and endeavored to counteract it. she wrote to the pope in , "that she was resolved to maintain these priests against any power, whatsoever it was"; and she was good to her word; the society remained unsuppressed in white russia. the protestant king of prussia, frederick the great, without exhibiting all the temper of the irascible lady, manipulated things as best he could to preserve the society. to sum up the order's experiences, it may well be said that in public life there is no resurrection; and the state which dies is dead forever. from infancy on through maturity it goes its way decrepit to the grave. yet balmez observes, "the society of jesus did not follow the common course of others, either in its foundation, its development, or its fall; that order, of which it is truly and correctly said, that it had neither infancy nor old age."[ ] it rose again; and the flag of the knight of loyola, though worn and torn, was none the less fair for that:-- jam se ipso formosius est. for neither the violence of endurance, nor the vehemence of energy, although begetting intensest fatigue, is to be confounded with decay. it was not decay, a century ago, when expropriation and exile were the confessed policy of the courts in europe; when, as an american writer states it, in portugal "pombal cut the gordian knot.... he commenced by the expulsion of the jesuits and the expropriation of their property." nor is it decay in the order, when a liberal confederation in switzerland, on obtaining the political ascendency in , suppresses the jesuit university at fribourg, and provides in this wise, as an american writer records: "no religious society shall be allowed to teach; and persons hereafter educated by the jesuits, or by any of the orders affiliated to the jesuits, shall be incapable of holding office in church or state."[ ] policy like this, whether in the countries "expurgated," or in countries thereunto "affiliated," proves no decay in the order. but where decay may come in has been clearly pointed out by one of its generals. speaking of the education of youth and the promotion of humane letters, mutius vitelleschi wrote, in , "if ever the society were to decline from that lofty position which it holds with so many provinces and peoples, such an event could come about in no other way than by failing to walk in the same steps, by which, with the divine grace, it has acquired that high esteem."[ ] those steps had been taken in various paths, of which only two have concerned us here. for its men of action were largely identified with the general history of europe; and its men of the word, who toiled in apostolic work, at home or abroad, have entwined their memories in the history of souls, often ungrateful, yet always worthy of the toil. but its men of the school did a work which we have sketched in a general way, and which we shall analyze in the second part of this essay; while its men of the pen deserve a passing word of notice here. they concern us from a pedagogic point of view, in many ways. they wrote text-books, many of which are the basis of manuals in almost every line of education to-day, sometimes without the change of a word, and generally without acknowledgment. besides that, their literary productions were, as a rule, the offspring of their labors in the schools. it might not be safe to estimate their standing as _littérateurs_, by the process which a scotch professor uses, who, in the course of forty-seven elegant lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, sees little occasion to recognize the existence of this jesuit school of literature, except when he goes out of his way to salute père rapin in a somewhat questionable manner.[ ] many of those whom the scottish professor himself does honor to, in his pages, were jesuit scholars,--bossuet, corneille, molière, tasso, fontenelle, didérot, voltaire, bourdaloue, himself a jesuit. it would be safer then to determine the standing of these professors, who were in control of a great literary age, by looking at the golden age itself, that of louis xiv. the majority of the brilliant figures, whom dr. blair names as illustrating the epoch,[ ] were all jesuit scholars. naturally, then, the fifty professors of the jesuit college at paris were, as cardinal maury affirmed, a permanent tribunal of literature for all men of letters, a high court of judicature, a focus of public attention from which radiated the public opinion of the capital; in short, as piron had emphatically said, "the star-chamber of literary reputations."[ ] devoted as they were to an austere profession, we may say of many among them, that they were not themselves romancers of a lively fancy or great poets; and so far agree with voltaire, who made this very remark about his old professor, père porée. yet also, without inconsistency i believe, we may agree with the spirit of père porée's rejoiner, when the remark was reported to him, that "he was not one of the great poets." the jesuit replied, "at least you may grant that i have been able to make some of them." and, should results be gauged on a wider basis than mere poetry, not a few of the most prominent men in european history would seem to have been the outcome of this system, men, too, who represented every possible school and tendency, in their subsequent literary and public life. a few names show this. there are those of descartes, buffon, justus lipsius, muratori, calderon, vico, the jurisconsult, founder of the philosophical school of history. there are richelieu, tilly, malesherbes, don john of austria, luxembourg, esterhazy, choiseul, with those of saint francis de sales, founder of a religious order, lambertini, afterwards the most learned of popes, under the name of benedict xiv, and the present pontiff, leo xiii, also most erudite. these certainly represent many schools and tendencies, and they come, with many others, from the same schools.[ ] as authors of every kind, and in departments even far remote from the regular courses of the schools, jesuit writers were, at the very least, so far related to jesuit teachers, that, as we see in the bibliographical dictionary of the society, all had been professors, with scarcely an exception; and almost all had professed humanities, belles lettres, rhetoric. when father nathaniel southwell of norfolk endeavored, in , to compile a dictionary of these authors, he recorded those whose works had the qualification of a respectable bulk to recommend them. he entered the names and works of authors who answered this description. this was years after the foundation of the order. the enterprise was repeatedly taken in hand afterwards. the possibility of ever accomplishing it was much jeopardized by the suppression. but at length the two fathers de backer published a series of seven quarto volumes, in the years - ; and this first step they followed up, in the years - , with a new edition, in three immense folios, containing the names of , authors. this number does not include the supplements, with the names of writers in the present century, and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. of this last category, father sommervogel's researches, up to , enabled him to publish a catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume of pages, with double columns. the writers of this century, whom the de backers catalogued in their supplement, fill columns, folio, very small print. altogether, the three folios contain columns, compressed with every art of typographical condensation. suarez of course is to be seen there, and cornelius à lapide, petau, and the bollandists. a single name, like that of zaccaria, has works recorded under it, whereof the th is in volumes quarto, and the th in volumes octavo. the catechism of canisius fills nearly columns with the notices of its principal editions, translations, abridgments; the commentaries upon it, and critiques. rossignol has works to his name. the list of productions about edmund campian, for or against him, chiefly in english, fills, in de backers' folio, two and a half columns of minutest print. bellarmine, in father sommervogel's new edition, fills pages, double column.[ ] under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes made into every language, including arabic, chinese, indian; also the critiques, and the works published in refutation--a controversial enterprise which largely built up the protestant theological literature of the times, and, in bellarmine's case alone, meant the theological protestant literature for or years afterwards. oxford founded an anti-bellarmine chair. the editions of one of this great man's works are catalogued by sommervogel under the distinct heads of languages.[ ] in the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the de backers' work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have their catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such subjects too are here as might not be expected. thus "military art" has authors' names under it; "agriculture" ; "navy" ; "music" ; "medicine" . to conclude then our history of this educational order, we have one synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors, all of one family. we have much more. this one work "attesting," as de backer says in his preface, "at one and the same time a prodigious activity and often an indisputable merit," whereof three and a half centuries have been the course in time, and the whole world the place and theatre, is a general record of religion, letters, science, and education, in every country, civilized or barbarous, where the society of jesus labored and travelled. and where has it not done so? in many parts of the world it was the first to occupy the field with literary men, who then sent communications to their superiors, or to learned societies, about the manners of different countries, the state of religion there, of letters, science, and education, including reports of their own observations in geography, meteorology, botany, astronomy, mineralogy, etc. original sources, from which later history in north, south, and central america is drawing materials, are seen described here as they appeared; so too with regard to japan, china, thibet, the philippine islands, hindustan, syria, as also to-day with respect to the native tongues of the north american indians. here the record of published literature, described and catalogued according to date, marks the stages of mathematical and physical science, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, and of magnetic and electrical researches all through last century; as well as the relationship between the books of jesuit authors and similar or kindred ones, by persons outside the society, in different countries and of divers religions. in short, works composed in most of the tongues of the world exhibit the chief periods in universal culture, and the developments elaborated in the civilization of mankind.[ ] part ii. analysis of the system of studies chapter x. aquaviva. the ratio studiorum. so centralized an order as the society of jesus, which formed its professors for every country, and sent them from one place to another, undertook, in doing so, to exhibit a definite system of education, of courses, of method. besides such a unity of method, it professed also a consistent uniformity of doctrine. before its time there was no one method which could be considered universal; because there was no teaching body itself universal. the order, as it branched out into the world, found a variety of systems in vogue; and the jesuit professors conformed, as best they could, to the local traditions of populations very diverse, in universities which were distinct and mutually independent. but, while they endeavored to better such systems, in accordance with the plan of their own constitution, it was clear that they fell short of realizing the idea of their founder. hence variations and dispensations were part of the usual order of the day. yet there is a best way of doing everything; and, not least, in education. in such a best way, some elements are essential at all times, while others are accidental, and vary with time, place, and circumstance. the ideal system will preserve in its integrity all that is essential, and then will adapt the general principles with the closest adjustment to the particular environment. besides the unity of method desired, which i may define to be _the best way best adjusted to circumstance_, there was need, as i have just said, of a consistent uniformity of doctrine; lest, in the same chair of philosophy, of divinity, or of science, or in chairs placed side by side, one professor should say yea to a question, and another nay to the same question, with no more material a reason evident for the difference, save that one taught here and the other there, one spoke yesterday, the other speaks to-day. the educational effects, however, are far from being immaterial; for, contradictory statements eliding one another, it is quite possible that the students understand less the next day than the day before. and, as to the professors themselves, nothing can imperil more the harmony and efficiency of an educational organization, than disagreement of opinion in the function and act of teaching. in philosophy, the occasions for dispute spring off at every turn. theology, as every one knows, is made to bristle with them. and, among men who are themselves educated to the highest degree of mental culture, interests and questions like these are far more absorbing than money, place, or power elsewhere. if anywhere ideas rule, it is among men of profound thought; as the intense intellectuality of the mediæval universities had shown, with all the consequences of unlimited vagaries in an unbridled scholasticism; or, again, as the whole history of the intellectual greek world had evidenced, whether in the early ages of the christian church, or in the heathen generations before. whatever, then, a man may think privately, and be free to think, in matters of mere opinion, the genius of education imposes limits on the manner and matter of his actual teaching; and the speculations of a thinker, a writer, or an investigator, are not to be confounded with the best results of an educator, who, doing his work in the best way, is to effect a definite and immediate object. that object is nothing less than the equipping of fresh young spirits with principles of thought and habits of life, to enter fully appointed on their respective paths of duty. in this view, therefore, definiteness of matter, no less than unity of method, were required from the first for an effective system of education. during forty years, the individual enterprise of experienced and responsible men had been interpreting the values and measuring the results of existing methods. the society itself had mounted into such a position, as practically to command the whole field of secular education. its own system must have been excellent already. nor could that system have been uniformly excellent, but for some uniformity which characterized it. still the unity was defective. the provinces were petitioning for an improvement. evils obstructed the way to something better. for these reasons, the matter was taken in hand by one general after another. and the final outcome of their work was a "form," or "method of studies," _formula_, or _ratio studiorum_. on the nineteenth day of february, , father claudius aquaviva was elected fifth general superior of the society. taking up this educational project where his predecessors had left it, and, like them, availing himself of his almost boundless resources for obtaining information, he began by putting the work through every possible stage of consultation, to which the traditions of his office, and his own executive ability prompted him; and, when all prudent means had been exhausted in deliberating, he then used the executive power which was vested in him; and he required that what had been so laboriously designed, by the united efforts of many, should henceforth be reduced to practice, with the good will of all. it will be interesting to review briefly the process of elaboration. in the general assembly which elected aquaviva, a committee of twelve fathers from different countries was appointed to draw up a method of studies. how far their work proceeded does not appear. three years later, in , the general named a commission of six, john azor from spain, gaspar gonzalez from portugal, peter buys from austria, anthony guisani from upper germany, stephen tucci of rome, and james tyre to represent france. this last-named jesuit, a scotchman, was not unknown in the lists of controversy to his countryman, john knox. they were all experienced in the administration of colleges, and versed in the subjects of all the faculties. entering on their labors, they worked during six winter months in the poenitentiaria of st. peter's in rome; and, during the next three summer months, they resided in the quirinal. the eyes of the chief authorities in the catholic world were turned in expectancy towards them. indeed, some of the chief interests of catholic christendom seemed to depend upon them. they spent three hours a day in consultation. the rest of their time they devoted to consulting authors and conning over methods, in the three fields of letters, philosophy, and divinity. the documents which they studied are enumerated by themselves as being the minutes of previous deliberations held at rome, or in the more prominent colleges of the order; the letters, consultations and laws of the universities, and other such documents, sent at different times up to that date from italy, spain, france, germany, poland; the fourth part of the constitution, as the standard of guidance; the canons of the general assemblies; the rules and statutes of the schools; moreover, the customs and regulations of the roman college.[ ] after nine months of consecutive labor, they presented the results to the general, in august, . father aquaviva submitted the document for examination to the professors of the roman college. then he took the whole matter under his own personal consideration, with his four general assistants, who represented each a certain number of provinces. at this stage, the report was printed, not as a rule determined on, but as the preliminary outline of a rule. the copies struck off were few, just enough for the use of the provinces. the general's letter, which accompanied the report, defined the precise stage at which the process was now understood to be.[ ] he says that, in a matter of such grave and universal consequence, it was not his intention to prescribe anything, without first learning the opinions of the chief doctors of the society. accordingly, he had been content with reading the results of the commission's labors, decreeing nothing, changing nothing, except so far as was necessary to put it in shape for distribution. he now required the provincial superiors, immediately upon receipt of the present letter, to select at least five men, who were the best qualified in point of learning and judgment, along with other members, who were eminent in literature, and whom the provincial might think fit to convoke. to these the report was to be submitted, for each to examine privately, and with great care. on certain days, several times in the week, they were to meet and hold consultations; to put their conclusions in writing, as well with regard to the practical method of studies, as with regard to the speculative opinions which they favored; they were to note whatever they thought should be added, or be made clearer, or otherwise regulated, for the greater perfection of the work. if any of the fathers, designated for this provincial committee, could not possibly attend the meetings, still they were to send their opinions in writing to the fathers actually in session; so that full account might be taken of the public opinion in that province. the criterion they were to follow, in making up their minds, was not so much their own private sentiment or their own leaning this way or that, as the general good of the whole society, the practice of the universities and schools, and, in fine, the judgment of doctors most approved for their authority and solidity of doctrine. aquaviva refers to the idea and intention of ignatius with respect to the present undertaking; and he adds: "i would have all steadfastly keep this object in view, that they endeavor to find out reasons, not how a final decree may be prevented, as if the enterprise were hard, and could not possibly be carried out (for we have made up our mind to carry it out, since it is necessary, and is recommended by the constitution); but how the difficulties, if any such there be, may disappear, and the whole order may combine in one and the same arrangement; for otherwise the final result would only be the greater detriment of the society." he calls their attention to an important point, in what is now styled pedagogics, or the science of education. it is, that, in the form now sent out, the fathers had taken pains to explain their reasons for arriving at conclusions. that would not be done in the system to be drawn up later, which would contain only the statement of directions for all to follow. in these words, we have a most important distinction laid down between the science which underlies the system of education, and the practical method itself which rests upon the science. the _ratio studiorum_, as subsequently promulgated, is a practical method. the science is sketched, as need arises, in the preliminary _ratio_ of . at the same time, father aquaviva despatched another letter, about which he says, in a postscript to the foregoing, that the six points provisionally laid down in it are to be subjected to the same examination as the preliminary _ratio_ itself. in this supplementary epistle, he premises that it will require much time and consideration to issue the final code of rules; and therefore, as a direction for the time being, he issues the following:-- first, professors shall adhere to st. thomas aquinas as their standard in theology. secondly, they shall take care, in their manner of teaching, always to consolidate faith and piety. thirdly, he lays down a principle of still wider application, and one which seems vital in the whole theory and practice of teaching: "let no one defend any opinion which is judged by the generality of learned men to go against the received tenets of philosophers and theologians, or the common consent of theological schools." this touches a vital element in education. if we suppose that the teacher's art lies, not in giving forth the lucubrations of his own private thoughts and theories, but in imparting solid results, approved and ascertained, to those who come for such results, and wish to receive them in the most approved way, then the professor in his chair ought not to mistake himself for the author in his study, nor should he practise on living men, whose life is all before them, what he might, with more propriety, first practise on the leisured world, and test elsewhere, either in the printed page, or in conference with his equals. the professor, as such, is not the original investigator. in mathematics, he is notoriously not so. in that branch, the best teacher is the man who walks along a definite line, turns neither to the right nor left, and finishes in a definite time; or else his scholars will never finish. to a certain degree, the same holds in all courses. if a man is theorizing, when he ought to be instructing, he goes off the line of perfect system, however much pains he takes with his matter; just as much as if, taking no pains whatever, he neglected his matter altogether, went behind it, or around it, gave histories of his branch, methods of teaching it, and descanted on pedagogics, to young people who were never sent to him for that purpose. they are sent to learn definite matter, and to be formed therein on a good plan, by the man who understands it. then, as loyola said in another connection, "when they have experienced in themselves the effects thereof," they will be qualified for all the rest, for understanding the plan itself on which they have been formed, and enjoying all the practical results of it; and, if their line of life invites, for understanding other plans too. this is practical wisdom in education; neither dilettantism nor speculation. fourthly, aquaviva lays down a principle regarding the public advocacy of opinions. he is not referring to authorities denouncing, or professors repudiating, them; but merely to certain conditions for putting them forward: "if opinions, no matter whose they be, are found in a certain province or city to give offence to many catholics, whether members of the society or not, that is, persons not unqualified to judge, let no one teach them or defend them there, albeit the same doctrines may be taught elsewhere without offence." the word "defence," in a context like this, means publishing and sustaining theses against all comers in public disputations; wherein the professor represents the school, and the school is put to the account of the order. the principle seems discreet. if a corporate body does not want to be compromised, it is not for the member to compromise it. if he wants to use the perfect freedom of his opinions, and deliver himself of his own pronouncements, he ought first to assure himself that his circumstances are such as to set him free from representing others. this is an elementary principle of social and urbane existence. the fifth point concerns the march of improvement in the advancement of opinions. it describes the method of discreet development: "in questions which have already been treated by others, let no one follow new opinions, or, in matters which in any way pertain to religion, or are of some consequence, let no one introduce new questions, without consulting the prefect of studies, or the superior. if, then, it still remains dubious, whether the new opinion, or the new question, is permissible, it will be proper for the said authority, in order that things may proceed more smoothly, to learn the judgment of others in the society upon the subject; and then he will determine what appears best for the greater glory of god." in the sixth and last point, aquaviva calls attention to a former decree, upon the manner of treating the aristotelian philosophy.[ ] so much for this letter of aquaviva. on the sense and purport thereof he invited the communication of views from the order at large, as well as on the document which he encloses, the preliminary _ratio studiorum_. to this we may now turn our attention. the six fathers, who drew it up, state, in their introduction, that there are two mainstays and supports of the society of jesus, "an ardent pursuit of piety and an eminent degree of learning," _ardens pietatis studium et præstans rerum scientia_. if piety is not illumined with the light of learning, it can be, no doubt, of great use to the person who possesses it, but of scarcely any use in the service of the church and of one's neighbor, in the administration of the word and of the sacraments, in the education of youth, in controversies with those who are hostile to the faith, in giving counsel, answering doubts, and in all other offices and functions, which are proper to men of the order. all these call for an endowment of learning not common, but excelling in its degree. to acquire such learning, it is of supreme consequence that we set before ourselves what path we enter on, what arts we employ, and what means we use; because, unless a ready and tried method be adopted, _ratio facilis ac solers_, much labor is spent in gathering but little fruit; whereas, if the labor of studies be guided by some sage rule, great results are compendiously obtained, at the cost of little research. then the commission goes on to say: "we have undertaken to teach, not only members of the order, but youth from the world outside. the number of this latter class is vast; it includes brilliant talent, and represents the nobility. we cannot imagine that we do justice to our functions, or come up to the expectations formed of us, if we do not feed this multitude of youths, in the same way as nurses do, with food dressed in the best way, for fear they grow up in our schools, without growing much in learning. an additional spur is felt in the circumstance, that whatever concerns us is public and, day after day, is before the eyes of all, even of those who are not well disposed towards us." the fathers consider it unnecessary to enlarge upon that harmony of views, so much commended in the constitution, as to matters of public policy or teaching; they say, "sufficient regard could not, up to this, be paid to such harmony; for, when no common order or form was as yet prescribed, every one thought that he could hold what sentiments he liked, and teach them to others in the manner he himself preferred; so that sometimes the members of the order disagreed as much among themselves, as with others outside."[ ] after describing, in vivid terms, the manner in which they had conducted their deliberations, and arrived at conclusions, and how, when any keen dispute had arisen among them,[ ] they had divided and distinguished the disputed matter, and had examined it during two and even three days, till they came to settle at last on what all of them accepted, the critics come to the practice and order of studies;[ ] and upon this they enlarge, in successive chapters, under the following heads:-- the sacred scriptures. the length of the course in divinity. the means of finishing that course in four years. the method of lecturing. the questions which are either not to be treated by the theological professors, or are to be treated only at a certain part of the course. repetitions. disputations. the choice, censorship, and correcting of opinions. the private studies of students. vacations. the degrees of bachelor, master, doctor. controversial theology. moral theology. hebrew. the study of philosophy, which includes physics. mathematics. literature, that is, grammar, history, poetry, rhetoric. seminaries for literature and the higher faculties. the professors of literature. the grammar to be used. greek. different exercises in the classics. incitements to study. the method of promotion. books. vacations in the lower classes. order and piety. the respective objects and exercises of the classes of grammar and humanity. the class of humanity. the class of rhetoric. general distribution of time during the year. these are the matters handled in the publication of . in the course of treatment, this document contains, by way of a running commentary, the complete theory of education, or science of pedagogics, as understood by these critics. it will not be possible, within the brief limits of this work, to give more than a bare sketch of the pedagogical elements contained in the one hundred and fifty pages of the _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_.[ ] a second, partial edition of this preliminary _ratio_ was sent out by father aquaviva, in , to which an entertaining bibliographical history is attached.[ ] in , the fifth general assembly of the order met, claudius aquaviva presiding. by this time, during the interval of seven years which had elapsed since the first edition, the book had been subjected to examination in all the provinces; observations and criticisms had been returned; it had been re-committed to the fathers at rome, and revised by the general with his assistants; and had again been sent out for trial. the provincials and deputies, meeting in , brought with them the reports of how the system worked. its slightest defects were noted.[ ] most asked for an abridged form. amid the very grave questions then pending, the assembly took some action on the _ratio_. it was re-committed once more to the competent authorities for revision. and it assumed its last and definite form, in what was probably its ninth edition. this last issue, in the year , after fifteen years spent on the elaboration of it, is the ratio studiorum. one hundred and twenty-seven years later, the great old university of paris seems to have become a disciple of its educational rival, the society of jesus. querard observes that the rector, rollin, "without saying anything about it, translated the _ratio_ for his _traité des Études_."[ ] indeed, as m. bréal, historian of that university, observes, referring to the suppression of the order: "once delivered from the jesuits, the university installed itself in their houses, and continued their manner of teaching."[ ] in all general works on education, there is question of this system. its form is that of a practical method, without reasons being assigned, or arguments urged. it is a legislative document, which superseded all previous forms. the general's letter, which accompanied it, ordered the suppression of them all, promulgating this one to the exclusion of the rest. the sentiment, to which the last words of this letter gives expression as a fond hope, was fully responded to by the course of events, in the one hundred and seventy-four years which were to elapse before the general suppression of the order: "it is believed," he said, "that it will bring forth abundant fruit, for the benefit of our scholars," _quae nostris auditoribus uberes fructus allatura creditur_. aquaviva's letter is dated the eighth day of january, .[ ] chapter xi. formation of the master. his courses of literature and philosophy. it seems an apt distribution of our subject, to consider, first, the formation of the master, and secondly, the formation of the scholar. the master's development will conduct us chiefly through the higher studies; the scholar's, rather through the lower. thus the two persons, about whom the science of education revolves, will be directly under inspection; while the elements which go to form them will, at the same time, pass under review. without theorizing on pedagogy, the jesuit system itself, merely as observed and realized, results in the formation of professors. there are several reasons, apparent on the surface, why it should do so. the studies, which the members of the order pursue, are the same courses as the order professes for the world at large. but, for the jesuit members of the divers courses, a most elaborate system of examinations at every stage, with a specially searching manner of testing the students, is made to regard one objective point, which is the capacity of the jesuit to teach what he has learnt, and this, as evinced, while under examination. the manner, in which this point is judicially determined, consists in referring the examiners to a standard, called "mediocrity." after a personal and oral disputation with the young jesuit, lasting either half an hour, or one hour, or two consecutive hours, according to the stage at which he happens to be, a preponderating vote of the four or five examining professors must aver that he has "surpassed mediocrity." the learning, prudence, and sincerity of the examiners are appealed to without further sanction, except at the very last stage in the young man's progress, when success under the ordeal will entitle him to profession in the society. then each examiner's prudence is stimulated, and his sincerity bound down, by an oath. only at one initial stage, that of the first examination in the course of his three years' philosophy, is a certain margin allowed the beginner, in favor of bare mediocrity. "mediocrity" is defined to be that degree of intelligence, and comprehension of the matters studied, which can give an account of them to one asking an explanation. "to surpass mediocrity" designates the student's ability to defend his entire ground with such erudition and facility as show him qualified, in point of actual attainments, to profess the philosophy or theology studied. the final degree in the order, which is that of profession, requires this competency for all philosophy and theology together. here then we see, that the capacity to teach is made the criterion of having learned sufficiently well. passing through all the grades with this mark of excellence, the man who, after a general formation of seventeen years, and the requisite development of other qualifications, is then appointed to profess in a chair of the higher faculties, has been very much to the manner born of "surpassing mediocrity," and of doing so with the characteristics of a professor.[ ] how the same principles, if not in the same form, affect the conduct of the literary curriculum, we shall now see in the rest of this chapter. the literary curriculum has been already finished by the jesuit, before entering the order. but, after his admission, special means are taken to have him revise those studies, extend them, and grasp them from the standpoint of the teacher. it happens in jesuit history, and the nature of secondary education will always have it so, that the largest amount of teaching has been done in the arena of these literary courses. and it was no small part of the general revival of studies, effected by ignatius of loyola, that justice was done to literature, as well by students who were to enter on philosophical or scientific courses,[ ] as by those who contemplated embarking on life in the world. we noticed, on a former occasion, the reasoning of aquaviva with respect to this policy.[ ] the literary courses in question are those of grammar, humanities, and rhetoric, which fill from five to seven years. the fathers of urge the importance of these studies for the english and german students in rome, as if special difficulties were experienced with them.[ ] if we inquire what were the results of the stringent regulations adopted to enforce this policy, and what degree of proficiency was attained in the jesuit courses of belles-lettres and eloquence, we have only to consult the concordant testimony of history upon the "handsome style" and literary finish of the scholars. an interesting answer, from a domestic point of view, is casually afforded us by a remark, which the fathers of upper germany make, when in they send to aquaviva some animadversions of theirs upon the _ratio_. they say that students in the class of rhetoric might deliver their own orations, "since there are generally found in that class, particularly among those of the second year, young men who often surpass even their own professors in genius, and in the variety and fluency of their language."[ ] the bearing of all this is obvious, in determining the grade of those students who ask for admission into the order. it is after a full gymnasium course of this kind, that the life of the jesuit is to begin. and these are the studies which he will have to possess after the manner of a teacher. he will review them as soon as his two years of novitiate are over. those years of novitiate are blank, under the aspect of secular pursuits. but, in other respects, being a time for reflection and for internal application to the affairs of his mind and heart, they are worth a long season in the process of developing character, by habits of assiduous labor, of acquiring a taste for retirement and virtue, and practising the spirit of docility to counsel. indeed, on issuing from this period of intense application to the knowledge of self, the young religious student is already started on his career of knowing men, and dealing successfully with human characters. henceforth, ecclesiastical knowledge and other acquirements will be proper to his state, as a religious; but, for the special vocation of the society of jesus, he returns to secular studies. in view of his approaching "regency," or professorship in the curriculum of letters, the critics of give this advice: "it would be most profitable for the schools, if those who are about to be preceptors were privately taken in hand by some one of great experience; and, for two months or more, were practised by him in the method of reading, teaching, correcting, writing, and managing a class. if teachers have not learnt these things beforehand, they are forced to learn them afterwards at the expense of their scholars; and then they will acquire proficiency only when they have already lost in reputation; and perchance they will never unlearn a bad habit. sometimes, such a habit is neither very serious nor incorrigible, if taken at the beginning; but, if the habit is not corrected then, it comes to pass that a man, who otherwise would have been most useful, becomes well-nigh useless. there is no describing how much amiss preceptors take it, if they are corrected, when they have already adopted a fixed method of teaching; and what continual disagreement ensues on that score with the prefects of studies. to obviate this evil, in the case of our professors, let the prefect in the chief college, whence our professors of humanities and grammar are usually taken, remind the rector and provincial, about three months before the next scholastic year begins, that, if the province needs new professors for the following term, they should select some one eminently versed in the art of managing classes, whether he be, at the time, actually a professor, or a student of theology or philosophy; and to him the future masters are to go daily for an hour, to be prepared by him for their new ministry, giving prelections in turn, writing, dictating, correcting, and discharging the other duties of a good teacher."[ ] this advice was in keeping with an ordinance of the second general assembly, held in , nine years after the death of ignatius. it had been resolved, that at least one perfect seminary of the society should be established in each province for the formation of professors and others, who would be competent workmen in the vineyard of christ, in the department of humane letters, philosophy, and theology, so as to suffice for the needs of the whole province. this was to be done as soon as convenient in each province. henceforward, it became a matter of general observance that all should have spent "at least two years in the school of eloquence," besides repeating grammar, if that were necessary.[ ] "and if any are so gifted as to promise great success in these pursuits, it will be worth while seeing whether they should not spend three years in them, to lay a more solid foundation."[ ] to such a solid foundation in humane letters corresponds a special privilege in the crowning of a member's formation, inasmuch as the society admits to profession one who is altogether eminent in literature, even though in theology he may not have surpassed mediocrity; a privilege which was extended to great proficiency in the indian and oriental languages, as also to a marked excellence in greek and hebrew.[ ] examining more in detail this literary formation, we may take up the programme for the seminary of the junior members, as drafted by jouvancy. he drew it up in pursuance of a decree to that effect, passed a hundred years later, by the general assembly of . this decree required that, "besides the rules, whereby the masters of literature are directed in the manner of teaching, they should be provided with an instruction and method of learning properly, and so be guided in their private studies even while they are actually teaching."[ ] the method in question is outlined in the first part of jouvancy's little book, entitled _ratio discendi et docendi_, "the art of learning and of teaching." a cursory glance at this part shows that, while addressing masters on the subject of their own private studies, his directions bear chiefly upon their efficiency as teachers. jouvancy divides his subject into three chapters: first, the knowledge and use of languages; secondly, the possession of sciences; thirdly, some aids to study. as to languages, they are three in number: greek, latin, and the native tongue. laying down some principles on style in general, he says: "if a correct understanding, according to horace, be the first principle and source of writing well, it follows that style, which is nothing else than a certain manner of writing, has two parts; first, the intelligent thought or sentiment, properly conceived; secondly, the expression of the same; so that, as man himself is made up of soul and body, all style likewise consists of the underlying thought and the manner of its expression." thought must be true, perspicuous, and adapted to the subject. to think truly or justly of things, there is required mental power and insight, which distinguishes what is really the gist of a subject-matter from what is only a deceptive appearance, or is superficial. assistance is to be had for all this from the reading of good books, from accurate reflection and protracted thought, which does not merely skim over the subject, or touch it in a desultory way; again, from the analysis of parts, causes, adjuncts; finally, from the prudent judgment of others, or what is called criticism. as to the ways of acquiring proper diction, jouvancy says: "i would have you avail yourself of books which treat of this matter, not so as to imagine all is done by thumbing them; you will gain much more by the plentiful reading of the best writers"; and again, "'abundance of diction,' _copia verborum_, will be easily acquired by reading much." it is by reading, writing, and imitating the best authors that a good style is formed; and only the best authors are to be read, "lest the odor of a foreign and vicious style cling to the mind, as to new vases." coming to treat of one's native tongue, jouvancy lays down these points: "the study of the vernacular consists chiefly in three things. first, since the latin authors are explained to the boys, and are rendered into the mother-tongue, the version so made should be as elegant as possible. wherefore, let the master elaborate his version for himself, or, if he draws on any writer in the vernacular, let him compare first the latin text with the version before him; thus he will find it easy to perceive what is peculiar to either tongue, and what is the respective force and beauty of each. the same method is to be observed in explaining and translating histories in the lower classes. secondly, all the drafts of compositions, which are dictated in the vernacular, must be in accord with the most exact rules of the mother-tongue, free from every defect of style. [thirdly,] it will be of use to bring up and discuss, from time to time, whatever has been noticed in the course of one's reading, and whatever others have observed regarding the vicious and excellent qualities of speech. the younger master should be on his guard against indulging too much in the reading of vernacular authors, especially the poets, to the loss of time, and perhaps to the prejudice of virtue." the interest here manifested in the vicious and excellent qualities of the mother-tongue was a contribution of the schools to the development of modern languages. nor was the severity, which is here prescribed, with reference to the use of poetry, a barrier to the formation of some good poets among the jesuits themselves. friedrich von spee is considered a distinguished lyric poet of the seventeenth century. denis, as the translator of ossian into german, helped to inaugurate the later period of german literature. in italian prose, bartoli, segneri, pallavicini, have ranked as classics; tiraboschi, as the historian of literature; bresciani, in our days, as the popular novelist. as writers of french prose, bourdaloue and bouhours appertain to the choicest circle of louis xiv's golden age; du cygne, brumoy, tournemine, besides others already mentioned in these pages, took their place as literary critics. and, in their several national literatures, cahours, martin, garucci, have attained their literary eminence as art-critics. reverting to solidity of thought as the basis of style, jouvancy eliminates the false ornaments of a subtle and abrupt style, by reducing the conceptions to a dialectical analysis: "what does the thing mean?" and he gives examples. in the second chapter of the same part, the _ars discendi_, he comes to the acquisition of those sciences, which are proper to a master of literature. he says: "the erudition of a religious master is not confined to mere command of languages, whereof we have spoken heretofore; it must rise higher to the understanding of some sciences, which it is usual to impart to youth. such are rhetoric, poetry, history, chronology, geography, and philology or polymathy, which last is not so much a single science as a series of erudite attainments, whereof an accomplished person should at least have tasted." history he divides into sacred, universal, and particular. "as to the histories of particular nations, writers of the respective nationalities record them;" "and if you do not add chronology to history, you take out one of history's eyes." for geography, he designates the books and maps which were then to be had. and, for all the branches, he indicates standard authors. now, in this little rhetorical sketch of jouvancy's, we may take note of two features, one pedagogical, the other historical. the distinctively pedagogical cast is put upon these private studies, in as much as they are magisterial, being pursued with express reference to the master's chair. the historical feature, to be noted here, is common to the jesuit educational literature in general; which, in its many departments, marked several epochs and, as a whole, made an era in education. thus, at the time of the _ratio studiorum_, there were indeed several guides of the very first rank, in the path of a literary formation. they were three in number, cicero, quintilian, and aristotle. from these the professor of rhetoric had to derive his matter and make clear his method. the _ratio_ names them as his text-books for the precepts.[ ] from these sources the literary activity and experience of many generations of professors, in several hundred colleges of the order, tended to mark out the best line to follow, for the attainment of literary perfection. the literary course, in which they themselves were proximately formed for the duties of teaching, served but to organize the matter, and to digest it. the numberless pedagogical text-books, issued before jouvancy, and after him, exhibit the progress of the movement during the several centuries. and, at present, the system may be seen in its most developed form, if one consults the newest guides, like father kleutgen's _ars dicendi_, or father broeckaert's _le guide du jeune littérateur_. but, long before our day, the most ordinary systems of literary instruction have embodied the method; and the commonest text-books have it. a similar epoch was made, as early as , by the grammar of father emmanuel alvarez, _de institutione grammatica libri tres_, a work adopted by the _ratio_, then republished in editions so numerous as to baffle all calculation, translated either entire, or in part, into thirteen languages; while one portion, well-known in our times as a "latin prosody," is credited to divers authors or publishers.[ ] the latest editions of this grammar, issued in different languages, are of the last twenty-five years. this era of development in grammar superseded the subtleties and metaphysical abstractions of mediæval methods.[ ] in history, not to mention the voluminous james sirmond, whose researches among original sources were made before the sixteenth century had closed, father denis petau (petavius), early in the following century, composed his great work on chronology, laying down the exact basis in this respect for universal history, both sacred and profane.[ ] geneva and holland alike reproduced the work. labbe's publications on ancient and modern history and chronology, the greater part of his eighty works being upon these subjects, with several abridgments and geographical adjuncts; father buffier's "practical history," which was published for the schools in , and then rapidly went through divers editions, to be supplemented in by his "universal geography," his treatise on the globe and his maps, all of which went through some scores of french, italian and dutch editions; these and other works of the kind indicate the line of pedagogical development going on at the same time in the various colleges. hence, the "new elements of history and geography for the use of the scholars of the collège louis-le-grand," which was an abridgment of buffier's book, could say, with some propriety, on its first page: "how great has been the carelessness of an age, otherwise so judicious and cultivated as ours, in not having as yet made the science of history and geography an essential part of the education of youth? the public and posterity will perhaps be grateful to the college of louis-le-grand, for having shown in this regard an example, which ought to do honor to our time."[ ] thus the same resources were at the service of jesuit education as, in the general literary world, helped to form the jesuit historians: mariana, historian of spain; damian strada, of the war in the netherlands; balbin, of bohemia; naruszewicz, of poland; katona, of the kings of hungary; damberger, of the middle ages; francis wagner, of leopold i; g. daniel, historiographer royal of france. geography is not to be separated from history. up to the end of the sixteenth century, ptolemy's geography, corrected, modified, altered, according to the reports of navigators, had been the scientific standard, but uncertain, vacillating, and self-contradictory. from the earlier part of the seventeenth century, the astronomical observations, sent from the far east by the jesuit missionaries, emphasized the need of a general reform, already sufficiently evident. father riccioli, assisted by father grimaldi, who is known in science as one of the precursors of newton, undertook, in his _geographia reformata_, the reform of geography by means of astronomy.[ ] for this purpose, he created first his own metrology, identifying, and reducing to a common denomination, all the measures received in reports from different parts of the earth. the first eclipse of the moon which he makes mention of, among his astronomical reports, had been observed on the night of november , , by father scheiner at ingolstadt and by father charles spinola at nangasaki in japan. at the time that riccioli was writing, the jesuit missionaries had multiplied in china. adam schall died in , holding the post of president of the mathematical tribunal at pekin; he was followed by ferdinand verbiest; and then a long line of imperial astronomers of the celestial empire, koegler, hallerstein, seixas, francesco, de rocha, espinha, continued to send their reports, either to the colleges of their respective provinces, or to other mathematical centres, or to the learned societies in europe, whereof not a few jesuits were members. meanwhile, scientific returns from hindustan, siam, thibet, on one side of the globe, and from san domingo on the other side, poured into the collège louis-le-grand, and made of this educational centre an indispensable auxiliary to the bureau of longitudes. all this, reacting on education, was received with satisfaction by the general world, and drew the pedagogic bodies steadily, though with some difficulty, on the line of progress. the university of paris was quite tardy in following up the steps of the jesuits.[ ] as to mathematics in education, it is evident that a similar process of development must have been the history of this branch, with the limitation however, that mathematical science has not been so nearly created anew within these last centuries, as some other departments. father christopher clavius, "the euclid of his time," was engaged by gregory xiii in reforming the calendar, the same which we use to-day; he died in . his death intervening, while his complete works were being republished, father ziegler superintended the new edition, till it was finished in five tomes. francis coster, at cologne, hurtado perez, at ingolstadt, henry garnet, an englishman, and grienberger, successor of clavius, both at rome, belonged, with other mathematicans of the order, to the sixteenth century. the writers of the preliminary _ratio_, , require that, in a brief course of mathematics, "euclid's elements" "be seasoned always with some application to geography or the sphere"; then, in the following year, the rest of father clavius' "epitome of practical arithmetic"[ ] is to be finished;[ ] and special courses are provided for members of the order, who give promise of eminence.[ ] indeed, whether as professors of officers for the army and navy, or as constructing and directing observatories, the members pursued every branch of mathematics, pure and applied. father l'hoste's "treatise on naval evolutions" was used in the french navy, as "the book of the jesuit."[ ] of this book the count de maistre writes quaintly in : "an english admiral assured me less than ten years ago, that he had received his first instructions in the 'book of the jesuit.' if events are taken for results, there is not a better book in the world!"[ ] eximeno, at the school of segovia, instructed young nobles in mathematics and the science of artillery. and so, in general, courses were provided, according as the needs of respective localities required. the republic of venice struck a gold medal in honor of vincent riccolati, the jesuit engineer, just as the king of denmark honors de vico, the astronomer, with a gold medal struck in his honor, and having the words inscribed, "comet seen, jan. , ."[ ] kircher, boscovich, pianciani, secchi, perry, honored with the fellowship of so many learned and scientific academies, and exercising a distinct influence to-day, either by the far-reaching effects of their researches, or by their actual contact with science, may be looked upon as belonging to our most recent times.[ ] it is remarked that to the order was due the multiplication of observatories, in the middle of last century. father huberti superintended the building of an observatory at würzburg; father maximilian hell, the court astronomer, built one at vienna. at manheim, a third was erected by mayer and metzger; at tyrnau, one by keri; at prague, another by steppling; one at the jesuit college of gratz; similarly at wilna, milan, florence, parma, venice, brescia, rome, lisbon, marseilles, bonfa. in short, montucla remarks: "in germany and the neighboring countries, there were few jesuit colleges without an observatory. they were to be found at ingolstadt, gratz, breslau, olmütz, prague, posen, etc. most of them seem to have shared the fate of the society; though there are a few which survive the general destruction."[ ] these few indications go to illustrate the pedagogical epochs made by the system of the order. and the young member, who is being formed to contribute his own share towards carrying on the education of the world, passes all these branches under review. one of them, mathematics, is conducted outside of the philological seminary, which we have so far been considering; it is left for his course of philosophy, which he will pursue during three years, before actually embarking on the life of the class-room, or his "regency." we may now suppose that the time has arrived for his entering the class-room, as a master of grammar and elementary literature. when he does so, he has possessed himself, in that philosophical triennium, of positive intellectual attainments, neither meagre nor common. he has surveyed the whole field of natural thought and investigation, in the various branches, mental, physical, and ethical. to enumerate them, there is logic, including dialectics, and the criteria, objective and subjective, of truth; ontology, or general metaphysics; special metaphysics, in its three divisions:--cosmology, which immediately underlies physics, chemistry, and biology; psychology, which underlies all the anthropological sciences about the human compound, its principles, and the formation of its ideas; natural theology. all this is theoretic or speculative philosophy. there is besides the science of moral life, which comprises ethics, natural right, and social right. concurrent with philosophy, there has been a double course of physics and chemistry, during one year, with a course of higher mathematics, varying from one year to three; as well as a half-year's course of geology, astronomy, and some other subsidiary matters. this is the general formation. the principle which guides individual cases was laid down by ignatius in these terms: "in the superior faculties, on account of the great inequality of talents and age and other considerations, the rector of the university will consider how much in each line individuals shall learn, and how long they shall stay in the courses; although it is better for those who are of the proper age, and who have the requisite facility in point of talent, that they should endeavor to advance and become conspicuous in all."[ ] during all this course of higher natural sciences, some attention has still been paid to accessories; literature has not been entirely neglected; oratory has been practised, and poems presented on stated occasions. and then the new master is introduced into his course of "regency." chapter xii. youthful masters. when ignatius of loyola was governing the society, the multiplicity of affairs which he had to administer, and the absorption of mind which they demanded, did not prevent him from devoting to every minute element the attention which it specially invited. hence he required the young scholastics, who were reviewing their literary studies at valencia, to send him their orations and a poem. so, too, with the masters of the lower classes at messina, in sicily. this college had opened with the higher courses of letters; but the very next year such numerous throngs of younger boys came asking for admission, that the system, begun with rhetoric and humanities, was carried down to meet their needs; and the entire course was distributed into five grades. ignatius required the teachers of these lower grades, no less than those of the higher, to write each week, and send him an account of the affairs of his class.[ ] it is indeed an eventful moment, when a man becomes a teacher of others. they may be boys. but, whether they are boys merely blossoming into life, or youths on the verge of manhood, the teacher of them has to be a teacher of men; and perhaps more so with the boy than with the man, inasmuch as his control of the younger student has to be so much the more complete. it is not merely such a control as will address the intellects of men mature, whose characters are already far advanced in the way of formation, or are perhaps fixed for life; but it must be such as will form a whole human nature, which is still pliable and docile. as an almost universal rule, the jesuit scholastic, after his course of philosophy, takes his place in a college to teach grammar or literature. if it be asked, why should this be an almost universal rule, several reasons are at hand. in the first place, the candidate for admission into the order has been accepted with special reference to this work. if this reference was expressly overlooked, the candidate so admitted is in an exceptional category. in the second place, the whole tenor of what has to be said in the present chapter will show the pedagogical policy in the arrangement. but, in the third place, not to pass over too summarily one special fitness, i will say a few words upon it at once. the manner of teaching the young is oral and tutorial. all through the jesuit system the manner followed is oral: in the examinations of the lower classes, where writing is admitted, it is only as a specimen of style and composition that writing enters the examination exercises. with the younger students, the manner of teaching is oral in its most specific sense. it is not that generic quality which will suit as well the lecturer or the public speaker. but it is the tutorial manner, which includes a fund of sympathy, of that tact which supposes sympathy, of such a superiority, both moral and intellectual, as knows how to stoop, and elevate the boy by stooping, and does it all naturally, instinctively, gracefully. in the ordinary course of human affairs, this magnetic power of the teacher is more intense, according as in years he is nearer to the subject on whom his ascendancy plays, and by whom it is spontaneously admitted. i mean that inestimable and precious subject, the mind and heart of the impressionable boy, who is about to develop into manhood, first young, and then mature. the youthful subject is rich, though not in positive acquisitions already made its own; for, in this respect, it may rather be considered _parum fructuosa_, as sacchini says; that is, bearing little fruit as yet, either of judgment or positive acquirements. but it is rich in its promise, as it struggles upward into the sunshine of varied and beautiful truth. this is the fact which imposes upon liberal education the duty of omitting nothing that is either beautiful or polished, in imagination, thought, or style. it justifies belles lettres and the most finished course of literature, as being the chosen garden of flowers and fruit, to entertain withal, richly and exquisitely, the youthful promise of mind, sentiment, and heart. or, inverting the figure, if we liken the mind itself in youth to the choice and prolific soil of a garden, we may note that, to till such soil, there is need of a gardener who has a delicate hand and a light touch. he must not be a lecturer who stands off, nor a speaker who declaims, nor a text-book monger who reads, and hears recitations of what a book says; nor is he to dole out methods and analyses to an inquisitive sense and emotional fancy, which, in the youthful soul, are the temporary vesture of an unfolding intellect; even, as in nature around, things tangible and palpable are bursting, to the boy's inquisitive eyes, with the great intellectual truths which they contain. analyses, text-books, lectures are not the powers with the young mind. but, often enough, we see where the real power lies; when young men, scarcely as yet approaching the prime of life, exercise over impressionable and brilliant youths, not much beneath themselves in age, such a personal influence as bids fair to rank them among the greater forces of human nature--forces which are great in leading, because they know so well how to follow. that other form of ascendancy, more purely intellectual, and originating in wide learning and maturity of scholarship, belongs to the university professor of a later stage of life. hence it appears that youthfulness in the master is an advantage for the tutorial teaching of the young. the critics who drew up the preliminary _ratio_ in were of opinion that the masters in the literary courses should be assigned to their work, not after their course of philosophy, but before.[ ] they would except from this arrangement only the professor of rhetoric; perhaps, also, in the chief colleges, the professor of humanity or poetry; besides, of course, those "whose age or deportment shows that they are too young to become masters as yet, or too far advanced in years to be kept back from their philosophy." in support of this view, they urge several reasons, which do not much concern us here; as, for instance, that, if young men have once tasted of the subtleties of the philosophers, they can hardly bring themselves to take pleasure any more in the insipid subject-matter of grammar; they will pore over philosophical lore; they will branch off, during class, into philosophical digressions, which may serve for show, but not for utility. the critics also express a fear that these philosophers will bring into the school-room a style of language infected with philosophical terms; and they quote the eminent jesuit, annibal codret, to the effect that, if philosophy has been tasted beforehand, nothing brilliant in literary style can subsequently be guaranteed. but, these arguments notwithstanding, the society, when it came to sanction a final arrangement, in the legislative document of , seems to have entertained a higher idea of the younger members, and of their ability and resolution to shake off any deleterious effects of scholastic latin, when they advanced to the chair of purest latinity. hence the legislation ordains that philosophy is to be studied before undertaking to teach letters.[ ] there are several reasons, however, which, as urged by these critics, are quite relevant to our present topic. they urge that grammar studies require a certain fervor, or alacrity, which is rather to be found in persons who are younger, and so far are nearer to the thoughts and sentiments of boyhood. the fuller results of education, in this respect, are not to be had from them when older. if authority or experience is felt to be wanting, it can readily be supplemented by the prefect of studies, who is constantly in attendance on the classes of grammar; and his direction finds a sufficient response in the teacher's aptitude and docility. indeed, docility to counsel is so indispensable a requisite, on the part of young teachers, that the general mutius vitelleschi observes: "if they were to show themselves impatient of correction, and were to refuse the necessary aids for becoming efficient, they should on all accounts be removed from teaching, even if they had filled only half a year; since it is more just and expedient that one suffer shame, than that many be injured."[ ] unless singular talents, or the bare force of circumstance, recommend another course of action, it is not desirable that new teachers should at once become masters of the higher class of grammar or of humanity, though otherwise not unfit for these grades. on all accounts, say the critics, the rule should be that they start with the lowest classes, and then, year after year, advance to the next higher grade, with the best part of their scholars. a certain crudeness and inexperience which, at the beginning, are unavoidable in their management, will cause, as long as it lasts, not so much evil with the younger as with the older students. inexperience wears away with practice. then again, if the masters go up each year, and the scholars go with them, the same students are very much with the same teachers. the young people have not to pass so often from one kind of management to another. frequent change entails a waste of time, until each party comes to know the other, and understand his own as well as the other's part.[ ] in , father oliver manare, visiting the german provinces by the general's authority, had noticed this point, in his ordinance for the management of _convictus_, or boarding colleges; that "frequent changes were burdensome to the students themselves, because they were forced to accommodate themselves often to new teachers or prefects."[ ] in the same sense, these critics, whom we are following, consider it undesirable that a master should resign his post in less than three years. frequent and manifold changes provoke complaints on the part of the outside world. besides, the master's own efforts at acquiring perfection in the magisterial art will be cut short. when there is no prospective permanency in a position, the mind is not so seriously applied to the work in hand.[ ] in all this, a most important question regarding boys is being faced by these critics; and a definite practical solution is adopted. the question is, which of the two alternatives to adopt, whether to submit boys to one person's dominant influence, or to pass them on through the hands of divers experienced and permanent professors, stationed respectively in the different grades. this latter alternative, if it is understood to mean that one professor remains perpetually in one grade, and another in another, scarcely seems to merit consideration with them, except as regards the two highest literary classes,--of poetry and rhetoric,--where the requirements of erudition are so considerable as to need a lengthened term of years for filling the chairs worthily. but, if the alternative regarding permanent professors means that the same teachers remain constantly within the limits of the same curriculum, then the question seems to be the one which the critics of the preliminary _ratio_ argue about in both senses, for and against; and they finally arrive at a solution, or rather a compromise.[ ] the severest thing they say against the plan is in this wise, when speaking directly of the two highest grades: "perpetuity of that kind may give occasion to mere idleness and indifference; for after acquiring, in the first years, some esteem and name for their learning (in poetry or rhetoric), masters prefer to enjoy the fruit and name of the labor already undergone, however moderate that was, rather than wear themselves out with new labors. hence they make no new acquisitions in the learning and accomplishments proper to their branch; they get rooted in very much the same spot, and teach what they have taught before over and over again, though with some variations. what is worse, as if they were quite worn out with their prolonged exertions, they say that they cannot any longer stand all the labor of exercising their students; whence everything freezes, and they ask for an assistant, who, if he is unlearned, does more harm than good; if learned, then why are two doing the work of one?" the solution which they arrive at is a compromise, which recognizes peculiar advantages in both arrangements. it is embodied in several rules of the _ratio studiorum_.[ ] as many perpetual professors as possible, for grammar and rhetoric, are to be provided; and some candidates for admission to the order, who seem qualified for this field of work, though apparently not likely to succeed in the higher studies of the society, may be admitted on this condition, that they devote themselves in perpetuity to this work of zeal. thus such exigencies are provided for as postulate a perpetuity of professorship within the same limited curriculum. on the other hand, the normal process is that which arranges a constant succession of teachers in the college, but not a constant change with the same boys. the same boys go hand in hand with the one master, with whom they have most to do. and no one is to take charge of them, however transiently, says the general vitelleschi, "whether on account of fewness of numbers, or merely to supply for another in his absence, of whom it is not certain that he is qualified for the post."[ ] the very frequent mention, in all these discussions, of something like domestic tragedies resulting from the change of masters, seems to show two things; first, it justifies the practice of keeping the same professor over the same boys for a certain term of years, if not until the class itself dissolves into higher courses; secondly, it shows what a usual condition it was for masters to have won the most absolute attachment to themselves, in the exercise of their magisterial duties, both on the side of parents and on the part of the scholars. thus, speaking of the professors mounting with their classes, the critics say: "they will have observed what their disciples need; they will take them up to the next class. and hence, that changing of masters, which has caused so many tragic scenes, will not be felt so much."[ ] add to these elements of permanency and identity, another which is most fundamental of all, the identity of their formation as masters; so that the young jesuits, as the general visconti sums up the matter in , "must have the most accomplished professors of rhetoric, immediately after their novitiate, men who not only are altogether eminent in this faculty, but who know how to teach, and make everything smooth for them; men of eminent talent and the widest experience in the art; who are not merely to form good scholars, but to train good masters"; and that "two years entire must be given to rhetoric, according to the custom of the society, which term is not to be abridged, unless necessity is urgent."[ ] add, moreover, the uniformity of plan, "so that the form of our schools may be everywhere as much as possible the same, and, when masters are changed, itself need undergo no change."[ ] it follows that, though the flow of new blood is constantly entering the pedagogic body, and a constant renewal is taking place, neither the permanency nor the identity of the teaching body and its system is found to depend upon the same individuals remaining at the same posts. naturally, such conditions are not to be looked for, except in the special circumstances of a religious community, with perfect organization in the body, with the conscientiousness of a self-denying formation actuating the members, with the landmarks of traditions, and a statutory method to show the way; and, finally, with executive officials adequate to control. as to this last-named condition of executive superintendence over persons and things in the system, several rules for the prefect of studies of these literary courses will explain themselves. the _ratio_ of says: "let him have the rules of the masters and scholars, and see that they are observed, as if they were his own. let him help the masters themselves and direct them, and be especially cautious that the esteem and authority due to them be not in the least impaired. let him be very solicitous that the new preceptors follow with accuracy the manner of teaching, and other customs of their predecessors, provided that these were not foreign to our method; so that persons outside may not have reason to find fault with the frequent change of masters. once a fortnight, at least, let him listen to each one teaching."[ ] this moral identity being secured, in the ways, means, and views of the teaching body, the individual and personal elements, which each master brings to bear upon the work before him, are no more interfered with, or hampered by community of method, than are all the varieties of race, nation, politics, and environment, slighted or interfered with by a single system of collegiate institution being placed in their midst. it was in view of being everywhere, that the system was cast in its precise and adjustable form, so that, in spite of being everywhere, it should be found equally manageable and effective. and similarly, in spite of the system itself being one, the play of individual talents can be various, as are the movable factors in any great organization. we may close this chapter by observing several far-reaching consequences of the foregoing principles. in the first place, those who, after personal experience in the classes, come to take charge of colleges in the capacity of rectors, are found, say the critics of , to take full and accurate account of studies and professors alike; for they themselves "have borne the burden of the schools, and know how to sympathize with others from their own experience"; a fact which is the more conducive to the end in view, as "colleges have been instituted for the study of letters. besides, not unfrequently there arise in the classes, especially of the smaller colleges, difficulties which can scarcely be overcome, except by a rector who has personal experience to guide him; otherwise, whether he chances to solve the difficulty aright, or solves it awry, he will not do much good either way, since they do not give him the credit of knowing how."[ ] the "smaller colleges" spoken of here, as more liable to encounter internal difficulties, are contrasted elsewhere by these critics with "the greater and principal ones, in which there are many counsellors or referees at hand, to whom the masters can have recourse for assistance; and the schools themselves have sufficient authority." but, in what they call the minor colleges, "the authority of the schools depends for the most part on the reputation and authority of the individual masters," who happen at a given time to be filling the posts.[ ] in the spirit of this personal and experienced concurrence with all the affairs of the college, the rector is required so to moderate the other concerns of his office, as to be prompt in fostering and advancing all literary exercises. he is to go often to the classes, those of the lower faculties as well as of the higher.[ ] every month, or at least every other month, he is to hold general consultations with all the masters below the course of logic, the several prefects being present; and, after the reading of some selection from the _ratio_, concerning the masters or the piety and good conduct of the students, he is to inquire what difficulties occur, or what omissions are noticed in the observance of rules.[ ] books are never to be wanting, in the sufficiency desired by the members generally, whether they are engaged in teaching, or are pursuing their studies.[ ] to this regulation, which concerns the chief authority in a province, the revised _ratio_ of adds: "the same is to be said of literary periodicals for the use of the professors; of museums, physical apparatus, and other equipments, which are needed by a college according to its degree." the general visconti observes somewhat emphatically, that "in buying books the rectors will never consider the money of their colleges ill spent."[ ] jouvancy applies the same principle to publishing the literary productions of the masters. he first sketches the series of literary productions expected from them,--the annual addresses of inauguration to be given by each professor in his own class, the public and solemn one to be delivered, on the same inaugural occasion, by the professor of rhetoric, the poem to be composed and read by the master of poetry; then, during the year, a certain number of addresses to be delivered; and, at the end, a tragedy composed by the professor of rhetoric, a minor drama by the professor of poetry, both to be acted on the stage. jouvancy goes on to recommend that no public occasion be allowed to go by, without receiving the tribute of some such literary work. then he adds: "nor is that expense to be considered useless which is incurred for printing and publishing good poems. in all these matter, splendors should be added to literary exercises, and to the exhibition thereof, in such wise that everything meanwhile tends to solidity of erudition."[ ] a second consequence of the literary cast, marking the whole order, is the vantage-ground on which it placed the jesuits, with regard to all the learning and the learned men of europe. the fluent and elegant command of the latin language gave at once a mastery over the vehicle of intercourse, in which all learning was conveyed. our critics of sum up the bearings of this particular advantage under several heads: the members of the order deal with so many nations; scholastic disputations, whether in philosophy or theology, are always conducted in latin; the members write so many books; they can do justice to the ancient fathers of the church; they have to deal constantly with learned men.[ ] a last consequence, which i shall present, is suggested by an observation of the same writers, in the same place. it throws no little light upon the history of the society, and it shows the practical adjustment of the educational system to the times. they say then, it is by the studies of belles-lettres, more than by the higher faculties, that the society has, in a short time, been propagated through all the principal parts of christendom. nor can it be preserved better or more solidly, than by the same means through which it was first introduced. unless they endeavor to maintain this honorable distinction, with which god has been pleased to grace the society, there is reason to fear that they themselves may yet lapse into the barbarism, which they are far from admiring in others. "as to the other faculties, which are brilliant enough of themselves, there is no trouble in cultivating them. but, natural inclinations feeling a repugnance for less conspicuous pursuits, people have, as it were, to drag themselves to these lower faculties. they should take lesson, therefore, by good husbandmen, who bestow more care on transplanted and exotic growths than on native shoots."[ ] and they proceed to quote the rule, formulated in the words of ignatius, by the general everard mercurian, who required the institution and preservation of the literary seminary.[ ] so that we end here this discussion on the lower faculties, at the point where we began. in all well-assorted plans each element has a reference to every other. men must match the work, and the work be suited to the men. were the men not formed, the best system would settle into an inert state; and, the more consistency and vitality of its own it offered to contribute, the more inept and inert would it look, a memorial of what it might do, dead to what it can. in itself, and in its effects, it might appear to be out of date, as not being understood. only the practical working of a thing, by the man who understands it, shows it off for what it is worth. this is a rule quite universal, wherever practical insight is needed for the working of a mechanism. it must be worked intelligently to be understood. once it is understood, the practical intelligence grows. chapter xiii. the courses of divinity and allied sciences. private study. repetition. . having finished his course of teaching literature, the jesuit returns to his higher studies. divinity and its allied sciences stand out in prominence for their intrinsic dignity; but they have, besides, a studied preëminence assigned them in the system before us. the almost universal rule, of intermitting the higher studies with a course of literary teaching, undergoes a special exception in the case of those "theologians, whose number is few, and use so manifold";[ ] of whom aquaviva says that, "according as the higher courses are developed, the fewer proportionately, out of many students, become qualified to profess those exalted sciences."[ ] the same policy holds with respect to those who have an eminent talent for oratory. laynez, himself a great preacher, and a competent judge in the matter, relieved father francis strada of the office of provincial, to set him free for the ministry of the pulpit; and he wrote, as he did so: "if only he had a sufficiency of those whom he could put in the office of provincial, he would relieve all preachers of that office, that they might devote themselves entirely to spreading the seed of the divine word."[ ] of these and others, "who give eminent promise of being equal to the graver occupations, or for whom an immediate need exists in that direction,"[ ] an immediate application is to be made to the study of theology.[ ] all who graduate in these higher courses do so, as "qualified to profess"; just as they had graduated in philosophy and its cognate branches.[ ] but, though a master in the matter of his philosophical triennium, no student is called upon to profess any of those branches, until he has graduated also in theology. here we may advert to several lines of strict parallelism in the system, both with regard to admitting any students, whether jesuits or not, to the respective courses of study, and with regard to admitting jesuits themselves to profess in the chairs. as a condition for admitting any students at all into the higher courses, the society introduced a much-needed reform, in requiring that literary qualifications of a sufficiently high grade should precede matriculation. thus the university of ingolstadt ordains that no one shall be admitted to academic, that is, university lectures, except after one year of rhetoric; and it adds very strict regulations about the election of courses, repetitions, disputations, etc., in the three years' curriculum of philosophy.[ ] in like manner, to be admitted as a student of divinity and its correlative sciences, it is necessary to have graduated in the course of arts, that is to say, philosophy and its branches. thus the university of würzburg ordains that no one shall be admitted as an auditor of scholastic theology, unless he be _magisterio insignis_, "a master of arts"; it excepts only the members of religious orders in attendance, and also _principis alumnos_, "the prince's scholars." others, who have not so graduated, it will admit to moral theology and its supplementary branches. it will not even examine, for the mastership in arts, any one, whether a religious or not, who has studied philosophy in a private institution or a monastery.[ ] to apply for academic degrees, "they must prove that they have followed all the courses in some approved public university."[ ] the curriculum, now before the student, is a quadriennium, or four-year course. it is prolonged into a fifth and sixth year, for reviewing the whole ground of one's studies; for preparing a public defence against all comers; and, in the case of jesuit students, for an immediate preparation to fill the professor's chair, the pulpit, or to discharge other functions. hence the university of cologne specifies, in general, a sexennium, or six-year course for theology.[ ] not unlike to this is the parallelism which we may notice, in appointing the members of the society to professors' chairs. though qualified to teach literature after his own complete course of letters in the seminary, yet, as we have seen, no one is to be put over the classes of grammar or humanity who has not first studied his philosophy. and so again, at this stage, though apparently competent to teach philosophy, and approved as being qualified to profess it, yet no one is to be put in a chair of that course who has not also studied his theology.[ ] the reasons for this are assigned by the critics of . the philosopher, they say, who has not yet become a theologian, will not be so safe in his conclusions, in his proofs, in his manner of expression. he will be of an age less mature. his learning will be less superabundant. he will scarcely be able to answer the arguments of unbelievers. nor will he treat philosophy in a way to render it useful to theology. in fine, the proprieties of things cannot be well observed, if he who has just filled a chair of philosophy has to sit down as a mere student in theology.[ ] the branches of this theological course are scholastic theology, moral theology, sacred scripture, hebrew and oriental languages, ecclesiastical history, and canon law. the general category of students is naturally more limited than in the philosophical curriculum. there the auditors were young men, who would betake themselves, at its close, to medicine, or other walks of life. they may have taken to law; though possevino, himself eminent in jurisprudence, would seem to imply that canon law must have been pursued first.[ ] the students now are chiefly ecclesiastics, with various careers before them; or they are religious of different orders; or, finally, the members of the society itself. the principal object of our consideration is the formation of these latter, as qualified to profess. the pedagogical elements before us may be ranged under three heads: private study; repetition, which includes disputation; lecturing, which is supplemented by dictation. . as to the method of private study, all the auditors of the course are directed to look over, prior to the lecture,[ ] the text in aristotle, st. thomas, etc., which the professor is about to explain.[ ] then, while the lecture is being delivered, they take down notes; the copying of mere dictation is not favored. after the lecture, they are to read over the notes which they have taken down. let them endeavor to understand their annotations. understanding what they have written, they are to make objections to themselves against the thesis established, and endeavor to solve their own objections. if they cannot find a solution, let them note the difficulties, and take occasion to ask the professor, or reserve them for disputation. such is the method of private study prescribed for the members of the order,[ ] and laid down in more general terms for the other students.[ ] to develop habits of such study, and to afford the requisite leisure, a certain custom, then prevailing in portugal, of keeping the professors of philosophy and their students during two hours and a half consecutively in the lecture room is discountenanced by the critics of : "that the philosophers should remain two whole hours and a half in class, as is now done, is burdensome to the professor and troublesome to the students; for these latter should get accustomed to private study, lest, like parrots, they seem to be always talking by rote."[ ] this curtailing of class hours was characteristic of the society's system. in the general father francis borgia wrote, through his secretary polanco, correcting, in this respect, a school-regulation which had been followed in the lower classes of the german province. the secretary writes: "it is found by experience, in the schools of the company, that to teach three consecutive hours in the forenoon, and three more in the afternoon, is injurious to the health of our masters, and does no good to the health of the scholars; for which reason it is now ordained that in our schools the morning classes shall not last longer than two and a half hours, and the same in the afternoon."[ ] nothing intensifies more the results of studies than concentration, nor dissipates them more than division of attention, while a given pursuit is in progress. this principle applies to the number of courses taken up at one time, the conduct of private studies in any single course, and the degree to which the appointed teachers and the standard authors have full justice done them. on this head, the critics of give recommendations, derived from the constitution, for the direction of all the students in general, and for the members of the order in particular. the recommendations are embodied briefly in the _ratio studiorum_.[ ] with aristotle in philosophy, or with st. thomas in theology, one commentary is to be designated, and that a specially chosen author, suited to the individual's capacity. in the second year of theology, one of the fathers of the church can be added, "to be read at odds and ends of time, or after the fatigue of a long stretch of study. another can be substituted, if after a while they ask for another. but care should be taken that they do not spend too much time on this reading, as if they were getting up a sermon."[ ] all this, no doubt, tends to make the student "a man of one book," who, as the adage says, is much to be feared. however, when he goes through every course, and is everywhere a man of concentrated attention, while, for the purpose of public disputation and the attempted refutation of his own and the professor's conclusions, the side avenues of various authors and systems are studiously and necessarily kept open, it is probable that, after being "a man of one book," in many courses successively, he will also be well-rounded by the time his formation is complete. with students in general, this can be accomplished by the age of twenty-five; with the jesuits themselves, about the age of thirty-three. . i come now to the subject of repetition, of which two chief forms offer themselves. one is just what the word of itself indicates; it belongs to all the faculties, but chiefly to the lower courses. i shall call it by the generic name of repetition. the other has place principally in the higher; it is disputation; of which a preparatory exercise, called _concertatio_, prevails also from the lowest class of grammar upwards. repetition then rehearses in full class, under various forms or modifications of that exercise, what the professor has explained in class. just before the close of the hour spent on his lecture, the professor of philosophy or theology signifies that he is ready for questions on the matter treated; he asks sometimes an account of the lecture, and he sees that it is repeated. the revised _ratio_ of puts it, in more general terms, thus: "he is often to require an account of the lectures, and to see that they are repeated"; and then it desires that, after the lecture, either in the class-room, or somewhere near, he remain accessible to the students for at least a quarter of an hour, to answer their questions.[ ] this is all from the constitution of ignatius. the repetition, which he is to see to personally, is that which takes place in small circles of about ten students each. "at the close of the lectures let them, in parties of about ten apiece, repeat for half an hour what they have just heard; one of the students, and, if possible, a member of the society, presiding over each party, _decuria_."[ ] neither the preliminary, nor the final, _ratio_ demands that the professor himself preside over any of these parties. but "those who do preside will become more learned, and will be practising to become masters themselves."[ ] it must be admitted that the tenor of many remarks in the earlier document of , shows the presence of jesuits among the auditors to have acted on the course as a leaven and a relief; although the concurrent testimony of historians, about the jesuit schools, indicates little or nothing there of that license of manners, such as possevino described for us in a former chapter.[ ] in a special manner, those jesuit students, already young priests, who, having gone through their four-year course, were now reviewing in a biennium, of a fifth and sixth year, all their long studies of the higher sciences, stood ready at hand for many functions in the arena of direction and presidency, either over the repetitions or the disputations, or in the chair; to which as many of them as were needed would be officially assigned, when their private studies left them at last free.[ ] to say a word upon this class of jesuit students, they show us the professor's formation at its last stage. they are reviewing all theology, philosophy, sacred scripture, canon law, polemical or controversial theology, and ecclesiastical erudition generally. the last of their rules for self-guidance says: "in particular, they are to devote themselves most of all to that pursuit, to which they feel chiefly drawn, without, however, omitting any of the rest."[ ] meanwhile, they present, in various ways, specimens of their talent and erudition; they throw into the form of a digest, "from their own genius," all theology, under certain heads and principles; they can choose some "splendid subject,"[ ] and deliver ten public lectures thereupon to the auditors who choose to attend, which, we may observe, was precisely the status of all professors in the mediæval universities. in their acts of public defence, five of which are prescribed during the two years, they are free to follow or to leave the opinions of their late professors.[ ] these students then are assistant and extraordinary professors. they have begun the work, which some of them will continue when called upon to become professors in ordinary. they are already in training for that independent work, which the revised _ratio_ of shows some anxiety about preserving; for it says to all who occupy any chair in these faculties, that, in case they adopt a standard author to follow in their lectures, which is a custom rather prevalent in more recent times, they must nevertheless deliver each year some special question elaborated independently by themselves.[ ] this independence of style, perfect command of the matter, with express leave for the incipient professor, in the course of his final biennium, to relinquish the opinions of his late professors, are made the subject of many a remark by the critics of . withal, it is clear enough that for a younger man to leave an approved opinion safely, it is very necessary for him to know well what he is about; and doubly necessary when he comes forward in a public defence; for his own late professors are among the doctors present, and are there to assail him in all his tenets. these, then, or others presiding over the circles, "one person repeats, the others listening; they propose difficulties mutually, and, if they cannot solve their own objections, they consult the professor."[ ] the one who repeats is to do so, not from his notes, but from memory. thus "the memory is exercised; practice is afforded those who are to be masters, so that they accustom themselves to develop their thoughts before others; it makes them all keep alive and attentive during the lecture, to take down the necessary notes, as they might not do, if they were free from such repetition."[ ] there are several other possible forms of conducting this exercise. when once the first crude repetition is over, the series of disputations begins, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. without counting in the "grand acts" of public defence against all objectors, at stated times and by specially designated persons, we may enumerate as many as seven ordinary rehearsals of the same matter. first, before going to the lecture hall, the student looks over the text. this is done easily enough in st. thomas or aristotle, if one of these is the standard. as ignatius expected would be done, many standard works have been published by writers of the society.[ ] their recommendation is, as he intimated, that they are "more adapted to our times"; and they have incorporated recent researches in progressive branches. in the sense of this adaptation to times and circumstances, the theologians in cologne, making their announcement for the year , say that they follow st. thomas as a general rule, but not so "as to treat all that he treats, nor only what he treats.... every age," they say, "has its own debated ground in matters of doctrine, and this brings it to pass that theology is not only constantly enlarged with a variety of new disputations, but assumes, as it were, a new cast."[ ] and the critics of the preliminary _ratio_, treating of the scripture course, lecture at some length all whom it may concern,--theologians, professors, preachers,--precisely on this ground, the need of amplifying and adapting the course of scripture to the conditions of the times.[ ] accordingly, works always new and adapted to latest needs, have poured forth from the writers of the order. and such as furnish the conditions of a text, which may readily be followed, also supply the conditions for conning over, before going to the lecture hall, what the professor means to treat. if no such standard is being followed, still, as i find noted in a documentary report of , "the professors should always, as far as possible, throw out directions enough for the students to look up the subject before coming to the lecture." in this connection many familiar names of authors occur. for scholastic theology and philosophy, there is, in the first place, the prince of modern theologians, francis suarez, with his library of tomes; there are the three cardinals toletus, bellarmine, de lugo; valentia, vasquez, lessius, franzelin; and, in the modern school of scholastic philosophy, the elegant liberatore, kleutgen, tongiorgi, pesch, along with the writers of louvain, stonyhurst, innsbruck, and elsewhere; in positive theology and controversy, canisius, becanus, petau, sardagna; in exegesis, maldonado, salmeron, À lapide, menochius, patrizi, cornely, with the school of maria laach; in moral theology, an endless number, sanchez, laymann, busembaum, with his two hundred editions, gury, ballerini.[ ] secondly, the student hears the professor's lecture. thirdly, one of the forms of regular repetition is gone through. fourthly, the daily disputation takes place, at least among the jesuit scholastics: "at home, every day except on saturdays, free and feast days, one hour is to be appointed," during which, after a preliminary summarizing of the matter for defence, the disputation follows; and, if time remains over, difficulties may be proposed. "in order to have some time remain over, the president must have the syllogistic form of discussion rigidly observed; and, if nothing new is being urged, he will cut off the debate."[ ] fifthly, there is the weekly disputation: "on saturday, or some other day, as the custom of the university has it, let them hold disputations in the schools during two hours, or longer still, whenever there is a large concourse of persons who come to hear."[ ] sixthly, the more solemn disputation follows, every month, or nearly so: "each month, or, if the students are few, every other month, let disputations be held on a certain day, both morning and afternoon. the number of defendants will correspond to the number of professors whose theses they defend."[ ] seventhly, towards the close of the scholastic year, though no time is to be set aside for the purpose, so as to prejudice the continuous course of the professor's lectures, yet "all the matter of the year is to have been gone through, by way of repetition, when the time of vacation arrives."[ ] the whole of this matter forms the subject of the year's examination for the jesuit members of the course.[ ] to all these argumentative repetitions may be added the discursive form, in the shape of lectures given by the students themselves, or dissertations read on stated occasions.[ ] it is evident that the members of the society are the chief subjects of this completeness of formation; and that for two reasons. in the first place, no other students, even if _convictores_, that is, boarders in the jesuit colleges, can be brought under such a thoroughness of system. secondly, other students are not in the same way subject to the regular gradation of examinations from year to year. when they are competent, they may apply for admission to the requisite public tests, or acts of defence; and, in the philosophical courses, they become bachelors, licentiates, and masters of arts; in theology, bachelors in the first and then in the second grade, licentiates, doctors. "no degree is to be conferred on any one who has not stood all the tests, which, according to the custom of universities, must precede the conferring of these degrees." the character of each degree, its conditions, tests, formalities, are treated of fully in the "form and method of conducting academies and _studia generalia s. j._," .[ ] here, then, the spirit of the constitution is fully observed, with regard to repetition and also disputation. the fathers remark that ignatius "recommends nothing with more urgency than disputation, and constancy in its exercise; so much stress does he lay upon it, as not to let the students of letters and grammar go without it."[ ] in the lower classes it takes the form of _concertatio_ and mutual challenges, in the matter of grammar and literary doctrine. here it is in its full form; and we may pass on to consider it in the next chapter, not as a manner of repetition, but on its own merits. i will make the transition, by quoting an important passage or two from the preliminary _ratio_. they bear not only on disputation, but on that very essential point, where it is that the vital power for actuating the whole system lies; and what is the intrinsic value of any system, as a mere code of legislation. the critics say that, to counteract the apparent decline of disputation, and to restore this exercise to its ancient form and splendor, everything depends on the vigilance and diligence of those in authority. "without this, nothing will be effected, even though, for the proper administration of this department of studies, many laws and precepts are put down in writing."[ ] elsewhere, acknowledging in another connection that there is indeed a multitude of points defined for observance, the same writers go on to make these pertinent reflections: "the perfection of doctrine, like the perfection of moral life, stands in need of many aids; whence it is that there is no people under the direction of more laws than the christian people, nor any religious order more under the obligation of constitution and decrees than our own." they undertake to prove the advantage of this, both from the side of those in authority, and of those under authority. "aristotle and st. thomas," they say, "are both of opinion that as few points as possible should be left to the private opinions of a judge, and as many as possible should be determined by the clear definition of law. they prove it; for it is easier to find the few wise men, whose wisdom is equal to the task of determining fixed rules of guidance, than to find the multitude, which otherwise is required to pass judgment in all contingencies of time and place; there is the sanction of greater maturity in laws which have stood the test of time and experience, than in the off-hand decision of the present hour; there is less of a corrupting influence on law-givers, when they are defining things in general and for the future. wherefore, whatever can be despatched by general law is so to be despatched; what cannot be provided for by such law is to be left to the judge, as the living rule. under this head come the particular decisions to be passed in given junctures, whereof the general law cannot take cognizance." so far aristotle and st. thomas; and the fathers of agree with them.[ ] chapter xiv. disputation. dictation. . many wise things had been said by the experienced masters of old on the subject of disputation. thus robert of sorbon, the founder of the college of the sorbonne, had put it down in one of his six essential rules for the scholar, that "nothing is perfectly known unless masticated by the tooth of disputation."[ ] our jesuit critics mention incidentally, in one place, that "their age is eminently versed in disputation."[ ] they are cautioning the professor of scripture against using disputation at all, lest he come thereby to relinquish his own eloquent style of commentary. for every chair has its own character; and that which the _ratio studiorum_ of attributes to the chair of scripture includes, among a number of qualifications, this one, which is mentioned in the last place, that, "as far as possible, the professors be well versed in eloquence."[ ] on the other hand, in the proper arena of disputation, they caution professors against its abuse. taking note, in one place, of the discord which can arise among learned men, they illustrate their point with some instances, taken precisely from a disputatious tendency, from that exaggerated scholasticism which had run into dialectic excesses. they say: "for the disturbance of harmony, it makes very little difference whether discord arises in great things or in little. it is not only the importance of a question, it is also the spirit of emulation, that fosters contention; so that sometimes a war of words and the bitterest altercation is kept up on a single term and phrase. forsooth, what is more trivial than to ask whether god is in imaginary space? yet what tragic scenes does not this very question give rise to!"[ ] excesses of this kind being guarded against, the fathers lay down the thesis that, when employed in its proper place, no exercise is more useful than disputation. you will see not a few wholly taken up with reading, writing, arranging, and paging what they have written; but they eschew most carefully all disputation, neglecting it, looking upon it as an idle occupation, having all their theology locked up, not so much in their memory and intelligence, as in their paper books. men of authority, they go on to say, have always been persuaded that philosophy and theology are learnt, not so much by hearing, as by discussing. for, in this exercise, you have a most certain test how much a man understands of what he is writing about or teaching; also how much solidity there is in one's own private cogitations, since it happens not unfrequently that what appears brilliant in one's private room is seen to drag in the mud, when it comes to disputation.[ ] then, too, while we are hard pressed by our adversary, we are forced to strain every nerve of our wits, and, when others are bearing down heavily upon us, we knock out of our brains many things which would never have come into our heads, while we stayed in the quiet of leisure and rested in the shade. we hear things which others have found out, and which either throw light on doubtful points, or indicate the path to some other point. or, if what is said does not commend itself to our judgment, we see through the opponent's artifice; we meet him with more facility, and establish our own thesis with more stability. the auditors, meanwhile, can take note of the good points one professor makes, the strong points of another, and, after the example of their doctors, they quicken their wits for the fray, observing where the arguments limp, which are the distinctions that tell, how the whole doctrine of a professor hangs together. in short, it is well established by the authority of the gravest men, and by the test of experience, that one disputation does more good than many lectures; not to mention the other consideration, that there is nothing more calculated to render our schools illustrious, than making our students competent to win great approbation and applause, in public sessions and disputations.[ ] these critics express their mind upon the need which exists, of reviving considerably the fervor and dignity of this exercise, and so restoring it to its former educational influence. but we can observe for ourselves, how congenial an element the whole exercise must be in a system like this, which is preëminently oral--oral examinations, oral and self-reliant defence and attack, free and open lecturing, with the influence of eye, voice, and person, to bring everything home, even though all the while there is no question of oratory, but of mere teaching. in the earlier stages, too, of the scholar's life, however much has been made of the acquirement of style, "forging the word with grammar," as robert of sorbon had said, "and polishing it with rhetoric," to make it glow on the written page, yet from the very first, also, no less account has been taken of the ability to express one's thought, with perfect presence of mind, without depending upon note or book. in the higher faculties, this holds good more than ever. now the time has come for matter of the most approved kind. and the independent, self-possessed delivery of one's thoughts, with the power to force them home unto conviction, or to maintain them against all odds, appears not only as the scope proposed in the system, but also as the historical result, effected in the public career of the order. father laynez, at the conference of poissy, contended thus with peter martyr and others; possevino at lyons with viret, using, not so much the severe syllogistic form, as copious and learned discussion. maldonado was double-handed, either syllogistic or discursive. in the conference at sedan, in , he argued first in dialectic form; then, on the demand of his opponents for a different kind of weapon, he took with the same facility to discursive exposition. edmund campian, in england, on being removed from the rack more dead than alive, was immediately brought face to face with newell and day, able champions as well of the queen's spiritual supremacy, as of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. he proceeded to argue: "if faith alone justifies, it justifies without charity; but without charity it does not justify; therefore faith alone does not justify." now for the answer, clear and incisive as the propositions. deny or distinguish major or minor proposition, if you want to deny the conclusion; for, those premises standing, the inference remains intact, since the syllogism is perfect in form. and so argumentations proceed. to revive disputation in its best style, the critics devote several pages to a most valuable analysis of the conditions and method of the exercise.[ ] their suggestions are embodied in the final _ratio_. the rectors are to show their lively and active interest in the disputations, by attending on public and private occasions alike, and by the various arts which such interest will inspire. as argument "freezes except in a crowd," the critics require that the attendance of all be insisted on, when the days and hours of disputation arrive. this susceptibility of human nature, which the fathers touch upon, when they speak of disputation freezing except in a concourse, is not without an exact counterpart, when, in another connection, they are speaking of the humanists, or professors of the literary classes. there they adopt the view that the literary seminary of the province should be in the same great college, along with the faculties of philosophy and theology; for, say they, among other reasons, "the humanists would languish in obscurity, if they had not the philosophers and theologians to be witnesses, spectators, and applauding auditors of their literary achievements." and again they plead sympathetically, "the philosophers and theologians, when composing the prefatory essays for their disputations, call for the taste of the humanists, by whose verses and orations, moreover, they are refreshed from time to time."[ ] continuing their remarks, the fathers define the limits of the weekly disputations to be two hours, not more, assigning four regular objectors for that time. the professors, belonging to different faculties, should invite one another reciprocally to the private disputations in their classes, at least for an hour or so, that the intellectual contest may wax warm by the meeting of these doctors. other doctors, too, not of the faculty, can be invited for the same purpose. but, continues the _ratio_ of , in undertaking to push the arguments which are being urged, "they should not take the thread out of the hands of an objector, who is still ably and strenuously following it up."[ ] meanwhile, the students who receive the commission to act as objectors, on occasions of some publicity, must be the more qualified members of the course; the others have the practice of their private arena, until they can take part with dignity in a public tournament. if argument freezes except in a crowd, so, too, it palls, if it never comes to a conclusion; and no useful point of doctrine is carried away by the listeners. truth is lost in clouds, and there is no gain to good humor. acrimony or melancholy may well be the only outcome of an unfinished or revolving argumentation. it will not revolve, if the disputants keep to strict syllogistic form. but when both or all parties become heated, and wit becomes lively, the syllogism may suffer, and then, when will they finish? to obviate this inconvenience, two persons are charged with the responsibility of the performance, one the professor himself, who is presiding over his own disputation, the other, the general prefect of studies, who controls the whole series of disputations, as they follow one another in turn. of the professor it is said, that he is to consider the day of disputation as no less laborious and useful than that of his own lecture; and that all the fruit and life of the exercise depends upon him. the earlier _ratio_ lays even more stress upon the private disputations, "which are wont to grow more frigid than the public ones." he is to assist the two disputants, "so as to be himself apparently the person contesting in each; let him signify his approval, if anything specially good is urged, excite the attention of all when any first-class difficulty is proposed, throw out a hint now and then to support the respondent or direct the opponent; call them back to strict syllogistic form, if they wander from it; not always be silent, nor yet be always talking, so as to let the students bring out what they know. what is brought forward, he can amend or improve; let him bid the objector proceed, so long as his argument carries weight with it; carry on the objector's difficulty for him farther; nor connive at it, if he slips off to another track. he is not to allow an argument which has been well answered to be kept up, nor an answer that is not solid to be long sustained; but, when the dispute has been sufficiently exhaustive, let him briefly define the matter, and explain it."[ ] the general prefect of studies is required to keep the series of disputations in due form; arguing himself but sparingly, and thereby discharging the duty of general direction with more dignity. he is not to suffer any difficulty which comes under debate, to be agitated this way and that, "so that it remains as much of a difficulty after as before"; but when such an agitated question has been sufficiently mooted, he will see that an accurate explanation of it is given by the professor who is presiding.[ ] with the last public act, or general defence of philosophy and theology, the formation of the future professor closes. this public defence occupies four or five hours, in two sessions. if the defendant is not a member of the order, special care is taken to honor it with all solemnity, and with the attendance of all the faculties, of guests invited, doctors from without, and princes or the nobility.[ ] this act will be followed by the solemnity of conferring the final degree upon the licentiate. when the student is a jesuit, much more is made of thoroughness in a searching examination then, as at all times previously. he has now passed through a long series of yearly examinations, which were almost always disputations, and that, not with equals, but with four or five professors.[ ] so that, on viewing him at the close of his formation, we are enabled to conceive, with more distinctness, the meaning of that standard, "surpassing mediocrity," which, in a former chapter, i endeavored to define.[ ] . on turning our attention now to the professor's chair, and examining his manner of lecturing, of explaining, of teaching, whether in the field of letters, science, philosophy, or theology, we have, on the one side, to suppose him complete in his formation, and, on the other, to regard the scholar as undergoing formation. here, then, we begin the second part of this analysis. the style of teaching and of management, which is distinctively the jesuit type, is presented in the _ratio studiorum_ under its practical and ideal aspect. there is also a manner of instruction which is not considered an ideal method, however much it may sometimes recommend itself as practically expedient. i will touch upon this latter, the negative side of the question, first, to be free, in the next chapter, for approaching the matter on its positive and constructive side. in putting dictation down as not being the ideal form of teaching in the society, i do not speak of the proper use of dictation. the _ratio_ itself leaves room for it. it is the abuse of dictation that merits and receives a protracted examination of its value, at the hands of the critics. the discussion is of the highest importance. in analyzing a style of instruction, with which they are not in harmony, they bring out the essential elements of all true teaching. and, if we approve at all of their principles, the implied disapproval for the rejected form becomes only aggravated, on contemplating an exaggerated development of the same; that is to say, when, instead of dictating what has the merit of being one's own laborious production, the teacher is seen to become the servile dependant on a text-book printed by somebody else; and neither does the teacher show any of the qualifications necessary to have composed the book, nor does the scholar expend the industry which would have been necessary to copy it. but it is left to speak as best it may, is read by the teacher, instead of his teaching, is read by the scholar as the talk of some third person, and is found, in the last issue, to have spoken just articulately enough for the pupil to have learnt a memory lesson, and perhaps to have gathered information which may or may not adhere to his mental structure. but, as to anything like mental training, or what is properly education, the final result of a long series of years seems to show that, if there has been any of it, possibly the man who wrote the book had it; and with him it has remained. so must it always be under such conditions. for when the living master has contributed so little in the way of live education, the scholar must, of necessity, go away with somewhat less. these critics say trenchantly: "let no dictation be given, unless the explanation of very much all that is dictated has gone before, or accompanies, or follows the dictation; where the custom does not exist, let no dictation be introduced; where it does, an effort should be made to do away with it, as far as possible." then they support their position by many quotations from the constitution of ignatius.[ ] they go on to state that this habit of dictating was a thing unheard of till within the last forty years; "yet the auditors were not less learned then than now." in fact, but a slight acquaintance with the old university system of europe will show how jealously the empire of the spoken word was maintained--the spoken word, as distinct, not only from reading what the doctor had himself composed, but also from consulting even notes, while actually lecturing. he might have the text of aristotle, or peter the lombard, before him; he might himself have written and published works; the student might, with permission, take down notes in shorthand, from which in part, but chiefly from memory, he would commit the whole lecture to writing,[ ] on his return from school. it was not mere want of facilities that determined the system so. but the objective point was, not to have learning in one's papers and bound up; still less to have it in books, bought for the learning that is in them, and left afterwards with the learning still remaining there. the object was to make learning one's personal possession, and to profess the live mastery of it, with voice, eye, and person showing how live it was. these doctors continue: "the common impression in men's minds is, that dictating is not lecturing; also that it is one thing to write after the manner of polishing off a treatise, a different thing to have at hand merely some brief heads and references. and, should the matter which is dictated be from some author, the labor of taking it down is superfluous." the living voice actuates the mind more; it expresses, it impresses; it arouses, suspends the attention; it explains. all these effects are nowhere in a dead-and-alive dictation. nor do they give satisfaction, who append the explanation afterwards; for then both times seem to be lost, that taken up with dictation and that with the explanation. first, while the dictation was going on, the auditors were intent upon writing rather than understanding; particularly as, before the end of a sentence is come to, the beginning of it has already slipped from the mind; and the writing has to go on, without allowing any of that time to breathe, which is frequent enough if the professor lectures and explains. secondly, when the time for explanation comes after the dictation, the students are tired; they think they have all their learning now, down in their papers; so they go off, or they yawn, or they read over their copy, to see if anything is wanting. after dictating, the professor thinks that he has now done his part. what follows, that is, the work of explaining, he gulps down, as best he can,--a laborious work, requiring memory, promptitude, facility of development, fluency of speech; whence he will gradually vanish away into a nonentity, as we see actually taking place in some universities. more time is lost. for, while he goes over his dictation to explain it, he has to take up again things which were clear enough, in order to follow out the whole thread of his matter. if he had lectured, he would have said those things once for all. then, since it must be something polished and finished in style that a man dictates, the poor scribes have to take down much that is not necessary. as if they had wearied themselves with this general assault on dictation, the fathers go on to relieve their feelings by exclaiming: "what an amount of tedium meanwhile to those who are not writing, especially to prelates and other illustrious persons present! must they be told not to come while the dictation is going on, and to appear only afterwards when the matter is being explained? if so, they will be in attendance barely half an hour, and what they will hear will be meagre enough; and the person they listen to will be one accustomed to languid dictation, one who relies on his papers, and is but little practised in the oral development of his thoughts. besides, the students themselves ought to get accustomed to make things their own when they hear them, and to exercise their own judgment in selecting what to write. thus they will understand things better, and be kept more on the alert." not to disguise inconveniences, from whatever side they come, these critics take note of the difficulties which are thought to exist; that, unless the matter is dictated, the students cannot do justice to it, that the lecturer is too quick, or, out of the many things he says, they do not know how to select the necessary elements for annotation; and, while phrase is piled upon phrase, they are at a loss, their notes are disordered, inept, and sometimes simply wrong. to this the critics promptly make answer: those who are to lecture in future are either such as are now beginning their career of professorship, or such as are long accustomed to dictation. for those who are now beginning, previous exercise is to be recommended in the most approved form of lecture, or _prælectio_. and they sketch the form. as to the others who are long habituated to dictating, the critics ask such professors to give this form of lecturing the benefit of a trial. if they despair of being able to adopt it, let them go their own way, until another generation of professors is ready to take their places. dictation can also be permitted, where our professors have often tried to give it up, but with the consequence that the students took fright, and abandoned the classes. "yet," continue the fathers, "they would not be apt to abandon the courses, nor complain so much, if all the professors would devote themselves to brilliant lecturing,[ ] and would put away dictation. for, if one dictates and nurses the lazy folks, and another does not, who doubts but that sloth will still be dearer to the slothful than the labors and thorns of study? yea, by dictation they are made daily more and more lazy, so as to be always asking for more and more time; whereas, without dictation, they become daily more prompt, and need less time for everything."[ ] the final _ratio_ of embodies these suggestions, without being absolute in excluding all dictation, for which it suggests the form most useful and in accord with the spirit of true lecturing. it deprecates the dictation of what may be found in authors within reach of the students. "let the professor refer his hearers to those authors who have been copious and accurate in their treatment of any matter." as to what the critics of recommend, that, if dictation be given, the lecture should extend to five quarters of an hour, the _ratio_ says nothing about it.[ ] possevino, in his _bibliotheca selecta_, has a chapter on this question, "whether mental culture suffers by the dictation of lectures?" he answers in the affirmative, and he speaks on the subject with his usual erudition. he refers to the pythagorean "acoustic" disciples, who were never copyists, and not even talkers, until, by a prolonged silence for years, they had thought enough to be able to talk well, to put questions, and make comments. he quotes the cynicism of diogenes, about writing at the expense of true exercise. he notes the plan of xeniades the corinthian, who gave a written compendium to the young people, but one so short that they had to have the best part of their learning in their heads. the socratic method was eminently one of living speech. and, as to aristotle's "peripatetic" school, which was conducted while _walking about_ the lyceum, that was certainly neither in practice nor in principle favorable to writing. coming to speak expressly of dictation and citing a pleasant old rhyme:-- quod si charta cadat, secum sapientia vadat,[ ] possevino goes on to plead for the chests of the students, and says that the ink is the price of their blood, and the end of their studies becomes the end of their lives. hence one singular result of it all is, that scholars even employ amanuenses to go to school instead of themselves, and bring back in writing what was said. but all that money, says possevino, could have been reserved for the buying of books, to supplement real study. then he enforces what he has said with a piece of university history, wherein perhaps no one of his time was better versed. the university of paris, two and a half centuries before, had legislated against dictating, and against the doctors who used it, and who were dubbed _nominatores ad pennam_. one century before, the cardinal legate had again formulated a law on the subject. and finally the jesuits, "of whom a great number are chiefly engaged in this profession, taught by experience the evils of that system, have long understood the necessity, not merely of moderating it, but simply doing away with it. wherefore the fathers in the universities of portugal have already published a part of natural philosophy, whereby writing is dispensed with, room is left for quickening genius, and much material stored up to bring into the arena of discussion."[ ] chapter xv. formation of the scholar. symmetry of the courses. the prelection. books. what is developed to perfection can make other things like unto itself; it is prolific. so the aristotelian principle has it: _perfectum est, quod generat simile sibi._ this is the outcome and test of perfection. having followed the master, therefore, till he was complete in his own formation, we have now turned to look in another direction, and see him reacting upon those whom he is to form. though much has been said already implicitly or otherwise, on the method and principles of this reactive process, yet something remains, especially with regard to the lower faculties, the literary courses. in this chapter, we may consider the attitude which the professors take, singly and as a body, towards the students and towards their own courses; and then their chief manner of imparting knowledge, or what is called in the _ratio_ the _prælectio_. in the next chapter we can survey the principal class exercises, and the method of school management, throughout the lower grades. and, in the chapter after that, i shall sketch the system of grades from the lowest to the highest. . one of the first most general rules lays it down that the authority, in whose hands is the appointment of professors, "should foresee far ahead what professors he can have for every faculty, noting especially those who seem to be more adapted for the work, who are learned, diligent, and assiduous, and who are zealous for the advancement of their students, as well in their lectures (or lessons) as in other literary exercises."[ ] "they are to procure the advancement of each of their scholars in particular," says ignatius.[ ] the professor "is not to show himself more familiar with one student than with another; he is to disregard no one, to foster the studies of the poor equally with the rich."[ ] these are the regular and "ordinary professors, who take account of their students in particular."[ ] there can also be in a university one or more of another kind, "who, with more solemnity than the ordinary lecturers, treat philosophy, mathematical sciences, or any other branch, after the manner of public professors."[ ] in the lower, or literary courses the masters must "be good and skilled," who "seriously, and with all the attention of their mind, work for the advancement of their scholars, as well in what concerns learning, as in the matter of morals. they will have to take care that besides the christian doctrine, which is so integral a part of our institute, they also give frequent exhortations, suited to the capacity of the boys, and not devised for empty ostentation; let them endeavor to instil solid affections of piety and love for the things of god, and a hatred for sin."[ ] what is meant by "good and skilled masters" in these courses, we have already seen from jouvancy's sketch of the accomplishments proper to a teacher of literature.[ ] if anything remained to be said on this topic, it would only be to note and reject false standards, by which the position or efficiency of professors might possibly, but incorrectly, be measured. thus, some five years ago, that is to say, three hundred years later than the drawing up of the _ratio_, i find two such false standards distinctly repudiated; one is the idea of gathering in just enough of doctrine beforehand to be able, when occasion calls for it, to develop the attainments of a professor; another is that which would look only to the environment around, and would measure the intellectual formation of men, and the supply of learning, by the estimate commonly formed of the article, and the actual demand for it. . if we regard not individual professors, but the whole moral body or faculty of them, there are two characteristics which it may be difficult to find, or at least to ensure, outside of an organization such as the society of jesus. one is the very strict unity of educational matter presented to the studious world. the other is the degree of coördination and subordination of courses professed. a word upon each. the unity of matter in question, as designed for the purposes of education, is prescribed on the strength of a double maxim; first, that the sifting of many opinions, by the varied and multiplied activity of many minds, leaves a residue of matter, quite solid enough to support a compact and reliable system of teaching; secondly, that, in point of fact, such matter, which i have called "a residue," is nothing else than the basis of truth, divine and eternal; since, in clearing away the ground, all the criteria of each order, the natural and supernatural, have been faithfully and assiduously regarded. hereupon, intellectual concord is felt to be the result in the entire teaching body. of this concord the critics say, that it is the condition and cause of a wider and profounder learning in the faculties at large. each professor is engaged, "not in tilling some patch of his own, but in contributing his industry to the general field of all." where is the gain, they ask, "if what one establishes, another upsets, not as if he had always excogitated something better, but for fear he should be thought to profit by the fruits of another's genius? sometimes it really makes no difference whether one or other tenet is held; but, if we are bent on receiving no support from another, then, for all our labor, we get no other fruit but dissension."[ ] i presume there is not a university anywhere but will bear witness, by its internal history, to the justice of this remark. nor do these fathers apprehend that reputation for real science will suffer by such concord, since "reputation for science does not come from opinions contradicting one another, but from their having agreed." they express no lofty esteem for the notoriety which may be had, by fighting no less with friends than with foes, and reserving admiration for only what is at a respectable distance, and "turning up one's nose at what is near."[ ] this pungent remark seems to be a new and pedagogical application of the old proverb, _nihil vicinia molestius_, "nothing more annoying than one's neighbors!" they hold that, upon a basis of concord, there is always room and liberty for the exercise of talent; first, in those questions which are manifestly indifferent; secondly, in thinking out new distinctions and reasons, whereby truths already certain may be made more secure still; thirdly, in attacking the same, either when publicly disputing, or also when actually teaching, if what they acutely urge against a position, they more acutely refute; fourthly, in proposing new opinions and questions, but after they have sought the approval of the responsible authorities, lest the labor be spent amiss. the most learned men have always been persuaded that there is more subtlety shown, more applause merited and comfort enjoyed, in pursuing the lines of approved and received thought, than in a general license and novelty of opinion.[ ] but these critics throw out an idea of theirs, which quite possibly will not meet with universal acceptance. they say, "it is not every one who can build up a theology for himself." the remark they add is graceful, that a modest genius does not court every kind of liberty, but that which is not divorced from virtue. these principles explain for us the unity of educational matter, as presented to the studious world. the same marshalling and husbanding of force, which effectuates this result, operates another, akin to the former. it is the most definite coördination and subordination of courses, with a mutual understanding between professors and faculties. where grades exist, either in their perfect form, as in the five stages of the classical or literary course, or in a shape approximating to that, as in the three stages of the philosophical triennium, such subordination is easily secured. but, also, elsewhere the conditions of perfectly definite outlines are laid down for courses, which have any points of mutual contact. this may be illustrated by some rules of the _ratio_. the two professors of dogmatic theology are to consider themselves dispensed from commenting on questions proper to sacred scripture, from treating philosophical matters, from evolving cases of moral theology. the professor of moral theology is to despatch with the briefest definitions the matter which belongs to dogma. the professor of holy scripture is desired not to go at length into points of controverted theology. the professor of ecclesiastical history need not treat canons or dogma. the professor of canon law will not touch theology or public right, any more than his time permits, and the necessary understanding of canon law requires. the same reserve is practised between theology in general, and philosophy. thus a professor of moral theology despatches perhaps in ten minutes the definition of natural law, upon which he knows two days are spent by the professor of moral philosophy. half a century later, this question of coördination received a still fuller treatment at the hands of the general francis piccolomini. after requiring that philosophers and theologians alike finish conscientiously all the matter assigned for each year, he will not allow that "the example of authors who have mixed up subjects, or have followed out their questions into mere minutiæ, can be cited as of any weight with our professors. for, whatever is to be thought of them, this method is not opportune for practical teaching in the schools." the general scouts the idea of "exploring the treasure-house of possibilities," to find out new questions; for there is reason to fear that "while folks search about for truths not ascertained, they will catch at chimeras and shadows."[ ] hence, as the _ratio_ prescribes, "opinions which are useless, obsolete, absurd, manifestly false, are not to receive treatment." the professors are to run rapidly through questions which are easy. in holy scripture, difficult passages are not to be dwelt on indefinitely, nor too much time to be given to chronological computations, or topological surveys of the holy land. in facing the objection, that all this entails a great expenditure of thought and matter, when professors must despatch in such short courses what might well be treated in longer terms, the preliminary _ratio_ draws a sharp line of demarcation between other universities and those conducted by jesuits. "whatever is the custom in other universities, our method is very different from theirs, so that no less progress can be made in our schools during four years, than in others during five; because our professors are for the most part more laborious; we have more numerous exercises; our society, as standing in need of many workmen, requires that perfection of science which is necessary for its men, not that otiose method of others, who, having no motive of this kind to make them expeditious, divide up into many lectures what could well be treated in fewer; their vacations too are for the most part longer and more frequent."[ ] _ex ungue leonem_, "you can tell a lion by his paw." let it appear that the brevity which you study is necessitated by your limits of time; let discernment be conspicuous in your selection of matter, whether to treat summarily or to treat copiously; let the alternate courses supplement one another, so that what had to be skimmed over in one quadriennium is dilated upon more at large in your next; then, say the fathers, the authority which the professors enjoy with ecclesiastical dignitaries will not suffer the detriment anticipated by some, when we give condensed and accurate treatment in a shorter time of what is usually spread out through a longer.[ ] the paw shows the lion. . we may proceed now to the typical form of jesuit instruction. it is called _prælectio_. this word is largely the equivalent of "lecturing," in the higher faculties; of "explanation," in the lower. in either case, however, it is something specific. for this reason, and because i shall have to use the word often, i may be allowed to put it in an english dress, and speak of "prelection." its form, as a lecture in the higher faculties, is conceived thus: the whole proposition, which is advanced, is to be delivered consecutively, without interposing any stoppages. then it should be repeated in the same words; and this will be taken by the students as a sign that it is to be written down; and the delivery of it should be marked by such inflections, and proceed at such a pace, especially in its obscure and finer points, that the students may readily distinguish between what is to be written and what is not. now, while the proposition is thus being taken down, the lecturer ought not to advance new ideas, but should dally with the same, either explaining it in more phrases or clearer ones, or adducing an example or similitude, or amplifying the topic, or drawing out the same logical sequence in another order, so as to make it stand out more distinctly, or throwing out a reason or two, which, however, it is not necessary for them to note. indeed, if the professor brings his own papers into the school, he might have in them some select phrases, brief but not obscure, in which he sums up in few words the gist of the propositions. longer development they will receive only in the explanation, which is then to be given.[ ] in that, the professor will endeavor to prove his thesis, not so much by the number of arguments, as by their weight. he should not be excessive in adducing authorities. and it belongs to his dignity, as a master, scarcely ever to quote an author whom he has not himself read.[ ] in the grade of rhetoric, which is the highest of the literary or classical course, the prelection is double; one is upon the art of eloquence, wherein precepts are explained; the other is upon an author, and has for its object the development of style. taking up an author such as cicero, the professor will, in the first place, make clear the sense of the passage. secondly, the artistic structure is to be analyzed and demonstrated: the _ratio_ here details the elements of this analysis. thirdly, other passages which are similar in thought or expression are to be adduced; other orators and poets, whether in the classics or in the vernacular, are to be cited as employing the same principles of art, in persuading or narrating. fourthly, if the matter allows of it, the thoughts expressed by the author are to be confirmed by what wise men have said on the same subject. fifthly, whatever else will conduce to ornamenting the passage is here in place, from history, mythology, erudition of every kind. finally, the words are to be weighed singly; their propriety of use, their beauty, variety, rhythm to be commented upon. the whole of this treatment, however, does not come within the limits of each and every lesson.[ ] the "erudition" for this grade is defined to comprise "the history and manners of nations, the authority of various writers, and all learning, but sparingly, to suit the capacity of the scholars."[ ] the prelection on the precepts or rules, "the power of which," says the _ratio_, "is very great for the purposes of oratory," comprises six points. cicero is the rhetorician who supplies the precepts; but quintilian and aristotle may also be used. first, the meaning of the rule is to be explained. secondly, upon the same rule, the rhetoricians are to be collated. thirdly, some reason for the rule is to be expounded. fourthly, some striking passages from prose writers, and also from poets, are to be adduced in exemplification of the rule. fifthly, if anything in the way of varied erudition makes to the purpose, it is to be added. lastly, an indication should be given how this principle of art can be turned to use by ourselves; the style in which this is done must be marked by the most absolute choice and finish of diction possible.[ ] in the grade of humanity, which is immediately below rhetoric, the prelection is to be lightly adorned from time to time with the ornaments of erudition, as far as the passage requires. the master should rather expatiate to the fullest extent upon the genius of the latin tongue, on the force and etymology of words as shown by approved authors, on the use and variety of phrases, with a view to imitation. here, as in other rules of this kind, we may notice the degree of progress made in the native tongues during two centuries and a half. while the _ratio_ of adds these words: "nor let him think it out of his way to bring forward something from the vernacular, if it presents anything specially idiomatic for rendering the idea, or offers some remarkable construction;" the revised _ratio_ of substitutes these words: "let him expatiate on a comparison between the genius of both tongues, with a view to imitation." when he is explaining a prose author, he should investigate the precepts of art, as exemplified therein. lastly, if he thinks fit, he can give a version, but a most elegant one, of the whole passage into the mother tongue.[ ] greek has its own form of prelection. as to the "prose writer" just mentioned, the manner of treating an historical writer in humanity, which is otherwise called the class of poetry, will serve by the way to illustrate the difference between what is recognized as the staple of studies in a class, and what comes in as subsidiary--a most essential distinction, characterizing this system of literary teaching. the critics of advert to it clearly. after showing the importance of including the study of historians in the course of poetry, they say: "this will not be too onerous to the preceptor; for the style of history is plainer and more lucid, so as not to need great study; and it would be enough to explain the course of events, as they are narrated by the author, so that he need not consult other authors who have written on the same matter. the prelection of the historian ought to be easy; after rendering a sentence of the author, the words may be lightly commented upon, and only such as have some obscurity hanging about them." the historians of whom there is question here, are cæsar, sallust, q. curtius, justin, tacitus, livy.[ ] "in both classes of rhetoric and humanities, not everything indiscriminately is to be dictated and taken down, but only certain interpretations of difficult passages, which are not readily obvious to every one, or which the master has elaborated as the outcome of his personal study; besides, some rather striking remarks on various passages of the author under examination, such annotations as the commentators give, who edit books of various readings. this will befit the master's dignity, and will be useful for the young men to know."[ ] the grades of grammar have respectively their own forms of prelection, given in detail by the final _ratio_. it will be enough for us to sketch the general form of the earlier critics.[ ] according as it is a grammar or an author that is being explained, a very different method of prelection is to be followed. in the grammar, we acquire a fund of precepts; in an author, a store of words and phrases. wherefore, in the books of grammar, the boys must understand perfectly the things explained; they need not attend scrupulously to the words there, with a view to forming style. but, in the letters of cicero, and other texts of the kind, it is not so much the substance of the sentences, as the words and phrases that are of chief consequence; the significance and force of his thoughts are to be reserved for the higher classes, when the students are no longer mere boys. in the classes of grammar then, let the master follow this method of explaining cicero, or any other author. first, he will sketch, in the briefest way, the meaning of the author, and the connection between what has gone before and what is now to be explained. then he will give a version of the period literally, preserving to the utmost the collocation of words, as they stand in the author; and also the figures employed. as to the collocation or arrangement of the words, this is of such consequence that sometimes, if a single word is put out of its place, the whole thought seems to lose its force and fall flat. herein, too, is perceived that rhythmic flow of the style, which of itself, even if other ornaments are wanting, pleases the ear wonderfully and gratifies the mind. thirdly, the whole period is to be resolved analytically into its structural elements, so that the boys understand distinctly what every word governs; and their attention should be directed to some useful points of good latinity. as to this structural analysis, i may be allowed the passing remark, which is familiar to every judge of a classical education, that the disciplinary value of literary studies reaches here its highest degree of mental exercise; and that the two classical tongues, latin and greek, are altogether eminent as supplying materials for this exercise, in their own native structure; which, in the latin, is an architectural build, characteristic of the reasoning roman mind; and, in the greek, is a subtle delicacy of conception and tracery, reflecting the art, the grace and versatility of athens and the ionian isles. after this, each word is to be examined, as to what it signifies, and to what uses it may be applied; the boy is to understand, as far as may be, the original and proper idea and force of every word, not merely its general significance, as in a shadowy outline; he should know, too, the phrases in his native tongue, which correspond with precision and propriety to the latin. the metaphors and the figurative use of words, especially as found in cicero, are to be explained to the boys in an extremely plain manner,[ ] and by examples drawn from the plainest objects. unless this use of words is understood, the true and genuine knowledge of the tongue is seriously obstructed. then, picking out the more elegant turns of style, the master will dictate them to the scholars, and afterwards require the use and imitation of these phrases in their themes. lastly, he will go back and translate the words of the author over again, as he did at the beginning; and, if need be, do so a third and a fourth time. as to writing, during all this, let him forbid them absolutely to take down a single letter, except when told. what he does dictate to them, he is to finish within the time of the prelection, and not prolong this time for the sake of the writing. it happens now and then that, with much labor, waste of time, and to no good purpose whatever, the boys take down, and preserve with diligence, a set of notes which have not been thought out very judiciously nor been arranged very carefully,--notes simply trivial, common, badly patched together, sometimes worse than worthless; and these notes they commit to paper, in wretched handwriting, full of mistakes and errors. therefore, let the dictation be only of a few points, and those extremely select. the masters are to be on their guard, lest private tutors at the boys' homes explain new lessons to them. these tutors have merely to repeat with the boys what has been heard in class. otherwise, the fruit of the good explanation which is received at school is lost at home. repetition is now in order. two principles govern this exercise. first, "what has often been repeated sinks deeper into the mind."[ ] secondly, "the industry of youths flags under nothing so much as satiety."[ ] as soon, therefore, as the prelection is over, the professor is to require at once an account of all that he has said, and he is to see that the whole line of his explanation is followed in the repetition. as if this seemed to imply that only the best scholars were to be called upon, the critics go on to note that not all of what has been explained should be repeated by one only, but that as many as possible should be practised every day. the master should not follow the order in which the boys are seated, but take them here and there. however, the first to be called on are those more advanced; then, the duller, or perhaps lazier ones, and these should rather be asked oftener, to be kept up to the mark.[ ] the final _ratio_ notes that the daily lesson should not exceed four lines in the lowest class of grammar; seven in middle grammar. there is, as i have already observed, a prelection proper to grammatical rules; also to greek, whether it be in the grammar or in an author. proportion in width and depth of matter is adjusted to each grade. a careful dictation in the vernacular is to be given, which, when rendered into latin or greek, will exemplify the precepts explained, or the use of the phrases already dictated. and one part of the school exercises, from the lowest class up to rhetoric, is a _concertatio_ between rivals, which is a lively discussion either upon matters explained in the prelections, or upon one another's compositions. in this field of debate, as is natural, the activity of the students grows, both in the extent of the field to be covered, and in the depth of erudition required, according as the grades are mounted. and it is carried out of the class-room into select societies, called "academies," the members whereof, whether grammarians or _littérateurs_, conduct their debates, give their own prelections or repeat a choice one of their professor's, award a place in the archives to some specially meritorious production; and they conduct all these exercises in exact keeping with their actual prelections and studies. nor do they yield an inch in gravity or dignity to the great academy of theologians and philosophers.[ ] as to the native tongue, one of the earliest systems of studies in the society, prior to the general _ratio_ by about forty years, lays down for the middle class of grammar, that "on mondays and wednesdays the boys will receive the themes in bohemian and german for their epistolary exercises."[ ] this document is probably from the pen of peter canisius, soon after the colleges were founded at prague, ingolstadt and cologne. in a directive memorial of , drawn up for mayence by father ferdinand alber, a postscript is added to the effect, "let exercise in the german tongue be furthered."[ ] jouvancy lays down the practice in this manner: "after the correction and dictation of the written exercises, the latin author is rendered into the mother tongue, or a _concertatio_ is held. these two exercises can be held on alternate days, if there is not enough of time every day for both. in rendering the author into the vernacular, you will observe three things: first, the idiom of the vernacular, and its agreement in construction with the latin, or else its disagreement, so that the scholars learn each tongue by the other; secondly, the proper turns and elegance of the latin style; finally, the thoughts of the author, as having a moral bearing, and as calculated to form and mould the judgment of the boys; also the ways of men, the punishments of the wicked, the maxims of sages. some part of an historical author should be given sometimes for their written exercise, to translate into the mother tongue; or it may be added, as an appendix, to a shorter theme. let the boys hold a discussion among themselves upon the merits of the translation; they can write in that narrative style, to win the best places in class; as also, at the close of the year, for the premiums. however, the whole time of class is not to be taken up by such translations, as happens sometimes with negligent masters, who shirk the labor of the prelection, and of the correction of themes. while the boys dispute among themselves on the precepts of grammar, poetry, or eloquence, one stands against many, or several against several. the subject, time, and manner of the _concertatio_ is to be defined beforehand; umpires and judges are to be appointed, prizes for the victors, penalties for the vanquished. the others, who are merely listening during the contest, will show in writing what fruit they have derived from it, or will be asked questions thereupon."[ ] in the following article,[ ] the same writer gives several specimens of a prelection in cicero, virgil, phædrus, as adapted to the different classes. they are only passages. the whole of this system goes by passages, taken consecutively, until a whole piece has been mastered by the students. for it is in the prior perfection of detail that perfection in a larger compass is attained. and we may also note that it is only in the original productions of perfect masters in style, that detail can ever be adequately studied. the understanding and enjoyment of an entire masterpiece, taken as a whole, is by every law of nature and of art an easy resultant of understanding the parts. if any writers on pedagogy have thought that no student could "understand and take pleasure" in an original classic, and therefore have advocated the reading of translations as a means of receiving the "literary impressions," i fear that we need only point to the style of literary writing which seems to have resulted from doing things in this second-hand fashion--if indeed it is even second-hand. for, after all, style itself never appears in a translation; only the thoughts are translated. thoughts are the soul of style; its expression was the body; each fitted the other in the classic original; and, in an eminent mutual fitness, an eminent style was being studied. the best translation of a classic piece has never done more than produce a bare equivalent. wherefore, if with the striking original no thorough work has been done, it is more than probable that, in the results, nothing original and striking will ever be done. this system of prelection, which in addition to the perfection of its _technique_, required erudition from every branch of learning,[ ] made of the professor anything but a technical pedagogue. voltaire noticed it, speaking of his own professor. "nothing will efface from my heart," he wrote to père de la tour, rector of the collège louis-le-grand, "the memory of father porée, who is equally dear to all that studied under him. never did man make study and virtue more amiable. the hours of his lessons were delicious hours to us. and i should have wished that it was the custom at paris, as it used to be at athens, that one, at any age, could listen to such lectures. i should often go to hear them. i have had the good fortune to be formed by more than one jesuit of the character of père porée, and i know that he has successors worthy of him."[ ] the productions of such professors replenished the literature of the classics, as we may see in the great editions, or _bibliothecæ classicæ_, published during the present century. father de la cerda of toledo, in his three folio volumes on virgil, in , gave to literature an encyclopædia of political and moral observations, including geography, history, and the natural sciences.[ ] his technical work was not inferior; for his "grammatical institutions" became in , by an exclusive privilege, the standard of all the public schools in spain. father nicholas abram, whose "epitome of greek precepts in latin verse" went through fifty editions in twenty-two years, published in , while professor at the college of pont-à-mousson, two volumes octavo on virgil, which were then republished constantly at rouen, paris, toulouse, poitiers, lyons, etc.[ ] undertaking the same labor, in behalf of cicero, he issued two volumes folio, "by which john george grævius profited in his edition of cicero, amsterdam, ; as well as the editor of cambridge, whose work appeared in , , and ."[ ] father de la rue's (carolus ruæus) delphin virgil is a familiar work in france, holland, england; so, too, de merouville's delphin edition of cicero, which was often reproduced at cambridge, london, dublin, etc. the same we see with regard to sanadon on horace, brumoy's great work on the greek drama, rené rapin's various critical and poetical works; and so of the rest. of père rapin's thirty-five works, there are few which were not translated into various european languages; and oxford, london, cambridge, have been among the most active centres of republication, or translation into english.[ ] . this chapter, which has extended beyond the usual limits, cannot close better than with a word on books, a matter intimately connected with its subject. the fathers of set down some principles with regard to the proper supply and use of books, as well as the expurgation of the classical standard works;[ ] and accordingly the _ratio_ of ordains that "the students are neither to be without useful books, nor to abound in useless ones."[ ] a multitude is considered useless, because "it oppresses the mind, and interferes with the convenient preparation of the lesson. of books by more recent authors few are to be allowed, and those very carefully selected." yet, "a variety of authors gives a richer vein to the boys, and makes imitation easier."[ ] here the fathers proceed to give directions for the composition of an entirely new kind of work, which would be of great use in the colleges. it is exactly the species so well known in our days under the various titles of "precepts of rhetoric," "art of composition," etc. as the development of pedagogical literature, which we took note of in a former chapter,[ ] had already made some progress, the critics say: "some one most versed in all these matters should be deputed to gather whatever is best in this line, and to compile in one treatise, written in an elegant style, all that he has selected, about the art of writing epigrams, elegies, odes, eclogues, _sylvæ_ (that is, materials, "objects"), comedies, tragedies, epopoeiæ, a brief method of chronology; explaining also what is the historical (or narrative) style, the poetic, the epistolary, the different kinds of speaking, and other such matters, all to be illustrated by examples."[ ] elsewhere they call for a similar work of a higher order, on the art of oratory. the sources which they designate for such a compilation are "the numerous publications of our professors of rhetoric, as well on the art itself, as on classical orations."[ ] these _compendia_, or text-books, were a new idea in education. chapter xvi. the classical literatures. school management and control. the subject of literary exercises and school management is treated in such a manner by the critics of , that justice could be done to it, only by transcribing, word for word, the several chapters of the preliminary _ratio_. as that is impossible, within the limits of space remaining, i shall endeavor to trace the outline. . there is one fundamental point, however, which should be touched on, to meet a latent query in the mind. it refers to the kind of education projected throughout. it is evidently not a special training which is contemplated; not the training of specialists, or technical students. all through the system, the field of pedagogical activity is that of a general culture; and, therefore, properly an education. the result aimed at is a general one, that of developing in the young mind all fundamental qualities; of adjusting it, by the early development of all natural fitnesses, to any special work of thought and labor in the mature life of the future. it would lay a solid substructure, in the whole mind and character, for any superstructure of science, professional and special; also for the entire building up of moral life, civil and religious. that such a general culture should go before the special seems to be obvious. to supplant it by the special, or even to abridge the process, is not only to sacrifice the general culture; it has a more serious effect than that. by a false economy, it cramps, curtails, and reduces to the smallest proportions whatever possibilities existed of general and special qualifications in the youthful mind. without a broad, radical formation below, the amplitude of organic growth above must necessarily fall short; the roots underneath not having shot out, the development above is wanting in vigor, to ramify according to its environment, and use its opportunities. in a boy's mind, there is needed a suppleness of general powers, as only the young mind can be made supple, while at the same time it is preëminently apt to be general. it is what seneca calls _curiosum ingenium_, "an inquisitive genius," open to everything, and prying to open everything. memory is then at its flourishing stage, ready to be cultivated throughout the extent of a potential vastness, which will never again be experienced in life. if cultivated richly in its season, it will be capable afterwards of every kind of ready yield, according to its acquired tenacity, and according to the richness of the seed deposited in it. the imagination, too, is at the stage of impressionable and vital expansion, and is keenly sensitive to the lights and shades of objective life. these are either brought under its observation, or, better still, are pictured for it in beautiful literature; since the fine fancy of great minds paints nature, as nature herself is not found dressed at every one's door. the opening judgment also is receptive of the thoughts and wisdom, which other minds have thought out and handed down, encasing it, as they did so, in a style worthy of their own vigor, and presenting it as the heritage of the past to the present, of the wise old age of the world to its youth, which may be wiser still. and thus in each individual youth, the judgment being tenderly nursed, and learning ripening with age, what was before in the memory passes gradually into the whole character and competency of the man. in the system which we are considering, the instrument employed for working these effects is a literature in the hands of a competent teacher; it is a great literature, and a double one. the great literatures of rome and greece have always been considered adequate instruments of universal culture. under a literary aspect, the eloquence and poetry of greece had been the mistress of roman excellence. under a philological aspect, the latin tongue has been the principal basis of our modern languages, as formed in the history of christendom. in both of them, the varied elements of richest thought are brought into contact with the undeveloped, but developing nature of the youth; glimpses of human life, individual, social, and political, favor his inquiring eyes, and lead him to feel the finest springs of human sentiment. better still, he feels these springs as touched by the greatest masters of expression; and he conceives thought as rendered in a style worthy of the greatest thinkers; and that, in languages, one of them the most delicately organized, the other perhaps the most systematically elaborated, of all tongues living or extinct. and, besides, these two literatures come down to us, bearing in their own right what no other tongues can convey. not as translations, which, in their best form, exhibit only a respectable degree of mendicancy, and represent other men's living thoughts in a decent misfit, these two literatures come down to us bearing in their own right all the historic memories of antiquity, as well sacred as profane; all the masterpieces of eloquence and poetry, belonging to no less than two out of the very few great epochs, those of pericles and augustus; all human philosophy, from socrates, plato, and aristotle, down to st. thomas aquinas, and, further down, to leibnitz and newton, both of them men of classical letters; in fine, all the traditions, the faith, and divinity of christendom. to these considerations we may add one more characteristic of the classical literatures, as instruments in the class-room, and we shall have seen enough on our present topic, to understand the theory which underlies the _ratio studiorum_. these tongues are dead. they are not the language of common life. they are not picked up by instinct, and without reflection. everything has to be learned by system, rule, and formula. the relations of grammar and logic must be attended to with deliberation. thought and judgment are constantly exercised in assigning the exact equivalents of the mother tongue for every phrase of the original. the coincidence of construction is too little, the community of idiomatic thought too remote, for the boy's mind to catch at the idea, by force of that preëstablished harmony which exists among most modern tongues. only the law of thought and logic guides him, with the assistance of a teacher to lead the way, and reassure his struggling conception. and when, in the last instance, the boy comes to write and to speak the language so learned, and quickens it, though dead, with the very life of actual speech which makes modern languages live, we have the supreme test and proof of successful toil, that which consists in the power to reproduce. we have also the very specific advantage, in this case, that the toil has been of the most valuable kind; it has been personal labor, spent in the freshness of life on complete self-culture. for that great law of all success in life, personal labor, has been honored in the most remunerative way, by cultivating memory, exercising judgment, and acquiring in the same thoughtful, reflective manner two languages together, latin and the mother tongue, greek and the mother tongue, each systematically helping the others by analogy and contrast. and, withal, what is more congenial to the young than letters, language, talk? as to the working of this jesuit system, it is very much of a commonplace, in pedagogic history, that "a handsome style" was aimed at, and a handsome style was the outcome. the scottish professor, whom i quoted on a former occasion, states very exactly the value of this result. speaking of the structure of sentences, he says: "logic and rhetoric have here, as in many cases, a strict connection; and he that is learning to arrange his sentences with order, is learning to think with accuracy and order; an observation which alone would justify all the care and attention we have bestowed on this subject."[ ] and, in another connection, he quotes, with the approval which it merits, the roman rhetorician's saying: _curam verborum, rerum volo esse sollicitudinem_, "i would have a sufficient care be given to the diction, but the thoughts must be the object of scrupulous attention."[ ] this latter principle, of diction first and matter afterwards, as translated into a process of educational development, assigns, in the _ratio_, five grades, or seven years, more or less, to be spent on the acquirement of style, chiefly as to its body, or, if you like, its form; then two great courses of science, natural and revealed, or philosophy and theology, for the acquirement of the same style, chiefly as to its soul, or, if you wish so to call it, the substratum of matter. from both together issues the thoroughly cultured man; as the well-known phrase has it: _le style c'est l'homme_, "a style is the man himself." and, if we have just had occasion to take notice that two of the great literary epochs of the world's history, those of pericles and augustus, are made present to us by the classical literatures, it is a subject of historical verification that a third great literary epoch, the age of louis xiv, was created under the influence of this system. the manner in which the critics of discuss the question of greek shows the practical eye they kept on the requirements of actual life, and the conditions of concrete surroundings.[ ] their conclusions are embodied in a rule of the director or prefect of studies: "he should not grant an immunity, particularly for any length of time, from either versification or greek, except for a grave reason."[ ] upon this theme there is a facetious touch in the report of the upper german province, which was sent to father aquaviva some three years after the final _ratio_ was published. the deputies say: "some ask for an exemption from greek and versification, in behalf of the older monks and nobles. but as the rule itself insinuates that an exception can be made, for a sufficiently grave cause, there is no need of a change. if we are facile in the matter, whether with monks or nobles, we shall end by eliminating greek altogether. but, if one is seen to be altogether inept and incapable, the impossibility of the thing exempts him; for, if god himself does not enjoin impossibilities, why, neither should we impose greek on such disciples." father aquaviva replies, "that is correct."[ ] . under the head of exercises, the preliminary _ratio_ treats elaborately and minutely the literary direction of a class. the subjects are orthography, and all that pertains to it; the prelection, as explained before; the repetitions, daily themes, and the method of daily correction; the recitation of lessons by heart; parsing; and the speaking of latin. jouvancy gives the order of the daily class exercises. and he makes this reflection: few things are to be taught in each class, but accurately, so that they remain in the minds of the boys; the teacher is to remember that these young intellects are like vases with a narrow orifice, which waste the liquid, if it is poured in copiously, but take it all, if it comes in by drops.[ ] there are, besides, a number of aids to school management. these are the division of the class into parties of ten apiece, or _decuriæ_; the exposition, once or twice a month, of some passage by a student, in the presence of invited friends; contests between rivals or parties; the delivery of an original piece or else an oratorical contest, every week; the exhibition or delivery of original poems; the annual distribution of premiums; the use of the stage, when "the boys can produce some specimen of their studies, their delivery and powers of memory." the composition of the tragedy and minor drama devolves, as we saw before, upon the professors of rhetoric and poetry. a general condition in the management of a class is absolute silence and attention. besides, it belongs to the college programme to insure application, not only in school to class exercises, but out of school to private study, especially when holidays intervene. the usual weekly relaxations scarcely rise to the rank of "holidays." for the amount of time to be assigned in private study to composition and other work is part of the daily order, whether the students be _alumni_, day-scholars, or _convictores_, boarders. all must have enough to occupy them, "that the boys be deterred from roaming about to their hurt." the same applies to the ordinary intervals between school hours, "particularly," say the fathers, "on the days in summer, when there is much time in the early afternoon, before classes are resumed; and we hear the court-yard resounding with cries and noisy pastimes, hour after hour."[ ] boys were the same genus then as now. it took all the efficacy of a benign firmness to control that element which tries the experience of every age. the german fathers draw a graphic picture of these sixteenth century boys. they are commenting on the rule which requires the prefect of studies at the end of school to be on the ground and supervise. they write thus to father aquaviva: "many object to this; but it seems reasonable. for, if somebody is not on hand, some one whom the scholars revere, then like a herd,[ ] all in a heap, they will fill the whole place with their yells and uproar, their tussling, laughter, and jostling. now, it is necessary to require the observance of decorum on the part of our scholars; since, if we leave room anywhere for unmannerliness, it will get at once into the school-rooms and ruin everything."[ ] in this sense, a certain small number of rules in the _ratio_, only fifteen in number, and very short, are directly presented to the students for their observance. "none of our students shall come to college with arms, poniards, knives, or anything else that is prohibited, according to the circumstances of time or place." swords and daggers were part of a gentleman's personal equipment in those times. "they must abstain entirely from swearing, injurious language or actions, detraction, lies, forbidden games, from places, too, that are dangerous, or are forbidden by the prefect of schools; in fine, from everything which is adverse to purity of morals." other rules follow, equally radical for those times, and reconstructive of education for the future.[ ] for, in these days of ours, we are not accustomed to see students walk in and out of a lecture room as they choose. and many other inconveniences of the sixteenth century are not usual with us. but the reason is, that we come three hundred years later than those times, and are enjoying the fruits of other people's labors. an ascendency of personal tact and address, conspicuous in the jesuit teachers, is usually commented upon and referred to some cause or other, in themselves or in the general organization of the society. omitting that, i prefer to designate one secret of control, which is full of significance, though not so likely to arrest attention. it is an insensible method of organization, making its way among the youths themselves, and subserving the purpose of general collegiate control. there were, in all, four classes of auditors, mingled together, and intermingling their influences. that of the strongest of course preponderated. there were jesuits themselves in the higher courses. there were boarders, _convictores_, who remained for ten, or rather eleven months of the year, entirely under the control and direction of the fathers. among these were whole houses of religious or ecclesiastics. besides, there were _alumni_, day scholars, that great body of students originally contemplated in the constitution of ignatius. these, however, owing to their divided life, partly at school, partly at home, were not found to represent, as a rule, the fullest effects of the education. finally, there were _externi_, external students, such as not being entered on the books, still attended lectures; and to this category we must refer such general gatherings as those several thousand hearers, who were in attendance for hours, before the time, at father maldonado's lectures in paris, and made him go out into the open air to satisfy all. now, besides the bond of affection which attached scholars to the professors, there was another bond, that of their character as sodalists. this character denoted membership in the sodality of the blessed virgin mary, a religious association which is most highly commended in the _ratio studiorum_, and which gathered into itself all that was excellent in the body of students. the literary and scientific "academies" were recruited only from the sodality. thus, by a double process, an aristocracy of virtue and talent was created among the students themselves, tending not only to the maintenance of order, but to the active development of all those qualities which an educational system most desires. chapter xvii. examinations and graduation. schedule of grades and courses. . all examinations, as projected by the _ratio studiorum_, are conducted by word of mouth. writing enters the examinations, only when the written word itself is the subject of investigation. thus, in the grades of the literary course, the composition of the student, from its elementary qualities of spelling, punctuation, grammar, up to the most varied forms and species of style, comes under examination for advancing to the next grade. but even then, after each of the three examiners has inspected carefully the written composition, and consulted the master's reports of the individual's progress during the year, they call in the writer, submit his paper to him, and subject him to an oral investigation upon it. after that, they proceed to the other branches, all by word of mouth. in the higher courses, where style is no longer a matter of study, writing never appears in examinations. written dissertations, special lectures, literary pieces of all kinds, composed for certain occasions, are merely a part thenceforth of the exercises incident to those courses. to speak here only of grammar and the humanities, each new-comer, on presentation of the credentials required, is examined by the director or prefect of studies, who "places him in the class, and with the professor, adapted to the boy's qualifications; in such a manner, however, that the young person be rather worthy of the class above, than unworthy of the class in which he is placed."[ ] it is the remark of the earlier critics, that "severity must be practised in examinations, since it is more injurious for boys to ascend a grade, when not fit, than, if really fit, to be kept where they are; and, in addition to that, if they are advanced when not qualified, they create no slight disturbance in the upper class."[ ] into the lowest grade, neither youths advanced in age, nor boys of very tender years, are to be admitted. the plea that parents merely want the children to be in good hands is not a sufficient reason for taking them; the only exception is for young boys who are really far advanced for their years. these conditions of age, and sufficient preparation for entering the classical course, illustrate very distinctly several features of the policy which the society pursued. father joseph calasanzio, a priest of great zeal, petitioned the rector of the roman college, which was flourishing with more than two thousand students, to open some schools for the unprovided children of rome. there is a latin word coined from the first four letters of the alphabet, for designating this elementary class of scholars, who are not yet qualified for literature. the word is _abecedarii_. the term is employed both in the constitution of loyola and in the _ratio_. the rector declined. father joseph applied to the general claudius aquaviva. he too declined; he referred to the constitution of the society, which had been distinctly and in all its parts approved by the popes. unable to have his idea carried out by the jesuits, father joseph opened his first "pious school" in rome, which was soon frequented by little boys, _abecedarii_. after the founder's death in , his work spread into the vast system of _scuole pie_. in our times, the revised _ratio_ of recognizes the element of preparatory departments. it merely requires that they be entirely under the same jurisdiction as the college proper.[ ] another feature of the policy which these conditions illustrate and which they also further, is that of their tending to discriminate between the right kind of scholars and others, whose circumstances will debar them from ever reaching the ultimate end of higher culture. where circumstances are not propitious, neither is the culture altogether desirable. for what is more injurious to society at large than to have young people hurt in two ways, positively and negatively; positively, by placing them in a false environment of culture, which cannot be theirs in future life; negatively, by taking up with such culture all the time and labor which might usefully be spent in receiving a plainer education, and reach its term in any commonest walk of life? besides, the liberal education itself suffers prejudice; for it is misinterpreted; since it comes to be estimated then by results and by circumstances which do not appertain to it. every system should be set on its own basis, and be built up subject to its own conditions. the absoluteness of loyola's constitution throughout, and of the _ratio studiorum_ in particular, throws this policy into relief at every turn. after the boy's admission into a class, he advances thenceforward, either with the whole class, at the general and solemn promotion every year, or, if he excels, as the reports and the master will determine, he is not to be detained in that grade, but may ascend, at any time of the year, after a fitting examination. a number of conditions, hard to realize, make this special promotion barely possible from the grade of first grammar to humanity, or from humanity to rhetoric.[ ] on the other hand, "if any one is found to be utterly incapable of entering the next grade, no account is to be taken of any petitions." . in the philosophical and theological courses, both of which terminate in the conferring of degrees, the system of examinations for all students, who are not members of the society, refers only to those degrees, at the time when application is made for them. for the philosophical degree, the first preliminary is an hour's disputation with three examiners, on the matter of the whole course, and that in presence of the other students. the result being satisfactory, permission will then be granted to prepare for a public defence of all philosophy. this is the method for the solemn form of graduation, which, in the old style, confers upon the successful student, after three years of natural sciences, or philosophy, the title of master of arts. at this point start the three professional lines of medicine, jurisprudence, theology. the last-named faculty ends in much the same manner as that of philosophy, but with a much greater amplitude of public acts or defence, and then finally with a defence of all philosophy and theology together. this entitles the defendant to the degree of doctor of divinity, which is conferred in the most solemn manner. there is a pedagogical history connected with the present subject, which it may be well to sketch in two stages, first, that of the sixteenth century, and secondly, that of the nineteenth. ignatius of loyola had legislated in his constitution to this effect: "in the study of arts, courses shall be arranged in which the natural sciences shall be taught; and, for these, less than three years will not suffice; besides which, another half-year shall be assigned the students, for repeating the matters they have heard, for holding public acts of defence, and for receiving the degree of master. the whole course, therefore, shall be three years and a half, up to the reception of the degree."[ ] again, ignatius had legislated for divinity: "the course of theology shall be six years in length; all the matters that have to be read will be treated in the first four; in the other two, besides making a repetition, those who are to be promoted to the degree of doctor will make the usual acts of defence."[ ] having this legislation before them, with the experience of forty years to illustrate its working, the critics of are confronted, at the same time, with a set of historical facts, which seem not to be in harmony with the legislation. while loyola's system was obviously the organization of education, the facts, which they notice, show a concomitant process going on, in an inverse sense, towards the dissolution of system. this, no doubt, was owing to the disturbed condition of the sixteenth century. making an effort to bring the _ratio_ and the facts more into harmony, the critics reason in this manner:-- "it is hard to expect everywhere that external students will be content to hold their acts of public defence, only after their course of philosophy or theology; and that, during the half-year, or the two years specified beyond. for, in italy, scarcely any are promoted to the degrees by our faculties, except our own alumni, or _convictores_, who cannot wait so long as that in expectancy, and who will readily slip away to medicine or jurisprudence; nay, they are alienated from us, and are offended at this severity, seeing that, in the other universities of italy, they can most easily obtain the degree if they want it. in germany, too, such intervals of protracted waiting are scarcely tolerated; and they rather think they have done something, if they have gone through a four-year course in theology. and it would seem proper to grant them a relaxation there; otherwise, the men are deterred from seeking the doctorate; so that germany will have but few catholic doctors in the future; whereas, it abounds in non-catholic doctors, whose promotion is to be had any day. in france, too, the philosophers do not wait beyond the close of the triennium to be made masters of arts; they could not put up with delay, for they are hurrying on to law. the same is the condition of things with the german philosophers, for other reasons. therefore the reverend father general might consider whether he will dispense with the observance of the constitution in the italian and transalpine provinces; the more so, as the constitution itself says that it is to be observed, as far as may be."[ ] in accordance with this, the _ratio studiorum_ is not absolute in its general legislation, and leaves room for the special conditions of different countries. a most distinct conception of the meaning and process of conferring degrees may be had, by consulting the typical constitution of an exclusively jesuit university, as exhibited in the _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_.[ ] the third part of this document treats exclusively of the "variety of academic degrees and the conditions for each." and it begins by saying: "as it is expedient to confer academic degrees on those who are found worthy of the same, so the utmost caution is to be practised, lest, at any time, they be conferred on such as would only bring the name of the academy into discredit, and the degrees themselves into contempt. wherefore no degree is ever to be conferred upon any one, who has not undergone all the tests which the customs of universities require." passing on from the sixteenth century to our time, an important gap has to be crossed in the educational history of the order. it is that of the suppression, during about forty years at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present. these blank pages signify the total loss of property and position, with a severance in many places of the educational traditions for almost sixty years, and the entire destruction of them in many other parts. besides, like "goods derelict," the whole system of education which, by means of the society, had passed out of a limited number of mediæval universities, and had been accommodated with a home gratuitously in over seven hundred cities and towns of a dozen nationalities, was found by the order, at its resurrection, to be largely in the hands of state authorities, or, at least, not independent of state control. restored, but having had to struggle into existence, under altered and unfavorable circumstances, this pedagogical system may be viewed with interest, as it stands towards the close of the nineteenth century. for this purpose i may be allowed to glance at it, in several parts of the world, under the precise aspect which i have just been regarding, that of endeavoring to complete its work of education with academic degrees. in the united states, it has the same freedom of action as any other system of higher education, with none of the special support which is given to organizations endowed by the state. in many parts of the continent of europe, the property of the order is in an habitual or chronic state of confiscation, and the members, as educators, are legally outlawed. education can scarcely thrive when on the wing. in austria, where the society is fully recognized, its teachers are, by a cross-move, practically debarred from state recognition. to pass on their students for state degrees, it is required that they themselves be certified state teachers. to become such teachers, they must have followed in actual attendance, and during four years, the special course of grammar, history, etc., in which their certificate afterwards will be recognized. meanwhile, as jesuits, they have gone through the courses which i have sketched in the pages of this essay; and they are certainly, by this time, not to be confounded with young persons, who are merely prospecting some limited field of pedagogic activity, as the scope of their lives. hence, at this most energetic and ripe period of their lives, they must waste four years, as if they were young normal scholars, in following out some one or two lines of pedagogical formation; and that, merely to have their word admitted when they pass their students on for the state degrees. in great britain and the dependencies of the british empire there are no such harassing restrictions. the conditions for matriculation, and for the subsequent series of examinations, in such universities as those of london, calcutta, or laval, are quite in keeping with the american ideas of social liberality; however high and exacting otherwise may be the standard requisite for success, either in the pass-examinations or in the honors. nor, if special matriculation is again required in certain english universities, before entering their courses of medicine, does that impose any special hardship. hence, st. francis xavier's, calcutta, ranks among the highest of what are called the "christian schools" of india. to make matters clearer, i shall take two instances, one from great britain itself, the other from the dominion of canada. stonyhurst will illustrate the working of the state system, as coming in contact with the _ratio studiorum_. the matriculation examinations at the london university create no special difficulty, although the higher classes of the literary curriculum may be regarded as under a strain, in the double effort to satisfy the _ratio_, and to matriculate at that university. after matriculation, the process is considerably smoother. to take the classical or mathematical honors, in the b. a. or m. a. examinations, is altogether in harmony with the usual course of the jesuit system. at once, after the b. a. honors, a good place on the indian civil service list is within easy reach. and, in general, changes made by the civil service commissioners have all been in the direction of adapting their competitive examinations to the ordinary school curriculum. in preparation for the military academies of woolwich and sandhurst, students follow the regular school course at stonyhurst, to within two years or so of the time for entrance; and then they merely take up their special course, designed for the military cadetship. the same is now possible with regard to the navy, since the age for entering that service has been somewhat raised. and, to mention one of the courses which are altogether proper to the jesuit system, that of philosophy, the usual lectures of the two years' philosophical curriculum have only to be supplemented with a few special lectures, and the students are ready for the philosophical papers of the b. a. examination, in the london university. montreal exhibits the relations of jesuit and state systems in a catholic country. the university of laval is at the same time chartered by the state and by the pope. the jesuit professors in the college at montreal conduct their own studies, examine their students, and merely send them with certificates to receive degrees at the university. from this history it appears, that, though the curriculum of divinity in the jesuit system need have undergone no great change during three centuries, beyond the usual self-accommodation of the courses to new and pressing questions, its curriculum of philosophy has been materially affected, with reference to the general world of students. this, as foreseen in the _ratio studiorum_ of , and as referred to again in the revised _ratio_ of , causes a double arrangement to be made. first, wherever members of the order are pursuing their studies, the philosophical triennium is, as a matter of course, in full operation, and is prolonged with individuals into a fourth year, for reviewing the subjects and prosecuting them further; and this seminary course, if connected with a public college, remains open as ever to the outside world. secondly, to meet the requirements of external students, who do not desire the full triennium, the provincial "will see that a course of philosophy be established according to the customs and necessities of the country."[ ] hence a biennium, or two-year course, is commonly established; and, according to the needs or desires of the locality, it is conducted either in latin or in the vernacular. . now we may review succinctly the different courses as conducted by the year, and as distributed through the week. the literary curriculum. the grading is based upon the principles of a classical education. other branches enter a classical course, as completing the staple studies. but, on their own merits, they receive a special distribution of their own. the prefect of the lower studies is instructed to "distribute history, geography, the elements of mathematics, and whatever else is usually treated in these classes, in such a manner that each master can satisfactorily and conveniently finish the matter assigned to him." this is to be done "after consulting the provincial authority," which assures stability in the manner of organizing these branches.[ ] as to the mother tongue, the study of which is bound up intimately with the classic literatures, a general direction is given once for all to the professors of these grades: "in learning the mother tongue, very much the same method will be followed as in the study of latin." and, in the form of prelection to be used, they are to adopt the method specified as peculiar to the historian and the poet, which is more summary than the prelection of the central prose author: "much the same method will be followed in giving the prelection on classic authors in the vernacular."[ ] lower grammar. the grade of this class is the perfect knowledge of the rudiments, and an incipient knowledge of syntax. in greek: reading, writing, and a certain portion of the grammar. the authors used for prelection will be some easy selections from cicero, besides fables of phædrus and lives of nepos. middle grammar. the grade is the knowledge, though not entire, of all grammar; another portion of the greek grammar; and, for the prelection, only the select epistles, narrations, descriptions, and the like from cicero, with the commentaries of cæsar, and some of the easiest poems of ovid. in greek: the fables of Æsop, select and expurgated dialogues of lucian, the table of cebes. upper grammar. the grade is the complete knowledge of grammar, including all the exceptions and idioms in syntax, figures of rhetoric, and the art of versification. in greek: the eight parts of speech, or all the rudiments. for the lessons: in prose, the most difficult epistles of cicero, the books de amicitia, de senectute, and others of the kind, or even some of the easier orations; in poetry, some select elegies and epistles of ovid, also selections from catullus, tibullus, propertius, and the eclogues of virgil, or some of virgil's easier books. in greek: st. chrysostom, xenophon, and the like. humanity. the grade is to prepare, as it were, the ground for eloquence, which is done in three ways, by a knowledge of the language, some erudition, and a sketch of the precepts pertaining to rhetoric. for a command of the language, which consists chiefly in acquiring propriety of expression and fluency, the one prose author employed in daily prelections is cicero; as historical writers, cæsar, sallust, livy, curtius, and others of the kind; the poets used are, first of all, virgil; also select odes of horace, with the elegies, epigrams, and other productions of illustrious poets, expurgated; in like manner, orators, historians, and poets, in the vernacular. the erudition conveyed should be slight, and only to stimulate and recreate the mind, not to impede progress in learning the tongue. the precepts will be the general rules of expression and style, and the special rules on the minor kinds of composition, epistles, narrations, descriptions, both in verse and prose. in greek: the art of versification, and some notions of the dialects; also a clear understanding of authors, and some composition in greek. the greek prose authors will be saints chrysostom and basil, epistles of plato and synesius, some selections from plutarch; the poets, homer, phocylides, theognis, st. gregory nazianzen, synesius, and others like them. rhetoric. the grade of this class cannot easily be defined. for it trains to perfect eloquence, which comprises two great faculties, the oratorical and poetical, the former chiefly being the object of culture; nor does it regard only the practical, but the beautiful also. for the precepts, cicero may be supplemented with quintilian and aristotle. the style, which may be assisted by drawing on the most approved historians and poets, is to be formed on cicero; all of his works are most fitted for this purpose, but only his speeches should be made the subject of prelection, that the precepts of the art may be seen in practice. as to the vernacular, the style should be formed on the best authors. the erudition will be derived from the history and manners of nations, from the authority of writers and all learning; but moderately, as befits the capacity of the students. in greek, the fuller knowledge of authors and of dialects is to be acquired. the greek authors, whether orators, historians, or poets, are to be ancient and classic: demosthenes, plato, thucydides, homer, hesiod, pindar, and others of the kind, including saints nazianzen, basil, and chrysostom. the compilers of the preliminary _ratio_ throw out some very useful hints, relative to the work and scope of this class. they say, for instance, that the students of rhetoric "are to be assisted with almost a daily exposition of some poet, to derive thence the variety and richness of poetic imitation and diction." again, "nothing dialectic is to be made the subject of prelection in this class, since rhetoricians are to be kept as far away as possible from the style, invention, and spirit of dialectics." "two or three years" are spoken of as spent in this grade.[ ] at any rate, "all our day-scholars or boarders[ ] should spend one year in rhetoric before they enter on philosophy; this should be brought home to their parents. the others, who attend our courses from outside,[ ] should be persuaded to do the same."[ ] if they still insist upon entering the philosophical curriculum at too early an age, special means are suggested to discountenance such a practice. all these five grades are evidently so connected as not to overlap one another. neither are they to be multiplied, except in the sense of allowing more than a single division, when scholars are very numerous. if all the grades cannot be maintained in any place, "the higher ones, as far as possible, are to be kept, the lower being dispensed with."[ ] the philosophical curriculum. with the side branches sufficiently learned, with the boy's native talents "stimulated" or "cultivated," as the _ratio_ frequently expresses itself,[ ] and his memory enriched with the fullest materials for style in two languages, latin and the vernacular, while greek has subsidized his culture, the student enters on the study of philosophy, using scholastic latin as the vehicle of expression. this instrument for the expression of philosophical thought possesses the qualities of subtlety, keenness, and precision, which the dialectic practice of all universities had tended to develop in it, from the twelfth century onwards. with the addition of cicero's fulness and richness, which the colleges cultivated with so much ardor, the scholastic latin of men like molina, ripalda, liberatore, franzelin, and so many others, has flourished to a degree of literary excellence. mathematics runs parallel with the course of philosophy, and upon that branch of science there is a rather eloquent passage in the _ratio_ of .[ ] physics was always included in the aristotelian philosophy. the career of modern physics was then in the future. but, as in mathematics pure and applied, the courses were always advanced to the foremost rank, and in arithmetic and geometry we notice that, as early as , a single public course, under the direction of jesuits at caen, numbered four hundred students,[ ] so, in the middle of the next century, the eighteenth, we find physical cabinets in regular use, and experimental lectures given to the classes by the professors of physics.[ ] the basis of the study is thus laid down in the rules of the revised _ratio_: "the professor is to expose theories, systems, and hypotheses, so as to make it clear what degree of certitude or probability belongs to each. since this faculty makes new progress every day, the professor must consider it part of his duty to know the more recent discoveries, so that in his prelections he may advance with the science itself."[ ] the general assemblies had legislated on this subject, as i indicated before; assigning its proper place in philosophy to what they called "the more pleasant" or the "lighter" form of physics. indeed, philosophy itself in the course of three centuries came to feel many new needs and submitted to new lines of treatment. =first year.= logic and general metaphysics. _one professor: eight hours a week._ introductory sketch of philosophy. dialectics or minor logic: ideas, judgment, reasoning. logic proper: the criteria of truth; species of knowledge, and general rules of criticism and hermeneutics. general metaphysics or ontology: the notions of being and the categories. mathematics. _one professor: six hours a week._ all that prepares for the physics of the following year, viz., algebra, geometry, plane and spherical trigonometry, and conic sections. this rapid course, in so short a time, supposes that the matter is not entirely new, but has been studied already in the literary course. =second year and part of the third.= special metaphysics. _one professor: four hours a week._ first, cosmology: the origin of the world, the elements of bodies, the perfection of the world, its nature and laws, supernatural effects and their criteria, as examined by philosophical principles. secondly, psychology: the essence of the human soul, and its faculties: sensation, imagination, memory, the nature of intelligence and reason, appetite, will, freedom; the essential difference between soul and body; the simplicity, spirituality, and immortality of the soul; the union of soul and body, the nature and origin of ideas; the vital principle of brutes. thirdly, natural theology: god, his existence and attributes, etc., as viewed by the light of human reason. physics. _one professor: nine hours a week._ mechanics, dynamics; the properties of bodies, hydrostatics, hydraulics, aerostatics, pneumatics; the elements of astronomy; light, caloric, electricity, magnetism, meteorology. what is not completed in this year is continued in the next, with the elements of natural history. much of this course may have been seen in the literary curriculum. "the matters are not to be treated so exclusively from a rational standpoint, as to leave barely any time for experiments; nor are experiments so to occupy the time, that it looks like a merely experimental science." chemistry. _one professor: three hours a week._ inorganic and organic. =third year.= metaphysics. _one professor: four hours a week._ what remains of the course just described, under the second year. moral philosophy. _one professor: four hours a week._ the end of man, the morality of human actions, natural law, natural rights and duties; the principles of public right. physics. _one professor: two hours a week._ geology, astronomy, physiology. part of the course above can be reserved for this year. mathematics. _one professor: three hours a week._ analytical geometry and differential calculus. in these courses of natural science, if the matter is not altogether new, as having been studied in the lower faculties, the philosophical attitude of theoretic criticism is quite specific throughout this curriculum. the theological curriculum. as the jesuit theologians of cologne announced in their programme of that, while they followed st. thomas, yet "neither all the matters, nor those alone which he treated," were to be handled by them; so, in every age, the standard adopted has been adhered to, with the same practical eye to the needs of the times. the reason is the same as those theologians assigned; because, they said, "every age has definite fields of conflict, which render it necessary that theology be enlarged with a variety of newly disputed questions, and, in fact, that it assume a new form."[ ] in the arrangement of scholastic theology the _ratio_ suggests the following form:-- =scholastic theology.= four years. _two professors: each four hours a week._ _one course._ religion and the church; god in unity and trinity; his attributes, predestination: god as creator; the angels; the creation of man and his fall; the incarnation; three of the seven sacraments. _the other course._ human acts, virtues, and vices; the theological virtues; the cardinal virtues; right and justice; religion; grace; the sacraments in general; the rest of the seven sacraments. =moral theology.= two years. _one professor: five and a half hours a week._ the scope of this course is to form ministers of the sacraments. _one year._ human acts, conscience, laws, sins, the commandments, excepting the seventh. _the other year._ the seventh commandment, which includes contracts; the sacraments, censures, the states and duties of life. =ecclesiastical history.= two years. _one professor: two hours a week._ the questions, necessary and opportune, in the history of each century. =canon law.= two years. _one professor: two hours a week._ _one year._ persons, judgments, penalties. _the other year._ things. =sacred scripture.= two years. _one professor: four hours a week._ general prolegomena. a book from the old and new testament alternately. =hebrew.= one year. _one professor: two hours a week._ supplemented with one hour a week on syriac, arabic, chaldaic, during four years. general distribution of time. the compilers of the preliminary _ratio_ made an effort to draw up a uniform system for the distribution of time in the various countries. but the final _ratio_ preferred to leave the matter thus: "since the variety of countries, times, and persons is apt to introduce variety in the order to be observed, and in the distribution of hours for study, repetitions, disputations, and other exercises, as also in vacations, the proper authority will report to the general whatever he thinks more expedient in his province, for the better advancement of studies, that a definite arrangement may be come to, which will meet all exigencies; keeping, however, as near as possible to the common order of our studies."[ ] accordingly, a rule of the general prefect of studies prescribes that "he lay down not only an order of studies, repetitions, disputations to be observed by members of the society, by our scholars, and by external students at large, under the direction of their professors; but also that he distribute all their time, to the effect that they spend the hours of private study well."[ ] i shall give three sketches of actual arrangements for the conduct of the literary or secondary curriculum; and one normal arrangement for the two departments of superior education in philosophy and theology. the three schedules for the secondary course are taken from the english speaking world. that numbered (i), if presented in full, would read very much like the usual arrangement of an american college. it is the method more or less adopted by the jesuit colleges which centre around the st. louis university in the western states. the schedule numbered (ii) represents the system of georgetown college, and of others in the eastern states; it looks like a close adaptation of the system as presented in these pages. number (iii) is the method of stonyhurst college, england; and to it may be referred the canadian system, and that of hindustan. the hours indicated in this schedule include the set time for studies, besides the hours of class. the set study time, in a boarding college, may be taken to average four and a half hours a day; other hours may be added thereto, from free study time, or hours of superfluous recreation. the stonyhurst arrangement is interesting, as being that of a faculty two hundred and ninety-nine years old, without any intermission in its career. its original home was st. omer's, france, where father parsons founded the college in . at the suppression of the order in france, , the college moved to bruges in belgium; thence, in , to liége; whence, under the stress of the french revolution, it took refuge in england, and opened its courses at stonyhurst, lancashire, in . the schedule for the philosophical triennium (superior instruction, b) is taken from woodstock college and st. louis university; that of the theological course (superior instruction, c) from woodstock. in these schedules, as well as in that not exhibited here for the seminary course of literature (superior instruction, a), no material difference would be found to exist between one house of studies and another in the society. distribution of hours per week. secondary instruction.--_literary._ i. | ii. grades i.-iv. v.-vi. vii. | i.-iv. v.-vi. vii. four two one | four two one years. years. year. | years. years. year. age of student - . - . . | - . - . . | subjects. | classics . . .. | - / . - / . .. mathematics . . . | - / . - / . .. english and } . . . | . . .. accessories} | natural sciences .. . .. | .. . . philosophy .. .. . | .. .. . iii. grades i.-iv. v.-vii. philosophical curriculum. four three years. years. age of student - . - . .. subjects. classics . . .. mathematics - / . - / . .. english . . .. french . .. .. history and geography . .. .. natural sciences .. - . .. philosophy .. .. two year course, as below (_b_). superior instruction.--(a) _literary._ seminary course. literature two years for members of the order. superior instruction.--(b) _philosophical._ triennial course. years i. ii. iii. subjects of courses. philosophy: logic, } + ontology.} (disputation). cosmology, } + psychology.} (disputation). psychology, } + natural theology.} (disputation). moral philosophy + (disputation). mathematics: algebra, geometry,} trigonometry. } . analytical geometry,} calculus. } . mechanics (three months). physics (seven months). chemistry (ten months). geology, astronomy,} physiology. } . specialties outside of this triennium. biennial course. (_a_) two year curriculum, included in the triennium. (_b_) similar curriculum, conducted separately in english. superior instruction.--(c) _theological._ sexennial course. years i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. subjects of courses. /---------^--------\ scholastic } + + + + biennium of general theology. } (disp.). (disp.). (disp.). (disp.) repetition, philosophical and moral theology, - / - / / / theological; and special ecclesiastical } .. .. seminary work. history. } canon law. .. .. sacred } .. .. scripture. } hebrew. .. .. .. syriac, arabic,} chald. } .. specialties. outside of this sexennium. superior instruction.--(d) _law._ conducted by a faculty not of the order. superior instruction.--(e) _medicine._ conducted by a faculty not of the order. chapter xviii. conclusion. it will not have escaped the attentive reader, that almost all the history, pedagogic or otherwise, which has been sketched in this essay, falls within the lines of what has been called the counter-reformation; and some portion of it belongs to what is styled, in the present century, the counter-revolution. for this reason, if the facts recorded seem at all new, he will discern the reason. they have lain outside of one of the beaten paths in history. beyond the facts of evolution, as they may have appeared in these pages, i do not pretend to have found a place for this system in any plan of pedagogic development. nor do i lay claim to the far-sightedness which may discern any posthumous development, as the legacy of this system to the world of education. politically, its place has often been assigned to it summarily by main force. but, pedagogically, too, the day may come, when gathered to the other remains which moulder in the past, it can look down from a grade and place of its own in evolution, and look out, like others, on a progeny more favored than itself, the fair mother of fairer children; even as the old university system of mediæval europe, particularly that of the great university of paris, can look down from its silent and solemn place in history, as the direct progenitor of the _ratio studiorum_. "we, too, have been taught by others," said possevino in . indeed, as is evident, the last thing which the system ever seems to dream of, which never, in fact, crosses the path of its intellectual vision, is that it is playing the rôle, perchance, of a pedagogic adventurer, or courting notice by some new and striking departure. no doubt, in its integrity, it is singularly the system of the jesuits, and, in a multitude of practical elements, it embodies the elaborate experience of one practical organization of men. but, none the less, if we look down for its foundations, we pass through the renaissance of letters, and find the traditions of scholastic europe; and further down still, in the stratification of history, we come to the principles of education as defined by aristotle, plato, and socrates. as to its ulterior evolution, i may designate two forms which the system has been invited to assume. rather, i may point to an epoch in its history, at which general and universal education divided off into two lines; and, by one or other way, almost all the secondary and superior education, which prevails amongst us, reaches our present time. the principles adopted on one side, however extravagant they may have been at their first adoption and in all the glow and fervor of a new departure, will certainly recommend themselves to some. the other was practically, if it has not as yet been formally, adopted by the order as a continuation of its old method, and as a revision in the nineteenth century of what itself had laid down in the fifteenth. i will quote, to explain one of the movements, a writer, m. drevon, whom i cited once before,[ ] chiefly because he is quite recent, and also because he is entirely out of sympathy with the system of the jesuits. for the other, i will quote one of the latest generals of the society of jesus, father john roothaan. when the jesuit colleges, more than ninety in number, were abruptly closed in france, then, says the first writer, "the departure of the jesuits was the occasion of a noisy demonstration against the instruction which had been imparted in the colleges. a multitude of books[ ] were at once seen pouring into the market, presenting plans for a new system of education, which should be more in keeping with the progress of science and philosophy. men of the gravest authority, like the president roland, did not disdain to occupy themselves with these matters, and to enter into details: 'the moment was come,' cried one of them, 'to set up furnaces, to add bellows thereto, and initiate scholars into the doctrine of gases.'[ ] the reaction was so much the more violent, as spirits had been the longer suppressed. it went even beyond the just measure, as happens almost always in such circumstances; so that, says a contemporary writer,[ ] children, properly instructed, ought to have become, at the age of fifteen, agriculturists sufficiently well qualified, intelligent naturalists, prudent economists, shrewd business men, enlightened politicians, profound metaphysicians, prodigious geometricians, without prejudice to writing and drawing, to universal geography, and ancient as well as modern history; without prejudice to the french language, english also and german and a little latin; and again without prejudice to music and heraldry, to dancing and fencing, to horsemanship, and, above all, to swimming. but people had not long to wait before deploring such excess. all this agitation proved unfortunately sterile; and as i have just said, on the eve of the french revolution, secondary education had not taken a step forward during fifty years.... "it came to a new birth in , and found itself very much where it had been, before this long sleep. napoleon declared that the new method of the university was very like that of the ancient university of paris; only that the courses 'left something to desire with regard to drawing, modern languages, geography, history, and especially mathematical and physical sciences.' this was progress, no doubt, and it is well to grant it. but napoleon is mistaken, when he pretends that the new university is a child of the ancient one. it is preëminently a child of the jesuits. for, as we have remarked, the jesuits, at the beginning, took great care to make no innovations. they accepted, as they found them, the old methods, introduced little by little their own mode of procedure, an alteration most calculated to assure their influence and their success. the grand old university which went down to the second rank, so to say, in public education, submitted to the influence of its detested and triumphant rivals, and, in spite of itself, it allowed itself to be permeated by their methods. hence, in , at the moment when napoleon dreams that he is reëstablishing the university, the ideal of public instruction was a mixture of the old university traditions and the empiric methods of the jesuits."[ ] it does not come within the scope of this writer to indicate how, from this historical point of divergence, the modern practical method of instruction came to be fully organized. each system went its own way. i pass on to the other line, or rather back to the jesuit _ratio_; and i will merely point out what process of adjustment it then underwent. in , father roothaan, general of the society, addressed an encyclical letter to the order. to give an abstract of it, he says: "in the very first assembly after the restoration of the society, a petition had been received from the provinces, and daily experience since then has shown it to be more and more necessary, that the system of studies should be accommodated to the exigencies of the times. after a consultation, involving much labor and accurate study, a form of revised _ratio_ has been drawn up, which is now offered for use and practice, in order that after being amended again if necessary, or else enlarged, it may receive the sanction of a universal law. the undertaking was approached with the greatest reverence for a system which had been approved by two centuries of successful operation, and which had been extolled, not unfrequently, by the very enemies of the order. "of the novelties which had been introduced into the method of educating youth, during the last fifty years or more, was it forsooth possible that all could be approved and adopted in our schools? new methods and new forms invented day after day, a new arrangement of matter and of time, often self-contradictory and mutually repugnant--how could all this be taken as a rule for our studies? "in the higher schools or in the treatment of the graver studies, it is a subject of lamentation with prudent men that there is no solidity but much show,--an ill-arranged mass of superfluous knowledge, very little exact reasoning--; that the sciences, if you except physics and mathematics, have not made any true progress, but are in general confusion, so that where the final results of truth are to be found scarcely appears. the study of logic and severe dialectics is almost in contempt, whence errors come to be deeply rooted in the minds of men who are not otherwise illiterate; and these errors, by some fatality or other, are made much of, as if they were ascertained truths, and they are lauded to the skies, because nothing is treated with strictness and accuracy, no account is made of definitions and distinctness of reasoning. thus, tasting lightly of philosophical matters, young men go forth utterly defenceless against sophistry, since they cannot even see the difference between a sophism and an argument. "in the lower schools, the object kept in view is to have boys learn as many things as possible, and learn them in the shortest time, and with the least exertion possible. excellent! but that variety of so many things and so many courses, all lightly sipped of by youth, enables them to conceive a high opinion of how much they know, and sometimes swells the crowd of the half-instructed, the most pernicious of all classes to the sciences and the state alike. as to knowing anything truly and solidly, there is none of it. something of everything: nothing in the end.[ ] running through the courses of letters in no time, tender in age, with minds as yet untrained, they take up the gravest studies of philosophy and the higher sciences; and, possessing themselves therein of scarcely any real fruit, they are only captivated by the enjoyment of greater liberty; they run headlong into vice, and are soon to become teachers themselves of a type, which, to put it as gently as possible, i will call immature. "as to the methods, ever easier and easier, which are being excogitated, whatever convenience may be found in them, there is this grave inconvenience; first, that what is acquired without labor adheres but lightly to the mind, and what is summarily gathered in is summarily forgotten; secondly, and this, though not adverted to by many, is a much more serious injury, almost the principal fruit of a boy's training is sacrificed, which is, accustoming himself from an early age to serious application of mind, and to that deliberate exertion which is required for hard work. "in some points, however, which do not concern the substance of education, the necessities of our times require us to modify the practice of our predecessors. and to consult the requirements of such necessities, far from being alien to our principles, is altogether in keeping with the institute. "in the superior courses, how many questions are there which formerly never entered into controversy, which now are vehemently assaulted, and must be established by solid arguments, lest the very foundations of truth be sapped! therefore the questions which are alive call for special discussion, solution, refutation. "in physics and mathematics we must not prove false to the traditions of the society, by neglecting these courses which have now mounted to a rank of the highest honor. if many have abused these sciences to the detriment of religion, we should be so much the farther from relinquishing them on that account. rather, on that account, should the members of the order apply themselves with the more ardor to these pursuits and snatch the weapons from the hands of the foe, and with the same arms, which they abuse to attack the truth, come forward in its defence. for truth is always consistent with itself, and in all the sciences it stands erect, ever one and the same; nor is it possible that what is true in physics and mathematics should contradict truth of a higher order. "finally, in the method of conducting the lower studies, some accessory branches should have time provided for them, especially the vernacular tongues and literatures. but the study of latin and greek letters must always remain intact and be the chief object of attention. as they have always been the principal sources, exhibiting the most perfect models of literary beauty in precept and style, so are they still. and, if they were kept more before the eyes and mind, we should not see issuing from the press, day after day, so many productions of talented men, with a diction and style no less novel and singular, than are the thoughts and opinions to which they give expression. the commonalty regard them with admiring awe and stupor; but men of knowledge and correct taste look with commiseration and grief on these unmistakable signs of an eloquence, no less depraved than the morals of the times. "the adaptation of the _ratio studiorum_, therefore, means that we consult the necessities of the age so far as not in the least to sacrifice the solid and correct education of youth."[ ] this is the substance of a document not unworthy of the letters and ordinances in behalf of education, issued by a long line of experienced and learned judges in the art of training youth. the modifications made in the old _ratio_ have been few; and i have taken note of them in the preceding analysis. so then the edifice of the past stands, with the latest modifications introduced into its façade by the spirit of the present. as the monumental structures which stud the soil of europe, and are set amid royal parks or rich fields of waving grain, have been tributes of devotion from princes of the church or princes of the land, and are not only the memorials of kings or peoples, but are especially the architectural record of centuries; so a system recognized in history as great, elevated in the order of highest human achievement, that of educating humanity, and resting on the basis of oldest traditions and the wisdom of the remotest past, has not been the work of an ordinary individual, nor of a day. masters in their art, and centuries in their duration, have combined to build it up, a monument of the practice and theory of generations. with devoted zeal and prudence, secular communities, and even pagans in times far gone by, had brought the stones, and contributed tithes to the erection of the fabric. but it is only too well known that ecclesiastics and religious men have been the architects of the monument as it stands. and they did not build better than they knew; for their structure is precisely one of knowledge, chiefly of divine knowledge, raised into a consistent theory, and honored by the most practical use. so the very first sentence in the _ratio studiorum_, speaking of the "abundant practical fruit to be gathered from this manifold labor of the schools," mentions that fruit as being "the knowledge and love of the creator." i may be permitted then to close this work by quoting their own poetry, which is inscribed on a statue of christ. the statue overlooks a park in front of it, and the fields hard by, and the rich garden of studious youth, within the college walls alongside. thus one inscription reads:-- tibi · haec · arva · rident · atque · aggere complanato · hae · floribus · nitent · areolae · et pubes · undique · accita · virtutibus scientiis · que · adolescit.[ ] and again the granite reads:-- quas · circum · cernis · christo urnae · floribus · halant · ne · carpe incesto · pollice · quisque · fuas.[ ] bibliographical appendix, indicating some of the sources and other works, more easy of access. pachtler, g. m., s. j.: ratio atque institutio studiorum, ; ratio studiorum, , ; and other pedagogical documents:--comprised in monumenta germaniÆ pÆdagogica, vols. ii, v, ix (to be followed by others); berlin, a. hofmann & co., . jouvancy, jos., s. j.: ratio discendi et docendi pro magistris scholarum inferiorum, vol. mo; avignon, fr. seguin, . sacchini, franc., s. j.: parænesis ad magistros scholarum inferiorum soc. jes.; protrepticon ad magistros scholarum inferiorum soc. jes.---- judde, claude, s. j.: instruction pour les jeunes professeurs qui enseignent les humanités:--comprised in manuel des jeunes professeurs, vol. mo; paris, poussielgue-rusand, . * * * * * crÉtineau-joly, monsieur m. j.: histoire religieuse, politique et littéraire de la compagnie de jésus, vols. mo; d edit.; paris, v. poussielgue-rusand, . maynard, monsieur l'abbÉ: the studies and teaching of the society of jesus, vol. vo; baltimore, john murphy & co., . the jesuits: their foundation and history, by b. n., vols. vo; benziger bros., new york, . genelli, christopher, s. j.: life of st. ignatius of loyola, vol. vo; benziger bros., new york. de rochemonteix, camille, s. j.: un collège de jésuites aux xvii^e. et xviii^e. siècles, le collège henri iv. de la flèche, vols. in vo; le mans, leguicheux, . daniel, charles, s. j.: les jésuites instituteurs de la jeunesse française, au xvii^e. et au xviii^e. siècle, vol. mo; paris, victor palmé, . * * * * * de backer, augustin, s. j.: bibliothèque des Écrivains de la compagnie de jésus, ou notices bibliographiques ^o de tous les ouvrages publiés par les membres &c., ^o des apologies, des controverses religieuses, des critiques littéraires et scientifiques suscitées à leur sujet; large folios (see above, page ); liége, chez l'auteur, a. de backer; paris, chez l'auteur, c. sommervogel, . only copies were struck off; it is embodied and amplified in the following, now in process of publication:-- sommervogel, carlos, s. j.: bibliothèque de la compagnie de jésus:--première partie, bibliographie; seconde partie, histoire. bibliographie, tom. i, abad-boujart, in to, à double colonne, col.; bruxelles, oscar schepens, , rue treurenberg; paris, alphonse picard, , rue bonaparte, . wetzer und welte's kirchenlexicon: d edit., by cardinal hergenroether and dr. f. kaulen; vol. vi, "jesuiten," col. - ; freiburg, benjamin herder, . typography by j. s. cushing & co., boston, u.s.a. presswork by berwick & smith, boston, u.s.a. index. abram, father nicholas, academies of the jesuits, alber, father ferdinand, allen, cardinal, alvarez, grammar of, anderledy, father anthony, aquaviva, father claudius, , , , ; the fifth general of the order, ; creates a commission to draw up a method of studies, ; provisional rules of, aquinas, st. thomas, , ; the standard in theology, argento, father john, , aristotle, use of, astronomical observations of the jesuits, augustine, azor, john, bacon, lord, , ; his debt to possevino, bader, father george, , bayonne, the college of, beckx, father, bellarmine, literary productiveness of, belles-lettres, ; the jesuits preëminent in the study of, berchmans, john, blair's "rhetoric," , boarding colleges, bobadilla, nicholas, , bonald, viscount de, bonaventure, st., borgia, francis, ; succeeds laynez, , ; founds the roman college, ; the third general of the order, borromeo, st. charles, bossuet, bourdaloue, , broeckaert, father, brouet, pasquier, buffer, father, "practical history" of, buys, father, , calasanzio, father joseph, his "pious school," calcutta, jesuit school at, campano, father, campian, edmund, , canisius, father peter, ; the catechism of, , caraffa, general vincent, , catharine ii., centurione, father aloysius, cerda, de la, father, chalotais, la, christian schools, cicero used as a text-book, class hours, classical literature in the scheme of jesuit education, clavius, father christopher, clement of alexandria, clement xiv. dissolves the order, coduri, john, , coimbra, university at, colleges, jesuit, number of, _et seq._; rise of, in spain, confessional, the, in educational institutions, coton, father, cretineau-joly, m., d'alembert, daniel, father charles, , daniel, g., de backers, , ; his dictionary of jesuit authors, descartes, dictation, how practised in the jesuit seminaries, _et seq._; objections to, by possevino, disputation, the place of, in the jesuit system, , _et seq._; syllogistic or discursive, ; numerous attendance upon required, ; superintendence of, divinity, courses in, _et seq._ doctrine, uniformity of, among the jesuits, domench, father jerome, drevon, m., dupanloup, educational system of the jesuits, the tributes of ranke and d'alembert to, ; the revolution the sequel of the overthrow of, ; explanation of its rise, ; kinship between it and the paris university, ; defined, ; development of, ; as formulated in the constitution, _et seq._; laynez's rule concerning the system of colleges, ; no tuition fees, , ; system and method of, ; number of colleges, ; number of students, _et seq._; ramifications of, _et seq._; scope and method of, _et seq._; classification of, ; grades in, ; subordinate elements in, _et seq._; moral scope of, _et seq._; vacations, ; ascendency of the masters, ; law and medicine in, ; the study of mathematics in, ; the development of geography, history, and physics, ; the _ratio studiorum_, _et seq._; the practice and order of studies, ; result of, the formation of professors, ; the literary curriculum, ; proficiency in belles-lettres, ; the study of history, ; of geography, ; of mathematics, ; manner of instruction, ; philosophy studied after the literary courses, ; masters advance with their scholars, ; the rectors, ; the study of divinity, _et seq._; courses in divinity, ; thoroughness of, ; the use of disputation, _et seq._; the place of dictation in, _et seq._; co-ordination of the courses in, ; the prelection, ; study of the classical literatures, _et seq._; school management, _et seq._; the lowest grade, ; system of examinations, _et seq._; academic degrees, ; literary curriculum, ; philosophical curriculum, ; theological curriculum, ; distribution of time, ; origin and evolution of the system, expurgating authors, fribourg, jesuit university suppressed at, frederick the great, letter of, to voltaire, , generals of the order, _et seq._ geography, method of teaching, germany, loyola, the founder of the jesuit order in, german college in rome, goa, seminary at, , gonzaga, aloysius, gonzales, gaspar, grammar, ; prelection in the grade of, ; method of teaching the classical languages in, ; the daily lesson in, gregory xiii., papal seminaries founded by, grotius, guisani, anthony, huebner, baron von, humanity, the course in, _et seq._, , ; the prelection in the grade of, ingolstadt, university at, janssen, jesus, society of, birthday of, , ; receives its bull of confirmation, ; constitution of, _et seq._; not admitted to germany at the present day, jouvancy, , ; his _ratio discendi et docendi_, , kessel, father, kleutgen, father, _ars docendi_ of, knox, john, kostka, stanislaus, latin composition, elegant command of, by the jesuits, laval, university of, law and medicine studied in the jesuit universities, laynez, james, , , ; elected successor to loyola, , , le jay, claude, lefèvre, peter, , _et seq._ lenormant, charles, literary productiveness of the jesuits, literary curriculum of the jesuits at present, _et seq._ loyola, st. ignatius of, ; begins his education, ; story of his life, _et seq._; becomes a master of arts, ; his self-discipline, ; at rome, , ; promulgates the constitution of his order, ; death of, , ; his educational system, ; his care for germany, ; founds a german college in rome, ; his educational policy successful, maistre, count de, maldonado, a double-headed disputant, moriana, , mathematics in the jesuit system of education, _et seq._ mercurian, father everard, the fourth general of the order, montague, college of, loyola at, montmorency, father, _monumenta germaniæ pædagogica_, the, moral education, the, prescribed by loyola, nadal, jerome, netherlands, jesuit schools in, nickel, father goswin, olave, martin, oliva, general paul, , pachtler, father, , papal seminaries founded by gregory xiii., parma, duke of, paris university, the, ; loyola at, parsons, robert, pascual, john sacrista, pedagogics in the _ratio studiorum_, peltier, father john, perry, petau, father denis, philosophy, course of, what it includes, philosophical curriculum, the, at the present time, _et seq._ piccolomini, father francis, , polanco, john, , porée, père, voltaire's preceptor, , playfer, dr., plato, possevino, father anthony, bacon's forerunner, , , _prælectio_, the typical form of jesuit instruction, _et seq._ professors formed by the jesuit system, _et seq._; literary productions expected from, ; in the jesuit seminaries, coördination between, "provincial letters" of pascal, quintilian, use of, ranke, von leopold, , , rapin, père, ; works of, _ratio studiorum_, the, , , , , , , ; formation of, by aquaviva, _et seq._, , ; final form of, , , , rectors of colleges, duties of, repetition, in the scheme of jesuit education, ; in the grammar grade, revolution, the french, rhetoric, instruction in, , _et seq._; double prelection in, ribadeneira, , , , , riccioli, father, robertson, rochemonteix, father, , rodriguez, simon, roman college, the, ; founded by lefèvre, ; other colleges following its course, roothaan, father, rossignol, rue, father de la, author of the delphin virgil, sacchini, , saint-yves, college of, salmeron, alphonsus, secchi, father, schall, adam, scheiner, father, scholastics, jesuit, expected to teach, schools, the cathedral, ; of study, of the jesuits, school management, _et seq._ sirmond, james, sodalities, the, , sommervogel, , southwell, father nathaniel, sorbon, robert of, , "spiritual exercises," the, stonyhurst, strada, damian, strada, father francis, strassmeyer, studies, practice and order of, in jesuit seminaries, suarez, francis, , text-books of the jesuits, theological instruction, method of, _et seq._ theological curriculum at the present time, _et seq._ theology, scholastic, jesuit authors in, tiraboschi, toffia, vittoria, tucci, stephen, tyre, james, university system, rise of the, urban viii., vacations in the jesuit system, verbiest, ferdinand, vernacular, the study of, , vienna and ingolstadt, the jesuits first centres in germany, villanova, francis, , visconti, ignatius, , vitelleschi, mutius, , ; the sixth general of the order, , voltaire, tribute of, to the morality of the jesuits, , ; and père porée, xavier, francis, , , , zaccaria, literary productiveness of, ziegler, father, footnotes: [ ] christian schools and scholars, by a. t. drane; ; last chapter. [ ] on the furthering of humane studies; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] history of the papacy, vol. i, book v, § ; jesuit schools in germany. [ ] sur la destruction des jésuites, par un auteur désintéressé, p. . [ ] imago primi sæculi, lib. vi, societas flandro-belgica, cap. iii, § , p. . [ ] crétineau-joly, histoire de la compagnie de jésus, tom. iv, ch. , p. ; ^{me} edit. . [ ] histoire de l'université de paris, par charles jourdain, liv. i, ch. ; quoted with other testimonies, in the learned work, un collège de jésuites aux xvii and xviii siècles, le collège henri iv de la flèche, par le p. camille de rochemonteix, ; tom. i, ch. , p. . [ ] exercitia spiritualia. [ ] ranke, history of the papacy, vol. i, book ii, § . [ ] genelli, life of st. ignatius loyola, p. . [ ] imago primi sæculi, lib. iv, cap. ix, pp. - ; de calumniis. [ ] jouvancy, epitome hist. s. j., p. , ad annum . [ ] advancement of learning, book i; philadelphia edit. , vol. i, p. . [ ] month of july, tom. vii; auct. j. p., § xviii, pp. - . [ ] genelli, life of st. ignatius loyola, part i, ch. . [ ] bollandists, as above, nn. - ; ibid., suarez, nigronius, and others. [ ] genelli, life of st. ignatius loyola, part ii, ch. . [ ] bulla canoniz. s. ign. de loyola, § . [ ] bollandists, nn. - ; . [ ] bollandists, july, tom. vii, auct. j. p., §§ xxvii, xxviii. [ ] nigronius; bollandists, n. . [ ] apocalypse, ch. xviii, . [ ] advancement of learning, book i, p. ; phila. edit. [ ] père charles daniel s. j., des Études classiques dans la société chrétienne, ch. , la concile de trente; . [ ] bollandists, auct. j. p., nn. - . [ ] bollandists, n. . [ ] gagliardi. [ ] hist. s. j., da pars, lainius; ad annum , n. , p. . [ ] chiefly from p. enrico vasco, s. j., il ratio studiorum addattato ecc, vol. i, cap. vii, n. , a private memoir, . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, ii, p. ; ratio studiorum, etc., by g. m. pachtler, s. j.; berlin, . [ ] ibid. pachtler, p. _seq._ [ ] ibid. pachtler, p. _seq._ [ ] genelli, part ii, ch. . [ ] jouvancy, epitome hist. s. j., anno christi, . [ ] vasco, vol. i, cap. vii, n. seq. [ ] orlandini, bollandists, n. . [ ] bollandists, n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] constitutiones s. j., pars iv, declarationes in prooemium. [ ] sacchini, pars iii, lib. i, nn. - . [ ] sacchini, pars iii, borgia; lib. i, nn. seq. [ ] sacchini, pars v, claudius aquaviva, tom. prior; lib. iv, n. . [ ] recherches sur la compagnie de jésus en france au temps du père coton, par le p. prat, tom. ii, p. . [ ] constitutiones s. j., pars iv, cap. vii, n. . [ ] bibliothèque des Écrivains de la compagnie de jésus, preface, . [ ] crétineau-joly; histoire religieuse, politique et littéraire de la compagnie de jésus, tom. ii, ch. iv, p. ; troisième édit. . [ ] de institutione juventutis; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii; pachtler, p. xx. [ ] they are catalogued by rochemonteix, collège henri iv, tom. ii, ch. i, p. , note. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix; pachtler, p. , n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pp. - . [ ] arch. rheni sup., quoted by pachtler; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. ; see also the letter of the general john paul oliva, ibid. p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii; pachtler, p. xx. [ ] vol. ix, pp. - . [ ] maynard; the studies and teaching of the society of jesus, at the time of its suppression, - ; baltimore edit. , ch. ; the jesuits in germany, pp. - . [ ] , novembre, oeuvres de voltaire, vol. xcv, p. ; edit. . [ ] lettre à voltaire, juillet, ; oeuvres de voltaire, tom. xii, p. ; edit. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pp. - . [ ] le collège henri iv, tom. ii, ch. , p. . [ ] fernand butel, docteur en droit, etc.; l'Éducation des jésuites autrefois et aujourd'hui, un collège breton, ch. , p. ; p. ; p. ; paris, firmin-didot, . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] formulæ acceptandorum collegiorum, etc., summarium; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. , . their curriculum was enlarged in ; ibid., p. , . [ ] ratio studiorum ; reg. prov. , § . pachtler, monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] constitutiones, ibid. [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] ibid., c. , n. , c. [ ] ch. xi. below. [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] ibid., p. , note. [ ] ribadeneira, bollandists, july, tom. vii, nn. _seq._ [ ] le collège henri iv., tom. iii, pp. - . [ ] compare the ordinance of father oliver manare, , n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii. p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] bollandists, ibid., - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] l'Éducation des jésuites autrefois, etc., par dr. f. butel, ch. , pp. - . this author sketches agreeably the means touched upon in the text, and his references are useful. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . addita quædam exercitiis litterariis humanistarum, ; prior to the completed ratio studiorum. [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] lettre xc. [ ] compare chateaubriand's genius of christianity, part iv, book vi, recapitulation; translation by dr. chas. i. white; baltimore, , p. _seq._ [ ] paris, victor palmé, . [ ] works; philadelphia edit. , vol. i, p. . [ ] bibliotheca selecta in qua agitur de ratione studiorum, in historia, in disciplinis, in salute omnium procuranda. de backer in his bibliothèque des Écrivains de la compagnie de jésus gives the list of republications, either in whole or in part. sommervogel's new work, royal quarto, bibliothèque de la compagnie de jésus, , has reached thus far only to the letter b; hence possevino is not yet entered. [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] ch. , of book , ratio collegiorum et scholarum, etc., end of chapter; roman edit. [ ] histoire d'un collège municipal aux xvi^_e_, xvii^_e_, et xviii^_e_ siècles ... à bayonne avant . thèse presentée à la faculté des lettres de toulouse, par j. m. drevon, censeur des Études au lycée d'agen, . about pages. [ ] pp. - . [ ] p. . [ ] dante, parad. viii. [ ] de la haute Éducation intellectuelle, liv. iv, ch . compare vasco, vol. i, n. . [ ] essais sur l'instruction publique, par charles lenormant, membre de l'institut; quoted by rochemonteix, le collège henri iv, tom. ii, ch. , p. , in his very instructive discussion on the jesuit _internat_, or _pensionnat_. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] const., part iv, ch. , decl. b. [ ] turpissimis signis. [ ] bibliotheca selecta, lib. i, ch. ; quasnam tetenderit insidias humani generis hostis, etc. [ ] ribadeneira, bollandists, nn. _seq._ [ ] bibliotheca selecta, lib. i, ch. . [ ] ratio studiorum of and , reg. prov. . the higher courses are allowed a midsummer vacation of between one and two months; in the lower or literary course, rhetoric is allowed one month, the others classes less. besides certain feast-days during the year, every week must have one day free, which, in the higher courses, is the whole day, but, in the lower, is only the latter part of it. [ ] ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] bollandists, n. . [ ] lettre février, ; oeuvres, tom. viii, p. ; edit. . [ ] crétineau-joly, histoire de la compagnie de jésus, tom. iv, ch. , p. ; edit. . this chapter and the following one, ch. , in crétineau-joly, pp. - , contain the most varied information on our subject, regarding professors, writers, scholars, etc. [ ] epistola de institutione juventutis, et studiis litterarum promovendis, ; mon. germ. pæd., vol. ix, pachtler, p. . [ ] paradise lost, book iv. [ ] notice sur le pensionnat, etc. à fribourg en suisse, , pp. _seq._ [ ] ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pachtler, p. . [ ] manare, commentarius. [ ] crétineau-joly, tom. i, ch. , p. . [ ] compare cretineau-joly, tom. i, ch. ; tom. iv, chs. , . [ ] the more heavily the strain of war bore upon germany, the more assiduously were the succors sent in; no part of the field was more under loyola's eye. [ ] history of the papacy, vol. i, book v, § ; the first jesuit schools in germany; foster's translation, p. . [ ] compare monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pachtler, nr. ; nr. ; nr. , etc. [ ] this very instructive correspondence may be seen sketched in genelli's life of st. ignatius of loyola, part ii, ch. , pp. _seq._ . [ ] ch. , above, p. . [ ] const., pars iv, c. , decl. e. [ ] compare mon. germ. pæd., vol. ii, pachtler, nr. , the theological faculty of the university of würzburg, p. , n. ; mon. germ. pæd., vol. ix, pachtler, nr. , p. , and nr. , p. , the theological and philosophical faculties of the university of trier, etc. [ ] compare monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, p. , note about perugia. [ ] ibid., p. , note about valencia. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. , letter to father kessel. [ ] compare monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, papstliche privilegien, pp. - . [ ] bollandists, j. p., n. . [ ] the pedagogic legislation, from this date onwards, is to be found in monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pachtler, pp. - . [ ] pachtler, ibid., p . [ ] pachtler, ibid., pp. - . [ ] european civilization, ch. . [ ] national education, part ii, vol. ii, p. ; p. ; new york, . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pachtler, p. . [ ] blair's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, lecture . [ ] lecture . [ ] eulogy pronounced by the cardinal maury on his predecessor in the institute of france, the jesuit de radonvilliers, .--orateurs sacrés, migne, tom. lxvii, column . [ ] a classification of eminent students may be found in crétineau-joly, tom. iv, ch. , p. . [ ] bibliothèque de la compagnie de jésus, nouvelle édition, par carlos sommervogel s. j., strasbourgeois, tom. i, from abad to boujart; large quarto edition, . [ ] doctrina christiana, etc.; traductions; sommervogel, _sub voce_, _bellarmine_, columns - . [ ] in the matter of general philology alone compare the monograph, die sprachkunde und die missionen, von joseph dahlmann s. j., january, , fiftieth supplement to the stimmen aus maria-laach, pages. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pachtler, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] disputatio acris oriebatur. [ ] ibid., nr. , p. . [ ] vol. v, pp. - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] as an instance of the minute criticism brought to bear upon it in germany, consult monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ similar animadversions are to be understood as coming from other quarters. [ ] supercheries littéraires dévoilées iii, , f; sommervogel, dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, etc., s. j., _sub voce_, _ratio_. [ ] quoted by ch. daniel, s. j., les jésuites instituteurs de la jeunesse, etc., last ch. p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, nr. , p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , ratio studiorum of , reg. prov. , § . [ ] compare lord bacon, the advancement of learning, book ii, p. , st column; philadelphia edit. . [ ] chapter vi, above, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , ratio studiorum of , c. stud. philos. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , n. , humanitatis doctores quos et quales, etc. [ ] vitelleschi, , monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. , n. . [ ] ratio stud., reg. prov. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, pp. , . [ ] ibid., vol. ii, p. . [ ] rt. st. , reg. prof, rhet. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] sommervogel fills twenty-four columns with a partial enumeration of the editions of alvarez; bibliothèque de la compagnie de jésus, , _sub voce_, _alvarez_. [ ] compare monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. , n. ; manare's ordinance for germany. [ ] rationarium temporum, paris, . [ ] daniel, les jésuites instituteurs, etc., ch. , p. . [ ] geographiæ et hydrographiæ reformatæ libri xii, bologna, , in folio. [ ] see the pleasant sketch in daniel's les jésuites instituteurs, etc., chs. - ; also maynard's the jesuits, their studies and teaching, ch. , scientific condition of the jesuits, etc. [ ] rome, , vo, pp. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , de mathematicis. [ ] reg. prov. n. . [ ] first edition in . [ ] de l'Église gallicane, liv. i, ch. , p. ; edit. . [ ] the medal is in the coleman museum of the georgetown university, where de vico, with sestini, was astronomer for some time. [ ] for an historical sketch of bavarian jesuits, under the aspect of scientific eminence, see monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pp. - , where father pachtler gives the prospectus of a new scientific and literary review, to be issued in bavaria, . the suppression forestalled it. [ ] histoire des mathematiques, t. iv, p. ; quoted by crétineau-joly, t. iv, c. , p. , who contains a large amount of literature upon this subject. according to late researches, made by mm. c. andré and g. rayet, astronomers of the observatory of paris, the number of observatories established in the whole world, towards the close of the last century, was . of this number, were founded by jesuits, or were under their direction.--victor van tricht, la bibliothèque des Écrivains de la compagnie de jésus, etc., appendice ^{er}, p. ; . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. . [ ] bollandists, j. p., n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] ratio st., reg. prov. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. ix, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, rt. st. , humanitatis magistri, n. , p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, n.. , p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, n. , p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. ; reg. prov. , . [ ] ibid., vol. ix, p. ; letter of the year . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid, vol. ix, p. , n. . [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] rt. st., reg. rect. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., n. , p. . [ ] reg. prov. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. ix, p. . [ ] jouvancy, ratio discendi; c. ordo studendi. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid., vol. ii, p. ; reg. prov. n. . [ ] rt. st. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] formula acceptandorum collegiorum, b; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] hist. s. j., sacchini, pars ii, lainius, lib. viii, n. , ad annum . [ ] rt. st. , ibid. [ ] rt. st. , reg. prov. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] chapter xi, above, p. . [ ] statuten der philos. fak. ingolstadt, ; de auditoribus; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] qui non in academia, sed privatim in aliquo auditorio aut monasterio audierunt philosophiam. [ ] nisi probent se omnes materias publice audivisse in aliqua academia probata: würzburger promotionsgebrauche, ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] rhetius s. j. für reform der theol. fak. zu köln, november, ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] rt. st., reg. prov. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. , n. , studium philos. [ ] biblioth. selecta; de cultura ingeniorum, cap. . [ ] prævidere. [ ] prælegere. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , n. . [ ] ibid., p. , n. . [ ] rt. st. , studium philos. n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . compare also the german province, where, in , four hours are reduced to three, ibid., vol. ii, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. , de privato studio scholasticorum; ibid. p. , n. , studium philos. [ ] ut concionabundi. [ ] rt. st., reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st. , reg. prof. phil. n. ; , n. , monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pp. , . [ ] rt. st. , repetitiones, n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] chapter vii, above, the moral scope, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. ; reg. rect. n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, p. ; institutio pro biennio, n. . [ ] præclara aliqua materia. [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , h. [ ] rt. st. , repetitiones, monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , b. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] ibid., vol. v, p. . [ ] consult the five volumes of nomenclator litterarius recentioris theologiæ catholicæ, by h. hurter, s. j., - . [ ] rt. st., reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. ; compare also monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, ordnung einer selbst. univ. der ges. j. , pars ii, c. , p. ; de repetitonibus et disputationibus scholasticorum s. j. [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. ; congr. gen. . [ ] reg. prof. s. script., n. , ; also statuten der philos. fak. ingolstadt, , monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, pp. - . [ ] rt. st. , disputationes; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid., vol. v, commentariolus, p. _seq._ [ ] nihil perfecte scitur, nisi dente disputationis feriatur; see the life and labors of st. thomas of aquin, by bede vaughan, , vol. i, ch. , p. . the two chapters on paris, in this learned work, are replete with information pertinent to our subject. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. , n. ; de scripturis. [ ] reg. prov., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] commentariolus, monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] cum non raro, quæ splendescere videntur in cubiculo, sordeant in scholasticis concertationibus. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, disputationes, n. , p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid., p. , separandane sint seminaria, etc. [ ] reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. ; rt. st. , reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; rt. st. , disputationes, ibid., p. . [ ] ibid., p. , n. , p. , n. . [ ] rt. st., reg. prof. stud., nn. , ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pp. , . [ ] ibid., reg. prov., n. , p. . [ ] chapter xi, above, p. . [ ] de ratione et modo prælegendi; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ad literam legibilem. [ ] ad prælegendum egregie. [ ] rt. st. , de ratione ac modo prælegendi; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pp. - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., nn. , , p. . [ ] why, if the paper drops, the wisdom too must be off! [ ] possevinus, biblioth. selecta, lib. i, de cultura ingeniorum, cc. - , edit. venet. , pp. - . he refers to the publication of the conimbricenses, a consolidated work of the faculty of coimbra, just as the "wirceburgenses," later on, and at present, under father cornely, the writers of the cursus scripturæ sacræ are publishing their works as a corporate whole. [ ] rt. st. , reg. prov., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] constitutiones, ibid., c. [ ] ibid. [ ] vitelleschi, ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] chapter xi, above, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, commentariolus, p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] ordinatio pro stud. sup., ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, utrum quinquennium, etc., p. . [ ] ibid. [ ] modus prælegendi, n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st. , reg. comm. prof. sup. fac., nn. , ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st., reg. prof. rhet., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] ibid., nn. , . [ ] reg. prof. hum., n. ; ibid., p. . [ ] rt. st. , classis hum.; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., class. rhet., n. , p. . [ ] ibid., exercitationes lat. et græc., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] maxime rudi minerva. [ ] rt. st., reg. præf. stud. inf., n. , § ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ibid., reg. comm. prof. cl. inf., n. ; ibid., p. . [ ] exercitationes lat. et græc., monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st., special rules of the respective classes, monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pp. - . rules of the academies, ibid., pp. - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. , schulregeln um - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] jouvancy, ratio docendi; c. de interpretatione vernacula, etc. [ ] modus explicandæ prælectionis. [ ] eruditio ex omni doctrina, reg. prof. rhet., n. , ex omni eruditione, ibid., n. . [ ] lettre février, , oeuvres, t. viii, p. ; edit. . [ ] de backer, bibliothèque des Écrivains de la compagnie, _sub voce_, _cerda_. [ ] sommervogel, bibliothèque de la compagnie, _sub voce_, _abram_. [ ] sommervogel, ibid. [ ] de backer, _sub voce_, _rapin_. [ ] rt. st. , c. , de libris; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] reg. præf. stud., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, p. . [ ] ibid., p. . [ ] ch. xi, above, p. _seq._ [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st. , class. rhet., pp. - . [ ] blair's lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres; lecture xii, at the end. [ ] ibid., lecture xix, on forming style, at the end. [ ] rt. st. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, pp. - . [ ] reg. præf. stud. inf., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] ratio docendi, c. ii, de discipulorum eruditione, art. . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, exercit. lat. et græc., n. , p. . [ ] sicut porcelli inter se commixti. [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] reg. externorum auditorum soc., monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st., reg. præf. stud. inf., ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] rt. st. , ratio promovendi, etc., monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] reg. præf. stud. inf., n. , § . [ ] rt. st., reg. præf. stud. inf., n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] constitutiones, pars iv, c. , n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] ibid., n. . [ ] rt. st. , de gradibus, etc., monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] vol. ix, pp. - . [ ] rt. st., reg. prov., , § . [ ] rt. st. , reg. præf. stud. inf., n. , § . [ ] ibid., nn. , § ; , § . [ ] ibid. [ ] alumni sive convictores. [ ] externi. [ ] reg. rect., n. . [ ] reg. prov., n. , § . [ ] excitetur ingenium; excolatur ingenium. [ ] de mathematicis; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. . [ ] crétineau-joly, histoire de la compagnie, tom. iv, ch. , p. . [ ] compare the ordinance for the upper german province, , n. ; monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ix, p. . [ ] rt. st. , pro physica, nn. - . [ ] monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. ii, p. . [ ] rt. st., reg. prov., n. . [ ] reg. præf. stud., n. . [ ] chapter vi, above, p. . [ ] by m. d'alembert, m. l'abbé de condillac, and others. [ ] l'abbé proyart, de l'Éducation publique. [ ] id., ibid. [ ] histoire d'un collège municipal, etc., bayonne; par j. m. drevon, ; last chapter, réforme et conclusion, pp. _seq._ [ ] ex omnibus aliquid: in toto nihil. [ ] epistola p. roothaan, , monumenta germaniæ pædagogica, vol. v, p. _seq._ [ ] for thee these meadows smile, and, on the hill-top smoothed away, these beds bedeck themselves with flowers, and the youth from every clime unfolds, in virtue and in science, the hopes of christian manhood. [ ] the urns thou see'st around breathe the fragrance of their flowers to christ. pluck them not, with hand unhallowed, whosoe'er thou be. transcribers' notes: punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained. ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references. the abbreviation "s. j." has been regularized here to always include a space, as that seems to be how it mostly was printed. page : "et eximium facinus" was printed that way. page : "mathematicans" was printed that way. footnote (referenced on page ): "mathematiques" was printed that way. page : "repetitonibus" was printed that way. page : footnote anchor (originally ) was missing from several editions of this book and has been added at a likely position by the transcriber. transcriber's note italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. property of the state of new jersey not to be taken permanently from the schoolroom state of new jersey department of public instruction trenton special days and their observance september [illustration] approved by state board of education june [illustration: liberty bell the symbol of liberty, freedom, justice and order in the government of the united states of america] state of new jersey department of public instruction trenton special days and their observance september [illustration] approved by state board of education june contents page foreword acknowledgments opening exercises morning exercises, jennie haver morning exercises, florence l. farber opening exercises, louis h. burch columbus day, j. cayce morrison thanksgiving day, roy l. shaffer lincoln's birthday, charles a. philhower washington's birthday, henry w. foster arbor day trees and forests, alfred gaskill arbor day observed by planting hamilton grove, charles a. philhower suggestions to teachers, k. c. davis value of our forests, u. s. bureau of education memorial day, george c. baker flag day, hannah h. chew bibliography, katharine b. rogers illustrations page liberty bell frontispiece columbus, "admiral at the helm" saint gaudens' lincoln gutzon borglum's lincoln stuart's washington statue of washington at west point foreword in the statutes of the state will be found the following: the day in each year known as arbor day shall be suitably observed in the public schools. the commissioner of education shall from time to time prepare and issue to schools such circulars of information, advice and instruction with reference to the day as he may deem necessary. for the purpose of encouraging the planting of shade and forest trees, the second friday of april in each year is hereby designated as a day for the general observance of such purpose, and to be known as arbor day. on said day appropriate exercises shall be introduced in all the schools of the state, and it shall be the duty of the several county and city superintendents to prepare a program of exercises for that day in all the schools under their respective jurisdiction. in all public schools there shall be held on the last school day preceding the following holidays, namely, lincoln's birthday, washington's birthday, decoration or memorial day and thanksgiving day, and on such other patriotic holidays as shall be established by law, appropriate exercises for the development of a higher spirit of patriotism. it shall be the duty of the principals and teachers in the public schools of this state to make suitable arrangements for the celebration, by appropriate exercises among the pupils in said schools, on the fourteenth day of june, in each year, as the day of the adoption of the american flag by the continental congress. the provisions of these statutes have been carried out in the schools of the state. they are believed in and supported heartily by the public opinion of the state. in order that greater assistance may be rendered to teachers and school officers in preparing for these special days, this pamphlet on _special days and their observance_ has been prepared by the department, chiefly through the efforts of mr. z. e. scott, assistant commissioner in charge of elementary education. the pamphlet also contains suggestions concerning the opening exercises of schools. mr. scott has been assisted in this work by the following persons, the school officers having in turn been aided by their teachers. to all these grateful acknowledgment is hereby made. george c. baker, supervising principal, moorestown louis h. burch, principal bangs avenue school, asbury park hannah chew, principal culver school, cumberland county k. c. davis, formerly of state agricultural college, new brunswick florence farber, helping teacher, sussex county henry w. foster, supervising principal, south orange alfred gaskill, state forester jennie haver, helping teacher, hunterdon county j. cayce morrison, supervising principal, leonia charles a. philhower, supervising principal, westfield katharine b. rogers, reference librarian, state library roy l. shaffer, supervisor of practice, newark state normal school it has been the aim of mr. scott and his associates to suggest exercises which would be appropriate for the observance of these several days, which would be of interest to pupils, and which at the same time would be of a character worthy of the dignity of the public schools of the state. calvin n. kendall _commissioner of education_ acknowledgments grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the following publishers and authors for permission to use copyrighted selections: american book company, new york, for extract from green's "short history of the english people." d. appleton & company, new york, for bryant's "america" and extract from edward s. holden's "our country's flag." henry holcomb bennett for "the flag goes by." bobbs-merrill company, indianapolis, for "the name of old glory," by james whitcomb riley. boosey & company, new york, for "we'll keep old glory flying," by carleton s. montanye. dr. frank crane for "after the great companions." thomas y. crowell company, new york, for extract from "the book of holidays," by j. walker mcspadden. reprinted by permission of the publishers. copyright by thomas y. crowell company. joseph fulford folsom for "the unfinished work." harper & brothers, new york, for extract from "the americanism of washington," by henry van dyke. caroline hazard for "the western land." houghton mifflin company, boston, for bret harte's "the reveille" and extract from "our national ideals," by william backus gitteau. kindergarten magazine publishing company, manistee, michigan, for nine selections, including two by laura rountree smith and one by mary r. campbell. macmillan company, new york, for extract from "the making of an american," by jacob a. riis, and "on a portrait of columbus," by george edward woodberry, used by permission of and special arrangement with the publishers. moffat, yard & co., new york, for extract from "memorial day," by robert haven schauffler. new england publishing company, boston, for "columbus day" and walt whitman's "address to america." from "journal of education." new york evening post for "america's answer," by r. w. lillard. new york herald for mrs. josephine fabricant's "the service flag." new york state department of education, albany, for "the boy columbus" and an extract from speech of chauncey m. depew. theodore presser company, philadelphia, for "our country's flag," by mrs. florence l. dresser. g. p. putnam's sons, new york, for "in flanders fields," by john mccrae. saturday evening post, philadelphia, for "i have a son," by emory pottle. charles scribner's sons, new york, for extract from "with americans of past and present days," by j. j. jusserand, copyright ; used by permission of the publishers. c. w. thompson & company, boston, for "the unfurling of the flag," by clara endicott sears. copyright; used by permission. horace traubel, camden, for "o captain! my captain!" by walt whitman. p. f. volland company, chicago, for "your flag and my flag," by wilbur d. nesbit. copyrighted by publishers. harr wagner publishing company, san francisco, for "columbus," by joaquin miller. opening exercises this above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. _shakespeare_ opening exercises morning exercises jennie haver, helping teacher, hunterdon county the morning exercise is a common meeting ground; it is the family altar of the school to which each brings his offerings--the fruits of his observations and studies, or the music, literature, and art that delight him; a place where all cooperate for the pleasure and well-being of the whole; where all contribute to and share the intellectual and spiritual life of the whole; where all bring their best and choicest experiences in the most effective form at their command. this quotation from the second year book of the frances w. parker school may well be an inspiration, a guide, and finally, a goal for us to use in preparation for the morning exercises. the period given to the opening exercises may be made the most important period of the day. the pupils, whether they be in a one room rural school or a larger town school, need a more receptive attitude toward the work before them. a short time given to interesting, uplifting exercises will do much to control and lead the restless children, encourage the downhearted ones, inspire the indifferent, and give to teachers and pupils alike higher ideals for effective work and right living. a part of the time given to opening exercises should be of a devotional nature--consisting of the reading of short selections from the bible, without comment--and of prayer and singing. very careful plans must be made for the devotional exercises if they are to function as they should. too often the selection of song and bible reading is made after the pupils are in their seats. a message that is truly inspiring is usually the result of considerable time spent in preparation. the thoughtful teacher will plan her opening exercises as carefully as any other part of her regular school work. the morning exercise affords an opportunity to train pupils for leadership. recently an interesting morning program of musical appreciation was carried out in a two room country school. when the bell rang the twelve year old pupil leader went to the front of the room and placed a march record on the phonograph. after the pupils were seated she conducted the following program with a great deal of poise and self confidence: _america_, by the school psalm xxiii bacarolle from "tales of hoffman" (phonograph) traumerei--schumann (phonograph) spring song--mendelssohn (phonograph) flag salute, by the school following each record on the phonograph she asked for the name of the selection and the composer's name. it was surprising to see how familiar even the little ones were with the classical selections. some one has said that the only influence greater than that of a good book is personal contact with a great man or woman. once in a while an interesting talk may be given by a visitor, but the morning exercise period should not be regarded as a lecture period. occasionally it is well to have leaders of different occupations in the neighborhood give short, pertinent talks on their work. all too often children are blind to the beauty, deaf to the music, and almost insensible to the wonder and mystery of the great world of nature. one day a little country girl found a large, silky, brown cocoon and carried it to school. she didn't know what it was: neither did her teacher. the cocoon was taken home and kept as an object of curiosity to be shown to the neighbors when they called. one warm spring morning a beautiful cecropia moth, measuring six inches from tip to tip of wing, emerged from the cocoon. that girl will never forget her wonder and awe as she watched nature stage one of her most beautiful miracles. any teacher would find it an inspiration and a delight to bring such a charming bit of nature into her morning exercises. every day nature is unfolding just as wonderful stories. our eyes must be open to see them. the opening exercises, conducted as they should be, may be a source of inspiration and a means of training for moral and social behavior, for patriotism, for health, for vocational usefulness, for the right use of leisure--in other words, for useful, patriotic citizenship. there is an abundance of material on every hand that can be used in morning exercises. following are a few suggestions that may be of help. singing profiting by the experience of french and english troops, instructors taught our sailors and soldiers to sing in unison. it has been found that singing does much to improve the morale of the company. singing in the morning exercises does much to socialize the group and develop school spirit. there is such a wealth of suitable songs for morning exercises that it seems hardly necessary to suggest many. the hymns selected should be inspiring and uplifting; the patriotic songs should be thoroughly learned and sung in an enthusiastic manner. =patriotic songs= america battle hymn of the republic columbia, the gem of the ocean dixie flag of the free god speed the right marching through georgia marseillaise hymn jerseyland national hymn old glory the american hymn the battle cry of freedom the star spangled banner =folk songs= annie laurie auld lang syne flow gently, sweet afton home, sweet home juanita my old kentucky home oft in the stilly night old black joe old folks at home robin adair santa lucia the blue bells of scotland the miller of dee =lullabies= cradle song lullaby and good-night oh, hush thee, my baby sweet and low silent night =sacred= how gentle god's command holy, holy, holy in heavenly love abiding italian hymn love divine, all love excelling nearer, my god, to thee oh, worship the king the king of love there's a wideness in god's mercy vesper hymn musical appreciation the introduction of the phonograph into the public school and the multitude of records which reproduce the great masterpieces now make it possible for every child to have an opportunity to hear and to be taught to appreciate good music. frequently part of the morning exercise period should be devoted to an appreciation of good vocal and instrumental musical selections. in one rural school the pupils readily associate the name of the composition and composer with each of the following records, which they helped to purchase: anvil chorus from "il trovatore"--verdi barcarolle from "tales of hoffman"--offenbach hearts and flowers--tobain humoresque--dvorak intermezzo from "cavalleria rusticana"--mascagni lo, hear the gentle lark--bishop melody in f--rubinstein miserere from "il trovatore"--verdi pilgrim's chorus from "tannhauser"--wagner sextette from "lucia di lammermoor"--donizetti spring song--mendelssohn traumerei--schumann literature on musical appreciation will be mailed free to all teachers who request it from the educational departments of the phonograph manufacturers. teachers who are really interested in giving their pupils the best music will find that a number of their patrons are willing to lend records to the school for special exercises. following are suggestive musical programs: a morning with beethoven bible reading and lord's prayer minuet in g, no. (phonograph) "the moonlight sonata," reading by pupil the moonlight sonata (phonograph) the flag salute, pupils a morning with mendelssohn hark! the herald angels sing, song by school bible reading and lord's prayer spring song (phonograph) oh, for the wings of a dove (phonograph) the flag salute, school indian songs bible reading and lord's prayer the story of the indians, pupil navajo indian song (phonograph) medicine song (phonograph) flag salute, school negro songs old black joe, school bible reading and prayer good news (phonograph) live a-humble (phonograph) the flag salute, school (the records given are by the tuskegee institute singers) irish songs wearin' of the green, school bible reading and prayer come back to erin (phonograph) macushla (phonograph) the flag salute, school scotch songs my laddie (phonograph) bible reading and prayer annie laurie, school my ain countrie (phonograph) flag salute, school literary exercises to instil in the hearts of boys and girls a love for good literature is to give them a never ending source of happiness throughout life. children can be interested in books by hearing stories read, by retelling them, and by reading them. the story of the author's life may add interest to the author's work. much can be done in morning exercises to start children on the road to good reading. the more work children do themselves the more interested they will be. following are suggestive literary programs: =robert louis stevenson= bible reading by pupils--philippians iv, - stevenson's prayer for a day's work, recitation by pupil short story of stevenson's life, pupil my shadow, pupil the land of story books, pupil god speed the right, sung by school the flag salute, school =hans christian andersen= psalm , pupil lord's prayer, school a poor boy who became famous, retold by pupil the steadfast tin soldier, retold by pupil the little tin soldier, song by school the flag salute, school =henry w. longfellow= the arrow and the song, song by school bible reading and lord's prayer scenes from hiawatha, dramatization by pupils the village blacksmith, recitation by pupil dramatic exercises when children are truly interested in reading, the natural outlet for the emotions aroused is dramatic action. let different classes be responsible for dramatizing stories from their history or reading lessons and present the results in the morning exercises. the educative and socializing value to the class presenting the exercise is almost invaluable. dramatizing the story makes an interesting incentive for a number of language lessons; rehearsing the play provides for much practice in oral expression; and producing the play before an audience gives valuable training in leadership, self confidence and poise. art appreciation we do not expect many of the school children to become artists, but all can learn to appreciate and tastefully select the beautiful in pictures, personal dress, home furnishing and decoration, and architecture. it has been truly said, "though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." frequently a few minutes of the morning exercises may be very profitably, spent in the study of the beautiful. artistic material to use as illustrations for the talks is on every hand. inexpensive reproductions of the world's great pictures; illustrations in magazines; beautifully colored papers for color combinations in neckties, dress designing and hat trimming; magazine and catalog pictures of well designed furniture and home utensils can be easily obtained. a suggestive list of morning talks is given below: famous pictures the first step--millet landscape with windmill--ruysdael the horse fair--bonheur sistine madonna--raphael morning--corot how can we get good pictures for our schoolroom color harmony in dress good taste in furniture home decoration beautifying the school ground washington, the city beautiful references how to enjoy pictures--emery a child's guide to pictures--coffin the mentor the school arts magazine ladies' home journal the perry pictures national geographic magazine health talks for morning exercises truly, "a people's health's a nation's wealth," and every encouragement should be given in school to further the doctrine of healthful living. the medical examiner, the school nurse, the pupils and the teachers, all may do their part to make the health talks practical and of much value to the school. =suggestive health talks= why we should exercise care of the teeth care of the eyes prevention of colds how to prevent tuberculosis swat the fly how to destroy mosquitoes cleanliness safety first cigarette smoking self control and good manners emergencies school sanitation =references= teaching of hygiene and safety pamphlets of health, from the national department of health, washington, d. c. state department of health, trenton, n. j. russell sage foundation, new york city health-education league, boston, mass. farmer's bulletins from u. s. department of agriculture modern hygiene textbooks newspaper and magazine articles nature talks the study of the wonderful things of the world, their beautiful fitness for their existence and function, the remarkable progressive tendency of all organic life, and the unity that prevails in it create admiration in the beholder and tend to his spiritual uplifting. =suggestive topics for morning exercises= how can we attract the birds? how i built a bird house does it pay the farmer to protect the birds? the travel of birds the life history of a frog the life history of a butterfly how i made my home garden how i raised an acre of corn the trees on our school ground the local history of the community a series of morning exercises may be devoted to the local history of a community. the material may be planned by the pupils with the assistance of some of the older people in the neighborhood. this idea was carried out very successfully in a small town and did much to interest the parents in the school. many were willing to send family heirlooms to the classroom to use as illustrations for the talks. one charming old lady sent a written account of the history of her old home. following are some topics that might be developed: former location of indian tribes in the community evidences of indian occupation (old trails, implements, mounds, etc.) the first white settlers revolutionary landmarks colonial relics historic homes in the community famous people of the community a program for one morning might be conducted by the pupils as follows: proverbs : - , pupil italian hymn, school famous people of the community the grandfather who fought in the civil war, pupil the man who was governor of the state, pupil the woman who was a nurse in the world war, pupil the man who wrote a book, pupil the soldier boy in france, pupil america the use of pupil organization in the morning exercises much interesting and instructive material can be secured for opening exercises by making use of members of recognized organizations for boys and girls. there are members of the boy scouts of america in almost every community. the camp fire girls are getting to be almost as well known. let each group prepare occasional programs for morning exercises. =boy scouts= bible reading and lord's prayer the origin and growth of scouting the three classes of scouts the scout motto the scout law "america" and flag salute =camp fire girls= bible reading and lord's prayer the seven laws of the order the wood gatherer the fire maker the torch bearer song by school the flag salute patriotic exercises the patriotic note should be found in every morning exercise and some periods should be devoted entirely to patriotic selections. the national hymns should be learned from the first stanza to the last. it is hard to get the patriotic note in our singing when we do not know the words. =suggestive programs= america, school bible reading and lord's prayer patrick henry's speech (phonograph) lincoln's gettysburg address (phonograph) flag salute bible reading and prayer army bugle call no. (phonograph) the junior red cross sewing for the red cross, a girl earning money for the red cross, a boy how the work of the junior red cross develops patriotism in a school, pupil come, thou almighty king, school "patriotism consists not in waving a flag but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong."--_james bryce_ "one cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man."--_goethe_ "go back to the simple life, be contented with simple food, simple pleasures, simple clothes. work hard, play hard, pray hard. work, eat, recreate and sleep. do it all courageously. we have a victory to win."--_hoover_ memory gems for life is the mirror of king and slave; 'tis just what we are and do. then give to the world the best you have and the best will come back to you. _madeline s. bridges_ somebody did a golden deed; somebody proved a friend in need; somebody sang a beautiful song; somebody served the whole day long. was that "somebody" you? courtesy is to do and say the kindest thing in the kindest way. truth is honest, truth is sure; truth is strong and must endure. _bailey_ hang on! cling on! no matter what they say. push on! sing on! things will come your way. sitting down and whining never helps a bit; best way to get there is by keeping up your grit. _louis e. thayer_ the day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep. _robert louis stevenson_ be strong! we are not here to play, to dream, to drift. we have hard work to do and loads to lift. shun not the struggle; face it; 'tis god's gift. be strong! it matters not how deep intrenched the wrong, how hard the battle goes, the day how long; faint not--fight on! tomorrow comes the song. _maltbie d. babcock_ smile a smile; while you smile, another smiles, and soon there's miles and miles of smiles. and life's worth while if you but smile. _jane thompson_ you cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.--_james anthony froude_ small service is true service while it lasts; of friends, however humble, scorn not one; the daisy, by the shadow that it casts, protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun. _wordsworth_ there's so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us. a wise old owl lived in an oak. the more he saw the less he spoke; the less he spoke the more he heard. why can't we be like that old bird? kindness is catching, and if you go around with a thoroughly developed case your neighbor will be sure to get it. the thing to do is hope, not mope: the thing to do is work, not shirk. if you have faith, preach it; if you have doubts, bury them; if you have joy, share it; if you have sorrow, bear it. find the bright side of things and help others to get sight of it also. this is the only and surest way to be cheerful and happy. morning exercises florence l. farber, helping teacher, sussex county the short period known as the opening exercise period belongs to all the children of the school. this period should furnish especially favorable opportunities for the development of initiative on the part of pupils, group cooperation, development of the play spirit, interest in community life, interest in and love for our great men and women, and devotion to our republic. the first problem of the teacher, then, is to understand fully that she is to a great degree responsible for furnishing aims and purposes in this beginning period of the day, or rather in providing the situations through which these aims and purposes may develop. when she feels the importance of this period in the general scheme of the day's work she will plan for it as definitely and as carefully as she will any other part of her program. the working out of a detailed program is of secondary importance. the thing of first importance is that she become fully cognizant of the general aims and ideals which she hopes to achieve. with these firmly fixed in her mind she is ready then to cooperate with the pupils of her room in planning detailed programs. the following projects are in keeping with the principles presented and have been found stimulating in one and two room schools: =project .= the teacher divides her children into groups on the basis of age and ability. for example, in a one room school a teacher might have two groups. each group is to work out with the teacher a program which it is to give and for which it is responsible. this program may consist of a short story to be dramatized, the story to contain not more than two or three important scenes. the costuming, if any is needed, is to be done by pupils and teacher. rehearsing is to be directed by the teacher. when the program is presented it should be as a new production to all the school except those who are engaged in presenting it. it is to be given, therefore, as a real play to a real audience. each pupil should invite a member of the family or a friend. the value of such work will soon be noticed in a better social spirit among the children. the dramatizations given may furnish the material for both oral and written language lessons. dramatization itself will provide excellent practice in oral expression and also training in initiative, leadership and cooperation. the story presented may furnish many funny settings which the pupils may enjoy with abandon. and what children do not need real merriment in school! opportunity ought to be afforded all children of our public schools to enjoy a real laugh at least once each day. teachers need have no fear that the different groups will be over-critical or discourteous to one another. they will understand that they are being entertained and they will cooperate to make the play given worth while. the following stories lend themselves very readily to dramatization. =first and second grades= the three billy goats gruff spry mouse and mr. frog the three bears the camel and the jackal the tale of peter rabbit our first flag =third and fourth grades= the sleeping beauty snow white and rose red brother fox's tar baby how the cave man made fire scenes from hiawatha early settlers in new jersey =fifth and sixth grades= the pied piper of hamelin joseph and his brethren abou ben adhem paul revere's ride scenes from life of daniel boone franklin's arrival in philadelphia scenes from alfred the great the battle of hastings how cedric became a knight =seventh and eighth grades= the vision of sir launfal rip van winkle the king of the golden river scenes from evangeline landing of the pilgrims conquest of the northwest territory the man without a country =project .= a special problem in history or geography, for example, may be taken up, such as the life of the people in japan, or the life of the people on a cattle ranch. in either case the class that presents the work as an opening exercise should be given opportunity to work out certain scenes which it wants to give. these scenes should be presented either by sand-table, by charts, by posters, by pictures from magazines, or by dramatization on the part of the children. preparation of such work is decidedly worth while, and ought to be a regular part of the day's program. the important scenes should be rehearsed before the final presentation. =project . poster exhibit.= this project could be arranged for all the children of a given school, in which case the best work would be selected and the children presenting it would discuss each poster in one or two minute talks. a still better way to handle the project would be to have the best posters from different schools. in this case at least one pupil from each school should be invited to present the posters from his school. =project . war programs.= a war opening exercise program could be worked out by the children of a given school. this could be done by having children collect war posters and war pictures made during the recent world war and arrange them in such a way that they tell a connected story. a group should be held responsible for presenting each story or part of a story. a sand-table should be provided if necessary. an excellent war program could be provided by having the emphasis placed upon the various men who have led or are leading in our own national life. pictures of these men should be secured and children called upon to tell what important work each man has done or is doing. this same device could be carried a step further and a special program arranged, centering around the pictures of the different men who led the allied forces. the older pupils of any school ought to be able to do this work. an additional way by which our schools may help in the work of patriotism is to have an opening exercise by the children whose immediate relatives were at the front. such a program ought to have for its purpose the idea of service to one's country. another helpful device would be to have at an appropriate time former soldiers come to the school and talk to the children concerning the meaning of the war. the teacher who plans her opening exercise periods in keeping with the foregoing presentation will make these periods inspiring and helpful to herself and her children. she will be putting across the gospel of good cheer, and cooperation in the new kind of school which offers opportunities for participation in life's present day activities, not preparation for future activities. opening exercises louis h. burch, principal bangs avenue school, asbury park play is one of the first manifestations of the child in self expression. as the child grows older this play is made up in part of the imitation of the doings and sayings of the older persons and playmates with whom he is associated. the child reflects the life of his parents wherever it comes under his comprehension. the stick horse gives as much pleasure to the boy as the well trained saddle horse gives to the father. when the child enters school much of the play element of his life is left behind, and teachers have often failed to use to advantage the experience and knowledge the child has in "living over" the actions and sayings of others. the ordinary child has observed the animals and birds around him and can imitate them. he can personify the tree, the flower, or the brook, and gain a clearer knowledge of the purpose and function of the thing personified by so doing. under the proper direction of the teacher nearly all the common occurrences of life may be dramatized by the children in the ordinary schoolroom and with few so-called stage properties. older children are interested in the simple dramatizations of the little folks and should have opportunity to see them often, not alone to be entertained, but to be reminded of the simple and easy ways of "playing you are someone else." a grammar grade class may learn many things from watching a primary class dramatize "three bears," "little red hen," or "little red ridinghood." the simple dramatization in the schoolroom furnish excellent material for general assemblies or morning exercises. simple costumes and stage settings satisfy the children, and the setting of the stage or platform for the scene should, in most cases, be done before the children. children who see the table set, the chairs placed, and the beds prepared for the "three bears" know how to get ready for their play when they are called upon to contribute their part for the assembly. children will bring material for their costumes and stage furnishings from home and should be encouraged to do so. parents will come to see children take part in a program when nothing else would attract them to the school, and if the home is to be called upon to help the school there must be a closer relationship between parents and teacher. in preparing dramatizations for elementary school pupils but few scenes should be chosen, and in those selected the language and action should be simple and within the capabilities of the children. the following dramatizations were worked out by teachers and pupils of our building as class projects. they were presented in the opening exercises as worth-while classroom projects which would be entertaining and helpful to all pupils of the school, to teachers and to parents. in presenting these scenes the pupils secured excellent practice in oral english work, in dramatic action, and in community and group cooperation. the pupils and teachers who made up the audience enjoyed opening exercises in which there was purpose. all entered into the spirit of the play; all enjoyed the exercises without having to think why. the results have been better team work between teacher and pupils, better school spirit, more pupil participation in leadership activities. the history of cotton _prepared by bessie o'hagen, teacher of fourth grade, bangs avenue school, asbury park_ _characters_: spirit of cotton, little girl, maiden from india, maiden from egypt, maiden from america, spirit of eli whitney. _little girl_ (_coming into the room in bad humor_). i hate this old cotton dress. i wish i had a silk one. i don't see why we have to use cotton anyway. we have to have cotton dresses, cotton sheets, cotton stockings, cotton everything. i just hate cotton! i'm not going out to play or anything. (_finally sits down._) i am so tired. i wish i had a silk dress. i hate this cotton dress. (_falls asleep._) _spirit of cotton_ (_skipping into the room_). heigh ho! ho heigh! here am i, the spirit of cotton. i heard what you said, little girl. did you ever see cotton grow? _little girl_ (_frightened_). why, no. _spirit of cotton._ how do you know whether it is interesting or not? i will tell you the story of my life. in the early spring the planter gets the ground ready for me. as soon as the frost is out of the ground, he plants me. _little girl._ what happens then? _spirit of cotton._ the good earth gives me food. the sun and rain make me grow, and soon-- heigh ho! ho heigh! there am i, a tall plant of cotton. _little girl._ how do you look? _spirit of cotton._ my leaves are green like the maple. i have lovely blossoms. they are white the first day and pink the next. _little girl._ i thought you said that you were a cotton plant. _spirit of cotton._ so i did. my blossoms fall off, and then-- heigh ho! ho heigh! there am i, a nice bunch of cotton. _little girl._ is that all? _spirit of cotton._ no, i have some friends who will tell you more about my life. (_goes out and returns leading a little girl by the hand._) this is my friend from india. (_goes out again._) _little girl._ how did you get here? _maiden from india._ i heard the spirit of cotton calling and i obeyed. _little girl_ (_pointing to a map of asia which is pinned on maiden from india_). is this your country? _maiden from india._ yes, i have come to tell you something about cotton in my country. cotton was first raised in my country. that was long, long, long ago. _little girl._ a hundred years ago? _maiden from india._ we knew how to weave cotton thousands of years ago. _little girl._ did you know how to weave well? _maiden from india._ we made such fine dresses that you could draw a whole one through your ring. _little girl._ i don't believe i could draw my dress through my ring. _maiden from india._ i know you couldn't. _spirit of cotton_ (_outside_). heigh ho! ho heigh! _maiden from india._ i must return. the spirit of cotton is calling. (_goes out._) _spirit of cotton_ (_comes in, leading a little girl by the hand_). this is my friend from egypt. she has something to tell you too. (_goes out._) _little girl._ do you know about cotton? _maiden from egypt._ yes, we knew how to use cotton long before your country was even heard of. _little girl._ is this your country (_pointing to a map_)? _maiden from egypt._ yes. _little girl._ did your people like cotton dresses? _maiden from egypt._ yes; just think how warm those woolen ones were. _little girl._ i guess every one who ever lived must have liked cotton. _maiden from egypt._ all good children do now. _spirit of cotton_ (_outside_). heigh ho! ho heigh! _maiden from egypt._ i must go. i hear the spirit of cotton calling. _spirit of cotton_ (_bringing a little girl into the room_). this is my friend from america. (_goes out again._) _little girl._ i know you. we studied that map in school. you are from the united states. what did america have to do with cotton? _maiden from america._ when columbus first landed on the bahama islands the natives came out to his ships in canoes, bringing cotton thread and yarn to trade. _little girl._ that was in , wasn't it? _maiden from america._ yes, it was years ago. _little girl._ why did you put all this cotton here (_points to cotton pasted on different states_)? _maiden from america._ they are the cotton states. _little girl._ i know which ones they are--north carolina, south carolina, louisiana, arkansas and texas. did america do anything wonderful with cotton? _maiden from america._ yes; we raise more cotton than any other place in the world. it is the best cotton too. _little girl._ i am so glad of that. we won't let india and egypt get ahead of us, will we? _maiden from america._ of course not. all good little girls must help too. _little girl._ i shall always like cotton after this. _spirit of cotton_ (_outside_). heigh ho! ho heigh! _maiden from america._ i hear the spirit of cotton calling; i must go. (_goes out._) _spirit of cotton_ (_leading a boy into the room_). this is my friend eli whitney. (_goes out._) _eli whitney._ i am the spirit of eli whitney. i was born in massachusetts in . one day when my father went to church, i took his watch to pieces and put it together again. then i thought i would go to yale college. when i finished yale college i went to georgia. i heard everyone there talking about cotton. they were trying to find out how to get the seeds out of it more easily. i invented the cotton gin. _little girl._ what happened then? _eli whitney._ one man could now clean fifty times as much cotton as he could before. _spirit of cotton_ (_outside_). heigh ho! ho heigh! _eli whitney._ i hear the spirit of cotton calling; i must go. (_goes out._) _little girl_ (_waking up_). where is the spirit of cotton? where is the maiden from india? where is the spirit of eli whitney? it must have been a dream! i guess i got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. i will always like cotton after this. i am going out to play now. the cat and his servant _prepared by alice lewis, teacher of second grade, bangs school, asbury park_ _dramatized from story of same name_ _characters: farmer, cat, fox, wolf, bear, rabbit, cow, sheep._ _materials used_: small branches of tree, box for house, cards with printed names of animals. _scene:_ the forest. _enter the farmer and the cat_ _farmer._--i have a cat. he is very wild so i will take him to the forest. (_puts cat in bag and takes him to tree._) i will leave him here. (_takes off bag and leaves the cat._) _cat._ i will build a house for myself and be the owner of this forest. (_brings in box and nails boards._) now my house is done. _enter the fox_ _fox._ good morning. what fine fur you have! what long whiskers you have! who are you? _cat._ i am ivan, the owner of this forest. _fox._ may i be your servant? _cat._ yes; you may. come into my house. (_both go in house._) i am hungry. go out and get me something to eat. _fox._ i will go. (_goes into forest and meets wolf._) _wolf._ good morning. _fox._ good morning. _wolf._ i have not seen you for a long time. where are you living now? _fox._ i am living with ivan. i am his servant. _wolf._ who is ivan? _fox._ he is the owner of this forest. _wolf._ may i come with you and see ivan? _fox._ yes; if you will promise to bring a sheep with you. if you do not ivan will eat you. _wolf._ i will go and get one. (_leaves the fox and hunts for a sheep._) _enter the bear_ _bear._ good morning, mr. fox. _fox._ good morning, mr. bear. _bear._ i have not seen you for a long time. where are you living? _fox._ i am living with ivan. i am his servant. _bear._ who is ivan? _fox._ he is the owner of this forest. _bear._ may i go with you and see him? _fox._ yes, but you must promise to bring a cow with you or ivan will eat you. _bear._ i will go and get one. (_leaves the fox and hunts for a cow._) _the fox returns to the house and enters_ _cat._ did you bring me something to eat? _fox._ no; but i have sent for something and it will be here soon. _cat._ all right; we will wait. _enter wolf with a sheep and bear with a cow_ _bear._ good morning, mr. wolf. where are you going? _wolf._ good morning. i am going to see ivan, the owner of this forest. _bear._ so am i. let us go together. _bear and wolf walk to cat's house and place sheep and cow near door_ _wolf._ you knock on the door. _bear._ no; you knock on the door. i am afraid. _wolf._ so am i. shall we ask mr. rabbit to do it? _bear._ yes; you ask him. _wolf_ (_calling to a rabbit who is passing_). hello, mr. rabbit; will you knock at the cat's door for us? _rabbit._ yes, i will. _(knocks.)_ _bear and wolf hide behind the trees and bushes_ _cat_ (_coming out of his house with the fox and noticing the cow and sheep lying by the door_). look! here is what you got for my dinner. there is only enough for two bites. _bear_ (_to himself_). how hungry he is. a cow would be enough to eat for four bears and he says it is only enough for two bites. what a terrible animal he is. _cat_ (_seeing wolf behind the bushes_). look! there is a mouse. i must catch him and eat him. (_chases wolf away._) i think i hear another mouse. (_sees bear and tries to catch him but fails._) i am so tired that i cannot run at all. let us sit by the door and eat our dinner. (_cat and fox sit down and eat the sheep and cow._) bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. columbus day october columbus, seeking the back door of asia, found himself knocking at the front door of america. _james russell lowell_ columbus day j. cayce morrison, supervising principal, leonia october , ! what a date in the world's history--the linking of the new world with the old--the dreams of a dreamer come true--the opening of the gates to a newer and better home for man--the promise of--america! the story of columbus is a story of romance, of patient perseverance, of high endeavor, of noble resolve--a story that grips and thrills. every boy and every girl who feels the story wants to discover a new world; and out of that desire may well come the discovery of america--its aims, ideals, opportunities. the columbus day program is an opportunity to discover the new world into which we are emerging. even childhood in the school may come to glimpse that which lies beyond and feel the exultation of the sailor who cried, "land! land!" the materials of this program are largely suggestive. it is hoped that they may be of service in program making from kindergarten to high school. the school program of most value is that which results from the creative genius of the children themselves. let children live the life of columbus in imagination and they will create their own program and express it in costume, tableaux, music, composition, acting, and dialog. the merit of the columbus day program will lie in its leading children, through their own expression, to a better understanding of their country, to a broader conception of patriotism. subjects for composition or oral reports marco polo a flat world the new idea--sailing west to reach the east the dangers of the western sea the attempted mutiny (see irving's "life of columbus") the signs of land columbus in chains san salvador october , the columbian exposition, the discovery of america, what columbus would do today a little program for columbus day recitation (by three boys bearing the american flag, the spanish flag, and a drum) _ st_--we are jolly little sailors; join us as we come; we'll bear the flag of proud old spain, and we will beat a drum! _ d_--we are jolly little sailors, and we pause to say, we raise the bonny flag of spain upon columbus day. _ d_--we are jolly little sailors; raise the red, the white, the blue; though we honor brave columbus, to our own flag we are true. _all_--(beat drum and wave flag) salute the banners, one and all, o raise them once again; salute the red, the white, the blue, salute the flag of spain! for countries old and countries new, we will wave the red, the white, the blue! recitation (by eight girls carrying banners that bear letters spelling "columbus") c columbus sailed o'er waters blue, o on and on to countries new. l long the ships sailed day and night, u until at last land came in sight. m many hearts were filled with fear, b but the land was drawing near. u upon the ground they knelt at last s so their dangers all were past. _all_ wave the banners bright and gay, we meet to keep columbus day. crowning columbus (recitation by four children. picture of columbus on easel. children place on it evergreen and flower wreaths and flags) _ st_--crown him with a wreath of evergreen, the very fairest ever seen-- our brave columbus. _ d_--crown him with flowers fresh and fair; we'll place them by his picture there-- our brave columbus. _ d_--crown him with the flag of spain; columbus day has come again-- our brave columbus. _ th_--crown him with red, and white, and blue; bring out the drum and banners too-- our brave columbus. _all_--as we stand by his picture here, columbus' name we all revere-- our brave columbus. what we can do (recitation by two small boys, carrying flag) . i wish i could do some great deed-- just find a world or two, so that the flag might wave for me as for columbus true. it makes a small child very sad to think all great deeds done. what is then left for us to do? what's to be tried and won? . my father says--and he knows too, for he's a grown up man-- that heroes leave some things for us to carry out their plan. he says that if we do our best, just where we are, you see, we too shall serve our country's flag; true patriots we shall be. _both._ we'll love our flag, we'll keep its pledge; we'll honor and obey; we'll love our fellow brothers all; and serve our land this way. recitation (by a very small child, carrying a flag) my beautiful flag, you are waving today, to honor a hero true; columbus who gave us our dear native land, our land of the red, white and blue. recitation (by a very small child, carrying a flag) i'll wave my flag for discovery day, and before i get frightened i'll scamper away. columbus game the children stand in a circle. they choose one to represent columbus. the children all sing the song (given below). as they sing the fifth line columbus points to three children, who become the nina (baby), the pinta, and the santa maria. these three children come inside the circle, and wave arms up and down as though sailing. the children now all repeat the song, marching round in the circle, waving arms up and down, and the children inside the circle skip round also. the song is then repeated, children standing in a circle, and the three chosen as nina, pinta and santa maria choose three children to take their places by pointing at any three children in the circle. game may continue as long as desired or until all have had a chance to go inside the circle.[a] [a] the story of columbus may be dramatized in connection with this game. song columbus was a sailor boy, many years ago. a great ship was the sailor's joy, many years ago. the nina, the pinta, the santa maria, little vessels three, the nina, the pinta, the santa maria, sailed out across the sea. _laura rountree smith_ my little ship once i made a little ship, down beside the sea; and i said, "come now, dear winds, and blow it back to me!" o little ship that sails the sea. o wind that blows it back to me! song _tune, lightly row_ wave the flags, wave the flags; we are sailor boys at play; wave the flags, wave the flags, on columbus day. o'er the waters we will go, singing, singing, as we row; wave the flags to and fro, on columbus day. (_children wave flags_) cross the flags, cross the flags, with their pretty colors gay; cross the flags, cross the flags, on columbus day. we would like to sail, 'tis true, o'er the waters bright and blue, so we cross the flags for you on columbus day. (_children cross flags_) _laura rountree smith_ recitation for very little boys _ st_--columbus was a sailor bold, at least that's what i have been told. _ d_--i would also like to sail the sea, if not too far from mother's knee. _ d_--he had three ships to sail the sea, one ship would be enough for me. _ th_--in the nina i would go; but what if stormy winds should blow? _ th_--in the pinta i'll set sail; that ship has weathered many a gale. _ th_--the santa maria waits for me; o how i love to sail the sea. _ th_--at night we'll glide across the foam, but wish ourselves quite safe at home. _ th_--kind friends, i hope you understand, we are really happier far on land. (_all join hands and run to seats_) then come, dear sailors, hand in hand, we'll run to seek the nearest land! play (_ferdinand and isabella on their thrones, chairs with a red drapery concealing them._) _enter columbus and followers, bowing low_ _columbus_ o most gracious majesties! _ferdinand_ my wise men say your scheme is vain, so your plan i must disdain; if as _you_ say this earth is round no one could stay upon the ground. (_bows his head and looks very wise. columbus looks sadly around and sighs. queen isabella stretches forth her hand._) _queen_ i have talked to the abbot kind, and he has made me change my mind. take these and these (_dropping her bracelets and necklaces into columbus' hat_) and may you be, successful in your quest at sea. _columbus and followers_ long live, long live isabella the queen! such generous faith has seldom been seen. long live, long live isabella the queen! _all_ (_except columbus, who bows as he listens_) here's to columbus, so brave and so true, who will soon sail west on the ocean blue to--find--the--land--of--india. _headed by king and queen all march around and off_ _one returns_ columbus safely made his voyage and now, though he never knew it, he discovered this land, the fair land of our birth, the greatest nation on all the earth. (_displays flag_) _all except columbus return and sing america_ _mary r. campbell_ recitation (_by three boys_) _ st_--columbus dared to cross the sea where none had gone before; and sailing west from palos, spain, he came to our front door. _ d_--his men were only prisoners queen isabel set free; for other men, they did not dare to cross the unknown sea. _ d_--he had no friend to share his hope; no one could understand; now all men honor his great name, who first saw our dear land. _all_--if we can only be as true to our best selves as he, speak truth, keep faith, be brave and pure, true heroes we shall be. discovery day i wonder what columbus would think of us today, just stepping out from ' , four centuries on, we'll say. with aeroplanes and warships, and submarine affairs, he'd surely think the mighty sea was putting on some airs. discovery day, we greet you; you're only just begun; industry, art, and science now, begin their race to run. but brighter than these wonders, more beautiful to see, democracy's fair smile begins to dawn o'er land and sea. discovery day! when freedom shall reign in every land, when nations know their brotherhood, and naught but good is grand. america, thy mission be this: discover now a _world_ safe for democracy. 'tis ours to teach it how. the flag of spain _tune--long, long ago_ there was a flag that waved all over spain long, long ago; long, long ago. and many sailors had gone forth in vain, long, long ago, long ago. then came the ships and columbus set sail; proudly the vessels withstood every gale. then came the cry, "blessed land, land we hail," long, long ago, long ago. columbus a dreamer they called him, and mocked him to scorn, but o, through this dreamer a new world was born. a new land whose watchword is ringing afar-- "democracy! freedom!" that none shall dare mar. a nation whose vision is making it be humanity's champion on land and on sea. america, my land, a dream gave thee birth; through vision thou'st conquered in all realms of worth. thy spirit shall beckon till all nations heed, and follow in wisdom the path thou dost lead. class exercise for columbus day the foundation for these exercises should be laid in previous class recitations and specially prepared class compositions which relate developing incidents in the life of columbus. several periods used in the preparation of these oral and written exercises will be time well spent. select the composition which portrays the life pictures most clearly and effectively; and as the writer reads his story, let other members of the class give tableaux or act scenes apropos. the children should be encouraged to initiate their own ideas and execute their own mental pictures in costume, arrangement, facial expression, etc. the following are mentioned _suggestively_: acts portraying the life of columbus . columbus, the boy boy of nine to eleven years, seated, intently studying a geography, _or_ boy whittling a wooden toy ship. . columbus, the man larger boy, posing as a dreamer, gazing at and studying the stars, _or_ larger boy drawing maps, appearing wise and thoughtful. (let others stand aside, smiling and mockingly pointing.) . columbus' appearance before king ferdinand and queen isabella king and queen, dressed in royal style, on improvised throne; columbus kneeling before them; the queen offering him her jewels. . on shipboard boys representing mutinous sailors, their faces depicting fear, anger, dejection--dressed sailor fashion. columbus displaying confidence, courage and patience--dressed in short full trousers, cape over his shoulders thrown back on one side. let facial expressions and actions change to show land has been sighted. . the landing columbus planting the flag of spain in the new world. sailors (all with uncovered heads) kneeling. indians (let the boys wear indian suits) watching from the outskirts, one falling down in worship. . the return reception king ferdinand and queen isabella on throne, dressed as before, with guards on either side. ladies-in-waiting, noblemen, etc., dressed in th century style, grouped about. columbus enters (to music). all bow low except king and queen, who rise to meet him. columbus kneels before them, kisses the queen's hand and rises. indians enter (with bow and arrow) and gaze in wonder about. one indian plucks columbus by sleeve and gruntingly interrogates him concerning some wonder in the room--a picture of the king and queen, decorated with spanish flags. the king takes the hand of the indian, places it in columbus' hand and, covering them with his own left hand, raises the right to signify his blessing upon the newly found land. music gives the signal for the recessional. all fall into line and march out--guards, king, queen, columbus, ladies, and courtiers. the indians follow irregularly. the boy columbus "'tis a wonderful story," i hear you say, "how he struggled and worked and plead and prayed, and faced every danger undismayed, with a will that would neither break nor bend, and discovered a new world in the end-- but what does it teach to a boy of today? all the worlds are discovered, you know, of course, all the rivers are traced to their utmost source; there is nothing left for a boy to find, if he had ever so much a mind to become a discoverer famous; and if we'd much rather read a book about some one else, and the risks he took, why nobody, surely, can blame us." so you think all the worlds are discovered now; all the lands have been charted and sailed about, their mountains climbed, their secrets found out; all the seas have been sailed and their currents known-- to the uttermost isles the winds have blown they have carried a venturing prow? yet there lie all about us new worlds, everywhere, that await their discoverer's footfall; spread fair are electrical worlds that no eye has yet seen, and mechanical worlds that lie hidden serene and await their columbus securely. there are new worlds in science and new worlds in art, and the boy who will work with his head and his heart will discover his new world surely. columbus and the egg one day columbus was at a dinner which a spanish gentleman had given in his honor, and several persons were present who were jealous of the great admiral's success. they were proud, conceited fellows, and they very soon began to try to make columbus uncomfortable. "you have discovered strange lands beyond the seas," they said, "but what of that? we do not see why there should be so much said about it. anybody can sail across the ocean; and anybody can coast along the islands on the other side, just as you have done. it is the simplest thing in the world." columbus made no answer; but after a while he took an egg from a dish and said to the company: "who among you, gentlemen, can make this egg stand on end?" one by one those at the table tried the experiment. when the egg had gone entirely around and none had succeeded, all said that it could not be done. then columbus took the egg and struck its small end gently upon the table so as to break the shell a little. after that there was no trouble in making it stand upright. "gentlemen," said he, "what is easier than to do this which you said was impossible? it is the simplest thing in the world. anybody can do it--after he has been shown how!" columbus day (_fitchburg, massachusetts, normal school_) this entertainment is simply an attempt to give a few of the most dramatic incidents in the life of columbus as connected with his discovery of the new world. other scenes could be readily added, although it would require some care to avoid an anti-climax. a. in spain at the council of salamanca before this scene is presented give a brief explanation and description of the early life of columbus and his attempts to obtain aid. _characters_: churchmen and counselors at the court of spain (seven to ten) and columbus. _costumes_: the _churchmen_ are dressed in long black garments, except two, who have black capes with white underneath. columbus wears a long, black garment or coat, which plainly shows the poverty of its owner. _tableau i--columbus before the council at salamanca_ the characters are arranged somewhat as in a picture of this scene found in the perry pictures. a picture of this scene is also found in lossing's history of the united states, volume i. only the chief characters are shown in this tableau. three churchmen or counselors are in center near columbus; two at left, one pointing mockingly, or making fun of columbus; two stand haughtily in the back, and there may also be two or three at right. columbus has a partly open roll of parchment in one hand and is pointing with the other. one of the churchmen in the center has an open bible in his hand, and another has a book which he is holding out to columbus. b. on shipboard _characters_: columbus, the mate, other sailors. _costumes_: columbus, red cape; sailors, sweaters and sailor caps. _tableau ii--nearing land; columbus and the mate_ the conversation in joaquin miller's "columbus" takes place between columbus and mate. the sailors are in the background, one holding a lantern. between the different parts of his conversation with columbus, the mate goes to consult with the sailors. the last stanza of the poem is given by some one from the wings. when the reader reaches the line, "a light! a light!" columbus and the mate change their position. columbus points and the mate raises his arm, peering forward. (picture in "leading facts of american history," by montgomery, revised edition. also in "stepping stones of american history.") c. in the new world _characters_: columbus, three noblemen, eight sailors, six indians. _costumes_: columbus and the noblemen wear the spanish costume of the fifteenth century (described later). sailors wear sweaters and sailor caps made from blue, red or grey cambric. indians wear indian suits (nearly all boys have or may obtain them from any clothing store). they carry bows and arrows or tomahawks. the spears and swords for this and the following scene are made from wood, bronzed to look like silver. the tall cross is made of wood and stained with shellac. the banner of the expedition is white, with a green cross. over the initials f and y (ferdinand and ysabella) are two gilt crowns. _tableau iii--the landing of columbus_ the characters are posed from vanderlyn's painting of the scene in the capitol at washington. reproductions are found in many histories and among the perry pictures. columbus holds the banner of the expedition in one hand, and a drawn sword in the other. one of the men has a tall staff with the top in form of a cross; two others hold tall spears. the indians are peering out at the white men from the sides of the stage; one of them is down on the stage with his head bowed on his hands, worshipping the strangers; the others seem to be full of fear and curiosity. d. at barcelona in spain before this scene is presented a description of the reception of columbus by the king and queen upon his return to spain is given. this scene is more elaborate than any of the others. _characters and costumes_: queen, red robe, purple figured front; collar and trimmings of ermine. she wears a crown. ermine is made of cotton with little pieces of black cloth sewed on it, crown of cardboard covered with gilt paper. dress cheesecloth with a front of silkoline. king wears purple full, short trousers (trunks), purple doublet, purple cape and gilt crown. the trousers and cape are trimmed with ermine. the two guards have black trousers (trunks) and red capes, collars, and knee pieces made from silver paper; they wear storm hats covered with silver paper, and carry spears. the two ladies-in-waiting wear dresses fixed to resemble the dress of the period. they have high headpieces shaped like cornucopias, made from cardboard covered with gilt paper, and with long veils draped over them; this was one style of headpiece worn in the fifteenth century. the eight churchmen, eight sailors and six indians are dressed as in previous scenes. the little page of columbus is dressed in his own white suit. columbus wears grey and red clothing. the ten noblemen wear combinations of bright colors. the general plan in regard to the dress of the spanish nobility in the time of columbus is to have the full, short trousers (trunks) made of one color and slashed with another; the upper garment or doublet made of figured silkoline; the cape of one color lined with another, worn turned back over one shoulder; pointed collars and cuffs of white glazed or silver paper; and soft felt hats with plumes. each nobleman carries a sword. the gold brought by the sailors may be made by gilding stones. _tableau iv--reception of columbus by king and queen_ in center of stage is raised platform or throne with two or three steps leading up to it: this throne is covered with figured raw silk (yellow and brown). chairs are placed on throne for king and queen. the scene is an attempt to represent the reception of columbus on his return to spain after his first voyage. (see painting by ricardo balaca, the spanish artist, of columbus before ferdinand and isabella at barcelona.) a march may be played on the piano while the different characters in the tableau come on the stage and take their proper positions. first the two royal guards march to the throne, taking positions one on each side, so that the king and queen may pass between them in mounting the platform. they are followed by the king and queen, and then the ladies-in-waiting. the king and queen mount the platform and take seats; the ladies wait in front of the platform until the king and queen are seated, then they take positions on each side of the throne. the guards, after the king and queen are seated, take positions on the platform in the rear. all these come as one group in the procession, with only a little space between them. next come the churchmen. one of them carries the tall cross. they take their places at the right of the queen. the indians come, shuffling across the stage to the extreme left of the king and queen. of course they know nothing of keeping time to the music or paying homage to royalty. the sailors march upon the stage, each bringing something from the new world--gold, a stuffed bird, or some product. each in turn approaches the king and queen, kneels, and then places whatever he carries at the side of the platform, and takes his place on the left. the noblemen, one by one, come in with great dignity, go to the front of the throne, kneel and salute with their swords. then they go to the right of the stage. finally the music sounds a more triumphal note, announcing the approach of the hero of the occasion. columbus is preceded by his page, carrying the banner of the expedition. the page kneels to the king and queen, then goes to the left, where he is to stand just back of the place reserved for columbus. as columbus approaches the throne, the king and queen rise and come forward to do him honor. columbus kneels, kisses the queen's hand, then rises and points out to the king and queen the treasures which his sailors have brought. he also brings forward one of the indians. the king and queen regard everything with interest. after this, at a signal given on the piano, all kneel to give thanks for the discovery of the new world. the te deum laudamus is chanted or the doxology is sung. this is the end of the reception. * * * * * this scene may be simplified, if desired, and given in the form of two tableaux. columbus kneeling before the queen and king and columbus telling his story may be given separately. there need not be as many characters in the scene. see the picture, "reception of columbus" (adapted from the picture by ricardo balaca) in "america's story for american children," by mara l. pratt. it would be easy to give the substance of this entertainment in any schoolroom and without costumes. even with these limitations the story of columbus would become more real to the children in this way than it could be made by any description. a good description of the reception of columbus in spain after his first voyage is given in the "life of columbus," by washington irving. a description and picture of the banner of the expedition may be found in lossing's "history of the united states," volume i. music that may be used: "columbus song," taken from " "; the "new hail columbia." the discovery of america it was on the morning of friday, th of october, , that columbus first beheld the new world.... no sooner did he land than he threw himself upon his knees, kissed the earth, and returned thanks to god with tears of joy. his example was followed by the rest, whose hearts indeed overflowed with the same feelings of gratitude. columbus then rising drew his sword, displayed the royal standard, and ... took solemn possession in the name of the castilian sovereigns, giving the island the name of san salvador. having complied with the requisite forms and ceremonies, he now called upon all present to take the oath of obedience to him, as admiral and viceroy, representing the persons of the sovereigns. the feelings of the crew now burst forth in the most extravagant transports.... they thronged around the admiral in their overflowing zeal. some embraced him, others kissed his hands. those who had been most mutinous and turbulent during the voyage, were now most devoted and enthusiastic. some begged favors of him, as of a man who had already wealth and honors in his gift. many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now crouched as it were at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him, and offering for the future the blindest obedience to his commands. _washington irving_ immortal morn immortal morn, all hail! that saw columbus sail by faith alone! the skies before him bowed, back rolled the ocean proud, and every lifting cloud with glory shone. fair science then was born, on that celestial morn, faith dared the sea; triumphant over foes then truth immortal rose, new heavens to disclose, and earth to free. strong freedom then came forth, to liberate the earth and crown the right; so walked the pilot bold upon the sea of gold, and darkness backward rolled, and there was light. _hezekiah butterworth_ all hail, columbus, discoverer, dreamer, hero, and apostle! we here, of every race and country, recognize the horizon which bounded his vision, and the infinite scope of his genius. the voice of gratitude and praise for all the blessings which have been showered upon mankind by his adventure is limited to no language, but is uttered in every tongue. neither marble nor brass can fitly form his statue. continents are his monument, and unnumbered millions, past, present, and to come, who enjoy in their liberties and their happiness the fruits of his faith, will reverently guard and preserve, from century to century, his name and fame. _chauncey mitchell depew_ little wonder that the whole world takes from the life of columbus one of its best-beloved illustrations of the absolute power of faith. to a faithless world he made a proposal, and the world did not hear it. to that faithless world he made it again and again, and at last roused the world to ridicule it and to contradict it. to the same faithless world he still made it year after year; and at last the world said that, when it was ready, it would try if he were right; to which his only reply is that he is ready now, that the world must send him now on the expedition which shall show whether he is right or wrong. the world, tired of his importunity, consents, unwillingly enough, that he shall try the experiment. he tries it; he succeeds; and the world turns round and welcomes him with a welcome which it cannot give to a conqueror. in a moment the grandeur of his plans is admitted, their success is acknowledged, and his place is fixed as one of the great men of history. give me white paper! the sheet you use is black and rough with smears of sweat and grime and fraud and blood and tears, crossed with the story of men's sins and fears, of battle and of famine all those years when all god's children have forgot their birth and drudged and fought and died like beasts of earth. give me white paper! one storm-trained seaman listened to the word; what no man saw he saw, and heard what no man heard. for answer he compelled the sea to eager man to tell the secret she had kept so well; left blood and woe and tyranny behind, sailing still west that land newborn to find, for all mankind the unstained page unfurled, where god might write anew the story of the world. _edward everett hale_ [illustration: columbus "admiral at the helm"] the fame of columbus is not local or limited. it does not belong to any single country or people. it is the proud possession of the whole civilized world. in all the transactions of history there is no act which for vastness and performance can be compared with the discovery of the continent of america, "the like of which was never done by any man in ancient or in later times." _james grant wilson_ with boldness unmatched, with faith in the teachings of science and of revelation immovable, with patience and perseverance that knew no weariness, with superior skill as a navigator unquestioned, and with a lofty courage unrivaled in the history of the race, columbus sailed from palos on the d of august, with three vessels, the largest (his flagship) of only ninety feet keel, and provided with four masts, eight anchors, and sixty-six seamen. passing the canaries and the blazing peak of teneriffe, he pushed westward into the "sea of darkness," in defiance of the fierce dragons with which superstition had peopled it, and the prayers and threats of his mutinous seamen, and on the th of october landed on one of the bahama islands. _benson j. lossing_ columbus[b] [b] from complete works of joaquin miller, published by the harr wagner publishing company of san francisco. behind him lay the gray azores, behind the gates of hercules; before him not the ghost of shores, before him only shoreless seas. the good mate said: "now must we pray, for lo! the very stars are gone. brave admiral, speak; what shall i say?" "why, say 'sail on! sail on! and on!'" "my men grow mutinous day by day; my men grow ghastly wan and weak." the stout mate thought of home; a spray of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "what shall i say, brave admiral, say, if we sight naught but seas at dawn?" "why, you shall say at break of day, 'sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!'" they sailed and sailed, as winds might blow, until at last the blanched mate said: "why, now not even god would know should i and all my men fall dead. these very winds forget their way, for god from these dread seas is gone. now speak, brave admiral, speak and say--" he said: "sail on! sail on! and on!" they sailed. they sailed. then spake the mate: "this mad sea shows his teeth tonight. he curls his lip, he lies in wait, he lifts his teeth, as if to bite! brave admiral, say but one good word; what shall we do when hope is gone?" the words leapt like a leaping sword: "sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!" then pale and worn, he paced his deck, and peered through darkness. ah, that night, of all dark nights! and then a speck-- a light! a light! at last a light! it grew, a starlit flag unfurled! it grew to be time's burst of dawn. he gained a world; he gave that world its grandest lesson: "oh! sail on!" _joaquin miller_ he failed. he reached to grasp hesperides, to track the foot-course of the sun, that flies toward some far western couch, and watch its rise-- but fell on unknown sand-reefs, chains, disease. he won. with splendid daring, from the sea's hard, niggard fist he plucked the glittering prize, and gave a virgin world to europe's eyes, where gold dust choked the streams, and spice the breeze. he failed fulfillment of the task he planned, and drooped a weary head on empty hand, unconscious of the vaster deed he'd done; but royal legacy to ferdinand he left--a key to doorways gilt with sun-- and proudest title of "world-father" won! _george w. w. houghton_ with all the visionary fervor of his imagination, its fondest dreams fell short of the reality. he died in ignorance of the real grandeur of his discovery. until his last breath, he entertained the idea that he had merely opened a new way to the old resorts of opulent commerce, and had discovered some of the wild regions of the east.... what visions of glory would have broke upon his mind, could he have known that he had indeed discovered a new continent, equal to the whole of the old world in magnitude, and separated by two vast oceans from all of the earth hitherto known by civilized man; and how would his magnanimous spirit have been consoled, amidst the chills of age and cares of penury, the neglect of a fickle public, and the injustice of an ungrateful king, could he have anticipated the splendid empires which were to spread over the beautiful world he had discovered, and the nations, and tongues, and languages, which were to fill its lands with his renown, and to revere and bless his name to the latest posterity! _washington irving_ on a portrait of columbus was this his face, and these the finding eyes that plucked a new world from the rolling seas? who, serving christ, whom most he sought to please, willed the great vision till he saw arise man's other home and earthly paradise-- his early thought since first with stalwart knees he pushed the boat from his young olive trees, and sailed to wrest the secret of the skies. he on the waters dared to set his feet, and through believing planted earth's last race. what faith in man must in our new world beat, thinking how once he saw before his face the west and all the host of stars retreat into the silent infinite of space! _george edward woodberry_ of no use are the men who study to do exactly as was done before, who can never understand that today is a new day. there never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set down in any history. we want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality--namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race--can act in the interest of civilization; men of elastic, men of moral mind, who can live in the moment and take a step forward. columbus was no backward-creeping crab, nor was martin luther, nor john adams, nor patrick henry, nor thomas jefferson; and the genius or destiny of america is no log or sluggard, but a man incessantly advancing, as the shadow on the dial's face, or the heavenly body by whose light it is marked. _ralph waldo emerson_ address to america (_from a commencement poem, dartmouth college. _) as a strong bird on pinions free, joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving, one song, america, before i go, i'd sing, o'er all the rest, with trumpet sound, for thee, the future. sail--sail thy best, ship of democracy! of value is thy freight--'tis not the present only, the past is also stored in thee! thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone-- not of thy western continent alone; earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel, o ship-- is steadied by thy spars. with thee time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee; with all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bears't the other continents; theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant, steer, steer with good strong hand and wary eye-- o helmsman--thou carryest great companions, venerable, priestly asia sails this day with thee, and royal, feudal europe sails with thee. _walt whitman_ america o mother of a mighty race, yet lovely in thy youthful grace! the elder dames, thy haughty peers, admire and hate thy blooming years; with words of shame and taunts of scorn they join thy name.... they know not, in their hate and pride, what virtues with thy children bide; how true, how good, thy graceful maids make bright, like flowers, the valley shades; what generous men spring, like thine oaks, by hill and glen. what cordial welcomes greet the guest by thy lone rivers of the west; how faith is kept, and truth revered, and man is loved and god is feared, in woodland homes, and where the ocean border foams. there's freedom at thy gates, and rest for earth's down-trodden and opprest; a shelter for the hunted head; for the starved laborer toil and bread. power, at thy bounds, stops, and calls back his baffled hounds. o fair young mother! on thy brow shall sit a nobler grace than now. deep in the brightness of thy skies the thronging years in glory rise, and, as they fleet, drop strength and riches at thy feet. thine eye, with every coming hour, shall brighten, and thy form shall tower; and when thy sisters, elder born, would brand thy name with words of scorn, before thy eye upon their lips the taunt shall die. _william cullen bryant_ the western land great western land, whose mighty breast between two oceans finds its rest, begirt by storms on either side, and washed by strong pacific tide. the knowledge of thy wondrous birth gave balance to the rounded earth; in sea of darkness thou didst stand, now first in light, great western land. in thee the olive and the vine unite with hemlock and with pine; in purest white the southern rose repeats the spotless northern snows. around thy zone a belt of maize rejoices in the sun's hot rays; and all that nature could command she heaped on thee, great western land. great western land, whose touch makes free, advance to perfect liberty, till right shall make thy sov'reign might, and every wrong be crushed from sight. behold thy day, thy time is here; thy people great, with naught to fear. god hold thee in his strong right hand, my well beloved western land. _caroline hazard_ our national ideals[c] [c] used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, houghton mifflin company, the authorized publishers. foremost among the ideals which have characterized our national life is the spirit of self-reliance. the very first chapter of our national history records the story of a man, who arose from among the toilers of his time, and whom eighteen years of disappointed hopes could not dismay. it tells how this man, holding out the promise of a new dominion, at last overcame the opposition of royal courtiers, and secured the tardy support of reluctant rulers. and when, at palos, columbus flung to the breeze the sails of his frail craft, and ventured upon that unknown ocean from which, according to the belief of his age, there was no hope of return, he displayed the chief characteristic of the american people--the spirit of self-reliance. what is this spirit? emerson has expressed it in a sentence: "we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." this was the spirit which animated that little group of colonists who preferred the unknown hardships of the new world to the certain tyranny of the old; who chose to break old ties, to brave the sea, to face the loneliness and perils of life in a strange land--a land of difficulties and dangers, but a land of liberty and opportunity.... in order that our country may continue this proud record of self-reliance, each one of us has a special obligation. every citizen in his individual life should live up to the same ideal of self-reliance. the young citizen who relies on himself, who does honest work in school, never cheating or shirking, who is always, ready to do a little more than is actually required of him, who thinks for himself, acts rightly because he loves right actions--such a citizen is doing his part in helping to achieve our national ideal of self-reliance. _william backus guitteau_ i believe in my country. i believe in it because it is made up of my fellow-men--and myself. i can't go back on either of us and be true to my creed. if it isn't the best country in the world it is partly because i am not the kind of a man that i should be. _charles stelzle_ bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. thanksgiving day last thursday in november for flowers that bloom about our feet; for tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; for song of bird, and hum of bee; for all things fair we hear or see, father in heaven, we thank thee! for blue of stream and blue of sky; for pleasant shade of branches high; for fragrant air and cooling breeze; for beauty of the blooming trees, father in heaven, we thank thee! _ralph waldo emerson_ thanksgiving day roy l. shaffer, state normal school, newark among our national holidays thanksgiving should be a red letter day. we need these days so that the modern tendency of reducing all days to the same mediocre level may be overcome. such days, when contrasted with common school days, show a wonderful stimulation. hence it is urged that the celebration of thanksgiving take on the aspect of the play-festival. the play-festival will have a potent effect on the audience and the actors. the audience will be composed for the most part of the school body and on this body the festival program will have a unifying effect. for this reason it is further urged that an entire grade, or perhaps a group of grades, be employed to render the program. such a rendition will be treated as a contribution from a part to the whole. the festival to be effective must bind the entire school into one social group. the response of the audience will be complementary and the spirit and the pride of the school will give forth inspiration to the actor and the audience. the performer must make others feel what he knows, and thus his learning becomes intensified. the result is that the play-festival has two high values, the social and the educational. the essential problem which arises, and which must be answered by every teacher, is, "what shall be done to provide a good program, and how shall it be done?" the answer will come from a careful survey of the needs, capacities, and make-up of each individual or group of pupils. the answer includes the utilization of the dramatic instinct, i. e., the play instinct, which finds expression through singing, speaking and dancing. the successful festival must be well organized, and this organization must be effected according to a suitable program. ( ) the history of the day must be clearly brought to the attention of the pupils. ( ) there should be a committee appointed to have supervision of the arranging of the festival. ( ) a program full of content should-be arranged. ( ) what constitutes the proper program for a thanksgiving festival should have the careful thought of those in charge. the children should be actual factors in planning the program, as well as in presenting it. in order that thanksgiving day may be celebrated in an appropriate manner it is necessary that its history be fully comprehended by the entire school. teachers of all grades should use the historic material that will meet the needs and capacities of their pupils. this material should be correlated with as much of the regular school work as may seem advisable. it is essential that the entire school fully appreciate the historic foundations of the day, so that they may comprehend the setting which has so much to do with this holiday. furthermore, a full comprehension of the history as a background for this festival will stimulate the school audience, so that they will receive from the program those things which we believe they ought to receive from the celebration. history the following extracts relative to the history of thanksgiving have been selected because they are exceptionally interesting; they show that traditionally the celebration of this holiday is truly american; they also give hints as to the wealth of material that may be woven into a program for the play-festival. the first year of the pilgrim settlement, in spite of that awful winter when nearly half of their number perished, had been comparatively successful. the pilgrims had planted themselves well, and it is easy to understand why this fact should have appealed to the mind of their governor, william bradford, as an especial reason for proclaiming a season of thanksgiving. the exact date is not certain, but from the records we learn that it was an open air feast. it is evident that it must have occurred in that lovely period of balmy, calm, cool air and soft sunshine which is called indian summer, and which may be considered to range between the latter week of october and the latter week of november. it came at the end of the year's harvest. in confirmation, let us quote from the writing of edward winslow, thrice governor of the pilgrims: "our corn did prove well; and, god be praised, we had a good increase of indian corn, and our barley indifferent good. our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors." we learn that as a result of this hunting expedition they had many wild turkeys, which the women probably stuffed with beechnuts, and they brought home wood pigeons and partridges in abundance. but, it seems, they must have lacked deer, since the indians, with their king, massasoit, volunteered to go out and bring in the venison. one noteworthy fact is the relations that existed between the pilgrims and the indians. at this first thanksgiving feast king massasoit and ninety of his warriors were present. they entered heartily into the preparations of thanksgiving. what a cheerful spectacle it must have been to see the indian guests appearing, carrying a many branched buck or a pretty doe, possibly hung across the stalwart shoulders of some giant red man? shall one doubt that the pilgrim gravity was for a moment dispelled, when the indians approached with their delicious contribution to the feast? can't we hear the welcoming cheer that arose from the throats of those englishmen, or the clapping of the hands of the younger women as those indian athletes entered the camp? it is also recorded that from their indian guests the pilgrims received clams, oysters, fish and vegetables. what a feast this must have been! the warriors remained with the pilgrims for several days, and contended with them in various games or feats of strength and agility. perhaps massasoit unbent from his kingly dignity to show how straight he could send an arrow at some improvised target. maybe some puritan maiden laughingly tried her hand on an indian bow. possibly, too, in the military drill which miles standish with his famous regiment of twenty gave, there was intention on the part of the stout little warrior to show the indian what a formidable foe the white man might be if provoked. at any rate, the friendship, hallowed by thanksgiving hospitality, continued unbroken for nearly half a century. what a noble, inspiring picture is the history of this first thanksgiving day--a picture of piety, of human brotherhood, and of poetry, for which the universal heart of man, when realizing its profound significance, must gladly and proudly give thanks. for many years this autumnal "feast of ingathering" was merely an occasional festival, as unexpected prosperity or hoped for aid in adversity moved our pilgrim fathers to a special act of praise. it was not until after the revolutionary war that this day took on a national significance. george washington issued the first proclamation in . this will be read by many with deep interest, especially in view of the fact that some persons believe that a national thanksgiving proclamation is a recent invention in our country. after this date it was only occasionally observed until . it was our civil war which awakened our national conscience, and since that time every president of the united states has issued a thanksgiving proclamation, which has in turn been issued to the different states by their respective governors. thanksgiving is a universal holiday; it is for all the people. as heretofore, each year brings new households, enlarged families, increased affections, comfortable homes, plentiful tables, abundant harvests, a beneficent government, free schools, and religious liberty. there is much to be grateful for in our national history. whatever may have been our sense of past duty, it is the privilege of all to thank god that he has given us the unexpected and unsought for opportunity to relieve much oppression and to extend the blessings of good government and fair freedom to many millions of people. it is a wonderful opportunity, and no people on the face of the globe have a stricter sense of duty than our great country. we may be far from perfect if tried by the highest standards, but where shall we find a nation which less desires to rule, and desires to rule more justly, giving liberty to all? we as a generation have lived to see what may be the greatest epoch in the world's history. truly the seeds of this harvest were sown years ago by our pilgrim fathers. for such mercies what soul will not raise its thanksgiving to god? let us as teachers of the state of new jersey teach our children these great truths, and enter with an open mind and a willing heart into each thanksgiving festival, and let us all try to inculcate in the hearts of our pupils this significant brotherhood. the festival committee let the history of this great thanksgiving feast be the background and setting for your play-festival. let it be the duty of teachers to see that the program for this celebration is inspired by patriotism, by a reverence for god, who has been most gracious to us as a people. for social reasons, it will be well to let some particular grade prepare the program for the festival. the other grades of the school will be in the audience, and thus the whole school will be united into one large social group. before it is decided which grade shall be selected to prepare the program the principal and teachers should meet and, after talking over the preliminary plans, appoint the festival committee. it is important that the proper kind of machinery for this festival work be constructed. it will be the duty of this special committee to keep in mind such objects of the play-festival as the promotion of a keener appreciation and a more reverent remembrance of great events and great men and women of our history; the promotion of a deep national patriotism; the promotion of a sense of deep gratitude that we live in such a bountiful and beautiful earth. the play-festival should be looked upon as a means of moral, social, cultural and esthetic education. keeping these things in mind, the play-festival should be invented almost entirely by the children, who will present the program. of course this will require the watchful guidance of teachers and committee. a play or program that has been already planned for the occasion may be taken, but even in such a program the scenes should be planned by the class. if this plan is followed almost any of the ready-made plays may be adapted for any grade from the kindergarten to the high school. the wealth of historic material which readily conforms to the thanksgiving program is abundant. there is no school that cannot act some scene, pantomime, tableau or the like, with but little thought and drill. the results obtained by bringing any class in touch with some of our masterpieces of history, literature, art, music, or sculpture, cannot be easily estimated. preparing the program a good method of preparing the program is to bring before the class who has been decided upon to render the festival the fact that this grade has been appointed to do this bit of patriotic service. tell them about the festival, its simple aims; about the historic material on which the day is founded. have the pupils write their ideas about developing the program. these may be discussed, and the best suggestions can be used about which to form an outline. this is admirable training for the pupils. not infrequently surprises occur; unsuspected talents are discovered; and often the children who have appeared as dullards in them regular school subjects will take an interest which will lead to salutary results. many times children will enjoy working on such plans and develop a new interest in their studies. the children should also be asked for suggestions as to developing the stage scenery, costumes, etc. frequently their suggestions, with slight modifications, have an effectiveness beyond the reach of the teacher. of course we as teachers must be satisfied with rather crude suggestions, and work up to a satisfactory result. the stage setting should always be simple, but suggestive. often a play-festival may be rendered with little or no scenery. in fact, most of our present school programs are given without even a semblance of scenery or decorations. some simple stage setting, scenery, or decorations will add wonderfully to the effect of your program, and this will be found easy to accomplish. this is particularly true of the thanksgiving day program. in the rural districts, especially, can be found the proper materials for this day. such things as cornstalks, pumpkins, apples, fruits, cereals, and vegetables of many kinds will meet your needs. whatever is good for a harvest home celebration may be used to celebrate thanksgiving. it is desirable, also, to have simple costumes. the teacher should not be burdened with the making of the costumes. arouse the interest of your class, and they will take home this interest. the result will be that the teacher will get more than he had hoped or suggested. the work of preparing the music should be done during the period of the day when singing is usually done. the music is very valuable. the whole school appreciates music and singing. it is the one unifying influence within the reach of the school. if all the various classes are used to promote the play-festival a practical correlation of the work of the school may be profitably accomplished. the program below is submitted a type program for the thanksgiving day festival. this is suitable for fifth and sixth grade pupils. this type of program may be easily changed so that it may be rendered by pupils of the first grade or by students of the high school. care should always be exercised that the plan of the program is easily understood by the class who renders it. scenes should be molded to meet the needs and capacities of the grade that is to perform. the dialog or monolog should also be adapted to the ages of the pupils who are to do the acting. below will be found a list of scenes which by thoughtful manipulation may be made to fall within the command of pupils from the kindergarten to the high school. the bibliography given will furnish much information. thanksgiving exercises _in charge of grade vi_ theme: the harvest =song=--"america," by the school =prayer= =reading=--"george washington's thanksgiving proclamation of " =song=--"harvest home," by the school =act i.= getting ready for seed time _scene i._ indians showing the pilgrims how to plant corn _scene ii._ resting (a camp scene) song--"thanksgiving day," by the school recitation--"thanksgiving," by a pupil =act ii.= a corn husking bee (place, a new england barn) _scene i._ husking corn _scene ii._ the frolic _scene iii._ going home song--"star spangled banner," by the school the following scenes may be made appropriate for the different grades by changing the quality and quantity of the scenery. pantomimes are especially to be recommended for use in our school programs. many of these scenes will lend themselves to this purpose. hints for the preparation of these scenes may be gained from the great paintings or their reproductions. autumn memories the pilgrims an indian camp an indian village miles standish and his warriors the pilgrim's town meeting the pilgrims going to church the pilgrims hunting the pilgrims fishing the husking bee the dying year thanksgiving at home the harvest home (old english) the country dance the love scene of priscilla and john alden miles standish's home many indian scenes from hiawatha many harvest home scenes bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. lincoln's birthday february again thy birthday dawns, o man beloved, dawns on the land thy blood was shed to save, and hearts of millions, by one impulse moved, bow and fresh laurels lay upon thy grave. _ida vose woodbury_ lincoln's birthday charles a. philhower, supervising principal, westfield the observance of lincoln's birthday as a national holiday has grown steadily until twenty-four states have designated it by statute as a holiday. the great emancipator is today our foremost national hero. his most unusual career from the log cabin to the white house sets ambition and hope of attainment before the most lowly and the most favorably environed alike. there are many salient reasons why the boys and girls of our schools should study the life of this great hero. he established once and for all time the now inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all mankind. early in life he was dubbed by his friends and neighbors with the enviable title of "honest abe." on the frontier we find him inuring himself to toil. he was thoroughly acquainted with that slogan always necessary to success, "hard work." his life was pure, untainted with the vices which spring from luxury, the lust for gain, the greed for fame. simple in living, steadfast in purpose, kindly in spirit, he towered among his fellows, exemplary of that manhood toward which all boys who would be of worth to mankind should aspire. at the present time it is especially opportune that lincoln's birthday be celebrated most impressively. the freedom for which we have just been fighting is a greater freedom than that of ' . that was for the freedom of the slave, this for a greater freedom of men already free; that was freedom for a part of mankind, this a freedom for all, for the democracy of the world. the principles for which he stood are the principles for which we must ever stand, but the application of those principles is limitless in its scope. it is for us to see that those who have sacrificed their lives in this great cause shall not have died in vain. it is for the boys and girls in our schools today to carry to a successful issue this great project of making the world safe for democracy and democracy safe for the world, and no small part of this work lies on our shoulders as teachers of boys and girls who will be citizens tomorrow. the law requires that on the last school day preceding lincoln's birthday appropriate exercises be held for the development of a high spirit of patriotism. the whole day should center around the life of lincoln. for the afternoon a special program should be prepared and the parents of the school children invited by special letters written by the pupils of the school. the pupils of each school should assist in working out the program. in some schools, in the upper grades the pupils should be held responsible for much of the work in program making. each teacher and principal should arrange the work of the day and the special program to one end, that of utilizing the great spirit and profound wisdom of a wonderful man to the establishment of a greater patriotism and the working out of the national problems before us. the following general suggestions indicate the important factors to be considered in making a lincoln program. point out the significance of the flag salute analyze the pledge sing patriotic songs the songs of today the songs of the past study lincoln's boyhood. his career from the log cabin to the white house is phenomenal lincoln the lawyer and politician emphasize the work and honesty in the life of abraham lincoln president of the united states and statesman. his great speeches read, study and memorize the gettysburg speech. each child should have a copy learn quotations, and know their meaning and application collect a number of pictures of lincoln call special attention to the best statuary gutzon borglum's lincoln before the court house in newark, new jersey, and the statue by saint gaudens in lincoln park, chicago, are the most worthy and should be particularly noted "o captain, my captain," by whitman, and "the perfect tribute," by mary shipman andrews, should be read by the teacher do not neglect the great humor in his life; children enjoy a joke pupils will enjoy writing acrostics on the name of lincoln the lincoln highway and the national lincoln memorial are recent monuments to the honor of this great man let the decorations of the room be in keeping with the celebration lincoln posters may be made in the drawing class the younger pupils will be interested in collecting the stamps with lincoln's picture civil war veterans, civil war pictures, civil war newspapers, civil war correspondence, will make vital contributions in vivifying the life of lincoln, incidents of the war, and this special observance. invite veterans to come in and make brief speeches. request pupils to bring old newspapers, old correspondence, war relics and the like with the assurance that they will be cared for and safely returned [illustration: saint gaudens' lincoln lincoln park, chicago copyright by underwood & underwood, n.y.] read letters from boys who were at the front. collect war pictures from the sunday newspapers. remember the boys from your community who went to war. contrast the present war situation and practices with those of the civil war. classroom activity of this kind may continue for the whole week. suggestions for use of the material which follows preparatory to the observance of lincoln's birthday teach carefully and thoroughly the gettysburg speech. each pupil from the fifth grade through the high school ought to know this great masterpiece. teach the occasion on which it was given, which brought forth this great production, the significance of the speech then and now, and finally have each child give it from memory. a contest in the delivery of lincoln's gettysburg speech would interest the school and the public. the winner should appear on the holiday program. the placing in schools of lincoln memorial bronze tablets containing the gettysburg speech will give special significance to the observance. this practice should be promoted. every new school should have its lincoln memorial tablet. the most interesting persons in the eyes of children are children. they are most concerned with what kind of a boy lincoln was. books such as "life of abraham lincoln for boys and girls," by c. w. moores, and "the boy's life of abraham lincoln," by j. g. nicolay, should be made available. pupils should be encouraged to tell to the class what they have found of interest in the accounts of his boyhood. incidents of his honesty, his desire for learning, and habit of hard work, will be brought forth and no effort should be spared to emphasize these most important characteristics. strive for enthusiastic admiration, and the imitation of these most desirable qualities will follow. stories from his life, incidents in his experience, and periods in his career, such as the twenty-two years on the farm, the twenty-seven years in intellectual pursuits, and the seven years in national service, will give profitable material for work in english. oral and written reproductions should be taught for some time before the holiday observance and the best of these used on this occasion. mr. judd stewart's suggestions (given on another page) respecting the study of lincoln's english are very valuable. give an exercise or two in acrostic writing with the aim of setting forth in a succinct way his admirable character and laudable accomplishments. a problem of this type appeals to children and has value in it. the humorous stories of lincoln should not be neglected. there is great need for high standards of humor, jokes and jests with boys and girls. every one should be able to tell a good story well. the humor in lincoln's life presents good material for such teaching. a study and memorizing of quotations may be begun early in the fall; in fact, such study should be pursued throughout the whole school course. if this is done many pupils will be able to give on february twelfth their choice from among lincoln's sayings with reasons for their selections and with statements respecting the source of their admiration. every pupil should have a stock of lincoln sayings at his command. these selected thoughts should be a part of the thinking of boys and girls. readings for the week preceding the holiday observance can be made from the following brief publications: "lincoln centenary ode," percy mackaye "commemorative ode," james russell lowell "abraham lincoln," carl schurz "abraham lincoln," george bancroft "the perfect tribute," mary shipman andrews the selections should be read in their entirety, in most cases by the teacher to the class. if there is a pupil who is a very good reader, such a pupil may do it effectively. each school library ought to have a good selection of lincolnia from which the pupils could draw books for outside reading. books such as these should be read by the class supplemental to the study of the civil war period. a good teacher is able to read well "o captain, my captain," and she reads it often to her pupils. ultimately the children will get the spirit of the poem and some will be able to read it well or give it from memory. the various poems herein mentioned are worthy of similar treatment. as the gettysburg speech is studied, so should the civil war songs be studied. the "battle hymn of the republic" should be sung with all the feeling which its meaning is capable of conveying. as much should be done with "tenting on the old camp ground." the allusion here is very impressive. the sentiment is the song, the tune is a mode of expression. each school in the state should have a picture of lincoln. it should be hung by the pupils where it can be seen by the youngest as well as the oldest. a child does well in having a definite acquaintance with the rugged, kindly face of lincoln. a look at this picture should give renewed emphasis to his standards of living and the great principles which he established. not long since a teacher said to me, "when i have a case of discipline where the pupil has difficulty in getting the right point of view i often say to the boy, especially if he be of the upper grades, 'go out into the hall and look for a few minutes at the fatherly face of the great lincoln and then come back to me and tell me what you think he would say in this case.'" such procedure is extremely effective, particularly when the pupil is acquainted with lincoln's sayings and the great principles for which he stood. marshall's "lincoln" is a fine portrait for schools. the decoration of the classroom will present demands for drawing and handwork activities such as picture frames, draperies, red, white and blue chains, and flag decorations. much can be done in the making of posters with water colors and crayons, in the artistic ornamentation of lincoln picture mounts on drawing paper, and in the lettering and decoration of lincoln acrostics. the use of lincoln picture cutouts; the drawing or painting of flags, the state seal and shields, the american eagle; perspective drawings of the log cabin, the white house and the capitol are suggested activities. postage stamps containing lincoln's picture may be used in connection with handwork and drawing activities. booklets for acrostics, anecdotes, quotations, brief biography or history incidents, with appropriate cover design, initial letters and simple illustrations will afford attractive and profitable projects. many other ways and means of presenting the life of lincoln will suggest themselves to the active, thinking teacher. the whole object is to help boys and girls to know lincoln as he lived, to make his life function in making their lives better and more worth while through his great thoughts, high ideals and indefatigable spirit of work. the following programs, selections, suggestions and bibliography are intended to make available some selected material which in many cases may not be accessible. assembly program =organization of school for exercises= . school orchestra . two color bearers at each entrance to auditorium . one color bearer with honorary guard of two at each side of platform . color bearer for flag salute--center of platform =program= salute flag draped over lincoln portrait song, "america" story of lincoln's life told by pupil[d] reading "gettysburg address" by teacher solo "when the boys come home" reading civil war letter solo, "star spangled banner," school joining in chorus talk by civil war veteran chorus sung by school, "keep the home fires burning" salute formal dismissal in keeping with assembly [d] it would be well to have several pupils take part in this, each presenting a period in lincoln's life. general program for classroom place in front of the room the picture of lincoln veiled with the american flag unveil picture pupils stand in saluting posture ten seconds quote in concert, verse from ida vose woodbury's "lincoln's birthday" song, "battle hymn of the republic" brief story of life of lincoln (compare autobiography). (told by an older pupil--not longer than five minutes) at least three incidents from lincoln's life given by intermediate pupils damage to borrowed book returning of right change lincoln and the pig long walk to school wood chopping for log house lincoln and his sums illustrate on sand table lincoln's log house and the clearing of forest land recitation, "gettysburg speech" "o captain, my captain" read by teacher song, "my country 'tis of thee" salute flag and give pledge: "i pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" intermediate grade program reading of acrostics, using letters of lincoln's name make lincoln booklets conversational lesson in which each child contributes what he knows or was able to find about lincoln, the teacher adding interesting items lincoln's gettysburg speech recited by one child civil war newspaper articles read patriotic songs chosen by children sung pledge--"i pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" primary program picture of lincoln in front of room salute and pledge song, "america" stories about lincoln selected and read by children from books brought from home or library recitation, "a prayer for our soldiers and sailors," by oriola johnson marching and military exercises with flags lincoln's early boyhood told by pupil. a few readings of sketches written by pupils. request that each child take his composition home and read it to his parents song kindergarten observance = . morning circle= singing tone plays about flag, etc. hail to the flag (gaynor) = . morning talk about lincoln= get from the children what they know about lincoln. add to this until they know something of his life, laying emphasis on his kindness, obedience, thoughtfulness, bravery. hint as to how these much admired qualities may be used by little children = . table work= gift period make soldier hats from squares of newspaper. build lincoln log house = . games= (a) "soldier boy, where are you going?" (b) parade for lincoln's birthday choice by children of best kindergarten soldiers to carry the flags in parade; use drum = . table work= occupation period make crayoneine frame around picture of lincoln take picture home = . sing "america," at least one verse= gettysburg speech four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. we are met on a great battle-field of that war. we have come to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. but, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground. the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. it is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under god, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. _abraham lincoln_ second inaugural address [lincoln's ideas respecting the injustice of the principles of slavery and the honesty of purpose in waging the civil war are set forth in the second inaugural speech. this passage is probably the most beautiful, the most chaste, the most profound, the grandest, ever uttered by an american.] fellow-countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. then a statement somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. the progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, i trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. with high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. on the occasion corresponding to this, four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. all dreaded it; all sought to avert it. while the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the union, and divide effects, by negotiation. both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. and the war came. the prayer of both could not be answered--those of neither have been answered fully. the almighty has his own purposes. "woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." if we shall suppose that american slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of god, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to north and south this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living god always ascribe to him? fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away. yet, if god wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether." with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as god gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. _abraham lincoln_ abraham lincoln's autobiography the following autobiography was written by mr. lincoln's own hand at the request j. w. fell, of springfield, illinois, december , . in the note which accompanied it the writer says: "herewith is a little sketch, as you requested. there is not much of it, for the reason, i suppose, that there is not much of me." i was born february , , in hardin county, kentucky. my parents were both born in virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps i should say. my mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of hanks, some of whom now reside in adams county, and others in mason county, illinois. my paternal grand-father, abraham lincoln, emigrated from rockingham county, virginia, to kentucky, about or , where, a year or two later, he was killed by indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest. his ancestors, who were quakers, went to virginia from berks county, pennsylvania. an effort to identify them with the new england family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of christian names in both families, such as enoch, levi, mordecai, solomon, abraham, and the like. my father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and grew up literally without any education. he removed from kentucky to what is now spencer county, indiana, in my eighth year. we reached our new home about the time the state came into the union. it was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. there i grew up. there were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond readin', writin' and cipherin' to the rule of three. if a straggler, supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. of course, when i came of age i did not know much. still, somehow, i could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. i have not been to school since. the little advance i now have upon this store of education i have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity. i was raised to farm work, at which i continued till i was twenty-two. at twenty-one i came to illinois, and passed the first year in macon county. then i got to new salem, at that time in sangamon, now menard county, where i remained a year as a sort of clerk in a store. then came the black hawk war, and i was elected a captain of volunteers--a success which gave me more pleasure than any i have had since. i went into the campaign, was elected, ran for the legislature the same year ( ), and was beaten--the only time i have ever been beaten by the people. the next and three succeeding biennial elections i was elected to the legislature. i was not a candidate afterward. during the legislative period i had studied law, and removed to springfield, to practice it. in i was elected to the lower house of congress. was not a candidate for reelection. from to , both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral ticket, making active canvasses. i was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the missouri compromise aroused me again. what i have done since then is pretty well known. if any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said i am in height six feet four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes--no other marks or brands recollected. the bixby letter executive mansion, washington, november , dear madam: i have been shown in the files of the war department a statement of the adjutant-general of massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. i feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. but i cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they have died to save. i pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. yours, very sincerely and respectfully abraham lincoln to mrs. bixby boston, massachusetts sayings from lincoln's speeches let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. i intend no modification of my oft-expressed wish that all men everywhere should be free. a house divided against itself cannot stand. i believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. i take the official oath today with no mental reservation and with no purpose to construe the constitution by any hypercritical rules. you can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government; while i shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect and defend" it. the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. in giving freedom to the slaves we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. do not swap horses in the middle of the stream. you can fool part of the people all of the time, and all of the people part of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. i do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. the leading rule for the man of every calling is diligence; never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. i never let an idea escape, but write it on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. in this way i sometimes save my best thoughts on a subject. wealth is a superfluity of what we do not need. come what will, i will keep faith with friend and foe. faith in god is indispensable to successful statesmanship. god bless my mother; all i am or hope to be i owe to her. i will study and get ready and maybe my chance will come. be sure you put your feet in the right place and then stand firm. and having thus chosen our course, without guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in god, and go forward without fear and with manly hearts. nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. it is all in that one word--thorough. let us strive on to finish the work we are in. when you can't remove an obstacle plow around it. the way for a young man to rise is to improve every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him. to add brightness to the sun or glory to the name of washington is alike impossible. let none attempt it. in solemn awe pronounce the name and in its naked deathless splendor leave it shining on. o captain! my captain! o captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done; the ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won; the port is near, the bells i hear, the people all exulting, while follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. but o heart! heart! heart! o the bleeding drops of red, where on the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead. o captain! my captain! rise up and hear the bells; rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; for you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding; for you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning. here, captain! dear father! this arm beneath your head! it is some dream that on the deck, you've fallen cold and dead. my captain does not answer; his lips are pale and still; my father does not feel my arm; he has no pulse nor will. the ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; from fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. exult, o shores, and ring, o bells! but i with mournful tread, walk the deck my captain lies, fallen cold and dead. _walt whitman_ the unfinished work the crowd was gone, and to the side of borglum's lincoln, deep in awe, i crept. it seemed a mighty tide within those aching eyes i saw. "great heart," i said, "why grieve alway? the battle's ended, and the shout shall ring forever and a day-- why sorrow yet, or darkly doubt?" "freedom," i plead, "so nobly won for all mankind, and equal right, shall with the ages travel on till time shall cease, and day be night." no answer--then; but up the slope with broken gait, and hands in clench, a toiler came, bereft of hope, and sank beside him on the bench. _joseph fulford folsom_ acrostic (written by a fifth grade child) l is for lincoln, brave and true i is for the iron nerve which helped him through n is for nation whose tongue sings his praise c is for colors on his birthday we raise o is for oration or speech he gave l is for liberty given the slave n is his name which ever we'll save [illustration: statue of lincoln by gutzon borglum in front of court house, newark] the boy that hungered for knowledge in his eagerness to acquire knowledge, young lincoln had borrowed of mr. crawford, a neighboring farmer, a copy of weems' life of washington--the only one known to be in existence in that section of the country. before he had finished reading the book, it had been left, by a not unnatural oversight, in a window. meantime, a rain storm came on, and the book was so thoroughly wet as to make it nearly worthless. this mishap caused him much pain; but he went, in all honesty, to mr. crawford with the ruined book, explained the calamity that had happened through his neglect, and offered, not having sufficient money, to "work out" the value of the book. "well, abe," said mr. crawford, after due deliberation, "as it's you, i won't be hard on you. just come over and pull fodder for me for two days, and we will call our accounts even." the offer was readily accepted, and the engagement literally fulfilled. as a boy, no less than since, abraham lincoln had an honorable conscientiousness, integrity, industry, and an ardent love of knowledge. abe lincoln's honesty lincoln could not rest for an instant under the consciousness that he had, even unwittingly, defrauded anybody. on one occasion, while clerking in offutt's store, at new salem, illinois, he sold a woman a little bill of goods, amounting in value by the reckoning, to two dollars six and a quarter cents. he received the money, and the woman went away. on adding the items of the bill again, to make sure of its correctness, he found that, he had taken six and a quarter cents too much. it was night and closing and locking the store, he started out on foot, a distance of two or three miles, for the house of his defrauded customer, and, delivering over to her the sum whose possession had so much troubled him, went home satisfied. on another occasion, just as he was closing the store for the night, a woman entered, and asked for a half pound of tea. the tea was weighed out and paid for, and the store was left for the night. the next morning, lincoln entered to begin the duties of the day, when he discovered a four-ounce weight on the scales. he saw at once that he had made a mistake, and, shutting the store, he took a long walk before breakfast to deliver the remainder of the tea. these are very humble incidents, but they illustrate the man's perfect conscientiousness--his sensitive honesty--better perhaps than they would if they were of greater moment. young lincoln's kindness of heart an instance of young lincoln's practical humanity at an early period of his life is recorded, as follows: one evening, while returning from a "raising" in his wide neighborhood, with a number of companions, he discovered a straying horse, with saddle and bridle upon him. the horse was recognized as belonging to a man who was accustomed to excess in drink, and it was suspected at once that the owner was not far off. a short search only was necessary to confirm the suspicions of the young men. the poor drunkard was found in a perfectly helpless condition, upon the chilly ground. abraham's companions urged the cowardly policy of leaving him to his fate, but young lincoln would not hear to the proposition. at his request, the miserable sot was lifted to his shoulders, and he actually carried him eighty rods to the nearest house. sending word to his father that he should not be back that night, with the reason for his absence, he attended and nursed the man until the morning, and had the pleasure of believing that he had saved his life. a bit of humor from the busy life of lincoln two persons who had been arguing with each other how long a man's legs should be in proportion to his body, stepped into lincoln's office and asked him to settle the dispute. to them he replied: "after much thought and consideration, not to mention mental worry and anxiety, it is my opinion, all side issues being swept aside, that a man's lower limbs, in order to preserve harmony of proportion, should be at least long enough to reach from his body to the ground." how lincoln and judge b. ... swapped horses when abraham lincoln was a lawyer in illinois, he and a certain judge once got to bantering each other about trading horses, and it was agreed that the next morning at nine o'clock they should make a trade, the horses to be unseen up to that hour, and no backing out, under a forfeiture of $ . at the hour appointed the judge came up, leading the sorriest-looking specimen of a horse ever seen in those parts. in a few minutes mr. lincoln was seen approaching with a wooden sawhorse upon his shoulders. great were the shouts and the laughter of the crowd, and both were greatly increased when mr. lincoln, on surveying the judge's animal, set down his sawhorse, and exclaimed: "well, judge, this is the first time i ever got the worst of it in a horse trade." the following paragraphs are quoted from a small pamphlet of mr. judd stewart of plainfield, new jersey, entitled "suggestions for a text book for students of english." mr. stewart is a profound student of lincoln, and without doubt has the largest private collection of lincolnia in the united states. it was recently suggested to me by a lieutenant in the navy, a graduate of annapolis, that in teaching english the writings and speeches of lincoln would be a very proper text-book. this appeals to me most forcefully because all school children know who lincoln was, know something of his gettysburg address, know him as the emancipator of the slaves and probably a majority of them admire him. therefore, it seems to me that a text-book based upon, or rather made up from lincoln's speeches and letters would be of great interest to the majority of children, and by having such a text-book they would learn history and good expressive english at the same time and in a most interesting way. the suggested text-book would consist of: the house divided against itself speech, in ; the first debate with douglas speech in ; the cooper institute speech, ; the first inaugural, ; the first message to congress, ; the emancipation proclamation, ; the gettysburg address, ; the letter to mrs. bixby, ; the second inaugural, . lincoln spent years of his life in preparation, six years in the accomplishment of his work. the study of his life is commended and commends itself to all thinking people. why should we not teach his thoughts, his modes of speech, his simplicity of expression to those who with their children and descendants for ages will remember abraham lincoln, the emancipator, the martyr, the greatest american? attention should be given to the great statue of lincoln before the court house in newark, new jersey. it presents our most admired statesman seated on a bench absorbed in thought. the statue is a wonderful work of art. from every angle it is unique, beautiful, and a masterpiece. at all times of day passersby may see the children of the city sitting in his arm, lovingly admiring the fatherly face. on his knees and on the bench they gather, children of all races, rejoicing in the freedom which he gave to mankind. the statue was conceived and made by the sculptor gutzon borglum, for amos h. vanhorn, the donor. it was presented to the lincoln post on may , , by chancellor mahlon pitney. colonel theodore roosevelt received it in behalf of the post, and mayor husaling made the speech of acceptance. pass on, thou that hast overcome. your sorrows, o people, are his peace. your bells and bands and muffled drums sound triumph in his ear. wail and weep here; god made it echo joy and triumph there. pass on. four years ago, o illinois, we took from your midst an untried man, and from amongst the people. we return him to you a mighty conqueror. not thine any more, but the nation's; not ours, but the world's. give him place, o ye prairies. in the midst of this great continent his dust shall rest, a sacred treasure to myriads who shall pilgrim to that shrine to kindle anew their zeal and patriotism. ye winds that move over the mighty places of the west, chant his requiem. ye people, behold a martyr whose blood as so many articulate words, pleads for fidelity, for law, for liberty. _henry ward beecher_ bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. washington's birthday february it was almost unconsciously that men learned to cling to washington with a trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him with a reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. _green_ washington's birthday henry w. foster, supervising principal, south orange february is the greatest month for the teaching of patriotism. the national heroes, washington and lincoln, whose birthdays we celebrate, give distinction to two of its days. the time falls happily in midyear, when pupils and teachers alike need inspiration for a new period of sustained effort requiring determination and vigor. it has been shown very clearly that through its schools a nation can be trained in ideals which will govern national life and conduct. neither washington nor lincoln, however, owed his heroic quality to schools; but they did owe it to the very same ideals for which our schools stand. indeed, their greatest service to mankind is the fact that they incarnated those ideals. it is not so easy to venerate abstract principles and to submit one's life to them as it is to imitate great personalities whose deeds have embodied those principles. because we love our national heroes and venerate them personally, they still live and work through us. the principles of democracy are established eternally in their deeds and in ours. the child who writes an appreciation of washington, or recites from his addresses, or renders a poem commemorating him, or dramatizes something from his life, enters into his spirit, and in the child washington lives again. the declaration of independence asserts the lofty principle of equality in liberty. all men are created free, and equal in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. it is a declaration of rights, not of duties. each person has a right to _his_ life, _his_ liberty, the pursuit of _his_ happiness. the deeds of washington embodied not only these principles, but emphasized the duty of service. in our time our country has fully justified a new statement of political faith, which washington lived. all men are born equal in the right to opportunity--each to make the best of himself--so that he may render the best service. think not of the reward! on the whole, service is requited according to its worth. too many want to do what they can't do, and won't do what they can do! it may be pride, or it may be looking for an undeserved reward. the school should train for service, and teach self-respect in doing the best that one can in the thing for which he is best fitted. washington sought no reward; but he commands the undying veneration, not only of his countrymen, but of all mankind. speaking of the retirement of washington, at a time when party spirit against the policy of the great founder and preserver of the republic was calculated to arouse bitterness in a less noble man, knight, in his "history of england," says: "had his nature been different, had his ambition been less under the control of his virtue, he might have taken up his sword and, sweeping away his enemy, have raised himself to supreme power upon the ruins of his country's liberty. he retired to his estate at mount vernon to pass the rest of his days as a private citizen.... washington's scheme of glory was realized. he had been a ruler of free men, ruling by the power of law. he laid down his authority when he had done the work to which he was called, most happy in this, that ambitions of a selfish order could never be justified by his example." washington's point of view as a ruler of men was unique at that period in the world's history. we need to teach from the life of washington that same respect for english ideals of government which he maintained and defended, even by revolting against the english king. too many of our people have grown up in hatred of england, through the story of the revolution and the war of , and the unfortunate attitude of aristocratic england in our civil war. how does england, the heart and brain of england, regard us? if we know that she sympathizes with our ideals and her heart has been with us all the time, shall we not feel safe with her, and find in englishmen brothers with whom we may work for the good of the world? english historians have an appreciation of washington which we cannot surpass. writing english history for the instruction of english boys and girls, and men and women, they justify our revolution and laud our national hero as a world hero. no american orator has ever magnified washington in more laudatory terms than are to be found in green's "history of england." green says: "washington more than any of his fellow colonists represented the clinging of the virginia land owner to the mother country, and his acceptance of the command proved that even the most moderate of them had no hope now save in arms." [illustration: stuart's washington copyright by underwood & underwood, n. y.] for the future we shall need a better understanding of our english brothers. this cannot better be attained than by knowing well that our ideals are held in the same regard by them as by ourselves. there was one man who was the chief instrument in the hands of providence for conducting the war, by his energy, prudence, and constancy, to that triumphant assertion of independence which has built up the great north american republic. to washington the historian naturally turns, as to the grandest object of contemplation, when he laid aside his victorious sword--that sword which, with those he had worn in his earlier career, he bequeathed to his nephews with words characteristic of his nobleness: "these swords are accompanied with an injunction not to unsheathe them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self-defence, or in defence of their country and its rights, and in the latter case to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands to the relinquishment thereof." the united colonies in america had such a man as washington to control the destinies of our country in the making. the new nation had such a man for a leader during the early years of trial and promise. the nation today has the records, accomplishments and deeds of the national hero, washington, to ever honor, venerate and imitate. the school children of the great state of new jersey should be happy to learn from the life of this great man lessons of service, respect for law and order, truthfulness and patriotism. quotations according to captain mercer, the following describes washington when he took his seat in the house of burgesses in : "he is as straight as an indian, measuring six feet two inches in his stockings, and weighing one hundred and seventy-five pounds. his head is well shaped, though not large, and is gracefully poised on a superb neck, with a large, and straight rather than prominent nose; blue-gray penetrating eyes, which are widely separated and overhung by heavy brows. a pleasing, benevolent, though commanding countenance, dark-brown hair, features regular and placid, with all the muscles under control, with a large mouth, generally firmly closed." houdon's bust accords with this description. * * * * * to the man of all men for whom his manly heart felt most tenderness, to lafayette, it is that he wrote the beautiful letter of february , , unaware that his rest was only temporary, and that he was to become the first president of the country he had given life to: "at length, my dear marquis, i am become a private citizen on the banks of the potomac, and under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, i am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments of which the soldier who is ever in pursuit of fame, the statesman whose watchful days and sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if the globe was insufficient for us all ... can have very little conception. i have not only retired from all public employments, but i am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk of private life with heart-felt satisfaction. envious of none, i am determined to be pleased with all; and this, my dear friend, being the order for my march, i will move gently down the stream of life until i sleep with my fathers." _j. j. jusserand_ among these men whose union in purpose and action made the strength and stability of the republic, washington was first, not only in the largeness of his nature, the loftiness of his desires, and the vigor of his will, but also in that representative quality which makes a man able to stand as the true hero of a great people. he had an instinctive power to divine, amid the confusions of rival interests and the cries of factional strife, the new aims and hopes, the vital needs and aspirations, which were the common inspiration of the people's cause and the creative forces of the american nation. the power to understand this, the faith to believe in it, and the unselfish courage to live for it, was the central factor of washington's life, the heart and fountain of his splendid americanism. _henry van dyke_ "how did george washington look?" asked nell; "what was he like? won't you please to tell?" thus i answered: "a courtly man, wearing his honors as heroes can. erect and tall, with his six feet two; knee-breeches, buckles, frills and queue; powdered brown hair; blue eyes, far apart; strong-limbed and fearless, with gentle heart; gracious in manner toward every one-- such, my nellie, was washington." washington one day came across a small band of soldiers working very hard at raising some military works, under command of a pompous little officer, who was issuing his orders in a peremptory style indeed. washington, seeing the very arduous task of the men, dismounted from his horse, lent a helping hand, perspiring freely, till the weight at which they were working was raised. then, turning to the officer, he inquired why he, too, had not helped, and received the indignant reply: "don't you know i'm the corporal?" "ah, well," said washington, "next time your men are raising so heavy a weight, send for your commander-in-chief." and he strode off, leaving the corporal dumbfounded. an american sailor landing in england shortly after the close of the war of the revolution took a first-class seat in a stage coach, but was told to get out, as such seats were reserved for gentlemen. "i am a gentleman," said the sailor. "who made gentlemen out of fellows like you?" asked the coach guard. "george washington," said the sailor; and he kept his seat. * * * * * no nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life. washington was grave and courteous in address; his manners were simple and unpretending, his silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a perfect self-mastery; but there was little in his outer bearing to reveal the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with all the simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses of the world around him. what recommended him for command was simply his weight among his fellow landowners of virginia, and the experience of war which he had gained by service in border contests with the french and the indians, as well as in braddock's luckless expedition against fort duquesne. it was only as the weary fight went on that the colonists learned little by little the greatness of their leader, his clear judgment, his heroic endurance, his silence under difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat, the patience with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck, the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its task through resentment or jealousy, that never through war or peace felt the touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no aim save that of guarding the freedom of his fellow countrymen, and no personal longing save that of returning to his own fireside when their freedom was secured. it was almost unconsciously that men learned to cling to washington with a trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him with a reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. even america hardly recognized his real greatness till death set its seal on "the man first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow countrymen." _j. r. green_ washington is the mightiest name on earth, long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. on that name a eulogy is expected. it cannot be. to add brightness to the sun or glory to the name of washington is alike impossible. let none attempt it. in solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked, deathless splendor leave it shining on. _abraham lincoln_ life of washington[e] [e] reprinted by permission from "the book of holidays," by j. w. mcspadden. copyright by thomas y. crowell company. the story of george washington's life has been often told, but it is worth repeating. it was an active, busy life from his earliest days, beginning as it did away back in colonial times when the country was wild and unsettled. washington was born in westmoreland county, virginia, in . there is no reliable record of his early education, but it has been supposed that the first school he ever attended was a little old field school kept by one of his father's tenants, named hobby, who was both sexton and schoolmaster. even at this early age george was fond of playing at war. he used to divide his playmates into parties and armies. one of them was called the french and the other american. a big boy named william bustle commanded the french, and george commanded the americans. every day, with cornstalks for muskets and gourds for drums, the two armies would turn out and march and fight. george was not remarkable as a scholar, but he had a liking for mathematics. he was of a more serious turn of mind than most boys of his age. his last two years at school were devoted to engineering, geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, and at sixteen years of age he was appointed a public surveyor. his new employment brought him a handsome salary, and well it might; for it took him into the perils and hardships of the wilderness, often meeting savage chieftains, or fording swollen streams, climbing rugged mountains, breasting furious storms, wading through snowdrifts, sleeping in the open air, and living upon the coarse food of hunters and of indians. but everywhere he gained the admiration of the backwoodsmen and the indians by his manly bearing and his wonderful endurance. in the year the frontiers of the colony of virginia were constantly being attacked by the french and the indians, so it was decided to divide the colony into military districts under a major; and when he was but nineteen, george washington received one of these appointments. two years later he was sent to the french, who were becoming threatening, to find out their intentions and to warn them against invading virginian territory. this important mission made it necessary for him to journey six hundred miles through the wilderness; but he carried out his instructions successfully, and traveled the whole distance without an escort.... in george washington served under the british officer, general braddock, showing great bravery under fire at the battle of monongahela, against the french and indians, which would probably not have been lost if the general had taken washington's advice. in washington married a widow named martha custis, with two children, john and martha parke custis. he was a great favorite with the two youngsters, and used to order toys, dolls, and gingerbreads for them from london. mrs. custis had a large estate and so had washington, and the management cf them took up all of his time. when the disputes between england and the american colonies were at their height, in , he became a member of the first continental congress, and the following year was chosen by that body commander-in-chief of the continental army. for this position his training and his surveying experiences had thoroughly fitted him. he took command of the troops at cambridge, massachusetts, on july , ; but it was a poor army that he found under him. it was in want of arms, ammunition, and general equipment. washington, however, kept it together with patience and skill during the trying years of the revolution. the war lasted six years and ended with the surrender of the british commander, cornwallis, at yorktown, virginia, in . during all this time washington had had to contend with the greatest difficulties. the troops were poorly paid or equipped; often there were disputes among the officers, and congress did not know the army's needs; but the general always kept the confidence of his men until victory was assured.... in washington bade farewell to his army, and for the next six years lived the simple life of a country gentleman on his estate at mount vernon, attending to the affairs of his homestead and property. in he was again called from private life, to become first president of the united states. congress was sitting at new york, for which city he started, in april. he disliked fuss and ceremony, but the people could not be restrained from showing their love and admiration. his progress through new jersey was amid constant cheering, ringing of bells, and the booming of cannon. at elizabethtown he embarked on a splendid barge, followed by other barges and boats, making a long water procession up the bay of new york, the ships in the harbor being decorated with colors, and firing salutes as it passed. the inauguration took place on april , , at the old city hall, in wall street, broad street being crowded with thousands of people as far as the eye could reach. in , he was re-elected for a second term of four years, after which he bade farewell to the people and retired into private life. on the th of december, , he caught a severe cold in making the round of his plantations and died two days later, in his sixty-eighth year. in number of years he had not lived a long life, but how much was crowded into it! most of the portraits of washington show him as a serious-looking gentleman in a wig, and the earliest biographies of him would lead us to believe that he was always on his dignity. but our first president was, in fact, a very genial man, with a hearty laugh, who enjoyed going to the theater, was fond of fox-hunting and was a thorough sportsman, and, as he himself admitted, had a hot temper. towards young people and children he was always very gracious and kind.... like lincoln, washington was very athletic. both of our two great presidents were tall men: washington was six feet two inches; lincoln was six feet four. when he first visited the natural bridge, in virginia, washington threw a stone to the top, a distance of about two hundred feet, and, climbing the rocks, carved his name far above all others.... in all the positions which he was called upon to fill, in his remarkable life, whether as host at his home, as surveyor, as general, or as president, washington showed the same desire to give the best that was in him for his people, his country, and for humanity at large. he endeared himself to the lowly and he gained the admiration of the great. he was never influenced by mean motives, and those who were under him loved him. thus it was that among americans he came to be regarded as "first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen;" and when his death became known on the other side of the atlantic ocean, the armies of napoleon in france, and the fleet of great britain, his former enemy, did homage to his memory. washington's birthday was celebrated even during his lifetime, and he had the satisfaction of receiving the congratulations of his fellow-citizens many times upon the return of this day, frequently being a guest at banquets given in honor of the occasion. in fact, after the revolution, washington's birthday practically took the place of the birthday of the various crowned heads of great britain, which had always been celebrated with enthusiasm during colonial times. when independence was established, all these royal birthdays were cast aside, and the birthday of washington naturally became one of the most widely celebrated of american holidays.... let us not forget what we owe to washington, or make him merely a name--an excuse for a holiday. let us remember him as a real, flesh and blood man--one of the greatest known to history. he gave us a nation to make it immortal; he laid down for freedom the sword that he drew; and his faith leads us on through the uplifting portal of the glories of peace and our destinies new. _j. walker mcspadden_ selections from the rules of civility (_copied by washington at the age of fourteen from an old translation of a french book of ._) show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another, though he were your enemy. when you see a crime punished you may be inwardly pleased; but always show pity to the suffering offender. superfluous compliments and all affectation of ceremony are to be avoided; yet, where due, they are not to be neglected. when a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it. be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any. in your apparel be modest, and endeavor to accommodate nature, rather than to procure admiration; keep to the fashion of your equals. associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company. speak not injurious words neither in jest nor in earnest; scoff at none, although they give occasion. gaze not at the marks or blemishes of others, and ask not how they came. what you may speak in secret to your friend, deliver not before others. nothing but harmony, honest industry, and frugality are necessary to make us a great people. first impressions are generally the most lasting. it is therefore absolutely necessary, if you mean to make any figure upon the stage, that you should take the first steps right. there is a destiny which has the control of our actions not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of human nature. let your heart feel for the afflictions and distresses of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse; remembering always the widow's mite, but that it is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all, however, are worthy the inquiry, or the deserving may suffer. i consider storms and victory under the direction of a wise providence, who no doubt directs them for the best purposes, and to bring round the greatest degree of happiness to the greatest number. happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person's mind, than on the externals in the world. to constitute a dispute there must be two parties. to understand it well, both parties and all the circumstances must be fully heard; and to accommodate differences, temper and mutual forbearance are requisite. idleness is disreputable under any circumstances; productive of no good, even when unaccompanied by vicious habits. it is not uncommon in prosperous gales to forget that adverse winds blow. economy in all things is as commendable in the manager, as it is beneficial and desirable to the employer. it is unfortunate when men cannot or will not see danger at a distance; or seeing it, are undetermined in the means which are necessary to avert or keep it afar off. every man who is in the vigor of life ought to serve his country in whatever line it requires, and he is fit for. rise early, that by habit it may become familiar, agreeable, healthy, and profitable. it may, for a while, be irksome to do this, but that will wear off; and the practice will produce a rich harvest forever thereafter, whether in public or in private walks of life. said by washington to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. there is a rank due to the united states among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained. the very idea of the power and right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government. if there was the same propensity in mankind for investigating the motives, as there is for censuring the conduct, of public characters, it would be found that the censure so freely bestowed is oftentimes unmerited and uncharitable. where is the man to be found who wishes to remain indebted for the defense of his own person and property to the exertions, the bravery, and the blood of others, without making one generous effort to repay the debt of honor and gratitude? there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. against the insidious wiles of foreign influence the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake. the name american must always exalt the just pride of patriotism. to the efficacy and permanency of your union a government for the whole is indispensable. every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest should be indignantly frowned upon. let us impart all the blessings we possess, or ask for ourselves, to the whole family of mankind. let us erect a standard to which the wise and honest may repair. 'tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. it is incumbent upon every person of every description to contribute to his country's welfare. it would be repugnant to the vital principles of our government virtually to exclude from public trusts, talents and virtue, unless accompanied by wealth. give such encouragements to our own navigation as will render our commerce less dependent on foreign bottoms. i have never made an appointment from a desire to serve a friend or relative. labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, conscience. washington's farewell to the army (_dated at rocky hill, near princeton, new jersey, november , _) it is universally acknowledged that the enlarged prospects of happiness, opened by the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, almost exceed the power of description. and shall not the brave men who have contributed so essentially to these inestimable acquisitions, retiring victorious from the field of war to the field of agriculture, participate in all the blessings which have been obtained? in such a republic, who will exclude them from the rights of citizens and the fruits of their labor? to those hardy soldiers who are actuated by the spirit of adventure, the fisheries will afford ample and profitable employment; and the extensive and fertile regions of the west will yield a most happy asylum to those who, fond of domestic enjoyment, are seeking personal independence. little is now wanting to enable the soldier to change the military character into that of a citizen but that steady and decent behavior which has distinguished not only the army under this immediate command, but the different detachments and separate armies through the course of the war. to the various branches of the army the general takes this last and solemn opportunity of professing his inviolable attachment and friendship. he can only again offer in their behalf his recommendations to their grateful country and his prayers to the god of armies. may ample justice be done them here, and may favors, both here and hereafter, attend those who, under the divine auspices, have secured innumerable blessings for others! with these wishes and this benediction the commander-in-chief is about to retire from service. the curtain of separation will soon be drawn, and the military scene to him will be closed forever! washington's farewell address (_to the people of the united states--september , _) friends and fellow-citizens: the period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the united states being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that i should now apprise you of the resolution i have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.... [illustration: statue of washington at west point presented to the united states military academy by a veteran of the civil war copyright by underwood & underwood, n. y.] in looking forward to the moment which is intended to terminate the career of my public life my feelings do not permit me to suspend the deep acknowledgment of that debt of gratitude which i owe to my beloved country for the many honors it has conferred upon me; still more for the steadfast confidence with which it has supported me, and for the opportunities i have thence enjoyed of manifesting my inviolable attachment, by services faithful and persevering, though in usefulness unequal to my zeal. if benefits have resulted to our country from these services, let it always be remembered to your praise, and as an instructive example in our annals, that under circumstances in which the passions, agitated in every direction, were liable to mislead, amidst appearances sometimes dubious, vicissitudes of fortune often discouraging, in situations in which not unfrequently want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism, the constancy of your support was the essential prop of the efforts, and a guarantee of the plans by which they were effected. profoundly penetrated with this idea, i shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that heaven may continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in fine, the happiness of the people of these states, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete, by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing, as will acquire for them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection and adoption of every nation which is yet a stranger to it. here, perhaps, i ought to stop. but a solicitude for your welfare, which cannot end but with my life, and the apprehension of danger, natural to that solicitude, urge me, on an occasion like the present, to offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments, which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment. the unity of government, which constitutes you one people, is also now dear to you. it is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. but as it is easy to foresee that from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it, accustoming yourself to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can, in any event, be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. for this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. the name 'american,' which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. with slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. you have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. but these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.... to the efficacy and permanency of your union a government for the whole is indispensable. no alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute; they must inevitably experience the infractions and interruptions which all alliances in all times have experienced. sensible of this momentous truth, you have improved upon your first essay by the adoption of a constitution of government better calculated than your former for an intimate union and for the efficacious management of your common concerns. this government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers uniting security with energy and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. the basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. but the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. the very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government. all obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. they serve to organize faction, to give an artificial and extraordinary force: to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.... towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular opposition to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretext. one method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. in all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of government as of other human institutions; that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real tendency of the existing constitution of a country; that facility in changes, upon the credit of mere hypothesis and opinion, exposes to perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion; and remember, especially, that, for the efficient management of your common interests, in a country so extensive as ours, a government of as much vigor as is consistent with the perfect security of liberty is indispensable. liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. it is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the enterprise of faction, to confine each member of the society within the limits prescribed by the laws, and to maintain all in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of the rights of person and property.... of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. in vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. the mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. a volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? and let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.... promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. in proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. as a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. one method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it; avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. the execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that the public opinion should cooperate.... observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? it will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. tributes the life of our washington cannot suffer by a comparison with those of other countries who have been most celebrated and exalted by fame. the attributes and decorations of royalty could have only served to eclipse the majesty of those virtues which made him, from being a modest citizen, a more resplendent luminary. malice could never blast his honor, and envy made him a single exception to her universal rule. for himself he had lived enough to life and to glory. for his fellow-citizens, if their prayers could have been answered, he would have been immortal. his example is complete, and it will teach wisdom and virtue to magistrates, citizens, and men, not only in the present age, but in future generations, as long as our history shall be read. _john adams_ washington stands alone and unapproachable like a snow peak rising above its fellows into the clear air of morning, with a dignity, constancy, and purity which have made him the ideal type of civic virtue to succeeding generations. _james bryce_ first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life, pious, just, humane, temperate, and sincere, uniform, dignified, and commanding, his example was as edifying to all around him, as were the effects of that example lasting. _henry lee_ others of our great men have been appreciated--many admired by all. but him we love. him we all love. about and around him we call up no dissentient and discordant and dissatisfied elements, no sectional prejudice nor bias, no party, no creed, no dogma of politics. none of these shall assail him. when the storm of battle blows darkest and rages highest, the memory of washington shall nerve every american arm and cheer every american heart. it shall relume that promethean fire, that sublime flame of patriotism, that devoted love of country, which his words have commended, which his example has consecrated. _rufus choate_ let a man fasten himself to some great idea, some large truth, some noble cause, even in the affairs of this world, and it will send him forward with energy, with steadfastness, with confidence. this is what emerson meant when he said: "hitch your wagon to a star." these are the potent, the commanding, the enduring men--in our own history, men like washington and lincoln. they may fail, they may be defeated, they may perish; but onward moves the cause, and their souls go marching on with it, for they are part of it, they have believed in it. _henry van dyke_ brave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, virtuous without severity--washington seems always to have confined himself within those limits where the virtues, by clothing themselves in more lively but more changeable and doubtful colors, may be mistaken for faults. inspiring respect, he inspires confidence, and his smile is always the smile of benevolence. _marquis chastelleux_ great without pomp, without ambition brave, proud, not to conquer fellow-men, but save; friend to the weak, a foe to none but those who plan their greatness on their brethren's woes; aw'd by no titles--undefil'd by lust-- free without faction--obstinately just; warm'd by religion's sacred, genuine ray, that points to future bliss the unerring way; yet ne'er control'd by superstition's laws, that worst of tyrants in the noblest cause. _from a london newspaper_ bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. arbor day second friday in april trees i think that i shall never see a poem lovely as a tree; a tree whose hungry mouth is prest against the earth's sweet flowing breast; a tree that looks at god all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray; a tree that may in summer wear a nest of robins in her hair; upon whose bosom snow has lain, who intimately lives with rain. poems are made by fools like me, but only god can make a tree. _joyce kilmer_ arbor day foreword in pamphlet on arbor day issued in the following are the provisions of the statutes of the state concerning the observance of arbor day: the day in each year known as arbor day shall be suitably observed in the public schools. the commissioner of education shall from time to time prepare and issue to schools such circulars of information, advice and instruction with reference to the day as he may deem necessary. for the purpose of encouraging the planting of shade and forest trees, the second friday of april in each year is hereby designated as a day for the general observance of such purpose, and to be known as arbor day. on said day appropriate exercises shall be introduced in all the schools of the state, and it shall be the duty of the several county and city superintendents to prepare a program of exercises for that day in all the schools under their respective jurisdiction. you will notice that arbor day now occurs on the second friday of april, the legislature of having changed the date. it is believed that arbor day may not only be devoted to the consideration of the value of trees and forests, including, of course, the planting of trees and shrubs, but that it may also be used to direct attention to birds and their protection, to the importance of the school garden, and to other related matters. the conservation of some of our natural resources might well be considered as the broad theme of the day, the main emphasis, however, being placed on trees. much of the contents of this pamphlet will afford suggestive material for the use of teachers at any appropriate time. the general information given may be of help to many teachers throughout the spring months. the discussions of the various subjects presented may afford valuable reading material in the grammar schools. the main purpose of the pamphlet is to give an impetus to the movement for a greater interest in our natural resources, and the movement for a greater appreciation of the opportunities offered by rural or semi-rural life. it is hoped that the suggestions made are such as may appeal to the interests of children. it is hoped that arbor day may be a profitable one to the pupils in the schools. it is further hoped that the influence of the contents of the pamphlet may not be confined to any one day, but may be extended to many days of the school year. calvin n. kendall _commissioner of education_ letter issued to school officials in arbor day will occur this year on friday, april . an announcement concerning it may be found in the march number of the education bulletin. it has been happily suggested by secretary houston of the department of agriculture at washington that the day be observed in part this year by planting trees upon our roadways, in our yards, and in our pleasure places, each tree being named for a soldier who has fallen in the late war. such trees would be appropriate memorials to these soldiers. i suggest that this particular year there be wide-spread planting of trees dedicated to those whose lives have been sacrificed in the war. the planting of the trees should be marked with some appropriate exercises and these exercises should take on more than a school significance. the whole community should be invited by the school to take part. i trust there may be a generous response on the part of the schools of new jersey to this idea. calvin n. kendall _commissioner of education_ trees and forests alfred gaskill, state forester save what we have, let planting come after when the farmers of nebraska, led by j. sterling morton, established arbor day in , they sought the threefold blessing that trees always give--shade from the summer sun, shelter from winter winds, and wood. these men found the broad prairies of the middle west practically treeless and they soon discovered that unless nature's fault was remedied the homes they hoped to make could be neither pleasant, nor secure, nor successful. in new jersey, as in all parts of the east, conditions were and are different. the whole state was originally unbroken forest, and the task of the pioneers was to make room for fields and settlements. nearly half our area ( per cent) is still forest, though the greater part has been reduced to a woefully poor condition. thus if _our_ festival is to serve _our_ needs, we will celebrate arbor day in such, a way that we shall learn to improve the forests we have rather than seek to make more; to protect and care for the trees we have as well as to plant more; to get rid of false impressions and broaden our understanding of the relations between tree life and human society. new jersey cannot spare more land for forests. she now has upwards of two million acres, and if we apply the rule that a state with per cent of her area in forests is well off, we shall reduce the total to about a million and a half acres. but this will adjust itself; our present concern is to stop the waste of our forest resources and bring them to serve one of the most highly organized communities in the nation. with respect to trees, as distinguished from forests, this intensive life and concentrated population make it imperative that cities and towns be provided with parks and as much street shade as possible. thus there are two ample fields for study and work, the one dealing with trees and their social bearings, the other with forests and their economic relations. the art of caring for _trees_ is called arboriculture, and one who devotes himself to it an arborist. the art of producing and developing tree communities, or _forests_, is silviculture or forestry. how trees live and grow the intimate study of trees is full of interest. the sap, consisting of raw food material gathered by the root hairs from the soil, courses upward, through the newer wood cells of trunk and branch, to the leaves; there, under the action of sunlight, it is assimilated with carbon dioxide, and, so prepared as tree food, passes downward through the newer bark. thus, the process never entirely suspended, even in winter, but varying in vigor with the seasons, the tree grows in stature by producing new shoots each year. no part of a tree that has concluded a season's growth is ever elongated, but remains fixed, and length is added to its terminal by the development of new buds. this is why a branch always remains at the height at which it started. on account of this fact the age of a tree or branch may be determined by counting back from the terminal one year for each section of development. on most deciduous trees this is hard to follow for more than a few years, but on the evergreens, which produce their branches in whorls, it is easy. on the other hand, diameter growth may continue indefinitely and is exhibited on any cross-section in a series of annual rings. a count of these rings will give the age of the tree at that point. other interesting things to know are the means by which trees support themselves upright, even in severe storms; how they support the weight of heavy branches; and how the various species differ in the form, color, texture of their bark. then the flowers and fruits. few people know that the early spring awakening of the silver maple is marked by the appearance of its flowers weeks before the leaves come out, or that pines and oaks have flowers at all. and so with the fruits: willows produce catkins; chestnuts, burs; elms, samaras; spruce, cones. knowing the trees and then one who is fond of trees will not be satisfied until he can recognize and name at least the commoner kinds. this is field work for many seasons, for the variations as well as the fixed characters must be observed, and there are at least a hundred species to be found in new jersey. the student will soon want a handbook like collins and preston's "key to trees," but without that he will distinguish the two great groups--evergreen and deciduous. the evergreens are also called conifers because the fruit of most of them is a cone. almost all are ornamental but none is suitable for the street. their wood is commonly called soft, though that of many species is quite hard, and forms the great bulk of coarse lumber used for building, etc. deciduous trees are so called because their leaves fall at the beginning of winter. there are many more kinds or species of these than of evergreens and their forms and characters are more varied. a few have recognized values as shade trees; many more are interesting or attractive in the park or on the lawn; others are never found outside the forest. by way of contrast with that of the conifers, the wood of deciduous trees is called hard, though many kinds are quite soft, and the trees themselves hardwoods. hardwood lumber is often very beautiful, and is used for many purposes besides furniture, but the world could better get along without it than without soft woods. shade trees one is attracted to a noble oak, a graceful hemlock, a beautifully colored maple, and wants to live with it and its kind. this desire deserves to be satisfied, and can be satisfied by encouraging the planting of trees where they will reduce the glare and heat of city streets; on lawns and in parks they are more at home and can be treated so that the beauty of individuals and the values of groups or masses can be brought out. especially should they find place upon every school ground so that the attention of the children may be constantly drawn to these hungry, thirsty, breakable, burnable, beautiful friends of man. the kinds of trees that may be planted upon a city street are few, for the life is so hard that only the hardiest can stand it. if we name norway maple, ginkgo, sycamore, white elm, red oak, the list of the best is exhausted. others may often be planted where conditions are favorable, and for lawns and parks the list of availables is almost endless, but in any case the wisest course is to avoid novelties and get some one who is experienced to do the planting. but more important than to plant a tree is to protect and develop one already in the right place. this applies especially to trees beside country roads. a newly planted tree has a precarious hold on life for several years, whereas an old one has survived many dangers. let, therefore, the care of the trees that are found in place be the first concern. guard them from all that may increase their infirmities, keep in check the insects that seek to destroy them, have their wounds attended to and their branches pruned where necessary. this is work for one who knows how, not for the butcher who "tops" a tree "to make it grow"; or for the "tree doctor" who uses cement without knowing whether it will do good or do harm. reputable men can be found to do any work of this kind. under wise direction there should be no hesitation about cutting down a tree that is in the way. in many places houses and streets are too much shaded. the fundamental idea to be grasped is that every tree is an organism; in one view an individual, in another a community. we must satisfy at least its strongest requirements or it cannot live. to the extent that all are satisfied is the tree healthy and vigorous. forests as with trees so with the tree communities called forests. our duty in new jersey is to improve the forests we have rather than to concern ourselves about getting more. of course, waste land may be redeemed by planting with trees, but where there is a remnant of the old forest, nature can be trusted to bring another if she is given a fair chance. the forest secured in this way may not yield so much lumber as one that was planted, and it will not satisfy a forester, but it will answer our most immediate needs, and can be secured more quickly than any other. and again, as with trees, let no one fear to have a forest cut off when its time comes. forest trees were made for use and if they are not used as they mature, nature will get rid of them by decay. that this must be so will appear when one observes that in any piece of native woods room is made for young trees by the fall of old ones that have lived their term. why forests are good nature clothed most of the habitable earth with forests of one kind or another and evidently meant that they should serve mankind. this they do by furnishing wood for shelter and for warmth (seven-eighths of the people of the world still use wood for fuel), by providing grateful shade in summer and protection from cold winds in winter, by preventing the soil on steep hillsides from being lost by erosion, by regulating the flow of streams. the contention that forests cause rainfall, or materially influence the climate of a country, is not established. the weight of evidence indicates that forests thrive in proportion to the rainfall rather than that the rain falls in proportion to the extent of forests. and in respect to stream flow we must distinguish between a mountainous or hilly country and a country that is flat; and whether the rain commonly falls in brief, heavy storms or in frequent gentle showers. for instance, we can say with assurance that in north jersey a forested watershed will discharge a purer, more regular stream than one that is unforested, while in south jersey the influence of the forest upon the streams is negligible. the forests of new jersey as the climate of new jersey is much the same in all parts, the character of our forests is determined chiefly by soil conditions. fortunately we have a great diversity, and between the northern and southern sections, strong contrasts. the line separating these sections is nowhere sharply defined but is commonly assumed to run more or less irregularly from long branch to salem. the forests of north jersey, supported by soils of considerable fertility, are almost universally of the mixed hardwood type common to the greater part of the central united states east of the mississippi river. that is, they are composed of a variety of deciduous trees in which are many oaks, chestnut, beech, several maples, ashes, hickories, elms, birches, etc. as exceptions or variants to the type are swampy areas in which black spruce and hemlock are dominant, and sterile mountain crests bearing the pitch pine and scrub oak of the poorest south jersey sands. this kind of forest, in which each species occupies the position to which it is best adapted, and from which therefore all competitors are excluded, is considered by ecologists the most highly developed vegetable society. and about and among these forests is the most fully developed human society--villages, towns and cities. practically all these forests have been several times cut over and many times burned. individual trees about settlements are often noble and imposing, and occasional groves of fine trees are found, but the forest is only a reminder of what it was--and a promise of what it may be. in south jersey the contrast with north jersey is emphasized in every way. instead of hills and valleys the land is level or gently rolling. near the delaware and at numerous points in the interior are fertile soils and thriving communities, but much of the territory is characterized by sand and forests of pine, with an undergrowth of scrub oak, often covering hundreds of thousands of acres. this condition justifies the common name of the region "the pines," though variations in soil frequently give rise to considerable areas of tree oaks, and swamps of white cedar border many of the streams. on the sandy land profitable agriculture is full of uncertainties; but forestry is not, for there the pitch pine, though burned almost to extinction by the fires that for years swept annually across the level reaches, persists and wherever given a few years' immunity from fire, sends up its arms of living green. here is the great forest area of the state; one of those tracts fitted by nature to maintain trees of a single kind, or single class. these "pure" forests, so called in contrast to the mixed forests of richer regions, are found in the southern states, in the far north and in the rocky mountains. they are easily developed, easily logged, and always will be, as they now are, the chief source of the world's lumber supply. fire the key to the forest problem in new jersey, as in every state, is the control of fire. a few years ago it was an undenied fact that more forest was destroyed by fire every year than by the ax. burning the forest to make plow-land was justifiable when trees were an encumbrance, but the practice got us into bad habits. from being a servant, fire became a master. without fires, we in new jersey can and will have all the forest we need; with fires, that which is bad becomes worse. the lesson for arbor day, and for every day, therefore, is to urge and require that no forest shall be burned. it is good fun to sit about a camp-fire, yet the danger that the fire will escape and do harm is great. even a surface-fire that apparently burns only dry leaves, and is often set for that purpose, will kill the young trees that are just starting on the struggle for life. fortunately new jersey is getting her fires under control. firewardens are located wherever there are forests; their duty is to prevent fires by every means possible, and if a fire is started they must summon men to put it out. the forests are already responding to this protection and proving their ability to take care of themselves when relieved of the frightful handicap that has been upon them for generations. practical forestry though fire control will make a forest where conditions are favorable as here, the skill of a forester is needed to make it a good and a productive forest. here is applied a knowledge that is more intimate than that which serves to recognize a tree or to provide for its physical well-being. the successful forester must be a practical scientist in many departments; must have executive ability and be a capable business man. all who cannot meet these requirements should be discouraged from seeking to make forestry their profession. parks every urban community needs parks where those who live in close quarters can find fresh air. and a state with many cities must make it possible for the people to get into the open--not for an hour only, but for days and weeks. new jersey can do this in the woodlands that are so near to most of the large cities. it is not always necessary that the state take title to the land; few owners object to reasonable use and almost all would gladly remove every restriction if they were assured that the privilege would not be abused. the timber forests of continental europe are universally used as great public parks. good roads make all parts accessible and the tourists are so accustomed to behave themselves that no serious harm is done. we can have ample parks of this kind at no more cost than assuring the owners' material interests. state aid the state of new jersey is prepared to help its citizens in any interest connected with the soil. the state forester, trenton, will advise individuals or communities regarding the care of shade trees and the planting or management of forests. the agricultural experiment station, new brunswick, and the department of agriculture, trenton, will afford similar assistance upon any subject connected with farms, orchards or gardens. anyone who wants to know about any of these subjects has the right to ask questions and to seek advice. arbor day may be observed by planting a hamilton grove charles a. philhower, supervising principal, westfield the following fitting observance of arbor day, commemorating an historic incident in the life of alexander hamilton, was conducted in mindowaskin park, westfield, april , . the program took its origin from the following narrative: alexander hamilton, in the year , planted a grove of thirteen trees at his home, "hamilton grange," d street, west of convent avenue, new york city. the trees were the liquidambar styraciflua, sweet or red gum, and were sent from the south. each one of the thirteen trees was named for one of the thirteen original colonies. the group of trees was later known as the "hamilton grove." martha washington became greatly interested both in its upkeep and in its preservation. the program was as follows. * * * * * the schools marched to the park with flags and assembled en masse. as the flag was raised, the star spangled banner was sung, a cornetist leading. address by honorable arthur n. pierson. song, "over there." planting of trees: each of the thirteen grades, from the kindergarten through the twelfth grade, planted a tree. as the trees for the states were planted the following passages were read. when the new jersey tree was planted the whole audience joined in the response. massachusetts this tree we plant as a memorial to the great state of massachusetts, noted for its patriots and its learning. as thy emblem, the pine tree, points to heaven, may thy ideals lead us on. new hampshire land of the great stone face, look over these united states of ours with a watchfulness that will keep us true and steadfast in the cause of democracy. rhode island grow, thou tree of life, as the spirit of religious liberty has grown in this broad land of ours. connecticut as the famous charter oak kept thy government free and unmolested, so may the branches of this tree perpetuate to the world the constitution under which we as a nation live. new york the towering buildings of thy metropolis cry as they mount heavenward "excelsior." may thy slogan be the slogan of our nation. new jersey proud are we of this the "garden state of the union." we love thee and the great union of which thou art a part. for thee and our country we live and serve. pennsylvania live to the memory of thy founder, william penn, father of peace and justice. this boon we would give to the world. maryland song--"maryland, my maryland." delaware long live the memory of this first state of the union. may we show to the world, "in union there is strength." virginia home of the father of our country, to thee we dedicate this tree. washington, give us that courage that held thee to the great cause of freedom. north carolina the cypress tall and majestic is the tree of this state. majestic may this country of ours stand among the nations of the world. south carolina like the palmetto which bends its branches over all who come to its shade, spread to all the benediction of life and liberty. georgia refuge of the oppressed. may the charity of thy founders characterize us as a nation. song, "america." a record of the plantings was filed in the school. on each succeeding arbor day each class which planted a tree will see whether its tree is growing. should the tree perchance have died, another will be planted in its place. other trees than the sweet gum may be used in some localities with greater certainty of thriving. suggestions to teachers k. c. davis, formerly of state agricultural college, new brunswick as the season of planting is upon us and all nature is preparing to show her most gorgeous dress, we should interest the pupil in ways of beautifying the school. there is not a school in the land that cannot be made better, and many of them may be improved very much. the pupils will take a great interest in the matter if they receive a little encouragement and leadership on the part of their teachers. beautify the school grounds. a woven wire trellis supporting a thrifty vine would be a splendid screen for unsightly outbuildings. shrubs about the foundations of the school building, in the angles of walks, and in natural clumps in the corners of the grounds would add beauty to the school surroundings. a few plots not used for play nor for garden may be grassed. never scatter the trees or shrubs openly about the lawn area. better mass the shrubs in natural clumps in angles or foundations, walks and borders. use the trees along boundary and division lines. native trees and shrubs are always preferable to imported or exotic kinds. planning for arbor day arbor day plans should be begun early and should include a number of lines of preparatory work. send for the bulletins first. draw plans of the grounds, measuring the lines and distances to make it somewhat accurate. if a class is assigned to this task the best map may be framed for the future use of the school. a passepartout binding, at least, may be used. this map may show the plan of planting for several years if there is more to be planted than can be done this year. the walks, buildings, clumps of shrubs, trees, school garden, playgrounds, etc., should all be shown. this work may be done by arithmetic or geography classes. the arithmetic class may also find suitable dimensions for the corn-contest plots. have the reading classes read about birds, gardening, trees, lawns, weeds, etc. use the newer words in spelling exercises. let boys and girls both make bird-houses at home. these may be ready to put up on arbor day. the corn testing and seed study should begin at once. trees, shrubs and seeds that are to be planted on arbor day, or soon after, should be ready in advance. the roots of trees and shrubs must be temporarily covered with soil to prevent drying out. some exercises in root grafting of apples may be carried out as described in two of the bulletins, and . tools to be used in the planting of school grounds may be brought by pupils from their homes; the list available for the purpose should be made in advance. divide the students into suitable groups for the work, so that each will know his part. invite parents and home folks to the work of arbor day, and make it a community exercise. the men may come in the morning to work, and the women may come with lunch baskets at noon, both staying until the exercises are over. plan to have some one take pictures of the children and patrons while the improvement work is going on. do not forget to have some manure and good soil hauled in advance. suggestive programs i . remarks by the teacher or a member of the school board on the value of teaching the useful and beautiful as well as the classical and historical. . have five pupils stand together. the first pupil will read from this pamphlet or tell in his own way why we should all know more about trees; the second about insects; the third about weeds; the fourth about birds; and the fifth about corn. . have five girls stand and each tell a few things about some useful bird. . have a boy who has made a bird box tell how bird boxes are a protection to young birds, and how he made his. . have a boy tell of some ways of destroying english sparrows, learned from u. s. farmers' bulletin . . another boy should tell how to distinguish english sparrows from other sparrows and common birds. . have some of the best tree planters tell how to plant a tree--preparation of soil, roots, pruning and actual planting. _note._ in any or all of these exercises pupils may get the subject matter from this pamphlet and from bulletins referred to in it. they may make note on paper of what they wish to say and speak from these notes. if the time for preparation be very short the points may be copied and read directly. let each exercise be very short. ii . announcement of outlines of contests in school or home gardening, corn growing, or other work the school may be planning, and the premiums offered for the contests and exhibits next fall. . some pupils may tell of several benefits of trees and forests, or five pupils may stand together and each tell of one important benefit. . have a pupil describe how to test seed corn by the individual ear method. . have two pupils tell of the two types of insect moths, each telling how to control such insects. . have a boy tell of three or four things necessary to improve the home lawn. (see u. s. bulletin ) . have three pupils stand and each take one part (_a_) use of vines to beautify the grounds at school or home, naming some vines to use in certain places (_b_) use of trees in same way (_c_) use of shrubs in same way the value of our forests few people ever think of a forest as a place to store water. who would think that "the woods" hold water as well as a mill pond or a reservoir! but they do, although we cannot see the water they hold, except, perhaps, as a pool here and there; and yet this is one of the most important functions that a forest can perform. all of us have noticed in walking through the woods how soft and springy the ground is. a thick carpet of leaves, twigs, and decayed wood covers the earth, sometimes to a depth of several feet. it is very porous, and it absorbs water like a sponge. when storms come and rain falls in torrents, it does not beat directly upon the ground under the trees because the raindrops first strike the leaves and branches above. the water then trickles gently down and soaks into the leafy carpet. if the forest is extensive a very large quantity of water is absorbed--enough to prevent floods except in extraordinarily long periods of rain. gradually through the weeks and months that follow the absorbed water oozes out of low places as "springs," and it dashes merrily away in little brooks that continue to form creeks and rivers which flow peacefully and steadily out to sea. if there are no trees, no leaves to break the beating rain, no spongy mold to hold the water when it falls, no matted roots to prevent washing, the big raindrops spatter upon the earth and quickly form rushing streams that wash the ground into gulleys. the bare earth absorbs some water, to be sure, but far less than the humus of the forest. if the rains are continued the rivers are soon filled beyond the capacity of their banks and they spread over the neighboring valleys, carrying devastation with them. after the heavy rains cease, the flood waters subside as suddenly as they had arisen and the streams dwindle to insignificance, sometimes completely drying up in a long, hot summer. thus it is that forests act as great reservoirs and aid in preventing disastrous floods and in maintaining the flow of streams at a rate that is nearly uniform all the year round. now let us see what use is made of the trees. the greatest of all is for firewood; but this is largely the decaying or faulty trees from the farmer's woodlot, the waste product of a lumber region, or from land that is cleared for cultivation. it is said that about , , cords are used annually. the greater part of the salable timber, however, is sawed into lumber, which is used in a variety of ways. the first and greatest use of lumber is for building houses, barns, sheds, outbuildings and fences. next comes furniture of all kinds--chairs, tables, beds, and all other house, office, and school furniture; musical instruments; vehicles of all kinds--wagons, carriages, buggies, and parts of automobiles; agricultural implements--plows, harrows, harvesters, thrashing machines, and other farm implements. car building is another great use for lumber--freight cars, passenger cars, and trolley cars. other important uses for timber are as cross-ties, poles for telegraph and telephone lines, and "shoring" or supports in mines. even more trees are used in the manufacture of paper than for these purposes. then there are various small articles used in the home, such as spools, butter dishes, fruit crates, baskets, boxes, all kinds of tools, toys, picture frames, matches, pencils, clothes pins, toothpicks, etc. these are little things, but so many of them are used that they consume a great deal of wood. next we derive tannic acid for tanning leather, turpentine and rosin, maple sugar, and many extracts used in making medicines. so valuable are the forests that the whole nation is interested in preserving them. no one is benefited more by them than the farmer, and no one should be more interested in them.--_u. s. bureau of education bulletin, "agriculture and rural life day"_ birds "the study of birds and bird life in the schools of new jersey," by dr. robert g. leavitt, of the trenton state normal school, published by this department, should be consulted. bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. memorial day may the sleep of the brave how sleep the brave, who sink to rest by all their country's wishes blessed! when spring, with dewy fingers cold, returns to deck their hallowed mold, she there shall dress a sweeter sod than fancy's feet have ever trod. by fairy hands their knell is rung; by forms unseen their dirge is sung; there honor comes, a pilgrim gray, to bless the turf that wraps their clay; and freedom shall awhile repair, to dwell a weeping hermit there! _william collins_ memorial day george c. baker, supervising principal, moorestown suggestive program flag salute song--"battle hymn of the republic" story of memorial day stories from the battle-fields of and , told by larger pupils, adult members of the community, or soldiers "the blue and the gray" song--"keep the home fires burning" "the gettysburg address" "in flanders fields" song--"america" or "the star spangled banner" preparatory to the making and carrying out of a memorial day program, the teacher, a group of pupils or some wide-awake member of the community should talk about the sacrifices made by the soldiers of our country during the different wars in which we have been engaged; what great principles they have fought for, and why we should honor their memory in the public schools of our land. throughout the preparation and the execution of the program there should be a consciousness of the debt we owe to those who have fought and died for freedom's cause. the simplest program prepared in this spirit will be of lasting value to the children of the school and to the members of the community in which the exercises are held. pupils and teachers should talk over fully the kind of program to be given. much responsibility should be placed upon the pupils for the making of the program. they should make all "projects" necessary for the carrying out of the program, and should invite all patrons and friends in the community. the exercises should be a service truly commemorating the honored dead of our land. origin of memorial day the observance of may as memorial day had its official origin in an order issued in by general john a. logan, then commander-in-chief of the grand army of the republic. general logan often said afterward that the issuing of that order was the proudest act of his life. the strewing of flowers upon graves is old in some countries. it is said that the first decoration of graves of soldiers of the civil war was done on april , , by two little girls, daughters of a michigan chaplain. they had been out gathering wild flowers, and, returning, came across a rough, unmarked mound which covered some northern boy. one of the girls said: "oh, let's put our flowers on this grave! he was a soldier boy." they knelt down and made garlands of flowers on that grave. this grave was in virginia, not far from mount vernon. the next day they interested their family and friends in a plan to decorate all the graves, and the plan was carried out. each year afterward, in may, they did the same wherever they happened to be. others saw them and followed their example. the later date of may was chosen by general logan so that flowers could be had in all the northern states. from decorating the graves of soldiers the custom has extended to the graves of all who have relatives or friends to remember them. in time the soldiers will be forgotten, but the custom of decorating graves with flowers will doubtless continue for many generations to come. the spirit which prompts it is a noble one, which should ever be cherished. two years after the close of the civil war the _new york tribune_ printed a paragraph simply stating that "the women of columbus, mississippi, have shown themselves impartial in their offerings made to the memory of the dead. they strewed flowers alike on the graves of the confederate and of the national soldiers." whereupon the north thrilled with tenderness and francis miles finch was inspired to write his moving lyric "the blue and the gray," which has become the credo of the festival. in a famous address, chauncey m. depew related the occurrence with felicity: "when the war was over in the south, where under warmer skies and with more poetic temperaments symbols and emblems are better understood than in the practical north, the widows, mothers, and the children of the confederate dead went out and strewed their graves with flowers; at many places the women scattered them impartially also over the unknown and unmarked resting-places of the union soldiers. as the news of this touching tribute flashed over the north it roused, as nothing else could have done, national amity and love and allayed sectional animosity and passion. thus out of sorrows common alike to north and south comes this beautiful custom." the incident, however, produced no practical results until in may, , adjutant-general n. p. chipman suggested to national commander john a. logan, of the grand army of the republic, that their organization inaugurate the custom of spreading flowers on the graves of the union soldiers at some uniform time. general logan immediately issued an order naming the th day of may, , "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, or hamlet churchyard in the land.... it is the purpose of the commander-in-chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of the departed." the idea spread rapidly. legislature after legislature enacted it into law until the holiday has become a legal one in all states. in some of the southern states an earlier date is usually chosen. the reveille[f] [f] used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, houghton mifflin company, the authorized publishers. hark! i hear the tramp of thousands and of armed men the hum; lo! a nation's hosts have gathered round the quick alarming drum-- saying "come, freeman, come! ere your heritage be wasted," said the quick alarming drum. "let me of my heart take counsel: war is not of life the sum; who shall stay and reap the harvest when the autumn days shall come?" but the drum echoed "come! death shall reap the braver harvest," said the solemn-sounding drum. "but when won the coming battle, what of profit springs therefrom? what if conquest, subjugation, even greater ills become?" but the drum answered, "come! you must do the sum to prove it," said the yankee answering drum. "what if, 'mid the cannon's thunder, whistling shot and bursting bomb, when my brothers fall around me, should my heart grow cold and numb?" but the drum answered "come! better there in death united than in life a recreant--come!" thus they answered--hoping, fearing, some in faith and doubting some, till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming, said, "my chosen people, come!" then the drum, lo! was dumb, for the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, "lord, we come!" _bret harte_ the blue and the gray by the flow of the inland river, whence the fleets of iron have fled, where the blades of the grave-grass quiver, asleep are the ranks of the dead: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; under the one, the blue, under the other, the gray. these in the robings of glory, those in the gloom of defeat, all with the battle-blood gory, in the dusk of eternity meet: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; under the laurel, the blue, under the willow, the gray. from the silence of sorrowful hours the desolate mourners go, lovingly laden with flowers alike for the friend and the foe: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; under the roses, the blue, under the lilies, the gray. so with an equal splendor, the morning sun-rays fall, with a touch impartially tender, on the blossoms blooming for all: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; broidered with gold, the blue, mellowed with gold, the gray. so, when the summer calleth, on forest and field of grain, with an equal murmur falleth the cooling drip of the rain: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; wet with the rain, the blue, wet with the rain, the gray. sadly, but not with upbraiding, the generous deed was done; in the storm of the years that are fading no braver battle was won: under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; under the blossoms, the blue, under the garlands, the gray. no more shall the war cry sever, or the winding rivers be red; they banish our anger forever when they laurel the graves of our dead! under the sod and the dew, waiting the judgment-day; love and tears for the blue, tears and love for the gray. _francis miles finch_ recessional god of our fathers, known of old-- lord of our far-flung battle line-- beneath whose awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine-- lord god of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget--lest we forget! the tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart; still stands thine ancient sacrifice-- an humble and a contrite heart. lord god of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget--lest we forget! far-called, our navies melt away; on dune and headland sinks the fire. lo! all our pomp of yesterday is one with nineveh and tyre! judge of the nations, spare us yet, lest we forget--lest we forget! if, drunk with sight of power, we loose wild tongues that have not thee in awe, such boasting as the gentiles use or lesser breeds without the law-- lord god of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget--lest we forget! for heathen heart that puts her trust in reeking tube and iron shard, all valiant dust that builds on dust, and guarding calls not thee to guard, for frantic boasts and foolish word, thy mercy on thy people, lord! amen. _rudyard kipling_ battle hymn of the republic mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord; he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; he hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; his truth is marching on. glory! glory! hallelujah! glory! glory! hallelujah! glory! glory! hallelujah! his truth is marching on. i have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; they have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps; i can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. his day is marching on. he has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; he is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat; oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet! our god is marching on. in the beauty of the lilies christ was born across the sea, with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me; as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while god is marching on. _julia ward howe_ we have scattered our floral tributes today over the graves of the patriotic dead. these frail mementos of affection will soon wither, but let not the memory of these martyrs fail to inspire in us a purer, holier life! the roll-call brings to mind their faces and their deeds. they were faithful to the end. the weary march, the bivouac, the battle are still remembered by the survivors. but your line, comrades, is growing slenderer every year. one by one you will drop out of the ranks, and other hands may ere long strew your grave with flowers as you have done today in yonder cemetery. when mustered in the last grand review, with all the veterans and heroes of earth, may each receive with jubilant heart the great commander's admiring tribute "well done!" and become with him partaker of a felicity that is enduring and triumphant! _e. p. thwing_ of all the martial virtues, the one which is perhaps most characteristic of the truly brave is the virtue of magnanimity. that sentiment, immortalized by scott in his musical and martial verse, will associate for all time the name of scotland's king with those of the great spirits of the past. how grand the exhibitions of the same generous impulses that characterize this memorable battle-field! my fellow-countrymen of the north, if i may be permitted to speak for those whom i represent, let me assure you that in the profoundest depths of their nature, they reciprocate that generosity with all the manliness and sincerity of which they are capable. in token of that sincerity they join in consecrating, for annual patriotic pilgrimage, these historic heights, which drank such copious draughts of american blood, poured so freely in discharge of duty, as each conceived it--a mecca for the north, which so grandly defended, a mecca for the south, which so bravely and persistently stormed it. we join you in setting apart this land as an enduring monument of peace, brotherhood, and perpetual union. i repeat the thought with emphasis, with singleness of heart and of purpose, in the name of a common country, and of universal liberty; and by the blood of our fallen brothers, we unite in the solemn consecration of these hallowed hills, as a holy, eternal pledge of fidelity to the life, freedom, and unity of this cherished republic. _john b. gordon_ from "gettysburg: a mecca for the blue and the gray" our fathers ordained that in this republic there should be no distinctions; but human nature is stronger than laws and nothing can prevent this people from showing honor to all who have deserved well of the country. every man who has borne arms with credit has earned and is sure to receive a special measure of regard. and it is our peculiar privilege to remember that our armies and navies, regular and volunteer, have always been worthy of esteem ... the grand army of the republic--soldiers and citizens whom the republic delights to honor. _john hay_ let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations, that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided republic. _john a. logan_ we honor our heroic and patriotic dead by being true men, as true men by faithfully fighting the battles of our day as they fought the battles of their day. _david gregg_ after the great companions! the race has not run out. we are still men, and worthy of our fathers. that is what memorial day says to us. not in pride nor vain boasting but in fearful and solemn humility we speak, for it is our dead that prompt us. they, our kin and blood, were not afraid to die. when the destroyer came, the obscene dragon, with breath of poison gas, eyes of hell fire, and teeth of steel, they did not shrink, our brothers, but played the man, and struck, and dying struck again, and flung their shredded bodies into the breach, and "filled the gap up with our english dead." we are of such. we put our arms around our dead, and hold them proudly up to god, and glory before all men that this is our breed. the lies of the accuser are disproved. his slanders fall from us. we are not slaves of greed, money grubbers, soft and lily-livered. we know how to suffer and to die. we, too, can follow the gleam. o greeks of marathon, room for us! through chateau thierry and the wood of argonne we have come up to stand by your side, and dare to call you brothers. you five hundred of balaklava, meet these boys from kansas and new york, who also rode blithely into the valley of death. they are your kind. you men of bunker hill, of gettysburg and of san juan, place! place for these, our neighbors' sons, our friends and playmates! for them also the laurel, and the royal requiem! for them the cross of honor, and the divine halo! they are ours! ours! dear god, we will be worthy of them. thus cries the poet of america: "allons! after the great companions, and to belong to them! "allons! through struggles and wars! "have the past struggles succeeded? "what has succeeded? yourself? your nation? nature? "now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. "allons! the road is before us!" _dr. frank crane_ the service flag the service flag is not an official flag of the united states government. the idea was, so far as we are advised, an entirely novel one, the credit for the conception of which appears to be due to r. l. queisser, of cleveland, ohio, who designed and patented the present flag. it has, however, taken such firm root in popular sentiment and has been of such beneficial influence that it is officially recognized, and everyone who is entitled to fly it is encouraged and urged to do so. mr. queisser was formerly captain of the machine gun company, th ohio infantry (now th united states infantry), from which he was retired because of an accident. he thus states the origin of the flag: "shortly after april , , when war with germany was declared, the thought came to me that both of my sons, who were still officers in the guard, would again be called out, and i wondered if i could not evolve some sign or symbol by which it might be known that they were away in their country's service, and one which would be to their mother a visible sign of the sacrifice her sons were making. the inspiration of the service flag came to me in that manner." _official u. s. bulletin_ the service flag a field of gleaming white, a border ruby red, and a blazing star that is seen afar as it flutters overhead. from the window of a cot, from the mansion on the hill, sends that banner fair, beyond compare, its loyal message still. "a man beloved and dear, o land, i've given to you. he has gone to fight on the side of right; to old glory he'll be true!" it floats from learning's halls, and within the busy mart, where its crowded stars form growing bars to rejoice the drooping heart. each star stands for a life, to the nation gladly given, for an answered prayer to those "over there," though a mother's heart be riven. we pass with kindling eye beneath your colors true; a nation's love, a nation's hope are bound in the heart of you! _josephine m. fabricant_ i have a son[g] [g] reprinted from the saturday evening post, philadelphia. copyrighted by the curtis publishing company, philadelphia. i have a son who goes to france tomorrow. i have clasped his hand-- most men will understand-- and wished him, smiling, lucky chance in france. my son! at last the house is still-- just the dog and i in the garden--dark-- stars and my pipe's red spark-- the house his young heart used to fill is still. he said one day, "i've got to go to france--dad, you know how i feel!" i knew. like sun and steel and morning. "yes," i said, "i know you'll go." i'd waited just to hear him speak like that. god, what if i had had another sort of lad, something too soft and meek and weak to speak! and yet! he could not guess the blow he'd struck. why, he's my only son! and we had just begun to be dear friends. but i dared not show the blow. but now--tonight-- no, no; it's right; i never had a righter thing to bear. and men must fling themselves away in the grieving sight of right. a handsome boy--but i, who knew his spirit--well, they cannot mar the cleanness of a star that'll shine to me, always and true, who knew. i've given him. yes; and had i more, i'd give them too--for there's a love that asking, asks above the human measure of our store-- and more. yes; it hurts! here in the dark, alone-- no one to see my wet old eyes-- i'll watch the morning rise-- and only god shall hear my groan alone. i have a son who goes to france tomorrow. i have clasped his hand-- most men will understand-- and wished him, smiling, lucky chance in france. _emory pottle_ in flanders fields[h] [h] from "in flanders fields," by lieutenant-colonel john mccrae, courtesy of g. p. putnam's sons, publishers. in flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row, that mark our place; and in the sky the larks, still bravely singing, fly, scarce heard amidst the guns below. we are the dead. short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved; and now we lie in flanders fields. take up our quarrel with the foe! to you from failing hands we throw the torch. be yours to hold it high! if ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in flanders fields. _john mccrae_ america's answer rest ye in peace, ye flanders dead. the fight that ye so bravely led we've taken up. and we will keep true faith with you who lie asleep, with each a cross to mark his bed, and poppies blowing overhead, where once his own life blood ran red. so let your rest be sweet and deep in flanders fields. fear not that ye have died for naught. the torch ye threw to us we caught. ten million hands will hold it high, and freedom's light shall never die! we've learned the lesson that ye taught in flanders fields. _r. w. lillard_ american sentiments it is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. but the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. to such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when america is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. god helping her, she can do no other. _woodrow wilson_ we came into this war for ourselves. it is a war to save america, to preserve self-respect, to justify our right to live as we have lived, not as some one else wishes us to live. it is more precious that this america shall live than that we americans should live. _franklin k. lane_ no nation has a right to its freedom if it is unwilling to fight for the freedom of others, and for its own. the cost of war is not to be measured in money. it is in the slow paid price of the human heart--in the blood drops, one by one. _charles c. gordon_ bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. flag day june the stars and stripes it is not a painted rag. it is a whole national history. it is the constitution. it is the government. it is the free people that stand in the government, on the constitution. _henry ward beecher_ flag day hannah h. chew, principal culver school, millville the great war has brought more forcibly to us a realization of the necessity for training the youth of our land to a greater respect for, and a fuller knowledge of our national emblem. wherever the flag floats, children must be taught to love it and to respect its significance. new jersey long ago required that the flag be displayed on school buildings, and the flag salute be given daily, but no statute can make certain that the spirit of the law is emphasized. the teachers of the children of the state bear the responsibility of training for patriotism, and the future of democracy depends upon the patriotic ideals nurtured in the public schools. we shall have more patriotic observances than formerly and one of those which we shall celebrate with more interest will be flag day. the date authorized to be observed as flag day comes so near the close of the school year that it may well be used as a special occasion on which pupil and parent join in paying tribute to our national emblem. flag day can be made the occasion of raising a new flag, or of taking a collection to provide silk flags or a patriotic picture for the classrooms, thus giving parents an opportunity to contribute to the patriotism of the school. if a new flag is to be presented to the school, flag day will be a most appropriate time to receive it, and exercises can be conducted partly or altogether out-of-doors. on the playground all pupils can take part in marches and drills suitable to their grades. in order to have the best effects, some uniformity of costume is best. any movements uniformly done in mass are pleasing, and teachers can adapt marching figures to their own playground with good effect. the purpose of the teacher of the primary grades should be to awaken love and reverence for the flag and to instill loyalty into the minds and hearts of the children. in the higher grades children should not only be trained to show love and respect for the flag, but should understand their duty toward their country. they should study the flag, its history, its significance, its various forms and uses, the correct ways of displaying it, and the proper manner of raising and lowering it. the flag of our state should also be taught, together with its history. it is a part of our school law that the flag salute shall be a part of the daily program. it is the duty of the teacher to interpret the meaning and the spirit of the salute to the pupils, not neglecting the correct pronunciation of the words. the salute should never be carelessly repeated, but should be given in a serious manner, and only after children have been called to standing position. in the making of a program, attention should be given to current events. the best of the popular songs may be sung. (be sure they are the best.) current literature will furnish some prose and poetry suitable for the occasion. a real, present-day note should always be sounded. the same program should not be used year after year, but the material should be selected anew each time, though some repetition in the use of standard recitations and national songs is to be expected. a scrap-book kept for suitable material will be a valuable aid to the teacher. such a scrap-book can be made by using large envelops, fastening them at the bottom within a cardboard cover, and labelling each envelop according to its contents. as additions are made to the songs, poems, programs, etc., a catalog of the contents can be kept on the outside of the envelop. it will be best to mount recitations on heavy paper in order to preserve them longer. suggestive programs primary grades opening remarks by teacher in charge singing by school, "america" recitation, "our flag" (by may howlister), first grade pupil recitation, "your flag and my flag" (by wilbur d. nesbit), fourth grade pupil song, "our country's flag" (by florence l. dresser) flag drill, all pupils presentation of new flag, member of parent-teacher association flag salute, entire audience: "i pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" song, "the star spangled banner" grammar grades remarks by teacher or pupil in charge song, "the star spangled banner," school, led by school orchestra oration, "flag day address" (by president wilson), eighth grade boy recitation, "the name of old glory" (by james whitcomb riley) song, "the unfurling of the flag" (by clara endicott sears) "why we should love the flag" (best original speech by grade pupil) recitation, "old flag" (by hubbard parker) song, "we'll keep old glory flying" (by carleton s. montanye) flag drill and grand march, all pupils of grades , , , presentation of new flag by father of pupil flag raising flag salute: "i pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" song, "america" brief history of the american flag on the d of july, , the american congress resolved "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; and that all political connection between us and the states of great britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." on the th of july a declaration of independence was adopted by the congress, and sent out under its authority, to announce to all other nations that the united states of america claimed a place among them. on this th of july the nation was born. its flag, the visible symbol of its power, was not adopted till . on the th of june, , congress resolved "that the flag of the thirteen united states be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." the national flag--_our_ national flag--grew in the most direct way out of the banners that had waved over the colonists. the flag of the united colonies had thirteen stripes, one for each colony, and the stripes were alternate red and white. this part of the old flag remained unchanged in the new one. each colony retained its stripe. the flag of the colonies, in its union, had displayed the king's colors. there was now no longer a king in america, but a new union had arisen--a union of thirteen states--no longer a union of kingdoms. the union of the old flag had been the crosses of st. george and st. andrew conjoined on a blue field. the new union was a circle of silver stars in a blue sky--"a new constellation." the flag of the united states was derived from the flag of the united colonies in the simplest and most natural manner. the old flag had expressed the hopes and aspirations of thirteen colonies which had united in order to secure justice from their king and fellow-countrymen in england. the new flag expressed the determined resolve of the same thirteen colonies--now become sovereign states--to form a permanent union, and to take their place among the nations of the world. they were no longer englishmen; they were americans. many suggestions have been made to account for the appearance of stars or of stripes in the new flag. it seems unnecessary to seek for any explanation other than the one that has just been given. the old flag of the united colonies expressed the feelings and aspirations of the revolted english colonists. they were willing to remain as subjects of the english king, but they had united to secure justice. the new flag expressed their firm resolve to throw off the yoke of england and to become a new nation. the symbols of each flag exactly expressed the feeling of the men who bore it. there is a resemblance between the colors and symbols of the new flag and the symbols borne on the coat of arms of general washington that is worthy of remark. general washington was a descendant of an english family, and his ancestors bore a coat of arms that he himself used as a seal, and for a book-plate. it has been supposed that the stars of the american flag were suggested by the three stars of this coat of arms, and this is not impossible. general washington was in philadelphia in june, , and he is said to have engaged mrs. john ross, at that time, to make the first flag, though this is not absolutely certain. however this may be, it is known that the american flag of thirteen stars and of thirteen stripes was displayed at the siege of fort stanwix in august, ; at the battle of brandywine on september ; at germantown on the th of october; at the surrender of the british under general burgoyne on october . the flag had been adopted in june of the same year. the vessels of the american navy flew this flag on the high seas, and their victories made it respected everywhere.... the treaty of peace between england and the united states was signed (at paris, france) on september , . this was the acknowledgment of great britain of the independence of her former colonies; and the other nations of europe stood by consenting. our flag was admitted, at that time, on equal terms with the standards of ancient kingdoms and states, to the company of the banners of the world.... in april, , the congress passed "an act to establish the flag of the united states": "section i. _be it enacted, etc._, that from and after the fourth day of july next, the flag of the united states be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white; that the union have twenty stars, white in a blue field. "section ii. _and be it further enacted_, that on the admission of every new state into the union, one star be added to the union of the flag; and that such addition shall take effect on the fourth of july next succeeding such admission. _approved_, april , ." no changes (other than the addition of new stars) have been made in the national flag since . the stars have been added, one by one, until in there are forty-five in all. every state has its star; each of the original thirteen states has its stripe. so long as the united states exists the flag will remain in its present form, except that new stars will be displayed as the new states come in. it will forever exhibit the origin of the nation from the thirteen colonies, and its growth into a union of sovereign states. _edward s. holden_ makers of the flag this morning, as i passed into the land office, the flag dropped me a most cordial salutation, and from its rippling folds i heard it say: "good-morning, mr. flag-maker." "i beg your pardon, old glory," i said, "aren't you mistaken? i am not the president of the united states, nor a member of congress, nor even a general in the army. i am only a government clerk." "i greet you again, mr. flag-maker," replied the gay voice. "i know you well. you are the man who worked in the swelter of yesterday straightening out the tangle of that farmer's homestead in idaho, or perhaps you found the mistake in that indian contract in oklahoma, or helped to clear that patent for the hopeful inventor in new york, or pushed the opening of that new ditch in colorado, or made that mine in illinois more safe, or brought relief to the old soldier in wyoming. no matter; whichever one of these beneficent individuals you may happen to be, i give you greeting, mr. flag-maker." i was about to pass on, when the flag stopped me with these words: "yesterday the president spoke a word that made happier the future of ten million peons in mexico; but that act looms no larger on the flag than the struggle which the boy in georgia is making to win the corn club prize this summer. "yesterday the congress spoke a word which will open the door of alaska; but a mother in michigan worked from sunrise until far into the night, to give her boy an education. she, too, is making the flag. "yesterday we made a new law to prevent financial panics, and yesterday, maybe, a school teacher in ohio taught his first letters to a boy who will one day write a song that will give cheer to the millions of our race. we are all making the flag." "but," i said impatiently, "these people were only working!" then came a great shout from the flag: "the work that we do is the making of the flag. "i am not the flag; not at all. i am but its shadow. "i am whatever you make me, nothing more. "i am your belief in yourself, your dream of what a people may become. "i live a changing life, a life of moods and passions, of heartbreaks and tired muscles. "sometimes i am strong with pride, when men do an honest work, fitting the rails together truly. "sometimes i droop, for then purpose has gone from me, and cynically i play the coward. "sometimes i am loud, garish, and full of that ego that blasts judgment. "but always i am all that you hope to be, and have the courage to try for. "i am song and fear, struggle and panic, and ennobling hope. "i am the day's work of the weakest man, and the largest dream of the most daring. "i am the constitution and the courts, statutes and the statute makers, soldier and dreadnaught, drayman and street sweep, cook, counselor, and clerk. "i am the battle of yesterday, and the mistake of tomorrow. "i am the mystery of the men who do without knowing why. "i am the clutch of an idea, and the reasoned purpose of resolution. "i am no more than what you believe me to be and i am all that you believe i can be. "i am what you make me, nothing more. "i swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation. my stars and my stripes are your dream and your labors. they are bright with cheer, brilliant with courage, firm with faith, because you have made them so out of your hearts. for you are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making." _franklin k. lane_ the name of old glory[i] [i] from the biographical edition of the complete works of james whitcomb riley, copyright . used by special permission of the publishers, the bobbs-merrill company. old glory! say, who, by the ships and the crew, and the long, blended ranks of the gray and the blue-- who gave you, old glory, the name that you bear with such pride everywhere as you cast yourself free to the rapturous air and leap out full-length, as we're wanting you to?-- who gave you that name, with the ring of the same, and the honor and fame so becoming to you?-- your stripes stroked in ripples of white and of red, with your stars at their glittering best overhead-- by day or by night their delightfulest light laughing down from their little square heaven of blue!-- who gave you the name of old glory?--say, who-- who gave you the name of old glory? the old banner lifted, and faltering then in vague lisps and whispers fell silent again. old glory--speak out!--we are asking about how you happened to "favor" a name, so to say, that sounds so familiar and careless and gay as we cheer it and shout in our wild breezy way-- we--the crowd, every man of us, calling you that-- we--tom, dick and harry--each swinging his hat and hurrahing "old glory!" like you were our kin, when--lord!--we all know we're as common as sin! and yet it just seems like you humor us all and waft us your thanks, as we hail you and fall into line, with you over us, waving us on where our glorified, sanctified betters have gone-- and this is the reason we're wanting to know-- (and we're wanting it so-- where our own fathers went we are willing to go)-- who gave you the name of old glory--o-ho!-- who gave you the name of old glory? the old flag unfurled with a billowy thrill for an instant, then wistfully sighed and was still. old glory: the story we're wanting to hear is what the plain facts of your christening were-- for your name--just to hear it, repeat it, and cheer it, 's tang to the spirit as salt as a tear;-- and seeing you fly, and the boys marching by, there's a shout in the throat and a blur in the eye and an aching to live for you always--or die, if dying, we still keep you waving on high. and so, by our love for you, floating above, and the scars of all wars and the sorrows thereof, who gave you the name of old glory, and why are we thrilled at the name of old glory? then the old banner leaped, like a sail in the blast, and fluttered an audible answer at last. and it spake, with a shake of the voice, and it said: by the driven snow-white and the living blood-red of my bars, and their heaven of stars overhead-- by the symbol conjoined of them all, skyward cast, as i float from the steeple, or flap at the mast, or droop o'er the sod where the long grasses nod-- my name is as old as the glory of god. ... so i came by the name of old glory. _james whitcomb riley_ we'll keep old glory flying _song_ we'll keep old glory flying fair, no matter where we are; we'll let the breeze caress each stripe and proudly kiss each star. 'twill never know the despot's heel, this banner of the free. we'll keep old glory flying high, for home and liberty! no matter where we go, or when, no matter where we go, our starry flag in grandeur proud, to us the way will show. on foreign shores, afar from home, we'll carry it on high, and let the foeman know its might-- to honor it or die. _carleton s. montanye_ our country's flag _song_ beneath our country's flag today, we stand a children's band, and to it now in loyalty we pledge each heart and hand. we love its colors as they wave beneath these summer skies, the flag our fathers fought to save is sacred in our eyes. our country's flag, the dear old flag, to it, ev'ry heart beats true! we will follow far each gleaming star, our own red, white and blue. 'neath each clust'ring fold, as in days of old, it will gather those oppressed, and secure from harm and from all alarm, it will bid them safely rest. to its slightest call, we will rally all; ev'ry pledge it makes to keep; and it leads us forth over lands afar, o'er the ocean's blue so deep. _florence l. dresser_ old flag what shall i say to you, old flag? you are so grand in every fold, so linked with mighty deeds of old, so steeped in blood where heroes fell, so torn and pierced by shot and shell, so calm, so still, so firm, so true, my throat swells at the sight of you, old flag. what of the men who lifted you, old flag, upon the top of bunker hill? 'mid shock and roar and crash and scream, who crossed the delaware's frozen stream, who starved, who fought, who bled, who died, that you might float in glorious pride, old flag? what of the women brave and true, old flag, who, while the cannon thundered wild, sent forth a husband, lover, child, who labored in the field by day, who, all the night long, knelt to pray, and thought that god great mercy gave, if only freely you might wave, old flag? what is your mission now, old flag? what but to set all people free, to rid the world of misery, to guard the right, avenge the wrong, and gather in one joyful throng beneath your folds in close embrace all burdened ones of every race, old flag. right nobly do you lead the way, old flag. your stars shine out for liberty, your white stripes stand for purity, your crimson claims that courage high for honor's sake to fight and die. lead on against the alien shore! we'll follow you e'en to death's door, old flag! _hubbard parker_ the unfurling of the flag _song_ there's a streak across the skyline that is gleaming in the sun, watchers from the lighthouse towers signalled it to foreign powers just as daylight had begun, message thrilling, hopes fulfilling to those fighting o'er the seas. "it's the flag we've named old glory that's unfurling to the breeze." can you see the flashing emblem of our country's high ideal? keep your lifted eyes upon it and draw joy and courage from it, for it stands for what is real, freedom's calling to the falling from oppression's hard decrees. it's the flag we've named old glory you see floating in the breeze. glorious flag we raise so proudly, stars and stripes, red, white and blue, you have been the inspiration of an ever growing nation such as this world never knew. peace and justice, freedom, progress, are the blessings we can seize when the flag we call old glory is unfurling to the breeze. when the cry of battling nations reaches us across the space of the wild tumultuous ocean, hearts are stirred with deep emotion for the saving of the race! peace foregoing, aid bestowing, first we drop on bended knees, then with shouts our grand old glory we set flaunting to the breeze! _clara endicott sears_ your flag and my flag your flag and my flag, and how it flies today in your land and my land and half a world away! rose-red and blood-red the stripes forever gleam; snow-white and soul-white-- the good forefathers' dream; sky-blue and true blue, with stars to gleam aright-- the gloried guidon of the day; a shelter through the night. your flag and my flag! and, oh, how much it holds-- your land and my land-- secure within its folds! your heart and my heart beat quicker at the sight; sun-kissed and wind-tossed-- red and blue and white. the one flag--the great flag--the flag for me and you-- glorified all else beside--the red and white and blue! your flag and my flag! to every star and stripe the drums beat as hearts beat and fifers shrilly pipe! your flag and my flag-- a blessing in the sky; your hope and my hope-- it never hid a lie! home land and far land and half the world around, old glory hears our glad salute and ripples to the sound! _wilbur d. nesbit_ our flag there are many flags in many lands, there are flags of every hue, but there is no flag in any land like our own red, white, and blue. then "hurrah for the flag!" our country's flag, its stripes and white stars, too; there is no flag in any land like our own red, white, and blue. _mary howlister_ this flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. it has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. the choices are ours. it floats in majestic silence above the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace or in war. and yet, though silent, it speaks to us--speaks to us of the past, of the men and women who went before us, and of the records they wrote upon it. we celebrate the day of its birth; and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great people. we are about to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will draw the fire of our enemies. we are about to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions, of our men--the young, the strong, the capable men of the nation--to go forth and die beneath it on fields of blood far away.... woe be to the man, or group of men, that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution, when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. we are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a new luster. once more we shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our people. _woodrow wilson_ from flag day address, june , story of the "star spangled banner" in the war of , when an attack was being made upon fort mchenry, mr. key and his friend were on board an american vessel just in sight of the enemy's fleet and the flag of fort mchenry. they remained on board all through the night, holding their breath at every shell that went careering over among their countrymen in the fort, and every moment expecting an explosion. suddenly the firing ceased, and as they had no connection with the enemy's ships they could not find out whether the fort had been abandoned, or the siege given up. for the remainder of the night they paced to and fro upon the deck in terrible anxiety, longing for the return of the day, and looking every few moments at their watches to see how long they must wait for it. light came at last, and they could see that our flag was still there. at length they were told that the attack had failed and that the british were re-embarking. the words of the "star spangled banner" were written by mr. key, as he walked the deck in the darkness and suspense. in less than an hour after it went into the printer's hands it was all over town, was hailed with joy, and at once took its place among our national pieces. ferdinand durag, an actor, saw it, and catching up a volume of flute music, he whistled tune after tune; at length, he chanced upon one called "anacreon in heaven," and as note after note fell from his lips, he cried, "boys, i've hit it!" then, taking up the words, there rang out for the first time the "song of the star spangled banner." how the men shouted and clapped! the actor sang it in public. it was caught up in camps, sung around bivouac fires, and whistled in the streets. when peace was declared and the people scattered to their homes, it was sung around thousands of firesides. the star-spangled banner oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight, o'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? and the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? on the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep, where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, what is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, as it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, in full glory reflected, now shines on the stream; 'tis the star-spangled banner; oh, long may it wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved homes and the war's desolation, blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation. then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: "in god is our trust!" and the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. _francis scott key_ * * * * * a man came from europe to this country, and went to cuba in . he was arrested as a spy, court-martialed and condemned to be shot. he sent for the american and english consuls, and proved to them that he was not a spy. they went to one of the spanish officers and said, "this man you have condemned to be shot is an innocent man." the spanish officer said, "the man has been legally tried by our laws and condemned, and the law must take its course and the man must die." the next morning the man was led out; the grave was already dug for him, the black cap was put on him, the soldiers were there ready to receive the order "fire," and in a few moments the man would be shot and put in that grave. then the american consul took the american flag and wrapped it around the prisoner, and the english consul took the english flag and wrapped it around him, and they said to those soldiers, "fire on those flags if you dare!" not a man dared. why? _there were two great governments behind those flags._ let us love our flag, because behind it is "the greatest of the best and the best of the great of all governments." * * * * * i have told the story of the making of an american. there remains to tell how i found out that he was made and finished at last. it was when i went back to see my mother once more and, wandering about the country of my childhood's memories, had come to the city of elsinore there i fell ill of a fever and lay many weeks in the house of a friend upon the shore of the beautiful oeresund. one day when the fever had left me they rolled my bed into a room overlooking the sea. the sunlight danced upon the waves, and the distant mountains of sweden were blue against the horizon. ships passed under full sail up and down the great waterway of the nations. but the sunshine and the peaceful day bore no message to me. i lay moodily picking at the coverlet, sick and discouraged and sore--i hardly knew why myself. until all at once there sailed past, close in shore, a ship flying at the top the flag of freedom, blown out on the breeze till every star in it shone bright and clear. that moment i knew. gone were illness, discouragement and gloom! forgotten weakness and suffering, the cautions of doctor and nurse. i sat up in bed and shouted, laughed and cried by turns, waving my handkerchief to the flag out there. they thought i had lost my head, but i told them no, thank god! i had found it, and my heart, too, at last. i knew then it was my flag; that my children's home was mine, indeed; that i also had become an american in truth. and i thanked god, and, like unto the man sick of the palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed. _jacob a. riis_ from "the making of an american" the flag goes by hats off! along the street there comes a blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums, a flash of color beneath the sky: hats off! the flag is passing by! blue and crimson and white it shines, over the steel-tipped, ordered lines. hats off! the colors before us fly; but more than the flag is passing by. sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great, fought to make and to save the state: weary marches and sinking ships; cheers of victory on dying lips; days of plenty and years of peace; march of a strong land's swift increase; equal justice, right and law, stately honor and reverend awe; sign of a nation, great and strong to ward her people from foreign wrong; pride and glory and honor--all live in the colors to stand or fall. hats off! along the street there comes a blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums; and loyal hearts are beating high: hats off! the flag is passing by! _henry holcomb bennett_ rules for flag etiquette in no case should the flag be permitted to touch the ground, nor should it be marred by advertisements, nor desecrated on the stage. for indoor decorations the flag should only be used as a drapery; it should not be used to cover a bench or table, or where anything can be placed upon the flag. no words, figures, pictures or marks of any kind should be placed upon the flag. when our national flag and state or other flags fly together, or are used in decoration, our national flag should be on the right. whenever possible the flag should always be allowed to fly in the breeze from a staff or mast, but if it should be necessary to fasten it to the side of a building or platform, it should hang with the blue field at the upper left hand corner. if hung where it can be seen from both sides, the blue field should be toward the east or north. the correct salute to the flag as required by the regulations of the united states army is: standing at attention, raise the right hand to the forehead over the right eye, palm downward, fingers extended and close together, arm at an angle of forty-five degrees. move hand outward about a foot, with a quick motion, then drop it to the side. the oath of allegiance to the flag, adopted by the n. s. d. a. r., and by our military schools, the boy scouts and other organizations, and which should be taught in all our public schools is: "i pledge allegiance to my flag, and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." when the colors are passing on parade or in review, the spectator should, if a man or boy, stand at attention and uncover. when the "star spangled banner" is played, all present should rise and stand at attention until the ending. when the flag is displayed at half mast, for mourning, it is lowered to that position from the top of the staff. it is afterward hoisted to the top before it is finally lowered. when the flag is flown at half staff as a sign of mourning it should be hoisted to full staff at the conclusion of the funeral. when used on a bier or casket at a funeral, the stars should be placed at the head. our most important holidays (when the flag should be displayed at full staff) are: lincoln's birthday, february ; washington's birthday, february ; arbor day; memorial day, may ; flag day, june ; independence day, july ; columbus day, october ; thanksgiving day, and state day. the flag should not be hoisted before sunrise or allowed to remain up after sunset. at "retreat," sunset, civilian spectators should stand at "attention" and the men should remove their hats during the playing of the "star spangled banner." military spectators are required by regulation to stand at "attention" and give the military salute. when the national colors are passing on parade, or in review, spectators should, if walking, halt, and if sitting, rise and stand at attention, the men removing their hats. bibliography see bibliography at end of monograph. bibliography bibliography katharine b. rogers, reference librarian, state library holidays and festivals in general =armstrong, w. c.= patriotic poems of new jersey. new jersey society sons of the american revolution =bacon, corinne=, _comp._ one thousand good books for children. wilson[j] [j] this bibliography contains references to books and parts of books for the different holidays. =bates, e. w. & orr, w.= pageants and pageantry. ginn =bemis, k. i., holtz, m. s. & smith, h. l.= patriotic reader. houghton =broadhurst, jean & rhodes, clara l.= verse for patriots. lippincott =chambers, r.= book of days. lippincott =chubb, percival.= festivals and plays. harper =craig, mrs. a. a.= the dramatic festival. putnam =davis, h. c.= _ed._ three minute declamations for college men. hinds =davis, h. c.= _ed._ three minute readings for college girls. hinds =deems, e. m.= holy-days and holidays. funk =dynes, s. a.= socializing the child. silver burdette (chapters vii and viii for teachers' reading) =horsford, i. m.= stories of our holidays. silver burdette =mackay, c. d.= how to produce children's plays. holt =mackay, c. d.= patriotic plays and pageants. holt =mackay, c. d.= plays of the pioneers. harper =mcspadden, j. w.= book of holidays. crowell =needham, m. m.= folk festivals. huebsch =olcott, f. j.= _ed._ good stories for great holidays. moffat =one= hundred and one famous poems. cable =patten, h. p.= the year's festivals. estes =paulsson, emilie.= holidays songs and everyday songs and games. milton bradley co. =rice, s. s.= holiday selections. penn =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ our american holiday series. moffat separate volumes on arbor day, flag day, lincoln's birthday, memorial day, thanksgiving, washington's birthday =stevenson, b. e.= days and deeds. baker & taylor =stevenson, b. e.= home book of verse. holt =thorp, j. & kimball, r.= patriotic pageants of today. holt =watkins, d. e. & williams, r. e.= the forum of democracy. allyn opening exercises =mcnaught, m. s.= training in courtesy. (u. s. bureau of education bulletin no. , ) columbus day =brooks, e. s.= the true story of christopher columbus. lothrop =colombo, fernando.= the discovery of america; from the life of columbus by his son. (old south leaflets, vol. , no. ) =fiske, john.= the discovery of america. vols. houghton =irving, washington.= columbus; his life and voyages. (heroes of the nation series) =mackie, c. p.= with the admiral of the ocean sea; a narrative of the first voyage to the western world, drawn mainly from the diary of columbus. mcclurg =moores, c. w.= life of christopher columbus for boys and girls. houghton =seelye, mrs. e. e.= the story of columbus. appleton =trenton state normal school--junior class.= columbus day; a dramatic festival. (manuscript at trenton state normal school library) =winsor, justin.= christopher columbus, and how he received and imparted the spirit of discovery. houghton thanksgiving day =kellogg, a. m.= how to celebrate thanksgiving and christmas. penn =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ thanksgiving. moffat =schell, s.= thanksgiving celebrations. werner. =sindelar, j. c.= thanksgiving entertainments. flanagan. =trenton state normal school.= thanksgiving day. crowell publishing co. (woman's home companion) lincoln's birthday =andrews, mary r. s.= the perfect tribute. scribner =arnold, i. n.= life of abraham lincoln. mcclurg =baldwin, james.= four great americans, washington, franklin, webster, lincoln. american book co. =brooks, e. s.= the true story of abraham lincoln. lothrop =brooks, noah.= abraham lincoln, and the downfall of american slavery. putnam =coffin, c. c.= abraham lincoln. harper =gordy, w. f.= abraham lincoln. scribner =hill, f. t.= lincoln, the lawyer. houghton =mackaye, percy.= lincoln centenary ode. macmillan =moores, c. w.= life of abraham lincoln for boys and girls. houghton =morgan, james.= abraham lincoln, the boy and the man. macmillan =morse, j. t.= abraham lincoln. vols. houghton =nicolay, j. g.= boy's life of abraham lincoln. century =nicolay, j. g.= short life of abraham lincoln. century =nicolay, j. g. & hay, john.= abraham lincoln. vols. century =nicolay, j. g. & hay, john.= complete works of abraham lincoln. vols. century =putnam, m. l.= children's life of abraham lincoln. mcclurg =robinson, l. e.= abraham lincoln as a man of letters. reilly =rothschild, alonzo.= lincoln, master of men. lane =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ lincoln's birthday. moffat =schurz, carl.= abraham lincoln. houghton =selby, paul.= anecdotal lincoln. thompson =tarbell, i. m.= life of abraham lincoln. vols. doubleday =whipple, wayne.= the story-life of lincoln. winston washington's birthday =brooks, e. s.= the true story of george washington. lothrop =carrington, h. b.= washington, the soldier. scribner =ford, p. l.= the true george washington. lippincott =ford, w. c.= george washington. small =hapgood, norman.= george washington. macmillan =haworth, p. l.= george washington: farmer. bobbs-merrill =headley, j. t.= washington and his generals. scribner =hill, f. t.= on the trail of washington. appleton =irving, washington.= life of george washington. vols. putnam =irving, washington.= washington and his country. ("life" abridged for schools) ginn =kellogg, a. m.= how to celebrate washington's birthday. penn =lodge, h. c.= george washington. vols. houghton =mackaye, percy.= washington, the man who made us. knopf =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ washington's birthday. moffat =scudder, h. e.= george washington. houghton =seawell, m. e.= virginia cavalier. harper =seelye, mrs. e. e.= story of washington. appleton =sindelar, j. c.= washington day entertainments. flanagan. =trent, w. p.= southern statesmen of the old régime. crowell =van dyke, henry.= americanism of washington. harper =whipple, wayne.= story-life of washington. vols. winston arbor day =revell, e. i.= arbor day exercises for the schoolroom. educational publishing co. =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ arbor day. moffat =skinner, c. r.= arbor day manual. bardeen memorial day =andrews, m. p.= the american's creed and its meaning. doubleday =hale, e. e.= the man without a country =revell, e. i.= memorial day exercises for the schoolroom. educational publishing co. =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ memorial day. moffat =united states committee on public information.= battle line of democracy flag day =canby, george & balderston, lloyd.= evolution of the american flag. ferris & leach =harrison, p. d.= the stars and stripes and other american flags. little, brown & co. =holden, e. s.= our country's flag and the flags of foreign countries. appleton =ide, e. k.= history and significance of the american flag. (published by the author) =national geographic magazine.= flag number, october =preble, g. h.= history of the flag of the united states of america, and other national flags. williams =schauffler, r. h.= _ed._ flag day. moffat =schell, stanley.= flag day program. werner =stewart, c. w.= the stars and stripes. boylston publishing co. =tappan, e. m.= little book of the flag. houghton =u. s. navy department.= flags of the maritime nations index adams, john, address to america, walt whitman, after the great companions, frank crane, america, william cullen bryant, america's answer, r. w. lillard, arbor day, - babcock, maltbie d., bailey, baker, george c., battle hymn of the republic, julia ward howe, beecher, henry ward, , bennett, henry holcomb, bibliography, katharine b. rogers, - bixby letter, abraham lincoln, blue and the gray, the, francis miles finch, boy columbus, the, boy that hungered for knowledge, the, bridges, madeline s., bryant, william cullen, bryce, james, butterworth, hezekiah, campbell, mary r., cat and his servant, the, alice lewis, chastelleux, marquis, chew, hannah h., - choate, rufus, civility, selections from rules of, collins, william, columbus, christopher, a dreamer they called him, columbus and the egg, columbus dared to cross the sea, columbus sailed over waters blue, columbus was a sailor bold, crowning columbus, discovery day, i'll wave my flag for discovery day, my beautiful flag, my little ship, we are jolly little sailors, what we can do, columbus, joaquin miller, columbus day, fitchburg (massachusetts) normal school, ; j. cayce morrison, - columbus game, columbus play, mary r. campbell, cotton, history of, bessie o'hagen, courtesy is to do and say, crane, frank, davis, k. c., depew, chauncey mitchell, discovery day, discovery of america, washington irving, dresser, florence l., emerson, ralph waldo, , fabricant, josephine m., farber, florence l., finch, francis miles, fitchburg (massachusetts) normal school, flag, american, brief history of, edward s. holden, flag, story about, flag day, hannah h. chew, - flag etiquette, rules for, flag goes by, henry holcomb bennett, flag of spain, folsom, joseph fulford, forests, value of, u. s. bureau of education, foster, henry w., froude, james anthony, gaskill, alfred, gettysburg speech, abraham lincoln, gordon, charles c., gordon, john b., green, j. r., , gregg, david, guitteau, william backus, hale, edward everett, hamilton grove, planting of, charles a. philhower, harte, bret, haver, jennie, hay, john, hazard, caroline, holden, edward s., houghton, george w. w., howe, julia ward, howlister, mary, i have a son, emory pottle, if you have faith, immortal morn, hezekiah butterworth, in flanders fields, john mccrae, irving, washington, , jusserand, j. j., kendall, c. n., , , , key, francis scott, kilmer, joyce, kindness is catching, kipling, rudyard, lane, franklin k., , lee, henry, lewis, alice, lillard, r. w., lincoln, abraham, , , lincoln, acrostic, lincoln and judge b. ... swap horses, lincoln's autobiography, lincoln's birthday, charles a. philhower, - lincoln's honesty, lincoln's humor, lincoln's kindness of heart, lincoln's speeches, sayings from, logan, john a., london newspaper, lossing, benson j., lowell, james russell, mccrae, john, mcspadden, j. walker, makers of the flag, franklin k. lane, memorial day, george c. baker, - miller, joaquin, montanye, carleton s., morning exercises, florence l. farber, ; jennie haver, morrison, j. cayce, name of old glory, james whitcomb riley, nesbit, wilbur d., o captain, my captain, walt whitman, o'hagen, bessie, old flag, hubbard parker, on a portrait of columbus, george edward woodberry, opening exercises, - ; ---- louis h. burch, our country's flag, florence l. dresser, our flag, mary howlister, our national ideals, william backus gitteau, parker, hubbard, philhower, charles a., , pottle, emory, recessional, rudyard kipling, reveille, the, bret harte, riis, jacob a., riley, james whitcomb, rogers, katharine b., sailor, story of, sears, clara endicott, second inaugural address, abraham lincoln, service flag, the, josephine m. fabricant, service flag, the, u. s. bulletin, shaffer, roy l., - shakespeare, william, sleep of the brave, the, william collins, smith, laura rountree, , somebody did a golden deed, star spangled banner, francis scott key, "star spangled banner," story of, stars and stripes, henry ward beecher, stelzle, charles, stevenson, robert louis, stewart, judd, suggestions to teachers, k. c. davis, thanksgiving day, roy l. shaffer, - thayer, louis e., there's so much bad, thing to do is hope, the, thompson, james, thwing, e. p., trees, joyce kilmer, trees and forests, alfred gaskill, truth is honest, u. s. bureau of education, unfinished work, joseph fulford folsom, unfurling of the flag, the, clara endicott sears, van dyke, henry, , washington, abraham lincoln, washington, george, life of, j. walker mcspadden, how did george washington look, lend a hand, washington as he looked, washington's birthday, henry w. foster, - washington's farewell address, washington's farewell to the army, washington's sayings, we thank thee, ralph waldo emerson, we'll keep old glory flying, carleton s. montanye, western land, the, caroline hazard, whitman, walt, , wilson, james grant, wilson, woodrow, , wise old owl, a, woodberry, george edward, woodbury, ida vose, wordsworth, william, your flag and my flag, wilbur d. nesbit, * * * * * available by internet archive (https://archive.org) note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ / -h.zip) images of the original pages are available through internet archive. see https://archive.org/details/feedingofschoolc bulkuoft transcriber's note: text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). the feeding of school children the ratan tata foundation (university of london) the feeding of school children by mildred emily bulkley with an introductory note by r. h. tawney director of the ratan tata foundation london g. bell and sons, ltd. the ratan tata foundation _honorary director_: professor l. t. hobhouse, m.a., d.lit. _honorary secretary_: professor e. j. urwick, m.a. _director_: mr. r. h. tawney, b.a. _secretary_: miss m. e. bulkley, b.sc. the ratan tata foundation has been instituted in order to promote the study and further the knowledge of methods of preventing and relieving poverty and destitution. for the furtherance of this purpose the foundation conducts inquiries into wages and the cost of living, methods of preventing and diminishing unemployment, measures affecting the health and well-being of workers, public and private agencies for the relief of destitution, and kindred matters. the results of its principal researches will be published in pamphlet or book form; it will also issue occasional notes on questions of the day under the heading of "memoranda on problems of poverty." in addition to these methods of publishing information, the officers of the foundation will, as far as is in their power, send replies to individual inquiries relating to questions of poverty and destitution, their causes, prevention and relief, whether at home or abroad. such inquiries should be addressed to the secretary of the ratan tata foundation, school of economics, clare market, kingsway, w.c. the officers are also prepared to supervise the work of students wishing to engage in research in connection with problems of poverty. courses of lectures will also be given from time to time, which will be open to the public. already published. "_some notes on the incidence of taxation on the working-class family._" by f. w. kolthammer, m.a. d. "_the health and physique of school children._" by arthur greenwood, b.sc. s. "_poverty as an industrial problem_": _an inaugural lecture_. by r. h. tawney, b.a. d. "_studies in the minimum wage._" no. . the establishment of minimum rates in the chain-making industry under the trade boards act of . by r. h. tawney, b.a. s. d. net. "_the feeding of school children._" by miss m. e. bulkley, b.a., b.sc. s. d. net. to appear shortly "_studies in the minimum wage._" no. . the establishment of minimum rates in the tailoring trade. by r. h. tawney, b.a. preface in the collection of the material on which the following pages are based i have received assistance from so many persons that it is impossible to thank them all individually. i gratefully acknowledge the unfailing courtesy of officials of local education authorities, school medical officers, secretaries of care committees and many others, who have always been most ready to supply me with information as to the working of the provision of meals act, and to show me the feeding centres. my thanks are due especially to the students of the social science department of the school of economics, who have assisted in collecting and arranging the material, especially to miss ruth giles, miss a. l. hargrove, and miss p. m. bisgood, the first chapter being very largely the work of miss giles; mrs. leslie mackenzie, mr. i. h. cunningham, miss cecil young and mrs. f. h. spencer have also kindly collected local information. i am greatly indebted to mr. r. h. tawney for much valuable advice and co-operation, and to mr. and mrs. sidney webb and dr. kerr for reading through the proofs. i should add that the enquiry was made during the course of the year and the account of the provision made refers to that date. m. e. bulkley. contents preface vii introduction by r. h. tawney xi chapter i. the history of the movement for the provision of school meals provision by voluntary agencies--the organisation of the voluntary agencies--the demand for state provision--provision by the guardians--the education (provision of meals) act. chapter ii. the administration of the education (provision of meals) act the adoption of the act--canteen committees, their constitution and functions--the selection of the children--the preparation and service of the meals--the provision of meals during the holidays--the provision for paying children and recovery of the cost--overlapping between the poor law and the education authorities--the provision of meals at day industrial schools and at special schools--the underfed child in rural schools--conclusions. chapter iii. the provision of meals in london the organisation of voluntary agencies--the assumption of responsibility by the county council--the extent of the provision--the care committee--the provision for paying children--the service of the meals--overlapping with the poor law authority--appendix (examples of feeding centres). chapter iv. the extent and causes of malnutrition chapter v. the effect of school meals on the children chapter vi. the effect on the parents chapter vii. conclusions appendix i.--examples of menus appendix ii.--the provision of meals in scotland appendix iii.--the provision of meals abroad introduction the provision of meals for school children, which is the subject of the following pages, is still undergoing that process of tentative transformation from a private charity to a public service by which we are accustomed to disguise the assumption of new responsibilities by the state. begun in the 'sixties of the nineteenth century as a form of philanthropic effort, and denounced from time to time as socialistic and subversive of family life, it first attracted serious public attention when the south african war made the physical defects caused by starvation, which had been regarded with tolerance in citizens, appear intolerable in soldiers, and was canvassed at some length in the well-known reports of the royal commission on physical training in scotland and of the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration. the first disposition of the authorities was, as usual, to recur to that maid-of-all-work, the poor law, and in april, , the relief (school children) order empowered the guardians to grant relief to the child of an able-bodied man without requiring him to enter the workhouse or to perform the outdoor labour test, provided that they took steps to recover the cost. the guardians, however, perhaps happily, had little sympathy for this deviation from the principle of deterrence, with the result that the new order was in most places either not applied or applied with insignificant results. the consequence was that the attempt to make the provision of meals for school children part of the poor law was abandoned. in the education (provision of meals) act was passed empowering local education authorities to provide food, either in co-operation with voluntary agencies or out of public funds, up to the limit of a half-penny rate. in the year - , out of authorities, were returned as making some provision for the feeding of school children. the object of miss bulkley's monograph is to describe what that provision is, how adequate or inadequate, how systematic or haphazard, and to examine its effect on the welfare both of the children concerned, and of the general community. the present work is, therefore, complementary to mr. greenwood's _health and physique of school children_, which was recently published by the ratan tata foundation, and which gave an exhaustive description of the conditions of school children in respect of health as revealed by the reports of school medical officers. that the subject with which miss bulkley deals is one of the first importance, few, whatever views may be held as to the act of , will be found to deny. almost all the medical authorities who have made a study of the health and physique of school children are unanimous that a capital cause of ill-health among them is lack of the right kind of food. "defective nutrition," states sir george newman, "stands in the forefront as the most important of all physical defects from which school children suffer.... from a purely scientific point of view, if there was one thing he was allowed to do for the six million children if he wanted to rear an imperial race, it would be to feed them.... the great, urgent, pressing need was nutrition. with that they could get better brains and a better race." "apart from infectious diseases," said dr. collie before the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration, "malnutrition is accountable for nine-tenths of child sickness." "food," dr. eichholz told the same body, "is at the base of all the evils of child degeneracy." "the sufficient feeding of children," declared dr. niven, the medical officer of health for manchester, "is by far the most important thing to attend to." "to educate underfed children," said dr. leslie mackenzie, "is to promote deterioration of physique by exhausting the nervous system. education of the underfed is a positive evil." what doctors understand by malnutrition is what the plain man calls starvation; and while it is, of course, due to other causes besides actual inability to procure sufficient food, the experience of those authorities which have undertaken the provision of meals in a thorough and systematic manner suggests that these statements as to the prevalence of malnutrition or starvation are by no means exaggerations. to say, as has recently been said by a writer of repute in the _economic journal_, "already , children are fed weekly at the schools without appreciably improving the situation," is a ridiculous misstatement of the facts. on the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in those areas where suitable and sufficient meals have been provided, there has been a marked improvement in the health of the children receiving them. the tentative conclusions on this point given for a single city by mr. greenwood (_health and physique of school children_, pp. - ), are substantiated by the fuller evidence which miss bulkley sets out in chapter v. of the present work. "as far as the children are concerned, indeed, whether we consider the improvement in physique, mental capacity or manners, there is no doubt that the provision of school meals has proved of the greatest benefit." but while there is little doubt that the authorities which have made determined attempts to use to the full their powers under the act of have been rewarded by an improvement in the health of the children attending school, miss bulkley's enquiries show that the act itself is open to criticism, that many local authorities who ought to have welcomed the new powers conferred by the act have been deterred by a mean and short-sighted parsimony from adopting it, and that in many areas where it has been adopted its administration leaves much to be desired. the limitation to a halfpenny rate of the amount which a local authority may spend, has resulted in more than one authority stopping meals in spite of the existence of urgent need for them. by deciding--contrary, it would appear, to the intention of parliament--that local authorities cannot legally spend money on providing meals except when the children are actually in school, the local government board has made impossible, except at the risk of a surcharge or at the cost of private charity, the provision of meals during holidays. to those who regard the whole policy of the act of as a mistake, these limitations upon it will appear, of course, to be an advantage. but the assumption on which the act is based is that it is in the public interest that provision should be made for children who would otherwise be underfed, and, granted this premise, the wisdom of intervening to protect ratepayers against their own too logical deductions from it would appear to be as questionable as it is unnecessary. the bad precedent of authorities such as leicester, which has refused to adopt the act, and which leaves the feeding of school children to be carried out by a voluntary organisation under whose management the application for meals is in effect discouraged, does not, unfortunately, stand alone. of more than authorities who have made no use of their statutory powers, how many are justified in their inaction by the absence of distress among the school children in their area? how many have even taken steps to ascertain whether such distress exists or not? if it is the case, as is stated by high medical authorities, that "the education of the underfed is a positive evil," would not the natural corollary appear to be that, now that the experimental stage has been passed, the act should be made obligatory and the provision of meals should become a normal part of the school curriculum? apart from these larger questions of policy, it will be agreed that, if local authorities are to feed children at all, it is desirable that they should do so in the way calculated to produce the beneficial results upon the health of school children which it is the object of the act to secure. that certain authorities have been strikingly successful in providing good food under humanising conditions appears from the account of the effects of school meals given by miss bulkley. but the methods pursued in the selection of the children and in the arrangements made for feeding them vary infinitely from place to place, and the standards of efficiency with which many authorities are content appear to be lamentably low. it is evident that in many places a large number of children who need food are overlooked, either because the conditions are such as to deter parents from applying for meals, or because no attempt is made to use the medical service to discover the needs of children whose parents have not applied, or for both reasons (pp. - ). it is evident also that many authorities do not give sufficient attention to the character of the meals provided (pp. - ), or to the conditions under which they are served (pp. - ), with the result that "most diets ... are probably wanting in value for the children," and that little attempt is made to secure the "directly educational effect ... in respect of manners and conduct," which was emphasised as a _desideratum_ by the board of education. london, in particular, where the necessity for the provision of meals is conspicuous, has won a bad pre-eminence by sinning against light. reluctant, in the first place, to use its powers at all--"the whole question," said the chairman of the sub-committee on underfed children in , "of deciding which children are underfed, and of making special provision for such children, should really be one for the poor law authority"--the education committee of the london county council has taken little pains to ensure that the food provided should always be suitable, or that the meals should be served under civilising conditions. that these defects can be removed by care and forethought is shown by the example set by such towns as bradford, and now that eight years have elapsed since the education (provision of meals) act was passed, they should cease to receive the toleration which may reasonably be extended to new experiments. miss bulkley's monograph will have served its purpose if it makes it somewhat easier for the administrator, whether on education authorities or care committees, in public offices or in parliament itself, to apply the varied experience of the last eight years to a problem whose solution is an indispensable condition of the progress of elementary education. r. h. tawney. heights and weights of children from secondary schools and , from elementary schools in liverpool. boys age secondary council a council b council c schools ft. in. ft. in. ft. in. ft. in. · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · · girls age council a council b council c ft. in. ft. in. ft. in. · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · - / · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · - / · · · · · boys age secondary council a council b council c schools st. lb. st. lb. st. lb. st. lb. · · - / · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · -- - / · · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · · · girls age council a council b council c st. lb. st. lb. st. lb. · - / · · · · - / · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · · · - / · · · · a is a school where the parents were comparatively well-to-do and the children mostly had comfortable homes. b is a school where the parents were mostly small shopkeepers or labourers in constant employment. c is a school where the parents were mostly unemployed or casually employed. chapter i the history of the movement for the provision of school meals the latter half of the nineteenth century was remarkable for the birth of a new social conscience manifesting itself in every kind of social movement. some were mere outbursts of sentimentality, pauperising and patronising, others indicated real care and sympathy for the weaker members of society, others again a love of scientific method and order. thus in the early 'sixties there was an enormous growth in the amount spent in charity, leading to hopeless confusion. an attempt to introduce some order into this chaos and to stem the tide of indiscriminate almsgiving was made in by the formation of the "society for the prevention of pauperism and crime," which split the following year into the industrial employment association and the better known charity organisation society. in the 'eighties "slumming" became a fashionable occupation, while saw the beginning of the settlement movement in the foundation of toynbee hall. meanwhile the working classes were becoming articulate, learning more self-reliance and mutual dependence. the growth of trade unions, of co-operative and friendly societies, showed how the working people were beginning to work out their own salvation. towards the close of the century methods of improvement were nearly all on collectivist lines--in sanitary reform, in free education, in the agitation for a legal limitation of labour to eight hours a day, for a minimum wage and for old age pensions. amongst the most characteristic of these activities was the movement for the feeding of poor school children. in the early years of the movement the motives were chiefly philanthropic. the establishment of the ragged and other schools had brought under the notice of teachers and others large numbers of children, underfed and ill-clothed. still more was this the case when education was made compulsory under the education act of . it was impossible for humanitarians to attempt to educate these children without at the same time trying to alleviate their distress. education, in fact, proved useless if the child was starving; more, it might be positively detrimental, since the effort to learn placed on the child's brain a task greater than it could bear. all these early endeavours to provide meals were undertaken by voluntary agencies. their operations were spasmodic and proved totally inadequate to cope with the evil. towards the end of the century we find a growing insistence on the doctrine that it was the duty of the state to ensure that the children for whom it provided education should not be incapable, through lack of food, of profiting by that education. on the one hand some socialists demanded that the state ought itself to provide food for all its elementary school children. another school of reformers urged that voluntary agencies might in many areas deal with the question, but that where their resources proved inadequate the state must step in and supplement them. others again objected to any public provision of meals on the ground that it would undermine parental responsibility. the demand that the state must take some action was strengthened by the alarm excited during the south african war by the difficulty experienced in securing recruits of the requisite physique. the importance of the physical condition of the masses of the population was thus forced upon public attention. it was urged that the child was the material for the future generation, and that a healthy race could not be reared if the children were chronically underfed. in the result parliament yielded to the popular demand, and by the education (provision of meals) act of gave power to the local education authorities to assist voluntary agencies in the work of providing meals, and if necessary themselves to provide food out of the rates. (a)--provision by voluntary agencies. the first experiments in the provision of free or cheap dinners for school children appear to date from the early 'sixties.[ ] one of the earliest and most important of the london societies was the destitute children's dinner society, founded in february, , in connection with a ragged school in westminster.[ ] this society quickly grew and, between october and april , fifty-eight dining rooms were opened for longer or shorter periods.[ ] the motive, though largely sentimental, was from the first supported by educational considerations. "their almost constant destitution of food," write the committee in their appeal for funds, "is not only laying the foundation of permanent disease in their debilitated constitutions, but reduces them to so low a state that they have not vigour of body or energy of mind sufficient to derive any profit from the exertions of their teachers."[ ] the influence of the newly-formed charity organisation society is seen in the nervous anxiety of the promoters to avoid the charge of pauperising. "our object is not the indiscriminate relief of the multitude of poor children to be found in the lowest parts of the metropolis. our efforts are limited to those in attendance at ragged or other schools so as to encourage and assist the moral and religious training thus afforded."[ ] the dinners were not self-supporting,[ ] but a great point was made of the fact that a penny was charged towards paying the cost. nevertheless the promoters admitted that "it has been found impossible in some localities to obtain any payment from the children."[ ] footnote : "many of our own [roman catholic] schools ... fed the children even in the 'sixties." (report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , evidence of monsignor brown, q. .) footnote : it is interesting to note that the impulse for the formation of this society came indirectly from france. in a commission of medical and scientific men had been appointed by the french government to enquire into the causes of diseases, such as scrofula, rickets, and impoverishment of blood, to which children of the poor were exposed, and which produced so much mortality. the committee reported that in their opinion the diseases were caused by children not having animal food, and might be checked by their having a meal of fresh meat once a month. owing to political events no action was taken on this report, but it made a great impression on victor hugo, and some fourteen years later (in ) he started the experiment of giving dinners of fresh meat and a small glass of wine, once a fortnight, to forty of the most necessitous young children of guernsey. this experiment was declared to be very successful. many children suffering from the above diseases had been cured, "and the physical constitution of nearly the whole of them sensibly improved" (_punch_, january , ). this description concluded with a suggestion that a similar scheme might be initiated in london. the destitute children's dinner society was the result. (_charity organisation review_, january, , p. .) footnote : report on metropolitan soup kitchens and dinner tables, by the society for organising charitable relief, , p. . footnote : _the times_, december , . footnote : _ibid._, november , . the following year the charity organisation society reports approvingly that the destitute children's dinner society "cordially accepts and endeavours to act up to the principle that 'to relieve destitution belongs to the poor law, while to prevent destitution is the peculiar function of charity.'" (report on metropolitan soup kitchens and dinner tables, , p. .) footnote : the cost of a meal was generally d., d. or d. footnote : _the times_, april , . the methods adopted by other societies were very similar. a common feature of all was the infrequency of the meal. as a rule a child would receive a dinner once a week, at the most twice a week.[ ] it is true that the dinners, unlike those supplied at the end of the century, when the predominant feature was soup, seem always to have been substantial and to have consisted of hot meat.[ ] but making all allowance for the nutritive value of the meal, its infrequency prevents us from placing much confidence in the enthusiastic reports of the various societies as to the beneficial result upon the children. "experience has proved," writes the destitute children's dinner society in , "that one substantial meat dinner per week has a marked effect on the health and powers of the children."[ ] "not only is there a marked improvement in their physical condition," reports the same society two years later, "but their teachers affirm that they are now enabled to exert their mental powers in a degree which was formerly impossible."[ ] the ragged school union in reports to the same effect. "the physical benefit of these dinners to the children is great; but it is not the body only that is benefited; the teachers agree in their opinion that those who are thus fed become more docile and teachable."[ ] footnote : we have only found one case where the dinner was given as often as three times a week. (see letter from john palmer, hon. sec. of the clare market ragged schools, _ibid._, october , .) footnote : thus a dinner given by the refuge for homeless and destitute children to pupils of st. giles and st. george, bloomsbury, consisted of boiled and roast beef, plenty of potatoes, and a thick slice of bread, the portion given to each child being abundant. (_ibid._, november , .) footnote : _ibid._, december , . footnote : _ibid._, march , . footnote : report of ragged school union for , quoted in report on metropolitan soup kitchens and dinner tables, , p. . meals were given only during the winter, though one society at any rate, the destitute children's dinner society, realised the importance of continuing the work throughout the year--an importance even now not universally appreciated--their object being "not to relieve temporary distress only, but by an additional weekly meal of good quality and quantity, to improve the general health and moral condition of the half starved and neglected children who swarm throughout the poor districts of london."[ ] funds apparently did not permit of their achieving this object.[ ] footnote : letter from the treasurer of the destitute children's dinner society, _the times_, april , . footnote : in that year ( ) dinners were given during nine months, being discontinued only from july to september, but in subsequent years they appear to have been provided during the winter months only. after the passing of the education act of , educational considerations became the dominant motive for feeding. teachers and school managers as well as philanthropists found themselves increasingly compelled to deal with the problem. it was not only that compulsory education brought into notice hundreds of needy children who had before been hidden away in courts and back alleys,[ ] but the effect of education on a starving child proved useless. footnote : "at the present season, when the energy of the school board visitors is filling the schools with all the poorest of the poor street arabs, the need of such a society as this is more than ever felt." (letter from the committee of the destitute children's dinner society, _the times_, december , .) the _referee_ fund, started in , was the result of mrs. burgwin's experience when head teacher of orange street school, southwark. she found the children in a deplorable condition and on appealing to a medical man for advice was told that they were simply starving. with the help of her assistant teachers she provided tea, coffee or warm milk for the most needy. soon a small local organisation was started, and a year or two after mr. g. r. sims drew public attention to the question by his articles on "how the poor live," and appealed for funds through the _referee_.[ ] the operations of the fund thus established were at first confined to west southwark--"in that area," mrs. burgwin triumphantly declared, "there was not a hungry school child"[ ]--but were gradually extended to other districts. as a result of the meals thus provided it was said that the children looked healthier and attended school better in the winter when they were being fed than they did in the summer.[ ] footnote : london school board, report of special committee on underfed children, , appendix , p. . footnote : report of inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , vol. ii., q. . footnote : london school board, report of special committee on underfed children, , appendix , p. . the standard example, however, constantly quoted as evidence of the value of school meals, was the experiment started by sir henry peek at rousdon in . the children in that district had to walk long distances to school, "bringing with them wretched morsels of food for dinner," with, naturally, most unsatisfactory results. sir henry peek provided one good meal a day for five days, charging one penny a day. the system was practically self-supporting. the experiment was declared by the inspector to have "turned out a very great success. what strikes one at once on coming into the school is the healthy vigorous look of the children, and that their vigour is not merely bodily, but comes out in the course of examination. there is a marked contrast between their appearance and their work on the day of inspection, and those of the children in many of the neighbouring schools. the midday meal is good and without stint. it acts as an attraction, and induces regularity of attendance.... before the school was started the education of the children of the neighbourhood was as low as in any part of the district."[ ] footnote : mr. mundella in the house of commons, _hansard_, july , , rd series, vol. , pp. - . "the effect on the health of the children," writes the rector of rousdon in january, , "may be well exemplified by the most recent illustration--viz., that in the third week of december, though whooping-cough had been, and still was, prevalent among them, and the weather was damp and raw, the entry on the master's weekly report was, absentees, --that is, _every_ child on the register had appeared on the monday morning and paid for its week's dinners. probably such a circumstance in a rural school district (with radius of a mile and a half at least) in the height of winter is unprecedented." (_sanitary record_, january , .) about another motive for school meals emerges. public opinion began to be aroused on the subject of over-pressure. it was said that far too many subjects were taught and that the system of "payment by results" forced the teachers to overwork the children for the sake of the grant. it was pointed out that not only was it useless to try to educate a starving child, but the results might be positively harmful. numerous letters from school managers, doctors and others appeared in _the times_. "in dispensary practice," writes dr. sophia jex-blake, "i have lately seen several cases of habitual headache and other cerebral affections among children of all ages attending our board schools, and have traced their origin to overstrain caused by the ordinary school work, which the ill-nourished physical frames are often quite unfit to bear. i have spoken repeatedly on the subject to members of the school boards, and also to teachers in the schools, and have again and again been assured by them that they were quite alive to the danger, and heartily wished that it was in their power to avert it, but that the constantly advancing requirements of the education code left them no option in the matter."[ ] footnote : _the times_, april , . speaking of the children at london hospitals, dr. robert farquharson writes: "ill-fed and badly housed and clothed, exposed to depressing sanitary and domestic conditions, these poor creatures are frequently expected to do an amount of school work of which their badly-nourished brains are utterly incapable. i have long been familiar with the pale, dejected look, the chronic headache, the sleeplessness, the loss of appetite, the general want of tone, caused undoubtedly by the undue exercise of nervous tissues unprovided with their proper allowance of healthy food." such children "are by no means inclined to shirk their lessons; they are frequently much interested in them; but, feeling the responsibility of class and examinations keenly ... they become sleepless and restless, and rapidly lose flesh and strength." (_ibid._, april , .) _the lancet_ spoke strongly on the subject[ ] and in it was hotly discussed in parliament. mr. mundella spoke in warm praise of sir henry peek's experiment, while mr. s. smith, the member for liverpool, went so far as to say that "if parliament compelled persons by force of law to send their children to school, and the little ones were to be forced to undergo such a grinding system, they ought not to injure them in so doing, but should provide them, in cases of proved necessity, with sufficient nourishment to enable them to stand the pressure."[ ] such a proposition sounds "advanced" for the year , but he added the still more modern suggestion--"that not only should we have a medical inspection of schools, but that the grants should be partly dependent upon the physical health of the children.... we were applying sanitary science to our great towns, and we should apply the same science also to the educational system of the country."[ ] at last mr. mundella instigated dr. crichton browne to undertake a private enquiry into the subject. the report was somewhat vague and rhetorical, and dr. browne's judgments were said to be based on insufficient data, so that little fresh light was thrown on the question. it is, however, noteworthy that he too recommended medical inspection and also that a record of the height, weight and chest girth of the children should be kept.[ ] footnote : "that good feeding is necessary for brain nutrition does not need to be demonstrated or even argued at length ... it must be evident that the position in which education places the brains of underfed children is that of a highly-exercised organ urgently requiring food, and finding none or very little. these children are _growing_, and all or nearly all the food they can get is appropriated by the grosser and bulkier parts of the body to the starvation of the brain.... it is cruel to educate a growing child unless you are also prepared to feed him." (leading article, _the lancet_, august , , vol. ii., pp. - .) footnote : _hansard_, july , , rd series, vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _the times_, september , . in spite of conflicting opinions, one point became increasingly clear. whether the amount of mental strain necessitated by the educational code was exaggerated or not, there was no doubt that good educational results were dependent upon health and could not be attained where the children were seriously underfed. the situation was summed up by mr. sydney buxton during a conference of managers and teachers of london board schools in . the school boards, he said, had by their compulsory powers been "year by year tapping a lower stratum of society, bringing to light the distress, destitution and underfeeding which formerly had escaped their notice. the cry of over-pressure had drawn public attention to the children attending elementary schools, and he thought it was now becoming more and more recognised that 'over-pressure' in a very large number of cases was only another word for 'underfeeding.'"[ ] footnote : _school board chronicle_, december , , pp. - . the principle that compulsory education involved some provision of food being thus generally admitted,[ ] the question remained how was this to be done? should the meals be provided free or should they be self-supporting? a keen controversy ensued as to the merits of penny dinners. _the times_ quoted with apparent astonishment and alarm the view of the minister of education that it would not be enough to provide meals for those who could pay for them, and that whatever might be the vices of the parents the children ought not to suffer.[ ] the charity organisation society held more than one conference on the subject and emphatically contended that the only means of avoiding "pauperisation" was to insist on payment for the meals. indeed some members felt so strongly that penny dinners were bound to be converted into halfpenny or free dinners, that they were reluctant to give the movement any support at all.[ ] the attitude of the society was, as _the times_ said, "one of watchful criticism."[ ] yet there were some, at any rate, who recognised that the obligation on the part of the parent to send his children to school involved a very real pecuniary sacrifice which might often more than counterbalance any advantage to be obtained from free meals. "we must not teach poor children or poor parents to lean upon charity," says the school board chronicle in . "but, on the other hand, it ought never to be forgotten that this new law of compulsory attendance at school, in the making whereof the poorest classes of the people had no hand whatever, exacts greater sacrifices from that class than from any other. we hear a good deal sometimes ... of the grumbling of the ratepayers ... as to the burden of the school rate.... but do these grumblers ever reflect that the very poor of whom we are speaking never asked to have education provided for their children, never wanted it, have practically nothing to gain by it and much to lose, and that this law of compulsory education is forced on them, not for their good or for their pleasure, but for the safety and progress of society and for the sake of economy in the administration of the laws in the matter of poor relief and crime."[ ] amidst all the discussion on the needs and morals of the poor from the standpoint of the superior person, it is refreshing to find so honest and sympathetic a criticism. footnote : "it is now admitted that children cannot be expected to learn their lessons unless they are properly fed." (_the times_, leading article, december , .) footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _charity organisation review_, january, , p. . as we shall see (post, p. ), their fears in this respect were realised. footnote : _the times_, leading article, january , . footnote : _the school board chronicle_, december , , p. . the outcome of this lengthy public discussion was a great increase in voluntary feeding agencies all over the country about the year .[ ] at the conference of board school managers and teachers in that year, mr. mundella stated that, since he referred in the house of commons to the rousdon experiment, provision for school meals was being made in rural districts to an extent which he could hardly believe.[ ] in london the council for promoting self-supporting penny dinners was established and the movement spread rapidly. in august, , there were only two centres where penny dinners on a self-supporting basis were provided. by december such dinners had been started in thirteen other districts.[ ] footnote : such voluntary agencies were established, for instance, at hastings (about ), at birmingham and gateshead (in ), at carlisle (in ). footnote : _school board chronicle_, december , , pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, p. . meanwhile the promoters of free meals continued their work unabashed. the board school children's free dinner fund declared in , "our work does not cross the lines of the penny dinner movement. it was started before that movement and has been in some cases carried on side by side with it, its object being to feed those children whose parents have neither pennies nor half-pennies to pay for their dinners. free dinners are restricted to the children of widows, and to those whose parents are ill or out of work."[ ] the _referee_ fund now supplied schools over a large part of south london and had always given free meals. in most provincial towns, whether the dinners were nominally self-supporting or not, necessitous children were seldom refused food on account of inability to pay. private philanthropists saw the suffering and tried to alleviate it, not enquiring too closely into the consequences. footnote : _the times_, december , . it was generally taken for granted that the meals, whether free or self-supporting, should be provided by voluntary agencies. the local education authorities sometimes granted the use of rooms and plant,[ ] but seldom took any further action. it is remarkable that the guardians, whose duty it was to relieve the destitution existing, seem to have paid but the scantiest attention to it. even where they attempted to deal with it by granting relief to the family, this relief was generally inadequate and the children were consequently underfed, with the result that they were given meals by the voluntary feeding agencies.[ ] there seems indeed to have been no co-operation whatever between the various voluntary agencies established all over the country and the boards of guardians.[ ] by an act of parliament passed in it was enacted that where any parent wilfully neglected to provide adequate food for his child the board of guardians should institute proceedings.[ ] this act seems to have remained almost a dead letter. in giving evidence before the house of lords select committee on poor law relief in , mr. benjamin waugh, director of the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children, in speaking of the act, stated, "first, that the guardians do not act upon it to any very great extent; secondly, that the police know that it is not their business, and they do not act upon it; and, thirdly, the public have an impression that they are excluded from taking cognisance of starvation cases because the term used is 'the guardians shall' do it." "there are cases in which they are habitually doing it, chiefly where ladies are upon the board, but in a very small number of cases indeed throughout the country."[ ] the part taken by the state in the matter of relieving the wants of underfed children was thus as yet a small one.[ ] footnote : thus at liverpool, about , the council of education resolved to offer grants to school managers for the supply of needful appliances for penny dinners, provided that "the payment of a penny should absolutely cover the cost of each dinner, so as not only to avoid pauperising the recipient, but also to render the scheme entirely self-supporting." (report of special sub-committee on meals for school children, in minutes of london school board, july , , p. .) at birmingham the school board allowed a voluntary committee to erect kitchens on the school premises. (london school board, report of general purposes committee on underfed children attending school, , p. .) at gateshead, in , the school board arranged for a supply of dinners in the schools in the poorest parts of the town. (report of select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , q. .) in london, the school board in resolved "that the board grant facilities to local managers and to other responsible persons for the provision on the school premises of penny dinners on self-supporting principles for elementary school children, where it can be done without interference with school work or injury to the school buildings." (report of special committee on meals for school children, in minutes of london school board, july , , p. .) at manchester, as early as , the school board initiated a scheme for providing meals. the chairman, mr. herbert birley, had been in the habit of supplying breakfasts to poor children in some of the schools, and on these schools being transferred to the school board, he induced it to continue the work. (report of inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , vol. ii., qs. a, , evidence of mr. c. h. wyatt.) footnote : in manchester there had been a serious attempt to meet the difficulty. there the board of guardians maintained a "day feeding school" and gave three meals a day to its out-door relief children for some years between and . (report of royal commission on the poor laws, , vo edition, vol. iii., p. n.) footnote : see for instance the evidence given before the london school board in . (see post, p. .) footnote : and vict. c. , sec. . footnote : house of lords select committee on poor law relief, , qs. , . footnote : by an act of , the local education authority might establish day industrial schools at which one or more meals were provided, towards the cost of which the parents should contribute. ( and vict., c. , sec. .) very few such schools were established. (see post, p. .) (b)--the organisation of the voluntary agencies. the history of the movement for the next ten years or so is mainly concerned with organisation. in london, with the number of feeding centres growing so rapidly, with many different agencies whose principles and methods conflicted, some plan of organisation and co-operation was the crying need. in may, , at the instigation of sir henry peek, a committee, composed of representatives of the various voluntary societies,[ ] was formed to consider in what ways co-operation was feasible. this committee recommended that (i) self-supporting dinner centres should be opened in as many districts as possible in london, and the various societies for providing dinners for children should be invited to make use of them; (ii) free dinners to children attending public elementary schools should only be given on the recommendation of the head teacher; (iii) when free dinners were given a register should be kept of the circumstances of the family.[ ] footnote : the committee represented the self-supporting penny dinner council, the board school children's free dinner fund, the south london schools dinner fund, free breakfasts and dinners for the poor board school and other children of southwark (the _referee_ fund) and the poor children's aid association. footnote : _the times_, november , . this attempt cannot have been very effective, for when, at last, the london school board took the matter in hand, feeding arrangements were as chaotic as ever. in a special committee was appointed to enquire into the whole question and report to the board. the report shows that the supply of food was extraordinarily badly distributed. "in some districts there is an excess of charitable effort leading to a wasteful and demoralising distribution of dinners to children who are not in want, while in other places children are starving."[ ] in most cases the provision was insufficient to feed all the indigent children every day, many getting a meal only once or twice a week.[ ] only a rough estimate of the number of necessitous children could be obtained, but it was calculated that , or · per cent. of the children attending schools of the board were habitually in want of food, and of these less than half were provided for.[ ] the committee recommended that a central organisation should be formed "to work with the existing associations with a view to a more economical and efficient system for the provision of cheap or free meals."[ ] as a result the london schools dinner association was founded. most of the large societies were merged into this body, one or two retaining their separate organisation, but agreeing to work in harmony with it.[ ] footnote : report of special sub-committee on meals for school children, in minutes of london school board, july , , p. . footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : seven members of the school board were placed on the executive committee as a kind of informal representation, but in this number had dwindled to three. (london school board, report of general purposes committee on underfed children, , pp. v.-vi.) there was "no direct touch" between the two bodies, "except the accidental circumstance that members of the board might be on the committee" of the association. (_ibid._, p. , evidence of mr. t. a. spalding.) another committee appointed by the school board in december, , was just as emphatic as to the general inefficiency and want of uniformity. the work of giving charitable meals, they found, was still in the experimental stage, as was shown by the "extremely divergent views ... both as to the nature and extent of the distress ... and as to the efficiency of the methods employed in meeting it."[ ] they were struck by "the apparent want of co-ordination between the various agencies which were dealing with distress in london" (_i.e._, the poor law, the labour bureaux established by the london vestries, etc.). "the local committees in connection with the schools seem to have had no knowledge whatsoever of what was being done by these other bodies, except in the few cases where more or less permanent out-door relief was being given, and where the children presented attendance cards to be filled up by their teachers."[ ] "our work," remarked one witness, "is carried on without paying heed to what may be done under the poor law authorities."[ ] relief was "often given without any connection with the managers or teachers of public elementary schools." in one instance tickets for meals "were distributed without enquiry at the door of a music hall ... the proprietor of which had been one of the chief subscribers to the fund."[ ] in another case "tickets issued by an evening paper fund were sold over and over again by the people to whom they were given; sold in the streets and in the public-houses."[ ] even when the arrangements were nominally controlled by the education authorities the methods of selection were haphazard and the provision often totally inadequate. a number of witnesses gave evidence of this. "it was found that one child of a family was given fourteen tickets during the season, whilst another child of the same family had only one or two."[ ] "it might have been well to have taken one or two children in hand for the purpose of observations," remarked the head-master of a stepney school, "but i remember one of my instructions was that the same child was not to be given a meal too often."[ ] in one school the number of children needing a dinner on any day was ascertained by a show of hands. each child was then called out before the teacher and asked about its parents' circumstances.[ ] in another case the teachers merely asked the children in the morning which of them would not get any dinner at home that day.[ ] of course there were seldom enough tickets to go round. for the parents this haphazard method was most bewildering. "no arrangement is made with the parents as to whether or not a child will have a meal on any day .... in many cases the parents hardly know whether the children are having a meal at school or not, as they constantly come home for something more."[ ] footnote : london school board, report of special committee on underfed children, , p. vii. footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _ibid._, p. , evidence of mr. w. h. libby. "i am of opinion," said this witness, "that the children of parents who are in receipt of out-door relief are more in need of our help than others." (_ibid._) "in my experience," said mrs. burgwin, "the greatest distress was amongst the children of parents who were in receipt of out-door relief, and free meals should certainly be given to them, for the amount allowed as out-door relief is so small that a family is left practically on the verge of starvation." (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. ii. footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. (evidence of mrs. marion leon, manager of vere street school, clare market). footnote : _ibid._, pp. - (evidence of mr. j. morgan). footnote : _ibid._, p. (evidence of mr. c. h. heller, headmaster of sayer street school, walworth). footnote : _ibid._, p. (evidence of mrs. marion leon). footnote : _ibid._, p. (evidence of miss l. p. fowler). in the self-supporting meal was still regarded as the normal type although the number of free meals was on the increase. in the committee recognised that self-supporting penny dinners were a failure. only per cent. of the meals were paid for by the children.[ ] this had one rather curious effect. the meals were much more uniform in type than in , and this uniformity was distasteful if not harmful to the children. the chief reason was perhaps that the need to attract the children was not so great as when it was hoped to establish the meals on a self-supporting basis. another reason was that the national food supply association, which did most of the catering, desired to encourage the use of vegetable soup as well as to relieve distress.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. iii. even when the dinners were paid for, the payment rarely covered the cost. the same want of success was reported in the provinces. at birmingham the experiment of giving penny dinners failed completely, and the meals had to be given free. (report of inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration, , qs. , , evidence of dr. airy.) "the experience of all workers in this movement testifies," says canon moore ede, "that the poorest of all--those who are least well nourished--are scarcely touched by the penny dinners." ("cheap meals for poor school children," by rev. w. moore ede, in _report of conference on education under healthy conditions at manchester_, , p. .) footnote : london school board, report of special committee on underfed children, , pp. iv., v. "under the penny dinner system, we had to provide something to attract the children, as they would not come to the same meal every day and pay a penny for it; puddings and meat pies were provided and varied from day to day. now they get soup." (_ibid._, appendix i., p. , evidence of rev. r. leach.) "the soup ... supplied by the national food association varies so very little from day to day that it is natural for the children to grow tired of it," (_ibid._, p. , evidence of mr. c. h. heller.) apart from the question of more efficient organisation, the recommendations of this committee were somewhat indefinite. they urged that, as a guide for future action, continuous records should be kept of all children fed.[ ] on the adequacy of the existing voluntary organisations to cope with the distress the majority declined to commit themselves. the minority asserted emphatically that these charitable funds were amply sufficient. the committee questioned how far the supply of food was the right way of dealing with distress. "actual starvation," they said, "was undoubtedly at one time the chief evil to be feared by the poor. but now that rent in london is so high and food so cheap conditions have changed."[ ] other forms of help, they felt, were possibly more needed, _e.g._, medical advice and clothing. indeed, during the last sixty years there had been such an improvement in the economic conditions of the working classes as had not been known at any other period of history. comparisons between conditions obtaining at the beginning and at the end of the nineteenth century are to some extent vitiated by the fact that the former was a period of extraordinary social misery. nevertheless, the improvement is striking. sir robert giffen, speaking on "the progress of the working classes in the last half century," in november, , showed that, while the wages of working men "have advanced, most articles he consumes have rather diminished in price, the change in wheat being especially remarkable, and significant of a complete revolution in the conditions of the masses. the increased price in the case of one or two articles--particularly meat and house rent--is insufficient to neutralise the general advantages which the workman has gained."[ ] by further statistics he showed "a decline in the rate of mortality, an increase of the consumption of articles in general use, an improvement in general education, a diminution of crime and pauperism, a vast increase in the number of depositors in savings banks, and other evidences of general well-being."[ ] up to the cost of living steadily declined, and in that year real wages were higher than they had ever been before. this did not mean, as some urged, that society might slacken any of its efforts to improve the condition of the poorer classes. even from the most optimistic standpoint the improvement was far too small, and there was still a residuum whose deplorable condition demanded "something like a revolution for the better."[ ] but now that the more prosperous working men were consciously striving to improve their own position, the community, or the philanthropists among it, were more able to assist the submerged remainder. the history of school feeding illustrates how "one of the least noticed but most certain facts of social life is the fact that society very seldom awakes to the existence of an evil while that evil is at its worst, but some time afterwards, when the evil is already in process of healing itself.... society can seldom be induced to bother itself about any suffering, the removal of which requires really revolutionary treatment. it only becomes sensitive, sympathetic and eager for reform when reform is possible without too great an upheaval of its settled way of life."[ ] a higher standard of living was now required and the real question was whether feeding the school child was the right way to attain to it, or only a following of the line of least resistance. if it was a healthy movement, then clearly it was time to set about feeding in a more thorough fashion. footnote : _ibid._, pp. v., viii. footnote : _ibid._, p. vi. footnote : _economic enquiries and studies_, by sir robert giffen, , vol. i., pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _a philosophy of social progress_, by e. j. urwick, , pp. , . in a third attempt was made by the london school board to deal with the question. it was referred to the general purposes committee to enquire into the number of underfed children and to consider "how far the present voluntary provision for school meals is, or is not, effectual."[ ] the evidence given before the committee shows the prevalence of a state of affairs very similar to that of the earlier years. there is the same complaint about "the want of any general plan, the utter lack of uniformity ... the absence (except in a few places) of any means of enquiring into doubtful cases, and above all the non-existence of any sort of machinery for securing that where want exists it shall be dealt with."[ ] but the report and recommendations of the majority of the special committee show an astonishing advance on the views of the two former committees. the necessity for feeding was not now denied, they thought, "even by those ... who are keenly anxious to prevent the undermining of prudence or self-help by ill-advised or unregulated generosity."[ ] they were most emphatic as to the good effects on the children when the meals were nicely served in the schools under proper supervision, and they considered "that food provision and training at meals should in particular form part of the work of all centres for physically and mentally defective children, and that the government grant should be calculated accordingly."[ ] one or two of the members of the committee and some of the witnesses urged that meals should be continued in the summer.[ ] as to the effect on the parents, "it appears to the sub-committee ... that its concern is with the well-being of the children, and even if it were the case that it was, in some way, better for the moral character of the parents to let the children starve, the sub-committee would not be prepared to advise that line of policy. the first duty of the community to the child ... is to see that it has a proper chance as regards its equipment for life."[ ] "if they come to school underfed ... it would seem to be the duty of those who have a care of the children to deal with it, and to see that the underfeeding ceases. it is, of course, obvious, in any case, that this, like all other social evils, may be gradually eliminated by the general improvement, moral and material, of the community. but apart from the fact that that is a slow process and that many generations of actual school children will come and go in the meantime, it is obvious that the prevention of underfeeding in school children (with its results of under-education and increasing malnutrition) is itself one of the potent means of forwarding the general improvement."[ ] at the same time the idea that school dinners pauperise the parents or destroy the sense of parental responsibility "appears to the sub-committee to be a mere theoretic fancy entirely unsupported by practical experience."[ ] parents who could feed their children and would not should "simply be summoned for 'cruelty.'"[ ] footnote : london school board, report of general purposes committee on underfed children, , p. ii., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. vi., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. iii., pars. , . footnote : _ibid._, p. v., par. . "school dinners well managed may be made to have an admirable educative effect.... this makes me think that a proper part of the business of the school should be a common mid-day meal." (evidence of mrs. despard, _ibid._, p. .) mrs. burgwin was of the same opinion. (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : see, for instance, the suggestions made by mr. whiteley (_ibid._, p. ix.), and the evidence of mrs. burgwin and mr. j. morant (_ibid._, pp. , ). footnote : _ibid._, p. iv., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. iv., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. iv., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. v., par. . the majority of the committee declared themselves convinced "by the consideration of the subject, and by the special information now obtained from paris and from other foreign countries,[ ] that the whole question of the feeding and health of children compulsorily attending school requires to be dealt with as a matter of public concern."[ ] they therefore recommended that a central committee should be formed, which should be authorised to call for reports and general assistance from the board's staff, facilities being granted for the use of rooms at the schools for meals, and they made the following important statement of principle:--"it should be deemed to be part of the duty of any authority by law responsible for the compulsory attendance of children at school to ascertain what children, if any, come to school in a state unfit to get normal profit by the school work--whether by reason of underfeeding, physical disability or otherwise--and there should be the necessary inspection for that purpose; that where it is ascertained that children are sent to school 'underfed' ... it should be part of the duty of the authority to see that they are provided, under proper conditions, with the necessary food;" that "the authority should co-operate in any existing or future voluntary efforts to that end," and that, "in so far as such voluntary efforts fail to cover the ground, the authority should have the power and the duty to supplement them." where dinners were provided, it was desirable that they should be open to all children, and that the parents should pay for them, unless they were unable by misfortune to find the money, and that no distinction should be made between the paying and the non-paying children. if the underfed condition of the child was due to the culpable neglect of the parent, the board should prosecute the parent, and, if the offence was persisted in, should have power to deal with the child under the industrial schools acts.[ ] footnote : for some account of the "cantines scolaires" of paris, and the provision of meals in other foreign towns, see appendix iii. footnote : london school board, report of general purposes committee on underfed children, , p. vii., par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. i. the board rejected these proposals and acted on the more cautious recommendations of the minority, who were convinced that there was no necessity for any public authority to undertake the work, the voluntary associations being entirely capable of dealing effectively with the need, if they were properly organised. they considered, therefore, that the duties of the school board should be confined to co-operation in the organisation of these associations.[ ] this decision was hailed with relief by _the times_, which rejoiced that "the attempt of the 'fabian' school of socialists, assisted by some philanthropic dupes, to capture the london school board has been decisively repelled."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. xii. minutes of the london school board, november , , vol. , pp. - . the majority report was rejected by votes to . footnote : _the times_, december , . as a matter of fact the fabian society seems as yet to have paid little attention to the question, and, in so far as these proposals had been due to socialist influence, the agitation had come from the social democratic federation. this body had, since the early 'eighties, made the provision of a free meal for all children attending elementary schools one of the fundamental planks of its platform.[ ] several memorials were sent to the school board,[ ] urging that all children whose parents were unemployed should be fed and clothed out of the rates, but this proposal was too sweeping to meet with a favourable reception. footnote : _justice_, march , september and , december , . footnote : see, for instance, the memorials presented in , , and . (minutes of the london school board, november , ; february , ; december , .) the recommendations, which were finally adopted in march, , provided for the establishment of a permanent committee, to be known as the "joint committee on underfed children." this was composed partly of members of the school board, partly of representatives of various other bodies. sub-committees, consisting of managers, teachers, school board visitors and one or more co-opted outsiders, were to be appointed in each board school, or group of schools, where the necessity for providing meals for underfed children was felt, and these sub-committees were to make all necessary arrangements for the provision of meals.[ ] the functions of the joint committee were limited. it was to receive reports from the sub-committees, to draw their attention to any defect which might appear in the selection of the children or the arrangements made for providing relief, to give them assistance by placing them in communication with a source of supply so as to enable them to obtain the necessary funds, to communicate with the chief collecting agencies when there was reason to fear that the funds might not be sufficient, and "generally to keep the public informed of what is being done to provide relief for underfed children, and to stimulate public interest in the work."[ ] how far this effort to meet the need was successful we shall relate in a subsequent chapter.[ ] footnote : similar committees had been in existence in several schools for some years. footnote : minutes of the london school board, march , , vol. , pp. - , . footnote : see chapter iii. (c)--the demand for state provision. soon after the beginning of the new century the agitation for some form of state feeding grew urgent and widespread. there was no attempt to deal with the matter in the education act of , but from about this date onwards the question constantly recurred in parliamentary debates, a sure indication that the question was interesting others besides the expert and the philanthropist. and to the old motives of sentiment and educational need was added a new motive, a motive specially characteristic of the present century and one which in some other directions threatens to become almost an obsession. this was the desire for "race regeneration," the conviction of the supreme importance of securing a physically efficient people. formerly the tendency had been to sacrifice the needs of the child to the supposed moral welfare of the family, now the child was regarded primarily as the raw material for a nation of healthy citizens. the south african war had been partly instrumental in producing this extreme anxiety about physical unfitness, and two public enquiries--the royal commission on physical training in scotland, and the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration--furnished abundant proof of the harm which was being done in this direction by the mal-nutrition of school children. the report of the royal commission on physical training showed indisputably the necessity for better feeding. on this point a large number of important witnesses were unanimous.[ ] the commissioners were, however, cautious in their recommendations. though fully convinced of the necessity for feeding, they were doubtful as to how far the responsibility for dealing with the need should be placed upon the education authorities. "it is matter for grave consideration," they declared, "whether the valuable asset to the nation in the improved moral and physical state of a large number of future citizens counterbalances the evils of impaired parental responsibility, or whether voluntary agencies may be trusted to do this work with more discrimination and consequently less danger than a statutory system."[ ] on the other hand, they urged, "it must be remembered that, with every desire to act up to their parental responsibility, and while quite ready to contribute in proportion to their power, there are often impediments in the way of the home provision of suitable food by the parents."[ ] they considered, therefore, that "accommodation and means for enabling children to be properly fed should ... be provided either in each school or in a centre; but, except a limited sum to provide the necessary equipment, no part of the cost should be allowed to fall on the rates."[ ] the meal should be educational in character. "an obligation for the proper supervision of the feeding of those who come for instruction should be regarded as one of the duties of school authorities."[ ] footnote : report of royal commission on physical training (scotland), . vol. i., p. , par. . "if we are going to develop the physical training of children we must be on our guard against overworking them," said one witness, "and, of course, underfed children would be positively injured by even light exercises." (_ibid._, vol. ii., q. , evidence of mr. j. e. legge, inspector of reformatory and industrial schools.) "children can exist, when doing no mental or physical work, on a bare subsistence diet," said dr. clement dukes, "but ... a bare subsistence diet becomes a starvation diet when mental or bodily work is added." (_ibid._, q. .) footnote : _ibid._, vol. i., p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . the findings of the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration were more definite and striking. to take first the evidence as to the extent of underfeeding, dr. eichholz, after careful investigation, estimated that the rough total of underfed children in london was , or per cent. of the elementary school population. these figures were based on the assumption that all the children being fed at schools and centres would otherwise have gone unfed; but, considering the loose method of enquiry prevalent, this was questionable. the london school board put the number at , , but this seems to have been grossly understating the case.[ ] in manchester, according to the estimate of the education committee and the medical officer of health, not less than per cent. were underfed.[ ] the evidence given was, however, conflicting, and indeed little reliance can be placed on these statistics. footnote : report of inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration, , p. , pars. - ; evidence of dr. eichholz, qs. - . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. ; evidence of dr. eichholz, q. . with regard to the effect of underfeeding on the physique of the children, the doctors gave striking testimony. dr. robert hutchison was of opinion that, if a child had not sufficient food during the period of growth, that is during the school years, it would be permanently stunted.[ ] "apart from infectious diseases," said dr. collie of the london school board, "malnutrition is accountable for nine-tenths of child sickness."[ ] dr. eichholz pointed out that at leeds dr. hall had found that fifty per cent. of the children in a poor school suffered from rickets, the true cause of which was poor and unsuitable food, whilst in a well-to-do school the proportion was only eight per cent.[ ] in the opinion of this witness, an opinion "shared by medical men, members of education committees, managers, teachers and others conversant with the condition of school children ... food is at the base of all the evils of child degeneracy."[ ] "the sufficient feeding of children," declared dr. niven, medical officer of health for manchester, "is by far the most important thing to attend to and ... specially important in connection with the army.... when trade is good," he argued, "you will have to rely for the army upon this very poor class, and in order to get good soldiers you must rear good children, you must see that children are adequately fed."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, q. . "the critical age," he considered, was "from to ." looking at the enormous improvement in children in the navy and in industrial schools, where they were properly fed, he did not "share the pessimistic view that the mischief is hopelessly done by the time a child reaches school age." he felt certain that "the provision of meals would do a great deal to improve the health and growth and development of the children of the poorer classes." (_ibid._, qs. , - , , .) footnote : _ibid._, q. . footnote : _ibid._, q. . footnote : _ibid._, q. . footnote : _ibid._, q. . see also evidence of general sir t. maurice, q. . such were the arguments on the negative side--on the positive side there was ample proof of the good effects of a regular nutritious diet. dr. eichholz referred to dr. hall's experiment in feeding poor children at leeds. "taking sixty poor seven-year-old children, at the beginning of the period they totalled lbs., below normal weight.... they gained in three months forty lbs. in addition to the normal increase in weight" for that time, "and they looked less anæmic and more cheerful."[ ] too much importance must not be attached to these figures since the data on which they are based are not sufficiently known to gauge their value, but that the improvement was very considerable cannot be doubted. moreover, in the special schools for mentally defective children where meals were regularly provided, the results were astonishing. dr. collie told how, "in a large number of instances after the careful individual attention and midday dinner of the special schools," the children "returned after from six to eighteen months to the elementary schools with a new lease of mental vigour. these children are functionally mentally defective.... their brains are starved, and naturally fail to react to the ordinary methods of elementary teaching."[ ] "bad nutrition and normal brain development," he added, "are incompatible."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, evidence of dr. eichholz, q. . footnote : _ibid._, evidence of dr. collie, q. . footnote : _ibid._, q. . there was indeed, as the committee pointed out, "a general consensus of opinion that the time had come when the state should realise the necessity of ensuring adequate nourishment to children in attendance at school ... it was, further, the subject of general agreement that, as a rule, no purely voluntary association could successfully cope with the full extent of the evil."[ ] in a large number of cases such voluntary organisations would be sufficient for the purpose, "with the support and oversight of the local authority," and, as long as this was so, the committee would "strongly deprecate recourse being had to direct municipal assistance."[ ] but in cases where "the extent or the concentration of poverty might be too great for the resources of local charity ... it might be expedient to permit the application of municipal aid on a larger scale."[ ] as a corollary to the exercise of such powers on the part of the local authority, the law would have to be altered to make it more possible to prosecute neglectful parents.[ ] the committee were also in favour of establishing special schools of the day industrial school type in which feeding would form an essential feature. to these definitely "retarded" children might be sent.[ ] they recommended that the funds for these experiments should be found through the machinery of the poor law,[ ] for they were anxious to guard the community from the consequences of "the somewhat dangerous doctrine that free meals are the necessary concomitant of free education."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, par. . footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _ibid._, par. . footnote : _ibid._, par. . footnote : _ibid._, par. . following on these reports came a strenuous agitation in parliament and in the country. the national labour conference on the state maintenance of children, held at the guildhall in january, , declared unanimously in favour of state maintenance "as a necessary corollary of universal compulsory education, and as a means of partially arresting that physical deterioration of the industrial population of this country, which is now generally recognised as a grave national danger. as a step towards such state maintenance," the conference called upon the government to introduce without further delay legislation enabling local authorities to provide meals for school children, the cost to be borne by the national exchequer.[ ] the national union of teachers, at a largely attended conference at llandudno in the same year, were agreed as to the urgent need for legislation.[ ] footnote : report of the national labour conference on the state maintenance of children, at the guildhall, january , , p. . footnote : report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , qs. , , . by a considerable majority the conference defeated an amendment that the board of guardians should be substituted for the local education authority as the authority for making the provision, but owing to a technical difficulty the main resolution was not put. see also the resolution passed at a conference of the school attendance officers' association, quoted by mr. slack in the house of commons (_hansard_, april , , th series, vol. , p. ). in parliament the agitation was led by mr. claude hay, sir john gorst and dr. macnamara. it was urged that a large part of the money spent on education was wasted. to teach children who were physically quite unfit to receive instruction, was, as sir john gorst pointed out, "the height of absurdity."[ ] thirty years' compulsory education had, mr. claude hay declared, resulted in disappointment. "the gain in intelligence was, to say the least of it, equivocal, while the physical deterioration of the people was obvious. the reason was largely that we had taken education as an isolated factor, whereas it was part of an absolutely indivisible unit.... we had assumed that ... the intellect could act independently of all other parts of the total human being. we had ignored the body, the soul and the will, and the result had been a fiasco."[ ] compulsory education involved free meals, but only for the "necessitous child."[ ] it was declared that many parents would gladly pay if they were thereby assured that their children were adequately and properly fed.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, july , , vol. , p. . see also _ibid._, february , , vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, april , , vol. , pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. ; sir john gorst, _ibid._, july , , vol. , p. . for some time the government remained obdurate, and declined to take any action. at last, however, it became clear that something must be done. the findings of the royal commission on physical training and the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration had created too profound an impression to be ignored. yet even now the government were not prepared for legislation. they were of opinion that there still existed a wide divergence of views as to the extent of underfeeding and the remedies to be applied. accordingly, in march, , another departmental committee was appointed to collect further information.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, march , , vol. , p. . the reference of this committee made it clear that the government had no intention of allowing the rates to be utilised for the supply of food. in the matter of feeding, the committee were merely to enquire into the relief given by the various voluntary agencies, and report "whether relief of this character could be better organised, without any charge upon public funds."[ ] the report was, therefore, mainly concerned with questions of administration. a careful and elaborate account was given of the existing agencies all over england, the methods employed, the sums expended, and the kind of relief given. evidence was received from representatives of all the more important societies in london and the provinces. it was found that outside london feeding agencies existed in out of the county boroughs, in out of the boroughs and in out of the large urban districts.[ ] in addition to these there were numerous efforts of a spasmodic character, school meals being often started hastily during some special emergency. the committee estimated that the total amount spent on the provision of meals in england and wales was approximately £ , , of which £ , was spent in london.[ ] but these figures were "very far from representing the full amount of money spent out of charitable sources."[ ] no account was taken of the innumerable philanthropic agencies existing all over the country, such as soup kitchens, district visiting societies and the like, who were incidentally spending large sums on the provision of food for school children. moreover, the impracticability of obtaining returns from all the feeding agencies and the varying methods in which their accounts were made up, made any exact computation impossible. footnote : report of the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , vol. i., p. vii. footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , pars. , , . the total number of these agencies was . of these were permanent (_i.e._, had been in existence over a year), were new, and were intermittent in their operations. footnote : _ibid._, pp. - , pars. - . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . in the evidence given before the committee, we note the same evils prevailing as had been discovered in former years. there is the same diversity in the method of selection and the same inadequate provision. we find still the practice of giving a child a meal two or three days a week only.[ ] in the great majority of cases the feeding was confined to the winter months, though many witnesses were of opinion that meals should be obtainable in the summer also.[ ] footnote : "at present," declared one witness, "the funds are wasted through their being distributed over too large a number of children.... at one school ... the headmaster asked the boys whether they would like to have their ticket this week or next week." (_ibid._, vol. ii., q. , evidence of mr. t. e. harvey.) at norwich, a child received a meal only once a week. "there was no system of feeding the children regularly. they had to take it in turns." (_ibid._, q. , evidence of mrs. pillow.) at hull it was "a rough rule given to the teacher" that a child should be fed every other day. (_ibid._, qs. , , evidence of mr. g. f. grant.) see also evidence given by mrs. adler (qs. - ), mrs. burgwin (q. ), and the rev. j. c. mantle (q. ). it was even urged by mr. hookham, of birmingham, that the insufficiency of the provision was a positive advantage. the fact "that there are more children wanting meals than can get them ... is the main safeguard against imposition." without this safeguard, he declares, "you will lose the evidence which the children give against one another when imposition takes place, which i think is the most valuable of all evidence" (_ibid._, q. .) footnote : _ibid._, vol. i., pp. - , pars. - . the meals given at bradford were continued all through the year, and so were the breakfasts given by mr. hookham at birmingham (_ibid._). the committee were convinced that, in all county boroughs and large towns, no voluntary agency which extended beyond the limits of one or two schools could be worked properly, except in intimate connection with, if not directly organised by, the local education authority. to avoid overlapping and abuse it was essential that managers and school teachers should be required to supply full information, and only the local authority had power to insist on this being done.[ ] the committee deprecated "the proneness for starting school meals hastily upon some special emergency."[ ] it was essential that any organisation for feeding school children should be of a permanent character and provision should be made for enabling meals to be given where necessary throughout the year.[ ] it was desirable that meals should be obtainable on every school day, and it should be the object of the feeding agency to feed the most destitute children regularly rather than a larger number irregularly.[ ] the committee recognised the valuable help which had been given by the teachers. many of the systems for feeding the children had in fact originated entirely with them, whilst in many more the whole brunt of the work had fallen upon them. but this work involved too great a strain upon the teachers and they should not be required to supervise the meals unless their attendance was indispensable.[ ] nor in the matter of the selection of the children should the teachers be asked to do more than draw up the preliminary list. they had no time for visiting the homes nor were they always the most competent persons for making enquiries. the final selection of the children should be in the hands of a relief committee, which should be formed for each school or group of schools.[ ] the increasing attention paid to the medical side of the question is shown by the recommendation that, wherever possible, the advice and guidance of the school doctor should be obtained.[ ] the committee refer with approval to the proposal that a system of school restaurants should be established, at which meals could be supplied at cost price. "not much attempt," they say, "has yet been made through the medium of school meals towards raising the standard of physical development among the children and promoting a taste for wholesome and nourishing food."[ ] in view of the very divergent opinions expressed by witnesses, the committee were unable to come to a clear conclusion whether or not such restaurants would succeed, but they would "welcome experiments made in this direction."[ ] the restaurants, they thought, would probably have to be kept separate from any system of free dinners, for attempts to combine free and cheap meals had always ended in failure. in country districts, where the children often lived at a great distance from the school, the need for school restaurants was distinctly felt. the lunches brought by the children were generally of a most unsatisfactory nature. the committee were of opinion that the managers should arrange for the provision of a hot dinner, or at any rate soup or cocoa, for those children who were unable to go home at midday. a charge should be made which should at least cover the cost of the food.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , par. , secs. , . footnote : _ibid._, p. , pars. , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , pars. , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , pars. , (secs. , ). footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . so far as the committee could discover, "the question of malnutrition and underfeeding has attracted very little attention in connection with medical inspection. there appears to be no area where the medical officer works in close touch with the organisations for the feeding of children." (_ibid._, p. , par. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . footnote : _ibid._, p. , par. . this was already being done in some rural schools. at siddington, for instance, a hot dinner had been supplied for the last two years, the parents' payments more than covering the cost of the food. (_ibid._, par. .) we have already alluded to the experiment at rousdon, where dinners were provided throughout the year in a specially provided dining-room, as a part of the school organisation. here the cost of the food was not quite covered by the parents' payments. (_ibid._, par. .) the report of the committee was published late in . meanwhile the parliamentary agitation had continued. two bills were introduced in march by mr. claude hay and mr. arthur henderson.[ ] these were withdrawn to make way for a resolution moved by mr. (afterwards sir bamford) slack--"that in the opinion of this house, the local education authorities should be empowered (as unanimously recommended by the inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration, ) to make provision, under such regulations and conditions as they may decide, for ensuring that all the children at any public elementary school in their area shall receive proper nourishment before being subjected to mental or physical instruction, and for recovering the cost, where expedient, from the parents or guardians."[ ] this resolution marks an important stage in the movement, for it received support from all sides of the house, and was passed by a considerable majority.[ ] one feature of the debate was new. it was no longer said that the matter should be left solely to private charity. the main point at issue now was whether the money required should come from the education rate or the poor rate.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, march and , , vol. , pp. - , . footnote : _ibid._, april , , vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, march , , vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, april , , vol. , p. . the balance of opinion was at this date in favour of the latter. sir john gorst thought that where the parents could not pay for the meals "reference should be made to the poor law authority, and the natural consequences of the receipt of public relief would follow." (_ibid._, july , , vol. , p. .) in the bill introduced by mr. claude hay in march, , provision was made for payment of the cost of meals by the guardians, but any parent receiving such relief from the guardians might apply to a court of summary jurisdiction and the court, "if satisfied that the parent's ... inability to pay is temporary and arises from no fault of his own," might make an order that he should not be disfranchised. (elementary education (feeding of children) bill, , clause .) (d)--provision by the guardians. following on this resolution came an attempt to deal with the question through the machinery of the poor law. by the relief (school children) order,[ ] issued in april, , the guardians were empowered to grant relief to the child of an able-bodied man without requiring him to enter the workhouse or perform the outdoor labour test.[ ] any relief so given was to be on loan if the case was one of habitual neglect, and might be so given in any case at the discretion of the guardians.[ ] except with the special sanction of the local government board proceedings were always to be taken to recover the cost.[ ] the children of widows and of wives not living with their husbands were expressly excluded from the scope of the order.[ ] the reason for this omission was that these children could already be dealt with by the guardians and that, therefore, no further sanction was needed, but this was not clearly explained by the local government board, and was indeed not generally understood.[ ] it was recommended that, where charitable organisations existed, the guardians should make arrangements with them for the supply of food; in other cases an arrangement might be made with a local shopkeeper.[ ] a circular issued by the board of education to the local education authorities, explaining how these authorities could co-operate with the guardians in carrying out the order, classified underfed children under three heads:--( ) those whose parents were permanently impoverished; ( ) those whose parents through illness, loss of employment, or other unavoidable causes were temporarily unable to provide for them; ( ) those whose parents, though capable of making provision, had neglected to do so. it was suggested that the second of these groups of cases should be left to the voluntary agencies, the first and third being dealt with by the guardians.[ ] footnote : for a description of the working of this order see the report of the royal commission on the poor laws, , vo. edition, vol. iii., pp. - . footnote : relief (school children) order, , article v. (in th report of local government board, - , p. ). footnote : _ibid._, article ii., sec. . footnote : _ibid._, article vi. whether the amount was recovered or not the parent became a pauper, and was disfranchised. footnote : _ibid._, article vii. footnote : "the whole order," declared mr. wyatt, the director of elementary education at manchester, "was a most perplexing thing. very early in the year there came down to manchester a poor law inspector who said that the construction of the order was that the children of widows or deserted women should not come under the order. that swept away a great many of those we had been feeding." (report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , q. .) miss margaret frere was of opinion that the order would be a dead letter in that it ruled out the two most difficult classes, one being widows and deserted wives. (report of inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , vol. ii., q. .) footnote : circular of local government board accompanying relief (school children) order, in th report of local government board, - , p. . footnote : circular issued by the board of education to the local education authorities re relief (school children) order, april , . in a large number of unions this order was entirely disregarded.[ ] in london the county council, though ready to assist in carrying it out where local authorities desired it, declined to initiate proceedings, for they did not look upon the order as "materially helping the solution of the problem."[ ] where the local education authority and the guardians agreed on a scheme, there was constant friction. this was only to be expected. the opposing views of the two bodies--the one actuated by a desire to ensure that children should not be prevented by lack of food from taking advantage of the education provided for them, the other imbued with the spirit of deterrence--militated against any successful co-operation. when the local education authority sent in lists of underfed children, the guardians cut them down ruthlessly.[ ] there was no serious contention that these children did not need food, but merely that their parents' circumstances were such that they could afford to provide it. undoubtedly under the voluntary feeding system there had been much abuse, many parents obtaining the meals when they were in receipt of good incomes.[ ] but in these cases, with very few exceptions,[ ] no pressure was brought to bear by the guardians on the parents to force them to provide adequate food for their children, and the children consequently remained unfed. in many cases the fathers of the children indignantly refused to allow them to receive the meals when they discovered that disfranchisement was entailed. footnote : the order "has been so far practically a dead letter in this district" [the counties of bedford, hertford, huntingdon, etc.]. ( th report of local government board, - , p. .) such seems to have been the case also in yorkshire and the northern counties, in wales, in essex and in surrey, for we find no mention of the order in the reports of the inspectors for these districts. footnote : minutes of the london county council, july , , p. . the council objected to the introduction of a dual authority in every district, which would cause delay and possibly friction; the absence of any provision for uniformity of rules in the different districts; and the radical error of allowing the cost to fall on the local authorities instead of on government funds, or at least on the rates of london as a whole. the risk of fathers being disfranchised as a result of meals being supplied by the guardians to their children without their knowledge, would militate against the usefulness of the scheme (_ibid._). as a matter of fact very few cases were relieved in london under the order. (_hansard_, july , , vol. , p. .) in two unions, fulham and wandsworth, where the guardians offered to assist, the council allowed lists to be sent from the schools, but the great majority of these children were reported by the relieving officers not to be underfed. (report of joint committee on underfed children for - , p. .) footnote : at bristol out of applications from the local education authority, the guardians felt justified in giving relief in cases only. ( th report of local government board, - , p. .) at chorlton, relief was given in cases out of , applications; at salford in out of , . (_ibid._, p. .) at stoke-on-trent, out of cases reported were relieved, and at ecclesall bierlow cases were reduced after careful investigation to one. (_ibid._, pp. , .) at kettering, on the other hand, practically all the cases referred to the guardians were relieved. (report of royal commission on the poor laws, , appendix, vol. i., q. .) this, however, was exceptional. footnote : at birmingham it was found that many parents "were earning over s. a week, and in one case the parent was in constant employment with an average rate of £ s. d. a week." ( th report of local government board, - , p. .) at bolton, some of the parents were receiving from £ to £ a week. (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : in the bolton union, in cases where the father's income was considered sufficient to provide meals without assistance, "the children were specially watched and reported upon by the cross visitor each fortnight, until the guardians were satisfied that the parents were carrying out their responsibility in this respect.... the relieving officer visits the home at meal time, or in the evening, to see what provision is made for feeding the children." ( th report of local government board, - , p. .) at birmingham the head teachers were of opinion that the children were being better looked after by their parents than formerly owing to the way in which the order was being carried out. (_ibid._, p. .) at bradford, where the most systematic attempt was made to carry out the order, the disputes and difficulties proved endless. "the principles upon which the guardians ... proceeded in selecting the children to be fed were," declared mr. f. w. jowett, "such as made not for the feeding of the children so much as for the saving of expense."[ ] the quality of the food and the conditions under which the meals were served[ ] were hotly criticised. the attempt on the part of the guardians to recover the cost from the parents raised a storm of protest.[ ] finally, in may, , the guardians announced their intention of discontinuing the provision of meals and the local education authority took over the work.[ ] in no other town was the action of the guardians prolonged to so late a date. by the end of , indeed, the order had become a dead letter. meanwhile, the public having assumed that everything necessary would be undertaken by the poor law authorities, voluntary contributions had declined.[ ] footnote : bradford city council proceedings, september , . footnote : at the centres provided by the guardians "the children were kept outside the doors until all was ready, and when they were allowed to enter they came in without any semblance of order, to tables without cloths, without seats." (_bradford and its children: how they are fed_, by councillor j. h. palin, , pp. - .) later the guardians distributed the children among various little eating-houses in the town, where the food was better, though the conditions of serving were not much improved. (_ibid._) footnote : _hansard_, february , , vol. , p. ; bradford city council proceedings, september , ; see also the local newspapers about this time. the prosecutions were apparently confined to those cases where the underfeeding of the children was due to neglect on the part of the parents. the charge fixed by the guardians was, however, very high, d. per meal. up to march , , action had been taken in the county court against men and orders for payment obtained in each case. (a short account of the working of the relief (school children) order, issued by the bradford poor law union, ; report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , qs. - .) in other unions there seems to have been little or no attempt to recover the cost. at birmingham, for instance, it was reported, "the process of recovery laid down by the local government board was farcical in character and was dropped." (report of royal commission on the poor laws, , appendix, vol. iv., q. , par. .) footnote : extracts from the annual reports of the bradford education committee for the four years ended march , , , and in respect to the working of the education (provision of meals) act, p. . footnote : at birmingham the free dinner society, after an existence of thirty years, ceased its operations when the order came into force. (report of the royal commission on the poor laws, , appendix, vol. i., q. .) "there was at first," declared mr. jenner fust, a local government board inspector, "much misapprehension among the public as to the scope of the order, the prevalent idea being that all school children requiring it would now be supplied with free meals at the public expense, and that there was no further occasion for voluntary efforts." ( th report of the local government board, - , p. .) (e)--the education (provision of meals) act. the relief (school children) order having proved a "relative failure," to use mr. john burns' moderate expression,[ ] and the evidence given before the committee on medical inspection and feeding of school children having demonstrated once more the inadequacy of existing agencies to cope with the evil, it became imperative for parliament to take action. early in the education (provision of meals) bill was introduced.[ ] the opposition to this bill, both inside[ ] and outside[ ] the house, rested mainly on the familiar arguments respecting parental responsibility and the advisability of leaving all questions connected with relief to the poor law authorities. we hear also the objection that free meals must lead to a reduction in wages.[ ] the strongest argument, to which, however, little attention was paid, was that urged by the edinburgh school board before the select committee of the house of commons to which the bill was referred. "the bill touches the fringe of very serious and comprehensive social problems with which the imperial parliament should deal, and it [the school board] objects to so much power being placed upon a local authority before parliament has dealt with serious principles underlying the questions involved."[ ] "the causes of low physique and vitality, and inability to profit by instruction" are "insanitation, overcrowding, keeping the children out at night very late or all night, bad footwear, and homes where they have no ventilation at night," irregular meals, "uncleanliness and bad clothing and out-of-school employment."[ ] this was very true, but it did not convince the public that nothing should be done. in the experience of miss horn, the secretary of the westminster health society, where continuous feeding was combined with regular visits to the parents, there was a distinct improvement in the standard of the homes.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, december , , vol. , p. . footnote : the bill was introduced by a private member, mr. w. t. wilson. the government decided to make the matter an open question with their followers. (_ibid._, february and march , , vol. , pp. , .) footnote : for the debates on the bill see _hansard_, march , december , , , , and , (vol. , pp. - ; vol. , pp. - , - ; vol. , pp. - , - , - , - ). footnote : see, for instance, the discussions at a conference of representatives of charity organisation societies held in . (_charity organisation review_, july, , pp. _et seq._) footnote : mr. harold cox, _hansard_, march , , vol. , pp. , . footnote : report of the select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , evidence of mr. mill, chairman of edinburgh school board, q. . footnote : _ibid._, evidence of mr. scott, head teacher of wood close school, bethnal green, q. . _cf._ evidence of dr. kerr (q. ), miss horn (qs. - ), and mr. ferguson (q. ). footnote : _ibid._, qs. - . during the parliamentary debates, for the first time, much emphasis was laid on the educational value of the meals if served under proper conditions. mr. birrell "could conceive no greater service to posterity than to raise the standard of living in the children of the present day."[ ] "it was desired that this work should be not a work of relief, but a work of education," declared mr. lough, the parliamentary secretary to the board of education. "they wanted wholesome food given to the children and they wanted the children taught how to eat it, which was a most useful lesson."[ ] "this was not merely a question of providing the meals," said mr. john burns, "it was also one of teaching better habits and manners."[ ] for this work the local education authorities were better fitted than the guardians, for they "would attract, in a way which boards of guardians would not, the services of voluntary agencies, of leisured people ... and of managers and teachers, whose assistance was absolutely essential."[ ] for these reasons it was essential that the local education authorities should have power to provide meals, not only for necessitous children but also, on receipt of payment, for the children of all parents who desired it.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, march , , vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, december , , vol. , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._ see also the speeches of mr. jowett (_ibid._, march , , vol. , p. ), mr. claude hay (_ibid._, december , , vol. , p. ) and the earl of crewe (_ibid._, december , , vol. , p. ). an amendment to substitute the poor law guardians for the local education authority as the authority for the administration of the act was defeated by an overwhelming majority, the voting being to . (_ibid._, december , , vol. , pp. - .) the local government board did not, in fact, desire to have the duty imposed on them. (mr. john burns, _ibid._, p. .) footnote : an amendment to limit the provision of meals to underfed children only was defeated by votes to . mr. lough declared the amendment would strike at the root of one of the objects of the bill. (_ibid._, december , , vol. , pp. - , .) the new attitude of society towards the child and the family was brought out by lord grimthorpe during the debates in the house of lords. "the children are the paramount consideration.... in a great many cases the parents are already demoralised owing to having themselves been insufficiently nourished in their youth. because they suffer from those conditions there is no reason why we should inflict similar conditions on the children.... experience in this matter shows us that the sense of parental responsibility will be increased rather than decreased. when the parent sees that his child is regarded by the nation as a valuable national asset he himself will think more of his child."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, december , , vol. , p. . the bill received the royal assent on december , .[ ] it provided that the local education authority might associate with themselves any committee (called a school canteen committee) on which the authority was represented, who would undertake to provide food, and might aid that committee by furnishing buildings and apparatus and the officers and servants necessary for the organisation, preparation and service of the meals.[ ] the parents were to be charged such an amount as might be determined by the local education authority, and, in the event of non-payment, the local authority, unless satisfied that the parent was unable to pay, should recover the amount summarily as a civil debt.[ ] failure on the part of the parent to pay was not, however, to involve disfranchisement.[ ] where the education authority resolved "that any of the children attending an elementary school within their area are unable by reason of lack of food to take full advantage of the education provided for them, and have ascertained that funds other than public funds are not available or are insufficient in amount to defray the cost of food," they might, with the sanction of the board of education, provide for food out of the rates, the amount thus spent being, however, limited to what would be produced by a halfpenny rate.[ ] the teachers might, if they desired, assist in the provision of meals but they were not to be required as part of their duties to do so.[ ] footnote : edward vii., c. . footnote : _ibid._, clause . footnote : _ibid._, clause . the select committee to which the bill had been referred, while of opinion "that the local education authority ought to undertake the administration rather than the boards of guardians," nevertheless recommended that it should be the duty of the guardians to recover the cost from neglectful parents. (report of select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , pp. viii., x.) they accordingly inserted a provision to this effect (_see_ the education (provision of meals) bill as amended by the select committee, no. of , clause ). this was amended in the committee stage in the house of commons. (_hansard_, december , , vol. , pp. - . footnote : edward vii., c. , clause . footnote : _ibid._, clause . footnote : _ibid._, clause . the bill, when it left the commons, applied to scotland as well as england and wales. the lords, however, struck out the clause extending its application to scotland.[ ] the commons, in view of the fact that the session was so far advanced, agreed to this amendment, but under protest.[ ] it was not till two years later that the scottish school boards, by the education (scotland) act of ,[ ] received power to spend the rates on the provision of food. footnote : _hansard_, december , , vol. , pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, december , , pp. - . footnote : edward vii., c. (december , ). a bill was introduced by the government in , but was withdrawn. (_hansard_, march , , vol. , pp. - .) for an account of the provision made in scotland see appendix ii. the provision of meals act marks an important point in the history of school feeding. the experiments of forty years had amply demonstrated the impossibility of dealing with the evils of underfeeding through voluntary agencies alone. parliament was indeed still convinced that voluntary organisations were the best bodies to supply the necessary food. the proposal that the duty of providing meals should be cast entirely upon local education authorities, relying only on public funds, had indeed, as the select committee of the house of commons declared, not been "seriously suggested." such a course would obviously result in the extinction of all voluntary societies, a result "from every point of view ... much to be deplored."[ ] only where voluntary subscriptions failed might the local authority provide the necessary funds. even in this case there was no compulsion on the authority to take any action whatsoever. still, with all these limitations, the act involved the assumption, however partial and incomplete, by the state of the function of securing to its children, by one means or another, the necessary minimum, not only of education, but also of food. footnote : report of select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , p. vi. chapter ii the administration of the education (provision of meals) act we propose in this chapter to describe the manner in which the local education authorities are administering the act of . we shall see that the adoption of the act has been by no means universal and that in many towns provision is still made by voluntary agencies. where the act has been put in force we shall find the greatest diversity of practice in such matters as the selection of the children, the dietary provided and the manner in which the meals are served. one local authority will construe its duties under the act in the narrowest sense, cutting down the number of children to be fed to the minimum, and serving the meals with the least possible expense. another authority will look on the school meal as a valuable means for improving the physique of its scholars; it will endeavour to secure that all children who are underfed shall be given school meals; the dietary will be carefully planned, while, in the matter of the service of the meals, the aim will be to make these in every way educational. we shall see that meals are as a rule given only during term-time, holiday feeding out of rates being held to be illegal, while many authorities limit their operations to the winter months. most authorities have confined their provision almost entirely to necessitous children, the plan of providing meals as a matter of convenience for children of parents who are at work all day or are otherwise prevented from preparing a midday meal, and who would be able and willing to pay for school dinners, finding but little favour. we shall describe the arrangements made in the special schools for defective children, where a dinner is provided either for all children attending the school or for all those who care to stay, and in the day industrial schools, where the provision of three meals a day for all is the rule. we shall discuss the extent to which the provision of meals by the local education authority overlaps the relief given by the poor law guardians. finally we shall touch upon the question of underfeeding in the rural districts, where the problem is little less urgent than in the towns. (a)--the adoption of the act. the provision of meals act came into force on december , . as we have seen, it was merely permissive and its adoption was, therefore, only gradual.[ ] many local education authorities contented themselves with making arrangements with voluntary agencies, the education committee continuing the already common practice of providing accommodation and apparatus, and the voluntary society providing as hitherto funds for the food. thus, at hull, the education authority co-operated with the hull school children's help society, which had been founded in for the provision of free meals. this arrangement was continued till , when the society's funds were exhausted and recourse was had to the rates.[ ] at scarborough, the amicable society, which had been founded in "for clothing and educating the children of the poor of scarborough," arranged with the education authority that the provision of meals should be organised through a joint committee of the two bodies.[ ] at liverpool, where the provision of meals had been undertaken since the early part of , before the act was passed, by a voluntary committee consisting of members of the education committee, the central relief society, the guardians and others, this system was continued for some years. in spite of strenuous opposition in from the labour party and the local fabian society, who complained that the numbers fed were far below the number in need of food, and that no proper attempt was made to ascertain the extent of the need, a special committee appointed by the education committee to investigate the whole question reported that the existing voluntary system was adequate. it was not till november, , that the education committee resolved that, "after full consideration of the circumstances and after having regard to the fact that it has been necessary to call upon the general public on two occasions during each year for subscriptions to the funds, the committee cannot but conclude that the time has now come when the provisions of the education (provision of meals) act, , should be put into force, and, therefore, _though with great reluctance_," they recommended that application be made to the board of education for power to levy a rate.[ ] footnote : aston manor was the first town to apply for authority to levy a rate. bradford, manchester, and other towns soon followed. during the year ended march , , authorities were authorised to levy a rate. during the two following years the number was increased to and respectively. (report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. ; report of the board of education for - , p. ; ditto for - , p. .) footnote : appendix to minutes of the hull education committee, october , . footnote : report of the scarborough amicable society for , pp. , . footnote : "feeding the children," by h. beswick, in the _clarion_, october , . leicester, perhaps, furnishes the most notable example of the survival of the voluntary principle. in , when the provision of meals bill was before parliament, the town council appears to have been in favour of it. after the act was passed, however, the leicester branch of the charity organisation society opposed its adoption. at a conference between representatives of the charity organisation society and the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children, a scheme was formulated for administering the act from voluntary funds. the scheme was accepted by the town council, and the formation of the children's aid association was the result.[ ] this body consists chiefly of members of the charity organisation society and of the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children, with a small minority representing the education committee. in spite of considerable opposition from the labour party, who demand that the act shall be put into force, meals are still provided by this association out of voluntary funds.[ ] footnote : first annual report of the leicester children's aid association, - , p. . footnote : for a description of the methods adopted, see post, pp. - . a somewhat similar system is in force at chesterfield, where the arrangements for feeding are made by the civic guild, the expense being borne out of their funds. the education committee is represented on the general council and executive committee of the guild in a general sense, not in connection with feeding alone. cases of children requiring food are reported by the attendance officers, and are fed at once by the guild, investigation being made afterwards. if help is found necessary the whole family is adequately relieved. arrangements are usually made for the children to be fed at eating-houses. the number of children so dealt with is very small. this delay on the part of the local authorities in towns where, it was asserted, it was notorious that children suffered from want of food,[ ] led to an attempt to make the school medical officer responsible for determining whether or not it was necessary to put the act in force. in december, , a bill was introduced by the labour party with the object of providing that, when requested by the education committee, by a majority of the managers, or by the head teachers, the local authority should provide for the medical inspection of the children for the purpose of determining whether they were suffering from insufficient or improper food; if the medical inspector reported that the children were so suffering, the local authority should be obliged to provide food. the bill was not proceeded with, and the same fate befell four similar bills introduced within the next five years.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, april , , th series, vol. , p. . footnote : education (administrative provisions) bill, december , ; february , ; april , ; february , ; april , . in - , out of local education authorities in england and wales, were returned as making some provision for the feeding of school children (_i.e._ counties, including london, county boroughs, boroughs and urban districts).[ ] of these were spending rates on the provision of food; were spending rates on administrative charges only (accommodation, apparatus, etc.), the cost of food being borne by voluntary funds; whilst in the remaining areas[ ] the cost of both food and administration was met by voluntary contributions. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - , . footnote : the most important of these are leicester, sunderland, and barnsley. the steady decrease in the amount derived from voluntary contributions, and the increase in rates are shown by the following table :--[ ] rates £ voluntary miscellaneous sources total. contribution £ (contributions from parents, poor law guardians, etc.) £ for the year , , , - for the year , , , - for the year , , , , - for the year , , , , - footnote : see report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. , and (for london) p. ; ditto for the year ended march , , p. ; report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. ; ditto for , p. . the voluntary contributions are understated in the figures for - , and possibly throughout. the returns for - , for instance, do not include liverpool, where the whole cost was defrayed by voluntary contributions, and no financial details were supplied to the board. the discrepancy in the total for - is due to the fact that the figures in the several columns are not given exactly, but to the nearest £. the total number of children fed is given in the returns for as , .[ ] this, however, does not include a few counties and towns which did not return the number fed during the year. in most of these areas the number fed is very small, but at barnsley the number attending daily was about , , and in london the highest number fed in any one week during the year was , . if we take these figures as representing roughly between two-fifths and one half of the total number of children who were fed at some time or other during the year, we get a total of about , ,[ ] out of a total school population of , , .[ ] footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - , . footnote : this does not include children fed at day industrial schools, open air schools or, with one or two exceptions, special schools for mentally or physically defective children. footnote : this number represents the average attendance at the ordinary elementary schools, not the total number on the rolls. (statistics of public education in england and wales, - , part i., pp. , .) in most towns where the act has been adopted the amount spent on food is well within the limit of the halfpenny rate. in - , only bradford and stoke-on-trent exceeded the limit, the latter (by an inconsiderable sum) owing to the coal strike. at bradford the rate has almost from the first been annually exceeded by a considerable amount.[ ] this excess is due partly to the numbers fed (a large proportion of the children receiving breakfasts as well as dinners), partly to the fact that the meals are continued throughout the holidays. the local government board auditor has regularly surcharged the excess expenditure, but the finance committee defrays it out of the corporation trading profits, which are not subject to the local government board audit. footnote : in - , by £ , ; in - , by £ , ; in - , by £ , , and in - , by £ . (report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. ; report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. ; ditto for , p. .) the limitation of the rate has in some towns undoubtedly restricted operations. in , for instance, the workington education committee were reluctantly obliged, owing to the exhaustion of the funds raised by the halfpenny rate, to stop the meals at a time of great distress.[ ] at east ham, the product of a halfpenny rate not being sufficient for a whole year, meals can only be given during the winter months.[ ] footnote : _hansard_, april , , th series, vol. , pp. - . a similar complaint was received from hartlepool. (_ibid._) footnote : see minutes of kingston-on-hull provision of meals sub-committee, march , , appendix, p. . the abortive bills introduced in and the following years by labour members contained a clause that the limitation of the rate should be abolished. we may note that the power of the local education authorities to provide food for necessitous children is not limited to their powers under the provision of meals act. by the education act of grants may be given for the maintenance of children at secondary schools. at bradford, at any rate, in quite a number of cases this grant is earmarked for providing school meals.[ ] more important is the power to provide three meals daily for all children attending day industrial schools. these children are drawn very largely from the class to whom free meals would have to be given if they were attending the ordinary elementary schools.[ ] again, necessitous children who are physically or mentally defective can receive meals at the special schools, and the cost of the food (and other expenses) can be charged to the special schools account. thus, at liverpool, dinner is provided for all defective children, this provision having been undertaken deliberately as part of the school curriculum long before the provision of meals act was passed. the class of physically defective children for whom special schools can be provided include not only cripples, but all children who are certified by a doctor to be "by reason of ... physical defect ... incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in the ordinary public elementary schools."[ ] this wide definition enables the school medical officer to send to the open air schools, which several local authorities have established, and at which one or more meals a day are provided, not only children suffering from definite diseases, but also those who are underfed, anæmic and generally debilitated, to whom the fresh air, healthy life and regular, wholesome meals prove an inestimable boon. footnote : "school feeding," by wm. leach, in the _crusade_, november, (vol. , p. ). footnote : for a fuller account of the arrangements made for providing food at the day industrial schools and the special schools see post, pp. - . footnote : elementary education (defective and epileptic children) act, ( and vict., c. , sec. ( )). (b)--canteen committees, their constitution and functions. the arrangements for carrying out the provision of meals act are usually in the hands of a committee called variously the school canteen committee, the children's care committee, the underfed children's meals committee, or, as at leicester, the children's aid association. the constitution of this committee varies in different towns. sometimes it is composed entirely of members of the education committee.[ ] sometimes outside bodies, such as boards of guardians and voluntary agencies, are represented upon it. thus at crewe the children's care committee consists of representatives of the local education authority, teachers, guardians and various voluntary societies.[ ] at leicester the members of the education committee are in the minority, the children's aid association being composed chiefly of members of the charity organisation society and the national society for the prevention of cruelty to children. elsewhere the committee may be composed entirely, or almost entirely, of voluntary workers. thus at leeds, where all the members are women, all, except the chairman and vice-chairman, who are members of the education committee, are voluntary workers; two inspectors attend the meetings and carry recommendations to the education committee, but they do not vote. at bury st. edmunds, where the committee is also composed of women members, the only representative of the education committee is the official who holds the post of borough treasurer and secretary to the education committee. at bournemouth the schools are grouped under four district care committees, composed of voluntary workers nominated by the school managers, and of representatives of the head teachers, the school attendance officers being _ex officio_ members. these district care committees are controlled by a central care committee, composed partly of members of the education committee, and partly of co-opted members. the school medical officer here, as in some other towns, is an _ex officio_ member.[ ] footnote : as at birkenhead, bradford, liverpool, manchester, nottingham, stoke, west ham. footnote : report of school medical officer for crewe, , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for bournemouth for , pp. - . the functions of the canteen committee also vary in different towns. sometimes, as at bradford, all the arrangements for the management of the centres and the decision as to which children shall be fed are in the hands of the committee. at leeds the committee has no executive power, its functions being limited to making recommendations to the education committee as to the management of the dining centres. at bury st. edmunds each member of the committee is responsible for one school, making arrangements with caterers for the feeding of the children and visiting the homes. this visiting of the homes is rarely, if ever, undertaken by members of the canteen committee, unless it is composed of voluntary workers. (c)--the selection of the children. in the selection of the children who are to receive school meals two methods may be adopted. the selection may be based either on the physical condition of the child or on the economic circumstances of the family. the majority of the children selected will, of course, be the same whichever method is adopted, since the child will generally be found to be under-nourished if the family income is inadequate, and vice versa; but there are some children who, although the family income is comparatively good, are yet, for some cause or other, underfed, and these will be excluded if the "poverty test" is the only criterion used. from the first the board of education has urged that the "physical test" should be used as well as the "poverty test." the administration of the provision of meals act should be carried on in the closest co-operation with the school medical service.[ ] the school medical officer should approve the dietary, he should supervise the quality, quantity, cooking and service of the food and should inspect the feeding centres.[ ] in the selection of the children he should take an important part. not only should he recommend for school meals all cases of bad or insufficient nutrition observed in the course of medical inspection. "the end to be aimed at," writes sir george newman, "is that all children admitted to the meals should be medically examined by the school medical officer either before, or as soon as possible after, admission."[ ] that is to say, the provision of meals act should not be considered primarily as a measure for the relief of distress; "the physical and mental well-being of [the] children ... should be regarded as the principal object to be kept in view."[ ] footnote : "when a system of medical inspection of school children such as already exists under several local education authorities has been established, the school canteen committee, so far as its operations are concerned with underfed, ill-nourished or destitute children, should work in intimate connection with the school medical officer." (circular issued by the board of education, january , , in report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. .) "it is obviously desirable that any arrangements made by a local education authority under the education (provision of meals) act, ... should be co-ordinated, as far as possible, with the arrangements for medical inspection under the act of ." (board of education, code of regulations for public elementary schools in england, , p. ii.) the general supervision of the administration of the act was placed in the hands of the board's medical department. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . footnote : _ibid._ for , p. . this course is strongly urged by the school medical officer for portsmouth. "_all_ children, however selected, either by the physical or poverty test, _should be examined by the school medical officer_. this in many areas would involve a good deal of extra work on many medical men who find their time already fully occupied. yet if any work is worth doing it is worth doing well, and here it is that the value of the school medical officer comes in, by culling and recording facts relating to the personal condition of the child, as well as the home conditions and surroundings of his or her life." ("the importance of a well-advised and comprehensive scheme in the selection of children ... under the education (provision of meals) act," by victor j. blake, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , pp. - .) footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . very few authorities have made any attempt to select the children primarily or even to any great extent on the "physical test." in brighton the plan has perhaps been tried with more thoroughness than in any other town. when, in , the education committee undertook the provision of meals in association with the voluntary canteen committee, it was resolved that "the term 'underfed' ... should be held to apply distinctively to those scholars who, by reason of more or less continuous antecedent underfeeding, are physically below a certain specified standard of size and weight. these cases, which must of course be the first consideration of any feeding scheme, can only be scientifically detected by a detailed system of medical weighing and examination, and when so detected should be dealt with in accordance with medical advice."[ ] accordingly all the children for whom an application for free meals is made are weighed and measured, and the canteen committee, when deciding whether any particular child shall be fed or not, has before it this report as to the child's physical condition. whether the meals are supplied free depends on the economic circumstances of the family. if the child needs meals on medical grounds but the income is adequate, a circular is sent to the parent warning him of the child's condition. sometimes the parent will be willing for meals to be supplied on payment of the cost. if the parent refuses to pay, meals are not granted, but the name of the child is placed on a special list for observation.[ ] roughly about fifty per cent. of the children are fed solely on economic grounds and fifty per cent. on medical grounds.[ ] footnote : brighton education committee, report of canteen joint branch sub-committee, july , . there were, of course, also the cases of "necessitous" children who did not appear on medical grounds to be suffering from malnutrition, but who, from the economic circumstances of the parents, were unable to obtain sufficient food. children to whom the provision of a mid-day meal would be a convenience, and whose parents were able and willing to pay the cost, should also be provided for. (_ibid._) footnote : we have not been able to ascertain exactly what happens to these children on the "watching" list. in the school medical officer reports that they "are examined at intervals by the school doctor, and their progress is noted, the [canteen] committee taking such action as is recommended. enquiries are also carried out by the school nurse, under the supervision of the school doctor, as to the nature of the meals given at home in these cases." (report on the medical inspection of school children in brighton for , p. .) these home visits by the school nurse are no longer paid. footnote : in , out of , children who received free meals, were not examined, were recommended by the school doctor on medical grounds, were fed solely on economic grounds. (_ibid._ for , p. .) in , out of , children fed, were not examined, were recommended on medical and on economic grounds. (_ibid._ for , p. .) at heston and isleworth, the canteen sub-committee decided in to obtain from the school medical officer a report on the state of each child before determining whether it required school meals.[ ] at lancaster also all children who are recommended for free meals are seen by the school medical officer.[ ] footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . footnote : report of school medical officer for lancaster for , p. . but these cases are exceptional. in "the number of local education authorities who left the final selection in the hands of the school medical officer, or acted exclusively upon his recommendation or required every application to be endorsed by him," was, so far as the information of the board of education extended, less than a dozen.[ ] in sir george newman writes, "it is true that in the majority of cases the school medical officer takes some part ... in the work connected with the provision of meals, but the number of cases in which he exercises all the functions ... appropriately devolving upon him are very few indeed."[ ] in the great majority of towns, though the school medical officer may recommend for school meals children whom he finds suffering from malnutrition in the course of medical inspection, the greater number of children are selected on the "poverty test." footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act, up to march , , pp. - . footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . as a rule the primary selection is made by the teachers, either on their own initiative or on receiving requests from the parents. the school nurse, the attendance officer or perhaps a member of the local guild of help may also recommend cases. sometimes a personal application by the parent at the education offices or before the canteen committee is insisted on. thus at manchester the parents have to make application either at the education offices or at any of the district centres, of which there are twenty-four, situated in different parts of the town, and open at convenient hours. the teachers can advise children, whom they consider to be in need of food, to tell their parents to apply, but they take no further part in the selection of the children. at west ham also the parents have to apply at the public hall or education office. the section of the act dealing with repayment is read to the applicant, who then decides whether or not he wishes his children to be fed.[ ] on the parent's signing a form (by which he agrees to repay the cost of meals when he gets into work[ ]), tickets are issued for a week, pending enquiry. the parent is expected to send a note to the head teacher each day to say that he or she still wishes the child to be fed.[ ] this personal application has to be renewed every month. the teachers are allowed to give urgency tickets for three meals, but if the parents fail to apply the meals have to be discontinued. at erith "no breakfasts are supplied till the parents have registered at the distress committee (if eligible), or have made personal application there, or at the education office."[ ] at leicester, again, the parent has to make personal application at the office of the canteen committee, and this application has to be renewed every month. at birmingham, except in special cases, the parent has to attend the meeting of the committee; if he fails to appear, after being given a second chance, the child, who has meanwhile been temporarily receiving the meals, is removed from the feeding list.[ ] footnote : report of west ham education committee for the year ending march , , p. . this is the procedure now in force. footnote : see post, p. . footnote : we were informed by the head teacher of an infants' department that she did not insist on a note being sent more than two or three times a week. footnote : report of erith education committee for the three years ending march , . footnote : _the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , p. . the primary selection of the children having been made, by whatever method, enquiry is then made into the home circumstances of the family. the object of this enquiry is or should be twofold: to ascertain the resources of the family, so as to determine whether the parents are able to provide adequate food for the child or not, and to find out whether help is needed in any other direction, and by friendly advice to improve the conditions of the home. we shall discuss later the great advantages to be obtained from the employment of voluntary workers for the purpose of these friendly home visits, as distinct from the duty of making enquiries.[ ] here it is sufficient to note that very few education authorities have made use of their services at all.[ ] the most notable example is, of course, furnished by the london care committees. a somewhat similar system has been adopted at bournemouth. here, as we have seen, the schools have been divided into four groups, and a care committee appointed for each. the members investigate the circumstances of children who are alleged to be in want of food and report to their committee, which thereupon decides whether or not the children shall receive free meals. at liverpool a tentative effort has been made in the same direction. care committees, managed by the different settlements, have for some years been attached to some half-dozen schools, but their position is rather indefinite. the enquiries are made by the school attendance officers, but the education committee asks the care committee for reports on special cases. at one school the care committee appears to visit all the cases. a wider scheme for the establishment of a system of care committees is at the present time ( ) under consideration. at brighton also, where care committees have been appointed, mainly for the purpose of finding employment and generally supervising the children when they leave school, a care visitor is sometimes asked to supplement the enquiries of the school attendance officers in doubtful cases where further investigation is needed. at leicester the enquiries are made by a paid investigator appointed by the children's aid association, subsequent friendly visits being paid by voluntary workers.[ ] in most towns, however, the work of enquiry is undertaken solely by the school attendance officers.[ ] footnote : see post, pp. _et seq._ footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - ; ditto for , pp. - . in several of the few towns where care committees have been appointed, they take no part in the work of feeding the children, their functions being confined to the "following up" of medical cases and perhaps the finding of employment for the children when they leave school. footnote : at southend-on-sea enquiry is made by the civic guild into many of the cases. (report of the school medical officer for southend-on-sea for , p. .) at bradford the canteen committee communicates to the guild of help the names of all the new cases which are put on the feeding list. the members of the guild thereupon visit any cases in which other help besides the meals is needed. footnote : as at birkenhead, birmingham, leeds, manchester, salford, sheffield, stoke, etc. at birkenhead an attendance officer has been specially appointed for this purpose. at bradford a special constable has been told off to make enquiries in difficult cases. the thoroughness of the investigation varies considerably in different towns. the parent's statements as to the amount of wages earned are in some cases checked by enquiries from the employers. at birmingham the wages are always thus verified where the worker is employed by one firm regularly. at bradford the wages are verified except when the applicants are working on their own account, for instance hawking, when it is clearly impossible. generally enquiry is made from the employer as to the wages of the head of the house only, but at leeds and at leicester the wages of all earning members of the family are verified. at leicester in doubtful cases enquiries may be made from the employer as often as once a week. in other towns, as at stoke and york, where the current rates of wages are well known, wages are only verified when there is any doubt as to the parent's statement. at bootle little attempt is made to verify the information given by the parents. here the enquiries are made--so far as they can be said to be made at all--by the teachers. the help of the attendance officer can be asked in difficult cases, but this appears to be seldom done. the teachers naturally have no time to visit the homes, and the enquiry generally resolves itself into a form being given to the child for its parent to fill up. the parents are asked to state the rent, the number in the family and the total weekly income, taking the average for four weeks. when one considers the difficulty normally experienced in filling up forms correctly, one can readily imagine that the information thus obtained is practically valueless. where the answers are unintelligible--an occurrence by no means rare to judge from the few specimens of case papers which we have seen--the information may be supplemented by questioning the children. often urgency tickets can be issued by the teachers, pending enquiries, as at bradford, birmingham, bootle and liverpool. at birkenhead the teacher can only report the need for meals, but the enquiries only take two or three days. at leeds we were told that a week or ten days generally elapses between the time of application and the child's being placed on the list, with the result that in some cases the most urgent need is passed. it is true that the head teachers can secure a child's being placed immediately on the list by writing specially to the education office, but to do this every time would involve a considerable expenditure on postage, which is not refunded. when investigation has been made into the home circumstances, the decision as to whether or no the child shall be fed is made generally by the canteen committee or by a small sub-committee of this committee, or perhaps by the chairman.[ ] sometimes the responsibility rests with the secretary of the education committee or some other official, as at acton and leeds. at bournemouth the cases are decided by the district care committees, which are composed of voluntary workers and teachers. at bootle the decision appears to rest entirely in the teachers' hands. footnote : thus, at birkenhead, where the canteen committee meets very seldom, the cases are decided by the chairman. the decision is based on a consideration of the family income. many authorities have adopted a scale. at birmingham meals are granted if the income per head, after rent is deducted, does not exceed s. d. in winter or s. d. in summer.[ ] in bootle the income limit, in summer and winter alike, is s. d. for an adult and s. d. for each child under .[ ] when we consider, however, the slipshod method of enquiry pursued at bootle, we cannot attach much importance to the existence on paper of this scale. at bradford dinners are given if the income does not exceed s. per head; if the income is less than s., breakfasts also are given. this scale is taken only as a rough criterion of the needs of the family. special circumstances are taken into account, such as the size of the family, sickness, old debts, etc. and where the circumstances of the family are slightly above the point at which free meals may be given, the parents are often allowed to receive them on paying / d. or d. towards the cost. at leeds, on the other hand, the scale, which is a low one ( s. in winter and s. d. in summer) is, we are informed, rigidly observed. no regard is paid to the circumstances of the family. as a rule, directly the family income rises above the limit, the child's dinners are stopped, no matter how much debt has to be paid off. a delicate child who needed feeding or an underfed neglected child would not be fed if the income was above the limit. at liverpool the scale is s. per head; at stoke it is s. d.; at brighton it is s. per adult, two children being reckoned as one adult. in all these towns the limit is not a hard and fast one, regard being paid to any special circumstances. at manchester a sliding scale has been adopted. if there are five or more in the family the limit is s. d. per head, if there are only three or four s. d. is allowed, while if there are only one or two s. is allowed.[ ] at salford the limit is s. per week for two persons, and s. extra for each additional member of the family, rent not being deducted. in other towns, as at birkenhead, bournemouth, leicester and west ham, there is no fixed scale, each case being decided on its merits. footnote : _the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , p. . footnote : report of bootle school canteen committee, - , p. . footnote : report of the manchester education committee, - , p. . as a rule the cases are revised about once a month. sometimes chronic cases will be continued for two or three months at a time, as at liverpool. at york the cases are revised only twice a year. at the beginning of the winter the head teachers send in lists of children whom they consider to be necessitous. these children (if the cases selection sub-committee decide to feed them) remain on the feeding list till the following april, when the head teachers are asked to send in a list of children who they consider need not receive meals during the summer. the attendance officers visit again and the cases are revised by the committee. this method is said to be satisfactory as, though officially the cases are revised so seldom, practically the circumstances are known, since the attendance officers regularly visit the homes in the course of their ordinary work and the chairman of the canteen committee knows many of the children intimately. at bootle, where, as we have seen, the decision as to which children shall be fed is practically in the hands of the teachers, there seems to be no system of revising the cases, and the tendency is for a child who is once put on the feeding list to remain on it till the meals are discontinued in the summer, unless the parents voluntarily withdraw the child on an improvement in the home circumstances. without discussing here the question whether it is possible to devise any system of selection which can be satisfactory, we may note some of the disadvantages of the methods at present in use. in the first place, since the selection is made in the main through the teachers, it necessarily follows that the numbers fed in any particular school depend very largely on the attitude taken by the head teachers. as a general rule the teachers are keenly interested in the physical welfare of their children, and anxious to do everything in their power which may promote it; but some teachers are opposed to the provision of meals, feeling that too much is done for the children; others, again, consider their schools "superior," and do not like their children to go to free meals. constantly one finds an astonishing disproportion between the numbers fed at two adjacent schools, drawing their children from the same locality. it is true that the character of two schools, within a stone's throw of each other, may vary in a curious way, one attracting a more prosperous class of children--perhaps because of the personality of the teacher, better buildings, or some other cause--but this would not account for all the difference. at bootle, for instance, it was reported, "there is apparently an absence of uniformity in assessing the needs of the children; for in the six schools of the poorest neighbourhoods it is found that of the number on the rolls the percentage of scheduled children varies from per cent. to per cent., and that in two schools of almost identical character, in one case per cent. of the children are returned as needing daily breakfasts, and in the other per cent."[ ] where the teachers are anxious to place all apparently underfed children on the feeding list, pressure is not infrequently exercised by the education authority to induce them to keep down the numbers. footnote : report of the bootle school canteen committee for - , p. . at birkenhead, and probably in other towns, the percentage of children fed in the church of england schools is very much higher than in the council schools, whilst the roman catholic schools feed a larger number still than the church schools. this is doubtless due partly to the character of the buildings, the non-provided schools being generally very much inferior, and the better-off children being consequently attracted to the council schools; partly, of course, also to the fact that the roman catholic population is chiefly irish and very poor. when an application by the parent is obligatory, there is cause for very grave doubt whether the provision of meals reaches all for whom it is intended. miss winder has shown that, at birmingham, out of , children for whom applications were received during the three years - , , were not fed because the parent failed to appear before the committee. she investigated the circumstances of twenty-eight of these families and came to the conclusion that, "although the small number of families investigated cannot justify an absolutely positive assertion, i think it may fairly be concluded that, on the whole, they are representative of most of the families whose applications are not granted, and that the home circumstances of these families are much the same as those of the families whose applications have been granted."[ ] this is the impression gained from enquiries at other towns. at west ham it is clear that there are children who need the meals, but do not get them because their parents will not apply. the number of "missed" cases does not appear to be large, for the act is administered in a sympathetic spirit, the superintendent of visitors impressing on the attendance officers that they should bring to his notice any case where the children appear to be suffering from lack of food. but there are cases where the parents, though they will take the urgency tickets for three meals which the teachers can give them, will take no further action. at one school the headmaster pointed out two boys who looked obviously in need of food and attention generally, but whose father, though out of work, would not apply. in another case he had used his discretion and kept two boys on the list for a month in spite of their parents' failure to renew their application, but he felt obliged at last to take them off though he considered that they still needed the meals. in such cases the attendance officers are supposed to visit the homes to find out the cause of the children's underfed condition, and to urge the parents, if necessary, to make application for school meals, but this course does not seem to be by any means always pursued. footnote : _the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , pp. , , , . at leicester again, nothing appears to be done in those cases where the child needs food but the parent refuses to apply. and such cases appear to be frequent. we were told by the vicar of a very poor parish that numbers of the parents would not make the necessary application. this evidence seems to be borne out by a comparison of the numbers of cases helped by the distress committee and the canteen committee. in , for instance, it was found that on september , married men and widowers, having , children wholly, and partly, dependent upon them, were registered at the labour bureau as unemployed.[ ] these numbers were, of course, not a complete index of the unemployment in the town. but, turning to the report of the canteen committee, we find that on the same date only children were being helped.[ ] the great discrepancy between these figures seems to point to the fact that the canteen committee had not discovered all the cases of children who were suffering from want of food. footnote : _leicester pioneer_, october , . footnote : quarterly report of the leicester children's aid association, july to september , . the failure of the parents to apply may in some cases be due to laziness and disregard for their children's welfare. or it may be that they are too sensitive to ask for help. or again it may be difficult or impossible for them to attend at the time named. the hour is usually fixed so as to be that most convenient for the parents, but it is impossible, of course, to fix a time which will suit all. at birmingham cases have even occurred "where the father has been obliged to pay tram fares in order to arrive in time to prove his inability to feed his children"![ ] footnote : _the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , p. . but even if the parent is not obliged to appear in person, but may send an application by note or verbal message to the teacher, there are still "missed" cases. it is notorious that many parents are too proud to let their need be known; in such cases, as teachers have frequently told us, it may be a considerable time before it is discovered that the child is suffering from want of food; and when the discovery is made there is frequently difficulty in inducing the parents to send the child, or in inducing the child itself to go, to the school meals. there still seems to exist, in certain districts at any rate, an idea that the provision of meals is poor law relief, and parents consequently shrink from applying. moreover, it is not generally recognised that the provision of school meals is by no means universally known to the parents. the school medical officer for leicester reports that "in certain cases it was a matter for regret that the families had not received help earlier by personally applying for assistance. ignorance of the existence of the canteen committee was given as the reason for non-application."[ ] and we have ourselves been told in other towns of cases where the children were suffering from want of food, but were not receiving school meals because the parents were unaware that they could be obtained. footnote : report of the school medical officer for leicester for , p. . the enquiries into the home circumstances undoubtedly exercise a deterrent influence--to what extent depends on the manner of the particular individual who makes the enquiries--both with the more independent parent who resents the investigator's visit, and with the criminal and semi-criminal parent whose record does not bear close investigation. thus the headmaster of a school in one of the worst districts of liverpool told us that numbers of the boys were in need of food but the parents would not submit to the necessary enquiries and consequently meals were not granted. at leicester, the searching enquiries made by the canteen committee, which, it must be remembered, is practically a department of the charity organisation society, coupled with the insistence on an application by the parent in person, result, as we have seen, in numbers of underfed children remaining underfed. where the education authority has adopted a scale of income on which to base the decision as to which children shall be fed, this scale is frequently below, and in some cases very considerably below, the minimum amount which has been shown to be necessary for expenditure on food.[ ] where the scale is rigidly adhered to, two classes of children are excluded altogether, those who are underfed through the neglect of their parents to provide for them though able to do so, and those cases where the family income may be sufficient to meet normal calls but where, owing to illness or the delicacy of the children or other special circumstances, extra nourishment is required. footnote : see note on page , _infra_. to sum up, we find as between town and town, and even as between school and school in the same town, a great want of uniformity in selecting the children to be fed. where the education authority has determined that all its underfed children shall be provided for, the child's need being the paramount consideration, undiscovered cases of underfeeding are reduced to a minimum. where, on the contrary, enquiries are carried out in a deterrent manner, or the parent is made to apply in person for the meals, or the selection is based on a rigid application of a scale, there is reason to fear that considerable numbers of children are, and remain, "unable by reason of lack of food to take full advantage of the education provided for them." (d)--the preparation and service of the meals. (i) the time of the meal. there are considerable differences of opinion as to what kind of meal should be given. many local authorities prefer breakfast. it is argued that when no breakfast is forthcoming at home the interval between the meal the previous evening and the midday dinner is too long, and that it is cruel to expect the child to attend morning school, when the heaviest work of the day is done, without a meal, especially in the cold winter months. by midday the parents, especially in districts where there is much casual labour, may have earned enough to provide some sort of a meal. but the arguments in favour of breakfast--as the sole meal provided--are largely based not so much on the child's physical needs as on the moral effect produced both on the child and the parent. the provision of breakfast furnishes a test of need. the meal is not so popular as dinner, and will only attract those who are really hungry.[ ] co-operation on the part of the mother is demanded, since she must get up early to see the children are dressed in time. moreover, the provision of breakfast does not act as an inducement to the mother to go out to work, as it is feared the provision of dinner may. footnote : thus it was found at a school in bethnal green that, "in spite of the supervision of a most efficient care committee," the change from a porridge breakfast to a meat pie dinner doubled the number of children attending. ("the feeding of necessitous children. a symposium. i., experience in s. w. bethnal green," by a. w. chute, in _oxford house magazine_, january, , p. .) the arguments seem to us overwhelmingly in favour of dinner. the provision of a midday meal may possibly encourage mothers to go out to work, though it is exceedingly difficult to trace such a result to any great extent. but on the other hand there are numbers of cases already where the mothers are forced, by stress of circumstances, to be the breadwinners and are obliged to leave home all day, or, if they come home for the dinner hour, have no time to prepare a proper meal. the children will either get a piece of bread, or will be given coppers to buy their own dinner; in either case the meal will be equally unsatisfactory. possibly the children will go dinnerless altogether, and the afternoon's lessons will then be a serious tax on their brains. the attendance at breakfasts is always less than at dinner.[ ] the breakfast acts, that is to say, as a successful "test." but this means that many children, either because their mothers are too lazy to get them dressed early, or because they are too lazy themselves, miss the meals, _though they are admittedly in need of them_. footnote : at west ham, for instance, where all the children on the feeding list receive both breakfast and dinner, the number of breakfasts given during the year - was , , and the number of dinners , ; the attendance at breakfast was thus only ninety per cent. of the attendance at dinner. (report of the west ham education committee for the year ended march , , pp. - .) we do not wish to under-estimate the importance of the moral aspect of the question. it is essential that co-operation on the part of the mother should be demanded. but the child's need must be the first consideration. the laziness of the children, be it noted, is frequently not entirely their own fault; the drowsiness in the morning may be due to the fact that they have slept all night in a crowded room and stuffy atmosphere. till the deep-rooted objection to open windows at night can be overcome, this will continue to be the case. for this reason too, the children will often have little appetite for breakfast. physiologically, again, dinner appears to be the better meal since it contains a greater quantity of the elements which are lacking in the ordinary home dietary of the child. thus in the feeding experiment at bradford in ,[ ] the porridge breakfast, the most satisfactory kind of breakfast that can be supplied from the food value point of view, contained a proteid value of grammes, and a fat value of grammes. the dinners contained, on an average, grammes of proteid and grammes of fat. thus the combined proteid and fat value of the breakfasts and dinners was respectively and grammes.[ ] moreover, the gain in point of cheapness to be derived from provision on a large scale is much greater relatively in the case of dinners than in the case of breakfasts. footnote : see post, pp. - . footnote : bradford education committee, report on a course of meals given to necessitous children from april to july, , p. . about per cent. of the local authorities give breakfasts only, and about per cent. dinners only, the remainder giving both meals.[ ] in the last-named case, dinners may be given in some schools and breakfasts in others, as at southampton and york. at bradford dinner is given to all the children on the feeding list, the most necessitous receiving breakfast as well.[ ] at west ham all the children receive both meals. at bootle, where till a few years ago only breakfasts were given, it was found that this provision was inadequate to meet the needs of many necessitous children.[ ] the expense and the practical difficulties in the way of providing a proper dinner led the education committee to adopt a simpler method, namely, that of increasing the quantity of food supplied for breakfasts, any overplus being given at midday at the discretion of the teachers as an extra meal to children who would otherwise go dinnerless.[ ] footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - . footnote : roughly about half the children fed receive both meals (bradford education committee, return as to the working of the education (provision of meals) act, for the year ended march , .) footnote : enquiries made by the head teachers showed that in the aggregate children received no mid-day meal or an insufficient meal. since, presumably, these enquiries were made by the method of questioning the children, no particular value can be attached to the actual figures; the school attendance officers enquired into fifty-four of the cases taken at random and found that all but two showed undoubted poverty in the home. (report of bootle school canteen committee, - , pp. - .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . this is the plan still pursued (see post, pp. - ). (ii) the dietary. taking into consideration the fact that with a large number of elementary school children bread and tea form the chief elements in the home diet, it is of the greatest importance that the school meal should be planned so as to contain a good proportion of the ingredients which are lacking at home. whatever views may be held as to the amount of proteid food that is necessary for adults, it is not disputed that in the case of children the more expensive forms are necessary because the growth of the body depends entirely upon the proteids. "it is impossible," declares the school medical officer of the london county council, "to cut down proteids to the same extent in children as in adults without serious results.... to set out, therefore, to relieve underfeeding by a single meal a day, it is necessary to concentrate attention upon proteids and fats ... and, therefore, a dinner for necessitous children must be necessarily more costly than for those properly fed in institutions or in their own homes. the want of clothing, which often accompanies underfeeding, also necessitates more expensive feeding in relief, the loss of bodily heat to be made up being greater than in the case of the child in an industrial school or workhouse, who is warmly clad, and who, moreover, spends much time in a properly heated playroom or dormitory."[ ] footnote : london county council, report of the medical officer (education) to sub-committee on underfed children, . see also "school feeding," by dr. john lambert, in _medical examination of schools and scholars_, edited by t. n. kelynack, m.d., , pp. - . few local authorities have so planned their dietary as to contain this excess of proteid and fat over starchy food. "judged by this standard," declared dr. kerr in , and the same statement holds good to-day, "most diets supplied by public funds are probably wanting in value for the children, however useful they might be as a single meal for a normal individual."[ ] footnote : report of the education committee of the london county council, submitting report of the medical officer (education) for the twenty-one months ending december , , p. . it would naturally be expected that the school medical officer would be consulted about the dietary as a matter of course,[ ] but this is by no means invariably the case. at birkenhead, for instance, the school medical officer has no voice in the planning of the menu. at stoke-on-trent the school medical officer reports in that, "with the exception of the fenton district, the medical staff does not appear to have even been consulted on the matter of dietary."[ ] footnote : "the determination of the dietary of the children generally, and of individual children whose health or age renders it desirable that special arrangements should be made in their case" is, as the chief medical officer of the board of education points out, a matter "on which the school medical officer is particularly competent to form an opinion, and on which, therefore, his opinion should be sought by the authority." (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. .) footnote : annual report of the school medical officer for stoke-on-trent for , p. . where the meals are given at restaurants, the dietary is almost invariably unsatisfactory, adequate inspection being impossible.[ ] footnote : see the descriptions of stoke and liverpool, post, pp. , - . the most elaborate dietary is probably that adopted by the bradford education committee. in , after the education committee had adopted the provision of meals act, but before arrangements had been made to feed the children out of the rates, an experiment was made in feeding forty children for fourteen weeks. the dietary was carefully planned so that, while containing the requisite amount of proteid and fat, it should not be beyond the purse of the ordinary parent in normal times.[ ] this dietary is still in force, a few alterations having been made which experience showed to be advisable. the menu is varied, according to the season, winter, summer, and spring or autumn. the same meal is not repeated for four weeks.[ ] at portsmouth again, where the dietary is drawn up by the medical officer of health and the school medical officer, a different meal is given every day for three weeks.[ ] in most towns, however, the same menu is continued week after week, with some slight variation in the summer. the same meal is given on the same day in the week so that the children learn to know what meal to expect, and in consequence the attendance is often considerably smaller on days when the dish is unpopular. sometimes the food will vary very little even from day to day. though served under various names, soup, stew or hash, it is really almost precisely the same. some authorities supply only one course, others two. in some towns a child is allowed to have as much as it wants, in reason; in other towns only one helping is allowed as a rule, though, if there happens to be any food over, this may be distributed among the children.[ ] footnote : see bradford education committee, report on a course of meals given to necessitous children from april to july, , p. . footnote : for bradford and some other typical menus see appendix i.] footnote : "the importance of a well-advised and comprehensive scheme in the selection of children ... under the education (provision of meals) act," by victor j. blake, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . footnote : at one centre that we visited, the second helping consisted only of what was left by some of the children on their plates! those who wanted more were asked to hold up their hands, and the food was then handed to them, the recipients being apparently selected at random, since there was not enough for all. occasionally special provision is made for the infants. thus, at york, milk and bread is given in the middle of the morning to infants who are on the feeding list, it having been found that they could not digest the ordinary dinners. but as a rule, though in well managed centres the infants are placed together at special tables, so that they can be better supervised and taught how to eat, there is no separate dietary for them. where only breakfasts are provided there is, of course, less room for variation. generally cocoa or coffee is given, with bread and butter, margarine, dripping, jam or syrup. at bootle pea soup is given one day a week. in several towns porridge is provided, either alternately with the cocoa or coffee breakfast, or every day. at sheffield, where a cocoa breakfast used to be given, porridge was substituted at one school as an experiment; it was found that the boys who were fed on porridge increased in weight at double the rate of the boys who received only the cocoa breakfast; as a result porridge breakfasts were substituted in all the schools.[ ] footnote : report of chief school medical officer for sheffield, for the year , pp. , . see post, p. . (iii) preparation and distribution of the meals. in a few cases the local education authority has equipped a kitchen for the preparation of the food, and makes arrangements for distributing it to the various centres. at bradford all the meals, with the exception of those for schools in outlying districts where arrangements are made with local caterers, are cooked at a central kitchen and distributed in special heat-retaining boxes to the different dining centres by motor vans. manchester, birkenhead and other towns also have their own central kitchen. sometimes, as at west ham, a kitchen is attached to each of the centres; or occasionally a cookery centre is utilised for the preparation of the meals. sometimes, as at leeds and portsmouth,[ ] the local education authority provides the kitchen and a caterer prepares the food. frequently, however, all the arrangements for the preparation and the distribution of the meals are in the hands of caterers. footnote : "the importance of a well-advised and comprehensive scheme in the selection of children ... under the education (provision of meals) act," by victor j. blake, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . (iv) the service of the meals. from the first great stress was laid by the board of education upon the educational aspect of the meals. "the methods employed in the provision of meals should be not merely such as will secure an improvement in the physical condition of the children, but such as will have a directly educational effect upon them in respect of manners and conduct."[ ] "the school dinner may ... be made to serve as a valuable object-lesson and used to reinforce the practical instruction in hygiene, cookery and domestic economy."[ ] footnote : board of education, code of regulations for public elementary schools in england, , p. ii. footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , prefatory note by l. a. selby-bigge, p. . in many cases this advice was totally disregarded. the second report on the working of the act contains many examples of the utter lack of discipline prevailing in some centres. in one case "no attempt to teach orderly eating was made; there was a certain amount of actual disorderly conduct, throwing bits of food at each other and so forth." in another case where the meals were served in a small outhouse in the playground, the "table was a low locker.... on this a newspaper was spread, and there was hardly room for more than six children to sit round it. other children sat on low benches where they could, holding their bowls on their knees ... about fifty partake of the dinner, but there is not room for more than twelve at a time, and then it is a scramble.... the food (irish stew and bread) was good but everything else was as bad as could be." at another centre, we read, "the dinner is eaten in a perfect pandemonium of noise. nine charwomen of a rather low type attend to about children."[ ] footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act for the year ended march , , pp. , . it is encouraging to note that there has since been, generally speaking, an improvement in the service of the meals. but "there are still areas in which the educational possibilities of the meals have not been realised, or, if realised, have not received the attention which they deserve"[ ]--a statement which we can amply corroborate. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. , . the different methods in vogue may be classified roughly under four heads, according to the place in which the meal is served, _i.e._ (_a_) in the school, (_b_) in eating-houses, (_c_) in "centres," or (_d_) in the home. (_a_) the ideal place for the meal is the school when a room is specially set apart as a dining-room. the meal should be attended only by the children from that particular school and should be served under proper supervision. the tables should be nicely laid, regard being paid to the æsthetic side of the meal, and table manners should be taught. the children should themselves lay the tables and wait on one another. we have found these ideal arrangements in some of the special schools for defective children and in open air schools,[ ] but it is very rare to find such provision made for the "necessitous" children in the ordinary elementary schools. many authorities, indeed, adopt the plan of serving the meals in the schools, but too frequently class-rooms are utilised. the objections to this course are obvious. adequate ventilation after a meal is often impossible, and the smell of food pervades the atmosphere. it is frequently necessary to hurry over the meal so that the room may be prepared in time for school. the food is often served on the desks, an uncomfortable arrangement and one which renders it very difficult to teach the children to eat nicely. footnote : we describe two or three of these schools later. (see post, pp. - .) the worst example of this utilisation of the school premises that we have seen is that of bootle. here the arrangements made for supplying the meals show a deplorable lack of appreciation, on the part of the education authority, of the benefits which may be derived from the provision of meals act. the breakfasts are served sometimes in class-rooms, sometimes in the cloak-rooms or the cellars! when we visited bootle (in april, ) the breakfasts had been stopped for the summer, but we were shown one or two of these cellars. we were told that they are made as inviting as possible--the walls are whitewashed, sawdust is sprinkled on the floors, a table is placed for the children to sit down to--but when all is done that can be done they remain entirely unsuitable places for the purpose. the only point that is urged in their favour is that the children enjoy the warmth from the heating apparatus. in the cloak-rooms there is not always room for a table, and the children sometimes have to sit along the walls, holding their mugs of cocoa or their basins of soup on their knees. when the class-rooms are utilised the food has to be placed on the desks; nothing in the nature of table-cloths is provided, and the state of the desks after the children, the infants especially, have eaten soup or bread and syrup, can be well imagined. often the breakfasts arrive late, and the children have consequently to be hurried over the meal so that the class-rooms may be got ready for school.[ ] it must not be assumed that nothing in the way of table manners is attempted; clean hands, for instance, can be insisted on (though even this is difficult in some schools where there is an insufficient supply of water), and at one school we were told that the infants had learnt to eat without spilling their food; but it is obvious that very little can be done. the method of serving the midday meal is even less "educational." we have seen that the education committee refused to make arrangements for the provision of a suitable dinner, and decided instead that the teachers should distribute at midday to the most necessitous children any surplus left over from breakfast. the dinner thus consists usually of merely a piece of bread, with perhaps some cocoa, if any remains from the morning meal. the bread is given to the children to take away, and they eat it on their way home. what renders the failure of the education authority to pay any regard to the educational aspect of the meal more disastrous is that it is the teachers who supervise the meals. many of them bitterly resent the way in which the meals are served; as one pointed out to us, the girls are taught in the school how to set a table, but the practical example which the teachers are forced to show will have much more weight than any theoretical teaching. a year ago the head teachers presented a memorial to the education committee, urging that the schools should no longer be used. as "a temporary expedient," runs the communication, they "have loyally endeavoured to work this imperfect system, but they now feel that the time has arrived for the adoption of a scheme on a more satisfactory and permanent basis.... the serving of meals in cloak-rooms, cellars or basements, and other unsuitable places, calls for immediate remedy. in some cases the children receive their meals whilst sitting upon the floor; in all, the bread is of necessity placed upon the dirty desks. in others, there is no adequate supply of hot water and towels for use in cleansing the utensils. under such conditions there can be no training in habits of decency or cleanliness.... when the meals are served in class-rooms, the desks and floors are rendered unfit for immediate school use, and a smell of food permeates the atmosphere. to combat this state of affairs as far as possible, the teachers have, in many cases, to wash the desks and brush the floors. in other cases, the children are hurried over their meals in order that the necessary preparations for lessons may be made."[ ] to this the education committee replied that, while they agreed "that an ideal system of feeding the children would be by properly equipped centres quite apart from the school premises, the cost of such would be prohibitory, and that quite possibly the pressing of such a change would jeopardise the continuance of the exercise of the powers given by the provision of meals act, now so beneficially and economically administered." the committee hoped "that the teachers will recognise the authority's financial difficulties in the way of the introduction of a more desirable system, and, pending the arrival of the long-expected parliamentary aid for this and other ameliorative work devolving upon local education authorities, will continue their valuable co-operation in meeting the needs of their hungry scholars by the existing practical if not perfect system."[ ] the teachers had apparently been considering the advisability of withdrawing their services altogether, but this threat of a possible cessation of the meals induced them to continue their assistance. footnote : at birmingham we note the same defect. "the children are quiet and well-behaved; but all the time is taken in serving the food, and there is no opportunity to teach individual children to eat slowly. the tendency, especially with the cocoa breakfast, is to gulp down the drink, eat part of the bread and jam, and carry the rest away." (_the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , p. .) footnote : report of bootle school canteen committee, - , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . (_b_) a second method is the service of the meals at local restaurants. this plan is strongly discouraged by the chief medical officer of the board of education, since it is impossible to secure adequate supervision of the meals or proper control of the dietary; "the meals are consequently of little, if any, value from an educational or even nutritional point of view."[ ] any authority adopting this system is, in fact, animated solely by the desire to get the children fed with the least possible trouble. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . unfortunately the plan is still in favour with a considerable number of local authorities,[ ] even in some of the large towns. footnote : in many towns where meals are usually served at centres, local restaurants are utilised in outlying districts where the number of children is too small to allow of a centre being established. thus at stoke-on-trent the children for whom free meals are granted are sent to eating-houses.[ ] these houses are often, if not always, small bakers' shops, not general restaurants. they are usually situated at an easy distance from the school. the numbers attending each are small, amounting to not more than twenty or so. at the one we visited[ ] the conditions seemed to be as good as could be expected under the circumstances; the caterer was a motherly old woman who took an evident interest in the children, and the food was hot and palatable. the disadvantages inherent in the system, the impossibility of supervision and the lack of control over the dietary, are, however, observable here as elsewhere. probably in few cases would the children get an insufficiency of food. the difficulty lies rather in securing good quality and the proper kind of meal. thus it was found that one caterer had substituted, for the regulation fish pie, bread and jam, because the children preferred it. "i have inspected several of these [eating-houses]," reports the school medical officer, "and although i found one instance in which the children were treated on exactly the same lines as the contractor's own children, in fact sat at the same table, and were regarded quite as members of the family; in most instances the surroundings, the manner of serving and the dietary left much to be desired.... i would strongly urge the advisability of getting the catering in all instances into our own hands. i do not think that the full benefit of the act can be secured in any other way; it is doubtful, as things are, whether the intention of the act, as a remedy for malnutrition, can be carried out at all."[ ] footnote : at one school, the children have the meal in the school, the food being sent in by a caterer, the head-mistress preferring that arrangement. footnote : in april, . footnote : annual report of the school medical officer for stoke-on-trent, , p. . at acton the meals are given at a dingy eating-house which is intended primarily to serve the needs of the women working at the laundries in the district.[ ] there is only one room, so that the children have to have their meals with the other customers, and the hour at which the children come in, between twelve and one, is, of course, the busy hour for the restaurant. at one time a rota of ladies attended voluntarily to supervise the meals, but this plan has been given up; the school attendance officers now take it in turn to be present. the children come and go as they please and there is no attempt to teach table manners. footnote : this eating-house is situated in the poorest part of acton, where the great majority of the children who are on the dinner-list live. in a few cases, where the children live in other districts, arrangements are made for them to obtain food at the cookery centres; this food they take home with them. this plan, we were told, is only adopted in cases where the mother can be trusted to see that the dinners are really eaten by the children for whom they are intended. at liverpool, till quite recently, the same system was in force. the children received coupons at the school, which they presented at various cocoa rooms in the city.[ ] the objections to this system were many. the number of cocoa rooms, at which coupons were accepted, was limited, and in some cases the nearest cocoa room was situated too far from the school for the children to be sent there.[ ] though some managers refused to supply unsuitable food, others gave whatever the children asked for--frequently buns, jam puffs, or iced cakes.[ ] often the children would take the food home to be shared among the other members of the family.[ ] at some cocoa rooms the children were served in the general room, and were brought into contact with adult customers "of a class not choice in language or manners." there was little or no supervision--only occasional visits by the teachers--and consequently no attempt "to influence the children in the direction of cleanliness and orderliness at meals."[ ] in spite of these revelations the system was continued for several years, being only finally given up in august, . the meals are now served in centres. the food is at present supplied by caterers, but the education committee are considering the advisability of providing their own kitchen. footnote : some were sent to the depôts of the food and betterment association. footnote : interim report of the special committee appointed to investigate the insufficient or improper feeding of school children, liverpool city council proceedings, - , vol. ii., pp. , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , , , . in one case where five coupons were given daily to five members of a family, it was found that the children took the coupons home every day, and at the end of the week these coupons were presented and value obtained. (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : ms. memorandum on the feeding of school children, by the liverpool fabian society, . (_c_) the plan most usually adopted, and the one recommended by the board of education, is the system of serving the meals at centres attended by children from three or four neighbouring schools. for this purpose some room belonging to the corporation may be utilised, perhaps a room attached to the police station, as often at manchester, or a room in some disused school; frequently the hall of a club or mission is hired. the arrangements are often of a makeshift character, the room being ill-adapted for the purpose and the surroundings dark and dreary. moreover, the assembling of large numbers of children from different schools renders the work of supervision more difficult and detracts considerably from the educational value of the meal. the actual conditions vary widely from town to town, and even from centre to centre in the same town. the best results are perhaps to be seen at bradford,[ ] the town in which most attention has been paid to the subject. here the teachers supervise the meal, two or three being present generally, one to apportion the food and the others to supervise the table manners of the children. they are assisted by boy and girl monitors. these are selected generally from the elder children on the dinner list.[ ] on arrival, about ten minutes before the meal, each monitor puts on one of the blue overalls provided for them, sets the table for which he or she is responsible and hands round the food. the position of monitor is a much coveted one. the system provides a valuable training for the children in doing things for themselves, and in looking after one another. the results are most marked. in every centre we visited the children were quiet and orderly, and in some cases the behaviour was excellent. at one centre we were particularly struck by the table manners of the boys, their consideration for one another, and the quick and quiet way in which they collected all the plates and spoons and packed them in the boxes for return to the cooking depot of their own accord, without any instructions from the teacher in charge. the results vary, of course, in different centres. for instance, with regard to clean hands and faces, some teachers are very strict, each child having to hold up his hands for inspection as he enters the dining-room. in others only periodical inspection is made, and we noticed several dirty hands, notably in the case of some of the boys who were assisting to hand round the food. infants are placed at separate tables so that they can receive special attention. each child is expected to eat the first course, or at any rate to try to eat it, before being given the second. when the child does not like the food, it is given a small helping at first and coaxed to eat it. over and over again we were told that at first the children would hardly touch the food, being accustomed to the home dietary of bread and tea and pickles; but by the patient endeavours of the teachers this difficulty was overcome and the children have learnt to appreciate nourishing food. the importance of the æsthetic side of the meal is fully appreciated. table cloths are provided and often flowers. the meal, indeed, "from start to finish is educational."[ ] footnote : the centres at bradford, leeds, west ham and birkenhead were all visited in the spring of and the descriptions refer to that date. footnote : in the secondary schools, the poorer children are allowed to act as monitors, being given in return a d. dinner free. footnote : report of school medical officer for bradford, , pp. - . at nottingham the conditions are very similar to those at bradford, the education committee having, in fact, modelled their policy on that of bradford. at leeds it struck us that the chief aim was merely to feed the children, the educational side receiving only secondary consideration. as most of the centres are not large enough to accommodate all the children at once (at any rate in winter time), two "sittings-down" are necessary, and the meal is hurried through so as to allow the second relay to come in as soon as possible. the children begin their meal as soon as they enter, without waiting till the others have come in so that all may begin together in an orderly manner. grace is said halfway through the meal. as soon as a child has finished the first course (of which it is allowed to have a second helping, if desired), it is given a piece of cake or bun which it eats outside in the street. the supervision is undertaken by the teachers, but only for a day or two at a time. this constant change of supervisors makes the teaching of table manners more difficult. one of the regulations runs that "the supervisor should see that no child is admitted who has not clean hands and face,"[ ] but to judge from the very dirty state of some of the hands and faces we saw, this rule seems to be ignored, at any rate at some of the centres. no special provision is made for the infants; they have the same food and are placed at the same tables with the bigger children; in some cases the tables are so high that they have to kneel on the forms in order to reach their food, and the spoons provided are so large that it is difficult for them to eat without spilling it.[ ] the condition of the rooms after the children have finished their dinner is anything but desirable, soup being spilled on the table and pieces dropped on the floor. especially was this noticeable at one centre where the meal was served on desks. these desks were covered with dirty and ragged linoleum, and the whole surroundings were inexpressibly dreary, the litter of food on the floor at the end of the meal adding to the general squalor. footnote : leeds education committee, rules for the management of dining centres. footnote : complaints on both these points had, we were told, been made to the education committee, but, on the score of expense, nothing had been done. at west ham some attempt is made to render the meal educational.[ ] monitors and monitresses are appointed from among the elder children to assist in waiting on the others. table cloths are provided, and in some cases flowers are placed on the tables. but here again the meal is spoilt by the sense of rush. since at each centre there may be twice or even perhaps three times as many children as can be accommodated at once, each child is given its dinner as soon as it comes in, and is dispatched as soon as it has finished. "table manners, personal appearance, good behaviour, and punctuality," are indeed, as the superintendent of the centres remarks, "not overlooked; but in these respects, the results are not as satisfactory as one could desire. the unusually large numbers of children attending the centres, and the limited time in which to serve the meals to enable the children to return in time for school, make it a difficult task to give the necessary individual attention."[ ] at one time school managers and members of the children's care committee took it in turn to attend the different centres and supervise the children, but this plan has been given up, and the supervision is now done solely by the women who prepare the meals. footnote : the meals are served at the schools in some room which is no longer needed for teaching purposes; in some cases, we believe, in a room which was specially built as a dining-room. we have included this example in the third class rather than in the first, since in each case the school serves as a centre for children from neighbouring schools. footnote : report of the west ham education committee for the year ended march , , p. . birkenhead affords a striking example of the varying conditions prevailing in different centres in the same town. in one case a dining-room has been specially built at the school, this dining-room serving as a centre for several other schools. no table cloths are used, but the tables are of white wood, well scrubbed; plants are sometimes provided, and the whole surroundings are bright and cheerful. the children were unfortunately allowed to come in as they liked, but in other respects the discipline seemed good. table manners were inculcated and clean hands insisted on. food had to be finished at table and might not be taken away. at another centre the conditions were entirely different. the meals were served in a corridor at the public baths. two long narrow tables were placed against each wall, with forms on one side; on the other side, owing to the narrowness of the corridor, there was no room for seats, so that some of the children had to stand. the children entered and left as they liked, and were allowed to take away food with them. little effort was made to teach table manners, indeed it would have been impossible to do much in this respect owing to the unsuitable character of the premises. it would perhaps be unfair to dwell too much on the conditions prevailing in this centre, since the use of these premises was admittedly a temporary expedient (though we understood they had been used for some time), but the conditions at a third centre were not very much better. the hall was large, it is true, and there was plenty of room for the children, but the surroundings were very dreary. the tables, which were not covered with tablecloths, were dark and dingy. here again the children were allowed to straggle in as they pleased, some as much as half an hour or forty minutes late. they left as soon as they had finished, frequently carrying away food with them unchecked. little attention was paid to table manners and much of the food was wasted. (_d_) the three methods which we have described all present one feature in common. the children, whether fed at the schools, at eating-houses or at centres, all share with their schoolfellows in a common meal. there remains one other method, the supply of food to the family for consumption at home. this is the method adopted at leicester and, so far as we know, in this town only. as we have already pointed out, no rate is levied at leicester, voluntary funds being declared to be sufficient. these funds are administered by the children's aid association, a body composed largely of members of the charity organisation society and imbued with its spirit. the association proceeds on the theory that the provision of meals is simply a form of relief; this being so, the relief should be adequate, and the family as a whole should be dealt with. the food is accordingly distributed in the homes,[ ] sufficient being supplied for all the family, not only for those attending school, and it is given every day, including sundays, throughout the year. milk being the chief article absent from the dietary of the poor, the food chosen is bread and milk. this is delivered by the ordinary baker and milkman so that the neighbours should not know that the family is receiving relief (though as a matter of fact the "bread and milk" families appear to be well known). footnote : where the home conditions are extremely bad, provision is made for children to be fed at eating-houses, but such cases are very rare. at the time of our visit, in july, , there was not one such case. certain advantages have undoubtedly accrued from this system. the parents have learnt the value of milk, and the children have been taught to take it. at first there was often much difficulty in this latter respect, but by constant visitation the children's prejudice has been broken down, and they now relish the food.[ ] on the other hand, under this method of distributing the food in the homes the advantages to be derived from a common meal are totally ignored. no provision is made to meet the case where the mother goes out to work all day, and where the provision of a midday meal at school would be of great value. moreover, though frequent visits are paid to the homes at breakfast-time to see that the children are actually getting the food intended for them, it is impossible to ensure this in all cases. footnote : second quarterly report of the children's aid association, november, , to february, , p. . we have classified the different methods under the above four headings according to the place where the meal is served, but, as will have been seen by the examples given, the educational value of the meal is determined even more by the character of the supervision than by the nature of the surroundings. the supervision is frequently undertaken by the teachers. in , the board of education reports that the "assistance of teachers has been the rule rather than the exception."[ ] this service is always rendered voluntarily, though occasionally, as at bradford, the teachers receive some small remuneration.[ ] the amount of service given varies widely in different towns. at bradford the same teacher will attend the centre daily for months. in other towns his or her turn may come quite infrequently, and may only amount to two or three days' service at a time.[ ] sometimes school managers, members of the canteen committee or voluntary workers take it in turn to assist in the supervision, but their attendance is generally spasmodic. at portsmouth the centres are entirely in charge of ladies who give their services voluntarily.[ ] as a rule, however, paid superintendents are appointed, too often women of the caretaker type. in some towns the school attendance officer attends to collect the tickets and helps to maintain order. footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. . footnote : the head teachers receive s. a week for supervising dinners, and s. d. for breakfasts; the assistant teachers s. and s. respectively. at derby also the teachers are paid. (report of the school medical officer for derby, , p. .) this payment is very exceptional. footnote : at leeds, for instance, the teacher will perhaps be called on for a day or two every two months. at liverpool a teacher is supposed to attend once a fortnight, but often no teacher at all is present. at bootle the turn may be one day a week or a fortnight, or perhaps a week at a time; here the teachers, we were informed, voluntarily give their services "under protest," a fact which, when one considers the conditions under which they are asked to serve the meals, is not surprising. footnote : "the importance of a well-advised and comprehensive scheme in the selection of children ... under the education (provision of meals) act," by victor j. blake, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . the question how far the teachers should be asked to give their services is a vexed one. on the one hand, where the teacher attends regularly--and regular attendance is essential if the full benefit from the meals is to be derived--this extra work involves a great strain. especially when the midday interval is only from to . , as in many provincial towns, the time for rest is seriously curtailed. at leeds "a reasonable time is allowed the teachers in charge for their own midday meal," and they are allowed to arrive late at afternoon school in consequence of this,[ ] but we were told that this permission is not in practice taken advantage of, as their late arrival would dislocate the work. moreover, although the service is supposed to be always entirely voluntary on the part of the teachers, there is always the danger that they may feel under a moral obligation to offer their services. in some cases, the burden seems to fall unduly on a few, only a small minority offering to assist in the supervision, the others taking no share. footnote : leeds education committee, rules for the management of dinner centres. at bradford it is noticeable that it is as a general rule the men teachers who supervise the meals; women teachers assist, but the responsibility for the management of the whole centre seems to involve too great a strain upon them. on the other hand, "it is unquestionable that where the teachers are willing to undertake the work, they are, generally speaking, the most competent supervisors. the reason for this is not far to seek. the children, being accustomed to obey the commands of their teachers, are more ready to behave in an orderly and disciplined manner when under their supervision than when a stranger is in charge. moreover, the teachers' acquaintance with the idiosyncrasies of individual children enables them to keep an eye on those children who are specially in need of food or who need persuasion to make them eat the wholesome food provided."[ ] again, the fact that the teachers are present connects the meal in the child's mind with the school, and so tends to make it more a part of the school curriculum, a lesson in table manners. without the teacher, miss mcmillan points out, "the whole venture will fail miserably on the educational side." but it is a mistake to ask the teachers to serve the food and wait on the children. their function should be "to preside and to be the head, and as far as possible the soul, of the daily gathering,"[ ] just as at dinner in a secondary school. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . footnote : _london's children: how to feed them and how not to feed them_, by margaret mcmillan and a. cobden-sanderson, , p. . we have met with this ideal arrangement only at one school--a small "special" school for feeble-minded children at bradford (see post, pp. - .). to sum up now the main characteristics of the present methods of serving the meals, it will be seen that, generally speaking, the conditions are very far from satisfactory. even where the local education authority draws up elaborate regulations for the management of the dining-centres, these regulations are frequently disregarded in practice by the supervisors. too often the object is to get the meal over as quickly as possible, and inadequate attention is paid to the inculcation of table manners and the little amenities of a civilised meal. to expedite the service the food is frequently placed on the table before the children come in, and it is nearly cold before they eat it. sometimes the second course is served and placed in front of the child before it has finished the first course. the food is almost invariably such as can be eaten with a spoon and fork, and the children are thus not taught the use of a knife.[ ] sometimes only a spoon is provided and the help of fingers is almost unavoidable. we have as a rule found the supply of utensils fairly adequate, though where water is given it is not always the case for each child to have a separate mug.[ ] it is rare to find any attempt at table decoration, and table-cloths are by no means universal. it may be objected that table cloths are expensive and, if the tables are kept thoroughly clean, unnecessary, but to keep the tables well scrubbed costs as much as to provide table cloths and the necessity of keeping the cloth clean is a useful lesson to the child. sometimes the food, if of the bread and jam nature, is placed on the table without plates. in very few cases has the system of utilising the services of the elder children been adopted with any thoroughness, and the valuable opportunity of training thus offered is lost. footnote : knives were used at bradford for a time, but were given up, as it was found that the children hurt themselves. their use demands, of course, much supervision, but they might be given to the elder children at any rate. footnote : at birmingham "in one school the same mugs [for cocoa] were used twice over for different children without being washed. the supply of utensils at several of the schools was too small for the numbers fed." (_the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , p. .) (e)--the provision of meals during the holidays. at the time the act of was passed, it appears to have been generally taken for granted that it empowered local education authorities to provide meals during holidays as well as during school time.[ ] the circular issued by the board of education, asking the local authorities for information as to the way in which the act had been administered, contained a question as to the number of children who were fed during the school holidays, thus assuming that the meals would be continued; nowhere was it pointed out that the cost of the meals so provided could not be borne by the rates.[ ] moreover, during the next two or three years, the accounts of several local authorities, who continued the meals during the holidays, were certified by the local government board auditors.[ ] about , however, the question was raised whether local authorities could legally spend the rates on providing meals when the children were not actually in school. the local government board, on being appealed to by the newcastle-on-tyne education authority, replied that they could not concur in any interpretation of the act which would empower the authority to incur expenditure when the closing of the schools precluded the children's attendance.[ ] in august, , the cost of feeding children during the previous christmas holidays was disallowed by the auditor in the accounts of the west ham authority. the local government board, on appeal, confirmed the disallowance, though they remitted the surcharge.[ ] footnote : see preamble to the education (provision of meals) act amendment bill, july , . "this bill introduces no new principle, but simply extends the act to render permissible the continued operation of the act during the holidays, a point which, when the original act was passing through parliament, it was generally thought was covered." footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act, up to march , , p. . footnote : _hansard_, july , , th series, vol. , pp. - . in , out of the twenty-five or so local authorities who continued the meals during the holidays, about one-fifth paid for them out of the rates. (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. - ; report of west ham education committee for the year ended march , , pp. - . since this date, in the great majority of towns where meals are continued during the holidays,[ ] the cost is met by voluntary funds. sometimes the local education authority will issue a special appeal for funds. or the arrangements may be undertaken by some voluntary society or by philanthropic individuals. where no provision is made officially, the teachers sometimes make arrangements privately for the most necessitous children to be fed at shops. at leeds it has become the custom for the lord mayor to provide out of his own purse meals during the christmas holidays (the meals being discontinued during the other holidays); the cost of this provision may amount to as much as £ . footnote : the first report which was issued on the working of the provision of meals act gave the number of authorities who continued the meals during the school holidays--at that date out of the counties, and out of the county boroughs, boroughs and urban districts, who were making some provision under the act (report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act, , up to march , , pp. - ). no figures are now available. in one or two towns the charge has been met year after year out of public funds. at bradford, for example, the meals have from the first been continued during school holidays.[ ] the expenditure has been surcharged regularly by the local government board auditor, but, as we have said, it has been met out of a grant voted by the finance committee from the trading profits of the corporation. the labour councillors maintain that when the act was passed holiday feeding was considered legal and the ratepayers generally seem to uphold them in this claim, in spite of occasional protests.[ ] at nottingham the same plan is pursued.[ ] at portsmouth a grant is made to the mayor on the tacit understanding that he will use it for the provision of meals during the holidays. at west ham, after the local government board auditor had, in , disallowed the charge for holiday feeding, the cost was for a year or two borne by voluntary funds.[ ] it became, however, increasingly difficult to raise the necessary subscriptions, and during £ was charged to the rates, the voluntary subscriptions only amounting to £ .[ ] during the following year recourse was again had to the rates. the local government board auditor surcharged the expenditure, but the board, on appeal, remitted the surcharge, though confirming the auditor's decision.[ ] at acton meals have been supplied regularly on saturdays[ ] and during the school holidays for the past few years without any question having been raised. footnote : report of bradford education committee for the year ended march , . footnote : see letter from bradford ratepayers association, in bradford city council proceedings, august , . footnote : in london, during the christmas holidays, - , meals were provided out of a sum placed at the disposal of the chairman of the council by the general purposes committee, from the balance of the account in connection with the erection and management of the coronation procession stands. (minutes of the london county council, february , , p. .) footnote : report of the west ham education committee for the year ended march , , p. ; _ibid._ for the year ended march , , p. . footnote : _ibid._ for the year ended march , , pp. - . footnote : the _east ham echo_, august , . footnote : at brighton meals were provided on saturdays by the local education authority out of the rates till january, , when it was declared to be _ultra vires_. (report on the medical inspection of school children in brighton for , p. .) the question of the legality of the provision of meals during the holidays out of the rates is, indeed, an open one. the london county council took counsel's opinion on the point in and again in , each time receiving the reply that holiday feeding was illegal,[ ] but the question has never been settled by a case in the courts. on special occasions the local government board have relaxed their prohibition. thus, in , mr. john burns stated in parliament that though the board would not sanction in advance any expenditure incurred in providing meals during the week the schools were closed on account of the coronation festivities, they would be prepared to consider each case on its merits, and decide whether any surcharge that might be made should be remitted or upheld.[ ] and in the spring of , during the widespread distress caused by the coal strike, the board sanctioned the provision of meals during the easter holidays. footnote : minutes of the london county council, february , , p. ; minutes of the education committee, november , , p. . footnote : _hansard_, march , , th series, vol. , pp. - . on several occasions bills have been brought in by the labour party to legalise the provision of meals during the holidays, the latest being in april, .[ ] so far these efforts have met with no success, though the prime minister declared in that the government was favourable to the principle,[ ] but it has now been promised that the forthcoming education bill shall contain a clause enabling local authorities to provide meals on sundays and during holidays.[ ] footnote : see education (administrative provisions) bills, april , (no. ), february , (no. ), april , (no. ), which all contained a clause for provision of school meals during the holidays; education (provision of meals) act amendment bills, july , (no. ); april , (no. ); march , (no. ); april , (no. ). footnote : _hansard_, march , , th series, vol. , p. . footnote : _hansard_, july , , vol. , pp. - . there seems indeed to be a general consensus of opinion in favour of holiday feeding. the experiments made by dr. crowley at bradford in , and by the medical officer of health at northampton in , which we shall describe later,[ ] not to mention the testimony offered by numbers of teachers as to the deterioration of the children physically during the holidays, prove conclusively the need for the continuation of the meals, if the children are not to lose much of the benefit which they have derived during term time. footnote : see post, pp. - . in passing we may note that not only do many local authorities--how many we are unable to ascertain, but the number must be considerable--discontinue the meals during the holidays, but they stop them entirely during the summer months.[ ] in some towns, where employment is good during the summer, there may be little need for school meals, but in large towns, such as bootle and salford, which contain a large population who rely on casual labour, it is obvious that the cessation of the meals during the summer must cause considerable hardship. footnote : this may be through lack of funds, as at east ham (see ante, p. ), but is not always due to this cause. (f)--the provision for paying children and recovery of the cost. when the provision of meals act was passed it was assumed that a considerable proportion of the cost of the meals would be borne by the parents. it was confidently expected that large numbers of parents would be willing to avail themselves of the provision of a midday meal at school for their children and would gladly pay for it.[ ] the circular issued by the board of education to the local authorities pointed out that the act aimed at securing that suitable meals should be available "just as much for those whose parents are in a position to pay as for those to whom food must be given free of cost."[ ] "there will generally be no difficulty in providing, where it is so desired, a school dinner at a fixed price in the middle of the day, attended by children for whom, by reason of distance from the school or because the mother's absence makes a home meal difficult, the parent prefers to take advantage of an arrangement similar to that now in operation in most secondary day schools."[ ] moreover, little difficulty was anticipated in extracting payment from those parents who could afford to pay but neglected to do so. these expectations have not been fulfilled. in the year - the sums received from the parents, either contributed voluntarily by them or recovered after prosecution or threat of prosecution, amounted to only £ , or . per cent. of the total receipts.[ ] in - the amount so received had increased but was still only per cent.[ ] footnote : see, for instance, _hansard_, december , , th series, vol. , p. ; december , , pp. , . see also _ibid._, july , , vol. , p. , and april , , vol. , p. . footnote : report on working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : the amount was £ , out of a total of £ , . (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. .) the smallness of the sums voluntarily contributed by the parents is largely due to the action of the local authorities. in the great majority of towns in england[ ] no serious attempt has been made to establish "school restaurants"; the local education authority, owing perhaps to lack of accommodation, perhaps to the difficulty of providing for a fluctuating number of children (a difficulty felt especially where the meals are supplied through a caterer), perhaps to the feeling that the provision of school meals as a matter of convenience would encourage the mothers to go out to work, has limited the provision to necessitous children. in - , out of towns (apart from london) in which provision was made for underfed children, in only twenty-two were any of the meals paid for wholly by the parents. the number of children so paid for was in most cases negligible, the total amounting to only a few hundreds. and these figures include meals paid for under compulsion (though without prosecution) as well as meals voluntarily paid for as a matter of convenience.[ ] footnote : for provision made for paying children in scottish towns, see appendix ii., pp. , , . footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - , . in eleven other towns the parents in some cases paid part of the cost. but even where the system of voluntary payment has been tried, it has been a failure. at bradford, where a large proportion of married women work in the mills, it was felt that many parents would take advantage of a system by which they could obtain a midday meal for their children at cost price.[ ] the education committee accordingly sent round a circular to the head teachers asking them to announce to their scholars that a good dinner could be obtained for d.[ ] the response was disappointing. comparatively few of the mothers took advantage of the offer, and the result, though the number of paying children[ ] seems to be larger than in any other provincial town,[ ] can only be described as a failure. this may be partly attributed to the cost. where there are several children a payment of d. per head may be more than the parent can afford. but the main cause of failure is undoubtedly the dislike of the independent type of parent who can afford to pay to sending his children to meals the majority of which are being given free. in fact any system which seeks to combine free and paying meals, the free meals being the chief element, is fore-doomed to failure.[ ] footnote : "the needs would be met of a host of children who never got a decent meal." (councillor north, bradford city council proceedings, february , , p. .) footnote : extracts from the annual reports of the bradford education committee for the four years ended march , , , and , pp. , . the charge is now - / d. footnote : the numbers given in the report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for (p. ) are , but some of these were paid for by the guardians. no record, we were told, is kept of the individual children who pay, but the amount received in - from parents who voluntarily paid the whole cost was £ s. d. thus only some , meals were wholly paid for, out of a total of , . (bradford education committee, return as to the working of the provision of meals act for the year ending march , .) footnote : at finchley as many as two-thirds of the meals are paid for, but the charge is very low, only / d. per meal. we were informed that the price would not cover the cost of food if it were not for the fact that the meat used in connection with the dinners was provided as a voluntary gift. footnote : this was the opinion of the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding in . (see ante, p. .) "if no distinction is made between the paying children and the non-paying children," declared one witness, "i feel sure that the birmingham artisan would not send his children. he would not let them go to receive a meal in regard to which it was not known whether it was given free or not." (report of the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , vol. ii., q. , evidence of mr. george hookham.) see also the evidence given by mr. f. wilkinson, the director of education for bolton. (_ibid._, qs. - .) in the special schools for mentally or physically defective children, where the dinner is provided more as a part of the school curriculum than as a "charity" meal, there is not, as we shall see, much difficulty in inducing the parents to pay for the meals.[ ] in rural districts also, where the children are in many cases unable to go home at midday, the system of paying dinners has more chance of success.[ ] footnote : see post, p. . footnote : see post, pp. - . turning now to the question of the recovery of the cost from unwilling parents, the provision of meals act, it will be remembered, laid down that the local authorities should require payment unless satisfied that the parents could not pay, and the cost might be recovered summarily as a civil debt. in practice this has been found very difficult to accomplish. it is impossible to tell from the returns how much of the £ , received from parents in - was contributed voluntarily, and how much recovered after compulsion, but the amount recovered must necessarily be very small.[ ] footnote : the amount recovered _after prosecution_ in - was £ s. d. for the whole of england and wales, london accounting for more than half this sum. (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - .) to this we must add the amount recovered with more or less difficulty, but without prosecution. where the local education authority confines the provision of meals strictly to the cases where the family income is below a certain amount per head, as at leeds, there is of course little to be recovered, attempts at recovery being limited to cases where the parents have made an incorrect statement as to their income, and have therefore been obtaining the meals under false pretences. at west ham, indeed, the education committee has interpreted the provision of meals act to mean that recovery must be attempted in every case where meals are supplied. when a parent applies for meals for his children on the score of being unable to provide for them himself--for only necessitous children are fed, no provision being made for voluntary payment--he has to sign a form by which he agrees to repay the cost of all meals which have been supplied when he gets back into work and can afford to do so. moreover, he has to send a note every day saying that he still wishes his children to be fed,[ ] this being insisted on as a proof that meals have been supplied in the event of an attempt at recovery. in any case the full cost is rarely charged, the wage and the number of children being taken into consideration, and a rebate of sometimes as much as per cent. being granted. but as a matter of fact very few accounts are sent to the borough treasurer for collection, as the wages of nearly all the parents of the children who are fed, even when they are in good work, are too small to allow of their paying for meals supplied in the past.[ ] footnote : see ante, p. . footnote : report of the west ham education committee for the year ending march , , p. . when the local education authority is determined to provide food for all children who need it, for those who are underfed through the neglect of their parents to provide for them as well as for those whose parents are too poor to do so, a considerable amount ought to be recovered. the difficulty lies in the impossibility in many cases of securing sufficient evidence of the parent's ability to pay. magistrates are notoriously loth to convict. at bradford we were told that in numbers of cases magistrates' orders for payment had been served on the parents, but these orders were frequently disregarded by parents who knew the practical difficulties in the way of enforcing them.[ ] footnote : in proceedings were taken against parents in only eight towns, including london. the number of cases was , of which were in london. (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - .) whether the amount due for meals which have been already supplied is paid by the parent or not, the commonest result of sending a notice that the local authority intends to recover the cost is that the parents refuse to allow their children any longer to receive the meals. "in practice it is found," says the bootle school canteen committee, "that when action is taken to enforce payment the children are withdrawn by their parents from further participation in the meals, with the result that the children revert to their former ill-fed condition."[ ] at york, too, we were told that when a child who is found to be underfed through neglect is put on the feeding-list and a letter written to the father that he will be charged the cost of the meals, he invariably writes back demanding that his child shall be taken off the list. nothing more is done and the child remains underfed. the local education authorities are, indeed, "on the horns of a dilemma in dealing with such cases, as the act obliges them to make this attempt to recover the cost, and they know that the only result of their doing so will be that the children are withdrawn from the meals."[ ] so much has the bradford education authority felt this difficulty that they have more than once sought power, by inserting a clause in the local bills promoted by the corporation, to compel the attendance of children at meals in all cases in which the school medical officer certifies that the children are underfed, and to recover the cost. these efforts have so far proved useless, it being held that such a clause involves a new principle and cannot therefore be included in a local act.[ ] footnote : report on the work of the bootle school canteen committee, - , p. . since this date the committee have accordingly made no attempt to prosecute parents for repayment of the cost. footnote : extracts from annual reports of bradford education committee for the four years ended march , , , and , p. . footnote : at bradford a child who is underfed through neglect is put on the feeding-list for a month before the bill is sent to its parents, so that it may receive the benefit of the meals for this period at any rate. the question of dealing with neglectful parents is indeed beset with difficulties. under the children act, , a parent or guardian can be prosecuted for neglecting a child "in a manner likely to cause such child unnecessary suffering or injury to its health." this neglect is defined to mean those cases where the parent or guardian "fails to provide adequate food, clothing, medical aid or lodging," or, if unable to provide the same himself, fails to apply to the guardians for relief.[ ] it is rare for the local education authorities themselves to institute proceedings under this act. usually they prefer to refer cases to the society for the prevention of cruelty to children. often an improvement in the condition of the child is effected as a result of the visits of this society's inspectors to the home. but when these warnings prove useless, frequently nothing more is done; the society are loth to prosecute, except in extreme cases when they can be practically certain of securing a conviction. footnote : edward vii., c. , sec. . (g)--overlapping between the poor law and the education authorities. we have already alluded to the neglect of the guardians to deal with more than an insignificant fraction of the children who are underfed. the attempt made in to force them to fulfil their responsibility in this respect was, as we have seen, a complete failure, and the duty was therefore cast upon the local education authorities. but even in the few cases where the guardians have assumed the responsibility by granting out-relief to the family, the amount of this relief is, in the vast majority of cases, totally inadequate. this was abundantly proved by the report of the poor law commission in . "the children," they reported, "are undernourished, many of them poorly dressed and many bare-footed ... the decent mother's one desire is to keep herself and her children out of the work-house. she will, if allowed, try to do this on an impossibly inadequate sum, until both she and her children become mentally and physically deteriorated."[ ] when the mother was careless or neglectful no supervision was exercised by the guardians to see that even this inadequate amount was really spent on the children. this indictment still holds good to-day. the inadequacy of the relief granted by the guardians, in all but a few exceptional unions, has, in fact, become a byword. footnote : report of the royal commission on the poor laws and relief of distress, , vo edition, vol. iii. (minority report), p. . in the great majority of towns, the local education authority is consequently driven to feed children whose parents are in receipt of poor relief. thus two authorities deal with the same case, without, in many instances, either of them knowing what the other is doing.[ ] only in a few cases has any attempt been made to prevent this overlapping. for example, at leicester (one of the few towns, we may note, where liberal out-relief is granted by the guardians) there has from the first been co-operation between the guardians and the canteen committee.[ ] the relieving officer refers to the canteen committee many applications that are made to him where temporary help only is needed, and the committee has frequently tided families over a bad time and saved them from recourse to the poor law. on the other hand, when a family is receiving out-relief the canteen committee refuses to grant food for the children. at acton a similar policy has been adopted. if parents who are in receipt of out-relief apply for school meals for their children, the secretary of the education committee recommends them to apply to the guardians for more relief, at the same time himself writing to the relieving officer. as a rule the relief is increased in consequence. meanwhile the teachers are told to watch the children to see that they do not suffer from want of food. at dewsbury, also, temporary cases are dealt with by the canteen committee, but all chronic cases by the guardians.[ ] footnote : occasionally, as we have seen, the guardians are represented on the canteen committee, as at crewe. footnote : first annual report of the leicester children's aid association, - , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for dewsbury for , p. . elsewhere an attempt has been made to prevent overlapping by other means. while the education authority undertakes to provide for all the underfed children, an arrangement is made with the guardians whereby they repay the cost of the meals supplied for all children whose parents are in receipt of relief. the relief is thus given partly in the form of school meals, a plan strongly to be commended, since it ensures that the relief given on account of the children is in fact obtained by them. this plan has been for some years pursued at bradford. at first there appear to have been complaints that the guardians were reducing the relief granted, on account of the dinners supplied at school,[ ] but the dinners are now given in addition to the ordinary relief.[ ] in - , the guardians paid £ to the education authority on this account.[ ] even so, there is some slight overlapping, since the guardians only pay for dinners and in some cases the canteen committee are of opinion that a second meal is needed, and consequently breakfasts are granted and paid for by the education authority. a similar plan has been adopted at blackburn,[ ] huddersfield,[ ] brighton,[ ] york and liverpool. in the last named town the arrangement has only recently been made, and is in force in only two of the three unions into which the town is divided, west derby and liverpool. the guardians have agreed to issue coupons for school meals to children whose parents are in receipt of out-relief, and will pay to the education authority d. per meal. we were informed that, in the case of the west derby guardians at any rate, these coupons would only be given to children whose mothers were out all day. the relief would be reduced in consequence, though not to the extent of the full value of the meal. the guardians of the toxteth union declined to make a similar arrangement, but suggested that the local education authority should inform them when they found children underfed whose parents were in receipt of relief, and they proposed in these cases to increase the relief.[ ] footnote : bradford city council proceedings, june , , p. ; april , , p. . footnote : thus the minimum relief for a widow is s., with s. each for the first two children, and s. each for other children. in addition five dinners a week, amounting in value to s. - / d., are given to all children attending school. (bradford poor law union, outdoor relief arrangements.) footnote : bradford education committee, return as to the working of the provision of meals act for the year ending march , . footnote : report of the school medical officer for blackburn, , p. . out of , meals given during the year, the guardians paid for , , or nearly one-third. footnote : report of the huddersfield education committee, , p. . footnote : report of brighton education committee for the year ending march , , p. . footnote : for the arrangements made between the liverpool education committee and the guardians with regard to payment for children admitted as voluntary cases to the day industrial schools, see post, p. n. other local education authorities have tried this plan of communicating with the guardians, in the hope that they would grant adequate relief for the needs of the children, but, finding no such result ensue, have discontinued the practice. at bury st. edmunds, for instance, it was found in the winter of - that "a large percentage of the families whose children were fed at school were in receipt of outdoor relief of an amount which the education authority thought inadequate. the attention of the board of guardians was called to the fact, but no steps were taken by them."[ ] the education committee accordingly continued to feed the children, and we gather that now no communication is made by them to the guardians. similarly at west ham we were informed that the education committee used to report cases to the guardians, but the practice proved useless and it has been given up, except for special cases, where the guardians will sometimes increase the relief given. footnote : report of the royal commission on the poor laws and relief of distress, , vo edition, vol. iii. (minority report), p. n. in a few unions, as at leeds, the only result of the guardians learning that the children are receiving school meals--the need for which points to the conclusion that the out-relief granted is inadequate--is that they promptly reduce the relief, though not contributing to the local education authority anything towards the cost of the meals. they appear to regard the provision of school meals merely as a means of reducing the poor-rates, and casting the burden on other shoulders. naturally in such circumstances the local education authority does not report cases to the guardians. any systematic arrangement between the two authorities appears indeed to be exceptional. as a rule there is practically no co-operation, beyond, perhaps, the notification of cases by both authorities to some mutual registration society,[ ] or the informal meetings of the relieving officers and the school attendance officers.[ ] footnote : thus at manchester, the education committee and the guardians send lists of their cases to the district provident society, and the secretary lets each authority know what the other is doing. footnote : it is impossible to give any figures as to the overlapping that exists, since the practice varies so much in different towns, and in many cases no records are kept. (h)--the provision of meals at day industrial schools and special schools. we have already alluded to the power of the local education authorities to provide meals for the children attending the day industrial schools and the special schools for the mentally or physically defective. the day industrial schools are intended primarily for children who have played truant from the ordinary schools and who are committed by a magistrate's order. but in the case of widows or deserted wives who have to work all day, or when the father is incapacitated from work by illness or infirmity, or if the father is a widower, the children may be admitted to a day industrial school, without an order, as "voluntary cases."[ ] when children are committed by a magistrate's order, the parents are ordered to make a weekly payment towards the cost of industrial training and meals.[ ] in the case of children admitted voluntarily such payment is also theoretically demanded,[ ] but in practice it is, as a rule, impossible to exact it. thus at liverpool, though small payments are received from widowers, the condition as to payment has to be waived in the case of widows and deserted wives, or when the father is unable to work through illness.[ ] at bootle we were informed that no payment is received from any of the voluntary cases. the schools are open from or in the morning to . or at night and three meals are provided. the dietary is as a rule monotonous, being continued week after week with practically no variation. in point of order, as might be expected, the service of the meals compares favourably with those given to necessitous children, erring rather on the side of over-much discipline. it is, unfortunately, by no means uncommon to find absolute silence insisted on, a regulation which has a most depressing effect. in these day industrial schools the local education authorities have a valuable instrument for providing for the numerous cases where mothers are at work all day and so cannot provide proper meals for their children, or where the children are neglected. this was urged by many witnesses before the royal commission on the poor laws,[ ] and again recently by the departmental committee on reformatory and industrial schools.[ ] very few authorities, however, have taken advantage of this power. in there were only twelve day industrial schools in england, provided by eight authorities, and eight in scotland, of which seven were in glasgow.[ ] the total attendance numbered a little over , , the voluntary cases amounting to only .[ ] these numbers showed a decrease compared with previous years,[ ] and this decline has since continued, partly owing to the fact that truancy is far less common now than formerly, partly owing to the provision of meals for children attending elementary schools, which renders the day industrial schools less necessary.[ ] footnote : elementary education act, ( and vic., c. ), sec. ( ); children act, ( edward vii., c. ), sec. ; "day industrial schools," by j. c. legge, in _proceedings of national conference on the prevention of destitution_, , p. . footnote : children act, , sec. ( ). footnote : _ibid._, sec. . footnote : "day industrial schools," by j. c. legge, in _proceedings of national conference on the prevention of destitution_, , p. . for many years an arrangement has been in force by which the liverpool select vestry pay the local education authority d. a week in respect of each child in their area admitted as a voluntary scholar. (_ibid._) a few years ago the guardians of the toxteth union agreed, in such cases, where the parent was in receipt of outdoor relief, to increase the relief by d. on condition that this was paid to the education authority. (_ibid._, p. .) the west derby guardians pay a lump sum of £ a year. footnote : report of the royal commission on the poor laws, . vo edition, vol. iii., p. . footnote : report of the departmental committee on reformatory and industrial schools, , p. . footnote : fifty-fifth report on reformatory and industrial schools, , part i., pp. - ; part ii., p. . two of the schools in england have since been closed, and the school at leeds is shortly to be given up. footnote : _ibid._, part i., pp. - ; part ii., p. . footnote : _ibid._, part ii., p. . footnote : report of the departmental committee on reformatory and industrial schools, , p. . the arrangements made for providing for the mentally and physically defective children vary in different towns. sometimes no special provision is made. at leicester, for instance, the mentally defective children who come from a distance bring their food with them and the caretaker warms it. frequently, however, a regular dinner is supplied. thus at eastbourne dinners are provided at the special school for dull and backward children at a very small charge.[ ] at bradford some of the children pay - / d. a meal, others receive it free. at liverpool a payment of s., d. or d. a week is demanded, according to the circumstances, the meals being given free in special cases.[ ] in birkenhead, too, the charge varies, some paying s. a week, some d. or d. per meal, at the discretion of the teacher; no meals are given free, children who cannot pay being sent to the centre to have their dinner with the necessitous children from the ordinary elementary schools. there appears to be usually little difficulty in collecting payment. at birkenhead we were told that some difficulty was experienced at first, but the children appreciate the dinners so much now that they beg their parents to give them the necessary pence. footnote : report of school medical officer for eastbourne for , p. . footnote : the majority pay about d. a week. in the case of physically defective children the parent's payment is intended to meet the expenses of dinner, any medicines or dressings that may be necessary, and the cost of conveyance. it does not, of course, nearly cover these charges. at the open air schools[ ] the common meal always forms part of the regular school routine. as a rule three meals a day are provided,[ ] and sometimes milk is given in addition in the middle of the morning. usually some charge is made towards the cost of the meals, varying from d. to s. per week, according to the parents' circumstances, but in necessitous cases the charge is remitted.[ ] footnote : in there were only nine open air schools, maintained by eight authorities. (report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. .) footnote : at darlington only a mid-day meal is provided. footnote : at norwich the charge varies from d. to s. d.; at sheffield, from d. to s. d.; at halifax it may amount to s. at barnsley all the parents are charged s. d. per week, no children being admitted without payment. at bradford the meals are given free to all. the service of the meals at these special schools presents in general a marked contrast to the methods prevailing at the centres for necessitous children. for example, at birkenhead, where the management of the feeding centres leaves much to be desired,[ ] the dinner provided at the mentally defective school, for all children who care to stay, is served in an attractive and educational manner. one or more teachers are always present to supervise it. the children enter all together and sit down at small tables. the boys and girls take it in turns to lay the tables and clear away afterwards, and help to serve the food. table-cloths are provided and these are kept remarkably clean. somewhat similar conditions prevail at liverpool in the special schools for physically and mentally defective children.[ ] but it is at a school for feeble-minded children at bradford that we found the most perfect arrangements. the smallness of the numbers--only some or children being present--allowed attention to be paid to each individual child. the dinner was served in a bright cheerful hall, and the tables were nicely laid by the children, with table-cloths, plants and flowers; these latter the children often bring themselves. two teachers are always present and preside at the two tables, having their dinner with the children. the children's manners were excellent and spoke volumes for the patience and care exercised by the teachers. footnote : see ante, pp. - . footnote : at one of these schools, the mentally defective children were having their dinner in one room, the physically defective in an adjoining room. all the children stay for the meal. the headmistress supervised, assisted by a teacher for the mentally defective, and the school nurse for the physically defective children. tablecloths were provided for the latter, but not for the former. the dinner was cooked by the children who had been attending the cookery class in the morning; the children laid the tables, and monitors helped to serve the food. the example afforded by the service of the meals at these special schools might well be imitated by the education authorities in providing meals at the ordinary elementary schools. (i)--the underfed child in rural schools. we have confined our investigations almost entirely to the urban districts. we must, however, briefly touch upon the question of underfeeding in the country. here the conditions are different. the problem is not only how to provide for the children who do not get sufficient to eat; there are also to be considered the large numbers who are unable to return home at midday and have to bring their dinner to school with them. many of these children have to walk long distances, perhaps two miles, three miles, or even more. the long walk necessitates an early start from home; this makes the interval between breakfast and dinner long and the exercise sharpens the appetite. hence it is of the greatest importance that the midday meal should be adequate. in most cases, however, as the reports of school medical officers abundantly testify, the dinner which these children bring with them consists of bread and jam, cake or pastry, with perhaps a bottle of cold tea.[ ] in a few schools the teachers have organised cocoa clubs, the children paying d. or - / d. per week, which is as a rule just sufficient to cover expenses.[ ] incidentally, it is noticed, the weekly payment for cocoa has a good effect on the attendance. "a child having once paid his or her cocoa fee at the beginning of the week seldom stays away from school during the remainder of the week if it can possibly be avoided."[ ] footnote : in east sussex, for instance, where particulars were supplied by the teachers as to the meals brought by eleven of the children, it was found that the food was totally inadequate, in most cases consisting of bread and butter, or cake, with perhaps a small piece of cheese or an apple. two children of five years old, who had to walk two miles to school, brought, one of them bread and butter only, the other cake. three children, who had to walk three and a half miles, brought either cake or only bread. ("the diet of elementary school children in country districts," by dr. george finch, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. .) in a bedfordshire school out of children who brought their dinner to school with them, one had an apple tart, three had bread and cheese, while had "bread with a thin layer of butter or lard on it, or else bread and jam, or bread and syrup. this meal was washed down with water, as nothing hot was obtainable." ("how the family of the agricultural labourer lives," by ronald t. herdman, reprinted in _rearing an imperial race_, p. .) footnote : thus at brynconin, where children are supplied daily with cocoa for a weekly charge of d., the week's expenditure on cocoa, sugar and milk amounts to s. d., and the children's payments to s. d. (report of the school medical officer for pembrokeshire for , p. .) see also reports of the school medical officer for hampshire ( ), p. ; for the isle of ely ( ), p. ; for gloucestershire ( ), p. ; for east suffolk ( ), p. ; for west sussex ( ), p. . sometimes the cocoa is provided free through the generosity of the teachers. (see report of monmouthshire education committee on the medical inspection department for , p. .) footnote : report of the school medical officer for hampshire for , p. . sometimes the teacher encourages the children to bring bottles of milk, cocoa or coffee and sees that they are warmed over the fire before being partaken of. occasionally a regular dinner is provided. we have already mentioned the experiment made at rousdon by sir henry peek in . this has been continued to the present day. a hot dinner is provided daily, consisting of one course, soup with bread and vegetables two days a week, and some form of suet pudding the other three days. about half the children stay for the dinner and pay one penny each, these payments just about covering the cost of the food. the meal is served in a dining-room in the school and the ex-headmaster and the present headmaster voluntarily undertake the supervision. a somewhat similar plan has been tried at grassington, in yorkshire. when, eighteen years ago, the teaching of cookery was introduced, it was resolved to combine with that instruction the provision of a hot midday meal. the children not only cook the dinner themselves, but they take it in turns to order and pay for the materials, thus acquiring the valuable knowledge how to buy. they are taught the value of the different foodstuffs and learn how to make a good substantial dinner at a little cost. a two-course dinner, ample and varied, is provided daily at the school.[ ] each child is allowed to eat as much as it wants, but no waste is allowed. marvellous as it appears, the payment of a d. per meal covers the cost of the food.[ ] the dinner appears to have been intended chiefly for the children who came from a distance, but the parents of the children who live in the village have been glad to avail themselves of the provision, since the school dinner is better than they can supply at home.[ ] nearly half the children stay. all the arrangements are, and have from the first been, made by the headmaster's wife, who takes the cookery lesson and serves the meal herself, and the success of the experiment must be very largely attributed to her voluntary labours. footnote : for sample menus, see appendix i., p. . footnote : for instance, the cost of the food for the dinners for twelve weeks amounted to £ s. d., and the children's payments to £ s. d. on cold snowy mornings hot cocoa is provided before morning school for all the children. the cost of this is, we gather, borne entirely by the headmaster and his wife. footnote : _yorkshire post_, july , . in two schools in cheshire also, siddington and nether alderley, hot dinners are provided at a charge of - / d., in the former during the winter months, in the latter all the year round. in both cases the children's payments cover, or slightly more than cover, the cost of the food, the other expenses being borne by voluntary funds. such provision is, however, quite exceptional. as a rule no provision whatever is made. "i have only once seen any supervision of the meal on the part of the teachers," writes a late assistant school medical officer for east sussex; "in fine weather the children generally eat [their dinner] out of doors; in bad weather it is taken in the school or cloak-room in what are often very unhygienic surroundings."[ ] "there is no doubt," writes another school medical officer, "that at some of the schools the conditions in which the children get their midday meal are deplorable."[ ] "it is only too common a sight," reports the school medical officer for derbyshire, "to see little children sitting in a corner of the class-room, cloak-room or even the playground, munching at thick slices of bread and butter. under these circumstances," he continues, "it cannot be wondered at that children below the normal development are to be found in our schools."[ ] in anglesey the school medical officer finds more children badly nourished in the rural areas than in the urban areas; this he attributes mainly to the long walk to school every day, the inadequacy of the midday meal and the hurried manner in which it is eaten.[ ] footnote : "the diet of elementary school children in country districts," by dr. george finch, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for hampshire, , p. . footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . it is indeed essential that in all country schools to which children come from a distance, provision should be made for the serving of a midday meal under proper supervision.[ ] as dr. george finch points out, "the authority which requires the child to spend its day away from home might not unreasonably be expected by the parents to make some provision that its midday meal might be taken under not unfavourable conditions. the parent, however conscientious, cannot adequately deal with the problem, and the provision of suitable cold food is not an easy matter, even in the more well-to-do family."[ ] the meals should be served as part of the school curriculum and might well be combined with the teaching of cookery as is done at grassington. footnote : as we have seen, the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding in recommended that managers of country schools should arrange, during the winter at any rate, to provide either a hot dinner or soup or cocoa for children who lived too far away to go home at mid-day. (see ante, p. .) footnote : "the diet of elementary school children in country districts," by dr. george finch, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . conclusions. it may be useful now to sum up the main points which emerge from the foregoing description. the proposal, which we shall discuss in the final chapter, to make the midday meal a part of the school curriculum, to be attended by all children who wish to avail themselves of the provision, would obviate many of the difficulties that arise under the present system. meanwhile we may point out some ways in which improvements can be effected, apart from this more drastic proposal. . since the provision of meals act is only permissive, local education authorities are allowed to remain inactive in spite of the fact that children in their schools are underfed, and that no adequate provision is made by voluntary agencies. it should be made obligatory on the local authority to take action in such a case. . the limitation of the amount which may be spent on food by the local education authority to the sum yielded by a halfpenny rate restricts operations in some towns, and prevents provision being made for all the necessitous children. this limitation should be removed. an alteration of the law in these two directions would merely assimilate the powers and duties of the english education authorities to those already conferred on the scottish school boards by the education (scotland) act of .[ ] footnote : see post, pp. - . . the selection of the children who are to receive school meals is based, often solely and always primarily, on the poverty test. little attempt is made to link up the provision of meals with the school medical service. the meals, that is to say, are regarded primarily as a means of relieving distress rather than as a remedy for malnutrition. the numbers selected vary according to the policy of the local education authority and the views taken by the individual head teachers. nowhere can the selection of the children be said to be satisfactory. in towns such as bradford, where the local authority is determined to search out all cases of children who are suffering from lack of food, the great majority of underfed children are doubtless discovered, but in other towns numbers of such children are overlooked and left unprovided for, while everywhere little or no provision is made for the countless children who are improperly fed at home. we shall discuss in the final chapter the best method to be pursued in this matter of selecting the children. . there is great diversity of practice in different towns with regard to the time at which the meal is given, the manner in which it is prepared and served, and the kind of food supplied. where only one meal is provided, it would appear that dinner is for many reasons preferable to breakfast. the dietary should be varied and should be drawn up in consultation with the school medical officer; it should be so planned as to contain a due proportion of the elements which are lacking in the child's home diet, and special provision should be made for the infants. the preparation of the meals should not be left to caterers but should be undertaken by the local authority, so that adherence to the approved dietary and a high standard of quality can be assured. the meal should be regarded as part of the school curriculum. it should be served as far as possible on the school premises, and should be attended only by children from that particular school. the children should be taught to set the tables and wait on one another, the tables being nicely laid, with table-cloths and, if possible, flowers or plants. clean hands and faces and orderly behaviour should be insisted on. some of the teachers should supervise the meal and should receive some extra remuneration for this service. . the discontinuance of the school meals during the holidays has been shown to undo much of the benefit derived during term-time, and it entails unnecessary suffering on the children. the expenditure of the rates on holiday feeding must be legalised. the limitation of the provision to the winter months, as is the practice in some towns, is even more absurd. local authorities should be required to continue the school meals throughout the year, if need exists. . the sums contributed by the parents towards the cost of their children's meals amount to only a trifling fraction of the total expenditure. the power of providing meals as a matter of convenience for children whose parents are able and willing to pay has been very sparingly used by the local education authorities, as far as the ordinary elementary schools are concerned. in the special schools for defective children, on the other hand, where not infrequently a midday meal is provided for all the children, a considerable proportion of the parents contribute towards the cost. it is difficult to say whether the establishment of school restaurants in the ordinary schools would be successful. one point, however, seems clear; if the plan is to succeed, the meals must be intended primarily for paying children; if they are provided mainly for necessitous children, parents who can afford to pay will not send their children to any great extent. in the case of the parents who can afford to feed their children but neglect to do so, the attempt to recover the cost of the meals supplied to the children results as a rule in almost total failure, owing to the extreme difficulty of obtaining conclusive evidence of the parents' ability to pay. an attempt to recover may be worse than useless, for it frequently leads the parent to withdraw his children promptly from the school meals, though their need of the meals continues as great as before. . owing to the inadequate relief usually given by the boards of guardians, the local education authorities are in many cases forced to feed children whose parents are receiving poor relief. in only a few towns is any systematic attempt made to prevent this overlapping between the two authorities. so long as the guardians retain their present functions, the plan adopted at bradford and a few other towns, by which the out-relief granted by the guardians is given partly in the form of school meals, the guardians paying the education authority for these meals, might well be extended to other towns. by this plan overlapping of relief is avoided, while it ensures that the relief given to the mother on account of her children is in effect obtained by them. . in the rural districts the conditions under which the children eat their midday meal are frequently deplorable. the long walk to school renders it even more important than it is in the towns that the meal should be a substantial one, but the food which the children bring with them is as a rule entirely inadequate. in the few schools where a hot dinner has been provided, the plan has met with marked success, and such provision should be made in all schools. it might advantageously be combined with the teaching of cookery, a plan which is more practicable in the country than in the towns, since the numbers to be provided for are comparatively small. chapter iii the provision of meals in london we have reserved the treatment of london for a separate chapter since, owing to its size and the diverse conditions prevailing in the different districts, it presents problems of special difficulty. we shall describe in this chapter the provision made in the early years of this century by voluntary agencies, and the final assumption by the london county council of the whole responsibility of dealing with its underfed children; we shall trace the gradual building up of a vast and complex organisation to deal not only with the question of school meals, but also with other matters affecting the general welfare of the children; and we shall discuss the actual methods of working at the present day. (a)--the organisation of the voluntary agencies. we have already sketched the early history of the movement in london, and described the attempts made by the london school board to organise the host of voluntary agencies.[ ] the proposal put forward by a committee of the school board in to make that body responsible for providing food for all its underfed children was, as we have shown, defeated by a large majority, and a renewed attempt was made by the establishment of a central organisation, the joint committee on underfed children, to organise the voluntary agencies. footnote : see ante, pp. - . this attempt met with but little more success than the earlier endeavours. the functions of the joint committee were limited to receiving reports from the relief committees, pointing out defects in their methods of working, and acting generally as a medium of communication between these committees and the collecting agencies. if the relief committees failed to send reports, the joint committee had no power to compel them to do so, nor could the committee insist on the remedying of the defects which they pointed out. by the committee were able to report that only one school had been discovered in which meals were provided but no report received. "we may hope, therefore," they continue, "that ... the instructions of the council ... have at last reached all head teachers and are being obeyed. but in default of any executive and inspecting machinery, it has taken the persistent efforts of the joint committee, during six years, to effect this result, if indeed it has really been effected."[ ] the greatest difficulty was experienced in getting relief committees established in every school or group of schools in which underfed children were provided with meals.[ ] even when these committees were appointed, the meetings of many of them were held infrequently and for formal business only, the selection of the children and the enquiry into the parents' circumstances being left entirely to the teachers.[ ] consequently the methods of selection differed widely, even in the same school, the different departments paying no attention to what the others were doing.[ ] the enquiry was generally totally inadequate, and in some cases was not even attempted.[ ] the joint committee urged that, when meals were given at all, they should be given regularly at least four if not five days a week, and should be continued throughout the year if necessary.[ ] but in we find that "there are still a good many schools where meals are only provided on one or two days, and more where they are only given on three days, the average number throughout the schools being - / meals per child per week."[ ] in only sixteen schools were the meals continued for more than twenty weeks during the year.[ ] footnote : report of the joint committee on underfed children, for - , p. . footnote : fourth annual report of the joint committee on underfed children, , pp. - ; report of inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , qs. , (evidence of mr. t. e. harvey). even in there were schools at which feeding took place which had not a properly constituted committee. (london county council, report by executive officer (education), appendix a to agenda of sub-committee on underfed children, july , .) footnote : "there is supposed to be a committee in every school," said one headmaster, "but the committees never meet in the vast majority of cases, and if they do, they never undertake personal investigation." (report of the select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , q. , evidence of mr. marshall jackman.) "there is [a relief committee] in accordance with the rules," declared another headmaster, but "the committee acts really through the head teachers.... the committee say that the teachers have their confidence, and they could not do any good by attempting themselves to help as a committee, and therefore they do not help." (report of the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , q. (evidence of mr. t. p. shovelier.) see also _ibid._, qs. a, - , , . footnote : see, for instance, report of inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , qs. , . footnote : "the duty of making enquiries by the managers, or by outsiders working for them, into the home conditions of the children is, with some remarkable exceptions, seldom well done, and often not done at all. they are authorised to invite assistance from attendance officers, ... from charity organisation society visitors, district visitors, country holiday fund visitors, and similar persons, but we have very seldom found that this class of person has been consulted." (report of the joint committee on underfed children for - , p. .) footnote : _ibid._ for - , p. . footnote : _ibid._ for - , appendix g., p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . the joint committee strenuously opposed the theory, which was now steadily gaining ground, that the rates should be utilised for the supply of food. in they report that, in their opinion, "all real distress on any considerable scale has been effectually met.... they have never been restricted in their efforts for want of funds, and there is no reason to think that any organisations dealing with public money would be more efficient than these bodies dealing with charitable money. on the other hand, there is reason to believe that, even as things are now, relief is often given to children who are not really in want, and there is no doubt that if the public purse were being drawn upon, relief would be distributed more lavishly."[ ] the county council could hardly, however, remain unmoved by the disquieting report of the committee on physical deterioration published in the same year. dr. eichholz, in his evidence before the committee, had indeed described the existing method of feeding in london as "entirely in the nature of a temporary stop-gap. there is," he declared, "but little concentrated effort at building up enfeebled constitutions, school feeding doing little beyond arresting further degeneracy."[ ] in april, , the council accordingly resolved "that, with a view to checking the physical deterioration among the london population and securing the best result from the expenditure on education, it be referred to the education committee to consider and report as to the necessary parliamentary power being obtained for the provision of food where necessary for the children attending rate-supported schools in london."[ ] the education committee, however, while admitting that there were numbers of underfed and ill-fed children attending the schools and that in the case of these children it was impossible to secure the best results from an educational standpoint, were nevertheless of opinion that, "while the necessity for feeding children as the last resort out of public funds is a proposition endorsed by the whole spirit of the poor law," there were strong arguments against seeking power to utilise the rates at present. the provision of school meals out of public funds must tend to lessen parental responsibility, and the expense entailed would be very serious, since the numbers, though small at first, would inevitably tend to increase.[ ] the committee recommended, therefore, that the experiment should be tried of utilising the food prepared at the cookery centres. the advantages of this course would be twofold. the experiment would prove whether there was a demand on the part of the better-off parents for the provision of cheap dinners at school, while the training at the cookery centres would be improved by receiving a more practical trend.[ ] footnote : fourth annual report of the joint committee on underfed children, , p. . evidence was given before the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding in , which showed that difficulty was experienced in collecting sufficient funds. the london schools dinner association found that people would contribute at christmas time, but in the early spring, when the work was heaviest, the subscriptions ceased. (report of the inter-departmental committee on medical inspection and feeding, , qs. , - .) see also evidence of mr. marshall jackman before the select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , qs. , - . footnote : report of inter-departmental committee on physical deterioration, , q. . footnote : minutes of the london county council, april , , p. . footnote : _ibid._, july , , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . the experiment was accordingly tried at five[ ] selected schools. in three of these schools, which were situated in poor districts, dinners were supplied at - / d each. in the other two schools, situated in better-class neighbourhoods, the cost was d. and d., the parents preferring the more expensive dinner.[ ] the council having no power to spend the rates on the provision of food, the meals had to be paid for by the parents or by charitable agencies. the teachers were instructed not to choose only necessitous children, but to distribute the tickets fairly between the children in the schools, the object being to try the experiment of a common dinner.[ ] from an educational point of view the dinners were very successful. the children were taught to eat properly,[ ] and the girls attending the cookery class benefited by the practical training. it appeared, too, that there was a demand, in certain districts at any rate, for the provision of cheap dinners at school.[ ] but the experiment was on too small a scale to have much practical bearing on the question of feeding necessitous children. for large numbers the cookery centres were quite inadequate and any attempt to use them primarily for the object of providing children's meals would interfere with the instruction given. footnote : the experiment was later extended to fifteen schools. footnote : report of the select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills, , qs. , , evidence of mr. a. j. shepheard. footnote : _ibid._, q. . footnote : the tables were "nicely laid and with tablecloths, with all the ordinary appliances and requirements of a table put there, such as salt cellars, knives and forks, and everything of that kind. the tables were laid out with flowers ... i think i may quite certainly say that some of these children had never sat down to a meal of that description in their lives." (_ibid._, q. .) footnote : minutes of the london county council, december , , p. . about eighty per cent. of the meals were paid for by the parents, the remaining twenty per cent. being paid for by friends or voluntary agencies. (report of the select committee on the education (provision of meals) bills, , q. .) (b)--the assumption of responsibility by the county council. no further serious attempt was made for some years to place the provision of food upon the rates. on the passing of the provision of meals act the county council took over the whole responsibility for the provision, the joint committee on underfed children, which had been composed partly of representatives of voluntary organisations,[ ] giving place to a sub-committee of the education committee[ ]; but voluntary funds were still relied on. in , however, the supply began to fail. in july of that year a conference of the mayors of the london boroughs had declared that there was no reason to fear that voluntary contributions would be insufficient to defray the cost of food.[ ] the appeal subsequently issued met, however, with a very meagre response, only some £ , being subscribed.[ ] by the end of the year it became clear that recourse must be had to the rates, and application was accordingly made to the board of education. the new system was put in force early in .[ ] footnote : when, in , the london school board was superseded by the london county council, the joint committee on underfed children had been continued by the latter body, its constitution remaining practically unaltered. (london county council, report of education committee, - , part ii., p. .) footnote : this sub-committee was known at first as the sub-committee on underfed children. in december, , the name was altered to the children's care (central) sub-committee. (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : see minutes of the london county council, november , , p. . footnote : "state feeding of school children in london," by sir charles elliott, in _nineteenth century_, may, , p. . footnote : london county council, report of the education committee for - , part ii., p. . meanwhile the constant complaints of the varying methods pursued by the different care committees[ ] in the selection of the children, and the rapid increase in the number of children fed,[ ] led the sub-committee on underfed children to call for a report on the circumstances of these children, so that the cause of the distress might be ascertained and some light thrown on the question how far the provision of free meals was really an effective remedy for the evils which existed.[ ] an investigation was accordingly conducted by the two officials who had been appointed by the council to organise the work of the local care committees. twelve schools were selected in different districts, and a careful enquiry made into the circumstances of all the children at these schools who were receiving free meals. in all , families were dealt with, containing , children. footnote : the local relief committees had been re-organised under the name of children's care committees in july, . (_ibid._) footnote : the numbers greatly increased during the winter of - , and reached a maximum of , in march, . (london county council, report on the home circumstances of necessitous children in twelve selected schools, , p. .) footnote : _ibid._ in a small number of the cases, · per cent., the distress was found to be due to illness or some other temporary misfortune; unemployment of the wage-earner accounted for · per cent., and under-employment for per cent., of the cases; in · per cent. the cause of the distress was attributed to the intemperance or wastefulness of the parents.[ ] the necessity of providing school meals, at any rate as a temporary expedient, was clearly proved. it was found that, though · per cent. of the children were not necessitous, the remaining · per cent. were necessitous "in the sense of lacking sufficient food," and that they would require school meals "until effective care committees are able to check the diseases attendant on partial employment, bad housing and other evils."[ ] so far little attempt had been made to improve the conditions of the homes by systematic visiting. with the majority of the care committees, declared the organisers, "their only active members are the head teachers and their only visitors are the attendance officers."[ ] the complaints as to want of uniformity in the selection of the children were corroborated. in many schools "each department has its own system of enquiry, its own method of selection, its own standard of necessity, and the result is that it is seldom that all the school children of one family are on the necessitous list."[ ] the extent of overlapping between the education authority and the boards of guardians was shown by the fact that out of the , families were in receipt of out-relief while no fewer than had been in receipt of relief recently.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, pp. - , . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . see also the description of the methods employed at typical schools. (_ibid._, pp. , .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . to put an end to all this want of uniformity it was recommended that a responsible secretary visitor should be appointed for each school or group of schools, who would organise bands of voluntary workers, and co-operate with all existing local agencies for social improvement. it was urged that the duties of the care committees should not be confined to the provision of meals, but should include everything pertaining to the health and general well-being of the child.[ ] this latter recommendation was carried out. the care committees were re-organised and given additional duties, the supervision of medical treatment and the work of after-care,[ ] and it was resolved that a committee should be appointed for every elementary school, not only for those which contained "necessitous" children.[ ] the suggestion that a paid secretary should be appointed for every school or group of schools was not adopted. the council decided merely to appoint twelve paid lady workers for the whole of london, whose duties would be to strengthen the care committees. at the same time, as a further step towards uniformity, local associations of care committees were formed. several such associations had already come into existence voluntarily, but they were now made uniform and permanent. the functions of these associations, which numbered , were to make all the arrangements in connection with the feeding centres, and to collect voluntary contributions. they were also to act as advisory bodies. at their meetings would be discussed such questions as the selection of children to be fed, after-care, medical treatment, and any other duties falling to the care committees to be performed. they would thus, it was hoped, initiate a common policy and serve as a means of co-ordinating the work of the various care committees. two-thirds of their members were to be representatives of care committees, one-sixth were to be nominated by the teachers' local consultative committees, and one-sixth appointed by the children's care (central) sub-committee.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : a few care committees were already carrying out these functions. see, for instance, the description of the methods adopted at one school (_ibid._, p. , no. c.) footnote : minutes of the london county council, april , , pp. - . footnote : minutes of the london county council, april , , pp. , ; handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , pp. - , . there are thus to-day three distinct, though interdependent, organisations--the children's care (central) sub-committee, the local associations of care committees and the local care committees appointed for each school. in considering the development in london of the movement for the provision of meals, one is struck by the haphazard way in which the vast organisation has been built up. the county council has from the first been reluctant to undertake the responsibility for its underfed children. "the whole question of deciding which children are underfed, and of making special provision for such children," declared the chairman of the sub-committee on underfed children in , "should really be one for the poor law authority to decide, and not the education authority."[ ] the attempt to make the guardians carry out their duty having signally failed, the london county council was forced to undertake the task, but it has done so in a half-hearted fashion. the results of this failure to grasp the problem in a statesmanlike manner are conspicuously evident in the conditions prevailing to-day. footnote : report on the home circumstances of necessitous children in twelve selected schools, , p. . (c)--the extent of the provision. the total expenditure on the provision of meals in london amounted, for the year - , to £ , . of this by far the greater part, £ , , was derived from the rates, voluntary contributions amounting to only £ . apart from these voluntary contributions collected by the local associations, however, a few schools "contract out" and supply the meals from their own private sources.[ ] moreover, large sums were collected by voluntary organisations for the provision of meals during the holidays, especially during the summer holiday of , owing to the distress caused by the dock strike. and besides this holiday feeding, which, since it cannot be met out of the rates, must be paid for out of voluntary funds, there are still a certain number of voluntary agencies which are providing meals quite independently of the county council. footnote : thus at st. giles'-in-the-fields the expenditure on the provision of food is still met from voluntary funds. at hampstead, in all the schools except one or two, the provision of food for necessitous children is paid for by the hampstead council of social welfare. the care committee refers to the council of social welfare cases which are suitable for home relief, _i.e._, cases where the mother can be trusted to look after the children at home; in these cases adequate relief for the whole family is given by the council. if the mother cannot be trusted or if she goes out to work all day, the children receive meals at the feeding centre, the council paying for these meals. amongst the most important of these is the london vegetarian association. one of the chief objects of this association, which has been in existence many years, is the popularisation in the homes of the poor of a vegetable diet which is at once both cheap and wholesome. dinners are provided consisting of a bowl of vegetable soup, a slice of wholemeal bread and a slab of pudding. as a rule the meals are given during the winter only, being continued during the christmas holidays and, if necessary, during the easter holidays, and on saturdays also. the number of centres opened varies according to the state of the association's finances and the need that exists. during the present winter some half-dozen have been established, besides the central depôt in whitechapel, about children on an average being fed daily. since the passing of the provision of meals act the activities of the association, as far as the children are concerned, have been confined theoretically to the supply of dinners to children under school age or to children who wish to pay for the meals. but school children who prefer to be fed by the association rather than by the school are also given meals, as in addition are those who are not considered necessitous by the school care committee. any child can have a dinner on producing a halfpenny. free dinners are only given to children for whom application is made by some charitable agency, district visitors, little sisters of the poor or other persons interested, no enquiry being made by the association itself in these cases. it is clear that there is much danger of overlapping--in fact it has been found that, in some cases, children have obtained a dinner at school first and have then gone on to the depôt. in other cases it seems that the association feeds some children of a family, the care committee others. the total number of individual children fed during the year - was , ,[ ] the average weekly number being , . the numbers fed during the last thirteen years are seen in the following table:--[ ] season. average weekly number of children fed. - (august to july inclusive) , - " " , - " " , - " " , - " " , - " " , - " " , - " " , - " " , - (august to march ) , - (april to march ) , - , - , footnote : these are necessitous children only. this number includes the necessitous children in the defective schools, except the cripple schools, where the meals are provided by the cripple children's dinners committee. (see post, pp. - .) footnote : annual report of london county council for , vol. iv., p. . the figures for the earlier years are not reliable owing to the multiplicity of agencies providing food. (d)--the care committee. in the selection of the children the county council has throughout pursued the policy of keeping the numbers fed as low as possible. the school doctor may recommend for meals, or more frequently for milk or codliver oil, under-nourished children whom he discovers in the course of medical inspection,[ ] but the number of such cases is comparatively small. as a rule the children are selected by the teachers (either on their own initiative or, more frequently, on the application of the parents) on the ground of poverty. footnote : the teachers are asked to point out to the school doctor any children about to be inspected whose names are on the necessitous register. (london county council, handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , p. .) the enquiry into the home circumstances of these children and the final decision as to which of them shall be fed, devolve upon the care committees. these care committees form the most striking feature of the administration of the provision of meals act in london. in no other town have the services of the volunteer worker been utilised to such an extent.[ ] as we have seen, the county council decided in that a children's care committee should be formed for every elementary school, and there is now practically no school for which a committee has not been appointed.[ ] the committees consist of two or three of the school managers, together with not less than four voluntary workers appointed by the children's care (central) sub-committee.[ ] the head teachers, though not members,[ ] usually attend the meetings, and in some cases undertake a considerable amount of clerical work. the members of these committees number some , ,[ ] but of these many take little or no part in the work, and the effective membership amounts perhaps to not more than two-thirds of this total. footnote : for examples of care committees in provincial towns, see ante, pp. - . in one or two scottish towns also care committees have been formed (see post, pp. , , - .) footnote : in addition to the ordinary elementary schools, care committees have been formed also for the special schools for defective children, with the exception of the physically defective. footnote : in a few cases the committees are composed entirely, or almost entirely, of working men. footnote : in the care committees were very largely composed of teachers. out of the total membership of , , , , or about three-sevenths, were teachers, , were school managers, and only were voluntary workers. (london county council, agenda for sub-committee on underfed children, appendix a, july , .) footnote : london county council, list of members of children's care (school) committees, . the functions of the care committees are numerous and important. they do not merely decide which children shall receive school meals. they have also to "follow up" cases of children who are found by the school medical officer to need medical treatment, and, by visiting the homes, induce the parents to obtain this treatment; often they arrange for the supply of spectacles at reduced rates and collect payment from the parents by instalments. further, they have to advise parents in connection with the employment of their children, referring suitable cases to the local juvenile advisory committee, apprenticeship committee or other agency, and generally befriending the children leaving school. some committees undertake the work in connection with the children's country holidays fund. frequently the care committee makes arrangements for the supply of boots,[ ] and sometimes also clothing, gratuitously or at reduced rates. footnote : at the end of , organisations for the supply of boots were in existence in , schools. these organisations were controlled by the care committees, managers, or head teachers. (report of the london county council for , vol. iv., p. .) the advantages of such a system of voluntary workers, acting in connection with, and under the guidance of, the local authority are many. the volunteer worker, as has often been pointed out, can bring to bear on individual cases a patience and an enthusiasm which the official has no time to bestow. by getting into friendly relations with the mother, the volunteer visitor will often be able to help the family in numberless ways. the care committee system represents, indeed, one of the most hopeful movements of the time, denoting, as it does, an awakening of the social conscience and a revolt against the old system of district visiting, which meant too frequently merely the giving of a dole, a system which encouraged a patronising attitude on the one hand, and a cadging habit on the other. from the care committee visitor little in the way of material gifts is to be expected. instead, some effort is demanded from the parent. he, or more usually she, is asked to co-operate with the care committee in doing what is necessary for the child's welfare. moreover, the care committee is invaluable as a means of educating public opinion. many will be found who, though perhaps strongly opposed in theory to the whole system of the provision of free meals, are yet willing to work for the children, and by contact with the children and their homes will learn something of the life and struggles of the poor, and a better mutual understanding will be brought about. as the warden of a settlement in liverpool has pointed out, "it is a constant lament of administrators of education that the public care more for saving the rates than making citizens. the complaint is justified. we only care about what we understand; the public understands the money it has to pay, but it does not understand what happens to it. as a matter of fact ninety per cent. of the ratepaying public have never been at a feeding centre or seen a medical inspection; and their own education was of such a scanty nature that one cannot expect their general imagination to supply the deficiency. hence they grumble at paying for a service of which they are ignorant. the remedy lies in making them understand. from the young men and women of these families we can recruit care committee workers. they will visit the homes of the people, the feeding centres and the school; their imagination will be stirred and their intellects quickened; finally, the time will come when an enlightened public opinion will be the critic of the education policy of our city."[ ] splendid work is now being done in many parts of london by the care committees and it is greatly to be regretted that the system has not been more widely adopted in the provinces. footnote : "care committee work in liverpool," by f. j. marquis, in the _school child_, september, , p. . on the other hand, the disadvantages of relying only on voluntary help must not be overlooked. in the first place there is the difficulty of securing enough workers. remarkable as has been the response to the appeal of the county council for helpers, yet many more are needed. in the residential parts of london this difficulty is not so much felt, but in the poorer districts, where the need is greatest, it is impossible to find enough people with leisure to devote to the work. from every care committee that we have visited comes the cry for more helpers. if the friendly relations with the parents are to be established, which are essential if the maximum amount of good is to be derived from the various activities which are undertaken by the school authorities, it is of the greatest importance that the homes should be visited; but it is rare to find a sufficient supply of workers forthcoming for this visiting to be undertaken regularly. it is true that some committees visit the homes once a month or sometimes even, in doubtful cases, once a fortnight, but more frequently visits are paid at long intervals, and in some districts many of the homes are never visited at all. at a school in east london, for instance (and this is typical of many others), we were told that it is found in practice quite impossible for every case to be visited, since there are only two members of the care committee to undertake this work. a committee in another district reports, "visits in doubtful cases are made twice a year, supplemented by quarterly visits," while another committee in the same district reports that, "owing to the lack of sufficient help, it is often necessary to receive parents instead of visiting homes." still more difficult is it to obtain honorary secretaries. the functions of a care committee are, as we have seen, many and varied, and involve an enormous amount of work, if they are to be performed efficiently, especially in districts where few volunteers can be obtained and where, in consequence, a disproportionate amount of visiting falls to the lot of the secretary. the secretary of a care committee in stepney found that it was necessary to give three quarters of her time to the work, and "even so, outside help had to be called in to keep the clerical work even approximately up to date."[ ] the secretary of another school in east london informed us that he had to give four full days a week, besides some hours devoted to clerical work in the evening; while another secretary, in central london, gives about four hours' work on an average five days a week. obviously it is impossible to secure enough volunteers. many who undertake the work of secretary find after a few months that they are obliged to give it up. the history of too many care committees is a record of ever-changing secretaries, interspersed with more or less prolonged interregna. in one district--and this appears to be typical of london as a whole--we were told that, out of schools, some or were at the time without secretaries, and the duties had to be undertaken by the assistant organisers. these officials are already overburdened, and the result is that all but the most urgent work is left undone. nothing is more disheartening for an energetic secretary who has laboured hard to effect some improvement in the condition of the children than to find, when forced by stress of circumstances to give up the work, that no one can be found to undertake the secretaryship and that, consequently, much of the devoted labour of months, perhaps of years, is undone. footnote : "care committees," by a. s., in the _school child_, march , pp. - . the need for the appointment of paid secretaries for each school or group of schools was, as we have seen, pointed out as long ago as .[ ] since that date the activities of the care committees have been enormously extended, and, in certain districts at any rate, if the work is to be done with any degree of efficiency, the necessity for such paid secretaries is becoming absolutely imperative. footnote : see ante, pp. - . but apart from the difficulty of securing enough voluntary workers, there are inherent disadvantages in the present system. the enquiry into the circumstances of the parents is not a duty for which the ordinary volunteer worker is fitted. and the necessity of making these enquiries may endanger those friendly relations which it is of such importance to establish between the visitor and the parent. the enquiry is generally totally inadequate. in the majority of cases the visitor is not trained for the purpose, and frequently finds this work distasteful. each visitor has a different standard. no enquiry is made from the employer[ ]; indeed, in the large number of cases where the father is casually employed such enquiry would be impracticable. in many cases there is little or no knowledge of what other help is being given to the family. many committees insist on the parents appearing before them to answer enquiries as to their circumstances. this is sometimes, as we have seen, rendered necessary by the lack of workers and the consequent impossibility of visiting the homes. but even if the homes are visited some committees consider that the obligation on the part of the parents to apply in person furnishes a test of the genuineness of their need. the attendance of the father, where it can be secured, is useful as it proves a means of bringing home to him his responsibility. it is not infrequently found that the mother has applied for meals without the husband's knowledge. on the other hand, as we have already shown, the insistence on the parents' attendance may result in considerable hardship to them, entailing perhaps the loss of half a day's work. they are often kept waiting for a considerable time. moreover, the assembling of numbers together, all for the purpose of making application for meals, tends to diminish the sense of self-respect. for this reason many committees consider it undesirable to summon the parents, or they only summon them in special cases. when the parent is summoned and does not attend, the council lays down that, if no immediate home visit is possible, a notice shall be sent to the parent that if he or she fails to attend before the committee or to show some good reason for not attending, the committee will be obliged to charge for the meals supplied to the children.[ ] as far as we can discover, this is very rarely done. the far more usual course is for the committee to send a notice to the effect that the meals will be discontinued unless the parent appeals. footnote : enquiries from the employers may not be made by the care committee without the consent of the parent or guardian. where the committee is doubtful of the accuracy of the parents' statements, the case can be referred to the divisional superintendent, who may make such enquiries. footnote : london county council, handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , pp. - . another disadvantage arising from the utilisation of the service of voluntary workers alone, is that no sufficient control can be exercised by the central authority to enforce a common policy. a certain amount of latitude is desirable so as to allow scope for individual initiative and experiment. but in the matter of selection of the children to be fed want of uniformity is wholly to be condemned. the diversity in methods that prevails is in effect amazing. in two schools situated almost side by side, and drawing their children from the same streets, the percentage fed may be, in the one case, two, in the other ten, fifteen or even more.[ ] we have found this lack of uniformity in other towns, since the numbers fed depend very largely on the views taken by individual teachers, but in london there is superadded the diversity produced by the divergence of views of the different care committees. in one care committee the socialist element will be predominant. in another the work may be done on strictly "c.o.s." lines; the meals are regarded simply as a form of relief, and the feeding-list is cut down to the lowest limit.[ ] footnote : thus in three schools in south london, attended by children whose home circumstances were very similar, the majority of the parents being casual labourers, the percentages of children who were receiving free meals in march, , were . , . and . . in another neighbouring school, where the children were very little poorer, nineteen per cent. were being fed. footnote : the most extreme example of the "strict" type is the committee which deals with a group of schools in st. george's-in-the-east. it is held that, the provision of meals being merely a form of relief, the work should be as far as possible dissociated from the school; the parents do not make application to the teachers but to a central office. the county council has not found it possible to lay down any uniform rule for the guidance of the committees.[ ] though, in a small number of cases, the committee professes to have a scale, usually that laid down by rowntree,[ ] in practice this is a very rough criterion, frequently departed from, and the cases are all virtually decided on their merits. moreover, the policy of the same care committee even will not always be a consistent one. the decision as to any particular case will vary with the presence or absence of particular members of the committee. footnote : "having regard to the varying circumstances and conditions of families, it is considered undesirable to fix a minimum wage which would justify children being provided with school meals, and each case should therefore be considered upon its own merits." (london county council, handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , p. .) footnote : that is, s. for an adult and s. d. for a child. (_poverty_, by b. seebohm rowntree, , p. .) where children from the same family attend different schools--a frequent occurrence in london--meals may be granted at one school and refused at another. the county council have issued elaborate regulations for ensuring that in such cases each care committee concerned shall know what the others are doing.[ ] but though many care committees do communicate with one another, or notify cases to a mutual registration committee, the county council's instructions are frequently disregarded. the secretary of one committee informed us that during the whole time of her secretaryship--a period of over a year--she never once received any notification from another committee. even where the cases are notified, it by no means follows that the several committees concerned adopt the same plan of action; often we have found that the one committee did not know in any particular case what the result of their notification had been. one secretary even told us that though all the committees in her district mutually notified cases to each other, this was solely for information; they pursued their own policy, merely noting that some of the children of the family were receiving meals at another school.[ ] footnote : handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , p. . footnote : the county council, a few months ago, drew attention to the lack of uniformity prevailing. "in a number of cases it has been found that the form has not been issued, with the result that care committees dealing with part of a family are unacquainted with the relief afforded by another care committee." (_london county council gazette_, march , , p. .) to the parents this diversity of treatment of similar cases can only appear as capricious. successive visits by the care committee visitors from different schools, all making the same enquiries, are a needless source of irritation to the parent, while being at the same time unnecessary expenditure of time and energy for the visitors. attempts have been made in some districts to put an end to this waste of energy and overlapping. in camberwell, two or three years ago, it was decided that the care committee visiting should be organised by streets instead of by schools. the care committees of the different schools all sent on their cases to the secretary of the organisation, who referred them to the visitor for the particular street.[ ] this scheme worked very well for about eighteen months, but was then given up chiefly because the secretary could not continue the work. now three care committees in this district have been amalgamated, so as to secure some measure of uniformity.[ ] in a few other districts also, the care committees for groups of schools, though nominally separately appointed for each school, are in effect composed of the same people. quite recently an attempt to prevent overlapping has been made by the county council on a larger scale. in whitechapel the council have provided a central office where case papers will be kept, and paid assistants have been appointed who will notify to each care committee any assistance which is being given to the brothers and sisters of the children with whom they are dealing. footnote : "school care committees," by maude f. davies, in _progress_, july, , p. . footnote : at st. george's-in-the-east five committees have been amalgamated and then re-divided into two, one dealing with all the jewish, one with all the christian, children of the group. overlapping is thus almost completely avoided. (e)--the provision for paying children. the county council from the first has not looked with approval on the proposal that meals should be provided as a matter of convenience to parents who are willing to pay for them. "only cases of exceptional hardship," declared the education committee, "_e.g._, children of widowers or of widows who are compelled, owing to their work, to be away from home all day--should be so dealt with."[ ] in such cases payment must be made in advance and a week's notice be given, the full cost of the meals being charged.[ ] consequently, in most schools we find that no parents or only an insignificant number are voluntarily paying for the meals.[ ] but that there is a certain demand for such provision is shown by the number of applications received where the care committee encourages such a plan. in one school, for instance, we were informed that a number of parents paid; sometimes when the children had been receiving free meals the parents wished the children to continue having them when the home circumstances improved, and were quite willing to pay the cost. in such cases they preferred the children to go to the cookery centre, this being looked on as superior to the feeding-centre. in another district we were told that, though there was a demand on the part of the parents, this was not encouraged, partly because the staff of supervisors was inadequate to cope with larger numbers. there is frequently an unfortunate difference in the treatment of the paying and the non-paying children. at one centre, for instance, the "necessitous" children are placed at one table, and are supplied with food provided by the alexandra trust; the paying children are placed at another and are given food cooked at the cookery centre. at another school we were told that the paying children were fed at one end of the room, the necessitous children at the other; incidentally the paying children had to stand, since there were no chairs available, while the necessitous children sat on forms. in several schools the parents pay for milk or codliver oil when this is recommended by the doctor. in at least one school, however, we were told that though some of the parents would be willing to pay for this milk, it was too much trouble to collect the money, so no payment was asked. in one or two schools milk is provided for any child who likes to pay a halfpenny, and this provision is very largely taken advantage of. footnote : london county council minutes, november , , p. . footnote : the charge includes the cost of preparation and service of the meals, and is calculated to the nearest farthing. (london county council, handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , pp. - .) footnote : in - the number of individual children who paid the full cost of the meals was , , that is, only one-fortieth of the number of "necessitous" children who were fed. the amount so received was £ . in the special schools for mentally defective children, where the provision of meals is carried on on the same lines as in the ordinary elementary schools, the proportion of children who pay for the meals is greater, since, owing to the distance from school of many of the children's homes, provision has to be made for non-necessitous as well as necessitous. in the cripple schools special provision has for many years been made by the cripple children's dinners committee. this body provides the food, the county council supplying the apparatus and attendance. dinners are supplied for all the children at a charge of d. each. the parents appear thoroughly to appreciate the provision made, and the great majority of them pay the full cost, only a few of the children receiving the dinner free or at a reduced price.[ ] footnote : in - the expenditure on food materials amounted to £ , s. d., and the payments for dinners to £ , s. d. out of a total of , dinners supplied, only , , or · per cent., were given free. the average cost of the dinner, for food materials only, was · d. (report of cripple children's dinners committee for - , pp. , .) (f)--the service of the meals. the results of the half-hearted fashion in which london undertook the responsibility for its underfed children are seen nowhere more clearly than in the arrangements made for serving the meals. the county council seems to have been actuated throughout rather by the desire to keep the expense down to the minimum than to supply the children with the most suitable food and to see that the meals were served under civilising conditions. in the early years after the council took over the provision, the local committees were left to make the best arrangements that they could. little encouragement was given them in any endeavour to provide wholesome and varied meals under conditions likely to exercise an educational influence over the children. still less was any attempt made to enforce such a policy. the reports are almost silent on this aspect of the question, though the scanty references which are to be found show a far from satisfactory state of affairs. in , for instance, it was reported that at thirty schools, where , children were fed, plates and mugs were not provided. "this has meant generally," reports the executive officer, "that the children brought their own mugs and ate the food out of their hands." in twenty other schools insufficient provision was made for washing up the utensils used and, "as food was served to the children in successive relays, two or more children used each drinking vessel or plate before it had been washed." "the usual meal has been a dinner of soup (sometimes containing meat), with, in certain cases, a form of pudding as an alternative. in the great majority of cases this was the daily meal for months without variety."[ ] the care committee organisers, in their report on the home circumstances of necessitous children in the same year, remark that, considering "the poor accommodation and the inferior quality of the meals often provided for the children," together with the fact that the highest average number of meals per child was · per week, it could not be expected that there would be much noticeable improvement in the physical condition of the children."[ ] footnote : london county council, agenda for sub-committee on underfed children, appendix a., july , . footnote : london county council, report on the home circumstances of necessitous children in twelve selected schools, , p. . since the formation of the local associations of care committees in conditions have improved, but they are still far from satisfactory. as we have already mentioned, these associations were formed in order to introduce some measure of uniformity into the work of feeding the necessitous children of the metropolis. they were from henceforth to be responsible for the arrangements made for the actual serving of the meals. the selection of a suitable centre rests with them, and it is their duty to arrange for the requisite supply of food and for the proper service of the meals and supervision of the children during the meal time. the food may be supplied by the alexandra trust, a local caterer, a cookery centre or a kitchen managed by the local association. the quality of the food varies according to the arrangements made by each local association. the food specially prepared for the jewish children appears to be generally good. at the cookery centres again, though complaints are occasionally heard that the dinners are badly cooked, they are as a rule appetising, and the menu is varied. the great majority of the meals are, however, supplied by the alexandra trust. ten different dinner menus have been drawn up by this trust, with a slight variation for summer,[ ] but in practice there is very little variety, practically the same dietary being repeated week after week; usually there is a deficiency of proteids and fats. the quantity supplied for each child varies considerably in different centres. in one that we visited, for instance, each child was given a large helping of suet pudding with minced meat, followed by a large plateful of rice, and second helpings were given if required; at another, where the dinner consisted of only one course, with a piece of bread, the portions were very small; the cook admitted that some of the children could eat more, but if any were allowed a second helping all would ask for it, whether they wanted it or not, and the food would then be left uneaten. footnote : for menus, see appendix i. how far the infants' needs are specially catered for depends on each local association. sometimes they are fed by themselves at the cookery centre, where it is easier to provide suitable food and to pay individual attention to their wants. more often they go with the elder children to the feeding-centres. the alexandra trust has drawn up a special menu for infants, and in centres where the food is supplied otherwise than by the trust the council have instructed the local association to make special provision.[ ] but it is rare to find any such provision made. as a rule the infants have the same food as the elder children, though in centres where there is careful supervision, and where the infants are placed at a separate table,[ ] the size of the helping is suited to their appetites. in many centres the number of infants is so few as to make the preparation of a separate diet hardly worth while, and the provision of special food has been known to give rise to jealousy on the part of the elder children. footnote : minutes of london county council, december , , p. . footnote : frequently the infants are placed with the older children at the ordinary tables, which are too high for them to reach up to with any comfort; it is sometimes impossible for them to eat without spilling their food. (see the description of a feeding centre, post, p. .) ordinarily one meal a day is provided, this meal being almost invariably dinner, but in cases of special necessity or delicacy an additional meal may be given. this meal may be either breakfast, milk or codliver oil. the practice varies in each school. in some schools breakfast is never given, or given only in very rare cases. in others breakfasts as well as dinners are given to the most necessitous children. at st. george's-in-the-east formerly only breakfasts were given, but now dinners are given in addition to all the children on the feeding-list; the breakfast is used as a test, the theory being that if the child does not come for breakfast it shall not receive dinner, but in practice this plan is not strictly carried out. milk and codliver oil are given in most schools, when recommended by the school doctor; in some schools milk is also given on economic grounds, as an additional meal to specially necessitous children, instead of breakfast. in a few schools a quantity of milk is supplied in the middle of the morning, and any child who pays a halfpenny can have it, the children, especially the infants, being encouraged to spend their halfpence on milk instead of on sweets. where no other suitable accommodation is available, the meals may be served in the school hall, but this method is not encouraged by the council, and is frequently objected to by the teachers, and it is only occasionally utilised. often, as we have already mentioned, the meals are served in the cookery centres, but the number of children that can be thus accommodated is necessarily limited, and the centre may be closed during the summer. till recently some local associations arranged for their children to be sent to small eating-houses. we have already pointed out the disadvantages--the impossibility of making the meal in any sense educational, and the lack of control over the dietary--inherent, even under the most favourable conditions, in this system. but in london, in many of these cookshops, the conditions were the reverse of favourable; they could, indeed, only be described as deplorable. for instance, at one eating-house, where the children were sent for their dinners up to the spring of , the room used was hardly larger than a cupboard, and only six or eight children could be fed at a time; the children had to go in relays and, when the numbers were very large, had to sit on the stairs eating their food. in others the conditions were equally bad. the plan of utilising restaurants is, we are glad to say, falling into disfavour, but it is not yet entirely abandoned. the most usual method is for the children to be sent to centres. these centres are frequently basement rooms, dark and cheerless. occasionally plants or flowers are provided, but it is very rare to find any attempt at table decoration. since the average cost of serving the meals is much less proportionately if the number of children is large, the county council has, for the sake of economy, decided that, where possible, schools shall be grouped, and the children from them fed at one centre.[ ] as we have already pointed out, the herding together of large numbers of children from different schools deprives the meal of much of its educational value. the children from the different schools will come in at different times. often the centre is not large enough for them all to be accommodated at once, and they have to be served in relays, with the consequence that the meal must be hurried through. they are usually seated at long tables, and are often crowded together, so that adequate supervision is rendered very difficult. footnote : london county council, handbook containing general information with reference to children's care, , p. . the supervision is occasionally undertaken voluntarily by teachers, and in many centres by other voluntary workers. where their regular attendance can be secured the good results are soon apparent. but the visits of voluntary supervisors are too often irregular, and it may happen that no one is present to supervise the meal, except the women who serve the food. in many districts it is impossible to obtain the services of volunteers at all, and paid supervisors are appointed.[ ] these may be assistant teachers, retired teachers or other suitable persons. one supervisor may be appointed for every hundred children, but frequently the number to be looked after by one supervisor far exceeds a hundred. thus, in three centres we visited, there were to children present, whilst in two others the numbers were well over two hundred; in all these there was only one supervisor. footnote : the payment is s. d. a week. (_ibid._, p. .) the county council has drawn up regulations for the management of the centres,[ ] but these regulations are largely disregarded. the council, for instance, has laid it down that boys and girls are to be appointed to act as monitors, to assist in laying the tables and serving the meals. in many centres this is not even attempted, and occasionally where their services are utilised, owing to the large number of children present, the supervisor is unable to devote much attention to the training of the monitors, and their presence rather adds to the prevailing confusion than conduces to the orderly and quiet service of the meal. another of the council's regulations directs that a separate mug shall be provided for each child.[ ] but it appears to be the exception rather than the rule for this instruction to be observed. though a sufficient supply of mugs is, or can on application be, supplied for every centre, the women who serve the meals, being only employed and paid for a fixed time, object to the extra labour involved in washing up. frequently no mugs are placed on the table at all, though we were told that the children could have water if they asked for it; when mugs are provided there is often only one to every two or three children, perhaps to every five or six! at one centre that we visited, though the girls were allowed mugs, the boys were not trusted, and mugs of water were placed on a side table for their indiscriminate use after the meal. footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . the actual management of each centre varies, of course, very largely according to the personality of the supervisor. we have visited some two or three centres where all the arrangements were admirable; the children were quiet and well-behaved, there was little or no waste of food, and attention was paid to individual wants. but these cases are unfortunately exceptional. out of twenty centres in different parts of london that we have seen,[ ] in at least half the educational advantages to be derived from the common meal are imperfectly realised.[ ] in a few cases the supervisors appear to consider this aspect as but of secondary importance. so long as the children are fed and some sort of rough order preserved, they are satisfied. the meal may be eaten in a babel of noise. food which the children do not fancy they will throw on the floor, little attempt being made to prevent waste. but in any case, in many centres, owing to the large number of children to be attended to, the task of inculcating table manners is an almost impossible one. though the supervisors do their utmost, for instance, to teach the children to use spoons and forks, it is not uncommon to observe children eating with their fingers--even occasionally licking their plates! it is impossible for the supervisor to give that individual attention which is absolutely essential if the meal is to be in any sense educational. footnote : these centres were all visited in the spring, summer or autumn of . we describe some typical examples in the appendix to this chapter. footnote : in , as the result of an inspection of all the feeding centres by the school doctors, it was reported that "in one-fifth ... the conditions required material improvement, to make the giving of these meals an educational function, and to impress the hygiene of proper eating and cleanliness on the children." (annual report of the london county council for , vol. iii., p. .) (g)--overlapping with the poor law authority. we have already described the extent to which, in the provinces, the provision of meals by the local education authority overlaps the granting of relief by the poor law authorities. london is no exception to the general rule. in it was found that out of , families investigated, · per cent. were at the time in receipt of out-relief, while · per cent. had recently been receiving such relief.[ ] in february, , it was reported that, of the children who were being fed all over london, · per cent. were from families to whom poor law relief was being granted.[ ] the confusion was the greater since the practice of the guardians varied in each union. "there is no uniformity of policy or action amongst the boards," reports the education committee of the county council in . "for example, there could hardly be a wider divergence of principle and practice between public bodies than that which exists between such boards as paddington, fulham, and st. george's-in-the-east on the one hand, and islington and poplar on the other. in the case of fulham, the guardians, when assessing the relief to be granted, take into account the extent to which school meals are already being supplied to children of the family ... but in the case of poplar, the guardians have informed the various school care committees that 'the fact that a family is in receipt of poor law relief should not be considered as a reason for the children not being supplied with meals.'"[ ] to put an end to all this overlapping and diversity of practice, the council proposed that the guardians should purchase school meals for the children of families who were in receipt of relief. the local government board, however, declined to agree to this course. in practice, they thought, it was hardly possible to avoid all difficulty of overlapping, "though it should be feasible, with careful administration, to restrict it within reasonable limits"; the only suggestion they offered towards the solution of the difficulty was that, if it appeared to the education authority that a child whose parents were receiving out-relief required supervision by the guardians, the education authority should communicate with the guardians with a view to an investigation of the circumstances.[ ] this suggestion was acted upon, and the care committees were instructed in future to notify to the guardians all cases in which, to their knowledge, necessitous children belonged to families in receipt of poor law relief.[ ] but such notification had little practical result. the guardians continued to grant inadequate relief, and the council felt compelled to continue to provide these children with food. how necessary school meals were was, indeed, clearly shown by a resolution of the hammersmith guardians, who themselves actually declared that, "when school children's parents are in receipt of outdoor relief, that fact should in general be taken as an indication that such children would be benefited by school meals, and not as an indication that they are adequately fed, since, as a matter of fact, outdoor relief is seldom or never adequate"![ ] footnote : london county council, report on the home circumstances of necessitous children in twelve selected schools, , p. . footnote : annual report of london county council for , chapter xli., p. . footnote : minutes of the london county council, february , , p. . footnote : _ibid._, july - , , p. . footnote : _london county council gazette_, may , , p. . footnote : _school child_, february, , p. . though the council's proposal that the boards of guardians should repay the cost of the meals was rejected by the local government board, as far as london generally was concerned, individual boards have agreed to the plan. in lambeth and chelsea the guardians have consented to pay the cost of meals supplied to the children of parents who are receiving out-relief, if they consider that school meals are necessary.[ ] at hampstead, where the funds for the provision of school meals are supplied by the council of social welfare,[ ] an informal arrangement has been made with the guardians. where the mother can stay at home and can be trusted to expend the relief given in food for the children, the guardians have agreed to give ample relief. where the mother goes out to work or cannot be trusted to feed the children properly, or where it is undesirable for the children to go home, the council of social welfare pays for school dinners. footnote : minutes of london county council, november , , p. ; _london county council gazette_, january , , p. . footnote : see ante, p. n. but as a rule no definite arrangement is made. a few care committees refuse to feed children whose parents are receiving relief, but in the great majority of schools cases are to be found where children are being fed by the care committee, while their parents are being relieved by the guardians.[ ] frequently no official communication passes between the two authorities concerned. the guardians may learn indirectly through the relieving officer, or perhaps through some member of their board who happens also to be a member of the care committee, that the latter are feeding the children. where a system of mutual registration has been established, each authority will, theoretically, be informed of what the other is doing. how far all cases are actually notified will depend on the secretary of each individual care committee. and this system of mutual registration does not prevent overlapping in many cases where the children are on the feeding-list for a short time only, since cases are often notified only once a month, by which time the necessity for feeding may have ceased. occasionally the guardians ask the care committee to inform them if they discover any cases where the relief appears inadequate, so that they may increase it, if necessary. in other unions the guardians deliberately count on the provision of school meals to supplement the relief given; they tell the parents to apply for dinners and grant less relief in consequence, thereafter priding themselves on keeping down the rates. footnote : most of the cases of overlapping are, of course, cases in which the guardians are granting out-relief. there are also the cases where the guardians are relieving a widow by maintaining some of her children in poor law schools, but the mother has not sufficient income adequately to maintain the remaining child or children. appendix examples of feeding centres in london (a)--school, visited october, . here the dinner is served in the infants' school in a room at the top of the building. some sixty infants, all attending the school, were being fed. they entered the room two by two and sat down together at low tables on specially small chairs. two teachers were present throughout the meal; they served the food, and four of the children handed it round. perfect order was kept, and at the end of the meal all the children rose together, and, after saying grace, marched out quietly. the food is cooked on the premises, the menu being drawn up by one of the teachers and varied every day. the whole meal was served in as attractive a manner as possible, and testified eloquently to the care and thought which must have been spent on its organisation. (b)--school, visited june, . here the meal is served in the school hall. the headmistress much objects to this plan, since it leaves the atmosphere close and stuffy all the afternoon. moreover, the bringing in of the tables and forms, an operation which has to be begun twenty minutes before the end of morning school, causes a considerable commotion. on the day of our visit children, boys, girls and infants, were receiving dinner. for this number there were only one supervisor and two servers, assisted by five or six monitresses chosen from among the elder children. as a result of this inadequate supervision the meal was served in a perfect babel of noise; the children shouted and screamed and banged their spoons on the table. a bell was rung at intervals throughout the meal to obtain silence, but no attention was paid to it. the fact that there was a deficiency of seating accommodation heightened the confusion. at the end of each table a child had to stand, and those sitting down were crowded much too closely together. separate tables were reserved for the infants, of whom there were a large number, some of them tiny mites of three years old. the tables, however, were not specially adapted for them, being of the ordinary height. in consequence many of the little ones had considerable difficulty in feeding themselves, their heads only just appearing above the table, and, of course, nobody had time to attend to their wants. it is only fair to add that we saw the centre at a particularly unfortunate time, since the supervisor had only taken over the work a few days prior to our visit, and therefore had not yet obtained a firm hold over the children. the noise, we were told, was usually not so great. (c)--centre, visited may, . this centre, attended by children from two neighbouring schools, is a striking illustration of what can be effected by patient and careful supervision. at the time of our visit this work was being performed by an assistant teacher, but before her appointment the secretary or some other member of the care committee daily supervised the meal for two years. the meal was served in a large, cheerful room. no tablecloths were supplied; at one time flowers were provided, much to the joy of the children, but it was found impossible to continue this practice. the children were seated at small tables, some eight or ten at each, an arrangement which renders the work of supervision very much easier. there were no infants present, as these are sent to the cookery centre. a boy or girl was responsible for each table; they handed round the food, paying attention to the individual appetites of the children. no waste of food was permitted, the children being kept till they had finished. the whole scene, the quiet and orderly behaviour of the children and their consideration for one another's wants, left a most pleasing impression upon the mind. at the date of our visit the numbers were small, only some children being present, but we were told that their behaviour was quite as orderly even in winter, when the numbers were much larger. (d)--centre, visited march, . this centre is a large basement room in a mission hall, dark and unattractive, accommodating between and children. it serves several neighbouring schools, and the numbers on the day of our visit were too large to admit of all the children sitting down together. as each child came in and gave up its ticket, it seized a spoon and fork from a pile on a table near the door, and rushed to its place. when about half the children were seated, grace was sung or rather shouted, and then the food was brought in and literally flung on to the table by the server and one or two of the elder boys. though the numbers were so large there was only one supervisor, though we were told that occasionally one of the sisters from the neighbouring settlement came to help. with such inadequate supervision it was, of course, impossible to teach table manners. the children, the boys especially, gobbled down their dinner, amid a hubbub of noise, and hurried out as soon as they had finished, other boys rushing in to take their places. no special provision was made for the infants; they were placed with the other children and were given the same food. no attention was paid to individual appetites and much of the food, we were told, was wasted. (e)--centre, visited june, . this is a centre for jewish children, serving three or four neighbouring schools. the room not being large enough to accommodate all the children at once, two relays are necessary, even in summer. over children were present, but there was only one supervisor, assisted by four or five women. the children entered in an orderly fashion and seated themselves at the table, none being allowed to begin the meal till all were seated. the infants were placed at a separate table; they are given special food when the dietary provided for the other children is not suitable for them. some of the elder girls acted as monitresses and helped to serve the food and clear up afterwards. unfortunately, owing to the fact that other children were waiting to come in, the meal was necessarily hurried, the second course being placed on the table while the children were still eating the first course. though the order maintained was wonderful, considering the large numbers present, it was impossible to attend adequately to the children's manners; many of them were using their fingers, and there appeared to be considerable waste of food. (f)--centre, visited october, . this is another centre for jewish children. the dinner was served in a large, dreary parish hall, to some or children. there was one supervisor and four servers, while tickets were taken by the caretaker. order was well preserved, but only by means of the frequent ringing of a bell, and by the enforcement of absolute silence. the supervisor said that if the children were allowed to talk the noise would be unbearable. before being given their food, the children were told to hold up their hands if they were "big eaters," the margin of waste being minimised in this way. although the manners and behaviour of the children could not be said to be bad, the whole effect was singularly unattractive--the bare room, the large numbers, and the frequent shouted commands and rebukes of the supervisor leaving no scope for humanising and educational influences. chapter iv the extent and causes of malnutrition "defective nutrition," sir george newman points out, "stands in the forefront as the most important of all physical defects from which school children suffer."[ ] malnutrition, 'debility' and other physical defects in childhood "are the ancestry of tuberculosis in the adult. they predispose to disease, and are, in a sense, both its seed and its soil."[ ] footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . it is impossible to give any figures as to the extent of this defect, since nutrition is not a condition which can be measured by any definite standards. the weight of the child is, of course, a most important matter to be noted, but there are other points--"the ratio of stature to weight; the general appearance, carriage and 'substance' of the child; the firmness of the tissues; the presence of subcutaneous fat; the development of the muscular system; the condition of the skin and redness of the mucous membranes; the expression of listlessness or alertness, apathy or keenness; the condition of the various systems of the body; and, speaking generally, the relative balance and co-ordination of the functions and powers of digestion, absorption and assimilation of food."[ ] each observer adopts a different standard of what constitutes good nutrition, and hence the statistics given in the reports of the school medical officers cannot be used for comparative purposes. according to the latest figures, as quoted by the president of the board of education, per cent. of the elementary school children of england and wales suffer from defective nutrition.[ ] many of the school medical officers, however, have obviously adopted a low standard and mr. arthur greenwood, who has made a careful enquiry into this subject, is of opinion that, "taking the country as a whole, not merely per cent., but probably a number approaching per cent., show perceptible signs of malnutrition."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _hansard_, april , , vol. , p. ; _the health and physique of school children_, by arthur greenwood, , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the degeneration is progressive. in an enquiry conducted by dr. arkle at liverpool, , children from three elementary schools were compared, as to height and weight, with children from secondary schools. the results (see accompanying table) showed that at practically every age the heights and weights of the children varied directly with the class from which they were drawn, and the deficit increased out of proportion to the rate of growth. "these figures," he points out, "are rendered all the more striking when one considers that one is talking of children and not of full-grown men. a difference of a stone in the weight of two men may not be a very great matter, but when the investigation shows such a discrepancy between two groups of boys of eleven, it means that one of the groups is deficient to the extent of one-fifth of the whole body weight, and the decadence is so progressive that the deficiency has by fourteen years of age almost reached a quarter of the whole body weight."[ ] footnote : "the medical examination of school children," by dr. a. s. arkle, a paper read at the north of england education conference, january, (reprinted in _school government chronicle_, supplement, january , , pp. , ). as we have already said, the nutrition cannot be determined solely by weight. "in fact," as a school medical officer points out, "an ill-nourished child may be above the average weight, or, on the other hand, a healthy child may be much under the average and yet not be ill-nourished." (report of the school medical officer for leeds for , p. .) but when dealing with large numbers of children, the average weight furnishes a reliable index of nutrition. this malnutrition is to be attributed to many causes besides actual lack of food. improper food and hurried methods of eating account for much malnutrition. so much has been written on the subject of the wrong feeding of children that it seems unnecessary to labour this point. one can, indeed, hardly open a report of a school medical officer without finding this evil deplored. in the poorest homes there are frequently no fixed meal times; the children are given "a piece" when they are hungry, and this is often eaten in the street or on the doorstep. bread and tea figure largely in the dietary. supper is frequently the principal meal of the day, with resulting indigestion for the children. employment out of school hours and want of sleep are again important factors. indeed, in the eyes of some school medical officers, malnutrition is due more to want of sleep than to lack of food. the children are almost invariably kept up till late at night, it being a rare exception to find a child being sent to bed at anything approaching a reasonable hour. a still more potent cause, perhaps, is to be found in bad housing conditions. striking testimony as to the relation between the physique of school children and housing was adduced by dr. leslie mackenzie and captain foster, as a result of an enquiry into the condition of , school children in glasgow. "if we take all the children of ages from to ," they report, "we find that the average weight of the one-roomed boy is · lbs.; of the two-roomed, · lbs.; of the three-roomed, · lbs.; of the four-roomed and over, · lbs. the respective heights are · inches; · inches; · inches and · inches. for girls the corresponding figures are:--weights, · lbs.; · lbs.; · lbs.; · lbs. the heights are · inches; · inches; · inches; · inches."[ ] footnote : report by dr. leslie mackenzie and captain a. foster, on the physical condition of children attending the public schools of the school board of glasgow, , p. v. at east ham also the nutrition of the children was found to vary in accordance with the number of rooms:--[ ] number of rooms. number of percentage with children nutritional examined. defects. children from and -roomed · houses -roomed houses · -roomed houses · -roomed houses , · number of persons per room. less than one · one · between one and two , · two and more · footnote : report of the school medical officer for east ham for , p. . the interpretation of these tables, as the school medical officer points out, must be guarded. but, he continues, "i think it is safe to assume that nutrition ... suffered the more confined the individual."[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . actual physical defects, such as decayed teeth,[ ] adenoids or enlarged tonsils, or definite diseases, such as phthisis, may account for malnutrition in many cases. want of cleanliness again may be a cause.[ ] footnote : the school medical officer for cumberland found that whilst, at the age of to , · per cent. of the boys and · per cent. of the girls were classified as good, "the percentages diminish gradually till at the age of to they are only · and · , but from · and · at the age of to they gradually rise to · and · at the age of to . probably in most cases the condition of the teeth is responsible for this falling off in condition. in the early years of life, before the teeth begin to go bad, the nutrition is good, but gradually gets worse as time goes on and more teeth decay, but nutrition again improves after the eruption of the permanent teeth, which, of course, are in the majority of cases sound for some little time." (report of the school medical officer for cumberland for , p. .) footnote : "the cleanliness of the houses and especially of the bedrooms ... has an important bearing on nutrition." (report of the school medical officer for congleton for , p. .) a school medical officer in london told us that if a child improved in the point of cleanliness there was a marked improvement also in nutrition. the precise effect to be attributed to each cause is difficult to estimate. often, of course, two or more factors will be present, concurrently and interdependently. in an enquiry made in by dr. chate, into the condition of children ( boys and girls) in a rural or semi-rural district of middlesex who were suffering from malnutrition, it was found that poverty was the principal cause in · per cent. of the cases among the boys, and · per cent. among the girls. adenoids, worms, rickets, carious teeth and oral sepsis accounted for · per cent. among the boys, and · per cent. among the girls. improper diet was the main cause in · per cent. of the cases. in cases malnutrition was due to some disease such as tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, etc., while in cases it was attributed to overcrowding, and in cases to overwork with insufficient sleep.[ ] in the following year a similar enquiry was made by dr. tate in a suburban residential area of the same county. out of cases, defective nutrition was found to be due to poverty and neglect in · per cent.; to rickets, adenoids, worms or digestive disorder in · per cent.; to lung affection in · per cent.; in · per cent. malnutrition "appeared to be associated with some previous or present condition of ill-health, to account for which no organic mischief could be found at the time of inspection"; while in instances no obvious cause could be assigned.[ ] footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , pp. - . footnote : _ibid._, for , p. . at bootle the school medical officer reports that out of cases of sub-normal nutrition, the cause is to be sought in per cent. in some definite disease or physical defect (including disturbances of digestion due to improper feeding); in per cent. there are no definite signs of organic disease; while in per cent. malnutrition is due to neglect.[ ] footnote : report of the school medical officer for bootle for , p. . at wolverhampton dr. badger reports that, out of cases, malnutrition is due to the influence or reaction of disease, convalescence from recent disease, or defective heredity in ; to pampering in ; to excessive growth in ; to overwork and insufficient sleep in ; to ignorance and poverty in ; while in cases there was strong evidence of neglect, dirt or drink.[ ] in his opinion, an opinion based upon a comparison of the clothing and footgear of the malnourished and normal children, "the malnutrition of the scholars examined was not primarily due to poverty."[ ] this, as sir george newman points out, "may well have been the case, but the fact that the examinations were 'routine' in character, when the children are apt to be specially dressed and boots even borrowed for the occasion, makes this particular item, unless subjected to further analysis, of little or no value as a criterion in forming a judgment as to the relation of poverty to the malnutrition."[ ] footnote : report of the school medical officer for wolverhampton for , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . other school medical officers are of the same opinion as dr. badger. at congleton the school medical officer visited the homes of a considerable number of children whose nutrition was defective, with a view to ascertaining the cause of their condition. he found that "actual poverty of the parents and inability to provide food was comparatively rare, that neglect was common, and unsuitable food probably the most frequent cause."[ ] at hornsey in the majority of cases "some definite ailment was apparent to explain, at least partially, the condition. there were very few instances in which it could be certainly stated that insufficiency of food was the sole cause."[ ] at manchester "the vast majority" of children whose nutrition was medium "and many of those who were poorly nourished were not in this condition through want of food.... each year's work adds to the evidence that poverty is not responsible for more than about per cent. of the cases."[ ] on the other hand, the school medical officer for kidderminster reports, "i find that the better condition of trade and employment in the town was reflected in the improved nutrition of the children.... this also tends to show that the majority of cases of defective nutrition arise, not from carelessness and inattention on the part of the parents, but from inability on their part to provide the children with sufficient nourishment owing to want of means."[ ] footnote : report of the school medical officer for congleton for , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for hornsey for , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for , in report of the manchester education committee, - , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for kidderminster for , p. . it is indeed impossible to say how much malnutrition is due to poverty. though the immediate cause may be disease, overwork, or overcrowding, these evils are themselves largely the result of insufficient means. the relation between the malnutrition of the children and the amount of the family income is strikingly illustrated by the results of an enquiry recently made into the diet of the labouring classes in glasgow. a careful study was made of the family diet of certain selected families during a week, or in some cases a fortnight, and the energy value of each diet expressed in terms of the requirements of a man per day, a woman or a boy of to being reckoned as equivalent to · of a man, a girl of to as · , and children of to , to , to , and under respectively as · , · , · , · . "if a family diet expressed in this way gives a yield of energy of less than , calories per man per day, it is insufficient for active work, and if less than , calories, it is quite inadequate for the proper maintenance of growth and of normal activity."[ ] footnote : report upon a study of the diet of the labouring classes in the city of glasgow carried out during - , by dorothy e. lindsay, b.sc., , pp. - . "taking the average intake of energy and of protein in the various groups [comprising families], the results are as follows:-- energy. protein. group a. [income regular, average s.] , · (excluding lix. abnormal) group b. [income regular, lodgers kept, , · average s.] group c. [income regular, between s. & , s.] group d. [ " " " s. & , · s.] group e. [ " " under s.] , · group f. [income irregular, over s.] , (excluding xliv. abnormal) , · group g. [income irregular, under s.] , · group h. [ " " father , · drinks] or, excluding xxvii. abnormal , · "these figures show conclusively that, while the labouring classes with a regular income of over s. a week generally manage to secure a diet approaching the proper standard for active life, _those with a smaller income and those with an irregular income entirely fail to get a supply of food sufficient for the proper development and growth of the body or for the maintenance of a capacity for active work_."[ ] "an interesting point in connection with these studies is the influence of the diet on the physical condition of the children." the weights of a number of children which were obtained "show very markedly the relationship between the physique and the food. _when the weight is much below the average for that age, almost without exception the diet is inadequate._"[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . the numbers in each group are so small that the average does not furnish a reliable index, but that the conclusion drawn from the figures is warranted is shown by the fact that of the families in the first four groups (excluding one case where the circumstances are abnormal), have a dietary yielding over , calories of energy and only fall below the minimum of , , while of the families in the remaining groups (excluding two abnormal cases), only one has a dietary yielding over , calories, while no less than fall below the minimum. (_ibid._, pp. - .) here, of course, again we have the question of wrong feeding. in many cases the income could have been laid out to better advantage. "where one family gets nearly their minimum adequate diet on an expenditure of · pence per man per diem ... others on an expenditure of nearly d. fail to secure it." (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . dr. larkins, late assistant school medical officer for surrey, also came to the conclusion "that a steady wage of s. a week is required to produce and properly maintain average strong well-nourished children; that below this figure, the danger zone is reached." this conclusion was based on an enquiry he made into the wages of the parents of all children aged that he examined during a considerable period.[ ] the results are seen in the following table:-- footnote : the actual number of children examined is not stated. average average weight general condition of average number of weekly in lbs. of the children children in family. wages. children aged (percent very good / (total, under , between and average / poor) over ) . over s. · / / · · · s. to · / / · · · s. s. to · / / · · · s. s. to · / · / · · · · s. s. to · / / · · · s. s. to · / / · · · s. the wages are the total weekly income out of which everything has to be paid, including rent, which varies from s. to s. d. ("the influence of wages on the child's nutrition," by f. e. larkins, m.d. edin., d.p.h., late assistant school medical officer for surrey, in _the medical officer_, december , , p. .) the effect of education is, as was recognised thirty years ago, to intensify the evil of malnutrition. "to educate underfed children," says dr. leslie mackenzie, "is to promote deterioration of physique by exhausting the nervous system. education of the underfed is a positive evil."[ ] "defective nutrition," says the school medical officer for blackburn, "to a far greater extent than any other single cause, and probably more than all other causes combined, renders children incapable of education. in a growing child the demands of muscle and bone must be satisfied before those of nervous tissue, and consequently when there is deficiency, or what comes to the same thing, unsuitability of food or inability to assimilate it, the nervous system is the first to suffer, the brain is starved and anæmic, and the extra strain involved in school work can have only a harmful, and in some cases a disastrous result."[ ] "there is probably no disease of children," says another school medical officer, "which needs combating more than bad nutrition.... it is quite impossible for any child thus affected to compete mentally with normal children of similar age; in fact, mental defect is frequently found in association with malnutrition."[ ] footnote : _the medical inspection of school children_, by dr. w. leslie mackenzie, assisted by dr. e. matthew, , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for blackburn for , p. . footnote : report of the school medical officer for leeds for , p. . this relation of mental capacity to nutrition was exemplified in the figures quoted by dr. ralph crowley at the education conference in . he examined , children in elementary schools at bradford, and classified them according to their nutrition and intelligence. of the children of exceptional intelligence, · per cent. were of good nutrition, · per cent. were below normal, and · per cent. were of poor or very poor nutrition. of the children who were exceptionally dull, only · per cent. were of good nutrition, · were below normal, and no less than · poor or very poor.[ ] footnote : "the physical conditions of school children," by dr. ralph h. crowley, north of england education conference, january, (reprinted in the _school government chronicle_, supplement, january , , pp. - ). in an enquiry made at manchester by the school medical officer a few years ago, it was found on examining poorly nourished and markedly badly nourished children, that · per cent. of the former were below par in mental capacity, and · per cent. were classed as bad; of the latter · per cent. were below normal, and · per cent. bad. but the most remarkable results are recorded by dr. arkle, of liverpool, in the enquiry to which we have already referred. he asked the teachers to give evidence as to the intelligence of the , elementary school children whom he examined. "the teachers in 'a' and 'b' both return about per cent. of the children as normal in intelligence, but whereas the former returns per cent. as above and per cent. below normal, the latter only returns per cent. above and per cent. as below the normal. but it is in the return from the poorest school that we get the most curious result. in 'c' the master only feels justified in calling per cent. of the boys normal, while he puts per cent. above and per cent. below normal." these figures, "it seems to me," writes dr. arkle, "can only be explained on one hypothesis. i believe, and my personal notes tend to confirm this view, that almost all the abnormal intelligences in the poorest school are due to the one factor--starvation.... over and over again i noted such cases of children without an ounce of superfluous flesh upon them, with skins harsh and rough, a rapid pulse and nerves ever on the strain, and yet with the expression of the most lively intelligence. but it is the eager intelligence of the hunting animal.... i fear it is from this class that the ranks of pilferers and sneak thieves come, and their cleverness is not of any real intellectual value. on the other hand, with children of a more lymphatic temperament, starvation seems to produce creatures more like automata.... if i told one of these children to open its mouth, it would take no notice till the request became a command, which had to be accompanied by a slight shake to draw the child's attention. then the mouth would be slowly opened widely, but no effort would be made to close it again until the child was told to do so.... i believe both these types of children are suffering from what i would call starvation of the nervous system, in one case causing irritation and in the other torpor. and, further, these cases are always associated with the clearest signs of bodily starvation, stunted growth, emaciation, rough and cold skin and the mouth full of viscid saliva due to hunger."[ ] footnote : "the medical examination of school children," by dr. a. s. arkle, in _school government chronicle_, supplement, january , , p. . somewhat similar results were observed by dr. badger, the school medical officer for wolverhampton. in comparing , normal children of thirteen years of age with mal-nourished children, he found that, while of the normal scholars · per cent. were of good intelligence, per cent. of average intelligence and · per cent. dull, among the mal-nourished children the percentages were respectively , and .[ ] this "record in respect of intelligence," points out sir george newman, "shows, what has been noted by other observers, that though the proportion of children considered as 'dull' by the teachers is considerably larger among mal-nourished children than among children generally, nevertheless there are children who suffer serious defects in nutrition whose mental powers are well above the average. it is naturally quick and keen children such as these who require care in order that their physical health may not be further injured by excessive mental application."[ ] footnote : report of the school medical officer for wolverhampton for , p. . (quoted in report of chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. .) footnote : report of chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . chapter v the effect of school meals on the children since the causes of malnutrition are so many and diverse it is obvious that this defect cannot be remedied or prevented solely by the provision of school meals. but that the provision of wholesome food at regular hours has a marked effect in the improvement of the physique of the children, there is abundant evidence. unfortunately, though the periodic weighing of children who are receiving school meals, in order to ascertain the effect produced, has been strongly advocated by the chief medical officer of the board of education,[ ] this advice has rarely been acted upon. it is true that a few--a very few--education authorities profess to have a system of weighing children who are receiving meals, before they are put on, and after they are taken off, the feeding-list, but for the most part this weighing is only done spasmodically, and the records are not accessible. footnote : report of the chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . several such enquiries have, however, been made in the past, the best known being that made by dr. ralph crowley at bradford in .[ ] the results of this experiment have been often quoted, but they are so important that they will bear repetition. forty children were selected from two of the poorest schools in the city, the children being mainly those who appeared to be most in need of food, though a few were included primarily on the ground of their particularly poor home circumstances.[ ] to these children from april to july two meals a day were given--breakfast, consisting of oatmeal porridge with milk and treacle followed by bread and margarine or dripping, with hot or cold milk to drink; and a dinner comprising in rotation one of seventeen different menus specially drawn up so as to contain the amounts of fat and proteid necessary for a child's nourishment.[ ] every effort was made to render the meals of as much educational value as possible, and special attention was given to such matters as the provision of table-cloths and flowers and the inculcation of good manners. footnote : bradford education committee, report on a course of meals given to necessitous children from april to july, . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . the children experimented on were weighed three times during the five weeks preceding the starting of the meals, and every week while they were receiving them. for the purpose of making comparative observations children were selected who were being fed at home, and who in other respects were as comparable as possible with those who were receiving the breakfasts and dinners. these "control children" were also weighed weekly. during the four weeks, march to april , before the feeding began, the forty children gained on an average · kilos, and during the week previous to feeding · kilos. at the end of the first week of feeding the average increase was found to be · kilos ( lb. oz.).[ ] during the next week, there was a slight loss of · kilos, followed by a gain during the next two weeks of · and · kilos respectively. during the ensuing eleven days, the whitsuntide holiday, no meals were given. at the end of this period it was found that the "control children" who, during the three weeks preceding the holiday, had lost · kilos on the average, had during these eleven days gained an average of · kilos; in the case, however, of the children fed at school, not only had the lack of food neutralised the benefits of fresh air and exercise, but they had actually lost an average of · kilos, a loss which it took them nearly a fortnight to make up, after the meals had been started again. during the eleven days after the holiday the "control children" only gained · kilos. a group of "control children" from another school similarly gained · kilos during the holiday, and only · kilos during the subsequent fortnight. the same result was observed during the five weeks' summer holiday; the "control children" gained on an average · kilos (_i.e._, at the rate of · kilos per week), while the children fed at school lost · kilos.[ ] the accompanying chart illustrates the rate of increase of the two groups of children. apart from the increase in weight, the improvement in the general appearance and carriage of the children who received the meals "was more or less apparent in all, and very obvious in some of the children, who visibly filled out and brightened up."[ ] the reverse process was equally apparent after the summer holidays. footnote : "the average gain per year of children of this class and size," dr. crowley points out, "is not more than two kilos ( lbs. oz.) for the whole year." (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . as dr. crowley points out, several points have to be considered in interpreting the effect on weight. "the increase in the weight of children normally varies greatly at different seasons of the year," and "at any given season fluctuates much, sometimes, comparatively, even from week to week. the proportional increase in weight varies with the age of the child, or rather with the weight to which the child has already attained." (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . [illustration: chart illustrating the average gain or loss in weight--during the intervals shown--of the children who were fed at bradford. the broken line shows the average increase in weight--during the same time--of the "control children."] at northampton, in , a similar experiment was conducted under the supervision of the medical officer of health. forty-four children were given breakfast and dinner for fourteen weeks, and weighed weekly, together with forty children of the same social class who were not receiving meals. at the beginning of the experiment the average weight of the fed children was · kilos less than that of the "controls"; in the second week their average gain was much greater, and by the end of the fourteenth week the difference in weight was reduced to · kilos. during the easter holidays of ten days in which no meals were given, the children who had previously been fed lost in weight while the "controls" gained.[ ] footnote : report on the working of the education (provision of meals) act up to march , , pp. - . another interesting experiment was conducted by dr. haden guest in a poor school in lambeth in the early part of .[ ] a large number of children were selected-- --but the attendance of many of these was irregular and continuous records were obtained in the case of only children. from january to april a midday meal was given six days a week. the meal consisted of two courses, a normal portion of which was calculated to be sufficient to supply the amounts of proteids, carbohydrates, fats and salts, physiologically necessary for children. the same meal was never given twice in succession, a variation of six menus being repeated over twelve consecutive days. the room in which the meals were served was bright and airy, the surroundings having, in dr. guest's estimation, an important physiological bearing on good digestion. all the children in the school were weighed before and after the experiment and again in the first week of july, the children who were receiving dinners being also weighed regularly during the experiment. taking first the case of the elder children, we read that the results "showed a very decided and positive improvement both from the general standpoint and from that of increase in weight, the fed children increasing at a more rapid rate than the other children in the school with whom they were compared."[ ] "starting a good deal below the normal of their own school mates, they tended, under the influence of one good meal a day, rapidly to approach that normal." and again, "the increase in the healthy appearance of the children and in their general alertness was marked. children with sores, small abscesses, colds and blepharitis recovered from these ailments.... the amount of absence from school due to illness was considerably less during the course of the experiment." this testimony was fully borne out by the headmaster. "the effect of the feeding of the children," he declared, "is a marked improvement judging from the general appearance of the boys, who are almost all brighter. the improvement is particularly noticeable in their play. they are more vigorous and enter more heartily into the rougher games of boys and bear the knocks without coming to the teacher to complain. they certainly enjoy their play more and show less fatigue. there are few lads shivering against the walls with hands in pockets, sloping shoulders and pale faces. in school, the effect during the first few weeks was drowsiness. this was succeeded by improved tone and greater independence of character, and generally a greater individuality. the difference in mental condition is not so marked, and is certainly more difficult to measure. there is less fatigue in lessons, and the lads are capable of more continuous exertion." the teachers' reports on the girls were of the same character, though not so decided in tone, except on one point--that those who were fed were "more troublesome," that is to say, more full of spirits, a factor which appeared also in their play. turning to the effect of the meals on the infants a most disquieting state of affairs was disclosed. it was found that, while the weight of the infants who were fed was less than that of the other infants of their own school, "the difference was much less than in the case of the bigger children, the increase in weight in each case correspondingly slow, and the amount by which both groups fell below the normal greater." during the first week there was a remarkable fall in weight among the infants who received meals, ascribable partly to the fact that they did not receive the necessary attention which was afterwards given them, partly to the fact that they were unfamiliar with good nourishing food (a factor operating in the case of the elder children also, though to a far less degree[ ]); largely, however, it was due to their being "actually unable to digest and assimilate this food." this slow progress on the part of the infants dr. guest attributed to improper feeding at home. in most lambeth homes the younger children received the same diet (the staple articles being tea and bread and butter) as the older ones, but whereas the latter could manage on this diet, and, with a good midday meal in addition, even flourish, the former could not thrive. dr. guest therefore advocated that necessitous infants should be fed at least twice a day, on a diet different from that given to the elder children, and that more individual care should be devoted to each child, since in most cases they required coaxing before they would eat the wholesome food provided. footnote : ms. report on lambeth school children feeding experiment, by dr. l. haden guest, . footnote : we have, unfortunately, not been able to obtain a copy of the figures on which dr. haden guest's report is based. footnote : in the case of the boys, their weights, during this week, only increased a little; those of the girls remained stationary. on the cessation of the meals we find the same result ensuing as we have already noticed at bradford and northampton. for when, in july, , three months after the meals had been discontinued, all the children were again weighed and measured, it was found that there was a general decline in weight; the decline was so general that it was obviously due partly to a diminution in clothing, but "the necessitous children, who after the conclusion of the experiment were only fed spasmodically, show a greater decrease than the other children, pointing to either a stationary weight during the twelve weeks from april to july or a loss of weight." interesting figures as to the effects of different dietaries were obtained at sheffield in . before this date the meals provided for necessitous children had taken the form of cocoa breakfasts. as an experiment at one school some of the boys were given porridge for several weeks. their weights were compared with those of a group of other boys who were receiving cocoa breakfasts at school, and also with a group of boys who were being fed at home. the two groups of boys who were fed at school were drawn from equally poor districts, those who were fed at home being somewhat better off. it was found that the boys who were receiving cocoa breakfasts only gained on an average · kilos or · oz. per week; the boys who were being fed at home gained · kilos ( · oz.); while the boys who were receiving porridge breakfasts gained as much as · kilos ( · oz.). as a result of this proof of the superiority of porridge diet, porridge breakfasts were substituted for cocoa breakfasts in all the schools.[ ] footnote : report of chief school medical officer for sheffield for , pp. - . we may quote here striking results observed in the improved physique of the children at a special school for cripple children in london consequent on an improved dietary. a two-course dinner of meat, potatoes and pudding had been previously given, but in the summer of it was decided to provide a more liberal and varied dietary, _e.g._, more hot meat, eggs, milk, cream, vegetables and fruit. the results were soon apparent. "partially paralysed children," writes mrs. humphry ward a few months after the change, "have been recovering strength in hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before. a child who, last year, often could not walk at all from rickets and extreme delicacy and seemed to be fading away, and who in may was still languid and feeble, is now racing about in the garden on his crutches; a boy who last year could only crawl on his hands and feet is now rapidly and steadily learning to walk, and so on.... hardly any child now wants to lie down during school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common, and the children both learn and remember better." (letter from mrs. humphry ward, _the times_, september , .) at brighton it has for the last few years been the practice to weigh before and after the course of meals the children who have been recommended for feeding on medical grounds. at the end of the last session, - , children who had received meals for nine weeks or more were thus re-examined. it was found that of these, or per cent., no longer needed meals on medical grounds, that is, they had been brought over the average weight for a given height.[ ] footnote : brighton education committee, report on the re-examination of children receiving free meals during the winter session, - . where only milk or codliver oil is given a remarkable improvement is often effected. indeed, several teachers told us that in their opinion the provision of milk was more beneficial than either breakfasts or dinners. at a bethnal green school, during the winter of - , it was found that out of boys and girls examined at the medical inspection, of the boys and of the girls were underfed. these children were given a tea-spoonful of codliver oil in a cupful of warm milk every day during the morning interval. at the end of the year the nutrition was re-assessed, with the following results:--[ ] footnote : annual report of london county council for , vol. iii., p. . good. average. bad. boys before after girls before after the results of these experiments are sufficient in themselves to establish conclusively the benefit to be derived from regular feeding even when no other factor in the child's environment is changed. "no doubt," says dr. haden guest, "irregular and late hours, disturbed sleep, overcrowding, improper clothing and employment of children after and before school hours, do each and all exercise a very detrimental effect on the children of poor parents. but that the greatest influence for evil is exerted by improper and insufficient food is a matter over which it appears impossible to have great controversy."[ ] footnote : ms. report by dr. l. haden guest on lambeth school children feeding experiment, . and these results are corroborated by abundant testimony from school medical officers, teachers, care committee workers and others, of the benefit derived by the children where the provision of meals act has been put in force. "the children derived an enormous amount of benefit" from the meals.[ ] "the physical appearance of the children speaks in pronounced terms" of the value of feeding.[ ] "those who have any practical experience ... are all agreed that such meals [free breakfasts] are of the greatest value, not only from a humanitarian point of view but also as a necessary adjunct for successful education."[ ] "there is continuous evidence of the immense benefit conferred upon the children by the administration of this act--both from the inspection of the scholars at the dining-centres and from the reports of the teachers."[ ] these are a few typical opinions culled from reports of school medical officers. at manchester "the operation of the provision of free meals acts very largely ... not so much in the way of improving the physical condition of children already emaciated and debilitated, but of preventing their ever reaching that condition by stepping in when the home income fails. it is certain that since the organisation of the supply of free meals at centres covering practically all parts of the city where they are required, _the number of underfed children_--_i.e._, the number showing signs of underfeeding--_has decreased markedly_. it is also certain that the type of child at the feeding centres is gradually improving--_i.e._, there are fewer children found in the centres with signs of the result of bad nourishment, and there are fewer such children in the schools."[ ] at bradford, where the local education authority has systematically endeavoured to effect an improvement in the condition of the children both by the school medical service and the provision of meals, there has been in the last few years a very marked improvement in nutrition and "a fairly regular increase in weight amongst bradford children as a whole. they are approaching nearer each year to the national average."[ ] footnote : report of school medical officer for macclesfield for , p. . footnote : _ibid._ for workington for , p. viii. footnote : _ibid._ for hastings for , p. . footnote : report of school medical officer for newcastle-on-tyne for , p. . footnote : report of school medical officer for manchester for , pp. - . in the following year he reports that out of over four hundred children attending eight feeding centres, only ten cases of markedly bad nourishment were recorded. (_ibid._ for , p. .) footnote : _the health and physique of school children_, by arthur greenwood, , pp. , . "it may perhaps be urged," he continues, "that this progress is purely accidental; but a close examination of a large number of school medical officers' reports does not show any general increase during the few years for which records are available. there are variations from year to year, of course, but no apparent regular improvement, except in isolated instances, of which bradford is one." (_ibid._, p. .) the witness of the teachers is no less favourable. in london, for instance, the education committee in made enquiries among the head teachers of some of the schools where a considerable number of meals were provided; the majority of the teachers were enthusiastic as to the benefit derived. "physical progress is most marked," said one headmistress. "the disappearance of chronic headaches, sores on faces, gatherings on fingers, pains in chest ... point to a more 'fit' condition, which the children can only express for me by saying that they 'feel better now,' for they 'are not hungry all the afternoons now.'"[ ] and a headmaster writes, "the change in the children after a month's provision of suitable and nourishing diet for breakfast and dinner has been distinctly beneficial. they have been more inclined to take part in the school sports, into which they have entered with considerable zest. their appearance, too, has greatly improved. their eyes have become brighter, their cheeks rounded. if, for any reason, such as temporary absence, they have lost the advantage of regular feeding, they have almost immediately shown signs of deterioration. when the period [of feeding] has been prolonged to three or six months, their health has permanently improved, and their capacity for work and play has still further developed."[ ] "the children on the necessitous register," says another headmaster, "now fully participate in these activities [games and sports] and supply rather above their proportionate number of prominent performers; this is equally true of swimming. it is indisputable that in the past lack of nourishment, where it did not entirely exclude, greatly limited the part taken by many children in this the most attractive side of school life."[ ] footnote : annual report of the london county council for , chapter xli., p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . footnote : _ibid._, p. . we have ourselves questioned numbers of teachers, both in london and the provinces, on this point. here and there are found, it is true, teachers who declare that no improvement is to be observed, perhaps because, being with the children day by day they do not notice any change. but the verdict as to the beneficial results of school meals is almost unanimous. at bradford we were told that it used to be not uncommon for a child to faint in school from want of food; such an occurrence is now unknown. often children who are dull and listless are found, after a course of regular meals, to become full of life and spirits. it is indeed frequently remarked that the children become "naughtier" after the meals, a sign, of course, of increased vitality. we find that, as a result of the regular feeding, the resisting power of the children is increased and they are less susceptible to the contraction of infectious and other diseases.[ ] the attendance at school is thus improved. at a school in the potteries, the headmaster informed us that during the coal strike in , when three meals a day were given in the schools, there was far less non-attendance than usual through biliousness, headaches or other minor ailments.[ ] at liverpool we were told that there has been a considerable improvement in the regularity of the children's attendance, as a result of the dinners.[ ] non-attendance may be due, of course, not only to illness, but also to lack of food. when the parents have nothing to give the children for breakfast they will encourage them to sleep through the morning. the headmaster of a very poor school in liverpool told us that some years ago, before the education committee had undertaken the provision of meals, the attendance was very bad. he raised a voluntary fund and provided breakfasts himself. as a result the attendance improved to such an extent that the increased grant amounted to £ , which more than covered the cost of the food (£ ). footnote : report of school medical officer for bootle for , p. ; _ibid._ for worcester for , p. . footnote : as we have seen, this result was noticed during the feeding experiment at lambeth (see ante, p. .) footnote : at bootle, on the other hand, where "it was anticipated that the movement would have a beneficial effect upon the regularity of the attendance ... there is no evidence to show that such has been the case, and it is very doubtful whether the attendance has been appreciably affected." (report of the bootle school canteen committee for - , p. .) it would be interesting to compare the nutrition of the children in the day industrial schools, where three meals a day are given. since the children in these schools, who, it must be remembered, are drawn very largely from the poorest and most neglected class, return home in the evening, the only condition altered is the supply of food. we have, unfortunately, not been able to obtain any statistics as to the weights of these children, but we have received ample evidence from teachers and others as to the very marked physical improvement which is to be observed after they have been in the schools but a very short time. at liverpool some time ago it was found that the children attending the day industrial schools suffered much from sores and gatherings. on the diet being altered very considerably, these ailments entirely disappeared, and the children, we were told, are now in perfect health. at leeds the school medical officer found that, while of , children from the ordinary elementary schools, · per cent. were of sub-normal nutrition, the percentage in the same condition among the day industrial school children (of whom were examined) was only · .[ ] footnote : report of school medical officer for leeds for , p. . the chairman of the leeds education committee, in giving evidence before the royal commission on the poor laws, stated, "the supply of three good meals a day has been of great benefit to the children in attendance, who compare favourably with the children attending the ordinary public elementary schools.... they take a good position in school competitions for swimming, etc., and are particularly smart in school drills and exercises." (report of the royal commission on the poor laws, , vol. iv. of evidence, appendix lxxxii. ( ).) let us turn now to the effect of the meals on the mental capabilities of the children. this effect is, from the nature of the case, less easy to assess, and the evidence is not so unanimous as on the question of the physical effect. a minority of teachers assert that no improvement is to be observed. at hull, for instance, out of head-teachers who were asked for their opinions on this point, declared that there had been a considerable or distinct improvement, that there had been a slight improvement, and that there was no visible difference.[ ] at bradford, teachers were of opinion that there had been a considerable or distinct improvement, that the improvement had been slight, that no visible difference was to be noticed.[ ] "i cannot say," said the headmaster of a london school, "that the improvement in mentality has been in any way commensurate with the physical improvement."[ ] on the other hand, a headmistress declared, "there is undoubted improvement physically and educationally in the necessitous children supplied with meals at this school. but i confess the fact only came home to me vividly at our last terminal examination, when i found three of them headed the class in standard iii. (including all subjects)."[ ] another wrote, "the girls receiving regular meals have become more alert, less apathetic, and consequently far more ready to respond to the teachers' efforts to gain their undivided attention. the interest thus aroused has led the girls to look upon all branches of their work with more favour than heretofore. the taste for knowledge once established, homework has followed with the inevitable results produced by voluntary effort rather than compulsory work."[ ] in north kensington the "children who are supplied with milk at school or who are given breakfast and dinner respond at once to the better feeding, and show distinct improvement in their class work."[ ] at darlington it was reported that, "generally speaking, the replies [from the teachers] were very definite to the effect that the provision of dinners had assisted the educational progress of the children."[ ] and a striking illustration of the benefit derived from a regular course of feeding is given us by a medical member of an education committee who writes, "i find the condition of the children much improved by feeding. some children who, eighteen months ago, were considered half-witted are now monitors and monitresses, taking an intelligent interest in their work." footnote : hull education committee, appendix to minutes of the provision of meals sub-committee, october , . footnote : report of bradford education committee for the months ended july , , p. . footnote : annual report of the london county council for , chapter xli., p. . footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _ibid._ footnote : annual report of the london county council for , vol. iii., p. . footnote : report of darlington education committee, - , p. xii. we have already noticed the improvement in attendance consequent on the provision of meals. this, of course, assists in the educational progress, not only of those children who before attended irregularly, but of the whole class, since the others are no longer kept back by the irregular attenders. too much importance cannot be attached to the training of the children in habits of self-control and thoughtfulness for one another. for this training the common meal furnishes an excellent opportunity. as we have seen, far too little attention is paid to this aspect of the question. it is true that, even where the meal is served in a somewhat rough-and-ready fashion, leaving, in the eyes of the educationalist, much to be desired, we have generally been informed that there has been an improvement in manners. at first the children, many of whom, probably, had rarely sat down to a meal before, would throw the food at each other or on the floor, and the scene was often a pandemonium. some sort of order has been evolved out of this chaos. but how far this falls short of what might be effected is seen when one compares the great majority of feeding-centres all over england, not necessarily the worst, with a small minority, such as some of the bradford centres, or one or two london centres, where the meal is truly educational. it is interesting to hear that, when recently a party of children were sent to the cinderella holiday home from one of the bradford schools and the supervisor was particularly requested to notice those who had been receiving meals, it was found that they alone knew how to behave at table, and that the others learnt from them. in another direction the school meal may have an educational result of the highest importance. children in all ranks of life are notoriously conservative in the matter of food and shy of venturing on unknown dishes, but with the poorest class of children it is not only "faddiness" which has to be contended with; the unaccustomed food, however wholesome for the normal child, actually does not agree with these chronically underfed children. as was pointed out at the time of the passing of the provision of meals act, "one great merit of this act ... will be the teaching and training of a child in the matter of taste. at present it is a well known physiological fact that the slum stomach cannot accommodate itself in a moment to good, wholesome food. the child has been accustomed to tea and jam and pickles, and to food that is often more tasty than nourishing. it will now eat under public and _medical superintendence_ and gradually a pure and simple taste will be cultivated."[ ] that this prophecy is in process of being fulfilled may, we think, with justice be claimed. there still exists a certain amount of difficulty in inducing the children to take food to which they are unaccustomed, but that this difficulty can be surmounted by the exercise of tact and attention to individual needs has been practically demonstrated again and again. over and over again we have been told the same tale, "at first the children would not eat this or that dish, but now they have learned to like it." especially is this the case with porridge. at first, wherever this was given, it was found that many refused to eat it, but this antipathy was gradually overcome, and the children finally ate it with relish.[ ] it is amusing to find that at st. george's-in-the-east, where a porridge breakfast was devised as a test of need, it being thought that no child would come who was not really hungry, the children now like the porridge so much that this diet no longer furnishes a test. where the children do not learn to eat what is provided, it always turns out, on further enquiry, that the supervisors have failed, either because of the large numbers whom they have to look after or, perhaps, through lack of enthusiasm, to devote that careful and detailed attention to the children without which it is quite impossible to bring about any change. footnote : _child life and labour_, by margaret alden, m.d., , p. . footnote : thus, to quote one of many instances, at bradford, when porridge breakfasts were given in the experiment of , it was found that the first morning thirteen refused to eat it; the next morning only two refused, and after that all ate and enjoyed it. (bradford education committee, report on a course of meals given to necessitous children from april to july, , p. .) moreover, it is encouraging to notice that this education of the children in the matter of taste is not without its effect on the home diet. this was observed as long ago as . in giving evidence before the committee of the london school board, mrs. burgwin declared that, as a result of the porridge breakfasts given to the school children, there was "an increasing demand upon the local shop-keepers by the poor families themselves."[ ] "at first," said miss honnor morten, "the children did not care for porridge, but the result of the breakfasts has been that many now persuade their parents to make it for them."[ ] "the children," says lady meyer, who has started penny dinners in connection with the health centre at newport, "act as missionaries to their mothers, comparing the meals at the health centre with those at their homes, much to the disparagement of the latter, which quickly brought the more intelligent mothers to the centre to 'see how it was done.'"[ ] footnote : report of the special committee of the london school board on underfed children, , appendix i., p. . footnote : report of the general purposes committee of the london school board on underfed children, , appendix i., p. . footnote : _a health centre and dental clinic in a rural district, newport, essex_, , p. . as far as the children are concerned, indeed, whether we consider the improvement in physique, mental capacity or manners, there is no doubt that the provision of school meals has proved of the greatest benefit. chapter vi the effect on the parents the evidence which has been presented in the preceding chapter as to the benefits resulting from the feeding of school children would have evoked, fifty, or even twenty years ago, a simple and decisive retort. granted, it would have been argued, that the health and educational capacity of the children is deteriorated by lack of nourishment, that irreparable and preventible damage is inflicted, and that the provision of meals by a public authority averts this evil for many and mitigates it for all; yet no plea of immediate expediency can stand against the ultimate loss involved in any public assumption of the cost of providing maintenance for children. if a local authority supplies part, even a small part, of their food, parental responsibility is, _pro tanto_, diminished, with results disastrous not only to the character of the parents but to the prospects of the children themselves. for if parents receive assistance in one direction from a public authority, they will soon clamour to receive assistance in other directions as well. in order to qualify for it, they will neglect their children, who will thus benefit in one way only to be victimized in others. the children themselves, having been fed from public funds, will be trained in habits of dependence, and, when they grow up, will insist on still further provision being made for their children in their turn. thus one tiny breach in the walls of the family will insensibly be widened till it admits a flood in which domestic affections and the integrity of the home, "relations dear, and all the charities of father, son, and brother" are submerged. if such anticipations seem exaggerated, they have nevertheless played an important part in determining the policy pursued in england towards more than one question, and lie behind many of the criticisms which are passed on certain recent forms of social intervention. the idea that relief given to the child must be regarded as relief given to the parent, and that, if given at all, it must be accompanied by severe restrictions, was enunciated emphatically in the poor law report of --indeed that famous document scarcely mentions children except in so far as the treatment of adults is influenced by these appendages--and has since become a settled part of poor law policy. the fear that parental responsibility might be weakened was a criticism brought against the education act of , against the abolition of school fees in , and against the provision of medical treatment for school children under the education (administrative provisions) act of . naturally, therefore, the public provision of meals for school children has not escaped the criticism that it would weaken the bond between parent and child and ultimately result in "the breaking up of the home." "to remove the spur to exertion and self-restraint," reported a special committee of the charity organisation society in , "which the spectacle of his children's hunger must be to any man in whom the feelings of natural kindness are not altogether dead, is to assume a very grave responsibility, and perhaps to take away the last chance of re-establishing the character and fortunes of the breadwinner, and, with him, the fortunes of the whole household. it is true, no doubt, that there are parents who are past redemption by influences of this kind, but the majority of the committee are of opinion that it is better in the interests of the community to allow, in such cases, the sins of the parents to be visited on the children than to impair the principle of the solidarity of the family and run the risk of permanently demoralising large numbers of the population by the offer of free meals to their children."[ ] footnote : "charity and food," report of a special committee of the charity organisation society, , p. . for later expressions of the same line of criticism, see, for instance, "the relief of school children," by m. clutton and e. neville (c.o.s. occasional paper), march, , pp. , ; "underfed school children," by arthur clay (c.o.s. occasional paper), may, , p. ; "the feeding of school children," by miss mcknight, in _charity organisation review_, july, , p. ; "a new poor law for children," by rev. h. iselin, in _charity organisation review_, march, , p. . now it is obvious that an economic policy which was determined primarily by a consideration for the "solidarity of the family" would lead to far-reaching measures of industrial reorganisation. if the ideal is a society in which "the bread-winner" is by his "exertion and self-restraint" to guarantee "the fortunes of his whole household," the immediate object of attack must be those industrial evils which effectually prevent him from doing so at present, and of which the principal are low wages, casual labour, recurrent periods of unemployment and bad housing. that a crusade conducted in the interests of the family against these regular features of modern industry is entirely desirable need not be questioned. but in its absence it is obvious that, so far from allowing "the sins of the parents to be visited on the children," what we are really doing is to allow the sins of the employer to be visited on the employed or the sins of the community to be visited upon future generations of unborn children, and it seems almost frivolous to ascribe the results of this constant and vicarious sacrifice to the measures which, like the provision of school meals, are directed merely to the partial mitigation of some of its worst effects. the truth is, to put the matter bluntly, that what breaks up the family is not the presence of food but its absence, and that, if the public conscience is unperturbed by the spectacle of numerous homes in which economic circumstances have deprived the parents of the means of providing meals for their children themselves, its sudden sensitiveness at the thought of meals being provided by some external authority would be ludicrous if it did not lead to such tragic consequences. the reader who reflects on the thousands of dock-labourers in london, liverpool and glasgow who, through no fault of their own, can obtain only three days' work a week, or on the to per cent. of the working-class population of reading who have been shown by professor bowley to be receiving a total family income below the low standard fixed by mr. rowntree,[ ] and to be receiving it, in per cent. of the cases, because they are "in regular work but at low wages,"[ ] will scarcely argue that the mere provision of meals, however injudicious he may regard it, is likely to contribute seriously to the weakening of family relationships which have been already strained or broken by industrial anarchy or industrial tyranny. _sublata causa tollitur effectus._ but does any one seriously believe that a cessation of school meals would restore the desired "solidarity of the family" to the casual or sweated labourer? footnote : "working-class households in reading," by professor a. l. bowley, in _the journal of the royal statistical society_, june, , p. . the minimum standard for food was computed by mr. rowntree, in , as s. for an adult, and s. d. for a child. this standard has been raised by professor bowley to s. d. and s. d. respectively, since prices in reading in were about sixteen per cent. higher than at york in . the diet on which mr. rowntree based his computations was mainly vegetarian, and his minimum standard assumed a knowledge of food values and perfectly scientific expenditure. (_ibid._, p. .) taking a slightly different standard, professor bowley computes that "_more than half the working-class children of reading, during some part of their first fourteen years, live in households where the standard of life in question is not attained_." (_ibid._, p. .) footnote : _ibid._, p. . if the suggestion that the provision of meals is a _principal_ cause undermining parental responsibility is fantastic, is the suggestion that it must necessarily exercise _some_ influence in that direction better founded? we shall deal later with such facts as can be used to throw light on this question. but we may point out here that the idea underlying it usually derives part of its cogency in the minds of many of its supporters less from any concrete evidence than from an implicit assumption that there is a "natural" division of duties between public authorities and the individual citizen, and that any redistribution of them between these two parties, which removes one function from the latter to the former, must necessarily result in the undermining of character, the weakening of the incentive to self-maintenance, the decay of parental responsibility, in short, in all the phenomena of the process known as "pauperisation." now we need scarcely point out that, stated in this crude form, the theory that every assumption of fresh responsibilities by public authorities results in the undermining of character has no foundation in the experience of mankind. it is, of course, quite true that any sudden removal from an individual of duties which he has hitherto been accustomed to discharge may result in weakening the springs of effort. it is also quite true that any sudden addition to his responsibilities may result in crushing them, and that, as far as the more poorly paid ranks of labour are concerned, energies are far more often worn out in a hopeless struggle than sapped by an insidious ease. but by themselves these facts prove nothing as to the _manner_ in which burdens, duties, responsibilities, should be distributed between the community and its individual members. what experience shows is that there is no "natural" allocation of functions, but that there has been throughout history at once a constant addition to, and a constant re-arrangement of them, and that the former process is quite compatible with the latter. nor is there any ground for the idea that the extension of the activities of public bodies must necessarily result in accelerating the approach of the state of economic and moral inertia described by those who anticipate it as "pauperism." if that were the case, all civilised communities would, indeed, have been hastening to destruction from a time "whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." for our fathers had no elementary education, our grandfathers no municipal water, and few lamp-posts; while our great-grandfathers enjoyed the independence derived from the possession of relatively few roads, and those of a character sufficiently bad to offer the most powerful incentives to the energy and self-reliance of the pedestrian. on this theory the citizen of manchester would be more pauperised than the citizen of london; both would be seriously pauperised compared with the peasant of connemara; while the wretched inhabitants of german municipalities would be wallowing in a perfect quagmire of perpetual pauperism. why indeed should one stop here? there have been periods in history in which not only these functions, but the organisation of justice and the equipment of military forces have been left to the bracing activities of private individuals; and an enquiry into the decline and fall of individual independence would, if logically pursued, lead us into dim regions of history far anterior to the norman conquest. the origins of modern pauperism, like the origins of modern liberty, are to be sought among "the primeval forests of germany!" while, however, there is no foundation for the doctrine that every extension of public provision results in a slackening of energy on the part of the individual, it is, none the less, possible that this may be the result of the particular kind of provision which consists in the supplying of meals to school children. in the event of that being proved to be the case, it is by no means easy to say what policy should be pursued. public authorities, it may be argued, should cease to provide school meals. to this answer, which is at first sight plausible, there are two objections which are together almost insuperable. the first is that education authorities are under a legal obligation to provide education for the children in their charge and to carry out medical inspection with a view to discovering their ailments; while they may, if they think fit, provide medical treatment for them. they owe it to their constituents to spend their money in the most effective and economical manner. education given to children who are suffering from want of nourishment not only is ineffective, but may be positively deleterious. when the extent of malnutrition is known, is it reasonable to expect the authorities deliberately to shut their eyes to the fact that so far from benefiting the children who suffer from it they may be positively aggravating their misfortunes? if it be replied, _ruat coelum fiat justitia_, let the children suffer in order to improve the moral character of their parents, an education committee may not unfairly retort that it is elected primarily to attend to the welfare of the children, and that the wisdom of elevating parents, who _ex hypothesi_ are demoralised, at the cost of the rising generation is, at any rate, too problematical to justify it in neglecting its own special duties. moreover, even assuming that public bodies were willing to apply to the education of children the principles recommended in for the treatment of "improvidence and vice," there is no reason to suppose that they would succeed in averting the "pauperisation" which is dreaded. no fact is more clearly established by the history of all kinds of relief administration since than that the effect of refusing to make public provision for persons in distress is merely to lead to the provision of assistance in a rather more haphazard, uncoordinated and indiscriminate manner by private agencies. a purely negative policy is systematically "blacklegged" by private philanthropists. rightly or wrongly the plain man finds his stomach turned by the full gospel of deterrence; with the result that, while the english poor law is nominally deterrent, enormous sums are spent every year in private charity in london alone; that in the local government board recommended local authorities to provide relief for certain classes of workers apart from the poor law, on the ground that the poor law, for whose administration the local government board is responsible, is necessarily degrading; and that, finally, a special act had to be passed in creating authorities to administer assistance for unemployed workmen whom public opinion would no longer allow to be left to the tender mercies of a deterrent policy of poor relief. that the same result would follow with even greater certainty were public bodies to decline to provide for necessitous school children is obvious, inasmuch as to the foolish sentimentality of the ordinary person the sufferings of childhood make a special appeal. indeed it has followed already. in the days when education authorities had no power to spend public money on the provision of meals for school children, what happened was that the provision of meals was begun by private persons, and in the towns which have not put the act of into force such private provision obtains at the present day. such extra-legal intervention has all the disadvantages ascribed to the public provision of meals, for one can scarcely accept the extravagant contention that while soup supplied by an education authority pauperises, soup tickets supplied by a philanthropic society do not. and it has few of its advantages. for private philanthropy tends to be more irregular and arbitrary in its administration than most public authorities. since it cannot cover the whole area of distress, its selection of children to be fed is more capricious; since its funds are raised by appeals _ad misericordiam_ they often fail when they are needed most; and when, as often happens, more than one agency enters the field, the result is overlapping and duplication. nor will it seem a minor evil to those who care for the civic spirit that even the best-intentioned charity can never escape from the taint of patronage, can never be anything but a sop with which the rich relieve their consciences by ministering to the poor. the statement that the feeding of school children weakens parental responsibility presumably means that the provision of meals at school induces parents to neglect to provide meals themselves. when one turns from these general considerations to examine how far this result has actually occurred, one is faced with the task of sifting a few grains of fact from a multitude of impressions. the first and most essential preliminary to the formation of any reasonable judgment is to determine the circumstances of those families one or more of whose members are receiving meals at school; and in order to throw some light on this point we give, in the following table, such particulars from six areas as are available:--[ ] footnote : the figures for birmingham are taken from _the public feeding of elementary school children_, by phyllis d. winder, , pp. - ; those for st. george's-in-the-east, from "the story of a children's care committee," by rev. h. iselin, in _economic review_, january, , p. ; those for stoke, bradford, st. pancras and bermondsey from case papers that we have analysed. these figures must not be taken as more than a somewhat rough indication of the state of affairs, for it is not always easy to determine precisely into which category a particular case should be put. probably the proportion of casually employed is somewhat understated; of the twenty-six, for instance, who are classed as unemployed at birmingham, roughly one-third belonged to the class of permanent casuals, but were totally unemployed at the date of the enquiry. (_the public feeding of elementary school children_, p. .) causes of stoke. bradford. birmingham. school school in distress in st. bermondsey pancras. unemployment casual employment short time -- -- regular work -- but low wages illness or disablement of father widows desertion or absence of father it will be seen that the four largest classes of families consist of those in which the father is casually employed, is disabled by illness or accident, is dead or is unemployed. if one adds to these families the in which the father is paid low wages or is working short time, there is a total of out of families in which distress is due either to industrial causes or to a misfortune. since men do not usually contract illness or die in order that their children may be fed at school, there is no question of the responsibility of the father being weakened in the cases in which death or ill-health was the cause which led to the provision of school meals. it is often argued, however, that the public provision of assistance is itself one cause of the distress which it is designed to relieve, because it must necessarily exercise a deteriorating influence over industrial conditions. the knowledge that his children will be fed is likely, it is said, to lead a man to relax the demands which he makes on his employer. the knowledge that he need not offer a subsistence wage for a family leads the employer to offer worse terms to his employees, more irregular employment or lower rates of wages, with the result that the ratepayer relieves the employer of part of his wage bill. cut off all public assistance, and "economic conditions will adjust themselves to the change." now it is perfectly true that the need which prompts the provision of school meals does normally arise from bad industrial conditions, and that to allow those conditions to continue while merely mitigating their effects is an offence against morality and an outrage on commonsense. whether school meals are desirable or not for their own sake, it is the right of the worker that industry should be organised in such a way that he should be able to provide for his children in the manner which he thinks best, and that he should not be compelled (as he often is at present) to choose between seeing them fed at school and seeing them half-starved at home. but the theory which we have stated goes much further than this. it holds that public provision is a _cause_ of bad industrial conditions, and that the mere abolition of public provision would _in itself_ result in those conditions being improved. it is obvious that, as far as certain economic evils are concerned, this doctrine does not hold good. many children are underfed because their parents are suffering from sickness or accident incurred in the course of their employment. clearly an employer will not be induced to render his processes safe merely by the fact that his employees' children will suffer if they are unsafe. many children are underfed because their parents are casually employed or altogether unemployed. equally clearly there is no reason whatever to suppose that casual labour would cease because of their starvation; for if that were the case it would have ceased long ago. nor again does the more specious doctrine that the wages of men are lowered by the provision of food for their children rest upon a securer foundation. in the nature of things it can neither be verified nor disproved by an appeal to facts; for the controversy is not concerning facts but concerning their interpretation. if we point out that in bradford, when the education (provision of meals) act was first adopted in , the majority of children fed were children of woolcombers, dyers' labourers, carters and builders' labourers, and that since the first three classes of workers have all received advances of wages, it may, of course, be answered that the advance would have been still greater if the children had not been fed.[ ] in reality, however, the more this theory that the feeding of school children acts as a subsidy to wages is examined, the weaker does it appear. historically it is traceable to the popular rendering of ricardo introduced by senior into the poor law report of , and it still contains marks of its origin. it assumes, in the first place, that wages are never above "subsistence level." for, clearly, if they are above it, there is no reason why they should be lowered if the cost of keeping a family is somewhat reduced. it assumes, in the second place, that they are never below the subsistence level of a family; for clearly, if they are, that in itself proves that the absence of public provision has not been able to maintain them. it assumes, in the third place, that the ability of workers to resist a reduction or to insist on an advance depends not upon the profitableness of the industry, nor upon the strength of their organisation, but solely upon their necessities. of these assumptions the first two are untrue, and the last is not only untrue, but the exact opposite of the truth. in reality, as every trade unionist knows, the necessities of the non-wage earning members of a family do not keep wages up; they keep them down. a man who knows that a stoppage of work will plunge his family in starvation has little resisting power, and acquiesces in oppression to which he would otherwise refuse to submit. it is the strikers' wives and children who really break many strikes, and if the pressure of immediate necessity is removed the worker is not less likely, he is more likely, to hold out for better terms. footnote : we may note that there are very few cases where the fathers of the children who are receiving school meals are, at the time, in regular work. (see table on page .) many authorities refuse to consider such cases, while, where they are not necessarily barred, they amount as a rule, so far as we have found, except at bradford, to a very small proportion of the total number of cases dealt with. in london a few committees have several such cases on their feeding-lists--a member of one committee, indeed, informed us that the fact that a man had a large family and low wages was, till recently, taken as a reason for granting meals to his children--but the great majority of committees either refuse to feed such children at all, or only do so in infrequent and exceptional circumstances. one or two instances were quoted to us where, as it was alleged, the provision of meals for the children had induced the father to acquiesce in the acceptance of a low wage without demanding an increase or seeking more remunerative employment. thus we were told of a man who was formerly in charge of two furnaces at a wage of s. a week; one furnace was shut down, and he was offered the charge of the remaining one at s. this he accepted and the care committee had been feeding his children for a whole year. in another case, a man who was out of work, and was having all his children fed at school, took a job at s. a week, a wage which, it was asserted, he would not otherwise have agreed to. but in such instances, infrequent and isolated as they are in any case, it is often found on analysis that the father, through some physical or mental infirmity, is incapable of performing a man's work, and unable, therefore, to earn more wages. nor is there much more substance in the theory that the provision of meals by a public authority weakens family life by "undermining parental responsibility." we are not, of course, concerned to deny that in the working classes as well as in the propertied classes there are a certain number of persons who are anxious "to get something for nothing." cases, no doubt, do arise in which a parent who knows that the needs of his children will partially be met by the food supplied by an education authority may for that reason contemplate their fate when abandoned by him with less apprehension. at most, however, such cases constitute only per cent. of those on the table, and the wisdom of withholding assistance from the remaining per cent. merely in order to bring pressure upon this small fraction of all the families concerned is, to put the matter at the lowest, highly questionable. moreover, even assuming that children who are neglected by their parents should be made to suffer in order to teach the latter a moral lesson, what probability is there that the lesson will be appreciated? in those families where a father is contemplating the desertion of his home, family relationships must obviously be weak and unstable. is it seriously suggested that the mere fact that a public body is known to provide meals for children in attendance at school is sufficient to tilt the scale; that a man who is willing, _ex hypothesi_, to contemplate relinquishing his wife and younger children to the poor law will be deterred from leaving them merely by anxiety as to how the children of school age will obtain their midday meal; and that, when his apprehensions upon this point are removed, he will hasten to avail himself of his freedom in order to abandon them to much more serious evils than the loss of one meal per day? such a suggestion carries its refutation on its face. when family life has been so disintegrated that a man is contemplating the desertion of his wife and children, he is not likely either to be encouraged to do so by the mere fact that meals for school children are provided by a public body, or deterred from doing so by the fact that they are not. and a similar answer may be made to those who argue that "the result of feeding children at school is merely to encourage their parents to spend more upon drink." no one, of course, would deny that, if a man has already formed the habit of indulging his tastes without regard to the consequences, an increase in his means will enable him to spend more upon such indulgence. but that is a very different thing from accepting the implication that every accession in the income of a class merely leads it to fresh extravagance. the evidence, indeed, points in the opposite direction. during the last forty years there has been a great extension of public provision and a rise in money wages. yet it is a matter of common knowledge that the consumption of alcoholic liquor per head of population has diminished and is still diminishing. in reality, however, the idea that any large number of parents misuse the public provision of meals appears to be quite without any solid foundation, and to be a hasty generalisation from exceptional cases, which, because they are exceptional, are recorded by charitable persons with pious horror, and are given an undeserved and misleading notoriety. almost all the actual evidence available points in the opposite direction. again and again has it been stated to us that parents withdraw their children from the school meals as soon as an improvement in their circumstances enables them to provide food at home.[ ] indeed, it is often said that they withdraw them before they can properly afford to do so, and before the canteen committee thinks it wise for the school meals to be stopped, while many refrain from applying for meals until they are driven to do so by actual necessity. the truth is that behind the talk on parental responsibility which finds favour in certain sections of society--especially those where it is customary for parents to pay for their children to be fed at school during to weeks of the year--there is a considerable amount not only of ignorance but of hypocrisy. these critics are apt entirely to overlook the fact that during the last hundred years parental responsibilities, so far from being diminished, have been multiplied by the state. middle-class parliaments have insisted that working-class parents should send their children to school, should dispense with the help of their earnings, should provide them with food, clothing and medical aid. more important, they forget that to insist on "responsibility" is meaningless unless the means of discharging it are available; for one cannot blame a man for failing to do what he wishes to do, but which he is prevented from doing by _force majeure_. now this is precisely the position of the majority of such parents as are aided by school meals. _they_ did not fix the wages of adult men at s. a week; _they_ did not ordain that employment at the ports of london and liverpool and glasgow, and in a score of other trades, should be a gamble. _they_ did not decree that those who direct industry should at intervals of five to seven years find it convenient to curtail production and turn their employees on to the streets. they are born into a world where this is the established social order, an order which, as individuals, they are impotent to alter. if some of them occasionally give up a struggle which must often seem hopeless, at whose door does the blood of these men and their children lie? if it is desired that every man should regularly provide the whole maintenance of his family, then industry must be organised in such a way as to make it possible. till that is done, to blame working people for acquiescing in circumstances which they did not create and which they detest is not only cruel but absurd. when every competent worker is secured regular employment and a living wage, it may be desirable that forms of public provision which exist at present should cease--though, even so, it is possible that the educational value of school meals will lead to their being continued. till that happy condition is brought about they must be not only continued, but extended and improved. footnote : at bradford a few years ago an enquiry was made with the object of discovering how far parents were obtaining the meals under false pretences. two criteria were taken, firstly, whether the parents' statements as to the income earned were corroborated by their employers; secondly, how far the parents voluntarily withdrew their children from the school meals when their circumstances improved. as a result of this enquiry it appeared that not more than - / per cent. were unduly taking advantage of the meals. in many cases, where the parents' statements as to income did not tally with the employers' statements, it was found that the parents, in giving their average earnings, had overstated instead of understating them. chapter vii conclusions the provision of meals for school children is, as we have pointed out, merely an attempt to mitigate some of the evil effects of industrial disorganisation. the principal end at which society should aim is the removal of the causes, low wages, casual employment, recurrent periods of unemployment, and bad housing, which make them necessary. but meanwhile, as long as economic conditions remain as they are, some provision must be made for the present generation of school children. and the provision of school meals is not merely a question of relief, it is also a preventive measure. "every step ... in the direction of making and keeping the children healthy is a step towards diminishing the prevalence and lightening the burden of disease for the adult, and a relatively small rise in the standard of child health may represent a proportionately large gain in the physical health, capacity, and energy of the people as a whole."[ ] footnote : report of chief medical officer of the board of education for , p. . granted, therefore, that the school meal is, for the present at any rate, a necessity, the question remains, for what children shall this meal be provided. we have described the methods of selection at present in force. we have seen that, though a few children are given school meals because they are found by the school doctor to be ill-nourished, the great majority are selected by the teachers on the ground of poverty, a method which involves an enquiry into the parents' circumstances. we have shown some of the disadvantages inherent in this method of selection. the enquiries deter parents from applying. it is impossible for the teachers to discover all cases of underfed children. if the child is told by its parents to say that it has plenty to eat at home, how is the teacher to know that it is underfed? it is difficult, and in many cases quite impossible, to ascertain the amount of income coming in. even if this could always be accurately ascertained, it would be difficult to discriminate with justice since other circumstances vary so widely. the enquiry is demoralising for the parents, putting a premium on deception and creating a sense of injustice. so unsatisfactory, indeed, has this system of investigation into income proved to be that there is a general consensus of opinion among adherents of the most opposing schools of thought that it must be given up. "as a guardian of the poor and a member of the charity organisation society, and in many other ways," says the late canon barnett, "i have come to see that no enquiry is adequate. i would not trust myself to enquire into any one's condition and be just. enquiry is never satisfactory and is always irritating.... _i believe it is enquiry and investigation and suspicion which undermine parental responsibility._"[ ] even so firm a supporter of charity organisation society principles as the rev. henry iselin would, we gather, prefer to the present inadequate system of investigation the provision of a meal for all children who like to come, without enquiry, though he would, of course, make the conditions of the meal in some way deterrent.[ ] in discussing what is the best method to be adopted we must, therefore, rule out any plan which involves an enquiry into the family income. footnote : report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , qs. , . (the italics are mine.) footnote : see post, p. . (i) we may consider first the proposal that the selection should be made by the school doctor, school meals being ordered for all children whom he finds to be suffering from mal-nutrition. this method, which is strongly recommended by the chief medical officer of the board of education, has been adopted in a few towns, but only to a very limited extent and always in subordination to the system of selection based on the "poverty test." the selection by the "physical test" would obviate all the disadvantages arising from the demoralising enquiry into the parents' circumstances. on the other hand, the practical difficulties would be very great. at present a child is normally examined by the doctor only two or three times during the whole of its school career. under the system proposed frequent examinations would be necessary, which would entail an enormous increase in the school medical staff. but, however frequent the examinations, the discovery of all underfed children would not be assured. it is not always possible for the doctor to determine the cause of malnutrition in any particular case; hence many children would be included who get plenty of food at home, but yet, from some other cause, do not thrive. more important, numbers of children would be excluded who fail to get sufficient food but who yet appear healthy. as a school medical officer points out, "temporary lack of food does not stamp the child in such a way that it is possible to detect past privations by ordinary inspection."[ ] the underfeeding might be prolonged for a considerable time before its effects were apparent. but it is essential that underfeeding should be discovered before the child shows definite signs of malnutrition, since the object to be aimed at is to prevent its ever getting into this state. the physical test, therefore, forms too narrow a basis to be satisfactorily employed, at any rate as the sole test, in the selection of children to be provided for. footnote : report of school medical officer for leicester for , p. . (ii) we will consider next the plan to which we have already alluded, the provision of meals, free and without enquiry, for all children who like to come, it being understood that the meals are intended only for "necessitous" children, _i.e._, those children who through poverty are unable to obtain an adequate supply of food at home. those who aim at making this provision in some way deterrent suggest a breakfast of porridge, the time of the meal and the nature of the food providing a test of need. "as the man inside the workhouse must not have better, but a decidedly worse, treatment than the man outside, so if the food be nourishing but not too palatable it may chance that only the truly necessitous may apply."[ ] children who can obtain food at home will prefer to do so. but it is found in practice that it is not only the children who can get sufficient food at home who are deterred by such a device, but that the "truly necessitous" also refuse to come. such a system, in fact, defeats its own ends. it is futile to provide meals for all underfed children and at the same time to make that provision so deterrent that those for whom it is intended decline to avail themselves of it. even if there is no intention of making the provision deterrent, the idea that the meals are meant only for necessitous children will, in fact, make it so; many parents will prefer to feed their children at home on a totally inadequate diet rather than disclose their poverty by sending them to the school meals. the "poverty test" in fact, in whatever form it may be applied, will exclude numbers of children whom it is desirable to provide for. footnote : "a new poor law for children," by rev. henry iselin, in _charity organisation review_, march, , p. . (iii) the two methods that we have described would each leave a large class of children without provision. the first would fail to discover numbers of children who are underfed, but who do not show obvious signs of malnutrition. the second would not touch those cases where the children cannot get sufficient food at home, but where the parents are too proud to accept school meals for them. a combination of the two methods would remove both these objections. the provision of meals, free and without enquiry, for all necessitous children, would secure the feeding of the majority of those who are underfed, while the school doctor would generally discover those cases where the parents try to conceal the fact that they cannot give their children sufficient food at home. for these children the doctor would, of course, order school meals. this method would not obviate the necessity of a great increase in the school medical service. moreover, by any of the methods discussed, provision would be made only for underfed children. there would remain the hosts who are unsuitably fed; the worst of these cases would, of course, be discovered by the doctor, but only the worst cases. and, again, no provision would be made for the children whose mothers are at work all day and consequently unable to provide a midday meal, and for whom the school dinner would be a great convenience, for which the parents would, in many cases, be willing to pay. (iv) there remains the only logical conclusion, the provision of a meal for all school children, as part of the school curriculum. such a provision need not necessarily be compulsory, though it should be so in all cases where the school doctor recommends it. from every point of view, the psychological, the medical and the educational, the advantages to be gained from such a course would be enormous. general provision for all would do away with all pauperising discrimination between the necessitous and the non-necessitous. on the medical side it would be difficult to over-estimate the benefits to be secured. on this point the chief medical officer of the board of education has recently pronounced in no measured terms. "from a purely scientific point of view," he declared, "if there was one thing he was allowed to do for the six million children, if he wanted to rear an imperial race, it would be to feed them.... the great, urgent, pressing need was nutrition. with that they could get better brains and a better race."[ ] the beneficial results already observed in the case of children who have received a regular course of school meals would be extended to all. then, again, the common meal would serve as an opportunity for the exercise of many little acts of consideration for one another. the teachers would be brought into more intimate relations with the children, for they get to know the children better at meal time than in any other way. the school meal would serve as an object lesson; taken in conjunction with the teaching of housewifery and cookery in the schools, it would speedily raise the standard in the homes. there would be another advantage. adequate rest after the meal could be insisted on, followed by healthy play in the open air in the playground instead of in stuffy rooms and backyards. in the rural districts, as we have already shown, it is imperative that dinner should be provided for all who want to stay. numbers of children are unable to return home, and it is almost impossible for the parents to provide suitable cold food for them to take with them; even when they can go home to dinner they frequently have a long walk, with the consequence that the meal must be eaten hastily and the children hurry back to school immediately afterwards. footnote : report of proceedings of university extension oxford summer meeting, , p. . if general provision is made, ought the parents to be required to pay or should the meal be free to all? the first plan has much to recommend it and has been advocated in many quarters. at the recent conference at the guildhall on school feeding, for instance, there appeared to be a general agreement in favour of this course. the experience of the special schools for defective children, and some of the rural schools, where a midday meal or hot cocoa is provided, shows that numbers of parents are able to pay, and there does not appear to be much difficulty in collecting the payment.[ ] and in the ordinary elementary schools, where little provision is made for paying cases, it would appear that there does exist a certain demand for such provision.[ ] on the other hand, it must be admitted that it is a question whether any large number of parents would voluntarily pay for their children's meals when it was known that provision was made for all and that other children were receiving the meal free. the payment would have to be left to the parent's conscience, for any attempt to try to decide in which cases payment should be insisted on and in which it should be remitted would introduce again the evils of the present system, with its demoralising enquiry into the parents' circumstances--though in a somewhat mitigated form, since no distinction would be made between the paying and the non-paying children, and the latter would not be marked off as a separate class as at present. another difficulty, though a minor one, would arise in the fixing of the price to be charged. in the more prosperous districts the dinner might be self-supporting, but in the poorest localities it would hardly be possible to charge an amount sufficient to cover the cost of the food. footnote : see ante, pp. , - , - . footnote : in the ordinary elementary schools in some of the scottish towns, large numbers of children pay for the dinners. (see appendix ii., pp. , , .) the provision of a free meal for all would obviate these difficulties. it will be objected at once that such a plan will undermine parental responsibility, but, as we have shown in the previous chapter, communal provision of other services has not had this result. and against this lightening of parental burdens must be set the continual increase of duties which are being placed upon them. a more serious objection lies in the expense. taking the cost of a school dinner at - / d. per head,[ ] the provision of one meal a day for five days a week during term time for all the six million school children in england, wales and scotland would cost about £ , , . this is, of course, an outside estimate, for it would probably be found that a considerable number of parents would prefer to have their children at home to dinner rather than send them to the school meal; and the provision might be confined to schools in poor districts. to the actual cost of supplying the meals there must be added the initial outlay incurred in providing dining-rooms and appliances.[ ] on the other hand, there would be a great saving of time and energy which is now consumed in making enquiries. and the provision of school meals would tend to diminish the amount which will otherwise have to be spent in the near future on medical treatment. food, as sir george newman has pointed out, is of more importance than drugs and surgical treatment, and if regular meals were provided there would be much less need for school clinics.[ ] the expenditure on the provision of school meals would, indeed, be nationally a most profitable investment; it would be amply justified by the improved physique of the rising generation and by the consequent increase in their efficiency. it would be far more productive, in fact, than much of the money which is now spent on education, than the outlay, for instance, on the erection of huge school buildings, an outlay the necessity of which is becoming more and more questionable in the light of the proved superiority of open-air education. footnote : the cost depends, of course, on the kind of food provided. at bradford, where a two-course dinner is given, the total cost per meal, for administrative charges (the upkeep of the cooking depot, the rent of the dining-rooms, the wages of the staff, payment for supervision, the carriage of the food, sinking fund, etc.), amounted in - to · d., and for food to · d., making a total of · d. about one-third of the meals supplied were breakfasts, which are usually rather cheaper than dinners, so that the cost per dinner would be slightly more. (bradford education committee, return as to the working of the education (provision of meals) act for the year ending march , ). at edinburgh, where a one-course dinner is given, the cost is · d. for food and d. for administrative charges. (report of the edinburgh school board for - , p. .) footnote : we must add one other item of expenditure, which will be necessary whatever course be adopted with regard to the provision of meals, namely, the appointment of salaried organisers for each group of schools, to supervise the work of medical treatment, after-care, and all other activities directed to the physical well-being of the child. footnote : report of proceedings of university extension oxford summer meeting, , p. . unfortunately the general provision of a school dinner will not be a complete solution of the problem. there will remain the children for whom one meal a day will not be sufficient, while the discontinuance of the meals during the holidays will cause them serious suffering. experience has amply shown the necessity of the meals being continued during the holidays and power must be given to the local education authorities to make this provision when it is required. they must also be allowed to provide an additional meal for those children for whom dinner alone is not sufficient. any proposal to limit the provision to one meal could not, indeed, be seriously entertained, for numbers of local authorities are already supplying this extra food and would resist any curtailment of their powers in this respect. but when we come to consider for what children this additional provision shall be made, we are face to face with all the old difficulties of selection. obviously it cannot be made for all. perhaps the best method would be to provide for all children who liked to come, whilst attendance should be obligatory on those for whom the school doctor ordered extra nourishment. such a prospect would be viewed with alarm by many, but the numbers to be provided for would probably not be excessive, if it was understood that this extra provision was intended only for necessitous or delicate children. it is found that the attendance drops off considerably during the holidays, and that it is always less for a breakfast than for a dinner; it requires more exertion to come in time for breakfast, while the fare provided is not so popular. probably the danger would be rather on the side of too few children being provided for than too many. no plan that can be proposed is free from disadvantages. and this brings us back to the point at which we started in this chapter. from the nature of the case, no attempt to deal with effects only, while causes remain untouched, can be wholly satisfactory. provision must be made for the present generation of school children; their necessities must be relieved and future inefficiency due to underfeeding in childhood must be prevented. but at the same time, and above all, a determined attack must be made on the evils which lie at the root of the children's malnutrition. industrial conditions must be so organised that it is possible for every man himself to provide for his children at least the requisite minimum of food, clothing and other necessaries. _summary of conclusions_ . that, so long as economic conditions remain as they are, the provision of school meals is a necessity. . that no method of selection of the children who are to receive the meals can be satisfactory, and that all attempts at picking and choosing should, therefore, be abandoned. the meal should be provided for all children who like to come, without any enquiry into their parents' circumstances. attendance should be compulsory if recommended by the school medical officer. . that the meal should be regarded as part of the school curriculum and should be educational. it should be served, as far as practicable, on the school premises, in rooms which are not used as class-rooms; the plan of sending the children to eating-houses or to large centres should be discontinued. some of the teachers should be present to supervise the children, who should be taught to set the tables and to wait on one another. the meal should be served as attractively as possible. . the dietary should be drawn up in consultation with the school medical officer, with a view to the physiological requirements of the children, special attention being paid to the infants. . the preparation of the food should not be entrusted to caterers, but should be undertaken by the local education authority. . the meals should be continued throughout the school year, and, if necessary, during the holidays. appendix i examples of menus ( ) bradford spring dietary, dinners to be repeated every four weeks st week: monday. brown vegetable soup. rice pudding. tuesday. cottage pie; green peas. stewed fruit. wednesday. potato and onion soup. plum cake (cocoanut cake alternate months). thursday. meat and potato hash; beans. rice pudding. friday. fish and potato pie; parsley sauce; peas. ground rice. nd week: monday. potato and onion soup. rice pudding. tuesday. shepherd's pie. stewed fruit. wednesday. yorkshire pudding; gravy; peas. sago pudding. thursday. scotch barley broth. currant pastry. friday. fish and potato pie; parsley sauce; peas. rice and sultanas. rd week: monday. brown vegetable soup. rice pudding. tuesday. meat and potato hash; beans. stewed fruit. wednesday. potato and onion soup. ginger pudding and sweet sauce. thursday. stewed beef and gravy; mashed potatoes. baked jam roll. friday. fish and potato pie; parsley sauce; peas. semolina pudding. th week: monday. potato and onion soup. wholemeal cake. tuesday. hashed beef and savoury balls. rice pudding. wednesday. yorkshire cheese pudding; peas and gravy. stewed fruit. thursday. shepherd's pie; green peas. sago pudding. friday. fish and potato pie; parsley sauce. rice and sultanas. ( ) leeds winter dietary repeated week after week. monday. pea soup; brown and white bread. parkin. tuesday. shepherd's pie; brown and white bread. buns or cake. wednesday (except during advent and lent)--irish stew; brown and white bread. parkin. wednesday (during advent and lent)--lentil and tomato soup (alternately with fish pie); brown and white bread. parkin. thursday. crust pie; brown or white bread. buns or cake. friday. lentil and tomato soup (alternately with fish pie); brown and white bread. parkin. (some other kind of cake or bun is now sometimes substituted for parkin.) summer dietary monday. rice pudding; stewed fruit. currant cake. tuesday. shepherd's pie; brown and white bread. seed cake. wednesday. crust pie; brown and white bread. currant cake. thursday. potted meat sandwiches. rice pudding. friday. lentil and tomato soup; white and brown bread. buns. ( ) west ham. winter dietary. monday. irish stew. brown bread and jam. tuesday. lentil soup. baked currant pudding. wednesday. roast mutton; potatoes; haricot beans; bread. thursday. mince. suet pudding; jam or stewed fruit. friday. soup. rice with jam or treacle. (during summer lighter food is substituted.) ( ) acton. monday. soup and bread. currant roll. tuesday. stewed meat; cabbage; potatoes. wednesday. soup and bread. plain suet pudding with syrup. thursday. irish stew and potatoes. plain pudding. friday. soup and bread. rice pudding. saturday. stewed meat and two vegetables. this menu is theoretically repeated week after week throughout the year, but in practice it is not always strictly adhered to. ( ) london. _dinners which may be supplied by the alexandra trust._ (_see minutes of the l.c.c., dec. , , ._) winter menu. . haricot bean soup; bread. treacle pudding. . fish and potato pie; bread. baked raisin pudding. . pea soup; bread baked in dripping. fig pudding. . stewed beef or mutton; dumplings; steamed potatoes; bread. . beef stewed with peas; dumplings; potatoes; bread. . mutton stewed with haricot beans; steamed potatoes; bread. suet pudding. . meat and potato pie; bread. . meat pudding. . toad-in-the-hole; potatoes; bread. . rice pudding; two slices of bread and butter. summer menu. . rice pudding; two slices of bread and butter. . toad-in-the-hole; potatoes; bread. . meat pies; potatoes; bread. . meat pudding; potatoes; bread. . cold meat pie; fruit roll. . meat sandwich; piece of cake. . (for infants) hot milk and bread; fruit roll. dinners for infants liquid part of winter dinner menus, nos. , , . rice, tapioca, macaroni or barley pudding, with two slices of sultana bread and butter. stew--very fine mince. baked custard, with bread and butter. savory custard, with bread and butter. ( ) grassington (yorkshire) sample menus[ ] footnote : there appears to be no fixed dietary, the dinners being varied each week. monday. haricot bean soup; bread. steamed suet pudding and treacle. tuesday. meat and potato pies with crusts on. rice pudding. wednesday. onion soup; bread. steamed ginger pudding; sweet sauce. thursday. meat and potato pie with crusts on. sago pudding. friday. yorkshire pudding; gravy; mashed potato. marmalade pudding; sweet sauce. monday. potato soup; bread. steamed ginger pudding; sweet sauce. tuesday. meat and potato pies with crusts on. cornflour pudding. wednesday. pea soup. plain plum puddings; sweet sauce. thursday. meat and potato pies with crusts on. rice pudding. friday. shepherd's pie (minced meat, mashed potato). sago pudding. appendix ii the provision of meals in scotland the provision of meals act of applied only to england and wales. as we have seen, the attempt of the house of commons to extend its operations to scotland was defeated in the house of lords, and it was not till that the scottish school boards were granted power to utilise the rates for the provision of food.[ ] by the education (scotland) act passed in that year it was enacted that a school board might, either by itself or in combination with other school boards, provide accommodation, apparatus and service for the preparation and supply of meals.[ ] where it appeared that a child was unable by lack of food or clothing to take full advantage of the education provided, the school board should, after due warning, summon the parent or guardian to appear and give an explanation of the child's condition. if the explanation was not forthcoming or was insufficient or unsatisfactory, and the condition of the child was due to neglect, the procurator fiscal should prosecute the parents under the prevention of cruelty act.[ ] if, however, it appeared that the parent or guardian, through poverty or ill-health, was unable to supply sufficient food or clothing, the school board, if satisfied that the necessities of the case would not be met by voluntary agency, should make "such provision for the child ... as they deem necessary" out of the school fund.[ ] temporary provision might be made by the school board pending completion of procedure against the parents, and the cost of such provision might be recovered.[ ] the powers conferred upon scottish school boards thus differed in several respects from those conferred on english local authorities by the act of . the school boards were granted power not only to provide food but also clothing, and no limitation was placed upon the amount which might be spent out of the rates on the provision of these necessaries. moreover, the act was not permissive. in england, when in any area school children are suffering from lack of food, and voluntary funds are not forthcoming to meet their needs, the local education authority _may_ provide food out of the rates; in scotland the school board _shall_ make such provision. footnote : see ante, p. . footnote : edward vii., c. , sec. ( ). footnote : _ibid._, sec. ( ). footnote : _ibid._, sec. ( ). footnote : _ibid._ no report has yet been published by the scottish education department as to the action taken either by the school boards or by voluntary agencies in the work of the provision of meals. as far as we can gather from the reports of the chief inspectors, though several boards co-operate with voluntary agencies and provide apparatus and service, in only some half-dozen towns, _e.g._, edinburgh, glasgow, govan, leith, perth, has the system of providing food out of the rates been adopted to any extent.[ ] the increase in expenditure on the provision of meals, etc., for necessitous children under the act of is shown by the following table:--[ ] footnote : during the coal strike in the spring of , some boards in the fife district took action under section and provided free meals. (report of the chief inspector for the southern division for , p. .) footnote : report of the committee of council on education in scotland, - , p. . providing food, clothing or total. accomodation other expenditure for meals, (for necessitous sec. ( ) children) sec. - (part of £ £ £ year only.) - , - , , , - , , , in edinburgh, the necessity for feeding underfed school children was recognized[ ] very soon after the passing of the education act of . the association for improving the condition of the poor early undertook to deal with cases reported by the attendance officers. in miss flora stevenson started a scheme for feeding and clothing destitute children, on condition that children so assisted must attend school.[ ] towards the close of the nineteenth century numerous other voluntary organisations appear to have been established.[ ] as in other towns the provision by these voluntary agencies proved inadequate and unsatisfactory. meals were supplied only for about ten weeks in the year. they were served in eating-houses, where the food was poor and the arrangements of the roughest description. the children were selected by the teachers and attendance officers, and there was no adequate investigation into the cases. in the autumn of the lord provost summoned a conference to discuss the question, and a scheme of co-operation between the school board and the two chief voluntary agencies, the flora stevenson committee and the courant fund, was drawn up, by which the voluntary funds were pooled, and cases were decided by a committee consisting of representatives of the three bodies concerned. in the following year the school board undertook the entire responsibility for the provision of meals, though it still relied on voluntary contributions. it decided to establish a cooking centre of its own instead of entrusting the supply of the meals to caterers. care committees of voluntary workers were to be appointed for each group of schools to investigate all cases of destitution, and to "keep in continuous and sympathetic touch" with the families. cases were to be recommended by the medical officer, school nurses, teachers and attendance officers, in addition to applications made by the parents; the care committee was also itself to take the initiative in searching out cases of destitution. to secure uniformity of treatment a central care committee, composed of representatives of the school board and the voluntary agencies, was appointed to give the final decision on all cases; this central committee was also to supervise the collection of the necessary funds, and to rouse general interest in the problem of school feeding.[ ] the courant fund declined to act with the board under this scheme, but the flora stevenson committee co-operated cordially. footnote : for the following account i am mainly indebted to the kindness of mrs. leslie mackenzie and mr. i. h. cunningham. footnote : report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , q. ; report of royal commission on physical training (scotland) , vol. ii., q. . footnote : report of special sub-committee on meals for school children, in minutes of london school board, july , , vol. , p. . footnote : edinburgh school board, memorandum on the feeding of school children, , pp. - . the cooking centre was opened in january, , and by the end of the year the system of care committees was in working order. voluntary subscriptions rapidly decreased, however, and in may, , the board resolved that recourse must be had to the rates. the central care committee thereupon ceased to exist, its duties being transferred to the attendance committee. the local care committees, of which eight had been appointed, were continued for a time, but at the beginning of the duty of investigation was entrusted to the attendance officers,[ ] and the local committees also were given up. the system had not worked entirely without friction. the method of investigation was cumbersome and slow, and the local committees were not in sufficiently close touch with the central committee. the committees were too large; from one to nine schools were allocated to each, and the membership usually numbered about twenty-five. but it is to be regretted that the system has been entirely abandoned. apart from the work of investigation, which, as we have shown elsewhere, is not a task which can suitably be entrusted to voluntary workers, there are many matters connected with the welfare of the school child in which the volunteer's services can be of the greatest value. footnote : two special officers have been appointed to make enquiries. the meal given is always dinner, though in one of the poorest districts breakfasts have recently been started; for these a halfpenny is charged, except to those children who are on the free list. till lately two courses were supplied at dinner, but now usually only one is given. the meals are served ordinarily in the schools, but in one or two places in halls hired for the purpose. from reports that we have received the arrangements seem to compare very favourably with those obtaining in most english dining-centres. the teachers frequently take a great interest in the question and supervise the meals. some of the elder boys and girls help to serve the food and wait on the children. the infants are served at a separate table or, perhaps, in a separate room. attention is paid to cleanliness and tidiness, and the children's manners are very good. provision is made not only for necessitous[ ] children, but for those who can pay part or the whole of the cost. non-necessitous children may obtain a dinner on payment of d., while the "semi-necessitous" may pay d. it is noteworthy that the number of free dinners is decreasing, while the number of penny dinners is on the increase. of the , meals supplied during - , nearly per cent. were supplied to "semi-necessitous" children on payment of d.; about per cent. were given free, the remaining per cent. being supplied to children whose parents were receiving relief from the parish council, children in higher grade and special schools, and the elder girls who helped in serving the meals.[ ] the work of investigation has been greatly reduced by the introduction of the penny dinner, and it has been suggested that the provision of a halfpenny dinner would still further diminish the need for free dinners, and consequently the need for investigation. footnote : there is no fixed scale in determining which children are necessitous, but free meals are usually granted if the gross income of the household is less than s. a head. footnote : for the week ending december , , the number of children fed was:-- necessitous paying children , parish council children for many years before the school board undertook the responsibility for providing for its underfed children, the parish council was supplying meals to the children of mothers who were receiving parish relief. the report of the royal commission on physical training in had drawn attention to the question of underfeeding among children, and the parish council determined to provide meals for the children for whose relief it was responsible, in order to ensure that no complaint might be brought against it.[ ] hot dinners were provided every day except sunday.[ ] they were intended chiefly for children whose mothers were at work all day, but tickets were also given in cases where an increase of relief would not have benefited the children, or where the children had a consumptive tendency.[ ] the dinners were served in eating-houses where "the conditions as to the serving of the meals, and the manners of the children--entirely without supervision--" were "anything but civilising."[ ] when the school board took over the general arrangements for feeding, it seemed at first as if the parish council would still continue its own methods, but the superiority of the board's scheme was soon apparent, and the parish council made an arrangement with it by which children whose mothers were receiving relief would have meals at school, the council paying - / d. per meal to the school board.[ ] footnote : evidence before the royal commission on the poor laws, , vol. vi., qs. - . footnote : _ibid._, q. ( ). footnote : _ibid._, q. ( ). footnote : report of the royal commission on the poor laws, , vo edition, vol. iii., p. . footnote : "administrative problems arising out of child feeding," by j. a. young, in _proceedings of the national conference on the prevention of destitution_, , pp. - . in glasgow, as in edinburgh, the provision of meals was very early undertaken by voluntary societies. as far back as the glasgow poor children's dinner table society was founded,[ ] and in another philanthropic society established day refuges, which were intended chiefly for children of widows or widowers who were at work all day, and at which three meals were supplied daily.[ ] the poor children's dinner table society continued to be the chief agency for supplying meals till , when voluntary contributions proved inadequate and the school board took over the provision of the meals. a central cooking centre, with modern labour-saving appliances, was built, the food being distributed to the different centres by motor waggon. the meals are served either in the schools or in halls hired for the purpose. the supervision is usually undertaken by the attendants; at some centres assistance is given by members of the old dinner societies, but the numbers are falling off. only necessitous children are fed. each case is decided on its merits, but dinners are not usually granted if the family income exceeds s. per head.[ ] the children are selected by the school doctors, nurses, attendance officers or teachers, and enquiries are made by the attendance officers, immediate provision being made in urgent cases. boots and clothing, which up to were supplied by the poor children's clothing scheme, are now provided by the school board.[ ] in the special schools for the physically defective, dinner is provided for practically all the children, and the parents pay. the food is good in quality and served in an attractive manner, tablecloths of some kind and flowers being provided. the supervision is undertaken by the nurses and teachers. footnote : report of select committee on education (provision of meals) bills (england and scotland), , qs. - . footnote : evidence before the royal commission on the poor laws, , vol. vi., q. ( ); report of london school board on underfed children attending school, , p. . footnote : see dundee school board, report on the feeding of school children, , p. . footnote : report of glasgow school board for - , p. . perth was one of the earliest school boards to use its powers under the act of and to provide food and clothing out of the rates, the system being begun in . a care committee was appointed in to assist the school board in looking after the welfare of the children and to take part in the distribution of the meals; the members visit the homes, but apparently have no voice in the selection of the children.[ ] the dinners are mostly served in a church hall and are supervised by the care committee and members of the school board. most of the dinners are supplied free, only a small proportion being paid for.[ ] in the matter of boots, if a child is found improperly shod, a notice is sent by the board to the parents. if they do not provide boots themselves, the board supplies them and calls upon the parents to pay[ ]; about two-thirds of the money thus spent is recovered from the parents.[ ] footnote : report of chief inspector for southern division for , pp. - . footnote : perth school board, officers' report on the supplying of meals and boots to school children, - , pp. - . footnote : report of chief inspector for southern division for , p. . footnote : perth school board, officers' report, - , p. . in most towns, as we have said, the cost of the food is still borne out of voluntary funds, whether the school board itself undertakes the provision of meals, or whether this is done by a voluntary society. in dundee provision has been made by "the free and assisted dinner fund" since the winter of - .[ ] the meals are given usually in the schools, but sometimes in coffee houses. the prevailing menu appears to be soup. in view of the large number of married women who are industrially employed at dundee, the school meal is a great convenience. a large proportion of the children, something like two-thirds in fact, make some payment towards the meal.[ ] but the price charged is very low; a single bowl of soup costs a halfpenny, while the payment of a penny a week secures a bowl daily.[ ] at paisley also a large proportion of the children pay. soup and bread, or, if the children prefer, cocoa and bread, etc., is provided for the sum of one halfpenny, the poorest children receiving it free. the balance of expenditure on food is met from voluntary funds; the school board pays all expenses of administration.[ ] in aberdeen the work of providing meals, which had formerly been undertaken by the aberdeen educational trust, was transferred in to the school board, together with the income which the trust had devoted to this purpose.[ ] at greenock the school board have raised a voluntary fund for the provision of books, boots or food for necessitous children, but it has not been found necessary to supply any meals within the last two years. in inverness provision is made by a voluntary organisation, the children being sent to local eating-houses. footnote : dundee school board, report on the feeding of school children, , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . footnote : in the special schools for defective children at paisley a two-course dinner is provided at a charge of d. a week. footnote : report of chief inspector for the northern division for , p. . turning now to the rural districts, we may mention an early experiment somewhat similar to that at rousdon, to which we have already referred. in the minister of the small country parish of farnell came to the conclusion that the attendance at school would be more regular, and the children would derive more profit from the education given if a hot midday meal were provided. accordingly a soup kitchen was instituted at the school, the plant being provided by voluntary contributions. a charge was made of a halfpenny per meal or d. per family, where there were more than two children. practically all the children availed themselves of the provision. the effects were soon visible, not only in improved attendance--the grant earned rose from £ in to £ in --but in greater immunity from epidemics and illness than in neighbouring schools, and in the greater buoyancy of spirits of the children.[ ] footnote : "can a sufficient mid-day meal be given to poor school children ... for ... less than one penny?" by sir henry peek, , p. . in this matter of providing a midday meal for the children attending rural schools, scotland would appear to be, on the whole, in advance of england, though the extent of the provision made varies considerably in different districts. thus, in the border counties, very few schools make any arrangements,[ ] while in fifeshire, where the inspector "has consistently pressed upon managers" the necessity for providing dinners, the attitude of most of the rural boards is one of "stolid apathy."[ ] in aberdeenshire, on the other hand, a cup of cocoa or a plate of soup is provided in most of the country schools,[ ] and in the county of inverness almost all the schools provide some sort of hot liquid.[ ] in kincardineshire it was reported in that the soup kitchen was a "universal institution."[ ] the meals may be paid for by the children, these payments being supplemented by voluntary contributions in money or in kind. footnote : report of chief inspector for the southern division for , p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . footnote : first report on medical inspection of school children in scotland, by dr. leslie mackenzie, , p. . footnote : "the diet of country elementary school children," by dr. gordon a. lang, in _rearing an imperial race_, edited by c. e. hecht, , p. . footnote : report of chief inspector for northern division for . but even where it is the rule to find cocoa or soup supplied, it is inadequate for the wants of many of the children, who require a more substantial and nourishing midday meal. moreover, the provision appears as a rule to be confined to the winter months, a limitation patently absurd, since the _raison d'être_ of the meals is not so much the poverty of the parents, a condition which may fluctuate according to the seasons, but the fact that the distances are, in many cases, too great to allow the children time to return home at midday--which condition is, of course, constant the whole year round. appendix iii the provision of meals abroad we have not been able to make any original enquiry into the systems of school feeding existing in other countries. the following history of the "cantines scolaires" in paris and brief notes as to the provision made in other foreign towns may, however, be useful for purposes of reference, and as showing how widespread has been the movement for the feeding of school children. the information as to foreign towns other than paris is derived mainly from _prize essays on feeding school children_, ; _report of london school board on underfed children attending school_, , appendix ix., pp. - ; _feeding of school children in continental and american cities_ (cd. ), ; _the free feeding of school children_, a reprint of the reports by the special sanitary commissioner of the _lancet_, nd edition, ; while fuller and more recent information is to be found in _school feeding, its practice at home and abroad_, by louise s. bryant, . (a) france (i) the cantines scolaires in paris paris has long offered to other cities an inspiring example of an efficient and uniform system for feeding poor school children. she was the first to make systematic provision on a large scale. she had a basis of organisation ready to her hand in the _caisses des ecoles_. these bodies correspond in some degree to the english care committees, though with a far wider sphere of action. the original object of these school funds was to encourage school attendance by rewards to industrious pupils and help to the needy. the first _caisse_ was established in by the national guard in the second _arrondissement_, and gradually the system spread. in a law was passed encouraging the formation of _caisses_ in every _commune_, and directing that their revenues were to consist of voluntary subscriptions and subventions by the commune, department or state.[ ] this law was merely permissive, but in , by the compulsory education law, the establishment of these organisations was made obligatory.[ ] a _caisse_ was accordingly set up in each of the twenty _arrondissements_ of paris. attendance at school being now compulsory, and it being therefore no longer so necessary to provide incentives to attendance, the _caisses_, though they still continued to grant prizes, turned their attention more and more to the physical needs of the children, boots, clothing, food, country holidays and, later, crèches, savings banks, skilled apprenticeship and medical treatment. the _caisse_ was a voluntary body, but was officially recognised by the municipality. the general committee was composed of the mayor, the members of the municipal council, and the school inspector for the district, together with from twenty to twenty-four persons elected by the subscribers.[ ] footnote : "the free feeding of school children," a reprint of the reports by the special sanitary commissioner of the _lancet_, nd edition, , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . as in other towns, the early attempts at feeding poor school children were due to private initiative; meals were provided by the _caisses des ecoles_ or other voluntary associations or by philanthropic individuals. these attempts were unco-ordinated and inadequate to deal with the evil of underfeeding. in the municipal council made an enquiry into the whole question. as a result a scheme was drawn up to place the work on a more satisfactory and uniform basis under public control. the provision of meals was entrusted in each _arrondissement_ to the _caisses des ecoles_, and a grant of , francs was voted by the municipal council to aid them in this work.[ ] footnote : "the cantines scolaires of paris," by sir charles a. elliott, in the _nineteenth century_, may, , pp. - . it is interesting to note that it was seriously considered whether the meals should not be supplied free for all children attending the schools. the council, however, came to the conclusion that, "in freeing the parents of all responsibility with regard to their children, and in accustoming them to evade their duties, they would be running the risk of weakening the family spirit, to the great detriment of the morality both of the children and of the parents."[ ] it was, therefore, decided that free provision should be limited to necessitous children. at the same time it would be difficult to exclude children who were willing to pay for their meals, hence provision should be made for these too. footnote : "organisation des cantines scolaires à paris," a manifold manuscript report issued by the direction de l'enseignement primaire, me bureau, . the voluntary subscriptions which had supported the work before continued in theory to be the chief resource of the new _cantines scolaires_. these voluntary subscriptions rapidly decreased, being either withdrawn altogether or diverted to the other objects of the _caisses_. at the same time both the number of meals provided and the proportion of free meals increased no less markedly. in , the first year in which meals were provided under the new system, only per cent. of the meals were supplied free (the remainder being paid for by the parents); in this proportion had nearly doubled, being per cent. the municipal subsidy rose correspondingly, and in amounted to , , francs. the council took fright and appointed a commission to consider the question, with the result that the grant was restricted to , , francs.[ ] this limit has been fairly strictly adhered to, for the grant amounts now to only , , francs, though the proportion of free meals has continued slowly to increase.[ ] footnote : "the cantines scolaires of paris," by sir charles elliott, in the _nineteenth century_, may, , pp. - . footnote : according to the latest figures per cent. of the children for whom meals are provided receive them free. each _caisse_ is allowed a free hand in the actual details of administration, hence the arrangements vary in the different _arrondissements_. the want of uniformity has obvious disadvantages, and a proposal was recently made that the system should be centralised, but this would have necessitated the appointment of a large and expensive staff, and it was felt desirable to leave the initiative and responsibility to voluntary workers.[ ] everywhere the meal is served on the school premises, a kitchen being established for each school or group of schools. the meal is cooked by the _cantinières_, and is sometimes provided by them at a fixed price per head; more often the _caisse_ prefers to purchase the materials itself, a more economical method, and one which ensures a better quality of food.[ ] the dinner may consist of one, two or three courses. the food is plentiful and good, well-cooked and well-served, and the menu sufficiently varied. the meals are made as attractive as possible to encourage the better-class parents to make use of them. the price charged varies from d. to d.; in almost all the _arrondissements_ the charge appears to be below the cost price. no difference is made between the children who pay and those who are on the free list. the teachers do not assist in serving the food, as in england, but are always present to supervise the children, and, in some schools at any rate, they eat their dinner with them. at first the supervision was undertaken voluntarily, but since the teachers have received an extra remuneration of · francs a day for this duty.[ ] this sharing in a common meal by all classes alike, together with the presence of the teacher, has had a marked influence on the children's manners. besides the mid-day meal, which is given by all the _caisses_, breakfasts of soup are sometimes supplied to the children who are receiving free dinners, while in some _arrondissements_, _e.g._, the eighteenth, a small meal is also given at four o'clock to these children if they remain at school for the "classe de garde."[ ] a further extension has recently been made in the seventeenth _arrondissement_, where it was decided in to try the experiment of a "classe de garde" till eight o'clock in the evening, with a supper, for children of widows or widowers who were at work till late, or for other especially poor children, or children with bad homes, the object being both to secure them adequate nourishment and to remove them from the temptations of the streets. for this purpose the municipal council voted a sum of , francs.[ ] weakly children have codliver oil given to them in winter and syrup of iodide of iron or phosphate of lime in the summer. footnote : "organisation des cantines scolaires à paris," report by direction de l'enseignement primaire, me bureau, . footnote : _ibid._ footnote : _ibid._ footnote : "caisse des écoles du e arrondissement," exercice de l'année , p. . footnote : proposition tendant à l'ouverture d'un crédit de , francs en vue de permettre à la caisse des ecoles du xviie arrondissement d'organiser, à titre d'essai, une classe de garde prolongée jusqu'à huit heures et une cantine du soir, déposée par m. frédéric brunet, conseiller municipal, septembre , . the methods of enquiry vary in the different _arrondissements_. usually the enquiries are made by a paid investigator, but the numbers of children on the free list are so large that the investigation is as a rule very superficial. the necessity of keeping secret the fact that a child is receiving the meals free also militates against any effective enquiry into the parents' circumstances. the meals are granted for a school year, hence it frequently happens that a child continues to receive them long after the need has passed away.[ ] the enquiries are, as might be expected, the least satisfactory part of the paris system. in granting the meals the _caisses_ usually take a generous view; it is held, for instance, that a man earning up to s. a week cannot adequately feed and clothe more than three children, and if his family is larger than this the _caisses_ are prepared to assist him; while widows' children are invariably fed if application is made.[ ] footnote : "organisation des cantines scolaires à paris," report issued by direction de l'enseignement primaire, me bureau, ; "necessitous children in paris and london," by george rainey, in _school hygiene_, november, , vol. iii., p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. . an interesting feature of the paris system is the provision of clothes. the municipality insists that the children shall come to school properly clothed; it is ready to provide the requisite garments, but it insists that they shall be kept clean and tidy. frequent inspections are made for this purpose. the result is a notable raising of the level of cleanliness and tidiness in the schools, both the parents and the children themselves learning to take a pride in their appearance.[ ] so far, indeed, from the work of the _caisses_ having undermined parental responsibility, it would appear that the reverse is the case, the parents responding to the higher standard demanded of them. footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . what strikes one in comparing the paris system with that obtaining in english towns is the thoroughness with which the problem is tackled in paris and the widespread interest taken by the citizens generally in the work of the _caisses_. no half measures content them. from the first the work has been educational, the primary object of the _caisses_ being to encourage school attendance rather than to relieve distress. the educational progress of the children, the improvement in their physique, the raising of the standard of manners and cleanliness, all show that the results have amply justified the expenditure.[ ] footnote : for the above description, see, besides the references already quoted, report of london school board on underfed children attending school, , appendix ix., pp. - ; "the cantines scolaires of paris," by marcel kleine, in _report of proceedings of the international congress for the welfare and protection of children_, , pp. - ; "feeding school children: the experience of france," in the _manchester guardian_, february , ; "children's care committees in paris," in the _morning post_, march , ; "school canteens in paris," by miss m. m. boldero, in the _school child_, july, ; _school feeding, its history and practice at home and abroad_, by louise stevens bryant, , pp. - ; conseil municipal de paris, procès verbal, june , , december , , march , . (ii) provision in other french towns. paris was not the first municipality in france to interest itself in the provision of school meals. the pioneer town in this respect seems to have been angers, where as early as the société de fourneau des ecoles laïques was founded with the support of the municipality, to provide hot dinners, either free or at a cost of centimes, during the winter.[ ] towards the close of the nineteenth century many municipalities were providing meals, either directly or indirectly through voluntary organisations. footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , pp. - . thus at havre, in , the municipality was making a grant of £ to a voluntary society; meals were provided for centimes, or were given free in cases of poverty; about five-eighths of the children who attended paid for the meals.[ ] footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , p. . at marseilles cantines scolaires were organised by the municipality in . prior to this date meals had been provided in some three or four schools, but only in a haphazard manner by voluntary agencies. by the bye-law of a committee of twenty-two was to be appointed by the mayor, and presided over by him or his representative; this committee was to investigate the demands made for free meals. in about per cent. of the children in the communal schools were dining at school, about half this number paying for the meal; in the infant schools the proportion fed was much greater, viz., per cent., while only about one-sixth of the parents paid. as in paris, no distinction was made between the paying and the non-paying children. dinner tickets could be bought at all the police stations; if the parents wished to receive the meals free, they had to make application personally or by letter to the education department; if on investigation they proved to be unable to pay, the municipality provided them with tickets.[ ] footnote : _lancet_ reports, , pp. - . at nice also cantines scolaires were established by the municipality about . here the object was not so much to feed starving children as to provide a suitable meal for children who came such distances that they were unable to return home at mid-day. the municipality built kitchens, provided all the necessary apparatus, and paid the salaries of the cooks. a penny was charged for a dinner of soup, the meal being given free to those who could not afford to pay. any deficit was supplied by voluntary subscriptions. in the infant schools, on the other hand, the municipality assumed the entire responsibility, and a hot meal was provided for all the children without payment.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . by cantines scolaires of one kind or another had been very generally established. it appeared that at this date something like three-fifths were supported entirely by public funds, the remainder being so supported indirectly and partially. in many towns where regular cantines had not been instituted, the teachers or janitors served warm soup to the children at a nominal sum. in country districts or smaller towns, the children would bring the raw material for soup and the teacher would prepare it; the children would also bring their own bread, and sometimes wine and cake. whether any organised provision was made or not, the great majority of the schools everywhere had a stove on which the children could warm any food they brought with them.[ ] footnote : _school feeding_ by louise s. bryant, , pp. , - . (b) switzerland switzerland was one of the first countries in which provision for necessitous school children became the subject of national legislation. the question early attracted attention. the long distances which many of the children had to walk to school rendered the provision of a mid-day meal of the greatest importance, while clothing and especially boots were little less necessary. after the system of providing food and clothing was greatly extended. the provision was everywhere made by voluntary societies, but assistance was given from the cantonal and communal funds. the cantonal contribution was derived chiefly from the alcohol monopoly profits and was devoted to this provision for the children's wants on the theory that their misery was in most cases the direct result of parental insobriety![ ] this method of administration by voluntary societies, subsidised but not controlled by the municipal authorities, proved most extravagant, and led to much abuse, while it aroused sectarian jealousies. the municipalities began, consequently, to take over the direct management of the school meals.[ ] in the federal government issued an order making it _obligatory_ for cantons to supply food and clothing to necessitous children in the public elementary schools. three years later it authorised the use of state funds for this purpose, on the understanding that in no case should the cantonal or city support be lessened because of this federal support.[ ] footnote : report of london school board on underfed children attending school, , pp. - . footnote : _the bitter cry of the children_, by john spargo, , p. . footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. . (c) italy as in other countries, the early attempts at school feeding in italy were made by voluntary agencies. in many towns, towards the close of the nineteenth century, committees of assistance and benevolent funds were instituted to assist poor pupils in the elementary schools, chiefly in the matter of books and clothing, but in several communes of lombardy and romagna meals were also given. a small grant, which in was raised to , francs (£ , ), was made by the department of public instruction to the school authorities in the large cities, and especially rome, who provided a mid-day meal for their children.[ ] footnote : report of london school board on underfed children attending school, , p. . the first town in which the municipality undertook the provision of meals was san remo, in . this policy was inaugurated by the socialist council. it was temporarily abandoned in , when a conservative council was appointed who preferred the subsidising of voluntary agencies to direct municipal action, but was re-introduced on the return of the socialists to power some four years later.[ ] footnote : _lancet_ reports, , pp. , . in milan an agitation for the provision of meals was set on foot in the last decade of the nineteenth century. the municipal authority declined to undertake the work themselves, but advocated the formation of charitable committees to raise subscriptions for the purpose, offering to supplement these voluntary funds with a municipal subvention. this grant amounted in to about £ .[ ] it was soon found that this system did not work satisfactorily, and the municipality was obliged, though somewhat reluctantly, to assume the responsibility.[ ] footnote : minutes of london school board, may , , vol. , p. . footnote : _lancet_ reports, , p. . but it is in the small rural town of vercelli that we find the most remarkable experiment.[ ] here for some years a charitable committee had been providing meals for children who lived too far from school to go home at mid-day, and the municipality had granted a small subsidy, but it was felt that this provision was entirely inadequate. in it was decided to provide a meal for all the children attending the elementary schools. the object was not the relief of distress but education in its fullest sense, as distinct from mere instruction. it was argued that the mid-day recess furnished an opportunity for moral education which could not be imparted in the class-room. the teachers would be brought into more intimate relation with the children, while the joining of richer and poorer alike in the common meal and in recreation afterwards would instil sentiments of brotherhood. the meal was to be free to all and attendance compulsory, for rich and poor were to be treated exactly alike. with the same object of preventing class distinctions, clothes were supplied for the poorer children, the municipality providing the material which was worked into garments by the sewing classes. the teachers were to have the same food, though they were allowed a double quantity, and were to eat it with the children. for this extra duty of supervising both the meals and recreation they only received an additional £ a year. since the moral rather than the physical welfare of the child was the primary consideration, too little attention was paid to the actual food that was given. the parents, it was argued, could in the great majority of cases amply feed their children at home, hence all that was needed was to supply sufficient food to compensate for the waste of energy during the two and a half hours of morning school. a cold meal of bread and sausage or cheese was given. this did not satisfy the more prosperous children, who would have preferred to pay for a hot meal, and some per cent. of the children, chiefly the richer ones, obtained a medical certificate exempting them from attendance. nor was the meal sufficient for the poorest children who were suffering from lack of food. to provide a really adequate meal free for all would have been too expensive an undertaking. accordingly, after some six years, the general free provision was abandoned. instead, hot soup was provided, which was given free to the poorest children, any others who wished being allowed to receive it on payment of · lire a month.[ ] footnote : [footnote : for the following account, see _lancet_ reports, pp. - . it is interesting to note that this scheme for making universal provision was introduced by the conservative party.] footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. ; il patronato scolastico umberto ° in vercelli e la sua opera al dicembre, , pp. , . the "school restaurant" seems to have been established in italy to a greater extent than in any other country. a very large proportion of the children attend, and a great number of these pay for the meals. in - it was found that in forty-three cities the average attendance amounted to per cent. of the total school population; while in several towns the attendance rose to over per cent.[ ] footnote : [footnote : _ibid._, p. .] (d) germany in germany little attention appears to have been paid to the question of feeding school children, apart from their parents, till the closing years of the nineteenth century.[ ] in some of the large towns, at any rate, the arrangements that were made were quite inadequate. in berlin, for instance, there was in no society whose chief object was the provision of school meals. a society which provided food for the poor generally had a branch which devoted special attention to the needs of school children, and gave a small sum, generally only s. or s. a year, to the committee of each parish school, to be used at the headmaster's discretion. generally milk and bread were given in the headmaster's house.[ ] about the subject began to attract more attention, especially in connection with the vacation colonies for school children; it was found that the children who were sent to these colonies, on returning to their homes, lost the benefit they had gained, owing to lack of food. on an attempt being made to continue the work of the colonies by feeding some of the children, it was found that thousands of others were also underfed.[ ] in a bill was introduced in the reichstag by the social democrats to make provision for school meals in the cities. the bill was defeated on the ground that it would increase the migration to the cities from the rural districts.[ ] some ten years later the agitation for national legislation was renewed, as a result of the discovery that from to per cent. of the conscripts for the imperial army were rejected on account of physical unfitness.[ ] footnote : "prize essays on feeding school children," , pp. , - . footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , pp. - , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . in it was found that out of cities from which information was obtained, in meals were being provided by voluntary societies, without any subsidy from, or control by, the municipal authorities, though these latter usually co-operated in the supervision and service, and often supplied rooms, gas and cooking free; in cities, meals were provided by voluntary organisations, but the city governments subsidised, and usually exercised some control over, their work; while in cities the provision of meals was undertaken entirely by the municipality.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . (e) austria in austria school meals are provided in most of the large towns. in vienna the central association for feeding necessitous school children was founded in , with the help and approval of the municipality, the mayor acting as president and the municipal council being represented on its administrative council. meals were given from november to april, occasionally at the schools, but more often in restaurants. all the meals were supplied free. the children were selected by the school managers and the headmaster, and enquiry was made by local committees with the help of voluntary workers. the teachers supervised the meals.[ ] in - , the municipal council made a grant to this society towards the provision of food;[ ] by this municipal subsidy amounted to , frs. (£ , ), while , frs. were granted for the supply of clothing.[ ] in the food subsidy had risen to £ , .[ ] the provision made was, however, inadequate. meals were only given during the winter, and were not obtained by all the children who needed them. it was felt that the city ought to assume direct control. in kitchens and dining-rooms were built in four new public schools.[ ] footnote : "prize essays on feeding school children," , pp. - , - , - . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , . footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , pp. , - . footnote : _feeding of school children in continental and american cities_, , p. . footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. . (f) belgium in most of the belgian towns in the last decade of the nineteenth century voluntary organisations were to be found whose object was to provide food and clothing for poor school children. this provision was made to enable them to attend school instead of begging in the streets, since education was not compulsory.[ ] in brussels the chief society was "le progrès" club, which in commenced the provision of soup dinners in the schools. the town council assisted by providing tables and undertaking the carriage of the food to the different centres, and in by granting a subsidy of , frs. an application was very soon made for an increase of this subsidy, whereupon the municipality undertook a detailed enquiry into the whole question of the food, clothing, lodging, cleanliness and health of the children in the communal schools. it was found as a result that · per cent. were badly shod, · per cent. badly clothed, and · per cent. insufficiently fed.[ ] the work of medical inspection and treatment was very early undertaken by the local authority. at the date of this report ( ), a doctor and dentist were attached to each school; frequent inspections were made by the doctor, and preventive medicine, _e.g._, codliver oil, was provided from public funds.[ ] the provision of meals continued to be undertaken by voluntary organisations, aided by a municipal subsidy. in - , this subsidy amounted to , frs. for the communal schools, and , frs. for the clerical schools. in addition large quantities of clothing were supplied from public funds.[ ] footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , p. . footnote : _ibid._, p. ; board of education, reports on educational subjects, vol. ii., , p. . footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , p. . footnote : _lancet_ reports, , pp. - . at liège, as early as , the municipality organised the provision of soup for all children in the kindergartens who wished to receive it.[ ] the dinner was only given on condition that the children were clean and tidy. each child was expected to have clean linen twice a week and also to have a pocket handkerchief. a teacher was present to supervise the children, and share the meal with them. each child brought a basket of bread and fruit to supplement the food provided, and at the end any bread that remained was packed in the baskets by the children, to prevent waste and to inculcate habits of thrift.[ ] the whole cost was borne out of municipal funds. in a voluntary committee was formed for providing soup in the communal primary schools. this committee placed at the disposal of the municipality a sum of , frs., in order that general provision might be made for the first year's scholars in the primary schools, on the same lines as in the kindergartens. in other classes in the primary schools soup was given only to necessitous children, or to those whose parents were at work all day; this provision was at first limited to three months during the winter, but in the municipality voted a grant of , frs. in order that it might be extended to six months.[ ] footnote : _feeding of school children in continental and american cities_, , p. ; london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , pp. , - . footnote : "prize essays on feeding school children," , pp. - . footnote : _feeding of school children in continental and american cities_, , pp. , , . (g) holland holland was the first country to enact national legislation for the provision of school meals. the law of enforcing compulsory education authorised municipal authorities to provide food and clothing for all school children, whether in public or private schools, who, owing to lack of these necessaries, were unable to attend school regularly. this provision might be undertaken directly by the municipality, or by means of subsidies to voluntary organisations.[ ] footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. . (h) denmark in some of the cities of denmark meals were provided by voluntary agencies in the 'seventies. in a law was passed allowing municipal authorities to subsidise these organisations. this system, however, proved unsatisfactory and, in , a campaign was set on foot for compulsory national legislation.[ ] footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. . in copenhagen the municipality from made a grant of , kr. (about £ , ) to the "society for providing meals to free school children," the voluntary contributions to which were rapidly diminishing. this society, though a voluntary organisation, was directly connected with the municipality, its executive board consisting of the seven municipal school inspectors and four private gentlemen, while the municipal school director was _ex officio_ president. more than half the total expenditure was met out of the municipal subsidy, the balance being made up by voluntary contributions. dinners were given three days a week to all the children in the free schools who wished to attend. no charge was made and no question raised as to the economic circumstances of the parents. about per cent. of the total number of free school children availed themselves of this provision.[ ] footnote : _the feeding of school children in continental and american cities_, , pp. , , . (i) norway christiania was the first town in norway to make municipal provision for underfed school children. the system was started in . a proposal was made to distribute food free to all elementary school children, but this was, at the time, rejected. in the winter of - , applications were made on behalf of . per cent. of the pupils in the school, the great majority of the meals being given free.[ ] the children made such marked progress as a result of this experiment that the system was extended and in christiania and several other towns a good dinner was provided by the school authorities for all school children who cared to attend, the entire cost of the system being met by taxation.[ ] it was soon found that the advantages of this free provision outweighed the expense. at trondhjem, when the proposal was first made by the socialists, it was bitterly opposed, but by the system was unanimously supported by all sections.[ ] footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , p. ; _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , p. . footnote : _the bitter cry of the children_, by john spargo, , pp. - , . footnote : _ibid._, p. . (j) sweden in many towns in sweden schemes for feeding poor school children were started in the 'eighties, these voluntary schemes being later subsidised by the local authorities.[ ] footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , pp. - . in stockholm several voluntary organisations were formed for supplying meals, the provision being usually limited to necessitous children. in order to preserve the self-respect of the children and parents, some of these societies adopted the plan of allowing the children to contribute to the expense of the dinner by performing some manual work, the making of baskets (which were sold), the mending of clothes, the sweeping out of the rooms, etc.[ ] towards the close of the nineteenth century the school boards of the several parishes resolved to build kitchens at the schools. the kitchens generally contained several fireplaces, at each of which dinners for a certain number of children were prepared by the elder girls.[ ] each child only received a dinner three times a week. footnote : "prize essays on feeding school children," , pp. - . footnote : london school board, report on underfed children attending school, , pp. - . at jönköping the free distribution of meals dates from . the funds, which were derived from voluntary contributions and proceeds of concerts, were administered by the board school inspector, and the distribution of the food was supervised by the school board. the children were usually sent for dinner to the houses of private ladies who undertook the catering.[ ] the poorest children were fed twice a week, those who were rather less poor only once. footnote : _ibid._, p. . at gothenburg, besides the provision made by voluntary agencies, the board of education distributed bread to certain children who were selected by the school board.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . (k) united states of america in america[ ] the movement for the feeding of school children is of comparatively recent date. it is true that in the numerous day industrial schools which were instituted in the nineteenth century by voluntary organisations, _e.g._, by the children's aid society, meals were always given,[ ] but it was not till , when mr. robert hunter in his "poverty" stated that probably , or , children in new york city often arrived at school hungry and unfitted to do their school work well,[ ] that public attention was seriously directed to the question of under-feeding among school children. footnote : see for a full description of the provision made in america, _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, . footnote : "prize essays on feeding school children," , pp. - . footnote : _poverty_, by robert hunter, , p. . in new york in a school lunch committee of physicians and social workers was formed with the object of ascertaining if a three cent lunch could be made self-supporting. this idea of making the meals self-supporting seems to be characteristic of the provision made in most of the american cities. two schools were at first chosen, and the experiment proved so successful that two years later the board of education gave permission for lunches to be supplied in other schools. the board provided rooms, equipment and gas; the cost of the food and service had to be met by the sale of tickets. the meals are served sometimes in the basement in the schools, and there does not appear to be always adequate accommodation. the meal itself is well cooked and served, the elder children helping the staff. a physician draws up the dietaries. these include one main dish such as soup, stew, rice pudding, etc., costing the child about four cents. there are besides "extras," such as dessert, cakes or other delicacies, which may be bought for one cent, but only by children who have had the main dish. the meals are not quite self-supporting, as a small number are given free.[ ] footnote : _school feeding_, by louise s. bryant, , pp. - . in philadelphia the starr center association undertook school feeding in some schools over fifteen years ago, but it is now managed by the home and school league. several of the schools provide a meal, some at . a.m., others a fuller meal at midday. the cost is one cent for lunch and three to five cents for dinner. there is one hot dish of soup or rice pudding, etc., and the children may spend another cent on the "extra" dainty. the meals are self-supporting. the teachers co-operate enthusiastically, and sometimes eat with the children. the food is served on japanned trays in enamel bowls and a paper napkin is provided. the washing up is done by the children under supervision, and everything is carefully sterilised. both the superintendent, who is responsible for planning the meals and purchasing the food materials, and the home visitor are trained dietists.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . in boston the hygiene committee of the home and school association began to organise school dinners in , at a school with a kitchen attached. by meals were being supplied at twenty-two schools. equipment was given in the first place, and the meals are now self-supporting. in schools where there is a kitchen, the cooking classes prepare and serve the meals; here one cent amply covers the cost of the food. in other schools outside help is hired, and an extra cent per meal ticket meets this expense.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, pp. - . throughout the rest of the states the system is gaining ground. by some thirty cities had organised the provision of school meals, while in at least twenty others the question was under consideration. everywhere this provision was made by voluntary organisations.[ ] public funds could not be utilised, but there was growing anxiety that the question should be made a national concern. the nearest approach to legislative action was taken by massachusetts, where in the committee on education of the lower house reported favourably a bill to allow school boards to spend part of the school funds on the provision of meals.[ ] footnote : _ibid._, p. . footnote : _ibid._, pp. , - . index aberdeen, ; county of, acton, , , , , after-care, , , , _n_ alexandra trust, , angers, anglesey, - arkle, dr., , - aston manor, _n_ attendance, effect of meals on, , , , - , - , audit by local government board, , , , - austria, - badger, dr., , , barnett, canon, barnsley, _n_, , _n_ bedfordshire, _n_ belgium, - berlin, bermondsey, _n_, bethnal green, _n_, - birkenhead, _n_, _n_, , _n_, , _n_, , , - , , birmingham, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, , , , , - , , _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, birrell, mr., blackburn, , blake, dr. sophia jex-, board of education, xvi, , , , , , . see also _newman, sir george_ board school children's free dinner fund, , _n_ bolton, _n_ bootle, , , , , - , , - , _n_, , , , , _n_ boots, provision of, , , , . see also _clothing_ boston, bournemouth, , , - bowley, professor a. l., bradford, xvi, _n_, - , _n_, , , _n_, , , , , , , , - , , _n_, _n_, , , , , , , - , , , - , - , , , , , _n_, _n_, , , - _n_, _n_, - breakfasts, versus dinners, - , ; dietary at, ; attendance at, , , ; a test, - , , , . see also _meals_ brighton, - , , , _n_, , bristol, _n_ browne, dr. crichton, brussels, - brynconin, _n_ burgwin, mrs., , _n_, _n_, burns, mr. john, , , bury st. edmunds, , , buxton, mr. sydney, _caisses des ecoles_, - camberwell, canteen committees, , - , , , , . see also _children's care committees_. _cantines scolaires_, - , , care committees. see _children's care committees_ carlisle, _n_ casual employment, , , , caterers, supply of meals by, , , , . see also _alexandra trust_ and _restaurants_ centres, service of meals in, - , - , ; inspection of, charity organisation society, , , , , , , , , chate, dr., chelsea, chesterfield, _n_ children, numbers fed, , , _n_, ; underfed, numbers of, , , - , _n_, , ; underfed, effect of education on, xiii, , , - , - , ; numbers attending school, , ; neglected, , , , _n_, , , - , , , - , ; necessitous, report on home circumstances of, - ; physique of, at liverpool, - ; industrial employment of, , ; effect of meals on, physically, xiii, - _n_, - , - , _n_, , , , - , , , - ; mentally, - , , , - , ; in point of manners, , _n_, , , ; in matter of taste, , - ; morally, , . see also _attendance_, _day industrial schools_, _infants_, _malnutrition_, _meals_, _selection_, _special schools_ children act ( ), , _n_ children's aid association, , , , . see also _canteen committees_. children's care (central) sub-committee, _n_, , children's care committees, in provinces, - ; in london, , , , , - , , ; in scotland, , , - ; constitution of, ; membership of, ; functions of, , , , , ; secretaries of, - , - , _n_; organisers of, , , - ; advantages of, - ; disadvantages of, - ; diverse policies of, - ; overlapping of work of, - ; local associations of, , , , . see also _canteen committees_, _relief committees_, _voluntary workers_ children's country holidays fund, chorlton, _n_ christiania, - civic guild, _n_, _n_ cleanliness, relation of, to nutrition, clothing, provision of, ; in scotland, , , ; abroad, , , , , , , . see also _boots_ cocoa rooms. see _restaurants_ cod liver oil, provision of, , , , , ; effects of, - collie, dr., xii, , conference, on state maintenance, ; on school feeding, congleton, cookery centres, preparation and service of meals at, , _n_, , , , - , , , , , copenhagen, council for promoting self-supporting penny dinners, , _n_ council of social welfare, _n_, - crewe, , _n_ cripple schools, _n_, - , - _n_. see also _special schools_ crowley, dr. ralph, , - , , cumberland, _n_ darlington, _n_, "day feeding school," at manchester, _n_ day industrial schools, _n_, , - ; provision of meals at, _n_, , , - , - ; in america, defective children. see _special schools_ denmark, - derby, _n_ derbyshire, destitute children's dinner society, - dewsbury, diet, at home, unsuitable, , , , , , _n_, , ; effect of school meals on, , ; of working classes in glasgow, - ; minimum amount necessary, , _n_ dietary (at school), xv, xvi, , , , - , - , , ; at bradford, , , ; planning of, , - , , ; for infants, , , ; at restaurants, - , , , , ; at day industrial schools, ; sample menus, - . see also _cod liver oil_, _milk_, _porridge_ dinners. see _meals_ disfranchisement, _n_, _n_, , distress committee, , divisional superintendent, _n_ dukes, dr. clement, _n_ dundee, eastbourne, east ham, , _n_, eating houses. see _restaurants_ ecclesall bierlow, _n_ ede, canon moore, _n_ edinburgh, , _n_, , - education, compulsory, , , - , ; effect of, on underfed children, xiii, , , - , - , ; provision of meals a corollary of, - , , education act ( ), , , ; ( ), ; ( ), , education (administrative provisions) act ( ), education (administrative provisions) bills, , _n_ education (provision of meals) act, xii, xiv, xvi, , , , , , , , ; debates on, - ; provisions of, - ; adoption of, xiv, , - ; should be compulsory, xv, education (provision of meals) act amendment bills, _n_, _n_ education (scotland) act ( ), , , - eichholz, dr., xiii, , , elementary education act ( ), _n_, _n_ elementary education (defective and epileptic children) act ( ), _n_ elementary education (feeding of children) bill ( ), _n_ enquiry, - , ; by whom made, , - , , , _n_, , , , , ; inadequacy of, , - , ; from employer, - , ; not suited to voluntary worker, , ; deterrent, - , ; proposed abandonment of, - , , erith, fabian society, , farnell, farquharson, dr. robert, _n_ feeble-minded children. see _special schools_ fenton, finch, dr. george, _n_, , finchley, _n_ fifeshire, _n_, foreign countries, provision of meals in, , - foster, captain, - france, _n_, - frere, miss margaret, _n_ fulham, _n_, gateshead, _n_, _n_ germany, - giffen, sir robert, - glasgow, , , - , , , - gorst, sir john, , _n_ gothenburg, govan, grassington, - , greenock, greenwood, mr. arthur, xii, xiii, , _n_ grimthorpe, lord, guardians. see _poor law guardians_ guernsey, - _n_ guest, dr. l. haden, - , guild of help, , _n_. see also _civic guild_ halifax, _n_ hall, dr. william, hammersmith, hampstead, _n_, - hartlepool, _n_ hastings, _n_ havre, hay, mr. claude, , , _n_, _n_ henderson, mr. arthur, heston and isleworth, holidays, provision of meals during, xiv, , , - , - ; loss of weight during, - , ; necessity for meals during, , , - , holland, home, provision of food at, _n_, - , _n_ hookham, mr. george, _n_, _n_, _n_ horn, miss, hornsey, housing, , ; relation of nutrition to, - huddersfield, hugo, victor, _n_ hull, _n_, , hunter, mr. robert, hutchison, dr. robert, industrial schools, _n_. see also _day industrial schools_ infants, special provision for, , , , , - , , , , , , , ; provision for, abroad, , , inverness, ; county of, iselin, rev. henry, _n_, _n_, , _n_ italy, - joint committee on underfed children, , - , jönköping, jowett, mr. f. w., , _n_ juvenile employment. see _after-care_ kensington, kerr, dr., , kettering, _n_ kidderminster, kincardineshire, labour party, , , , _n_, lambeth, , - , _n_ lancaster, larkins, dr., leeds, , , , _n_, , , , , - , _n_, , , , _n_, - , - leicester, xiv, - , _n_, , , , , , - , - , - , , leith, liège, - liverpool, _n_, , _n_, , _n_, - , , , , - , _n_, - , , , , , , - , - , local education authorities, power of, to provide meals, , - , , , , , , - , - ; adoption of provision of meals act by, - ; numbers making provision, ; different policies of, ; co-operation and overlapping of, with guardians, , , - , - , , - ; provision of meals by, abroad, - . see also _school boards_, _state_, _voluntary agencies (co-operation of, with local authorities)_ local government board, xiv, , , , , , , , , london, xvi, - , , - , _n_, - , , , , , , _n_, _n_, _n_, - , - _n_, , , - , , , _n_, - london county council, xvi, , , , - , - , , , , , - , london school board, _n_, _n_; committees of, on underfed children, - , , london schools dinner association, - , _n_ london vegetarian association, - lough, mr., mackenzie, dr. leslie, xiii, , macmillan, miss margaret, macnamara, dr., malnutrition, extent of, , - ; causes of, , - , ; signs of, , ; effects of, on physique, xii-xiii, - ; effects of, on mental capacity, , - , ; relation of, to family income, - . see also _children_ manchester, _n_, , _n_, _n_, _n_, , _n_, , , , _n_, , , marseilles, massachusetts, meals, school, motives for provision of, , , , , ; public provision of, , , - , - , - , - ; a corollary of compulsory education, - , , ; cost of, _n_, _n_, _n_, _n_, - ; price of, , , _n_, , , , , , , , ; expenditure on, - ; time of, - , , , ; number of, per day, - , , , ; number of, per week, , , , , , , , ; continuance of, throughout the year, , , , , , , , , , , , - , , ; preparation and distribution of, - , , , , , ; service of, xv, xvi, - , - , , - , , , , - , - , , , , ; in day industrial schools, - ; in special schools, , _n_, - , ; service of, by poor law authorities, , ; provision of, at home, _n_, - , _n_; a form of relief, , , , , ; a preventive measure, ; provision of, deterrent, , ; provision of, not universally known, ; reasons for granting, , - ; necessity for, , , , , , ; provision of, for all necessitous children, , , , ; general provision of, without enquiry, , - , - , , , , - , , , - . see also _centres_, _children_, _cookery centres_, _dietary_, _holidays_, _local education authorities_, _parents_, _payment_, _poor law guardians_, _rates_, _restaurants_, _school_, _supervision_, _voluntary agencies_, _wages_ medical inspection, , , , , ; in brussels, ; and feeding, inter-departmental committee on, - , , _n_, _n_, _n_ medical officer of health, medical treatment, _n_, , , , , mental capacity, relation of, to nutrition, , - , mentally defective. see _special schools_ meyer, lady, middlesex, - milan, milk, provision of, , , , ; effects of, - monitors, , , , , , - , , , , morten, miss honnor, mundella, rt. hon. a. j., _n_, , , , municipality. see _local education authorities_ and _state_ mutual registration, , , national food supply association, national society for the prevention of cruelty to children, , , national union of teachers, nether alderley, newcastle-on-tyne, newman, sir george, xii, , , _n_, , , , , , , , newport, new york, - nice, - niven, dr., xiii, northampton, , - norway, - norwich, _n_, _n_ nottingham, _n_, _n_, open air schools, - , , - , outdoor relief. see _poor law guardians_ over-pressure, - . see also _education_ paisley, parents, application for meals by, xv, - , - , , , ; withdrawal of children from meals by, , - ; dislike of, to accept meals, - , , , ; co-operation of, , , ; effect on responsibility of, , - , , , , , , - , , - ; abuse of provision of meals by, , ; obligations of, increased, - , , ; neglect of children by, , , , _n_, , - , , , - , - , . see also _payment_ and _recovery_ paris, , - parish council, provision of meals by, in edinburgh, - payment, by parents for school meals, - , , , , , , , - , , , - , , , , - , , , - ; for children at day industrial schools, ; for children at special schools, , , , , , , , , _n_; in rural districts, , , , , , , ; in scotland, , , , ; abroad, , , , , , , - , . see also _penny dinners_ peek, sir henry, , , , "penny dinners," , , , . see also _payment_ perth, , - philadelphia, physical deterioration, , , , , , ; inter-departmental committee on, xi, , - , , physical test. see _selection_ physical training (scotland), royal commission on, xi, - , , poor law, report of royal commission on ( ), , poor law guardians, inaction of, - ; inadequacy of relief given by, , - _n_, - , - , , , ; the authority for the provision of meals, xvi, _n_, _n_, , , _n_, ; service of meals by, ; no co-operation between voluntary agencies and, , ; prosecution by, - , ; overlapping of, with education authorities, , - , - , , - ; representation of, on canteen committees, , _n_; payment for school meals by, _n_, - , , , ; payment for children in day industrial schools by, _n_; provision of meals by, at manchester, _n_. see also _parish council_, _poor rate_, and _relief (school children) order_ poor laws, royal commission on ( ), , , _n_ poor rate, provision of meals from, , . see also _poor law guardians_ poplar, porridge, , , ; effects of, , ; as test, , portsmouth, _n_, , , , potteries, poverty test. see _selection_ prevention of cruelty to children act, prices, changes in, - ragged school union, ragged schools, , , rates, expenditure on provision of meals from, , , , , , - , , , - , ; in scotland, , - ; limitation of amount to be spent from, xiv, , , , ; provision of meals during holidays from, , , - . see also _education (provision of meals) act (adoption of)_ and _poor rate_ reading, recovery of cost, , , , , , - , , referee fund, - , , _n_ reformatory and industrial schools, departmental committee on, relief, deterrent policy of, , - , , relief committees, , , , _n_. see also _children's care committees_ relief (school children) order, xi, - relieving officer, , , restaurants, service of meals at, _n_, _n_, - , - _n_, , , , , , ; dietary at, - , , , ricardo, rome, rousdon, - , , _n_, - , rowntree, mr. seebohm, , rural districts, - ; provision of midday meal in, - , , , - , ; in scotland, - ; abroad, ; need for provision in, - , , , - , , - st. george's-in-the-east, _n_, _n_, , , , _n_, st. giles'-in-the-fields, _n_ st. pancras, _n_, salford, _n_, _n_, , san remo, scale of income. see _selection_ scarborough, school, service of meals in, - , _n_, , - , - , , , , , ; fees, abolition of, school attendance officers, _n_, , , , ; selection of children by, , , , ; enquiry by, , , , , , ; supervision of meals by, , school attendance officers' association, _n_ school boards, powers of, in scotland, , - ; co-operation of, with voluntary agencies, , , , . see also _local education authorities_ school medical officers, proposed responsibility of, for putting provision of meals act in force, - ; part taken by, in provision of meals, , , ; _ex-officio_ members of canteen committee, ; selection of children by, - , , - , , - , , , , , ; milk and cod liver oil recommended by, - , ; planning of dietary by, , , , , ; testimony of, as to effect of meals on children, - school nurse, _n_, , _n_, , school restaurants, - , , , . see also _payment_ and _cantines scolaires_ scotland, , _n_, - secondary schools, , _n_ selection of children, xv, - , - ; under voluntary agencies, - , , ; by physical test, - , - , , - ; by poverty test, - , - , - , , , - , , , - ; based on scale of income, - , , - , _n_, ; final decision in, ; revision of cases, - ; want of uniformity in, , - , , - ; disadvantages of present system, - , ; suggested schemes of, - , . see also _school attendance officers_, _school medical officers_, _school nurse_ and _teachers_ senior, mr. nassau, sheffield, _n_, , _n_, siddington, _n_, sims, mr. g. r., slack, sir bamford, _n_, sleep, want of, , smith, mr. s., - social democratic federation, south african war, xi, - , southampton, southend-on-sea, _n_ southwark, - special schools for defective children, _n_; provision of meals at, - , , , - , , _n_, , , - , , , , , _n_. see also _cripple schools_ and _open air schools_ spectacles, state, provision of meals by, , , - , - , - ; abroad, - . see also _local education authorities_ stevenson, miss flora, , stockholm, stoke-on-trent, _n_, , _n_, _n_, , , , , _n_, sub-committee on underfed children, xvi, , sunderland, _n_ supervision of meals, , , , , , - , , , , , ; at restaurants, , , , . see also _school attendance officers_, _teachers_ and _voluntary workers_ supper, provision of, in paris, surcharge. see _audit_ surrey, sussex, east, - _n_, sweden, - switzerland, - tate, dr., teachers, provision of meals by, , , _n_, _n_; selection of children by, , , , , , - , , - , , , - , , , ; urgency tickets given by, , - , ; enquiry by, , , ; members of canteen and care committees, , , , ; supervision of meals by, , , - , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; testimony of, as to effect of meals on children, , - , , - teachers, national union of, teeth, defective, malnutrition due to, toxteth, trondhjem, underfeeding. see _malnutrition_ unemployment, , , , united states, - urgency tickets, , - , utensils, insufficient supply of, , - , vercelli, - vienna, - visiting of homes, , , , - , - , - , . see also _enquiry_ voluntary agencies, provision of meals by, xiv, , - , , , - , , , - , - , - , , , , - , - , - , - , , , - ; the best agency for provision of meals, , ; disadvantages of provision by, - , , - , , , - , - , ; number of, ; expenditure of, - ; organisation of, - , , , - ; discontinuance of, ; co-operation of, with local authorities, xii, , , - , , , , - , , , - , - , - , - , - , - , - , - , ; co-operation of, with guardians, , , voluntary contributions, amount of, - , , - , ; provision of meals during holidays from, , , - voluntary workers, utilisation of services of, - , , ; organisation of, ; canteen committees composed of, - , ; supervision of meals by, , , , , , , . see also _children's care committees_ wages, effect of provision of meals on, , - ; low, - , , wandsworth, _n_ ward, mrs. humphry, - _n_ waugh, mr. benjamin, west derby, west ham, _n_, , , , _n_, , , - , , , - , - , whitechapel, , winder, miss phyllis d., - wilson, mr. w. t., _n_ wolverhampton, , women, married, employment of, - , , , , , workington, wyatt, mr. c. h., _n_, _n_ york, , , , , - , , _n_ * * * * * * transcriber's note: missing or obscured punctuation was corrected. typographical errors were silently corrected. spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed. one unpaired double quotation mark could not be corrected with confidence. one unpaired curved bracket could not be corrected with confidence. tables have been reformatted to a manageable width where necessary. [illustration: story-telling time george cruikshank] stories to tell to children fifty-four stories with some suggestions for telling by sara cone bryant author of "how to tell stories to children" [illustration] london george g. harrap & co. ltd. & portsmouth street kingsway w.c. the riverside press limited, edinburgh great britain preface this little book came into being at the instance of my teaching friends. their requests for more stories of the kind which were given in _how to tell stories to children_, and especially their urging that the stories they liked, in my telling, should be set down in print, seemed to justify the hope that the collection would be genuinely useful to them. that it may be, is the earnest desire with which it is offered. i hope it will be found to contain some stories which are new to the teachers and friends of little children, and some which are familiar, but in an easier form for telling than is usual. and i shall indeed be content if its value to those who read it is proportionate to the pleasure and mental stimulus which has come to me in the work among pupils and teachers which accompanied its preparation. among the publishers and authors whose kindness enabled me to quote material are mr john murray and miss mary frere, to whom i am indebted for the four stories of the little jackal; messrs little, brown & company and the alcott heirs, who allowed me the use of louisa alcott's poem, _my kingdom_; and dr douglas hyde, whose letter of permission to use his irish material was in itself a literary treasure. to the charming friend who gave me the outline of _epaminondas_, as told her by her own "mammy," i owe a deeper debt, for _epaminondas_ has carried joy since then into more schools and homes than i dare to enumerate. and to all the others,--friends in whom the child-heart lingers,--my thanks for the laughs we have had, the discussions we have warmed to, the helps you have given. may you never lack the right story at the right time, or a child to love you for telling it! sara cone bryant contents page some suggestions for the story-teller additional suggestions for method--two valuable types of story--a graded list of stories to dramatise and retell story-telling in teaching english importance of oral methods--opportunity of the primary grades--points to be observed in dramatising and retelling, in connection with english stories to tell to children two little riddles in rhyme the little yellow tulip the cock-a-doo-dle-doo the cloud the little red hen the gingerbread man the little jackals and the lion the country mouse and the city mouse little jack rollaround how brother rabbit fooled the whale and the elephant the little half-chick the blackberry-bush the fairies the adventures of the little field mouse another little red hen the story of the little rid hin the story of epaminondas and his auntie the boy who cried "wolf!" the frog king the sun and the wind the little jackal and the alligator the larks in the cornfield a true story about a girl (louisa alcott) my kingdom piccola the little fir tree how moses was saved the ten fairies the elves and the shoemaker who killed the otter's babies? early the brahmin, the tiger, and the jackal the little jackal and the camel the gulls of salt lake the nightingale margery's garden the little cotyledons the talkative tortoise robert of sicily the jealous courtiers prince cherry the gold in the orchard margaret of new orleans the dagda's harp the tailor and the three beasts how the sea became salt the castle of fortune david and goliath the shepherd's song the hidden servants little gottlieb how the fir tree became the christmas tree the diamond and the dewdrop some suggestions for the story-teller concerning the fundamental points of method in telling a story, i have little to add to the principles which i have already stated[ ] as necessary, in my opinion, in the book of which this is, in a way, the continuation. but in the two years which have passed since that book was written, i have had the happiness of working on stories and the telling of them, among teachers and students in many parts, and in that experience certain secondary points of method have come to seem more important, or at least more in need of emphasis, than they did before. as so often happens, i had assumed that "those things are taken for granted"; whereas, to the beginner or the teacher not naturally a story-teller, the secondary or implied technique is often of greater difficulty than the mastery of underlying principles. the few suggestions which follow are of this practical, obvious kind. take your story seriously. no matter how riotously absurd it is, or how full of inane repetition, remember, if it is good enough to tell, it is a real story, and must be treated with respect. if you cannot feel so toward it, do not tell it. have faith in the story, and in the attitude of the children toward it and you. if you fail in this, the immediate result will be a touch of shamefacedness, affecting your manner unfavourably, and, probably, influencing your accuracy and imaginative vividness. perhaps i can make the point clearer by telling you about one of the girls in a class which was studying stories last winter; i feel sure if she or any of her fellow-students recognises the incident, she will not resent being made to serve the good cause, even in the unattractive guise of a warning example. a few members of the class had prepared the story of _the fisherman and his wife_. the first girl called on was evidently inclined to feel that it was rather a foolish story. she tried to tell it well, but there were parts of it which produced in her the touch of shamefacedness to which i have referred. when she came to the rhyme,-- "o man of the sea, come, listen to me, for alice, my wife, the plague of my life, has sent me to beg a boon of thee," she said it rather rapidly. at the first repetition she said it still more rapidly; the next time she came to the jingle she said it so fast and so low that it was unintelligible; and the next recurrence was too much for her. with a blush and a hesitating smile she said, "and he said that same thing, you know!" of course everybody laughed, and of course the thread of interest and illusion was hopelessly broken for everybody. now, anyone who chanced to hear miss shedlock?[a] tell that same story will remember that the absurd rhyme gave great opportunity for expression, in its very repetition; each time that the fisherman came to the water's edge his chagrin and unwillingness were greater, and his summons to the magic fish mirrored his feeling. the jingle _is_ foolish; that is a part of the charm. but if the person who tells it _feels_ foolish, there is no charm at all! it is the same principle which applies to any assemblage: if the speaker has the air of finding what he has to say absurd or unworthy of effort, the audience naturally tends to follow his lead, and find it not worth listening to. let me urge, then, take your story seriously. next, "take your time." this suggestion needs explaining, perhaps. it does not mean license[a] to dawdle. nothing is much more annoying in a speaker than too great deliberateness[a] or than hesitation of speech. but it means a quiet[a] realisation of the fact that the floor is yours, everybody wants to hear you, there is time[a] enough for every point and shade of meaning, and no one will think the story too long. this mental attitude must underlie proper control of speed. never hurry. a business-like leisure is the true attitude of the story-teller. and the result is best attained by concentrating one's attention on the episodes of the story. pass lightly, and comparatively swiftly, over the portions between actual episodes, but take all the time you need for the elaboration of those. and above all, do not _feel_ hurried. the next suggestion is eminently plain and practical, if not an all too obvious one. it is this: if all your preparation and confidence fails you at the crucial moment, and memory plays the part of traitor in some particular,--if, in short, you blunder on a detail of the story, _never admit it_. if it was an unimportant detail which you misstated, pass right on, accepting whatever you said, and continuing with it; if you have been so unfortunate as to omit a fact which was a necessary link in the chain, put it in, later, as skilfully as you can, and with as deceptive an appearance of its being in the intended order; but never take the children behind the scenes, and let them hear the creaking of your mental machinery. you must be infallible. you must be in the secret of the mystery, and admit your audience on somewhat unequal terms; they should have no creeping doubts as to your complete initiation into the secrets of the happenings you relate. plainly, there can be lapses of memory so complete, so all-embracing, that frank failure is the only outcome; but these are so few as not to need consideration, when dealing with so simple material as that of children's stories. there are times, too, before an adult audience, when a speaker can afford to let his hearers be amused with him over a chance mistake. but with children it is most unwise to break the spell of the entertainment in that way. consider, in the matter of a detail of action or description, how absolutely unimportant the mere accuracy is, compared with the effect of smoothness and the enjoyment of the hearers. they will not remember the detail, for good or evil, half so long as they will remember the fact that you did not know it. so, for their sakes, as well as for the success of your story, cover your slips of memory, and let them be as if they were not. and now i come to two points in method which have to do especially with humorous stories. the first is the power of initiating the appreciation of the joke. every natural humorist does this by instinct, and the value of the power to a story-teller can hardly be overestimated. to initiate appreciation does not mean that one necessarily gives way to mirth, though even that is sometimes natural and effective; one merely feels the approach of the humorous climax, and subtly suggests to the hearers that it will soon be "time to laugh." the suggestion usually comes in the form of facial expression, and in the tone. and children are so much simpler, and so much more accustomed to following another's lead than their elders, that the expression can be much more outright and unguarded than would be permissible with a mature audience. children like to feel the joke coming, in this way; they love the anticipation of a laugh, and they will begin to dimple, often, at your first unconscious suggestion of humour. if it is lacking, they are sometimes afraid to follow their own instincts. especially when you are facing an audience of grown people and children together, you will find that the latter are very hesitant about initiating their own expression of humour. it is more difficult to make them forget their surroundings then, and more desirable to give them a happy lead. often at the funniest point you will see some small listener in an agony of endeavour to cloak the mirth which he--poor mite--fears to be indecorous. let him see that it is "the thing" to laugh, and that everybody is going to. having so stimulated the appreciation of the humorous climax, it is important to give your hearers time for the full savour of the jest to permeate their consciousness. it is really robbing an audience of its rights, to pass so quickly from one point to another that the mind must lose a new one if it lingers to take in the old. every vital point in a tale must be given a certain amount of time: by an anticipatory pause, by some form of vocal or repetitive emphasis, and by actual time. but even more than other tales does the funny story demand this. it cannot be funny without it. everyone who is familiar with the theatre must have noticed how careful all comedians are to give this pause for appreciation and laughter. often the opportunity is crudely given, or too liberally offered; and that offends. but in a reasonable degree the practice is undoubtedly necessary to any form of humorous expression. a remarkably good example of the type of humorous story to which these principles of method apply, is the story of _epaminondas_ on page . it will be plain to any reader that all the several funny crises are of the perfectly unmistakable sort children like, and that, moreover, these funny spots are not only easy to see; they are easy to foresee. the teller can hardly help sharing the joke in advance, and the tale is an excellent one with which to practise for power in the points mentioned. epaminondas is a valuable little rascal from other points of view, and i mean to return to him, to point a moral. but at the moment i want space for a word or two about the matter of variety of subject and style in school stories. there are two wholly different kinds of story which are equally necessary for children, i believe, and which ought to be given in about the proportion of one to three, in favour of the second kind; i make the ratio uneven because the first kind is more dominating in its effect. the first kind is represented by such stories as _the pig brother_,[ ] which has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for illustration without repetition here. it is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,--it passes on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralising. the story becomes an inescapable part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals which is a necessary possession of the heir of civilisation. children do not object to these stories in the least, if the stories are good ones. they accept them with the relish which nature seems ever to have for all truly nourishing material. and the little tales are one of the media through which we elders may transmit some very slight share of the benefit received by us, in turn, from actual or transmitted experience. the second kind has no preconceived moral to offer, makes no attempt to affect judgment or to pass on a standard. it simply presents a picture of life, usually in fable or poetic image, and says to the hearer, "these things are." the hearer, then, consciously or otherwise, passes judgment on the facts. his mind says, "these things are good"; or, "this was good, and that, bad"; or, "this thing is desirable," or the contrary. the story of _the little jackal and the alligator_ (page ) is a good illustration of this type. it is a character-story. in the naïve form of a folk tale, it doubtless embodies the observations of a seeing eye, in a country and time when the little jackal and the great alligator were even more vivid images of certain human characters than they now are. again and again, surely, the author or authors of the tales must have seen the weak, small, clever being triumph over the bulky, well-accoutred, stupid adversary. again and again they had laughed at the discomfiture of the latter, perhaps rejoicing in it the more because it removed fear from their own houses. and probably never had they concerned themselves particularly with the basic ethics of the struggle. it was simply one of the things they saw. it was life. so they made a picture of it. the folk tale so made, and of such character, comes to the child somewhat as an unprejudiced newspaper account of to-day's happenings comes to us. it pleads no cause, except through its contents; it exercises no intentioned influence on our moral judgment; it is there, as life is there, to be seen and judged. and only through such seeing and judging can the individual perception attain to anything of power or originality. just as a certain amount of received ideas is necessary to sane development, so is a definite opportunity for first-hand judgments essential to power. in this epoch of well-trained minds we run some risk of an inundation of accepted ethics. the mind which can make independent judgments, can look at new facts with fresh vision, and reach conclusions with simplicity, is the perennial power in the world. and this is the mind we are not noticeably successful in developing, in our system of schooling. let us at least have its needs before our consciousness, in our attempts to supplement the regular studies of school by such side-activities as story-telling. let us give the children a fair proportion of stories which stimulate independent moral and practical decisions. and now for a brief return to our little black friend. _epaminondas_ belongs to a very large, very ancient type of funny story: the tale in which the jest depends wholly on an abnormal degree of stupidity on the part of the hero. every race which produces stories seems to have found this theme a natural outlet for its childlike laughter. the stupidity of lazy jack, of big claus, of the good man, of clever alice, all have their counterparts in the folly of the small epaminondas. evidently, such stories have served a purpose in the education of the race. while the exaggeration of familiar attributes easily awakens mirth in a simple mind, it does more: it teaches practical lessons of wisdom and discretion. and possibly the lesson was the original cause of the story. not long ago, i happened upon an instance of the teaching power of these nonsense tales, so amusing and convincing that i cannot forbear to share it. a primary teacher who heard me tell _epaminondas_ one evening, told it to her pupils the next morning, with great effect. a young teacher who was observing in the room at the time told me what befell. she said the children laughed very heartily over the story, and evidently liked it much. about an hour later, one of them was sent to the board to do a little problem. it happened that the child made an excessively foolish mistake, and did not notice it. as he glanced at the teacher for the familiar smile of encouragement, she simply raised her hands, and ejaculated, "'for the law's sake!'" it was sufficient. the child took the cue instantly. he looked hastily at his work, broke into an irrepressible giggle, rubbed the figures out, without a word, and began again. and the whole class entered into the joke with the gusto of fellow-fools, for once wise. it is safe to assume that the child in question will make fewer needless mistakes for a long time because of the wholesome reminder of his likeness with one who "ain't got the sense he was born with." and what occurred so visibly in his case goes on quietly in the hidden recesses of the mind in many cases. one _epaminondas_ is worth three lectures. i wish there were more of such funny little tales in the world's literature, all ready, as this one is, for telling to the youngest of our listeners. but masterpieces are few in any line, and stories for telling are no exception; it took generations, probably, to make this one. the demand for new sources of supply comes steadily from teachers and mothers, and is the more insistent because so often met by the disappointing recommendations of books which prove to be for reading only, rather than for telling. for the benefit of suggestion to teachers in schools where story-telling is newly or not yet introduced in systematic form, i am glad to append the following list of additional stories which will be found to be equally tellable and likeable. the list is not mine, although it embodies some of my suggestions. i offer it merely as a practical result of the effort to equalise and extend the story-hour throughout the schools. the list is roughly graded in four groups. stories in the present volume have been excluded. stories for reproduction first group the lion and the mouse, Ã�sop the fox and the crow, Ã�sop the hare and the tortoise, Ã�sop the wolf and the kid, Ã�sop the crow and the pitcher, Ã�sop the fox and the grapes, Ã�sop the dog and his shadow, Ã�sop the hare and the hound, Ã�sop the wolf and the crane, Ã�sop the elf and the dormouse[ ] the three little pigs[ ] henny penny the three bears[ ] why the woodpecker's head is red[ ] little red riding-hood the cat and the mouse, grimm snow white and rose red, grimm second group the boasting traveller, Ã�sop the wolf and the fox, Ã�sop the boy and the filberts, Ã�sop hercules and the wagoner, Ã�sop the shepherd boy and the wolf, Ã�sop the star dollars[ ] the pied piper[ ] king midas[ ] raggylug[ ] peter rabbit, b. potter the tar-baby, joel chandler harris (from _uncle remus_) the tailor and the elephant the blind men and the elephant (_harrap's dramatic readers_, book ii.) the valiant blackbird, wm. canton (from _the true annals of fairyland_) the wolf and the goslings, grimm the ugly duckling, andersen the old woman and her pig[ ] the cat and the parrot[ ] third group little black sambo why the bear has a short tail[ ] why the fox has a white tip to his tail[ ] why the wren flies low[ ] jack and the beanstalk the golden fleece[ ] the pig brother[ ] the ugly duckling, andersen how the mole became blind[ ] how fire was brought to the indians[ ] echo[ ] why the morning glory climbs[ ] the bay of winds[ ] pandora's box[ ] the little match girl, andersen the story of wylie[ ] fourth group arachne[ ] the nürnberg stove[ ] clytie[ ] latona and the frogs[ ] dick whittington and his cat proserpine[ ] the bell of atri[ ] the land east of the sun and west of the moon, edgar (from _stories from the earthly paradise_) the guardians of the door, wm. canton (from _a child's book of saints_) the little lame prince, mrs craik narcissus[ ] the little hero of haarlem[ ] the bar of gold[ ] the golden fish[ ] saint christopher[ ] the four seasons[ ] a further source for excellent stories put into a form which is suggestive for purposes of retelling to children is the series of graded reading books known as _harrap's dramatic readers_. footnotes: [ ] _how to tell stories to children._ [ ] in _how to tell stories to children_, page . [ ] _how to tell stories to children._ [ ] _nature myths_, florence holbrook. [ ] _favourite greek myths_, lilian s. hyde. [ ] _legends of greece and rome_, g.h. kupfer. [ ] _folk tales from many lands_, lilian gask. story-telling in teaching english i have to speak now of a phase of elementary education which lies very close to my warmest interest, which, indeed, could easily become an active hobby if other interests did not beneficently tug at my skirts when i am minded to mount and ride too wildly. it is the hobby of many of you who are teachers, also, and i know you want to hear it discussed. i mean the growing effort to teach english and english literature to children in the natural way: by speaking and hearing,--orally. the structure of the language and the choice of words are dark matters to most of our young people; this has long been acknowledged and struggled against. but even darker, and quite equally destructive to english expression, is their state of mind regarding pronunciation, enunciation, and voice. it is the essential connection of these elements with english speech that we have been so slow to realise. we have felt that they were externals, desirable but not necessary adjuncts--pretty tags of an exceptional gift or culture. many an intelligent person will say, "i don't care much about _how_ you say a thing; it is _what_ you say that counts." he cannot see that voice and enunciation and pronunciation are essentials. but they are. you can no more help affecting the meaning of your words by the way you say them than you can prevent the expressions of your face from carrying a message; the message may be perverted by an uncouth habit, but it will no less surely insist on recognition. the fact is that speech is a method of carrying ideas from one human soul to another, by way of the ear. and these ideas are very complex. they are not unmixed emanations of pure intellect, transmitted to pure intellect: they are compounded of emotions, thoughts, fancies, and are enhanced or impeded in transmission by the use of word-symbols which have acquired, by association, infinite complexities in themselves. the mood of the moment, the especial weight of a turn of thought, the desire of the speaker to share his exact soul-concept with you,--these seek far more subtle means than the mere rendering of certain vocal signs; they demand such variations and delicate adjustments of sound as will inevitably affect the listening mind with the response desired. there is no "what" without the "how" in speech. the same written sentence becomes two diametrically opposite ideas, given opposing inflection and accompanying voice-effect. "he stood in the front rank of the battle" can be made praiseful affirmation, scornful scepticism, or simple question, by a simple varying of voice and inflection. this is the more unmistakable way in which the "how" affects the "what." just as true is the less obvious fact. the same written sentiment, spoken by a lord rosebery and by a man from white chapel or an uneducated ploughman, is not the same to the listener. in one case the sentiment comes to the mind's ear with certain completing and enhancing qualities of sound which give it accuracy and poignancy. the words themselves retain all their possible suggestiveness in the speaker's just and clear enunciation, and have a borrowed beauty, besides, from the associations of fine habit betrayed in the voice and manner of speech. and, further, the immense personal equation shows itself in the beauty and power of the vocal expressiveness, which carries shades of meaning, unguessed delicacies of emotion, intimations of beauty, to every ear. in the other case, the thought is clouded by unavoidable suggestions of ignorance and ugliness, brought by the pronunciation and voice, even to an unanalytical ear; the meaning is obscured by inaccurate inflection and uncertain or corrupt enunciation; but, worst of all, the personal atmosphere, the aroma, of the idea has been lost in transmission through a clumsy, ill-fitted medium. the thing said may look the same on a printed page, but it is not the same when spoken. and it is the spoken sentence which is the original and the usual mode of communication. the widespread poverty of expression in english, which is thus a matter of "how," and to which we are awakening, must be corrected chiefly, at least at first, by the elementary schools. the home is the ideal place for it, but the average home in many districts is no longer a possible place for it. the child of parents poorly educated and bred in limited circumstances, the child of powerful provincial influences, must all depend on the school for standards of english. and it is the elementary school which must meet the need, if it is to be met at all. for the conception of english expression which i am talking of can find no mode of instruction adequate to its meaning, save in constant appeal to the ear, at an age so early that unconscious habit is formed. no rules, no analytical instruction in later development, can accomplish what is needed. hearing and speaking; imitating, unwittingly and wittingly, a good model; it is to this method we must look for redemption from present conditions. i believe we are on the eve of a real revolution in english teaching,--only it is a revolution which will not break the peace. it will introduce a larger proportion of oral work than has hitherto been contemplated in secondary school work. it will recognise the fact that english is primarily something spoken with the mouth and heard with the ear. and this recognition will have greatest weight in the systems of elementary teaching. it is as an aid in oral teaching of english that story-telling in school finds its second value; ethics is the first ground of its usefulness, english the second,--and after these, the others. it is, too, for the oral uses that the secondary forms of story-telling are so available. by secondary i mean those devices which i have tried to indicate, as used by many teachers, in the chapter on "specific schoolroom uses," in my earlier book. they are retelling, dramatisation, and forms of seat-work. all of these are a great power in the hands of a wise teacher. if combined with much attention to voice and enunciation in the recital of poetry, and with much good reading aloud _by the teacher_, they will go far toward setting a standard and developing good habit. but their provinces must not be confused or overestimated. i trust i may be pardoned for offering a caution or two to the enthusiastic advocate of these methods,--cautions the need of which has been forced upon me, in experience with schools. a teacher who uses the oral story as an english feature with little children must never lose sight of the fact that it is an aid in unconscious development; not a factor in studied, conscious improvement. this truth cannot be too strongly realised. other exercises, in sufficiency, give the opportunity for regulated effort for definite results, but the story is one of the play-forces. its use in english teaching is most valuable when the teacher has a keen appreciation of the natural order of growth in the art of expression: that art requires, as the old rhetorics used often to put it, "a natural facility, succeeded by an acquired difficulty." in other words, the power of expression depends, first, on something more fundamental than the art-element; the basis of it is something to say, _accompanied by an urgent desire to say it_, and _yielded to with freedom_; only after this stage is reached can the art-phase be of any use. the "why" and "how," the analytical and constructive phases, have no natural place in this first vital epoch. precisely here, however, does the dramatising of stories and the paper-cutting, etc., become useful. a fine and thoughtful principal of a great school asked me, recently, with real concern, about the growing use of such devices. he said, "paper-cutting is good, but what has it to do with english?" and then he added, "the children use abominable language when they play the stories; can that directly aid them to speak good english?" his observation was close and correct, and his conservatism more valuable than the enthusiasm of some of his colleagues who have advocated sweeping use of the supplementary work. but his point of view ignored the basis of expression, which is to my mind so important. paper-cutting is external to english, of course. its only connection is in its power to correlate different forms of expression, and to react on speech-expression through sense-stimulus. but playing the story is a closer relative to english than this. it helps, amazingly, in giving the "something to say, the urgent desire to say it," and the freedom in trying. never mind the crudities,--at least, at the time; work only for joyous freedom, inventiveness, and natural forms of reproduction of the ideas given. look for very gradual changes in speech, through the permeating power of imitation, but do not forget that this is the stage of expression which inevitably precedes art. all this will mean that no corrections are made, except in flagrant cases of slang or grammar, though all bad slips are mentally noted, for introduction at a more favourable time. it will mean that the teacher will respect the continuity of thought and interest as completely as she would wish an audience to respect her occasional prosy periods if she were reading a report. she will remember, of course, that she is not training actors for amateur theatricals, however tempting her show-material may be; she is simply letting the children play with expression, just as a gymnasium teacher introduces muscular play,--for power through relaxation. when the time comes that the actors lose their unconsciousness it is the end of the story-play. drilled work, the beginning of the art, is then the necessity. i have indicated that the children may be left undisturbed in their crudities and occasional absurdities. the teacher, on the other hand, must avoid, with great judgment, certain absurdities which can easily be initiated by her. the first direful possibility is in the choice of material. it is very desirable that children should not be allowed to dramatise stories of a kind so poetic, so delicate, or so potentially valuable that the material is in danger of losing future beauty to the pupils through its present crude handling. mother goose is a hardy old lady, and will not suffer from the grasp of the seven-year-old; and the familiar fables and tales of the "goldilocks" variety have a firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable--or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature--are sorely hurt in their metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. they are for telling only. another point on which it is necessary to exercise reserve is in the degree to which any story can be acted. in the justifiable desire to bring a large number of children into the action one must not lose sight of the sanity and propriety of the presentation. for example, one must not make a ridiculous caricature, where a picture, however crude, is the intention. personally represent only such things as are definitely and dramatically personified in the story. if a natural force, the wind, for example, is represented as talking and acting like a human being in the story, it can be imaged by a person in the play; but if it remains a part of the picture in the story, performing only its natural motions, it is a caricature to enact it as a rôle. the most powerful instance of a mistake of this kind which i have ever seen will doubtless make my meaning clear. in playing a pretty story about animals and children, some children in an elementary school were made by the teacher to take the part of the sea. in the story, the sea was said to "beat upon the shore," as a sea would, without doubt. in the play the children were allowed to thump the floor lustily, as a presentation of their watery functions! it was unconscionably funny. fancy presenting even the crudest image of the mighty sea, surging up on the shore, by a row of infants squatted on the floor and pounding with their fists! such pitfalls can be avoided by the simple rule of personifying only characters that actually behave like human beings. a caution which directly concerns the art of story-telling itself, must be added here. there is a definite distinction between the arts of narration and dramatisation which must never be overlooked. do not, yourself, half tell and half act the story; and do not let the children do it. it is done in very good schools, sometimes, because an enthusiasm for realistic and lively presentation momentarily obscures the faculty of discrimination. a much loved and respected teacher whom i recently listened to, and who will laugh if she recognises her blunder here, offers a good "bad example" in this particular. she said to an attentive audience of students that she had at last, with much difficulty, brought herself to the point where she could forget herself in her story: where she could, for instance, hop, like the fox, when she told the story of the "sour grapes." she said, "it was hard at first, but now it is a matter of course; _and the children do it too, when they tell the story_." that was the pity! i saw the illustration myself a little later. the child who played fox began with a story: he said, "once there was an old fox, and he saw some grapes"; then the child walked to the other side of the room, and looked at an imaginary vine, and said, "he wanted some; he thought they would taste good, so he jumped for them"; at this-point the child did jump, like his rôle; then he continued with his story, "but he couldn't get them." and so he proceeded, with a constant alternation of narrative and dramatisation which was enough to make one dizzy. the trouble in such work is, plainly, a lack of discriminating analysis. telling a story necessarily implies non-identification of the teller with the event; he relates what occurs or occurred, outside of his circle of consciousness. acting a play necessarily implies identification of the actor with the event; he presents to you a picture of the thing, in himself. it is a difference wide and clear, and the least failure to recognise it confuses the audience and injures both arts. in the preceding instances of secondary uses of story-telling i have come some distance from the great point, the fundamental point, of the power of imitation in breeding good habit. this power is less noticeably active in the dramatising than in simple retelling; in the listening and the retelling, it is dominant for good. the child imitates what he hears you say and sees you do, and the way you say and do it, far more closely in the story-hour than in any lesson-period. he is in a more absorbent state, as it were, because there is no preoccupation of effort. here is the great opportunity of the cultured teacher; here is the appalling opportunity of the careless or ignorant teacher. for the implications of the oral theory of teaching english are evident, concerning the immense importance of the teacher's habit. this is what it all comes to ultimately: the teacher of young children must be a person who can speak english as it should be spoken,--purely, clearly, pleasantly, and with force. it is a hard ideal to live up to, but it is a valuable ideal to try to live up to. and one of the best chances to work toward attainment is in telling stories, for there you have definite material, which you can work into shape and practise on in private. that practice ought to include conscious thought as to one's general manner in the schoolroom, and intelligent effort to understand and improve one's own voice. i hope i shall not seem to assume the dignity of an authority which no personal taste can claim, if i beg a hearing for the following elements of manner and voice, which appeal to me as essential. they will, probably, appear self-evident to my readers, yet they are often found wanting in the public school teacher; it is _so_ much easier to say "what were good to do" than to do it! three elements of manner seem to me an essential adjunct to the personality of a teacher of little children: courtesy, repose, vitality. repose and vitality explain themselves; by courtesy i specifically do _not_ mean the habit of mind which contents itself with drilling the children in "good-mornings" and in hat-liftings. i mean the attitude of mind which recognises in the youngest, commonest child the potential dignity, majesty, and mystery of the developed human soul. genuine reverence for the humanity of the "other fellow" marks a definite degree of courtesy in the intercourse of adults, does it not? and the same quality of respect, tempered by the demands of a wise control, is exactly what is needed among children. again and again, in dealing with young minds, the teacher who respects personality as sacred, no matter how embryonic it be, wins the victories which count for true education. yet, all too often, we forget the claims of this reverence, in the presence of the annoyances and the needed corrections. as for voice: work in schoolrooms brings two opposing mistakes constantly before me: one is the repressed voice, and the other, the forced. the best way to avoid either extreme, is to keep in mind that the ideal is development of one's own natural voice, along its own natural lines. a "quiet, gentle voice" is conscientiously aimed at by many young teachers, with so great zeal that the tone becomes painfully repressed, "breathy," and timid. this is quite as unpleasant as a loud voice, which is, in turn, a frequent result of early admonitions to "speak up." neither is natural. it is wise to determine the natural volume and pitch of one's speaking voice by a number of tests, made when one is thoroughly rested, at ease, and alone. find out where your voice lies when it is left to itself, under favourable conditions, by reading something aloud or by listening to yourself as you talk to an intimate friend. then practise keeping it in that general range, unless it prove to have a distinct fault, such as a nervous sharpness, or hoarseness. a quiet voice is good; a hushed voice is abnormal. a clear tone is restful, but a loud one is wearying. perhaps the common-sense way of setting a standard for one's own voice is to remember that the purpose of a speaking voice is to communicate with others; their ears and minds are the receivers of our tones. for this purpose, evidently, a voice should be, first of all, easy to hear; next, pleasant to hear; next, susceptible of sufficient variation to express a wide range of meaning; and finally, indicative of personality. is it too quixotic to urge teachers who tell stories to little children to bear these thoughts, and better ones of their own, in mind? not, i think, if it be fully accepted that the story hour, as a play hour, is a time peculiarly open to influences affecting the imitative faculty; that this faculty is especially valuable in forming fine habits of speech; and that an increasingly high and general standard of english speech is one of our greatest needs and our most instant opportunities in the schools of to-day. and now we come to the stories! stories to tell to children two little riddles in rhyme[ ] there's a garden that i ken, full of little gentlemen; little caps of blue they wear, and green ribbons, very fair. (flax.) from house to house he goes, a messenger small and slight, and whether it rains or snows, he sleeps outside in the night. (the path.) the little yellow tulip once there was a little yellow tulip, and she lived down in a little dark house under the ground. one day she was sitting there, all by herself, and it was very still. suddenly, she heard a little _tap, tap, tap_, at the door. "who is that?" she said. "it's the rain, and i want to come in," said a soft, sad, little voice. "no, you can't come in," the little tulip said. by and by she heard another little _tap, tap, tap_ on the window-pane. "who is there?" she said. the same soft little voice answered, "it's the rain, and i want to come in!" "no, you can't come in," said the little tulip. then it was very still for a long time. at last, there came a little rustling, whispering sound, all round the window: _rustle, whisper, whisper_. "who is there?" said the little tulip. "it's the sunshine," said a little, soft, cheery voice, "and i want to come in!" "n--no," said the little tulip, "you can't come in." and she sat still again. pretty soon she heard the sweet little rustling noise at the keyhole. "who is there?" she said. "it's the sunshine," said the cheery little voice, "and i want to come in, i want to come in!" "no, no," said the little tulip, "you cannot come in." by and by, as she sat so still, she heard _tap, tap, tap_, and _rustle, whisper, rustle_, up and down the window-pane, and on the door and at the keyhole. "_who is there?_" she said. "it's the rain and the sun, the rain and the sun," said two little voices, together, "and we want to come in! we want to come in! we want to come in!" "dear, dear!" said the little tulip, "if there are two of you, i s'pose i shall have to let you in." so she opened the door a little wee crack, and in they came. and one took one of her little hands, and the other took her other little hand, and they ran, ran, ran with her right up to the top of the ground. then they said,-- "poke your head through!" so she poked her head through; and she was in the midst of a beautiful garden. it was early springtime, and few other flowers were to be seen; but she had the birds to sing to her and the sun to shine upon her pretty yellow head. she was so pleased, too, when the children exclaimed with pleasure that now they knew that the beautiful spring had come! footnotes: [ ] these riddles were taken from the gaelic, and are charming examples of the naïve beauty of the old irish, and of dr hyde's accurate and sympathetic modern rendering. from _beside the fire_ (david nutt). the cock-a-doo-dle-doo[ ] a very little boy made this story up "out of his head," and told it to his papa. i think you littlest ones will like it; i do. once upon a time there was a little boy, and he wanted to be a cock-a-doo-dle-doo. so he was a cock-a-doo-dle-doo. and he wanted to fly up into the sky. so he did fly up into the sky. and he wanted to get wings and a tail so he did get some wings and a tail. footnotes: [ ] from _the ignominy of being grown up_, by dr. samuel m. crothers, in the _atlantic monthly_ for july . the cloud[ ] one hot summer morning a little cloud rose out of the sea and floated lightly and happily across the blue sky. far below lay the earth, brown, dry, and desolate, from drought. the little cloud could see the poor people of the earth working and suffering in the hot fields, while she herself floated on the morning breeze, hither and thither, without a care. "oh, if i could only help the poor people down there!" she thought. "if i could but make their work easier, or give the hungry ones food, or the thirsty a drink!" and as the day passed, and the cloud became larger, this wish to do something for the people of earth was ever greater in her heart. on earth it grew hotter and hotter; the sun burned down so fiercely that the people were fainting in its rays; it seemed as if they must die of heat, and yet they were obliged to go on with their work, for they were very poor. sometimes they stood and looked up at the cloud, as if they were praying, and saying, "ah, if you could help us!" "i will help you; i will!" said the cloud. and she began to sink softly down toward the earth. but suddenly, as she floated down, she remembered something which had been told her when she was a tiny cloud-child, in the lap of mother ocean: it had been whispered that if the clouds go too near the earth they die. when she remembered this she held herself from sinking, and swayed here and there on the breeze, thinking,--thinking. but at last she stood quite still, and spoke boldly and proudly. she said, "men of earth, i will help you, come what may!" the thought made her suddenly marvellously big and strong and powerful. never had she dreamed that she could be so big. like a mighty angel of blessing she stood above the earth, and lifted her head and spread her wings far over the fields and woods. she was so great, so majestic, that men and animals were awe-struck at the sight; the trees and the grasses bowed before her; yet all the earth-creatures felt that she meant them well. "yes, i will help you," cried the cloud once more. "take me to yourselves; i will give my life for you!" as she said the words a wonderful light glowed from her heart, the sound of thunder rolled through the sky, and a love greater than words can tell filled the cloud; down, down, close to the earth she swept, and gave up her life in a blessed, healing shower of rain. that rain was the cloud's great deed; it was her death, too; but it was also her glory. over the whole country-side, as far as the rain fell, a lovely rainbow sprang its arch, and all the brightest rays of heaven made its colours; it was the last greeting of a love so great that it sacrificed itself. soon that, too, was gone, but long, long afterward the men and animals who were saved by the cloud kept her blessing in their hearts. footnotes: [ ] adapted from the german of robert reinick's _märchen-, lieder-und geschichtenbuch_ (velhagen und klasing, bielefeld and leipsic). the little red hen the little red hen was in the farmyard with her chickens, when she found a grain of wheat. "who will plant this wheat?" she said. "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen, and she planted the grain of wheat. when the wheat was ripe she said, "who will take this wheat to the mill?" "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen, and she took the wheat to the mill. when she brought the flour home she said, "who will make some bread with this flour?" "not i," said the goose. "not i," said the duck. "i will, then," said the little red hen. when the bread was baked, she said, "who will eat this bread?" "i will," said the goose. "i will," said the duck. "no, you won't," said the little red hen. "i shall eat it myself. cluck! cluck!" and she called her chickens to help her. the gingerbread man[ ] once upon a time there was a little old woman and a little old man, and they lived all alone in a little old house. they hadn't any little girls or any little boys, at all. so one day, the little old woman made a boy out of gingerbread; she made him a chocolate jacket, and put raisins on it for buttons; his eyes were made of fine, fat currants; his mouth was made of rose-coloured sugar; and he had a gay little cap of orange sugar-candy. when the little old woman had rolled him out, and dressed him up, and pinched his gingerbread shoes into shape, she put him in a pan; then she put the pan in the oven and shut the door; and she thought, "now i shall have a little boy of my own." when it was time for the gingerbread boy to be done she opened the oven door and pulled out the pan. out jumped the little gingerbread boy on to the floor, and away he ran, out of the door and down the street! the little old woman and the little old man ran after him as fast as they could, but he just laughed, and shouted,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and they couldn't catch him. the little gingerbread boy ran on and on, until he came to a cow, by the roadside. "stop, little gingerbread boy," said the cow; "i want to eat you." the little gingerbread boy laughed and said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "and a little old man, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and, as the cow chased him, he looked over his shoulder and cried,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the cow couldn't catch him. the little gingerbread boy ran on, and on, and on, till he came to a horse, in the pasture. "please stop, little gingerbread boy," said the horse, "you look very good to eat." but the little gingerbread boy laughed out loud. "oho! oho!" he said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and, as the horse chased him, he looked over his shoulder and cried,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the horse couldn't catch him. by and by the little gingerbread boy came to a barn full of threshers. when the threshers smelt the gingerbread boy, they tried to pick him up, and said, "don't run so fast, little gingerbread boy; you look very good to eat." but the little gingerbread boy ran harder than ever, and as he ran he cried out,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and when he found that he was ahead of the threshers, he turned and shouted back to them,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the threshers couldn't catch him. then the little gingerbread boy ran faster than ever. he ran and ran until he came to a field full of mowers. when the mowers saw how fine he looked, they ran after him, calling out, "wait a bit! wait a bit, little gingerbread boy, we wish to eat you!" but the little gingerbread boy laughed harder than ever, and ran like the wind. "oho! oho!" he said,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "a barn full of threshers, "and i can run away from you, i can!" and when he found that he was ahead of the mowers, he turned and shouted back to them,-- "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" and the mowers couldn't catch him. by this time the little gingerbread boy was so proud that he didn't think anybody could catch him. pretty soon he saw a fox coming across a field. the fox looked at him and began to run. but the little gingerbread boy shouted across to him, "you can't catch me!" the fox began to run faster, and the little gingerbread boy ran faster, and as he ran he chuckled,-- "i have run away from a little old woman, "a little old man, "a cow, "a horse, "a barn full of threshers, "a field full of mowers, "and i can run away from you, i can! "run! run! as fast as you can! "you can't catch me, i'm the gingerbread man!" "why," said the fox, "i would not catch you if i could. i would not think of disturbing you." just then, the little gingerbread boy came to a river. he could not swim across, and he wanted to keep running away from the cow and the horse and the people. "jump on my tail, and i will take you across," said the fox. so the little gingerbread boy jumped on the fox's tail, and the fox began to swim the river. when he was a little way from the bank he turned his head, and said, "you are too heavy on my tail, little gingerbread boy, i fear i shall let you get wet; jump on my back." the little gingerbread boy jumped on his back. a little farther out, the fox said, "i am afraid the water will cover you, there; jump on my shoulder." the little gingerbread boy jumped on his shoulder. in the middle of the stream the fox said, "oh, dear! little gingerbread boy, my shoulder is sinking; jump on my nose, and i can hold you out of water." so the little gingerbread boy jumped on his nose. the minute the fox reached the bank he threw back his head, and gave a snap! "dear me!" said the little gingerbread boy, "i am a quarter gone!" the next minute he said, "why, i am half gone!" the next minute he said, "my goodness gracious, i am three quarters gone!" and after that, the little gingerbread boy never said anything more at all. footnotes: [ ] i have tried to give this story in the most familiar form; it varies a good deal in the hands of different story-tellers, but this is substantially the version i was "brought up on." the little jackals and the lion[ ] once there was a great big jungle; and in the jungle there was a great big lion; and the lion was king of the jungle. whenever he wanted anything to eat, all he had to do was to come up out of his cave in the stones and earth and _roar_. when he had roared a few times all the little people of the jungle were so frightened that they came out of their holes and hiding-places and ran, this way and that, to get away. then, of course, the lion could see where they were. and he pounced on them, killed them, and gobbled them up. he did this so often that at last there was not a single thing left alive in the jungle besides the lion, except two little jackals,--a little father jackal and a little mother jackal. they had run away so many times that they were quite thin and very tired, and they could not run so fast any more. and one day the lion was so near that the little mother jackal grew frightened; she said,-- "oh, father jackal, father jackal! i b'lieve our time has come! the lion will surely catch us this time!" "pooh! nonsense, mother!" said the little father jackal. "come, we'll run on a bit!" and they ran, ran, ran very fast, and the lion did not catch them that time. but at last a day came when the lion was nearer still and the little mother jackal was frightened almost to death. "oh, father jackal, father jackal!" she cried; "i'm sure our time has come! the lion's going to eat us this time!" "now, mother, don't you fret," said the little father jackal; "you do just as i tell you, and it will be all right." then what did those cunning little jackals do but take hold of hands and run up towards the lion, as if they had meant to come all the time. when he saw them coming he stood up, and roared in a terrible voice,-- "you miserable little wretches, come here and be eaten, at once! why didn't you come before?" the father jackal bowed very low. "indeed, father lion," he said, "we meant to come before; we knew we ought to come before; and we wanted to come before; but every time we started to come, a dreadful great lion came out of the woods and roared at us, and frightened us so that we ran away." "what do you mean?" roared the lion. "there's no other lion in this jungle, and you know it!" "indeed, indeed, father lion," said the little jackal, "i know that is what everybody thinks; but indeed and indeed there is another lion! and he is as much bigger than you as you are bigger than i! his face is much more terrible, and his roar far, far more dreadful. oh, he is far more fearful than you!" at that the lion stood up and roared so that the jungle shook. "take me to this lion," he said; "i'll eat him up and then i'll eat you up." the little jackals danced on ahead, and the lion stalked behind. they led him to a place where there was a round, deep well of clear water. they went round on one side of it, and the lion stalked up to the other. "he lives down there, father lion!" said the little jackal. "he lives down there!" the lion came close and looked down into the water,--and a lion's face looked back at him out of the water! when he saw that, the lion roared and shook his mane and showed his teeth. and the lion in the water shook his mane and showed his teeth. the lion above shook his mane again and growled again, and made a terrible face. but the lion in the water made just as terrible a one, back. the lion above couldn't stand that. he leaped down into the well after the other lion. but, of course, as you know very well, there wasn't any other lion! it was only the reflection in the water! so the poor old lion floundered about and floundered about, and as he couldn't get up the steep sides of the well, he was at last drowned. and when he was drowned, the little jackals took hold of hands and danced round the well, and sang,-- "the lion is dead! the lion is dead! "we have killed the great lion who would have killed us! "the lion is dead! the lion is dead! "ao! ao! ao!" footnotes: [ ] the four stories of the little jackal, in this book, are adapted from stories in _old deccan days_, by mary frere (john murray), a collection of orally transmitted hindu folk tales, which every teacher would gain by knowing. in the hindu animal legends the jackal seems to play the rôle assigned in germanic lore to reynard the fox, and to "bre'r rabbit" in the negro stories of southern america; he is the clever and humorous trickster who usually comes out of an encounter with a whole skin, and turns the laugh on his enemy, however mighty he may be.[a] the country mouse and the city mouse[ ] once a little mouse who lived in the country invited a little mouse from the city to visit him. when the little city mouse sat down to dinner he was surprised to find that the country mouse had nothing to eat except barley and grain. "really," he said, "you do not live well at all; you should see how i live! i have all sorts of fine things to eat every day. you must come to visit me and see how nice it is to live in the city." the little country mouse was glad to do this, and after a while he went to the city to visit his friend. the very first place that the city mouse took the country mouse to see was the kitchen cupboard of the house where he lived. there, on the lowest shelf, behind some stone jars, stood a big paper bag of brown sugar. the little city mouse gnawed a hole in the bag and invited his friend to nibble for himself. the two little mice nibbled and nibbled, and the country mouse thought he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life. he was just thinking how lucky the city mouse was, when suddenly the door opened with a bang, and in came the cook to get some flour. "run!" whispered the city mouse. and they ran as fast as they could to the little hole where they had come in. the little country mouse was shaking all over when they got safely away, but the little city mouse said, "that is nothing; she will soon go away and then we can go back." after the cook had gone away and shut the door they stole softly back, and this time the city mouse had something new to show: he took the little country mouse into a corner on the top shelf, where a big jar of dried prunes stood open. after much tugging and pulling they got a large dried prune out of the jar on to the shelf and began to nibble at it. this was even better than the brown sugar. the little country mouse liked the taste so much that he could hardly nibble fast enough. but all at once, in the midst of their eating, there came a scratching at the door and a sharp, loud _miaouw_! "what is that?" said the country mouse. the city mouse just whispered, "sh!" and ran as fast as he could to the hole. the country mouse ran after, you may be sure, as fast as _he_ could. as soon as they were out of danger the city mouse said, "that was the old cat; she is the best mouser in town,--if she once gets you, you are lost." "this is very terrible," said the little country mouse; "let us not go back to the cupboard again." "no," said the city mouse, "i will take you to the cellar; there is something specially fine there." so the city mouse took his little friend down the cellar stairs and into a big cupboard where there were many shelves. on the shelves were jars of butter, and cheeses in bags and out of bags. overhead hung bunches of sausages, and there were spicy apples in barrels standing about. it smelt so good that it went to the little country mouse's head. he ran along the shelf and nibbled at a cheese here, and a bit of butter there, until he saw an especially rich, very delicious-smelling piece of cheese on a queer little stand in a corner. he was just on the point of putting his teeth into the cheese when the city mouse saw him. "stop! stop!" cried the city mouse. "that is a trap!" the little country mouse stopped and said, "what is a trap?" "that thing is a trap," said the little city mouse. "the minute you touch the cheese with your teeth something comes down on your head hard, and you're dead." the little country mouse looked at the trap, and he looked at the cheese, and he looked at the little city mouse. "if you'll excuse me," he said, "i think i will go home. i'd rather have barley and grain to eat and eat it in peace and comfort, than have brown sugar and dried prunes and cheese,--and be frightened to death all the time!" so the little country mouse went back to his home, and there he stayed all the rest of his life. footnotes: [ ] the following story of the two mice, with the similar fables of _the boy who cried wolf_, _the frog king_, and _the sun_ _and the wind_, are given here with the hope that they may be of use to the many teachers who find the over-familiar material of the fables difficult to adapt, and who are yet aware of the great usefulness of the stories to young minds. a certain degree of vividness and amplitude must be added to the compact statement of the famous collections, and yet it is not wise to change the style-effect of a fable, wholly. i venture to give these versions, not as perfect models, of course, but as renderings which have been acceptable to children, and which i believe retain the original point simply and strongly. little jack rollaround[ ] once upon a time there was a wee little boy who slept in a tiny trundle-bed near his mother's great bed. the trundle-bed had castors on it so that it could be rolled about, and there was nothing in the world the little boy liked so much as to have it rolled. when his mother came to bed he would cry, "roll me around! roll me around!" and his mother would put out her hand from the big bed and push the little bed back and forth till she was tired. the little boy could never get enough; so for this he was called "little jack rollaround." one night he had made his mother roll him about, till she fell asleep, and even then he kept crying, "roll me around! roll me around!" his mother pushed him about in her sleep, until her slumber became too sound; then she stopped. but little jack rollaround kept on crying, "roll around! roll around!" by and by the moon peeped in at the window. he saw a funny sight: little jack rollaround was lying in his trundle-bed, and he had put up one little fat leg for a mast, and fastened the corner of his wee shirt to it for a sail; and he was blowing at it with all his might, and saying, "roll around! roll around!" slowly, slowly, the little trundle-bed boat began to move; it sailed along the floor and up the wall and across the ceiling and down again! "more! more!" cried little jack rollaround; and the little boat sailed faster up the wall, across the ceiling, down the wall, and over the floor. the moon laughed at the sight; but when little jack rollaround saw the moon, he called out, "open the door, old moon! i want to roll through the town, so that the people can see me!" the moon could not open the door, but he shone in through the keyhole, in a broad band. and little jack rollaround sailed his trundle-bed boat up the beam, through the keyhole, and into the street. "make a light, old moon," he said; "i want the people to see me!" so the good moon made a light and went along with him, and the little trundle-bed boat went sailing down the streets into the main street of the village. they rolled past the town hall and the schoolhouse and the church; but nobody saw little jack rollaround, because everybody was in bed, asleep. "why don't the people come to see me?" he shouted. high up on the church steeple, the weather-vane answered, "it is no time for people to be in the streets; decent folk are in their beds." "then i'll go to the woods, so that the animals may see me," said little jack. "come along, old moon, and make a light!" the good moon went along and made a light, and they came to the forest. "roll! roll!" cried the little boy; and the trundle-bed went trundling among the trees in the great wood, scaring up the squirrels and startling the little leaves on the trees. the poor old moon began to have a bad time of it, for the tree-trunks got in his way so that he could not go so fast as the bed, and every time he got behind, the little boy called, "hurry up, old moon, i want the beasts to see me!" but all the animals were asleep, and nobody at all looked at little jack rollaround except an old white owl; and all she said was, "who are you?" the little boy did not like her, so he blew harder, and the trundle-bed boat went sailing through the forest till it came to the end of the world. "i must go home now; it is late," said the moon. "i will go with you; make a path!" said little jack rollaround. the kind moon made a path up to the sky, and up sailed the little bed into the midst of the sky. all the little bright stars were there with their nice little lamps. and when he saw them, that naughty little jack rollaround began to tease. "out of the way, there! i am coming!" he shouted, and sailed the trundle-bed boat straight at them. he bumped the little stars right and left, all over the sky, until every one of them put his little lamp out and left it dark. "do not treat the little stars so," said the good moon. but jack rollaround only behaved the worse: "get out of the way, old moon!" he shouted, "i am coming!" and he steered the little trundle-bed boat straight into the old moon's face, and bumped his nose! this was too much for the good moon; he put out his big light, all at once, and left the sky pitch-black. "make a light, old moon! make a light!" shouted the little boy. but the moon answered never a word, and jack rollaround could not see where to steer. he went rolling criss-cross, up and down, all over the sky, knocking into the planets and stumbling into the clouds, till he did not know where he was. suddenly he saw a big yellow light at the very edge of the sky. he thought it was the moon. "look out, i am coming!" he cried, and steered for the light. but it was not the kind old moon at all; it was the great mother sun, just coming up out of her home in the sea, to begin her day's work. "aha, youngster, what are you doing in my sky?" she said. and she picked little jack rollaround up and threw him, trundle-bed boat and all, into the middle of the sea! and i suppose he is there yet, unless somebody picked him out again. footnotes: [ ] based on theodor storm's story of _der kleine häwelmann_ (george westermann, braunschweig). very freely adapted from the german story. how brother rabbit fooled the whale and the elephant[ ] one day little brother rabbit was running along on the sand, lippety, lippety, when he saw the whale and the elephant talking together. little brother rabbit crouched down and listened to what they were saying. this was what they were saying:-- "you are the biggest thing on the land, brother elephant," said the whale, "and i am the biggest thing in the sea; if we join together we can rule all the animals in the world, and have our way about everything." "very good, very good," trumpeted the elephant; "that suits me; we will do it." little brother rabbit sniggered to himself. "they won't rule me," he said. he ran away and got a very long, very strong rope, and he got his big drum, and hid the drum a long way off in the bushes. then he went along the beach till he came to the whale. "oh, please, dear, strong mr whale," he said, "will you have the great kindness to do me a favour? my cow is stuck in the mud, a quarter of a mile from here. and i can't pull her out. but you are so strong and so obliging, that i venture to trust you will help me out." the whale was so pleased with the compliment that he said, "yes," at once. "then," said the rabbit, "i will tie this end of my long rope to you, and i will run away and tie the other end round my cow, and when i am ready i will beat my big drum. when you hear that, pull very, very hard, for the cow is stuck very deep in the mud." "huh!" grunted the whale, "i'll pull her out, if she is stuck to the horns." little brother rabbit tied the rope-end to the whale, and ran off, lippety, lippety, till he came to the place where the elephant was. "oh, please, mighty and kindly elephant," he said, making a very low bow, "will you do me a favour?" "what is it?" asked the elephant. "my cow is stuck in the mud, about a quarter of a mile from here," said little brother rabbit, "and i cannot pull her out. of course you could. if you will be so very obliging as to help me----" "certainly," said the elephant grandly, "certainly." "then," said little brother rabbit, "i will tie one end of this long rope to your trunk, and the other to my cow, and as soon as i have tied her tightly i will beat my big drum. when you hear that, pull; pull as hard as you can, for my cow is very heavy." "never fear," said the elephant, "i could pull twenty cows." "i am sure you could," said the rabbit, politely, "only be sure to begin gently, and pull harder and harder till you get her." then he tied the end of the rope tightly round the elephant's trunk, and ran away into the bushes. there he sat down and beat the big drum. the whale began to pull, and the elephant began to pull, and in a jiffy the rope tightened till it was stretched as hard as could be. "this is a remarkably heavy cow," said the elephant; "but i'll fetch her!" and he braced his forefeet in the earth, and gave a tremendous pull. "dear me!" said the whale. "that cow must be stuck mighty tight"; and he drove his tail deep in the water, and gave a marvellous pull. he pulled harder; the elephant pulled harder. pretty soon the whale found himself sliding toward the land. the reason was, of course, that the elephant had something solid to brace against, and, beside, as fast as he pulled the rope in a little, he took a turn with it round his trunk! but when the whale found himself sliding toward the land he was so provoked with the cow that he dived head first, down to the bottom of the sea. that was a pull! the elephant was jerked off his feet, and came slipping and sliding to the beach, and into the surf. he was terribly angry. he braced himself with all his might, and pulled his best. at the jerk, up came the whale out of the water. "who is pulling me?" spouted the whale. "who is pulling me?" trumpeted the elephant. and then each saw the rope in the other's hold. "i'll teach you to play cow!" roared the elephant. "i'll show you how to fool me!" fumed the whale. and they began to pull again. but this time the rope broke, the whale turned a somersault, and the elephant fell over backward. at that, they were both so ashamed that neither would speak to the other. so that broke up the bargain between them. and little brother rabbit sat in the bushes and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. footnotes: [ ] adapted from two tales included in the records of the american folk-lore society. the little half-chick there was once upon a time a spanish hen, who hatched out some nice little chickens. she was much pleased with their looks as they came from the shell. one, two, three, came out plump and fluffy; but when the fourth shell broke, out came a little half-chick! it had only one leg and one wing and one eye! it was just half a chicken. the hen-mother did not know what in the world to do with the queer little half-chick. she was afraid something would happen to it, and she tried hard to protect it and keep it from harm. but as soon as it could walk the little half-chick showed a most headstrong spirit, worse than any of its brothers. it would not mind, and it would go wherever it wanted to; it walked with a funny little hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, and got along pretty fast. one day the little half-chick said, "mother, i am off to madrid, to see the king! good-bye." the poor hen-mother did everything she could think of to keep him from doing so foolish a thing, but the little half-chick laughed at her naughtily. "i'm for seeing the king," he said; "this life is too quiet for me." and away he went, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, over the fields. when he had gone some distance the little half-chick came to a little brook that was caught in the weeds and in much trouble. "little half-chick," whispered the water, "i am so choked with these weeds that i cannot move; i am almost lost, for want of room; please push the sticks and weeds away with your bill and help me." "the idea!" said the little half-chick. "i cannot be bothered with you; i am off to madrid, to see the king!" and in spite of the brook's begging, he went away, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick. a bit farther on, the half-chick came to a fire, which was smothered in damp sticks and in great distress. "oh, little half-chick," said the fire, "you are just in time to save me. i am almost dead for want of air. fan me a little with your wing, i beg." "the idea!" said the little half-chick. "i cannot be bothered with you; i am off to madrid, to see the king!" and he went laughing off, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick. when he had hoppity-kicked a good way, and was near madrid, he came to a clump of bushes, where the wind was caught fast. the wind was whimpering, and begging to be set free. "little half-chick," said the wind, "you are just in time to help me; if you will brush aside these twigs and leaves, i can get my breath; help me, quickly!" "ho! the idea!" said the little half-chick "i have no time to bother with you. i am going to madrid, to see the king." and he went off, hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, leaving the wind to smother. after a while he came to madrid and to the palace of the king. hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, the little half-chick skipped past the sentry at the gate, and hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick, he crossed the court. but as he was passing the windows of the kitchen the cook looked out and saw him. "the very thing for the king's dinner!" she said. "i was needing a chicken!" and she seized the little half-chick by his one wing and threw him into a kettle of water on the fire. the water came over the little half-chick's feathers, over his head, into his eyes. it was terribly uncomfortable. the little half-chick cried out,-- "water, don't drown me! stay down, don't come so high!" "but," the water said, "little half-chick, little half-chick, when i was in trouble you would not help me," and came higher than ever. now the water grew warm, hot, hotter, frightfully hot; the little half-chick cried out, "do not burn so hot, fire! you are burning me to death! stop!" but the fire said, "little half-chick, little half-chick, when i was in trouble you would not help me," and burned hotter than ever. just as the little half-chick thought he must suffocate, the cook took the cover off, to look at the dinner. "dear me," she said, "this chicken is no good; it is burned to a cinder." and she picked the little half-chick up by one leg and threw him out of the window. in the air he was caught by a breeze and taken up higher than the trees. round and round he was twirled till he was so dizzy he thought he must perish. "don't blow me so, wind," he cried, "let me down!" "little half-chick, little half-chick," said the wind, "when i was in trouble you would not help me!" and the wind blew him straight up to the top of the church steeple, and stuck him there, fast! there he stands to this day, with his one eye, his one wing, and his one leg. he cannot hoppity-kick any more, but he turns slowly round when the wind blows, and keeps his head toward it, to hear what it says. the blackberry-bush[ ] a little boy sat at his mother's knees, by the long western window, looking out into the garden. it was autumn, and the wind was sad; and the golden elm leaves lay scattered about among the grass, and on the gravel path. the mother was knitting a little stocking; her fingers moved the bright needles; but her eyes were fixed on the clear evening sky. as the darkness gathered, the wee boy laid his head on her lap and kept so still that, at last, she leaned forward to look into his dear round face. he was not asleep, but was watching very earnestly a blackberry-bush, that waved its one tall, dark-red spray in the wind outside the fence. "what are you thinking about, my darling?" she said, smoothing his soft, honey-coloured hair. "the blackberry-bush, mamma; what does it say? it keeps nodding, nodding to me behind the fence; what does it say, mamma?" "it says," she answered, "'i see a happy little boy in the warm, fire-lighted room. the wind blows cold, and here it is dark and lonely; but that little boy is warm and happy and safe at his mother's knees. i nod to him, and he looks at me. i wonder if he knows how happy he is! "'see, all my leaves are dark crimson. every day they dry and wither more and more; by and by they will be so weak they can scarcely cling to my branches, and the north wind will tear them all away, and nobody will remember them any more. then the snow will sink down and wrap me close. then the snow will melt again and icy rain will clothe me, and the bitter wind will rattle my bare twigs up and down. "'i nod my head to all who pass, and dreary nights and dreary days go by; but in the happy house, so warm and bright, the little boy plays all day with books and toys. his mother and his father cherish him; he nestles on their knees in the red firelight at night, while they read to him lovely stories, or sing sweet old songs to him,--the happy little boy! and outside i peep over the snow and see a stream of ruddy light from a crack in the window-shutter, and i nod out here alone in the dark, thinking how beautiful it is. "'and here i wait patiently. i take the snow and the rain and the cold, and i am not sorry, but glad; for in my roots i feel warmth and life, and i know that a store of greenness and beauty is shut up safe in my small brown buds. day and night go again and again; little by little the snow melts all away; the ground grows soft; the sky is blue; the little birds fly over, crying, "it is spring! it is spring!" ah! then through all my twigs i feel the slow sap stirring. "'warmer grow the sunbeams, and softer the air. the small blades of grass creep thick about my feet; the sweet rain helps to swell my shining buds. more and more i push forth my leaves, till out i burst in a gay green dress, and nod in joy and pride. the little boy comes running to look at me, and cries, "oh, mamma! the little blackberry-bush is alive and beautiful and green. oh, come and see!" and i hear; and i bow my head in the summer wind; and every day they watch me grow more beautiful, till at last i shake out blossoms, fair and fragrant. "'a few days more, and i drop the white petals down among the grass, and, lo! there are the green tiny berries! carefully i hold them up to the sun; carefully i gather the dew in the summer nights; slowly they ripen; they grow larger and redder and darker, and at last they are black, shining, delicious. i hold them as high as i can for the little boy, who comes dancing out. he shouts with joy, and gathers them in his dear hand; and he runs to share them with his mother, saying, "here is what the patient blackberry-bush bore for us: see how nice, mamma!" "'ah! then indeed i am glad, and would say, if i could, "yes, take them, dear little boy; i kept them for you, held them long up to the sun and rain to make them sweet and ripe for you"; and i nod and nod in full content, for my work is done. from the window he watches me and thinks, "there is the little blackberry-bush that was so kind to me. i see it and i love it. i know it is safe out there nodding all alone, and next summer it will hold ripe berries up for me to gather again."'" * * * * * then the wee boy smiled, and said he liked the little story. his mother took him up in her arms, and they went out to supper and left the blackberry-bush nodding up and down in the wind; and there it is nodding yet. footnotes: [ ] from celia thaxter's _stories and poems for children_. the fairies[ ] up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together; green jacket, red cap, and white owl's feather! down along the rocky shore some make their home-- they live on crispy pancakes of yellow tide-foam; some in the reeds of the black mountain-lake, with frogs for their watch-dogs, all night awake. high on the hilltop the old king sits; he is now so old and gray, he's nigh lost his wits. with a bridge of white mist columbkill he crosses, on his stately journeys from slieveleague to rosses; or going up with music on cold starry nights, to sup with the queen of the gay northern lights. they stole little bridget for seven years long; when she came down again her friends were all gone. they took her lightly back, between the night and morrow; they thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow. they have kept her ever since deep within the lake, on a bed of flag-leaves, watching till she wake. by the craggy hillside, through the mosses bare, they have planted thorn-trees, for pleasure here and there. is any man so daring as dig them up in spite, he shall find their sharpest thorns in his bed at night. up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men. wee folk, good folk, trooping all together; green jacket, red cap, and white owl's feather! footnotes: [ ] by william allingham. the adventures of the little field mouse once upon a time, there was a little brown field mouse; and one day he was out in the fields to see what he could find. he was running along in the grass, poking his nose into everything and looking with his two eyes all about, when he saw a smooth, shiny acorn, lying in the grass. it was such a fine shiny little acorn that he thought he would take it home with him; so he put out his paw to touch it, but the little acorn rolled away from him. he ran after it, but it kept rolling on, just ahead of him, till it came to a place where a big oak-tree had its roots spread all over the ground. then it rolled under a big round root. little mr field mouse ran to the root and poked his nose under after the acorn, and there he saw a small round hole in the ground. he slipped through and saw some stairs going down into the earth. the acorn was rolling down, with a soft tapping sound, ahead of him, so down he went too. down, down, down, rolled the acorn, and down, down, down, went the field mouse, until suddenly he saw a tiny door at the foot of the stairs. the shiny acorn rolled to the door and struck against it with a tap. quickly the little door opened and the acorn rolled inside. the field mouse hurried as fast as he could down the last stairs, and pushed through just as the door was closing. it shut behind him, and he was in a little room. and there, before him, stood a queer little red man! he had a little red cap, and a little red jacket, and odd little red shoes with points at the toes. "you are my prisoner," he said to the field mouse. "what for?" said the field mouse. "because you tried to steal my acorn," said the little red man. "it is my acorn," said the field mouse; "i found it." "no, it isn't," said the little red man, "i have it; you will never see it again." the little field mouse looked all about the room as fast as he could, but he could not see any acorn. then he thought he would go back up the tiny stairs to his own home. but the little door was locked, and the little red man had the key. and he said to the poor mouse,-- "you shall be my servant; you shall make my bed and sweep my room and cook my broth." so the little brown mouse was the little red man's servant, and every day he made the little red man's bed and swept the little red man's room and cooked the little red man's broth. and every day the little red man went away through the tiny door, and did not come back till afternoon. but he always locked the door after him, and carried away the key. at last, one day he was in such a hurry that he turned the key before the door was quite latched, which, of course, didn't lock it at all. he went away without noticing,--he was in such a hurry. the little field mouse knew that his chance had come to run away home. but he didn't want to go without the pretty, shiny acorn. where it was he didn't know, so he looked everywhere. he opened every little drawer and looked in, but it wasn't in any of the drawers; he peeped on every shelf, but it wasn't on a shelf; he hunted in every closet, but it wasn't in there. finally, he climbed up on a chair and opened a wee, wee door in the chimney-piece,--and there it was! he took it quickly in his forepaws, and then he took it in his mouth, and then he ran away. he pushed open the little door; he climbed up, up, up the little stairs; he came out through the hole under the root; he ran and ran through the fields; and at last he came to his own house. when he was in his own house he set the shiny acorn on the table. i expect he set it down hard, for all at once, with a little snap, it opened!--exactly like a little box. and what do you think! there was a tiny necklace inside! it was a most beautiful tiny necklace, all made of jewels, and it was just big enough for a lady mouse. so the little field mouse gave the tiny necklace to his little mouse-sister. she thought it was perfectly lovely. and when she wasn't wearing it she kept it in the shiny acorn box. and the little red man never knew what had become of it, because he didn't know where the little field mouse lived. another little red hen[ ] once upon a time there was a little red hen, who lived on a farm all by herself. an old fox, crafty and sly, had a den in the rocks, on a hill near her house. many and many a night this old fox used to lie awake and think to himself how good that little red hen would taste if he could once get her in his big kettle and boil her for dinner. but he couldn't catch the little red hen, because she was too wise for him. every time she went out to market she locked the door of the house behind her, and as soon as she came in again she locked the door behind her and put the key in her apron pocket, where she kept her scissors and some sugar candy. at last the old fox thought out a way to catch the little red hen. early in the morning he said to his old mother, "have the kettle boiling when i come home to-night, for i'll be bringing the little red hen for supper." then he took a big bag and slung it over his shoulder, and walked till he came to the little red hen's house. the little red hen was just coming out of her door to pick up a few sticks for firewood. so the old fox hid behind the wood-pile, and as soon as she bent down to get a stick, into the house he slipped, and scurried behind the door. in a minute the little red hen came quickly in, and shut the door and locked it. "i'm glad i'm safely in," she said. just as she said it, she turned round, and there stood the ugly old fox, with his big bag over his shoulder. whiff! how scared the little red hen was! she dropped her apronful of sticks, and flew up to the big beam across the ceiling. there she perched, and she said to the old fox, down below, "you may as well go home, for you can't get me." "can't i, though!" said the fox. and what do you think he did? he stood on the floor underneath the little red hen and twirled round in a circle after his own tail. and as he spun, and spun, and spun, faster, and faster, and faster, the poor little red hen got so dizzy watching him that she couldn't hold on to the perch. she dropped off, and the old fox picked her up and put her in his bag, slung the bag over his shoulder, and started for home, where the kettle was boiling. he had a very long way to go, up hill, and the little red hen was still so dizzy that she didn't know where she was. but when the dizziness began to go off, she whisked her little scissors out of her apron pocket, and snip! she cut a little hole in the bag; then she poked her head out and saw where she was, and as soon as they came to a good spot she cut the hole bigger and jumped out herself. there was a great big stone lying there, and the little red hen picked it up and put it in the bag as quick as a wink. then she ran as fast as she could till she came to her own little farmhouse, and she went in and locked the door with the big key. the old fox went on carrying the stone and never knew the difference. my, but it bumped him well! he was pretty tired when he got home. but he was so pleased to think of the supper he was going to have that he did not mind that at all. as soon as his mother opened the door he said, "is the kettle boiling?" "yes," said his mother; "have you got the little red hen?" "i have," said the old fox. "when i open the bag you hold the cover off the kettle and i'll shake the bag so that the hen will fall in, and then you pop the cover on, before she can jump out." "all right," said his mean old mother; and she stood close by the boiling kettle, ready to put the cover on. the fox lifted the big, heavy bag up till it was over the open kettle, and gave it a shake. splash! thump! splash! in went the stone and out came the boiling water, all over the old fox and the old fox's mother! and they were scalded to death. but the little red hen lived happily ever after, in her own little farmhouse. footnotes: [ ] adapted from the verse version, by horace e. scudder, which follows this as an alternative. the story of the little rid hin there was once't upon a time a little small rid hin, off in the good ould country where yees ha' nivir bin. nice and quiet shure she was, and nivir did any harrum; she lived alane all be herself, and worked upon her farrum. there lived out o'er the hill, in a great din o' rocks, a crafty, shly, and wicked ould folly iv a fox. this rashkill iv a fox, he tuk it in his head he'd have the little rid hin: so, whin he wint to bed, he laid awake and thaught what a foine thing 'twad be to fetch her home and bile her up for his ould marm and he. and so he thaught and thaught, until he grew so thin that there was nothin' left of him but jist his bones and shkin. but the small rid hin was wise, she always locked her door, and in her pocket pit the key, to keep the fox out shure. but at last there came a schame intil his wicked head, and he tuk a great big bag and to his mither said,-- "now have the pot all bilin' agin the time i come; we'll ate the small rid hin to-night, for shure i'll bring her home." and so away he wint wid the bag upon his back, an' up the hill and through the woods saftly he made his track. an' thin he came alang, craping as shtill's a mouse, to where the little small rid hin lived in her shnug ould house. an' out she comes hersel', jist as he got in sight, to pick up shticks to make her fire: "aha!" says fox, "all right. "begorra, now, i'll have yees widout much throuble more"; an' in he shlips quite unbeknownst, an' hides be'ind the door. an' thin, a minute afther, in comes the small rid hin, an' shuts the door, and locks it, too, an' thinks, "i'm safely in." an' thin she tarns around an' looks be'ind the door; there shtands the fox wid his big tail shpread out upon the floor. dear me! she was so schared wid such a wondrous sight, she dropped her apronful of shticks, an' flew up in a fright, an' lighted on the bame across on top the room; "aha!" says she, "ye don't have me; ye may as well go home." "aha!" says fox, "we'll see; i'll bring yees down from that." so out he marched upon the floor right under where she sat. an' thin he whiruled around, an' round an' round an' round, fashter an' fashter an' fashter, afther his tail on the ground. until the small rid hin she got so dizzy, shure, wid lookin' at the fox's tail, she jist dropped on the floor. an' fox he whipped her up, an' pit her in his bag, an' off he started all alone, him and his little dag. all day he tracked the wood up hill an' down again; an' wid him, shmotherin' in the bag, the little small rid hin. sorra a know she knowed awhere she was that day; says she, "i'm biled an' ate up, shure an' what'll be to pay?" thin she betho't hersel', an' tuk her schissors out, an' shnipped a big hole in the bag, so she could look about. an' 'fore ould fox could think she lept right out--she did, an' thin picked up a great big shtone, an' popped it in instid. an' thin she rins off home, her outside door she locks; thinks she, "you see you don't have me, you crafty, shly ould fox." an' fox he tugged away wid the great big hivy shtone, thimpin' his shoulders very bad as he wint in alone. an' whin he came in sight o' his great din o' rocks, jist watchin' for him at the door he shpied ould mither fox. "have ye the pot a-bilin'?" says he to ould fox thin; "shure an' it is, me child," says she; "have ye the small rid hin?" "yes, jist here in me bag, as shure as i shtand here; open the lid till i pit her in: open it--nivir fear." so the rashkill cut the shtring, an' hild the big bag over; "now when i shake it in," says he, "do ye pit on the cover." "yis, that i will"; an' thin the shtone wint in wid a dash, an' the pot o' bilin' wather came over them ker-splash. an' schalted 'em both to death, so they couldn't brathe no more; an' the little small rid hin lived safe, jist where she lived before. the story of epaminondas and his auntie[ ] epaminondas used to go to see his auntie 'most every day, and she nearly always gave him something to take home to his mammy. one day she gave him a big piece of cake; nice, yellow, rich gold-cake. epaminondas took it in his fist and held it all crunched up tight, like this, and came along home. by the time he got home there wasn't anything left but a fistful of crumbs. his mammy said,-- "what you got there, epaminondas?" "cake, mammy," said epaminondas. "cake!" said his mammy. "epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! that's no way to carry cake. the way to carry cake is to wrap it all up nice in some leaves and put it in your hat, and put your hat on your head, and come along home. you hear me, epaminondas?" "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. next day epaminondas went to see his auntie, and she gave him a pound of butter for his mammy; fine, fresh, sweet butter. epaminondas wrapped it up in leaves and put it in his hat, and put his hat on his head, and came along home. it was a very hot day. pretty soon the butter began to melt. it melted, and melted, and as it melted it ran down epaminondas' forehead; then it ran over his face, and in his ears, and down his neck. when he got home, all the butter epaminondas had was _on him_. his mammy looked at him, and then she said,-- "law's sake! epaminondas, what you got in your hat?" "butter, mammy," said epaminondas; "auntie gave it to me." "butter!" said his mammy. "epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! don't you know that's no way to carry butter? the way to carry butter is to wrap it up in some leaves and take it down to the brook, and cool it in the water, and cool it in the water, and cool it in the water, and then take it on your hands, careful, and bring it along home." "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. by and by, another day, epaminondas went to see his auntie again, and; this time she gave him a little new puppy-dog to take home. epaminondas put it in some leaves and took it down to the brook; and there he cooled it in the water, and cooled it in the water, and cooled it in the water; then he took it in his hands and came along home. when he got home, the puppy-dog was dead. his mammy looked at it, and she said,-- "law's sake! epaminondas, what you got there?" "a puppy-dog, mammy," said epaminondas. "a _puppy-dog_!" said his mammy. "my gracious sakes alive, epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! that ain't the way to carry a puppy-dog! the way to carry a puppy-dog is to take a long piece of string and tie one end of it round the puppy-dog's neck and put the puppy-dog on the ground, and take hold of the other end of the string and come along home, like this." "all right, mammy," said epaminondas. next day epaminondas went to see his auntie again, and when he came to go home she gave him a loaf of bread to carry to his mammy; a brown, fresh, crusty loaf of bread. so epaminondas tied a string around the end of the loaf and took hold of the end of the string and came along home, like this. (imitate dragging something along the ground.) when he got home his mammy looked at the thing on the end of the string, and she said,-- "my laws a-massy! epaminondas, what you got on the end of that string?" "bread, mammy," said epaminondas; "auntie gave it to me." "bread!!!" said his mammy. "o epaminondas, epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with; you never did have the sense you was born with; you never will have the sense you was born with! now i ain't gwine tell you any more ways to bring truck home. and don't you go see your auntie, neither. i'll go see her my own self. but i'll just tell you one thing, epaminondas! you see these here six mince pies i done make? you see how i done set 'em on the doorstep to cool? well, now, you hear me, epaminondas, _you be careful how you step on those pies_!" "yes, mammy," said epaminondas. then epaminondas' mammy put on her bonnet and her shawl and took a basket in her hand and went away to see auntie. the six mince pies sat cooling in a row on the doorstep. and then,--and then,--epaminondas _was_ careful how he stepped on those pies! he stepped (imitate)--right--in--the--middle--of--every--one. * * * * * and, do you know, children, nobody knows what happened next! the person who told me the story didn't know; nobody knows. but you can guess. footnotes: [ ] a negro nonsense tale from the southern states of america. the boy who cried "wolf!" there was once a shepherd-boy who kept his flock at a little distance from the village. once he thought he would play a trick on the villagers and have some fun at their expense. so he ran toward the village crying out, with all his might,-- "wolf! wolf! come and help! the wolves are at my lambs!" the kind villagers left their work and ran to the field to help him. but when they got there the boy laughed at them for their pains; there was no wolf there. still another day the boy tried the same trick, and the villagers came running to help and got laughed at again. then one day a wolf did break into the fold and began killing the lambs. in great fright, the boy ran for help. "wolf! wolf!" he screamed. "there is a wolf in the flock! help!" the villagers heard him, but they thought it was another mean trick; no one paid the least attention, or went near him. and the shepherd-boy lost all his sheep. that is the kind of thing that happens to people who lie: even when they tell the truth no one believes them. the frog king did you ever hear the old story about the foolish frogs? the frogs in a certain swamp decided that they needed a king; they had always got along perfectly well without one, but they suddenly made up their minds that a king they must have. they sent a messenger to jove and begged him to send a king to rule over them. jove saw how stupid they were, and sent a king who could not harm them: he tossed a big log into the middle of the pond. at the splash the frogs were terribly frightened, and dived into their holes to hide from king log. but after a while, when they saw that the king never moved, they got over their fright and went and sat on him. and as soon as they found he really could not hurt them they began to despise him; and finally they sent another messenger to jove to ask for a new king. jove sent an eel. the frogs were much pleased and a good deal frightened when king eel came wriggling and swimming among them. but as the days went on, and the eel was perfectly harmless, they stopped being afraid; and as soon as they stopped fearing king eel they stopped respecting him. soon they sent a third messenger to jove, and begged that they might have a better king,--a king who was worth while. it was too much; jove was angry at their stupidity at last. "i will give you a king such as you deserve!" he said; and he sent them a stork. as soon as the frogs came to the surface to greet the new king, king stork caught them in his long bill and gobbled them up. one after another they came bobbing up, and one after another the stork ate them. he was indeed a king worthy of them! the sun and the wind the sun and the wind once had a quarrel as to which was the stronger. each believed himself to be the more powerful. while they were arguing they saw a traveller walking along the country highway, wearing a great cloak. "here is a chance to test our strength," said the wind; "let us see which of us is strong enough to make that traveller take off his cloak; the one who can do that shall be acknowledged the more powerful." "agreed," said the sun. instantly the wind began to blow; he puffed and tugged at the man's cloak, and raised a storm of hail and rain, to beat at it. but the colder it grew and the more it stormed, the tighter the traveller held his cloak around him. the wind could not get it off. now it was the sun's turn. he shone with all his beams on the man's shoulders. as it grew hotter and hotter, the man unfastened his cloak; then he threw it back; at last he took it off! the sun had won. the little jackal and the alligator the little jackal was very fond of shell-fish. he used to go down by the river and hunt along the edges for crabs and such things. and once, when he was hunting for crabs, he was so hungry that he put his paw into the water after a crab without looking first,--which you never should do! the minute he put in his paw, _snap_!--the big alligator who lives in the mud down there had it in his jaws. "oh, dear!" thought the little jackal; "the big alligator has my paw in his mouth! in another minute he will pull me down and gobble me up! what shall i do? what shall i do?" then he thought, suddenly, "i'll deceive him!" so he put on a very cheerful voice, as if nothing at all were the matter, and he said,-- "ho! ho! clever mr alligator! smart mr alligator, to take that old bulrush root for my paw! i hope you'll find it very tender!" the old alligator was hidden away beneath the mud and bulrush leaves, and he couldn't see anything. he thought, "pshaw! i've made a mistake." so he opened his mouth and let the little jackal go. the little jackal ran away as fast as he could, and as he ran he called out,-- "thank you, mr alligator! kind mr alligator! _so_ kind of you to let me go!" the old alligator lashed with his tail and snapped with his jaws, but it was too late; the little jackal was out of reach. after this the little jackal kept away from the river, out of danger. but after about a week he got such an appetite for crabs that nothing else would do at all; he felt that he must have a crab. so he went down by the river and looked all around, very carefully. he didn't see the old alligator, but he thought to himself, "i think i'll not take any chances." so he stood still and began to talk out loud to himself. he said,-- "when i don't see any little crabs on the land i generally see them sticking out of the water, and then i put my paw in and catch them. i wonder if there are any fat little crabs in the water to-day?" the old alligator was hidden down in the mud at the bottom of the river, and when he heard what the little jackal said, he thought, "aha! i'll pretend to be a little crab, and when he puts his paw in, i'll make my dinner of him." so he stuck the black end of his snout above the water and waited. the little jackal took one look, and then he said,-- "thank you, mr alligator! kind mr alligator! you are _exceedingly_ kind to show me where you are! i will have dinner elsewhere." and he ran away like the wind. the old alligator foamed at the mouth, he was so angry, but the little jackal was gone. for two whole weeks the little jackal kept away from the river. then, one day he got a feeling inside him that nothing but crabs could satisfy: he felt that he must have at least one crab. very cautiously, he went down to the river and looked all around. he saw no sign of the old alligator. still, he did not mean to take any chances. so he stood quite still and began to talk to himself,--it was a little way he had. he said,-- "when i don't see any little crabs on the shore, or sticking up out of the water, i usually see them blowing bubbles from under the water; the little bubbles go _puff, puff, puff_, and then they go _pop, pop, pop_, and they show me where the little juicy crabs are, so i can put my paw in and catch them. i wonder if i shall see any little bubbles to-day?" the old alligator, lying low in the mud and weeds, heard this, and he thought, "pooh! _that's_ easy enough; i'll just blow some little crab-bubbles, and then he will put his paw in where i can get it." so he blew, and he blew, a mighty blast, and the bubbles rose in a perfect whirlpool, fizzing and swirling. the little jackal didn't have to be told who was underneath those bubbles: he took one quick look, and off he ran. but as he went, he sang,-- "thank you, mr alligator! kind mr alligator! you are the kindest alligator in the world, to show me where you are, so nicely! i'll breakfast at another part of the river." the old alligator was so furious that he crawled up on the bank and went after the little jackal; but, dear, dear, he couldn't catch the little jackal; he ran far too fast. after this, the little jackal did not like to risk going near the water, so he ate no more crabs. but he found a garden of wild figs, which were so good that he went there every day, and ate them instead of shell-fish. now the old alligator found this out, and he made up his mind to have the little jackal for supper, or to die trying. so he crept, and crawled, and dragged himself over the ground to the garden of wild figs. there he made a huge pile of figs under the biggest of the wild fig trees, and hid himself in the pile. after a while the little jackal came dancing into the garden, very happy and free from care,--_but_ looking all around. he saw the huge pile of figs under the big fig tree. "h-m," he thought, "that looks singularly like my friend, the alligator. i'll investigate a bit." he stood quite still and began to talk to himself,--it was a little way he had. he said,-- "the little figs i like best are the fat, ripe, juicy ones that drop off when the breeze blows; and then the wind blows them about on the ground, this way and that; the great heap of figs over there is so still that i think they must be all bad figs." the old alligator, underneath his fig pile, thought,-- "bother the suspicious little jackal! i shall have to make these figs roll about, so that he will think the wind moves them." and straight-way he humped himself up and moved, and sent the little figs flying,--and his back showed through. the little jackal did not wait for a second look. he ran out of the garden like the wind. but as he ran he called back,-- "thank you, again, mr alligator; very sweet of you to show me where you are; i can't stay to thank you as i should like: good-bye!" at this the old alligator was beside himself with rage. he vowed that he would have the little jackal for supper this time, come what might. so he crept and crawled over the ground till he came to the little jackal's house. then he crept and crawled inside, and hid himself there in the house, to wait till the little jackal should come home. by and by the little jackal came dancing home, happy and free from care,--_but_ looking all around. presently, as he came along, he saw that the ground was all raked up as if something very heavy had been dragged over it. the little jackal stopped and looked. "what's this? what's this?" he said. then he saw that the door of his house was crushed at the sides and broken, as if something very big had gone through it. "what's this? what's this?" the little jackal said. "i think i'll investigate a little!" so he stood quite still and began to talk to himself (you remember, it was a little way he had), but loudly. he said,-- "how strange that my little house doesn't speak to me! why don't you speak to me, little house? you always speak to me, if everything is all right, when i come home. i wonder if anything is wrong with my little house?" the old alligator thought to himself that he must certainly pretend to be the little house, or the little jackal would never come in. so he put on as pleasant a voice as he could (which is not saying much) and said,-- "hullo, little jackal!" oh! when the little jackal heard that, he was frightened enough, for once. "it's the old alligator," he said, "and if i don't make an end of him this time he will certainly make an end of me. what shall i do?" he thought very fast. then he spoke out pleasantly. "thank you, little house," he said, "it's good to hear your pretty voice, dear little house, and i will be in with you in a minute; only first i must gather some firewood for dinner." then he went and gathered firewood, and more firewood, and more firewood; and he piled it all up solid against the door and round the house; and then he set fire to it! and it smoked and burned till it smoked that old alligator to smoked herring! the larks in the cornfield there was once a family of little larks who lived with their mother in a nest in a cornfield. when the corn was ripe the mother lark watched very carefully to see if there were any sign of the reapers' coming, for she knew that when they came their sharp knives would cut down the nest and hurt the baby larks. so every day, when she went out for food, she told the little larks to look and listen very closely to everything that went on, and to tell her all they saw and heard when she came home. one day when she came home the little larks were much frightened. "oh, mother, dear mother," they said, "you must move us away to-night! the farmer was in the field to-day, and he said, 'the corn is ready to cut; we must call in the neighbours to help.' and then he told his son to go out to-night and ask all the neighbours to come and reap the corn to-morrow." the mother lark laughed. "don't be frightened," she said; "if he waits for his neighbours to reap the corn we shall have plenty of time to move; tell me what he says to-morrow." the next night the little larks were quite trembling with fear; the moment their mother got home they cried out, "mother, you must surely move us to-night! the farmer came to-day and said, 'the corn is getting too ripe; we cannot wait for our neighbours; we must ask our relatives to help us.' and then he called his son and told him to ask all the uncles and cousins to come to-morrow and cut the corn. shall we not move to-night?" "don't worry," said the mother lark; "the uncles and cousins have plenty of reaping to do for themselves; we'll not move yet." the third night, when the mother lark came home, the baby larks said, "mother, dear, the farmer came to the field to-day, and when he looked at the corn he was quite angry; he said, 'this will never do! the corn is getting too ripe; it's no use to wait for our relatives, we shall have to cut this corn ourselves.' and then he called his son and said, 'go out to-night and hire reapers, and to-morrow we will begin to cut.'" "well," said the mother, "that is another story; when a man begins to do his own business, instead of asking somebody else to do it, things get done. i will move you out to-night." a true story about a girl once there were four little girls who lived in a big, bare house, in the country. they were very poor, but they had the happiest times you ever heard of, because they were very rich in everything except money. they had a wonderful, wise father, who knew stories to tell, and who taught them their lessons in such a beautiful way that it was better than play; they had a lovely, merry, kind mother, who was never too tired to help them work or watch them play; and they had all the great green country to play in. there were dark, shadowy woods, and fields of flowers, and a river. and there was a big barn. one of the little girls was named louisa. she was very pretty, and ever so strong; she could run for miles through the woods and not get tired. she had a splendid brain in her little head; it liked study, and it thought interesting thoughts all day long. louisa liked to sit in a corner by herself, sometimes, and write thoughts in her diary; all the little girls kept diaries. she liked to make up stories out of her own head, and sometimes she made verses. when the four little sisters had finished their lessons, and had helped their mother wash up and sew, they used to go to the big barn to play; and the best play of all was theatricals. louisa liked theatricals better than anything. they made the barn into a theatre, and the grown-up people came to see the plays they acted. they used to climb up on the hay-loft for a stage, and the grown people sat in chairs on the floor. it was great fun. one of the plays they acted was _jack and the beanstalk_. they had a ladder from the floor to the loft, and on the ladder they tied a vine all the way up to the loft, to look like the wonderful beanstalk. one of the little girls was dressed up to look like jack, and she acted that part. when it came to the place in the story where the giant tried to follow jack, the little girl cut down the beanstalk, and down came the giant tumbling from the loft. the giant was made out of pillows, with a great, fierce head of paper, and funny clothes. another story that they acted was _cinderella_. they made a wonderful big pumpkin out of the wheelbarrow, trimmed with yellow paper, and cinderella rolled away in it, when the fairy godmother waved her wand. one other beautiful story they used to play. it was the story of _pilgrim's progress_; if you have never heard it, you must be sure to read it as soon as you can read well enough to understand the old-fashioned words. the little girls used to put shells in their hats for a sign they were on a pilgrimage, as the old pilgrims used to do; then they made journeys over the hill behind the house, and through the woods, and down the lanes; and when the pilgrimage was over they had apples and nuts to eat, in the happy land of home. louisa loved all these plays, and she made some of her own and wrote them down so that the children could act them. but better than fun or writing louisa loved her mother, and by and by, as the little girl began to grow into a big girl, she felt very sad to see her dear mother work so hard. she helped all she could with the housework, but nothing could really help the tired mother except money; she needed money for food and clothes, and someone grown up, to help in the house. but there never was enough money for these things, and louisa's mother grew more and more weary, and sometimes ill. i cannot tell you how much louisa suffered over this. at last, as louisa thought about it, she came to care more about helping her mother and her father and her sisters than about anything else in all the world. and she began to work very hard to earn money. she sewed for people, and when she was a little older she taught some little girls their lessons, and then she wrote stories for the papers. every bit of money she earned, except what she had to use, she gave to her dear family. it helped very much, but it was so little that louisa never felt as if she were doing anything. every year she grew more unselfish, and every year she worked harder. she liked writing stories best of all her work, but she did not get much money for them, and some people told her she was wasting her time. at last, one day, a publisher asked louisa, who was now a woman, to write a book for girls. louisa was not very well, and she was very tired, but she always said, "i'll try," when she had a chance to work; so she said, "i'll try," to the publisher. when she thought about the book she remembered the good times she used to have with her sisters in the big, bare house in the country. and so she wrote a story and put all that in it; she put her dear mother and her wise father in it, and all the little sisters, and besides the jolly times and the plays, she put the sad, hard times in,--the work and worry and going without things. when the book was written, she called it _little women_, and sent it to the publisher. and, children, the little book made louisa famous. it was so sweet and funny and sad and real,--like our own lives,--that everybody wanted to read it. everybody bought it, and much money came from it. after so many years, little louisa's wish came true: she bought a nice house for her family; she sent one of her sisters to europe, to study; she gave her father books; but best of all, she was able to see to it that the beloved mother, so tired and so ill, could have rest and happiness. never again did the dear mother have to do any hard work, and she had pretty things about her all the rest of her life. louisa alcott, for that was louisa's name, wrote many beautiful books after this, and she became one of the most famous women of america. but i think the most beautiful thing about her is what i have been telling you: that she loved her mother so well that she gave her whole life to make her happy. my kingdom the little louisa i told you about, who wrote verses and stories in her diary, used to like to play that she was a princess, and that her kingdom was her own mind. when she had unkind or dissatisfied thoughts, she tried to get rid of them by playing they were enemies of the kingdom; and she drove them out with soldiers; the soldiers were patience, duty, and love. it used to help louisa to be good to play this, and i think it may have helped make her the splendid woman she was afterward. maybe you would like to hear a poem she wrote about it, when she was only fourteen years old.[ ] it will help you, too, to think the same thoughts. a little kingdom i possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell, and very hard i find the task of governing it well; for passion tempts and troubles me, a wayward will misleads, and selfishness its shadow casts on all my words and deeds. how can i learn to rule myself, to be the child i should, honest and brave, nor ever tire of trying to be good? how can i keep a sunny soul to shine along life's way? how can i tune my little heart to sweetly sing all day? dear father, help me with the love that casteth out my fear, teach me to lean on thee, and feel that thou art very near, that no temptation is unseen, no childish grief too small, since thou, with patience infinite, doth soothe and comfort all. i do not ask for any crown but that which all may win, nor seek to conquer any world, except the one within. be thou my guide until i find, led by a tender hand, thy happy kingdom in _myself_, and dare to take command. footnotes: [ ] from louisa m. alcott's _life, letters and journals_. piccola[ ] poor, sweet piccola! did you hear what happened to piccola, children dear? 'tis seldom fortune such favour grants as fell to this little maid of france. 'twas christmas-time, and her parents poor could hardly drive the wolf from the door, striving with poverty's patient pain only to live till summer again. no gifts for piccola! sad were they when dawned the morning of christmas-day; their little darling no joy might stir, st nicholas nothing would bring to her! but piccola never doubted at all that something beautiful must befall every child upon christmas-day, and so she slept till the dawn was gray. and full of faith, when at last she woke, she stole to her shoe as the morning broke; such sounds of gladness filled all the air, twas plain st nicholas had been there! in rushed piccola sweet, half wild: never was seen such a joyful child. "see what the good saint brought!" she cried, and mother and father must peep inside. now such a story who ever heard? there was a little shivering bird! a sparrow, that in at the window flew, had crept into piccola's tiny shoe! "how good poor piccola must have been!" she cried, as happy as any queen, while the starving sparrow she fed and warmed, and danced with rapture, she was so charmed. children, this story i tell to you, of piccola sweet and her bird, is true. in the far-off land of france, they say, still do they live to this very day. footnotes: [ ] from celia thaxter's _stories and poems for children_. the little fir tree when i was a very little girl some one, probably my mother, read to me hans christian andersen's story of the little fir tree. it happened that i did not read it for myself or hear it again during my childhood. one christmas day, when i was grown up, i found myself at a loss for the "one more" story called for by some little children with whom i was spending the holiday. in the mental search for buried treasure which ensued, i came upon one or two word-impressions of the experiences of the little fir tree, and forthwith wove them into what i supposed to be something of a reproduction of the original. the latter part of the story had wholly faded from my memory, so that i "made up" to suit the tastes of my audience. afterward i told the story to a good many children, at one time or another, and it gradually took the shape it has here. it was not until several years later that, in rereading andersen for other purposes, i came upon the real story of the little fir tree, and read it for myself. then indeed i was amused, and somewhat distressed, to find how far i had wandered from the text. i give this explanation that the reader may know i do not presume to offer the little tale which follows as an "adaptation" of andersen's famous story. i offer it plainly as a story which children have liked, and which grew out of my early memories of andersen's _the little fir tree_. once there was a little fir tree, slim and pointed, and shiny, which stood in the great forest in the midst of some big fir trees, broad, and tall, and shadowy green. the little fir tree was very unhappy because he was not big like the others. when the birds came flying into the woods and lit on the branches of the big trees and built their nests there, he used to call up to them,-- "come down, come down, rest in my branches!" but they always said,-- "oh, no, no; you are too little!" when the splendid wind came blowing and singing through the forest, it bent and rocked and swung the tops of the big trees, and murmured to them. then the little fir tree looked up, and called,-- "oh, please, dear wind, come down and play with me!" but he always said,-- "oh, no; you are too little, you are too little!" in the winter the white snow fell softly, softly, and covered the great trees all over with wonderful caps and coats of white. the little fir tree, close down in the cover of the others, would call up,-- "oh, please, dear snow, give me a cap, too! i want to play, too!" but the snow always said,-- "oh no, no, no; you are too little, you are too little!" the worst of all was when men came into the wood, with sledges and teams of horses. they came to cut the big trees down and carry them away. whenever one had been cut down and carried away the others talked about it, and nodded their heads, and the little fir tree listened, and heard them say that when you were carried away so, you might become the mast of a mighty ship, and go far away over the ocean, and see many wonderful things; or you might be part of a fine house in a great city, and see much of life. the little fir tree wanted greatly to see life, but he was always too little; the men passed him by. but by and by, one cold winter's morning, men came with a sledge and horses, and after they had cut here and there they came to the circle of trees round the little fir tree, and looked all about. "there are none little enough," they said. oh! how the little fir tree pricked up his needles! "here is one," said one of the men, "it is just little enough." and he touched the little fir tree. the little fir tree was happy as a bird, because he knew they were about to cut him down. and when he was being carried away on the sledge he lay wondering, _so_ contentedly, whether he should be the mast of a ship or part of a fine city house. but when they came to the town he was taken out and set upright in a tub and placed on the edge of a path in a row of other fir trees, all small, but none so little as he. and then the little fir tree began to see life. people kept coming to look at the trees and to take them away. but always when they saw the little fir tree they shook their heads and said,-- "it is too little, too little." until, finally, two children came along, hand in hand, looking carefully at all the small trees. when they saw the little fir tree they cried out,-- "we'll take this one; it is just little enough!" they took him out of his tub and carried him away, between them. and the happy little fir tree spent all his time wondering what it could be that he was just little enough for; he knew it could hardly be a mast or a house, since he was going away with children. he kept wondering, while they took him in through some big doors, and set him up in another tub, on the table, in a bare little room. very soon they went away, and came back again with a big basket, which they carried between them. then some pretty ladies, with white caps on their heads and white aprons over their blue dresses, came bringing little parcels. the children took things out of the basket and began to play with the little fir tree, just as he had often begged the wind and the snow and the birds to do. he felt their soft little touches on his head and his twigs and his branches. when he looked down at himself, as far as he could look, he saw that he was all hung with gold and silver chains! there were strings of white fluffy stuff drooping around him; his twigs held little gold nuts and pink, rosy balls and silver stars; he had pretty little pink and white candles in his arms; but last, and most wonderful of all, the children hung a beautiful white, floating doll-angel over his head! the little fir tree could not breathe, for joy and wonder. what was it that he was, now? why was this glory for him? after a time every one went away and left him. it grew dusk, and the little fir tree began to hear strange sounds through the closed doors. sometimes he heard a child crying. he was beginning to be lonely. it grew more and more shadowy. all at once, the doors opened and the two children came in. two of the pretty ladies were with them. they came up to the little fir tree and quickly lighted all the little pink and white candles. then the two pretty ladies took hold of the table with the little fir tree on it and pushed it, very smoothly and quickly, out of the doors, across a hall, and in at another door. the little fir tree had a sudden sight of a long room with many little white beds in it, of children propped up on pillows in the beds, and of other children in great wheeled chairs, and others hobbling about or sitting in little chairs. he wondered why all the little children looked so white and tired; he did not know that he was in a hospital. but before he could wonder any more his breath was quite taken away by the shout those little white children gave. "oh! oh! m-m! m-m!" they cried. "how pretty! how beautiful! oh, isn't it lovely!" he knew they must mean him, for all their shining eyes were looking straight at him. he stood as straight as a mast, and quivered in every needle, for joy. presently one little weak child-voice called out,-- "it's the nicest christmas tree i ever saw!" and then, at last, the little fir tree knew what he was; he was a christmas tree! and from his shiny head to his feet he was glad, through and through, because he was just little enough to be the nicest kind of tree in the world! how moses was saved thousands of years ago, many years before david lived, there was a very wise and good man of his people who was a friend and adviser of the king of egypt. and for love of this friend, the king of egypt had let numbers of the israelites settle in his land. but after the king and his israelitish friend were dead, there was a new king, who hated the israelites. when he saw how strong they were, and how many there were of them, he began to be afraid that some day they might number more than the egyptians, and might take his land from him. then he and his rulers did a wicked thing. they made the israelites slaves. and they gave them terrible tasks to do, without proper rest, or food, or clothes. for they hoped that the hardship would kill off the israelites. they thought the old men would die and the young men be so ill and weary that they could not bring up families, and so the race would dwindle away. but in spite of the work and suffering, the israelites remained strong, and more and more boys grew up, to make the king afraid. then he did the most wicked thing of all. he ordered his soldiers to kill every boy baby that should be born in an israelitish family; he did not care about the girls, because they could not grow up to fight. very soon after this wicked order, a boy baby was born in a certain israelitish family. when his mother first looked at him her heart was nearly broken, for he was even more beautiful than most babies are,--so strong and fair and sweet. but he was a boy! how could she save him from death? somehow, she contrived to keep him hidden for three whole months. but at the end of that time, she saw that it would not be possible to keep him safe any longer. she had been thinking all this time about what she should do, and now she carried out her plan. first, she took a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it all over with pitch, so that it was water-tight, and then she laid the baby in it; then she carried it to the edge of the river and laid it in the flags by the river's brink. it did not show at all, unless one were quite near it. then she kissed her little son and left him there. but his sister stood far off, not seeming to watch, but really watching carefully to see what would happen to the baby. soon there was the sound of talk and laughter, and a train of beautiful women came down to the water's edge. it was the king's daughter, come down to bathe in the river, with her maidens. the maidens walked along by the river side. as the king's daughter came near to the water, she saw the strange little basket lying in the flags, and she sent her maid to bring it to her. and when she had opened it, she saw the child; the poor baby was crying. when she saw him, so helpless and so beautiful, crying for his mother, the king's daughter pitied him and loved him. she knew the cruel order of her father, and she said at once, "this is one of the hebrews' children." at that moment the baby's sister came to the princess and said, "shall i go and find thee a nurse from the hebrew women, so that she may nurse the child for thee?" not a word did she say about whose child it was, but perhaps the princess guessed; i don't know. at all events, she told the little girl to go. so the maiden went, and brought her mother! then the king's daughter said to the baby's mother, "take this child away and nurse it for me, and i will give thee wages." was not that a strange thing? and can you think how happy the baby's mother was? for now the baby would be known only as the princess's adopted child, and would be safe. and it was so. the mother kept him until he was old enough to be taken to the princess's palace. then he was brought and given to the king's daughter, and he became her son. and she named him moses. but the strangest part of the whole story is, that when moses grew to be a man he became so strong and wise that it was he who at last saved his people from the king and rescued them from the egyptians. the one child saved by the king's own daughter was the very one the king would most have wanted to kill, if he had known. the ten fairies[ ] once upon a time there was a dear little girl, whose name was elsa. elsa's father and mother worked very hard and became rich. but they loved elsa so much that they did not like her to do any work; very foolishly, they let her play all the time. so when elsa grew up, she did not know how to do anything; she could not make bread, she could not sweep a room, she could not sew a seam; she could only laugh and sing. but she was so sweet and merry that everybody loved her. and by and by, she married one of the people who loved her, and had a house of her own to take care of. then, then, my dears, came hard times for elsa! there were so many things to be done in the house, and she did not know how to do any of them! and because she had never worked at all it made her very tired even to try; she was tired before the morning was over, every day. the maid would come and say, "how shall i do this?" or "how shall i do that?" and elsa would have to say, "i don't know." then the maid would pretend that she did not know, either; and when she saw her mistress sitting about doing nothing, she, too, sat about, idle. elsa's husband had a hard time of it; he had only poor food to eat, and it was not ready at the right time, and the house looked all in a muddle. it made him sad, and that made elsa sad, for she wanted to do everything just right. at last, one day, elsa's husband went away quite cross; he said to her, as he went out of the door, "it is no wonder that the house looks so, when you sit all day with your hands in your lap!" little elsa cried bitterly when he was gone, for she did not want to make her husband unhappy and cross, and she wanted the house to look nice. "oh, dear," she sobbed, "i wish i could do things right! i wish i could work! i wish--i wish i had ten good fairies to work for me! then i could keep the house!" as she said the words, a great grey man stood before her; he was wrapped in a strange grey cloak that covered him from head to foot; and he smiled at elsa. "what is the matter, dear?" he said. "why do you cry?" "oh, i am crying because i do not know how to keep the house," said elsa. "i cannot make bread, i cannot sweep, i cannot sew a seam; when i was a little girl i never learned to work, and now i cannot do anything right. i wish i had ten good fairies to help me!" "you shall have them, dear," said the grey man, and he shook his strange grey cloak. pouf! out hopped ten tiny fairies, no bigger than that! "these shall be your servants, elsa," said the grey man; "they are faithful and clever, and they will do everything you want them to, just right. but the neighbours might stare and ask questions if they saw these little chaps running about your house, so i will hide them away for you. give me your little useless hands." wondering, elsa stretched out her pretty, little, white hands. "now stretch out your little useless fingers, dear!" elsa stretched out her pretty pink fingers. the grey man touched each one of the ten little fingers, and as he touched them he said their names: "little thumb; forefinger; thimble-finger; ring-finger; little finger; little thumb; forefinger; thimble-finger; ring-finger; little finger!" and as he named the fingers, one after another, the tiny fairies bowed their tiny heads; there was a fairy for every name. "hop! hide yourselves away!" said the grey man. hop, hop! the fairies sprang to elsa's knee, then to the palms of her hands, and then--whisk! they were all hidden away in her little pink fingers, a fairy in every finger! and the grey man was gone. elsa sat and looked with wonder at her little white hands and the ten useless fingers. but suddenly the little fingers began to stir. the tiny fairies who were hidden away there were not used to remaining still, and they were getting restless. they stirred so that elsa jumped up and ran to the cooking table, and took hold of the bread board. no sooner had she touched the bread board than the little fairies began to work: they measured the flour, mixed the bread, kneaded the loaves, and set them to rise, quicker than you could wink; and when the bread was done, it was as nice as you could wish. then the little fairy-fingers seized the broom, and in a twinkling they were making the house clean. and so it went, all day. elsa flew about from one thing to another, and the ten fairies did the work, just right. when the maid saw her mistress working, she began to work, too; and when she saw how beautifully everything was done, she was ashamed to do anything badly herself. in a little while the housework was going smoothly, and elsa could laugh and sing again. there was no more crossness in that house. elsa's husband grew so proud of her that he went about saying to everybody, "my grandmother was a fine housekeeper, and my mother was a fine housekeeper, but neither of them could hold a candle to my wife. she has only one maid, but, to see the work done, you would think she had as many servants as she has fingers on her hands!" when elsa heard that, she used to laugh, but she never, never told. footnotes: [ ] adapted from the facts given in the german of _die zehn feen_ in _märchen und erzählungen_, zweiter teil, by h.a. guerber. the elves and the shoemaker once upon a time there was an honest shoemaker, who was very poor. he worked as hard as he could, and still he could not earn enough to keep himself and his wife. at last there came a day when he had nothing left but one piece of leather, big enough to make one pair of shoes. he cut out the shoes, ready to stitch, and left them on the bench; then he said his prayers and went to bed, trusting that he could finish the shoes on the next day and sell them. bright and early the next morning, he rose and went to his work bench. there lay a pair of shoes, beautifully made, and the leather was gone! there was no sign of anyone having been there. the shoemaker and his wife did not know what to make of it. but the first customer who came was so pleased with the beautiful shoes that he bought them, and paid so much that the shoemaker was able to buy leather enough for two pairs. happily, he cut them out, and then, as it was late, he left the pieces on the bench, ready to sew in the morning. but when morning came, two pairs of shoes lay on the bench, most beautifully made, and no sign of anyone who had been there. the shoemaker and his wife were quite at a loss. that day a customer came and bought both pairs, and paid so much for them that the shoemaker bought leather for four pairs, with the money. once more he cut out the shoes and left them on the bench. and in the morning all four pairs were made. it went on like this until the shoemaker and his wife were prosperous people. but they could not be satisfied to have so much done for them and not know to whom they should be grateful. so one night, after the shoemaker had left the pieces of leather on the bench, he and his wife hid themselves behind a curtain, and left a light in the room. just as the clock struck twelve the door opened softly, and two tiny elves came dancing into the room, hopped on to the bench, and began to put the pieces together. they were quite naked, but they had wee little scissors and hammers and thread. tap! tap! went the little hammers; stitch, stitch, went the thread, and the little elves were hard at work. no one ever worked so fast as they. in almost no time all the shoes were stitched and finished. then the tiny elves took hold of each other's hands and danced round the shoes on the bench, till the shoemaker and his wife had hard work not to laugh aloud. but as the clock struck two, the little creatures whisked away out of the window, and left the room all as it was before. the shoemaker and his wife looked at each other, and said, "how can we thank the little elves who have made us happy and prosperous?" "i should like to make them some pretty clothes," said the wife, "they are quite naked." "i will make the shoes if you will make the coats," said her husband. that very day they commenced their task. the wife cut out two tiny, tiny coats of green, two weeny, weeny waistcoats of yellow, two little pairs of trousers, of white, two bits of caps, bright red (for every one knows the elves love bright colours), and her husband made two little pairs of shoes with long, pointed toes. they made the wee clothes as dainty as could be, with nice little stitches and pretty buttons; and by christmas time, they were finished. on christmas eve, the shoemaker cleaned his bench, and on it, instead of leather, he laid the two sets of gay little fairy-clothes. then he and his wife hid away as before, to watch. promptly at midnight, the little naked elves came in. they hopped upon the bench; but when they saw the little clothes there, they laughed and danced for joy. each one caught up his little coat and things and began to put them on. then they looked at each other and made all kinds of funny motions in their delight. at last they began to dance, and when the clock struck two, they danced quite away, out of the window. they never came back any more, but from that day they gave the shoemaker and his wife good luck, so that they never needed any more help. who killed the otter's babies?[ ] once the otter came to the mouse-deer and said, "friend mouse-deer, will you please take care of my babies while i go to the river, to catch fish?" "certainly," said the mouse-deer, "go along." but when the otter came back from the river, with a string of fish, he found his babies crushed flat. "what does this mean, friend mouse-deer?" he said. "who killed my children while you were taking care of them?" "i am very sorry," said the mouse-deer, "but you know i am chief dancer of the war-dance, and the woodpecker came and sounded the war-gong, so i danced. i forgot your children, and trod on them." "i shall go to king solomon," said the otter, "and you shall be punished." soon the mouse-deer was called before king solomon. "did you kill the otter's babies?" said the king. "yes, your majesty," said the mouse-deer, "but i did not mean to." "how did it happen?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the mouse-deer, "that i am chief dancer of the war-dance. the woodpecker came and sounded the war-gong, and i had to dance; and as i danced i trod on the otter's children." "send for the woodpecker," said king solomon. when the woodpecker came, he said to him, "was it you who sounded the war-gong?" "yes, your majesty," said the woodpecker, "but i had to." "why?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the woodpecker, "that i am chief beater of the war-gong, and i sounded the gong because i saw the great lizard wearing his sword." "send for the great lizard," said king solomon. when the great lizard came, he asked him, "was it you who were wearing your sword?" "yes, your majesty," said the great lizard; "but i had to." "why?" said the king. "your majesty knows," said the great lizard, "that i am chief protector of the sword. i wore my sword because the tortoise came wearing his coat of mail." so the tortoise was sent for. "why did you wear your coat of mail?" said the king. "i put it on, your majesty," said the tortoise, "because i saw the king-crab trailing his three-edged pike." then the king-crab was sent for. "why were you trailing your three-edged pike?" said king solomon. "because, your majesty," said the king-crab, "i saw that the crayfish had shouldered his lance." immediately the crayfish was sent for. "why did you shoulder your lance?" said the king. "because, your majesty," said the crayfish, "i saw the otter coming down to the river to kill my children." "oh," said king solomon, "if that is the case, the otter killed the otter's children. and the mouse-deer cannot be blamed, by the law of the land!" footnotes: [ ] adapted from the story as told in _fables and folk tales from an eastern forest_, by walter skeat. early[ ] i like to lie and wait to see my mother braid her hair. it is as long as it can be, and yet she doesn't care. i love my mother's hair. and then the way her fingers go; they look so quick and white,-- in and out, and to and fro, and braiding in the light, and it is always right. so then she winds it, shiny brown, around her head into a crown, just like the day before. and then she looks and pats it down, and looks a minute more; while i stay here all still and cool. oh, isn't morning beautiful? footnotes: [ ] from _the singing leaves_, by josephine preston peabody. the brahmin, the tiger, and the jackal do you know what a brahmin is? a brahmin is a very good and gentle kind of man who lives in india, and who treats all the beasts as if they were his brothers. there is a great deal more to know about brahmins, but that is enough for the story. one day a brahmin was walking along a country road when he came upon a tiger, shut up in a strong iron cage. the villagers had caught him and shut him up there for his wickedness. "oh, brother brahmin, brother brahmin," said the tiger, "please let me out, to get a little drink! i am so thirsty, and there is no water here." "but brother tiger," said the brahmin, "you know if i should let you out, you would spring on me and eat me up." "never, brother brahmin!" said the tiger. "never in the world would i do such an ungrateful thing! just let me out a little minute, to get a little, little drink of water, brother brahmin!" so the brahmin unlocked the door and let the tiger out. the moment he was out he sprang on the brahmin, and was about to eat him up. "but, brother tiger," said the brahmin, "you promised you would not. it is not fair or just that you should eat me, when i set you free." "it is perfectly right and just," said the tiger, "and i shall eat you up." however, the brahmin argued so hard that at last the tiger agreed to wait and ask the first five whom they should meet, whether it was fair for him to eat the brahmin, and to abide by their decision. the first thing they came to, to ask, was an old banyan tree, by the wayside. (a banyan tree is a kind of fruit tree.) "brother banyan," said the brahmin, eagerly, "does it seem to you right or just that this tiger should eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" the banyan tree looked down at them and spoke in a tired voice. "in the summer," he said, "when the sun is hot, men come and sit in the cool of my shade and refresh themselves with the fruit of my branches. but when evening falls, and they are rested, they break my twigs and scatter my leaves, and stone my boughs for more fruit. men are an ungrateful race. let the tiger eat the brahmin." the tiger sprang to eat the brahmin, but the brahmin said,-- "wait, wait; we have asked only one. we have still four to ask." presently they came to a place where an old bullock was lying by the road. the brahmin went up to him and said,-- "brother bullock, oh, brother bullock, does it seem to you a fair thing that this tiger should eat me up, after i have just freed him from a cage?" the bullock looked up, and answered in a deep, grumbling voice,-- "when i was young and strong my master used me hard, and i served him well. i carried heavy loads and carried them far. now that i am old and weak and cannot work, he leaves me without food or water, to die by the wayside. men are a thankless lot. let the tiger eat the brahmin." the tiger sprang, but the brahmin spoke very quickly,-- "oh, but this is only the second, brother tiger; you promised to ask five." the tiger grumbled a good deal, but at last he went on again with the brahmin. and after a time they saw an eagle, high overhead. the brahmin called up to him imploringly,-- "oh, brother eagle, brother eagle! tell us if it seems to you fair that this tiger should eat me up, when i have just saved him from a frightful cage?" the eagle soared slowly overhead a moment, then he came lower, and spoke in a thin, clear voice. "i live high in the air," he said, "and i do no man any harm. yet as often as they find my eyrie, men stone my young and rob my nest and shoot at me with arrows. men are a cruel breed. let the tiger eat the brahmin!" the tiger sprang upon the brahmin, to eat him up; and this time the brahmin had very hard work to persuade him to wait. at last he did persuade him, however, and they walked on together. and in a little while they saw an old alligator, lying half buried in mud and slime, at the river's edge. "brother alligator, oh, brother alligator!" said the brahmin, "does it seem at all right or fair to you that this tiger should eat me up, when i have just now let him out of a cage?" the old alligator turned in the mud, and grunted, and snorted; then he said,-- "i lie here in the mud all day, as harmless as a pigeon; i hunt no man, yet every time a man sees me, he throws stones at me, and pokes me with sharp sticks, and jeers at me. men are a worthless lot. let the tiger eat the brahmin!" at this the tiger was going to eat the brahmin at once. the poor brahmin had to remind him, again and again, that they had asked only four. "wait till we've asked one more! wait until we see a fifth!" he begged. finally, the tiger walked on with him. after a time, they met the little jackal, coming gaily down the road toward them. "oh, brother jackal, dear brother jackal," said the brahmin, "give us your opinion! do you think it right or fair that this tiger should eat me, when i set him free from a terrible cage?" "beg pardon?" said the little jackal. "i said," said the brahmin, raising his voice, "do you think it is fair that the tiger should eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" "cage?" said the little jackal, vacantly. "yes, yes, his cage," said the brahmin. "we want your opinion. do you think----" "oh," said the little jackal, "you want my opinion? then may i beg you to speak a little more loudly, and make the matter quite clear? i am a little slow of understanding. now what was it?" "do you think," said the brahmin, "it is right for this tiger to eat me, when i set him free from his cage?" "what cage?" said the little jackal. "why, the cage he was in," said the brahmin. "you see----" "but i don't altogether understand," said the little jackal. "you 'set him free,' you say?" "yes, yes, yes!" said the brahmin. "it was this way: i was walking along, and i saw the tiger----" "oh, dear, dear!" interrupted the little jackal; "i never can see through it, if you go on like that, with a long story. if you really want my opinion you must make the matter clear. what sort of cage was it?" "why, a big, ordinary cage, an iron cage," said the brahmin. "that gives me no idea at all," said the little jackal. "see here, my friends, if we are to get on with this matter you'd best show me the spot. then i can understand in a jiffy. show me the cage." so the brahmin, the tiger, and the little jackal walked back together to the spot where the cage was. "now, let us understand the situation," said the little jackal. "friend brahmin, where were you?" "i stood just here by the roadside," said the brahmin. "tiger, and where were you?" said the little jackal. "why, in the cage, of course," roared the tiger. "oh, i beg your pardon, father tiger," said the little jackal, "i really am _so_ stupid; i cannot _quite_ understand what happened. if you will have a little patience,--_how_ were you in the cage? what position were you in?" "i stood here," said the tiger, leaping into the cage, "with my head over my shoulder, so." "oh, thank you, thank you," said the little jackal, "that makes it _much_ clearer; but i still don't _quite_ understand--forgive my slow mind--why did you not come out, by yourself?" "can't you see that the door shut me in?" said the tiger. "oh, i do beg your pardon," said the little jackal. "i know i am very slow; i can never understand things well unless i see just how they were; if you could show me now exactly how that door works i am sure i could understand. how does it shut?" "it shuts like this," said the brahmin, pushing it to. "yes; but i don't see any lock," said the little jackal, "does it lock on the outside?" "it locks like this," said the brahmin. and he shut and bolted the door! "oh, does it, indeed?" said the little jackal. "does it, _indeed_! well, brother brahmin, now that it is locked, i should advise you to let it stay locked! as for you, my friend," he said to the tiger, "i think you will wait a good while before you'll find anyone to let you out again!" then he made a very low bow to the brahmin. "good-bye, brother," he said. "your way lies that way, and mine lies this; good-bye!" the little jackal and the camel all these stories about the little jackal that i have told you, show how clever the little jackal was. but you know--if you don't, you will when you are grown up--that no matter how clever you are, sooner or later you surely meet some one who is more clever. it is always so in life. and it was so with the little jackal. this is what happened. the little jackal was, as you know, exceedingly fond of shell-fish, especially of river crabs. now there came a time when he had eaten all the crabs to be found on his own side of the river. he knew there must be plenty on the other side, if he could only get to them, but he could not swim. one day he thought of a plan. he went to his friend the camel, and said,-- "friend camel, i know a spot where the sugar-cane grows thick; i'll show you the way, if you will take me there." "indeed i will," said the camel, who was very fond of sugar-cane. "where is it?" "it is on the other side of the river," said the little jackal; "but we can manage it nicely, if you will take me on your back and swim over." the camel was perfectly willing, so the little jackal jumped on his back, and the camel swam across the river, carrying him. when they were safely over, the little jackal jumped down and showed the camel the sugar-cane field; then he ran swiftly along the river bank, to hunt for crabs; the camel began to eat sugar-cane. he ate happily, and noticed nothing around him. now, you know, a camel is very big, and a jackal is very little. consequently, the little jackal had eaten his fill by the time the camel had barely taken a mouthful. the little jackal had no mind to wait for his slow friend; he wanted to be off home again, about his business. so he ran round and round the sugar-cane field, and as he ran he sang and shouted, and made a great hullabaloo. of course, the villagers heard him at once. "there is a jackal in the sugar-cane," they said; "he will dig holes and destroy the roots; we must go down and drive him out." so they came down, with sticks and stones. when they got there, there was no jackal to be seen; but they saw the great camel, eating away at the juicy sugar-cane. they ran at him and beat him, and stoned him, and drove him away half dead. when they had gone, leaving the poor camel half killed, the little jackal came dancing back from somewhere or other. "i think it's time to go home, now," he said; "don't you?" "well, you _are_ a pretty friend!" said the camel. "the idea of your making such a noise, with your shouting and singing! you brought this upon me. what in the world made you do it? why did you shout and sing?" "oh, i don't know _why_" said the little jackal,--"i always sing after dinner!" "so?" said the camel. "ah, very well, let us go home now." he took the little jackal kindly on his back and started into the water. when he began to swim he swam out to where the river was the very deepest. there he stopped, and said,-- "oh, jackal!" "yes," said the little jackal. "i have the strangest feeling," said the camel,--"i feel as if i must roll over." "'roll over'!" cried the jackal. "my goodness, don't do that! if you do that, you'll drown me! what in the world makes you want to do such a crazy thing? why should you want to roll over?" "oh, i don't know _why_," said the camel slowly, "but i always roll over after dinner!" so he rolled over. and the little jackal was drowned, for his sins, but the camel came safely home. the gulls of salt lake the story i am going to tell you is about something that really happened, many years ago. a brave little company of pioneers from the atlantic coast crossed the mississippi river and journeyed across the plains of central north america in big covered wagons with many horses, and finally succeeded in climbing to the top of the great rockies and down again into a valley in the very midst of the mountains. it was a valley of brown, bare, desert soil, in a climate where almost no rain falls; but the snow on the mountain-tops sent down little streams of pure water, the winds were gentle, and lying like a blue jewel at the foot of the western hills was a marvellous lake of salt water,--an inland sea. so the pioneers settled there and built themselves huts and cabins for the first winter. it had taken them many months to make the terrible journey; many had died of weariness and illness on the way; many died of hardship during the winter; and the provisions they had brought in their wagons were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. all their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. they made the barren land fertile by spreading water from the little streams over it,--what we call "irrigating"; and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and prayers, and careful eyes. in good time the seeds sprouted, and the dry, brown earth was covered with a carpet of tender, green, growing things. no farmer's garden could have looked better than the great garden of the desert valley. and from day to day the little shoots grew and flourished till they were all well above the ground. then a terrible thing happened. one day, the men who were watering the crops saw a great number of crickets swarming over the ground at the edge of the gardens nearest the mountains. they were hopping from the barren places into the young, green crops, and as they settled down they ate the tiny shoots and leaves to the ground. more came, and more, and ever more, and as they came they spread out till they covered a big corner of the grain field. and still more and more, till it was like an army of black, hopping, crawling crickets, streaming down the side of the mountain to kill the crops. the men tried to kill the crickets by beating them down, but the numbers were so great that it was like beating at the sea. then they ran and told the terrible news, and all the village came to help. they started fires; they dug trenches and filled them with water; they ran wildly about in the fields, killing what they could. but while they fought in one place new armies of crickets marched down the mountain-sides and attacked the fields in other places. and at last the people fell on their knees and wept and cried in despair, for they saw starvation and death in the fields. a few knelt to pray. others gathered round and joined them, weeping. more left their useless struggles and knelt beside their neighbours. at last nearly all the people were kneeling on the desolate fields praying for deliverance from the plague of crickets. suddenly, from far off in the air toward the great salt lake, there was the sound of flapping wings. it grew louder. some of the people looked up, startled. they saw, like a white cloud rising from the lake, a flock of sea gulls flying toward them. snow-white in the sun, with great wings beating and soaring, in hundreds and hundreds, they rose and circled and came on. "the gulls! the gulls!" was the cry. "what does it mean?" the gulls flew overhead, with a shrill chorus of whimpering cries, and then, in a marvellous white cloud of outspread wings and hovering breasts, they settled down over the cultivated ground. "oh! woe! woe!" cried the people. "the gulls are eating what the crickets have left! they will strip root and branch!" but all at once, someone called out,-- "no, no! see! they are eating the crickets! they are eating only the crickets!" it was true. the gulls devoured the crickets in dozens, in hundreds, in swarms. they ate until they were gorged, and then they flew heavily back to the lake, only to come again with new appetite. and when at last they finished, they had stripped the fields of the army of crickets; and the people were saved. to this day, in the beautiful city of salt lake, which grew out of that pioneer village, the little children are taught to love the sea gulls. and when they learn drawing and weaving in the schools, their first design is often a picture of a cricket and a gull. the nightingale[ ] a long, long time ago, as long ago as when there were fairies, there lived an emperor in china, who had a most beautiful palace, all made of crystal. outside the palace was the loveliest garden in the whole world, and farther away was a forest where the trees were taller than any other trees in the world, and farther away, still, was a deep wood. and in this wood lived a little nightingale. the nightingale sang so beautifully that everybody who heard her remembered her song better than anything else that he heard or saw. people came from all over the world to see the crystal palace and the wonderful garden and the great forest; but when they went home and wrote books about these things they always wrote, "but the nightingale is the best of all." at last it happened that the emperor came upon a book which said this, and he at once sent for his chamberlain. "who is this nightingale?" said the emperor. "why have i never heard him sing?" the chamberlain, who was a very important person, said, "there cannot be any such person; i have never heard his name." "the book says there is a nightingale," said the emperor. "i command that the nightingale be brought here to sing for me this evening." the chamberlain went out and asked all the great lords and ladies and pages where the nightingale could be found, but not one of them had ever heard of him. so the chamberlain went back to the emperor and said, "there is no such person." "the book says there is a nightingale," said the emperor; "if the nightingale is not here to sing for me this evening i will have the court trampled upon, immediately after supper." the chamberlain did not want to be trampled upon, so he ran out and asked everybody in the palace about the nightingale. at last, a little girl who worked in the kitchen to help the cook, said, "oh, yes, i know the nightingale very well. every night, when i go to carry scraps from the kitchen to my mother, who lives in the wood beyond the forest, i hear the nightingale sing." the chamberlain asked the maid to take him to the nightingale's home, and many of the lords and ladies followed after. when they had gone a little way, they heard a cow moo. "ah!" said the lords and ladies, "that must be the nightingale; what a large voice for so small a creature!" "oh, no," said the little girl, "that is just a cow, mooing." a little farther on they heard some bullfrogs, in a swamp. "surely that is the nightingale," said the courtiers; "it really sounds like church-bells!" "oh, no," said the little girl, "those are bullfrogs, croaking." at last they came to the wood where the nightingale was. "hush!" said the little girl, "she is going to sing." and, sure enough, the little nightingale began to sing. she sang so beautifully that you have never in all your life heard anything like it. "dear, dear," said the courtiers, "that is very pleasant; does that little grey bird really make all that noise? she is so pale that i think she has lost her colour for fear of us." the chamberlain asked the little nightingale to come and sing for the emperor. the little nightingale said she could sing better in her own greenwood, but she was so sweet and kind that she came with them. that evening the palace was all trimmed with the most beautiful flowers you can imagine, and rows and rows of little silver bells, that tinkled when the wind blew in, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of wax candles, that shone like tiny stars. in the great hall there was a gold perch for the nightingale, beside the emperor's throne. when all the people were there, the emperor asked the nightingale to sing. then the little grey nightingale filled her throat full, and sang. and, my dears, she sang so beautifully that the emperor's eyes filled up with tears! and, you know, emperors do not cry at all easily. so he asked her to sing again, and this time she sang so marvellously that the tears came out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks. that was a great success. they asked the little nightingale to sing, over and over again, and when they had listened enough the emperor said that she should be made "singer in chief to the court." she was to have a golden perch near the emperor's bed, and a little golden cage, and was to be allowed to go out twice every day. but there were twelve servants appointed to wait on her, and those twelve servants went with her every time she went out, and each of the twelve had hold of the end of a silken string which was tied to the little nightingale's leg! it was not so very much fun to go out that way! for a long, long time the nightingale sang every evening to the emperor and his court, and they liked her so much that the ladies all tried to sing like her; they used to put water in their mouths and then make little sounds like this: _glu-glu-glug_. and when the courtiers met each other in the halls, one would say "night," and the other would say "ingale," and that was supposed to be conversation. at last, one day, there came a little package to the emperor, on the outside of which was written, "the nightingale." inside was an artificial bird, something like a nightingale, only it was made of gold, and silver, and rubies, and emeralds, and diamonds. when it was wound up it played a waltz tune, and as it played it moved its little tail up and down. everybody in the court was filled with delight at the music of the new nightingale. they made it sing that same tune thirty-three times, and still they had not had enough. they would have made it sing the tune thirty-four times, but the emperor said, "i should like to hear the real nightingale sing, now." but when they looked about for the real little nightingale, they could not find her anywhere! she had taken the chance, while everybody was listening to the waltz tunes, to fly away through the window to her own greenwood. "what a very ungrateful bird!" said the lords and ladies. "but it does not matter; the new nightingale is just as good." so the artificial nightingale was given the real nightingale's little gold perch, and every night the emperor wound her up, and she sang waltz tunes to him. the people in the court liked her even better than the old nightingale, because they could all whistle her tunes,--which you can't do with real nightingales. about a year after the artificial nightingale came, the emperor was listening to her waltz tune, when there was a _snap_ and _whir-r-r_ inside the bird, and the music stopped. the emperor ran to his doctor, but he could not do anything. then he ran to his clock-maker, but he could not do much. nobody could do much. the best they could do was to patch the gold nightingale up so that it could sing once a year; even that was almost too much, and the tune was very shaky. still, the emperor kept the gold nightingale on the perch in his own room. a long time went by, and then, at last, the emperor grew very ill, and was about to die. when it was sure that he could not live much longer, the people chose a new emperor and waited for the old one to die. the poor emperor lay, quite cold and pale, in his great big bed, with velvet curtains and tall candlesticks all about. he was quite alone, for all the courtiers had gone to congratulate the new emperor, and all the servants had gone to talk it over. when the emperor woke up, he felt a terrible weight on his chest. he opened his eyes, and there was death, sitting on his heart. death had put on the emperor's gold crown, and he had the gold sceptre in one hand, and the silken banner in the other; and he looked at the emperor with his great hollow eyes. the room was full of shadows, and the shadows were full of faces. everywhere the emperor looked, there were faces. some were very, very ugly, and some were sweet and lovely; they were all the things the emperor had done in his life, good and bad. and as he looked at them they began to whisper. they whispered, "_do you remember this?_" "_do you remember that?_" the emperor remembered so much that he cried out loud, "oh, bring the great drum! make music, so that i may not hear these dreadful whispers!" but there was nobody there to bring the drum. then the emperor cried, "you little gold nightingale, can you not sing something for me? i have given you gifts of gold and jewels, and kept you always by my side; will you not help me now?" but there was nobody to wind the little gold nightingale up, and of course it could not sing. the emperor's heart grew colder and colder where death crouched upon it, and the dreadful whispers grew louder and louder, and the emperor's life was almost gone. suddenly, through the open window, there came a most lovely song. it was so sweet and so loud that the whispers died quite away. presently the emperor felt his heart grow warm, then he felt the blood flow through his limbs again; he listened to the song until the tears ran down his cheeks; he knew that it was the little real nightingale who had flown away from him when the gold nightingale came. death was listening to the song, too; and when it was done and the emperor begged for more, death, too, said, "please sing again, little nightingale!" "will you give me the emperor's gold crown for a song?" said the little nightingale. "yes," said death; and the little nightingale bought the emperor's crown for a song. "oh, sing again, little nightingale," begged death. "will you give me the emperor's sceptre for another song?" said the little grey nightingale. "yes," said death; and the little nightingale bought the emperor's sceptre for another song. once more death begged for a song, and this time the little nightingale obtained the banner for her singing. then she sang one more song, so sweet and so sad that it made death think of his garden in the churchyard, where he always liked best to be. and he rose from the emperor's heart and floated away through the window. when death was gone, the emperor said to the little nightingale, "oh, dear little nightingale, you have saved me from death! do not leave me again. stay with me on this little gold perch, and sing to me always!" "no, dear emperor," said the little nightingale, "i sing best when i am free; i cannot live in a palace. but every night when you are quite alone, i will come and sit in the window and sing to you, and tell you everything that goes on in your kingdom: i will tell you where the poor people are who ought to be helped, and where the wicked people are who ought to be punished. only, dear emperor, be sure that you never let anybody know that you have a little bird who tells you everything." after the little nightingale had flown away, the emperor felt so well and strong that he dressed himself in his royal robes and took his gold sceptre in his hand. and when the courtiers came in to see if he were dead, there stood the emperor with his sword in one hand and his sceptre in the other, and said, "good-morning!" footnotes: [ ] adapted from hans christian andersen. margery's garden[ ] there was once a little girl named margery, who had always lived in the city. the flat where her mother and father lived was at the top of a big building, and you couldn't see a great deal from the windows, except chimney-pots on other people's roofs. margery did not know much about trees and flowers, but she loved them dearly; whenever it was a fine sunday she used to go with her mother and father to the park and look at the lovely flower-beds. they seemed always to be finished, though, and margery was always wishing she could see them grow. one spring, when margery was nine, her father obtained a new situation and they removed to a little house with a nice big piece of ground a short distance outside the town where his new position was. margery was delighted. and the very first thing she said, when her father told her about it, was, "oh, may i have a garden? _may_ i have a garden?" margery's mother was almost as eager for a garden as she was, and margery's father said he expected to live on their vegetables all the rest of his life! so it was soon agreed that the garden should be the first thing attended to. behind the cottage were apple trees, a plum tree, and two or three pear trees; then came a stretch of rough grass, and then a stone wall, with a gate leading into the fields. it was on the grass plot that the garden was to be. a big piece was to be used for wheat and peas and beans, and a little piece at the end was to be given to margery. "what shall we have in it?" asked her mother. "flowers," said margery, with shining eyes,--"blue, and white, and yellow, and pink,--every kind of flower!" "surely, flowers," said her mother, "and shall we not have a little salad garden in the middle?" "what is a salad garden?" margery asked. "it is a garden where you have all the things that make nice salad," said her mother, laughing, for margery was fond of salads; "you have lettuce, and endive, and mustard and cress, and parsley, and radishes, and beetroot, and young onions." "oh! how good it sounds!" said margery. "i should love a salad garden." that very evening, margery's father took pencil and paper, and drew out a plan for her garden; first, they talked it all over, then he drew what they decided on; it looked like the diagram on the next page. "the outside strip is for flowers," said margery's father, "and next is a footpath, all the way round the beds; that is to let you get at the flowers to weed and to pick; there is a wider path through the middle, and the rest is for rows of salad vegetables." "papa, it is glorious!" said margery. papa laughed. "i hope you will still think it glorious when the weeding time comes," he said, "for you know, you and mother have promised to take care of this garden, while i take care of the big one." "i wouldn't _not_ take care of it for anything!" said margery. "i want to feel that it is my very own." [illustration] her father kissed her, and said it was certainly her "very own." two evenings after that, when margery was called in from her first ramble in the fields, she found the postman at the door. "something for you, margery," said her mother, with the look she had when something nice was happening. it was a box, quite a big box, with a label on it that said:-- miss margery brown, primrose cottage, narcissus road, colchester. from seeds and plants company, reading. margery could hardly wait to open it. it was filled with little packages, all with printed labels; and in the packages, of course, were seeds. it made margery dance, just to read the names,--nasturtium, giant helianthus, canariensis, calendula, canterbury bells: more names than i can tell you; and other packages, bigger, that said, "sweet peas," "french beans," "carrots," "wallflowers," and such things! margery could almost smell the posies, she was so excited. only, she had seen so little of flowers that she did not know what all the names meant. she did not know that a helianthus was a sunflower until her mother told her so, and she had never seen the dear, blue, bell-shaped flowers that always grow in old-fashioned gardens, and are called canterbury bells. she thought the calendula must be a strange, grand flower, by its name; but her mother told her it was the gay, sturdy, everydayish little flower called a marigold. there was a great deal for a little city girl to be surprised about, and it did seem as if morning was a long way off! "did you think you could plant them in the morning?" asked her mother. "you know, dear, the ground has to be made ready first; it takes a little time,--it may be several days before you can plant." that was another surprise. margery had thought she could begin to sow the seed right off. but this was what had happened. early the next morning, a man came driving up to the cottage with two strong white horses; in his wagon was a plough. i suppose you have seen ploughs, but margery never had, and she watched with great interest, while the man and her father took the plough from the cart and harnessed the horses to it. it was a great, three-cornered piece of sharp steel, with long handles coming up from it, so that a man could hold it in place. it looked like this:-- [illustration] "i brought a two-horse plough because it's virgin soil," the man said. margery wondered what in the world he meant; it had not been cultivated, of course, but what had that do with the kind of plough? "what does he mean, father?" she whispered, when she got a chance. "he means that this land has not been ploughed before; it will be hard to turn the soil, and one horse could not pull the plough," said her father. it took the man two hours to plough the little strip of land. he drove the sharp end of the plough into the soil, and held it firmly so, while the horses drew it along in a straight line. margery found it fascinating to watch the long line of dark earth and green grass come rolling up and turn over, as the knife passed it. she could see that it took real skill and strength to keep the line even, and to avoid the stones. sometimes the plough struck a hidden stone, and then the man was jerked almost off his feet. but he only laughed, and said, "tough piece of land; it will be a lot better next year." when he had ploughed, the man went back to his cart and unloaded another farm implement. this one was like a three-cornered platform of wood, with a long, curved, strong rake under it. it was called a harrow, and it looked like the diagram on the next page. the man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform and drove all over the strip of land. it was fun to watch, but perhaps it was a little hard to do. the man's weight kept the harrow steady, and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it did not stay in ridges. "he scrambles the ground, father!" said margery. "it needs 'scrambling,'" laughed her father. "we are going to get more weeds than we want on this fresh soil, and the more the ground is broken, the fewer there will be." [illustration] after the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and margery's father said that he himself would do the rest of the work in the late afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he was a boy. so margery did not see any more done until the next day. but the next day there was hard work for margery's father! every bit of that ground had to be broken up still more with a spade, and then the clods which were full of grass-roots had to be taken on a fork and shaken, till the earth fell out; when the grass was thrown to one side. that would not have had to be done if the land had been ploughed in the autumn; the grass would have rotted in the ground, and would have made food for the plants. now, margery's father put the fertiliser on the top, and then raked it into the earth. at last, it was time to make the place for the seeds. margery and her mother helped. father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden. then he took the cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to another stake, and drove that down. that made a straight line. then he hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and scattered fertiliser in it. pretty soon the whole garden was lined with little trenches. "now for the seed," said father. margery ran and brought the seed box. "may i help?" she asked. "if you watch me sow one row, i think you can do the next," said her father. so margery watched. her father took a handful of peas, and, stooping, walked slowly along the line, letting the seed trickle through his fingers. it was pretty to watch; it made margery think of a photograph her teacher had, a photograph of a famous picture called "the sower." perhaps you have seen it. putting in the seed was not so easy to do as to watch; sometimes margery dropped in too much, and sometimes not enough; but her father was patient with her, and soon she did better. they planted peas, beans, spinach, carrots, and parsnips. and margery's father made a row of holes, after that, for the tomato plants. he said those had to be transplanted; they could not be sown from seed. when the seeds were in the trenches they had to be covered up, and margery really helped at that. it is fun to do it. you stand beside the little trench and walk backward, and as you walk you hoe the loose earth back over the seeds; the same earth that was hoed up you pull back again. then you rake very gently over the surface, with the back of a rake, to even it all off. margery liked it, because now the garden began to look _like_ a garden. but best of all was the work next day, when her own little particular garden was begun. father brown loved margery and margery's mother so much that he wanted their garden to be perfect, and that meant a great deal more work. he knew very well that the old grass would begin to come through again on such soil, and that it would make terribly hard weeding. he was not going to have any such thing for his two "little girls," as he called them. so he gave that little garden particular attention. this is what he did. after he had thrown out all the turf, he shovelled clean earth on to the garden,--as much as three solid inches of it; not a bit of grass was in that. then it was ready for raking and fertilising, and for the lines. the little footpaths were marked out by father brown's feet; margery and her mother laughed well at his actions, for it looked like some kind of dance. mr brown had seen gardeners do it when he was a little boy, and he did it very nicely: he walked along the sides of the square, with one foot turned a little out, and the other straight, taking such tiny steps that his feet touched each other all the time. this tramped out a path just wide enough for a person to walk. the wider path was marked with lines and raked. margery thought, of course, all the flowers would be put in as the vegetables were; but she found that it was not so. for some, her father poked little holes with his finger; for some, he made very shallow trenches; and some very small seeds were scattered lightly over the top of the ground. margery and her mother had taken so much pains in thinking out the arrangement of the flowers, that perhaps you will like to hear just how they designed that garden. at the back were the sweet peas, which would grow tall, like a screen; on the two sides, for a kind of hedge, were yellow sunflowers; and along the front edge were the gay nasturtiums. margery planned that, so that she could look into the garden from the front, but have it shut away from the vegetable patch by the tall flowers on the sides. the two front corners had canariensis in them. canariensis is a pretty creeper with golden blossoms, very dainty and bright. and then, in little square patches all round the garden, were planted london pride, blue bachelor's buttons, yellow marigolds, tall larkspur, many-coloured asters, hollyhocks and stocks. all these lovely flowers used to grow in our grandmothers' gardens, and if you don't know what they look like, i hope you can find out next summer. between the flowers and the middle path went the seeds for that wonderful salad garden; all the things mrs brown had named to margery were there. margery had never seen anything more wonderful than the little round lettuce-seeds. they were so tiny that it did not seem possible that green lettuce leaves could come from them. but they surely would. mother and father and margery were late to supper that evening. but they were all so happy that it did not matter. the last thing margery thought of, as she went to sleep at night, was the dear, smooth little garden, with its funny footpath, and with the little sticks standing at the ends of the rows, labelled "lettuce," "beets," "helianthus," and so on. "i have a garden! i have a garden!" was margery's last thought as she went off to dreamland. footnotes: [ ] i have always been inclined to avoid, in my work among children, the "how to make" and "how to do" kind of story; it is too likely to trespass on the ground belonging by right to its more artistic and less intentional kinsfolk. nevertheless, there is a legitimate place for the instruction-story. within its own limits, and especially in a school use, it has a real purpose to serve, and a real desire to meet. children have a genuine taste for such morsels of practical information, if the bites are not made too big and too solid. and to the elementary teacher, from whom so much is demanded in the way of practical instruction, i know that these stories are a boon. they must be chosen with care, and used with discretion, but they need never be ignored. i venture to give some little stories of this type, which i hope may be of use in the schools where country life and country work is an unknown experience to the children. the little cotyledons this is another story about margery's garden. the next morning after the garden was planted, margery was up and out at six o'clock. she could not wait to look at her garden. to be sure, she knew that the seeds could not sprout in a single night, but she had a feeling that _something_ might happen at any moment. the garden was just as smooth and brown as the night before, and no little seedlings were in sight. but a very few mornings after that, when margery went out, she saw a funny little crack opening up through the earth, the whole length of the patch. quickly she knelt down on the footpath, to see. yes! tiny green leaves, a whole row of them, were pushing their way through the crust! margery knew what she had put there: it was the radish-row; these must be radish leaves. she examined them very closely, so that she might know a radish next time. the little leaves, no bigger than half your little-finger nail, grew in twos,--two on each tiny stem; they were almost round. margery flew back to her mother, to say that the first seeds were up. and her mother, nearly as excited as margery, came to look at the little crack. each day, after that, the row of radishes grew, till, in a week, it stood as high as your finger, green and sturdy. but about the third day, while margery was stooping over the radishes, she saw something very, very small and green, peeping above ground, where the lettuce was planted. could it be weeds? no, for on looking very closely she saw that the wee leaves faintly marked a regular row. they did not make a crack, like the radishes; they seemed too small and too far apart to push the earth up like that. margery leaned down and looked with all her eyes at the baby plants. the tiny leaves grew two on a stem, and were almost round. the more she looked at them the more it seemed to margery that they looked exactly as the radish looked when it first came up. "do you suppose," margery said to herself, "that lettuce and radish look alike while they are growing? they don't look alike when they are on the table!" day by day the lettuce grew, and soon the little round leaves were easier to examine; they certainly were very much like radish leaves. then, one morning, while she was searching for signs of other seeds, margery discovered the beets. in irregular patches on the row, hints of green were coming. the next day and the next they grew, until the beet leaves were big enough to see. margery looked. then she looked again. then she wrinkled her forehead. "can we have made a mistake?" she thought. "do you suppose we can have planted _all_ radishes?" for those little beet leaves were almost round, and they grew two on a stem, precisely like the lettuce and the radish; except for the size, all three rows looked alike. it was too much for margery. she ran to the house and found her father. her little face was so anxious that he thought something unpleasant had happened. "papa," she said, all out of breath, "do you think we could have made a mistake about my garden? do you think we could have put radishes in all the rows?" father laughed. "what makes you think such a thing?" he asked. "papa," said margery, "the little leaves all look exactly alike! every plant has just two tiny leaves on it, and shaped the same; they are roundish, and grow out of the stem at the same place." papa's eyes began to twinkle. "many of the dicotyledonous plants look alike at the beginning," he said, with a little drawl on the big word. that was to tease margery, because she always wanted to know the big words she heard. "what's 'dicotyledonous'?" said margery, carefully. "wait till i come home to-night, dear," said her father, "and i'll tell you." that evening margery was waiting eagerly for him. when her father finished his supper they went together to the garden, and father examined the seedlings carefully. then he pulled up a little radish plant and a tiny beet. "these little leaves," he said, "are not the real leaves of the plant; they are only little pockets to hold food for the plant to live on till it gets strong enough to push up into the air. as soon as the real leaves come out and begin to draw food from the air, these little substitutes wither up and fall off. these two lie folded up in the little seed from the beginning, and are full of plant food. they don't have to be very special in shape, you see, because they don't stay on the plant after it is grown up." "then every plant looks like this at first?" said margery. "no, dear, not every one; plants are divided into two kinds: those which have two food leaves, like these plants, and those which have only one; these are called dicotyledonous, and the ones which have but one food leaf are monocotyledonous. many of the dicotyledons look alike." "i think that is interesting," said margery. "i always, supposed the plants were different from the minute they began to grow." "indeed, no," said father. "even some of the trees look like this when they first come through; you would not think a birch tree could look like a vegetable or a flower, would you? but it does, at first; it looks so much like these things that in the great nurseries, where trees are raised for forests and parks, the workmen have to be very carefully trained, or else they would pull up the trees when they are weeding. they have to be taught the difference between a birch tree and a weed." "how funny!" said margery, dimpling. "yes, it sounds funny," said father; "but, you see, the birch tree is dicotyledonous, and so are many weeds, and the dicotyledons look so much alike at first." "i am glad to know that, father," said margery, soberly. "i believe i shall learn a good deal from living in the country; don't you think so?" margery's father took her in his arms. "i hope so, dear," he said; "the country is a good place for little girls." and that was all that happened, that day. the talkative tortoise[ ] once upon a time, a tortoise lived in a pond with two ducks, who were her very good friends. she enjoyed the company of the ducks, because she could talk with them to her heart's content; the tortoise liked to talk. she always had something to say, and she liked to hear herself say it. after many years of this pleasant living, the pond became very low, in a dry season; and finally it dried up. the two ducks saw that they could no longer live there, so they decided to fly to another region, where there was more water. they went to the tortoise to bid her good-bye. "oh, don't leave me behind!" begged the tortoise. "take me with you; i must die if i am left here." "but you cannot fly!" said the ducks. "how can we take you with us?" "take me with you! take me with you!" said the tortoise. the ducks felt so sorry for her that at last they thought of a way to take her. "we have thought of a way which will be possible," they said, "if only you can manage to keep still long enough. we will each take hold of one end of a stout stick, and do you take the middle in your mouth; then we will fly up in the air with you and carry you with us. but remember not to talk! if you open your mouth, you are lost." the tortoise said she would not say a word; she would not so much as move her mouth; and she was very grateful. so the ducks brought a strong little stick and took hold of the ends, while the tortoise bit firmly on the middle. then the two ducks rose slowly in the air and flew away with their burden. when they were above the treetops, the tortoise wanted to say, "how high we are!" but she remembered, and kept still. when they passed the church steeple she wanted to say, "what is that which shines?" but she remembered, and held her peace. then they came over the village square, and the people looked up and saw them. "look at the ducks carrying a tortoise!" they shouted; and every one ran to look. the tortoise wanted to say, "what business is it of yours?" but she didn't. then she heard the people shout, "isn't it strange! look at it! look!" the tortoise forgot everything except that she wanted to say, "hush, you foolish people!" she opened her mouth,--and fell to the ground. and that was the end of the tortoise. it is a very good thing to be able to hold one's tongue! footnotes: [ ] very freely adapted from one of the _fables of bidpai_. robert of sicily[ ] an old legend says that there was once a king named robert of sicily, who was brother to the great pope of rome and to the emperor of allemaine. he was a very selfish king, and very proud; he cared more for his pleasures than for the needs of his people, and his heart was so filled with his own greatness that he had no thought for god. one day, this proud king was sitting in his place at church, at vesper service; his courtiers were about him, in their bright garments, and he himself was dressed in his royal robes. the choir was chanting the latin service, and as the beautiful voices swelled louder, the king noticed one particular verse which seemed to be repeated again and again. he turned to a learned clerk at his side and asked what those words meant, for he knew no latin. "they mean, 'he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted them of low degree,'" answered the clerk. "it is well the words are in latin, then," said the king angrily, "for they are a lie. there is no power on earth or in heaven which can put me down from my seat!" and he sneered at the beautiful singing, as he leaned back in his place. presently the king fell asleep, while the service went on. he slept deeply and long. when he awoke the church was dark and still, and he was all alone. he, the king, had been left alone in the church, to awake in the dark! he was furious with rage and surprise, and, stumbling through the dim aisles, he reached the great doors and beat at them, madly, shouting for his servants. the old sexton heard some one shouting and pounding in the church, and thought it was some drunken vagabond who had stolen in during the service. he came to the door with his keys and called out, "who is there?" "open! open! it is i, the king!" came a hoarse, angry voice from within. "it is a crazy man," thought the sexton; and he was frightened. he opened the doors carefully and stood back, peering into the darkness. out past him rushed the figure of a man in tattered, scanty clothes, with unkempt hair and white, wild face. the sexton did not know that he had ever seen him before, but he looked long after him, wondering at his wildness and his haste. in his fluttering rags, without hat or cloak, not knowing what strange thing had happened to him, king robert rushed to his palace gates, pushed aside the startled servants, and hurried, blind with rage, up the wide stair and through the great corridors, toward the room where he could hear the sound of his courtiers' voices. men and women servants tried to stop the ragged man, who had somehow got into the palace, but robert did not even see them as he fled along. straight to the open doors of the big banquet hall he made his way, and into the midst of the grand feast there. the great hall was filled with lights and flowers; the tables were set with everything that is delicate and rich to eat; the courtiers, in their gay clothes, were laughing and talking; and at the head of the feast, on the king's own throne, sat a king. his face, his figure, his voice were exactly like robert of sicily; no human being could have told the difference; no one dreamed that he was not the king. he was dressed in the king's royal robes, he wore the royal crown, and on his hand was the king's own ring. robert of sicily, half naked, ragged, without a sign of his kingship on him, stood before the throne and stared with fury at this figure of himself. the king on the throne looked at him. "who art thou, and what dost thou here?" he asked. and though his voice was just like robert's own, it had something in it sweet and deep, like the sound of bells. "i am the king!" cried robert of sicily. "i am the king, and you are an impostor!" the courtiers started from their seats, and drew their swords. they would have killed the crazy man who insulted their king; but he raised his hand and stopped them, and with his eyes looking into robert's eyes he said, "not the king; you shall be the king's jester! you shall wear the cap and bells, and make laughter for my court. you shall be the servant of the servants, and your companion shall, be the jester's ape." with shouts of laughter, the courtiers drove robert of sicily from the banquet hall; the waiting-men, with laughter, too, pushed him into the soldiers' hall; and there the pages brought the jester's wretched ape, and put a fool's cap and bells on robert's head. it was like a terrible dream; he could not believe it true, he could not understand what had happened to him. and when he woke next morning, he believed it was a dream, and that he was king again. but as he turned his head, he felt the coarse straw under his cheek instead of the soft pillow, and he saw that he was in the stable, with the shivering ape by his side. robert of sicily was a jester, and no one knew him for the king. three long years passed. sicily was happy and all things went well under the king, who was not robert. robert was still the jester, and his heart grew harder and more bitter with every year. many times, during the three years, the king, who had his face and voice, had called him to himself, when none else could hear, and had asked him the one question, "who art thou?" and each time that he asked it his eyes looked into robert's eyes, to find his heart. but each time robert threw back his head and answered, proudly, "i am the king!" and the other king's eyes grew sad and stern. at the end of three years, the pope called the emperor of allemaine and the king of sicily, his brothers, to a great meeting in his city of rome. the king of sicily went, with all his soldiers and courtiers and servants,--a great procession of horsemen and footmen. never had there been seen a finer sight than the grand train, men in bright armour, riders in wonderful cloaks of velvet and silk, servants, carrying marvellous presents to the pope. and at the very end rode robert, the jester. his horse was poor and old, many-coloured, and the ape rode with him. every one in the villages through which they passed ran after the jester, and pointed and laughed. the pope received his brothers and their trains in the square before saint peter's. with music and flags and flowers he made the king of sicily welcome, and greeted him as his brother. in the midst of it, the jester broke through the crowd and threw himself before the pope. "look at me!" he cried; "i am your brother, robert of sicily! this man is an impostor, who has stolen my throne. i am robert, the king!" the pope looked at the poor jester with pity, but the emperor of allemaine turned to the king of sicily, and said, "is it not rather dangerous, brother, to keep a madman as jester?" and again robert was pushed back among the serving-men. it was holy week, and the king and the emperor, with all their trains, went every day to the great services in the cathedral. something wonderful and holy seemed to make these services more beautiful than ever before. all the people of rome felt it: it was as if the presence of an angel were there. men thought of god, and felt his blessing on them. but no one knew who it was that brought the beautiful feeling. and when easter day came, never had there been so lovely, so holy a day: in the great churches, filled with flowers, and sweet with incense, the kneeling people listened to the choirs singing, and it was like the voices of angels; their prayers were more earnest than ever before, their praise more glad; there was something heavenly in rome. robert of sicily went to the services with the rest, and sat in the humblest place with the servants. over and over again he heard the sweet voices of the choirs chant the latin words he had heard long ago: _he hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted them of low degree_. and at last, as he listened, his heart was softened. he, too, felt the strange blessed presence of a heavenly power. he thought of god, and of his own wickedness; he remembered how selfish he had been, and how little good he had done; he realised, that his power had not been from himself, at all. on easter night, as he crept to his bed of straw, he wept, not because he was so wretched, but because he had not been a better king when power was his. at last all the festivities were over, and the king of sicily went home to his own land again, with his people. robert the jester came home too. on the day of their home-coming, there was a special service in the royal church, and even after the service was over for the people, the monks held prayers of thanksgiving and praise. the sound of their singing came softly in at the palace windows. in the great banquet room, the king sat, wearing his royal robes and his crown, while many subjects came to greet him. at last, he sent them all away, saying he wanted to be alone; but he commanded the jester to stay. and when they were alone together the king looked into robert's eyes, as he had done before, and said, softly, "who art thou?" robert of sicily bowed his head. "thou knowest best," he said, "i only know that i have sinned." as he spoke, he heard the voices of the monks singing, _he hath put down the mighty from their seat_,--and his head sank lower. but suddenly the music seemed to change; a wonderful light shone all about. as robert raised his eyes, he saw the face of the king smiling at him with a radiance like nothing on earth, and as he sank to his knees before the glory of that smile, a voice sounded with the music, like a melody throbbing on a single string,-- "i am an angel, and thou art the king!" then robert of sicily was alone. his royal robes were upon him once more; he wore his crown and his royal ring. he was king. and when the courtiers came back they found their king kneeling by his throne, absorbed in silent prayer. footnotes: [ ] adapted from longfellow's poem. the jealous courtiers[ ] i wonder if you have ever heard the anecdote about the artist of düsseldorf and the jealous courtiers. this is it. it seems there was once a very famous artist who lived in the little town of düsseldorf. he did such fine work that the elector, prince johann wilhelm, ordered a portrait statue of himself, on horseback, to be done in bronze. the artist was overjoyed at the commission, and worked early and late at the statue. at last the work was done, and the artist had the great statue set up in the public square of düsseldorf, ready for the opening view. the elector came on the appointed day, and with him came his favourite courtiers from the castle. then the statue was unveiled. it was very beautiful,--so beautiful that the prince exclaimed in surprise. he could not look enough, and presently he turned to the artist and shook hands with him, like an old friend. "herr grupello," he said, "you are a great artist, and this statue will make your fame even greater than it is; the portrait of me is perfect!" when the courtiers heard this, and saw the friendly hand-shake, their jealousy of the artist was beyond bounds. their one thought was, how could they safely do something to humiliate him. they dared not pick flaws in the portrait statue, for the prince had declared it perfect. but at last one of them said, with an air of great frankness, "indeed, herr grupello, the portrait of his royal highness is perfect; but permit me to say that the statue of the horse is not quite so successful: the head is too large; it is out of proportion." "no," said another, "the horse is really not so successful; the turn of the neck, there, is awkward." "if you would change the right hind-foot, herr grupello," said a third, "it would be an improvement." still another found fault with the horse's tail. the artist listened, quietly. when they had all finished, he turned to the prince and said, "your courtiers, prince, find a good many flaws in the statue of the horse; will you permit me to keep it a few days more, to do what i can with it?" the elector assented, and the artist ordered a temporary screen to be built around the statue, so that his assistants could work undisturbed. for several days the sound of hammering came steadily from behind the enclosure. the courtiers, who took care to pass that way, often, were delighted. each one said to himself, "i must have been right, really; the artist himself sees that something was wrong; now i shall have credit for saving the prince's portrait by my artistic taste!" once more the artist summoned the prince and his courtiers, and once more the statue was unveiled. again the elector exclaimed at its beauty, and then he turned to his courtiers, one after another, to see what they had to say. "perfect!" said the first. "now that the horse's head is in proportion, there is not a flaw." "the change in the neck was just what was needed," said the second; "it is very graceful now." "the rear right foot is as it should be, now," said a third, "and it adds so much to the beauty of the whole!" the fourth said that he considered the tail greatly improved. "my courtiers are much pleased now," said the prince to herr grupello; "they think the statue much improved by the changes you have made." herr grupello smiled a little. "i am glad they are pleased," he said, "but the fact is, i have changed nothing!" "what do you mean?" said the prince in surprise. "have we not heard the sound of hammering every day? what were you hammering at then?" "i was hammering at the reputation of your courtiers, who found fault simply because they were jealous," said the artist. "and i rather think that their reputation is pretty well hammered to pieces!" it was, indeed. the elector laughed heartily, but the courtiers slunk away, one after another, without a word. footnotes: [ ] adapted from h.a. guerber's _märchen und erzählungen_ (d.c. heath & co.). prince cherry[ ] there was once an old king, so wise and kind and true that the most powerful good fairy of his land visited him and asked him to name the dearest wish of his heart, that she might grant it. "surely you know it," said the good king; "it is for my only son, prince cherry; do for him whatever you would have done for me." "gladly," said the great fairy; "choose what i shall give him. i can make him the richest, the most beautiful, or the most powerful prince in the world; choose." "none of those things are what i want," said the king. "i want only that he shall be good. of what use will it be to him to be beautiful, rich, or powerful, if he grows into a bad man? make him the best prince in the world, i beg you!" "alas, i cannot make him good," said the fairy; "he must do that for himself. i can give him good advice, reprove him when he does wrong, and punish him if he will not punish himself; i can and will be his best friend, but i cannot make him good unless he wills it." the king was sad to hear this, but he rejoiced in the friendship of the fairy for his son. and when he died, soon after, he was happy to know that he left prince cherry in her hands. prince cherry grieved for his father, and often lay awake at night, thinking of him. one night, when he was all alone in his room, a soft and lovely light suddenly shone before him, and a beautiful vision stood at his side. it was the good fairy. she was clad in robes of dazzling white, and on her shining hair she wore a wreath of white roses. "i am the fairy candide," she said to the prince. "i promised your father that i would be your best friend, and as long as you live i shall watch over your happiness. i have brought you a gift; it is not wonderful to look at, but it has a wonderful power for your welfare; wear it, and let it help you." as she spoke, she placed a small gold ring on the prince's little finger. "this ring," she said, "will help you to be good; when you do evil, it will prick you, to remind you. if you do not heed its warnings a worse thing will happen to you, for i shall become your enemy." then she vanished. prince cherry wore his ring, and said nothing to anyone of the fairy's gift. it did not prick him for a long time, because he was good and merry and happy. but prince cherry had been rather spoiled by his nurse when he was a child; she had always said to him that when he should become king he could do exactly as he pleased. now, after a while, he began to find out that this was not true, and it made him angry. the first time that he noticed that even a king could not always have his own way was on a day when he went hunting. it happened that he got no game. this put him in such a bad temper that he grumbled and scolded all the way home. the little gold ring began to feel tight and uncomfortable. when he reached the palace his pet dog ran to meet him. "go away!" said the prince, crossly. but the little dog was so used to being petted that he only jumped up on his master, and tried to kiss his hand. the prince turned and kicked the little creature. at the instant, he felt a sharp prick in his little finger, like a pin prick. "what nonsense!" said the prince to himself. "am i not king of the whole land? may i not kick my own dog, if i choose? what evil is there in that?" a silver voice spoke in his ear: "the king of the land has a right to do good, but not evil; you have been guilty of bad temper and of cruelty to-day; see that you do better to-morrow." the prince turned sharply, but no one was to be seen; yet he recognised the voice as that of fairy candide. he followed her advice for a little, but presently he forgot, and the ring pricked him so sharply that his finger had a drop of blood on it. this happened again and again, for the prince grew more self-willed and headstrong every day; he had some bad friends, too, who urged him on, in the hope that he would ruin himself and give them a chance to seize the throne. he treated his people carelessly and his servants cruelly, and everything he wanted he felt that he must have. the ring annoyed him terribly; it was embarrassing for a king to have a drop of blood on his finger all the time! at last he took the ring off and put it out of sight. then he thought he should be perfectly happy, having his own way; but instead, he grew more unhappy as he grew less good. whenever he was crossed, or could not have his own way instantly, he flew into a passion. finally, he wanted something that he really could not have. this time it was a most beautiful young girl, named zelia; the prince saw her, and loved her so much that he wanted at once to make her his queen. to his great astonishment, she refused. "am i not pleasing to you?" asked the prince in surprise. "you are very handsome, very charming, prince," said zelia; "but you are not like the good king, your father; i fear you would make me very miserable if i were your queen." in a great rage, prince cherry ordered the young girl to be put in prison; and the key of her dungeon he kept. he told one of his friends, a wicked man who flattered him for his own purposes, about the thing, and asked his advice. "are you not king?" said the bad friend. "may you not do as you will? keep the girl in a dungeon till she does as you command, and if she will not, sell her as a slave." "but would it not be a disgrace for me to harm an innocent creature?" said the prince. "it would be a disgrace to you to have it said that one of your subjects dared disobey you!" said the courtier. he had cleverly touched the prince's worst trait, his pride. prince cherry went at once to zelia's dungeon, prepared to do this cruel thing. zelia was gone. no one had the key save the prince himself; yet she was gone. the only person who could have dared to help her, thought the prince, was his old tutor, suliman, the only man left who ever rebuked him for anything. in fury, he ordered suliman to be put in fetters and brought before him. as his servants left him, to carry out the wicked order, there was a clash, as of thunder, in the room, and then a blinding light. fairy candide stood before him. her beautiful face was stern, and her silver voice rang like a trumpet, as she said, "wicked and selfish prince, you have become baser than the beasts you hunt; you are furious as a lion, revengeful as a serpent, greedy as a wolf, and brutal as a bull; take, therefore, the shape of those beasts whom you resemble!" with horror, the prince felt himself being transformed into a monster. he tried to rush upon the fairy and kill her, but she had vanished with her words. as he stood, her voice came from the air, saying, sadly, "learn to conquer your pride by being in submission to your own subjects." at the same moment, prince cherry felt himself being transported to a distant forest, where he was set down by a clear stream. in the water he saw his own terrible image; he had the head of a lion, with bull's horns, the feet of a wolf, and a tail like a serpent. and as he gazed in horror, the fairy's voice whispered, "your soul has become more ugly than your shape is; you yourself have deformed it." the poor beast rushed away from the sound of her words, but in a moment he stumbled into a trap, set by bear-catchers. when the trappers found him they were delighted to have caught a curiosity, and they immediately dragged him to the palace courtyard. there he heard the whole court buzzing with gossip. prince cherry had been struck by lightning and killed, was the news, and the five favourite courtiers had struggled to make themselves rulers, but the people had refused them, and offered the crown to suliman, the good old tutor. even as he heard this, the prince saw suliman on the steps of the palace, speaking to the people. "i will take the crown to keep in trust," he said. "perhaps the prince is not dead." "he was a bad king; we do not want him back," said the people. "i know his heart," said suliman, "it is not all bad; it is tainted, but not corrupt; perhaps he will repent and come back to us a good king." when the beast heard this, it touched him so much that he stopped tearing at his chains, and became gentle. he let his keepers lead him away to the royal menagerie without hurting them. life was very terrible to the prince, now, but he began to see that he had brought all his sorrow on himself, and he tried to bear it patiently. the worst to bear was the cruelty of the keeper. at last, one night, this keeper was in great danger; a tiger got loose, and attacked him. "good enough! let him die!" thought prince cherry. but when he saw how helpless the keeper was, he repented, and sprang to help. he killed the tiger and saved the keeper's life. as he crouched at the keeper's feet, a voice said, "good actions never go unrewarded!" and the terrible monster was changed into a pretty little white dog. the keeper carried the beautiful little dog to the court and told the story, and from then on, cherry was carefully treated, and had the best of everything. but in order to keep the little dog from growing, the queen ordered that he should be fed very little, and that was pretty hard for the poor prince. he was often half starved, although so much petted. one day he had carried his crust of bread to a retired spot in the palace woods, where he loved to be, when he saw a poor old woman hunting for roots, and seeming almost starved. "poor thing," he thought, "she is even more hungry than i"; and he ran up and dropped the crust at her feet. the woman ate it, and seemed greatly refreshed. cherry was glad of that, and he was running happily back to his kennel when he heard cries of distress, and suddenly he saw some rough men dragging along a young girl, who was weeping and crying for help. what was his horror to see that the young girl was zelia! oh, how he wished he were the monster once more, so that he could kill the men and rescue her! but he could do nothing except bark, and bite at the heels of the wicked men. that did not stop them; they drove him off, with blows, and carried zelia into a palace in the wood. poor cherry crouched by the steps, and watched. his heart was full of pity and rage. but suddenly he thought, "i was as bad as these men; i myself put zelia in prison, and would have treated her worse still, if i had not been prevented." the thought made him so sorry and ashamed that he repented bitterly the evil he had done. presently a window opened, and cherry saw zelia lean out and throw down a piece of meat. he seized it and was just going to devour it, when the old woman to whom he had given his crust snatched it away and took him in her arms. "no, you shall not eat it, you poor little thing," she said, "for every bit of food in that house is poisoned." at the same moment, a voice said, "good actions never go unrewarded!" and instantly prince cherry was transformed into a little white dove. with great joy, he flew to the open palace window to seek out his zelia, to try to help her. but though he hunted in every room, no zelia was to be found. he had to fly away, without seeing her. he wanted more than anything else to find her, and stay near her, so he flew out into the world, to seek her. he sought her in many lands, until one day, in a far eastern country, he found her sitting in a tent, by the side of an old, white-haired hermit. cherry was wild with delight. he flew to her shoulder, caressed her hair with his beak, and cooed in her ear. "you dear, lovely little thing!" said zelia. "will you stay with me? if you will, i will love you always." "ah, zelia, see what you have done!" laughed the hermit. at that instant, the white dove vanished, and prince cherry stood there, as handsome and charming as ever, and with a look of kindness and modesty in his eyes which had never been there before. at the same time, the hermit stood up, his flowing hair changed to shining gold, and his face became a lovely woman's face; it was the fairy candide. "zelia has broken your spell," she said to the prince, "as i meant she should, when you were worthy of her love." zelia and prince cherry fell at the fairy's feet. but with a beautiful smile she bade them come to their kingdom. in a trice, they were transported to the prince's palace, where king suliman greeted them with tears of joy. he gave back the throne with all his heart, and king cherry ruled again, with zelia for his queen. he wore the little gold ring all the rest of his life, but never once did it have to prick him hard enough to make his finger bleed. footnotes: [ ] a shortened version of the familiar tale. the gold in the orchard[ ] there was once a farmer who had a fine olive orchard. he was very industrious, and the farm always prospered under his care. but he knew that his three sons despised the farm work, and were eager to make wealth fast, through adventure. when the farmer was old, and felt that his time had come to die, he called the three sons to him and said, "my sons, there is a pot of gold hidden in the olive orchard. dig for it, if you wish it." the sons tried to get him to tell them in what part of the orchard the gold was hidden; but he would tell them nothing more. after the farmer was dead, the sons went to work to find the pot of gold; since they did not know where the hiding-place was, they agreed to begin in a line, at one end of the orchard, and to dig until one of them should find the money. they dug until they had turned up the soil from one end of the orchard to the other, round the tree-roots and between them. but no pot of gold was to be found. it seemed as if some one must have stolen it, or as if the farmer had been wandering in his wits. the three sons were bitterly disappointed to have all their work for nothing. the next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given before; the fine cultivating they had had from the digging brought so much fruit, and of so fine a quality, that when it was sold it gave the sons a whole pot of gold! and when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meant when he said, "there is gold hidden in the orchard; dig for it." footnotes: [ ] an italian folk tale. margaret of new orleans if you ever go to the beautiful city of new orleans, somebody will be sure to take you down into the old business part of the city, where there are banks and shops and hotels, and show you a statue which stands in a little square there. it is the statue of a woman, sitting in a low chair, with her arms around a child, who leans against her. the woman is not at all pretty: she wears thick, common shoes, a plain dress, with a little shawl, and a sun-bonnet; she is stout and short, and her face is a square-chinned irish face; but her eyes look at you like your mother's. now there is something very surprising about this statue: it was the first one that was ever made in america in honour of a woman. even in europe there are not many monuments to women, and most of the few are to great queens or princesses, very beautiful and very richly dressed. you see, this statue in new orleans is not quite like anything else. it is the statue of a woman named margaret. her whole name was margaret haughery, but no one in new orleans remembers her by it, any more than you think of your dearest sister by her full name; she is just margaret. this is her story, and it tells why people made a monument for her. when margaret was a tiny baby, her father and mother died, and she was adopted by two young people as poor and as kind as her own parents. she lived with them until she grew up. then she married, and had a little baby of her own. but very soon her husband died, and then the baby died, too, and margaret was all alone in the world. she was poor, but she was strong, and knew how to work. all day, from morning until evening, she ironed clothes in a laundry. and every day, as she worked by the window, she saw the little motherless children from the orphan asylum, near by, working and playing about. after a while, there came a great sickness upon the city, and so many mothers and fathers died that there were more orphans than the asylum could possibly take care of. they needed a good friend, now. you would hardly think, would you, that a poor woman who worked in a laundry could be much of a friend to them? but margaret was. she went straight to the kind sisters who had the asylum and told them she was going to give them part of her wages and was going to work for them, besides. pretty soon she had worked so hard that she had some money saved from her wages. with this, she bought two cows and a little delivery cart. then she carried her milk to her customers in the little cart every morning; and as she went, she begged the pieces of food left over from the hotels and rich houses, and brought it back in the cart to the hungry children in the asylum. in the very hardest times that was often all the food the poor children had. a part of the money margaret earned went every week to the asylum, and after a few years that was made very much larger and better. margaret was so careful and so good at business that, in spite of her giving, she bought more cows and earned more money. with this, she built a home for orphan babies; she called it her baby house. after a time, margaret had a chance to get a bakery, and then she became a bread-woman instead of a milk-woman. she carried the bread just as she had carried the milk, in her cart. and still she kept giving money to the asylum. then the great war came, the civil war. in all the trouble and sickness and fear of that time, margaret drove her cart of bread; and somehow she had always enough to give the starving soldiers, and for her babies, beside what she sold. and despite all this, she earned enough so that when the war was over she built a big steam factory for her bread. by this time everybody in the city knew her. the children all over the city loved her; the business men were proud of her; the poor people all came to her for advice. she used to sit at the open door of her office, in a calico gown and a little shawl, and give a good word to everybody, rich or poor. then, by and by, one day, margaret died. and when it was time to read her will, the people found that, with all her giving, she had still saved a great deal of money, and that she had left every penny of it to the different orphan asylums of the city,--each one of them was given something. whether they were for white children or black, for jews, catholics, or protestants, made no difference; for margaret always said, "they are all orphans alike." and just think, dears, that splendid, wise will was signed with a cross instead of a name, for margaret had never learned to read or write! when the people of new orleans knew that margaret was dead, they said, "she was a mother to the motherless; she was a friend to those who had no friends; she had wisdom greater than schools can teach; we will not let her memory go from us." so they made a statue of her, just as she used to look, sitting in her own office door, or driving in her own little cart. and there it stands to-day, in memory of the great love and the great power of plain margaret haughery, of new orleans. the dagda's harp you know, dears, in the old countries there are many fine stories about things which happened so very long ago that nobody knows exactly how much of them is true. ireland is like that. it is so old that even as long ago as four thousand years it had people who dug in the mines, and knew how to weave cloth and to make beautiful ornaments out of gold, and who could fight and make laws; but we do not know just where they came from, nor exactly how they lived. these people left us some splendid stories about their kings, their fights, and their beautiful women; but it all happened such a long time ago that the stories are mixtures of things that really happened and what people said about them, and we don't know just which is which. the stories are called _legends_. one of the prettiest legends is the story i am going to tell you about the dagda's harp. it is said that there were two quite different kinds of people in ireland: one set of people with long dark hair and dark eyes, called fomorians--they carried long slender spears made of golden bronze when they fought--and another race of people who were golden-haired and blue-eyed, and who carried short, blunt, heavy spears of dull metal. the golden-haired people had a great chieftain who was also a kind of high priest, who was called the dagda. and this dagda had a wonderful magic harp. the harp was beautiful to look upon, mighty in size, made of rare wood, and ornamented with gold and jewels; and it had wonderful music in its strings, which only the dagda could call out. when the men were going out to battle, the dagda would set up his magic harp and sweep his hand across the strings, and a war song would ring out which would make every warrior buckle on his armour, brace his knees, and shout, "forth to the fight!" then, when the men came back from the battle, weary and wounded, the dagda would take his harp and strike a few chords, and as the magic music stole out upon the air, every man forgot his weariness and the smart of his wounds, and thought of the honour he had won, and of the comrade who had died beside him, and of the safety of his wife and children. then the song would swell out louder, and every warrior would remember only the glory he had helped win for the king; and each man would rise at the great table, his cup in his hand, and shout "long live the king!" there came a time when the fomorians and the golden-haired men were at war; and in the midst of a great battle, while the dagda's hall was not so well guarded as usual, some of the chieftains of the fomorians stole the great harp from the wall, where it hung, and fled away with it. their wives and children and some few of their soldiers went with them, and they fled fast and far through the night, until they were a long way from the battlefield. then they thought they were safe, and they turned aside into a vacant castle, by the road, and sat down to a banquet, hanging the stolen harp on the wall. the dagda, with two or three of his warriors, had followed hard on their track. and while they were in the midst of their banqueting, the door was suddenly burst open, and the dagda stood there, with his men. some of the fomorians sprang to their feet, but before any of them could grasp a weapon, the dagda called out to his harp on the wall, "come to me, o my harp!" the great harp recognised its master's voice, and leaped from the wall. whirling through the hall, sweeping aside and killing the men who got in its way, it sprang to its master's hand. and the dagda took his harp and swept his hand across the strings in three great, solemn chords. the harp answered with the magic music of tears. as the wailing harmony smote upon the air, the women of the fomorians bowed their heads and wept bitterly, the strong men turned their faces aside, and the little children sobbed. again the dagda touched the strings, and this time the magic music of mirth leaped from the harp. and when they heard that music of mirth, the young warriors of the fomorians began to laugh; they laughed till the cups fell from their grasp, and the spears dropped from their hands, while the wine flowed from the broken bowls; they laughed until their limbs were helpless with excess of glee. once more the dagda touched his harp, but very, very softly. and now a music stole forth as soft as dreams, and as sweet as joy: it was the magic music of sleep. when they heard that, gently, gently, the fomorian women bowed their heads in slumber; the little children crept to their mothers' laps; the old men nodded; and the young warriors drooped in their seats and closed their eyes: one after another all the fomorians sank into sleep. when they were all deep in slumber, the dagda took his magic harp, and he and his golden-haired warriors stole softly away, and came in safety to their own homes again. the tailor and the three beasts[ ] there was once a tailor in galway, and he started out on a journey to go to the king's court at dublin. he had not gone far when he met a white horse, and he saluted him. "god save you," said the tailor. "god save you," said the horse. "where are you going?" "i am going to dublin," said the tailor, "to build a court for the king and to get a lady for a wife, if i am able to do it." for, it seems the king had promised his daughter and a great lot of money to anyone who should be able to build up his court. the trouble was, that three giants lived in the wood near the court, and every night they came out of the wood and threw down all that was built by day. so nobody could get the court built. "would you make me a hole," said the old white garraun, "where i could go in to hide whenever the people come to fetch me to the mill or the kiln, so that they won't see me; for they tire me out doing work for them?" "i'll do that, indeed," said the tailor, "and welcome." he brought his spade and shovel, and he made a hole, and he asked the old white horse to go down into it so that he could see if it would fit him. the white horse went down into the hole, but when he tried to come up again, he was not able. "make a place for me now," said the white horse, "by which i can come up out of the hole here, whenever i am hungry." "i will not," said the tailor; "remain where you are until i come back, and i'll lift you up." the tailor went forward next day, and the fox met him. "god save you," said the fox. "god save you," said the tailor. "where are you going?" said the fox. "i'm going to dublin, to try to make a court for the king." "would you make a place for me where i can hide?" said the fox. "the rest of the foxes are always beating me, and they will not allow me to eat anything with them." "i'll do that for you," said the tailor. he took his axe and his saw, and he made a thing like a crate, and he told the fox to get into it so that he could see whether it would fit him. the fox went into it, and when the tailor had him down, he shut him in. when the fox was satisfied at last that he had a nice place of it within, he asked the tailor to let him out, and the tailor answered that he would not. "wait there until i come back again," said he. the tailor went forward the next day, and he had not walked very far when he met a lion; and the lion greeted him. "god save you," said the lion. "god save you," said the tailor. "where are you going?" said the lion. "i'm going to dublin to make a court for the king if i am able to make it," said the tailor. "if you were to make a plough for me," said the lion, "i and the other lions could be ploughing and harrowing until we'd have a bit to eat in the harvest." "i'll do that for you," said the tailor. he brought his axe and his saw, and he made a plough. when the plough was made he put a hole in the beam of it, and got the lion to go in under the plough so that he might see if he was any good as a ploughman. he placed the lion's tail in the hole he had made for it, and then clapped in a peg, and the lion was not able to draw out his tail again. "loose me now," said the lion, "and we'll fix ourselves and go ploughing." the tailor said he would not loose him until he came back himself. he left him there then, and he came to dublin. when he arrived, he engaged workmen and began to build the court. at the end of the day he had the workmen put a great stone on top of the work. when the great stone was raised up, the tailor put some sort of contrivance under it, that he might be able to throw it down as soon as the giants came near to it. the workpeople then went home, and the tailor went in hiding behind the big stone. when the darkness of the night was come, he saw the three giants arriving, and they began throwing down the court until they arrived at the place where the tailor was in hiding up above, and one of them struck a blow with his sledge on the place where he was. the tailor threw down the stone, and it fell on him and killed him. the other two went home then and left all of the court that was remaining without throwing it down, since their companion was dead. the workmen came again the next day, and they were working until night, and as they were going home the tailor told them to put up the big stone on the top of the work, as it had been the night before. they did that for him, went home, and the tailor went in hiding the same as he did the evening before. when the people had all gone to rest, the two giants came, and they were throwing down all that was before them, but as soon as they began, the tailor commenced manoeuvring until he was able to throw down the great stone, so that it fell upon the skull of the giant that was under him, and it killed him. after this there was only the one giant left, and he never came again until the court was finished. then when the work was over, the tailor went to the king and told him to give him his wife and his money, as he had the court finished; and the king said he would not give him any wife until he had killed the other giant, for he said that it was not by his strength he had killed the two giants before, and that he would give him nothing now until he killed the other one for him. then the tailor said that he would kill the other giant for him, and welcome; that there should be no delay at all about that. the tailor went then till he came to the place where the other giant was, and asked did he want a servant-boy. the giant said he did want one, if he could get one who would do everything that he would do himself. "anything that you will do, i will do," said the tailor. they went to their dinner then, and when they had eaten it, the giant asked the tailor "would he dare to swallow as much boiling broth as himself." the tailor said, "i will certainly do that, but you must give me an hour before we commence." the tailor went out then, and he got a sheepskin, which he sewed up until he made a bag of it, and he slipped it down under his coat. he came in then and told the giant first to drink a gallon of the broth himself. the giant drank that up while it was boiling. "i'll do that," said the tailor. he went on until it was all poured into the skin, and the giant thought he had drunk it. the giant drank another gallon then, and the tailor let another gallon down into the skin, but the giant thought he was drinking it. "i'll do a thing now that you will not dare to do," said the tailor. "you will not," said the giant. "what is it you would do?" "make a hole and let out the broth again," said the tailor. "do it yourself first," said the giant. the tailor gave a prod of the knife, and he let the broth out of the skin. "now you do that," said he. "i will," said the giant, giving such a prod of the knife into his own stomach that he killed himself. that is the way the tailor killed the third giant. he went to the king then, and desired him to send him out his wife and his money, saying that he would throw down the court again if he did not do so immediately. they were afraid then that he would throw down the court, and they sent the wife to him. when the tailor was a day gone, himself and his wife, they repented and followed him to take his wife away from him again. the people who went after him followed him until they came to the place where the lion was, and the lion said to them, "the tailor and his wife were here yesterday. i saw them going by, and if you will loose me now, i am swifter than you, and i will follow them until i overtake them." when they heard that, they released the lion. the lion and the people of dublin went on, and pursued the tailor, until they came to the place where the fox was, and the fox greeted them, and said, "the tailor and his wife were here this morning, and if you will loose me, i am swifter than you, and i will follow them, and overtake them." they therefore set the fox free. the lion and the fox and the army of dublin went on then, trying to catch the tailor, and they kept going until they came to the place where the old white garraun was, and the old white garraun told them that the tailor and his wife were there in the morning, and "loose me," said he; "i am swifter than you, and i'll overtake them." they released the old white garraun then, and the old white garraun, the fox, the lion, and the army of dublin pursued the tailor and his wife, and it was not long before they came up with them. when the tailor saw them coming, he got out of the coach with his wife, and he sat down on the ground. when the old white garraun saw the tailor sitting on the ground, he said, "that's the position he was in when he made the hole for me, that i couldn't get out of, when i went down into it. i'll go no nearer to him." "no!" said the fox, "but that's the way he was when he was making the thing for me, and i'll go no nearer to him." "no!" says the lion, "but that's the very way he had, when he was making the plough that i was caught in. i'll go no nearer to him." they all left him then and returned. the tailor and his wife came home to galway. footnotes: [ ] from _beside the fire_, douglas hyde (david nutt). how the sea became salt this story was told long ago by our northern forefathers who brought it with them in their dragon ships when they crossed the north sea to settle in england. in those days men were apt to invent stories to account for things about them which seemed peculiar, and loving the sea as they did, it is not strange that they had remarked the peculiarity of the ocean water and had found a reason why it is so different from the water in the rivers and steams. this is not the only story that has come down to tell us how people of old accounted for the sea being salt. there are many such stories, each different from the other, all showing that the same childlike spirit of inquiry was at work in different places, striving to find an answer to this riddle of nature. * * * * * there sprang from the sons of odin a race of men who became mighty kings of the earth, and one of these, named frode, ruled over the lands that are called denmark. now about this time were found in denmark two great millstones, so large that no one had the strength to turn them. so frode sent for all the wise men of the land and bade them examine the stones and tell him of what use they were, since no one could grind with them. and after the wise men had looked closely at them and read the magic letters which were cut upon their edge, they said that the millstones were precious indeed, since they would grind out of nothing anything that the miller might wish. so king frode sent messengers over the world to find for him two servants who would be strong enough to grind with the millstones, and after a long, long time his messengers found him two maid-servants, who were bigger and stronger than anyone in denmark had ever seen. but no one guessed that these were really giant-maidens who bore a grudge against all of the race of odin. directly the giant-maidens were brought before frode, and before they had rested after their long journey, or satisfied their hunger, he bade them go to the mill, and grind for him gold and peace and happiness. "they sang and swung the swift mill stone, and with loud voice they made their moan. 'we grind for frode wealth and gold abundant riches he shall behold.'" presently frode came into the mill to see that the new servants were performing their task diligently. and as he watched them from the shadow by the door, the maidens stayed their grinding for a while to rest. the greedy man could not bear to see even an instant's pause, and he came out of the shadow, and bade them, with harsh words, go on grinding, and cease not except for so long as the cuckoo was silent, or while he himself sang a song. now it was early summer-time, and the cuckoo was calling all the day and most of the night. so the giant-maidens waxed very wroth with king frode, and as they resumed their labours they sang a song of the hardness of their lot in the household of this pitiless king. they had been grinding out wealth and happiness and peace, but now they bade the magic stones to grind something very different. presently, as the great stones moved round and round, frode, who still stood by, heard one chant in a low, sing-song voice,-- "i see a fire east of the town--the curlews awake and sound a note of warning. a host approaches in haste, to burn the dwelling of the king." and the next took up her song,-- "no longer will frode sit on his throne, and rule over rings of red gold and mighty millstones. now must we grind with all our might--and, behold! red warriors come forth--and revenge, and bloodshed, and ruin." then frode shook from head to foot in his terror, for he heard the tramp of a mighty host of warriors advancing from the sea. and as he looked for a way of escape, the braces of the millstones broke with the strong grinding, and fell in two. and the whole world shook and trembled with the mighty shock of that breaking. but through the crash and din came the voices of the giant-maidens, loudly chanting,-- "we have turned the stone round; though weary the maidens, see what they have ground!" and that same night a mighty sea-king came up and slew frode and plundered his city. when he had sacked the city, the sea-king took on board his ship the two giant-maidens, and with them the broken millstones. and he bade them begin at once to grind salt, for of this he had very scanty store. so they ground and ground; and in the middle of the night, being weary, they asked the sea-king if he had not got salt enough. but the sea-king was hard of heart, like frode, and he roughly bade them go on grinding. and the maidens did so, and worked to such effect that within a short time the millstones had ground out so much salt that the weight of it began to sink the ship. down, down it sank, ship and giants and millstones, and in that spot, in the very middle of the ocean, arose a whirlpool, from whence the salt is carried north and south, east and west, throughout the waters of the earth. and that is how the sea became salt. the castle of fortune[ ] one lovely summer morning, just as the sun rose, two travellers started on a journey. they were both strong young men, but one was a lazy fellow and the other was a worker. as the first sunbeams came over the hills, they shone on a great castle standing on the heights, as far away as the eye could see. it was a wonderful and beautiful castle, all glistening towers that gleamed like marble, and glancing windows that shone like crystal. the two young men looked at it eagerly, and longed to go nearer. suddenly, out of the distance, something like a great butterfly, of white and gold, swept toward them. and when it came nearer, they saw that it was a most beautiful lady, robed in floating garments as fine as cobwebs and wearing on her head a crown so bright that no one could tell whether it was of diamonds or of dew. she stood, light as air, on a great, shining, golden ball, which rolled along with her, swifter than the wind. as she passed the travellers, she turned her face to them and smiled. "follow me!" she said. the lazy man sat down in the grass with a discontented sigh. "she has an easy time of it!" he said. but the industrious man ran after the lovely lady and caught the hem of her floating robe in his grasp. "who are you, and whither are you going?" he asked. "i am the fairy of fortune," the beautiful lady said, "and that is my castle. you may reach it to-day, if you will; there is time, if you waste none. if you reach it before the last stroke of midnight, i will receive you there, and will be your friend. but if you come one second after midnight, it will be too late." when she had said this, her robe slipped from the traveller's hand and she was gone. the industrious man hurried back to his friend, and told him what the fairy had said. "the idea!" said the lazy, man, and he laughed; "of course, if we had a horse there would be some chance, but _walk_ all that way? no, thank you!" "then good-bye," said his friend, "i am off." and he set out, down the road toward the shining castle, with a good steady stride, his eyes straight ahead. the lazy man lay down in the soft grass, and looked rather wistfully at the far-away towers. "if only i had a good horse!" he sighed. just at that moment he felt something warm nosing about at his shoulder, and heard a little whinny. he turned round, and there stood a little horse! it was a dainty creature, gentle-looking, and finely built, and it was saddled and bridled. "hello!" said the lazy man. "luck often comes when one isn't looking for it!" and in an instant he had leaped on the horse, and headed him for the castle of fortune. the little horse started at a fine pace, and in a very few minutes they overtook the other traveller, plodding along on foot. "how do you like shank's pony?" laughed the lazy man, as he passed his friend. the industrious man only nodded, and kept on with his steady stride, eyes straight ahead. the horse kept his good pace, and by noon the towers of the castle stood out against the sky, much nearer and more beautiful. exactly at noon, the horse turned aside from the road, into a shady grove on a hill, and stopped. "wise beast," said his rider: "'haste makes waste,' and all things are better in moderation. i'll follow your example, and eat and rest a bit." he dismounted and sat down in the cool moss, with his back against a tree. he had a lunch in his traveller's pouch, and he ate it comfortably. then he felt drowsy from the heat and the early ride, so he pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled himself for a nap. "it will go all the better for a little rest," he said. that _was_ a sleep! he slept like the seven sleepers, and he dreamed the most beautiful things you could imagine. at last, he dreamed that he had entered the castle of fortune and was being received with great festivities. everything he wanted was brought to him, and music played while fireworks were set off in his honour. the music was so loud that he awoke. he sat up, rubbing his eyes, and behold, the fireworks were the very last rays of the setting sun, and the music was the voice of the other traveller, passing the grove on foot! "time to be off," said the lazy man, and looked about him for the pretty horse. no horse was to be found. the only living thing near was an old, bony, grey donkey. the man called, and whistled, and looked, but no little horse appeared. after a long while he gave it up, and, since there was nothing better to do, he mounted the old grey donkey and set out again. the donkey was slow, and he was hard to ride, but he was better than nothing; and gradually the lazy man saw the towers of the castle draw nearer. now it began to grow dark; in the castle windows the lights began to show. then came trouble! slower, and slower, went the grey donkey; slower, and slower, till, in the very middle of a pitch-black wood, he stopped and stood still. not a step would he budge for all the coaxing and scolding and beating his rider could give. at last the rider kicked him, as well as beat him, and at that the donkey felt that he had had enough. up went his hind heels, and down went his head, and over it went the lazy man on to the stony ground. there he lay groaning for many minutes, for it was not a soft place, i can assure you. how he wished he were in a soft, warm bed, with his aching bones comfortable in blankets! the very thought of it made him remember the castle of fortune, for he knew there must be fine beds there. to get to those beds he was even willing to bestir his poor limbs, so he sat up and felt about him for the donkey. no donkey was to be found. the lazy man crept round and round the spot where he had fallen, scratched his hands on the stumps, tore his face in the briers, and bumped his knees on the stones. but no donkey was there. he would have laid down to sleep again, but he could hear now the howls of hungry wolves in the woods; that it did not sound pleasant. finally, his hand struck against something that felt like a saddle. he grasped it, thankfully, and started to mount his donkey. the beast he took hold of seemed very small, and, as he mounted, he felt that its sides were moist and slimy. it gave him a shudder, and he hesitated; but at that moment he heard a distant clock strike. it was striking eleven! there was still time to reach the castle of fortune, but no more than enough; so he mounted his new steed and rode on once more. the animal was easier to sit on than the donkey, and the saddle seemed remarkably high behind; it was good to lean against. but even the donkey was not so slow as this; the new steed was slower than he. after a while, however, he pushed his way out of the woods into the open, and there stood the castle, only a little way ahead! all its windows were ablaze with lights. a ray from them fell on the lazy man's beast, and he saw what he was riding: it was a gigantic snail! a snail as large as a calf! a cold shudder ran over the lazy man's body, and he would have got off his horrid animal then and there, but just then the clock struck once more. it was the first of the long, slow strokes that mark midnight! the man grew frantic when he heard it. he drove his heels into the snail's sides, to make him hurry. instantly, the snail drew in his head, curled up in his shell, and left the lazy man sitting in a heap on the ground! the clock struck twice. if the man had run for it, he could still have reached the castle, but, instead, he sat still and shouted for a horse. "a beast, a beast!" he wailed, "any kind of a beast that will take me to the castle!" the clock struck three times. and as it struck the third note, something came rustling and rattling out of the darkness, something that sounded like a horse with harness. the lazy man jumped on its back, a very queer, low back. as he mounted, he saw the doors of the castle open, and saw his friend standing on the threshold, waving his cap and beckoning to him. the clock struck four times, and the new steed began to stir; as it struck five, he moved a pace forward; as it struck six, he stopped; as it struck seven, he turned himself about; as it struck eight, he began to move backward, away from the castle! the lazy man shouted, and beat him, but the beast went slowly backward. and the clock struck nine. the man tried to slide off, then, but from all sides of his strange animal great arms came reaching up and held him fast. and in the next ray of moonlight that broke the dark clouds, he saw that he was mounted on a monster crab! one by one, the lights went out, in the castle windows. the clock struck ten. backward went the crab. eleven! still the crab went backward. the clock struck twelve! then the great doors shut with a clang, and the castle of fortune was closed for ever to the lazy man. what became of him and his crab no one knows to this day, and no one cares. but the industrious man was received by the fairy of fortune, and made happy in the castle as long as he wanted to stay. and ever afterward she was his friend, helping him not only to happiness for himself, but also showing him how to help others, wherever he went. footnotes: [ ] adapted from the german of _der faule und der fleissige_, by robert reinick. david and goliath[ ] a long time ago, there was a boy named david, who lived in a country in the far east. he was good to look upon, for he had fair hair and a ruddy skin; and he was very strong and brave and modest. he was shepherd-boy for his father, and all day--often all night--he was out in the fields, far from home, watching over the sheep. he had to guard them from wild animals, and lead them to the right pastures, and care for them. by and by, war broke out between the people of david's country and a people that lived near at hand; these men were called philistines, and the people of david's country were named israelites. all the strong men of israel went up to the battle, to fight for their king. david's three older brothers went, but he was only a boy, so he was left behind to care for the sheep. after the brothers had been gone some time, david's father longed very much to hear from them, and to know if they were safe; so he sent for david, from the fields, and said to him, "take now for thy brothers an ephah of this parched corn, and these ten loaves, and run to the camp, where thy brothers are; and carry these ten cheeses to the captain of their thousand, and see how thy brothers fare, and bring me word again." (an ephah is about three pecks.) david rose early in the morning, and left the sheep with a keeper, and took the corn and the loaves and the cheeses, as his father had commanded him, and went to the camp of the israelites. the camp stood on a mountain on the one side, and the philistines stood on a mountain on the other side; and there was a valley between. david came to the place where the israelites were, just as the host was going forth to the fight, shouting for the battle. so he left his gifts in the hands of the keeper of the baggage, and ran into the army, amongst the soldiers, to find his brothers. when he found them, he saluted them and began to talk with them. but while he was asking them the questions his father had commanded, there arose a great shouting and tumult among the israelites, and men came running back from the front line of battle; everything became confusion. david looked to see what the trouble was, and he saw a strange sight: down the slope of the opposite mountain came striding a philistine warrior, calling out something in a taunting voice; he was a gigantic man, the largest david had ever seen, and he was covered with armour, that shone in the sun: he had a helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders; his spear was so tremendous that the staff of it was like a weaver's beam, and his shield so great that a man went before him, to carry it. "who is that?" asked david. "it is goliath, of gath, champion of the philistines," said the soldiers about. "every day, for forty days, he has come forth, so, and challenged us to send a man against him, in single combat; and since no one dares to go out against him alone, the armies cannot fight." (that was one of the laws of warfare in those times.) "what!" said david, "does none dare go out against him?" as he spoke, the giant stood still, on the hillside opposite the host of israel, and shouted his challenge, scornfully. he said, "why are ye come out to set your battle in array? am i not a philistine, and ye servants of saul? choose you a man, and let him come down to me. if he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants; but if i prevail against him, and kill him, then shall ye be our servants, and serve us. i defy the armies of israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together!" when king saul heard these words, he was dismayed, and all the men of israel, when they saw the man, fled from him and were sore afraid. david heard them talking among themselves, whispering and murmuring. they were saying, "have ye seen this man that is come up? surely if anyone killeth him that man will the king make rich; perhaps he will give him his daughter in marriage, and make his family free in israel!" david heard this, and he asked the men if it were so. it was surely so, they said. "but," said david, "who is this philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living god?" and he was stirred with anger. very soon, some of the officers told the king about the youth who was asking so many questions, and who said that it was shame upon israel that a mere philistine should defy the armies of the living god. immediately saul sent for him. when david came before saul, he said to the king, "let no man's heart fail because of him; thy servant will go and fight with this philistine." but saul looked at david, and said, "thou art not able to go against this philistine, to fight with him, for thou art but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth." then david said to saul, "once i was keeping my father's sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock; and i went out after the lion, and struck him; and delivered the lamb out of his mouth, and when he arose against me, i caught him by the beard, and struck him, and slew him! thy servant slew both the lion and the bear; and this philistine shall be as one of them, for he hath defied the armies of the living god. the lord, who delivered me out of the paw of the lion and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this philistine." "go," said saul, "and the lord be with thee!" and he armed david with his own armour,--he put a helmet of brass upon his head, and armed him with a coat of mail. but when david girded his sword upon his armour, and tried to walk, he said to saul, "i cannot go with these, for i am not used to them." and he put them off. then he took his staff in his hand and went and chose five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he had; and his sling was in his hand; and he went out and drew near to the philistine. and the philistine came on and drew near to david; and the man that bore his shield went before him. and when the philistine looked about and saw david, he disdained him, for david was but a boy, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. and he said to david, "am i a dog, that thou comest to me with a cudgel?" and with curses he cried out again, "come to me, and i will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field." but david looked at him, and answered, "thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield; but i come to thee in the name of the lord of hosts, the god of the armies of israel, whom thou hast defied. this day will the lord deliver thee into my hand, and i will smite thee, and take thy head from thee, and i will give the carcasses of the host of the philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a god in israel! and all this assembly shall know that the lord saveth not with sword and spear; for the battle is the lord's, and he will give you into our hands." and then, when the philistine arose, and came, and drew nigh to meet david, david made haste and ran toward the army to meet the philistine. and when he was a little way from him, he put his hand in his bag, and took from thence a stone, and put it in his sling, and slung it, and smote the philistine in the forehead, so that the stone sank into his forehead; and he fell on his face to the earth. and david ran, and stood upon the philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of its sheath, and slew him with it. then, when the philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. but the army of israel pursued them, and victory was with the men of israel. and after the battle, david was taken to the king's tent, and made a captain over many men; and he went no more to his father's house, to herd the sheep, but became a man, in the king's service. footnotes: [ ] from the text of the revised version of the old testament, with introduction and slight interpolations, changes of order, and omissions. the shepherd's song david had many fierce battles to fight for king saul against the enemies of israel, and he won them all. then, later, he had to fight against the king's own soldiers, to save himself, for king saul grew wickedly jealous of david's fame as a soldier, and tried to kill him. twice, when david had a chance to kill the king, he forbore to harm him; but even then, saul continued trying to take his life, and david was kept away from his home as if he were an enemy. but when king saul died, the people chose david for their king, because there was no one so brave, so wise, or so faithful to god. king david lived a long time, and made his people famous for victory and happiness; he had many troubles and many wars, but he always trusted that god would help him, and he never deserted his own people in any hard place. after a battle, or when it was a holiday, or when he was very thankful for something, king david used to make songs, and sing them before the people. some of these songs were so beautiful that they have never been forgotten. after all these hundreds and hundred of years, we sing them still; we call them psalms. often, after david had made a song, his chief musician would sing with him, as the people gathered to worship god. sometimes the singers were divided into two great choruses, and went to the service in two processions; then one chorus would sing a verse of david's song, and the other procession would answer with the next, and then both would sing together; it was very beautiful to hear. even now, we sometimes do that with the songs of david in our churches. one of his psalms that everybody loves is a song that david made when he remembered the days before he came to saul's camp. he remembered the days and nights he used to spend in the fields with the sheep, when he was just a shepherd-boy; and he thought to himself that god had taken care of him just as carefully as he himself used to care for the little lambs. it is a beautiful song; i wish we knew the music that david made for it, but we only know his words. i will tell it to you now, and then you may learn it, to say for yourselves. =the lord is my shepherd; i shall not want. he maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. he restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and i will dwell in the house of the lord for ever.= the hidden servants[ ] this is a legend about a hermit who lived long ago. he lived high up on the mountainside in a tiny cave; his food was roots and acorns, a bit of bread given by a peasant, or a cheese brought by a woman who wanted his prayers; his work was praying, and thinking about god. for forty years he lived so, preaching to the people, praying for them, comforting them in trouble, and, most of all, worshipping in his heart. there was just one thing he cared about: it was to make his soul so pure and perfect that it could be one of the stones in god's great temple of heaven. one day, after the forty years, he had a great longing to know how far along he had got with his work,--how it looked to the heavenly father. and he prayed that he might be shown a man-- "whose soul in the heavenly grace had grown to the selfsame measure as his own; whose treasure on the celestial shore could neither be less than his nor more." as he looked up from his prayer, a white-robed angel stood in the path before him. the hermit bowed before the messenger with great gladness, for he knew that his wish was answered. "go to the nearest town," the angel said, "and there, in the public square, you will find a mountebank (a clown) making the people laugh for money. he is the man you seek; his soul has grown to the selfsame stature as your own; his treasure on the celestial shore is neither less than yours nor more." when the angel had faded from sight, the hermit bowed his head again, but this time with great sorrow and fear. had his forty years of prayer been a terrible mistake, and was his soul indeed like a clown, fooling in the market-place? he knew not what to think. almost he hoped he should not find the man, and could believe that he had dreamed the angel vision. but when he came, after a long, tiring walk to the village, and the square, alas! there was the clown, doing his silly tricks for the crowd. the hermit stood and looked at him with terror and sadness, for he felt that he was looking at his own soul. the face he saw was thin and tired, and though it kept a smile or a grin for the people, it seemed very sad to the hermit. soon the man felt the hermit's eyes; he could not go on with his tricks. and when he had stopped and the crowd had left, the hermit went and drew the man aside to a place where they could rest; for he wanted more than anything else on earth to know what the man's soul was like, because what it was, his was. so, after a little, he asked the clown, very gently, what his life was, what it had been. and the clown answered, very sadly, that it was just as it looked,--a life of foolish tricks, for that was the only way of earning his bread that he knew. "but have you never been anything different?" asked the hermit, painfully. the clown's head sank in his hands. "yes, holy father," he said, "i have been something else. i was a thief! i once belonged to the most wicked band of mountain robbers that ever tormented the land, and i was as wicked as the worst." alas! the hermit felt that his heart was breaking. was this how he looked to the heavenly father--like a thief, a cruel mountain robber? he could hardly speak, and the tears streamed from his old eyes, but he gathered strength to ask one more question. "i beg you," he said, "if you have ever done a single good deed in your life, remember it now, and tell it to me"; for he thought that even one good deed would save him from utter despair. "yes, one," the clown said, "but it was so small, it is not worth telling; my life has been worthless." "tell me that one!" pleaded the hermit. "once," said the man, "our band broke into a convent garden and stole away one of the nuns, to sell as a slave or to keep for a ransom. we dragged her with us over the rough, long way to our mountain camp, and set a guard over her for the night. the poor thing prayed to us so piteously to let her go! and as she begged, she looked from one hard face to another, with trusting, imploring eyes, as if she could not believe men could be really bad. father, when her eyes met mine something pierced my heart! pity and shame leaped up, for the first time, within me. but i made my face as hard and cruel as the rest, and she turned away, hopeless. "when all was dark and still, i stole like a cat to where she lay bound. i put my hand on her wrist and whispered, 'trust me, and i will take you safely home.' i cut her bonds with my knife, and she looked at me to show that she trusted. father, by terrible ways that i knew, hidden from the others, i took her safe to the convent gate. she knocked; they opened; and she slipped inside. and, as she left me, she turned and said, 'god will remember.' "that was all. i could not go back to the old bad life, and i had never learned an honest way to earn my bread. so i became a clown, and must be a clown until i die." "no! no! my son," cried the hermit, and now his tears were tears of joy. "god has remembered; your soul is in his sight even as mine, who have prayed and preached for forty years. your treasure waits for you on the heavenly shore just as mine does." "as _yours_? father, you mock me!" said the clown. but when the hermit told him the story of his prayer and the angel's answer, the poor clown was transfigured with joy, for he knew that his sins were forgiven. and when the hermit went home to his mountain, the clown went with him. he, too, became a hermit, and spent his time in praise and prayer. together they lived, and worked, and helped the poor. and when, after two years, the man who had been a clown died, the hermit felt that he had lost a brother more holy than himself. for ten years more the hermit lived in his mountain hut, thinking always of god, fasting and praying, and doing no least thing that was wrong. then, one day, the wish once more came, to know how his work was growing, and once more he prayed that he might see a being-- "whose soul in the heavenly grace had grown to the selfsame measure as his own; whose treasure on the celestial shore could neither be less than his nor more." once more his prayer was answered. the angel came to him, and told him to go to a certain village on the other side of the mountain, and to a small farm in it, where two women lived. in them he should find two souls like his own, in god's sight. when the hermit came to the door of the little farm, the two women who lived there were overjoyed to see him, for everyone loved and honoured his name. they put a chair for him on the cool porch, and brought food and drink. but the hermit was too eager to wait. he longed greatly to know what the souls of the two women were like, and from their looks he could see only that they were gentle and honest. one was old, and the other of middle age. presently he asked them about their lives. they told him the little there was to tell: they had worked hard always, in the fields with their husbands, or in the house; they had many children; they had seen hard times,--sickness, sorrow; but they had never despaired. "but what of your good deeds," the hermit asked,--"what have you done for god?" "very little," they said, sadly, for they were too poor to give much. to be sure, twice every year, when they killed a sheep for food, they gave half to their poorer neighbours. "that is very good, very faithful," the hermit said. "and is there any other good deed you have done?" "nothing," said the older woman, "unless, unless--it might be called a good deed----" she looked at the younger woman, who smiled back at her. "what?" said the hermit. still the woman hesitated; but at last she said, timidly, "it is not much to tell, father, only this, that it is twenty years since my sister-in-law and i came to live together in the house; we have brought up our families here; and in all the twenty years there has never been a cross word between us, or a look that was less than kind." the hermit bent his head before the two women, and gave thanks in his heart. "if my soul is as these," he said, "i am blessed indeed." and suddenly a great light came into the hermit's mind, and he saw how many ways there are of serving god. some serve him in churches and in hermits' cells, by praise and prayer; some poor souls who have been very wicked turn from their wickedness with sorrow, and serve him with repentance; some live faithfully and gently in humble homes, working, bringing up children, keeping kind and cheerful; some bear pain patiently, for his sake. endless, endless ways there are, that only the heavenly father sees. and so, as the hermit climbed the mountain again, he thought,-- "as he saw the star-like glow of light, in the cottage windows far, how many god's hidden servants are!" footnotes: [ ] adapted, with quotations, from the poem in _the hidden servants_, by francesca alexander. little gottlieb[ ] across the north sea, in a country called germany, lived a little boy named gottlieb. his father had died when he was but a baby, and although from early morning till late at night his mother sat plying her needle, she found it difficult indeed to provide food and clothing and shelter for her little boy and herself. gottlieb was not old enough to work, but he would often sit on a small stool at his mother's feet and dream about the wonderful things he would do for his dear mother when he grew to be a man, and she was comforted as she looked upon her boy, and the thought that she was working for him often gave strength to her tired fingers. but one night gottlieb saw that his mother was more than usually troubled. every now and then she would sigh, and a tear would trickle down her cheek. the little boy had grown quick to read these signs of distress, and he thought, "christmas will be here soon, and dear mother is thinking of what a sad time it will be." what would gottlieb have given to be able to comfort his mother! he could only sit and brood, while his young heart swelled and a lump rose in his throat at the thought that he could do nothing. presently, however, a happy fancy came to him. was not the christ child born on christmas day, and did not he send good gifts to men on his birthday? but then came the thought, "he will never find us. our home is so mean and small." it seemed foolish to hope, but a boy is not long cast down, and as gottlieb sat dreaming, a happy inspiration came to him. stealing softly from the room he took paper and pen, for he had learnt to write, and spelt out, word after word, a letter which he addressed to the christ child. you may be sure that the postman was puzzled what to do with this letter when he sorted it out of the heap in the letter-box. perhaps the burgomaster would know the right thing to do? so the postman took the letter to the great burly man who lived in the big house and wore a gold chain round his neck. the burgomaster opened the envelope, and as he read the letter written in the trembling hand of a child, tears came into his eyes. but he spoke gruffly enough to the postman, "this must be a foolish boy; a small one, i have no doubt." soon christmas morning dawned, and gottlieb woke very early. but others were up before him, for, to his surprise, he saw a strange gentleman with his mother. his wondering eyes soon perceived other unusual objects, for the hearth was piled with wood, and the table was loaded with food and dainties such as he had never even imagined. gottlieb entered the room just as his mother threw herself at the stranger's feet to bless him for his generous goodness to the widow and orphan. "nay, give me no thanks, worthy dame," said the visitor. "rather be grateful to your little son, and to the good lord to whom he wrote for aid." then he turned to gottlieb with a smile, "you see that although you wrote to the christ child, your prayer for aid came only to the burgomaster. the gifts you asked for are here, but they come from my hand." but gottlieb answered him humbly, "nay, sir, the christ child sent them, for he put the thought in your heart." footnotes: [ ] adapted from the poem by phoebe gary, in _a treasury of verse_, part i., m.g. edgar. how the fir tree became the christmas tree[ ] when you stand round the christmas tree and look longingly at the toys hanging from the prickly branches, it does not occur to you to ask why it is always this particular tree that is so honoured at christmas. the dark green fir looks so majestic when laden with bright toys and lit up by christmas candles, that perhaps it is not easy to believe that it is the most modest of trees. but so it is, and because of its humility it was chosen to bear christmas gifts to the children. this is the story: when the christ child was born, all people, animals, trees, and other plants felt that a great happiness had come into the world. and truly, the heavenly father had sent with the holy babe his blessings of peace and goodwill to all. every day people came to see the sweet babe, bringing presents in their hands. by the stable wherein lay the christ child stood three trees, and as the people came and went under their spreading branches, they thought that they, too, would like to give presents to the child. said the palm, "i will choose my biggest leaf and place it as a fan beside the manger to waft soft air to the child." "and i," said the olive, "i will sprinkle sweet-smelling oil over him." "what can i give to the child?" asked the fir. "you?" said the others. "you have nothing to offer. your needles would prick the wee babe, and your tears are sticky." this made the poor fir very unhappy indeed, and it said, sadly, "yes, you are right. i have nothing that would be good enough to offer to the christ child." now, quite near to the trees had stood an angel, who had heard all that had passed. he was moved to pity the fir, who was so lowly and without envy of the other trees, and he resolved to help it. high in the dark of the heavens the stars were beginning to twinkle, and the angel begged some of the little ones to come down and rest upon the branches of the fir. this they were glad to do, and their silvery light shone among the branches just like christmas candles. from where he lay the christ child could see the great dark evening world and the darker forms of the trees keeping watch, like faithful guardians, beside the open door of the stable; and to its delight the fir tree saw the face of the babe illumined with a heavenly smile as he looked upon the twinkling lights. the christ child did not forget the lovely sight, and long afterward he bade that to celebrate his birthday there should be placed in every house a fir tree, which might be lit up with candles to shine for the children as the stars shone for him on his first birthday. was not the fir tree richly rewarded for its meekness? surely there is no other tree that shines on so many happy faces! footnotes: [ ] from the german of hedwig levi. the diamond and the dewdrop[ ] a costly diamond, that had once sparkled in a lady's ring, lay in a field amid tall grasses and oxeye daisies. just above it, was a big dewdrop that clung timidly to a nodding grass-blade. overhead, the blazing sun shone in all his noonday glory. ever since the first pink blush of dawn, the modest dewdrop had gazed fixedly down upon the rich gem, but feared to address a person of such exalted consequence. at last, a large beetle, during his rambles, chanced to espy the diamond, and he also recognised him to be some one of great rank and importance. "sire," he said, making a low bow, "permit your humble servant to offer you greeting." "tha--nks," responded the diamond in languid tones of affectation. as the beetle raised his head from his profound bow, his gaze happened to alight upon the dewdrop. "a relative of yours, i presume, sire?" he remarked affably, waving one of his feelers in the direction of the dewdrop. the diamond burst into a rude, contemptuous laugh. "quite _too_ absurd, i declare!" he exclaimed loftily. "but there, what _can_ you expect from a low, grovelling beetle? away, sir, pass on! your very presence is distasteful to me. the _idea_ of placing me upon the same level--in the same family, as a low-born, mean, insignificant, utterly valueless----" here the diamond fairly choked for breath. "but has he not beauty exactly like your own, sire?" the beetle ventured to interpose, though with a very timid air. "beau--ty!" flashed the diamond, with fine disdain--"the impudent fellow merely apes and imitates me. however, it is some small consolation to remember that 'imitation is the sincerest flattery.' but, even _allowing_ him to possess it, mere beauty without _rank_ is ridiculous and worthless. a boat without _water_--a carriage, but no _horses_--a well, but never a _winch_: such is beauty without rank and wealth! there is no _real worth_ apart from rank and wealth. combine beauty, rank, _and_ wealth, and you have the whole world at your feet. now you know the secret of the world worshipping me." and the diamond sparkled and gleamed with vivid, violet flashes, so that the beetle was glad to shade his eyes. the poor dewdrop had listened silently to all that had passed, and felt so wounded, that at last he wished he never had been born. slowly a bright tear fell and splashed the dust. just then, a skylark fluttered to the ground and eagerly darted his beak at the diamond. "alas!" he piped, with a great sob of disappointment. "what i thought to be a precious dewdrop is only a worthless diamond. my throat is parched for want of water. i must die of thirst!" "really? the world will never get over your loss," cruelly sneered the diamond. but a sudden and noble resolve came to the dewdrop. deeply did he repent his foolish wish. _he could now lay down his life that the life of another might be saved!_ "may _i_ help you, please?" he gently asked. the lark raised his drooping head. "oh, my precious, precious friend, if you will, you can save my life!" "open your mouth then." and the dewdrop slid from the blade of grass, tumbled into the parched beak, and was eagerly swallowed. "ah--well, well!" pondered the beetle as he continued his homeward way. "i've been taught a lesson that i shall not easily forget. yes, yes! simple worth is far better than rank or wealth without modesty and unselfishness--and there is no _true_ beauty where these virtues are absent!" footnotes: [ ] by rev. albert e. sims. [transcriber's notes: all words marked [a] in the original were presumed. the text was not clear enough to make them out definitively. marchen changed to märchen to fit rest of text. standarized punctuation.] international education series edited by william t. harris, a. m., ll. d. _volume ix_. the international education series. mo, cloth, uniform binding. * * * * * the international education series was projected for the purpose of bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old, upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and training for teachers generally. it is edited by w. t. harris, ll. d., united states commissioner of education, who has contributed for the different volumes in the way of introductions, analysis, and commentary. the volumes are tastefully and substantially bound in uniform style. _volumes now ready_ vol. i.--the philosophy of education. by johann k. f. rosenkranz, doctor of theology and professor of philosophy, university of königsberg. translated by anna c. brackett. second edition, revised, with commentary and complete analysis. $ . . vol. ii.--a history of education. by f. v. n. painter, a. m., professor of modern languages and literature, roanoke college, va. $ . . vol. iii.--the rise and early constitution of universities. with a survey of mediÆval education. by s. s. laurie, ll. d., professor of the institutes and history of education, university of edinburgh. $ . . vol. iv.--the ventilation and warming of school buildings. by gilbert b. morrison, teacher of physics and chemistry, kansas city high school. $ . . vol. v.--the education of man. by friedrich froebel. translated and annotated by w. n. hailmann, a. m., superintendent of public schools, la porte, ind. $ . . vol. vi.--elementary psychology and education. by joseph baldwin, a. m., ll. d., author of "the art of school management." $ . . vol. vii.--the senses and the will. 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( ) central disturbances, . ( ) periphero-expressive or articulatory disturbances, . . the organic conditions of learning to speak . parallel between the disturbances of speech in adults and the imperfections of speech in the child i. lalopathy, . a. the impressive peripheral processes disturbed--deafness, . b. the central processes disturbed--dysphasia, . ( ) the sensory processes centrally disturbed, . ( ) the sensori-motor processes of diction disturbed, . ( ) the motor processes centrally disturbed, . c. the expressive peripheral processes disturbed, . ( ) dyslalia and alalia, . ( ) literal pararthria or paralalia, . ( ) bradylalia, or bradyarthria, . ii. dysphasia, . iii. dysmimia, . . development of speech in the child xviii.--first sounds and beginnings of speech in the case of a child observed daily during his first three years xix.--development of the feeling of self, the "i"-feeling xx.--summary of results appendixes. appendix a.--comparative observations concerning the acquirement of speech by german and foreign children (_a_) diary of the child of the baroness von taube, of esthonia, . appendix b.--notes concerning lacking, defective, and arrested mental development in the first years of life appendix c.--reports concerning the process of learning to see, on the part of persons born blind, but acquiring sight through surgical treatment. also some critical remarks i. the chesselden case, . ii, iii. the ware cases, . iv, v. the home cases, . vi. the wardrop case, . vii. the franz case, . final remarks, . a conspectus of the observations of professor preyer on the mind of the child. arranged chronologically by months, for the convenience of those who wish to verify these observations, or to use them as a guide in their own investigations. by h. w. brown. first month. senses.[a] sight.--_light._--five minutes after birth, slight sensibility to light ( ). second day, sensitiveness to light of candle ( ). sixth and seventh days, pleasure in moderately bright daylight ( , ). ninth and tenth days, sensitiveness greater at waking than soon afterward ( ). sleeping babes close the eyes more tightly when light falls on the eyes ( ). eleventh day, pleasure in light of candle and in bright object ( ). _discrimination of colors._--twenty-third day, pleasure in sight of rose-colored curtain ( ). _movements of eyelids._--first to eleventh day, shutting and opening of eyes ( ). irregular movements ( ). lid closed at touch of lashes from sixth day on ( ). twenty-fifth day, eyes opened and shut when child is spoken to or nodded to ( ). pleasure shown by opening eyes wide, displeasure by shutting them tightly; third, sixteenth, and twenty-first days ( ). _movements of eyes._--first day, to right and left ( ). tenth day, non-coördinated movements ( ). third week, irregularity prevails ( ). _direction of look._--eleventh day, to father's face and to the light ( ). upward look ( ). twenty-third day, active looking begins ( ). twenty-third and thirtieth days, a moving light followed ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--twelfth day, hypermetropia ( ). hearing.--first days, all children deaf ( ). fourth day, child hears noises like clapping of hands ( ). eleventh and twelfth days, child quieted by father's voice: hears whistling. twenty-fifth day, pulsation of lids at sound of low voice. twenty-sixth day, starting at noise of dish. thirtieth day, fright at loud voice ( ). feeling.--_sensitiveness to contact._--at birth ( - ). second and third days, starting at gentle touches. seventh day, waked by touch on face ( ). eleventh day, lid closed at touch of conjunctiva more slowly than in adults ( ). _perception of touch._--first gained in nursing ( ). _sensibility to temperature._--at birth, cooling unpleasant. warm bath agreeable. seventh day, eyes opened wide with pleasure from bath ( ). first two or three years, cold water disagreeable ( ). mucous membrane of mouth, tongue, lips, very sensitive to cold and warmth ( ). taste.--_sensibility._--at birth ( - ). first day, sugar licked ( ). second day, milk licked ( ). differences among newly-born ( ). sensation not merely general ( ). _comparison of impressions._--during nursing period child prefers sweet taste ( ). second day, child accepts food that on the fourth he refuses ( ). smell.--_faculty at birth._--strong-smelling substances produce mimetic movements ( ). _discrimination._--eighth day, groping about for nipple ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--_pleasure._--first day, in nursing; in the bath; in the sight of objects; in the light ( ). _discomfort._--first days, from cold, wet, hunger, tight clothing, etc. ( ). _hunger._--first days, manifested in sucking movements, crying, restlessness ( ). cry differs from that of pain or of satisfaction. other signs of hunger ( ). _satiety._--third to fifth week, the nipple pushed away with the lips: mouth-piece of bottle ditto. tenth day, smile after eating. fourth week, signs of satisfaction; laughing, opening and half shutting eyes; inarticulate sounds ( ). _fatigue._--from crying and nursing ( ). second and third weeks, from use of senses ( ). first month, sleep lasts two hours; sixteen of the twenty-four hours spent in sleep ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--outstretching and bending of arms and legs just after birth; contractions, spreading and bending of fingers ( ). grimaces ( ). wrinkling of forehead ( ). first day, arms and legs take same position as before birth ( ). second week, stretching of limbs after waking ( ). _reflex movements._--in case of light-impressions ( - ). first cry ( ). sneezing of newly-born ( ). coughing, ditto. ( ). seventh day, yawning ( ). first day, spreading of toes when sole of foot is touched ( ). first day, hiccough ( ). first five days, choking ( ). wheezing, yawning ( ). seventh day, respiration irregular ( ). ninth day, clasping ( ). tenth day, lips protruded ( ). fourteenth day, movement of left hand toward left temple ( ). twenty-fourth day, snoring ( ). _instinctive movements._--first to third day, hands to face. fifth day, fingers clasp firmly; toes do not. sixth day, hands go into eye ( ). seventh day, pencil held with toes, but no seizing. ninth day, no clasping by sleeping child ( ). sucking ( - ). at end of first week, lateral movements of head ( ). third week, clasping with fingers, not with thumb ( ). _expressive movements._--twenty-sixth day, smile of contentment ( ). twenty-third day, tears flow ( ). crying, with tears, and whimpering, become signs of mental states ( ). intellect.[b] memory first active in the departments of taste and of smell; then in touch, sight, hearing ( ). comparison of tastes (i, ). vowel-sounds in first month ( ). sounds in first six months ( ). sounds made in crying and screaming, _u-ä_ ( ). twenty-second day, association of the breast with nursing (i, ). footnotes: [a] under "senses" and "will" the numbers in parentheses indicate pages in vol. i. [b] under "intellect" the numbers in parentheses indicate pages from vol. ii, unless otherwise stated. second month. senses. sight.--_light._--bright or highly-colored objects give pleasure ( ). _discrimination of colors._--forty-second day, pleasure in sight of colored tassels ( ). _movements of eyelids._--fifth week, irregular movements of lids. eighth week, lid covering iris ( ). twenty-fifth day, opening and shutting eyes in surprise ( ). fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth days, winking. sixtieth day, quick opening and shutting in fright ( ). _movements of eyes._--thirty-first day, strabismus rare. forty-sixth to fiftieth day, very rare. fifty-fifth day, irregular movements rare, but appearing in sleep till the sixtieth day ( ). _direction of look._--fifth week, toward the christmas-tree ( ). thirty-ninth day, toward tassels swinging ( ). seventh week, moving lamp or bright object followed ( ). hearing.--fifth week, child does not sleep if persons walk or speak. starting at noises. sixth week, starting at slight noises even in sleep; quieted by mother's singing. seventh week, fright at noise is greater ( ). sensibility to musical tones, ditto. eighth week, tones of piano give pleasure ( ). touch.--thirty-eighth day, movements caused by touch of water ( ). forty-first day, reflex movement of arms caused by a general slight agitation ( , ). fiftieth and fifty-fifth days, closing of eyelid at touch of eyelash ( ). seventh week, upper lip sensitive ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--pleasure in musical sounds ( ); in sight of human face ( ). reflexive laughing ( ). sixth week, fretfulness and hunger ( ). eighth week, fatigue after hearing piano-playing ( ). sleep of three, sometimes of five or six hours ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--of eyes before waking, also twistings and raisings of trunk ( ). seventh week, number of respirations twenty-eight to the minute ( ). _reflex movements._--of right arm at touch of left temple ( ). forty-third day, sneezing caused by witch-meal ( ). fifth week, vomiting ( ). eighth week, laughing caused by tickling ( ). _instinctive movements._--seventh week, clasping not yet with thumb. eighth week, the four fingers of the child embrace the father's finger ( ). intellect. _speech._--forty-third day, first consonant; child says _am-ma_; also vowel-sound _ao_. forty-fourth day, syllables _ta-hu_; forty-sixth day, _gö_, _örö_; fifty-first day, _ara_; eighth and ninth weeks, _örrö_, _arra_, frequent ( ). third month. senses. sight.--_movements of the eyelids._--eyelid not completely raised when child looked up ( ). irregular movements of eyes appear (though rare) up to tenth week; at three months are no more observed ( ). _direction of look._--sixty-first day, child looked at his mother and gave a cry of joy; the father's face made the child gay. sixty-second day, look directed at a swinging lamp ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--ninth week, accommodation apparent ( ). hearing.--ninth week, sound of watch arouses attention; other noises ( ). eleventh week, head moved in direction of sound ( ). eighty-first day ditto. ( ). twelfth week, sudden turning of head toward sounding body ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--_pleasure._--smile at sight of the mother's face ( ). _unpleasant feeling._--from some internal cause ( ). _fatigue._--sucking tiresome ( ). sleep of four or five hours without waking ( ). _hunger._--tenth week, child hungry three times or more in a night ( ). will. _reflex movements._--respirations, thirteenth week, twenty-seven to the minute ( ). hiccough frequent; stopped by use of sweetened water ( ). _instinctive movements._--eleventh week, pencil held, but mechanically; thumb not used in clasping ( ). twelfth week, eighty-fourth day, contra-position of thumb reflexive ( , ). thirteenth week, thumb follows fingers more readily ( ). eleventh week, head balanced occasionally. twelfth week, some gain in holding head. thirteenth week, head tolerably well balanced ( ). seizing merely apparent ( ). no voluntary movement ( ). intellect. eighty-first day, seeking direction of sound (i, ). _speech._--consonant _m_ frequent ( ). sixty-fourth day, _ma_ ( ). sixty-fifth day, _nei nei nei_ and once _a-omb_. sixty-sixth day, _la_, _grei_, _aho_, _ma_. sixty-ninth day, _mömm_ and _ngö_. seventy-first day, _ra-a-ao_. seventy-sixth day, _nä_ and _n[=a]i-n_. seventy-eighth day, _habu_. twelfth week, _a-i_ and _u[=a]o_, _ä-o-a_, _ä-a-a_ and _o-ä-ö_ ( ). _feeling of self._--eleventh week, child does not see himself in mirror ( ). fourth month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyelids._--ninety-eighth day, brow wrinkled when look is upward ( ). fifty-seventh day, winking ( ). fifteenth and sixteenth weeks, ditto ( ). seventeenth week, objects seized are moved toward eyes; grasping at objects too distant ( ). _movements of eyes._--no more non-coördinated ( ). _direction of look._--fourteenth week, following person moving. one hundred and first day, following pendulum. sixteenth week, gazing at sides and ceiling of carriage and at objects ( ). hearing.--sixteenth week, head turned toward sound with certainty of reflex ( ). feeling.--seventeenth week, eyes are closed when a drop of water touches lashes ( ). fourteenth week, sleeping child throws up arms at sudden touch ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--pleasure in grasping at objects ( ). fifteenth week, intervals between meals three or four hours ( ). sleep lasts five or six hours ( ). twenty-second week, astonishment at seeing father after separation ( ). fourteenth week, smile of satiety. seventeenth week, joy in seeing image in mirror ( ). will. _reflex movements._--fourteenth week, right hand to right eye ( ). _instinctive movements._--fourteenth week, hands hold objects longer and with contra-position of thumb. fifteenth and sixteenth weeks, no intentional seizing. one hundred and fourteenth day, ditto ( ). seventeenth week, efforts to take hold of ball; ball moved to mouth and eyes. one hundred and eighteenth day, frequent attempts at seizing; following day, grasping gives pleasure ( ). fourteenth week, head seldom falls forward. sixteenth week, head held up permanently ( ), this the first distinct manifestation of will ( ). fourteenth week, child sits, his back supported ( ). seventeenth week, biting ( ). _imitative movements._--fifteenth week, beginnings of imitation; trying to purse the lips ( ). seventeenth week, protruding tip of tongue ( ). _expressive movements._--sixteenth week, turnings of head and nodding, not significant; head turned away in refusal ( ). _deliberate movements._--fourteenth week, attentive looking at person moving; one hundred and first day, at pendulum swinging ( ). fifteenth week, imitation, pursing lips ( ). sixteenth and seventeenth weeks, voluntary gazing at image in mirror ( ). intellect. intellect participates in voluntary movements (i, ). _speech._--fourteenth week, _ntö_, _ha_, _lö_, _na_. fifteenth week, _nan-nana_, _n[=a]-n[=a]_, _nanna_, in refusal ( ). sixteenth week, in screaming, _ä-[)u] ä-[)u] ä_, _[=a]-[)u] [=a]-[)u]_, _[)u]-ä [)u]-ä_, _[=u]-[=u]-[=a]-ö_, _amme-a_; in discomfort, _[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]_ ( ). _feeling of self._--seventeenth week, child gazes at his own hand ( ). one hundred and thirteenth day, for the first time regards his image with attention ( ). one hundred and sixteenth day, laughs at his image ( ). fifth month. senses. sight.--_direction of look._--looking inquiringly ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--reaching too short ( ). hearing.--nineteenth week, pleasure in sound of crumpling of paper by himself. twenty-first week, beating of gong enchains attention ( ). disturbed by noise ( ). touch.--auditory canal sensitive ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--pleasure in crumpling paper, tearing newspapers and rolling them into balls, pulling at glove or hair, ringing of a bell ( , ). eighteenth week, discomfort shown by depressing angles of mouth ( ). eighteenth week, nights of ten to eleven hours without taking food ( ). eighteenth week, desire shown by stretching out arms ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--eighteenth week, objects seized are held firmly and carried to the mouth ( ). nineteenth week, child takes bit of meat and carries to mouth. one hundred and twenty-third day, lips protruded in connection with seizing ( ). intellect. _speech._--consonant _k_, _gö_, _kö_, _[)a]gg[)e]gg[)e]kö_. first five months, screaming sounds _u_, _ä_, _ö_, _a_, with _ü_ and _o_; _m_ almost the only consonant ( ). _feeling of self._--discovery by child that he can cause sensations of sound ( ). looking at his own fingers very attentively ( ). sixth month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyelids._--twenty-fifth-week, winking caused by puff of wind in face ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--child laughs when nodded to by father; observes father's image in mirror, etc. ( ). taste.--medicine taken if sweetened ( ). one hundred and fifty-sixth day, child refuses breast, having had sweeter milk. end of twenty-third week, milk of new nurse taken, also cow's milk, meat-broth ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--pleasure in grasping increases ( ). arms moved up and down when child is nodded to ( ). twenty-third week, depression of angles of mouth and cry of distress caused by harsh address ( ). hunger apparent in persistent gaze at bottle, crying, and opening of mouth ( ). sleep of six to eight hours ( ). astonishment at seeing father after separation, and at sight of stranger ( ). will. _reflex movements._--sneezing caused, on one hundred and seventieth day, by blowing on the child ( ). _instinctive movements._--twenty-second week, child raised himself to sitting posture ( ). twenty-third week, ditto; pleased at being placed upright ( ). _expressive movements._--laugh accompanied by raisings and droppings of arms when pleasure is great ( ). arm-movements that seemed like defensive movements ( ). "crowing" a sign of pleasure (ii, ). intellect. use of means to cause flow of milk ( ). _speech._--twenty-second week, _ögö_, _ma-ö-[)e]_, _h[)a]_, _[=a]_, _ho-ich_. "crowing" and aspirate _ha_, and _brrr-há_, signs of pleasure ( ). so _aja_, _örrgö_, _[=a]-[=a]-i-[)o]-[=a]_, _eu_ and _oeu_ (french) and _ä_ and _ö_ (german), also _ijä_; _i_ and _u_ rare ( ). _feeling of self._--twenty-third week, discrimination between touch of self and of foreign object ( ; i, ). twenty-fourth week, child gazes at glove and at his fingers alternately ( ). twenty fourth week, sees father's image in mirror and turns to look at father. twenty-fifth week, stretches hand toward his own image. twenty-sixth week, sees image of father and compares it with original ( ). seventh month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyelids._--end of seventh month, opening and shutting of fan causes opening and shutting of eyes ( ). _direction of look._--twenty-ninth week, looking at flying sparrow ( ). thirtieth week, child does not look after objects let fall ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--accommodation is perfect ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--staring at strange face ( ). hearing.--gaze at person singing; joy in military music ( ). feeling.--child became pale in bath ( ). taste.--new tastes cause play of countenance ( ). one hundred and eighty-fifth day, cow's milk boiled, with egg, is liked; leguminous food not ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--pleasure in his image in mirror ( ). child laughs when others laugh to him ( ). twenty-ninth week, crying with hunger; spreading out tongue ( ). satiety shown by thrusting mouth-piece out ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--nose becomes mobile. babes strike about them vigorously ( ). _reflex movements._--sighing appears ( ). _instinctive movements._--thirtieth week, seizing more perfect ( ). child places himself upright on lap, twenty-eighth week ( ). _imitative movements._--imitation of movements of head; of pursing lips ( ). _expressive movements._--averting head as sign of refusal; thrusting nipple out of mouth ( , ). astonishment shown by open mouth and eyes ( ). intellect. child did not recognize nurse after absence of four weeks ( ); but children distinguish faces before thirtieth week ( ). _speech._--when hungry, child screams _mä_, _ä_, _[)u]ä_, _[)u]ä[)e]_; when contented, says _örrö_; _lä_, _[)u]-[=a]-[)u]-i-i_; _t_ seldom, _k_ only in yawning, _p_ very rarely ( ). eighth month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyelids._--brow not wrinkled invariably in looking upward ( ). play of lid on hearing new noises; no lifting of eyebrows ( , ). thirty-fourth week, eyes opened wide with longing ( ). _direction of look._--thirty-first week, gaze turned in direction of falling object. thirty-third week, objects moved slowly downward are followed with close gaze. thirty-fourth week, objects let fall by him are seldom looked after ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--interest in bottles ( ). hearing.--quick closing of lids at new impressions of sound ( ). taste.--pleasure in the "prepared food" ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--discomfort accompanied by square form of the mouth ( ). craving for food shown by cooing sound ( ). strongest feeling connected with appeasing of hunger ( ). restless nights ( ). astonishment at new sounds and sights; with fright ( ). thirty-first week, at clapping of fan. thirty-fourth week, at imitation of voices of animals ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--accompanying movement of hand ( ). thirty-fourth week, stretchings of arms and legs accompanying utterance (ii, ). _instinctive movements._--thirty-second week, seizing with both hands more perfect; attention more active ( ). in same week, legs stretched up vertically, feet observed attentively, toes carried to mouth with the hands ( ). pulling objects to him; grasping at bottle ( ). thirty-fourth week, carrying things to mouth ( ). _expressive movements._--laugh begins to be persistently loud ( ). thirty-second week, child no longer sucks at lips when he is kissed, but licks them ( ). eyelid half closed in disinclination ( ). interest in objects shown by stretching out hands ( ). intellect. _speech._--variety of sounds made in the first eight months at random ( ). concept of bottle before language ( ). sounds in screaming different ( ). once the sound _h[=a]-upp_; frequently _a-[(ei]_, _a-[(au]_, _[)a]-h[(au]-[)a]_, _hörrö_. also _nt[)e]-ö_, _mi-ja mija_; once _o[)u][=a][)e]i_ ( ). feeling of self.--thirty-second week, child looks at his legs and feet as if they were foreign to him ( ). ninth month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyes._--eyes converged easily ( ). _direction of look._--thirty-sixth week, objects that fall are not regularly looked after, but slowly moving objects, e. g., tobacco-smoke, are followed ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--boxes are gazed at ( ). more interest shown in things in general ( ). hearing.--winking and starting at slamming noise ( ). taste.--yolk of egg with cane-sugar taken with expression of surprise. water and bread liked ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--striking hands together and laughing for joy ( ). eyes shut when something disagreeable is to be endured; head turned away also ( ). cooing, as in eighth month ( ). fear of dog ( , ). will. _reflex movements._--number of respirations (in fever) forty and forty-two in a minute ( ). _instinctive movements._--teeth-grinding ( ). turning over when laid face downward ( ). thirty-fifth week, child places himself on arm and hand of nurse, and looks over her shoulder ( ). thirty-ninth week, likes to sit with support ( ). thirty-ninth week, stands on feet a moment without support ( ). _expressive movements._--loud laughing at new, pleasing objects ( ). turns head to light when asked where it is ( ). _deliberate movements._--things brought to mouth are put quickly on tongue ( ). intellect. question understood before child can speak (i, ). _speech._--voice more modulated: screaming varies with different causes ( ). delight shown by crowing sounds: _mä-mä_, _ämmä_, _mä_, are expressions of pleasure; _[=a]-au-[=a]-[=a]_, _[=a]-[)o]_, _a-u-au_, _na-na_; _apa_, _ga-au-[)a]_, _acha_ ( ). feeling of self.--feet are felt of, and toes are carried to mouth ( ). thirty-fifth week, foot grasped and carried to mouth. thirty-sixth week, other objects preferred to hands and feet. thirty-ninth week, in the bath his own skin is looked at and felt of, also his legs ( ). thirty-fifth week, his image in mirror is grasped at gayly ( ). tenth month. senses. sight.--_movements of eyelids._--brow invariably wrinkled at looking upward ( ). _movements of eyes._--convergence of lines of vision disturbed ( ). _direction of look._--forty-third week, objects thrown down are looked at ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--visual impressions connected with food best interpreted ( ). hearing.--head turned at noise ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--joy at lighting of lamp ( ). will. _reflex movements._--inhibition of reflex ( ). _instinctive movements._--forty-third week, carrying objects to mouth ( ). taking a hair from one hand into the other ( ). finger bitten ( ). bread crunched and swallowed ( ). turning over when laid on face ( ). fortieth and forty-first weeks, trying to sit without support ( ). forty-second week, sitting up without support in bath and carriage ( , ). forty-first week, first attempts at walking ( ). forty-second week, moving feet forward and sidewise; inclination to walk. forty-third week, foot lifted high; moving forward ( ). _imitative movements._--beckoning imitated ( ). _expressive movements._--laughing becomes more conscious and intelligent ( ). crying in sleep ( ). striking hands together in sleep ( ). object pointed at is carried to mouth and chewed ( ). body straightened in anger ( ). this not intentional ( ). intellect. forty-third week, knowledge of weight of bodies (i, ). a child missed his parents when they were absent, also a single nine-pin of a set ( , ). _speech._--child can not repeat a syllable heard ( ). in monologue, syllables are more distinct, loud, and varied when child is left to himself than when other persons entertain him: _ndä[)e]_, _b[=a]ë-b[=a]ë_, _ba ell_, _arrö_. frequent are _mä_, _pappa_, _tatta_, _appapa_, _babba_, _tätä_, _pa_, _rrrr_, _rrra_. hints at imitation ( ). _feeling of self._--forty-first week, striking his own body and foreign objects ( ). forty-first to forty-fourth week, image in mirror laughed at and grasped at ( ). eleventh month. senses. sight.--_direction of look._--forty-seventh week, child throws down objects and looks after them ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--forty-fourth week, new objects no longer carried to eyes, but gazed at and felt. forty-seventh week, accommodation perfect ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--trying to fixate objects ( ). hearing.--screaming is quieted by a "sh!" or by singing. three hundred and nineteenth day, difference in sound of spoon on plate when plate was touched by hand ( ). taste.--meat-broth with egg taken; scalded skimmed milk rejected; dry biscuit liked ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--forty-fourth week, astonishment at strange face ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--forty-fifth week, grasping at flame of lamp; forty-seventh, at objects behind a pane of glass; gain in moving muscles of arm; shreds of paper handled ( ). biting father's hand ( ). smacking lips ( ). sitting becomes habit for life ( ). standing without support; stamping; but standing only for a moment ( ). end of forty-seventh week, feet well placed, but lifted too high and put down too hard ( ). _expressive movements._--grasping at his image with laugh; jubilant noise at being allowed to walk ( ). _deliberate movements._--striking spoon against object and exchanging objects ( , ). child takes biscuit, carries it to mouth, bites off a bit, chews and swallows it; but can not drink from glass ( ). intellect. syllables correctly repeated; intentional sound-imitation on the three hundred and twenty-ninth day. forty-fifth week, response made for diversion: whispering begins ( ). three kinds of _r_-sounds: new syllables, _ta-h[(ee]_, _dann-tee_, _[(aa]-n[(ee]_, _ngä_, _tai_, _bä_, _dall_, _at-tall_, _kamm_, _akkee_, _praï-jer_, _tra_, _[=a]-h[(ee]_. some earlier sounds frequent; consonants _b_, _p_, _t_, _d_, _m_, _n_, _r_; _l_, _g_, _k_: vowel _a_ most used, _u_ and _o_ rare, _i_ very rare ( ). accentuation not frequent ( ). association of idea with utterance in one case ( , ). forty-fifth week, to word "papa," response _rrra_ ( ). _feeling of self._--forty-fifth to fifty-fifth week, discovery of his power to cause changes ( ). twelfth month. senses. sight.--_seeing near and distant objects._--fifty-first week, pleasure in seeing men sawing wood at distance of more than one hundred feet ( ). hearing.--screaming quieted by "sh!" ( ). three hundred and sixty-third day, hears noise in next room and looks in direction of sound ( ). taste.--fastidious about food ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--grunting as indication of pleasure ( ). fifty-second week, astonishment at new sound ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--accompanying movement of hand in drinking ( ). _instinctive movements._--child seized father's hand, carried it to mouth and bit it ( ). forty-eighth week, standing without support a moment; stamping; pushing a chair ( ). forty-ninth week, child can not raise himself without help or stand more than an instant. fiftieth week, can not place himself on his feet, or walk without help ( ). _imitative movements._--trying to strike with spoon on tumbler; puffing repeated in sleep ( ). _expressive movements._--end of year, imitative laughing; crowing ( ). laughing in sleep ( ). opening of mouth in kissing ( ). arms stretched out in desire ( ). _deliberate movements._--biscuit put into mouth with few failures; drinking from glass, breathing into the water ( ). intellect. ideas gained before language ( ). logical activity applied to perceptions of sound (i, ). abstraction, whiteness of milk ( ). _speech._--imitation more successful, but seldom correct. articulate sounds made spontaneously: _haja_, _jajajajaja_, _aja_, _njaja_, _naïn-hopp_, _ha-a_, _pa-a_, _d[=e]wär_, _han-na_, _mömma_, _allda_, _alldaï_, _apa-u-a_, _gägä_, _ka_, _ladn_; _atta_ is varied, no more _dada_; _w_ for the first time. ability to discriminate between words ( ). fifty-second week, child of himself obeys command, "give the hand!" quieting effect of sounds "sh, ss, st, pst" ( ). _feeling of self._--striking hard substances against teeth; gnashing teeth ( ). tearing of paper continued ( ). thirteenth month. senses. hearing.--child strikes on keys of piano; pleased with singing of canary-bird ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--laughing almost invariably follows the laugh of others ( ). sleep, fourteen hours daily ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--standing some moments without support ( ). fifty-third week, creeping. fifty-fourth week, walking, with support; movements in creeping asymmetrical ( ). _expressive movements._--no idea of kissing ( ). shaking head in denial ( ). begging sound along with extending of hands in desire ( ). intellect. trying door after shutting it ( , ). hears the vowel-sounds in word ( ). _speech._--desire expressed by _ä-na_, _ä-nananana_ ( ). awkwardness continues; attention more lively. tries to repeat words said for him. three hundred and sixty-ninth day, _papa_ repeated correctly ( , ). syllables most frequent, _nja_, _njan_, _dada_, _atta_, _mama_, _papaï_, _attaï_, _na-na-na_, _hatta_, _meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meen[)e],_ _mömm_, _mömma_, _ao-u_: _na-na_ denotes desire, _mama_, mother. fifty-fourth week, joy expressed by crowing, some very high tones; first distinct _s_, three hundred and sixty-eighth day ( ). understanding of words spoken ( ). confusion of associations; first conscious act of obedience ( ). _feeling of self._--rapping head with hand ( ). finding himself a cause; shaking keys, etc. ( ). fifty-fifth week, strikes himself and observes his hands; compares fingers of others with his own ( ). fourteenth month. senses. sight.--_seeing near and distant objects._--fifty-eighth week, grasping at lamp above him ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of falling ( ). fifty-eighth week, astonishment at lantern ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--child could be allowed to bite paper to pieces; he took the pieces out of his mouth ( ). fifty-seventh week, he hitches along on hands and knees; can not walk without support. sixtieth week, raises himself by chair ( ). _imitative movements._--for imitating swinging of arms an interval of time was required ( ). coughing imitated ( ). nodding not imitated ( ). _expressive movements._--confounding of movements ( ). affection shown by laying hand on face and shoulders of others ( ). _deliberate movements._--child takes off and puts on the cover of a can seventy-nine times ( ). intellect. wrong understanding of what is heard ( ). _speech._--no doubt that _atta_ means "going"; _brrr_, practiced and perfected; _dakkn_, _daggn_, _taggn_, _attagn_, _attatn_; no special success in repeating vowels and syllables ( ). child tries and laughs at his failures, if others laugh; parrot-like repetition of some syllables ( ). gain in understanding of words heard; association of definite object with name ( ). more movements executed on hearing words ( ). confounding of movements occurs, but grows rare; begging attitude seen to be useful ( ). _feeling of self._--four hundred and ninth day, child bit himself on the arm ( ). pulling out and pushing in a drawer, turning leaves of book, etc. ( ). fifty-seventh week, child looks at his image in hand-mirror, puts hand behind glass, etc. ( ). fifty-eighth week, his photograph treated in like manner; he turns away from his image in mirror; sixtieth week, recognizes his mother's image in mirror as image ( ). fifteenth month. senses. sight.--_direction of look._--sixty-third to sixty-fifth week, objects thrown down and looked after ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--grasps at candle, puts hand into flame, but once only ( ). hearing.--laughing at new noises, as gurgling or thunder ( ). smell.--coffee and cologne make no impression till end of month ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--sixty-second week, child stands a few seconds when support is withdrawn. sixty-third week, walks, holding on to a support ( ). sixty-fourth week, can walk without support, if he thinks he is supported; sixty-fifth week, walks holding by one finger of another's hand; raises himself to knees, stands up if he can hold to something ( ). _imitative movements._--coughing. learns to blow out candle ( ). opening and shutting of hand ( ). _expressive movements._--laughing at new sounds ( ). the words "give a kiss" produce a drawing near of head and protruding of lips ( ). wrinkling of brow in attempts at imitation ( ). deprecating movement of arm ( ). sixty-fourth week, nodding sometimes accompanies the word "no"; four hundred and forty-fifth day, an accompanying movement ( ). first shrugging of shoulders ( ). begging gesture made by child when he wants something ( ). same made in asking for amusement ( ). wish expressed by handing a ring, looking at glasses to be struck, and saying _hay-[)u]h_ ( ). intellect. hunting for scraps of paper, etc. ( ). after burning his finger in flame of candle, the child never put it near the flame again, but would, in fun, put it in the direction of the candle. he allowed mouth and chin to be wiped without crying ( ). _speech._--new sound _wa_; astonishment expressed by _h[=a]-[=a]-[)e][=a]-[)e]_, joy by crowing in high and prolonged tones, strong desire by _häö_, _hä-[)e]_, pain, impatience, by screaming in vowels passing over into one another ( ). the _atta_ still used when a light is dimmed ( ). advance in repeating syllables. child is vexed when he can not repeat a word. one new word, _heiss_ (hot) ( ). the _s_ is distinct; _th_ (eng.) appears; _w_; smacking in sixty-fifth week; tongue the favorite plaything ( ). understands words "moon," "clock," "eye," "nose," "cough," "blow," "kick," "light"; affirmative nod at "ja" in sixty-fourth week; negative shaking at "no"; holding out hand at words "give the hand" or "hand"; more time required when child is not well ( ). _feeling of self._--child bit his finger so that he cried out with pain ( ). sixty-second week, playing with his fingers as foreign objects; pressing one hand down with the other ( ). sixty-first week, trying to feel of his own image in the mirror ( ). sixteenth month. senses. sight.--_seeing near and distant objects._--sixty-eighth week, reaching too short, too far to left or right, too high or too low ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--grasping at jets of water ( ). hearing.--child holds watch to his ear and listens to the ticking ( ). smell.--smell and taste not separated; a flower is taken into mouth ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of high tones ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--sleeping child raised hand to eye ( ). accompanying movement of fingers in drinking ( ). _reflex movements._--respirations, in sleep, twenty-two to twenty-five a minute ( ). _instinctive movements._--sixty-sixth week, four hundred and fifty-seventh day, child runs alone ( ). next day, stops and stamps. four hundred and sixty-first day, can walk backward, if led, and can turn round alone. at the end of the week can look at objects while walking. sixty-seventh week, a fall occurs rarely. sixty-eighth week, walking becoming mechanical ( ). _imitative movements._--a ring put on his head in imitation ( ). waiting attitude ( ). _expressive movements._--lips protruded almost like a snout ( ). shaking head meant "no" and "i do not know" ( ). child shrugs shoulders when unable to answer ( ). waiting attitude becomes a sign ( ). _deliberate movements._--opening and shutting cupboards, bringing objects, etc. holding ear-ring to ear ( ). intellect. child holds an ear-ring to his ear with understanding (i, ). a begging movement at seeing box from which cake had come ( ). small understanding shown in grasping at ring ( ). _speech._--progress in repeating words spoken for him and in understanding words heard. desire expressed by _hä!_ _hä-ö!_ _hä-[)e]!_ _h[)e]-[)e]!_ more seldom _hi_, _gö-gö_, _gö_, _f-pa_, _[(au]_; more frequently, _ta_, _dokkn_, _tá-ha_, _a-bwa-bwa_, _b[)u][=a]-b[)u][=a]_; once _dagon_. child "reads" the newspaper ( ). pain expressed by screaming; joy by crowing with vowel _i_; _a_ repeated on command; _mö_ and _ma_; imitation tried ( ). touches eye, ear, etc., when these are named--not with certainty ( ). understands "bring," "give," etc. ( ). _feeling of self._--putting thumbs against the head and pushing, experimenting ( ). sixty-sixth week, child strikes at his image in mirror. sixty-seventh week, makes grimaces before mirror; turns round to see his father, whose image appeared in mirror ( ). sixty-ninth week, signs of vanity ( ). seventeenth month. senses. sight.--_interpretation of what is seen._--child grasps at tobacco-smoke ( ). hearing.--holding watch to ear ( ). taste.--surprise at new tastes ( ). smell.--inability to separate smell and taste ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--prolonged sleep; ten hours at a time ( ). will. _reflex movements._--right hand moved when right nostril is touched ( ). _instinctive movements._--clasping of finger in sleep ( ). seventieth week, child raises himself from floor alone; seventy-first week, steps over threshold ( ). _expressive movements._--shaking head means "i do not wish" ( ). throwing himself on floor and screaming with rage ( ). intellect. child brings traveling-bag to stand upon in order to reach ( ). play of "hide and seek" ( ). _speech._--screaming, whimpering, etc. ( ). increase of discrimination: _bibi_, _nä-nä-nä_, _t-tó_, _höt-tó_; voluntary imitation ( ). associations of words heard with objects and movements ( ). _feeling of self._--making grimaces before mirror ( ). eighteenth month. senses. sight.--_direction of look._--seventy-eighth week, throwing away of playthings is rare ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--anxiety on seeing man dressed in black ( ). smell.--objects no longer carried to mouth ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--laughing at thunder ( ). will. _impulsive movements._--holding little finger apart from others ( ). _instinctive movements._--walks over threshold by holding on ( ). seventy-seventh week, runs around table; seventy-eighth, walks over threshold without holding on ( ). _imitative movements._--blowing horn ( ). _expressive movements._--trying to hit with foot, striking, etc. ( ). waiting attitude ( ). _deliberate movements._--full spoon carried to mouth with skill ( ). intellect. memory of towel ( ). watering flowers with empty pot ( ). plays ( ). giving leaves to stag, etc. ( ). stick of wood put in stove ( ). _speech._--understanding of words increases ( ). repeating of syllables is rare; _atta_ becomes _tto_, _t-tu_, _ftu_; feeling recognized by tone of voice ( ). _feeling of self._--recognition of himself as cause of changes ( ). nineteenth month. senses. hearing.--hearing watch on his head ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of strangers ceases ( ). laugh at thunder and lightning ( ). will. _imitative movements._--combing and brushing hair, washing hands, etc. ( ). _expressive movements._--fastidious about kissing ( ). pride in baby-carriage ( ). _deliberative movements._--spoon taken in left hand ( ). intellect. father recognized after absence ( ). bringing cloth for wrap and begging for door to be opened ( ). grunting in order to be taken away ( ). induction, watch and clock ( ). crying seen to be useless ( ). _speech._--imitation of whistle ( ). spontaneous sound imitations more frequent ( ). gazing after objects thrown and whispering, reading newspaper ( ). response to _pa_ correctly given ( ). objects correctly pointed out; memory of tricks ( ). _feeling of self._--attempt to give his foot ( ). twentieth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--first color-tests. eighty-fifth week, no discrimination ( ). eighty-sixth and eighty-seventh weeks, no results ( ). _movements of the eyes._--readiness of convergence, pupils very wide open ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--prolonged sleep habitual, etc. ( ). will. _reflex movements._--respirations twenty-two and more ( ). _instinctive movements._--eighty-fifth week, thresholds stepped over quickly; inclines forward in running ( ). _imitative movements._--use of comb and brush, putting on collar ( ). scraping feet, putting pencil to mouth, marking on paper ( ). _expressive movements._--proximity essential in kissing; bends head when "kiss" is said ( ). antipathy expressed by turning head at approach of women in black ( ). _deliberate movements._--carries spoon with food to mouth cleverly ( ). intellect. as in nineteenth month, grunting ( , ). _speech._--_rodi_, _otto_, _rojo_ ( ). understanding of the word "other" ( , ). five hundred and eighty-fourth day, important advance in repeating words said ( ). imagination; can not repeat three syllables; laughs when others laugh ( ). single words more promptly understood ( ). one new concept, expressed by _d[=a]_ and _nd[=a]_, or _t[=a]_ and _nt[=a]_. eighty-seventh week, _attah_ said on railway-train; _papa_ and _bät_ or _bit_ (for "bitte") rightly used; much outcry ( ). crowing tones not so high; loud readings continued ( ). twenty-first month. senses. hearing.--dancing not rhythmical ( , ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of the sea ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--eighty-ninth week, running is awkward, but falling rare ( ). _imitative movements._--imitation without understanding ( , ). _expressive movements._--ninetieth week, pointing as expression of wish ( ). intellect. recognition of father ( ). association of biscuit with coat and wardrobe ( ). _speech._--imitations more frequent. eighty-ninth week, babbling different, more _consonants_; _ptö-ptö_, _pt-pt_, and _verlapp_, also _dla-dla_; willfulness shown in articulate sounds and shaking head ( ). unlike syllables not repeated, _dang-gee_ and _dank-kee_; tendency to doubling syllables, _tete_, _bibi_; babbling yields great pleasure; _bibi_ for "bitte" rightly used. new word _mimi_, when hungry or thirsty ( ). understands use and signification of sound, _neinein_; and answers of his own accord _jaja_ to question in ninety-first week. strength of memory for sounds; points correctly to nose, mouth, etc. ( ). astonishing progress in understanding what is said. few expressions of his own with recognizable meaning, _j[=a][)e]_ excepted. _att_, _att_, _att_, unintelligible. tried to imitate sound of steam of locomotive ( ). _feeling of self._--placing shells and buttons in rows ( ). puts lace about him; vanity; laughs and points at his own image in mirror ( ). the same on six hundred and twentieth day ( ). twenty-second month. senses. sight.--new impressions enchain attention; the mysterious more attractive ( ). intellect. _speech._--progress in understanding; orders executed with surprising accuracy ( ). strength of word-memory; facility of articulation; spontaneous utterance of _pss_, _ps_, _ptsch_, _pth_; _pa-ptl-dä-pt_; greeting with _h[=a][=a]-ö_, _ada_ and _ana_. singing, _rollo_, _mama_, _mämä_, etc. more certainty in reproducing sounds: "pst, anna, otto, lina," etc. three-syllabled words correctly repeated, _a-ma-ma_, _a-pa-pa_ ( ). words too hard are given back with _tap[)e]ta_, _p[)e]ta_, _pta_, _ptö-ptö_ or _rateratetat_. _ja ja_ and _nein nein_, with _da_ and _bibi_ and _mimi_, used properly in request. cry of pain a strong contrast with the crowing for joy ( ). twenty-third month. senses. sight.--_seeing near and distant objects._--ninety-sixth week, does not appreciate distance ( ). will. _imitative movements._--imitative impulse seems like ambition; ceremonious movements imitated ( ). _expressive movements._--kiss given as a mark of favor ( ). striking hands together in applause and desire for repetition ( ). tears of sorrow instead of anger; tries to move chair to table, etc. ( ). intellect. joy at seeing playthings after absence of eleven and a half weeks ( ). concept of "cup" not sharply defined ( ). use of adjective for the first spoken judgment ( ). _speech._--_heiss_ (hot) means "the drink is too hot," and "the stove is hot" ( ). _watja_ and _mimi_; _mimmi_, _mömö_, _m[=a]m[=a]_, mean food; _atta_, disappearance; spontaneous articulation, _[(oi]_, _[(eu]_, _ana_, _ida_, _didl_, _dadl_, _dldo-dlda_; in singing-tone, _opojö_, _apojopojum aui_, _heissa_; calls grandparents _e-papa_ and _e-mama_; knows who is meant when these are spoken of. understands words more easily, as "drink, eat, shut, open" ( ). word-memory becoming firm; imagination. great progress in reproducing syllables and words ( ). child's name, "axel," is called _aje_, _eja_. "bett, karre, kuk," repeated correctly. echolalia reappears ( ). words are best pronounced by child when he is not called upon to do it ( ). _feeling of self._--child holds biscuit to his toes ( ). twenty-fourth month. senses. sight.--_interpretation of what is seen._--moving animals closely observed ( ). hearing.--trying to sing, and beating time ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--astonishment more seldom apparent ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--child turns, of himself, dancing in time to music; beats time ( ). _imitative movements._--ceremonious movements imitated, salutation, uncovering head ( ). _expressive movements._--roguish laughing first observed ( ). intellect. understanding of actions and of use of utensils more developed than ability to interpret representations of them (i, , ). _speech._--voluntary sound-imitations gain in frequency and accuracy; genuine echolalia ( ). imperfect imitations ( ). multiplicity of meanings in the same utterance ( ). distinguishing men from women. combination of two words into a sentence, seven hundred and seventh day; words confounded; also gestures and movements; but not in the expression of joy and grief ( , ). twenty-fifth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--color-tests, red and green; seven hundred and fifty-eighth day, eleven times right, six wrong; seven hundred and fifty-ninth, seven right, five wrong; seven hundred and sixtieth, nine right, five wrong ( ). does not yet _know_ what blue and green signify. moves and handles himself well in twilight ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--one hundred and eighth week, power of accommodation good; small photographic likenesses recognized ( ). intellect. _speech._--progress is extraordinary. does not pronounce a perfect "u." all sound-imitations more manifold, etc.; begins saying "_so_" when any object is brought to appointed place ( ). has become more teachable, repeats three words imperfectly. evidence of progress of memory, understanding and articulation in answers given. no word invented by himself; calls his nurse _wolá_, probably from the often-heard "ja wohl." correct use of single words picked up increases surprisingly ( ). misunderstandings rational; words better understood; reasoning developed ( ). inductive reasoning. progress in forming sentences. sentence of five words. pronouns signify objects or qualities ( , ). twenty-sixth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--seven hundred and sixty-third day, right, wrong. three colors pointed out; disinclination to continue ( ). seven hundred and sixty-fifth day, green confounded with yellow. one hundred and tenth week, right , wrong . blue added. end of one hundred and tenth week to one hundred and twelfth week, right , wrong . yellow more surely recognized than other colors. violet added ( ). colors taken separately. one hundred and twelfth week, right , wrong . tests in both ways; attention not continuous. gray is added. one hundred and twelfth and one hundred and thirteenth weeks, right , wrong ( , ). child does not know what "green" means in one hundred and twelfth week ( ). _seeing near and distant objects._--one hundred and thirteenth week, articles of furniture recognized in pictures at distance of three inches or three feet ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--first attempts at climbing ( ). intellect. child points out objects in pictures, and repeats names given to them; list of results ( ). points out of his own accord, with certainty, in the picture-book. appropriates many words not taught him, _tola_ for "kohlen," _dals_ for "salz." others correctly said and used ( ). some of his mutilated words not recognizable; "sch" sometimes left out, sometimes given as _z_ or _ss_. independent thoughts expressed by words more frequently; "good-night" said to the christmas-tree ( ). verb used (in the infinitive) showing growth of intellect; learning of tricks decreases ( ). no notion of number; does not understand "thank you," but thanks himself. more names of animals, learned from adults; no onomatopoeia ( ). twenty-seventh month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--color-tests, from one hundred and fourteenth to one hundred and sixteenth week, four trials, colors mixed; result, right, wrong ( ). blue especially confounded with violet, also with green. four trials in one hundred and fourteenth and one hundred and fifteenth weeks; result, right, wrong ( ). two trials in one hundred and fifteenth week; result, right, wrong ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--uncomfortable feeling through pity; child weeps if human forms cut out of paper are in danger of mutilation ( , ). will. _instinctive movements._--pleasure in climbing begins ( ). intellect. _speech._--activity of thought. observation and comparison. gratitude does not appear ( ). wishes expressed by verbs in the infinitive or by substantives. adverbs; indefinite pronouns. seven hundred and ninety-sixth day, makes the word _messen_ ( ). _wolà_ and _atta_ have almost disappeared. independent applications of words ( ). monologues less frequent. begs apple to give to a puppet. echolalia prominent. tones and noises imitated ( ). laughing when others laugh; fragments of a dialogue repeated. feeble memory for answers and numbers. eight hundred and tenth day, gave his own name for first time in answer to a question ( ). no question yet asked by the child. the article is not used. pronunciation slowly becoming correct ( ). twenty-eighth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--one hundred and twenty-first week, greater uncertainty ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of pigs ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--going on all-fours; jumping, climbing gives pleasure ( ). intellect. _speech._--rapid increase of activity in forming ideas, and greater certainty in use of words. ambition; observation and combination; beginning of self-control; use of his own name and of names of parents; independent thinking ( ). increase in number of words correctly pronounced; attempt to use prepositions; first intelligent use of the article ( ). questioning active; first spontaneous question on eight hundred and forty-fifth day. "where?" is his only interrogative word. reproduction of foreign expressions ( ). imagination lively; paper cups used like real ones. articulation better, but still deficient. many parts of the body named correctly ( ). child makes remarks for a quarter of an hour at a time concerning objects about him, sings, screams in sleep ( ). twenty-ninth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--one hundred and twenty-fourth week, right, ; wrong, . eight hundred and sixty-eighth day, child takes colors of his own accord and names them; confounding rose, gray, and pale-green, brown and gray, blue and violet. one hundred and twenty-fourth and one hundred and twenty-fifth weeks, right, ; wrong, ( ). red and yellow generally named rightly; blue and green not. red and yellow are removed; child is less interested. one hundred and twenty-fifth and one hundred and twenty-sixth weeks, right, ; wrong, . orange confounded with yellow, blue with violet, green with gray, black with brown. failure of attempt to induce child to put like colors together, or to select colors by their names ( ). _direction of look._--one hundred and twenty-fourth week, gaze follows ball thrown ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of dogs ( ). intellect. personal pronoun used in place of his own name. inflection of verbs appears, but the infinitive is generally used for imperative; regular and irregular verbs begin to be distinguished ( ). desire expressed by infinitive. numbering active; numerals confounded. eight hundred and seventy-eighth day, nine-pins counted "one, one, one," etc. ( ). questioning increases; "too much" is confounded with "too little." yet memory gains ( ). sounds of animals well remembered. slow progress in articulation ( ). _feeling of self._--personal pronoun in place of his own name; "me" but not yet "i" ( ). thirtieth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--one hundred and twenty-sixth, one hundred and twenty-seventh, and one hundred and twenty-eighth weeks, four trials with single color at a time; right, wrong. eight hundred and ninety-eighth day, every color rightly named; some guessing on blue and green ( ). _interpretation of what is seen._--persistent desire daily to "write" locomotives ( ). hearing.--while eating, by chance puts hand to ear while kettle of boiling water stood before him; notices diminution in force of sound ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--mounting a staircase without help; ten days later with hands free ( , ). intellect. _speech._--independent activity of thought. when language fails, he considers well ( ). deliberation without words; concepts formed. intellectual advance shown in first intentional use of language ( ). only interrogative word is still "where?" "i" does not appear, but "me" is used. sentences independently applied ( ). more frequent use of the plural in nouns; of the article; of the strong inflection; auxiliaries omitted or misemployed. twofold way of learning correct pronunciation ( ). memory for words denoting objects good; right and left confounded ( ). thirty-first month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--nine hundred and thirty-fourth day, child says he can not tell green and blue. green mostly called gray; blue, violet ( ). feeling.--_sensibility to temperature._--child laughs joyously in cold bath ( ). will. weakness of will shown by ceasing to eat when told that he has had enough ( ). intellect. _speech._--onomatopoeia: imitation of locomotive-whistle ( ). two new questions. indefinite article more frequent. individual formations of words, as comparative of "high"; "key-watch." confounding of "to-day" and "yesterday" ( ). forming of sentences imperfect. reporting of faults. calls things "stupid" when he is vexed by them. changes occupation frequently. imitation less frequent. singing in sleep. "sch" not yet pronounced ( ). _feeling of self._--causing change in objects, pouring water into and out of vessels ( ). laughing at image of self in mirror ( ). thirty-second month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--one hundred and thirty-eighth and a few previous weeks, six trials, child taking colors and naming them; right , wrong, ( , ). green and blue called "nothing at all." unknown colors named green; leaves of roses called "nothing," as are whitish colors. one hundred and thirty-eighth and one hundred and thirty-ninth weeks, three trials; right, , wrong, ( , ). green begins to be rightly named, blue less often ( ). intellect. _speech._--"i" begins to displace the name of child. sentence correctly applied. clauses formed. particle separated in compound verbs. longer names and sentences distinctly spoken, but the influence of dialect appears ( ). memory improved, but fastidious; good for what is interesting and intelligible to child ( ). _feeling of self._--fourfold designation of self ( ). thirty-third month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--one hundred and thirty-ninth, one hundred and forty-first, and one hundred and forty-sixth weeks, took colors of his own accord and named them; result of three trials, right, wrong ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--fear of even smallest dog ( ). intellect. understanding that violations of well-known precepts have unpleasant consequences ( ). _speech._--strength of memory shown in characteristic remarks narrative of feeding fowls ( ). interest in animals and other moving objects; lack of clearness in concepts of animal and machine; meaning of word "father" includes also "uncle"; selfhood more sharply manifested. confounds "too much" with "too little," etc. ( ). _feeling of self._--"i" especially used in "i want that," etc. ( ). thirty-fourth month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--"green" rightly applied to leaves and grass ( ). order in which colors are rightly named up to this time; right, one thousand and forty-four; wrong, four hundred and forty-two: right, . per cent; wrong, . . yellow and red much sooner named rightly than green and blue ( ). will. _instinctive movements._--first gymnastic exercises ( ). _expressive movements._--kissing an expression of thankfulness ( ). intellect. _speech._--repeating, for fun, expressions heard. calls, without occasion, the name of the nurse; calls others by her name, sometimes correcting himself. seldom speaks of himself in third person; gradually uses "du" in address; uses "what?" in a new way. one thousand and twenty-eighth day, "why?" first used; instinct of causality expressed in language ( ). questioning repeated to weariness. articulation perfected, with some exceptions ( ). _feeling of self._--repeats the "i" heard, meaning by it "you" ( ). thirty-fifth month. will. _reflex movements._--responsive movement in sleeping child ( ). intellect. _speech._--fondness for singing increases; pleasure in compass and power of his voice ( ). thirty-sixth month. senses. hearing.--musical notes c, d, e, could not be rightly named by child, in spite of teaching ( ). intellect. "when?" not used until close of the third year ( ). great pleasure in singing, but imitation here not very successful, though surprisingly so in regard to speech. grammatical errors more rare. long sentences correctly but slowly formed. ambition manifested in doing things without help ( ). invention in language rare. participles well used ( ). thirty-seventh month. senses. sight.--_discrimination of colors._--colors named correctly except very dark or pale ones ( ). organic sensations and emotions.--night's sleep from eleven to twelve hours; day-naps no longer required ( ). fear (in sleep) of pigs ( ). intellect. _speech._--child's manner of speaking approximates more and more rapidly to that of the family ( ). fortieth month. intellect. _feeling of self._--fortieth month, pleased with his shadow ( ). the mind of the child. third part. _development of the intellect._ the development of the intellect depends in so great measure upon the modification of innate endowments through natural environment and education, even before systematic instruction begins, and the methods of education are so manifold, that it is at present impossible to make a complete exposition of a normal intellectual development. such an exposition would necessarily comprise in the main two stages: . the _combination_ of sensuous _impressions_ into _perceptions_ (wahrnehmungen); which consists essentially in this--that the sensation, impressing itself directly upon our experience, is by the intellect, now beginning to act, co-ordinated in space and time. . the _combination_ of _perceptions_ into _ideas_; in particular into _sense-intuitions_ and _concepts_. a sense-intuition (anschauung) is a perception together with its cause, the object of the sensation; a concept (begriff) results from the union of the previously separated perceptions, which are then called separate marks or qualities. the investigation of each of these stages in the child is in itself a great labor, which an individual may indeed begin upon, but can not easily carry through uniformly in all directions. i have indeed tried to collect recorded facts, but have found only very little trustworthy material, and accordingly i confine myself essentially to my own observations on my child. these are not merely perfectly trustworthy, even to the minutest details (i have left out everything of a doubtful character), but they are the most circumstantial ever published in regard to the intellectual development of a child. but i have been acquainted with a sufficient number of other children to be certain that the child observed by me did not _essentially_ differ from other healthy and intelligent boys in regard to the principal points, although the time at which development takes place, and the rapidity of it, differ a good deal in different individuals. girls often appear to learn to speak earlier than boys; but further on they seem to possess a somewhat inferior capacity of development of the logical functions, or to accomplish with less ease abstractions of a higher order; whereas in boys the emotional functions, however lasting their reactions, are not so delicately graduated as in girls. without regard to such differences, of which i am fully aware, the following chapters treat exclusively of the development of purely intellectual cerebral activity in both sexes during the first years. i acknowledge, however, that i have found the investigation of the influence of the affectional movements, or emotions, upon the development of the intellect in the child during the first years so difficult, that i do not for the present enter into details concerning it. the observations relate, first, to the non-dependence of the child's intellect upon language; next, to the acquirement of speech; lastly, to the development of the feeling of self, the "i"-feeling. chapter xvi. development of the child's intellect independently of language. a wide-spread prejudice declares, "without language, no understanding"! subtile distinctions between understanding and reason have limited the statement to the latter term. but even in the restricted form, "without verbal language, no reason," it is at least unproved. _is there any thinking without words?_ the question takes this shape. now, for the thinker, who has long since forgotten the time when he himself learned to speak, it is difficult, or even impossible, to give a decided answer. for the thinking person can not admit that he has been thinking without words; not even when he has caught himself arriving at a logical result without a continuity in his unexpressed thought. a break occurred in the train. there was, however, a train of thought. breaks alone yield no thought; they arise only after words have been associated with thoughts, and so they can by no means serve as evidence of a thinking without words, although the ecstasy of the artist, the profundity of the meta-physician, may attain the last degree of unconsciousness, and a dash may interrupt the thought-text. but the child not yet acquainted with verbal language, who has not been prematurely artificialized by training and by suppression of his own attempts to express his states of mind, who learns _of himself_ to _think_, just as he learns of himself to see and hear--such a child shows plainly to the attentive observer that long before knowledge of the word as a means of understanding among men, and long before the first successful attempt to express himself in articulate words--nay, long before learning the pronunciation of even a single word, he combines ideas in a logical manner--i. e., he _thinks_. thinking is, it is true, "internal speech," but there is a speech without words. facts in proof of this have already been given in connection with other points (vol. i, pp. , , ); others are given further on. it will not be superfluous, however, to put together several observations relating to the development of the childish intellect without regard to the acquirement of speech; and to present them separately, as a sort of introduction to the investigation of the process of learning to speak. memory; a causative combination of the earliest recollections, or memory-images; purposive, deliberate movements for the lessening of individual strain--all these come to the child in greater or less measure independently of verbal language. the, as it were, embryonic logic of the child does not need words. a brief explanation of the operation of these three factors will show this. memory takes the first place in point of time. without memory no intellect is possible. the only material at the disposal of the intellect is received from the senses. it has been provided solely out of sensations. now a sensation in itself alone, as a simple fundamental experience affecting primarily the one who has the sensation, can not be the object of any intellectual operation whatever. in order to make such activity possible there must be several sensations: two of different kinds, of unequal strength; or two of different kinds, of the same strength; or two of the same kind unequally strong; in any case, two unlike sensations (cf. my treatise "elemente der reinen empfindungslehre," jena, ), if the lowest activity of the intellect, _comparison_, is to operate. but because the sensations that are to be compared can not all exist together, recollection of the earlier ones is necessary (for the comparison); that is, individual or personal memory. this name i give to the memory formed by means of individual impressions (occurrences, experiences) in contrast with the _phyletic_ memory, or instinct, the memory of the race, which results from the inheritance of the traces of individual experiences of ancestors; of this i do not here speak. all sensations leave traces behind in the brain; weak ones leave such as are easy to be obliterated by others; strong ones, traces more enduring. at the beginning of life it seems to be the department of taste (sweet) and of smell (smell of milk) in which memory is first operative (vol. i, p. ). then comes the sense of touch (in nursing). next in order the sense of sight chiefly asserts itself as an early promoter of memory. hearing does not come till later. if the infant, in the period from three to six months of age, is brought into a room he has not before seen, his expression changes; he is astonished. the new sensations of light, the different apportionment of light and dark, arouse his attention; and when he comes back to his former surroundings he is not astonished. these have lost the _stimulus of novelty_--i. e., a certain _reminiscence_ of them has remained with the child, they have _impressed_ themselves upon him. long before the thirtieth week, healthy children distinguish human faces definitely from one another; first, the faces of the mother and the nurse, then the face of the father, seen less often; and all three of these from every strange face. probably faces are the first thing frequently perceived clearly by the eye. it has been found surprising that infants so much earlier recognize human faces and forms, and follow them with the gaze, than they do other objects. but human forms and faces, being large, moving objects, awaken interest more than other objects do; and on account of the manner of their movements, and because they are the source from which the voice issues, are essentially different from other objects in the field of vision. "in these movements they are also characterized as a coherent whole, and the face, as a whitish-reddish patch with the two sparkling eyes, is always a part of this image that will be easy to recognize, even for one who has seen it but a few times" (helmholtz). hence the memory for faces is established earlier than that for other visual impressions, and with this the ability to recognize members of the family. a little girl, who does not speak at all, looks at pictures with considerable interest in the seventh month, "and points meantime with her little forefinger to the heads of the human figures" (frau von strümpell). my child in the second month could already localize the face and voice of his mother, but the so-called knowing ("erkennen") is a recognition (wiedererkennen) which presupposes a very firm _association of the memory-images_. this fundamental function attached to the memory can have but a slow development, because it demands an accumulation of memory-images and precision in them. in the second three months it is so far developed, at least, that strange faces are at once known as strange, and are distinguished from those of parents and nurse; for they excite astonishment or fear (crying) while the faces of the latter do not. but the latter, if absent, are not yet, at this period, missed by most children. hence it is worthy of note that a girl in her twelfth month recognized her nurse after six days' absence, immediately, "with sobs of joy," as the mother reports (frau von strümpell); another recognized her father, after a separation of four days, even in the tenth month (lindner). in the seventh month my child did _not_ recognize his nurse, to whom he had for months been accustomed, after an absence of four weeks. another child, however, at four months noticed at evening the absence of his nurse, who had been gone only a day, and cried lustily upon the discovery, looking all about the room, and crying again every time after searching in vain (wyma, ). at ten months the same child used to be troubled by the absence of his parents, though he bore himself with indifference toward them when he saw them again. at this period a single nine-pin out of the whole set could not be taken away without his noticing it, and at the age of a year and a half this child knew at once whether one of his ten animals was missing or not. in the nineteenth and twenty-first months my boy recognized his father immediately from a distance, after a separation of several days, and once after two weeks' absence; and in his twenty-third month his joy at seeing again his playthings after an absence of eleven and a half weeks (with his parents) was very lively, great as was the child's forgetfulness in other respects at this period. a favorite toy could often be taken from him without its being noticed or once asked for. but when the child--in his eighteenth month--after having been accustomed to bring to his mother two towels which he would afterward carry back to their place, on one occasion had only one towel given back to him, he came with inquiring look and tone to get the second. this observation, which is confirmed by some similar ones, proves that at a year and a half the memory for visual and motor ideas that belong together was already well developed without the knowledge of the corresponding words. but artificial associations of this sort need continual renewing, otherwise they are soon forgotten; the remembrance of them is speedily lost even in the years of childhood. it is noteworthy, in connection with this, that what has been lately acquired, e. g., verses learned by heart, can be recited more fluently during sleep than in the waking condition. at the age of three years and five months a girl recited a stanza of five lines on the occasion of a birthday festival, not without some stumbling, but one night soon after the birthday she repeated the whole of the rhymes aloud in her sleep without stumbling at all (frau von strümpell). it is customary, generally, to assume that the memory of adults does not extend further back than to the fourth year of life. satisfactory observations on this point are not known to exist. but it is certainly of the first consequence, in regard to the development of the faculty of memory, whether the later experiences of the child have any characteristic in common with the earlier experiences. for many of these experiences no such agreement exists; nothing later on reminds us of the once existing inability to balance the head, or of the former inability to turn around, to sit, to stand, to walk, of the inborn difficulty of hearing, inability to accommodate the eye, and to distinguish our own body from foreign objects; hence, no man, and no child, remembers these states. but this is not true of what is acquired later. my child when less than three years old remembered very well--and would almost make merry over himself at it--the time when he could not yet talk, but articulated incorrectly and went imperfectly through the first, often-repeated performances taught by his nurse, "how tall is the child?" and "where is the rogue?" if i asked him, after he had said "frühstücken" correctly, how he used to say it, he would consider, and would require merely a suggestion of accessory circumstances, in order to give the correct answer _fritick_ and so with many words difficult to pronounce. the child of three and even of four years can remember separate experiences of his second year, and a person that will take the pains to remind him frequently of them will be able easily to carry the recollections of the second and third years far on into the more advanced years of childhood. it is merely because no one makes such a useless experiment that older children lose the memory-images of their second year. these fade out because they are not combined with new ones. at what time, however, the first natural association of a particular idea with a new one that appears weeks or months later, takes place without being called up by something in the mean time, is very hard to determine. on this point we must first gather good observations out of the second and third half-years, like the following: "in the presence of a boy a year and a half old it was related that another boy whom he knew, and who was then in the country far away, had fallen and hurt his knee. no one noticed the child, who was playing as the story was told. after some weeks the one who had fallen came into the room, and the little one in a lively manner ran up to the new-comer and cried, 'fall, hurt leg!'" (stiebel, ). another example is given by g. lindner ( ): "the mother of a two-year-old child had made for it out of a postal-card a sled (schlitten), which was destroyed after a few hours, and found its way into the waste-basket. just four weeks later another postal-card comes, and it is taken from the carrier by the child and handed to the mother with the words,'_mamma, litten!_' this was in summer, when there was nothing to remind the child of the sled. soon after the same wish was expressed on the receipt of a letter also." i have known like cases of attention, of recollection, and of intelligence in the third year where they were not suspected. the child, unnoticed, hears all sorts of things said, seizes on this or that expression, and weeks after brings into connection, fitly or unfitly, the memory-images, drawing immediately from an insufficient number of particular cases a would-be general conclusion. equally certain with this fact is the other, less known or less noticed, that, _even before the first attempts at speaking, such a generalizing and therefore concept-forming combination of memory-images regularly takes place_. all children in common have inborn in them the ability to combine all sorts of sense-impressions connected with food, when these appear again individually, with one another, or with memory-images of such impressions, so that adaptive movements suited to the obtaining of fresh food arise as the result of this association. in the earlier months these are simple and easier to be seen, and i have given several examples (vol. i, pp. , , , ). later such movements, through the perfecting of the language of gesture and the growth of this very power of association, become more and more complicated: e. g., in his sixteenth month my boy saw a closed box, out of which he had the day before received a cake; he at once made with his hands a begging movement, yet he could not speak a word. in the twenty-first month i took out of the pocket of a coat which was hanging with many others in the wardrobe a biscuit and gave it to the child. when he had eaten it, he went directly to the wardrobe and looked in the right coat for a second biscuit. at this period also the child can not have been thinking in the unspoken words, "get biscuit--wardrobe, coat, pocket, look," for he did not yet know the words. even in the sixth month an act of remarkable _adaptiveness_ was once observed, which can not be called either accidental or entirely voluntary, and if it was fully purposed it would indicate a well-advanced development of understanding in regard to food without knowledge of words. when the child, viz., after considerable experience in nursing at the breast, discovered that the flow of milk was less abundant, he used to place his hand hard on the breast as if he wanted to force out the milk by pressure. of course there was here no insight into the causal connection, but it is a question whether the firm laying on of the little hand was not repeated for the reason that the experience had been once made accidentally, that after doing this the nursing was less difficult. on the other hand, an unequivocal complicated act of deliberation occurred in the seventeenth month. the child could not reach his playthings in the cupboard, because it was too high for him; he ran about, brought a traveling-bag, got upon it, and took what he wanted. in this case he could not possibly think in words, since he did not yet know words. my child tries further (in the nineteenth and twentieth months) in a twofold fashion to make known his eager wish to leave the room, not being as yet able to speak. he takes any cloth he fancies and brings it to me. i put it about him, he wraps himself in it, and, climbing beseechingly on my knee, makes longing, pitiful sounds, which do not cease until after i have opened a door through which he goes into another room. then he immediately throws away the cloth and runs about exulting. the other performance is this: when the child feels the need of relieving his bowels, he is accustomed to make peculiar grunting sounds, by means of a strain of the abdomen, shutting the mouth and breathing loud, by jerks, through the nose. he is then taken away. now, if he is not suited with the place where he happens to be, at any time, he begins to make just such sounds. if he is taken away, no such need appears at all, but he is in high glee. here is the expectation, "i shall be taken away if i make that sound." whether we are to admit, in addition, an intentional _deception_ in this case, or whether only a logical process takes place, i can not decide. in the whole earlier and later behavior of the child there is no ground for the first assumption, and the fact that he employs this artifice while in his carriage, immediately after he has been waited on, is directly against it. to how small an extent, some time previous to this, perceptions were made use of _to simplify his own exertions_, i. e., were combined and had motor effect, appears from an observation in the sixteenth month. earlier than this, when i used to say, "give the ring," i always laid an ivory ring, that was tied to a thread, before the child, on the table. i now said the same thing--after an interval of a week--while the same ring was hanging near the chair by a red thread a foot long, so that the child, as he sat on the chair, could just reach it, but only with much pains. he made a grasp now, upon getting the sound-impression "ring," not at the thread, which would have made the seizure of the ring, hanging freely, very easy for him, but directly at the ring hanging far below him, and gave it to me. and when the command was repeated, it did not occur to him to touch the thread. it is likewise a sign of small understanding that the mouth is always opened in smelling of a fragrant flower or perfume (vol. i, p. ). deficiencies of this kind are, indeed, quite logical from the standpoint of childish experience. because, at an earlier period the pleasant smell (of milk) always came in connection with the pleasant taste, therefore, thinks the child, in every case where there is a pleasant smell there will also be something that tastes good. the common or collective concept _taste-smell_ had not yet (in the seventeenth month) been differentiated into the concepts taste and smell. in the department of the sense of hearing the differentiation generally makes its appearance earlier; memory, as a rule, later. yet children whose talent for music is developed early, retain _melodies_ even in their first year of life. a girl to whom some of the froebel songs were sung, and who was taught appropriate movements of the hands and feet, always performed the proper movement when one of the melodies was merely hummed, or a verse was said (in the thirteenth month), without confounding them at all. this early and firm association of sound-images with motor-images is possible only when interest is attached to it--i. e., when the attention has been directed often, persistently, and with concentration, upon the things to be combined. thus, this very child (in the nineteenth month), when her favorite song, "who will go for a soldier?" ("wer will unter die soldaten?") was sung to her, could not only join in the rhyme at the end of the verse, but, no matter where a stop was made, she would go on, in a manner imperfect, indeed, but easily intelligible (frau dr. friedemann). here, however, in addition to memory and attention, heredity is to be considered; since such a talent is wholly lacking in certain families, but in others exists in all the brothers and sisters. in performances of this kind, a superior understanding is not by any means exhibited, but a stronger memory and faculty of association. these associations are not, however, of a logical sort, but are habits acquired through training, and they may even retard the development of the intellect if they become numerous. for they may obstruct the formation, at an early period, of independent ideas, merely on account of the time they claim. often, too, these artificial associations are almost useless for the development of the intellect. they are too special. on this ground i am compelled to censure the extravagancies, that are wide-spread especially in germany, of the froebel methods of occupying young children. the _logic of the child_ naturally operates at the beginning with much more extensive, and therefore less intensive, notions than those of adults, with notions which the adult no longer forms. but the child does not, on that account, proceed illogically, although he does proceed awkwardly. some further examples may illustrate. the adult does not ordinarily try whether a door that he has just bolted is fast; but the one-year-old child tests carefully the edge of the door he has shut, to see whether it is really closed, because he does not understand the effect of lock and bolt. for even in the eighteenth month he goes back and forth with a key, to the writing-desk, with the evident purpose of opening it. but at twelve months, when he tries whether it is fast, he does not think of the key at all, and does not yet possess a single word. an adult, before watering flowers with a watering-pot, will look to see whether there is water in it. the child of a year and a half, who has seen how watering is done, finds special pleasure in going from flower to flower, even with an empty watering-pot, and making the motions of pouring upon each one separately, as if water would really come out. for him the notion "watering-pot" is identical with the notion "filled watering-pot," because at first he was acquainted with the latter only. much of what is attributed to imagination in very young children rests essentially on the formation of such vague concepts, on the inability to combine constant qualities into sharply defined concepts. when, in the twenty-third month, the child holds an empty cup to his mouth and sips and swallows, and does it repeatedly, and with a serene, happy expression, this "play" is founded chiefly on the imperfect notion "filled cup." the child has so often perceived something to drink, drinking-vessel, and the act of drinking, in combination with one another, that the one peremptorily demands the other when either appears singly; hence the pleasure in pouring out from empty pitchers into empty cups, and in drinking out of empty cups (in second to fifth years). when adults do the same in the play of the theatre, this action always has a value as language, it signifies something for other persons; but with the child, who plays in this fashion entirely alone, the pleasure consists in the production of familiar ideas together with agreeable feelings, which are, as it were, crystallized with comparative clearness out of the dull mass of undefined perceptions. these memory-images become real existences, like the hallucinations of the insane, because the sensuous impressions probably impress themselves directly--without reflection--upon the growing brain, and hence the memory-images of them, on account of their vividness, can not always be surely distinguished from the perceptions themselves. most of the plays that children invent of themselves may be referred to this fact; on the other hand, the play of hide-and-seek (especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth months), and, nearly allied to this, the hunting after scraps of paper, bits of biscuit, buttons, and other favorite objects (in the fifteenth month), constitute an intellectual advance. by practice in this kind of seeking for well-known, purposely concealed objects, the intelligence of little children can easily be increased to an astonishing degree, so that toward the end of the second year they already understand some simple tricks of the juggler; for example, making a card disappear. but after i had discontinued such exercises for months, the ordinary capacity for being duped was again present. this ease with which children can be deceived is to be attributed to lack of experience far more than to lack of intelligence. when the child of a year and a half offers leaves to a sheep or a stag, observes the strange animal with somewhat timid astonishment, and a few days after holds out some hastily plucked grass-blades to a chaffinch he sees hopping across the road, supposing that the bird will likewise take them from his hand and eat them--an observation that i made on my child exactly as sigismund did on his--it is not right to call such an act "stupid"; the act shows ignorance--i. e., inexperience--but it is not illogical. the child would be properly called stupid only in case he did not _learn_ the difference between the animals fed. when, on the other hand, the child of two and a half years, entirely of his own accord, holds a watch first to his left ear, then to his right, listens both times, and then says, "the watch goes, goes too!" then, pointing with his finger to a clock, cries with delight, "the clock goes too," we rightly find in such independent induction a proof of intellect. for the swinging of the pendulum and the ticking had indeed often been perceived, but to connect the notion of a "going clock" with the visible but noiseless swinging, just as with the audible but invisible ticking of the watch, requires a pretty well advanced power of abstraction. that the ability to _abstract_ may show itself, though imperfectly, even in the first year, is, according to my observations, certain. infants are struck by a quality of an object--e. g., the white appearance of milk. the "taking away" or "abstracting" then consists in the isolating of this quality out of innumerable other sight-impressions and the blending of the impressions into a concept. the _naming_ of this, which begins months later, by a rudimental word, like _mum_, is an outward sign of this abstraction, which did not at all lead to the formation of the concept, but followed it, as will be shown in detail further on (in the two following chapters). it would be interesting to collect observations concerning this reasoning power in the very earliest period, because at that time language does not interfere to help or to hinder. but it is just such observations that we especially lack. when a child in the twelfth month, on hearing a watch for the first time, cries out, "tick-tick," looking meantime at the clock on the wall, he has not, in doing this, "formed," as g. lindner supposes, "his first concept, although a vague and empty one as yet," but he had the concept before, and has now merely given a name to it for the first time. the first observation made in regard to his child by darwin, which seemed to him to prove "a sort of practical reflection," occurred on the one hundred and forty-fourth day. the child grasped his father's finger and drew it to his mouth, but his own hand prevented him from sucking the finger. the child then, strangely enough, instead of entirely withdrawing his hand, slipped it along the finger so that he could get the end of the finger into his mouth. this proceeding was several times repeated, and was evidently not accidental but intentional. at the age of five months, associations of ideas arose independently of all instruction. thus, e. g., the child, being dressed in hat and cloak, was very angry if he was not at once taken out of doors. how strong the _reasoning power without_ words may be at a later period, the following additional observations show: from the time when my child, like sigismund's (both in the fifteenth month), had burned his finger in the flame of the candle, he could not be induced to put his finger near the flame again, but he would sometimes put it in fun toward the flame without touching it, and he even (eighteen months old) carried a stick of wood of his own accord to the stove-door and pushed it in through the open slide, with a proud look at his parents. there is surely something more than an imitation here. further, my child at first never used to let his mouth and chin be wiped without crying; from the fifteenth month on he kept perfectly quiet during the disagreeable operation. he must have noticed that this was finished sooner when he was quiet. the same thing can be observed in every little child, provided he is not too much talked to, punished, yielded to, or spoiled. in the nineteenth month it happened with my child that he resisted the command to lie down in the evening. i let him cry, and raise himself on his bed, but did not take him up, did not speak to him, did not use any force, but remained motionless and watchful near by. at last he became tired, lay down, and fell asleep directly. here he acquired an understanding of the uselessness of crying in order to avoid obedience to commands. the _knowledge_ of right (what is allowed and commanded) and of wrong (what is forbidden) had been long since acquired. in the seventeenth month, e. g., a sense of cleanliness was strongly developed, and later (in the thirty-third month) the child could not, without lively protest, behold his nurse acting contrary to the directions that had been given to himself--e. g., putting the knife into her mouth or dipping bread into the milk. emotions of this kind are less a proof of the existence of a sense of duty than of the _understanding_ that violations of well-known precepts have unpleasant consequences--i. e., that certain actions bring in their train pleasant feelings, while other acts bring unpleasant feelings. how long before the knowledge of words these emotions began to exist i have, unfortunately, not succeeded in determining. but in many of the above cases--and they might without difficulty be multiplied by diligent observation--there is not the least indication of any influence of spoken words. whether no attempt at speaking has preceded, or whether a small collection of words may have been made, the cases of child-intelligence adduced in this chapter, observed by myself, prove that without knowledge of verbal language, and independently of it, the logical activity of the child attains a high degree of development, and no reason exists for explaining the intelligent actions of children who do not yet speak at all--i. e., do not yet clothe their ideas in words, but do already combine them with one another--as being different specifically from the intelligent (not instinctive) actions of sagacious orangs and chimpanzees. the difference consists far more in this, that the latter can not form so many, so clear, and so abstract conceptions, or so many and complicated combinations of ideas, as can the gifted human child in the society of human beings--_even before he has learned to speak_. when he has learned to speak, then the gap widens to such an extent that what before was in some respects almost the equal of humanity seems now a repulsive caricature of it. in order, then, to understand the real difference between brute and man, it is necessary to ascertain how a child and a brute animal may have ideas without words, and may combine them for an end: whether it is done, e. g., with memory-images, as in dreaming. and it is necessary also to investigate the _essential character of the process of learning to speak_. concerning the first problem, which is of uncommon psychogenetic interest and practical importance, a solution seems to be promised in the investigation of the formation of concepts in the case of those born deaf, the so-called deaf and dumb children. on this point i offer first the words of a man of practical experience. the excellent superintendent of the educational institute for the deaf and dumb in weimar, c. oehlwein ( ), well says: "the deaf-mute in his first years of life looks at, turns over, feels of objects that attract him, on all sides, and approaches those that are at a distance. by this he receives, like the young child who has all his senses, sensations and sensuous ideas;[c] and from the objects themselves he apprehends a number of qualities, which he compares with one another or with the qualities of other objects, but always refers to the object which at the time attracts him. herein he has a more correct or less correct sense-intuition of this object, according as he has observed, compared, and comprehended more or less attentively. as this object has affected him through sight and feeling, so he represents it to other persons also by characteristic signs for sight and indirectly for feeling also. he shapes or draws a copy of the object seen and felt with life and movement. for this he avails himself of the means that nature has placed directly within human power--the control over the movement of the facial muscles, over the use of the hands, and, if necessary, of the feet also. these signs, _not obtained from any one's suggestion_, self-formed, which the deaf-mute employs directly in his representation, are, as it were, the given outline of the image which he has found, and they stand therefore in the closest relation to the inner constitution of the individual that makes the representation. "but we find not only that the individual senses of the deaf-mute, his own observation and apprehension, are formative factors in the occurrences of sensation and perception, as is of course the case, but that the qualities of the objects observed by him, and associated, according to his individual tendencies, are also raised by him, through comparison, separation, grouping--through his own act, therefore--to general ideas, concepts, although as yet imperfect ones, and they are named and recognized again by peculiar signs intelligible to himself. "but in this very raising of an idea to a general idea, to a concept--a process connected with the forming of a sign--is manifested the influence of the lack of hearing and of speech upon the psychical development of the deaf-mute. it appears at first to be an advantage that the sign by which the deaf-mute represents an idea is derived from the impression, the image, the idea, which the user of the sign himself has or has had; he expresses by the sign nothing foreign to him, but only what has become his own. but this advantage disappears when compared with the hindrance caused by this very circumstance in the raising of the individual idea to a general idea, for the fact that the latter is designated by the image, or the elements of the image in which the former consists, is no small obstacle to it in attaining complete generality. the same bond that unites the concept with the conceiver binds it likewise to one of the individual ideas conceived--e. g., when, by pointing to his own flesh, his own skin, he designates the concept flesh, skin (in general also the flesh or the skin of animals); whereas, by means of the word, which the child who has all his senses is obliged to learn, a constraint is indeed exercised as something foreign, but a constraint that simply enforces upon his idea the claim of generality. "one example more. the deaf-mute designates the concept, or general idea, 'red' by lightly touching his lips. with this sign he indicates the red of the sky, of paintings, of dress-stuffs, of flowers, etc. thus, in however manifold connection with other concepts his concept 'red' may be repeated, it is to him as a concept always _one_ and the same only. it is _common_ to _all_ the connections in which it repeatedly occurs." but before the thinking deaf-mute arrived at the concept "red," he formed for himself the ideas "lip, dress, sky, flower," etc. for a knowledge of intellectual development in the child possessed of all the senses, and of the great extent to which he is independent of verbal language in the formation of concepts, it is indispensable to make a collection of such concepts as uneducated deaf-mutes not acquainted either with the finger-alphabet or with articulation express by means of their own gestures in a manner intelligible to others. their language, however, comprises "not only the various expressive changes of countenance (play of feature), but also the varied movements of the hands (gesticulations), the positions, attitudes, bearing, and movements of the other parts of the entire body, through which the deaf-mute naturally, i. e., _untouched by educational influences_, expresses his ideas and conceptions." but i refrain from making such a catalogue here, as we are concerned with the fact that _many concepts are, without any learning of words whatever, plainly expressed and logically combined with one another_, and their correctness is proved by the conduct of any and every untaught child born deaf. besides, such a catalogue, in order to possess the psychogenetic value desired by me, needs a critical examination extremely difficult to carry through as to whether the "educational influences" supposed to be excluded are actually wholly excluded in all cases as they really are in some cases, e. g., in regard to food. degerando ( ) has enumerated a long list of concepts, which deaf-mutes before they are instructed represent by pantomimic gesture. many of these forms of expression in french deaf-mutes are identical with those of german. it is most earnestly to be wished that this international language of feature and gesture used by children entirely uninstructed, born deaf, may be made accessible to psycho-physiological and linguistic study by means of pictorial representations--photographic best of all. this should be founded on the experiences of german, french, english, russian, italian, and other teachers of deaf-mutes. for there is hardly a better proof that thinking is not dependent on the language of words than the conduct of deaf-mutes, who express, indeed, many more concepts of unlike content in the same manner than any verbal language does--just as children with all their senses do before they possess a satisfactory stock of words--but who, by gesticulation and pantomime before receiving any instruction, demonstrate that concepts are formed without words. with reference to the manner in which uneducated deaf-mutes speak, the following examples are characteristic performances in gesture-language: one deaf-mute asks another, "stay, go you?" (look of inquiry). answer: "go, i" (i. e., "do you stay or go?" "i go"). "hunter hare shoots." "arm, man, be strong," means, "the man's arm is strong." "n., spectacles, see," means, "n. sees with the spectacles." "run i finished, go to sleep," means, "when i had finished running, i went to sleep." "money, you?" means, "have you money?" one of the most interesting sights i know of, in a psychological and physiological point of view, is a conversation in gesture and pantomime between two or three children born totally deaf, who do not know that they are observed. i am indebted to director oehlwein, of weimar, for the opportunity of such observations, as also for the above questions and answers. especially those children (of about seven years) not yet instructed in articulation employ an astonishing number of looks and gestures, following one upon another with great rapidity, in order to effect an understanding with one another. they understand one another very easily, but, because their gestures, and particularly their excessively subtilized play of feature, do not appear in ordinary life, these children are just as hard to understand for the uninitiated as are men who speak a wholly foreign language without any gestures. even the eye of the deaf-mute has a different expression from that of the person who talks. the look seems more "interested," and manifestly far fewer unnecessary movements of the eyes and contractions of the facial muscles are made by the deaf-mute than by the child of the same age who has his hearing. further, deaf-mutes, even those of small ability, imitate all sorts of movements that are plainly visible much better, in general, than do persons with all their senses. i made, in presence of the children, several not very easy crossings of the fingers, put my hands in different positions, and the like--movements that they could not ever have seen--and i was surprised that some of the children at once made them deftly, whereas ordinary children, first consider a long time, and then imitate clumsily. it is doubtless this exaltation of the imitative functions in deaf-mute children which makes it appear as if they themselves invented their gestures (see above, p. ). certainly they do not get their first signs through "any one's suggestion," they form them for themselves, but, so far as i see, only through imitation and the hereditary expressive movements. the signs are in great part themselves unabridged imitations. the agreement, or "convention," which many teachers of deaf-mutes assume, and which would introduce an entirely causeless, not to say mysterious, principle, consists in this, that all deaf-mutes in the beginning imitate the same thing in the same way. thus, through this perfectly natural accord of all, it comes to pass that they understand one another. when they have gained ideas, then they combine the separate signs in manifold ways, as one who speaks combines words, in order to express new ideas; they become thereby more and more difficult to be understood, and often are only with difficulty understood even among themselves; and they are able only in very limited degree to form concepts of a higher order. "nothing, being dead, space"--these are concepts of a very high order for them. for this reason it is easy to comprehend that a deaf-mute child, although he has learned but few words through instruction in articulation, weaves these continually into his pantomimic conversation in place of his former elaborate gestures. i observed that individual children, born totally deaf, preferred, even in conversation with one another, and when ignorant of the fact that i was observing them, the articulate words just learned, although these were scarcely intelligible, to their own signs. thus mighty is the charm of the spoken word, even when the child does not himself hear it, but merely feels it with his tongue. but the schooling the deaf-mute must go through in order to become acquainted with the sensations of sight, touch, and movement that go with the sound, is unspeakably toilsome. w. gude says in his treatise, remarkable alike for acuteness and clearness, "principles and outlines of the exposition of a scheme of instruction for an institution for deaf-mutes" ("grundsätze und grundzüge zur aufstellung eines lehrplans für eine taubstummen-anstalt," ): "the utterances of tones and of articulate sounds called forth by involuntary stimulus during the first years, in deaf-mutes, are such unimportant motor phenomena that they are not immediately followed by a motor sensation. but when the deaf-mute child is more awake mentally, he perceives that his relatives make movements of the mouth in their intercourse, and repeated attempts of those about him to make themselves intelligible by pronouncing certain words to him are not entirely without effect upon the deaf-mute that is intellectually active. when such deaf-mutes now direct their attention to the matter, they succeed in regard to only a part of the sounds--those that are conspicuous to the eye in their utterance--in getting a tolerable imitation. individual deaf-mutes go so far, in fact, as to understand various words correctly without repeating them; others succeed gradually in repeating such words as 'papa, mamma,' so that one can understand what is meant. those who are deaf-mutes from birth do not, however, of themselves, succeed in imitating accurately other vocal sounds in general." a deaf-mute, who had not been instructed, explained to romanes, at a later period when he had learned the sign-language, that he had before thought in "images," which means nothing else than that he, in place of the words heard (in our case) and the digital signs seen (in his case), had made use of memory-images gained from visual impressions, for distinguishing his concepts. laura bridgman, too, a person in general the subject of very incorrect inferences, who was not blind and deaf from birth, could form a small number of concepts that were above the lowest grade. these originated from the materials furnished by the sense of touch, the muscular sense and general sensibility, before she had learned a sort of finger-language. but she had learned to speak somewhat before she became dumb and blind. children with sight, born deaf, seem not to be able to perform the simplest arithmetical operations, e. g., - and x (according to asch, ), until after several years of continuous instruction in articulate speaking. they do succeed, however, and that without sound-images of words, and perhaps, too, without sight-images of words; in mental arithmetic without knowledge of written figures, by help of the touch-images of words which the tongue furnishes. in any case uneducated persons born deaf can count by means of the fingers without the knowledge of figures; and, when they go beyond , the notched stick comes to their aid (sicard and degerando). the language of gesture and feature in very young children, born dumb and not treated differently from other children, shows also, in most abundant measure, that concepts are formed without words. the child born deaf uses the primitive language of gesture to the same extent as does the child that has his hearing; the former makes himself intelligible by actions and sounds as the latter does, so that his deficiency is not suspected. this natural language is also _understood_ by the child born deaf, so far as it is recognizable by his eye. in the look and the features of his mother he reads her mood. but he very early becomes quiet and develops for himself, "out of unconscious gesticulation, the gesture language, which at first is not conventional, nay, is not in the strict sense quite a sign-language, but a mimetic-plastic representation of the influences experienced from the external world," since the deaf-mute imitates movements perceived, and the attitude of persons and the position of objects. upon this pantomime alone rests the possibility of coming to an understanding, within a certain range, with deaf-mutes that have had no instruction at all. it can not, therefore, in its elementary form be conventional, as hill, to whom i owe these data, rightly maintains. he writes concerning the child born deaf: "his voice seems just like that of other children. he screams, weeps, according as he feels uncomfortable; he starts when frightened by any noise. even friendly address, toying, fun, serious threats, are understood by him as early as by any child." but he does not hear his own voice; it is not sound that frightens him, but the concussion; it is not the pleasant word that delights him, but the pleasant countenance of his mother. "it even happens, not seldom, that through encouragement to use the voice, these children acquire a series of articulate sounds, and a number of combinations of sounds, which they employ as the expression of their wishes." they not only _point out_ the object desired, not only _imitate_ movements that are to procure what they want, but they also outline the forms of objects wished for. they are able to conduct themselves so intelligently in this, that the deaf-mute condition is not discovered till the second year, or even later, and then chiefly by their use of the eye, because in case of distant objects only those seen excite their attention. from this behavior of infants born deaf it manifestly follows that even without the possibility of natural imitation of sounds, and without the knowledge of a single word, qualities may be blended with qualities into concepts. thus, _primitive thinking is not bound up with verbal language_. it demands, however, a certain development of the cerebrum, probably a certain very considerable number of ganglionic cells in the cerebral cortex, that stand in firm organic connection with one another. the difference between an uninstructed young deaf-mute and a cretin is immense. the former can learn a great deal through instruction in speaking, the latter can not. this very ability to learn, in the child born deaf, is greater than in the normal child, in respect to pantomime and gesture. if a child with his hearing had to grow up among deaf-mutes, he would undoubtedly learn their language, and would in addition enjoy his own voice without being able to make use of it; but he would probably be discovered, further on, without testing his hearing, by the fact that he was not quite so complete a master of this gesture-language as the deaf-mutes, on account of the diversion of his attention by sound. the total result of the foregoing observations concerning the capacity of accomplishment on the part of uneducated deaf-mutes in regard to the natural language of gesture and feature, demonstrates more plainly than any other fact whatever that, without words and without signs for words, thought-activity exists--that thinking takes place when both words and signs for words are wanting. wherefore, then, should the logical combination of ideas in the human being born perfect begin only with the speaking of words or the learning to speak? because the adult supposes that he no longer thinks without words, he easily draws the erroneous conclusion that no one, that not even he himself, could think before the knowledge of verbal language. in truth, however, it was _not language that generated the intellect; it is the intellect that formerly invented language: and even now the new-born human being brings with him into the world far more intellect than talent for language_. footnotes: [c] empfindungsvorstellungen. chapter xvii. learning to speak. no human being remembers how he learned his mother-tongue in early youth, and the whole human race has forgotten the origin of its articulate speech as well as of its gestures; but every individual passes perceptibly through the stage of learning to speak, so that a patient observer recognizes much as conformable to law. the acquisition of speech belongs to those physiological problems which can not be solved by the most important means possessed by physiology, vivisection. and the speechless condition in which every human being is born can not be regarded as a disease that may be healed by instruction, as is the case with certain forms of acquired aphasia. a set of other accomplishments, such as swimming, riding, fencing, piano-playing, the acquirement of which is physiological, are learned like articulate speech, and nobody calls the person that can not swim an anomaly on that account. the _inability to appropriate_ to one's self these and other co-ordinated muscular movements, this alone is abnormal. but we can not tell in advance in the case of any new-born child whether he will learn to speak or not, just as in the case of one who has suffered an obstruction of speech or has entirely lost speech, it is not certain whether he will ever recover it. in this the normal child that does _not yet_ speak perfectly, resembles the diseased adult who, for any cause, _no longer_ has command of language. and to compare these two with each other is the more important, as at present no other empirical way is open to us for investigating the nature of the process of learning to speak; but this way conducts us, fortunately, through pathology, to solid, important physiological conclusions. . disturbances of speech in adults. the command of language comprises, on the one hand, the understanding of what is spoken; on the other hand, the utterance of what is thought. it is at the height of its performance in free, intelligible, connected speech. everything that disturbs the _understanding of words heard_ must be designated disturbance of speech equally with everything that disturbs _the production of words_ and sentences. by means of excellent investigations made by many persons, especially by broca, wernicke, kussmaul, it has become possible to make a topical division of most of the observed disturbances of speech of both kinds. in the first class, which comprises the _impressive_ processes, we have to consider every functional disturbance of the peripheral ear, of the auditory nerve and of the central ends of the auditory nerve; in the second class, viz., the _expressive_ processes, we consider every functional disturbance of the apparatus required for articulation, including the nerves belonging to this in their whole extent, in particular the hypoglossus, as motor nerve of the tongue, and certain parts of the cerebral hemispheres from which the nerves of speech are excited and to which the sense-impressions from without are so conducted by connecting fibers that they themselves or their memory-images can call forth expressive, i. e., motor processes. the diagram, fig. , illustrates the matter. [illustration: fig. .] the peripheral ear _o_, with the terminations of the auditory nerve, is by means of sensory fibers _a_, that are connected with the auditory nerve, in connection with the storehouse of sound-impressions, k. this is connected by means of the intercentral paths _v_ with the motor speech-center m. from it go out special fibers of communication, _h_, to the motor nerves of speech which terminate in the external instruments of articulation, _z_. the impressive nerve-path, _o_ _a_ k, is centripetal; the expressive, m _h_ _z_, centrifugal; _v_, intercentral. when the normal child learns to speak, _o_ receives the sound-impressions; by _a_ the acoustic-nerve excitations are passed along to k, and are here stored up, every distinctly heard sound (a tone, a syllable, a word) leaving an impression behind in k. it is very remarkable here that, among the many sounds and noises that impress themselves upon the portions of the brain directly connected with the auditory nerve, a selection is made in the sound-field of speech, k, since all those impressions that can be reproduced, among them all the acoustic images necessary for speech, are preserved, but many others are not, e. g., thunder, crackling. memory is indistinct with regard to these. from k, when the sound-images or sound-impressions have become sufficiently strong and numerous, the nerve-excitement goes farther through the connecting paths _v_ to m, where it liberates motor impulses, and through _h_ sets in activity the peripheral apparatus of speech, _z_. now, speech is disturbed when at any point the path _o_ _z_ is interrupted, or the excitation conducted along the nerve-fibers and ganglionic cells upon the hearing of something spoken or upon the speaking of something represented in idea (heard inwardly) is arrested, a thing which may be effected without a total interruption of the conduction, e. g., by means of poison and through anatomical lesions. on the basis of these physiological relations, about which there is no doubt, i divide, then, all pure disturbances of speech, or _lalopathies_, into three classes: ( ) periphero-impressive or perceptive disturbances. the organ of hearing is injured _at its peripheral extremity_, or else the acusticus in its course; then occurs _difficulty of hearing_ or _deafness_. what is spoken is not correctly heard or not heard at all: the utterance is correct only in case the lesion happened late. if it is inborn, then this lack of speech, alalia, is called _deaf-mutism_, although the so-called deaf and dumb are not in reality dumb, but only deaf. if words spoken are incorrectly heard on account of acquired defects of the peripheral ear, the patient mis-hears, and the abnormal condition is called paracusis. ( ) central disturbances. _a._ the higher impressive central paths are disturbed: _centro-sensory dysphasia and aphasia_, or _word-deafness_. words are heard but not understood. the hearing is acute. "patients may have perfectly correct ideas, but they lack the correct expression for them; not the thoughts but the words are confused. they would understand the ideas of others also if they only understood the words. they are in the position of persons suddenly transported into the midst of a people using the same sounds but different words, which strike upon their ear like an unintelligible noise." (kussmaul.) their articulation is without defect, but what they say is unintelligible because the words are mutilated and used wrongly. c. wernicke discovered this form, and has separated it sharply from other disturbances of speech. he designated it sensory aphasia. kussmaul later named this abnormal condition word-deafness (surditas verbalis). _b._ the connections between the impressive sound-centers and the motor speech-center are injured. then we have intercentral conductive dysphasia and aphasia. what is spoken is heard and understood correctly even when _v_ is completely interrupted. the articulation is not disturbed, and yet the patient utters no word of himself. he can, however, read aloud what is written. (kussmaul.) the word that has just been read aloud by the patient can not be repeated by him, neither can the word that has been pronounced to him; and, notwithstanding this, he reads aloud with perfect correctness. in this case, then, it is impossible for the patient of his own motion, even if the memory of the words heard were not lost, to set in activity the expressive mechanism of speech, although it might remain uninjured. _c._ the motor speech-center is injured. then we have centro-motor dysphasia and aphasia. if the center is completely and exclusively disturbed, then it is a case of pure ataxic aphasia. spontaneous speaking, saying over of words said by another, and reading aloud of writing, are impossible. (kussmaul.) on the other hand, words heard are understood, although the concepts belonging with them can not be expressed aloud. the verbal memory remains; and the patient can still express his thoughts in writing and can copy in writing what he reads or what is dictated to him. ( ) periphero-expressive or articulatory disturbances. the centrifugal paths from the motor speech-center to the motor nerves of speech and to their extremities, or else these nerves themselves, are injured. then occurs _dysarthria_, and, if the path is totally impassable at any place, _anarthria_. the hearing and understanding of words are not hindered, but speaking, repeating the words of others, and reading aloud are, as in the last case ( , _c_), impossible. in general this form can not be distinguished from the foregoing when both are developed in an extreme degree, except in cases of peripheral dysarthria, i. e., dyslalia, since, as may be easily understood, it makes no difference in the resulting phenomena whether the motor center itself is extirpated or its connections with the motor outlet are absolutely cut off just where the latter begins; but if this latter is injured nearer to the periphery, e. g., if the hypoglossus is paralyzed, then the phenomena are different (paralalia, mogilalia). here belongs all so-called mechanical dyslalia, caused by defects of the peripheral speech-apparatus. of these five forms each occurs generally only in connection with another; for this reason the topical diagnosis also is often extraordinarily difficult. but enough cases have been accurately observed and collected to put it almost beyond a doubt that each form may also appear for a short time purely by itself. to be sure, the anatomical localization of the impressive and expressive paths is not yet ascertained, so that for the present the centripetal roads from the acusticus to the motor speech-center, and the intercentral fibers that run to the higher centers, are as much unknown as the centrifugal paths leading from them to the nuclei of the hypoglossus; but that the speech-center discovered by broca is situated in the posterior portion of the third frontal convolution (in right-handed men on the left, in left-handed on the right) is universally acknowledged. further, it results from the abundance of clinical material, that the acoustic-center k must be divided into a sound-center l, a syllable-center s, a word-center w, each of which may be in itself defective, for cases have been observed in which sounds were still recognized and reproduced, but not syllables and words, also cases in which sounds and syllables could be dealt with but no words; and, finally, cases in which all these were wanting. the original diagram is thereby considerably complicated, as the simple path of connection between k and m has added to it the arcs l s m and l s w m (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] the surest test of the perfect condition of all the segments is afforded by the repetition of sounds, syllables, and words pronounced by others. syllables and sounds, but no words, can be pronounced if w is missing or the path s w or w m is interrupted; no syllables if s is missing or l s or s m is interrupted. if l is missing, then nothing can be repeated from hearing. if l m is interrupted, then syllables and words are more easily repeated than simple sounds, so far as the latter are not syllables. if l s is interrupted, then simple sounds only can be repeated. all these abnormal states have been actually observed. the proofs are to be found in kussmaul's classic work on the disturbances of speech ( ). even the strange case appears in which, l m being impracticable, syllables are more easily repeated than simple sounds. if _a_ is interrupted before the acquirement of speech, and thus chronic deafness is present in very early childhood, articulation may still be learned through visual and tactile impressions; but in this case the sound-center l is not developed. another, a sound-touch-center, comes in its place in deaf-mutes when they are instructed, chiefly through the tactile sensations of the tongue; and, when they are instructed in reading (and writing), a sound-sight-(or letter) center. this last is, on the contrary, wanting to those born blind; and both are wanting to those born blind and deaf. instead is formed in them through careful instruction, by means of the tactile sensations of the finger-tips, a center for signs of sound that are known by touch (as with the printed text for the blind). accordingly, the eye and ear are not absolutely indispensable to the acquirement of a verbal language; but for the thorough learning of the verbal language in its entire significance both are by all means indispensable. for, the person born blind does not get the significance of words pertaining to light and color. for him, therefore, a large class of conceptions, an extensive portion of the vocabulary of his language, remains empty sound. to the one born deaf there is likewise an extensive district of conceptions closed, inasmuch as all words pertaining to tone and noise remain unintelligible to him. moreover, those born blind and deaf, or those born blind and becoming deaf very early, or those born deaf and becoming blind very early, though they may possess ever so good intelligence, and perhaps even learn to write letters, as did the famous laura bridgman, will invariably understand only a small part of the vocabulary of their language, and will not articulate correctly. those born deaf are precisely the ones that show plainly how necessary hearing is for the acquirement of perfectly articulate speech. one who is deaf from birth does not even learn to speak half a dozen sounds correctly without assistance, and the loss of speech that regularly follows deafness coming on in children who have already learned to speak, shows how inseparably the learning and the development of perfect articulation are bound up with the hearing. even the deafness that comes on in maturer years injures essentially the agreeable tone, often also the intelligibility, of the utterance. . the organic conditions of learning to speak. how is it, now, with the normal child, who is learning to speak? how is it as to the existence and practicability of the nervous conduction, and the genesis of the centers? in order to decide these questions, a further extension of the diagram is necessary (fig. ). [illustration: fig. .] for the last diagram deals only with the hearing and pronouncing of sounds, syllables, and single words, not with the grammatical formation and syntactical grouping of these; there must further be a center of higher rank, the _dictorium_, or center of diction (kussmaul), brought into connection with the centers l s and w. and, on the one hand, the word-image acquired (by hearing) must be at the disposition of the diction-center, an excitation, therefore, passing from w to d (through _m_); on the other hand, an impulse must go out from the diction-center to pronounce the word that is formed and placed so as to correspond to the sense (through _n_). the same is true for syllables and sounds, whose paths to and from are indicated by _k_ and _l_, as well as by _g_ and _i_. these paths of connection must be of twofold sort. the excitement can not pass off to the diction-center d on the same anatomical path as the return impulse from d, because not a single case is known of a nerve-fiber that in natural relations conducts both centrifugally _and_ centripetally, although this possibility of double conduction does occur under artificial circumstances. apart, then, from pathological experience, which seems to be in favor of it, the separation of the two directions of the excitement seems to be justified anatomically also. on the contrary, it is questionable whether the impulse proceeding from d does not arrive directly at the motor speech-center, instead of passing through w, s, or l. the diagram then represents it as follows (fig. ). here the paths of direct connection _i_, _l_, and _n_ from d to m represent that which was just now represented by _i_ l _d_ and _l_ s _e_ and _n_ w _f_, respectively; in fig. , _i_ conducts only sound-excitations coming from l, _l_ only excitations coming from s, and _n_ only those coming from w, as impulses for m. for the present, i see no way of deciding between the two possibilities. they may even exist both together. all the following statements concerning the localization of the disturbances of speech and the parallel imperfections of child-speech apply indifferently to either figure; it should be borne in mind that the nerve-excitement always goes _only_ in the direction of the arrows, never in the opposite direction, through the nervous path corresponding to them. such a parallel is not only presented, as i have found, and as i will show in what follows, by the most superficial exhibition of the manifold deviations of child-speech from the later perfect speech, but is, above all, necessary for the answering of the question: what is the condition of things in learning to speak? [illustration: fig. .] . parallel between the disturbances of speech in adults and the imperfections of speech in the child. in undertaking to draw such a parallel, i must first of all state that in regard to the pathology of the subject, i have not much experience of my own, and therefore i rely here upon kussmaul's comprehensive work on speech-disturbances, from which are taken most of the data that serve to characterize the individual deviations from the rule. in that work also may be found the explanations, or precise definitions, of almost all the names--with the exception of the following, added here for the sake of brevity--skoliophasia, skoliophrasia, and palimphrasia. on the other hand, the statements concerning the speech of the child rest on my own observations of children--especially of my own son--and readers who give their attention to little children may verify them all; most of them, indeed, with ease. only the examples added for explaining mogilalia and paralalia are taken in part from sigismund, a few others from vierordt. they show more plainly (at least concerning rhotacism) than my own notes, some imperfections of articulation of the child in the second year, which occur, however, only in single individuals. in general the defects of child-speech are found to be very unequally distributed among different ages and individuals, so that we can hardly expect to find all the speech-disturbances of adults manifested in typical fashion in one and the same child. but with very careful observation it may be done, notwithstanding; and when several children are compared with one another in this respect, the analogies fairly force themselves upon the observer, and there is no break anywhere. the whole group into which i have tried to bring in organic connection all the kinds of disturbances and defects of speech in systematic form falls into three divisions: . imperfections not occasioned by disturbance of the intelligence--pure speech-disturbances or _lalopathies_. . imperfections occasioned solely by disturbances of the intelligence--disturbances of continuous speech or discourse (rede)--_dysphrasies_. . imperfections of the language of gesture and feature--_dysmimies_. i. lalopathy. a. the impressive peripheral processes disturbed. _deafness._--persons able to speak but who have become deaf do not understand what is spoken simply because they can _no longer_ hear. the newly born do not understand what is spoken because they can _not yet_ hear. the paths _o_ and _a_ are not yet practicable. all those just born are deaf and dumb. _difficulty of hearing._--persons who have become hard of hearing do not understand what is spoken, or they misunderstand, because they _no longer_ hear distinctly. such individuals easily hear wrong (paracusis). very young infants do not understand what is spoken, for the reason that they do _not yet_ hear distinctly; _o_ and _a_ are still difficult for the acoustic nerve-excitement to traverse. little children very easily hear wrong on this account. b. the central processes disturbed. _dysphasia._--in the child that can use only a small number of words, the cerebral and psychical act through which he connects these with his ideas and gives them grammatical form and syntactical construction in order to express the movement of his thought is _not yet_ complete. ( ) the sensory processes centrally disturbed. _sensory aphasia_ (wernicke), _word-deafness_ (kussmaul).--the child, in spite of good hearing and sufficiently developed intelligence, can _not yet_ understand spoken words because the path _m_ is not yet formed and the storehouse of word images w is still empty or is just in the stage of origination. _amnesia, amnesic dysphasia and aphasia, partial and total word-amnesia, memory-aphasia._--the child has as yet no word-memory, or only a weak one, utters meaningless sounds and sound-combinations. he can _not yet_ use words because he does not yet have them at his disposal as acoustic sound-combinations. in this stage, however, much that is said to him can be repeated correctly in case w is passable, though empty or imperfectly developed. ( ) the sensori-motor processes of diction disturbed. _acataphasia_ (steinthal).--the child that has already a considerable number of words at his disposal is _not yet_ in condition to arrange them in a sentence syntactically. he can _not yet_ frame correct sentences to express the movement of his thought, because his diction-center d is still imperfectly developed. he expresses a whole sentence by a word; e. g., _hot!_ means as much as "the milk is too hot for me to drink," and then again it may mean "the stove is too hot!" _man!_ means "a strange man has come!" _dysgrammatism_ (kussmaul) _and agrammatism_ (steinthal).--children can _not yet_ put words into correct grammatical form, decline, or conjugate. they like to use the indefinite noun-substantive and the infinitive, likewise to some extent the past participle. they prefer the weak inflection, ignore and confound the articles, conjunctions, auxiliaries, prepositions, and pronouns. in place of "i" they say their own names, also _tint_ (for "kind"--child or "baby"). instead of "du, er, sie" (thou, he, you), they use proper names, or man, papa, mamma. sometimes, too, the adjectives are placed after the nouns, and the meaning of words is indicated by their position with reference to others, by the intonation, by looks and gestures. agrammatism in child-language always appears in company with acataphasia, often also in insane persons. when the imbecile tony says, "tony flowers taken, attendant come, tony whipped" (tony blumen genommen, wärterin gekommen, tony gehaut), she speaks exactly like a child (kussmaul), without articles, pronouns, or auxiliary verbs, and, like the child, uses the weak inflection. the connection _m_ of the word-image-center w with the diction-center d, i. e., of the word-memory with grammar, and the centers themselves, are as yet very imperfectly developed, unused. _bradyphasia._--children that can already frame sentences take a surprising amount of time in speaking on account of the slowness of their diction. in d and w _m_ in the cerebral cortex the hindrances are still great because of too slight practice. ( ) the motor processes centrally disturbed. _a. centro-motor dysphasia and aphasia, aphemia, asymbolia, asemia._--children have not yet learned, or have hardly learned, the use of language, although their intelligence is already sufficient. there is no longer any deficiency in the development of the external organs of speech, no muscular weakness, no imperfection of the nervous structures that effect the articulation of the separate sounds, for intelligence shows itself in the child's actions; he forms the separate sounds correctly, unintentionally; his hearing is good and the sensory word-memory is present, since the child already obeys. his _not yet_ speaking at this period (commonly as late as the second year) must accordingly be essentially of centro-motor character. in the various forms of this condition there is injury or lack of sufficient relative development either in the centro-motorium m or in the paths that lead into it, _d_, _e_, _f_ as well as _i_, _l_, _n_. _[alpha]. central dysarthria and anarthria._--in the child at the stage of development just indicated articulation is _not yet_ perfect, inasmuch as while he often unintentionally pronounces correctly sounds, syllables, and single words, yet he can not form these intentionally, although he hears and understands them aright. he makes use of gestures. _ataxic aphasia (verbal anarthria)._--the child that already understands several words as sound-combinations and retains them (since he obeys), can not yet use these in speech because he has not yet the requisite centro-motor impulses. he forms correctly the few syllables he has already learned of his future language, i. e., those he has at the time in memory as sound-combinations (sensory), but can _not yet_ group them into new words; e. g., he says _bi_ and _te_ correctly, learns also to say "_bitte_," but not yet at this period "tibe," "tebi." he lacks still the motor co-ordination of words. at this period the gesture-language and modulation of voice of the child are generally easy to understand, as in case of pure ataxic aphasia (the verbal asemia or asymbolia of finkelnburg) are the looks and gestures of aphasic adults. chiefly _n_, _f_, and m are as yet imperfectly developed. _central stammering and lisping (literal dysarthria)._--children just beginning to form sentences stammer, not uttering the sounds correctly. they also, as a rule, lisp for a considerable time, so that the words spoken by them are still indistinct and are intelligible only to the persons most intimately associated with them. the paths _d_ and _i_, and consequently the centro-motorium m, come chiefly into consideration here; but l also is concerned, so far as from it comes the motor impulse to make a sound audible through m. the babbling of the infant is not to be confounded with this. that imports merely the unintentional production of single disconnected articulate sounds with non-coördinated movements of the tongue on account of uncontrolled excitement of the nerves of the tongue. _stuttering (syllabic dysarthria)._--stutterers articulate each separate sound correctly, but connect the consonants, especially the explosive sounds, with the succeeding vowels badly, with effort as if an obstacle were to be overcome. the paths _i_ and _l_ are affected, and hence m is not properly excited. s, too, comes under consideration in the case of stuttering, so far as impulses go out from it for the pronunciation of the syllables. children who can not yet speak of themselves but can repeat what is said for them, exert themselves unnecessarily, making a strong expiratory effort (with the help of abdominal pressure) to repeat a syllable still unfamiliar, and they pause between the doubled or tripled consonant and vowel. this peculiarity, which soon passes away and is to be traced often to the lack of practice and to embarrassment (in case of threats), and which may be observed _occasionally_ in every child, is stuttering proper, although it appears more seldom than in stutterers. example: the child of two years is to say "tischdecke," and he begins with an unnecessary expiratory effort, _t-t-itt-t_, and does not finish. stuttering is by no means a physiological transition-stage through which every child learning to speak must necessarily pass. but it is easily acquired, in learning to speak, by imitation of stutterers, in frequent intercourse with them. hence, stutterers have sometimes stuttering children. _[beta]. stumbling at syllables._--children that already articulate correctly separate sounds, and do so intentionally, very often put together syllables out of the sounds incorrectly, and frame words incorrectly from the syllables, where we can not assume deficient development of the external organs of speech; this is solely because the co-ordination is still imperfect. the child accordingly says _beti_ before he can say _bitte_; so too _grefessen_ instead of _gefressen_. the tracts _l_ and _n_ are still incompletely developed; also s and w, so far as impulses come thence to utter syllables by means of m. _b. paraphasia._--children have learned some expressions in their future language, and use them independently but wrongly; they put in the place of the appropriate word an incorrect one, confounding words because they can _not yet_ correctly combine their ideas with the word-images. they say, e. g., _kind_ instead of "kinn," and _sand_ instead of "salz"; also _netz_ for "nest" and _billard_ for "billet," _matrone_ for "patrone." the connection of d with m through _n_ is still imperfect, and perhaps also m is not sufficiently developed. _making mistakes in speaking (skoliophasia)._--in this kind of paraphasia in adults the cause is a lack of attention; therefore purely central concentration is wanting, or one fails to "collect himself"; there is distraction, hence the unintentional, frequently unconscious, confounding of words similar in sound or connected merely by remote, often dim, reminiscences. this kind of mis-speaking through carelessness is distinguished from skoliophrasia (see below) by the fact that there is no disturbance of the intelligence, and the correction easily follows. skoliophasia occurs regularly with children in the second and third years (and later). the child in general has not yet the ability to concentrate his attention upon that which is to be spoken. he _wills_ to do it but _can_ not yet. hence, even in spite of the greatest effort, occur often erroneous repetitions of words pronounced for him (aside from difficulties of articulation, and also when these are wanting); hence confounding (of words), wrong forms of address, e. g., _mama_ or _helene_ instead of "papa," and _papa_ instead of "marie." _c. taciturnity (dumbness)._--individual human beings of sound physical condition who can speak very well are dumb, or speak only two or three words in all for several years, because they no longer _will_ to speak (e. g., in the belief that silence prevents them from doing wrong). this taciturnity is not to be confounded with the paranoic aphrasia in certain insane persons--e. g., in catatonia, where the will is paralyzed. it also occurs--seldom, however--that children who have already learned to speak pretty well are dumb, or speak only a few words--among these the word _no_--during several months, or speak only with certain persons, because they _will not_ speak (out of obstinacy, or embarrassment). here an organic obstacle in the motor speech-center is probable. for voluntary dumbness requires great strength of will, which is hardly to be attributed to the child. the unwillingness to speak that is prompted by _fun_ never lasts long. c. the expressive peripheral processes disturbed. ( ) dyslalia and alalia (peripheral dysarthria and anarthria). the infant can _not yet_ articulate correctly, or at all, on account of the still deficient development, and afterward the lack of control, of the nerves of speech and the external organs of speech. the complete inability to articulate is called alalia. the newly born is alalic. dyslalia continues with many children a long time even after the learning of the mother-tongue. this is always a case simply of imperfections in _h_ and _z_. _a. bulbo-nuclear stammering (literal bulbo-nuclear dysarthria and anarthria)._--patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. the tongue is _no longer_ regulated by the will. the child that has not yet gained control over his vocal muscles stammers before he can speak correctly, and, according to my observations, regularly shows fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue along with an extraordinary mobility of the tongue. the tongue is _not yet_ regulated by the will. its movements are aimless. _b. mogilalia._--children, on account of the as yet deficient control of the external organs of speech, especially of the tongue, can _not yet_ form some sounds, and therefore omit them. they say, e. g., _in_ for "hin," _ätz_ for "herz," _eitun_ for "zeitung," _ere_ for "schere." _gammacism._--children find difficulties in the voluntary utterance of k and ks (_x_), and indeed of g, and therefore often omit these sounds without substituting others; they say, e. g., _atsen_ for "klatschen," _atten_ for "garten," _asse_ for "gasse," _all_ for "karl," _ete_ for "grete" (in the second year), _wesen_ for "gewesen," _opf_ for "kopf." _sigmatism._--all children are late in learning to pronounce correctly s, and generally still later with sch, and therefore omit both, or in a lisping fashion put s in place of sch; more rarely sch in place of s. they say, e. g., _saf._ in place of "schaf," _int_ for "singt," _anz_ for "salz," _lafen_ and _slafen_ for "schlafen," _iss_ for "hirsch," _pitte_ for "splitter," _tul_ for "stuhl," _wein_ for "schwein," _tuttav_ for "gustav," _torch_ for "storch" (second year), _emele_ for "schemel," _webenau_ for "fledermaus," but also _kusch_ for "kuss." but in no case have i myself heard a child regularly put "sch" in place of _s_, as _joschef_ for "josef." this form, perhaps, occurs in jewish families; but i have no further observations concerning it as yet. _rhotacism._--many children do not form r at all for a long time and put nothing in place of it. they say _duch_ for "durch," _bot_ for "brot," _unte_ for "herunter," _tautech_ for "traurig," _ule_ for "ruhe," _tänen_ for "thränen," _ukka_ for "zucker." on the contrary, some form early the r lingual, guttural, and labial, but all confound now and then the first two with each other. _lambdacism._--many children are late in learning to utter l, and often omit it. they say, e. g., _icht_ for "licht," _voge_ for "vogel," _atenne_ for "laterne," _batn_ for "blatt," _mante_ for "mantel." ( ) literal pararthria or paralalia. children who are beginning to repeat intentionally what is said, often put another sound in place of the well-known correct (no doubt intended) one; this on account of deficient control of the tongue or other peripheral organs of speech. e. g., they say _t_ in place of _p_, or _b_ for _w_ (_basse_ for "wasser" and for "flasche"), _e_ for _i_ and _o_ for _u_, as in _bete_ for "bitte," and _ohr_ for "uhr." _paragammacism._--children supply the place of the insuperably difficult sounds g, k, x by others, especially d and t, also n, saying, e. g., _itte_ for "rike," _finne_ for "finger," _tein_ for "klein," _toss_ for "gross," _atitte_ for "karnickel," _otute_ for "kuk," _attall_ for "axel," _wodal_ for "vogel," _tut_ for "gut," _tatze_ for "katze." _parasigmatism._--children are late in learning to utter s and sch correctly. they often supply the place of them, before acquiring them, by other sounds, saying, e. g., _tule_ for "schule," _ade_ for "hase," _webbe_ for "wasser," _beb_ for "bös," _bebe_ for "besen," _gigod_ for "schildkröte," _baubee_ for "schwalbe." _pararhotacism._--most children, if not all, even when they have very early formed r correctly (involuntarily), introduce other sounds in place of it in speaking--e. g., they say _moigjen_ for "morgen," _matta_ for "martha," _annold_ for "arnold," _jeiben_ for "reiben," _amum_ for "warum," _welfen_ for "werfen." _paralambdacism._--many children who do not learn until late to utter l put in its place other sounds; saying, e. g., _bind_ for "bild," _bampe_ for "lampe," _tinne_ for "stille," _degen_ for "legen," _wewe_ for "löwe," _ewebau_ for "elephant." ( ) bradylalia or bradyarthria. children reciting for the first time something learned by heart speak not always indistinctly, but, on account of the incomplete practicability of the motor-paths, slowly, monotonously, without modulation. sounds and syllables do _not yet_ follow one another quickly, although they are already formed correctly. the syllables belonging to a word are often separated by pauses like the words themselves--a sort of dysphasia-of-conduction on account of the more difficult and prolonged conduction of the motor-impulse. i knew a boy (feeble-minded, to be sure) who took from three to eight seconds for answering even the simplest question; then came a regular explosion of utterance. yet he did not stutter or stammer. when he had only _yes_ or _no_ to answer, the interval between question and answer was shorter. here belong in part also the imperfections of speech that are occasioned by too large a tongue (macroglossia). when a child is born with too large a tongue, he may remain long alalic, without the loss of intellectual development, as was observed to be the case by paster and o. von heusinger ( ). ii. dysphrasia (dyslogical disturbances of speech). the child that can already speak pretty correctly deforms his speech after the manner of insane persons, being moved by strange caprices, because his understanding is not yet sufficiently developed. _logorrhoea_ (_loquaciousness_).--it is a regular occurrence with children that their pleasure in articulation and in vocal sound often induces them to hold long monologues, sometimes in articulate sounds and syllables, sometimes not. this chattering is kept up till the grown people present are weary, and that by children who can not yet talk; and their screaming is often interrupted only by hoarseness, just as in the case of the polyphrasia of the insane. _dysphrasia of the melancholy._--children exert themselves perceptibly in their first attempts to speak, answer indolently or not at all, or frequently with embarrassment, always slowly, often with drawl and monotone, very frequently coming to a stop. they also sometimes begin to speak, and then lose at once the inclination to go on. _dysphrasia of the delirious_ (_wahnsinnigen_).--children that have begun to speak often make new words for themselves. they have already invented signs before this; they are also unintelligible often-times because they use the words they have learned in a different sense. _dysphrasia of the insane_ (_verrückten_).--the child is not yet prepared to speak. he possesses only non-co-ordinated sounds and isolated rudiments of words, primitive syllables, roots, as the primitive raw material of the future speech. in many insane persons only the disconnected remains or ruins of their stock of words are left, so that their speech resembles that of the child at a certain stage. _dysphrasia of the feeble-minded._--the child at first reacts only upon strong impressions, and that often indolently and clumsily and with outcry; later, upon impressions of ordinary strength, without understanding--laughing, crowing, uttering disconnected syllables. so the patient reacts either upon strong impressions only, and that indolently, bluntly, with gestures that express little and with rude words, or he still reacts upon impressions of ordinary strength, but in flat, silly, disconnected utterances. _dysphrasia of idiots._--children have command at the beginning of no articulate sounds; then they learn these and syllables; after this also words of one syllable; then they speak short words of more than one syllable and sentences, but frequently babble forth words they have heard without understanding their meaning, like parrots. imbeciles also frequently command only short words and sentences or monosyllabic words and sounds, or, finally, they lack all articulate sound. many microcephalous idiots babble words without understanding their meaning, like little children. _echo-speech or echolalia_ (_imitative reflex speech_).--children not yet able to frame a sentence correctly like to repeat the last word of a sentence they have heard; and this, according to my observations and researches, is so general that i am forced to call this echolalia a physiological transition stage. of long words said to them, the children usually repeat only the last two syllables or the last syllable only. the feeble-minded also repeat monotonously the words and sentences said by a person in their neighborhood without showing an awakened attention, and in general without connecting any idea with what they say. (romberg.) _interjectional speech._--children sometimes have a fancy for speaking in interjections. they express vague ideas by single vowels (like _ä_), syllables (e. g., _na_, _da_), and combinations of syllables, and frequently call out aloud through the house meaningless sounds and syllables. d and w are as yet undeveloped. often, too, children imitate the interjections used by members of the family--_hop!_ _patsch_, _bauz!_ an interjectional echolalia. many deranged persons express their feelings in like manner, in sounds, especially vowels, syllables, or sound-combinations resembling words, which are void of meaning or are associated merely with obscure ideas (martini). then d is connected with m only through l and s, and so through _i_ and _e_. _embolophrasia._--many children, long after they have overcome acataphasia and agrammatism, delight in inserting between words sounds, syllables, and words that do not belong there; e. g., they double the last syllable of every word and put an _eff_ to it: _ich-ich-eff_, _bin in-eff_, etc., or they make a kind of bleat between the words (kussmaul); and, in telling a story, put extra syllables into their utterance while they are thinking. many adults likewise have the disagreeable habit of introducing certain words or meaningless syllables into their speech, where these do not at all belong; or they tack on diminutive endings to their words. the syllables are often mere sounds, like _eh_, _uh_; in many cases they sound like _eng_, _ang_ (angophrasia--kussmaul). _palimphrasia._--insane persons often repeat single sounds, syllables, or sentences, over and over without meaning; e. g., "i am-am-am-am." "the phenomenon in many cases reminds us of children, who say or sing some word or phrase, a rhyme or little verse, so long continuously, like automata, that the by-standers can endure it no longer. it is often the ring of the words, often the sense, often both, by which the children are impressed. the child repeats them because they seem to him strange or very sonorous." (kussmaul.) _bradyphrasia._--the speech of people that are sad or sleepy, and of others whose mental processes are indolent, often drags along with tedious slowness; is also liable to be broken off abruptly. the speaker comes to a standstill. this is not to be confounded with bradyphasia or with bradyarthria or bradylalia (see above). in children likewise the forming of the sentence takes a long time on account of the as yet slow rise and combination of ideas, and a simple narrative is only slowly completed or not finished at all, because the intellectual processes in the brain are too fatiguing. _paraphrasia._--under the same circumstances as in the case of bradyphrasia the (slow) speech may be marred and may become unintelligible because the train of thought is confused--e. g., in persons "drunk" with sleep--so that words are uttered that do not correspond to the original ideas. in the case of children who want to tell something, and who begin right, the story may be interrupted easily by a recollection, a fresh train of thought, and still they go on; e. g., they mix up two fairy tales, attaching to the beginning of one the end of another. _skoliophrasia._--distracted and timid feeble-minded persons easily make mistakes in speaking, because they can not direct their attention to what they are saying and to the way in which they are saying it, but they wander, allowing themselves to be turned aside from the thing to be said by all sorts of ideas and external impressions; and, moreover, they do not notice afterward that they have been making mistakes (cf. p. ). children frequently put a wrong word in place of a right one well known to them, without noticing it. they allow themselves to be turned aside very easily from the main point by external impressions and all sorts of fancies, and often, in fact, say the opposite of what they mean without noticing it. iii. dysmimia. disturbances of gesture-language (pantomime). _perceptive asemia._--patients have lost the ability to _understand_ looks and gestures (steinthal). children can not yet understand the looks and gestures of persons about them. _amnesic amimia._--aphasic persons can sometimes imitate gestures, but can not execute them when bid, but only when the gestures are made for them to imitate. children that do not yet speak can imitate gestures if these are made for them to see, but it is often a long time before they can make them at the word of command. _ataxic dysmimia and amimia_ (_mimetic asemia_).--patients can _no longer_ execute significative looks and gestures, on account of defective co-ordination. children can not express their states of desire, etc., because they do _not yet_ control the requisite co-ordination for the corresponding looks and gestures. _paramimia_ (_paramimetic asemia_).--many patients can make use of looks and gestures, but confound them. children have not yet firmly impressed upon them the significance of looks and gestures; this is shown in their interchanging of these; e. g., the head is shaken in the way of denial when they are affirming something. _emotive language_ (_affectsprache_) _in aphrasia._--in aphrasia it happens that smiling, laughing, and weeping are _no longer_ controlled, and that they break out on the least occasion with the greatest violence, like the spinal reflexes in decapitated animals. (hughlings-jackson.) emotive language may continue when the language of ideas (begriffssprache) is completely extinguished, and idiotic children without speech can even sing. in children, far slighter occasions suffice normally to call forth smiles, laughter, and tears, than in adults. these emotional utterances are _not yet_ often voluntarily inhibited by the child that can not yet speak; on the contrary, they are unnecessarily repeated. _apraxia._--many patients are _no longer_ in condition, on account of disturbed intellect, to make right use of ordinary objects, the use of which they knew well formerly; e. g., they can no longer find the way to the mouth; or they bite into the soap. children are _not yet_ in condition, on account of deficient practice, to use the common utensils rightly; e. g., they will eat soup with a fork, and will put the fork against the cheek instead of into the mouth. . development of speech in the child. we may now take up the main question as to the condition of the child that is learning to speak, in regard to the development and practicability of the nerve-paths and of the centers required for speech. for the comparison of the disturbances of speech in adults with the deficiencies of speech in the child, on the one hand, and the chronological observation of the child, on the other hand, disclose to us what parts of the apparatus of speech come by degrees into operation. first to be considered are the _impressive_ and _expressive_ paths in general. all new-born human beings are deaf or hard of hearing, as has already been demonstrated. since the hearing but slowly grows more acute during the first days, no utterances of sound at this period can be regarded as responses to any sound-impressions whatever. the first cry is purely reflexive, like the croaking of the decapitated frog when the skin of his back is stroked (vol. i, p. ). the cry is not heard by the newly-born himself and has not the least value as language. it is on a par with the squeaking of the pig just born, the bleating of the new-born lamb, and the peeping of the chick that is breaking its shell. upon this first, short season of physiological deaf-mutism follows the period during which crying expresses bodily conditions, feelings such as pain, hunger, cold. here, again, there exists as yet no connection of the expressive phenomena with acoustic impressions, but there is already the employment of the voice with stronger expiration in case of strong and disagreeable excitations of other sensory nerves than those of general sensation and of the skin. for the child now cries at a dazzling light also, and at a bitter taste, as if the unpleasant feeling were diminished by the strong motor discharge. in any case the child cries because this loud, augmented expiration lessens for him the previously existing unpleasant feelings, without exactly inducing thereby a comfortable condition. not until later does a sudden sound-impression, which at first called forth only a start and then a quivering of the eyelids, cause also crying. but this loud sign of fright may be purely reflexive, just like the silent starting and throwing up of the arms at a sudden noise, and has at most the significance of an expression of discomfort, like screaming at a painful blow. it is otherwise with the first loud response to an acoustic impression _recognized_ as new. the indefinable sounds of satisfaction made by the child that hears music for the first time are no longer reflexive, and are not symptoms of displeasure. i see in this reaction, which may be compared with the howling of the dog that for the first time in his life hears music--i see in this reaction of the apparatus of voice and of future speech, _the first sign of the connection now just established between impressive_ (acoustic) and _expressive_ (having the character of emotive language) _paths_. the impressive, separately, were long since open, as the children under observation after the first week allowed themselves to be quieted by the singing of cradle-songs, and the expressive, separately, must likewise have been open, since various conditions were announced by various sorts of crying. everything now depends on a well-established _intercentral communication_ between the two. this is next to be discussed. the primitive connection is already an advance upon that of a reflex arc. the sound-excitations arriving from the ear at the central endings of the auditory nerve are not directly transformed into motor excitations for the laryngeal nerves, so that the glottis contracts to utter vocal sound. when the child (as early as the sixth to the eighth week) takes pleasure in music and laughs aloud, his voice can not in this case (as at birth) have been educed by reflex action, for without a cerebrum he would not laugh or utter joyous sounds, whereas even without that he cries. from this, however, by no means follows the existence of a speech-center in the infant. the fact that he produces sounds easily articulated, although without choice, like _tahu_ and _amma_, proves merely the functional capacity of the peripheral apparatus of articulation (in the seventh week) at a period long before it is intentionally used for articulation. the unintentionally uttered syllables that make their appearance are, to be sure, simple, at least in the first half-year. it is vowels almost exclusively that appear in the first month, and these predominate for a long time yet. of the consonants in the third month _m_ alone is generally to be noted as frequent. this letter comes at a later period also, from the raising and dropping of the lower jaw in expiration, an operation that is besides soon easy for the infant with less outlay of will than the letter _b_, which necessitates a firmer closing of the lips. but in spite of the simplicity of all the vocal utterances and of the defectiveness of the articulatory apparatus, the child is able (often long before the seventh month) to respond to address, questions, chiding, either with inarticulate sounds or with vowels or by means of simple syllables, like _pa_, _ta_, _ma_, _na_, _da_, _mä_, _mö_, _gö_, _rö_ [_a_ as in _father_; ä as in _fate_; ö like _i_ in _bird_.] since these responses are entirely, or almost entirely, lacking in microcephali and in children born deaf, they are not purely reflexive, like sneezing, e. g.; therefore there must be in the case of these a cerebral operation also, simple indeed, but indubitably intellectual, interposed between sound-perception and vocal utterance, especially as the infant behaves differently according to what he hears, and he discriminates very well the stern command from the caress, forbidding from allowing, in the voice of the person speaking to him. yet it is much more the _timbre_, the accent, the pitch, the intensity of the voice and the sounds, the variation of which excites attention, than it is the spoken word. in the first half-year the child hears the vowels much better than he does the consonants, and will imperfectly understand or divine the sense of a few sounds only--e. g., when his name is uttered in a threatening tone he will hear merely the accented vowel, for at the first performance taught him, purposely postponed to a very late period (in his thirteenth month), it made no difference to my child whether we asked without changing a feature, "wie gross?" (how tall?) or "ooss?" or "oo?" in all three cases he answered with the same movement of the hand. now, although all infants in normal condition, before they can repeat anything after others or can understand any word whatever, _express_ their feelings by various sounds, even by syllables, and _distinguish_ vowels and many consonants in the words spoken to them, yet this does not raise them above the intelligent animal. the response to friendly address and loud chiding by appropriate sounds is scarcely to be distinguished as to its psychical value from the joyous barking and whining of the poodle. the pointer-dog's understanding of the few spoken utterances that are impressed upon him in his training is also quite as certain at least as the babe's understanding of the jargon of the nurse. the correctly executed movements or arrests of movement following the sound-impressions "setz dich! pfui! zurück! vorwärts! allez! fass! apporte! such! verloren! pst! lass! hierher! brav! leid's nicht! ruhig! wahr dich! hab acht! was ist das! pfui vogel! pfui hase! halt!" prove that the bird-dog understands the meaning of the sounds and syllables and words heard as far as he needs to understand them. the training in the english language accomplishes the same result with "down! down charge! steady! toho! fetch! hold up!" as the training in the french language, with yet other words--so that we can by no means assume any hereditary connection whatever between the quality of the sound heard and the movement or arrest of movement to be executed, such as may perhaps exist in the case of the chick just hatched which follows the clucking of the hen. rather does the dog learn afresh in every case the meaning of the words required for hunting, just as the speechless child comprehends the meaning of the first words of its future language without being able to repeat them himself--e. g., "give! come! hand! sh! quiet!" long before the child's mechanism of articulation is so far developed that these expressions can be produced by him, the child manifests his understanding of them unequivocally by corresponding movements, by gestures and looks, by obedience. no doubt this behavior varies in individual cases, inasmuch as in some few the imitative articulation may be to some extent earlier developed than the understanding. there are many children who even in their first year have a monkey-like knack at imitation and repeat all sorts of things like parrots without guessing the sense of them. here, however, it is to be borne in mind that such an echo-speech appears only after the _first_ understanding of some spoken word can be demonstrated; in no case before the fourth month. lindner relates that when he one day observed that his child of eighteen weeks was gazing at the swinging pendulum of the house-clock, he went with him to it, saying, "tick-tack," in time with the pendulum; and when he afterward called out to the child, who was no longer looking at the clock, "tick-tack!" this call was answered, at first with delay, a little later immediately, by a turning of the look toward the clock. this proved that there was understanding long before the first imitation of words. progress now became pretty rapid, so that at the end of the seventh month the questions, "where is your eye? ear? head? mouth? nose? the table? chair? sofa?" were answered correctly by movements of hand and eyes. in the tenth month this child for the first time himself used a word as a means of effecting an understanding, viz., _mama_ (soon afterward, indeed, he called both parents _papa_). the child's inability to repeat distinctly syllables spoken for him is not to be attributed, shortly before the time at which he succeeds in doing it, to a purely psychical adynamy (impotence), not, as many suppose, to "being stupid," or to a weakness of will without organic imperfections determined by the cerebral development, for the efforts, the attention, and the ability to repeat incorrectly, show that the will is not wanting. since also the peripheral impressive acoustic and expressive phonetic paths are intact and developed, as is proved by the acuteness of the hearing and the spontaneous formation of the very syllables desired, the cause of the inability to repeat correctly must be solely organic-centro-motor. the connecting paths between the sound-center and the syllable-center, and of both these with the speech motorium, are not yet or not easily passable; but the imitation of a single sound, be it only _a_, can not take place without the mediation of the cerebral cortex. thus in the very first attempt to repeat something heard there exists an unquestionable advance in brain development; and the first successful attempt of this kind proves not merely the augmented functional ability of the articulatory apparatus and of the sound-center, and the practicability of the impressive paths that lead from the ear to the sound-center--it proves, above all, the establishment of intercentral routes that lead from the sound-center and the syllable-center to the motorium. in fact, the correct _repeating_ of a sound heard, of a syllable, and, finally, of a word pronounced by another person, is the surest proof of the establishment and practicability of the entire impressive, central, and expressive path. it, however, proves nothing as to the _understanding_ of the sound or word heard and faultlessly repeated. as the term "understanding" or "understand" is ambiguous, in so far as it may relate to the ideal content (the meaning), and at the same time to the mere perception of the word spoken (or written or touched)--e. g., when any one speaks indistinctly so that we do not "understand" him--it is advisable to restrict the use of this expression. _understand_ shall in future apply only to the _meaning_ of the word; _hear_--since it is simply the perceiving of a word through the hearing that we have in view--will relate to the sensuous impression. it is clear, then, that all children who can hear but can not yet speak, repeat many words without understanding them, and understand many words without being able to repeat them, as kussmaul has already observed. but i must add that the repeating of what is not understood begins only after some word (even one that can not be repeated) has been understood. now it is certain that the majority, if not all, of the children that have good hearing develop the understanding more at first, since the impressive side is practiced more and sooner than the expressive-articulatory. probably those that imitate early and skillfully are the children that can speak earliest, and whose cerebrum grows fastest but also soonest ceases to grow; whereas those that imitate later and more sparingly, generally learn to speak later, and will generally be the more intelligent. for with the higher sort of activity goes the greater growth of brain. while the other children cultivate more the centro-motor portion, the sensory, the intellectual, is neglected. in animals, likewise, a brief, rapid development of the brain is wont to go along with inferior intelligence. the intelligence gets a better development when the child, instead of repeating all sorts of things without any meaning, tries to guess the meaning of what he hears. precisely the epoch at which this takes place belongs to the most interesting in intellectual development. like a pantomimist, the child, by means of his looks and gestures, and further by cries and by movements of all sorts, gives abundant evidence of his understanding and his desires, without himself speaking a single word. as the adult, after having half learned a foreign language from books, can not speak (imitate) it, and can not easily understand it when he hears it spoken fluently by one that is a perfect master of it, but yet makes out _single_ expressions and understands them, and divines the meaning of the whole, so the child at this stage can distinctly hear single words, can grasp the purport of them, and divine correctly a whole sentence from the looks and gestures of the speaker, although the child himself makes audible no articulate utterance except his own, for the most part meaningless, variable babble of sounds and syllables and outcries. the causes of the slowness of the progress in expressing in articulate words what is understood and desired, on the part of normal children, is not, however, to be attributed, as it has often been, to a slower development of the expressive motor mechanism, but must be looked for in the difficulty of establishing the connection of the various central storehouses of sense-impressions with the intercentral path of connection between the acoustic speech-centers and the speech-motorium. for the purely peripheral articulatory acts are long since perfect, although as yet a simple "_a_" or "_pa_" can not be repeated after another person; for these and other sounds and syllables are already uttered correctly by the child himself. the order of succession in which these separate sounds appear, without instruction, is very different in individual cases. with my boy, who learned to speak rather late, and was not occupied with learning by heart, the following was the order of the perfectly pure sounds heard by me: on the left are the sounds or syllables indicated by one letter; on the right, the same indicated by more than one letter; and it is to be borne in mind that the child needs to pronounce only fourteen of the nineteen so-called consonants of the german alphabet in order to master the remaining five also; for c = ts and k v = f and w x = ks and gs q = ku and kw z = ts and ds and of the fourteen four require no new articulation, because p is a toneless b t is a toneless d f is a toneless w k is a toneless g of the ten positions of the mouth required for all the consonants of the alphabet, nine are taken by the child within the first six months:* months. . indefinite vowels; ä u, uä. . a, ö, o; m, g, r, t; h, am, ma, ta, hu, ör, rö, ar, ra, gö. . i; b, l, n, ua, oa, ao, ai, [(ei], oä, äo, äa, äö; öm, in, ab, om; la, ho, mö, nä, na, ha, bu; ng, mb, gr. . e, [(äu], a-u, aö, ea; an; na, tö, la, me; nt. . ü (y); k, ag, eg, ek, ge, kö. . j; the oi ([(eu], [(äu]), io, öe, eu (french); ij, aj, lingual-labial ög, ich; ja, jä; rg, br, ch. sound, . d, p, äe, ui; mä. . eö, aë, ou, [(au]; up; hö, mi, te. . ap, ach, äm; pa, ga, cha. . el, ab, at, ät; dä, ba, ta, tä; nd. . ad, al, ak, er, ej, öd; da, gä, bä, ka, ke, je, he, ne; pr, tr. . w, än, op, ew, är; de, wä; nj, ld. . s (ss), en; hi; dn. . mu; kn, gn, kt. . z, oö, öa, is, iss, es, ass, th (english), ith (engl.), it; hä, di, wa, sse. . f (v), ok, on; do, go; bw, fp. . ib, öt, an; bi. . äi, iä; äp, im; tu, pä; ft. . ön, et, es; sa, be; st, tth (engl.), s-ch, sj. . ub, ot, id, od, oj, uf, ät; bo, ro, jo; dj, dth (engl.). . öp; fe; rl, dl, nk, pt. . ol; lo; ps, pt, tl, sch, tsch, pth (engl.). . q, uo; id, op, um, em, us, un, ow, ed, uk, ig, il; jö, ju, po, mo, wo, fa, fo, fi, we, ku (qu), li, ti; tn, pf, gch, gj, tj, schg. . ut, esch; pu, wi, schi, pi. . oë, ul, il, och, iw, ip, ur; lt, rb, rt. . nl, ds, mp, rm, fl, kl, nch, ml, dr. . x, kch, cht, lch, ls, sw, sl. _____________________________________________________________________ * pronounce the letters in the tabular view as in german. every such chronological view of the sequence of sounds is uncertain, because we can not observe the child uninterruptedly, and hence the first appearance of a new sound easily escapes notice. the above synopsis has a chronological value only so far as this, that it announces, concerning every single sound, that such sound was heard in its purity by me at least as early as the given month. the sound may, however, have been uttered considerably earlier without my hearing it. i know from personal experience that in other children many sounds appear much earlier; in my child, e. g., _ngä_ was observed too late, and i have no doubt that the first utterance of _f_ and _w_ was unobserved, although i was on the lookout for them. when it is maintained, on the contrary, that _m_ is not heard from a normal child until the tenth month, then the _am_ and _mö_ which appear universally in the first half-year have escaped notice. earlier tabular views of this sort, which have even served as a foundation for instruction of deaf-mutes in speaking, do not rest exclusively on observation. besides, in this matter, even two children hardly agree. according to my observations, i am compelled in spite of this disagreement to lay down the proposition as valid for all healthy children, that the greatly _preponderating majority of the sounds the child makes use of after learning verbal language, and many other sounds besides these, are correctly formed by him within the first eight months_, not intentionally, but just as much at random as any other utterance of sound not to be used later in speech, not appearing in any civilized language. i will only mention as an example the labio-lingual explosive sound, in which the tip of the tongue comes between the lips and, with an expiration, bursting from its confinement is drawn back swiftly (with or without tone). all children seem to like to form this sound, a sound between _p_, _b_, and _t_, _d_; but it exists in few languages. among the innumerable superfluous, unintentional, random, muscular movements of the infant, the movements of the muscles of the larynx, mouth, and tongue take a conspicuous place, because they ally themselves readily with acoustic effects and the child takes delight in them. it is not surprising, therefore, that precisely those vibrations of the vocal cords, precisely those shapings of the cavity of the mouth, and those positions of the lips, often occur which we observe in the utterance of our vowels, and that among the child-noises produced unconsciously and in play are found almost all our consonants and, besides, many that are used in foreign languages. the plasticity of the apparatus of speech in youth permits the production of a greater abundance of sounds and sound-combinations than is employed later, and not a single child has been observed who has, in accordance with the principle of the least effort (_principe du moindre effort_) applied by french authors to this province, advanced in regular sequence from the sounds articulated easily--i. e., with less activity of will--to the physiologically difficult; rather does it hold good for all the children i have observed, and probably for all children that learn to speak, that many of the sounds uttered by them at the beginning, in the speechless season of infancy, without effort and then forgotten, have to be learned afresh at a later period, have to be painstakingly acquired by means of imitation. mobility and perfection in the _technique_ of sound-formation are not speech. they come into consideration in the process of learning to speak as facilitating the process, because the muscles are perfected by previous practice; but the very first attempts to imitate voluntarily a sound heard show how slight this advantage is. even those primitive syllables which the child of himself often pronounces to weariness, like _da_, he can not at the beginning (in the tenth month in my case) as yet say after any one, although he makes manifest by his effort--a regular strain--by his attention, and his unsuccessful attempts, that he would like to say them, as i have already mentioned. the reason is to be looked for in the still incomplete development of the sensori-motor central paths. in place of _tatta_ is sounded _tä_ or _ata_; in place of _papa_ even _taï_, and this not once only, but after a great many trials repeated again and again with the utmost patience. that the sound-image has been correctly apprehended is evident from the certainty with which the child responds correctly in various cases by gestures to words of similar sound unpronounceable by him. thus, he points by mistake once only to the mouth (mund) instead of the moon (mond), and points correctly to the ear (ohr) and the clock (uhr) when asked where these objects are. the acuteness of hearing indispensable for repeating the sounds is therefore present before the ability to repeat. on the whole, the infant or the young child already weaned must be placed higher at this stage of his mental development than a very intelligent animal, but not on account of his knowledge of language, for the dog also understands very well single words in the speech of his master, in addition to hunting-terms. he divines, from the master's looks and gestures, the meaning of whole sentences, and, although he has not been brought to the point of producing articulate sounds, yet much superior in this respect is the performance of the cockatoo, which learns all articulate sounds. a child who shows by looks and gestures and actions that he understands single words, and who already pronounces correctly many words by imitation without understanding them, does not on this account stand higher intellectually than a sagaciously calculating yet speechless elephant or an arabian horse, but because he already forms many more and far more complex concepts. the animal phase of intellect lasts, in the sound, vigorous, and not neglected child, to the end of the first year of life at the farthest; and long before the close of this he has, by means of the _feelings_ of pleasure and of discomfort, very definitely distinguishable by him even in the first days of life, but for which he does not get the verbal expressions till the second and third year, formed for himself at least in one province, viz., that of food, _ideas_ more or less well defined. romanes also rightly remarks that the _concept_ of food arises in us through the feeling of hunger quite independently of language. probably this concept is the very first that is formed by the quite young infant, only he would not name it "food," if indeed he named it at all, but would understand by it everything that puts an end to the feeling of hunger. it is of great importance to hold firmly to this fact of the origination of ideas, and that not of sensuous percepts only but of concepts, without language, because it runs contrary to prevailing assumptions. he who has conscientiously observed the mental development of infants must come to the conclusion that _the formation of ideas is not bound up with the learning of words, but is a necessary prerequisite for the understanding of the words to be learned first, and therefore for learning to speak_. long before the child understands even a single word, before he uses a single syllable consistently with a definite meaning, he already has a number of ideas which are expressed by looks and gestures and cries. to these belong especially ideas gained through touch and sight. associations of objects touched and seen with impressions of taste are probably the first generators of concepts. the child, still speechless and toothless, takes a lively interest in bottles; sees, e. g., a bottle that is filled with a white opaque liquid (goulard water), and he stretches out his arms with desire toward it, screaming a long time, in the belief that it is a milk-bottle (observed by me in the case of my child in the thirty-first week). the bottle when empty or when filled with water is not so long attractive to him, so that the idea of food (or of something to drink, something to suck, something sweet) must arise from the sight of a bottle with certain contents without the understanding or even utterance of any words. the formation of concepts without words is actually demonstrated by this; for the speechless child not only perceived the points of identity of the various bottles of wine, water, oil, the nursing-bottle and others, the sight of which excited him, but he united in one notion the contents of the different sorts of bottles when what was in them was white--i. e., he had separated the concept of food from that of the bottle. ideas are thus independent of words. certain as this proposition is, it is not, however, supported by the reasons given for it by kussmaul, viz., that one and the same object is variously expressed in various languages, and that a new animal or a new machine is known before it is named; for no one desires to maintain that certain ideas are _necessarily_ connected with certain words, without the knowledge of which they could not arise--it is maintained only that ideas do not exist without words. now, any object has some appellation in each language, were it only the appellation "object," and a new animal, a new machine, is already called "animal," "machine," before it receives its special name. hence from this quarter the proof can not be derived. on the other hand, the speechless infant certainly furnishes the proof, which is confirmed by some observations on microcephalous persons several years old or of adult age. the lack of the power of abstraction apparent in these persons and in idiots is not so great that they have not developed the notion "food" or "taking of food." indeed, it is not impossible that the formation of ideas may continue after the total loss of word-memory, as in the remarkable and much-talked-of case of lordat. yet this case does not by any means prove that the formation of concepts of the _higher_ order is possible without previous mastery of verbal language; rather is it certain that concepts rising above the lowest abstractions can be formed only by him who has thoroughly learned to speak: for intelligent children without speech are acquainted, indeed, with more numerous and more complex ideas than are very sagacious animals, but not with many more abstractions of a higher sort, and where the vocabulary is small the power of abstraction is wont to be as weak in adults as in children. the latter, to be sure, acquire the words for the abstract with more difficulty and later than those for the concrete, but have them stamped more firmly on the mind (for, when the word-memory fails, proper names and nouns denoting concrete objects are, as a rule, first forgotten). but it would not be admissible, as i showed above, to conclude from this that no abstraction at all takes place without words. to me, indeed, it is probable that in the most intense thought the most abstract conceptions are effected most rapidly without the disturbing images of the sounds of words, and are only supplementarily clothed in words. in any case the intelligent child forms many concepts of a lower sort without any knowledge of words at all, and he therefore performs abstraction without words. when sigismund showed to his son, not yet a year old and not able to speak a word, a stuffed woodcock, and, pointing to it, said, "bird," the child directly afterward looked toward another side of the room where there stood upon the stove a stuffed white owl, represented as in flight, which he must certainly have observed before. here, then, the concept had already arisen; but how little specialized are the first concepts connected with words that do not relate to food is shown by the fact that in the case of lindner's child (in the tenth month) _up_ signified also _down_, _warm_ signified also _cold_. just so my child used _too much_ also for _too little_; another child used _no_ also for _yes_; a third used _i_ for _you_. if these by no means isolated phenomena rest upon a lack of differentiation of the concepts, "then the child already has a presentiment that opposites are merely the extreme terms of the same series of conceptions" (lindner), and this before he can command more than a few words. but to return to the condition of the normal child, as yet entirely speechless. it is clear that, being filled with desire to give expression in every way to his feelings, especially to his needs, he will use his voice, too, for this purpose. the adult likewise cries out with pain, although the "oh!" has no direct connection with the pain, and there is no intention of making, by means of the outcry, communication to others. now, before the newly-born is in condition to seek that which excites pleasure, to avoid what excites displeasure, he cries out in like fashion, partly without moving the tongue, partly with the sound _ä_ dominant, repeated over and over monotonously till some change of external conditions takes place. after this the manner of crying begins to vary according to the condition of the infant; then come sounds clearly distinguishable as indications of pleasure or displeasure; then syllables, at first to some extent spontaneously articulated without meaning, afterward such as express desire, pleasure, etc.; not until much later imitated sounds, and often the imperfect imitation of the voices of animals, of inorganic noises, and of spoken words. the mutilation of his words makes it seem as if the child were already inventing new designations which are soon forgotten; and as the child, like the lunatic, uses familiar words in a new sense after he has begun to learn to talk, his style of expression gets an original character, that of "baby-talk." here it is characteristic that the feelings and ideas do not now first _arise_, though they are now first articulately expressed; but they were in part present long since and did not become articulate, but were expressed by means of looks and gestures. in the adult ideas generate new words, and the formation of new words does not cease so long as thinking continues; but in the child without speech new feelings and new ideas generate at first only new cries and movements of the muscles of the face and limbs, and, the further we look back into child-development proper, the greater do we find the number of the conditions expressed by one and the same cry. the organism as yet has too few means at its disposal. in many cases of aphasia every mental state is expressed by one and the same word (often a word without meaning). upon closer examination it is found, however, that for the orator also, who is complete master of speech, all the resources of language are insufficient. no one, e. g., can name all the colors that may be perceived, or describe pain, or describe even a cloud, so that several hearers gain the same idea of its form that the speaker has. the words come short, but the idea is clear. if words sufficed to express clearly clear conceptions, then the greater part of our philosophical and theological literature would not exist. this literature has its basis essentially in the inevitable fact that different persons do not associate the same concept with the same word, and so one word is used to indicate different concepts (as is the case with the child). if a concept is exceptionally difficult--i. e., exceptionally hard to express clearly in words--then it is wont to receive many names, e. g., "die," and the confusion and strife are increased; but words alone render it possible to form and to make clear concepts of a higher sort. they favor the formation of new ideas, and without them the intellect in man remains in a lower stage of development just because they are the most trustworthy and the most delicate means of expression for ideas. if ideas are not expressed at all, or not intelligibly, their possessor can not use them, can not correct or make them effective. those ideas only are of value, as a general thing, which continue to exist after being communicated to others. communication takes place with accuracy (among human beings) only by means of words. it is therefore important to know how the child learns to speak words, and then to use them. i have above designated, as the chief difficulty for the child in the formation of words, the establishment of a connection between the central storehouse for sense-impressions--i. e., the sensory centers of higher rank--with the intercentral path of connection between the center-for-sounds and the speech-motorium. after the establishment of these connections, and long after ideas have been formed, the sound-image of the word spoken by the mother, when it emerges in the center-for-sounds directly after the rise of a clear idea, is now repeated by the child accurately, or, in case it offers insurmountable difficulties of articulation for pronunciation, inaccurately. this fact of _sound-imitation_ is fundamental. beyond it we can not go. especially must be noted here as essential that it appears to be an entirely indifferent matter what syllables and words are employed for the first designation of the child's ideas. were one disposed to provide the child with false designations, he could easily do it. the child would still connect them logically. if taught further on that two times three are five, he would merely give the _name_ five to what is six, and would soon adopt the usual form of expression. in making a beginning of the association of ideas with articulate syllables, such syllables are, as a rule, employed (probably in all languages) as have already been often uttered by the child spontaneously without meaning, because these offered no difficulties of articulation; but only the child's family put meaning into them. such syllables are _pa_, _ma_, with their doubled form _papa_, _mama_, for "father" and "mother," in connection with which it is to be observed that the meaning of them is different in different languages and even in the dialects of a language. for _mamán_, _mamá_, _máma_, _mamme_, _mammeli_, _mömme_, _mam_, _mamma_, _mammeken_, _memme_, _memmeken_, _mamm[)e]l[)e]_, _mammi_, are at the same time child-words and designations for "mother" in various districts of germany, whereas these and very similar expressions signify also the mother's breast, milk, pap, drink, nursing-bottle; nay, even in some languages the father is designated by _ma_-sounds, the mother by _ba_-and _pa_-sounds. it is very much the same with other primitive syllables of the babe's utterance, e. g., _atta_. where this does not denote the parents or grandparents it is frequently used (_táta_, _tatta_, _tatá_, also in england and germany) in the sense of "gone" ("fort") and "goodby." these primitive syllables, _pa-pa_, _ma-ma_, _tata_ and _apa_, _ama_, _ata_, originate of themselves when in the expiration of breath the passage is stopped either by the lips (_p_, _m_) or by the tongue (_d_, _t_); but after they have been already uttered many times with ease, without meaning, at random, the mothers of all nations make use of them to designate previously existing ideas of the child, and designate by them what is most familiar. hence occurs the apparent confounding of "milk" and "breast" and "mother" and "(wet-) nurse" or "nurse" and "bottle," all of which the child learns to call _mam_, _amma_, etc. but just at this period appears a genuine echolalia, the child, unobserved, repeating correctly and like a machine, often in a whisper, all sorts of syllables, when he hears them at the end of a sentence. the normal child, before he can speak, repeats sounds, syllables, words, if they are short, "mechanically," without understanding, as he imitates movements of the hands and the head that are made in his sight. speaking is a movement-making that invites imitation the more because it can be strictly regulated by means of the ear. anything more than regulation is not at first given by the sense of hearing, for those born deaf also learn to speak. they can even, like normal children, speak quite early in dreams (according to gerard van asch). those born deaf, as well as normal children, when one turns quietly toward them, often observe attentively the lips (and also touch them sometimes) and the tongue of the person speaking; and this visual image, even without an auditory image, provokes imitation, which is made perfect by the combination of the two. this combination is lacking in the child born blind, pure echolalia prevailing in this case; in the one born deaf, the combination is likewise wanting, the reading-off of the syllables from the mouth coming in as a substitute. with the deaf infant the study of the mouth-movements is, as is well known, the only means of understanding words spoken aloud, and it is sight that serves almost exclusively for this, very rarely touch; and the child born deaf often repeats the visible movements of lips and tongue better than the hearing child that can not yet talk. it is to be observed, in general, that the hearing child makes less use, on the whole, of the means of reading-off from the mouth than we assume, but depends chiefly on the ear. i have always found, too, that the child has the greatest difficulty in imitating a position of the mouth, in case the sound belonging to it is not made, whereas he easily achieves the same position of the mouth when the acoustic effect goes along with it. accordingly, the connection between the ear and the speech-center must be shorter or more practicable in advance (hereditarily) than that between the eye and the speech-center. with regard to both associations, however, the gradually progressive shortening or consolidating is to be distinguished in space and time. with the child that does not yet speak, but is beginning to repeat syllables correctly and to associate them with primitive ideas, the act of imitation takes longer than with the normal adult, but the paths in the brain that he makes use of are shorter, absolutely and relatively--absolutely, because the whole brain is smaller; relatively, because the higher centers, which at a later period perform their functions with consciousness and accessory ideas, are still lacking. notwithstanding this, the time is longer than at a later period--often amounting to several seconds--because the working up of what has been heard, and even the arrangement of it in the center for sound-images, and of what has been seen in the center for sight-images, takes more time apart from a somewhat less swift propagation of the nerve-excitement in the peripheral paths. the child's imitation can not be called fully conscious or deliberate. it resembles the half-conscious or unconscious imitation attained by the adult through frequent repetition--i. e., through manifold practice--and which, as a sort of reminiscence of conscious or an abbreviation of deliberate imitation, results from frequent continuous use of the same paths. only, the child's imitations last longer, and especially the reading-off from the mouth. the child can not distinguish the positions of the mouth that belong to a syllable, but can produce them himself very correctly. he is like the patients that kussmaul calls "word-blind," who can not, in spite of good sight, read the written words they see, but can express them in speech and writing. for the same word, e. g., _atta_, which the child does not read off from the mouth and does not repeat, he uses himself when he wants to be taken out; thus the inability is not expressive-motor, but central or intercentral. for the child can already see very well the movement of mouth and tongue; the impressive sight-path has been long established. herein this sort of word-blindness agrees fully with the physiological word-deafness of the normal child without speech, whose hearing is good. for he understands wrongly what he hears, when, e. g., in response to the order, "no! no!" he makes the affirmative movement of the head, although he can make the right movement very well. here too, then, it is not centrifugal and centripetal peripheral lines, but intercentral paths or centers, that are not yet sufficiently developed--in the case of my child, in the fourteenth month. the path leading from the word-center to the dictorium, and the word-center itself, must have been as yet too little used. from all this it results, in relation to the question, how the child comes to learn and to use words, that in the first place he has ideas; secondly, he imitates sounds, syllables, and words spoken for him; and, thirdly, he associates the ideas with these. e. g., the idea "white+wet+sweet+warm" having arisen out of frequent seeing, feeling, and tasting of milk, it depends upon what primitive syllable is selected for questioning the hungry infant, for talking to him, or quieting him, whether he expresses his desire for food by _möm_, _mimi_, _nana_, _ning_, or _maman_, or _mäm_, or _mem_, or _mima_, or yet other syllables. the oftener he has the idea of food (i. e., something that banishes hunger or the unpleasant feeling of it), and at the same time the sound-impression "milk," so much the more will the latter be associated with the former, and in consideration of the great advantages it offers, in being understood by all, will finally be adopted. thus the child learns his first words. but in each individual case the first words acquired in this manner have a wider range of meaning than the later ones. by means of pure echolalia, without associating ideas with the word babbled in imitation, the child learns, to be sure, to articulate words likewise; but he does not learn to understand them or to use them properly unless coincidences, intentional or accidental, show him this or that result when this or that word is uttered by him. if the child, e. g., hearing the new word "schnee," says, as an echo, _nee_, and then some one shows him actual snow, the meaningless _nee_ becomes associated with a sense-intuition; and later, also, nothing can take the place of the intuition--i. e., the direct, sensuous perception--as a means of instruction. this way of learning the use of words is exactly the opposite of that just discussed, and is less common because more laborious. for, in the first case, the idea is first present, and only needs to be expressed (through hearing the appropriate word). in the second case, the word comes first, and the idea has to be brought in artificially. later, the word, not understood, awakens curiosity, and thereby generates ideas. but this requires greater maturity. the third way in which the first words are learned is this: the idea and the word appear almost simultaneously, as in onomatopoetic designations and interjections. absolutely original onomatopoetic words are very rare with children, and have not been observed by me except after the children already knew some words. the names of animals, _bow-wow_, _moo-moo_, _peep-peep_ (bird), _hotto_ (horse), from the expression of the carter, "hott-ho" ("_tt_," instead of _haut_ (the skin), i. e., "left," in contrast with "aarr"--_haar_, _mähne_ (the mane)--i. e., "right"), are spoken for the child by the members of his family. some names of animals, like _kukuk_ (cuckoo), also _kikeriki_ (cock) and _kuak_ (duck, frog), are probably formed often without having been heard from others, only more indistinctly, by german, english (american), and french children. _ticktack_ (_tick-tick_) has also been repeated by a boy of two years for a watch. on the other hand, _weo-weo-weo_ (german, _[)u]io_) for the noise of winding a watch (observed by holden in a boy of two years) is original. _hüt_, as an unsuccessful imitation of the locomotive-whistle by my boy of two and a half years, seems also noteworthy as an onomatope independently invented, because it was used daily for months in the same way merely to designate the whistle. the voice of the hen, of the redstart, the creaking of a wheel, were imitated by my child of his own accord long before he could speak a word. but this did not go so far as the framing of syllables. it is not easy in this to trace so clearly the framing of a concept as attaching itself directly to onomatopoetic forms as it is in a case communicated by romanes. a child that was beginning to talk, saw and heard a duck on the water, and said _quack_. thereafter the child called, on the one hand, all birds and insects, on the other hand, all liquids, _quack_. finally, it called all coins also _quack_, after having seen an eagle on a french sou. thus the child came, by gradual generalization, to the point of designating a fly, wine, and a piece of money by the same onomatopoetic word, although only the first perception contained the characteristic that gave the name. another case is reported by eduard schulte: a boy of a year and three quarters applied the joyous outcry _ei_ (which may be an imitated interjection), modifying it first into _eiz_, into _aze_, and then into _ass_, to his wooden goat on wheels, and covered with rough hide; _eiz_, then, became exclusively a cry of joy; _ass_, the name for everything that moved along--e. g., for animals and his own sister and the wagon; also for everything that moved at all; finally, for everything that had a rough surface. now, as this child already called all coverings of the head and covers of cans _huta_, when he saw, for the first time, a fur cap, he at once christened it _ass-huta_. here took place a decided subordination of one concept to another, and therewith a new formation of a word. how broad the comprehensiveness of the concept designated _huta_ was, is perceived especially in this, that it was used to express the wish to have objects at which the child pointed. he liked to put all sorts of things that pleased him upon his head, calling them _huta_. out of the _huta_, for "i should like to have that as a hat" grew, then, after frequent repetition, "i should like that." there was in this case an extension of the narrower concept, after it had itself experienced previously a differentiation, and so a limitation, by means of the suffix _ass_. these examples show how independent of words the formation of concepts is. with the smallest stock of words the concepts are yet manifold, and are designated by the same word when there is a lack of words for the composition of new words, and so for fresh word-formation. the formation of words out of interjections without imitation has not been observed. here belongs the _rollu_, _rollolo_, uttered by my boy, of his own accord, on seeing rolling balls or wheels; and (in the twentieth month) _rodi_, _otto_, _rojo_, where the rotation perceived by the child occasions at once the one or the other exclamation containing _l_ or _r_. in the case of steinthal, it was _lu-lulu_; in the case of a boy a year and a half old, observed by kussmaul, it was _golloh_. in these cases the first interjection is always occasioned by a _noise_, not simply by the sight of things rolling without noise. the interjection must accordingly be styled imitative. a combination of the original--i. e., inborn--interjectional sounds into syllables and groups of syllables, without the assistance of members of the family, and without imitation, for the purpose of communicating an idea, is not proved to exist. on the whole, the way in which the child learns to speak not merely resembles the way in which he learns at a later period to write, but is essentially completely in accord with it. here, too, he makes no new inventions. first are drawn strokes and blurs without meaning; then certain strokes are imitated; then signs of sounds. these can not be at once combined into syllables, and even after the combination has been achieved and the written word can be made from the syllables it is not yet understood. yet the child could see, even before the first instruction in writing or the first attempt at scribbling, every individual letter in the dimensions in which he writes it later. so, too, the speechless child hears every sound before he understands syllables and words, and he understands them before he can speak them. the child commonly learns reading before writing, and so understands the sign he is to write before he can write it. yet the sign written by himself is often just as unintelligible to him as the word he himself speaks. the analogy is perfect. if the first germs of words, after ideas have begun to become clear by means of keener perception, are once formed, then the child fashions them of his own effort, and this often with surprising distinctness; but in the majority of cases the words are mutilated. in the first category belongs the comparative _hocher_ for _höher_ in the sentence _hocher bauen_ (build higher)! (in the third year uttered as a request when playing with building-stones). the understanding of the comparative is plainly manifest in this. when, therefore, the same child in his fifth year, to the improper question, "whom do you like better, papa or mamma?" answers, "papa and mamma," we should not infer a lack of that understanding, as many do (e. g., heyfelder); but the decision is impossible to the child. just so in the case of the question, "would you rather have the apple or the pear?" other inventions of my child were the verb _messen_ for "mit dem messer schneiden" (to cut with the knife); _schiffern_, i. e., "das schiff bewegen" (move the ship), for "rudern," (row). and the preference of the weak inflection on the part of all children is a proof that _after_ the appropriation of a small number of words through imitation, independent--always logical--changes of formation are undertaken. _gegebt_, _gegeht_, _getrinkt_ (gived, goed, drinked), have never been heard by the child; but "gewebt, geweht, gewinkt" (as in english, waved, wafted, beckoned), have been known to him as models (or other formations corresponding to these). yet this is by no means to say that every mutilation or transformation the child proposes is a copy after an erroneously selected model; rather the child's imagination has a wide field here and acts in manifold fashion, especially by combinations. "my teeth-roof pains me," said a boy who did not yet know the word "palate." another in his fourth year called the road (weg) the "go" (gehe). a child of three years used the expression, "just grow me" (_wachs mich einmal_) for "just see how i have grown" (sieh einmal wie ich gewachsen bin) (lindner). such creations of the childish faculty of combination, arising partly through blending, partly through transference, are collected in a neat pamphlet, "zur philosophie der kindersprache," by agathon keber, . the most of them, however, are from a later time of life than that here treated of. so it is with the two "heretical" utterances communicated by rösch. a child said _unterblatte_ (under-leaf) for "oblate," because he saw the wafer (oblate) slipped under the leaf of paper (blatt); and he called the "american chair," "herr-decaner-chair," because somebody who was called "herr decan" used to sit in it. here may be seen the endeavor to put into the acoustic impression not understood a meaning. these expressions are not inventions, but they are evidence of intellect. they can not, of course, appear in younger children without knowledge of words, because they are transformations of words. on the other hand it is of the greatest importance for the understanding of the first stage of the use of words in their real significance, after the acquirement of them has once begun, to observe how many different ideas the child announces by one and the same verbal expression. here are some examples: _tuhl_ (for stuhl, chair) signifies-- . "my chair is gone"; . "the chair is broken"; . "i want to be lifted into the chair"; . "here is a chair." the child (steinthal's) says (in the twenty-second month), when he sees or hears a barking dog, _bellt_ (barks), and thinks he has by that word designated the whole complex phenomenon, the sight-perception of the dog and of a particular dog, and the sound-perception; but he says _bellt_ also when he merely hears the dog. no doubt the memory-image of the dog he has seen is then revived for him. through this manifold significance of a word, which is a substitute for a whole sentence, is exhibited a much higher activity of the intellect than appears in the mutilation and new formation of words having but one meaning to designate a sense-impression, for, although in the latter is manifested the union of impressions into perceptions and also of qualities into concepts, wherein an unconscious judgment is involved, yet a _clear_ judgment is not necessarily connected with them. the union of concepts into conscious clear judgments is recognized rather in the formation of a sentence, no matter whether this is expressed by one word or by several words. in connection with this an error must be corrected that is wide-spread. it consists in the assumption that all children begin to speak with nouns, and that these are followed by verbs. this is by no means the case. the child daily observed by me used an adjective for the first time in the twenty-third month in order to express a judgment, the first one expressed in the language of those about him. he said "hot" for "the milk is too hot." in general, the appropriation and employment of words for the first formation of sentences depends, in the first instance, upon the action of the adults in the company of the child. a good example of this is furnished by an observation of lindner, whose daughter in her fourteenth month first begged with her hands for a piece of apple, upon which the word "apple" was distinctly pronounced to her. after she had eaten the apple she repeated the request, re-enforcing her gesture this time by the imitated sound _appn_, and her request was again granted. evidently encouraged by her success, the child from that time on used _appn_ for "eat, i want to eat," as a sign of her desire to eat in general, because those about her "accepted this signification and took the word stamped by her upon this concept for current coin, else it would very likely have been lost." this also confirms my statement (p. ) that a child easily learns to speak with logical correctness with wrong words. he also speaks like the deaf-mute with logical correctness with quite a different arrangement of words from that of his speech of a later period. thus the child just mentioned, in whom "the inclination to form sentences was manifest from the twenty-second month," said, "hat die olga getrinkt," when she had drunk! but every child learns at first not only the language of those in whose immediate daily companionship he grows up, but also at first the peculiarities of these persons. he imitates the accent, intonation, dialect, as well as the word, so that a thuringian child may be surely distinguished from a mecklenburg child even in the second and third year, and, at the same time, we may recognize the peculiarities of the speech of its mother or nurse, with whom it has most intercourse. this phenomenon, the persistence of dialects and of peculiarities of speech in single families, gives the impression, on a superficial observation, of being something inherited; whereas, in fact, nothing is inherited beyond the voice through inheritance of the organic peculiarities of the mechanism of phonation. for everything else completely disappears when a child learns to speak from his birth in a foreign community. hereditary we may, indeed, call the characteristic of humanity, speech; hereditary, also, is articulation in man, and the faculty of acquiring any articulate language is innate. but beyond this the tribal influence does not reach. if the possibility of learning to speak words phonetically is wanting because ear or tongue refuses, then another language comes in as a substitute--that of looks, gestures, writing, tactile images--then not broca's center, but another one is generated. so that the question whether a speech-center already exists in the alalic child must be answered in the negative; the center is formed only when the child hears speech, and, if he does not hear speech, no center is developed. in this case the ganglionic cells of the posterior third of the third frontal convolution are otherwise employed, or they suffer atrophy. in learning to speak, on the contrary, there is a continuous development, first of the sound-center, then of the syllable-center, then of the word-center and the dictorium. the brain grows through its own activity. chapter xviii. first sounds and beginnings of speech in the case of a child observed daily during his first three years. the observations bearing upon the acquirement of speech recorded by me in the case of my boy from the day of his birth, the d of november, , are here presented, so far as they appear worthy of being communicated, in chronological order. they are intended to serve as authenticated documents. the points to which the attention is to be directed in these observations are determined by the organic conditions of the acquirement of speech, which have been treated previously. first, the expressive processes, next the impressive, last the central processes, claim the attention. ( ) to the _expressive_ beginnings of speech belongs the sum total of the inarticulate sounds--crying, whimpering, grunting, cooing, squealing, crowing, laughing, shouting (for joy), modulation of the voice, smacking, and many others, but also the silent movement of the tongue; further, articulation, especially before imitation begins; the formation of sound, and so the gradual perfecting of the vowels, aspirates, and consonants; at the same time the forming of syllables. the last is especially easy to follow in the babbling monologues of the infant, which are often very long. the reduplication of syllables, accentuation, and inflection, whispering, singing, etc., belong likewise here. ( ) the _impressive_ processes are discerned in the looks and gestures of the child as yet speechless; later, the ability to discriminate in regard to words and noises, and the connection of the ear with the speech-center, are discerned in the first imitations of sounds and in the repeating after others--i. e., in word-imitation. here belong also the onomatopoetic attempts of children, which are simply a sort of imitation. later, are added to these the answers to simple spoken questions, these answers being partly interjectional, partly articulate, joined into syllables, words, and then sentences. the understanding of words heard is announced especially by the first listening, by the association of certain movements with certain sound-impressions, and of motionless objects with other sound-impressions, before speaking begins. hereby ( ) the _central_ processes are already shown to be in existence. the childish logic, especially induction from too few particulars, the mutilation of words reproduced, the wrong applications of expressions correctly repeated, the confounding of opposites in the verbal designation of concepts of the child's own formation, offer an abundance of noteworthy facts for the genesis of mind. moreover, the memory for sounds and words, the imagination, especially in filling out, as well as the first acts of judging, the forming of propositions, questioning--all these are to be considered. as for the order in which the separate classes of words appear, the training in learning-by-heart, speculations as to which spoken word is first perfectly understood, to these matters i have paid less attention, for the reason that here the differences in the child's surroundings exert the greatest influence. my report must, in any event, as a rough draft of the history of the development of language in the child, be very imperfect. it, however, contains nothing but perfectly trustworthy matter of my own observation. during the first weeks the child often cried long and vigorously from discomfort. if one were to try to represent by written vowels the screaming sounds, these would most nearly resemble, in the majority of cases, a short _u_ (oo in book), with a very quickly following prolonged _ä_ (_ai_ in fair); thus, _uä_, _uä_, _uä_, _uä_, were the first sounds that may be approximately expressed. they were uttered after the lapse of five months exactly as at the beginning, only more vigorously. all the other vowel-sounds were at first undefined. notwithstanding this uniformity in the vowel-sounds, the sounds of the voice are so varied, even within the first five weeks, that it may be told with certainty from these alone whether the child feels hunger or pain or pleasure. screaming with the eyes firmly closed in hunger, whimpering in slight indisposition, laughing at bright objects in motion, the peculiar grunting sounds which at a later period are joined with abdominal pressure and with lively arm-movements, as the announcement of completed digestion and of wetness (retained for the first of these states even into the seventeenth month), are manifold acoustic expressions of vitality, and are to be looked upon as the first forerunners of future oral communication, in contrast with the loud-sounding reflex movements of sneezing and of hiccough, and with the infrequent snoring, snuffling (in sucking), and other loud expirations observed in the first days, which have just as little linguistic value as have coughing and the later clearing of the throat. the voice is very powerful as early as the sixth day, especially when it announces feelings of discomfort. screaming is much more frequent, persistent, and vigorous also when diluted cow's milk is given instead of that from the breast. if one occupies himself longer than usual with the infant (in the first two months), the child is afterward more inclined to cry, and cries then (as in the case of hunger) quite differently from what he does when giving notice of something unpleasant--e. g., wetness. directly upon his being made dry, the crying ceases, as now a certain contentment is attained. on the other hand, the inclination to cry serves very early (certainly from the tenth week on) as a sign of well-being (or increase in the growth of the muscles). at least a prolonged silence at this season is wont to be connected with slight ailment. but it is to be remarked that during the whole period no serious illness, lasting more than one day, occurred. on the forty-third day i heard the _first consonant_. the child, in a most comfortable posture, uttering all sorts of obscure sounds, said once distinctly _am-ma_. of vowels, _ao_ was likewise heard on that day. but, on the following day, the child surprised me and others by the syllables, spoken with perfect distinctness, _ta-hu_. on the forty-sixth day, in the otherwise unintelligible babble of the infant, i heard, once each, _gö_ (_ö_ nearly like _i_ in bird), _örö_, and, five days later, _ara_. in the eighth and ninth _weeks_, the two utterances, _örrö_, _arra_, became frequent, the _ö_ and _a_ being pure and the _r_ uvular. the syllable _ma_ i heard by itself (it was during his crying) for the first time on the sixty-fourth day. but on the following day was sounded, during persistent, loud crying, often and distinctly (it returned in like manner months after), _nei_, _nei_, _nei_, and once, during his babbling, _a-omb_. on the day after, distinctly, once each, _la_, _grei_, _aho_, and, besides, _ma_ again. on the sixty-ninth day, the child, when hungry, uttered repeatedly and very distinctly, _mömm_ and _ngö_. of the syllables earlier spoken, only _örrö_ is distinctly repeated in the tenth week. on the seventy-first day, the child being in the most comfortable condition, there comes the new combination, _ra-a-ao_, and, five days later, in a hungry and uncomfortable mood, _nä_, and then _n[=a]i-n_. the manifest sign of contentment was very distinct (on the seventy-eighth day): _habu_, and likewise in the twelfth week _a-i_ and _u[=a]o_, as well as _ä-o-a_, alternating with _ä-a-a_, and _o-ä-ö_. it now became more and more difficult to represent by letters the sounds, already more varied, and even to distinguish the vowels and repeat them accurately. the child cries a good deal, as if to exercise his respiratory muscles. to the sounds uttered while the child is lying comfortably are added in the fourteenth week _ntö_, _ha_. the last was given with an unusually loud cry, with distinct aspiration of the _h_, though with no indication that the child felt any particular pleasure. at this period i heard besides repeatedly _lö_, _na_, the latter along with screaming at disagreeable impressions more and more frequently and distinctly; in the fifteenth week, _nannana_, _n[=a]-n[=a]_, _nanna_ in refusal. on the other hand, the earlier favorite _örrö_ has not been heard at all for some weeks. screaming while waiting for his food to be prepared (milk and water) or for the nurse, who had not sufficient nourishment for the child, is marked, in the sixteenth week--as is also screaming on account of unpleasant feelings--in general by predominance of the vowels, _ä-[)u]_, _ä-[)u] ä_, _[=a]-[)u]_, _[=a]-[)u]_, _[)u]-ä_, _[)u]-ä_, _[=u]-[=u]-[=a]-ö_, but meantime is heard _amme-a_, and as a sign of special discomfort the persistent ill-sounding _[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]-[=u][)a]_ (_[)u]_ = eng. _[=oo]_). screaming in the first five months expresses itself in the main by the vowels _u_, _ä_, _ö_, _a_, with _ü_ and _o_ occurring more seldom, and without other consonants, for the most part, than _m_. in the fifth month no new consonants were developed except _k_; but a merely passive _gö_, _kö_, _aggegg[)e]kö_, the last more rarely than the first, was heard with perfect distinctness during the child's yawning. while in this case the _g_-sound originates passively, it was produced, in connection with _ö_, evidently by the position of the tongue, when the child was in a contented frame, as happens in nursing; _ögö_ was heard in the twenty-second week, as well as _ma-ö-[)e]_, _h[)a]_, _[=a]_, _ho-ich_. the _i_ here appeared more distinct than in the third month. the soft _ch_, which sounded like the _g_ in "honig," was likewise quite distinct. about this time began the amusing loud "crowing" of the child, an unmistakable expression of pleasure. the strong aspirate sound _ha_, and this sound united with the labial _r_ in _brrr-há_; corresponding in force to the voice, which had become exceptionally powerful, must likewise be regarded as expressions of pleasure. so with the sounds _aja_, _örrgö_, _[=a]-[=a]-i-[)o]-[=a]_, which the child toward the end of the first half-year utters as if for his own gratification as he lies in comfort. with these belongs also the frequently repeated "eu" of the french "heure," and the "oeu" of the french "coeur," which is not found in the german language, also the primitive sounds _ä_ and _ö_ (german). the lips contract very regularly, and are protruded equally in the transition from _ä_ to _ö_. i heard also _ijä_ cried out by the child in very gay mood. in the babbling and crowing continued often for a long time without interruption, consonants are seldom uttered, pure vowels, with the exception of _a_, less often than _ä_ and _ö_; _i_ and _u_ are especially rare. when the child lies on his back, he moves his arms and legs in a lively manner even without any external provocation. he contracts and expands all the muscles he can command, among these especially the muscles of the larynx, of the tongue, and of the aperture of the mouth. in the various movements of the tongue made at random it often happens that the mouth is partly or entirely closed. then the current of air that issues forth in breathing bursts the barrier and thus arise many sounds, among them some that do not exist in the german language, e. g., frequently and distinctly, by means of labio-lingual stoppage, a consonant-sound between _p_ and _t_ or between _b_ and _d_, in the production of which the child takes pleasure, as he does also in the labial _brr_ and _m_. by far the greater part of the consonant-sounds produced by the exercises of the tongue and lips can not be represented in print; just as the more prolonged and more manifold movements of the extremities, movements made by the child when he has eaten his fill, and is not sleepy and is left to himself, can not be drawn or described. it is noteworthy that all the utterances of sound are expiratory. i have not once observed an attempt to form sounds while drawing in the breath. in the seventh month the child at one time screamed piercingly, in very high tones, from pain. when hungry and desiring milk, he said with perfect distinctness, _mä_, _ä_, _[)u]ä_, _[)u]ä[)e]_; when contented he would say _örrö_ too, as at an earlier period. the screaming was sometimes kept up with great vigor until the child began to be hoarse, in case his desire, e. g., to leave his bed, was not granted. when the child screams with hunger, he draws the tongue back, shortens it and thereby broadens it, making loud expirations with longer or shorter intervals. in pain, on the other hand, the screaming is uninterrupted and the tones are higher than in any other screaming. during the screaming i heard the rare _l_ distinctly in the syllable _lä_. the vowels _[)u]-[=a]-[)u]-i-i_ also appeared distinctly, all as if coming by accident, and not often pure. the _t_ also was seldom heard; _f_, _s_, _sch_, _st_, _sp_, _sm_, _ts_, _ks_, _w_, not once yet; on the other hand, _b_, _d_, _m_, _n_, _r_, often; _g_, _h_, more seldom; _k_, only in yawning; _p_, but very rarely, both in screaming and in the child's babble to himself or in response to friendly address. in the eighth month the screaming sounds were for the most part different from what they had been; the disagreeable screaming no longer so intense and prolonged, from the time that the food of the child consisted exclusively of pap (kindermehl) and water. single vowels, like _u_ and _ä_, are very often not to be heard pure. often the child does not move the lips at all when with mouth shut he lifts and drops the larynx, and with eager desire for the pap howls; or coos like a dove, or grunts. the prattling monologues become longer when the child is alone, lying comfortably in bed. but definite consonants can only with difficulty be distinguished in them, with the exception of _r_ in the _örrö_, which still continues to be uttered, though rarely and unintentionally. once the child, while in the bath, cried out as if yawning, _h[=a]-upp_, and frequently, when merry, _a-[(ei]_, _a-[(au]_, _[)a]-h[(au]-[)a]_, _hörrö_. when he babbles contentedly in this manner, he moves the tongue quickly, both symmetrically, e. g., raising the edges equally, and asymmetrically, thrusting it forward to right or left. he often also puts out the tongue between the lips and draws it back during expiration, producing thereby the before-mentioned labio-lingual explosive sounds. i also heard _nt[)e]-ö_, _mi-ja_, _mija_ (_j_ like eng. _y_) and once distinctly _o[)u][=a][)e]i_. in the ninth month it is still difficult to recognize definite syllables among the more varied utterances of sound. but the voice, often indeed very loud and inarticulate, is already more surely modulated as the expression of psychical states. when the child, e. g., desires a new, especially a bright object, he not only stretches both arms in the direction of it, indicating the direction by his gaze, but also makes known, by the same sound he makes before taking his food, that he wants it. this complex combination of movements of eye, larynx, tongue, lips, and arm-muscles appears now more and more; and we can recognize in his screaming the desire for a change of position, discomfort (arising from wet, heat, cold), anger, and pain. the last is announced by screaming with the mouth in the form of a square and by higher pitch. but delight at a friendly expression of face also expresses itself by high crowing sounds, only these are not so high and are not continued long. violent stretchings of arms and legs accompany (in the thirty-fourth week first) the joyous utterance. coughing, almost a clearing of the throat, is very rare. articulate utterances of pleasure, e. g., at music, are _mä-mä_, _äm-mä_, _mä_. meantime the lip-movements of the _m_ were made without the utterance of sound, as if the child had perceived the difference. other expressions of sound without assignable cause are _[=a]-au [=a]-[=a]_, _[=a]-[)o]_, _a-u-au_, _na-na_, the latter not with the tone of denial as formerly, and often repeated rapidly in succession. as separate utterances in comfortable mood, besides _örrö_ came _apa_, _ga au-[)a]_, _acha_. the tenth month is marked by the increasing distinctness of the syllables in the monologues, which are more varied, louder, and more prolonged when the child is left to himself than when any one tries to entertain him. of new syllables are to be noted _ndä[)e]_, _b[=a]ë-b[=a]ë_, _ba ell_, _arrö_. from the forty-second week on, especially the syllables _mä_ and _pappa_, _tatta_, _appapa_, _babba_, _tätä_, _pa_, are frequently uttered, and the uvular _rrrr_, _rrra_, are repeated unweariedly. the attempts to make the child repeat syllables pronounced to him, even such syllables as he has before spoken of his own accord, all fail. in place of _tatta_ he says, in the most favorable instance, _tä_ or _ata_; but even here there is progress, for in the previous month even these hints at _imitating_ or even responding to sound were almost entirely lacking. in the eleventh month some syllables emphatically pronounced to the child were for the first time correctly repeated. i said "ada" several times, and the attentive child, after some ineffectual movements of the lips, repeated correctly _ada_, which he had for that matter often said of his own accord long before. but this single repetition was so decided that i was convinced that the _sound-imitation_ was intentional. it was the first _unquestionable_ sound-imitation. it took place on the three hundred and twenty-ninth day. the same day when i said "mamma," the response was _nanna_. in general, it often happens, when something is said for imitation, and the child observes attentively my lips, that evident attempts are made at imitation; but for the most part something different makes its appearance, or else a silent movement of the lips. in the forty-fifth week everything said to the child, in case it received his attention, was responded to with movements of lips and tongue, which gave the impression of being made at random and of serving rather for diversion. further, at this period the child begins during his long monologues to _whisper_. he produces sounds in abundance, varying in force, pitch, and _timbre_, as if he were speaking an unknown tongue; and some single syllables may gradually be more easily distinguished, although the corresponding positions of the mouth pass into one another, sometimes quite gradually, sometimes rapidly. the following special cases i was able to establish by means of numerous observations: in crying _rrra_, there is a vibration on both sides of the edges of the tongue, which is bent to a half-cylinder with the ridge upward. in this way the child produces three kinds of _r_-sounds--the labial, the uvular, and this bilateral-lingual. new syllables of this period are _ta-h[(ee]_, _dann-tee_, _[(aa]-n[(ee]_, _ngä_, _tai_, _bä_, _dall_, _at-tall_, _kamm_, _akkee_, _praï-jer_, _tra_, _[=a]-h[(ee]_. among them _tra_ and _pra_ are noteworthy as the first combination of _t_ and _p_ with _r_. the surprising combinations _attall_ and _akkee_ and _praijer_, which made their appearance singly without any occasion that could be noticed, like others, are probably the first attempts to reproduce the child's own name (axel preyer) from memory. of earlier sounds, syllables, and combinations of these, the following are especially frequent: _mammam_, _apapa_, _örrö_, _papa_, _tata_, _tatta_, _n[(aa]_, _rrra_, _pata_, _mmm_, _n[)a]_, _[=a]_, _ä_, _[(au]_, _anna_, _attapa_, _dadada_, _ja_, _ja-ja_, _eja_, _jaë_. the last syllables are distinguished by the distinct _e_, which is now more frequent. all the pains taken to represent a babbling monologue perfectly by letters were fruitless, because these distinct and oft-repeated syllables alternated with indistinct loud and soft ones. still, on the whole, of the consonants the most frequent at this period are _b_, _p_, _t_, _d_, _m_, _n_, and the new _r_; _l_, _g_, _k_, not rare. of vowels the _a_ has a decided preponderance. both _u_ and _o_ are rare; _i_ very rare. yet a vowel is not repeated, either by itself or in a syllable, more than five times in succession without an interval. commonly it is twice or three times. i have also noticed that the mechanical repetition of the same syllable, e. g., _papapa_, occurs far more often than the alternation of a distinctly spoken syllable with, another distinctly spoken one, like _pata_. in the mean time it is certain that the child during his various movements of lips and tongue, along with contraction and expansion of the opening of the mouth, readily starts with surprise when he notices such a change of acoustic effect. it seems as if he were himself taking pleasure in practicing regularly all sorts of symmetrical and asymmetrical positions of the mouth, sometimes in silence, sometimes with loud voice, then again with soft voice. in the combinations of syllables, moreover, palpable accentuation somewhat like this, _appápapa atátata_, is by no means frequent. the surprisingly often repeated _dadada_ has generally no accent. with regard to the question whether in this period, especially important for the development of the apparatus of speech, any articulate utterance of sound stands in firm association with an idea, i have observed the child under the most varied circumstances possible without disturbing him; but i have ascertained only one such case with certainty. the _atta_, _hödda_, _hatta_, _hataï_, showed itself to be associated with the perception that something disappeared, for it was uttered when some one left the room, when the light was extinguished, and the like; also, to be sure, sometimes when such remarkable changes were not discoverable. thus, the eleventh month ends without any other indubitable firm _association of articulation and idea_. in the next four weeks, up to the _end of the first year_ of life, there was no progress in this respect to record; but, from this time on, an eager desire--e. g., for a biscuit seen, but out of reach--was regularly announced by _ä-na_, _ä-nananana_, uttered loudly and with an expression of indescribable longing. the attempts at imitation, too, are somewhat more successful, especially the attention is more strained. when, e. g., in the fifty-first week, i sang something for the child, he gazed fixedly more than a minute, with immovable countenance, without winking, at my mouth, and then moved his own tongue. correct repetition of a syllable pronounced to him is, however, very rare. when i laugh, and the child observes it, he laughs likewise, and then crows, with strong abdominal pressure. this same loud expression of joy is exhibited when the child unexpectedly sees his parents at a distance. this peculiar pressure, with strong expiration, is in general associated with feelings of pleasure. the child almost seems to delight in the discovery of his own abdominal pressure, when he produces by means of it the very high crowing sounds with the vowel _i_ or a genuine grunt. of articulate sounds, syllables, and combinations, made without suggestion from others in the twelfth month, i have caught the following particularly with accuracy: _haja_, _jajajajaja_, _aja_, _njaja_, _naïn-hopp_, _ha-a_, _pa-a_, _d[=e]wär_, _han-na_, _mömma_, _allda_, _alldaï_, _apa-u-a_, _gägä_, _ka_, _ladn_. besides, the earlier _atta_ variously modified; no longer _dada_. more important than such almost meaningless sound-formations, among which, by the way, appears for the first time _w_ is the now awakened _ability to discriminate between words heard_. the child turns around when his name is spoken in a loud voice; he does this, it is true, at other loud sounds also, but then with a different expression. when he hears a new tone, a new noise, he is surprised, opens his eyes wide, and holds his mouth open, without moving. by frequent repetition of the words, "give the hand," with the holding out of the hand, i have brought the child, in the fifty-second week, to the point of obeying this command of himself--a sure proof that he distinguishes words heard. another child did the same thing in the seventh month. in this we can not fail to see the beginning of communication by means of ordinary language, but this remained a one-sided affair till past the third half-year, the child being simply receptive. during this whole period, moreover, from birth on, special sounds, particularly "sch (eng., _sh_), ss, st, pst," just the ones not produced by the child, had a remarkable effect of a quieting character. if the child heard them when he was screaming, he became quiet, as when he heard singing or instrumental music. in the _first weeks of the second year of life_, the child behaves just as awkwardly as ever in regard to saying anything that is said to him, but his attention has become more lively. when anything is said to him for him to say--e. g., _papa_, _mama_, _atta_, _tatta_--he looks at the speaker with eyes wide open and mouth half open, moves the tongue and the lips, often very slightly, often vigorously, but can not at the same time make his voice heard, or else he says, frequently with an effort of abdominal pressure, _attaï_. earlier, even in the forty-fifth week, he had behaved in much the same way, but to the word "papa," pronounced to him, he had responded _rrra_. once only, i remember, _papa_ was repeated correctly, in a faint tone, on the three hundred and sixty-ninth day, almost as by one in a dream. with this exception, no word could be repeated on command, notwithstanding the fact that the faculty of imitation was already active in another department. the syllables most frequently uttered at this stage were _nja_, _njan_, _dada_, _atta_, _mama_, _papaï_, _attaï_, _na-na-na_, _hatta_, _meen[)e]-meen[)e]-meen[)e]_, _mömm_, _mömma_, _ao-u_. of these syllables, _na-na_ regularly denotes a desire, and the arms are stretched out in connection with it; _mama_ is referred to the mother perhaps in the fifty-fourth week, on account of the pleasure she shows at the utterance of these syllables, but they are also repeated mechanically without any reference to her; _atta_ is uttered now and then at going away, but at other times also. his joy--e. g., at recognizing his mother at a distance--the child expresses by crowing sounds, which have become stronger and higher than they were, but which, can not be clearly designated; the nearest approach to a representation of them is _[)a]hij[)a]_. affirmation and negation may already be recognized by the tone of voice alone. the signification of the cooing and the grunting sounds remains the same. the former indicates desire of food; the latter the need of relieving the bowels. as if to exercise the vocal cords, extraordinarily high tones are now produced, which may be regarded as signs of pleasure in his own power. an imperfect language has thus already been formed imperceptibly, although no single object is as yet designated by a sound assigned to it _alone_. the articulation has made progress, for on the three hundred and sixty-eighth day appeared the first distinct _s_, in the syllable _ssi_; quite incidentally, to be sure. the most important advance consists in the now awakened _understanding of spoken words_. the ability to learn, or the capability of being trained, has emerged almost as if it had come in a night. for it did not require frequent repetition of the question, "how tall is the child?" along with holding up his arms, in order to make him execute this movement every time that he heard the words, "wie gross?" ("how tall?") or "ooss," nay, even merely "oo." it was easy, too, to induce him to take an ivory ring, lying before him attached to a thread, into his hand, and reach it to me prettily when i held out my hand and said, "where is the ring?" and, after it had been grasped, said, "give." in the same way, the child holds the biscuit, which he is carrying to his mouth, to the lips of the person who says pleasantly to him, "give"; and he has learned to move his head sidewise hither and thither when he hears "no, no." if we say to him, when he wants food or an object he has seen, "bitte, bitte" (say "please"), he puts his hands together in a begging attitude, a thing which seemed at first somewhat hard for him to learn. finally, he had at this time been taught to respond to the question, "where is the little rogue?" by touching the side of his head with his hand (a movement he had often made of himself before). from this it appears beyond a doubt that now (rather late in comparison with other children) the association of words heard with certain movements is established, inasmuch as upon acoustic impressions--at least upon combined impressions of hearing and of sight, which are repeated in like fashion--like movements follow, and indeed follow invariably with the expression of great satisfaction on the countenance. yet this connection between the sensorium and the motorium is not yet stable, for there follows not seldom upon a command distinctly uttered, and without doubt correctly understood, the wrong movement--paramimy. upon the question, "how tall?" the hands are put together for "please," and the like. once when i said, "how tall?" the child raised his arms a moment, then struck himself on the temples, and thereupon put his hands together, as if "rogue," and then "please," had been said to him. all three movements followed with the utmost swiftness, while the expression of face was that of a person confused, with wavering look. evidently the child had _forgotten_ which movement belonged with the "tall," and performed all the three tricks he had learned, _confounding_ them one with another. this confounding of arm-raising, head-shaking, giving of the ring, putting the hands together, touching the head, is frequent. it is also to be noticed that some one of these five tricks is almost invariably performed by the child when some new command is given to him that he does not understand, as he perceives that something is required of him--the first conscious act of _obedience_, as yet imperfect. in the fourteenth month there was no great increase in the number of independent utterances of sound that can be represented by syllables of the german language. surprising visual impressions, like the brilliant christmas-tree, and the observation of new objects, drew from the pleasurably excited child, without his having touched anything, almost the same sounds that he at other times made when in discontented mood, _[)u]ä_, _m[)u]ä_, only softer; _mömö_ and _mama_, and also _papa_ are frequent expressions of pleasure. when the child is taken away, he often says _ta-ta_ loudly, also, _atta_ in a whisper. there can no longer be a doubt that in these syllables is now expressed simply the idea of "going." the labial _brrr_, the so-called "coachman's _r_," was practiced by the child, of his own accord, with special eagerness, and indeed was soon pronounced so cleverly that educated adults can not produce it in such purity and especially with so prolonged an utterance. the only new word is _dakku_ and _daggn_, which is often uttered pleasantly with astonishing rapidity, in moments of enjoyment, e. g., when the child is eating food that tastes good. but it is also uttered so often without any assignable occasion, that a definite meaning can hardly be attributed to it, unless it be that of satisfaction. for it is never heard when the least thing of a disagreeable sort has happened to the child. the probability is obvious that we have here a case of imitation of the "thanks" (danke) which he has not seldom heard. but the modifications _taggn_, _attagn_, _attatn_, pass over into the word, undoubtedly the original favorite, _taï_, _ataï_. among all the indistinct and distinct sounds of the babbling monologues, no inspiratory ones appeared at this time either; but such did make their appearance now and then, in a passive manner, in swallowing and in the coughing that followed. i spent much time in trying to get the child to repeat vowels and syllables pronounced to him, but always without special success. when i said plainly to him "pá-pá-pá," he answered loudly _ta-taï_, or with manifest effort and a vigorous straining, _t-taï_, _k-taï_, _at-taï_, _hattaï_, and the same when "má-má" was said for him by any one, no matter whom. he also moved lips and tongue often, as if trying to get the sound in various ways; as if the _will_ of the child, as he attentively observed the mouth of the speaker, were present, but not the ability to reproduce the sound-impression. evidently he is taking pains to repeat what he has heard; and he laughs at the unsuccessful effort, if others laugh over it. the earliest success is with the repetition of the vowels "a-u-o," but this is irregular and inaccurate. in contrast with these halting performances stands the precise, _parrot-like repetition_ of such syllables as the child had uttered of his own accord, and which i had immediately after pronounced to him. thus _attaï_, _taï_, _atta_, were often easily and correctly repeated, but, strangely enough, frequently in a whisper. the _ä-[)e]_, _ä-ö_, _ä-[)e]_, accompanied by oscillatory movements of the hand, when imitated directly by me was also produced again; in like manner, regularly, the _dakkn_, but this course did not succeed in the case of other primitive syllables or words, even under the most favorable circumstances: here it is to be borne in mind that the last-named utterances were precisely the most frequent at this period. when he was requested with emphasis to say _papa_, _mama_, _tata_, he would bring out one of the tricks he had been taught in the previous month; among others, that of moving the head to one side and the other as if in negation; but this it could not be, for this significance of the gesture was wholly unknown to him at that time. rather had the child received the impression from my voice that he was to do something that he was bidden, and he did what was easy to him just at the moment, "mechanically," without knowing which of the movements that he had learned was required (cf. p. ). in regard to the _understanding of words heard_, several points of progress are to be noted; above all a change of place in consequence of the question, "where is your clothes-press?" the child, standing erect, being held by the hand, at these words turns his head and his gaze toward the clothes-press, draws the person holding him through the large room by the hand, although he can not walk a step alone, and then opens the press without assistance. here, at the beginning of the fourteenth month, is the _idea of a definite stationary object associated with a sound heard_, and so strongly that it is able to produce an independent act of locomotion, the first one; for, although before this the clothes-press had often been named and shown, the going to it is still the child's own performance. it is now a matter of common occurrence that other words heard have also a definite relation to objects seen. the questions, "where is papa? mamma? the light?" are invariably answered correctly, after brief deliberation, by turning the head (at the word "light," occasionally since the ninth month) and the gaze in the proper direction, and by lifting the right arm, often also the left, to point, the fingers of the outstretched hand being at the same time generally spread out. in the previous month, only the association of the word _mama_ with the appearance of the mother was established. the following are now added to the movements executed upon hearing certain words. the child likes to beat with his hands upon the table at which he is sitting. i said to him, "play the piano," and made the movement after him. afterward, when i merely said the word "piano" to the child (who was at the time quiet), without moving my hands, he _considered_ for a few seconds, and then beat again with his hands on the table. thus the recollection of the sound was sufficient to bring out the movement. further, the child had accustomed himself, of his own accord, to give a regular _snort_, contracting the nostrils, pursing up the mouth, and breathing out through the nose. if now any one spoke to him of the "nose," this snorting was sure to be made. the word put the centro-motors into a state of excitement. the same is true of the command "give!" since the child reaches out the object he is holding or is about to take hold of, in case any one puts out the hand or the lips to him. some weeks ago this took place only with the ring and biscuit; now the word "give" has the same effect with any object capable of being grasped, but it operates almost like a reflex stimulus, "mechanically," without its being even once the case that the act of giving is a purely voluntary act or even occasioned by sympathy. in these already learned co-ordinated movements made upon hearing the words "please, how tall? rogue! no! piano! ring! give!" all of which are now executed with shorter intervals of deliberation as if by a well-trained animal, there is in general absolutely no deeper understanding present than that to this and the other sound-impression belong this and the other movement. by means of daily repetition of both, the time required for the production of the movement after the excitement of the auditory nerve becomes less and less, the doubt as to which movement follows this or that sound withdrawing more and more. at last the responsive movements followed without any remarkable strain of attention. they became habitual. now and then, however, the movements are still confounded. upon "no! no!" follows the touching of the head; upon "please," the shaking of the head; upon "rogue," the putting of the hands together, etc. these errors become frequent when a new impression diverts the attention. they become more and more rare through repetition of the right movements made for the child to see and through guiding the limbs of the child. a further evidence of the increased ability to learn toward the end of the month is the fact that the hands are raised in the attitude of begging not only at the command "please," but also at the question, "how does the good child behave?" thus, the experience is beginning to become a conscious one that, in order to obtain anything, the begging attitude is useful. the fifteenth month brought no new definite independent utterances of sound with the exception of _wa_. sensations and emotions, however, are indicated more and more definitely and variously by sounds that are inarticulate and sometimes unintelligible. thus, astonishment is expressed by _h[=a]-[=a] [)e][=a]-[)e]_; joy by vigorous crowing in very high tones and more prolonged than before; further, very strong desire by repeated _häö_, _hä-[)e]_; pain, impatience, by screaming in vowels which pass over into one another. the only word that is unquestionably used of the child's own motion to indicate a class of perceptions is still _atta_, _ha-atta_, which during the following month also is uttered softly, for the most part, on going out, and which signifies "away" or "gone" (weg), and still continues to be used also as it was in the eleventh month, when a light is dimmed (by a lamp-shade). beyond this no syllable can be named that marked the dawn of mental independence, none that testified to the voluntary use of articulate sounds for the purpose of announcing perceptions. for the _brrr_, the frequent _dakkn_, _mamam_, _mömö_, and _papap_, are without significance in the monologues. even the saying of _atta_, with turning of the head toward the person going away, has acquired the meaning of "away" (fort) only through being repeatedly said to the child upon his being carried out; but no one said the word when the lamp was extinguished. here has been in existence for some time not only the formation of the concept, but also the designation of the concept by syllables. the similarity in the very different phenomena of going away and of the dimming of the light, viz., the disappearance of a visual impression, was not only discovered, but was named by the child entirely independently in the eleventh month, and has kept its name up to the present time. he has many impressions; he perceives, he unites qualities to make concepts. this he has been doing for a long time without words; but only in this _one_ instance does the child express one of his concepts in language after a particular instance had been thus named for him, and then the word he uses is one not belonging to his later language, but one that belongs to all children the world over. in regard to the repeating of syllables pronounced to him a marked advance is noticeable. the child can not, indeed, by any means repeat _na_ and _pa_ and _o_ or _e_ and _be_. he answers _a_, _taï_, _ta-a-o-ö-a_, and practices all sorts of tongue-and lip-exercises. but the other syllables uttered by him, especially _anna_, _taï_, _dakkn_, _a_, he says in response to any one who speaks them distinctly to him, and he gives them easily and correctly in parrot fashion. if a new word is said to him, e. g., "kalt" (cold), which he can not repeat, he becomes vexed, turns away his head, and screams, too, sometimes. i have been able to introduce into his vocabulary only one new word. in the sixty-third week he seized a biscuit that had been dipped in hot water, let it fall, drew down the corners of his mouth, and began to cry. then i said "heiss" (hot), whereupon the child, speedily quieted, repeated _haï_ and _haï-s_ (with a just discernible _s_). three days later the same experiment was made. after this the _haïs_, _haïsses_, with distinct _s_, was often heard without any occasion. some days later i wanted him to say "hand." the child observed my mouth closely, took manifest pains, but produced only _ha-ïss_, then very distinctly _hass_ with sharp _ss_, and _ha-ith_, _hadith_, with the english _th_; at another time distinctly _ha-its_. thus, at a time when _ts_ = _z_ can not be repeated, there exists the possibility of pronouncing _z_. when i said to him "warm," _ass_ was pronounced with an effort and distinctly, although the syllable _wa_ belonged to the child's stock of words. this was evidently a recollection of the previous attempts to repeat "heiss" and "hand." corresponding to this inability to say words after another's utterance of them is an articulation as yet very imperfect. still, there is indication of progress in the distinctness of the _s_, the frequent english _th_ with the thrusting out of the tip of the tongue between the incisors, the _w_, which now first appears often, as well as in the _smacking_ first heard in the sixty-fifth week (in contented mood). the tongue is, when the child is awake, more than other muscles that in the adult are subject to cerebral volition, almost always in motion even when the child is silent. it is in various ways partly contracted, extended, bent. the lateral bending of the edges of the tongue downward and the turning back of the tip of the tongue (from left to right) so that the lower surface lies upward, are not easily imitated by adults. the mobility of my child's tongue is at any rate much greater than that of my tongue, notwithstanding the fact that, in consequence of varied practice from an early period in rapid speaking, the most difficult performances in rapid speaking are still easily executed by mine. the tongue is unquestionably the child's favorite plaything. one might almost speak of a lingual delirium in his case, as in that of the insane, when he pours forth all sorts of disconnected utterances, articulate and inarticulate, in confusion; and yet i often saw his tongue affected with fibrillar contractions as if the mastery of the hypoglossus were not as yet complete. quite similar fibrillar movements seem to be made by the tongue in bulbar paralysis, and in the case of dogs and guinea-pigs whose hypoglossus has been severed. to the number of words heard that already produce a definite movement are added the following new ones. the child is asked, "where is the moon? the clock? the eye? the nose?" and he raises an arm, spreads the fingers, and looks in the proper direction. if i speak of "coughing," he coughs; of "blowing," he blows; of "kicking," he stretches out his legs; of "light," he blows into the air, or, if there is a lamp in sight, toward that, looking at it meantime--a reminiscence of the blowing out of matches and candles often seen by him. it requires great pains to get from him the affirmative nod of the head at the spoken "ja, ja." not till the sixty-fourth week was this achieved by means of frequent repetition and forcible direction, and the movement was but awkwardly executed even later--months after. on hearing the "no, no," the negative shake of the head now appeared almost invariably, and this was executed as by adults without the least uncertainty. the holding out of his hand at hearing "give the hand," occurs almost invariably, but is not to be regarded as a special case of understanding of the syllable "give," for the word "hand" alone produces the same result. all these accomplishments, attained by regular training, do not afford the least evidence of an understanding of what is commanded when the sound-impression is converted into motor impulse. it is rather a matter of the establishment of the recollection of the customary association of both during the interval of deliberation. the words and muscular contractions that belong together are less often confounded, and the physiological part of the process takes less time, but its duration is noticeably prolonged when the child is not quite well. he deliberates for as much as twelve seconds when the question is asked him, "where is the rogue?" and then responds with the proper gesture (p. ). the sixteenth month brought few new articulate utterances of sound, none associated with a definite meaning; on the other hand, there was a marked progress in repeating what was said to the child, and especially in the understanding of words heard. among the sounds of his own making are heard--along with the _hä!_ _hä-ö!_ _ha-[)e]!_ _h[)e]-[)e]!_ that even in the following months often expresses desire, but often also is quite without meaning--more seldom _hi_, _gö-gö_, _gö_, _f-pa_ (the _f_ for the first time), _[(au]_, and more frequently _ta_, _dokkn_, _tá-ha_, _a-bwa-bwa_, _b[)u][=a]-b[)u]-[=a]_, and, as if by accident, once among all sorts of indefinable syllables, _dagon_. further, the child--as was the case in the previous month--likes to take a newspaper or a book in his hands and hold the print before his face, babbling _ä-[)e]_, _ä-[)e]_, _ä-[)e]_, evidently in imitation of the reading aloud which he has often observed. by giving the command, "read!" it was easy to get this performance repeated. besides this, it is a delight to the child to utter a syllable--e. g., _bwa_ or _ma_--over and over, some six times in succession, without stopping. as in the previous month, there are still the whispered _attö_ and _hattö_, at the hiding of the face or of the light, at the shutting of a fan, or the emptying of a soup-plate, together with the _dakkn_, with the combinations of syllables made out of _ta_, _pa_, _ma_, _na_, _at_, _ap_, _am_, _an_, and with _mömö_. the _papa_ and _mama_ do not, however, express an exclusive relation to the parents. only to the questions, "where is papa?" "where is mamma?" he points toward them, raising his hand with the fingers spread. pain is announced by loud and prolonged screaming; joy by short, high-pitched, piercing crowing, in which the vowel _i_ appears. of isolated vowels, _a_ only was correctly repeated on command. of syllables, besides those of the previous month, _mö_ and _ma_; and here the child's excessive gayety over the success of the experiment is worthy of remark. he made the discovery that his parrot-like repetition was a fresh source of pleasure, yet he could not for several weeks repeat again the doubled syllables, but kept to the simple ones, or responded with all sorts of dissimilar ones, like _attob_, or said nothing. the syllable _ma_ was very often given back as _hömá_ and _hömö_; _pa_ was never given back, but, as had been the case previously, only _ta_ and _taï_ were the responses, made with great effort and attention, and the visible purpose of repeating correctly. to the word "danke," pronounced for him with urgency innumerable times, the response is _dakkn_, given regularly and promptly, and this in the following months also. if all persuasion failed, and the child were then left to himself without any direction of his attention, then not infrequently new imitations of sounds would be given correctly--e. g., when i said "bo"--but these, again, would no longer succeed when called for. indeed, such attempts often broke down utterly at once. thus the child once heard a hen making a piteous outcry, without seeing the creature, and he tried in vain to imitate the sound, but once only, and not again. on the other hand, he often succeeds in repeating correctly movements of the tongue made for him to see, as the thrusting out of the tongue between the lips, by reason of the extraordinary mobility of his tongue and lips; he even tries to smack in imitation. the more frequent partial contractions of the tongue, without attempts at speaking, are especially surprising. on one side, toward the middle of the tongue, rises a longitudinal swelling; then the edges are brought together, so that the tongue almost forms a closed tube; again, it is turned completely back in front. such flexibility as this hardly belongs to the tongue of any adult. besides, the lips are often protruded a good deal, even when this is not required in framing vocables. the gain in the understanding of words heard is recognizable in this, that when the child hears the appropriate word, he takes hold, with thumb and forefinger, in a most graceful manner, of nose, mouth, beard, forehead, chin, eye, ear, or touches them with the thumb. but in doing this he often confounds ear and eye, chin and forehead, even nose and ear. "o" serves in place of "ohr" (ear); "au" in place of "auge" (eye). in both cases the child soon discovered that these organs are in pairs, and he would seize with the right hand the lobe of my left and of my right ear alternately after i had asked "ear?" how easily in such cases a new sound-impression causes confusion is shown by the following fact: after i had at one time pointed out one ear, and had said, "other ear," i succeeded, by means of repetition, in getting him to point out this other one also correctly every time. now, then, the thing was to apply what had been learned to the eye. when one eye had been pointed out, i asked, "where is the other eye?" the child grasped at an ear, with the sight of which the sound "other" was now associated. not till long after (in the twentieth month) did he learn to apply this sound of himself to different parts of the body. on the other hand, he understands perfectly the significance of the commands, "bring, fetch, give----"; he brings, fetches, gives desired objects, in which case, indeed, the gesture and look of the speaker are decisive; for, if these are only distinctly apprehended, it does not make much difference which word is said, or whether nothing is said. in the seventeenth month, although no disturbance of the development took place, there was no perceptible advance in the utterance of thoughts by sounds, or in the imitation of syllables pronounced by others, or in articulation, but there was a considerable increase of the acoustic power of discrimination in words heard and of the memory of sounds. of syllables original with the child, these are new: _bibi_, _nä-nä-nä_--the first has come from the frequent hearing of "bitte"; the last is an utterance of joy at meeting and an expression of the desire to be lifted up. otherwise, longing, abhorrence, pleasure and pain, hunger and satiety, are indicated by pitch, accent, _timbre_, intensity of the vocal sounds, more decidedly than by syllables. a peculiar complaining sound signifies that he does not understand; another one, that he does not wish. in place of _atta_, at the change of location of an object perceived, comes often a _t-tó_ and _höt-tó_, with the lips much protruded. but, when the child himself wishes to leave the room, then he takes a hat, and says _atta_, casting a longing look at his nurse, or repeatedly taking hold of the door. of voluntary attempts to imitate sounds, the most noteworthy were the efforts to give the noise heard on the winding of a time-piece, and to repeat tones sung. the associations of words heard with seen, tangible objects on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with definite co-ordinated muscular movements, have become considerably more numerous. thus the following are already correctly distinguished, being very rarely confounded: uhr (clock), ohr (ear); schuh (shoe), stuhl (chair), schulter (shoulder), fuss (foot); stirn (forehead), kinn (chin); nase (nose), blasen (blow); bart (beard), haar (hair); heiss (hot), fleisch (meat). in addition to the above, eye, arm, hand, head, cheek, mouth, table, light, cupboard, flowers, are rightly pointed out. the child so often obeys the orders he hears--"run," "kick," "lie down," "cough," "blow," "bring," "give," "come," "kiss"--that when he occasionally does not obey, the disobedience must be ascribed no longer, as before, to deficient understanding, but to caprice, or, as may be discerned beyond a doubt from the expression of his countenance, to a genuine roguishness. thus the spoken consonants are at last surely recognized in their differences of sound. in the eighteenth month this ability of the ear to discriminate, and with it the understanding of spoken words, increases. "finger, glass, door, sofa, thermometer, stove, carpet, watering-pot, biscuit," are rightly pointed out, even when the objects, which were at first touched, or merely pointed at, along with loud and repeated utterance of those words, are no longer present, but objects like them are present. say "finger," and the child takes hold of his own fingers only; "ofen" (stove), then he invariably at first looks upward ("oben"). besides the earlier commands, the following are correctly obeyed: "find, pick up, take it, lay it down." hand him a flower, saying, "smell," and he often carries it to his nose without opening his mouth. the repeating of syllables spoken for him is still rare; "mamma" is responded to by _ta_. the voluntary repeating of syllables heard by chance is likewise rare; in particular, "jaja" is now repeated with precision. the _atta_, which used to be whispered when anything disappeared from the child's field of vision, has changed to _tto_ and _t-tu_ and _ftu_, with pouting of the lips. in the monologues appear _näi_, _mimi_, _päpä_, _mimiä_, _pata_, _rrrrr_, the last uvular and labial for minutes at a time. but these meaningless utterances are simply signs of well-being in general, and are gladly repeated from pleasure in the exercise of the tongue and lips. the tongue still vibrates vigorously with fibrillar contractions when it is at rest, the mouth being open. characteristic for this period is the precision with which the various moods of feeling are expressed, without articulate sounds, by means of the voice, now become very high and strong, in screaming and crowing, then again in wailing, whimpering, weeping, grunting, squealing; so that the mood is recognized by the voice better than ever before, especially desire, grief, joy, hunger, willfulness, and fear. but this language can not be represented by written characters. the same holds good of the nineteenth month, in which bawling and babbling are more rare, the spontaneous sound-imitations are more frequent, the vocal cords are strained harder, the mechanism of articulation works with considerably more ease; the understanding and the retention of spoken words have perceptibly increased, but no word of the child's own, used always in the same sense, is added. when the child has thrown an object from the table to the floor, he often follows it with his gaze and whispers, even when he does not know he is observed, _atta_ or _t-ta_, which is here used in the same sense with _tuff_ or _ft_ or _ftu_, for "fort" (gone). when he had taken a newspaper out of the paper-basket and had spread it on the floor, he laid himself flat upon it, holding his face close to the print, and said--evidently of his own accord, imitating, as he had done before, the reading aloud of the newspaper, which had often been witnessed by him--repeating it for a long time in a monotonous voice, _e-já-e-e-já nanana ána-ná-na atta-ána [=a]je-já s[=a]_; then he tore the paper into many small pieces, and next turned the leaves of books, uttering _pa-pa-ab ta hö-ö-[)e] mömömöm hö-ön[)e]_. such monologues are, however, exceptional at this period, the rule being uniform repetitions of the same syllable, e. g., _habb habb habb habb habbwa habbua_. screaming when water of ° c. was poured over him in the bath appeared, a few days after the first experiment of this sort, even before the bathing, at sight of the tub, sponge, and water. previously, fear had only in very rare cases occasioned screaming, now the _idea_ of the cold and wet that were to be expected was enough to occasion violent screaming. after about three weeks of daily bathing with water from to ° c., however, the screaming decreased again. the experience that a pleasant feeling of warmth succeeded, may have forced the recollection of the unpleasant feeling into the background. but the screaming can not at all be represented by letters; _ä_ and _ö_ do not suffice. the same is true of the screaming, often prolonged, before falling asleep in the evening, which occurs not seldom also without any assignable occasion, the child making known by it his desire to leave the bed. as this desire is not complied with, the child perceives the uselessness of the screaming, and at length obeys the command, "lie down," without our employing force or expedients for soothing him. how far the power of imitation and of articulation is developed, is shown especially by the fact that now, at last, _pa_ is correctly pronounced in response; in the beginning _ta_ was still frequently the utterance, then _ba_, finally _pa_ almost invariably given correctly. further, these results were obtained: words said to him. response. bitte _bis_, _bits_, _bit_, _bets_, _beest_, _be_, _bi_, _bit-th_ (eng., _th_). hart _hatt_, _att_, _haat_. fleisch _da-ich_, _daï-s-ch_, _daï-s-j_. ma _mö_, _ma_. in _bits_ appears with perfect distinctness (as already in the fifteenth month) the very rare _ts_ = _z_. the "hart" was once only confounded with "haar," and responded to by grasping at the hair. the _bits_ soon served to add force to the putting together of the hands in the attitude of begging; it is thus the first attempt at the employment of a german word to denote a state of his own, and that the state of desire. the other words said to him, and illustrated by touching and putting the hands upon objects, could not be given by him in response. when he was to say "weich" (soft), "kalt" (cold), "nass" (wet), he turned his head away in repugnance, as formerly. to "nass" he uttered in reply, once only, _na_. smacking, when made for him, was imitated perfectly. the early morning hours, in which the sensibility of the brain is at its highest, are the best adapted to such experiments; but these experiments were not multiplied, in order that the independent development might not be disturbed. the progress in the discrimination of words heard, and in the firm retention of what has been repeatedly heard, is shown particularly in more prompt obedience, whether in abstaining or in acting. to the list of objects correctly pointed out upon request are added "leg, nail, spoon, kettle," and others. it is noteworthy, too, that now, if the syllables _pa_ and _ma_, or _papa_ and _mamma_, are prefixed to the names of the known parts of the face and head, the child points these out correctly; e. g., to the question "where is mamma-ear," the child responds by taking hold of the ear of his mother, and to "papa-ear," of that of his father; so with "nose, eye," etc. but if asked for "mamma-beard," the child is visibly embarrassed, and finally, when there is a laugh at his hesitation, he laughs too. the old tricks, "how tall is the child?" and "where is the little rogue?" which have not been practiced for months past, have been retained in memory, for when in the eighty-second week i brought out both questions with urgency, the child bethought himself for several seconds, motionless, then suddenly, after the first question, raised both arms. after the other question he likewise considered for several seconds, and then pointed to his head as he used to do. his _memory_ for sound-impressions often repeated and associated with specific movements is consequently good. in the twentieth month there was an important advance to be recorded in his manner of repeating what was said to him. suddenly, on the five hundred and eighty-fourth day, the child is repeating correctly and without difficulty words of two syllables that consist either of two like syllables--for the sake of brevity i will call these _like-syllabled_--or of syllables the second of which is the reverse of the first--such i call _reverse-syllabled_. thus of the first class are _papa_, _mama_, _bebe_, _baba_, _neinei_, _jaja_, _bobo_, _bubu_; of the second class, _otto_, _enne_, _anna_; these are very frequently given back quickly and faultlessly at this period, after the repetition of the single syllables _pa_, _ma_, and others had gone on considerably more surely than before, and the child had more often tried of himself to imitate what he heard. these imitations already make sometimes the impression of not being voluntary. thus the child once--in the eighty-third week--observed attentively a redstart in the garden for two full minutes, and then imitated five or six times, not badly, the piping of the bird, turning round toward me afterward. it was when he saw me that the child first seemed to be aware that he had made attempts at imitation at all. for his countenance was like that of one awaking from sleep, and he could not now be induced to imitate sounds. after five days the spectacle was repeated. again the piping of the bird was reproduced, and in the afternoon the child took a cow, roughly carved out of wood, of the size of the redstart, made it move back and forth on the table, upon its feet, and chirped now as he had done at sight of the bird; _imagination_ was here manifestly much excited. the wooden animal was to represent the bird, often observed in the garden, and nesting in the veranda; and the chirping and piping were to represent its voice. on the other hand, words of unlike syllables, like "zwieback" (biscuit), "butterbrod," are either not given back at all or only in unrecognizable fashion, in spite of their being pronounced impressively for him. "trocken" (dry) yields sometimes _tokk[)e]_, _tokko_, _otto_. words of one syllable also offer generally great difficulties of articulation: thus "warm" and "weich" become _w[=a]i_, "kalt" and "hart" become _hatt_. although "bi" and "te" are often rightly given each by itself, the child can not combine the two, and turns away with repugnance when he is to reproduce "bi-te." the same thing frequently happens, still, even with "mamma" and "papa." but the child, when in lively spirits, very often pronounces of his own accord the syllables "bi" and "te" together, preferring, indeed, _bidth_ (with english _th_) and _beet_ to "bitte." in place of "adjö" (adieu) he gives back _ad[=e]_ and _adj[=e]_. nor does he succeed in giving back three syllables; e. g., the child says _papa_, but not "papagei", and refuses altogether to repeat "gei" and "pagei." the same is true of "gut," "nacht," although he of himself holds out his hand for "gute nacht." when others laugh at anything whatsoever, the child laughs regularly with them, a purely imitative movement. it is surprising that the reproducing of what is said to him succeeds best directly after the cold bath in the morning, when the child has been screaming violently and has even been shivering, or when he is still screaming and is being rubbed dry, and, as if resigned to his fate, lies almost without comprehension. the will, it would seem, does not intrude here as a disturbing force, and echolalia manifests itself in its purity, as in the case of hypnotics. the little creature is subdued and powerless. but he speedily recovers himself, and then it is often quite hard to tell whether he _will_ not or _can_ not say the word that is pronounced to him. the _understanding of single words_, especially of single questions and commands, is considerably more prompt than in the previous month. without there being any sort of explanation for it, this extraordinary understanding is here, manifesting itself particularly when the child is requested to fetch and carry all sorts of things. he has observed and touched a great deal, has listened less, except when spoken to. all training in tricks and performances, an evil in the modern education of children hard to avoid, was, however, suppressed as far as possible, so that the only new things were "making a bow" and "kissing the hand." the child practices both of these toward the end of the month, without direction, at coming and going. many new objects, such as window, bed, knife, plate, cigar, his own teeth and thumbs, are correctly pointed out, if only the corresponding word is distinctly pronounced. yet "ofen" and "oben" are still confounded. to put into written form the syllables invented by the child independently, and to get at a sure denotation of objects by them, is exceedingly difficult, particularly when the syllables are merely whispered as the objects are touched, which frequently occurs. at the sight of things rolled noisily, especially of things whirling in a circle, the child would utter _rodi_, _otto_, _rojo_, and like sounds, in general, very indistinctly. only _one_ new concept could with certainty be proved to be associated with a particular sound. with _d[=a]_ and _nd[=a]_, frequently uttered on the sudden appearance of a new object in the field of vision, in a lively manner, loudly and with a peculiarly demonstrative accent--also with _t[=a]_ and _nt[=a]_--the child associates, beyond a doubt, existence, coming, appearing, shooting forth, emerging, in contrast with the very often softly spoken, whispered _atta_, _f-tu_, _tuff_, which signifies "away" or "gone." if i cover my head and let the child uncover it, he laughs after taking off the handkerchief, and says loudly _da_; if i leave the room, he says _atta_ or _hätta_, or _ft_ or _t-ta_, generally softly; the last of these, or else _hata_, he says if he would like to be taken out himself. in the eighty-seventh week we went away on a journey, and on the railway-train the child, with an expression of terror or of anxious astonishment, again and again said _attah_, but without manifesting the desire for a change of place for himself, even by stretching out his arms. two words only--_papa_ for father, and _bät_ or _bit_ for "bitte," are, besides, rightly applied of the child's own accord. the prolonged screaming, from wantonness, of _n[=a]n[=a]n[=a]n[=a]_, _nom-nom_, _h[=a]h[=a]_, _l[=a]l[=a]_, chiefly when running about, has no definite meaning. the child exercises himself a good deal in loud outcry, as if he wanted to test the power of his voice. these exercises evidently give him great pleasure. still the highest crowing tones are no longer quite so high and piercing as they were formerly. the vocal cords have become larger, and can no longer produce such high tones. the screaming sounds of discontent, which continue to be repeated sometimes till hoarseness appears, but rarely in the night, have, on the contrary, as is the case with the shrill sounds of pain, scarcely changed their character, _hä-e_, _hä-ä-ä-[)e]_, _[)e]_. they are strongest in the bath, during the pouring on of cold water. the child, when left to himself, keeps up all the time his loud readings ("lesestudien"). he "reads" in a monotonous way maps, letters, newspapers, drawings, spreading them out in the direction he likes, and lies down on them with his face close to them, or holding the sheet with his hands close to his face, and, as before, utters especially vowel-sounds. in the twenty-first month imitative attempts of this kind became more frequent; but singularly enough the babbling--from the eighty-ninth week on--became different. before this time vowels were predominant, now more _consonants_ are produced. when something is said for the child to reproduce that presents insuperable difficulties of articulation, then he moves tongue and lips in a marvelous fashion, and often says _ptö-ptö_, _pt-pt_, and _verlapp_, also _dla-dla_, without meaning, no matter what was the form of the word pronounced to him. in such practice there often appears likewise a wilfulness, showing itself in inarticulate sounds and the shaking of the head, even when it is merely the repetition of easy like-syllabled words that is desired. hence, in the case of new words, it is more difficult than before, or is even impossible to determine whether the child _will_ not or whether he _can_ not reproduce them. words of unlike syllables are not repeated at all, not even "bitte." in place of "danke" are heard _dang-gee_ and _dank-kee_; the former favorite _dakkn_ is almost never heard. in most of the attempts at sound imitation, the tendency to the doubling of syllables is worthy of notice. i say "bi," and the answer is _bibi_; then i say "te," and the answer is _te-te_. if i say "bi-te," the answer is likewise _bibi_; a single time only, in spite of daily trial, the answer was _bi-te_, as if by oversight. this doubling of syllables, involuntary and surely contrary to the will of the child, stands in remarkable contrast with the indolence he commonly shows in reproducing anything said, even when the fault is not to be charged to teasing, stubbornness, or inability. the child then finds more gratification in other movements than those of the muscles of speech. the babbling only, abounding in consonants, yields him great pleasure, particularly when it is laughed at, although it remains wholly void of meaning as language. yet _bibi_, like _bäbä_, for "bitte," is correctly used by the child of his own accord. a new word, and one that gives notice of a considerable advance, is the term used by the child when hungry and thirsty, for "milk" or "food." he says, viz., with indescribable longing in his voice, _mimi_, more rarely than before _mämä_ and _mömöm_ (page ). the first appellation was certainly taken from the often-heard "milk" by imitation, and applied to biscuit and other kinds of food. if the child, when he has eaten enough, is asked, "do you want milk?" he says without direction, _neinein_; he has thus grasped and turned to use already the signification of the sound. the same is, perhaps, true also of "ja." for previously, when i asked the child as he was eating, "does it taste good?" he was silent, and i would say, "say jaja," and this would be correctly repeated. but in the ninety-first week he, of his own accord, answers the question with _jaja_--"yes, yes." this, too, may rest simply on imitation, without a knowledge of the meaning of the _ja_, and without an understanding of the question; yet there is progress in the recollection of the connection of the sound "schmeckt's" with _jaja_, the intermediate links being passed over. in other cases, too, the strength of the memory for sounds is plainly manifested. to all questions of an earlier period, "where is the forehead, nose, mouth, chin, beard, hair, cheek, eye, ear, shoulder?" the child now at once pointed correctly in every instance, although he might not have answered them for anybody even once for two weeks. only the question, "where is the thumb?" made him hesitate. but when the thumb had been again shown to him (firmly pressed), he knew it, and from that time pointed it out invariably without delay. to the question, "where is the eye?" he is accustomed to shut both eyes quickly at the same time and to open them again, and then to point to my eye; to the question, "axel's eye?" he responds by pointing to his own; to the question, "the other eye?" by pointing to the one not touched. in the understanding of what is spoken astonishing progress has been made--e. g., if i say, "go, take the hat and lay it on the chair!" the child executes the order without considering more than one or two seconds. he knows the meaning of a great number of words that no one has taught him--e. g., "whip, stick, match, pen." objects of this sort are surely distinguished by the child, for, upon receiving orders, he gets, picks up, brings, lays down, gives these things each by itself. this understanding of spoken words is the more surprising, as his repetition of them continues still to be of a very rudimentary character. with the exception of some interjections, especially _j[=a][)e]_ as a joyous sound and of crowing sounds, also screaming sounds, which, however, have become more rare, the child has but few expressions of his own with a recognizable meaning; _ndä_, _ndä_, _da_ is demonstrative "da" ("there") at new impressions. _att_, _att_, _att_, is unintelligible, perhaps indicative of movement. _attah_ means "we are off" (upon setting out) and "i want to go" ("ich will fort"); _tatass_, _tatass_ is unintelligible, possibly a sound-imitation. when traveling by rail the child tried several times to imitate the hissing of the steam of the locomotive. in the twenty-second month again there are several observations to record, which show the progress in understanding, the strengthening of the memory, and the greater facility in articulation. the child executes the orders given him with surprising accuracy, although the words spoken have not previously been impressed on him separately. here, indeed, it is essential to consider the looks and gestures of those who give the orders; but the child also does what i request of him without looking at me. instances of confusion among the words known to him are also perceptibly more rare. once i asked him very distinctly, "where's the moon?" (mond), and for answer the child pointed to his mouth (mund). but the error was not repeated. the strength of the word-memory appears particularly in this, that all the objects learned are more quickly pointed out on request than they were previously, and the facility of articulation is perceived in the multiplying of consonants in the monologues and in the frequent spontaneous utterance of _pss_, _ps_, _ptsch_ (once), and _pth_ (engl.). the child says, without any occasion, _pa-ptl-dä_, _pt_, and gives a loud greeting from a distance with _h[=aa]-ö_, with _ada_, and _ana_. it seemed to me remarkable that the boy began several times without the least incitement to _sing_ tolerably well. when i expressed my approval of it, he sprang about, overjoyed. at one time he sang, holding his finger on his tongue, first _rollo_, _rollo_, innumerable times, then _mama_, _mama_, _mämä_, _mama_. the progress in the sound-mechanism is most plainly discerned in the greater certainty in reproducing what is spoken. thus, "pst" is correctly given, and of reverse-syllabled words, very accurately, "anna, otto, alla, appa, enne"; of unlike-syllabled words, "lina," but still, notwithstanding many trials, not yet "bitte." _for the first time three-syllabled words also, plainly pronounced to him, were correctly given back_, viz., _a-mama_ and _a-pa-pa_, as the child names his grandparents. hitherto the vowels _e_, _i_, _o_, _u_, could not be correctly given every time, but "a" could be so given as before. when the reproduction of any new word that is too hard is requested--e. g., "gute nacht"--the child at this period regularly answers _tap[)e]ta_, _p[)e]ta_, _pta_, and _ptö-ptö_, also _rateratetat_, expressing thereby not merely his inability, but also, sometimes roguishly, his disinclination to repeat. _ja ja_ and _nein nein_, along with _da_ and _bibi_ (with or without folding of the hands, for "bitte"), and _mimi_, continue still to be the only words taken from the language of adults that are used by the child in the proper sense when he desires or refuses anything. apart from these appear inarticulate sounds, uttered even with the mouth shut. the intense cry of pain, or that produced by cold or wet or by grief at the departure of the parents (this with the accompaniment of abundant tears and the drawing of the corners of the mouth far down), makes the strongest contrast with the crowing for joy, particularly that at meeting again. the twenty-third month brought at length _the first spoken judgment_. the child was drinking milk, carrying the cup to his mouth with both hands. the milk was too warm for him, and he set the cup down quickly and said, loudly and decidedly, looking at me with eyes wide open and with earnestness, _heiss_ (hot). this single word was to signify "the drink is too hot!" in the same week, at the end of the ninety-ninth, the child of his own accord went to the heated stove, took a position before it, looked attentively at it, and suddenly said with decision, _hot_ (_heiss_)! again, a whole proposition in a syllable. in the sixty-third week for the first time the child had reproduced the word "hot" pronounced to him. eight and a half months were required for the step from the imitative _hot_ to the independent _hot_ as expressive of his judgment. he progressed more rapidly with the word "wasser," which was reproduced as _watja_, and was called out longingly by the thirsty child a few weeks afterward. he already distinguishes water and milk in his own fashion as _watja_ and _mimi_. yet _mimmi_, _mömö_, and _m[=a]m[=a]_ still signify food in general, and are called out often before meal-times by the impatient and hungry child. the primitive word _atta_ is likewise frequently uttered incidentally when anything disappears from the child's field of vision or when he is himself carried away. the other sound-utterances of this period proceeding from the child's own impulse are interesting only as exercises of the apparatus of articulation. thus, the child not seldom cries aloud _oi_ or _eu_ (_äu_); further, unusually loud, _ana_, and for himself in play, _ida_, _didl_, _dadl_, _dldo-dlda_, and in singing tone _opojö_, _apojopojum aui_, _heissa_. with special pleasure the child, when talking to himself, said _papa_, _mama_, _mämä_, _mimi_, _momo_, of his own accord, but not "mumu"; on the other hand, _e-mama-ma-memama_, _mi_, _ma_, _mö_, _ma_. his grandparents he now regularly designates by _e-papa_ and _e-mama_. he knows very well who is meant when he is asked, "where is grandmamma? grandpapa?" and several days after leaving them, when asked the question, e. g., on the railway-train, he points out of the window with a troubled look. the understanding of words heard is, again, in general more easy. the child for the most part obeys at once when i say, "drink, eat, shut, open, pick it up, turn around, sit, run!" only the order "come!" is not so promptly executed, not, however, on account of lack of understanding, but from willfulness. that the word-memory is becoming firm is indicated particularly by the circumstance that now the separate parts of the face and body are pointed out, even after pretty long intervals, quickly and upon request, on his own person and that of others. when i asked about his beard, the child (after having already pointed to my beard), in visible embarrassment, pointed with his forefinger to the place on his face corresponding to that where he saw the beard on mine, and moved his thumb and forefinger several times as if he were holding a hair of the beard between them and pulling at it, as he had had opportunity to do with mine. here, accordingly, memory and imagination came in as supplementary to satisfy the demand made by the acoustic image. the greatest progress is to be recorded in this month in regard to the reproduction of syllables and words. a perfecting of the process is apparent in the fact that when anything is said for him to repeat, his head is not turned away in unwillingness so often as before, in case the new word said to him is too difficult, nor are all sorts of incoherent, complicated sounds (_paterateratte_) given forth directly upon the first failure of the attempt at imitation. thus, the following words were at this period, without systematic exercises, incidentally picked up (give, as before, the german pronunciation to the letters): spoken to him. reproduced. ohr, _oa(r)_. tisch, _tiss_. haus, _hausesess_. hemd, _hem_. peitsche, _paitsch_, _paitse_. wasser, _wass_, _watja_. hand, _hann_. heiss, _haïss_. auge, _autschge_. butter, _buotö_. eimer, _aïma_. bitte, _bete_, _bite_. blatt, _batn_. tuch, _tuhs_. papier, _patn_, _paï_. fort, _wott_. vater, _fa-ata_. grete, _deete_. karl, _kara_. alle, _alla_. alle, _alla_. mund, _munn_. finger, _finge_. pferd, _pfowed_, _fowid_. gute nacht, _nag-ch na_. guten tag, _tatách_. morgen, _moigjen_. axel, _akkes_, _aje_, _eja_. the four words, _paitsch_ or _paitse_, _bite_, _watja_, and _haïss_, are uttered now and then by the child without being said to him, and their use has regard to the meaning contained in them. his whip and his pail he learned to name quickly and correctly. his own name, axel, on the contrary, he designates by the favorite interjections _aje_, _eja_. on the whole, variety of articulation is on the increase as compared with the previous month, but the ability to put syllables together into words is still but little developed. thus, e. g., the child reproduces quite correctly "je," and "ja," and "na." but if any one says to him "jena" or "jana," the answer runs regularly _nena_ or _nana_, and only exceptionally, as if by chance, _jena_. further, he repeats correctly the syllables "bi" and "te" when they are given to him, and then also _bi-te_; afterward, giving up the correct imitation, he says _beti_, but can not reproduce _ti-be_ or _tebi_. "bett, karre, kuk," are correctly repeated. finally, echolalia, not observed of late, appears again. if the child hears some one speak, he often repeats the last syllable of the sentence just finished, if the accent were on it--e. g., "what said the man?" _man_; or "who is there?" _there?_ "nun?" (now) _nou_ (_n[=oo]_). once the name "willy" was called. immediately the child likewise called _[)u]il[=e]_, with the accent on the last syllable, and repeated the call during an hour several dozens of times; nay, even several days later he entertained himself with the stereotyped repetition. had not his first echo-play produced great merriment, doubtless this monotonous repetition would not have been kept up. in regard to the preference of one or another word the behavior of those about the child is not merely influential, but is alone decisive. i observed here, as i had done earlier, that urgent exhortations to repeat a new word have generally a much worse result than is obtained by leaving the child to himself. the correct, or at any rate the best, repetitions were those made when the child was not spoken to. even adults can imitate others in their manner of speaking, their dialect, even their voice, much better when not called upon to do it, but left entirely to their own inclination. the wish or command of others generates an embarrassment which disturbs the course of the motor processes. i resolved, consequently, to abandon in the following month all attempts to induce the child to reproduce sounds, but to observe so much the more closely what he might say of his own accord. in the last month of the second year of his life this leaving of him to himself proved fruitful in results to this extent--that voluntary sound-imitations gained considerably in frequency and accuracy. particularly, genuine echolalia manifested itself more at this period in the repeating of the last syllables of sentences heard, the meaning of which remained unintelligible to the child; and of single words, the sense of which became gradually clear to him by means of accompanying gestures. thus, the word "herein!" (come in!) was repeated as an empty sound, and then _arein_, _harrein_, _haarein_, were shouted strenuously toward the door, when the child wanted to be let in; _ab_ (off) was uttered when a neck-ribbon was to be loosened. _moigen_ signified "guten morgen!" _na_, "gute nacht!" to the question, "was thun wir morgen?" (what shall we do to-morrow?) comes the echo-answer _moigen_. in general, by far the greater part of the word-imitations are much distorted, to strangers often quite unintelligible. _ima_ and _imam_ mean "emma," _dakkngaggngaggn_ again means "danke," and _betti_ still continues to signify "bitte." only with the utmost pains, after the separate syllables have been frequently pronounced, appear _dang[=ee]_ and _bitt[=ee]_. an apple (apfel) is regularly named _apfel[=ee]l[=ee]_ (from apfelgelée); a biscuit (zwieback), _wita_, then _wijak_; butter, on the contrary, is often correctly named. instead of "jawohl," the child almost invariably says _wolja_; for "licht" _list_ and _lists_; for "wasser," _watja_ still as before; for "pfui" he repeats, when he has been awkward, _[=u]i_, and often adds a _pott_ or _putt_ in place of "caput." "gut" is still pronounced _[=u]t_ or _tut_, and "fort," _okk_ or _ott_. all the defects illustrated by these examples are owing rather to the lack of flexibility in the apparatus of articulation--even stammering, _tit-t-t-t_, in attempting to repeat "tisch," appears--than to imperfect ability to apprehend sounds. for the deficiency of articulation shows itself plainly when a new word is properly used, but pronounced sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly. thus, the "tsch" hitherto not often achieved (twentieth month), and the simple "sch" in _witschi_ and _wesch_, both signifying "zwetschen," are imperfect, although both sounds were long ago well understood as commands to be silent, and zwetschen (plums) have been long known to the child. further, the inability to reproduce anything is still expressed now and then by _raterateratera_; the failure to understand, rather by a peculiar dazed expression of countenance, with an inquiring look. with regard to the independent application of all the words repeated, in part correctly, in part with distortions, a multiplicity of meanings is especially noteworthy in the separate expressions used by the child. the primitive word _atta_, used with uncommon frequency, has now among others the following significations: "i want to go; he is gone; she is not here; not yet here; no longer here; there is nothing in it; there is no one there; it is empty; it is nowhere; out there; go out." to the question "where have you been?" the child answers, on coming home, _atta_, and when he has drunk all there was in the glass, he likewise says _atta_. the concept common to all the interpretations adduced, "gone," seems to be the most comprehensive of all that are at the child's disposal. if we choose to regard a word like this _atta_ as having the force of a whole sentence, we may note many such primitive sentences in this month. thus, _mann_ means, on one occasion, "a man has come," then almost every masculine figure is named _mann_; _auff_, accompanied with the offering of a key, signifies the wish for the opening of a box, and is cried with animation after vain attempts to open a watch. the concepts "male being" and "open" are thus not only clear, but are already named with the right words. the distinguishing of men from women appears for months past very strikingly in this, that the former only are greeted by reaching out the hand. the manifold meaning of a single word used as a sentence is shown particularly in the cry of _papa_, with gestures and looks corresponding to the different meanings of it. this one word, when called out to his father, means ( ) "come play with me"; ( ) "please lift me up"; ( ) "please give me that"; ( ) "help me get up on the chair"; ( ) "i can't," etc. the greatest progress, however, is indicated by the _combination of two words_ into a sentence. the first sentence of this sort, spoken on the seven hundred and seventh day of his life at the sight of the house that was his home, was _haim_, _mimi_, i. e., "i would like to go home and drink milk." the second was _papa_, _mimi_, and others were similar. contrasted with these first efforts at the framing of sentences, the earlier meaningless monologues play only a subordinate part; they become, as if they were the remains of the period of infancy, gradually rudimentary: thus, _pipapapaï_, _breit_, _baraï_. a more important fact for the recognition of progress in speaking is that the words are often _confounded_, e. g., _watja_ and _buotö_ (for _butter_). in gestures also and in all sorts of performances there are bad cases of confusion almost every day; e. g., the child tries to put on his shoes, holding them with the heel-end to his toes, and takes hold of the can out of which he pours the milk into his cup by the lip instead of the handle. he often affirms in place of denying. his joy is, however, regularly expressed by loud laughing and very high tones; his grief by an extraordinarily deep depression of the angles of the mouth and by weeping. quickly as this expression of countenance may pass over into a cheerful one--often on a sudden, in consequence of some new impression--no confusion of _these_ two _mimetic_ movements takes place. in the first month of the third year of life the progress is extraordinary, and it is only in regard to the articulatory mechanism that no important new actions are to be recorded. the child does not pronounce a perfect "u," or only by chance. generally the lips are not enough protruded, so that "u" becomes "ou"; "uhr" and "ohr" often sound almost the same. the "i" also is frequently mixed with other vowel-sounds, particularly with "e." probably the corners of the mouth are not drawn back sufficiently. with these exceptions the vowels of the german language now offer hardly any difficulties. of the consonants, the "sch" and "cht" are often imperfect or wanting. "waschtisch" is regularly pronounced _waztiz_, and "gute nacht" _gna_. the sound-imitations of every kind are more manifold, eager, and skillful than ever before. once the child even made a serious attempt to reproduce ten words spoken in close succession, but did not succeed. the attempt proves all the same that the word-imitation is now far beyond the lower echo-speech; yet he likes to repeat the last words and syllables of sentences heard by him even in the following months. here belongs his saying _so_ when any object is brought to the place appointed for it. when the reproduction is defective, the child shows himself to be now much more amenable to correction. he has become more teachable. at the beginning of the month he used to say, when he wanted to sit, _ette_ then _etse_, afterward _itse_; but he does not yet in the present month say "setzen" or "sitzen." hitherto he could repeat correctly at the utmost two words said for him. now he repeats three, and once even four, imperfectly: _papa_, _beene_, _delle_, means "papa, birne, teller," and is uttered glibly; but "papa, birne, teller, bitte," or "papa, butter, bitte," is not yet repeated correctly, but _pata_, _butte_, _betti_, and the like; only very seldom, in spite of almost daily trial, _papa_, _beene_, _delle_, _bittee_. evidence of the progress of the memory, the understanding, and the articulation, is furnished in the answers the child gave when i asked him, as i touched various objects, "what is that?" he replied: _autse_, for auge (eye). _nana_, " nase (nose). _ba_, " backe (back). _baat_, " bart (beard). _oë, oa_, " ohr (ear). _opf_, " kopf (head). _tenn_, " kinn (chin). _täne_, " zähne (teeth). _hai_, " haar (hair). _ulter_, " schulter (shoulder). _aam_, " arm (arm). _ann_, " hand (hand). _wiër_, " finger (finger). _daima_, " daumen (thumb). _anu_, " handschuh (glove). _baïn_, " bein (leg). but not one word has the child himself invented. when a new expression appears it may be surely traced to what has been heard, as _uppe_, _oppee_, _appee_, _appei_, to "suppe." the name alone by which he calls on his nurse, _wolá_, seemed hard to explain. if any one says, "call mary," the child invariably calls _wolá_. it is probable, as he used to call it _wolja_, that the appellation has its origin in the often-heard "ja wohl." the correct use of single words, picked up, one might say, at random, increases in a surprising manner. here belong _baden_, _reiputtse_, for "reissuppe," _la-ock_ for "schlafrock," _boter_ for "butter," _butterbrod_, _uhr_, _buch_, _billerbooch_ for "bilderbuch." in what fashion such words now incorporated into the child's vocabulary are employed is shown by the following examples: _tul_ (for "stuhl") means--( ) "i should like to be lifted up on the chair; ( ) my chair is gone; ( ) i want this chair brought to the table; ( ) this chair doesn't stand right." if the chair or other familiar object is broken, then it is still styled _putt_ (for "caput," gone to smash); and if the child has himself broken anything he scolds his own hand, and says _oi_ or _oui_, in place of "pfui" (fie)! he wants to write to his grandmother, and asks for _papier_, a _daitipf_ (for "bleistift," pencil), and says _raiwe_ (for "schreiben," write). that misunderstandings occur in such beginnings of speech seems a matter of course. all that i observed, however, were from the child's standpoint rational. some one says, "schlag das buch auf" (open the book, but meaning literally "strike upon the book"), and the child strikes upon the book with his hands without opening it. he does the same when one says, "schlag auf das buch" (strike upon the book). or we say, "will you come? one, two!" and the child, without being able to count, answers, "three, four." he has merely had the sequence , , , , said over to him frequently. but, on the whole, his _understanding_ of words heard, particularly of commands, has considerably advanced; and how far the reasoning faculty has developed is now easily seen in his independent designations for concepts. for example, since his delight at gifts of all sorts on his birthday, he says _burtsa_ (for geburtstag, birthday) when he is delighted by anything whatever. another instance of childish induction was the following: the child's hand being slightly hurt, he was told to blow on his hand and it would be better. he did blow on his hand. in the afternoon he hit his head against something, and he began at once to blow of his own accord, supposing that the blowing would have a soothing effect, even when it did not reach the injured part. in the forming of sentences considerable progress is to be recorded. yet only once has the child joined more than four words in a sentence, and rarely three. his sentences consisting of two words, which express a fact of the present or of the immediate past, are often, perhaps generally, quite unintelligible to strangers. thus, _danna kuha_ signifies "aunt has given me cake"; _kaffee naïn_, "there is no coffee here"; and _mama etsee_ or _etse_ is intelligible only by means of the accompanying gesture as the expression of the wish, "mamma, sit by me." _helle pumme_ signifies the wish to help (_helfen_) in pumping, and is uttered at the sight of persons pumping water. the following sentence consisting of five words is particularly characteristic of this period, because it exhibits the first attempt to relate a personal experience. the child dropped his milk-cup and related _mimi atta teppa papa oï_, which meant "milch fort [auf den] teppich, papa [sagte] pfui." (milk gone [on] carpet, papa [said] "fie!") the words adopted by the child have often a very different meaning from that which they have in the language of adults, being not entirely misunderstood but peculiarly interpreted by the imitator. thus, pronouns, which are not for a long time yet understood in their true sense, signify objects themselves or their qualities. _dein bett_ means "the large bed." in the twenty-sixth month a large picture-book, with good colored pictures, was shown to the child by me every day. then he himself would point out the separate objects represented, and those unknown to him were named to him, and then the words were repeated by him. thus were obtained the following results: said to him. his imitation. blasebalg (bellows), _ba-a-bats_, _blasabalitz_. saugflasche (nursing-bottle), _augflaze_. kanone (cannon), _nanone_. koffer (trunk), _towwer_, _toffer_, _pfoffa_, _poffa_, _toff-wa_. fuchs (fox), _fuhts_. kaffeekanne (coffee-urn), _taffeetanne_, _pfafee-tanne_. frosch (frog), _frotz_. klingel (bell), _linli_ (learned as _ingeling_ and _linlin_). besen (broom), _b[=e]sann_, _beedsen_, _beedsenn_. stiefel (boot), _tiefel_, _stibbell_, _tihbell_, _tibl_. nest (nest), _netz_. storch (stork), _toich_. giesskanne (watering-pot), _tietstanne_, _ihtstanne_, _ziesstanne_. fisch (fish), _fiz_. zuckerhut (sugar-loaf), _ukkahut_. vogel (bird), _wodal_. kuchen (cake), _tuche_, _tuch[=e]n_ (hitherto _kuha_). licht (light), _lihts_, _lits_. schlitten (sled), _lita_, _litta_. tisch (table), _tiss_. nuss (nut), _nuhuss_, _nuss_. kaffeetopf (coffee-pot), _poffee-topf_. hund (dog), _und_. brief (letter), _dief_. elephant, _elafant_. fledermaus (bat), _lebamaunz_, _fleedermauz_. kamm (comb), _damm_, _lamm_, _namm_. schwalbe (swallow), _baubee_. staar (starling), _tahr_. of his own accord the child pointed out with certainty in the picture-book-- _häm_, _hä-em_, _hemm_ for helm (helmet). _hörz_ " hirsch (stag). _tawell_ " tafel (table). _lompee_, _lamp['=e]_ " lampe (lamp). _lotz_ " schloss (castle). _benne_ " birne (pear). _torb_ " korb (basket). _onne-erm_ " sonnenschirm (parasol). _flatse_ " flasche (bottle). _wetsa_ " zwetschen (plums). _clawelier_ " clavier (piano). _littl_, _litzl_, _lützl_ " schlüssel (key). _löwee_ " löwe (lion). _ofa_ " ofen (stove). _[=u][)a]_ " uhr (watch). _tint_, _kint_ " kind (child). _naninchä_ " kaninchen (rabbit). _manne_ " pfanne (pan). _tomml_, _tromml_ " trommel (drum). _tuhl_ " stuhl (chair). with these words, the meaning of which the child knows well, though he does not yet pronounce them perfectly, are to be ranked many more which have not been taught him, but which he has himself appropriated thus, _tola_ for kohlen (coals), _dals_ for salz (salt). other words spontaneously appropriated are, however, already pronounced correctly and correctly used, as _papier_ (paper), _holz_ (wood), _hut_ (hat), _wagen_ (carriage), _teppich_ (carpet), _deckel_ (cover), _milch_, _teller_ (often _tell[)e]_), _frau_, _mann_, _mäuse_. these cases form the minority, and are striking in the midst of the manifold mutilations which now constitute the child's speech. of these mutilations some are, even to his nearest relatives who are in company with the child every day, unintelligible or only with great pains to be unriddled. thus, the child calls himself _attall_ instead of axel; says also _rräus atsl_ for "heraus axel," i. e., "axel wants to go out." he still says _bita_ for "bitte," and often _mima_ or _mami_ for marie; _apf_ for "apfel." the numerous mutilations of the words the child undertakes to speak are not all to be traced to defect of articulation. the "sch" is already perfectly developed in _handschuh_; and yet in other words, as appears from the above examples, it is either simply left out or has its place supplied by _z_ and _ss_. further, it sounds almost like wantonness when frequently the surd consonant is put in place of the sonant one or _vice versa_; when, e. g., _puch_ (for buch) _pücherr_ is said on the one hand, and _wort_ instead of "fort" on the other. here belongs likewise the peculiar staccato manner of uttering the syllables, e. g., _pil-ter-puch_ (bilder-buch--picture-book). at other times is heard a hasty _billerbuch_ or _pillerpuch_. the babbling monologues have become infrequent and more of a play with words and the syllables of them, e. g., in the frequently repeated _papa-[)u]-á-[)u]a_. on the other hand, independent thoughts expressed by words are more and more multiplied. here is an example: the child had been extraordinarily pleased by the christmas-tree. the candles on it had been lighted for three evenings. on the third evening, when only one of its many lights was burning, the child could not leave it, but kept taking a position before it and saying with earnest tone, _gunná-itz-boum_, i. e., "gute nacht, christbaum!" the most of his sentences still consist of two words, one of which is often a verb in the infinitive. thus, _helle mama_, _helle mami_, i. e., "helfen (help) mama, marie!" and _bibak tommen_, i. e., "der zwieback soll kommen" (let the biscuit come); or _tsee machen_ (make _c_)--on the piano the keys _c_, _d_, _e_, had often been touched separately by the little fingers accidentally, and the applause when in response to the question, "where is _c_?" the right key was touched, excited the wish for repetition; _roth_, _drün machen_ (make red or green)--the child was instructed by me in the naming of colors; and _dekkn pilen_, i. e., "verstecken spielen" (play hide and seek). in quite short narratives, too, the verbs appear in the infinitive only. such accounts of every-day occurrences--important to the child, however, through their novelty--are in general falling into the background as compared with the expression of his wishes in words as in the last-mentioned cases. both kinds of initiatory attempts at speaking testify more and more plainly to awakening intellect, for, in order to use a noun together with a verb in such a way as to correspond to a wish or to a fact experienced, there must be added to the imitation of words heard and to the memory of them something which adapts the sense of them to the outward experiences at the time and the peculiar circumstances, and associates them with one another. this something is the intellect. in proportion as it grows, the capacity for being taught tricks decreases and the child is already ashamed to answer by means of his former gestures the old questions, "where is the little rogue?" "how tall?" etc. but how far from the intellect of the older child is that of the child now two years and two months old appears from this fact, that the latter has not the remotest notion of number. he repeats mechanically, many times over, the words said for him, _one_, _two_, _three_, _four_, _five_; but when objects of the same sort are put before him in groups, he confounds all the numbers with one another in spite of countless attempts to bring the number into firm connection with the sound two, etc. nor does he as yet understand the meaning of the frequently repeated "danke" (thanks), for, when the child has poured out milk for himself, he puts down the pitcher and says _dankee_. one more remark is to be made about the names of animals. these names are multiplying in this period, which is an important one in regard to the genesis of mind. ask, "what is the animal called?" and the answer runs, _mumu_, _kikeriki_, _bauwau_, _piep-piep_, and others. no trace of onomatopoetic attempts can be discovered here. the child has received the names pronounced to him by his nurse and has retained them; just so _hotto_ for "pferd" (horse), like _lingeling_ for "klingel" (bell). none the less every healthy child has a strong inclination to onomatopeia. the cases already reported prove the fact satisfactorily. the echolalia that still appears now and then really belongs to this. inasmuch as in general in every onomatopoetic attempt we have to do with a sound-imitation or the reproducing of the oscillations of the tympanum as nearly as possible by means of the vocal cords, all attempts of the speechless child to speak are ultimately of onomatopoetic character in the earliest period; but from the present time on sound-imitation retires before the reasoning activity, which is now shooting forth vigorously in the childish brain. in the twenty-seventh month the activity of thought manifests itself already in various ways. the independent ideas, indeed, move in a narrowly limited sphere, but their increasing number testifies to the development of the intellect. some examples may be given: the child sees a tall tree felled, and he says as it lies upon the ground, _pick up_! seeing a hole in a dressing-gown, he says, _nä[)e]n_ (sew)! in his play he sometimes says to himself, _dib acht_ (take care)! to the question, "did it taste good?" the child answers while still eating, _mekk noch_ (schmeckt noch), "it _does_ taste good," thus distinguishing the past in the question from the present. the development of observation and _comparison_ is indicated by the circumstance that salt is also called _sand_. on the other hand, the feeling of gratitude is as yet quite undeveloped. the child, as in the previous month, says _dankee_ to himself when, e. g., he has opened his wardrobe-door alone. the word is thus as yet unintelligible to him, or it is used in the sense of "so" or "succeeded." his frequent expressions of pity are striking. when dolls are cut out of paper, the child weeps violently in the most pitiful manner, for fear that in the cutting a head (_topf_) may be taken off. this behavior calls to mind the cries of _arme wiebak_ (armer zwieback--poor biscuit)! when a biscuit is divided, and _arme holz_ (poor wood)! when a stick of wood is thrown into the stove. nobody has taught the child anything of that sort. the independent observations which he expresses correctly but very briefly in a form akin to the style of the telegraphic dispatch are now numerous, e. g.: _tain milch_: there is no milk here. _lammee aus_, _lampee aus_: the flame, the lamp, is gone out. _dass la-okk_: that is the dressing-gown (schlafrock). _diss nicht la-okk_: this is not the dressing-gown. his wishes the child expresses by means of _verbs_ in the infinitive or of substantives alone. thus, _papa auf-tehen_ (papa, get up), _frü-tükken_ (breakfast), _aus-taigen_ (get out), _nicht blasen_ (not blow--in building card-houses), _pieldose aufziehn_ (wind up the music-box), and _biback_ (i should like a biscuit). into these sentences of one, two, and three words there come, however, single adverbs not before used and indefinite pronouns, like _[=e][=e]n_ and _[)e]_ in _tann [=e][=e]n nicht_ or _tann[)e] nicht_, for "kann _er_ nicht" or "kann _es_ nicht." _butter drauf_ (butter on it), _mama auch tommen_ (mamma come, too), _noch mehr_ (more), _blos wasser_ (only water), _hier_ (here), are the child's own imperatives. _schon wieder_ (again) he does indeed say of his own accord on fitting occasions; but here he is probably repeating mechanically what he has heard. in all, the forming of a word that had not been heard as such, or that had not come from what had been heard through mutilation, has been surely proved in only a single instance. the child, viz., expressed the wish (on his seven hundred and ninety-sixth day) to have an apple pared or cut up, by means of the word _messen_. he knows a knife (messer) and names it rightly, and while he works at the apple with a fork or a spoon or anything he can get hold of, or merely points at it with his hand, he says repeatedly _messen_! only after instruction did he say _messer neiden_ (mit dem messer schneiden--cut with the knife). here for the first time a wholly new word is formed. the concept and the word "knife" ("messer") and the concept, "work with the knife," were present, but the word "schneiden" (cut) for the last was wanting, as also was "schälen" (pare). hence, both in one were named _messen_ (for "messern," it may be). the two expressions that used to be heard many times daily, the name _wolà_ for the nurse mima (mary) and _atta_, have now almost disappeared. _atta wesen_ for "draussen gewesen" (been out) is still used, it is true, but only seldom. in place of it come now _weg_, _fort_, _aus_, and _allall_, in the sense of "empty," "finished." the too comprehensive, too indefinite concept _atta_ has broken up into more limited and more definite ones. it has become, as it were, differentiated, as in the embryo the separate tissues are differentiated out of the previously apparently homogeneous tissue. in the period of rapid development now attained, the child daily surprises us afresh by his independent applications of words just heard, although many are not correctly applied, as _tochen haiss_ (boiling hot), said not only of the milk, but also of the fire. when words clearly comprehended are used in a different sense from that in which adults use them--_incorrectly_ used, the latter would say--there is, however, no _illogical_ employment of them on the part of the child. for it is always the fact, as in the last example, that the concept associated with the word is taken in a more extended sense. the very young child infers a law from a few, even from two observations, which present some agreement only in one respect, and that perhaps a quite subordinate respect. he makes inductions without deliberation. he has heard milk called "boiling hot," he feels its warmth, and then feels the warmth of the stove, consequently the stove also is "boiling hot"; and so in other cases. this logical activity, the _inductive_ process, now prevails. the once favorite monologues, pure, meaningless exercises of articulation, of voice and of hearing, are, on the contrary, falling off. the frequent repetition of the same syllable, also of the same sentence (_lampee aus_), still survives particularly in animated expressions of wish, _erst essen_ (first eat), _viel milch_ (much milk), _mag-e-nicht_ (don't like it). desire for food and for playthings makes the child loquacious, much more than dislike does, the latter being more easily manifested by means of going away, turning around, turning away. the child can even beg on behalf of his carved figures of animals and men. pointing out a puppet, he says _tint aïn tikche apfl!_ für das kind _ein_ stückchen apfel! (a bit of apple for the child.) notwithstanding these manifold signs of a use of words that is beginning to be independent, the sound and word imitation continues to exist in enlarged measure. echolalia has never, perhaps, been more marked, the final words of sentences heard being repeated with the regularity of a machine. if i say, "leg die feder hin" (lay the pen down)! there sounds in response a _feder hin_. all sorts of tones and noises are imitated with varying success; even the whistle of the locomotive, an object in which a passionate interest is displayed; the voices of animals; so also german, french, italian, and english words. the french nasal "n" (in _bon_, _orange_), however--even in the following months--as well as the english "th," in _there_ (in spite of the existence of the right formation in the fifteenth month), is not attained. the child still laughs regularly when others laugh, and on his part excites merriment through exact reproduction of separate fragments of a dialogue that he does not understand, and that does not concern him; e. g., _da hastn_ (da hast du ihn) (there you have him), or _aha sist[)e]_ (siehst du) (do you see)? or _um gottes willen_ (for god's sake), the accent in these cases being also imitated with precision. but in his independent use of words the accentuation varies in irregular fashion. such an arbitrary variation is _bitté_ and _bi-t[)e]_. _beti_ no longer appears. as a noteworthy deficiency at this period is to be mentioned the feeble memory for often-prescribed answers to certain questions. to the question of a stranger, "what is your name?" the child for the first time gave of his own accord the answer _attsell_ (axel), on the eight hundred and tenth day of his life. on the other hand, improper answers that have been seriously censured remain fixed in his recollection. the impression is stronger here. the weakness of memory is still shown most plainly when we try to make intelligible to the child the numerals one to five. it is a failure. the sensuous impression that _one_ ball makes is so different from that which two balls make, the given words _one_ and _two_ sound so differently, that we can not help wondering how one and two, and likewise three, four, five, are confounded with one another. a _question_ has not yet been uttered by the child. the frequent _ist das_ signifies merely "das ist," or it is the echo of the oft-heard question, "was ist das?" and is uttered without the tone of interrogation. the articles are not used at all yet; at any rate, if used, they are merely imitated without understanding. the defects of articulation are now less striking, but only very slowly does the correct and distinct pronunciation take the place of the erroneous and indistinct. we still have regularly: _bücher-rank_ for bücherschrank (book-case). _fraï takkee_ " fräulein starke (miss starke). _[=e]r[)e]_, _tseer_ " schere (shears). _raïb[)e]_, _raiben_ " schreiben (u. zeichnen) (write or draw). _nur_ " schnur (string). _neiderin_ " schneiderin (tailoress). _dsön_ (also _schön_) " schön (pretty). _lafen_ " schlafen (sleep). _pucken_ " spucken (spit). _dsehen_ (also _sehen_) " sehen (see). the sounds "sch" and "sch" in the "st" as well as in the "sp" ("schneiden, spiel") are often omitted without any substitute (_naid[)a]_, _taign_, _piel_); more seldom their place is supplied by "s," as in _swer_ = "schwer" for "müde." yet _ks_, _ts_ are often given with purity in _bex_, _bux_, _axl_. the last word is often pronounced _ats[)e]l_ and _atsli_ (heard by him as "axeli"), very rarely _akkl_; in "aufziehen" the "z" is almost always correctly reproduced. further, we still have _locotiwe_ for locomotive. _nepf_ " knöpfe (buttons). _ann-nepf_ " anknöpfen. _nits_ " nichts (nothing). "milch" is now permanently named correctly; no longer _mimi_, _mich_; wasser, _wassa_, no longer _watja_. but "gefährlich" is called _fährlich_; "getrunken," _trunken_. the twenty-eighth month is characterized by a rapid increase of activity in the formation of ideas, on the one hand, and by considerably greater certainty in the use of words, on the other. ambition is developed and makes itself known by a frequent _laïnee_ (_allein_, alone). the child wants to undertake all sorts of things without help. he asks for various objects interesting to him, with the words _ding haben_ (have the thing). that the faculty of observation and of combination is becoming perfected, is indicated by the following: the child sees an ox at the slaughter-house and says _mumu_ (moo-moo); i add "todt" (dead); thereupon comes the response _mumu todt_, and after a pause the child says, of his own accord, _lachtett_ (_geschlachtet_, slaughtered); then _blut heraus_ (blood out). the beginning of self-control is perceived in this, that the child often recollects, of himself, the strict commands he has received to refrain from this and that. thus, he had been accustomed to strike members of the family in fun, and this had been forbidden him. now, when the inclination seizes him still to strike, he says emphatically _nicht lagen_ (_schlagen_,--not strike), _axel brav_ (good). in general the child names himself only by his name, which he also tells to strangers without being asked. his parents, and these alone, are mostly named _papa_ and _mama_, but often also by their names. the following is a proof of independent thinking while the understanding of language is still imperfect: at breakfast i say, "axel is breakfasting with papa, is he not (_nicht wahr_)?" he replies earnestly, with genuine child-logic, _doch wahr_ (but he _is_)! the earlier appellation _swer_ and _wer_ (schwer--heavy) for müde (tired) is preserved. this transference, like the other one, _locotiwe wassa trinkt_, when the engine is supplied with water, is the intellectual peculium of the child. the number of such childish conceptions has now become very large. on the other hand, the words independently formed out of what has been heard are not numerous: _beisst_ for gebissen (bitten), _reit_ " geritten (ridden), _esst_ " gegessen (eaten), _wesen_ " gewesen (been), _austrinkt_ " ausgetrunken (drunk up), _tschulter_ " schulter (shoulder), must be considered as mutilations, not as new formations. the great number of words correctly pronounced and used continues, on the other hand, to increase. there are even decided attempts to use single _prepositions_: _nepfe_ (knöpfe) _für mama_ (buttons for mamma) may be simple repetition, like _axel mit papa_; but as utterances of this kind were not formerly repeated by him, though just as often made in his hearing, the understanding of the "für" and "mit" must now be awakened. from this time forth the understanding of several prepositions and the correct use of them abide. in addition there come into this period the first applications of the _article_. however often this part of speech may have been reproduced from the speech of others, it has never been said with understanding; but now in the expressions _um'n hals_ and _für'm axel_ (around the neck and for (the) axel) there lies the beginning of right use of the article, and, indeed, also in the months immediately succeeding, almost solely of the definite article. but more significant psychogenetically than all progress of this kind in the manipulation of language is the questioning that becomes active in this month. although i paid special attention to this point from the beginning, i first heard the child ask a question of his own accord on the eight hundred and forty-fifth day of his life. he asked, "where is mima?" from that time on questions were more frequent; but in the time immediately following this his question was always one relating to something in space. the word "where?" continued for a long time to be his only interrogative. he has also for a long time understood the "where?" when he heard it. if, e. g., i asked, "where is the nose?" without giving any hint by look or otherwise, this question has for months past been correctly answered by a movement of the child's arm to his nose. it is true that my question, "what is that?" a much more frequent one, is likewise answered correctly, although the word "what?" has never been used by the child. his cleverness in reproducing even foreign expressions is surprising. the words pronounced for him by italians (during a pretty long sojourn on lake garda), e. g., _uno_, _due_, _tre_, are given back without the least german accent. "quattro," to be sure, became _wattro_, but _ancora piccolo_ was absolutely pure. the imitation of the marching of soldiers, with the frequent cry _batelón eins s[)u]ai_ (battalion, one, two), already gives him the greatest pleasure. the imagination that is active in it is to be discerned, however, rather in gestures than in words. how lively the child's power of imagination is appears also in the fact that flat figures rudely cut out of newspaper, to represent glasses and cups, are carried to the mouth like real ones. the _articulation_ has again become a little more perfected, but in many respects it is still a good deal deficient; thus, in regard to the "sch," he says: _abneiden_ for abschneiden (cut off). _hirn_ " stirn (forehead). _verbrochen_ " versprochen (promised). _lagn_ " schlagen (strike). _runtergeluckt_ " heruntergeschluckt (swallowed). _einteign_ " einsteigen (get in). on the other hand, _aus-teign_ (aussteigen) (alight). other defects of articulation are shown by the following examples: _topf_ for klopfen (knock). _üffte_ " lüften (take the air). _leben_ " kleben (adhere). _viloa, viloja,_ " viola. _dummi_ " gummi (gum). the _l mouillé_ can not be at all successfully given at the beginning of this month (_bat[)e]l[=o]n_ for "bataillon"), and the nasal sounds in "orange" and "salon" offer insuperable difficulties (up to the second half of the fourth year). at the end of this month, however, i heard a _ganzee bataljohn_ (_j_ like english _y_). "orange" continued to be, after _oraanjee_ had been given up, _orohs[)e]_. the softening (mouilliren--_nj_ = _ñ_) was inconvenient in this case. quite correctly named at this period were eye, nose, cheek, tongue, mouth, ear, beard, hair, arm, thumb, finger. meaningless chatter has become much more rare. on the other hand, the child is in the habit of making all sorts of remarks, especially in the morning early after waking, for a quarter of an hour at a time and longer without interruption, these remarks for the most part consisting of a noun and verb and relating to objects immediately about him. monologues also are given in a singing voice, syllables without meaning, often a regular singing, the child meantime running many times around the table; besides, his strong voice is not seldom practiced in producing high tones without any outward occasion; and, finally, it is worthy of note that sometimes in sleep, evidently when the child has a vivid dream, a scream is uttered. talking in his sleep first appeared in his fourth year. the greatest advance in the twenty-ninth month consists in the employment of the personal pronoun in place of his own name: _bitte gib mir brod_ (please give me bread) was the first sentence in which it appeared. "ich" (i) is not yet said, but if i ask "who is 'me'?" then the child names himself with his own name, as he does in general. through this employment, more and more frequent from this time forth, of the pronoun instead of the proper name, is gradually introduced the inflection of the verbs he has heard; but at this time the imperative has its place generally supplied by the infinitive: _p[)a]p[)a] s[=a]gn_ and _ssooss sitzen_. sentences composed by himself, or heard and then used by him, like _das meckt_ (schmeckt) _sehr gut_ (that tastes very good), are rare; yet the discrimination between regular and irregular verbs has already begun to be made. to be sure, the question "where have you been?" is answered with _paziren gegeht_ (goed to walk), and _ausgezieht_ is said for _ausgezogen_ (drawed out), also _geseht_ (seed) instead of _gesehen_ (seen); but at the same time frequently _eingetigen_ and _ausgetigen_, instead of _ein-_ and _aus-geteigt_. an interesting, rare misformation was _grefessen_ for "gefressen." the verbs most frequently used seem to be "haben" (have) and "kommen" (come), and the forms "hat" and "kommt" are indeed correctly used sometimes, e. g., _viel rauch kommt heraus_ (much smoke comes out), and _gleich kommt kaffee_ (the coffee is coming). while the infinitives "haben" and "kommen" are uttered several times a day, the infinitive "sein" (to be) is never heard; but of this auxiliary verb "ist" and "wesen" are used, the latter for "gewesen." in every instance where the child expresses a desire by means of a verb, he simply takes the infinitive; e. g., he hears, as he sits in the room, the noise of the railway-train at a distance, and he says, _locotiwe sehen_. further, _numbering_ begins to be active to a noteworthy degree. although the numerals are already well known to the child, he still confounds them on all occasions, and in view of the absolute failure of the many attempts to teach the child the significance of the numbers , , , , , one might infer that he has not yet perceived the difference between, e. g., matches and matches; yet counting is already taking place, though in very unexpected fashion. the child began, viz., on the eight hundred and seventy-eighth day, suddenly, of his own accord entirely, to count with his nine-pins, putting them in a row, saying with each one, _eins_ (one)! _eins!_ _eins!_ _eins!_ afterward saying _eins!_ _noch eins_ (one more)! _noch eins!_ _noch eins!_ the process of adding is thus performed without the naming of the sums. the questioning that appeared in the previous month, the surest sign of independent thought in the child, is somewhat more plainly manifest; but "where" alone serves as the interrogative word, and that in its proper sense: where is hat? "which, who, why, when" are not spoken by the child and doubtless not understood, for, although succession in time is in many cases clear to him ("first eat," "then," "now"), yet in many other cases he does not know how to express distinctions of time; just as in comparing many and few, large and small objects, the quantity is wrongly given. thus he says correctly, when many counters are to be brought together, _zuviel_ (too many), but says _zuviel_ wrongly for _zuwenig_ (too little) when there is too little butter on his bread. in this case the _zuviel_ (too much) sounds almost like irony, which, of course, is out of the question at his age. "too much" and "too little" are confounded in the same way as and . yet, in another respect the memory has made a considerable gain. expressions long since forgotten by those about the child are suddenly without assignable occasion sometimes uttered again with perfect distinctness, and the child even applies fitly what he has observed. thus, he brings matches when he sees that some one wants to light a candle. i say to him, "pick up the bread-crumbs." upon this the child comes forward, though very slowly, cries out suddenly, _get broom_, recollecting that he has seen the carpet swept, goes and gets the broom, and sweeps the crumbs away. his memory for the utterances of animals as they have been made for him is very good. if i ask, e. g., "what does the duck say?" the answer is _kuak kuak_. he has gained also in certainty in naming the separate parts of a drawing, especially of a locomotive, so that one chief condition of speech, in the full sense of the word--memory--may be said to be well developed. articulation, on the contrary, makes slow progress. "hirsch" is called _hirss_, "schwalbe" _walbe_, "flasche" _flassee_. the following are generally correctly pronounced: _treppe_, _fenster_, _krug_, _kraut_, _kuchen_, _helm_, _besen_, _cigarre_, _hut_, _giesskanne_, _dinte_, _buch_, _birne_. for "barometer, thermometer," he says _mometer_, for "schrauben" _raubn_, for "frühstücken" (to breakfast) still often _fri-ticken_. in the _thirtieth month_ the independent activity of thought develops more and more. when the child is playing by himself, e. g., he often says to himself: _eimerchen ausleeren_ (make pail empty); _hackemesser_ (chopping-knife). thus his small vocabulary serves him at any rate for making clear his own ideas. already his thinking is often a low speaking, yet only in part. when language fails him, he first considers well. an example: the child finds it very difficult to turn crosswise or lengthwise one of the nine-pins which he wants to put into its box, and when i say, "round the other way!" he turns it around in such a way that it comes to lie as it did at the beginning, wrongly. he also pushes the broad side of the cover against the small end of the box. the child evidently understands the expression "round the other way"; but as the expression is ambiguous (the head of the nine-pin may go to the left, to the right, up, down, back, forward), we can understand that the pin should be turned now one way and again another way, and even brought back to its original position. then appears the child's own deliberation without words--without any speaking at all, low or loud--until after frequently repeated packing and unpacking hardly any hesitation is shown. many utterances show how easily at this period objects that have only a slight resemblance to one another or only a few qualities in common are included in one concept. when a roasted apple is peeled, the child sees the peel and says (thinking of his boiled milk, which he saw several hours previous, but which is not now present), _milch auch haut_ (milk skin too). similar is the expression _kirche läutet_ (church rings) when the tower-clock strikes. the child forms concepts which comprehend a few qualities in unity, and indeed without designating the concept always by a particular word, whereas the developed understanding more and more forms concepts with many qualities and designates them by words. hence the concepts of the child have less content and more extent than those of adults. for this reason they are less distinct also, and are often ephemeral, since they break up into narrower, more distinct concepts; but they always testify to activity of thought. a greater intellectual advance, however, is manifested at this time in the first intentional use of language in order to bring on a game of hide-and-seek. a key falls to the floor. the child picks it up quickly, holds it behind him, and to my question, "where is the key?" answers _nicht mehr da_ (no longer there). as i found in the following months no falsehood, in the proper sense of the word, to record, but rather that the least error, the most trivial exaggeration, was corrected at once by the child himself, with peculiarly _naïve_ seriousness, in a little story, with pauses between the separate words, so, too, in the present case the answer _nicht mehr da_ is no falsehood, but is to be understood as meaning that the key is no longer to be seen. the expression of the face was roguish at the time. the sole interrogative word continues still to be "where?" e. g., _where is ball?_ the demonstratives _da_ (there) and _dort_ (yonder) (_dort ist nass_--wet) were more frequently spoken correctly in answer. the "i" in place of his own name does not yet appear, because this word does not occur frequently enough in conversation with the child. the bad custom adults have of designating themselves in their talk with little children, not as in ordinary conversation by the word "i," but by the proper name, or as "aunt," "grandma," etc., postpones the time of saying "i" on the part of children. _me_ is pretty often used at this period, for the reason that it is frequently heard at meal-times in "give me!" _bitte, liebe mama, gib mir mehr suppe_ (please, dear mamma, give me more soup) is, to be sure, learned by heart; but such sentences are at the proper time and in the proper place modified and even independently applied. _noch mehr_, _immer noch mehr_, _vielleicht_, _fast_ (more, more yet, perhaps, almost), are also expressions often properly employed, the last two, however, with uncertainty still. _fast gefallen_ (almost fell) the child says when he has actually fallen down. although declension and conjugation are as yet absolutely lacking, a transition has become established from the worst form of dysgrammatism to the beginning of correct diction by means of the more frequent use of the plural in nouns (_rad_, _räder_), the more frequent employment of the article (_för d[)e] papa_), the not very rare strong inflection (_gegangen_ instead of the earlier _gegeht_; _genommen_ instead of the earlier _genehmt_). to be sure, the infinitive still stands in the place of the participle and the imperative in by far the great majority of cases. the auxiliaries are often omitted or employed in strange misformations, e. g., "where have you been?" answer, _paziren gewarent_ [something like _they wented 'alk_] (wir waren spazieren, spazieren gewesen). in _articulation_ no perceptible progress is to be recorded. the objects known from the picture-book are indeed for the most part rightly named, but new ones often have their names very much distorted--e. g., "violine" is persistently called _wiloïne_. the "sch" is occasionally given correctly, but _s-trümpfe_, _auf-s-tehen_ is the rule. the answer that has been learned to the question, "how old are you?" "seit november zwei jahre," is given _wember wai jahr_. the way in which the child learns the correct pronunciation is in general twofold: . through frequent hearing of the correct words, since no one speaks as he himself does; thus, e. g., _genommen_ took the place of _genehmt_ without instruction. . through having the words frequently pronounced on purpose for him to imitate with the utmost attention. thus, e. g., the child up to this time always said _locotiwe_ and _locopotiwe_. i exhorted him a few times earnestly to say "locomotive." the result was _loco-loco-loco-mo-tiwe_, and then _locomotiwe_, with exact copying of the accent with which i spoke. singing also is imitated. his memory for words that denote objects is very good; but when expressions designating something not very apparent to the senses are to be learned, he easily fails. thus, the left and the right foot or arm, the left and the right cheek or hand, are very often correctly named, but often falsely. the difference between left and right can not be exactly described, explained, or made imaginable to the child. in the _thirty-first month_ two new questions make their appearance: the child asks, _welches papier nehmen?_ (what paper take?) after he has obtained permission to make marks with the pencil, i. e., to _raiben_ (write and draw), and _was kost die trommel?_ (what does the drum cost?) now the indefinite article appears oftener; it is distinctly audible in _halt n biss-chen wasser!_ more surprising are individual new formations, which disappear, however, soon after their rise; thus, the comparative of "hoch." the child says with perfect distinctness _hocher bauen_ (build higher) in playing with wooden blocks; he thus forms of himself the most natural comparative, like the participle _gegebt_ for "gegeben." in place of "uhr-schlüssel" (watch-key) he says _slüssl-uhr_ (key-watch), thus placing the principal thing first. he makes use of the strange expression _heitgestern_ in place of "heute" (to-day), and in place of "gestern" (yesterday). the two latter taken singly are confounded with each other for a long time yet. sentence-forming is still very imperfect: _is smoke_ means "that is smoke" and "there is smoke"; and _kommt locomotiwe_ stands for "da kommt eine oder die locomotive" (there comes a, or the, engine). at sight of the bath-tub, however, the child says six times in quick succession _da kommt kalt wasser rein, marie_ (cold water is to go in here, mary). he frequently makes remarks on matters of fact, e. g., _warm out there_. if he has broken a flower-pot, a bandbox, a glass, he says regularly, of his own accord, _frederick glue again_, and he reports faithfully every little fault to his parents. but when a plaything or an object interesting to him vexes him, he says, peevishly, _stupid thing_, e. g., to the carpet, which he can not lift; and he does not linger long over one play. his occupation must be changed very often. the imitations are now again becoming less frequent than in the past months, and expressions not understood are repeated rather for the amusement of the family than unconsciously; thus, _ach gott_ (oh god!) and _wirklich grossartig_ (truly grand). yet the child sometimes sings in his sleep, several seconds at a time, evidently dreaming. the pronunciation of the "sch," even in the favorite succession of words, _ganzes batalljohn marss_ (for "marsch") _eins_, _zwei_, is imperfect, and although no person of those about him pronounces the "st" in "stall, stehen" otherwise than as "scht," the child keeps persistently to _s-tall_, _s-tehen_. the pronunciation "scht" began in the last six months of the fourth year of his life, and in the forty-sixth month it completely crowded out the "st," which seems the more remarkable as the child was taken care of by a mecklenburg woman from the beginning of the fourth year. in the _thirty-second month_ the "i" began to displace his own name. _mir_ (_gib mir_) and _mich_ (_bitte heb mich herauf_, please lift me up) had already appeared in the twenty-ninth to the thirty-first month; _ich komme gleich_, _geld möcht ich haben_ (i am coming directly, i should like money), are new acquirements. if he is asked "who is _i_?" the answer is, _der axel_. but he still speaks in the third person frequently; e. g., the child says, speaking of himself, _da ist er wieder_ (here he is again), _axel auch haben_ (axel have, too), and _mag-[)e] nicht_, thus designating himself at this period in fourfold fashion, by _i_, _he_, _axel_, and by the omission of all pronouns and names. although _bitte setz mich auf den stuhl_ (please put me on the chair) is learned from hearing it said for him, yet the correct application of the sentence, which he makes of himself daily from this time on, must be regarded as an important advance. the same is true of the forming of clauses, which is now beginning to take place, as in _weiss nicht, wo es ist_ (don't know where it is). new also is the separation of the particle in compound verbs, as in _fällt immer um_ (keeps tumbling over). longer and longer names and sentences are spoken with perfect distinctness, but the influence of the dialect of the neighborhood is occasionally perceptible. his nurse is the one who talks most with him. she is from the schwarzwald, and from her comes the omission of the "n" at the end of words, as in _kännche_, _trocke_. besides, the confounding of the surd, "p," with the sonant, "b" (_putter_), is so frequent that it may well be taken from the thuringian dialect, like the confounding of "eu" and "ei" (_heit_). the only german sounds that still present great difficulties are "sch" and "chts" (in "nichts"). the memory of the child has indeed improved, but it has become somewhat fastidious. only that which seems interesting and intelligible to the child impresses itself permanently; on the other hand, useless and unintelligible verses learned by rote, that persons have taught him, though seldom, for fun, are forgotten after a few days. in the _thirty-third month_ the strength of memory already mentioned for certain experiences shows itself in many characteristic remarks. thus the child, again absent from home with his parents for some weeks, says almost every evening, _gleich blasen die soldaten_ (the soldiers, i. e., the band, will play directly), although no soldier is to be seen in the country far and wide. but at home the music was actually to be heard every evening. at sight of a cock in his picture-book the child says, slowly, _das ist der hahn--kommt immer--das ganze stück fortnehmt--von der hand--und laüft fort_ ("that is the cock--keeps coming--takes away the whole piece--out of the hand--and runs off"). this narrative--the longest yet given, by the way--has reference to the feeding of the fowls, on which occasion the cock had really carried off a piece of bread. the doings of animals in general excited the attention of the child greatly. he is capable even of forgetting to eat, in order to observe assiduously the movements of a fly. _jetzt geht in die zeitung--geht in die milch!_ _fort thier! geh fort! unter den kaffee!_ (now he is going into the newspaper--going into the milk! away, creature! go away! into the coffee!) his interest is very keen for other moving objects also, particularly locomotives. how little clearness there is in his conceptions of animal and machine, however, appears from the fact that both are addressed in the same way. when his father's brother comes, the child says, turning to his father, _neuer_ (new) _papa_; he has not, therefore, the slightest idea of that which the word "father" signifies. naturally he can have none. yet selfhood (ichheit) has come forth at this period in considerably sharper manifestation. he cries, _das ding haben! das will ich, das will ich, das will ich, das spiel möcht ich haben!_ (have the thing! i want it, i should like the game.) to be sure, when one says "komm, ich knöpfs dir zu" (come, i will button it for you), the child comes, and says, as an echo, _ich knöpfs dir zu_ (i will button it for you), evidently meaning, "button it for me"! he also confounds _zu viel_ (too much) with _zu wenig_ (too little), _nie_ (never) with _immer_ (always), _heute_ (to-day) with _gestern_ (yesterday); on the contrary, the words _und_, _sondern_, _noch_, _mehr_, _nur_, _bis_, _wo_ (and, but, still, more, only, till, where) are always used correctly. the most striking mistakes are those of conjugation, which is still quite erroneous (e. g., _getrinkt_ and _getrunkt_ along with _getrunken_), and of articulation, the "sch" (_dsen_ for "schön") being only seldom pure, mostly given as "s" or "ts." "toast" is called _toos_ and _dose_. after the first thousand days of his life had passed, the observation of him was continued daily, but not the record in writing. some particulars belonging to the following months may be noted: many expressions accidentally heard by the child that excited the merriment of the family when once repeated by him, were rehearsed times without number in a laughing, roguish, obtrusive manner, thus, _du liebe zeit_. the child also calls out the name of his nurse, _marie_, often without meaning, over and over again, even in the night. he calls others also by this name in manifest distraction of mind, often making the correction himself when he perceives the mistake. more and more seldom does the child speak of himself in the third person, and then he calls himself by his name, never saying "he" any more. usually he speaks of himself as "i," especially "i will, i will have that, i can not." gradually, too, he uses _du_ in address, e. g., _was für hübsen rock hast du_ (what a handsome coat you have)! here the manner of using the "was" is also new. on the ten hundred and twenty-eighth day _warum_ (why?) was first used in a question. i was watching with the closest attention for the first appearance of this word. the sentence ran, _warum nach hause gehen? ich will nicht nach hause_ (why go home? i don't want to go home). when a wheel creaked on the carriage, the child asked, _was macht nur so_ (what makes that)? both questions show that at last the instinct of causality, which manifested itself more than a year before in a kind of activity of inquiry, in experimenting, and even earlier (in the twelfth week) in giving attention to things, is expressed _in language_; but the questioning is often repeated in a senseless way till it reaches the point of weariness. _warum wird das holz gesnitten?_ (for "gesägt"--why is the wood sawed?) _warum macht der frödrich die [blumen] töpfe rein?_ (why does frederick clean the flower-pots?) are examples of childish questions, which when they receive an answer, and indeed whatever answer, are followed by fresh questions just as idle (from the standpoint of adults); but they testify plainly to a far-reaching independent activity of thought. so with the frequent question, _wie macht man das nur?_ (how is that done?) it is to be said, further, that i found the endeavor impracticable to ascertain the order of succession in which the child uses the different interrogative words. it depends wholly on the company about him at what time first this or that turn of expression or question is repeated and then used independently. "why" is heard by him, as a rule, less often than "what?" and "how?" and "which?" still, it seems remarkable that i did not once hear the child say "when?" until the close of the third year. the sense of space is, to be sure, but little developed at that time, but the sense of time still less. the use of the word "forgotten" (_ich habe vergessen_) and of "i shall" (do this or that) is exceedingly rare. the articulation was speedily perfected; yet there was no success at all in the repetition of french nasal sounds. in spite of much pains "salon" remained _salo_, "orange" _orose_; and the french "je" also presented insuperable difficulties. of german sounds, "sch" alone was seldom correct. it was still represented by _s_; for example, in _sloss_ for "schloss," _ssooss_ for "schooss." his fondness for singing increases, and indeed all sorts of meaningless syllables are repeated with pleasure again and again, much as in the period of infancy, only more distinctly; but, just as at that time, they can not all be represented on paper or even be correctly reproduced by adults. for a considerable time he was fond of _[=e]-la_, _[=e]-la_, _la_, _la_, _la_, _la_, in higher and higher pitch, and with unequal intervals, _lálla-lálla_, _lilalula_. in this it was certainly more the joy over the increasing compass and power of his voice that stimulated him to repetition than it was the sound of the syllables; yet in the thirty-sixth month he showed great pleasure in his singing, of which peculiar, though not very pleasing, melodies were characteristic. the singing over of songs sung to him was but very imperfectly successful. on the other hand, the copying of the manner of speaking, of accent, cadence, and ring of the voices of adults was surprising, although echolalia proper almost ceased or appeared again only from time to time. grammatical errors are already becoming more rare. a stubborn fault in declension is the putting of _am_ in place of _dem_ and _der_, e. g., _das am mama geben_. long sentences are formed correctly, but slowly and with pauses, without errors, e. g., _die blume--ist ganz durstig--möcht auch n bischen wasser haben_ (the flower is quite thirsty--would like a little water). if i ask now, "from whom have you learned that?" the answer comes regularly, _das hab ich alleine gelernt_ (i learned it alone). in general the child wants to manage for himself without assistance, to pull, push, mount, climb, water flowers, crying out repeatedly and passionately, _ich möcht ganz alleine_ (i want to [do it] all alone). in spite of this independence and these ambitious inclinations, there seldom appears an invention of his own in language. here belongs, e. g., the remark of the child, _das bett ist zu holzhart_ (the bed is too wooden-hard), after having hit himself against the bed-post. further, to the question, "do you like to sleep in the large room?" he answered, _o ja ganz lieberich gern_; and when i asked, "who, pray, speaks so?" the answer came very slowly, with deliberation and with pauses, _nicht-nicht-nicht-nicht-nicht-niemand_ (not--nobody). how far advanced is the use of the participles, which are hard to master, is shown by the sentence, _die milch ist schon heiss gemacht worden_ (the milk has already been made hot). the child's manner of speaking when he was three years old approximated more and more rapidly to that of the family through continued listening to them and imitation of them, so that i gave up recording it; besides, the abundant--some may think too abundant--material already presented supplies facts enough to support the foundations of the history of the development of speech in the child as i have attempted to set it forth. a systematic, thorough-going investigation requires the combined labor of many, who must all strive to answer the same questions--questions which in this chronological survey are, in regard to one single individual, in part answered, but in part could merely be proposed. to observe the child every day during the first thousand days of his life, in order to trace the historical development of speech, was possible only through self-control, much patience, and great expenditure of time; but such observations are necessary, from the physiological, the psychological, the linguistic, and the pedagogic point of view, and nothing can supply their place. in order to secure for them the highest degree of trustworthiness, i have adhered strictly, without exception, to the following rules: . i have not adopted a single observation of the accuracy of which i was not _myself_ most positively convinced. least of all can one rely on the reports of nurses, attendants, and other persons not practiced in scientific observing. i have often, merely by a brief, quiet cross-examination, brought such persons to see for themselves the erroneous character of their statements, particularly in case these were made in order to prove how "knowing" the infants were. on the other hand, i owe to the mother of my child, who has by nature a talent for observation such as is given to few, a great many communications concerning his mental development which have been easily verified by myself. . every observation must _immediately_ be entered in writing in a diary that is always lying ready. if this is not done, details of the observations are often forgotten; a thing easily conceivable, because these details in themselves are in many ways uninteresting--especially the meaningless articulations--and they acquire value only in connection with others. . in conducting the observations every artificial strain upon the child is to be avoided, and the effort is to be made as often as possible to observe without the child's noticing the observer at all. . all training of the one-year-old and of the two-year-old child must be, so far as possible, prevented. i have in this respect been so far successful that my child was not until late acquainted with such tricks as children are taught, and was not vexed with the learning by heart of songs, etc., which he was not capable of understanding. still, as the record shows, not all unnecessary training could be avoided. the earlier a little child is constrained to perform ceremonious and other conventional actions, the meaning of which is unknown to him, so much the earlier does he lose the poetic naturalness which, at any rate, is but brief and never comes again; and so much the more difficult becomes the observation of his unadulterated mental development. . every interruption of one's observation for more than a day demands the substitution of another observer, and, after taking up the work again, a verification of what has been perceived and noted down in the interval. . three times, at least, every day the same child is to be observed, and everything incidentally noticed is to be put upon paper, no less than that which is methodically ascertained with reference to definite questions. in accordance with these directions, tested by myself, all my own observations in this book, and particularly those of this chapter, were conducted. comparison with the statements of others can alone give them a general importance. what has been furnished by earlier observers in regard to children's learning to speak is, however, not extensive. i have collected some data in an appendix. chapter xix. development of the feeling of self, the "i"-feeling. before the child is in a condition to recognize as belonging to him the parts of his body that he can feel and see, he must have had a great number of experiences, which are for the most part associated with _painful feelings_. how little is gained for the development of the notion of the "i" by means of the first movements of the hands, which the infant early carries to the mouth, and which must give him, when he sucks them, a different feeling from that given by sucking the finger of another person, or other suitable objects, appears from the fact that, e. g., my child for months tugged at his fingers as if he wanted to pull them off, and struck his own head with his hand by way of experiment. at the close of the first year he had a fancy for striking hard substances against his teeth, and made a regular play of gnashing the teeth. when on the four hundred and ninth day he stood up straight in bed, holding on to the railing of it with his hands, _he bit himself on his bare arm_, and that the upper arm, so that he immediately cried out with pain. the marks of the incisors were to be seen long afterward. the child did not a second time bite himself in the arm, but only bit his fingers, and inadvertently his tongue. the same child, who likes to hold a biscuit to the mouth of any member of the family to whom he is favorably disposed, offered the biscuit in the same way, entirely of his own accord, to his own foot--sitting on the floor, holding the biscuit in a waiting attitude to his toes--and this strange freak was repeated many times in the twenty-third month. the child amused himself with it. thus, at a time when the attention to what is around is already very far developed, one's own person may not be distinguished from the environment. vierordt thinks that a discrimination between the general feelings [i. e., those caused by bodily states] and the sensations that pertain to the external world exists in the third month. from my observations i can not agree with him; for, although the division may begin thus early, yet it does not become complete until much later. in the ninth month the feet are still eagerly felt of by the little hands, though not so eagerly as before, and the toes are carried to the mouth like a new plaything. nay, even in the nineteenth month it is not yet clear how much belongs to one's own body. the child had lost a shoe. i said, "give the shoe." he stooped, seized it, and gave it to me. then, when i said to the child, as he was standing upright on the floor, "give the foot," in the expectation that he would hold it out, stretch it toward me, he grasped at it with both hands, and labored hard to get it and hand it to me. how little he understands, even after the first year of his life has passed, the difference between the parts of his own body and foreign objects is shown also in some strange experiments that the child conducted quite independently. he sits by me at the table and strikes very often and rapidly with his hands successive blows upon the table, at first gently, then hard; then, with the right hand alone, hard; next, suddenly strikes himself with the same hand on the mouth; then he holds his hand to his mouth for a while, strikes the table again with the right hand, and then on a sudden strikes his own head (above the ear). the whole performance gave exactly the impression of his having for the first time noticed that it is one thing to strike oneself, one's own hard head, and another thing to strike a foreign hard object (forty-first week). even in the thirteenth month the child often raps his head with his hand to try the effect, and seems surprised at the hardness of the head. in the sixteenth month he used not unfrequently to set the left thumb against the left side of the head, and at the same time the right thumb against the right side of the head, above the ears, with the fingers spread, and to push at the same time, putting on a strange, wondering expression of face, with wide-open eyes. this movement is not imitated and not inherited, but invented. the child is doubtless making experiments by means of it upon the holding of the head, head-shaking, resistance of his own body, perhaps also upon the management of the head, as at every thump of the thumbs against the temporal bones a dull sound was heard. the objectivity of the fingers was found out not much before this time by involuntary, painful biting of them, for as late as the fifteenth month the child bit his finger so that he cried out with pain. pain is the most efficient teacher in the learning of the difference between subjective and objective. another important factor is the _perception of a change produced by ones own activity_ in all sorts of familiar objects that can be taken hold of in the neighborhood; and the most remarkable day, from a psychogenetic point of view, in any case an extremely significant day in the life of the infant, is the one in which he first experiences the _connection of a movement executed by himself with a sense-impression following upon it_. the noise that comes from the tearing and crumpling of paper is as yet unknown to the child. he discovers (in the fifth month) the fact that he himself in tearing paper into smaller and smaller pieces has again and again the new sound-sensation, and he repeats the experiment day by day and with a strain of exertion until this connection has lost the charm of novelty. at present there is not, indeed, as yet any clear insight into the nexus of cause; but the child has now had the experience that he can himself be the cause of a combined perception of sight and sound regularly, to the extent that when he tears paper there appears, on the one hand, the lessening in size; on the other hand, the noise. the patience with which this occupation--from the forty-fifth to the fifty-fifth week especially--is continued with pleasure is explained by the gratification at being a cause, at the perception that so striking a transformation as that of the newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own activity. other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the strewing about of garden-mold or gravel; the turning of the leaves of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month); digging and scraping in the sand; the carrying of footstools hither and thither; the placing of shells, stones, or buttons in rows (twenty-first month); pouring water into and out of bottles, cups, watering-pots (thirty-first to thirty-third months); and, in the case of my boy, the throwing of stones into the water. a little girl in the eleventh month found her chief pleasure in "rummaging" with trifles in drawers and little boxes. her sister "played" with all sorts of things, taking an interest in dolls and pictures in the tenth month (frau von strümpell). here, too, the eagerness and seriousness with which such apparently aimless movements are performed is remarkable. the satisfaction they afford must be very great, and it probably has its basis in the feeling of his own power generated by the movements originated by the child himself (changes of place, of position, of form) and in the proud feeling of being a cause. this is not mere playing, although it is so called; it is _experimenting_. the child that at first merely played like a cat, being amused with color, form, and movement, has become a _causative being_. herewith the development of the _"i"-feeling_ enters upon a new phase; but it is not yet perfected. vanity and ambition come in for the further development of it. above all, it is _attention_ to the _parts of his own body_ and the _articles of his dress_, the nearest of all objects to the child's eye, that helps along the separation in thought of the child's body from all other objects. i therefore made special observation of the directing of his look toward his own body and toward the mirror. in regard to the first i took note, among other facts, of the following: _ th week._--in the seizing movements, as yet imperfect, the gaze is fixed partly on the object, partly on _his own hand_, especially if the hand has once seized successfully. _ th week._--the very attentive regarding of the fingers in seizing is surprising, and is to be observed daily. _ d week._--when the infant, who often throws his hands about at random in the air, accidentally gets hold of one hand with the other, he regards attentively both his hands, which are often by chance folded. _ th week._--in the same way the child fixes his gaze for several minutes alternately upon a glove held by himself in his hands and upon his own fingers that hold it. _ d week._--the child, lying on his back, _looks_ very frequently _at_ his _legs_ stretched up vertically, especially at his _feet_, as if they were something foreign to him. _ th week._--in every situation in which he can do so, the child tries to grasp a foot with both hands and carry it to his mouth, often with success. this monkey-like movement seems to afford him special pleasure. _ th week._--his own hands and feet are no more so frequently observed by him without special occasion. other new objects attract his gaze and are seized. _ th week._--the same as before. in the bath, however, the child sometimes looks at and feels of _his own skin_ in various places, evidently taking pleasure in doing so. sometimes he directs his gaze to his legs, which are bent and extended in a very lively manner in the most manifold variety of positions. _ th week._--the child looks for a long time attentively at a person eating, and follows with his gaze every movement; grasps at the person's face, and then, after _striking himself on the head_, fixes his gaze on his own hands. he is fond of playing with the fingers of the persons in the family, and delights in the bendings and extensions, evidently comparing them with those of his own fingers. _ d week._--playing with his own fingers (at which he looks with a protracted gaze) as if he would pull them off. again, one hand is pressed down by the other flat upon the table until it hurts, as if the hand were a wholly foreign plaything, and it is still looked at wonderingly sometimes. from this time forth the gazing at the parts of his own body was perceptibly lessened. the child _knew_ them as to their form, and gradually learned to distinguish them from foreign objects as parts belonging to him; but in this he by no means arrives at the point of considering, "the hand is mine, the thing seized is not," or "the leg belongs to me," and the like; but because all the visible parts of the child's body, on account of very frequently repeated observation, no longer excite the optic center so strongly and therefore appear no longer interesting--because the experiences of touch combined with visual perceptions always recur in the same manner--the child has gradually become accustomed to them and _overlooks_ them when making use of his hands and feet. he no longer represents them to himself separately, as he did before, whereas every new object felt, seen, or heard, is very interesting to him and is separately represented in idea. thus arises the definite separation of object and subject in the child's intellect. in the beginning the child is new to himself, namely, to the representational apparatus that gets its development only after birth; later, after he has become acquainted with himself, after he, namely, his body, has lost the charm of novelty for him, i. e., for the representational apparatus in his brain, a dim feeling of the "i" exists, and by means of further abstraction the concept of the "i" is formed. the progress of the intellect in the act of _looking into the mirror_ confirms this conclusion drawn from the above observations. for the behavior of the child toward his image in the glass shows unmistakably the gradual growth of the consciousness of self out of a condition in which objective and subjective changes are not yet distinguished from each other. among the subjective changes is, without doubt, the smiling at the image in the tenth week, which was probably occasioned merely by the brightness (sigismund). another boy in the twenty-seventh week looked at himself in the glass with a smile (sigismund). darwin recorded of one of his sons, that in the fifth month he repeatedly smiled at his father's image and his own in a mirror and took them for real objects; but he was surprised that his father's voice sounded from behind him (the child). "like all infants, he much enjoyed thus looking at himself, and in less than two months perfectly understood that it was an image, for if i made quite silently any odd grimace, he would suddenly turn round to look at me. he was, however, puzzled at the age of seven months, when, being out of doors, he saw me on the inside of a large plate-glass window, and seemed in doubt whether or not it was an image. another of my infants, a little girl, was not nearly so acute, and seemed quite perplexed at the image of a person in a mirror approaching her from behind. the higher apes which i tried with a small looking-glass behaved differently. they placed their hands behind the glass, and in doing so showed their sense; but, far from taking pleasure in looking at themselves, they got angry and would look no more." the first-mentioned child, at the age of not quite nine months, associated his own name with his image in the looking-glass, and when called by name would turn toward the glass even when at some distance from it. he gave to "ah!" which he used at first when recognizing any person or his own image in a mirror, an exclamatory sound such as adults employ when surprised. thus darwin reports. my boy gave me occasion for the following observations: in the eleventh week he does not see himself in the glass. if i knock on the glass, he turns his head in the direction of the sound. his image does not, however, make the slightest impression upon him. in the fourteenth and fifteenth weeks he looks at his image with utter indifference. his gaze is directed to the eyes in the image without any expression of pleasure or displeasure. in the sixteenth week the reflected image is still either ignored or looked at without interest. near the beginning of the seventeenth week (on the one hundred and thirteenth day) the child for the first time regards his image in the glass with unmistakable attention, and indeed with the same expression with which he is accustomed to fix his gaze on a strange face seen for the first time. the impression appears to awaken neither displeasure nor pleasure; the perception seems now for the first time to be distinct. three days later the child for the first time undoubtedly laughed at his image. when, in the twenty-fourth week, i held the child again before the glass, he saw my image, became very attentive, and suddenly turned round toward me, manifestly convincing himself that i stood near him. in the twenty-fifth week he for the first time stretched out his hand toward his own image. he therefore regarded it as capable of being seized. in the twenty-sixth week the child is delighted at seeing me in the glass. he turns round toward me, and evidently _compares_ the original with the image. in the thirty-fifth week the child gayly and with interest grasps at his image in the glass, and is surprised when his hand comes against the smooth surface. in the forty-first to the forty-fourth week, the same. the reflected image is regularly greeted with a laugh, and is then grasped at. all these observations were made before a very large stationary mirror. in the fifty-seventh week, however, i held a small hand-mirror close to the face of the child. he looked at his image and then passed his hand behind the glass and moved the hand hither and thither as if searching. then he took the mirror himself and looked at it and felt of it on both sides. when after several minutes i held the mirror before him again, precisely the same performance was repeated. it accords with what was observed by darwin in the case of anthropoid apes mentioned above (p. ). in the fifty-eighth week i showed to the child his photograph, cabinet-size, in a frame under glass. he first turned the picture round as he had turned the hand-mirror. although the photographic image was much smaller than the reflected one, it seemed to be equally esteemed. on the same day (four hundred and second) i held the hand-mirror before the boy again, pointing out to him his image in it; but he at once turned away obstinately (again like the intelligent animal). here the incomprehensible--in the literal sense--was disturbing. but very soon came the insight which is wanting to the quadrumana, for in the sixtieth week the child saw his mother in the mirror, and to the question, "where is mamma?" he pointed to the image in the mirror and then turned round, laughing, to his mother. now, as he had before this time behaved roguishly, there is no doubt that at this time, after fourteen months, original and image were distinguished with certainty as such, especially as his own photograph no longer excited wonder. nevertheless, the child, in the sixty-first week, is still trying to feel of his own image in the glass, and he licks the glass in which he sees it, and, in the sixty-sixth week, also strikes against it with his hand. in the following week for the first time i saw the child make grimaces before the glass. he laughed as he did it. i stood behind him and called him by name. he turned around directly, although he saw me plainly in the glass. he evidently knew that the voice did not come from the image. in the sixty-ninth week signs of vanity are perceived. the child looks at himself in the glass with pleasure and often. if we put anything on his head and say, "pretty," his expression changes. he is gratified in a strange and peculiar fashion; his eyebrows are raised, and the eyes are opened wide. in the twenty-first month the child puts some lace or embroidered stuff about him, lets it hang down from his shoulders, looks round behind at the train, advancing, stopping, eagerly throwing it into fresh folds. here there is a mixture of apish imitation with vanity. as the child had, moreover, even in the seventeenth month, been fond of placing himself before the glass and making all sorts of faces, the experiments with the mirror were no longer continued. they show the transition from the infant's condition previous to the development of the _ego_, when he can not yet see distinctly, to the condition of the developed _ego_, who consciously distinguishes himself from his image in the glass and from other persons and their images. yet for a long time after this step there exists a certain lack of clearness in regard to names. in the twenty-first month the child laughs at his image in the glass and points to it when i ask, "where is axel?" and at my image when asked, "where is papa?" but, being asked with emphasis, the child turns round to me with a look of doubt. i once brought a large mirror near the child's bed in the evening after he had gone to sleep, so that he might perceive himself directly upon waking. he saw his image immediately after waking, seemed very much surprised at it, gazed fixedly at it, and when at last i asked, "where is axel?" he pointed not to himself but to the image (six hundred and twentieth day). in the thirty-first month it still afforded him great pleasure to gaze at his image in the glass. the child would laugh at it persistently and heartily. animals show great variety of behavior in this respect, as is well known. a pair of turkish ducks, that i used to see every day for weeks, always kept themselves apart from other ducks. when the female died, the drake, to my surprise, betook himself by preference to a cellar-window that was covered on the inside and gave strong reflections, and he would stand with his head before this for hours every day. he saw his image there, and thought perhaps that it was his lost companion. a kitten before which i held a small mirror must surely have taken the image for a second living cat, for she went behind the glass and around it when it was conveniently placed. many animals, on the contrary, are afraid of their reflected image, and run away from it. in like manner little children are sometimes frightened by the discovery of their own shadows. my child exhibited signs of fear at his shadow the first time he saw it; but in his fourth year he was pleased with it, and to the question, "where does the shadow come from?" he answered, to our surprise, "from the sun" (fortieth month). more important for the development of the child's _ego_ than are the observation of the shadow and of the image in the glass is the learning of speech, for it is not until words are used that the higher concepts are first marked off from one another, and this is the case with the concept of the _ego_. yet the wide-spread view, that the "i"-_feeling_ first appears with the beginning of the use of the word "i," is wholly incorrect. many headstrong children have a strongly marked "i"-feeling without calling themselves by anything but their names, because their relatives in speaking with them do not call themselves "i," but "papa, mamma, uncle, o mamma," etc., so that the opportunity early to hear and to appropriate the words "i" and "mine" is rare. others hear these words often, to be sure, especially from children somewhat older, and use them, yet do not understand them, but add to them their own names. thus, a girl of two and a half years, named ilse, used to say, _ilse mein tuhl_ (ilse, my chair), instead of "mein stuhl" (bardeleben). my boy of two and three fourths years repeated the "i" he heard, meaning by it "you." in the twenty-ninth month _mir_ (me) was indeed said by him, but not "ich" (i), (p. ). soon, however, he named himself no more, as he had done in the twenty-third and even in the twenty-eighth month (pp. - ), by his first name. in the thirty-third month especially came _das will ich! das möcht ich!_ (i wish that, i should like that) (p. ). the fourfold designation of his own person in the thirty-second month (p. )--by his name, by "i," by "he," and by the omission of all pronouns--was only a brief transition-stage, as was also the misunderstanding of the "dein" (your) which for a time (p. ) meant "gross" (large). these observations plainly show that the "i"-feeling is not first awakened by the learning of words, for this feeling, according to the facts given above, is present much earlier; but by means of speech the _conceptual_ distinction of the "i," the self, the mine, is first made exact; the development, not the origin, of the "i"-feeling is simply favored. how obscure the "i"-concept is even after learning the use of the personal pronouns is shown by the utterance of the four-year-old daughter of lindner, named olga, _die hat mich nass gemacht_ (she has made me wet), when she meant that she herself had done it; and _du sollst mir doch folgen, olga_ (but you must follow me, olga), the latter expression, indeed, being merely said after some one else. in her is noteworthy, too, the confounding of the possessives "his" and "her," e. g., _dem papa ihr buch auf der mama seinen platz gelegt_ (her book, papa's, laid in his place, mamma's) (lindner); and yet in these forms of speech there is an advance in the differentiation of the concepts. all children are known to be late in beginning to speak about themselves, of what they wish to become, or of that which they can do better than others can, and the like. the _ego_ has become an experience of consciousness long before this. all these progressive steps, which in the individual can be traced only with great pains, form, as it were, converging lines that culminate in the fully developed feeling of the personality as exclusive, as distinct from the outer world. thus much the purely physiological view can admit without hesitation; but a further unification or indivisibility or unbroken permanence of the child's _ego_, it can not reconcile with the facts, perfectly well established by me, that are presented in this chapter. for what is the significance of the fact, that "to the child his feet, hands, teeth, seem a plaything foreign to himself"? and that "the child bit his own arm as he was accustomed to bite objects with which he was not acquainted"? "seem" to what part of the child? what is that which bites in the child as in the very young chick that seizes its own toe with its bill and bites it as if it were the toe of its neighbor or a grain of millet? evidently the "subject" in the head is a different one from that in the trunk. the _ego_ of the brain is other than the _ego_ of the spinal marrow (the "spinal-marrow-soul" of pflüger). the one speaks, sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels; the other merely feels, and at the beginning, so long as brain and spinal marrow have only a loose organic connection and no functional connection at all with each other, the two _egos_ are absolutely isolated from each other. newly-born children with no brain, who lived for hours and days, as i myself saw in a case of rare interest, could suck, cry, move the limbs, and feel (for they stopped crying and took to sucking when something they could suck was put into their mouths when they were hungry). on the other hand, if a human being could be born with a brain but without a spinal marrow and could live, it would not be able to move its limbs. when a normal babe, therefore, plays with its feet or bites itself in the arm as it would bite a biscuit, we have in this a proof that the brain with its perceptive apparatus is independent of the spinal marrow. and the fact that acephalic new-born human beings and animal embryos deprived of brain, as soltmann and i found, move their limbs just as sound ones do, cry just as they do, suck and respond to reflexes, proves that the functions of the spinal marrow (inclusive of the optic thalami, the corpora quadrigemina and the cervical marrow) are independent of the cerebral hemispheres (together with the corpus striatum, according to soltmann). now, however, the brainless living child that sucks, cries, moves arms and legs, and distinguishes pleasure from displeasure, has indisputably an individuality, an _ego_. we must, then, of necessity admit two _egos_ in the child that has both cerebrum and spinal marrow, and that represents to himself his arm as good to taste of, as something to like. but, if two, why not several? at the beginning, when the centers of sight, hearing, smell, and taste, in the brain are still imperfectly developed, each of these perceives for itself, the perceptions in the different departments of sense having as yet no connection at all with one another. the case is like that of the spinal marrow, which at first does not communicate, or only very imperfectly communicates, to the brain that which it feels, e. g., the effect of the prick of a needle, for the newly born do not generally react upon that. only by means of very frequent coincidences of unlike sense-impressions, in tasting-and-touching, seeing-and-feeling, seeing-and-hearing, seeing-and-smelling, tasting-and-smelling, hearing-and-touching, are the intercentral connecting fibers developed, and then first can the various representational centers, these "i"-makers, as it were, contribute, as in the case of the ordinary formation of concepts, to the formation of the corporate "i," which is quite abstract. this abstract "i"-concept, that belongs only to the adult, thinking human being, comes into existence in exactly the same way that other concepts do, viz., by means of the individual ideas from which it results, as e. g., the forest exists only when the trees exist. the subordinate "i's," that preside over the separate sense-departments, are in the little child not yet blended together, because in him the organic connections are still lacking; which, being translated into the language of psychology, means that he lacks the necessary power of abstraction. the co-excitations of the sensory centers, that are as yet impressed with too few memory-images, can not yet take place on occasion of a single excitation, the cerebral connecting fibers being as yet too scanty. these co-excitations of parts of the brain functionally different, on occasion of excitation of a part of the brain that has previously often been excited together with those, form the physiological foundation of the psychical phenomenon of the formation of concepts in general, and so of the formation of the "i"-concept. for the special ideas of all departments of sense have in all beings possessed of all the senses--or of four senses, or of three--the common quality of coming into existence only under conditions of time, space, and causality. this common property presupposes similar processes in every separate sense-center of the highest rank. excitations of one of these centers easily effect similar co-excitations of centers that have often been excited together with them through objective impressions, and it is this similar co-excitement extending itself over the cerebral centers of all the nerves of sense that evokes the composite idea of the "i." according to this view, therefore, the "i" can not exist as a unit, as undivided, as uninterrupted; it exists only when the separate departments of sense are active with their _egos_, out of which the "i" is abstracted; e. g., it disappears in dreamless sleep. in the waking condition it has continued existence only where the centro-sensory excitations are most strongly in force; i. e., where the attention is on the strain. still less, however, is the "i" an aggregate. for this presupposes the exchangeability of the component parts. the seeing _ego_, however, can just as little have its place made good by a substitute as can the hearing one, the tasting one, etc. the sum-total of the separate leaves, blossoms, stalks, roots, of the plant does not, by a great deal, constitute the plant. the parts must be joined together in a special manner. so, likewise, it is not enough to add together the characteristics common to the separate sense-representations in order to obtain from these the regulating and controlling "i." rather there results from the increasing number and manifoldness of the sense-impressions a continually increasing growth of the gray substance of the child's cerebrum, a rapid increase of the intercentral connecting fibers, and through this a readier co-excitement--association, so called--which unites feeling with willing and thinking in the child. this union is the "i," the sentient and emotive, the desiring and willing, the perceiving and thinking "i." chapter xx. summary of results. of all the facts that have been established by me through the observation of the child in the first years of his life, the _formation of concepts without language_ is most opposed to the traditional doctrines, and it is just this on which i lay the greatest stress. it has been demonstrated that the human being, at the very beginning of his life, not only distinguishes pleasure and discomfort, but may also have single, distinct sensations. he behaves on the first day differently, when the appropriate sense-impressions exist, from what he does when they are lacking. the first effect of these feelings, these few sensations, is the association of their traces, left behind in the central nervous system, with inborn movements. those traces or central impressions develop gradually the personal _memory_. these movements are the point of departure for the primitive activity of the intellect, which separates the sensations both in time and in space. when the number of the memory-images, of distinct sensations, on the one hand, on the other, of the movements that have been associated with them--e. g., "sweet" and "sucking"--has become larger, then a firmer association of sensation-and-movement-memories, i. e., of excitations of sensory and motor ganglionic cells takes place, so that excitement of the one brings with it co-excitement of the other. sucking awakens the recollection of the sweet taste; the sweet taste of itself causes sucking. this succession is already a separation _in time_ of two sensations (the sweet and the motor sensation in sucking). the separation in space requires the recollection of two sensations, each with one movement; the distinction between sucking at the left breast and sucking at the right is made after one trial. with this, the first act of the intellect is performed, the first perception made, i. e., a sensation first localized in time and space. the motor sensation of sucking has come, like the sweet taste, _after_ a similar one, and it has come between two unlike relations in space that were distinguished. by means of multiplied perceptions (e. g., luminous fields not well defined, but yet defined) and multiplied movements with sensations of touch, the perception, after considerable time, acquires an object; i. e., the intellect, which already allowed nothing bright to appear without boundary-lines, and thus allowed nothing bright to appear except in space (whereas at the beginning brightness, as was the case even later with sound, had no limitation, no demarcation), begins to assign a cause for that which is perceived. hereby perception is raised to _representation_. the often-felt, localized, sweet, warm, white wetness, which is associated with sucking, now forms an idea, and one of the earliest ideas. when, now, this idea has often arisen, the separate perceptions that have been necessary to its formation are united more and more firmly. then, when one of these latter appears for itself, the memory-images of the others will also appear, through co-excitement of the ganglionic cells concerned; but this means simply that the _concept_ is now in existence. for the concept has its origin in the union of attributes. attributes are perceived, and the memory-images of them, that is, accordingly, memory-images of separate perceptions, are so firmly associated that, where only one appears in the midst of entirely new impressions, the concept yet emerges, because all the other images appear along with it. language is not required for this. up to this point, those born deaf behave exactly like infants that have all the senses, and like some animals that form concepts. these few first ideas, namely, the individual ideas, or sense-intuitions that are generated by the first perceptions, and the simple general ideas (of a lower order), or concepts, arising out of these--the concepts of the child as yet without language, of microcephali also, of deaf-mutes, and of the higher animals--have now this peculiarity, that they have all been formed exactly in this way by the parents and the grandparents and the representatives of the successive generations (such notions as those of "food," "breast"). these concepts are not innate; because no idea can be innate, for the reason that several peripheral impressions are necessary for the formation of even a single perception. they are, however, inherited. just as the teeth and the beard are not usually innate in man, but come and grow like those of the parents and are already implanted, piece for piece, in the new-born child, and are thus hereditary, so the first ideas of the infant, his first concepts, which arise unconsciously, without volition and without the possibility of inhibition, in every individual in the same way, must be called hereditary. different as are the teeth from the germs of teeth in the newly-born, so different are the man's concepts, clear, sharply defined by words, from the child's ill-defined, obscure concepts, which arise quite independently of all language (of word, look, or gesture). in this wise the old doctrine of "innate ideas" becomes clear. ideas or thoughts are themselves either representations or combinations of representations. they thus presuppose perceptions, and can not accordingly be innate, but may some of them be inherited, those, viz., which at first, by virtue of the likeness between the brain of the child and that of the parent, and of the similarity between the external circumstances of the beginnings of life in child and parent, always arise in the same manner. the principal thing is the innate aptitude to perceive things and to form ideas, i. e., the innate intellect. by aptitude (anlage), however, can be understood nothing else at present than a manner of reacting, a sort of capability or excitability, impressed upon the central organs of the nervous system after repeated association of nervous excitations (through a great many generations in the same way). the brain comes into the world provided with a great number of impressions upon it. some of these are quite obscure, some few are distinct. each ancestor has added his own to those previously existing. among these impressions, finally, the useless ones must soon be obliterated by those that are useful. on the other hand, deep impressions will, like wounds, leave behind scars, which abide longer; and very frequently used paths of connection between different portions of the brain and spinal marrow and the organs of sense are easier to travel even at birth (instinctive and reflexive processes). now, of all the higher functions of the brain, the ordering one, which compares the simple, pure sensations, the original experiences, and first sets them in an order of succession, viz., arranges them in time, then puts them side by side and one above another, and, not till later, one behind another, viz., arranges them in space--this function is one of the oldest. this ordering of the sense-impressions is _an activity of the intellect that has nothing to do with speech_, and the _capacity_ for it is, as immanuel kant discovered, present in man "as he now is" (kant) _before_ the activity of the senses begins; but without this activity it can not assert itself. now, i maintain, and in doing so i take my stand upon the facts published in this book, that just as little as the intellect of the child not yet able to speak has need of words or looks or gestures, or any symbol whatever, in order to arrange in time and space the sense-impressions, so little does that intellect require those means in order to form concepts and to perform logical operations; and in this fundamental fact i see the material for bridging over the only great gulf that separates the child from the brute animal. that even physiologists deny that there is any passage from one to the other is shown by vierordt in his "physiology of infancy" ( ). the fundamental fact that a genuinely logical activity of the brain goes on without language of any sort, in the adult man who has the faculty of speech, was discovered by helmholtz. the logical functions called by him "unconscious inferences" begin, as i think i have shown by many observations in the newly-born, immediately with the activity of the senses. perception in the third dimension of space is a particularly clear example of this sort of logical activity without words, because it is developed slowly. in place of the expression "unconscious," which, because it has caused much mischief, still prevents the term "unconscious inferences" from being naturalized in the physiology of the senses and the theory of perception, it would be advisable, since "instinctive" and "intuitive" are still more easily misunderstood, to say "wordless." wordless ideas, wordless concepts, wordless judgments, wordless inferences, may be inherited. to these belong such as our progenitors often experienced at the beginning of life, such as not only come into existence without the participation of any medium of language whatever, but also are never even willed (intended, deliberate, voluntary), and can not under any circumstances be set aside or altered, whether to be corrected or falsified. an inherited defect can not be put aside, and neither can the inherited intellect. when the outer angle at the right of the eye is pressed upon, a light appears in the closed eye at the left, not at the right; not at the place touched. this optical illusion, which was known even in newton's day, this wordless inductive inference, is hereditary and incorrigible; and, on the other hand, the hereditary wordless _concept_ of food can neither be prevented from arising nor be set aside nor be formed otherwise than it was formed by our ancestors. innate, to make it once more prominent, is the faculty (the capacity, the aptitude, the potential function) of forming concepts, and some of the first concepts are hereditary. new (not hereditary) concepts arise only after new perceptions, i. e., after experiences that associate themselves with the primitive ones by means of new connecting paths in the brain, and they begin in fact before the learning of speech. a chick just out of the shell possesses the capacity to lay eggs--the organs necessary--in fact the future eggs are inborn in the creature; but only after some time does it lay eggs, and these are in every respect similar to the first eggs of its mother. indeed, the chicks that come from these eggs resemble those of the mother herself; thus the eggs have hereditary properties. new eggs originate only by crossing, by external influences of all sorts, influences, therefore, of experience. so, too, the new-born child possesses the capacity of forming concepts. the organs necessary for that are inborn in him, but not till after some time does he form concepts, and these are in all nations and at all times quite similar to the first concepts formed by the child's mother. indeed, the inferences that attach themselves to the first concepts will resemble those which were developed in the mother or will be identical with them; these concepts have, then, hereditary properties. new concepts originate only through experience. they originate in great numbers in every child that learns to speak. if the fact that children utterly ignorant of speech, even those born deaf, already perform logical operations with perfect correctness, proves the intellect to be independent of language, yet searching observation of the child that is learning to speak shows that only by means of verbal language can the intellect give precision to its primitive indistinct concepts and thereby develop itself further, connecting ideas appropriately with the circumstances in which the child lives. it is a settled fact, however, that many ideas must already be formed in order to make possible the acquirement of speech. the existence of ideas is a necessary condition of learning to speak. the greatest intellectual advance in this field consists in this, that the specific method of the human race is discovered by the speechless child--the method of expressing ideas aloud and articulately, i. e., by means of expirations of breath along with various positions of the larynx and the mouth and various movements of the tongue. no child _invents_ this method, it is _transmitted_; but each individual child _discovers_ that by means of sounds thus originating one can make known his ideas and thereby induce feelings of pleasure and do away with discomfort. therefore he applies himself to this process of himself, without instruction, provided only that he grows up among speaking people; and even where hearing, which serves as a means of intercourse with them, is wanting from birth, a life rich in ideas and an intelligence of a high order may be developed, provided that written signs of sound supply the place of sounds heard. these signs, however, can be learned only by means of instruction. the way in which writing is learned is the same as the way in which the alalic child learns to speak. both rest upon imitation. i have shown that the first firm association of an idea with a syllable or with a word-like combination of syllables, takes place exclusively through imitation; but a union of this sort being once established, the child then freely invents new combinations, although to a much more limited extent than is commonly assumed. no one brings with him into the world a genius of such quality that it would be capable of inventing articulate speech. it is difficult enough to comprehend that imitation suffices for the child to learn a language. what organic conditions are required for the imitation of sounds and for learning to speak i have endeavored to ascertain by means of a systematic collection, resting on the best pathological investigations, of all the disturbances of speech thus far observed in adults; and the daily observation of a sound child, who was kept away from all training as far as possible, as well as the frequent observation of other children, has brought me to the following important result: that every known form of disturbance of speech in adults finds its perfect counterpart in the child that is learning to speak. the child can not _yet_ speak correctly, because his impressive, central, and expressive organs of speech are not yet completely developed. the adult patient can _no longer_ speak correctly, because those parts are no longer complete or capable of performing their functions. the parallelism is perfect even to individual cases, if children of various ages are carefully observed in regard to their acquirement of speech. as to facts of a more general nature, we arrive, then, at the three following: . the normal infant understands spoken language much earlier than he can himself produce through imitation the sounds, syllables, and words he hears. . the normal child, however, before he begins to speak or to imitate correctly the sounds of language, forms of his own accord all or nearly all the sounds that occur in his future speech and very many others besides, and delights in doing it. . the order of succession in which the sounds of speech are produced by the infant is different with different individuals, and consequently is not determined by the principle of the least effort. it is dependent upon several factors--brain, teeth, size of the tongue, acuteness of hearing, motility, and others. only in the later, intentional, sound-formations and attempts at speaking does that principle come under consideration. in the acquirement of every complicated muscular movement, dancing, e. g., the difficult combinations which make a greater strain on the activity of the will are in like manner acquired last. heredity plays no part in this, for every child can learn to master perfectly any language, provided he hears from birth only the one to be learned. the plasticity of the inborn organs of speech is thus in the earliest childhood very great. to follow farther the influence that the use of speech as a means of understanding has upon the intellectual development of the child lies outside the problem dealt with in this book. let me, in conclusion, simply give a brief estimate of the questioning-activity that makes its appearance very early after the first attempts at speech, and also add a few remarks on the development of the _"i"-feeling_. the child's questioning as a means of his culture is almost universally underrated. the interest in causality that unfolds itself more and more vigorously with the learning of speech, the asking why, which is often almost unendurable to parents and educators, is fully justified, and ought not, as unfortunately is too often the case, to be unheeded, purposely left unanswered, purposely answered falsely. i have from the beginning given to my boy, to the best of my knowledge invariably, an answer to his questions intelligible to him and not contrary to truth, and have noticed that in consequence at a later period, in the fifth and the sixth and especially in the seventh year, the questions prove to be more and more intelligent, because the previous answers are retained. if, on the contrary, we do not answer at all, or if we answer with jests and false tales, it is not to be wondered at that a child even of superior endowments puts foolish and absurd questions and thinks illogically--a thing that rarely occurs where questions are rightly answered and fitting instruction is given, to say nothing of rearing the child to superstition. the only legend in which i allow my boy to have firm faith is that of the stork that brings new babes, and what goes along with that. with regard to the development of the "i"--feeling the following holds good: this feeling does not awake on the day when the child uses for the first time the word "i" instead of his own name--the date of such use varies according as those about it name themselves and the child by the proper name and not by the pronoun for a longer or a shorter period; but the "i" is separated from the "not-i" after a long series of experiences, chiefly of a painful sort, as these observations have made clear, through the _becoming accustomed to the parts of one's own body_. these, which at first are foreign objects, affect the child's organs of sense always in the same manner, and thereby become uninteresting after they have lost the charm of novelty. now, his own body is that to which the attractive objective impressions (i. e., the world) are referred, and with the production by him of new impressions, with the changes wrought by him (in the experimenting which is called "playing"), with the experience of being-a-cause, is developed more and more in the child the feeling of self. with this he raises himself higher and higher above the dependent condition of the animal, so that at last the difference, not recognizable at all before birth and hardly recognizable at the beginning after birth, between animal and human being attains a magnitude dangerous for the latter, attains it, above all, by means of language. but if it is necessary for the child to appropriate to himself as completely as possible this highest privilege of the human race and through this to overcome the animal nature of his first period; if his development requires the stripping off of the remains of the animal and the unfolding of the responsible "i"--then it will conduce to the highest satisfaction of the thinking man, at the summit of his experience of life, to go back in thought to his earliest childhood, for that period teaches him plainly that he himself has his origin in nature, is intimately related to all other living creatures. however far he gets in his development, he is ever groping vainly in the dark for a door into another world; but the very fact of his reflecting upon the possibility of such a door shows how high the developed human being towers above all his fellow-beings. the key to the understanding of the great enigma, how these extremes are connected, is furnished in the history of the development of the mind of the child. appendixes. a. comparative observations concerning the acquirement of speech by german and foreign children. among the earlier as among the later statements concerning the acquirement of speech, there are several that have been put forth by writers on the subject without a sufficient basis of observed facts. not only buffon, but also taine and his successors, have, from a few individual cases, deduced general propositions which are not of general application. good observations were first supplied in germany by berthold sigismund in his pamphlet, "kind und welt" ("the child and the world") ( ); but his observations were scanty. he noted, as the first articulate sounds made by a child from thüringen (rudolstadt), _ma_, _ba_, _bu_, _appa_, _ange_, _anne_, _brrr_, _arrr_: these were made about the middle of the first three months. sigismund is of the opinion that this first lisping, or babbling, consists in the production of syllables with only two sounds, of which the consonant is most often the first; that the first consonants distinctly pronounced are labials; that the lips, brought into activity by sucking, are the first organs of articulation; but this conjecture lacks general confirmation. in the second three months (in the case of one child in the twenty-third week, with other healthy children considerably earlier) were heard, for the first time, the loud and high _crowing_-sounds, uttered by the child spontaneously, jubilantly, with lively movements of the limbs that showed the waxing power of the muscles: the child seemed to take pleasure in making the sounds. the utterance of syllables, on the other hand, is at this period often discontinued for weeks at a time. in the third quarter of the first year, the lisping or stammering was more frequent. new sounds were added: _bä_, _fbu_, _fu_; and the following were among those that were repeated without cessation, _bäbäbä_, _dädädä_; also _adad_, _eded_. in the next three months the child manifested his satisfaction in any object by the independent sound _ei_, _ei_. the first imitations of sounds, proved to be such, were made after the age of eleven months. but it is more significant, for our comprehension of the process of learning to speak, that long before the boy tried to imitate words or gestures, viz., at the age of nine months, he distinguished accurately the words "father, mother, light, window, moon, lane"; for he looked, or pointed, at the object designated, as soon as one of these words was spoken. and when, finally, imitation began, musical tones, e. g., f, c, were imitated sooner than the spoken sounds, although the former were an octave higher. and the _ei_, _ei_ was repeated in pretty nearly the same tone or accent in which it had been pronounced for the child. sneezing was not imitated till after fourteen months. the first word imitated by the child of his own accord (after fourteen months) was the cry "neuback" (fresh-bake), as it resounded from the street; it was given back by the child, unsolicited, as _ei-a_. as late as the sixteenth month he replied to the word _papa_, just as he did to the word _ida_, only with _atta_; yet he had in the mean time learned to understand "lantern, piano, stove, bird, nine-pin, pot"--in all, more than twenty words--and to indicate by a look the objects named; he had also learned to make the new imperfect sounds _pujéh_, _pujéh_, _tupe tupe téh_, _ämmäm_, _atta_, _ho_. in the seventeenth month came in place of these sounds the babbled syllables _mäm_, _mam_, _mad-am_, _a-dam_, _das_; in the case of other children, syllables different from these. children often say several syllables in quick succession, "then suddenly stop as if they were thinking of something new--actually strain, as if they must exert themselves to bring their organs to utterance, until at last a new sound issues, and then this is repeated like the clack of a mill." along with this appears the frequent doubling of syllables, as in _papa_, _mama_. the boy, at twenty months, told his father the following, with pretty long pauses and animated gestures: _atten--beene--titten--bach--eine--puff--anna_, i. e., "wir waren im garten, haben beeren und kirschen gegessen, und in den bach steine geworfen; dann kam anna" (we were in the garden, ate berries and cherries, and threw stones into the brook; then anna came). the observations of sigismund are remarkable for their objectivity, their clearness of exposition, and their accuracy, and they agree with mine, as may easily be seen, in many respects perfectly. unfortunately, this excellent observer (long since deceased) did not finish his work. the first part only has appeared. moreover, the statements as to the date of the first imitations (see pp. , , , , ) are not wholly in accord with one another. i. e. löbisch, likewise a physician, in his "entwickelungsgeschichte der seele des kindes" ("history of the development of the mind of the child," vienna, , p. ), says: "naturally the first sound formed in the mouth, which is more or less open, while the other organs of speech are inactive, is the sound resembling _a_, which approximates sometimes more, sometimes less, nearly to the _e_ and the _o_.[d] "of the consonants the first are those formed by closing and opening the lips: _m_, _b_, _p_; these are at first indistinct and not decidedly differentiated till later; then the _m_ naturally goes not only before the _a_ but also after it; _b_ and _p_ for a long time merely commence a syllable, and rarely close one until other consonants also have been formed. a child soon says _pa_, but certainly does not say _ab_ until he can already pronounce other consonants also (p. ). "the order in which the sounds are produced by the child is the following: of the vowels, first _a_, _e_, _o_, _u_, of course not well distinguished from _a_ at the beginning; the last vowel is _i_. of the consonants, _m_ is the first, and it passes by way of the _w_ into _b_ and _p_. but here we may express our astonishment that so many writers on the subject of the order of succession of the consonants in the development of speech have assigned so late a date to the formation of the _w_; schwarz puts it even after _t_, and before _r_ and _s_. then come _d_, _t_; then _l_ and _n_; _n_ is easily combined with _d_ when it precedes _d_; next _f_ and the gutturals _h_, _ch_, _g_, _k_, the _g_ and _k_ often confounded with _d_ and _t_. _s_ and _r_ are regarded as nearly simultaneous in their appearance; the gutturals as coming later, the latest of them being _ch_. still, there is a difference in this respect in different children. for many produce a sound resembling _r_ among the first consonant sounds; so too _ä_, _ö_, _ü_; the diphthongs proper do not come till the last." these statements of löbisch, going, as they do, far beyond pure observation, can not all be regarded as having general validity. for most german children, at least, even those first adduced can scarcely claim to be well founded. h. taine (in the supplement to his book on "intelligence," which appeared in a german translation in ) noted, as expressions used by a french child in the fifteenth month, _papa_, _maman_, _tété_ (nurse, evidently a word taken from the word _têter_, "to nurse or suck at the breast"), _oua-oua_ (dog, in all probability a word said for the child to repeat), _koko_ (cock, no doubt from _coq-coq_, which had been said for the child), _dada_ (horse, carriage, indicating other objects also, no doubt; a demonstrative word, as it is with many german children). _tem_ was uttered without meaning for two weeks; then it signified "give, take, look, pay attention." i suspect that we have here a mutilation of the strongly accentuated _tiens_, which had probably been often heard. as early as the fourteenth month, _ham_ signified "i want to eat" (_hamm_, then _am_, might have had its origin in the echo of _faim, as-tu faim?_ (are you hungry?)). at the age of three and a half months this child formed only vowels, according to the account; at twelve months she twittered and uttered first _m-m_, then _kraaau_, _papa_, with varying intonation, but spoke no word with a recognizable meaning. in the tenth month there was an understanding of some questions. for the child, when asked "where is grandpapa?" smiled at the portrait of the grandfather, but not at the one of the grandmother, which was not so good a likeness. in the eleventh month, at the question "where is mamma?" the child would turn toward her mother, and in like manner toward the father at the question, "papa"? a second child observed by taine made utterances that had intellectual significance in the seventh week, for the first time. up to the age of five months _ah_, _gue_, _gre_ (french) were heard; in the seventh month, also _ata_, _ada_. in his reflections, attached to these and a few other observations of his own, taine rightly emphasizes the great power of generalization and the peculiarity the very young child had of associating with words it had heard other notions than those common with us; but he ascribes too much to the child's inventive genius. the child guesses more than it discovers, and the very cases adduced (_hamm_, _tem_), on which he lays great weight, may be traced, as i remarked above parenthetically, to something heard by the child; this fact he seems to have himself quite overlooked. it is true, that in the acquirement of speech _one_ word may have several different meanings in succession, as is especially the case with the word _bébé_ (corresponding to the english word _baby_), almost universal with french children; it is not true that a child without imitation of sounds invents a word with a fixed meaning, and that, with no help or suggestion from members of the family, it employs its imperfectly uttered syllables (lallsylben) consistently for designating its ideas. among the notes of wyma concerning an english child ("the mental development of the infant of to-day," in the "journal of psychological medicine and mental pathology," vii, part i, pp. - , london, april, ), the following, relating to the acquisition of speech, are to be mentioned: at five months the child began to use a kind of language, consisting of six words, to indicate a desire or intention. _ning_ signified desire for milk, and was employed for that up to the age of two years. (the word may possibly have been derived from the word _milk_,[e] frequently heard.) at nine months the child made use of the words _pretty things_ for animals; at ten months it formed many small sentences. the child practiced itself in speaking, even without direct imitation of words just spoken, for at the age of two years it began to say over a number of nursery rhymes that nobody in the house knew, and that could not have been learned from other children, because the child had no intercourse with such. at a later period the child declared that the rhymes had been learned from a former nurse, whom it had not seen for nearly three months. thus the articulation was perfecting itself for weeks before it was understood. the exercises of the child sounded like careless reading aloud. the book of prof. ludwig strümpell, of leipsic, "psychologische pädagogik" (leipsic, , pages), contains an appendix, "notizen über die geistige entwickelung eines weiblichen kindes während der ersten zwei lebensjahre" ("notes on the mental development of a female child during the first two years of life"); in this are many observations that relate to the learning of speech. these are from the years and . in the tenth week, _ah! ah!_ was an utterance of joy; in the thirteenth, the child sings, all alone; in the nineteenth comes the guttural utterance, _grrr_, but no consonant is assigned to this period. in the first half-year are heard distinctly, in the order given, _ei_, _aga_, _eigei_, _ja_, _ede_, _dede_, _eds_, _edss_, _emme_, _meme_, _nene_, _nein_. in the eighth month, there is unmistakable understanding of what is said; e. g., "where is the tick-tack?" in the ninth, _am_, _amme_, _ap_, _pap_, are said; she sings vowels that are sung for her. in the eleventh month, imitation of sounds is frequent, _kiss_, _kiss_; at sight of the tea-kettle, _ssi_, _ssi_; she knows all the people in the house; calls the birds by the strange name _tibu_. echolalia. in the fourteenth month, needles are called _tick_ (_stich_ = prick or stitch). to the question, "where is emmy?" the child points, correctly, to herself; says distinctly, _kopf_ (head), _buch_ (book), _roth_ (red), _tante_ (aunt), _gut_ (good), _mann_ (man), _baum_ (tree); calls the eye (auge) _ok_, pruscinsky _prrti_, the dog _uf, uf_. in the seventeenth month, simple sentences are spoken; she speaks to herself. in the nineteenth month, she calls herself by her name, and counts _twei_, _drei_, _ümpf_, _exe_, _ibene_, _atte_, _neune_ (zwei, drei, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun-- , , , , , , ); in the twenty-second month, she talks a good deal to herself, and makes very rapid progress in the correct use of words and the formation of sentences. from the diary kept by frau von strümpell concerning this daughter and a sister of this one, and kindly placed at my disposal in the original, i take the following notes: in the eighth month, _mamma_, in the tenth, _papa_, without meaning. in the eleventh month, the child's understanding of what is said to her is surprising, and so is her imitation. to "guten tag" (good-day) she responds, _tata_; to "adieu," _adaa_. a book, which the child likes to turn the leaves of, she calls _ade_ (for a b c). the first certain association of a sound learned with a concept seems to be that of the _ee_, which has often been said to her, with wet, or with what is forbidden. _amme am_ _om_, "amme komm" (nurse come) (both imitative), is most frequently repeated, _papa_ seldom. the _r_ guttural, or rattled, is imperfectly imitated. in the thirteenth month, the little girl says, _tippa tappa_, when she wants to be carried, and responds _te te_ to "steh! steh" (stop)! she now calls the book _a-be-te_ (for a b c). pigeons she calls _kurru_; men, in the picture-book, _mann mann_. when some one asked, "where is the brush?" the child made the motion of brushing. to the questions, "where is your ear, your tooth, nose, hand, your fingers, mamma's ear, papa's nose?" etc., she points correctly to the object. on her mother's coming into the room, _mamam_; her father's, _papap_. when the nurse is gone, _amme om, amme am_. the mother asked some one, "do you hear?" and the child looked at her and took hold of her own ears. to the question, "how do we eat?" she makes the motion of eating. she says _nein_ when she means to refuse. "dank" (thank) is pronounced _dakkn_. "bitte" (i beg, or please) is correctly pronounced. she understands the meaning of spoon, dress, mirror, mouth, plate, drink, and many other words, and likes to hear stories, especially when they contain the words already known to her. in the fifteenth month "mathilde" is given by her as _tilda_ and _tida_. at sight of a faded bouquet she said _blom_ (for blume, flower). she says everything that is said to her, though imperfectly; produces the most varied articulate sounds; says _ta, papa, ta_ when she hands anything to a person; calls the foot (fuss) _pss_, lisping and thrusting out the tongue. she often says _omama_ and _opapa_. in the seventeenth month, ring is called _ning_, wagen (carriage), _uagen_, sophie, _dsofi_, olga, _olla_ krank (ill), _kank_, pflaume (plum), _pluma_, satt (satisfied, as to hunger), _datt_, hände-waschen (washing the hands), _ander-uaschen_, schuh and tuch (shoe and cloth), _tu_, strumpf (stocking), _tumpf_, hut (hat), _ut_, suppe (soup), _duppe_. _mama kum bild dat bank_, is for "mama komm, ich habe das bilderbuch, erzähle mir dazu etwas, dort setz' dich zu mir" (m., come, i have the picture-book; tell me something in it; sit there by me). in the eighteenth month, "where is omama?" is answered with _im garten_; "how are omama and opapa?" with _sund_ (for gesund, well); "what is omama doing?" with _näht_ (she is sewing). the black apollo is called _pollo wurz_ (schwarz, black). the sister of this child, in the tenth month, applied the word _mama_ to her mother, _pap pap_ and _papap_ to her father, but was less sure in this; _tj[=e]-t[=e]_ were favorite syllables. when asked, "where is tick-tack?" she looks at the clock on the wall. a piercing scream is an utterance of joy. in the fifteenth month, _apapa_ is her word for grandfather, and is roguishly used for grandmother. she says _aben_ for "haben" (have), _tatta_ for "tante" (aunt), _apa_ (for _uppa_) means "i want to go up." her imitation of what is said is very imperfect, but her understanding of it is surprising. in the nineteenth month she makes much use of her hands in gesture instead of speaking. _kuker_ is her word for "zucker" (sugar), _bildebu_ for "bilderbuch" (picture-book). but she habitually calls a book _omama_ or _opapa_ (from the letters of her grandparents). clara is pronounced _clala_, christine, _titine_. in the twentieth month, her mother, after telling her a story, asked, "who, pray, is this, i?" and the child replied, "_mamma"_ "and who is that, you?" "_bertha, bertha_" (the child's name) was the answer. at this period she said, _bertha will_; also _paren_ (for fahren, drive), _pallen_ (fallen, fall), _bot_, (brot, bread), _atig_ (artig, good, well-behaved), _mal_ (noch einmal, once more), _muna_ (mund, mouth), _aujen_ (augen, eyes), _ol_ (ohr, ear), _tirn_ (stirn, forehead), _wanne_ (wange, cheek, and wanne, bath-tub), _aua_ (august), _dute_ (gute) _mama_, _päsche_ (equipage), _wasar tinken_ (wasser trinken, drink water) _dabel_ (gabel, fork), _lüssel_ (schlüssel, key), _is nits_ (ist nichts, is nothing), _mula_ (milch, milk), _ass_ (heiss, hot). another remarkable observation is the following from the fifteenth month. it reminds one of the behavior of hypnotized adults. on her grandmother's birthday the child said some rhymes that she did not easily remember (there were six short verses, thirty-four words). one night soon after the birthday festival the little girl said off the verses, "almost for the first time without any stumbling, in her sleep." from this we see how much more quickly in regard to articulation and independent use of words both these girls (the first of whom weighed only six pounds at birth) learned to speak than did sigismund's boy, my own boy, and others. darwin observed (_a biographical sketch of an infant_ in "mind, a quarterly review of psychology and philosophy," july, , pp. - ) in a son of his, on the forty-seventh day of his life, a formation of sounds without meaning. the child took pleasure in it. the sounds soon became manifold. in the sixth month he uttered the sound _da_ without any meaning; but in the fifth he probably began to try to imitate sounds. in the tenth month the imitation of sounds was unmistakable. in the twelfth he could readily imitate all sorts of actions, such as shaking his head and saying "ah." he also understood intonations, gestures, several words, and short sentences. when exactly seven months old, the child associated his nurse with her name, so that when it was called out he would look round for her. in the thirteenth month the boy used gestures to explain his wishes; for instance, he picked up a bit of paper and gave it to his father, pointing to the fire, as he had often seen and liked to see paper burned. at exactly the age of a year he called food _mum_, which also signified "give me food," and he used this word instead of beginning to cry as formerly. this word with affixes signified particular things to eat; thus _shu-mum_ signified sugar, and a little later licorice was called _black-shu-mum_. when asking for food by the word _mum_ he gave to it a very strongly marked tone of longing (darwin says an "interrogatory sound," which should mean the same thing). it is remarkable that my child also, and in the tenth week for the first time, said _mömm_ when he was hungry, and that a child observed by fritz schultze (dresden) said _mäm-mäm_. probably the syllable has its origin from the primitive syllable _ma_ and from hearing the word "mamma" when placed at the breast of the mother. of the facts communicated by the physiologist vierordt concerning the language of the child ("deutsche revue" of january, , berlin, pp. - ) should be mentioned this, that a babe in its second month expressed pleasure by the vowel _a_, the opposite feeling by _ä_. this is true of many other children also. in the third and fourth months the following syllables were recognizable: _mam_, _ämma_, _fu_, _pfu_, _ess_, _äng_, _angka_, _acha_, _erra_, _hab_. a lisping babe said, countless times, _hab_, _hob_, _ha_. these syllables coincide in part with those given by other observers. the _pf_ and _ss_ only have not been heard by me at this age, and i doubt whether _f_, for which teeth are needed, was produced with purity so early. in the second and third years a child pronounced the following words: _beb_ (for bös, naughty); _bebe_ (besen, _beesann_, broom); _webbe_ (wasser, _watja_, water); _wewe_ (löwe, _löwee_, lion); _ewebau_ (elephant, _elafant_); _webenau_ (fledermaus, _lebamaunz_, bat); _babaube_ (blasebalg, _ba-abats_, bellows); _ade_ (hase, hare); _emele_ (schemel, footstool); _gigod_ (schildkröte, tortoise). these examples illustrate very well the mogilalia and paralalia that exist in every child, but with differences in each individual. sigmatism and parasigmatism and paralambdacism are strongly marked. at the same time the influence of dialect is perceptible (tübingen). the pronunciations given in parentheses in the above instances were regularly used by my boy in his twenty-sixth month when he saw the pictures of the objects named in his picture-book. (in jena.) one would not suppose beforehand that _watja_ and _webbe_ have the same meaning. from the ten examples may be seen, further, that _f_, _l_, _r_, _s_, _t_ present more difficulties of articulation than _b_, _w_, _m_, _g_, and _d_; but neither must this be made a general conclusion. the _w_ (on account of the teeth) regularly comes later than the _b_, _m_, and _r_. in the third year vierordt noted down the following narration. i put in brackets the words omitted by the child: _id. mama ... papa gäge_ [es] ist [eine] mama [und ein] papa gewesen _unn die habe wai didi gabt_ und diese haben zwei kinder gehabt, _unn, didi ... waud._ und [die] kinder [sind in den] wald [gegangen] _unn habe ohd duh_ und haben holz geholt; _na ... an e gugeeide guju_ dann [sind sie] an ein zuckerhäuschen gegangen _unn habe gäg_ und haben gegessen; _no ad die egg gag_ dann hat die hexe gesagt: _näg näg neidi_ "nucker, nucker neisle _wie. immi. eidi_ wer [krabbelt] mir am haüsle?" _no habe die didi gag_ dann haben die kinder gesagt: _die wid, de immi immi wid_ ["der wind, der wind, das himmlische kind"] der wind, der himmlische, himmlische wind. (there were once a mama and a papa, and they had two children. and the children went into the woods and fetched wood. then they came to a little sugar house and ate. then the witch said: "nucker, nucker neisle, who is crawling in my little house?" then the children said: "the wind, the wind, the heavenly child"--the wind, the heavenly, heavenly wind.) i told the same story to my boy for the first time when he was two years and eighteen days old. he repeated, with an effort: _ess ets aine mama unn ain papa edam (wesen)._ _unn (unt) diesa abn wais (twai) kinna (tinder) ghatf (dehappt)._ _unn die kinna sint (dsint) in den walt tegang (gangen)._ _unn-daben (habn) holz (olz) geh[=o]l (ohlt)._ _dann sint (dsint) sie an ain utsom-händom (zuke-häussn) zezan (gangn)._ _unn (unt) habn (abn) ge ... (dessen)._ _dann hatt die hetse (hekksee) dsa (tsakt)._ _nanuck (nuke nuke) nana nainle (naisle)._ _wer ... (drabbelt) mir am häultje (äusle)._ _dann baben (habn) die ... (tinder) ze-a (dsagt)._ _der wi[)e]ds (wind) ... (der fint)._ _ds[=e]r wenn daz (das) himmelä (immlis) khint (tint)._ where the periods are, his attempts were all vain. at any rate, he would say _pta-pta_ as he usually did in fruitless efforts at imitating sounds. just two months after these first attempts, the same child recited for me the narrative, using the expressions in the parentheses; this indicated a distinct progress in articulation. a year after the first attempt, he easily repeated the whole, with only a single error. he still said _himmelä_, and then _himmliss_, for "himmlische." a third boy (düsseldorf) repeated the narrative much better, as early as his twenty-fifth month. he made only the following errors, which were noted by his mother, and kindly communicated by her to me: _gewesa_ for gewesen _gehat_ " gehabt _gehat_ } _gehakt_ } " gesagt _gegannen_ " gegangen _hamen_ " haben _hind hie_ " sind sie _kabbell_ " krabbelt _himmli-he_ " himmlische _fai_ " zwei _kinner_ " kinder _wlad_ " wald _hol-l-l-t_ " holz _uckerhäussen_ " zuckerhäuschen _hekes_ " hexe _neissel_ " neisle _häussel_ " häusle the _ss_ between two vowels was imperfect, reminding one of the english "th" and the german "sch" and "s." the child could not at this time be brought to learn by heart. we see, from these three versions, how unequal the capacity for articulation is in its development, and how varied it is in regard to the omission of difficult consonants and the substitution of others in place of them, as well as in regard to transposition, e. g., in _wand_, _walt_, _wlad_ (wald), _wenn_, _wid_, _wi[)e]ds_, _fint_ (wind)--and this even in the same individual. as no one thus far has instituted comparisons of this sort, one more example may be given. the verses taught by sigismund to his child (for whom i use the sign s) of twenty-one months, were often repeated by my boy (a), of twenty-five months, to me, and by the boy from düsseldorf (d), in his twenty-fifth month, to his mother: s. a d. [_______________________] st month. th month. th month. th month. guter tute tuten tuter guter mond bohnd monn mond mund du gehst du tehz du gehts du dehst du gehs so stille so tinne so tilte so tille ho tille durch die duch die durch die durch die durch die abendwolken aten-bonten aben-woltn abendwolkn abehtwolken him in in in hin gehst so tehz so gehts so dehst so gehs so traurig tautech (atich) treuja trauig terauhig und ich und ich unn ich und ich und ich fühle büne felam fühle fühle dass ich dass ich dess ich dass ich dass ich ohne ruhe one ule ohno ruhge ohne ruhe ohni ruhe bin bin bin bin bin guter tute hotten tuter guter mond bohnd mohn mond mond du darfst du atz du dafp du darfst du darf es wissen es bitten es witsen es wissen es wissen weil du so bein du so leil du so weil du so weil du ho verschwiegen bieten wereidsam verwiegen werwiegen bist bitz bits bist bits warum amum wa-um warum wahum meine meine meine meinhe meine thränen tänen tänen thränen tänen fliessen bieten flietjam fliessen fliessen und mein und mein und mein und mein und mein herz so ätz so hetz so erst so hetz ho traurig ist atich iz treutjam its trauig ist taudig ist errors the errors are very unlike, and are characteristic for each child. the fact that in the case of a the errors diminished by half within two months is to be explained by frequency of recitation. i may add that the inclination to recite was so often lacking that a good deal of pains was required to bring the child to it. from the vocabulary of the second year of the child's life, according to the observations of sigismund and myself, the following words of frequent use are also worthy of notice: [ vater mutter anna milch kuh pferd | (father) (mother) (milk) (cow) (horse) s. | _atte_ _amme_ _anne_ _minne_ _muh_ _hotto_ | _ätte_ _ämme_ _dodo_ | _tate_ _ämmäm_ _päd_ | _fatte_ _mämme_ [ _matte_ {_va-ata_ _mama_ _anna_ _mimi_ _mumuh_ _otto_ p. {_papa_ _mukuh_ _pfowed_ { _fowid_ vogel mund nase ohr haare finger da (bird) (mouth) (nose) (ear) (hair) (there) s. _piep-piep_ _mund_ _ase_ _ohn_ _ale_ _finne_ _da_ p. _piep_, _pipiep_ _mum_ _nane_ _o-a_ _ha-i_ {finge _da_ {wi-er adieu guten tag fort ja nein (good-day) (away) (yes) (no) s. _adé_ _tag_ _fot_ _ja_ _nein_ p. _adjee_ _tatach_ _wott_ _ja_; _jaja_ _neinein_ grossmutter kuk zucker karl grete (grandmother) (sugar) {_tosutte_ _o-tute_ _zucke_ _all_ _ete_ s. {_abutte_ {_osmutte_ p. {_a-mama_ _kuk_ _ucka_ _kara_ _dete_ {_e-mama_ sigismund noticed the following names of animals (in imitation of words given to the children): _bä_, _put_, _gikgak_, _wäkwäk_, _huhu_, _ihz_ (hinz). i did not find these with my child. sigismund likewise observed _baie-baie_ for wiege (cradle), which my child was not acquainted with; _päpä_ for verborgen (hidden); _eichönten_ for eichhörnchen (squirrel); _äpften_ for Äpfelchen (little apple); _mädsen_ and _mädis_ for mädchen (girl); _atatt_ for bernhard; _hundis_ for hundchen, the thüringian form of hündchen (little dog); _pot_ for topf (pot); _dot_ for dort (yonder). on the other hand, both children used _wehweh_ for schmerz (pain); _caput_ for zerbrochen (broken to pieces); _schoos_, _sooss_ for "auf den schooss möcht ich" (i want to get up in the lap); _auf_ for "hinauf möchte ich gehoben werden" (i want to be taken up); _toich_ for storch (stork); _tul_ for stuhl (chair). a third child in my presence called his grandmother _mama-mama_, i. e., twice-mamma, in distinction from the mother. this, however, does not necessarily imply a gift for invention, as the expression "mamma's mamma" may have been used of the grandmother in speaking to the child. other children of the same age do very much the same. the boy d, though he repeated cleverly what was said, was not good at naming objects when he was expected to do this of himself. he would say, e. g., _pilla_ for spiegel (mirror). at this same period (twenty-five months) he could not yet give the softened or liquid sound of consonants (mouilliren). he said _n_ and _i_ and _a_ very plainly, and also _i-a_, but not _nja_, and not once "ja"; but, on the contrary, always turned away angrily when his father or i, or others, required it of him. but as late as the twenty-eighth month echolalia was present in the highest degree in this very vigorous and intelligent child, for he would at times repeat mechanically the last word of every sentence spoken in his hearing, and even a single word, e. g., when some one asked "warum?" (why) he likewise said _warum_ without answering the question, and he continued to do it for days again and again in a vacant way, with and without the tone of interrogation (which he did not understand). from this we see again plainly that the imitation of sounds is independent of the understanding of them, but is dependent on the functions of articulation. these functions are discussed by themselves in the work of prof. fritz schultze, of dresden, "die sprache des kindes" ("the language of the child," leipsic, , pp.). the author defends in this the "principle of the least effort." he thinks the child begins with the sounds that are made with the least physiological effort, and proceeds gradually to the more difficult sounds, i. e., those which require more "labor of nerve and muscle." this "law" is nothing else than the "loi du moindre effort" which is to be traced back to maupertuis, and which was long ago applied to the beginnings of articulation in children: e. g., by buffon in ("oeuvres complètes," paris, , iv, pp. , ), and, in spite of littré, again quite recently by b. perez[f] ("les trois premières années de l'enfant," paris, , pp. - , _seq._) but this supposed "law" is opposed by many facts which have been presented in this chapter and the preceding one. the impossibility of determining the degree of "physiological effort" required for each separate sound in the child, moreover, is well known. besides, every sound may be produced with very unequal expenditure of force; but the facts referred to are enough for refutation of the theory. according to schultze, e. g., the vowels ought, in the process of development of the child's speech, to appear in the following order, separated in time by long intervals: . Ä; . a; . u; . o; . e; . i; . Ö; . Ü. it is correct that _ä_ is one of the vowels that may be first plainly distinguished; but neither is it the first vowel audible--on the contrary, the first audible vowel is indistinct, and imperfectly articulated vowels are the first--nor can we admit that _ä_ is produced with less of effort than is _a_. the reverse is the case. further, _ö_ is said to present "enormous difficulties," and hence has the place next to the last; but i have often heard the _ö_, short and long, perfectly pure in the second month, long before the _i_, and that not in my child alone. from the observations upon the latter, the order of succession appears to be the following: indeterminate vowels, _u_, _ä_, _a_, _ö_, _o_, _ai_, _ao_, _i_, _e_, _ü_, _oeu_ (french sound in coeur), _au_, _oi_. thus, for the above eight vowels, instead of , , , , , , , , the order , , , , , , , , so that only _i_ and _ü_ keep their place. but other children give a varying order, and these differences in the order of succession of vowels as well as of consonants will certainly not be referred to the "influence of heredity." two factors of quite another sort are, on the contrary, to be taken into account here in the case of every normal child without exception, apart from the unavoidable errors in every assigned order growing out of incomplete observation. in the earliest period and when the babbling monologues begin, the cavity of the mouth takes on an infinitely manifold variety of forms--the lips, tongue, lower jaw, larynx, are moved, and in a greater variety of ways than ever afterward. at the same time there is expiration, often loud expiration, and thus originates entirely at random sometimes one sound, sometimes another. the child _hears_ sounds and tones new to him, hears his own voice, takes pleasure in it, and delights in making sounds, as he does in moving his limbs in the bath. it is natural that he should find more pleasure in some sounds, in others less. the first are more frequently made by him on account of the motor memories that are associated with the acoustic memories, and an observer does not hear the others at all if he observes the child only from time to time. in fact, however, almost all simple sounds, even the most difficult, are formed in purity before they are used in speaking in the first eight months--most frequently those that give the child pleasure, that satisfy his desires, or lessen his discomfort. it is not to be forgotten that even the _ä_, which requires effort on account of the drawing back and spreading out of the tongue, diminishes discomfort. the fretful babe feels better when he cries _u-ä_ than when he keeps silent. the second factor is determined by the surroundings of the child. those sounds which the child distinctly hears he will be able to imitate correctly sooner than he will other sounds: but he will be in condition to hear most correctly, first of all, the sounds that are most frequent, just because these most frequently excite the auditory nerve and its tract in the brain; secondly, among these sounds that are acoustically most sharply defined, viz., first the vowels, then the resonants (m, n, ng); last, the compound "friction-sounds" (fl, schl). but it is only in part that the surroundings determine this order of succession for the sounds. another thing that partly determines and modifies this order is the child's own unwearied practice in forming consonant-sounds. he hears his own voice now better than he did at an earlier period when he was forming vowels only. he most easily retains and repeats, among the infinitely manifold consonants that are produced by loud expiration, those which have been distinctly heard by him. this is owing to the association of the motor and the acoustic memory-image in the brain. these are the most frequent in his speech. not until later does the mechanical difficulty of articulation exert an influence, and this comes in at the learning of the compound sounds. hence there can not be any chronological order of succession of sounds that holds good universally in the language of the child, because each language has a different order in regard to the frequency of appearance of the sounds; but heredity can have no influence here, because every child of average gifts, though it may hear from its birth a language unknown to its ancestors, if it hears no other, yet learns to speak this language perfectly. what is hereditary is the great plasticity of the entire apparatus of speech, the voice, and with it a number of sounds that are not acquired, as _m_. an essential reason for the defective formation of sounds in children born deaf is the fact that they do not hear their own voice. this defect may also be hereditary. the treatise of f. schultze contains, besides, many good remarks upon the _technique_ of the language of the child, but, as they are of inferior psychogenetic interest, they need not be particularly mentioned here. others of them are only partially confirmed by the observations, as is shown by a comparison with what follows. gustav lindner ("twelfth annual report of the lehrer-seminars at zschopau," , p. ) heard from his daughter, in her ninth week, _arra_ or _ärrä_, which was uttered for months. also _äckn_ appeared early. the principle of the least effort lindner finds to be almost absolutely refuted by his observations. he rightly remarks that the frequent repetitions of the same groups of sounds, in the babbling monologues, are due in part to a kind of pleasure in success, such as urges adults also to repeat their successful efforts. thus his child used to imitate the reading of the newspaper (in the second half-year) by _degattegattegatte_. in the eleventh and twelfth months the following were utterances of hers in repeating words heard: _ómama_, _oia_ (rosa), _batta_ (bertha), _ächard_ (richard), _wiwi_ (friedchen), _agga_ (martha), _olla olla_ (olga, her own name). milch (milk) she called _mimi_, stuhl (chair) _tuhl_, laterne (lantern), _katonne_, the whistle of an engine in a neighboring factory, _wuh_ (prolonged, onomatopoetic), paul, _gouch_, danke (thank you), _dagn_ or _dagni_, baum (tree), _maum_. another child substituted _u_ for _i_ and _e_, saying _hund_ for "kind," and _uluwant_ for "elephant"; thus, _ein fomme hund lass wäde much_ for "ein frommes kind lass werden mich" (let me become a pious child). lindner's child, however, called "werden" not _wäde_ but _wegen_; and "turnen" she called _tung_, "blau" _balau_. at the end of the second year no sound in the german language presented difficulties to the child. her pronunciation was, however, still incorrect, for the correct pronunciation of the separate sounds does not by any means carry with it the pronunciation of them in their combinations. this remark of lindner's is directly to the point, and is also confirmed, as i find, by the first attempts of the child of four years to read a word after having learned the separate letters. the learning of the correct pronunciation is also delayed by the child's preference of his original incorrect pronunciation, to which he is accustomed, and which is encouraged by imitations of it on the part of his relatives. lindner illustrates this by good examples. his child continued to say _mimela_ after "kamilla" was easy for him. not till the family stopped saying it did "kamilla" take its place. at the age of three and a half years the child still said _gebhalten_ for "behalten" and _vervloren_ for "verloren," as well as _gebhüte_ for "behüte." "grosspapa" was called successively _opapa_, _gropapa_, _grosspapa_. grossmama had a corresponding development. "fleisch" (meat) was first called _jeich_, then _leisch_; "kartoffeln" (potatoes) _kaffom_, then _kaftoffeln_; "zschopau" _sopau_, _schodau_, _tschopau_; "sparbüchse" (savings-box) _babichse_, _spabichse_, _spassbüchse_, _sparzbüchse_; "häring" (herring, also gold-fish) _hänging_. a sound out of the second syllable goes into the first. the first question, _isn das?_ from "was ist denn das?" (what is that, pray?) was noticed in the twentieth month; the interrogative word _was?_ (what) in the twenty-second month. wo? (where) and wohin? (whither) had the same meaning (that of the french _où?_), and this as late as in the fourth year. the word "ich" (i) made its appearance in the thirtieth month. as to verbs, it is to be mentioned that, with the child at two years of age, before the use of the tenses there came the special word denoting activity in general: thus he said, when looking at a head of christ by guido reni, _thut beten_, instead of "betet" ("does pray," instead of "prays"). the verb "sein" (be) was very much distorted: _warum warst du nicht fleissig gebist?_ (gebist for gewesen) (why have you not been industrious?). (cf., pp. , .) he inflected _bin_, _binst_ (for bist), _bint_ (ist), _binn_ (sind), _bint_ (sind and seid), _binn_ (sind). further, _wir isn_ (wir sind, we are), and _nun sei ich ruhig_ (sei for bin) (now i am quiet), and _ich habe nicht ruhig geseit_ (_habe_ for "bin" and _geseit_ for "gewesen") (i have not been quiet), are worthy of note, because they show how strong an influence in the formation of words during the transition period is exerted by the forms most frequently heard--here the imperative. the child used first of all the imperative; last the subjunctive. the superlative and comparative were not used by this child until the fourth year. the observations of lindner (edited anew in the periodical "kosmos" for ) are among the best we have. in the case of four brothers and sisters, whose mother, frau dr. friedemann, of berlin, has most kindly placed at my disposal trustworthy observations concerning them, the first articulate sounds heard were _ärä_, _hägä_, _äche_, and a deep guttural, rattling or snarling sound (schnarren); but the last was heard from only one of the children. the above syllables contain three consonants (_r_, _h_, _ch_) that are declared by many, wrongly, to be very late in their appearance. these children in their first attempts at speaking often left out the first consonant of a word pronounced for them, or else substituted for it the one last heard, as if their memory were not equal to the retaining of the sounds heard first: e. g., in the fifteenth month they would say _t[)e]_, _t_ for _hut_ (hat), _lale_ for _rosalie_; in the twenty-fourth, _kanke_ for _danke_ (thank you), _kecke_ for _decke_ (covering), _kucker_ for _zucker_ (sugar), _huch_, _huche_ for _schuh_, _schuhe_ (shoe, shoes), fifteenth month. in the last two cases comes in, to explain the omission, also the mechanical difficulty of the _z_ and _sch_. the oldest of these children, a girl, when a year old, used to say, when she refused anything, _ateta_, with a shake of the head. she knew her own image in the glass, and pointed at it, saying _täte_ (for _käte_). in the following table the roman figures stand for the month; f_{ }, f_{ }, f_{ }, f_{ }, for the four children in the order of their ages. no further explanation will be needed: viii. _papa_ distinctly (f_{ }); _dada_, _da_, _deda_, first syllables (f_{ }); _derta_ for _bertha_ (f_{ }). x. _dada_, name for all possible objects (f_{ }); _papa_ (f_{ }); _ada_, _mama_, _detta_ (f_{ }). xii. _puppe_ (doll) correctly; _täte_ for _käte_ (f_{ }); _ida_, _papa_, _tata_ for _tante_ (aunt); _täte_ (f_{ }). xiii. _mama_, _detta_ for _bertha_; _wauwau_ (f_{ }); _lala_ (f_{ }). xiv. _ba_ for _baden_ (bathe) (f_{ }). xv. _hia_ for _ida_; _ate_ for _artig_ (well-behaved); _da_ for _danke_; _bappen_ for _essen_ (eat); _piep_; _ja_, _nein_ (yes, no) correctly (f_{ }). xvi. _ei_ (egg) correctly; _feisch_ for _fleisch_ (meat); _waffer_ for _wasser_ (water); _wuffe_ for _suppe_ (f_{ }); _tatte_ for _tante_; _tittak_; _hut_ (f_{ }). xix. _at_ for _katze_ (cat); _duh_ for _kuh_ (cow); _w[=a]n_ for _schwan_ (swan); _nine_ for _kaninchen_ (rabbit); _betta_ for _blätter_ (leaves); _butta_ for _butterblume_ (buttercup); _fiedemann_ for _friedemann_; _täti_ for _käti_ (f_{ }); _gad_ for _gerade_ (straight); _kumm_ for _krumm_ (crooked) (f_{ }). xx. _fidat_ for _zwieback_ (biscuit); _tierdatten_ for _thiergarten_ (zoölogical garden); _waden_ for _wagen_ (carriage); _nähnaden_ for _nähnadel_ (needle); _wewette_ for _serviette_ (napkin); _teid_ for kleid (dress); _weife_ for seife (soap); _famm_ for _schwamm_ (sponge); _tonnat_ for _konrad_; _potne_ for _portemonnaie_; _hauf_ for _herauf_ (up here); _hunta_ for _herunter_ (down here); _hiba papa_ for _lieber_ (dear) _papa_ (f_{ }); _tü_ for _thür_ (door); _bau_ for _bauen_ (build); _teta_ for _käte_; _manna_ for _amanda; ta_ for _guten tag_ (good-day); _ku_ for _kugel_ (ball) (f_{ }); _appudich_ for _apfelmuss_ (apple-sauce); _mich_ for _milch_ (milk); _ule pomm_ for _ulrich komm_ (ulrich come); _ku_ for _kuchen_ (cake); _lilte_ for _mathilde_ (f_{ }). xxi. _teine_ for _steine_ (stones); _bimelein_ for _blümelein_ (little flowers); _mamase_ for _mamachen_ (little mama); _tettern_ for _klettern_ (climb); _papa weint nis_ (papa doesn't cry), first sentence (f_{ }); _mamase, täte artig--tuss_ (means _mamachen, käte ist wieder artig, gib ihr einen kuss_) (mamma, darling, katy is good again, give her a kiss) (f_{ }); _amanda's hut_, _mamases hirm_ (for schirm) (amanda's hat, mamma's umbrella), first use of the genitive case (f_{ }); _mein buch_ (my book); _dein ball_ (thy ball) (f_{ }); _das?_ for _was ist das?_ (what is that?) in the tone of interrogation (f_{ }) _dida_ for _ida_; _lala_ for _rosalie_; _fadi_ for _fahne_ (flag); _büda_ for _brüderchen_ (little brother); _hu-e_ for _schuhe_ (shoes); _mai maich_, for _meine milch_ (my milk) (f_{ }). xxii. _kusch_ for _kuss_ (kiss); _sch_ generally used instead of _s_ for months (f_{ }). xxiii. _koka_ for _cacao_; _batt_ for _bett_ (bed); _emmu_ for _hellmuth_ (light-heartedness); _nanna mommom_ (bon-bon); _papa_, _appel_ for _papa_, _bitte einen apfel_ (papa, please, an apple) (f_{ }); _petscher_ for _schwester_ (sister); _till_ for _still_; _bils_ for _milch_; _hiba vata_ for _lieber vater_ (dear father) (f_{ }). xxiv. _pija eine_ for _eine fliege_ (a fly); _pipik_ for _musik_. sentences begin to be formed (f_{ }). xxv. _pater_ for _vater_ (father); _appelsine_ for _apfelsine_ (orange) (f_{ }). all these observations confirm my results in regard to articulation, viz., that in very many cases the more difficult sounds, i. e., those that require a more complicated muscular action, are either omitted or have their places supplied by others; but this rule does not by any means hold good universally: e. g., the sound preferred by f_{ }, _sch_, is more difficult than _s_, and my child very often failed to produce it as late as the first half of the fourth year. in the twenty-second month, in the case of the intelligent little girl f_{ }, numbering began suddenly. she took small stones from a table in the garden, one after another, and counted them distinctly up to the ninth. the persons present could not explain this surprising performance (for the child had not learned to count) until it was discovered that on the previous day some one had counted the stairs for the child in going up. my child did not begin to count till the twenty-ninth month, and, indeed, although he knew the numbers (their names, not their meaning), he counted only by adding one to one (cf. above, p. ). sigismund's boy, long before he formed sentences, on seeing two horsemen, one following the other at a short interval, said, _eite_ (for reiter)! _noch eins!_ this proves the activity of the faculty of numbering. the boy f_{ }, at the age of two and two thirds years, still said _schank_ for _schrank_ and _nopf_ for _knopf_, and, on being told to say _sch-r-ank_ plainly, he said _rrr-schank_. this child from the thirty-first month on made much use of the interrogative words. _warum?_ _weshalb?_ he asked at every opportunity; very often, too, _was?_ _wer?_ _wo?_ (why? wherefore? what? who? where?); sometimes _was?_ four or five times when he had been spoken to. when the meaning of what had been said was made plain, then the child stopped asking questions. the little girl f_{ }, in her thirteenth month, always says, when she sees a clock, _didda_ (for "tick-tack," which has been said to her), and imitates with her finger the movement of the pendulum. it was noticed of this child that, when not yet five months old, she would accompany a song, sung for her by her mother, with a continuous, drawling _äh-äh-äh_; but, as soon as the mother stopped, the child became silent also. the experiment was one day (the one hundred and forty-fifth of the child's life) repeated nine times, with the same result. i have myself repeatedly observed that babes in the fourth month respond to words spoken in a forcible, pleasant manner with sounds indeterminate often, with _ö-[)e]_ and other vowels. there is no imitation in this, but a reaction that is possible only through participation of the cerebrum, as in the case of the joyous sounds at music at an earlier period. the date at which the words heard from members of the family are for the first time clearly imitated, and the time when the words of the mother-tongue are first used independently, depends, undoubtedly, with children in sound condition, chiefly upon the extent to which people occupy themselves with the children. according to heinr. feldmann (_de statu normali functionum corporis humani_. inaugural dissertation, bonn, , p. ), thirty-three children spoke for the first time (_prima verba fecerunt_) as follows: month. children. of these there could walk alone month. --^-- ---^--- children. according to this, it is generally the case (the author presumably observed rhenish children) that the first independent step is taken in walking several months earlier than the first word is spoken. but the statement of heyfelder is not correct, that the average time at which sound children learn to walk ("laufen lernen") comes almost exactly at the completion of the twelfth month. the greater part of them are said by him to begin to walk a few days before or after the th day. r. demme observed that the greater part began to walk between the twelfth and eighteenth months, and my inquiries yield a similar result. sigismund's boy could run before he imitated words and gestures, and he did not yet form a sentence when he had more than sixty words at his command. of two sisters, the elder could not creep in her thirteenth month, could walk alone for the first time in the fifteenth month, step over a threshold alone in the eighteenth, jump down alone from a threshold in the nineteenth, run nimbly in the twentieth; the younger, on the other hand, could creep alone cleverly at the beginning of the tenth month, even over thresholds, could take the first unsteady steps alone in the thirteenth, and stride securely over the threshold alone in the fifteenth. in spite of this considerable start the younger child was not, by a great deal, so far advanced in articulation, in repeating words after others, and in the use of words, in her fifteenth month, as the elder was in her fifteenth. the latter spoke before she walked, the former ran before she spoke (frau von strümpell). my child could imitate gestures (beckoning, clinching the fist, nodding the head) and single syllables (_heiss_), before he could walk, and did not learn to speak till after that; whereas the child observed by wyma could stand firmly at nine months, and walk soon after, and he spoke at the same age. inasmuch as in such statistical materials the important thing is to know what is meant by "speaking for the first time," whether it be saying _mama_, or imitating, or using correctly a word of the language that is to be spoken later, or forming a sentence of more than one word--and yet on these points data are lacking--we can not regard the laborious inquiries and collections as of much value. children in sound condition walk for the most part before they speak, and understand what is said long before they walk. a healthy boy, born on the th of july, , ran alone for the first time on the st of november, , and formed his first sentence, _hia muta ji_ ("marie! die mutter ist ausgegangen," _ji_ = adieu) (mary, mother has gone out), on the st of november, , thus a full year later (schulte). more important, psychogenetically, are observations concerning the forming of new words with a definite meaning before learning to speak--words not to be considered as mutilations, imperfectly imitated or onomatopoetic forms (these, too, would be imitations), or as original primitive interjections. in spite of observations and inquiries directed especially to this point, i have not been able to make sure that any inventions of that sort are made before there has taken place, through the medium of the child's relatives, the first association of ideas with articulate sounds and syllables. there is no reason for supposing them to be made by children. according to the foregoing data, they are not thus made. all the instances of word-inventions of a little boy, communicated by prof. s. s. haldemann, of the university at philadelphia, in his "note on the invention of words" ("proceedings of the american philological association," july , ) are, like those noted by taine, by holden (see below), by myself, and others, onomatopoetic (imitative, pp. , ). he called a cow _m_, a bell _tin-tin_ (holden's boy called a church-bell _ling-dong-mang_ [communicated in correspondence]), a locomotive _tshu, tshu,_ the noise made by throwing objects into the water _boom_, and he extended this word to mean throw, strike, fall, spill, without reference to the sound. but the point of departure here, also, was the sound. in consideration of the fact that a sound formed in imitation of it, that is, a repetition of the tympanic vibrations by means of the vibrations of the vocal cords, is employed as a _word_ for a phenomenon associated with the sound--that this is done by means of the faculty of generalization belonging to children that are intelligent but as yet without speech--it is perfectly allowable, notwithstanding the scruples and objections of even a max müller, to look for the origin of language in the imitation of sounds and the repetition of our own inborn vocal sounds, and so in an imitation. for the power of forming concepts must have manifested itself in the primitive man, as is actually the case in the infant, by movements of many sorts before articulate language existed. the question is, not whether the roots of language originated onomatopoetically or interjectionally, but simply whether they originated through imitation or not. for interjections, all of them, could in no way come to be joined together so as to be means of mutual understanding, i. e., words, unless one person imitated those of another. now if the alalic child be tested as to whether he forms new words in any other way than by imitation and transformation of what he imitates, i. e., whether he forms them solely of his own ability, be it by the combination of impulsive sounds of his own or of sounds accidentally arising in loud expiration, we find no sure case of it. sound combinations, syllables--and those not in the least imitated--there are in abundance, but that even a single one is, without the intervention of the persons about the child, constantly associated with one and the same idea (before other ideas have received their verbal designation--likewise by means of the members of the family--and have been made intelligible to the child), can not be shown to be probable. my observations concerning the word _atta_ (p. _et al._) would tend in that direction, were it not that the _atta_, uttered in the beginning without meaning, had first got the meaning of "away," through the fact that _atta_ was once said by somebody at going away. so long as proof is wanting, we can not believe that each individual child discovers anew the fundamental fact of the expression of ideas by movements of the tongue; but we have to admit that he has inherited the faculty for such expression, and simply manifests it when he finds occasion for imitations. the first person that has attempted to fix the _number_ of all the words used by the child, independently, before the beginning of the third year of life (and these only), is an astronomer, e. s. holden, director of the observatory of the university at madison, wisconsin. his results in the case of three children have been recently published (in the "transactions of the american philological association," , pp. - ). holden found, by help of webster's "unabridged dictionary," his own vocabulary to consist of , words, with a probable error of one per cent. allowing a probable error of two per cent, his vocabulary would be comprised between the limits of , words and , words. a vocabulary of , words and over is, according to the researches of himself and his friends, by no means an unusual one for grown persons of average intelligence and education. holden now determined in the most careful manner the words actually used by two children during the twenty-fourth month of their lives. a friend in england ascertained the same for a third child. all doubtful words were rigidly excluded. for example, words from nursery rhymes were excluded, unless they were independently and separately used in the same way with words of daily and common use. in the first two cases the words so excluded are above in number. again, the names of objects represented in pictures were not included unless they were often spontaneously used by the children. the lists of words are presented in the order of their initial letters, because the ease or difficulty of pronouncing a word, the author is convinced, largely determines its early or late adoption. in this i can not fully agree with him, on the ground of my own experience (particularly since i have myself been teaching my child english, in his fourth year; he learns the language easily). it is not correct that the pronunciation rather than the meaning makes the learning of a word difficult. thus, in all three of holden's cases, the words that have the least easy initial (s) predominate; the child, however, avoided them and substituted easy ones. holden makes no mention of this; and in his list of all the words used he puts together, strangely, under one and the same letter, without regard to their sound-(phonic) value, vocables that begin with entirely different sounds. thus, e. g., under _c_ are found _corner_ (_k_), _chair_ (tsch), _cellar_ (_s_); under _k_, actually _knee_ (_n_) and _keep_ (_k_), and, under _s_, words that begin with the same _s_-sound as in _cellar_, e. g., _soap_, and also words beginning with the _sch_-sound, _sugar_, and with _st_, _sw_, _sm_, and many others. as the words of the three children are grouped, not according to the _sounds_ with which they begin, but according to their initial _letters_, into twenty-six classes, the author's conclusions can not be admitted. the words must first all be arranged according to their initial _sounds_. when this task is accomplished, which brings _no_ and _know_, e. g., into one class, _wrap_ and _rag_ into a second--whereas they were put in four different classes--then we find by no means the same order of succession that holden gives. the author wrote to me, however, in , that his oldest child _understood_ at least , words more than those enumerated here, i. e., than those published by him, and that with both children facility of pronunciation had more influence in regard to the use of words than did the ease with which the words could be understood; this, however, does not plainly follow from the printed statements before me, as he admits. when the first-born child was captivated by a new word, she was accustomed to practice it by herself, alone, and then to come and employ it with a certain pride. the second child did so, too, only in a less striking manner. the boy, on the contrary, who was four years old in december, , and who had no ear for music and less pride than his sisters, did not do as they did. further, the statements of the number of all the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs used by a child of two years are of interest, although they present several errors: e. g., _supper_ makes its appearance twice in the case of the same child under _s_, and _enough_ figures as an adjective. for the three girls, in their twenty-fourth month, the results were: -----------------------|----------------|-----------------|------------- parts of speech. | first child. | second child. | third child. -----------------------|----------------|-----------------|------------- nouns | | | verbs | | | adjectives | | | adverbs | | | other parts of speech | | | |----------------|-----------------|------------- total | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ a fourth child, brother of the first and second, made use (according to the lists kindly communicated to me by the author), in his twenty-fourth month, of nouns--some proper names among them-- verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and words of the remaining classes (all these figures being taken from the notes of the child's mother). from these four vocabularies of the twenty-fourth month it plainly results that the stock of words and the kinds of words depend primarily on the words most used in the neighborhood of the child, and the objects most frequently perceived; they can not, therefore, be alike in different children. the daughters of the astronomer, before their third year, name correctly a portrait of galileo, and one of struve. a local "tone," or peculiarity of this sort, attaches to every individual child, a general one to the children of a race. i may add that the third child (in england) seems to have been less accurately observed than the others (in madison, wisconsin). great patience and attention are required to observe and note down every word used by a child in a month. without mentioning the name of holden, but referring to his investigations, which, in spite of the defects mentioned, are of the very highest merit, m. w. humphreys, professor of greek in vanderbilt university, nashville, has published a similar treatise, based on observations of his own ("a contribution to infantile linguistic," in the "transactions of the american philological association," , xi, pp. - ). he collected, with the help of a dictionary, all the words that a little girl of just two years "had full command of," whether correctly pronounced or not, and whether they appeared exactly in the twenty-fourth month or earlier. he simply required to be convinced that every one of the words was understood and had been spontaneously used, and could still be used. he did not include proper names, or words (amounting to hundreds) from nursery-rhymes, or numerals, or names of the days of the week, because he was not sure that the child had a definite idea associated with them. the vocabulary thus numbered , words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. in this table irregular verb-and noun-forms are not counted as separate words, except in the case of defective verbs, as _am_, _was_, _been_. the author presents the , words according to their classification as parts of speech, and according to initial _letters_, not according to initial _sounds_, although he himself declares this an erroneous proceeding, as i did in discussing holden's paper. the only reason for it was convenience. in the adoption of a word by the child, difficulty of utterance had some influence in the _first_ year; when the little girl was two years old, this had ceased to have any effect whatever. she had by that time adopted certain substitutes for letters that she could not pronounce, and words containing these letters were employed by her as freely as if the substitutes had been the correct sounds. in regard to the meaning, and the frequency of use dependent upon it, it is to be observed that the simplest ideas are most frequently expressed. when two words are synonymous, one of them will be used exclusively by a child, because of the rarer employment of the other by persons speaking in the child's presence. here, too, the local "tone" that has been mentioned made itself felt; thus, the little girl used the word "crinoid" every day, to designate sections of fossil crinoid stems which abounded in neighboring gravel walks. as to parts of speech, nouns were most readily seized; then, in order, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns. prepositions and conjunctions the child began to employ early, but acquired them slowly. natural interjections--_wah_, for instance--she used to some extent from the beginning; conventional ones came rather late. the following observations by humphreys are very remarkable, and are, in part, up to this time unique: when about four months old the child began a curious and amusing mimicry of conversation, in which she so closely imitated the ordinary cadences that persons in an adjacent room would mistake it for actual conversation. the articulation, however, was indistinct, and the vowel-sounds obscure, and no attempt at separate words, whether real or imaginary, was made until she was six months old, _when she articulated most syllables distinctly_, without any apparent effort. when she was eight months old it was discovered that she knew by name every person in the house, as well as most of the objects in her room, and the parts of the body, especially of the face. she also understood simple sentences, such as, "where is the fire?" "where is the baby in the glass?" to which she would reply by pointing. in the following months she named many things correctly, thus using words as words in the proper sense. the pronunciation of some final consonants was indistinct, but all initial consonants were distinctly pronounced, except _th_, _t_, _d_, _n_, _l_. these the child learned in the eleventh month. at this period she could imitate with accuracy any sound given her, and had a special preference for _ng_ (_ngang_, _ngeng_), beginning a mimicry of language again, this time using real or imaginary words, without reference to signification. but an obscurity of vowel-sounds had begun again. after the first year her facility of utterance seemed to have been lost, so that she watched the mouths of others closely when they were talking, and labored painfully after the sounds. finally, she dropped her mimicry of language, and, at first very slowly, acquired words with the ordinary infant pronunciation, showing a preference for labials (_p_, _b_, _m_) and linguals (_t_, _d_, _n_, not _l_). presently she substituted easy sounds for difficult ones. in the period from eighteen months to two years of age, the following defects of articulation appeared regularly: _v_ was pronounced like _b_, _th_ (_this_) like _d_, _th_ (_thin_) like _t_, _z_ like _d_, _s_ like _t_, _r_ like _w_, _j_ like _d_, _ch_ like _t_, _sh_ like _t_; further: initial. final. _f_ like _w_, _f_ like _p_, _l_ not at all, _l_ correctly, _g_ like _d_, _g_ correctly, _k_ like _t_, _k_ correctly, and in general correctly, _m_, _b_, _p_, _n_, _d_, _t_, _h_, _ng_, _w_. on the other hand, the initial sounds _bl_, _br_, _li_, _pr_, _fl_, _fr_, _dr_, _tr_, _thr_, _sp_, _st_, became _b_, _b_, _p_, _p_, _w_, _w_, _d_, _t_, _t_, _p_, _t_; and the initial sounds _sk_, _sw_, _sm_, _sn_, _sl_, _gl_, _gr_, _kw_, _kl_, _kr_, _hw_, became _t_, _w_, _m_, _n_, _t_ (for _s_), _d_, _w_, _w_, _t_, _w_, _hw_ (_h_ weak). the letter _y_ was not pronounced at all, at first. from this table, as humphreys rightly observes, may be drawn the following conclusions in regard to the initial sounds of words: when a letter which could be pronounced correctly preceded another, the first was retained, but, if both were represented by substitutes, the second was retained. if, however, the second was one which the child made silent, then she pronounced the first. thus, _tr_ = _t_, _kr_ = _w_ (for _r_), _kl_ = _t_ (for _k_, _l_ being one of her silent letters). with these results should be compared those presented in regard to german children, in the paper of fritz schultze (p. above) (which likewise are not of universal application). the accent was for the most part placed on the last syllable. only one case of the invention of a new word could be established. when the child was about eighteen months old, a fly flew all about her plate when she was eating, and she exclaimed, "the old fly went wiggely-waggely." but at this time the child had already learned to speak; she knew, therefore, that perceptions are expressed by words. notwithstanding, the original invention remains remarkable, unless there may be found in it a reminiscence of some expression out of nursery-talk (cf., p. ). until the eighteenth month, "no" signified both "yes" and "no." at the end of two years subordinate propositions were correctly employed. this was the case also with a german girl in jena, who, for instance, said, "the ball which puck has" (p. fürbringer). in the case of my boy such sentences did not make their appearance till much later. i had hoped to find trustworthy observations in several other works besides those mentioned. their titles led one to expect statements concerning the acquirement of speech by little children; thus, "das kind, tagebuch eines vaters" ("the child, a father's diary"), by h. semmig (second edition, leipsic, ), and the book of b. perez, already named (p. ). but inasmuch as for the former of these writers the first cry of the newly-born is a "triumphal song of everlasting life," and for the second author "the glance" is associated with "the magnetic effluvia of the will," i must leave both of these works out of consideration. the second contains many statements concerning the doings and sayings of little children in france; but these can not easily be turned to account. the same author has issued a new edition, in abridged form, of the "memoirs," written, according to him, by dietrich tiedemann, of a son of tiedemann two years of age (the biologist, friedrich tiedemann, born in ). (_thierri tiedemann et la science de l'enfant. mes deux chats. fragment de psychologie comparée par bernard perez._ paris, , pp. - ; tiedemann, - . "the first six weeks of two cats.") but it is merely on account of its historical interest that the book is mentioned here, as the scanty (and by no means objective) notes of the diary were made a hundred years ago. the treatises of pollock and egger, mentioned in the periodical "mind" (london, july, , no. ), i am not acquainted with, and the same is true of the work of schwarz (mentioned above, p. ). very good general statements concerning the child's acquisition of speech are to be found in degerando ("l'éducation des sourds-muets de naissance," vol., paris, , pp. - ). he rightly maintains that the child learns to speak through his own observation, without attention from other persons, far more than through systematic instruction; the looks and gestures of the members of the family when talking with one another are especially observed by the child, who avails himself of them in divining the meaning of the words he hears. this divining, or guessing, plays in fact a chief part in the learning of speech, as i have several times remarked. new comprehensive diaries concerning the actions of children in the first years of life are urgently to be desired. they should contain nothing but well-established _facts_, no hypotheses, and no repetitions of the statements of others. among the very friendly notes that have been sent to me, the following particularly conform to the above requirements. they were most kindly placed at my disposal by the baroness von taube, of esthonia, daughter of the very widely and honorably known count keyserling. they relate to her first-born child, and come all of them from the mother herself: in the first five months i heard from my son, when he cried, all the vowels. the sound _ä_ was the first and most frequent. of the consonants, on the other hand, i heard only _g_, which appeared after seven weeks. when the child was fretful he often cried _gege_; when in good humor he often repeated the syllables _agu_, _agö_, _äou_, _ogö_, _eia_; then _l_ came in, _ül_. the same sounds in the case of my daughter; but from her i heard, up to her tenth month, in spite of all my observation, no other consonants than _g_, _b_, _w_, rarely _l_, and finally _m_-sounds. with my son at the beginning of the seventh month an r-sound appeared--_grr_, _grrr_, plainly associated with _d_ in _dirr dirr_. these sounds were decidedly sounds of discomfort, which expressed dissatisfaction, violent excitement, sleepiness; and they are made even now by the boy at four years of age when, e. g., he is in pain. in the ninth month _dada_ and _b_, _bab-a_, _bäb-ä_ are added. _agö_ also is often said, and _ö_ still more often. this _ö_ is already a kind of conscious attempt at speaking, for he uses it when he sees anything new, e. g., the dog caro, which he observes with eager attention, as he does the cat, uttering aloud meanwhile _ö, ö_. if any one is called, the child calls in a very loud voice, _Ö, oe!_ first imitation. (gestures have been imitated since the eighth month, and the making of grimaces in the child's presence had to be strictly forbidden.) understanding for what is said is also present, for when one calls "caro, caro," in his hearing, he looks about him as if he were looking for the dog. in the tenth month he often repeats _pap-ba_, but it has no significance. if "backe backe kuchen" ("bake cakes," corresponding to our "pat-a-cake") is said to him, he immediately pats his hands as if preparing bread for baking. in the eleventh month _pap-ba_ is dropped. he now says often _dädädädä_, and, when he is dull or excited (_erregt_) or sleepy, _drin, drin_. these _r_-sounds do not occur with my daughter; but since her tenth month she uses _m_-sounds, _mämmä_ when she is sleepy or dull. the boy now stretches out his hand and beckons when he sees any one at a distance. at sight of anything new, he no longer says _ö_, but _äda_ (twelfth month). he likes to imitate gestures with his arms and mouth; he observes attentively the _movements of the lips of one who is speaking_, sometimes _touching_ at the same time the _mouth of the speaker with his finger_. at ten months the first teeth came. in the eleventh month the child was for the first time taken out into the open air. now the _g_-sounds again become prominent--_aga_, _ga_, _gugag_. the child begins to creep, but often falls, and while making his toilsome efforts keeps crying out in a very comical manner, _äch, äch, äch!_ at eleven and a half months a great advance. the child is now much out of doors, and enjoys seeing horses, cows, hens, and ducks. when he sees the hens he says _gog, gog_, and even utters some croaking sounds. he can also imitate at once the sound _prrr_ when it is pronounced to him. if _papa_ is pronounced for him (he has lost this word), he responds regularly _wawa_ or _wawawa_. i have only once heard _wauwau_ from him. if he hears anybody cough, he immediately gives a little imitative cough in fun (vol. i, p. ), and this sounds very comical. he makes much use of _od_, _ädo_, and _äd_, and this also when he sees pictures. when the boy had reached the age of a year, he was weaned; from that time his mental development was very rapid. if any one sings to him gi ga gack, he responds invariably _gack_. he begins to adapt sounds to objects: imitation of sound is the chief basis of this adaptation. he calls the ducks with _gäk, gäk_, and imitates the cock, after a fashion, names the dog _aua_ (this he got from his nurse), not only when he sees the animal, but also when he hears him bark. e. g., the child is playing busily with pasteboard boxes; the dog begins to bark outside of the house; the child listens and says _aua_. i roll his little carriage back and forth; he immediately says _brrr_, pointing to it with his hand; he wants to ride, and i have to put him in (he had heard _burra_, as a name for riding, from his nurse). when he sees a horse, he says _prr_ (this has likewise been said for him). i remark here that the notion that the child thinks out its own language--a notion i have often met with, held by people not well informed in regard to this matter--rests on defective observation. the child has part of his language given to him by others; part is the result of his own sound-imitations--of animals, e. g.--and part rests on mutilations of our language. at the beginning of the thirteenth month he suddenly names all objects and pictures, for some days, _dodo_, _toto_, which takes the place of his former _ö_; then he calls them _niana_, which he heard frequently, as it means "nurse" in russian. everything now is called _niana_: _dirr_ continues to be the sign of extreme discomfort. _papba_ is no more said, ever; on the other hand, _mamma_ appears for the first time, but without any significance, still less with any application to the mother. the word _niana_ becomes now the expression of desire, whether of his food or of going to somebody or somewhere. sometimes, also, under the same circumstances, he cries _mämmä_ and _mamma_; the dog is now decidedly called _aua_, the horse _prr_. _ th month._--he now names also single objects in his picture-book: the dog, _aua_, the cats, _tith_ (pronounced as in english), _kiss kiss_ having been said for him; horses, _prr_, all birds, _gock_ or _gack_. in the house of a neighbor he observes at once the picture, although it hangs high up on the wall, of the emperor driving in a sleigh, and cries _prrr_. animals that he does not know he calls, whether in the book or the real animals, _aua_ or _ua_, e. g. cows. his nurse, to whom he is much attached, he now calls decidedly _niania_, although he continues to use this word in another sense also. if she is absent for some time, he calls, longingly, _niania_, _niania_. he sometimes calls me _mamma_; but not quite surely yet. he babbles a good deal to himself; says over all his words, and makes variations in his repertory, e. g., _niana_, _kanna_, _danna_; repeats syllables and words, producing also quite strange and unusual sounds, and accumulations of consonants, like _mba_, _mpta_. as soon as he wakes in the morning he takes up these meaningless language-exercises, and i hear him then going on in an endless babble. when he does not want a thing, he shakes his head as a sign of refusal; this no one has taught him. nodding the head as a sign of assent or affirmation he is not yet acquainted with, and learns it much later. the nurse speaks with me of caro; the child attends and says _aua_; he knows what we were talking about. if his grandmother says, "give the little hand," he at once stretches it out toward her. he understands what is said, and begins consciously to repeat it. his efforts to pronounce the word grossmama (grandmamma) are comical; in spite of all his pains, he can not get beyond the _gr_; says _gr-mama_, and finally _goo-mama_, and makes this utterance every time he sees his grandmother. at this time he learns also from his nurse the word _koppa_ as a name for horse, instead of _prr_, _burra_, which, from this time forth, denotes only going in a carriage. _koppa_ is probably a formation from "hoppa koppati," an imitation of the sound of the hoofs. at the end of the fourteenth month, his stock of words is much enlarged. the child plays much in the open air, sees much, and advances in his development; words and sounds are more and more suited to conceptions. he wakes in the night and says _appa_, which means "give me some drink." the ball he calls _ball_; flower, _bume_ (for blume); cat, _katz_ and _kotz_ (katze)--what _kalla_, _kanna_, _kotta_ signify we do not know. he imitates the barking of the dog with _auauauau_. he says _teine_ for steine (stones); calls braten (roast meat) _pâati_ and _pâa_, and brod (bread) the same. if he hits against anything in creeping, he immediately says _ba_ (it hurts). if he comes near a dangerous object, and some one says to him, _ba_, he is on his guard at once. a decided step in advance, at the end of the fourteenth month, is his calling me _mama_. at sight of me he often cries out, in a loud voice and in a coaxing tone, _ei-mamma!_ just as he calls the nurse _ei-niana_. his father he now calls _papa_, too, but not until now, although this sound, _papba_, made its appearance in the tenth month, after which time it was completely forgotten. his grandmother, as he can not get beyond the _gr_, is now called simply _grrru_; not until later, _go-mamma_. _ th month._--he now says _guten tag_ (good-day), but not always at the right time; also _guttag_. he likes to see pictures, and calls picture-books _ga_ or _gock_, probably because a good many birds are represented in them. he likes to have stories told to him, and to have pictures explained or rather named. "hinauf" (up) he calls _üppa_, e. g., when he is to be lifted into his chair. for "unten, hinab" (below, down), he says _patz_. not long ago he repeated unweariedly _pka, pta_ (pp. , ), _mba, mbwa_. at this period he begins to raise himself erect, holding on by chairs and such things. of horses he is passionately fond; but he begins to use the word _koppa_, as the chinese do their words, in various meanings. he calls my large gold hair-pins _koppa_. perhaps in his imagination they represent horses, as do many other objects also with which he plays. berries he now calls _mamma_. he has a sharp eye for insects, and calls them all _putika_, from the esthonian _puttukas_ (beetle), which he has got from the maid. all large birds in the picture-book he now calls _papa_, the word being probably derived from _papagei_ (parrot), which he also pronounces _papagoi_. the smaller birds are called _gog_ and _gack_. his image in the glass he calls _titta_ (esthonian designation for child, doll). does he recognize himself in it (p. , _et seq._)? once he heard me in the garden calling some one in a loud voice. he immediately imitated me, and afterward when he was asked "what does mamma do?" he understood the question at once, put out his lips, and made the same sound. he is very uneasy in strange surroundings, in strange places, or among strangers. my bracelet, too, he now calls _kopita_. _mann_ is a new word. _o-patz_ means "playing on the piano," as well as "below, down there." when the piano is played he sings in a hoarse voice, with lips protruded, as well as he can, but does not get the tune. he likes to dance, and always dances in time. _nocho_ (noch, yet) is a new word, which he uses much in place of _mehr_ (more), e. g., when he wants more food. he often plays with apples, which for this reason, and very likely because they are round, he calls _ball_, as he does his rubber ball. yesterday he had baked apples, mashed, with milk. he recognized the apple at once in this altered form, and said as he ate, _ball!_ at this time he was not yet sixteen months old. _ th month._--he is often heard to beg, or rather order, _mamma opatz_ (play the piano). if i do not at once obey, he moves his little hands like a piano-player and begs _tatata_, _tatata_, imitating the music. he likes also to hear songs sung, and can already tell some of them, as _gigagack_, _kucka_ _tralla_. he joins in singing the last of these. _ th month._--he speaks his own name correctly, and when asked "where is adolph?" he points to his breast. as he is always addressed in the third person, i. e., by his name, he does not know any personal pronouns. the syllable _ei_ he often changes to _al_; e. g., he says _papagal_ instead of "papagei." he had some grapes given to him for the first time, and he at once called them _mammut_ (berries). being asked, "how do you like them?" he pressed his hand on his heart in an ecstasy of delight that was comical, crying _ach! ach!_ _ th month._--he comprehends and answers questions; e. g., "where are you going?" _zu tuhl_ (to the chair). "what is that?" _bett tuddu_, i. e., a bed for sleeping. "who gave you this?" _mamma_, _pappa_. he can now say almost any word that is said to him, often mutilating it; but, if pains be taken to repeat it for him, he pronounces it correctly. he often tacks on the syllable _ga_, as if in endearment, _mammaga_, _pappaga_, _nianiaga_. the _forming of sentences is also beginning_, for he joins two words together, e. g., _mamma kommt_ (comes), _papa gut_ (good), _ferd_ (for _pferd_) _halt_ (horse stop). he says _wiebacka_ for zwieback (biscuit), _brati_ for braten (roast meat), goossmama for grossmama (grandmamma). he pronounces correctly "onkel kuno, suppe, fuchs, rabe, kameel." when others are conversing in his presence, he often says to himself the words he hears, especially the last words in the sentence. the word "nein" (no) he uses as a sign of refusal; e. g., "will you have some roast meat?" _nein_. _ja_ (yes), on the other hand, he does not use, but he answers in the affirmative by repeating frequently with vehemence what he wants, e. g., "do you want some roast?" _brati, brati_ (i. e., i do want roast). he gives names to his puppets. he calls them grandmamma, grandpapa, uncle kuno, uncle grünberg, gardener, cook, etc. the puppets are from his noah's ark. now appear his first attempts at drawing. he draws, as he imagines, all kinds of animals: ducks, camels, tigers. he lately made marks, calling out _torch und noch ein torch_ (a stork and another stork). (cf. pp. , .) the book of birds is his greatest delight. i have to imitate the notes of birds, and he does it after me, showing memory in it. he knows at once stork, woodpecker, pigeon, duck, pelican, siskin, and swallow. the little verses i sing at the same time amuse him, e. g., "zeislein, zeislein, wo ist dein häuslein?" (little siskin, where is your little house?); and he retains them when he hears them often. russian words also are repeated by him. for the first time i observe the attempt to communicate to others some experience of his own. he had been looking at the picture-book with me, and when he went to the nurse he told her, _mamma, bilder, papagei_ (mamma, pictures, parrot). _ th month._--from the time he was a year and a half old he has walked alone. he speaks whole sentences, but without connectives, e. g., _niana braten holen_ (nurse bring roast); _caro draussen wauwau_ (caro outside, bow-wow); _mamma tuddut_ (sleeps, inflected correctly); _decke um_ (cover over); _papa koppa stadt_ (papa driven to city); _mamma sitzt tuhl_ (mamma sits chair); _adolph bei mama bleiben_ (adolph stay with mamma); _noch tanzen_ (more dance); _pappa fuchs machen_ (papa make fox). certain words make him nervous. he does not like the refrain of the children's song of the goat. if i say "darum, darum, meck, meck, meck," he looks at me indignantly and runs off. sometimes he lays his hand on my mouth or screams loudly for the nurse. he gives up any play he is engaged in as soon as i say "darum, darum." _pax vobiscum_ has the same effect. the songs amuse him chiefly on account of the words, particularly through the imitations of the sounds of animals. he knows the songs and asks of his own accord for _kucku esaal_, _kater putz_, _kucku tralla_, but commonly hears only the first stanza, and then wants a different song. lately, however, he listened very earnestly to the three stanzas of "möpschen," and when i asked "what now?" he answered _noch mops_ (more mops). playing with his puppets, he hummed to himself, _tu, tu, errsen, tu tu errsen_. i guessed that it was "du, du liegst mir im herzen," which he had on the previous day wanted to hear often and had tried to repeat. _ th month._--now for the first time _ja_ is used for affirmation, chiefly in the form _ja wohl_ (yes, indeed, certainly), which he retains. "do you want this?" _ja wohl._ being asked "whose feet are these?" he answers correctly, _mine_; but no personal pronouns appear yet. he often retains a new and difficult word that he has heard only once, e. g., "chocolade." to my question, after his grandfather had gone away, "where is grandpapa now?" he answers sorrowfully, _verloren_ (lost). (cf. p. .) in his plays he imitates the doings and sayings of adults, puts a kerchief about his head and says, _adolph go stable, give oats_. not long ago, as he said good-night to us, he went also to his image in the glass and kissed it repeatedly, saying, _adolph, good-night!_ _ th month._--he knows a good many flowers, their names and colors; calls pansies "the dark flowers." he also caught the air and rhythm of certain songs, e. g., _kommt a vogel angeflogen, du, du, liegst mir im herzen, machst mir viel serzen_, and used to sing to himself continually when he was on a walk. now that he is four years old, on the contrary, he hardly ever sings. _ th month._--beetles have a great interest for him. he brings a dead beetle into the parlor, and cries, "run now!" his astonishment is great that the creature does not run. if he sees something disagreeable (e. g., he saw the other day an organ-grinder with a monkey), he covers his face with his hands weeping aloud and crying, _monkey go away_. so, too, when he sees strangers. the latin names of flowers and insects are easily retained by him. they are not taught him, he simply hears them daily. _ th and th months._--of his childish language he has retained only the term _mammut_, for berries. milk, which he used to call _mima_, is now called _milch_ (cf., pp. , ). the child's use of the personal pronoun is strange. during my absence an aunt of his took my place, and she addressed him for the _first time_ with the word "du" (thou), and spoke of herself as "i," whereas i always called myself "mama." the consequence was that the boy for a long time used "thou" as the first person, "i" as the second person, with logical consistency. he hands me bread, saying, _i am hungry_, or, when i am to go with him, _i come too_. referring to himself, he says, _you want flowers_; _you will play with niania_. all other persons are addressed with "i" instead of "you." he tells his uncle, _there's an awfully pretty gentian in the yard_. he gets the nurse occasionally to repeat the latin names, because they are difficult for her, and his correction of her is very comical. _ th month._--he speaks long sentences. _papa, come drink coffee,_ _please do_. _papa, i drive_ (for "you drive") _to town, to reval, and bring some parrots (bellensittiche)_. he often changes the form of words for fun, e. g., _guten porgen_ (for guten morgen). on going out, he says, with a knowing air, "splendid weather, the sun shines so warm." he alters songs also, putting in different expressions: e. g., instead of _lieber vogel fliege weiter, nimm a kuss und a gruss_, adolph sings, _lieber vogel fliege weiter in die wolken hinein_ (dear bird, fly farther, _into the clouds_, instead of _take a kiss and a greeting_). it is a proof of logical thinking that he asks, at sight of the moon, _the moon is in the sky, has it wings?_ i had been sick; when i was better and was caressing him again, he said, _mama is well, the dear jesus has made mama well with sealing-wax_. "with sealing-wax?" i asked, in astonishment. _yes, from the writing-desk._ he had often seen his toys, when they had been broken, "made well", as he called it, by being stuck together with sealing-wax. he now asks, _where is the dear jesus?_ "in heaven." _can he fly then; has he wings?_ religious conceptions are difficult to impart to him, even at a much later period: e. g., heaven is too cold for him, his nose would freeze up there, etc. he now asks questions a good deal in general, especially _what is that called?_ e. g., _what are chestnuts called?_ "horse-chestnuts." _what are these pears called?_ "bergamots." he jests: _nein, bergapots_, or, _what kind of mots are those?_ he will not eat an apple until he has learned what the name of it is. he would often keep asking, in wanton sport, _what are books called?_ or _ducks?_ or _soup?_ he uses the words "to-day, to-morrow," and the names of the days of the week, but without understanding their meaning. instead of saying "_zu mittag gehen_" (go to noon-meal), he says, logically, "zu nachmittag gehen" (go to afternoon-meal). the child does not know what is true, what is actual. i never can depend on his statements, except, as it appears, when he tells what he has had to eat. if riding is spoken of, e. g., he has a vivid picture of riding in his mind. to-day, when i asked him "did you see papa ride?" he answered, _yes, indeed, papa rode away off into the woods_. yet his father had not gone to ride at all. in the same way he often denies what he has seen and done. he comes out of his father's room and i ask, "well, have you said good-night to papa?" _no._ his father told me afterward that the child had done it. in the park we see some crested titmice, and i tell the nurse that, in the previous autumn, i saw for the first time finnish parrots or cross-bills here, but that i have not seen any since. when the child's father asked later, "well, adolph, what did you see in the park?" _crested titmice, with golden crests_ (he adds out of his own invention) _and finnish parrots_. he mixes up what he has heard and seen with what he imagines. truth has to be taught to a child. the less this is done, the easier it is to inoculate him with religious notions, i. e., of miraculous revelation; otherwise one must be prepared for many questions that are hard to answer. _ th month._--sad stories affect him to tears, and he runs away. names of animals and plants he remembers often more easily than i do, and informs me. he reasons logically. lately, when he asked for some foolish thing, i said to him, "sha'n't i bring the moon for you, too?" _no_, said he, _you can't do that, it is too high up in the clouds_. _ th to d months._--he now often calls himself "adolph," and then speaks of himself in the third person. he frequently confounds "i" and "you," and does not so consistently use the first person for the second, and the reverse. the transition is very gradually taking place to the correct use of the personal pronoun. instead of _my mamma_, he repeats often, when he is in an affectionate mood, _your mamma_, _your mamma_. some new books are given to him. in the book of beetles there are shown to him the party-colored and the gray, so-called "sad," grave-digger (_necrophorus_). the latter now becomes prominent in his plays. "why is he called the sad?" i asked the child yesterday. _ah! because he has no children_, he answered, sorrowfully. probably he has at some time overheard this sentence, which has no meaning for him, from a grown person. adult persons' ways of speaking are thus employed without an understanding of them; pure verbal memory. in the same way, he retains the names, in his new book, of butterflies (few of them german) better than i do, however crabbed and difficult they may be. this (pure) memory for mere sounds or tones has become less strong in the now four-year-old boy, who has more to do with ideas and concepts, although his memory in other respects is good. in the thirty-seventh month he sang, quite correctly, airs he had heard, and he could sing some songs to the piano, if they were frequently repeated with him. his fancy for this soon passed away, and these exercises ceased. on the other hand, he tells stories a great deal and with pleasure. his pronunciation is distinct, the construction of the sentences is mostly correct, apart from errors acquired from his nurse. the confounding of the first and second persons, the "i" and "you," or rather his use of the one for the other, has ceased, and the child designates himself by _i_, others by _thou_ and _you_. men are ordinarily addressed by him with _thou_, as his father and uncle are; women with _you_, as are even his mother and nurse. this continues for a long time. the boy of four years counts objects, with effort, up to six; numbers remain for a long time merely empty words (pp. , ). in the same way, he has, as yet, but small notion of the order of the days of the week, and mixes up the names of them. to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, have gradually become more intelligible to him. notwithstanding the aphoristic character of these extracts from a full and detailed diary of observations, i have thought they ought to be given, because they form a valuable supplement to my observations in the nineteenth chapter, and show particularly how far independent thought may be developed, even in the second and third years, while there is, as yet, small knowledge of language. the differences in mental development between this child and mine are no less worthy of notice than are the agreements. among the latter is the fact, extremely important in a pedagogical point of view, that, the less we teach the child the simple truth from the beginning, so much the easier it is to inoculate him permanently with religious notions, i. e., of "miraculous revelation." fairy tales, ghost-stories, and the like easily make the childish imagination, of itself very active, hypertrophic, and cloud the judgment concerning actual events. morals and nature offer such an abundance of facts with which we may connect the teaching of language, that it is better to dispense with legends. Æsop's fables combine the moral and the natural in a manner unsurpassable. my child tells me one of these fables every morning. footnotes: [d] the vowels have the continental, not the english, sounds. [e] or possibly for the word _drink_, which a child of my acquaintance called _ghing_.--editor. [f] "the first three years of childhood," edited and translated by alice m. christie; published in chicago, . b. notes concerning lacking, defective, and arrested mental development in the first years of life. the data we have concerning the behavior of children born, living, without head or without brain, and of microcephalous children, as well as of idiots and cretins more advanced in age, are of great interest, as helping us to a knowledge of the dependence of the first psychical processes upon the development of the brain, especially of the cerebral cortex. unfortunately, these data are scanty and scattered. very important, too, for psychogenesis, are reports concerning the physiological condition and activity of children whose mental development has seemed to be stopped for months, or to be made considerably slower, or to be unusually hastened. scanty as are the notes i have met with on this matter, after much search, yet i collect and present some of them, in the hope that they will incite to more abundant and more careful observation in the future than has been made up to this time. a good many data concerning the behavior of cretin children are to be found in the very painstaking book, "neue untersuchungen über den kretinismus oder die entartung des menschen in ihren verschiedenen graden und formen" ("new investigations concerning cretinism, or human deterioration, in its various forms and degrees"), by maffei and rösch (two vols, erlangen, ). but, in order that these data should be of value, the observed anomalies and defects of the cerebral functions ought to be capable of being referred to careful morphological investigations of the cretin brain. as the authors give no results of _post-mortem_ examinations, i simply refer to their work here. i once had the opportunity myself of seeing a hemicephalus, living, who was brought to the clinic of my respected colleague, prof. b. schultze, in jena. the child was of the male sex, and was born on the st of july, , at noon, along with a perfectly normal twin sister. the parents are of sound condition. i saw the child for the first time on the d of july, at two o'clock. i found all the parts of the body, except the head, like those of ordinary children born at the right time. the head had on it a great red lump like a tumor, and came to an end directly over the eyes, going down abruptly behind; but, even if the tumor were supposed to be covered with skin, there would by no means be the natural arched formation of the cranium of a newly-born child. the face, too, absolutely without forehead, was smaller in comparison than the rest of the body. i found now, in the case of this child, already two days old, a remarkably regular breathing, a very cool skin--in the forenoon a specific warmth of ° c. had been found--and slight mobility. the eyes remained closed. when i opened them, without violence, the pupil was seen to be immobile. it did not react in the least upon the direct light of the sun on either side. the left eye did not move at all, the right made rare, convulsive, lateral movements. the conjunctiva was very much reddened. the child did not react in the least to pricks of a dull needle tried on all parts of the body, and reacted only very feebly to pinches; not at all to sound-stimuli, but regularly to stronger, prolonged cutaneous stimuli; in particular, the child moved its arms after a slap on the back, just like normal new-born children, and uttered very harsh, feeble tones when its back was rubbed. when i put my finger in its mouth vigorous sucking movements began, which induced me to offer the bottle--this had not yet been done. some cubic centimetres of milk were vigorously swallowed, and soon afterward the breast of a nurse was taken. while this was going on i could feel quite distinctly with my finger, under the chin, the movements of swallowing. it was easy to establish the further fact that my finger, which i laid in the hollow of the child's hand, was frequently clasped firmly by the little fingers, which had well-developed nails. not unfrequently, sometimes without previous contact, sometimes after it, the tip of the tongue, and even a larger part of the tongue, was thrust out between the lips, and once, when i held the child erect, he plainly gave a prolonged yawn. finally, the fact seemed to me very noteworthy that, after being taken and held erect, sometimes also without any assignable outward occasion, the child inclined its head forward and turned it vigorously both to the right and to the left. when the child had sucked lustily a few times, it opened both eyes about two millimetres wide, and went on with its nursing. an assistant physician saw the child sneeze. these observations upon a human child, two days old, unquestionably acephalous, i. e., absolutely without cerebrum, but as to the rest of its body not in the least abnormal, prove what i have already advanced (vol. i, p. ), that the cerebrum takes no part at all in the first movements of the newly-born. in this respect the extremely rare case of an acephalous child, living for some days, supplies the place of an experiment of vivisection. unfortunately, the child died so early that i could not carry on further observations and experiments. the report of the _post-mortem_ examination will be published by itself. every observer of young children knows the great variety in the rapidity of their development, and will agree with me in general that a slow and steady development of the cerebral functions in the first four years, but especially in the first two years, justifies a more favorable prognosis than does a very hasty and unsteady development; but when during that period of time there occurs a complete and prolonged interruption of the mental development, then the danger is always great that the normal course will not be resumed. so much the more instructive, therefore, are the cases in which the children after such a standstill have come back to the normal condition. four observations of this kind have been published by r. demme (" . bericht über das jenner'sche kinderspital in bern, ," s. bis ). these are of so great interest in their bearing on psychogenesis, and they confirm in so striking a manner some of the propositions laid down by me in this book, that i should like to print them here word for word, especially as the original does not appear to have found a wide circulation; but that would make my book altogether too large. i confine myself, therefore, to this reference, with the request that further cases of partial or total interruption of mental development during the first year of life, with a later progress in it, may be collected and made public. it is only in rare cases that microcephalous children can be observed, while living, for any considerable length of time continuously. in this respect a case described by aeby is particularly instructive. a microcephalous boy was born of healthy parents--he was their first child--about four weeks too soon. his whole body had something of stiffness and awkwardness. the legs were worse off in this respect than the arms; they showed, as they continued to show up to the time of his death, a tendency to become crossed. the boy was never able to stand or walk. he made attempts to seize striking objects, white or party-colored, but never learned actually to hold anything. the play of feature was animated. the dark eyes, shining and rapidly moving, never lingered long upon one and the same object. the child was much inclined to bite, and always bit very sharply. mentally there was pronounced imbecility. in spite of his four years the boy never got so far as to produce any articulate sounds whatever. even simple words like "papa" and "mamma" were beyond his ability. his desire for anything was expressed in inarticulate and not specially expressive tones. his sleep was short and light; he often lay whole nights through with open eyes. he seldom shed tears; his discomfort was manifested chiefly by shrill screaming. he died of pulmonary paralysis at the end of the fourth year. the autopsy showed that the frontal lobes were surprisingly small, and that there was a partial deficiency of the median longitudinal fissure. the fissure did not begin till beyond the crown of the head, in the region of the occiput. the anterior half of the cerebrum consequently lacked the division into lateral hemispheres. it had few convolutions also, and the smoothness of its surface was at once obvious. the _corpus callosum_ and the _fornix_ were undeveloped. "the gray cortical layer attained in general only about a third of the normal thickness, and was especially weakly represented in the frontal region." the cerebellum not being stunted, seemed, by the side of the greatly shrunken cerebrum, surprisingly large. in this case the microcephalous of four years behaves, as far as the development of will is concerned, like the normal boy of four months. the latter is, in fact, superior to him in _seizing_, while the former in no way manifests any advantage in a psychical point of view. two cases of microcephaly have been described by fletcher beach (in the "transactions of the international medical congress," london, , iii, - ). e. r. was, in may, , received into his institution at the age of eleven years. she had at the time of her birth a small head, and had at no time manifested much intelligence. she could not stand or walk, but was able to move her arms and legs. her sight and hearing were normal. she was quiet and obedient, and sat most of the time in her chair. she paid no attention to her bodily needs. she could not speak and had to be fed with a spoon. after six months she became a little more intelligent, made an attempt to speak, and muttered something indistinctly. she would stretch out her hand when told to give it, and she recognized with a smile her nurse and the physician. some four months later she would grind her teeth when in a pleasant mood, and would act as if she were shy when spoken to, holding her hand before her eyes. she was fond of her nurse. thus there was capacity of observation, there were attention, memory, affection, and some power of voluntary movement. she died in january, . her brain weighed, two days after her death, seven ounces. it is minutely described by the author--but after it had been preserved in alcohol for six years, and it then weighed only two ounces. the author found a number of convolutions not so far developed as in the foetus of six months, according to gratiolet, and he is of opinion that the cerebellum was further developed after the cerebrum had ceased to grow, so that there was not an arrest of the development but an irregularity. the cerebral hemispheres were asymmetrical, the frontal lobes, corresponding to the psychical performances in the case, being relatively pretty large, while the posterior portion of the third convolution on the left side, the island of reil, and the operculum were very small, corresponding to the inability to learn to speak. the author connects the slight mobility with the smallness of the parietal and frontal ascending convolutions. the other case is that of a girl of six years (e. h.), who came to the institution in january, , and died in july of the same year. she could walk about, and she had complete control of her limbs. she was cheerful, easy to be amused, and greatly attached to her nurse. she associated with other children, but could not speak a word. her hearing was good, her habits bad. although she could pick up objects and play with them, it did not occur to her to feed herself. she could take notice and observe, and could remember certain persons. her brain weighed, two days after death, - / ounces, and was, in many respects, as simple as that of an infant; but, in regard to the convolutions, it was far superior to the brain of a monkey--was superior also to that of e. r. the ascending frontal and parietal convolutions were larger, corresponding to the greater mobility. the third frontal convolution and the island of reil were small on both sides, corresponding to the alalia. the author is of opinion that the ganglionic cells in this brain lacked processes, so that the intercentral connections did not attain development. a more accurate description of two brains of microcephali is given by julius sander in the "archiv für psychiatrie und nerven-krankheiten" (i, - ; berlin, ), accompanied by good plates. one of these cases is that of which an account is given by johannes müller (in the "medicinische zeitung des vereins für heilkunde in preussen," , nr. und ). in the full and detailed treatises concerning microcephali by karl vogt ("archiv für anthropologie," ii, , ) and von flesch ("würzburger festschrift," ii, , ) may be found further data in regard to more recent cases. many questions of physiological and psychological importance in respect to the capacity of development in cases of imperfectly developed brain are discussed in the "zeitschrift für das idioten-wesen" by w. schröter (dresden) and e. reichelt (hubertusburg). but thus far the methods of microscopical investigation of the brain are still so little developed that we can not yet with certainty establish a causal connection, in individual cases, between the deviations of microcephalic brains from the normal brain and the defects of the psychical functions. the number of brains of microcephali that have been examined with reference to this point is very small, although their scientific value, after thorough-going observation of the possessors of them during life, is immense. for microcephalous children of some years of age are a substitute for imaginary, because never practicable, vivisectory experiments, concerning the connection of body and mind. to conclude these fragments, let me add here some observations concerning a case of rare interest, that of the microcephalous child, margarethe becker (born ), very well known in germany. these observations i recorded on the th of july, , in jena, while the child was left free to do what she pleased. the girl, eight years of age, born, according to the testimony of her father, with the frontal fontanelle (fonticulus anterior) closed and solid, had a smaller head than a child of one year. the notes follow the same order as that of the observations. _time, . a. m._--the child yawns. she grasps with animation at some human skulls that she sees on a table near her, and directs her look to charts on the walls. she puts her fingers into her nostrils, brushes her apron with both hands, polishes my watch, which i have offered her and she has seized, holds it to one ear, then to one of her father's ears, draws her mouth into a smile, seems to be pleased by the ticking, holds the watch to her father's other ear, then to her own other ear, laughs, and repeats the experiment several times. her head is very mobile. the child now folds a bit of paper that i have given her, rolls it up awkwardly, wrinkling her forehead the while, chews up the paper and laughs aloud. saliva flows from her mouth almost incessantly. then the child begins to eat a biscuit, giving some of it, however, to her father and the attendant, putting her biscuit to their lips, and this with accuracy at once, whereas in the former case the watch was held at first near the ear, to the temple, and not till afterward to the ear itself. the girl is very lively; she strikes about her in a lively manner with her hands, sees charts hanging high on the walls, points to them with her finger, throws her head back upon her neck to see them better, and _moves her fingers in the direction of the lines_ of the diagrams. at last weariness seems to come on. the child puts an arm around the neck of her father, sits on his lap, but is more and more restless. _ . ._--quiet. to appearance, the child has fallen asleep. _ . ._--awake again. the child _sees_ well, _hears_ well, _smells_ well; obeys some few commands, e. g., she gives her hand. but with this her intellectual accomplishments are exhausted. she does not utter a word. kollmann, who saw this microcephalous subject in september, , writes, among other things, of her ("correspondenzblatt der deutschengesellschaft für anthropologie," nr. , s. ): "her gait is tottering, the movements of the head and extremities jerky, not always co-ordinated, hence unsteady, inappropriate and spasmodic; her look is restless, objects are not definitely fixated. the normal functions of her mind are far inferior to those of a child of four years. the eight-year-old margaret speaks only the word _mama_; no other articulate sound has been learned by her. she makes known her need of food by plaints, by sounds of weeping, and by distortion of countenance; she laughs when presented with something to eat or with toys. it is only within the last two years that she has become cleanly; since then her appetite has improved. her nutrition has gained, in comparison with the first years of life, and with it her comprehension also; she helps her mother set the table, and brings plates and knives, when requested to do so, from the place where they are kept. further, she shows a tender sympathy with her microcephalous brother; she takes bread from the table, goes to her brother's bedside and feeds him, as he is not of himself capable of putting food into his mouth. she shows a very manifest liking for her relatives and a fear of strangers. when taken into the parlor she gave the most decided evidences of fear; being placed upon the table she hid her head in her father's coat, and did not become quiet until her mother took her in her arms. this awakening of mental activity shows that, notwithstanding the extremely small quantity of brain-substance, there exists a certain degree of intellectual development with advancing years. with the fourth year, in the case of m., independent movements began; up to that time she lay, as her five-year-old brother still lies, immovable in body and limbs, with the exception of slight bendings and stretchings." richard pott, who ( ) likewise observed this microcephalous subject, found that she wandered about aimlessly, restlessly, and nimbly, from corner to corner [as if], groping and seeking; yet objects held before her were only momentarily fixated, scarcely holding her attention; often she did not once grasp at them. "the girl goes alone, without tottering or staggering, but her locomotive movements are absolutely without motive, having no end or aim, frequently changing their direction. notwithstanding her size, the child gives the impression of the most extreme helplessness." she was fed, but was not indifferent as to food, seeming to prefer sour to sweet. she would come, indeed, when she was called, but seemed not to understand the words spoken to her; she spoke no word herself, but uttered shrill, inarticulate sounds; she felt shame when she was undressed, hiding her face in her sister's lap. the expression of her countenance was harmless, changeable, manifesting no definite psychical processes. the statements contradictory to those of kollmann are probably to be explained by the brevity of the observations. virchow ("correspondenzblatt," s. ), in his remarks upon this case, says: "i am convinced that every one who observes the microcephalic child will find that psychologically it has nothing whatever of the ape. all the positive faculties and qualities of the ape are wanting here; there is nothing of the psychology of the ape, but only the psychology of an imperfectly developed and deficient little child. every characteristic is human; every single trait. i had the girl in my room a few months since, for hours together, and occupied myself with her; i never observed anything in her that reminds me even remotely of the psychological conditions of apes. she is a human being, in a low stage of development, but in no way deviating from the nature of humanity." from these reports it is plain to be seen that for all mental development an hereditary physical growth of the cerebrum is indispensable. if the sensuous impressions experienced anew in each case by each human being, and the original movements, were sufficient without the development of the cerebral convolutions and of the gray cortex, then these microcephalous beings, upon whom the same impressions operated as upon other new-born children, must have had better brains and must have learned more. but the brain, notwithstanding the peripheral impressions received in seeing, hearing, and feeling, could not grow, and so the rudimentary human child could not learn anything, and could not even form the ideas requisite for articulate voluntary movement, or combine these ideas. only the motor centers of lower rank could be developed. in peculiar contrast with these cases of genuine microcephaly stands the exceedingly remarkable case, observed by dr. rudolf krause (hamburg), of a boy whose brain is not at all morbidly affected or abnormally small, but exhibits decidedly the type of the brain of the ape. the discoverer reported upon it to the anthropological society ("correspondenzblatt a.a. o., s. - ) the following facts among others: "the skull and brain belonged to a boy who was born on the th of october, , the last of four children. paul was scrofulous from his youth. he did not get his teeth until the end of his second year, and they were quite brown in color and were soon lost. according to the statement of paul's mother, he had several successive sets of teeth. it was not until the fifth year that he learned to walk. he was cleanly from the third year, but not when he felt ill. his appetite was always good up to his last sickness of four weeks. his sleep was habitually undisturbed. he was of a cheerful temperament, and inclined to play; as soon as he heard music he would dance, and sing to the music in rather unmelodious tones. when teased he could be very violent; he would throw anything he could lay his hands on at the head of the offender. he liked the company of others, especially of men. by the time he was four years old he had learned to eat without help. paul was very supple, was fond of climbing, and had great strength in his arms and hands especially; these had actually a horny appearance, and thus reminded one of the hands of the chimpanzee. he could sit on the ground with his legs wide apart. his gait was uncertain, and he was apt to tumble; he ran with knees bent forward and legs crooked; he was fond of hopping, and seemed particularly ape-like when doing so. the great-toe of each foot stood off at an angle from the foot, and thus gave the impression of a prehensile toe. i thought at first that this deviation had its origin in the fact that the child, on account of his uncertainty in walking, wanted to get a broader basis of support; but i afterward gave up that opinion, because i have never found an instance of a similar habit in other children with diseased heads, e. g., hydrocephalous children. paul could speak but little, could say hardly any words except _papa_ and _mama_, and even these he did not until late learn to pronounce in two syllables; he uttered for the most part only sounds that resembled a grunt. he imitated the barking of a dog by the sound _rrrrrr_. he frequently stamped with feet and hands, clapped his hands together, and ejaculated a sort of grunting sound, just as i have observed in the case of gorillas and chimpanzees. "paul was smaller than children of his age; on his right eye he had from his youth a large leucoma; the eyelids had generally a catarrhal affection, and were in a state of suppuration. the head looked sore; the forehead was small. paul had a strongly marked tendency to imitation. his whole being, his movements, were strikingly ape-like. he was decidedly neglected by his parents, was generally dirty in appearance, and i really think the early death of the child was induced by the slight care taken of him. paul was taken sick at the beginning of december, , with an acute bronchial catarrh, and died on the th of january, , at the age of seven and a quarter years. "if you look at the cranium and the brain here, which belonged to the child just described, there are lacking in the first place all the characteristics of microcephaly. the cranium possesses a capacity of , cubic centimetres, and the brain weighs grammes; they do not deviate, therefore, from the normal condition. but let the cranium, where it is laid open by the saw, be observed from within, and we notice an _asymmetry of the two hemispheres of the brain_; the cranium is pushed somewhat forward and to the right. the _partes orbitales_ of the frontal bone are higher and more arched than is usual, in consequence of which the _lamina cribrosa_ of the ethmoid bone lies deeper, and room is given for the well-known conformation of the ethmoidal process in the brain. the cerebral convolutions are plainly marked upon the inner surface of the cranium. the facial cranium shows no deviations. there is no prognathism. the formation of the teeth alone is irregular; one pre-molar tooth is lacking above and below in the jaw, and, in fact, there is no place for it. the incisors and the pre-molar teeth are undergoing change. "the two cerebral hemispheres are asymmetrical; in the region where the parieto-occipital fissure is situated on the left hemisphere, the two hemispheres diverge from each other and form an edge which curves outward and backward, so that the cerebellum remains uncovered. on the lower surface of the frontal lobes there exists a strongly marked ethmoidal prominence. neither of the fissures of sylvius is quite closed, the left less so than the right; the operculum is but slightly developed, and the island of reil lies with its fissures almost entirely uncovered. this conformation reminds us throughout of the brain of the anthropoid apes. the two _sulci centrales sive fissuræ rolandi_ run straight to the border of the hemisphere, less deeply impressed than is normally the case, without forming an angle with each other. very strongly and deeply impressed _sulci præcentrales_ seem to serve as substitutes for them. the _sulcus interparietalis,_ which begins farther outward than in the ordinary human being, receives the _sulcus parieto-occipitalis_--a structure in conformity with the typical brain of the ape. the _sulcus occipitalis transversus_, which is generally lightly stamped in man, extends here as a deep fissure across over the occipital lobe, thus producing a so-called simian fissure, and the posterior part of the occipital lobe has the appearance of an operculum. the _fissura calcarina_ has its origin directly on the surface of the occipital lobe, does not receive until late the _fissura parieto-occipitalis_, and goes directly, on the right side, into the _fissura hippocampi_. this abnormal structure also is typical for the brain of the ape. "the _gyrus occipitalis primus_ is separated from the upper parietal lobe by the _sulcus parieto-occipitalis_, a formation that, according to gratiolet, exists in many apes. the _gyrus temporalis superior_ is greatly reduced on both sides, and has an average breadth of only five millimetres; it is the one peculiarity that recalls emphatically the brain of the chimpanzee, which always has this reduced upper temporal convolution. "we have here, then, a brain that scarcely deviates from the normal brain in volume, that possesses all the convolutions and fissures, seeming, perhaps, richer than the average brain in convolutions, and that is in every respect differentiated; and notwithstanding all this it approximates, in its whole structure, to the simian rather than to the human type. had the brain been placed before me without my knowing its origin, i should have been perfectly justified in assigning this brain to an anthropoid ape standing somewhat nearer to man than does the chimpanzee." no second case of this sort has thus far been observed. c. reports concerning the process of learning to see, on the part of persons born blind, but acquiring sight through surgical treatment. also some critical remarks. i. the chesselden case. the following extracts are taken from the report published by will. chesselden in the "philosophical transactions for the months of april, may, and june, " (no. , london, pp. - ), or the "philosophical transactions from to , abridged by j. eames and j. martyn" (vii, , pp. - , london, ): "though we say of the gentleman that he was blind, as we do of all people who have ripe cataracts, yet they are never so blind from that cause but that they can discern day from night, and, for the most part, in a strong light distinguish black, white, and scarlet; but they can not perceive the shape of anything.... and thus it was with this young gentleman, who, though he knew these colors asunder in a good light, yet when he saw them after he was couched, the faint ideas he had of them before were not sufficient for him to know them by afterward, and therefore he did not think them the same which he had known before by those names.... "when he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment about distances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin, and thought no objects so agreeable as those which were smooth and regular. he knew not the shape of anything nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude; but upon being told what things were, whose form he before knew from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again. but, having too many objects to learn at once, he forgot many of them, and (as he said) at first he learned to know and again forgot a thousand things in a day. having often forgot which was the cat and which the dog, he was ashamed to ask; but catching the cat (which he knew by feeling), he was observed to look at her steadfastly, and then, setting her down, said, 'so, puss, i shall know you another time.' he was very much surprised that those things which he had liked best did not appear most agreeable to his eyes, expecting those persons would appear most beautiful that he loved most, and such things to be most agreeable to his sight that were so to his taste. we thought he soon knew what pictures represented which were showed to him, but we found afterward we were mistaken, for about two months after he was couched he discovered at once they represented solid bodies, when to that time he considered them only as party-colored planes or surfaces diversified with variety of paint; but even then he was no less surprised, expecting the pictures would feel like the things they represented, and was amazed when he found those parts, which by their light and shadow appeared now round and uneven, felt only flat like the rest, and asked which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing? "being shown his father's picture in a locket at his mother's watch and told what it was, he acknowledged a likeness, but was vastly surprised, asking how it could be that a large face could be expressed in so little room. "at first he could bear but very little sight, and the things he saw he thought extremely large; but, upon seeing things larger, those first seen he conceived less, never being able to imagine any lines beyond the bounds he saw. the room he was in he said he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger. before he was couched he expected little advantage from seeing, except reading and writing. blindness, he observed, had this advantage, that he could go anywhere in the dark much better than those who could see, and after he had seen he did not soon lose this quality nor desire a light to go about the house in the night. "a year after first seeing, being carried upon epsom downs and observing a large prospect, he was exceedingly delighted with it and called it a new kind of seeing; and now being lately couched of his other eye, he says that objects at first appeared large to this eye but not so large as they did at first to the other, and, looking upon the same object with both eyes, he thought it looked about twice as large as with the first couched eye only, but not double, that we can anywise discover." remark on the first case. although this chesselden case is the most famous of all, and the most frequently cited, it belongs, nevertheless, to those most inaccurately described. it is, however, not only the first in the order of time, but especially important for the reason that it demonstrates in a striking manner the slow acquirement of space-perception by the eye, and also the acquirement of the first and second dimensions of space (cf. vol. i, p. ). ii., iii. the ware cases. one of these cases is that of a boy, who at the age of seven years recovered his sight which he had lost in the first half-year of his life. the surgeon who performed the operation, james ware, writes ("philosophical transactions of the royal society for ," ii, london, , pp. - ): "the young w. appeared to be a healthy, perfect child; his eyes in particular were large and rather prominent. about the end of his first year, a number of persons passing in procession near his father's house, accompanied with music and flags, the child was taken to see them; but, instead of looking at the procession, it was observed that, though he was evidently much pleased with the music, his eyes were never directed to the place from whence the sound came. his mother, alarmed by this discovery, held silver spoons and other glaring objects before him at different distances, and she was soon convinced that he was unable to perceive any of them. a surgeon was consulted, who, on examining the eyes, pronounced that there was a complete cataract in each. all thoughts of assisting his sight were (for the present) relinquished. as soon as he could speak it was observed that when an object was held close to his eyes he was able to distinguish its color if strongly marked, but on no occasion did he ever notice its outline or figure. i performed the operation on the left eye on the th of december, . the eye was immediately bound up, and no inquiries made on that day with regard to his sight. on the th i found that he had experienced a slight sickness on the preceding evening. on the st, as soon as i entered his chamber, the mother with much joy informed me that her child could see. about an hour before my visit he was standing near the fire, with a handkerchief tied loosely over his eyes, when he told her that under the handkerchief, which had slipped upward, he could distinguish the table by the side of which she was sitting. it was about a yard and a half from him, and he observed that it was covered with a green cloth (which was really the case), and that it was a little farther off than he was able to reach.... desirous to ascertain whether he was able to distinguish objects, i held a letter before him at the distance of about twelve inches, when he told me, after a short hesitation, that it was a piece of paper; that it was square, which he knew by its corners; and that it was longer in one direction than it was in the other. on being desired to point to the corners, he did it with great precision and readily carried his finger in the line of its longest diameter. i then showed him a small oblong bandbox covered with red leather, which he said was red and square, and pointed at once to its four corners. after this i placed before him an oval silver box, which he said had a shining appearance, and presently afterward that it was round, because it had not corners. a white stone mug he first called a white basin, but soon after, recollecting himself, said it was a mug because it had a handle. i held the objects at different distances from his eye and inquired very particularly if he was sensible of any difference in their situation, which he always said he was, informing me on every change whether they were brought nearer to or carried farther from him. i again inquired, both of his mother and himself, whether he had ever before this time distinguished by sight any sort of object, and i was assured by both that he never had on any occasion, and that when he wished to discover colors, which he could only do when they were very strong, he had always been obliged to hold the colored object close to his eye and a little on one side to avoid the projection of the nose. no further experiments were made on that day. on the st of january i found that he felt no uneasiness on the approach of light. i showed him a table-knife, which at first he called a spoon, but soon rectified the mistake, giving it the right name and distinguishing the blade from the handle by pointing to each as he was desired. he called a yellow pocket-book by its name, taking notice of the silver lock in the cover. i held my hand before him, which he knew, but could not at first tell the number of my fingers nor distinguish one of them from another. i then held up his own hand and desired him to remark the difference between his thumb and his fingers, after which he readily pointed out the distinctions in mine also. dark-colored and smooth objects were more agreeable to him than those which were bright and rough. on the d of january he saw from the drawing-room window a dancing bear in the street and distinguished a number of boys that were standing round him, noticing particularly a bundle of clothes which one of them had on his head. on the same evening i placed him before a looking-glass and held up his hand. after a little time he smiled and said he saw the shadow of his hand as well as that of his head. he could not then distinguish his features; but on the following day, his mother having again placed him before the glass, he pointed to his eyes, nose, and mouth. the young w., a remarkably intelligent boy (of seven years), gave the most direct and satisfactory answers to every question that was put to him, and, though not born blind, certainly had not any recollection of having ever seen. the right eye was operated upon a month after the left, but without the least success." in regard to the other case, ware writes: "in the instance of a young gentleman from ireland, fourteen years old, from each of whose eyes i extracted a cataract in the year , and who, before the operation, assured me, as did his friends, that he had never seen the figure of any object, i was astonished by the facility with which, on the first experiment, he took hold of my hand at different distances, mentioning whether it was brought nearer to or carried farther from him, and conveying his hand to mine in a circular direction, that we [ware and another physician] might be the better satisfied of the accuracy with which he did it." in this case, as in others of like nature, ware could not, "although the patients had certainly been blind from early infancy," satisfy himself "that they had not, before this period, enjoyed a sufficient degree of sight to impress the image of visible objects on their minds, and to give them ideas which could not afterward be entirely obliterated." ware found, moreover, that, in the case of two children between seven and eight years of age, both blind from birth, and on whom no operation had been performed, the knowledge of colors, limited as it was, was sufficient to enable them to tell whether colored objects were brought nearer to or carried farther from them; for instance, whether they were at the distance of two inches or four inches from their eyes; and he himself observes that they were not, in strictness of speech, blind, though they were deprived of all useful sight. remarks on the second and third cases. it is a surprising thing, in the account of the former case, that nothing whatever is said of the behavior of the patient on the first and on the fourth day after the operation. we must assume that he passed the first day wholly with his eyes bandaged. further, the boy pointed out four corners of a box, while the box had eight; yet no inference can be drawn from this, for possibly only one side of the box was shown to him. the most remarkable thing is the statement of the patient that he saw the _shadow_ of his hand in the glass. this circumstance, and the astonishing certainty, at the very first attempts to estimate space-relations, in the discrimination of round and angular, and in the observation that the table was somewhat farther from him than he could reach, show what influence the mere ability to perceive colors has upon vision in space. before the operation, w. distinguished only striking colors from one another; but he could perceive nearness and distance of colored objects, within narrow limits, by the great differences in the luminous intensity of the colors. he distinguished with certainty dimness from brightness. accordingly, when he noticed a decrease in the brightness of a color, he inferred the distance of the colored object from the eye, regulating his judgment also by touch. thus the boy had, before the operation, some perception of space with the eye, and it is not much to be wondered at, considering his uncommon intelligence, that he, soon after the operation (probably attempts at seeing were secretly made by the patient on the first day) learned to judge pretty surely of space-relations--much more surely than a person born blind learns to judge in so short a time. besides, it is not to be forgotten that, while it is true that the cataract had become completely developed at the end of the first year of life, there is no proof that the child was unable to see during the first months. at that time images, as in the second case, may have unconsciously impressed themselves, with which, at a later period, more accurate space-ideas may have been associated, through the sense of touch, than is the case with persons born completely blind. ware concludes, from his observations-- . "when children are born blind, in consequence of having cataracts in their eyes, they are never so totally deprived of sight as not to be able to distinguish colors; and, though they can not see the figure of an object, nor even its color, unless it be placed within a very short distance, they nevertheless can tell whether, when within this distance, it be brought nearer to or carried farther from them. . "in consequence of this power, whilst in a state of comparative blindness, children who have their cataracts removed are enabled immediately on the acquisition of sight to form some judgment of the distance, and even of the outline, of those strongly defined objects with the color of which they were previously acquainted." both these conclusions are simply matter of fact. it only needs explanation how the distance and outlines of objects can be known after the operation _in consequence of_ the ability described in the first proposition. that distance is actually estimated at once in consequence of this power, is clear; not so with the outlines. how can round and angular be distinguished, when only colors and gross differences of intensity and saturation are perceived? ware gives no solution of the difficulty, but thinks that, because the colors appeared more intense, the previously imperfect ideas concerning distances might be improved and extended, so that they would even give a knowledge of the boundary-lines and of the form of those things with the color of which the patients were previously acquainted. but this improvement of the ideas concerning distance can not lead directly to discrimination of the limits of objects, and is itself hypothetical, inasmuch as we might expect, _immediately_ after the operation, on account of the enormous difference in the luminous intensity, an uncertainty in the judgment. but such uncertainty appeared only in a slight degree in both the cases, a thing possible only because there had already been sufficient experiences with the eye. but these experiences, as is frequently stated, were absolutely lacking in regard to the limits and the form of objects. here another thing comes in to help. evidently, an eye that distinguishes only colors sees these colors always only as limited; even if it saw only a single color that occupied the whole field of vision, the field would still be a limited one. but the colored field may be small or large, and this difference may be noticed before the operation. if the object--one of vivid coloring--is long and narrow, the patient, even before the operation, will see it otherwise than if it is, with the same coloring, short and broad. and suppose he merely observes that not the whole field of vision is colored. if the whole field is colored, there is, of course, an entire lack of angles; on the other hand, if the whole field of vision is not filled by the colored object, then it is--however faintly--divided, and the lines of division, i. e., the indistinct boundary-lines of the objects whose color is perceived, may be either like the natural limits of the entire field of vision, i. e., "round," or unlike them, i. e., "angular." if, now, the obstacle is suddenly removed, the patient (even if he did not before the operation distinguish angular and round by the eye) must yet perceive which of the objects before him resemble in contour the previous field of vision, i. e., are round, and which do not; for the round contour of his field of vision is familiar to him. but w. had learned, through the sense of touch, that what is not round is angular. he would, therefore, even if he could perceive colors when the whole field of vision was filled--a matter on which we have no information--be able to guess the outlines of some objects soon after the operation, merely on the ground of his experiences before it. it was guess-work every time, as appears from the confounding of knife and spoon, mug and basin. the boy must have thought, "how would it be if i felt of it?" and, as he had before the operation frequently observed that whatever had the same contour as his field of vision, or a contour similar to that, was round, he could, after the operation, distinguish round and not round--a thing which a person born blind, on the other hand, and knowing nothing of his field of vision, because he has never had any, can never do. on the whole, the two ware cases are by no means so important as the franz (see below) and chesselden cases, because the boy, w., had ample opportunity up to his seventh year for learning to distinguish different colors according to their quality and luminous intensity; because he must have known the limits of his field of vision, and could in any case, by means of touch, correct and relatively confirm his very frequent attempts to guess at forms and distances by the eye. finally, it is not known whether he became blind before or immediately after his birth, or, as is most probable, not till some months after birth. the same is true of the second case. iv, v. the home cases. everard home makes the following statement in the "philosophical transactions of the royal society," london, , i, pp. - , : " . william stiff, twelve years of age, had cataracts in his eyes, which, according to the account of his mother, existed at the time of birth. from earliest infancy he never stretched out his hand to catch at anything, nor were his eyes directed to objects placed before him, but rolled about in a very unusual manner. the eyes were not examined till he was six months old, and at that time the cataracts were as distinct as when he was received into the hospital. he could at that time (july , ) distinguish light from darkness, and the light of the sun from that of a fire or candle; he said it was redder and more pleasant to look at, but lightning made a still stronger impression on his eyes. all these different lights he called red. the sun appeared to him the size of his hat. the candle-flame was larger than his finger and smaller than his arm. when he looked at the sun, he said it appeared to touch his eye. when a lighted candle was placed before him, both his eyes were directed toward it, and moved together. when it was at any nearer distance than twelve inches, he said it touched his eyes. when moved farther off he said it did not touch them, and at twenty-two inches it became invisible. "on the st of july the operation of extracting the crystalline lens was performed on the left eye. light became very distressing to his eye. after allowing the eyelids to remain closed for a few minutes, and then opening them, the pupil appeared clear, but he could not bear exposure to light. on my asking him what he had seen, he said, 'your head, which seemed to touch my eye,' but he could not tell its shape. on the d the light was less offensive. he said he saw my head, which touched his eye. on the d the eye was less inflamed, and he could bear a weak light. he said he could see several gentlemen round him, but could not describe their figure. my face, while i was looking at his eye, he said was round and red. from the th of july to the st of august there was inflammation. on the th of august an attempt was made to ascertain the powers of vision; it became necessary to shade the glare of light by hanging a white cloth before the window. the least exertion fatigued the eye, and the cicatrix on the cornea, to which the iris had become attached, drew it down so as considerably to diminish the pupil. the attempt had therefore to be postponed. "on the th of september the right eye was couched. the light was so distressing to his eye that the lids were closed as soon as it was over. the eyes were not examined with respect to their vision till the th of october; the boy remained quiet in the hospital. on this day he could discern a white, red, or yellow color, particularly when bright and shining. the sun and other objects did not now seem to touch his eyes as before, they appeared to be at a short distance from him. the right eye had the most distinct vision, but in both it was imperfect. the distance at which he saw best was five inches. when the object was of a bright color, and illuminated by a strong light, he could make out that it was flat and broad; and when one corner of a square substance was pointed out to him, he saw it, and could find out the other, which was at the end of the same side, but could not do this under less favorable circumstances. when the four corners of a white card were pointed out, and he had examined them, he seemed to know them; but when the opposite surface of the same card, which was yellow, was placed before him, he could not tell whether it had corners or not, so that he had not acquired any correct knowledge of them, since he could not apply it to the next colored surface, whose form was exactly the same with that, the outline of which the eye had just been taught to trace.... " . john salter, seven years of age, was admitted into st. george's hospital on the st of october, , with cataracts in both eyes, which, according to the accounts of his relations, had existed from his birth. the pupils contracted considerably when a lighted candle was placed before him, and dilated as soon as it was withdrawn. he was capable of distinguishing colors with tolerable accuracy, particularly the more bright and vivid ones. on the th of october the left eye was couched. the eye was allowed ten minutes to recover itself; a round piece of card, of a yellow color, one inch in diameter, was then placed about six inches from it. he said immediately that it was yellow, and, on being asked its shape, said, 'let me touch it, and i will tell you.' being told that he must not touch it, after looking for some time, he said it was round. a square, blue card, nearly the same size, being put before him, he said it was blue and round. a triangular piece he also called round. the different colors of the objects placed before him he instantly decided on with great correctness, but had no idea of their form. he saw best at a distance of six or seven inches. he was asked whether the object seemed to touch his eye; he said, 'no,' but when desired to say at what distance it was, he could not tell. the eye was covered, and he was put to bed and told to keep himself quiet; but upon the house-surgeon going to him half an hour afterward, his eye was found uncovered, and he was looking at his bed-curtains, which were close drawn. the bandage was replaced, but so delighted was the boy with seeing, that he again immediately removed it. the house-surgeon could not enforce his instructions, and repeated the experiment about two hours after the operation. upon being shown a square, and asked if he could find any corners to it, the boy was very desirous of touching it. this being refused, he examined it for some time, and said at last that he had found a corner, and then readily counted the four corners of the square; and afterward, when a triangle was shown him, he counted the corners in the same way; but in doing so his eye went along the edge from corner to corner, naming them as he went along. next day he told me he had seen 'the soldiers with their fifes and pretty things.' the guards in the morning had marched past the hospital with their band; on hearing the music, he had got out of bed and gone to the window to look at them. seeing the bright barrels of muskets, he must in his mind have connected them with the sounds which he heard, and mistaken them for musical instruments. twenty-four hours after the operation the pupil of the eye was clear. a pair of scissors was shown him, and he said it was a knife. on being told he was wrong, he could not make them out; but the moment he touched them he said they were scissors, and seemed delighted with the discovery. "from this time he was constantly improving himself by looking at, and examining with his hands, everything within his reach, but he frequently forgot what he had learned. on the th i saw him again. he went to the window and called out, 'what is that moving?' i asked him what he thought it was. he said: 'a dog drawing a wheelbarrow. there is one, two, three dogs drawing another. how very pretty!' these proved to be carts and horses on the road, which he saw from a two-pair-of-stairs window. "on the th the different colored pieces of card were separately placed before his eye, and so little had he gained in thirteen days that he could not, without counting their corners one by one, tell their shape. this he did with great facility, running his eye quickly along the outline, so that it was evident he was still learning, just as a child learns to read. he had got so far as to know the angles, when they were placed before him, and to count the number belonging to any one object. the reason of his making so slow a progress was, that these figures had never been subjected to examination by touch, and were unlike anything he had been accustomed to see. he had got so much the habit of assisting his eyes with his hands, that nothing but holding them could keep them from the object. "on the th the experiments were again repeated on the couched eye. it was now found that the boy, on looking at any one of the cards in a good light, could tell the form nearly as readily as the color." from these two instructive cases home concludes: "that, where the eye, before the cataract is removed, has only been capable of discerning light, without being able to distinguish colors, objects after its removal will seem to touch the eye, and there will be no knowledge of their outline, which confirms the observations made by chesselden. "that where the eye has previously distinguished colors, there must also be an imperfect knowledge of distances, but not of outline, which, however, will be very soon acquired, as happened in ware's cases. this is proved by the history of the first boy, who, before the operation had no knowledge of colors or distances, but after it, when his eye had only arrived at the same state that the second boy's was in before the operation, he had learned that the objects were at a distance and of different colors. "that when a child has acquired a new sense, nothing but great pain or absolute coercion will prevent him from making use of it." vi. the wardrop case. james wardrop reports ("philosophical transactions of the royal society for ," iii, - , london, ): "a girl who was observed, during the first months of her infancy, to have something peculiar in the appearance of her eyes and an unusual groping manner which made her parents suspect that she had defective vision, had an operation performed on both eyes at the age of about six months. the right eye was entirely destroyed in consequence. the left eye was preserved, but the child could only distinguish a very light from a very dark room without having the power to perceive even the situation of the window through which the light entered, though in sunshine or in bright moonlight she knew the direction from which the light emanated. in this case no light could reach the retina except such rays as could pass through the substance of the iris. until her forty-sixth year the patient could not perceive objects and had no notion of colors. on the th of january i introduced a very small needle through the cornea and the center of the iris; but i could not destroy any of the adhesions which had shut up the pupillar opening. after this operation she said she could distinguish more light, but she could perceive neither forms nor colors. on the th of february the iris (a portion of it) was divided. the light became offensive to her. she complained of its brightness, and was frequently observed trying to see her hands; but it was evident that her vision was very imperfect, for, although there was an incision made in the iris, some opaque matter lay behind the opening, which must have greatly obstructed the entrance of light. "on the th of february a third operation. the opening was enlarged and the opaque matter removed. the operation being performed at my house, she returned home in a carriage, with her eye covered only with a loose piece of silk, and the first thing she noticed was a hackney-coach passing, when she exclaimed, 'what is that large thing that has passed by us?' in the course of the evening she requested her brother to show her his watch, concerning which she expressed much curiosity, and she looked at it a considerable time, holding it close to her eye. she was asked what she saw, and she said there was a dark and a bright side; she pointed to the hour of twelve, and smiled. her brother asked her if she saw anything more. she replied, 'yes,' and pointed to the hour of six and to the hands of the watch. she then looked at the chain and seals, and observed that one of the seals was bright, which was the case. the following day i asked her to look again at the watch, which she refused to do, saying that the light was offensive to her eye and that she felt very stupid, meaning that she was much confused by the visible world thus for the first time opened to her. "on the third day she observed the doors on the opposite side of the street and asked if they were red, but they were, in fact, of an oak-color. in the evening she looked at her brother's face and said that she saw his nose. he asked her to touch it, which she did. he then slipped a handkerchief over his face and asked her to look again, when she playfully pulled it off and asked, 'what is that?' "on the sixth day she told us that she saw better than she had done on any preceding day; 'but i can not tell what i do see. i am quite stupid.' she felt disappointed in not having the power of distinguishing at once by her eye objects which she could so readily distinguish from one another by feeling them. "on the seventh day she observed that the mistress of the house was tall. she asked what the color of her gown was, to which she was answered that it was blue. 'so is that thing on your head,' she then observed, which was the case; 'and your handkerchief, that is a different color,' which was also correct. she added, 'i see you pretty well, i think.' the teacups and saucers underwent an examination. 'what are they like?' her brother asked her. 'i don't know,' she replied, 'they look very queer to me, but i can tell what they are in a minute when i touch them.' she distinguished an orange, but could form no notion of what it was till she touched it. she seemed now to have become more cheerful, and she was very sanguine that she would find her newly acquired faculty of more use to her when she returned home, where everything was familiar to her. "on the eighth day she asked her brother 'what he was helping himself to?' and when she was told it was a glass of port wine, she replied, 'port wine is dark, and looks to me very ugly.' she observed, when candles were brought into the room, her brother's face in the mirror as well as that of a lady who was present; she also walked for the first time without assistance from her chair to a sofa which was on the opposite side of the room and back again to the chair. when at tea she took notice of the tray, observed the shining of the japan-work, and asked 'what the color was round the edge?' she was told that it was yellow, upon which she remarked, 'i will know that again.' "on the ninth day she came down-stairs to breakfast in great spirits. she said to her brother, 'i see you very well to-day,' and came up to him and shook hands. she also observed a ticket on a window of a house on the opposite side of the street ('a lodging to let'), and her brother, to convince himself of her seeing it, took her to the window three separate times, and to his surprise and gratification she pointed it out to him distinctly on each trial. "she spent a great part of the eleventh day looking out of the window, and spoke very little. "on the twelfth day she went to walk with her brother. the clear blue sky first attracted her notice, and she said, 'it is the prettiest thing i have ever seen yet, and equally pretty every time i turn round and look at it.' she distinguished the street from the foot-pavement distinctly, and stepped from one to the other like a person accustomed to the use of her eyes. her great curiosity, and the manner in which she stared at the variety of objects and pointed to them, exciting the observation of many by-standers, her brother soon conducted her home, much against her will. "on the evening of the thirteenth day she observed that there was a different tea-tray, and that it was not a pretty one, but had a dark border, which was a correct description. her brother asked her to look in the mirror and tell him if she saw his face in it, to which she answered, evidently disconcerted: 'i see my own; let me go away.' "on the fourteenth day she drove in a carriage four miles, and noticed the trees, and likewise the river thames as she crossed vauxhall bridge. at this time it was bright sunshine, and she said something dazzled her when she looked on the water. "on the fifteenth day she walked to a chapel. the people passing on the pavement startled her, and once when a gentleman was going past her who had a white waistcoat and a blue coat with yellow buttons, which the sunshine brought full in her view, she started so as to draw her brother, who was walking with her, off the pavement. she distinguished the clergyman moving his hands in the pulpit, and observed that he held something in them. this was a white handkerchief. "on the sixteenth day she went in a coach through the town, and appeared much entertained with the bustle in the streets. on asking her how she saw on that day, she answered: 'i see a great deal, if i could only tell what i do see; but surely i am very stupid.' "on the seventeenth day, when her brother asked her how she was, she replied: 'i am well, and see better; but don't tease me with too many questions till i have learned a little better how to make use of my eye. all that i can say is, that i am sure, from what i do see, a great change has taken place, but i can not describe what i feel.' "on the eighteenth day, when pieces of paper one inch and a half square, differently colored, were presented to her, she not only distinguished them at once from one another, but gave a decided preference to some colors, liking yellow most, and then pale pink. when desirous of examining an object, she had considerable difficulty in directing her eye to it and finding out its position, moving her hand as well as her eye in various directions, as a person when blindfolded or in the dark gropes with his hands for what he wishes to touch. she also distinguished a large from a small object when they were both held up before her for comparison. she said she saw different forms in various objects which were shown to her. on asking what she meant by different forms, such as long, round, and square, and desiring her to draw with her finger these forms on her other hand, and then presenting to her eye the respective forms, she pointed to them exactly; she not only distinguished small from large objects, but knew what was meant by above and below. a figure, drawn with ink, was placed before her eye, having one end broad and the other narrow, and she saw the positions as they really were, and not inverted. "she could also perceive motions, for, when a glass of water was placed on the table before her, on approaching her hand near it, it was moved quickly to a greater distance, upon which she immediately said: 'you move it; you take it away.' "she seemed to have the greatest difficulty in finding out the distance of any object; for, when an object was held close to her eye, she would search for it by stretching her hand far beyond its position, while on other occasions she groped close to her own face for a thing far removed from her. "she learned with facility the names of the different colors, and two days after the colored papers had been shown to her, on coming into a room the color of which was crimson, she observed that it was red. she also observed some pictures hanging on the red wall of the room in which she was sitting, distinguishing several small figures in them, but not knowing what they represented, and admiring the gilt frames. on the same day she walked round a pond, and was pleased with the glistening of the sun's rays on the water, as well as with the blue sky and green shrubs, the colors of which she named correctly. "she had as yet acquired, by the use of her sight, but very little knowledge of any forms, and was unable to apply the information gained by this new sense, and to compare it with what she had been accustomed to acquire by her sense of touch. when, therefore, a silver pencil-case and a large key were given her to examine with her hands, she discriminated and knew each distinctly; but when they were placed on the table, side by side, though she distinguished each with her eye, yet she could not tell which was the pencil-case and which was the key. "on the twenty-fifth day after the operation she drove in a carriage for an hour in the regent's park, and asked more questions, on her way there, than usual, about the objects surrounding her, such as, 'what is that?' 'it is a soldier,' she was answered. 'and that? see, see!' these were candles of various colors in a tallow-chandler's window. 'who is that that has passed us just now?' it was a person on horseback. 'but what is that on the pavement, red?' it was some ladies who wore red shawls. on going into the park she was asked if she could guess what any of the objects were. 'oh, yes,' she replied, 'there is the sky; that is the grass; yonder is water, and two white things,' which were two swans. "when she left london, forty-two days after the operation, she had acquired a pretty accurate notion of colors and their different shades and names. she had not yet acquired anything like an accurate knowledge of distance or of forms, and, up to this period, she continued to be very much confused with every new object at which she looked. neither was she yet able, without considerable difficulty and numerous fruitless trials, to direct her eye to an object; so that, when she attempted to look at anything, she turned her head in various directions, until her eye caught the object of which it was in search." remarks on the sixth case. this case has been adduced as a proof that the sense of sight is sufficient, without aid from the sense of touch, to perceive whether an object is brought nearer the eye or carried farther from it. but john stuart mill rightly observes, in opposition to this ("dissertations and discussions," ii, ; london, ), that the observation we are concerned with was not made "till the eighteenth day after the operation, by which time a middle-aged woman might well have acquired the experience necessary for distinguishing so simple a phenomenon." besides, she was very uncertain in her judgment of distances, and, in her attempts to seize with the hand new and distant objects, she frequently acted exactly like an infant. vii. the franz case. j. c. a. franz, of leipsic, communicates the following to the "philosophical transactions of the royal society" (by sir benjamin c. brodie), (london, ; i, pp. - ): "f. j. is the son of a physician. he is endowed with an excellent understanding, quick power of conception, and retentive memory. at his birth, both eyes were found to be turned inward to such an extent that a portion of the cornea was hidden by the inner canthus, and in both pupils there was a yellowish-white discoloration. that the strabismus and cataract of both eyes in this case were congenital is evident from the testimony both of the parents and of the nurse. the latter held a light before the eyes of the child when he was a few months old, of which he took no notice. i ascertained also from her that the eyeballs did not move hither and thither, but were always turned inward, and that but rarely either the one or the other was moved from the internal canthus. "toward the end of the second year, as was stated to me, the operation of keratonyxis was performed on the right eye, upon which a severe iritis ensued, terminating in atrophy of the eyeball. within the next four years two similar operations were performed on the left eye without success. the color of the opacity became, however, of a clearer white, and the patient acquired a certain sensation of light, which he did not seem to have had before the operation. "at the end of june, , the patient, being then seventeen years of age, was brought to me. i found the condition of things as follows: both eyes were so much inverted that nearly one half the cornea was hidden. the left eye he could move voluntarily outward, but not without exertion; it returned immediately inward when the influence of the will had ceased. the left eyeball was of the natural size and elasticity. the patient had not the slightest perception of light with the right eye; the stimulus of light had no effect on the pupil. the pupil of the left eye, which was not round, but drawn angularly downward and inward, did not alter in dimension with the movements of the eye nor from the stimulus of light. on examining the eye by looking straight into it through the pupil, the anterior wall of the capsule appeared opaque in its whole extent, and of a color and luster like mother-of-pearl. on looking from the temporal side in an oblique direction into the pupil, there was visible in the anterior wall of the capsule a very small perpendicular cleft of about one line and a quarter in length. "this cleft was situated so far from the center of the pupil that it was entirely covered by the iris. with this eye the patient had a perception of light, and was even capable of perceiving colors of an intense and decided tone. he believed himself, moreover, able to perceive about one third of a square inch of any bright object, if held at the distance of half an inch or an inch from the eye, and obliquely in such a direction as to reflect the light strongly toward the pupil. but this, i am convinced, was a mere delusion, for all rays of light falling in the direction of the optic axis must have been intercepted and reflected by the opaque capsule. by these rays, therefore, a perception of light, indeed, might be conveyed, but certainly no perception of objects. on the other hand, it seems probable that the lateral cleft in the capsule permitted rays of light to pass into the interior of the eye. but as this small aperture was situated entirely behind the iris, those rays only would have permeated which came in a very oblique direction from the temporal side. admitting, then, these rays of light to pass through the cleft, still on account of their obliquity they could produce but a very imperfect image, because they impinged upon an unfavorable portion of the retina. moreover, i satisfied myself by experiments, that the patient could not in the least discern objects by sight. my experiments led me to the conclusion that his belief that he really saw objects resulted solely from his imagination combined with his power of reasoning. in feeling an object and bringing it in contact with the eyelids and the cheek, an idea of the object was produced, which was judged of and corrected according to the experience he had gained by constant practice. "the patient's sense of touch had attained an extraordinary degree of perfection. in order to examine an object minutely he conveyed it to his lips. "on the th of july, , i performed an operation on the left eye. the light was so painful to him that i could not try any experiments immediately after the operation. both eyes were closed with narrow strips of court-plaster, and treated with iced water for forty-eight hours. the patient suffered from _muscæ volitantes_, and could not bear even a mild degree of light falling on the closed lids. after the lapse of a few weeks, the _muscæ volitantes_ were greatly mitigated, and the intolerance of light ceased. "on opening the eye for the first time on the third day after the operation, i asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he saw an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion. he could not distinguish objects. the pain produced by the light forced him to close the eye immediately. "two days afterward the eye, which had been kept closed by means of court-plaster, was again opened. he now described what he saw as a number of opaque watery spheres, which moved with the movements of the eye, but when the eye was at rest remained stationary, and then partly covered each other. two days after this the eye was again opened. the same phenomena were again observed, but the spheres were less opaque and somewhat transparent; their movements more steady; they appeared to cover each other more than before. he was now for the first time able, as he said, to look through the spheres, and to perceive a difference, but merely a difference, in the surrounding objects. when he directed his eye steadily toward an object, the visual impression produced by the object was painful and very imperfect, because the eye, on account of its intolerance of light, could not be kept open long enough for the formation of the idea as derived from visual sensation. the appearance of spheres diminished daily; they became smaller, clearer, and more pellucid, allowed objects to be seen more distinctly, and disappeared entirely after two weeks. the _muscæ volitantes_, which had the form of black, immovable, and horizontal stripes, appeared, every time the eye was opened, in a direction upward and inward. when the eye was closed he observed, especially in the evening, in an outward and upward direction, an appearance of dark blue, violet, and red colors; these colors became gradually less intense, were shaded into bright orange, yellow, and green, which latter colors alone eventually remained, and in the course of five weeks disappeared entirely. as soon as the intolerance of light had so far abated that the patient could observe an object without pain, and for a sufficient time to gain an idea of it, the following experiments were made on different days. "_first experiment._--silk ribbons of different colors, fastened on a black ground, were employed to show the complementary colors. the patient recognized the different colors, with the exception of yellow and green, which he frequently confounded, but could distinguish when both were exhibited at the same time. he could point out each color correctly when a variety was shown him at the same time. gray pleased him best; the effect of red, orange, and yellow was painful; that of violet and brown not painful, but disagreeable. black produced subjective colors, and white occasioned the recurrence of _muscæ volitantes_ in a most vehement degree. "_second experiment._--the patient sat with his back to the light, and kept his eye closed. a sheet of paper on which two strong black lines had been drawn, the one horizontal, the other vertical, was placed before him, at the distance of about three feet. he was now allowed to open the eye, and after attentive examination he called the lines by their right denominations. when i asked him to point out with his finger the horizontal line, he moved his hand slowly, as if feeling, and pointed to the vertical; but after a short time, observing his error, he corrected himself. the outline in black of a square [six inches in diameter], within which a circle had been drawn, and within the latter a triangle, was, after careful examination, recognized and correctly described by him. when he was asked to point out either of the figures, he never moved his hand directly and decidedly, but always as if feeling, and with the greatest caution; he pointed them out, however, correctly. a zigzag and a spiral line, both drawn on a sheet of paper, he observed to be different, but could not describe them otherwise than by imitating their forms with his finger in the air. he said he had no idea of those figures. "_third experiment._--the windows of the room were darkened, with the exception of one, toward which the patient, closing his eye, turned his back. at the distance of three feet, and on a level with the eye, a solid _cube_ and a _sphere_, each of four inches diameter, were placed before him. i now let him open his eye. after attentively examining these bodies, he said he saw a _quadrangular_ and a _circular_ figure, and after some consideration he pronounced the one a _square_ and the other a _disk_. his eye being then closed, the cube was taken away, and a disk of equal size substituted and placed next to the sphere. on again opening his eye he observed no difference in these objects, but regarded them both as disks. the solid cube was now placed in a somewhat oblique position before the eye, and close beside it a figure cut out of pasteboard, representing a plane outline prospect of the cube when in this position. both objects he took to be something like flat quadrates. a pyramid, placed before him with one of its sides toward his eye, he saw as a plane triangle. this object was now turned a little, so as to present two of its sides to view, but rather more of one side than of the other; after considering and examining it for a long time, he said that this was a very extraordinary figure; it was neither a triangle, nor a quadrangle, nor a circle; he had no idea of it, and could not describe it. 'in fact,' said he, 'i must give it up.' on the conclusion of these experiments i asked him to describe the sensations the objects had produced, whereupon he said that immediately on opening his eye he had discovered a difference in the two objects, the cube and the sphere, placed before him, and perceived that they were not drawings; but that he had not been able to form from them the idea of a square and a disk, _until he perceived a sensation of what he saw in the points of his fingers_, as if he really touched the objects. when i gave the three bodies, the sphere, cube, and pyramid, into his hand, he was much surprised that he had not recognized them as such by sight, as he was well acquainted with them by touch. these experiments prove the correctness of the hypothesis i have advanced elsewhere on the well-known question put by mr. molyneux to locke, which was answered by both these gentlemen in the negative. "_fourth experiment._--in a vessel containing water to about the depth of one foot was placed a musket-ball, and on the surface of the water a piece of pasteboard of the same form, size, and color as the ball. the patient could perceive no difference in the position of these bodies; he believed both to be upon the surface of the water. pointing to the ball, i desired him to take up this object. he made an attempt to take it from the plane of the water; but, when he found he could not grasp it there, he said he had deceived himself, the objects were lying in the water, upon which i informed him of their real position. i now desired him to touch the ball which lay in the water with a small rod. he attempted this several times, but always missed his aim. he could never touch the object at the first movement of his hand toward it, but only by feeling about with the rod. on being questioned with respect to reflected light, he said that he was always obliged to bear in mind that the looking-glass was fastened to the wall in order to correct his idea of the apparent situation of objects behind the glass. "when the patient first acquired the faculty of sight, all objects appeared to him so near that he was sometimes afraid of coming in contact with them, though they were in reality at a great distance from him. he saw everything much larger than he had supposed from the idea obtained by his sense of touch. moving and especially living objects, such as men, horses, etc., appeared to him very large. if he wished to form an estimate of the distance of objects from his own person or of two objects from each other without moving from his place, he examined the objects from different points of view by turning his head to the right and to the left. of perspective in pictures he had, of course, no idea; it appeared to him unnatural that the figure of a man represented in the front of a picture should be larger than a house or mountain in the background. all objects appeared to him perfectly flat. thus, although he very well knew by his touch that the nose was prominent and the eyes sunk deeper in the head, he saw the human face only as a plane. though he possessed an excellent memory, this faculty was at first quite deficient as regarded visible objects: he was not able, for example, to recognize visitors, unless he heard them speak, till he had seen them very frequently. even when he had seen an object repeatedly he could form no idea of its visible qualities without having the real object before him. heretofore when he dreamed of any persons, of his parents, for instance, he felt them and heard their voices, but never saw them; but now, after having seen them frequently, he saw them also in his dreams. the human face pleased him more than any other object. although the newly-acquired sense afforded him many pleasures, the great number of strange and extraordinary sights was often disagreeable and wearisome to him. he said that he saw too much novelty which he could not comprehend; and, even though he could see both near and remote objects very well, he would nevertheless continually have recourse to the use of the sense of touch." final remarks. to the seven reports upon cases of persons born blind and afterward surgically treated, which are here presented in abridged form from the english originals, may be added some more recent and more accessible ones, one by hirschberg ("archiv für opthalmologie," xxi, . abth., s. bis , ), one by a. von hippel (ibid., xxi, . abth., s. ), and one by dufour ("archives des sciences physiques et naturelles," lviii, no. , april, , p. ). the cases reported here are those most discussed. i have given them considerably in detail in order that the reader may form an independent judgment concerning the behavior of persons born blind and then operated upon, as that behavior is described _before_ the modern physiological controversy over empiricism and nativism. helmholtz ("physiologische optik," § ) mentions, besides those of chesselden and wardrop and ware, which he gives in abridged form, some other cases also. others still may be found in froriep's "notizen" (xi, p. , , and iv, p. , , also xxi, p. , ), partly reported, partly cited (the latter according to franz). in addition to the cases here given of persons born blind and then surgically treated--persons not able to see things in space-relations before becoming blind--one more case is to be mentioned; it is that of a girl who in her seventh year (probably in consequence of the effect of dazzling sunlight) lost her sight completely, but recovered it again at the age of seventeen years after being treated with electricity. she had to begin absolutely anew to learn to name colors like a child; all measure of distance, perspective, size, had been lost for her _by lack of practice_ (as o. heyfelder relates in his work "die kindheit des menschen," second edition, erlangen, , pp. - ). he says, p. , that the patient had been eight years blind; p. , that she had been ten years so. such cases prove the great influence of experience upon vision in space, and show how little of this vision is inborn in mankind. when we compare the acquirement of sight by the normal newly-born child and the infant with that of those born blind, we should, above all, bear in mind that the latter in general could make use of only _one_ eye, and also that on account of the long inactivity of the retina and the absence of the crystalline lens, as well as in consequence of the numerous experiences of touch, essential differences exist. notwithstanding this, there appears an agreement in the manner in which in both cases vision is learned, the eye is practiced, and the association of sight and touch is acquired. the seventh case in particular shows plainly how strong the analogies are. these cases are sufficient to refute some singular assertions, e. g., that all the newly-born must see objects reversed, as even a buffon ("oeuvres complètes," iv, ; paris, ) thought to be the fact. my boy, when i had him write, in his fifth year, the ordinary figures after a copy that i set for him, imitated the most of them, to my surprise, always in a reversed hand (spiegelschrift, "mirror-hand"); the and the he continued longest to write thus, though he often made the the other way, too, whereas he always wrote the correctly. this, however, was, of course, not owing to imperfect sight, but to incomplete transformation of the visual idea into the motor idea required for writing. other boys, as i am given to understand, do the same thing. for myself, i found the distinction between "right" and "left" so difficult in my childhood, that i remember vividly the trouble i had with it. singularly enough, buffon assumed, in , that the neglect of the double images does not yet take place at the beginning of life. johannes müller, in , expresses the same view. but, inasmuch as in the first two or three weeks after the birth of a human being, in contrast with many animals, nothing at all can as yet be distinctly seen, it is not allowable to maintain that everything must be seen double. rather is it true that everything is seen neither single nor double, since the very young child perceives, as yet, no forms (boundary-lines) and no distances, but merely receives impressions of light, precisely as is the case with the person born blind, in the period directly after an operation has been performed upon his eyes. schopenhauer (in his treatise on "sight and colors," first edition, leipsic, , p. ) divined this truth. he says, "if a person who was looking out upon a wide and beautiful prospect could be in an instant wholly deprived of his intellect, then nothing of all the view would remain for him except the sensation of a very manifold reaction of his retina, which is, as it were, the raw material out of which his intellect created that view." the new-born child has, as yet, no intellect, and therefore can not, as yet, at the beginning, see; he can merely have the sensation of light. this opinion of mine, derived from observation of the behavior of newly-born and of very young infants (cf. the first chapter of this book), seems to me to be practically confirmed in an account given by anselm von feuerbach in his work on kaspar hauser (anspach, , p. ). "in the year , soon after his arrival in nuremberg, kaspar hauser was to look out at the window in the vestner tower, from which there was a view of a broad and many-colored summer landscape. kaspar hauser turned away; the sight was repugnant to him. at a later period, long after he had learned to speak, he gave, when questioned, the following explanation: "'when i looked toward the window it always seemed to me as if a shutter had been put up close before my eyes, and that upon this shutter a colorer had wiped off his brushes of different colors, white, blue, green, yellow, and red, all in motley confusion. individual things, as i now see them, i could not, at that time, perceive and distinguish upon it; it was absolutely hideous to look upon.'" by this, as well as by the experiences with persons born blind and afterward surgically treated, it is clearly demonstrated that colors and degrees of brightness are severally apprehended before forms and distances can be perceived. the case must be the same with the normal human child in the first weeks after birth. after discrimination of the luminous sensations, the boundary-lines of bright plane surfaces are next clearly discerned; then come forms, and, last of all, the distances of these. with reference to this progress of the normal infant in learning to see, the accounts of persons born blind and afterward surgically treated are again of great value. after the famous question put by molyneux to locke, whether an intelligent person, blind from birth, would be able immediately after an operation to distinguish a sphere from a cube by means of the eye alone, had been answered in the negative, the opinion was accepted as satisfactory that such a person learns the distinction only by means of the sense of touch. thus, the perception of difference would come later, after the sight of different forms, only by means of the tactual memory. in truth, however, very many forms are discerned as different purely by means of the eye, without the possibility of aid from any other sense. phenomena exclusively optical, which, like the rainbow, can not be apprehended by touch or by hearing, are distinctly perceived by the child at a very early period. without touching, the different forms of objects would be perceived by means of sight alone, and that even by a child unable to touch, through movements of the eyes and head, changes of bodily position, of attitude and posture, and through practice in accommodation and in the observation of differences of brightness. the fact correctly predicted by molyneux, that those born blind but afterward surgically treated can not, by means of the eye alone, distinguish the form of a sphere from that of a cube, must accordingly be supplemented to this extent, viz., that such persons are capable, just as are normal children who can see, of learning this difference of form by means of the eye alone without the direct intervention of the sense of touch; for the co-ordination of the retinal excitations in space and time by means of the intellect, quite independently of all impressions from other departments of sense, is possible, and is in countless cases actual, just as is the learning of differences of form solely by means of the sense of touch in children who are born blind and never learn to see. the end. d. appleton & co.'s publications. new volumes in the international education series. _education from a national standpoint_. by alfred fouillÉe. translated and edited, with a preface, by w. j. greenstreet, m. a., st. john's college, cambridge; head master of the marling school, stroud. mo. cloth, $ . . fouillée's work is a timely and valuable contribution to the discussions of some of the important educational questions that are at present claiming attention in both this country and europe. _systematic science teaching. a manual of inductive elementary work for all instructors in graded and ungraded schools, the kindergarten, and the home_. by edward gardnier howe. mo. cloth, $ . . a thoroughly practical and reliable guide to elementary instruction in science has long been a desideratum, and this work, embodying the results of fourteen years of actual classroom tests, will satisfactorily meet such a demand. the volume gives a general outline of work for the first three years. _the education of the greek people, and its influence on civilization_. by thomas davidson. mo. cloth, $ . . "this work is not intended for scholars or specialists, but for that large body of teachers throughout the country who are trying to do their duty, but are suffering from that want of enthusiasm which necessarily comes from being unable clearly to see the end and purpose of their labors, or to invest any end with sublime import. i have sought to show them that the end of their work is the redemption of humanity, an essential part of that process by which it is being gradually elevated to moral freedom, and to suggest to them the direction in which they ought to turn their chief efforts. if i can make even a few of them feel the consecration that comes from single-minded devotion to a great end, i shall hold that this book has accomplished its purpose."--_author's preface_. _the evolution of the massachusetts public-school system. a historical sketch in six lectures_. by george h. martin, a. m., supervisor of public schools, boston, massachusetts. mo. cloth, $ . . the public discussion that arose from professor martin's papers upon the topic treated in this work will make the complete collection of the essays of much interest to a large circle of readers. in the present volume the author aims to show the evolutionary character of the public-school history of the state, and to point out the lines along which the development has run and the relation throughout to the social environment, and incidentally to illustrate the slow and irregular way by which the people under popular governments work out their own social and intellectual progress. _the pygmies_. by a. de quatrefages, late professor of anthropology at the museum of natural history, paris. with numerous illustrations. mo. cloth, $ . . in this interesting volume the author has gathered the results of careful studies of the small black races of africa, and he shows what the pygmies of antiquity really were. the peculiar intellectual, moral, and religious characteristics of these races are also described. _woman's share in primitive culture_. by otis tufton mason, a. m., curator of the department of ethnology in the united states national museum. with numerous illustrations. mo. cloth, $ . . 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"the work is free of all needless technicalities, and will be of intense interest to every intelligent reader, while of inestimable value to the student of art."--_boston home journal_. _by the same author_. _schools and masters of painting_. with numerous illustrations and an appendix on the principal galleries of europe. new edition, fully revised, and in part rewritten. mo. cloth, $ . ; half calf, $ . . "the volume is one of great practical utility, and may be used to advantage as an artistic guide-book by persons visiting the collections of italy, france, and germany for the first time."--_new york tribune_. _the dawn of civilization_. (egypt and chaldÆa.) by prof. maspero. edited by the rev. prof. sayce. translated by m. l. mcclure. with maps and over illustrations. quarto. cloth, $ . . "the most complete account of ancient egypt ever published."--_chicago herald_. "professor maspero's intimate acquaintance with egypt and its literature, and the opportunities offered him by his position for several years as director of the bulak museum give him a unique claim to speak with authority on the history of the nile valley."--_new york sun_. _popular astronomy: a general description of the heavens_. by camille flammarion. translated from the french by j. ellard gore, f. r. a. s. with plates and illustrations. vo. cloth, $ . . "m. flammarion has produced a work that charms while it interests. he has classified astronomy so perfectly that any person of ordinary intelligence may learn from this book practically all that the men in the observatories know."--_new york times_. "the fullest and most elaborate compendium of popular astronomy.... the book might reasonably be pronounced the most desirable of its kind."--_new york sun_. _life of sir richard owen_. by rev. richard owen. with an introduction by t. h. huxley. vols. mo. cloth, $ . . "the value of these memoirs is that they disclose with great minuteness the daily labors and occupations of one of the foremost men of science of england."--_boston herald_. "a noteworthy contribution to biographical literature."--_philadelphia press_. _dean buckland_. the life and correspondence of william buckland, d. d., f. r. s., sometime dean of westminster, twice president of the theological society, and first president of the british association. by his daughter, mrs. gordon. with portraits and illustrations. vo. buckram, $ . . "next to charles darwin, dean buckland is certainly the most interesting personality in the field of natural science that the present century has produced."--_london daily news_. "a very readable book, for it gives an excellent account, without any padding or unnecessary detail, of a most original man."--_westminster gazette._ _the ice age in north america, and its bearings upon the antiquity of man_. by g. frederick wright, d. d., ll. d., f. g. s. a., professor in oberlin theological seminary; assistant on the united states geological survey. with an appendix on "the probable cause of glaciation," by warren upham, f. g. s. a., assistant on the geological surveys of new hampshire, minnesota, and the united states. new and enlarged edition. with maps and illustrations. vo, pages, and index. cloth, $ . . "not a novel in all the list of this year's publications has in it any pages of more thrilling interest than can be found in this book by professor wright. there is nothing pedantic in the narrative, and the most serious themes and startling discoveries are treated with such charming naturalness and simplicity that boys and girls, as well as their seniors, will be attracted to the story, and find it difficult to lay it aside."--_new york journal of commerce_. "one of the most absorbing and interesting of all the recent issues in the department of popular science."--_chicago herald_. "though his subject is a very deep one, his style is so very unaffected and perspicuous that even the unscientific reader can peruse it with intelligence and profit. in reading such a book we are led almost to wonder that so much that is scientific can be put in language so comparatively simple."--_new york observer_. "the author has seen with his own eyes the most important phenomena of the ice age on this continent from maine to alaska. in the work itself, elementary description is combined with a broad, scientific, and philosophic method, without abandoning for a moment the purely scientific character. professor wright has contrived to give the whole a philosophical direction which lends interest and inspiration to it, and which in the chapters on man and the glacial period rises to something like dramatic intensity."--_the independent_. "... to the great advance that has been made in late years in the accuracy and cheapness of processes of photographic reproduction is due a further signal advantage that dr. wright's work possesses over his predecessors'. he has thus been able to illustrate most of the natural phenomena to which he refers by views taken in the field, many of which have been generously loaned by the united states geological survey, in some cases from unpublished material; and he has admirably supplemented them by numerous maps and diagrams."--_the nation_. _man and the glacial period_. by g. frederick wright, d. d., ll. d., author of "the ice age in north america," "logic of christian evidences," etc. international scientific series. with numerous illustrations. mo. cloth, $ . . "it may be described in a word as the best summary of scientific conclusions concerning the question of man's antiquity as affected by his known relations to geological time."--_philadelphia press_. "the earlier chapters describing glacial action, and the traces of it in north america--especially the defining of its limits, such as the terminal moraine of the great movement itself--are of great interest and value. the maps and diagrams are of much assistance in enabling the reader to grasp the vast extent of the movement."--_london spectator_. richard a. proctor's works. _other worlds than ours: the plurality of worlds, studied under the light of recent scientific researches_. by richard anthony proctor. with illustrations, some colored. mo. cloth, $ . . contents.--introduction.--what the earth teaches us.--what we learn from the sun.--the inferior planets.--mars, the miniature of our earth.--jupiter, the giant of the solar system.--saturn, the ringed world.--uranus and neptune, the arctic planets.--the moon and other satellites.--meteors and comets: their office in the solar system.--other suns than ours.--of minor stars, and of the distribution of stars in space.--the nebulæ: are they external galaxies?--supervision and control. _our place among infinities_. a series of essays contrasting our little abode in space and time with the infinities around us. to which are added essays on the jewish sabbath and astrology. mo. cloth, $ . . contents.--past and future of the earth.--seeming wastes in nature.--new theory of life in other worlds.--a missing comet.--the lost comet and its meteor train.--jupiter.--saturn and its system.--a giant sun.--the star depths.--star gauging.--saturn and the sabbath of the jews.--thoughts on astrology. _the expanse of heaven_. a series of essays on the wonders of the firmament. mo. cloth, $ . . contents.--a dream that was not all a dream.--the sun.--the queen of night.--the evening star.--the ruddy planet.--life in the ruddy planet.--the prince of planets.--jupiter's family of moons.--the ring-girdled planet.--newton and the law of the universe.--the discovery of two giant planets.--the lost comet.--visitants from the star depths.--whence come the comets?--the comet families of the giant planets.--the earth's journey through showers.--how the planets grew.--our daily light.--the flight of light.--a cluster of suns.--worlds ruled by colored suns.--the king of suns.--four orders of suns.--the depths of space.--charting the star depths.--the star depths astir with life.--the drifting stars.--the milky way. _the moon: her motions, aspect, scenery, and physical conditions_. with three lunar photographs, map, and many plates, charts, etc. mo. cloth, $ . . contents.--the moon's distance, size, and mass.--the moon's motions.--the moon's changes of aspect, rotation, libration, etc.--study of the moon's surface.--lunar celestial phenomena.--condition of the moon's surface.--index to the map of the moon. _light science for leisure hours_. a series of familiar essays on scientific subjects, natural phenomena, etc. mo. cloth, $ . . [illustration: john bach mcmaster.] _history of the people of the united states_, from the revolution to the civil war. by john bach mcmaster. to be completed in six volumes. vols. i, ii, iii, and iv now ready. vo, cloth, gilt top, $ . each. in the course of this narrative much is written of wars, conspiracies, and rebellions; of presidents, of congresses, of embassies, of treaties, of the ambition of political leaders, and of the rise of great parties in the nation. yet the history of the people is the chief theme. at every stage of the splendid progress which separates the america of washington and adams from the america in which we live, it has been the author's purpose to describe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the literary canons of the times; to note the changes of manners and morals; to trace the growth of that humane spirit which abolished punishment for debt, and reformed the discipline of prisons and of jails; to recount the manifold improvements which, in a thousand ways, have multiplied the conveniences of life and ministered to the happiness of our race; to describe the rise and progress of that long series of mechanical inventions and discoveries which is now the admiration of the world, and our just pride and boast; to tell how, under the benign influence of liberty and peace, there sprang up, in the course of a single century, a prosperity unparalleled in the annals of human affairs. "the pledge given by mr. mcmaster, that 'the history of the people shall be the chief theme,' is punctiliously and satisfactorily fulfilled. he carries out his promise in a complete, vivid, and delightful way. we should add that the literary execution of the work is worthy of the indefatigable industry and unceasing vigilance with which the stores of historical material have been accumulated, weighed, and sifted. the cardinal qualities of style, lucidity, animation, and energy, are everywhere present. seldom indeed has a book in which matter of substantial value has been so happily united to attractiveness of form been offered by an american author to his fellow-citizens."--_new york sun_. "to recount the marvelous progress of the american people, to describe their life, their literature, their occupations, their amusements, is mr. mcmaster's object. his theme is an important one, and we congratulate him on his success. it has rarely been our province to notice a book with so many excellences and so few defects."--_new york herald_. "mr. mcmaster at once shows his grasp of the various themes and his special capacity as a historian of the people. his aim is high, but he hits the mark."--_new york journal of commerce_. "... the author's pages abound, too, with illustrations of the best kind of historical work, that of unearthing hidden sources of information and employing them, not after the modern style of historical writing, in a mere report, but with the true artistic method, in a well-digested narrative.... if mr. mcmaster finishes his work in the spirit and with the thoroughness and skill with which it has begun, it will take its place among the classics of american literature."--_christian union_. * * * * * new york: d. appleton & co., fifth avenue. * * * * * transcriber's notes: non-ascii diacritical marks represented as follows: [=a] a with macron [=aa] aa with macron [=e] e with macron [=ee] ee with macron [=o] o with macron [=oo] oo with macron [=u] u with macron [)a] a with breve [)e] e with breve [)o] o with breve [)u] u with breve [(aa] aa with inverted breve [(au] au with inverted breve [(äu] äu with inverted breve [(ee] ee with inverted breve [(ei] ei with inverted breve [(eu] eu with inverted breve [(oi] oi with inverted breve ['=e] e with macron and acute accent changes to original text: page xxvii ... too high or too low ( ), changed "comma" to "fullstop" page xxix _organic sensations and emotions._ changed to "organic sensations and emotions." page a. _central dysarthria and anarthria._ changed to [alpha]. _central dysarthria and anarthria._ page e. g changed to e. g. page inarticulto changed to inarticulate page _hotto_ (horse, from the expression of the carter, "hott-ho (_tt," instead ... changed to _hotto_ (horse), from the expression of the carter, "hott-ho" ("_tt_," instead ... page unsually changed to unusually page reference to the sound). changed to reference to the sound. page microcephalus changed to microcephalous page three several times changed to three separate times st page publications list "sysemtatic" changed to "systematic" rd page publications list "a noteworthy ... literature.' changed to "a noteworthy ... literature." * * * * * here and now story book here and now story book two- to seven-year-olds experimental stories written for the children of the city and country school (formerly the play school) and the nursery school of the bureau of educational experiments. _by_ lucy sprague mitchell _illustrated by_ hendrik willem van loon [illustration: logo - classics to grow on] _published by e. p. dutton & company, inc., for_ parents' institute, inc. publishers of parents' magazine and approved publications for young people vanderbilt avenue, new york copyright, , by e. p. dutton & company, inc. copyright (renewal) by lucy sprague mitchell _all rights reserved_ _printed in the united states of america_ contents page foreword: by caroline pratt ix introduction _content_: its educational and psychological basis _form_: its patterns in words, sentences and stories stories: _two-year-olds_: types to be adjusted to individual children. content, personal activities, told in motor and sense terms. form reduced to a succession of few simple patterns. marni takes a ride marni gets dressed in the morning _three-year-olds_: content based on enumeration of familiar sense and motor associations and simple familiar chronological sequences. some attempt to give opportunity for own contribution or for "motor enjoyment." the room with the window looking out on the garden the many horse stable my kitty the rooster and the hens the little hen and the rooster _jingles_: my horse, old dan horsie goes jog-a-jog auto, auto _four- and five-year-olds_: content, simple relationships between familiar moving objects, stressing particularly the idea of use. emphasis on sound. attempt to make verse patterns carry the significant points in the narrative. how spot found a home the dinner horses the grocery man the journey pedro's feet how the engine learned the knowing song the fog boat story hammer, saw, and plane the elephant how the animals move the sea-gull the farmer tries to sleep wonderful-cow-that-never-was things that loved the lake how the singing water got to the tub the children's new dresses old dan gets the coal _six- and seven-year-olds_: content, relationships further removed from the personal and immediate and extended to include social significance of simple familiar facts. longer-span pattern which has become organic with beginning, middle and end. the subway car boris takes a walk and finds many different kinds of trains boris walks every way in new york speed five little babies once the barn was full of hay the wind the leaf story a locomotive moon, moon automobile song silly will eben's cows the sky scraper foreword our school has always assumed that children are interested in and will work with or give expression to those things which are familiar to them. this is not new: the kindergarten gives domestic life a prominent place with little children. but with the kindergarten the present and familiar is abandoned in most schools and emphasis is placed upon that which is unfamiliar and remote. it is impossible to conceive of children working their own way from the familiar to the unknown unless they develop a method in understanding the familiar which will apply to the unfamiliar as well. this method is the method of art and science--the method of experimentation and inquiry. we can almost say that children are born with it, so soon do they begin to show signs of applying it. as they have been in the past and as they are in the present to a very great extent, schools make no attempt to provide for this method; in fact they take pains to introduce another. they are disposed to set up a rigid program which answers inquiries before they are made and supplies needs before they have been felt. we try to keep the children upon present day and familiar things until they show by their attack on materials and especially upon information that they are ready to work out into the unknown and unfamiliar. in the matter of stories and verse which fit into such a program we have always felt an almost total void. whether other schools feel this would depend upon their intentional program. surely no school would advise giving classical literature without the setting which would make the stories and verse understandable. it is a question whether the fact of desirable literature has not in the past and does not still govern our whole school program more than many educators would be willing to admit. what seems to be more logical is to set up that which is psychologically sound so far as we know it and create if need be a new literature to help support the structure. in the presence of art, schools have always taken a modest attitude. for some reason or other they seem to think it out of their province. they regard children as potential scientists, professional men and women, captains of industry, but scarcely potential artists. to what school of design, what academy of music, what school of literary production, do our common schools lead? we are not fitting our children to compose, to create, but at our best to appreciate and reproduce. mrs. mitchell as story teller in this new sense of writing stories, rather than merely telling them, is having an influence in the school which has not been altogether unlooked for. the children look upon themselves as composers in language and language thus becomes not merely a useful medium of expression but also an art medium. they regard their own content, gathered by themselves in a perfectly familiar setting as fit for use as art material. that is, just as the children draw and show power to compose with crayons and paints, they use language to compose what they term stories or occasionally, verse. often these "stories" are a mere rehearsal of experiences, but in so far as they are vivid and have some sort of fitting ending they pass as a childish art expression just as their compositions in drawing do. so far as content is concerned the school gives the children varied opportunities to know and express what they find in their environment. mrs. mitchell finds this content in the school. it is being used, it is even being expressed in language. what she particularly does is to show the possibility of using this same content as art in language. she does this both by writing stories herself and by helping the children to write. the children are not by any means read to, so much as they are encouraged to tell their own stories. these are taken down verbatim by the teachers of the younger groups. through skilful handling of several of the older groups what the children call "group stories" are produced as well as individual ones. we hope this book will bring to parents and teachers what it has to us, a new method of approach to literature for little children, and to children the joy our children have in the stories themselves. caroline pratt the city and country school july, here and now story book here and now story book introduction these stories are experiments,--experiments both in content and in form. they were written because of a deep dissatisfaction felt by a group of people working experimentally in a laboratory school, with the available literature for children. i am publishing them not because i feel they have come through to any particularly noteworthy achievement, but because they indicate a method of work which i believe to be sound where children are concerned. they must always be regarded as experiments, but experiments which have been strictly limited to lines suggested to me by the children themselves. both the stuff of the stories and the mould in which they are cast are based on suggestions gained directly from children. i have tried to put aside my notions of what was "childlike." i have tried to ignore what i, as an adult, like. i have tried to study children's interests not historically but through their present observations and inquiries, and their sense of form through their spontaneous expressions in language, and to model my own work strictly on these findings. i have forced myself throughout to be deliberate, conscious, for fear i should slip back to adult habits of thought and expression. i can give here only samples of the many stories and questions i have gathered from the children which form the basis of my own stories. suffice it that my own stories attempt to follow honestly the leads which here and now the children themselves indicate in content and in form, no matter how difficult or strange the going for adult feet. first, as to the stuff of which the story is made,--the content. i have assumed that anything to which a child gives his spontaneous attention, anything which he questions as he moves around the world, holds appropriate material about which to talk to him either in speech or in writing. i have assumed that the answers to these his spontaneous inquiries should be given always in terms of a relationship which is natural and intelligible at his age and which will help him to order the familiar facts of his own experiences. thus the answers will themselves lead him on to new inquiries. for they will give him not so much new facts as a new method of attack. i have further assumed that any of this material which by taking on a pattern form can thereby enhance or deepen its intrinsic quality is susceptible of becoming literature. material which does not lend itself to some sort of intentional design or form, may be good for informational purposes but not for stories as such. the task, then, is to examine first the things which get the spontaneous attention of a two-year-old, a three-year-old and so up to a seven-year-old; and then to determine what relationships are natural and intelligible at these ages. obviously to determine the mere subject of attention is not enough. children of all ages attend to engines. but the two-year-old attends to certain things and the seven-year-old to quite different ones. the relationships through which the two-year-old interprets his observations may make of the engine a gigantic extension of his own energy and movement; whereas the relationships through which the seven-year-old interprets his observations may make of the engine a scientific example of the expansion of steam or of the desire of men to get rapidly from one place to another. what relationship he is relying on we can get only by watching the child's own activities. the second part of the task is to discover what _is_ pattern to the untrained but unspoiled ears, eyes, muscles and minds of the little folk who are to consume the stories. each part of the task has its peculiar difficulties. but fortunately in each, children do point the way if we have the courage to forget our own adult way and follow theirs. content in looking for content for these stories i followed the general lines of the school for which they were written. the school gives the children the opportunity to explore first their own environment and gradually widens this environment for them along lines of their own inquiries. consequently i did not seek for material outside the ordinary surroundings of the children. on the contrary, i assumed that in stories as in other educational procedure, the place to begin is the point at which the child has arrived,--to begin and lead out from. with small children this point is still within the "here" and the "now," and so stories must begin with the familiar and the immediate. but also stories must lead children out from the familiar and immediate, for that is the method both of education and of art. here and now stories mean to me stories which include the children's first-hand experiences as a starting point, not stories which are literally limited to these experiences. therefore to get my basis for the stories i went to the environment in which a child of each age naturally finds himself and there i watched him. i tried to see what in his home, in his school, in the streets, he seized upon and how he made this his own. i tried to determine what were the relationships he used to order his experiences. fortunately for the purposes of writing stories i did not have to get behind the baffling eyes and the inscrutable sounds of a small baby. yet i learned much for understanding the twos by watching even through the first months. what "the great, big, blooming, buzzing confusion" (as james describes it) means to an infant, i fancy we grown-ups will really never know. but i suppose we may be sure that existence is to him largely a stream of sense impressions. also i suppose we are reasonably safe in saying that whatever the impression that reaches him he tends to translate it into action. at what age a child accomplishes what can be called a "thought" or what these first thoughts are, is surely beyond our present powers to describe. but that his early thoughts have a discernible muscular expression, i fancy we may say. it may well be that thought is merely associative memory as loeb maintains. it may well be that behaviorists are right and that thought is just "the rhythmic mimetic rehearsal of the first hand experience in motor terms." if the act of thinking is itself motor, its expression is somewhat attenuated in adults. be that as it may, a small child's expressions are still in unmistakable motor terms. it is obviously through the large muscles that a baby makes his responses. and even a three-year-old can scarcely think "engine" without showing the pull of his muscles and the puff-puffing of exertion. nor can he observe an object without making some movement towards it. he takes in through his senses; and he interprets through his muscles. for our present purposes this characteristic has an important bearing. the world pictured for the child must be a world of sounds and smells and tastes and sights and feeling and contacts. above all his early stories must be of activities and they must be told in motor terms. often we are tempted to give him reasons in response to his incessant "why?" but when he asks "why?" he really is not searching for reasons at all. a large part of the time he is not even asking a question. he merely enjoys this reciperative form of speech and is indignant if your answer is not what he expects. one of my children enjoyed this antiphonal method of following his own thoughts to such an extent that for a time he told his stories in the form of questions telling me each time what to answer! his questions had a social but no scientific bearing. and even when a three-year-old asks a real question he wants to be answered in terms of action or of sense impressions and not in terms of reasons why. how could it be otherwise since he still thinks with his senses and his muscles and not with that generalizing mechanism which conceives of cause and effect? the next time a three-year-old asks you "why you put on shoes?" see if he likes to be told "mother wears shoes when she goes out because it is cold and the sidewalks are hard," or if he prefers, "mother's going to go outdoors and take a big bus to go and buy something:" or "you listen and in a minute you'll hear mother's shoes going pat, pat, pat downstairs and then you'll hear the front door close bang! and mother won't be here any more!" "why?" really means, "please talk to me!" and naturally he likes to be talked to in terms he can understand which are essentially sensory and motor. now what activities are appropriate for the first stories? i think the answer is clear. his, the child's, own! the first activities which a child knows are of course those of his own body movements whether spontaneous or imposed upon him by another. everything is in terms of himself. again i think none of us would like to hazard a guess as to when the child comes through to a sharp distinction between himself and other things or other persons. but we are sure, i think, that this distinction is a matter of growth which extends over many years and that at two, three, and even four, it is imperfectly apprehended. we all know how long a child is in acquiring a correct use of the pronouns "me" and "you." and we know that long after he has this language distinction, he still calls everything he likes "mine." "this is my cow, this is my tree!" the only way to persuade him that it is _not_ his is to call it some one else's. possessed it must be. he knows the world only in personal terms. that is, his early sense of relationship is that of himself to his concrete environment. this later evolves into a sense of relationship between other people and their concrete environment. at first, then, a child can not transcend himself or his experiences. nor should he be asked to. a two-year-old's stories must be completely his stories with his own familiar little person moving in his own familiar background. they should vivify and deepen the sense of the one relationship he does feel keenly,--that of himself to something well-known. now a two-year-old's range of experiences is not large. at least the experiences in which he takes a real part are not many. so his stories must be of his daily routine,--his eating, his dressing, his activities with his toys and his home. these are the things to which he attends: they make up his world. and they must be his very own eating and dressing and home, and not eating and dressing and homes in general. stories which are not intimately his own, i believe either pass by or strain a two-year-old; and i doubt whether many three-year-olds can participate with pleasure and without strain in any experience which has not been lived through in person. he may of course get pleasure from the sound of the story apart from its meaning much earlier. just now we are thinking solely of the content. i well remember the struggles of my three-year-old boy to get outside himself and view a baby chicken's career objectively. he checked up each step in my story by this orienting remark, "that the baby chicken in the shell, not me! the baby chicken go scritch-scratch, not me!" was not this an evident effort to comprehend an extra-personal relationship? again just as at first a small child can not get outside himself, so he can not get outside the immediate. at first he can not by himself recall even a simple chronological sequence. he is still in the narrowest, most limiting sense, too entangled in the "here" and the "now." the plot sense emerges slowly. indeed there is slight plot value in most children's stories up to eight years. plot is present in embryonic form in the omnipresent personal drama: "where's baby? peek-a-boo! there she is!" it can be faintly detected in the pleasure a child has in an actual walk. but the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets in the action itself. small children's experiences are and should be pretty much continuous flows of more or less equally important episodes. their stories should follow their experiences. they should have no climaxes, no sense of completion. the episodes should be put together more like a string of beads than like an organic whole. almost any section of a child's experience related in simple chronological sequence makes a satisfactory story. this can be pressed even further. there is another kind of relationship by which little children interpret their environment. it is the early manifestation of the associational process which in our adult life so largely crowds out the sensory and motor appreciation of the world. it runs way back to the baby's pleasure in recognizing things, certainly long before the period of articulate questions. we all retain vestiges of this childlike pleasure in our joyful greeting of a foreign word that is understood or in any new application of an old thought or design. as a child acquires a few words he adds the pleasure of naming,--an extension of the pleasure of recognition. this again develops into the joy of enumerating objects which are grouped together in some close association, usually physical juxtaposition. for instance a two-or three-year-old likes to have every article he ate for breakfast rehearsed or to have every member of the family named at each episode in a story which concerns the group! earlier he likes to have his five little toes checked off as pigs or merely numbered. this is closely tied up with the child's pattern sense which we shall discuss at length under "form." now the pleasure of enumeration, like that of a refrain, is in part at least a pleasure in muscle pattern. my two-year-old daughter composed a song which well illustrates the fascination of enumeration. the refrain "tick-tock" was borrowed from a song which had been sung to her. "tick-tock marni's nose, tick-tock marni's eyes, tick-tock marni's mouth, tick-tock marni's teeth, tick-tock marni's chin, tick-tock marni's romper, tick-tock marni's stockings, tick-tock marni's shoes," etc., etc. this she sang day after day, enumerating such groups as her clothes, the objects on the mantel and her toys. walt whitman has given us glorified enumerations of the most astounding vitality. if some one would only pile up equally vigorous ones for children! but it is not easy for an adult to gather mere sense or motor associations without a plot thread to string them on. the children's response to the two i have attempted in this collection, "old dan" and "my kitty," make me eager to see it tried more commonly. all this means that the small child's attention and energy are absorbed in developing a technique of observation and control of his immediate surroundings. the functioning of his senses and his muscles engrosses him. ideally his stories should happen currently along with the experience they relate or the object they reproduce, merely deepening the experience by giving it some pleasurable expression. at first the stories will have to be of this running and partly spontaneous type. but soon a child will like to have the story to recall an experience recently enjoyed. the living over of a walk, a ride, the sight of a horse or a cow, will give him a renewed sense of participation in a pleasurable activity. this is his first venture in vicarious experiences. and he must be helped to it through strong sense and muscular recalls. i have felt that these fairly literal recalls of every day details _did_ deepen his sense of relationships since by himself he cannot recapture these familiar details even in a simple chronological sequence. but if stories for a two or a three-year-old need to be of himself they must be written especially for him. those written for another two-year-old may not fit. consequently the first three stories in this collection are given as types rather than as independent narratives. "marni takes a ride" is so elementary in its substance and its form as to be hardly recognizable as a "story" at all. and yet the appeal is the same as in the more developed narratives. it falls between the embryonic story stage of "peek-a-boo!" and marni's second story. it was first told during the actual ride. repeated later it seemed to give the child a sense of adventure,--an inclusion of and still an extension of herself beyond the "here" and "now" which is the essence of a story. both of marni's stories are given as types for a mother to write for her two-year-old; the "room with the window in it" (written for the play school group) is given as a type for a teacher to write for her three-year-old group. i cannot leave the subject of the "familiar" for children without looking forward a few years. this process of investigating and trying to control his immediate surroundings, this appreciation of the world through his senses and his muscles, does not end when the child has gained some sense of his own self as distinguished from the world,--of the "me" and the "not me,"--or achieved some ability to expand temporarily the "here" and the "now" into the "there" and the "then." the process is a precious one and should not be interrupted and confused by the interjection of remote or impersonal material. he still thinks and feels primarily through his own immediate experiences. if this is interfered with he is left without his natural material for experimentation for he cannot yet experiment easily in the world of the intangible. moreover to the child the familiar _is_ the interesting. and it remains so i believe through that transition period,--somewhere about seven years,--when the child becomes poignantly aware of the world outside his own immediate experience,--of an order, physical or social, which he does not determine, and so gradually develops a sense of standards of what is to be expected in the world of nature or of his fellows along with a sense of workmanship. it is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting. the attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness. children do not find the unusual piquant until they are firmly acquainted with the usual; they do not find the preposterous humorous until they have intimate knowledge of ordinary behavior; they do not get the point of alien environments until they are securely oriented in their own. too often we mistake excitement for genuine interest and give the children stimulus instead of food. the fairy story, the circus, novelty hunting, delight the sophisticated adult; they excite and confuse the child. red riding-hood and circus indians excite the little child; cinderella confuses him. not one clarifies any relationship which will further his efforts to order the world. nonsense when recognized and enjoyed as such is more than legitimate; it is a part of every one's heritage. but nonsense which is confused with reality is vicious,--the more so because its insinuations are subtle. so far as their content is concerned, it is chiefly as a protest against this confusing presentation of unreality, this substitution of excitement for legitimate interest, that these stories have been written. it is not that a child outgrows the familiar. it is rather that as he matures, he sees new relationships in the old. if our stories would follow his lead, they should not seek for unfamiliar and strange stuff in intrigue him; they should seek to deepen and enrich the relationships by which he is dimly groping to comprehend and to order his familiar world. but to return to the younger children. children of four are not nearly so completely ego-centric as those of three. there has seemed to me to be a distinct transition at this age to a more objective way of thinking. a four-year-old does not to the same extent have to be a part of every situation he conceives of. ordinarily, too, he moves out from his own narrowly personal environment into a slightly wider range of experiences. now, what in this wider environment gets his spontaneous attention? what does he take from the street life, for instance, to make his own? surely it is moving things. he is still primarily motor in his interest and expression and remains so certainly up to six years. engines, boats, wagons with horses, all animals, his own moving self,--these are the things he notices and these are the things he interprets in his play activities. transportation and animals and himself. do not these pretty well cover the field of his interests? if conceived of as motor and personal do they not hold all the material a four-or five-year-old needs for stories? if we bring in inanimate unmoving things, we must do with them what he does. we must endow them with life and motion. we need not be afraid of personification. this is the age when anthropomorphism flourishes. the five-year-old is still motor; his conception of cause is still personal. he thinks through his muscles; he personifies in his thought and his play. nevertheless there is very real danger in anthropomorphism,--in thus leaving the world of reality. there is danger of confusing the child. we must be sure our personifications are built on relationships which our child can understand and which have an objective validity. we must be sure that a wolf remains a wolf and an engine an engine, though endowed with human speech. now, what are the typical relationships which a four-or five-year-old uses to bind together his world into intelligible experiences? we have already noted the personal relationship which persists in modified form. but does not the grouping of things because of physical juxtaposition now give way to a conception of "use"? does he not think of the world largely in terms of active functioning? has not the typical question of this age become "what's it for?" even his early definitions are in terms of use which has a strong motor implication. "a table is to eat off"; "a spoon is to eat in"; "a river means where you get drinks out of water, and catch fish, and throw stones." (waddle: introduction to child psychology, p. .) it was only consistent with his general conception of relationships in the world to have a little boy of my acquaintance examine a very small man sitting beside him in the subway and then turn to his father with the question, "what is that little man for?" stories which are offered to small children must be assessed from this two-fold point of view. what relationships are they based on? and in what terms are they told? fairy stories should not be exempted. we are inclined to accept them uncritically, feeling that they do not cramp a child as does reality. we cling to the idea that children need a fairy world to "cultivate their imaginations." in the folk tales we are intrigued by the past,--by the sense that these embodiments of human experience, having survived the ages, should be exempt from modern analysis. if, however, we do commit the sacrilege of looking at them alongside of our educational principles, i think we find a few precious ones that stand the test. for children under six, however, even these precious few contribute little in content, but much through their matchless form. on the other hand, we find that many of the human experiences which these old tales embody are quite unsuitable for four-and five-year-olds. cruelty, trickery, economic inequality,--these are experiences which have shaped and shaken adults and alas! still continue to do so. but do we wish to build them into a four-year-old's thinking? some of these experiences run counter to the trends of thinking we are trying to establish in other ways; some merely confuse them. we seem to identify imagination with gullibility or vague thinking. but surely true imagination is not based on confusion. imagination is the basis of art. but confused art is a contradiction of terms. now, the ordinary fairy tale which is the chief story diet of the four-and five-year-olds, i believe does confuse them; not because it does not stick to reality (for neither do the children) but because it does not deal with the things with which they have had first-hand experience and does not attempt to present or interpret the world according to the relationships which the child himself employs. rather it gives the child material which he is incapable of handling. much in these tales is symbolic and means to the adult something quite different from what it bears on its face. and much, i believe, is confused even to the grown-up. now a confused adult does not make a child! nor does it ever help a child to give him confusion. when my four-year-old personified a horse for one whole summer, he lived the actual life of a horse as far as he knew it. his bed was always "a stall," his food was always "hay," he always brushed his "mane" and "put on his harness" for breakfast. it was only when real horse information gave out that he supplied experiences from his own life. he was not limited by reality. he was exercising his imagination. this is quite different from the adult mixtures of the animal, the social, and the moral worlds. does not cinderella interject a social and economic situation which is both confusing and vicious? does not red riding-hood in its real ending plunge the child into an inappropriate relationship of death and brutality or in its "happy ending" violate all the laws that can be violated in regard to animal life? does not "jack and the beanstalk" delay a child's rationalizing of the world and leave him longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards? the growth of the sense of reality is a growth of the sense of relations. from the time when the child begins to relate isolated experiences, when he groups together associations, when he begins to note the sequence, the order of things, from this time he is beginning to think scientifically. it is preëminently the function of education to further the growth of the sense of reality, to give the child the sense of relationship between facts, material or social: that is, to further scientific conceptions. stories, if they are to be a part of an educational process, must also further the growth of the sense of reality, must help the child to interpret the relationships in the world around him and help him to develop a scientific process of thinking. it is not important that he know this or that particular fact; it _is_ important that he be able to fit any particular fact into a rational scheme of thought. accordingly, the relationships which a story clarifies are of much greater import than the facts it gives. all this, of course, concerns the content of stories--the intentional material it presents to the child and has nothing to do with the pleasure of the presentation,--the relish which comes from the form of the story. i do not wish this to be interpreted to mean that i think all fairy stories forever harmful. from the beginning innocuous tales like the "gingerbread man" should be given for the pattern as should the "old woman and her pig." moreover, after a child is somewhat oriented in the physical and social world, say at six or seven,--i think he can stand a good deal of straight fairy lore. it will sweep him with it. he will relish the flight the more for having had his feet on the ground. but for brutal tales like red riding-hood or for sentimental ones like cinderella i find no place in any child's world. obviously, fairy stories cannot be lumped and rejected en masse. i am merely pleading not to have them accepted en masse on the ground that they "have survived the ages" and "cultivate the imagination." for a child's imagination, since it is his native endowment, will surely flourish if he is given freedom for expression, without calling upon the stimulus of adult fancies. it is only the jaded adult mind, afraid to trust to the children's own fresh springs of imagination, that feels for children the need of the stimulus of magic. the whole question of myths and sagas together with the function of personification must be taken up with the older children. for the present we are still concerned with four-and five-year-olds. two sets of stories told by four-and five-year-old children in the school seem to me to show what emphasizing unrealities may do at this age. the first child in each set is thinking disjunctively; the second has his facts organized into definite relationships. can one think that the second child enjoyed his ordered world less than the first enjoyed his confusion? two stories by four-year-olds once there was a table and he was taking a walk and he fell into a pond of water and an alligator bit him and then he came up out of the pond of water and he stepped into a trap that some hunters had set for him, and turned a somersault on his nose. * * * there was a new engine and it didn't have any headlight--its light wasn't open in its headlight so its engineer went and put some fire in the wires and made a light. and then it saw a lot of other engines on the track in front of it. so when it wanted to puff smoke and go fast it told its engineer and he put some coal in the coal car. and then the other engines told their engineers to put coal in their coal cars and then they all could go. (the child then played a song by a "'lectric" engine on the piano and tried to write the notes.) two stories by five-year-olds once upon a time there was a clown and the clown jumped on the bed and the bed jumped on the cup. then the clown took a pencil and drawed on his face. and the clown said, "oh, i guess i'll sit in a rocking chair." so the rocking chair said, "ha! ha!" and it tumbled away. then a little pig came along and he said, "could you throw me up and throw an apple down?" so the clown threw him so far that he was dead. he was on the track. * * * there was a big factory where all the men made engines. and one man made a smoke stack. and one man made a tender. and one man made a cab. and one man made a bell. and one man made a wheel. and then another man came and put them all together and made a great big engine. and this man said, "we haven't any tracks!" and then a man came and made the tracks. and then another man said, "we haven't any station!" so many men came and built a big station. and they said, "let's have the station in washington square." so they pulled down the arch and they pulled up all the sidewalks. and they built a big station. and they left all the houses; for where would we live else? (in a sequel he says: so they knocked down the arch and chopped up all the pieces. and they chopped all around the trees but they didn't chop them down because they looked so pretty with our station!) i am far from meaning that five-year-olds should be confined to their literal experiences. they have made considerable progress in separating themselves from their environment though at times they seem still to think of the things around them more or less as extensions of themselves. their inquiries still emanate from their own personal experiences; but they do not end there. a child of this age has a genuine curiosity about where things come from and where they go to. "what's it for?" indeed, implies a dim conception beyond the "here" and the "now," a conception which his stories should help him to clarify. if we try to escape the pitfall of "fairy stories,"--abandoning a child in unrealities,--we must not fall into the opposite pitfall and continue the easy habit of merely recounting a series of events, neither significant in themselves nor, as in the earlier years, significant because they are personal experiences. "arabella and araminta" and their like give a five-year-old no real food. they are saved, if saved they are, not by their content, but by a daring and skilful use of repetition and of sound quality. no, our stories must add something to the children's knowledge and must take them beyond the "here" and the "now." but this "something," as i have already said, is not so much new information as it is a new relationship among already familiar facts. in each of the stories for four-and five-year-olds i have attempted to clarify known facts by showing them in a relationship a little beyond the children's own experience. all the stories came from definite inquiries raised by some child. they attempt to answer these inquiries and to raise others. "how the engine learned the knowing song," "the fog boat story," "hammer and saw and plane," "how the singing water gets to the tub," "things that loved the lake," "the children's new dresses," "how animals move,"--all are based on definite relationships, largely physical, between simple physical facts. interest in these relationships,--inquiries which hold the germ of physical science, continue and increase with each year. in addition, a little later, children seem to begin questioning things social and to be ready for the simpler social relationships which underlie and determine the physical world of their acquaintance. "what's it for?" still dominates, but a six-year-old is on the way to becoming a conscious member of society. he now likes his answers to be in human terms. he takes readily to such conceptions as congestion as the cause for subways and elevated trains; the desire for speed as the cause of change in transportation; the dependence of man on other living things,--all of which i have made the bases of stories. to the children the material in "the subway car," "speed," "silly will," is familiar; the relationships in which it appears are new. somewhere about seven years, there seems to be another transition period. psychologists, whether in or out of schools, generally agree in this. children of this age are acquiring a sense of social values,--a consciousness of _others_ as sharply distinguished from themselves. they are also acquiring a sense of workmanship, of technique,--of _things_ as sharply distinguished from themselves. they seek information in and for itself,--not merely in its immediate application to themselves. their inquiries take on the character of "how?" this means, does it not, that the children have oriented themselves in their narrow personal world and that they are reaching out for experience in larger fields? it means that the "not-me" which was so shadowy in the earlier years has gained in social and in physical significance. and this again means that opportunity for exploration in ever-widening circles should be given. stories should follow this general trend and open up the relationships in larger and larger environments until at last a child is capable of seeing relationships for himself and of regarding the whole world in its infinite physical and social complexity, as his own environment. probably the first extra-personal excursions should be into alien scenes or experiences which lead back or contribute directly to their old familiar world. stories of unknown raw material which turn into well-known products are of this type,--cattle raising in texas, dairy farms in new england, lumbering in minnesota, sheep raising in california. it is a happy coincidence that raw materials are often produced under semi-primitive conditions, so that a vicarious participation in their production gives to children something of that thrilling contact with the elemental that does the life of primitive men, and this without sending them into the remote and, for modern children, "unnatural" world of unmodified nature. the danger here is that the story will be sacrificed to the information. indeed it can hardly be otherwise, if the aim is to give an adequate picture of some process of production. this, of course, is a legitimate aim,--but for the encyclopedia, not for the story. what i have in mind is a dramatic situation which has this process as a background, so that the child becomes interested in the process because of the part it plays in the drama just as he would if the process were a background in his own life. i am thinking of the opportunities which these comparatively primitive situations give for adventure rather than for the detailed elucidation of a process of production. it is the peculiar function of a story to raise inquiries, not to give instruction. a story must stimulate not merely inform. this is the trouble with our "informational literature" for children, of which very little is worthy of the name. indeed, i am not sure it is not a contradiction of terms. it is frankly didactic. it aims to make clear certain facts, not to stimulate thought. it assumes that if a child swallows a fact it must nourish him. to give the child material with which to experiment,--this lies outside its present range. reaction from the unloveliness of this didactic writing has produced a distressing result. the misunderstood and misapplied educational principle that children's work should interest them has developed a new species of story,--a sort of pseudo-literary thing in which the medicinal facts are concealed by various sugar-coating devices. children will take this sort of story,--what will their eager little minds not take? and like encyclopedias and other books of reference this type has its place in a child's world. but it should never be confused with literature. literature must give a sense of adventure. this sense of adventure, of excursion into the unknown, must be furnished to children of every age. as i have said before, i think "peek-a-boo, there's the baby!" is the elementary expression of this love of adventure. the baby disappears into the unknown vastness behind the handkerchief and to her, her reappearance is a thrilling experience. children's stories,--as indeed all stories,--have been largely founded on this. the "prudy" and "dotty dimple" books though keyed so low in the scale seem adventurous because of the meagre background of their young readers. but children of the age we are considering,--who have left the narrowly personal and predominantly play period demand something higher in the scale of adventure. to them are offered the great variety of tales of adventure and danger of which the boy scout is the latest example. every child in reading these becomes a hero. and every child (and grown-up) enjoys being a hero. higher still comes "kidnapped" and so up to stanley weyman and "the three musketeers" which differ in their art, not in their appeal. now is it not possible to give children these adventurous excursions which they crave and should have, without so much killing of animals or men, and so many blood-thirsty excitements, and so much fake heroism? what relationships do such tales interpret? what truths do they give a child upon which to base his thinking? the relation of life to life is a delicate and difficult thing to interpret. but surely we can do better at an interpretation than tales of hunting, of impossible heroisms, and of war. or at least, we can protest against having these almost the sole interpretations of adventure which are offered to children. the world of industry holds possibilities for adventure as thrilling as the world of high-colored romance. we must look with fresh eyes to see it. when once we see it, we shall be able to give the children a new type of the "story of adventure." of all the experiments which the stories in this collection represent, this attempt to find and picture the romance and adventure in our world here and now, i consider the most important and difficult. in such stories as "boris" and "eben's cows" and "the sky scraper," i have made experimental attempts to give children a sense of adventure by presenting social relations in this new way. the cultured world has yet another answer to the question, "how shall we give our children adventure?" it points to the wealth of classical myths, of iliads, sagas, of fairy-stories which are practically folk-lore, semi-magic, semi-allegorical, semi-moral tales which express the ideals and experiences of a different and younger world than ours of today. and it replies, "give them these." it feels in the sternness of saga stuff and in the humanity of folk-lore, a validity and a dignity and a simplicity which seem to make them suitable for children. these tales tell of beliefs of folk less experienced than we: we have outgrown them. they must be suited to the less experienced: give them to children. thus runs the common argument. and so we find hawthorne's "tanglewood tales," Ã�sop's "fables," various indian myths and celtic legends, and even the "niebelungen lied" often given to quite young children. but do we find this reasoning valid when we examine these tales free from the glamour which adult sophistication casts around them? remember we are thinking now of children in that delicate seven-to eight-year-old transition period. i have already told how i believe these children are but just beginning to have conceptions of laws,--social and physical. they are groping their way, regimenting their experiences, seeing dim generalizations and abstractions. but they are not firmly oriented. they are beginners in the world of physical or social science and can be easily side-tracked or confused. a child of twelve or even ten is quite a different creature, often with clear if not articulate conceptions of the make-up of the physical and human world. he has something to measure against, some standards to cling to. but we are talking about children still in the early plastic stages of standards who will take the relationships we offer them through stories and build them into the very fabric of their thinking. now, how much of the classical literature follows the lead of the children's own inquiries? how much of it stimulates fruitful inquiries? what are the relationships which sagas, myths and folk-lore interpret? and what are the interpretations? this is a vast question and can be answered only briefly with the full consciousness that there is much lumping of dissimilar material with resulting injustices and superficiality. also there is no attempt to use the words "myth," "saga" and "folk-lore" in technical senses.[a] i have merely taken the dominant characteristic of any piece of literature as determining its class. [a] for a clear exposition of this field of literature for children see "literature in the elementary school," by porter lander macclintock, university of chicago press, . myths, properly, are slow-wrought beliefs which embody a people's effort to understand their relations to the great unknown. they are essentially religious, symbolic, mystic, subtle, full of fears and propitiations, involved, often based on the forgotten,--altogether unlike in their approach to the ingenuous and confident child. they are full of the struggle of life. hardly before the involved introspections and theories of adolescence can we expect the real beauty and poignancy of a genuine myth to be even dimly understood. and why offer the shell without the spirit? it is likely to remain a shell forever if we do. and indeed, such an empty thing to most of us is the great myth of prometheus or of the garden of eden. but sagas! are they not of exactly the heroic stuff for little children? in essence the relationships with which they deal are human,--social. the story of siegfried, of achilles, of abraham,--these are great sagas. each is a tremendous picture of a human experience, the first two under heroic, enlarged conditions, the last under a human culture picturesquely different from our own. but even as straight tales of adventure they do not carry for little children. the environment is too remote, the world to be conquered too unknown to carry a convincing sense of heroism to small children. the same is true of the heroic tales of romance,--of arthur and all the legends which cluster around his name. magic, the children will get from these tales but little else. but if the tales should succeed in taking a child with them in their strange exploits into a strange land, they would surely fail to take him into the turgid human drama they picture. and as surely we should wish them to fail. the sagas, like most genuine folk-lore deal with the great elemental human facts, life and death, love, sexual passion and its consequences, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood. we grasp at them for our children, i believe, just _because_ they deal with these fundamental things,--the very things we are afraid of unless they come to us concealed in strange clothing. but what kind of a foundation for interpreting these great elemental facts will the stories of achilles and briseus, of jason and medea, pluto and proserpina, of guinevere and launcelot make? what do we expect a child to get from these pictures of sexual passion on the part of the man,--even though a god,--and of social dependence of woman? do greek draperies make prostitution suitable for children? does the glamour of chivalry explain illicit love? most parents and schools who unhesitatingly hand over these social pictures to their children have never tried,--and neither care nor dare to try,--to face these elemental facts with their children. can we really wish to avoid a frank statement of the _positive_ in sex relations, of the facts of parenthood, of the institution of marriage, of the mutual companionship between man and woman, and give the _negative_, the unfulfilled, the distorted? this is preposterous and no one would uphold it. it must be the beauty of the tale, and not the significance we are after. but _are_ these tales beautiful except as we endow them with the subtleties of a classical civilization, as we read into them piquant contrasts of a sensitive, expressive race still primitive in its social thinking and social habits,--that elusive thing which we mean by "greek"? and can children get this without its background, particularly as they have yet no social background in their own world to hold it up against? and can children do any better with the perplexing ideals of the chivalrous knight swept by a human passion? and in the same way can a child really get the beauty of siegfried? what can he make out of the incestuous love of siegmund and sieglinda? and of siegfried's naïve passion on his first glimpse of a woman? what do we want him to make of it? is that the way we wish to introduce him to sex? and as for the rest, the allegory of the ring itself, the sword, the dragon's blood, what do little children get from this except the excitement of magic? what _we_ get because of what we have to put into it, is a different matter and should never be confused with the straight question of what children get. outgrown adult thinking in social matters is no more suitable to children than outgrown thinking on physical facts. we do not teach that the world is flat because grown-ups once believed it was. we are not afraid of a round earth so we tell the truth about it. but we come near to teaching "spontaneous generation" with our endless evasions. we are afraid of a reproducing world, and so we fall back on curious mixtures of sex fables,--on storks and fairy godmothers and leave the mysteries of sex to be interpreted by achilles and siegfried and guinevere! to emasculate these tales is to insult them,--to strip them of their significance and individuality. is it not wiser to wait until children will not be confused by all their straight vigor and beauty? there is other folk-lore less gripping in its human intensity. through this may not children safely gain their needed adventures? and here we come again to the real "märchen,"--the fairy tales. they take us into a lovely world of unreality where magic and luck hold sway and where the child is safe from human problems and from scientific laws alike. i have already said in talking of the younger children that i feel it unsafe to loose a child in this unsubstantial world before he is fairly well grounded in a sense of reality. once he has his bearings there is a good deal he will enjoy without confusion. the common defense that the mystery of fairy tales answers to a legitimate need in children, i believe holds good for children of six or seven, or even five, who have had opportunities for rational experiences. we all know how children revel in a secret. they like to live in a world of surprises. to give the children this sense of mystery i do not believe it is at all necessary to turn to vicious tales of giants, of ogres, and bluebeards, or to the no less vicious pictures of the beautiful princess and the wicked stepmother. even after rejecting the brutal and sentimental we have a good deal left,--a good deal that is intrinsically amusing as in "the musicians of bremen" or "prudent hans" or charming as in "briar rose." symbolic or primitive attempts to explain the physical world,--as in the indian legend of "tavwots" i have never found held great appeal for the modern six- or seven-year-old scientists. also the burden of symbolic morality rests on a good many of the traditional tales which usually neither adds nor detracts for the child and satisfies an adult yearning. allegories like Ã�sop's "fables" and "the lion of androcles" have a certain right to a hearing because of their historic prestige, apart from any reform they may accomplish in the way of character building. and in our own day many animals have achieved what i believe is a permanent place in child literature. "the elephant's child," the wild creatures of the "jungle book," "raggylug" and even the little mole in the "wind in the willows,"--these are animals to trust any child with. yet even in these exquisitely drawn tales, i doubt if children enjoy what we adults wish them to enjoy either in content or in form. and i doubt if we should accept even some of kipling's matchless tales if the faultless form did not intrigue us and make us oblivious of the content. it is just here that most of us fail to be discriminating. most of the classical literature, most of the legends, or the folk tales that i have been discussing have a compelling charm through their form. but unfortunately that does not make their content suitable! their place in the world's thinking and feeling and their transcription into their present forms by really great artists give them a permanent place in the world's literature. this i do not question. it is partly because i believe this so intensely that i wish them kept for fuller appreciation. it is as formative factors in a young child's thinking that i am afraid of them. neither am i afraid of all of them. there are some old conceptions of life and death and human relations which the race has not outgrown, perhaps never will outgrow. the mystery and pathos of the pied piper, the humor of prudent hans, the cleverness of the boy david, the heroism of the little dutch boy stopping the hole in the dyke, the love of the queer little baker, and the greed and grief of midas are eternal. in spite of these and many more, i maintain that for the most part, myths, sagas, folk-lore depend for their significance and beauty alike upon a grasp of present social values which a young child cannot have and that our first attention should be to give him those values in terms intelligible to him. after we have done that he is safe. it matters little what we give him so long as it is good: for he will have standards by which to judge our offerings for himself. yet after all is said and done, we may be reduced to giving children some of the stories we think inappropriate, for lack of something better. but a recognition of the need may evoke a great writer for children. i maintain we have never had one of the first order. the best books that we have for children are throw-offs from artists primarily concerned with adults,--kipling and stevenson stand in this group,--or child versions of adult literature,--from charles and mary lamb down. the world has yet to see a genuinely great creator whose real vision is for children. when children have _their_ psalmist, _their_ shakespeare, _their_ keats, they will not be offered diluted adult literature. so after we have gathered what we can from the world's store for children of this seven-to-eight-year old period i think we shall find many unfilled gaps. most attempts at humor, for instance, are on the level of the comic sheet of the sunday supplement or the circus. there is little except a few of the "drolls" which give the child pure fun unmixed with excitement or confusion. even "alice in wonderland" when first read to a six-year-old who was used to rational thinking and talking was pronounced "too funny!" this same boy, however, went back to alice again and again. he always relished such bits as: "speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes, he only does it to annoy because he knows it teases." no child's world is complete without humor. and children have a sense of the preposterous, the inappropriate all their own. lewis carroll and a few others have occasionally found it. still, i think much remains to be done in the way of studying the things that children themselves find amusing. this is true for the younger ones as well. i give several younger children's stories which appeared both to the tellers and their audiences to be convulsing. the humor is strangely physical and amazingly simple. and it is all fresh. stories by four-year-olds i dreamed i was asleep in a tomato and just scrambled around until i'd eaten it up. * * * once there was a cow and he was in a wagon and he jumped over the wagon's edge. * * * sesame the cat she lived with a nice man, a candy man, and she was at the gate watching the cattle go by and the men were digging under some caramel bricks and he called sesame the cat and she came banging and almost jumped on the man's head. she jumped like a merry balloon. oh, he got angry! * * * story by five-year-old once there was a fly. and he went out walking on a little boy's face. he came to a kind of a soft hump. "what is this?" thought the fly. "oh, i guess it's the little boy's eye!" then he came to a lot of kind of wiggly things that went down with him. "what is this?" thought the fly. "oh, i guess it's the little boy's hair!" then he slipped and fell into a deep hole. it was the little boy's ear. and he couldn't get out. he tried and he tried. but he staid there until the little boy's ear got all sore! * * * stories by six-year-olds once upon a time there was a fox and a skunk, and the fox was walking down the path with a lot of prickly bushes on the side of the path. then he saw a skunk coming along. he said, "will you let me throw my little bag of perfume on you?" and then she (it was a lady fox) she backed and backed and backed and backed and backed and backed, and she backed so far she backed into the bushes, and she got her skirt torn on the prickly bushes. * * * once upon a time there was a boy and the boy was awfully funny. and one day the boy went to the store to buy some eggs and he got the eggs and ran so fast with the eggs home,--he stumbled and broke the eggs. so he took the eggs, and took the shell and fixed it like the same egg. and he walked off slowly to his home. and his mother was going to beat the eggs and she just opened the shell and no egg was there, and she couldn't make no cake that night. there is still another kind of story which i believe children of this transition period and a little older seek and for the most part seek in vain. these children are beginning to generalize, to marshal their facts and experiences along lines which in their later developments we call "laws." they like these wide-spreading conceptions which order the world for them. but they cannot always take them as bald scientific statements. moreover there are certain general truths which tie together isolated familiar facts which can be most simply pictured through some device such as personification,--for at this age personification is recognized and enjoyed as a device and not, as in earlier years, as a necessary expression of thought. this uniting bond, this underlying relation may be a physical law like the dependence of life on life; it may be a social law like the division of labor in modern industry. any dramatic statement of these laws is a simplification as is a diagram or map. and like a diagram or map, it is in a way artificial since it gives weight to one element at the expense of the others. but again like the diagram or map, the thing it shows is a fact, a fact which is more readily grasped by this artificial device than by bald statement. maps do not take the place of photographs, nevertheless they have their own peculiar place in making intelligible the make-up of the physical world. in the same way, personification does not take the place of science. nevertheless it has its own peculiar place in making clear to the child some simplifying principle,--physical or social,--which unifies his multitudinous experiences. so long as personification elucidates a true, a scientific principle, so long as it is not pressed to tortuous lengths which actually give false impressions, so long as it is kept within the bounds of æsthetic decency, so long as it is recognized as a play device and does not confuse a child's thinking,--so long as it is justified. no more. it is a useful intellectual tool and a charming device for play. kipling is preëminently the master here. it is a dangerous tool in lesser hands. yet i have dared to use it and without scruple in "speed," in "once the barn was full of hay" and in "silly will." here again i feel sure that study of children's questions and stories would bring rich suggestions as to how to fill this large gap in their present literature. gaps there are, and many and large ones. still, taken all in all, the field for the seven- to eight-year-old transition period is not as completely barren as the field for the earlier years. for these children are evolving from the stage where they need "here and now" stories. they are beginning to take on adult modes of thought and to appreciate and understand the peculiar language which adults use no matter how young a child they address! so much for the content of children's stories. and at best the content is but half. form if content is but half, form is the other half of stories and not the easier half, either. every story, to be worthy of the name, must have a pattern, a pattern which is both pleasing and comprehensible. this design, this composition, this pattern, whether it be of a story as a whole or of a sentence or a phrase, is as essential to a piece of writing as is the design or composition to a picture. it satisfies the emotional need of the child which is as essential in real education as is the intellectual. without this design, language remains on the utilitarian level,--where, to be sure, we usually find it in modern days. now what kind of pattern is adapted to a small child,--say a three-year-old? what kind does he like? more, what kind can he perceive? herein the expression as fatally as in the content has the adult shaped the mould to his own liking. or rather, the case is even worse. the adult more often than not has presented his stories and verse to children in forms which the children could not like because they literally could not hear them! the pattern, as such, did not exist for them. but what have we to guide us in creating suitable patterns for these little children who can help us neither by analysis nor by articulate remonstrance? we have two sources of help and both of them come straight from the children. the first are the children's own spontaneous art forms; the second are the story and verse patterns which make an almost universal appeal to little children. even a superficial study of these two sources,--and where shall we find a thorough study?--suggests two fundamental principles. they sound obvious and perhaps they are. but how often is the obvious ignored in the treatment of children! the first is that the individual units whether ideas, sentences or phrases must be simple. the second is that these simple units must be put close together. as the quickest and most eloquent exemplification of both these principles i give four stories. the first was told by a little girl of twenty-two months, a singularly articulate little person,--as she looked at the blank wall where had hung a picture of a baby (she supposed her little brother), a cow and a donkey. the second was a story told by a little girl of two and a half after a summer on the seashore. the third was achieved by a boy of three,--a child, in general, unsensitive to music. the fourth was told in school by a four-year-old girl. story by twenty-two-months-old child where cow? where donk? where little aa? cow gone away! donk gone away! little aa gone away! like cow! like donk! like little aa! come back cow! come back donk! come back little aa! story by two-and-a-half-year-old i fell in water. man fell in water. john fell in water. for' fell in water. aunt carrie fell in water. i pull boat out. man pull boat out. john pull boat out. for' pull boat out. aunt carrie pull boat out. i go in that boat. man go in that boat. john go in that boat. for' go in that boat. aunt carrie go in that boat. story by three-year-old and father went down, down, down into the hole and the bull-frog, he went up, up, up into the sky! and then the bull-frog, he went down, down, down into the hole and then father, he went up, up, up, way into the sky! and then the bull-frog he went down, down, down into the hole and up, up into the sky! and then he went down into the hole and up into the sky! and he went down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up down and up---- (to wordless song.) story by a four-year-old baby bye, baby bye here's a fly you'd better be careful else he will sting you and here's a spider too. and if you hurt him he will sting you and don't you hurt him and his pattern on the wall. certainly all have form,--spontaneous native art form. indeed they strongly suggest that to the child, the pleasure lay in the form rather than in the content. the patterns of the first two are somewhat alike,--variations of a simple statement. in content the younger child keeps her attention on one point, so to speak, while the older child allows a slight movement like an embryonic narrative. the pattern of the three-year-old's is considerably more complex. the phrases shorten, the tempo quickens, until the whole swings off into wordless melody. the fourth probably started from some remembered lullaby but quickly became the child's own. i give two more examples of stories. in the first, does not this five-year-old girl give us her vivid impressions in marvelously simple sense and motor terms? and does not the six-year-old boy in the second show that imagination can spring from real experiences? stories by five-year-olds i am going to tell you a story about when i went to falmouth with my mother. we had to go all night on the train and this is the way it sounded, (moving her hand on the table and intoning in different keys) thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, _new ark!_ thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, falmouth! and then we got off and we took a trolley car and the trolley car went clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip. and another trolley car came in the other direction (again with hands) and one came along saying clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip and the other came along saying clipperty, clipperty, clipperty, zip, zip, zip, bang! and they hit in the middle and they got stuck and they tried to pull them apart and they stuck and they stuck and they stuck and finally they got them apart and then we went again. and when we got off we had to take a subway and the subway went rockety-rockety-rockety-rock. you know a subway makes a terrible noise! it made a _terrible_ noise it sounded like rockety-rockety-rockety-rockety-rock. and at last we got there and when we came up in the streets of falmouth it was so still that i didn't know what to do. you know the streets of falmouth are just so terribly quiet and then we had to walk millions and millions of miles almost to get to our little cottage. and when we got there i put on my bathing suit and i went in bathing and i shivered just like this because it was a rainy day, the day i went to falmouth with my mother. the talk of the brook o brook, o brook, that sings so loud, o brook, o brook, that goes all day, o brook, o brook, that goes all night and forever. splashes and waves, girls and boys are playing with you and in you. some with shoes off and some with shoes on, and some are crying because they fell in you. o brook, o brook, have you an end ever? or do you go forever? technically in all these stories the child exemplifies the two rules. he attends to but one thing at a time. and his steps from one point to the next are short and clear. when we look at the forms which have been presented to children with these their spontaneous patterns fresh in mind, we can see, i think, why mother goose has been taken as a child's own and eugene field and even stevenson rejected as unintelligible. i do not believe there is anything in the content of mother goose to win the child. i believe it is the form that makes the appeal. vachel lindsay, whose daring play with words has made him an object of suspicion to the reluctant of mind, has given us one poem in pattern singularly like the children's own and in content full of interest and charm. again i give examples as the quickest of arguments. and i give them in verse where the form is more obvious and can be shown in briefer space than in stories. jack and jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. jack fell down and broke his crown and jill came tumbling after. time to rise a birdie with a yellow bill hopped upon the window sill, cocked his shining eye and said: "ain't you shamed, you sleepy head?" --_stevenson._ the little turtle (a recitation for martha wakefield, three years old) there was a little turtle. he lived in a box. he swam in a puddle. he climbed on the rocks. he snapped at a musquito. he snapped at a flea. he snapped at a minnow. and he snapped at me. he caught the musquito. he caught the flea. he caught the minnow. but he didn't catch me. --_vachel lindsay._ from the dinkey-bird so when the children shout and scamper and make merry all the day, when there's naught to put a damper to the ardor of their play; when i hear their laughter ringing, then i'm sure as sure can be that the dinkey-bird is singing in the amfalula tree. --_eugene field._ of the two "jack and jill" and "birdie with the yellow bill," surely stevenson's is the more charming to the adult ear. but when i have read it to three-year-olds, i have felt that they were lost. they could not sustain the long grammatical suspense, could not carry over "a birdie" from the first line to the conclusion and so actually did not know who was saying "ain't you shamed, you sleepy-head!" mother goose repeats her subject. the span to carry is two phrases in mother goose as against four in stevenson. the vachel lindsay i have found is as easily remembered and as much enjoyed as mother goose, though it is a pity it is about an unfamiliar animal. as for the dinkey-bird even a seven-year-old can hardly _hear_ the rhyme even if intellectually he could follow the adult vocabulary and the complicated sentence with its long postponed subject. it is the same with stories. the classic tales which have held small children,--"the gingerbread man," "the three little pigs," "goldylocks,"--have patterns so obvious and so simple that they cannot be missed. in "the gingerbread man" the pattern is one of increasing additions. it belongs to the aptly called "cumulative" tales. the refrains act like sign-posts to help the child to mark the progress. this is simply a skilful way of making the continuity close, of showing the ladder rungs for the child's feet. i venture to say that any good story-teller consciously or unconsciously puts up sign-posts to help the children. if he is skilful, he makes a pattern of them so that they are not merely intellectually helpful but charming as well. so kipling in his "just so stories" uses his sign-posts,--which are sometimes words, sometimes phrases, sometimes situations,--in such a way that they ring musically and give a pleasant sense of pattern even to children too young to find them intellectually helpful. in other words, the little child is not equipped psychologically to hear complicated units. i wish some one could determine how the average four-year-old hears the harmony of a chord on the piano. is it much except confusion? in the same way, he is not equipped to leap a span between units. i wish some one would determine the four-year-old's memory span for rhymes, for instance. the involutions, the suggestiveness so attractive to adult ears, he cannot hear. even an adult ear, untutored, can scarcely hear the intermingling rhythms and overlapping rhymes which blend like overtones of a chord in such verse as patmore's ode "the toys." i feel sure the small child cannot hear complexities; he cannot leap gaps. and so he cannot understand when even simple ideas are given in complex and discontinuous form. this explains his notorious love of repetition. repetition is the simplest of patterns, simple enough to be enjoyed as pattern. i have found that almost any simple phrase of music or words repeated slowly and with a kind of ceremonious attention, enthralls a year-old child. if the unit is simple enough to be remembered he will inevitably enjoy recognizing it as it recurs and recurs. this is the embryonic pattern sense. this pattern enjoyment too is motor in its basis. his early repetitions of sounds are probably largely pleasure in muscle patterns. we all know that a child uses first his large muscles,--arm, leg and back,--and that he early enjoys any regular recurrent use of these muscles. so at the time when the vocal muscles tend to become his means of expression, he enjoys repeating the same sounds over and over. and soon he gets enjoyment from listening to repetitions or rhythmic language,--a vicarious motor enjoyment. surely it is important that stories should furnish him this exercise and pleasure. three- and four-year-olds will enjoy a positively astounding amount of repetition. in the arabella and araminta stories a large proportion of the sentences are given in duplicate by the simple device of having twins who do and say the same things and by telling the remarks and actions of each. the selection quoted is repeated entire four times, the variation being only in the flower picked: and arabella picked a poppy, and araminta picked a poppy, and arabella picked a poppy, and araminta picked a poppy, and arabella picked a poppy, and araminta picked a poppy, and arabella picked a poppy, and araminta picked a poppy, and arabella picked a poppy, and araminta picked a poppy, until they each had a great big bunch (i should say a very large bunch), and then they ran back to the house. arabella got a glass and put her poppies in it, and araminta got a glass and put her poppies in it. and arabella clapped her hands and danced around the table. and araminta clapped her hands and danced around the table. adult ears repudiate anything as obvious as this; they still, however, enjoy a ballad refrain. just as small children cannot hear complications, so they cannot grasp details if the movement is swift. we must give time for a child's slow reactions. we usually fail to do this in ordinary social situations and are often surprised to hear our three-year-old say "good-bye" long after the front door is closed and our guest well on his way down the street. in stories we must take a leisurely pace. we must also read very slowly allowing ample time for a child to give the full motor expression to his thought for the art of abbreviation he has not yet learned. it is not enough to recognize that since a child attends to but one thing at a time the units must be simple. here in the form as in the content, must the motor quality of a child's thinking be held constantly in mind. in trying to find the general subject matter appropriate for little children i said that they think through their muscles. this motor expression of small children has its direct application in the concrete method of telling of any happening. the story child who is experiencing, should go through the essential muscular performances which the real listening child would go through if he were actually experiencing himself. for he thinks through these muscular expressions. as an example, when a group of four-year-olds heard a story about a little boy who saw the elevated train approach and pass above him, they thought the child might have been run over. the words "up" and "above" and "overhead" had been used but the children failed to get the idea of "upness." unquestionably they would have understood if i had made the little boy _throw back his head and look up_. small children act with big gestures and with big muscles. and they think through the same mechanisms. these two principles, simplicity and continuity, apply concretely to sentence and phrase structure as well. the effort to obtain continuity for the child explains the colloquial "the little boy who lived in this house, _he_ did so and so----" you help your child back to the subject, "the little boy" by the grammatically redundant "he" after his mind has gone off on "this house." this same need for continuity also explains why a child's own stories are characteristically one continuous sentence strung together with "ands" and "thens" and "buts." he sees and hears and consequently thinks in a simple, rhythmic, continuous flow. if we would have him see and hear and think with us, we must give him his stories and verse in simple units closely and obviously linked together. but after all is said and done, why should we give children stories at all? is it to instruct and so should we pay attention to the content? is it to delight and so should we pay attention to the form? both things, information and relish, have their place in justifying stories for children. but both to my mind are of minor importance compared to a third and quite different thing,--and this is to get children to create stories of their own, to play with words. "to get" is an unhappy phrase for it suggests that children must be coaxed to the task. this i do not believe though i cannot prove it. i do believe that children play with words naturally and spontaneously just as they play with any material that comes to their creative hands. and further i believe,--though this too i cannot prove,--that we adults kill this play with words just as we kill their creative play with most things. most of us have forgotten how to play with anything, most of all with words. we are utilitarian, we are executive, we are didactic, we are earth-tied, we are hopelessly adult! actually children use their ears and noses and fingers much more than do we adults. our stories rely mainly upon visual recalls. we forget to listen even to birds whose message is pure melody. and how many of us _hear_ the city sounds which surround us, the characteristic whirr of revolving wheels, the vibrating rhythm of horses' feet, the crunch of footsteps in the snow? noises we hear, the warning shriek of the fire engine or the honk! honk! of the automobile. but the subtler, finer reverberations we are not sensitive to. yet little children love to listen and develop another method of sensing and appreciating their world by this pleasurable use of their hearing. it surely is an unused opportunity for story-tellers. i have tried to use it in "pedro's feet" which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds. and even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in language. we listen only for the _meaning_ and forget the sensuous delight of sound. but happily children are not so determined to wring a meaning out of every sight and every sound. children play. play is a child's own technique. through it he seizes the strange unknown world around him and fashions it into his very own. he recreates through play. and through creating, he learns and he enjoys. there is no better play material in the world than words. they surround us, go with us through our work-a-day tasks, their sound is always in our ears, their rhythms on our tongue. why do we leave it to special occasions and to special people to use these common things as precious play material? because we are grown-ups and have closed our ears and our eyes that we may not be distracted from our plodding ways! but when we turn to the children, to hearing and seeing children, to whom all the world is as play material, who think and feel through play, can we not then drop our adult utilitarian speech and listen and watch for the patterns of words and ideas? can we not care for the _way_ we say things to them and not merely _what_ we say? can we not speak in rhythm, in pleasing sounds, even in song for the mere sensuous delight it gives us and them, even though it adds nothing to the content of our remark? if we can, i feel sure children will not lose their native use of words: more, i think those of six and seven and eight who have lost it in part,--and their stories show they have,--will win back to their spontaneous joy in the play of words. this is the ultimate test of stories and verse,--whether they help children to retain their native gift of play with language and with thought. in the city and country school where my experiments in language have been carried on, we have not gone far enough to offer convincing proof along these lines. but i submit two stories told by a six-year-old class which are at least suggestive. the first is the best story told to me by any member of the class before any effort had been made to get the children to listen to the sound of their words or to think of their ideas as all pointing in one direction and giving a single impression. the second was told by the class as a whole while looking at willebeek le mair's illustration of "twinkle, twinkle, little star." they said the picture made them feel sleepy and that they would say only things that made them sleepy and use only words that made them sleepy. between the two stories i had met with them seven times. i had read them sounding and rhythmic verse. they had become interested in the sound of language apart from its meaning. they had become interested in the sound of the rain and the fire. they were thinking through their ears. am i mistaken in believing this shows in their language and in their thought? story by a six-year-old once upon a time there was a little boy named peter and a little boy named boris. and peter took him out for a walk and took him all around school. then i took him out to my house and saw all my play things. and then i took him to central park and showed him sea lions and the giraffe and the elephant and i showed how they eat by their trunks. and he thought it was queer. and he said he was afraid of animals and so i took him home. i told him to tell his mother about it and his mother said, "you want to go for another walk?" and he said, "yes, but not where the wild animals are." i said, "do you want to go to central park?" and he said, "yes." you see he got fooled! he didn't know about the wild animals. joint story by six-year-old class i like it when the boy and the girl look at the sky. they look at the trees and they are sleepy. it is dark outside. it is night and the sky is dark blue. and it is kind of whitish and the trees are next to the blue sky. the bright evening star is out. the star is so far up in the sky that you can hardly see it. the children are looking at the sky before they go to bed and they are praying to god. they have their nightgowns on. the bed is all nice so they couldn't have just got up. the clothes are hanging on the bed. they sleep in their own bed together. when they go to bed they have their door closed. "the leaf story" and "the wind story" i have incorporated with my stories, though they are almost entirely the work of children. in both cases the organization is beyond the children. but the content and the phraseology bear their unmistakable imprint. the same is true of "the sea gull." because of the pattern, the play aspect of language, i believe in written stories even for very little ones. if we loved our language better and played with its sound in our ordinary speech, perhaps stories for two- and three-year-olds would not be needed. but as it is, we need to present them with something more intentional, more thought out than is possible with most of us in a story told. if the patterns of our ideas or of our speech are to have charm, if they are to fit the occasion with nicety, if they are to flow easily and are to be continuous enough to be comprehended by little children, they will need careful attention,--attention that cannot be given under the emergency of telling a story, not, at least, by the uninspired of us. inevitably, with our utilitarian tendencies, we shall be drawn off to an undue regard of the content to the neglect of the expression. and yet, for very little children, there is unquestionably something lost by the formality and fixity of a written story. a story told has more spontaneity, allows more leeway to include the chance happenings or remarks of the children; it can be more intimately personal, more adapted to the particular occasion and to the particular child. perhaps some time we shall achieve a fortunate compromise, a stepping stone between the story told and the story read. perhaps we shall work out happy or characteristic phrases about familiar things,--little personal things about the clothes and habits of each child, general familiar things like autos and wagons and horses on the street, coal going down the hole in the sidewalk, the squabbling of sparrows in the dirt, the drift of snow on the roofs,--perhaps we shall learn to use such thought-out phrases or refrains like blocks for building many stories. if we could work out some such technique as this, we could keep the intimacy, the flexibility, the waywardness of the spoken story and still give the children the charm of careful thinking and careful phrasing. many such phrases have been fashioned by people sensitive to the quality of sound. every nursery has had its rooster crow: "cock-a-doodle-doo!" but few have given its children that delightful epitome of the songs of spring birds which has piped with irrepressible freshness now for nearly four centuries: "cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!" i have never known the child who did not respond to kipling's engine song: "with a michnai-ghignai-shtingal! yah! yah! yah!" every child creates these wonderful sound interpretations of the world. we smile a smile of indulgence when we hear them. and then we forget them! cannot we seize some of them however imperfectly and learn to build them into the structure of our stories? it was more or less this kind of thing that i had in mind in writing marni's stories and "the room with the window looking out upon the garden" which as i have said elsewhere are types to be told rather than narratives to be read. and i feel sure if we could once make a beginning that the children themselves would soon take the matter into their own hands and create their own building blocks. for children are primarily creators. they do not willingly nor for long maintain the passive rôle. this should be reckoned with in stories and not merely as a concession to restless children but as a real aid to the story. an active rôle should be provided for the children somewhere within every story until the children are old enough to have a genuinely impersonal interest in things and events and until they do not need a motor expression of their thoughts. for as i have already said, up to that age,--and it is for psychologists to say when that age is,--children think in terms of themselves expressed through their own activities. this active rôle should be used not merely as a safety valve of expression to keep the child a patient listener, but as a tool by which he may become aware of the form of thought and language. it is interesting that the children to whom these stories have been read, have seized upon the rhyme refrains as their own and after a few readings have joined in saying them as though this were their natural portion. it is with this hope that i have tried to make the refrains not mere interludes in the story, as they usually are, but the real skeleton, the intrinsic thought pattern, the fundamental design. in "how the singing water gets to the tub" and "how spot found a home," for instance, the refrains taken by themselves out of the context, tell the whole story. it is too soon to say, but i am strong in the hope that through relish for this kind of active participation in written stories, a small child may become captivated by the play side of the stories as opposed to the content and so turn to language as play material in which to fashion patterns of his own. for the sake of analysis, i have treated content and form separately. but i am keenly aware that the divorce of the two is what has made our stories for children so unsatisfactory. we have good ideas told without charm of design; and we have meaningless patterns which tickle the ear for the moment but fade because they spring from no real thought. literature is only achieved when the thought pattern and the language pattern exactly fit. a refrain for the mere sake of recurrent jingle, that has no genuine no essential recurrence in the thought, is a trick. if the pattern does not help the thought and the thought suggest the pattern, there is something wrong. it is an artifice, not art. this matching of content and form is nothing new. it is and always has been the basis of good literature. the task that is new is to find thought sequences, thought relations which are truly childlike and the language design which is really appropriate to them,--to make both content and form the child's. as i said at the beginning, so must i say at the end. these stories are experiments, experiments both in content and form. to have any value they must be treated as such. the theses underlying them have been stated for brevity's sake only in didactic form. in reality, they lie in my mind as open questions urgently in need of answers. but i do not hope much from the answers of adults,--from the deaf and blind writers to the hearing and seeing children. the answers must come from the children themselves. we must listen to children's speech, to their casual everyday expressions. we must gather children's stories. mothers and teachers everywhere should be making these precious records. we must study them not merely as showing what a child is thinking, but the _way_ he is thinking and the way he is enjoying. it is the hope that these stories may be tried out with children, the hope of reaching others who may be watching and listening and working along these lines, the hope that we may gather records of children's stories which will become a basis for a real literature, the hope that somewhere among grown-ups we may find an ear still sensitive to hear and an eye still fresh to see,--it is this hope that has given me the courage to expose these pitifully inadequate adult efforts to speak with little children in their own language. some one must dare, if only to give courage to the better equipped. and if we dare enough, i am sure the children will come to our rescue. if we let them, they will lead us. whatever these stories hold of merit or of suggestiveness is due to the inspiration and tolerance of the courageous group of workers in the city and country school and in the bureau of educational experiments and in particular to caroline pratt without whom these stories would never have been dreamed or written; and above all to the children themselves, for whom the stories were written and to whom they have been read, both in the laboratory school and in my own home. to those then, who wish to follow the lead of little children, to those who have the curiosity to know into what new paths of literature children's interest and children's spontaneous expression of those interests will lead, and to the children themselves, i send these stories. lucy sprague mitchell. new york city july, . marni takes a ride in a wagon the refrains in this story were first made up during the actual ride. later they served to recall the experience with vividness. this story is given only as a type which any one may use when helping a two-year-old to live over an experience. marni takes a ride in a wagon one day marni went for a ride. little aa, he climbed into sprague's wagon and marni, she climbed in behind him. then mother took the handle and she began to pull the wagon with little aa and marni in it. and mother she went: jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, _and_ jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog! and the wheels, they went, (with motion of hands): round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, _and_ round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round! and then mother was tired. so she stopped. and marni said, "whoa, horsie!" then little aa said, "ugh, ugh!" for he wanted to go. but marni said, "get up, horsie!" for she wanted to go too. so mother took hold of the handle and went: jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, _and_ jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog! and the wheels they went: round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, _and_ round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round! and then mother was tired. so she stopped, and marni said, "whoa, horsie!" then little aa said, "ugh, ugh!" for he wanted to go. but marni said "get up, horsie!" for she wanted to go too. so mother took hold of the handle and went, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, _and_ jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog, jog! and the wheels they went: round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, _and_ round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round, round! and then mother was very, _very_ tired. so she stopped. and marni said, "whoa, horsie!" then little aa said, "ugh, ugh!" for he wanted to go again. but marni said "get up, horsie!" for she wanted to go too. but mother she was very, _very_, very tired. she had jogged, jogged, jogged so long and made the wheels go round, round, round, round, so much! so she said, "the ride is all over!" then little aa climbed down out of the wagon and marni climbed down out of the wagon. and marni said, "goodbye, wagon!" and ran away! marni gets dressed in the morning this story, obviously, is for a particular little girl. it is told in the terms of her own experience, of her own environment, and of her own observations. it is nothing more or less than the living over in rhythmic form of the daily routine of her morning dressing. her story remarks are either literal quotations or adaptations of her actual every day responses. the little verse refrains are the type of thing almost anyone can improvise. i have found that any simple statement about a familiar object or act told (or sung) with a kind of ceremonious attention and with an obvious and simple rhythm, enthralls a two-year-old. the little girl for whom this story was written began embryonic stories before her second birthday. the water-soap-sponge episode is an adaptation of one of her first narrative forms. this story is meant merely as a suggestion of the way almost anyone can make language an every day plaything to the small child she is caring for. marni gets dressed in the morning once there was a little girl and her name was marni moo. marni used to sleep in a little bed in mother's room. in the morning marni would wake up and she would say "hello, mother." and then in a minute she would say, "i want to get up." and mother would say: "hoohoo, marni moo. i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming for you." then mother would get up and she'd come over and she'd unfasten the blanket and she'd take little marni moo in her arms and she'd walk into marni's bath-room and she'd take off marni's nightgown and marni's shirt. and then she'd get a little basin, and she'd put some water in it, and she'd get some soap and she'd get a sponge and she'd wash little marni moo. she'd wash marni's face and then she'd wash marni's hands, and marni would put one hand in the basin and she'd splash the water like this:-- then she'd put another hand in the basin and she'd splash the water like this:-- then mother would wipe both hands and she'd throw the water down the sink and she'd put away the soap and the sponge. and marni would watch mother and then she'd say: [illustration] "where water? where soap? where sponge? water gone away! soap gone away! sponge gone away!" and after that what do you suppose marni would say? "shirt, shirt." and mother would put marni's shirt over her head and say: "peek-a-boo, marni moo, marni's head is coming through." and then mother would button up marni's shirt. and then marni would say "waist, waist." then while mother put on marni's waist she would say: "here's one hand and here's another. marni's a sister and robin's a brother." and then marni would say, "drawers, drawers." and while mother put on marni's drawers she would say: "here's one foot and here's another. marni's a sister and peter's a brother." and then marni would say, "stockings, stockings." and mother would put on one stocking on her left foot, and then she'd put on another stocking on her right foot. and then she'd fasten the garters on one stocking, and then she'd fasten the garters on the other stocking. and all the time mother would keep saying: "here's one leg and here's another. marni's a sister and jack-o's a brother." then marni would say, "shoe, shoe." and mother would put one shoe on her left foot and then she'd put on the other shoe on her right foot. and then she'd say again: "here's one foot and here's another. marni's a sister and robin's a brother." and then marni would say, "hook, hook." and mother would get the button-hook and then she'd button up the left shoe and then she'd button up the right shoe. and all the time she was buttoning up first one shoe and then the other shoe marni would say: "look, look, hook, hook." and when the shoes were all buttoned up, mother would hit first one little sole and then the other little sole, and say: "now we're through tit, tat, too. here a nail, there a nail, now we're through." then marni would run and get her romper and bring it to mother calling, "romper, romper." and mother would put on her romper, singing: "romper, romper who's got a romper? little marni moo she's got two. one is a yellow one and one is blue. romper, romper who's got a romper?" and then marni would say, "button, button." and mother would button up her romper all down the back. first one button and then another button and then another button and then another button, and then another button and then another button until they were buttoned all down the back. and then marni would say, "sweater." and mother would put on her little blue sweater saying: "sweater, sweater who's got a sweater? little marni moo she's got two. one is a yellow one and one is blue. sweater, sweater, who's got a sweater?" and then marni would say, "hair." and mother would get the brush and comb and brush marni's hair. and all the time she was brushing it she would say: "brush it so and brush it slow. brush it here and brush it there. brush it so and brush it slow. and brush it here and brush it there and brush it all over your dear little head." and then marni would say, "all ready." and mother would put her down on the floor. then marni would say: "where my little pail? my little pail gone away. i want my little pail come, little pail." and mother would give her her little pail. and marni would put one nut in her pail, and then she'd put another nut in her pail, and then she'd put another nut in her pail. and then she'd put a marble in her pail, and then she'd put another marble in her pail, and then she'd put another marble in her pail. and then she'd put her quack-quack in her pail, and then she'd put her fish in her pail, and then she'd put her frog in her pail. then she would shake her pail with all of the nuts and the marbles and the quack-quack and the frog and the fish, and they would all go bingety-bang, crickety-crack, bingety-bang, crickety-crack. and marni would say, "bingety-bang, crickety-crack. where jack-o?" and marni would run to find jack-o, and she would say, "jack-o, hear bingety-bang, crickety-crack." and she would rattle her little pail with all the nuts and the marbles and the quack-quack and the fish and the frog. then she'd say, "where peter?" and marni would run to find peter, and she would say, "peter, hear bingety-bang, crickety-crack." and she would rattle her little pail with all the nuts and the marbles and the quack-quack and the fish and the frog. then mother would call, "breakfast, breakfast. anyone ready for breakfast?" and jack-o would call back, "i am, i am, i am ready for breakfast." and peter would run as fast as he could calling, "i am, i am, i am ready for breakfast." and last of all would come little marni moo calling, "breakfast, breakfast." then the two boys would chase marni to the breakfast table saying: "marni mitchell, marni moo, run like a mousie or i'll catch you." and marni would scimper scamper like a mousie until she reached the breakfast table. then they would all have breakfast together. the room with the window looking out on the garden in this story written for a three-year-old group, i have tried to present the familiar setting of the classroom from a new point of view and to give the presentation a very obvious pattern. i want the children to take an _active_ part in the story. but before they try to do this i want them to have some conception of the whole pattern of the story so that their contributions may be in proper design, both in substance and in length. that is the reason i give two samples before throwing the story open to the children. if each child has a part which falls into a recognized scheme, through performing that part he gets a certain practice in pattern making in language,--however primitive--and also a certain practice in the technique of co-operation which means listening to the others as well as performing himself. i have not tried to add anything to their stock of information,--merely to give them the pleasure of drawing on a common fund together. the room with the window looking out on the garden once there was a little girl. she was just three years old. one morning she and her mother put on their hats and coats right after breakfast. they walked and walked and walked from their house until they came to macdougal alley. and then they walked straight down the alley into the play school. now the little girl had never been to the play school before and she didn't know where anything was and she didn't know any of the children and she didn't even know her teacher! so she asked her mother, "which room is going to be mine?" and her mother answered, "the one with the window looking out on the garden." and sure enough, when the little girl looked around there was the sun shining right in through a window which looked out on a lovely garden! she knelt right down on the window sill to look out. [illustration] then she heard some one say, "little new girl, why don't you take off your things?" she turned around and there was virginia talking to her. "because i don't know where to put them," said little new girl. "how funny!" laughed virginia, "because see, here are all the hooks right in plain sight," and she pointed under the stairs. so the little girl took off her hat and her mittens. her mother had to unbutton the hard top button but she did all the rest. then she hung up everything on a hook. "goodbye," said her mother. "goodbye," said little new girl. "don't forget to come for me because i don't know where anything is and i don't know the children and i don't even know my teacher." and her mother answered, "no, i won't." and then she was gone. "now, little new girl, what do you want to do?" said her teacher. but the little girl only shook her head and said, "i don't know anything to do." one little boy said, "let me show little new girl something." and what did he show her? he took her over to the shelves and he showed her the blocks. "you can build a house or anything with them," said the little boy. then another little girl said, "let me show little new girl something." and what did this other little girl show her? she showed her the dolls. "you can put them into a house," said this other little girl. "who else can show little new girl something to do?" called her teacher. "will you, robert?" so what did robert show her? (give child ample time to think. if he does not respond go on.) robert took her over to the shelves and showed her the paper and crayons. "you can draw ever so many pictures," said robert. then virginia said, "let me show little new girl something." so what did virginia show her?--virginia showed her the horses and wagons. "you can harness them up," said virginia. then craig said, "let _me_ show little new girl something." so what did craig show her?--craig showed her the beads. "you can string them in strings," said craig. then peter said, "let _me_ show little new girl something." so what did peter show her?--peter showed her the clay. "you can make anything you want out of it," said peter. then tom said, "let _me_ show little new girl something." so what did tom show her? tom showed her the saw and hammer and nails. "you can saw or hammer nails," said tom. then barbara said, "let me show little new girl something." so what did barbara show her? barbara showed her the paper and scissors. "you can cut out anything you want," said barbara. "now little new girl, what do you want to do?" said her teacher. and this time the little girl jumped right up and down and said, "i'm glad! i want to do everything." "but which thing first?" asked her teacher. "let me watch," the little new girl said. so little new girl stood quite still. she saw robert go and get some paper and crayons and sit down at his little table to draw. she saw virginia get some horses and harness and sit down at her little table to harness them. she saw craig get some beads and sit down at his little table to string them. she saw peter get the clay and sit down at his little table to model. she saw tom go to the bench and begin to saw a piece of wood. she saw barbara get some paper and scissors and paste and sit down at her little table to cut out and to paste. then she said, "i want to draw first." so she took some paper and some colored crayons and she sat down at a little table near the window looking out on the garden. there she drew and she drew and she drew. and she didn't feel like a little new girl at all for now she knew where everything was and she knew all the children and she knew her teacher. the room with the window looking out on the garden i know a yellow room with great big sliding doors and a window on the side looking out upon a garden. there's a balcony above with a bench for carpenters with planes and saws and hammers, bang! bang! with nails and hammers. there are hooks beneath the stairs to hang up hats and coats, and nearby there's a sink with everybody's cup. there's a rope and there's a slide zzzip! but there's a slide. there are shelves and shelves and shelves with colored silk and beads, with paper and with crayons, and a great big crock with clay. and the're blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and the're horses there and wagons and cows and dogs and sheep, and men and women, boys and girls with clothes upon them too. and then the're cars to make a train with engine and caboose.[b] and the're lots of little tables in this yellow, yellow room for boys and girls to sit at and play with all those things. and there's a great big floor in this yellow, yellow room for boys and girls to sit on and play with all those things. and there is lots of sunshine in this yellow, yellow room for boys and girls to sit in and play with all those things. [b] _at this point the teacher might ask, "what else?" not the first time, however. the children must get the outline as a whole before they contribute. otherwise they will be entirely absorbed by the content._ the many-horse stable all the material for this story was supplied by a three-year-old. the pattern was added. an older child would not be content with so sketchy an account. but it seems to compass a three-year-old's most significant associations with a stable. the title is one in actual use by a four-year-old class. the many-horse stable [illustration] once there was a stable. the stable was in a big city. downstairs in the stable there were many g-r-e-a-t b-i-g wagons and one little-bit-of-a wagon. and on the walls there were many g-r-e-a-t b-i-g harnesses and one little-bit-of-a harness. and there were many g-r-e-a-t b-i-g blankets and one little-bit-of-a blanket. and there were some g-r-e-a-t b-i-g whips and one little-bit-of-a whip. and there were some g-r-e-a-t b-i-g nose bags and one little-bit-of-a nose bag. upstairs in the stalls there were some g-r-e-a-t b-i-g horses and one little-bit-of-a pony. in the morning the men would come and harness up the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g horses with the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g harnesses to the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g wagons. they would put in the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g blankets and the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g whips and the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g nose bags. then they would get up on the seats and gather up the reins and off down the street would go the g-r-e-a-t b-i-g horses. clumpety-lumpety bump! thump! clumpety-lumpety bump! thump! then a little-bit-of-a man would harness up the little-bit-of-a pony with the little-bit-of-a harness to the little-bit-of-a wagon. he would put in the little-bit-of-a blanket and the little-bit-of-a whip and the little-bit-of-a nose bag. then he would get up on the seat and gather up the reins and off down the street would go the little-bit-of-a pony! lippety-lippety! lip! lip! lip! lippety-lippety! lip! lip! lip! my kitty here there is no plot. instead i have attempted to enumerate the associations which cluster around a kitten, and present them in a patterned form. my kitty meow, meow! kitty's eyes, two eyes, yellow eyes, shiny bright eyes. meow, meow! kitty's pointed ears, pink on the inside, fur on the outside. meow, meow! kitty's mouth, little white teeth and whiskers long. meow, meow! kitty's fur, soft to stroke like this, like this. prrrr, prrrr, little fur ball cuddled close to the warm, warm fire. prrrr, prrrr, little padded feet pattering soft to get her milk. prrrr, prrrr, little pink tongue, lapping up the milk from her own little dish. prrrr, prrrr, warm little, round little, happy little kitten snuggled in my arms. pssst, pssst! stiff little kitten, spitting at a dog. pssst, pssst! hair standing up on her humped-up back. pssst, pssst! sharp white teeth, sharp, sharp, claws. pssst, pssst! ready to jump and to bite and to scratch. kitty, kitty, kitty, you funny little cat, i never know whether you'll purr or spit you funny little cat! the rooster and the hens an objective story tied in with the personal. the rooster and the hens once there was an egg. inside the egg there was a little chicken growing, for the mother hen had sat on it for three weeks. when the chicken was big enough he wanted to come out and so he went pick, peck, pick, peck, until he made a little hole in the shell. then he stuck his bill through the hole and wiggled it until the shell cracked and he could get his head through. then he wiggled it a little more and the shell broke and he could get his foot out. and then the shell broke right in two. as soon as the little chicken was out he went scritch, scratch, with his little foot. then he ran to a little saucer of water. he took a little water in his bill; then he held his head up in the air while the water ran down his throat. the mother hen went: "cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck," and the little chicken ran to her calling: "cheep, cheep, cheep." then he heard a funny little noise. he looked around and what do you think he saw? another egg was cracking because another little chicken was going pick, peck inside. soon out of the shell came a little baby brother. and then he heard another funny little noise, and another shell broke and out of the shell came a little baby sister. and then he heard another little noise and another shell broke and out of the shell came still another little sister. this went on until there were a lot of yellow baby chickens. then all the little chickens went scritch, scratch, with their little feet looking for worms, and all the little chickens took a drink of water and held up their heads to let the water run down their throats. and all the little chickens ran to the mother hen calling: "cheep, cheep, cheep." now all the little chickens began to grow. the little sisters all got little bits of combs on the tops of their heads and under their bills. their little yellow feathers turned into all kinds of colors. but the little brother chicken, he got a great big red comb on the top of his head and under his bill, and he got long spurs on his ankles. on his neck the feathers grew long and yellow and behind on his tail they grew very long and all shiny green. he was walking around one morning while it was still dark when suddenly he felt a funny feeling in his throat. he wanted to open his mouth. so he did, and out of his mouth this is what came: "cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo." he thought it sounded perfectly wonderful; so he opened his mouth again and out came the same sound: "cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo." now when his sister hens heard this wonderful rooster-noise they all came running out of the chicken house. this made the rooster more pleased than ever. so he threw his head way back and he opened his beak wide and he crowed: "cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo, i'm twice as smart as you, cock-a-doodle-doo, see what i can do." when his sister hens heard him say this each one began to cluck and say: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i'm going to lay an egg, an egg." then the rooster answered: "cock-a-doodle-doo, i don't believe it's true. cock-a-doodle-doo, i don't believe it's true." so the little black and white hen, she ran into the barn and up on the side of the wall she saw a little box. she jumped into the little box and there she laid an egg. then she said: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for robert. cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for robert." then the little yellow hen she jumped right into the manger and she wiggled around in the straw until she made a little nest where she laid an egg. then she said: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for martha. cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for martha." then the little black hen she saw another little box nailed on to the wall so she jumped up on it and she laid an egg and then she said: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for tom, for tom, cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for tom." and then the little white hen she could not find any place at all. she ran around and around. finally she sat right down in the soft dust which by this time the sun had made all warm, until she made a little round hollow and there she laid an egg. then she said: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for peter. cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, i laid an egg for peter." when the rooster saw all these eggs he opened his mouth again and bragged: "cock-a-doodle-doo, what they say is true. see what they can do, cock-a-doodle-doo." and the little hens answered: "cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, we can lay an egg, an egg, cut-cut-cut, cadaakut, we can lay an egg." and if ever you are out in the country early in the morning you will hear the wonderful rooster-noise. and then you will hear the hens telling how many eggs they have laid for you. the little hen and the rooster the little hen goes "cut cut cut." the rooster he goes "cock a doodle doo! you want me and i want you, but i'm up here and you're down there." the little hen goes "cut cut cut," the rooster he steps with a funny little strut, he cocks his eye, gives a funny little sound, he looks at the hen, he looks all around, he flaps his wings, he beats the air, he stretches his neck, then flies to the ground. "cock a doodle, cock a doodle, cock a doodle doo! now you have me and i have you!" my horse, old dan this verse utilizes a child's love of enumeration and of movement. the school has found it the most successful of my verse for small children. my horse, old dan old dan has two ears old dan has two eyes old dan has one mouth with many, many, many, many teeth. old dan has four feet old dan has four hoofs old dan has one tail with many, many, many, many hairs. old dan can w a l k, w a l k, old dan can trot, trot, trot, old dan can run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, many, many, many, many miles. * * * horsie goes jog-a-jog-a-jog the wheels go round and round and round. horsie goes jog-a-jog-a-jog oh, hear what a rattlety, tattlety sound! horsie goes jog-a-jog-a-jog the wheels they pound and pound and pound. horsie goes jog-a-jog-a-jog while the wagon it rattles along the ground! [illustration] auto, auto. may i have a ride? yes, sir, yes, sir, step right inside. pour in the water, turn on the gasolene, and chug, chug, away we go through the country green. how spot found a home this story was worked out with the help of a five-year-old boy who supplied most of the content. it at once suggested dramatization to various groups of children to whom it was read. the refrains are definite corner posts in the story and are recognized as such by the children. how spot found a home once there was a cat. she was a black and white and yellow cat and the boys on the street called her spot. for she was a poor cat with no home but the street. when she wanted to sleep, she had to hunt for a dark empty cellar. when she wanted to eat, she had to hunt for a garbage can. so poor spot was very thin and very unhappy. and much of the time she prowled and yowled and howled. [illustration] now one day spot was prowling along the fence in the alley. she wanted to find a home. she was saying to herself: "meow, meow! i've no place to eat, i've no place to sleep, i've only the street! meow, meow, meow!" then suddenly she smelled something. sniff! went her pink little nose. spot knew it was smoke she smelled. the smoke came out of the chimney of a house. "where there is smoke there is fire," thought spot, "and where there is fire, it is warm to lie." so she jumped down from the fence and on her little padded feet ran softly to the door. there she saw an empty milk bottle. "where there are milk bottles, there is milk," thought spot, "and where there is milk, it is good to drink." so she slipped in through the door. inside was a warm, warm kitchen. spot trotted softly to the front of the stove and there she curled up. she was very happy, so she closed her eyes and began to sing: "purrrr, purrrr, curling up warm to a ball of fur, i close my eyes and purr and purr. purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr." bang! went the kitchen door. spot opened one sleepy eye. in front of her stood a cross, cross woman. the cross, cross woman scowled. she picked up poor spot and threw her out of the door, screaming: "scat, scat! you old street cat! scat, scat! and never come back!" with a bound spot jumped back to the fence. "meow, meow! i've no place to eat, i've no place to sleep, i've only the street. meow, meow, meow!" so she trotted along the fence. in a little while sniff! went her little pink nose again. she smelled more smoke. she stopped by a house with two chimneys. the smoke came out of both chimneys! "where there are two fires there must be room for me," thought spot. she jumped off the fence and pattered to the door. by the door there were two empty milk bottles. "where there is so much milk there will be some for me," thought spot. but the door was shut tight. spot ran to the window. it was open! in skipped spot. there was another warm, warm kitchen and there was another stove. spot trotted softly to the stove and curled up happy and warm. she closed her eyes and softly sang: "purrrr, purrrr, curling up warm to a ball of fur, i close my eyes and purr and purr. purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr." "ssssspt!" hissed something close by. spot leapt to her feet. "ssssspt!" she answered back. for there in front of her stood an enormous black cat. his back was humped, his hair stood on end, his eyes gleamed and his teeth showed white. "ssssspt! leave my rug! ssssspt! leave my fire! ssssspt! leave my milk! ssssspt! leave my home!" spot gave one great jump out of the window and another great jump to the top of the fence. for spot was little and thin and the great black cat was strong and big. and he didn't want spot in his home. poor spot trotted along the fence, thinking: "meow, meow, i've no place to eat, i've no place to sleep, i've only the street, meow, meow, meow." in a little while she smelled smoke again. sniff! went her little pink nose. this time she stopped by a house with three chimneys. the smoke came out of all the chimneys! "where there are three fires there _must_ be room for me," thought spot. so she jumped off the fence and pattered to the door. by the door were three empty milk bottles! "where there is so much milk there must be children," thought spot and then she began to feel happy. but the door was shut tight. she trotted to the window. the window was shut tight too! then she saw some stairs. up the stairs she trotted. there she found another door and in she slipped. she heard a very pleasant sound. "i crickle, i crackle, i flicker, i flare, i jump from nothing right into the air." there on the hearth burned an open fire with a warm, warm rug in front of it. on the rug was a little table and on the table were two little mugs of milk. spot curled up on the rug under the table and began to sing: "purrrr, purrrr, curling up warm to a ball of fur, i close my eyes, and purr and purr. purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr." pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat! spot heard some little feet coming. a little boy in a nightgown ran into the room. "look," he called, "at the pretty spotted cat under our table!" then pat, pat, pat, pat, pat! and a little girl in a nightgown ran into the room. "see," she called, "the pussy has come to take supper with us!" then the little boy, quick as a wink, put a saucer on the floor and poured some of his milk into it and the little girl, quick as a wink, poured some of hers in too. in and out, in and out, in and out, went spot's pink tongue lapping up the milk. then she sat up and washed her face very carefully. then she curled up and closed her eyes and began to sing. that was her way of saying "thank you, little boy and little girl! i'm so glad i've found a home!" "purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr, purrrr." the dinner horses the grocery man the material for these stories came from questions and observations on the part of three- and four-year-olds arising largely from their trips on the city streets. the children should be allowed to name the various kinds of food. the dinner horses in a certain house on a certain street there lives a certain little girl and her name is ruth (one of children's names). she sleeps in a little bed in a room with a big window opening on to the street. she sleeps all night in the little bed with her eyes closed tight. in the morning she opens her eyes and it's just beginning to get light. then she stretches and stretches her legs. then she stops still and listens. for she hears him coming, coming, coming down the street. clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clop! comes the milk horse down the street! he stops in front of ruth's house. ruth hears him. then she hears the driver jump out and pat, pat, pat, she hears his feet coming to the door. clank, clink, clank, go the milk bottles in his hands. clank! she hears him put them down. then fast she hears his feet, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. "go on, dan!" she hears him call, and clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clop! off goes the milk horse down the street. then after a while she hears something else. it's quite light now. ruth thinks it must be time to get up. she stretches and stretches her legs. then she stretches and stretches her arms. then she stops still and listens. for she hears him coming, coming, coming down the street. clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, lip, lip, lip! comes the bread horse down the street. he stops in front of ruth's house. ruth hears him. then she hears the driver jump out and pat, pat, pat, she hears his feet coming to the door. rattle, crackle, goes the paper as he puts down the loaves of bread all wrapped up to keep them clean. then fast she hears his feet, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat, pat. "go on, bill!" she hears him call and clippety, lip, lip, lip, clippety, lip, lip, lip! off goes the bread horse down the street. after breakfast when ruth is all ready to go to school she hears a big auto coming down the street. kachug-a-chug-a-chug comes the grocery auto down the street. it stops at ruth's house. ruth runs and looks out of the window. she sees the driver jump out and take from the back of the auto a basket all full of things. she can see spinach and potatoes and a package of sugar and----and----and----. then pat, pat, pat, the driver runs to the door. prrrrrr! she hears the bell ring and ruth knows that the driver is giving bessie all the things at the kitchen door. then pat, pat, pat back comes the driver, jumps into the auto and kachug-a-chug-a-chug! off goes the grocery auto down the street! on the way to school ruth passes another wagon. rattling and clattering, she hears the butcher's wagon come down the street. "is there anything in that wagon for us?" asks ruth. and her mother answers, "yes, a little chicken." then rattling and clattering off to ruth's house goes the butcher's wagon down the street. now while ruth is away at school bessie washes the spinach and chops it up fine and puts it on the stove to boil. she puts the little chicken in a pan and puts it in the oven to roast. then she puts some big potatoes in the oven to bake. then she slices some bread and cuts off a piece of butter and pours out some glasses of milk. when ruth comes home from school she smells something good. "dinner's all ready," calls bessie. ruth answers, "come father, come mother. i'm hungry." so ruth and her father and mother sit down at the table and they drink the milk and they eat the bread and the spinach and the potatoes and the chicken which the milk horse and the bread horse and the grocery auto and the butcher's wagon brought in the morning. [illustration] the grocery man prrrip! prrrip! prrrip! the telephone rings in the grocery store. "hello," says the grocery man. "who are you?" "i'm ruth's mother. good morning, mr. grocery man." "good morning, ruth's mother. what can i send you today?" "please, mr. grocery man, send me some potatoes and some graham crackers and a package of sugar and some carrots." "is that all, ruth's mother?" "yes, that's all. goodbye, mr. grocery man." "goodbye, ruth's mother." so the grocery man hangs up the telephone and takes a basket and in the basket he puts some potatoes, some graham crackers, a package of sugar and some carrots. then prrrip! prrrip! prrrip! the telephone rings again. "hello!" says the grocery man. "who is this?" "this is john's mother. good morning, mr. grocery man." "good morning, john's mother. what can i send you today?" "please, mr. grocery man, send me some spinach and some apples and some butter and some eggs." "is that all, john's mother?" "yes, that's all. goodbye, mr. grocery man." "goodbye, john's mother." so the grocery man hangs up the telephone and takes another basket and in the basket he puts some spinach and some apples and some butter and some eggs. then prrrip! prrrip, prrrip! the telephone rings another time. "hello!" says the grocery man. "who are you?" "i'm robert's mother. good morning, mr. grocery man." "good morning, robert's mother. what can i send you today?" "please, mr. grocery man, send me some prunes and some macaroni and some salt and some oatmeal." "is that all, robert's mother?" "yes, that's all. goodbye, mr. grocery man." "goodbye, robert's mother." so the grocery man hangs up the telephone and takes another basket and in the basket he puts some prunes and some macaroni and some salt and some oatmeal. then he carries ruth's basket out and puts it in a wagon on the street. then he carries john's basket out and puts it in the wagon. at last he carries robert's basket out and puts that in the wagon with the others. then the driver jumps to the seat and gathers up the reins and says "go on, old dan," and clopperty, clopperty clop! off goes old dan down the street. old dan goes clopperty, clopperty, clop till he gets to ruth's house and there he stops. the driver jumps out and takes the basket and pat, pat, pat, go his feet running to the door. prrrr! he rings the bell and gives ruth's mother the potatoes, the graham crackers, the sugar and the carrots. then pat, pat, pat, he is back in the wagon. "go on, old dan," and clopperty, clopperty, clop! off goes old dan down the street. old dan goes clopperty, clopperty, clop till he gets to john's house and there he stops. the driver jumps out and takes another basket and pat, pat, pat go his feet running to the door. prrrr! he rings the bell and gives john's mother the spinach, the apples, the butter and the eggs. then pat, pat, pat, he is back in the wagon. "go on, old dan," and clopperty, clopperty, clop! off goes old dan down the street. old dan goes clopperty, clopperty, clop till he gets to robert's house and there he stops. the driver jumps out, takes another basket and pat, pat, pat, he is at the door. prrrr! he rings the bell and gives robert's mother the prunes, the macaroni, the salt and the oatmeal. then pat, pat, pat, he is back in the wagon. "go on, old dan," and clopperty, clopperty, clop! off goes old dan down the street. so old dan goes clopperty, clopperty, clop from house to house until he has left a basket with everybody who telephoned to the grocery man in the morning. the journey this story, which is an adaptation of a five-year-old's story quoted in the introduction, embodies the details given to me by another three-year-old child. the sound of the train should be intoned, as it was in the original telling. the journey once ruth's father was going to take a journey. he got out his suitcase. and in his suitcase he put his slippers, his pajamas, his tooth brush, some tooth paste, some clean underclothes, some clean shirts, some collars, some socks and some handkerchiefs. then he kissed ruth goodbye as she lay asleep in her bed and he kissed her mother goodbye and with his suitcase in his hand went up to the pennsylvania station. at the train he met the negro porter. "what berth, sir?" said the porter. "lower ", said ruth's father. so the porter took the suitcase and put it down at number which was all made up into two beds, one above the other, with green curtains hanging in front. then ruth's father undressed. and in a few minutes he was asleep behind the green curtains. soon the train started and ruth's father never woke up. "thum," said the train (on many different keys) all through the night. "thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _philadelphia!_ thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _baltimore!_ thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _washington!_" then ruth's father got up and dressed himself, for it was morning. the negro porter carried his suitcase to the platform. "goodbye, sir," he said. "goodbye, porter," said ruth's father. and then he went off to a hotel. the next day it was time for him to go home. so ruth's father packed his suitcase again. in his suitcase he put his slippers, his pajamas, his tooth brush, some tooth paste, his dirty underclothes, his dirty shirts, his collars, his socks and his handkerchiefs. then he went to the pennsylvania station in washington. at the train he met another negro porter. "what berth, sir?" said the porter. "upper ," said ruth's father. so the porter took the suitcase and put it in the top bed of number . ruth's father climbed up into the upper berth. then he undressed and in a few minutes he was asleep behind the green curtains. soon the train started. "thum," said the train, though ruth's father never heard it he was so sound asleep. "thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _baltimore!_ thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _philadelphia!_ thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum; thum, thum, thum, thum. _new york!_" then ruth's father got up and dressed himself for it was morning. the negro porter carried his suitcase to the platform. "goodbye, sir," he said. "goodbye, porter," said ruth's father. then ruth's father jumped into a taxi and in a few minutes he was at home. ruth came running down the stairs. "here's father," she cried. "here's father in time for breakfast!" "my," said ruth's father, giving her a hug, "it's good to be home!" pedro's feet here there is a definite attempt to let the sounds tell their own story. pedro's feet little pedro was a dog. he lived in new york city. he was owned by a little boy who loved him. for pedro had big brown eyes and curly brown hair and when he wanted anything he would go: "hu-u-u, hu-u-u, hu-u-u!" and any one would have loved pedro. one day pedro was lying on his front steps in the warm, warm sun. he put his nose on his little fore paws and went to sleep. "bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz!" went a little fly in his ear. "yap, yap!" went pedro's jaws as he snapped at the fly. but he missed the fly. "bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz!" went the little fly. "yap, yap!" went pedro's jaws. but he missed the fly again. "bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz!" "yap, yap, yap!" "bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz!" "yap, yap, yap, yap!" up jumped pedro. "i can't sleep with that fly in my ear! i'll take a walk!" down the steps he went. skippety, skippety, skippety, skippety. he reached the sidewalk. on the sidewalk went his feet. you could hear them as they beat. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter down the street. when he came to the end of the block, he started across the street. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter pat---- "honk, honk! look out, look out! honk, honk!" jump-thump! went pedro's feet. jump-jump jump-jump, jump-jump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, jump-jump, jump-jump, jump-jump, pitter patter, pitter patter,--he'd reached the other side! and the auto hadn't hurt him! again on the sidewalk went his feet. you could hear them as they beat pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter down the street. when he came to the end of this block, he started across the next street. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter pat---- "clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clopperty! get out of my way, get out of my way! clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clopperty!" jump-thump! went pedro's feet. jump-jump jump-jump, jump-jump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, jump-jump, jump-jump, jump-jump, pitter patter, pitter patter,--he'd reached the other side! and the horse hadn't hurt him either! again on the sidewalk went his feet. you could hear them as they beat,--pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter down the street. when he came to the end of this block, he started across the next street. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter pat---- pedro stopped with one little front foot up in the air. in the middle of the street stood a man. he had on high rubber boots and he held a big hose. shrzshrzshrzshrzshrz--came the water out of the hose. it hit the street. splsh splsh splsh splsh splsh! it ran in a little stream into the hole in the gutter,--gubble, gubble, gubble, gubble, gubble! this was something new to pedro. he didn't understand. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter. he thought he'd better find out about it. "hie, you little dog! look out!" shouted the man. pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter. "hie, you little dog. i say look out!" pitter patter, pitter pat--ssssssssss bang! the water hit him! "ki-eye! yow! yow!" kathump, kathump, kathump, kathump; kathump, kathump, kathump, kathump! fast, fast went pedro's feet, running, tearing down the street. "ki-eye! i'm going home!" kathump, kathump, kathump, kathump! down the sidewalk, 'cross the street, 'nother sidewalk, 'nother street, kathump, kathump, kathump, kathump! pedro was at home. skippety, skippety up the stairs. pedro was at his own front door. he stopped. brrrrrrrrrrrrr--he shook himself. he scattered the water all around. "bow, wow, i'm glad i'm home! bow, wow, i'm glad i'm home!" then he lay down in the warm, warm sun. and he put his nose on his little fore paws. and he closed his eyes and he went to sleep. "bzbzbzbzbzbzbzbzbz!" but pedro was too sound asleep to hear the fly. "whe-whuhuhu, whe-whuhuhu, whe-whuhuhu." that's the way he was breathing. for he was oh, so sound asleep! and there he is sleeping now. how the engine learned the knowing song this story stresses the relationship of use in response to what seems to be a five-year-old method of thinking. the school has found it best to let the younger children take the parts individually but to omit the parts in unison. the joy of the mere noise makes it difficult to bring them back for the close of the story. all the children have repeated the refrains after a few readings with evident enjoyment. how the engine learned the knowing song once there was a new engine. he had a great big boiler; he had a smoke stack; he had a bell; he had a whistle; he had a sand-dome; he had a headlight; he had four big driving wheels; he had a cab. but he was very sad, was this engine, for he didn't know how to use any of his parts. all around him on the tracks were other engines, puffing or whistling or ringing their bells and squirting steam. one big engine moved his wheels slowly, softly muttering to himself, "i'm going, i'm going, i'm going." now the new engine knew this was the end of the knowing song of engines. he wanted desperately to sing it. so he called out: "i want to go but i don't know how; i want to know, please teach me now. please somebody teach me how." now there were two men who had come just on purpose to teach him how. and who do you suppose they were? the engineer and the fireman! when the engineer heard the new engine call out, he asked, "what do you want, new engine?" and the engine answered: "i want the sound of my wheels going round. i want to stream a jet of steam. i want to puff smoke and stuff. i want to ring ding, ding-a-ding. i want to blow my whistle so. i want my light to shine out bright. i want to go ringing and singing the song, the humming song of the engine coming, the clear, near song of the engine here, the knowing song of the engine going." now the engineer and the fireman were pleased when they heard what the new engine wanted. but the engineer said: "all in good time, my engine, steady, steady, 'til you're ready. learn to know before you go." [illustration] then he said to the fireman, "first we must give our engine some water." so they put the end of a hose hanging from a big high-up tank right into a little tank under the engine's tender. the water filled up this little tank and then ran into the big boiler and filled that all up too. and while they were doing this the water kept saying: "i am water from a stream when i'm hot i turn to steam." when the engine felt his boiler full of water he asked eagerly: "now i have water, now do i know how i should go?" but the fireman said: "all in good time, my engine, steady, steady, 'til you're ready, learn to know before you go." then he said to the engineer, "now we must give our engine some coal." so they filled the tender with coal, and then under the boiler the fireman built a fire. then the fireman began blowing and the coals began glowing. and as he built the fire, the fire said: "i am fire, the coal i eat to make the heat to turn the stream into the steam." when the engine felt the sleeping fire wake up and begin to live inside him and turn the water into steam he said eagerly: "now i have water, now i have coal, now do i know how i should go?" but the engineer said: "all in good time, my engine, steady, steady, 'til you're ready. learn to know before you go." then he said to the fireman, "we must oil our engine well." so they took oil cans with funny long noses and they oiled all the machinery, the piston-rods, the levers, the wheels, everything that moved or went round. and all the time the oil kept saying: "no creak, no squeak." when the engine felt the oil smoothing all his machinery, he said eagerly: "now i have water, now i have coal, now i am oiled, now do i know how i should go?" but the fireman said: "all in good time, my engine, steady, steady, 'til you're ready. learn to know before you go." then he said to the engineer, "we must give our engine some sand." so they took some sand and they filled the sand domes on top of the boiler so that he could send sand down through his two little pipes and sprinkle it in front of his wheels when the rails were slippery. and all the time the sand kept saying: "when ice drips, and wheel slips, i am sand close at hand." when the new engine felt his sand-dome filled with sand he said eagerly: "now i have water, now i have coal, now i am oiled, now i have sand, now do i know how i should go?" but the engineer said: "all in good time, my engine, steady, steady, 'til you're ready. learn to know before you go." then he said to the fireman, "we must light our engine's headlight." so the fireman took a cloth and he wiped the mirror behind the light and polished the brass around it. then he filled the lamp with oil. then the engineer struck a match and lighted the lamp and closed the little door in front of it. and all the time the light kept saying: "i'm the headlight shining bright like a sunbeam through the night." now when the engine saw the great golden path of brightness streaming out ahead of him, he said eagerly: "now i have water, now i have coal, now i am oiled, now i have sand, now i make light, now do i know how i should go?" [illustration] and the engineer said, "we will see if you are ready, my new engine." so he climbed into the cab and the fireman got in behind him. then he said, "engine, can you blow your whistle so?" and he pulled a handle which let the steam into the whistle and the engine whistled (who wants to be the whistle?) "toot, toot, toot." then he said, "can you puff smoke and stuff?" and the engine puffed black smoke (who wants to be the smoke?), saying, "puff, puff, puff, puff, puff." then he said, "engine, can you squirt a stream of steam?" and he opened a valve (who wants to be the steam?) and the engine went, "szszszszsz." then he said, "engine, can you sprinkle sand?" and he pulled a little handle (who wants to be the sand?) and the sand trickled drip, drip, drip, down on the tracks in front of the engine's wheels. then he said, "engine, does your light shine out bright?" and he looked (who wants to be the headlight?) and there was a great golden flood of light on the track in front of him. then he said, "engine, can you make the sound of your wheels going round?" and he pulled another lever and the great wheels began to move (who wants to be the wheels?) then the engineer said: "now is the time, now is the time. steady, steady, now you are ready. blow whistle, ring bell, puff smoke, hiss steam, sprinkle sand, shine light, turn wheels! 'tis time to be ringing and singing the song, the humming song of the engine coming, the clear, near song of the engine here, the knowing song of the engine going." then whistle blew, bell rang, smoke puffed, steam hissed, sand sprinkled, light shone and wheels turned like this: (eventually the children can do this together, each performing his chosen part.) "toot-toot, ding-a-ding, puff-puff, szszszszsz, drip-drip, chug-chug." (after a moment stop the children) that's the way the new engine sounded when he started on his first ride and didn't know how to do things very well. but that's not the way he sounded when he had learned to go really smooth and fast. then it was that he learned _really_ to sing "the knowing song of the engine." he sang it better than any one else for he became the fastest, the steadiest, the most knowing of all express engines. and this is the song he sang. you could hear it humming on the rails long before he came and hear it humming on the rails long after he had passed. now listen to the song. (begin very softly rising to a climax with "i'm here" and gradually dying to a faint whisper) "i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming, i'm coming. i'm here, i'm here, i'm here, i'm here, i'm here, i'm here, i'm here, i'm here. i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going, i'm going." the fog boat story the refrains must be intoned if not sung to get the proper effect. most of the informational parts of the original story have been cut out. the story grew out of questions asked before breakfast on foggy days, and was originally told to the sound of the distant fog horns. the fog boat story early, early one morning, all the fog boats were talking. this is the way they were going: "toot, toot, toot, too-oot, to-oo-oot!" (on many different keys.) [illustration] way down at the wharf a big steamer was being pulled out into the river. the furnaces were all going for the stokers were down in the hole shoveling coal, down in the hole shoveling coal, shoveling coal, and a lot of black smoke was coming out of the smoke stack. and the engines were working, chug, chug, chug. and all the baggage and freight had been put down in the hold. and all the food had been put on the ice. and all the passengers were on board and the gang-plank had been pulled up. and this is what the big steamer was saying: [illustration: musical score "toot toot i'm mov-ing; toot toot i'm mov-ing."] and do you know what was making the steamer move? what was pulling her out into the river? it was a little tug boat and the tug boat had hold of one end of a big rope and the other end of the rope was tied fast to the steamer. and the little tug boat was puffing and chucking and working away as hard as he could and calling out: [illustration: musical score "too too too too toot i'm aw-ful smart; too too too too toot i pull big things."] and do you know why the tug boat and the steamer were talking like this? it is because they were afraid they might bump into some other ship in the fog for they can't see in the fog. you know how white and thick the fog can be. so the old steamer and the little tug boat both kept tooting until they were way out in the middle of the river. "toot, toot, i'm moving." "tootootootootoot, i'm awful smart." [illustration] now when they were way out in the middle of the river, the little tug boat dropped the rope from the big steamer and turned around. as it puffed away it called out: "too-too-too-tootoot, i'm going home too-too-too-tootoot, i'm awful smart." then the big steamer moved slowly down the river towards the great ocean calling through the fog: "toot, toot, i'm moving." up on the captain's bridge stood the pilot. he is the man who tells just where to make the steamer go in the harbor. he knows where everything is. he knows where the rocks are on the right and he didn't let the steamer bump them. he knows where the sand reef is on the left and he didn't let the steamer get on to that. he knows just where the deep water is and he kept the steamer in it all the time. now down on the right so close that it almost bumped, there went a flat boat. this boat was saying: [illustration: musical score "toot toot my load is heavy, load is heavy, load is heavy, toot,"] and that was a coal barge. and then down on the left so close that it almost bumped on the other side they heard another boat saying: [illustration: musical score "too toot, back & forth, too toot, back & forth"] and that was a ferry boat! then off on the right they heard a great big deep voice. this is what it said: [illustration: musical score "toot toot, 'tis i"] and that was a war boat! and every time the old steamer answered: "toot, toot, i'm moving." once off on the left the passengers could hear this: "ding----g! dong----g! hear my song----g! ding----g! dong----g!" and what bell do you think that was way out there? a bell buoy rocking on the water! every time the wave went up it said, "ding" and every time the wave went down it said, "dong." by this time the old steamer was out of the harbor way out in the open sea. the pilot came down from the captain's deck; he climbed down the rope ladder to the little pilot boat that was tied close to the big steamer. then the little pilot boat pushed away into the fog calling: [illustration: musical score "too too toot too toot i'm go-ing go-ing home"] and again the big steamer answered: "toot, toot, i'm moving." then way off on the left so far away it could barely hear it, it heard: [illustration: musical score "don't hit me, toot toot, don't hit me, toot toot"] and that was a sail boat! then way off on the right so far away it could barely hear it, it heard "toot, toot, i'm moving" and that was another steamer. [illustration] and again the big steamer answered: "toot, toot, i'm moving." and so the old steamer went out into the fog calling, calling so that no boat would hit it. and all the other boats that passed it, they went calling, calling too. hammer and saw and plane this story is a slight extension of the children's own experience. it is purposely limited to the tools they themselves handle familiarly. hammer and saw and plane once there was a carpenter. he had built himself a fine new house. and now it was all done. the walls, the floors and the roof were done. the stairs were done. the windows and doors were done. and the carpenter had moved into his new house. in his house he had a stove and he had electric lights. he had beds and chairs and bureaus and bookcases. he had everything except a table to eat off of. he still had to stand up when he ate his meals! so the carpenter thought he would make him a table. but he had no lumber left. so off he went to the lumber mill. at the lumber mill he saw lots and lots of lumber piled in the yard. the carpenter told the man at the lumber mill just how much lumber he wanted and just how long he wanted it and how broad he wanted it and how thick he wanted it. so the man at the lumber mill put all this lumber,--just what the carpenter had ordered,--on a wagon and sent it out to the carpenter's house. and then the carpenter began. he said to himself, "first i must make my boards just the right length." so he measured a board just as long as he wanted the top to be; then he put the board on a sawhorse and he took his saw and began to saw: [illustration] "zzzu," went the saw, "zzzu, zzzu, zzzu." the sawdust flew the saw ripped through down dropped the board sawed right in two. and then the carpenter took another board and he measured this just the same length. then he put this board on the sawhorse and he took the saw and began to saw: "zzzu," went the saw, "zzzu, zzzu, zzzu." the sawdust flew the saw ripped through down dropped the board sawed right in two. and then the carpenter took still another board and "zzzu," went the saw until this board too was sawed right in two. then he had enough for the top of the table. then he took the pieces that were going to make the legs and he sawed four of them just the right length. then he sawed the boards that were going to be the braces until they too were just the right length. and underneath his sawhorse there was a little pile of sawdust. then after this the carpenter says to himself, "i must make my boards smooth." so he puts a board in the vise and he begins to plane the board. the plane he guides the plane it glides it smooths, it slides all over the sides. and when this board is all smooth, the carpenter takes it out of the vise and puts in another board. then he takes his plane. the plane he guides the plane it glides it smooths, it slides all over the sides. and then the carpenter takes still another board and he guides and slides the plane until this board too is all smooth. and he does this until all the boards that are going to make the top and the legs and the braces are all smooth. and underneath his bench there is a pile of shavings. and then the carpenter he says to himself, "i must nail my boards together." so he puts the boards that are going to make the top together and he takes a nail and then he swings his hammer: the hammer it gives a swinging pound. the nail it gives a ringing sound. bing! bang! bing! bing! and the boards are tight together! and then the carpenter takes another piece of the top and puts it beside the other two and he takes another nail and then he swings his hammer again. the hammer it gives a swinging pound. the nail it gives a ringing sound. bing! bang! bing! bing! and the boards are tight together! and then the carpenter takes one piece that is going to be a leg and he holds it so it stands right out from the top, and he takes another nail and he nails the leg to the top. bing! bang! bing! bing! he does this with the other three legs of his table. and then he has four strong legs and the top of his table all nailed together. then the carpenter he says to himself, "i'll put some boards across and make it stronger." so he takes some boards sawed just the right length, and he nails them across underneath the top, bing! bang! bing! bing! and then he has a table! so the carpenter lifts his table out into the middle of his room and he puts a chair beside it. when he sits down he is smiling all over. for the table is just the right size and just the right height and it is strong and good to look at. the carpenter is so glad to have a table to eat off of that he says to himself: "now isn't it grand? i won't have to stand while eating my dinner again! for now i am able to sit at the table i made with saw, hammer and plane!" the elephant this was written with the help of eight-year-old children who were trying to make everything sound "heavy" and "slow." the elephant the little boy had never before been to the zoo. he walked up close to the high iron fence. on the other side he saw a huge wrinkled grey lump slowly sway to one side and then slowly sway back to the other. and as it swayed from side to side its great long wrinkled trunk swung slowly too. the little boy followed the trunk with his eye up to the huge head of the great wrinkled grey lump. there were enormous torn worn flapping ears. and there, too, embedded like jewels in a leather wall sparkled two little eyes. these eyes were fastened on the little boy. they seemed to shine in the dull wrinkled skin. slowly the huge mass began to move. slowly one heavy padded foot came up and then went down with a soft thud. then came another soft thud and another and another. suddenly the monstrous trunk waved, curled, lifted, stretched and stretched, until its soft pink end was thrust through the high iron fence and the little boy could look up into the fleshy yawning red mouth. the little boy drew back from the high iron fence. the end of the trunk wiggled and wriggled around feeling its way up and down a rod of the fence; the great body swayed from one heavy foot to the other; and all the time the bright little eyes were fastened on the boy. the little boy looked and looked and looked again. he could hardly believe his eyes. "whew!" he said at last, "so that's an elephant!" how the animals move the classifications and most of the expressions were suggested by a child. how the animals move the lion, he has paws with claws, the horse, he walks on hooves, the worm, he lies right on the ground and wriggles when he moves! the seal, he moves with swimming feet, the moth, has wings like a sail, the fly he clings; the bird he wings, the monkey swings by his tail! but boys and girls with feet and hands can walk and run and swim and stand! the sea-gull all the material and most of the expressions are taken from a story by a six-year-old. it was put into rhythm because the children wished "the words to go like the waves." the sea-gull feel the waves go rocking, rocking, feel them roll and roll and roll. on the top there sits a sea-gull and he's rocking with the waves. now 'tis evening and he's weary so he's resting on the waves. when he woke in early morning like a flash he spied a fish. quick he flew and quickly diving snapped the fish and ate him straight. then he screamed for he was happy. then he spied another fish quick he flew and quickly diving snapped the fish and ate him straight. so he played while shone the sunshine, catching fish and screaming hoarse till he was quite out of hunger, and would rest him on the waves. once he flapped and flapped his great wings, soaring like an aeroplane. down below him lay the ocean like a wrinkled crinkly thing, and giant steamers looked like toy ones slowly moving on the waves. now the moonshine's making silver all the tossing, rocking waves. and the sea-gull looks like silver and his great wings look like silver pressing close his silver side, and his sharp beak looks like silver tucked beneath his silver wings. for beneath the silver moonlight see, the sea-gull's gone to sleep. rocking, rocking on the water, sleeping, sleeping on the waves, rocking--sleeping--sleeping--rocking, fast asleep upon the waves. the farmer tries to sleep it has seemed appropriate to let the children realize the incessant quality of farm work before that of the factory. the farmer tries to sleep the farmer woke up in the morning and sleepy as sleepy was he, he turned in his bed and he grouchily said: "today i will sleep! let me be, let me be! today i will sleep! let me be!" now puss in the corner she heard she heard what the farmer had said, she ran to the barn and she mewed in alarm; "the farmer will sleep in his bed, in his bed! today he will sleep in his bed!" then horse in the stable looked up, he whinneyed and shook his old head; "shall i stand here all day without any hay? whey-ey-ey! farmer, come feed me!" he said, so he said, "whey-ey-ey! farmer, come feed me!" he said. but the farmer he tight closed his eyes for sleepy as sleepy was he, he turned in his bed and he angrily said: "horse, i will sleep! let me be, let me be! horse, i will sleep! let me be!" down under the barn in the dirt pig heard what the pussy cat mewed. "can he give me the scraps when he's taking his naps? wee-ee, farmer, come give me my food, oh, my food! wee-ee, farmer, come give me my food!" but the farmer he tight closed his ears for sleepy as sleepy was he, he turned in his bed and he sulkily said: "pig, i will sleep! let me be, let me be! pig, i will sleep! let me be!" now rooster with chickens and hen had been crowing since early that morn, and he crowed when he heard this terrible word: "cock-a-doo! farmer, give us our corn, us our corn! cock-a-doo! farmer, give us our corn." but the farmer he pulled up the covers for sleepy as sleepy was he, he turned in his bed and crossly he said: "cock, i will sleep! let me be, let me be! cock, i will sleep! let me be!" cow heard in the pasture and lowed; "my cud no longer i chew, i stand by the gate and i wait and i wait, oh, farmer, come milk me! moo-oo, moo-oo! oh, farmer, come milk me, moo-oo!" but the farmer got under the covers, for sleepy as sleepy was he, he turned in his bed and fiercely he said, "cow, i will sleep! let me be, let me be! cow, i will sleep! let me be!" then horse he broke from the stable, and pig he broke from the pen, and cow jumped the fence though she hadn't much sense, and cock called chickens and hen, and hen, he called to chickens and hen. then up to the farm house door all followed the pussy who knew. horse whinneyed, cock crowed, pig grunted, cow lowed; "get up, farmer! whey, cock-a-doo, wee-wee-wee, mooo! whey, cock-a-doo, wee-wee-wee, moooo!" the farmer down under the covers, he heard and he groaned and he sighed. he wearily rose and he put on his clothes; "they need me, i'm coming, i'm coming," he cried, "they need me, i'm coming," he cried. "i'll feed horse, chickens and pig, i'll milk old cow," said he, "and when this is done, my work's just begun, today i must work, so i see, so i see! today i must work, so i see!" so he fed horse, chickens and pig and afterwards milked old cow. for farmer must work, he never can shirk! today he is working, right now, right now! today he is working right now! wonderful-cow-that-never-was! all the essential points in this story were taken from the story of a four-year-old's about a horse. he enjoyed the nonsense in telling it. some of the four-year-old groups have appreciated the humor; some five-year-olds have not. instead they have seemed confused. wonderful-cow-that-never-was! once there was a wonderful cow,--only she never was! she always had been wonderful, ever since she was a baby calf. her mother noticed it at once. she was born out in the pasture one sunny morning in june. as soon as she was born, she got up on her long, thin legs. she wobbled quite a little for she wasn't very strong. then she went over to her mother and put her nose down to her mother's bag and took a drink of milk. this is what all the old cow's babies had always done so the old cow thought nothing of that. but when this wonderful last baby calf had drunk its breakfast, what do you suppose it did? it stood on its head! now the old cow had never seen anything like this. it was most surprising! it frightened her. she called to it: "oh, my baby, baby calf, your mother kindly begs, please, _please_ get off your head and stand upon your legs!" but the baby calf only mooed. and it smiled when it mooed which the old cow thought queer too. none of her other babies had smiled. then the calf said: "i'm a wonderful calf, and it makes me laugh such wonderful things can i do! i stand on my head whenever i'm fed, and smile whenever i moo, i do, i smile whenever i moo!" "dear me!" thought the old mother cow. "i never saw or heard anything like this!" but this was only the beginning. the baby calf kept on doing strange and wonderful things till at last everyone called her wonderful-calf-that-never-was! and many people used to come to see her stand on her head whenever she was fed. she did other queer things too! once she pulled off the ear of another calf! and all she said was: "poor little calf! you mustn't go in the pasture where there are other calves!" but the little calf who had lost its ear said, "yes, i must!" but after that wonderful-calf-that-never-was was kept in the barn for a long time. at last it was june again and she was a year old. her horns had begun to grow. the old cow, her mother, had another baby. this new baby calf was just like other calves and not wonderful at all. the old cow was glad for wonderful-cow-that-never-was worried her very much. for everything about her was queer. one day the calf who had lost the ear,--she was a young cow now,--took hold of the tail of wonderful-young-cow-that-never-was and pulled it. and what do you suppose happened? the tail broke right off! all the cows were frightened. whoever heard of a broken tail? but wonderful-young-cow-that-never-was only mooed and when she mooed she always smiled. then she said: "i'm a wonderful cow and i don't know how such wonderful things i do! if i break my tail, i never fail to glue with a grasshopper's goo, i do, i glue with a grasshopper's goo!" and so she did. she got a grasshopper to give her some sticky stuff and she smeared it on the two ends of her broken tail and stuck them together. "and now it's as good as new," she said, "and now it's as good as new!" her horns grew and grew. she was very proud of them and was always trying to hook some one or gore another cow with them. but one day she went to the edge of the lake when it was very still. it wasn't wavy at all. and as she leaned over to drink, she saw herself in the water. my mercy! but she was shocked! "my horns are straight!" she screamed, "and i want them curly!" she ran to the old mother cow and had what her mother called the "krink-kranks." she jumped up and down and bellowed: "my horns are straight and i want them curly!" the old mother cow was giving her new baby some milk. it made her cross to hear wonderful-cow-that-never-was having krink-kranks over her horns. "horns grow the way they grow!" she remarked crossly. "so what are you going to do about it?" "something!" answered the young cow. "i'm not wonderful-cow-that-never-was for nothing!" and she stopped having krink-kranks and went off. she stayed away all day and when she did come back, her horns were curled up tight! and she was chewing and smiling and chewing and smiling. "what have you done now?" gasped the old mother cow. "i never saw horns curled so crumply!" the young cow smiled and said: "i'm a wonderful cow and i don't know how such wonderful things i do! i curl my horn on the cob of a corn and smile whenever i chew, i do, i smile whenever i chew!" "and here is the corn cob i curled them on," she said, opening her mouth. and sure enough, there was the corn cob! now wonderful-cow-that-never-was got queerer and queerer until the farmer thought her a little _too_ queer. she was very proud of her crumpled horns and tried to hook everyone on them. once she tore the farmer's coat trying to hook him. and once she _did_ toss him up. she watched him in the air and all she said was "he's up now, but he'll come down some time." and bang! so he did! finally one terrible day, they tied her tight and cut off her horns. she was never the same afterwards. she couldn't hook any more. "i don't care about being queer any more," she said to her mother. and she wasn't. she stopped standing on her head. she never pulled off another ear. she never broke her tail again and of course she never curled her horns again. because she hadn't any! "after all," she said, "it's wonderful enough just to be a cow and have four stomachs and chew cud and give milk and have a baby each spring!" and that's what she's doing now! she's a wonderful cow, and anyhow she does a wonderful thing! she wallows in mud, she chews her cud, and has a baby in spring! things that loved the lake this story was worked out with a five-year-old boy. it is the result of his own summer experiences on a lake. things that loved the lake once there was a little lake. and many things loved the little lake for its water was clear and smooth and blue when it was sunshiny, and dark and wavy and cross-looking when it was rainy. now one of the things that loved the little lake was a little fish. he was a slippery shiny little fish all covered with slippery shiny scales. he lived in the shadow of a big rock near a deep, dark, cool pool. and when his wide-open shiny eye saw a little fly fall on the top of the water, he would flip his slippery, shiny tail and wave his slippery, shiny fins and dart out and up and--snap! he'd have the fly inside him! then like a shiny streak he'd quietly slip back to the cool, deep, dark pool. [illustration] another thing that loved the little lake was a spotted green frog. he too lived near the big rock. he would squat like a lump on the top in the sun, blinking his bright little eyes. then splash! jump he would go, plump into the water. he'd keep his funny head with the little blinking, bright eyes above water while he'd kick his long, spotted, green legs and he'd swim across to another rock. at first he used to frighten the slippery shiny little fish when he came tumbling into the quiet water. but the spotted green frog never did anything to hurt the little fish so the slippery shiny little fish didn't mind him after all. but at night what do you think the spotted green frog did? he squatted on the rock with his front feet toeing in, like this, and he looked up at the far-away white moon in the far-away dark sky, and then he swelled and he swelled and he swelled his throat, and then he opened his wide, wide mouth and out came a noise. oh, such a noise! "k-k-k-krink!! k-k-k-krank!!" all night the spotted frog swelled his throat and croaked at the moon. now another thing that loved the little lake was a beautiful wild duck. the wild duck had beautiful green and brown feathers and on his head he had a little green top-knot. every year he flew north from the warm south where he had been spending the winter. high up in the air he flew, leading many other beautiful wild ducks. he flew with his head stretched out and his feet tucked up close to his body and his strong wings flapping, flapping, flapping like great fans. and as he flew way up in the air his keen eye would see the little lake glistening down below. "quonk-quonk!" he would call. and the other wild ducks would answer, "quonk-quonk-quonk!" and then they would swoop, right down to the little lake and they'd light right on the water. there they would sit, rocking on the little waves or swimming about with their red webbed feet. oh, the wild ducks loved the little lake very much! but not the slippery shiny fish, not the spotted green frog, not the beautiful wild duck loves the lake as much as some one else does. i don't believe any one else loves the little lake as much as does the little summer boy! sometimes the little summer boy goes rowing on top of the lake. he leans way forward and stretches his oars way back, then he puts them into the water and pulls as hard as ever he can--splash--splash--splash--splash----! and the boat glides and slides right over the water! sometimes,--and this he loves better still,--he stands on the rock in his red bathing suit. then plump! he jumps right into the water! sometimes he goes feetwards and sometimes he goes headwards and sometimes he turns a somersault in the air before he touches the water. and then away he goes moving his arms and kicking his legs almost like the spotted green frog. but the little fish when he hears this great thing come splashing into the quiet water, he flips his slippery shiny tail and waves his slippery shiny fins and darts way out into the deep water where the little boy with the red bathing suit can't follow him. for to the little fish this little summer boy seems very queer, and very, _very_ noisy, and very, _very_, very enormous! and the spotted green frog too gets out of the way when the little boy comes racketing into the water. he hops, hops under the rocks into a safe little cave and from there he watches and blinks his bright little eyes. but he never croaks then! the little summer boy knows the green frog is there and sometimes he peeks at him and thinks "i wish i could make my back legs go like yours!" for he's often seen the spotted green frog swim from rock to rock. but the beautiful wild duck, he never saw the little summer boy. for long before the boy came to the little lake, the duck had left the lake far behind. early one morning in spring he flapped his strong wings and tucked his wet webbed feet up close to his body and stretched out his long neck and calling "quonk-quonk!" he flapped away to the north. and all the other beautiful wild ducks followed calling, "quonk-quonk-quonk!" so the little summer boy never knew the wild duck! it is too bad that the fish and the frog are scared away when the summer boy goes in bathing. but it is only for a little while anyway. for the little summer boy's mother doesn't let him play in the lake all day as does the mother of the slippery shiny fish and the mother of the spotted green frog. she has called him now, and he calls back, "one more time!" for no one loves the little lake as much as the little boy in the red bathing suit. he has climbed up on the rock. the water is running down him, for he is as wet as a baby seal. now he puts out his hands, like this, and he calls out, "this time i'm going to take a headwards dive!" in the lake they play, the spotted green frog and the slippery shiny fish. they frisk and they whisk, and they dip and they flip. and the water it glimmers, it ripples and twinkles when the frog and the fishes play. in the lake they play, the beautiful duck and the rackety summer boy. when the wild duck swims the water it skims. but the boy with a shout he plumps in, he jumps out. and the little lake shakes with his play. how the singing water got to the tub in this story i have tried to make the refrains carry the essential points in the content. i have tried, however, to subordinate the information to the pattern. this story came in response to direct questions during baths. how the singing water got to the tub once there was a little singing stream of water. it sang whatever it did. and it did many things from the time it bubbled up in the far-away hills to the time it splashed into the dirty little boy's tub. it began as a little spring of water. then the water was as cool as cool could be for it came up from the deep cool earth all hidden away from the sun. it came up into a little hollow scooped out of the earth and in the hollow were little pebbles. right up through the pebbles, bubbling and gurgling it came. and what do you suppose the water did when the little hollow was all full? it did just what water always does, it tried to find a way to run down hill! one side of the little hollow was lower than the others and here the water spilled over and trickled down. and this is the song the water sang then: "i bubble up so cool into the pebbly pool. over the edge i spill and gallop down the hill!" so the water became a little stream and began its long journey to the little boy's tub. and always it wanted to run down--always down, and as it ran, it tinkled this song: "i sing, i run, in the shade, in the sun, it's always fun to sing and to run." sometimes it pushed under twigs and leaves; sometimes it made a big noise tumbling over the roots of trees; sometimes it flowed all quiet and slow through long grasses in a meadow. once it came to the edge of a pretty big rock and over it went, splashing and crashing and dashing and making a fine, fine spray. it sang to the little birds that took their baths in the spray. and the little birds ruffled their feathers to get dry and sang back to the little brook. "ching-a-ree!" they sang. it sang to the bunny rabbit who got his whiskers all wet when he took a drink. it sang to the mother deer who always came to the same place and licked up some water with her tongue. to all of these and many more little wild wood things the little brook rippled its song: "i sing, i run, in the shade, in the sun, it's always fun to sing and to run." but to the fish in the big dark pool under the rocks it sang so softly, so quietly, that only the fishes heard. now all the time that the little brook kept running down hill, it kept getting bigger. for every once in a while it would be joined by another little brook coming from another hillside spring. and, of course, the two of them were twice as large as each had been alone. this kept happening until the stream was a small river,--so big and deep that the horses couldn't ford it any more. then people built bridges over it, and this made the small river feel proud. little boats sailed in it too,--canoes and sail boats and row boats. sometimes they held a lot of little boys without any clothes on who jumped into the water and splashed and laughed and splashed and laughed. at last the river was strong enough to carry great gliding boats, with deep deep voices. "toot," said the boats, "tootoot-tooooooooot!" and now the song of the river was low and slow as it answered the song of the boats: "i grow and i flow as i carry the boats, as i carry the boats of men." after the little river had been running down hill for ever so long, it came to a place where the banks went up very high and steep on each side of it. here something strange happened. the little river was stopped by an enormous wall. the wall was made of stone and cement and it stretched right across the river from one bank to the other. the little river couldn't get through the wall, so it just filled up behind it. it filled and filled until it found that it had spread out into a real little lake. only the people who walked around it called it a reservoir! now in the wall was just one opening down near the bottom. and what do you suppose that led to? a pipe! but the pipe was so big that an elephant could have walked down it swinging his trunk! only, of course, there wasn't any elephant there. now the little river didn't like to have his race down hill stopped. so he began muttering to himself: "what shall i do, oh, what shall i do? here's a big dam and i can't get through! behind the dam i fill and fill but i want to go running and running down hill! if the pipe at the bottom will let me through i'll run through the pipe! that's what i'll do!" so he rushed into the pipe as fast as he could for there he found he could run down hill again! he ran and he ran for miles and miles. above him he knew there were green fields and trees and cows and horses. these were the things he had sung to before he rushed into the pipe. then after a long time he knew he was under something different. he could feel thousands of feet scurrying this way and that; he could feel thousands of horses pulling carriages and wagons and trucks; he could feel cars, subways, engines;--he could feel so many things crossing him that he wondered they didn't all bump each other. then he knew he was under the big city. and this is the song he shouted then: "way under the street, street, street, i feel the feet, feet, feet. i feel their beat, beat, beat, above on the street, street, street." and then again something queer happened. every once in a while a pipe would go off from the big pipe. now one of these pipes turned into a certain street and then a still smaller pipe turned off into a certain house and a still smaller pipe went right up between the walls of the house. and in this house there lived the dirty little boy. [illustration] the water flowed into the street pipe and then it flowed into the house pipe and then,--what do you think?--it went right up that pipe between the walls of the house! for you see even the top of that dirty little boy's house isn't nearly as high as the reservoir on the hill where the water started and the water can run up just as high as it has run down. in the bath-room was the dirty little boy. his face was dirty, his hands were dirty, his feet were dirty and his knees--oh! his knees were very, very dirty. this very dirty little boy went over to the faucet and slowly turned it. out came the water splashing, and crashing and dashing. "my! but i need a bath tonight," said the dirty little boy as he heard the water splashing in the tub. the water was still the singing water that had sung all the way from the far-away hills. it had sung a bubbling song when it gurgled up as a spring; it had sung a tinkling song as it rippled down hill as a brook; it had crooned a flowing song when it bore the talking boats; it had muttered and throbbed and sung to itself as it ran through the big, big pipe. now as it splashed into the dirty little boy's tub it laughed and sang this last song: "i run from the hill,--down, down, down, under the streets of the town, town, town, then in the pipe, up, up, up, i tumble right into your tub, tub, tub." and the dirty little boy laughed and jumped into the singing water! the children's new dresses an old pattern with new content. the steps in the process were originally dug out by a child of six through his own questions. the children's new dresses once there was a small town. in the small town were many houses and in the houses were many people. in one of these houses there lived a mother with a great many children. one night after the children were all in bed and the mother was sitting by the fire, a brick fell down the chimney. then another came bumping and rattling down. now outside there was a great wind blowing. it whistled down the chimney and up flamed the fire. the sparks flew into the hole where the bricks had fallen out. the first thing the mother knew the house was all on fire. still the great wind roared. the house next door caught fire, then the next, then the next, then the next, until half the little town was burning. the mother with the many children and many other frightened people ran to the part of the town behind the great wind. and there they stayed until the wind died down and they could put the fire out. now many of these people's clothes had burned with their houses. the many children who had gone to bed before the fire began had nothing to wear except their nightclothes. the mother went to the store. that too was burned! but she found the storekeeper and said:--"storekeeper, sell me some dresses for my children for their dresses have been burned and they have nothing to wear." [illustration] "but, mother of the many children," the storekeeper replied, "first i must get me the dresses. for that i must send to the many-fingered factory in the middle of the city." so he sent to the many-fingered factory in the middle of the great city and he said:--"clothier, send me some dresses that i may sell to the mother; for her children's dresses have burned up and they have nothing to wear." but the clothier in the many-fingered factory replied:--"first i must get me the cloth. for that i must send to the weaving mill. the weaving mill is in the hills where there is water to turn its wheels." so the clothier sent to the weaving mill in the hills where there is water to turn its wheels and said:--"weaver, send me the cloth that the many fingers at the factory may make dresses to send to the storekeeper in the small town to sell to the mother; for her children's dresses have burned up and they have nothing to wear." but the weaver in the weaving mill in the hills sent back word:--"first i must get me the cotton. for that i must send to the cotton fields. the cotton fields are in the south where the land is hot and low." so the weaver in the weaving mill in the hills sent to the cotton plantation, and he said:--"planter, send me the cotton from the hot low lands that i may make cloth in the mill in the hills to send to the clothier in the many-fingered factory in the middle of the great city to be made into dresses to send to the storekeeper in the small town to sell to the mother; for her children's dresses have burned up and they have nothing to wear." but the planter sent back word:--"first i must get the negroes to pick the cotton. for cotton must be picked in the hot sun and negroes are the only ones who can stand the sun." [illustration] so the planter went to the negroes and he said:--"pick me the cotton from the hot low lands that i may send it to the weaver in his mill in the hills that he may weave the cloth to send to the clothier in the many-fingered factory in the middle of the great city to make dresses to send to the storekeeper in the small town to sell to the mother; for her children's dresses have burned up and they have nothing to wear." but the negroes answered:--"first de sun, he hab got to shine and shine and shine! 'cause de sun, he am de only one dat can make dem little seed bolls bust wide open!" so the negroes sang to the sun:--"big sun, so shiny hot! is you gwine to shine on dem cotton bolls so we can pick de cotton for de massah so he can send it to de weaver in de weaving mills in de hills to weave into cloth so he can send it to de clothier in de many-fingered factory in de middle of de big city to make dresses to send to de storekeeper in de small town so he can sell it to de mammy; for de chillun's dresses hab gone and burned up and dey ain't got nothin' to wear!" now the sun heard the song of the negroes of the south. and he began to shine. and he kept on shining on the hot low lands. and when the cotton bolls on the hot low lands felt the sun shine and shine and shine, they burst wide open. then the negroes picked the cotton, the planter shipped it, the weaver wove it, the clothier made it into dresses, and the storekeeper sold them to the mother. so at last the many children took off their nightclothes and put on their new dresses. and so they were all happy again! old dan gets the coal the occupations of the city horse are always absorbing to the school children. they have many tales about various "old dans" and their various trades. the docks are familiar to almost all the children,--even to the four-year-olds. this verse is meant to be read fast or slow according to whether or no the wagon is empty. old dan gets the coal old dan, he lives in a stable, he does, he sleeps in a stable stall. old dan, he eats in the stable, he does, he eats the hay from the manger, he does, he pulls the hay and he chews the hay when he eats in his stable stall. old dan, he leaves the stable, he does, he pulls the wagon behind. old dan he goes trotting along, so he does, he trots with the wagon all empty, he does; the wagon, it clatters, the mud, it all spatters old dan with the wagon behind. old dan, he trots to the dock, he does, he trots to the coal barge dock. old dan, he stands by the barge, he does, he stands and the big crane creaks, it does. up! into the chute, bang! out of the chute comes the coal at the coal barge dock! old dan, he pulls the load, he does, he pulls the heavy load. old dan he pulls the coal, he does, he slowly pulls the heavy coal. the wagon thumps, it bumps, it clumps when old dan pulls the load. old dan, he stands by the house, he does, and the coal rattles out behind. old dan stands still by the house, he does, he stands and the slippery coal, so it does goes rattlety klang! zippy kabang! as it slides from the wagon behind! old dan, he then leaves the house, so he does, a-pulling the wagon behind. old dan he goes trotting along, so he does, he trots with the wagon all empty, he does. the wagon it clatters, the mud it all spatters old dan with the wagon behind. old dan, comes home to his stable, he does, home to his stable stall. he finds the hay in the stable, he does, he eats the hay from the manger, he does, he pulls the hay, he chews the hay, then he sleeps in his stable stall. the subway car the relationship which this story aims to clarify is the social significance of the subway car--its construction and the need it answers to. children have enjoyed the verse better, i think, than any other in the book. the subway car the surface car is a poky car, it stops 'most every minute. at every corner someone gets out and someone else gets in it. it stops for a lady, an auto, a hoss, for any old thing that wants to cross, this poky old, stupid old, silly old, timid old, lumbering surface car. [illustration] up on high against the sky the elevated train goes by. above it soars, above it roars on level with the second floors of dirty houses, dirty stores who have to see, who have to hear this noisy ugly monster near. and as it passes hear it yell, "i'm the deafening, deadening, thunderous, hideous, competent, elegant el." under the ground like a mole in a hole, i tear through the white tiled tunnel, with my wire brush on the rail i rush from station to lighted station. levers pull, the doors fly ope', people press against the rope. and some are stout and some are thin and some get out and some get in. again i go. beginning slow i race, i chase at a terrible pace, i flash and i dash with never a crash, i hurry, i scurry with never a flurry. i tear along, flare along, singing my lightning song, "i'm the rushing, speeding, racing, fleeting, rapid subway car." the subway car whew-ee-ee-ee-ew-ew went the siren whistle. and all the men and all the women hurried toward the factory. for that meant it was time to begin work. each man and each woman went to his particular machine. the steam was up; the belts were moving; the wheels were whirring; the piston rods were shooting back and forth. and one man made a piece of wheel, and one man made a part of a brake, and one man made a belt, and one man made a leather strap, and one man made a door, and one man made some straw-covered seats, and one man made a window-frame, and one man made a little wire brush. and then some other men took all these things and began putting them together. and when the car was finished some other men came and painted it, and on the side they painted the number . the car stood on the siding wondering what he was for and what he was to do. suddenly he heard another car come bumping and screeching down the track. before the new car could think what was happening,--bang!--the battered old car went smash into him. this seemed to be just what the man standing along side expected. for the car felt him swing on to the steps, and shout "go ahead." at the same minute the car felt a piece of iron slip from his own rear and hook into the front of the other car. and "go ahead" he did, though no. thought he would be wrenched to pieces. "whatever is happening to me?" he nervously asked the car that was pushing him. "i feel my wheels going round and round underneath me and i can't stop them. can't you just hear me creak? i'm afraid i will split in two." the dilapidated old thing behind simply screamed with delight as he jounced over a switch. "see here, now," he said in a rasping voice, "what do you think wheels are for anyway if they are not to go round? and if you can't hang together in a quiet little jaunt like this, you had better turn into a baby carriage and be done with it. say, what do you think you were made for anyway, freshie?" with this he gave a vicious pull. freshie thought it would probably loosen every carefully fastened bolt in his whole structure. "and what's more," continued the amused and irritated old car, "if you think all you've got to do is to be pulled around like a fine lady in a limousine, you are pretty well fooled. wait till you feel the juice go through you--just wait--that's all i say." "what is juice?" groaned no. . but he could get no answer except "just wait, you will find out soon enough." in another minute he had found out. he felt his door pulled open and a heavy tread come clump, clump, clump down the whole length of him to the little closet room at the end. there he felt levers pulled and switches turned. suddenly the little wire brush underneath him dropped until it touched the third rail. z-z-zr-zr-zr-zz-zz--what in the name of all blazes was happening to him? he tingled in every bolt. he quivered with fear. "this must be the juice!" another lever was turned. he leaped forward on the track, jerking and thumping and creaking. then he settled down and it wasn't so bad. the first scare was over. he did not go to pieces. on the contrary he felt so excited and strong that he almost told the old thing behind him to take off his brush and let himself be pulled. but he was afraid of the cross old car. so he ventured timidly: "isn't this great? i should like to go flying along in the sun like this all day." "in the sun?" snarled his old companion. "come now, freshie, can't you catch on to what you are? you just look your fill at the old sun now for you won't see him again for some time." "why not?" whimpered no. . but he needed no answer. ahead of him he could see the track sliding down into a deep hole. the earth closed over him in a queer rounded arch, all lined with shiny white tiles. at the same moment the lights all up and down his own ceiling flashed on. he noticed then that he had a red lantern on his front. he could tell it by the red, glinting reflections it threw on the tiles as he tore along. ahead he could see a great cluster of lights which seemed to be rushing towards him. of course he was really rushing towards them, but he was so excited he got all mixed in his ideas. "where are we? and what on earth is that rushing towards us? and why do we come down here under the ground?" he screamed to the old car behind. "there's no room for us on top," jerked the old car. "there are a heap of people in this old city of new york, freshie, and you will find 'em on the surface or scooting in the elevated and here jogging along underneath the earth." "people!" screamed no. , "i don't see any. what do we do with them in this hole anyway?" even as he spoke he felt the man in the little closet room in his front turn something. his wire brush lifted and all his strength seemed to ooze away. then something clutched his wheels. he screeched,--yes, he really screeched, and then he stood still, close to the station platform. the station looked big to no. and very brilliantly lighted. it was jammed with people who stood pressed against ropes in long rows. a man on his own platform pulled down a handle and then another. he felt his end doors and then his center doors fly open. then tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp--a hundred feet came pounding on his floor. he could feel them and somehow he liked the feel. he could even feel two small feet that walked much faster than the others, and in another moment he felt two little knees on one of his straw-covered seats. then the handles were pulled again. his doors banged closed; z-zr-zr-rr--the brush underneath touched the rail and the electricity shot through him. he felt a hundred feet shift quickly and heavily. he felt his leather straps clutched by a hundred hands. and amid the noise he heard a little voice say, "father, isn't this a brand new subway car?" and then he knew what he was! boris takes a walk and finds many different kinds of trains this first story is an attempt to let a child discover the significance of his everyday environment,--of subways and elevated railways. here there is no content new to the city child. but the relationship to congestion he has not always seen for himself. in the second story the lay-out of new york on a crowded island is discovered. again the content is old but its significance may be new. both these stories verge on the informational. boris takes a walk and finds many different kinds of trains many little boys and girls with fathers and with mothers, many little boys and girls with sisters and with brothers, many little boys and girls they come from far away. they sail and sail to big new york, and there they land and stay! and you would never, never guess when they grow big and tall, that they had come from far away when they were wee and small! one of the little boys who sailed and sailed until he came to big new york was named boris. he came as the others did, with his father and his mother and his sisters and his brothers. he came from a wide green country called russia. in that country he had never seen a city, never seen wharves with ocean steamers and ferry boats and tug boats and barges,--never seen a street so crowded you could hardly get through, had never seen great high buildings reaching up, up, up to the clouds, he thought. and he had never heard a city, never heard the noise of elevated trains and surface cars and automobiles and the many, many hurrying feet. he often thought of the wide green country he had left behind, and he used to talk about it to his mother in a funny language you wouldn't understand. for boris and his family still spoke russian. but boris was nine years old and he loved new things as well as old. so he grew to love this crowded noisy new home of his as well as the still wide country he had left. [illustration] now boris had been in new york quite a while. but he hadn't been out on the streets much. one day he said to his mother in the funny language, "i think i'll take a walk!" "all right," she answered, "be careful you don't get run over by one of those queer wagons that run without horses!" "yes i will," laughed boris for he was a careful and a smart little boy and knew well how to take care of himself for all he was so little. so boris went out on the street. he walked to the corner and waited to go across. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse; thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. he waited another minute. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse; thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. he stood there a long while watching this stream of autos and horses and trucks go by and he thought: "dear me! dear me! what shall i do? the're so many things, i'll never get through!" just then all the autos and the horses and the trucks stopped. they stood still right in front of him. and boris saw that the big man standing in the middle of the street had put up his hand to stop them. so he scampered across. boris didn't know that the big man was the traffic policeman! [illustration] now boris scampered down the block to the next street. there he waited to go across. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse; thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. he stood there a long time watching the autos and horses and trucks go by. and he thought: "dear me! dear me! what shall i do? the're so many things, i'll never get through!" boris looked at the big policeman who stood in the middle of _this_ street. after a while the big policeman raised his hand and all the autos and horses and trucks stopped and boris scampered across and ran down the block to the next street crossing. and there the same thing happened again. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse; thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. "i'll not get much of a walk this way," he thought. "i have to wait and wait at each corner. and the're so many things i'll never get through." just then he saw a street car. "i might take a car," he thought. but then he saw on the street a long line of cars waiting, waiting to get through. "it wouldn't do much good," he thought. "they're just like me." "dear me! dear me! what can they do? the're so many things, they'll never get through!" then he noticed a big hole in the sidewalk. down the hole went some steps and down the steps hurried lots and lots of people. "i wonder what this is?" thought boris and down the steps he ran. [illustration] at the bottom of the steps there was a big room all lined with white tile and all lighted with electric lights. on the side was the funniest little house with a little window in it and a man looking through the window. boris watched carefully for he didn't understand. everyone went up to the window and gave the man cents and the man handed out a little piece of blue paper. "that's a ticket," thought boris, for he was a very smart little boy. "these people must be going somewhere." so he reached down in his pocket and pulled out a nickel. for all he was so little, and so new to new york, he knew what a cent piece was quite well. he had to stand on tiptoe to hand the man his nickel and to reach his little blue ticket. then he watched again. everyone dropped this ticket in a funny little box by a funny little gate and another man moved a handle up and down. so boris did just the same. he stood on tiptoe and dropped his ticket in the box and walked through the little gate to a big platform. and what do you think he saw there? a great long tunnel stretching off in both directions,--a long tunnel all lined with white tiles! and on the bottom were rails! "i wonder what runs on that track?" thought boris. just then he heard a most terrible noise: rackety, clackety, klang, klong! rackety, clackety, klang, klong! and down the tunnel came a train of cars. "yi-i-i-i--sh-sh-sh-sh!" screamed the cars and stopped right in front of boris. and then what do you suppose happened? the doors in the car right in front of him flew open. everyone stepped in. so did boris. it was the front car. he walked to the front and sat down where he could look out on the tracks. he could also look into the funny little box room and see the man who pulled the levers and made the car go and stop. in a moment they started: rackety, clackety, klang, klong! how fast! how fast! then "yi-i-i-i--sh-sh-sh-sh!" the man put on the brakes and they stopped at another station. in another moment they started again. rackety, clackety, klang, klong! then "yi-i-i-i--sh-sh-sh-sh" another station! and so they went flying from lighted station to lighted station through the white-tiled tunnel. boris was very happy. he sat quite still watching out of the window and saying with the car; rackety, clackety, klang, klong; rackety, clackety, klang, klong! "this is the way to go if you're in a hurry," he thought. he looked up and smiled to think of all the autos and horses and trucks above going oh! so slowly down the street! at last he thought he would get out. so the next time the man put the brakes on and the train yelled "yi-i-i-i--sh-sh-sh-sh!" boris walked through the open doors on to the platform, then through the little gate, up some long steps and found himself on the street again. but right near him what do you think he saw? a park all full of trees and grass! this made boris happy for he hadn't seen so many trees and so much grass since he had left the wide country in his old home in russia. a little breeze was blowing too! he clapped his hands and ran around and laughed and laughed and laughed and sang: "i like the grass, i like the trees, i like the sky, i like the breeze! i touch the grass, i touch the trees, let me play in the park, oh, please! oh, please!" so he ran all round and played in the park. suddenly he thought it was time to go home. he looked for the hole in the sidewalk but he couldn't find it. and he didn't know how to ask for the subway for he didn't know its name and he couldn't talk english. "i'll have to walk!" he thought. he knew he must walk south for he had noticed which way the sun was when he went into the hole in the sidewalk. and now he noticed again where it was and so he could tell which way was south. so boris went out on the street. he walked to the corner and waited to go across. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse, thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. he waited another minute. kachunk, kachunk, kachunk went by an auto; clopperty, clopperty, clopperty went by a horse; thunk-a-ta, thunk-a-ta, bang, bang went by a truck. he stood there a long time watching the stream of autos and horses and trucks go by. and he thought; "i'll never get home if i have to go as slowly as this. "dear me! dear me! what shall i do? the're so many things i'll never get through!" and for all he was so smart he was a very little boy and he began to cry for his legs were tired and he was a little frightened, too. just then what do you suppose he saw? down the street way up in the air on a kind of trestle, he saw a train of cars tearing by. "that's just what i want! that train doesn't have to stop for autos and horses and things!" thought boris and he ran down the street. when he got to the high trestle, there was a long flight of stairs. up the steps went boris. at the top he found another funny little room with a window in it and a man looking out. this time he knew just what to do. he stood on tiptoe and gave the man cents and the man handed him a little red piece of paper. boris took it, walked through a little gate, stood on tiptoe and dropped the ticket into another funny little box and another man moved the handle up and down and his ticket dropped down. and what do you suppose he saw from the platform? tracks again! tracks stretching out in both directions. he didn't have to wait on the platform long before he heard the train coming. it seemed to say: "i'm the elevated train, i'm the elevated train, i'm the elevated, elevated, elevated train!" it stopped right in front of boris and boris got into the front car again. here was another man in another little box room moving more levers and making this train stop and go. and boris could look right out in front and see the stations before he reached them. he could see bridges before they tore under them; he could look down and see the horses and the autos and the trucks. he smiled as he saw how slowly they had to go while he was racing along above them. so boris was quite happy and sat very still and watched out of the window. suddenly he heard the conductor call "fourteenth street!" now that was one of the few english words that boris knew for he lived on th street. now he was pleased for he knew he was near home. so he got off the car, ran down the long, long steps and found himself on the street. down th street he ran until he came to his house. "well," called his mother. "you've been gone a long time! what did you see on the streets?" boris smiled. "i haven't been _on_ the streets much mother." his mother was surprised. "where have you been if you haven't been on the streets?" she asked. boris laughed and laughed. "there were so many things on the streets, so many autos and horses and trucks," he said, "that i couldn't go fast. so i found a wonderful train _under_ the streets and i went out on that. and i found a wonderful train _over_ the streets and i came home on that!" "well, well," said his mother. "trains under and trains over! think of that!" and boris did think of them much. and when he was in bed that night, he seemed to hear this little song about them: "now out on the streets there everything meets and they're all in a hurry to go. but what can they do for they can't get through and all are so terribly slow? "but under the street where nothing can meet the subway goes rackety, klack! it can dash and can race, it can flash and can chase, for there's nothing ahead on the track. "and over the street where nothing can meet is a wonderful train indeed! high up the stair way up in the air it goes at remarkable speed." boris walks every way in new york part one morning when boris was eating his breakfast, he suddenly thought of the wide green country around his old home in russia. i don't know what made him think of it. he just did! "mother," he said, "i want to see some grass." his mother smiled. "want to go to the park, boris?" she asked. "no, more grass than that even. i want to see it everywhere," and boris waved his arms around. "i think i'll go and find lots and lots of it!" "i'd like to see lots and lots of grass too, boris," smiled his mother. but her eyes were full of tears too! "but i don't know where you can go in new york and see grass everywhere!" "then i'll go out of new york!" cried boris. "if i walk far enough i'll surely find grass, won't i?" "you can try," answered his mother. boris was now much bigger than when he came to new york and could talk quite a little english too. so his mother let him walk over the city alone. boris clapped his hands! for though he was much bigger, he was still a little boy, you know! "which way had i better go?" thought boris when he was out on the street. "i think i'll go west first." so he walked west. though the streets were crowded he had learned to go faster than when he took his first walk and discovered the subway and elevated. west, west, west he went. street after street,--houses set close together all the way. then at last he saw something that made him run. the city came to an end! and there was a big river, oh! such an enormous river! the edge of the river was all docks,--docks as far as he could look. across on the other side he could see another city with big chimneys and lots and lots of smoke. there were lots of boats in the river too. "some day i'll come and watch them," thought boris excitedly, "but now i want to find my grass." so he turned around. "i'll have to go east, i guess," he thought. so east he went. east he went until he came to his house. but he did not stop. he went right by it. "how many houses there are" he thought. "how many people there must be!" and still he walked east. and still the houses were set close together street after street. after a while he saw something that made him run again. the city came to an end! and there was another big river! this edge too was all docks,--docks as far as he could look. across on the other side he could see another city with big chimneys and lots of smoke. "well," thought boris, "isn't it the funniest thing that when i walk west i come to a river and when i walk east i come to a river too!" now this puzzled him so that he thought he must ask somebody about it. close to him was a big dock and at the dock was a flat barge. a lot of men were unloading coal from her. he walked up to one. "please," he said, "what river is this?" the man stopped his work for a minute. "it's the east river of course. where do you come from, boy?" "from russia," said boris, "so you see i didn't know. and please, is the other river the west river then?" "what other river, boy? what are you talking about?" this made boris feel very uncomfortable, but he knew there was another river in the west for hadn't he just walked there? so he said bravely, "if you keep walking west you _do_ come to another river. i know you do! for i've done it. and it's a bigger river than this, too!" the man laughed out loud. "right you are, boy!" he said. "you're a great walker, you are. did you walk all the way from russia?" now boris thought the man couldn't know very much to ask him such a question. but, then, he didn't know much either. he was asking questions too! so he answered, "oh! no! i came on an enormous boat. but please you haven't told me the name of the other river?" the man laughed louder than ever. "it's a funny thing, boy, that we call it the north river. but you are right: it _is_ west! it's really the hudson river, boy, that's what it is. and a mighty big river it is too. want to know anything more?" and the man turned back to his work. "well," thought boris. "i can't get to my grass today if i strike rivers everywhere i go." and he turned and walked home slowly, because he was sorry. and he was very, very tired too. for you see he had walked all the way across the city twice and that is a pretty long walk even for a boy the size of boris. boris, he went out to walk to find the country wide. and he walked west and west he walked but found the hudson wide! and so he turned himself about and walked the other way and he walked east and east he walked and there east river lay! part the next morning at breakfast, boris suddenly thought again of the wide green country around his old home in russia. i don't know why he thought of it again. he just did! and then he thought of the hudson river he had found by walking west and of the east river he had found by walking east. "i might try walking north this time," he thought. and so he said to his mother, "i think i'll go on another hunt for grass,--grass that's everywhere!" and again he waved his arms. "all right," answered his mother. "but i'm afraid you'll have to walk a long way to find grass everywhere!" out on the street he began to walk north. then he remembered what a long long ride north in the subway he had had the other day. "i'd better take something if i want to get to the country wide," he thought. so boris went down to the subway and took the train. he rode for ever and ever so long. he kept wondering if there were still houses above him or if it was all grass,--lots and lots of grass. "i guess i'll go up and see," he thought. so up he went at the next station. but there were still houses everywhere. they weren't so high nor quite so close together; but still there was no grass. so he kept on walking north. then he saw something that made him run. he could hardly believe his eyes. there was _another river_! "oh! dear! oh! dear!" thought boris. "i'll never in the world find the country wide if i strike a river whatever way i go. i think i'll take the subway and go way, way south. surely i can get through that way. west a river, east a river, north a river. yes, i'll go south!" so again boris went down to the subway and took a train going south. he stayed on it so long that he thought he must surely be way out in the country wide under grass, grass, everywhere. "i guess i'll go up and see," he thought. so up he went at the next station. but when he came up he found himself on a street. there were high buildings all around him. he began to walk south. the farther he walked, the higher the buildings he found. at last he came to a place where the buildings reached up, up, up,--up to the clouds, he thought. he threw back his head to look at them,--so high above him that it made him almost dizzy to look at their tops. he wasn't sure they weren't going to fall either! then he looked down again. and what did he see at the end of the street? trees, yes, green trees! "perhaps i am coming to the wide green country," he thought. and he hurried on. [illustration] but when he got to the trees he saw that the city came to an end again. and what a wonderful end it was too! all around him was water,--water so full of boats that it made boris gasp. when he looked to the west he could see a great river with another city on the other side. "that's the hudson," thought boris for he remembered what the coal man had told him. when he looked to the east he could see another great river. "that's the east river," he thought for he remembered that name too. but what river was that out in front of him? then suddenly boris remembered. that was new york harbor! this was where he had landed when he had come in the giant steamer from russia! out there was ellis island where he had stayed with his father and his mother and his sisters and his brothers until they had been looked at! he thought he could see ellis island from where he stood. but there were so many islands he couldn't be sure. but he _could_ see the statue of liberty, that enormous woman holding a torch in her hand. he was sure of that. and he could see the boats everywhere all over the harbor. boris stood there some time just staring and listening and staring. when boris he went out again to find the country wide and he went north and north he went to harlem river's side. again he turned himself about and went the other way and he went south and south he went and there the harbor lay! part suddenly boris remembered what he had come for. he was looking for the wide green country, for a place where grass grew everywhere. "this is the funniest thing in the world," he thought scratching his head. "wherever i walk in new york i come to water. so many people and water on every side of them! how do they ever get out?" as soon as he thought of this, he began to look around. across the east river he could see a giant bridge leaping from new york over to another city and on the bridge were trains and cars shooting back and forth and autos and horses and people. "so that is the way they get out!" he thought. then he looked to the west, to the hudson river. "no bridges there!" he said. "it's too wide." then he suddenly remembered the ferry boat that had brought him from ellis island. "ferry boats, of course," he thought. and sure enough there were ferry boats and ferry boats going back and forth from new york to the other side and to the little islands out in the harbor too! now boris walked along thinking hard about all this water all around new york. just then he noticed a lot of people coming up out of a hole in the sidewalk. "the subway," he thought, for you remember he had been on the subway. but the name over the steps didn't spell "subway." he looked at it for a long time. at last he could read it. "hudson tubes" it said. hudson tubes? what could that mean? boris wanted to know. so he walked right up to a woman coming out of the hole. "what are the hudson tubes and where do they take you?" he asked. the woman laughed. "they take you to new jersey, of course," she said. "is that over there?" boris asked, pointing across the hudson. "and do they really go under the hudson river?" "yes, to be sure they do. where do you want to go?" she answered and then boris remembered what he had been hunting for. "i want to go to a wide green country where there is grass everywhere. but every way i walk in new york i come to water. i know because i've walked east and i've walked west and i've walked north and i've walked south," he said, feeling a little like crying for he was very tired and he _was_ only a little boy too. the woman smiled and she looked nice when she smiled. "you see, boy," she said, "new york is an island, so of course, you come to water every way you walk. and it's so full of people that there isn't any wide green country left,--except the parks of course." "yes, i know the parks," said boris, "but that isn't quite what i mean!" the woman smiled again. "there _is_ a wide green country when you get out of the island," she said. "you'll find it some day i'm sure," and then the woman hurried away. boris was very, very tired. so he took the subway home. when he came in his mother called out, "did you find the wide green country, boris?" "no," said boris, "i couldn't, you see. because what do you think new york is?" "what do i think new york is, boris? why, it's the biggest city in the world!" "that's not what i mean. what do you think it _is_? what is it built on i mean?" "what is it built on? on good sound rock i suppose!" boris laughed and laughed. "no, no," he said. "i mean it's an island. every way you walk, if you walk long enough, you come to water. now isn't that the funniest thing?" and boris's mother thought it was funny too. "so many people and all to live on an island!" she kept saying to herself. "i should think it would make them a lot of work!" and boris who remembered the bridges and the ferry boats and the "tubes" thought so too! boris, he went out to walk to find the country wide and he walked west and west he walked but he found the hudson wide! and so he turned himself about and walked the other way and he walked east and east he walked and there east river lay! but boris he went out again to find the country wide and he went north and north he went to harlem river's side. again he turned himself about and went the other way and he went south and south he went and there the harbor lay! then boris scratched his head and thought: "whatever way i go there's always water at the end whatever way i go! new york must be an island an island it must be so many people all shut in by rivers and by sea! they've bridges and they've ferry boats across the top to go; they've subways and they've hudson tubes to burrow down below to get things in, to get things out how busy they must be! in that enormous big new york on rivers and on sea!" speed this story is a definite attempt to make the child aware of a new relationship in his familiar environment. the verse is for the older children. the story has lent itself well to dramatization. speed once there was a big beautiful white ox. his back was broad, his horns were long and his eyes were large and gentle. he went slowly sauntering down the road one sunshiny summer day. as he walked along he swung from side to side carefully putting down his small feet. and this is what he thought: "i am pleased with myself--so large, so broad, so strong am i. is there anyone else who can pull so heavy a load? is there anyone else who can plow so straight a furrow? what would the world do without me?" just then he heard something tearing along the road behind him. "clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clopperty." in a moment up dashed a big, black horse. "greetings," lowed the ox, slowly turning his large gentle eyes on the excited horse. "why such haste, my brother?" the horse tossed his mane. "i'm in a hurry," he snorted, "because i'm made to go fast. why, i can go ten miles while you crawl one! the world has no more use for a great white snail like you. but if you want speed, i'm just what you need. watch how fast i go!" and clopperty, clopperty he was off down the road. as the ox watched the horse disappear he thought of what he had heard. "he called me a great white snail! he said he could go ten miles while i crawled one! surely this swift horse is more wonderful than i!" now as the horse went frisking along this is what he thought. "i am pleased with myself. i am sleek, i am swift--swifter than the ox. what would the world do without me?" just then he heard a strange humming overhead. he glanced up. the sound came from a wire taut and vibrating. then he heard fast turning wheels coming "kathump, kathump." and what do you think that poor frightened horse saw coming along the road? a self-moving car with a trolley overhead touching the singing wire! his eyes stuck out of his head and his mane stood on end he was so scared. what made it go, he wondered. "hello, clodhopper," shrieked the electric car. "i didn't know there were any of you four-footed curiosities left. surely the world has no more use for you. where you go in half a day, i go in an hour; where you carry one man, i carry ten. if you want speed i'm just what you need. just watch me!" he was gone leaving only the humming wire overhead. the poor horse thought of what he had heard. "he called me a clodhopper! he said he could go in an hour where i take half a day! surely this swift car is more wonderful than i!" now the trolley went swinging on his way thinking, "i am pleased with myself. my power is the same as the lightning that rips the sky. i am swift,--swifter than the ox--swifter than the horse. what would the world do without me?" just then he heard a terrifying noise. it sounded like a mightly monster coughing his life away. "chug, a chug a chug a chug, chug." then to his horror he saw coming across the green field a gigantic iron creature with black smoke and fiery sparks streaming from a nose on top of his head. "well, slowpoke," screamed the engine as he came near the car. "out o' breath? no wonder. you're not made to go fast like me, for i move by the great power of steam. look at my monstrous boilers; see my hot fire. where you go in half a day, i go in an hour; where you carry one man i carry twenty. if you want speed i'm just what you need! goodbye. take your time, slow coach." and chug, chug, he was off leaving only a trail of dirty smoke behind him. the poor trolley car thought of what he had heard. "he called me a slowpoke! he said he could go in an hour where i take a half day! surely this ugly engine is greater than i!" [illustration] now the engine raced down to the freight depot which was near the great shipping docks. as he waited to be loaded he thought: "i am pleased with myself. i am swift--swifter than the ox, swifter than the horse, swifter than the electric car. what would the world do without me? i serve everyone, i go everywhere----" just here he was interrupted by the deep booming voice of a freight steamer lying alongside the wharf. "tooooot" is what the voice said, "you ridiculous landlubber! you go everywhere? what about the water? can you go to france and back again? it's only i who can haul the world's goods across the ocean! and even where you _can_ go, you never get trusted if they can possibly trust me, now do you? did you ever think why men use river steamers instead of you? did you ever think why men cut the great panama canal so that sea could flow into sea? well, it's simply because they're smart and prefer me to you when they can get me. you eat too much coal with your speed,--that's what the trouble is with you--you ridiculous landlubber!" this long speech made the old steamer quite hoarse so he cleared his throat with a long "toooot" and sank into silence. "of course, what he says is true," thought the engine. "at the same time it is equally true that _on land_ i _do_ serve everyone, i go everywhere----" just here he was interrupted again by a most unexpected noise. it sounded half like a steel giggle, half like a brass hiccough. it made the engine uneasy. he was sure someone was laughing at him. majestically he turned his headlight till it lighted up a funny little automobile who was laughing and laughing and shaking frantically like this and going "zzzzz." "you silly little road beetle," shouted the great engine, "what on earth's the matter with you?" the automobile gave one violent shake, turned off his spark and said in an orderly voice, "it struck my funny bone to hear you say you went everywhere _on land_, that's all. don't you realize you're an old fuss budget with your steam and your boiler and your fire and what not? you're tied to your rails and if everything about your old tracks isn't kept just so you tumble over into a ditch or do some fool thing. now i'm the one that can endure real hardships. sparks and gasoline! you just sit right there, you baby, you railclinger, and watch me take that hill! honk, honk!" and he was off up the hill. the engine slowly turned back his headlight till the light shone full on his shiny rails. he thought of what he had heard. "he called me a railclinger--yes, that i am. how can that preposterous little beetle run without tracks? i'm afraid he's more wonderful than i." now the automobile went jouncing and bouncing up the rough road puffing merrily and thinking, "i'm mightily pleased with myself. look at the way i climb this hill. there's nothing really so wonderful as i----" just then he heard a sound that made his engine boil with fright. dzdzdzdzdzr--it seemed to come right out of the sky. he got all his courage together and turned his searchlights up. the sight instantly killed his engine. above him soared a giant aeroplane. it floated, it wheeled, it rose, it dropped. it looked serene, strong and swift. down, down came the great thing. through the terrific droning the automobile could just make out these words: "dzdzdzdz. you think you're wonderful, you poor little creeping worm tied to the earth! i pity all you slow, slow things that i look down on as i fly through the sky. ox made way for horse, horse made way for engine, car and auto but all,--all make way for me. for if you want speed, i'm just what you need. dzdzdzdzdz." and the great aeroplane wheeled and rose like a giant bird. the automobile watched him, too humbled to speak. up, up, up, went the aeroplane--up, up, up 'til it was out of sight. speed the hounds they speed with hanging tongues; the deer they speed with bursting lungs; foxes hurry, field mice scurry. eagles fly swift, through the sky, and man, his face all wrinkled with worry, goes speeding by tho' he couldn't tell why! but a little wild hare he pauses to stare at the daisies and baby and me just sitting,--not trying to go anywhere, just sitting and playing with never a care in the shade of a great elm tree. and the daisies they laugh as they hear the world pass, what is speed to the growing flowers? and my baby laughs as he sits in the grass, we all laugh through the sunshiny hours,-- through the long, dear sunshiny hours! for flowers and babies and i still know 'tis fun to be happy, 'tis fun to go slow, 'tis fun to take time to live and to grow. five little babies this story was originally written because the children thought a negro was dirty. the songs are authentic. they have been enjoyed by children as young as four years old. five little babies this is going to be a story about some little babies,--five different little babies who were born in five different parts of this big round world and didn't look alike or think alike at all. one little baby was all yellow. he just came that way. his eyes were black and slanted up in his little face. his hair was black and straight. he wore gay little silk coats and gay little silk trousers with flowers and figures sewed all over them. when he looked up he saw his father's face was yellow and so was his mother's. and his father's hair was black and so was his mother's. and when he was a little older he saw they both wore gay silk coats and gay silk trousers with flowers and figures sewed all over them. but the baby didn't think any of this was queer,--not even when he grew up. for every one he knew had yellow skin and wore silk coats and trousers. so of course he thought all the world was that way. but long before he was old enough to notice any of these things he knew his mother loved her little yellow baby with slanting black eyes. and he loved to have her take him in her arms and sing to him, saying: "chu sir tsun ching min. tsoun sun gi gi. koo yin fee min kwei hua shiang lee pan run yin. fon chin yoa sir. loo yi to choa yeo liang sung. tsun tze doo soo soo wei gun. tsin tsin." for all this happened in china and he was a little chinese baby. * * * another little baby was all brown. he just came that way. his eyes were black and his hair was black. he wore pretty colored silk shawls and little silk dresses. and when he looked up he saw his father's face was brown and that he wore a big turban on his head. and he saw that around his mother's brown face was long soft hair. he saw that she wore pretty colored silk shawls and long silk trousers and bare feet. but the baby didn't think any of this was queer,--even when he grew up. he thought every one had brown skin and that everybody dressed like himself and his father and his mother. but long before he was old enough to notice any of these things, he knew his mother loved her little brown baby with black eyes. and he loved to have her take him in her arms and sing to him, saying: "arecoco jarecoco, jungle parkie bare, marabata cunecomunga dumrecarto sare, hillee milee puneah jara de naddeah, arecoco jarecoco jungle parkie bare." for all this happened in india and he was a little indian baby. * * * now another little baby was all black. he just came that way. his eyes were black and his hair was black and curled in tight kinky curls all over his little head. and this little baby didn't wear anything at all except a loin cloth. when he looked up he saw the black faces and kinky black hair of his father and his mother. and when he was a little older he saw that they didn't wear any clothes either except a loin cloth and a feather skirt and some shells. neither did this baby think any of this was queer,--not even when he grew older. he thought all the world looked and dressed like that. but long before he was old enough to notice any of these things, he knew his mother loved her little black baby with kinky black hair. and he loved to have her take him in her arms and sing to him, saying, "o túla, mntwána, o túla, unyóko akamúko, uséle ezintabéni, uhlú shwa izigwégwe, iwá. o túla, mntwána, o túla, unyóko w-zezobúya, akupatéle ínto enhlé, iwá." for all this happened in africa and he was a little negro baby. * * * still another little baby,--he was the fourth,--was all red. he just came that way. his eyes were black and his hair was straight and black. he was bound up tight and slipped into a basket and carried around on his mother's back. he didn't think this was queer, even when he grew up. he thought all little babies were carried that way. and he thought all fathers and mothers had red skin and black hair and wore leather coats and trousers trimmed with feathers. for his did. but long before he was old enough to notice any of these things he knew his mother loved her little red baby that she carried on her back, and he loved to have her take him out of his basket bed and rock him in her arms and sing to him, saying: "cheda-e nakahu-kalu be-be! nakahu-kalu be-be! e-be-be!" for all this happened in america long, long ago, and he was a little indian baby. * * * the last little baby, and he makes five, was all white. he just came so too. his eyes were blue and his hair was gold and he looked like a little baby you know. and he wore dear little white dresses and little knitted shoes. when he looked up he saw his father's white skin and his mother's blue eyes. when the baby was big enough he saw what kind of clothes his father and his mother wore,--but the story doesn't tell what they were like. and when the baby was big enough he saw they all lived in a big dirty noisy city, but the story doesn't tell what kind of a house they lived in. and the story doesn't tell whether he thought any of these things queer when he was little or when he grew up; probably because you know all these things yourselves. but the story does tell that long before he was old enough to notice any of these things he knew his mother loved her little white baby with blue eyes and golden hair. and it tells that he loved to have her rock him in her arms and sing to him this song: "listen, wee baby, i'd sing you a song; the arms of the mothers are tender and strong, the arms of the mothers where babies belong! brown mothers and yellow and black and red too, they love their babies as i, dear, love you,-- my little white blossom with wide eyes of blue! and your wee golden head, i do love it, i do! and your feet and your hands i love you there too! and my love makes me sing to you sing to you songs, lying hushed in my arms where a baby belongs!" for all this is happening in your own country every day and he is a little american baby. perhaps you know his father,--perhaps you know the baby,--perhaps, oh, perhaps, you have heard his mother sing! once the barn was full of hay this story made a special appeal to the school children because the school building was originally a stable in macdougal alley. they had even witnessed this evolution from stable to garage. the children have seemed to enjoy the rhythmic language without any sense of strangeness. once the barn was full of hay once the barn was full of hay, now 'tis there no more. i wonder why the hay has left the barn? the old horse stood in the stall all day. he wanted to be on the streets. he was strong, was this old horse. he was wise, was this old horse. and he was brave as well. and he was proud, oh, very proud to be strong and wise and brave! he wanted to be on the streets, and he wondered what was wrong that now for ten long days no one had to come harness him up. old tom, the aged driver, seemed to have gone away, and only the stable boy had given him water and oats, and poked him hay from the loft above. and as the old horse thought of this he reached up high with his quivering nose, and pushing his lips far back on his teeth, pulled down a mouthful of hay. but as he stood chewing the hay again he wondered and wondered again why nobody needed him, why nobody wished to drive. for almost every day old tom would harness him up to a dear little, neat little, sweet little carriage and down the alley they'd go and around to the front of the house. and there he'd stand and wait, this dear, this steady old horse, flicking the flies with his tail, till the door of the house would open wide and out would come his mistress dear with the baby in her arms, and running along beside would come her little boy, the little boy he loved so well, who gave him sugar from his hand and patted his nose and neck. and into the carriage they all would get, his mistress and baby and little boy. and tom would tighten the reins a bit and off down the street they'd go, clopperty, clopperty, clopperty, clop. when he was out on the streets,-- this dear old, steady old horse,-- he knew just what to do, when to go and when to stand still. and when with clang! clang! clang! fire engines shrieked down the street he'd stand as still as a rock so his mistress and her baby were never frightened a bit! and the little boy laughed and watched and laughed! and when the great policeman, so big in the middle of the street, held up his hand, the old horse stopped but watched him close for the first wave of the hand that would tell him to go ahead. always the first to stop, always the first to go, the old horse loved the streets. now he wanted the streets. and while he stood and chewed his hay and wondered what was wrong, suddenly there came a rumble of noises all a-jumble, a quaking and a shaking a terrifying tremble making the old horse quiver and stand still! it came from the alley, his own peaceful alley where he knew every horse, every coach, every wagon! bump, thump, like a lump of lead jolting, bang, whang, like a steam engine bolting, down it came crashing down it came smashing, till it stopped with a snort at his own stable door! the old horse pulled at his halter and strained to look round at the door. out of the tail of his eye he could see the doors, the doors to his very own barn, swing wide under the crane where they hoisted the hay. and there in the alley, oh what did he see this old horse with his terrified eye? a monster all shiny and black with great headlights stuck way out in front, with brass things that grated and groaned as the driver pulled this thing and that. and there on the back of this monster sat old tom who had driven him now for fifteen long years. and out of the mouth of the monster, as there opened a neat little door, stepped his mistress dear with her eager little boy and the baby in her arms. and the poor horse trembled to see those that he loved so well so near this terrible monster. "'twill eat them all!" he thought. and for the first time in all his brave and prudent life the old horse was frightened. he raised his head, he spread his nostrils, he neighed with all his strength. his mistress dear would surely hear, would hear and understand! he wanted to save her, save the boy and save the little baby from this terrible ugly beast snorting there so near! and his mistress dear, she heard. but did she understand? she came and laid her hand upon his quivering side. "poor dear old horse," she said, "your day is gone and you must go!" what could she mean? what could she mean? what could she mean? "you have been strong; but not so strong as is our new machine! you have been brave; but see this thing, this thing can know no fear! you have been wise; but this machine is like a part of tom. he pulls a lever, turns a wheel and this machine obeys! poor dear old horse your day is gone and now you too must go!" so that was what she meant! so that was what she meant! so that was what she meant! * * * the old horse heard but how could he understand? how could he know that she had said they wanted him no longer? how could he know that this big monster, this new automobile was going to do his work for them and do it better than he! he knew that something was wrong. he was puzzled and sad and frightened. with head drooped low and feet that dragged he let old tom untie his rope and lead him from the stall. for one short moment as he passed the shiny automobile he straightened his head and widened his nostrils and snorted and snorted again. but there within the monster, lying safe upon a seat, he saw the little baby laughing and all alone. and the old horse was puzzled, was puzzled and frightened too. then old tom pulled him gently through the wide swinging doors and led him down the alley. past the stables with other horses, past the grooms and stable boys, down the alley he knew so well went the old horse for the last time. for he never came back again. they had no need of him; they liked their auto better! down the alley he slowly went and as he turned into the street below one last long look he gave to the stable at the end, one last long look at his mistress dear with the baby in her arms, one last long look at the little boy waving and calling: "goodbye, goodbye". one last long look, and then he was gone! once the barn was full of hay: now 'tis there no more. i wonder why the hay has left the barn? the wind this story is composed entirely of observations on the wind dictated by a six-year-old and a seven-year-old class. every phrase (except the one word "toss") is theirs. the ordering only is mine. the wind in the summer-time the wind goes like breathing, but in a winter storm it growls and roars. [illustration] sometimes the wind goes oo-oo-oo-oo-oo! it sounds like water running. it makes a singing sound. it blows through the grass. it blows against the tree and the tree bows over and bends way down. it whistles in the leaves and makes a rustling sound. the tree shakes, the branches and leaves all rustle. the wind knocks the leaves off the trees and tosses them up in the air. then it blows them straight in to the window and drags them around on the floor. it makes the leaves whirl and twirl. and sometimes the wind is frisky. it whisks around the corners. it comes blowing down the street. it blows the papers round and round on the ground. it tears them and rares them, then up, it takes them sailing. it sweeps around the house, blowing and puffing. it blows the wash up. it blows the chickens off the trees. it makes the nuts come rattling down. it turns the windmill and makes the fire burn. it blows out the matches, it blows out the candles, it blows out the gas lights. it hits the people on the street. some it keeps back from walking and some it pushes forward. it unbuttons the coat of a little girl, it unbuttons her leggings too and the little girl feels all chilly in the frisky wind. it blows up her skirt. it pulls off her hat and blows through her hair till she feels all chilly on her head too. puff! it goes, puff! puff! then off go other hats spinning down the street. it gets under umbrellas and turns them inside out. the frisky wind blows harder and harder. the houses shake. the windows rattle. and the people on the street are whirling and twirling like the leaves. sometimes there is a storm. the wind roars over the ocean and makes the waves bigger than the ships. the waves go up and down, and up and down, and the ship goes rocking and rocking, this way and that way, this way and that way, to the right, to the left, to the right, to the left, back and forth and back and forth. a boat gets tossed on the sea. the sails are all torn to pieces by the storm. the masts get broken off and fall down on the ship. the ship just rocks and rocks. then pretty soon it bumps into a rock and is wrecked and sinks. and all the men get drowned. the wind growls and roars over the mountain. there is thunder and lightning. the thunder says, "boompety, boom, boom, boom!" the lightning is all shiny. the rain comes pouring down. the wind whistles in the trees. it blows a tree over. it crashes down. the lightning goes crack! and splits the tree in two. and then the tree catches on fire and the leaves burn like paper. in the summer-time the wind goes like breathing, but in a winter storm it growls and roars. the leaf story all the content and many of the expressions were taken from stories on dried leaves dictated by a six-year-old and a seven-year-old class. the leaf story [illustration] i want to fly up in the air! if i take two leaves in my hands and put two leaves on my feet and the wind blows perhaps i'll fly up in the air! listen! something stirs in the dried leaves, the tree bends, the tree bows, the wind sweeps through the brown leaves. the brown leaves crackle and rattle and dance, they rustle and murmur and pull at the bough, they shiver, they quiver till they pull themselves loose and are free. up, up they fly! little brown specks in the sky. they twist and they spin, they whirl and they twirl, they teeter, they turn somersaults in the air. then for a moment the wind holds its breath. down, down, down float the leaves, still turning and twisting, still twirling and whirling, the brown leaves float to the earth. puff! goes the wind, up they fly again with a little soft rustling laugh. then down they float. down, down, down. on the ground the leaves go as if walking or running. they go and then they stop. they scurry along, still twisting and turning, still twirling and whirling, they hurry along, with a soft little rustle they tumble, they roll and they roll. i want to fly up in the air! if i take two leaves in my hands and put two leaves on my feet and the wind blows, perhaps i'll fly up in the air. a locomotive in the daytime, what am i? in the hubbub, what am i? a mass of iron and of steel, of boiler, piston, throttle, wheel, a monster smoking up the sky, a locomotive! that am i! in the darkness, what am i? in the stillness, what am i? streak of light across the sky, a clanging bell, a shriek, a cry, a fiery demon rushing by, a locomotive that am i! [illustration] moon moon (_to the tune of "du, du, liegst mir im herzen._") moon, moon, shiny and silver, moon, moon, silver and white; moon, moon, whisper to children "sleep through the silvery night." there, there, there, there, sleep through the silvery night. sun, sun, shiny and golden, sun, sun, golden and gay; sun, sun, shout to the children "wake to the sunshiny day!" there, there, there, there, wake to the sunshiny day. automobile song a-rolling, bowling, fast or slow, a-racing, chasing, off we go. the jolly automobile whizzes along with flying wheel. we go chug, chug-chug, chug-up! then we go s-l-i-d-i-n-g down. we go scooting over the hills, we go tooting back to town. silly will in this story i have used a device to tie together many isolated familiar facts. i have never found that six-year-old children did not readily discriminate the actual from the imaginary. silly will part once there was a little boy. now he was a very silly little boy, so silly that he was called silly will. he had an idea that he was tremendously smart and that he could quite well get along by himself in this world. this foolish idea made him do and say all sorts of silly things which led to all sorts of terrible happenings as this story will show. one day he went out walking. he walked down the road until he met a little girl. the little girl was crying. "what's the matter with you?" asked silly will. "oh!" sobbed the little girl, "our cow has died and i don't know what we shall do. i don't know how we can get along without her milk and everything. we depended on her so!" "depended on a cow!" cried silly will. "whoever heard of such a thing! i've often seen that stupid old cow of yours. clumsy, lumbering thing! cows are no good! i wouldn't depend on any animal, not i! it wouldn't matter to me if all the cows in the world died!" and silly will strutted off down the road. the little girl looked after him with astonishment. "i just wish no cow would ever give that silly boy anything!" she thought. before long he met an old woman. the old woman was crying too. "what's the matter with you?" asked silly will. "oh!" cried the old woman wringing her hands. "our sheep has fallen over a cliff and broken its legs and it's going to die. i don't know how we shall get along without her wool for spinning. we depended so much on her!" "depended on a sheep!" cried silly will. "whoever heard of such a thing! i've often heard your stupid old sheep bleating. sheep are no good. i wouldn't depend on any animal, not i! it wouldn't matter to me if all the sheep in the world died!" and silly will strutted off down the road feeling very smart. the old woman looked after him greatly surprised. "silly little boy!" she thought. "he little knows! i just wish no sheep would give him anything!" then before long silly will met a man. the man was sitting beside the road with his face in his hands. "what's the matter with you?" asked silly will. the man looked up. "oh, our horse has died!" he sighed dolefully, "and i don't know how we can get along without him to plow for us now that it's seeding time. and there's not much use getting in the seeds anyway without a horse to carry the grain to market when it's ripe. we depended so on our horse!" "depended on a horse!" cried silly will. "whoever heard of such a thing! first i meet a little girl who says she depended on a cow for food: then i meet an old woman who says she depended on a sheep for clothes. and here is a man who says he depends on a horse to work and to carry for him! as for me, i depend on no animal, not i! it wouldn't matter to me if there were no animals in the world. they needn't give me anything! i wish they wouldn't!" the man looked at him greatly amazed. "silly little boy!" he said. "i hope your silly wish will come true. how little you understand! i just wish tonight all the animal kingdom would leave you and then perhaps you would understand a little!" but silly will walked home feeling very smart, for he _didn't_ understand. silly people never _do_ understand! now that night a strange thing happened to silly will. i can't explain how or why it happened. but in the middle of the night, all the animals _did_ leave silly will. not only the cow and the sheep and the horse but all the animal kingdom! he was sound asleep in his flannel nightgown snuggled under warm wool blankets. suddenly he felt a jerk. what was happening? he sat up in bed just in time to see his blankets whisk off him and disappear. he looked down. his night shirt was gone! he heard a faint sound almost like the bleating of the old woman's sheep. "ba-ba-a-a i take back my wool!" then he was aware that something queer had happened to his mattress. it was just an empty bag of ticking. he heard a faint sound almost like the neighing of the man's horse who had died. "whey-ey-ey, i take back my hair!" he reached for his pillow. it too was an empty sack. "hh-ss-s-hh" hissed a faint sound almost like a goose. "i take back my feathers!" "whatever is happening?" screamed silly will. "let me get a light." he found a match and struck it, but his candlestick was empty. "ba-a-moo-oo" said some faint voices. "i take back my fat!" by this time silly will was thoroughly frightened and shivering with cold besides. "i'd better get dressed," he thought, and groped his way to the chair where he had left his clothes. he could find only his cotton underwaist and his cotton shirt. his wool undershirt and drawers, his trousers and stockings, and his silk necktie were gone. and so were his leather shoes. just the lacings lay on the floor. "mooooo" he seemed to hear a faint sound almost like the little girl's cow he had made fun of in the afternoon. "i take back my hide." he put on the few cotton clothes that were left, but there were no buttons to hold them together. "moooooo," he heard a faint voice say. "i take back my bones." terrified he ran to the closet to see what more he could find. "i'll surely freeze," he thought as he lighted another match. "i'll slip on my coat and get into bed." but his warm coat with the fur collar was gone, too. "chee, chee, chee," he seemed to hear a faint sound almost like the squirrel he was fond of frightening. "i take back my skin!" but he did find some cotton stockings and some old overalls. these he put on relieved to find they had metal buttons. then poor silly will crawled back to bed wearing his cotton clothes and waited for morning to come. he didn't sleep much for the wire spring cut into him. he was cold, too. as soon as it was light he hunted around for more clothes. he found some straw bed-room slippers. his rubbers too were there and he put them on over his slippers. then he ran downstairs to get something to eat. "anyway," he thought, "those old animals can't get me when it comes to eating. i never did care much about meat." the pantry door squeaked as he opened it. it sounded for all the world like a far away barnyard--hens, cows, and pigs. he looked around. no milk, no eggs, no bacon! "bread and butter will do me," he thought. but the butter had gone too! he opened the bread box. the bread was still there! he almost wept from relief. by hunting around he found a good deal to eat. cocoa made with water instead of milk was pretty good. then there were crackers and apples. his oatmeal wasn't very good without milk or butter. but he ate it. he knew he would have plenty of vegetables and fruits and cereals. and the day was warm enough so that he didn't mind his cotton clothes. but his feet did hurt him. he wondered about wooden shoes and thought he would try to make some. he was a little worried too about his bed. he hunted around in the house until he found two cotton comforters. one he put under his sheet in place of his mattress and one on top in place of his blankets. so, on the whole, he thought, he could manage to get along. poor little silly will! he had never before thought how much the animals did for him. once in a while he would think of the little girl and the old woman and the man he had met that afternoon. but not for long. and he never remembered that some time winter would come. but long before that time came, silly will had got himself into still more trouble. for even now he didn't understand! part from this time on nothing went well with silly will. when he had eaten the vegetables he had in the house he walked over to a gardener who lived nearby. he wanted to get potatoes and other supplies for the winter. to his horror he found everything drooping and wilted and withered. "what's the matter with the vegetables, gardener?" asked silly will. "a frost," sighed the gardener. "it's killed all the potatoes. i hope you weren't depending on them?" "oh, of course not," said silly will, gulping hard. "i certainly wouldn't depend on a vegetable. that would be too ridiculous. if the frost should kill all the vegetables, it would make no difference to me!" nevertheless in his heart he felt unhappy and a little frightened at the thought of the coming winter. but still he didn't understand. silly people never do understand. he walked on down the road saying to himself, "i'll go order my winter wood anyway. i'm almost out of it at home." just then he looked up. he expected to see the green forest stretching up the hillside. he stared. the hillside was black smoking stumps, fallen blackened trees, white ashes! beside the dead trees stood the old forester wringing his hands. silly will didn't even speak to him. he could see what had happened without asking. he turned around. slowly he walked home. he went right to bed. he still pretended that he wasn't unhappy or frightened. he kept saying to himself, "i don't really depend on the wood at all. of course that would be silly! i've got coal. it wouldn't matter to me if all the plants left me." and with that thought he fell asleep. you see even now he didn't understand. silly people never do understand. now that night another strange thing happened to silly will. i can't explain how or why it happened. but in the middle of the night all the plants _did_ leave silly will,--not only the potatoes and the trees but the whole vegetable kingdom. he was asleep all curled up to keep warm in his cotton clothes. suddenly he felt the comforter and sheet under him jerk away and he was left lying on the wire spring. at the same time the comforter and sheet over him disappeared. so did his nightshirt. then bang! his wooden bed was gone. the house began to creak and rock. he jumped up and tore down stairs. he just got outside the front door when the whole house collapsed. the moon was shining. silly will could see quite plainly. there stood the brick chimneys rising out of a pile of plaster dumped on top of the concrete foundations. there was the slate roof and the broken window of glass. the air was full of a sound like the violent trembling of many leaves. it sounded for all the world as if it said, "i take back my wood!" "whatever will i do?" groaned silly will as he shivered all naked in the moonlight. then his eye lighted on the kitchen stove. there it stood with the stove pipe all safely connected with the chimney. "i'll build a coal fire," he thought. there stood the iron coal scuttle. but alas! it was empty! he heard a far-away murmur like a faint wind stirring in giant ferns. and they said, "i take back my buried leaves!" by this time silly will was shaking with cold. "i've heard that newspapers are warm," he thought. but the pile behind the stove was gone. again came the murmur of trees--"i take back my pulp," and a queer soft sound which he couldn't quite make out. was it "i take back my cotton?" silly will was thoroughly terrified now. "i'll go somewhere to think," he said to himself. so he crept down the cement steps to the cellar and crawled into a sheltered corner. but he couldn't think of anything pleasant. he could hear a confused noise all around him. sometimes it sounded like growls, like animal cries, like animal calls. "the animal kingdom has left him," it seemed to say. again it sounded like the wind rustling a thousand leaves. "the vegetable kingdom has left him," it seemed to say. "i've nothing to wear," sobbed silly will. "and i'm afraid i've nothing to eat." at the thought of food he jumped up and ran over to the cellar pantry. he found just three things. they did not make a tempting meal! they were a crock of salt, a tin of soda and a porcelain pitcher of water. "what shall i ever do? how shall i live? i'll never have another glass of milk or cup of cocoa. i'll never have anything to wear. i'll freeze and i'll starve. i might just as well die now!" and poor little silly will broke down and cried and cried and cried. "i can't live without other living things," he sobbed. "i can't eat only minerals and i can't keep warm in minerals. everybody has to depend on animals and vegetables. and after all i'm only a little boy! i've got to have living things to keep alive myself!" then a wonderful thing happened to silly will. i can't explain how or why it happened. suddenly he felt all warm and comfortable. "perhaps i'm freezing," he thought. "i've heard that people feel warm when they are almost frozen to death." slowly he put out his hand. surely that was a linen sheet! surely that was a woolen blanket. surely he had on his flannel nightgown. he sat straight up. surely this was his own bed: this was his own room: this was his own house. he could scarcely believe his eyes. he gave a great shout. "moo-oo-oo," answered a cow under a tree outside his window. and the leaves of the tree rustled at him too. "hello, old cow! hello, old tree!" cried silly will running to the window. "isn't it good we're all alive?" and when you think of it that wasn't a silly remark at all! "moo-oo-oo," lowed the old cow. "swish-sh-sh-sh," rustled the tree. and suddenly silly will thought he understood! i wonder if he did! eben's cows this story attempts to make an industrial process a background for real adventure. eben's cows part eben was looking at the cows. and the cows were looking at eben. what eben saw was twenty-six pairs of large gentle eyes, twenty-six mouths chewing with a queer sidewise motion, twenty-six fine fat cattle, some red, some white, some black, some red and white, and some black and white, all in a bright green meadow. what the cows saw, held by his mother on the rail fence, was a fat baby with a shining face and waving arms. what eben heard was the heavy squashy footsteps of the slow-moving cows as they lumbered toward the little figure on the fence. what the cows heard was a high, excited little voice saying a real word for the first time in its life, "cow! cow! oh, cow! oh, cow!" and so with his first word began eben's life-long friendship with the cows. eben brewster lived in a little white farm-house with green blinds. the cows lived in a great long red barn, which was connected with the little white farm-house by a wagon-shed and tool-house. high up on the great red barn was printed green mountain farm. long before eben knew how to read he knew what those big letters said, and he knew that the lovely rolling hills that ringed the farm around, were called the green mountains. in front of both house and barn stretched the bright green meadows where day after day fed the twenty-six cows. in a neighboring meadow played the long-legged calves. for at green mountain farm there were always many calves. in the summer they usually had fifteen or twenty calves a few months old. for every cow of course had her baby once a year. the little bull calves they sold; but the little cow calves they raised. [illustration] when eben was three years old he made friends with the calves his own way. he wiggled through the bars of the gate into their pasture. the calves stared at him; they sniffed at him. then they came a little closer. they stared at him again. they sniffed at him again. then they came closer still. then one little black and white thing came right up to him and licked his face and hands. and three-year-old eben liked the feel of the soft nose and the rough tongue and he liked the sweet cow smell. so it came about that eben played regularly with the calves. it always amused his father andrew to watch them together. "i never saw a child so crazy about cows!" he used to say. one day he put a pretty little new calf,--white with red spots,--into the pasture. eben ran to the calf at once. "what shall we call the calf, eben?" asked his father. "think of some nice name for her." eben put his arms around the calf's neck and smiled. "i call him 'ittle sister," he said. for little baby sister was the only thing three-year-old eben loved better than a calf. and the name stuck to the calves of green mountain farm. from that time on they were always called little sisters! real little sister or nancy, as she was called, grew apace. to her eben was always wonderful. at six years he seemed equal to about anything. it did not surprise her at all one day to hear her father say, "eben, you get the cows tonight." but it did surprise eben. he had helped his father drive them home for years. and now he was to do it alone! down the dusty road he went, switch in hand, taking such big important strides that the footprints of his little bare feet were almost as far apart as a man's. the cows stood facing the bars. he took down the bars. the cows filed through one by one. nancy and her father, waiting to help him turn the cows in at the barn, knew he was coming. they could see the cloud of dust and hear the many shuffling feet and the shrill boy's voice calling: "hi, spotty, don't you stop to eat! go 'long there, crumplehorn, don't you know the way home yet! hurry up, redface. can't you keep in the road?" eben felt older from that day. from the day he began driving home the cows alone eben took a real share in the work at the farm. he put the cows' heads into the stanchions when each one lumbered into her stall. he fed them hay and ensilage through the long winter months when the meadows were white with snow. he put the cans to catch the cream and the skimmed milk when his father turned the separator. he took the separator apart and carried it up to his mother to be washed. nancy helped and talked. only she really talked more than she helped! eben's talk ran much on cows. his poor mother read all she could in the encyclopedia, but even then she couldn't answer all his questions. why does a cow have four stomachs? why does her food come back to be chewed? why does she chew sideways? why does she have to be milked twice a day? why doesn't she get out of the way when an auto comes down the road? when eben asked his father these things the farmer would shake his head and answer, "i guess it's just because she's a cow." there came a very exciting day at green mountain farm. for twenty years andrew brewster and his men had milked his cows morning and evening. his hands were hard from the practice. the children loved to watch him milk. with every pull of his strong hands he made a fine white stream of milk shoot into the pail, squirt, squirt, squirt. eben had often tried, but pull as he would, he could only get out a few drops. and even as andrew brewster had milked his cows morning and evening until his hands were horny, so had his father done before him. yes, and his father's father, too. for three generations of brewsters had hardened their hands milking cows on green mountain farm. then there came this exciting day, and a new way of milking began at the big red barn. a milking machine was put in. it ran by a wonderful little puffing gasolene engine. it milked two cows at once. and it milked all twenty-six of them in twenty minutes. andrew brewster could manage the whole herd alone with what help eben could give him. it was a great day for him. it was a great day for eben and nancy too. part there came another day which was even more exciting for the two children than when the milking machine was put into the big red barn. this story is really about that day. eben was then ten years old and nancy seven. their father and mother had gone for the day to a county fair. the two children were to be alone all day, which made up for not going to the fair. the children had long since eaten the cold dinner their mother had left for them. they had done all their chores too. nancy had gathered the eggs and eben had chopped the kindling and brought in the wood. they had fed the baby chickens and given them water. then they had gone to the woods for an afternoon climb over the big rocks and a wade in the brook. now they were waiting for their father and mother to come back. they had been waiting for a long time, for it was seven o'clock. the last thing their mother had called out as she drove off behind the two old farm horses was, "we'll be back by five o'clock, children." what could have happened? "eben," said nancy, "we'd better eat our own supper and get something ready for father and mother. i guess i'll try to scramble some eggs." "go ahead," answered eben. "but we're not the ones i'm worrying about--nor father and mother either. it's those poor cows." "oh! the cows!" cried nancy. "and the poor little sisters! they'll be so hungry." both children ran to the door. "just listen to them," said eben. "they've been waiting in the barn for over an hour now. i certainly wish father would come." from the big red barn came the lowing of the restless cattle. "i'm going to have another look at them," said eben. "come along, nancy." the two children peered into the big dark barn. the unmistakable cow smell came to them strong in the dark. stretching down the whole length was stall after stall, each holding an impatient cow. the children could see the restless hind feet moving and stamping; they could see the flicking of many tails; they could feel the cows pulling at the stanchions. on the other side were the stalls of the little sisters. they too were moving about wildly. over above it all rose the deafening sound of the plaintive lowings. by the door stood the gasolene engine. it was attached to a pipe which ran the whole length of the great barn above the cows' stalls. eben's eyes followed this pipe until it was lost in the dark. "moo-oo-oo," lowed the cow nearest at hand, so loud that both children jumped. "poor old redface," said nancy. "i wish we could help you." "we're going to," said eben in an excited voice, "see here, nancy. we're going to milk these cows!" "why, eben brewster, we could never do it alone!" nancy's eyes went to the gasolene engine as she spoke. "we've got to," said eben. "that's all there is about it." so the children began with trembling hands. they lighted two lanterns. "i wish the cows would stop a minute," said nancy. "i can't seem to think with such a racket going on." eben turned on the spark of the engine. he had done it before, but it seemed different to do it when his father wasn't standing near. then he took the crank. "i hope she doesn't kick tonight," he wished fervently. he planted his feet firmly and grasped the handle! round he swung it, around and around. only the bellowing of the cows answered. he began again. round he swung the handle; around and around. "chug, chug-a-chug, chug, chug, chug-a-chug, chug," answered the engine. nancy jumped with delight. "you're as good as a man, eben," she cried. "come now, bring the lantern," commanded eben. nancy carried the lantern and eben a rubber tube. this tube eben fastened on to the first faucet on the long pipe between the first two cows. this rubber tube branched into two and at the end of each were four hollow rubber fingers. eben stuck his fingers down one. he could feel the air pull, pull, pull. "she's working all right, nancy," he whispered in a shaking voice. "put the pail here." nancy obeyed. eben took one bunch of four hollow rubber fingers and slipped one finger up each udder of one cow. then he took the other bunch and slipped one finger up each udder of the second cow. the cows, feeling relief was near, quieted at once. "i can see the milk," screamed nancy, watching a tiny glass window in the rubber tube. and sure enough, through the tube and out into the pail came a pulsing stream of milk. squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt. in a few minutes the two cows were milked and the children moved on to the next pair. nancy carried the pail and eben the rubber tube which he fastened on to the next faucet. and in another few minutes two more cows were milked. so the children went the length of the great red barn, and gradually the restless lowings quieted as pail after pail was filled with warm white milk. "i wouldn't try the separator if it weren't for the poor little sisters," said eben anxiously as they reached the end of the barn. "they've got to be fed," said nancy. "but i can't lift those pails." slowly eben carried them one by one with many rests back to the separator by the gasoline engine. he took the strap off one wheel and put it around the wheel of the separator. "i can't lift a whole pail," sighed eben. taking a little at a time he poured the milk into the tray at the top of the separator. in a few minutes the yellow cream came pouring out of one spout and the blue skimmed milk out of another. in another few minutes the calves were drinking the warm skimmed milk. "there, little sisters, poor, hungry little sisters," said nancy, as she watched their eager pink tongues. eben turned off the engine. "i'm sorry i couldn't do the final hand milking," he said. "i wonder if we'd better turn the cows out?" before nancy could answer both children heard a sound. they held their breath. surely those were horses' feet! cloppety clop clop clop cloppety clop clop clop. up to the barn door dashed the old farm horses. from the dark outside the children heard their mother's voice, "children, children, are you there? the harness broke and i thought we'd _never_ get home." carrying a lantern apiece the children rushed out and into her arms. "here, eben," called his father. "you take the horses quick. i must get started milking right away. those poor cows!" the children were too excited to talk plainly. they both jabbered at once. then each took a hand of their father and led him into the great red barn. there by the light of the lanterns andrew brewster could see the pails of warm white milk and yellow cream. he stared at the quiet cows and at the little sisters. then he stared at eben and nancy. "yes," cried both children together. "we did it. we did it ourselves!" the sky scraper the story tries to assemble into a related form many facts well-known to seven-year-olds and to present the whole as a modern industrial process. [illustration] the sky scraper once in an enormous city, men built an enormous building. deep they built it, deep into the ground; high they built it, high into the air. now that it is finished the men who walk about its feet forget how deep into the ground it reaches. but they can never forget how high into the blue it soars. their necks ache when they throw back their heads to see to the top. for, of all the buildings in the world, this sky scraper is the highest. the sky scraper stands in the heart of the great city. from its top one can see the city, one can hear the city, one can smell the city--the city where men live and work. one can see the crowded streets full of tiny men and tiny automobiles, the riverside with its baby warehouses and its baby docks, the river with its toy bridges and toy giant steamers and tug boats and barges and ferries. the city noise,--the distant, rumbling, grumbling noise,--sounds like the purring of a far-away giant beast. and over it all lies the smell of gas and smoke. the sky scraper stands in the heart of the great city. but from its top in the blue, blue sky one can see all over the land. landward the fields spread out like a map till they are lost in the mist and smoke. seaward lies the vast, the tremendous stretch of the sea, the wrinkled, the crinkled, the far-away sea that stretches to touch the sky. now this soaring sky scraper is the work of men--of many, many men. its lofty lacy tower was first thought of by the architect. with closed eyes he saw it, and with his well-trained fingers quickly he drew its outline. then at his office many men with t squares and with compasses, sitting at high long tables, with green-shaded lamps, worked far into the nights till all the plans were ready. then the sky scraper began to grow. the first men brought mighty steam shovels. one hundred feet into the earth they burrowed. the gigantic mouths of the steam shovels gnawed at the rock and the clay. huge hulks they clutched from this underworld, heaved up with enormous derricks and crashed out on the upper land. deep they dug, deep into the ground till they found the firm bed-rock. with a network of steel they filled this terrific hole. into the rasping, revolving mixers they poured tons of sand and cement and gravel which steadily flowed in a sluggish stream to strengthen the steel supports. at last,--and that was an exciting day,--the great beams began to rise. again the derricks ground, as slowly, steadily, accurately, they swung each beam to its place. a thousand men swarmed over the steel bones, some throwing red-hot rivets, others catching them in pails, all to the song of the rivet driver. [illustration] the riveter screamed and shrieked and shrilled. it pierced the air of the narrow streets. on the nearby buildings it vibrated, echoed. the sky scraper seemed alive and thrilled by the quivering, throbbing, shrieking shrill,--by the song of the riveter. story by story the sky scraper grew, a monstrous outline against the sky. and ever and ever as it grew, hissed the rivet and screamed the drill. at length the sky scraper soared sixty dizzy stories high. then swiftly came the stone masons and encased the giant steel frame. swiftly in its center, men reared the plunging elevators. swiftly worked the electrician, the plumber, the carpenter. all workmen were called and all workmen came. the world listened to the call of this sky scraper standing in the heart of the great city. from the mines of minnesota to the swamps of louisiana came goods to serve its need. long, long ago, in olden days, the churches grew slowly bit by bit, as one man carved a door post here and another fitted a window there, each planning his own part. not so with the sky scraper. it grew in haste. its parts were made in factories scattered the country over. each factory was ready with a part, and the railroad was ready swift to bring them to its feet. the sky scraper grew in haste. for it the many worked as one. planned by those who command and reared by those who obey, in an enormous city men built this enormous building. deep they built it, deep into the ground; high they built it, high into the air. and now they use this building built by them. the sky scraper houses an army of ten thousand men. all day they clamber up and down its core like insects in a giant tree. they buzz and buzz, and then go home. [illustration] but there with the shadowy silent streets at its feet stands the lofty sky scraper. on its head there glows a monstrous light. the rays pierce through the fogs. and when the storm is screaming wild, the light struggles through to the frightened boats tossing on the mountain waves. the storm howls and beats on the sides of the lofty lacy tower with the shining light on top. the storms beat on its side, the tower leans in the wind, the tower of steel and of stone leans and leans a full two feet. then when the blast is past, this tower of steel and of stone swings back to straightness again. and so in the enormous city men built this enormous building. deep they built it, deep into the ground; high, they built it, high into the air. now that it is finished, the men who walk about its feet forget how deep into the ground it reaches. but they can never forget how high into the blue it soars. their necks ache when they throw back their heads to see to the top. for of all the buildings in the world this sky scraper is the highest. end ontario teachers' manuals nature study authorized by the minister of education toronto the ryerson press copyright, canada, , by the minister of education for ontario second printing, third printing, fourth printing, transcriber's note: minor typos have been corrected. italics are indicated by subscripts (_) and bold words are indicated by tildes (~). contents page prefatory note course of study--details chapter i the aims of nature study; general methods concrete material topics and material must suit the season; matter suited to the child; use of the commonplace; order of development of lesson; problems in observation; note-books and records the school garden suggestions; garden expenses the excursion its value; difficulties; frequency; suggestions for ungraded schools; the teacher's excursions; a type excursion collections animal studies domestic animals; references birds; references insects; insect collections butterfly and moth collections plant collections chapter ii physical science phase of nature study instructions and general method value of such lessons; conditions under which experiments should be performed correlations of physical science phase list of reference books and bulletins on garden and plant study, physical science, and animal study physical science--equipment for forms iii and iv desirable apparatus chemicals apparatus grenet cells; decomposition apparatus; pneumatic trough; spirit-lamp; barometer; hygrometer; hints time apportioned to nature study chapter iii. form i: autumn garden work lessons on a garden plant--pansy observation exercises on the dandelion correlation with literature and reading dwarf nasturtium seeds field exercise; class-room lesson based on the collection seed dispersal lesson on seeds that fly; correlations twigs and buds lesson on twigs further study of twigs; review lesson lesson on buds review lesson; correlations leaves field exercises; class-room lesson on leaves garden studies studies in the pupil's individual plot studies from the garden as a whole bulb planting lesson on bulbs and bulb planting planting the bulb chapter iv. form i: winter pet animals the rabbit--lesson on; correlations the domestic cat--detailed study the pigeon--detailed study winter-blooming plants--observation and care of trees pines of the locality the white pine field exercises; class-room lesson the elm--field exercise domestic animals the horse; correlations domestic birds the duck--class-room lesson chapter v. form i: spring garden work garden studies--window garden wild flowers recognition of wild flowers lesson in outline--bloodroot; correlations insect study cecropia, or emperor-moth dragon-fly other conspicuous insects birds the robin field exercises; the nest, eggs, and young the song-sparrow field exercises; class-room lesson the sheep problems for field work chapter vi. form ii: autumn bulb planting out-of-doors bed for growing bulbs; planting of bulbs indoors garden work seed selection; storing seeds; harvesting and storing of garden crops; class-room lesson; autumn cultivation garden studies garden records; correlations climbing plants trees storing of tree seeds a flower type--nasturtium soil studies kinds of soil animal studies bird migration; correlations common wild animals general method for field work the wood-chuck the chipmunk--field exercises the eastern swallow-tail butterfly chapter vii. form ii: winter care of plants in the home trees collection of wood specimens related reading the dog class-room lesson; observation exercises; correlations lessons involving comparison cat and dog; experiments for assisting in the study of the cat; comparison of the horse and cow the squirrel field exercises; class-room lesson winter birds field exercises; class-room lesson; correlations animals of the zoological gardens chapter viii. form ii: spring garden work combating garden pests cutworms; root-maggots; flea-beetles seed germination plants for individual plots studies based on observations of growing plants planting and care of sweet-peas wild flowers weeds the apple tree field exercise; class-room lesson; field exercise following class-room lesson bird study the toad field exercises; class-room lesson; detailed study; life history of the toad the earthworm class-room lesson; references the aquarium aquarium specimens mosquito; study of adult form; the development; references caddice-fly insects suitable for lessons in form ii chapter ix. form iii: autumn garden work treatment of fungi treatment of insects--cabbage-worm plants annuals, biennials, and perennials class-room lesson garden studies annuals, biennials, perennials special study of garden plants sweet-pea; pumpkin; corn; correlations seed dispersal--lesson detailed study of seed dispersal--class-room lesson seed collections; man as a disperser of seeds the sugar maple--field exercises maple leaves--class-room lesson; correlations weed studies observation lesson on weed seeds grasshopper--field exercises; class-room lesson aphides tomato worm--the adult; the chrysalis the crow; correlations chapter x. form iii: winter care of plants in the home plant cuttings selection of cuttings; potting of rooted cuttings evergreens--class-room lesson collection of wood specimens related reading how animals prepare for winter summary of lessons; correlations chickens conversation lesson; arithmetic lesson; care and food of chickens physical science phase of nature study solids, liquids, and gases change of state expansion of solids practical applications; questions for further investigation expansion of liquids--applications the thermometer expansion of air sources of heat and light notes for a series of lessons conduction--problems convection--problems, convection in gases; applications radiation of heat--problems chapter xi. form iii: spring window boxes window gardens suitable plants; fertilizer soil studies--constituents garden work tree seeds transplanting--flowers, vegetables, tree seedlings budding cuttings--leaf cuttings, root cuttings, layering planting and care of herbaceous perennials garden studies--biennials wild flowers study of the trillium class-room lesson on the specimens adaptations of animals bird types woodpeckers--the downy woodpecker; observations flycatchers wrens insect types cabbage-butterfly tussock-moth potato beetle references fish--observations; problems; references chapter xii. form iv: autumn garden work herbaceous perennials from seed trees--deciduous; references trees in relation to their environment fruits--excursion to a well-kept orchard small fruits autumn wild flowers--milkweed; correlations trees--the white pine outline of a class-room lesson on the white pine; correlations; references apples--comparative lesson on winter varieties king, baldwin, northern spy codling moth; references some common animal forms; references centipeds and millipeds salamanders or newts spiders bird studies chapter xiii. form iv: winter forest trees evergreens; wood specimens fruits weeds and weed seeds physical science phase of nature study water pressure--exercises study of air the barometer; the common pump; expansive force of air; composition of air; oxygen; carbon dioxide; impurities of air solutions of solids solutions of liquids solutions of gases limestone carbon hydrogen magnets electricity steam farm tools--machines; problems chapter xiv. form iv: spring method of improving home and school grounds making and care of a lawn; references soil studies weight subsoils fertilizers--experiments soil-forming agents tilling the soil garden work--experiments in plots out-of-doors function of parts of plants how the plant gets its food from the soil; germination of some of the common grains weeds vines wild flowers planting of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials in home and school grounds shade trees; transplanting animal studies scale insects san josé scale; oyster-shell bark-louse; cutworms; white grubs crayfish freshwater mussel bird study different aspects of nature study prefatory note this manual is placed in the hands of the teachers in the hope that the suggestions which it contains on lesson topics, materials, books of reference, and methods in teaching will be found helpful to all teachers and in particular to those who have had little or no instruction in nature study during their academic or professional training. the first chapter of the manual discusses topics which have general reference to the subject as a whole. the remaining part of the manual deals more particularly with the subject in its application to the different public and separate school forms. while this division of the matter into forms is convenient for general classification, it is not to be regarded as arbitrary. materials and methods of presentation suitable for one class of pupils in a certain form might, under different conditions, be quite unsuitable for another class of pupils in the same form. for example, work which would be suitable for a class in form i made up of pupils admitted to a school at seven or eight years of age, after two years' training in a kindergarten where nature lessons received special attention, would not be suitable for a form i class made up of pupils admitted to a school at five years of age with no such previous training. in selecting work for any class the teacher, therefore, should not be guided solely by the arbitrary divisions of the manual, but should exercise his own judgment, taking into account his environment and the attainments of his pupils. to facilitate such a selection, page references are given in the details of the course of study, which in reality forms a detailed expansion of the public and separate school course in nature study. by means of these references, the teacher may find, in any department of the subject, typical matter suited to the development of his pupils. the numerous type lessons that are contained in the manual are intended to suggest principles of method that are to be applied in lessons upon the same and similar topics, but the teacher is cautioned against attempting to imitate these lessons. this error can be avoided by the teacher's careful preparation of the lesson. this preparation should include the careful study of the concrete materials that are to be used. the books, bulletins, etc., that are named in the manual as references will be found helpful. to facilitate teaching through the experimental and investigation methods, special attention has been given to the improvising of simple apparatus from materials within the reach of every teacher. from the character of the subject the course of study must be more or less elastic, and the topics detailed in the programme are intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. it may be that, owing to local conditions, topics not named are among the best that can be used, but all substitutions and changes should be made a subject of consultation with the inspector. the treatment of the subject must always be suited to the age and experience of the pupils, to the seasons of the year, accessibility of materials, etc. notes should not be dictated by the teacher. mere information, whether from book, written note, or teacher, is not nature study. the acquisition of knowledge must be made secondary to awakening and maintaining the pupil's interest in nature and to training him to habits of observation and investigation. as a guide to the minimum of work required, it is suggested that at least one lesson be taught from the subjects outlined under each general heading in the detailed course of study, with a minimum average of three lessons from the subjects under each general heading. public and separate school course of study details form i autumn garden work and garden studies: division of the garden plots, removal of weeds and observations on these weeds, identification of garden plants, observation lessons based on garden plants, selection of seeds, harvesting and disposing of the crop. (see pp. - .) study of plants: class lessons based on a flowering garden plant, as pansy, aster, nasturtium; study of a field plant, as buttercup, goldenrod, dandelion. (see pp. - .) potted and garden plants: observation lesson based on a bulb; planting bulbs in pots, or in the garden. (see pp. - .) birds and conspicuous insects: identification of a few common birds, as robin, english sparrow, meadow-lark; observation lessons on the habits of these birds; collection of the adult forms, the larvæ and the cocoons of a few common moths and butterflies, as emperor-moth, promothea moth, eastern swallow-tail butterfly. (see pp. - and - .) common trees: identification of a few common trees, as white pine, elm, maple; observations on the general shape, branches, leaves, and bark of these trees. (see pp. - and - .) winter farm animals, including fowls: habits and characteristics of a few domestic animals, as horse, cow, sheep, hen, duck; the uses of these animals, and how to take care of them. (see pp. - .) pet animals: observations on the habits, movements, and characteristics of pet animals, as cat, pigeon, bantam, rabbit, etc.; conversations about the natural homes and habits of these animals, and inferences upon their care. (see pp. - .) common trees: observations on the branching of common trees. (see pp. - .) spring garden work: preparation, planting, and care of the garden plot; observations on the growing plants. (see pp. - .) flowers: identification and study of a few spring flowers, as trillium, bloodroot, hepatica, spring-beauty. (see pp. - .) birds and insects: identification and study of the habits of a few common birds, as song-sparrow, blue-bird, wren; observations of the form and habits of a few common insects, as house-fly, dragon-fly. (see pp. - and - .) common trees: observations on the opening buds of the trees which were studied in the autumn. (see p. .) form ii autumn birds and insects: autumn migration of birds; identification and observations on the habits and movements of a few common insects, including their larval forms, as grasshopper, eastern swallow-tail butterfly. (see pp. - and - .) animals of the farm, field, and wood: observations on the homes and habits of wild animals, as frog, toad, squirrel, ground-hog; habits and structures, including adaptive features, of domestic animals, as dog, cat, horse, cow. (see pp. and - .) trees of the farm, roadside, wood, and orchard: observations on the shapes, sizes, rate of growth, and usefulness of common orchard, shade, and forest trees, as apple, elm, horse-chestnut. (see pp. - .) wild flowers and weeds: identification and study of a few common weeds, noting their means of persistence and dispersal. (see pp. - .) care of potted and garden plants: preparation of pots and garden beds for bulbs; selecting and storing garden seeds; observations on the habits of climbing plants, and application of the knowledge gained to the care required for these plants. (see pp. - and .) winter birds: identification of winter birds and study of their means of protection and of obtaining food. (see pp. - .) animals of the farm: comparative study of the horse and cow, of the dog and cat, and of the duck and hen. (see pp. - .) animals of the park and zoological garden: observations on the general structural features, noting the natural adaptations of such animals as bear, lion, deer, tiger, etc. (see p. .) trees: winter study of trees, noting buds, branches, and foliage of spruce, cedar, horse-chestnut, etc. (see pp. - .) spring birds and insects: observations on the structure, adaptations and development of insect larvæ kept in an aquarium, as larva of mosquito, dragon-fly, caddice-fly; spring migration of birds. (see pp. - .) animals of the field and woods: observations on the forms, homes, habits, and foods of wild animals, continued. (see pp. - , - .) orchard trees: the buds and blossoms of apple, and cherry or plum, observed through the stages up to fruit formation. (see pp. - .) experiments in the germination of seeds: germination of seeds and general observations on the stages of development; testing the conditions required for seed germination; introductory exercises in soil study as a preparation for seed planting. (see pp. - and - .) wild flowers and weeds: field and class-room study of marsh marigold, jack-in-the-pulpit, violet, etc. (see pp. - .) form iii autumn birds and insects: observations on the habits and the ravages of common noxious insects, as cabbage-worm, grasshopper, tussock-moth, etc.; discussion of means of checking these insects. (see pp. - and - .) farm and wild animals of the locality: field study and class-room lessons on the habits and structure, including adaptive features, of common animals, as musk-rat, fox, fish, sheep. (see pp. and - .) garden and experimental plots: harvesting of garden and field crops; preparation of cuttings from geraniums, begonia, currant, etc.; identification of garden plants; seed dispersal. (see pp. , - , and - .) study of common flowers, trees, and fruits: characteristics of annuals, biennials, and perennials; life histories of common plants, as sweet-pea, indian corn, etc. (see pp. - and - .) study of weeds and their eradication: identification of the common noxious weeds of the locality; collection, description, and identification of weed seeds; cause of the prevalence of the weeds studied, and means of checking them. (see pp. - and - .) winter farm and wild animals of the locality: habits and instincts of common domestic animals, as fowls, sheep, and hogs; the economic values of these animals. (see pp. - .) garden work and experimental plots: the characteristics of common house plants, and care of these plants. (see pp. - .) study of common flowers, trees, and fruits: comparative study of common evergreens, as balsam, spruce, hemlock, etc.; collection of wood specimens. (see pp. - .) observations of natural phenomena: simple experiments to show the nature of solids, liquids, and gases. (see pp. - .) heat phenomena: source of heat, changes of volume in solids, liquids, and gases, accompanying changes in temperature; heat transmission; the thermometer and its uses. (see pp. - .) spring birds and insects: field and class lessons on the habits, movements, and foods of common birds, as crow, woodpecker, king-bird, phoebe, blackbird, etc. (see pp. - .) garden work and experimental plots: care of garden plots; transplanting; testing best varieties; making of, and caring for, window boxes; propagation of plants by budding, cuttings, and layering. (see pp. - and - .) common wild flowers: field lessons on the habitat of common wild flowers; class-room study of the plant organs including floral organs; study of weeds and weed seeds continued, also the study of garden and field annuals, biennials, and perennials. (see autumn.) (see pp. - and - .) soil studies and experiments: the components of soils, their origin, properties, and especially their water absorbing and retaining properties; the relation of soils to plant growth; experiments demonstrating the benefits of mulching and of drainage. (see pp. - .) form iv autumn injurious and beneficial insects and birds: identification of common insects and observations on their habits; means of combating such insects, as codling moth, etc.; bird identification, and study of typical members of some common families, as woodpeckers, flycatchers; spiders. (see pp. - and - .) ornamental and experimental garden plots: observations and conclusions based upon experimental plots; common shrubs, vines, and trees, and how to grow them. (see pp. - and .) functions of plant organs: simple experiments illustrating roots as organs of absorption, stems as organs of transmission, and leaves as organs of respiration, transpiration, and food building. (see pp. - .) economic study of plants: comparative study of varieties of winter apples, of fall apples, or of other fruits of the locality; visits to orchards; weed studies continued. (see form iii.) (see pp. - and - .) relation of soil and soil tillage to farm crops: soil-forming agents, as running water, ice, frost, heat, wind, plants, and animals, and inferences as to methods of tillage. (see pp. - .) winter air and liquid pressure: simple illustrations of the buoyancy of liquids and of air; simple tests to demonstrate that air fills space and exerts pressure; the application of air pressure in the barometer, the common pump, the bicycle tire, etc. (see pp. - .) oxygen and carbon dioxide: generate each of these gases and test for properties, as colour, odour, combustion, action with lime-water; the place occupied by these gases in nature. (see pp. - .) practical application of heat, steam, and electricity: making a simple voltaic cell, an electro-magnet, and a simple electroscope. test the current by means of the two latter and also with an electric bell. explain the application of the above in the electric telegraph and motor. simple demonstration of pressure of steam; history and uses of the steam-engine. (see pp. - .) spring injurious and beneficial insects and birds: identification of noxious insects and observations thereon; study of representatives of common families of birds, as thrushes, warblers, sparrows; economic values of birds. (see pp. - and - .) aquatic animals: observation exercises upon the habits, movements, and structures, including adaptive features of aquatic animals, as crayfish, mussel, tadpole, etc. (see pp. - .) ornamental and experimental garden plots: experimental plots demonstrating the benefits of seed selection; ornamental plots of flowering perennials and bulbous plants; how to improve the school grounds and the home lawns. (see pp. - and - .) tree studies: comparison of the values of the common varieties of shade trees, how to plant and how to take care of shade trees. (see pp. - .) the functions of plant organs: examination of the organs of common flowers; use of root, flower organs, fruit, and seed. (see pp. - .) economic study of plants: plants of the lawn and garden; weed studies. (see pp. - , - , and - .) relation of soil and soil tillage to farm crops: study of subsoils; capillarity in soils; benefits of crop rotations and mulching; experiments in fertilizing, mulching, depth of planting, and closeness of planting. (see pp. - .) nature study chapter i the aims of nature study nature study means primarily the study of natural things and preferably of living things. like all other subjects, it must justify its position on the school curriculum by proving its power to equip the pupil for the responsibilities of citizenship. that citizen is best prepared for life who lives in most sympathetic and intelligent relation to his environment, and it is the primary aim of nature study to maintain the bond of interest which unites the child's life to the objects and phenomena which surround him. to this end it is necessary to adapt the teaching, in matter and method, to the conditions of the child's life, that he may learn to understand the secrets of nature and be the better able to control and utilize the forces of his natural environment. at all times, the teacher must keep in mind the fact that it is not the quantity of matter taught but the interest aroused and the spirit of investigation fostered, together with carefulness and thoroughness, which are the important ends to be sought. with a mind trained to experiment and stimulated by a glimpse into nature's secrets, the worker finds in his labour a scientific interest that lifts it above drudgery, while, from a fuller understanding of the forces which he must combat or with which he must co-operate, he reaps better rewards for his labours. the claims of nature study to an educative value are based not upon a desire to displace conventional education, but to supplement it, and to lay a foundation for subsequent reading. constant exercise of the senses strengthens these sources of information and develops alertness, and at the same time the child is kept on familiar ground--the world of realities. it is for these reasons that nature study is frequently defined as "the natural method of study". independent observation and inference should be encouraged to the fullest degree, for one of the most important, though one of the rarer accomplishments of the modern intellect, is to think independently and to avoid the easier mode of accepting the opinions of others. reading from nature books, the study of pictures, and other such matter, is not nature study. these may supplement nature study, but must not displace the actual vitalizing contact between the child and natural objects and forces. it is this contact which is at the basis of clear, definite knowledge; and clearness of thought and a feeling of at-homeness with the subject is conducive to clearness and freedom of expression. the nature study lesson should therefore be used as a basis for language lessons. undoubtedly one of the most important educative values that can be claimed for nature study is its influence in training the pupil to appreciate natural objects and phenomena. this implies the widening and enriching of human interests through nurturing the innate tendency of the child to love the fields and woods and birds; the checking of the selfish and destructive impulses by leading him to see the usefulness of each creature, the harmony of its relation to its environment, and the significance of its every part. nor is it a mistake to cultivate the more sentimental love of nature which belongs to the artist and the poet. john ruskin emphasizes this value in these words: "all other efforts are futile unless you have taught the children to love trees and birds and flowers". general methods in nature study concrete material it is evident that concrete material must be provided and so distributed that each member of the class will have a direct opportunity to exercise his senses, and, from his observations, to deduce inferences and form judgments. the objects chosen should be mainly from the common things of the locality. the teacher should be guided in the selection by the interests of the pupils, first finding out from them the things upon which they are expending their wonder and inquiry. trees, field crops, flowers, birds, animals of the parks, woods, or farmyard, all form suitable subjects for study. topics and material must suit the season the material should be selected not only with reference to locality but also with due regard to season. for example, better nature study lessons can be taught on the elm tree of the school grounds than on the giant douglas fir of british columbia; and on the oriole whose nest is in the elm tree than on the eagle portrayed in roberts' animal stories; and it is manifestly unwise to teach lessons on snow in summer, or on flowers and ants in winter. matter must be suited to the child for the urban pupil the treatment of the material must be different from that in the case of the pupil of the rural school. rural school pupils have already formed an extensive acquaintance with many plants and animals which are entirely unknown to the children of the city. the simpler facts which are interesting and instructive to the pupils of the urban classes would prove commonplace and trivial to rural pupils. for example, while it is necessary to show the city child a squirrel that he may learn the size, colour, and general appearance of the animal, the efforts of the pupil of the rural school should be directed to the discovery of the less evident facts of squirrel life. use of the commonplace it must be kept in mind that besides leading the pupils to discover new sources of interest, the teacher should strive to accomplish that which is even greater, namely, to lead them to discover new truth and new beauty in old, familiar objects. it may be true that "familiarity breeds contempt" and there is always a danger that the objects with which children have associated in early life may be passed by as uninteresting while they go in search of something "new and interesting". for example, to be able to recognize many plants and to call them by name is no doubt something of an accomplishment, but it should not be the chief aim of the teacher in conducting nature study lessons on plants. it is of much greater importance that the child should be led to love the flowers and to appreciate their beauty and their utility. such appreciation will result in the desire to protect and to produce fine flowers and useful plants, and this end can be reached only through intelligent acquaintanceship. there can be no true appreciation without knowledge, and this the child gets chiefly by personal observation and experiment. with reference to the wild flowers of the woods and fields, the method employed is that of continuous observation. order of development of the lesson each animal or plant should be studied as a living, active organism. the attention of the pupils should be focused upon activities; for these appeal to the child nature and afford the best means for securing interest and attention. what does this animal do? how does it do it? how is it fitted for doing this? how does this plant grow? what fits it for growing in this way? these are questions which should exercise the mind of the child. they are questions natural in the spirit of inquiry in child nature and give vitality to nature teaching. they are an effective means of establishing a bond of sympathy between the child and nature. the child who takes care of a plant or animal because it is his own, does so at first from a purely personal motive, which is perfectly natural to childhood; but while he studies its needs and observes its movements and changes, gradually and unconsciously this interest will be transferred to the plant or animal for its own sake. the nature of the child is thus broadened during the process. problems in observation in studying the material provided, whether it be in the class-room, or during a nature excursion, or by observations made in the farmyard at home, the teacher must guide the efforts of the pupils by assigning to them definite and suitable problems. care must be taken to reach the happy mean of giving specific directions without depriving the pupils of the pleasure of making original discovery. for example, instead of asking them to study the foot of the horse and learn all they can about it, more specific problems should be assigned, such as: observe how the hoof is placed on the ground in walking. what are the arrangements for lessening the shock when the hoof strikes the ground? examine the under surface of the hoof and discover what prevents the unshod horse from slipping. note-books and records in grades higher than form i, written exercises should be required and also sketches representing the objects studied. for this purpose a nature study note-book is necessary--a loose-leaf note-book being preferable because of necessary corrections, rearrangements, additions, or omissions. in all records and reports, independence of thought and of expression should be encouraged. the drawing and the oral or written description should express what is actually observed, not what the book or some member of the class says has been, or should be, observed. the descriptions should be in the pupil's own words, because these are most in keeping with his own ideas on the subject. more correct forms of expression may be obtained when notes are taken from the teacher's dictation, but this is fatal to the development of originality. the disparity of the results in individual work gives opportunity for impressing upon the pupil, in the first place, the necessity for more accurate observation and, secondly, the impossibility of reaching a correct general conclusion without having studied a large number of examples. the development of critical and judicious minds, which may result from carefully observing many examples and generalizing from these observations, is vastly more important than the memorizing of many facts. the school garden in the study of garden plants there is added a certain new interest arising out of experimentation, cultivation, and ownership. the love of the gardener has in it elements that the love of the naturalist does not usually possess--a sort of paternal love and care for the plants produced in his garden; but every gardener should be a naturalist as well. most people have a higher appreciation for that which they own and which they have produced or acquired at some expense or personal sacrifice; therefore it is that the growing of plants in home and school gardens or in pots and window boxes is so strongly advocated throughout this course. ownership always implies responsibility, which is at once the chief safeguard of society and the foundation of citizenship. a careless boy will never respect the property of others so much as when he himself has proprietary interests involved. we believe, therefore, that every teacher should encourage his pupils to cultivate plants and, if possible, to own a plot of ground however small. the teacher should not merely aim at _making_ a garden in the school grounds. the great question is rather how best to use a school garden in connection with the training of boys and girls. to learn to do garden work well is indeed worth while and provides a highly beneficial kind of manual training. to understand something of soils and methods of cultivation, of fertilizers and drainage, the best kinds of flowers, vegetables, fruits, and farm crops, and how to grow them successfully, is very important in such a great agricultural country as this; but the greatest of all results which we may hope to realize in connection with school gardening is the ennobling of life and character. the pupils are taught to observe the growing plants with great care, noting developments day by day. this adds to their appreciation of the beauties and adaptations found among plants on every side, and cannot fail to produce good results in moral as well as in mental development. the teachers must always remember that the gardeners with whom they are working are more important than the gardens which they cultivate. the best garden is not always the largest and most elaborate one. it is rather the garden that both teacher and pupils have been most deeply interested in. it is the garden in which they have experienced most pleasure and profit that makes them want to have another better than the last. no school is too small to have a garden of some kind, and no garden is too small to become the joy and pride of some boy or girl. suggestions for the benefit of teachers beginning their duties on the first of september, in school sections where school gardening has never been carried on, the following suggestions are offered: . see if the grounds will permit of a part being used for a garden. to ascertain this, note the size of the present grounds and see if they meet the requirements of the department as laid down in the regulations. if they do not, consult your inspector at once and acquaint him with your plans. if the grounds are to be enlarged, try to take in sufficient land of good quality to make a good garden. the part chosen for the garden should be both convenient and safe. examine the soil to see if it is well drained and sufficiently deep to permit of good cultivation. lack of fertility can be overcome by good fertilizing. . see that the fences and gates are in good repair. when circumstances will permit, a woven wire fence that will exclude dogs, pigs, and poultry is most desirable. if not used to inclose the whole grounds, it should at least inclose the part used for gardening. . begin modestly and provide room for extension as the work progresses. sow clover on the part to be held in reserve for future gardening operations. . if local public sentiment is not strongly in favour of school gardening, or is somewhat adverse, begin on a small scale. if the work is well done, you will soon have both moral and financial support. . see that the land is well drained. plough it early in the autumn and, if a load of well-rotted manure is available, spread it on the land before ploughing. commercial fertilizer may also be used on the plots the following spring, but no stable manure. . in spring, when dry enough, cultivate thoroughly with disc and drag harrows. build up a compost heap in the rear of the garden with sods and stable manure, for use in the autumn and also the following spring. garden expenses in connection with those schools where the teacher holds a diploma from the ontario agricultural college in elementary agriculture and horticulture, there is no difficulty in meeting the expenses for seeds, tools, fertilizers, and labour, as the government grant for such purposes is sufficient. in other schools, however, where the teacher holds no such diploma (and such is the case in most of the schools as yet), other means of meeting the expenses must be resorted to. the following are offered as suggestions along this line: . part of the grant made to every school for the maintaining of the school grounds should be available for school garden expenses. . an occasional school entertainment may add funds that could not be used to better advantage. . an occasional load of stable manure supplied free from neighbouring farms will help to solve the fertilizer problem. . donations of plants and seeds by the parents and other interested persons and societies will be forthcoming, if the teacher is in earnest and his pupils interested. . if it is required, the trustees could make a small grant each year toward the cost of tools. . fencing and cultivation of the garden can often be provided for by volunteer assistance from the men of the school section. . it is often possible to grow a garden crop on a fairly large scale, the school being formed into a company for this purpose and the proceeds to be used to meet garden expenses. . the pupils can readily bring the necessary tools from home for the first season's work. . many agricultural and horticultural societies offer very substantial cash prizes for school garden exhibits, and all funds so obtained should be used to improve the garden from which the exhibits were taken. . an earnest, resourceful teacher will find a way of meeting the necessary expenses. the excursion nature study is essentially an outdoor subject. while it is true that a considerable amount of valuable work may be done in the class-room by the aid of aquaria, insectaria, and window boxes, yet the great book of nature lies outside the school-house walls. the teacher must lead or direct his pupils to that book and help them to read with reverent spirit what is written there by its great author. ~value.~--the school excursion is valuable chiefly because it brings the pupil into close contact with the objects that he is studying, permits him to get his knowledge at first hand, and gives him an opportunity of studying these objects in their natural environment. incidentally the excursion yields outdoor exercise under the very best conditions--no slight advantage for city children especially; and it gives the teacher a good opportunity to study the pupils from a new standpoint. it also provides a means of gathering nature study material. ~difficulties.~--where is the time to be found? how can a large class of children be managed in the woods or fields? if only one class be taken, how, in an ungraded school, are the rest of the children to be employed? will the excursion not degenerate into a mere outing? what if the woods are miles away? these are all real problems, and the nature study teacher, desirous of doing his work well, will have to face some of them at least. short excursions the excursion need not occupy much time. it should be well planned beforehand. _one_ object only should be kept in view and announced to the class before starting. matters foreign or subordinate to this should be neglected for the time. the following are suggested as objects for excursions: ~objects.~--a bird's nest in an adjacent meadow; a ground-hog's hole; a musk-rat's home; crayfish or clams in the stream near by; a pine (or other) tree; a toad's day-resort; the soil of a field; the pests of a neighbouring orchard; a stone-heap or quarry; ants' nests or earthworms' holes; the weeds of the school yard; buds; the vegetable or animal life of a pond; sounds of spring; tracks in the snow; a spider's web. such excursions may be accomplished at the expenditure of very little time. many of them will take the pupils no farther than the boundaries of the school yard. of course the locality will influence the character of the excursion, as it will that of the whole of the work done in nature study, but in any place the thoughtful teacher may find material for open-air work at his very door. much outside work can be done without interfering with the regular programme. the teacher may arrange a systematic list of questions and problems for the pupils to solve from their own observations, and these observations may be made by the pupils at play hours, or while coming or going from school, or on saturdays. the following will serve as an example of the treatment that may be followed: ~pests of apple trees.~--look on the twigs of your apple trees for little scales. bring an infected branch to school. note whether unhealthy-looking or dead branches are infected. examine scales with a lens. loosen one, turn it over, and examine with a lens the under side. for eggs, look closely at the twigs in june. do you see white specks moving? if so examine them with a lens. are there any small, prematurely ripe apples on the ground in the orchard? cut into one of these and look for a "worm". look for apples with worm holes in the side. are there worms in these apples? what is in them? note the dirty marks that the larva has left. keep several apples in a close box and watch for the "worms" to come out. examine the bark of apple trees for pupæ in the fall. frequency of excursions as to the frequency of excursions, the teacher will be the best judge. it is desirable that they occur naturally in the course of the nature study work as the need for them arises. one short trip each week with a single object in view is much more satisfactory than a whole afternoon each term spent in aimless wandering about the woods. excursions to a distance long-distance excursions will of necessity be infrequent. if the woods are far away, one such trip in may or june would prove valuable to enable the pupils to become acquainted with wild flowers, and another in october to gather tree seeds, autumn leaves, pupæ, and other material for winter study. when a large class is to be taken on an excursion, preparations must be made with special care. the teacher and one or two assistants should go over the ground beforehand and arrange for the work to be done. some work must be given to every pupil, and prompt obedience to every command and signal must be required. the class, for example, may decide to search a small wood or meadow to find out what flowers are there. the pupils should be dispersed throughout the field to hunt for specimens and to meet at a known signal to compare notes. suggestions for ungraded schools . the teacher may take all the classes, choosing an object of study from which he can teach lessons suitable to all ages, a bird's nest, for example. . in many sections, the little ones are dismissed at . p.m. opportunity is thus given for an excursion with the seniors. . the older pupils may be assigned work and left in charge of a monitor, elected by themselves, who shall be responsible for their conduct, while the teacher is working outside with the lower forms. . boys who are naturally interested in outdoor work should be encouraged to show the others anything of interest they may have found. . an occasional saturday excursion may be arranged. ~discipline.~--the teacher should insist on making the excursion a serious part of the school work, not merely recreation. school-room behaviour cannot be expected, but the boisterous conduct of the playground should give place to earnest expectancy. the pupils should keep within sound of the teacher's voice (a sharp whistle may be used) and should promptly respond to every call. topics of conversations should as far as possible be restricted to those pertaining to the object of the excursion or related matters. in visiting woods, children should be trained to study flowers in their environment and leave them there, plucking or digging for none except for some excellent reason. the same respect should be shown to birds and their nests, and to insects, and all other living things encountered. the teacher's excursions as soon as possible after coming to a section, the teacher should acquaint himself with the woods, groves, streams, or other haunts that may provide him with material for his indoor or outdoor work. he can then direct the pupils effectively. the teacher should go over the route of an excursion shortly before it takes place. this prevents waste of time in looking for the objects that he wishes his pupils to see. if the teacher wishes to increase his love for nature, he must take many walks without his pupils. the school garden offers a partial solution of the difficulties mentioned above. it brings a large amount of material to the doors of the school. plants of the farm or the garden may be studied under various changeable conditions, and it will be seen that insect pests, weeds, and fungous diseases follow the lessons on plants, while lessons on birds and toads follow those on insects. with sections of the garden devoted to the cultivation of wild flowers, ferns, and forest trees, the specially organized excursion will become less of a necessity, although it will still continue to be a valuable factor in nature study work. after an excursion is over, it should be discussed in class. the various facts learned should be reviewed and related. if any pupils have made inaccurate observations, they should be required to observe again to correct their errors. finally, the excursion may form the subject of a composition. a type excursion ~a bird's nest.~--the children have been instructed to study the meadow-lark, beginning about march twenty-first. while engaged in this work, a nest is discovered near the school. the teacher is informed and the pupils are conducted to the spot. what is growing in the field? is there a long or a short growth? did the mother bird make much noise as she rose from the nest? did this help to reveal its presence? is the nest easy to see? the class will halt a few paces from it and try to find it. how many eggs? their colour? note the arch of grass so beautifully concealing the nest. returning to school, the facts observed are reviewed. the pupils may then express themselves by written composition or by drawings, paintings, or modellings of the nest, the eggs, or the surroundings. frequent visits to the nest should not be made, and the pupils should be warned not to disturb the bird, as she may desert the nest on slight provocation. a second excursion may be made, when the eggs are hatched, to see the young birds. ~a wasp's nest.~--a nest having been discovered, the pupils note how it is suspended and how it is situated with regard to concealment or to protection from rain, its colour, the material of the nest, and the position of the entrance. is the opening ever deserted? how many wasps enter and how many leave the nest in a minute? try to follow one and watch what he does. wasps may be found biting wood from an old board fence. this they chew into pulp, and from this pulp their paper is made. get the children to verify this by observations. if the nest is likely to become a nuisance, smoke out the wasps, take the nest carefully down, and use it for indoor study, examining the inside of the nest to ascertain the nature and the structure of the comb which, in this case is entirely devoted to larvæ. collections general school collections of such objects as noxious weeds, weed seeds, wild flowers, noxious insects, leaves of forest trees, rocks or stones of the locality, etc., should be undertaken. all the pupils should contribute as many specimens as possible to each collection and should assist in the work of preparing them. in addition to the above collections it is advisable that pupils who show special interest in this phase of nature work should be encouraged to make individual collections. collections, when properly prepared, have a value within themselves, because of the beauty and variety of the forms that they contain, and also because of their usefulness in illustrating nature lessons and in the identifying of insects, weeds, etc. nevertheless the chief value of the collection rests in the making of it, because of the training that it gives the collector in carefulness and thoroughness, and also because it causes the child to study natural objects in their natural surroundings. animal studies domestic animals the teacher, before attempting to teach lessons on domestic animals, should carefully consider how his lessons will best fulfil the following important aims: . the cultivation of a deeper sympathy for, and a more complete understanding of, farm animals. . the development of more kindly treatment of domestic animals through awakened sympathy and more intelligent understanding. . implanting the idea that the best varieties are the most interesting and profitable. the following domestic animals are suggested as being suitable for study: horse, cow, sheep, dog, cat, goose, duck, hen. there are two practical methods of observation work; namely, home observation and class-room observation. the observation work on some of the animals named must of necessity be done out of school. in this the teacher can direct the efforts of the pupils by assigning to them definite problems to be solved by their study of the animals. the results of their observations can be discussed in the class in lessons of ten or fifteen minutes length. it may frequently be necessary to re-assign the problems in order that the pupils may correct their observations. it is possible for the teacher or the pupils to bring to the school-room certain of the animals, as the dog, cat, duck, hen, and the observations may then be made by the whole class directly under the guidance of the teacher. references crawford: _guide to nature study._ copp clark co., cents. dearness: _how to teach the nature study course._ copp clark co., cents. shaler: _domesticated animals._ scribners, $ . . smith: _the uses and abuses of domestic animals._ jarrold & sons, cents. birds the chief aims in developing lessons on birds are: . to teach the children to recognize their bird neighbours, to love them for their beauty, and sweet songs, and their sprightly ways. . to train the pupils to appreciate them for their usefulness in destroying insect pests. many persons spend their lives surrounded by singing birds, yet they never hear their songs. many children see and hear the birds, but if they have not been brought into sympathetic relation with them, they never learn to appreciate them; on the contrary, their attitude becomes one of indifference or of destructiveness. too often, boys cruelly destroy the nests and young and persecute the old birds with stone and catapult. the cowardice of such acts should be condemned, but more effective lessons may be taught through leading the children to find in the birds assistants and companions that contribute to their material progress and to their joy in life. with these aims in view, the teacher will readily perceive that the most effective work in bird study results from observing the living birds in their natural environment. field excursions are valuable for this, but good results can seldom be attained when the class is large, for birds are shy and will hide or fly away from the unusual excitement. quietness is absolutely necessary for success. better results are obtained when only one or two accompany the teacher. if the teacher selects a few who are interested in birds, and there are always some pupils in every school who are readily interested in bird study, these few can soon be made sufficiently acquainted with the more common birds, so that they will be able to point them out to the other pupils of the school, and thus they become the teacher's assistants in the work. by beginning with the most common and conspicuous birds, an acquaintance grows rapidly. early spring is a good time to begin, when the first birds return from their winter sojourn. the teacher and pupils may now learn to recognize the birds, because there are only a few, and these are easily seen, as the robin, blue-bird, junco, meadow-lark, goldfinch, bronzed grackle, sapsucker, blue jay, downy woodpecker, and flicker. the teacher, assisted by the pupils who already know these birds, directs the younger pupils to where these birds may be seen, and they are also required to describe the birds observed and to identify them by means of the bird chart or colour key. the description should include: size (compare with some common bird); shape; colour of head, back, and breast; conspicuous markings, as crest, stripes, bright patches of feathers; movements in flight or on the ground; song, call notes; whether in flocks, or pairs, or single birds. later in spring, other birds will attract attention, as the song-sparrow, phoebe, wren, horned lark, cowbird, and red-winged blackbird; while in summer the oriole, catbird, vesper sparrow, american redstart, night hawk, scarlet tanager, and crested flycatcher are some of the birds that will call for attention, because of their plumage, songs, or peculiar habits. when a nest has been found by a pupil, he should report it to the teacher, and the other pupils should be permitted to visit it only upon promising not to molest the nest or to annoy the mother bird by remaining too long near it. while it is well that the pupils should see the nest with the young birds, they should be taught to respect the desire of the bird for quietness and seclusion. in studying the nest, observe: concealment, protection, size, comfort, number and colour of eggs, young birds, size, colour, covering, food. the pupils should be asked to observe the feeding of birds thus: watch the wrens returning to the nest; what do they carry to their young? where do the wrens get the snails and grubs? observe how the robins find the worms and how they pull them out of the ground. follow the downy woodpecker to the apple tree and find out what he was pecking. watch the crow in the pasture field and learn whether this bird kills grasshoppers and crickets. observe the birds that pick seeds out of the weeds. collecting birds' eggs should be condemned, because it nearly always leads to the robbing of the nests. the practice of exchanging eggs is the chief cause of this; for although an occasional boy will collect wisely, the greater number are simply anxious to add to their collection without regard for the sacredness of the birds' homes. a collection of birds' nests may be made after the nests have been abandoned for the season, and it will be found useful for interesting the pupils in the ingenuity, neatness, and instinctive foresight of the builders. references chapman and reed: _colour key to north american birds_ $ . reed: _bird guide, pts. i and ii_ . silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_ . cornish: _thirty lessons in nature study on birds._ dominion book company . _canadian birds in relation to agriculture._ this chart has pictures in colours of eighty-eight canadian birds. g. m. hendry co., $ . . _the audubon charts._ these three charts have pictures of fifty-five birds; the pictures are larger in the latter charts than in the first named. g. m. hendry co., $ . each. _coloured bird pictures_, mumford, chicago, (separate coloured pictures) are very suitable for illustrating nature lessons on birds. insects there are three classes of insects that are of immediate interest to the pupils of the junior grades, and the teacher who makes direct use of this natural interest has taken possession of the key to success in insect study in the primary classes. the three classes, basing the classification upon their power to attract attention, are: the beautiful insects, including moths, butterflies, and beetles, the wonderful insects, including such insects as ants, ant-lions, caddice-flies, etc., the economic insects, including bees, silk-worms, codling-moths, etc. economic insects are interesting because of their relations to the occupations of the home. the successful growing of farm, orchard, and garden crops practically depends upon keeping a proper balance of insect and bird life. the teacher who feels that his knowledge of insects is too limited to allow him to undertake the teaching of this branch of nature study should cast his misgivings aside; for it is not difficult for the teacher who knows nothing about insects at the outset to become acquainted with such members of the three classes named above as attract the attention of the pupils of the nature study classes. the following suggestions in insect study are offered as guides to teacher or pupil: obtain books and pamphlets from the department of agriculture, toronto, on the subject of insect pests on farm crops and fruit trees. secure a good general book on insects. _modern nature study_, by silcox and stevenson, contains illustrations of several of the most common moths and butterflies, which are clear enough to make possible the identification of the forms represented. comstock's _manual for the study of insects_ is the best general book on the subject. this, and holland's _the moth book_ and _the butterfly book_, are valuable for those who wish to follow the study of insects at any length. begin by studying the more conspicuous moths, butterflies, and beetles, and especially by studying the injurious forms which thrust themselves into prominence by causing destruction of grain, vegetable, or fruit crops in the locality. the utility phase of lessons on these insects will appeal to the older children and also to their parents. moreover, these are the easiest insects to identify and upon which to obtain literature dealing with their life histories and habits. carefully observe the colour, size, and shape of the insect, and note the plant on which it is feeding and its manner of feeding. consult available books on plant pests to find descriptions of the insects that feed upon this plant, and study carefully what is said about the insect observed. if this method is persistently followed, the teacher will be surprised at the rapidity with which his acquaintance with insects broadens. pictures of moths, butterflies, and beetles are of great assistance in the identification of these insects. a school collection, made from the insects studied, is useful for future collection and for identification of insects. do not allow any insect to be killed unless it is a good specimen intended to fill a place in the collection, or unless it is known to be an injurious insect. the teacher, by exercising proper control of the collecting, has an efficient means of teaching the sacredness of life. the fact should be emphasized that killing even an insect, when there is no good reason for doing so, is the act of a mean and selfish coward. in addition to a collection of insects, including larval and pupal forms, collections of insect nests, of plant galls, of markings of engraver beetles, of burrows of tree borers, and of samples of the destructive workings of insect pests should be made. while nothing is more beautiful than a carefully prepared collection of moths, butterflies, and beetles with their infinite variety of form and colour, nothing is more disgusting than a badly preserved collection of distorted, shrivelled, vermin-infested specimens. the teacher should avail himself of the collecting instinct which is prominent in boys of nine to fourteen years of age and of their desire to have things done well, to develop in them habits of carefulness, neatness, and thoroughness. insect collections see manual on _manual training_, for details for making collecting appliances. agricultural bulletin no. , _nature collections for schools_, department of education, ontario, for detailed instructions on making insect collections. the outfit for collecting is neither expensive nor hard to prepare. it consists of ( ) an insect net for catching the insects, made by sewing a bag of cheese-cloth to a stout ring one foot in diameter, which is fastened to a broom handle; ( ) a cyanide bottle for killing the insects, prepared by pouring some soft plaster-paris over a few lumps of potassium cyanide (three pieces, each of the size of a pea) in a wide-mouthed bottle. when the plaster has set, keep the bottle tightly corked to retain the poisonous gases. ( ) pins to mount the specimens. entomological pins, nos. , , and , are the best for general use. beetles are usually pinned through the right wing-cover at about one fourth of its length from the front end of it. moths and butterflies are pinned through the thorax. small insects may be fastened to a very small pin, which in turn is set into a bit of cork, supported by a pin of ordinary size. ( ) spreading board for moths and butterflies. ( ) insect boxes to hold the specimens. this should be secured before the collection is begun. it is a common mistake to believe that any box whatever will do for storing insects. it is necessary to encourage effort in drying, spreading, pinning, and labelling, by providing an effective means of permanently preserving the specimens. in cigar-boxes, pasteboard boxes, and such makeshifts, the specimens soon become broken, covered with dust, and marred in other ways, and the collectors become discouraged; hence it is necessary to secure good boxes from dealers in entomological supplies. a sponge saturated with carbon bisulphide should be placed in the box at intervals of not more than three months, to ensure the killing of parasites that destroy the specimens. entomological supplies may be obtained from chapman & co., london, ont., or from g. m. hendry co., toronto, ont., or from messrs. watters bros., guelph, ont. butterfly and moth collections for a study of the metamorphosis of butterflies and moths, it is necessary to have an insect cage. this can be purchased from any dealer in entomological supplies or it may be made by the pupils in the manual training class. see manual on _manual training_. a very satisfactory cage may be made, by the teacher or larger pupils, from a soap box, by tacking wire gauze over the open surface of the box, removing the nails from one of the boards of the bottom, and converting this board into a door by attaching it in its former position by light hinges and a hook and staple. the box, if now placed on end with two inches of loose soil in the bottom, will constitute a satisfactory insect cage, or vivarium. a large lamp chimney with gauze tied over the upper end is useful for inclosing a small plant upon which eggs or insect larvæ are developing. the base of the chimney may be thrust an inch into the soil and the development of the larva as it feeds upon the growing plant can be studied. the following are larvæ suitable for study and may be found in the places named: the tomato worm on tomato or tobacco plants. (look for stems whose leaves have been stripped off.) the milkweed butterfly larvæ on milkweed, the potato beetle on potato vines, the eastern swallow-tail butterfly on parsnip or carrot plants, the tussock-moth on horse-chestnuts, the promothea moth on lilac bushes, the cabbage-butterfly on cabbage or mustard plants, the red-spotted purple, banded purple, and viceroy butterfly larvæ on willow and alder, cocoons of tussock-moth and tiger-moth under bark, logs, and rubbish in early autumn. larvæ of the emperor-moth (cecropia) may be found wandering about, apparently aimlessly, in september; but they are searching for suitable places for attaching their cocoons to orchard and forest trees. after the leaves have fallen from shrubs and trees, cocoons can be found more easily on the naked twigs or in withered, rolled-up leaves that are fastened by the silk of the cocoon to the branches. larvæ, when placed in the cage, should be supplied with green plant food such as they were found feeding upon, and the pupils should be instructed to observe the chrysalis building or the cocoon weaving. it will be found that some larvæ burrow into the soil. during winter the cage should be kept in a cool place, such as a shed, so that the winter conditions may be as nearly natural as possible. in a few cases, the development within the cocoon is quite rapid; and the adult form hatches out in a few weeks, for example, the cabbage-butterfly, monarch or milkweed butterfly, and tussock-moth. for this reason these are preferable for study by form i pupils. in april the cage should be placed in the school-room, that the pupils may observe the emergence of the insects and the spreading of the wings. the insects can be fed with syrup or honey until they are strong, then the pupils should set them free. reference.--_reports of the entomological society of ontario_, department of agriculture. plant collections the instructions given below for collecting, pressing, and mounting plants are applicable to wild flowers, grains, grasses, and weeds. ~the specimen.~--select a plant which in form and size is typical of its species and which is in full flower. care must be taken to dig down and secure the root. if the plant is too large for the mounting sheet, cut out the central part, and use the root, lower leaves, upper leaves, and flower. if the root is very thick, cut slices lengthwise off the sides so as to reduce it to a flat form that is not too bulky. before the plant has had time to wither, spread it out flat on a sheet of paper and spread another sheet over it, taking care to straighten the leaves and flower out. blotting-paper is preferable, but any soft paper that will absorb moisture will make a very good substitute. ~pressing and drying.~--place several sheets of paper above and below the specimen. any number of specimens prepared as described in the last paragraph may be placed in a pile, one over another, resting on the floor or on a table. place on top of the pile a board which is large enough to cover the surface of the pile, and on the board place a weight of about fifteen pounds of bricks, or other convenient material. a box containing sand, stones, or coal may be used in place of the board and weights. the weight prevents the shrivelling and distortion of the plants. to prevent discoloration and mildewing of the plants, the papers around them must be changed at the end of the following successive intervals: two days, three days, five days, one week, etc., until they are quite dry. the length of time required for pressing and drying depends upon the quantity of sap in the plants and also upon the dryness or humidity of the atmosphere. ~mounting.~--when dry, the specimens are mounted on sheets of heavy white paper. these sheets are cut to a standard size, eleven inches by fourteen inches, or sheets of half this size, namely, seven inches by eleven inches; are permissible. the best method of attaching the plant to the sheet is by pasting narrow strips of gummed paper across the plant in such positions as will serve to hold all parts of it in position. ~labelling.~--the name of the specimen, the date of collection, the place from which collected, and the name of the collector are to be neatly written in a column in the lower right-hand corner of the sheet. printed labels which are pasted on this corner of the sheet are also used. collections of leaves may be prepared by the same process as that given for plants. leaves will retain their autumn tints if their surface is covered with varnish or paraffin, which will prevent the admission of air. to cover with paraffin dip the leaf for a moment into melted paraffin. chapter ii physical science phase of nature study instructions and general method the preceding portions of this manual dealt with living things. there is another phase of nature study which has a more direct relation to the physical sciences, chemistry and physics, two subjects that are essentially experimental in their methods. although the lessons that follow are grouped in one portion of this book, the teacher should understand that he is to introduce them into his work as the occasion demands. they may be used to throw light on other parts of the school work. the experimental method is somewhat advanced for young children, hence no lessons are outlined for forms i and ii. in ungraded schools, forms iii and iv may be combined for the subject. it will be found most convenient to take this portion of the nature study during the winter months. value of such lessons . they are _interesting_, hence there is attention. the senses must be alert, hence pupils are trained to observe accurately. . after the experiment comes the inference, hence reasoning powers are developed. . they enable the teacher to make exceedingly _concrete_ some very difficult abstract principles. . they can be _correlated_ with a large number of other subjects and made to have a beneficial influence on the whole of the school work. . the great advance that is being made in all useful inventions to-day is largely due to the study of the physical sciences. many boys and girls (seventy-five per cent.) never attend the high school. the elementary school owes them a taste at least of these sciences that have such a bearing on their lives, that have surrounded them with so many mechanical contrivances for their comfort and convenience, and that explain so many common natural phenomena. give a boy a taste for experimental science, and there is some chance that after leaving school he will not throw aside his studies to subsist intellectually on the newspaper, but that he will continue to investigate for himself, and make himself a well-informed man, an influential man in his section. the elementary school must aim at fitting the boys and girls for life. . the advent of the experiment marks the downfall of superstition, prejudice, and reliance on authority and tradition. to lead a child to think for himself is a great achievement. . the use of the experiment in gaining knowledge will result in a cautiousness in accepting statements and making decisions. conditions under which experiments should be performed . they should be introduced into the school work naturally, as answers to questions which arise either in the regular course of the work or from suggestions made by the teacher at appropriate times. . as far as possible, the pupils should assist in performing the experiment. in small rural schools the scarcity of apparatus will necessitate the teacher's doing most of the work. in form v classes and continuation schools the pupils may do the experiments individually. . the bearing of an experiment is not always evident; the teacher must be ready with judicious questions to lead the class to the proper conclusions. . the pupils must be acquainted with all the apparatus used. they must know what the teacher is doing and must be near enough to see the result. . a problem may be suggested, and a few days allowed for the pupils to think out a means of solution. if they invent and make their own apparatus, so much the better. . whenever possible, the experiment should be applied to some natural phenomenon or everyday occurrence. correlations of physical science phase geography.--the value of physical science in the elementary school is largely due to the light it throws on geographical data. numerous examples will appear in the succeeding pages. hygiene.--experiments in carbon dioxide, oxygen, air, water, sound, and light, are absolutely necessary, if the children are to grasp with any degree of clearness the principles of respiration and ventilation, and the phenomena of hearing and seeing. manual training.--many pieces of apparatus may be made by the boys in their work with wood or iron. some of the elementary principles of chemistry enable the girls to do their cooking intelligently. a knowledge of some of the principles of machines will help the pupils to understand the tools they may use in any employment. drawing.--careful drawing of the apparatus used helps to fix the experiment in the mind and at the same time gives practice in art. composition.--pupils must have ideas before they can write. the description of the experiment will make a good composition exercise, oral or written. list of reference books and bulletins garden and plant study bulletins of the ontario department of agriculture, toronto. bulletins of the dominion department of agriculture, ottawa. improvement of school grounds. department of education, toronto. atkinson. first studies of plant life. ginn & co. cents. bailey. manual of gardening. macmillan co. $ . . blanchan. nature's garden. doubleday co. $ . . comstock, a. m. handbook of nature study. comstock pub. co. $ . . gray. field, forest, and garden botany. amer. book co. $ . . green, louise. among school gardens. charities pub. co. $ . . hodge. nature study and life. ginn & co. $ . . holtz. nature study. scribners' sons. $ . . jackson and dougherty. agriculture through the laboratory and school garden. judd. $ . . james. agriculture. appleton & co. cents. keeler. our native trees. scribners' sons. $ . . osterhout. experiments with plants. macmillan co. $ . . parsons. how to plan the home grounds. doubleday co. $ . . sergeant. corn plants. houghton, mifflin co. cents. physical science miller. minerals and how they occur. the copp, clark co. $ . . milliken and gale. first course in physics. ginn & co. $ . . newman. laboratory exercises. ginn & co. c. each. remsen. college chemistry. am. pub. co. $ . . simmons and syenhouse. science of common life. the macmillan company, $ . . woodhull. home-made apparatus. high school text-books. animal study bulletin no. . dominion department of agriculture, ottawa. bulletin no. . ontario department of agriculture, toronto. bulletin no. . ontario department of agriculture, toronto. bulletin no. . ontario department of agriculture, toronto. reports of entomological society of ontario. department of education. fishes of ontario. nash. department of education. bailey and coleman. first course in biology. the macmillan company. $ . . buchanan. senior country reader. the macmillan company. cents. chapman. bird life. appleton. $ . . crawford. guide to nature study. the copp, clark co. cents. dearness. how to teach the nature study course. the copp, clark co. cents. jordan and kellogg. animal life. appleton & co. $ . . kellogg. elementary zoology. holt & co. $ . . reed. bird guide--parts i and ii. musson book co., toronto. cents each. shaler. domesticated animals. scribners' sons. $ . . silcox and stevenson. modern nature study. the macmillan company. cents. note.--the bulletins named above are supplied free to schools. chemical and physical apparatus and entomological supplies may be obtained from g. m. hendry co., victoria street, toronto. rocks and minerals may be obtained from the ward natural science establishment, rochester, or from the central scientific co., chicago. physical science forms iii and iv desirable apparatus lb. glass tubing in ft. lengths / in. to / in. outside diameter. florence flasks, oz. to oz. $ . funnel, in. diameter . beaker, oz. . evaporating dish . ft. pure gum rubber tubing / in. inside . / sq. foot thin sheet rubber . doz. test-tubes in. by / in. . / doz. test-tubes in. by / in. . capillary glass tubing, sizes . rubber stoppers no. , one hole " " " , " " " " " , two holes . watch glasses . ball and ring . dry cells . bar magnets . chemical thermometer deg. f. to deg. f. . spirit-lamp . retort, oz. stoppered . wax candles . retort stand of iron, two rings . thistle tube . common corks, assorted . filter paper in. diameter . test-tube holder . test-tube rack . test-tube cleaner . piece glass tubing in. long, / in. inside, for barometer . clamp for closing rubber tube . covered copper wire . small compass . glass model of common pump . globe for weighing air . small piece of platinum foil, / in. by in. . glass prism . tuning fork - / in. . electric bell . motor (ajax) . balance . air-pump . iron wire gauze . sheet metals, iron, copper, zinc, lead, aluminum . lamp chimneys, straight ones preferred, at c . iron ball, in. in diameter . dairy thermometers at c . chemicals sulphuric acid, lb. . hydrochloric acid, oz. . nitric acid, oz. . washing soda . sugar . salt . blue vitriol . alum . saltpetre . sulphur . potass. permanganate . lime . plaster-paris . potass. bichromate . methylated spirits, pt. . alcohol, % . iodine crystals . mercury, lb. . pot. chlorate . manganese dioxide . phosphorus . sweet oil, oz. . benzine, oz. . the following tools will be found very valuable: saw, square, plane, brace and bit, knife, hammer, glass cutter, files--round, flat, and triangular. where the circumstances will not allow of the purchase of the preceding list, the following apparatus is recommended as sufficient for the performance of a large number of the experiments: / lb. glass tubing in ft. lengths, / in. and / in. outside $ . florence flasks, oz. . funnel . ft. pure gum rubber tubing, / in. inside . / doz. test-tubes assorted, / to / diameter, in. long . rubber stoppers, no. , one hole . rubber stopper, no. , one hole . expansion of heat apparatus (made at blacksmith's) . common corks, assorted . chemical thermometer deg. f. to deg. f. . spirit-lamp, oz. . thistle tube . covered wire, copper . chemicals iodine crystals . sulphuric acid, lb. . methylated spirits pt. . alcohol, % . mercury, / lb. . pot. chlorate . manganese dioxide . the following may be obtained, for either list, at little or no cost from household stores or home-made sources: washing soda, sugar, salt, ammonia, coal, coke, saltpetre, sulphur, blue vitriol, alum, potass. bichromate, blueing, lime, pickle-jars, wire gauze, candles, wire, sheet metals, test-tube holder and rack, balance, battery cells, horse-shoe magnet, pneumatic trough, lamp chimneys, tin cans, melting spoon, bicycle pump, baking-powder. for home-made apparatus, consult _laboratory exercises in physics_ by newman, ginn & co., c., and manual on _manual training_. reference has been made in the preceding experiments to the use of simple and easily contrived apparatus. the more of this the pupils can contrive and make under the direction of the teacher, the more valuable will be the course in physical science. grenet cells into a pint gem-jar put water parts, sulphuric acid part, potass, bichromate part. have jar three quarters full. cut a piece of board in. square, bore two holes in it, and through the holes thrust two pieces of electric light carbon, in. or in. long. the outer edges of the carbons should not be more than two inches apart. with a saw, cut a slit in the board between the holes and insert a strip of zinc in. by in. previously rubbed over with mercury. set the three elements in the jar, connect the two carbons to one wire, and the zinc to another. one cell of this kind will run a small motor, operate a telegraph sounder, make a simple electro-magnet, or ring an electric bell; two cells will decompose water: three will heat a piece of fine iron wire red-hot. decomposition apparatus . cut the neck end from a pickle bottle. get a no. stopper, (rubber) with two holes in it and insert a piece of platinum foil in. by / in. into each hole so that / in. projects above and below. insert a tight plug beside each strip, thus holding it fast and making the stopper watertight. insert the stopper into the neck of the jar. pour into the vessel thus formed enough water to cover the platinums, and add a few drops of sulphuric acid. touch the wires from the battery to the lower ends of the strips. note bubbles of gas arise from the platinums. these may be collected in test-tubes and found by test to be oxygen and hydrogen. . fasten a strip of platinum in. by / in. to each wire from the battery and dip these into some acidulated water contained in a tumbler. the decomposition of the water into two gases can be seen, but the gases cannot be collected so readily as in above. bits of electric light carbon will do instead of platinum if the current is not too weak. pneumatic trough when oxygen or other gas is to be collected over water, use a milk pan or similarly shaped vessel. spirit-lamp use an ink-bottle to contain the alcohol and several strands of string for the wick; make a hole in a piece of tin and draw the wick through; then let the tin rest on the neck of the bottle to support the wick. barometer a siphon barometer takes less mercury than a cistern barometer. to the open end of the barometer tube attach a piece of strong rubber tubing in. long and to this a piece of glass tubing in. long. fill the tube thus formed with mercury to within in. from the top. holding the short glass tube open end up, turn the long tube closed end up. (a tube of / in. bore needs only one quarter of the mercury required to fill a tube / in. bore.) hygrometer for a hygrometer, suspend two dairy thermometers side by side against the wall, cover the bulb of one with thin muslin, and let the muslin hang down and dip into water in some small vessel placed about three inches below the bulb on a little shelf. hints to avoid explosions, a spirit-lamp should be kept filled. toy rubber balloons answer well for sheet rubber. red ink makes good colouring matter. make touch-paper by soaking any porous paper in a solution of saltpetre, and drying it. instead of bending glass tubes, join them with rubber tubing. to make a test-tube holder, fold a sheet of paper until it is about half an inch wide and wrap this around the tube. to bend glass tubing, hold in the flame of the spirit-lamp and rotate between the fingers till it becomes soft and flexible, remove from the flame, and bend. to break glass tubing, first scratch with a file. to break glass bottles, make neatly a deep cut with a file, then touch the glass near the cut with a red-hot wire. when a crack appears, move the hot wire and the crack will follow. several heatings may be necessary. in the case of a heavy glass bottle, file the cut as before, wrap the bottle with string dipped in alcohol, light it, and after it has burned, plunge the bottle vertically into cold water. melted paraffin is good for closing small leaks. time apportioned to nature study the nature study lesson should be given a definite place on the time-table. it is recommended that each class should have at least one lesson of fifteen minutes in length, a week. in addition to this, about five minutes a week should be spent in assigning problems for out-of-door work and in discussing the observations which the pupils have made on problems previously assigned. chapter iii form i autumn garden work on the re-opening of school after the summer holidays, the pupils should see that their plots are put into good order without delay. if they have been neglected during the holidays, a good deal of attention will be needed, and in some cases it may not be possible to reclaim them because of prolonged neglect. if such plots are found, they should be cleaned off completely, spaded up, and left in readiness for planting the following spring. all plots should be cultivated throughout the month of september to keep the soil mellow and prevent the growth of weeds. the pupils should be allowed to pick flowers from their own plots, but should always leave a few in bloom for the sake of the general appearance of the garden. paths should be kept clean, and all rubbish, weeds, dead plants, etc., removed to the compost heap, which should be in the least conspicuous part of the garden. hoes, rakes, and claw-hand weeders should be used in cleaning up and cultivating the plots. the soil should be kept fine and loose on top to prevent drying out. lessons on a garden plant pansy lesson i ~materials.~--a flower for each pupil a plant set into a flower-pot a leaf for each pupil a pile of leaves containing a few pansy leaves and several of other kinds. ~introduction.~--a conversation with the pupils about their favourite flowers. ~observations.~--the pansy flowers are now distributed and the general form of the flower is first noted. the resemblance to the face of an animal will be discovered. the name _corolla_ is given, but no other botanical terms are to be introduced in this lesson. the details of colours, perfumes, velvety feeling of the corolla, and the number of leaflets in it are next _discovered_ and described by the _pupils_. lastly, in a withering flower they discover the seed cases and the little seeds. lesson ii the conception of the relationship between the flower, root, and stem is developed by a method similar to the following: what soon happens to a pansy flower after it is broken from the plant? are the flowers that you have in your hands withering? how can you keep them from withering? hence, what must the flower get from the stem? where does the stem get the moisture? hence, what is one use of the root? a pupil is asked to pull the plant out of the soil in the flower-pot. what is another use that you have discovered for the root? the plant is now uprooted from the soil, and the pupils examine the root to find how it is fitted for gathering water and food from the soil and for holding the plant in place. note the number of branches touching a great deal of soil and also the twisted form of the roots for grasping the soil. the form of the leaves is studied by the pupils, and, as a test of the accuracy of their observation, they are asked to pick out the pansy leaves from the pile of leaves. _to the teacher._--the pupils must be active participants in the lesson. they must use their eyes, hands, and even their noses in gaining first-hand impressions, and they are to be required to express in their own way the things that they discover. the beautiful flower with its face like that of an animal is an appeal to the child's imagination, and the child's interest in the _use_ of things is utilized in the study of the relations of root, stem, and flower. this lesson may be used as the basis for busy work by means of the following correlations: . with art: represent the flower in colours. . with reading and literature: the pupils are required to express the meaning and sentiment of the following stanza: the pansy wakes in early spring to make our world more bright; all summer long its happy face fills children with delight, lessons similar to those on the pansy may be based upon the following plants of the garden or field: dandelion, aster, buttercup, nasturtium, goldenrod. the teacher in preparing the lesson should read a description of the plant from a nature study book and should also study the plant itself until he is familiar with all the phases of its life. observation exercises on the dandelion the exercises given below are suggestive for out of school observation work, but must not be too long. by way of preparation for an exercise of this kind, the interest of the pupils in the dandelion must first be aroused. first exercise the teacher places the pupils at the school windows from which dandelions are visible and asks them to name any flower that they can see. a short conversation about the brightness of the flower follows. the pupils are next instructed to: . find dandelions late in the evening, and find out how they prepare to go to sleep and how they are tucked in for the night. . find where the leaves of the dandelion are, and bring a leaf to school next morning, and also observe how the leaves are grouped or placed. _to the teacher._--dandelion flowers close up in the evening; the green leaves beneath the head wrap closely around the flowers to form a snug covering. the leaves have margins with teeth shaped like those of a lion, and from this the plant gets its name, for the name is the french _dent de lion_, which is pronounced very much like the word dandelion. the use of the leaf cluster as a system of rain-spouts for guiding the rain toward the root should be noted. second exercise . why is the dandelion easy to find? . what makes it easy to find even in long grass? . what insect friends visit the dandelion? . find out just how these visitors act during their visits, and find whether they carry anything to or away from the flowers. _to the teacher._--the bright yellow colour of the dandelion attracts attention. when it grows in long grass, the flower stalk grows long, so that the flower surmounts its obstructions and climbs up to the sunshine. the flowers are visited by ants, bees, and wasps, and these may be seen burrowing into the flowers in search of honey. if their bodies and legs be touched, the yellow pollen of the flowers will be found sticking to them. third exercise . look for flower heads that do not open to the sun. do not disturb them, but watch them for a few days and find out what they become. . examine the large white balls of the dandelions and find out what they are. . blow the down away. what does it carry with it? _to the teacher._--in this exercise the pupils will learn that the large white balls are the mature, or ripened, flowers and are composed of little brown seeds, each being a little airship for wafting it away. correlation with literature and reading when the above exercises have been completed, the pupil's knowledge of the dandelion may be utilized in interpreting the following stanzas: oh dandelion! yellow as gold, what do you do all day? i just wait here in the tall green grass till the children come to play. and what do you do when your hair is white and the children come to play? they take me up in their dimpled hands and blow my hair away. in addition to the dandelion, the following plants are suitable for observation exercises: morning-glory, wild balsam, sweet-pea, snap-dragon, nasturtium. dwarf nasturtium ~observations.~--the size of the plant at the time of flowering; its leaves--size, colour, shape, length of petiole and how arranged; colours found in the flower, comparison with others of same species found in the garden; size and shape of the flower and the length of its stems. do the flowers grow higher than the leaves? do they look better when with the leaves or when alone? note the perfume and taste of the flower stem, the insect visitors, and what part of the flower they tried to get at, when the first blossom was seen, and how long the blossoms continued to come out. do they keep well in bouquets? do they stand hot, dry weather as well as other flowers? when did the frost kill them? compare with the climbing nasturtium. find the seeds. seeds the autumn months are the best for seed studies, for almost all annuals are ripening their seeds at this time of year. field exercise assign to the pupils the following exercise: collect the seed pods from as many plants of your garden plots, or home gardens, or wild plants, as possible, and be careful to write the name of each plant on the paper in which you put the seed pod of that plant. notice the part of the plant from which the seed pod is formed. class-room lesson based on this collection the pupils place the seed pods on their desks, and observations and problems are dealt with of which the following are representative: how does each seed case open? what are the seeds for? how many seeds are in each case? why should a plant have so many seeds? how are the seed cases fitted for protecting the seeds? are any two seeds alike in shape? are the seeds easy to find if they are spilled upon the ground? what makes them hard to find? where do nearly all seeds spend the winter? of what use is the hard shell of the seed? seed dispersal study only a few of the more striking examples of seed dispersal with the form i class. seeds that fly and seeds that steal rides are good examples of classes of seeds whose methods of dispersal will prove of interest to children. lesson on seeds that fly ~materials.~--a milkweed pod; a ripe dandelion head. ~introduction.~--a short conversation about the effects of the crowding of plants, as carrots and turnips, in a garden plot, and hence the need for the scattering of seeds. ~observations.~--open a milkweed pod in the presence of the class, so that they may see how the pod opens, how beautifully the seeds are arranged, and how the silk tufts are so closely packed in together. allow a pupil to lift a seed out, blow it in the air, and observe how the silk opens out like an umbrella. distribute seeds, one to each pupil. ask the pupils to find out why this little airship is able to carry the seed. they will find that the seeds though broad, are thin and light, and the silky plumes very light. ask the pupils to release their milkweed seeds at recess, when out of school, and find out how far they can fly. this is an interesting experiment for a windy day. the white balls of the dandelion are next examined, the tiny seeds are found standing on tiptoe on a raised platform, each grasping a tiny parachute and waiting for a puff of wind to start them off. a pupil is permitted to give the puff. seeds are distributed, and the means of flight is compared with that of the milkweed. the shape of the seeds is observed and also the tiny anchor points at the lower end of the seed for clutching the ground when the seed alights. another lesson on seeds that fly can be based on the study of tree seeds, using those of the maple, elm, basswood, pine, and spruce. correlations . drawing of milkweed pods and seeds, and drawing of the dandelion seed-ball and the seeds when floating in the air. . reading and literature. interpret the thought and read expressively: dainty milkweed babies, wrapped in cradles green, rocked by mother nature, fed by hands unseen, brown coats have the darlings, slips of milky white, and wings, but that's a secret, they're folded out of sight. twigs and buds the study of buds is a part of tree study and may be taken as observation work in the class-room. this somewhat detailed study should follow the general lessons on tree study. the materials for the lessons may be collected by the pupils at the time of the field lesson and kept fresh in a jar of water until required for use. lesson on twigs ~materials.~--a twig of horse-chestnut about six inches long, for each pupil. a twig of the same tree with the leaves still on it. ~observations.~--the twigs are distributed and the teacher asks the pupils to examine them and to describe all marks and projections that can be found on the twig. answers are required from the pupils separately. the pupil's answer in each case should be sufficiently clear for all the class to recognize the feature that the answer is intended to describe. a few brief questions will guide the answerer in making his description more definite, but the description should be the result of the pupil's observation and expressed in his own words. the meaning or use of each feature should be discussed, when possible, immediately after it has been described. the following features will be discovered and the problems suggested will be solved: the brown or greenish-brown bark. the buds. one bud (sometimes two) is at the end of the twig. some buds are along the side of the twig. what caused the end bud to grow larger than the others? there is a leaf scar under each bud. of what use is it to the bud to be between the twig and the leaf stalk? the bands of rings, one or more on each twig. the tiny oval pores, each surrounded by a little raised band. the detailed study of the buds is left for a separate lesson. further study of twigs the study in detail of various features is illustrated in the following: look closely at the leaf scars and describe them fully, as to shape, colour, and marks. do the scars look like fresh wounds, or are they healed over? of what use to the tree is the healing of the scar? we will learn later that the part of the twig between each pair of bands of rings represents one year's growth. how old is your twig? who has the oldest twig? do all twigs grow at the same rate? who has the twig that had the most rapid growth? _to the teacher._--the bud at the end of the twig or its branches is called the end bud; there are two leaf scars underneath it. the buds along the sides of the stem are called side buds, the latter are smaller than the end bud. the bud situated between the stem of the leaf and the twig is in a sheltered position. this position also puts the bud close to the pantry door, for the plant food is prepared in the leaf. the leaf scars are yellowish-brown, or if they are the scars from the leaves of former years, are dark brown in colour. each scar is shaped like a horse-shoe and tiny dots are found in the position that the horse-shoe nails would have. even before the leaf falls, a layer of corklike substance has formed over the scar. this layer is a protection against the entrance of frost and rain and germs of fungi and it also prevents the loss of sap from the scar. the tiny oval pores, each as large as the point of a needle, are the breathing pores of the twig. the bands of rings are the scars of the scales of the end buds of successive years. this latter fact can be discovered when the bud is opening. review lesson the review lesson should consist of a review of the points taken up in the lessons that were based on the horse-chestnut twig, supplemented by the examination of the twigs of elm, apple, or lilac. lesson on buds ~materials.~--twigs and buds of horse-chestnut, one for each pupil. an opening bud. (a bud or a twig placed in water in a warm room will develop rapidly.) ~lesson.~--distribute specimens, and review the positions of the buds. pupils examine the buds and tell all they can about them. they describe the colour, shape, and size of the buds, and also their gummy and scalelike covering. of what use are the gum and scales? of what use is the brown colour of the bud? they next find out what is inside the little brown house. they open the buds and try to identify the contents. there will be some uncertainty as to the meaning of the contents. leave this over till spring. _to the teacher._--the brown colour of the bud makes it an absorbent of sunlight, and also serves as a protection from observation by the sharp eyes of bud-eating birds. the gummy scales are waterproof, and the scales, by spreading open gradually, cause the waterproof property to be retained even after the bud has grown quite large. the inner part of the bud is composed of two, four, or six tiny leaves folded up and supported on a short bit of stem. some of the buds have, in addition to leaves, a tiny young flower cluster. all of these things are densely covered with white down. the down is the fur coat to protect the tender parts from the cold. review lesson review the lesson on buds, but substitute buds of the lilac or apple for the horse-chestnut buds of the original lesson. correlations the observational study of the buds and twigs is a good preparation for busy work in art and manual training, and the pupils may be assigned exercises, such as charcoal drawing of a horse-chestnut twig, paper cutting of a lilac twig and buds, clay or plasticine modelling of twigs and buds. for oral and written language exercises, enlarge the vocabulary of the pupils by requiring sentences containing the words--scales, twigs, buds, protection, terminal, lateral, leaf stalk, blade, etc. leaves leaves, because of their abundance and the ease with which they may be obtained, are valuable for nature study work. it is possible to arouse the interest of even young children in the study of leaves, but care must be taken not to make the observation work too minute and the descriptions too technical for the primary classes. field exercises an excursion to the school grounds or to some neighbouring park will suffice to bring the pupils into direct contact with the following plants: a maple tree, a boston ivy (or other climbing vine), a nasturtium, a geranium. ask the pupils to find out where and how leaves are placed on each of these plants, that is, whether they are on the inner parts of the branches of the tree or out at the ends of the branches. do the leaves overlap one another or does each make room for its neighbours? are the leaves spread out flat or curled up? what holds the leaves out straight and flat? what do the leaves need to make them green and healthy? are the leaves placed in the right way, and are they of the right form to get these things? _to the teacher._--the leaves of the plants named are quite noticeably so placed on the plants, have such relations to one another, and are of such outline that they present the greatest possible surface to the _air_ and _sunshine_ and _rain_. the leaf stalk and midrib and veins are stiff and strong to keep the leaves spread out. compare with the ribs of an umbrella. the benefit of sunshine to leaves and plants can be developed by discussing with the pupils the paleness and delicateness of plants that have been kept in a dark place, such as in a dark cellar. they are also acquainted with the refreshing effect of rains upon leaves. the use of air to the leaves is not so easy to develop with pupils of this age, but the use of air for breathing just as boys and girls need air for breathing may be told them. class-room lesson on leaves ~introduction.~--tell me all the things that you know upon which leaves grow. on trees, bushes, flowers, plants, vegetables, etc. are leaves all of the same shape? to-day we are going to learn the names of some of the shapes of leaves. ~observations.~--show the class the heart-shaped leaf of catalpa or lilac, and obtain from the pupils the name _heart-shape_. use the following types: maple leaf as star-shape, grass or wheat or corn as ribbon-shape, nasturtium or water-lily as shield-shape, ash or rowan, as feather-shape. ~drill.~--pupils pick out the shape named. pupils name the plant to which each belongs. which shape do you think is the prettiest? garden studies if the pupils of this form have planted and cared for garden plots of their own, they will have a greater love for the flowers or vegetables that grow in them than for any others in the garden, because they have watched their development throughout. for them such continuous observation cannot but result in a quickening of perception and a deepening of interest and appreciation. studies in the pupil's individual plot what plant is the first to appear above ground? what plant is the last to appear? describe what each plant was like when it first appeared above ground. what plants grow the fastest? what effect has cold weather, warm weather, dry weather, on the growth of the plants? what weeds grow in the plot? why do these weeds obstruct the growth of the other plants? what kind of root has each weed? find out what kind of seeds each weed produces? why is each weed hard to keep out of fields? what garden plants produce flowers? how are the seeds protected? compare the seeds with those that you planted. select the seeds of the largest plants and finest flowers for next year's seeding. studies from the garden as a whole what plants grow tallest? what plants are most suitable for borders? what plants are valuable for their flowers? what plants are valuable for their edible roots, for their edible leaves, for their edible seeds? how are the edible parts stored for winter use? compare the plants that are crowded, with others of the same kind that are not crowded. compare the rate of growth of the plants in a plot that is kept hoed and raked with the rate of growth of plants in a neglected plot. bulb planting the planting of bulbs in pots for winter blooming should be commenced with pupils in form i and continued in the higher forms. as a rule, the potted bulbs will be stored and cared for in the home, as most school-rooms are not heated continuously during the winter. paper-white narcissus and freesia are most suitable and should be planted about the fifteenth of october, so that the plants will be in bloom for christmas. lesson on bulbs and bulb planting ~materials.~--the bulbs to be planted. as many four-inch flower-pots or tomato cans as are required. soil, composed of garden loam, sand, and well-rotted manure in equal proportions. stones for drainage. sticks for labels (smooth pieces of shingle, one and a half inches wide and sharpened at one end, will answer). pictures of the plants in bloom. ~observations.~--the attention of the pupils is directed to the bulbs, and they are asked to describe the size, form, and colour of each kind of bulb. a bulb is cut across to make possible the study of the parts, and the pupils observe the scales or rings which are the bases of the leaves of the plant from which the bulb grew. the use of the fleshy mass of the bulb as a store of food for the plant that will grow from it is discussed. the sprout in the centre of the scales with its yellowish-green tip is observed, and its meaning inferred. the picture is shown to illustrate the possibilities within the bulb. planting the bulb the teacher directs, but the work is done by the pupils, and the reasons for the following operations are developed: what is the use of the one-inch layer of pebbles, or broken brick, or stone, that is placed in the bottom of the pot? why are the bulbs planted near the top of the soil? why is the soil packed firmly around the bulbs? why must the soil be well wetted? why is the pot set in a cool, dark place for a month or more? _to the teacher._--the pebbles or broken bricks are for giving drainage. the bulbs are planted with their tips just showing above the surface of the soil and there is about half an inch of space between the top of the soil and the upper edge of the pot in order to facilitate watering. the potted bulbs must be set in a cool, dark place until they are well rooted. this is subjecting them to their natural winter conditions, and it will cause them to yield larger flowers, a great number of flowers, and flowers that are more lasting. sand in the soil permits of the more free passing of air through the soil. basements and cellars are usually suited for storing bulbs until they have rooted, but they must not be warm enough to promote rapid growth. the pots when stored should be covered with leaves, sawdust, or coarse sand to prevent drying out. the soil must be kept moist, but not wet. paper-white narcissus, if brought out of the dark after three or four weeks, will be in bloom at the end of another month if kept in the window of a warm room. care must be taken not to expose the plants to bright light until they have become green. the bulbs of the white narcissus are to be thrown away after the flowers have withered, as they will not bloom again, but freesia bulbs may be kept and planted again the following year. chapter iv form i winter lessons on a pet animal: the rabbit i the lesson is introduced by a conversation with the pupils about their various pets. since we are to have a rabbit brought to the school we must learn how to take care of it, and the proper method of taking care of it is based upon a knowledge of the habits of the wild rabbit. where do wild rabbits live? what sort of home does a rabbit have? in what ways does this home protect the rabbit? hence, what kind of home must we have ready for the rabbit? what does the rabbit eat? are there any of these foods that are not good for its health? give a list of foods that you can bring for the rabbit. why will the rabbit, when kept in a hutch, require less food than one that runs about? since the rabbit likes a soft bed, what can you bring for its bed? ii ~observations.~--the teacher or a pupil brings a rabbit to the school-room, where, during recreation periods, the pupils make observations on topics suggested by the teacher, such as: its choice of food; its timidity; its movements--hopping, squatting, listening, scratching, and gnawing. these observations are discussed in the class and are corrected or verified. _to the teacher._--wild rabbits live in the woods or in shrubbery at the edges of fields. the home of the rabbit is either a burrow under ground or a sheltered place under a root or log closely concealed among the bushes. this home is dry and affords a shelter from enemies, and from wind, rain, and snow. from this we know that we must provide a dry bed for our rabbit in a strong box in which it will feel secure, and in which it will be protected from wind and rain. the food of the rabbit consists of vegetables and soft young clover and grains. it also gnaws the bark of trees, and in winter it feeds upon buds. we can, therefore, feed our rabbit on carrots, beets, apples, oats, bran, grass, and leaves of plants, and we must provide it with some twigs to gnaw, for gnawing helps to keep its large chisel-shaped teeth in good condition. we must be careful not to give it too much exercise, and we must not give it any cabbage, because this is not good for the rabbit's health. a dish of water must be placed in the hutch, for the rabbit needs water to drink. iii details, if studied in isolation, are uninteresting to form i pupils. detailed study should be based upon the animal's habits, movements, and instincts, and each detail should be studied as an answer to questions such as: how is the animal able to perform these movements? how is the animal fitted for this habit of life, etc.? watch the rabbit moving. how does a rabbit move? which legs are the more useful for hopping? how are the hind legs fitted for making long hops? why is the rabbit able to defend itself by kicking with its hind feet? find out how the rabbit is fitted for burrowing. listen carefully and find out whether the rabbit makes much noise while moving. of what advantage is it to the rabbit to move silently? find out, by examining the feet of the rabbit, what causes it to make very little noise. how are rabbits prepared for living during cold weather? test the ability of the rabbit to hear faint noises. why is it necessary for the rabbit to be able to hear faint sounds? how is it fitted for hearing faint sounds? examine the teeth and find out how they are fitted for gnawing. _to the teacher._--the long, strong, hind legs of the rabbit are bent in the form of levers and enable the animal to take long, quick hops. when the rabbit attacks, it frequently defends itself by vigorous kicks with its hind feet, which are armed with long, strong claws. ernest thompson-seton's story of molly cottontail and "raggylug", in _wild animals i have known_, contains an interesting account of how molly rescued raggy from a snake by this manner of fighting. the rabbit has many enemies, hence it has need of large, movable ears to aid its acute sense of hearing. the thick pads of hair on the soles of its feet enable it to move noiselessly. the thick, soft, inner hair keeps the animal warm, while the longer, stiffer, outer hair sheds the rain. impress upon the pupils the cruelty of rough handling of the rabbit and of neglecting to provide it with a place for exercise and with a clean, dry home. the following pet animals may be studied, using the same order and general method of treatment: pigeon, cat, canary, guinea pig, white mouse, raccoon, squirrel, parrot. in many cases these animals can be brought to school by the pupils. encourage the keeping of pet animals by the pupils, for the best lessons grow out of the actual care of the pets. the study of a pet bird may be conducted along lines similar to the outline given below for the study of the pigeon. correlations with literature and reading: ernest thompson-seton's "raggylug". with art: charcoal drawing representing the rabbit in various attitudes, as squatting, listening, hopping. with modelling in clay or plasticine. with paper cutting. with language: the vocabulary of the pupils is enlarged by the introduction of new words whose meaning is made clear by means of the concrete illustration furnished by direct observation of the rabbit. they use these new words in sentences which they form in describing the rabbit; for example: hutch, gnaw, padded, cleft lip, timid. the rabbit has padded feet so that it can walk without noise. the rabbit has a soft bed in its hutch. the domestic cat the following facts are suggested as topics for a first lesson on the domestic cat. the teacher can rely upon the pupil's knowledge of the cat to furnish these statements of fact during a conversation lesson: the cat goes about at night as readily as during the day. the cat can hear faint noises quite readily. the cat can walk noiselessly. the cat creeps along until it is close to its prey, then pounces upon it, and seizes it with its claws. the cat enjoys attention and purrs if it is stroked gently. the cat likes to sleep in a warm place. the cat can fight viciously with her claws. the cat keeps her fur smooth and clean and her whiskers well brushed with her paws. the cat eats birds, mice, rats, meat, fish, milk, bread, and cake. detailed study base the study of the details upon the facts of habit, movements, instincts, etc., which were developed in the preceding lesson. ~observations.~--find out how the cat's feet are fitted for giving a noiseless tread. find the claws. how are the claws fitted for seizing prey? how are the claws protected from being made dull by striking against objects when the cat is walking? the pigeon a pigeon is kept in a cage in the school-room and the pupils observe: its size as compared with that of other birds; outline of body, including shape of head; the feathers, noting quill feathers, and covering or contour feathers; manner of feeding and drinking; movements, as walking, flying, tumbling. the owner or the teacher describes the dove-cot, the necessity of keeping it clean, the use of tobacco stems for killing vermin in the nest, the two white eggs, the habits of male and female in taking turns in hatching, the parents' habit of half digesting the food in their own crops and then pouring it into the crops of the young, the rapid growth of the young, the next pair of young hatched before the first pair is full-fledged. descriptions of the habits of one or more well-known varieties--pouters, fantails, homing pigeons, etc. read stories of the training and flights of homing pigeons, from ernest thompson-seton's _arnex_. more detailed study for class work compare the uses of the quill and contour feathers. find out how these two kinds differ in texture; the differences fitting them for their difference in function. the names quill and contour may be replaced by some simple names, as feathers for flying and feathers for covering the body. study the adaptations for flight, noting the smooth body surface, the overlapping feathers of the wing for lifting the bird upward as the wing comes down, the long wing bones, the strong breast, and the covering of feathers giving lightness and warmth. the warmth and lightness of feathers is illustrated by the feather boas worn by ladies. examine the feet and find out why pigeons are able to perch on trees. examine the beak, mouth, tongue, nostrils, eyes, ears. how is the bill adapted for picking up grains and seeds? observation and care of winter-blooming plants children are most interested in things which they own and care for themselves. if a child plants a bulb or a slip and succeeds in bringing it to maturity, it will be to him the most interesting and, at the same time, will bring him more into sympathy with plants wherever he may find them. the teacher should impress upon the pupil the desirability of having beautiful flowers in the home in winter, when there are none to be had out-of-doors. every pupil should be encouraged to have one plant at least, and the bulbs planted in october and stored away in the dark in the home cellar will require a good deal of care and afford an excellent opportunity for observing plant growth and the development of flowers. if the pots have been stored in a cool cellar and have been kept slightly moist, the bulbs will have made sufficient root growth in a month and should be brought up into a warmer room where they can get some sunshine every day. the pupils will make a report each week as to what changes are noticeable in the growing plant. they will note the appearance of pale green shoots, which later develop into leaves and at least one flower stalk. they should make a drawing once every week and show it to the teacher, and the teacher should make it a point to see a number of the pupils' plants by calling at their homes. in this way the pupils come to know what plants need for their development in the way of soil, water, light, and heat. this interest will soon be extended, until, in a very few years, the children will add new and beautiful plants to the home collection and assume the responsibility of caring for all of them. trees pines of the locality this study may be commenced in november after the deciduous trees have lost their leaves and have entered their quiescent winter period. this is the time when the evergreens stand out so prominently on the landscape in such sharp contrast with the others that have been stripped of their broad leaves and now look bare and lifeless. if no pines are to be found in the vicinity, balsam or spruce may be substituted. the lessons should, as far as possible, be observational. the pupils should be encouraged to make some observations for themselves out of school. at least one lesson should be conducted out-of-doors, a suitable pine tree having been selected beforehand for the purpose. the following method might serve as a guide in the study of any species of tree. the white pine field exercises have the pupils observe the shape and height of the tree from a distance, tracing the outline with the finger. compare the shape of this tree with that of other evergreens and also with that of the broad-leafed trees. have them describe in what particulars the shapes differ in different trees. they will come to realize that the difference in shape results from difference in length, direction, and arrangement of branches. they may notice that other evergreen trees resemble the pine in that the stems are all straight and extend as a gradually tapering shaft from the bottom to the top, that all have a more or less conical shape, and that the branches grow more or less straight out from the main stem, not slanting off as in the case of the maples and elms. coming close to the tree, the pupils may first examine the trunk. by using a string or tape-line, find its diameter and how big it is around. tell them how big some evergreens are (the giant trees of the pacific coast are sometimes over forty feet around). have them notice where the trunk is largest, and let them find out why a tree needs to be so strong at the ground. heavy wind puts a great strain on it just at this point. illustrate by taking a long slat or lath, drive it into the ground firmly, and then, catching it by the top, push it over. it will break off just at the ground. if a little pine tree could be taken up, the pupils would be interested in seeing what long, strong, fibrous roots the pine has. let them examine the bark of the trunk and describe its colour and roughness. the fissures in the bark, which are caused by the enlarging of the tree by the formation of new wood under the bark, are deeper at the bottom of the tree than at the top, the tree being younger and the bark thinner the nearer to the top we go. let the pupils look up into the tree from beneath and then go a little distance away and look at it. they will notice how bare the branches are on the inside, and the teacher will probably have to explain why this is so. they will discover that the leaves are nearly all out toward the ends of the branches as they get light there, while the centre of the tree top is shaded, and the great question that every tree must try to solve is how to get most light for its leaves. the pupils will now see an additional reason why the lower limbs should be longer than the upper ones. the greater length of the lower limbs brings the leaves out into the sunlight. the reason for calling this tree an "evergreen" may now be considered. why it retains its leaves all winter is a problem for more advanced classes; but if the question is asked, the teacher may get over the difficulty by explaining to the class that the leaves are so small, and yet so hardy, that wind, frost, or snow does not injure them. each pupil may bring a small branch or twig back to the school-room for use in a class-room lesson. class-room lesson ~materials.~--small branches--one for each pupil, cones, bark, pieces of pine board. ~introduction.~--review the general features of the pine that were observed in the field lesson. ~observations.~--the branches are distributed. pupils test the strength and suppleness of the branches and find the gummy nature of the surface. of what value are these qualities to the tree during winter storms? examine the texture, stiffness, and fineness of the needles. note that the needles are in little bunches. how many are in each bunch? are there any buds on the branches? if so, where are the buds? how are the buds protected from rain? the pupils examine the cones and describe their general shape. the pupils are asked to break open the tough scales and find the seeds. allow the seeds to fall through the air, and thus the pupils will discover the use of the wings attached to the seeds. the wood is next examined, its colour and odour are noted, and its hardness is tested. find articles in the school-room that are made of pine wood. elm the following topics are suggested for aiding in the selection of matter for a lesson on a typical broad-leafed tree: the height of the tree. the part of the height that is composed of tree tops. the umbrella shape or dome shape of the top. the gracefully drooping branches of the outer part of the top. try to find other trees with tops like that of the elm. the diameter of the trunk. the diameter is almost uniform up to the branches. the branches all come off from one point, like the ribs of an umbrella. the thick bark, that of the old trees being marked by deep furrows. the birds that make their nests in the elm. in spring find and examine the flowers, fruits, seeds, and also the leaves. field exercise a good out-of-door exercise to follow the general lesson outlined above, is to require the pupils to find all the elm trees or a number of elm trees growing in the locality and to describe their location and the kind of soil on which they grow. the maple, oak, horse-chestnut, and apple are also suitable trees upon which to base lessons for form i. domestic animals domestic animals not only furnish suitable subjects for observation work, but also afford good opportunities for developing that sympathetic interest in animal life which will cause the pupils to more nearly appreciate the useful animals and to treat them more humanely. the horse i ~introduction.~--by means of a conversation with the pupils, find out what they know about the horse and lead them to think about his proper treatment. ~lesson.~--the matter and method are suggested by the following: what are the different things for which horses are useful? what kinds of horses are most useful for hauling heavy loads? why are they most useful? what kinds are the most useful for general farm work? why are they the most useful? what kinds are the most useful for driving? are there any other animals that would be as useful as the horse for all these things? what causes some horses to be lean and weary while others are fat and brisk? what kinds of stables should horses have as to warmth, dryness, and fresh air? why is it cruel to put a frosty bit into a horse's mouth? when a horse is warm from driving on a cold day, how should he be protected if hitched out-of-doors? why, when he is warm from driving, should the blanket not be put on until he has been in the stable for a little while? correlate with reading from _black beauty_. ii ~preparation.~--i want you to find out some more things about the horse, but you will understand these things better if you remember that long ago all horses were wild, just as some horses are wild on the prairies to-day, and that the habits learned by wild horses remain in our tame horses. the teacher should read to the class parts of "the pacing mustang" from ernest thompson-seton's _wild animals i have known_, or "kaweah's run" from _neighbours with claws and hoofs_. this will give the pupils a motive for making the required observations. ~observations.~--compare the length of the legs of the horse with his height. of what use were these long legs to the wild horses? what causes horses to "shy"? of what use was this habit to wild horses? in how many directions can a horse move his ears? of what use was this to wild horses? when horses in a field are alarmed, do they rush together or keep apart, and where are the young foals found at this time? of what use were these habits to wild horses? are the eyes of the horse so placed that he can see behind him and to either side as well as in front? of what use was this to wild horses? _to the teacher._--the horse is an animal which is strong, swift, graceful, gentle, obedient, docile. the pupils should learn that, in return for his good services, the horse should be treated with kindness and consideration. the legs of the horse are long, straight, and strong, and the single toe (or hoof) means that the horse walks on the tip of one toe, and the hoof is in reality a large toe nail developed to protect the tip of the toe. to these features is due the great speed of the horse. horses gather together in the field with the foals in the most protected part of the group, just as wild horses found it necessary to do for protection. the wild horses "shied" at a fierce enemy concealed in the grass, and the tame horse shies at a strange object. correlations with literature and reading: by interpretation of _the bell of atri_. with language: by exercise on new words, as graceful, etc. domestic birds the duck ~home observations.~--compare the duck and the drake as to size, colouring, calls, and other sounds. observe the position of the birds when standing. observe their mode of walking, of swimming, and of flying. where do they prefer to make their nests? why is the duck more plain in dress than the drake? what is the shape, size, and build of the nest? describe the eggs. when does the duck sleep? why can it not sleep upon a perch as hens do? how do ducks feed on land? compare with the feeding of hens. observe how ducks feed when in water. observe the various sounds, as alarm notes, call notes, social sounds. describe the preening of the feathers and explain the meaning of it. compare the appearance of the young ducks with that of the older ones. do the young ducks need to be taught to swim? class-room lesson provide, where convenient, a duck for class study. ~observations.~--colour, size, general shape of the body, and the relation of the shape to ease of swimming; divisions of the body. size of head, length of neck, and the relation of the length of the neck to the habit of feeding in water. the legs and web feet, and the relation of these to the bird's awkward walking and ease in swimming. the bill and its relation to the bird's habits of feeding by scooping things from the bottom of the water and then straining the water out. the sensitive tip of the bill by which the duck can feel the food. the feathers, their warmth, and compactness for shedding water. the oil spread over them during the preening is useful as a protection against water. the bill, feet, and feathers should be compared with those of the hen and goose, and reasons for the similarities and differences should be discussed. the uses that people make of ducks and their feathers and eggs; the gathering of eider-down. for desk work, make drawings of the duck when swimming, flying, and standing. chapter v form i spring garden work the pupils in form i cannot be expected to do heavy work, such as spading plots or making paths. in some cases the larger boys will undertake to line out the walks and do the spading or digging. sometimes it may be best to engage a man to do the spading. in any case the boys and girls should do the measuring and marking out of the plots. if stable manure is used in fertilizing the plots, it must be well rotted and then carefully spaded into the plots. the rest of the work should be done by the pupils themselves under the direction of the teacher. this work will include the levelling of the plots with hoes and rakes, and the trimming of the edges to the exact size of the plots, as determined by a string drawn taut about the four corner pickets. if the pupils in this form have individual plots, each pupil will mark out his drills, put in the seeds, and cover them. the teacher may give demonstrations in connection with the work but should not do the work for the pupils. the teacher must use his own judgment as to what seeds to allow the pupils to plant. one variety of vegetable and one of flowers is sufficient for form i pupils, and it is desirable that large seeds be chosen for them and such as are pretty sure to grow under ordinary circumstances. beans, beets, radishes, or lettuces are suitable as vegetables, and nasturtiums, balsams, or four-o'clocks as flowers. these seeds should be planted at least an inch apart in the drill and the drills, twelve to fifteen inches apart. large seeds may have an inch of soil over them and smaller seeds much less. unless the soil is very dry, watering should not be allowed, and in any case it is better to water the plot thoroughly the day before planting the seed instead of after, as is commonly done. the pupils must not allow a crust to form over the plot either before the seeds come up or after. claw-hand weeders are convenient for loosening the soil close to the plants, and small-sized garden rakes can be used between the rows as soon as the seedlings appear. it is always better to cultivate before the weeds get a start, and thus prevent their growth. usually the young plants will be too thick in the row, so that thinning should be begun when the plants are about two inches high. the edges of the plots should be kept straight and the paths clean and level. each plot should have a wooden label bearing the owner's name or number and form. the teacher is referred to _circular _ of the ontario department of education, _elementary agriculture and horticulture_, for lists of seeds, tools, etc. garden studies the pupils should be in the garden every day as soon as gardening commences. in this way only will they be able to follow and appreciate the whole life of the plant from seed to seed again. the teacher should give a few minutes daily to receiving verbal reports from the pupils. all new developments that the pupils notice should be reported for the good of all. the teacher should make a practice of visiting the garden for a few minutes daily before or after school, in order that he may be in a position to direct the pupils in their studies in the garden. the pupils should watch for the first appearance of the young plants above ground, noting how they get through the soil, and the size, shape, and colour of the first leaves. they can readily determine whether all of the seeds grow. they will then watch for the opening of the second pair of leaves and compare them with the first pair. they should report the amount of growth made from day to day, and also what insect enemies attack the plants, and what animals, such as toads and birds, are seen during the season. they will also have occasion to note the effect of rain and sun upon the soil and upon the plants. the first vegetables fit for use and the first flowers in bloom will be reported. while they give special attention to the development of the plants in their own plots, they will of course observe what is going on in the garden generally. correlate with the interpretation of "the seed" in _nature in verse_.--lovejoy. silver, burdett & co., cents. window garden the pupils should plant some seeds in sand or moist sawdust in boxes or pots in the school-room, so that they may be able to examine the progress of germination. in this way they will come to realize that every good seed has in it a tiny plant asleep and that warmth and moisture are needed to awaken it and help it to grow. it sends one delicate shoot down into the soil and another up into the light. another interesting way to plant seeds is in egg-shells filled with fine, moist soil, which are set in rows in a box of sand. one seed only should be put in a shell. the plants may be grown to quite a size and then set out in the garden plot, the shell having first been broken off and the ball of earth containing the roots carefully set down in a small hole, packed about with garden soil, and watered. the pupils should draw diagrams or maps of their plots and afterwards of the whole garden. (see manual on _geography_.) they can mark the lines of plants, and those who can write can give in short, simple sentences the main things noticed from day to day. they should give the day and date when the seeds were planted, when plants came up, when rain storms occurred, when work in weeding, thinning, and cultivating was done, when the plants were fit to use, and how they were disposed of, etc. this will serve as profitable seat work in writing, drawing, and language. simple problems based upon dimensions of plots and the value of vegetables, etc., afford excellent supplementary exercises in arithmetic. wild flowers the admiration that even little children have for the wild flowers of the woods and their delight in finding and gathering them is sufficient justification for including them in studies for form i. the teacher must be careful, however, lest he go too far in the critical examination of the parts of the flowers, forgetting that little children are not interested in stamens and petals, but in the fresh, fragrant, and delicate blossoms that beautify the little banks and hollows of every woodland and that brighten up the fields and roadsides in spring time. the teacher should aim to deepen that childish admiration and give to the child a more intelligent appreciation of the beauties of the wild flowers and a desire to protect them from extermination. no attempt should be made to prohibit the picking of wild flowers, but the pupils should be instructed not to pull up plants by the roots. the picking of flowers in moderation does not injure the plants, but rather tends to increase their vigour. pupils should pick flowers with some purpose in view, rather than to see how big a bunch each can gather. the teacher should show them how to arrange a few flowers in a neat bouquet and emphasize the fact that a great mass of blossoms crushed closely together is far from being artistic or ornamental. pupils should then be encouraged to make up pretty bouquets for the teacher's desk, for the home dining-room, and for old or invalid people who love flowers--especially those plucked by the hands of thoughtful children. recognition of wild flowers the pupils should learn to recognize each year a few species of wild flowers by name as well as by sight. this may be accomplished in two ways, ( ) by means of excursions to the woods a few times each year during the spring and summer months, and ( ) by having occasional observation lessons in the school-room based upon the flowers gathered for the school-room bouquets. both methods are to be recommended, but it must be borne in mind that a wilted, lacerated flower has no interest for a little child. lesson in outline bloodroot plants are always most interesting when studied in their natural environment, and this is one reason why the school excursion deserves the highest commendation as a method of studying wild flowers. when studying wild flowers out-of-doors, the pupils should notice what seems to be the favourite or usual location for the particular species under consideration. have the pupils observe the following about the bloodroot: it seems to prefer fairly dry, rich soil, on or near a hillside. it opens its beautiful white blossoms early in the spring, as if to enjoy the bright sunshine before the trees put out their thick coat of leaves to shade it. it, like many another early spring flower, comes into bloom so early in the spring because it got ready the summer before. the teacher should carefully dig up a specimen--root and all--as young pupils cannot be depended on to get up all of the underground part. note the large amount of plant food stored up in the underground stem, how the flower was protected before it opened out, and what becomes of the protection. note the peculiar beauty of the snow-white blossoms with their yellow centres, and how beautiful they look as they nestle amongst the handsome green leaves with their pinkish-tinted stems. wound the root, and notice the reddish, bloodlike juice whence the plant derives its name. indians sometimes use this juice for war-paint, and some mothers give it to their children on sugar as a cure for coughs and colds. other wild flowers suitable for form i are buttercup, spring beauty, dog's-tooth violet, hepatica, and trillium. if there is a corner of the school ground that is partly shaded, and if the soil is fairly mellow and moist, some of these wild flowers should be transplanted there where they will grow well and can be seen every day during the blooming period. the leaves and flowers of the bloodroot and the above-mentioned wild flowers can be used for drawing. correlations oral and written descriptions of the flowers studied afford suitable exercises in language and composition. insect study cecropia, or emperor-moth the larvæ of this, the largest of canadian moths, may be found early in september, as they wander about in search of a suitable branch upon which to fasten their cocoons. if the pupils are not successful in finding the larvæ, the cocoons can be found after the leaves have fallen, because their size makes them conspicuous. the only difficulty in finding them is due to their being of the same colour as the withered leaves, so that they are easily mistaken for the latter. the pupils should be directed to look carefully at what appears at first sight to be a withered leaf attached to a tree or shrub, and in this way many cocoons of various moths will be found. ~observe.~--the large size--from three to four inches long; the greenish colour; the stumpy legs; movements, as walking, feeling, clinging; the rows of warts, and short, stiff spines on these; the feeding habits, biting or sucking; eggs of parasites, for frequently these are found on the larvæ. place the larva in a box covered with gauze, and observe the spinning and weaving of the cocoon. from what part of the body is the silk obtained? with what organs are the threads placed in position? what part of the cocoon is made first and what part is made last? what time is required for making the cocoon? how is the cocoon fastened to the tree? what provision is made in the cocoon for warmth, for protection from birds, for shelter from rain? cut open a cocoon and examine the pupa, noting the mummy-like case on which can be seen the impressions of the wings developing within. if the cocoon is kept in the vivarium in a cool place, so that the conditions may be as nearly as possible like the natural conditions, the adult moth will emerge about the first of may. in april the cocoon should be wetted occasionally, as it would be if exposed to rains; this ensures more perfect development of the insect. ~observe.~--at what part of the cocoon the moth makes an opening; the slow spreading and strengthening of the wings; the size and coloration of the moth; the feathery feelers; the position of the wings and sucking mouth parts when at rest. require the pupils to make drawings of the cocoon, larva, and adult. the promothea moth, whose cocoons are common on lilac bushes, may be studied in the same way as the emperor. reference.--silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_ dragon-fly the larvæ of this insect may be obtained in may or june by scraping leaves, weeds, and mud from the bottom of ponds and allowing the mud and water to settle in a pail or tub. the larvæ may be distinguished from other aquatic creatures by the long insect-like body, three pairs of legs, and the "mask"--a flap with pincers at the end. this mask can be turned under the head and body when not in use, or it can be projected in front of the larva for catching prey. at the rear end are three tubes, which fit together to form the breathing tube. the pupils should observe the above features, and also the movements, seizing of prey, breathing, moulting, semi-resting or pupa stage, at the close of which the pupa climbs up a reed or stalk of grass and bursts the skin from which the adult emerges. the pupils should put into the aquarium various kinds of insects and decide what foods are preferred by the larva and the adult. ~observe.~--the size, length of body, movements in flight, lace-like wings, and insect-killing habits of the dragon-fly. should dragon-flies be protected? give reasons. are all dragon-flies of the same size, build, and colour? at what time of year are dragon-flies most numerous? ~reference.~--silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_. other conspicuous insects the potato-beetle, giant water-bug, eastern swallow-tail butterfly, and promothea moth are insects suitable as types to be studied by the pupils of form i. the giant water-bug is the large, broad, grayish-brown insect that is found on the sidewalks in may and june mornings. (for information on the eastern swallow-tail and promothea see metamorphosis, in butterfly and moth collections.) birds bird studies for form i should be limited to observations made directly upon a few common birds, such as the robin, house-sparrow (english), song-sparrow, flicker, house-wren, crow, bronzed grackle, and meadow-lark. these are easily reached by the pupils of every rural and village school, and the purpose of the lessons should be to teach the pupils to recognize these birds, and by making use of child interest in living active creatures, to develop their interest in birds. the robin field exercises i observe the robins and find out the following things: . are all robins of the same colour? if not of the same colour, what difference do you note? . does the bird run or hop? imitate its movements. . listen to its song. is it sweet or harsh? is it loud or low? is it cheerful or gloomy? . watch the robin as it moves along the grass and learn how it finds out where the worms are. _to the teacher._--the pupils should be given a few days in which to find out answers to these questions, and at the end of that time the answers should be discussed in the class. male robins have more pronounced colours than female robins. the beak is yellower, the breast is brighter, the back and the top of the head are darker. robins both run and hop. the sense of sight of the robin is very acute, but its sense of hearing is even more keen. the bird may be observed turning its head to one side to listen for the sound of a worm which is still inside its burrow. ii a second set of exercises may now be assigned which will demand a more detailed study of the bird, namely, a study of the size, colour, form of body, manner of flight, and length of beak. iii the nest, eggs, and young . find out various places in which robins build their nests. in what ways are these places all alike? examine the materials of the nest and find out why the nests are built in the kind of places in which they are found. . describe the eggs. . what kinds of food do the parent birds bring to the young? does the father bird aid in bringing food to the young? _to the teacher._--the nests are found in well-sheltered parts of apple trees and evergreens, in sheds, under ledges of roofs, and in other sheltered places. the nests, since they are composed largely of mud and grass, would easily be washed away if exposed to rain storms. the food brought to the young consists of worms and insect larvæ, and the father bird is very industrious in helping to take care of his family. it is the father bird that sings, and the mother bird devotes all her energies to working and scolding. the song-sparrow field exercises in early march, when the streams are just beginning to break from underneath the ice and spots of ground peep here and there through the snow, assign to the pupils an exercise such as the following: watch for a small, gray-brown bird which perches near the top of a bush, or small tree, and sings the "tea-kettle song". try to interpret the song in the words: "maids! maids! maids! put on the tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle-ettle." is the song bright and cheerful or dull and gloomy? does the bird sing this song often? approach close to the bird. are there any stripes or spots on its breast or head? describe the flight of the bird from its perch, when it is disturbed. _to the teacher._--it is possible for the pupils to distinguish the song-sparrow by means of the above exercises. it is one of the first birds to return in the spring, and, as it is a lusty singer, it will attract the attention of all who are looking for birds. the dark brown spot in the centre of the breast is a distinguishing mark, and the more observant will find the three ashy-gray stripes on its head and the dark line through the eye. when disturbed, it does not rise into the air, but flies downward and disappears with a swish of its tail. the nest is usually built on the ground or in a low bush or tree. it is composed of grass, fine roots, or weed stems, and lined with fine grass or hair. the eggs are usually four or five, but sometimes there are as many as seven. they are white with a greenish-blue tint and are closely spotted with brown. class-room lesson discuss with the pupils the observations that they have made on the field exercises. generalize as to the similarity of the places in which the pupils have seen the sparrow singing, and as to the times of day in which the bird sings. teach the marks of identification which some have discovered, using for this purpose pictures of the bird or black-board drawings; and encourage those who have not yet seen the song-sparrow to try again and to secure the assistance of those who have succeeded. compare the size and form of the song-sparrow with that of the house-sparrow (english). tell the pupils the great value of the bird in killing cutworms, plant-lice, caterpillars, ground-beetles, grasshoppers, flies, and other insects. it also helps to prevent the spread of weeds by eating thousands of seeds of noxious weeds. assign the pupils some other things to discover, as for example: through how many months of the summer does the bird sing? find the nest. why is it hard to find? describe the eggs, as to size, colour, and number. do not disturb the nest and do not visit it very often. _to the teacher._--base lessons in bird study upon the english sparrow, flicker, wren, and meadow-lark. the sheep problems for field work how do sheep find one another when they have become separated? how old are the lambs before they can keep up with the old sheep when running? what fits the lamb for running so well? watch the lambs when they are playing, and find out whether they play: . i'm the king of the castle. . follow the leader. find out by watching a flock of sheep what is meant by "men follow one another like a flock of sheep". describe how sheep move when they are going very fast. why should sheep be kept in a well-ventilated building that protects them from snow and rain but is not very warm? _to the teacher._--each movement, habit, and instinct implied in this exercise is explained by the life of the wild sheep. their natural home is in the mountain, and their swift movement is that of bounding from rock to rock as they follow the strongest and boldest (their leader) to a place of safety. the legs of the lamb grow rapidly, beyond all proportion to the rate of growth of the body, so that within two weeks after birth the young lamb is almost as strong of limb and fleet of foot as its mother. in their games the lambs are fitting themselves for their place in the flock, and these games very much resemble those named in the exercise. chapter vi form ii autumn bulb planting out-of-doors tulips and daffodils (narcissus) are the most suitable bulbs for out-of-door planting. the best varieties for outdoor culture are usually designated in catalogues. bulbs should not be planted in individual plots, but in borders and ornamental beds. the latter should not be placed in the centre of a lawn, as is frequently done. bulbs should be planted before the last of october. beds for growing bulbs to make a bulb bed, throw out the top soil to a depth of eight or nine inches, put about three inches of well-rotted stable manure in the bottom, and cover it with about three inches of the soil which was thrown out. rake the plot level and then place the bulbs about eight inches apart on the top of the soil, arranging them in any design chosen. cover them with the rest of the soil and rake it level. there will be about five inches of soil over the bulbs. when a solid crust has formed over the bed, put on a covering of leaves, straw, or branches of evergreens, and some pieces of boards to hold them in place. this covering does not protect the bulbs from freezing, but prevents too rapid thawing out in the spring. this covering should remain until the tips of the bulbs are showing above ground, when it should be removed. ordinarily the bulbs may be left a second year before digging up. they should then be re-set or replaced with new ones, and the bed made and fertilized as before. in clay soil the bulbs should not be set quite so deep as in sandy soil, and the bulbs have better drainage about their roots if a handful of sand is placed under each bulb in planting. crocus bulbs may be planted in clumps anywhere about the grounds or borders by simply making a small hole about five inches deep, dropping the bulb in, and covering it. lily of the valley grows best in partial shade in some unfrequented corner. planting of bulbs indoors read again the instructions given under this heading in form i work, regarding soil, planting, and care. the chinese sacred lily and trumpet narcissus may be chosen for the pupils of this form. the narcissus, also called daffodil, may be held back until early spring if kept in a cool, dark cellar, but the chinese sacred lily, which is also a variety of narcissus, comes into bloom from four to six weeks after planting. it is usually grown in water in a bowl of suitable size. place a few pieces of charcoal in the bottom of the bowl, set the bulb upon them, and pack coloured stones and shells around it as a support. keep the bowl about two thirds full of water and set it in a warm, sunny place. it does not need to be set in the dark, as is the case with other bulbs. these may also be grown in soil in the same way as other varieties of narcissus. when blooming is over, the bulbs may be thrown away, as they cannot be used again. garden work (see autumn work for form i.) the pupils in form ii should be given more responsibility with reference to the care and management of their garden plots. if they have had a couple of years in gardening while in form i, they will have gained sufficient knowledge as to the needs of plants and sufficient practice in garden craft to do a certain amount of work quite independently. the boys of form ii are able, with suitable garden tools, to do all the work needed in the management of their own plots and may even be allowed to do some of the harder work for the girls of their form. seed selection besides the usual work of weeding, cultivating, and harvesting of their crops, the pupils should undertake some work in seed selection. this work not only results in the improvement of the plants grown from year to year, but also helps to train the pupils in painstaking observation and the discerning of minute points of excellence. the ambition to produce, by careful selection and thorough cultivation, a grain or flower better than has been, is aroused, and, as the pupil's interest increases, his love for the art increases and his efforts meet with greater success. the teacher should aim from the first to use only the best available seed even if the cost be greater. he should send for a number of catalogues and carefully choose those varieties of seeds that possess evident merit for the purpose intended. in the case of flowers, the pupils should be asked to decide what individual plants showed greatest excellence, and these should be marked, and the seed from them preserved for next season's planting. when the flower is in full bloom, a small string tag should be tied to the flower stem (string tags can be got from a local merchant). on this tag should be written in lead-pencil the name of the species, the shade, and date of flowering. these flowers should be left to ripen thoroughly, and then the seed picked and sealed up in small envelopes, which the pupils should make as part of their manual training work. the date on the tag should be transferred to the seed envelope. storing seeds all the envelopes should be collected, placed in a mouse-proof box, and stored in a cool, dry place until time to plant in the spring. small bottles are excellent for holding seed and safer than envelopes. if such selection is carried on systematically, it will result in an increase of yield and of quality not to be equalled by even the best seed that the markets have to offer. thus the school garden may become the centre of interest for the community. seeds of good varieties can be distributed to the ratepayers, and the standard of gardening and horticulture raised. here, as elsewhere, much--almost everything--depends upon the teacher's interest and ability to lead as well as to instruct. harvesting and storing of garden crops as soon as the vegetables reach their best stage of development, they should be taken from the garden by the owner. all dead plants and refuse should be removed and covered up in a compost heap. the boys of this form should also assist in doing part of the general work of the school garden. they might take up from the garden border such tender plants as dahlias, gladioli, and canna lilies. these should be dried off and stored in a cool, dry cellar. if the cellar be warm, it is necessary to cover the bulbs with garden soil to prevent their drying out too much. class-room lesson the pupils are led, through conversation, to state their experiences and observations. the teacher assists them in interpreting their observations and organizing their knowledge and stimulates them to thoughtful search for further information. discuss with the pupils such questions as: what are people busy doing on their farms and in their gardens at this time of year? why do they harvest and store the wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, and apples, etc.? are there any countries in which people do not need to gather in the grains, vegetables, and fruits? the discussion of these questions will direct their thought to the need of storing sufficient food for animals and for man to last through the winter, when these things do not grow. they must be gathered to protect them from destruction by storms of wind and rain and the severe frosts of winter. people who live in very warm countries find foods growing all the year round, and they do not need to prepare for winter, but these people are always lazy and unprogressive. discuss the means taken to protect the various crops, as follows: why can grain be kept in barns or granaries or in stacks? why can apples, turnips, and potatoes not be kept in the same way as grains? what are the conditions that are best suited for keeping the latter products? name some kinds of crops that cannot be kept in any of the ways already discussed. why can they not be kept in these ways? these discussions will develop the idea of the necessity of keeping apples, potatoes, and turnips, in cellars, root-houses, and pits, where they cannot freeze, but where they are kept at uniformly low temperatures which are as close as possible to their freezing points. the air must not be too dry, as dryness causes them to shrivel up. in dry cellars they should be covered with fine soil. very delicate fruits, such as cherries, grapes, peaches, plums, strawberries, etc., can only be kept for a length of time by preserving or canning them. correlate with lessons in household management on preserving and canning. fall cultivation when the garden has been finally cleaned out, the plot should be spaded up and left without raking. clay soil especially is much improved in physical qualities by thus being exposed to the air and frost. all garden tools should receive a special cleaning up before storing for winter. garden studies the observational studies suggested under this head for form i will be followed also in form ii. the pupils of form ii will be expected to make more critical observations in connection not only with the plants growing in their own individual plots, but also with those plants which other pupils have been growing. they should give some attention also to the plants in the perennial flower border. garden records. in this form the pupils should begin to make garden records on such points as the following: . description of the plant--size, habit of growth, kind of leaves and their arrangement, date of flowering, form, size and colouring of the flowers, points of merit or the reverse, description of the seed and how scattered, how disposed of, and the value. . the work done in the garden from day to day, with dates. . the effect of rain, drought, or other weather conditions on the growth of the plants. . what insects were seen visiting the flowers and what they were doing--whether beneficial or harmful. . what birds or other animals were found frequenting the garden. (see animal studies, pp. , , .) . what plants suffered from earliest frosts; what from subsequent frosts; what ones proved to be most hardy, etc. . what plants the pupils like most in the garden, and what ones seem to suit the soil and weather conditions best. the pupils in this form, by direct observation, should come to appreciate the development of the fruit and seed from the flower. their work in seed selection, based upon the excellence of the flower, helps to ensure this line of observation. correlations art: drawing of leaves, flowers, and vegetables, in colour when possible. arithmetic: calculations as to dimensions, number of plants, number of flowers on a plant and seeds in a flower, value of products of flowers and vegetables. cost of seeds, fertilizer, and labour, gross and net proceeds. statement showing the above. composition: general connected account or story of the work done and the things learned during the season, as taken from the garden diary and from memory. exercises in writing and spelling, as suitable seat work. geography: weather observations, as related to the garden work and to plant growth. comparison of the soil of the garden with other samples from the district, as to composition and origin. direction, as related to the paths or walks in the garden. map drawing: plans of plots and of whole garden and grounds, represented on sand-table, paper, or black-board. map drawing on a horizontal surface is best for the first year or two. the products of the garden, as compared with home products, as food supplies for man and beast. manual training: making of seed envelopes and boxes, modelling in clay of fruits and vegetables. climbing plants observe particularly the sweet-pea and morning-glory. consider the following points: . advantages gained by climbing, such as securing of more light, production of many leaves and flowers, and not so much stem. . method of climbing--sweet-pea by tendrils that wind around the support; morning-glory by twining its rough stem closely around its support. do all morning-glory vines twine in the same direction? find other vines that climb. examine their modes of climbing. . time of flowering and notes on how to plant. make drawings of the leaves and blossoms. trees (see type lesson on trees under form i.) in this form it is better to follow closely the development of one or two selected trees in school or on the home grounds than to attempt to observe many different species. allow the pupils to choose their own trees for study and, if possible, have them select one at home and another near the school or on the way to school. the following points might receive attention: the name of the species, whence obtained and by whom planted if known; its approximate height, size, and age; its location, and the nature of the soil; its general shape, and whether or not influenced at present or at some time in the past by proximity to other trees; description and arrangement of its branches, leaves, and buds, its bark, flowers, and fruit; time of leafing out and blossoming; colouring and falling of leaves and ripening of seeds; the amount of growth for the year compared with that of previous years as shown by the younger branches; qualities of beauty and usefulness of the tree. drawing exercises. at least two visits should be made to the woods during the autumn months, one when the leaves of the trees begin to colour and another when the leaves have fallen. consider the preparation made for winter in the woods and fields, the use of dead leaves in the woods as a protection to forest vegetation and as soil-making material. bring back samples of leaves and of leaf mould or humus for class-room observation. note the effect of frost in hastening the falling of leaves--frost does not give the brilliant hues to leaves, as many people think. consider the relationship of the forest trees to animal life. storing of tree seeds make a collection of nuts and other tree seeds, some of which should be put in the school collection and the rest planted in the garden or stored away for spring planting. the seeds of evergreens should be kept dry and cold, but other seeds, as a rule, are best packed in a box of slightly moist sand set in a cold place or buried in the ground. a flower type: nasturtium i teacher and pupils visit the nasturtium bed, where the flowers stand up boldly, surrounded by the shield-shaped leaves. a search for the young flower buds and for the very old flowers leads to the discovery that these are snugly sheltered under the shields. the greenish-yellow calyx, which is closely wrapped around the bud, is next examined. its name is given, and its use as a protector is discussed. the strong seed cases are opened and the seeds are discovered. the pupils are instructed to watch the insects that visit the bright flowers. name the insects. describe their movements. catch a few and find the yellow powder on their furry little bodies and legs. ii each member of the class brings a flower to the school-room. the varieties of colours of the flowers are discussed. the cave-like form of each flower is noted. the velvety feeling of the corolla and the delicate perfume are likewise sensed by the pupils. the pupils nip off the point of the cave and taste the nectar (honey), and thus learn why the insects visit the flowers. they next trace the course of the coloured lines on the corolla and find that they all point into the cave. continuing their explorations of the mouth of the cave, the pupils will discover the little boxes containing the yellow powder that the flower dusts upon the insects. the names _pollen_ and _pollen boxes_ are given. the fringe on the edges of the leaves of the corolla for the purpose of preventing the insects stealing into the cave without receiving their baptism of pollen, is discovered. the teacher should, at this point, give a brief explanation of the valuable work done by the insects in carrying pollen to cause seeds to grow in the next flower that the insect visits. the position of the tiny brush (stigma, but do not give this name) held up by the seed case for rubbing the pollen off the insect, should also be observed. ~summary.~--name and point out the parts of the flower (calyx, corolla, pollen boxes, seed cases). what useful work do insects do for the flower? what reward do they receive for their work? what advertisements do the flowers put out for attracting themselves? (bright colours, sweet perfumes, and honey) flowers suitable for lessons in form ii are nasturtium, larkspur, snap-dragon, morning-glory, and sweet-pea. note.--botanical names should be reduced to a minimum. soil studies (see _soils_ by fletcher.) soil should have a place in a nature study course because: . it is so closely related to life. . it lends itself so admirably to the experimental method. . it is so liable to be overlooked and considered as common and valueless. kinds of soil _gravel_ is composed of small, rounded stones of various colours, sizes, and shapes. occurs in beds, generally mixed with sand. get a sample and examine the constituents. lead the pupils to see that the pebbles are the result of the breaking up of larger rocks. what has made the corners smooth and rounded? what use is made of gravel? have the pupils find some gravelly land. _sand_ is composed of small angular pieces of hard rock. have a few samples from different places brought to school, note fineness and colours, examine with a lens and note resemblance to pieces of broken stone. draw a magnet through the sand and note black particles adhering, showing presence of iron in some form. show the hardness by rubbing against the surface of a piece of glass. sand is used for mortar, concrete, and glass. the chief sand-forming rocks are quartz and granite. show pupils how to recognize these. examine a sample of sand under a lens. _clay._ note colour and odour of fresh sample. dry and pulverize and note extreme fineness of the particles by rubbing between the fingers (an ounce of clay contains about four and one half million particles). clay is made from crushed rocks, chiefly feldspars. mix clay with a little water and note sticky character. compare with sand in this respect. which makes the best road in wet weather, gravel, sand, or clay? note how hard the clay bakes after being moistened. uses of clay--pottery, bricks, tile. pupils should visit a brick- or tile-yard and watch the process of manufacture. in many parts of the world there are beds of clay of extreme fineness and whiteness, from which beautiful china is made. _humus_ is decayed vegetable matter. pupils should gather soil from the forest, bog, or marsh. note dark colour. examine carefully and see what you can find in it that is not in sand or clay. most of our farm land consists of these four soils mixed in various proportions, and it gets its name from the one that preponderates. thus we have our sandy, gravelly, or clay _loams_. humus is likely to be present in all fields, because vegetable matter grows, to some extent, everywhere; but freshly broken land, reclaimed swamps, and prairie lands are likely to be especially well supplied. the great value of humus in the soil will appear in later studies. animal studies bird migration (consult _bird life_ by frank m. chapman, and _bird studies_ by g. a. cornish.) in the autumn, direct attention to the flight of wild ducks and geese and to the gathering into flocks of robins, crows, bronze grackles, blue herons, sparrows, and other birds in preparation for migration. discuss with the pupils the reasons for migration, namely, scarcity of food, the cold, the snow. in the spring, the return is stimulated by the nesting instinct. note how the birds are guided--some, for example the ducks and geese, by their leaders, while others have no guides but their instincts. in winter, require the pupils to observe the kinds of birds that are to be seen in the gardens, fields, orchards, and woods, having them note the scarcity of birds and the absence of many forms that are with us in the summer. correlations geography: by pointing out on the map the countries into which the birds go, namely, central america, brazil, etc. reading and literature: by interpreting where did you spend the dreary winter? in a green and sunny land, by the warm sea-breezes fanned, where orange trees with fruit are bent, there the dreary time i've spent. common wild animals general method for field work the best method for studying wild animals is to assign to each pupil some animal as his particular subject of study. begin by finding out from the pupils the wild animals that each one knows to be near his home, and assign to each pupil a number of problems on the animal which is most convenient for him to study. in some cases, only one pupil will be studying a particular kind of animal, while in other cases several pupils may be studying the same kind of animal. the latter method has the advantage of giving opportunity for comparison of results. differences should serve as stimuli to more careful observation, in order to verify or disprove previous conclusions. the observations and inferences, together with drawings illustrating the animals, their homes, etc., are recorded in the nature study note-books. these are discussed in the class, verified or corrected, and supplemented by descriptions of lives and habits of the animals from nature writers or naturalists, such as charles g. d. roberts, ernest thompson-seton, etc. when pupils become interested in this form of study, they become nature students in the true meaning of the term. the pupil is brought into contact with the animal in its natural environment and, under these conditions, the natural habits, interests, and activities of the wild creatures are more likely to appeal to the sympathy of child nature than under any other method of study. the method has also the advantage of being one of original discovery, and consequently it trains in self-reliance and independence of thought. finally, since close and careful observation is necessary, the child learns that it is unwise to alarm the animal, and thus a better relationship between child life and animal life is fostered. it may be objected that this method is slow and that little is accomplished. this may be true from the view-point of matter learned, but from the view-point of child training more can be accomplished from the study of a single living animal than from the study of a score of pictures or stuffed skins. a second method that is recommended is the study of tame animals. by conversations with the boys of the school the teacher will find what tame squirrels, ground-hogs, raccoons, foxes, and other animals are available for class-room work. the possessors of these animals are usually quite willing to bring them to school for the class to study. the movements, habits, food, and other topics, may be studied by direct observations guided by the teacher's questions or problems. a third method and, unfortunately, the one which is in most general use, is the study of animals by means of stuffed specimens and pictures, supplemented by descriptions and stories by the teacher. these lessons may be called information lessons, but they are not worthy of the name nature study. indeed, if conditions are such that it is the only method available for animal study, it is advised that the time be spent on other branches of the subject; but if living animals are made the basis of study, stuffed specimens may be found useful for identification and for confirming observations on minute structural features, colour, etc. the wood-chuck the problems outlined below are intended to illustrate the plan of study suggested in the first general method. they are assigned to a boy who has discovered a ground-hog burrow, in order to direct him in his observations on the animal. what is the kind of soil dug out in making the burrow? why is this soil suitable for the burrow? what size of stones are dug out in burrowing? are there more entrances than one? by slowly approaching the animal, find out how close it will permit you to come. at what times of day does the ground-hog come out? give reasons for its coming out at these times rather than at mid-day. upon what does the animal feed? describe the colour of the animal and find out any advantages in this colour. observe the following actions: running, hiding, keeping sentry, and scouting. do more wood-chucks than one live in one burrow? when do the young wood-chucks first come out of the burrow? describe their size, colour, and habits. are wood-chucks ever seen during the winter? do they use the same burrow year after year? describe the sounds made by the animal. what injury does the animal cause to the fields? describe the fur, teeth, and claws, and show their relation to the animal's habits of life. dig out a burrow and draw a plan of it. make pictures showing the various attitudes of the animal. the chipmunk field exercises describe the size, colour, shape, length of tail, and movements of the chipmunk. compare with the red squirrel. have all chipmunks the same number of stripes? discover its home; method of carrying grain, nuts, or other foods; whether it is found most commonly on the ground, in trees, or among logs and stones. try to tame it by placing food where it can reach it and, finally, try to have it feed from your hand. find out why there is no loose soil around the entrance to its burrow, whether more families than one live in one burrow, whether the chipmunk comes out during winter, or how early in the spring. learn to distinguish the sounds of the animal, as expressing alarm, surprise, anger, playfulness. _to the teacher._--chipmunks carry grain, etc., in their cheeks. frequently these are so full that they must be emptied to permit them to enter their burrows. it is not uncommon for several to spend the winter in the same burrow, having a common storehouse connected by passages to the main burrow. these little animals are easily tamed and soon learn to take food from the hand. they are not hibernating animals, for they store food for winter, and though they are not asleep all winter, yet they rarely come out of their burrows while there is snow on the ground. eastern swallow-tail butterfly no butterfly is more suitable for study by the junior forms than the eastern swallow-tail. it is one of the most beautiful and attractive of our butterflies and lays its eggs so accommodatingly on every carrot or parsnip bed that it gives ample opportunity for observation. if possible, have the pupils observe the insect in the act of placing the eggs, one here and one there, on the under surface of the leaves of the plants, noting the busy movements; discuss the advantage of scattering the eggs, and also that of placing them on the under surface of the leaves. if the egg placing cannot be observed, there will be little difficulty in finding the large yellow and green larva with a head shaped like that of a miniature sea-horse. if the larva itself is not easily found, the leaves stripped bare of green blade and the droppings on the ground will reveal its presence. why was it difficult to see such a large, and now that it is seen, conspicuous object? lead the pupils to notice that the yellow and green bands harmonize in colour with the green leaves and alternate streaks of golden sunlight. does the larva feed by biting or by sucking? how many legs has the larva? cover the plant and larva with a paper bag, or inverted bottle, or a lamp chimney with a gauze top until the larva is full grown; or place the larva in a vivarium, feed it on carrot leaves, and observe its growth. when full grown, the larva builds for itself a snail-shaped, fairly firm case, fastened by a slender girdle of silk to a piece of wood or other support. keep this over winter, and in march, or early april, the black-and-blue-and-gold insect emerges. observe the movements of the wings in flight, the long tube with which it sucks honey from flowers, the three pairs of legs, the position of the wings when at rest; compare the structure with that of the larva. make drawings of the butterfly and paint its colours. chapter vii form ii winter care of plants in the home the care of flowering bulbs, which was begun in form i, will be continued in form ii. the growing of new plants from cuttings will now be taken up. in those schools which are kept continuously heated, potted plants may be kept throughout the year. the pupils will come to appreciate the plants' needs and learn how to meet them in the supply of good soil, water, and sunlight. the following points should be observed: . good potting soil can be made by building up alternating layers of sods and stable manure and allowing this compost to stand until thoroughly rotted. a little sharp sand mixed with this forms an excellent soil for most house plants. . thorough watering twice a week is better than adding a little water every day. . the leaves should be showered with water once a week to free them from dust. . an ounce of whale-oil soap dissolved in a quart of water may be used to destroy plant-lice. common soap-suds may also be used for this purpose, but care should be taken to rinse the plants in clean water after using a soap wash. . most plants need some direct sunlight every day if possible, although most of the ferns grow without it. . plants usually need re-potting once a year. many kinds may be set out-of-doors in flower beds in may and left until september, when they may be taken up and placed in pots, or cuttings may be made from them for potting. . a flower exhibition at the school once or twice a year, or at a local exhibition, adds to the interest. . the pupils should report to the teacher, from time to time, the progress of their plants and make many drawings showing their development. trees in november or december make a study of canadian evergreens, choosing spruce, balsam, and cedar if available. the pupils should learn to distinguish the different species by an examination of the leaves, buds, arrangement of branches, bark, seeds, and cones. the age of young trees can be determined by noting the successive whorls of branches. in this way also the age of the leaves may be determined. on some trees the leaves persist for seven or eight years. evergreens are frequently used as christmas trees and their branches for house decorations. on which species do the leaves persist longest? how do they compare with the pines? the leaves are always as old as the wood upon which they grow. have the pupils notice how the small leaves and horizontal branches resist the clinging of snow in winter. each branch bends down enough to cause the snow to slide off on to the one next below, and so on, until it reaches the ground. the conical shape of the tree also facilitates this action of dislodging the snow. they will also notice that these trees are well adapted to withstand wind, as the top part, which is most exposed to the wind, is much smaller and more pliable than the part next the bottom. the gum, or resinous covering, of the buds protects them from injury by rain or snow. some kinds of pine, such as the pitch pine, have a great abundance of gum and turpentine. resin and pine tar are made chiefly from this species. heat a piece of pine wood--a knot or root is best. the gum will be seen oozing out of the wood. pine torches were much used in the early days of settlement in canada. examine the gum "blisters" in the bark of the balsam tree. from this source the "canada balsam" gum of commerce is taken. the gum and resin in the wood and bark help to preserve the wood from decay. collection of wood specimens during the winter months the boys may prepare specimens of wood for the school collection. these specimens should be cut green and dried. they should be uniform in length--not more than six inches--and should show the bark at one side. the side showing the bark should be two inches wide at most, six inches long, and running in a v-shaped, radial section toward the pith. a tangential section also shows well the annual layers. a piece of slab as cut lengthwise off a round stick is tangential. also visit wood-working factories for specimens of rare or foreign woods. in securing these specimens, care should be taken not to mutilate trees. related reading winter is nature's quiescent period. continuous active observation out-of-doors among the plants of the forest and garden gives place for a time to indoor work and reflection. pupils need time for reading and reflection, and no time is so opportune as the quiet winter season. during these months some time should be devoted to the reading of nature stories and extracts from magazines and books dealing with plant as well as animal life. pupils should review their gardening experiences and discuss plans of improvement for the approaching spring and summer. let them write letters to the form ii pupils of other schools where similar work has been carried on, giving some of their experiences in gardening and plant and animal studies. a certain friday afternoon might be appointed for hearing the letters read which have been received in reply. suitable short poems that have a direct bearing upon their outdoor studies should be read from time to time. good pictures come in here also as an aid in helping the children to appreciate written descriptions. the first-hand observations made by the pupils will form a basis for the better and more appreciative interpretation of these literature selections. the dog class-room lesson use the conversation method, since this is an animal that is well known to all the pupils. by natural, easy conversation with the pupils, encourage them to tell what they know about the usefulness and the other qualities of their canine friends. the pupils know that some dogs are useful for hunting wild animals, others for driving or herding cattle and sheep, others for guarding their master's property, others for hauling sleighs and wagons, while others are of use as pets or playfellows. discuss with the pupils the qualities that make the dog so generally useful to us. in this discussion, guide the thoughts of the pupils to the qualities of faithfulness, loyalty to his friends, and docility--few animals are so easily taught. note his strength and swiftness--he can continue in a race until he catches almost any other animal. note also his bravery--for he does not hesitate to attack an animal many times larger than himself. short stories of the following type may be told, to illustrate the chief qualities of the dog: a dog was trained to guard any article that his master placed under his charge, and not to permit any one to touch it until his master gave his consent. one day, when returning from the mill, the master placed a sack of flour inside the gate for a neighbour who had asked him to do so, and then continued on his way without noticing that his dog had taken charge of the sack. all through the afternoon of that day and through the long, cold night that followed, the faithful animal remained at his post. when the owner of the sack came next morning to get it, the dog, although numb with cold and famished with hunger, would not permit him to take the flour. nor could the stout-hearted creature be persuaded either by threats or by coaxing, until his master was brought, when, at his first word of command, the dog bounded joyfully toward him. conclude the lesson by a short discussion of the proper care and treatment that should be given to dogs. the dog requires a fairly warm but dry kennel, with a soft bed of straw or rugs. the food should consist chiefly of porridge, milk, bread, biscuit, and a little meat. only dogs that are running a great deal out of doors should be given much meat. the dog should be given bones to pick; picking bones is as good for a dog's teeth as a tooth-brush is for a boy's. observation exercises by making observations upon your dog at home, find answers to these problems: . how does a dog hold a bone while he is picking it, and how does he get the meat off the bone? . examine the dog's feet and find out: ( ) why he does not slip while running. ( ) what protects the soles of his feet from injury as he bounds over rough ground. . which is the sharper, a dog's eye or his nose? watch how he finds his master in a crowd or finds an object that you have hidden. correlations language: . require oral or written reproduction of the stories used in illustration in the lesson on the dog. . require the pupils to relate incidents from dog life that have come within their own experiences. art and modelling: . a sleeping dog. . a dog waiting for his master. lessons involving comparison it will be found helpful, both for increasing interest in the observations and for fixing the facts in memory, to study an animal by comparing its habits, qualities, and physical peculiarities with those of another animal which is somewhat similar. where differences are discovered, explanations of the differences should be developed in such a way that a tendency may be cultivated for interpreting the adaptation of structure to use and of life habits to surrounding conditions. cat and dog compare the movement of a cat when approaching its prey with the movement of the dog when chasing a squirrel. account for the difference. the natural habit of the cat is to hunt alone and rely upon stealth, while dogs hunt in packs and tire their prey by running and by terrifying noises. other differences and their explanations, which the pupils should be led to discover are: the dog is a more useful animal to man than is the cat. the cat's body is longer and more slender, and this gives it greater suppleness in crawling and leaping. the cat's eye is larger and the pupil is especially large at night, to enable it to see. the cat's whiskers are longer; they help in guiding it at night. the cat's tongue is rougher; it uses it for cleaning bones. the pads on the cat's feet are softer, so that it can move more silently in stealing upon its prey. the cat's claws are sharper, because it uses them for seizing its prey, while the dog seizes its prey with its teeth. the dog is more faithful to its master because it is a more sociable animal. in its natural state every dog is faithful to the pack and to the leader; the cat is not a social animal, but is by nature solitary and independent. the dog's sense of smell is keener than that of the cat, but its sense of hearing is less acute. account for these differences from the animals' habits of hunting. why does the cat bring home living animals to her kittens, while the dog buries dead animals? the cat trains the kittens to approach by stealth and then to pounce on the right spot. wild animals related to the dog bury the "kill" which is too large to be eaten at one meal. experiments for assisting in the study of the cat . gently scratch with a pin at some distance from where a cat is lying. what do the movements of the cat indicate? . put a fish in water and watch a cat trying to get it. . sprinkle water on a cat's fur and find out why she dislikes being wetted. . attach a ball to a string and move it near a cat. describe the movements, as stalking, springing, seizing, retreating. . put some catnip in a room out of reach of the cat and observe the movements of the animal. nearly all children make pets of the house cat, and although the cat is a domestic animal of thieving propensities and an enemy of birds, yet it would be unwise to teach the younger children any enmity toward her. the establishment of sympathy with animal life, the humanizing effect upon child nature of having a kitty for a playfellow, will offset many times over the amount of depredation of which she may be guilty. comparison of the horse and cow assign problems for the pupils to solve by observations made upon the animals in the field or farmyard. . what features of build give to the horse greater speed than the cow? . compare the movements of the heads of the horse and cow while cropping grass. account for the difference. . how has nature fitted the cow and the horse respectively, for defence? . which end of the body does the horse raise first when it is getting up? which end of its body does the cow raise first? account for the difference. _to the teacher._--the horse is the swifter and more graceful runner because the body is less bulky and the legs are longer and straighter. in cropping grass the cow pushes its nose forward and breaks the grass off, a process which is made necessary because the cow has no upper front teeth. the strong, sharp horns, short, powerful neck, and heavy shoulders are an efficient equipment for the cow's method of defence, while the long, strong legs and powerful hindquarters of the horse enable it to deal terrific blows with its hard hoofs. the horse rises upon its forelegs before raising the rear of its body, while the cow raises its hindquarters first. the squirrel field exercises ~problems~: is it true that squirrels have little roads along the ground? does the squirrel come down a tree head foremost, or tail foremost? are a squirrel's feet close together or wide apart when it is climbing? how many kinds of feeling can a squirrel express by its voice? how does a squirrel open a nut? examine a squirrel's tracks in the snow; which foot-prints are in front? try to gain the confidence of a squirrel by never chasing it and by placing some favourite food for it. class-room lesson a tame squirrel is very desirable for concrete study. describe the shape, size, and colour. find out how the legs and feet are fitted for climbing and leaping. compare the length of the tail with that of the body. of what use is the tail in cold weather? of what use is the tail in leaping? examine the teeth and find out how they are fitted for opening nuts; gnawing wood. _to the teacher._--the legs of the squirrel are short so that it can press its body close to the tree when climbing. the claws are strong and sharp and the hindquarters are very strong, and are, in consequence, well fitted for leaping. the tail of the squirrel is very long and bushy and serves as a fur for keeping the squirrel's nose warm in winter. the tail is also used for balancing the body when the animal is leaping from bough to bough. the front teeth of the squirrel are very large and strong and are shaped like chisels. winter birds in the class lesson on winter birds, take up the birds that the pupils have seen, such as chickadee, blue jay, quail, ruffed grouse, hairy woodpecker, downy woodpecker, great horned owl, house-sparrow, snow bunting (snow bird), pine grosbeak, snowy owl, and purple finch. the four latter are to be noted as winter visitors. use pictures for illustrating these birds. the habits and winter food of the birds should also be described from the view-point of how these adapt the birds for spending the winter in a cold climate. direct the children to look for grosbeaks in the pine and rowan trees, where they may be seen feeding on the seeds. the ruffed grouse (commonly called partridge) feeds on the buds of trees in winter; its legs and feet are thickly covered with feathers in winter but are bare in summer. field exercises arouse the interest of the pupils by a conversation of about three minutes on birds that they have seen during the winter, and assign the following exercise: take a walk through the orchards and woods on a bright winter day. what birds do you see? what are these birds doing? are they found singly or in flocks? what bird sounds do you hear? class-room lesson the method is conversational and based upon the observations made by the pupils during the field exercises. the discussion would involve the winter habits of some of the more common birds, as, for example, the ruffed grouse (commonly though incorrectly called the partridge). this bird takes shelter from the winter storms in the centre of a dense evergreen or burrows deep into a snow bank. the close covering of feathers upon its feet serves not only to keep the feet warm, but also as snow-shoes. in the evenings these birds may frequently be seen in the tops of such trees as maple, birch, cherry, and poplar, the buds of which form the greater part of their winter food. the snow bird, or snow bunting, is another bird commonly seen in winter. flocks of these hardy little winter visitors frequent the roads and fields during winter. its summer home is in the far north. another visitor from the sub-arctic regions is the pine grosbeak, which is often mistaken for the robin, for these two birds are nearly equal in size. the carmine colour of the upper surface of the male grosbeak distinguishes it from the grays and blacks of the upper part of the robin. the grosbeak frequents the rowan trees. the bird sounds which attract attention during the winter are the cheerful notes of the chickadee, the bold clarion call of the blue jay, and the sharp tap, tap, tap, of the downy woodpecker. the downy woodpecker and the chickadee have snug winter homes within hollow trees, but, when the weather is favourable, they go about searching industriously for the eggs and larvæ of insects that infest forest and orchard trees. correlations literature: do you know the chickadee, in his brownish ashen coat, with a cap so black and jaunty, and a black patch on his throat? language: write a story about the winter experiences of a downy woodpecker. geography: describe the summer home of the snow bird. animals of the zoological gardens pupils who have an opportunity to visit museums or zoological gardens will observe more intelligently if the visit is preceded by such a discussion in the class-room as will arouse their curiosity respecting the habits, movements, and adaptive features of the animals about to be studied. class-room lesson name the kinds of bears you have seen or have read about. what kind was the largest? are all bears wholly flesh-eating animals? find out what food the keepers give these animals. what features give to the bear his great strength? observe the length of his "arms", teeth, claws. does the bear climb a pole in the same way that a boy does? read: rogers. wild animals every child should know. mcclelland, goodchild, & stewart. cents. thompson-seton. wild animals i have known. briggs. $ . . roberts. children of the wild. macmillan. $ . . chapter viii form ii spring garden work the pupils have now arrived at an age when they are able to do most of the work of preparing and planting their own plots. the seeds have been selected and placed in readiness for planting long before the ground is ready. the plans for the garden and the varieties to be sown in the different plots have likewise been arranged. fertilizers, lines, tools, and labels are made ready for use. with such thorough preparation the making and planting of the garden becomes a pleasure and a delight to both teacher and pupils. the garden diary should begin as soon as the snow disappears from the garden and be continued until all the work is completed in the autumn, and the garden again blanketed in snow. the main points to be safeguarded are: . thorough cultivation and fertilization. . the best available seed carefully planted. guard against thick sowing and deep covering. . frequent cultivation and careful thinning while the plants are quite small. . vigilance in detecting the appearance of cutworms or other injurious insects and promptness in combating them. . protection of the garden against injury from dogs, pigs, poultry, and english sparrows. . failure of some plots, through the owner's absence from school for long periods. combating garden pests cutworms in gardens where the soil is light or sandy, cutworms are most likely to be troublesome. watch for them about the time that the plants are nicely above ground. they come up at night and cut the young plants off just above the ground. they are about an inch long, gray and brown, fat and greasy-looking. to protect the plants put one quarter of a pound of paris-green with twenty-five pounds of slightly moistened bran, using a little sugar in the water and stirring the paris-green into the bran very thoroughly. if too wet, add more dry bran. it should crumble through the fingers. sprinkle a little of this mixture with the fingers along the row close to the plants. the cutworms eat this poisoned bran quite readily. care must be exercised in using this poison lest poultry should get at it. on the other hand, poultry should not be allowed to get into the garden. wrapping a piece of paper around the stem when transplanting young plants will help to save them from cutworms. root maggots root maggots of cabbage, radish, and onions are the larvæ of flies similar in appearance to house-flies but a little smaller. when the plants are young, the flies lay their white eggs on the stem close to the ground. when the eggs hatch, the larvæ crawl down under the ground and cause the plants to decay. the wilting of the leaves is the first sign of the trouble. prevention is better than cure in this case. dust some dry white hellebore along the rows of onions or radishes and around the cabbage plants; or, for radishes, make a decoction of insect powder (pyrethrum), four ounces to one gallon of water, and pour around the root, using half a teacupful to each plant. flea-beetles the turnip flea-beetle quickly destroys young plants of the cruciferæ family by eating their leaves. paris-green, one part to twenty parts of pulverized gypsum (land plaster) dusted on the plants while damp, helps to destroy these insects. _to the teacher._--when pupils who are absent find it impossible to give the necessary attention to their garden plots at school, they should turn them over to other pupils or to the teacher, who may at his own discretion use the produce for purposes of general garden revenue. seed germination the seeds for the garden should be purchased quite early in the spring. as the planting of poor seed is often the cause of much disappointment, it is well to test the germinating power of the different varieties to be planted. the pupils of this form should test especially those varieties which they have chosen. to do this, place about twenty-five seeds in a germinating dish, which may be made as follows: take a deep plate, such as a soup plate, fill it about half full of moist sand, and spread over this a piece of moist cloth. put the seeds upon this cloth and cover them with a second piece of damp cloth or moss. to prevent drying out invert over it another plate and set all in a warm dry place (about to degrees f.). after a few days count the number of seeds that have germinated. this will be a guide in planting as to how thick the seed should be sown. the pupils should watch the development of germinating grains, such as corn and beans, germinated in the same way as in the last exercise. the following points may be observed: . the first change noticed. (swelling of the seed) . the appearance of a growing shoot and its direction. (root) . the second shoot and its direction. (stem) . the appearance of the first pair of leaves. . the appearance of root-hairs and rootlets. . what becomes of the main body of the seed. . how the second pair of leaves differs from the first pair. . length of time required to produce the first pair of leaves. pupils may be taught the conditions that are necessary for the germination of seeds by means of a few simple experiments which can be carried on in the school-room. . in february, plant a few seeds of the pea, or oat, or wheat, in a box of soil, and place the box outside the school window. . in april, plant a few seeds similar to those used in no. , in a box of perfectly dry soil, and set the box inside the school window. . plant a few seeds similar to those used in no. , in a jar containing soil that is kept very wet, and set the jar in the school window. . plant a few seeds, similar to those used in no. . in a box containing soil that is moist but not wet, and set the box in the school window. . plant seeds as in no. , except that the box is kept in a dark cupboard. compare the results of the above with reference to: . the number of seeds that germinate. . the growth and condition of the plants. form conclusions with reference to: . the conditions that are required for seed germination. . the benefits of well-drained soil. pupils make drawings showing the boxes and plants. plants for individual plots the pupils of this form should not attempt to grow more than two varieties of flowers and two of vegetables. of flowers, mixed asters and shirley poppy are to be recommended, the poppy being an early blooming flower and the aster late blooming. carrots and radishes are desirable vegetables, as the carrot matures late and the radish early. two or three crops of radishes may be grown on the same ground in one season. besides these, a few others should be chosen for special study, such as the potato, onion, corn, and sunflower. studies based on observations of growing plants attention should be given to the growing habits of plants, the size and rate of development, the method of multiplying and propagation, and the part used for food. the potato is a tuber which is nothing more than the swollen end of an underground stem; the onion a bulb composed of the bases of thickened leaves; the corn an example of a jointed stem or grass having two kinds of flowers, the tassels being the staminate flowers and the cob with its silk the pistillate ones; the sunflower an example of a compound flower made up of many little flowers each of which produces a single seed. observations should also be made upon the progress in germination of the nuts and other tree seeds collected in the fall. when the seeds fall from the elms and soft maples in the spring, some of them should be collected and planted in the forestry plot, or nursery. planting and care of sweet-peas . sow as early as possible in spring. . sow on well-drained land and never in the shade or near grass. grass roots rob the sweet-pea roots of water. . use a small amount of fertilizer--well-rotted manure spaded deeply into the soil. this is best done in the autumn. . make the trench in the fall about five or six inches deep. . plant in a trench in april from half an inch to an inch apart. . cover from three inches to four inches deep. . water thoroughly once or twice a week, and have the soil lower along the row than farther out, so as to hold the water. . put a mulch of lawn clippings along the row on each side to prevent drying out. wild flowers arrange an excursion to the woods when the spring flowers are in bloom. keep a flower calendar, showing: . the date when a plant was first found in bloom . the name of the plant . place where found . name of the pupil who found it. when in the woods discuss the following points: . why these wild flowers come into bloom so early in spring. they have a large supply of food stored up from the previous summer. . dig down with a trowel or heavy knife and find this storehouse of food. it may be in the form of bulb, corm, or rhizome. . the blooming of the spring flowers in the woods before the leaves of the trees reach their full development, thus taking advantage of the sunlight. . mark a few clumps or individual plants and visit them again after a month. look for the growing fruit with its seeds. . the leaves of the hepatica seen at the time when the blossoms appear are leaves which grew the previous season. dig up a plant and notice the new leaves starting. . the kind of soil each seems to grow best in and the amount of light it receives. . have the pupils examine the flowers and leave them growing. they should gather a few for the school-room. . have the pupils write a short account of their visit to the woods. have them make drawings of the different flowers collected. dig up a few specimens of wild flowers and transplant in a shady corner in the grounds or school garden. the following varieties are suggested for special observation and study: hepatica, violet, anemone, columbine, indian turnip, marsh marigold. teach one or two lessons on wild flowers, similar to the lessons illustrated for the nasturtium. weeds pupils in this form should learn to identify most of the weeds that are found in the garden plots and a few of those commonly found in fields and along roadsides. the large bulletin _farm weeds_, published by the dominion department of agriculture, will be of great value in helping to identify the weeds and also in gaining useful information regarding them and the best means of eradicating them. the following species are recommended for special study during the season: mustard (such varieties as are found in the vicinity), canada thistle, purslane, lamb's quarter, pink-rooted pigweed, and quack grass. the pupils should be familiar with the general appearance of the plant; its appearance when coming up in the spring; whether annual, biennial, or perennial; nature of the root, and whether hard to pull up; if hard to eradicate, why so; its rate of growth compared with the garden plants; the number of seeds produced by a single plant; how the seeds are scattered. the apple tree (when the buds are beginning to open) field exercise the pupils, during an excursion that is conducted by the teacher or while making individual observations, obtain answers to problems of the following type: what is the shape of the top of the apple tree? are all apple trees of the same shape? what is the height of the trunk? measure the girth of the trunk of the largest? are the leaf buds and flower buds more numerous near the inside of the tree top or more numerous at the outer part of the top? _to the teacher._--when discussing the answers to the above problems, develop the conception of the convenience of the low stature of the tree for gathering the apples, of the wide-spreading branches for bearing a large crop, of the stoutness of the trunk for supporting the weight, and also of the position of the buds as adapting them for securing sunshine. class-room lesson on the apple tree ~materials.~--twigs bearing flower and leaf buds. these are gathered by the pupils from the apple trees that were studied during the field exercises. each pupil finds on his twig the objects and markings, etc., as in the following outline: describe the shape of the twig. where were the apples that grew last year attached? describe the positions of the buds on the twigs. which buds are the larger, those at the end or those on the side of the twig? describe the condition of the bud scales. open the buds and find what they contain. of what use are the bud scales? how many blossoms are in one bud? of what use to the young leaves is the downy covering? field exercise following class-room lesson (just after the blossoms are fully open) what is the colour of the apple blossom? find the little green cup on which the petals rest. describe the cup. find the other things that are on the rim of, or that are within, the cup. what are they? what insects visit the flowers? does the cup fall off when the petals fall? does the cup close up as soon as the petals fall? what does the green cup grow to be? _to the teacher._--apple trees have somewhat round or pyramid-shaped tops, varying in detail with the variety of apple tree. the twigs are short and usually crooked. the fruit twigs are called spurs. the buds at the ends of the twigs and spurs are the largest and contain both leaves and blossoms, and there are usually several blossoms in each bud. the bud scales burst apart and drop off as the leaves and blossoms develop. the side buds produce leaves only. the petals and pollen boxes are borne on the rim of the green cup, and inside the cup are found the five tips of the seed cases. when the petals drop off, the rim of the cup remains spread out for a short time. this is the proper time for spraying, so that the cup may hold a drop of poison to kill the tiny worms which cause apples to be wormy. it is the green cup that grows and forms the flesh of the apple. orchard trees suitable for lessons for form ii are apple, plum, pear, peach, and cherry. bird study a valuable exercise in bird study, suitable for the pupils of form ii, is the study of a pair of birds and the history of their home through the entire season. a record, with dates, should be kept, and the following topics are suggested for observation: where the nest is located, protection of the nest, part of building done by each bird; eggs, number, colour, size, time required for hatching; young birds, number, description, how fed and upon what foods, time required before ready to leave the nest; history for a time after leaving the nest. birds suitable for study by the pupils of form ii are the crow, flicker, downy woodpecker, blue-bird, chipping-sparrow, phoebe, wren. correlate with art, by requiring drawings and models of the nest and its surroundings, and with language, by having pupils write the history of the nest and family. the toad field exercises direct the pupils to watch for toads under the street lamps and on the lawns in the evenings, and to observe what they are doing. find out, by turning over boards, logs of wood, stones, and old stumps, where toads spend the daytime. if there is a sandy beach near by, an interesting nature lesson is to trace a toad to its daytime retreat under a log or stone. its wanderings and adventures during the night can be traced from the record that its trail makes in the sand. are toads that live in light-coloured sand of the same colour as those that live in black clay? of what value to the toad are these differences in colour? the pupils are thus led to see that although the toad is not a handsome animal, yet its rough, dark skin is of great value to it for concealment among the lumps of soil with which it harmonizes. can a dog be induced to seize a toad? will he seize it as readily a second time as he did the first? the secretion from the glands of the toad have a biting, acid effect on the dog's mouth. this secretion will not injure a person's hands unless the skin is broken, and even then it does not "cause warts". how many toads can you find on your lawn in one evening? how many in the vegetable garden? how many in the flower beds? place a toad on loose soil among some weeds and observe how it proceeds to get out of sight. is it true that a toad is attracted by music? give reasons for your answer. class-room lesson secure a few living toads and keep them in a box covered with a pane of glass. be sure to put moist soil and damp moss in the bottom of the box in which toads, frogs, newts, or snakes are kept. this enables these animals to live in comfort, and they soon become sufficiently accustomed to their surroundings to act in a normal way. ~observation.~--by flicking in front of a toad a small feather or a bit of meat attached to a thread, the darting out of the tongue for catching prey on its adhesive surface may be observed. the children, by bringing slugs, caterpillars, grubs, and various insects for the toads, may learn what composes the food of the animal. it is to be observed that the toad does not snap at an object until it moves. detailed study ~observation.~--general shape; division into head, trunk, and limbs; size of head and mouth; position and structure of eyes and ears; difference in the size of the fore and hind limbs, and explanation of this difference by references to the use of the limbs; the hind foot, uses of the web; the glands on the surface of the body and their uses for protection. why is a large mouth useful? how are the ears fitted for life in water? in conclusion, the teacher should make sure that the pupils appreciate the usefulness of the toad and also the beauty represented in its adaptations to its conditions of life. in these particulars the toad is a good illustration of the adage "handsome is that handsome does". life history of the toad in early spring look for the toads on the surface of the water in ponds. the music of the toads at this time of year has been described by one naturalist as "one of the sweetest sounds of nature". the eggs may be found in these ponds at this time. they are attached to long strings of jelly which entwine among grasses and other objects in the ponds. (frogs' eggs are in masses of jelly, not in strings.) place some of the eggs in a jar of water and set the jar in the window of the school-room. a great mass of eggs is too much to put in a jar, a few dozen eggs in a pint of water will be more likely to develop. the water in the jar should be changed twice a week. ~observations.~--the light and dark areas of the eggs, the dark area gradually increasing in size; the increase in the length of the egg; the gradual change of the dark area into the general shape of a tadpole with head and tail, the first appearance of the gills, the separation from the jelly, the movement by means of the tail, the disappearance of the gills, the growth of the hind legs and, later, of the forelegs, and the disappearance of the tail. ~questions and observations.~--what is the use of the dark colour of the area from which the tadpole is formed? explain the uses of the strings of jelly. describe how the tadpole swims. upon what does the young tadpole feed? what is the advantage of external gills at this stage in the tadpole's life? ~later observations.~--the disappearance of the gills, the budding out of the hind legs and, later, the forelegs. while the legs are growing out, the tail gradually becomes smaller, at the same time the shape changes to that of the adult toad with a broad body and large mouth and eyes. ~questions.~--what movements has the toad which the tadpole did not have? what makes these movements possible? why is the mouth of the toad better suited to its manner of life than the small mouth of the tadpole would be? of what advantage to the tadpole was the smooth outline of its body, and why is the rougher outline of the toad's body better suited for the life of the latter? why would gills be unsuitable for the life of the toad? _to the teacher._--from the dark area of the egg the tadpole develops, the dark colour absorbs the sunlight, and this causes growth. the jelly holds the eggs up so that the sun can reach them and it also keeps them from being swept away by the water. the tadpole is very small, and external gills are needed to keep it in very close contact with the water. the tail does not drop off, the substance in it is absorbed into the body of the growing toad to serve as nutriment. since all the changes in the development of the toad from egg to adult form take place in about one month, this comparatively rapid development makes the life history of the toad particularly suitable for observation work. the development of the eggs of the frog or newt may be studied from preparations made in precisely the same way as those for the study of the development of the toad. if observations on the developments of two forms are carried on at one time, interesting comparisons can be made on such points as, shape and size of the eggs, time required for development, shapes and colours of the tadpoles, activity of the tadpoles, etc. the earthworm ~time.~--may or june, in connection with gardening, when the working of the worms in the moist soil of the garden is quite noticeable. outdoor studies may be assigned, as: observe the loose soil at the entrance to the burrows. insert a straw in the burrow and, following it, dig downward with a garden trowel and learn the nature of the earthworm's home. are earthworms ever found out of their burrows during the day? if so, on what kind of days? why do earthworms burrow deep in dry weather? earthworms can breathe only when the surfaces of their bodies are in moist conditions. go out at night with a lantern to where earthworms are known to have burrows, observe the worms stretched out with the rear ends of their bodies attached to the burrows, and note how quickly they draw back when they are touched. do they draw back if the ground is jarred near them? do they draw back when the light falls upon them? state the facts which are taught by the observations which were made on the above topics. class-room lesson put two or three earthworms into a jar of rich, damp soil, on top of which there is a layer of sand a quarter of an inch thick. put bits of cabbage, onion, grass, and other plants on the surface and cover the jar with a glass slip or cardboard. after a few days, examine the jar, noting the number of burrows, the foods selected, the castings, the food dragged into the burrows. pour water into the jar and observe the actions of the worms. can an earthworm live in water? place an earthworm on a moist plate or board and direct the pupils to study it, as follows: distinguish the head from the rear end, the upper from the lower surface. observe the means of living. to assist in the latter observation, stroke the worm from rear to head and find the four double rows of bristles. why is it difficult to pull an earthworm out of its burrow? find the mouth. has the earthworm any eyes, ears, or nose? place a pin in the path of a moving worm and try to explain why it turns aside before touching the obstacle. test the sensitiveness to feeling. why is it cruel to put an earthworm on a fishhook? from the soil castings found in the jar, infer the value of earthworms for enriching and pulverizing soil. (see "soil studies", p. .) references bailey and coleman: _first course in biology._ macmillan co. $ . . crawford: _guide to nature study._ the copp, clark co. cents. kellogg: _elementary zoology._ holt & co. $ . . the aquarium a large glass aquarium may be purchased from any school supply company at a cost of a few dollars, but a small globe-shaped aquarium such as is used for gold-fishes will be found suitable for school purposes. if it is not possible to secure either of these, a large glass jar, such as a battery jar or large fruit jar, will be found to answer quite well. to set up the aquarium, put into the jar about two inches of clean shore sand (sand from a sand pit, washed until the water comes away clear, will do). secure from a pond some water-plants, place these in the jar with their roots covered with sand and secured in position by small stones. pour in water until the jar is nearly full, taking care not to wash the roots out of place, and then put in a freshwater clam and a few water snails. these are scavengers, for the clam feeds upon organisms that float in the water, while the snails eat the green scum that grows on the glass. the other aquarium specimens may now be put in. one fish about three inches long to a gallon of water is about the right proportion. when there is a sufficient quantity of plant life to keep the water properly oxygenated and enough animal life to supply the carbon dioxide necessary to keep the plants growing well, the aquarium is said to be _balanced_. the balanced aquarium does not require that the water be changed more often than once in two months. too much direct sunlight causes too rapid growth of green slime, hence the aquarium should not be set in a window. close to a window through which the sun shines upon it for an hour or longer each day is the best position. do not supply more food to the animals in the aquarium than they can eat up clean. crayfish, perch, trout, and other freshwater fishes are destructive of insect larvæ and other aquarium specimens, hence care must be taken in selecting the specimens that are put together into an aquarium. suitable animals for the aquarium: mosquito larvæ, dragon-fly larvæ, caddice-fly larvæ, crayfish, clam, water snails, tadpoles, fish, frog, turtle. aquarium specimens mosquito time.--may or june. ~questions and observations.~--at what time of the year are mosquitoes most plentiful? in what localities are they most plentiful? why are they most plentiful in these places? are mosquitoes ever seen during fall or winter? how do you account for their rapid increase in number early in summer? how do mosquitoes find their victims? observe the humming noise and try to discover how it is made. watch a mosquito as it draws blood from your hand. does the point of the beak pierce the skin? capture a number of mosquitoes and place them in a jar containing some water and a few straws or sticks standing upright out of the water. cover the mouth of the jar with a glass plate or fine gauze. watch for the rafts of mosquitoes' eggs on the surface of the water. the eggs may also be found on the surface of ponds or open rain barrels, and may be transferred to water in a jar in the laboratory. study of the adult form note the shape, colour, sucking tube, wings, and legs. compare with the house-fly. distinguish the male insect from the female; the former has feathery feelers, and has mouth parts unsuited for biting. how many kinds of mosquitoes have you seen? direct attention to the kind which causes the spread of malaria. it is recognized by its habit of standing with its body pointing at right angles to the surface on which its feet are placed or, in other words, it appears to stand on its head. the development describe the egg raft. observe the wigglers (hatched in about a day); the divisions of the body of the wigglers; position of the wigglers when at rest. observe that the tail end is upward. lead the pupils to perceive that this is the means of getting air. observe the rapid movement toward the bottom when disturbed; the means of causing this movement; the change into the large-headed pupæ--a change which takes place about ten days after hatching; the almost motionless character of the pupæ; the change from the pupæ forms into the adult--a change which takes place at about the fourth day of pupæ life. put some mosquito larvæ (wigglers) into the fish aquarium. are mosquitoes of any use? the wigglers are the food on which some young fishes live. young bass and trout feed upon them. put some kerosene on the surface of a jar in which there are mosquito larvæ. describe a method of destroying mosquitoes. the teacher tells about the mosquito as the cause of the spread of malaria. from the fact that the eggs hatch on stagnant water, deduce a benefit arising from the draining of land. references silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_ hodge: _nature study and life_ caddice-fly time: may. the caddice-flies are very interesting insects, owing to the habits of the larvæ of building little cases of wood, stones, or shells, in which they pass their development stages under water. these larvæ are easily found during the month of may in little streams of water everywhere throughout the province. look for what at first sight appears to be a bit of twig or a cylinder of stone about an inch long moving along the bottom as though carried by currents. closer observation will result in the discovery that this is a little case composed of grains, of bits of stick, or of sand and tiny shells, and the head of the occupant may be seen projecting from one end. collect some of these larvæ in a jar of water and transfer them to the aquarium. direct the pupils to look for others in the streams, so that they may observe their appearances and movements in their natural environment. if kept in jars, the water must be changed every day, and the top should be covered to prevent the escape of the adults. ~observe.~--the shape of the various kinds of cases; the materials, and how fastened together (chiefly by silk); the part of the larva that protrudes from the case; the movement, and how caused; the fitness of the case as a protection. note hardness, colour, and shape as protective features. the pupils will be fortunate if they observe the sudden rise of the larva to the surface of the water and the almost instantaneous change into the four-winged fly. insects suitable for lessons in form ii walking-stick insect, katydid, cricket, mole-cricket, clothes-moth, giant water-bug, potato beetle, click-beetle, luna moth, and swallow-tail butterfly. chapter ix form iii autumn garden work the pupils in this form should be able to do all of the work required of them in the garden without assistance. they should aim at intensive and thorough cultivation and, in the autumn, when the plants of their gardens ripen, these should be removed and the soil carefully spaded. they should continue the work of selecting the seed from the best flowers, as indicated in the work for form ii, and should grow some seed from vegetables and perennials seen to be particularly good. boys in this form may also wish to do some gardening for profit. in some cases where there is plenty of space, this may be carried on in a part of the school garden set aside for that purpose. usually, however, it will be found most convenient to carry it on in the home garden. best varieties for local markets should then be grown and attention given to the proper time and manner of marketing or storing for a later market. cool, well-ventilated cellars are best for most fruits and vegetables. treatment of fungi during the summer and early autumn months attention should be given to the spraying of plants for blight and for injurious insects. the potato is commonly affected by a fungous disease which causes the stalks to blacken and die before the tubers have matured. this disease may be prevented in large measure by the use of a fungicide known as bordeaux mixture. this may be prepared as follows: take one pound of copper sulphate (blue vitriol); make it fine by pounding it in a bag or cloth and then dissolve it in water, using a wooden pail. it dissolves rapidly if put in a little cheese-cloth sack, which is suspended near the top of the pail by putting a stick across the pail and tying the sack of copper sulphate to it. dilute this solution to five gallons. take also a pound of unslaked or quick-lime and add a cupful of water to it. when it begins to swell up and get hot, add more water slowly, and, when the action ceases, dilute to five gallons. mix these two solutions together in a tub or barrel, and churn them up, or stir them together vigorously. they give a deep robin's-egg-blue mixture, which is slightly alkaline and should be used at once. the solutions can be kept separate as stock solutions throughout the summer and then diluted and mixed whenever needed. care should be observed in not mixing the solutions before each has been diluted to the strength, one pound to five gallons. a piece of blue litmus paper will be convenient to prove that the mixture is alkaline. if alkaline, as it should be, the paper remains blue when dipped in it. if the mixture turns the litmus paper red, it must have more lime-water added to make it alkaline. the potato tops should be thoroughly sprayed with this mixture when about ten inches high and then once every two weeks, until they have been treated three or four times. this is to prevent blight and not to kill bugs. if the potato-beetle is troubling the potatoes, add paris-green to the bordeaux mixture--a teaspoonful to every two gallons. to prove the value of this treatment have a trial plot of potatoes which receive all attention save spraying with bordeaux mixture. if a heavy rain should follow the spraying, it should be repeated. potato-scab may be prevented to a large degree by soaking the tubers before cutting for planting in a solution of formalin (a -per cent. solution of formaldehyde) one-half pint to fifteen gallons of water. seed grain is frequently treated this way before sowing, to destroy smut spores. a pound of formalin is put in forty gallons of water in a large barrel. a bag full of the grain to be treated is set in the barrel of formalin mixture for about two hours and then taken and dried on a floor that has been previously washed with water containing formalin. a solution of copper sulphate (bluestone), one pound in twenty gallons of water is sometimes used. the grain is left in this solution for twelve hours and then dried for sowing. all bags and utensils should also be disinfected with this formalin solution. treatment of insects in order to poison insects successfully, it is necessary to determine how the insect feeds. if it is a biting insect, that is one that eats the leaf, such as the potato beetle, paris-green should be used. paris-green sometimes burns the tender leaves. this may be prevented by adding a tablespoonful of lime to each pail of water used. it may also be used dry with flour or dust. if the insect feeds by sucking the juices from the leaf, as is the case with plant-lice, then a solution that kills by contact must be used, such as whale-oil soap, one ounce to a quart of water. tobacco-water is sometimes mixed with the soap solution as follows: four pounds of tobacco-waste is steeped in nine gallons of hot water for five hours; this is then strained, and to the tobacco-water one pound of whale-oil soap dissolved in one gallon of hot water is added and mixed thoroughly. kerosene emulsion, which is made as follows, is very destructive to plant-lice and scale insects: dissolve a quarter of a pound of common laundry soap in half a gallon of rain-water and, while hot, mix with one gallon of coal-oil and churn vigorously for five minutes to get a smooth, creamy mixture. on cooling, it thickens and is diluted before using by adding nine quarts of warm water to one quart of the emulsion. use smaller quantities in correct proportions when only a few plants are to be treated. cabbage-worm the larvæ of the cabbage-butterfly sometimes do a great deal of harm by eating the cabbage leaves. it will not do to use paris-green on cabbage, as the leaves are for eating. instead, use pyrethrum or insect powder, which may be diluted by mixing with cheap flour--one ounce of insect powder to five of flour. mix thoroughly and leave in a closed tin over night. dust the mixture on the leaves from a cheese-cloth bag by tapping with a small stick or from a dusting-pan. if used while the dew is on the leaves, it sticks better. insect powder is not poisonous to man as is paris-green, and so may be used freely on cabbage or other similar plants. plants annuals, biennials, and perennials class-room lesson by means of questions based upon the pupils' knowledge of a few common annuals, such as the oat, sweet-pea, and garden aster, develop the following points: . these plants are always grown from seeds. . these plants produce flowers and ripe seeds during one season's growth. . these plants wither and die in the autumn. plants having these characteristics are called _annuals_. the teacher explains the meaning of the word and requires the pupils to name a few other annuals. in a similar way, discuss a few common types of _biennials_, such as turnip, cabbage, hollyhock, and develop the following points: . these plants produce no flowers and seeds during the first year of their life. . these plants, during the first year, lay up a store of food in roots, leaves, or stems. . the food is used in the second year of the plant's life to nourish the flowers and seeds. a biennial should be grown for two years in the school garden to furnish material for concrete study. in a similar way discuss a few common types of _perennials_, such as rhubarb, dahlia, apple tree, and develop the following points: . these plants may or may not produce seeds during the first year's growth. . some of these plants are herbs, but most of them are trees and shrubs. . food is stored in roots or stems to provide for early spring growth. . these plants live on from year to year. garden studies annuals ~observations.~--some plants, such as poppy and candy-tuft, are early blooming, while others, such as aster and cosmos, bloom in late summer, hence a selection should be made that will yield a succession of bloom throughout the season. some are hardy annuals which can be grown from open planting, even when the weather is cold. these often seed themselves; for example, sweet-pea, morning-glory, phlox, poppy, sweet-alyssum. some are half-hardy annuals, such as asters, balsams, stocks, and nasturtiums. these must be started indoors or in hotbeds, or if in plots, not until the soil is quite warm. the heights of annuals vary, and consequently they must be arranged in the bed in such a way that tall plants will not shade the short ones. biennials ~observations.~--during the first year food is stored in the root of the turnip, carrot, parsnip, and beet, in the leaves of the cabbage, and in the stem of the hollyhock. flowers and seeds are produced during the second year, and the storehouse becomes empty, dry, and woody. preparation for winter is therefore, in the case of biennials, preparation for a renewal of growth the following spring. perennials ~observations.~--the highest forms of plant life are found in this class; namely, the strong, large, hardy trees and shrubs. the herbaceous perennials are equipped with underground parts that act as storehouses of food to ensure the growth of the plant through successive seasons. examples: the roots of dahlia, rhubarb, dandelion, and chicory; the underground stems of potato, onion, tulip, scutch-grass, canada thistle, etc. many of the wild flowers that bloom in early spring belong to this class, and their rapid growth then is made possible by the store of food in the underground parts. examples: trillium, bloodroot, squirrel-corn, indian turnip, solomon's seal, etc. special study of garden plants a few plants should be selected for special study, and the following are recommended: annuals--sweet-pea, pumpkin, and corn; biennials--cabbage, parsnip, and carrot; perennials--dahlia, rhubarb, and couch-grass. it is desirable that the observations be made upon the plants in the garden, but they may be conducted in the class-room upon specimens brought into the room by the pupils. sweet-pea examine the stem of the sweet-pea and describe its form, its uniform slender structure, and the fact that it climbs. find out just how it climbs. the pupils will observe the tendrils, which are extensions of the midribs of the leaves. describe the leaves, noting what is meant by calling them _compound_. observe the position of the flower, its colours, odour, size, and form. what insect does it resemble in shape? what different features of the flower enable it to attract attention? the names and uses of the floral organs may be taught to this class. for example: pupils find the green blanket that protects the bud. this is the _calyx_. the beautiful, attractive part is the _corolla_. the parts that produce the pollen are called _stamens_. the case that holds the seeds is the _pistil_. examine flowers of different ages and trace the change from the minute pistil to the pod. study, comparatively, the flowers of the field-pea, bean, or wild vetch. select a few of the finest blossoms of the sweet-pea and put tags on them while they are still in bloom. when they ripen, collect the seeds and preserve them for spring planting. conduct observation lessons on the pumpkin and corn, in which the pupils will discover such facts as those given below. pumpkin notice the method of growth--the stem no stronger than that of the sweet-pea, but lying flat on the ground. notice the little roots sent out here and there where the stem touches the ground. this gives extra nourishment. the leaves are not numerous and grow only in one direction, but are very large--entirely too large to be borne upon an upright stem. notice the large funnel-like flowers and that not all of them set fruit. examine the flowers. some of them have stamens for producing pollen, but no pistil. these never produce fruit, for pumpkins are simply enlarged and ripened pistils. look for insects and examine them to find out whether they are carrying pollen. notice younger pumpkins and even blossoms toward the end of the vine. pick all the blossoms and small pumpkins off a vine, leaving only one of the best growing pumpkins. see whether this one grows larger than one of equal age on a vine having young pumpkins developing on it. notice the arrangement of the seeds inside a ripe pumpkin. collect some seeds, wash clean, and dry for spring planting. it is desirable to plant pumpkins late in may, so that they will have flowers on their vines as late as september. study the flowers of the cucumber and compare them with those of the pumpkin. corn this plant is native to america, was greatly prized by the aborigines, and even worshipped by some of them. note the upright character of the plant and how the stalk is divided into sections by the joints, or nodes. count these joints and also the leaves, and note the relationship of leaves and joints in the stalk, and how the leaves come off in different directions so as not to shade each other. note the strong, stringy threads in the leaf, which give strength to the leaf as well as circulation of sap. they are strong and elastic, allowing of movement. the same strengthening fibres are seen in the stalk when it is broken across. in the stalk these fibres are arranged in a tubular form, as this gives greatest strength, the centre being soft and weak. the stalks are largest near the base, where the greatest stiffness is required. the nodes are also closer together here for strength. the stem is made much stronger by the bases of the leaves being wrapped so firmly around for a distance above the point of attachment at the node. notice the close-fitting sheath or rain-guard, where the blade of the leaf leaves the stalk. this prevents rain soaking down inside the leaf sheath, but lets it run down the outside to the root where it is needed. as the plant gets older and taller, new roots come out from the node next above the root and sometimes from the second node above. these prop-roots are needed for support as the stalk lengthens, and they also reinforce the feeding capacity. note the appearance of little cobs in the axils of the leaves. as soon as the silk appears, take a cob off and open it carefully. the little cob, which corresponds to the pistil in other plants, is covered with small and undeveloped kernels, and to each kernel one of the strands of so-called silk is attached. whilst this little cob is forming, a bunch, or tassel, of flowers is forming on the top of the corn plant. open one of these flowers and find the stamens with pollen-grains inside. this pollen, when shed, falls upon the silk, and each grain sends a tiny tube down inside the silk to the delicate ovules on the cob, fertilizing them and starting them to develop. the silk then withers. the wind carries this pollen. find out how the silk is fitted for catching the pollen. what is the need for the great quantity of pollen that the plant produces? strip off the husks and compare the tough, hard husks that are found on the outside with the soft paper-like husks found close to the cob. show how each kind is fitted for its particular work. pupils make experiments in the corn plot to find: . whether the corn grows faster: ( ) when the soil is kept mellow or when the soil is hard; ( ) when the days are warm or when they are cool; ( ) when the nights are cool or when they are warm. . the effect of growing black corn and golden corn in the same or in adjoining plots. account for the result. correlations art: clay-modelling and drawing exercises on the whole plant, and also upon the ear. literature: interpretation and reading of "blessing the corn-fields", from _hiawatha_. history: the name indian corn originated in the early colonial days of the eastern and central states, when the pioneers obtained corn from the indians. the indians showed the settlers how to kill the trees by girdling and how to plant the corn among the standing trunks, and thus have corn ready for roasting by august, and for grinding into meal or for boiling to make hominy by september. seed dispersal the lessons on seed dispersal which were begun in form i should be continued in this form. i. lesson select a few weeds belonging to species which produce large numbers of seeds, such as wild mustard, white cockle, false-flax, etc. distribute the seed pods among the pupils of the class and require them to estimate the number of seeds produced by each plant. by references to observations made in the garden, help the pupils to recall the bad results, both to parent plants and to young seedlings, of improper scattering of seeds, namely: . the excessive crowding and shading, which causes the plants to become weak. . insufficient food and moisture for the large number of plants, which causes the plants to be small and worthless. discuss how the crowding of cultivated plants is prevented and, in a general way, how nature provides for the scattering of seeds. the great work of the plant is the production and dispersal of its seeds. ask the pupils to be on the alert to find examples of plants in which provision is made for the dispersal of the seeds, and to bring these plants to the class for the next lesson. detailed study of seed dispersal ii. class-room lesson make use of the specimens gathered by the pupils and by the teacher for observing and classifying as follows: . seeds that steal rides. examples--burdock, blue burr, pitch-fork weed, barley, stick-tight, hound's tongue. . seeds that are carried in edible fruits which have attractive colours, tastes, etc. examples--apple, grape, cherry, rowan, hawthorn. . seeds that are carried by the wind. examples--dandelion, thistle, milkweed, maple, pine, elm. . seeds that are scattered by being shot from bursting pods. examples--violet, jewel-weed (touch-me-not), sweet-pea, witch-hazel. . seeds that are scattered by plants which are rolled along by the wind. examples--russian thistle, tumble-mustard, tumble-grass. . seeds that float. very many seeds float, although not specially fitted for floating, and some, such as the cocoa-nut and water-lily, are especially adapted for dispersal by water. _to the teacher._--require the pupils to observe the special structure that facilitates the dispersal of the seed. as an illustration, ask the pupils to find the seeds of the burdock and to describe what the burr is really like. they find that the burr is a little basket filled with seeds. the basket has many little hooks which catch on the hair of animals and, since these hooks turn inwards, they serve to hold the basket in such a position that all the seeds are not likely to drop out at one time. the pupils should also observe that these baskets are quite firmly attached to the parent plant until the seeds are ripe; after that the baskets break off the plant at the slightest pull. seed collections during late summer and in the autumn the seeds of the weeds that have been identified by the pupils should be collected. instruct the pupils to rub the ripened seed pods between the hands until the seeds are thrashed out, at the same time blowing away the chaff. the seeds are now placed in small phials or in small envelopes and these are carefully labelled. if possible, fill each phial so that there may be sufficient seed for use by all the members of the class in the lessons on seed description and identification which are to be taken during the winter months, when nature study material is less plentiful than it is in the summer and autumn. the phials or envelopes may be stored in a shallow box, or the phials may be mounted on a stout card. they may be attached to this card either by stout thread sewed through the card and passing around the phial, or by brass cleats, which may be obtained with the phials from dealers in nature study supplies. man as a disperser of seeds man as an agent in the dispersal of seeds should be made a topic for discussion. obtain, through the pupils, samples of seed-grain, clover seed, timothy seed, turnip seed, etc. ask the pupils to examine these and count the number of weed seeds found in each. the results will reveal a very common way in which the seeds of noxious weeds are introduced. describe the introduction from europe to the wheat-fields of the prairie provinces of such weeds as russian thistle, false-flax, french-weed. the seeds of these weeds were carried in seed-grain, fodder for animals, and also in the hay and straw used by the immigrants as packing for their household goods. careful farmers will not allow thrashing-machines, seed drills, fanning-mills, etc., to come from farms infested with noxious weeds to do work upon their farms, nor will they buy manure, straw, or hay that was produced on dirty farms. the sugar maple field exercises select a convenient sugar maple as a type. ask the pupils to observe and to describe the height of the tree, the height of the trunk below the branches, the shape and size of the crown, the diameter of the trunk, the colour of the bark, the markings on the bark, the number and direction of the branches, and the density of the foliage. compare the density of the foliage with that of other kinds of trees. require the pupils to make a crayon drawing of the tree. examine the crop of grain produced near a shade tree. compare the crop on the north side of the tree with that on the south side. account for the difference. is the crop around the tree inferior to that in the rest of the field? find out how long the various sugar maple shade trees in the locality have been planted. is it a tree of rapid or slow growth? are these sugar maples infested with insects or attacked by fungi? do these trees yield sap that is suitable for making maple syrup? examine trees that have been tapped and find whether the old wounds become overgrown or cause decay. find out all you can about the uses that are made of maple wood. _to the teacher._--the sugar maple is the most highly prized of our native trees for ornament and shade. it grows fairly rapidly and becomes a goodly-sized tree within twenty years after it is planted. the symmetrical dome-shaped crown and the dense foliage of restful dark green give to it a fine appearance. it is hardy and has few insect pests, and its value is enhanced by the abundant yield of rich sap. as a commercial tree it has few superiors; the wood is hard and durable and takes a high polish. it is used for flooring, furniture, boat building, for the wooden parts of machinery and tools, and for making shoe-pegs and shoe lasts. as fuel maple wood is surpassed only by hickory. maple leaves class-room lesson the pupils bring to the class leaves of the sugar maple. each pupil is provided with a leaf and makes direct observations under the guidance of the teacher. ~observations.~--colour, dark green on the upper surface, lighter green on the lower surface. surface smooth and shiny. shape: star-shaped, broader than long. lobes: usually five, often three; each lobe has usually two large teeth. base has a heart-shaped notch; petiole long and slender, usually red. veins are stiff and run out to the points of the teeth. distribute leaves of the _red_ maple and ask the pupils to note the general resemblance. next ask them to compare the leaves as to shape, texture, and teeth on the margin. ask the pupils to find red maple trees and also to find maples with leaves that are different from those of the red maple and those of the sugar maple. make a collection of maple leaves when they are in autumn colours. (see collections, page , in general method.) _to the teacher._--the leaves of the red maple are longer than broad, and are not so smooth and shiny as the leaves of the sugar maple. there are numerous "saw teeth" on the margins of the lobes. the silver maple, with leaves having silver-white under surfaces, is another common species. a lesson similar to that on leaf studies may be based on the fruits (keys) of the maples. the oak, ash, elm, beech, or birch may be taken up in lessons similar to those outlined for the study of the maple. correlations with literature and reading: by interpreting "the maple", _the ontario readers, third book_, page ; with art: by sketching the tree and reproducing the autumn leaves in colour work. weed studies in every locality there are about a dozen weeds that are particularly troublesome, and the pupils of form iii should be taught to identify these and to understand the characteristics which make each weed persistent. to produce these results it will be necessary to have exercises such as the following: . the teacher exhibits a weed to the pupils and directs their attention to a few of the outstanding features of the plant. . the pupils are required, as a field exercise, to observe where the weed is abundant; and whether in hay field, pasture, hoe crop, or in grain. the pupils will bring specimens to the class. . detailed study in the class of specimens of the weed brought by the pupils to find offensive odours and prickles, also the character of the leaves, flowers, seed pods, and seeds, including the means of dispersal; the underground parts, whether underground stem, tap-root, or fibrous root, and the value of the underground parts as a means of persistence. . the pupils make a collection of the weeds that have been studied. (see plant collection, page , in general method.) . the pupils make collections of the seeds of the weeds that have been studied. observation lesson on weed seeds the seed of a weed should always be exhibited and studied in association with a fresh or a mounted specimen of the weed. each pupil should use a hand lens in examining the seed. the pupils examine the seed of each species and describe it according to the following scheme: name of seed _colour:_ _size:_ (in fractions of an inch) _shape:_ _details:_ _occurrence:_ the results of the pupils' study of the ox-eye daisy would then appear in the following form: seed of ox-eye daisy _colour:_ black and greenish-white in stripes, _size:_ one sixteenth of an inch, _shape:_ club-shaped, _details_: grooved lengthwise, yellow peg in large end, _occurrence:_ a common impurity in grass seed. grasshopper (consult the manual on _suggestions for teachers of science_: zoology, first year.) the ease with which this insect may be obtained in august or september, together with its fairly large size, makes it a suitable specimen for insect study. it is also a typical insect, so that a careful study serves as a basis for a knowledge of the class _insecta_. field exercises problems to be assigned for outdoor observation: locomotion by flying, leaping, walking; protective coloration and habit of "lying low"; its behaviour when caught; in what kinds of fields it is most plentiful; in what kinds of weather it is most active; its position on the grass or grain when feeding; the nature and extent of the damage done by it. use a class period for discussion of the above. confirm, correct, or incite to more careful observation. class-room lesson (studied as a typical insect) ~observations.~--the three divisions of the body--head, thorax, abdomen; the segmental division of the two latter parts; the hard, protecting covering; the movements of the abdomen; the two large compound eyes and three small eyes; the feelers; the two pairs of mouth feelers; the cutting mandibles; the three pairs of legs (one pair for leaping) and two pairs of wings on the thorax; the breathing pores, the ears, ovipositors of the female. the young grasshoppers may be found in spring or early summer, and a few even in late summer, among the grass of old meadows and pastures. they are easily recognized because of their general resemblance to the adult and are in the stage of development called the _nymph_ phase. note the hairy body and the absence of wings. _to the teacher._--the moulting of the nymph is a very interesting process to observe and so is the laying of the eggs by the female in a burrow that she prepares in the soil. if females secured in july are kept in a jar having two inches of soil in the bottom, they will lay their eggs in the soil; the nests and eggs may then be taken up and examined. in order that we may not destroy our friends and helpers, it is expedient to know what creatures help to hold pests in check. the enemies of grasshoppers are birds and insect parasites. under the wings of grasshoppers may frequently be found little red mites; these kill the grasshoppers to which they are attached. the blister-beetles lay their eggs in the grasshoppers' nests, and the larvæ of the beetles feed upon and destroy the eggs. the birds that are especially useful in destroying grasshoppers are the meadow-lark, crow, bobolink, quail, grasshopper sparrow. the curious hairlike worms known to the school boys as "hair snakes" because of the belief that they are parts of horse hairs turned into snakes, are worms that pass the early part of their life within the bodies of grasshoppers and, when the insects die, the worms escape and are washed by rains into troughs and ponds where their movements attract attention. study the cricket and house-fly and compare the cricket with the grasshopper. aphides in september obtain leaves of sweet-pea, apple, rose bush, maple, oak, turnip, etc., on which the insects are feeding; also provide specimens of woolly aphides on the bark of apple trees or stems of goldenrod or alder. observe the nature of the injury to the leaves and plants on which these insects feed. do the insects bite the leaves or suck the juices? give evidence in support of your answer. sprinkle paris-green on the leaves; does this kill the insects? why does it not? spray the insects with a little oil, such as kerosene, or with water in which the stub of a cigar has been soaked; what is the effect? insects that suck juices from inside the leaf escape the poisoning from solutions in the leaf surfaces; such insects are killed by oils which enter the breathing pores and cause poisoning. search in the garden, orchard, and forest for plants attacked by aphides. carefully observe the lady-birds that are frequently found where there are aphides. lady-birds (also called lady-bugs), are small, spotted beetles, broad oval in form, of bright colours, red and black, or yellow and black, or black and white. they are of great service to the farmer and gardener because their foods consists largely of plant-lice (aphides). watch the action of ants which are found among the aphides. the ants may be observed stroking the aphides with their feelers, causing the aphides to excrete a sweet fluid on which the ant feeds. aphides are sometimes called ant-cows. direct the attention of the pupils to the difference between the male and female aphides; the males have wings, but the females are wingless. tomato worm the adult the adult moth may be captured on spring evenings when the lilacs are in bloom, as it buzzes about among the lilac blossoms sucking their honey. it is frequently mistaken for the humming-bird when thus engaged. it may also be observed during the summer evenings laying its eggs on the leaves of tomato vines. observe the worms that hatch from these eggs and note their rapid growth. keep the larvæ in a box in the school-room and feed them on tomato leaves. note their size and colour, the oblique stripes on the sides, the horn which is used for terrifying assailants, the habit of remaining rigid for hours--hence the name sphinx moth. the larvæ burrow into the ground in september to form the chrysalides, hence there should be soil in the vivarium in which they are kept. the chrysalis ~observations.~--the shape, colour, nature of the covering, the long handle, the wing impressions, the segmental part, the emergence of the adult in may or early june. what organ of the insect was contained in the "handle" of the chrysalis? the adult is one of the handsomest of moths, because of its graceful, clear-cut shape and the variegated grays and yellows of its dress. look on poplar, cotton-wood, plum, and pine trees, and on tobacco plants for relatives of the tomato worm, the large green larvæ whose chrysalis and adult forms resemble those of the tomato worm. the crow crows are so plentiful that there will be no difficulty in making observations on the living birds in the free state in spring or summer. (as the crow is a bird that is easily tamed, it may be possible to have a tame crow in the class-room for more careful study of the details of structure.) ~observations.~--describe its attitude when perched, movements of the wings in flight, speed of flight. why does the crow perch high up in trees? what gives to the crow its swift flight? study the various calls of the crow and note the alarm, threat, summons, and expression of fear. find the nest and note its position, size, build, materials, eggs, and young. how is the nest concealed? what makes it strong? are crows often seen on the ground? do they walk or hop? observe and report on the crow's habits of feeding. it eats corn, potatoes, oats, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, cutworms, and occasionally birds' eggs or young birds. why do king-birds chase and thrash the crow? are scarecrows effective in keeping crows off the grain fields? note the sentinels that are on the watch to warn other crows of danger. give reasons for the belief that the crow is a wise bird. give reasons for regarding the crow as a neighbour of doubtful character. give reasons why crows should be protected. note.--crows will not pull up corn and seed that has been covered with coal-tar before it is planted. in addition to the animals already named, the musk-rat, raccoon, fox, flying-squirrel, robin, wren, and king-bird will be found convenient for study in many localities. the swimming of the musk-rat, and how its shape, fur, feet, and tail fit it for a life in water are topics suitable for observational exercises, as are also its food, its winter home, and the burrows leading from the water into the banks. in the case of the winter home, the location, the structure, the submerged entrance, the living-room, and the surrounding moat, are topics of interest. correlations with literature: by reading animal stories, such as, _the kindred of the wild_ and "red fox," by charles g. d. roberts; and _wild animals i have known_, by ernest thompson-seton. with language: by oral and written descriptions of the animals that have been observed. chapter x form iii winter care of plants in the home the care of flowering bulbs which was begun in form i will be continued in form ii. the growing of new plants from cuttings will now be taken up. in those schools which are kept continuously heated, potted plants may be kept throughout the year. the pupils will come to appreciate the plant's needs and learn how to meet them in the supply of good soil, water, and sunlight. the following points should be observed: . good potting soil can be made by building up alternating layers of sods and stable manure and allowing this compost to stand until thoroughly rotted. a little sharp sand mixed with this forms an excellent soil for most house plants. . thorough watering twice a week is better than adding a little water every day. . the leaves should be showered with water once a week to cleanse them from dust. . an ounce of whale-oil soap dissolved in a quart of water may be used to destroy plant-lice. common soap-suds may also be used for this purpose, but care should be taken to rinse the plants in clean water after using a soap wash. . most plants need some direct sunlight every day if possible, although most of the ferns grow without it. . plants usually need re-potting once a year. many kinds may be set out-of-doors in flower beds in may and left until september, when they may be taken up and placed in pots, or cuttings made from them for potting. . a flower exhibition at the school once or twice a year, or at a local exhibition, adds to the interest. . the pupils should report to the teacher from time to time the progress of their plants and make many drawings showing their development. plant cuttings the pupils will be interested to know that it is possible to produce new plants without waiting for them to grow up from the seed. it will indeed be quite a surprise to them to see a new plant complete in all its parts grow up from a small piece of stem, root, or even leaf. with a little care even children may propagate plants in this way. selection of cuttings begin with some of the common herbaceous bedding-plants, such as geranium, coleus, or fuschia. these are such common bedding-plants that they are easily obtained in the autumn. only well-matured stems of the season's growth, such as will break with a slight snap when bent, should be used. let the pupils provide themselves with sharp knives for the lesson, with small boxes or pots, and with some moist, clean sand--not potting soil. a few holes should be bored in the bottom of the box, then a layer of fine gravel put in to provide for good drainage, and over it layers of moist sand. take a slip or growing end of a stem about three inches in length, always cutting it at or just below a node, or joint, and leaving only a couple of small leaves on the top of the slip. insert it to about half its depth in the box of moist sand. these cuttings may be placed a few inches apart in the box, which should then be placed in a warm, light room for a few weeks until the roots develop. the cuttings should be partly shaded by papers from the strong sunlight, and the sand kept slightly moist but not wet. bottom heat and a moist, warm atmosphere hasten their development. another very convenient and very successful method of starting cuttings is to take a six-inch flower-pot, put two inches of fine gravel in the bottom, set a four-inch unglazed flower-pot in the centre, and fill up the space around it with sand and garden-loam, mixed. put a cork in the hole in the bottom of the small flower-pot, and then fill it with water. put the cuttings around in the space between the two pots and set in a fairly warm room in moderate light. potting of rooted cuttings when the cuttings are well rooted, which requires from three to six weeks according to the variety and growth conditions furnished, they should be carefully lifted with a trowel and each set in a small pot or can. first put in the bottom a few small stones to secure drainage, and then a little good potting soil. set the plant in place and fill in around with more soil and pack this firmly around the roots. keep room in the top of the pot for water. when the new plant has made some growth, it may be shifted to a larger pot. geraniums and coleus (foliage plants) should not be kept more than two seasons. take cuttings off the old plants and then throw the latter away. evergreens in december make a study of canadian evergreens, choosing spruce, balsam, and cedar, if available, or substitute hemlock for any one of these. compare the general features of these trees, such as shape, direction of branches, colour, persistence of leaves through the winter. have the pupils notice how nature fits these trees to endure the snows and storms of winter by: . the tapering cone which causes the snow to slide off the tree. . the fine, needle-shaped leaves to which only very sticky snow will adhere. . the very tough, flexible, and elastic branches, which bend in the wind and under the weight of snow, but spring back to their old positions. . the resin in leaves, stems, and buds, which enables the trees to resist frost and rain. teach the pupils to distinguish these trees by their differences in colour and form and also by the differences in their leaves and cones. class-room lesson distribute small twigs of balsam and require the pupils to observe and describe the length, shape, and colour of the leaves. next distribute small twigs of spruce and require the pupils to compare the spruce leaves with those of the balsam in length, shape, and colour. next distribute twigs of cedar and proceed similarly. the cones may be dealt with in a similar manner. require the pupils to make a census of the evergreens of the locality, recording the class of evergreen, the size, and the use of each kind for shade, ornament, or for commercial purposes. _to the teacher._--the balsam, spruce, and hemlock are difficult for the beginner to distinguish, but this may be done by noting the following points of difference in their leaves: the leaf of the hemlock is the only one that has a distinct leaf-stalk. look for this tiny stalk. the leaf of the hemlock, like that of the balsam, is flat, but the hemlock leaf is much the shorter. the leaf of the spruce is not flat, but is three-sided or nearly so. its colour is uniform, while the under surface of the hemlock leaf, and also of the balsam leaf, is of a decidedly lighter colour than the upper surface. note that the spruce _type_ is studied; no attempt is made at this stage to differentiate the several species of spruce. collection of wood specimens during the winter months the boys may prepare specimens of wood for the school collection. these specimens should be cut when green, and dried afterwards. they should be uniform in length--not more than six inches--and should show the bark on one side. the side showing the bark should be two inches wide at most, six inches long, and running in a v-shaped, radial section toward the pith. a tangential section also shows well the rounded layers. a piece of slab as cut lengthwise off a round stick is tangential. care should be taken not to mutilate trees in taking these specimens. specimens of rare or foreign woods may be obtained at wood-working factories. related reading winter is nature's quiescent period. continuous active observation in the out-of-doors among the plants of the forest and garden gives place for a time to indoor work and reflection. pupils need time for reading and reflection, and no time is so opportune as the quiet winter season. during these months some time should be devoted to the reading of nature stories and extracts from magazines and books dealing with plant as well as with animal life. pupils should review their gardening experiences and discuss plans of improvement for the approaching spring and summer. let them write letters to the form ii pupils of other schools where similar work has been carried on, and give some of their experiences in gardening and other plant studies, and also in animal studies. a certain friday afternoon might be appointed for hearing the letters read which were received in reply. suitable short poems that have a direct bearing upon the outdoor studies should be read from time to time. good pictures also come in here as an aid in helping the pupils to appreciate written descriptions. the first-hand observations made by them will form a basis for the better and more appreciative interpretation of these literature selections. for observation lesson on weed seeds, see page . how animals prepare for winter ~introduction.~--discuss the preparations that people make for winter, such as the storing of food and the providing of warmer clothes and homes. ~method.~--the teacher questions the pupils and encourages them to tell what they have learned through their own observation of animals. the knowledge of the pupils is supplemented by information given by the teacher, but the pupils are left to find out more facts by further observations. thus: do you ever see ground-hogs out during winter? what do they feed upon during the winter? what is the condition of ground-hogs in late summer and in autumn? what is the use of the great store of fat that they have in their bodies? examine the snow near the burrows of ground-hogs and find whether they ever come out in mid-winter. _to the teacher._--the hibernating animals prepare a home or nest and lay up a store of food in the form of fat within their bodies. to hibernate does not mean the same as to sleep. the hibernating animals have much less active organs than the sleeping animals. the heart-beat and the respiratory movements are very slow and feeble, consequently a very little nourishment suffices to sustain life. summary of lessons (two lessons of twenty minutes) . some animals migrate: examples--many birds, butterflies, and some bats; the cariboo, and buffalo. . some animals hibernate: examples--bear, ground-hog, raccoon, frogs, toads, snakes, and some bats. note.--flies, mosquitoes, and some other insects crawl into crevices and remain at rest during winter, but their bodies are not stored with food. . some animals build houses and store foods: examples--beaver, squirrel, chipmunk, honey-bee, deer-mouse. . some animals build homes convenient to food: examples--musk-rat, field-mouse. . some animals put on warmer clothing: examples--fox, mink, otter, rabbit, horse, cow, partridge, chickadee. the rabbit and weasel turn white, a colour protection. . many insect larvæ form cocoons or pupæ cases: examples--emperor-moth, codling moth, tomato worm. correlations with literature, reading, and language. with geography: by a lesson on "the influence of climate upon animal and plant life." chickens (consult _principles and practice of poultry culture_ by robinson. ginn & co., $ . .) conversation lesson how many of you keep chickens at your homes? why do many kinds of people keep chickens? what breeds of chickens do you keep? how many other breeds do you know? describe the appearance of a few of the commoner breeds. why are there so many different breeds? name those that are good laying breeds. name breeds that are not usually considered good laying breeds. _to the teacher._--chickens are kept by all classes of people. many keep them for the profit in eggs and meat, others keep them as a fad, and others to gratify a craving for animal companionship. there are one hundred and seventy-five recognized breeds, varying in size from that of the japanese bantam weighing ten ounces to that of the huge brahma which weighs fourteen pounds. the shapes and colours present as great a variation as the sizes. the breeds that are usually regarded as good layers are white leghorn, barred bock, and rhode island red, while the game breeds are usually regarded as poor layers. careful tests prove, however, that there are good laying and poor laying strains in every breed, and care must be taken to select from good strains, since the breed is not a sufficient guide. at the close of the first lesson, assign to the pupils the task of making a chicken census of the district as follows: . request each pupil to count the number of hens under two years old at his home and also to count the hens that are more than two years old. . request each pupil to find out, if possible, the number of eggs obtained at his home during the whole year. arithmetic lesson based on the chicken census . using the data collected by the pupils, calculate the total number of chickens under two years old in the district. calculate the number over two years old. (the latter are classed as unprofitable.) . using the data obtained by the pupils (provided sufficient data was obtained to make it reasonably reliable), calculate the average number of eggs laid a year by each hen. . if the data collected by the pupils as to the number of eggs is thought to be unreliable, make use of the following: the average number of eggs laid each year by each hen in ontario is seven dozen. use this average number, and: ( ) calculate the value of the eggs produced in this district in a year, the average price of eggs being twenty cents a dozen. ( ) if the average production of eggs were increased to ten dozen (a number that is easily possible under improved management), find the value of the eggs that would be produced in a year, and find the gain that would result from this better management. . if it costs ninety cents a year to feed a hen, find the net annual profit to this district from the egg production. care of chickens the method of developing conceptions of how to take proper care of chickens is based partly upon the pupils' experiences and partly upon a knowledge of the history of the original wild hens. information can be gathered from the pupils as to the date of hatching of the earliest chickens and the date at which the pullets begin to lay. chickens that are hatched in april begin to lay in november or december and lay throughout the winter when eggs bring the highest price. the original wild hens lived in the dry, grassy, and shrubby jungles of india. they were free to move about in the open air, and at night they perched in the trees, which sheltered them from rain. hence may be inferred what kind of quarters should be provided for chickens. care and food of chickens points developed chickens must have plenty of fresh air without draughts. heat is not necessary. their quarters must be dry, clean, and well lighted. they require exercise. their food must have in it the materials that are needed to make the substance of the egg. breakfast: wheat or corn scattered among straw--the scratching affords exercise. dinner: meat scraps, slaughter-house refuse, vegetables, sour milk, and rolled oats. supper: as at breakfast. physical science phase of nature study the teacher is advised to read carefully the instructions and general method of experimental science, chapter i, before beginning the lessons in physical science. solids, liquids, and gases arrange a collection of objects of various shapes, sizes, colours, and weights, as cork, glass, lead, iron, copper, stone, coal, chalk. show that these are alike in one respect, namely, that they have a shape not easily changed, that is, they are _solids_. compare these solids with such substances as water, alcohol, oil, molasses, mercury, milk, tar, honey, glycerine, gasolene. these latter will pour, and depend for their shape on the containing vessel. they are _liquids_. compare air with solids and liquids. such a material as air is called a _gas_. other examples of illuminating gas, and dentists' "gas"; others will be studied in future lessons. pupils may think all gases are invisible. to show that some are not, put a few pieces of copper in a test-tube or tumbler and add a little nitric acid. watch the brown gas fall through the air; note how it spreads in all directions. some gases fall because they are heavier than air; others rise because lighter. all gases spread out as soon as liberated and try to fill all the available space. spill a little ammonia and note how soon the odour of the gas is smelled in all parts of the room. change of state heat some lead or solder in a spoon till liquid. let it cool. do the same with wax. heat some water in a flask till it becomes steam. steam is a gas. cool the steam and form water again. (see distillation.) refer to lava (melted rock), moulding iron, melting ice and snow, softening of butter. all solids may be changed to liquids and even to gases if sufficiently heated. likewise all gases may be changed into liquids and then to solids. expansion of solids in winter pupils may find that the ink is frozen. the teacher directs attention to this and inquires why it has occurred. it may be that in a lesson on rocks the teacher will ask the pupils to account for all the little stones. the following _experiments_ will aim at solving the foregoing problems: . a brass ball and ring are shown. pupils handle these and note that both are cold and that the ball just passes through the ring. they are asked to compare the size of the ball with that of the ring. . the spirit-lamp is lighted and examined. pupils hold their hands over the flame to note the heat. . the ball is heated in the flame for a short time by one of the pupils, and felt cautiously. an attempt is made to pass it through the ring. how has the ball changed in feeling? in size? how does one know it is larger? what has caused these changes? . cool the ball. feel it. try to pass it through the ring now. how has it changed in feeling? in size? what caused these changes? how does heat affect the ball? how does cold affect it? the teacher may now give the words _expand_ and _contract_, writing them on the black-board and explaining their use. pupils may then state their conclusions: _a brass ball expands when heated and contracts when cooled._ a blacksmith can make the following very serviceable apparatus: a scrap of iron about eleven inches long, one inch wide, and one-eighth inch thick, has one inch bent up at each end. a rod one-eighth inch in diameter is made just long enough to pass between the upturned ends of the first piece when both are cold. the rod is heated and the experiment conducted as in the case of the ball. two additional facts are learned: ( ) iron expands as well as brass; ( ) solids expand in length as well as in volume. the pupils may now be told that other solids have been tried and expansion has invariably followed heating. the conclusion may then be made general. practical applications . when your ink-bottle was placed on the stove, which end became warmer? which expanded the more. why then did it crack? . what other examples like this have you noticed? (lamp chimneys, fruit jars, stove plates) . the earth was once very hot and is now cooling. how is the size of the earth changing? does it ever crack? what causes earthquakes? . find out by observation how a blacksmith sets tires. . invent a way to loosen a glass stopper stuck in the neck of a bottle. . what does your mother do if the metal rim refuses to come off the fruit jar? . next time you cross a railway, notice whether the ends of the rails touch. explain. . what allowance is made for contraction in a wire fence? a railway bridge? why? . why do the stove-pipes crack when the fire is first started? . why does the house go "thump" on a very cold night? . draw the ball, ring, and spirit-lamp in position. . describe in writing the experiments we have made. questions for further investigation you have seen that iron and brass both expand. do they expand equally? let pupils have a few days to invent a way of answering the question. the experiment may then be tried with the compound bar. see _the ontario high school physics_, pages - , also _first course in physics_, milliken and gale, page . if the equipment of the school is limited, it may be necessary to dispense with the ball and ring and generalize from one experiment. another easily made apparatus consists of two iron rings with handles. one ring will just pass through the other when both are cold. the stove may take the place of the spirit-lamp. a still simpler plan consists in driving two nails into a block at such a distance apart that an iron rod (six-inch nail, poker, bolt, etc.) will just pass between. on heating the rod the increase in length becomes evident. expansion of liquids fill a common bottle with coloured water; insert a rubber stopper through which passes a glass tube about sixteen inches long. set the bottle in a pan of water and gradually warm the water. the rise of the liquid in the tube will indicate expansion. on setting the bottle in cold water the fall of the column of coloured water shows contraction. see _the ontario high school physics_, page , also _science of common life_, page . macmillan co., cents. set the flask or bottle in a mixture of ice and salt and note that the extreme cold causes contraction for a while, then expansion. note that when expansion begins, the water has not begun to freeze, but that it does so soon after. the night before this experiment the children should set out in the cold air, tightly corked bottles of water. in the morning they will be found burst by the expansion. applications . why did some of the ink-bottles burst in the cold room? . find large stones split up into two or more fragments. explain. . why is fall-ploughed land so mellow in spring? . why does ice float? think what would happen if it did not. . explain the heaving of oats, clover, wheat. . do all liquids expand on freezing? try melted paraffin. the thermometer besides the ordinary thermometer the school should possess a chemical thermometer graduated from ° fahrenheit to °. . our sensations vary so much under different circumstances and in different individuals that they cannot be depended on. find examples of this and show the need of a measuring instrument. . the pupils can learn, by examination of the common wall instrument, the parts of the thermometer--tube, bulb, liquid (alcohol or mercury), and scale. . repeat the experiment for expansion of liquids, showing wherein the apparatus resembles the thermometer, warm the thermometer bulb and watch the column rise; cool it and note the fall. . set the bulb of the chemical thermometer in boiling water. the mercury comes to rest near °. bury the bulb in melting snow and notice that the column falls to °. give names for these points. explain that a degree is one of the equal parts which lie between boiling point and freezing-point. show that ° below freezing must be °, or zero. . the uses of thermometers for indoors and outdoors; for dairy, sick room, incubator, and soils; maximum and minimum. dairy thermometers registering ° fahrenheit may be obtained; they are cheaper than chemical thermometers. expansion of air half fill a flask with water and invert it uncorked over water in a plate. apply a cloth soaked in boiling water to the part that contains air. why does the water leave the flask? apply cold water. why does the water return? any ordinary bottle may be used in place of the flask, but it is more liable to crack. make an air thermometer. see _the ontario high school physics_, page , also _science of common life_, page . try to graduate it from the mercurial thermometer. have the boys make a stand for it. _inferences._--heated gases rise because they expand. hot-air balloons, winds, and heating with hot-air furnaces, all depend on this principle. sources of heat and light notes for a series of lessons . the sun.--our dependence on it. valuable results of its heat. simple notions as to its size, distance, and nature. our earth catches a very small fraction of the sun's heat; our sun is but one of millions--the fixed stars. show the burning effect of a lens. . fuels.--wood, oil, coal, alcohol, gas, peat, straw: where obtained; special uses of each under varying conditions; need of economy. (this is closely related to geography.) . electricity.--in urban schools use the electric light or some heating device for illustration. in rural schools a battery of two or three cells (see "apparatus") will melt a fine strand drawn from a picture wire. applications: ironing, toasting, cooking; advantages or disadvantages compared with gas or wood. . friction.--pupils rub hands together; rub a button on a cloth; saw a string across the edge of a board or across the hand; bore a hole through a hardwood plank, then feel the auger-bit. applications: restoring circulation; "hot-boxes" in machinery; lubricants and their uses; lighting matches. . pounding.--hammer a nail flat on an anvil or stone; feel it. bullets fired against an iron or stone surface may be picked up very hot. note sparks that can be struck from a stone; percussion caps, flint-lock muskets. . pressure.--after using a bicycle pump for some time, feel the bottom, also the top. if possible, examine an air-compressor and find out the means used for cooling the air. . sources of light.--sun, moon, oil, tallow, gas, electricity, wax, acetylene; advantages of each; relative cost. primitive methods of obtaining fire: most savages obtain fire by friction; rubbing two pieces of wood together till hot enough to set fire to some dry, light material. the natives of australia placed a flat piece of wood on the ground and pressed against this the end of a round piece, which they twirled rapidly with their hands till fire was produced. the north american indians did the twirling with their bow strings; the eskimo's plan is somewhat similar. it is impossible to say when flint and steel were first used, but we know they continued to be the chief means of producing fire till about , when matches were invented. let pupils try to produce fire by these means. the earliest lamps consisted of shells, skulls of animals, and cup-shaped stones filled with fat or fish oils which burned on a wick of cloth or the pith of rushes. the tibetans burn butter, the eskimos whale- or seal-oil, the arabians palm- or olive-oil. for outdoor lighting, torches carried in the hand were used till gas came into general use about . conduction give to four boys strips of copper, aluminium, wood, and glass, respectively. they hold these by one end and heat the other end till one or more are forced to drop the piece on account of the heat. the boys with the metals will soon find them hot throughout, but the other two will be able to hold on indefinitely. the teacher gives the terms "good conductor" and "poor conductor". problems . are metals generally good conductors? try with strips of zinc, lead, iron, a silver spoon. . are all good conductors equally good? devise a means of ascertaining. see _science of common life_, chapter vi; also _the ontario high school physics_, page . . is water a good conductor? lists of good and poor conductors may then be made, the teacher adding to the list. good: metals; poor: wood, horn, bone, cloth, leather, air, water, hair, asbestos, ashes, rock, earth. problems . if the interior of the earth is very hot, why do we not feel it? . how can the cold snow keep the earth warm? . why does your hand freeze to metals but not to wood? . let the children try to find other instances: wools or furs for clothing, fur coats on northern animals, feathers on birds, down quilts, tea cosies, sawdust for packing ice, double windows, wooden handles for hot irons, asbestos coating for steam pipes. the miners' safety-lamp: this is a most important application of conduction. get from the tinsmith a piece of brass gauze six inches square. raise the wick of the spirit-lamp causing it to give a high flame and bring the gauze down upon the flame till it touches the wick. note that the flame does not rise above the gauze. hold a piece of paper above the gauze near the flame and note that it does not take fire. note also that the gauze soon becomes hot. the brass wires conduct the heat of the flame rapidly away so that there is not heat enough above the gauze to cause combustion. now roll the gauze into a hollow cylinder, pin the edges together, insert a cork at each end, and have a short candle fastened to the lower one. try to light the candle with the lamp through the gauze. it is not easily done. the miner carries a lamp made like this, so that if he should be in the presence of the explosive gas, "fire damp", it would not explode because of the wire gauze shield. convection water is not a conductor, how then is it heated? drop a few pieces of solid colouring matter, (analine blue, blueing, or potassium permanganate) into a beaker of cold water. place the beaker over a heater and observe the coloured portion rise. wet sawdust will make a good substitute for the colouring matter. a sealing jar or even a tin cup will do instead of the beaker. the stove or a dish of hot water will take the place of the lamp. problems . using a thermometer, see whether the water at the bottom is warmer than that at the top while the beaker is being heated. . heat some oil and pour it over the surface of some cold water. lower a thermometer into this. does the water at the bottom soon become warm? . if your kitchen is provided with a hot-water tank, find out what part of the tank first becomes warm after the fire is lighted. . in bathing, where do you find the coldest water of a pond or still river? see _science of common life_, chapter vi; also _the ontario high school physics_, page . convection in gases a good apparatus may be made by cutting two holes one inch in diameter in one side of a chalk box, replace the lid with a piece of glass, place a lamp chimney over each hole and a lighted candle under one of the chimneys. hold a piece of smoking touch-paper at each chimney in turn and note direction of air current. applications . winds are caused by the rising of air over heated areas, allowing cooler currents to take its place. (geography) . rooms are ventilated by heating some of the air more than the rest, thus producing a current. (hygiene) winds are nature's means of ventilating the earth. radiation of heat this should be taken up as an introduction to dew, frost, winds, climate, etc. . make an iron ball hot (the end of a poker will answer). hold the hand a few inches below the iron. does the heat reach the hand by convection? by conduction? by means of suitable questions, lead the pupil to see that it is not by convection, for the hand is below the hot object while heated air rises; it is not by conduction, for air is one of the very poorest conductors; moreover, the heat is felt instantly from the poker, but it takes an appreciable time for it to come by conduction and convection. we say this heat is _radiated_ from the iron. the velocity of radiated heat is about , miles a second. . the above experiment may be varied by bringing the hot iron gradually toward the bulb of the air thermometer and noting the greatest distance at which it will affect the thermometer. it is by radiation that the sun's heat and light reach us. we get much of the heat of stoves, fire-places, and radiators by the same means. why does the earth cool off at night? why does dew form? why can no dew form on a cloudy night? why is a mountain top or a desert so cold, especially at night? . take two tin cans (baking powder boxes will answer) and make holes in the lids large enough to admit a thermometer. blacken one box in the flame of an oil lamp. fill both with boiling water and put in a cool place. test with a thermometer from time to time. which cools most rapidly? . fill the tin cans with cold water, find the temperature, and then place them near a hot stove. which warms faster? usually dark or rough surfaces radiate heat and absorb heat faster than bright or smooth ones. an excellent way of testing this is to lay a black cloth and a white one side by side on the snow where the sun is shining brightly. the snow will melt more rapidly under the black cloth. painted shingles may be substituted for the cloths. try different colours. the day chosen should not be extremely cold. problems . why should we have the outside of a tea-kettle, teapot, or hot-air shaft of a bright colour? why should we have stoves and stove-pipes dull black? . why does a coat of snow keep the earth warm? . which is the warmest colour to wear in winter? does this account for the colour of arctic animals? . which is the coolest colour to wear in the hot sun? . gardeners sometimes strew the ground with coal-dust to help ripen their melons. show the value of this. . suggest a method of protecting a wall from the heat of a stove. chapter xi form iii spring window boxes many garden plants should be started in a box of earth in a warm, sunny window. in some schools this can be done with a little care in heating on cold nights. small boxes or grape baskets full of rich sandy loam with an inch of gravel in the bottom for drainage may be used. sow the seeds in rows or broadcast. to prevent the soil from drying out too quickly, cover the box with a pane of glass. when the plants are up, give them plenty of light and not too much warmth. on very mild days set them in a warm, sheltered place out-of-doors and bring them in again early in the evening. this tends to make them hardy. when about three inches high, pick the young plants out and set them in other boxes a few inches apart. this moving causes the formation of numerous fibrous roots and makes stronger plants. window gardens window boxes may be used for a whole season on the inside of the building in cold weather, and on the outside in warm weather. there is almost no limit to the kinds of plants that can be grown in them, but they are most suitable for flowers. good boxes may be made of dressed lumber so as to fit on the window-sill. they should be six inches deep, ten inches wide, and the required length. they should have a few small holes in the bottom to allow excess water to drain off and should be painted dark green or some quiet colour. there should be an inch of gravel in the bottom, some rotted sods covering this, and then the box filled with rich sandy loam. suitable plants some flowers suitable for growing in window boxes outside in summer are those of drooping habit: lobelia, kenilworth ivy, verbena, tropeolum, petunia, and sweet-alyssum toward the front, and behind, more erect plants, such as geranium, heliotrope, begonia, phlox, and nasturtium. the box must not be too much crowded. for inside and in shady situations the following are suitable: tradescantia, parlour ivy, moneywort, vinca smilax, climbing fern, asparagus fern, dracæna, coleus, centaurea, sword fern, and boston fern. for indoor boxes in winter, the following may be used: abutilon, calceolaria, cyclamen, violets, primroses, petunias, geraniums, freesia, and such foliage plants as dracæna, cannas, dusty miller, and coleus. the following climbing plants may be trained up the window cases: asparagus plumosus fern, cobea scandens, smilax, maurandia, and english ivy. if drooping or trailing plants are desired, the following may be used: oxalis, sweet-alyssum, lobelia, ivy, geranium, kenilworth ivy, and wandering jew. fertilizer as the amount of soil is limited and the number of plants that it has to support is great, the soil should be made quite rich and should be further fertilized from time to time with a little liquid manure. this can be best obtained by taking a strong barrel or large keg and filling it about half full of water. then fill an ordinary coarse potato sack with cow-stable manure and set the sack in the barrel for a few days. a tap in the bottom of the barrel is most convenient for drawing off the liquid manure. a little of this will also be found valuable for watering dahlias, roses, and other garden plants during the summer. soil studies the classes of soil should be reviewed. pupils should gather examples from many places. the samples may be kept in bottles of uniform size and should include not only the four types but varieties of each, also various kinds of loam. exercises and experiments soil constituents . with a sharp spade, cut a piece about twelve inches deep from ( ) the forest floor, ( ) an old pasture field. note character and order of the layers of soil in ( ) leaves, humus, loam, sand, or clay; in ( ) grass, dead grass, humus, loam, sand, or clay. observe soils shown in railway cuttings, freshly dug wells, post holes. . note the effect produced on the soil of a field by ( ) leaving it a few years in pasture, ( ) ploughing in heavy crops, ( ) applying barn-yard manure. in all these cases vegetable matter is mixed with the soil. . dry some good leaf-mould. throw a handful on the surface of some water. the mineral matter sinks, while the vegetable portion remains suspended for some time. try this experiment with gravel, sand, and clay. note that the gravel sinks rapidly, the sand less rapidly, and that the clay takes a long time to settle. if the water be kept in rapid motion, the finer soils will all remain suspended till motion becomes slower. apply this in geography. the bed of a stream will consist of stones if it be swift, of sand if less swift, and of clay if very slow. how are alluvial plains formed? . place half an ounce of dry humus on an iron plate or fire-shovel and heat strongly in a stove. note that it begins to smoke and a large part smoulders away to ashes; the mineral portion remains. weigh the part left and find what fraction of the humus consisted of vegetable material. try to find the proportion of vegetable matter in each of the following: loams from various sources, sand, clay, gravel. the last three will show scarcely any change. this experiment will give rise to some good arithmetical problems in fractions. water in soils . compare a handful of fresh garden soil with the same soil dried. note the glistening of the fresh soil, also its weight and darker colour. the fresh soil admits of packing though no water can be squeezed from it. in its best condition, the water of the soil adheres as a film of moisture about every particle. free water is to be avoided since it excludes the air from the soil. . equal weights of soils of different kinds and degrees of fineness are placed in funnels or in inverted bottles with bottoms removed. water is then slowly added to each until it begins to drop from the lower end. from this is seen ( ) the great value of humus as a water holder, ( ) the advantage of fine soil over coarse. for retention of water by absorption, consult _nature study and life_, hodge, page . . take two wooden boxes (chalk boxes will do), fill one box with moist sand and the other with moist leaf-mould. weigh the boxes separately and leave them for three or four days in a warm room. weigh again and note decrease from evaporation. the sand dries out much faster than the humus. test with clay, gravel, and loam, also with mixtures of these and leaf-mould. . take three paint cans; punch holes in the bottoms. fill each with good soil well shaken down. stand the cans in water till the tops are moist, then place them in a warm, dry place. loosen the soil on the top of no. to a depth of one inch; on no. to a depth of two inches; leave no. untouched. find out after a few days which is drying out fastest. how may soil be treated so as to lessen evaporation of water? drainage . gravel and sand allow water to run away rapidly, but where the soil is fine or closely packed as in clay soils, under-drains are necessary ( ) to carry off the surplus water, ( ) to allow air to enter the soil, ( ) to warm the soil (wet soil is colder than dry). take two equal-sized tin cans, make several holes in the bottom of one, place therein a layer of broken pottery or stones, and fill with good soil. fill the other with similar soil but make no holes for drainage. plant in each can a healthy plant of the same size and kind. water both till the soil is saturated and continue watering every two or three days for six weeks. note ( ) the progress of the plants, ( ) the temperature of the soils, ( ) which plant has the largest and deepest roots. (see _bulletin _, ontario department of agriculture.) . take five equal-sized boxes, provide for drainage, and fill no. with wood, earth, or humus, no. with clay, no. with sand, no. with a mixture of clay and humus, no. with a mixture of sand and humus. plant corn in each box, set in a warm room, and keep watered for two or three weeks. note in which case growth is most rapid. set boxes in a dry place and cease watering. which suffers most from the drought? which bakes hardest in the sun? test the temperature of each after watering and standing in the sun for an hour. sand is warmer than clay, also the presence of humus raises the temperature. this item is important, since most seeds decay instead of sprouting if the temperature is below ° fahrenheit. . enumerate the services rendered to the soil by humus. . in experiment , let the corn grow for some time and determine whether the very rich humus is the best in the end. sand and clay are almost altogether mineral; leaf-mould almost entirely organic; neither alone is good, but a mixture gives the best results. garden work the boys of this form should attend to the fertilizing and spading of the plots belonging to the girls of their form. the girls themselves can do all the rest of the work, and they should try to keep the plots level, uniform in size, and in a straight line. if the corner posts are kept in line and the plots made up the exact size, the appearance of the garden will be greatly improved. the pupils are now old enough to make their own choice of flowers and vegetables. very tall growing plants, such as corn and sunflowers, are not desirable in individual plots as they shade other plants near them. corn is best grown in a large plot about twenty feet square. the same may be said of vines, such as cucumbers, melons, squash, etc. if the plots are small, it is better to plant but a single variety, but in large plots from two to four varieties may be arranged to advantage. usually rows of vegetables, such as carrots and beets, may be placed a foot apart, cabbage about twice that distance, and tomatoes a little farther apart than cabbage. generally speaking, plants should be placed so that when full grown they will just touch, cover the ground completely, and thus prevent the growth of weeds. as soon as the young plants appear above the ground, light cultivation with rakes and claw-hand weeders should be started, so as to keep weeds from growing and at the same time to provide a loose surface or earth mulch for conserving the moisture and aerating the soil. thinning should also be begun when the plants are quite small, but it should not all be done at once. as the plants increase in size, the best ones should be left and the poor ones taken out. in some cases plants thus removed may be re-set to fill vacant places. tree seeds tree seeds that have been stored over winter should now be planted in rows in a small plot. the rows should be a foot apart and the seeds quite close together in the row. a cheese-cloth or slat shade should be used on this plot, as the hot sun is too strong for tree seedlings when they first come up. they should have cultivation every week and watering in dry weather. always water in the evening after school, or even later when possible. transplanting pupils in this form should have practice in transplanting, as well as in sowing seed. for this purpose seeds should be started about the first of april in hotbeds or window boxes, seedlings transplanted into cold frames when two or three inches high, and then set out in the garden in the latter part of may when danger of frost is past. transplanting flowers and vegetables choose, if possible, a cool cloudy day. water the plants thoroughly in the hotbed or cold frame a few hours before lifting them. lift them with a trowel or small spade, and keep as much earth on their roots as possible. with a transplanting trowel, make holes deep enough so that the plant will be a little deeper in the soil than before transplanting. unless the soil is moist, a little water put in the hole with the plant is beneficial. the evening is considered best for transplanting if the weather is clear. if the sun is very hot, the plants should be shaded for a few days until the roots become established and begin their work. shingles slanting over the plants from the south side and driven into the ground to hold them in position are best. papers held by means of two stones also give good results. the practice of covering them with inverted cans is not a good one, as the light is almost completely cut off. a few holes in the can would help considerably. care must be taken to pack the earth firmly about the roots. watering again twenty-four hours after transplanting is often necessary. if the plant has a leafy top, it is best to take off some of the leaves, as they tend to give off water more rapidly than the roots can at first take it in. transplanting tree seedlings nuts and other tree seeds collected the previous autumn should now be planted in the forestry plots in rows a foot apart. as the seeds may not all grow, they may be planted close together in the row and thinned out the following spring if necessary. they need some shelter from the sun the first summer. in large plots this is provided by means of a slat covering, but in a small plot cheese-cloth tacked on strips and fastened on corner posts is satisfactory. when a shower comes, this cheese-cloth screen should be removed so that the rain may moisten the plot evenly. seedlings may be transplanted from the woods or from the forestry rows before the leaves open out. budding in budding, a slit like the letter t is made in the side of the young seedling close to the ground. the bark is raised a little at the point where the vertical slit meets the horizontal one, and a bud of desired variety with a shield-shaped bit of bark (and perhaps a little wood) attached to it is shoved in and the sides of the slit bound down upon it. after the bud, or scion, has started to grow, the stock is cut off an inch above the point where the bud was inserted. the bud then makes rapid growth, and in two years the resulting tree is large enough to set in its permanent place in the orchard. cuttings pupils in this form should try to grow such woody plants as roses and grapes from cuttings. roses are frequently propagated by budding, as in the case of apples and peaches. they may also be grown upon their own roots or from stem cuttings. such cuttings should be from well-matured wood of the present year taken in the autumn and packed in moist sand over the winter. make the cuttings about three inches in length. the top end should be cut off immediately above a bud and the bottom end just below a bud, as roots seem to start more readily from a node, or bud. such a cutting may have three or four buds of which only the upper two need be left. if both of these grow, the poorer one may afterwards be removed. these rose cuttings should then be inserted in a box of clean, moist sand to a depth of two inches, kept in a warm room, and shaded with a sheet of newspaper when the sun is very bright. keep the sand moist but not wet, and when possible have gentle bottom heat. when roots have made some growth, transplant carefully into small flower-pots, using fairly rich, clay loam. in a few weeks they will be ready to plant out in the garden. grape cuttings should be taken late in the fall when the vines are well matured. such a cutting includes only two joints, the upper one being the growing end and the lower the rooting end. they must be stored over winter in cold, moist sand, but should not be permitted to freeze. as soon as the ground can be prepared in the spring, set them out. they should be placed on a slant of about forty-five degrees and covered all but the top bud. leaf cuttings some plants with large and vigorous leaves, such as many of the begonias, may be propagated by means of leaf cuttings. buds readily develop from cuts made in the large veins. take a full-grown healthy leaf and remove the stem all but about half an inch. make a few cuts across the larger veins on the under side of the leaves at points where main veins branch. press the leaf firmly down on the top of a box of moist sand with the under side next the sand. keep the leaf in this position, using small stones or little pegs pushed through the leaf into the sand. put the box in a warm room and do not let the sand become dry. when roots strike into the sand and buds develop from the points where the veins were wounded, take a sharp knife and cut out the new plant from the old leaf and transplant it into a small flower-pot in good soil. sink the pot in a box of moist sand to prevent its drying out. root cuttings such plants as "sprout from the roots" may be propagated by root cuttings. sections of underground stems may also come under this heading, as in the case of horseradish cuttings. but real roots may be used for cuttings, as in the case of the blackberry and raspberry. the roots should be cut in pieces three or four inches long, planted in a horizontal position, and entirely covered with two or three inches of soil. layering bush fruits, such as currants and gooseberries, are frequently propagated by stem cuttings, as in the case of roses. another method, which is known as layering, consists in bending one or more of the lowest branches down against the ground, fastening it there by means of a forked stick, and then covering it with two or three inches of earth. the part in contact with the moist earth will send out roots, while one or more shoots will come up. when roots and shoots have developed, the branch is severed from the parent bush and the new plant set in its permanent place. strawberries exhibit a sort of natural layering. planting and care of herbaceous perennials perennials grown from seed the previous summer should now be set in clumps two or three feet apart in the perennial border or here and there beside the fences or walks. the soil should be made fine and fertilized with well-rotted manure from the compost heap before setting out the young perennials. dahlias and gladioli which were taken in in the autumn should now be set out. the dahlias should be divided and only the best roots used. other perennials that have grown into large clumps should be dug up, divided, and re-set in well-fertilized soil. garden studies pupils in this form have now had enough experience in the growing of vegetables and flowers to allow them to make intelligent variety tests. they should grow some of the less familiar varieties and report on the merits of each variety tested. this, however, should not be carried on to the exclusion of the well-known standard varieties. let the pupils consult the best seed catalogues available and choose for themselves some varieties not already known to them. they should keep a systematic record of all varieties grown and the methods used in cultivating, fertilizing, etc. the knowledge thus gained will be of value in after years, and the homes will also benefit by it. biennials the pupils should observe the second year's growth of biennials. a special plot in the school garden should be set apart for this purpose. have them plant in it a turnip, a carrot, a beet, a cabbage, or any other garden biennial saved over winter for the purpose. if desired, the pupils might grow their own seed of these varieties. notice ( ) what part of the plant has become enlarged with stored up food and how big it is when planted, ( ) how this part changes in size and texture as the flowers and seeds develop, ( ) in what way this extra food seems to have been used. wild flowers study of the trillium the pupils bring the plants for the lesson. there should be a few purple trilliums among the white, and some of the plants should have the underground parts intact. discuss with the collectors their observations on where the trilliums grow, the kind of soil, the depth of the root-stocks below the surface, the uses of the root-stocks, insect visitors. class-room lesson the pupils are directed to examine the plant and flowers and find out all the means for attracting insects. find out why the purple trillium attracts flies and beetles, while the white trillium attracts bees and butterflies. look into the top of the flower; what figure do the tips of the six flower leaves form? using the names calyx and corolla, describe the circle of flower leaves as to number, colour, and relative position. find the stamens and describe as to number and position; find out how the stamens are fitted to ensure that the pollen will get upon the visiting insects. find the pistil and describe its shape. how is the stigma fitted for receiving the pollen that is carried by the insect visitors. _to the teacher._--the trilliums attract insects by their large white and purple flowers, which are held up by their long stalks high above the three broad leaves. the strong carrion-like odour of the purple trillium is attractive to flies and beetles, while bees and butterflies find the fragrance of the white trillium more to their liking. the root-stock serves as a buried store of food to tide the plant over the drought of late summer and the severe cold of winter. the well-stocked cellar also explains the flourishing condition of the plant in early spring. the six stamens stand on close guard around the pistil, and insects forcing their way to the nectaries are well peppered with pollen. continue the observation work by means of field exercises such as the following: what change takes place in the colour of the white trillium as it grows old? find the ripened seed pods of the trillium, open them, count the number of chambers, and examine the seeds. do trilliums grow from the same root-stock year after year? as correlations, represent the trillium in colour and design an embroidery pattern based on it. lessons similar to that on the trillium may be based on adder's tongue, indian turnip, dutchman's breeches, violet, and clover. adaptations of animals it is not considered necessary to go outside the list of ordinary animals to find sufficient illustrations of adaptations, and it is recommended that attention be given to these during the study of animals prescribed for the regular course. this may be supplemented by an occasional review of adaptive features for the purpose of emphasizing the general fitness of animals for their varied habits and surroundings. care must be taken lest the attempt to explain structures by adaptation be carried to an extreme, for it is impossible to account for all the variations in animal forms. the following list contains a few of the many examples of adaptations to be met with in the course prescribed for forms ii and iii. the horse walks and runs on the tips of its toes; this gives greater speed. wild animals of the cow and deer kind can swallow their food hastily so that they may retire to a safe retreat; there they regurgitate the food and chew it. the domesticated animal retains this habit, though there is no longer a need for it. the wood-hare's fur is brown in summer, hence its enemies cannot see it against the brown grass and moss; in winter its colour is white, which, against the snow, is a protective colour. the porcupine is very slow, but its colour and shape make it almost impossible to distinguish from a knot on a log. its quills form an effective protection when it is discovered. the feet of the squirrel are adapted for climbing and its teeth for gnawing wood and for opening nuts. the tail serves as a balancing pole for leaping from tree to tree and in winter it acts as a protection from cold. the earthworm's shape and movements are suited to its habits of burrowing through the soil. its habits of swallowing the soil fit it for burrowing and for obtaining its food at the same time. many insect larvæ, as the tomato worm and the cabbage-worm, are of the same colour as the plants on which they feed, and this enables them to escape detection by birds. the larvæ of dragon-flies and may-flies breathe in water by means of gills very much as fishes do, but the adult forms are suited for breathing in air. female birds are usually dull gray or mottled, so that their colours blend with their surroundings while they are nesting, and hence they do not attract the notice of their enemies. birds that swim have webbed feet, which act as oars for pushing them through the water. their feathers are compact and soft for warmth, and these properties, together with oil on their surfaces, make them waterproof. the tongue of the woodpecker is long, spear-shaped, and sticky; hence it is adapted for catching insects in the holes pecked into the wood. the tongue of the toad is fastened at the front end, so that a flap can be shot out for more than an inch in front of the animal, thus enabling it to catch insects on its sticky surface. the toes of the frog are webbed to make them more serviceable in swimming. the tail of the musk-rat is strong and broad like the blade of an oar and serves the same purpose as an oar. the tail of the fish is more serviceable for swimming than legs would be. bird types woodpeckers woodpeckers are easily distinguished from other birds by their habit of perching in a vertical position on the trunks of trees with the tips of their tails pressed against the bark. while in this position, they tap upon the tree with their sharp, pointed beaks. the downy woodpecker learn to recognize the smallest of our woodpeckers, the downy. winter or summer it may be found among the apple trees and shade trees, a tiny black and white bird little bigger than a wren. observations i why is "checkerboard" a good name for this bird? are there any distinct lines of white? are there any patches of red? do its movements reveal energy or listlessness? how does it move up a tree trunk? how does it move down a tree trunk? find out how it can hold so firmly to the trunk. does it use its sharp beak as a drill or as a pick? _to the teacher._--the downy is spotted black and white, with barred wings and a white line down the centre of the back. a bright scarlet crown is the colour distinction of the male. this little bird is the embodiment of energy and perseverance. it hops nimbly up the trunk, tapping here and there with its beak, and then listening for the movements of the disturbed wood-borers. if it wishes to descend, it wastes no time in turning around, but hops backward down the trunk, or jumps off and flies down. ii examine an apple tree upon which a downy has been at work and find out what it was doing there. do you find the birds in pairs during winter? during summer? distinguish the male from the female. tie a beef bone with scraps of meat adhering to it to a tree. what birds come to it? find the nest of the downy and describe the nest and the eggs. do the holes made by the downy injure the trees? why should the downy be welcomed in our orchards? describe the sounds made by the birds. _to the teacher._--discuss the pupils' answers to the above problems in the class lesson, using a picture of a woodpecker to illustrate the features of the bird that adapt it for its habits. examples: the straight, sharp beak suited for drilling; the two backward, projecting toes for perching; the spines on the tips of the tail feathers to act as a prop. the downy woodpecker is very useful in the orchard, because it destroys great numbers of larvæ of the tussock-moth and other insects. the holes made in the bark have never been found to injure the trees. the nest is made in a hollow tree, the entrance to it being almost perfectly round and about one and one-quarter inches in diameter. the downy woodpecker has a very unmusical voice, but fortunately he is aware of this deficiency, and his only attempt at music is drumming with his beak upon a hollow limb or tree. the hairy woodpecker, redheaded woodpecker, flicker, and yellow-bellied woodpecker (sapsucker) are other varieties which visit the orchards and are suitable for lessons similar to these on the downy woodpecker. they are all beneficial birds. flycatchers members common to this class are: king-bird; house-phoebe, wood-phoebe, or pewee; whip-poor-will; least fly-catcher; giant fly-catcher. direct the observations of the pupils to the following type features: brownish or grayish colours; fringe of long bristles around the mouth (explain their use); whistling notes, varying with the different members of the family; habit of jumping from the perch, catching an insect while on the wing, and returning to the spot from which the flight began; nests, chiefly of mud built in a protected place, as under a bridge, ledge of rock, or projecting log. wrens the house wren may be studied as a type. observe its brownish colour, faintly mottled; its small size and energetic movements, its tail turned nearly vertically upward. observe and report on other wrens, noting any differences. cabbage-butterfly have a plant of wild mustard or a cabbage growing in a pot. in june, have the pupils, by means of the insect net, catch a number of the white butterflies, the adults of the cabbage-worm. place the butterflies in jars or bottles and observe them. make drawings of them. direct the attention of the pupils to the difference between the wings of the male and those of the female. the former has only one dark spot on the front wing, while the female has two spots on this wing. release the males and put the females in a vivarium with the potted plant. (a pasteboard box, with a large piece cut out and the opening covered with gauze, makes a good substitute for a vivarium in this case.) observe the laying of the eggs. how many are placed at one spot? how are the eggs protected? the eggs may be gathered from the cabbage plants in the garden. observe and record the hatching of the tiny worm, its feeding, growth, forming of chrysalis, development into adult. frequently little yellow silken cocoons are found in vivaria where cabbage-worms are kept; these are cocoons of a parasite (braconid) that infests the worm. because of the ease with which the cabbage-butterfly may be obtained and the rapidity of its development in the various stages, it is very suitable as a type for the study of metamorphosis. the sulphur, or puddler (called by the latter name because of its habit of settling in groups around the edges of the water holes), is also a suitable type. the larvæ in this case must be fed on clover. the tussock-moth begin the study of this insect in june and july by observing the larvæ feeding on the foliage of the horse-chestnut and other shade trees, and direct attention to their destructiveness. in observing the larvæ, note the size, movements, legs, colour, coral red head, tufts of hair on the back, and the three long plumes. watch the birds among the trees to discover whether they eat the larvæ. of what use are the tufts of hair? do the larvæ feed by biting or by sucking? describe the damage done by the larvæ. collect a number of these larvæ and place them in the vivarium with some twigs of horse-chestnut. observe the spinning of the cocoon and, about two weeks later, look for the emergence of the adult moths. observe the two kinds of insects. describe each. are there any differences in the cocoons from which they emerge? which form of insect places the egg mass and is therefore the female? note the number and shape of the eggs and how they are protected. the female moths have no wings and do not move far from the cocoons from which they emerge, while the males have the power of flight. as outdoor work, look for the egg masses on trees and fences and devise means of combating the tussock-moth. gathering and destroying the egg masses during the winter is found to be fairly effective in checking these insects. since the cocoons frequently contain parasites that prey upon the larvæ, it is advisable that only the cocoons that have egg masses attached to them should be destroyed; the others are harmless and may contain the useful parasites. the egg masses may be kept over winter in a box in a cool place, and the hatching of the tiny larvæ and their subsequent rapid growth observed. potato beetle the eggs of this beetle may be found in early summer in clusters on the under surfaces of the leaves of potato plants. egg.--observe the size, colour, shape, position, and number in a cluster; appearance of head from outer end after a week. larva.--observe the colour, shape, head, legs, voracious appetite, movements, rapid growth, destructiveness. pupa.--observe the larvæ disappear from the plants; a search underground reveals the resting stage, or pupæ. after ten days, the adult beetles emerge. adult.--observe the colour, the hard shell covering the head; the hard outer wings and membraneous inner wings; the hard shell on the under surface of the body; the feelers, and legs. why will spraying with a poison, such as paris-green, kill these insects? references dearness: _how to teach the nature study course stories in agriculture, bulletin no. ._ fish the nature study lessons must be based upon observations of the living fish, preferably in may or june, september or october. the best place for this is on the bank of a clear stream from which it is possible to observe the fish in their natural environment. here their life activities, their struggles, their conquests, and silent tragedies are enacted before the eyes of the observer. many observations may be made in this way which will create a life-long interest in these reticent, yet active creatures. since this method of study is practicable in but few cases, the study of the living fish in the aquarium is the best available substitute. the teacher or the boys of the class can catch a few fish of three or four inches in length and carry them in a jar of water to the aquarium. minnows, chub, perch, catfish, or other common forms will do. observations i the general shape, and the suitability of the shape for swimming. the surface of the body and the protection it affords. note the scales and the slime, the latter a protection against the growth of fungi, etc. the gills--two openings behind the flaps at the rear of the head. the colours, and their value in concealing the fish. the dark upper surface makes it inconspicuous from above; the light under surface blends with the shadow and dims it. the divisions of the body--head, trunk, and tail. movements of the fish and the part that the various fins play in these movements. note that the broad tail fin is the most useful fin for locomotion, the others act as balancers or as brakes, or for causing currents of water near the gills. observe the movements of the pair of fins nearest the gills, the movements of the mouth, and the currents of water entering the mouth and passing through the gill slits. when a fish is kept in a very small quantity of water, observe the effect produced on the movements of the mouth and gill flaps. what are the uses of these movements? the pupils will thus discover the nature of the respiration of the fish. why do fish die if many are kept in a jar of water? ii by supplying various foods learn what kinds are preferred. find in the actions or habits of the living fish evidences of a sense of smell, of sight, of hearing, and of taste. nearly all the following points of detailed study can be observed from the living fish: shape; size; tongue; teeth; gill slits leading from the mouth to the gills; nostrils, number and position; eyes, absence of eyelids; fins, size, build; the arrangement of the scales. problems why does the fish require a large mouth? how are the eyes protected? compare the shape of the eye with the shape of the eye of a land animal. why are there no openings from the surface directly into the ears? show the suitability of the fins as organs of locomotion in water. references silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_ nash: _fishes of ontario_ (from department of education, free) kellogg: _elementary zoology_ chapter xii form iv autumn garden work the regular work of cultivation of garden and experimental plots should be carefully attended to. pupils in this form should be able to do all kinds of garden work with a good deal of proficiency. the work of selecting the best flowers for seed production should be continued. these should be used for planting in the school garden and in home gardens as well. this part of the work might be left to the girls. the boys should be encouraged to take up the systematic selection of seed grain. to get good seed to start with, two methods may be used: . decide upon the kind of grain to be selected and choose from one of the best fields a hundred of the best heads--those that are vigorous, clean, free from rust or smut, and standing up straight. when the heads are dried a little, shell the grain off them and preserve it in a jar in a cold, dry place until spring. . take a quart of oats and pick it carefully, keeping only the largest and most plump kernels. keep this for spring planting. at the same time, a sample of the poorer grains should be kept for comparison. a regular system of selection should be followed from year to year, taking enough of the largest, brightest, and most compact heads from the plot each autumn to sow a plot of equal size the next spring. after the selection of heads has been made, the remainder of the crop may be harvested, and the grain from this known as general crop from hand-selected seed of the first, second, third year, etc. if the value per acre is required, the plots should be made of a certain size easy to compute, such as one rod square or one rod by two rods. ( - / ft. by ft. is about / acre.) samples of each crop should be kept in uniform bottles and labelled; for example--"from selected heads of ". the yield per acre in the plot from which the selected heads came should also be noted. these will be interesting for purposes of comparison and for testing duration of vitality later. if the same amount of grain is used in planting a plot each time, the change in bushels per acre may be ascertained and also in pounds per bushel. some of the boys in this form may wish to continue this work of improvement by selection and, if so, they should communicate with the secretary of the canadian seed growers' association, canadian building, ottawa, and receive full instructions to enable them to carry on their work practically as well as scientifically. herbaceous perennials from seed the teacher should encourage the growing of herbaceous perennials for the purpose of beautifying the school grounds. many plants may be started from seed at the school and given to the pupils for home planting. these plants require but little attention and provide excellent bloom in gardens and home grounds from early in spring before annuals are in bloom, on into the autumn. a list of the best varieties will be found in circular , on _elementary agriculture and horticulture_, a copy of which should be in every school. the seed plot should be fertilized and prepared in the usual way, and the seeds planted before the first of september. they may be started in june also, in which case they make more growth before winter. the plot should be well fertilized with thoroughly rotted manure and, if the soil is very dry, the plot should be well watered the day before the seeds are planted. the seeds are usually quite small and should be covered very lightly. the plot should be protected from the hot sun by means of cheese-cloth tacked on a frame. the plants should be watered twice a week in dry weather. in the late autumn, when the ground freezes, the plot should be covered with leaves or straw and some boards, which should be removed when the frost comes out in the spring. deciduous trees before the pupils of this form leave school they should be able to recognize, by name as well as by sight, all of the species of trees found in their vicinity. to this end the teacher should help them to prepare an inventory of species of trees, shrubs, and vines of the vicinity. they should learn to distinguish the different species of maples, elms, birches, etc. a named collection of leaves helps materially in doing this. the influence of environment upon the growth and shape of trees and how trees adapt themselves to the conditions in which they live is a most interesting and profitable study, demanding careful observation, reflection, and judgment. references muldrew: _sylvan ontario._ briggs. keeler: _our native trees._ scribners' sons. $ . . trees in relation to their environment consider the influences at work and their effect under the following heads: . character of the soil and subsoil.--it may be gravelly, pure sand, sandy loam, clay or clay loam, muck or humus, shallow or rocky, and the subsoil may be sand, clay or hard clay with stones (hard-pan). notice what species are most common in each kind of soil. . water supply.--what species are found naturally in moist ravines or along the margins of rivers and lakes, in bogs or swamps, on dry, sandy plains, or rocky hillsides. consider also the rainfall. . exposure to sunlight.--account for the lack of symmetry in the shapes of trees. branches grow only where their leaves can get the light. account for the pith in many tree stems not being in the geometric centre. account for the rapid growth in height made by young trees in the woods. their light supply is chiefly from above, and they stretch up toward it as rapidly as possible. dim light causes rapid growth at the expense, however, of strength of tissue, but as these young trees are protected in the woods from the strain of wind storms, their slimness and lack of toughness is a benefit rather than a hindrance to them. also, the limbs near the ground die off while the trees are still young and small, giving us the clear timber tree, free from large knots, tall and straight. make further application of this principle of light in relation to the planting of trees for shade and for wood or lumber. account for the large size of the leaves of young trees in the dimly lighted woods as compared with the leaves of older trees. the principle of rapid growth in dim light is seen here also. it will be noticed that the large leaves of the young trees are more thin, soft, and flexible. . wind.--observe the tops of tall trees that have always been exposed to a strong prevailing wind as, for instance, those growing on the tops of hills or the eastern shore of a lake which has a prevailing west wind. the tops lean in the direction in which the prevailing wind blows. does strong wind help or hinder the growth of a tree? examples of stunted trees on wind swept hills or shores readily show this. it will be seen also that the higher branches are poorest on the side most exposed to the wind. . suitability of the species to the climate.--observe that some trees retain their leaves much later in the autumn than do others. the beech, hickory, red oak, and chestnut are good examples. these are on the northern extreme of their territory of growth. the tree best suited to a rigorous climate is the one that finishes its work early in the autumn and has all its tissues well matured before cold weather sets in. examples: maple, elm, birch, and willow. fruits excursion to a well-kept orchard if the teacher can arrange to take the pupils to see a well-kept orchard about the time of the apple harvest, it will help to arouse interest in the study of fruits. the trees, as well as the fruit, frequently show distinguishing marks whereby they may be identified. have the pupils notice the following points: general shape of tree, colour of bark, shape of leaf, method of cultivation, fertilizing, pruning and grafting, spraying and its need, orchard pests, method of picking and packing apples in barrels and boxes for market. small fruits study the method of propagating strawberries and such bush fruits as currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and blackberries. reports issued from the fruit division of the experimental farm at ottawa give information regarding the best varieties suitable for different parts of ontario and quebec. have the pupils try propagating strawberries by taking the stolons or runners; currants and gooseberries, by means of layers or stem cuttings; and raspberries or blackberries, by root cuttings or the detaching of root shoots or suckers. stem and root cuttings, when taken in the autumn, may be planted at once or may be stored in damp moss or sand in a cold cellar over winter. stem cuttings should be about the size and length of a lead-pencil and root cuttings about half that size. autumn wild flowers observations made with garden flowers should be supplemented by observation lessons on a few selected wild flowers of the woods, fields, and roadsides. although the spring months afford a much greater variety of wild flowers than do the autumn months, they do not afford quite as good an opportunity for finding and studying them. the woods and fields are drier and more easily reached in the autumn and the fall flowers last much longer. some of the species seen blooming in spring and early summer are now in fruit and scattering their seed, so that the pupils have a chance to follow out the whole life history of a few chosen species. the pupils in this form might select for special study the milkweed, worm-seed mustard, wild aster, and goldenrod. these should be observed out-of-doors, preferably, but suitable class-room lessons may be taught by using similar matter. milkweed taking the milkweed as a type, the following points are to be considered: the kind of soil, where found, and whether in sun or shade. try to pull up a small-sized plant. dig one up and notice the underground part. note the size of the largest plant seen, also the size of the leaves, and how they are arranged to prevent overshadowing. break off a leaf and note the white sticky juice, whence the name "milkweed". discuss this milk as a protection to the plant. note time of first and last flowering of the plant and the colour and odour of the flowers. watch insects gathering honey on a bright day. note the little sacks of pollen that cling to their feet. they sometimes get their feet caught in little slits in the flower and perish. after the flowers disappear, note the forming of the little boat-shaped pods in pairs. select one that is ripe and notice that it bursts along one side which is most protected. open a pod carefully and notice how beautifully the flat, brown seeds are arranged in overlapping rows and how each seed has a large tuft of silky down that serves to carry it far away in the wind. this silk-like down is sometimes used to stuff cushions, and because of it the plant is sometimes called silk weed. one species of butterfly in particular feeds upon this plant--the monarch, or milkweed, butterfly. this is one of the few butterflies that birds do not eat. it is protected by a distasteful fluid. look on the under side of the leaves of several plants until you find a pretty, pale green cocoon with golden dots, hanging by a thread-like attachment. early in the season the larvæ may be found feeding on the leaves. this plant is troublesome in some fields and gardens and so is classed as a weed. when the stems come up in the spring, they are soft and tender and are sometimes used as pot herbs. correlations draw a leaf, a flower, a pair of pods, and a seed with its tuft. write an account of a visit to the woods to study wild flowers. trees a study of the pines of the locality may be commenced in november, after the deciduous trees have lost their leaves and have entered their quiescent winter period. this is the time when the evergreens stand out prominently on the landscape, in sharp contrast with the other trees that have been stripped of their broad leaves and now look bare and lifeless. if no pines are to be found in the vicinity, cedar or hemlock may be substituted. the lessons should, as far as possible, be observational. the pupils should be encouraged to make observations for themselves out of school. at least one lesson should be conducted out-of-doors, a suitable pine tree having been selected beforehand for the purpose. the following method will serve as a guide in the outdoor study of any species of tree: the white pine have the pupils observe the shape and height of the tree from a distance and trace the outline with the finger. compare the shape of this tree with others near by of the same species and then with members of other species. have the pupils describe in what particulars the shapes differ in different trees. they will come to realize that the difference in shape results from differences in length, direction, and arrangement of branches. they may notice that other evergreens resemble the pine in that the stems are all straight and extend as a gradually tapering shaft from the bottom to the top, that all have a more or less conical shape, and that the branches grow straight out from the main stem and not slanting off as in the case of the maples and elms. coming close to the tree, the pupils may first examine the trunk. by using a string or tape-line, they may find out how big it is around and the length of the diameter. tell them how big some evergreens are (the giant trees of the pacific coast are sometimes over forty feet around). have them notice where the trunk is largest, and let them find out why a tree needs to be so strong at the ground. heavy wind puts a great strain on it just at this point. illustrate by driving a long slat or lath into the ground firmly: then catching it by the top, push it over, and it will break off just at the ground. if a little pine tree could be taken up, the pupils would be interested in seeing what long, strong, fibrous roots the pine has. let them examine the bark of the trunk and describe its colour and roughness. the fissures in the bark, which are caused by the enlarging of the tree through the formation of new wood under the bark, are deeper at the bottom of the tree than at the top--the tree being younger and the bark thinner, the nearer to the top we go. how old is the very top, down to the first whorl of branches? how old is the stem between the first and second whorls? between the third and fourth? let the pupils find out in this way the age of a little pine that is regular and unbroken. the whorls of branches near the ground are usually small and dead in young trees and in old trees have completely disappeared. relate the size of the trunk to its age, and also relate the size and length of the branches to their age. where are the youngest branches and how old are they? what branches are oldest? notice how the branch is noticeably larger just where it joins the trunk, as this is the point of greatest strain. are the branches the same length on all sides of the trunk? if not, find one where branches are shorter on one side than on the other and try to discover the cause. usually, if other trees are near enough to shade a certain tree, the branches are shorter and smaller on the shaded side. let the pupils look up into the tree from beneath and then go a little distance away and look at it. they will notice how bare the branches are on the inside, and the teacher will probably have to explain why this is so. they will discover that the leaves are nearly all out toward the ends of the branches. the leaves get light there while the centre of the tree top is shaded, and the great question that every tree must try to solve is how to get most light for its leaves. the pupils will now see an additional reason why the lower limbs should be longer than the upper ones. the greater length of the lower limbs brings the leaves out into the sunlight. why this tree is called an evergreen may now be considered. why it retains its leaves all winter is a problem for more advanced classes, but if the question is asked, the teacher may get over the difficulty by explaining to the class that the leaves are so small and yet so hardy that wind and frost and snow do not injure them. the pupils may each bring a small branch of twig back to the school-room, if the white pine is growing commonly about, otherwise the teacher may provide himself with a branch upon which to base another observation lesson in the class-room. if the tree has cones on it, an effort should be made to get a few, as they will also be considered in a subsequent class-room lesson. if the cones have not yet opened when they are picked, so much the better, as they will soon open in a warm room, and the pupils will be able to examine the seeds and notice how they whirl through the air in falling. if possible, let the pupils have an opportunity of seeing pine trees growing in the woods as well as in the open. outline of a class-room lesson on the white pine ~inferences.~--if possible, each pupil is supplied with a small branch of the white pine and the teacher with a larger branch which can easily be seen by all the pupils. before proceeding to examine the specimens, give the pupils a chance to tell what they now know about the white pine, and thus review the lesson taken out-of-doors. then ask a few questions bearing upon their own observations, such as: what was the soil like where you found the pine tree growing? (they are found most commonly on light, sandy soil.) did you notice any difference between the shapes of the pines in the deep woods and the pines in the open fields? did you notice any dead limbs on those in the woods? why did they die? the pupils may conclude that branches whose leaves cannot get the sunlight must die. show that this causes knots in the lumber and exhibit samples. this explains also why the trees of the forest have such tall stems without branches for a long distance up from the ground. they get the light only from above and seem to strive with the surrounding trees to reach it. if we want trees to grow tall, how should we plant them? (close together) what would such trees be good for? (making timber or lumber) if we want trees to grow low and have thick and bushy tops, how should we plant them? (far apart) what would such trees be good for? (their shade and their beauty) good shade trees should be thirty to forty feet apart. ask the pupils if they have ever been near a pine tree when a gentle breeze was blowing, and have them tell the cause of the sound that they heard. they may decide that the shape and size of the leaves caused the sound when the wind was blowing through the tree top. have them examine the branches in order to discover the following points: leaves.--these are in bunches of five, two to three inches long, three-cornered, and with little teeth pointing toward the tip, light green near the tip of the bough (young leaves) and darker further down (older leaves); age of a leaf the same as the age of the wood it grows on, therefore some leaves are one year, some two, and a few three years old. no leaves on four-year-old wood, therefore the leaves fall off the white pine the third year. ask pupils to try to find out by observation when the leaves fall off the pines. note the fragrance of the leaves, and that they are sometimes put into "pine" cushions, also, how slippery they are to walk on. buds.--these are found at the tips of the branches, one large one in the centre and several smaller ones grouped around it. note their reddish-brown colour and that they are made up of scales overlapping and covered with gum which keeps out the rain, thus protecting the little growing tip inside. when buds grow, they become little twigs with leaves on. find where the buds were a year ago. notice the light colour of the twigs that grow during the present season and the darker colour of the twigs of the previous year. where were the buds two years ago? what did the centre bud become? (a continuation of the stem) what did the other buds, called lateral buds, become? (new branches) compare the growth made in different years. notice also how white the wood of the twigs is--the probable reason for calling it "white pine". cones.--note the length and shape of the cones and how the seeds are placed in them inside the large scales. get some of the seeds and note the wing-like attachment. take the wing off a seed and drop it from a height at the same instant with one that has its wing attached. note the whirling motion and infer what purpose the wing serves in scattering seed. taste the kernel of a pine seed and discover why squirrels are fond of them. burn a pine cone. find out what birds like to live in this tree. what has been noticed about them and their nests? have the pupils keep the seeds until the following spring by putting them in a box of dry sand and setting them in a cold place. they should then plant them in a corner where they can be partly shaded when the sun is bright. plant them about half an inch deep and keep them watered if the weather is dry during the first summer. note.--the cones drop their seeds from high up in the tree so that the wind can carry the seeds long distances. the cones usually stay on the trees for a couple of years after they lose their seeds. correlations draw a pine tree, a bunch of pine needles, a pine cone, and a pine seed. write a description of a pine tree seen in the woods; also of one found in the open. write a list of things for which the white pine is useful. _to the teacher._--the winter months, besides affording an opportunity for seeing trees and plants in their dormant or quiescent condition, also afford an opportunity for reading and reflection, for recalling observations and experiences of the past season, and for making plans for work and study in the school garden, woods, and fields when spring returns. the knowledge gained by the pupils through first-hand observation of trees, flowers, and gardens can be greatly extended by pictures and stories descriptive of these, which the teacher may from time to time bring to the school-room. their personal experiences will be the basis for interpretation of many new things which will come up in the reading lessons, in selections which the teacher reads from week to week, and in books and papers which they themselves read in their homes. thus the interest that is aroused by the first-hand studies of plants in garden, orchard, or woodland will be carried over from autumn to spring, and the pupils, with the awakening of spring, will take up anew the study of plant life with a keener interest because of the time given to reading and reflection during the winter. illustrated magazines dealing with gardening and with the study of trees and plants, and such magazines as have a children's department, will prove of great assistance to the teacher who makes any serious attempt to interest pupils in plant studies. stories of life in the woods and of plant studies suitable to young pupils should be used. references margaret morley: _flowers and their friends._ ginn & co. cents. margaret morley: _seed babies._ ginn & co. cents. margaret morley: _little wanderers._ ginn & co. cents. alice lounsberry: _the garden book for young people._ stokes. $ . . gertrude stone: _trees in prose and poetry._ ginn & co. cents. comparative lesson on varieties of winter apples king, baldwin, northern spy discuss the names, keeping and cooking qualities of the apples, and bearing qualities of the trees. provide each member of the class with a typical representative of each of the above varieties of apples. compare the three apples as to size, form, colour--including marks; hardness, length, and thickness of stem; depth of cavity at the stem end; depth and shape of the cavity at the calyx end. split each apple from stem to calyx and compare as to the thickness and toughness of the skin, the colour of the flesh, the size of the core, taste and juiciness of the flesh. _to the teacher._--all three are apples of fair size, the baldwin being on the average the smallest of the three. all three are roundish, but the king is somewhat oval-round, and the spy, conical-round. the baldwin has a yellowish skin with crimson and red splashes dotted with russet spots. the king is reddish, shading to dark crimson. the spy has a yellowish-green skin sprinkled with pink and striped with red. the beautiful colours make all these apples very popular in the markets of american cities and in those of the british isles; but the soft and easily damaged skin of the spy makes it the least desirable as an apple for export. all keep well and in cool cellars remain in good condition until april. they may be kept much longer in cold storage chambers, where the temperature is uniformly near the freezing point of the apple. the baldwin apple tree is reasonably hardy within the ordinary range for apple trees, and its yield is a satisfactory average. the king apple tree is not a hardy tree, nor is it a satisfactory bearer except in the best apple districts. the spy is a fairly hardy tree and thrives and yields well throughout a wide range; but it does not begin to bear until it is about fifteen years old. a comparative lesson may also be based on selected varieties of autumn apples, such as fameuse, mcintosh red, wealthy, gravenstein, and st. lawrence. codling moth begin the study of the codling moth in august by examining wormy apples. find out, by asking the pupils, which orchards of the locality had been sprayed in the spring. ask the pupils to count out at random one hundred apples and to select from these the number that are wormy. what percentage of the apples are wormy? compare the percentage of wormy apples in unsprayed, with that in sprayed, orchards. the results will afford evidence of the benefit of spraying. find out, if possible, the dates on which, and the conditions under which, the spraying of the orchards with the least number of wormy apples was done. ask the pupils to bring to the school-room a number of wormy apples. have the pupils cut these open and note the nature and position of the hole, or burrow, and the amount of damage done to the apples. have the pupils observe the larva and note the size, colour, shape, and number of legs. _to the teacher._--the apple maggot is a less common insect larva and may be distinguished from the larva of the codling moth by the fact that the former has no legs and has the habit of burrowing in all directions through the pulp of the apple, while the larva of the codling moth works almost entirely in the core. the cocoon and pupa phase of this insect may be obtained by keeping the wormy apples in a box containing loose paper on which the cocoons will be placed, or by searching under the bark scales of apple trees in october. describe the cocoons. open some of them and describe the contents. keep the remaining cocoons in a box or vivarium in a cool place during the winter. what birds are seen tapping at the bark scales of the apple trees during winter? examine the bark scales when a downy woodpecker has been at work and note that the cocoons have been destroyed. should we encourage the visits of woodpeckers to the orchards? by hanging up a beef bone in the orchard, various birds, including woodpeckers, will be induced to visit and perhaps to make their homes in the orchard. references _common insects affecting fruit trees, bulletin no. _, department of agriculture, parliament buildings, toronto. _bulletins nos. and _, ontario department of agriculture, deal with many insect pests and their remedies. in may look for the adult moths as they emerge from the cocoons. observe the colour, size, shape, and the bright copper-coloured horse-shoe on the front wing--the "brand" of the codling moth. examine the little apples when the blossoms are falling. note the tiny, flat, oval-shaped egg at various places on the surfaces of the apples and a few days later the tiny worm which emerges from the egg. this soon eats its way into the apple, entering usually at the calyx end. if spraying is done after the petals have fallen and just before the calyx end closes up, a drop of poison is inclosed, and when the larva enters it and begins eating its way into the apple, it gets the poison. some common animal forms brief lessons should be given on some of the lower members of the animal kingdom, for the purpose of broadening the interests of the pupils. the following are suggested as types: snail, spider, freshwater mussel (clam), crayfish (crab), centiped, milliped, salamander, and wood-louse. these are common animal forms, most of which are frequently seen by the pupils, but seldom are their interesting life habits or their places in the animal kingdom recognized. the salamander is to many pupils a lizard of the most poisonous kind; centipeds and millipeds are worms, and they do not recognize that the clam is an animal with sensibilities and instincts. references kellogg: _elementary zoology_ silcox and stevenson: _modern nature study_ centipeds and millipeds under stones and sticks in moist soil are to be found two worm-like forms, both having many legs. one of these animals is flat, about an inch long, brown in colour, and provided with a pair of long feelers. on each division of the body is a single pair of legs. this is the _centiped_. the other animal is more cylindrical in shape and has two pairs of legs on each division of the body. its colour is a darker brown than that of the centiped, and it has a habit of coiling into a spiral shape, when disturbed, so that the soft under surface is concealed. this is the _milliped_. both of these animals are quite harmless and feed on decaying vegetable matter. they stand midway between worms and insects in forms and habits. a brief observation lesson on each animal, involving their movements and the structural features named above, will enable the pupils to identify them and to appreciate their position in the animal kingdom. salamanders, or newts some forms of these are found in water, as in streams, ponds, and ditches, while other forms are found on land, where they hide under stones and sticks. they are commonly mistaken for lizards, which they closely resemble in shape; but the two animals may be distinguished by the fact that the surface of the body of a salamander is smooth, while that of a lizard is covered with scales. the small red or copper-coloured newts are the most common in ontario and are frequently found on roads after heavy rains. the tiger salamanders are larger than the red newts and are marked with orange and black spots, hence the name "tiger". many people believe this species to be especially venomous, while in reality it is quite harmless and, like the other salamanders, is useful for destroying insects and small snails, which form the greater part of its food. _to the teacher._--the superstition of the salamander's power to extinguish a fire into which it is thrown still exists. the early life of the salamander is spent in water, the young form being very much like a tadpole. the salamanders are close relatives of the frogs and toads and may be kept in a jar or vivarium in wet moss or grass. the pupils should learn to recognize the animals and should be instructed as to their habits. spiders ~problems in observation.~--in how many places can you find spiders' webs? how many forms of spiders' webs can you find? are the many webs that are found on the meadow grass in the dewy mornings the homes of spiders? if so, describe where the spiders live. (at the bottom of tunnels that run into the ground.) what uses do spiders make of their webs? (trapping prey, supporting egg cases, protection, and means of moving, as in the case of cobweb spiders.) drop a fly upon a spider's web and observe the action of the spider. search under the webs of spiders in attics and sheds and learn, from the skeletons found there, what the spider feeds upon. it will be found that flies, beetles, and other spiders are killed by this monster. watch a spider spinning its web and find out what parts of the body are used in this work. it will be seen that the threads are produced from little tubes at the rear end of the animal and are placed and fastened by means of the feet. examine, by the aid of a hand lens, the feet and head of the spider. note the "brushes and combs" on the former. note, on the latter, the four, six, or eight eyes (the number and arrangement vary), and the short poison claws at the front of the head. how are the poison claws adapted for seizing and piercing? note the sharp hooks at the lower ends. bird studies continue the lessons in bird identification and in bird types, using the methods outlined for these studies in form iii. (see pp. - .) chapter xiii form iv winter forest trees evergreens several species of evergreens have already been studied. these should be reviewed, and representatives of other species examined. mid-winter is most suitable for the study of evergreens. the following points should be considered: . description leading to identification . nature of soil and water conditions . common uses of each species of evergreen . collection of wood specimens and cones. wood specimens specimens should be uniform in size and should show bark on one side and heart wood as well as the outside, or sap wood. they should be about six inches long, two inches wide on the side having the bark, and should gradually come to an edge toward the pith, or centre. when seasoned, one side and one edge should be polished and then oiled or varnished. specimens of the wood of the deciduous trees may also be prepared during the winter. fruits during the winter months, some time should be devoted to reading and discussing articles on general farming and fruit growing. such articles may be taken from books, magazines, or newspapers, and may be supplied partly by the teacher and partly by the pupils. these articles will be appreciated by the pupils all the more because of their studies of fruit trees during the season. such topics as the following may be discussed: . best kind of apples, plums, bush fruits, and strawberries. reports from the dominion and provincial departments of agriculture. . method of raising fruit trees--from seed, grafting, and budding. . demonstrations in pruning. this may be done in early spring by taking a class to a neighbouring orchard. . methods of planting and cultivation. . packing and storing. . spraying. much information is to be found in horticultural journals and papers, and in bulletins to be obtained from the secretary of agriculture for ontario. illustrated articles on gardening and fruit growing should be collected for school use. views of fine gardens, parks, and home grounds will be of interest to the pupils. simple artistic methods of ornamental planting with trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous perennials can now be introduced, and some scheme for improving the school grounds outlined. catalogues should be obtained soon after new year's and, after examining their merits, the best varieties of seed and fruit for the district should be selected. horticultural societies, as well as dominion and provincial departments of agriculture, commonly give selected lists with descriptions of the different varieties. weeds and weed seeds the training in the observation and identification of weeds and weed seeds, which was begun in form iii, should be continued in form iv. for method see form iii. physical science phase of nature study water pressure . grasp an empty tin can by the top and push it down into a pail of water. note the tendency of the can to rise. the water presses upward. its downward pressure is evident. . tie a large stone to a string, hold it at arm's length, shut the eyes, and lower the stone into water. _note_ the decrease in weight. this is also due to upward pressure, which we call buoyancy. the actual decrease may be found by means of a spring balance. . try experiment , using a piece of iron the same weight as the stone. is the decrease in weight as evident? ships made wholly of iron will sink. explain. . put an egg into water; it slowly sinks. add salt to the water; the egg floats. exercises . will the human body sink in water? in which is there less danger of drowning, lake or sea water? . when in bathing, immerse nearly the whole body, then take a full inspiration. note the rise of the body. . why does ice float? (see expansion of water by freezing.) . balloons are bags filled with some light gas, generally hydrogen or hot air. they are pushed up by the buoyancy of the air. the rise of heated air or water (see convection) is really due to the same force. clouds, feathers, and thistledown are kept in the air more by the action of winds and small air currents than by buoyancy. study of air (consult _science of common life_, chaps. viii, ix, x.) . air takes up space. put a cork with one hole into the neck of a flask or bottle. insert the stem of a funnel and try to pour in water. try with two holes in the cork. when we call a bottle "empty" what is in it? . air is all around us. feel it; wave the hands through it; run through it; note that the wind is air; inhale the air and watch the chest. . air has weight. this is not easy to demonstrate without an air-pump and a fairly delicate balance. fit a large glass flask with a tightly fitting rubber stopper having a short glass tube passing through it. to the glass tube attach a short rubber one and on this put a clamp. open the clamp and suck out all the air possible. close the clamp and weigh the flask. when perfectly balanced, open the clamp and let the air enter again. note the increase in weight. if an air-pump is available, procure a glass globe provided with a stop-cock (see apparatus). pump some of the air from the globe, then weigh and, while it is on the balance, admit the air again and note increase in weight. tie a piece of thin sheet rubber over the large end of a thistle tube; suck the air out of the tube and note how the rubber is pushed in. this is due to the weight or pressure of the air. turn the tube in various positions to show that the pressure comes from all directions. to show that "suction" is not a force, let a pupil try to suck water out of a flask when there is only one opening through the stopper. if two holes are made, the water may be sucked up, that is, _pushed_ up by the weight of the air. fill a pickle jar with water. place a piece of writing paper on the top and then, holding the paper with the palm of the hand, invert the jar. the pressure of the air keeps the water in. a cubic foot of air weighs nearly - / oz. find the weight of the air in your school-room. the atmosphere exerts about fifteen pounds pressure on every square inch of the surface it rests against. find the weight supported by the top of a desk inches by inches. if the surface of the body is eight square feet, what weight does it have to sustain? why does this weight not crush us? the barometer the experiments immediately preceding will have paved the way for a study of the barometer. . fill a jar with water and invert it, keeping its mouth below the surface of the water in another vessel. if the pupils can be led to see that the water is sustained in the jar by the air pressing on the water in the vessel, they can understand the barometer. . fill a tube about inches long, and / inch inside diameter with water, and invert it over water, as with the jar in the previous experiment. . use the same tube or one similar to that in above, but fill with mercury and allow the pupils to notice the great weight of the mercury. holding the mercury in with your finger, invert the tube over mercury. this time the fluid falls some distance in the tube as soon as the finger is removed. a tube of this size requires lb. of mercury. lead the pupils to see that the mercury remaining in the tube is sustained by the air pressure, and that any increase or decrease of the atmospheric pressure will result in the rise or fall of the mercury column. leave the barometer (made as in above) in the room for a few days and note whether its weight changes. the use of the instrument in predicting weather changes should be emphasized. compare your barometer with the records in the daily papers. the average height of the barometric column is inches at sea-level. explain how you could estimate heights of mountains and balloons with a barometer. the common pump this is a valuable application of air pressure. a glass model will prove useful, but a model made by pupils will be much more so. (see _laboratory exercises in physics_ by newman.) the water rises in the pump because the sucker lifts the air from the water inside, allowing the air outside to push the water up. a common pump will not lift water more than about feet. why is this? compare the pump to a barometer. (see _the ontario high school physics_.) expansive force of air air and all other gases manifest a pressure in all directions not due to their weight. the power of air to keep tires and footballs inflated and that of steam in driving an engine are examples. it is this force that prevents the pressure of air from crushing in, since there are many air spaces distributed throughout the body. composition of air this subject and the three immediately following it have a special bearing on hygiene. . invert a sealing-jar over a lighted candle. has the candle used up _all_ the air when it goes out? . place a very short candle on a thin piece of cork afloat on water in a plate; light the candle, and again invert the jar over it. note that the candle goes out and the water rises only a short distance in the jar; therefore _all_ the air has not been used up. . slip the glass top of the jar under the open end and set the jar mouth upward on the table without allowing any water to escape. now plunge a lighted splinter into the jar. the flame is extinguished. air, therefore, contains an active part that helps the candle to burn and an inactive part that extinguishes flame. the names _oxygen_ and _nitrogen_ may be given. these gases occur in air in the proportion of about : . (this method is not above criticism. its advantage for young pupils lies in its simplicity.) oxygen make two or three jars of oxygen, using potassium chlorate and manganese dioxide. (see any chemistry text-book.) let the pupils examine the chemicals, learn their names, and know where to obtain them. perform the following experiments: . a glowing splinter relights and burns very brightly if plunged into oxygen. . a piece of picture wire tipped with sulphur burns with great brightness. . burn phosphorus or match heads in a spoon. a spoon may be made by attaching to a wire a bit of crayon having a hollow scooped on its upper surface. a clay pipe bowl attached to a wire will answer. from these experiments pupils will learn the value of nitrogen as a diluent of the oxygen. pure oxygen entering the lungs would be just as destructive as it would be entering the furnace. carbon dioxide . make a jar of this gas. washing soda and vinegar will answer if hydrochloric acid and marble are not obtainable. (consult the _science of common life_, chap. xiii, and any chemistry text-book.) . lower a lighted candle first into a jar of air then into the jar of carbon dioxide. . make some lime-water by stirring slaked lime with water and allowing the mixture to settle. shake up some clear lime-water with a jar of the gas. pupils will be made to understand that the milky colour will in future be considered the test for carbon dioxide. . have one of the pupils cause his breath to bubble through some clear lime-water for a minute. using a bicycle pump, cause some fresh air to bubble through lime-water. . hold a clear jar inverted over the candle flame for a few seconds, then test with lime-water. . invert a large jar over a leafy plant for a day. keep in the dark and test the jar with lime-water. is this gas likely to be in the air? set a plate of lime-water in the school-room for a day or two, and then examine it. try to pour the gas from jar to jar and use a candle as a test. is the gas heavier than air? on account of its weight, the gas often collects in the bottoms of old wells, mines, and tunnels. it is dangerous there since it will not support life. uses: . add a little water to some baking powder and cause the gas that forms to pass through lime-water. what causes the biscuits to "rise"? . mix flour and water in a jar, add a bit of yeast cake and a little sugar, and let stand in a warm place. test the gas that forms, for carbon dioxide. what causes bread to rise? . uncork a bottle of ginger ale, shake the bottle, and lead the gas that comes off through lime-water. . most portable fire extinguishers depend on the generation of carbon dioxide. show the similarity between our bodies and the candle. the candle needs oxygen; it produces heat, and yields water and carbon dioxide. much of our food is somewhat similar in composition to the wax of a candle; we breathe oxygen, our bodies are warmed by a real burning within, and we exhale water and carbon dioxide. after exercise why do we feel more hungry? why do we breathe faster? why do we feel warmer? why does the fire burn better when the damper is opened? impurities of air all air contains carbon dioxide. if the amount exceeds parts in , , it becomes an impurity, not so much on its own account as because it indicates a poisoned state of the air in a room, since organic poisons always accompany it when it is emitted from the lungs. other impurities of the air, dependent on the locality and the season, are smoke, dust, disease germs, sewer gas, coal-gas, pollen dust. solutions of solids (consult the _science of common life_, chap. vii.) have the pupils weigh out equal quantities of sugar, salt, soda, alum, blue-vitriol. shake up with equal quantities of water to compare solubilities. repeat, using hot water. is it possible to recover the substance dissolved? set out solutions on the table to evaporate, or evaporate them rapidly over a stove or spirit-lamp. try to dissolve sand, sulphur, charcoal, in water. obtain crystals of iodine and show how much better, in some cases, alcohol is as a solvent than is water. applications: . most of our "essences", "tinctures", and "spirits" are alcoholic solutions. . digestion is the effort of the body to dissolve food. . the food in the soil enters the plant only after solution. . the solvent power of water makes it so valuable for washing. . maple sap is water containing sugar in solution. . in the salt region along lake huron, holes are drilled to the salt beds, water is poured in, then pumped out and evaporated. explain. . meat broth is a solution of certain materials in the meat. . how could you manufacture salt from sea water? solution of liquids try to mix oil and water, benzine and water, oil and benzine. only in the third case do we find a permanent mixture, or solution. try to dissolve vinegar, glycerine, alcohol, mercury, with water. applications: . paint is mixed with oil so that the rain will not wash it off so easily. . water will not wash grease stains. benzine is necessary. . why is it necessary to "shake" the bottle before taking medicine? solution of gases study air dissolved in water, by gently heating water in a test-tube and observing the bubbles of air that gather on the inner surface of the test-tube. aquatic animals, such as fish, clams, crayfish, crabs, subsist on this dissolved air. limestone pieces of this rock may be found in all localities. teach pupils to recognize it by its gray colour, its effervescence with acid, and the fossils and strata that show in most cases. if exposed limestone rocks are near, visit them with the pupils and note the layers, fossils, and evidences of sea action. compare lime with limestone as to touch, colour, and action on water and litmus. try to make lime by putting a lump of limestone in the coals for some time; add water to this. other forms of limestone are marble, chalk, egg-shells, clam-shells, scales in tea-kettles. geographically, the study of limestone is of great importance. grind some limestone very fine, add a very little of this to water, and bubble carbon dioxide through for some time; note the disappearance of the limestone. this explains how limestone rocks are being slowly worn away and why the water of rivers, springs, and wells is so often "hard". catch some rain-water in the open and test it for hardness. it will be found "soft". place a few limestone pebbles in a tumbler with this soft water and after a day or two test again. the water will be "hard". compare, as to hardness, the water from a concrete cistern with that from a wooden one. carbon procure specimens of hard and soft coal, coke, charcoal, graphite, peat, and petroleum. note the distinctive characteristics of each. discuss the uses. try to set each on fire. note which burns with a flame when laid on the coals or placed over the spirit-lamp. put a bit of soft coal into a small test-tube; heat and light the gas that is produced. this gas, when purified, is one kind of illuminating gas. note the _coke_ left in the test-tube. fill the bowl of a clay pipe with soft coal and seal it up with plaster of paris. after this has hardened, place the bowl in hot coals or in the flame of a spirit-lamp and light the coal-gas at the end of the stem. after all the gas has been driven off, look for the coke inside. heat a bit of wood in a small test-tube and light the gas that is evolved. note the charcoal left. cover a piece of wood with sand or earth; heat, and note that charcoal is formed. this illustrates the old method of charcoal-burning. this subject is closely related to industrial geography. hydrogen a convenient way to prepare hydrogen is to use zinc and hydrochloric acid with a test-tube for a generator. (consult any chemistry text-book.) make the gas and burn it at the end of a tube, holding a dry, cold tumbler inverted over the flame. note that water is formed. conclude what water consists of, namely, oxygen and hydrogen. water may be decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen, hence a use of hydrogen may be shown by attaching a clay pipe to the generator and filling soap bubbles with the gas. when freed these rise quickly. magnets if bar magnets cannot be obtained, use a child's horse-shoe magnet. procure small pieces of cork, wood, iron, brass, glass, lead, etc., and let pupils discover which the magnet attracts. have pupils interpose paper, wood, slate, glass, iron, lead, etc., in sheets between the magnet and the iron and note the effect on the force exerted. note that when one end of a magnet touches or comes near the end of a nail, the nail becomes a magnet, but not a permanent one. magnetize a needle by drawing one of the poles of the magnet from end to end of the needle, always in the same direction, about twenty times. suspend the needle horizontally with a piece of silk thread and note its position when at rest. get a small compass and show how it is related to the foregoing experiments. emphasize its use to mariners. if possible, get a piece of lodestone and show its magnetic properties. electricity half fill a tumbler with water and add about a teaspoonful of sulphuric acid. set in this a piece of copper and a piece of zinc, but do not let them touch. make a coil by winding insulated wire around a block of wood about ten times. remove the wood and place a compass in the centre of the coil. join the ends of the wire to the two metals in the tumbler. the sudden movement of the needle will be taken as the indication of a current. let pupils try experiments with many pairs of solids, such as lead and silver, carbon and glass, wood and iron, tin and zinc, and liquids such as vinegar and brine. show pupils how to make a simple battery. see home-made apparatus, page , and consult _laboratory exercises_ by newman. two or three dry cells will be found sufficient for any experiments, but the home-made battery is to be preferred. show pupils how to make a magnet by winding a piece of insulated wire around a nail and joining the ends of the wire to the battery. make a horse-shoe magnet by bending the nail and winding the wire about both ends in opposite directions. as an application of the electro-magnet, show pupils how to make a telegraph sounder. (see manual on _manual training_.) if possible, examine the construction of an electric bell. the motor and electric light are other common applications of the current. take up the uses of the motor in factories, and for running street-cars and automobiles. show the necessity for a water-wheel or engine to produce the current, and for wires to connect. explain that batteries are not used to produce large currents, but that machines called dynamos, similar to motors, when driven by steam or water-power, will yield electric currents as batteries do. steam the power of steam may be shown by loosely corking a flask and boiling the water in it until the cork is driven out, or by stopping the spout of a boiling tea-kettle, or by letting a stream of steam impinge on a toy paper wheel. encourage pupils to learn all they can about steam and gasolene engines and their uses. farm tools this topic should be dealt with only in so far as it can be made a subject for actual observation by the pupils. children should learn to be thoughtful and observant and to do all kinds of work, manual as well as mental, intelligently. machines (consult _the ontario high school physics_, chap. ix.) lever.--when a _lever_ is used to lift a log, one end is placed under the log, a block called a _fulcrum_ is placed under the lever as close as possible to the log, and then the workman pulls down on the outer end of the lever. for example, if the fulcrum is one foot from the log and ten feet from the man, the latter can raise ten pounds with a pull of one pound, but he has to move his end of the lever ten times as far as the log rises. try it. see other examples in plough handles, see-saw, balance, scissors, wheel-barrow, pump-handle, handspike, crowbar, canthook, nut-crackers. rope and pulley.--in the _rope_ and _pulley_ note that when the pulley is a fixed one, the only advantage is a changed direction of the rope. when the pulley is _movable_, the horse pulling will have only half the weight to draw if the pulley is single, one quarter if double, one sixth if triple, etc. thus in the case of a common hay-fork the horse draws only half the weight of the hay, but he walks twice as far as the hay moves. cogs.--if one wheel has eighty _cogs_ and the other ten, the latter will turn eight times to the former's once. belt.--when a _belt_ runs over two wheels, one having, say, one fifth of the diameter of the other, the smaller will revolve five times for one revolution of the other. crank.--with a _crank_ two feet long, one may turn a wheel twice as easily as with one one foot long, but the hand will move twice as far. if a wedge is two inches thick at the large end and ten inches long, a man may lift pounds by striking the wedge a -lb. blow. inclined plane.--if a plank twelve inches long has one end on the ground and the other on a cart four inches high, one man can roll up the plank the same weight that would require three men to lift, but he has to move the object three times as far. problems . why is a long-handled spade easier to dig with than a short-handled one? . which is easier, to dig when the spade is thrust full length or half length into the earth? . can a small boy "teeter" on a board against a big boy? how? . in helping to move a wagon, why grasp the wheel near its rim? . in making a balance, why should the arms be equal? in a balance with unequal arms, compare the weights used with the article weighed. . in using shears, is it better to place the object you wish to cut near the handles or near the points? . where is the best place to put the load on a wheel-barrow? . notice how three horses are hitched to a plough or binder. . where would you grasp the pump-handle when you wish to pump ( ) easily, ( ) quickly? . stretch out your arm and see whether you can hold as heavy a weight on your hand as on your elbow. . count the pulleys used in a hay-fork and determine the use of each. . if a ton of hay is unloaded at five equal forkfuls, what weight has the horse to draw at each load? . count the cogs on the wheels of a fanning-mill, washing-machine, apple-parer, or egg-beater, and determine how the direction or rate of the motion is changed thereby. . measure the diameter of the large fly-wheel of a thrashing-machine engine, and of that which turns the cylinder in the separator. decide how many times the cylinder revolves for one turn of the fly-wheel. . think of all the uses of a wedge. draw one. compare the axe, knife, and chisel with the wedge. . how are heavy logs loaded on a sleigh or truck? how are barrels of salt and sugar loaded and unloaded? . there are two hills of the same height. one has a gradual slope, the other a steep one. which is easier to climb? in what case is it farthest to the top? . why does a cow or horse take a zigzag path when climbing a steep hill? chapter xiv form iv spring methods of improving home and school grounds the study of plants should lead to an intelligent appreciation of their beauties and a desire to have them growing about. many of our native trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous plants are quite as beautiful as some that are procured at considerable expense from nurserymen. a great work remains to be done in cultivating and popularizing our best native species. up to this point the pupils have been getting acquainted with them in their own natural habitat; the next step should be to use them in covering up harsh and offensive views about the school and home grounds, in softening and giving restful relief to barren yards and bare walls, to ugly fences and uninteresting walks and driveways. begin to plan some simple improvements for the spring. these may be repairing of fences and gates in order to protect the grounds from stray animals, the cleaning up of the yards, the gathering of stones which may be used in making a rockery, the planting of trees along the sides and front of the grounds--a double row of evergreens to overcome a cold northern exposure or to exclude from view disagreeable features, the laying out of a walk or drive with borders, flower beds, or shrubs in little clumps. plans of grounds well laid out should be examined and discussed in the school-room. many illustrated magazines give useful suggestions. plans can be worked out on the black-board with the pupils. it will take years to complete such a plan, but the pupils should have a part in making the plan as well as in carrying it out. the aim should be to encourage the use of simple and inexpensive things obtained in the vicinity, wherewith to produce harmony and pleasing natural effects. comfort and utility must be considered as well as beauty and natural design. in the school grounds the outdoor games must also be provided for and sufficient room allowed. such efforts on the part of the teacher and pupils, if wisely directed, are sure to meet with the approval of the parents and must call forth the hearty co-operation of the trustees. it is not well to attempt too much in one year. it is better to do a small amount well than to leave much work in a half-done condition. making and care of a lawn the soil must be drained and not too much shaded by trees. at first it should be summer fallowed or cultivated every few weeks throughout the summer, to kill the weeds and make it fine and level. a thick seeding of lawn grass-seed should be sown early the next spring and raked lightly in. all levelling and preparation must have been done the previous season. coarse grasses, such as timothy, should not be used on a lawn. red top and kentucky blue-grass in equal parts are best and, if white clover is desired, add about half as much white dutch clover seed as red top. if the soil has been prepared as above, there is no need to use a foster crop of oats or barley, as is done in seeding down meadows. roll the lawn after seeding and also after heavy rains as soon as the surface dries. shortly after the grass appears, begin to run the lawn-mower over it, so as to cut weeds or native grasses that may be gaining a foothold. watering is dangerous, unless carefully and regularly done during the summer, the evening being the best time. merely wetting the surface by sprinkling encourages shallow rooting and therefore rapid drying out. regular mowing and rolling are more important. references parsons: _how to plan the home grounds._ doubleday. $ . waugh: _the landscape beautiful._ judd. $ . department of education: _improvement of school grounds._ soil studies weight using a balance, compare weights of equal-sized boxes of different soils, dried and powdered fine. note the comparative lightness of humus. weigh a box of earth taken fresh from the field, from this compute ( ) the weight of a cubic foot of such soil, ( ) the weight of the soil to the depth of a foot in a ten-acre field. repeat the experiment, making it an exercise in percentage. fill two glass tubes (lamp chimneys will do), one with finely powdered clay, the other with sand. set the tubes in a pan containing water. note the rise of the water due to capillarity. through which soil does it rise faster? farther? try with other soils. try with fine soil and also with the same soil in a lumpy condition. from this give a reason ( ) for tilling soil, ( ) for rolling after seeding. subsoils procure samples of soil from different depths, four inches, eight inches, twelve inches, sixteen inches, etc. note how the soil changes in colour and texture. in which do plants succeed best? in most fields the richest part of the soil is contained in the upper nine inches; the portion below this is called subsoil. this extends to the underlying rock and is usually distinguished from the upper portion by its lighter colour, poorer texture, and smaller supply of available plant food. the difference is due largely to the absence of humus. the character of the subsoil has an important bearing on the condition of the upper soil. a layer of sand or gravel a few feet below the surface provides natural drainage, but if it be too deep, it may allow the water to run away rapidly, carrying the plant food down below the roots of the plants. a hard clay subsoil will render the top too wet in rainy weather and too dry in droughts, because of the small amount of water absorbed. such a soil is benefited by under-draining. a deep and absorptive subsoil returns water to the surface, by capillary action, as it is needed. the subsoil finally contains a large amount of plant food, which becomes gradually changed into a form in which plants can make use of it. pupils should find out the character of the subsoil in their various fields at home and its effect on the fertility of the field. fertilizers along with water, the roots take up from the soil various substances that are essential to their healthy growth. potash, phosphoric acid, nitrogen, calcium, sulphur, magnesium, and iron are needed by plants, but the first three are particularly important. if land is to yield good crops year after year, it must be fertilized, that is, there must be added chemicals containing the above-mentioned plant foods. land becomes poor from two causes: the plant food in the soil becomes exhausted, and poisonous excretions from the roots of one year's crops act injuriously on those of the next season. rotating crops will improve both conditions for a while, but eventually the soil will require treatment. humus contains plant food and is also an excellent absorbent of the poisonous excretions. it is added as barn-yard manure, leaves, or as a green crop ploughed in. the chemicals commonly used comprise nitrate of soda, bone meal, sulphate of potash, chloride of potash, lime, ashes, cotton-seed meal, dried blood, super-phosphate, rock phosphate, and basic clay. experiments: . sow wheat on the same plot year after year and note the result when no fertilizer is used. sow wheat on another plot, but use good manure. . try the various commercial fertilizers on the school plots, leaving some without treatment. . examine the roots of clover, peas, or beans, and look for nodules. these show the presence of bacteria, which convert the atmospheric nitrogen into a form in which the plants can use it. scientific farmers have learned the value of inoculating their soil with these germs. a crop of peas or clover may produce the same result. . observe nature's method of supplying soil with humus. soil-forming agents there was once a time when the surface of the earth was bare rock. much of this rock still exists and in many places lies on the surface, but it is usually hidden by a layer of soil. soil is said to be "rock ground to meal by nature's millstones". the process is very slow, but it is constantly going on. the pupils should be directed to find evidences of this "grinding". . running water.--brooks, creeks, rain, and the tiny streamlets on the hills all tell us how soil is carried from place to place. get some muddy water from the river after a heavy rain. let it settle in a tall jar and observe the fine layer formed. wash some pebbles clean, place them in a glass jar with some clear water, and roll or shake the jar about for a few minutes. note that the water becomes turbid with fine material worn from the stones. a process similar to this is constantly going on in rivers, lakes, and seas. account for the presence of gravel beds now situated far away from any water. . ice glaciers.--how do these act on rocks? show evidences in ontario as far as these can be illustrated from the surroundings, such as polished rocks, boulders, beds of clay, sand, or gravel, small lakes, grooved stones, etc. . frost and heat.--see "expansion of solids", pages , . look for splintered or cracked stones. why do farmers plough in the fall? . wind.--in sections near the lakes the action of the wind in moving the sand may be seen and appreciated. there are other places where this work is going on on a smaller scale. . plants.--our study of humus shows the value of vegetable matter in soil. besides contributing to the soil, plants break up rocks with their roots and dissolve them with acid excretions. it is interesting to study how a bare rock becomes covered with soil. first come the lichens which need no soil; on the remains of these the mosses grow. the roots of mosses and lichens help to disintegrate the rock with their excretions, so that, with frost, heat, air, and rain to assist, there is a layer of soil gradually formed on which larger plants can live. a forest develops. the trees supply shade from the sun and shelter from the wind, thus retarding evaporation. the roots of the trees hold the soil from being washed away. the dead leaves and fallen stems provide humus, and, on account of the water-holding capacity of humus, the forest floor acts like a sponge, preventing floods in wet seasons and droughts in dry times. . animals.--pupils should make a list of all burrowing animals and look for examples. the work of the earthworms is especially interesting. by eating the soil, they improve its texture and expose it to the air. their holes admit air and water to the soil. the worms also drag leaves, sticks, and grass into their holes and thus add to the humus. darwin estimated that the earthworms in england passed over ten tons of soil an acre through their bodies annually. this is left on the surface and makes a rich top-dressing. tilling the soil . it makes the soil finer, thus increasing the surface for holding film water and enabling it to conduct more water by capillarity. . it saves water from evaporation. (see experiments and , form iii.) . it aerates the soil, enabling roots to thrive better. . it drains (hence warms) the soil, assuring more rapid growth. . it kills weeds. a large part of the work with soils may be done in connection with the garden studies, though most of the above mentioned experiments may be tried in the school-room. in ungraded schools any of the experiments may be made instructive to all the forms. pupils should be asked to acquaint themselves with the common implements used on the farm. they should ascertain the special service rendered by each. see _circular _, dominion department of agriculture. garden work the work in gardening for form iv should be connected with some definite line of experimental work. the garden should be so planned that a part of it can be used exclusively for experimental work. co-operation with the farmer's experimental union of the ontario agricultural college at guelph is advisable at this point. the following list of experiments is suggested as suitable for boys especially, but no pupil should attempt more than one experiment each year. experiments in plots out-of-doors experimental plots may be of different sizes, according to the space available, from a yard square to a rod square or larger. a plot ft. in. by ft. in. is almost / of an acre, so that the actual yield on such a plot when multiplied by is an approximation of the yield an acre. . testing of varieties of grains, vegetables, or root seeds, including potatoes new to the district. . testing different varieties of clovers and fodder grasses. these plots should be so situated that they can remain for three years. . thick and thin sowing of grain: use plots not less than four feet square. they may be tried most easily with wheat, oats, or barley, although any species of grain may be used. use four plots of the same size, equal in fertility and other soil conditions. in no. put grains of wheat or oats, as the case may be, two inches apart each way. in no. put the grains two inches apart in the row and the rows four inches apart. in no. put the grains four inches apart in the row and the rows four inches apart. in no. put the grains four inches apart in the row and the rows eight inches apart. if possible, weigh the straw and grain when cut and the grain alone when dry and shelled out of the heads. . deep and shallow growing of grain: use four plots similar to those in experiment no. . put the same amount of seed in the different plots. in no. , one inch deep; in no. . two inches deep; in no. , four inches deep, and in no. , six inches deep. note which is up first, and which gives the best yield and best quality. . early and late sowing: three plots are required. plant the same amount of seed in each and cover to the same depth. plant no. as early as the soil can be made ready; no. , two weeks later; and no. , two weeks later than no. . compare the quality and the yield. . effect of sowing clover with grain the first year: only two plots are required. sow the same amount of wheat or oats on each plot. on one plot put a moderate supply of red clover and none on the other. weigh (or estimate), as in experiment above, the straw and the grain produced on each. . effect of a clover crop on the grain crop succeeding it the following year: the same two plots must be used as in no. . when the grain was cut the previous autumn, the plots should have been left standing without cultivation until spring. when the clover has made some growth, spade it down and prepare the other plot in the same way. rake them level and sow the same amount of grain in each again. weigh the crops produced on each. . test quality, yield, and time of maturity of several varieties of the same species. samples of such varieties of wheat as red fife, white fife, preston, turkey red, dawson's golden chaff, white russian, etc., may be obtained from the central experimental farm at ottawa, if not available in the district. . effect of different fertilizers ( ) on the same crop, ( ) on different crops: this can be done either out-of-doors in small plots or indoors, using pots or boxes. ( ) effect on the same crop: for example, oats on plots four feet square. the following standard fertilizers may be used: stable manure, nitrate of soda, muriate of potash, and bone meal. on plot no. , a dressing of stable manure, on plot no. , four oz. nitrate of soda, on plot no. , four oz. muriate of potash, on plot no. , eight oz. bone meal, on plot no. , two oz. nitrate of soda, two oz. muriate of potash, and four oz. bone meal. on plot no. , use no fertilizer. record results. ( ) effect on different crops: try a series of experiments similar to the above, using (a) peas instead of oats, (b) using corn, (c) using cabbage, (d) using potatoes. function of parts of plants this may be introduced in form iii and continued in the next form. already the attention of the pupils has been directed to the essential organs of the flower, namely, stamens and pistil. they have noticed the two kinds of flowers on pumpkins, corn, and many trees. they have seen that only the pistillate flowers produce fruit and seeds, and that when the staminate flowers have shed their pollen, they die. they have seen the yellow dust that the stamens contain and have seen bees laden with it as they emerge from the heart of the flower. have them watch the bee as it enters the flower and notice how it invariably rubs some part of its pollen-covered body against the pistil. when on the moist, sticky top of the pistil, these little pollen-grains soon begin to grow, sending a delicate tube down to the bottom of the pistil to the ovary. inside the ovary are little bodies called the ovules that are moistened by a fluid that comes from this delicate pollen tube, and at once they begin to enlarge and eventually become the seeds. the coverings surrounding them complete the true fruit. the use of the root in supporting the plant in its normal position is apparent to every pupil. to demonstrate the firm hold it has upon the soil, have the pupils try to pull up some large plants by the roots. they will then notice the branching roots of some plants and the long conical roots of others. compare the colour and other surface features of the root and stem. to prove its feeding power, try two plants of equal size, taking the root off one and leaving it uninjured in the other. set them side by side in moist earth and notice which withers. take all the leaves off a plant and keep them off for a few weeks. the plant dies if its leaves are not allowed to grow. keep it in the dark for a long time, and it finally dies even when water and soil are supplied. the leaves, therefore, are essential and require sunlight in doing their work. their complete work will be considered later. how the plant gets its food from the soil when seeds germinate, the lower end of the caulicle, which becomes the root, bears large numbers of root-hairs. inside the root-hairs is protoplasm and cell sap. these root-hairs grow among the soil particles which lie covered over with a thin film of moisture. it is this moisture that is taken up by these root-hairs, and in it is a small amount of mineral matter in solution which helps to sustain the plant. the transmission of soil water through the delicate cell walls of these root-hairs is known as _osmosis_. germination of some of the common grains make a special study of corn, wheat, and buckwheat. take three plates and put moist sand in each to a depth of about half an inch. spread over this a piece of damp cloth. put in no. , one hundred grains of corn; in no. , the same number of grains of wheat; and in no. , the same number of grains of buckwheat, peas, or beans. cover each plate with another piece of damp cloth and invert another plate over each to prevent drying out. keep in a warm room and do not allow the cloths to become dry. if one of the cloths be left hanging six or eight inches over the side of the plate and dipping into a dish of water, the whole cloth will be kept moist by capillarity. note the following points: . changes in the size of the seeds during the first twenty-four hours. . in which variety germination seems most rapid. . the percentage vitality, that is, the number of seeds which germinate out of one hundred. . the nature of the coverings and their use. (protection to the parts inside) . the parts of the seed inside. (buckwheat, pea, or bean divides into two parts, which become greenish and are called seed leaves. wheat and corn do not divide thus.) . the first signs of growth. a little shoot or tiny plant begins to develop at one end of the seed. note which end bears this tiny plant. . note the development of this embryo plant and the formation of stem and root. . of what use is the bulky part of the seed? to answer this, let the pupils separate the white part of a kernel of corn, which is attached to the embryo plant, from the pulpy mass surrounding it. set five such plants in moist sand and also five germinating seeds not so dissected. pupils will discover that the mass surrounding the embryo is for the nourishing of the embryo plant. it is a little store of food prepared by the mother plant for the little ones that grow from the seeds. note that it disappears as the plant grows. to further show the great value of this stored plant food, put a large-sized pea in a pot of moist moss or sawdust for a few days. when it has germinated and its root is a couple of inches long, place the pea in a thistle tube or small funnel, with the root projecting down the tube into a glass of water in which the funnel tube rests. place all in a sunny window and note how much growth the plant is able to make without any food except that which the seed contained. . note the development of the root and root-hairs. it is by means of these root-hairs that the plant absorbs moisture. the branching form of the root gives greater support to the plant and increased area for absorption of water by means of root-hairs. to show the direction taken by the root and also by the shoot, take a glass jar with straight sides like a battery jar (a large fruit jar will do); line it inside with a layer of blotting-paper and then fill it with moist sawdust. drop seeds of sunflower or squash down between the paper and the glass. the moisture from the blotting-paper will cause them to sprout, the shoot or stem always taking an upward direction and the root turning downward quite regardless of the position in which the seeds were placed. . apply this study to seed planting: plant seeds of wheat in four pots of soil, no. , half an inch deep; no. , two inches; no. , four inches; no. , six inches. repeat this experiment, using buckwheat. what seeds are up first? what seeds last? which are best after a week? after three or four weeks? from this experiment could you recommend a certain depth for the planting of wheat and buckwheat? . does the kind of soil make any difference? to answer this have different pupils choose different soils, such as ( ) coarse sand, ( ) fine sand, ( ) wet clay, ( ) humus or leaf mould, ( ) mixed soil or loam; and let each put in grains of wheat, two inches deep. allow five other pupils to plant seeds of buckwheat, under similar conditions. treat all pots alike as to time of watering and quantity of water used on each and give them all equal light and heat. note which come up first. which are highest in one week, in two weeks, in four weeks? . this study may be continued in the garden by planting one plot each of corn, wheat, and buckwheat. plots ten feet by twenty feet are large enough. observe the rate of development in the plots. which seems to mature most quickly? which blossoms first? in what respect are the leaves of these plants alike or unlike? how do the stems differ? examine the blossoming and seed formation. when the grains are ripe, collect a hundred of the best looking and most compact heads of each grain and also a hundred of the smallest heads of each. dry, shell, and store the two samples of each grain in separate bottles. these samples are for planting the following spring. . to show the need of moisture in germination: fill two flower-pots or cans with dry sand; put seeds of sunflower in each, covering them an inch deep. put water in one pot and none in the other. examine both pots after two or three days. . to show that heat is needed for germination of seeds: plant sunflower seeds in two pots as above; place one in a warm room and the other in a cold room or refrigerator; water both and observe result in three days. . to show that air is necessary for germination: fill a pint sealer with hydrogen (the gas collected over water in the usual way, as shown in any chemistry text-book). put a few sunflower seeds in a small sponge or wrap them loosely in a piece of soft cloth. keeping the mouth of the jar which has been inverted over water and filled with hydrogen, under the surface of the water, introduce the sponge containing the seeds, by putting it under the water and pushing it up into the jar. seal the jar without letting the gas get out. put some seeds in another jar in a wet sponge and leave the jar uncovered. compare results after several days. here is a second experiment to prove this. boil some water in a beaker in order to drive out all the air, put a few grains of rice in the water, and then add enough oil to make a thin covering on the water. this covering will prevent air from mixing with the water again. put some rice in a second beaker without boiling or adding the oil. leave the beakers side by side in a warm room for a week. the seeds will not germinate in the boiled water. it is not always easy to get rice that will germinate, but when it has been procured, the experiment is easy and very interesting. any other seeds, such as those of pond lily and eel-grass, that germinate readily under water, will do as well as rice. weeds pupils in this form should learn to identify a large number of weeds and weed seeds. the collecting and mounting of weeds and weed seeds the previous summer and autumn will have helped to prepare them for this work. in the spring, when flower and vegetable seeds are coming up in the garden, it is often difficult for pupils to distinguish the weeds from the useful plants. to help in this work of distinguishing the good from the bad, the teacher should arrange for a plot having, say, ten rows, one row for each variety of weed selected. each row should be designated by a number instead of a name. the identification of these growing weeds by name may be given as a problem to the pupils. this plot should remain until the pupils have observed the manner of growth of each variety, the blossoming and seed formation, and then the root growth, as they are being uprooted previous to the ripening of the seed. each pupil should prepare a brief description of each of the ten varieties studied, and make drawings of the plant and its parts, especially the leaf, flower, seed, and root. they should learn the best methods of eradication and add these in their notes. _farm weeds_ will be of great value in such weed studies. vines suitable garden vines for study are climbing nasturtium, scarlet runner bean, and japanese hop. their growth and method of climbing should be compared with that of the sweet-pea and morning-glory already studied. observe particularly the kind of leaves and their arrangement, also the flowers and fruit. observe also the gourd family--melon, cucumber, and squash--their tendency to climb, and the nature of their flowers and fruit. wild flowers in schools where the studies with garden plants, such as have been indicated, can be carried on, there will not be as much time for the study of wild flowers as in those schools where no garden plants are available. a definite list of wild flowers for study should be arranged by the teacher early in spring. the following are common in most parts of ontario: squirrel-corn, dutchman's breeches, blue cohosh, dog's-tooth violet, water-parsnip, catnip, and mallow. in each study observe the following points: . description of leaves and flowers for identification. . storing of food in underground parts. . time of flowering. (pupils of this form should keep a flower calendar.) . description of fruit and seeds and how these are scattered. . their location, and the character of the soil where found. encourage the pupils to transplant a specimen of each from the woods to the school or home garden. moist humus soil and partial shade are the best conditions for the growth of these wild wood flowers. review the type lessons given already for primary classes and apply the information thus gained to the observational study of the varieties of flowers named above. planting of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials in home and school grounds this work should be the outcome of the plans made in the winter. if each pupil does a little toward the carrying out of the scheme of planting, the grounds will soon be wonderfully improved. the teacher should guard against over-planting and arrange for the care of the shrubs and flowers during the summer holidays. new varieties of herbaceous perennials, grown from seed planted the previous summer or procured from homes in the vicinity, should be introduced. as most herbaceous perennials become too thick after a few years, it is necessary to keep digging some out year by year, dividing and resetting them, and fertilizing the ground. native trees and shrubs should be placed so as to obscure undesirable views, such as closets and outbuildings, rough fences, or bare walls. this principle in planting should be observed in the case of trees. evergreen trees are particularly desirable as screens and shelters from cold winds. no planting should be done, on the other hand, that would shut out a good view of the school or obscure a beautiful landscape. too frequently unused corners of the school ground are covered with weeds. prevent this by putting trees there and also shrubs. keep all centres open, and let the trees, shrubs, and flowering perennials be massed about the corners and along the sides. the informal method of planting is to be preferred to formal planting of designs. the public school inspector will provide a copy of a departmental circular on the _improvement of school grounds_, which should be carefully studied by every teacher. shade trees consider suitable varieties to plant for shade and for ornamental effects. white elm, hard and soft maple, white birch, pines, and spruces are among the best. elms and maples are excellent trees for roadside or street planting, and should be about forty feet apart. spruces and pines may be planted five or six feet apart along the north and west, to act as a wind break. otherwise, evergreens are best when planted in triangular clumps. white birch is particularly ornamental against a dark background of evergreens. specimen trees of horse-chestnut, beech, ash, and hickory are also desirable. transplanting the best time for transplanting trees is in the autumn after the leaves have fallen, or in the spring before the buds have opened. in planting a tree, the following points should be observed: . preserve as much of the root system as possible, and trim off all broken or bruised portions. . do not expose the roots to sun or wind while out of the ground. this is especially important in transplanting evergreens. . reduce the top of the tree sufficiently to balance with the reduced root system. . set the tree a few inches deeper than it was before transplanting. . pack the best top soil closely about the roots, so as to exclude all air spaces, since these tend to dry the delicate roots. . if the ground is very dry, water should be used in planting; otherwise it is of no advantage. water the trees thoroughly once a week in dry weather during the first season. . after planting, put a mulch or covering of fine straw, grass, or chips for two or three feet around the tree; or establish a soil mulch and keep down the grass by frequent cultivation. grass roots dry out the soil. . in the case of deciduous trees, have the lowest limbs at least seven feet from the ground. evergreens, however, should never be trimmed, but should have their branches right from the ground up--this uninterrupted pyramid form is one of their chief beauties. animal studies scale insects san josÃ� scale certain districts in ontario and especially those bordering on lake erie have suffered from the ravages of this scale on apple, peach, pear, and other orchard trees. a hand lens should be used in studying these insects, observations being carried on from may to september. carefully examine the fruits and twigs of orchard trees for evidences of the presence of the scale, and learn to identify it and to recognize the damages resulting from its attacks. observe the almost circular flat scale of a grayish colour and having a minute point projecting upward at its centre. the young insects which emerge from underneath these scales in the spring crawl around for a time, then become stationary, and each one secretes a scale under which it matures. the mature males have two wings but the mature females are wingless. note the withering of fruit and twigs due to the insects' attacks and the minute openings in the skin of the twig, made by the insertion of the sucking mouth parts. describe to the pupils how the insect was transported from japan to america and how it is now spread on nursery stock. give a brief account of its destructiveness in the orchards of essex and kent. (consult _bulletin no. , common insects affecting fruit trees and fungus diseases affecting fruit trees_. bethune & jarvis, department of agriculture, toronto, free.) oyster-shell bark-louse this is very common throughout the province on apple and pear trees. observe the unhealthy appearance of the leaves of the infested trees, the inferior quality of the fruit, and the gray scales shaped like tiny oyster-shells. the means of destroying these pests should be discussed. the bulletins named above give detailed information in reference to spraying and fumigation. cutworms (consult _bulletin _, department of agriculture, ottawa.) cutworms are the larvæ of medium-sized brown moths that fly at night. there are many species of cutworms, all of which are destructive to some forms of plants or grasses, grains, and vegetables. the larvæ are rather thick, naked, worm-like forms. they burrow into the ground, but emerge at night to feed by cutting through the stems of tender plants or by feeding upon the leaves. for the most effective method of dealing with these refer to what is said on "combating garden pests", form ii. when a field is known to be infested with cutworms, it is a good plan to spread poisoned clover or cabbage leaves over the ground before the seed is planted. white grubs white grubs are large, fat, white larvæ of june beetles. these beetles are the well-known large, brown, clumsy beetles that blunder into the house at night in may or june and drop with a thud upon the floor. three years are spent in the larval form, the grubs living underground and feeding on the roots of plants, especially the roots of grains and grasses. since they are found chiefly in fields recently ploughed from grass, they may be held in check by rotation of crops and by fall ploughing, which exposes the larvæ to the winter frosts. in may or june, when the adults are feeding on the foliage of fruit and shade trees, spraying the trees with london purple is quite effective for destroying the beetles before they have laid their eggs among the roots of the grass. hogs destroy many larvæ by rooting in the soil to find them for food. crayfish search for the crayfish in streams and ponds. why is the crayfish hard to find? hard to capture? obtain a living crayfish from a pond or stream and place it in a jar of water or in an aquarium. the crayfish should not be placed in an aquarium containing insects and small fish which are to be kept, as it is fierce and voracious. the pupils should study the living animal, noting its habit of lurking under stones; the sweeping of the water with the feelers; the backward movement in swimming, produced by bending the tail sharply underneath the body; the walking by means of four pairs of legs, the great claws being used to turn the animal; the use of the great claws in seizing prey and holding food near the mouth; the movements of the small appendages under the front part of the animal and the water currents caused by these; the movements of the small appendages under the abdomen of the animal. freshwater mussel the freshwater mussel--"clam" as it is usually called by school-boys--may be found in almost any stream. place a mussel in the aquarium, and note the opening and closing of the valves of the shell; the hinge connecting the valves; the foot protruding from the shell; the movements by means of the foot; the mantle lobes lining the shell and visible at the open margins; the two siphons at the rear of the animal--water currents may be observed entering the upper and emerging from the lower of these. infer uses for these currents. touch the edge of the upper siphon and observe how quickly the shell is closed. compare the mussel with the snail as to movements and shell. compare also with the oyster and sea clam. examine empty shells and notice the pearly layer of the shell, the action of the hinge, and the marks on the shell to which the muscles for closing the shell were attached. state all the means of protection that you have discovered the animal to possess. bird study (consult _bulletin . birds of ontario in relation to agriculture_, nash. department of agriculture, free.) if the lessons in bird study which are prescribed for forms i, ii, and iii have been successful, the pupils of form iv should have a fair acquaintance with the habits of the common birds. a very interesting exercise is to hold a trial upon those birds which are viewed with suspicion or which are openly condemned as objectionable neighbours. a pupil is appointed to act as judge and other pupils give evidence. the evidence must be based upon the pupil's personal observations on the habits of the bird. the following birds are named, and brief descriptions of their habits are given as suggestions for materials for bird trials: robin.--he steals small fruits, such as cherries, currants, etc. he is a cheerful, jolly neighbour, who sings sweetly. he eats great numbers of cutworms and white grubs. crow.--he robs the nests of other birds, and steals chickens, corn, and potatoes. he helps the farmer by killing cutworms, white grubs, grasshoppers, and other insects. woodpecker.--the members of this family are grievously persecuted because they are believed to injure orchard and shade trees by pecking holes in the bark from which to suck the sap. careful observations tend to show that the trees are benefited rather than injured by this treatment. woodpeckers are undoubtedly beneficial as destroyers of wood-borers and other obnoxious insects. crow-blackbird (bronzed grackle).--his habits are similar to those of the crow. owls.--all the owls are held in ill repute because of the crimes of a few members of the family. very seldom does an owl steal a chicken; their food consists chiefly of mice, rats, squirrels, grasshoppers, and other field pests. hawks.--the hawks are unjustly persecuted for crimes of which they are seldom guilty. as a class they are beneficial, not injurious birds. different aspects of nature study there is a knowledge of nature which contributes to the earning of a living. this is the _utilitarian_ aspect. there is a knowledge of nature which may be obtained in such a way as to develop the observing and reasoning powers and give a training in scientific method. this is the _disciplinary_ aspect. there is a knowledge which leads the pupil to perceive the beautiful in nature, to enjoy it and so add to his happiness. this is the _æsthetic_ aspect. there is a knowledge of nature which, through the life history of plant and animal, throws light on the pupil's own life, gives him an insight into all life in its unity, and leads him to look up reverently to the author of all life--through nature up to nature's god. this is the _spiritual_ aspect. each of these aspects supplements, interprets, or enforces the others. he who omits or neglects any of these perceives but a part of a complete whole. nature study develops in the pupil a sympathetic attitude toward nature for the purpose of increasing the joy of living. it leads him to see nature through the eyes of the poet and the moralist as well as through those of the scientist. nature study is concerned with plants, birds, insects, stones, clouds, brooks, etc., but it is not botany, ornithology, entomology, geology, meteorology, or geography. in this study, it is the spirit of inquiry developed rather than the number of facts ascertained that is important. gradually it becomes more systematic as it advances until, in the high school, it passes over into the science group of studies. illustrations of these aspects the simple observational lessons on the robin, pages - , form the bases for further study in more advanced classes. this bird as a destroyer of worms, beetles, etc., is a valuable assistant to the farmer as, indeed, are practically all birds in this province. birds such as the duck, goose, partridge, etc., are valuable as food, and laws are made to protect them during certain seasons. the training in inference which a pupil receives in studying the parts of a plant or an animal and the adaptation of these parts to function is valuable. he studies the plant and the animal as living organisms with work to do in the world, and learns how what they do and their manner of doing it affect their form and structure. the short, curved, and slightly hooked bill of the hen and her method of breaking open a pea pod or splitting an object too large to swallow shows the bill to be a mallet, a wedge, or a pick as the case may be. a study of the bills of the duck, woodpecker, and hawk will reveal the method by which each gets his food and how the organ is adapted to its purpose. similar studies of the feet and legs of birds will make the idea of adaptation increasingly clear. literature is rich with tributes to the songs of the birds. the thoughts and feelings aroused or suggested by these songs are the topics of much of the world's enduring poetry. longfellow, in his "birds of killing-worth" (_tales of a wayside inn_) sings exquisitely of the use and beauty and worth of birds. shelley, in his "skylark", describes in glowing verse "the unbodied joy" that "singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest". wordsworth hears the blithe new comer, the cuckoo, and rejoices though babbling only to the vale of sunshine and of flowers thou bringest unto me a tale of visionary hours. the life story of a bird throws light on our own lives, puts us in sympathy with the lives of others, teaches kindness, teaches the duties and responsibilities of the higher to the lower, teaches respect for all life. observe the helpless bird in its nest, helpless as a baby. see the care given by the mother and father to keep it warm till its down and feathers grow, to feed it till it is able to leave the nest. watch the parents teaching it to fly by repeated short flights. olive thorn miller in her _bird ways_ gives a delightful sketch of the father robin teaching a young robin where to look for worms and how to dig them up. when that task was accomplished, his father began to give him "music lessons", that is, practice in imitating the robin's song. thus, the young bird was equipped to make a living and to enjoy life. the social life of birds, as they sing their matins, as they choose their mates, as they gather in flocks preparatory to migration, furnish many opportunities for indirect teaching on many of life's problems. the ontario readers contain many poems that may be used in connection with the nature study lessons. to supplement the observational studies of birds, read from the third reader, "the robin's song", "the red-winged blackbird", "the sandpiper", "to the cuckoo", "bob white", "the lark and the rook", "the poet's song". in the third reader, the lessons on "the fountain", "the brook", "the tide river", and "a song of the sea" form a group that can be used in connection with lessons in geography. "a song for april", "an apple orchard in the spring", "the gladness of nature", "the orchard", "a midsummer song", "corn-fields", "the corn song", "the death of the flowers", "the frost", "the snow-storm", make another group to accompany a study of the seasons. a similar group may be selected from the fourth reader. the pupil who has made a study of a "brook" as a lesson in geography and defined it as "a small natural stream of water flowing from a spring or fountain" will, if he studies the following lines from tennyson's "the brook" and perceives by careful observation the descriptive accuracy and aptness of the words in italics, realize that the poet sees much that the geographer has not included in his definition. i _chatter_ over stony ways, in little sharps and trebles, i _bubble_ into eddying bays, i _babble_ on the pebbles. * * * i _slip_, i _slide_, i _gloom_, i _glance_. among my skimming swallows; * * * i _murmur_ under moon and stars. * * * i _linger_ by my shingly bars. i _loiter_ round my cresses. correlations such as these add greatly to the pupil's interest in this subject. given a teacher with a love of out-of-door life, with observant eyes and ears, and the spirit that sympathizes with children's curiosity and stimulates inquiry, nature study will be a joy and an inspiration to pupils. a collection of college words and customs. by b.h. hall. "multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, cadentque quæ nunc sunt in honore, vocabula." "notandi sunt tibi mores." hor. _ars poet._ revised and enlarged edition. entered according to act of congress, in the year , by b.h. hall, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. introduction. the first edition of this publication was mostly compiled during the leisure hours of the last half-year of a senior's collegiate life, and was presented anonymously to the public with the following "preface. "the editor has an indistinct recollection of a sheet of foolscap paper, on one side of which was written, perhaps a year and a half ago, a list of twenty or thirty college phrases, followed by the euphonious titles of 'yale coll.,' 'harvard coll.' next he calls to mind two blue-covered books, turned from their original use, as receptacles of latin and greek exercises, containing explanations of these and many other phrases. his friends heard that he was hunting up odd words and queer customs, and dubbed him 'antiquarian,' but in a kindly manner, spared his feelings, and did not put the vinegar 'old' before it. "two and one half quires of paper were in time covered with a strange medley, an olla-podrida of student peculiarities. thus did he amuse himself in his leisure hours, something like one who, as dryden says, 'is for raking in chaucer for antiquated words.' by and by he heard a wish here and a wish there, whether real or otherwise he does not know, which said something about 'type,' 'press,' and used other cabalistic words, such as 'copy,' 'devil,' etc. then there was a gathering of papers, a transcribing of passages from letters, an arranging in alphabetical order, a correcting of proofs, and the work was done,--poorly it may be, but with good intent. "some things will be found in the following pages which are neither words nor customs peculiar to colleges, and yet they have been inserted, because it was thought they would serve to explain the character of student life, and afford a little amusement to the student himself. society histories have been omitted, with the exception of an account of the oldest affiliated literary society in the united states. "to those who have aided in the compilation of this work, the editor returns his warmest thanks. he has received the assistance of many, whose names he would here and in all places esteem it an honor openly to acknowlege, were he not forbidden so to do by the fact that he is himself anonymous. aware that there is information still to be collected, in reference to the subjects here treated, he would deem it a favor if he could receive through the medium of his publisher such morsels as are yet ungathered. "should one pleasant thought arise within the breast of any alumnus, as a long-forgotten but once familiar word stares him in the face, like an old and early friend; or should one who is still guarded by his alma mater be led to a more summer-like acquaintance with those who have in years past roved, as he now roves, through classic shades and honored halls, the labors of their friend, the editor, will have been crowned with complete success. "cambridge, july th, ." fearing lest venerable brows should frown with displeasure at the recital of incidents which once made those brows bright and joyous; dreading also those stern voices which might condemn as boyish, trivial, or wrong an attempt to glean a few grains of philological lore from the hitherto unrecognized corners of the fields of college life, the editor chose to regard the brows and hear the voices from an innominate position. not knowing lest he should at some future time regret the publication of pages which might be deemed heterodox, he caused a small edition of the work to be published, hoping, should it be judged as evil, that the error would be circumscribed in its effects, and the medium of the error buried between the dusty shelves of the second-hand collection of some rusty old bibliopole. by reason of this extreme caution, the volume has been out of print for the last four years. in the present edition, the contents of the work have been carefully revised, and new articles, filling about two hundred pages, have been interspersed throughout the volume, arranged under appropriate titles. numerous additions have been made to the collection of technicalities peculiar to the english universities, and the best authorities have been consulted in the preparation of this department. an index has also been added, containing a list of the american colleges referred to in the text in connection with particular words or customs. the editor is aware that many of the words here inserted are wanting in that refinement of sound and derivation which their use in classical localities might seem to imply, and that some of the customs here noticed and described are "more honored in the breach than the observance." these facts are not, however, sufficient to outweigh his conviction that there is nothing in language or manners too insignificant for the attention of those who are desirous of studying the diversified developments of the character of man. for this reason, and for the gratification of his own taste and the tastes of many who were pleased at the inceptive step taken in the first edition, the present volume has been prepared and is now given to the public. troy, n.y., february , . a collection of college words and customs. _a_. a.b. an abbreviation for _artium baccalaureus_, bachelor of arts. the first degree taken by students at a college or university. it is usually written b.a., q.v. absit. latin; literally, _let him be absent_; leave of absence from commons, given to a student in the english universities.--_gradus ad cantab._ academian. a member of an academy; a student in a university or college. academic. a student in a college or university. a young _academic_ coming into the country immediately after this great competition, &c.--_forby's vocabulary_, under _pin-basket_. a young _academic_ shall dwell upon a journal that treats of trade, and be lavish in the praise of the author; while persons skilled in those subjects hear the tattle with contempt.--_watts's improvement of the mind_. academicals. in the english universities, the dress peculiar to the students and officers. i must insist on your going to your college and putting on your _academicals_.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . the proctor makes a claim of s. d. on every undergraduate whom he finds _inermem_, or without his _academicals_.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . if you say you are going for a walk, or if it appears likely, from the time and place, you are allowed to pass, otherwise you may be sent back to college to put on your _academicals_.--_collegian's guide_, p. . acknowledgment. at harvard college, every student admitted upon examination, after giving a bond for the payment of all college dues, according to the established laws and customs, is required to sign the following _acknowledgment_, as it is called:--"i acknowledge that, having been admitted to the university at cambridge, i am subject to its laws." thereupon he receives from the president a copy of the laws which he has promised to obey.--_laws univ. of cam., mass._, , p. . act. in english universities, a thesis maintained in public by a candidate for a degree, or to show the proficiency of a student.--_webster_. the student proposes certain questions to the presiding officer of the schools, who then nominates other students to oppose him. the discussion is syllogistical and in latin and terminates by the presiding officer questioning the respondent, or person who is said _to keep the act_, and his opponents, and dismissing them with some remarks upon their respective merits.--_brande_. the effect of practice in such matters may be illustrated by the habit of conversing in latin, which german students do much more readily than english, simply because the former practise it, and hold public disputes in latin, while the latter have long left off "_keeping acts_," as the old public discussions required of candidates for a degree used to be called.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the word was formerly used in harvard college. in the "orders of the overseers," may th, , is the following: "such that expect to proceed masters of arts [are ordered] to exhibit their synopsis of _acts_ required by the laws of the college."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . nine bachelors commenced at cambridge; they were young men of good hope, and performed their _acts_ so as to give good proof of their proficiency in the tongues and arts.--_winthrop's journal, by mr. savage_, vol. i. p. . the students of the first classis that have beene these foure years trained up in university learning (for their ripening in the knowledge of the tongues, and arts) and are approved for their manners, as they have _kept_ their publick _acts_ in former yeares, ourselves being present at them; so have they lately _kept_ two solemn _acts_ for their commencement.--_new england's first fruits_, in _mass. hist. coll._, vol. i. p. . but in the succeeding _acts_ ... the latin syllogism seemed to give the most content.--_harvard register_, - , p. . . the close of the session at oxford, when masters and doctors complete their degrees, whence the _act term_, or that term in which the _act_ falls. it is always held with great solemnity. at cambridge, and in american colleges, it is called _commencement_. in this sense mather uses it. they that were to proceed bachelors, held their _act_ publickly in cambridge.--_mather's magnalia_, b. , pp. , . at some times in the universities of england they have no public _acts_, but give degrees privately and silently.--_letter of increase mather, in app. to pres. woolsey's hist. disc._, p. . ad eundem gradum. latin, _to the same degree_. in american colleges, a bachelor or master of one institution was formerly allowed to take _the same_ degree at another, on payment of a certain fee. by this he was admitted to all the privileges of a graduate of his adopted alma mater. _ad eundem gradum_, to the same degree, were the important words in the formula of admission. a similar custom prevails at present in the english universities. persons who have received a degree in any other college or university may, upon proper application, be admitted _ad eundem_, upon payment of the customary fees to the president.--_laws union coll._, , p. . persons who have received a degree in any other university or college may, upon proper application, be admitted _ad eundem_, upon paying five dollars to the steward for the president.--_laws of the univ. in cam., mass._, . persons who have received a degree at any other college may, upon proper application, be admitted _ad eundem_, upon payment of the customary fee to the president.--_laws mid. coll._, , p. . the house of convocation consists both of regents and non-regents, that is, in brief, all masters of arts not honorary, or _ad eundems_ from cambridge or dublin, and of course graduates of a higher order.--_oxford guide_, , p. xi. fortunately some one recollected that the american minister was a d.c.l. of trinity college, dublin, members of which are admitted _ad eundem gradum_ at cambridge.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . adjourn. at bowdoin college, _adjourns_ are the occasional holidays given when a professor unexpectedly absents himself from recitation. adjourn. at the university of vermont, this word as a verb is used in the same sense as is the verb bolt at williams college; e.g. the students _adjourn_ a recitation, when they leave the recitation-room _en masse_, despite the professor. admission. the act of admitting a person as a member of a college or university. the requirements for admission are usually a good moral character on the part of the candidate, and that he shall be able to pass a satisfactory examination it certain studies. in some colleges, students are not allowed to enter until they are of a specified age.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . _laws tale coll._, , p. . the requisitions for entrance at harvard college in are given in the following extract. "when any scholar is able to read tully, or such like classical latin author, _extempore_, and make and speak true latin in verse and prose _suo (ut aiunt) marte_, and decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the greek tongue, then may he be admitted into the college, nor shall any claim admission before such qualifications."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . admittatur. latin; literally, _let him be admitted_. in the older american colleges, the certificate of admission given to a student upon entering was called an _admittatur_, from the word with which it began. at harvard no student was allowed to occupy a room in the college, to receive the instruction there given, or was considered a member thereof, until he had been admitted according to this form.--_laws harv. coll._, . referring to yale college, president wholsey remarks on this point: "the earliest known laws of the college belong to the years and , and are in manuscript; which is explained by the custom that every freshman, on his admission, was required to write off a copy of them for himself, to which the _admittatur_ of the officers was subscribed."--_hist. disc, before grad. yale coll._, , p. . he travels wearily over in visions the term he is to wait for his initiation into college ways and his _admittatur_.--_harvard register_, p. . i received my _admittatur_ and returned home, to pass the vacation and procure the college uniform.--_new england magazine_, vol. iii. p. . it was not till six months of further trial, that we received our _admittatur_, so called, and became matriculated.--_a tour through college_, , p. . admitto te ad gradum. _i admit you to a degree_; the first words in the formula used in conferring the honors of college. the scholar-dress that once arrayed him, the charm _admitto te ad gradum_, with touch of parchment can refine, and make the veriest coxcomb shine, confer the gift of tongues at once, and fill with sense the vacant dunce. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, ed. , exeter, p. . admonish. in collegiate affairs, to reprove a member of a college for a fault, either publicly or privately; the first step of college discipline. it is followed by _of_ or _against_; as, to admonish of a fault committed, or against committing a fault. admonition. private or public reproof; the first step of college discipline. in harvard college, both private and public admonition subject the offender to deductions from his rank, and the latter is accompanied in most cases with official notice to his parents or guardian.--see _laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . _laws yale coll._, , p. . mr. flynt, for many years a tutor in harvard college, thus records an instance of college punishment for stealing poultry:--"november th, . three scholars were publicly admonished for thievery, and one degraded below five in his class, because he had been before publicly admonished for card-playing. they were ordered by the president into the middle of the hall (while two others, concealers of the theft, were ordered to stand up in their places, and spoken to there). the crime they were charged with was first declared, and then laid open as against the law of god and the house, and they were admonished to consider the nature and tendency of it, with its aggravations; and all, with them, were warned to take heed and regulate themselves, so that they might not be in danger of so doing for the future; and those who consented to the theft were admonished to beware, lest god tear them in pieces, according to the text. they were then fined, and ordered to make restitution twofold for each theft."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . adopted son. said of a student in reference to the college of which he is or was a member, the college being styled his _alma mater_. there is something in the affection of our alma mater which changes the nature of her _adopted sons_; and let them come from wherever they may, she soon alters them and makes it evident that they belong to the same brood.--_harvard register_, p. . advance. the lesson which a student prepares for the first time is called _the advance_, in contradistinction to _the review_. even to save him from perdition, he cannot get "_the advance_," forgets "_the review_." _childe harvard_, p. . Ægrotal. latin, _ægrotus_, sick. a certificate of illness. used in the univ. of cam., eng. a lucky thought; he will get an "_ægrotal_," or medical certificate of illness.--_household words_, vol. ii. p. . Ægrotat. latin; literally, _he is sick_. in the english universities, a certificate from a doctor or surgeon, to the effect that a student has been prevented by illness from attending to his college duties, "though, commonly," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "the real complaint is much more serious; viz. indisposition of the mind! _ægrotat_ animo magis quam corpore." this state is technically called _ægritude_, and the person thus affected is said to be _æger_.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. pp. , . to prove sickness nothing more is necessary than to send to some medical man for a pill and a draught, and a little bit of paper with _ægrotat_ on it, and the doctor's signature. some men let themselves down off their horses, and send for an _ægrotat_ on the score of a fall.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . during this term i attended another course of aristotle lectures, --but not with any express view to the may examination, which i had no intention of going in to, if it could be helped, and which i eventually escaped by an _ægrotat_ from my physician.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . mr. john trumbull well describes this state of indisposition in his progress of dullness:-- "then every book, which ought to please, stirs up the seeds of dire disease; greek spoils his eyes, the print's so fine, grown dim with study, and with wine; of tully's latin much afraid, each page he calls the doctor's aid; while geometry, with lines so crooked, sprains all his wits to overlook it. his sickness puts on every name, its cause and uses still the same; 'tis toothache, colic, gout, or stone, with phases various as the moon, but tho' thro' all the body spread, still makes its cap'tal seat, the head. in all diseases, 'tis expected, the weakest parts be most infected." ed. , part i. p. . Ægrotat degree. one who is sick or so indisposed that he cannot attend the senate-house examination, nor consequently acquire any honor, takes what is termed an _Ægrotat degree_.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . alma mater, _pl._ almÆ matres. fostering mother; a college or seminary where one is educated. the title was originally given to oxford and cambridge, by such as had received their education in either university. it must give pleasure to the alumni of the college to hear of his good name, as he [benjamin woodbridge] was the eldest son of our _alma mater_.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . i see the truths i have uttered, in relation to our _almæ matres_, assented to by sundry of their children.--_terræ-filius_, oxford, p. . alumni, society of. an association composed of the graduates of a particular college. the object of societies of this nature is stated in the following extract from president hopkins's address before the society of alumni of williams college, aug. , . "so far as i know, the society of the alumni of williams college was the first association of the kind in this country, certainly the first which acted efficiently, and called forth literary addresses. it was formed september , , and the preamble to the constitution then adopted was as follows: 'for the promotion of literature and good fellowship among ourselves, and the better to advance the reputation and interests of our alma mater, we the subscribers, graduates of williams college, form ourselves into a society.' the first president was dr. asa burbank. the first orator elected was the hon. elijah hunt mills, a distinguished senator of the united states. that appointment was not fulfilled. the first oration was delivered in , by the rev. dr. woodbridge, now of hadley, and was well worthy of the occasion; and since that time the annual oration before the alumni has seldom failed.... since this society was formed, the example has been followed in other institutions, and bids fair to extend to them all. last year, for the first time, the voice of an alumnus orator was heard at harvard and at yale; and one of these associations, i know, sprung directly from ours. it is but three years since a venerable man attended the meeting of our alumni, one of those that have been so full of interest, and he said he should go directly home and have such an association formed at the commencement of his alma mater, then about to occur. he did so. that association was formed, and the last year the voice of one of the first scholars and jurists in the nation was heard before them. the present year the alumni of dartmouth were addressed for the first time, and the doctrine of progress was illustrated by the distinguished speaker in more senses than one.[ ] who can tell how great the influence of such associations may become in cherishing kind feeling, in fostering literature, in calling out talent, in leading men to act, not selfishly, but more efficiently for the general cause through particular institutions?"--_pres. hopkins's miscellaneous essays and discourses_, pp. - . to the same effect also, mr. chief justice story, who, in his discourse before the society of the alumni of harvard university, aug. , , says: "we meet to celebrate the first anniversary of the society of all the alumni of harvard. we meet without any distinction of sect or party, or of rank or profession, in church or in state, in literature or in science.... our fellowship is designed to be--as it should be--of the most liberal and comprehensive character, conceived in the spirit of catholic benevolence, asking no creed but the love of letters, seeking no end but the encouragement of learning, and imposing no conditions, which say lead to jealousy or ambitious strife. in short, we meet for peace and for union; to devote one day in the year to academical intercourse and the amenities of scholars."--p. . an alumni society was formed at columbia college in the year , and at rutgers college in . there are also societies of this nature at the college of new jersey, princeton; university of virginia, charlottesville; and at columbian college, washington. alumnus, _pl._ alumni. latin, from _alo_, to nourish. a pupil; one educated at a seminary or college is called an _alumnus_ of that institution. a.m. an abbreviation for _artium magister_, master of arts. the second degree given by universities and colleges. it is usually written m.a., q.v. analysis. in the following passage, the word _analysis_ is used as a verb; the meaning being directly derived from that of the noun of the same orthography. if any resident bachelor, senior, or junior sophister shall neglect to _analysis_ in his course, he shall be punished not exceeding ten shillings.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . annarugians. at centre college, kentucky, is a society called the _annarugians_, "composed," says a correspondent "of the wildest of the college boys, who, in the most fantastic disguises, are always on hand when a wedding is to take place, and join in a most tremendous charivari, nor can they be forced to retreat until they have received a due proportion of the sumptuous feast prepared." apostles. at cambridge, england, the last twelve on the list of bachelors of arts; a degree lower than the [greek: oi polloi] "scape-goats of literature, who have at length scrambled through the pales and discipline of the senate-house, without being _plucked_, and miraculously obtained the title of a.b."--_gradus ad cantab._ at columbian college, d.c., the members of the faculty are called after the names of the _apostles_. applicant. a diligent student. "this word," says mr. pickering, in his vocabulary, "has been much used at our colleges. the english have the verb _to apply_, but the noun _applicant_, in this sense, does not appear to be in use among them. the only dictionary in which i have found it with this meaning is entick's, in which it is given under the word _applier_. mr. todd has the term _applicant_, but it is only in the sense of 'he who applies for anything.' an american reviewer, in his remarks on mr. webster's dictionary, takes notice of the word, observing, that it 'is a mean word'; and then adds, that 'mr. webster has not explained it in the most common sense, a _hard student_.'--_monthly anthology_, vol. vii. p. . a correspondent observes: 'the utmost that can be said of this word among the english is, that perhaps it is occasionally used in conversation; at least, to signify one who asks (or applies) for something.'" at present the word _applicant_ is never used in the sense of a diligent student, the common signification being that given by mr. webster, "one who applies; one who makes request; a petitioner." appointee. one who receives an appointment at a college exhibition or commencement. the _appointees_ are writing their pieces.--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , p. . to the gratified _appointee_,--if his ambition for the honor has the intensity it has in some bosoms,--the day is the proudest he will ever see.--_ibid._, p. . i suspect that a man in the first class of the "poll" has usually read mathematics to more profit than many of the "_appointees_," even of the "oration men" at yale.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . he hears it said all about him that the college _appointees_ are for the most part poor dull fellows.--_ibid._, p. . appointment. in many american colleges, students to whom are assigned a part in the exercises of an exhibition or commencement, are said to receive an _appointment_. appointments are given as a reward for superiority in scholarship. as it regards college, the object of _appointments_ is to incite to study, and promote good scholarship.--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , p. . if e'er ye would take an "_appointment_" young man, beware o' the "blade" and "fine fellow," young man! _yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . some have crammed for _appointments_, and some for degrees. _presentation day songs_, yale coll., june , . see junior appointments. approbamus. latin; _we approve_. a certificate, given to a student, testifying of his fitness for the performance of certain duties. in an account of the exercises at dartmouth college during the commencement season in , dr. belknap makes use of this word in the following connection: "i attended, with several others, the examination of joseph johnson, an indian, educated in this school, who, with the rest of the new england indians, are about moving up into the country of the six nations, where they have a tract of land fifteen miles square given them. he appeared to be an ingenious, sensible, serious young man; and we gave him an _approbamus_, of which there is a copy on the next page. after which, at three p.m., he preached in the college hall, and a collection of twenty-seven dollars and a half was made for him. the auditors were agreeably entertained. "the _approbamus_ is as follows."--_life of jeremy belknap, d.d._, pp. , . approbate. to express approbation of; to manifest a liking, or degree of satisfaction.--_webster_. the cause of this battle every man did allow and _approbate_.--_hall, henry vii., richardson's dict._ "this word," says mr. pickering, "was formerly much used at our colleges instead of the old english verb _approve_. the students used to speak of having their performances _approbated_ by the instructors. it is also now in common use with our clergy as a sort of technical term, to denote a person who is licensed to preach; they would say, such a one is _approbated_, that is, licensed to preach. it is also common in new england to say of a person who is licensed by the county courts to sell spirituous liquors, or to keep a public house, that he is approbated; and the term is adopted in the law of massachusetts on this subject." the word is obsolete in england, is obsolescent at our colleges, and is very seldom heard in the other senses given above. by the twelfth statute, a student incurs ... no penalty by declaiming or attempting to declaim without having his piece previously _approbated_.--_ms. note to laws of harvard college_, . observe their faces as they enter, and you will perceive some shades there, which, if they are _approbated_ and admitted, will be gone when they come out.--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , p. . how often does the professor whose duty it is to criticise and _approbate_ the pieces for this exhibition wish they were better! --_ibid._, p. . i was _approbated_ by the boston association, i suspect, as a person well known, but known as an anomaly, and admitted in charity.--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, p. lxxxv. asses' bridge. the fifth proposition of the first book of euclid is called the _asses' bridge_, or rather "pons asinorum," from the difficulty with which many get over it. the _asses' bridge_ in euclid is not more difficult to be got over, nor the logarithms of napier so hard to be unravelled, as many of hoyle's cases and propositions.--_the connoisseur_, no. lx. after mr. brown had passed us over the "_asses' bridge_," without any serious accident, and conducted us a few steps further into the first book, he dismissed us with many compliments.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . i don't believe he passed the _pons asinorum_ without many a halt and a stumble.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . assessor. in the english universities, an officer specially appointed to assist the vice-chancellor in his court.--_cam. cal._ auction. at harvard college, it was until within a few years customary for the members of the senior class, previously to leaving college, to bring together in some convenient room all the books, furniture, and movables of any kind which they wished to dispose of, and put them up at public auction. everything offered was either sold, or, if no bidders could be obtained, given away. audit. in the university of cambridge, england, a meeting of the master and fellows to examine or _audit_ the college accounts. this is succeeded by a feast, on which occasion is broached the very best ale, for which reason ale of this character is called "audit ale."--_grad. ad cantab._ this use of the word thirst made me drink an extra bumper of "_audit_" that very day at dinner.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . after a few draughts of the _audit_, the company disperse.--_ibid._ vol. i. p. . authority. "this word," says mr. pickering, in his vocabulary, "is used in some of the states, in speaking collectively of the professors, &c. of our colleges, to whom the _government_ of these institutions is intrusted." every freshman shall be obliged to do any proper errand or message for the _authority_ of the college.--_laws middlebury coll._, , p. . autograph book. it is customary at yale college for each member of the senior class, before the close of his collegiate life, to obtain, in a book prepared for that purpose, the signatures of the president, professors, tutors, and of all his classmates, with anything else which they may choose to insert. opposite the autographs of the college officers are placed engravings of them, so far as they are obtainable; and the whole, bound according to the fancy of each, forms a most valuable collection of agreeable mementos. when news of his death reached me. i turned to my _book of classmate autographs_, to see what he had written there, and to read a name unusually dear.--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , p. . average book. at harvard college, a book in which the marks received by each student, for the proper performance of his college duties, are entered; also the deductions from his rank resulting from misconduct. these unequal data are then arranged in a mean proportion, and the result signifies the standing which the student has held for a given period. in vain the prex's grave rebuke, deductions from the _average book_. _ms. poem_, w.f. allen, . _b_. b.a. an abbreviation of _baccalaureus artium_, bachelor of arts. the first degree taken by a student at a college or university. sometimes written a.b., which is in accordance with the proper latin arrangement. in american colleges this degree is conferred in course on each member of the senior class in good standing. in the english universities, it is given to the candidate who has been resident at least half of each of ten terms, i.e. during a certain portion of a period extending over three and a third years, and who has passed the university examinations. the method of conferring the degree of b.a. at trinity college, hartford, is peculiar. the president takes the hands of each candidate in his own as he confers the degree. he also passes to the candidate a book containing the college statutes, which the candidate holds in his right hand during the performance of a part of the ceremony. the initials of english academical titles always correspond to the _english_, not to the latin of the titles, _b.a._, m.a., d.d., d.c.l., &c.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . see bachelor. baccalaureate. the degree of bachelor of arts; the first or lowest degree. in american colleges, this degree is conferred in course on each member of the senior class in good standing. in oxford and cambridge it is attainable in two different ways;-- . by examination, to which those students alone are admissible who have pursued the prescribed course of study for the space of three years. . by extraordinary diploma, granted to individuals wholly unconnected with the university. the former class are styled baccalaurei formati, the latter baccalaurei currentes. in france the degree of baccalaureat (baccalaureus literarum) is conferred indiscriminately upon such natives or foreigners and after a strict examination in the classics, mathematics, and philosophy, are declared to be qualified. in the german universities, the title "doctor philosophiæ" has long been substituted for baccalaureus artium or literarum. in the middle ages, the term baccalaureus was applied to an inferior order of knights, who came into the field unattended by vassals; from them it was transferred to the lowest class of ecclesiastics; and thence again, by pope gregory the ninth to the universities. in reference to the derivation of this word, the military classes maintain that it is either derived from the _baculus_ or staff with which knights were usually invested, or from _bas chevalier_, an inferior kind of knight; the literary classes, with more plausibility, perhaps, trace its origin to the custom which prevailed universally among the greeks and romans, and which was followed even in italy till the thirteenth century, of crowning distinguished individuals with laurel; hence the recipient of this honor was style baccalaureus, quasi _baccis laureis_ donatus.--_brande's dictionary_. the subjoined passage, although it may not place the subject in any clearer light, will show the difference of opinion which exists in reference to the derivation of this work. speaking of the exercises of commencement at cambridge mass., in the early days of harvard college, the writer says "but the main exercises were disputations upon questions wherein the respondents first made their theses: for according to vossius, the very essence of the baccalaureat seems to lye in the thing: baccalaureus being but a name corrupted of batualius, which batualius (as well as the french bataile [bataille]) comes à batuendo, a business that carries beating in it: so that, batualii fuerunt vocati, quia jam quasi _batuissent_ cum adversario, ac manus conseruissent; hoc est, publice disputassent, atque ita peritiæ suæ specimen dedissent."--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. p. . the seniors will be examined for the _baccalaureate_, four weeks before commencement, by a committee, in connection with the faculty.--_cal. wesleyan univ._, , p. . bachelor. a person who has taken the first degree in the liberal arts and sciences, at a college or university. this degree, or honor, is called the _baccalaureate_. this title is given also to such as take the first degree in divinity, law, or physic, in certain european universities. the word appears in various forms in different languages. the following are taken from _webster's unabridged dictionary_. "french, _bachelier_; spanish, _bachiller_, a bachelor of arts and a babbler; portuguese, _bacharel_, id., and _bacello_, a shoot or twig of the vine; italian, _baccelliere_, a bachelor of arts; _bacchio_, a staff; _bachetta_, a rod; latin, _bacillus_, a stick, that is, a shoot; french, _bachelette_, a damsel, or young woman; scotch, _baich_, a child; welsh, _bacgen_, a boy, a child; _bacgenes_, a young girl, from _bac_, small. this word has its origin in the name of a child, or young person of either sex, whence the sense of _babbling_ in the spanish. or both senses are rather from shooting, protruding." of the various etymologies ascribed to the term _bachelor_, "the true one, and the most flattering," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "seems to be _bacca laurus_. those who either are, or expect to be, honored with the title of _bachelor of arts_, will hear with exultation, that they are then 'considered as the budding flowers of the university; as the small _pillula_, or _bacca_, of the _laurel_ indicates the flowering of that tree, which is so generally used in the crowns of those who have deserved well, both of the military states, and of the republic of learning.'--_carter's history of cambridge, [eng.]_, ." bachelor fellow. a bachelor of arts who is maintained on a fellowship. bachelor scholar. at the university of cambridge, eng., a b.a. who remains in residence after taking his degree, for the purpose of reading for a fellowship or acting as private tutor. he is always noted for superiority in scholarship. bristed refers to the bachelor scholars in the annexed extract. "along the wall you see two tables, which, though less carefully provided than the fellows', are still served with tolerable decency and go through a regular second course instead of the 'sizings.' the occupants of the upper or inner table are men apparently from twenty-two to twenty-six years of age, and wear black gowns with two strings hanging loose in front. if this table has less state than the adjoining one of the fellows, it has more mirth and brilliancy; many a good joke seems to be going the rounds. these are the bachelors, most of them scholars reading for fellowships, and nearly all of them private tutors. although bachelors in arts, they are considered, both as respects the college and the university, to be _in statu pupillari_ until they become m.a.'s. they pay a small sum in fees nominally for tuition, and are liable to the authority of that mighty man, the proctor." --_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . bachelorship. the state of one who has taken his first degree in a university or college.--_webster_. back-lesson. a lesson which has not been learned or recited; a lesson which has been omitted. in a moment you may see the yard covered with hurrying groups, some just released from metaphysics or the blackboard, and some just arisen from their beds where they have indulged in the luxury of sleeping over,--a luxury, however, which is sadly diminished by the anticipated necessity of making up _back-lessons_.--_harv. reg._, p. . balbus. at yale college, this term is applied to arnold's latin prose composition, from the fact of its so frequent occurrence in that work. if a student wishes to inform his fellow-student that he is engaged on latin prose composition, he says he is studying _balbus_. in the first example of this book, the first sentence reads, "i and balbus lifted up our hands," and the name balbus appears in almost every exercise. ball up. at middlebury college, to fail at recitation or examination. bands. linen ornaments, worn by professors and clergymen when officiating; also by judges, barristers, &c., in court. they form a distinguishing mark in the costume of the proctors of the english universities, and at cambridge, the questionists, on admission to their degrees, are by the statutes obliged to appear in them.--_grad. ad cantab._ banger. a club-like cane or stick; a bludgeon. this word is one of the yale vocables. the freshman reluctantly turned the key, expecting a sophomore gang to see, who, with faces masked and _bangers_ stout, had come resolved to smoke him out. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xx. p. . barber. in the english universities, the college barber is often employed by the students to write out or translate the impositions incurred by them. those who by this means get rid of their impositions are said to _barberize_ them. so bad was the hand which poor jenkinson wrote, that the many impositions which he incurred would have kept him hard at work all day long; so he _barberized_ them, that is, handed them over to the college barber, who had always some poor scholars in his pay. this practice of barberizing is not uncommon among a certain class of men.--_collegian's guide_, p. . barney. at harvard college, about the year , this word was used to designate a bad recitation. to _barney_ was to recite badly. barnwell. at cambridge, eng., a place of resort for characters of bad report. one of the most "civilized" undertook to banter me on my non-appearance in the classic regions of _barnwell_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . barring-out spree. at princeton college, when the students find the north college clear of tutors, which is about once a year, they bar up the entrance, get access to the bell, and ring it. in the "life of edward baines, late m.p. for the borough of leeds," is an account of a _barring-out_, as managed at the grammar school at preston, england. it is related in dickens's household words to this effect. "his master was pompous and ignorant, and smote his pupils liberally with cane and tongue. it is not surprising that the lads learnt as much from the spirit of their master as from his preceptions and that one of those juvenile rebellions, better known as old than at present as a '_barring-out_,' was attempted. the doors of the school, the biographer narrates, were fastened with huge nails, and one of the younger lads was let out to obtain supplies of food for the garrison. the rebellion having lasted two or three days, the mayor, town-clerk, and officers were sent for to intimidate the offenders. young baines, on the part of the besieged, answered the magisterial summons to surrender, by declaring that they would never give in, unless assured of full pardon and a certain length of holidays. with much good sense, the mayor gave them till the evening to consider; and on his second visit the doors were found open, the garrison having fled to the woods of penwortham. they regained their respective homes under the cover of night, and some humane interposition averted the punishment they had deserved."-- am. ed. vol. iii. p. . battel. to stand indebted on the college books at oxford for provisions and drink from the buttery. eat my commons with a good stomach, and _battled_ with discretion. --_puritan_, malone's suppl. , p. . many men "_battel_" at the rate of a guinea a week. wealthier men, more expensive men, and more careless men, often "_battelled_" much higher.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . cotgrave says, "to _battle_ (as scholars do in oxford) être debteur an collège pour ses vivres." he adds, "mot usé seulement des jeunes écoliers de l'université d'oxford." . to reside at the university; to keep terms.--_webster_. battel. derived from the old monkish word _patella_, or _batella_, a plate. at oxford, "whatsoever is furnished for dinner and for supper, including malt liquor, but not wine, as well as the materials for breakfast, or for any casual refreshment to country visitors, excepting only groceries," is expressed by the word _battels_.--_de quincey_. i on the nail my _battels_ paid, the monster turn'd away dismay'd. _the student_, vol. i. p. , . batteler, battler. a student at oxford who stands indebted, in the college books, for provisions and drink at the buttery.--_webster_. halliwell, in his dict. arch. and prov. words, says, "the term is used in contradistinction to gentleman commoner." in _gent. mag._, , p. , is the following:--"there was formerly at oxford an order similar to the sizars of cambridge, called _battelers_ (_batteling_ having the same signification as sizing). the _sizar_ and _batteler_ were as independent as any other members of the college, though of an inferior order, and were under no obligation to wait upon anybody." . one who keeps terms, or resides at the university.--_webster_. batteling. at oxford, the act of taking provisions from the buttery. batteling has the same signification as sizing at the university of cambridge.--_gent. mag._, , p. . _batteling in a friend's name_, implies eating and drinking at his expense. when a person's name is _crossed in the buttery_, i.e. when he is not allowed to take any articles thence, he usually comes into the hall and battels for buttery supplies in a friend's name, "for," says the collegian's guide, "every man can 'take out' an extra commons, and some colleges two, at each meal, for a visitor: and thus, under the name of a guest, though at your own table, you escape part of the punishment of being crossed."--p. . . spending money. the business of the latter was to call us of a morning, to distribute among us our _battlings_, or pocket money, &c.--_dicken's household words_, vol. i. p. . baum. at hamilton college, to fawn upon; to flatter; to court the favor of any one. b.c.l. abbreviated for _baccalaureus civilis legis_, bachelor in civil law. in the university of oxford, a bachelor in civil law must be an m.a. and a regent of three years' standing. the exercises necessary to the degree are disputations upon two distinct days before the professors of the faculty of law. in the university of cambridge, the candidate for this degree must have resided nine terms (equal to three years), and been on the boards of some college for six years, have passed the "previous examination," attended the lectures of the professor of civil law for three terms, and passed a _series_ of examinations in the subject of them; that is to say in general jurisprudence, as illustrated by roman and english law. the names of those who pass creditably are arranged in three classes according to merit.--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . this degree is not conferred in the united states. b.d. an abbreviation for _baccalaureus divinitatis_, bachelor in divinity. in both the english universities a b.d. must be an m.a. of seven years' standing, and at oxford, a regent of the same length of time. the exercises necessary to the degree are at cambridge one act after the fourth year, two opponencies, a clerum, and an english sermon. at oxford, disputations are enjoined upon two distinct days before the professors of the faculty of divinity, and a latin sermon is preached before the vice-chancellor. the degree of theologiæ baccalaureus was conferred at harvard college on mr. leverett, afterwards president of that institution, in , and on mr. william brattle in the same year, the only instances, it is believed, in which this degree has been given in america. beadle, bedel, bedell. an officer in a university, whose chief business is to walk with a mace, before the masters, in a public procession; or, as in america, before the president, trustees, faculty, and students of a college, in a procession, at public commencements.--_webster_. in the english universities there are two classes of bedels, called the _esquire_ and the _yeoman bedel_. of this officer as connected with yale college, president woolsey speaks as follows:--"the beadle or his substitute, the vice-beadle (for the sheriff of the county came to be invested with the office), was the master of processions, and a sort of gentleman-usher to execute the commands of the president. he was a younger graduate settled at or near the college. there is on record a diploma of president clap's, investing with this office a graduate of three years' standing, and conceding to him 'omnia jura privilegia et auctoritates ad bedelli officium, secundum collegiorum aut universitatum leges et consuetudines usitatas; spectantia.' the office, as is well known, still exists in the english institutions of learning, whence it was transferred first to harvard and thence to this institution."--_hist. disc._, aug., , p. . in an account of a commencement at williams college, sept. , , the order in which the procession was formed was as follows: "first, the scholars of the academy; second, students of college; third, the sheriff of the county acting as _bedellus_," &c.--_federal orrery_, sept. , . the _beadle_, by order, made the following declaration.--_clap's hist. yale coll._, , p. . it shall be the duty of the faculty to appoint a _college beadle_, who shall direct the procession on commencement day, and preserve order during the exhibitions.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . bed-maker. one whose occupation is to make beds, and, as in colleges and universities, to take care of the students' rooms. used both in the united states and england. t' other day i caught my _bed-maker_, a grave old matron, poring very seriously over a folio that lay open upon my table. i asked her what she was reading? "lord bless you, master," says she, "who i reading? i never could read in my life, blessed be god; and yet i loves to look into a book too."--_the student_, vol. i. p. , . i asked a _bed-maker_ where mr. ----'s chambers were.--_gent. mag._, , p. . while the grim _bed-maker_ provokes the dust, and soot-born atoms, which his tomes encrust. _the college.--a sketch in verse_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . the _bed-makers_ are the women who take care of the rooms: there is about one to each staircase, that is to say, to every eight rooms. for obvious reasons they are selected from such of the fair sex as have long passed the age at which they might have had any personal attractions. the first intimation which your bed-maker gives you is that she is bound to report you to the tutor if ever you stay out of your rooms all night.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . beer-comment. in the german universities, the student's drinking code. the _beer-comment_ of heidelberg, which gives the student's code of drinking, is about twice the length of our university book of statutes.--_lond. quar. rev._, am. ed., vol. lxxiii. p. . bemossed head. in the german universities, a student during the sixth and last term, or _semester_, is called a _bemossed head_, "the highest state of honor to which man can attain."--_howitt_. see moss-covered head. bene. latin, _well_. a word sometimes attached to a written college exercise, by the instructor, as a mark of approbation. when i look back upon my college life, and think that i one starveling _bene_ got. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . bene discessit. latin; literally, _he has departed honorably_. this phrase is used in the english universities to signify that the student leaves his college to enter another by the express consent and approbation of the master and fellows.--_gradus ad cantab._ mr. pope being about to remove from trinity to emmanuel, by _bene-discessit_, was desirous of taking my rooms.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . beneficiary. one who receives anything as a gift, or is maintained by charity.--_blackstone_. in american colleges, students who are supported on established foundations are called _beneficiaries_. those who receive maintenance from the american education society are especially designated in this manner. no student who is a college _beneficiary_ shall remain such any longer than he shall continue exemplary for sobriety, diligence, and orderly conduct.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . bever. from the italian _bevere_, to drink. an intermediate refreshment between breakfast and dinner.--_morison_. at harvard college, dinner was formerly the only meal which was regularly taken in the hall. instead of breakfast and supper, the students were allowed to receive a bowl of milk or chocolate, with a piece of bread, from the buttery hatch, at morning and evening; this they could eat in the yard, or take to their rooms and eat there. at the appointed hour for _bevers_, there was a general rush for the buttery, and if the walking happened to be bad, or if it was winter, many ludicrous accidents usually occurred. one perhaps would slip, his bowl would fly this way and his bread that, while he, prostrate, afforded an excellent stumbling-block to those immediately behind him; these, falling in their turn, spattering with the milk themselves and all near them, holding perhaps their spoons aloft, the only thing saved from the destruction, would, after disentangling themselves from the mass of legs, arms, etc., return to the buttery, and order a new bowl, to be charged with the extras at the close of the term. similar in thought to this account are the remarks of professor sidney willard concerning harvard college in , in his late work, entitled, "memories of youth and manhood." "the students who boarded in commons were obliged to go to the kitchen-door with their bowls or pitchers for their suppers, when they received their modicum of milk or chocolate in their vessel, held in one hand, and their piece of bread in the other, and repaired to their rooms to take their solitary repast. there were suspicions at times that the milk was diluted by a mixture of a very common tasteless fluid, which led a sagacious yankee student to put the matter to the test by asking the simple carrier-boy why his mother did not mix the milk with warm water instead of cold. 'she does,' replied the honest youth. this mode of obtaining evening commons did not prove in all cases the most economical on the part of the fed. it sometimes happened, that, from inadvertence or previous preparation for a visit elsewhere, some individuals had arrayed themselves in their dress-coats and breeches, and in their haste to be served, and by jostling in the crowd, got sadly sprinkled with milk or chocolate, either by accident or by the stealthy indulgence of the mischievous propensities of those with whom they came in contact; and oftentimes it was a scene of confusion that was not the most pleasant to look upon or be engaged in. at breakfast the students were furnished, in commons hall, with tea, coffee, or milk, and a small loaf of bread. the age of a beaker of beer with a certain allowance of bread had expired."--vol. i. pp. , . no scholar shall be absent above an hour at morning _bever_, half an hour at evening _bever_, &c.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . the butler is not bound to stay above half an hour at _bevers_ in the buttery after the tolling of the bell.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . bever. to take a small repast between meals.--_wallis_. bible clerk. in the university of oxford, the _bible clerks_ are required to attend the service of the chapel, and to deliver in a list of the absent undergraduates to the officer appointed to enforce the discipline of the institution. their duties are different in different colleges.--_oxford guide_. a _bible clerk_ has seldom too many friends in the university.--_blackwood's mag._, vol. lx., eng. ed., p. . in the university of cambridge, eng., "a very ancient scholarship, so called because the student who was promoted to that office was enjoined to read the bible at meal-times."--_gradus ad cantab._ biennial examination. at yale college, in addition to the public examinations of the classes at the close of each term, on the studies of the term, private examinations are also held twice in the college course, at the close of the sophomore and senior years, on the studies of the two preceding years. the latter are called _biennial_.--_yale coll. cat._ "the _biennial_," remarks the writer of the preface to the _songs of yale_, "is an examination occurring twice during the course,--at the close of the sophomore and of the senior years,--in all the studies pursued during the two years previous. it was established in ."--ed. , p. . the system of examinations has been made more rigid, especially by the introduction of _biennials_.--_centennial anniversary of the linonian soc._, yale coll., , p. . faculty of college got together one night, to have a little congratulation, for they'd put their heads together and hatched out a load, and called it "_bien. examination_." _presentation day songs_, june , . big-wig. in the english universities, the higher dignitaries among the officers are often spoken of as the _big-wigs._ thus having anticipated the approbation of all, whether freshman, sophomore, bachelor, or _big-wig_, our next care is the choice of a patron.--_pref._ to _grad. ad cantab._ bishop. at cambridge, eng., this beverage is compounded of port-wine mulled and burnt, with the addenda of roasted lemons and cloves.--_gradus ad cantab._ we'll pass round the _bishop_, the spice-breathing cup. _will. sentinel's poems_. bitch. among the students of the university of cambridge, eng., a common name for tea. the reading man gives no swell parties, runs very little into debt, takes his cup of _bitch_ at night, and goes quietly to bed. --_grad. ad cantab._, p. . with the queens-men it is not unusual to issue an "at home" tea and vespers, alias _bitch_ and _hymns_.--_ibid., dedication_. bitch. at cambridge, eng., to take or drink a dish of tea. i followed, and, having "_bitched_" (that is, taken a dish of tea) arranged my books and boxes.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . i dined, wined, or _bitched_ with a medallist or senior wrangler. --_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . a young man, who performs with great dexterity the honors of the tea-table, is, if complimented at all, said to be "an excellent _bitch_."--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . black book. in the english universities, a gloomy volume containing a register of high crimes and misdemeanors. at the university of göttingen, the expulsion of students is recorded on a _blackboard_.--_gradus ad cantab._ sirrah, i'll have you put in the _black book_, rusticated, expelled.--_miller's humors of oxford_, act ii. sc. i. all had reason to fear that their names were down in the proctor's _black book_.--_collegian's guide_, p. . so irksome and borish did i ever find this early rising, spite of the health it promised, that i was constantly in the _black book_ of the dean.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . black-hood house. see senate. black riding. at the college of south carolina, it has until within a few years been customary for the students, disguised and painted black, to ride across the college-yard at midnight, on horseback, with vociferations and the sound of horns. _black riding_ is recognized by the laws of the college as a very high offence, punishable with expulsion. bleach. at harvard college, he was formerly said to _bleach_ who preferred to be _spiritually_ rather than _bodily_ present at morning prayers. 't is sweet commencement parts to reach, but, oh! 'tis doubly sweet to _bleach_. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . blood. a hot spark; a man of spirit; a rake. a word long in use among collegians and by writers who described them. with some rakes from boston and a few college _bloods_, i got very drunk.--_monthly anthology_, boston, , vol. i. p. . indulgent gods! exclaimed our _bloods_. _the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . blood. at some of the western colleges this word signifies excellent; as, a _blood_ recitation. a student who recites well is said to _make a blood_. bloodee. in the farmer's weekly museum, formerly printed at walpole, n.h., appeared august , , a poetic production, in which occurred these lines:-- seniors about to take degrees, not by their wits, but by _bloodees_. in a note the word _bloodee_ was thus described: "a kind of cudgel worn, or rather borne, by the bloods of a certain college in new england, feet inches in length, and - / inch in diameter, with a huge piece of lead at one end, emblematical of its owner. a pretty prop for clumsy travellers on parnassus." bloody. formerly a college term for daring, rowdy, impudent. arriving at lord bibo's study, they thought they'd be a little _bloody_; so, with a bold, presumptuous look, an honest pinch of snuff they took. _rebelliad_, p. . they roar'd and bawl'd, and were so _bloody_, as to besiege lord bibo's study. _ibid._, p. . blow. a merry frolic with drinking; a spree. a person intoxicated is said to be _blown_, and mr. halliwell, in his dict. arch. and prov. words, has _blowboll_, a drunkard. this word was formerly used by students to designate their frolics and social gatherings; at present, it is not much heard, being supplanted by the more common words _spree_, _tight_, &c. my fellow-students had been engaged at a _blow_ till the stagehorn had summoned them to depart.--_harvard register_, - , p. . no soft adagio from the muse of _blows_, e'er roused indignant from serene repose. _ibid._, p. . and, if no coming _blow_ his thoughts engage, lights candle and cigar. _ibid._, p. . the person who engages in a blow is also called a _blow_. i could see, in the long vista of the past, the many hardened _blows_ who had rioted here around the festive board.--_collegian_, p. . blue. in several american colleges, a student who is very strict in observing the laws, and conscientious in performing his duties, is styled a _blue_. "our real delvers, midnight students," says a correspondent from williams college, "are called _blue_." i wouldn't carry a novel into chapel to read, not out of any respect for some people's old-womanish twaddle about the sacredness of the place,--but because some of the _blues_ might see you.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . each jolly soul of them, save the _blues_, were doffing their coats, vests, pants, and shoes. _yale gallinipper_, nov. . none ever knew a sober "_blue_" in this "blood crowd" of ours. _yale tomahawk_, nov. . lucian called him a _blue_, and fell back in his chair in a pouting fit.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . to acquire popularity,... he must lose his money at bluff and euchre without a sigh, and damn up hill and down the sober church-going man, as an out-and-out _blue_.--_the parthenon, union coll._, , p. . blue-light. at the university of vermont this term is used, writes a correspondent, to designate "a boy who sneaks about college, and reports to the faculty the short-comings of his fellow-students. a _blue-light_ is occasionally found watching the door of a room where a party of jolly ones are roasting a turkey (which in justice belongs to the nearest farm-house), that he may go to the faculty with the story, and tell them who the boys are." blues. the name of a party which formerly existed at dartmouth college. in the dartmouth, vol. iv. p. , , is the following:--"the students here are divided into two parties,--the _rowes_ and the _blues_. the rowes are very liberal in their notions; the _blues_ more strict. the rowes don't pretend to say anything worse of a fellow than to call him a blue, and _vice versa_" see indigo and rowes. blue-skin. this word was formerly in use at some american colleges, with the meaning now given to the word blue, q.v. i, with my little colleague here, forth issued from my cell, to see if we could overhear, or make some _blue-skin_ tell. _the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . board. the _boards_, or _college boards_, in the english universities, are long wooden tablets on which the names of the members of each college are inscribed, according to seniority, generally hung up in the buttery.--_gradus ad cantab. webster_. i gave in my resignation this time without recall, and took my name off the _boards_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . similar to this was the list of students which was formerly kept at harvard college, and probably at yale. judge wingate, who graduated at the former institution in , writes as follows in reference to this subject:--"the freshman class was, in my day at college, usually _placed_ (as it was termed) within six or nine months after their admission. the official notice of this was given by having their names written in a large german text, in a handsome style, and placed in a conspicuous part of the college buttery, where the names of the four classes of undergraduates were kept suspended until they left college. if a scholar was expelled, his name was taken from its place; or if he was degraded (which was considered the next highest punishment to expulsion), it was moved accordingly."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . bogs. among english cantabs, a privy.--_gradus ad cantab._ bohn. a translation; a pony. the volumes of bohn's classical library are in such general use among undergraduates in american colleges, that _bohn_ has come to be a common name for a translation. 'twas plenty of skin with a good deal of _bohn_. _songs, biennial jubilee_, yale coll., . bolt. an omission of a recitation or lecture. a correspondent from union college gives the following account of it:--"in west college, where the sophomores and freshmen congregate, when there was a famous orator expected, or any unusual spectacle to be witnessed in the city, we would call a 'class meeting,' to consider upon the propriety of asking professor ---- for a _bolt_. we had our chairman, and the subject being debated, was generally decided in favor of the remission. a committee of good steady fellows were selected, who forthwith waited upon the professor, and, after urging the matter, commonly returned with the welcome assurance that we could have a _bolt_ from the next recitation." one writer defines a _bolt_ in these words:--"the promiscuous stampede of a class collectively. caused generally by a few seconds' tardiness of the professor, occasionally by finding the lock of the recitation-room door filled with shot."--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . the quiet routine of college life had remained for some days undisturbed, even by a single _bolt_.--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . bolt. at union college, to be absent from a recitation, on the conditions related under the noun bolt. followed by _from_. at williams college, the word is applied with a different signification. a correspondent writes: "we sometimes _bolt_ from a recitation before the professor arrives, and the term most strikingly suggests the derivation, as our movements in the case would somewhat resemble a 'streak of lightning,'--a thunder-_bolt_." bolter. at union college, one who _bolts_ from a recitation. . a correspondent from the same college says: "if a student is unable to answer a question in the class, and declares himself unprepared, he also is a '_bolter_.'" bonfire. the making of bonfires, by students, is not an unfrequent occurrence at many of our colleges, and is usually a demonstration of dissatisfaction, or is done merely for the sake of the excitement. it is accounted a high offence, and at harvard college is prohibited by the following law:--"in case of a bonfire, or unauthorized fireworks or illumination, any students crying fire, sounding an alarm, leaving their rooms, shouting or clapping from the windows, going to the fire or being seen at it, going into the college yard, or assembling on account of such bonfire, shall be deemed aiding and abetting such disorder, and punished accordingly."--_laws_, , _bonfires_. a correspondent from bowdoin college writes: "bonfires occur regularly twice a year; one on the night preceding the annual state fast, and the other is built by the freshmen on the night following the yearly examination. a pole some sixty or seventy feet long is raised, around which brush and tar are heaped to a great height. the construction of the pile occupies from four to five hours." not ye, whom midnight cry ne'er urged to run in search of fire, when fire there had been none; unless, perchance, some pump or hay-mound threw its _bonfire_ lustre o'er a jolly crew. _harvard register_, p. . book-keeper. at harvard college, students are allowed to go out of town on saturday, after the exercises, but are required, if not at evening prayers, to enter their names before p.m. with one of the officers appointed for that purpose. students were formerly required to report themselves before p.m., in winter, and , in summer, and the person who registered the names was a member of the freshman class, and was called the _book-keeper_. i strode over the bridge, with a rapidity which grew with my vexation, my distaste for wind, cold, and wet, and my anxiety to reach my goal ere the hour appointed should expire, and the _book-keeper's_ light should disappear from his window; "for while his light holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return."--_collegian_, p. . see freshman, college. book-work. among students at cambridge, eng., all mathematics that can be learned verbatim from books,--all that are not problems.--_bristed_. he made a good fight of it, and ... beat the trinity man a little on the _book-work_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the men are continually writing out _book-work_, either at home or in their tutor's rooms.--_ibid._, p. . boot-fox. this name was at a former period given, in the german universities, to a fox, or a student in his first half-year, from the fact of his being required to black the boots of his more advanced comrades. bootlick. to fawn upon; to court favor. scorns the acquaintance of those he deems beneath him; refuses to _bootlick_ men for their votes.--_the parthenon_, union coll., vol. i. p. . the "wooden spoon" exhibition passed off without any such hubbub, except where the pieces were of such a character as to offend the delicacy and modesty of some of those crouching, fawning, _bootlicking_ hypocrites.--_the gallinipper_, dec. . bootlicker. a student who seeks or gains favor from a teacher by flattery or officious civilities; one who curries favor. a correspondent from union college writes: "as you watch the students more closely, you will perhaps find some of them particularly officious towards your teacher, and very apt to linger after recitation to get a clearer knowledge of some passage. they are _bootlicks_, and that is known as _bootlicking_; a reproach, i am sorry to say, too indiscriminately applied." at yale, and _other colleges_, a tutor or any other officer who informs against the students, or acts as a spy upon their conduct, is also called a _bootlick_. three or four _bootlickers_ rise.--_yale banger_, oct. . the rites of wooden spoons we next recite, when _bootlick_ hypocrites upraised their might. _ibid._, nov. . then he arose, and offered himself as a "_bootlick_" to the faculty.--_yale battery_, feb. , . boots. at the college of south carolina it is customary to present the most unpopular member of a class with a pair of handsome red-topped boots, on which is inscribed the word beauty. they were formerly given to the ugliest person, whence the inscription. bore. a tiresome person or unwelcome visitor, who makes himself obnoxious by his disagreeable manners, or by a repetition of visits.--_bartlett_. a person or thing that wearies by iteration.--_webster_. although the use of this word is very general, yet it is so peculiarly applicable to the many annoyances to which a collegian is subjected, that it has come by adoption to be, to a certain extent, a student term. one writer classes under this title "text-books generally; the professor who marks _slight_ mistakes; the familiar young man who calls continually, and when he finds the door fastened demonstrates his verdant curiosity by revealing an inquisitive countenance through the ventilator."--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . in college parlance, prayers, when the morning is cold or rainy, are a _bore_; a hard lesson is a _bore_; a dull lecture or lecturer is a _bore_; and, _par excellence_, an unwelcome visitor is a _bore_ of _bores_. this latter personage is well described in the following lines:-- "next comes the bore, with visage sad and pale, and tortures you with some lugubrious tale; relates stale jokes collected near and far, and in return expects a choice cigar; your brandy-punch he calls the merest sham, yet does not _scruple_ to partake a _dram_. his prying eyes your secret nooks explore; no place is sacred to the college bore. not e'en the letter filled with helen's praise, escapes the sight of his unhallowed gaze; ere one short hour its silent course has flown, your helen's charms to half the class are known. your books he takes, nor deigns your leave to ask, such forms to him appear a useless task. when themes unfinished stare you in the face, then enters one of this accursed race. though like the angel bidding john to write, frail ------ form uprises to thy sight, his stupid stories chase your thoughts away, and drive you mad with his unwelcome stay. when he, departing, creaks the closing door, you raise the grecian chorus, [greek: kikkabau]."[ ] _ms. poem_, f.e. felton, harv. coll. bos. at the university of virginia, the desserts which the students, according to the statutes of college, are allowed twice per week, are respectively called the _senior_ and _junior bos_. bosh. nonsense, trash, [greek: phluaria]. an english cantab's expression.--_bristed_. but spriggins's peculiar forte is that kind of talk which some people irreverently call "_bosh_."--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xx. p. . bosky. in the cant of the oxonians, being tipsy.--_grose_. now when he comes home fuddled, alias _bosky_, i shall not be so unmannerly as to say his lordship ever gets drunk.--_the sizar_, cited in _gradus ad cantab._, pp. , . bowel. at harvard college, a student in common parlance will express his destitution or poverty by saying, "i have not a _bowel_." the use of the word with this signification has arisen, probably, from a jocular reference to a quaint scriptural expression. bracket. at the university of cambridge, eng., the result of the final examination in the senate-house is published in lists signed by the examiners. in these lists the names of those who have been examined are "placed in individual order of merit." when the rank of two or three men is the same, their names are inclosed in _brackets_. at the close of the course, and before the examination is concluded, there is made out a new arrangement of the classes called the _brackets_. these, in which each is placed according to merit, are hung upon the pillars in the senate-house.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . as there is no provision in the printed lists for expressing the number of marks by which each man beats the one next below him, and there may be more difference between the twelfth and thirteenth than between the third and twelfth, it has been proposed to extend the use of the _brackets_ (which are now only employed in cases of literal equality between two or three men), and put together six, eight, or ten, whose marks are nearly equal. --_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . bracket. in a general sense, to place in a certain order. i very early in the sophomore year gave up all thoughts of obtaining high honors, and settled down contentedly among the twelve or fifteen who are _bracketed_, after the first two or three, as "english orations."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . there remained but two, _bracketed_ at the foot of the class.--_ibid._, p. . the trinity man who was _bracketed_ senior classic.--_ibid._, p. . brander. in the german universities a name given to a student during his second term. meanwhile large tufts and strips of paper had been twisted into the hair of the _branders_, as those are called who have been already one term at the university, and then at a given signal were set on fire, and the _branders_ rode round the table on chairs, amid roars of laughter.--_longfellow's hyperion_, p. . see brand-fox, burnt fox. brand-fox. a student in a german university "becomes a _brand-fuchs_, or fox with a brand, after the foxes of samson," in his second half-year.--_howitt_. brick. a gay, wild, thoughtless fellow, but not so _hard_ as the word itself might seem to imply. he is a queer fellow,--not so bad as he seems,--his own enemy, but a regular _brick_.--_collegian's guide_, p. . he will come himself (public tutor or private), like a _brick_ as he is, and consume his share of the generous potables.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . see like a brick. brick mill. at the university of vermont, the students speak of the college as the _brick mill_, or the _old brick mill_. buck. at princeton college, anything which is in an intensive degree good, excellent, pleasant, or agreeable, is called _buck_. bull. at dartmouth college, to recite badly; to make a poor recitation. from the substantive _bull_, a blunder or contradiction, or from the use of the word as a prefix, signifying large, lubberly, blundering. bull-dog. in the english universities, the lictor or servant who attends a proctor when on duty. sentiments which vanish for ever at the sight of the proctor with his _bull-dogs_, as they call them, or four muscular fellows which always follow him, like so many bailiffs.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . the proctors, through their attendants, commonly called _bull-dogs_, received much certain information, &c.--_collegian's guide_, p. . and he had breathed the proctor's _dogs_. _tennyson, prologue to princess_. bully club. the following account of the _bully club_, which was formerly a most honored transmittendum at yale college, is taken from an entertaining little work, entitled sketches of yale college. "_bullyism_ had its origin, like everything else that is venerated, far back in antiquity; no one pretends to know the era of its commencement, nor to say with certainty what was the cause of its establishment, or the original design of the institution. we can only learn from dim and doubtful tradition, that many years ago, no one knows how many, there was a feud between students and townsmen: a sort of general ill-feeling, which manifested itself in the lower classes of society in rudeness and insult. not patiently borne with, it grew worse and worse, until a regular organization became necessary for defence against the nightly assaults of a gang of drunken rowdies. nor were their opponents disposed to quit the unequal fight. an organization in opposition followed, and a band of tipsy townsmen, headed by some hardy tars, took the field, were met, no one knows whether in offence or defence, and after a fight repulsed, and a huge knotty club wrested from their leader. this trophy of personal courage was preserved, the organization perpetuated, and the _bully club_ was every year, with procession and set form of speech, bestowed upon the newly acknowledged leader. but in process of time the organization has assumed a different character: there was no longer need of a system of defence,--the "bully" was still acknowledged as class leader. he marshalled all processions, was moderator of all meetings, and performed the various duties of a chief. the title became now a matter of dispute; it sounded harsh and rude to ears polite, and a strong party proposed a change: but the supporters of antiquity pleaded the venerable character of the customs identified almost with the college itself. thus the classes were divided, a part electing a marshal, class-leader, or moderator, and a part still choosing a _bully_ and _minor bully_--the latter usually the least of their number--from each class, and still bestowing on them the wonted clubs, mounted with gold, the badges of their office. "unimportant as these distinctions seem, they formed the ground of constant controversy, each party claiming for its leader the precedence, until the dissensions ended in a scene of confusion too well known to need detail: the usual procession on commencement day was broken up, and the partisans fell upon each other pell-mell; scarce heeding, in their hot fray, the orders of the faculty, the threats of the constables, or even the rebuke of the chief magistrate of the state; the alumni were left to find their seats in church as they best could, the aged and beloved president following in sorrow, unescorted, to perform the duties of the day. it need not be told that the disputes were judicially ended by a peremptory ordinance, prohibiting all class organizations of any name whatever." a more particular account of the bully club, and of the manner in which the students of yale came to possess it, is given in the annexed extract. "many years ago, the farther back towards the middle ages the better, some students went out one evening to an inn at dragon, as it was then called, now the populous and pretty village of fair haven, to regale themselves with an oyster supper, or for some other kind of recreation. they there fell into an affray with the young men of the place, a hardy if not a hard set, who regarded their presence there, at their own favorite resort, as an intrusion. the students proved too few for their adversaries. they reported the matter at college, giving an aggravated account of it, and, being strongly reinforced, went out the next evening to renew the fight. the oystermen and sailors were prepared for them. a desperate conflict ensued, chiefly in the house, above stairs and below, into which the sons of science entered pell-mell. which came off the worse, i neither know nor care, believing defeat to be far less discreditable to either party, and especially to the students, than the fact of their engaging in such a brawl. where the matter itself is essentially disgraceful, success or failure is indifferent, as it regards the honor of the actors. among the dragoners, a great bully of a fellow, who appeared to be their leader, wielded a huge club, formed from an oak limb, with a gnarled excrescence on the end, heavy enough to battle with an elephant. a student remarkable for his strength in the arms and hands, griped the fellow so hard about the wrist that his fingers opened, and let the club fall. it was seized, and brought off as a trophy. such is the history of the bully club. it became the occasion of an annual election of a person to take charge of it, and to act as leader of the students in case of a quarrel between them, and others. 'bully' was the title of this chivalrous and high office."--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , pp. , . bumptious. conceited, forward, pushing. an english cantab's expression.--_bristed_. about nine, a.m., the new scholars are announced from the chapel gates. on this occasion it is not etiquette for the candidates themselves to be in waiting,--it looks too "_bumptious_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . burial of euclid. "the custom of bestowing burial honors upon the ashes of euclid with becoming demonstrations of respect has been handed down," says the author of the sketches of yale college, "from time immemorial." the account proceeds as follows:--"this book, the terror of the dilatory and unapt, having at length been completely mastered, the class, as their acquaintance with the greek mathematician is about to close, assemble in their respective places of meeting, and prepare (secretly for fear of the faculty) for the anniversary. the necessary committee having been appointed, and the regular preparations ordered, a ceremony has sometimes taken place like the following. the huge poker is heated in the old stove, and driven through the smoking volume, and the division, marshalled in line, for _once_ at least see _through_ the whole affair. they then march over it in solemn procession, and are enabled, as they step firmly on its covers, to assert with truth that they have gone over it,--poor jokes indeed, but sufficient to afford abundant laughter. and then follow speeches, comical and pathetic, and shouting and merriment. the night assigned having arrived, how carefully they assemble, all silent, at the place appointed. laid on its bier, covered with sable pall, and borne in solemn state, the corpse (i.e. the book) is carried with slow procession, with the moaning music of flutes and fifes, the screaming of fiddles, and the thumping and mumbling of a cracked drum, to the open grave or the funeral pyre. a gleaming line of blazing torches and twinkling lanterns wave along the quiet streets and through the opened fields, and the snow creaks hoarsely under the tread of a hundred men. they reach the scene, and a circle forms around the consecrated spot; if the ceremony is a burial, the defunct is laid all carefully in his grave, and then his friends celebrate in prose or verse his memory, his virtues, and his untimely end: and three oboli are tossed into his tomb to satisfy the surly boatman of the styx. lingeringly is the last look taken of the familiar countenance, as the procession passes slowly around the tomb; and the moaning is made,--a sound of groans going up to the seventh heavens,--and the earth is thrown in, and the headstone with epitaph placed duly to hallow the grave of the dead. or if, according to the custom of his native land, the body of euclid is committed to the funeral flames, the pyre, duly prepared with combustibles, is made the centre of the ring; a ponderous jar of turpentine or whiskey is the fragrant incense, and as the lighted fire mounts up in the still night, and the alarm in the city sounds dim in the distance, the eulogium is spoken, and the memory of the illustrious dead honored; the urn receives the sacred ashes, which, borne in solemn procession, are placed in some conspicuous situation, or solemnly deposited in some fitting sarcophagus. so the sport ends; a song, a loud hurrah, and the last jovial roysterer seeks short and profound slumber."--pp. - . the above was written in the year . that the interest in the observance of this custom at yale college has not since that time diminished, may be inferred from the following account of the exercises of the sophomore class of , on parting company with their old mathematical friend, given by a correspondent of the new york tribune. "arrangements having been well matured, notice was secretly given out on wednesday last that the obsequies would be celebrated that evening at 'barney's hall,' on church street. an excellent band of music was engaged for the occasion, and an efficient force committee assigned to their duty, who performed their office with great credit, taking singular care that no 'tutor' or 'spy' should secure an entrance to the hall. the 'countersign' selected was 'zeus,' and fortunately was not betrayed. the hall being full at half past ten, the doors were closed, and the exercises commenced with music. then followed numerous pieces of various character, and among them an _oration_, a _poem_, _funeral sermon_ (of a very metaphysical character), a _dirge_, and, at the grave, a _prayer to pluto_. these pieces all exhibited taste and labor, and were acknowledged to be of a higher tone than that of any productions which have ever been delivered on a similar occasion. besides these, there were several songs interspersed throughout the programme, in both latin and english, which were sung with great jollity and effect. the band added greatly to the character of the performances, by their frequent and appropriate pieces. a large coffin was placed before the altar, within which, lay the veritable euclid, arranged in a becoming winding-sheet, the body being composed of combustibles, and these thoroughly saturated with turpentine. the company left the hall at half past twelve, formed in an orderly procession, preceded by the band, and bearing the coffin in their midst. those who composed the procession were arrayed in disguises, to avoid detection, and bore a full complement of brilliant torches. the skeleton of euclid (a faithful caricature), himself bearing a torch, might have been seen dancing in the midst, to the great amusement of all beholders. they marched up chapel street as far as the south end of the college, where they were saluted with three hearty cheers by their fellow-students, and then continued through college street in front of the whole college square, at the north extremity of which they were again greeted by cheers, and thence followed a circuitous way to _quasi_ potter's field, about a mile from the city, where the concluding ceremonies were performed. these consist of walking over the coffin, thus _surmounting the difficulties_ of the author; boring a hole through a copy of euclid with a hot iron, that the class may see _through_ it; and finally burning it upon the funeral pyre, in order to _throw light_ upon the subject. after these exercises, the procession returned, with music, to the state-house, where they disbanded, and returned to their desolate habitations. the affair surpassed anything of the kind that has ever taken place here, and nothing was wanting to render it a complete performance. it testifies to the spirit and character of the class of ' ."--_literary world_, nov. , , from the _new york tribune_. in the sketches of williams college, printed in the year , is a description of the manner in which the funeral exercises of euclid are sometimes conducted in that institution. it is as follows:--"the burial took place last night. the class assembled in the recitation-room in full numbers, at o'clock. the deceased, much emaciated, and in a torn and tattered dress, was stretched on a black table in the centre of the room. this table, by the way, was formed of the old blackboard, which, like a mirror, had so often reflected the image of old euclid. in the body of the corpse was a triangular hole, made for the _post mortem_ examination, a report of which was read. through this hole, those who wished were allowed to look; and then, placing the body on their heads, they could say with truth that they had for once seen through and understood euclid. "a eulogy was then pronounced, followed by an oration and the reading of the epitaph, after which the class formed a procession, and marched with slow and solemn tread to the place of burial. the spot selected was in the woods, half a mile south of the college. as we approached the place, we saw a bright fire burning on the altar of turf, and torches gleaming through the dark pines. all was still, save the occasional sympathetic groans of some forlorn bull-frogs, which came up like minute-guns from the marsh below. "when we arrived at the spot, the sexton received the body. this dignitary presented rather a grotesque appearance. he wore a white robe bound around his waist with a black scarf, and on his head a black, conical-shaped hat, some three feet high. haying fastened the remains to the extremity of a long, black wand, he held them in the fire of the altar until they were nearly consumed, and then laid the charred mass in the urn, muttering an incantation in latin. the urn being buried deep in the ground, we formed a ring around the grave, and sung the dirge. then, lighting our larches by the dying fire, we retraced our steps with feelings suited to the occasion."--pp. - . of this observance the writer of the preface to the "songs of yale" remarks: "the _burial of euclid_ is an old ceremony practised at many colleges. at yale it is conducted by the sophomore class during the first term of the year. after literary exercises within doors, a procession is formed, which proceeds at midnight through the principal streets of the city, with music and torches, conveying a coffin, supposed to contain the body of the old mathematician, to the funeral pile, when the whole is fired and consumed to ashes."-- , p. . from the lugubrious songs which are usually sung on these sad occasions, the following dirge is selected. it appears in the order of exercises for the "burial of euclid by the class of ' ," which took place at yale college, november , . tune,--"_auld lang syne_." i. come, gather all ye tearful sophs, and stand around the ring; old euclid's dead, and to his shade a requiem we'll sing: then join the saddening chorus, all ye friends of euclid true; defunct, he can no longer bore, "[greek: pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]"[ ] ii. though we to pluto _dead_icate, no god to take him deigns, so, one short year from now will fate bring back his sad _re-manes_: for at biennial his ghost will prompt the tutor blue, and every fizzling soph will cry, "[greek: pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]" iii. though here we now his _corpus_ burn, and flames about him roar, the future fresh shall say, that he's "not dead, but gone before": we close around the dusky bier, and pall of sable hue, and silently we drop the tear; "[greek: pheu pheu, oi moi, pheu pheu.]" burlesque bill. at princeton college, it is customary for the members of the sophomore class to hold annually a sophomore commencement, caricaturing that of the senior class. the sophomore commencement is in turn travestied by the junior class, who prepare and publish _burlesque bills_, as they are called, in which, in a long and formal programme, such subjects and speeches are attributed to the members of the sophomore class as are calculated to expose their weak points. see sophomore commencement. burlington. at middlebury college, a water-closet, privy. so called on account of the good-natured rivalry between that institution and the university of vermont at burlington. burning of conic sections. "this is a ceremony," writes a correspondent, "observed by the sophomore class of trinity college, on the monday evening of commencement week. the incremation of this text-book is made by the entire class, who appear in fantastic rig and in torch-light procession. the ceremonies are held in the college grove, and are graced with an oration and poem. the exercises are usually closed by a class supper." burning of convivium. convivium is a greek book which is studied at hamilton college during the last term of the freshman year, and is considered somewhat difficult. upon entering sophomore it is customary to burn it, with exercises appropriate to the occasion. the time being appointed, the class hold a meeting and elect the marshals of the night. a large pyre is built during the evening, of rails and pine wood, on the middle of which is placed a barrel of tar, surrounded by straw saturated with turpentine. notice is then given to the upper classes that convivium will be burnt that night at twelve o'clock. their company is requested at the exercises, which consist of two poems, a tragedy, and a funeral oration. a coffin is laid out with the "remains" of the book, and the literary exercises are performed. these concluded, the class form a procession, preceded by a brass band playing a dirge, and march to the pyre, around which, with uncovered heads, they solemnly form. the four bearers with their torches then advance silently, and place the coffin upon the funeral pile. the class, each member bearing a torch, form a circle around the pyre. at a given signal they all bend forward together, and touch their torches to the heap of combustibles. in an instant "a lurid flame arises, licks around the coffin, and shakes its tongue to heaven." to these ceremonies succeed festivities, which are usually continued until daylight. burning of zumpt's latin grammar. the funeral rites over the body of this book are performed by the students in the university of new york. the place of turning and burial is usually at hoboken. scenes of this nature often occur in american colleges, having their origin, it is supposed, in the custom at yale of burying euclid. burnt fox. a student during his second half-year, in the german universities, is called a _burnt fox_. bursar, _pl._ bursarii. a treasurer or cash-keeper; as, the _bursar_ of a college or of a monastery. the said college in cambridge shall be a corporation consisting of seven persons, to wit, a president, five fellows, and a treasurer or _bursar_.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . every student is required on his arrival, at the commencement of each session, to deliver to the _bursar_ the moneys and drafts for money which he has brought with him. it is the duty of the _bursar_ to attend to the settlement of the demands for board, &c.; to pay into the hands of the student such sums as are required for other necessary expenses, and to render a statement of the same to the parent or guardian at the close of the session. --_catalogue of univ. of north carolina_, - , p. . . a student to whom a stipend is paid out of a burse or fund appropriated for that purpose, as the exhibitioners sent to the universities in scotland, by each presbytery.--_webster_. see a full account in _brande's dict. science, lit., and art_. bursary. the treasury of a college or monastery.--_webster_. . in scotland, an exhibition.--_encyc._ bursch (bursh), _pl._ burschen. german. a youth; especially a student in a german university. "by _bursché_," says howitt, "we understand one who has already spent a certain time at the university,--and who, to a certain degree, has taken part in the social practices of the students."--_student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . und hat der _bursch_ kein geld im beutel, so pumpt er die philister an, und denkt: es ist doch alles eitel vom _burschen_ bis zum bettleman. _crambambuli song_. student life! _burschen_ life! what a magic sound have these words for him who has learnt for himself their real meaning.--_howitt's student life of germany_. burschenschaft. a league or secret association of students, formed in , for the purpose, as was asserted, of the political regeneration of germany, and suppressed, at least in name, by the exertions of the government.--_brandt_. "the burschenschaft," says the yale literary magazine, "was a society formed in opposition to the vices and follies of the landsmannschaft, with the motto, 'god, honor, freedom, fatherland.' its object was 'to develop and perfect every mental and bodily power for the service of the fatherland.' it exerted a mighty and salutary influence, was almost supreme in its power, but was finally suppressed by the government, on account of its alleged dangerous political tendencies."--vol. xv. p. . burse. in france, a fund or foundation for the maintenance of poor scholars in their studies. in the middle ages, it signified a little college, or a hall in a university.--_webster_. burst. to fail in reciting; to make a bad recitation. this word is used in some of the southern colleges. burt. at union college, a privy is called _the burt_, from a person of that name, who many years ago was employed as the architect and builder of the _latrinæ_ of that institution. busy. an answer often given by a student, when he does not wish to see visitors. poor croak was almost annihilated by this summons, and, clinging to the bed-clothes in all the agony of despair, forgot to _busy_ his midnight visitor.--_harv. reg._, p. . whenever, during that sacred season, a knock salutes my door, i respond with a _busy_.--_collegian_, p. . "_busy_" is a hard word to utter, often, though heart and conscience and the college clock require it.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . butler. anciently written botiler. a servant or officer whose principal business is to take charge of the liquors, food, plate, &c. in the old laws of harvard college we find an enumeration of the duties of the college butler. some of them were as follows. he was to keep the rooms and utensils belonging to his office sweet and clean, fit for use; his drinking-vessels were to be scoured once a week. the fines imposed by the president and other officers were to be fairly recorded by him in a book, kept for that purpose. he was to attend upon the ringing of the bell for prayer in the hall, and for lectures and commons. providing candles for the hall was a part of his duty. he was obliged to keep the buttery supplied, at his own expense, with beer, cider, tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, biscuit, butter, cheese, pens, ink, paper, and such other articles as the president or corporation ordered or permitted; "but no permission," it is added in the laws, "shall be given for selling wine, distilled spirits, or foreign fruits, on credit or for ready money." he was allowed to advance twenty per cent. on the net cost of the articles sold by him, excepting beer and cider, which were stated quarterly by the president and tutors. the butler was allowed a freshman to assist him, for an account of whom see under freshman, butler's.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., pp. , . _laws harv. coll._, , pp. - . president woolsey, in his historical discourse pronounced before the graduates of yale college, august th, , remarks as follows concerning the butler, in connection with that institution:-- "the classes since , when the office of butler was, abolished, are probably but little aware of the meaning of that singular appendage to the college, which had been in existence a hundred years. to older graduates, the lower front corner room of the old middle college in the south entry must even now suggest many amusing recollections. the butler was a graduate of recent standing, and, being invested with rather delicate functions, was required to be one in whom confidence might be reposed. several of the elder graduates who have filled this office are here to-day, and can explain, better than i can, its duties and its bearings upon the interests of college. the chief prerogative of the butler was to have the monopoly of certain eatables, drinkables, and other articles desired by students. the latin laws of give him leave to sell in the buttery, cider, metheglin, strong beer to the amount of not more than twelve barrels annually,--which amount as the college grew was increased to twenty,--together with loaf-sugar ('saccharum rigidum'), pipes, tobacco, and such necessaries of scholars as were not furnished in the commons hall. some of these necessaries were books and stationery, but certain fresh fruits also figured largely in the butler's supply. no student might buy cider or beer elsewhere. the butler, too, had the care of the bell, and was bound to wait upon the president or a tutor, and notify him of the time for prayers. he kept the book of fines, which, as we shall see, was no small task. he distributed the bread and beer provided by the steward in the hall into equal portions, and had the lost commons, for which privilege he paid a small annual sum. he was bound, in consideration of the profits of his monopoly, to provide candles at college prayers and for a time to pay also fifty shillings sterling into the treasury. the more menial part of these duties he performed by his waiter."--pp. , . at both harvard and yale the students were restricted in expending money at the buttery, being allowed at the former "to contract a debt" of five dollars a quarter; at the latter, of one dollar and twenty-five cents per month. butter. a size or small portion of butter. "send me a roll and two butters."--_grad. ad cantab._ six cheeses, three _butters_, and two beers.--_the collegian's guide_. pertinent to this singular use of the word, is the following curious statement. at cambridge, eng., "there is a market every day in the week, except monday, for vegetables, poultry, eggs, and butter. the sale of the last article is attended with the peculiarity of every pound designed for the market being rolled out to the length of a yard; each pound being in that state about the thickness of a walking-cane. this practice, which is confined to cambridge, is particularly convenient, as it renders the butter extremely easy of division into small portions, called _sizes_, as used in the colleges."--_camb. guide_, ed. , p. . buttery. an apartment in a house where butter, milk, provisions, and utensils are kept. in some colleges, a room where liquors, fruit, and refreshments are kept for sale to the students.--_webster_. of the buttery, mr. peirce, in his history of harvard university, speaks as follows: "as the commons rendered the college independent of private boarding-houses, so the _buttery_ removed all just occasion for resorting to the different marts of luxury, intemperance, and ruin. this was a kind of supplement to the commons, and offered for sale to the students, at a moderate advance on the cost, wines, liquors, groceries, stationery, and, in general, such articles as it was proper and necessary for them to have occasionally, and which for the most part were not included in the commons' fare. the buttery was also an office, where, among other things, records were kept of the times when the scholars were present and absent. at their admission and subsequent returns they entered their names in the buttery, and took them out whenever they had leave of absence. the butler, who was a graduate, had various other duties to perform, either by himself or by his _freshman_, as ringing the bell, seeing that the hall was kept clean, &c., and was allowed a salary, which, after , was £ per annum."--_hist. harv. univ._, p. . with particular reference to the condition of harvard college a few years prior to the revolution, professor sidney willard observes: "the buttery was in part a sort of appendage to commons, where the scholars could eke out their short commons with sizings of gingerbread and pastry, or needlessly or injuriously cram themselves to satiety, as they had been accustomed to be crammed at home by their fond mothers. besides eatables, everything necessary for a student was there sold, and articles used in the play-grounds, as bats, balls, &c.; and, in general, a petty trade with small profits was carried on in stationery and other matters, --in things innocent or suitable for the young customers, and in some things, perhaps, which were not. the butler had a small salary, and was allowed the service of a freshman in the buttery, who was also employed to ring the college bell for prayers, lectures, and recitations, and take some oversight of the public rooms under the butler's directions. the buttery was also the office of record of the names of undergraduates, and of the rooms assigned to them in the college buildings; of the dates of temporary leave of absence given to individuals, and of their return; and of fines inflicted by the immediate government for negligence or minor offences. the office was dropped or abolished in the first year of the present century, i believe, long after it ceased to be of use for most of its primary purposes. the area before the entry doors of the buttery had become a sort of students' exchange for idle gossip, if nothing worse. the rooms were now redeemed from traffic, and devoted to places of study, and other provision was made for the records which had there been kept. the last person who held the office of butler was joseph chickering, a graduate of ."--_memories of youth and manhood_, , vol. i. pp. , . president woolsey, in his historical discourse pronounced before the graduates of yale college, august th, , makes the following remarks on this subject: "the original motives for setting up a buttery in colleges seem to have been, to put the trade in articles which appealed to the appetite into safe hands; to ascertain how far students were expensive in their habits, and prevent them from running into debt; and finally, by providing a place where drinkables of not very stimulating qualities were sold, to remove the temptation of going abroad after spirituous liquors. accordingly, laws were passed limiting the sum for which the butler might give credit to a student, authorizing the president to inspect his books, and forbidding him to sell anything except permitted articles for ready money. but the whole system, as viewed from our position as critics of the past, must be pronounced a bad one. it rather tempted the student to self-indulgence by setting up a place for the sale of things to eat and drink within the college walls, than restrained him by bringing his habits under inspection. there was nothing to prevent his going abroad in quest of stronger drinks than could be bought at the buttery, when once those which were there sold ceased to allay his thirst. and a monopoly, such as the butler enjoyed of certain articles, did not tend to lower their price, or to remove suspicion that they were sold at a higher rate than free competition would assign to them."--pp. , . "when," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "the 'punishment obscene,' as cowper, the poet, very properly terms it, of _flagellation_, was enforced at our university, it appears that the buttery was the scene of action. in the poor scholar, a comedy, written by robert nevile, fellow of king's college in cambridge, london, , one of the students having lost his gown, which is picked up by the president of the college, the tutor says, 'if we knew the owner, we 'd take him down to th' butterie, and give him due correction.' to which the student, (_aside_,) 'under correction, sir; if you're for the butteries with me, i'll lie as close as diogenes in dolio. i'll creep in at the bunghole, before i'll _mount a barrel_,' &c. (act ii. sc. .)--again: 'had i been once i' th' butteries, they'd have their rods about me. but let us, for joy that i'm escaped, go to the three tuns and drink a pint of wine, and laugh away our cares.--'t is drinking at the tuns that keeps us from ascending buttery barrels,' &c." by a reference to the word punishment, it will be seen that, in the older american colleges, corporal punishment was inflicted upon disobedient students in a manner much more solemn and imposing, the students and officers usually being present. the effect of _crossing the name in the buttery_ is thus stated in the collegian's guide. "to keep a term requires residence in the university for a certain number of days within a space of time known by the calendar, and the books of the buttery afford the appointed proof of residence; it being presumed that, if neither bread, butter, pastry, beer, or even toast and water (which is charged one farthing), are entered on the buttery books in a given name, the party could not have been resident that day. hence the phrase of 'eating one's way into the church or to a doctor's degree.' supposing, for example, twenty-one days' residence is required between the first of may and the twenty-fourth inclusive, then there will be but three days to spare; consequently, should our names be crossed for more than three days in all in that term, --say for four days,--the other twenty days would not count, and the term would be irrecoverably lost. having our names crossed in the buttery, therefore, is a punishment which suspends our collegiate existence while the cross remains, besides putting an embargo on our pudding, beer, bread and cheese, milk, and butter; for these articles come out of the buttery."--p. . these remarks apply both to the universities of oxford and cambridge; but in the latter the phrase _to be put out of commons_ is used instead of the one given above, yet with the same meaning. see _gradus ad cantabrigiam_, p. . the following extract from the laws of harvard college, passed in , shows that this term was formerly used in that institution: "no scholar shall be _put in or out of commons_, but on tuesdays or fridays, and no bachelor or undergraduate, but by a note from the president, or one of the tutors (if an undergraduate, from his own tutor, if in town); and when any bachelors or undergraduates have been out of commons, the waiters, at their respective tables, shall, on the first tuesday or friday after they become obliged by the preceding law to be in commons, _put them into commons_ again, by note, after the manner above directed. and if any master neglects to put himself into commons, when, by the preceding law, he is obliged to be in commons, the waiters on the masters' table shall apply to the president or one of the tutors for a note to put him into commons, and inform him of it." be mine each morn, with eager appetite and hunger undissembled, to repair to friendly _buttery_; there on smoking crust and foaming ale to banquet unrestrained, material breakfast! _the student_, , vol. i. p. . buttery-book. in colleges, a book kept at the _buttery_, in which was charged the prices of such articles as were sold to the students. there was also kept a list of the fines imposed by the president and professors, and an account of the times when the students were present and absent, together with a register of the names of all the members of the college. my name in sure recording page shall time itself o'erpower, if no rude mice with envious rage the _buttery-books_ devour. _the student_, vol. i. p. . buttery-hatch. a half-door between the buttery or kitchen and the hall, in colleges and old mansions. also called a _buttery-bar_.--_halliwell's arch. and prov. words_. if any scholar or scholars at any time take away or detain any vessel of the colleges, great or small, from the hall out of the doors from the sight of the _buttery-hatch_ without the butler's or servitor's knowledge, or against their will, he or they shall be punished three pence.--_quincy's hist. harv. coll._, vol. i. p. . he (the college butler) domineers over freshmen, when they first come to the _hatch_.--_earle's micro-cosmographie_, , char. . there was a small ledging or bar on this hatch to rest the tankards on. i pray you, bring your hand to the _buttery-bar_, and let it drink.--_twelfth night_, act i. sc. . bye-fellow. in england, a name given in certain cases to a fellow in an inferior college. at the university of cambridge, eng., a bye-fellow can be elected to one of the regular fellowships when a vacancy occurs. bye-fellowship. an inferior establishment in a college for the nominal maintenance of what is called a _bye-fellow_, or a fellow out of the regular course. the emoluments of the fellowships vary from a merely nominal income, in the case of what are called _bye-fellowships_, to $ , per annum.--_literary world_, vol. xii. p. . bye-foundation. in the english universities, a foundation from which an insignificant income and an inferior maintenance are derived. bye-term. in the university of cambridge, eng., students who take the degree of b.a. at any other time save january, are said to "_go out in a bye-term_." bristed uses this word, as follows: "i had a double disqualification exclusive of illness. first, as a fellow commoner.... secondly, as a _bye-term man_, or one between two years. although i had entered into residence at the same time with those men who were to go out in , my name had not been placed on the college books, like theirs, previously to the commencement of . i had therefore lost a term, and for most purposes was considered a freshman, though i had been in residence as long as any of the junior sophs. in fact, i was _between two years_."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . _c_. cad. a low fellow, nearly equivalent to _snob_. used among students in the university of cambridge, eng.--_bristed_. cahoole. at the university of north carolina, this word in its application is almost universal, but generally signifies to cajole, to wheedle, to deceive, to procure. calendar. at the english universities the information which in american colleges is published in a catalogue, is contained in a similar but far more comprehensive work, called a _calendar_. conversation based on the topics of which such a volume treats is in some localities denominated _calendar_. "shop," or, as it is sometimes here called, "_calendar_," necessarily enters to a large extent into the conversation of the cantabs.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . i would lounge about into the rooms of those whom i knew for general literary conversation,--even to talk _calendar_ if there was nothing else to do.--_ibid._, p. . calvin's folly. at the university of vermont, "this name," writes a correspondent, "is given to a door, four inches thick and closely studded with spike-nails, dividing the chapel hall from the staircase leading to the belfry. it is called _calvin's folly_, because it was planned by a professor of that (christian) name, in order to keep the students out of the belfry, which dignified scheme it has utterly failed to accomplish. it is one of the celebrities of the old brick mill,[ ] and strangers always see it and hear its history." camel. in germany, a student on entering the university becomes a _kameel_,--a camel. campus. at the college of new jersey, the college yard is denominated the _campus_. _back campus_, the privies. cantab. abridged for cantabrigian. it was transmitted to me by a respectable _cantab_ for insertion. --_hone's every-day book_, vol. i. p. . should all this be a mystery to our uncollegiate friends, or even to many matriculated _cantabs_, we advise them not to attempt to unriddle it.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . cantabrigian. a student or graduate of the university of cambridge, eng. used also at cambridge, mass., of the students and inhabitants. cantabrigically. according to cambridge. to speak _cantabrigically_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . cap. the cap worn by students at the university of cambridge, eng., is described by bristed in the following passage: "you must superadd the academical costume. this consists of a gown, varying in color and ornament according to the wearer's college and rank, but generally black, not unlike an ordinary clerical gown, and a square-topped cap, which fits close to the head like a truncated helmet, while the covered board which forms the crown measures about a foot diagonally across."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . a similar cap is worn at oxford and at some american colleges on particular occasions. see oxford. cap. to uncover the head in reverence or civility. the youth, ignorant who they were, had omitted to _cap_ them.--_gent. mag._, vol. xxiv. p. . i could not help smiling, when, among the dignitaries whom i was bound to make obeisance to by _capping_ whenever i met them, mr. jackson's catalogue included his all-important self in the number. --_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . the obsequious attention of college servants, and the more unwilling "_capping_" of the undergraduates, to such a man are real luxuries.--_blackwood's mag._, eng. ed., vol. lvi. p. . used in the english universities. captain of the poll. the first of the polloi. he had moreover been _captain_ (head) _of the poll_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . caput senatus. latin; literally, _the head of the senate_. in cambridge, eng., a council of the university by which every grace must be approved, before it can be submitted to the senate. the caput senatus is formed of the vice-chancellor, a doctor in each of the faculties of divinity, law, and medicine, and one regent m.a., and one non-regent m.a. the vice-chancellor's five assistants are elected annually by the heads of houses and the doctors of the three faculties, out of fifteen persons nominated by the vice-chancellor and the proctors.--_webster. cam. cal. lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . see grace. carcer. latin. in german schools and universities, a prison.--_adler's germ, and eng. dict._ wollten ihn drauf die nürnberger herren mir nichts, dir nichts ins _carcer_ sperren. _wallenstein's lager_. and their nur'mberg worships swore he should go to _jail_ for his pains,--if he liked it, or no. _trans. wallenstein's camp, in bohn's stand. lib._, p. . castle end. at cambridge, eng., a noted resort for cyprians. catharine puritans. in the university of cambridge, eng., the members of st. catharine's hall are thus designated, from the implied derivation of the word catharine from the greek [greek: katharos], pure. caution money. in the english universities, a deposit in the hands of the tutor at entrance, by way of security. with reference to oxford, de quincey says of _caution money_: "this is a small sum, properly enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon his college. in most colleges it amounts to £ ; in one only it was considerably less." --_life and manners_, p. . in american colleges, a bond is usually given by a student upon entering college, in order to secure the payment of all his college dues. censor. in the university of oxford, eng., a college officer whose duties are similar to those of the dean. cerevis. from latin _cerevisia_, beer. among german students, a small, round, embroidered cap, otherwise called a beer-cap. better authorities ... have lately noted in the solitary student that wends his way--_cerevis_ on head, note-book in hand--to the professor's class-room,... a vast improvement on the _bursche_ of twenty years ago.--_lond. quart. rev._, am. ed., vol. lxxiii. p. . chamber. the apartment of a student at a college or university. this word, although formerly used in american colleges, has been of late almost entirely supplanted by the word _room_, and it is for this reason that it is here noticed. if any of them choose to provide themselves with breakfasts in their own _chambers_, they are allowed so to do, but not to breakfast in one another's _chambers_.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . some ringleaders gave up their _chambers_.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . chamber-mate. one who inhabits the same room or chamber with another. formerly used at our colleges. the word chum is now very generally used in its place; sometimes _room-mate_ is substituted. if any one shall refuse to find his proportion of furniture, wood, and candles, the president and tutors shall charge such delinquent, in his quarter bills, his full proportion, which sum shall be paid to his _chamber-mate_.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . chancellor. the chancellor of a university is an officer who seals the diplomas, or letters of degree, &c. the chancellor of oxford is usually one of the prime nobility, elected by the students in convocation; and he holds the office for life. he is the chief magistrate in the government of the university. the chancellor of cambridge is also elected from among the prime nobility. the office is biennial, or tenable for such a length of time beyond two years as the tacit consent of the university may choose to allow.--_webster. cam. guide_. "the chancellor," says the oxford guide, "is elected by convocation, and his office is for life; but he never, according to usage, is allowed to set foot in this university, excepting on the occasion of his installation, or when he is called upon to accompany any royal visitors."--ed. , p. xi. at cambridge, the office of chancellor is, except on rare occasions, purely honorary, and the chancellor himself seldom appears at cambridge. he is elected by the senate. . at trinity college, hartford, the _chancellor_ is the bishop of the diocese of connecticut, and is also the visitor of the college. he is _ex officio_ the president of the corporation.--_calendar trin. coll._, , pp. , . chapel. a house for public worship, erected separate from a church. in england, chapels in the universities are places of worship belonging to particular colleges. the chapels connected with the colleges in the united states are used for the same purpose. religious exercises are usually held in them twice a day, morning and evening, besides the services on the sabbath. chapel. at the university of cambridge, eng., the attendance at daily religious services in the chapel of each college at morning and evening is thus denominated. some time ago, upon an endeavor to compel the students of one college to increase their number of "_chapels_," as the attendance is called, there was a violent outcry, and several squibs were written by various hands.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . it is rather surprising that there should be so much shirking of _chapel_, when the very moderate amount of attendance required is considered.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . to _keep chapel_, is to be present at the daily religious services of college. the undergraduate is expected to go to chapel eight times, or, in academic parlance, to _keep eight chapels_ a week, two on sunday, and one on every week-day, attending morning or evening _chapel_ on week-days at his option. nor is even this indulgent standard rigidly enforced. i believe if a pensioner keeps six chapels, or a fellow-commoner four, and is quite regular in all other respects, he will never be troubled by the dean. it certainly is an argument in favor of severe discipline, that there is more grumbling and hanging back, and unwillingness to conform to these extremely moderate requisitions, than is exhibited by the sufferers at a new england college, who have to keep sixteen chapels a week, seven of them at unreasonable hours. even the scholars, who are literally paid for going, every chapel being directly worth two shillings sterling to them, are by no means invariable in attending the proper number of times.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . chapel clerk. at cambridge, eng., in some colleges, it is the duty of this officer to _mark_ the students as they enter chapel; in others, he merely sees that the proper lessons are read, by the students appointed by the dean for that purpose.--_gradus ad cantab._ the _chapel clerk_ is sent to various parties by the deans, with orders to attend them after chapel and be reprimanded, but the _chapel clerk_ almost always goes to the wrong person.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . chaplain. in universities and colleges, the clergyman who performs divine service, morning and evening. chaw. a deception or trick. to say, "it's all a gum," or "a regular _chaw_" is the same thing. --_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . chaw. to use up. yesterday a junior cracked a joke on me, when all standing round shouted in great glee, "chawed! freshman chawed! ha! ha! ha!" "no i a'n't _chawed_," said i, "i'm as whole as ever." but i didn't understand, when a fellow is _used up_, he is said to be _chawed_; if very much used up, he is said to be _essentially chawed_.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . the verb _to chaw up_ is used with nearly the same meaning in some of the western states. miss patience said she was gratified to hear mr. cash was a musician; she admired people who had a musical taste. whereupon cash fell into a chair, as he afterwards observed, _chawed up_.--_thorpe's backwoods_, p. . chip day. at williams college a day near the beginning of spring is thus designated, and is explained in the following passage. "they give us, near the close of the second term, what is called '_chip day_,' when we put the grounds in order, and remove the ruins caused by a winter's siege on the woodpiles."--_sketches of williams college_, , p. . another writer refers to the day, in a newspaper paragraph. "'_chip day_,' at the close of the spring term, is still observed in the old-fashioned way. parties of students go off to the hills, and return with brush, and branches of evergreen, with which the chips, which have accumulated during the winter, are brushed together, and afterwards burnt."--_boston daily evening traveller_, july , . about college there had been, in early spring, the customary cleaning up of "_chip day_."--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . chopping at the tree. at university college in the university of oxford, "a curious and ancient custom, called '_chopping at the tree_,' still prevails. on easter sunday, every member, as he leaves the hall after dinner, chops with a cleaver at a small tree dressed up for the occasion with evergreens and flowers, and placed on a turf close to the buttery. the cook stands by for his accustomed largess."--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. , note. chore. in the german universities, a club or society of the students is thus designated. duels between members of different _chores_ were once frequent;--sometimes one man was obliged to fight the members of a whole _chore_ in succession.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . christian. in the university of cambridge, eng., a member of christ's college. chum. armenian, _chomm_, or _chommein_, or _ham_, to dwell, stay, or lodge; french, _chômer_, to rest; saxon, _ham_, home. a chamber-fellow; one who lodges or resides in the same room.--_webster_. this word is used at the universities and colleges, both in england and the united states. a young student laid a wager with his _chum_, that the dean was at that instant smoking his pipe.--_philip's life and poems_, p. . but his _chum_ had wielded, in his just defence, a bowl of vast circumference.--_rebelliad_, p. . every set of chambers was possessed by two co-occupants; they had generally the same bedroom, and a common study; and they were called _chums_.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . i am again your petitioner in behalf of that great _chum_ of literature, samuel johnson.--_smollett, in boswell_. in this last instance, the word _chum_ is used either with the more extended meaning of companion, friend, or, as the sovereign prince of tartary is called the _cham_ or _khan_, so johnson is called the _chum_ (cham) or prince of literature. chum. to occupy a chamber with another. chumming. occupying a room with another. such is one of the evils of _chumming_.--_harvardiana_, vol. i. p. . chumship. the state of occupying a room in company with another; chumming. in the seventeenth century, in milton's time, for example, (about ,) and for more than sixty years after that era, the practice of _chumship_ prevailed.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . civilian. a student of the civil law at the university.--_graves. webster_. clarian. in the university of cambridge, eng., a member of clare hall. class. a number of students in a college or school, of the same standing, or pursuing the same studies. in colleges, the students entering or becoming members the same year, and pursuing the same studies.--_webster_. in the university of oxford, _class_ is the division of the candidates who are examined for their degrees according to their rate of merit. those who are entitled to this distinction are denominated _classmen_, answering to the _optimes_ and _wranglers_ in the university of cambridge.--_crabb's tech. dict._ see an interesting account of "reading for a first class," in the collegian's guide, chap. xii. class. to place in ranks or divisions students that are pursuing the same studies; to form into a class or classes.--_webster_. class book. within the last thirty or forty years, a custom has arisen at harvard college of no small importance in an historical point of view, but which is principally deserving of notice from the many pleasing associations to which its observance cannot fail to give rise. every graduating class procures a beautiful and substantial folio of many hundred pages, called the _class book_, and lettered with the year of the graduation of the class. in this a certain number of pages is allotted to each individual of the class, in which he inscribes a brief autobiography, paying particular attention to names and dates. the book is then deposited in the hands of the _class secretary_, whose duty it is to keep a faithful record of the marriage, birth of children, and death of each of his classmates, together with their various places of residence, and the offices and honors to which each may have attained. this information is communicated to him by letter by his classmates, and he is in consequence prepared to answer any inquiries relative to any member of the class. at his death, the book passes into the hands of one of the _class committee_, and at their death, into those of some surviving member of the class; and when the class has at length become extinct, it is deposited on the shelves of the college library. the class book also contains a full list of all persons who have at any time been members of the class, together with such information as can be gathered in reference to them; and an account of the prizes, deturs, parts at exhibitions and commencement, degrees, etc., of all its members. into it are also copied the class oration, poem, and ode, and the secretary's report of the class meeting, at which the officers were elected. it is also intended to contain the records of all future class meetings, and the accounts of the class secretary, who is _ex officio_ class treasurer and chairman of the class committee. by virtue of his office of class treasurer, he procures the _cradle_ for the successful candidate, and keeps in his possession the class fund, which is sometimes raised to defray the accruing expenses of the class in future times. in the harvardiana, vol. iv., is an extract from the class book of , which is very curious and unique. to this is appended the following note:--"it may be necessary to inform many of our readers, that the _class book_ is a large volume, in which autobiographical sketches of the members of each graduating class are recorded, and which is left in the hands of the class secretary." class cane. at union college, as a mark of distinction, a _class cane_ was for a time carried by the members of the junior class. the juniors, although on the whole a clever set of fellows, lean perhaps with too nonchalant an air on their _class canes_.--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . they will refer to their _class cane_, that mark of decrepitude and imbecility, for old men use canes.--_ibid._ class cap. at hamilton college, it is customary for the sophomores to appear in a _class cap_ on the junior exhibition day, which is worn generally during part of the third term. in american colleges, students frequently endeavor to adopt distinctive dresses, but the attempt is usually followed by failure. one of these attempts is pleasantly alluded to in the williams monthly miscellany. "in a late number, the ambition for whiskers was made the subject of a remark. the ambition of college has since taken a somewhat different turn. we allude to the class caps, which have been introduced in one or two of the classes. the freshmen were the first to appear in this species of uniform, a few days since at evening prayers; the cap which they have adopted is quite tasteful. the sophomores, not to be outdone, have voted to adopt the tarpaulin, having, no doubt, become proficients in navigation, as lucidly explained in one of their text-books. the juniors we understand, will follow suit soon. we hardly know what is left for the seniors, unless it be to go bare-headed."-- , p. . class committee. at harvard college a committee of two persons, joined with the _class secretary_, who is _ex officio_ its chairman, whose duty it is, after the class has graduated, during their lives to call class meetings, whenever they deem it advisable, and to attend to all other business relating to the class. see under class book. class cradle. for some years it has been customary at harvard college for the senior class, at the meeting for the election of the officers of class day, &c., to appropriate a certain sum of money, usually not exceeding fifty dollars, for the purchase of a cradle, to be given to the first member of the class to whom a child is born in lawful wedlock at a suitable time after marriage. this sum is intrusted to the hands of the _class secretary_, who is expected to transmit the present to the successful candidate upon the receipt of the requisite information. in one instance a _baby-jumper_ was voted by the class, to be given to the second member who should be blessed as above stated. class cup. it is a theory at yale college, that each class appropriates at graduating a certain amount of money for the purchase of a silver cup, to be given, in the name of the class, to the first member to whom a child shall be born in lawful wedlock at a suitable time after marriage. although the presentation of the _class cup_ is often alluded to, yet it is believed that the gift has in no instance been bestowed. it is to be regretted that a custom so agreeable in theory could not be reduced to practice. each man's mind was made up to obtain the "_class cup_." _presentation day songs_, june , . see silver cup. class day. the custom at harvard college of observing with appropriate exercises the day on which the senior class finish their studies, is of a very early date. the first notice which appears in reference to this subject is contained in an account of the disorders which began to prevail among the students about the year . among the evils to be remedied are mentioned the "disorders upon the day of the senior sophisters meeting to choose the officers of the class," when "it was usual for each scholar to bring a bottle of wine with him, which practice the committee (that reported upon it) apprehend has a natural tendency to produce disorders." but the disturbances were not wholly confined to the _meeting_ when the officers of class day were chosen; they occurred also on class day, and it was for this reason that frequent attempts were made at this period, by the college government, to suppress its observance. how far their efforts succeeded is not known, but it is safe to conclude that greater interruptions were occasioned by the war of the revolution, than by the attempts to abolish what it would have been wiser to have reformed. in a ms. journal, under date of june st, , is the following entry: "neither the valedictory oration by ward, nor poem by walton, was delivered, on account of a division in the class, and also because several were gone home." how long previous to this the st of june had been the day chosen for the exercises of the class, is uncertain; but for many years after, unless for special reasons, this period was regularly selected for that purpose. another extract from the ms. above mentioned, under date of june st, , reads: "a valedictory poem was delivered by paine st, and a valedictory latin oration by abiel abbott." the biographer of mr. robert treat paine, referring to the poem noticed in the above memorandum, says: "the st of every june, till of late years, has been the day on which the members of the senior class closed their collegiate studies, and retired to make preparations for the ensuing commencement. on this day it was usual for one member to deliver an oration, and another a poem; such members being appointed by their classmates. the valedictory poem of mr. paine, a tender, correct, and beautiful effusion of feeling and taste, was received by the audience with applause and tears." in another place he speaks on the same subject, as follows: "the solemnity which produced this poem is extremely interesting; and, being of ancient date, it is to be hoped that it may never fall into disuse. his affection for the university mr. paine cherished as one of his most sacred principles. of this poem, mr. paine always spoke as one of his happiest efforts. coming from so young a man, it is certainly very creditable, and promises more, i fear, than the untoward circumstances of his after life would permit him to perform."--_paine's works_, ed. , pp. xxvii., . it was always customary, near the close of the last century, for those who bore the honors of class day, to treat their friends according to the style of the time, and there was scarcely a graduate who did not provide an entertainment of such sort as he could afford. an account of the exercises of the day at this period may not be uninteresting. it is from the diary which is above referred to. " th (thursday). this day for special reasons the valedictory poem and oration were performed. the order of the day was this. at ten, the class walked in procession to the president's, and escorted him, the professors, and tutors, to the chapel, preceded by the band playing solemn music. "the president began with a short prayer. he then read a chapter in the bible; after this he prayed again; cutler then delivered his poem. then the singing club, accompanied by the band, performed williams's _friendship_. this was succeeded by a valedictory latin oration by jackson. we then formed, and waited on the government to the president's, where we were very respectably treated with wine, &c. "we then marched in procession to jackson's room, where we drank punch. at one we went to mr. moore's tavern and partook of an elegant entertainment, which cost / a piece. marching then to cutler's room, we shook hands, and parted with expressing the sincerest tokens of friendship." june, . the incidents of class day, five years subsequent to the last date, are detailed by professor sidney willard, and may not be omitted in this connection. "on the st of june, , the day of the dismission of the senior class from all academic exercises, the class met in the college chapel to attend the accustomed ceremonies of the occasion, and afterwards to enjoy the usual festivities of the day, since called, for the sake of a name, and for brevity's sake, class day. there had been a want of perfect harmony in the previous proceedings, which in some degree marred the social enjoyments of the day; but with the day all dissension closed, awaiting the dawn of another day, the harbinger of the brighter recollections of four years spent in pleasant and peaceful intercourse. there lingered no lasting alienations of feeling. whatever were the occasions of the discontent, it soon expired, was buried in the darkest recesses of discarded memories, and there lay lost and forgotten. "after the exercises of the chapel, and visiting the president, professors, and tutors at the president's house, according to the custom still existing, we marched in procession round the college halls, to another hall in porter's tavern, (which some dozen or fifteen of the oldest living graduates may perhaps remember as bradish's tavern, of ancient celebrity,) where we dined. after dining, we assembled at the liberty tree, (according to another custom still existing,) and in due time, having taken leave of each other, we departed, some of us to our family homes, and others to their rooms to make preparations for their departure."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. pp. , . referring to the same event, he observes in another place: "in speaking of the leave-taking of the college by my class, on the st of june, ,--class day, as it is now called,--i inadvertently forgot to mention, that according to custom, at that period, [samuel p.p.] fay delivered a latin valedictory oration in the chapel, in the presence of the immediate government, and of the students of other classes who chose to be present. speaking to him on the subject some time since, he told me that he believed [judge joseph] story delivered a poem on the same occasion.... there was no poetical performance in the celebration of the day in the class before ours, on the same occasion; dr. john c. warren's latin oration being the only performance, and his class counting as many reputed poets as ours did."--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . alterations were continually made in the observances of class day, and in twenty years after the period last mentioned, its character had in many particulars changed. instead of the latin, an english oration of a somewhat sportive nature had been introduced; the poem was either serious or comic, at the writer's option; usually, however, the former. after the exercises in the chapel, the class commonly repaired to porter's hall, and there partook of a dinner, not always observing with perfect strictness the rules of temperance either in eating or drinking. this "cenobitical symposium" concluded, they again returned to the college yard, where, scattered in groups under the trees, the rest of the day was spent in singing, smoking, and drinking, or pretending to drink, punch; for the negroes who supplied it in pails usually contrived to take two or more glasses to every one glass that was drank by those for whom it was provided. the dance around the liberty tree, "each hand in comrade's hand," closed the regular ceremonies of the day; but generally the greater part of the succeeding night was spent in feasting and hilarity. the punch-drinking in the yard increased to such an extent, that it was considered by the government of the college as a matter which demanded their interference; and in the year , on one of these occasions, an instructor having joined with the students in their revellings in the yard, the faculty proposed that, instead of spending the afternoon in this manner, dancing should be introduced, which was accordingly done, with the approbation of both parties. the observances of the day, which in a small way may be considered as a rival of commencement, are at present as follows. the orator, poet, odist, chaplain, and marshals having been previously chosen, on the morning of class day the seniors assemble in the yard, and, preceded by the band, walk in procession to one of the halls of the college, where a prayer is offered by the class chaplain. they then proceed to the president's house, and escort him to the chapel where the following order is observed. a prayer by one of the college officers is succeeded by the oration, in which the transactions of the class from their entrance into college to the present time are reviewed with witty and appropriate remarks. the poem is then pronounced, followed by the ode, which is sung by the whole class to the tune of "fair harvard." music is performed at intervals by the band. the class then withdraw to harvard hall, accompanied by their friends and invited guests, where a rich collation is provided. after an interval of from one to two hours, the dancing commences in the yard. cotillons and the easier dances are here performed, but the sport closes in the hall with the polka and other fashionable steps. the seniors again form, and make the circuit of the yard, cheering the buildings, great and small. they then assemble under the liberty tree, around which with hands joined they run and dance, after singing the student's adopted song, "auld lang syne." at parting, each member takes a sprig or a flower from the beautiful "wreath" which surrounds the "farewell tree," which is sacredly treasured as a last memento of college scenes and enjoyments. thus close the exercises of the day, after which the class separate until commencement. the more marked events in the observance of class day have been graphically described by grace greenwood, in the accompanying paragraphs. "the exercises on this occasion were to me most novel and interesting. the graduating class of are a fine-looking set of young men certainly, and seem to promise that their country shall yet be greater and better for the manly energies, the talent and learning, with which they are just entering upon life. "the spectators were assembled in the college chapel, whither the class escorted the faculty, headed by president everett, in his oxford hat and gown. "the president is a man of most imperial presence; his figure has great dignity, and his head is grand in form and expression. but to me he looks the governor, the foreign minister and the president, more than the orator or the poet. "after a prayer from the chaplain, we listened to an eloquent oration from the class orator, mr. tiffany, of baltimore and to a very elegant and witty poem from the class poet mr. clarke, of boston. the 'fair harvard' having been sung by the class, all adjourned to the college green, where such as were so disposed danced to the music of a fine band. from the green we repaired to harvard hall, where an excellent collation was served, succeeded by dancing. from the hall the students of marched and cheered successively every college building, then formed a circle round a magnificent elm, whose trunk was beautifully garlanded will flowers, and, with hands joined in a peculiar manner, sung 'auld lang syne.' the scene was in the highest degree touching and impressive, so much of the beauty and glory of life was there, so much of the energy, enthusiasm, and proud unbroken strength of manhood. with throbbing hearts and glowing lips, linked for a few moments with strong, fraternal grasps, they stood, with one deep, common feeling, thrilling like one pulse through all. an involuntary prayer sprang to my lips, that they might ever prove true to _alma mater_, to one another, to their country, and to heaven. "as the singing ceased, the students began running swiftly around the tree, and at the cry, 'harvard!' a second circle was formed by the other students, which gave a tumultuous excitement to the scene. it broke up at last with a perfect storm of cheers, and a hasty division among the class of the garland which encircled the elm, each taking a flower in remembrance of the day."--_greenwood leaves_, ed. d, , pp. , . in the poem which was read before the class of , by william c. bradley, the comparisons of those about to graduate with the youth who is attaining to his majority, and with the traveller who has stopped a little for rest and refreshment, are so genial and suggestive, that their insertion in this connection will not be deemed out of place. "'t is a good custom, long maintained, when the young heir has manhood gained, to solemnize the welcome date, accession to the man's estate, with open house and rousing game, and friends to wish him joy and fame: so harvard, following thus the ways of careful sires of older days, directs her children till they grow the strength of ripened years to know, and bids their friends and kindred, then, to come and hail her striplings--men. "and as, about the table set, or on the shady grass-plat met, they give the youngster leave to speak of vacant sport, and boyish freak, so now would we (such tales have power at noon-tide to abridge the hour) turn to the past, and mourn or praise the joys and pains of boyhood's days. "like travellers with their hearts intent upon a distant journey bent, we rest upon the earliest stage of life's laborious pilgrimage; but like the band of pilgrims gay (whom chaucer sings) at close of day, that turned with mirth, and cheerful din, to pass their evening at the inn, hot from the ride and dusty, we, but yet untired and stout and free, and like the travellers by the door, sit down and talk the journey o'er." as a specimen of the character of the ode which is always sung on class day to the tune "fair harvard,"--which is the name by which the melody "believe me, if all those endearing young charms" has been adopted at cambridge,--that which was written by joshua danforth robinson for the class of is here inserted. "the days of thy tenderly nurture are done, we call for the lance and the shield; there's a battle to fight and a crown to be won, and onward we press to the field! but yet, alma mater, before we depart, shall the song of our farewell be sung, and the grasp of the hand shall express for the heart emotions too deep for the tongue. "this group of thy sons, alma mater, no more may gladden thine ear with their song, for soon we shall stand upon time's crowded shore, and mix in humanity's throng. o, glad be the voices that ring through thy halls when the echo of ours shall have flown, and the footsteps that sound when no longer thy walls shall answer the tread of our own! "alas! our dear mother, we see on thy face a shadow of sorrow to-day; for while we are clasped in thy farewell embrace, and pass from thy bosom away, to part with the living, we know, must recall the lost whom thy love still embalms, that one sigh must escape and one tear-drop must fall for the children that died in thy arms. "but the flowers of affection, bedewed by the tears in the twilight of memory distilled, and sunned by the love of our earlier years, when the soul with their beauty was thrilled, untouched by the frost of life's winter, shall blow, and breathe the same odor they gave when the vision of youth was entranced by their glow, till, fadeless, they bloom o'er the grave." a most genial account of the exercises of the class day of the graduates of the year may be found in harper's magazine, vol. ix. pp. , . classic. one learned in classical literature; a student of the ancient greek and roman authors of the first rank. these men, averaging about twenty-three years of age, the best _classics_ and mathematicians of their years, were reading for fellowships.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . a quiet scotchman irreproachable as a _classic_ and a whist-player.--_ibid._, p. . the mathematical examination was very difficult, and made great havoc among the _classics_.--_ibid._, p. . classic shades. a poetical appellation given to colleges and universities. he prepares for his departure,--but he must, ere he repair to the "_classic shades_," et cetera,--visit his "ladye fayre." _poem before iadma_, harv. coll., . i exchanged the farm-house of my father for the "_classic shades_" of union.--_the parthenon_, union coll., , p. . classis. same meaning as class. the latin for the english. [they shall] observe the generall hours appointed for all the students, and the speciall houres for their own _classis_.--_new england's first fruits_, in _mass. hist. coll._, vol. i. p. . class list. in the university of oxford, a list in which are entered the names of those who are examined for their degrees, according to their rate of merit. at the university of cambridge, eng., the names of those who are examined at stated periods are placed alphabetically in the class lists, but the first eight or ten individual places are generally known. there are some men who read for honors in that covetous and contracted spirit, and so bent upon securing the name of scholarship, even at the sacrifice of the reality, that, for the pleasure of reading their names at the top of the _class list_, they would make the examiners a present of all their latin and greek the moment they left the schools.--_collegian's guide_, p. . classman. see class. class marshal. in many colleges in the united states, a _class marshal_ is chosen by the senior class from their own number, for the purpose of regulating the procession on the day of commencement, and, as at harvard college, on class day also. "at union college," writes a correspondent, "the class marshal is elected by the senior class during the third term. he attends to the order of the procession on commencement day, and walks into the church by the side of the president. he chooses several assistants, who attend to the accommodation of the audience. he is chosen from among the best-looking and most popular men of the class, and the honor of his office is considered next to that of the vice-president of the senate for the third term." classmate. a member of the same class with another. the day is wound up with a scene of careless laughter and merriment, among a dozen of joke-loving _classmates_.--_harv. reg._, p. . class meeting. a meeting where all the class are assembled for the purpose of carrying out some measure, appointing class officers, or transacting business of interest to the whole class. in harvard college, no class, or general, or other meeting of students can be called without an application in writing of three students, and no more, expressing the purpose of such meeting, nor otherwise than by a printed notice, signed by the president, expressing the time, the object, and place of such meeting, and the three students applying for such meeting are held responsible for any proceedings at it contrary to the laws of the college.--_laws univ. cam., mass._, , appendix. similar regulations are in force at all other american colleges. at union college the statute on this subject was formerly in these words: "no class meetings shall be held without special license from the president; and for such purposes only as shall be expressed in the license; nor shall any class meeting be continued by adjournment or otherwise, without permission; and all class meetings held without license shall be considered as unlawful combinations, and punished accordingly."--_laws union coll._, , pp. , . while one, on fame alone intent, seek to be chosen president of clubs, or a _class meeting_. _harv. reg._, p. . classology. that science which treats of the members of the classes of a college. this word is used in the title of a pleasant _jeu d'esprit_ by mr. william biglow, on the class which graduated at harvard college in . it is called, "_classology_: an anacreontic ode, in imitation of 'heathen mythology.'" see under high go. class secretary. for an account of this officer, see under class book. class supper. in american colleges, a supper attended only by the members of a collegiate class. class suppers are given in some colleges at the close of each year; in others, only at the close of the sophomore and senior years, or at one of these periods. class trees. at bowdoin college, "immediately after the annual examination of each class," says a correspondent, "the members that compose it are accustomed to form a ring round a tree, and then, not dance, but run around it. so quickly do they revolve, that every individual runner has a tendency 'to go off in a tangent,' which it is difficult to resist for any length of time. the three lower classes have a tree by themselves in front of massachusetts hall. the seniors have one of their own in front of king chapel." for an account of a similar and much older custom, prevalent at harvard college, see under class day and liberty tree. climbing. in reference to this word, a correspondent from dartmouth college writes: "at the commencement of this century, the greek, latin, and philosophical orations were assigned by the faculty to the best scholars, while the valedictorian was chosen from the remainder by his classmates. it was customary for each one of these four to treat his classmates, which was called '_climbing_,' from the effect which the liquor would have in elevating the class to an equality with the first scholars." cliosophic. a word compounded from _clio_, the muse who presided over history, and [greek: sophos], intelligent. at yale college, this word was formerly used to designate an oration on the arts and sciences, which was delivered annually at the examination in july. having finished his academic course, by the appointment of the president he delivered the _cliosophic_ oration in the college hall.--_holmes's life of ezra stiles_, p. . coach. in the english universities, this term is variously applied, as will be seen by a reference to the annexed examples. it is generally used to designate a private tutor. everything is (or used to be) called a "_coach_" at oxford: a lecture-class, or a club of men meeting to take wine, luncheon, or breakfast alternately, were severally called a "wine, luncheon, or breakfast _coach_"; so a private tutor was called a "private _coach_"; and one, like hilton of worcester, very famed for getting his men safe through, was termed "a patent safety."--_the collegian's guide_, p. . it is to his private tutors, or "_coaches_," that he looks for instruction.--_household words_, vol. ii. p. . he applies to mr. crammer. mr. crammer is a celebrated "_coach_" for lazy and stupid men, and has a system of his own which has met with decided success.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . coach. to prepare a student to pass an examination; to make use of the aid of a private tutor. he is putting on all steam, and "_coaching_" violently for the classical tripos.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d. p. . it is not every man who can get a travis to _coach_ him.--_ibid._, p. . coaching. a cant term, in the british universities, for preparing a student, by the assistance of a private tutor, to pass an examination. whether a man shall throw away every opportunity which a university is so eminently calculated to afford, and come away with a mere testamur gained rather by the trickery of private _coaching_ (tutoring) than by mental improvement, depends, &c.--_the collegian's guide_, p. . coax. this word was formerly used at yale college in the same sense as the word _fish_ at harvard, viz. to seek or gain the favor of a teacher by flattery. one of the proverbs of solomon was often changed by the students to read as follows: "surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood; so the _coaxing_ of tutors bringeth forth parts."--_prov._ xxx. . cochleaureatus, _pl._ cochleaureati. latin, _cochlear_, a spoon, and _laureatus_, laurelled. a free translation would be, _one honored with a spoon_. at yale college, the wooden spoon is given to the one whose name comes last on the list of appointees for the junior exhibition. the recipient of this honor is designated _cochleaureatus_. now give in honor of the spoon three cheers, long, loud, and hearty, and three for every honored june in _coch-le-au-re-a-ti_. _songs of yale_, , p. . see wooden spoon. coffin. at the university of vermont, a boot, especially a large one. a companion to the word hummel, q.v. collar. at yale college, "to come up with; to seize; to lay hold on; to appropriate."--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiv. p. . by that means the oration marks will be effectually _collared_, with scarce an effort.--_yale banger_, oct. . collection. in the university of oxford, a college examination, which takes place at the end of every term before the warden and tutor. read some herodotus for _collections_.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . the college examinations, called _collections_, are strictly private.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . collector. a bachelor of arts in the university of oxford, who is appointed to superintend some scholastic proceedings in lent.--_todd_. the collectors, who are two in number, bachelors of arts, are appointed to collect the names of _determining_ bachelors, during lent. their office begins and ends with that season.--_guide to oxford_. collectorship. the office of a _collector_ in the university of oxford.--_todd_. this lent the _collectors_ ceased from entertaining the bachelors by advice and command of the proctors; so that now they got by their _collectorships_, whereas before they spent about _l._, besides their gains, on clothes or needless entertainments.--_life of a. wood_, p. . college. latin, _collegium_; _con_ and _lego_, to gather. in its primary sense, a collection or assembly; hence, in a general sense, a collection, assemblage, or society of men, invested with certain powers and rights, performing certain duties, or engaged in some common employment or pursuit. . an establishment or edifice appropriated to the use of students who are acquiring the languages and sciences. . the society of persons engaged in the pursuits of literature, including the officers and students. societies of this kind are incorporated, and endowed with revenues. "a college, in the modern sense of that word, was an institution which arose within a university, probably within that of paris or of oxford first, being intended either as a kind of boarding-school, or for the support of scholars destitute of means, who were here to live under particular supervision. by degrees it became more and more the custom that teachers should be attached to these establishments. and as they grew in favor, they were resorted to by persons of means, who paid for their board; and this to such a degree, that at one time the colleges included nearly all the members of the university of paris. in the english universities the colleges may have been first established by a master who gathered pupils around him, for whose board and instruction he provided. he exercised them perhaps in logic and the other liberal arts, and repeated the university lectures, as well as superintended their morals. as his scholars grew in number, he associated with himself other teachers, who thus acquired the name of _fellows_. thus it naturally happened that the government of colleges, even of those which were founded by the benevolence of pious persons, was in the hands of a principal called by various names, such as rector, president, provost, or master, and of fellows, all of whom were resident within the walls of the same edifices where the students lived. where charitable munificence went so far as to provide for the support of a greater number of fellows than were needed, some of them were intrusted, as tutors, with the instruction of the undergraduates, while others performed various services within their college, or passed a life of learned leisure."--_pres. woolsey's hist. disc._, new haven, aug. , , p. . . in _foreign universities_, a public lecture.--_webster_. college bible. the laws of a college are sometimes significantly called _the college bible_. he cons _the college bible_ with eager, longing eyes, and wonders how poor students at six o'clock can rise. _poem before iadma of harv. coll._, . colleger. a member of a college. we stood like veteran _collegers_ the next day's screw.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . [_little used_.] . the name by which a member of a certain class of the pupils of eton is known. "the _collegers_ are educated gratuitously, and such of them as have nearly but not quite reached the age of nineteen, when a vacancy in king's college, cambridge, occurs, are elected scholars there forthwith and provided for during life--or until marriage."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . they have nothing in lieu of our seventy _collegers_.--_ibid._, p. . the whole number of scholars or "_collegers_" at eton is seventy. --_literary world_, vol. xii. p. . college yard. the enclosure on or within which the buildings of a college are situated. although college enclosures are usually open for others to pass through than those connected with the college, yet by law the grounds are as private as those connected with private dwellings, and are kept so, by refusing entrance, for a certain period, to all who are not members of the college, at least once in twenty years, although the time differs in different states. but when they got to _college yard_, with one accord they all huzza'd.--_rebelliad_, p. . not ye, whom science never taught to roam far as a _college yard_ or student's home. _harv. reg._, p. . collegian. a member of a college, particularly of a literary institution so called; an inhabitant of a college.--_johnson_. collegiate. pertaining to a college; as, _collegiate_ studies. . containing a college; instituted after the manner of a college; as, a _collegiate_ society.--_johnson_. collegiate. a member of a college. combination. an agreement, for effecting some object by joint operation; in _an ill sense_, when the purpose is illegal or iniquitous. an agreement entered into by students to resist or disobey the faculty of the college, or to do any unlawful act, is a _combination_. when the number concerned is so great as to render it inexpedient to punish all, those most culpable are usually selected, or as many as are deemed necessary to satisfy the demands of justice.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . _laws univ. cam., mass._, , p. . combination room. in the university of cambridge eng., a room into which the fellows, and others in authority withdraw after dinner, for wine, dessert, and conversation.--_webster_. in popular phrase, the word _room_ is omitted. "there will be some quiet bachelors there, i suppose," thought i, "and a junior fellow or two, some of those i have met in _combination_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . comitat. in the german universities, a procession formed to accompany a departing fellow-student with public honor out of the city.--_howitt_. commemoration day. at the university of oxford, eng., this day is an annual solemnity in honor of the benefactors of the university, when orations are delivered, and prize compositions are read in the theatre. it is the great day of festivity for the year.--_huber_. at the university of cambridge, eng., there is always a sermon on this day. the lesson which is read in the course of the service is from ecclus. xliv.: "let us now praise famous men," &c. it is "a day," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "devoted to prayers, and good living." it was formerly called _anniversary day_. commence. to take a degree, or the first degree, in a university or college.--_bailey_. nine bachelors _commenced_ at cambridge; they were young men of good hope, and performed their acts so as to give good proof of their proficiency in the tongues and arts.--_winthrop's journal, by mr. savage_, vol. ii. p. . four senior sophisters came from saybrook, and received the degree of bachelor of arts, and several others _commenced_ masters.--_clap's hist. yale coll._, p. . a scholar see him now _commence_, without the aid of books or sense. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, , p. . charles chauncy ... was afterwards, when qualified, sent to the university of cambridge, where he _commenced_ bachelor of divinity.--_hist. sketch of first ch. in boston_, , p. . commencement. the time when students in colleges _commence_ bachelors; a day in which degrees are publicly conferred in the english and american universities.--_webster_. at harvard college, in its earliest days, commencements were attended, as at present, by the highest officers in the state. at the first commencement, on the second tuesday of august, , we are told that "the governour, magistrates, and the ministers, from all parts, with all sorts of schollars, and others in great numbers, were present."--_new england's first fruits_, in _mass. hist. coll._, vol. i. p. . in the ms. diary of judge sewall, under date of july , , commencement day, is this remark: "gov'r there, whom i accompanied to charlestown"; and again, under date of july , , is the following entry respecting the commencement of that year: "go to cambridge by water in ye barge wherein the gov'r, maj. gen'l, capt. blackwell, and others." in the private journal of cotton mather, under the dates of and , there are notices of the boston troops waiting on the governor to cambridge on commencement day. during the presidency of wadsworth, which continued from to , "it was the custom," says quincy, "on commencement day, for the governor of the province to come from boston through roxbury, often by the way of watertown, attended by his body guards, and to arrive at the college about ten or eleven o'clock in the morning. a procession was then formed of the corporation, overseers, magistrates, ministers, and invited gentlemen, and immediately moved from harvard hall to the congregational church." after the exercises of the day were over, the students escorted the governor, corporation, and overseers, in procession, to the president's house. this description would answer very well for the present day, by adding the graduating class to the procession, and substituting the boston lancers as an escort, instead of the "body guards." the exercises of the first commencement are stated in new england's first fruits, above referred to, as follows:--"latine and greeke orations, and declamations, and hebrew analysis, grammaticall, logicall, and rhetoricall of the psalms: and their answers and disputations in logicall, ethicall, physicall, and metaphysicall questions." at commencement in , the exercises were, besides disputes, four orations, one latin, two greek, and one hebrew in the presidency of wadsworth, above referred to, "the exercises of the day," says quincy, "began with a short prayer by the president; a salutatory oration in latin, by one of the graduating class, succeeded; then disputations on theses or questions in logic, ethics, and natural philosophy commenced. when the disputation terminated, one of the candidates pronounced a latin 'gratulatory oration.' the graduating class were then called, and, after asking leave of the governor and overseers, the president conferred the bachelor's degree, by delivering a book to the candidates (who came forward successively in parties of four), and pronouncing a form of words in latin. an adjournment then took place to dinner, in harvard hall; thence the procession returned to the church, and, after the masters' disputations, usually three in number, were finished, their degrees were conferred, with the same general forms as those of the bachelors. an occasional address was then made by the president. a latin valedictory oration by one of the masters succeeded, and the exercises concluded with a prayer by the president." similar to this is the account given by the hon. paine wingate, a graduate of the class of , of the exercises of commencement as conducted while he was in college. "i do not recollect now," he says, "any part of the public exercises on commencement day to be in english, excepting the president's prayers at opening and closing the services. next after the prayer followed the salutatory oration in latin, by one of the candidates for the first degree. this office was assigned by the president, and was supposed to be given to him who was the best orator in the class. then followed a syllogistic disputation in latin, in which four or five or more of those who were distinguished as good scholars in the class were appointed by the president as respondents, to whom were assigned certain questions, which the respondents maintained, and the rest of the class severally opposed, and endeavored to invalidate. this was conducted wholly in latin, and in the form of syllogisms and theses. at the close of the disputation, the president usually added some remarks in latin. after these exercises the president conferred the degrees. this, i think, may be considered as the summary of the public performances on a commencement day. i do not recollect any forensic disputation, or a poem or oration spoken in english, whilst i was in college."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, pp. , . as far back as the year , it was customary for the president to deliver an address near the close of the exercises. under this date, in the ms. diary of judge sewall, are these words: "mr. president after giving ye degrees made an oration in praise of academical studies and degrees, hebrew tongue." in , at the commencement, according to the same gentleman, mr. william hubbard, then acting as president under the appointment of sir edmund andros, "made an oration." the disputations were always in latin, and continued to be a part of the exercises of commencement until the year . the orations were in latin, greek, hebrew, and sometimes french; in a spanish oration was delivered at the commencement for that year by mr. george osborne. the first english oration was made by mr. jedidiah huntington, in the year , and the first english poem by mr. john davis, in . the last latin syllogisms were in , on the subjects, "materia cogitare non potest," and "nil nisi ignis naturâ est fluidum." the first year in which the performers spoke without a prompter was . there were no master's exercises for the first time in . to prevent improprieties, in the year , "the duty of inspecting the performances on the day," says quincy, "and expunging all exceptionable parts, was assigned to the president; on whom it was particularly enjoined 'to put an end to the practice of addressing the female sex.'" at a later period, in , by referring to the "order of the exercises of commencement," we find that in the concluding oration "honorable notice is taken, from year to year, of those who have been the principal benefactors of the university." the practice is now discontinued. at the first commencement, all the magistrates, elders, and invited guests who were present "dined," says winthrop in his journal, vol. ii. pp. , , "at the college with the scholars' ordinary commons, which was done on purpose for the students' encouragement, &c., and it gave good content to all." after dinner, a psalm was usually sung. in , at commencement, sewall says: "after dinner ye d part of ye d ps. was sung in ye hall." the seventy-eighth psalm was the one usually sung, an account of which will be found under that title. the senior class usually waited on the table on commencement day. after dinner, they were allowed to take what provisions were left, and eat them at their rooms, or in the hall. this custom was not discontinued until the year . in , owing to the expensive habits worn on commencement day, a law was passed, ordering that on that day "every candidate for his degree appear in black, or dark blue, or gray clothes; and that no one wear any silk night-gowns; and that any candidate, who shall appear dressed contrary to such regulations, may not expect his degree." at present, on commencement day, every candidate for a first degree wears, according to the law, "a black dress and the usual black gown." it was formerly customary, on this day, for the students to provide entertainment in their rooms. but great care was taken, as far as statutory enactments were concerned, that all excess should be avoided. during the presidency of increase mather was developed among the students a singular phase of gastronomy, which was noticed by the corporation in their records, under the date of june , , in these words: "the corporation, having been informed that the custom taken up in the college, not used in any other universities, for the commencers [graduating class] to have plumb-cake, is dishonorable to the college, not grateful to wise men, and chargeable to the parents of the commencers, do therefore put an end to that custom, and do hereby order that no commencer, or other scholar, shall have any such cakes in their studies or chambers; and that, if any scholar shall offend therein, the cakes shall be taken from him, and he shall moreover pay to the college twenty shillings for each such offence." this stringent regulation was, no doubt, all-sufficient for many years; but in the lapse of time the taste for the forbidden delicacy, which was probably concocted with a skill unknown to the moderns, was again revived, accompanied with confessions to a fondness for several kinds of expensive preparations, the recipes for which preparations, it is to be feared, are inevitably lost. in , in the latter part of president leverett's administration, an act was passed "for reforming the extravagancys of commencements," and providing "that henceforth no preparation nor provision of either plumb cake, or roasted, boyled, or baked meates or pyes of any kind shal be made by any commencer," and that no "such have any distilled lyquours in his chamber or any composition therewith," under penalty of being "punished twenty shillings, to be paid to the use of the college," and of forfeiture of the provisions and liquors, "_to be seized by the tutors_." the president and corporation were accustomed to visit the rooms of the commencers, "to see if the laws prohibiting certain meats and drinks were not violated." these restrictions not being sufficient, a vote passed the corporation in , declaring, that "if any, who now doe, or hereafter shall, stand for their degrees, presume to doe any thing contrary to the act of th june, , or _go about to evade it by plain cake_, they shall not be admitted to their degree, and if any, after they have received their degree, shall presume to make any forbidden provisions, their names shall be left or rased out of the catalogue of the graduates." in , the corporation strongly recommended to the parents and guardians of such as were to take degrees that year, "considering the awful judgments of god upon the land," to "retrench commencement expenses, so as may best correspond with the frowns of divine providence, and that they take effectual care to have their sons' chambers cleared of company, and their entertainments finished, on the evening of said commencement day, or, at furthest, by next morning." in , attempts were made to prevent those "who proceeded bachelors of arts from having entertainments of any kind, either in the college or any house in cambridge, after the commencement day." this and several other propositions of the overseers failing to meet with the approbation of the corporation, a vote finally passed both boards in , by which it was ordered, that, on account of the "distressing drought upon the land," and "in consideration of the dark state of providence with respect to the war we are engaged in, which providences call for humiliation and fasting rather than festival entertainments," the "first and second degrees be given to the several candidates without their personal attendance"; a general diploma was accordingly given, and commencement was omitted for that year. three years after, "all unnecessary expenses were forbidden," and also "dancing in any part of commencement week, in the hall, or in any college building; nor was any undergraduate allowed to give any entertainment, after dinner, on thursday of that week, under severe penalties." but the laws were not always so strict, for we find that, on account of a proposition made by the overseers to the corporation in , recommending a "repeal of the law prohibiting the drinking of _punch_," the latter board voted, that "it shall be no offence if any scholar shall, at commencement, make and entertain guests at his chamber with _punch_," which they afterwards declare, "as it is now usually made, is no intoxicating liquor." to prevent the disturbances incident to the day, an attempt was made in to have the "commencements for time to come more private than has been usual," and for several years after, the time of commencement was concealed; "only a short notice," says quincy, "being given to the public of the day on which it was to be held." friday was the day agreed on, for the reason, says president wadsworth in his diary, "that there might be a less remaining time of the week spent in frolicking." this was very ill received by the people of boston and the vicinity, to whom commencement was a season of hilarity and festivity; the ministers were also dissatisfied, not knowing the day in some cases, and in others being subjected to great inconvenience on account of their living at a distance from cambridge. the practice was accordingly abandoned in , and commencement, as formerly, was held on wednesday, to general satisfaction. in , "three gentlemen," says quincy, "who had sons about to be graduated, offered to give the college a thousand pounds old tenor, provided 'a trial was made of commencements this year, in a more private manner.'" the proposition, after much debate, was rejected, and "public commencements were continued without interruption, except during the period of the revolutionary war, and occasionally, from temporary causes, during the remainder of the century, notwithstanding their evils, anomalies, and inconsistencies."[ ] the following poetical account of commencement at harvard college is supposed to have been written by dr. mather byles, in the year or thereabouts. of its merits, this is no place to speak. as a picture of the times it is valuable, and for this reason, and to show the high rank which commencement day formerly held among other days, it is here presented. "commencement. "i sing the day, bright with peculiar charms, whose rising radiance ev'ry bosom warms; the day when _cambridge_ empties all the towns, and youths commencing, take their laurel crowns: when smiling joys, and gay delights appear, and shine distinguish'd, in the rolling year. "while the glad theme i labour to rehearse, in flowing numbers, and melodious verse, descend, immortal nine, my soul inspire, amid my bosom lavish all your fire, while smiling _phoebus_, owns the heavenly layes and shades the poet with surrounding bayes. but chief ye blooming nymphs of heavenly frame, who make the day with double glory flame, in whose fair persons, art and nature vie, on the young muse cast an auspicious eye: secure of fame, then shall the goddess sing, and rise triumphant with a tow'ring wing, her tuneful notes wide-spreading all around, the hills shall echo, and the vales resound. "soon as the morn in crimson robes array'd with chearful beams dispels the flying shade, while fragrant odours waft the air along, and birds melodious chant their heavenly song, and all the waste of heav'n with glory spread, wakes up the world, in sleep's embraces dead. then those whose dreams were on th' approaching day, prepare in splendid garbs to make their way to that admired solemnity, whose date, tho' late begun, will last as long as fate. and now the sprightly fair approach the glass to heighten every feature of the face. they view the roses flush their glowing cheeks, the snowy lillies towering round their necks, their rustling manteaus huddled on in haste, they clasp with shining girdles round their waist. nor less the speed and care of every beau, to shine in dress and swell the solemn show. thus clad, in careless order mixed by chance, in haste they both along the streets advance: 'till near the brink of _charles's_ beauteous stream, they stop, and think the lingering boat to blame. soon as the empty skiff salutes the shore, in with impetuous haste they clustering pour, the men the head, the stern the ladies grace, and neighing horses fill the middle space. sunk deep, the boat floats slow the waves along, and scarce contains the thickly crowded throng; a gen'ral horror seizes on the fair, while white-look'd cowards only not despair. 'till rowed with care they reach th' opposing side, leap on the shore, and leave the threat'ning tide. while to receive the pay the boatman stands, and chinking pennys jingle in his hands. eager the sparks assault the waiting cars, fops meet with fops, and clash in civil wars. off fly the wigs, as mount their kicking heels, the rudely bouncing head with anguish swells, a crimson torrent gushes from the nose, adown the cheeks, and wanders o'er the cloaths. taunting, the victor's strait the chariots leap, while the poor batter'd beau's for madness weep. "now in calashes shine the blooming maids, bright'ning the day which blazes o'er their heads; the seats with nimble steps they swift ascend, and moving on the crowd, their waste of beauties spend. so bearing thro' the boundless breadth of heav'n, the twinkling lamps of light are graceful driv'n; while on the world they shed their glorious rays, and set the face of nature in a blaze. "now smoak the burning wheels along the ground, while rapid hoofs of flying steeds resound, the drivers by no vulgar flame inspir'd, but with the sparks of love and glory fir'd, with furious swiftness sweep along the way, and from the foremost chariot snatch the day. so at olympick games when heros strove, in rapid cars to gain the goal of love. if on her fav'rite youth the goddess shone he left his rival and the winds out-run. "and now thy town, _o cambridge_! strikes the sight of the beholders with confus'd delight; thy green campaigns wide open to the view, and buildings where bright youth their fame pursue. blest village! on whose plains united glows, a vast, confus'd magnificence of shows. where num'rous crowds of different colours blend, thick as the trees which from the hills ascend: or as the grass which shoots in verdant spires, or stars which dart thro' natures realms their fires. "how am i fir'd with a profuse delight, when round the yard i roll my ravish'd sight! from the high casements how the ladies show! and scatter glory on the crowds below. from sash to sash the lovely lightening plays and blends their beauties in a radiant blaze. so when the noon of night the earth invades and o'er the landskip spreads her silent shades. in heavens high vault the twinkling stars appear, and with gay glory's light the gleemy sphere. from their bright orbs a flame of splendors shows, and all around th' enlighten'd ether glows. "soon as huge heaps have delug'd all the plains, of tawny damsels, mixt with simple swains, gay city beau's, grave matrons and coquats, bully's and cully's, clergymen and wits. the thing which first the num'rous crowd employs, is by a breakfast to begin their joys. while wine, which blushes in a crystal glass, streams down in floods, and paints their glowing face. and now the time approaches when the bell, with dull continuance tolls a solemn knell. numbers of blooming youth in black array adorn the yard, and gladden all the day. in two strait lines they instantly divide, while each beholds his partner on th' opposing side, then slow, majestick, walks the learned _head_, the _senate_ follow with a solemn tread, next _levi's_ tribe in reverend order move, whilst the uniting youth the show improve. they glow in long procession till they come, near to the portals of the sacred dome; then on a sudden open fly the doors, the leader enters, then the croud thick pours. the temple in a moment feels its freight, and cracks beneath its vast unwieldy weight, so when the threatning ocean roars around a place encompass'd with a lofty mound, if some weak part admits the raging waves, it flows resistless, and the city laves; till underneath the waters ly the tow'rs, which menac'd with their height the heav'nly pow'rs. "the work begun with pray'r, with modest pace, a youth advancing mounts the desk with grace, to all the audience sweeps a circling bow, then from his lips ten thousand graces flow. the next that comes, a learned thesis reads, the question states, and then a war succeeds. loud major, minor, and the consequence, amuse the crowd, wide-gaping at their fence. who speaks the loudest is with them the best, and impudence for learning is confest. "the battle o'er, the sable youth descend, and to the awful chief, their footsteps bend. with a small book, the laurel wreath he gives join'd with a pow'r to use it all their lives. obsequious, they return what they receive, with decent rev'rence, they his presence leave. dismiss'd, they strait repeat their back ward way and with white napkins grace the sumptuous day.[ ] "now plates unnumber'd on the tables shine, and dishes fill'd invite the guests to dine. the grace perform'd, each as it suits him best, divides the sav'ry honours of the feast, the glasses with bright sparkling wines abound and flowing bowls repeat the jolly round. thanks said, the multitude unite their voice, in sweetly mingled and melodious noise. the warbling musick floats along the air, and softly winds the mazes of the ear; ravish'd the crowd promiscuously retires, and each pursues the pleasure he admires. "behold my muse far distant on the plains, amidst a wrestling ring two jolly swains; eager for fame, they tug and haul for blood, one nam'd _jack luby_, t' other _robin clod_, panting they strain, and labouring hard they sweat, mix legs, kick shins, tear cloaths, and ply their feet. now nimbly trip, now stiffly stand their ground, and now they twirl, around, around, around; till overcome by greater art or strength, _jack luby_ lays along his lubber length. a fall! a fall! the loud spectators cry, a fall! a fall! the echoing hills reply. "o'er yonder field in wild confusion runs, a clam'rous troop of _affric's_ sable sons, behind the victors shout, with barbarous roar, the vanquish'd fly with hideous yells before, the gloomy squadron thro' the valley speeds whilst clatt'ring cudgels rattle o'er their heads. "again to church the learned tribe repair, where syllogisms battle in the air, and then the elder youth their second laurels wear. hail! happy laurels! who our hopes inspire, and set our ardent wishes all on fire. by you the pulpit and the bar will shine in future annals; while the ravish'd nine will in your bosom breathe cælestial flames, and stamp _eternity_ upon your names. accept my infant muse, whose feeble wings can scarce sustain her flight, while you she sings. with candour view my rude unfinish'd praise and see my _ivy_ twist around your _bayes_. so _phidias_ by immortal _jove_ inspir'd, his statue carv'd, by all mankind admir'd. nor thus content, by his approving nod, he cut himself upon the shining god. that shaded by the umbrage of his name, eternal honours might attend his fame." in his almanacs, nathaniel ames was wont to insert, opposite the days of commencement week, remarks which he deemed appropriate to that period. his notes for the year were these:-- "much talk and nothing said." "the loquacious more talkative than ever, and fine harangues preparing." "much money sunk, much liquor drunk." his only note for the year was this:-- "many crapulæ to day give the head-ach to the gay." commencement day was generally considered a holiday throughout the province, and in the metropolis the shops were usually closed, and little or no business was done. about ten days before this period, a body of indians from natick--men, women, and pappooses--commonly made their appearance at cambridge, and took up their station around the episcopal church, in the cellar of which they were accustomed to sleep, if the weather was unpleasant. the women sold baskets and moccasons; the boys gained money by shooting at it, while the men wandered about and spent the little that was earned by their squaws in rum and tobacco. then there would come along a body of itinerant negro fiddlers, whose scraping never intermitted during the time of their abode. the common, on commencement week, was covered with booths, erected in lines, like streets, intended to accommodate the populace from boston and the vicinity with the amusements of a fair. in these were carried on all sorts of dissipation. here was a knot of gamblers, gathered around a wheel of fortune, or watching the whirl of the ball on a roulette-table. further along, the jolly hucksters displayed their tempting wares in the shape of cooling beverages and palate-tickling confections. there was dancing on this side, auction-selling on the other; here a pantomimic show, there a blind man, led by a dog, soliciting alms; organ-grinders and hurdy-gurdy grinders, bears and monkeys, jugglers and sword-swallowers, all mingled in inextricable confusion. in a neighboring field, a countryman had, perchance, let loose a fox, which the dogs were worrying to death, while the surrounding crowd testified their pleasure at the scene by shouts of approbation. nor was there any want of the spirituous; pails of punch, guarded by stout negroes, bore witness to their own subtle contents, now by the man who lay curled up under the adjoining hedge, "forgetting and forgot," and again by the drunkard, reeling, cursing, and fighting among his comrades. the following observations from the pen of professor sidney willard, afford an accurate description of the outward manifestations of commencement day at harvard college, during the latter part of the last century. "commencement day at that time was a widely noted day, not only among men and women of all characters and conditions, but also among boys. it was the great literary and mob anniversary of massachusetts, surpassed only in its celebrities by the great civil and mob anniversary, namely, the fourth of july, and the last wednesday of may, election day, so called, the anniversary of the organization of the government of the state for the civil year. but commencement, perhaps most of all, exhibited an incongruous mixture of men and things. besides the academic exercises within the sanctuary of learning and religion, followed by the festivities in the college dining-hall, and under temporary tents and awnings erected for the entertainments given to the numerous guests of wealthy parents of young men who had come out successful competitors for prizes in the academic race, the large common was decked with tents filled with various refreshments for the hungry and thirsty multitudes, and the intermediate spaces crowded with men, women, and boys, white and black, many of them gambling, drinking, swearing, dancing, and fighting from morning to midnight. here and there the scene was varied by some show of curiosities, or of monkeys or less common wild animals, and the gambols of mountebanks, who by their ridiculous tricks drew a greater crowd than the abandoned group at the gaming-tables, or than the fooleries, distortions, and mad pranks of the inebriates. if my revered uncle[ ] took a glimpse at these scenes, he did not see there any of our red brethren, as mr. jefferson kindly called them, who formed a considerable part of the gathering at the time of his graduation, forty-two years before; but he must have seen exhibitions of depravity which would disgust the most untutored savage. near the close of the last century these outrages began to disappear, and lessened from year to year, until by public opinion, enforced by an efficient police, they were many years ago wholly suppressed, and the vicinity of the college halls has become, as it should be, a classic ground."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. pp. , . it is to such scenes as these that mr. william biglow refers, in his poem recited before the phi beta kappa society, in their dining-hall, august th, . "all hail, commencement! when all classes free throng learning's fount, from interest, taste, or glee; when sutlers plain in tents, like jacob, dwell, their goods distribute, and their purses swell; when tipplers cease on wretchedness to think, those born to sell, as well as these to drink; when every day each merry andrew clears more cash than useful men in many years; when men to business come, or come to rake, and modest women spurn at pope's mistake.[ ] "all hail, commencement! when all colors join, to gamble, riot, quarrel, and purloin; when afric's sooty sons, a race forlorn, play, swear, and fight, like christians freely born; and indians bless our civilizing merit, and get dead drunk with truly _christian spirit_; when heroes, skilled in pocket-picking sleights, of equal property and equal rights, of rights of man and woman, boldest friends, believing means are sanctioned by their ends, sequester part of gripus' boundless store, while gripus thanks god plutus he has more; and needy poet, from this ill secure, feeling his fob, cries, 'blessed are the poor.'" on the same subject, the writer of our chronicle of ' , a satirical poem, versifies in the following manner:-- "then comes commencement day, and discord dire strikes her confusion-string, and dust and noise climb up the skies; ladies in thin attire, for 't is in august, and both men and boys, are all abroad, in sunshine and in glee making all heaven rattle with their revelry! "ah! what a classic sight it is to see the black gowns flaunting in the sultry air, boys big with literary sympathy, and all the glories of this great affair! more classic sounds!--within, the plaudit shout, while punchinello's rabble echoes it without." to this the author appends a note, as follows:-- "the holiday extends to thousands of those who have no particular classical pretensions, further than can be recognized in a certain _penchant_ for such jubilees, contracted by attending them for years as hangers-on. on this devoted day these noisy do-nothings collect with mummers, monkeys, bears, and rope-dancers, and hold their revels just beneath the windows of the tabernacle where the literary triumph is enacting. 'tum sæva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractæque catenæ.'" a writer in buckingham's new england magazine, vol. iii., , in an article entitled "harvard college forty years ago," thus describes the customs which then prevailed:-- "as i entered cambridge, what were my 'first impressions'? the college buildings 'heaving in sight and looming up,' as the sailors say. pyramids of egypt! can ye surpass these enormous piles? the common covered with tents and wigwams, and people of all sorts, colors, conditions, nations, and tongues. a country muster or ordination dwindles into nothing in comparison. it was a second edition of babel. the governor's life-guard, in splendid uniform, prancing to and fro, 'quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.' horny-hoofed, galloping quadrupeds make all the common to tremble. "i soon steered for the meeting-house, and obtained a seat, or rather standing, in the gallery, determined to be an eyewitness of all the sport of the day. presently music was heard approaching, such as i had never heard before. it must be 'the music of the spheres.' anon, three enormous white wigs, supported by three stately, venerable men, yclad in black, flowing robes, were located in the pulpit. a platform of wigs was formed in the body pews, on which one might apparently walk as securely as on the stage. the _candidates_ for degrees seemed to have made a mistake in dressing themselves in _black togas_ instead of _white_ ones, _pro more romanorum_. the musicians jammed into their pew in the gallery, very near to me, with enormous fiddles and fifes and ramshorns. _terribile visu_! they sounded. i stopped my ears, and with open mouth and staring eyes stood aghast with wonderment. the music ceased. the performances commenced. english, latin, greek, hebrew, french! these scholars knew everything." more particular is the account of the observances, at this period, of the day, at harvard college, as given by professor sidney willard:-- "commencement day, in the year , was a day bereft, in some respects, of its wonted cheerfulness. instead of the serene summer's dawn, and the clear rising of the sun, 'the dawn was overcast, the morning lowered, and heavily in clouds brought on the day.' in the evening, from the time that the public exercises closed until twilight, the rain descended in torrents. the president[ ] lay prostrate on his bed from the effects of a violent disease, from which it was feared he could not recover.[ ] his house, which on all occasions was the abode of hospitality, and on commencement day especially so, (being the great college anniversary,) was now a house of stillness, anxiety, and watching. for seventeen successive years it had been thronged on this anniversary from morn till night, by welcome visitors, cheerfully greeted and cared for, and now it was like a house of mourning for the dead. "after the literary exercises of the day were closed, the officers in the different branches of the college government and instruction, masters of arts, and invited guests, repaired to the college dining-hall without the ceremony of a procession formed according to dignity or priority of right. this the elements forbade. each one ran the short race as he best could. but as the alumni arrived, they naturally avoided taking possession of the seats usually occupied by the government of the college. the governor, increase sumner, i suppose, was present, and no doubt all possible respect was paid to the overseers as well as to the corporation. i was not present, but dined at my father's house with a few friends, of whom the late hon. moses brown of beverly was one. we went together to the college hall after dinner; but the honorable and reverend corporation and overseers had retired, and i do not remember whether there was any person presiding. if there were, a statue would have been as well. the age of wine and wassail, those potent aids to patriotism, mirth, and song, had not wholly passed away. the merry glee was at that time outrivalled by _adams and liberty_, the national patriotic song, so often and on so many occasions sung, and everywhere so familiarly known that all could join in grand chorus."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. pp. , . the irregularities of commencement week seem at a very early period to have attracted the attention of the college government; for we find that in , to prevent disorder, a formal request was made by the president, at the suggestion of the immediate government, to lieutenant-governor dummer, praying him to direct the sheriff of middlesex to prohibit the setting up of booths and tents on those public days. some years after, in , "an interview took place between the corporation and three justices of the peace in cambridge, to concert measures to keep order at commencement, and under their warrant to establish a constable with six men, who, by watching and walking towards the evening on these days, and also the night following, and in and about the entry at the college hall at dinner-time, should prevent disorders." at the beginning of the present century, it was customary for two special justices to give their attendance at this period, in order to try offences, and a guard of twenty constables was usually present to preserve order and attend on the justices. among the writings of one, who for fifty years was a constant attendant on these occasions, are the following memoranda, which are in themselves an explanation of the customs of early years. "commencement, ; no tents on the common for the first time." "commencement, ; no persons intoxicated in the hall or out of it; the first time." the following extract from the works of a french traveller will be read with interest by some, as an instance of the manner in which our institutions are sometimes regarded by foreigners. "in a free country, everything ought to bear the stamp of patriotism. this patriotism appears every year in a solemn feast celebrated at cambridge in honor of the sciences. this feast, which takes place once a year in all the colleges of america, is called _commencement_. it resembles the exercises and distribution of prizes in our colleges. it is a day of joy for boston; almost all its inhabitants assemble in cambridge. the most distinguished of the students display their talents in the presence of the public; and these exercises, which are generally on patriotic subjects, are terminated by a feast, where reign the freest gayety and the most cordial fraternity."--_brissot's travels in u.s._, . london, , vol. i. pp. , . for an account of the _chair_ from which the president delivers diplomas on commencement day, see president's chair. at yale college, the first commencement was held september th, , while that institution was located at saybrook, at which four young men who had before graduated at harvard college, and one whose education had been private, received the degree of master of arts. this and several commencements following were held privately, according to an act which had been passed by the trustees, in order to avoid unnecessary expense and other inconveniences. in , the year in which the first college edifice was completed, was held at new haven the first public commencement. the following account of the exercises on this occasion was written at the time by one of the college officers, and is cited by president woolsey in his discourse before the graduates of yale college, august th, . "[we were] favored and honored with the presence of his honor, governor saltonstall, and his lady, and the hon. col. taylor of boston, and the lieutenant-governor, and the whole superior court, at our commencement, september th, , where the trustees present,--those gentlemen being present,--in the hall of our new college, first most solemnly named our college by the name of yale college, to perpetuate the memory of the honorable gov. elihu yale, esq., of london, who had granted so liberal and bountiful a donation for the perfecting and adorning of it. upon which the honorable colonel taylor represented governor yale in a speech expressing his great satisfaction; which ended, we passed to the church, and there the commencement was carried on. in which affair, in the first place, after prayer an oration was had by the saluting orator, james pierpont, and then the disputations as usual; which concluded, the rev. mr. davenport [one of the trustees and minister of stamford] offered an excellent oration in latin, expressing their thanks to almighty god, and mr. yale under him, for so public a favor and so great regard to our languishing school. after which were graduated ten young men, whereupon the hon. gov. saltonstall, in a latin speech, congratulated the trustees in their success and in the comfortable appearance of things with relation to their school. all which ended, the gentlemen returned to the college hall, where they were entertained with a splendid dinner, and the ladies, at the same time, were also entertained in the library; after which they sung the four first verses in the th psalm, and so the day ended."--p. . the following excellent and interesting account of the exercises and customs of commencement at yale college, in former times, is taken from the entertaining address referred to above:--"commencements were not to be public, according to the wishes of the first trustees, through fear of the attendant expense; but another practice soon prevailed, and continued with three or four exceptions until the breaking out of the war in . they were then private for five years, on account of the times. the early exercises of the candidates for the first degree were a 'saluting' oration in latin, succeeded by syllogistic disputations in the same language; and the day was closed by the masters' exercises,--disputations and a valedictory. according to an ancient academical practice, theses were printed and distributed upon this occasion, indicating what the candidates for a degree had studied, and were prepared to defend; yet, contrary to the usage still prevailing at universities which have adhered to the old method of testing proficiency, it does not appear that these theses were ever defended in public. they related to a variety of subjects in technology, logic, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and afterwards theology. the candidates for a master's degree also published theses at this time, which were called _quæstiones magistrales_. the syllogistic disputes were held between an affirmant and respondent, who stood in the side galleries of the church opposite to one another, and shot the weapons of their logic over the heads of the audience. the saluting bachelor and the master who delivered the valedictory stood in the front gallery, and the audience huddled around below them to catch their latin eloquence as it fell. it seems also to have been usual for the president to pronounce an oration in some foreign tongue upon the same occasion.[ ] "at the first public commencement under president stiles, in , we find from a particular description which has been handed down, that the original plan, as above described, was subjected for the time to considerable modifications. the scheme, in brief, was as follows. the salutatory oration was delivered by a member of the graduating class, who is now our aged and honored townsman, judge baldwin. this was succeeded by the syllogistic disputations, and these by a greek oration, next to which came an english colloquy. then followed a forensic disputation, in which james kent was one of the speakers. then president stiles delivered an oration in hebrew, chaldaic, and arabic,--it being an extraordinary occasion. after which the morning was closed with an english oration by one of the graduating class. in the afternoon, the candidates for the second degree had the time, as usual, to themselves, after a latin discourse by president stiles. the exhibiters appeared in syllogistic disputes, a dissertation, a poem, and an english oration. among these performers we find the names of noah webster, joel barlow, and oliver wolcott. besides the commencements there were exhibitions upon quarter-days, as they were called, in december and march, as well as at the end of the third term, when the younger classes performed; and an exhibition of the seniors in july, at the time of their examination for degrees, when the valedictory orator was one of their own choice. this oration was transferred to the commencement about the year , when the masters' valedictories had fallen into disuse; and being in english, gave a new interest to the exercises of the day. "commencements were long occasions of noisy mirth, and even of riot. the older records are full of attempts, on the part of the corporation, to put a stop to disorder and extravagance at this anniversary. from a document of , it appears that cannons had been fired in honor of the day, and students were now forbidden to have a share in this on pain of degradation. the same prohibition was found necessary again in , at which time the practice had grown up of illuminating the college buildings upon commencement eve. but the habit of drinking spirituous liquor, and of furnishing it to friends, on this public occasion, grew up into more serious evils. in the year , the trustees, having found that there was a great expense in spirituous distilled liquors upon commencement occasions, ordered that for the future no candidate for a degree, or other student, should provide or allow any such liquors to be drunk in his chamber during commencement week. and again, it was ordered in , with the view of preventing several extravagant and expensive customs, that there should be 'no kind of public treat but on commencement, quarter-days, and the day on which the valedictory oration was pronounced; and on that day the seniors may provide and give away a barrel of metheglin, and nothing more.' but the evil continued a long time. in , it appears that it was usual for the graduating class to provide a pipe of wine, in the payment of which each one was forced to join. the corporation now attempted by very stringent law to break up this practice; but the senior class having united in bringing large quantities of rum into college, the commencement exercises were suspended, and degrees were withheld until after a public confession of the class. in the two next years degrees were given at the july examination, with a view to prevent such disorders, and no public commencement was celebrated. similar scenes are not known to have occurred afterwards, although for a long time that anniversary wore as much the aspect of a training-day as of a literary festival. "the commencement day in the modern sense of the term--that is, a gathering of graduated members and of others drawn together by a common interest in the college, and in its young members who are leaving its walls--has no counterpart that i know of in the older institutions of europe. it arose by degrees out of the former exercises upon this occasion, with the addition of such as had been usual before upon quarter-days, or at the presentation in july. for a time several of the commencing masters appeared on the stage to pronounce orations, as they had done before. in process of time, when they had nearly ceased to exhibit, this anniversary began to assume a somewhat new feature; the peculiarity of which consists in this, that the graduates have a literary festival more peculiarly their own, in the shape of discourses delivered before their assembled body, or before some literary society."--_woolsey's historical discourse_, pp. - . further remarks concerning the observance of commencement at yale college may be found in ebenezer baldwin's "annals" of that institution, pp. - . an article "on the date of the first public commencement at yale college, in new haven," will be read with pleasure by those who are interested in the deductions of antiquarian research. it is contained in the "yale literary magazine," vol. xx. pp. , . the following account of commencement at dartmouth college, on wednesday, august th, , written by dr. belknap, may not prove uninteresting. "about eleven o'clock, the commencement began in a large tent erected on the east side of the college, and covered with boards; scaffolds and seats being prepared. "the president began with a prayer in the usual _strain_. then an english oration was spoken by one of the bachelors, complimenting the trustees, &c. a syllogistic disputation on this question: _amicitia vera non est absque amore divina_. then a cliosophic oration. then an anthem, 'the voice of my beloved sounds,' &c. then a forensic dispute, _whether christ died for all men_? which was well supported on both sides. then an anthem, 'lift up your heads, o ye gates,' &c. "the company were invited to dine at the president's and the hall. the connecticut lads and lasses, i observed, walked about hand in hand in procession, as 't is said they go to a wedding. "afternoon. the exercises began with a latin oration on the state of society by mr. kipley. then an english _oration on the imitative arts_, by mr. j. wheelock. the degrees were then conferred, and, in addition to the usual ceremony of the book, diplomas were delivered to the candidates, with this form of words: 'admitto vos ad primum (vel secundum) gradum in artibus pro more academiarum in anglia, vobisque trado hunc librum, una cum potestate publice prelegendi ubicumque ad hoc munus avocati fueritis (to the masters was added, fuistis vel fueritis), cujus rei hæc diploma membrana scripta est testimonium.' mr. woodward stood by the president, and held the book and parchments, delivering and exchanging them as need required. rev. mr. benjamin pomeroy, of hebron, was admitted to the degree of doctor in divinity. "after this, mcgregore and sweetland, two bachelors, spoke a dialogue of lord lyttleton's between apicius and darteneuf, upon good eating and drinking. the mercury (who comes in at the close of the piece) performed his part but clumsily; but the two epicures did well, and the president laughed as heartily as the rest of the audience; though considering the circumstances, it might admit of some doubt, whether the dialogue were really a burlesque, or a compliment to the college. "an anthem and prayer concluded the public exercises. much decency and regularity were observable through the day, in the numerous attending concourse of people."--_life of jeremy belknap, d.d._, pp. - . at shelby college, ky., it is customary at commencement to perform plays, with appropriate costumes, at stated intervals during the exercises. an account of the manner in which commencement has been observed at other colleges would only be a repetition of what has been stated above, in reference to harvard and yale. these being, the former the first, and the latter the third institution founded in our country, the colleges which were established at a later period grounded, not only their laws, but to a great extent their customs, on the laws and customs which prevailed at cambridge and new haven. commencement card. at union college, there is issued annually at commencement a card containing a programme of the exercises of the day, signed with the names of twelve of the senior class, who are members of the four principal college societies. these cards are worded in the form of invitations, and are to be sent to the friends of the students. to be "_on the commencement card_" is esteemed an honor, and is eagerly sought for. at other colleges, invitations are often issued at this period, usually signed by the president. commencer. in american colleges, a member of the senior class, after the examination for degrees; generally, one who _commences_. these exercises were, besides an oration usually made by the president, orations both salutatory and valedictory, made by some or other of the _commencers_.--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. p. . the corporation with the tutors shall visit the chambers of the _commencers_ to see that this law be well observed.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . thirty _commencers_, besides mr. rogers, &c.--_ibid._, app., p. . commers. in the german universities, a party of students assembled for the purpose of making an excursion to some place in the country for a day's jollification. on such an occasion, the students usually go "in a long train of carriages with outriders"; generally, a festive gathering of the students.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. ; see also chap. xvi. commissary. in the university of cambridge, eng., an officer under the chancellor, and appointed by him, who holds a court of record for all privileged persons and scholars under the degree of m.a. in this court, all causes are tried and determined by the civil and statute law, and by the custom of the university.--_cam. cal._ common. to board together; to eat at a table in common. commoner. a student of the second rank in the university of oxford, eng., who is not dependent on the foundation for support, but pays for his board or _commons_, together with all other charges. corresponds to a pensioner at cambridge. see gentleman commoner. . one who boards in commons. in all cases where those who do damage to the table furniture, or in the steward's kitchen, cannot be detected, the amount shall be charged to the _commoners_.--_laws union coll._, , p. . the steward shall keep an accurate list of the _commoners_.--_ibid._, , p. . common room. the room to which all the members of the college have access. there is sometimes one _common room_ for graduates, and another for undergraduates.--_crabb's tech. dict._ oh, could the days once more but come, when calm i smoak'd in _common room_. _the student_, oxf. and cam., , vol. i. p. . commons. food provided at a common table, as in colleges, where many persons eat at the same table, or in the same hall.--_webster_. commons were introduced into harvard college at its first establishment, in the year , in imitation of the english universities, and from that time until the year , when they were abolished, seem to have been a never-failing source of uneasiness and disturbance. while the infant college with the title only of "school," was under the superintendence of mr. nathaniel eaton, its first "master," the badness of commons was one of the principal causes of complaint. "at no subsequent period of the college history," says mr. quincy, "has discontent with commons been more just and well founded, than under the huswifery of mrs. eaton." "it is perhaps owing," mr. winthrop observes in his history of new england, "to the gallantry of our fathers, that she was not enjoined in the perpetual malediction they bestowed on her husband." a few years after, we read, in the "information given by the corporation and overseers to the general court," a proposition either to make "the scholars' charges less, or their commons better." for a long period after this we have no account of the state of commons, "but it is not probable," says mr. peirce, "they were materially different from what they have been since." during the administration of president holyoke, from to , commons were the constant cause of disorders among the students. there appears to have been a very general permission to board in private families before the year : an attempt was then made to compel the undergraduates to board in commons. after many resolutions, a law was finally passed, in , prohibiting them "from dining or supping in any house in town, except on an invitation to dine or sup _gratis_." "the law," says quincy, "was probably not very strictly enforced. it was limited to one year, and was not renewed." an idea of the quality of commons may be formed from the following accounts furnished by dr. holyoke and judge wingate. according to the former of these gentlemen, who graduated in , the "breakfast was two sizings of bread and a cue of beer"; and "evening commons were a pye." the latter, who graduated thirteen years after, says: "as to the commons, there were in the morning none while i was in college. at dinner, we had, of rather ordinary quality, a sufficiency of meat of some kind, either baked or boiled; and at supper, we had either a pint of milk and half a biscuit, or a meat pye of some other kind. such were the commons in the hall in my day. they were rather ordinary; but i was young and hearty, and could live comfortably upon them. i had some classmates who paid for their commons and never entered the hall while they belonged to the college. we were allowed at dinner a cue of beer, which was a half-pint, and a sizing of bread, which i cannot describe to you. it was quite sufficient for one dinner." by a vote of the corporation in , a law was passed, declaring "that the quantity of commons be as hath been usual, viz. two sizes of bread in the morning; one pound of meat at dinner, with sufficient sauce" (vegetables), "and a half a pint of beer; and at night that a part pie be of the same quantity as usual, and also half a pint of beer; and that the supper messes be but of four parts, though the dinner messes be of six." this agrees in substance with the accounts given above. the consequence of such diet was, "that the sons of the rich," says mr. quincy, "accustomed to better fare, paid for commons, which they would not eat, and never entered the hall; while the students whose resources did not admit of such an evasion were perpetually dissatisfied." about ten years after, another law was made, "to restrain scholars from breakfasting in the houses of town's people," and provision was made "for their being accommodated with breakfast in the hall, either milk, chocolate, tea, or coffee, as they should respectively choose." they were allowed, however, to provide themselves with breakfasts in their own chambers, but not to breakfast in one another's chambers. from this period breakfast was as regularly provided in commons as dinner, but it was not until about the year that an evening meal was also regularly provided. in the year , after the erection of hollis hall, the accommodations for students within the walls were greatly enlarged; and the inconvenience being thus removed which those had experienced who, living out of the college buildings, were compelled to eat in commons, a system of laws was passed, by which all who occupied rooms within the college walls were compelled to board constantly in common, "the officers to be exempted only by the corporation, with the consent of the overseers; the students by the president only when they were about to be absent for at least one week." scarcely a year had passed under this new _régime_ "before," says quincy, "an open revolt of the students took place on account of the provisions, which it took more than a month to quell." "although," he continues, "their proceedings were violent, illegal, and insulting, yet the records of the immediate government show unquestionably, that the disturbances, in their origin, were not wholly without cause, and that they were aggravated by want of early attention to very natural and reasonable complaints." during the war of the american revolution, the difficulty of providing satisfactory commons was extreme, as may be seen from the following vote of the corporation, passed aug. th, . "whereas by law th of chap. vi. it is provided, 'that there shall always be chocolate, tea, coffee, and milk for breakfast, with bread and biscuit and butter,' and whereas the foreign articles above mentioned are now not to be procured without great difficulty, and at a very exorbitant price; therefore, that the charge of commons may be kept as low as possible,-- "_voted_, that the steward shall provide at the common charge only bread or biscuit and milk for breakfast; and, if any of the scholars choose tea, coffee, or chocolate for breakfast, they shall procure those articles for themselves, and likewise the sugar and butter to be used with them; and if any scholars choose to have their milk boiled, or thickened with flour, if it may be had, or with meal, the steward, having reasonable notice, shall provide it; and further, as salt fish alone is appointed by the aforesaid law for the dinner on saturdays, and this article is now risen to a very high price, and through the scarcity of salt will probably be higher, the steward shall not be obliged to provide salt fish, but shall procure fresh fish as often as he can."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . many of the facts in the following account of commons prior to, and immediately succeeding, the year , have been furnished by mr. royal morse of cambridge. the hall where the students took their meals was usually provided with ten tables; at each table were placed two messes, and each mess consisted of eight persons. the tables where the tutors and seniors sat were raised eighteen or twenty inches, so as to overlook the rest. it was the duty of one of the tutors or of the librarian to "ask a blessing and return thanks," and in their absence, the duty devolved on "the senior graduate or undergraduate." the waiters were students, chosen from the different classes, and receiving for their services suitable compensation. each table was waited on by members of the class which occupied it, with the exception of the tutor's table, at which members of the senior class served. unlike the _sizars_ and _servitors_ at the english universities, the waiters were usually much respected, and were in many cases the best scholars in their respective classes. the breakfast consisted of a specified quantity of coffee, a _size_ of baker's biscuit, which was one biscuit, and a _size_ of butter, which was about an ounce. if any one wished for more than was provided, he was obliged to _size_ it, i.e. order from the kitchen or buttery, and this was charged as extra commons or _sizings_ in the quarter-bill. at dinner, every mess was served with eight pounds of meat, allowing a pound to each person. on monday and thursday the meat was boiled; these days were on this account commonly called "boiling days." on the other days the meat was roasted; these were accordingly named "roasting days." two potatoes were allowed to each person, which he was obliged to pare for himself. on _boiling days_, pudding and cabbage were added to the bill of fare, and in their season, greens, either dandelion or the wild pea. of bread, a _size_ was the usual quantity apiece, at dinner. cider was the common beverage, of which there was no stated allowance, but each could drink as much as he chose. it was brought, on in pewter quart cans, two to a mess, out of which they drank, passing them from mouth to mouth like the english wassail-bowl. the waiters replenished them as soon as they were emptied. no regular supper was provided, but a bowl of milk, and a size of bread procured at the kitchen, supplied the place of the evening meal. respecting the arrangement of the students at table, before referred to, professor sidney willard remarks: "the intercourse among students at meals was not casual or promiscuous. generally, the students of the same class formed themselves into messes, as they were called, consisting each of eight members; and the length of one table was sufficient to seat two messes. a mess was a voluntary association of those who liked each other's company; and each member had his own place. this arrangement was favorable for good order; and, where the members conducted themselves with propriety, their cheerful conversation, and even exuberant spirits and hilarity, if not too boisterous, were not unpleasant to that portion of the government who presided at the head table. but the arrangement afforded opportunities also for combining in factious plans and organizations, tending to disorders, which became infectious, and terminated unhappily for all concerned."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. pp. , . a writer in the new england magazine, referring to the same period, says: "in commons, we fared as well as one half of us had been accustomed to at home. our breakfast consisted of a good-sized biscuit of wheaten flour, with butter and coffee, chocolate, or milk, at our option. our dinner was served up on dishes of pewter, and our drink, which was cider, in cans of the same material. for our suppers, we went with our bowls to the kitchen, and received our rations of milk, or chocolate, and bread, and returned with them to our rooms."--vol. iii. p. . although much can be said in favor of the commons system, on account of its economy and its suitableness to health and study, yet these very circumstances which were its chief recommendation were the occasion also of all the odium which it had to encounter. "that simplicity," says peirce, "which makes the fare cheap, and wholesome, and philosophical, renders it also unsatisfactory to dainty palates; and the occasional appearance of some unlucky meat, or other food, is a signal for a general outcry against the provisions." in the plain but emphatic words of one who was acquainted with the state of commons, as they once were at harvard college, "the butter was sometimes so bad, that a farmer would not take it to grease his cart-wheels with." it was the usual practice of the steward, when veal was cheap, to furnish it to the students three, four, and sometimes five times in the week; the same with reference to other meats when they could be bought at a low price, and especially with lamb. the students, after eating this latter kind of meat for five or six successive weeks would often assemble before the steward's house, and, as if their natures had been changed by their diet, would bleat and blatter until he was fain to promise them a change of food, upon which they would separate until a recurrence of the same evil compelled them to the same measures. the annexed account of commons at yale college, in former times, is given by president woolsey, in his historical discourse, pronounced at new haven, august th, . "at first, a college without common meals was hardly conceived of; and, indeed, if we trace back the history of college as they grew up at paris, nothing is more of their essence than that students lived and ate together in a kind of conventual system. no doubt, also, when the town of new haven was smaller, it was far more difficult to find desirable places for boarding than at present. but however necessary, the steward's department was always beset with difficulties and exposed to complaints which most gentlemen present can readily understand. the following rations of commons, voted by the trustees in , will show the state of college fare at that time. 'ordered, that the steward shall provide the commons for the scholars as follows, viz.: for breakfast, one loaf of bread for four, which [the dough] shall weigh one pound. for dinner for four, one loaf of bread as aforesaid, two and a half pounds beef, veal, or mutton, or one and three quarter pounds salt pork about twice a week in the summer time, one quart of beer, two pennyworth of sauce [vegetables]. for supper for four, two quarts of milk and one loaf of bread, when milk can conveniently be had, and when it cannot, then apple-pie, which shall be made of one and three fourth pounds dough, one quarter pound hog's fat, two ounces sugar, and half a peck apples.' in we find, from a vote prohibiting the practice, that beer had become one of the articles allowed for the evening meal. soon after this, the evening meal was discontinued, and, as is now the case in the english colleges, the students had supper in their own rooms, which led to extravagance and disorder. in the revolutionary war the steward was quite unable once or twice to provide food for the college, and this, as has already appeared, led to the dispersion of the students in and , and once again in delayed the beginning of the winter term several weeks. since that time, nothing peculiar has occurred with regard to commons, and they continued with all their evils of coarse manners and wastefulness for sixty years. the conviction, meanwhile, was increasing, that they were no essential part of the college, that on the score of economy they could claim no advantage, that they degraded the manners of students and fomented disorder. the experiment of suppressing them has hitherto been only a successful one. no one, who can retain a lively remembrance of the commons and the manners as they were both before and since the building of the new hall in , will wonder that this resolution was adopted by the authorities of the college."--pp. - . the regulations which obtained at meal-time in commons were at one period in these words: "the waiters in the hall, appointed by the president, are to put the victuals on the tables spread with decent linen cloths, which are to be washed every week by the steward's procurement, and the tutors, or some of the senior scholars present, are to ask a blessing on the food, and to return thanks. all the scholars at mealtime are required to behave themselves decently and gravely, and abstain from loud talking. no victuals, platters, cups, &c. may be carried out of the hall, unless in case of sickness, and with liberty from one of the tutors. nor may any scholar go out before thanks are returned. and when dinner is over, the waiters are to carry the platters and cloths back into the kitchen. and if any one shall offend in either of these things, or carry away anything belonging to the hall without leave, he shall be fined sixpence."--_laws of yale coll._, , p. . from a little work by a graduate at yale college of the class of , the accompanying remarks, referring to the system of commons as generally understood, are extracted. "the practice of boarding the students in commons was adopted by our colleges, naturally, and perhaps without reflection, from the old universities of europe, and particularly from those of england. at first those universities were without buildings, either for board or lodging; being merely rendezvous for such as wished to pursue study. the students lodged at inns, or at private houses, defraying out of their own pockets, and in their own way, all charges for board and education. after a while, in consequence of the exorbitant demands of landlords, _halls_ were built, and common tables furnished, to relieve them from such exactions. colleges, with chambers for study and lodging, were erected for a like reason. being founded, in many cases, by private munificence, for the benefit of indigent students, they naturally included in their economy both lodging-rooms and board. there was also a _police_ reason for the measure. it was thought that the students could be better regulated as to their manners and behavior, being brought together under the eye of supervisors." omitting a few paragraphs, we come to a more particular account of some of the jocose scenes which resulted from the commons system as once developed at yale college. "the tutors, who were seated at raised tables, could not, with all their vigilance, see all that passed, and they winked at much they did see. boiled potatoes, pieces of bread, whole loaves, balls of butter, dishes, would be flung back and forth, especially between sophomores and freshmen; and you were never sure, in raising a cup to your lips, that it would not be dashed out of your hands, and the contents spilt upon your clothes, by one of these flying articles slyly sent at random. whatever damage was done was averaged on our term-bills; and i remember a charge of six hundred tumblers, thirty coffee-pots, and i know not how many other articles of table furniture, destroyed or carried off in a single term. speaking of tumblers, it may be mentioned as an instance of the progress of luxury, even there, that down to about such a thing was not known, the drinking-vessels at dinner being capacious pewter mugs, each table being furnished with two. we were at one time a good deal incommoded by the diminutive size of the milk-pitchers, which were all the while empty and gone for more. a waiter mentioned, for our patience, that, when these were used up, a larger size would be provided. 'o, if that's the case, the remedy is easy.' accordingly the hint was passed through the room, the offending pitchers were slyly placed upon the floor, and, as we rose from the tables, were crushed under foot. the next morning the new set appeared. one of the classes being tired of _lamb, lamb, lamb_, wretchedly cooked, during the season of it, expressed their dissatisfaction by entering the hall bleating; no notice of which being taken, a day or two after they entered in advance of the tutors, and cleared the tables of it, throwing it out of the windows, platters and all, and immediately retired. "in truth, not much could be said in commendation of our alma mater's table. a worse diet for sedentary men than that we had during the last days of the _old_ hall, now the laboratory, cannot be imagined. i will not go into particulars, for i hate to talk about food. it was absolutely destructive of health. i know it to have ruined, permanently, the health of some, and i have not the least doubt of its having occasioned, in certain instances which i could specify, incurable debility and premature death."--_scenes and characters in college_, new haven, , pp. - . see invalid's table. slum. that the commons at dartmouth college were at times of a quality which would not be called the best, appears from the annexed paragraph, written in the year . "he [eleazer wheelock, president of the college] has had the mortification to lose two cows, and the rest were greatly hurt by a contagious distemper, so that they _could not have a full supply of milk_; and once the pickle leaked out of the beef-barrel, so that the _meat was not sweet_. he had also been ill-used with respect to the purchase of some wheat, so that they had smutty bread for a while, &c. the scholars, on the other hand, say they scarce ever have anything but pork and greens, without vinegar, and pork and potatoes; that fresh meat comes but very seldom, and that the victuals are very badly dressed."--_life of jeremy belknap, d.d._, pp. , . the above account of commons applies generally to the system as it was carried out in the other colleges in the united states. in almost every college, commons have been abolished, and with them have departed the discords, dissatisfactions, and open revolts, of which they were so often the cause. see bever. commorantes in villa. latin; literally, _those abiding in town_. in the university of cambridge, eng., the designation of masters of arts, and others of higher degree, who, residing within the precincts of the university, enjoy the privilege of being members of the senate, without keeping their names on the college boards. --_gradus ad cantab._ to have a vote in the senate, the graduate must keep his name on the books of some college, or on the list of the _commorantes in villâ_.--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . composition. at the university of cambridge, eng., translating english into greek or latin is called _composition_.--_bristed_. in _composition_ and cram i was yet untried.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . you will have to turn english prose into greek and latin prose, english verse into greek iambic trimeters, and part of some chorus in the agamemnon into latin, and possibly also into english verse. this is the "_composition_," and is to be done, remember, without the help of books or any other assistance.--_ibid._, p. . the term _composition_ seems in itself to imply that the translation is something more than a translation.--_ibid._, p. . writing a latin theme, or original latin verses, is designated _original composition_.--_bristed_. composuist. a writer; composer. "this extraordinary word," says mr. pickering, in his vocabulary, "has been much used at some of our colleges, but very seldom elsewhere. it is now rarely heard among us. a correspondent observes, that 'it is used in england among _musicians_.' i have never met with it in any english publications upon the subject of music." the word is not found, i believe, in any dictionary of the english tongue. compounder. one at a university who pays extraordinary fees, according to his means, for the degree he is to take. a _grand compounder_ pays double fees. see the _customs and laws of univ. of cam., eng._, p. . concio ad clerum. a sermon to the clergy. in the english universities, an exercise or latin sermon, which is required of every candidate for the degree of d.d. used sometimes in america. in the evening the "_concio ad clerum_" will be preached.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . condition. a student on being examined for admission to college, if found deficient in certain studies, is admitted on _condition_ he will make up the deficiency, if it is believed on the whole that he is capable of pursuing the studies of the class for which he is offered. the branches in which he is deficient are called _conditions_. talks of bacchus and tobacco, short sixes, sines, transitions, and alma mater takes him in on ten or twelve _conditions_. _poem before y.h. soc., harv. coll._ praying his guardian powers to assist a poor sub fresh at the dread examination, and free from all _conditions_ to insure his first vacation. _poem before iadma of harv. coll._ condition. to admit a student as member of a college, who on being examined has been found deficient in some particular, the provision of his admission being that he will make up the deficiency. a young man shall come down to college from new hampshire, with no preparation save that of a country winter-school, shall be examined and "_conditioned_" in everything, and yet he shall come out far ahead of his city latin-school classmate.--_a letter to a young man who has just entered college_, , p. . they find themselves _conditioned_ on the studies of the term, and not very generally respected.--_harvard mag._, vol. i. p. . conduct. the title of two clergymen appointed to read prayers at eton college, in england.--_mason. webster_. confession. it was formerly the custom in the older american colleges, when a student had rendered himself obnoxious to punishment, provided the crime was not of an aggravated nature, to pardon and restore him to his place in the class, on his presenting a confession of his fault, to be read publicly in the hall. the diary of president leverett, of harvard college, under date of the th of march, , contains an interesting account of the confession of larnel, an indian student belonging to the junior sophister class, who had been guilty of some offence for which he had been dismissed from college. "he remained," says mr. leverett, "a considerable time at boston, in a state of penance. he presented his confession to mr. pemberton, who thereupon became his intercessor, and in his letter to the president expresses himself thus: 'this comes by larnel, who brings a confession as good as austin's, and i am charitably disposed to hope it flows from a like spirit of penitence.' in the public reading of his confession, the flowing of his passions was extraordinarily timed, and his expressions accented, and most peculiarly and emphatically those of the grace of god to him; which indeed did give a peculiar grace to the performance itself, and raised, i believe, a charity in some that had very little i am sure, and ratified wonderfully that which i had conceived of him. having made his public confession, he was restored to his standing in the college."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. pp. , . congregation. at oxford, the house of _congregation_ is one of the two assemblies in which the business of the university, as such, is carried on. in this house the chancellor, or his vicar the vice-chancellor, or in his absence one of his four deputies, termed pro-vice-chancellors, and the two proctors, either by themselves or their deputies, always preside. the members of this body are regents, "either regents '_necessary_' or '_ad placitum_,' that is, on the one hand, all doctors and masters of arts, during the first year of their degree; and on the other, all those who have gone through the year of their necessary regency, and which includes all resident doctors, heads of colleges and halls, professors and public lecturers, public examiners, masters of the schools, or examiners for responsions or 'little go,' deans and censors of colleges, and all other m.a.'s during the second year of their regency." the business of the house of congregation, which may be regarded as the oligarchical body, is chiefly to grant degrees, and pass graces and dispensations.--_oxford guide_. conservator. an officer who has the charge of preserving the rights and privileges of a city, corporation, or community, as in roman catholic universities.--_webster_. consilium abeundi. latin; freely, _the decree of departure_. in german universities, the _consilium abeundi_ "consists in expulsion out of the district of the court of justice within which the university is situated. this punishment lasts a year; after the expiration of which, the banished student can renew his matriculation."--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . consistory court. in the university of cambridge, england, there is a _consistory court_ of the chancellor and of the commissary. "for the former," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "the chancellor, and in his absence the vice-chancellor, assisted by some of the heads of houses, and one or more doctors of the civil law, administers justice desired by any member of the university, &c. in the latter, the commissary acts by authority given him under the seal of the chancellor, as well in the university as at stourbridge and midsummer fairs, and takes cognizance of all offences, &c. the proceedings are the same in both courts." constitutional. among students at the university of cambridge, eng., a walk for exercise. the gallop over bullington, and the "_constitutional_" up headington.--_lond. quart. rev._, am. ed., vol. lxxiii. p. . instead of boots he [the cantab] wears easy low-heeled shoes, for greater convenience in fence and ditch jumping, and other feats of extempore gymnastics which diversify his "_constitutionals_".--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . even the mild walks which are dignified with the name of exercise there, how unlike the cantab's _constitutional_ of eight miles in less than two hours.--_ibid._, p. . lucky is the man who lives a mile off from his private tutor, or has rooms ten minutes' walk from chapel: he is sure of that much _constitutional_ daily.--_ibid._, p. . "_constitutionals_" of eight miles in less than two hours, varied with jumping hedges, ditches, and gates; "pulling" on the river, cricket, football, riding twelve miles without drawing bridle,... are what he understands by his two hours' exercise.--_ibid._, p. . constitutionalizing. walking. the most usual mode of exercise is walking,--_constitutionalizing_ is the cantab for it.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . convention. in the university of cambridge, england, a court consisting of the master and fellows of a college, who sit in the _combination room_, and pass sentence on any young offender against the laws of soberness and chastity.--_gradus ad cantabrigiam_. convictor. latin, _a familiar acquaintance_. in the university of oxford, those are called _convictores_ who, although not belonging to the foundation of any college or hall, have at any time been regents, and have constantly kept their names on the books of some college or hall, from the time of their admission to the degree of m.a., or doctors in either of the three faculties.--_oxf. cal._ convocation. at oxford, the house of _convocation_ is one of the two assemblies in which the business of the university, as such, is transacted. it consists both of regents and non-regents, "that is, in brief, all masters of arts not 'honorary,' or 'ad eundems' from cambridge or dublin, and of course graduates of a higher order." in this house, the chancellor, or his vicar the vice-chancellor, or in his absence one of his four deputies, termed pro-vice-chancellors, and the two proctors, either by themselves or their deputies, always preside. the business of this assembly--which may be considered as the house of commons, excepting that the lords have a vote here equally as in their own upper house, i.e. the house of congregation--is unlimited, extending to all subjects connected with the well-being of the university, including the election of chancellor, members of parliament, and many of the officers of the university, the conferring of extraordinary degrees, and the disposal of the university ecclesiastical patronage. it has no initiative power, this resting solely with the hebdomadal board, but it can debate, and accept or refuse, the measures which originate in that board.--_oxford guide. literary world_, vol. xii. p. . in the university of cambridge, england, an assembly of the senate out of term time is called a _convocation_. in such a case a grace is immediately passed to convert the convocation into a congregation, after which the business proceeds as usual.--_cam. cal._ . at trinity college, hartford, the house of _convocation_ consists of the fellows and professors, with all persons who have received any academic degree whatever in the same, except such as may be lawfully deprived of their privileges. its business is such as may from time to time be delegated by the corporation, from which it derives its existence; and is, at present, limited to consulting and advising for the good of the college, nominating the junior fellows, and all candidates for admissions _ad eundem_; making laws for its own regulation; proposing plans, measures, or counsel to the corporation; and to instituting, endowing, and naming with concurrence of the same, professorships, scholarships, prizes, medals, and the like. this and the _corporation_ compose the _senatus academicus_.--_calendar trin. coll._, , pp. , . cope. in the university of cambridge, eng., the ermined robe worn by a doctor in the senate house, on congregation day, is called a _cope_. copus. "of mighty ale, a large quarte."--_chaucer_. the word _copus_ and the beverage itself are both extensively used among the _men_ of the university of cambridge, england. "the conjecture," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "is surely ridiculous and senseless, that _copus_ is contracted from _epis_copus, a bishop, 'a mixture of wine, oranges, and sugar.' a copus of ale is a common fine at the student's table in hall for speaking latin, or for some similar impropriety." copy. at cambridge, eng., this word is applied exclusively to papers of verse composition. it is a public-school term transplanted to the university.--_bristed_. cork, calk. in some of the southern colleges, this word, with a derived meaning, signifies a _complete stopper_. used in the sense of an entire failure in reciting; an utter inability to answer an instructor's interrogatories. corporal punishment. in the older american colleges, corporal punishment was formerly sanctioned by law, and several instances remain on record which show that its infliction was not of rare occurrence. among the laws, rules, and scholastic forms established between the years and , by mr. dunster, the first president of harvard college, occurs the following: "siquis scholarium ullam dei et hujus collegii legem, sive animo perverso, seu ex supinâ negligentiâ, violârit, postquam fuerit bis admonitus, si non adultus, _virgis coërceatur_, sin adultus, ad inspectores collegii deferendus erit, ut publicè in eum pro merítis animadversio fiat." in the year , this law was strengthened by another, recorded by quincy, in these words: "it is hereby ordered that the president and fellows of harvard college, for the time being, or the major part of them, are hereby empowered, according to their best discretion, to punish all misdemeanors of the youth in their society, either by fine, or _whipping in the hall openly_, as the nature of the offence shall require, not exceeding ten shillings or _ten stripes_ for one offence; and this law to continue in force until this court or the overseers of the college provide some other order to punish such offences."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. pp. , . a knowledge of the existence of such laws as the above is in some measure a preparation for the following relation given by mr. peirce in his history of harvard university. "at the period when harvard college was founded," says that gentleman, "one of the modes of punishment in the great schools of england and other parts of europe was corporal chastisement. it was accordingly introduced here, and was, no doubt, frequently put in practice. an instance of its infliction, as part of the sentence upon an offender, is presented in judge sewall's ms. diary, with the particulars of a ceremonial, which was reserved probably for special occasions. his account will afford some idea of the manners and spirit of the age:-- "'june , , thomas sargeant was examined by the corporation finally. the advice of mr. danforth, mr. stoughton, mr. thacher, mr. mather (the present), was taken. this was his sentence: "'that being convicted of speaking blasphemous words concerning the h.g., he should be therefore publickly whipped before all the scholars. "' . that he should be suspended as to taking his degree of bachelor. (this sentence read before him twice at the president's before the committee and in the library, before execution.) "' . sit alone by himself in the hall uncovered at meals, during the pleasure of the president and fellows, and be in all things obedient, doing what exercise was appointed him by the president, or else be finally expelled the college. the first was presently put in execution in the library (mr. danforth, jr. being present) before the scholars. he kneeled down, and the instrument, goodman hely, attended the president's word as to the performance of his part in the work. prayer was had before and after by the president, july , .'" "men's ideas," continues mr. peirce, "must have been very different from those of the present day, to have tolerated a law authorizing so degrading a treatment of the members of such a society. it may easily be imagined what complaints and uneasiness its execution must frequently have occasioned among the friends and connections of those who were the subjects of it. in one instance, it even occasioned the prosecution of a tutor; but this was as late as , when old rudeness had lost much of the people's reverence. the law, however, was suffered, with some modification, to continue more than a century. in the revised body of laws made in the year , we find this article: 'notwithstanding the preceding pecuniary mulcts, it shall be lawful for the president, tutors, and professors, to punish undergraduates by boxing, when they shall judge the nature or circumstances of the offence call for it.' this relic of barbarism, however, was growing more and more repugnant to the general taste and sentiment. the late venerable dr. holyoke, who was of the class of , observed, that in his day 'corporal punishment was going out of use'; and at length it was expunged from the code, never, we trust, to be recalled from the rubbish of past absurdities."--pp. , . the last movements which were made in reference to corporal punishment are thus stated by president quincy, in his history of harvard university. "in july, , the overseers voted, that it [the right of boxing] should be 'taken away.' the corporation, however, probably regarded it as too important an instrument of authority to be for ever abandoned, and voted, 'that it should be suspended, as to the execution of it, for one year.' when this vote came before the overseers for their sanction, the board hesitated, and appointed a large committee 'to consider and make report what punishments they apprehend proper to be substituted instead of boxing, in case it be thought expedient to repeal or suspend the law which allows or establishes the same.' from this period the law disappeared, and the practice was discontinued."--vol. ii. p. . the manner in which corporal punishment was formerly inflicted at yale college is stated by president woolsey, in his historical discourse, delivered at new haven, august, . after speaking of the methods of punishing by fines and degradation, he thus proceeds to this topic: "there was a still more remarkable punishment, as it must strike the men of our times, and which, although for some reason or other no traces of it exist in any of our laws so far as i have discovered, was in accordance with the 'good old plan,' pursued probably ever since the origin of universities. i refer--'horresco referens'--to the punishment of boxing or cuffing. it was applied before the faculty to the luckless offender by the president, towards whom the culprit, in a standing position, inclined his head, while blows fell in quick succession upon either ear. no one seems to have been served in this way except freshmen and commencing 'sophimores.'[ ] i do not find evidence that this usage much survived the first jubilee of the college. one of the few known instances of it, which is on other accounts remarkable, was as follows. a student in the first quarter of his sophomore year, having committed an offence for which he had been boxed when a freshman, was ordered to be boxed again, and to have the additional penalty of acting as butler's waiter for one week. on presenting himself, _more academico_, for the purpose of having his ears boxed, and while the blow was falling, he dodged and fled from the room and the college. the beadle was thereupon ordered to try to find him, and to command him to keep himself out of college and out of the yard, and to appear at prayers the next evening, there to receive further orders. he was then publicly admonished and suspended; but in four days after submitted to the punishment adjudged, which was accordingly inflicted, and upon his public confession his suspension was taken off. such public confessions, now unknown, were then exceedingly common." after referring to the instance mentioned above, in which corporal punishment was inflicted at harvard college, the author speaks as follows, in reference to the same subject, as connected with the english universities. "the excerpts from the body of oxford statutes, printed in the very year when this college was founded, threaten corporal punishment to persons of the proper age,--that is, below the age of eighteen,--for a variety of offences; and among the rest for disrespect to seniors, for frequenting places where 'vinum aut quivis alius potus aut herba nicotiana ordinarie venditur,' for coming home to their rooms after the great tom or bell of christ's church had sounded, and for playing football within the university precincts or in the city streets. but the statutes of trinity college, cambridge, contain more remarkable rules, which are in theory still valid, although obsolete in fact. all the scholars, it is there said, who are absent from prayers,--bachelors excepted,--if over eighteen years of age, 'shall be fined a half-penny, but if they have not completed the year of their age above mentioned, they shall be chastised with rods in the hall on friday.' at this chastisement all undergraduates were required to be lookers on, the dean having the rod of punishment in his hand; and it was provided also, that whosoever should not answer to his name on this occasion, if a boy, should be flogged on saturday. no doubt this rigor towards the younger members of the society was handed down from the monastic forms which education took in the earlier schools of the middle ages. and an advance in the age of admission, as well as a change in the tone of treatment of the young, may account for this system being laid aside at the universities; although, as is well known, it continues to flourish at the great public schools of england."--pp. - . corporation. the general government of colleges and universities is usually vested in a corporation aggregate, which is preserved by a succession of members. "the president and fellows of harvard college," says mr. quincy in his history of harvard university, "being the only corporation in the province, and so continuing during the whole of the seventeenth century, they early assumed, and had by common usage conceded to them, the name of "_the corporation_," by which they designate themselves in all the early records. their proceedings are recorded as being done 'at a meeting of _the corporation_,' or introduced by the formula, 'it is ordered by _the corporation_,' without stating the number or the names of the members present, until april th, , when, under president oakes, the names of those present were first entered on the records, and afterwards they were frequently, though not uniformly, inserted."--vol. i. p. . . at trinity college, hartford, the _corporation_, on which the _house of convocation_ is wholly dependent, and to which, by law, belongs the supreme control of the college, consists of not more than twenty-four trustees, resident within the state of connecticut; the chancellor and president of the college being _ex officio_ members, and the chancellor being _ex officio_ president of the same. they have authority to fill their own vacancies; to appoint to offices and professorships; to direct and manage the funds for the good of the college; and, in general, to exercise the powers of a collegiate society, according to the provisions of the charter.--_calendar trin. coll._, , p. . costume. at the english universities there are few objects that attract the attention of the stranger more than the various academical dresses worn by the members of those institutions. the following description of the various costumes assumed in the university of cambridge is taken from "the cambridge guide," ed. . "a _doctor in divinity_ has three robes: the _first_, a gown made of scarlet cloth, with ample sleeves terminating in a point, and lined with rose-colored silk, which is worn in public processions, and on all state and festival days;--the _second_ is the cope, worn at great st. mary's during the service on litany-days, in the divinity schools during an act, and at conciones ad clerum; it is made of scarlet cloth, and completely envelops the person, being closed down the front, which is trimmed with an edging of ermine; at the back of it is affixed a hood of the same costly fur;--the _third_ is a gown made of black silk or poplin, with full, round sleeves, and is the habit commonly worn in public by a d.d.; doctors, however, sometimes wear a master of arts' gown, with a silk scarf. these several dresses are put over a black silk cassock, which covers the entire body, around which it is fastened by a broad sash, and has sleeves coming down to the wrists, like a coat. a handsome scarf of the same materials, which hangs over the shoulders, and extends to the feet, is always worn with the scarlet and black gowns. a square black cloth cap, with silk tassel, completes the costume. "_doctors in the civil law and in physic_ have two robes: the _first_ is the scarlet gown, as just described, and the _second_, or ordinary dress of a d.c.l., is a black silk gown, with a plain square collar, the sleeves hanging down square to the feet;--the ordinary gown of an m.d. is of the same shape, but trimmed at the collar, sleeves, and front with rich black silk lace. "a _doctor in music_ commonly wears the same dress as a d.c.l.; but on festival and scarlet-days is arrayed in a gown made of rich white damask silk, with sleeves and facings of rose-color, a hood of the same, and a round black velvet cap with gold tassel. "_bachelors in divinity_ and _masters of arts_ wear a black gown, made of bombazine, poplin, or silk. it has sleeves extending to the feet, with apertures for the arms just above the elbow, and may be distinguished by the shape of the sleeves, which hang down square, and are cut out at the bottom like the section of a horseshoe. "_bachelors in the civil law and in physic_ wear a gown of the same shape as that of a master of arts. "all graduates of the above ranks are entitled to wear a hat, instead of the square black cloth cap, with their gowns, and the custom of doing so is generally adopted, except by the heads, _tutors_, and _university_ and _college officers_, who consider it more correct to appear in the full academical costume. "a _bachelor of arts'_ gown is made of bombazine or poplin, with large sleeves terminating in a point, with apertures for the arms, just below the shoulder-joint.[ ] _bachelor fellow-commoners_ usually wear silk gowns, and square velvet caps. the caps of other bachelors are of cloth. "all the above, being _graduates_, when they use surplices in chapel wear over them their _hoods_, which are peculiar to the several degrees. the hoods of _doctors_ are made of scarlet cloth, lined with rose-colored silk; those of _bachelors in divinity_, and _non-regent masters of arts_, are of black silk; those of _regent masters of arts_ and _bachelors in the civil law and in physic_, of black silk lined with white; and those of _bachelors of arts_, of black serge, trimmed with a border of white lamb's-wool. "the dresses of the _undergraduates_ are the following:-- "a _nobleman_ has two gowns: the _first_ in shape like that of the fellow-commoners, is made of purple ducape, very richly embroidered with gold lace, and is worn in public processions, and on festival-days: a square black velvet cap with a very large gold tassel is worn with it;--the _second_, or ordinary gown, is made of black silk, with full round sleeves, and a hat is worn with it. the latter dress is worn also by the bachelor fellows of king's college. "a _fellow-commoner_ wears a black prince's stuff gown, with a square collar, and straight hanging sleeves, which are decorated with gold lace; and a square black velvet cap with a gold tassel. "the fellow-commoners of emmanuel college wear a similar gown, with the addition of several gold-lace buttons attached to the trimmings on the sleeves;--those of trinity college have a purple prince's stuff gown, adorned with silver lace,[ ] and a silver tassel is attached to the cap;--at downing the gown is made of black silk, of the same shape, ornamented with tufts and silk lace; and a square cap of velvet with a gold tassel is worn. at jesus college, a bachelor's silk gown is worn, plaited up at the sleeve, and with a gold lace from the shoulder to the bend of the arm. at queen's a bachelor's silk gown, with a velvet cap and gold tassel, is worn: the same at corpus and magdalene; at the latter it is gathered and looped up at the sleeve,--at the former (corpus) it has velvet facings. married fellow-commoners usually wear a black silk gown, with full, round sleeves, and a square velvet cap with silk tassel.[ ] "the _pensioner's_ gown and cap are mostly of the same material and shape as those of the bachelor's: the gown differs only in the mode of trimming. at trinity and caius colleges the gown is purple, with large sleeves, terminating in a point. at st. peter's and queen's, the gown is precisely the same as that of a bachelor; and at king's, the same, but made of fine black woollen cloth. at corpus christi is worn a b.a. gown, with black velvet facings. at downing and trinity hall the gown is made of black bombazine, with large sleeves, looped up at the elbows.[ ] "_students in the civil law and in physic_, who have kept their acts, wear a full-sleeved gown, and are entitled to use a b.a. hood. "bachelors of arts and undergraduates are obliged by the statutes to wear their academical costume constantly in public, under a penalty of s. d. for every omission.[ ] "very few of the _university officers_ have distinctive dresses. "the _chancellor's_ gown is of black damask silk, very richly embroidered with gold. it is worn with a broad, rich lace band, and square velvet cap with large gold tassel. "the _vice-chancellor_ dresses merely as a doctor, except at congregations in the senate-house, when he wears a cope. when proceeding to st. mary's, or elsewhere, in his official capacity, he is preceded by the three esquire-bedells with their silver maces, which were the gift of queen elizabeth. "the _regius professors of the civil law and of physic_, when they preside at acts in the schools, wear copes, and round black velvet caps with gold tassels. "the _proctors_ are not distinguishable from other masters of arts, except at st. mary's church and at congregations, when they wear cassocks and black silk ruffs, and carry the statutes of the university, being attended by two servants, dressed in large blue cloaks, ornamented with gold-lace buttons. "the _yeoman-bedell_, in processions, precedes the esquire-bedells, carrying an ebony mace, tipped with silver; his gown, as well as those of the _marshal_ and _school-keeper_, is made of black prince's stuff, with square collar, and square hanging sleeves."--pp. - . at the university of oxford, eng., the costume of the graduates is as follows:-- "the doctor in divinity has three dresses: the first consists of a gown of scarlet cloth, with black velvet sleeves and facings, a cassock, sash, and scarf. this dress is worn on all public occasions in the theatre, in public processions, and on those sundays and holidays marked (*) in the _oxford calendar_. the second is a habit of scarlet cloth, and a hood of the same color lined with black, and a black silk scarf: the master of arts' gown is worn under this dress, the sleeves appearing through the arm-holes of the habit. this is the dress of business; it is used in convocation, congregation, at morning sermons at st. mary's during the term, and at afternoon sermons at st. peter's during lent, with the exception of the morning sermon on quinquagesima sunday, and the morning sermons in lent. the third, which is the usual dress in which a doctor of divinity appears, is a master of arts' gown, with cassock, sash, and scarf. the vice-chancellor and heads of colleges and halls have no distinguishing dress, but appear on all occasions as doctors in the faculty to which they belong. "the dresses worn by graduates in law and physic are nearly the same. the doctor has three. the first is a gown of scarlet cloth, with sleeves and facings of pink silk, and a round black velvet cap. this is the dress of state. the second consists of a habit and hood of scarlet cloth, the habit faced and the hood lined with pink silk. this habit, which is perfectly analogous to the second dress of the doctor in divinity, has lately grown into disuse; it is, however, retained by the professors, and is always used in presenting to degrees. the third or common dress of a doctor in law or physic nearly resembles that of the bachelor in these faculties; it is a black silk gown richly ornamented with black lace; the hood of the bachelor of laws (worn as a dress) is of purple silk, lined with white fur. "the dress worn by the doctor of music on public occasions is a rich white damask silk gown, with sleeves and facings of crimson satin, a hood of the same material, and a round black velvet cap. the usual dresses of the doctor and of the bachelor in music are nearly the same as those of law and physic. "the master of arts wears a black gown, usually made of prince's stuff or crape, with long sleeves which are remarkable for the circular cut at the bottom. the arm comes through an aperture in the sleeve, which hangs down. the hood of a master of arts is black silk lined with crimson. "the gown of a bachelor of arts is also usually made of prince's stuff or crape. it has a full sleeve, looped up at the elbow, and terminating in a point; the dress hood is black, trimmed with white fur. in lent, at the time of _determining_ in the schools, a strip of lamb's-wool is worn in addition to the hood. noblemen and gentlemen-commoners, who take the degrees of bachelor and master of arts, wear their gowns of silk." the costume of the undergraduates is thus described:-- "the nobleman has two dresses; the first, which is worn in the theatre, in processions, and on all public occasions, is a gown of purple damask silk, richly ornamented with gold lace. the second is a black silk gown, with full sleeves; it has a tippet attached to the shoulders. with both these dresses is worn a square cap of black velvet, with a gold tassel. "the gentleman-commoner has two gowns, _both of black silk_; the first, which is considered as a dress gown, although worn on all occasions, at pleasure, is richly ornamented with tassels. the second, or undress gown, is ornamented with plaits at the sleeves. a square black velvet cap with a silk tassel, is worn with both. "the dress of commoners is a gown of black prince's stuff, without sleeves; from each shoulder is appended a broad strip, which reaches to the bottom of the dress, and towards the top is gathered into plaits. square cap of black cloth and silk tassel. "the student in civil law, or civilian, wears a plain black silk gown, and square cloth cap, with silk tassel. "scholars and demies of magdalene, and students of christ church who have not taken a degree, wear a plain black gown of prince's stuff, with round, full sleeves half the length of the gown, and a square black cap, with silk tassel. "the dress of the servitor is the same as that of the commoner, but it has no plaits at the shoulder, and the cap is without a tassel." the costume of those among the university officers who are distinguished by their dress, may be thus noted:-- "the dress of the chancellor is of black damask silk, richly ornamented with gold embroidery, a rich lace band, and square velvet cap, with a large gold tassel. "the proctors wear gowns of prince's stuff, the sleeves and facings of black velvet; to the left shoulder is affixed a small tippet. to this is added, as a dress, a large ermine hood. "the pro-proctor wears a master of arts' gown, faced with velvet, with a tippet attached to the left shoulder." the collectors wear the same dress as the proctors, with the exception of the hood and tippet. the esquire bedels wear silk gowns, similar to those of bachelors of law, and round velvet caps. the yeoman bedels have black stuff gowns, and round silk caps. the dress of the verger is nearly the same as that of the yeoman bedel. "bands at the neck are considered as necessary appendages to the academic dress, particularly on all public occasions."--_guide to oxford_. see dress. courts. at the english universities, the squares or acres into which each college is divided. called also quadrangles, abbreviated quads. all the colleges are constructed in quadrangles or _courts_; and, as in course of years the population of every college, except one,[ ] has outgrown the original quadrangle, new courts have been added, so that the larger foundations have three, and one[ ] has four courts.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . crackling. at the university of cambridge, eng., in common parlance, the three stripes of velvet which a member of st. john's college wears on his sleeve, are designated by this name. various other gowns are to be discerned, the pembroke looped at the sleeve, the christ's and catherine curiously crimped in front, and the johnian with its unmistakable "_crackling_"--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . cram. to prepare a student to pass an examination; to study in view of examination. in the latter sense used in american colleges. in the latter [euclid] it is hardly possible, at least not near so easy as in logic, to present the semblance of preparation by learning questions and answers by rote:--in the cant phrase of undergraduates, by getting _crammed_.--_whalely's logic, preface_. for many weeks he "_crams_" him,--daily does he rehearse. _poem before the iadma of harv. coll._, . a class of men arose whose business was to _cram_ the candidates. --_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . in a wider sense, to prepare another, or one's self, by study, for any occasion. the members of the bar were lounging about that tabooed precinct, some smoking, some talking and laughing, some poring over long, ill-written papers or large calf-bound books, and all big with the ponderous interests depending upon them, and the eloquence and learning with which they were "_crammed_" for the occasion.--_talbot and vernon_. when he was to write, it was necessary to _cram_ him with the facts and points.--_f.k. hunt's fourth estate_, . cram. all miscellaneous information about ancient history, geography, antiquities, law, &c.; all classical matter not included under the heads of translation and composition, which can be learned by cramming. peculiar to the english universities.--_bristed_. . the same as cramming, which see. i have made him promise to give me four or five evenings of about half an hour's _cram_ each.--_collegian's guide_, p. . it is not necessary to practise "_cram_" so outrageously as at some of the college examinations.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . . a paper on which is written something necessary to be learned, previous to an examination. "take care what you light your cigars with," said belton, "you'll be burning some of tufton's _crams_: they are stuck all about the pictures."--_collegian's guide_, p. . he puzzled himself with his _crams_ he had in his pocket, and copied what he did not understand.--_ibid._, p. . crambambuli. a favorite drink among the students in the german universities, composed of burnt rum and sugar. _crambambuli_, das ist der titel des tranks, der sich bei uns bewährt. _drinking song_. to the next! let's have the _crambambuli_ first, however.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . cram book. a book in which are laid down such topics as constitute an examination, together with the requisite answers to the questions proposed on that occasion. he in consequence engages a private tutor, and buys all the _cram books_ published for the occasion.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . cramination. a farcical word, signifying the same as _cramming_; the termination _tion_ being suffixed for the sake of mock dignity. the ---- scholarship is awarded to the student in each senior class who attends most to _cramination_ on the college course.--_burlesque catalogue_, yale coll., - , p. . cram man. one who is cramming for an examination. he has read all the black-lettered divinity in the bodleian, and says that none of the _cram men_ shall have a chance with him.--_collegian's guide_, p. . crammer. one who prepares another for an examination. the qualifications of a _crammer_ are given in the following extract from the collegian's guide. "the first point, therefore, in which a crammer differs from other tutors, is in the selection of subjects. while another tutor would teach every part of the books given up, he virtually reduces their quantity, dwelling chiefly on the 'likely parts.' "the second point in which a crammer excels is in fixing the attention, and reducing subjects to the comprehension of ill-formed and undisciplined minds. "the third qualification of a crammer is a happy manner and address, to encourage the desponding, to animate the idle, and to make the exertions of the pupil continually increase in such a ratio, that he shall be wound up to concert pitch by the day of entering the schools."--pp. , . cramming. a cant term, in the british universities, for the act of preparing a student to pass an examination, by going over the topics with him beforehand, and furnishing him with the requisite answers.--_webster_. the author of the collegian's guide, speaking of examinations, says: "first, we must observe that all examinations imply the existence of examiners, and examiners, like other mortal beings, lie open to the frauds of designing men, through the uniformity and sameness of their proceedings. this uniformity inventive men have analyzed and reduced to a system, founding thereon a certain science, and corresponding art, called _cramming_."--p. . the power of "_cramming_"--of filling the mind with knowledge hastily acquired for a particular occasion, and to be forgotten when that occasion is past--is a power not to be despised, and of much use in the world, especially at the bar.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . i shall never forget the torment i suffered in _cramming_ long lessons in greek grammar.--_dickens's household words_, vol. i. p. . cram paper. a paper in which are inserted such questions as are generally asked at an examination. the manner in which these questions are obtained is explained in the following extract. "every pupil, after his examination, comes to thank him as a matter of course; and as every man, you know, is loquacious enough on such occasions, tufton gets out of him all the questions he was asked in the schools; and according to these questions, he has moulded his _cram papers_."--_collegian's guide_, p. . we should be puzzled to find any questions more absurd and unreasonable than those in the _cram papers_ in the college examination.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . crib. probably a translation; a pony. of the "odes and epodes of horace, translated literally and rhythmically" by w. sewell, of oxford, the editor of the literary world remarks: "useful as a '_crib_,' it is also poetical."--vol. viii. p. . crow's-foot. at harvard college a badge formerly worn on the sleeve, resembling a crow's foot, to denote the class to which a student belongs. in the regulations passed april , , for establishing the style of dress among the students at harvard college, we find the following. a part of the dress shall be "three crow's-feet, made of black silk cord, on the lower part of the sleeve of a senior, two on that of a junior, and one on that of a sophomore." the freshmen were not allowed to wear the crow's-foot, and the custom is now discontinued, although an unsuccessful attempt was made to revive it a few years ago. the freshman scampers off at the first bell for the chapel, where, finding no brother student of a higher class to encourage his punctuality, he crawls back to watch the starting of some one blessed with a _crow's-foot_, to act as vanguard.--_harv. reg._, p. . the corded _crow's-feet_, and the collar square, the change and chance of earthly lot must share. _class poem at harv. coll._, , p. . what if the creature should arise,-- for he was stout and tall,-- and swallow down a sophomore, coat, _crow's-foot_, cap, and all. _holmes's poems_, , p. . cue, kue, q. a small portion of bread or beer; a term formerly current in both the english universities, the letter q being the mark in the buttery books to denote such a piece. q would seem to stand for _quadrans_, a farthing; but minsheu says it was only half that sum, and thus particularly explains it: "because they set down in the battling or butterie bookes in oxford and cambridge, the letter q for half a farthing; and in oxford when they make that cue or q a farthing, they say, _cap my q_, and make it a farthing, thus, [symbol: small q with a line over]. but in cambridge they use this letter, a little f; thus, f, or thus, s, for a farthing." he translates it in latin _calculus panis_. coles has, "a _cue_ [half a farthing] minutum."--_nares's glossary_. "a cue of bread," says halliwell, "is the fourth part of a half-penny crust. a cue of beer, one draught." j. woods, under-butler of christ church, oxon, said he would never sitt capping of _cues_.--_urry's ms._ add. to ray. you are still at cambridge with size _kue_.--_orig. of dr._, iii. p. . he never drank above size _q_ of helicon.--_eachard, contempt of cl._, p. . "_cues_ and _cees_," says nares, "are generally mentioned together, the _cee_ meaning a small measure of beer; but why, is not equally explained." from certain passages in which they are used interchangeably, the terms do not seem to have been well defined. hee [the college butler] domineers over freshmen, when they first come to the hatch, and puzzles them with strange language of _cues_ and _cees_, and some broken latin, which he has learnt at his bin.--_earle's micro-cosmographie_, ( ,) char. . the word _cue_ was formerly used at harvard college. dr. holyoke, who graduated in , says, the "breakfast was two sizings of bread and a _cue_ of beer." judge wingate, who graduated thirteen years after, says: "we were allowed at dinner a _cue_ of beer, which was a half-pint." it is amusing to see, term after term, and year after year, the formal votes, passed by this venerable body of seven ruling and teaching elders, regulating the price at which a _cue_ (a half-pint) of cider, or a _sizing_ (ration) of bread, or beef, might be sold to the student by the butler.--_eliot's sketch of hist. harv. coll._, p. . cup. among the english cantabs, "an odious mixture ... compounded of spice and cider."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . curl. in the university of virginia, to make a perfect recitation; to overwhelm a professor with student learning. cut. to be absent from; to neglect. thus, a person is said to "_cut_ prayers," to "_cut_ lecture," &c. also, to "_cut_ greek" or "latin"; i.e. to be absent from the greek or latin recitation. another use of the word is, when one says, "i _cut_ dr. b----, or prof. c----, this morning," meaning that he was absent from their exercises. prepare to _cut_ recitations, _cut_ prayers, _cut_ lectures,--ay, to _cut_ even the president himself.--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._ . next morn he _cuts_ his maiden prayer, to his last night's text abiding.--_poem before y.h. of harv. coll._, . as soon as we were seniors, we _cut_ the morning prayers, we showed the freshmen to the door, and helped them down the stairs. _presentation day songs_, june , . we speak not of individuals but of majorities, not of him whose ambition is to "_cut_" prayers and recitations so far as possible. --_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . the two rudimentary lectures which he was at first forced to attend, are now pressed less earnestly upon his notice. in fact, he can almost entirely "_cut_" them, if he likes, and does _cut_ them accordingly, as a waste of time,--_household words_, vol. ii. p. . _to cut dead_, in student use, to neglect entirely. i _cut_ the algebra and trigonometry papers _dead_ my first year, and came out seventh.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . this word is much used in the university of cambridge, england, as appears from the following extract from a letter in the gentleman's magazine, written with reference to some of the customs there observed:--"i remarked, also, that they frequently used the words _to cut_, and to sport, in senses to me totally unintelligible. a man had been cut in chapel, cut at afternoon lectures, cut in his tutor's rooms, cut at a concert, cut at a ball, &c. soon, however, i was told of men, _vice versa_, who cut a figure, _cut_ chapel, _cut_ gates, _cut_ lectures, _cut_ hall, _cut_ examinations, cut particular connections; nay, more, i was informed of some who _cut_ their tutors!"--_gent. mag._, , p. . the instances in which the verb _to cut_ is used in the above extract without italics, are now very common both in england and america. _to cut gates_. to enter college after ten o'clock,--the hour of shutting them.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . cut. an omission of a recitation. this phrase is frequently heard: "we had a cut to-day in greek," i.e. no recitation in greek. again, "prof. d---- gave us a cut," i.e. he had no recitation. a correspondent from bowdoin college gives, in the following sentence, the manner in which this word is there used:--"_cuts_. when a class for any reason become dissatisfied with one of the faculty, they absent themselves from his recitation, as an expression of their feelings" _d_. d.c.l. an abbreviation for _doctor civilis legis_, doctor in civil law. at the university of oxford, england, this degree is conferred four years after receiving the degree of b.c.l. the exercises are three lectures. in the university of cambridge, england, a d.c.l. must be a b.c.l. of five years' standing, or an m.a. of seven years' standing, and must have kept two acts. d.d. an abbreviation of _divinitatis doctor_, doctor in divinity. at the university of cambridge, england, this degree is conferred on a b.d. of five, or an m.a. of twelve years' standing. the exercises are one act, two opponencies, a clerum, and an english sermon. at oxford it is given to a b.d. of four, or a regent m.a. of eleven years' standing. the exercises are three lectures. in american colleges this degree is honorary, and is conferred _pro meritis_ on those who are distinguished as theologians. dead. to be unable to recite; to be ignorant of the lesson; to declare one's self unprepared to recite. be ready, in fine, to cut, to drink, to smoke, to _dead_.--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, . i see our whole lodge desperately striving to _dead_, by doing that hardest of all work, nothing.--_ibid._, . _transitively_; to cause one to fail in reciting. said of a teacher who puzzles a scholar with difficult questions, and thereby causes him to fail. have i been screwed, yea, _deaded_ morn and eve, some dozen moons of this collegiate life, and not yet taught me to philosophize? _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . dead. a complete failure; a declaration that one is not prepared to recite. one must stand up in the singleness of his ignorance to understand all the mysterious feelings connected with a _dead_.--_harv. reg._, p. . and fearful of the morrow's screw or _dead_, takes book and candle underneath his bed. _class poem, by b.d. winslow, at harv. coll._, , p. . he, unmoved by freshman's curses, loves the _deads_ which freshmen make.--_ms. poem_. but oh! what aching heads had they! what _deads_ they perpetrated the succeeding day.--_ibid._ it was formerly customary in many colleges, and is now in a few, to talk about "taking a dead." i have a most instinctive dread of getting up to _take a dead_, unworthy degradation!--_harv. reg._, p. . dead-set. the same as a dead, which see. now's the day and now's the hour; see approach old sikes's power; see the front of logic lower; screws, _dead-sets_, and fines.--_rebelliad_, p. . grose has this word in his slang dictionary, and defines it "a concerted scheme to defraud a person by gaming." "this phrase," says bartlett, in his dictionary of americanisms, "seems to be taken from the lifeless attitude of a pointer in marking his game." "the lifeless attitude" seems to be the only point of resemblance between the above definitions, and the appearance of one who is _taking a dead set_. the word has of late years been displaced by the more general use of the word _dead_, with the same meaning. the phrase _to be at a dead-set_, implying a fixed state or condition which precludes further progress, is in general use. dean. an officer in each college of the universities in england, whose duties consist in the due preservation of the college discipline. "old holingshed," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "in his chronicles, describing cambridge, speaks of 'certain censors, or _deanes_, appointed to looke to the behaviour and manner of the students there, whom they punish _very severely_, if they make any default, according to the quantitye and qualitye of their trespasses.' when _flagellation_ was enforced at the universities, the deans were the ministers of vengeance." at the present time, a person applying for admission to a college in the university of cambridge, eng., is examined by the dean and the head lecturer. "the dean is the presiding officer in chapel, and the only one whose presence there is indispensable. he oversees the markers' lists, pulls up the absentees, and receives their excuses. this office is no sinecure in a large college." at oxford "the discipline of a college is administered by its head, and by an officer usually called dean, though, in some colleges, known by other names."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . _literary world_, vol. xii. p. . in the older american colleges, whipping and cuffing were inflicted by a tutor, professor, or president; the latter, however, usually employed an agent for this purpose. see under corporal punishment. . in the united states, a registrar of the faculty in some colleges, and especially in medical institutions.--_webster_. a _dean_ may also be appointed by the faculty of each professional school, if deemed expedient by the corporation.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . . the head or president of a college. you rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place of public resort, with a christ-church-man, but he takes occasion, if young and frivolous, to talk loudly of the _dean_, as an indirect expression of his own connection with this splendid college; the title of _dean_ being exclusively attached to the headship of christ church.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . dean of convocation. at trinity college, hartford, this officer presides in the _house of convocation_, and is elected by the same, biennially.--_calendar trin. coll._, , p. . dean's bounty. in , the rev. dr. george berkeley, then dean of derry, in ireland, came to america, and resided a year or two at newport, rhode island, "where," says clap, in his history of yale college, "he purchased a country seat, with about ninety-six acres of land." on his return to london, in , he sent a deed of his farm in rhode island to yale college, in which it was ordered, "that the rents of the farm should be appropriated to the maintenance of the three best scholars in greek and latin, who should reside at college at least nine months in a year, in each of the three years between their first and second degrees." president clap further remarks, that "this premium has been a great incitement to a laudable ambition to excel in the knowledge of the classics." it was commonly known as the _dean's bounty_.--_clap's hist. of yale coll._, pp. , . the dean afterwards conveyed to it [yale college], by a deed transmitted to dr. johnson, his rhode island farm, for the establishment of that _dean's bounty_, to which sound classical learning in connecticut has been much indebted.--_hist. sketch of columbia coll._, p. . dean scholar. the person who received the money appropriated by dean berkeley was called the _dean scholar_. this premium was formerly called the dean's bounty, and the person who received it the _dean scholar_.--_sketches of yale coll._, p. . decent. tolerable; pretty good. he is a _decent_ scholar; a _decent_ writer; he is nothing more than _decent_. "this word," says mr. pickering, in his vocabulary, "has been in common use at some of our colleges, but only in the language of conversation. the adverb _decently_ (and possibly the adjective also) is sometimes used in a similar manner in some parts of great britain." the greater part of the pieces it contains may be said to be very _decently_ written.--_edinb. rev._, vol. i. p. . declamation. the word is applied especially to the public speaking and speeches of students in colleges, practised for exercises in oratory.--_webster_. it would appear by the following extract from the old laws of harvard college, that original declamations were formerly required of the students. "the undergraduates shall in their course declaim publicly in the hall, in one of the three learned languages; and in no other without leave or direction from the president, and immediately give up their declamations fairly written to the president. and he that neglects this exercise shall be punished by the president or tutor that calls over the weekly bill, not exceeding five shillings. and such delinquent shall within one week after give in to the president a written declamation subscribed by himself."--_laws , in peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . . at the university of cambridge, eng., an essay upon a given subject, written in view of a prize, and publicly recited in the chapel of the college to which the writer belongs. declamation boards. at bowdoin college, small establishments in the rear of each building, for urinary purposes. deduction. in some of the american colleges, one of the minor punishments for non-conformity with laws and regulations is deducting from the marks which a student receives for recitations and other exercises, and by which his standing in the class is determined. soften down the intense feeling with which he relates heroic rapid's _deductions_.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . . at the university of cambridge, eng., an original proposition in geometry. "how much euclid did you do? fifteen?" "no, fourteen; one of them was a _deduction_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . with a mathematical tutor, the hour of tuition is a sort of familiar examination, working out examples, _deductions_, &c.--_ibid._, pp. , . degradation. in the older american colleges, it was formerly customary to arrange the members of each class in an order determined by the rank of the parent. "degradation consisted in placing a student on the list, in consequence of some offence, below the level to which his father's condition would assign him; and thus declared that he had disgraced his family." in the immediate government book, no. iv., of harvard college, date july th, , is the following entry: "voted, that trumbal, a middle bachelor, who was degraded to the bottom of his class for his misdemeanors when an undergraduate, having presented an humble confession of his faults, with a petition to be restored to his place in the class in the catalogue now printing, be restored agreeable to his request." the triennial catalogue for that year was the first in which the names of the students appeared in an alphabetical order. the class of was the first in which the change was made. "the punishment of degradation," says president woolsey, in his historical discourse before the graduates of yale college, "laid aside not very long before the beginning of the revolutionary war, was still more characteristic of the times. it was a method of acting upon the aristocratic feelings of family; and we at this day can hardly conceive to what extent the social distinctions were then acknowledged and cherished. in the manuscript laws of the infant college, we find the following regulation, which was borrowed from an early ordinance of harvard under president dunster. 'every student shall be called by his surname, except he be the son of a nobleman, or a knight's eldest son.' i know not whether such a 'rara avis in terris' ever received the honors of the college; but a kind of colonial, untitled aristocracy grew up, composed of the families of chief magistrates, and of other civilians and ministers. in the second year of college life, precedency according to the aristocratic scale was determined, and the arrangement of names on the class roll was in accordance. this appears on our triennial catalogue until , when the minds of men began to be imbued with the notion of equality. thus, for instance, gurdon saltonstall, son of the governor of that name, and descendant of sir richard, the first emigrant of the family, heads the class of , and names of the same stock begin the lists of and . it must have been a pretty delicate matter to decide precedence in a multitude of cases, as in that of the sons of members of the council or of ministers, to which class many of the scholars belonged. the story used to circulate, as i dare say many of the older graduates remember, that a shoemaker's son, being questioned as to the quality of his father, replied, that _he was upon the bench_, which gave him, of course, a high place."--pp. , . see under place. degrade. at the english universities to go back a year. "'_degrading_,' or going back a year," says bristed, "is not allowed except in case of illness (proved by a doctor's certificate). a man _degrading_ for any other reason cannot go out afterwards in honors."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . i could choose the year below without formally _degrading_.--_ibid._, p. . degree. a mark of distinction conferred on students, as a testimony of their proficiency in arts and sciences; giving them a kind of rank, and entitling them to certain privileges. this is usually evidenced by a diploma. degrees are conferred _pro meritis_ on the alumni of a college; or they are honorary tokens of respect, conferred on strangers of distinguished reputation. the _first degree_ is that of _bachelor of arts_; the _second_, that _of master of arts_. honorary degrees are those of _doctor of divinity_, _doctor of laws_, &c. physicians, also, receive the degree of _doctor of medicine_.--_webster_. degree examination. at the english universities, the final university examination, which must be passed before the b.a. degree is conferred. the classical tripos is generally spoken of as _the_ tripos, the mathematical one as _the degree examination_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . delta. a piece of land in cambridge, which belongs to harvard college, where the students kick football, and play at cricket, and other games. the shape of the land is that of the greek delta, whence its name. what was unmeetest of all, timid strangers as we were, it was expected on the first monday eventide after our arrival, that we should assemble on a neighboring green, the _delta_, since devoted to the purposes of a gymnasium, there to engage in a furious contest with those enemies, the sophs, at kicking football and shins.--_a tour through college_, - , p. . where are the royal cricket-matches of old, the great games of football, when the obtaining of victory was a point of honor, and crowds assembled on the _delta_ to witness the all-absorbing contest?--_harvardiana_, vol. i. p. . i must have another pair of pantaloons soon, for i have burst the knees of two, in kicking football on the _delta_.--_ibid._, vol. iii. p. . the _delta_ can tell of the deeds we've done, the fierce-fought fields we've lost and won, the shins we've cracked, and noses we've whacked, the eyes we've blacked, and all in fun. _class poem, , harv. coll._ a plat at bowdoin college, of this shape, and used for similar purposes, is known by the same name. demi, demy. the name of a scholar at magdalene college, oxford, where there are thirty _demies_ or half-fellows, as it were, who, like scholars in other colleges, succeed to fellowships.--_johnson_. den. one of the buildings formerly attached to harvard college, which was taken down in the year , was for more than a half-century known by the name of the _den_. it was occupied by students during the greater part of that period, although it was originally built for private use. in later years, from its appearance, both externally and internally, it fully merited its cognomen; but this is supposed to have originated from the following incident, which occurred within its walls about the year , the time when it was built. the north portion of the house was occupied by mr. wiswal (to whom it belonged) and his family. his wife, who was then ill, and, as it afterwards proved, fatally, was attended by a woman who did not bear a very good character, to whom mr. wiswal seemed to be more attentive than was consistent with the character of a true and loving husband. about six weeks after mrs. wiswal's death, mr. wiswal espoused the nurse, which, circumstance gave great offence to the good people of cambridge, and was the cause of much scandal among the gossips. one sunday, not long after this second marriage, mr. wiswal having gone to church, his wife, who did not accompany him, began an examination of her predecessor's wardrobe and possessions, with the intention, as was supposed, of appropriating to herself whatever had been left by the former mrs. wiswal to her children. on his return from church, mr. wiswal, missing his wife, after searching for some time, found her at last in the kitchen, convulsively clutching the dresser, her eyes staring wildly, she herself being unable to speak. in this state of insensibility she remained until her decease, which occurred shortly after. although it was evident that she had been seized with convulsions, and that these were the cause of her death, the old women were careful to promulgate, and their daughters to transmit the story, that the devil had appeared to her _in propria persona_, and shaken her in pieces, as a punishment for her crimes. the building was purchased by harvard college in the year . in the federal orrery, march , , is an article dated _wiswal-den_, cambridge, which title it also bore, from the name of its former occupant. in his address spoken at the harvard alumni festival, july , , hon. edward everett, with reference to this mysterious building as it appeared in the year , said:-- "a little further to the north, and just at the corner of church street (which was not then opened), stood what was dignified in the annual college catalogue--(which was printed on one side of a sheet of paper, and was a novelty)--as 'the college house.' the cellar is still visible. by the students, this edifice was disrespectfully called 'wiswal's den,' or, for brevity, 'the den.' i lived in it in my freshman year. whence the name of 'wiswal's den' i hardly dare say: there was something worse than 'old fogy' about it. there was a dismal tradition that, at some former period, it had been the scene of a murder. a brutal husband had dragged his wife by the hair up and down the stairs, and then killed her. on the anniversary of the murder,--and what day that was no one knew,--there were sights and sounds,--flitting garments daggled in blood, plaintive screams,--_stridor ferri tractæque catenæ_,--enough to appall the stoutest sophomore. but for myself, i can truly say, that i got through my freshman year without having seen the ghost of mr. wiswal or his lamented lady. i was not, however, sorry when the twelvemonth was up, and i was transferred to that light, airy, well-ventilated room, no. hollis; being the inner room, ground floor, north entry of that ancient and respectable edifice."--_to-day_, boston, saturday, july , , p. . many years ago there emigrated to this university, from the wilds of new hampshire, an odd genius, by the name of jedediah croak, who took up his abode as a student in the old _den_.--_harvard register_, - , _a legend of the den_, pp. - . deposition. during the first half of the seventeenth century, in the majority of the german universities, catholic as well as protestant, the matriculation of a student was preceded by a ceremony called the _deposition_. see _howitt's student life in germany_, am. ed., pp. - . descendas. latin; literally, _you may descend_. at the university of cambridge, eng., when a student who has been appointed to declaim in chapel fails in eloquence, memory, or taste, his harangue is usually cut short "by a testy _descendas_."--_grad. ad cantab._ determining. in the university of oxford, a bachelor is entitled to his degree of m.a. twelve terms after the regular time for taking his first degree, having previously gone through the ceremony of _determining_, which exercise consists in reading two dissertations in latin prose, or one in prose and a copy of latin verses. as this takes place in lent, it is commonly called _determining in lent_.--_oxf. guide_. detur. latin; literally, _let it be given_. in , the hon. edward hopkins, dying, left, among other donations to harvard college, one "to be applied to the purchase of books for presents to meritorious undergraduates." the distribution of these books is made, at the commencement of each academic year, to students of the sophomore class who have made meritorious progress in their studies during their freshman year; also, as far as the state of the funds admits, to those members of the junior class who entered as sophomores, and have made meritorious progress in their studies during the sophomore year, and to such juniors as, having failed to receive a _detur_ at the commencement of the sophomore year, have, during that year, made decided improvement in scholarship.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . "from the first word in the short latin label," peirce says, "which is signed by the president, and attached to the inside of the cover, a book presented from this fund is familiarly called a _detur_."--_hist. harv. univ._, p. . now for my books; first bunyan's pilgrim, (as he with thankful pleasure will grin,) tho' dogleaved, torn, in bad type set in, 't will do quite well for classmate b----, and thus with complaisance to treat her, 't will answer for another _detur_. _the will of charles prentiss_. be not, then, painfully anxious about the greek particles, and sit not up all night lest you should miss prayers, only that you may have a "_detur_," and be chosen into the phi beta kappa among the first eight. get a "_detur_" by all means, and the square medal with its cabalistic signs, the sooner the better; but do not "stoop and lie in wait" for them.--_a letter to a young man who has just entered college_, , p. . or yet,--though 't were incredible, --say hast obtained a _detur_! _poem before iadma_, . dig. to study hard; to spend much time in studying. another, in his study chair, _digs_ up greek roots with learned care,-- unpalatable eating.--_harv. reg._, - , p. . here the sunken eye and sallow countenance bespoke the man who _dug_ sixteen hours "per diem."--_ibid._, p. . some have gone to lounge away an hour in the libraries,--some to ditto in the grove,--some to _dig_ upon the afternoon lesson.--_amherst indicator_, vol. i. p. . dig. a diligent student; one who learns his lessons by hard and long-continued exertion. a clever soul is one, i say, who wears a laughing face all day, who never misses declamation, nor cuts a stupid recitation, and yet is no elaborate _dig_, nor for rank systems cares a fig. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . i could see, in the long vista of the past, the many honest _digs_ who had in this room consumed the midnight oil.--_collegian_, p. . and, truly, the picture of a college "_dig_" taking a walk--no, i say not so, for he never "takes a walk," but "walking for exercise"--justifies the contemptuous estimate.--_a letter to a young man who has just entered college_, , p. . he is just the character to enjoy the treadmill, which perhaps might be a useful appendage to a college, not as a punishment, but as a recreation for "_digs_."--_ibid._, p. . resolves that he will be, in spite of toil or of fatigue, that humbug of all humbugs, the staid, inveterate "_dig_." _poem before iadma of harv. coll._, . there goes the _dig_, just look! how like a parson he eyes his book! _the jobsiad_, in _lit. world_, oct. , . the fact that i am thus getting the character of a man of no talent, and a mere "_dig_," does, i confess, weigh down my spirits.--_amherst indicator_, vol. i. p. . by this 't is that we get ahead of the _dig_, 't is not we that prevail, but the wine that we swig. _ibid._, vol. ii. p. . digging. the act of studying hard; diligent application. i find my eyes in doleful case, by _digging_ until midnight.--_harv. reg._, p. . i've had an easy time in college, and enjoyed well the "otium cum dignitate,"--the learned leisure of a scholar's life,--always despised _digging_, you know.--_ibid._, p. . how often after his day of _digging_, when he comes to lay his weary head to rest, he finds the cruel sheets giving him no admittance.--_ibid._, p. . hopes to hit the mark by _digging_ nightly into matters dark. _class poem, harv. coll._, . he "makes up" for past "_digging_." _iadma poem, harv. coll._, . dignity. at bowdoin college, "_dignity_," says a correspondent, "is the name applied to the regular holidays, varying from one half-day per week, during the freshman year, up to four in the senior." diked. at the university of virginia, one who is dressed with more than ordinary elegance is said to be _diked out_. probably corrupted from the word _decked_, or the nearly obsolete _dighted_. diploma. greek, [greek: diploma], from [greek: diploo], to _double_ or fold. anciently, a letter or other composition written on paper or parchment, and folded; afterward, any letter, literary monument, or public document. a letter or writing conferring some power, authority, privilege, or honor. diplomas are given to graduates of colleges on their receiving the usual degrees; to clergymen who are licensed to exercise the ministerial functions; to physicians who are licensed to practise their profession; and to agents who are authorized to transact business for their principals. a diploma, then, is a writing or instrument, usually under seal, and signed by the proper person or officer, conferring merely honor, as in the case of graduates, or authority, as in the case of physicians, agents, &c.--_webster_. discipline. the punishments which are at present generally adopted in american colleges are warning, admonition, the letter home, suspension, rustication, and expulsion. formerly they were more numerous, and their execution was attended with great solemnity. "the discipline of the college," says president quincy, in his history of harvard university, "was enforced and sanctioned by daily visits of the tutors to the chambers of the students, fines, admonitions, confession in the hall, publicly asking pardon, degradation to the bottom of the class, striking the name from the college list, and expulsion, according to the nature and aggravation of the offence."--vol. i. p. . of yale college, president woolsey in his historical discourse says: "the old system of discipline may be described in general as consisting of a series of minor punishments for various petty offences, while the more extreme measure of separating a student from college seems not to have been usually adopted until long forbearance had been found fruitless, even in cases which would now be visited in all american colleges with speedy dismission. the chief of these punishments named in the laws are imposition of school exercises,--of which we find little notice after the first foundation of the college, but which we believe yet exists in the colleges of england;[ ] deprivation of the privilege of sending freshmen upon errands, or extension of the period during which this servitude should be required beyond the end of the freshman year; fines either specified, of which there are a very great number in the earlier laws, or arbitrarily imposed by the officers; admonition and degradation. for the offence of mischievously ringing the bell, which was very common whilst the bell was in an exposed situation over an entry of a college building, students were sometimes required to act as the butler's waiters in ringing the bell for a certain time."--pp. , . see under titles admonition, confession, corporal punishment, degradation, fines, letter home, suspension, &c. discommune. at the university of cambridge, eng., to prohibit an undergraduate from dealing with any tradesman or inhabitant of the town who has violated the university privileges or regulations. the right to exercise this power is vested in the vice-chancellor. any tradesman who allows a student to run in debt with him to an amount exceeding $ , without informing his college tutor, or to incur any debt for wine or spirituous liquors without giving notice of it to the same functionary during the current quarter, or who shall take any promissory note from a student without his tutor's knowledge, is liable to be _discommuned_.--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . in the following extracts, this word appears under a different orthography. there is always a great demand for the rooms in college. those at lodging-houses are not so good, while the rules are equally strict, the owners being solemnly bound to report all their lodgers who stay out at night, under pain of being "_discommonsed_," a species of college excommunication.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . any tradesman bringing a suit against an undergraduate shall be "_discommonsed_"; i.e. all the undergraduates are forbidden to deal with him.--_ibid._, p. . this word is allied to the law term "discommon," to deprive of the privileges of a place. dismiss. to separate from college, for an indefinite or limited time. dismission. in college government, dismission is the separation of a student from a college, for an indefinite or for a limited time, at the discretion of the faculty. it is required of the dismissed student, on applying for readmittance to his own or any other class, to furnish satisfactory testimonials of good conduct during his separation, and to appear, on examination, to be well qualified for such readmission.--_college laws_. in england, a student, although precluded from returning to the university whence he has been dismissed, is not hindered from taking a degree at some other university. dispensation. in universities and colleges, the granting of a license, or the license itself, to do what is forbidden by law, or to omit something which is commanded. also, an exemption from attending a college exercise. the business of the first of these houses, or the oligarchal portion of the constitution [the house of congregation], is chiefly to grant degrees, and pass graces and _dispensations_.--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. xi. all the students who are under twenty-one years of age may be excused from attending the private hebrew lectures of the professor, upon their producing to the president a certificate from their parents or guardians, desiring a _dispensation_.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . disperse. a favorite word with tutors and proctors; used when speaking to a number of students unlawfully collected. this technical use of the word is burlesqued in the following passages. minerva conveys the freshman to his room, where his cries make such a disturbance, that a proctor enters and commands the blue-eyed goddess "_to disperse_." this order she reluctantly obeys.--_harvardiana_, vol. iv. p. . and often grouping on the chains, he hums his own sweet verse, till tutor ----, coming up, commands him to _disperse_. _poem before y.h. harv. coll._, . disputation. an exercise in colleges, in which parties reason in opposition to each other, on some question proposed.--_webster_. disputations were formerly, in american colleges, a part of the exercises on commencement and exhibition days. dispute. to contend in argument; to reason or argue in opposition. --_webster_. the two senior classes shall _dispute_ once or twice a week before the president, a professor, or the tutor.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . divinity. a member of a theological school is often familiarly called a _divinity_, abbreviated for a divinity student. one of the young _divinities_ passed straight through the college yard. _childe harvard_, p. . division. at the university of cambridge, eng., each of the three terms is divided into two parts. _division_ is the time when this partition is made. after "_division_" in the michaelmas and lent terms, a student, who can assign a good plea for absence to the college authorities, may go down and take holiday for the rest of the time.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . doctor. one who has passed all the degrees of a faculty, and is empowered to practise and teach it; as, a _doctor_ in divinity, in physic, in law; or, according to modern usage, a person who has received the highest degree in a faculty. the degree of _doctor_ is conferred by universities and colleges, as an honorary mark of literary distinction. it is also conferred on physicians as a professional degree.--_webster_. doctorate. the degree of a doctor.--_webster_. the first diploma for a doctorate in divinity given in america was presented under the seal of harvard college to mr. increase mather, the president of that institution, in the year .--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . dodge. a trick; an artifice or stratagem for the purpose of deception. used often with _come_; as, "_to come a dodge_ over him." no artful _dodge_ to leave my school could i just then prepare. _poem before iadma, harv. coll._, . agreed; but i have another _dodge_ as good as yours.--_collegian's guide_, p. . we may well admire the cleverness displayed by this would-be chatterton, in his attempt to sell the unwary with an ossian _dodge_.--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . dominus. a title bestowed on bachelors of arts, in england. _dominus_ nokes; _dominus_ stiles.--_gradus ad cantab._ don. in the english universities, a short generic term for a fellow or any college authority. he had already told a lie to the _dons_, by protesting against the justice of his sentence.--_collegian's guide_, p. . never to order in any wine from an oxford merchant, at least not till i am a _don_.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . nor hint how _dons_, their untasked hours to pass, like cato, warm their virtues with the glass.[ ] _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . donkey. at washington college, penn., students of a religious character are vulgarly called _donkeys_. see lap-ear. dormiat. latin; literally, _let him sleep_. to take out a _dormiat_, i.e. a license to sleep. the licensed person is excused from attending early prayers in the chapel, from a plea of being indisposed. used in the english universities.--_gradus ad cantab._ double first. at the university of cambridge, eng., a student who attains high honors in both the classical and the mathematical tripos. the calendar does not show an average of two "_double firsts_" annually for the last ten years out of one hundred and thirty-eight graduates in honors.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the reported saying of a distinguished judge,... "that the standard of a _double first_ was getting to be something beyond human ability," seems hardly an exaggeration.--_ibid._, p. . double man. in the english universities, a student who is a proficient in both classics and mathematics. "_double men_," as proficients in both classics and mathematics are termed, are very rare.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . it not unfrequently happens that he now drops the intention of being a "_double man_," and concentrates himself upon mathematics. --_ibid._, p. . to one danger mathematicians are more exposed than either classical or _double men_,--disgust and satiety arising from exclusive devotion to their unattractive studies.--_ibid._, p. . double marks. it was formerly the custom in harvard college with the professors in rhetoric, when they had examined and corrected the _themes_ of the students, to draw a straight line on the back of each one of them, under the name of the writer. under the names of those whose themes were of more than ordinary correctness or elegance, _two_ lines were drawn, which were called _double marks_. they would take particular pains for securing the _double mark_ of the english professor to their poetical compositions.--_monthly anthology_, boston, , vol. i. p. . many, if not the greater part of paine's themes, were written in verse; and his vanity was gratified, and his emulation roused, by the honor of constant _double marks_.--_works of r.t. paine, biography_, p. xxii., ed. . see theme. double second. at the university of cambridge, eng., one who obtains a high place in the second rank, in both mathematical and classical honors. a good _double second_ will make, by his college scholarship, two fifths or three fifths of his expenses during two thirds of the time he passes at the university.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . dough-ball. at the anderson collegiate institute, indiana, a name given by the town's people to a student. dress. a uniformity in dress has never been so prevalent in american colleges as in the english and other universities. about the middle of the last century, however, the habit among the students of harvard college of wearing gold lace attracted the attention of the overseers, and a law was passed "requiring that on no occasion any of the scholars wear any gold or silver lace, or any gold or silver brocades, in the college or town of cambridge," and "that no one wear any silk night-gowns." "in ," says quincy, "in order to lessen the expense of dress, a uniform was prescribed, the color and form of which were minutely set forth, with a distinction of the classes by means of frogs on the cuffs and button-holes; silk was prohibited, and home manufactures were recommended." this system of uniform is fully described in the laws of , and is as follows:-- "all the undergraduates shall be clothed in coats of blue-gray, and with waistcoats and breeches of the same color, or of a black, a nankeen, or an olive color. the coats of the freshmen shall have plain button-holes. the cuffs shall be without buttons. the coats of the sophomores shall have plain button-holes like those of the freshmen, but the cuffs shall have buttons. the coats of the juniors shall have cheap frogs to the button-holes, except the button-holes of the cuffs. the coats of the seniors shall have frogs to the button-holes of the cuffs. the buttons upon the coats of all the classes shall be as near the color of the coats as they can be procured, or of a black color. and no student shall appear within the limits of the college, or town of cambridge, in any other dress than in the uniform belonging to his respective class, unless he shall have on a night-gown or such an outside garment as may be necessary over a coat, except only that the seniors and juniors are permitted to wear black gowns, and it is recommended that they appear in them on all public occasions. nor shall any part of their garments be of silk; nor shall they wear gold or silver lace, cord, or edging upon their hats, waistcoats, or any other parts of their clothing. and whosoever shall violate these regulations shall be fined a sum not exceeding ten shillings for each offence."--_laws of harv. coll._, , pp. , . it is to this dress that the poet alludes in these lines:-- "in blue-gray coat, with buttons on the cuffs, first modern pride your ear with fustian stuffs; 'welcome, blest age, by holy seers foretold, by ancient bards proclaimed the age of gold,'" &c.[ ] but it was by the would-be reformers of that day alone that such sentiments were held, and it was only by the severity of the punishment attending non-conformity with these regulations that they were ever enforced. in , "the sumptuary law relative to dress had fallen into neglect," and in the next year "it was found so obnoxious and difficult to enforce," says quincy, "that a law was passed abrogating the whole system of distinction by 'frogs on the cuffs and button-holes,' and the law respecting dress was limited to prescribing a blue-gray or dark-blue coat, with permission to wear a black gown, and a prohibition of wearing gold or silver lace, cord, or edging."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . a writer in the new england magazine, in an article relating to the customs of harvard college at the close of the last century, gives the following description of the uniform ordered by the corporation to be worn by the students:-- "each head supported a three-cornered cocket hat. yes, gentle reader, no man or boy was considered in full dress, in those days, unless his pericranium was thus surmounted, with the forward peak directly over the right eye. had a clergyman, especially, appeared with a hat of any other form, it would have been deemed as great a heresy as unitarianism is at the present day. whether or not the three-cornered hat was considered as an emblem of trinitarianism, i am not able to determine. our hair was worn in a _queue_, bound with black ribbon, and reached to the small of the back, in the shape of the tail of that motherly animal which furnishes ungrateful bipeds of the human race with milk, butter, and cheese. where nature had not bestowed a sufficiency of this ornamental appendage, the living and the dead contributed of their superfluity to supply the deficiency. our ear-locks,--_horresco referens_!--my ears tingle and my countenance is distorted at the recollection of the tortures inflicted on them by the heated curling-tongs and crimping-irons. "the bosoms of our shirts were ruffled with lawn or cambric, and 'our fingers' ends were seen to peep from ruffles, full five inches deep.' our coats were double-breasted, and of a black or priest-gray color. the directions were not so particular respecting our waistcoats, breeches,--i beg pardon,--small clothes, and stockings. our shoes ran to a point at the distance of two or three inches from the extremity of the foot, and turned upward, like the curve of a skate. our dress was ornamented with shining stock, knee, and shoe buckles, the last embracing at least one half of the foot of ordinary dimensions. if any wore boots, they were made to set as closely to the leg as its skin; for a handsome calf and ankle were esteemed as great beauties as any portion of the frame, or point in the physiognomy."--vol. iii. pp. , . in his late work, entitled, "memories of youth and manhood," professor sidney willard has given an entertaining description of the style of dress which was in vogue at harvard college near the close of the last century, in the following words:-- "except on special occasions, which required more than ordinary attention to dress, the students, when i was an undergraduate, were generally very careless in this particular. they were obliged by the college laws to wear coats of blue-gray; but as a substitute in warm weather, they were allowed to wear gowns, except on public occasions; and on these occasions they were permitted to wear black gowns. seldom, however, did any one avail himself of this permission. in summer long gowns of calico or gingham were the covering that distinguished the collegian, not only about the college grounds, but in all parts of the village. still worse, when the season no longer tolerated this thin outer garment, many adopted one much in the same shape, made of colorless woollen stuff called lambskin. these were worn by many without any under-coat in temperate weather, and in some cases for a length of time in which they had become sadly soiled. in other respects there was nothing peculiar in the common dress of the young men and boys of college to distinguish it from that of others of the same age. breeches were generally worn, buttoned at the knees, and tied or buckled a little below; not so convenient a garment for a person dressing in haste as trousers or pantaloons. often did i see a fellow-student hurrying to the chapel to escape tardiness at morning prayers, with this garment unbuttoned at the knees, the ribbons dangling over his legs, the hose refusing to keep their elevation, and the calico or woollen gown wrapped about him, ill concealing his dishabille. "not all at once did pantaloons gain the supremacy as the nether garment. about the beginning of the present century they grew rapidly in favor with the young; but men past middle age were more slow to adopt the change. then, last, the aged very gradually were converted to the fashion by the plea of convenience and comfort; so that about the close of the first quarter of the present century it became almost universal. in another particular, more than half a century ago, the sons adopted a custom of their wiser fathers. the young men had for several years worn shoes and boots shaped in the toe part to a point, called peaked toes, while the aged adhered to the shape similar to the present fashion; so that the shoemaker, in a doubtful case, would ask his customer whether he would have square-toed or peaked-toed. the distinction between young and old in this fashion was so general, that sometimes a graceless youth, who had been crossed by his father or guardian in some of his unreasonable humors, would speak of him with the title of _old square-toes_. "boots with yellow tops inverted, and coming up to the knee-band, were commonly worn by men somewhat advanced in years; but the younger portion more generally wore half-boots, as they were called, made of elastic leather, cordovan. these, when worn, left a space of two or three inches between the top of the boot and the knee-band. the great beauty of this fashion, as it was deemed by many, consisted in restoring the boots, which were stretched by drawing them on, to shape, and bringing them as nearly as possible into contact with the legs; and he who prided himself most on the form of his lower limbs would work the hardest in pressure on the leather from the ankle upward in order to do this most effectually."--vol. i. pp. - . in was passed the "law of harvard university, regulating the dress of the students." the established uniform was as follows. "the coat of black-mixed, single-breasted, with a rolling cape, square at the end, and with pocket flaps; waist reaching to the natural waist, with lapels of the same length; skirts reaching to the bend of the knee; three crow's-feet, made of black-silk cord, on the lower part of the sleeve of a senior, two on that of a junior, and one on that of a sophomore. the waistcoat of black-mixed or of black; or when of cotton or linen fabric, of white, single-breasted, with a standing collar. the pantaloons of black-mixed or of black bombazette, or when of cotton or linen fabric, of white. the surtout or great coat of black-mixed, with not more than two capes. the buttons of the above dress must be flat, covered with the same cloth as that of the garments, not more than eight nor less than six on the front of the coat, and four behind. a surtout or outside garment is not to be substituted for the coat. but the students are permitted to wear black gowns, in which they may appear on all public occasions. night-gowns, of cotton or linen or silk fabric, made in the usual form, or in that of a frock coat, may be worn, except on the sabbath, on exhibition and other occasions when an undress would be improper. the neckcloths must be plain black or plain white." no student, while in the state of massachusetts, was allowed, either in vacation or term time, to wear any different dress or ornament from those above named, except in case of mourning, when he could wear the customary badges. although dismission was the punishment for persisting in the violation of these regulations, they do not appear to have been very well observed, and gradually, like the other laws of an earlier date on this subject, fell into disuse. the night-gowns or dressing-gowns continued to be worn at prayers and in public until within a few years. the black-mixed, otherwise called oxford mixed cloth, is explained under the latter title. the only law which now obtains at harvard college on the subject of dress is this: "on sabbath, exhibition, examination, and commencement days, and on all other public occasions, each student, in public, shall wear a black coat, with buttons of the same color, and a black hat or cap."--_orders and regulations of the faculty of harv. coll._, july, , p. . at one period in the history of yale college, a passion for expensive dress having become manifest among the students, the faculty endeavored to curb it by a direct appeal to the different classes. the result was the establishment of the lycurgan society, whose object was the encouragement of plainness in apparel. the benefits which might have resulted from this organization were contravened by the rashness of some of its members. the shape which this rashness assumed is described in a work entitled "scenes and characters in college," written by a yale graduate of the class of . "some members were seized with the notion of a _distinctive dress_. it was strongly objected to; but the measure was carried by a stroke of policy. the dress proposed was somewhat like that of the quakers, but less respectable,--a rustic cousin to it, or rather a caricature; namely, a close coatee, with stand-up collar, and _very_ short skirts,--_skirtees_, they might be called,--the color gray; pantaloons and vest the same;--making the wearer a monotonous gray man throughout, invisible at twilight. the proposers of this metamorphosis, to make it go, selected an individual of small and agreeable figure, and procuring a suit of fine material, and a good fit, placed him on a platform as a specimen. on _him_ it appeared very well, as a belted blouse does on a graceful child; and all the more so, as he was a favorite with the class, and lent to it the additional effect of agreeable association. but it is bad logic to derive a general conclusion from a single fact: it did not follow that the dress would be universally becoming because it was so on him. however, majorities govern; the dress was voted. the tailors were glad to hear of it, expecting a fine run of business. "but when a tall son of anak appeared in the little bodice of a coat, stuck upon the hips; and still worse, when some very clumsy forms assumed the dress, and one in particular, that i remember, who was equally huge in person and coarse in manners, whose taste, or economy, or both,--the one as probably as the other,--had led him to the choice of an ugly pepper-and-salt, instead of the true oxford mix, or whatever the standard gray was called, and whose tailor, or tailoress, probably a tailoress, had contrived to aggravate his natural disproportions by the most awkward fit imaginable,--then indeed you might have said that 'some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.' they looked like david's messengers, maltreated and sent back by hanun.[ ] "the consequence was, the dress was unpopular; very few adopted it; and the society itself went quietly into oblivion. nevertheless it had done some good; it had had a visible effect in checking extravagance; and had accomplished all it would have done, i imagine, had it continued longer. "there was a time, some three or four years previous to this, when a rakish fashion began to be introduced of wearing white-topped boots. it was a mere conceit of the wearers, such a fashion not existing beyond college,--except as it appeared in here and there an antiquated gentleman, a venerable remnant of the olden time, in whom the boots were matched with buckles at the knee, and a powdered queue. a practical satire quickly put an end to it. some humorists proposed to the waiters about college to furnish them with such boots on condition of their wearing them. the offer was accepted; a lot of them was ordered at a boot-and-shoe shop, and, all at once, sweepers, sawyers, and the rest, appeared in white-topped boots. i will not repeat the profaneness of a southerner when he first observed a pair of them upon a tall and gawky shoe-black striding across the yard. he cursed the 'negro,' and the boots; and, pulling off his own, flung them from him. after this the servants had the fashion to themselves, and could buy the article at any discount."--pp. - . at union college, soon after its foundation, there was enacted a law, "forbidding any student to appear at chapel without the college badge,--a piece of blue ribbon, tied in the button-hole of the coat."--_account of the first semi-centennial anniversary of the philomathean society, union college_, . such laws as the above have often been passed in american colleges, but have generally fallen into disuse in a very few years, owing to the predominancy of the feeling of democratic equality, the tendency of which is to narrow, in as great a degree as possible, the intervals between different ages and conditions. see costume. dudleian lecture. an anniversary sermon which is preached at harvard college before the students; supported by the yearly interest of one hundred pounds sterling, the gift of paul dudley, from whom the lecture derives its name. the following topics were chosen by him as subjects for this lecture. first, for "the proving, explaining, and proper use and improvement of the principles of natural religion." second, "for the confirmation, illustration, and improvement of the great articles of the christian religion." third, "for the detecting, convicting, and exposing the idolatry, errors, and superstitions of the romish church." fourth, "for maintaining, explaining, and proving the validity of the ordination of ministers or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of the sacraments or ordinances of religion, as the same hath been practised in new england from the first beginning of it, and so continued to this day." "the instrument proceeds to declare," says quincy, "that he does not intend to invalidate episcopal ordination, or that practised in scotland, at geneva, and among the dissenters in england and in this country, all which 'i esteem very safe, scriptural, and valid.' he directed these subjects to be discussed in rotation, one every year, and appointed the president of the college, the professor of divinity, the pastor of the first church in cambridge, the senior tutor of the college, and the pastor of the first church in roxbury, trustees of these lectures, which commenced in , and have since been annually continued without intermission."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. pp. , . dulce decus. latin; literally, _sweet honor_. at williams college a name given by a certain class of students to the game of whist; the reason for which is evident. whether mæcenas would have considered it an _honor_ to have had the compliment of horace, "o et præsidium et dulce decus meum," transferred as a title for a game at cards, we leave for others to decide. dummer junge,--literally, _stupid youth_,--among german students "is the highest and most cutting insult, since it implies a denial of sound, manly understanding and strength of capacity to him to whom it is applied."--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . dun. an importunate creditor who urges for payment. a character not wholly unknown to collegians. thanks heaven, flings by his cap and gown, and shuns a place made odious by remorseless _duns_. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . _e_. egresses. at the older american colleges, when charges were made and excuses rendered in latin, the student who had left before the conclusion of any of the religious services was accused of the misdemeanor by the proper officer, who made use of the word _egresses_, a kind of barbarous second person singular of some imaginary verb, signifying, it is supposed, "you went out." much absence, tardes and _egresses_, the college-evil on him seizes. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, part i. eight. on the scale of merit, at harvard college, eight is the highest mark which a student can receive for a recitation. students speak of "_getting an eight_," which is equivalent to saying, that they have made a perfect recitation. but since the fates will not grant all _eights_, save to some disgusting fellow who'll fish and dig, i care not a fig, we'll be hard boys and mellow. _ms. poem_, w.f. allen. numberless the _eights_ he showers full on my devoted head.--_ms. ibid._ at the same college, when there were three exhibitions in the year, it was customary for the first eight scholars in the junior class to have "parts" at the first exhibition, the second eight at the second exhibition, and the third eight at the third exhibition. eight seniors performed with them at each of these three exhibitions, but they were taken promiscuously from the first twenty-four in their class. although there are now but two exhibitions in the year, twelve performing from each of the two upper classes, yet the students still retain the old phraseology, and you will often hear the question, "is he in the first or second _eight_?" the bell for morning prayers had long been sounding! she says, "what makes you look so very pale?"-- "i've had a dream."--"spring to 't, or you'll be late!"-- "don't care! 't was worth a part among the _second eight_." _childe harvard_, p. . electioneering. in many colleges in the united states, where there are rival societies, it is customary, on the admission of a student to college, for the partisans of the different societies to wait upon him, and endeavor to secure him as a member. an account of this _society electioneering_, as it is called, is given in _sketches of yale college_, at page . society _electioneering_ has mostly gone by.--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . elegant extracts. at the university of cambridge, eng., a cant title applied to some fifteen or twenty men who have just succeeded in passing their final examination, and who are bracketed together, at the foot of the polloi list.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . emeritus, _pl._ emeriti. latin; literally, _obtained by service_. one who has been honorably discharged from public service, as, in colleges and universities, a _professor emeritus_. emigrant. in the english universities, one who migrates, or removes from one college to another. at christ's, for three years successively,... the first man was an _emigrant_ from john's.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . see migration. empty bottle. at the university of cambridge, eng., the sobriquet of a fellow-commoner. indeed they [fellow-commoners] are popularly denominated "_empty bottles_," the first word of the appellation being an adjective, though were it taken as a verb there would be no untruth in it.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . encenia, _pl._ greek [greek: enkainia], _a feast of dedication_. festivals anciently kept on the days on which cities were built or churches consecrated; and, in later times, ceremonies renewed at certain periods, as at oxford, at the celebration of founders and benefactors.--_hook_. end woman. at bowdoin college, "end women," says a correspondent, "are the venerable females who officiate as chambermaids in the different entries." they are so called from the entries being placed at the _ends_ of the buildings. engagement. at yale college, the student, on entering, signs an _engagement_, as it is called, in the words following: "i, a.b., on condition of being admitted as a member of yale college, promise, on my faith and honor, to observe all the laws and regulations of this college; particularly that i will faithfully avoid using profane language, gaming, and all indecent, disorderly behavior, and disrespectful conduct to the faculty, and all combinations to resist their authority; as witness my hand. a.b." --_yale coll. cat._, , p. . nearly the same formula is used at williams college. engine. at harvard college, for many years before and succeeding the year , a fire-engine was owned by the government, and was under the management of the students. in a ms. journal, under date of oct. , , is this note: "this day i turned out to exercise the engine. p.m." the company were accustomed to attend all the fires in the neighboring towns, and were noted for their skill and efficiency. but they often mingled enjoyment with their labor, nor were they always as scrupulous as they might have been in the means used to advance it. in , the engine having been newly repaired, they agreed to try its power on an old house, which was to be fired at a given time. by some mistake, the alarm was given before the house was fairly burning. many of the town's people endeavored to save it, but the company, dragging the engine into a pond near by, threw the dirty water on them in such quantities that they were glad to desist from their laudable endeavors. it was about this time that the engine society was organized, before which so many pleasant poems and orations were annually delivered. of these, that most noted is the "rebelliad," which was spoken in the year , and was first published in the year . of it the editor has well remarked: "it still remains the text-book of the jocose, and is still regarded by all, even the melancholy, as a most happy production of humorous taste." its author was dr. augustus pierce, who died at tyngsborough, may , . the favorite beverage at fires was rum and molasses, commonly called _black-strap_, which is referred to in the following lines, commemorative of the engine company in its palmier days. "but oh! let _black-strap's_ sable god deplore those _engine-heroes_ so renowned of yore! gone is that spirit, which, in ancient time, inspired more deeds than ever shone in rhyme! ye, who remember the superb array, the deafening cry, the engine's 'maddening play,' the broken windows, and the floating floor, wherewith those masters of hydraulic lore were wont to make us tremble as we gazed, can tell how many a false alarm was raised, how many a room by their o'erflowings drenched, and how few fires by their assistance quenched?" _harvard register_, p. . the habit of attending fires in boston, as it had a tendency to draw the attention of the students from their college duties, was in part the cause of the dissolution of the company. their presence was always welcomed in the neighboring city, and although they often left their engine behind them on returning to cambridge, it was usually sent out to them soon after. the company would often parade through the streets of cambridge in masquerade dresses, headed by a chaplain, presenting a most ludicrous appearance. in passing through the college yard, it was the custom to throw water into any window that chanced to be open. their fellow-students, knowing when they were to appear, usually kept their windows closed; but the officers were not always so fortunate. about the year , having discharged water into the room of the college regent, thereby damaging a very valuable library of books, the government disbanded the company, and shortly after sold the engine to the then town of cambridge, on condition that it should never be taken out of the place. a few years ago it was again sold to some young men of west cambridge, in whose hands it still remains. one of the brakes of the engine, a relic of its former glory, was lately discovered in the cellar of one of the college buildings, and that perchance has by this time been used to kindle the element which it once assisted to extinguish. esquire bedell. in the university of cambridge, eng., three _esquire bedells_ are appointed, whose office is to attend the vice-chancellor, whom they precede with their silver maces upon all public occasions.--_cam. guide_. at the university of oxford, the esquire bedells are three in number. they walk before the vice-chancellor in processions, and carry golden staves as the insignia of their office.--_guide to oxford_. see beadle. evangelical. in student phrase, a religious, orthodox man, one who is sound in the doctrines of the gospel, or one who is reading theology, is called an _evangelical_. he was a king's college, london, man, an _evangelical_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . it has been said by some of the _evangelicals_, that nothing can be done to improve the state of morality in the universities so long as the present church system continues.--_ibid._, p. . examination. an inquiry into the acquisitions of the students, in _colleges_ and _seminaries of learning_, by questioning them in literature and the sciences, and by hearing their recitals.--_webster_. in all colleges candidates for entrance are required to be able to pass an examination in certain branches of study before they can be admitted. the students are generally examined, in most colleges, at the close of each term. in the revised laws of harvard college, printed in the year , was one for the purpose of introducing examinations, the first part of which is as follows: "to animate the students in the pursuit of literary merit and fame, and to excite in their breasts a noble spirit of emulation, there shall be annually a public examination, in the presence of a joint committee of the corporation and overseers, and such other gentlemen as may be inclined to attend it." it then proceeds to enumerate the times and text-books for each class, and closes by stating, that, "should any student neglect or refuse to attend such examination, he shall be liable to be fined a sum not exceeding twenty shillings, or to be admonished or suspended." great discontent was immediately evinced by the students at this regulation, and as it was not with this understanding that they entered college, they considered it as an _ex post facto_ law, and therefore not binding upon them. with these views, in the year , the senior and junior classes petitioned for exemption from the examination, but their application was rejected by the overseers. when this was declared, some of the students determined to stop the exercises for that year, if possible. for this purpose they obtained six hundred grains of tartar emetic, and early on the morning of april th, the day on which the examination was to begin, emptied it into the great cooking boilers in the kitchen. at breakfast, or more students and officers being present, the coffee was brought on, made with the water from the boilers. its effects were soon visible. one after another left the hall, some in a slow, others in a hurried manner, but all plainly showing that their situation was by no means a pleasant one. out of the whole number there assembled, only four or five escaped without being made unwell. those who put the drug in the coffee had drank the most, in order to escape detection, and were consequently the most severely affected. unluckily, one of them was seen putting something into the boilers, and the names of the others were soon after discovered. their punishment is stated in the following memoranda from a manuscript journal. "exhibition, . april th. this morning trapier was rusticated and sullivan suspended to groton for nine months, for mingling tartar emetic with our commons on ye morning of april th." "may st. ely was suspended to amherst for five months, for assisting sullivan and trapier in mingling tartar emetic with our commons." another student, who threw a stone into the examination-room, which struck the chair in which governor hancock sat, was more severely punished. the circumstance is mentioned in the manuscript referred to above as follows:-- "april th, . henry w. jones of h---- was expelled from college upon evidence of a little boy that he sent a stone into ye philosopher's room while a committee of ye corporation and overseers, and all ye immediate government, were engaged in examination of ye freshman class." although the examination was delayed for a day or two on account of these occurrences, it was again renewed and carried on during that year, although many attempts were made to stop it. for several years after, whenever these periods occurred, disturbances came with them, and it was not until the year that the differences between the officers and the students were satisfactorily adjusted, and examinations established on a sure basis. examine. to inquire into the improvements or qualifications of students, by interrogatories, proposing problems, or by hearing their recitals; as, to _examine_ the classes in college; to _examine_ the candidates for a degree, or for a license to preach or to practise in a profession.--_webster_. examinee. one who is examined; one who undergoes at examination. what loads of cold beef and lobster vanish before the _examinees_. --_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . examiner. one who examines. in colleges and seminaries of learning, the person who interrogates the students, proposes questions for them to answer, and problems to solve. coming forward with assumed carelessness, he threw towards us the formal reply of his _examiners_.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . exeat. latin; literally, _let him depart_. leave of absence given to a student in the english universities.--_webster_. the students who wish to go home apply for an "_exeat_," which is a paper signed by the tutor, master, and dean.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . [at king's college], _exeats_, or permission to go down during term, were never granted but in cases of life and death.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . exercise. a task or lesson; that which is appointed for one to perform. in colleges, all the literary duties are called _exercises_. it may be inquired, whether a great part of the _exercises_ be not at best but serious follies.--_cotton mather's suggestions_, in _quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . in the english universities, certain exercises, as acts, opponencies, &c., are required to be performed for particular degrees. exhibit. to take part in an exhibition; to speak in public at an exhibition or commencement. no student who shall receive any appointment to _exhibit_ before the class, the college, or the public, shall give any treat or entertainment to his class, or any part thereof, for or on account of those appointments.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . if any student shall fail to perform the exercise assigned him, or shall _exhibit_ anything not allowed by the faculty, he may be sent home.--_ibid._, , p. . . to provide for poor students by an exhibition. (see exhibition, second meaning.) an instance of this use is given in the gradus ad cantabrigiam, where one antony wood says of bishop longland, "he was a special friend to the university, in maintaining its privileges and in _exhibiting_ to the wants of certain scholars." in mr. peirce's history of harvard university occurs this passage, in an account of the will of the hon. william stoughton: "he bequeathed a pasture in dorchester, containing twenty-three acres and four acres of marsh, 'the income of both to be _exhibited_, in the first place, to a scholar of the town of dorchester, and if there be none such, to one of the town of milton, and in want of such, then to any other well deserving that shall be most needy.'" --p. . exhibition. in colleges, a public literary and oratorical display. the exercises at _exhibitions_ are original compositions, prose translations from the english into greek and latin, and from other languages into the english, metrical versions, dialogues, &c. at harvard college, in the year , it was voted, "that twice in a year, in the spring and fall, each class should recite to their tutors, in the presence of the president, professors, and tutors, in the several books in which they are reciting to their respective tutors, and that publicly in the college hall or chapel." the next year, the overseers being informed "that the students are not required to translate english into latin nor latin into english," their committee "thought it would be convenient that specimens of such translations and other performances in classical and polite literature should be from time to time laid before" their board. a vote passed the board of overseers recommending to the corporation a conformity to these suggestions; but it was not until the year that a law was formally enacted in both boards, "that twice in the year, viz. at the semiannual visitation of the committee of the overseers, some of the scholars, at the direction of the president and tutors, shall publicly exhibit specimens of their proficiency, by pronouncing orations and delivering dialogues, either in english or in one of the learned languages, or hearing a forensic disputation, or such other exercises as the president and tutors shall direct."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. pp. - . a few years after this, two more exhibitions were added, and were so arranged as to fall one in each quarter of the college year. the last year in which there were four exhibitions was . after this time there were three exhibitions during the year until , when one was omitted, since which time the original plan has been adopted. in the journal of a member of the class which graduated at harvard college in the year , under the date of december d, , exhibition, is the following memorandum: "music was intermingled with elocution, which (we read) has charms to soothe even a savage breast." again, on a similar occasion, april th, , an account of the exercises of the day closes with this note: "tender music being interspersed to enliven the audience." vocal music was sometimes introduced. in the same journal, date october st, , exhibition, the writer says: "the performances were enlivened with an excellent piece of music, sung by harvard singing club, accompanied with a band of music." from this time to the present day, music, either vocal or instrumental, has formed a very entertaining part of the exhibition performances.[ ] the exercises for exhibitions are assigned by the faculty to meritorious students, usually of the two higher classes. the exhibitions are held under the direction of the president, and a refusal to perform the part assigned is regarded as a high offence.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . _laws yale coll._, , p. . . allowance of meat and drink; pension; benefaction settled for the maintenance of scholars in the english universities, not depending on the foundation.--_encyc._ what maintenance he from his friends receives, like _exhibition_ thou shalt have from me. _two gent. verona_, act. i. sc. . this word was formerly used in american colleges. i order and appoint ... ten pounds a year for one _exhibition_, to assist one pious young man.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . as to the extending the time of his _exhibitions_, we agree to it. --_ibid._, vol. i. p. . in the yearly "statement of the treasurer" of harvard college, the word is still retained. "a _school exhibition_," says a writer in the literary world, with reference to england, "is a stipend given to the head boys of a school, conditional on their proceeding to some particular college in one of the universities."--vol. xii. p. . exhibitioner. one who has a pension or allowance, granted for the encouragement of learning; one who enjoys an exhibition. used principally in the english universities. . one who performs a part at an exhibition in american colleges is sometimes called an _exhibitioner_. expel. in college government, to command to leave; to dissolve the connection of a student; to interdict him from further connection. --_webster_. expulsion. in college government, expulsion is the highest censure, and is a final separation from the college or university. --_coll. laws_. in the diary of mr. leverett, who was president of harvard college from to , is an account of the manner in which the punishment of expulsion was then inflicted. it is as follows:--"in the college hall the president, after morning prayers, the fellows, masters of art, and the several classes of undergraduates being present, after a full opening of the crimes of the delinquents, a pathetic admonition of them, and solemn obtestation and caution to the scholars, pronounced the sentence of expulsion, ordered their names to be rent off the tables, and them to depart the hall."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . in england, "an expelled man," says bristed, "is shut out from the learned professions, as well as from all colleges at either university."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _f_. facilities. the means by which the performance of anything is rendered easy.--_webster_. among students, a general name for what are technically called _ponies_ or translations. all such subsidiary helps in learning lessons, he classed ... under the opprobrious name of "_facilities_," and never scrupled to seize them as contraband goods.--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, p. lxxvii. faculty. in colleges, the masters and professors of the several sciences.--_johnson_. in america, the _faculty_ of a college or university consists of the president, professors, and tutors.--_webster_. the duties of the faculty are very extended. they have the general control and direction of the studies pursued in the college. they have cognizance of all offences committed by undergraduates, and it is their special duty to enforce the observance of all the laws and regulations for maintaining discipline, and promoting good order, virtue, piety, and good learning in the institution with which they are connected. the faculty hold meetings to communicate and compare their opinions and information, respecting the conduct and character of the students and the state of the college; to decide upon the petitions or requests which may be offered them by the members of college, and to consider and suggest such measures as may tend to the advancement of learning, and the improvement of the college. this assembly is called a _faculty-meeting_, a word very often in the mouths of students.--_coll. laws_. . one of the members or departments of a university. "in the origin of the university of paris," says brande, "the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) seem to have been the subjects of academic instruction. these constituted what was afterwards designated the faculty of arts. three other faculties--those of divinity, law, and medicine--were subsequently added. in all these four, lectures were given, and degrees conferred by the university. the four faculties were transplanted to oxford and cambridge, where they are still retained; although, in point of fact, the faculty of arts is the only one in which substantial instruction is communicated in the academical course."--_brande's dict._, art. faculty. in some american colleges, these four departments are established, and sometimes a fifth, the scientific, is added. fag. scotch, _faik_, to fail, to languish. ancient swedish, _wik-a_, cedere. to drudge; to labor to weariness; to become weary. . to study hard; to persevere in study. place me 'midst every toil and care, a hapless undergraduate still, to _fag_ at mathematics dire, &c. _gradus ad cantab._, p. . dee, the famous mathematician, appears to have _fagged_ as intensely as any man at cambridge. for three years, he declares, he only slept four hours a night, and allowed two hours for refreshment. the remaining eighteen hours were spent in study.--_ibid._, p. . how did ye toil, and _fagg_, and fume, and fret, and--what the bashful muse would blush to say. but, now, your painful tremors are all o'er, cloath'd in the glories of a full-sleev'd gown, ye strut majestically up and down, and now ye _fagg_, and now ye fear, no more! _gent. mag._, , p. . fag. a laborious drudge; a drudge for another. in colleges and schools, this term is applied to a boy of a lower form who is forced to do menial services for another boy of a higher form or class. but who are those three by-standers, that have such an air of submission and awe in their countenances? they are _fags_,--freshmen, poor fellows, called out of their beds, and shivering with fear in the apprehension of missing morning prayers, to wait upon their lords the sophomores in their midnight revellings.--_harvardiana_, vol. ii. p. . his _fag_ he had well-nigh killed by a blow. _wallenstein in bohn's stand. lib._, p. . a sixth-form schoolboy is not a little astonished to find his _fags_ becoming his masters.--_lond. quar. rev._, am. ed., vol. lxxiii, p. . under the title freshman servitude will be found as account of the manner in which members of that class were formerly treated in the older american colleges. . a diligent student, i.e. a _dig_. fag. time spent in, or period of, studying. the afternoon's _fag_ is a pretty considerable one, lasting from three till dark.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . after another _hard fag_ of a week or two, a land excursion would be proposed.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . fagging. laborious drudgery; the acting as a drudge for another at a college or school. . studying hard, equivalent to _digging, grubbing, &c._ thrice happy ye, through toil and dangers past, who rest upon that peaceful shore, where all your _fagging_ is no more, and gain the long-expected port at last. _gent. mag._, , p. . to _fagging_ i set to, therefore, with as keen a relish as ever alderman sat down to turtle.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . see what i pay for liberty to leave school early, and to figure in every ball-room in the country, and see the world, instead of _fagging_ at college.--_collegian's guide_, p. . fair harvard. at the celebration of the era of the second century from the origin of harvard college, which was held at cambridge, september th, , the following ode, written by the rev. samuel gilman, d.d., of charleston, s.c., was sung to the air, "believe me, if all those endearing young charms." "fair harvard! thy sons to thy jubilee throng, and with blessings surrender thee o'er, by these festival-rites, from the age that is past, to the age that is waiting before. o relic and type of our ancestors' worth, that hast long kept their memory warm! first flower of their wilderness! star of their night, calm rising through change and through storm! "to thy bowers we were led in the bloom of our youth, from the home of our free-roving years, when our fathers had warned, and our mothers had prayed, and our sisters had blest, through their tears. _thou_ then wert our parent,--the nurse of our souls,-- we were moulded to manhood by thee, till, freighted with treasure-thoughts, friendships, and hopes, thou didst launch us on destiny's sea. "when, as pilgrims, we come to revisit thy halls, to what kindlings the season gives birth! thy shades are more soothing, thy sunlight more dear, than descend on less privileged earth: for the good and the great, in their beautiful prime, through thy precincts have musingly trod, as they girded their spirits, or deepened the streams that make glad the fair city of god. "farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright! to thy children the lesson still give, with freedom to think, and with patience to bear, and for right ever bravely to live. let not moss-covered error moor _thee_ at its side, as the world on truth's current glides by; be the herald of light, and the bearer of love, till the stock of the puritans die." since the occasion on which this ode was sung, it has been the practice with the odists of class day at harvard college to write the farewell class song to the tune of "fair harvard," the name by which the irish air "believe me" has been adopted. the deep pathos of this melody renders it peculiarly appropriate to the circumstances with which it has been so happily connected, and from which it is to be hoped it may never be severed. see class day. fair lick. in the game of football, when the ball is fairly caught or kicked beyond the bounds, the cry usually heard, is _fair lick! fair lick!_ "_fair lick_!" he cried, and raised his dreadful foot, armed at all points with the ancestral boot. _harvardiana_, vol. iv. p. . see football. fantastics. at princeton college, an exhibition on commencement evening, of a number of students on horseback, fantastically dressed in masks, &c. fast. an epithet of one who is showy in dress, expensive or apparently so in his mode of living, and inclined to spree. formerly used exclusively among students; now of more general application. speaking of the student signification of the word, bristed remarks: "a _fast man_ is not necessarily (like the london fast man) a _rowing_ man, though the two attributes are often combined in the same person; he is one who dresses flashily, talks big, and spends, or affects to spend, money very freely."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the _fast_ man comes, with reeling tread, cigar in mouth, and swimming head. _ms. poem_, f.e. felton. fat. at princeton college, a letter with money or a draft is thus denominated. father or prÆlector. in the university of cambridge, eng., one of the fellows of a college, who attends all the examinations for the bachelor's degree, to see that justice is done to the candidates from his own college, who are at that time called his _sons_.--_gradus ad cantab._ the _fathers_ of the respective colleges, zealous for the credit of the societies of which they are the guardians, are incessantly employed in examining those students who appear most likely to contest the palm of glory with their _sons_.--_gent. mag._, , p. . february twenty-second. at shelby, centre, and bacon colleges, in kentucky, it is customary to select the best orators and speakers from the different literary societies to deliver addresses on the twenty-second of february, in commemoration of the birthday of washington. at bethany college, in virginia, this day is observed in a similar manner. feeze. usually spelled pheeze, q.v. under flop, another, but probably a wrong or obsolete, signification is given. fellow. a member of a corporation; a trustee. in the english universities, a residence at the college, engagement in instruction, and receiving therefor a stipend, are essential requisites to the character of a _fellow_. in american colleges, it is not necessary that a _fellow_ should be a resident, a stipendiary, or an instructor. in most cases the greater number of the _fellows of the corporation_ are non-residents, and have no part in the instruction at the college. with reference to the university of cambridge, eng., bristed remarks: "the fellows, who form the general body from which the other college officers are chosen, consist of those four or five bachelor scholars in each year who pass the best examination in classics, mathematics, and metaphysics. this examination being a severe one, and only the last of many trials which they have gone through, the inference is allowable that they are the most learned of the college graduates. they have a handsome income, whether resident or not; but if resident, enjoy the additional advantages of a well-spread table for nothing, and good rooms at a very low price. the only conditions of retaining their fellowships are, that they take orders after a certain time and remain unmarried. of those who do not fill college offices, some occupy themselves with private pupils; others, who have property of their own, prefer to live a life of literary leisure, like some of their predecessors, the monks of old. the eight oldest fellows at any time in residence, together with the master, have the government of the college vested in them."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . for some remarks on the word fellow, see under the title college. fellow-commoner. in the university of cambridge, england, _fellow-commoners_ are generally the younger sons of the nobility, or young men of fortune, and have the privilege of dining at the fellows' table, whence the appellation originated. "fellow-commoners," says bristed, "are 'young men of fortune,' as the _cambridge calendar_ and _cambridge guide_ have it, who, in consideration of their paying twice as much for everything as anybody else, are allowed the privilege of sitting at the fellows' table in hall, and in their seats at chapel; of wearing a gown with gold or silver lace, and a velvet cap with a metallic tassel; of having the first choice of rooms; and as is generally believed, and believed not without reason, of getting off with a less number of chapels per week. among them are included the honorables _not_ eldest sons,--only these wear a hat instead of the velvet cap, and are thence popularly known as _hat_ fellow-commoners."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . a _fellow-commoner_ at cambridge is equivalent to an oxford _gentleman-commoner_, and is in all respects similar to what in private schools and seminaries is called a _parlor boarder_. a fuller account of this, the first rank at the university, will be found in the gentleman's magazine, , p. , and in the gradus ad cantabrigiam, p. . "fellow-commoners have been nicknamed '_empty bottles_'! they have been called, likewise, 'useless members'! 'the licensed sons of ignorance.'"--_gradus ad cantab._ the fellow-commoners, alias _empty bottles_, (not so called because they've let out anything during the examination,) are then presented.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . in the old laws of harvard college we find the following: "none shall be admitted a _fellow-commoner_ unless he first pay thirteen pounds six and eight pence to the college. and every _fellow-commoner_ shall pay double tuition money. they shall have the privilege of dining and supping with the fellows at their table in the hall; they shall be excused from going on errands, and shall have the title of masters, and have the privilege of wearing their hats as the masters do; but shall attend all duties and exercises with the rest of their class, and be alike subject to the laws and government of the college," &c. the hon. paine wingate, a graduate of the class of , says in reference to this subject: "i never heard anything about _fellow-commoners_ in college excepting in this paragraph. i am satisfied there has been no such description of scholars at cambridge since i have known anything about the place."--_peirce's hist. harv. coll._, p. . in the appendix to "a sketch of the history of harvard college," by samuel a. eliot, is a memorandum, in the list of donations to that institution, under the date , to this effect. "mr. joseph brown, mr. edward page, mr. francis wainwright, _fellow-commoners_, gave each a silver goblet." mr. wainwright graduated in . the other two do not appear to have received a degree. all things considered, it is probable that this order, although introduced from the university of cambridge, england, into harvard college, received but few members, on account of the evil influence which such distinctions usually exert. fellow of the house. see under house. fellow, resident. at harvard college, the tutors were formerly called _resident fellows_.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . the _resident fellows_ were tutors to the classes, and instructed them in hebrew, "and led them through all the liberal arts before the four years were expired."--_harv. reg._, p. . fellowship. an establishment in colleges, for the maintenance of a fellow.--_webster_. in harvard college, tutors were formerly called fellows of the house or college, and their office, _fellowships_. in this sense that word is used in the following passage. joseph stevens was chosen "fellow of the college, or house," and as such was approved by that board [the corporation], in the language of the records, "to supply a vacancy in one of the _fellowships_ of the house."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . fellows' orchard. see tutors' pasture. femur. latin; _a thigh-bone_. at yale college, a _femur_ was formerly the badge of a medical bully. when hand in hand all joined in band, with clubs, umbrellas, _femurs_, declaring death and broken teeth 'gainst blacksmiths, cobblers, seamers. _the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . "one hundred valiant warriors, who (my captain bid me say) three _femurs_ wield, with one to fight, with two to run away, "wait in scull castle, to receive, with open gates, your men; their right arms nerved, their _femurs_ clenched, safe to protect ye then!"--_ibid._, p. . ferg. to lose the heat of excitement or passion; to become less angry, ardent; to cool. a correspondent from the university of vermont, where this word is used, says: "if a man gets angry, we 'let him _ferg_,' and he feels better." fess. probably abbreviated for confess. in some of the southern colleges, to fail in reciting; to silently request the teacher not to put farther queries. this word is in use among the cadets at west point, with the same meaning. and when you and i, and benny, and general jackson too, are brought before a final board our course of life to view, may we never "_fess_" on any "point," but then be told to go to join the army of the blest, with benny havens, o! _song, benny havens, o!_ fines. in many of the colleges in the united states it was formerly customary to impose fines upon the students as a punishment for non-compliance with the laws. the practice is now very generally abolished. about the middle of the eighteenth century, the custom of punishing by pecuniary mulets began, at harvard college, to be considered objectionable. "although," says quincy, "little regarded by the students, they were very annoying to their parents." a list of the fines which were imposed on students at that period presents a curious aggregate of offences and punishments. £ s. d. absence from prayers, tardiness at prayers, absence from professor's public lecture, tardiness at do. profanation of lord's day, not exceeding absence from public worship, tardiness at do. ill behavior at do. not exceeding going to meeting before bell-ringing, neglecting to repeat the sermon, irreverent behavior at prayers, or public divinity lectures, absence from chambers, &c., not exceeding not declaiming, not exceeding not giving up a declamation, not exceeding absence from recitation, not exceeding neglecting analyzing, not exceeding bachelors neglecting disputations, not exceeding respondents neglecting do. from s. d. to undergraduates out of town without leave, not exceeding undergraduates tarrying out of town without leave, not exceeding _per diem_, undergraduates tarrying out of town one week without leave, not exceeding undergraduates tarrying out of town one month without leave, not exceeding lodging strangers without leave, not exceeding entertaining persons of ill character, not exceeding going out of college without proper garb, not exceeding frequenting taverns, not exceeding profane cursing, not exceeding graduates playing cards, not exceeding undergraduates playing cards, not exceeding undergraduates playing any game for money, not exceeding selling and exchanging without leave, not exceeding lying, not exceeding opening door by pick-locks, not exceeding drunkenness, not exceeding liquors prohibited under penalty, not exceeding second offence, not exceeding keeping prohibited liquors, not exceeding sending for do. fetching do. going upon the top of the college, cutting off the lead, concealing the transgression of the th law,[ ] tumultuous noises, second offence, refusing to give evidence, rudeness at meals, butler and cook to keep utensils clean, not exceeding not lodging at their chambers, not exceeding sending freshmen in studying time, keeping guns, and going on skating, firing guns or pistols in college yard, fighting or hurting any person, not exceeding in , a committee, of which lieutenant-governor hutchinson was a member, was appointed to consider of some other method of punishing offenders. although they did not altogether abolish mulets, yet "they proposed that, in lieu of an increase of mulcts, absences without justifiable cause from any exercise of the college should subject the delinquent to warning, private admonition, exhortation to duty, and public admonition, with a notification to parents; when recitations had been omitted, performance of them should be exacted at some other time; and, by way of punishment for disorders, confinement, and the performance of exercises during its continuance, should be enjoined."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. pp. , . by the laws of , fines not exceeding one dollar were imposed by a professor or tutor, or the librarian; not exceeding two dollars, by the president; all above two dollars, by the president, professors, and tutors, at a meeting. upon this subject, with reference to harvard college, professor sidney willard remarks: "for a long period fines constituted the punishment of undergraduates for negligence in attendance at the exercises and in the performance of the lessons assigned to them. a fine was the lowest degree in the gradation of punishment. this mode of punishment or disapprobation was liable to objections, as a tax on the father rather than a rebuke of the son, (except it might be, in some cases, for the indirect moral influence produced upon the latter, operating on his filial feeling,) and as a mercenary exaction, since the money went into the treasury of the college. it was a good day for the college when this punishment through the purse was abandoned as a part of the system of punishments; which, not confined to neglect of study, had been extended also to a variety of misdemeanors more or less aggravated and aggravating."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. p. . "of fines," says president woolsey, in his historical discourse relating to yale college, "the laws are full, and other documents show that the laws did not sleep. thus there was in a fine of a penny for the absence of an undergraduate from prayers, and of a half-penny for tardiness or coming in after the introductory collect; of fourpence for absence from public worship; of from two to six pence for absence from one's chamber during the time of study; of one shilling for picking open a lock the first time, and two shillings the second; of two and sixpence for playing at cards or dice, or for bringing strong liquor into college; of one shilling for doing damage to the college, or jumping out of the windows,--and so in many other cases. "in the year , a somewhat unfair pamphlet was written, which gave occasion to several others in quick succession, wherein, amidst other complaints of president clap's administration, mention is made of the large amount of fines imposed upon students. the author, after mentioning that in three years' time over one hundred and seventy-two pounds of lawful money was collected in this way, goes on to add, that 'such an exorbitant collection by fines tempts one to suspect that they have got together a most disorderly set of young men training up for the service of the churches, or that they are governed and corrected chiefly by pecuniary punishments;--that almost all sins in that society are purged and atoned for by money.' he adds, with justice, that these fines do not fall on the persons of the offenders,--most of the students being minors,--but upon their parents; and that the practice takes place chiefly where there is the least prospect of working a reformation, since the thoughtless and extravagant, being the principal offenders against college law, would not lay it to heart if their frolics should cost them a little more by way of fine. he further expresses his opinion, that this way of punishing the children of the college has but little tendency to better their hearts and reform their manners; that pecuniary impositions act only by touching the shame or covetousness or necessities of those upon whom they are levied; and that fines had ceased to become dishonorable at college, while to appeal to the love of money was expelling one devil by another, and to restrain the necessitous by fear of fine would be extremely cruel and unequal. these and other considerations are very properly urged, and the same feeling is manifested in the laws by the gradual abolition of nearly all pecuniary mulcts. the practice, it ought to be added, was by no means peculiar to yale college, but was transferred, even in a milder form, from the colleges of england."--pp. , . in connection with this subject, it may not be inappropriate to mention the following occurrence, which is said to have taken place at harvard college. dr. ----, _in propria persona_, called upon a southern student one morning in the recitation-room to define logic. the question was something in this form. "mr. ----, what is logic?" ans. "logic, sir, is the art of reasoning." "ay; but i wish you to give the definition in the exact words of the _learned author_." "o, sir, he gives a very long, intricate, confused definition, with which i did not think proper to burden my memory." "are you aware who the learned author is?" "o, yes! your honor, sir." "well, then, i fine you one dollar for disrespect." taking out a two-dollar note, the student said, with the utmost _sang froid_, "if you will change this, i will pay you on the spot." "i fine you another dollar," said the professor, emphatically, "for repeated disrespect." "then 'tis just the change, sir," said the student, coolly. first-year men. in the university of cambridge, england, the title of _first-year men_, or _freshmen_, is given to students during the first year of their residence at the university. fish. at harvard college, to seek or gain the good-will of an instructor by flattery, caresses, kindness, or officious civilities; to curry favor. the german word _fischen_ has a secondary meaning, to get by cunning, which is similar to the english word _fish_. students speak of fishing for parts, appointments, ranks, marks, &c. i give to those that _fish for parts_, long, sleepless nights, and aching hearts, a little soul, a fawning spirit, with half a grain of plodding merit, which is, as heaven i hope will say, giving what's not my own away. _will of charles prentiss, in rural repository_, . who would let a tutor knave screw him like a guinea slave! who would _fish_ a fine to save! let him turn and flee.--_rebelliad_, p. . did i not promise those who _fished_ and pimped most, any part they wished?--_ibid._, p. . 't is all well here; though 't were a grand mistake to write so, should one "_fish_" for a "forty-eight!" _childe harvard_, p. . still achieving, still intriguing, learn to labor and to _fish_. _poem before y.h._, . the following passage explains more clearly, perhaps, the meaning of this word. "any attempt to raise your standing by ingratiating yourself with the instructors, will not only be useless, but dishonorable. of course, in your intercourse with the professors and tutors, you will not be wanting in that respect and courtesy which is due to them, both as your superiors and as gentlemen."--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . washington allston, who graduated at harvard college in the year , left a painting of a fishing scene, to be transmitted from class to class. it was in existence in the year , but has disappeared of late. fish, fisher. one who attempts to ingratiate himself with his instructor, thereby to obtain favor or advantage; one who curries favor. you besought me to respect my teachers, and to be attentive to my studies, though it shall procure me the odious title of a "_fisher_."--_monthly anthology_, boston, , vol. i. p. . fishing. the act performed by a _fisher_. the full force of this word is set forth in a letter from dr. popkin, a professor at harvard college, to his brother william, dated boston, october th, . "i am sensible that the good conduct which i have advised you, and which, i doubt not, you are inclined to preserve, may expose you to the opprobrious epithet, _fishing_. you undoubtedly understand, by this time, the meaning of that frightful term, which has done more damage in college than all the bad wine, and roasted pigs, that have ever fired the frenzy of genius! the meaning of it, in short, is nothing less than this, that every one who acts as a reasonable being in the various relations and duties of a scholar is using the basest means to ingratiate himself with the government, and seeking by mean compliances to purchase their honors and favors. at least, i thought this to be true when i was in the government. if times and manners are altered, i am heartily glad of it; but it will not injure you to hear the tales of former times. if a scholar appeared to perform his exercises to his best ability, if there were not a marked contempt and indifference in his manner, i would hear the whisper run round the class, _fishing_. if one appeared firm enough to perform an unpopular duty, or showed common civility to his instructors, who certainly wished him well, he was _fishing_. if he refused to join in some general disorder, he was insulted with _fishing_. if he did not appear to despise the esteem and approbation of his instructors, and to disclaim all the rewards of diligence and virtue, he was suspected of _fishing_. the fear of this suspicion or imputation has, i believe, perverted many minds which, from good and honorable motives, were better disposed."--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, pp. xxvi., xxvii. to those who've parts at exhibition, obtained by long, unwearied _fishing_, i say, to such unlucky wretches, i give, for wear, a brace of breeches. _will of charles prentiss, in rural repository_, . and, since his _fishing_ on the land was vain, to try his luck upon the azure main.--_class poem_, . whenever i needed advice or assistance, i did not hesitate, through any fear of the charge of what, in the college cant, was called "_fishing_," to ask it of dr. popkin.--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, p. ix. at dartmouth college, the electioneering for members of the secret societies was formerly called _fishing_. at the same institution, individuals in the senior class were said to be _fishing for appointments_, if they tried to gain the good-will of the faculty by any special means. fives. a kind of play with a ball against the side of a building, resembling tennis; so named, because three _fives_ or _fifteen_ are counted to the game.--_smart_. a correspondent, writing of centre college, ky., says: "fives was a game very much in vogue, at which the president would often take a hand, and while the students would play for ice-cream or some other refreshment, he would never fail to come in for his share." fizzle. halliwell says: "the half-hiss, half-sigh of an animal." in many colleges in the united states, this word is applied to a bad recitation, probably from the want of distinct articulation which usually attends such performances. it is further explained in the yale banger, november , : "this figure of a wounded snake is intended to represent what in technical language is termed a _fizzle_. the best judges have decided, that to get just one third of the meaning right constitutes a _perfect fizzle_." with a mind and body so nearly at rest, that naught interrupted my inmost repose save cloudy reminiscences of a morning "_fizzle_" and an afternoon "flunk," my tranquillity was sufficiently enviable.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . here he could _fizzles_ mark without a sigh, and see orations unregarded die. _the tomahawk_, nov., . not a wail was heard, or a "_fizzle's_" mild sigh, as his corpse o'er the pavement we hurried. _the gallinipper_, dec., . at princeton college, the word _blue_ is used with _fizzle_, to render it intensive; as, he made a _blue fizzle_, he _fizzled blue_. fizzle. to fail in reciting; to recite badly. a correspondent from williams college says: "flunk is the common word when some unfortunate man makes an utter failure in recitation. he _fizzles_ when he stumbles through at last." another from union writes: "if you have been lazy, you will probably _fizzle_." a writer in the yale literary magazine thus humorously defines this word: "_fizzle_. to rise with modest reluctance, to hesitate often, to decline finally; generally, to misunderstand the question."--vol. xiv. p. . my dignity is outraged at beholding those who _fizzle_ and flunk in my presence tower above me.--_the yale banger_, oct. , . i "skinned," and "_fizzled_" through. _presentation day songs_, june , . the verb _to fizzle out_, which is used at the west, has a little stronger signification, viz. to be quenched, extinguished; to prove a failure.--_bartlett's dict. americanisms_. the factious and revolutionary action of the fifteen has interrupted the regular business of the senate, disgraced the actors, and _fizzled out_.--_cincinnati gazette_. . to cause one to fail in reciting. said of an instructor. _fizzle_ him tenderly, bore him with care, fitted so slenderly, tutor, beware. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xiii. p. . fizzling. reciting badly; the act of making a poor recitation. of this word, a writer jocosely remarks: "_fizzling_ is a somewhat _free_ translation of an intricate sentence; proving a proposition in geometry from a wrong figure. fizzling is caused sometimes by a too hasty perusal of the pony, and generally by a total loss of memory when called upon to recite."--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . weather drizzling, freshmen _fizzling_. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . flam. at the university of vermont, in student phrase, to _flam_ is to be attentive, at any time, to any lady or company of ladies. e.g. "he spends half his time _flamming_" i.e. in the society of the other sex. flash-in-the-pan. a student is said to make a _flash-in-the-pan_ when he commences to recite brilliantly, and suddenly fails; the latter part of such a recitation is a fizzle. the metaphor is borrowed from a gun, which, after being primed, loaded, and ready to be discharged, _flashes in the pan_. floor. among collegians, to answer such questions as may be propounded concerning a given subject. then olmsted took hold, but he couldn't make it go, for we _floored_ the bien. examination. _presentation day songs_, yale coll., june , . to _floor a paper_, is to answer every question in it.--_bristed_. somehow i nearly _floored the paper_, and came out feeling much more comfortable than when i went in.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . our best classic had not time to _floor_ the _paper_.--_ibid._, p. . flop. a correspondent from the university of vermont writes: "any 'cute' performance by which a man is sold [deceived] is a _good flop_, and, by a phrase borrowed from the ball ground, is 'rightly played.' the discomfited individual declares that they 'are all on a side,' and gives up, or 'rolls over' by giving his opponent 'gowdy.'" "a man writes cards during examination to 'feeze the profs'; said cards are 'gumming cards,' and he _flops_ the examination if he gets a good mark by the means." one usually _flops_ his marks by feigning sickness. flop a twenty. at the university of vermont, to _flop a twenty_ is to make a perfect recitation, twenty being the maximum mark for scholarship. flummux. any failure is called a _flummux_. in some colleges the word is particularly applied to a poor recitation. at williams college, a failure on the play-ground is called a _flummux_. flummux. to fail; to recite badly. mr. bartlett, in his dictionary of americanisms, has the word _flummix_, to be overcome; to be frightened; to give way to. perhaps parson hyme didn't put it into pokerville for two mortal hours; and perhaps pokerville didn't mizzle, wince, and finally _flummix_ right beneath him.--_field, drama in pokerville_. flunk. this word is used in some american colleges to denote a complete failure in recitation. this, o, [signifying neither beginning nor end,] tutor h---- said meant a perfect _flunk_.--_the yale banger_, nov. , . i've made some twelve or fourteen _flunks_.--_the gallinipper_, dec. . and that bold man must bear a _flunk_, or die, who, when john pleased be captious, dared reply. _yale tomahawk_, nov. . the sabbath dawns upon the poor student burdened with the thought of the lesson, or _flunk_ of the morrow morning.--_ibid._, feb. . he thought ... first of his distant home and parents, tunc, of tutors' note-books, and the morrow's _flunk_. _ibid._, feb. . in moody meditation sunk, reflecting on my future _flunk_. _songs of yale_, , p. . and so, in spite of scrapes and _flunks_, i'll have a sheep-skin too. _presentation day songs_, june , . some amusing anecdotes are told, such as the well-known one about the lofty dignitary's macaronic injunction, "exclude canem, et shut the door"; and another of a tutor's dismal _flunk_ on faba.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . flunk. to make a complete failure when called on to recite. a writer in the yale literary magazine defines it, "to decline peremptorily, and then to whisper, 'i had it all, except that confounded little place.'"--vol. xiv. p. . they know that a man who has _flunked_, because too much of a genius to get his lesson, is not in a state to appreciate joking. --_amherst indicator_, vol. i. p. . nestor was appointed to deliver a poem, but most ingloriously _flunked_.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . the phrase _to flunk out_, which bartlett, in his dictionary of americanisms, defines, "to retire through fear, to back out," is of the same nature as the above word. why, little one, you must be cracked, if you _flunk out_ before we begin.--_j.c. neal_. it was formerly used in some american colleges as is now the word _flunk_. we must have, at least, as many subscribers as there are students in college, or "_flunk out."--the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . flunkey. in college parlance, one who makes a complete failure at recitation; one who _flunks_. i bore him safe through horace, saved him from the _flunkey's_ doom. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xx. p. . flunking. failing completely in reciting. _flunking_ so gloomily, crushed by contumely. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xiii. p. . we made our earliest call while the man first called up in the division-room was deliberately and gracefully "_flunking_."--_ibid._, vol. xiv. p. . see what a spot a _flunking_ soph'more made! _yale gallinipper_, nov. . flunkology. a farcical word, designed to express the science _of flunking_. the ---- scholarship, is awarded to the student in each freshman class who passes the poorest examination in _flunkology_.--_burlesque catalogue_, yale coll., - , p. . football. for many years, the game of football has been the favorite amusement at some of the american colleges, during certain seasons of the year. at harvard and yale, it is customary for the sophomore class to challenge the freshmen to a trial game, soon after their entrance into college. the interest excited on this occasion is always very great, the seniors usually siding with the former, and the juniors with the latter class. the result is generally in favor of the sophomores. college poets and prose-writers have often chosen the game of football as a topic on which to exercise their descriptive powers. one invokes his muse, in imitation of a great poet, as follows:-- "the freshmen's wrath, to sophs the direful spring of shins unnumbered bruised, great goddess, sing!" another, speaking of the size of the ball in ancient times compared with what it is at present, says:-- "a ball like this, so monstrous and so hard, six eager freshmen scarce could kick a yard!" further compositions on this subject are to be found in the harvard register, harvardiana, yale banger, &c. see wrestling-match. forensic. a written argument, maintaining either the affirmative or the negative side of a question. in harvard college, the two senior classes are required to write _forensics_ once in every four weeks, on a subject assigned by the professor of moral philosophy; these they read before him and the division of the class to which they belong, on appointed days. it was formerly customary for the teacher to name those who were to write on the affirmative and those on the negative, but it is now left optional with the student which side he will take. this word was originally used as an adjective, and it was usual to speak of a forensic dispute, which has now been shortened into _forensic_. for every unexcused omission of a _forensic_, or of reading a _forensic_, a deduction shall be made of the highest number of marks to which that exercise is entitled. seventy-two is the highest mark for _forensics_.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, . what with themes, _forensics_, letters, memoranda, notes on lectures, verses, and articles, i find myself considerably hurried.--_collegian_, , p. . when i call to mind _forensics_ numberless, with arguments so grave and erudite, i never understood their force myself, but trusted that my sage instructor would. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . fork on. at hamilton college, _to fork on_, to appropriate to one's self. forts. at jefferson and at washington colleges in pennsylvania, the boarding-houses for the students are called _forts_. foundation. a donation or legacy appropriated to support an institution, and constituting a permanent fund, usually for a charitable purpose.--_webster_. in america it is also applied to a donation or legacy appropriated especially to maintain poor and deserving, or other students, at a college. in the selection of candidates for the various beneficiary _foundations_, the preference will be given to those who are of exemplary conduct and scholarship.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . scholars on this _foundation_ are to be called "scholars of the house."--_sketches of yale coll._, p. . foundationer. one who derives support from the funds or foundation of a college or a great school.--_jackson_. this word is not in use in the _united states_. see beneficiary. foundation scholar. at the university of cambridge, eng., a scholar who enjoys certain privileges, and who is of that class whence fellows are taken. of the scholars of this name, bristed remarks: "the table nearer the door is filled by students in the ordinary undergraduate blue gown; but from the better service of their table, and perhaps some little consequential air of their own, it is plain that they have something peculiar to boast of. they are the foundation scholars, from whom the future fellows are to be chosen, in the proportion of about one out of three. their scholarships are gained by examination in the second or third year, and entitle them to a pecuniary allowance from the college, and also to their commons gratis (these latter subject to certain attendance at and service in chapel), a first choice of rooms, and some other little privileges, of which they are somewhat proud, and occasionally they look as if conscious that some don may be saying to a chance visitor at the high table, 'those over yonder are the scholars, the best men of their year.'"--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . fox. in the german universities, a student during the first half-year is called a fox (fuchs), the same as freshman. to this the epithet _nasty_ is sometimes added. on this subject, howitt remarks: "on entering the university, he becomes a _kameel_,--a camel. this happy transition-state of a few weeks gone by, he comes forth finally, on entering a chore, a _fox_, and runs joyfully into the new burschen life. during the first _semester_ or half-year, he is a gold fox, which means, that he has _foxes_, or rich gold in plenty yet; or he is a _crass-fucks_, or fat fox, meaning that he yet swells or puffs himself up with gold."--_student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . "halloo there, herdman, _fox_!" yelled another lusty tippler, and herdman, thus appealed to, arose and emptied the contents of his glass.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . at the same moment, a door at the end of the hall was thrown open, and a procession of new-comers, or _nasty foxes_, as they are called in the college dialect, entered two by two, looking wild, and green, and foolish.--_longfellow's hyperion_, p. . see also in the last-mentioned work the fox song. freeze. a correspondent from williams college writes: "but by far the most expressive word in use among us is _freeze_. the meaning of it might be felt, if, some cold morning, you would place your tender hand upon some frosty door-latch; it would be a striking specimen on the part of the door-latch of what we mean by _freeze_. thus we _freeze_ to apples in the orchards, to fellows whom we electioneer for in our secret societies, and alas! some even go so far as to _freeze_ to the ladies." "now, boys," said bob, "_freeze on_," and at it they went.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . fresh. an abbreviation for freshman or freshmen; freshes is sometimes used for the plural. when sophs met _fresh_, power met opposing power. _harv. reg._, p. . the sophs did nothing all the first fortnight but torment the _fresh_, as they call us.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . listen to the low murmurings of some annihilated _fresh_ upon the delta.--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, . fresh. newly come; likewise, awkward, like a freshman.--_grad. ad cantab._ for their behavior at table, spitting and coughing, and speaking loud, was counted uncivil in any but a gentleman; as we say in the university, that nothing is _fresh_ in a senior, and to him it was a glory.--_archæol. atticæ_, edit. oxon., , b. vi. freshman, _pl._ freshmen. in england, a student during his first year's residence at the university. in america, one who belongs to the youngest of the four classes in college, called the _freshman class_.--_webster_. freshman. pertaining to a freshman, or to the class called _freshman_. freshman, butler's. at harvard and yale colleges, a freshman, formerly hired by the butler, to perform certain duties pertaining to his office, was called by this name. the butler may be allowed a freshman, to do the foregoing duties, and to deliver articles to the students from the buttery, who shall be appointed by the president and tutors, and he shall be allowed the same provision in the hall as the waiters; and he shall not be charged in the steward's quarter-bills under the heads of steward and instruction and sweepers, catalogue and dinner.--_laws of harv. coll._, , p. . with being _butler's freshman_, and ringing the bell the first year, waiter the three last, and keeping school in the vacations, i rubbed through.--_the algerine captive_, walpole, , vol. i. p. . see butler, buttery. freshman club. at hamilton college, it is customary for the new sophomore class to present to the freshmen at the commencement of the first term a heavy cudgel, six feet long, of black walnut, brass bound, with a silver plate inscribed "_freshman club_." the club is given to the one who can hold it out at arm's length the longest time, and the presentation is accompanied with an address from one of the sophomores in behalf of his class. he who receives the club is styled the "leader." the "leader" having been declared, after an appropriate speech from a freshman appointed for that purpose, "the class," writes a correspondent, "form a procession, and march around the college yard, the leader carrying the club before them. a trial is then made by the class of the virtues of the club, on the chapel door." freshman, college. in harvard university, a member of the freshman class, whose duties are enumerated below. "on saturday, after the exercises, any student not specially prohibited may go out of town. if the students thus going out of town fail to return so as to be present at evening prayers, they must enter their names with the _college freshman_ within the hour next preceding the evening study bell; and all students who shall be absent from evening prayers on saturday must in like manner enter their names."--_statutes and laws of the univ. in cam., mass._, , p. . the _college freshman_ lived in no. , massachusetts hall, and was commonly called the _book-keeper_. the duties of this office are now performed by one of the proctors. freshmanhood. the state of a _freshman_, or the time in which one is a freshman, which is in duration a year. but yearneth not thy laboring heart, o tom, for those dear hours of simple _freshmanhood_? _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . when to the college i came, in the first dear day of _my freshhood_, like to the school we had left i imagined the new situation. _ibid._, vol. iii. p. . freshmanic. pertaining to a _freshman_; resembling a _freshman_, or his condition. the junior class had heard of our miraculous doings, and asserted with that peculiar dignity which should at all times excite terror and awe in the _freshmanic_ breast, that they would countenance no such proceedings.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . i do not pine for those _freshmanic_ days.--_ibid._, vol. iii. p. . freshman, parietal. in harvard college, the member of the freshman class who gives notice to those whom the chairman of the parietal committee wishes to see, is known by the name of the _parietal freshman_. for his services he receives about forty dollars per annum, and the rent of his room. freshman, president's. a member of the freshman class who performs the official errands of the president, for which he receives the same compensation as the parietal freshman. then bibo kicked his carpet thrice, which brought his _freshman_ in a trice. "you little rascal! go and call the persons mentioned in this scroll." the fellow, hearing, scarcely feels the ground, so quickly fly his heels. _rebelliad_, p. . freshman, regent's. in harvard college, a member of the freshman class whose duties are given below. "when any student shall return to town, after having had leave of absence for one night or more, or after any vacation, he shall apply to the _regent's freshman_, at his room, to enter the time of his return; and shall tarry till he see it entered. "the _regent's freshman_ is not charged under the heads of steward, instruction, sweepers, catalogue, and dinner."--_laws of harv. coll._, , pp. , . this office is now abolished. freshman's bible. among collegians, the name by which the body of laws, the catalogue, or the calendar of a collegiate institution is often designated. the significancy of the word _bible_ is seen, when the position in which the laws are intended to be regarded is considered. the _freshman_ is supposed to have studied and to be more familiar with the laws than any one else, hence the propriety of using his name in this connection. a copy of the laws are usually presented to each student on his entrance into college. every year there issues from the warehouse of messrs. deighton, the publishers to the university of cambridge, an octavo volume, bound in white canvas, and of a very periodical and business-like appearance. among the undergraduates it is commonly known by the name of the "_freshman's bible_,"--the public usually ask for the "university calendar."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . see college bible. freshman servitude. the custom which formerly prevailed in the older american colleges of allowing the members of all the upper classes to send freshmen upon errands, and in other ways to treat them as inferiors, appears at the present day strange and almost unaccountable. that our forefathers had reasons which they deemed sufficient, not only for allowing, but sanctioning, this subjection, we cannot doubt; but what these were, we are not able to know from any accounts which have come down to us from the past. "on attending prayers the first evening," says one who graduated at harvard college near the close of the last century, "no sooner had the president pronounced the concluding 'amen,' than one of the sophomores sung out, 'stop, freshmen, and hear the customs read.'" an account of these customs is given in president quincy's history of harvard university, vol. ii. p. . it is entitled, "the ancient customs of harvard college, established by the government of it." " . no freshman shall wear his hat in the college yard, unless it rains, hails, or snows, provided he be on foot, and have not both hands full. " . no undergraduate shall wear his hat in the college yard when any of the governors of the college are there; and no bachelor shall wear his hat when the president is there. " . freshmen are to consider all the other classes as their seniors. " . no freshman shall speak to a senior[ ] with his hat on, or have it on in a senior's chamber, or in his own, if a senior be there. " . all the undergraduates shall treat those in the government of the college with respect and deference; particularly they shall not be seated without leave in their presence; they shall be uncovered when they speak to them or are spoken to by them. " . all freshmen (except those employed by the immediate government of the college) shall be obliged to go on any errand (except such as shall be judged improper by some one in the government of the college) for any of his seniors, graduates or undergraduates, at any time, except in studying hours, or after nine o'clock in the evening. " . a senior sophister has authority to take a freshman from a sophomore, a middle bachelor from a junior sophister, a master from a senior sophister, and any governor of the college from a master. " . every freshman before he goes for the person who takes him away (unless it be one in the government of the college) shall return and inform the person from whom he is taken. " . no freshman, when sent on an errand, shall make any unnecessary delay, neglect to make due return, or go away till dismissed by the person who sent him. " . no freshman shall be detained by a senior, when not actually employed on some suitable errand. " . no freshman shall be obliged to observe any order of a senior to come to him, or go on any errand for him, unless he be wanted immediately. " . no freshman, when sent on an errand, shall tell who he is going for, unless he be asked; nor be obliged to tell what he is going for, unless asked by a governor of the college. " . when any person knocks at a freshman's door, except in studying time, he shall immediately open the door, without inquiring who is there. " . no scholar shall call up or down, to or from, any chamber in the college. " . no scholar shall play football or any other game in the college yard, or throw any thing across the yard. " . the freshmen shall furnish bats, balls, and footballs for the use of the students, to be kept at the buttery.[ ] " . every freshman shall pay the butler for putting up his name in the buttery. " . strict attention shall be paid by all the students to the common rules of cleanliness, decency, and politeness. "the sophomores shall publish these customs to the freshmen in the chapel, whenever ordered by any in the government of the college; at which time the freshmen are enjoined to keep their places in their seats, and attend with decency to the reading." at the close of a manuscript copy of the laws of harvard college, transcribed by richard waldron, a graduate of the class of , when a freshman, are recorded the following regulations, which differ from those already cited, not only in arrangement, but in other respects. college customs, anno - . " . no freshman shall ware his hat in the college yard except it rains, snows, or hails, or he be on horse back or haith both hands full. " . no freshman shall ware his hat in his seniors chamber, or in his own if his senior be there. " . no freshman shall go by his senior, without taking his hat of if it be on. " . no freshman shall intrude into his seniors company. " . no freshman shall laugh in his seniors face. " . no freshman shall talk saucily to his senior, or speak to him with his hat on. " . no freshman shall ask his senior an impertinent question. " . freshmen are to take notice that a senior sophister can take a freshman from a sophimore,[ ] a middle batcelour from a junior sophister, a master from a senior sophister, and a fellow[ ] from a master. " . freshmen are to find the rest of the scholars with bats, balls, and foot balls. " . freshmen must pay three shillings a peice to the butler to have there names set up in the buttery. " . no freshman shall loiter by the [way] when he is sent of an errand, but shall make hast and give a direct answer when he is asked who he is going [for]. no freshman shall use lying or equivocation to escape going of an errand. " . no freshman shall tell who [he] is going [for] except he be asked, nor for what except he be asked by a fellow. " . no freshman shall go away when he haith been sent of an errand before he be dismissed, which may be understood by saying, it is well, i thank you, you may go, or the like. " . when a freshman knocks at his seniors door he shall tell [his] name if asked who. " . when anybody knocks at a freshmans door, he shall not aske who is there, but shall immediately open the door. " . no freshman shall lean at prayrs but shall stand upright. " . no freshman shall call his classmate by the name of freshmen. " . no freshman shall call up or down to or from his seniors chamber or his own. " . no freshman shall call or throw anything across the college yard. " . no freshman shall mingo against the college wall, nor go into the fellows cus john.[ ] " . freshmen may ware there hats at dinner and supper, except when they go to receive there commons of bread and bear. " . freshmen are so to carry themselves to there seniors in all respects so as to be in no wise saucy to them, and who soever of the freshmen shall brake any of these customs shall be severely punished." another manuscript copy of these singular regulations bears date september, , and is entitled, "the customs of harvard college, which if the freshmen don't observe and obey, they shall be severely punished if they have heard them read." " . no freshman shall wear his hat in the college yard, except it rains, hails, or snows, he be on horseback, or hath both hands full. " . no freshman shall pass by his senior, without pulling his hat off. " . no freshman shall be saucy to his senior, or speak to him with his hat on. " . no freshman shall laugh in his senior's face. " . no freshman shall ask his senior any impertinent question. " . no freshman shall intrude into his senior's company. " . freshmen are to take notice that a senior sophister can take a freshman from a sophimore, a master from a senior sophister, and a fellow from a master. " . when a freshman is sent of an errand, he shall not loiter by the way, but shall make haste, and give a direct answer if asked who he is going for. " . no freshman shall tell who he is a going for (unless asked), or what he is a going for, unless asked by a fellow. " . no freshman, when he is going of errands, shall go away, except he be dismissed, which is known by saying, 'it is well,' 'you may go,' 'i thank you,' or the like. " . freshman are to find the rest of the scholars with bats, balls, and footballs. " . freshmen shall pay three shillings to the butler to have their names set up in the buttery. " . no freshman shall wear his hat in his senior's chambers, nor in his own if his senior be there. " . when anybody knocks at a freshman's door, he shall not ask who is there, but immediately open the door. " . when a freshman knocks at his senior's door, he shall tell his name immediately. " . no freshman shall call his classmate by the name of freshman. " . no freshman shall call up or down, to or from his senior's chamber or his own. " . no freshman shall call or throw anything across the college yard, nor go into the fellows' cuz-john. " . no freshman shall mingo against the college walls. " . freshmen are to carry themselves, in all respects, as to be in no wise saucy to their seniors. " . whatsoever freshman shall break any of these customs, he shall be severely punished." a written copy of these regulations in latin, of a very early date, is still extant. they appear first in english, in the fourth volume of the immediate government books, , p. . the two following laws--one of which was passed soon after the establishment of the college, the other in the year --seem to have been the foundation of these rules. "nulli ex scholaribus senioribus, solis tutoribus et collegii sociis exceptis, recentem sive juniorem, ad itinerandum, aut ad aliud quodvis faciendum, minis, verberibus, vel aliis modis impellere licebit. et siquis non gradatus in hanc legem peccaverit, castigatione corporali, expulsione, vel aliter, prout præsidi cum sociis visum fuerit punietur."--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. p. . "none belonging to the college, except the president, fellows, professors, and tutors, shall by threats or blows compel a freshman or any undergraduate to any duty or obedience; and if any undergraduate shall offend against this law, he shall be liable to have the privilege of sending freshmen taken from him by the president and tutors, or be degraded or expelled, according to the aggravation of the offence. neither shall any senior scholars, graduates or undergraduates, send any freshman on errands in studying hours, without leave from one of the tutors, his own tutor if in college."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, app., p. . that this privilege of sending freshmen on errands was abused in some cases, we see from an account of "a meeting of the corporation in cambridge, march th, ," at which time notice was given that "great complaints have been made and proved against ----, for his abusive carriage, in requiring some of the freshmen to go upon his private errands, and in striking the said freshmen." in the year , "the overseers having repeatedly recommended abolishing the custom of allowing the upper classes to send freshmen on errands, and the making of a law exempting them from such services, the corporation voted, that, 'after deliberate consideration and weighing all circumstances, they are not able to project any plan in the room of this long and ancient custom, that will not, in their opinion, be attended with equal, if not greater, inconveniences.'" it seems, however, to have fallen into disuse, for a time at least, after this period; for in june, , "the retaining men or boys to perform the services for which freshmen had been heretofore employed," was declared to be a growing evil, and was prohibited by the corporation.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. ; vol. ii. pp. , . the upper classes being thus forbidden to employ persons not connected with the college to wait upon them, the services of freshmen were again brought into requisition, and they were not wholly exempted from menial labor until after the year . another service which the freshmen were called on to perform, was once every year to shake the carpets of the library and philosophy chamber in the chapel. those who refused to comply with these regulations were not allowed to remain in college, as appears from the following circumstance, which happened about the year . a young man from the west indies, of wealthy and highly respectable parents, entered freshman, and soon after, being ordered by a member of one of the upper classes to go upon an errand for him, refused, at the same time saying, that if he had known it was the custom to require the lower class to wait on the other classes, he would have brought a slave with him to perform his share of these duties. in the common phrase of the day, he was _hoisted_, i.e. complained of to a tutor, and on being told that he could not remain at college if he did not comply with its regulations, he took up his connections and returned home. with reference to some of the observances which were in vogue at harvard college in the year , the recollections of professor sidney willard are these:-- "it was the practice, at the time of my entrance at college, for the sophomore class, by a member selected for the purpose, to communicate to the freshmen, in the chapel, 'the customs,' so called; the freshmen being required to 'keep their places in their seats, and attend with decency to the reading.' these customs had been handed down from remote times, with some modifications not essentially changing them. not many days after our seats were assigned to us in the chapel, we were directed to remain after evening prayers and attend to the reading of the customs; which direction was accordingly complied with, and they were read and listened to with decorum and gravity. whether the ancient customs of outward respect, which forbade a freshman 'to wear his hat in the college yard, unless it rains, hails, or snows, provided he be on foot, and have not both hands full,' as if the ground on which he trod and the atmosphere around him were consecrated, and the article which extends the same prohibition to all undergraduates, when any of the governors of the college are in the yard, were read, i cannot say; but i think they were not; for it would have disturbed that gravity which i am confident was preserved during the whole reading. these prescripts, after a long period of obsolescence, had become entirely obsolete. "the most degrading item in the list of customs was that which made freshmen subservient to all the other classes; which obliged those who were not employed by the immediate government of the college to go on any errand, not judged improper by an officer of the government, or in study hours, for any of the other classes, the senior having the prior right to the service.... the privilege of claiming such service, and the obligation, on the other hand, to perform it, doubtless gave rise to much abuse, and sometimes to unpleasant conflict. a senior having a claim to the service of a freshman prior to that of the classes below them, it had become a practice not uncommon, for a freshman to obtain a senior, to whom, as a patron and friend, he acknowledged and avowed a permanent service due, and whom he called _his_ senior by way of eminence, thus escaping the demands that might otherwise be made upon him for trivial or unpleasant errands. the ancient custom was never abolished by authority, but died with the change of feeling; so that what might be demanded as a right came to be asked as a favor, and the right was resorted to only as a sort of defensive weapon, as a rebuke of a supposed impertinence, or resentment of a real injury."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. pp. , . the following account of this system, as it formerly obtained at yale college, is from president woolsey's historical discourse before the graduates of that institution, aug. , :-- "another remarkable particular in the old system here was the servitude of freshmen,--for such it really deserved to be called. the new-comers--as if it had been to try their patience and endurance in a novitiate before being received into some monastic order--were put into the hands of seniors, to be reproved and instructed in manners, and were obliged to run upon errands for the members of all the upper classes. and all this was very gravely meant, and continued long in use. the seniors considered it as a part of the system to initiate the ignorant striplings into the college system, and performed it with the decorum of dancing-masters. and, if the freshmen felt the burden, the upper classes who had outlived it, and were now reaping the advantages of it, were not willing that the custom should die in their time. "the following paper, printed i cannot tell when, but as early as the year , gives information to the freshmen in regard to their duty of respect towards the officers, and towards the older students. it is entitled 'freshman laws,' and is perhaps part of a book of customs which was annually read for the instruction of new-comers. "'it being the duty of the seniors to teach freshmen the laws, usages, and customs of the college, to this end they are empowered to order the whole freshman class, or any particular member of it, to appear, in order to be instructed or reproved, at such time and place as they shall appoint; when and where every freshman shall attend, answer all proper questions, and behave decently. the seniors, however, are not to detain a freshman more than five minutes after study bell, without special order from the president, professor, or tutor. "'the freshmen, as well as all other undergraduates, are to be uncovered, and are forbidden to wear their hats (unless in stormy weather) in the front door-yard of the president's or professor's house, or within ten rods of the person of the president, eight rods of the professor, and five rods of a tutor. "'the freshmen are forbidden to wear their hats in college yard (except in stormy weather, or when they are obliged to carry something in their hands) until may vacation; nor shall they afterwards wear them in college or chapel. "'no freshman shall wear a gown, or walk with a cane, or appear out of his room without being completely dressed, and with his hat; and whenever a freshman either speaks to a superior or is spoken to by one, he shall keep his hat off until he is bidden to put it on. a freshman shall not play with any members of an upper class, without being asked; nor is he permitted to use any acts of familiarity with them, even in study time. "'in case of personal insult, a junior may call up a freshman and reprehend him. a sophomore, in like case, must obtain leave from a senior, and then he may discipline a freshman, not detaining him more than five minutes, after which the freshman may retire, even without being dismissed, but must retire in a respectful manner. "'freshmen are obliged to perform all reasonable errands for any superior, always returning an account of the same to the person who sent them. when called, they shall attend and give a respectful answer; and when attending on their superior, they are not to depart until regularly dismissed. they are responsible for all damage done to anything put into their hands by way of errand. they are not obliged to go for the undergraduates in study time, without permission obtained from the authority; nor are they obliged to go for a graduate out of the yard in study time. a senior may take a freshman from a sophimore, a bachelor from a junior, and a master from a senior. none may order a freshman in one play time, to do an errand in another. "'when a freshman is near a gate or door belonging to college or college yard, he shall look around and observe whether any of his superiors are coming to the same; and if any are coming within three rods, he shall not enter without a signal to proceed. in passing up or down stairs, or through an entry or any other narrow passage, if a freshman meets a superior, he shall stop and give way, leaving the most convenient side,--if on the stairs, the banister side. freshmen shall not run in college yard, or up or down stairs, or call to any one through a college window. when going into the chamber of a superior, they shall knock at the door, and shall leave it as they find it, whether open or shut. upon entering the chamber of a superior, they shall not speak until spoken to; they shall reply modestly to all questions, and perform their messages decently and respectfully. they shall not tarry in a superior's room, after they are dismissed, unless asked to sit. they shall always rise whenever a superior enters or leaves the room where they are, and not sit in his presence until permitted. "'these rules are to be observed, not only about college, but everywhere else within the limits of the city of new haven.' "this is certainly a very remarkable document, one which it requires some faith to look on as originating in this land of universal suffrage, in the same century with the declaration of independence. he who had been moulded and reduced into shape by such a system might soon become expert in the punctilios of the court of louis the fourteenth. "this system, however, had more tenacity of life than might be supposed. in we still find it laid down as the senior's duty to inspect the manners and customs of the lower classes, and especially of the freshmen; and as the duty of the latter to do any proper errand, not only for the authorities of the college, but also, within the limits of one mile, for resident graduates and for the two upper classes. by degrees the old usage sank down so far, that what the laws permitted was frequently abused for the purpose of playing tricks upon the inexperienced freshmen; and then all evidence of its ever having been current disappeared from the college code. the freshmen were formally exempted from the duty of running upon errands in ."--pp. - . among the "laws of yale college," published in , appears the following regulation: "every freshman is obliged to do any proper errand or message, required of him by any one in an upper class, which if he shall refuse to do, he shall be punished. provided that in study time no graduate may send a freshman out of college yard, or an undergraduate send him anywhere at all without liberty first obtained of the president or tutor."--pp. , . in a copy of the "laws" of the above date, which formerly belonged to amasa paine, who entered the freshman class at yale in , is to be found a note in pencil appended to the above regulation, in these words: "this law was annulled when dr. [matthew] marvin, dr. m.j. lyman, john d. dickinson, william bradley, and amasa paine were classmates, and [they] claimed the honor of abolishing it." the first three were graduated at yale in the class of ; bradley was graduated at the same college in and paine, after spending three years at yale, was graduated at harvard college in the class of . as a part of college discipline, the upper classes were sometimes deprived of the privilege of employing the services of freshmen. the laws on this subject were these:-- "if any scholar shall write or publish any scandalous libel about the president, a fellow, professor, or tutor, or shall treat any one of them with any reproachful or reviling language, or behave obstinately, refractorily, or contemptuously towards either of them, or be guilty of any kind of contempt, he may be punished by fine, admonition, be deprived the liberty of sending freshmen for a time; by suspension from all the privileges of college; or expulsion, according as the nature and aggravation of the crime may require." "if any freshman near the time of commencement shall fire the great guns, or give or promise any money, counsel, or assistance towards their being fired; or shall illuminate college with candles, either on the inside or outside of the windows, or exhibit any such kind of show, or dig or scrape the college yard otherwise than with the liberty and according to the directions of the president in the manner formerly practised, or run in the college yard in company, they shall be deprived the privilege of sending freshmen three months after the end of the year."--_laws yale coll._, , pp. , , . to the latter of these laws, a clause was subsequently added, declaring that every freshman who should "do anything unsuitable for a freshman" should be deprived of the privilege "of sending freshmen on errands, or teaching them manners, during the first three months of _his_ sophomore year."--_laws yale coll._, , in _yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . in the sketches of yale college, p. , is the following anecdote, relating to this subject:--"a freshman was once furnished with a dollar, and ordered by one of the upper classes to procure for him pipes and tobacco, from the farthest store on long wharf, a good mile distant. being at that time compelled by college laws to obey the unreasonable demand, he proceeded according to orders, and returned with ninety-nine cents' worth of pipes and one pennyworth of tobacco. it is needless to add that he was not again sent on a similar errand." the custom of obliging the freshmen to run on errands for the seniors was done away with at dartmouth college, by the class of , at the close of their freshman year, when, having served their own time out, they presented a petition to the trustees to have it abolished. in the old laws of middlebury college are the two following regulations in regard to freshmen, which seem to breathe the same spirit as those cited above. "every freshman shall be obliged to do any proper errand or message for the authority of the college." --"it shall be the duty of the senior class to inspect the manners of the freshman class, and to instruct them in the customs of the college, and in that graceful and decent behavior toward superiors, which politeness and a just and reasonable subordination require."--_laws_, , pp. , . freshmanship. the state of a freshman. a man who had been my fellow-pupil with him from the beginning of our _freshmanship_, would meet him there.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . freshman's landmark. at cambridge, eng., king's college chapel is thus designated. "this stupendous edifice may be seen for several miles on the london road, and indeed from most parts of the adjacent country."--_grad. ad cantab._ freshman, tutor's. in harvard college, the _freshman_ who occupies a room under a _tutor_. he is required to do the errands of the tutor which relate to college, and in return has a high choice of rooms in his sophomore year. the same remarks, _mutatis mutandis_, apply to the _proctor's freshman_. fresh-soph. an abbreviation of _freshman-sophomore_. one who enters college in the _sophomore_ year, having passed the time of the _freshman_ year elsewhere. i was a _fresh-sophomore_ then, and a waiter in the commons' hall. --_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . frog. in germany, a student while in the gymnasium, and before entering the university, is called a _frosch_,--a frog. funk. disgust; weariness; fright. a sensation sometimes experienced by students in view of an examination. in cantab phrase i was suffering examination _funk_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . a singular case of _funk_ occurred at this examination. the man who would have been second, took fright when four of the six days were over, and fairly ran away, not only from the examination, but out of cambridge, and was not discovered by his friends or family till some time after.--_ibid._, p. . one of our scholars, who stood a much better chance than myself, gave up from mere _funk_, and resolved to go out in the poll.--_ibid._, p. . . fear or sensibility to fear. the general application of the term. so my friend's first fault is timidity, which is only not recognized as such on account of its vast proportions. i grant, then, that the _funk_ is sublime, which is a true and friendly admission.--_a letter to the n.y. tribune_, in _lit. world_, nov. , . _g_. gas. to impose upon another by a consequential address, or by detailing improbable stories or using "great swelling words"; to deceive; to cheat. found that fairspeech only wanted to "_gas_" me, which he did pretty effectually.--_sketches of williams college_, p. . gate bill. in the english universities, the record of a pupil's failures to be within his college at or before a specified hour of the night. to avoid gate-bills, he will be out at night as late as he pleases, and will defy any one to discover his absence; for he will climb over the college walls, and fee his gyp well, when he is out all night--_grad. ad cantab._, p. . gated. at the english universities, students who, for misdemeanors, are not permitted to be out of their college after ten in the evening, are said to be _gated_. "_gated_," i.e. obliged to be within the college walls by ten o'clock at night; by this he is prevented from partaking in suppers, or other nocturnal festivities, in any other college or in lodgings.--note to _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . the lighter college offences, such as staying out at night or missing chapel, are punished by what they term "_gating_"; in one form of which, a man is actually confined to his rooms: in a more mild way, he is simply restricted to the precincts of the college. --_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . gaudy. in the university of oxford, a feast or festival. the days on which they occur are called _gaudies_ or _gaudy days_. "blount, in his glossographia," says archdeacon nares in his glossary, "speaks of a foolish derivation of the word from a judge _gaudy_, said to have been the institutor of such days. but _such_ days were held in all times, and did not want a judge to invent them." come, let's have one other _gaudy_ night: call to me all my sad captains; fill our bowls; once more let's mock the midnight bell. _antony and cleopatra_, act. iii. sc. . a foolish utensil of state, which like old plate upon a _gaudy day_, 's brought forth to make a show, and that is all. _goblins_, old play, x. . edmund riche, called of pontigny, archbishop of canterbury. after his death he was canonized by pope innocent v., and his day in the calendar, nov., was formerly kept as a "_gaudy_" by the members of the hall.--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. . . an entertainment; a treat; a spree. cut lectures, go to chapel as little as possible, dine in hall seldom more than once a week, give _gaudies_ and spreads.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . gentleman-commoner. the highest class of commoners at oxford university. equivalent to a cambridge _fellow-commoner_. gentlemen commoners "are eldest sons, or only sons, or men already in possession of estates, or else (which is as common a case as all the rest put together), they are the heirs of newly acquired wealth,--sons of the _nouveaux riches_"; they enjoy a privilege as regards the choice of rooms; associate at meals with the fellows and other authorities of the college; are the possessors of two gowns, "an undress for the morning, and a full dress-gown for the evening," both of which are made of silk, the latter being very elaborately ornamented; wear a cap, covered with velvet instead of cloth; pay double caution money, at entrance, viz. fifty guineas, and are charged twenty guineas a year for tutorage, twice the amount of the usual fee.--compiled from _de quincey's life and manners_, pp. - . get up a subject. see subject. this was the fourth time i had begun algebra, and essayed with no weakness of purpose to _get_ it _up_ properly.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . gill. the projecting parts of a standing collar are, from their situation, sometimes denominated _gills_. but, o, what rage his maddening bosom fills! far worse than dust-soiled coat are ruined "_gills_." _poem before the class of , harv. coll., by j.c. richmond_, p. . gobble. at yale college, to seize; to lay hold of; to appropriate; nearly the same as to _collar_, q.v. alas! how dearly for the fun they paid, whom the proffs _gobbled_, and the tutors too. _the gallinipper_, dec. . i never _gobbled_ one poor flat, to cheer me with his soft dark eye, &c. _yale tomahawk_, nov. . i went and performed, and got through the burning, but oh! and alas! i was _gobbled_ returning. _yale banger_, nov. . upon that night, in the broad street, was i by one of the brain-deficient men _gobbled_.--_yale battery_, feb. . then shout for the hero who _gobbles_ the prize. _songs of yale_, , p. . at cambridge, eng., this word is used in the phrase _gobbling greek_, i.e. studying or speaking that tongue. ambitious to "_gobble_" his greek in the _haute monde_.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . it was now ten o'clock, and up stairs we therefore flew to _gobble_ greek with professor ----.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . you may have seen him, traversing the grass-plots, "_gobbling greek_" to himself.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . golgotha. _the place of a skull_. at cambridge, eng., in the university church, "a particular part," says the westminster review, "is appropriated to the _heads_ of the houses, and is called _golgotha_ therefrom, a name which the appearance of its occupants renders peculiarly fitting, independent of the pun."--am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . gonus. a stupid fellow. he was a _gonus_; perhaps, though, you don't know what _gonus_ means. one day i heard a senior call a fellow a _gonus_. "a what?" said i. "a great gonus," repeated he. "_gonus_," echoed i, "what's that mean?" "o," said he, "you're a freshman and don't understand." a stupid fellow, a dolt, a boot-jack, an ignoramus, is called here a _gonus_. "all freshmen," continued he gravely, "are _gonuses_."--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . if the disquisitionist should ever reform his habits, and turn his really brilliant talents to some good account, then future _gonuses_ will swear by his name, and quote him in their daily maledictions of the appointment system.--_amherst indicator_, vol. i. p. . the word _goney_, with the same meaning, is often used. "how the _goney_ swallowed it all, didn't he?" said mr. slick, with great glee.--_slick in england_, chap. xxi. some on 'em were fools enough to believe the _goney_; that's a fact.--_ibid._ good fellow. at the university of vermont, this term is used with a signification directly opposite to that which it usually has. it there designates a soft-brained boy; one who is lacking in intellect, or, as a correspondent observes, "an _epithetical_ fool." goody. at harvard college, a woman who has the care of the students' rooms. the word seems to be an abbreviated form of the word _goodwife_. it has long been in use, as a low term of civility or sport, and in some cases with the signification of a good old dame; but in the sense above given it is believed to be peculiar to harvard college. in early times, _sweeper_ was in use instead of _goody_, and even now at yale college the word _sweep_ is retained. the words _bed-maker_ at cambridge, eng., and _gyp_ at oxford, express the same idea. the rebelliad, an epic poem, opens with an invocation to the goody, as follows. old _goody_ muse! on thee i call, _pro more_, (as do poets all,) to string thy fiddle, wax thy bow, and scrape a ditty, jig, or so. now don't wax wrathy, but excuse my calling you old _goody_ muse; because "_old goody_" is a name applied to every college dame. aloft in pendent dignity, astride her magic broom, and wrapt in dazzling majesty, see! see! the _goody_ come!--p. . go on, dear _goody_! and recite the direful mishaps of the fight.--_ibid._, p. . the _goodies_ hearing, cease to sweep, and listen; while the cook-maids weep.--_ibid._, p. . the _goody_ entered with her broom, to make his bed and sweep his room.--_ibid._, p. . on opening the papers left to his care, he found a request that his effects might be bestowed on his friend, the _goody_, who had been so attentive to him during his declining hours.--_harvard register_, - , p. . i was interrupted by a low knock at my door, followed by the entrance of our old _goody_, with a bundle of musty papers in her hand, tied round with a soiled red ribbon.--_collegian_, , p. . were there any _goodies_ when you were in college, father? perhaps you did not call them by that name. they are nice old ladies (not so _very_ nice, either), who come in every morning, after we have been to prayers, and sweep the rooms, and make the beds, and do all that sort of work. however, they don't much like their title, i find; for i called one, the other day, _mrs. goodie_, thinking it was her real name, and she was as sulky as she could be.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . yet these half-emptied bottles shall i take, and, having purged them of this wicked stuff, make a small present unto _goody_ bush. _ibid._, vol. iii. p. . reader! wert ever beset by a dun? ducked by the _goody_ from thine own window, when "creeping like snail unwillingly" to morning prayers?--_ibid._, vol. iv. p. . the crowd delighted saw them, like _goodies_, clothed in gowns of satin, of silk or cotton.--_childe harvard_, p. , . on the wall hangs a horse-shoe i found in the street; 't is the shoe that to-day sets in motion my feet; though its charms are all vanished this many a year, and not even my _goody_ regards it with fear. _the horse-shoe, a poem, by j.b. felton_, , p. . a very clever elegy on the death of goody morse, who "for forty years or more ... contrived the while no little dust to raise" in the rooms of the students of harvard college, is to be found in harvardiana, vol. i. p. . it was written by mr. (afterwards rev.) benjamin davis winslow. in the poem which he read before his class in the university chapel at cambridge, july , , he referred to her in these lines: "'new brooms sweep clean': 't was thine, dear _goody_ morse, to prove the musty proverb hath no force, since fifty years to vanished centuries crept, while thy old broom our cloisters duly swept. all changed but thee! beneath thine aged eye whole generations came and flitted by, yet saw thee still in office;--e'en reform spared thee the pelting of its angry storm. rest to thy bones in yonder church-yard laid, where thy last bed the village sexton made!"--p. . gorm. from _gormandize_. at hamilton college, to eat voraciously. got. in princeton college, when a student or any one else has been cheated or taken in, it is customary to say, he was _got_. government. in american colleges, the general government is usually vested in a corporation or a board of trustees, whose powers, rights, and duties are established by the respective charters of the colleges over which they are placed. the immediate government of the undergraduates is in the hands of the president, professors, and tutors, who are styled _the government_, or _the college government_, and more frequently _the faculty_, or _the college faculty_.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , pp. , . _laws of yale coll._, , p. . for many years he was the most conspicuous figure among those who constituted what was formerly called "the _government_."--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, p. vii. [greek: kudiste], mighty president!!! [greek: kalomen nun] the _government_.--_rebelliad_, p. . did i not jaw the _government_, for cheating more than ten per cent?--_ibid._, p. . they shall receive due punishment from harvard college _government_.--_ibid._, p. . the annexed production, printed from a ms. in the author's handwriting, and in the possession of the editor of this work, is now, it is believed, for the first time presented to the public. the time is ; the scene, harvard college. the poem was "written by john q. adams, son of the president, when an undergraduate." "a description of a government meeting. "the government of college met, and _willard_[ ] rul'd the stern debate. the witty _jennison_[ ] declar'd as how, he'd been completely scar'd; last night, quoth he, as i came home, i heard a noise in _prescott's_[ ] room. i went and listen'd at the door, as i had often done before; i found the juniors in a high rant, they call'd the president a tyrant; and said as how i was a fool, a long ear'd ass, a sottish mule, without the smallest grain of spunk; so i concluded they were drunk. at length i knock'd, and prescott came: i told him 't was a burning shame, that he should give his classmates wine; and he should pay a heavy fine. meanwhile the rest grew so outragious, altho' i boast of being couragious, i could not help being in a fright, for one of them put out the light. i thought 't was best to come away, and wait for vengeance 'till this day; and he's a fool at any rate who'll fight, when he can rusticate. when they [had] found that i was gone, they ran through college up and down; and i could hear them very plain take the lord's holy name in vain. to wier's[ ] chamber they then repair'd, and there the wine they freely shar'd; they drank and sung till they were tir'd. and then they peacefully retir'd. when this homeric speech was said, with drolling tongue and hanging head, the learned doctor took his seat, thinking he'd done a noble feat. quoth joe,[ ] the crime is great i own, send for the juniors one by one. by this almighty wig i swear, which with such majesty i wear, which in its orbit vast contains my dignity, my power and brains, that wier and prescott both shall see, that college boys must not be free. he spake, and gave the awful nod like homer's didonean god, the college from its centre shook, and every pipe and wine-glass broke. "_williams_,[ ] with countenance humane, while scarce from laughter could refrain, thought that such youthful scenes of mirth to punishment could not give birth; nor could he easily divine what was the harm of drinking wine. "but _pearson_,[ ] with an awful frown, full of his article and noun, spake thus: by all the parts of speech which i so elegantly teach, by mercy i will never stain the character which i sustain. pray tell me why the laws were made, if they're not to be obey'd; besides, _that wier_ i can't endure, for he's a wicked rake, i'm sure. but whether i am right or not, i'll not recede a single jot. "_james_[ ] saw 'twould be in vain t' oppose, and therefore to be silent chose. "_burr_,[ ] who had little wit or pride, preferr'd to take the strongest side. and willard soon receiv'd commission to give a publick admonition. with pedant strut to prayers he came, call'd out the criminals by name; obedient to his dire command, prescott and wier before him stand. the rulers merciful and kind, with equal grief and wonder find, that you do drink, and play, and sing, and make with noise the college ring. i therefore warn you to beware of drinking more than you can bear. wine an incentive is to riot, disturbance of the publick quiet. full well your tutors know the truth, for sad experience taught their youth. take then this friendly exhortation; the next offence is rustication." gown. a long, loose upper garment or robe, worn by professional men, as divines, lawyers, students, &c., who are called _men of the gown_, or _gownmen_. it is made of any kind of cloth, worn over ordinary clothes, and hangs down to the ankles, or nearly so. --_encyc._ from a letter written in the year , by mr. holyoke, then president of harvard college, it would appear that gowns were first worn by the members of that institution about the year . the gown, although worn by the students in the english universities, is now seldom worn in american colleges except on commencement, exhibition, or other days of a similar public character. the students are permitted to wear black _gowns_, in which they may appear on all public occasions.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . every candidate for a first degree shall wear a black dress and the usual black _gown_.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . the performers all wore black _gowns_ with sleeves large enough to hold me in, and shouted and swung their arms, till they looked like so many methodist ministers just ordained.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . saw them ... clothed in _gowns_ of satin, or silk or cotton, black as souls benighted.-- all, save the _gowns_, was startling, splendid, tragic, but gowns on men have lost their wonted magic. _childe harvard_, p. . the door swings open--and--he comes! behold him wrapt in his mantling _gown_, that round him flows waving, as cæsar's toga did enfold him.--_ibid._, p. . on saturday evenings, sundays, and saints' days, the students wear surplices instead of their _gowns_, and very innocent and exemplary they look in them.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . . one who wears a gown. and here, i think, i may properly introduce a very singular gallant, a sort of mongrel between town and _gown_,--i mean a bibliopola, or (as the vulgar have it) a bookseller.--_the student_, oxf. and cam., vol. ii. p. . gownman, gownsman. one whose professional habit is a gown, as a divine or lawyer, and particularly a member of an english university.--_webster_. the _gownman_ learned.--_pope_. oft has some fair inquirer bid me say, what tasks, what sports beguile the _gownsman's_ day. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . for if townsmen by our influence are so enlightened, what must we _gownsmen_ be ourselves?--_the student_, oxf. and cam., vol. i. p. . nor must it be supposed that the _gownsmen_ are thin, study-worn, consumptive-looking individuals.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . see cap. grace. in english universities, an act, vote, or decree of the government of the institution.--_webster_. "all _graces_ (as the legislative measures proposed by the senate are termed) have to be submitted first to the caput, each member of which has an absolute veto on the grace. if it passes the caput, it is then publicly recited in both houses, [the regent and non-regent,] and at a subsequent meeting voted on, first in the non-regent house, and then in the other. if it passes both, it becomes valid."--_literary world_, vol. xii. p. . see caput senatus. graduate. to honor with a degree or diploma, in a college or university; to confer a degree on; as, to _graduate_ a master of arts.--_wotton_. _graduated_ a doctor, and dubb'd a knight.--_carew_. pickering, in his vocabulary, says of the word _graduate_: "johnson has it as a verb active only. but an english friend observes, that 'the active sense of this word is rare in england.' i have met with one instance in an english publication where it is used in a dialogue, in the following manner: 'you, methinks, _are graduated_.' see a review in the british critic, vol. xxxiv. p. ." in mr. todd's edition of johnson's dictionary, this word is given as a verb intransitive also: "to take an academical degree; to become a graduate; as he _graduated_ at oxford." in america, the use of the phrase _he was graduated_, instead of _he graduated_, which has been of late so common, "is merely," says mr. bartlett in his dictionary of americanisms, "a return to former practice, the verb being originally active transitive." he _was graduated_ with the esteem of the government, and the regard of his contemporaries--_works of r.t. paine_, p. xxix. the latter, who _was graduated_ thirteen years after.--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . in this perplexity the president had resolved "to yield to the torrent, and _graduate_ hartshorn."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . (the quotation was written in .) in may, , three gentlemen who had sons about _to be graduated_.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . mr. peirce was born in september, ; and, after _being graduated_ at harvard college, with the highest honors of his class.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. , and chap. xxxvii. _passim_. he _was graduated_ in with distinguished honors, at the age of nineteen.--_mr. young's discourse on the life of president kirkland_. his class when _graduated_, in , consisted of thirty-two persons.--_dr. palfrey's discourse on the life and character of dr. ware_. . _intransitively_. to receive a degree from a college or university. he _graduated_ at leyden in .--_london monthly mag._, oct. , p. . wherever magnol _graduated_.--_rees's cyclopædia_, art. magnol. graduate. one who has received a degree in a college or university, or from some professional incorporated society.--_webster_. graduate in a school. a degree given, in the university of virginia, to those who have been through a course of study less than is required for the degree of b.a. graduation. the act of conferring or receiving academical degrees. --_charter of dartmouth college_. after his _graduation_ at yale college, in , he continued his studies at harvard university, where he took his second degree in .--_hist. sketch of columbia coll._, p. . bachelors were called senior, middle, or junior bachelors according to the year since _graduation_, and before taking the degree of master.--_woolsey's hist. disc._, p. . grand compounder. at the english universities, one who pays double fees for his degree. "candidates for all degrees, who possess certain property," says the oxford university calendar, "must go out, as it is termed, _grand compounders_. the property required for this purpose may arise from two distinct sources; either from some ecclesiastical benefice or benefices, or else from some other revenue, civil or ecclesiastical. the ratio of computation in the first case is expressly limited by statute to the value of the benefice or benefices, as _rated in the king's books_, without regard to the actual estimation at the present period; and the amount of that value must not be _less than forty pounds_. in the second instance, which includes all other cases, comprising ecclesiastical as well as civil income, (academical income alone excepted,) property to the extent of _three hundred pounds_ a year is required; nor is any difference made between property in land and property in money, so that a _legal_ revenue to this extent of any description, not arising from a benefice or benefices, and not being strictly academical, renders the qualification complete."--ed. , p. . at oxford "a '_grand compounder_' is one who has income to the amount of $ , , and is made to pay $ for his degree, while the ordinary fee is $ ." _lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . grand tribunal. the grand tribunal is an institution peculiar to trinity college, hartford. a correspondent describes it as follows. "the grand tribunal is a mock court composed of the senior and junior classes, and has for its special object the regulation and discipline of sophomores. the first officer of the tribunal is the 'grand high chancellor,' who presides at all business meetings. the tribunal has its judges, advocates, sheriff, and his aids. according to the laws of the tribunal, no sophomore can be tried who has three votes in his favor. this regulation makes a trial a difficult matter; there is rarely more than one trial a year, and sometimes two years elapse without there being a session of the court. when a selection of an offending and unlucky soph has been made, he is arrested some time during the day of the evening on which his trial takes place. the court provides him with one advocate, while he has the privilege of choosing another. these trials are often the scenes of considerable wit and eloquence. one of the most famous of them was held in . when the tribunal is in session, it is customary for the faculty of the college to act as its police, by preserving order amongst the sophs, who generally assemble at the door, to disturb, if possible, the proceedings of the court." granta. the name by which the university of cambridge, eng., was formerly known. at present it is sometimes designated by this title in poetry, and in addresses written in other tongues than the vernacular. warm with fond hope, and learning's sacred flame, to _granta's_ bowers the youthful poet came. _lines in memory of h.k. white, by prof. william smyth_, in _cam. guide_. gratulatory. expressing gratulation; congratulatory. at harvard college, while wadsworth was president, in the early part of the last century, it was customary to close the exercises of commencement day with a _gratulatory oration_, pronounced by one of the candidates for a degree. this has now given place to what is generally called the _valedictory oration_. gravel day. the following account of this day is given in a work entitled sketches of williams college. "on the second monday of the first term in the year, if the weather be at all favorable, it has been customary from time immemorial to hold a college meeting, and petition the president for '_gravel day_.' we did so this morning. the day was granted, and, recitations being dispensed with, the students turned out _en masse_ to re-gravel the college walks. the gravel which we obtain here is of such a nature that it packs down very closely, and renders the walks as hard and smooth as a pavement. the faculty grant this day for the purpose of fostering in the students the habit of physical labor and exercise, so essential to vigorous mental exertion."-- , pp. , . the improved method of observing this day is noted in the annexed extract. "nearly every college has its own peculiar customs, which have been transmitted from far antiquity; but williams has perhaps less than any other. among ours are '_gravel day_,' 'chip day,' and 'mountain day,' occurring one in each of the three terms. the first usually comes in the early part of the fall term. in old times, when the students were few, and rather fonder of _work_ than at the present, they turned out with spades, hoes, and other implements, and spread gravel over the walks, to the college grounds; but in later days, they have preferred to tax themselves to a small amount and delegate the work to others, while they spend the day in visiting the cascade, the natural bridge, or others of the numerous places of interest near us."--_boston daily evening traveller_, july , . great go. in the english universities the final and most important examination is called the _great go_, in contradistinction to the _little go_, an examination about the middle of the course. in my way back i stepped into the _great go_ schools.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . read through the whole five volumes folio, latin, previous to going up for his _great go_.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . green. inexperienced, unsophisticated, verdant. among collegians this term is the favorite appellation for freshmen. when a man is called _verdant_ or _green_, it means that he is unsophisticated and raw. for instance, when a man rushes to chapel in the morning at the ringing of the first bell, it is called _green_. at least, we were, for it. this greenness, we would remark, is not, like the verdure in the vision of the poet, necessarily perennial.--_williams monthly miscellany_, , vol. i. p. . grind. an exaction; an oppressive action. students speak of a very long lesson which they are required to learn, or of any thing which it is very unpleasant or difficult to perform, as a _grind_. this meaning is derived from the verb _to grind_, in the sense of to harass, to afflict; as, to _grind_ the faces of the poor (isaiah iii. ). i must say 't is a _grind_, though --(perchance i spoke too loud). _poem before iadma_, , p. . grinding. hard study; diligent application. the successful candidate enjoys especial and excessive _grinding_ during the four years of his college course. _burlesque catalogue, yale coll._, - , p. . groats. at the english universities, "nine _groats_" says grose, in his dictionary of the vulgar tongue, "are deposited in the hands of an academic officer by every person standing for a degree, which, if the depositor obtains with honor, are returned to him." _to save his groats_; to come off handsomely.--_gradus ad cantab._ group. a crowd or throng; a number collected without any regular form or arrangement. at harvard college, students are not allowed to assemble in _groups_, as is seen by the following extract from the laws. three persons together are considered as a _group_. collecting in _groups_ round the doors of the college buildings, or in the yard, shall be considered a violation of decorum.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , suppl., p. . grouping. collecting together. it will surely be incomprehensible to most students how so large a number as six could be suffered with impunity to horde themselves together within the limits of the college yard. in those days the very learned laws about _grouping_ were not in existence. a collection of two was not then considered a sure prognostic of rebellion, and spied out vigilantly by tutoric eyes. a _group_ of three was not reckoned a gross outrage of the college peace, and punished severely by the subtraction of some dozens from the numerical rank of the unfortunate youth engaged in so high a misdemeanor. a congregation of four was not esteemed an open, avowed contempt of the laws of decency and propriety, prophesying utter combustion, desolation, and destruction to all buildings and trees in the neighborhood; and lastly, a multitude of five, though watched with a little jealousy, was not called an intolerable, unparalleled violation of everything approaching the name of order, absolute, downright shamelessness, worthy capital mark-punishment, alias the loss of - / digits!--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . the above passage and the following are both evidently of a satirical nature. and often _grouping_ on the chains, he hums his own sweet verse, till tutor ----, coming up, commands him to disperse! _poem before y.h._, , p. . grub. a hard student. used at williams college, and synonymous with dig at other colleges. a correspondent says, writing from williams: "our real delvers, midnight students, are familiarly called _grubs_. this is a very expressive name." a man must not be ashamed to be called a _grub_ in college, if he would shine in the world.--_sketches of williams college_, p. . some there are who, though never known to read or study, are ever ready to debate,--not "_grubs_" or "reading men," only "wordy men."--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . grub. to study hard; to be what is denominated a _grub_, or hard student. "the primary sense," says dr. webster, "is probably to rub, to rake, scrape, or scratch, as wild animals dig by scratching." i can _grub out_ a lesson in latin or mathematics as well as the best of them.--_amherst indicator_, vol. i. p. . guarding. "the custom of _guarding_ freshmen," says a correspondent from dartmouth college, "is comparatively a late one. persons masked would go into another's room at night, and oblige him to do anything they commanded him, as to get under his bed, sit with his feet in a pail of water," &c. gulf. in the university of cambridge, eng., one who obtains the degree of b.a., but has not his name inserted in the calendar, is said to be in the _gulf_. he now begins to ... be anxious about ... that classical acquaintance who is in danger of the _gulf_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . some ten or fifteen men just on the line, not bad enough to be plucked or good enough to be placed, are put into the "_gulf_," as it is popularly called (the examiners' phrase is "degrees allowed"), and have their degrees given them, but are not printed in the calendar.--_ibid._, p. . gulfing. in the university of cambridge, england, "those candidates for b.a. who, but for sickness or some other sufficient cause, might have obtained an honor, have their degree given them without examination, and thus avoid having their names inserted in the lists. this is called _gulfing_." a degree taken in this manner is called "an Ægrotat degree."--_alma mater_, vol. ii. pp. , . i discovered that my name was nowhere to be found,--that i was _gulfed_.--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . gum. a trick; a deception. in use at dartmouth college. _gum_ is another word they have here. it means something like chaw. to say, "it's all a _gum_," or "a regular chaw," is the same thing.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . gum. at the university of vermont, to cheat in recitation by using _ponies_, _interliners_, &c.; e.g. "he _gummed_ in geometry." . to cheat; to deceive. not confined to college. he was speaking of the "moon hoax" which "_gummed_" so many learned philosophers.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiv. p. . gummation. a trick; raillery. our reception to college ground was by no means the most hospitable, considering our unacquaintance with the manners of the place, for, as poor "fresh," we soon found ourselves subject to all manner of sly tricks and "_gummations_" from our predecessors, the sophs.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . gyp. a cant term for a servant at cambridge, england, at _scout_ is used at oxford. said to be a sportive application of [greek: gyps], a vulture.--_smart_. the word _gyp_ very properly characterizes them.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . and many a yawning _gyp_ comes slipshod in, to wake his master ere the bells begin. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . the freshman, when once safe through his examination, is first inducted into his rooms by a _gyp_, usually recommended to him by his tutor. the gyp (from [greek: gyps], vulture, evidently a nickname at first, but now the only name applied to this class of persons) is a college servant, who attends upon a number of students, sometimes as many as twenty, calls them in the morning, brushes their clothes, carries for them parcels and the queerly twisted notes they are continually writing to one another, waits at their parties, and so on. cleaning their boots is not in his branch of the profession; there is a regular brigade of college shoeblacks.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . it is sometimes spelled _jip_, though probably by mistake. my _jip_ brought one in this morning; faith! and told me i was focussed.--_gent. mag._, , p. . _h_. half-lesson. in some american colleges on certain occasions the students are required to learn only one half of the amount of an ordinary lesson. they promote it [the value of distinctions conferred by the students on one another] by formally acknowledging the existence of the larger debating societies in such acts as giving "_half-lessons_" for the morning after the wednesday night debates.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . half-year. in the german universities, a collegiate term is called a _half-year_. the annual courses of instruction are divided into summer and winter _half-years_.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., pp. , . hall. a college or large edifice belonging to a collegiate institution.--_webster_. . a collegiate body in the universities of oxford and cambridge. in the former institution a hall differs from a college, in that halls are not incorporated; consequently, whatever estate or other property they possess is held in trust by the university. in the latter, colleges and halls are synonymous.--_cam. and oxf. calendars_. "in cambridge," says the author of the collegian's guide, "the halls stand on the same footing as the colleges, but at oxford they did not, in my time, hold by any means so high a place in general estimation. certainly those halls which admit the outcasts of other colleges, and of those alone i am now speaking, used to be precisely what one would expect to find them; indeed, i had rather that a son of mine should forego a university education altogether, than that he should have so sorry a counterfeit of academic advantages as one of these halls affords."--p. . "all the colleges at cambridge," says bristed, "have equal privileges and rights, with the solitary exception of king's, and though some of them are called _halls_, the difference is merely one of name. but the halls at oxford, of which there are five, are not incorporated bodies, and have no vote in university matters, indeed are but a sort of boarding-houses at which students may remain until it is time for them to take a degree. i dined at one of those establishments; it was very like an officers' mess. the men had their own wine, and did not wear their gowns, and the only don belonging to the hall was not present at table. there was a tradition of a chapel belonging to the concern, but no one present knew where it was. this hall seemed to be a small botany bay of both universities, its members made up of all sorts of incapables and incorrigibles."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . . at cambridge and oxford, the public eating-room. i went into the public "_hall_" [so is called in oxford the public eating-room].--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . dinner is, in all colleges, a public meal, taken in the refectory or "_hall_" of the society.--_ibid._, p. . . at the university of cambridge, eng., dinner, the name of the place where the meal is taken being given to the meal itself. _hall_ lasts about three quarters of an hour.--_bristed's five year in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . after _hall_ is emphatically lounging-time, it being the wise practice of englishmen to attempt no hard exercise, physical or mental, immediately after a hearty meal.--_ibid._, p. . it is not safe to read after _hall_ (i.e. after dinner).--_ibid._, p. . hang-out. an entertainment. i remember the date from the fourth of july occurring just afterwards, which i celebrated by a "_hang-out_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . he had kept me six hours at table, on the occasion of a dinner which he gave ... as an appendix to and a return for some of my "_hangings-out_."--_ibid._, p. . hang out. to treat, to live, to have or possess. among english cantabs, a verb of all-work.--_bristed_. there were but few pensioners who "_hung out_" servants of their own.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . i had become ... a man who knew and "_hung out_ to" clever and pleasant people, and introduced agreeable lions to one another.--_ibid._, p. . i had gained such a reputation for dinner-giving, that men going to "_hang out_" sometimes asked me to compose bills of fare for them.--_ibid._, p. . harry sophs, or henry sophisters; in reality harisophs, a corruption of erisophs ([greek: erisophos], _valde eruditus_). at cambridge, england, students who have kept all the terms required for a law act, and hence are ranked as bachelors of law by courtesy.--_gradus ad cantab._ see, also, gentleman's magazine, , p. . harvard washington corps. from a memorandum on a fly leaf of an old triennial catalogue, it would appear that a military company was first established among the students of harvard college about the year , and that its first captain was mr. william wetmore, a graduate of the class of . the motto which it then assumed, and continued to bear through every period of its existence, was, "tam marti quam mercurio." it was called at that time the marti mercurian band. the prescribed uniform was a blue coat, the skirts turned with white, nankeen breeches, white stockings, top-boots, and a cocked hat. this association continued for nearly twenty years from the time of its organization, but the chivalrous spirit which had called it into existence seems at the end of that time to have faded away. the last captain, it is believed, was mr. solomon vose, a graduate of the class of . under the auspices of governor gerry, in december of the year , it was revived, and through his influence received a new loan of arms from the state, taking at the same time the name of the harvard washington corps. in , mr. george thacher was appointed its commander. the members of the company wore a blue coat, white vest, white pantaloons, white gaiters, a common black hat, and around the waist a white belt, which was always kept very neat, and to which were attached a bayonet and cartridge-box. the officers wore the same dress, with the exceptions of a sash instead of the belt, and a chapeau in place of the hat. soon after this reorganization, in the fall of , a banner, with the arms of the college on one side and the arms of the state on the other, was presented by the beautiful miss mellen, daughter of judge mellen of cambridge, in the name of the ladies of that place. the presentation took place before the door of her father's house. appropriate addresses were made, both by the fair donor and the captain of the company. mr. frisbie, a professor in the college, who was at that time engaged to miss mellen, whom he afterwards married, recited on the occasion the following verses impromptu, which were received with great _eclat_. "the standard's victory's leading star, 't is danger to forsake it; how altered are the scenes of war, they're vanquished now who take it." a writer in the harvardiana, , referring to this banner, says: "the gilded banner now moulders away in inglorious quiet, in the dusty retirement of a senior sophister's study. what a desecration for that 'flag by angel hands to valor given'!"[ ] within the last two years it has wholly disappeared from its accustomed resting-place. though departed, its memory will be ever dear to those who saw it in its better days, and under its shadow enjoyed many of the proudest moments of college life. at its second organization, the company was one of the finest and best drilled in the state. the members were from the senior and junior classes. the armory was in the fifth story of hollis hall. the regular time for exercise was after the evening commons. the drum would often beat before the meal was finished, and the students could then be seen rushing forth with the half-eaten biscuit, and at the same time buckling on their armor for the accustomed drill. they usually paraded on exhibition-days, when the large concourse of people afforded an excellent opportunity for showing off their skill in military tactics and manoeuvring. on the arrival of the news of the peace of , it appears, from an interleaved almanac, that "the h.w. corps paraded and fired a salute; mr. porter treated the company." again, on the th of may, same year, "h.w. corps paraded in charlestown, saluted com. bainbridge, and returned by the way of boston." the captain for that year, mr. w.h. moulton, dying, on the th of july, at five o'clock, p.m., "the class," says the same authority, "attended the funeral of br. moulton in boston. the h.w. corps attended in uniform, without arms, the ceremony of entombing their late captain." in the year , it received a third loan of arms, and was again reorganized, admitting the members of all the classes to its ranks. from this period until the year , very great interest was manifested in it; but a rebellion having broken out at that time among the students, and the guns of the company having been considerably damaged by being thrown from the windows of the armory, which was then in university hall, the company was disbanded, and the arms were returned to the state. the feelings with which it was regarded by the students generally cannot be better shown than by quoting from some of the publications in which reference is made to it. "many are the grave discussions and entry caucuses," says a writer in the harvard register, published in , "to determine what favored few are to be graced with the sash and epaulets, and march as leaders in the martial band. whilst these important canvassings are going on, it behooves even the humblest and meekest to beware how he buttons his coat, or stiffens himself to a perpendicular, lest he be more than suspected of aspiring to some military capacity. but the _harvard washington corps_ must not be passed over without further notice. who can tell what eagerness fills its ranks on an exhibition-day? with what spirit and bounding step the glorious phalanx wheels into the college yard? with what exultation they mark their banner, as it comes floating on the breeze from holworthy? and ah! who cannot tell how this spirit expires, this exultation goes out, when the clerk calls again and again for the assessments."--p. . a college poet has thus immortalized this distinguished band:-- "but see where yonder light-armed ranks advance!-- their colors gleaming in the noonday glance, their steps symphonious with the drum's deep notes, while high the buoyant, breeze-borne banner floats! o, let not allied hosts yon band deride! 't is _harvard corps_, our bulwark and our pride! mark, how like one great whole, instinct with life, they seem to woo the dangers of the strife! who would not brave the heat, the dust, the rain, to march the leader of that valiant train?" _harvard register_, p. . another has sung its requiem in the following strain:-- "that martial band, 'neath waving stripes and stars inscribed alike to mercury and mars, those gallant warriors in their dread array, who shook these halls,--o where, alas! are they? gone! gone! and never to our ears shall come the sounds of fife and spirit-stirring drum; that war-worn banner slumbers in the dust, those bristling arms are dim with gathering rust; that crested helm, that glittering sword, that plume, are laid to rest in reckless faction's tomb." _winslow's class poem_, . hat fellow-commoner. at the university of cambridge, eng., the popular name given to a baronet, the eldest son of a baronet, or the younger son of a nobleman. a _hat fellow-commoner_ wears the gown of a fellow-commoner, with a hat instead of the velvet cap with metallic tassel which a fellow-commoner wears, and is admitted to the degree of m.a. after two years' residence. hauled up. in many colleges, one brought up before the faculty is said to be _hauled up_. haze. to trouble; to harass; to disturb. this word is used at harvard college, to express the treatment which freshmen sometimes receive from the higher classes, and especially from the sophomores. it is used among sailors with the meanings _to urge_, _to drive_, _to harass_, especially with labor. in his dictionary of americanisms, mr. bartlett says, "to haze round, is to go rioting about." be ready, in fine, to cut, to drink, to smoke, to swear, to _haze_, to dead, to spree,--in one word, to be a sophomore.--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, , p. . to him no orchard is unknown,--no grape-vine unappraised,-- no farmer's hen-roost yet unrobbed,--no freshman yet _unhazed_! _poem before y.h._, , p. . 't is the sophomores rushing the freshmen to _haze_. _poem before iadma_, , p. . never again leave unbolted your door when to rest you retire, and, _unhazed_ and unmartyred, you proudly may scorn those foes to all freshmen who 'gainst thee conspire. _ibid._, p. . freshmen have got quietly settled down to work, sophs have given up their _hazing_.--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . we are glad to be able to record, that the absurd and barbarous custom of _hazing_, which has long prevailed in college, is, to a great degree, discontinued.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . the various means which are made use of in _hazing_ the freshmen are enumerated in part below. in the first passage, a sophomore speaks in soliloquy. i am a man, have human feelings, though mistaken fresh affirmed i was a savage or a brute, when i did dash cold water in their necks, discharged green squashes through their window-panes, and stript their beds of soft, luxurious sheets, placing instead harsh briers and rough sticks, so that their sluggish bodies might not sleep, unroused by morning bell; or when perforce, from leaden syringe, engine of fierce might, i drave black ink upon their ruffle shirts, or drenched with showers of melancholy hue, the new-fledged dickey peering o'er the stock, fit emblem of a young ambitious mind! _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . a freshman writes thus on the subject:-- the sophs did nothing all the first fortnight but torment the fresh, as they call us. they would come to our rooms with masks on, and frighten us dreadfully; and sometimes squirt water through our keyholes, or throw a whole pailful on to one of us from the upper windows.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . head of the house. the generic name for the highest officer of a college in the english universities. the master of the college, or "_head of the house_," is a d.d. who has been a fellow.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the _heads of houses_ [are] styled, according to the usage of the college, president, master, principal, provost, warden, or rector. --_oxford guide_, , p. xiii. written often simply _head_. the "_head_," as he is called generically, of an oxford college, is a greater man than the uninitiated suppose.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . the new _head_ was a gentleman of most commanding personal appearance.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . headship. the office and place of head or president of a college. most of the college _headships_ are not at the disposal of the crown.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, note, p. , and _errata_. the _headships_ of the colleges are, with the exception of worcester, filled by one chosen by the fellows from among themselves, or one who has been a fellow.--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. xiv. heads out. at princeton college, the cry when anything occurs in the _campus_. used, also, to give the alarm when a professor or tutor is about to interrupt a spree. see campus. hebdomadal board. at oxford, the local governing authority of the university, composed of the heads of colleges and the two proctors, and expressing itself through the vice-chancellor. an institution of charles i.'s time, it has possessed, since the year , "the sole initiative power in the legislation of the university, and the chief share in its administration." its meetings are held weekly, whence the name.--_oxford guide. literary world_, vol. xii., p. . high-go. a merry frolic, usually with drinking. songs of scholars in revelling roundelays, belched out with hickups at bacchanal go, bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, are all for college carousals too low. of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, and fully inspired with amity's glow, with hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, the juniors combine, boys, in friendly high-go. _glossology, by william biglow_, inserted in _buckingham's reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. - . he it was who broached the idea of a _high-go_, as being requisite to give us a rank among the classes in college. _d.a. white's address before soc. of the alumni of harv. univ._, aug. , , p. . this word is now seldom used; the words _high_ and _go_ are, however, often used separately, with the same meaning; as the compound. the phrase _to get high_, i.e. to become intoxicated, is allied with the above expression. or men "_get high_" by drinking abstract toddies? _childe harvard_, p. . high steward. in the english universities, an officer who has special power to hear and determine capital causes, according to the laws of the land and the privileges of the university, whenever a scholar is the party offending. he also holds the university _court-leet_, according to the established charter and custom.--_oxf. and cam. cals._ at cambridge, in addition to his other duties, the high steward is the officer who represents the university in the house of lords. high table. at oxford, the table at which the fellows and some other privileged persons are entitled to dine. wine is not generally allowed in the public hall, except to the "_high table_."--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . i dine at the "_high table_" with the reverend deans, and hobnob with professors.--_household words_, am. ed., vol. xi. p . high-ti. at williams college, a term by which is designated a showy recitation. equivalent to the word _squirt_ at harvard college. hills. at cambridge, eng., gogmagog hills are commonly called _the hills_. or to the _hills_ on horseback strays, (unasked his tutor,) or his chaise to famed newmarket guides. _gradus ad cantab._, p. . hiss. to condemn by hissing. this is a favorite method, especially among students, of expressing their disapprobation of any person or measure. i'll tell you what; your crime is this, that, touchy, you did scrape, and _hiss_. _rebelliad_, p. . who will bully, scrape, and _hiss_! who, i say, will do all this! let him follow me,--_ibid._, p. . hoaxing. at princeton college, inducing new-comers to join the secret societies is called _hoaxing_. hobby. a translation. hobbies are used by some students in translating latin, greek, and other languages, who from this reason are said to ride, in contradistinction to others who learn their lessons by study, who are said to _dig_ or _grub_. see pony. hobson's choice. thomas hobson, during the first third of the seventeenth century, was the university carrier between cambridge and london. he died january st, . "he rendered himself famous by furnishing the students with horses; and, making it an unalterable rule that every horse should have an equal portion of rest as well as labor, he would never let one out of its turn; hence the celebrated saying, 'hobson's choice: _this_, or none.'" milton has perpetuated his fame in two whimsical epitaphs, which may be found among his miscellaneous poems. hoe in. at hamilton college, to strive vigorously; a metaphorical meaning, taken from labor with the hoe. hoist. it was formerly customary at harvard college, when the freshmen were used as servants, to report them to their tutor if they refused to go when sent on an errand; this complaint was called a _hoisting_, and the delinquent was said to be _hoisted_. the refusal to perform a reasonable service required by a member of the class above him, subjected the freshmen to a complaint to be brought before his tutor, technically called _hoisting_ him to his tutor. the threat was commonly sufficient to exact the service.--_willard's memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. p. . hold ins. at bowdoin college, "near the commencement of each year," says a correspondent, "the sophs are wont, on some particular evening, to attempt to '_hold in_' the freshmen when coming out of prayers, generally producing quite a skirmish." hollis. mr. thomas hollis of lincoln's inn, to whom, with many others of the same name, harvard college is so much indebted, among other presents to its library, gave "sixty-four volumes of valuable books, curiously bound." to these reference is made in the following extract from the gentleman's magazine for september, . "mr. hollis employed mr. fingo to cut a number of emblematical devices, such as the caduceus of mercury, the wand of Æsculapius, the owl, the cap of liberty, &c.; and these devices were to adorn the backs and sometimes the sides of books. when patriotism animated a work, instead of unmeaning ornaments on the binding, he adorned it with caps of liberty. when wisdom filled the page, the owl's majestic gravity bespoke its contents. the caduceus pointed out the works of eloquence, and the wand of Æsculapius was a signal of good medicine. the different emblems were used on the same book, when possessed of different merits, and to express his disapprobation of the whole or parts of any work, the figure or figures were reversed. thus each cover exhibited a critique on the book, and was a proof that they were not kept for show, as he must read before he could judge. read this, ye admirers of gilded books, and imitate." honorarium, honorary. a term applied, in europe, to the recompense offered to professors in universities, and to medical or other professional gentlemen for their services. it is nearly equivalent to _fee_, with the additional idea of being given _honoris causa_, as a token of respect.--_brande. webster_. there are regular receivers, quæstors, appointed for the reception of the _honorarium_, or charge for the attendance of lectures.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . honoris causa. latin; _as an honor_. any honorary degree given by a college. degrees in the faculties of divinity and law are conferred, at present, either in course, _honoris causa_, or on admission _ad eundem_.--_calendar trin. coll._, , p. . honors. in american colleges, the principal honors are appointments as speakers at exhibitions and commencements. these are given for excellence in scholarship. the appointments for exhibitions are different in different colleges. those of commencement do not vary so much. the following is a list of the appointments at harvard college, in the order in which they are usually assigned: valedictory oration, called also _the_ english oration, salutatory in latin, english orations, dissertations, disquisitions, and essays. the salutatorian is not always the second scholar in the class, but must be the best, or, in case this distinction is enjoyed by the valedictorian, the second-best latin scholar. latin or greek poems or orations or english poems sometimes form a part of the exercises, and may be assigned, as are the other appointments, to persons in the first part of the class. at yale college the order is as follows: valedictory oration, salutatory in latin, philosophical orations, orations, dissertations, disputations, and colloquies. a person who receives the appointment of a colloquy can either write or speak in a colloquy, or write a poem. any other appointee can also write a poem. other colleges usually adopt one or the other of these arrangements, or combine the two. at the university of cambridge, eng., those who at the final examination in the senate-house are classed as wranglers, senior optimes, or junior optimes, are said to go out in _honors_. i very early in the sophomore year gave up all thoughts of obtaining high _honors_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . hood. an ornamented fold that hangs down the back of a graduate, to mark his degree.--_johnson_. my head with ample square-cap crown, and deck with _hood_ my shoulders. _the student_, oxf. and cam., vol. i. p. . horn-blowing. at princeton college, the students often provide themselves at night with horns, bugles, &c., climb the trees in the campus, and set up a blowing which is continued as long as prudence and safety allow. horse-shedding. at the university of vermont, among secret and literary societies, this term is used to express the idea conveyed by the word _electioneering_. house. a college. the word was formerly used with this signification in harvard and yale colleges. if any scholar shall transgress any of the laws of god, or the _house_, he shall be liable, &c.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . if detriment come by any out of the society, then those officers [the butler and cook] themselves shall be responsible to the _house_.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . a member of the college was also called a _member of the house_. the steward is to see that one third part be reserved of all the payments to him by the _members of the house_ quarterly made.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . a college officer was called an _officer of the house_. the steward shall be bound to give an account of the necessary disbursements which have been issued out to the steward himself, butler, cook, or any other _officer of the house_.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . neither shall the butler or cook suffer any scholar or scholars whatever, except the fellows, masters of art, fellow-commoners or _officers of the house_, to come into the butteries, &c.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . before the year , the term _fellows of the house_ was applied, at harvard college, both to the members of the corporation, and to the instructors who did not belong to the corporation. the equivocal meaning of this title was noticed by president leverett, for, in his duplicate record of the proceedings of the corporation and the overseers, he designated certain persons to whom he refers as "fellows of the house, i.e. of the corporation." soon after this, an attempt was made to distinguish between these two classes of fellows, and in the distinction was settled, when one whiting, "who had been for several years known as tutor and 'fellow of the house,' but had never in consequence been deemed or pretended to be a member of the corporation, was admitted to a seat in that board."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. pp. , . see scholar of the house. . an assembly for transacting business. see congregation, convocation. house of representatives. at union college, the members of the junior class compose what is called the _house of representatives_, a body organized after the manner of the national house, for the purpose of becoming acquainted with the forms and manner of legislation. the following account has been furnished by a member of that college. "at the end of the third term, sophomore year, when the members of that class are looking forward to the honors awaiting them, comes off the initiation to the house. the friday of the tenth week is the day usually selected for the occasion. on the afternoon of that day the sophomores assemble in the junior recitation-room, and, after organizing themselves by the appointment of a chairman, are waited upon by a committee of the house of representatives of the junior class, who announce that they are ready to proceed with the initiation, and occasionally dilate upon the importance and responsibility of the future position of the sophomores. "the invitation thus given is accepted, and the class, headed by the committee, proceeds to the representatives' hall. on their arrival, the members of the house retire, and the incoming members, under the direction of the committee, arrange themselves around the platform of the speaker, all in the room at the same time rising in their seats. the speaker of the house now addresses the sophomores, announcing to them their election to the high position of representatives, and exhorting them to discharge well all their duties to their constituents and their common country. he closes, by stating it to be their first business to elect the officers of the house. "the election of speaker, vice-speaker, clerk, and treasurer by ballot then follows, two tellers being appointed by the chair. the speaker is elected for one year, and must be one of the faculty; the other officers hold only during the ensuing term. the speaker, however, is never expected to be present at the meetings of the house, with the exception of that at the beginning of each term session, so that the whole duty of presiding falls on the vice-speaker. this is the only meeting of the _new_ house during that term. "on the second friday afternoon of the fall term, the speaker usually delivers an inaugural address, and soon after leaves the chair to the vice-speaker, who then announces the representation from the different states, and also the list of committees. the members are apportioned by him according to population, each state having at least one, and some two or three, as the number of the junior class may allow. the committees are constituted in the manner common to the national house, the number of each, however, being less. business then follows, as described in jefferson's manual; petitions, remonstrances, resolutions, reports, debates, and all the 'toggery' of legislation, come on in regular, or rather irregular succession. the exercises, as may be well conceived, furnish an excellent opportunity for improvement in parliamentary tactics and political oratory." the house of representatives was founded by professor john austin tates. it is not constituted by every junior class, and may be regarded as intermittent in its character. see senate. humanist. one who pursues the study of the _humanities (literæ humaniores)_, or polite literature; a term used in various european universities, especially the scotch.--_brandt_. humanity, _pl._ humanities. in the plural signifying grammar, rhetoric, the latin and greek languages, and poetry; for teaching which there are professors in the english and scotch universities. --_encyc._ hummel. at the university of vermont, a foot, especially a large one. hyphenute. at princeton college, the aristocratic or would-be aristocratic in dress, manners, &c., are called _hyphenutes_. used both as a noun and adjective. same as [greek: oi aristoi] q.v. _i_. illuminate. to interline with a translation. students _illuminate_ a book when they write between the printed lines a translation of the text. _illuminated_ books are preferred by good judges to ponies or hobbies, as the text and translation in them are brought nearer to one another. the idea of calling books thus prepared _illuminated_, is taken partly from the meaning of the word _illuminate_, to adorn with ornamental letters, substituting, however, in this case, useful for ornamental, and partly from one of its other meanings, to throw light on, as on obscure subjects. illustration. that which elucidates a subject. a word used with a peculiar application by undergraduates in the university of cambridge, eng. i went back,... and did a few more bits of _illustration_, such as noting down the relative resources of athens and sparta when the peloponnesian war broke out, and the sources of the athenian revenue.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . imposition. in the english universities, a supernumerary exercise enjoined on students as a punishment. minor offences are punished by rustication, and those of a more trivial nature by fines, or by literary tasks, here termed _impositions_.--_oxford guide_, p. . literary tasks called _impositions_, or frequent compulsive attendances on tedious and unimproving exercises in a college hall.--_t. warton, minor poems of milton_, p. . _impositions_ are of various lengths. for missing chapel, about one hundred lines to copy; for missing a lecture, the lecture to translate. this is the measure for an occasional offence.... for coming in late at night repeatedly, or for any offence nearly deserving rustication, i have known a whole book of thucydides given to translate, or the ethics of aristotle to analyze, when the offender has been a good scholar, while others, who could only do mechanical work, have had a book of euclid to write out. long _impositions_ are very rarely _barberized_. when college tutors intend to be severe, which is very seldom, they are not to be trifled with. at cambridge, _impositions_ are not always in writing, but sometimes two or three hundred lines to repeat by heart. this is ruin to the barber.--_collegian's guide_, pp. , . in an abbreviated form, _impos._ he is obliged to stomach the _impos._, and retire.--_grad. ad cantab._, p. . he satisfies the proctor and the dean by saying a part of each _impos._--_ibid._, p. . see barber. incept. to take the degree of master of arts. they may nevertheless take the degree of m.a. at the usual period, by putting their names on the _college boards_ a few days previous to _incepting_.--_cambridge calendar_. the m.a. _incepts_ in about three years and two months from the time of taking his first degree.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . inceptor. one who has proceeded to the degree of m.a., but who, not enjoying all the privileges of an m.a. until the commencement, is in the mean time termed an inceptor. used in the english universities, and formerly at harvard college. and, in case any of the sophisters, questionists, or _inceptors_ fail in the premises required at their hands ... they shall be deferred to the following year.--_laws of , in quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . the admissio _inceptorum_ was as follows: "admitto te ad secundum gradum in artibus pro more academiarum in angliâ: tibique trado hunc librum unâ cum potestate publice profitendi, ubicunque ad hoc munus publicè evocatus fueris."--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . indian society. at the collegiate institute of indiana, a society of smokers was established, in the year , by an indian named zachary colbert, and called the indian society. the members and those who have been invited to join the society, to the number of sixty or eighty, are accustomed to meet in a small room, ten feet by eighteen; all are obliged to smoke, and he who first desists is required to pay for the cigars smoked at that meeting. indigo. at dartmouth college, a member of the party called the blues. the same as a blue, which see. the howes, years ago, used to room in dartmouth hall, though none room there now, and so they made up some verses. here is one:-- "hurrah for dartmouth hall! success to every student that rooms in dartmouth hall, unless he be an _indigo_, then, no success at all." _the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . initiation. secret societies exist in almost all the colleges in the united states, which require those who are admitted to pass through certain ceremonies called the initiation. this fact is often made use of to deceive freshmen, upon their entrance into college, who are sometimes initiated into societies which have no existence, and again into societies where initiation is not necessary for membership. a correspondent from dartmouth college writes as follows: "i believe several of the colleges have various exercises of _initiating_ freshmen. ours is done by the 'united fraternity,' one of our library societies (they are neither of them secret), which gives out word that the _initiation_ is a fearful ceremony. it is simply every kind of operation that can be contrived to terrify, and annoy, and make fun of freshmen, who do not find out for some time that it is not the necessary and serious ceremony of making them members of the society." in the university of virginia, students on entering are sometimes initiated into the ways of college life by very novel and unique ceremonies, an account of which has been furnished by a graduate of that institution. "the first thing, by way of admitting the novitiate to all the mysteries of college life, is to require of him in an official communication, under apparent signature of one of the professors, a written list, tested under oath, of the entire number of his shirts and other necessary articles in his wardrobe. the list he is requested to commit to memory, and be prepared for an examination on it, before the faculty, at some specified hour. this the new-comer usually passes with due satisfaction, and no little trepidation, in the presence of an august assemblage of his student professors. he is now remanded to his room to take his bed, and to rise about midnight bell for breakfast. the 'callithumpians' (in this institution a regularly organized company), 'squallinaders,' or 'masquers,' perform their part during the livelong night with instruments 'harsh thunder grating,' to insure to the poor youth a sleepless night, and give him full time to con over and curse in his heart the miseries of a college existence. our fellow-comrade is now up, dressed, and washed, perhaps two hours in advance of the first light of dawn, and, under the guidance of a _posse comitatus_ of older students, is kindly conducted to his morning meal. a long alley, technically 'green alley,' terminating with a brick wall, informing all, 'thus far shalt thou go, and no farther,' is pointed out to him, with directions 'to follow his nose and keep straight ahead.' of course the unsophisticated finds himself completely nonplused, and gropes his way back, amidst the loud vociferations of 'go it, green un!' with due apologies for the treatment he has received, and violent denunciations against the former _posse_ for their unheard-of insolence towards the gentleman, he is now placed under different guides, who volunteer their services 'to see him through.' suffice it to be said, that he is again egregiously 'taken in,' being deposited in the rotunda or lecture-room, and told to ring for whatever he wants, either coffee or hot biscuit, but particularly enjoined not to leave without special permission from one of the faculty. the length of his sojourn in this place, where he is finally left, is of course in proportion to his state of verdancy." inspector of the college. at yale college, a person appointed to ascertain, inspect, and estimate all damages done to the college buildings and appurtenances, whenever required by the president. all repairs, additions, and alterations are made under his inspection, and he is also authorized to determine whether the college chambers are fit for the reception of the students. formerly the inspectorship in harvard college was held by one of the members of the college government. his duty was to examine the state of the college public buildings, and also at stated times to examine the exterior and interior of the buildings occupied by the students, and to cause such repairs to be made as were in his opinion proper. the same duties are now performed by the _superintendent of public buildings_.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . _laws harv. coll._, , p. , and , p . the duties of the _inspector of the college buildings_, at middlebury, are similar to those required of the inspector at yale.--_laws md. coll._, , pp. , . in statu pupillari. latin; literally, _in a state of pupilage_. in the english universities, one who is subject to collegiate laws, discipline, and officers is said to be _in statu pupillari_. and the short space that here we tarry, at least "_in statu pupillari_," forbids our growing hopes to germ, alas! beyond the appointed term. _grad. ad cantab._, p. . interlinear. a printed book, with a written translation between the lines. the same as an _illuminated_ book; for an account of which, see under illuminate. then devotes himself to study, with a steady, earnest zeal, and scorns an _interlinear_, or a pony's meek appeal. _poem before iadma_, , p. . interliner. same as interlinear. in the "memorial of john s. popkin, d.d.," a professor at harvard college, professor felton observes: "he was a mortal enemy to translations, '_interliners_,' and all such subsidiary helps in learning lessons; he classed them all under the opprobrious name of 'facilities,' and never scrupled to seize them as contraband goods. when he withdrew from college, he had a large and valuable collection of this species of literature. in one of the notes to his three lectures he says: 'i have on hand a goodly number of these confiscated wares, full of manuscript innotations, which i seized in the way of duty, and would now restore to the owners on demand, without their proving property or paying charges.'"--p. lxxvii. ponies, _interliners_, ticks, screws, and deads (these are all college verbalities) were all put under contribution.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . intonitans bolus. greek, [greek: bolos], a lump. latin, _bolus_, a bit, a morsel. english, _bolus_, a mass of anything made into a large pill. it may be translated _a thundering pill_. at harvard college, the _intonitans bolus_ was a great cane or club which was given nominally to the strongest fellow in the graduating class; "but really," says a correspondent, "to the greatest bully," and thus was transmitted, as an entailed estate, to the samsons of college. if any one felt that he had been wronged in not receiving this emblem of valor, he was permitted to take it from its possessor if he could. in later years the club presented a very curious appearance; being almost entirely covered with the names of those who had held it, carved on its surface in letters of all imaginable shapes and descriptions. at one period, it was in the possession of richard jeffrey cleveland, a member of the class of , and was by him transmitted to jonathan saunderson of the class of . it has disappeared within the last fifteen or twenty years, and its hiding-place, even if it is in existence, is not known. see bully club. invalid's table. at yale college, in former times, a table at which those who were not in health could obtain more nutritious food than was supplied at the common board. a graduate at that institution has referred to the subject in the annexed extract. "it was extremely difficult to obtain permission to board out, and indeed impossible except in extreme cases: the beginning of such permits would have been like the letting out of water. to take away all pretext for it, an '_invalid's table_' was provided, where, if one chose to avail himself of it, having a doctor's certificate that his health required it, he might have a somewhat different diet."--_scenes and characters in college, new haven_, , pp. , . _j_. jack-knife. at harvard college it has long been the custom for the ugliest member of the senior class to receive from his classmates a _jack-knife_, as a reward or consolation for the plainness of his features. in former times, it was transmitted from class to class, its possessor in the graduating class presenting it to the one who was deemed the ugliest in the class next below. mr. william biglow, a member of the class of , the recipient for that year of the jack-knife,--in an article under the head of "omnium gatherum," published in the federal orrery, april , , entitled, "a will: being the last words of charles chatterbox, esq., late worthy and much lamented member of the laughing club of harvard university, who departed college life, june , , in the twenty-first year of his age,"--presents this _transmittendum_ to his successor, with the following words:-- "_item_. c---- p----s[ ] has my knife, during his natural college life; that knife, which ugliness inherits, and due to his superior merits, and when from harvard he shall steer, i order him to leave it here, that't may from class to class descend, till time and ugliness shall end." mr. prentiss, in the autumn of , soon after graduating, commenced the publication of the rural repository, at leominster, mass. in one of the earliest numbers of this paper, following the example of mr. biglow, he published his will, which mr. paine, the editor of the federal orrery, immediately transferred to his columns with this introductory note:--"having, in the second number of 'omnium gatherum' presented to our readers the last will and testament of charles chatterbox, esq., of witty memory, wherein the said charles, now deceased, did lawfully bequeath to ch----s pr----s the celebrated 'ugly knife,' to be by him transmitted, at his college demise, to the next succeeding candidate; -------- and whereas the said ch----s pr----s, on the st of june last, departed his aforesaid college life, thereby leaving to the inheritance of his successor the valuable legacy which his illustrious friend had bequeathed, as an entailed estate, to the poets of the university,--we have thought proper to insert a full, true, and attested copy of the will of the last deceased heir, in order that the world may be furnished with a correct genealogy of this renowned _jack-knife_, whose pedigree will become as illustrious in after time as the family of the 'rolles,' and which will be celebrated by future wits as the most formidable _weapon_ of modern genius." that part of the will only is here inserted which refers particularly to the knife. it is as follows:-- "i--i say i, now make this will; let those whom i assign fulfil. i give, grant, render, and convey my goods and chattels thus away; that _honor of a college life, that celebrated_ ugly knife, which predecessor sawney[ ] orders, descending to time's utmost borders, to _noblest bard_ of _homeliest phiz_, to have and hold and use, as his, i now present c----s p----y s----r,[ ] to keep with his poetic lumber, to scrape his quid, and make a split, to point his pen for sharpening wit; and order that he ne'er abuse said ugly knife, in dirtier use, and let said charles, that best of writers, in prose satiric skilled to bite us, and equally in verse delight us, take special care to keep it clean from unpoetic hands,--i ween. and when those walls, the muses' seat, said s----r is obliged to quit, let some one of apollo's firing, to such heroic joys aspiring, who long has borne a poet's name, with said knife cut his way to fame." see _buckingham's reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. , . tradition asserts that the original jack-knife was terminated at one end of the handle by a large blade, and at the other by a projecting piece of iron, to which a chain of the same metal was attached, and that it was customary to carry it in the pocket fastened by this chain to some part of the person. when this was lost, and the custom of transmitting the knife went out of fashion, the class, guided by no rule but that of their own fancy, were accustomed to present any thing in the shape of a knife, whether oyster or case, it made no difference. in one instance a wooden one was given, and was immediately burned by the person who received it. at present the jack-knife is voted to the ugliest member of the senior class, at the meeting for the election of officers for class day, and the sum appropriated for its purchase varies in different years from fifty cents to twenty dollars. the custom of presenting the jack-knife is one of the most amusing of those which have come down to us from the past, and if any conclusion may be drawn from the interest which is now manifested in its observance, it is safe to infer, in the words of the poet, that it will continue "till time and ugliness shall end." in the collegiate institute of indiana, a jack-knife is given to the greatest liar, as a reward of merit. see will. japanned. a cant term in use at the university of cambridge, eng., explained in the following passage. "many ... step ... into the church, without any pretence of other change than in the attire of their outward man,--the being '_japanned_,' as assuming the black dress and white cravat is called in university slang."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . jesuit. at the university of cambridge, eng., a member of jesus college. jobation. at the university of cambridge, eng., a sharp reprimand from the dean for some offence, not eminently heinous. thus dismissed the august presence, he recounts this _jobation_ to his friends, and enters into a discourse on masters, deans, tutors, and proctors.--_grad. ad cantab._, p. . jobe. to reprove; to reprimand. "in the university of cambridge, [eng.,] the young scholars are wont to call chiding, _jobing_."--_grad. ad cantab._ i heard a lively young man assert, that, in consequence of an intimation from the tutor relative to his irregularities, his father came from the country to _jobe_ him.--_gent. mag._, dec. . joe. a name given at several american colleges to a privy. it is said that when joseph penney was president of hamilton college, a request from the students that the privies might be cleansed was met by him with a denial. in consequence of this refusal, the offices were purified by fire on the night of november th. the derivation of the word, allowing the truth of this story, is apparent. the following account of _joe-burning_ is by a correspondent from hamilton college:--"on the night of the th of november, every year, the sophomore class burn 'joe.' a large pile is made of rails, logs, and light wood, in the form of a triangle. the space within is filled level to the top, with all manner of combustibles. a 'joe' is then sought for by the class, carried from its foundations on a rude bier, and placed on this pile. the interior is filled with wood and straw, surrounding a barrel of tar placed in the middle, over all of which gallons of turpentine are thrown, and then set fire to. from the top of the lofty hill on which the college buildings are situated, this fire can be seen for twenty miles around. the sophomores are all disguised in the most odd and grotesque dresses. a ring is formed around the burning 'joe,' and a chant is sung. horses of the neighbors are obtained and ridden indiscriminately, without saddle or bridle. the burning continues usually until daylight." ponamus convivium _josephi_ in locum et id uremus. _convivii exsequiæ, hamilton coll._, . johnian. a member of st. john's college in the university of cambridge, eng. the _johnians_ are always known by the name of pigs; they put up a new organ the other day, which was immediately christened "baconi novum organum."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv., p . jun. abbreviated for junior. the target for all the venomed darts of rowdy sophs, magnificent _juns_, and lazy senes.--_the yale banger_, nov. , . june. an abbreviation of junior. i once to yale a fresh did come, but now a jolly _june_, returning to my distant home, i bear the wooden spoon. _songs of yale_, , p. . but now, when no longer a fresh or a soph, each blade is a gentleman _june_. _ibid._, p. . june training. the following interesting and entertaining account of one of the distinguishing customs of the university of vermont, is from the pen of one of her graduates, to whom the editor of this work is under many obligations for the valuable assistance he has rendered in effecting the completeness of this collection. "in the old time when militia trainings were in fashion, the authorities of burlington decided that, whereas the students of the university of vermont claimed and were allowed the right of suffrage, they were to be considered citizens, and consequently subject to military duty. the students having refused to appear on parade, were threatened with prosecution; and at last they determined to make their appearance. this they did on a certain 'training day,' (the year i do not recollect,) to the full satisfaction of the authorities, who did not expect _such_ a parade, and had no desire to see it repeated. but the students being unwilling to expose themselves to 'the rigor of the law,' paraded annually; and when at last the statute was repealed and militia musters abolished, they continued the practice for the sake of old association. thus it passed into a custom, and the first wednesday of june is as eagerly anticipated by the citizens of burlington and the youth of the surrounding country for its 'training,' as is the first wednesday of august for its annual commencement. the faculty always smile propitiously, and in the afternoon the performance commences. the army, or more euphoniously the 'university invincibles,' take up 'their line of march' from the college campus, and proceed through all the principal streets to the great square, where, in the presence of an immense audience, a speech is delivered by the commander-in-chief, and a sermon by the chaplain, the roll is called, and the annual health report is read by the surgeon. these productions are noted for their patriotism and fervid eloquence rather than high literary merit. formerly the music to which they marched consisted solely of the good old-fashioned drum and fife; but of late years the invincibles have added to these a brass band, composed of as many obsolete instruments as can be procured, in the hands of inexperienced performers. none who have ever handled a musical instrument before are allowed to become members of the band, lest the music should be too sweet and regular to comport with the general order of the parade. the uniform (or rather the _multiform_) of the company varies from year to year, owing to the regulation that each soldier shall consult his own taste,--provided that no two are to have the same taste in their equipments. the artillery consists of divers joints of rusty stove-pipe, in each of which is inserted a toy cannon of about one quarter of an inch calibre, mounted on an old dray, and drawn by as many horse-apologies as can be conveniently attached to it. when these guns are discharged, the effect--as might be expected--is terrific. the banners, built of cotton sheeting and mounted on a rake-handle, although they do not always exhibit great artistic genius, often display vast originality of design. for instance, one contained on the face a diagram (done in ink with the wrong end of a quill) of the _pons asinorum_, with the rather belligerent inscription, 'remember napoleon at lodi.' on the reverse was the head of an extremely doubtful-looking individual viewing 'his natural face in a glass.' inscription,--'o wad some pow'r the giftie gie us to see oursel's as others see us.' "the surgeon's equipment is an ox-cart containing jars of drugs (most of them marked 'n.e.r.' and 'o.b.j.'), boxes of homoeopathic pills (about the size of a child's head), immense saws and knives, skeletons of animals, &c.; over which preside the surgeon and his assistant in appropriate dresses, with tin spectacles. this surgeon is generally the chief feature of the parade, and his reports are astonishing additions to the surgical lore of our country. he is the wit of the college,--the one who above all others is celebrated for the loudest laugh, the deepest bumper, the best joke, and the poorest song. how well he sustains his reputation may be known by listening to his annual reading, or by reference to the reports of 'trotwood,' 'gubbins,' or 'deppity sawbones,' who at different times have immortalized themselves by their contributions to science. the cavalcade is preceded by the 'pioneers,' who clear the way for the advancing troops; which is generally effected by the panic among the boys, occasioned by the savage aspect of the pioneers,--their faces being hideously painted, and their dress consisting of gleanings from every costume, christian, pagan, and turkish, known among men. as the body passes through the different streets, the martial men receive sundry testimonials of regard and approval in the shape of boquets and wreaths from the fair 'peruvians,' who of course bestow them on those who, in their opinion, have best succeeded in the object of the day,--uncouth appearance. after the ceremonies, the students quietly congregate in some room in college to _count_ these favors and to ascertain who is to be considered the hero of the day, as having rendered himself pre-eminently ridiculous. this honor generally falls to the lot of the surgeon. as the sun sinks behind the adirondacs over the lake, the parade ends; the many lookers-on having nothing to see but the bright visions of the next year's training, retire to their homes; while the now weary students, gathered in knots in the windows of the upper stories, lazily and comfortably puff their black pipes, and watch the lessening forms of the retreating countrymen." further to elucidate the peculiarities of the june training, the annexed account of the custom, as it was observed on the first wednesday in june of the current year, is here inserted, taken from the "daily free press," published at burlington, june th, . "the annual parade of the principal military body in vermont is an event of importance. the first wednesday in june, the day assigned to it, is becoming the great day of the year in burlington. already it rivals, if it does not exceed, commencement day in glory and honor. the people crowd in from the adjoining towns, the steamboats bring numbers from across the lake, and the inhabitants of the town turn out in full force. the yearly recurrence of such scenes shows the fondness of the people for a hearty laugh, and the general acceptableness of the entertainment provided. "the day of the parade this year was a very favorable one,--without dust, and neither too hot nor too cold for comfort the performances properly--or rather _im_properly--commenced in the small hours of the night previous by the discharge of a cannon in front of the college buildings, which, as the cannon was stupidly or wantonly pointed _towards_ the college buildings, blew in several hundred panes of glass. we have not heard that anybody laughed at this piece of heavy wit. "at four o'clock in the afternoon, the invincibles took up their line of march, with scream of fife and roll of drum, down pearl street to the square, where the flying artillery discharged a grand national salute of one gun; thence to the exchange, where a halt was made and a refreshment of water partaken of by the company, and then to the square in front of the american, where they were duly paraded, reviewed, exhorted, and reported upon, in presence of two or three thousand people. "the scene presented was worth seeing. the windows of the american and wheeler's block had all been taken out, and were filled with bright female faces; the roofs of the same buildings were lined with spectators, and the top of the portico of the american was a condensed mass of loveliness and bright colors. the town hall windows, steps, doors, &c. were also filled. every good look-out anywhere near the spot was occupied, and a dense mass of by-standers and lookers-on in carriages crowded the southern part of the square. "of the cortege itself, the pencil of a hogarth only could give an adequate idea. the valorous colonel brick was of course the centre of all eyes. he was fitly supported by his two aids. the three were in elegant uniforms, were handsomely mounted, rode well and with gallant bearing, and presented a particularly attractive appearance. "behind them appeared a scarlet robe, surmounted by a white wig of brobdinagian dimensions and spectacles to match, which it is supposed contained in the interior the physical system of the reverendissimus boanerges diogenes lanternarius, chaplain, the whole mounted upon the vertebræ of a solemn-looking donkey. "the representative of the church militant was properly backed up by the flying artillery. their banner announced that they were 'for the reduction of sebastopol,' and it is safe to say that they will certainly take that fortress, if they get a chance. if the russians hold out against those four ghostly steeds, tandem, with their bandy-legged and kettle-stomached riders,--that gun, so strikingly like a joint of old stove-pipe in its exterior, but which upon occasion could vomit forth your real smoke and sound and smell of unmistakable brimstone,--and those slashed and blood-stained artillerymen,--they will do more than anybody did on wednesday. "the t.l.n. horn-et band, with sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and shawm, tanglang, locofodeon, and hugag, marched next. they reserved their efforts for special occasions, when they woke the echoes with strains of altogether unearthly music, composed for them expressly by saufylur, the eminent self-taught new zealand composer. "barnum's baby-show, on four wheels, in charge of the great showman himself, aided by that experienced nurse, mrs. gamp, in somewhat dilapidated attire, followed. the babies, from a span long to an indefinite length, of all shapes and sizes, black, white, and snuff-colored, twins, triplets, quartettes, and quincunxes, in calico and sackcloth, and in a state of nature, filled the vehicle, and were hung about it by the leg or neck or middle. a half-starved quadruped of osseous and slightly equine appearance drew the concern, and the shrieking axles drowned the cries of the innocents. "mr. joseph hiss and mrs. patterson of massachusetts were not absent. joseph's rubicund complexion, brassy and distinctly know-nothing look, and nasal organ well developed by his experience on the olfactory committee, were just what might have been expected. the 'make up' of mrs. p., a bright brunette, was capital, and she looked the woman, if not the lady, to perfection. the two appeared in a handsome livery buggy, paid for, we suppose, by the state of massachusetts. "a wagon-load of two or three tattered and desperate looking individuals, labelled 'recruits for the crimea,' with a generous supply of old iron and brick-bats as material of war, was dragged along by the frame and most of the skin of what was once a horse. "towards the rear, but by no means least in consequence or in the amount of attention attracted, was the army hospital, drawn by two staid and well-fed oxen. in front appeared the snowy locks and 'fair round belly, with good _cotton_ lined' of the worthy dr. esculapius liverwort tarand cantchuget-urlegawa opodeldoc, while by his side his assistant sawbones brayed in a huge iron mortar, with a weighty pestle, much noise, and indefatigable zeal, the drugs and dye-stuffs. thigh-bones, shoulder-blades, vertebræ, and even skulls, hanging round the establishment, testified to the numerous and successful amputations performed by the skilful surgeon. "noticeable among the cavalry were don quixote de la u.v.m., knight of the patent-leather gaiters, terrible in his bright rectangular cuirass of tin (once a tea-chest), and his glittering harpoon; his doughty squire, sancho panza; and a dashing young lady, whose tasteful riding-dress of black cambric, wealth of embroidered skirts and undersleeves, and bold riding, took not a little attention. "of the rank and file on foot it is useless to attempt a description. beards of awful size, moustaches of every shade and length under a foot, phizzes of all colors and contortions, four-story hats with sky-scraping feathers, costumes ring-streaked, speckled, monstrous, and incredible, made up the motley crew. there was a northern emigrant just returned from kansas, with garments torn and water-soaked, and but half cleaned of the adhesive tar and feathers, watched closely by a burly missourian, with any quantity of hair and fire-arms and bowie-knives. there were rev. antoinette brown, and neal dow; there was a darky whose banner proclaimed his faith in stowe and seward and parker, an aboriginal from the prairies, an ancient minstrel with a modern fiddle, and a modern minstrel with an ancient hurdy- gurdy. all these and more. each man was a study in himself, and to all, falstaff's description of his recruits would apply:-- "'my whole charge consists of corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked his sores; the cankers of a calm world and a long peace; ten times more dishonorable ragged than an old-faced ancient: and such have i, that you would think i had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. a mad fellow met me on the way and told me i had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. no eye hath seen such scarecrows.' "the proceedings on the review were exciting. after the calling of the roll, the idol of his regiment, col. martin van buren brick, discharged an eloquent and touching speech. "from the report of dr. opodeldoc, which was thirty-six feet in length, we can of course give but a few extracts. he commenced by informing the invincibles that his cures the year past had been more astounding than ever, and that his fame would continue to grow brighter and brighter, until eclipsed by the advent of some younger dr. esculapius liverwort tar cant-ye-get-your-leg-away opodeldoc, who in after years would shoot up like a meteor and reproduce his father's greatness; and went on as follows:-- "'the first academic that appeared after the last report was the _desideratum graduatere_, or graduating fever. twenty-seven were taken down. symptoms, morality in the head,--dignity in the walk, --hints about graduating,--remarkable tendency to swell,--literary movement of the superior and inferior maxillary bones, &c., &c. strictures on bleeding were first applied; then treating homoeopathically _similis similibus_, applied roots extracted, roots latin and greek, infinitesimal extracts of calculus, mathematical formulas, psychological inductions, &c., &c. no avail. finally applied huge sheep-skin plasters under the axilla, with a composition of printers' ink, paste, paper, ribbons, and writing-ink besmeared thereon, and all were despatched in one short day. "'sophomore exhibition furnished many cases. one man hit by a soph-bug, drove eye down into stomach, carrying with it brains and all inside of the head. in order to draw them back to their proper place, your surgeon caused a leaf from barnum's autobiography to be placed on patient's head, thinking that to contain more true, genuine _suction_ than anything yet discovered. * * * * * "'nebraska _cancers_ have appeared in our ranks, especially in missouri division. surgeon recommends eighty-pounders be loaded to the muzzle, first with blank cartridges,--to wit, frank pierce and stephen a. douglas, free-soil sermons, fern leaves, hot corn, together with all the fancy literature of the day,--and cause the same to be fired upon the disputed territory; this would cause all the breakings out to be removed, and drive off everybody.' "the close of the report was as follows. it affected many even to tears. "'may you all remember your surgeon, and may your thoracic duck ever continue to sail peacefully down the common carrotted arteries, under the keystone of the arch of the aorta, and not rush madly into the abominable cavity and eclipse the semi-lunar dandelions, nor, still worse, play the dickens with the pneumogastric nerve and auxiliary artery, reverse the doododen, upset the flamingo, irritate the _high-old-glossus_, and be for ever lost in the receptaculum chyli. no, no, but, &c. yours feelingly, 'dr. e.l.t.c.o., m.d.' "dr. o., we notice, has added a new branch, that of dentistry, to his former accomplishments. by his new system, his customers are not obliged to undergo the pain of the operations in person, but, by merely sending their heads to him, can have everything done with a great decrease of trouble. from a calf's head thus sent in, the doctor, after cutting the gums with a hay-cutter, and filing between the teeth with a wood-saw, skilfully extracted with a pair of blacksmith tongs a very great number of molars and incisors. "miss lucy amazonia crura longa lignea, thirteen feet high, and mr. rattleshanks don skyphax, a swain a foot taller, advanced from the ranks, and were made one by the chaplain. the bride promised to own the groom, but _protested_ formally against his custody of her person, property, and progeny. the groom pledged himself to mend the unmentionables of his spouse, or to resign his own when required to rock the cradle, and spank the babies. he placed no ring upon her finger, but instead transferred his whiskers to her face, when the chaplain pronounced them 'wife and man,' and the happy pair stalked off, their heads on a level with the second-story windows. "music from the keeseville band who were present followed; the flying artillery fired another salute; the fife and drums struck up; and the invincibles took their winding way to the university, where they were disbanded in good season." junior. one in the third year of his collegiate course in an american college, formerly called junior sophister. see sophister. . one in the first year of his course at a theological seminary. --_webster_. junior. noting the third year of the collegiate course in american colleges, or the first year in the theological seminaries.--_webster_. junior appointments. at yale college, there appears yearly, in the papers conducted by the students, a burlesque imitation of the regular appointments of the junior exhibition. these mock appointments are generally of a satirical nature, referring to peculiarities of habits, character, or manners. the following, taken from some of the yale newspapers, may be considered as specimens of the subjects usually assigned. philosophical oration, given to one distinguished for a certain peculiarity, subject, "the advantage of a great breadth of base." latin oration, to a vain person, subject, "amor sui." dissertations: to a meddling person, subject, "the busybody"; to a poor punster, subject, "diseased razors"; to a poor scholar, subject, "flunk on,--flunk ever." colloquy, to a joker whose wit was not estimated, subject, "unappreciated facetiousness." when a play upon names is attempted, the subject "perfect looseness" is assigned to mr. slack; mr. barnes discourses upon "_stability_ of character, or pull down and build greater"; mr. todd treats upon "the student's manual," and incentives to action are presented, based on the line "lives of great men all remind us," by students who rejoice in the christian names, george washington, patrick henry, martin van buren, andrew jackson, charles james fox, and henry clay. see mock part. junior bachelor. one who is in his first year after taking the degree of bachelor of arts. no _junior bachelor_ shall continue in the college after the commencement in the summer vacation.--_laws of harv. coll._, , p. . junior fellow. at oxford, one who stands upon the foundation of the college to which he belongs, and is an aspirant for academic emoluments.--_de quincey_. . at trinity college, hartford, a junior fellow is one chosen by the house of convocation to be a member of the examining committee for three years. junior fellows must have attained the m.a. degree, and can only be voted for by masters in arts. six junior fellows are elected every three years. junior freshman. the name of the first of the four classes into which undergraduates are divided at trinity college, dublin. junior optime. at the university of cambridge, eng., those who occupy the third rank in honors, at the close of the final examination in the senate-house, are called _junior optimes_. the third class, or that of _junior optimes_, is usually about at numerous as the first [that of the wranglers], but its limits are more extensive, varying from twenty-five to sixty. a majority of the classical men are in it; the rest of its contents are those who have broken down before the examination from ill-health or laziness, and choose the junior optime as an easier pass degree under their circumstances than the poll, and those who break down in the examination; among these last may be sometimes found an expectant wrangler.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d p. . the word is frequently abbreviated. two years ago he got up enough of his low subjects to go on among the _junior ops._--_ibid._, p. . there are only two mathematical papers, and these consist almost entirely of high questions; what a _junior op._ or low senior op. can do in them amounts to nothing.--_ibid._, p. . junior sophister. at the university of cambridge, eng., a student in the second year of his residence is called junior soph or sophister. . in some american colleges, a member of the junior class, i.e. of the third year, was formerly designated a junior sophister. see sophister. _k_. keep. to lodge, live, dwell, or inhabit. to _keep_ in such a place, is to have rooms there. this word, though formerly used extensively, is now confined to colleges and universities. inquire of anybody you meet in the court of a college at cambridge your way to mr. a----'s room, you will be told that he _keeps_ on such a staircase, up so many pair of stairs, door to the right or left.--_forby's vocabulary_, vol. ii. p. . he said i ought to have asked for his rooms, or inquired where he _kept_.--_gent. mag._, , p. . dr. johnson, in his dictionary, cites this very apposite passage from shakespeare: "knock at the study where they say he keeps." mr. pickering, in his vocabulary, says of the word: "this is noted as an americanism in the monthly anthology, vol. v. p. . it is less used now than formerly." _to keep an act_, in the english universities, "to perform an exercise in the public schools preparatory to the proceeding in degrees." the phrase was formerly in use in harvard college. in an account in the mass. hist. coll., vol. i. p. , entitled new england's first fruits, is the following in reference to that institution: "the students of the first classis that have beene these foure yeeres trained up in university learning, and are approved for their manners, as they have _kept their publick acts_ in former yeeres, ourselves being present at them; so have they lately _kept two solemn acts_ for their commencement." _to keep chapel_, in colleges, to attend divine services, which are there performed daily. "as you have failed to _make up your number_ of chapels the last two weeks," such are the very words of the dean, "you will, if you please, _keep every chapel_ till the end of the term."--_household words_, vol. ii. p. . _to keep a term_, in universities, is to reside during a term.--_webster_. keys. caius, the name of one of the colleges in the university of cambridge, eng., is familiarly pronounced _keys_. kingsman. at the university of cambridge, eng., a member of king's college. he came out the winner, with the _kingsman_ and one of our three close at his heels.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . kitchen-hatch. a half-door between the kitchen and the hall in colleges and old mansions. at harvard college, the students in former times received at the _kitchen-hatch_ their food for the evening meal, which they were allowed to eat in the yard or at their rooms. at the same place the waiters also took the food which they carried to the tables. the waiters when the bell rings at meal-time shall take the victuals at the _kitchen-hatch_, and carry the same to the several tables for which they are designed.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . see buttery-hatch. knock in. a phrase used at oxford, and thus explained in the collegian's guide: "_knocking in_ late, or coming into college after eleven or twelve o'clock, is punished frequently with being 'confined to gates,' or being forbidden to '_knock in_' or come in after nine o'clock for a week or more, sometimes all the term."--p. . knocks. from knuckles. at some of the southern colleges, a game at marbles called _knucks_ is a common diversion among the students. [greek: kudos]. greek; literally, _glory, fame_. used among students, with the meaning _credit, reputation_. i was actuated not merely by a desire after the promotion of my own [greek: kudos], but by an honest wish to represent my country well.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . _l_. landsmannschaft. german. the name of an association of students in german universities. lap-ear. at washington college, penn., students of a religious character are called _lap-ears_ or _donkeys_. the opposite class are known by the common name of _bloods_. latin spoken at colleges. at our older american colleges, students were formerly required to be able to speak and write latin before admission, and to continue the use of it after they had become members. in his history of harvard university, quincy remarks on this subject:-- "at a period when latin was the common instrument of communication among the learned, and the official language of statesmen, great attention was naturally paid to this branch of education. accordingly, 'to speak true latin, both in prose and verse,' was made an essential requisite for admission. among the 'laws and liberties' of the college we also find the following: 'the scholars _shall never use their mother tongue_, except that, in public exercises of oratory or such like, they be called to make them in english.' this law appears upon the records of the college in the latin as well as in the english language. the terms in the former are indeed less restrictive and more practical: 'scholares vernaculâ linguâ, _intra collegii limites_, nullo pretextu utentur.' there is reason to believe that those educated at the college, and destined for the learned professions, acquired an adequate acquaintance with the latin, and those destined to become divines, with the greek and hebrew. in other respects, although the sphere of instruction was limited, it was sufficient for the age and country, and amply supplied all their purposes and wants." --vol. i. pp. , . by the laws of , the undergraduates were required to "declaim publicly in the hall, in one of the three learned languages; and in no other without leave or direction from the president." the observance of this rule seems to have been first laid aside, when, "at an overseers' meeting at the college, april th, , john vassall, jonathan allen, tristram gilman, thomas toppan, edward walker, samuel barrett, presented themselves before the board, and pronounced, in the respective characters assigned them, a dialogue in _the english tongue_, translated from castalio, and then withdrew,"--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . the first english oration was spoken by mr. jedediah huntington in the year , and the first english poem by mr. john davis in . in reference to this subject, as connected with yale college, president wholsey remarks, in his historical discourse:-- "with regard to practice in the learned languages, particularly the latin, it is prescribed that 'no scholar shall use the english tongue in the college with his fellow-scholars, unless he be called to a public exercise proper to be attended in the english tongue, but scholars in their chambers, and when they are together, shall talk latin.'"--p. . "the fluent use of latin was acquired by the great body of the students; nay, certain phrases were caught up by the very cooks in the kitchen. yet it cannot be said that elegant latin was either spoken or written. there was not, it would appear, much practice in writing this language, except on the part of those who were candidates for berkeleian prizes. and the extant specimens of latin discourses written by the officers of the college in the past century are not eminently ciceronian in their style. the speaking of latin, which was kept up as the college dialect in rendering excuses for absences, in syllogistic disputes, and in much of the intercourse between the officers and students, became nearly extinct about the time of dr. dwight's accession. and at the same period syllogistic disputes as distinguished from forensic seem to have entirely ceased."--p. . the following story is from the sketches of yale college. "in former times, the students were accustomed to assemble together to render excuses for absence in latin. one of the presidents was in the habit of answering to almost every excuse presented, 'ratio non sufficit' (the reason is not sufficient). on one occasion, a young man who had died a short time previous was called upon for an excuse. some one answered, 'mortuus est' (he is dead). 'ratio non sufficit,' repeated the grave president, to the infinite merriment of his auditors."--p. . the story is current of one of the old presidents of harvard college, that, wishing to have a dog that had strayed in at evening prayers driven out of the chapel, he exclaimed, half in latin and half in english, "exclude canem, et shut the door." it is also related that a freshman who had been shut up in the buttery by some sophomores, and had on that account been absent from a recitation, when called upon with a number of others to render an excuse, not knowing how to express his ideas in latin, replied in as learned a manner as possible, hoping that his answer would pass as latin, "shut m' up in t' buttery." a very pleasant story, entitled "the tutor's ghost," in which are narrated the misfortunes which befell a tutor in the olden time, on account of his inability to remember the latin for the word "beans," while engaged in conversation, may be found in the "yale literary magazine," vol. xx. pp. - . see non paravi and non valui. laureate. to honor with a degree in the university, and a present of a wreath of laurel.--_warton_. laureation. the act of conferring a degree in the university, together with a wreath of laurel; an honor bestowed on those who excelled in writing verse. this was an ancient practice at oxford, from which, probably, originated the denomination of _poet laureate_.--_warton_. the laurel crown, according to brande, "was customarily given at the universities in the middle ages to such persons as took degrees in grammar and rhetoric, of which poetry formed a branch; whence, according to some authors, the term baccalaureatus has been derived. the academical custom of bestowing the laurel, and the court custom, were distinct, until the former was abolished. the last instance in which the laurel was bestowed in the universities, was in the reign of henry the eighth." laws. in early times, the laws in the oldest colleges in the united states were as often in latin as in english. they were usually in manuscript, and the students were required to make copies for themselves on entering college. the rev. henry dunster, who was the first president of harvard college, formed the first code of laws for the college. they were styled, "the laws, liberties, and orders of harvard college, confirmed by the overseers and president of the college in the years , , , , and , and published to the scholars for the perpetual preservation of their welfare and government." referring to him, quincy says: "under his administration, the first code of laws was formed; rules of admission, and the principles on which degrees should be granted, were established; and scholastic forms, similar to those customary in the english universities, were adopted; many of which continue, with little variation, to be used at the present time."--_hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . in , the laws were revised, and it was voted that they should all be in latin, and that each student should have a copy, which he was to write out for himself and subscribe. in , they were again revised and printed in english, since which time many editions have been issued. of the laws of yale college, president woolsey gives the following account, in his historical discourse before the graduates of that institution, aug. , :-- "in the very first year of the legal existence of the college, we find the trustees ordaining, that, 'until they should provide further, the rector or tutors should make use of the orders and institutions of harvard college, for the instructing and ruling of the collegiate school, so far as they should judge them suitable, and wherein the trustees had not at that meeting made provision.' the regulations then made by the trustees went no further than to provide for the religious education of the college, and to give to the college officers the power of imposing extraordinary school exercises or degradation in the class. the earliest known laws of the college belong to the years and , and are in manuscript; which is explained by the custom that every freshman, on his admission, was required to write off a copy of them for himself, to which the admittatur of the officers was subscribed. in the year a new revision of the laws was completed, which exists in manuscript; but the first printed code was in latin, and issued from the press of t. green at new london, in . various editions, with sundry changes in them, appeared between that time and the year , when the first edition in english saw the light. "it is said of this edition, that it was printed by particular order of the legislature. that honorable body, being importuned to extend aid to the college, not long after the time when president clap's measures had excited no inconsiderable ill-will, demanded to see the laws; and accordingly a bundle of the latin laws--the only ones in existence--were sent over to the state-house. not admiring legislation in a dead language, and being desirous to pry into the mysteries which it sealed up from some of the members, they ordered the code to be translated. from that time the numberless editions of the laws have all been in the english tongue."--pp. , . the college of william and mary, which was founded in , imitated in its laws and customs the english universities, but especially the university of oxford. the other colleges which were founded before the revolution, viz. new jersey college, columbia college, pennsylvania university, brown university, dartmouth, and rutgers college, "generally imitated harvard in the order of classes, the course of studies, the use of text-books, and the manner of instruction."--_am. quart. reg._, vol. xv. , p. . the colleges which were founded after the revolution compiled their laws, in a great measure, from those of the above-named colleges. leather medal. at harvard college, the _leather medal_ was formerly bestowed upon the _laziest_ fellow in college. he was to be last at recitation, last at commons, seldom at morning prayers, and always asleep in church. lecture. a discourse _read_, as the derivation of the word implies, by a professor to his pupils; more generally, it is applied to every species of instruction communicated _vivâ voce_. --_brande_. in american colleges, lectures form a part of the collegiate instruction, especially during the last two years, in the latter part of which, in some colleges, they divide the time nearly equally with recitations. . a rehearsal of a lesson.--_eng. univ._ of this word, de quincey says: "but what is the meaning of a lecture in oxford and elsewhere? elsewhere, it means a solemn dissertation, read, or sometimes histrionically declaimed, by the professor. in oxford, it means an exercise performed orally by the students, occasionally assisted by the tutor, and subject, in its whole course, to his corrections, and what may be called his _scholia_, or collateral suggestions and improvements."--_life and manners_, p. . lecturer. at the university of cambridge, england, the _lecturers_ assist in tuition, and especially attend to the exercises of the students in greek and latin composition, themes, declamations, verses, &c.--_cam. guide_. lem. at williams college, a privy. night had thrown its mantle over earth. sol had gone to lay his weary head in the lap of thetis, as friend hudibras has it; the horned moon, and the sweet pale stars, were looking serenely! upon the darkened earth, when the denizens of this little village were disturbed by the cry of fire. the engines would have been rattling through the streets with considerable alacrity, if the fathers of the town had not neglected to provide them; but the energetic citizens were soon on hand. there was much difficulty in finding where the fire was, and heads and feet were turned in various directions, till at length some wight of superior optical powers discovered a faint, ruddy light in the rear of west college. it was an ancient building,--a time-honored structure,--an edifice erected by our forefathers, and by them christened lemuel, which in the vernacular tongue is called _lem_ "for short." the dimensions of the edifice were about by inches. the loss is almost irreparable, estimated at not less than , pounds, avoirdupois. may it rise like a phoenix from its ashes!--_williams monthly miscellany_, , vol. i. p. , . letter home. a writer in the american literary magazine thus explains and remarks upon the custom of punishing students by sending a letter to their parents:--"in some institutions, there is what is called the '_letter home_,'--which, however, in justice to professors and tutors in general, we ought to say, is a punishment inflicted upon parents for sending their sons to college, rather than upon delinquent students. a certain number of absences from matins or vespers, or from recitations, entitles the culprit to a heartrending epistle, addressed, not to himself, but to his anxious father or guardian at home. the document is always conceived in a spirit of severity, in order to make it likely to take effect. it is meant to be impressive, less by the heinousness of the offence upon which it is predicated, than by the pregnant terms in which it is couched. it often creates a misery and anxiety far away from the place wherein it is indited, not because it is understood, but because it is misunderstood and exaggerated by the recipient. while the student considers it a farcical proceeding, it is a leaf of tragedy to fathers and mothers. then the thing is explained. the offence is sifted. the father finds out that less than a dozen morning naps are all that is necessary to bring about this stupendous correspondence. the moral effect of the act of discipline is neutralized, and the parent is perhaps too glad, at finding his anxiety all but groundless, to denounce the puerile, infant-school system, which he has been made to comprehend by so painful a process."--vol. iv. p. . avaunt, ye terrific dreams of "failures," "conditions," "_letters home_," and "admonitions."--_yale lit. mag._, vol. iii. p. . the birch twig sprouts into--_letters home_ and dismissions.--_ibid._, vol. xiii. p. . but if they, capricious through long indulgence, did not choose to get up, what then? why, absent marks and _letters home_.--_yale banger_, oct. , . he thinks it very hard that the faculty write "_letters home_."--_yale tomahawk_, may, . and threats of "_letters home_, young man," now cause us no alarm. _presentation day song_, june , . liberty tree. at harvard college, a tree which formerly stood between massachusetts and harvard halls received, about the year , the name of the liberty tree, on an occasion which is mentioned in hutchinson's posthumous volume of the history of massachusetts bay. "the spirit of liberty," says he, "spread where it was not intended. the undergraduates of harvard college had been long used to make excuses for absence from prayers and college exercises; pretending detention at their chambers by their parents, or friends, who come to visit them. the tutors came into an agreement not to admit such excuses, unless the scholar came to the tutor, before prayers or college exercises, and obtained leave to be absent. this gave such offence, that the scholars met in a body, under and about a great tree, to which they gave the name of the _tree of liberty_! there they came into several resolves in favor of liberty; one of them, that the rule or order of the tutors was _unconstitutional_. the windows of some of the tutors were broken soon after, by persons unknown. several of the scholars were suspected, and examined. one of them falsely reported that he had been confined without victuals or drink, in order to compel him to a confession; and another declared, that he had seen him under this confinement. this caused an attack upon the tutors, and brickbats were thrown into the room, where they had met together in the evening, through the windows. three or four of the rioters were discovered and expelled. the three junior classes went to the president, and desired to give up their chambers, and to leave the college. the fourth class, which was to remain but about three months, and then to be admitted to their degrees, applied to the president for a recommendation to the college in connecticut, that they might be admitted there. the overseers of the college met on the occasion, and, by a vigorous exertion of the powers with which they were intrusted, strengthened the hands of the president and tutors, by confirming the expulsions, and declaring their resolution to support the subordinate government of the college; and the scholars were brought to a sense and acknowledgment of their fault, and a stop was put to the revolt."--vol. iii. p. . some years after, this tree was either blown or cut down, and the name was transferred to another. a few of the old inhabitants of cambridge remember the stump of the former liberty tree, but all traces of it seem to have been removed before the year . the present liberty tree stands between holden chapel and harvard hall, to the west of hollis. as early as the year there were gatherings under its branches on class day, and it is probable that this was the case even at an earlier date. at present it is customary for the members of the senior class, at the close of the exercises incident to class day, (the day on which the members of that class finish their collegiate studies, and retire to make preparations for the ensuing commencement,) after cheering the buildings, to encircle this tree, and, with hands joined, to sing their favorite ballad, "auld lang syne." they then run and dance around it, and afterwards cheer their own class, the other classes, and many of the college professors. at parting, each takes a sprig or a flower from the beautiful wreath which is hung around the tree, and this is sacredly preserved as a last memento of the scenes and enjoyments of college life. in the poem delivered before the class of , on their class day, occur the following beautiful stanzas in memory of departed classmates, in which reference is made to some of the customs mentioned above:-- "they are listening now to our parting prayers; and the farewell song that we pour their distant voices will echo from the far-off spirit shore; "and the wreath that we break with our scattered band, as it twines round the aged elm,-- its fragments we'll keep with a sacred hand, but the fragrance shall rise to them. "so to-day we will dance right merrily, an unbroken band, round the old elm-tree; and they shall not ask for a greener shrine than the hearts of the class of ' ." its grateful shade has in later times been used for purposes similar to those which hutchinson records, as the accompanying lines will show, written in commemoration of the rebellion of . "wreaths to the chiefs who our rights have defended; hallowed and blessed be the liberty tree: where lenox[ ] his pies 'neath its shelter hath vended, we sophs have assembled, and sworn to be free." _the rebelliad_, p. . the poet imagines the spirits of the different trees in the college yard assembled under the liberty tree to utter their sorrows. "it was not many centuries since, when, gathered on the moonlit green, beneath the tree of liberty, a ring of weeping sprites was seen." _meeting of the dryads,[ ] holmes's poems_, p. . it is sometimes called "the farewell tree," for obvious reasons. "just fifty years ago, good friends, a young and gallant band were dancing round the farewell tree, --each hand in comrade's hand." _song, at semi-centennial anniversary of the class of _. see class day. liceat migrare. latin; literally, _let it be permitted him to remove_. at oxford, a form of modified dismissal from college. this punishment "is usually the consequence of mental inefficiency rather than moral obliquity, and does not hinder the student so dismissed from entering at another college or at cambridge."--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . same as licet migrari. licet migrari. latin; literally, _it is permitted him to be removed_. in the university of cambridge, england, a permission to leave one's college. this differs from the bene discessit, for although you may leave with consent, it by no means follows in this case that you have the approbation of the master and fellows so to do.--_gradus ad cantab._ like a brick or a bean, like a house on fire, like bricks. among the students at the university of cambridge, eng., intensive phrases, to express the most energetic way of doing anything. "these phrases," observes bristed, "are sometimes in very odd contexts. you hear men talk of a balloon going up _like bricks_, and rain coming down _like a house on fire_."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . still it was not in human nature for a classical man, living among classical men, and knowing that there were a dozen and more close to him reading away "_like bricks_," to be long entirely separated from his greek and latin books.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . "_like bricks_," is the commonest of their expressions, or used to be. there was an old landlady at huntingdon who said she always charged cambridge men twice as much as any one else. then, "how do you know them?" asked somebody. "o sir, they always tell us to get the beer _like bricks_."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . literÆ humaniores. latin; freely, _the humanities; classical literature_. at oxford "the _literæ humaniores_ now include latin and greek translation and composition, ancient history and rhetoric, political and moral philosophy, and logic."--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . see humanity. literary contests. at jefferson college, in pennsylvania, "there is," says a correspondent, "an unusual interest taken in the two literary societies, and once a year a challenge is passed between them, to meet in an open literary contest upon an appointed evening, usually that preceding the close of the second session. the _contestors_ are a debater, an orator, an essayist, and a declaimer, elected from each society by the majority, some time previous to their public appearance. an umpire and two associate judges, selected either by the societies or by the _contestors_ themselves, preside over the performances, and award the honors to those whom they deem most worthy of them. the greatest excitement prevails upon this occasion, and an honor thus conferred is preferable to any given in the institution." at washington college, in pennsylvania, the contest performances are conducted upon the same principle as at jefferson. little-go. in the english universities, a cant name for a public examination about the middle of the course, which, being less strict and less important in its consequences than the final one, has received this appellation.--_lyell_. whether a regular attendance on the lecture of the college would secure me a qualification against my first public examination; which is here called _the little-go_.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . also called at oxford _smalls_, or _small-go_. you must be prepared with your list of books, your testamur for responsions (by undergraduates called "_little-go_" or "_smalls_"), and also your certificate of matriculation.--_collegian's guide_, p. . see responsion. ll.b. an abbreviation for _legum baccalaureus_, bachelor of laws. in american colleges, this degree is conferred on students who fulfil the conditions of the statutes of the law school to which they belong. the law schools in the different colleges are regulated on this point by different rules, but in many the degree of ll.b. is given to a b.a. who has been a member of a law school for a year and a half. see b.c.l. ll.d. an abbreviation for _legum doctor_, doctor of laws. in american colleges, an honorary degree, conferred _pro meritis_ on those who are distinguished as lawyers, statesmen, &c. see d.c.l. l.m. an abbreviation for the words _licentiate in medicine_. at the university of cambridge, eng., an l.m. must be an m.a. or m.b. of two years' standing. no exercise, but examination by the professor and another doctor in the faculty. loaf. at princeton college, to borrow anything, whether returning it or not; usually in the latter sense. lodge. at the university of cambridge, england, the technical name given to the house occupied by the master of a college.--_bristed_. when undergraduates were invited to the _conversaziones_ at the _lodge_, they were expected never to sit down in the master's presence.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . long. at the university of cambridge, eng., the long vacation, or, as it is more familiarly called, "the long," commences according to statute in july, at the close of the easter term, but practically early in june, and ends october th, at the beginning of the michaelmas term. for a month or six weeks in the "_long_," they rambled off to see the sights of paris.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . in the vacations, particularly the _long_, there is every facility for reading.--_ibid._, p. . so attractive is the vacation-college-life that the great trouble of the dons is to keep the men from staying up during the _long_. --_ibid._, p. . some were going on reading parties, some taking a holiday before settling down to their work in the "_long_."--_ibid._, p. . see vacation. long-ear. at jefferson college, pennsylvania, a student of a sober or religious character is denominated a _long-ear_. the opposite is _short-ear_. lottery. the method of obtaining money by lottery has at different times been adopted in several of our american colleges. in , a new building being wanted at yale college, the "liberty of a lottery" was obtained from the general assembly, "by which," says clap, "five hundred pounds sterling was raised, clear of all charge and deductions."--_hist. of yale coll._, p. . this sum defrayed one third of the expense of building what was then called connecticut hall, and is known now by the name of "the south middle college." in , harvard college being in an embarrassed condition, the legislature granted it the benefit of a lottery; in this grant was renewed, and for the purpose of enabling the college to erect an additional building. the proceeds of the lottery amounted to $ , , which, with $ , from the general funds of the college, were applied to the erection of stoughton hall, which was completed in . in the legislature again authorized a lottery, which enabled the corporation in to erect a new building, called holworthy hall, at an expense of about $ , , the lottery having produced about $ , .--_quincy's hist. of harv. univ._, vol. ii. pp. , , . lounge. a treat, a comfort. a word introduced into the vocabulary of the english cantabs, from eton.--_bristed_. low. the term applied to the questions, subjects, papers, &c., pertaining to a low man. the "_low_" questions were chiefly confined to the first day's papers.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the "_low_ subjects," as got up to pass men among the junior optimes, comprise, etc.--_ibid._, p. . the _low_ papers were longer.--_ibid._, p. . lower house. see senate. low man. at the university of cambridge, eng., the name given to a junior optime as compared with a senior optime or with a wrangler. i was fortunate enough to find a place in the team of a capital tutor,... who had but six pupils, all going out this time, and five of them "_low men_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _m_. m.a. an abbreviation of _magister artium_, master of arts. the second degree given by universities and colleges. sometimes written a.m., which, is in accordance with the proper latin arrangement. in the english universities, every b.a. of three years' standing may proceed to this degree on payment of certain fees. in america, this degree is conferred, without examination, on bachelors of three years' standing. at harvard, this degree was formerly conferred only upon examination, as will be seen by the following extract. "every schollar that giveth up in writing a system, or synopsis, or summe of logick, naturall and morall philosophy, arithmetick, geometry and astronomy: and is ready to defend his theses or positions: withall skilled in the originalls as above-said; and of godly life and conversation; and so approved by the overseers and master of the colledge, at any publique act, is fit to be dignified with his d degree."--_new england's first fruits_, in _mass. hist. coll._, vol. i. p. . until the year , it was customary for those who applied for the degree of m.a. to defend what were called _master's questions_; after this time an oration was substituted in place of these, which continued until , when for the first time there were no master's exercises. the degree is now given to any graduate of three or more years' standing, on the payment of a certain sum of money. the degree is also presented by special vote to individuals wholly unconnected with any college, but who are distinguished for their literary attainments. in this case, where the honor is given, no fee is required. make up. to recite a lesson which was not recited with the class at the regular recitation. it is properly used as a transitive verb, but in conversation is very often used intransitively. the following passage explains the meaning of the phrase more fully. a student may be permitted, on petition to the faculty, to _make up_ a recitation or other exercise from which he was absent and has been excused, provided his application to this effect be made within the term in-which the absence occurred.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . ... sleeping,--a luxury, however, which is sadly diminished by the anticipated necessity of _making up_ back lessons.--_harv. reg._, p. . man. an undergraduate in a university or college. at cambridge and eke at oxford, every stripling is accounted a _man_ from the moment of his putting on the gown and cap.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . sweet are the slumbers, indeed, of a freshman, who, just escaped the trammels of "home, sweet home," and the pedagogue's tyrannical birch, for the first time in his life, with the academical gown, assumes the _toga virilis_, and feels himself a _man_.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . in college all are "_men_" from the hirsute senior to the tender freshman who carries off a pound of candy and paper of raisins from the maternal domicile weekly.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . manciple. latin, _manceps_; _manu capio_, to take with the hand. in the english universities, the person who purchases the provisions; the college victualler. the office is now obsolete. our _manciple_ i lately met, of visage wise and prudent. _the student_, oxf. and cam., vol. i. p. . mandamus. in the university of cambridge, eng., a special mandate under the great seal, which enables a candidate to proceed to his degree before the regular period.--_grad. ad cantab._ manners. the outward observances of respect which were formerly required of the students by college officers seem very strange to us of the present time, and we cannot but notice the omissions which have been made in college laws during the present century in reference to this subject. among the laws of harvard college, passed in , is one declaring, that "all scholars shall show due respect and honor in speech and behavior, as to their natural parents, so to magistrates, elders, the president and fellows of the corporation, and to all others concerned in the instruction or government of the college, and to all superiors, keeping due silence in their presence, and not disorderly gainsaying them; but showing all laudable expressions of honor and reverence that are in use; such as uncovering the head, rising up in their presence, and the like. and particularly undergraduates shall be uncovered in the college yard when any of the overseers, the president or fellows of the corporation, or any other concerned in the government or instruction of the college, are therein, and bachelors of arts shall be uncovered when the president is there." this law was still further enforced by some of the regulations contained in a list of "the ancient customs of harvard college." those which refer particularly to this point are the following:-- "no freshman shall wear his hat in the college yard, unless it rains, hails, or snows, provided he be on foot, and have not both hands full. "no undergraduate shall wear his hat in the college yard, when any of the governors of the college are there; and no bachelor shall wear his hat when the president is there. "no freshman shall speak to a senior with his hat on; or have it on in a senior's chamber, or in his own, if a senior be there. "all the undergraduates shall treat those in the government of the college with respect and deference; particularly, they shall not be seated without leave in their presence; they shall be uncovered when they speak to them, or are spoken to by them." such were the laws of the last century, and their observance was enforced with the greatest strictness. after the revolution, the spirit of the people had become more republican, and about the year , "considering the spirit of the times and the extreme difficulty the executive must encounter in attempting to enforce the law prohibiting students from wearing hats in the college yard," a vote passed repealing it.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . on this subject, professor sidney willard, with reference to the time of the presidency of joseph willard at harvard college, during the latter part of the last century, remarks: "outward tokens of respect required to be paid to the immediate government, and particularly to the president, were attended with formalities that seemed to be somewhat excessive; such, for instance, as made it an offence for a student to wear his hat in the college yard, or enclosure, when the president was within it. this, indeed, in the fulness of the letter, gradually died out, and was compromised by the observance only when the student was so near, or in such a position, that he was likely to be recognized. still, when the students assembled for morning and evening prayer, which was performed with great constancy by the president, they were careful to avoid a close proximity to the outer steps of the chapel, until the president had reached and passed within the threshold. this was a point of decorum which it was pleasing to witness, and i never saw it violated."--_memories of youth and manhood_, , vol. i. p. . "in connection with the subject of discipline," says president woolsey, in his historical discourse before the graduates of yale college, "we may aptly introduce that of the respect required by the officers of the college, and of the subordination which younger classes were to observe towards older. the germ, and perhaps the details, of this system of college manners, are to be referred back to the english universities. thus the oxford laws require that juniors shall show all due and befitting reverence to seniors, that is, undergraduates to bachelors, they to masters, masters to doctors, as well in private as in public, by giving them the better place when they are together, by withdrawing out of their way when they meet, by uncovering the head at the proper distance, and by reverently saluting and addressing them." after citing the law of harvard college passed in , which is given above, he remarks as follows. "our laws of contain the same identical provisions. these regulations were not a dead letter, nor do they seem to have been more irksome than many other college restraints. they presupposed originally that the college rank of the individual towards whom respect is to be shown could be discovered at a distance by peculiarities of dress; the gown and the wig of the president could be seen far beyond the point where features and gait would cease to mark the person."--pp. , . as an illustration of the severity with which the laws on this subject were enforced, it may not be inappropriate to insert the annexed account from the sketches of yale college:--"the servile requisition of making obeisance to the officers of college within a prescribed distance was common, not only to yale, but to all kindred institutions throughout the united states. some young men were found whose high spirit would not brook the degrading law imposed upon them without some opposition, which, however, was always ineffectual. the following anecdote, related by hon. ezekiel bacon, in his recollections of fifty years since, although the scene of its occurrence was in another college, yet is thought proper to be inserted here, as a fair sample of the insubordination caused in every institution by an enactment so absurd and degrading. in order to escape from the requirements of striking his colors and doffing his chapeau when within the prescribed striking distance from the venerable president or the dignified tutors, young ellsworth, who afterwards rose to the honorable rank of chief justice of the united states, and to many other elevated stations in this country, and who was then a student there, cut off entirely the brim portion of his hat, leaving of it nothing but the crown, which he wore in the form of a skull-cap on his head, putting it under his arm when he approached their reverences. being reproved for his perversity, and told that this was not a hat within the meaning and intent of the law, which he was required to do his obeisance with by removing it from his head, he then made bold to wear his skull-cap into the chapel and recitation-room, in presence of the authority. being also then again reproved for wearing his hat in those forbidden and sacred places, he replied that he had once supposed that it was in truth a veritable hat, but having been informed by his superiors that it was _no hat_ at all, he had ventured to come into their presence as he supposed with his head uncovered by that proscribed garment. but the dilemma was, as in his former position, decided against him; and no other alternative remained to him but to resume his full-brimmed beaver, and to comply literally with the enactments of the collegiate pandect."--pp. , . man who is just going out. at the university of cambridge, eng., the popular name of a student who is in the last term of his collegiate course. mark. the figure given to denote the quality of a recitation. in most colleges, the merit of each performance is expressed by some number of a series, in which a certain fixed number indicates the highest value. in harvard college the highest mark is eight. four is considered as the average, and a student not receiving this average in all the studies of a term is not allowed to remain as a member of college. at yale the marks range from zero to four. two is the average, and a student not receiving this is obliged to leave college, not to return until he can pass an examination in all the branches which his class has pursued. in harvard college, where the system of marks is most strictly followed, the merit of each individual is ascertained by adding together the term aggregates of each instructor, these "term aggregates being the sum of all the marks given during the term, for the current work of each month, and for omitted lessons made up by permission, and of the marks given for examination by the instructor and the examining committee at the close of the term." from the aggregate of these numbers deductions are made for delinquencies unexcused, and the result is the rank of the student, according to which his appointment (if he receives one) is given.--_laws of univ. at cam., mass._, . that's the way to stand in college, high in "_marks_" and want of knowledge! _childe harvard_, p. . if he does not understand his lesson, he swallows it whole, without understanding it; his object being, not the lesson, but the "_mark_," which he is frequently at the president's office to inquire about.--_a letter to a young man who has just entered college_, , p. . i have spoken slightingly, too, of certain parts of college machinery, and particularly of the system of "_marks_." i do confess that i hold them in small reverence, reckoning them as rather belonging to a college in embryo than to one fully grown. i suppose it is "dangerous" advice; but i would be so intent upon my studies as not to inquire or think about my "_marks_."--_ibid._ p. . then he makes mistakes in examinations also, and "loses _marks_." --_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . marker. in the university of cambridge, england, three or four persons called _markers_ are employed to walk up and down chapel during a considerable part of the service, with lists of the names of the members in their hands; they an required to run a pin through the names of those present. as to the method adopted by the markers, bristed says: "the students, as they enter, are _marked_ with pins on long alphabetical lists, by two college servants, who are so experienced and clever at their business that they never have to ask the name of a new-comer more than once."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . his name pricked off upon the _marker's_ roll, no twinge of conscience racks his easy soul. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . marshal. in the university of oxford, an officer who is usually in attendance on one of the proctors.--_collegian's guide_. marshal's treat. an account of the manner in which this observance, peculiar to williams college, is annually kept, is given in the annexed passage from the columns of a newspaper. "another custom here is the marshal's treat. the two gentlemen who are elected to act as marshals during commencement week are expected to _treat_ the class, and this year it was done in fine style. the seniors assembled at about seven o'clock in their recitation-room, and, with marshals whiting and taft at their head, marched down to a grove, rather more than half a mile from the chapel, where tables had been set, and various luxuries provided for the occasion. the philharmonia musical society discoursed sweet strains during the entertainment, and speeches, songs, and toasts were kept up till a late hour in the evening, when after giving cheers for the three lower classes, and three times three for ' , they marched back to the president's. a song written for the occasion was there performed, to which he replied in a few words, speaking of his attachment to the class, and his regret at the parting which must soon take place. the class then returned to east college, and after joining hands and singing auld lang syne, separated."--_boston daily evening traveller_, july , . masquerade. it was formerly the custom at harvard college for the tutors, on leaving their office, to invite their friends to a masquerade ball, which was held at some time during the vacation, usually in the rooms which they occupied in the college buildings. one of the most splendid entertainments of this kind was given by mr. kirkland, afterwards president of the college, in the year . the same custom also prevailed to a certain extent among the students, and these balls were not wholly discontinued until the year . after this period, members of societies would often appear in masquerade dresses in the streets, and would sometimes in this garb enter houses, with the occupants of which they were not acquainted, thereby causing much sport, and not unfrequently much mischief. master. the head of a college. this word is used in the english universities, and was formerly in use in this country, in this sense. the _master_ of the college, or "head of the house," is a d.d., who has been a fellow. he is the supreme ruler within the college trails, and moves about like an undergraduate's deity, keeping at an awful distance from the students, and not letting himself be seen too frequently even at chapel. besides his fat salary and house, he enjoys many perquisites and privileges, not the least of which is that of committing matrimony.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . every schollar, that on proofe is found able to read the originals of the old and new testament into the latine tongue, &c. and at any publick act hath the approbation of the overseers and _master_ of the colledge, is fit to be dignified with his first degree.--_new england's first fruits_, in _mass. hist. coll._, vol. i. pp. , . . a title of dignity in colleges and universities; as, _master_ of arts.--_webster_. they, likewise, which peruse the questiones published by the _masters_.--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. pp. , . master of the kitchen. in harvard college, a person who formerly made all the contracts, and performed all the duties necessary for the providing of commons, under the direction of the steward. he was required to be "discreet and capable."--_laws of harv. coll._, , p. . master's question. a proposition advanced by a candidate for the degree of master of arts. in the older american colleges it seems to have been the established custom, at a very early period, for those who proceeded masters, to maintain in public _questions_ or propositions on scientific or moral topics. dr. cotton mather, in his _magnalia_, p. , referring to harvard college, speaks of "the _questiones_ published by the masters," and remarks that they "now and then presume to fly as high as divinity." these questions were in latin, and the discussions upon them were carried on in the same language. the earliest list of masters' questions extant was published at harvard college in the year . it was entitled, "quæstiones in philosophia discutiendæ ... in comitiis per inceptores in artib[us]." in the title was changed to "quæstiones pro modulo discutiendæ ... per inceptores." the last masters' questions were presented at the commencement in . the next year masters' exercises were substituted, which usually consisted of an english oration, a poem, and a valedictory latin oration, delivered by three out of the number of candidates for the second degree. a few years after, the poem was omitted. the last masters' exercises were performed in the year . at yale college, from onwards, there were no masters' valedictories, nor syllogistic disputes in latin, and in there were no master's exercises at all. mathematical slate. at harvard college, the best mathematician received in former times a large slate, which, on leaving college, he gave to the best mathematician in the next class, and thus transmitted it from class to class. the slate disappeared a few years since, and the custom is no longer observed. matricula. a roll or register, from _matrix_. in _colleges_ the register or record which contains the names of the students, times of entering into college, remarks on their character, &c. the remarks made in the _matricula_ of the college respecting those who entered the freshman class together with him are, of one, that he "in his third year went to philadelphia college."--_hist. sketch of columbia college_, p. . similar brief remarks are found throughout the _matricula_ of king's college.--_ibid._, p. . we find in its _matricula_ the names of william walton, &c.--_ibid._, p. . matriculate. latin, _matricula_, a roll or register, from _matrix_. to enter or admit to membership in a body or society, particularly in a college or university, by enrolling the name in a register.--_wotton_. in july, , he was examined at that university, and _matriculated_.--_works of r.t. paine, biography_, p. xviii. in , he _matriculated_ at st. john's college, cambridge.--_household words_, vol. i. p. . matriculate. one enrolled in a register, and thus admitted to membership in a society.--_arbuthnot_. the number of _matriculates_ has in every instance been greater than that stated in the table.--_cat. univ. of north carolina_, - . matriculation. the act of registering a name and admitting to membership.--_ayliffe_. in american colleges, students who are found qualified on examination to enter usually join the class to which they are admitted, on probation, and are matriculated as members of the college in full standing, either at the close of their first or second term. the time of probation seldom exceeds one year; and if at the end of this time, or of a shorter, as the case may be, the conduct of a student has not been such as is deemed satisfactory by the faculty, his connection with the college ceases. as a punishment, the _matriculation certificate_ of a student is sometimes taken from him, and during the time in which he is unmatriculated, he is under especial probation, and disobedience to college laws is then punished with more severity than at other times.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . _laws yale coll._, , p. . maudlin. the name by which magdalen college, cambridge, eng., is always known and spoken of by englishmen. the "_maudlin men_" were at one time so famous for tea-drinking, that the cam, which licks the very walls of the college, is said to have been absolutely rendered unnavigable with tea-leaves.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . max. abbreviated for _maximum_, greatest. at union college, he who receives the highest possible number of marks, which is one hundred, in each study, for a term, is said to _take max_ (or maximum); to be a _max scholar_. on the merit roll all the _maxs_ are clustered at the top. a writer remarks jocosely of this word. it is "that indication of perfect scholarship to which none but freshmen aspire, and which is never attained except by accident."--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . probably not less than one third of all who enter each new class confidently expect to "mark _max_," during their whole course, and to have the valedictory at commencement.--_ibid._ see merit roll. may. at the university of cambridge, eng., the college easter term examination is familiarly spoken of as _the may_. the "_may_" is one of the features which distinguishes cambridge from oxford; at the latter there are no public college examinations.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . as the "_may_" approached, i began to feel nervous.--_ibid._, p. . may training. a correspondent from bowdoin college where the farcical custom of may training is observed writes as follows in reference to its origin: "in , a law passed the legislature requiring students to perform military duty, and they were summoned to appear at muster equipped as the law directs, to be inspected and drilled with the common militia. great excitement prevailed in consequence, but they finally concluded to _train_. at the appointed time and place, they made their appearance armed _cap-à-pie_ for grotesque deeds, some on foot, some on horse, with banners and music appropriate, and altogether presenting as ludicrous a spectacle as could easily be conceived of. they paraded pretty much 'on their own hook,' threw the whole field into disorder by their evolutions, and were finally ordered off the ground by the commanding officer. they were never called upon again, but the day is still commemorated." m.b. an abbreviation for _medicinæ baccalaureus_, bachelor of physic. at cambridge, eng., the candidate for this degree must have had his name five years on the boards of some college, have resided three years, and attended medical lectures and hospital practice during the other two; also have attended the lectures of the professors of anatomy, chemistry, and botany, and the downing professor of medicine, and passed an examination to their satisfaction. at oxford, eng., the degree is given to an m.a. of one year's standing, who is also a regent of the same length of time. the exercises are disputations upon two distinct days before the professors of the faculty of medicine. the degree was formerly given in american colleges before that of m.d., but has of late years been laid aside. m.d. an abbreviation for _medicines doctor_, doctor of physic. at cambridge, eng., the candidate for this degree must be a bachelor of physic of five years' standing, must have attended hospital practice for three years, and passed an examination satisfactory to the medical professors of the university, at oxford, an m.d. must be an m.b. of three years' standing. the exercises are three distinct lectures, to be read on three different days. in american colleges the degree is usually given to those who have pursued their studies in a medical school for three years; but the regulations differ in different institutions. med, medic. a name sometimes given to a student in medicine. ---- who sent the _medic_ to our aid. _the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . "the council are among ye, yale!" some roaring _medic_ cries. _ibid._, p. . the slain, the _medics_ stowed away. _ibid._, p. . seniors, juniors, freshmen blue, and _medics_ sing the anthem too. _yale banger_, nov. . take ... sixteen interesting "_meds_," with dirty hands and towzeled heads. _songs of yale_, , p. . medalist. in universities, colleges, &c., one who has gained a medal as the reward of merit.--_ed. rev. gradus ad cantab._ these _medalists_ then are the best scholars among the men who have taken a certain mathematical standing; but as out of the university these niceties of discrimination are apt to be dropped they usually pass at home for absolutely the first and second scholars of the year, and sometimes they are so.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . medical faculty. usually abbreviated med. fac. the medical faculty society was established one evening after commons, in the year , by four students of harvard college, james f. deering, charles butterfield, david p. hall, and joseph palmer, members of the class of . like many other societies, it originated in sport, and, as in after history shows, was carried on in the same spirit. the young men above named happening to be assembled in hollis hall, no. , a proposition was started that deering should deliver a mock lecture, which having been done, to the great amusement of the rest, he in his turn proposed that they should at some future time initiate members by solemn rites, in order that others might enjoy their edifying exercises. from this small beginning sprang the renowned med. fac. society. deering, a "fellow of infinite jest," was chosen its first president; he was much esteemed for his talents, but died early, the victim of melancholy madness. the following entertaining account of the early history of this society has been kindly furnished, in a letter to the editor, by a distinguished gentleman who was its president in the year , and a graduate of the class of . "with regard to the medical faculty," he writes, "i suppose that you are aware that its object was mere fun. that object was pursued with great diligence during the earlier period of its history, and probably through its whole existence. i do not remember that it ever had a constitution, or any stated meetings, except the annual one for the choice of officers. frequent meetings, however, were called by the president to carry out the object of the institution. they were held always in some student's room in the afternoon. the room was made as dark as possible, and brilliantly lighted. the faculty sat round a long table, in some singular and antique costume, almost all in large wigs, and breeches with knee-buckles. this practice was adopted to make a strong impression on students who were invited in for examination. members were always examined for admission. the strangest questions were asked by the venerable board, and often strange answers elicited,--no matter how remote from the purpose, provided there was wit or drollery. sometimes a singularly slow person would be invited, on purpose to puzzle and tease him with questions that he could make nothing of; and he would stand in helpless imbecility, without being able to cover his retreat with even the faintest suspicion of a joke. he would then be gravely admonished of the necessity of diligent study, reminded of the anxiety of his parents on his account, and his duty to them, and at length a month or two would be allowed him to prepare himself for another examination, or he would be set aside altogether. but if he appeared again for another trial, he was sure to fare no better. he would be set aside at last. i remember an instance in which a member was expelled for a reason purely fictitious,--droll enough to be worth telling, if i could remember it,--and the secretary directed 'to write to his father, and break the matter gently to him, that it might not bring down the gray hairs of the old man with sorrow to the grave.' "i have a pleasant recollection of the mock gravity, the broad humor, and often exquisite wit of those meetings, but it is impossible to give you any adequate idea of them. burlesque lectures on all conceivable and inconceivable subjects were frequently read or improvised by members _ad libitum_. i remember something of a remarkable one from dr. alden, upon part of a skeleton of a superannuated horse, which he made to do duty for the remains of a great german professor with an unspeakable name. "degrees were conferred upon all the members,--m.d. or d.m.[ ] according to their rank, which is explained in the catalogue. honorary degrees were liberally conferred upon conspicuous persons at home and abroad. it is said that one gentleman, at the south, i believe, considered himself insulted by the honor, and complained of it to the college government, who forthwith broke up the society. but this was long after my time, and i cannot answer for the truth of the tradition. diplomas were given to the m.d.'s and d.m.'s in ludicrous latin, with a great seal appended by a green ribbon. i have one, somewhere. my name is rendered _filius steti_." a graduate of the class of writes: "i well remember that my invitation to attend the meeting of the med. fac. soc. was written in barbarous latin, commencing 'domine crux,' and i think i passed so good an examination that i was made _professor longis extremitatibus_, or professor with long shanks. it was a society for purposes of mere fun and burlesque, meeting secretly, and always foiling the government in their attempts to break it up." the members of the society were accustomed to array themselves in masquerade dresses, and in the evening would enter the houses of the inhabitants of cambridge, unbidden, though not always unwelcome guests. this practice, however, and that of conferring degrees on public characters, brought the society, as is above stated, into great disrepute with the college faculty, by whom it was abolished in the year . the catalogue of the society was a burlesque on the triennial of the college. the first was printed in the year , the others followed in the years , , , and . the title on the cover of the catalogue of , the last issued, similar to the titles borne by the others, was, "catalogus senatus facultatis, et eorum qui munera et officia gesserunt, quique alicujus gradus laurea donati sunt in facultate medicinæ in universitate harvardiana constituta, cantabrigiæ in republica massachusettensi. cantabrigiæ: sumptibus societatis. mdcccxxxiii. sanguinis circulationis post patefactionem anno ccv." the prefaces to the catalogues were written in latin, the character of which might well be denominated _piggish_. in the following translations by an esteemed friend, the beauty and force of the originals are well preserved. _preface to the catalogue of _. "to many, the first edition of the medical faculty catalogue was a wonderful and extraordinary thing. those who boasted that they could comprehend it, found themselves at length terribly and widely in error. those who did not deny their inability to get the idea of it, were astonished and struck with amazement. to certain individuals, it seemed to possess somewhat of wit and humor, and these laughed immoderately; to others, the thing seemed so absurd and foolish, that they preserved a grave and serious countenance. "now, a new edition is necessary, in which it is proposed to state briefly in order the rise and progress of the medical faculty. it is an undoubted matter of history, that the medical faculty is the most ancient of all societies in the whole world. in fact, its archives contain documents and annals of the society, written on birch-bark, which are so ancient that they cannot be read at all; and, moreover, other writings belong to the society, legible it is true, but, by ill-luck, in the words of an unknown and long-buried language, and therefore unintelligible. nearly all the documents of the society have been reduced to ashes at some time amid the rolling years since the creation of man. on this account the medical faculty cannot pride itself on an uninterrupted series of records. but many oral traditions in regard to it have reached us from our ancestors, from which it may be inferred that this society formerly flourished under the name of the 'society of wits' (societas jocosorum); and you might often gain an idea of it from many shrewd remarks that have found their way to various parts of the world. "the society, after various changes, has at length been brought to its present form, and its present name has been given it. it is, by the way, worthy of note, that this name is of peculiar signification, the word 'medical' having the same force as 'sanative' (sanans), as far as relates to the mind, and not to the body, as in the vulgar signification. to be brief, the meaning of 'medical' is 'diverting' (divertens), that is, _turning_ the mind from misery, evil, and grief. under this interpretation, the medical faculty signifies neither more nor less than the 'faculty of recreation.' the thing proposed by the society is, to _divert_ its immediate and honorary members from unbecoming and foolish thoughts, and is twofold, namely, relating both to manners and to letters. professors in the departments appropriated to letters read lectures; and the alumni, as the case requires, are sometimes publicly examined and questioned. the library at present contains a single book, but this _one_ is called for more and more every day. a collection of medical apparatus belongs to the society, beyond doubt the most grand and extensive in the whole world, intended to sharpen the _faculties_ of all the members. "honorary degrees have been conferred on illustrious and remarkable men of all countries. "a certain part of the members go into all academies and literary 'gymnasia,' to act as nuclei, around which branches of this society may be enabled to form." _preface to the catalogue of _. "as the members of the medical faculty have increased, as many members have been distinguished by honorary degrees, and as the former catalogues have all been sold, the senate orders a new catalogue to be printed. "it seemed good to the editors of the former catalogue briefly to state the nature and to defend the antiquity of this faculty. nevertheless, some have refused their assent to the statements, and demand some reasons for what is asserted. we therefore, once for all, declare that, of all societies, this is the most ancient, the most extensive, the most learned, and the most divine. we establish its antiquity by two arguments: firstly, because everywhere in the world there are found many monuments of our ancestors; secondly, because all other societies derive their origin from this. it appears from our annals, that different curators have laid their bones beneath the pyramids, naples, rome, and paris. these, as described by a faithful secretary, are found at this day. "the obelisks of egypt contain in hieroglyphic characters many secrets of our faculty. the chinese wall, and the colossus at rhodes, were erected by our ancestors in sport. we could cite many other examples, were it necessary. "all societies to whom belong either wonderful art, or nothing except secrecy, have been founded on our pattern. it appears that the society of free-masons was founded by eleven disciples of the med. fac. expelled a.d. . but these ignorant fellows were never able to raise their brotherhood to our standard of perfection: in this respect alone they agree with us, in admitting only the _masculine_ gender ('masc. gen.').[ ] "therefore we have always been antimason. no one who has ever gained admittance to our assembly has the slightest doubt that we have extended our power to the farthest regions of the earth, for we have embassies from every part of the world, and satan himself has learned many particulars from our senate in regard to the administration of affairs and the means of torture. "we pride ourselves in being the most learned society on earth, for men versed in all literature and erudition, when hurried into our presence for examination, quail and stand in silent amazement. 'placid death' alone is coeval with this society, and resembles it, for in its own catalogue it equalizes rich and poor, great and small, white and black, old and young. "since these things are so, and you, kind reader, have been instructed on these points, i will not longer detain you from the book and the picture.[ ] farewell." _preface to the catalogue of_ . "it was much less than three years since the third edition of this catalogue saw the light, when the most learned med. fac. began to be reminded that the time had arrived for preparing to polish up and publish a new one. accordingly, special curators were selected to bring this work to perfection. these curators would not neglect the opportunity of saying a few words on matters of great moment. "we have carefully revised the whole text, and, as far as we could, we have taken pains to remove typographical errors. the duty is not light. but the number of medical men in the world has increased, and it is becoming that the whole world should know the true authors of its greatest blessing. therefore we have inserted their names and titles in their proper places. "among other changes, we would not forget the creation of a new office. many healing remedies, foreign, rare, and wonderful, have been brought for the use of the faculty from egypt and arabia felix. it was proper that some worthy, capable man, of quick discernment, should have charge of these most precious remedies. accordingly, the faculty has chosen a curator to be called the 'apothecarius.' many quacks and cheats have desired to hold the new office; but the present occupant has thrown all others into the shade. the names, surnames, and titles of this excellent man will be found in the following pages.[ ] "we have done well, not only towards others, but also towards ourselves. our library contains quite a number of books; among others, ten thousand obtained through the munificence and liberality of great societies in the almost unknown regions of kamtschatka and the north pole, and especially also through the munificence of the emperor of all the russias. it has become so immense, that, at the request of the librarian, the faculty have prohibited any further donations. "in the next session of the general court of massachusetts, the senate of the faculty (assisted by the president of harvard university) will petition for forty thousand sesterces, for the purpose of erecting a large building to contain the immense accumulation of books. from the well-known liberality of the legislature, no doubts are felt of obtaining it. "to say more would make a long story. and this, kind reader, is what we have to communicate to you at the outset. the fruit will show with how much fidelity we have performed the task imposed upon us by the most illustrious men. farewell." as a specimen of the character of the honorary degrees conferred by the society, the following are taken from the list given in the catalogues. they embrace, as will be seen, the names of distinguished personages only, from the king and president to day and martin, sam patch, and the world-renowned sea-serpent. "henricus christophe, rex haytiæ quondam, m.d. med. fac. honorarius."[ ] "gulielmus cobbett, qui ad angliam ossa thomæ paine ferebat, m.d. med. fac. honorarius."[ ] "johannes-cleaves symmes, qui in terræ ilia penetravissit, m.d. med. fac. honorarius."[ ] "alexander i. russ. imp. illust. et sanct. foed. et mass. pac. soc. socius, qui per legat. american. claro med. fac., '_curiositatem raram et archaicam_,' regie transmisit, , m.d. med. fac. honorarius."[ ] "andreas jackson, major-general in bello ultimo americano, et _nov. orleans heros_ fortissimus; et _ergo_ nunc præsidis rerumpub. foed, muneris _candidatus_ et 'old hickory,' m.d. et m.u.d. , med. fac. honorarius, et præses rerumpub. foed., et ll.d. ." "gulielmus emmons, prænominatus pickleïus, qui orator eloquentissimus nostræ ætatis; poma, nuces, _panem-zingiberis_, suas orationes, '_egg-popque_' vendit, d.m. med. fac. honorarius."[ ] "day et martin, angli, qui per quinquaginta annos toto christiano orbi et præcipue _univ. harv._ optimum _real japan atramentum_ ab 'xcvii. altâ holborniâ' subministrârunt, m.d. et m.u.d. med. fac. honorarius." "samuel patch, socius multum deploratus, qui multa experimenta, de gravitate et 'faciles descensus' suo corpore fecit; qui gradum, m.d. _per saltum_ consecutus est. med. fac. honorarius." "cheng et heng, siamesi juvenes, invicem _a mans_ et intime attacti, med. fac. que honorarii." "gulielmus grimke, et quadraginta sodales qui 'omnes in uno' conic sections sine tabulis aspernati sunt, et contra facultatem, col. yal. rebellaverunt, posteaque expulsi et 'obumbrati' sunt et med. fac. honorarii." "martin van buren, _armig._, civitatis scriba reipub. foed. apud aul. brit. legat. extraord. sibi constitutus. reip. nov. ebor. gub. 'don whiskerandos'; 'little dutchman'; atque 'great rejected.' nunc ( ), rerumpub. foed. vice-præses et 'kitchen cabinet' moderator, m.d. et med. fac. honorarius." "magnus serpens maris, suppositus, aut porpoises aut horse-mackerel, grex; 'very like a whale' (shak.); m.d. et peculiariter m.u.d. med. fac. honorarius." "timotheus tibbets et gulielmus j. snelling 'par nobile sed hostile fratrum'; 'victor et victus,' unus buster et rake, alter lupinarum cockpitsque purgator, et nuper edit. nov. ang. galax. med. fac. honorarii."[ ] "capt. basil hall, tabitha trollope, atque _isaacus fiddler_ reverendus; semi-pay centurio, famelica transfuga, et semicoctus grammaticaster, qui scriptitant solum ut prandere possint. tres in uno mend. munch. prof. m.d., m.u.d. et med. fac. honorarium." a college poet thus laments the fall of this respected society:-- "gone, too, for aye, that merry masquerade, which danced so gayly in the evening shade, and learning weeps, and science hangs her head, to mourn--vain toil!--their cherished offspring dead. what though she sped her honors wide and far, hailing as son muscovia's haughty czar, who in his palace humbly knelt to greet, and laid his costly presents at her feet?[ ] relentless fate her sudden fall decreed, dooming each votary's tender heart to bleed, and yet, as if in mercy to atone, that fate hushed sighs, and silenced many a _groan_." _winslow's class poem_, . merit roll. at union college, "the _merit rolls_ of the several classes," says a correspondent, "are sheets of paper put up in the college post-office, at the opening of each term, containing a list of all students present in the different classes during the previous term, with a statement of the conduct, attendance, and scholarship of each member of the class. the names are numbered according to the standing of the student, all the best scholars being clustered at the head, and the poorer following in a melancholy train. to be at the head, or 'to head the roll,' is an object of ambition, while 'to foot the roll' is anything but desirable." middle bachelor. one who is in his second year after taking the degree of bachelor of arts. a senior sophister has authority to take a freshman from a sophomore, a _middle bachelor_ from a junior sophister.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . migrate. in the english universities, to remove from one college to another. one of the unsuccessful candidates _migrated_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . migration. in the english universities, a removal from one college to another. "_a migration_," remarks bristed, "is generally tantamount to a confession of inferiority, and an acknowledgment that the migrator is not likely to become a fellow in his own college, and therefore takes refuge in another, where a more moderate degree will insure him a fellowship. a great deal of this _migration_ goes on from john's to the small colleges."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . migrator. in the english universities, one who removes from one college to another. mild. a student epithet of depreciation, answering nearly to the phrases, "no great shakes," and "small potatoes."--_bristed_. some of us were very heavy men to all appearance, and our first attempts _mild_ enough.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . mingo. latin. at harvard college, this word was formerly used to designate a chamber-pot. to him that occupies my study, i give for use of making toddy, a bottle full of _white-face stingo_, another, handy, called a _mingo_. _will of charles prentiss_, in _rural repository_, . many years ago, some of the students of harvard college wishing to make a present to their tutor, mr. flynt, called on him, informed him of their intention, and requested him to select a gift which would be acceptable to him. he replied that he was a single man, that he already had a well-filled library, and in reality wanted nothing. the students, not all satisfied with this answer, determined to present him with a silver chamber-pot. one was accordingly made, of the appropriate dimensions, and inscribed with these words: "mingere cum bombis res est saluberrima lumbis." on the morning of commencement day, this was borne in procession, in a morocco case, and presented to the tutor. tradition does not say with what feelings he received it, but it remained for many years at a room in quincy, where he was accustomed to spend his saturdays and sundays, and finally disappeared, about the beginning of the revolutionary war. it is supposed to have been carried to england. minor. a privy. from the latin _minor_, smaller; the word _house_ being understood. other derivations are given, but this seems to be the most classical. this word is peculiar to harvard college. miss. an omission of a recitation, or any college exercise. an instructor is said _to give a miss_, when he omits a recitation. a quaint professor of harvard college, being once asked by his class to omit the recitation for that day, is said to have replied in the words of scripture: "ye ask and receive not, for ye ask a-_miss_." in the "memorial of john s. popkin, d.d.," professor felton has referred to this story, and has appended to it the contradiction of the worthy doctor. "amusing anecdotes, some true and many apocryphal, were handed down in college from class to class, and, so far from being yet forgotten, they are rather on the increase. one of these mythical stories was, that on a certain occasion one of the classes applied to the doctor for what used to be called, in college jargon, a _miss_, i.e. an omission of recitation. the doctor replied, as the legend run, 'ye ask, and ye receive not, because ye ask a-_miss_.' many years later, this was told to him. 'it is not true,' he exclaimed, energetically. 'in the first place, i have not wit enough; in the next place, i have too much wit, for i mortally hate a pun. besides, _i never allude irreverently to the scriptures_.'"--p. lxxvii. or are there some who scrape and hiss because you never give a _miss_.--_rebelliad_, p. . ---- is good to all his subjects, _misses_ gives he every hour.--_ms. poem_. miss. to be absent from a recitation or any college exercise. said of a student. see cut. who will recitations _miss_!--_rebelliad_, p. . at every corner let us hiss 'em; and as for recitations,--_miss_ 'em.--_ibid._, p. . who never _misses_ declamation, nor cuts a stupid recitation. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . _missing_ chambers will be visited with consequences more to be dreaded than the penalties of _missing_ lecture.--_collegian's guide_, p. . mitten. at the collegiate institute of indiana, a student who is expelled is said _to get the mitten_. mock-part. at harvard college, it is customary, when the parts for the first exhibition in the junior year have been read, as described under part, for the part-reader to announce what are called the _mock-parts_. these mock-parts which are burlesques on the regular appointments, are also satires on the habits, character, or manners of those to whom they are assigned. they are never given to any but members of the junior class. it was formerly customary for the sophomore class to read them in the last term of that year when the parts were given out for the sophomore exhibition but as there is now no exhibition for that class, they are read only in the junior year. the following may do as specimens of the subjects usually assigned:--the difference between alluvial and original soils; a discussion between two persons not noted for personal cleanliness. the last term of a decreasing series; a subject for an insignificant but conceited fellow. an essay on the humbug, by a dabbler in natural history. a conference on the three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness, between three persons, one very tall, another very broad, and the third very fat. moderate. in colleges and universities, to superintend the exercises and disputations in philosophy, and the commencements when degrees are conferred. they had their weekly declamations on friday, in the colledge hall, besides publick disputations, which either the præsident or the fellows _moderated_.--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. p. . mr. mather _moderated_ at the masters' disputations.--_hutchinson's hist. of mass._, vol. i. p. , note. mr. andrew _moderated_ at the commencements.--_clap's hist. of yale coll._, p. . president holyoke was of a noble, commanding presence. he was perfectly acquainted with academic matters, and _moderated_ at commencements with great dignity.--_holmes's life of ezra stiles_, p. . mr. woodbridge _moderated_ at commencement, .--_woolsey's hist. disc._, p. . moderator. in the english universities, one who superintends the exercises and disputations in philosophy, and the examination for the degree of b.a.--_cam. cal._ the disputations at which the _moderators_ presided in the english universities "are now reduced," says brande, "to little more than matters of form." the word was formerly in use in american colleges. five scholars performed public exercises; the rev. mr. woodbridge acted as _moderator_.--_clap's hist. of yale coll._, p. . he [the president] was occasionally present at the weekly declamations and public disputations, and then acted as _moderator_; an office which, in his absence, was filled by one of the tutors.--_quincy's hist. of harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . monitor. in schools or universities, a pupil selected to look to the scholars in the absence of the instructor, or to notice the absence or faults of the scholars, or to instruct a division or class.--_webster_. in american colleges, the monitors are usually appointed by the president, their duty being to keep bills of absence from, and tardiness at, devotional and other exercises. see _laws of harv. and yale colls._, &c. let _monitors_ scratch as they please, we'll lie in bed and take our ease. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . moonlight. at williams college, the prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. the students speak of "making a rush for _moonlight_," i.e. of attempting to gain the prize for elocution. in the evening comes _moonlight_ exhibition, when three men from each of the three lower classes exhibit their oratorical powers, and are followed by an oration before the adelphic union, by ralph waldo emerson.--_boston daily evening traveller_, july , . moonlight rangers. at jefferson college, in pennsylvania, a title applied to a band composed of the most noisy and turbulent students, commanded by a captain and sub-officer, who, in the most fantastic disguises, or in any dress to which the moonlight will give most effect, appear on certain nights designated, prepared to obey any command in the way of engaging in any sport of a pleasant nature. they are all required to have instruments which will make the loudest noise and create the greatest excitement. moss-covered head. in the german universities, students during the sixth and last term, or _semester_, are called _moss-covered heads_, or, in an abbreviated form, _mossy heads_. mountain day. the manner in which this day is observed at williams college is described in the accompanying extracts. "greylock is to the student in his rambles, what mecca is to the mahometan; and a pilgrimage to the summit is considered necessary, at least once during the collegiate course. there is an ancient and time-honored custom, which has existed from the establishment of the college, of granting to the students, once a year, a certain day of relaxation and amusement, known by the name of '_mountain day_.' it usually occurs about the middle of june, when the weather is most favorable for excursions to the mountains and other places of interest in the vicinity. it is customary, on this and other occasions during the summer, for parties to pass the night upon the summit, both for the novelty of the thing, and also to enjoy the unrivalled prospect at sunrise next morning."--_sketches of will. coll._, , pp. - . "it so happens that greylock, in our immediate vicinity, is the highest mountain in the commonwealth, and gives a view from its summit 'that for vastness and sublimity is equalled by nothing in new england except the white hills.' and it is an ancient observance to go up from this valley once in the year to 'see the world.' we were not of the number who availed themselves of this _lex non scripta_, forasmuch as more than one visit in time past hath somewhat worn off the novelty of the thing. but a goodly number 'went aloft,' some in wagons, some on horseback, and some, of a sturdier make, on foot. some, not content with a mountain _day_, carried their knapsacks and blankets to encamp till morning on the summit and see the sun rise. not in the open air, however, for a magnificent timber observatory has been set up,--a rough-hewn, sober, substantial 'light-house in the skies,' under whose roof is a limited portion of infinite space shielded from the winds."--_williams monthly miscellany_, , vol. i. p. . "'_mountain day_,' the date to which most of the imaginary _rows_ have been assigned, comes at the beginning of the summer term, and the various classes then ascend greylock, the highest peak in the state, from which may be had a very fine view. frequently they pass the night there, and beds are made of leaves in the old tower, bonfires are built, and they get through it quite comfortable."--_boston daily evening traveller_, july , . mouth. to recite in an affected manner, as if one knew the lesson, when in reality he does not. never shall you allow yourself to think of going into the recitation-room, and there trust to "skinning," as it is called in some colleges, or "phrasing," as in others, or "_mouthing_ it," as in others.--_todd's student's manual_, p. . mrs. goff. formerly a cant phrase for any woman. but cease the touching chords to sweep, for _mrs. goff_ has deigned to weep. _rebelliad_, p. . muff. a foolish fellow. many affected to sneer at him, as a "_muff_" who would have been exceedingly flattered by his personal acquaintance.--_blackwood's mag._, eng. ed., vol. lx. p. . mule. in germany, a student during the vacation between the time of his quitting the gymnasium and entering the university, is known as a mule. mus.b. an abbreviation for _musicæ baccalaureus_, bachelor of music. in the english universities, a bachelor of music must enter his name at some college, and compose and perform a solemn piece of music, as an exercise before the university. mus.d. an abbreviation for _musicæ doctor_, doctor of music. a mus.d. is generally a mus.b., and his exercise is the same. muses. a college or university is often designated the _temple, retreat, seat_, &c. _of the muses_. having passed this outer court of the _temple of the muses_, you are ushered into the sanctum sanctorum itself.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . inviting ... such distinguished visitors as happen then to be on a tour to this attractive _retreat of the muses_.--_ibid._, vol. i, p. . my instructor ventured to offer me as a candidate for admission into that renowned _seat of the muses_, harvard college.--_new england mag._, vol. iii. p. . a student at a college or university is sometimes called a _son of the muses_. it might perhaps suit some inveterate idlers, smokers, and drinkers, but no true _son of the muses_.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . while it was his earnest desire that the beloved _sons of the muses_ might leave the institutions enriched with the erudition, &c.--_judge kent's address before [greek: phi beta kappa] of yale coll._, p. , . _n_. navy club. the navy club, or the navy, as it was formerly called, originated among the students of harvard college about the year , but did not reach its full perfection until several years after. what the primary design of the association was is not known, nor can the causes be ascertained which led to its formation. at a later period its object seems to have been to imitate, as far as possible, the customs and discipline peculiar to the flag-ship of a navy, and to afford some consolation to those who received no appointments at commencement, as such were always chosen its officers. the _lord high admiral_ was appointed by the admiral of the preceding class, but his election was not known to any of the members of his class until within six weeks of commencement, when the parts for that occasion were assigned. it was generally understood that this officer was to be one of the poorest in point of scholarship, yet the jolliest of all the "jolly blades." at the time designated, he broke the seal of a package which had been given him by his predecessor in office, the contents of which were known only to himself; but these were supposed to be the insignia of his office, and the instructions pertaining to the admiralty. he then appointed his assistant officers, a vice-admiral, rear-admiral, captain, sailing-master, boatswain, &c. to the boatswain a whistle was given, transmitted, like the admiral's package, from class to class. the flag-ship for the year was a large marquee, called "the good ship harvard," which was moored in the woods, near the place where the residence of the hon. john g. palfrey now stands. the floor was arranged like the deck of a man-of-war, being divided into the main and quarter decks. the latter was occupied by the admiral, and no one was allowed to be there with him without special order or permission. in his sway he was very despotic, and on board ship might often have been seen reclining on his couch, attended by two of his subordinates (classmates), who made his slumbers pleasant by guarding his sacred person from the visits of any stray mosquito, and kept him cool by the vibrations of a fan. the marquee stood for several weeks, during which time meetings were frequently held in it. at the command of the admiral, the boatswain would sound his whistle in front of holworthy hall, the building where the seniors then, as now, resided, and the student sailors, issuing forth, would form in procession, and march to the place of meeting, there to await further orders. if the members of the navy remained on board ship over night, those who had received appointments at commencement, then called the "marines," were obliged to keep guard while the members slept or caroused. the operations of the navy were usually closed with an excursion down the harbor. a vessel well stocked with certain kinds of provisions afforded, with some assistance from the stores of old ocean, the requisites for a grand clam-bake or a mammoth chowder. the spot usually selected for this entertainment was the shores of cape cod. on the third day the party usually returned from their voyage, and their entry into cambridge was generally accompanied with no little noise and disorder. the admiral then appointed privately his successor, and the navy was disbanded for the year. the exercises of the association varied from year to year. many of the old customs gradually went out of fashion, until finally but little of the original navy remained. the officers were, as usual, appointed yearly, but the power of appointing them was transferred to the class, and a public parade was substituted for the forms and ceremonies once peculiar to the society. the excursion down the harbor was omitted for the first time the present year,[ ] and the last procession made its appearance in the year . at present the navy club is organized after the parts for the last senior exhibition have been assigned. it is composed of three classes of persons; namely, the true navy, which consists of those who have _never_ had parts; the marines, those who have had a _major_ or _second_ part in the senior year, but no _minor_ or _first_ part in the junior; and the horse-marines, those who have had a _minor_ or _first_ part in the junior year, but have subsequently fallen off, so as not to get a _major_ or _second_ part in the senior. of the navy officers, the lord high admiral is usually he who has been sent from college the greatest number of times; the vice-admiral is the poorest scholar in the class; the rear-admiral the laziest fellow in the class; the commodore, one addicted to boating; the captain, a jolly blade; the lieutenant and midshipman, fellows of the same description; the chaplain, the most profane; the surgeon, a dabbler in surgery, or in medicine, or anything else; the ensign, the tallest member of the class; the boatswain, one most inclined to obscenity; the drum major, the most aristocratic, and his assistants, fellows of the same character. these constitute the band. such are the general rules of choice, but they are not always followed. the remainder of the class who have had no parts and are not officers of the navy club are members, under the name of privates. on the morning when the parts for commencement are assigned, the members who receive appointments resign the stations which they have held in the navy club. this resignation takes place immediately after the parts have been read to the class. the door-way of the middle entry of holworthy hall is the place usually chosen for this affecting scene. the performance is carried on in the mock-oratorical style, a person concealed under a white sheet being placed behind the speaker to make the gestures for him. the names of those members who, having received commencement appointments, have refused to resign their trusts in the navy club, are then read by the lord high admiral, and by his authority they are expelled from the society. this closes the exercises of the club. the following entertaining account of the last procession, in , has been furnished by a graduate of that year:-- "the class had nearly all assembled, and the procession, which extended through the rooms of the natural history society, began to move. the principal officers, as also the whole band, were dressed in full uniform. the rear-admiral brought up the rear, as was fitting. he was borne in a sort of triumphal car, composed of something like a couch, elevated upon wheels, and drawn by a white horse. on this his excellency, dressed in uniform, and enveloped in his cloak, reclined at full length. one of the marines played the part of driver. behind the car walked a colored man, with a most fantastic head-dress, whose duty it was to carry his honor the rear-admiral's pipe. immediately before the car walked the other two marines, with guns on their shoulders. the 'digs'[ ] came immediately before the marines, preceded by the tallest of their number, carrying a white satin banner, bearing on it, in gold letters, the word 'harvard,' with a _spade_ of gold paper fastened beneath. the digs were all dressed in black, with oxford caps on their heads, and small iron spades over their shoulders. they walked two and two, except in one instance, namely, that of the first three scholars, who walked together, the last of their brethren, immediately preceding the marines. the second and third scholars did not carry spades, but pointed shovels, much larger and heavier; while the first scholar, who walked between the other two, carried an enormously great square shovel,--such as is often seen hung out at hardware-stores for a sign,--with 'spades and shovels,' or some such thing, painted on one side, and 'all sizes' on the other. this shovel was about two feet square. the idea of carrying real, _bonâ fide_ spades and shovels originated wholly in our class. it has always been the custom before to wear a spade, cut out of white paper, on the lapel of the coat. the navy privates were dressed in blue shirts, monkey-jackets, &c., and presented a very sailor-like appearance. two of them carried small kedges over their shoulders. the ensign bore an old and tattered flag, the same which was originally presented by miss mellen of cambridge to the harvard washington corps. the chaplain was dressed in a black gown, with an old-fashioned curly white wig on his head, which, with a powdered face, gave him a very sanctimonious look. he carried a large french bible, which by much use had lost its covers. the surgeon rode a beast which might well have been taken for the rosinante of the world-renowned don quixote. this worthy Æsculapius had an infinite number of brown-paper bags attached to his person. he was enveloped in an old plaid cloak, with a huge sign for _pills_ fastened upon his shoulders, and carried before him a skull on a staff. his nag was very spirited, so much so as to leap over the chains, posts, &c., and put to flight the crowd assembled to see the fun. the procession, after having cheered all the college buildings, and the houses of the professors, separated about seven o'clock, p.m." at first like a badger the freshman dug, fed on latin and greek, in his room kept snug; and he fondly hoped that on _navy club_ day the highest spade he might bear away. _ms. poem_, f.e. felton, harv. coll. neck. to _run one's neck_, at williams college, to trust to luck for the success of any undertaking. nescio. latin; literally, _i do not know_. at the university of cambridge, england, _to sport a nescio_, to shake the head, a signal that one does not understand or is ignorant of the subject. "after the senate-house examination for degrees," says grose, in his classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, "the students proceed to the schools, to be questioned by the proctor. according to custom immemorial, the answers _must_ be _nescio_. the following is a translated specimen:-- "_ques._ what is your, name? _ans._ i do not know. "_ques._ what is the name of this university? _ans._ i do not know. "_ques._ who was your father? _ans._ i do not know. "the last is probably the only true answer of the three!" newling. in the german universities, a freshman; one in his first half-year. newy. at princeton college, a fresh arrival. nightgown. a dressing-gown; a _deshabille_. no student shall appear within the limits of the college, or town of cambridge, in any other dress than in the uniform belonging to his respective class, unless he shall have on a _nightgown_, or such an outside garment as may be necessary over a coat.--_laws harv. coll._, . nobleman. in the english universities, among the undergraduates, the nobleman enjoys privileges and exemptions not accorded to others. at oxford he wears a black-silk gown with full sleeves "couped" at the elbows, and a velvet cap with gold tassel, except on full-dress occasions, when his habit is of violet-figured damask silk, richly bedight with gold lace. at cambridge he wears the plain black-silk gown and the hat of an m.a., except on feast days and state occasions, when he appears in a gown still more gorgeous than that of a fellow-commoner.--_oxford guide. bristed_. no end of. bristed records this phrase as an intensive peculiar to the english cantabs. its import is obvious "they have _no end of_ tin; i.e. a great deal of money. he is _no end of_ a fool; i.e. the greatest fool possible."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the use of this expression, with a similar signification, is common in some portions of the united states. non ens. latin; literally _not being_. at the university of cambridge, eng., one who has not been matriculated, though he has resided some time at the university; consequently is not considered as having any being. a freshman in embryo.--_grad. ad cantab._ non paravi. latin; literally, _i have not prepared_. when latin was spoken in the american colleges, this excuse was commonly given by scholars not prepared for recitation. with sleepy eyes and countenance heavy, with much excuse of _non paravi_. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, , p. . the same excuse is now frequently given in english. the same individuals were also observed to be "_not prepared_" for the morning's recitation.--_harvardiana_, vol. ii. p. . i hear you whispering, with white lips, "_not prepared_, sir."--_burial of euclid_, , p. . non placet. latin; literally, _it is not pleasing_. in the university of cambridge, eng., the term in which a _negative_ vote is given in the senate-house. to _non-placet_, with the meaning of the verb _to reject_, is sometimes used in familiar language. a classical examiner, having marked two candidates belonging to his own college much higher than the other three examiners did, was suspected of partiality to them, and _non-placeted_ (rejected) next year when he came up for approval.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . non-reading man. see reading man. the result of the may decides whether he will go out in honors or not,--that is, whether he will be a reading or a _non-reading man_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . non-regent. in the english universities, a term applied to those masters of arts whose regency has ceased.--_webster_. see regent. senate. non-term. "when any member of the senate," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "dies within the university during term, on application to the vice-chancellor, the university bell rings an hour; from which period _non-term_, as to public lectures and disputations, commences for three days." non valui. latin; literally, _i was sick_. at harvard college, when the students were obliged to speak latin, it was usual for them to give the excuse _non valui_ for almost every absence or omission. the president called upon delinquents for their excuses in the chapel, after morning prayers, and these words were often pronounced so broadly as to sound like _non volui_, i did not wish [to go]. the quibble was not perceived for a long time, and was heartily enjoyed, as may be well supposed, by those who made use of it. [greek: nous]. greek; _sense_. a word adopted by, and in use among, students. he is a lad of more [greek: nous], and keeps better company.--_pref. to grad. ad cantab._ getting the better of them in anything which required the smallest exertion of [greek: nous], was like being first in a donkey-race. --_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . number fifty, number forty-nine. at trinity college, hartford, the privies are known by these names. jarvis hall contains forty-eight rooms, and the numbers forty-nine and fifty follow in numerical continuation, but with a different application. number ten. at the wesleyan university, the names "no. , and, as a sort of derivative, no. , are applied to the privy." the former title is used also at the university of vermont, and at dartmouth college. nuts. a correspondent from williams college says, "we speak of a person whom we despise as being a _nuts_." this word is used in the yorkshire dialect with the meaning of a "silly fellow." mr. halliwell, in his dictionary of archaic and provincial words, remarks: "it is not applied to an idiot, but to one who has been doing a foolish action." _o_. oak. in the english universities, the outer door of a student's room. no man has a right to attack the rooms of one with whom he is not in the habit of intimacy. from ignorance of this axiom i had near got a horse-whipping, and was kicked down stairs for going to a wrong _oak_, whose tenant was not in the habit of taking jokes of this kind.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . a pecker, i must explain, is a heavy pointed hammer for splitting large coals; an instrument often put into requisition to force open an _oak_ (an outer door), when the key of the spring latch happens to be left inside, and the scout has gone away.--_the collegian's guide_, p. . every set of rooms is provided with an _oak_ or outer door, with a spring lock, of which the master has one latch-key, and the servant another.--_ibid._, p. . "to _sport oak_, or a door," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "is, in the modern phrase, to exclude duns, or other unpleasant intruders." it generally signifies, however, nothing more than locking or fastening one's door for safety or convenience. i always "_sported my oak_" whenever i went out; and if ever i found any article removed from its usual place, i inquired for it; and thus showed i knew where everything was last placed.--_collegian's guide_, p. . if you persist, and say you cannot join them, you must _sport your oak_, and shut yourself into your room, and all intruders out.--_ibid._, p. . used also in some american colleges. and little did they dream who knocked hard and often at his _oak_ in vain, &c.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. x. p. . oaths. at yale college, those who were engaged in the government were formerly required to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration appointed by the parliament of england. in his discourse before the graduates of yale college, president woolsey gives the following account of this obligation:-- "the charter of imposed another test in the form of a political oath upon all governing officers in the college. they were required before they undertook the execution of their trusts, or within three months after, 'publicly in the college hall [to] take the oaths, and subscribe the declaration, appointed by an act of parliament made in the first year of george the first, entitled, an act for the further security of his majesty's person and government, and the succession of the crown in the heirs of the late princess sophia, being protestants, and for extinguishing the hopes of the pretended prince of wales, and his open and secret abettors.' we cannot find the motive for prescribing this oath of allegiance and abjuration in the protestant zeal which was enkindled by the second pretender's movements in england,--for, although belonging to this same year , these movements were subsequent to the charter,--but rather in the desire of removing suspicion of disloyalty, and conforming the practice in the college to that required by the law in the english universities. this oath was taken until it became an unlawful one, when the state assumed complete sovereignty at the revolution. for some years afterwards, the officers took the oath of fidelity to the state of connecticut, and i believe that the last instance of this occurred at the very end of the eighteenth century."--p. . in the diary of president stiles, under the date of july , , is the annexed entry, in which is given the formula of the oath required by the state:-- "the oath of fidelity administered to me by the hon. col. hamlin, one of the council of the state of connecticut, at my inauguration. "'you, ezra stiles, do swear by the name of the ever-living god, that you will be true and faithful to the state of connecticut, as a free and independent state, and in all things do your duty as a good and faithful subject of the said state, in supporting the rights, liberties, and privileges of the same. so help you god.' "this oath, substituted instead of that of allegiance to the king by the assembly of connecticut, may, , to be taken by all in this state; and so it comes into use in yale college."--_woolsey's hist. discourse_, appendix, p. . [greek: hoi aristoi.] greek; literally, _the bravest_. at princeton college, the aristocrats, or would-be aristocrats, are so called. [greek: hoi polloi.] greek; literally, _the many_. see polloi. old bursch. a name given in the german universities to a student during his fourth term. students of this term are also designated _old ones_. as they came forward, they were obliged to pass under a pair of naked swords, held crosswise by two _old ones_.--_longfellow's hyperion_, p. . old house. a name given in the german universities to a student during his fifth term. opponency. the opening of an academical disputation; the proposition of objections to a tenet; an exercise for a degree.--_todd_. mr. webster remarks, "i believe not used in america." in the old times, the university discharged this duty [teaching] by means of the public readings or lectures,... and by the keeping of acts and _opponencies_--being certain _vivâ voce_ disputations --by the students.--_the english universities and their reforms_, in _blackwood's magazine_, feb. . opponent. in universities and colleges, where disputations are carried on, the opponent is, in technical application, the person who begins the dispute by raising objections to some tenet or doctrine. optime. the title of those who stand in the second and third ranks of honors, immediately after the wranglers, in the university of cambridge, eng. they are called respectively _senior_ and _junior optimes_. see junior optime, polloi, and senior optime. optional. at some american colleges, the student is obliged to pursue during a part of the course such studies as are prescribed. during another portion of the course, he is allowed to select from certain branches those which he desires to follow. the latter are called _optional_ studies. in familiar conversation and writing, the word _optional_ is used alone. for _optional_ will come our way, and lectures furnish time to play, 'neath elm-tree shade to smoke all day. _songs, biennial jubilee_, yale coll., . original composition. at the university of cambridge, eng., an essay or theme written by a student in latin, greek, or hebrew, is termed _original_ composition. composition there is of course, but more latin than greek, and some _original composition_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _original composition_--that is, composition in the true sense of the word--in the dead languages is not much practised.--_ibid._, p. . overseer. the general government of the colleges in the united states is vested in some instances in a corporation, in others in a board of trustees or overseers, or, as in the case of harvard college, in the two combined. the duties of the overseers are, generally, to pass such orders and statutes as seem to them necessary for the prosperity of the college whose affairs they oversee, to dispose of its funds in such a manner as will be most advantageous, to appoint committees to visit it and examine the students connected with it, to ratify the appointment of instructors, and to hear such reports of the proceedings of the college government as require their concurrence. oxford. the cap worn by the members of the university of oxford, england, is called an _oxford_ or _oxford cap_. the same is worn at some american colleges on exhibition and commencement days. in shape, it is square and flat, covered with black cloth; from the centre depends a tassel of black cord. it is further described in the following passage. my back equipped, it was not fair my head should 'scape, and so, as square as chessboard, a _cap_ i bought, my skull to screen, of cloth without, and all within of pasteboard. _terræ-filius_, vol. ii. p. . thunders of clapping!--as he bows, on high "præses" his "_oxford_" doffs, and bows reply. _childe harvard_, p. . it is sometimes called a _trencher cap_, from its shape. see cap. oxford-mixed. cloth such as is worn at the university of oxford, england. the students in harvard college were formerly required to wear this kind of cloth as their uniform. the color is given in the following passage: "by black-mixed (called also _oxford-mixed_) is understood, black with a mixture of not more than one twentieth, nor less than one twenty-fifth, part of white."--_laws of harv. coll._, , p. . he generally dresses in _oxford-mixed_ pantaloons, and a brown surtout.--_collegian_, p. . it has disappeared along with commons, the servility of freshmen and brutality of sophomores, the _oxford-mixed_ uniform and buttons of the same color.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . oxonian. a student or graduate of the university of oxford, england. _p_. pandowdy band. a correspondent writing from bowdoin college says: "we use the word _pandowdy_, and we have a custom of _pandowdying_. the pandowdy band, as it is called, has no regular place nor time of meeting. the number of performers varies from half a dozen and less to fifty or more. the instruments used are commonly horns, drums, tin-kettles, tongs, shovels, triangles, pumpkin-vines, &c. the object of the band is serenading professors who have rendered themselves obnoxious to students; and sometimes others,--frequently tutors are entertained by 'heavenly music' under their windows, at dead of night. this is regarded on all hands as an unequivocal expression of the feelings of the students. "the band corresponds to the _calliathump_ of yale. its name is a burlesque on the _pandean band_ which formerly existed in this college." see horn-blowing. pape. abbreviated from paper, q.v. old hamlen, the printer, he got out the _papes_. _presentation day songs_, yale coll., june , . but soph'more "_papes_," and soph'more scrapes, have long since passed away.--_ibid._ paper. in the english universities, a sheet containing certain questions, to which answers are to be given, is called _a paper_. _to beat a paper_, is to get more than full marks for it. in explanation of this "apparent hibernicism," bristed remarks: "the ordinary text-books are taken as the standard of excellence, and a very good man will sometimes express the operations more neatly and cleverly than they are worded in these books, in which case he is entitled to extra marks for style."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . . this name is applied at yale college to the printed scheme which is used at the biennial examinations. also, at harvard college, to the printed sheet by means of which the examination for entrance is conducted. parchment. a diploma, from the substance on which it is usually printed, is in familiar language sometimes called a _parchment_. there are some, who, relying not upon the "_parchment_ and seal" as a passport to favor, bear that with them which shall challenge notice and admiration.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. iii. p. . the passer-by, unskilled in ancient lore, whose hands the ribboned _parchment_ never bore. _class poem at harv. coll._, , p. . see sheepskin. parietal. from latin _paries_, a wall; properly, _a partition-wall_, from the root of _part_ or _pare_. pertaining to a wall.--_webster_. at harvard college the officers resident within the college walls constitute a permanent standing committee, called the parietal committee. they have particular cognizance of all tardinesses at prayers and sabbath services, and of all offences against good order and decorum. they are allowed to deduct from the rank of a student, not exceeding one hundred for one offence. in case any offence seems to them to require a higher punishment than deduction, it is reported to the faculty.--_laws_, , app. had i forgotten, alas! the stern _pariètal_ monitions? _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . the chairman of the parietal committee is often called the _parietal tutor_. i see them shaking their fists in the face of the _parietal tutor_.--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, . the members of the committee are called, in common parlance, _parietals_. four rash and inconsiderate proctors, two tutors, and five _parietals_, each with a mug and pail in his hand, in their great haste to arrive at the scene of conflagration, ran over the devil, and knocked him down stairs.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . and at the loud laugh of thy gurgling throat, the _pariètals_ would forget themselves. _ibid._, vol. iii. p. et passim. did not thy starting eyeballs think to see some goblin _pariètal_ grin at thee? _ibid._, vol. iv. p. . the deductions made by the parietal committee are also called _parietals_. how now, ye secret, dark, and tuneless chanters, what is 't ye do? beware the _pariètals_. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . reckon on the fingers of your mind the reprimands, deductions, _parietals_, and privates in store for you.--_orat. h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, . the accent of this word is on the antepenult; by _poetic license_, in four of the passages above quoted, it is placed on the penult. part. a literary appointment assigned to a student to be kept at an exhibition or commencement. in harvard college as soon as the parts for an exhibition or commencement are assigned, the subjects and the names of the performers are given to some member of one of the higher classes, who proceeds to read them to the students from a window of one of the buildings, after proposing the usual "three cheers" for each of the classes, designating them by the years in which they are to graduate. as the name of each person who has a part assigned him is read, the students respond with cheers. this over, the classes are again cheered, the reader of the parts is applauded, and the crowd disperses except when the mock parts are read, or the officers of the navy club resign their trusts. referring to the proceedings consequent upon the announcement of appointments, professor sidney willard, in his late work, entitled "memories of youth and manhood," says of harvard college: "the distribution of parts to be performed at public exhibitions by the students was, particularly for the commencement exhibition, more than fifty years ago, as it still is, one of the most exciting events of college life among those immediately interested, in which parents and near friends also deeply sympathized with them. these parts were communicated to the individuals appointed to perform them by the president, who gave to them, severally, a paper with the name of the person and of the part assigned, and the subject to be written upon. but they were not then, as in recent times, after being thus communicated by the president, proclaimed by a voluntary herald of stentorian lungs, mounted on the steps of one of the college halls, to the assembled crowd of students. curiosity, however, was all alive. each one's part was soon ascertained; the comparative merits of those who obtained the prizes were discussed in groups; prompt judgments were pronounced, that a had received a higher prize than he could rightfully claim, and that b was cruelly wronged; that some were unjustly passed over, and others raised above them through partiality. but at whatever length their discussion might have been prolonged, they would have found it difficult in solemn conclave to adjust the distribution to their own satisfaction, while severally they deemed themselves competent to measure the degree in the scale of merit to which each was entitled."--vol. i. pp. , . i took but little pains with these exercises myself, lest i should appear to be anxious for "_parts_."--_monthly anthology_, boston, , vol. i. p. . often, too, the qualifications for a _part_ ... are discussed in the fireside circles so peculiar to college.--_harv. reg._, p. . the refusal of a student to perform the _part_ assigned him will be regarded as a high offence.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, , p. . young men within the college walls are incited to good conduct and diligence, by the system of awarding _parts_, as they are called, at the exhibitions which take place each year, and at the annual commencement.--_eliot's sketch of hist. harv. coll._, pp. , . it is very common to speak of _getting parts_. here are acres of orations, and so forth, the glorious nonsense that enchants young hearts with all the humdrumology of "_getting parts_." _our chronicle of ' _, boston, , p. . see under mock-part and navy club. pass. at oxford, permission to receive the degree of b.a. after passing the necessary examinations. the good news of the _pass_ will be a set-off against the few small debts.--_collegian's guide_, p. . pass examination. at the university of cambridge, eng., an examination which is required for the b.a. degree. of these examinations there are three during a student's undergraduateship. even the examinations which are disparagingly known as "_pass_" ones, the previous, the poll, and (since the new regulations) the junior optime, require more than half marks on their papers.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . passman. at oxford, one who merely passes his examination, and obtains testimonials for a degree, but is not able to obtain any honors or distinctions. opposed to classman, q.v. "have the _passmen_ done their paper work yet?" asked whitbread. "however, the schools, i dare say, will not be open to the classmen till monday."--_collegian's guide_, p. . patron. at some of the colleges in the united states, the patron is appointed to take charge of the funds, and to regulate the expenses, of students who reside at a distance. formerly, students who came within this provision were obliged to conform to the laws in reference to the patron; it is now left optional. p.d. an abbreviation of _philosophiæ doctor_, doctor of philosophy. "in the german universities," says brande, "the title 'doctor philosophiæ' has long been substituted for baccalaureus artium or literarium." peach. to inform against; to communicate facts by way of accusation. it being rather advisable to enter college before twelve, or to stay out all night, bribing the bed-maker next morning not to _peach_.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . when, by a little spying, i can reach the height of my ambition, i must _peach_. _the gallinipper_, dec. . pembroker. at the university of cambridge, eng., a member of pembroke college. the _pembroker_ was booked to lead the tripos.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . pene. latin, _almost, nearly_. a candidate for admission to the freshman class is called a _pene_, that is, _almost_ a freshman. penniless bench. archdeacon nares, in his glossary, says of this phrase: "a cant term for a state of poverty. there was a public seat so called in oxford; but i fancy it was rather named from the common saying, than that derived from it." bid him bear up, he shall not sit long on _penniless bench_. _mass. city mad._, iv. . that everie stool he sate on was _pennilesse bench_, that his robes were rags.--_euphues and his engl._, d. . pensioner. french, _pensionnaire_, one who pays for his board. in the university of cambridge, eng., and in that of dublin, a student of the second rank, who is not dependent on the foundation for support, but pays for his board and other charges. equivalent to commoner at oxford, or oppidant of eton school.--_brande. gent. mag._, . peruvian. at the university of vermont, a name by which the students designate a lady; e.g., "there are two hundred _peruvians_ at the seminary"; or, "the _peruvians_ are in the observatory." as illustrative of the use of this word, a correspondent observes: "if john smith has a particular regard for any one of the burlington ladies, and tom brown happens to meet the said lady in his town peregrinations, when he returns to college, if he meets john smith, he (tom) says to john, 'in yonder village i espied a _peruvian_'; by which john understands that tom has had the very great pleasure of meeting john's dulcinea." petty compounder. at oxford, one who pays more than ordinary fees for his degree. "a _petty compounder_," says the oxford university calendar, "must possess ecclesiastical income of the annual value of five shillings, or property of any other description amounting in all to the sum of five pounds, per annum."--ed. , p. . pheeze, or feeze. at the university of vermont, to pledge. if a student is pledged to join any secret society, he is said to be _pheezed_ or _feezed_. phi beta kappa. the fraternity of the [greek: phi beta kappa] "was imported," says allyn in his ritual, "into this country from france, in the year ; and, as it is said, by thomas jefferson, late president of the united states." it was originally chartered as a society in william and mary college, in virginia, and was organized at yale college, nov. th, . by virtue of a charter formally executed by the president, officers, and members of the original society, it was established soon after at harvard college, through the influence of mr. elisha parmele, a graduate of the year . the first meeting in cambridge was held sept. th, . the original alpha of virginia is now extinct. "its objects," says mr. quincy, in his history of harvard university, "were the 'promotion of literature and friendly intercourse among scholars'; and its name and motto indicate, that 'philosophy, including therein religion as well as ethics, is worthy of cultivation as the guide of life.' this society took an early and a deep root in the university; its exercises became public, and admittance into it an object of ambition; but the 'discrimination' which its selection of members made among students, became an early subject of question and discontent. in october, , a committee of the overseers, of which john hancock was chairman, reported to that board, 'that there is an institution in the university, with the nature of which the government is not acquainted, which tends to make a discrimination among the students'; and submitted to the board 'the propriety of inquiring into its nature and designs.' the subject occasioned considerable debate, and a petition, of the nature of a complaint against the society, by a number of the members of the senior class, having been presented, its consideration was postponed, and it was committed; but it does not appear from the records, that any further notice was taken of the petition. the influence of the society was upon the whole deemed salutary, since literary merit was assumed as the principle on which its members were selected; and, so far, its influence harmonized with the honorable motives to exertion which have ever been held out to the students by the laws and usages of the college. in process of time, its catalogue included almost every member of the immediate government, and fairness in the selection of members has been in a great degree secured by the practice it has adopted, of ascertaining those in every class who stand the highest, in point of conduct and scholarship, according to the estimates of the faculty of the college, and of generally regarding those estimates. having gradually increased in numbers, popularity, and importance, the day after commencement was adopted for its annual celebration. these occasions have uniformly attracted a highly intelligent and cultivated audience, having been marked by a display of learning and eloquence, and having enriched the literature of the country with some of its brightest gems."--vol. ii. p. . the immediate members of the society at cambridge were formerly accustomed to hold semi-monthly meetings, the exercises of which were such as are usual in literary associations. at present, meetings are seldom held except for the purpose of electing members. affiliated societies have been established at dartmouth, union, and bowdoin colleges, at brown and the wesleyan universities, at the western reserve college, at the university of vermont, and at amherst college, and they number among their members many of the most distinguished men in our country. the letters which constitute the name of the society are the initials of its motto, [greek: philosophia, biou kubernaetaes], philosophy, the guide of life. a further account of this society may be found in allyn's ritual of freemasonry, ed. , pp. - . philistine. in germany this name, or what corresponds to it in that country, _philister_, is given by the students to tradesmen and others not belonging to the university. und hat der bursch kein geld im beutel, so pumpt er die philister an. and has the bursch his cash expended? to sponge the _philistine's_ his plan. _the crambambuli song_. mr. halliwell, in his dictionary of archaic and provincial words, says of this word, "a cant term applied to bailiffs, sheriffs' officers, and drunkards." the idea of narrowmindedness, a contracted mode of thinking, and meanness, is usually connected with it, and in some colleges in the united states the name has been given to those whose characters correspond with this description. see snob. phrasing. reciting by, or giving the words or phraseology of the book, without understanding their meaning. never should you allow yourself to think of going into the recitation-room, and there trust to "skinning it," as it is called in some colleges, or "_phrasing_," as in others.--_todd's students manual_, p. . piece. "be it known, at cambridge the various commons and other places open for the gymnastic games, and the like public amusements, are usually denominated _pieces_."--_alma mater_, london, , vol. ii. p. . pietas et gratulatio. on the death of george the second, and accession of george the third, mr. bernard, governor of massachusetts, suggested to harvard college "the expediency of expressing sympathy and congratulation on these events, in conformity with the practice of the english universities." accordingly, on saturday, march , , there was placed in the chapel of harvard college the following "proposal for a celebration of the death of the late king, and the accession of his present majesty, by members of harvard college." "six guineas are given for a prize of a guinea each to the author of the best composition of the following several kinds:-- . a latin oration. . a latin poem, in hexameters. . a latin elegy, in hexameters and pentameters. a latin ode. . an english poem, in long verse. . an english ode. "other compositions, besides those that obtain the prizes, that are most deserving, will be taken particular notice of. "the candidates are to be, all, gentlemen who are now members of said college, or have taken a degree within seven years. "any candidate may deliver two or more compositions of different kinds, but not more than one of the same kind. "that gentlemen may be more encouraged to try their talents upon this occasion, it is proposed that the names of the candidates shall be kept secret, except those who shall be adjudged to deserve the prizes, or to have particular notice taken of their compositions, and even these shall be kept secret if desired. "for this purpose, each candidate is desired to send his composition to the president, on or before the first day of july next, subscribed at the bottom with, a feigned name or motto, and, in a distinct paper, to write his own name and seal it up, writing the feigned name or motto on the outside. none of the sealed papers containing the real names will be opened, except those that are adjudged to obtain the prizes or to deserve particular notice; the rest will be burned sealed." this proposal resulted in a work entitled, "pietas et gratulatio collegii cantabrigiensis apud novanglos." in january, , the corporation passed a vote, "that the collections in prose and verse in several languages composed by some of the members of the college, on the motion of his excellency our governor, francis bernard, esq., on occasion of the death of his late majesty, and the accession of his present majesty, be printed; and that his excellency be desired to send, if he shall judge it proper, a copy of the same to great britain, to be presented to his majesty, in the name of the corporation." quincy thus speaks of the collection:--"governor bernard not only suggested the work, but contributed to it. five of the thirty-one compositions, of which it consists, were from his pen. the address to the king is stated to have been written by him, or by lieutenant-governor hutchinson. its style and turn of thought indicate the politician rather than the student, and savor of the senate-chamber more than of the academy. the classical and poetic merits of the work bear a fair comparison with those of european universities on similar occasions, allowance being made for the difference in the state of science and literature in the respective countries; and it is the most creditable specimen extant of the art of printing, at that period, in the colonies. the work is respectfully noticed by the 'critical' and 'monthly' reviews, and an ode of the president is pronounced by both to be written in a style truly horatian. in the address prefixed, the hope is expressed, that, as 'english colleges have had kings for their nursing fathers, and queens for their nursing mothers, this of north america might experience the royal munificence, and look up to the throne for favor and patronage.' in may, , letters were received from jasper mauduit, agent of the province, mentioning 'the presentation to his majesty of the book of verses from the college,' but the records give no indication of the manner in which it was received. the thoughts of george the third were occupied, not with patronizing learning in the colonies, but with deriving revenue from them, and harvard college was indebted to him for no act of acknowledgment or munificence."--_quincy's hist. of harv. univ._, vol. ii. pp. - . the charleston courier, in an article entitled "literary sparring," says of this production:--"when, as late as , harvard university sent forth, in greek, latin, and english, its congratulations on the accession of george the third to the throne, it was called, in england, a curiosity."--_buckingham's miscellanies from the public journals_, vol. i. p. . mr. kendall, an english traveller, who visited cambridge in the year - , notices this work as follows:--"in the year , on the death of george the second and the accession of his present majesty, harvard college, or, as on this occasion it styles itself, cambridge college, produced a volume of tributary verses, in english, latin, and greek, entitled, pietas et gratulatio collegii cantabrigiensis apud novanglos; and this collection, the first received, and, as it has since appeared, the last to be received, from this seminary, by an english king, was cordially welcomed by the critical journals of the time."--_kendall's travels_, vol. iii. p. . for further remarks, consult the monthly review, vol. xxix. p. ; critical review, vol. x. p. ; and the monthly anthology, vol. vi. pp. - ; vol. vii. p. . pill. in english cantab parlance, twaddle, platitude.--_bristed_. pimp. to do little, mean actions for the purpose of gaining favor with a superior, as, in college, with an instructor. the verb with this meaning is derived from the adjective _pimping_, which signifies _little, petty_. did i not promise those who fished and _pimped_ most, any part they wished. _the rebelliad_, p. . piscatorian. from the latin _piscator_, a fisherman. one who seeks or gains favor with a teacher by being officious toward him. this word was much used at harvard college in the year , and for a few years after; it is now very seldom heard. see under fish. pit. in the university of cambridge, the place in st. mary's church reserved for the accommodation of masters of arts and fellow-commoners is jocularly styled the _pit_.--_grad. ad cantab._ place. in the older american colleges, the situation of a student in the class of which he was a member was formerly decided, in a measure, by the rank and circumstances of his family; this was called _placing_. the hon. paine wingate, who graduated at harvard college in the year , says, in one of his letters to mr. peirce:-- "you inquire of me whether any regard was paid to a student on account of the rank of his parent, otherwise than his being arranged or _placed_ in the order of his class? "the right of precedence on every occasion is an object of importance in the state of society. and there is scarce anything which more sensibly affects the feelings of ambition than the rank which a man is allowed to hold. this excitement was generally called up whenever a class in college was _placed_. the parents were not wholly free from influence; but the scholars were often enraged beyond bounds for their disappointment in their _place_, and it was some time before a class could be settled down to an acquiescence in their allotment. the highest and the lowest in the class was often ascertained more easily (though not without some difficulty) than the intermediate members of the class, where there was room for uncertainty whose claim was best, and where partiality, no doubt, was sometimes indulged. but i must add, that, although the honor of a _place_ in the class was chiefly ideal, yet there were some substantial advantages. the higher part of the class had generally the most influential friends, and they commonly had the best chambers in college assigned to them. they had also a right to help themselves first at table in commons, and i believe generally, wherever there was occasional precedence allowed, it was very freely yielded to the higher of the class by those who were below. "the freshman class was, in my day at college, usually _placed_ (as it was termed) within six or nine months after their admission. the official notice of this was given by having their names written in a large german text, in a handsome style, and placed in a conspicuous part of the college _buttery_, where the names of the four classes of undergraduates were kept suspended until they left college. if a scholar was expelled, his name was taken from its place; or if he was degraded (which was considered the next highest punishment to expulsion), it was moved accordingly. as soon as the freshmen were apprised of their places, each one took his station according to the new arrangement at recitation, and at commons, and in the chapel, and on all other occasions. and this arrangement was never afterward altered, either in college or in the catalogue, however the rank of their parents might be varied. considering how much dissatisfaction was often excited by placing the classes (and i believe all other colleges had laid aside the practice), i think that it was a judicious expedient in harvard to conform to the custom of putting the names in _alphabetical_ order, and they have accordingly so remained since the year ."--_peirce's hist. of harv. univ._, pp. - . in his "annals of yale college," ebenezer baldwin observes on the subject: "doctor dwight, soon after his election to the presidency [ ], effected various important alterations in the collegiate laws. the statutes of the institution had been chiefly adopted from those of european universities, where the footsteps of monarchical regulation were discerned even in the walks of science. so difficult was it to divest the minds of wise men of the influence of venerable follies, that the printed catalogues of students, until the year , were arranged according to respectability of parentage."--p. . see degradation. placet. latin; literally, _it is pleasing_. in the university of cambridge, eng., the term in which an _affirmative_ vote is given in the senate-house. pluck. in the english universities, a refusal of testimonials for a degree. the origin of this word is thus stated in the collegian's guide: "at the time of conferring a degree, just as the name of each man to be presented to the vice-chancellor is read out, a proctor walks once up and down, to give any person who can object to the degree an opportunity of signifying his dissent, which is done by plucking or pulling the proctor's gown. hence another and more common mode of stopping a degree, by refusing the testamur, or certificate of proficiency, is also called plucking."--p. . on the same word, the author in another place remarks as follows: "as long back as my memory will carry me, down to the present day, there has been scarcely a monosyllable in our language which seemed to convey so stinging a reproach, or to let a man down in the general estimation half as much, as this one word pluck."--p. . plucked. a cant term at the english universities, applied to those who, for want of scholarship, are refused their testimonials for a degree.--_oxford guide_. who had at length scrambled through the pales and discipline of the senate-house without being _plucked_, and miraculously obtained the title of a.b.--_gent. mag._, , p. . o what a misery is it to be _plucked_! not long since, an undergraduate was driven mad by it, and committed suicide.--the term itself is contemptible: it is associated with the meanest, the most stupid and spiritless animals of creation. when we hear of a man being _plucked_, we think he is necessarily a goose.--_collegian's guide_, p. . poor lentulus, twice _plucked_, some happy day just shuffles through, and dubs himself b.a. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . poker. at oxford, eng., a cant name for a _bedel_. if the visitor see an unusual "state" walking about, in shape of an individual preceded by a quantity of _pokers_, or, which is the same thing, men, that is bedels, carrying maces, jocularly called _pokers_, he may be sure that that individual is the vice-chancellor. _oxford guide_, , p. xii. pole. at princeton and union colleges, to study hard, e.g. to _pole_ out the lesson. to _pole_ on a composition, to take pains with it. poler. one who studies hard; a close student. as a boat is impelled with _poles_, so is the student by _poling_, and it is perhaps from this analogy that the word _poler_ is applied to a diligent student. poling. close application to study; diligent attention to the specified pursuits of college. a writer defines poling, "wasting the midnight oil in company with a wine-bottle, box of cigars, a 'deck of eucre,' and three kindred spirits," thus leaving its real meaning to be deduced from its opposite.--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov., . poll. abbreviated from polloi. several declared that they would go out in "the _poll_" (among the [greek: polloi], those not candidates for honors).--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . at cambridge, those candidates for a degree who do not aspire to honors are said to go out in the _poll_; this being the abbreviated term to denote those who were classically designated [greek: hoi polloi].--_the english universities and their reforms_, in _blackwood's magazine_, feb. . polloi. [greek: hoi polloi], the many. in the university of cambridge, eng., those who take their degree without any honor. after residing something more than three years at this university, at the conclusion of the tenth term comes off the final examination in the senate-house. he who passes this examination in the best manner is called senior wrangler. "then follow about twenty, all called wranglers, arranged in the order of merit. two other ranks of honors are there,--senior optimes and junior optimes, each containing about twenty. the last junior optime is termed the wooden spoon. then comes the list of the large majority, called the _hoy polloi_, the first of whom is named the _captain of the poll_, and the twelve last, the apostles."--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . . used by students to denote the rabble. on learning's sea, his hopes of safety buoy, he sinks for ever lost among the [greek: hoi polloi]. _the crayon_, yale coll., , p. . pons asinorum. vide asses' bridge. pony. a translation. so called, it may be, from the fleetness and ease with which a skilful rider is enabled to pass over places which to a common plodder present many obstacles. one writer jocosely defines this literary nag as "the animal that ambulates so delightfully through all the pleasant paths of knowledge, from whose back the student may look down on the weary pedestrian, and 'thank his stars' that 'he who runs may read.'"--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. and stick to the law, tom, without a _pony_.--_harv. reg._, p. . and when leaving, leave behind us _ponies_ for a lower class; _ponies_, which perhaps another, toiling up the college hill, a forlorn, a "younger brother," "riding," may rise higher still. _poem before the y.h. soc._, , p. . their lexicons, _ponies_, and text-books were strewed round their lamps on the table.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . in the way of "_pony_," or translation, to the greek of father griesbach, the new testament was wonderfully convenient.--_new england magazine_, vol. iii. p. . the notes are just what notes should be; they are not a _pony_, but a guide.--_southern lit. mess._ instead of plodding on foot along the dusty, well-worn mcadam of learning, why will you take nigh cuts on _ponies_?--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiii. p. . the "board" requests that all who present themselves will bring along the _ponies_ they have used since their first entrance into college.--_the gallinipper_, dec. . the tutors with _ponies_ their lessons were learning. _yale banger_, nov. . we do think, that, with such a team of "_ponies_" and load of commentators, his instruction might evince more accuracy.--_yale tomahawk_, feb. . in knowledge's road ye are but asses, while we on _ponies_ ride before. _songs of yale_, , p. . pony. to use a translation. we learn that they do not _pony_ their lessons.--_yale tomahawk_, may, . if you _pony_, he will see, and before the faculty you will surely summoned be. _songs of yale_, , p. . popping. at william and mary college, getting the advantage over another in argument is called _popping_ him. popularity. in the college _use_, favor of one's classmates, or of the members of all the classes, generally. nowhere is this term employed so often, and with so much significance, as among collegians. the first wish of the freshman is to be popular, and the desire does not leave him during all his college life. for remarks on this subject, see the literary miscellany, vol. ii. p. ; amherst indicator, vol. ii. p. , _et passim_. portionist. one who has a certain academical allowance or portion. --_webster_. see postmaster. posted. rejected in a college examination. term used at the university of cambridge, eng.--_bristed_. fifty marks will prevent one from being "_posted_" but there are always two or three too stupid as well as idle to save their "_post_." these drones are _posted_ separately, as "not worthy to be classed," and privately slanged afterwards by the master and seniors. should a man be _posted_ twice in succession, he is generally recommended to try the air of some small college, or devote his energies to some other walk of life.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . postmaster. in merton college, oxford, the scholars who are supported on the foundation are called postmasters, or portionists (_portionistæ_).--_oxf. guide_. the _postmasters_ anciently performed the duties of choristers, and their payment for this duty was six shillings and fourpence per annum.--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. . pow-wow. at yale college on the evening of presentation day, the seniors being excused from further attendance at prayers, the classes who remain change their seats in the chapel. it was formerly customary for the freshmen, on taking the sophomore seats, to signalize the event by appearing at chapel in grotesque dresses. the impropriety of such conduct has abolished this custom, but on the recurrence of the day, a uniformity is sometimes observable in the paper collars or white neck-cloths of the in-coming sophomores, as they file in at vespers. during the evening, the freshmen are accustomed to assemble on the steps of the state-house, and celebrate the occasion by speeches, a torch-light procession, and the accompaniment of a band of music. the students are forbidden to occupy the state-house steps on the evening of presentation day, since the faculty design hereafter to have a _pow-wow_ there, as on the last.--_burlesque catalogue_, yale coll., - , p. . prÆses. the latin for president. "_præses_" his "oxford" doffs, and bows reply. _childe harvard_, p. . did not the _præses_ himself most kindly and oft reprimand me? _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . --the good old _præses_ cries, while the tears stand in his eyes, "you have passed and are classed with the boys of 'twenty-nine.'" _knick. mag._, vol. xlv. p. . prayers. in colleges and universities, the religious exercises performed in the chapel at morning and evening, at which all the students are required to attend. these exercises in some institutions were formerly much more extended than at present, and must on some occasions have been very onerous. mr. quincy, in his history of harvard university, writing in relation to the customs which were prevalent in the college at the beginning of the last century, says on this subject: "previous to the accession of leverett to the presidency, the practice of obliging the undergraduates to read portions of the scripture from latin or english into greek, at morning and evening service, had been discontinued. but in january and may, , this 'ancient and laudable practice was revived' by the corporation. at morning prayers all the undergraduates were ordered, beginning with the youngest, to read a verse out of the old testament from the hebrew into greek, except the freshmen, who were permitted to use their english bibles in this exercise; and at evening service, to read from the new testament out of the english or latin translation into greek, whenever the president performed this service in the hall." in less than twenty years after the revival of these exercises, they were again discontinued. the following was then established as the order of morning and evening worship: "the morning service began with a short prayer; then a chapter of the old testament was read, which the president expounded, and concluded with prayer. the evening service was the same, except that the chapter read was from the new testament, and on saturday a psalm was sung in the hall. on sunday, exposition was omitted; a psalm was sung morning and evening; and one of the scholars, in course, was called upon to repeat, in the evening, the sermons preached on that day."--vol. i. pp. , . the custom of singing at prayers on sunday evening continued for many years. in a manuscript journal kept during the year , notices to the following effect frequently occur. "feb. th, sunday. the singing club performed man's victory, at evening prayers." "sund. april th, p.m. at prayers the club performed brandon." "may th, sabbath, p.m. at prayers the club performed holden's descend ye nine, etc." soon after this, prayers were discontinued on sunday evenings. the president was required to officiate at prayers, but when unable to attend, the office devolved on one of the tutors, "they taking their turns by course weekly." whenever they performed this duty "for any considerable time," they were "suitably rewarded for their service." in one instance, in , all the officers being absent, mr., afterwards prof. mckean, then an undergraduate, performed the duties of chaplain. in the journal above referred to, under date of feb. , , is this note: "at prayers, i declaimed in latin"; which would seem to show, that this season was sometimes made the occasion for exercises of a literary as well as religious character. in a late work by professor sidney willard, he says of his father, who was president of harvard college: "in the early period of his presidency, mr. willard not unfrequently delivered a sermon at evening prayers on sunday. in the year , i remember he preached once or twice on that evening, but in the next year and onward he discontinued the service. his predecessor used to expound passages of scripture as a part of the religious service. these expositions are frequently spoken of in the diary of mr. caleb gannett when he was a tutor. on saturday evening and sunday morning and evening, generally the college choir sang a hymn or an anthem. when these sunday services were observed in the chapel, the faculty and students worshipped on lord's day, at the stated hours of meeting, in the congregational or the episcopal church." --_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. pp. , . at yale college, one of the earliest laws ordains that "all undergraduates shall publicly repeat sermons in the hall in their course, and also bachelors; and be constantly examined on sabbaths [at] evening prayer."--_pres. woolsey's discourse_, p. . prayers at this institution were at one period regulated by the following rule. "the president, or in his absence, one of the tutors in their turn, shall constantly pray in the chapel every morning and evening, and read a chapter, or some suitable portion of scripture, unless a sermon, or some theological discourse shall then be delivered. and every member of college is obliged to attend, upon the penalty of one penny for every instance of absence, without a sufficient reason, and a half penny for being tardy, i.e. when any one shall come in after the president, or go out before him."--_laws yale coll._, , p. . a writer in the american literary magazine, in noticing some of the evils connected with the american college system, describes very truthfully, in the following question, a scene not at all novel in student life. "but when the young man is compelled to rise at an unusually early hour to attend public prayers, under all kinds of disagreeable circumstances; when he rushes into the chapel breathless, with wet feet, half dressed, and with the prospect of a recitation immediately to succeed the devotions,--is it not natural that he should be listless, or drowsy, or excited about his recitation, during the whole sacred exercise?"--vol. iv. p. . this season formerly afforded an excellent opportunity, for those who were so disposed, to play off practical jokes on the person officiating. on one occasion, at one of our colleges, a goose was tied to the desk by some of the students, intended as emblematic of the person who was accustomed to occupy that place. but the laugh was artfully turned upon them by the minister, who, seeing the bird with his head directed to the audience, remarked, that he perceived the young gentlemen were for once provided with a parson admirably suited to their capacities, and with these words left them to swallow his well-timed sarcasm. on another occasion, a ram was placed in the pulpit, with his head turned to the door by which the minister usually entered. on opening the door, the animal, diving between the legs of the fat shepherd, bolted down the pulpit stairs, carrying on his back the sacred load, and with it rushed out of the chapel, leaving the assemblage to indulge in the reflections excited by the expressive looks of the astonished beast, and of his more astonished rider. the bible was often kept covered, when not in use, with a cloth. it was formerly a very common trick to place under this cloth a pewter plate obtained from the commons hall, which the minister, on uncovering, would, if he were a shrewd man, quietly slide under the desk, and proceed as usual with the exercises. at harvard college, about the year , two indian images were missing from their accustomed place on the top of the gate-posts which stood in front of the dwelling of a gentleman of cambridge. at the same time the bible was taken from the chapel, and another, which was purchased to supply its place, soon followed it, no one knew where. one day, as a tutor was passing by the room of a student, hearing within an uncommonly loud noise, he entered, as was his right and office. there stood the occupant,[ ] holding in his hands one of the chapel bibles, while before him on the table were placed the images, to which he appeared to be reading, but in reality was vociferating all kinds of senseless gibberish. "what is the meaning of this noise?" inquired the tutor in great anger. "propagating the _gospel_ among the _indians_, sir," replied the student calmly. while professor ashur ware was a tutor in harvard college, he in his turn, when the president was absent, officiated at prayers. inclined to be longer in his devotions than was thought necessary by the students, they were often on such occasions seized with violent fits of sneezing, which generally made themselves audible in the word "a-a-shur," "a-a-shur." the following lines, written by william c. bradley when an undergraduate at harvard college, cannot fail to be appreciated by those who have been cognizant of similar scenes and sentiments in their own experience of student life. "hark! the morning bell is pealing faintly on the drowsy ear, far abroad the tidings dealing, now the hour of prayer is near. to the pious sons of harvard, starting from the land of nod, loudly comes the rousing summons, let us run and worship god. "'t is the hour for deep contrition, 't is the hour for peaceful thought, 't is the hour to win the blessing in the early stillness sought; kneeling in the quiet chamber, on the deck, or on the sod, in the still and early morning, 't is the hour to worship god. "but don't _you_ stop to pray in secret, no time for _you_ to worship there, the hour approaches, 'tempus fugit,' tear your shirt or miss a prayer. don't stop to wash, don't stop to button, go the ways your fathers trod; leg it, put it, rush it, streak it, _run_ and worship god. "on the staircase, stamping, tramping, bounding, sounding, down you go; jumping, bumping, crashing, smashing, jarring, bruising, heel and toe. see your comrades far before you through the open door-way jam, heaven and earth! the bell is stopping! now it dies in silence--d**n!" prelection. latin, _prælectio_. a lecture or discourse read in public or to a select company. further explained by dr. popkin: "in the introductory schools, i think, _prelections_ were given by the teachers to the learners. according to the meaning of the word, the preceptor went before, as i suppose, and explained and probably interpreted the lesson or lection; and the scholar was required to receive it in memory, or in notes, and in due time to render it in recitation."--_memorial of john s. popkin, d.d._, p. . prelector. latin, _prælector_. one who reads an author to others and adds explanations; a reader; a lecturer. their so famous a _prelectour_ doth teach.--_sheldon, mir. of anti-christ_, p. . if his reproof be private, or with the cathedrated authority of a _prælector_ or public reader.--_whitlock, mann. of the english_, p. . . same as father, which see. prepositor. latin. a scholar appointed by the master to overlook the rest. and when requested for the salt-cellar, i handed it with as much trepidation as a _præposter_ gives the doctor a list, when he is conscious of a mistake in the excuses.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . presentation day. at yale college, presentation day is the time when the senior class, having finished the prescribed course of study, and passed a satisfactory examination, are _presented_ by the examiners to the president, as properly qualified to be admitted to the degree of bachelor of arts. a distinguished professor of the institution where this day is observed has kindly furnished the following interesting historical account of this observance. "this presentation," he writes, "is a ceremony of long standing. it has certainly existed for more than a century. it is very early alluded to, not as a _novelty_, but as an established custom. there is now less formality on such occasions, but the substantial parts of the exercises are retained. the examination is now begun on saturday and finished on tuesday, and the day after, wednesday, six weeks before the public commencement, is the day of presentation. there have sometimes been literary exercises on that day by one or more of the candidates, and sometimes they have been omitted. i have in my possession a latin oration, what, i suppose, was called a _cliosophic oration_, pronounced by william samuel johnson in , at the presentation of his class. sometimes a member of the class exhibited an english oration, which was responded to by some one of the college faculty, generally by one who had been the principal instructor of the class presented. a case of this kind occurred in , when mr., afterwards president dwight, responded to the class orator in an address, which, being delivered the same july in which independence was declared, drew, from its patriotic allusions, as well as for other reasons, unusual attention. it was published,--a rare thing at that period. another response was delivered in , by j. stebbins, tutor, which was likewise published. there has been no exhibition of the kind since. for a few years past, there have been an oration and a poem exhibited by members of the graduating class, at the time of presentation. the appointments for these exercises are made by the class. "so much of an exhibition as there was at the presentation in has not been usual. more was then done, probably, from the fact, that for several years, during the revolutionary war, there was no public commencement. perhaps it should be added, that, so far back as my information extends, after the literary exercises of presentation day, there has always been a dinner, or collation, at which the college faculty, graduates, invited guests, and the senior class have been present." a graduate of the present year[ ] writes more particularly in relation to the observances of the day at the present time. "in the morning the senior class are met in one of the lecture-rooms by the chairman of the faculty and the senior tutor. the latter reads the names of those who have passed a satisfactory examination, and are to be recommended for degrees. the class then adjourn to the college chapel, where the president and some of the professors are waiting to receive them. the senior tutor reads the names as before, after which professor kingsley recommends the class to the president and faculty for the degree of b.a., in a latin discourse. the president then responds in the same tongue, and addresses a few words of counsel to the class. "these exercises are followed by the poem and oration, delivered by members of the class chosen for these offices by the class. then comes the dinner, given in one of the lecture-rooms. after this the class meet in the college yard, and spend the afternoon in smoking (the old clay pipe is used, but no cigars) and singing. thus ends the active life of our college days." "presentation day," says the writer of the preface to the "songs of yale," "is the sixth wednesday of the summer term, when the graduating class, after having passed their second 'biennial,' are presented to the president as qualified for the first degree, or the b.a. after this 'presentation,' a farewell oration and poem are pronounced by members of the class, previously elected by their classmates for the purpose. after a public dinner, they seat themselves under the elms before the college, and smoke and sing for the last time together. each has his pipe, and 'they who never' smoked 'before' now smoke, or seem to. the exercises are closed with a procession about the buildings, bidding each farewell." , p. . this last smoke is referred to in the following lines:-- "green elms are waving o'er us, green grass beneath our feet, the ring is round, and on the ground we sit a class complete." _presentation day songs_, june , . "it is a very jolly thing, our sitting down in this great ring, to smoke our pipes and loudly sing."--_ibid._ pleasant reference is had to some of the more modern features of presentation day, in the annexed extract from the "yale literary magazine":-- "there is one spot where the elms stretch their long arms, not 'in quest of thought,' but as though they would afford their friendly shade to make pleasant the last scene of the academic life. seated in a circle in this place, which has been so often trampled by the 'stag-dance' of preceding classes, and made hallowed by associations which will cling around such places, are the present graduates. they have met together for the last time as a body, for they will not all be present at the closing ceremony of commencement, nor all answer to the muster in the future class reunions. it is hard to tell whether such a ceremony should be sad or joyous, for, despite the boisterous merriment and exuberance which arises from the prospect of freedom, there is something tender in the thought of meeting for the last time, to break strong ties, and lose individuality as a class for ever. "in the centre of the circle are the class band, with horns, flutes, and violins, braying, piping, or saw-filing, at the option of the owners,--toot,--toot,--bum,--bang,--boo-o-o,--in a most melodious discord. songs are distributed, pipes filled, and the smoke cloud rises, trembles as the chorus of a hundred voices rings out in a merry cadence, and then, breaking, soars off,--a fit emblem of the separation of those at whose parting it received its birth. "'braxton on the history of the class!' "'the class history!--braxton!--braxton!' "'in a moment, gentlemen,'--and our hero mounts upon a cask, and proceeds to give in burlesque a description of class exploits and the wonderful success of its _early_ graduates. speeches follow, and the joke, and song, till the lengthening shadows bring a warning, and a preparation for the final ceremony. the ring is spread out, the last pipes smoked in college laid down, and the 'stag-dance,' with its rush, and their destruction ended. again the ring forms, and each classmate moves around it to grasp each hand for the last time, and exchange a parting blessing. "the band strike up, and the long procession march around the college, plant their ivy, and return to cheer the buildings."--vol. xx. p. . the following song was written by francis miles finch of the class of , for the presentation day of that year. "gather ye smiles from the ocean isles, warm hearts from river and fountain, a playful chime from the palm-tree clime, from the land of rock and mountain: and roll the song in waves along, for the hours are bright before us, and grand and hale are the elms of yale, like fathers, bending o'er us. "summon our band from the prairie land, from the granite hills, dark frowning, from the lakelet blue, and the black bayou, from the snows our pine peaks crowning; and pour the song in joy along, for the hours are bright before us, and grand and hale are the towers of yale, like giants, watching o'er us. "count not the tears of the long-gone years, with their moments of pain and sorrow, but laugh in the light of their memories bright, and treasure them all for the morrow; then roll the song in waves along, while the hours are bright before us, and high and hale are the spires of yale, like guardians, towering o'er us. "dream of the days when the rainbow rays of hope on our hearts fell lightly, and each fair hour some cheerful flower in our pathway blossomed brightly; and pour the song in joy along, ere the moments fly before us, while portly and hale the sires of yale are kindly gazing o'er us. "linger again in memory's glen, 'mid the tendrilled vines of feeling, till a voice or a sigh floats softly by, once more to the glad heart stealing; and roll the song on waves along, for the hours are bright before us, and in cottage and vale are the brides of yale, like angels, watching o'er us. "clasp ye the hand 'neath the arches grand that with garlands span our greeting, with a silent prayer that an hour as fair may smile on each after meeting; and long may the song, the joyous song, roll on in the hours before us, and grand and hale may the elms of yale, for many a year, bend o'er us." in the appendix to president woolsey's historical discourse delivered before the graduates of yale college, is the following account of presentation day, in . "the professor of divinity, two ministers of the town, and another minister, having accompanied me to the library about , p.m., the middle tutor waited upon me there, and informed me that the examination was finished, and they were ready for the presentation. i gave leave, being seated in the library between the above ministers. hereupon the examiners, preceded by the professor of mathematics, entered the library, and introduced thirty candidates, a beautiful sight! the diploma examinatorium, with the return and minutes inscribed upon it, was delivered to the president, who gave it to the vice-bedellus, directing him to read it. he read it and returned it to the president, to be deposited among the college archives _in perpetuam rei memoriam_. the senior tutor thereupon made a very eloquent latin speech, and presented the candidates for the honors of the college. this presentation the president in a latin speech accepted, and addressed the gentlemen examiners and the candidates, and gave the latter liberty to return home till commencement. then dismissed. "at about , p.m., the afternoon exercises were appointed to begin. at - / , the bell tolled, and the assembly convened in the chapel, ladies and gentlemen. the president introduced the exercises in a latin speech, and then delivered the diploma examinatorium to the vice-bedellus, who, standing on the pulpit stairs, read it publicly. then succeeded,-- cliosophic oration in latin, by sir meigs. poetical composition in english, by sir barlow. dialogue, english, by sir miller, sir chaplin, sir ely. cliosophic oration, english, by sir webster. disputation, english, by sir wolcott, sir swift, sir smith. valedictory oration, english, by sir tracy. an anthem. exercises two hours."--p. . president. in the united states, the chief officer of a college or university. his duties are, to preside at the meetings of the faculty, at exhibitions and commencements, to sign the diplomas or letters of degree, to carry on the official correspondence, to address counsel and instruction to the students, and to exercise a general superintendence in the affairs of the college over which he presides. at harvard college it was formerly the duty of the president "to inspect the manners of the students, and unto his morning and evening prayers to join some exposition of the chapters which they read from hebrew into greek, from the old testament, in the morning, and out of english into greek, from the new testament, in the evening." at the same college, in the early part of the last century, mr. wadsworth, the president, states, "that he expounded the scriptures, once eleven, and sometimes eight or nine times in the course of a week."--_harv. reg._, p. , and _quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . similar duties were formerly required of the president at other american colleges. in some, at the present day, he performs the duties of a professor in connection with those of his own office, and presides at the daily religious exercises in the chapel. the title of president is given to the chief officer in some of the colleges of the english universities. president's chair. at harvard college, there is in the library an antique chair, venerable by age and association, which is used only on commencement day, when it is occupied by the president while engaged in delivering the diplomas for degrees. "vague report," says quincy, "represents it to have been brought to the college during the presidency of holyoke, as the gift of the rev. ebenezer turell of medford (the author of the life of dr. colman). turell was connected by marriage with the mathers, by some of whom it is said to have been brought from england." holyoke was president from to . the round knobs on the chair were turned by president holyoke, and attached to it by his own hands. in the picture of this honored gentleman, belonging to the college, he is painted in the old chair, which seems peculiarly adapted by its strength to support the weight which fills it. before the erection of gore hall, the present library building, the books of the college were kept in harvard hall. in the same building, also, was the philosophy chamber, where the chair usually stood for the inspection of the curious. over this domain, from the year to , presided mr. samuel shapleigh, the librarian. he was a dapper little bachelor, very active and remarkably attentive to the ladies who visited the library, especially the younger portion of them. when ushered into the room where stood the old chair, he would watch them with eager eyes, and, as soon as one, prompted by a desire of being able to say, "i have sat in the president's chair," took this seat, rubbing his hands together, he would exclaim, in great glee, "a forfeit! a forfeit!" and demand from the fair occupant a kiss, a fee which, whether refused or not, he very seldom failed to obtain.[ ] this custom, which seems now-a-days to be going out of fashion, is mentioned by mr. william biglow, in a poem before the phi beta kappa society, recited in their dining-hall, august , . speaking of commencement day and its observances, he says:-- "now young gallants allure their favorite fair to take a seat in presidential chair; then seize the long-accustomed fee, the bliss of the half ravished, half free-granted kiss." the editor of mr. peirce's history of harvard university publishes the following curious extracts from horace walpole's private correspondence, giving a description of some antique chairs found in england, exactly of the same construction with the college chair; a circumstance which corroborates the supposition that this also was brought from england. horace walpole to george montagu, esq. "_strawberry hill, august_ , . "dickey bateman has picked up a whole cloister full of old chairs in herefordshire. he bought them one by one, here and there in farm-houses, for three and sixpence and a crown apiece. they are of wood, the seats triangular, the backs, arms, and legs loaded with turnery. a thousand to one but there are plenty up and down cheshire, too. if mr. and mrs. wetenhall, as they ride or drive out, would now and then pick up such a chair, it would oblige me greatly. take notice, no two need be of the same pattern."--_private correspondence of horace walpole, earl of orford_, vol. ii. p. . horace walpole to the rev. mr. cole. "_strawberry hill, march_ , . "when you go into cheshire, and upon your ramble, may i trouble you with a commission? but about which you must promise me not to go a step out of your way. mr. bateman has got a cloister at old windsor furnished with ancient wooden chairs, most of them triangular, but all of various patterns, and carved and turned in the most uncouth and whimsical forms. he picked them up one by one, for two, three, five, or six shillings apiece, from different farm-houses in herefordshire. i have long envied and coveted them. there may be such in poor cottages in so neighboring a county as cheshire. i should not grudge any expense for purchase or carriage, and should be glad even of a couple such for my cloister here. when you are copying inscriptions in a churchyard in any village, think of me, and step into the first cottage you see, but don't take further trouble than that."--_ibid._, vol. iii. pp. , , from _peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . an engraving of the chair is to be found in president quincy's history of harvard university, vol. i. p. . prevaricator. a sort of an occasional orator; an academical phrase in the university of cambridge, eng.--_johnson_. he should not need have pursued me through the various shapes of a divine, a doctor, a head of a college, a professor, a _prevaricator_, a mathematician.--_bp. wren, monarchy asserted_, pref. it would have made you smile to hear the _prevaricator_, in his jocular way, give him his title and character to face.--_a. philips, life of abp. williams_, p. . see terrÆ-filius. previous examination. in the english universities, the university examination in the second year. called also the little-go. the only practical connection that the undergraduate usually has with the university, in its corporate capacity, consists in his _previous examination_, _alias_ the "little-go," and his final examination for a degree, with or without honors.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . prex. a cant term for president. after examination, i went to the old _prex_, and was admitted. _prex_, by the way, is the same as president.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . but take a peep with us, dear reader, into that _sanctum sanctorum_, that skull and bones of college mysteries, the _prex's_ room.--_the yale banger_, nov. , . good old _prex_ used to get the students together and advise them on keeping their faces clean, and blacking their boots, &c.--_amherst indicator_, vol. iii. p. . prince's stuff. in the english universities, the fabric of which the gowns of the undergraduates are usually made. [their] every-day habit differs nothing as far as the gown is concerned, it being _prince's stuff_, or other convenient material.--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. xv. see costume. principal. at oxford, the president of a college or hall is sometimes styled the principal.--_oxf. cal._ privat docent. in german universities, a _private teacher_. "the so-called _privat docenten_," remarks howitt, "are gentlemen who devote themselves to an academical career, who have taken the degree of doctor, and through a public disputation have acquired the right to deliver lectures on subjects connected with their particular department of science. they receive no salary, but depend upon the remuneration derived from their classes."--_student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . private. at harvard college, one of the milder punishments is what is called _private admonition_, by which a deduction of thirty-two marks is made from the rank of the offender. so called in contradistinction to _public admonition_, when a deduction is made, and with it a letter is sent to the parent. often abbreviated into _private_. "reckon on the fingers of your mind the reprimands, deductions, parietals, and _privates_ in store for you."--_oration before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, . what are parietals, parts, _privates_ now, to the still calmness of that placid brow? _class poem, harv. coll._, . privatissimum, _pl._ privatissimi. literally, _most private_. in the german universities, an especially private lecture. to these _privatissimi_, as they are called, or especially private lectures, being once agreed upon, no other auditors can be admitted.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . then my _privatissimum_--(i've been thinking on it for a long time--and in fact begun it)-- will cost me rix-dollars more, please send with the ducats i mentioned before. _the jobsiad_, in _lit. world_, vol. ix. p. . the use of a _privatissimum_ i can't conjecture, when one is already ten hours at lecture. _ibid._, vol. ix. p. . prizeman. in universities and colleges, one who takes a prize. the wrangler's glory in his well-earned fame, the _prizeman's_ triumph, and the plucked man's shame. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, _may_, . probation. in colleges and universities, the examination of a student as to his qualifications for a degree. . the time which a student passes in college from the period of entering until he is matriculated and received as a member in full standing. in american colleges, this is usually six months, but can be prolonged at discretion.--_coll. laws_. proceed. to take a degree. mr. halliwell, in his dictionary of archaic and provincial words, says, "this term is still used at the english universities." it is sometimes used in american colleges. in he _proceeded_ master of arts, and became celebrated as a wit and a poet.--_poems of bishop corbet_, p. ix. they that expect to _proceed_ bachelors that year, to be examined of their sufficiency,... and such that expect to _proceed_ masters of arts, to exhibit their synopsis of acts. they, that are approved sufficient for their degrees, shall _proceed_.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . the overseers ... recommended to the corporation "to take effectual measures to prevent those who _proceeded_ bachelors of arts, from having entertainments of any kind."--_ibid._, vol. ii. p. . when he _proceeded_ bachelor of arts, he was esteemed one of the most perfect scholars that had ever received the honors of this seminary.--_holmes's life of ezra stiles_, p. . masters may _proceed_ bachelors in either of the faculties, at the end of seven years, &c.--_calendar trin. coll._, , p. . of the surviving graduates, the oldest _proceeded_ bachelor of arts the very commencement at which dr. stiles was elected to the presidency.--_woolsey's discourse, yale coll._, aug. , , p. . proctor. contracted from the latin _procurator_, from _procuro_; _pro_ and _curo_. in the university of cambridge, eng., two proctors are annually elected, who are peace-officers. it is their especial duty to attend to the discipline and behavior of all persons _in statu pupillari_, to search houses of ill-fame, and to take into custody women of loose and abandoned character, and even those _de malo suspectcæ_. their other duties are not so menial in their character, and are different in different universities.--_cam. cal._ at oxford, "the proctors act as university magistrates; they are appointed from each college in rotation, and remain in office two years. they nominate four pro-proctors to assist them. their chief duty, in which they are known to undergraduates, is to preserve order, and keep the town free from improper characters. when they go out in the evening, they are usually attended by two servants, called by the gownsmen bull-dogs.... the marshal, a chief officer, is usually in attendance on one of the proctors.... it is also the proctor's duty to take care that the cap and gown are worn in the university."--_the collegian's guide_, oxford, pp. , . at oxford, the proctors "jointly have, as has the vice-chancellor singly, the power of interposing their _veto_ or _non placet_, upon all questions in congregation and convocation, which puts a stop at once to all further proceedings in the matter. these are the 'censores morum' of the university, and their business is to see that the undergraduate members, when no longer under the ken of the head or tutors of their own college, behave seemly when mixing with the townsmen and restrict themselves, as far as may be, to lawful or constitutional and harmless amusements. their powers extend over a circumference of three miles round the walls of the city. the proctors are easily recognized by their full dress gown of velvet sleeves, and bands-encircled neck."--_oxford guide_, ed. , p. xiii. at oxford, "the two proctors were formerly nearly equal in importance to the vice-chancellor. their powers, though diminished, are still considerable, as they administer the police of the university, appoint the examiners, and have a joint veto on all measures brought before convocation."--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . the class of officers called proctors was instituted at harvard college in the year , their duty being "to reside constantly and preserve order within the walls," to preserve order among the students, to see that the laws of the college are enforced, "and to exercise the same inspection and authority in their particular district, and throughout college, which it is the duty of a parietal tutor to exercise therein."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . i believe this is the only college in the united states where this class of academical police officers is established. prof, proff. abbreviated for _professor_. the _proff_ thought he knew too much to stay here, and so he went his way, and i saw him no more.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . for _proffs_ and tutors too, who steer our big canoe, prepare their lays. _yale lit. mag._, vol. iii. p. . professor. one that publicly teaches any science or branch of learning; particularly, an officer in a university, college, or other seminary, whose business is to read lectures or instruct students in a particular branch of learning; as a _professor_ of theology or mathematics.--_webster_. professoriate. the office or employment of a professor. it is desirable to restore the _professoriate_.--_lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . professor of dust and ashes. a title sometimes jocosely given by students to the person who has the care of their rooms. was interrupted a moment just now, by the entrance of mr. c------, the gentleman who makes the beds, sweeps, takes up the ashes, and supports the dignity of the title, "_professor of dust and ashes_."--_sketches of williams college_, p. . the south college _prof. of dust and ashes_ has a huge bill against the society.--_yale tomahawk_, feb. . proficient. the degree of proficient is conferred in the university of virginia, in a certificate of proficiency, on those who have studied only in certain branches taught in some of the schools connected with that institution. pro meritis. latin; literally, _for his merits_. a phrase customarily used in american collegiate diplomas. then, every crime atoned with ease, _pro meritis_, received degrees. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, part i. pro-proctor. in the english universities, an officer appointed to assist the proctors in that part of their duty only which relates to the discipline and behavior of those persons who are _in statu pupillari_.--_cam. and oxf. cals._ more familiarly, these officers are called _pro's_. they [the proctors] are assisted in their duties by four pro-proctors, each principal being allowed to nominate his two "_pro's_."--_oxford guide_, , p. xiii. the _pro's_ have also a strip of velvet on each side of the gown-front, and wear bands.--_ibid._, p. xiii. pro-vice-chancellor. in the english universities a deputy appointed by the vice-chancellor, who exercises his power in case of his illness or necessary absence. provost. the president of a college. dr. jay, on his arrival in england, found there dr. smith, _provost_ of the college in philadelphia, soliciting aid for that institution.--_hist. sketch of columbia coll._, p. . at columbia college, in , an officer was appointed, styled _provost_, who, in absence of the president, was to supply his place, and who, "besides exercising the like general superintendence with the president," was to conduct the classical studies of the senior class. the office of provost continued until , when the trustees determined that its powers and duties should devolve upon the president.--_ibid._, p. . at oxford, the chief officer of some of the colleges bears this title. at cambridge, it is appropriated solely to the president of king's college. "on the choice of a provost," says the author of a history of the university of cambridge, , "the fellows are all shut into the ante-chapel, and out of which they are not permitted to stir on any account, nor none permitted to enter, till they have all agreed on their man; which agreement sometimes takes up several days; and, if i remember right, they were three days and nights confined in choosing the present provost, and had their beds, close-stools, &c. with them, and their commons, &c. given them in at the windows."--_grad. ad cantab._, p. . prudential committee. in yale college, a committee to whom the discretionary concerns of the college are intrusted. they order such repairs of the college buildings as are necessary, audit the accounts of the treasurer and steward, make the annual report of the state of the college, superintend the investment of the college funds, institute suits for the recovery and preservation of the college property, and perform various other duties which are enumerated in the laws of yale college. at middlebury college, similar powers are given to a body bearing the same name.--_laws mid. coll._, , pp. , . public. at harvard college, the punishment next higher in order to a _private admonition_ is called a _public admonition_, and consists in a deduction of sixty-four marks from the rank of the offender, accompanied by a letter to the parent or guardian. it is often called _a public_. see admonition, and private. public day. in the university of virginia, the day on which "the certificates and diplomas are awarded to the successful candidates, the results of the examinations are announced, and addresses are delivered by one or more of the bachelors and masters of arts, and by the orator appointed by the society of the alumni."--_cat. of univ. of virginia_. this occurs on the closing day of the session, the th of june. public orator. in the english universities, an officer who is the voice of the university on all public occasions, who writes, reads, and records all letters of a public nature, and presents, with an appropriate address, those on whom honorary degrees are conferred. at cambridge, this it esteemed one of the most honorable offices in the gift of the university.--_cam. and oxf. cals._ pump. among german students, to obtain or take on credit; to sponge. und hat der bursch kein geld im beutel, so _pumpt_ er die philister an. _crambambuli song_. puny. a young, inexperienced person; a novice. freshmen at oxford were called _punies of the first year_.--_halliwell's dict. arch. and prov. words_. put through. a phrase very general in its application. when a student treats, introduces, or assists another, or masters a hard lesson, he is said to _put_ him or it _through_. in a discourse by the rev. dr. orville dewey, on the law of progress, referring to these words, he said "he had heard a teacher use the characteristic expression that his pupils should be '_put through_' such and such studies. this, he said, is a modern practice. we put children through philosophy,--put them through history,--put them through euclid. he had no faith in this plan, and wished to see the school teachers set themselves against this forcing process." . to examine thoroughly and with despatch. first thatcher, then hadley, then larned and prex, each _put_ our class _through_ in succession. _presentation day songs_, june , . _q_. q. see cue. quad. an abbreviation of quadrangle, q.v. how silently did all come down the staircases into the chapel _quad_, that evening!--_collegian's guide_, p. . his mother had been in oxford only the week before, and had been seen crossing the _quad_ in tears.--_ibid._, p. . quadrangle. at oxford and cambridge, eng., the rectangular courts in which the colleges are constructed. soon as the clouds divide, and dawning day tints the _quadrangle_ with its earliest ray. _the college_, in _blackwood's mag._, may, . quarter-day. the day when quarterly payments are made. the day that completes three months. at harvard and yale colleges, quarter-day, when the officers and instructors receive their quarterly salaries, was formerly observed as a holiday. one of the evils which prevailed among the students of the former institution, about the middle of the last century, was the "riotous disorders frequently committed on the _quarter-days_ and evenings," on one of which, in , "the windows of all the tutors and divers other windows were broken," so that, in consequence, a vote was passed that "the observation of _quarter-days_, in distinction from other days, be wholly laid aside, and that the undergraduates be obliged to observe the studying hours, and to perform the college exercises, on quarter-day, and the day following, as at other times."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . questionist. in the english universities, a name given to those who are in the last term of their college course, and are soon to be examined for honors or degrees.--_webster_. in the "orders agreed upon by the overseers, at a meeting in harvard college, may th, ," this word is used in the following sentence: "and, in case any of the sophisters, _questionists_, or inceptors fail in the premises required at their hands,... they shall be deferred to the following year"; but it does not seem to have gained any prevalence in the college, and is used, it is believed, only in this passage. quillwheel. at the wesleyan university, "when a student," says a correspondent, "'knocks under,' or yields a point, he says he _quillwheels_, that is, he acknowledges he is wrong." _r_. rag. this word is used at union college, and is thus explained by a correspondent: "to _rag_ and _ragging_, you will find of very extensive application, they being employed primarily as expressive of what is called by the vulgar thieving and stealing, but in a more extended sense as meaning superiority. thus, if one declaims or composes much better than his classmates, he is said to _rag_ all his competitors." the common phrase, "_to take the rag off_," i.e. to excel, seems to be the form from which this word has been abbreviated. rake. at williams and at bowdoin colleges, used in the phrase "to _rake_ an x," i.e. to recite perfectly, ten being the number of marks given for the best recitation. ram. a practical joke. ---- in season to be just too late a successful _ram_ to perpetrate. _sophomore independent_, union coll., nov. . ram on the clergy. at middlebury college, a synonyme of the slang noun, "sell." ranters. at bethany college, in virginia, there is "a band," says a correspondent, "calling themselves '_ranters_,' formed for the purpose of perpetrating all kinds of rascality and mischievousness, both on their fellow-students and the neighboring people. the band is commanded by one selected from the party, called the _grand ranter_, whose orders are to be obeyed under penalty of expulsion of the person offending. among the tricks commonly indulged in are those of robbing hen and turkey roosts, and feasting upon the fruits of their labor, of stealing from the neighbors their horses, to enjoy the pleasure of a midnight ride, and to facilitate their nocturnal perambulations. if detected, and any complaint is made, or if the faculty are informed of their movements, they seek revenge by shaving the tails and manes of the favorite horses belonging to the person informing, or by some similar trick." razor. a writer in the yale literary magazine defines this word in the following sentence: "many of the members of this time-honored institution, from whom we ought to expect better things, not only do their own shaving, but actually _make their own razors_. but i must explain for the benefit of the uninitiated. a pun, in the elegant college dialect, is called a razor, while an attempt at a pun is styled a _sick razor_. the _sick_ ones are by far the most numerous; however, once in a while you meet with one in quite respectable health."--vol. xiii. p. . the meeting will be opened with _razors_ by the society's jester. --_yale tomahawk_, nov. . behold how duncia leads her chosen sons, all armed with squibs, stale jokes, _dull razors_, puns. _the gallinipper_, dec. . read. to be studious; to practise much reading; e.g. at oxford, to _read_ for a first class; at cambridge, to _read_ for an honor. in america it is common to speak of "reading law, medicine," &c. we seven stayed at christmas up to _read_; we seven took one tutor. _tennyson, prologue to princess_. in england the vacations are the very times when you _read_ most. _bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . this system takes for granted that the students have "_read_," as it is termed, with a private practitioner of medicine.--_cat. univ. of virginia_, , p. . reader. in the university of oxford, one who reads lectures on scientific subjects.--_lyell_. . at the english universities, a hard student, nearly equivalent to reading man. most of the cantabs are late _readers_, so that, supposing one of them to begin at seven, he will not leave off before half past eleven.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . readership. in the university of oxford, the office of a reader or lecturer on scientific subjects.--_lyell_. reading. in the academic sense, studying. one would hardly suspect them to be students at all, did not the number of glasses hint that those who carried them had impaired their sight by late _reading_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . reading man. in the english universities, a _reading man_ is a hard student, or one who is entirely devoted to his collegiate studies.--_webster_. the distinction between "_reading men_" and "_non-reading men_" began to manifest itself.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . we might wonder, perhaps, if in england the "[greek: oi polloi]" should be "_reading men_," but with us we should wonder were they not.--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . reading party. in england, a number of students who in vacation time, and at a distance from the university, pursue their studies together under the direction of a coach, or private tutor. of this method of studying, bristed remarks: "it is not _impossible_ to read on a reading-party; there is only a great chance against your being able to do so. as a very general rule, a man works best in his accustomed place of business, where he has not only his ordinary appliances and helps, but his familiar associations about him. the time lost in settling down and making one's self comfortable and ready for work in a new place is not inconsiderable, and is all clear loss. moreover, the very idea of a reading-party involves a combination of two things incompatible, --amusement and relaxation beyond the proper and necessary quantity of daily exercise, and hard work at books. "reading-parties do not confine themselves to england or the island of great britain. sometimes they have been known to go as far as dresden. sometimes a party is of considerable size; when a crack tutor goes on one, which is not often, he takes his whole team with him, and not unfrequently a classical and mathematical bachelor join their pupils."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. - . read up. students often speak of _reading up_, i.e. preparing themselves to write on a subject, by reading the works of authors who have treated of it. rebellion tree. at harvard college, a large elm-tree, which stands to the east of the south entry of hollis hall, has long been known by this name. it is supposed to have been planted at the request of dr. thaddeus m. harris. his son, dr. thaddeus w. harris, the present librarian of the college, says that his father has often told him, that when he held the office of librarian, in the year , a number of trees were set out in the college yard, and that one was planted opposite his room, no. hollis hall, under which he buried a pewter plate, taken from the commons hall. on this plate was inscribed his name, the day of the month, the year, &c. from its situation and appearance, the rebellion tree would seem to be the one thus described; but it did not receive its name until the year , when the famous rebellion occurred among the students, and perhaps not until within a few years antecedent to the year . at that time, however, this name seems to have been the one by which it was commonly known, from the reference which is made to it in the rebelliad, a poem written to commemorate the deeds of the rebellion of that year. and roared as loud as he could yell, "come on, my lads, let us rebel!" * * * * * with one accord they all agree to dance around _rebellion tree_. _rebelliad_, p. . but they, rebellious rascals! flee for shelter to _rebellion tree_. _ibid._, p. . stands a tree in front of hollis, dear to harvard over all; but than ---- desert us, rather let _rebellion_ fall. _ms. poem_. other scenes are sometimes enacted under its branches, as the following verses show:-- when the old year was drawing towards its close, and in its place the gladsome new one rose, then members of each class, with spirits free, went forth to greet her round _rebellion tree_. round that old tree, sacred to students' rights, and witness, too, of many wondrous sights, in solemn circle all the students passed; they danced with spirit, until, tired, at last a pause they make, and some a song propose. then "auld lang syne" from many voices rose. now, as the lamp of the old year dies out, they greet the new one with exulting shout; they groan for ----, and each class they cheer, and thus they usher in the fair new year. _poem before h.l. of i.o. of o.f._, p. , . recentes. latin for the english freshmen. consult clap's history of yale college, , p. . recitation. in american colleges and schools, the rehearsal of a lesson by pupils before their instructor.--_webster_. recitation-room. the room where lessons are rehearsed by pupils before their instructor. in the older american colleges, the rooms of the tutors were formerly the recitation-rooms of the classes. at harvard college, the benches on which the students sat when reciting were, when not in use, kept in piles, outside of the tutors' rooms. when the hour of recitation arrived, they would carry them into the room, and again return them to their places when the exercise was finished. one of the favorite amusements of the students was to burn these benches; the spot selected for the bonfire being usually the green in front of the old meeting-house, or the common. recite. transitively, to rehearse, as a lesson to an instructor. . intransitively, to rehearse a lesson. the class will _recite_ at eleven o'clock.--_webster_. this word is used in both forms in american seminaries. record of merit. at middlebury college "a class-book is kept by each instructor, in which the character of each student's recitation is noted by numbers, and all absences from college exercises are minuted. demerit for absences and other irregularities is also marked in like manner, and made the basis of discipline. at the close of each term, the average of these marks is recorded, and, when desired, communicated to parents and guardians." this book is called the _record of merit_.--_cat. middlebury coll._, - , p. . rector. the chief elective officer of some universities, as in france and scotland. the same title was formerly given to the president of a college in new england, but it is not now in use.--_webster_. the title of _rector_ was given to the chief officer of yale college at the time of its foundation, and was continued until the year , when, by "an act for the more full and complete establishment of yale college in new haven," it was changed, among other alterations, to that of _president_.--_clap's annals of yale college_, p. . the chief officer of harvard college at the time of its foundation was styled _master_ or _professor_. mr. dunster was chosen the first _president_, in , and those who succeeded him bore this title until the year , when mr. joseph dudley, having received the commission of president of the colony, changed for the sake of distinction the title of _president of the college_ to that of _rector_. a few years after, the title of _president_ was resumed. --_peirce's hist. of harv. univ._, p. . redeat. latin; literally, _he may return_. "it is the custom in some colleges," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "on coming into residence, to wait on the dean, and sign your name in a book, kept for that purpose, which is called signing your _redeat_."--p. . refectory. at oxford, eng., the place where the members of each college or hall dine. this word was originally applied to an apartment in convents and monasteries, where a moderate repast was taken.--_brande_. in oxford there are nineteen colleges and five halls, containing dwelling-rooms for the students, and a distinct _refectory_ or dining-hall, library, and chapel to each college and hall.--_oxf. guide_, , p. xvi. at princeton college, this name is given to the hall where the students eat together in common.--abbreviated refec. regent. in the english universities, the regents, or _regentes_, are members of the university who have certain peculiar duties of instruction or government. at cambridge, all resident masters of arts of less than four years' standing and all doctors of less than two, are regents. at oxford, the period of regency is shorter. at both universities, those of a more advanced standing, who keep their names on the college books, are called _non-regents_. at cambridge, the regents compose the upper house, and the non-regents the lower house of the senate, or governing body. at oxford, the regents compose the _congregation_, which confers degrees, and does the ordinary business of the university. the regents and non-regents, collectively, compose the _convocation_, which is the governing body in the last resort.--_webster_. see senate. . in the state of new york, the member of a corporate body which is invested with the superintendence of all the colleges, academies, and schools in the state. this board consists of twenty-one members, who are called _the regents of the university of the state of new york_. they are appointed and removable by the legislature. they have power to grant acts of incorporation for colleges, to visit and inspect all colleges, academies, and schools, and to make regulations for governing the same.--_statutes of new york_. . at harvard college, an officer chosen from the _faculty_, whose duties are under the immediate direction of the president. all weekly lists of absences, monitor's bills, petitions to the faculty for excuse of absences from the regular exercises and for making up lessons, all petitions for elective studies, the returns of the scale of merit, and returns of delinquencies and deductions by the tutors and proctors, are left with the regent, or deposited in his office. the regent also informs those who petition for excuses, and for elective studies, of the decision of the faculty in regard to their petitions. formerly, the regent assisted in making out the quarter or term bills, of which he kept a record, and when students were punished by fining, he was obliged to keep an account of the fines, and the offences for which they were imposed. some of his duties were performed by a freshman, who was appointed by the faculty.--_laws harv. coll._, , and _regulations_, . the creation of the office of regent at harvard college is noticed by professor sidney willard. in the year "an officer was appointed to occupy a room in one of the halls to supply the place of a tutor, for preserving order in the rooms in his entry, and to perform the duties that had been discharged by the butler, so far as it regarded the keeping of certain records. he was allowed the service of a freshman, and the offices of butler and of butler's freshman were abolished. the title of this new officer was regent."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. p. . see freshman, regent's. register. in union college, an officer whose duties are similar to those enumerated under registrar. he also acts, without charge, as fiscal guardian for all students who deposit funds in his hands. registrar, registrary. in the english universities, an officer who has the keeping of all the public records.--_encyc._ at harvard college, the corporation appoint one of the faculty to the office of _registrar_. he keeps a record of the votes and orders passed by the latter body, gives certified copies of the same when requisite, and performs other like duties.--_laws univ. at cam., mass._, . regius professor. a name given in the british universities to the incumbents of those professorships which have been founded by _royal_ bounty. regulators. at hamilton college, "a junior class affair," writes a correspondent, "consisting of fifteen or twenty members, whose object is to regulate college laws and customs according to their own way. they are known only by their deeds. who the members are, no one out of the band knows. their time for action is in the night." relegation. in german universities, the _relegation_ is the punishment next in severity to the _consilium abeundi_. howitt explains the term in these words: "it has two degrees. first, the simple relegation. this consists in expulsion [out of the district of the court of justice within which the university is situated], for a period of from two to three years; after which the offender may indeed return, but can no more be received as an academical burger. secondly, the sharper relegation, which adds to the simple relegation an announcement of the fact to the magistracy of the place of abode of the offender; and, according to the discretion of the court, a confinement in an ordinary prison, previous to the banishment, is added; and also the sharper relegation can be extended to more than four years, the ordinary term,--yes, even to perpetual expulsion."--_student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . relig. at princeton college, an abbreviated name for a professor of religion. renown. german, _renommiren_, to hector, to bully. among the students in german universities, to _renown_ is, in english popular phrase, "to cut a swell."--_howitt_. the spare hours of the forenoon and afternoon are spent in fencing, in _renowning_,--that is, in doing things-which make people stare at them, and in providing duels for the morrow.--_russell's tour in germany_, edinburgh ed., , vol. ii. pp. , . we cannot be deaf to the testimony of respectable eyewitnesses, who, in proof of these defects, tell us ... of "_renowning_," or wild irregularities, in which "the spare hours" of the day are spent.--_d.a. white's address before soc. of the alumni of harv. univ._, aug. , , p. . replicator. "the first discussions of the society, called forensic, were in writing, and conducted by only two members, styled the respondent and the opponent. subsequently, a third was added, called a _replicator_, who reviewed the arguments of the other two, and decided upon their comparative merits."--_semi-centennial anniversary of the philomathean society, union coll._, p. . report. a word much in use among the students of universities and colleges, in the common sense of _to inform against_, but usually spoken in reference to the faculty. thanks to the friendly proctor who spared to _report_ me. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . if i hear again of such fell outrage to the college laws, of such loud tumult after eight o'clock, thou'lt be _reported_ to the faculty.--_ibid._, p. . residence. at the english universities, to be "in residence" is to occupy rooms as a member of a college, either in the college itself, or in the town where the college is situated. trinity ... usually numbers four hundred undergraduates in _residence_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . at oxford, an examination, not always a very easy one, must be passed before the student can be admitted to _residence_.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . resident graduate. in the united states, graduates who are desirous of pursuing their studies in a place where a college is situated, without joining any of its departments, can do so in the capacity of _residents_ or _resident graduates_. they are allowed to attend the public lectures given in the institution, and enjoy the use of its library. like other students, they give bonds for the payment of college dues.--_coll. laws_. respondent. in the schools, one who maintains a thesis in reply, and whose province is to refute objections, or overthrow arguments.--_watts_. this word, with its companion, _affirmant_, was formerly used in american colleges, and was applied to those who engaged in the syllogistic discussions then incident to commencement. but the main exercises were disputations upon questions, wherein the _respondents_ first made their theses.--_mather's magnalia_, b. iv. p. . the syllogistic disputes were held between an _affirmant_ and _respondent_, who stood in the side galleries of the church opposite to one another, and shot the weapons of their logic over the heads of the audience.--_pres. woolsey's hist. disc., yale coll._, p. . in the public exercises at commencement, i was somewhat remarked as a _respondent_.--_life and works of john adams_, vol. ii. p. . responsion. in the university of oxford, an examination about the middle of the college course, also called the _little-go_.--_lyell_. see little-go. retro. latin; literally, _back_. among the students of the university of cambridge, eng., used to designate a _behind_-hand account. "a cook's bill of extraordinaries not settled by the tutor."--_grad. ad cantab._ review. a second or repeated examination of a lesson, or the lesson itself thus re-examined. he cannot get the "advance," forgets "the _review_." _childe harvard_, p. . rider. the meaning of this word, used at cambridge, eng., is given in the annexed sentence. "his ambition is generally limited to doing '_riders_,' which are a sort of scholia, or easy deductions from the book-work propositions, like a link between them and problems; indeed, the rider being, as its name imports, attached to a question, the question is not fully answered until the rider is answered also."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . roll a wheel. at the university of vermont, in student parlance, to devise a scheme or lay a plot for an election or a college spree, is to _roll a wheel_. e.g. "john was always _rolling a big wheel_," i.e. incessantly concocting some plot. room. to occupy an apartment; to lodge; _an academic use of the word_.--_webster_. inquire of any student at our colleges where mr. b. lodges, and you will be told he _rooms_ in such a building, such a story, or up so many flights of stairs, no. --, to the right or left. the rowes, years ago, used to _room_ in dartmouth hall.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . _rooming_ in college, it is convenient that they should have the more immediate oversight of the deportment of the students.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . seven years ago, i _roomed_ in this room where we are now.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xii. p. . when christmas came again i came back to this room, but the man who _roomed_ here was frightened and ran away.--_ibid._, vol. xii. p. . rent for these apartments is exacted from sophomores, about sixty _rooming_ out of college.--_burlesque catalogue_, yale coll., - , p. . root. a word first used in the sense given below by dr. paley. "he [paley] held, indeed, all those little arts of underhand address, by which patronage and preferment are so frequently pursued, in supreme contempt. he was not of a nature to _root_; for that was his own expressive term, afterwards much used in the university to denote the sort of practice alluded to. he one day humorously proposed, at some social meeting, that a certain contemporary fellow of his college [christ's college, cambridge, eng.], at that time distinguished for his elegant and engaging manners, and who has since attained no small eminence in the church of england, should be appointed _professor of rooting_."--_memoirs of paley_. . to study hard; to dig, q.v. ill-favored men, eager for his old boots and diseased raiment, torment him while _rooting_ at his greek.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . rot. twaddle, platitude. in use among the students at the university of cambridge, eng.--_bristed_. rowes. the name of a party which formerly existed at dartmouth college. they are thus described in the dartmouth, vol. iv. p. : "the _rowes_ are very liberal in their notions. the rowes don't pretend to say anything worse of a fellow than to call him a _blue_, and _vice versâ_." see blues. rowing. the making of loud and noisy disturbance; acting like a _rowdy_. flushed with the juice of the grape, all prime and ready for _rowing_. when from the ground i raised the fragments of ponderous brickbat. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . the fellow-commoners generally being more disposed to _rowing_ than reading.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d. p. . rowing-man. one who is more inclined to fast living than hard study. among english students used in contradistinction to reading-man, q.v. when they go out to sup, as a reading-man does perhaps once a term, and a _rowing-man_ twice a week, they eat very moderately, though their potations are sometimes of the deepest.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . rowl, rowel. at princeton, union, and hamilton colleges, this word is used to signify a good recitation. used in the phrase, "to make a _rowl_." from the second of these colleges, a correspondent writes: "also of the word _rowl_; if a public speaker presents a telling appeal or passage, he would _make a perfect rowl_, in the language of all students at least." rowl. to recite well. a correspondent from princeton college defines this word, "to perform any exercise well, recitation, speech, or composition; to succeed in any branch or pursuit." rush. at yale college, a perfect recitation is denominated a _rush_. i got my lesson perfectly, and what is more, made a perfect _rush_.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiii. p. . every _rush_ and fizzle made every body frigid laid. _ibid._, vol. xx. p. . this mark [that of a hammer with a note, "hit the nail on the head"] signifies that the student makes a capital hit; in other words, a decided _rush_.--_yale banger_, nov. , . in dreams his many _rushes_ heard. _ibid._, oct. , . this word is much used among students with the common meaning; thus, they speak of "a _rush_ into prayers," "a _rush_ into the recitation-room," &c. a correspondent from dartmouth college says: "_rushing_ the freshmen is putting them out of the chapel." another from williams writes: "such a man is making a _rush_, and to this we often add--for the valedictory." the gay regatta where the oneida led, the glorious _rushes_, seniors at the head. _class poem, harv. coll._, . one of the trinity men ... was making a tremendous _rush_ for a fellowship.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . rush. to recite well; to make a perfect recitation. it was purchased by the man,--who 'really did not look' at the lesson on which he '_rushed_.'--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiv. p. . then for the students mark flunks, even though the young men may be _rushing_.--_yale banger_, oct., . so they pulled off their coats, and rolled up their sleeves, and _rushed_ in bien. examination. _presentation day songs, yale coll._, june , . rusticate. to send a student for a time from a college or university, to reside in the country, by way of punishment for some offence. see a more complete definition under rustication. and those whose crimes are very great, let us suspend or _rusticate_.--_rebelliad_, p. . the "scope" of what i have to state is to suspend and _rusticate_.--_ibid._, p. . the same meaning is thus paraphrastically conveyed:-- by my official power, i swear, that you shall _smell the country air_.--_rebelliad_, p. . rustication. in universities and colleges, the punishment of a student for some offence, by compelling him to leave the institution, and reside for a time in the country, where he is obliged to pursue with a private instructor the studies with which his class are engaged during his term of separation, and in which he is obliged to pass a satisfactory examination before he can be reinstated in his class. it seems plain from his own verses to diodati, that milton had incurred _rustication_,--a temporary dismission into the country, with, perhaps, the loss of a term.--_johnson_. take then this friendly exhortation. the next offence is _rustication_. _ms. poem_, by john q. adams. rust-ringing. at hamilton college, "the freshmen," writes a correspondent, "are supposed to lose some of their verdancy at the end of the last term of that year, and the 'ringing off their rust' consists in ringing the chapel bell--commencing at midnight --until the rope wears out. during the ringing, the upper classes are diverted by the display of numerous fire-works, and enlivened by most beautifully discordant sounds, called 'music,' made to issue from tin kettle-drums, horse-fiddles, trumpets, horns, &c., &c." _s_. sack. to expel. used at hamilton college. sail. at bowdoin college, a _sail_ is a perfect recitation. to _sail_ is to recite perfectly. saint. a name among students for one who pretends to particular sanctity of manners. or if he had been a hard-reading man from choice,--or a stupid man,--or a "_saint_,"--no one would have troubled themselves about him.--_blackwood's mag._, eng. ed., vol. lx. p. . salting the freshmen. in reference to this custom, which belongs to dartmouth college, a correspondent from that institution writes: "there is an annual trick of '_salting the freshmen_,' which is putting salt and water on their seats, so that their clothes are injured when they sit down." the idea of preservation, cleanliness, and health is no doubt intended to be conveyed by the use of the wholesome articles salt and water. salutatorian. the student of a college who pronounces the salutatory oration at the annual commencement.--_webster_. salutatory. an epithet applied to the oration which introduces the exercises of the commencements in american colleges.--_webster_. the oration is often called, simply, _the salutatory_. and we ask our friends "out in the world," whenever they meet an educated man of the class of ' , not to ask if he had the valedictory or _salutatory_, but if he takes the indicator.--_amherst indicator_, vol. ii. p. . satis. latin; literally, _enough_. in the university of cambridge, eng., the lowest honor in the schools. the manner in which this word is used is explained in the gradus ad cantabrigiam, as follows: "_satis disputasti_; which is at much as to say, in the colloquial style, 'bad enough.' _satis et bene disputasti_, 'pretty fair,--tolerable.' _satis et optime disputasti_, 'go thy ways, thou flower and quintessence of wranglers.' such are the compliments to be expected from the moderator, after the _act is kept_."--p. . s.b. an abbreviation for _scientiæ baccalaureus_, bachelor in science. at harvard college, this degree is conferred on those who have pursued a prescribed course of study for at least one year in the scientific school, and at the end of that period passed a satisfactory examination. the different degrees of excellence are expressed in the diploma by the words, _cum laude_, _cum magna laude_, _cum summa laude_. scarlet day. in the church of england, certain festival days are styled _scarlet days_. on these occasions, the doctors in the three learned professions appear in their scarlet robes, and the noblemen residing in the universities wear their full dresses.--_grad. ad cantab._ scheme. the printed papers which are given to the students at yale college at the biennial examination, and which contain the questions that are to be answered, are denominated _schemes_. they are also called, simply, _papers_. see the down-cast air, and the blank despair, that sits on each soph'more feature, as his bleared eyes gleam o'er that horrid _scheme_! _songs of yale_, , p. . olmsted served an apprenticeship setting up types, for the _schemes_ of bien. examination. _presentation day songs_, june , . here's health to the tutors who gave us good _schemes_, vive la compagnie! _songs, biennial jubilee_, . scholar. any member of a college, academy, or school. . an undergraduate in english universities, who belongs to the foundation of a college, and receives support in part from its revenues.--_webster_. scholar of the house. at yale college, those are called _scholars of the house_ who, by superiority in scholarship, become entitled to receive the income arising from certain foundations established for the purpose of promoting learning and literature. in some cases the recipient is required to remain at new haven for a specified time, and pursue a course of studies under the direction of the faculty of the college.--_sketches of yale coll._, p. . _laws of yale coll._ . "the _scholar of the house_," says president woolsey, in his historical discourse,--"_scholaris ædilitus_ of the latin laws,--before the institution of berkeley's scholarships which had the same title, was a kind of ædile appointed by the president and tutors to inspect the public buildings, and answered in a degree to the inspector known to our present laws and practice. he was not to leave town until the friday after commencement, because in that week more than usual damage was done to the buildings."--p. . the duties of this officer are enumerated in the annexed passage. "the scholar of the house, appointed by the president, shall diligently observe and set down the glass broken in college windows, and every other damage done in college, together with the time when, and the person by whom, it was done; and every quarter he shall make up a bill of such damages, charged against every scholar according to the laws of college, and deliver the same to the president or the steward, and the scholar of the house shall tarry at college until friday noon after the public commencement, and in that time shall be obliged to view any damage done in any chamber upon the information of him to whom the chamber is assigned."--_laws of yale coll._, , p. . scholarship. exhibition or maintenance for a scholar; foundation for the support of a student--_ainsworth_. school. the schools, _pl._; the seminaries for teaching logic, metaphysics, and theology, which were formed in the middle ages, and which were characterized by academical disputations and subtilties of reasoning; or the learned men who were engaged in discussing nice points in metaphysics or theology.--_webster_. . in some american colleges, the different departments for teaching law, medicine, divinity, &c. are denominated _schools_. . the name given at the university of oxford to the place of examination. the principal exercises consist of disputations in philosophy, divinity, and law, and are always conducted in a sort of barbarous latin. i attended the _schools_ several times, with the view of acquiring the tact and self-possession so requisite in these public contests.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . there were only two sets of men there, one who fagged unremittingly for the _schools_, and another devoted to frivolity and dissipation.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . s.c.l. at the english universities, one who is pursuing law studies and has not yet received the degree of b.c.l. or d.c.l., is designated s.c.l., _student_ in or of _civil law_. at the university of cambridge, eng., persons in this rank who have kept their acts wear a full-sleeved gown, and are entitled to use a b.a. hood. sconce. to mulct; to fine. used at the university of oxford. a young fellow of baliol college, having, upon some discontent cut his throat very dangerously, the master of the college sent his servitor to the buttery-book to _sconce_ (i.e. fine) him s.; and, says the doctor, tell him the next time he cuts his throat i'll _sconce_ him ten.--_terræ-filius_, no. . was _sconced_ in a quart of ale for quoting latin, a passage from juvenal; murmured, and the fine was doubled.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . scout. a cant term at oxford for a college servant or waiter.--_oxford guide_. my _scout_, indeed, is a very learned fellow, and has an excellent knack at using hard words. one morning he told me the gentleman in the next room _contagious_ to mine desired to speak to me. i once overheard him give a fellow-servant very sober advice not to go astray, but be true to his own wife; for _idolatry_ would surely bring a man to _instruction_ at last.--_the student_, oxf. and cam., , vol. i. p. . an anteroom, or vestibule, which serves the purpose of a _scout's_ pantry.--_the etonian_, vol. ii. p. . _scouts_ are usually pretty communicative of all they know.--_blackwood's mag._, eng. ed., vol. lx. p. . sometimes used in american colleges. in order to quiet him, we had to send for his factotum or _scout_, an old black fellow.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xi. p. . scrape. to insult by drawing the feet over the floor.--_grose_. but in a manner quite uncivil, they hissed and _scraped_ him like the devil. _rebelliad_, p. . "i do insist," quoth he, "that two, who _scraped_ and hissed, shall be condemned without a jury to pass the winter months _in rure_."--_ibid._, p. . they not unfrequently rose to open outrage or some personal molestation, as casting missiles through his windows at night, or "_scraping him_" by day.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . scraping. a drawing of, or the act of drawing, the feet over the floor, as an insult to some one, or merely to cause disturbance; a shuffling of the feet. new lustre was added to the dignity of their feelings by the pathetic and impressive manner in which they expressed them, which was by stamping and _scraping_ majestically with their feet, when in the presence of the detested tutors.--_don quixotes at college_, . the morning and evening daily prayers were, on the next day (thursday), interrupted by _scraping_, whistling, groaning, and other disgraceful noises.--_circular, harvard college_, , p. . this word is used in the universities and colleges of both england and america. screw. in some american colleges, an excessive, unnecessarily minute, and annoying examination of a student by an instructor is called a _screw_. the instructor is often designated by the same name. haunted by day with fearful _screw_. _harvard lyceum_, p. . _screws_, duns, and other such like evils. _rebelliad_, p. . one must experience all the stammering and stuttering, the unending doubtings and guessings, to understand fully the power of a mathematical _screw_.--_harv. reg._, p. . the consequence was, a patient submission to the _screw_, and a loss of college honors and patronage.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . i'll tell him a whopper next time, and astonish him so that he'll forget his _screws_.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xi. p. . what a darned _screw_ our tutor is.--_ibid._ apprehension of the severity of the examination, or what in after times, by an academic figure of speech, was called screwing, or a _screw_, was what excited the chief dread.--_willard's memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. p. . passing such an examination is often denominated _taking a screw_. and sad it is to _take a screw_. _harv. reg._, p. . . at bowdoin college, an imperfect recitation is called a _screw_. you never should look blue, sir, if you chance to take a "_screw_," sir, to us it's nothing new, sir, to drive dull care away. _the bowdoin creed_. we've felt the cruel, torturing _screw_, and oft its driver's ire. _song, sophomore supper, bowdoin coll._, . screw. to press with an excessive and unnecessarily minute examination. who would let a tutor knave _screw _him like a guinea slave! _rebelliad_, p. . have i been _screwed_, yea, deaded morn and eve, some dozen moons of this collegiate life? _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . o, i do well remember when in college, how we fought reason,--battles all in play,-- under a most portentous man of knowledge, the captain-general in the bloodless fray; he was a wise man, and a good man, too, and robed himself in green whene'er he came to _screw_. _our chronicle of ' _, boston, . in a note to the last quotation, the author says of the word _screw_: "for the information of the inexperienced, we explain this as a term quite rife in the universities, and, taken substantively, signifying an intellectual nonplus." at last the day is ended, the tutor _screws_ no more. _knick. mag._, vol. xlv. p. . screwing up. the meaning of this phrase, as understood by english cantabs, may be gathered from the following extract. "a magnificent sofa will be lying close to a door ... bored through from top to bottom from the _screwing up_ of some former unpopular tenant; "_screwing up_" being the process of fastening on the outside, with nails and screws, every door of the hapless wight's apartments. this is done at night, and in the morning the gentleman is leaning three-fourths out of his window, bawling for rescue."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . scribbling-paper. a kind of writing-paper, rather inferior in quality, a trifle larger than foolscap, and used at the english universities by mathematicians and in the lecture-room.--_bristed. grad. ad cantab._ cards are commonly sold at cambridge as "_scribbling-paper_."--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . the summer apartment contained only a big standing-desk, the eternal "_scribbling-paper_," and the half-dozen mathematical works required.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . scrouge. an exaction. a very long lesson, or any hard or unpleasant task, is usually among students denominated a _scrouge_. scrouge. to exact; to extort; said of an instructor who imposes difficult tasks on his pupils. it is used provincially in england, and in america in some of the northern and southern states, with the meaning _to crowd, to squeeze_.--_bartlett's dict. of americanisms_. scrub. at columbia college, a servant. . one who is disliked for his meanness, ill-breeding, or vulgarity. nearly equivalent to spoon, q.v. scrubby. possessing the qualities of a scrub. partially synonymous with the adjective spoony, q.v. scrutator. in the university of cambridge, england, an officer whose duty it is to attend all _congregations_, to read the _graces_ to the lower house of the senate, to gather the votes secretly, or to take them openly in scrutiny, and publicly to pronounce the assent or dissent of that house.--_cam. cal._ second-year men. in the university of cambridge, eng., the title of _second-year men_, or _junior sophs_ or _sophisters_, is given to students during the second year of their residence at the university. section court. at union college, the college buildings are divided into sections, a section comprising about fifteen rooms. within each section is established a court, which is composed of a judge, an advocate, and a secretary, who are chosen by the students resident therein from their own number, and hold their offices during one college term. each section court claims the power to summon for trial any inhabitant within the bounds of its jurisdiction who may be charged with improper conduct. the accused may either defend himself, or select some person to plead for him, such residents of the section as choose to do so acting as jurors. the prisoner, if found guilty, is sentenced at the discretion of the court,--generally, to treat the company to some specified drink or dainty. these courts often give occasion for a great deal of fun, and sometimes call out real wit and eloquence. at one of our "_section courts_," which those who expected to enter upon the study of the law used to hold, &c.--_the parthenon, union coll._, , p. . section officer. at union college, each section of the college buildings, containing about fifteen rooms, is under the supervision of a professor or tutor, who is styled the _section officer_. this officer is required to see that there be no improper noise in the rooms or corridors, and to report the absence of students from chapel and recitation, and from their rooms during study hours. seed. in yale college this word is used to designate what is understood by the common cant terms, "a youth"; "case"; "bird"; "b'hoy"; "one of 'em." while tutors, every sport defeating, and under feet-worn stairs secreting, and each dark lane and alley beating, hunt up the _seeds_ in vain retreating. _yale banger_, nov. . the wretch had dared to flunk a gory _seed_! _ibid._, nov. . one tells his jokes, the other tells his beads, one talks of saints, the other sings of _seeds_. _ibid._, nov. . but we are "_seeds_," whose rowdy deeds make up the drunken tale. _yale tomahawk_, nov. . first greek he enters; and with reckless speed he drags o'er stumps and roots each hapless _seed_. _ibid._, nov. . each one a bold _seed_, well fit for the deed, but of course a little bit flurried. _ibid._, may, . seedy. at yale college, rowdy, riotous, turbulent. and snowballs, falling thick and fast as oaths from _seedy_ senior crowd. _yale gallinipper_, nov. . a _seedy_ soph beneath a tree. _yale gallinipper_, nov. . . among english cantabs, not well, out of sorts, done up; the sort of feeling that a reading man has after an examination, or a rowing man after a dinner with the beefsteak club. also, silly, easy to perform.--_bristed_. the owner of the apartment attired in a very old dressing-gown and slippers, half buried in an arm-chair, and looking what some young ladies call interesting, i.e. pale and _seedy_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . you will seldom find anything very _seedy_ set for iambics.--_ibid._, p. . sell. an unexpected reply; a deception or trick. in the literary world, march , , is the following explanation of this word: "mr. phillips's first introduction to curran was made the occasion of a mystification, or practical joke, in which irish wits have excelled since the time of dean swift, who was wont (_vide_ his letters to stella) to call these jocose tricks 'a _sell_,' from selling a bargain." the word _bargain_, however, which johnson, in his dictionary, defines "an unexpected reply tending to obscenity," was formerly used more generally among the english wits. the noun _sell_ has of late been revived in this country, and is used to a certain extent in new york and boston, and especially among the students at cambridge. i sought some hope to borrow, by thinking it a "_sell_" by fancying it a fiction, my anguish to dispel. _poem before the iadma of harv. coll._, , p. . sell. to give an unexpected answer; to deceive; to cheat. for the love you bear me, never tell how badly i was _sold_.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xx. p. . the use of this verb is much more common in the united states than that of the noun of the same spelling, which is derived from it; for instance, we frequently read in the newspapers that the whigs or democrats have been _sold_, i.e. defeated in an election, or cheated in some political affair. the phrase _to sell a bargain_, which bailey defines "to put a sham upon one," is now scarcely ever heard. it was once a favorite expression with certain english writers. where _sold he bargains_, whipstitch?--_dryden_. no maid at court is less ashamed, howe'er for _selling bargains_ famed.--_swift_. dr. sheridan, famous for punning, intending _to sell a bargain_, said, he had made a very good pun.--_swift, bons mots de stella_. semester. latin, _semestris_, _sex_, six, and _mensis_, month. in the german universities, a period or term of six months. the course of instruction occupies six _semesters_. class distinctions depend upon the number of _semesters_, not of years. during the first _semester_, the student is called _fox_, in the second _burnt fox_, and then, successively, _young bursch_, _old bursch_, _old house_, and _moss-covered head_. senate. in the university of cambridge, england, the legislative body of the university. it is divided into two houses, called regent and non-regent. the former consists of the vice-chancellor, proctors, taxors, moderators, and esquire-beadles, all masters of arts of less than five years' standing, and all doctors of divinity, civil law, and physic, of less than two, and is called the upper house, or white-hood house, from its members wearing hoods lined with white silk. the latter is composed of masters of arts of five years' standing, bachelors of divinity, and doctors in the three faculties of two years' standing, and is known as the lower house, or black-hood house, its members wearing black silk hoods. to have a vote in the senate, the graduate must keep his name on the books of some college (which involves a small annual payment), or in the list of the _commorantes in villâ_.--_webster. cam. cal. lit. world_, vol. xii. p. . . at union college, the members of the senior class form what is called the senate, a body organized after the manner of the senate of the united states, for the purpose of becoming acquainted with the forms and practice of legislation. the members of the junior class compose the house of representatives. the following account, showing in what manner the senate is conducted, has been furnished by a member of union college. "on the last friday of the third term, the house of representatives meet in their hall, and await their initiation to the upper house. there soon appears a committee of three, who inform them by their chairman of the readiness of the senate to receive them, and perhaps enlarge upon the importance of the coming trust, and the ability of the house to fill it. "when this has been done, the house, headed by the committee, proceed to the senate chamber (senior chapel), and are arranged by the committee around the president, the senators (seniors) meanwhile having taken the second floor. the president of the senate then rises and delivers an appropriate address, informing them of their new dignities and the grave responsibilities of their station. at the conclusion of this they take their seats, and proceed to the election of officers, viz. a president, a vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. the president must be a member of the faculty, and is chosen for a term; the other officers are selected from the house, and continue in office but half a term. the first vice-presidency of the senate is considered one of the highest honors conferred by the class, and great is the strife to obtain it. "the senate meet again on the second friday of the next term, when they receive the inaugural message of the president. he then divides them into seven districts, each district including the students residing in a section, or hall of college, except the seventh, which is filled by the students lodging in town. the senate is also divided into a number of standing committees, as law, ethics, political economy. business is referred to these committees, and reported on by them in the usual manner. the time of the senate is principally occupied with the discussion of resolutions, in committee of the whole; and these discussions take the place of the usual friday afternoon recitation. at commencement the senate have an orator of their own election, who must, however, have been a past or honorary member of their body. they also have a committee on the 'commencement card.'" on the same subject, another correspondent writes as follows:-- "the senate is composed of the senior class, and is intended as a school of parliamentary usages. the officers are a president, vice-president, and secretary, who are chosen once a term. at the close of the second term, the junior class are admitted into the senate. they are introduced by a committee of senators, and are expected to remain standing and uncovered during the ceremony, the president and senators being seated and covered. after a short address by the president, the old senators leave the house, and the juniors proceed to elect their officers for the third term. dr. thomas c. reed who was the founder of the senate, was always elected president during his connection with the college, but rarely took his place in the chamber except at the introduction of the juniors. the vice-president for the third term, who takes a part in the ceremonies of commencement, is considered to hold the highest honor of the class, and his election is attended with more excitement than any other in the college." see commencement card; house of representatives. senate-house. at the university of cambridge, eng., the building in which the public business of the university, such as examinations, the passing of graces, and admission to degrees, is carried on.--_cam. guide_. senatus academicus. at trinity college, hartford, the _senatus academicus_ consists of two houses, known as the corporation and the house of convocation, q.v.--_calendar trin. coll._, , p. . sene. an abbreviation for senior. magnificent juns, and lazy _senes_. _yale banger_, nov. , . a rare young blade is the gallant _sene_. _ibid._, nov. . senior. one in the fourth year of his collegiate course at an american college; originally called _senior sophister_. also one in the third year of his course at a theological seminary.--_webster_. see sophister. senior. noting the fourth year of the collegiate course in american colleges, or the third year in theological seminaries.--_webster_. senior bachelor. one who is in his third year after taking the degree of bachelor of arts. it is further explained by president woolsey, in his historical discourse: "bachelors were called senior, middle, or junior bachelors, according to the year since graduation and before taking the degree of master."--p. . senior classic. at the university of cambridge, eng., the student who passes best in the voluntary examination in classics, which follows the last required examination in the senate-house. no one stands a chance for _senior classic_ alongside of him.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . two men who had been rivals all the way through school and through college were racing for _senior classic_.--_ibid._, p. . senior fellow. at trinity college, hartford, the senior fellow is a person chosen to attend the college examinations during the year. senior freshman. the name of the second of the four classes into which undergraduates are divided at trinity college, dublin. seniority. in the university of cambridge, eng., the eight senior fellows and the master of a college compose what is called the _seniority_. their decisions in all matters are generally conclusive. my duty now obliges me, however reluctantly, to bring you before the _seniority_.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . senior optime. those who occupy the second rank in honors at the close of the final examination at the university of cambridge, eng., are denominated _senior optimes_. the second class, or that of _senior optimes_, is larger in number [than that of the wranglers], usually exceeding forty, and sometimes reaching above sixty. this class contains a number of disappointments, many who expect to be wranglers, and some who are generally expected to be.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the word is frequently abbreviated. the pembroker ... had the pleasant prospect of getting up all his mathematics for a place among the _senior ops._--_ibid._, p. . he would get just questions enough to make him a low _senior op._ --_ibid._, p. . senior oration. "the custom of delivering _senior orations_," says a correspondent, "is, i think, confined to washington and jefferson colleges in pennsylvania. each member of the senior class, taking them in alphabetical order, is required to deliver an oration before graduating, and on such nights as the faculty may decide. the public are invited to attend, and the speaking is continued at appointed times, until each member of the class has spoken." senior sophister. at the university of cambridge, eng., a student in the third year of his residence is called a senior soph or sophister. . in some american colleges, a member of the senior class, i.e. of the fourth year, was formerly designated a senior sophister. see sophister. senior wrangler. in the university of cambridge, eng., the senior wrangler is the student who passes the best examination in the senate-house, and by consequence holds the first place on the mathematical tripos. the only road to classical honors and their accompanying emoluments in the university, and virtually in all the colleges, except trinity, is through mathematical honors, all candidates for the classical tripos being obliged as a preliminary to obtain a place in that mathematical list which is headed by the _senior wrangler_ and tailed by the wooden spoon.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . sequester. to cause to retire or withdraw into obscurity. in the following passage it is used in the collegiate sense of _suspend_ or _rusticate_. though they were adulti, they were corrected in the college, and _sequestered_, &c. for a time.--_winthrop's journal, by savage_, vol. ii. p. . servitor. in the university of oxford, an undergraduate who is partly supported by the college funds. _servitors_ formerly waited at table, but this is now dispensed with. the order similar to that of the _servitor_ was at cambridge styled the order of _sub-sizars_. this has been long extinct. the _sizar_ at cambridge is at present nearly equivalent to the oxford _servitor_.--_gent. mag._, , p. . _brande_. "it ought to be known," observes de quincey, "that the class of '_servitors_,' once a large body in oxford, have gradually become practically extinct under the growing liberality of the age. they carried in their academic dress a mark of their inferiority; they waited at dinner on those of higher rank, and performed other menial services, humiliating to themselves, and latterly felt as no less humiliating to the general name and interests of learning."--_life and manners_, p. . a reference to the cruel custom of "hunting the servitor" is to be found in sir john hawkins's life of dr. johnson, p. . session. at some of the southern and western colleges of the united states, the time during which instruction is regularly given to the students; a term. the _session_ commences on the st of october, and continues without interruption until the th of june.--_cat. of univ. of virginia_, , p. . seventy-eighth psalm. the recollections which cluster around this psalm, so well known to all the alumni of harvard, are of the most pleasant nature. for more than a hundred years, it has been sung at the dinner given on commencement day at cambridge, and for more than a half-century to the tune of st. martin's. mr. samuel shapleigh, who graduated at harvard college in the year , and who was afterwards its librarian, on the leaf of a hymn-book makes a memorandum in reference to this psalm, to the effect that it has been sung at cambridge on commencement day "from _time immemorial_." the late rev. dr. john pierce, a graduate of the class of , referring to the same subject, remarks: "the seventy-eighth psalm, it is supposed, has, _from the foundation of the college_, been sung in the common version of the day." in a poem, entitled education, delivered at cambridge before the phi beta kappa society, by mr. william biglow, july th, , speaking of the conduct and manners of the students, the author says:-- "like pigs they eat, they drink an ocean dry, they steal like france, like jacobins they lie, they raise the very devil, when called to prayers, 'to sons transmit the same, and they again to theirs'"; and, in explanation of the last line, adds this note: "alluding to the psalm which is _always_ sung in harvard hall on commencement day." in his account of some of the exercises attendant upon the commencement at harvard college in , professor sidney willard observes: "at the commencement dinner the sitting is not of long duration; and we retired from table soon after the singing of the psalm, which, with some variation in the version, has been sung on the same occasion from time immemorial."--_memoirs of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. p. . but that we cannot take these accounts as correct in their full extent, appears from an entry in the ms. diary of chief justice sewall relating to a commencement in , which he closes with these words: "after dinner ye d part of ye d ps. was sung in ye hall." in the year , at the dinner on commencement day, the rev. joseph willard, then president of the college, requested mr. afterwards dr. john pierce, to set the tune to the psalm; with which request having complied to the satisfaction of all present, he from that period until the time of his death, in , performed this service, being absent only on one occasion. those who have attended commencement dinners during the latter part of this period cannot but associate with this hallowed psalm the venerable appearance and the benevolent countenance of this excellent man. in presenting a list of the different versions in which this psalm has been sung, it must not be supposed that entire correctness has been reached; the very scanty accounts which remain render this almost impossible, but from these, which on a question of greater importance might be considered hardly sufficient, it would appear that the following are the versions in which the sons of harvard have been accustomed to sing the psalm of the son of jesse. .--_the new england version_. "in there was an agreement amo. ye magistrates and ministers to set aside ye psalms then printed at ye end of their bibles, and sing one more congenial to their ideas of religion." rev. mr. richard mather of dorchester, and rev. mr. thomas weld and rev. mr. john eliot of roxbury, were selected to make a metrical translation, to whom the rev. thomas shepard of cambridge gives the following metrical caution:-- "ye roxbury poets, keep clear of ye crime of missing to give us very good rhyme, and you of dorchester, your verses lengthen, but with the texts own words you will y'm strengthen." the version of this ministerial trio was printed in the year , at cambridge, and has the honor of being the first production of the north american press that rises to the dignity of _a book_. it was entitled, "the psalms newly turned into metre." a second edition was printed in . "it was more to be commended, however," says mr. peirce, in his history of harvard university, "for its fidelity to the text, than for the elegance of its versification, which, having been executed by persons of different tastes and talents, was not only very uncouth, but deficient in uniformity. president dunster, who was an excellent oriental scholar, and possessed the other requisite qualifications for the task, was employed to revise and polish it; and in two or three years, with the assistance of mr. richard lyon, a young gentleman who was sent from england by sir henry mildmay to attend his son, then a student in harvard college, he produced a work, which, under the appellation of the 'bay psalm-book,' was, for a long time, the received version in the new england congregations, was also used in many societies in england and scotland, and passed through a great number of editions, both at home and abroad."--p. . the seventy-eighth psalm is thus rendered in the first edition:-- give listning eare unto my law, yee people that are mine, unto the sayings of my mouth doe yee your eare incline. my mouth i'le ope in parables, i'le speak hid things of old: which we have heard, and knowne: and which our fathers have us told. them from their children wee'l not hide, to th' after age shewing the lords prayses; his strength, and works of his wondrous doing. in jacob he a witnesse set, and put in israell a law, which he our fathers charg'd they should their children tell: that th' age to come, and children which are to be borne might know; that they might rise up and the same unto their children show. that they upon the mighty god their confidence might set: and gods works and his commandment might keep and not forget, and might not like their fathers be, a stiffe, stout race; a race that set not right their hearts: nor firme with god their spirit was. the bay psalm-book underwent many changes in the various editions through which it passed, nor was this psalm left untouched, as will be seen by referring to the twenty-sixth edition, published in , and to the edition of , revised and corrected, with additions, by mr. thomas prince. .--_watts's version_. the psalms and hymns of dr. isaac watts were first published in this country by dr. franklin, in the year . his version is as follows:-- let children hear the mighty deeds which god performed of old; which in our younger years we saw, and which our fathers told. he bids us make his glories known, his works of power and grace, and we'll convey his wonders down through every rising race. our lips shall tell them to our sons, and they again to theirs, that generations yet unborn may teach them to their heirs. thus shall they learn in god alone their hope securely stands, that they may ne'er forget his works, but practise his commands; .--_brady and tate's version_. in the year , the seventy-eighth psalm was first printed on a small sheet and placed under every plate, which practice has since been always adopted. the version of that year was from brady and tate's collection, first published in london in , and in this country about the year . it was sung to the tune of st. martin's in , as appears from a memorandum in ink on the back of one of the sheets for that year, which reads, "sung in the hall, commencement day, tune st. martin's, ." from the statements of graduates of the last century, it seems that this had been the customary tune for some time previous to this year, and it is still retained as a precious legacy of the past. st. martin's was composed by william tans'ur in the year . the following is the version of brady and tate:-- hear, o my people; to my law devout attention lend; let the instruction of my mouth deep in your hearts descend. my tongue, by inspiration taught, shall parables unfold, dark oracles, but understood, and owned for truths of old; which we from sacred registers of ancient times have known, and our forefathers' pious care to us has handed down. we will not hide them from our sons; our offspring shall be taught the praises of the lord, whose strength has works of wonders wrought. for jacob he this law ordained, this league with israel made; with charge, to be from age to age, from race to race, conveyed, that generations yet to come should to their unborn heirs religiously transmit the same, and they again to theirs. to teach them that in god alone their hope securely stands; that they should ne'er his works forget, but keep his just commands. .--_from belknap's collection_. this collection was first published by the rev. dr. jeremy belknap, at boston, in . the version of the seventy-eighth psalm is partly from that of brady and tate, and partly from dr. watts's, with a few slight variations. it succeeded the version of brady and tate about the year , and is the one which is now used. the first three stanzas were written by brady and tate; the last three by dr. watts. it has of late been customary to omit the last stanza in singing and in printing. give ear, ye children;[ ] to my law devout attention lend; let the instructions[ ] of my mouth deep in your hearts descend. my tongue, by inspiration taught, shall parables unfold; dark oracles, but understood, and owned for truths of old; which we from sacred registers of ancient times have known, and our forefathers' pious care to us has handed down. let children learn[ ] the mighty deeds which god performed of old; which, in our younger years we saw, and which our fathers told. our lips shall tell them to our sons, and they again to theirs; that generations yet unborn may teach them to their heirs. thus shall they learn in god alone their hope securely stands; that they may ne'er forget his works, but practise his commands. it has been supposed by some that the version of the seventy-eighth psalm by sternhold and hopkins, whose spiritual songs were usually printed, as appears above, "at ye end of their bibles," was the first which was sung at commencement dinners; but this does not seem at all probable, since the first commencement at cambridge did not take place until , at which time the "bay psalm-book," written by three of the most popular ministers of the day, had already been published two years. shady. among students at the university of cambridge, eng., an epithet of depreciation, equivalent to mild and slow.--_bristed_. some ... are rather _shady_ in greek and latin.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . my performances on the latin verse paper were very _shady_.--_ibid._, p. . shark. in student language, an absence from a recitation, a lecture, or from prayers, prompted by recklessness rather than by necessity, is called a _shark_. he who is absent under these circumstances is also known as a shark. the monitors' task is now quite done, they 've pencilled all their marks, "othello's occupation's gone,"-- no more look out for _sharks_. _songs of yale_, , p. . sheepskin. the parchment diploma received by students on taking their degree at college. "in the back settlements are many clergymen who have not had the advantages of a liberal education, and who consequently have no diplomas. some of these look upon their more favored brethren with a little envy. a clergyman is said to have a _sheepskin_, or to be a _sheepskin_, when educated at college."--_bartlett's dict. of americanisms_. this apostle of ourn never rubbed his back agin a college, nor toted about no _sheepskins_,--no, never!... how you'd a perished in your sins, if the first preachers had stayed till they got _sheepskins_.--_carlton's new purchase_. i can say as well as the best on them _sheepskins_, if you don't get religion and be saved, you'll be lost, teetotally and for ever.--(_sermon of an itinerant preacher at a camp meeting_.)--_ibid._ as for john prescot, he not only lost the valedictory, but barely escaped with his "_sheepskin_."--_yale lit. mag._, vol. x. p. . that handsome senior ... receives his _sheepskin_ from the dispensing hand of our worthy prex.--_ibid._, vol. xix. p. . when first i saw a "_sheepskin_," in prex's hand i spied it. _yale coll. song_. we came to college fresh and green,-- we go back home with a huge _sheepskin_. _songs of yale_, , p. . shin. to tease or hector a person by kicking his shins. in some colleges this is one of the means which the sophomores adopt to torment the freshmen, especially when playing at football, or other similar games. we have been _shinned_, smoked, ducked, and accelerated by the encouraging shouts of our generous friends.--_yale banger_, nov. , . shine. at harvard college this word was formerly used to designate a good recitation. used in the phrase, "_to make a shine_." shinny. at princeton college, the game of _shinny_, known also by the names of _hawky_ and _hurly_, is as great a favorite with the students as is football at other colleges. "the players," says a correspondent, "are each furnished with a stick four or five feet in length and one and a half or two inches in diameter, curved at one end, the object of which is to give the ball a surer blow. the ball is about three inches in diameter, bound with thick leather. the players are divided into two parties, arranged along from one goal to the other. the ball is then '_bucked_' by two players, one from each side, which is done by one of these two taking the ball and asking his opponent which he will have, 'high or low'; if he says 'high,' the ball is thrown up midway between them; if he says 'low,' the ball is thrown on the ground. the game is opened by a scuffle between these two for the ball. the other players then join in, one party knocking towards north college, which is one 'home' (as it is termed), and the other towards the fence bounding the south side of the _campus_, the other home. whichever party first gets the ball home wins the game. a grand contest takes place annually between the juniors and sophomores, in this game." ship. among collegians, one expelled from college is said to be _shipped_. for i, you know, am but a college minion, but still, you'll all be _shipped_, in my opinion, when brought before conventus facultatis. _yale tomahawk_, may, . he may be overhauled, warned, admonished, dismissed, _shipped_, rusticated, sent off, suspended.--_burlesque catalogue_, _yale coll._, - , p. . shipwreck. among students, a total failure. his university course has been a _shipwreck_, and he will probably end by going out unnoticed among the [greek: _polloi_].--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . short-ear. at jefferson college, penn., a soubriquet for a roistering, noisy fellow; a rowdy. opposed to _long-ear_. short term. at oxford, eng., the extreme duration of residence in any college is under thirty weeks. "it is possible to keep '_short terms_,' as the phrase is, by residence of thirteen weeks, or ninety-one days."--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . side. in the university of cambridge, eng., the set of pupils belonging to any one particular tutor is called his _side_. a longer discourse he will perhaps have to listen to with the rest of his _side_.--_westminster rev._, am. ed., vol. xxxv. p. . a large college has usually two tutors,--trinity has three,--and the students are equally divided among them,--_on their sides_ the phrase is.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . silver cup. at trinity college, hartford, this is a testimonial voted by each graduating class to the first legitimate boy whose father is a member of the class. at yale college, a theory of this kind prevails, but it has never yet been carried into practice. i tell you what, my classmates, my mind it is made up, i'm coming back three years from this, to take that _silver cup_. i'll bring along the "requisite," a little white-haired lad, with "bib" and fixings all complete, and i shall be his "dad." _presentation day songs_, june , . see class cup. sim. abbreviated from _simeonite_. a nickname given by the rowing men at the university of cambridge, eng., to evangelicals, and to all religious men, or even quiet men generally. while passing for a terribly hard reading man, and a "_sim_" of the straitest kind with the "empty bottles,"... i was fast lapsing into a state of literary sensualism.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . sir. it was formerly the fashion in the older american colleges to call a bachelor of arts, sir; this was sometimes done at the time when the seniors were accepted for that degree. voted, sept. th, , "that _sir_ sewall, b.a., be the instructor in the hebrew and other learned languages for three years."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . december, . some time in this month, _sir_ adams resigned the berth of butler, and _sir_ samuel shapleigh was chosen in his stead.--_ms. journal, harv. coll._ then succeeded cliosophic oration in latin, by _sir_ meigs. poetical composition in english, by _sir_ barlow.--_woolsey's hist. disc._, p. . the author resided in cambridge after he graduated. in common with all who had received the degree of bachelor of arts and not that of master of arts, he was called "_sir_," and known as "_sir_ seccomb." some of the "_sirs_" as well as undergraduates were arraigned before the college government.--_father abbey's will_, cambridge, mass., , p. . sitting of the solstices. it was customary, in the early days of harvard college, for the graduates of the year to attend in the recitation-room on mondays and tuesdays, for three weeks, during the month of june, subject to the examination of all who chose to visit them. this was called the _sitting of the solstices_, because it happened in midsummer, or at the time of the summer solstice. the time was also known as the _weeks of visitation_. sizar, sisar, sizer. in the university of cambridge, eng., a student of the third rank, or that next below that of a pensioner, who eats at the public table after the fellows, free of expense. it was formerly customary for _every fellow-commoner_ to have his _sizar_, to whom he allowed a certain portion of commons, or victuals and drink, weekly, but no money; and for this the sizar was obliged to do him certain services daily. a lower order of students were called _sub-sizars_. in reference to this class, we take the following from the gentleman's magazine, , p. . "at king's college, they were styled _hounds_. the situation of a sub-sizar being looked upon in so degrading a light probably occasioned the extinction of the order. but as the sub-sizars had certain assistances in return for their humiliating services, and as the poverty of parents stood in need of such assistances for their sons, some of the sizars undertook the same offices for the same advantages. the master's sizar, therefore, waited upon him for the sake of his commons, etc., as the sub-sizar had done; and the other sizars did the same office to the fellows for the advantage of the remains of their commons. thus the term sub-sizar became forgotten, and the sizar was supposed to be the same as the _servitor_. but if a sizar did not choose to accept of these assistances upon such degrading terms, he dined in his own room, and was called a _proper sizar_. he wore the same gown as the others, and his tutorage, etc. was no higher; but there was nothing servile in his situation."--"now, indeed, all (or almost all) the colleges in cambridge have allowed the sizars every advantage of the remains of the fellows' commons, etc., though they have very liberally exempted them from every servile office." another writer in the same periodical, , p. , says: the sizar "is very much like the _scholars_ at westminster, eton, &c., who are on the _foundation_; and is, in a manner, the _half-boarder_ in private academies. the name was derived from the menial services in which he was occasionally engaged; being in former days compelled to transport the plates, dishes, _sizes_, and platters, to and from the tables of his superiors." a writer in the encyclopædia britannica, at the close of the article sizar, says of this class: "but though their education is thus obtained at a less expense, they are not now considered as a menial order; for sizars, pensioner-scholars, and even sometimes fellow-commoners, mix together with the utmost cordiality." "sizars," says bristed, "answer to the beneficiaries of american colleges. they receive pecuniary assistance from the college, and dine gratis after the fellows on the remains of their table. these 'remains' are very liberally construed, the sizar always having fresh vegetables, and frequently fresh tarts and puddings."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . size. food and drink from the buttery, aside from the regular dinner at commons. "a _size_" says minsheu, "is a portion of bread or drinke, it is a farthing which schollers in cambridge have at the buttery; it is noted with the letter s. as in oxford with the letter q. for halfe a farthing; and whereas they say in oxford, to battle in the buttery booke, i.e. to set downe on their names what they take in bread, drinke, butter, cheese, &c.; so, in cambridge, they say, to _size_, i.e. to set downe their quantum, i.e. how much they take on their name in the buttery booke." in the poems of the rev. dr. dodd, a _size_ of bread is described as "half a half-penny 'roll.'" grose, also, in the provincial glossary, says "it signifies the half part of a halfpenny loaf, and comes from _scindo_, i cut." in the encyclopædia britannica is the following explanation of this term. "a _size_ of anything is the smallest quantity of that thing which can be thus bought" [i.e. by students in addition to their commons in the hall]; "two _sizes_, or a part of beef, being nearly equal to what a young person will eat of that dish to his dinner, and a _size_ of ale or beer being equal to half an english pint." it would seem, then, that formerly a _size_ was a small plateful of any eatable; the word now means anything had by students at dinner over and above the usual commons. of its derivation webster remarks, "either contracted from _assize_, or from the latin _scissus_. i take it to be from the former, and from the sense of setting, as we apply the word to the _assize_ of bread." this word was introduced into the older american colleges from cambridge, england, and was used for many years, as was also the word _sizing_, with the same meaning. in , the corporation of harvard college voted, "that the quantity of commons be as hath been usual, viz. two _sizes_ of bread in the morning; one pound of meat at dinner, with sufficient sauce [vegetables], and a half-pint of beer; and at night that a part pie be of the same quantity as usual, and also half a pint of beer; and that the supper messes be but of four parts, though the dinner messes be of six."--_quincy's hist. harv. coll._, vol. ii. p. . the students of that day, if we may judge from the accounts which we have of their poor commons, would have used far different words, in addressing the faculty, from king lear, who, speaking to his daughter regan, says:-- "'t is not in thee to grudge my pleasures,... ... to scant my _sizes_." size. in the university of cambridge, eng., to _size_ is to order any sort of victuals from the kitchens which the students may want in their rooms, or in addition to their commons in the hall, and for which they pay the cooks or butchers at the end of each quarter; a word corresponding to battel at oxford.--_encyc. brit._ in the gentleman's magazine, , p. , a writer says: "at dinner, to _size_ is to order for yourself any little luxury that may chance to tempt you in addition to the general fare, for which you are expected to pay the cook at the end of the term." this word was formerly used in the older american colleges with the meaning given above, as will be seen by the following extracts from the laws of harvard and yale. "when they come into town after commons, they may be allowed to _size_ a meal at the kitchen."--_laws of harv. coll._, , p. . "at the close of each quarter, the butler shall make up his bill against each student, in which every article _sized_ or taken up by him at the buttery shall be particularly charged."--_laws yale coll._, , p. . "as a college term," says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "it is of very considerable antiquity. in the comedy called 'the return from parnassus,' , one of the character says, 'you that are one of the devil's fellow-commoners; one that _sizeth_ the devil's butteries,' &c. again, in the same: 'fidlers, i use to _size_ my music, or go on the score for it.'" _for_ is often used after the verb _size_, without changing the meaning of the expression. the tables of the undergraduates, arranged according to their respective years, are supplied with abundance of plain joints, and vegetables, and beer and ale _ad libitum_, besides which, soup, pastry, and cheese can be "_sized for_," that is, brought in portions to individuals at an extra charge.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _to size upon another_. to order extra food, and without permission charge it to another's account. if any one shall _size upon another_, he shall be fined a shilling, and pay the damage; and every freshman sent [for victuals] must declare that he who sends him is the only person to be charged.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . sizing. extra food or drink ordered from the buttery; the act of ordering extra food or drink from the buttery. dr. holyoke, who graduated at harvard college in , says: "the breakfast was two _sizings_ of bread and a cue of beer." judge wingate, who graduated a little later, says: "we were allowed at dinner a cue of beer, which was a half-pint, and a _sizing_ of bread, which i cannot describe to you. it was quite sufficient for one dinner."--_peirce's hist. harv. univ._, p. . from more definite accounts it would seem that a sizing of biscuit was one biscuit, and a sizing of cracker, two crackers. a certain amount of food was allowed to each mess, and if any person wanted more than the allowance, it was the custom to tell the waiter to bring a sizing of whatever was wished, provided it was obtained from the commons kitchen; for this payment was made at the close of the term. a sizing of cheese was nearly an ounce, and a sizing of cider varied from a half-pint to a pint and a half. the steward shall, at the close of every quarter, immediately fill up the columns of commons and _sizings_, and shall deliver the bill, &c.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . the butler shall frequently inspect his book of _sizings_.--_ibid._, p. . whereas young scholars, to the dishonor of god, hinderance of their studies, and damage of their friends' estate, inconsiderately and intemperately are ready to abuse their liberty of _sizing_ besides their commons; therefore the steward shall in no case permit any students whatever, under the degree of masters of arts, or fellows, to expend or be provided for themselves or any townsmen any extraordinary commons, unless by the allowance of the president, &c., or in case of sickness.--orders written th march, .--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . this term, together with the verb and noun _size_, which had been in use at harvard and yale colleges since their foundation, has of late been little heard, and with the extinction of commons has, with the others, fallen wholly, and probably for ever, into disuse. the use of this word and its collaterals is still retained in the university of cambridge, eng. along the wall you see two tables, which, though less carefully provided than the fellows', are still served with tolerable decency, and go through a regular second course instead of the "_sizings_."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . sizing party. in the university of cambridge, eng., where this term is used, a "_sizing party_" says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, "differs from a supper in this; viz. at a sizing party every one of the guests contributes his _part_, i.e. orders what he pleases, at his own expense, to his friend's rooms,--'a _part_ of fowl' or duck; a roasted pigeon; 'a _part_ of apple pie.' a sober beaker of brandy, or rum, or hollands and water, concludes the entertainment. in our days, a bowl of bishop, or milk punch, with a chant, generally winds up the carousal." skin. at yale college, to obtain a knowledge of a lesson by hearing it read by another; also, to borrow another's ideas and present them as one's own; to plagiarize; to become possessed of information in an examination or a recitation by unfair or secret means. "in our examinations," says a correspondent, "many of the fellows cover the palms of their hands with dates, and when called upon for a given date, they read it off directly from their hands. such persons _skin_." the tutor employs the crescent when it is evident that the lesson has been _skinned_, according to the college vocabulary, in which case he usually puts a minus sign after it, with the mark which he in all probability would have used had not the lesson been _skinned_.--_yale banger_, nov. . never _skin_ a lesson which it requires any ability to learn.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . he has passively admitted what he has _skinned_ from other grammarians.--_yale banger_, nov. . perhaps the youth who so barefacedly _skinned_ the song referred to, fondly fancied, &c.--_the tomahawk_, nov. . he uttered that remarkable prophecy which horace has so boldly _skinned_ and called his own.--_burial of euclid_, nov. . a pewter medal is awarded in the senior class, for the most remarkable example of _skinned_ composition.--_burlesque catalogue, yale coll._, - , p. . classical men were continually tempted to "_skin_" (copy) the solutions of these examples.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _to skin ahead_; at hamilton college, to read a lesson over in the class immediately before reciting. skin. a lesson learned by hearing it read by another; borrowed ideas; anything plagiarized. 't was plenty of _skin_ with a good deal of bohn.[ ] _songs, biennial jubilee, yale coll._, . skinning. learning, or the act of learning, a lesson by hearing it read by another; plagiarizing. alas for our beloved orations! acquired by _skinning_, looking on, and ponies.--_yale banger_, oct. . barefaced copying from books and reviews in their compositions is familiar to our students, as much so as "_skinning_" their mathematical examples.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . skunk. at princeton college, to fail to pay a debt; used actively; e.g. to _skunk_ a tailor, i.e. not to pay him. slang. to scold, chide, rebuke. the use of this word as a verb is in a measure peculiar to students. these drones are posted separately as "not worthy to be classed," and privately _slanged_ afterwards by the master and seniors.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . "i am afraid of going to t------," you may hear it said; "he don't _slang_ his men enough."--_ibid._, p. . his vanity is sure to be speedily checked, and first of all by his private tutor, who "_slangs_" him for a mistake here or an inelegancy there.--_ibid._, p. . slanging. abusing, chiding, blaming. as he was not backward in _slanging_,--one of the requisites of a good coach,--he would give it to my unfortunate composition right and left.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . sleeping over. a phrase equivalent to being absent from prayers. you may see some who have just arisen from their beds, where they have enjoyed the luxury of "_sleeping over_."--_harv. reg._, p. . slow. an epithet of depreciation, especially among students. its equivalent slang is to be found in the phrases, "no great shakes," and "small potatoes."--_bristed_. one very well disposed and very tipsy man who was great upon boats, but very _slow_ at books, endeavored to pacify me.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the juniors vainly attempted to show that sophs and seniors were somewhat _slow_ in talent and ability. _sophomore independent, union college_, nov. . slow-coach. a dull, stupid fellow. slum. a word once in use at yale college, of which a graduate of the year has given the annexed explanation. "that noted dish to which our predecessors, of i know not what date, gave the name of _slum_, which was our ordinary breakfast, consisting of the remains of yesterday's boiled salt-beef and potatoes, hashed up, and indurated in a frying-pan, was of itself enough to have produced any amount of dyspepsia. there are stomachs, it may be, which can put up with any sort of food, and any mode of cookery; but they are not those of students. i remember an anecdote which president day gave us (as an instance of hasty generalization), which would not be inappropriate here: 'a young physician, commencing practice, determined to keep an account of each case he had to do with, stating the mode of treatment and the result. his first patient was a blacksmith, sick of a fever. after the crisis of the disease had passed, the man expressed a hankering for pork and cabbage. the doctor humored him in this, and it seemed to do him good; which was duly noted in the record. next a tailor sent for him, whom he found suffering from the same malady. to him he _prescribed_ pork and cabbage; and the patient died. whereupon, he wrote it down as a general law in such cases, that pork and cabbage will cure a blacksmith, but will kill a tailor.' now, though the son of vulcan found the pork and cabbage harmless, i am sure that _slum_ would have been a match for him."--_scenes and characters at college_, new haven, , p. . slump. german _schlump_; danish and swedish _slump_, a hap or chance, an accident; that is, a fall. at harvard college, a poor recitation. slump. at harvard college, to recite badly; to make a poor recitation. in fact, he'd rather dead than dig; he'd rather _slump_ than squirt. _poem before the y.h. of harv. coll._, . _slumping_ is his usual custom, deading is his road to fame.--_ms. poem_. at recitations, unprepared, he _slumps_, then cuts a week, and feigns he has the mumps. _ms. poem_, by f.e. felton. the usual signification of this word is given by webster, as follows: "to fall or sink suddenly into water or mud, when walking on a hard surface, as on ice or frozen ground, not strong enough to bear the person." to which he adds: "this legitimate word is in common and respectable use in new england, and its signification is so appropriate, that no other word will supply its place." from this meaning, the transfer is, by analogy, very easy and natural, and the application very correct, to a poor recitation. small-college. the name by which an inferior college in the english universities is known. a "_small-college_" man was senior wrangler.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . small-colleger. a member of a small-college. the two latin prizes and the english poem [were carried off] by a _small-colleger_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . the idea of a _small-colleger_ beating all trinity was deemed preposterous.--_ibid._, p. . smalls, or small-go. at the university of oxford, an examination in the second year. see little-go; previous examination. at the _smalls_, as the previous examination is here called, each examiner sends in his greek and latin book.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . it follows that the _smalls_ is a more formidable examination than the little-go.--_ibid._, p. . smash. at the wesleyan university, a total failure in reciting is called a _smash_. smile. a small quantity of any spirituous liquor, or enough to give one a pleasant feeling. hast ta'en a "_smile_" at brigham's. _poem before the iadma_, , p. . smoke. in some colleges, one of the means made use of by the sophomores to trouble the freshmen is to blow smoke into their rooms until they are compelled to leave, or, in other words, until they are _smoked out_. when assafoetida is mingled with the tobacco, the sensation which ensues, as the foul effluvium is gently wafted through the keyhole, is anything but pleasing to the olfactory nerves. or when, in conclave met, the unpitying wights _smoke_ the young trembler into "college rights": o spare my tender youth! he, suppliant, cries, in vain, in vain; redoubled clouds arise, while the big tears adown his visage roll, caused by the smoke, and sorrow of his soul. _college life, by j.c. richmond_, p. . they would lock me in if i left my key outside, _smoke me out_, duck me, &c.--_sketches of williams college_, p. . i would not have you sacrifice all these advantages for the sake _of smoking_ future freshmen.--_burial of euclid_, , p. . a correspondent from the university of vermont gives the following account of a practical joke, which we do not suppose is very often played in all its parts. "they 'train' freshmen in various ways; the most _classic_ is to take a pumpkin, cut a piece from the top, clean it, put in two pounds of 'fine cut,' put it on the freshman's table, and then, all standing round with long pipe-stems, blow into it the fire placed in the _tobac_, and so fill the room with smoke, then put the freshman to bed, with the pumpkin for a nightcap." smouge. at hamilton college, to obtain without leave. smut. vulgar, obscene conversation. language which obtains "where bacchus ruleth all that's done, and venus all that's said." smutty. possessing the qualities of obscene conversation. applied also to the person who uses such conversation. snob. in the english universities, a townsman, as opposed to a student; or a blackguard, as opposed to a gentleman; a loafer generally.--_bristed_. they charged the _snobs_ against their will, and shouted clear and lustily. _gradus ad cantab_, p. . used in the same sense at some american colleges. . a mean or vulgar person; particularly, one who apes gentility. --_halliwell_. used both in england and the united states, "and recently," says webster, "introduced into books as a term of derision." snobbess. in the english universities, a female _snob_. effeminacies like these, induced, no doubt, by the flattering admiration of the fair _snobbesses_.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . snobbish. belonging to or resembling a _snob_. snobby. low; vulgar; resembling or pertaining to a _snob_. snub. to reprimand; check; rebuke. used among students, more frequently than by any other class of persons. soph. in the university of cambridge, england, an abbreviation of sophister.--_webster_. on this word, crabb, in his _technological dictionary_, says: "a certain distinction or title which undergraduates in the university at oxford assume, previous to their examination for a degree. it took its rise in the exercises which students formerly had to go through, but which are now out of use." three college _sophs_, and three pert templars came, the same their talents, and their tastes the same. _pope's dunciad_, b. ii. v. , . . in the american colleges, an abbreviation of sophomore. _sophs_ wha ha' in commons fed! _sophs_ wha ha' in commons bled! _sophs_ wha ne'er from commons fled! puddings, steaks, or wines! _rebelliad_, p. . the _sophs_ did nothing all the first fortnight but torment the fresh, as they call us.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . the _sophs_ were victorious at every point.--_yale banger_, nov. , . my chum, a _soph_, says he committed himself too soon.--_the dartmouth_, vol. iv. p. . sophic. a contraction of sophomoric. so then the _sophic_ army came on in warlike glee. _the battle of the ball_, . sophimore. the old manner of spelling what is now known as sophomore. the president may give leave for the _sophimores_ to take out some particular books.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . his favorite researches, however, are discernible in his observations on a comet, which appeared in the beginning of his _sophimore_ year.--_holmes's life of ezra stiles_, p. . i aver thou hast never been a corporal in the militia, or a _sophimore_ at college.--_the algerine captive_, walpole, , vol. i. p. . sophish gown. among certain gownsmen, a gown that bears the marks of much service; "a thing of shreds and patches."--_gradus ad cantab._ sophist. a name given to the undergraduates at cambridge, england. --_crabb's tech. dict._ sophister. greek, [greek: sophistaes]. in the university of cambridge, eng., the title of students who are advanced beyond the first year of their residence. the entire course at the university consists of three years and one term, during which the students have the titles of first-year men, or freshmen; second-year men, or junior sophs or sophisters; third-year men, or senior sophs or sophisters; and, in the last term, questionists, with reference to the approaching examination. in the older american colleges, the junior and senior classes were originally called junior sophisters and senior sophisters. the term is also used at oxford and dublin. --_webster_. and in case any of the _sophisters_ fail in the premises required at their hands, &c.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . sophomore. one belonging to the second of the four classes in an american college. professor goodrich, in his unabridged edition of dr. webster's dictionary, gives the following interesting account of this word. "this word has generally been considered as an 'american barbarism,' but was probably introduced into our country, at a very early period, from the university of cambridge, eng. among the cant terms at that university, as given in the gradus ad cantabrigiam, we find _soph-mor_ as 'the next distinctive appellation to freshman.' it is added, that 'a writer in the gentlemen's magazine thinks _mor_ an abbreviation of the greek [greek: moria], introduced at a time when the _encomium moriæ_, the praise of folly, by erasmus, was so generally used.' the ordinary derivation of the word, from [greek: sofos] and [greek: moros] would seem, therefore, to be incorrect. the younger sophs at cambridge appear, formerly, to have received the adjunct _mor_ ([greek: moros]) to their names, either as one which they courted for the reason mentioned above, or as one given them in sport, for the supposed exhibition of inflated feeling in entering on their new honors. the term, thus applied, seems to have passed, at a very early period, from cambridge in england to cambridge in america, as 'the next distinctive appellation to freshman,' and thus to have been attached to the second of the four classes in our american colleges; while it has now almost ceased to be known, even as a cant word, at the parent institution in england whence it came. this derivation of the word is rendered more probable by the fact, that the early spelling was, to a great extent at least, soph_i_more, as appears from the manuscripts of president stiles of yale college, and the records of harvard college down to the period of the american revolution. this would be perfectly natural if _soph_ or _sophister_ was considered as the basis of the word, but can hardly be explained if the ordinary derivation had then been regarded as the true one." some further remarks on this word may be found in the gentleman's magazine, above referred to, , vol. lxv. p. . sophomore commencement. at princeton college, it has long been the custom for the sophomore class, near the time of the commencement at the close of the senior year, to hold a commencement in imitation of it, at which burlesque and other exercises, appropriate to the occasion, are performed. the speakers chosen are a salutatorian, a poet, an historian, who reads an account of the doings of the class up to that period, a valedictorian, &c., &c. a band of music is always in attendance. after the addresses, the class partake of a supper, which is usually prolonged to a very late hour. in imitation of the sophomore commencement, _burlesque bills_, as they are called, are prepared and published by the juniors, in which, in a long and formal programme, such subjects and speeches are attributed to the members of the sophomore class as are calculated to expose their weak points. sophomoric, sophomorical. pertaining to or like a sophomore. better to face the prowling panther's path, than meet the storm of _sophomoric_ wrath. _harvardiana_, vol. iv. p. . we trust he will add by his example no significancy to that pithy word, "_sophomoric_."--_sketches of williams coll._, p. . another meaning, derived, it would appear, from the characteristics of the sophomore, yet not very creditable to him, is _bombastic, inflated in style or manner_.--_j.c. calhoun_. students are looked upon as being necessarily _sophomorical_ in literary matters.--_williams quarterly_, vol. ii. p. . the professor told me it was rather _sophomorical_.--_sketches of williams coll._, p. . sophroniscus. at yale college, this name is given to arnold's greek prose composition, from the fact of its repeated occurrence in that work. _sophroniscum_ relinquemus; et euclidem comburemus, ejus vi soluti. _pow-wow of class of ' , yale coll._ see balbus. spirt. among the students at the university of cambridge, eng., an extraordinary effort of mind or body for a short time. a boat's crew _make a spirt_, when they pull fifty yards with all the strength they have left. a reading-man _makes_ _a spirt_ when he crams twelve hours daily the week before examination.--_bristed_. as my ... health was decidedly improving, i now attempted a "_spirt_," or what was one for me.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . my amateur mathematical coach, who was now making his last _spirt_ for a fellowship, used to accompany me.--_ibid._, p. . he reads nine hours a day on a "_spirt_" the fortnight before examination.--_ibid._, p. . spirting. making an extraordinary effort of mind or body for a short time.--_bristed_. ants, bees, boat-crews _spirting_ at the willows,... are but faint types of their activity.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . splurge. in many colleges, when one is either dashy, or dressed more than ordinarily, he is said to _cut a splurge_. a showy recitation is often called by the same name. in his dictionary of americanisms, mr. bartlett defines it, "a great effort, a demonstration," which is the signification in which this word is generally used. splurgy. showy; of greater surface than depth. applied to a lesson which is well rehearsed but little appreciated. also to literary efforts of a certain nature, to character, persons, &c. they even pronounce his speeches _splurgy_.--_yale tomahawk_, may, . spoon. in the university of cambridge, eng., the last of each class of the honors is humorously denominated _the spoon_. thus, the last wrangler is called the golden spoon; the last senior optime, the silver spoon; and the last junior optime, the wooden spoon. the wooden spoon, however, is _par excellence_, "the spoon."--_gradus ad cantab._ see wooden spoon. spoon, spoony, spooney. a man who has been drinking till he becomes disgusting by his very ridiculous behavior, is said to be _spoony_ drunk; and hence it is usual to call a very prating, shallow fellow a rank _spoon_.--_grose_. mr. bartlett, in his dictionary of americanisms, says:--"we use the word only in the latter sense. the hon. mr. preston, in his remarks on the mexican war, thus quotes from tom crib's remonstrance against the meanness of a transaction, similar to our cries for more vigorous blows on mexico when she is prostrate: "'look down upon ben,--see him, _dunghill_ all o'er, insult the fallen foe that can harm him no more. out, cowardly _spooney_! again and again, by the fist of my father, i blush for thee, ben.' "ay, you will see all the _spooneys_ that ran, like so many _dunghill_ champions, from , stand by the president for the vigorous prosecution of the war upon the body of a prostrate foe." --_n.y. tribune_, . now that year it so happened that the spoon was no _spooney_.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . not a few of this party were deluded into a belief, that all studious and quiet men were slow, all men of proper self-respect exclusives, and all men of courtesy and good-breeding _spoonies_. --_collegian's guide_, p. . suppose that rustication was the fate of a few others of our acquaintance, whom you cannot call slow, or _spoonies_ either, would it be deemed no disgrace by them?--_ibid._, p. . when _spoonys_ on two knees, implore the aid of sorcery, to suit their wicked purposes they quickly put the laws awry. _rejected addresses_, am. ed., p. . they belong to the class of elderly "_spoons_," with some few exceptions, and are nettled that the world should not go at their rate of progression.--_boston daily times_, may , . spoony, spooney. like a _spoon_; possessing the qualities of a silly or stupid fellow. i shall escape from this beautiful critter, for i'm gettin' _spooney_, and shall talk silly presently.--_sam slick_. both the adjective and the noun _spooney_ are in constant and frequent use at some of the american colleges, and are generally applied to one who is disliked either for his bad qualities or for his ill-breeding, usually accompanied with the idea of weakness. he sprees, is caught, rusticates, returns next year, mingles with feminines, and is consequently degraded into the _spooney_ junior. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . a "bowl" was the happy conveyance. perhaps this was chosen because the voyagers were _spooney_.--_yale banger_, nov. . spoops, spoopsy. at harvard college, a weak, silly fellow, or one who is disliked on account of his foolish actions, is called a _spoops_, or _spoopsy_. the meaning is nearly the same as that of _spoony_. spoopsy. foolish; silly. applied either to a person or thing. seniors always try to be dignified. the term "_spoopsey_" in its widest signification applies admirably to them.--_yale tomahawk_, may, . sport. to exhibit or bring out in public; as, to _sport_ a new equipage.--_grose_. this word was in great vogue in england in the year and ; but is now sacred to men of _fashion_, both in england and america. with regard to the word _sport_, they [the cantabrigians] _sported_ knowing, and they _sported_ ignorant,--they _sported_ an Ægrotat, and they _sported_ a new coat,--they _sported_ an exeat, they _sported_ a dormiat, &c.--_gent. mag._, , p. . i'm going to serve my country, and _sport_ a pretty wife. _presentation day songs_, june , , yale coll. to _sport oak_, or a door, is to fasten a door for safety or convenience. if you call on a man and his door is _sported_, signifying that he is out or busy, it is customary to pop your card through the little slit made for that purpose.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . some few constantly turn the keys of their churlish doors, and others, from time to time, "_sport oak_."--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . sporting-door. at the english universities, the name given to the outer door of a student's room, which can be _sported_ or fastened to prevent intrusion. their impregnable _sporting-doors_, that defy alike the hostile dun and the too friendly "fast man."--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . spread. a feast of a more humble description than a gaudy. used at cambridge, england. this puts him in high spirits again, and he gives a large _spread_, and gets drunk on the strength of it.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . he sits down with all of them, about forty or fifty, to a most glorious _spread_, ordered from the college cook, to be served up in the most swell style possible.--_ibid._, p. . sprout. any _branch_ of education is in student phrase a _sprout_. this peculiar use of the word is said to have originated at yale. sprung. the positive, of which _tight_ is the comparative, and _drunk_ the superlative. "one swallow makes not spring," the poet sung, but many swallows make the fast man _sprung_. _ms. poem_, by f.e. felton. see tight. spy. in some of the american colleges, it is a prevailing opinion among the students, that certain members of the different classes are encouraged by the faculty to report what they have seen or ascertained in the conduct of their classmates, contrary to the laws of the college. many are stigmatized as _spies_ very unjustly, and seldom with any sufficient reason. squirt. at harvard college, a showy recitation is denominated a _squirt_; the ease and quickness with which the words flow from the mouth being analogous to the ease and quickness which attend the sudden ejection of a stream of water from a pipe. such a recitation being generally perfect, the word _squirt_ is very often used to convey that idea. perhaps there is not, in the whole vocabulary of college cant terms, one more expressive than this, or that so easily conveys its meaning merely by its sound. it is mostly used colloquially. . a foppish young fellow; a whipper-snapper.--_bartlett_. if they won't keep company with _squirts_ and dandies, who's going to make a monkey of himself?--_maj. jones's courtship_, p. . squirt. to make a showy recitation. he'd rather slump than _squirt_. _poem before y.h._, p. . webster has this word with the meaning, "to throw out words, to let fly," and marks it as out of use. squirtiness. the quality of being showy. squirtish. showy; dandified. it's my opinion that these slicked up _squirtish_ kind a fellars ain't particular hard baked, and they always goes in for aristocracy notions.--_robb, squatter life_, p. . squirty. showy; fond of display; gaudy. applied to an oration which is full of bombast and grandiloquence; to a foppish fellow; to an apartment gayly adorned, &c. and should they "scrape" in prayers, because they are long and rather "_squirty_" at times. _childe harvard_, p. . stammbook. german. a remembrance-book; an album. among the german students stammbooks were kept formerly, as commonly as autograph-books now are among american students. but do procure me the favor of thy rapunzel writing something in my _stammbook_.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . standing. academical age, or rank. of what _standing_ are you? i am a senior soph.--_gradus ad cantab._ her mother told me all about your love, and asked me of your prospects and your _standing_. _collegian_, , p. . _to stand for an honor_; i.e. to offer one's self as a candidate for an honor. star. in triennial catalogues a star designates those who have died. this sign was first used with this signification by mather, in his magnalia, in a list prepared by him of the graduates of harvard college, with a fanciful allusion, it is supposed, to the abode of those thus marked. our tale shall be told by a silent _star_, on the page of some future triennial. _poem before class of , harv. coll._, p. . we had only to look still further back to find the _stars_ clustering more closely, indicating the rapid flight of the spirits of short-lived tenants of earth to another sphere.--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. ii. p. . star. to mark a star opposite the name of a person, signifying that he is dead. six of the sixteen presidents of our university have been inaugurated in this place; and the oldest living graduate, the hon. paine wingate of stratham, new hampshire, who stands on the catalogue a lonely survivor amidst the _starred_ names of the dead, took his degree within these walls.--_a sermon on leaving the old meeting-house in cambridge_, by rev. william newell, dec. , , p. . among those fathers were the venerable remnants of classes that are _starred_ to the last two or three, or it may be to the last one.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . statement of facts. at yale college, a name given to a public meeting called for the purpose of setting forth the respective merits of the two great societies in that institution, viz. "linonia" and "the brothers in unity." there are six orators, three from linonia and three from the brothers,--a senior, a junior, and the president of each society. the freshmen are invited by handsomely printed cards to attend the meeting, and they also have the best seats reserved for them, and are treated with the most intense politeness. as now conducted, the _statement of facts_ is any thing rather than what is implied by the name. it is simply an opportunity for the display of speaking talent, in which wit and sarcasm are considered of far greater importance than truth. the freshmen are rarely swayed to either side. in nine cases out of ten they have already chosen their society, and attend the statement merely from a love of novelty and fun. the custom grew up about the year , after the practice of dividing the students alphabetically between the two societies had fallen into disuse. like all similar customs, the statement of facts has reached its present college importance by gradual growth. at first the societies met in a small room of the college, and the statements did really consist of the facts in the case. now the exercises take place in a public hall, and form a kind of intellectual tournament, where each society, in the presence of a large audience, strives to get the advantage of the other. from a newspaper account of the observance of this literary festival during the present year, the annexed extract is taken. "for some years, students, as they have entered college, have been permitted to choose the society with which they would connect themselves, instead of being alphabetically allotted to one of the two. this method has made the two societies earnest rivals, and the accession of each class to college creates an earnest struggle to see which shall secure the greater number of members. the electioneering campaign, as it is termed, begins when the students come to be examined for admission to college, that is, about the time of the commencement, and continues through a week or two of the first term of the next year. each society, of course, puts forth the most determined efforts to conquer. it selects the most prominent and popular men of the senior class as president, and arrangements are so made that a freshman no sooner enters town than he finds himself unexpectedly surrounded by hosts of friends, willing to do anything for him, and especially instruct him in his duty with reference to the selection of societies. for the benefit of those who do not yield to this private electioneering, this statement of facts is made. it amounts, however, to little more than a 'good time,' as there are very few who wait to be influenced by 'facts' they know will be so distorted. the advocates of each society feel bound, of course, to present its affairs in the most favorable aspect. disputants are selected, generally with regard to their ability as speakers, one from the junior and one from the senior class. the presidents of each society also take part."--_n.y. daily times_, sept. , . as an illustration of the eloquence and ability which is often displayed on these occasions, the following passages have been selected from the address of john m. holmes of chicago, ill., the junior orator in behalf of the brothers in unity at the statement of facts held september th, . "time forbids me to speak at length of the illustrious alumni of the brothers; of professor thatcher, the favorite of college,--of professor silliman, the nestor of american literati,--of the revered head of this institution, president woolsey, first president of the brothers in ,--of professor andrews, the author of the best dictionary of the latin language,--of such divines as dwight and murdock,--of bacon and bushnell, the pride of new england,--or of the great names of clayton, badger, calhoun, ellsworth, and john davis,--all of whom were nurtured and disciplined in the halls of the brothers, and there received the achillean baptism that made their lives invulnerable. but perhaps i err in claiming such men as the peculium of the brothers,--they are the common heritage of the human race. 'such names as theirs are pilgrim shrines, shrines to no code nor creed confined, the delphian vales, the palestines, the meccas of the mind.' "but there are other names which to overlook would be worse than negligence,--it would be ingratitude unworthy of a son of yale. "at the head of that glorious host stands the venerable form of joel barlow, who, in addition to his various civil and literary distinctions, was the father of american poetry. there too is the intellectual brow of webster, not indeed the great defender of the constitution, but that other webster, who spent his life in the perpetuation of that language in which the constitution is embalmed, and whose memory will be coeval with that language to the latest syllable of recorded time. beside webster on the historic canvas appears the form of the only judge of the supreme court of the united states that ever graduated at this college,--chief justice baldwin, of the class of . next to him is his classmate, a patriarchal old man who still lives to bless the associations of his youth,--who has consecrated the noblest talents to the noblest earthly purposes,--the pioneer of western education,--the apostle of temperance,--the life-long teacher of immortality,--and who is the father of an illustrious family whose genius has magnetized all christendom. his classmate is lyman beecher. but a year ago in the neighboring city of hartford there was a monument erected to another brother in unity,--the philanthropist who first introduced into this country the system of instructing deaf mutes. more than a thousand unfortunates bowed around his grave. and although there was no audible voice of eulogy or thankfulness, yet there were many tears. and grateful thoughts went up to heaven in silent benediction for him who had unchained their faculties, and given them the priceless treasures of intellectual and social communion. thomas h. gallaudet was a brother in unity. "and he who has been truly called the most learned of poets and the most poetical of learned men,--whose ascent to the heaven of song has been like the pathway of his own broad sweeping eagle,--j.g. percival,--is a brother in unity. and what shall i say of morse? of morse, the wonder-worker, the world-girdler, the space-destroyer, the author of the noblest invention whose glory was ever concentrated in a single man, who has realized the fabulous prerogative of olympian jove, and by the instantaneous intercommunication of thought has accomplished the work of ages in binding together the whole civilized world into one great brotherhood in unity? "gentlemen, these are the men who wait to welcome you to the blessings of our society. there they stand, like the majestic statues that line the entrance to an eternal pyramid. and when i look upon one statue, and another, and another, and contemplate the colossal greatness of their proportions, as canova gazed with rapture upon the sun-god of the vatican, i envy not the man whose heart expands not with the sense of a new nobility, and whose eye kindles not with the heart's enthusiasm, as he thinks that he too is numbered among that glorious company,--that he too is sprung from that royal ancestry. and who asks for a richer heritage, or a more enduring epitaph, than that he too is a brother in unity?" s.t.b. _sanctæ theologiæ baccalaureus_, bachelor in theology. see b.d. s.t.d. _sanctæ theologiæ doctor_. doctor in theology. see d.d. steward. in colleges, an officer who provides food for the students, and superintends the kitchen.--_webster_. in american colleges, the labors of the steward are at present more extended, and not so servile, as set forth in the above definition. to him is usually assigned the duty of making out the term-bills and receiving the money thereon; of superintending the college edifices with respect to repairs, &c.; of engaging proper servants in the employ of the college; and of performing such other services as are declared by the faculty of the college to be within his province. stick. in college phrase, _to stick_, or _to get stuck_, is to be unable to proceed, either in a recitation, declamation, or any other exercise. an instructor is said to _stick_ a student, when he asks a question which the student is unable to answer. but he has not yet discovered, probably, that he ... that "_sticks_" in greek, and cannot tell, by demonstration of his own, whether the three angles of a triangle are equal to two, or four, ... can nevertheless drawl out the word fresh, &c.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . s.t.p. _sanctæ theologiæ professor_. professor in theology. a degree of similar import to s.t.d., and d.d. student. a person engaged in study; one who is devoted to learning, either in a seminary or in private; a scholar; as, the _students_ of an academy, of a college or university; a medical _student_; a law _student_. . a man devoted to books; a bookish man; as, a hard _student_; a close _student_.--_webster_. . at oxford, this word is used to designate one who stands upon the foundation of the college to which he belongs, and is an aspirant for academic emoluments.--_de quincey_. . in german universities, by _student_ is understood "one who has by matriculation acquired the rights of academical citizenship."--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . study. a building or an apartment devoted to study or to literary employment.--_webster_. in some of the older american colleges, it was formerly the custom to partition off, in each chamber, two small rooms, where the occupants, who were always two in number, could carry on their literary pursuits. these rooms were called, from this circumstance, _studies_. speaking of the first college edifice which was erected at new haven, mr. clap, in his history of yale college, says: "it made a handsome appearance, and contained near fifty _studies_ in convenient chambers"; and again he speaks of connecticut hall as containing thirty-two chambers and sixty-four _studies_. in the oldest buildings, some of these _studies_ remain at the present day. the _study_ rents, until december last, were discontinued with mr. dunster.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. p. . every graduate and undergraduate shall find his proportion of furniture, &c., during the whole time of his having a _study_ assigned him.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . to him that occupies my _study_, i give, &c.--_will of charles prentiss_. stump. at princeton college, to fail in reciting; to say, "not prepared," when called on to recite. a _stump_, a bad recitation; used in the phrase, "_to make a stump_." sub-fresh. a person previous to entering the freshman class is called a _sub-fresh_, or one below a freshman. praying his guardian powers to assist a poor "_sub-fresh_" at the dread examination. _poem before the iadma soc. of harv. coll._, , p. . our "_sub-fresh_" has that feeling. _ibid._, p. . everybody happy, except _sub-fresh_, and they trying hardest to appear so.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xx. p. . the timid _sub-fresh_ had determined to construct stout barricades, with no lack of ammunition.--_ibid._, p. . sometimes written _sub_. information wanted of the "_sub_" who didn't think it an honor to be electioneered.--_n.b., yale coll., june_ , . see pene. subject. at the university of cambridge, eng., a particular author, or part of an author, set for examination; or a particular branch of mathematics, such as optics, hydrostatics, &c.--_bristed_. to _get up a subject_, is to make one's self thoroughly master of it.--_bristed_. sub-rector. a rector's deputy or substitute.--_walton, webster_. sub-sizar. in the university of cambridge, eng., formerly an order of students lower than the _sizars_. masters of all sorts, and all ages, keepers, _subcizers_, lackeys, pages. _poems of bp. corbet_, p. . there he sits and sees how lackeys and _subsizers_ press and scramble for degrees. _ibid._, p. . see under sizar. suck. at middlebury college, to cheat at recitation or examination by using _ponies_, _interliners_, or _helps_ of any kind. supplicat. latin; literally, _he supplicates_. in the english universities, a petition; particularly a written application with a certificate that the requisite conditions have been complied with.--_webster_. a _supplicat_, says the gradus ad cantabrigiam, is "an entreaty to be admitted to the degree of b.a.; containing a certificate that the questionist has kept his full number of terms, or explaining any deficiency. this document is presented to the caput by the father of his college." surplice day. an occasion or day on which the surplice is worn by the members of a university. "on all sundays and saint-days, and the evenings preceding, every member of the university, except noblemen, attends chapel in his surplice."--_grad. ad cantab._, pp. , . suspend. in colleges, to separate a student from his class, and place him under private instruction. and those whose crimes are very great, let us _suspend_ or rusticate.--_rebelliad_, p. . suspension. in universities and colleges, the punishment of a student for some offence, usually negligence, by separating him from his class, and compelling him to pursue those branches of study in which he is deficient under private instruction, provided for the purpose. suspension-paper. the paper in which the act of suspension from college is declared. come, take these three _suspension-papers_; they'll teach you how to cut such capers. _rebelliad_, p. . suspension to the room. in princeton college, one of the punishments for certain offences subjects a student to confinement to his chamber and exclusion from his class, and requires him to recite to a teacher privately for a certain time. this is technically called _suspension to the room_. sweep, sweeper. the name given at yale and other colleges to the person whose occupation it is to sweep the students' rooms, make their beds, &c. then how welcome the entrance of the _sweep_, and how cutely we fling jokes at each other through the dust!--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xiv. p. . knocking down the _sweep_, in clearing the stairs, we described a circle to our room.--_the yale banger_, nov. , . a freshman by the faithful _sweep_ was found half buried in soft sleep. _ibid._, nov. , . with fingers dirty and black, from lower to upper room, a college _sweep_ went dustily round, plying his yellow broom. _songs of yale_, , p. . in the yale literary magazine, vol. iii. p. , is "a tribute to certain members of the faculty, whose names are omitted in the catalogue," in which appropriate praise is awarded to these useful servants. the steward ... engages _sweepers_ for the college.--_laws harv. coll._, , p. . one of the _sweepers_ finding a parcel of wood,... the defendant, in the absence of the owner of the wood, authorizes the _sweeper_ to carry it away.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . swell block. in the university of virginia, a sobriquet applied to dandies and vain pretenders. swing. at several american colleges, the word _swing_ is used for coming out with a secret society badge; st, of the society, to _swing out_ the new men; and, d, of the men, intransitively, to _swing_, or to _swing out_, i.e. to appear with the badge of a secret society. generally, _to swing out_ signifies to appear in something new. the new members have "_swung out_," and all again is harmony.--_sophomore independent_, union college, nov. . syndic. latin, _syndicus_; greek, [greek: sundikos; sun], _with_, and [greek: dikae], _justice_. an officer of government, invested with different powers in different countries. almost all the companies in paris, the university, &c., have their _syndics_. the university of cambridge has its _syndics_, who are chosen from the senate to transact special business, as the regulation of fees, forming of laws, inspecting the library, buildings, printing, &c.--_webster. cam. cal._ syndicate. a council or body of syndics. the state of instruction in and encouragement to the study of theology were thus set forth in the report of a _syndicate_ appointed to consider the subject in .--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . _t_. tads. at centre college, ky., there is "a society," says a correspondent, "composed of the very best fellows of the college, calling themselves _tads_, who are generally associated together, for the object of electing, by the additional votes of their members, any of their friends who are brought forward as candidates for any honor or appointment in the literary societies to which they belong." take up. to call on a student to rehearse a lesson. professor _took_ him _up_ on greek; he tried to talk, but couldn't speak. _ms poem_. take up one's connections. in students' phrase, to leave college. used in american institutions. tardes. at the older american colleges, when charges were made and excuses rendered in latin, the student who had come late to any religious service was addressed by the proper officer with the word _tardes_, a kind of barbarous second person singular of some unknown verb, signifying, probably, "you are or were late." much absence, _tardes_ and egresses, the college-evil on him seizes. _trumbull's progress of dullness_, part i. tardy. in colleges, late in attendance on a public exercise.--_webster_. tavern. at harvard college, the rooms no. massachusetts hall, and no. hollis hall, were occupied from the year to by mr. charles angier. his table was always supplied with wine, brandy, crackers, etc., of which his friends were at liberty to partake at any time. from this circumstance his rooms were called _the tavern_ for nearly twenty years after his graduation. in connection with this incident, it may not be uninteresting to state, that the cellars of the two buildings above mentioned were divided each into thirty-two compartments, corresponding with the number of rooms. in these the students and tutors stored their liquors, sometimes in no inconsiderable quantities. frequent entries are met with in the records of the faculty, in which the students are charged with pilfering wine, brandy, or eatables from the tutors' _bins_. taxor. in the university of cambridge, eng., an officer appointed to regulate the assize of bread, the true gauge of weights, etc.--_cam. cal._ team. in the english universities, the pupils of a private tutor or coach.--_bristed_. no man who has not taken a good degree expects or pretends to take good men into his _team_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . it frequently, indeed usually happens, that a "coach" of reputation declines taking men into his _team_ before they have made time in public.--_ibid._, p. . tear. at princeton college, a _perfect tear_ is a very extra recitation, superior to a _rowl_. temple. at bowdoin college, a privy is thus designated. ten-strike. at hamilton college, a perfect recitation, ten being the mark given for a perfect recitation. ten-year men. in the university of cambridge, eng., these are allowed to take the degree of bachelor in divinity without having been b.a. or m.a., by the statute of th queen elizabeth, which permits persons, who are admitted at any college when twenty-four years of age and upwards, to take the degree of b.d. after their names have remained on the _boards_ ten years or more. after the first eight years, they must reside in the university the greater part of three several terms, and perform the exercises which are required by the statutes.--_cam. cal._ term. in universities and colleges, the time during which instruction is regularly given to students, who are obliged by the statutes and laws of the institution to attend to the recitations, lectures, and other exercises.--_webster_. in the university of cambridge, eng., there are three terms during each year, which are fixed by invariable rules. october or michaelmas term begins on the th of october, and ends on the th of december. lent or january term begins on the th of january, and ends on the friday before palm sunday. easter or midsummer term, begins on the eleventh day (the wednesday sennight) after easter-day, and ends on the friday after commencement day. commencement is always on the first tuesday in july. at oxford university, there are four terms in the year. michaelmas term begins on the th of october, and ends on the th of december. hilary term begins on the th of january, and ends the day before palm sunday. but if the saturday before palm sunday should be a festival, the term does not end till the monday following. easter term begins on the tenth day after easter sunday, and ends on the day before whitsunday. trinity term begins on the wednesday after whitsunday, and ends the saturday after the act, which is always on the first tuesday in july. at the dublin university, the terms in each year are four in number. hilary term begins on the monday after epiphany, and ends the day before palm sunday. easter term begins on the eighth day after easter sunday, and ends on whitsun-eve. trinity term begins on trinity monday, and ends on the th of july. michaelmas term begins on the st of october (or on the d, if the st should be sunday), and ends on december th. terrÆ filius. latin; _son of earth_. formerly, one appointed to write a satirical latin poem at the public acts in the university of oxford; not unlike the prevaricator at cambridge, eng.--_webster_. full accounts of the compositions written on these occasions may be found in a work in two volumes, entitled "terræ-filius; or the secret history of the university of oxford," printed in the year . see tripos paper. testamur. latin; literally, _we testify_. in the english universities, a certificate of proficiency, without which a person is not able to take his degree. so called from the first word in the formula. there is not one out of twenty of my pupils who can look forward with unmixed pleasure to a _testamur_.--_collegian's guide_, p. . every _testamur_ must be signed by three out of the four examiners, at least.--_ibid._, p. . theatre. at oxford, a building in which are held the annual commemoration of benefactors, the recitation of prize compositions, and the occasional ceremony of conferring degrees on distinguished personages.--_oxford guide_. theme. in college phrase, a short dissertation composed by a student. it is the practice at cambridge [mass.] for the professor of rhetoric and the english language, commencing in the first or second quarter of the student's sophomore year, to give the class a text; generally some brief moral quotation from some of the ancient or modern poets, from which the students write a short essay, usually denominated a _theme_.--_works of r.t. paine_, p. xxi. far be it from me to enter into competition with students who have been practising the sublime art of _theme_ and forensic writing for two years.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . but on the sleepy day of _themes_, may doze away a dozen reams. _ibid._, p. . nimrod holds his "first _theme_" in one hand, and is leaning his head on the other.--_ibid._, p. . theme-bearer. at harvard college, until within a few years, a student was chosen once in a term by his classmates to perform the duties of _theme-bearer_. he received the subjects for themes and forensics from the professors of rhetoric and of moral philosophy, and posted them up in convenient places, usually in the entries of the buildings and on, the bulletin-boards. he also distributed the corrected themes, at first giving them to the students after evening prayers, and, when this had been forbidden by the president, carrying them to their rooms. for these services he received seventy-five cents per term from each member of the class. theme-paper. in american colleges, a kind of paper on which students write their themes or composition. it is of the size of an ordinary letter-sheet, contains eighteen or nineteen lines placed at wide intervals, and is ruled in red ink with a margin a little less than an inch in width. shoe-strings, lucifers, omnibus-tickets, _theme-paper_, postage-stamps, and the nutriment of pipes.--_harv. mag._, vol. i. p. . theologue. a cant name among collegians for a student in theology. the hardened hearts of freshmen and _theologues_ burned with righteous indignation.--_yale tomahawk_, may, . the _theologs_ are not so wicked as the medics.--_burlesque catalogue, yale coll._, - , p. . theses-collector. one who collects or prepares _theses_. the following extract from the laws of harvard college will explain further what is meant by this term. "the president, professors, and tutors, annually, some time in the third term, shall select from the junior class a number of _theses-collectors_, to prepare theses for the next year; from which selection they shall appoint so many divisions as shall be equal to the number of branches they may assign. and each one shall, in the particular branch assigned him, collect so many theses as the government may judge expedient; and all the theses, thus collected, shall be delivered to the president, by the saturday immediately succeeding the end of the spring vacation in the senior year, at furthest, from which the president, professors, and tutors shall select such as they shall judge proper to be published. but if the theses delivered to the president, in any particular branch, should not afford a sufficient number suitable for publication, a further number shall be required. the name of the student who collected any set or number of theses shall be annexed to the theses collected by him, in every publication. should any one neglect to collect the theses required of him, he shall be liable to lose his degree."-- , p. . the theses-collectors were formerly chosen by the class, as the following extract from a ms. journal will show. "march th, . my class assembled in the chapel to choose theses-collectors, a valedictory orator, and poet. jackson was chosen to deliver the latin oration, and cutler to deliver the poem. ellis was almost unanimously chosen a collector of the grammatical theses. prince was chosen metaphysical theses-collector, with considerable opposition. lowell was chosen mathematical theses-collector, though not unanimously. chamberlain was chosen physical theses-collector." thesis. a position or proposition which a person advances and offers to maintain, or which is actually maintained by argument; a theme; a subject; particularly, a subject or proposition for a school or university exercise, or the exercise itself.--_webster_. in the older american colleges, the _theses_ held a prominent place in the exercises of commencement. at harvard college the earliest theses extant bear the date of the year . they were theses technological, logical, grammatical, rhetorical, mathematical, and physical. the last theses were presented in the year . the earliest theses extant belonging to yale college are of , and the last were printed in . thirding. in england, "a custom practised at the universities, where two _thirds_ of the original price is allowed by upholsterers to the students for household goods returned them within the year."--_grose's dict._ on this subject de quincey says: "the oxford rule is, that, if you take the rooms (which is at your own option), in that case you _third_ the furniture and the embellishments; i.e. you succeed to the total cost diminished by one third. you pay, therefore, two guineas out of each three to your _immediate_ predecessor."--_life and manners_, p. . third-year men. in the university of cambridge, eng., the title of third-year men, or senior sophs or sophisters, is given to students during the third year of their residence at the university. thundering bolus. see intonitans bolus. tick. a recitation made by one who does not know of what he is talking. _ticks_, screws, and deads were all put under contribution.--_a tour through college_, boston, , p. . ticker. one who recites without knowing what he is talking about; one entirely independent of any book-knowledge. if any "_ticker_" dare to look a stealthy moment on his book. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . ticking. the act of reciting without knowing anything about the lesson. and what with _ticking_, screwing, and deading, am candidate for a piece of parchment to-morrow.--_harv. reg._, p. . tight. a common slang term among students; the comparative, of which _drunk_ is the superlative. some twenty of as jolly chaps as e'er got jolly _tight_. _poem before y.h._, . hast spent the livelong night in smoking esculapios,--in getting jolly _tight_? _poem before iadma_, . he clenched his fist as fain for fight, sank back, and gently murmured "_tight_." _ms. poem_, w.f. allen, . while fathers, are bursting with rage and spite, and old ladies vow that the students are _tight_. _yale gallinipper_, nov. . speaking of the word "drunk," the burlington sentinel remarks: "the last synonyme that we have observed is '_tight_,' a term, it strikes us, rather inappropriate, since a 'tight' man, in the cant use of the word, is almost always a 'loose character.' we give a list of a few of the various words and phrases which have been in use, at one time or another, to signify some stage of inebriation: over the bay, half seas over, hot, high, corned, cut, cocked, shaved, disguised, jammed, damaged, sleepy, tired, discouraged, snuffy, whipped, how come ye so, breezy, smoked, top-heavy, fuddled, groggy, tipsy, smashed, swipy, slewed, cronk, salted down, how fare ye, on the lee lurch, all sails set, three sheets in the wind, well under way, battered, blowing, snubbed, sawed, boosy, bruised, screwed, soaked, comfortable, stimulated, jug-steamed, tangle-legged, fogmatic, blue-eyed, a passenger in the cape ann stage, striped, faint, shot in the neck, bamboozled, weak-jointed, got a brick in his hat, got a turkey on his back." dr. franklin, in speaking of the intemperate drinker, says, he will never, or seldom, allow that he is drunk; he may be "boosy, cosey, foxed, merry, mellow, fuddled, groatable, confoundedly cut, may see two moons, be among the philistines, in a very good humor, have been in the sun, is a little feverish, pretty well entered, &c., but _never drunk_." a highly entertaining list of the phrases which the germans employ "to clothe in a tolerable garb of decorum that dreamy condition into which bacchus frequently throws his votaries," is given in _howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., pp. , . see sprung. . at williams college, this word is sometimes used as an exclamation; e.g. "o _tight_!" tight fit. at the university of vermont, a good joke is denominated by the students a _tight fit_, and the jokee is said to be "hard up." tile. a hat. evidently suggested by the meaning of the word, a covering for the roof of buildings. then, taking it from off his head, began to brush his "_tile_." _poem before the iadma_, . toady. a fawning, obsequious parasite; a toad-eater. in college cant, one who seeks or gains favor with an instructor or popularity with his classmates by mean and sycophantic actions. toady. to flatter any one for gain.--_halliwell_. tom. the great bell of christ church, oxford, which formerly belonged to osney abbey. "this bell," says the oxford guide, "was recast in , its weight being about , pounds; more than double the weight of the great bell in st. paul's, london. this bell has always been represented as one of the finest in england, but even at the risk of dispelling an illusion under which most oxford men have labored, and which every member of christ church has indulged in from to the present time, touching the fancied superiority of mighty tom, it must be confessed that it is neither an accurate nor a musical bell. the note, as we are assured by the learned in these matters, ought to be b flat, but is not so. on the contrary, the bell is imperfect and inharmonious, and requires, in the opinion of those best informed, and of most experience, to be recast. it is, however, still a great curiosity, and may be seen by applying to the porter at tom-gate lodge."--ed. , p. , note a. to the _n(-th.)_, to the _n + (-th.)_ among english cantabs these algebraic expressions are used as intensives to denote the most energetic way of doing anything.--_bristed_. towney. the name by which a student in an american college is accustomed to designate any young man residing in the town in which the college is situated, who is not a collegian. and _towneys_ left when she showed fight. _pow-wow of class of ' , yale coll._ translation. the act of turning one language into another. at the university of cambridge, eng., this word is applied more particularly to the turning of greek or latin into english. in composition and cram i was yet untried, and the _translations_ in lecture-room were not difficult to acquit one's self on respectably.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . transmittendum, _pl._ transmittenda or transmittendums. anything transmitted, or handed down from one to another. students, on withdrawing from college, often leave in the room which they last occupied, pictures, looking-glasses, chairs, &c., there to remain, and to be handed down to the latest posterity. articles thus left are called _transmittenda_. the great mathematical slate was a _transmittendum_ to the best mathematical scholar in each class.--_ms. note in cat. med. fac. soc._, , p. . trencher-cap. a-name, sometimes given to the square head-covering worn by students in the english universities. used figuratively to denote collegiate power. the _trencher-cap_ has claimed a right to take its part in the movements which make or mar the destinies of nations, by the side of plumed casque and priestly tiara.--_the english universities and their reforms_, in _blackwood's mag._, feb. . triangle. at union college, a urinal, so called from its shape. triennial, or triennial catalogue. in american colleges, a catalogue issued once in three years. this catalogue contains the names of the officers and students, arranged according to the years in which they were connected with the college, an account of the high public offices which they have filled, degrees which they have received, time of death, &c.[ ] the _triennial catalogue_ becomes increasingly a mournful record--it should be monitory, as well as mournful--to survivors, looking at the stars thickening on it, from one date to another.--_scenes and characters in college_, p. . our tale shall be told by a silent star, on the page of some future _triennial_. _class poem, harv. coll._, , p. . trimester. latin _trimestris_; _tres_, three, and _mensis_, month. in the german universities, a term or period of three months.--_webster_. trinitarian. the popular name of a member of trinity college in the university of cambridge, eng. tripos, _pl._ triposes. at cambridge, eng., any university examination for honors, of questionists or men who have just taken their b.a. the university scholarship examinations are not called _triposes_.--_bristed_. the classical tripos is generally spoken of as _the tripos_, the mathematical one as the degree examination.--_ibid._, p. . . a tripos paper. . one who prepares a tripos paper.--_webster_. tripos paper. at the university of cambridge, england, a printed list of the successful candidates for mathematical honors, accompanied by a piece in latin verse. there are two of these, designed to commemorate the two tripos days. the first contains the names of the wranglers and senior optimes, and the second the names of the junior optimes. the word _tripos_ is supposed to refer to the three-legged stool formerly used at the examinations for these honors, though some derive it from the three _brackets_ formerly printed on the back of the paper. _classical tripos examination_. the final university examination for classical honors, optional to all who have taken the mathematical honors.--_c.a. bristed_, in _webster's dict._ the tripos paper is more fully described in the annexed extract. "the names of the bachelors who were highest in the list (wranglers and senior optimes, _baccalaurei quibus sua reservatur senioritas comitiis prioribus_, and junior optimes, _comitiis posterioribus_) were written on slips of paper; and on the back of these papers, probably with a view of making them less fugitive and more entertaining, was given a copy of latin verses. these verses were written by one of the new bachelors, and the exuberant spirits and enlarged freedom arising from the termination of the undergraduate restrictions often gave to these effusions a character of buffoonery and satire. the writer was termed _terræ filius_, or _tripos_, probably from some circumstance in the mode of his making his appearance and delivering his verses; and took considerable liberties. on some occasions, we find that these went so far as to incur the censure of the authorities. even now, the tripos verses often aim at satire and humor. [it is customary to have one serious and one humorous copy of verses.] the writer does not now appear in person, but the tripos paper, the list of honors with its verses, still comes forth at its due season, and the list itself has now taken the name of the tripos. this being the case with the list of mathematical honors, the same name has been extended to the list of classical honors, though unaccompanied by its classical verses."--_whewell on cambridge education_, preface to part ii., quoted in _bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . trump. a jolly blade; a merry fellow; one who occupies among his companions a position similar to that which trumps hold to the other cards in the pack. not confined in its use to collegians, but much in vogue among them. but soon he treads this classic ground, where knowledge dwells and _trumps_ abound. _ms. poem_. trustee. a person to whom property is legally committed in _trust_, to be applied either for the benefit of specified individuals, or for public uses.--_webster_. in many american colleges the general government is vested in a board of _trustees_, appointed differently in different colleges. see corporation and overseer. tuft-hunter. a cant term, in the english universities, for a hanger-on to noblemen and persons of quality. so called from the _tuft_ in the cap of the latter.--_halliwell_. there are few such thorough _tuft-hunters_ as your genuine oxford don.--_blackwood's mag._, eng. ed., vol. lvi. p. . tuition. in universities, colleges, schools, &c., the money paid for instruction. in american colleges, the tuition is from thirty to seventy dollars a year. tute. abbreviation for tutor. tutor. latin; from _tueor_, to defend; french, _tuteur_. in english universities and colleges, an officer or member of some hall, who has the charge of hearing the lessons of the students, and otherwise giving them instruction in the sciences and various branches of learning. in the american colleges, tutors are graduates selected by the trustees, for the instruction of undergraduates of the first three years. they are usually officers of the institution, who have a share, with the president and professors, in the government of the students.--_webster_. tutorage. in the english universities, the guardianship exerted by a tutor; the care of a pupil. the next item which i shall notice is that which in college bills is expressed by the word _tutorage_.--_de quincey's life and manners_, p. . tutor, class. at some of the colleges in the united states, each of the four classes is assigned to the care of a particular tutor, who acts as the ordinary medium of communication between the members of the class and the faculty, and who may be consulted by the students concerning their studies, or on any other subject interesting to them in their relations to the college. at harvard college, in addition to these offices, the class tutors grant leave of absence from church and from town for sunday, including saturday night, on the presentation of a satisfactory reason, and administer all warnings and private admonitions ordered by the faculty for misconduct or neglect of duty.--_orders and regulations of the faculty of harv. coll._, july, , pp. , . of this regulation as it obtained at harvard during the latter part of the last century, professor sidney willard says: "each of the tutors had one class, of which he was charged with a certain oversight, and of which he was called the particular tutor. the several tutors in latin successively sustained this relation to my class. warnings of various kinds, private admonitions for negligence or minor offences, and, in general, intercommunication between his class and the immediate government, were the duties belonging to this relation."--_memories of youth and manhood_, vol. i. p. , note. tutor, college. at the universities of oxford and cambridge, an officer connected with a college, whose duties are described in the annexed extracts. with reference to oxford, de quincey remarks: "each college takes upon itself the regular instruction of its separate inmates,--of these and of no others; and for this office it appoints, after careful selection, trial, and probation, the best qualified amongst those of its senior members who choose to undertake a trust of such heavy responsibility. these officers are called tutors; and they are connected by duties and by accountability, not with the university at all, but with their own private colleges. the public tutors appointed in each college [are] on the scale of one to each dozen or score of students."--_life and manners_, boston, , p. . bristed, writing of cambridge, says: "when, therefore, a boy, or, as we should call him, a young man, leaves his school, public or private, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and 'goes up' to the university, he necessarily goes up to some particular college, and the first academical authority he makes acquaintance with in the regular order of things is the college tutor. this gentleman has usually taken high honors either in classics or mathematics, and one of his duties is naturally to lecture. but this by no means constitutes the whole, or forms the most important part, of his functions. he is the medium of all the students' pecuniary relations with the college. he sends in their accounts every term, and receives the money through his banker; nay, more, he takes in the bills of their tradesmen, and settles them also. further, he has the disposal of the college rooms, and assigns them to their respective occupants. when i speak of the college _tutor_, it must not be supposed that one man is equal to all this work in a large college,--trinity, for instance, which usually numbers four hundred undergraduates in residence. a large college has usually two tutors,--trinity has three,--and the students are equally divided among them,--_on their sides_, the phrase is,--without distinction of year, or, as we should call it, of _class_. the jurisdiction of the rooms is divided in like manner. the tutor is supposed to stand _in loco parentis_; but having sometimes more than a hundred young men under him, he cannot discharge his duties in this respect very thoroughly, nor is it generally expected that he should."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. , . tutorial. belonging to or exercised by a tutor or instructor. even while he is engaged in his "_tutorial_" duties, &c.--_am. lit. mag._, vol. iv. p. . tutoric. pertaining to a tutor. a collection of two was not then considered a sure prognostic of rebellion, and spied out vigilantly by _tutoric_ eyes.--_harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . tutorific. the same as _tutoric_. while thus in doubt they hesitating stand, approaches near the _tutorific_ band. _yale tomahawk_, may, . "old yale," of thee we sing, thou art our theme, of thee with all thy _tutorific_ host.--_ibid._ tutoring freshmen. of the various means used by sophomores to trouble freshmen, that of _tutoring_ them, as described in the following extract from the sketches of yale college, is not at all peculiar to that institution, except in so far as the name is concerned. "the ancient customs of subordination among the classes, though long since abrogated, still preserve a part of their power over the students, not only of this, but of almost every similar institution. the recently exalted sophomore, the dignified junior, and the venerable senior, look back with equal humor at the 'greenness' of their first year. the former of these classes, however, is chiefly notorious in the annals of freshman capers. to them is allotted the duty of fumigating the room of the new-comer, and preparing him, by a due induction into the mysteries of yale, for the duties of his new situation. of these performances, the most systematic is commonly styled _tutoring_, from the character assumed by the officiating sophomore. seated solemnly in his chair of state, arrayed in a pompous gown, with specs and powdered hair, he awaits the approach of the awe-struck subject, who has been duly warned to attend his pleasure, and fitly instructed to make a low reverence and stand speechless until addressed by his illustrious superior. a becoming impression has also been conveyed of the dignity, talents, and profound learning and influence into the congregated presence of which he is summoned. everything, in short, which can increase his sufficiently reverent emotions, or produce a readier or more humble obedience, is carefully set forth, till he is prepared to approach the door with no little degree of that terror with which the superstitious inquirer enters the mystic circle of the magician. a shaded light gleams dimly out into the room, and pours its fuller radiance upon a ponderous volume of hebrew; a huge pile of folios rests on the table, and the eye of the fearful freshman half ventures to discover that they are tomes of the dead languages. "but first he has, in obedience to his careful monitor, bowed lowly before the dignified presence; and, hardly raising his eyes, he stands abashed at his awful situation, waiting the supreme pleasure of the supposed officer. a benignant smile lights up the tutor's grave countenance; he enters strangely enough into familiar talk with the recently admitted collegiate; in pathetic terms he describes the temptations of this _great_ city, the thousand dangers to which he will be exposed, the vortex of ruin into which, if he walks unwarily, he will be surely plunged. he fires the youthful ambition with glowing descriptions of the honors that await the successful, and opens to his eager view the dazzling prospect of college fame. nor does he fail to please the youthful aspirant with assurances of the kindly notice of the faculty; he informs him of the satisfactory examination he has passed, and the gratification of the president at his uncommon proficiency; and having thus filled the buoyant imagination of his dupe with the most glowing college air-castles, dismisses him from his august presence, after having given him especial permission to call on any important occasion hereafter."--pp. - . tutor, private. at the universities of oxford and cambridge, an instructor, whose position and studies are set forth in the following extracts. "besides the public tutors appointed in each college," says de quincey, writing of oxford, "there are also tutors strictly private, who attend any students in search of special and extraordinary aid, on terms settled privately by themselves. of these persons, or their existence, the college takes no cognizance." "these are the working agents in the oxford system." "the _tutors_ of oxford correspond to the _professors_ of other universities."--_life and manners_, boston, , pp. , . referring to cambridge, bristed remarks: "the private tutor at an english university corresponds, as has been already observed, in many respects, to the _professor_ at a german. the german professor is not _necessarily_ attached to any specific chair; he receives no _fixed_ stipend, and has not public lecture-rooms; he teaches at his own house, and the number of his pupils depends on his reputation. the cambridge private tutor is also a graduate, who takes pupils at his rooms in numbers proportionate to his reputation and ability. and although while the german professor is regularly licensed as such by his university, and the existence of the private tutor _as such_ is not even officially recognized by his, still this difference is more apparent than real; for the english university has _virtually_ licensed the tutor to instruct in a particular branch by the standing she has given him in her examinations." "students come up to the university with all degrees of preparation.... to make up for former deficiences, and to direct study so that it may not be wasted, are two _desiderata_ which probably led to the introduction of private tutors, once a partial, now a general appliance."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, pp. - . tutorship. the office of a tutor.--_hooker_. in the following passage, this word is used as a titulary compellation, like the word _lordship_. one morning, as the story goes, before his _tutorship_ arose.--_rebelliad_, p. . tutors' pasture. in , john bulkley, the "first master of arts in harvard college," by a deed, gave to mr. dunster, the president of that institution, two acres of land in cambridge, during his life. the deed then proceeds: "if at any time he shall leave the presidency, or shall decease, i then desire the college to appropriate the same to itself for ever, as a small gift from an alumnus, bearing towards it the greatest good-will." "after president dunster's resignation," says quincy, "the corporation gave the income of bulkley's donation to the tutors, who received it for many years, and hence the enclosure obtained the name of '_tutors' pasture_,' or '_fellows' orchard_.'" in the donation book of the college, the deed is introduced as "extractum doni pomarii sociorum per johannem bulkleium."--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. i. pp. , . for further remarks on this subject, see peirce's "history of harvard university," pp. , , , also chap. xiii., and "memorial of john s. popkin, d.d.," pp. , . twitch a twelve. at middlebury college, to make a perfect recitation; twelve being the maximum mark for scholarship. _u_. ugly knife. see jack-knife. undergraduate. a student, or member of a university or college, who has not taken his first degree.--_webster_. undergraduate. noting or pertaining to a student of a college who has not taken his first degree. the _undergraduate_ students shall be divided into four distinct classes.--_laws yale coll._, , p. . with these the _undergraduate_ course is not intended to interfere.--_yale coll. cat._, - , p. . undergraduateship. the state of being an undergraduate.--_life of paley_. university. an assemblage of colleges established in any place, with professors for instructing students in the sciences and other branches of learning, and where degrees are conferred. a _university_ is properly a universal school, in which are taught all branches of learning, or the four faculties of theology, medicine, law, and the sciences and arts.--_cyclopædia_. . at some american colleges, a name given to a university student. the regulation in reference to this class at union college is as follows:--"students, not regular members of college, are allowed, as university students, to prosecute any branches for which they are qualified, provided they attend three recitations daily, and conform in all other respects to the laws of college. on leaving college, they receive certificates of character and scholarship."--_union coll. cat._, . the eyes of several freshmen and _universities_ shone with a watery lustre.--_the parthenon_, vol. i. p. . up. to be _up_ in a subject, is to be informed in regard to it. _posted_ expresses a similar idea. the use of this word, although common among collegians, is by no means confined to them. in our past history, short as it is, we would hardly expect them to be well _up_.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . he is well _up_ in metaphysics.--_ibid._, p. . upper house. see senate. _v_. vacation. the intermission of the regular studies and exercises of a college or other seminary, when the students have a recess.--_webster_. in the university of cambridge, eng., there are three vacations during each year. christmas vacation begins on the th of december, and ends on the th of january. easter vacation begins on the friday before palm sunday, and ends on the eleventh day after easter-day. the long vacation begins on the friday succeeding the first tuesday in july, and ends on the th of october. at the university of oxford there are four vacations in each year. at dublin university there are also four vacations, which correspond nearly with the vacations of oxford. see term. valediction. a farewell; a bidding farewell. used sometimes with the meaning of _valedictory_ or _valedictory oration_. two publick orations, by the candidates: the one to give a specimen of their knowledge, &c., and the other to give a grateful and pathetick _valediction_ to all the officers and members of the society.--_clap's hist. yale coll._, p. . valedictorian. the student of a college who pronounces the valedictory oration at the annual commencement.--_webster_. valedictory. in american colleges, a farewell oration or address spoken at commencement, by a member of the class which receive the degree of bachelor of arts, and take their leave of college and of each other. varmint. at cambridge, england, and also among the whip gentry, this word signifies natty, spruce, dashing; e.g. he is quite _varmint_; he sports a _varmint_ hat, coat, &c. a _varmint_ man spurns a scholarship, would consider it a degradation to be a fellow.--_gradus ad cantab._, p. . the handsome man, my friend and pupil, was naturally enough a bit of a swell, or _varmint_ man.--_alma mater_, vol. ii. p. . verger. at the university of oxford, an officer who walks first in processions, and carries a silver rod. vice-chancellor. an officer in a university, in england, a distinguished member, who is annually elected to manage the affairs in the absence of the chancellor. he must be the head of a college, and during his continuance in office he acts as a magistrate for the university, town, and county.--_cam. cal._ at oxford, the vice-chancellor holds a court, in which suits may be brought against any member of the university. he never walks out, without being preceded by a yeoman-bedel with his silver staff. at cambridge, the mayor and bailiffs of the town are obliged, at their election, to take certain oaths before the vice-chancellor. the vice-chancellor has the sole right of licensing wine and ale-houses in cambridge, and of _discommuning_ any tradesman or inhabitant who has violated the university privileges or regulations. in both universities, the vice-chancellor is nominated by the heads of houses, from among themselves. vice-master. an officer of a college in the english universities who performs the duties of the master in his absence. visitation. the act of a superior or superintending officer, who visits a corporation, college, church, or other house, to examine into the manner in which it is conducted, and see that its laws and regulations are duly observed and executed.--_cyc._ in july, , a law was formally enacted, "that twice in the year, viz. at the semiannual _visitation_ of the committee of the overseers, some of the scholars, at the direction of the president and tutors, shall publicly exhibit specimens of their proficiency," &c.--_quincy's hist. harv. univ._, vol. ii. p. . viva voce. latin; literally, _with the living voice_. in the english universities, that part of an examination which is carried on orally. the examination involves a little _viva voce_, and it was said, that, if a man did his _viva voce_ well, none of his papers were looked at but the paley.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . in combination room, where once i sat at _viva voce_, wretched, ignorant, the wine goes round, and wit, and pleasant talk.--_household words_, am. ed., vol. xi. p. . _w_. walling. at the university of oxford, the punishment of _walling_, as it is popularly denominated, consists in confining a student to the walls of his college for a certain period. warden. the master or president of a college.--_england_. warning. in many colleges, when it is ascertained that a student is not living in accordance with the laws of the institution, he is usually informed of the fact by a _warning_, as it is called, from one of the faculty, which consists merely of friendly caution and advice, thus giving him an opportunity, by correcting his faults, to escape punishment. sadly i feel i should have been saved by numerous _warnings_. _harvardiana_, vol. iii. p. . no more shall "_warnings_" in their hearing ring, nor "admonitions" haunt their aching head. _yale lit. mag._, vol. xv. p. . wedge. at the university of cambridge, eng., the man whose name is the last on the list of honors in the voluntary classical examination, which follows the last examination required by statute, is called the _wedge_. "the last man is called the _wedge_" says bristed, "corresponding to the spoon in mathematics. this name originated in that of the man who was last on the first tripos list (in ), _wedgewood_. some one suggested that the _wooden wedge_ was a good counterpart to the _wooden spoon_, and the appellation stuck."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . wet. to christen a new garment by treating one's friends when one first appears in it; e.g.:--a. "have you _wet_ that new coat yet?" b. "no." a. "well, then, i should recommend to you the propriety of so doing." b. "what will you drink?" this word, although much used among students, is by no means confined to them. whinnick. at hamilton college, to refuse to fulfil a promise or engagement; to retreat from a difficulty; to back out. white-hood house. see senate. wigs. the custom of wearing wigs was, perhaps, observed nowhere in america during the last century with so much particularity as at the older colleges. of this the following incident is illustrative. mr. joseph palmer, who graduated at harvard in the year , entered college at the age of fourteen; but, although so young, was required immediately after admission to cut off his long, flowing hair, and to cover his head with an unsightly bag-wig. at the beginning of the present century, wigs were not wholly discarded, although the fashion of wearing the hair in a queue was more in vogue. from a record of curious facts, it appears that the last wig which appeared at commencement in harvard college was worn by mr. john marsh, in the year . see dress. will. at harvard college, it was at one time the mode for the student to whom had been given the jack-knife in consequence of his ugliness, to transmit the inheritance, when he left, to some one of equal pretensions in the class next below him. at one period, this transmission was effected by a _will_, in which not only the knife, but other articles, were bequeathed. as the st of june was, till of late years, the day on which the members of the senior class closed their collegiate studies, and retired to make preparations for the ensuing commencement, wills were usually dated at that time. the first will of this nature of which mention is made is that of mr. william biglow, a member of the class of , and the recipient for that year of the knife. it appeared in the department entitled "omnium gatherum" of the federal orrery, published at boston, april , , in these words:-- "a will: being the last words of charles chatterbox, esq., late worthy and much lamented member of the laughing club of harvard universitt, who departed college life, june , , in the twenty-first year of his age. "i, charley chatter, sound of mind, to making fun am much inclined; so, having cause to apprehend my college life is near its end, all future quarrels to prevent, i seal this will and testament. "my soul and body, while together, i send the storms of life to weather; to steer as safely as they can, to honor god, and profit man. "_imprimis_, then, my bed and bedding, my only chattels worth the sledding, consisting of a maple stead, a counterpane, and coverlet, two cases with the pillows in, a blanket, cord, a winch and pin, two sheets, a feather bed and hay-tick, i order sledded up to _natick_, and that with care the sledder save them for those kind parents, first who gave them. "_item_. the laughing club, so blest, who think this life what 't is,--a jest,-- collect its flowers from every spray, and laugh its goading thorns away; from whom to-morrow i dissever, take one sweet grin, and leave for ever; my chest, and all that in it is, i give and i bequeath them, viz.: westminster grammar, old and poor, another one, compiled by moor; a bunch of pamphlets pro and con the doctrine of salva-ti-on; the college laws, i'm freed from minding, a hebrew psalter, stripped from binding. a hebrew bible, too, lies nigh it, unsold--because no one would buy it. "my manuscripts, in prose and verse, they take for better and for worse; their minds enlighten with the best, and pipes and candles with the rest; provided that from them they cull my college exercises dull, on threadbare theme, with mind unwilling, strained out through fear of fine one shilling, to teachers paid t' avert an evil, like indian worship to the devil. the above-named manuscripts, i say. to club aforesaid i convey, provided that said themes, so given, full proofs that _genius won't be driven_, to our physicians be presented, as the best opiates yet invented. "_item_. the government of college, those liberal _helluos_ of knowledge, who, e'en in these degenerate days, deserve the world's unceasing praise; who, friends of science and of men, stand forth gomorrah's righteous ten; on them i naught but thanks bestow, for, like my cash, my credit's low; so i can give nor clothes nor wines, but bid them welcome to my fines. "_item_. my study desk of pine, that work-bench, sacred to the nine, which oft hath groaned beneath my metre, i give to pay my debts to peter. "_item_. two penknives with white handles, a bunch of quills, and pound of candles, a lexicon compiled by cole, a pewter spoon, and earthen bowl, a hammer, and two homespun towels, for which i yearn with tender bowels, since i no longer can control them, i leave to those sly lads who stole them. "_item_. a gown much greased in commons, a hat between a man's and woman's, a tattered coat of college blue, a fustian waistcoat torn in two, with all my rust, through college carried, i give to classmate o----,[ ] who's _married_. "_item_. c------ p------s[ ] has my knife, during his natural college life,-- that knife, which ugliness inherits, and due to his superior merits; and when from harvard he shall steer, i order him to leave it here, that 't may from class to class descend, till time and ugliness shall end. "the said c------ p------s, humor's son, who long shall stay when i am gone, the muses' most successful suitor, i constitute my executor; and for his trouble to requite him, member of laughing club i write him. "myself on life's broad sea i throw, sail with its joy, or stem its woe, no other friend to take my part, than careless head and honest heart. my purse is drained, my debts are paid, my glass is run, my will is made, to beauteous cam. i bid adieu, and with the world begin anew." following the example of his friend biglow, mr. prentiss, on leaving college, prepared a will, which afterwards appeared in one of the earliest numbers of the rural repository, a literary paper, the publication of which he commenced at leominster, mass., in the autumn of . thomas paine, afterwards robert treat paine, jr., immediately transferred it to the columns of the federal orrery, which paper he edited, with these introductory remarks: "having, in the second number of 'omnium gatherum' presented to our readers the last will and testament of charles chatterbox, esq., of witty memory, wherein the said charles, now deceased, did lawfully bequeath to ch----s pr----s the celebrated 'ugly knife,' to be by him transmitted, at his collegiate demise, to the next succeeding candidate;... and whereas the said ch-----s pr-----s, on the st of june last, departed his aforesaid '_college life_,' thereby leaving to the inheritance of his successor the valuable legacy, which his illustrious friend had bequeathed, as an _entailed estate_, to the poets of the university,--we have thought proper to insert a full, true, and attested copy of the will of the last deceased heir, in order that the world may be furnished with a correct genealogy of this renowned _jack-knife_, whose pedigree will become as illustrious in after time as the family of the 'rolles,' and which will be celebrated by future wits as the most formidable _weapon_ of modern genius." "a will; being the last words op ch----s pr----s, late worthy and much lamented member of the laughing club of harvard university, who departed college life on the st of june, . "i, pr-----s ch----s, of judgment sound, in soul, in limb and wind, now found; i, since my head is full of wit, and must be emptied, or must split, in name of _president_ apollo, and other gentle folks, that follow: such as urania and clio, to whom my fame poetic i owe; with the whole drove of rhyming sisters, for whom my heart with rapture blisters; who swim in helicon uncertain whether a petticoat or shirt on, from vulgar ken their charms do cover, from every eye but _muses' lover_; in name of every ugly god; whose beauty scarce outshines a toad; in name of proserpine and pluto, who board in hell's sublimest grotto; in name of cerberus and furies, those damned _aristocrats_ and tories; in presence of two witnesses, who are as homely as you please, who are in truth, i'd not belie 'em, ten times as ugly, faith, as i am; but being, as most people tell us, a pair of jolly clever fellows, and classmates likewise, at this time, they sha'n't be honored in my rhyme. i--i say i, now make this will; let those whom i assign fulfil. i give, grant, render, and convey my goods and chattels thus away: that _honor of a college life_, _that celebrated_ ugly knife, which predecessor sawney[ ] orders, descending to time's utmost borders, to _noblest bard of homeliest phiz_, to have and hold and use as his; i now present c----s p----y s----r,[ ] to keep with his poetic lumber, to scrape his quid, and make a split, to point his pen for sharpening wit; and order that he ne'er abuse said ugly knife, in dirtier use, and let said charles, that best of writers, in prose satiric skilled to bite us, and equally in verse delight us, take special care to keep it clean from unpoetic hands,--i ween. and when those walls, the muses' seat, said s----r is obliged to quit, let some one of apollo's firing, to such heroic joys aspiring, who long has borne a poet's name, with said knife cut his way to fame. "i give to those that fish for parts, long sleepless nights, and aching hearts, a little soul, a fawning spirit, with half a grain of plodding merit, which is, as heaven i hope will say, giving what's not my own away. "those _oven baked_ or _goose egg folded_, who, though so often i have told it, with all my documents to show it, will scarce believe that i'm a poet, i give of criticism the lens with half an ounce of common sense. "and 't would a breach be of humanity, not to bequeath d---n[ ] my vanity; for 'tis a rule direct from heaven, _to him that hath, more shall be given_. "_item_. tom m----n,[ ] college lion, who'd ne'er spend cash enough to buy one, the boanerges of a pun, a man of science and of fun, that quite uncommon witty elf, who darts his bolts and shoots himself, who oft hath bled beneath my jokes, i give my old _tobacco-box_. "my _centinels_[ ] for some years past, so neatly bound with thread and paste, exposing jacobinic tricks, i give my chum _for politics_. "my neckcloth, dirty, old, yet _strong_, that round my neck has lasted long, i give big boy, for deed of pith, namely, to hang himself therewith. "to those who've parts at exhibition obtained by long, unwearied fishing, i say, to such unlucky wretches, i give, for wear, a brace of breeches; then used; as they're but little tore, i hope they'll show their tails no more. "and ere it quite has gone to rot, i, b---- give my blue great-coat, with all its rags, and dirt, and tallow, because he's such a dirty fellow. "now for my books; first, _bunyan's pilgrim_, (as he with thankful pleasure will grin,) though dog-leaved, torn, in bad type set in, 't will do quite well for classmate b----, and thus, with complaisance to treat her, 't will answer for another detur. "to him that occupies my study, i give, for use of making toddy, a bottle full of _white-face_ stingo, another, handy, called a _mingo_. my wit, as i've enough to spare, and many much in want there are, i ne'er intend to keep at _home_, but give to those that handiest come, having due caution, _where_ and _when_, never to spatter _gentlemen_. the world's loud call i can't refuse, the fine productions of my muse; if _impudence_ to _fame_ shall waft her, i'll give the public all, hereafter. my love-songs, sorrowful, complaining, (the recollection puts me pain in,) the last sad groans of deep despair, that once could all my entrails tear; my farewell sermon to the ladies; my satire on a woman's head-dress; my epigram so full of glee, pointed as epigrams should be; my sonnets soft, and sweet as lasses, my geography of mount parnassus; with all the bards that round it gather, and variations of the weather; containing more true humorous satire, than's oft the lot of human nature; ('o dear, what can the matter be!' i've given away my _vanity_; the vessel can't so much contain, it runs o'er and comes back again.) my blank verse, poems so majestic, my rhymes heroic, tales agrestic; the whole, i say, i'll overhaul 'em, collect and publish in a volume. "my heart, which thousand ladies crave, that i intend my wife shall have. i'd give my foibles to the wind, and leave my vices all behind; but much i fear they'll to me stick, where'er i go, through thin and thick. on wisdom's _horse_, oh, might i ride, whose steps let prudence' bridle guide. thy loudest voice, o reason, lend, and thou, philosophy, befriend. may candor all my actions guide, and o'er my every thought preside, and in thy ear, o fortune, one word, let thy swelled canvas bear me onward, thy favors let me ever see, and i'll be much obliged to thee; and come with blooming visage meek, come, health, and ever flush my cheek; o bid me in the morning rise, when tinges sol the eastern skies; at breakfast, supper-time, or dinner, let me against thee be no sinner. "and when the glass of life is run, and i behold my setting sun, may conscience sound be my protection, and no ungrateful recollection, no gnawing cares nor tumbling woes, disturb the quiet of life's close. and when death's gentle feet shall come to bear me to my endless home, oh! may my soul, should heaven but save it, safely return to god who gave it." _federal orrery_, oct. , . _buckingham's reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. - , - . it is probable that the idea of a "college will" was suggested to biglow by "father abbey's will," portions of which, till the present generation, were "familiar to nearly all the good housewives of new england." from the history of this poetical production, which has been lately printed for private circulation by the rev. john langdon sibley of harvard college, the annexed transcript of the instrument itself, together with the love-letter which was suggested by it, has been taken. the instances in which the accepted text differs from a broadside copy, in the possession of the editor of this work, are noted at the foot of the page. "father abbey's will: to which is now added, a letter of courtship to his virtuous and amiable widow. "_cambridge, december_, . "some time since died here mr. matthew abbey, in a very advanced age: he had for a great number of years served the college in quality of bedmaker and sweeper: having no child, his wife inherits his whole estate, which he bequeathed to her by his last will and testament, as follows, viz.:-- "to my dear wife my joy and life, i freely now do give her, my whole estate, with all my plate, being just about to leave her. "my tub of soap, a long cart-rope, a frying pan and kettle, an ashes[ ] pail, a threshing-flail, an iron wedge and beetle. "two painted chairs, nine warden pears, a large old dripping platter, this bed of hay on which i lay, an old saucepan for butter. "a little mug, a two-quart jug, a bottle full of brandy, a looking-glass to see your face, you'll find it very handy. "a musket true, as ever flew, a pound of shot and wallet, a leather sash, my calabash, my powder-horn and bullet. "an old sword-blade, a garden spade, a hoe, a rake, a ladder, a wooden can, a close-stool pan, a clyster-pipe and bladder. "a greasy hat, my old ram cat, a yard and half of linen, a woollen fleece, a pot of grease,[ ] in order for your spinning. "a small tooth comb, an ashen broom, a candlestick and hatchet, a coverlid striped down with red, a bag of rags to patch it. "a rugged mat, a tub of fat, a book put out by bunyan, another book by robin cook,[ ] a skein or two of spun-yarn. "an old black muff, some garden stuff, a quantity of borage,[ ] some devil's weed, and burdock seed, to season well your porridge. "a chafing-dish, with one salt-fish. if i am not mistaken, a leg of pork, a broken fork, and half a flitch of bacon. "a spinning-wheel, one peck of meal, a knife without a handle, a rusty lamp, two quarts of samp, and half a tallow candle. "my pouch and pipes, two oxen tripes, an oaken dish well carved, my little dog, and spotted hog, with two young pigs just starved. "this is my store, i have no more, i heartily do give it: my years are spun, my days are done, and so i think to leave it. "thus father abbey left his spouse, as rich as church or college mouse, which is sufficient invitation to serve the college in his station." _newhaven, january_ , . "our sweeper having lately buried his spouse, and accidentally hearing of the death and will of his deceased cambridge brother, has conceived a violent passion for the relict. as love softens the mind and disposes to poetry, he has eased himself in the following strains, which he transmits to the charming widow, as the first essay of his love and courtship. "mistress abbey to you i fly, you only can relieve me; to you i turn, for you i burn, if you will but believe me. "then, gentle dame, admit my flame, and grant me my petition; if you deny, alas! i die in pitiful condition. "before the news of your dear spouse had reached us at new haven, my dear wife dy'd, who was my bride in anno eighty-seven. "thus[ ] being free, let's both agree to join our hands, for i do boldly aver a widower is fittest for a widow. "you may be sure 't is not your dower i make this flowing verse on; in these smooth lays i only praise the glories[ ] of your person. "for the whole that was left by[ ] _mat._ fortune to me has granted in equal store, i've[ ] one thing more which matthew long had wanted. "no teeth, 't is true, you have to shew, the young think teeth inviting; but silly youths! i love those mouths[ ] where there's no fear of biting. "a leaky eye, that's never dry, these woful times is fitting. a wrinkled face adds solemn grace to folks devout at meeting. "[a furrowed brow, where corn might grow, such fertile soil is seen in 't, a long hook nose, though scorned by foes, for spectacles convenient.][ ] "thus to go on i would[ ] put down your charms from head to foot, set all your glory in verse before ye, but i've no mind to do 't.[ ] "then haste away, and make no stay; for soon as you come hither, we'll eat and sleep, make beds and sweep. and talk and smoke together. "but if, my dear, i must move there, tow'rds cambridge straight i'll set me.[ ] to touse the hay on which you lay, if age and you will let me."[ ] the authorship of father abbey's will and the letter of courtship is ascribed to the rev. john seccombe, who graduated at harvard college in the year . the former production was sent to england through the hands of governor belcher, and in may, , appeared both in the gentleman's magazine and the london magazine. the latter was also despatched to england, and was printed in the gentleman's magazine for june, and in the london magazine for august, . both were republished in the massachusetts magazine, november, . a most entertaining account of the author of these poems, and of those to whom they relate, may be found in the "historical and biographical notes" of the pamphlet to which allusion has been already made, and in the "cambridge [mass.] chronicle" of april , . wine. to drink wine. after "wining" to a certain extent, we sallied forth from his rooms.--_alma mater_, vol. i. p. . hither they repair each day after dinner "_to wine_." _ibid._, vol. i. p. . after dinner i had the honor of _wining_ with no less a personage than a fellow of the college.--_ibid._, vol. i. p. . in _wining_ with a fair one opposite, a luckless piece of jelly adhered to the tip of his still more luckless nose.--_the blank book of a small-colleger_, new york, , p. . wine party. among students at the university of cambridge, eng., an entertainment after dinner, which is thus described by bristed: "many assemble at _wine parties_ to chat over a frugal dessert of oranges, biscuits, and cake, and sip a few glasses of not remarkably good wine. these wine parties are the most common entertainments, being rather the cheapest and very much the most convenient, for the preparations required for them are so slight as not to disturb the studies of the hardest reading man, and they take place at a time when no one pretends to do any work."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . wire. at harvard college, a trick; an artifice; a stratagem; a _dodge_. wiry. trickish; artful. witenagemote. saxon, _witan_, to know, and _gemot_, a meeting, a council. in the university of oxford, the weekly meeting of the heads of the colleges.--_oxford guide_. wooden spoon. in the university of cambridge, eng., the scholar whose name stands last of all on the printed list of honors, at the bachelors' commencement in january, is scoffingly said to gain the _wooden spoon_. he is also very currently himself called the _wooden spoon_. a young academic coming into the country immediately after this great competition, in which he had conspicuously distinguished himself, was asked by a plain country gentleman, "pray, sir, is my jack a wrangler?" "no, sir." now jack had confidently pledged himself to his uncle that he would take his degree with honor. "a senior optime?" "no, sir." "why, what was he then?" "wooden spoon!" "best suited to his wooden head," said the mortified inquirer.--_forby's vocabulary_, vol. ii. p. . it may not perhaps be improper to mention one very remarkable personage, i mean "the _wooden spoon_." this luckless wight (for what cause i know not) is annually the universal butt and laughing-stock of the whole senate-house. he is the last of those young men who take honors, in his year, and is called a junior optime; yet, notwithstanding his being in fact superior to them all, the very lowest of the [greek: oi polloi], or gregarious undistinguished bachelors, think themselves entitled to shoot the pointless arrows of their clumsy wit against the _wooden spoon_; and to reiterate the stale and perennial remark, that "wranglers are born with gold spoons in their mouths, senior optimes with silver, junior optimes with _wooden_, and the [greek: oi polloi] with leaden ones."--_gent. mag._, , p. . who while he lives must wield the boasted prize, whose value all can feel, the weak, the wise; displays in triumph his distinguished boon, the solid honors of the _wooden spoon_. _grad. ad cantab._, p. . . at yale college, this title is conferred on the student who takes the last appointment at the junior exhibition. the following account of the ceremonies incident to the presentation of the wooden spoon has been kindly furnished by a graduate of that institution. "at yale college the honors, or, as they are there termed, appointments, are given to a class twice during the course;--upon the merits of the two preceding years, at the end of the first term, junior; and at the end of the second term, senior, upon the merits of the whole college course. there are about eight grades of appointments, the lowest of which is the third colloquy. each grade has its own standard, and if a number of students have attained to the same degree, they receive the same appointment. it is rarely the case, however, that more than one student can claim the distinction of a third colloquy; but when there are several, they draw lots to see which is entitled to be considered properly _the_ third colloquy man. "after the junior appointments are awarded, the members of the junior class hold an exhibition similar to the regular junior exhibition, and present a _wooden spoon_ to the man who received the lowest honor in the gift of the faculty. "the exhibition takes place in the evening, at some public hall in town. except to those engaged in the arrangements, nothing is known about it among the students at large, until the evening of the performances, when notices of the hour and place are quietly circulated at prayers, in order that it may not reach the ears of the faculty, who are ever too ready to participate in the sports of the students, and to make the result tell unfavorably against the college welfare of the more prominent characters. "as the appointed hour approaches, long files of black coats may be seen emerging from the dark halls, and winding their way through the classic elms towards the temple, the favorite scene of students' exhibitions and secret festivals. when they reach the door, each man must undergo the searching scrutiny of the door-keeper, usually disguised as an indian, to avoid being recognized by a college officer, should one chance to be in the crowd, and no one is allowed to enter unless he is known. "by the time the hour of the exercises has arrived, the hall is densely packed with undergraduates and professional students. the president, who is a non-appointment man, and probably the poorest scholar in the class, sits on a stage with his associate professors. appropriate programmes, printed in the college style, are scattered throughout the house. as the hour strikes, the president arises with becoming dignity, and, instead of the usual phrase, 'musicam audeamus,' restores order among the audience by 'silentiam audeamus,' and then addresses the band, 'musica cantetur.' "then follow a series of burlesque orations, dissertations, and disputes, upon scientific and other subjects, from the wittiest and cleverest men in the class, and the house is kept in a continual roar of laughter. the highest appointment men frequently take part in the speeches. from time to time the band play, and the college choir sing pieces composed for the occasion. in one of the best, called audacia, composed in imitation of the crambambuli song, by a member of the class to which the writer belonged, the wooden spoon is referred to in the following stanza:-- 'but do not think our life is aimless; o no! we crave one blessed boon, it is the prize of value nameless, the honored, classic wooden spoon; but give us this, we'll shout hurrah! o nothing like audacia!' "after the speeches are concluded and the music has ceased, the president rises and calls the name of the hero of the evening, who ascends the stage and stands before the high dignitary. the president then congratulates him upon having attained to so eminent a position, and speaks of the pride that he and his associates feel in conferring upon him the highest honor in their gift,--the wooden spoon. he exhorts him to pursue through life the noble cruise he has commenced in college,--not seeking glory as one of the illiterate,--the [greek: oi polloi],--nor exactly on the fence, but so near to it that he may safely be said to have gained the 'happy medium.' "the president then proceeds to the grand ceremony of the evening, --the delivery of the wooden spoon,--a handsomely finished spoon, or ladle, with a long handle, on which is carved the name of the class, and the rank and honor of the recipient, and the date of its presentation. the president confers the honor in latin, provided he and his associates are able to muster a sufficient number of sentences. "when the president resumes his seat, the third colloquy man thanks his eminent instructors for the honor conferred upon him, and thanks (often with sincerity) the class for the distinction he enjoys. the exercises close with music by the band, or a burlesque colloquy. on one occasion, the colloquy was announced upon the programme as 'a practical illustration of humbugging,' with a long list of witty men as speakers, to appear in original costumes. curiosity was very much excited, and expectation on the tiptoe, when the colloquy became due. the audience waited and waited until sufficiently _humbugged_, when they were allowed to retire with the laugh turned against them. "many men prefer the wooden spoon to any other college honor or prize, because it comes directly from their classmates, and hence, perhaps, the faculty disapprove of it, considering it as a damper to ambition and college distinctions." this account of the wooden spoon exhibition was written in the year . since then its privacy has been abolished, and its exercises are no longer forbidden by the faculty. tutors are now not unfrequently among the spectators at the presentation, and even ladies lend their presence, attention, and applause, to beautify, temper, and enliven the occasion. the "_wooden spoon_," tradition says, was in ancient times presented to the greatest glutton in the class, by his appreciating classmates. it is now given to the one whose name comes last on the list of appointees for the junior exhibition, though this rule is not strictly followed. the presentation takes place during the summer term, and in vivacity with respect to the literary exercises, and brilliance in point of audience, forms a rather formidable rival to the regularly authorized junior exhibition.--_songs of tale_, preface, , p. . of the songs which are sung in connection with the wooden spoon presentation, the following is given as a specimen. "air,--_yankee doodle_. "come, juniors, join this jolly tune our fathers sang before us; and praise aloud the wooden spoon in one long, swelling chorus. yes! let us, juniors, shout and sing the spoon and all its glory,-- until the welkin loudly ring and echo back the story. "who would not place this precious boon above the greek oration? who would not choose the wooden spoon before a dissertation? then, let, &c. "some pore o'er classic works jejune, through all their life at college,-- i would not pour, but use the spoon to fill my mind with knowledge. so let, &c. "and if i ever have a son upon my knee to dandle, i'll feed him with a wooden spoon of elongated handle. then let, &c. "most college honors vanish soon, alas! returning never, but such a noble wooden spoon is tangible for ever. so let, &c. "now give, in honor of the spoon, three cheers, long, loud, and hearty, and three for every honored june in coch-le-au-re-a-ti.[ ] yes! let us, juniors, shout and sing the spoon and all its glory,-- until the welkin loudly ring and echo back the story." _songs of yale_, , p. . wrangler. in the university of cambridge, eng., at the conclusion of the tenth term, the final examination in the senate-house takes place. a certain number of those who pass this examination in the best manner are called _wranglers_. the usual number of _wranglers_--whatever wrangler may have meant once, it now implies a first class man in mathematics--is thirty-seven or thirty-eight. sometimes it falls to thirty-five, and occasionally rises above forty.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . see senior wrangler. wranglership. the office of a _wrangler_. he may be considered pretty safe for the highest _wranglership_ out of trinity.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . wrestling-match. at harvard college, it was formerly the custom, on the first monday of the term succeeding the commencement vacation, for the sophomores to challenge the freshmen who had just entered college to a wrestling-match. a writer in the new england magazine, , in an article entitled "harvard college forty years ago," remarks as follows on this subject: "another custom, not enjoined by the government, had been in vogue from time immemorial. that was for the sophomores to challenge the freshmen to a wrestling-match. if the sophomores were thrown, the juniors gave a similar challenge. if these were conquered, the seniors entered the lists, or treated the victors to as much wine, punch, &c. as they chose to drink. in my class, there were few who had either taste, skill, or bodily strength for this exercise, so that we were easily laid on our backs, and the sophomores were acknowledged our superiors, in so far as 'brute force' was concerned. being disgusted with these customs, we held a class-meeting, early in our first quarter, and voted unanimously that we should never send a freshman on an errand; and, with but one dissenting voice, that we would not challenge the next class that should enter to wrestle. when the latter vote was passed, our moderator, pointing at the dissenting individual with the finger of scorn, declared it to be a vote, _nemine contradicente_. we commenced sophomores, another freshman class entered, the juniors challenged them, and were thrown. the seniors invited them to a treat, and these barbarous customs were soon after abolished."--vol. iii. p. . the freshman class above referred to, as superior to the junior, was the one which graduated in , of which mr. thomas mason, surnamed "the college lion," was a member,--"said," remarks mr. buckingham, "to be the greatest _wrestler_ that was ever in college. he was settled as a clergyman at northfield, mass., resigned his office some years after, and several times represented that town in the legislature of massachusetts." charles prentiss, the wit of the class of ' , in a will written on his departure from college life, addresses mason as follows:-- "item. tom m----n, college lion, who'd ne'er spend cash enough to buy one, the boanerges of a pun, a man of science and of fun, that quite uncommon witty elf, who darts his bolts and shoots himself, who oft has bled beneath my jokes, i give my old _tobacco-box_." _buckingham's reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. . the fame which mr. mason had acquired while in college for bodily strength and skill in wrestling, did not desert him after he left. while settled as a minister at northfield, a party of young men from vermont challenged the young men of that town to a bout at wrestling. the challenge was accepted, and on a given day the two parties assembled at northfield. after several rounds, when it began to appear that the vermonters were gaining the advantage, a proposal was made, by some who had heard of mr. mason's exploits, that he should be requested to take part in the contest. it had now grown late, and the minister, who usually retired early, had already betaken himself to bed. being informed of the request of the wrestlers, for a long time he refused to go, alleging as reasons his ministerial capacity, the force of example, &c. finding these excuses of no avail, he finally arose, dressed himself, and repaired to the scene of action. shouts greeted him on his arrival, and he found himself on the wrestling-field, as he had stood years ago at cambridge. the champion of the vermonters came forward, flushed with his former victories. after playing around him for some time, mr. mason finally threw him. having by this time collected his ideas of the game, when another antagonist appeared, tripping up his heels with perfect ease, he suddenly twitched him off his centre and laid him on his back. victory was declared in favor of northfield, and the good minister was borne home in triumph. similar to these statements are those of professor sidney willard relative to the same subject, contained in his late work entitled "memories of youth and manhood." speaking of the observances in vogue at harvard college in the year , he says:--"next to being indoctrinated in the customs, so called, by the sophomore class, there followed the usual annual exhibition of the athletic contest between that class and the freshman class, namely, the wrestling-match. on some day of the second week in the term, after evening prayers, the two classes assembled on the play-ground and formed an extended circle, from which a stripling of the sophomore class advanced into the area, and, in terms justifying the vulgar use of the derivative word sophomorical, defied his competitors, in the name of his associates, to enter the lists. he was matched by an equal in stature, from that part of the circle formed by the new-comers. beginning with these puny athletes, as one and another was prostrated on either side, the contest advanced through the intermediate gradations of strength and skill, with increasing excitement of the parties and spectators, until it reached its summit by the struggle of the champion or coryphæus in reserve on each of the opposite sides. i cannot now affirm with certainty the result of the contest; whether it was a drawn battle, whether it ended with the day, or was postponed for another trial. it probably ended in the defeat of the younger party, for there were more and mightier men among their opponents. had we been victorious, it would have behooved us, according to established precedents, to challenge the junior class, which was not done. such a result, if it had taken place, could not fade from the memory of the victors; while failure, on the contrary, being an issue to be looked for, would soon be dismissed from the thoughts of the vanquished. instances had occurred of the triumph of the freshman class, and one of them recent, when a challenge in due form was sent to the juniors, who, thinking the contest too doubtful, wisely resolved to let the victors rejoice in their laurels already won; and, declining to meet them in the gymnasium, invited them to a sumptuous feast instead. "wrestling was, at an after period, i cannot say in what year, superseded by football; a grovelling and inglorious game in comparison. wrestling is an art; success in the exercise depends not on mere bodily strength. it had, at the time of which i have spoken, its well-known and acknowledged technical rules, and any violation of them, alleged against one who had prostrated his adversary, became a matter of inquiry. if it was found that the act was not achieved _secundum artem_, it was void, and might be followed by another trial."--vol. i. pp. , . remarks on this subject are continued in another part of the work from which the above extract is made, and the story of thomas mason is related, with a few variations from the generally received version. "wrestling," says professor willard, "was reduced to an art, which had its technical terms for the movement of the limbs, and the manner of using them adroitly, with the skill acquired by practice in applying muscular force at the right time and in the right degree. success in the art, therefore, depended partly on skill; and a violation of the rules of the contest vitiated any apparent triumph gained by mere physical strength. there were traditionary accounts of some of our predecessors who were commemorated as among the coryphæi of wrestlers; a renown that was not then looked upon with contempt. the art of wrestling was not then confined to the literary gymnasium. it was practised in every rustic village. there were even migrating braves and hectors, who, in their wanderings from their places of abode to villages more or less distant, defied the chiefest of this order of gymnasts to enter the lists. in a country town of massachusetts remote from the capital, one of these wanderers appeared about half a century since, and issued a general challenge against the foremost wrestlers. the clergyman of the town, a son of harvard, whose fame in this particular had travelled from the academic to the rustic green, was apprised of the challenge, and complied with the solicitation of some of his young parishioners to accept it in their behalf. his triumph over the challenger was completed without agony or delay, and having prostrated him often enough to convince him of his folly, he threw him over the stone wall, and gravely admonished him against repeating his visit, and disturbing the peace of his parish."--vol. i. p. . the peculiarities of thomas mason were his most noticeable characteristics. as an orator, his eloquence was of the _ore rotundo_ order; as a writer, his periods were singularly johnsonian. he closed his ministerial labors in northfield, february , , on which occasion he delivered a farewell discourse, taking for his text, the words of paul to timothy: "the time of my departure is at hand. i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course, i have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." as a specimen of his style of writing, the following passages are presented, taken from this discourse:--"time, which forms the scene of all human enterprise, solicitude, toil, and improvement, and which fixes the limitations of all human pleasures and sufferings, has at length conducted us to the termination of our long-protracted alliance. an assignment of the reasons of this measure must open a field too extended and too diversified for our present survey. nor could a development of the whole be any way interesting to us, to whom alone this address is now submitted. suffice it to say, that in the lively exercise of mutual and unimpaired friendship and confidence, the contracting parties, after sober, continued, and unimpassioned deliberation, have yielded to existing circumstances, as a problematical expedient of social blessing." after commenting upon the declaration of paul, he continued: "the apostle proceeds, 'i have fought a good fight' would to god i could say the same! let me say, however, without the fear of contradiction, 'i have fought a fight!' how far it has been 'good,' i forbear to decide." his summing up was this: "you see, my hearers, all i can say, in common with the apostle in the text, is this: 'the time of my departure is at hand,'--and, 'i have finished my course.'" referring then to the situation which he had occupied, he said: "the scene of our alliance and co-operation, my friends, has been one of no ordinary cast and character. the last half-century has been pregnant with novelty, project, innovation, and extreme excitement. the pillars of the social edifice have been shaken, and the whole social atmosphere has been decomposed by alchemical demagogues and revolutionary apes. the sickly atmosphere has suffused a morbid humor over the whole frame, and left the social body little more than 'the empty and bloody skin of an immolated victim.' "we pass by the ordinary incidents of alienation, which are too numerous, and too evanescent to admit of detail. but seasons and circumstances of great alarm are not readily forgotten. we have witnessed, and we have felt, my friends, a political convulsion, which seemed the harbinger of inevitable desolation. but it has passed by with a harmless explosion, and returning friends have paused in wonder, at a moment's suspension of friendship. mingled with the factitious mass, there was a large spice of sincerity which sanctified the whole composition, and restored the social body to sanity, health, and increased strength and vigor. "thrice happy must be our reflections could we stop here, and contemplate the ascending prosperity and increasing vigor of this religious community. but the one half has not yet been told,--the beginning has hardly been begun. could i borrow the language of the spirits of wrath,--was my pen transmuted to a viper's tooth dipped in gore,--was my paper transformed to a vellum which no light could illume, and which only darkness could render legible, i could, and i would, record a tale of blood, of which the foulest miscreant must burn in ceaseless anguish only once to have been suspected. but i refer to imagination what description can never reach." what the author referred to in this last paragraph no one knew, nor did he ever advance any explanation of these strange words. near the close of his discourse, he said: "standing in the place of a christian minister among you, through the whole course of my ministrations, it has been my great and leading aim ever to maintain and exhibit the character and example of a christian man. with clerical foppery, grimace, craft, and hypocrisy, i have had no concern. in the free participation of every innocent entertainment and delight, i have pursued an open, unreserved course, equally removed from the mummery of superstition and the dissipation of infidelity. and though i have enjoyed my full share of honor from the scandal of bigotry and malice, yet i may safely congratulate myself in the reflection, that by this liberal and independent progress were men weighed in the balance of intellectual, social, and moral worth, i have yet never lost a single friend who was worth preserving."--pp. , , , , , . _y_. yager fights. at bowdoin college, "_yager fights_," says a correspondent, "are the annual conflicts which occur between the townsmen and the students. the yagers (from the german _jager_, a hunter, a chaser) were accustomed, when the lumbermen came down the river in the spring, to assemble in force, march up to the college yard with fife and drum, get famously drubbed, and retreat in confusion to their dens. the custom has become extinct within the past four years, in consequence of the non-appearance of the yagers." yalensian. a student at or a member of yale college. in making this selection, we have been governed partly by poetic merit, but more by the associations connected with various pieces inserted, in the minds of the present generation of _yalensians_. --_preface to songs of yale_, . the _yalensian_ is off for commencement.--_yale lit. mag._, vol. xix. p. . yankee. according to the account of this word as given by dr. william gordon, it appears to have been in use among the students of harvard college at a very early period. a citation from his work will show this fact in its proper light. "you may wish to know the origin of the term _yankee_. take the best account of it which your friend can procure. it was a cant, favorite word with farmer jonathan hastings, of cambridge, about . two aged ministers, who were at the college in that town, have told me, they remembered it to have been then in use among the students, but had no recollection of it before that period. the inventor used it to express excellency. a _yankee_ good horse, or _yankee_ cider, and the like, were an excellent good horse and excellent cider. the students used to hire horses of him; their intercourse with him, and his use of the term upon all occasions, led them to adopt it, and they gave him the name of yankee jon. he was a worthy, honest man, but no conjurer. this could not escape the notice of the collegiates. yankee probably became a by-word among them to express a weak, simple, awkward person; was carried from the college with them when they left it, and was in that way circulated and established through the country, (as was the case in respect to hobson's choice, by the students at cambridge, in old england,) till, from its currency in new england, it was at length taken up and unjustly applied to the new-englanders in common, as a term of reproach."--_american war_, ed. , vol. i. pp. , . _thomas's spy_, april, , no. . in the massachusetts magazine, vol. vii., p. , the editor, the rev. thaddeus mason harris, d.d., of dorchester, referring to a letter written by the rev. john seccombe, and dated "cambridge, sept. , ," observes: "it is a most humorous narrative of the fate of a goose roasted at 'yankee hastings's,' and it concludes with a poem on the occasion, in the mock-heroic." the fact of the name is further substantiated in the following remarks by the rev. john langdon sibley, of harvard college: "jonathan hastings, steward of the college from to ,... was a son of jonathan hastings, a tanner, who was called 'yankee hastings,' and lived on the spot at the northwest corner of holmes place in old cambridge, where, not many years since, a house was built by the late william pomeroy."--_father abbey's will_, cambridge, mass., , pp. , . year. at the english universities, the undergraduate course is three years and a third. students of the first year are called freshmen, and the other classes at cambridge are, in popular phrase, designated successively second-year men, third-year men, and men who are just going out. the word _year_ is often used in the sense of class. the lecturer stands, and the lectured sit, even when construing, as the freshmen are sometimes asked to do; the other _years_ are only called on to listen.--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . of the "_year_" that entered with me at trinity, three men died before the time of graduating.--_ibid._, p. . yeoman-bedell. at the university of cambridge, eng., the _yeoman-bedell_ in processions precedes the esquire-bedells, carrying an ebony mace, tipped with silver.--_cam. guide_. at the university of oxford, the yeoman-bedels bear the silver staves in procession. the vice-chancellor never walks out without being preceded by a yeoman-bedel with his insignium of office.--_guide to oxford_. see beadle. young bursch. in the german universities, a name given to a student during his third term, or _semester_. the fox year is then over, and they wash the eyes of the new-baked _young bursche_, since during the fox-year he was held to be blind, the fox not being endued with reason.--_howitt's student life of germany_, am. ed., p. . a list of american colleges referred to in this work, in connection with particular words or customs. amherst college, amherst, mass., references. anderson collegiate institute, ind., references. bacon college, ky., reference. bethany college, bethany, va., references. bowdoin college, brunswick, me., references. brown university, providence, r.i., references. centre college, danville, ky., references. columbia [king's] college, new york., references. columbian college, washington, d.c., reference. dartmouth college, hanover, n.h., references. hamilton college, clinton, n.y., references. harvard college, cambridge, mass., references. jefferson college, canonsburg, penn., references. king's college. see columbia. middlebury college, middlebury, vt., references. new jersey, college of, princeton, n.j., references. new york, university of, new york., reference. north carolina, university of, chapel hill, n.c., references. pennsylvania, university of, philadelphia, penn., references. princeton college. see new jersey, college of. rutger's college, new brunswick, n.j., references. shelby college, shelbyville, ky., references. south carolina college, columbia, s.c., references. trinity college, hartford, conn., references. union college, schenectady, n.y., references. vermont, university of, burlington, vt., references. virginia, university of, albemarle co., va., references. washington college, washington, penn., references. wesleyan university, middletown, conn., references. western reserve college, hudson, ohio., reference. west point, n.y., reference. william and mary college, williamsburg, va., references. williams college, williamstown, mass., references. yale college, new haven, conn., references. the end. footnotes: [ ] hon. levi woodbury, whose subject was "progress." [ ] _vide_ aristophanes, _aves_. [ ] alcestis of euripides. [ ] see brick mill. [ ] at harvard college, sixty-eight commencements were held in the old parish church which "occupied a portion of the space between dane hall and the old presidential house." the period embraced was from to . there was no commencement in , on account of the small-pox; nor from to , seven years, on account of the revolutionary war. the first commencement in the new meeting-house was held in . in , there was rain at commencement, for the first time in thirty-five years. [ ] the graduating class usually waited on the table at dinner on commencement day. [ ] rev. john willard, s.t.d., of stafford, conn., a graduate of the class of . [ ] "men, some to pleasure, some to business, take; but every woman is at heart a rake." [ ] rev. joseph willard, s.t.d. [ ] the rev. dr. simeon howard, senior clergyman of the corporation, presided at the public exercises and announced the degrees. [ ] see under thesis and master's question. [ ] the old way of spelling the word sophomore, q.v. [ ] speaking of bachelors who are reading for fellowships, bristed says, they "wear black gowns with two strings hanging loose in front."--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . [ ] bristed speaks of the "blue and silver gown" of trinity fellow-commoners.--_five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . [ ] "a gold-tufted cap at cambridge designates a johnian or small-college fellow-commoner."--_ibid._, p. . [ ] "the picture is not complete without the 'men,' all in their academicals, as it is sunday. the blue gown of trinity has not exclusive possession of its own walks: various others are to be discerned, the pembroke looped at the sleeve, the christ's and catherine curiously crimped in front, and the johnian with its unmistakable 'crackling.'"--_bristed's five years in an eng. univ._, ed. d, p. . "on saturday evenings, sundays, and saints' days the students wear surplices instead of their gowns, and very innocent and exemplary they look in them."--_ibid._, p. . [ ] "the ignorance of the popular mind has often represented academicians riding, travelling, &c. in cap and gown. any one who has had experience of the academic costume can tell that a sharp walk on a windy day in it is no easy matter, and a ride or a row would be pretty near an impossibility. indeed, during these two hours [of hard exercise] it is as rare to see a student in a gown, as it is at other times to find him beyond the college walks without one."--_ibid._, p. . [ ] downing college. [ ] st. john's college. [ ] see under imposition. [ ] "narratur et prisci catonis sæpè mero caluisse virtus." horace, ode _ad amphoram_. [ ] education: a poem before [greek: phi. beta. kappa.] soc., , by william biglow. [ ] samuel x. . [ ] a printed "order of exhibition" was issued at harvard college in , for the first time. [ ] in reference to cutting lead from the old college. [ ] senior, as here used, indicates an officer of college, or a member of either of the three upper classes, agreeable to custom no. , above. [ ] the law in reference to footballs is still observed. [ ] see sophomore. [ ] i.e. tutor. [ ] abbreviated for cousin john, i.e. a privy. [ ] joseph willard, president of harvard college from to . [ ] timothy lindall jennison, tutor from to . [ ] james prescott, graduated in . [ ] robert wier, graduated in . [ ] joseph willard. [ ] dr. samuel williams, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. [ ] dr. eliphalet pearson, professor of hebrew and other oriental languages. [ ] eleazar james, tutor from to . [ ] jonathan burr, tutor , . [ ] "flag of the free heart's hope and home! by angel hands to valor given." _the american flag_, by j.r. drake. [ ] charles prentiss, who when this was written was a member of the junior class. both he and mr. biglow were fellows of "infinite jest," and were noted for the superiority of their talents and intellect. [ ] mr. biglow was known in college by the name of sawney, and was thus frequently addressed by his familiar friends in after life. [ ] charles pinckney sumner, afterwards a lawyer in boston, and for many years sheriff of the county of suffolk. [ ] a black man who sold pies and cakes. [ ] written after a general pruning of the trees around harvard college. [ ] doctor of medicine, or student of medicine. [ ] referring to the masks and disguises worn by the members at their meetings. [ ] a picture representing an examination and initiation into the society, fronting the title-page of the catalogue. [ ] leader dam, _armig._, m.d. et ex off l.k. et ll.d. et j.u.d. et p.d. et m.u.d, etc., etc., et ass. he was an empiric, who had offices at boston and philadelphia, where he sold quack medicines of various descriptions. [ ] christophe, the black prince of hayti. [ ] it is said he carried the bones of tom paine, the infidel, to england, to make money by exhibiting them, but some difficulty arising about the duty on them, he threw them overboard. [ ] he promulgated a theory that the earth was hollow, and that there was an entrance to it at the north pole. [ ] alexander the first of russia was elected a member, and, supposing the society to be an honorable one, forwarded to it a valuable present. [ ] he made speeches on the fourth of july at five or six o'clock in the morning, and had them printed and ready for sale, as soon as delivered, from his cart on boston common, from which he sold various articles. [ ] tibbets, a gambler, was attacked by snelling through the columns of the new england galaxy. [ ] referring to the degree given to the russian alexander, and the present received in return. [ ] . [ ] see dig. in this case, those who had parts at two exhibitions are thus designated. [ ] jonathan leonard, who afterwards graduated in the class of . [ ] . [ ] william a. barron, who was graduated in , and was tutor from to , was "among his contemporaries in office ... social and playful, fond of _bon-mots_, conundrums, and puns." walking one day with shapleigh and another gentleman, the conversation happened to turn upon the birthplace of shapleigh, who was always boasting that two towns claimed him as their citizen, as the towns, cities, and islands of greece claimed homer as a native. barron, with all the good humor imaginable, put an end to the conversation by the following epigrammatic impromptu:-- "kittery and york for shapleigh's birth contest; kittery won the prize, but york came off the best." [ ] in brady and tate, "hear, o my people." [ ] in brady and tate, "instruction." [ ] watts, "hear." [ ] see bohn. [ ] the triennial catalogue of harvard college was first printed in a pamphlet form in the year . [ ] jesse olds, a classmate, afterwards a clergyman in a country town. [ ] charles prentiss, a member of the junior class when this was written; afterwards editor of the rural repository.--_buckingham's reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. - . [ ] william biglow was known in college by the name of sawney, and was frequently addressed by this sobriquet in after life, by his familiar friends. [ ] charles pinckney sumner,--afterwards a lawyer in boston, and for many years sheriff of the county of suffolk. [ ] theodore dehon, afterwards a clergyman of the episcopal church, and bishop of the diocese of south carolina. [ ] thomas mason, a member of the class after prentiss, said to be the greatest _wrestler_ that was ever in college. he was settled as a clergyman at northfield, mass.; resigned his office some years after, and several times represented that town in the legislature of massachusetts. see under wrestling-match. [ ] the columbian centinel, published at boston, of which benjamin russell was the editor. [ ] "ashen," on _ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "a pot of grease, a woollen fleece."--_ed's broadside_. [ ] "rook."--_ed.'s broadside_. "hook."--_gent. mag._, may, . [ ] "burrage."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "that."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "beauties."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "my."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "i've" omitted in _ed.'s broadside_. nay, i've two more what matthew always wanted.--_gent. mag._, june, . [ ] "but silly youth, i love the mouth."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] this stanza, although found in the london magazine, does not appear in the gentleman's magazine, or on the editor's broadside. it is probably an interpolation. [ ] "cou'd."--_gent. mag._, june, . [ ] "do it."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "tow'rds cambridge i'll get thee."--_ed.'s broadside_. [ ] "if, madam, you will let me."--_gent. mag._, june, . [ ] see cochleaureatus. [transcriber's notes] page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. { }. they have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. underscores indicate italics. several pages have only pictures with no text. none of the images in the book have descriptions and most are abstract, so they are not mentioned in this txt file. view the html version to see the images. [end transcriber's notes] mother truth's melodies. common sense for children. a kindergarten, by mrs. e. p. miller, author of "a father's advice; a book for every boy." and "a mother's advice; a book for every girl." illustrations. new and enlarged edition. chicago: cram standard book co., boston, mass., j. q. adams & co . copyrighted , by standard publishing company. copyrighted by standard columbian company, , . copyrighted by cram standard book company copyrighted by george f. cram, { } to all who love the children, this book, inscribed, i bring,-- thus reaching forth to draw you within my charmed ring, where seeds and germs we'll nurture in babies, children, youth, till every plant shall blossom, and bear the fruits of truth. { } introduction. since little ones are _geese_ no more, but _knowing_ have become, it ill beseems that "mother goose" should dwell in every home. so "mother truth" in "melodies" for babes, here lifts her voice, assured that parents, children, all, will welcome and rejoice. { } note. let no one suppose that the author of these "melodies" considers them poetry. they are simply rhymes, the jingle of which may be music in the children's ears, and the illustrations a delight to eager eyes. the truths presented, even if not fully understood at first, will leave their impress, and in so far as they fill the little minds, will keep out falsehood and false ideas. the putting of facts in such form as to attract the attention of the little ones, and be readily fixed in their memory, was first suggested to the writer of these rhymes by a valued friend, the well known philanthropist, mrs. elizabeth thompson, and her interest in the "melodies" is such that she has generously assisted in procuring illustrations for the same. thus "mother truth's melodies" are introduced with the hope that this effort to entertain children with rhyming reason will meet with the approval of every lover of the young, and of truth. { } poetry is the language of the imagination, while "facts are stubborn things," and, in the mass, refuse utterly to be poetized. yet, even facts may be presented pleasingly and melodiously, and in such way that they will be easily impressed upon the minds of children. this the author of "mother truth's melodies" sought to do, when the little book was first given to the public. now, however, in the revising and enlarging of the book, she has given wider play to the imagination, has enlarged the range of subjects, has embodied lessons for children of older growth, and feels that altogether, it will meet more fully the demands which its already large sales warrant her in believing to exist. she can ask no more favorable reception than was first met; but, hoping for a continuance of the same, she trusts that as it becomes more widely distributed, its truths and teachings will be impressed upon household after household, till throughout the land, the little ones, and larger, too, shall be influenced thereby. mrs. e. p. m. { } contents why fly away, mother goose, toss the baby, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, hey, my kitten, my kitten, winkum, winkum, baby's bell, willy-nilly, baby's record, sleep, little sweetey, never tell a fib, humpty-dumpty, hush-a-bye, don't make me laugh, bye-baby-bunting, to bed with the chickens, dive me sudar, tause i'm tross, the new book whiskum, whiskum, the jack-horse, hi-diddle diddle, the rain, feed the birdies, rock-a-bye, the snowball, little bo-peep, the tea party, tell it again, mother, little jack horner, little boy blue, miss velvet paws, { } polly hopkins, a, b, c, c-a-t spells cat, the kitten, dolly dimple, if you please, the poor little chick-a-dees, heigh-ho, daisies and buttercups, the pony, baby's reckoning, two little pink shoes, baby pearl, my valentine, fee-fi-fo-fum, the oxen, the broken pitcher, the elephants, the wind, the fog, the rain, the snow, truth, hi diddle, ho-diddle, what is the axis, heat and cold, harley's dream, our language key, the speech family, number and gender, one little chicken, letters, words, a smile, twinkle, twinkle, old sol in a jingle, "robert of lincoln," limpy-dimpy-dingle, castle wonderful, the rattle of the bones { } wholly hole-y, the breath o' life, three little girls, temperance child, listen, children, tick-tock, tick-tock, curious trees; the cow tree, the sugar-pine, the butter-tree, the bread-fruit tree, the clove-tree, the tree village, no eyes, the mammoth cave, the camels, key notes, the bears, the bear, a blessing, fruits, the raccoon, the bank swallows, the mocking bird, the busy bees, honey-sweet, what they say, britain's rulers, our land, signs of the zodiac, grapho, the stop family, little mischief, grandma's canary, baby's faith, the meadow quails, the little housewife, mother-love, it snows! it snows! an old saw, { } the dandelion blossom, sunshine, our ethel, little girl's letter to god, grandma's lessons, my little four year old, handsome dick, bessie's kisses, the dinner pot, nanny's play, nanny's lesson, nanny's ride, the race, our kenneth, my ten year's old, dare to say no, ask mother; tell mother, don't tell a lie, little moses, the children's railroad, the phoebe's nest in the old well wheel, mabel's snow-feathers forest trees, childhood fancies, lizzie and the angels, child memories, nelly and ned, the clamberers, the new white jattet, remember the poor, the little street sweeper, the here, there and everywhere family, quirks, somebody's boy, the laddie-and lassie birds, the great watch full i, { } mother truth's melodies. _why fly away, mother goose?_ "mother goose, mother goose, why fly away?" "because mother truth is a-coming to-day. she'll tell you funny things, but they'll be true; she'll bring you pictures so charming and new; she'll sing you melodies, helping to show how, to true women and men, you may grow." { } _toss the baby_. toss the baby high in air; catch him though, with special care lest his little back be strained, lest his little joints be sprained, lest his bones be bent or broken; lest through life he bear some token of a careless toss or fall, that for sympathy shall call, and that must forever be painful to our memory. { } _pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake_. pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, mamma's boy, laughing and crowing, and jumping with joy; roll it, and pick it and mark it with b, and toss in the oven for baby and me. pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, papa's girl, springing in baby-glee, shaking her curl; roll it and pick it and mark it with g, and toss in the oven for girly and me. { } _hey, my kitten, my kitten_. hey, my kitten, my kitten, hey, my kitten, my deary; if mamma should feed him too often, he never could be so cheery. here we go up, up, up. and here we go down, down, down-y. if we never feed baby too much, he never will give us a frown-y. hey, my kitten, my kitten, hey, my kitten, my deary; we'll put him to bed with the birdies, and that will make him so cheery! here we go up, up, up, and here we go down, down, down-y; if we give him nothing but smiles, he will give us never a frown-y. { } _winkum, winkum_. winkum, winkum, shut your eye, sweet, my baby, lullaby; for the dew is falling soft, lights are flickering up aloft, and the head-light's peeping over yonder hill-top capped with clover; chickens long have gone to rest, birds lie snug within their nest, and my birdie soon will be sleeping with the chick-a-dee, for with only half a try, winkum, winkum, shuts her eye. { } _baby's bell_. jingle! jingle! baby's bell; what a tale its tongue might tell. could it speak it sure would say, "when the baby's tired with play, and is getting cross, don't try to jingle bells, but hush-a-bye; all so still, now crooning low, lull-a-bye, bye-o, bye-o,-- quiet down his quaking nerves, soothe him as his state deserves;-- passing hand from head to feet, sl-o-w-l-y, softly, loving, sweet, as to smooth the feathers down, rumpled, from your birdling's crown;-- { } see, he sleeps, and in his dream yours may hand of angel seem, raveling out the tangled ills, knitting up with restful thrills." _willy-nilly_. willy-nilly, birdy sings, for he's running over with the music that he flings to his sweet bird-lover;-- willy-nilly, baby laughs, gay and glad and gleeful; brimming over high with health, she is always playful. { } _baby's record_. new-born baby, soft and pink, of the two worlds on the brink. one month old,--eat and sleep; precious little human heap. two months old,--tear and smile; fists in mouth and eyes the while. three months old,--"goo-a-goo," windows wide where soul looks through. four months old,--finds his toes, tries to fix them on his nose. { } five months old,--first wee pearl; all the household in a whirl. six months old,--sits alone; wishes swaddling clothes were gone. seven months old,--creep and crawl, wonder-eyed, a charm to all. eight months old,--confiscate pussy's tail and papa's pate. nine months old,--roguish eyes deepening daily; wilful, wise. ten months old,--witching ways wind us in; the baby pays! eleven months old,--finger-tip guides the elfin on his trip. year old,--lots of mischief done; walking, talking, just for fun. { } _sleep, little sweetey_. sleep now, my sweetey, dear one, and pretty! weary with playing, weary with straying, stop little thinkers, shut little winkers; sleep, little sweetey, precious and pretty. sleep now, my sweetey, dear one, and pretty! stop little thinkers, shut little winkers, angels a-watching sleep-doors unlatching; slip in, my sweetey, precious and pretty! sleeping, my sweetey, dear one, and pretty! stopped, little thinkers, shut, little winkers, angels a-watching, sleep-doors are latching; slipped in, my sweetey, precious and pretty! { } _never tell a fib_. if mamma says she'll punish, she must do it, or she tells a fib, as sister annie told "a story" 'bout the bells; and if mamma tells a fib, then surely children will, and what a fearful thing, our home with fibs to fill! { } _humpty--dumpty_. humpty-dumpty, hip-o'-to-hop, baby is crying, why doesn't he stop? what does he cry for? his clothing is tight; no wonder such things make baby a fright. humpty-dumpty, hip-o'-to-hop, baby was crying, but now he will stop; what did he cry for? his clothing was wet; no wonder such things should make babies fret. humpty-dumpty, hip-o'-to-hop, baby is crying, oh, when will he stop? what does he cry for? his feet are a-cold; no wonder such things should make baby scold. { } humpty-dumpty, hip-o'-to-hop, baby is crying, but soon he will stop; what does he cry for? he had too much food; no baby in this way can ever be good. humpty-dumpty, hip-o'-to-hop, baby is laughing and scarcely will stop; what does he laugh for? oh, when he feels well, he always is happy,--'tis thus we can tell. { } _hush-a-bye_. hush-a-bye, baby, on grandmother's lap; hush-a-bye, baby, and take a nice nap; hush-a-bye, baby, what is it you say? your "teeth are a-coming," you're "ten months to-day;" well, babies must cry, and grandmothers must try to comfort and hush them, but never forget the little gums ache, and little nerves quake, till little lips quiver, and babies must fret. hush-a-bye, baby, we'll cool his hot gums, hush-a-bye, baby, with tiny ice-crumbs; hush-a-bye, baby, we'll rub hard and long with icy-cold finger,-- see him list to my song! { } ah, babies are sweet if their wants we but meet, so why should we blame them when fretful and cross? let us find what is wrong, and remove it ere long, and we'll see that time thus spent is never a loss. hush-a-bye, baby, what more can we do hush-a-bye, baby, that will comfort you? hush-a-bye, baby, we'll lay you down flat, on your stomach, dear baby, on grandmother's lap. { } nor trot you a mite, no matter how slight, but, sure that your clothing is all dry and neat, we'll loosen each band, and with soft and warm hand, gently rub you all over from head to your feet. hush-a-bye, baby, we will not forget, hush-a-bye, baby, that hands may be wet, hush-a-bye, baby, and soothe you sometimes, when dry hands won't do it, hush, list to my rhymes! { } and now we'll not nurse till the nursing's a curse; nor dose you, nor drug you, nor feed with sweet-meats; nor to soothe, will we try, with old "dame winslow" by, for our hopes for the babies, she ever defeats. hush-a-bye, baby, we'll quiet his nerves, hush-a-bye, baby, the truth it deserves-- hush-a-bye, baby-- even here to be known: we will _quiet his nerves_ by _just calming our own!_ and our baby will feel the sweet hush o'er him steal, that brings with it soothing and comfort and rest; and to slumber so soft, his spirit we'll waft, and then lay him away in his own baby nest. { } _don't make me laugh_. dear mamma, i've been laughing for uncle ben and pa, and then for sister lizzie i talked "ar-g o-o" and "gar;" and then a "little story" for dick and cousin jane,-- and now you, mamma, want me to laugh and talk again. i'd like to do it, mamma, but if i even try, i am so weary with it, i'm sure i'd only cry! don't let them try, dear mamma, to make me laugh and crow, i'll do it when i'm able, for babies always do. { } _bye-baby-bunting_. bye-baby-bunting, the indians live by hunting, and bring home many a beaver-skin to wrap the little pappoose in. and mother-squaw the baby'll tie fast on a board, and swinging high, will hang it up among the trees to rock-a-bye with every breeze; but our dear baby, snug and warm, shall rock-a-bye on mother's arm. { } _to bed with the chickens_. oh, put me in my bed, mamma, when chickens go to rest, for i'm your little chick-a-dee, so put me in my nest. yes, when the birds forget to sing, and lambs forget to play, you'll put your birdy in his nest, your lamb you'll fold away. { } _dive me sudar_. papa, when you dive me tandy, dive me only white,-- 'tause there's poison in the tolored, which my health will blight; but you better dive me sudar, let the tandy be,-- 'tause i shall not want so much, and that is best for me. { } _'tause i'm tross_ mamma, 'tause i'm tross don't whip me; i tan't help it, not a bit! 'tis the tandy hurts my stomat, and that mates me whine and fret. sometimes, too, i'm whipped for trossness when the trossness tomes from meat; { } thint how tiders drowl and drumble, and then dive me food to eat that will mate me well and happy,-- wheat and oat-meal, rice and truit, these will mate me dood and gentle, 'stead of mating me a brute. { } the new book. cock-a-doodle-doo, a picture-book for you,-- keep it nice, and in a trice sing cock-a-doodle-doo. { } whiskum, whiskum. whiskum, whiskum, over the house, scud the cloudlets, still as a mouse; whiskum, whiskum, by-and-by they'll pour rain-drops from the sky. { } _the jack-horse_. we will ride our jack-horse all the meadows across; oh no, do not whip him, but feed him, my dear! a handful of grass in his mouth as we pass, will make him trot gaily, and give us good cheer! { } _hi-diddle-diddle_. hi-diddle-diddle mother duck's in the middle, her baby-ducks swimming around; with bills like a ladle, and feet like a paddle, no danger that they will be drowned { } _the rain_. come, rain, come, that the water may run, that the meadow grass may grow; that the fruit and grain o'er hill and plain, may greet us as we go. come, rain, come, that the water may run, that the mill may make our meal;-- 'twill grind our wheat, and corn so sweet, when it turns the old mill-wheel. { } _feed the birdies_. feed the birdies, darling, when the snow is here, when there are no berries on the bushes, dear;-- scatter food out for them, and they'll quickly come, hopping, singing, chirping "thank you for the crumb." { } _rock-a-bye_. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, don't tremble with fear, for that tends to make his slight illness severe. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill. rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby. don't coax him to nurse, for urging to eat only makes matters worse. { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, no company 'round, not even the dear ones, to make a loud sound. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, don't rattle the papers nor whisper around, little nerves cut such capers. { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, whatever is wrong, attend to his bowels, neglected too long, rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, if he is too hot, undress him and bathe him; but, ah! he is not. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, there is cough with unrest, so we'll wring out hot flannels, and cover his chest, { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill; rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, he's perspiring, to pour! we will keep up this treatment a full hour more. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, now dry him off neat, and wrap him up warm, and to-morrow, repeat. { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, 'tis not in his chest? then place the hot flannels where he feels the unrest. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill, rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, he is moaning with pain, and rolling his head, and we pet him in vain. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill; rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, we will wring out from ice, linen cloths for his head, all so cooling and nice. { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill; rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well; rock-a-bye, baby, if cold don't relieve, use hot and then cold, and then hot, you perceive. rock-a-bye, baby, our darling is ill; rock-a-bye, baby, we'll soon have him well;-- rock-a-bye, baby, we'll see that his feet are kept warm all the time, and his clothes dry and neat. { } rock-a-bye, baby, our darling was ill rock-a-bye, baby, but now he is well; rock-a-bye, baby, no drugs, not a dose! yet he's over it finely, just hear how he crows { } _the snowball_. have ever you seen how a wee bit of snow, to a big bouncing ball, just by rolling, will grow? 'tis thus our wee sins, children, let to roll on, will grow big, bigger, biggest, till satan has won. { } _little bo-peep_. co' nan, co' nan, says little bo-peep, co' nan, co' nan, up come the sheep; they jump the ditch and scale the wall, where one sheep goes, they follow, all. co' dea', co' dea', says little bo-peep, co' dea', co' dea', i'll shear my sheep; their wool so fine will make my coat, my blankets and my hose to boot. { } _the tea-party_. ah! little ones, i'm sure there's not a drop of tea in your weeny pot. for water bright and milk so pure, alone will bring you health, be sure; and health is beauty, health is cheer, health is happiness so dear. { } _tell it again, mother_. "tell it again, mother, tell it again,"-- no matter what story she told we children, would cry, in the days gone by. before our years were old. "tell it again, mother, tell it again,"-- no matter how weary and worn. for we children knew naught of the care we brought, before our sense was born. { } "tell it again, mother, tell it again,"-- and she, patient, and kind, and wise, the tale would repeat, or the song so sweet, and 'twas ever a glad surprise. "tell it again, mother, tell it again,"-- ah! you children, when children no more, will go back to the days of sweet babyhood lays, and mother's sage sayings con o'er. { } _little jack horner_. little jack horner sat in the corner, eating a morsel of nice brown bread; "have some pie, or some cake?" "nay, not i," with a shake and a toss of his wise little head. "for this bread will make bone, and white teeth like a stone, that will neither grow soft nor decay; but rich cake and rich pie sure will break, bye and bye, my good health, and that never will pay." { } _little boy blue_. "little boy blue, may i go with you now?" "yes, down to the pasture to drive up the cow." "little boy blue, what then may i have?" a nice cup of milk as ever cow gave. "little boy blue, the milk must be set;" "yes, for 'tis thus the nice cream we shall get." "little boy blue, what will we do then?" "we'll skim it and dash it, with 'churn, butter, churn.'" "little boy blue, what else can we make?" "o, cheese, tempting cheese, and the dainty cheese cake." "little boy blue, is there anything more?" "o, yes, puddings, custards and dainties, a store." "little boy blue, shall we eat of all these?" "simple food is far better for us, if you please." { } _miss velvet-paws_. little miss velvet-paws, raveling out her yarn, catches mice, in a trice, in everybody's barn. look out for velvet paws, do not trust them far, for velvet paws cover claws that will leave a scar. { } _polly hopkins_. now little polly hopkins must surely know great a, and b, and c, and d, and e, f, g, h, i, j, k; and l, and m, and n, and o, and p, and q, r, s, and t, u, v, and w, x, and y, & z, i guess. { } _a, b, c_. a stands for alligator, b stands for ball, c stands for cat in a cream-pot, d stands for doll. { } e stands for east, or ellen. f stands for fay, g stands for goat, a pen in, h stands for hay, i stands for indigestion, { } j stands for jar, k stands for king, or keepsake, l stands for la, m stands for man, or thousand, n stands for nail, { } o stands for oaken bucket, p stands for pail, q stands for queen, or question. r stands for rose, s stands for christmas stocking, { } t stands for toes, u stands for urn, or ulster, v stands for vane, w stands for west, or winter. { } x stands for ten. y stands for yoke, (with oxen). z stands for zero. & when you've learned your letters, you'll be a hero. { } c-a-t spells cat, that brought the kittens here; d-o-g spells dog, that does, the puppies, rear. c-o-w, cow, the mother of the calf; o-x spells the ox, that's bigger, yes, by half. { } b-o-y spells boy, that's little brother lou; g-i-r-l, girl, and that is sister sue. b-i-r-d, bird, just hear canary sing; g-o-l-d, gold, that makes a handsome ring b-o-o-k, book, in which we learn to read; c-o-o-k, cook, supplies the food we need. { } s-e-e-d, seed, from which we raise the plant; s-i-n-g, sing, just hear the children chant. b-a, ba, b-y, by, and that spells baby, love; l-a, la, d-y, dy, and that spells lady, dove. m-a, ma, r-y, ry, and that spells mary, child, e-d, ed, d-y, dy, that's eddy, sweet and mild. { } _the kitten_. one, two, ( , ,) here's a kitten for you; three, four, ( , ,) she will open the door, five, six, ( , ,) and your cream she will mix,-- { } seven, eight, ( , ,) if you are too late, nine, ten, ( , ,) to cover the pan; eleven, twelve, ( , ,) and then you must delve,-- thirteen, fourteen, ( , ,) to cover her sporting; fifteen, sixteen, ( , ,) but while you are fixing,--- { } seventeen, eighteen, ( , ,) remember i'm waiting, nineteen, twenty, ( , ,) for butter a plenty. * * * * * to those who serve you, children, all, be gentle and polite,-- for thus are gentle-women known, or gentle-men, at sight. { } _dolly dimple_. dolly dimple, just for fun, stands to show us she is one. dolly and her sister sue show that one and one make two. { } dolly, sue, and nanny lee, show that one with two make three. doll, sue, nan, and little noah, show that one with three make four { } doll, sue, nan, noah, and ben brive show that one with four make five. now all these with jenny hicks show that one with five make six. { } one more, ned, a baby, even, shows that one with six make seven. with these girls and boys, put kate, and the one with seven make eight. { } all these eight, with adaline show that one with eight make nine. now with these put dick, and then you'll see that one with nine make ten. { } _if you please_. i hope my children never will say, "give me" this or that,-- but, "if you please," i'd like a bun, or, "thank you" for a pat. { } _the poor little chick-a-dees_. ten little chick-a-dees clinging to a vine,-- a speckled snake charmed _one_, then there were but nine. nine little chick-a-dees,--one without a mate,-- a sparrow-hawk caught _one_, then there were but eight. { } eight little chick-a dees, by a 'possum driven,-- he caught _one_ and slaughtered it, then there were but seven. seven little chick-a-dees hopping round the ricks,-- a weasel came and captured _one_, then there were but six. six little chick-a-dees watching rover dive,-- he sprang ashore and seized _one_, then there were but five. { } five little chick-a-dees pecking at the door, kitty-cat caught _one_, then there were but four. four little chick-a-dees full of birdy glee, _one_ was tangled in a net, then there were but three. three little chick-a-dees dabbling in the dew, a stone fell and crushed _one_, then there were but two. { } two little chick-a-dees peeping just for fun, a hungry kite caught _one_, then there was but one. one little chick-a-dee, mourning all alone, flew away to find a mate, and then there was none, { } _heigh-ho, daisies and butter-cups_. heigh-ho, daisies and butter-cups grow in the meadows for children to gather; but cattle will shun them, and farmers will burn them, because in their fields they are only a bother. heigh-ho, red-top and clover-bloom, filling the air with their sweetness and beauty, will yield without measure, their wealth of rich treasure, rewarding the farmer for doing his duty. { } _the pony_. once is , here's a pony for you; two s are , but be careful the more,-- three s are , for perhaps pony kicks; four s are , and if so we must wait, { } five s are , till he's trained by the men;-- six s are , before trusting ourselves, { } seven s are , to ride him out sporting; eight s are , but we can be fixing nine s are , his food while we're waiting; ten s are , oh, yes, give him plenty,-- eleven s are , for then he will be gentle to-- { } twelve s are , us who feed and pet him more. { } { } _baby's reckoning_. one little head, ah! but what does it hold? no matter,--it's worth its whole weight in pure gold. two big brown eyes, soft with heaven's own dew; no diamonds so precious, so sparkling, so true. { } three cunning dimples, one deep in her chin, and one in each cheek--ah! they're just twin and twin. four little fingers to clutch mamma's hair, but sweeter than honeycomb, even when there. five, we may call it, with little tom thumb, and that fist in her mouth is as sweet as a plum. six wonderful pearls her bright coral lips hide, and the kohinoor's nothing these pure pearls beside. seven brown wavelets are ever in motion, and silken floss to them is naught, to our notion. eight little giggles run over with glee-- and more if you call them, so merry is she. nine songs, (they're greek tho' to all but mamma), make us think she is destined, an opera star. ten toddling steps, but to us full of grace, for our babe in our hearts ever holds the first place. { } _two little pink shoes_. two little pink shoes standing by the head of our nanny sleeping in the trundle-bed; on the little table, waiting for the morn, two little pink shoes, our nanny to adorn. { } two little bright eyes, peeping open wide, spied the little table, and the pink shoes spied. two little fat hands climbing up to catch; two little fat feet following to match. two little fat arms hug them to her breast; two little fat legs run to show the rest. never more a treasure can our nancy choose, that will give such pleasure as these two pink shoes. * * * * * in your work or your play, when you read, talk, or write, sit always, my child, with your back to the light, { } _baby pearl_. now listen while i tell you, child, that i am quite a grown-up girl, for i can read, and spell my name, while you,--why, you're just baby pearl. i help mamma to "house-keep," too, although she says i make a whirl! but i can wipe the forks and spoons, while you, ah, you're just baby pearl. and then i dress myself, you see, and comb my hair when not in curl, and i can make my dolly's clothes, while you, you're only baby pearl. { } tis true, mamma says i must be "a very pattern little girl," just all for you, and i shall try because, because, you're baby pearl. * * * * * _my valentine_. dearest little lover mine, sweetest, pertest valentine; "desht i'm two years old," he says,-- blessings on his pretty ways,-- "'tan't i be your valentine?" yes forever, lover mine, shalt thou be my valentine. { } _fee-fi-fo-fum_. fee-fi-fo-fum, from the spruce-tree comes the gum; from the pine the turpentine, tar and pitch, and timber which is very choice and fine. fee-fi-fo-fum, how from spruce-tree comes the gum? soft enough;--the sticky stuff, from seam and cleft, both right and left, flows out, and hardens, rough. { } fay-fi-fo-fee, nut-galls grow on the oak-tree; by tiny worms the nut-gall forms, like little ball; and from nut-gall the gallic acid comes. fee-fi-fo-fade, from nut-galls, too, the tannin's made; while acorns grow in group or row;-- and live-oak long, makes ship-knees, strong, that round the world may go. { } fee-fi-fo-fap, we tap the maples, and the sap we find as sweet as sugar-beet, then boiling hard, our sure reward, the maple-sugar treat. { } fay-fi-fo-fee, see the graceful white-birch tree, with bark so light, so tough and tight that indians wrought canoes we're taught, and paddled out of sight. { } fee-fi-fo-fap, hark and hear the hemlock snap;-- little spine so full of wind, heated, hops, and jumping, pops, and makes the bright eyes shine. fee-fi-fo-fur, see the curious chestnut-burr; green and round, then turning brown. frost opens wide each prickly side, and out the chestnuts bound. { } fee-fi-fo-fay, now the farmer makes his hay; grasses grow, which workmen mow,-- toss every-wise, till sunshine dries, then into stacks, they stow. fay-fee-fi-fo, see the farmer wield his hoe, lettuce, greens, then corn and beans, with pumpkin-vines along the lines, where many a weed o'er-leans. { } fee-fi-fo-fog, see the wriggling pollywog,*-- with funny tail; but without fail this pollywog will grow a frog, and lose his wiggle-tail. [footnote: pollywog--common name for poll wig, or tadpole.] fee-fi-fo-faint, colors, seven, the rainbow paint; violet bright is first in sight-- then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red,--the seven, white. { } fay-fee-fi-fo, now you ask, "what makes rainbow?" it is the sun, my darling one, shines through the rain, o'er hill and plain, but see, the beauty's flown. fay-fi-fo-fear, don't you understand it, dear? raindrops fall, sun shines through all, reflects beyond, this beauteous wand which we the rainbow call. { } _the oxen_. the oxen are such clever beasts, they'll drag the plough all day; they're very strong and tug along great loads of wood or hay. they feed on grass, when green or dry; their flesh is beef, for food; their lungs are "lights," their stomach, "tripe," their skin for leather's good. their hair men use in mortar, too, lime, water, sand and hair, they nicely mix and smoothly fix, for plastering, so fair. { } for making soap their bones are used; their horns for combs we group; their feet are boiled for "neat's-foot-oil," their tails for ox-tail soup. their heart-case forms a money-bag; their tallow, candles, white; their intestine, gold-beater's skin, with which gold-leaf we smite. thus every part is useful made; the same is true of cows,-- except their ilk gives luscious milk instead of dragging ploughs. { } oxen and cows are "cattle" called; they go in "herds," when wild; but when they're tame, by other name,-- a "drove," _en masse_, they're styled. their little ones are "calves,"--and cows' rich milk produces cream, which butter makes, and nice cheese-cakes, with curd, whey, and caseine. and now 'tis funny, but 'tis true, some children young and mazy, have thought their eyes were used some-wise, to make the ox-eyed daisy! { } this cannot be, yet creatures' bones placed round trees, plants and bowers, will serve to feed just what they need, to grow fine fruits and flowers. { } _the broken pitcher_. "sweet, my love, i'm sorry that you did not tell, when you broke the pitcher coming from the well." "oh, i thought you'd whip me, just as betty did; then when she would ask me, i would tell a fib." "sweet, my child, i never punish any one for an accidental thing that may be done. "tell me always, darling, everything you do; this will help to make you thoughtful, brave and true." { } _the elephants_. the ivory for our combs, from elephants' tusks is made; the handles, too for many a knife, and for paper-knives the blade. the elephant knows a friend,-- and well remembers, too, a kindly act, but ne'er forgets the teasing of a foe. { } _the wind_. "what is the wind, mamma?" "tis air in motion, child;" "why can i never see the wind that blows so fierce and wild?" "because the gases, dear, of which the air is made, are quite transparent, that is, we see through, but see no shade." "and what are gases, ma?" "fluids, which, if we squeeze in space too small, will burst with force;"-- "and what are _fluids_, please?" "fluids are what will flow, and gases are so light that when we give them room enough, they rush with eager flight." { } "what gases, dear mamma, make up the air or wind?" "'tis oxygen and nitrogen that chiefly there we find; and when the air is full of oxygen we're gay, but when there is not quite enough, we're dull, or faint away." _the fog_. "what is the fog, mamma?" "sometimes the air is light and cannot bear up all the mists, and then 'tis foggy, quite; but when air heavier grows, the fog is borne above, and floated off, the cloudy stuff,-- just see it, graceful, move." { } the rain. "what makes the rain, mamma?" "the mists and vapors rise from land and stream and rolling sea, up toward the distant skies; and there they form the clouds, which, when they're watery, dear, pour all the water down to earth, and rain afar or near." _the snow_. "what makes the snow, mamma?" "when very cold above, the mists are frozen high in air, and fall as snow, my love." { } "and hail?" "tis formed the same; cold streams of air have come and frozen all the water-drops, and thus the hail-stones form. "now do not question more, dear child, but run and play, i'll tell you of the water, fire, and light, another day." "oh yes, and dear mamma, of thunder, lightning, too, for i shall want to know it all, so tell me, mamma, do." { } _truth_. do not let "mother truth" find a falsehood all over,-- amongst all her children, no, never a lie; stand for truth, ye wee babies, for truth, ye who're older, for truth while you live, and for truth till you die. all ye myriads of children this little book talks to, form now in each household a band for the truth, do not let even a "white lie," and still less a "whopper," find a place in your hearts, nor your heads, nor your mouth. you know god is truth;--and as you are his children, you want to be like him as near as you can; speak the truth, live the truth, be the truth with him, and heaven will have come, as christ taught in his plan. { } { } _hi-diddle, ho-diddle_. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, this earth of ours, on which we live, is round as it can be. pray, then, what is a mountain, valley, hill? they are but like little warts, and pores, on orange-peel. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee,-- our earth is swinging in the air, as you can plainly see;-- { } pray, then, what keeps it hanging up in space? the sun, my child, attracts the earth and holds it in its place. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, a lovely moon is shining for this earth of ours, you see,-- held in its cradle ever since its birth, because our globe attracted it, as the sun attracts the earth. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, what i mean by globe, child, you're wondering now, i see. { } a globe or a ball, dear, is what is round and true, and that is why i'm calling it, this earth, a globe, to you. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, instead of globe i might have said a _sphere_ for you and me; for all the same, in truth, are sphere and globe and ball, and _hemi_'s half so half this earth, a _hemisphere_, we call. hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, 't was once supposed the earth stood still, while sun went round it, free;-- but now we've learned it well, that 't is the earth doth turn upon its axis, as it's called; and also round the sun. { } hi-diddle, ho-diddle, pop-diddle-dee, our earth in turning round, how long may she be? she turns on her axis in a day, and a night, but to go around the sun takes a year for the flight. { } _what is the axis?_ now you ask, "what is the axis?" with an apple i will show; place your thumb upon the stem-place, and your finger at the blow;-- now we'll just suppose the apple has a stem that passes through, and this stem would be the axis; now we'll whirl the apple, true, holding fast 'twixt thumb and finger,-- that's the way the earth goes round on its axis, as we call it, though no real stem is found. { } and the two ends of the axis have been called the poles, my dear; yes, the north pole and the south pole, where 'tis very cold and drear. now we'll hold a bigger apple at a distance, for the sun; tip the smaller one a little, and then slowly wheel it round all around the larger apple, and it represents the earth circling round the sun that holds it, ceaseless, in its yearly path. wondrous is the strong attraction of the sun which holds in place all the planets in their turnings, all the stars that see his face; but more wondrous far the power that created sun and us, and that gave a form and being, to this mighty universe. "the universe!" now you exclaim: "by the universe, what do you mean?" { } 'tis the sun and the planets, and every thing known, that we call by this universe name. now the "planets," you ask, "what are planets?" they're globes, some larger, some smaller than earth,-- which are swinging in space, and are all held in place, by the god-power that first gave them birth. { } _heat and cold_. our earth has a _north pole_, where 'tis very cold; it also has a _south pole_, that's just the same, we're told. but half-way between, and all the way around, we call it the _equator_, and heat doth there abound. for there the sun shines always, though it goes north or south some twenty-three degrees or more, and sometimes causes drouth. the sun goes north, we call it. but 'tis the earth instead, that tips, and makes it seem the sun comes higher overhead. and when the sun is northward 'tis summer here, you see; and when it's to the southward 'tis there in same degree. { } _harley's dream_. i know a little brown-eyed boy, his name is harley hart; and with a naughty boy or girl, our harley has no part. he cons his lessons o'er and o'er, and once he fell asleep, with finger marking a, b, c, as 'twere the place to keep. and then he dreamed a funny dream-- the page jumps up to dance, the letters laugh, and by and by, like imps they leap and prance. { } now harley oft had wondered whence the letters first had come; and i'm afraid he sometimes wished they all had staid at home, instead of teasing him with quirks, and bothering him with names that seemed to help him hardly more in learning words than games. one little imp squeaked: "i am _a;_ you could not be a man without me." then another cried: "i am e" and quickly ran, exclaiming: "and without us both you could not have a h_e_ad." another says: "you'd have no l_i_mbs if _i_ were lost or dead." then _o_, "you'd have no n_o_se nor t_o_es, if it were not for me;" "and what is more, were i not here," says _u_, "yo_u_ could not be." { } and thus they each and all lay claim to parcel and to part of what he was, or what should do with hand, or head, or heart. they hung a ladder 'gainst the tree, and clambered up and down; they played a thousand pranks as wild as any gipsey clown. they whispered that they came from rome, and that, if rightly placed, they'd serve our harley with a feast a king would joy to taste. so when he woke and knew they were the little mystic keys that open learning's gates so wide, he loved his a, b, c's. { } _our language key_. a e i o u y we are small, and we are few, but we're wondrous mighty, too,-- for no word can language wear, save in it we hold a share. one of us in may is met,-- one is caught in every net; one is in the clambering vine, one, in moon, must ever shine; one's in you,--and all so shy, the last is hiding in your eye. { } the speech family. the name of everything we know, as _slate_, or _book_, or _toy_, is called a _noun_. all names are nouns; remember this, my boy. a word that means to be, to act, or to be acted on, is called a _verb_; as _is_, or _eat_, or _sing_; or he _is gone_. { } a word that tells the color, form, or quality of things, is called an _adjective_; as, _bright_, or _round_, or _softest_ wings. a word that tells how things are done, as _quickly_, _bravely_, _well_. is called an _adverb_; and i'm sure you many more can tell. a word that's used in place of nouns, a _pronoun_ we may call; as, _i_ for mother; _you_, for james; _this_, _that_, for hoop or ball a _preposition's_ placed before a noun, and serves to show relation to some other word; as, rover's _in_ the snow. and then _conjunctions_ join two words or sentences together; as, man _and_ boy, or birds will fly _and_ winds blow o'er the heather. then _interjections_, _oh!_ and _ah! behold!_ and many another, express surprise, delight; dismay, far more than every other. { } and these the _parts of speech_ we call; _eight_ parts as you may tell; and all the language you will know, when these you've studied well. _number and gender._ a noun or name that means but one, is called in the _singular number_; but when it stands for more than one, 'tis _plural_, child, remember. * * * * * a noun that is the name of males, as ox, or horse, or father, is _masculine_ in _gender_, dear; while cow, and mare, and mother, and all the names of females, child, are _feminine_, 'tis true; now tell me all the names you know, and tell their gender, too. but you will find there's many a noun not male, nor female either, as chair, and book; and such we call in _neuter gender_--neither. { } one little chicken. one little chicken, two little chickens, three little chickens, dear; don't you see we add _s_, when more than one is here? and this we do with almost all the nouns that may appear. one little birdy, two little birdies, three little birdies soar; the _y_ is changed to _i-e-s_ for birdies two or more; and this, when a word shall end in _y_ with a _consonant_ before. one little donkey, two little donkeys, three little donkeys bray. but here the _y_ remains unchanged, and _s_ is called in play; and this, when a word shall end in _y_, where a _vowel_ leads the way. { } _letters._ a, e, i, o, u, the _vowels_ we may call; w, y, are vowels too, whene'er they chance to fall to the end of syllable or word. and this we well may know that all the rest are _consonants_; just nineteen in a row. k, p, and t are called the _mutes_, because they interrupt all voice or sound; while b and d can only intercept; hence these are partial mutes, my child; and h is _aspirate_; and _th_, too, in _th_ink and _th_rone, but vocal in _this, that._ { } then lip-letters, or _labials_, and _dentals_, or tooth letters, with _palatals_ and _sibilants_ seem wondrously like fetters. but, ah! instead of prisoning, they open wide the way that leads to learning's loftiest heights; press on, and win the day. * * * * * words. tell me the name of something, dear; as book, or ball, or kite; now tell some quality of each, as big, or round, or light. and now some word that means _to be_ yes, _is_, my child, you're right. the ink is black, the snow is white, the ice is hard--is cold: the sky is blue, the air is light, sometimes the child is bold. { } and thus let names of everything afar or near be told; and qualities of each and all let memory infold. * * * * * now give one name, and tell me all its qualities as well; as, coal is black, and coal is hard, and coal's inflammable. and now, you children should be taught that we need not repeat the name, with every word that tells its qualities complete. coal's black, hard, and inflammable, we say; but all so fast, a comma follows after each, with _and_ before the last. and now use iron, chalk, and clay, use water, snow, and ice, use thread and needle, pin and pen, use every word that's nice.-- { } another lesson now attend-- we'll find some quality embraced by several different things, as you will plainly see. snow is cold, ice is cold, salt is cold as well; snow, ice, and salt are cold, my child, as every one can tell. * * * * * a smile. "she smiled on me, she smiled on me!" in ecstacy exclaimed a little waif in tattered gown, with form so halt and maimed. remember, even a smile may cheer, a cup of water, bless; a kindly word, sow seeds of joy, whose fruit is happiness. { } _twinkle, twinkle._ "twinkle, twinkle, little star, up above the world so far, whisper now and tell me, pray, what you are, and how you stay." "some of us away so far, planets like your own earth, are; and we shine with borrowed light, borrowed from the sun, so bright. "some of us are silvery moons, shining all the nightly noons; some of us are jelly, soft, shooting, falling, from aloft. { } some of us are nebulae,-- faint and misty stars we be;-- some are suns to other worlds; here and there a comet whirls. "having each our time and place, swinging in the wondrous space; held in line by him who planned, and who holds you in his hand." { } old sol in a jingle. hi-diddle-diddle, the sun's in the middle, and planets around him so grand, are swinging in space, held forever in place, in the zodiac girdle or band. hi-diddle-diddle, the sun's in the middle, and mercury's next to the sun while venus, so bright, seen at morning or night, comes _second_, to join in the fun. hi-diddle-diddle, the sun's in the middle, and _third_ in the group is our earth; while mars with his fire, so warlike and dire, swings around to be counted the _fourth_. { } { } hi-diddle-diddle, the sun's in the middle, while jupiter's next after mars,-- and his four moons at night show the speed of the light; next golden-ringed saturn appears, hi-diddle-diddle, the sun's in the middle, after saturn comes uranus far;-- and his antics so queer, led astronomers near to old neptune, who drives the last car. [footnote: other planets are as yet too little known to claim place.] { } "_robert of lincoln_." "bob-o-link, bob-o-link, reed-bird, butter-bird, all through the country his jingle is gaily heard; reveling in rice-fields he sweeps through the south, while wheat, corn, and barley-fields welcome him north, and bobby is wild with his singing and chatter, so saucily calling with rattle and clatter, bob-o-link, bob-o-link, tom-denny, tom-denny, come-now-and-pay-me-that-two-shillings-one-penny, no,-i'll-not-wait-for-a-day-nor-a-minute, so-pay-me-up-quick-or-you'll-get-your-foot-in-it;-- chink-a-chee, chink-a-chee, chink-a-chee, chin-it, yes,-pay-me-up-quick,-or-you'll-get-your-foot-in-it." { } _limpy-dimpy-dingle_. limpy-dimpy-dingle, chicky-bid would stray to the trap that had been set for weasels, many a day, limpy-dimpy-dingle, chicky-bid walked in, and the trap its teeth shut up, on chicky-biddy's shin. limpy-dimpy-dingle, chicky-bid is brought, and her leg, so sore and big, we bathe with water hot. limpy-dimpy-dingle, here's a broken bone, all so rough,--but close enough we bring the ends, right soon. { } limpy-dimpy-dingle, strips of paste-board cut, we will place with care and grace, from thigh to trembling foot limpy-dimpy-dingle, softest cotton, too, just within the paste-board thin, to fit around so true. limpy-dimpy-dingle, now with tape or band, neatly wind, and closely bind, with deft and skillful hand. limpy-dimpy-dingle, nature'll do the rest, and soon will knit the bone to fit, as good as very best. { } _castle wonderful_. i know a castle, curious, of lovely form and make; that we may view the castle through, a hasty peep we'll take. { } the framework of my castle proud, is neither wood nor stone, but earthy matter mixed with lime and hardened into bone. this frame, of oddments is composed,-- in mind, the number fix,-- of long and short and thick and thin, two hundred just, and six. and these are fastened each to each, by hinges, like, or joints, which, with an oil so soft and pure, the builder wise, anoints. for garnishing this goodly frame, quaint cushions, large and small, are fitly fashioned, each in place, and pliant, one and all. for cushion covers, deftly wrought, a scarf so beautiful, so pinkish-white, so loose yet tight, so warm and yet so cool; upon the smoothly rounded roof is strewn the finest floss, a filmy veil, as soft as silk,-- or is it fairy moss? { } two windows hath this castle fair, that shut and open wide, with cords and pulleys, curtains fringed, and fixtures fine beside. these wondrous windows even smile and speak and fairly dance, and play at anger, hate, and love, and mischief, too, perchance. these windows, too, are marvelous in that they let the light both in and out for him who dwells within, the lordly knight. two telephones of wondrous make,-- a door, with guards and bell,-- a ventilator, double-bored, aye does its duty well. { } and ah! within, this castle grand, is fitted to a t, with everything that's needful there for serving you or me. and strange to tell, this castle builds itself, if but supplies be placed within the open door, with watchful care and wise. { } it clears itself too of the dust and ashes strewed within, if but the alley-ways are free, and outlets all a-kin. and stranger still, this castle comes and goes where'er the will of him who holds the rule within shall bid, his hest to fill. and wondrous more than all beside, this house the temple is, of him the great designer, god,-- and "all the earth is his." { } now list, and of this castle grand a further tale we'll tell, in language plain, so plain that all may read and heed it well. the food we eat makes all our blood, and makes us children grow; and if we eat improper food it harms from top to toe. we all have teeth quite sharp and strong, with which to chew our food, and in the mouth are glands and glands-- yes, quite a numerous brood. these glands pour out saliva, free, to moisten what we eat and then a trap-door at the throat performs a wondrous feat in guiding all the food along into the esophagus, and thence to stomach through a pass called cardiac orifice. and here 'tis mixed with gastric juice, and into chyme is churned then through the gateway, pylorus, as wiser ones have learned. { } 'tis in the duodenum now, where it is mixed with bile, and with the pancreatic juice, which changes it to chyle. this chyle flows on, and all that's fit for nourishment and growth, is taken up by lacteals, or "tubes with many a mouth." these lead to the thoracic duct, which holds a spoonful large, and from this duct a pipe proceeds through which it may discharge. into the great sub-clavian vein, which to the heart doth lead, whence it is sent into the lungs, and into good blood made. then back into the heart it flows, the muscles there contract, and pump it into arteries, which wind to every part. we'd like to tell about the bones, the ribs and vertebras, the clavicle, or collar-bone, breast-bone, and scapulae; { } of hinge, and ball-and-socket joints; of muscles, tendons, skin, of lungs and veins and arteries, of nerves and heart and brain. but, ah! we should your patience tire, were we the whole to tell, so, waiting till another time, we bid you now, farewell. { } _the rattle of the bones_. how many bones in the human face? fourteen, when they're all in place. how many bones in the human head? eight, my child, as i've often said. how many bones in the human ear? three in each; and they help to hear. [footnote: standard authorities give three, though latest works say four.] how many bones in the human spine? twenty-six; like a climbing vine. how many bones of the human chest? twenty-four ribs and two of the rest. how many bones the shoulders, bind? two in _each_; one before, one behind. how many bones in the human arm? in _each_ arm, one; two in _each_ fore-arm. { } { } how many bones in the human wrist? eight in _each_, if none are missed. how many bones in the palm of the hand? five in _each_, with many a band. { } how many bones in the fingers ten? twenty-eight, and by joints they bend. how many bones in the human hip? one in _each_; like a dish they dip. how many bones in the human thigh? one in _each_, and deep they lie. how many bones in the human knees? one in _each_, the knee-pan, please. how many bones in the leg from knee? two in _each_, we can plainly see. how many bones in the ankle strong? seven in _each_, but none are long. { } how many bones in the ball of the foot? five in _each_; as in palms were put. how many bones in the toes half-a-score? twenty-eight, and there are no more. and now, all together, these many bones, fix, and they count in the body two hundred and six. and then we have, in the human mouth, of upper and under, thirty-two teeth. and we now and then have a bone, i should think that forms on a joint, or to fill up a chink. a sesamoid bone, or a wormian, we call, and now we may rest, for we've told them all. { } _wholly hole-y_. seven million little openings, god has made upon your skin; mouths of tiny little sewers that run everywhere, within. and along these numerous sewers all impurities must go, that are not by other outlets, carried off with active flow. { } when these many little openings. we call pores, get shut quite close, through your frame the poison wanders, making you feel dull and cross. it will make your lungs grow tender, and they'll soon be sore, and cough; it will make your stomach feeble, and your head ache hard enough. then your heart can not be joyous, and your other organs, too, will get weak, and be unable for the work they ought to do; quaking nerves will groan and quiver, weary bones be racked with pain, and you'll all the time be saying: "how can i be well again?" heat and bathing widely open all the pores, when discords dire, quick flow out in perspiration, quenching all the fever-fire. raveling out the tangled tissues, setting free the life-blood's flow, pouring forth the pent-up poisons, wakening thus a healthful glow. { } { } _the breath o' life_. our lungs are formed of curious cells, and tubes to draw in air,-- and if we breathe quite deep and full and take our needful share, 'twill keep our blood so red and pure, our health so firm and true, we scarce shall know what suffering means, but joyous feel, and new. but if we wear our clothing tight, the little cells will close, and then they cannot do their work, and thus our health we lose; or if we breathe the air impure, 't will give us tainted blood, while plenty, pure, sun-ripened air will make us glad and good. { } _the girls._ three little girls with their sun-bonnets on, wandered out for a walk in the dew; and they tip-toed about, full of frolic and fun, while their aprons around them they drew. but their little wet feet brought fever and cough, and their little red lips grew so thin; and their little round faces were haggard enough, o, i'm sure they'll not do it again! not do it, i mean, without boots that shall guard their ankles and feet from the wet; for the care of the health brings a joyous reward, the neglect, brings us pain and regret. { } _the temperance child._ mamma, if you'd have me be a temperance child, you must give me only food that's pure and mild. highly-seasoned dishes make the stomach crave stronger things; and often lead to drunkard's grave. { } _listen, children!_ listen, children! when your head aches, do not eat, but wait a meal; this will oftentimes relieve you, making you right joyous feel. listen, children! when your stomach rolls and tumbles, wait awhile; do not eat, but drink warm water, and you'll soon be glad and smile. listen, children! in hot water put your feet when you've "a cold;" into bed now, wrapped in blankets, and you'll soon be well, we're told. listen, children! perspiration is a saving from much sin: wash and rub, and dry well after; thus we quell disease within. listen, children! when you're hungry do not stuff you like a pig, but eat slowly and chew thorough, lest your teeth your grave shall dig. { } _tick-took, tick-tock_. tick-tock, tick-tock, sings the pretty cuckoo clock; tick-tack, tick-tack, time flies on, but ne'er comes back. tick-tock, tick-tock, sings the dainty crystal clock; tick-tack, tick-tack, work and wait, and never lack. tick-tock, tick-tock, sings the old grandfather's clock, tick-tack, tick-tack, take and keep, the better track. { } _curious trees._ the cow-tree. south america's soil yields the towering cow-tree, with sweet milk in its cells for you or for me; its sap is the milk,-- cut the tree and it flows; like leather its leaves, and its branches like bows. { } the sugar-pine. then, too, my dear children, the sweet sugar-pine, on pacific's wild coast, in our own soil we find; cut or scoop out the trunk, and the juices ooze forth, and harden, for sugar, like icicles, north. * * * * * the butter-tree. and, funny enough, there's a butter-tree, too; its seeds, when boiled down, will make butter for you. in india and africa the butter-tree grows, with coffee and spices, as every one knows. { } the bread-fruit tree, and listen, dear children, in hot countries too, the bread-fruit tree grows, most delicious for you; its great roasted nuts, like soft, sweet loaves of bread, form most of the food on which natives are fed. { } and further, its fibres of bark, will make cloth; its wood, boats and houses;-- its leaves are not loath to be used for a towel, a table-cloth, napkin; its juice will make bird-lime, and tinder, its catkin. the clove-tree. and, children, one more, here's a spicy clove-tree, growing forty feet high, ornamental, you see; the little round drop, fixed the four prongs between, forms the blossom or flower, when it's not picked too green. now list, while i tell you, clove-trees will not grow except in hot climates, moluccas, or so, { } where they bloom the year round, in the sunshine or storm, with their trunks straight and smooth, and their pyramid form. and lastly, dear children, clove-trees never flower till a half-dozen years they have grown, maybe more; then the buds, picked by hand, and dried quickly, are best;-- trees a hundred years old often yield with the rest. { } _the "tree village."_ { } in the solomon group in the great southern sea, and on isabel island alone, a tree village is found, up the steep, rocky ground, on the top of a mountain of stone. so gigantic the trees that it is not with ease that the houses of natives are built, for the stems are six score of our feet, maybe more, and you'd think they must live on a stilt. by a ladder facade the ascent must be made, formed of pliable trees, or a creeper resembling the vine, which the natives entwine,-- and the ladder's drawn up by the sleeper; for these houses are made but to sleep in, 'tis said, when some enemy threatens;--to guard 'gainst surprise in the night, they are fortified quite, with great stones, to be thrown at a pard. at the foot, of these trees are the day-huts for ease and for eating and dancing and play, yet the huts up so high have a goodly supply of the needful for night or for day. { } _no eyes._ those creatures that live in the dark, and have no use for eyes, are made without these organs bright, which we so highly prize. the fish in the mammoth cave,-- some species of the ant, have only a trace where eyes should be, yet never know the want. { } who knows but girls and boys, kept always in the dark, might come to have but little sight, and finally not a spark. god meant us to live in the light, he has poured it all about; oh, let us not ourselves destroy, by shutting his sunshine out. { } _the mammoth cave._ "what is the mammoth cave?" i hear the children say, where fishes have no eyes nor sight, and where 'tis dark by day? you all have seen a ledge of big rocks piled, or stone?-- now just suppose a door-way made, or entrance to go in. { } and when you're in, a path leads on, right under ground, and by-and-by you come to a place like a room with walls around. 'tis jagged and rough and rude, 'tis dark and damp as a grave, but whether 'tis large or small, 'tis always called a cave. now, mammoth means _monstrous big_, and the mammoth cave, we claim as the largest known in the world, and that's what gives the name. and it has many a room, quite large and wondrous grand, and it has springs and streams and lakes, all dark, you understand. and here are fishes, too, yes, fishes with no eyes, that have lived in the dark for ages past, as learned men surmise. { } _the camels_. the camels live in desert lands; their feet are made to walk on sands; they carry burdens far and near, where neither grass nor trees appear; where there's no rain, no rivers, brooks, no water anywhere for folks;-- but god has made in camels' chest peculiar sacs, for he knew best what they must do, and that they'd die, if he did not their drink supply. before they start they drink and drink, till every sac is full, i think;-- and at the mouth of every sac, a muscle strong, but loose and slack, will tighten up when it is filled, so that no drink can e'er be spilled. and when on journey, last or first, the camel wants to slake his thirst, a bag-string loosens, and out-pours enough to satisfy for hours. { } { } the laden camels, in a row, are called a caravan, you know;-- sometimes a caravan is lost, being buried deep in sand and dust. a storm of wind, a simoon named, will sweep across the desert sand, when camels, men, and every one must throw themselves their knees upon, and bury faces in the earth, for thus alone they save their breath; a fearful thing, but 'tis the best that they can do,--now hear the rest. { } sometimes they're buried deep, and find when they dig out they're almost blind and cannot tell which way to go, and thus are lost, a serious woe! sometimes, when lost, the drink for men gets short; is gone; they thirst, and then they kill a camel just for lack of what he carries in his sac. { } in deserts bare and bleak and drear, the sun shines hot through all the year, but many an oasis is found, or spot where grass and trees abound. and here is drink, and here they rest, and take their fill of what is best; then travel on in thankful mood, with song and shout! "allah is good!" { } _key-notes._ l m n r lightly flowing liquids, we,-- tethered with our brothers. make we music, melody, more than all the others; lulling, mellowy, nimble, rare, reveling in rhythm, running here and everywhere, make me merry with 'em. { } _the bears._ wild bears are found all over, from northern lands to south, but largest, strongest, where 'tis cold and fiercest farthest north. all bears are fond of honey, of berries, too, and roots; they hug or squeeze their prey to death, as this their nature suits. they mate in june-y weather; their little ones are cubs; they sadly mourn when mates are killed, you'd almost hear their sobs. they'll try to feed a cub that's lying cold and dead, and will not flee, but stand and take the fatal knife instead. { } { } they sleep through winter-time, but prowl in wildest storms, with hope to find some creature killed, or struck with death's alarms. the bears are white, or black, or brown or grizzly gray, the white 'mong polar snows are found, where half the year is day. their fur is used for robes, for coats, sometimes a muff,-- their meat is prized by some as food, while some would call it "stuff." { } they nimbly climb a tree, but "back down," for their frame is made so lungs would forward press, if they head-foremost, came. * * * * * _the bear a blessing._ to people of kamtschatka, the bear a blessing proves; his skin forms beds and coverlets, and bonnets, shoes, and gloves. his flesh and fat are dainties, and of his intestine, is made a mask for warding off the glare of sun in spring. { } 'tis also used for windows, as substitute for glass; of shoulder-blade a tool is made, that's used for cutting grass. norwegians think the bear is more sensible than men; while laplands call him "dog of god," and dare not him offend. { } _fruits_ the fruits of the orchard and garden are beautiful, luscious and good, partake of them freely, dear children, but eat them at meals with your food. { } _the raccoon._ come, child, and see our pet raccoon,-- the raccoons live in the woods, you know; but ours was caught, and caged, and brought from old virginia, long ago. { } oh, no, you need not be afraid. see, he is fastened with a chain; for ropes enough he has gnawed off, and he is hard to catch again. he e'en will climb this ten-foot fence, and, careless where his feet may strike, he tumbles, bang! and there will hang, his rope being caught by vine or spike. and once the rascal ran away; was gone for days, and maybe weeks; when children came, and charging blame, said, "your raccoon has caught our chicks." { } "he's on our roof a-making mouth, and chatters when we would go near. we wish you'd come and take time home, so that our chick need not fear." { } so now he's chained; yet up he'll climb the stake to which he's fastened tight, and mutter low, so pleading, oh! 't would make you sorry for him, quite. just see his nose, so pointed, sharp,-- his ears as keen as keen can be,-- his eyes so bright, so full of light, and see him leap right merrily! his fur, you see, is yellowish gray,-- and he is nearly two feet long; he lives on roots, and nuts and fruits, when he's his native woods among. but here we give him bread and milk; he never eats like dogs or lambs, but takes it up from out the cup with his fore-foot, as we use hands. { } you'd laugh to see him, i am sure; of strawberries, too, he's very fond; will poke around till he has found each one among the hulls out-thrown. then, too, he's fond of nice clean clothes, will spring for sheet hung out to dry; and children dressed in very best, are sure to please his dainty eye. no matter where his feet have been, he'll spring and plant them, little pest, on something white, and then will fight to hold, and hide it in his nest. * * * * * { } you've "come again to see our coon"? well, he is gone; he plagued us so, we sent the "rac" to central park, where you can see him when you go. oh yes, they're glad to get him, there; they have no clothes hung out to dry; and children aye must stand away, for there a keeper's always nigh. * * * * * a "yes" and "no" are common, hard, but "yes'm," "no-sir," choice;-- let none but sweet and gentle words flow from your gift of voice. { } _the bank-swallows._ in a village of bank-swallows, you will find so many a nest, "that you scarce can tell their number nor which one of them is best." { } in the sand-hill, see the openings, round or oval odd-shaped, some, size and form depending often, on how loose the sand become. when with their short bills they pecked it, clinging fast with claws the while, till they made an open door-way suiting them in size and style. once within, they peck and peck it,-- sometimes quite a yard or more, while the nest is snugly builded, farthest from the outer door. but, so wise are they, this archway from the entrance to the nest, is inclining ever upward, that no rain within may rest. so the pink-white eggs are laid there, safe from harm, till baby-birds chirrup forth to take their places, 'mongst the self-sustaining herds. { } smallest of the swallow species, homeliest, too, yet favorites dear, for their graceful, airy movements, and their simple, social cheer. found are they from north to south-land, known of every tribe and race;-- swift in flight, yet swinging, swaying, skimming low from place to place. parent-birds care less for young ones, than do other swallow-kind;-- push them off half-fledged and timid, each his food and home to find. thus they, many a time, fall prey to hawks and crows, their enemies;-- even the nest sometimes is entered by the snakes and fleas and flies. swallows migrate in the winter, from the cold to warmer climes, flying back as spring approaches, to the haunts of former times. { } "ne'er one swallow makes a summer," is a saying everywhere;-- but when swallows come in myriads, blessed summer-time is here. { } _the mocking-bird._ the new world boasts the mocking-bird and whether caged or free, his wondrous voice pours forth in songs of rarest melody. his notes swell out and die away, as if a joyous soul were wrought to highest ecstacy, all music to control. { } his native notes are bold and full, and then he'll imitate, till it would seem the feathered tribe were all arrayed in state. he'll whistle for the dog or cat, will squeak like chicken, hurt, and cluck and crow and bark and mew, so comical and curt. while blue-birds warble, swallows scream, or hens will cackle clear. in robin's song, the whip-poor-will pours forth his plaint so near. { } canaries, hang-birds, nightingales, he echoes loud and long; while they stand silent, mortified, he triumphs in his song. _the busy bees._ why do the little busy bees so dearly love their queen, and wait upon and pay respect, with watchful care and mien? { } because the queen lays all the eggs, and mothers all the young, while every father-bee that's hatched is nothing but a drone. the working bees might all be queens, if cared for and well-fed when they are in the larvae state, but they're half-starved instead,-- while those intended for young queens are fattened overmuch, and nursed and petted every hour, that they full growth may reach. for every different kind of egg that makes the different bees, a different kind of cell is made, the queen directing these. for drones or males, six-sided cells, quite neat, and smooth, and nice; for working-bees a smaller cell, uncouth, and rough, and coarse; { } while those for queens are large and free, and fashioned fine with care, and lined with softest, silken shreds so daintily they fare. the queen-bee lays the worker-eggs, a dozen days, i ween, and then the drones as many more, then workers, then the queen. eggs, two or three, and sometimes four are laid in worker-cell; while drones and queens have each but one, as oft is proven well. the bluish eggs so close and warm, hatch out with three days passed; { } when larvae, white, as little worms, are watched and fed and nursed. these larvae, when some six days old, close in their cells are shut, and there at once begin to weave a silken web about. they turn and twist till all around themselves 'tis woven quite, and then they rest for twenty days,-- 'tis such a pretty sight. the small cocoons of working-bees, the larger ones of drones, the large and plump and perfect ones of all the coming queens. { } in twenty days they now burst forth, equipped from tip to toe, the working-bees and drones, i mean, for queens come forth more slow. the queen cocoons ope from behind, and i will tell you why, 'tis that the reigning queen may sting the others till they die. if mother queen leads off a swarm, a young queen they release, and she may take another swarm, and leave the hive in peace. another queen is then let out, perhaps a third and fourth, as many as can raise a swarm, to follow them, not loath; { } but when no more can swarm and go, because not bees enough, as i have said, the reigning queen stings all the rest to death. for in each hive and everywhere, one queen alone will reign, and any interloper meets with sure and sharp disdain. of workers, some are strong to fly, while some are weak and small, unfitted quite, for load or flight, or outside work at all. these last complete the larvae-cells, and nurse and feed the young; they mix the bee-bread, cleanse the hive, and care for every drone. all bees have stings except the drones, and these, when autumn nears, are stung to death with furious wrath, as by the book appears. { } and now i hope you children all, will use your wondrous power to "gather honey all the day, from every opening flower." { } bbb r yyy b u yy [footnote: bees are wises; be you wise.] { } { } _honey-sweet._ "ah, but how do bees make honey?" now the children, eager, ask; and we'll try to give them answer, if we're able for the task. see, the under-lip is lengthened, like a trunk or proboscis, ending by a kind of button, fringed with tiny moving hairs. all along its length, too, fringes, just the same, are growing forth; and by means of these, the honey is conveyed from flowers to mouth. then the bee has two small stomachs, in the first of which is stored all the honey it can gather, but, when home, 'tis quick out-poured. { } bees have six legs; and in hindmost, there are baskets found, or bags, into which the pollen gathered, is brushed off by the other legs. and this pollen, for the bee-bread and as food for young, they use, mixed with honey and with water,-- swallowed and disgorged like juice by the nurses, who digest it partly, for the larvae-food, taking care that each shall have it, just according to the brood. { } now we'll watch and see them working; see them brush off pollen-dust; see them, too, disgorge the honey, into cells the sweetness thrust. children, with your useful fingers, hands and arms and feet and head, do not let the bees surpass you, making honey, nay, nor bread. { } _what they say._ those creatures that chew the cud, the "ruminants" we call, from "rumen," or the stomach-pouch, in which their food doth fall. a "species" is a kind of animals or plants;-- each species has a different name, and differing traits and wants,-- and species may unite to form a race we know, for _race_ from _root_ is always drawn, and _roots_ must spread and grow. { } that men and women are the race most choice and fine, we plainly see, and sometimes call, the _human race divine_. { } the noble horse neighs out, "i am the race _equine_, and nearest seem, and dearest to the 'human race, divine.'" the ox and cow l-o-o, l-o-o, "we are the race _bovine_; and we most useful are, unto the 'human race, divine.'" { } the ass and mule bray out, "our race is_ assinine_, and very like us seem some of the 'human race, divine.'" the dog bow-wows as race _canine, canine, canine_; { } while tigers, cats and catamounts, g-r-o-w-l, growl, as race _feline_. the lion, king of beasts (feline), roars "_leonine_;"-- the lamb that's to lie down with him, ba-a, ba-as for race _ovine_. { } fishes in lakes or seas or rivers sport _piscine_; while birds in air or cages close, sing, "race _avine, avine_." all bees in hives or wild, hum out the race _apine_; { } and reptiles all rejoicing crawl in race _reptilian_. * * * * * i've a name that's made up of three letters alone,-- that reads backwards and forwards the same; i speak without sound,--yes, i talk without tongue. and to beauty i lay the first claim. * * * * * a word of three syllables, children, now find, that holds the whole twenty-six letters combined. [ ] the b ing m t, john put some: [ ] stand take to taking ----- ---- -- ------ [ ] i you throw my [footnote : alphabet] [footnote : the grate being empty, john put some coal on.] [footnote : i understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.] { } _britain's rulers_. old britain was under the romans from fifty-five years before christ ( b. c.) to four hundred fifty-five ( a. d.) then her eight states on home-rule insist. { } for many a year now they wrangle, ah! yes, for quite three seventy-two, being ruled now by this king, now that one, as each might the former o'erthrow. but ever since eight-twenty-seven ( ), britain's rulers have reigned by descent, from egbert, first "monarch of england," to victoria, daughter of kent. a score reigned and fell.--second harold in ten-sixty-six ( ), proud; usurps, but soon in fierce battle is conquered by william of normandy's troops. then came william the conqueror, a norman, then william the second, his son; then henry and stephen and henry, then richard (coeur de lion), and john. next henry the third, and first edward, edward second and third, richard, two (ii). henrys fourth, fifth and sixth, and fourth edward fifth edward,--third richard, they rue. henry seventh and eighth, and sixth edward, then mary, bess, james, and charles first,-- eleven years then with no monarch; second charles, second james, not the worst. { } then william and mary, then anne, four georges, fourth william, until came victoria, long live her queenship, for she wields her proud scepter with skill. { } _our land_. a ship sailed over the blue, salt sea, for a man, columbus called, had thought that the world was round, and he of the old ideas had palled. so, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, he sailed across from spain, and found our continent so new-- the "land beyond the main." { } but jealousies and rivalries and bickerings begun, and christopher columbus now with grief was overborne. americus vespucius soon our shores came sailing round, and stole the naming of the land columbus sought and found; while he, columbus, lay in chains, and died in sore distress; yet won for us who tread his land, a lasting blessedness. * * * * * young i-know is saucy and pert, and thinks himself wondrously wise; but i-know, the second, steps in all so curt, and you'd think that each might lose his eyes. { } _signs of the zodiac_. the annual path of the sun, the_ ecliptic_ is called, as we see,-- and a belt, eight degrees, on each side, the _zodiac_ ever will be. the principal planets all seem to move in the zodiac lines, while the belt, of itself, is cut up into twelve equal parts, called the _signs_. and these signs were first named, we are told, from their fancied resemblance to beasts, which astronomers thought they could see in the stars, from the west to the east. { } there is aries, the ram, then the bull, which is taurus,--then gemini, twins; then cancer, a crab and then leo, a lion, and virgo, virgin. next libra, the balance or scales, and scorpio, a scorpion (with sting),-- sagittarius, the archer or arrow,-- capricornus, a goat's horn we bring. { } aquarius, the bearer of water,-- and pisces, or fish from the sea,-- all together make twelve, and a wonder it is, that these fancies should be. { } _grapho_. children, you ought to know that _grapho_ can but mean to picture out, or tell about, some object or some thing. now _geo_ means the _earth_; and so geography means picturing out or telling about this earth of ours, you see. as _phono_ means a _sound_, phonography so terse, just pictures out or tells about the sounds of the human voice. { } as _photo_ means the _light_, photography must mean a picturing of the light that falls upon a thing, i ween. now _astro_ means the _stars_; and hence astrography means to describe or tell about the stars we all may see. and then astronomy tells all the various laws that govern or relate to stars; of their motions tells the cause. now _bios_ means a _life_; and so biography means writing out the life of one, which we may often see. _zoos_ means _animal_; and your zoography describes the animals that live on land or in the sea. { } then there's stenography, a writing narrow, small, or, as so many call it now, "short-hand," which tells it all. and then xylography-- engraving upon wood; and crystallography as well, that tells of crystals good. but these are _ographies_ enough for now, you think; yet when you're older, wiser grown, you many more will link. { } _the stop family_. "i'm a dot with a quirk," whispers little miss comma, "and you'll please not to pause long for me." "i'm a dot over comma," says miss semicolon, "and you'll pause twice as long where i be." "i am dot over dot," master colon speaks out, "you'll pause longer for me than they say:" "i am one dot alone," period says with a tone that means: "stop when you see me obey!" { } "i'm a hook over dot," says dame interrogation, "i ask questions; but answer? o, nay!" "i'm a splash over dot," says old sir exclamation; "i show wonder, delight, or dismay!" "i'm a line east and west," says miss dash, "and i'm best at changing of subjects, you know."-- "i am dash's small sister," says hyphen, and kissed her; "i unite words, or syl-la-bles, so." then said marks of parenthesis (carefully curved), "we inclose what you well may omit; but we're often displaced by miss dash (in your haste), whom you sadly mistake for a wit." now apostrophe, caret, quotation, exclaimed: "we are commas and hyphens combined; we leave out, or put in, or reveal to your kin what you've said, when their backs you're behind." then star, daggers, parallels, paragraph too, started up, staring wildly about, { } with "we rise to explain on the margin, 'tis plain, or to point a new paragraph out." of the whole punctuation, each knew his own station. each did his own duty, we see; if we do ours as well, and of their's, too, can tell, we shall soon learn good readers to be. * * * * * "all is not gold that glitters;" yet think not, children mine, that all that glitters is not gold; the true must ring and shine. { } _little mischief_. little master mischief lives in nellie's eye, sitting in the corner, peeping out so sly; now he's crossed the snow-ground and in chamber blue, thinking he is hidden, peek-a-boos at you. now he drops the curtain, sure that he is hid, but you see him dancing even on the lid. now, the curtains lifting, you can see he's crept to the inner chamber, where the love-light slept. watching now his moment he pops out, and see, mamma's spools and thimble quickly disagree. { } { } shall we punish mischief? better teach the child how to hold and lead him, running now so wild. would she like her playthings scattered here and there, when she had arranged them? would she think it fair? would she like her puzzle portions of it, lost? would she like her dishes everywhere uptossed? would she like her apron with a missing string, mamma hunting, meanwhile, thread and everything? nellie, learn the lesson: be to others true, always do as you would have them do to you. { } this the dear lord's precept,-- this the golden rule,-- this the highest lesson in our nellie's school. * * * * * be gentle and loving, be kind and polite; be thoughtful for others, be sure and do right. { } _grandma's canary._ grandma loves her birdy, and when he gaily sings, she will laugh and chat with him, at which he hops and springs. fearing though, that birdy might not understand, grandma from the toy-shop, brought a whistle grand. tuning now the whistle, to his sweet bird-note, he in singing back to her, nearly burst his throat, { } birdy, free outflying, often comes to light on grandma's tip-of-finger or chair-back, pretty sight! from her hand she feeds him, and he oft will take from her mouth the sugar, with a merry shake. yester-morn the window being open wide, birdy thought it brighter on the outer side. grandma mourning sadly, shed of tears a few, then she prayed the father, "show me what to do." soon she set his cage out on the window-sill, saying, "birdy'll come now, oh, i'm sure he will!" { } then she, hopeful, praying, "bring my birdy home," took the sweet bird-whistle, playing "birdy, come." and the birdy hearing, quickly came and lit on the cage, and shortly flitted into it. thankful now was grandma, to the dear lord, who, listening to her prayer taught her what to do. { } _a baby's faith_. our maude was dancing with her doll, in childhood's chattering glee; a brimming bucket standing by, the maiden failed to see, and skipping, tripped; the bucket tipped; the water, cool and clear, { } was rudely swayed, but, undismayed, and quickly kneeling near, both little hands she spread above the water's merry surge. "and what's she doing there," we ask? no answer, till we urge, and then, "why mamma, don't you know god stilled the waves so wild, with his great hand? and so i thought, although i'm but a child, that i might still these little waves with my two hands so small; and mamma, see, they're quiet now! but where's my baby-doll?" * * * * * _health and happiness_. mamma keeps her children in the happiest mood when she feeds them only with the simplest food. viands clog and pain them, then they fret and cry, and then when she whips them, everything's awry. { } _the meadow quails_. over in the meadow where the men make hay, in an elm-tree shadow on a bright summer day, two speckled quails ponder as to what will be best, should the stout mower blunder on their pretty home-nest. but a cloud in a minute from her great white bed threw a big silver bonnet o'er the sun's golden head and the quails, though they wondered would their home be beset, cried aloud, and it thundered: "more wet! more wet!" { } then the great sturdy yeoman coming close to the nest, with the heart of a true man beating soft in his breast, saw the parent-quails watching, with what fear who can tell? saw the baby-quails hatching, hardly out of the shell. and who knows but he thought of his own precious baby his dear little daughter in her mother's arms, maybe? for he quickly made over that portion of meadow with the sweetest of clover, and the softest of shadow. to the quails who all summer lived alongside the lane, ever warning the farmer of the forth-coming rain; for long ere it thundered and i hear the cry yet they would call as they wandered, "more wet! more wet!" * * * * * didn't-think is a heedless lad and never takes the prize: remember-well wins every time. for he is quick and wise. { } _the little housewife_. this little girl knows how to make a batch of bread, or loaf of cake; she helps to cook potatoes, beets, to boil or bake the fish and meats. she knows to sweep and make a bed, can hem a handkerchief for ned; in short, a little housewife she, as busy as the busy bee. { } let every girl learn how to do all things that help to make life true; that serve to keep the home-hearth bright; that o'er life's burdens throw a light. and then if she may never need herself to labor, she may lead her household in the better way, that eft shall bring a brighter day. the boys, too, let them learn to know of household duties, and to sew; for oft a button, oft a rip, by sewing they may save a "fip." yes, let them know that "woman's work" with many a turn and many a quirk, is not "a play with straws," as some. would seem to think. 'tis making home. { } _mother-love_. "ar-g-o-o, ar-g-o-o," is the song of songs, to the loving mother's ear; "ar-g-o-o, ar-g-o-o," these baby notes fill all the house with cheer. the baby's laugh, the baby's coo. the baby's every move, is music, joy, and grace to her, who is rich in mother-love. { } the precious pearl that is first unlocked by nature's mystic key, from out the baby's jewel-box, makes mamma's jubilee. the day of baby's mastership to raise himself upright, an era marks along the way, by mother-love made light. her mother-voice lures on his step, her care protects from harm; while deeper into her heart he glides, with every opening charm. and when he "ma-ma" sweetly says, or "pa-pa," in her breast his throne is fixed forevermore, this prince of babes confessed. when threads of thought begin to spin, and webs of mind to weave, when kindling soul looks out at eyes that know not to deceive,-- the mother's holiest task to keep her darling pure and true; her constant care, her watchful prayer, alone can guide him through { } the maze his youthful feet must tread, and if perchance he fall, her baby still in him she sees, her love can cover it all. o, the wondrous love the baby brings, is far beyond our ken! we only know that the fount once oped, can never be dry again. * * * * * _it snows! it snows!_ it snows! yes, it snows! and the children are wild, at thought of the fun in the snow-drifts up-piled; the boy with his first new boots is in sight, and the wee baby-girl, with her mittens so bright. they are tramping and tossing the snow as they run, and laughing and shouting, so brimful of fun; while the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, have measured their length from the barn to the wood. a dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, that we, who are older, forget to be staid, { } and shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed in feathery garments, press on or retreat, determined to win, nor acknowledge defeat, and the snow tumbles down with such beauty and grace that the air seems filled up with soft, bridal-veil lace, through whose meshes the sunbeams shall kiss mother earth, till the buds and the blossoms are bred into birth. but the children, at length, tired out with their play, and stamping the snow from their feet by the way, come slipping and stumbling and scrambling along, while the big brother catching the baby-girl's song, "oh, my finders are told!" gives her now a gay toss, the golden hair streaming like distaff of floss; and so cheery the group that is ranged round the board, that for snow, blessed snow! we all thank the good lord. { } { } an old saw. "if you'll break the first brake and will kill the first snake, you'll be sure to go through with what you undertake." thus our grandma, quaint but queenly, taught us grand-bairns one by one; and the lesson relished keenly filled each spring-time full of fun. for the watchful eyes were eager, and the flying feet must roam till they every nook beleaguer round the old ancestral home. * * * * * but 'twas not the broken brakelet that wrought good for after years; not the killing of the snakelet, but the conquering of fears, and the patient, wistful watching, educating thought and eye, made the brakelet and the snakelet types of weal for bye and bye. { } _the dandelion blossom._ in the spring when the grass had sprung up in the pass, and the meadows with velvet were green, we children would tease, "o, dear mother, please let us doff shoes and stockings, (ah! naught gave us shockings), and barefooted run o'er the leas, aye, barefooted run o'er the leas." and mother, so wise, looking into our eyes,-- { } "there's a snowdrift down under the hill! but when you will bring me, yes, when you will fling me a dandelion blossom to wear on my bosom you may barefooted run as you will, aye, barefooted run as you will." so for "guineas of gold," o'er the dandelion-wold, we hunted afar and anear; and with shouts of delight we all greeted the sight of the fully-blown flower presaging the shower of bright blossoms that brought us such cheer, aye, the blossoms that brought us such cheer. * * * * * fear naught save that which slimes thee o'er with falsity or fraud:-- let thine own soul stand clean and white before its maker, god. { } _sunshine._ the sun shines on forever though clouds may hide his face; his brightness and his glory the whole wide world may trace for clouds are naught but vapor whose fleecy veils unfold, and softest silver lining we then with joy behold. * * * * * _our ethel._ our ethel was not always, as people may have thought, a goody-goody little girl who never mischief wrought. oh, no, our darling ethel, the precious little woman, although so very dear to us, was most intensely human. she waded into mischief like ducklets into water, and kept us ever on the watch with, "daughter!" "oh, my daughter!" { } she took the ribbon from her hair the kitten to bedeck, then brought its tail between its legs and tied it tail and neck. she took her dolly to the pump and pinned it on the spout, and then with all her might and main she pumped the water out. "oh, little haynth tho' thelfith,' she cried, because her cousin { } besought one pillow, while she hugged them all, a half a dozen. she found a bell that tinkled, and fastened it, for fun, 'round kitty's neck then clapped her hands, and cried, run! kitty, run! she fain would pick the eyes out, of little baby-brother, "to find the pretty balls like those in fishes' eyes, and other." { } and then she'd fold her little hands so quaintly and demurely, you'd think she must be quite a saint, or not a sinner, surely. and thus her pranks from day to day and hour to hour repeated, would bring the thought, "tis all for naught, our aims are all defeated." * * * * * nay, nay, not so, the years roll by, and ethel's baby-mischief becomes the power that leads her kind, for by her force she is chief. * * * * * _the six sisters._ one of us e'er lives in dates, one in every peach awaits; one in pine-apple is found, one in orange, bright and round, one in plum, so luscious sweet, and our last in strawberry--treat. { } _the little girls' letter to god._ now susy's such a naughty dirl, and i ain't any better, and so we thought we just would wite the dear dood dod a letter. and tell him all about our bad, betause he'd have to know, or else he touldn't mate us dood, and so we told him how, { } once when i spit on susy's dwess then susy spit on me; and when i bwote her dolly's arm she smashed my twistmas-twee. then when i pushed her off the wall, she spattered me with mud; when i pulled up her tolumbine, she snapped my wed wose-bud { } i talled her "old dwanmother dwill" and she tailed me "old maid,"-- and then we stwatched each others' eyes down in the darden shade. and then my ma and susy's ma both said the only way would be to teep us little dirls apart in all our play. { } and so the bid, brown date was shut, and that was such a bother,-- 'tause susy's yard was on one side and mine was on the other. but we tould peet thwough all the twats, and tiss us thwough the hole where the bid, udly knot tame out, as bid as susy's bowl, for i love susy awful much, and susy she loves me, and so we told the dear, dood dod we'd twy dood dirls to be. so now when we just feel the bad a-tomin' in our heart, we both wun home and shut the date and teep ourselves apart. and in a minute all the dood tomes bat,--and then our plays seem nicer yet, and we fordet the naughty,--naughty--ways. { } { } _grandma's lessons._ "tis guilt to wear the garb of sin, though all be innocent within," these little girls heard grandma say, and wondered if 'twere half in play. but when they're wiser, older grown, and when the world to them is known, they'll learn to shun even seeming ill; they'll learn with grace their lives to fill, and thank dear grandma o'er and o'er, for this, and many lessons more. "'tis guilt to wear the garb of sin, though all be innocent within." "if you do well by others' ills, you'll do right well," she said, when we would come and tell about the naughtiness of ned. "now children, if you shun the bad you may in others find, and never let yourself be rude, or naughty, or unkind, you'll learn to do by others' ills right well," dear grandma said, "and in the way that's good and true, your youthful feet shall tread." { } _my little four-years-old_ telling dolly what she will say to her birthday friends i'm four years old to-day, and i can talk enough for ten birth-days, and i shan't rhyme it, neither;-- for little girls can't do it nice. no matter what they think, and so they needn't try, no, never. i'm glad you all are here, and now, with all our dollies in a row, i'm sure we'll have good times; and when we have our apples, grapes, and nuts and figs and patty-cakes, who'll care for silly rhymes! { } _handsome dick._ elzie's kitty, white as snow, loves his little mistress so, that he'll come at her command, lift his paw to shake her hand, bow his head and kneel to her, rumpling all his milk-white fur; many another pretty trick, too, he's learned, our elzie's dick. { } well, the church-fair coming on, elzie thought, "what can be done by a little girl like me, in the cause of charity?" mam'a told her she would show her some fancy work to do, which a half-a-dozen dimes sure would bring;--so, many times elzie made her fingers fly neat and nice to form the "tie." now our elzie, large and fine, looks like twelve, though only nine-- and the "tie" when quite complete, was so small, though choice and neat, that it could not be denied, elzie was not satisfied. so she shook her curly head, as with curious smile she said: "if i were a _little_ girl, like nannette or cousin pearl, this wee 'tie' might then appear just the thing,--but now, i fear, looking at the 'tie' and me, we shall seem to disagree.-- { } now, mamma, don't answer quick; stop and think,--my snowy dick at the fair might win some pence, by his wise obedience; and his pretty winsome ways being shown through all the days;-- and, dear mamma, then i should feel i'd done the best i could." quickly mamma took the thought, and a royal cage was brought; cushion made of scarlet bright,-- for our dicky, pure and white, thus was wont to perch and sit,-- and a collar blue we fit to his neck, when loyal, true, he presents red, white, and blue. so the cage is placed within a sly corner, free from din, and with tickets five cents each, elzie sought her end to reach. { } "handsome dick! weight fifteen pounds"-- whispers elzie on her rounds; "what is 'handsome dick'?" they say; "come and see, please,--step this way;" and once seen they're glad to tell others of white dick, as well;-- for the cat, as knowing now he must make his courtliest bow. { } did his best to help along elzie's plan, the friends among. upon his cushion he would stand, or sit, as elzie might command; then down upon his blanket lie and be wrapped up like baby-bye; would lap his milk, or dainty, sip, and shake his pretty under-lip, thus showing teeth as white as pearl,-- then round and round would quickly whirl, till each one seeing, cheerful, said: "for that five cents i'm sure we're paid." thus the three days passing by, which the fair must occupy-- dollars ten--ah, yes! and more, elzie holds within her store! dues for cage and tickets met, and the _ten_ is elzie's yet,-- which unto the fair she gave with an air so joyful-grave, that it seemed a spirit bright, nestled in her heart so light;-- and a happier child than she, we may never hope to see. { } _bessie's kisses._ kisses, kisses, raining, raining, on her lips, her cheeks, her brow, till she, wearied, "daughter, darling, mamma's had enough for now." "ah! but bessie has so many!"-- naught the pretty prattler daunts; mamma pleading, baby shouting, "ah! but bessie's more'n she wants." { } _the dinner-pot._ the homeliest things are highest worth, the dinner-pot's a treasure compared with diamonds, chains and rings, which serve alone for pleasure;-- enwreathe the dinner-pot with flame, and fill it with love's mixings, and it possesses charms beyond all gold or fancy fixings. and then, our bony frame-work, too, so stiff and hard and homely, will serve when plumpness all is gone, and lost is all that's comely. fling beauty, grace and sweetness round, festoon your lives with flowers, but ne'er forget that plainest things are life's most precious dowers. { } _nanny's play._ our nanny helped her mother in many a childish way,-- she picked up chips to feed the fire, and "played that it was play." she loved the hens and chickens and fed them day by day, and dubbed them each with quaintest name, and this was always play. she hunted through the big barn for hens' nests in the hay, and fetched the eggs right carefully, and this again was play. she donned her mother's dust-cap and danced about so gay, and planned how she would house-keep, and this was "truly play." { } with basin full of water she scrubbed the door one day, and splashed about till mother dear must work instead of play. { } with brush and broom a-sweeping she fluttered like a fay; the broken cup soon told her 'twas anything but play. { } she romped around the hay-field and shook the new-mown hay, and with her baby-rake she gleaned the meadow for her play. she ran to pick the berries that ripened by the way, and with her basket full to brim this was the best of play. so many things, so many, far more than i can say, our nanny in her childhood has "played that it was play." { } _nanny's lessons._ our nanny was but four years old when mother said, "my love, your needle learn with skill to use, it will a blessing prove." so nanny learned to "overhand," and "hem" so fine and neat, to "backstitch," "run," and many a join that she could scarce repeat. { } she learned to "catch-stitch" and to "cross," to "patch" and "darn," as well, to "gather," "plait," "box-plait" and "side," to "feather-stitch" and "fell." she sewed the buttons fast, and "worked the buttonholes" so neat, that many an eld accomplishes with less success, the feat. "be sure your thread is smooth and strong, a goodly knot or two, a double stitch for first, and then a fastening sure when through; "and thus your seams will never rip, your sewing never wear,-- like buttons loose and hooks awry,-- a slip-shod, shiftless air." all this and more her mother taught, and nanny conned it o'er till she was versed in all the arts that point the seamster's lore. { } { } her ninth birthday, and mother said "you're old enough to care for all your clothing now, my child, except the best you wear. "and here, within this little chest, and in this drawer wide, you'll keep them ranged so neat and nice, whatever may betide. "a place for this, a place for that, each garment grouped aright, that you may lay your little hand upon it, day or night. "no garment must be laid within, except it ready be, to don and wear, for thus you spare us trouble, you and me." and nanny, pleased with mother's trust, accepted it with pride, and, in her heart, the lessons learned forevermore abide. { } _nanny's ride._ our nanny oft in fancy soared up, the earth above, and sailed the great air-ocean with skylark or with dove. and in this fashion musing, one sunny summer's day, half-watching mother mending and baby-brother play, without a word of warning the old umbrella came, opened upside down before her, and whispered soft her name. { } "come, nanny you've been longing for a ride, and now's your time: jump in,--be quick! and careful, too, for i'm o'erpast my prime." so, springing in, she sat there as happy as you please, and through the open window, was borne upon the breeze. the sparrows eyed her keenly, the doves left off their cooing, and children, cause they couldn't go, set up a grand boo-hoo-ing. she bobbed against a clothes-line, and all the wash went flying; { } the good dame cried, "a witch! a witch! the saints forefend my drying." and next she got entangled in the telegraphic wires; and when she jerked away from them, she bumped against the spires. she hit the tallest chimneys, and set the smoke a-curling, then knocked a flag-pole all awry, the stars and stripes a-whirling. now, far beyond the city, with mountains in her face, an eagle pounced to catch her, but she quickly won the race. { } within a mountain cavelet, two baby-bears so young, smiled on her as she passed them, and greetings to her flung. she heard the thunder rolling. and saw the lightning's glare, from clouds away beneath her, while 'round her all was fair. { } { } she met a cherub driving a brace of butterflies, while dancing on a gorgeous one, away in wonder-skies. she saw an angel lighting the stars up one by one, as he balanced on a cloudlet that was left behind the sun. she heard angelic music, far up, the blue along, and knew 'twas mary crooning o'er her first sweet cradle-song. { } she saw such wondrous pictures, so beautiful and grand, such skyscapes and such cloudscapes, such waterscapes and land. but now the fluttering insects all round her plainly told that she was nearing mother earth far o'er the daisy-wold; and startled at the distance from home, the baby screaming and mother still a-mending there, told nanny she'd been dreaming. { } _the race._ a hop, a skip, and a gambol, a run, a tumble, a scramble, an up-and-a-going, a laughing-and-crowing, a weal-and-a-woe-ing,-- yes, a race for a ball or a toy we may call, this race that is human,-- for child, man, or woman, tis one and the same, a mysterious game that is played by us all, and we each get a fall; and so many it may be that forever a baby we feel in the race for a name and a place. { } _our kenneth._ written for our pet, as indicative of what he _should be_ but _is not_. know ye our little black-eyed boy? his name is kenney stone; now listen, for he always speaks in such a gentle tone. he never says "i will!" "i wi'n't!" he's never rough nor rude, but always bows with, "thank you; please;" and tries to be so good. our kenneth never kicks nor strikes, nor makes an ugly face; he never slides down banisters, nor puts things out of place. he never says a naughty word, nor tells a big, big story! o, no, nor even a little one, to make us all so sorry. { } { } our kenneth is a gentleman, he will not scratch nor bite; he never speaks to any child, a word that is not right. our kenneth never slams the doors nor stamps along the halls; he goes away when he is told, and comes when mamma calls. our kenneth, everybody loves, because he's so polite, our darling little black-eyed boy, our kenney stone so bright. { } _to my ten-years-old._ on thy cheek the roses lie; lilies, on thy forehead fair; violets blue, in each bright eye, sunbeams, in thy golden hair. pearls, within thy coral lips, ears and nostrils, crystal-clear, dainty, sea-shell finger tips, form, a sylph might love to wear. yet no beauty, thou, my child, save as filled with inward grace; save a spirit, undefiled, warm thy heart and wreathe thy face. { } _dare to say no._ dear children, you are sometimes led to sorrow, sin, and woe, { } because you have not courage quite, and dare not answer, no. when playmates tell you this, or that is "very nice to do," see first what mamma says, or if you think 'tis wrong, say no. be always gentle, but be firm. and wheresoe'er you go, if you are asked to do what's wrong, don't fear to answer, no. false friends may laugh and sneer at you. temptations round you flow, but prove yourself both brave and true, and firmly tell them, no. sometimes a thing that's not a sin, you might be asked to do,-- but when you think it is not best, don't yield, but answer, no. true friends will honor you the more, ah, yes, and false ones too, when they have learned you're not afraid to stand and answer, no. { } and when temptations rise within, and plead to "come," or "go," and do a wrong for "_just this once_" be sure you answer, no. for when you once have done a wrong, the right receives a blow,-- and wrong will triumph easier now, so haste and answer, no. there's many a little boy and girl, and man and woman too, have gone to ruin and to death for want of saying, no! so, young or old, or great or small, don't fail, whate'er you do, to stand for right and nobly dare to speak an honest no. { } _ask mother._ yes, my darling, when you question, i will answer, simple, plain, just the truth;--and when playmate tells you anything again, come to mother, she will tell you, yes, and tell you always true, for she knows what's low and sinful, and what's right and wrong for you. _tell mother._ 'tis wrong, my dear, to do a thing that mother must not know; and when your playmates, old or young, shall tell you thus to do, leave them at once, and quickly come to your dear mother's side, and tell her,--for she'll know what's wrong, and she will be your guide. { } _don't tell a lie._ don't tell a lie, dear children, no matter what you do,-- { } own up and be a hero, right honest, brave, and true. you'd better have a whipping each day than tell a lie,-- no, not a "white one," even, they lead to blackest dye. the rod but hurts your body, while lies deform your soul;-- don't mind the present smarting, keep the spirit pure and whole. but i am sure that mamma and papa, too, will try to help you children tell the truth, nor drive you to a lie. they will not punish harshly, nor when they're angry, quite; nor promise, and then fail to do,-- but always lead you right. { } _little moses._ in the talmud you will find it,-- in the quaint and curious lore of the ancient priests, or rabbins, whom the people bowed before; find the story of an infant sitting on the kingly knee; "little moses," pharaoh calls him,-- crowing loud in baby glee. { } and the banqueters were cheering, when the infant with a spring, reached and caught the crown that rested upon pharaoh's head, as king. caught the crown, and quickly placed it on his own unwitting head; but the king and all his princes, in the deed a meaning read. then spake balaam, the magician, "not because the child is young, hath he done this thing unknowing;-- he hath mocked thee, he hath flung "in thy face thy kindly dealings; such hath ever been the way of his people; a usurper-- let his blood be spilled this day." but the winsome baby-fingers toying with the kingly beard, won the edict: "call the judges; let their counselings be heard." { } so the judges and the wise men came with jethro, midian's priest, who, with wish to save young moses, thus his majesty addressed: "if it to the king be pleasing, fetch two plates, and we will hold them before the babe, a-brimming, one with fire, and one with gold. "if the child shall grasp the golden, he hath done this knowingly; he will trample on thy statutes; for thine honor he must die. "but if he shall grasp the other, know, o king, he knoweth nought of a royal crown or scepter,-- and his life with fire is bought." these wise words, the king approving, plate of fire and plate of gold, courtiers brought, and screams of anguish, soon the childish choosing told. { } for he, baby-like, had thrust it in his mouth; and though he flung quick the coal, he ever after spake with slow and stammering tongue. [footnote: exodus iv: ] * * * * * charming 'tis to see children who agree; chaste, and choice, and cheery, chiming in so merry, childlike, ever; churlish, never. championing the good; challenging the rude; chary as the dove; chief in jesus' love. { } _the children's railroad._ old time has built a railroad, on which you children speed to a land of light and plenty, or a land of darksome need; and soon you'll come to a meadow, where two tracks mark the way, but they'll run close up alongside for many and many a day. and one is strewn with roses, while one looks bleak and bare, with now and then a berry-bush, and a violet here and there;-- { } on one you'll find companions who but for pleasure seek, while friends along the other, will words of wisdom speak. be careful in your choosing, for if you take the _right_, you will travel in the shadow of the rock that shields at night; 't will lead through greenest pastures where softest brooklets flow, and land you at a station that is full of cheer and glow. { } on the other track, the roses are backed by sharpest thorns; while berries always nourish, and the violet but adorns;-- you will stumble into sluices, and what is worse than all, your self-respect and conscience grow weak with every fall. yes, if you choose the other that looks so bright and gay, you'll find the bridges broken, and the road-bed washed away; and when you near the station, you'll switch to a fearful leap, that will hurl you into darkness, and bury you in the deep. but those who choose the right one grow manly, womanly, true; god's love-light shines upon them, and falls as heavenly dew;-- they grieve at your wild folly, and will gladly help you back, if at any curve or turning you seek the trusty track. { } but ah! the scars you're wearing, from thorns that pierced you sore,-- { } and the ditches in which you've fallen, that were strewn with roses o'er;-- and the joys you've lost, unnumbered, that spring from good deeds done; and the fruits you've missed, unmeasured, that by others have been won. though friends may be indulgent, and loved ones even forget, yourself can never banish the memories that beset. you will wish you had never traveled the way that leads to death; you will wish you had never reveled in the viper's venomed breath. so beware which track you follow; and again i say, beware! the _false_ is strewn with roses,-- the _true_ looks bleak and bare; but this, 't is plain, is only that youthful, artless eyes are open to show and glamour, but see not deep nor wise, { } to truth then, children, listen, and cultivate the seed that in your hearts god planted, to serve your every need;-- yes, heed the voice within you, and follow it all the way, for it will help you choose the road that leads to endless day. { } _the phoebe's nest in the old well-wheel._ "phoe-be, phoe-be," why, 'tis a little bird, "phoe-be, phoe-be," singing the pretty word; "phoe-be, phoe-be," brown feathers cover him, gray breast, with blackish stripes scattered all over him. "phoe-be, phoe-be," here comes his little mate, "phoe-be, phoe-be," both on the garden gate, "phoe-be, phoe-be," loving now they trill, planning to build a nest in the old well-wheel. "phoe-be, phoe-be," now the nest is begun; "phoe-be, phoe-be," now it is nearly done; "phoe-be, phoe-be," how will the birdies feel, when the egg is dropped down, with turn of the wheel. "phoe-be, phoe-be," children are sorry now, "phoe-be, phoe-be," birds are all a-worry now, "phoe-be, phoe-be," laying eggs day by day, while the turn of the wheel ever drops them away. { } "phoe-be, phoe-be," never the lesson learned, "phoe-be, phoe-be," year by year they returned, "phoe-be, phoe-be," building persistently, where the turn of the wheel dropped the eggs all away. phoe-be, phoe-be, yet not in vain you wrought, phoe-be, phoe-be, for, by your folly taught, phoe-be, phoe-be, children plan so to build, that no eggs may be lost by the turn of life's wheel. { } _mabel's snow-feathers._ listen, children, while i tell you what our merry mabel said when she saw the feathery snow-flakes tumbling down about her head. clapping hands and dancing gaily, "mamma, mamma, come and see! come and see the feathers, mamma, soft and white as they can be!" { } standing then a moment, pondering as it were, whence came the snow, little face so wise and thoughtful, mabel cried: "oh, now i know, "there are lots of eider ducklets up in heaven, above the blue, and they're dropping off their feathers,-- and such downy feathers, too! "see them frolic with each other; see them kiss as fast they fly; see them make believe they are going to, then go gaily flitting by. "see them on the spruce and balsam, pile up little soft, fat hands; see their many plump, white cushions; see them wave their fairy wands. "see the showers of flying feathers whisking 'round in merry moods; see, the telegraph their perch is,-- oh, i'm sure they're almost birds!" { } now she fancies she can hear them whisper of their ducklet birth;-- hear their soft and wean-y quacklings, as they tumble down to earth. now she listens for the jingle of the sleigh-bells they will bring; now she sees the flying horses, prancing gaily at their ring. lovely are these fleecy feathers, dainty in each rare device; all unlike our ducklet feathers,-- white and soft, but cold as ice. { } yet they cover, warmly cover mother earth so bleak and brown; cover her with feathery mantles, comforters of eider-down. { } _forest trees._ children, have you seen the budding of the trees in valleys low? have you watched it creeping, creeping up the mountain, soft and slow? weaving there a plush-like mantle, brownish, grayish, red-dish green, changing, changing, daily, hourly, till it smiles in emerald sheen? have you watched the shades so varied, from the graceful, little white birch, faint and tender, to the balsam's evergreen, so dark and rich? have you seen the quaint mosaics gracing all the mountain-sides, where they, mingling, intertwining, sway like softest mid-air tides? { } have you seen the autumn frostings spread on all the leafage bright, frostings of the rarest colors, red and yellow, dark and light? have you seen the glory painted on the mountain, valley, hill, when the landscape all illumined, blazons forth his taste and skill? have you seen the foliage dropping, tender cling, as loth to leave mother-trees that taught them deftly, all their warp and woof to weave? have you seen the leafless branches tossing wildly 'gainst the blue? have you seen the soft gray beauty of their wintry garments' hue? have you thought the resurrection seen in nature year by year, is a symbol of our rising in a higher, holier sphere? children, ye are buds maturing; make your autumn rich and grand, that your winter be a passage through the gates to glory-land. { } _childhood fancies._ the twilight gray is falling, now list and you shall hear the footsteps of the sylphid fays,-- this is their hour of cheer. list to the gentle patter on each wee blade of grass, as it is bent, and back again, whene'er the fairies pass. { } upon the tips of grasses they cross the meadows, lawn, and laugh and dance and play and sing, from twilight hour till dawn. they light their myriad lanterns, and hang them in the arch of blue that canopies o'erhead, and by their light they march. they sometimes miss a fairy, and take a lantern down to search for her, and mortals say; "a fire-fly flits around." on leaves they hang their diamonds, their pearls in every flower; their gauzy veils upon the grass, they spread for fairy bower. their slender wings are hanging on every shrub, across; their seats are dainty cushion-beds of green and springy moss. { } their shrubbery of coral is gray and scarlet-tipped; their hair upon the maize is hung each summer, when 'tis clipped. the mushroom forms their table, their dishes, acorn cups; the ant-hills are their barracks high; their cannon, "hemlock pops." their scarfs of plush are lying on ripening grape and peach; their sea-shells 'neath the apple trees, each spring bestrew their beach. they paint the leaves in autumn; they make a tiny rink of every puddle, fen, and dike, and skate from nave to brink. they brown the nuts in forests, the burrs they open wide; they lure the feathers from the clouds. and pile them up, to slide. { } they build along the way-side their fairy palisades,-- the "hoar-frost" some have christened it,-- and hold west point parades. they sketch upon the windows such pictures as no power of man can ever execute, and on them pearl-dust shower. { } all these and myriad fancies that never can be told, my childhood days so new and sweet, in memory infold. but mother softly whispers, "tis not the fays, my dears, tis old dame nature's song of songs, the 'music of the spheres.' "list ever for it, children, twill bring you close to god; each sound but echoes him who made, each motion is his nod." * * * * * "waste not, want not," be your motto,-- little things bring weal or woe; save the odds and ends, my children, some one wants them, if not you. { } _lizzie and the angels._ little lizzie, thoughtful, earnest, springing up at break of day, thinks she heard the angels whisper softly, as she knelt to pray. { } "yes, they whispered to me, mamma, and they told me lots of things,-- and they said, 'o lizzie, lizzie, 'tis your temper trouble brings!' "then they said: you, child, can never be a woman good and true, if you let your fiery temper and your own will govern you; and they told me 'even jesus said, 'thy will, not mine, be done,' and that if i grew up wilful, all my life i can but mourn. and they told me, too, dear mamma, that if i were called to die, i could not be glad in heaven, for no heaven in me would lie. now, what shall i do, dear mamma, that i may be good and true? how shall i my temper govern, and my wicked will subdue?" "lizzie, darling, if you listen, you will hear a voice within, { } that will tell you every moment, what is right, and what is sin. but you must not disobey it, or it will grow faint and weak; you must watch to catch its whispers, hurry when you hear it speak. { } "for if you should linger waiting, there's another voice will say: never mind, nobody'll know it, even though you disobey.' and this other voice, this tempter, sure will lead you to the wrong, while the voice of the good angel fills your life with cheer and song. "in your play and in your working, you the golden rule must heed; do by others as you'd have them do by you, if in their stead. better far to_ bear_ and _suffer_ than to _do_ a wrong, my child; better give up every pleasure, than to be by sin beguiled. "in your eating, in your drinking, in your clothing, in your talk, you can glorify the father, or in wickedness can walk. for your little body, lizzie, god has said, 'keep holy, pure,' { } tis his 'temple' he has lent you, keep its every gate secure, "what you eat and drink makes muscles, bones and nerves, and brain, and thought; and by food and drink improper, fearful evils may be wrought. much of meat and spice and candies, makes your blood impure, and then all your body's in a jangle, and your temper's wild again. "and your clothes if tight or heavy, help to make your blood impure; help to make you weak and wicked, into evil ways to lure. foul air, too, your blood will poison sitting up too late at night; all these things will make it harder for you, child, to do the right. "bad companions also lead you to the wrong, and tempt you sore to defy the voice within you till it, grieved, will speak no more,-- { } do not hesitate to tell them you cannot their ways approve. do not yield to their enticements; tell them 'no!' with firmness, love. "do not ever let a single word unkind, nor coarse, impure, pass your lips; for these will lead you toward the bad, you may be sure. do not let a playmate tell you anything that must be kept as a secret from your mother;-- something's wrong, so don't accept. "always tell a thing precisely as it is; don't try to make it more fine and entertaining; tell the truth for truth's dear sake. never lay a finger, darling, on what is not quite your own, lest temptation overtake you, and your honesty be gone. "in the silence of your chamber, when no human being's nigh, { } don't forget that god is with you, watching with all seeing-eye; don't forget that he will know it if you do a thing that's wrong; keep yourself so pure and perfect, that your life shall be his song. "now, dear child, the blessed jesus always, when you wish it, hears, giving help to those who ask it, lightening woes, and lessening fears. follow always his example; take his precepts for your guide; learn to trust him, for he's walking ever loving at your side." { } _child-memories._ was ever so sweet the clover, was ever so clear the brook, as my child-days, over and over, found fresh in the dear home-nook? { } was ever such grace of motion, or ever such trills of song. as the birds in mid-air ocean, poured childhood's plays among? were ever so bright the noondays, were ever the skies so blue, or so soft the slanting moon-rays, as stole my childhood through? was ever so dear a mother, or a child so sweet, i pray, as my blue-eyed baby-brother, in the time so far away? was ever so true boy-lover,-- o, ever such pictures bright, as my child-days, over and over, reflect by memory's light! { } _nelly and ned._ "i'm twelve years old to-day," says ned, "and wish i were twelve more, sir,-- and nelly warner's almost twelve, so we'd be twenty-four, sir." "'and what of that!' why, nelly 'n' i have always played together; and then i draw her on my sled, to school in stormy weather. "and all the goodies that we get, we share them half and half, sir; and o, we have such lots of fun, i'm sure 'twould make you laugh, sir! "now nelly lives in cottage square, while i live 'round the corner, and all the boys would laugh and shout, 'ned jarrett loves nell warner.' { } { } "i didn't care for this, you know, but o, i couldn't bear it when they began to laugh at her, and say, 'nell loves ned jarrett!' "and so i thought i'd have to fight,-- and though i was the smallest of all the party, i's so mad i'd easy beat the tallest. "but nelly coaxed and comforted, and said, 'why would i do it, when they had only told the truth, and everybody knew it!'" { } _the clamberers._ all you babies perched in air, careful how you caper there! careful lest the little feet or the little hands so sweet, lose their hold and babies fall,-- careful, careful, babies all. { } _the new white jattet._ i never seen such naughty dirls as susy jones and ellen; they laughed, o desht as hard's they tould when i twipped up and fell in the old toal-hole. and see, mamma, i tore my new white jattet; and when i twied, they laughed and laughed, and said, "o, what a wattet!" the bid dirls talled them most untind, and said they surely knew it, the teaching of the dolden wule, and then how tould they do it! i duess they'd twy if they was me, i duess they'd mate a wattet, if they should fall in a toal-hole, and tear their new white jattet. { } _remember the poor._ "sweet, my darling, come and see what mamma has brought for thee; garments soft and ribbons bright, hat and coat, a pretty sight; sweet, my child, what shall we do with the old, now you've the new?" "why, mamma, this frock and frill, these are good and pretty still. but as they are quite too small, give them, please, to lillie ball in the cottage by the hill, she'll be glad, i know she will; for mamma, they're very poor, and 'tis cold to cross the moor in their tattered garments few; mamma, may i give the new?" "no, my child, and yet you may sometimes give new things away. keep your pennies, and they'll be dollars, by and by, two, three; thus you now and then may have something new and fresh to give." { } _the little street-sweeper._ look at that little girl sweeping the crossing; see how the mud her bare legs is embossing! and her feet are so slippered with mud, that it seems as though from the ground she grew up 'mongst the teams; and why she's not run over surely's a wonder, standing there sweeping, the horses' feet under. see her close curls and her bright, beaming eye; though fearless, the glance, you perceive, is half shy, { } as so lightly she swings her wet broom, and so true,-- let us cross, and we'll give her a penny or two. but wait, now a passer-by hands her a penny; just see her bright glance twinkle over to benny, the little hunchback sitting there on the curb-stone, close up to the lamp-post, that he may disturb none. his crutches beside him a sorry tale tell; but see, he's a basket of knick-nacks to sell; and a lady has bought for her child a toy whip, and now from her port-monaie gives him the scrip, but refuses the change,--and with tears in his eyes, he thanks her and blesses, with grateful surprise;-- and the glance the boy now flashes over to jenny, is as bright as she gave him when she got the penny. o, i've seen them so many times! always together, always happy and cheery, in bright or dull weather; for though he makes the most when it's fair, as they show me, yet she does the best when it's muddy and stormy. watch, now, her quick smile of such pleased recognition:-- to win it i oft come this way on my mission. but see, she draws back as i offer the penny, { } and modestly says, "madam, please keep the money, for you know 'tis a pleasure to me to be sweeping the path for you, lady;" and, all the time keeping her broom just before us to brush the least speck, the sweet smiles in her eyes her whole being bedeck. so i keep it, for she has as good claim as i to the right to do favors and none will deny that "it is more blessed to give than receive," and her sweep is far more than my pennies to give. but we'll stop and see benny, and make it up there, for in all that each gets they will both have a share. a nice little bib for my baby at home,-- a patent tape-measure, a mother-pearl comb; and benny's pale face lightens up with a glow such as angels rejoice in;--now, maud, we must go. but to benny: "i'm thinking to-night i may come and bring my friend with me, to see your new home." "o, if you will!" says the child with delight rippling over his face like a sunbeam--and quite as joyously, jenny: "o, madam, please do, for we've something at home that we want to show you!" so when 'tis near night-fall we take the short car { } that off through west fourth street goes winding afar, and away to the hudson, almost, we shall find a lone-seeming tenement cuddled behind huge heaps of fresh lumber so piney and sweet, while everything round there is charmingly neat.-- yes, the children are home and as gay as a lark, while the good mother greets us with pleasure;--but hark! a baby-cry comes from the bedroom beyond, and jenny brings forth a sweet, sunny-haired blonde, saying: "this is the something we wanted to show you, this two-years-old baby-girl--why, does she know you? she holds out her hands to go to you so soon!" "ah! she feels we are friendly;--hear now her soft croon. but how came she here, child?" "we found her just over the lumber-yard fence, with a board for a cover, wrapped up in a blanket marked bertha." "but why do you not to the charity mission apply?" "o, we want her ourselves! and the good lord, through you, { } has given us this home, so what else should we do, than to keep what he sends? and we're sure he sent berty, in place of our baby that died, little myrtie!" and here these poor people, so poor they were starving when i found them a few months ago, were now halving their food and their home with this waif and with benny-- for he was an orphan child left by his granny, who died in an attic just over their room, in the tumble-down house they before-time called home; though they've four of their own, and the eldest is jenny, the little street-sweep who would not take the penny, yet they say, "benny seems quite as much to belong here, and be one of our children, as if he were born here." o, how many rich homes where no child is given, might be made, for poor orphans, an opening to heaven! { } and how many, poorer, might seem to be rich, with a benny or bertha to fill up the niche that is left 'neath the hundreds of home-roofs all over. which the lord has designed some poor orphan shall cover; for he makes his home where his children are moored,-- and brings in his wealth where they live by his word; and the meal and the oil there shall never be spent;-- what we give to the poor, to the lord we have lent. a baby to feed, is a baby to love, a child in the house, "a well-spring" from above,-- and never forsaken, and ne'er begging bread, shall be those who take care that his lambs are well fed. { } _the here, there and everywhere family._ z i am always in a buzz, though i'm never in a fret, but i'm ever with a zealot in his zeal; i am in the zephyr-breath, yet with zest have often met the zero mark that brings the ice-man weal. y i've to do with the yoke, but not with the ox; i help every priest in his prayer; i am new every year, and in four months appear, while i yield to the yeoman a share. x i live in a lexicon, i mark half a score; i ride with a mexican, in texas, for lore, { } w i am in every wing, yet i'm not in a dove; i wait in the swing to be tossed up above. i live in the woods, and i perch on the wall; i am in the wild waves, though i sail in a yawl. v i am mingled with your victuals, yet 'm never in your mouth; i always lead the van and must forever stem the wave; i grow in every gravel bed, east, west, or north, or south, and although i'm with the living, you will find me in the grave. u i live in the urn, but not in the vase, i always can run, but i never can race. i tumble and jump, but i can't hop nor skip; i hide in your mouth, but i ne'er touch your lip. t i'm doubled up in a patty-pan, yet i never saw a pie; i hide in the boy's first pair of boots, nor pass his mittens by. { } s i am always in sadness, yet never know grief; then, too, i'm in gladness, which gives me relief. i know not the ocean, but swim in the sea, and the stars and the sunshine were not, but for me. r i live at both ends of a river, my home is the center of art; i am found in both arrows and quiver yet i quietly rest in your heart. q i lead the queen, yet never walk without you (u) at my heels; i laugh at every question queer, and joy in piggy's squeals. p i perch on every pepper-pod, i peer in every place; i prance with every palfrey gay, yet never run nor race. { } o listen, children, and you'll hear me in the cooing of the dove; in the lowing of the kine and the crowing of the cocks; i am in your joy and sorrow, and i come to you in love, and you will find me safely hidden in the middle of your box. n i live in the moon, yet i visit the sun, i've twice blest the noon, and i've twice kissed the nun; i was in the beginning, yes, double and treble, and wherever's an end i am always in the middle. m i, too, live in the moon, yet i ne'er saw the sun; i ne'er blessed the noon, and i ne'er kissed a nun. i'm one of the many, and in at each mess, though i've never a penny, i'm not in distress. l i sing in every lullaby, i'm out in every squall; i ring in every shilling piece, and roll in every ball. { } k i am baked in a cake, but i never see bread, i can fork hay, and rake, but i can't lie in bed; i can like, but not love; though no doe, i'm with the buck; i'm in kite, but not in dove; and i'm always in luck. j i'm in a baby-jumper, and with joy i laugh and sing, but i quickly find myself shut up in jail, where i pass my time in jokes, or perhaps in conjuring, till i lead the judge, who says i'm "out on bail." i i live in an inn, yet i never taste beer, i never smoke, chew, or use snuff; i am seen in high life, yet i'm true to my wife, and now i have told you enough. h at the door of a hut i must stand, it is true, yet of the king's household i'm one; i revel in heather all wet with the dew, and yet i am never in fun. { } g i grow in grace, yet gayety would have no place except for me; i greet the gardener with a grin, e'en though i lie the grave within. i'm with the king, yet shun the queen; i walk in grey, ah! yes in green; i gleam in gold, yet live in gloom, and at a wedding kiss the groom. f i am in the farmer's field, i am fresh in all his fruits; i'm in all his forests wide, but i'm not in his pursuits. e twice told, i'm in eternity, and yet i live in time; i eat and sleep in every place, yet soar in the sublime. d i darken your doors and your windows, and if you are deaf, dumb, or blind, you may know i am always quite ready, your duds or your dainties to find. { } c though i live in the ocean so blue, yet i never am seen in the sea; i can cast a sheet-anchor, 't is true, and captains depend upon me. b i grow in the bean, and to beauty i lean, and when buttercups bloom i am there; i bend the boy's bow, and the bugle i blow, till i wake the kamtchatcadale bear. a i lead out the ape, and i'm seen in the glass; i hide in the grape, and i'm found in the grass. i was there in the garden when adam was made, not to help them to sin, though i stood in their shade. you can not have an apple, an orange, a pear, but in each and in all, i must have my full share. you can not eat nor speak, nay, nor hear, without me; that i'm chief among my fellows, you all must agree. { } _quirks._ a little word of letters five that means bound fast together; transpose but two, and you will find a scattering yon and hither. unite--untie. * * * * * and now a word of letters four five perfect words will make, if you transpose and rightly place 'tis true and no mistake. levi--live--vile--evil--veil. * * * * * now five are found, with spring and bound a twist or turn to take, and ere we know, all in a row, five other words they make. the times are bad, the items sad, the mites must meet their fate; to smite the rock emits a shock that hurls us from the gate. times--items--mites--smite--emits. { } _somebody's boy._ list to the ring of the midnight song! 'tis somebody's boy; the winds give to every wild echo a tongue. yes, somebody's boy; the witch of the revel has waved her wand over somebody's boy; and the spirit of evil has clasped the hand of somebody's boy. comes now a yell on the midnight air from somebody's boy; reckless, defiant, and devil-may-care, is somebody's boy. foul is the bed, madly dark the dank cell, where somebody's boy is writhing in torture, the veriest hell, yet, somebody's boy. waiting and watching, a mother's eyes weep for somebody's boy; the vigil, dear father, o help her to keep! for somebody's boy. { } throw round him, and over, thy spirit to save,-- this somebody's boy, ere fiends for his lost soul shall hollow the grave of somebody's boy. fill with thy spirit, too, our hearts we pray, that somebody's boy we may watch for, and snatch from the death-trodden way, yes, somebody's boy. { } _the laddie-and-lassie birds._ come sit with me in the green-wood bower, while i sing you a song of love;-- 'tis the song of the birds in the deep, wild woods, 'tis the song of the sweet ring-dove. the laddie-bird says, "i have come to woo;" and the lassie-bird, "ah! coo, coo, coo, coo." { } the laddie-bird says, "with a hope to win,"-- and the lassie-bird, "coo, coo, that is no sin." the laddie-bird says, "together we'll dwell," and the lassie-bird says, "in the linden dell." the laddie-bird says, "and build our nest," and the lassie-bird says, "in the tree to the west." the laddie-bird says, "and raise our brood," and the lassie-bird says, "in the sweet solitude." the laddie-bird says, "till they're fit to fly," and the lassie-bird, "yes, to the blue, blue sky." the laddie-bird says, "let us hie away;"-- and the lassie-bird, "yes, and begin to-day. the laddie-bird says, "i will take this moss,"-- and the lassie-bird says, "and i, this floss." { } the laddie-bird says, "and we'll love so true;" and the lassie-bird, "ah, yes, coo, coo, coo." 'tis the old-new song that the birds have sung, aye, the birds of every race, since the world was planned, and came forth from the hand of the maker, aglow with grace. 'tis the song they will sing till time is o'er,-- 'tis the stream that from paradise gushed; { } and the music that flows when the love-light glows, will never, no, never be hushed. { } time eternity. us [footnote: "the great watchful i is over us through time and eternity.] none none the evolution of "dodd" a pedagogical story giving his struggle for the survival of the fittest tracing his chances, his changes, and how he came out. by william hawley smith. mdcccxcvii. "happy is the man who grinds at the mill; the mill turns 'round and he stands there still." "social institutions are made for man, and not man for social institutions." "the supreme purpose of creation is the development of the individual." the evolution of "dodd." chapter i. there was joy in the weaver household when the child was born, and when it had been duly announced that it was a boy. the event was the first of the kind in this particular branch of the weaver family, and, as is always the case, there was such rejoicing as does not come with the recurrence of like episodes. a man hardly feels sure of his manhood till the magic word father is put in the vocative case and applied to him direct, and the apotheosis of woman comes with maternity. there is nothing remarkable about all this. it is the same the world around. but it is the usual that demands most of our time and attention here below, whether we wish it so or otherwise; and although we are everlastingly running after the strange and eccentric in human nature, as well as in all other branches of creation, it is the rule and not the exception that we have to deal with during most of our lives. this weaver family, father and mother, were much like other young fathers and mothers, and their child was not unlike other first-born children. his first low cry and his struggle for breath were just such as the officiating doctor had witnessed a hundred times, and doubtless his last moan and gasp will be such as the attending physician will have seen many a time and oft. it is not the unusual that this brief tale has to deal with. yet, with all of these points held in common with the rest of the race, the hero of the adventures herein chronicled had an individuality that was his own, and most thoroughly so. this, too, is common. most people have an individuality, if they can only find it! a good many men never do find this quality in themselves, having it crushed out by the timid or designing people who take charge of their education, so called; but for all that, to every man is given a being unlike that of any other in all the world, and it is the business of each, for himself, to make the most of his own peculiar gift, and for all his teachers and all systems of education to help him in his heaven-ordained task. the young weaver, whose advent has just been mentioned, was an individual. the nurse became conscious of it before he was an hour old, and the same impression has been received by all of his since-acquired acquaintances. he was a boy with a way of his own. he came into a world where there are crowds possessed of the same characteristics. it is a marvel, how, in such a multitude of differences, either he or the rest of us get along, even as well as we do. when it came to naming the child, he was called "dodd." "dodd" was the short for doddridge, and the full appellation given to the youth at his christening, when he was two months old, was doddridge watts weaver, a name which the officiating clergyman pronounced with great unction, and in the prayer after baptism made mention of again, asking heaven to grant that the mantle of both the old worthies whose names the child bore might fall upon the little body wrapped up in an embroidered blanket and held on the shoulder of the good woman who stood before the altar. that is not just the way the preacher said this, but it is substantially the idea that he tried to convey to the lord, and perhaps he succeeded in doing so better than i have succeeded in conveying it to you, dear reader; but then, he had this advantage: the lord is quicker at taking a point hinted at than the public is! though this needs to be added: that if the hearer of prayer did catch the meaning that lay around loose somewhere in the jumble of the parson's petition, that morning, he did not see fit to grant the request, for no scrap of a rag that ever had graced the backs of those dear old hymn-makers fell, either soon or late, upon the form of the boy whose wriggling little body the mother tried to keep in order while the parson prayed. the father of this bit of humanity was parson weaver, a man of some ability, as was evinced by the fact that he joined the church, got married, went to preaching, and became a father, as noted, all within a twelve-month. he was shrewd, and generally had sufficient reasons for his actions. he even had a purpose in naming his first-born. he was fresh to the ministry, and young. the elders of the church were somber men, and feared that their pastor might be too much given to levity. mr. weaver got wind of this, somehow, and to impress upon the pillars of his church and the payers of his salary the fact that he was "sober, righteous and godly," he named his first-born out of the hymn book. but the boy never liked the name. when he began to go to school the other boys used to laugh at him when he stood up and told the teacher what his name was, and, a tease among the girls, who had an old grandmother who used to sit in a corner and read old books, once nick-named the youth "rise and progress." as soon as he could write, he always signed his name d. w. weaver, and insisted that the initials stood for daniel webster. as already noted, the child was the first born of his parents. he was not the last, however, for, like a faithful clergyman of the old school, that he was, parson weaver ultimately had a family, the number of which could not be told by any one significant figure. the children came into the household in quick succession too, for when "dodd" was four years old he had four brothers and sisters, two pairs of twins having blessed the good parson and his wife within the first half decade of their wedded life. these trifling facts may seem irrelevant to this record, but due reflection will doubtless show that they are worthy to be set down as pertaining to the case. perhaps first children are more apt to be individual than those of later birth. be this as it may, "dodd" had a much more marked individuality than his brothers and sisters. not to attempt to trace the ways of nature too far, it is perhaps true that in a first-born child are joined the individualities of the young father and mother to a greater extent than in the younger members of a family. the untamed currents of youthful blood that course through the veins of the bride and groom, and their unmodified natures--all of which mellow with years,--leave marks upon their eldest which the younger children escape. at any rate, "dodd" was a wayward boy from the first, a typical preacher's son. he was rebellious, belligerent, and naturally deceitful. this last trait, matched with a vivid imagination, made him a great liar as soon as he grew old enough to use the two faculties at the same time. in this regard, however, he was not so wonderfully unlike a great many other people. he had bursts of great generosity; was brave and daring even to foolhardiness; had friends, and would stand by them till death, if need be, when the good impulse was on; or perhaps betray them in their greatest extremity if the opposite passion got control at a critical moment. intellectually he was bright, even to keenness; physically he was lazy and a shirk; morally his status is best represented by the algebraic sign - ; spiritually he was at times profoundly reverent and aspiring, or again, outrageously blasphemous, and reckless almost to desperation. this is a partial catalogue of the characteristics with which "dodd" was originally endowed. the character that was evolved from these, by means of the education that fell to the lot of this individual, is the business of these pages. to take such timber as is furnished in this specimen, and fashion from it a temple of the lord, is a task that might puzzle angels. to make a decent child, a boy, or man out of "dodd" weaver, was the thing that worried everybody that had anything to do with him, and may, some day, perhaps, prove too hard a task for that individual himself. yet his case is no uncommon one in many of its phases, for every day sees thousands quite like it in the school houses of america, as elsewhere. and the question is, what are we to do about it? not to detail carefully all the events pertaining to the home life of "dodd" up to the time he was six years old, it is enough to say that after the time he was able to creep, he lived much in the street. he was usually in mischief when not asleep, and his overworn mother and somewhat shiftless and careless father were so taken up with the other children and with family and pastoral cares, that "dodd" grew up by himself, as so many children do; more is the pity. a man seldom gets so many calves, or colts, or pigs that he cannot take good care of them, every one; but for his own children--well, it need not be said what, the cases are so frequent that everybody knows all about them. "dodd" was a youngster for everybody to tease. when he first began to toddle along the sidewalk in front of the house, the folks who came along would pull his little cap down over his eyes, and then laugh at him when he got mad and cried. all this tended to develop him, and doubtless the evolution of many points in his character took rise in these and similar events. at last the morning dawned when "dodd" was six years old, and there was joy in parson weavers household in the fact that now one youngster could be got rid of for six hours a day, and ten months in the year, saturdays and sundays excepted. gentle teacher, you who read these lines, you know who was to take care of this specimen, don't you? alas! alas! what herds of six-year-old babies there are thus to be taken care of, many of them coming from homes where they have never known what care meant, but every one to be got into shape somehow, by you, my dear school ma'am, or master, all for a handful of paltry dollars per month, while you wait to get married, or to enter another profession. "to what base uses do we return!" so, on a leaden morning in november, when the mud was deepest and the first snow was shied through the air, whose sharpness cut like a knife, "dodd" weaver came into the schoolroom alone, his mother being too busy to go with him. he had waded across the street where the mud and slush were worse than anywhere else. his boots were smeared to their very tops, and the new book that he started with had a black daub the size of your hand on the bright cover. he came late and, without a word of hesitation, marched to the desk, and remarked to the woman in charge: "mam said you was to take care o' me!" chapter ii. miss elvira stone was teaching the school that year. miss stone was above the average height of women, and carried her social much higher than she did her physical head, while there was a kind of nose-in-the-air bearing in both cases. she had beautiful, wavy black hair, a clear complexion, black eyes, and narrow, thin lips, which were always slightly pursed up, as the groundwork or main support of a kind of cast-iron smile that never left her face for a moment while she was awake. her dresses always fitted her perfectly, and her skirts trailed at the proper angle, but yet there was a feeling, all the time, that she had been poured into the mould that the dressmaker had prepared, and now that she had got hard, you could strike her with a hammer and not break her up, though you could not help thinking that it must have taken a very hot fire ever to melt her. she wore glasses, too. not spectacles, but a dainty pair of eye glasses, set in gold, that sat astride of her nose in a very dignified fashion and crowned the everlasting smile that was spread out below them. in fact miss stone was so superior a person that one wondered how it ever happened that she should condescend to teach school at all. but this was only a general view of the case. when viewed in detail the fact appeared that although elvira was proud she was also poor! this accounted for her being in the schoolroom. but she had made the most of herself in her profession, as she had in other directions. her motto was to aim high, even if her arrow should light in the mud at last, and she always shot by that rule. when she decided to be a teacher rather than a clerk in a store, she began to look about for the best opportunities in the direction of her choice. it should be remarked that the alternative of store or schoolroom came to her only after several unsuccessful seasons in society, in which the moulded form, the wavy hair, and the constant smile had been used to their best possible advantage, but all in vain. the hook on which her bait was hung was so rigid and cold that no gudgeon, even, ever thought of biting at it; though the angler thought it a clever and tempting bit to bite at. how apt we all are to be deceived--by ourselves. so elvira resolved to make a school teacher out of herself. being somewhat dull intellectually, and detesting severe study, she abjured all paths that would lead her to teach the higher branches of learning, and bent her rather spare and somewhat stale energies to fitting herself for primary work. this, too, in the face of the fact that she naturally despised children, except sweet little girls in their best clothes, with long curls, freshly made up, and hanging like a golden flood over neck and shoulders; or bright little boys, also well dressed and duly curled, for about a minute, when they came into the parlor where miss stone used to sit with her smile. for these she had a fancy merely, it could not be called an affection. miss stone was not affectionate. she went to st. louis and associated herself with the kindergarten of that far-famed city. far be it from this record to intimate that this is not a good thing to do, on occasion. with this point i have naught to do. but history is history, and facts must be duly recorded; and the fact is, miss stone went to st. louis, as before stated, and let out the job of being fashioned into a kindergarten, to certain persons who dwelt in that city, and whose business it was to do just this sort of thing. neither can it be here set down what her ultimate success might have been had she confined herself to kindergarten work proper. indeed, it is an open question how any one ever succeeded in this particular way, or, in fact, whether any one ever did do kindergarten work proper for a week at a time. it is one of the peculiarities of this kind, that it is never met with in all its purity. like the old-fashioned milk-sickness, you can never come to the place where it really exists. any one can tell you just where you will find it, but when you pursue it, and come to the place, like the end of the rainbow, it evades you and goes beyond. but this is getting on slowly. miss stone got on slowly, too. this was the woman to whom "dodd" committed himself, in the words of the last chapter. the lady turned towards the boy and brought the full force of her smile to bear upon his luckless head. "my dear little child," she said, "go and clean your feet!" this, vocally. in mental reservation she remarked at the same time: "drat the little villain, i've got to take him at last," for she had heard of "dodd" and his exploits before she had been in her place a week. "i don't haf to," returned the youth, scraping a piece of black loam off his left boot with the toe of his right, and rubbing the sticky lump into the floor. but miss stone had faith in her training. she hastily ran through all the precepts and maxims of froebel, and also such others as his american followers have added by way of perfecting this highly wrought system, but though she thought a great deal more rapidly than usual, she found no rules and regulations duly made and provided for a case just like this. for the first time in her life she realized that there was one thing in this world that even a german specialist, backed up by st. louis philosophy, had not reached; neither froebel nor his followers said a word about poking mud off one boot with the toe of the other, nor of rubbing mud into the floor, nor what to do with a saucy little boy who said defiantly, "i don't haf to." had she been teaching in a large city she might have sent for the principal, and he might have telephoned the superintendent, who might have called a meeting of the board to consider the case, and so overcome the dilemma; but circleville had a school of only three rooms, and the principal, so called, heard twenty-two recitations a day, in his own room, and had little time for anything else. so there was no help from that quarter, and for the time miss stone was dumb. there is a tradition that her smile left her for a moment, but the fact is not well authenticated and should not be too freely believed. how long this teacher would have remained in her unfortunate condition it is impossible to tell, for just at this instant esther tracy, a motherly little soul, aged seven, who had been conscientiously trying for half an hour to see in how many different ways she could arrange four wooden tooth-picks upon the desk, according to a modified form of froebel's canons, as interpreted by miss stone, took the ends of her fingers out from between her lips, where she had thrust them during the moment of her doubt, and raising her hand, said: "please, miss stone, let me take 'dodd' and i'll take care of him." without waiting for a reply, she came forward, took the boy by the hand and led him out of the room. o, nature, nature! how inexorable art thou! as people are born, so are they always, and what do all our strivings to change thy decrees amount to? esther tracy, aged seven, who had never heard of a theory and art of teaching, and who scarce knew her letters; indeed, has put to shame miss elvira stone, the handmade disciple of froebel and the st. louis kindergarten system! she knew what to do with "dodd," and miss stone didn't. this was the success of one, the failure of the other. the principle obtains always. chapter iii. it was fully fifteen minutes before esther and "dodd" returned to the schoolroom. it takes a large reserve force of both patience and scraping to make presentable such a specimen as "dodd" was on this memorable morning. but when the two appeared again, the boy's boots were clean, and his hair was smoothed down, while the book cover showed only a wet spot, of deeper tint than the rest of the book, in place of the black blot that had been so prominent a few minutes before. the girl led the boy to a seat not far from hers and then returned to her own little desk. while the children were out miss stone had time to collect her thoughts, and she began at once to consider what she should do to amuse the child. it had been a primary principle with those who constructed this female educator, that the chief end of a primary teacher was to amuse the children placed under her charge. this precept had been drilled into miss stone, and nothing less than a charge of dynamite could have dislodged it. she was taught that it was little less than wicked to impose tasks upon young shoulders; that the "pretty little birdies" (this always said with a smile) "enjoyed themselves, hopping about in god's blessed sunlight, and that it was nature's way to have her children happy." "happiness," in this case, seemed to mean doing nothing, but simply being amused--a definition that finds general recognition among many, there being those who dream of heaven as a place where they can be as everlastingly lazy as they choose, through all eternity, with the celestial choirs forever tooting soft music in the distance, and streams of milk and honey flowing perpetually to their lips, all for their amusement and delectation. perhaps this last is the correct idea. it might as well be confessed that on this point we are not well posted in this world, though many profess to be. the father will show us this some day, as he will all else, but till then we can wait. but, be the employment or enjoyment of heaven what it may, it is evident that in this world a man or a child has something to do besides being amused. we are all born destined for work, rich and poor alike. it is our reasonable service, and the best thing we can do is to fit ourselves for the task, from the very first. not that our work shall be mere drudgery, though it may be that and nothing more, and, even so, be better than idleness or being amused; but it is the fate of every soul born on earth to be called upon constantly to do things which it had rather not do, just then, anyhow, and whenever such a condition exists, work is the word that describes what has to be done. it is the business of life to work. the book has it that, "the father worketh hitherto." even the new version has failed to reveal the phrase, "the father is amused," and the master, when a boy, declared that he must attend to the "business" that lay waiting for him. but the pedagogic preceptors of miss stone did not draw their system of education from so old a book as the one just referred to. it is perhaps true, also, that german philosophy was evolved merely that people might be amused by it! quietly she glided down the aisle, her dress rustling along the seats, and an odor of "new mown hay" exhaling from her clothing. "dodd" hung his head as she approached--perhaps it was to dodge her smile--and waited developments. "what is your name, my dear?" came from between the pursed-up lips. "doddridge watts weaver," said the boy, in a loud tone. there was a titter all over the room. the name was very odd, and an oddity is always to be laughed at by the average person, boy or man. did you ever think of that, my dear pedagogue; you who would fain amuse children, and yet will spit them upon the spear of public ridicule by asking them to tell their names out loud in public, before all the rest of the boys and girls? it is doubtful if any one ever likes to tell his name in public. i have known old lawyers to blush when put upon the witness stand and obliged to tell their names to the court and jury, all of whom had known them for the last fifty years! if such is the effect on a dry old stump of a lawyer, what must the effect be on a green, sensitive child? "dodd" heard the titter and it made him mad. he was not to blame for the name, and he felt that it was mean for the folks to laugh at him for what he couldn't help. he cast an angry glance out of the corner of his eyes, as if to say he would be even for this some day, and then hung his head again. "that's a very pretty name," said miss stone, thinking by this thin compliment to amuse the boy. "tain't nuther!" returned the youth. miss stone ventured no further in that line. "i am glad you have come to school, and i hope you will be a very nice little boy, because we all love nice little boys," replied miss stone. "dodd" glanced across the aisle to where sat a "curled darling" and wished be could pull his hair till he howled. "now here is something that will amuse you a little while, i am sure," pursued miss stone, and she laid a handful of beans upon the desk. the boy glanced up and giggled just a little--such a knowing giggle, too, as much as to say: "what do you take me for? here's a go! come to school to be amused with beans!" miss stone caught the glance, and in her inmost soul knew all it meant, and realized its full force; but she checked the truth that she felt within her and proceeded by the card. and why not? was she not acting in accordance with the rules and regulations laid down by those who had fashioned her for this very work, and were not these same warranted to keep in any climate, and not to be affected by dampness or dry weather? she had put her faith in a system and had paid for what she received; and she didn't propose to be beaten out of her possession by any little white-headed son of a methodist preacher, in a town of a thousand inhabitants. she showed "dodd" how to divide the handful of beans into little bunches of three each, and how to lay each pile by itself along the top of the desk, and then left him to be amused according to the rule in such cases made and provided. now it is admitted, right here, that beans are not a strictly kindergarten "property"--to bring a stage term into the schoolroom--but one seldom sees genuine kindergarten properties, or hardly ever, even in st. louis, and beans are so commonly used as above stated, that it can hardly be the fault of the harmless vegetable that miss stone's plan did not succeed exactly as she wished it to. the fact is, "dodd" knew how to count before he went to school, and could even add and subtract fairly, as was shown by his doing errands at the store for his mother and counting the change which he brought back to her. the bean business was therefore mere nonsense to him. he turned up his nose at the inoffensive kidney-shaped pellets before him, and his reverence for the dignity of the schoolroom and his faith in miss stone fell several degrees in a few minutes. perhaps it would not have been so in boston. in that city, i am told, the bean is held in such reverence by all grown-up people that one might well expect to see the quality descend to all children, as a natural inheritance. but circleville is not boston, and there are thousands of other towns in these united states that are like circleville in this respect. however, "dodd" sat idly moving the beans about for some time. he was quiet, and gradually miss stone forgot him in the press of other thoughts. to be plain, she had recently joined an art club, an organization composed of a few ladies in the little village, women whose husbands were well-to-do, and who, being childless, were restless and anxious to "become developed." miss stone was a member of this club, and in a few days she was to read a paper on "giunta pisano, and his probable relation to cimabue," and the subject was working her mightily, for she was anxious to have her production longer than miss blossom's, read at the last meet, and to secure this was no small task. she had been to the "up-stairs room" during recess and brought down the cyclopedia, and, happily, had found a page and a half regarding giunta pisano therein, which she was copying verbatim. to be sure, there was no word in it about cimabue, or the relation of the one to the other, but this was not taken into account. there were plenty of words in the article, and that was the chief end just then. so miss stone was soon busy with her pen, the index finger of her left hand noting the line in the cyclopedia which should be next transcribed. the children whispered and played a good deal, but she paid little heed. there was little danger of visitors, for no one visited schools in circleville (how like all other towns it is in this respect!) and miss stone knew how to hustle classes through recitations and make time on a down grade just before dinner, and so took her time at her task of writing up poor old giunta. she was presently conscious, however, that something unusual was going on, and on looking up, found the eyes of the pupils fastened on "dodd." she ran down to his desk, hoping to find the beans in order. but alas for human expectations! we are all so often doomed to disappointment! not a bean was to be seen, and "dodd" hung his head. miss stone reached for his hands, thinking he was hiding them there; but his hands were empty. she tried his pockets. they yielded ample returns of such things as boys' pockets are wont to contain, but no beans appeared. miss stone was alarmed, and she almost trembled as she asked: "'dodd,' where are the beans?" the boy did not look up, but with a kind of suppressed chuckle, he muttered, "i've eat 'em all up!" chapter iv. for some cause or other miss stone and "dodd" did not get on well together as their acquaintance progressed. the boy was impulsive, saucy, rude, and generally outrageous, in more ways than can be told or even dreamed of by any one but a primary teacher who has become familiar with the species. miss stone had no natural tact as a teacher, no gift of god in this direction, no intuition, which is worth more than all precepts and maxims combined. she knew how to work by rule, as so many teachers do, but beyond this she had little ability. this to her credit, however: she did, ultimately, labor hard with the boy, and tried her best to do something with him, or for him, or by him, but all to little purpose. it seemed to be "dodd's" special mission to knock in the head the pet theories of this hand-made school-ma'am. she had him up to read on the afternoon of the first day of his attendance at school. being but six years of age, and having just entered school, it was proper, according to the regulations, that he should enter the chart class. so to the chart class he went. the word for the class that day was "girl," and the lesson proceeded after the usual manner of those who hold to this method of teaching children to read. a little girl was placed upon the platform (the prettiest little girl in the class, to be sure), and the pupils were asked to tell what they saw. they all answered in concert, "a girl;" and it is to be hoped that this answer, thus given, was duly evolved from their inner consciousness by a method fully in harmony with the principles of thought-development, as laid down in the books, and by miss stone's preceptors. a picture girl was then displayed upon a card-board which hung against the wall. there were many of these card-boards in the room, all made by a book-concern that had some faith and a good deal of money invested in this particular way of teaching reading--all of which, i am sure, is well enough, but the fact, probably, ought to be mentioned just here, as it is. the pupils were asked if the girl on the platform was the same as the one on the card-board, and there was a unanimous opinion that they were not identical. the analysis of differences was not pursued to any great length, but enough questions were asked the children, by miss stone, to develop in them the thought that "structurally and functionally the two objects, designated by the common term, were not the same!" when this diagnosis had been thoroughly mastered by the children, a third member was added for their serious consideration, miss stone having duly explained to the class that "there is still another way to make us think girl." "you know," she said, "we always think girl when we see 'lollie'"--the little girl on the platform--"and we always think girl when we see the picture; but now you all watch me, and i will show you one other way in which we may always be made to think girl." then, with much flourish of chalk, miss stone printed "girl" upon the board, and proceeded to elucidate, as follows: "now, this that i have written upon the board is not 'lollie,' for she is on the platform yet; nor is it the picture, for that is on the card-board, but it is the word 'girl,' and whenever i see it, it makes me think girl. now, 'lollie' is the real girl, on the card-board is the picture girl, and on the blackboard is the word girl. now, who thinks he can take the pointer and point to the kind of girl i ask for?" several little hands went up, but "dodd's" was not among them. miss stone noticed this and was "riled" a little, for she had tried doubly hard to do well, just because this tow-head was in the class, and now to have the little scamp repudiate it all was too bad. she called on one and another of the children to point, now to the real girl, now to the picture girl, now to the word girl, and all went very nicely, till finally she asked "dodd" to take the pointer and see what he could do. but the boy made no motion to obey. gently she urged him to try, but he hung his head and would not budge. "why don't you want to try, 'dodd?'" asked the lady, bending down over the child. o fatal question! quick as thought the lad replied, as he raised his head: "coz, i've knowed that always!" it is not the intention of this chronicle to pass judgment upon any system of teaching children to read. this record does not concern itself with one system nor another. but in the evolution of "dodd," miss stone used the word-method of the charts, as before stated, and using it just as she did, she failed to reach the boy as she hoped to, and her failure was very unfortunate for the child. she was aware of this, but she had not strength enough, in her own right, to change the result. so it was that day after day went by, and the antagonism between teacher and pupil grew. the boy presently discovered that he could annoy miss stone mightily, and he lost no opportunity to do what he could in this direction. it was contrary to the creed taught this good woman to inflict corporal punishment upon any child, and though "dodd" aggravated her almost to desperation, and was malicious in his persecutions, yet she kept her hands off him. once or twice she tried some slight punishment, such as making him sit on the platform at her feet, or stand with his face in the corner, but these light afflictions the boy counted as joyous rather than grievous, and did as he chose more than ever. he slyly unfastened one of miss stone's shoestrings one day, when seated at her feet for penalty, and laughed when she tripped in it as she got up; and somehow or other, he would always put the whole room in a turmoil whenever placed with his face to the wall. "dodd" learned to read quite rapidly, however, having mastered his letters before he went to school, and having spelled a good many words on signs and in newspapers. before the end of the third week he had read his first reader through, one way or another, though he was still in the chart class, and having once been through the book, it lost many, if not most, of its charms for him thereafter. but if his reader was so soon crippled for him, what shall be said of the work of the chart class, over which he went again and again, always in substantially the same way? it may be said, and truthfully, that there were some pupils in the class who, even after going over and over the same lesson, for days and days, still did not master it, and so the class was not ready to move on; but it does not follow that therefore "dodd" was not ready to move on. this did follow, however, according to miss stone's teaching, and according to the system adopted by multitudes of teachers east, west, north, and south. i am well aware that there are teachers, plenty of them, whose spirits will rebel against the above insinuation, so, a word with you, ladies and gentlemen. the system used by miss stone may have worked well enough in some other hands, but it should be remembered that it is not a system that can educate our children. nor is it a system--any set of rules and formularies--that can make our schools, any more than it is forms and ceremonies that make our churches. these may all be well enough in their proper places, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in them, per se. it is the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees in the one case, and the dry bones of pedagogy in the other, the evil arises, in the schools as in the churches, from believing and acting as if there were something in the system itself. if human nature were a fixed quantity, if any two children were alike, or anywhere nearly alike, if a certain act done for a child always brought forth the same result, then it might be possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry. but the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any other of nature's laboratories. a chemist will distill for you the odor of a blown rose, or catch and hold captive the breath of the morning meadow, and do it always just the same, and ever with like results. but there is no art by which anything analogous can be wrought in human life. here a new element comes in that entirely changes the economy of nature in this regard. the individuality of every human soul is this new factor, and because of it, of its infinite variability--because no two atoms that are cast into the crucible of life are ever the same, or can be wrought into character by the same means--because of this, no fixed rules can ever be laid down for evolving a definite result, in the realm of soul, by never-varying means. and this is where miss stone was at fault. she had put her faith in a system, a mill through which all children should be run, and in passing through which each child should receive the same treatment, and from which they should all emerge, stamped with the seal of the institution, "uniformity." this was the prime idea that lay at the foundation of miss stone's system of training--to make children uniform. this very thing that god and nature have set themselves against--no two faces, or forms, or statures; no two minds, or hearts, or souls being alike, as designed by the creator, and as fashioned by nature's hand--to make all these alike was the aim of the system under which "dodd" began to be evolved, and with which he began to clash at once. the boy was much brighter than most of the class in which he was placed. the peculiarity of his own nature, and his surroundings before entering school, made him a subject for some special notice, something more than the "regular thing" prescribed by the rules. yet this he did not get, and by so much as he did not, by so much he failed to receive his proper due at this period of his life. and this is a fault in any system, or in any teacher who works exclusively by any card other than his or her own good sense, as applied to each individual case. it was not so much the means that miss stone tried upon "dodd" that were at fault, as it was the way in which she applied them and the end she strove to reach by their use. and for you, my dear, who are walking over the same road as the one just reported as traversed by miss stone, look the way over and see how it is with you in these matters. and do not content yourself, either, by merely saying, "but what are we going to do about it?" bless your dear life, that is the very thing that is set for you to find out, and as you hope for success here and a reward hereafter, don't give up till you have answered the question. neither can any one but yourself answer this question. the experience of others may be of some help to you, but the problem--and you have a new problem every time you have a new pupil--is only to be solved by yourself. look over the history of the chart class, over whose silly mumblings this boy was dragged till disgust took the place of expectancy, then think of like cases that you have known, and ask yourself what you are going to do about it. it is true that classes are large, that rooms are full, that some pupils are severely dull, and that it is a very hard thing to know what it is best to do; but these things, all of them, do not excuse you from doing your best, and from making that best, in large measure, meet the absolute needs of the child. "hic labor, hoc opus est." and for you, who send your six-year-olds to school with a single book, and grumble because you have to buy even so much of an outfit, what are you going to do about it when your boy drains all the life out of the little volume, in a couple of weeks or a month? he knows the stories by heart, and after that says them over, day by day, because he must, and not in the least because he cares to. what are you going to do about this? it is largely your business. you cannot shirk it and say that you send the boy to school, and it is the teacher's business to take care of him. that will not answer the question. look the facts in the face, and then do as well by your boy as you do by your hogs! when they get cloyed on corn, then you change their feed, and so keep them growing, even if it does cost twice as much to make the change; and yet, the chances are that when your boy is tired to death of the old, old stories in his reader, tales worn threadbare, as they are drawled over and over in his hearing by the dullards of his class, till his soul is sick of them, even then you force him to go again and again over the hated pages, till he will resort to rank rebellion to be rid of them! and what are you going to do about it? miss stone knew none of these things. they were of little interest to her, and she bothered her head but little about them. but they were of interest to "dodd" weaver. in the evolution of this young hopeful they played an important part. they were hindrances to the boy at the very outset of his course in the public schools. they begot in him habits and dislikes which it took years to efface, and from which it is doubtful if he ever did fully recover. there are multitudes in like case, and what are we going to do about it? chapter v. the severity of the duties, pastoral and paternal, that fell to the lot of elder weaver, wore rapidly upon the constitution of that worthy gentleman, and when "dodd" was nine years old his father found it necessary to retire from the pulpit, for a year at least, and, as is usual in such cases, he went to that refuge for fagged out ministers of all denominations, the old homestead of his wife's parents. from this rustic domicile he had led the youngest daughter, a buxom bride, ten years before; to it he now returned with her and with seven small children besides. an ambitious young man and a healthy young woman, a decade before, they came back to the threshold from which they had gone out, he, broken in spirit and as poor in purse as in purpose; she, worn and faded, yet trying hard to seem cheerful as she came within the sunlight of the old home again. the old people lengthened the cords and strengthened the stakes of their simple home, and made the elder and his wife, and the seven children ("seven devils," an irreverent sister once called them in a burst of indignation at the state of affairs) as comfortable as possible. to be sure grandpa and grandma stebbins were old, and it was long since there had been children in the house, but they had enough and to spare in crib and pantry, and they had lived sufficiently long in this world to accept the inevitable without a murmur. but for all of that, the children were a source of a good deal of annoyance to the old people, especially until they were brought somewhat under subjection by the faithful hand of the old gentleman, who found that he should have to stand up for his own in the premises or submit to the unendurable. the first real climax occurred on the second day of the quartering of the family thus, and "dodd" was the boy who brought matters to a focus. the month was october, and down in the yard, a few feet from the bee-hives, just beyond the shadow of the weeping-willow that stood near the well, and along the row of gooseberry bushes under which the hens were wont to gather and gossip--standing on one leg and making their toilets meanwhile--there stood a barrel, out of whose bung-hole protruded a black bottle turned bottom side up. the barrel was filled with the best cider made that season, a special run from apples that had been sorted out, and from which every worm-hole and specked place had been cut by the thrifty hand of grandma stebbins. this was for the family vinegar for the year, and the cask was thus left in the sun duly to ripen its contents. "dodd" had not been in the yard five minutes before his quick eye caught sight of this, and his eager imagination transformed it into a horse in a twinkling. he did this the more easily, too, because it was raised from the ground a foot or more, being supported by blocks of wood which in the mind's eye of the boy did well enough for legs, while a spicket, protruding from one end, below, made a head for the animal, which, though small, was available for bridling purposes. it was the work of but a minute to jerk a string from his pocket, bridle the beast, and mount him for a ride. "dodd" had but fairly started on this escapade, however, when his grandfather appeared in the yard and at once saw the danger that threatened his carefully garnered cider. he quietly approached his little grandson, and, telling him that he could not permit him to play with the barrel, began gently to lift him to the ground. but against this the boy rebelled. he clutched his little legs about the cask and held to his seat with all his might, and when at last he was forced to yield, he took the black bottle with him as a trophy. his grandfather set him down and explained to him how the cider was turning to vinegar; that if it was jarred it would spoil it, and how the black bottle "drew the sun." but "dodd" heard little of all this, and cared less, even, for what he did hear. he was used to having his own way. he wriggled and squirmed during the explanation, and as soon as he was released, he made straight for his coveted seat again, even in the very face of the old gentleman, and when his grandfather caught him once more and led him away somewhat rapidly, he kicked the shins of his captor in a very malicious and wicked fashion, and yelled lustily the while. the old man took the boy to his mother and explained matters, assuring "dodd" and the other children, who stood about in a ring, that they must in no case touch the cask in question, and then left the room. mrs. weaver scolded her first-born roundly, told him he was "a very naughty boy," and ended by taking from behind the clock a small and brittle switch--an auxiliary that she had made haste to provide herself with before she had been on the premises an hour, and without which she felt that her family government would be but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal--and striking "dodd" one or two slight strokes over his hips. this was mrs. weaver's way of "training" her children. from "dodd's" earliest infancy he had been used to this sort of thing. his mother believed in the maxim, "spare the rod and spoil the child," and this was her method of endeavoring to fulfill both the spirit and the letter of the precept. there was always a small, brittle switch behind the clock, and it was taken down numberless times each day, only to make a child bawl for a minute, as he was threatened or struck lightly with the harmless stick. the usual result was that he went ahead and did the very thing he was forbidden to do. "dodd" yelled lustily while his mother laid on, though in truth he scarcely felt the blows, and then sulked for the rest of the day, teasing the other children and making life a burden to everybody and everything he came near. it was the next day, about two o'clock, that the boy once more got into the yard and made straight for his coveted seat. the fact is he had never given up his purpose to return at the first opportunity. he fastened the bridle to the spigot and mounted in hot haste, kicking his little heels into the bleached staves, and plying the riding whip like a young fury. the horse acted badly ("dodd's" horses always acted badly), and he jerked smartly on the bridle rein to subdue him. it was rare sport, and the lad fairly reveled in it, in his little heart defying those who had forbidden him this pleasure, and glorying in his triumph. but "the way of sinners is as darkness, they know not at what they stumble," and "dodd" was destined to "take a header" forthwith. the jerks on the reins drew the spigot from its place, and the first he knew it was dangling in the air over the end of the barrel. he leaned over, fully to observe this fact, and saw the cider shooting out in an amber stream and flooding all the ground. "hurray," he yelled, "that's a bully waterfall!" and he thrust his whip into the stream to see it spatter, hopping about meantime. it was just at this instant that grandfather stebbins came out of the barn, and, hearing the shout of the boy, looked over that way and took in the situation. he was over seventy, but he covered the ground from barn to barrel in most excellent time. "hi! hi!" he shouted as he ran. "stop it up! stop it up!" "dodd" saw the old man coming, and realizing something of the situation, he began to beat a retreat, taking the spigot with him. "here! you young benjamite" ("dodd" was left-handed, and the old gentleman was well posted in bible lore), "bring back that spigot." but the boy ran like a white-head that he was, and a race of several yards ensued before he was caught. but the old man was wiry and was urged to his topmost speed by the press of the circumstances. he caught "dodd," and collared him with a grip such as the boy had never before felt. he dragged the young rogue back to the barrel in no gentle manner, and thrust the plug into the hole, saving a mere remnant that remained of the contents of the cask, and then devoted himself to the little scamp whom he still held. for a few times in a lifetime fortune puts into our hands the very thing we most want at the very time we most want it, and this was one of the times when the fickle goddess favored the old man stebbins. "dodd" had dropped the riding whip that he had been using, beside the barrel, and it lay where it fell. it was a tough bit of rawhide, hard-twisted, and lithe. the old man's hand caught it instinctively, as if drawn to it by an irresistible attraction, and before the young lawbreaker, whom he held by the collar, could say, or think, "what doest thou?" he plied it so vigorously about his legs and back that the culprit thought for a moment that he had been struck by lightning. he yelled from very pain for the first time in his life, from such a cause, and tried to find breath or words to beg for a respite, but in vain, for the blows fell thick and fast and they stung terribly, every one. "i'll teach you," the old man shouted as he laid on. "perhaps you think this is a little switch, and that i shall only tickle you with it." he paused a minute to let "dodd" catch up with the general line of thought, in his somewhat distracted mind, and while the youth danced about, he proceeded. "young man, i have got to teach you to mind! i told you to keep away from this barrel and you paid no attention, and now i'm going to whip you till you will pay attention!" at the words "going to whip you" "dodd" tried to find words to beg, but they came too slowly, and once more the old man wrapped the supple lash about the smarting understandings of his grandson. it seemed to "dodd" as though his legs were fairly whipped off, and as if the place for the general reception of the strokes had left him altogether; as though he could not endure another blow, but still the supply was unexhausted. he fell limp to the ground, and fairly roared for mercy. it was the first time in his life that he had really yielded to any one, but he never thought of that; he only groaned and begged for reprieve. the old man stopped when he felt that he had quite fulfilled his duty, as he understood it, and then spoke as follows to the boy, who lay collapsed on the ground: "there, my young man, get up and go into the house, and after this, remember and do just exactly as i tell you. that's all i want, but that i must have, and you must understand it. i don't want to be cruel to you, and i won't be,--but you must learn to mind, and you had better learn it now than later. don't you ever do again what i tell you not to do, or i shall have to punish you even harder than this!" "dodd" rubbed his stinging legs and wondered if there was anything beyond what he had suffered. he staggered to his feet and went to the house as limp as a rag. he did not seek his mother, but went straight up stairs and threw himself upon the bed in the back room, where he cried for half an hour, and finally fell asleep. as for the old gentleman, he went back to the barn all in a tremble, his hands shaking like an aspen and his heart in a flutter. he busied himself here and there for a few minutes, but finally broke down completely and retired in to the granary, where be fell upon his knees, and with penitential tears besought the lord to forgive him if he had done wrong, and to help him, in his last years, to keep the devil out of his heart and life. he prayed for the boy too, and asked the god in whom he trusted to lead him in the right way as he grew out of youth into manhood. and then he rose from his knees refreshed, and went about his business. his heart was somewhat heavy, but he reviewed the whole situation and concluded that he had done the best thing, and so was content. he knew that he had not maimed the child in any way, but had only caused him to suffer intense pain for a time, a sensation which would soon pass away, but the memory of which, and the dread of a repetition of which, he trusted, would endure for a lifetime. at five o'clock he came into the house; and finding "dodd" in fair good humor, playing with the children in the kitchen, he asked him to go with him and fetch the cows for milking. the boy was off for his hat in an instant, and a moment later the two were seen, hand in hand, going down the lane that led to the pasture. they chatted pleasantly as they went along. they even referred freely to the affair of three hours before. the old gentleman read him no terrible lesson as to his depravity, and his probable end of life upon the gallows if he persisted in so headstrong and wilful a course. the story of the "forty she bears" he did not repeat to the youth, and no reference was made to the awful death of jack ketch. he was too shrewd an observer of human nature to present anything as attractive as these things to the imagination of his grandson! tell a boy like "dodd" that he is on the high road to ruin, the prison, or the rope, and the chances are that you puff him up with pride at his own achievement, or fill him with ambition to see the end of his own career carried out in this line. but grandpa stebbins gave "dodd" none of this. he simply told him that it was the best thing for everybody that he should mind. he reviewed the facts regarding the waste of the cider, and showed him how bad he had been in doing as he had done, and why he was bad. the boy offered no word of remonstrance, but, on the contrary, acknowledged his fault, and assured his grandfather that he would "remember" in future. with a light heart he ran for the cows, which were taking a farewell feed along the banks of the brook that ran across the pasture, and it was with a genuine pride that he headed them for home, especially one contrary heifer, that preferred to have her own way and not obey his command. he ran after her with much spirit, and was quite delighted when he forced her to do his bidding. and for you, good people, who do not believe in this sort of thing, what about this case? it is a hard case, no doubt. there is no pleasing feature in its early stages, but does not its outcome warrant all its ugly phases? grant that it is all old fashioned; that to you it seems silly for the old man to go alone and pray after trouncing the boy, or that you fear the "boy's will was broken" by this episode, yet review the facts in their entirety, and see if there is not a good in them that you are wont to overlook. the punishment was harsh, but it was just such as "dodd" weaver had been needing for a long time, and the only thing that could reach him just then. it would have been a crime to treat in like manner a gentle little girl with a sweet disposition, but was it a crime in the case of "dodd?" and if not a crime in "dodd's" case, why in other cases like his? and if the punishment was right, inflicted by the hand of the grandfather, why not by the hand of the teacher who shall have occasion to resort, even to this, to put a boy into the right way? i do not mean a cold-blooded whipping, inflicted by a principal for a trifling transgression of a rule in some department of school, under one of the assistant teachers, but a retribution, swift, sure, and terrible, that is inflicted by the person against whom the wrong is done, and which falls upon the willful transgressor to keep him from doing so again. for this is the mission of penalty, to keep the wrong-doer from a repetition of his wrong doing. "dodd" weaver was a wrong-doer, and under the treatment he was receiving from his parents, and had received from miss stone, he was waxing worse and worse with each recurring day. this was really more unfortunate for him than for the people whom he annoyed by his lawlessness. there was no likelihood of his correcting the fault by his own will, nor could persuasion lead him to reform, this having been worn to rags by miss stone, till the boy laughed to scorn so gentle an opposition to his bad actions. but over all these misfortunes and follies alike came the lively thrashing of grandpa stebbins, and brought the boy to a realizing sense of the situation. the young sinner found himself suddenly confronted with the penalty of his sin, and when he found that this penalty was really extreme suffering, he made up his mind that it was something worth looking out for. to be sure, it was not a high motive to right action, but it was a motive that led to better deeds on the part of "dodd" weaver, and as such is worthy a place in this record. there was one man and one thing in the world that be had learned to have a decent respect for, and that was a new acquisition at this period of his life. so long as grandpa stebbins lived, he and "dodd" were fast friends, and when, years after, the old man went to his reward, there was no more genuine mourner that stood about his grave than the hero of these adventures. quarrel with the theory of corporal punishment as much as you choose, beloved, but when you get a case like "dodd's," do as well by it as grandpa stebbins did by him--if you can. chapter vi. the "fall school" in "deestrick" number four had been in session for more than a month when the weavers moved into the country and came within its jurisdiction. preparations were at once made to increase its numbers, if not its graces, to a very perceptible extent, from out of the bosom of the weaver homestead; for, as the youngest twins were now "five past," they were held by the inexorable logic of rural argumentation to be "in their sixth year," and so to come within the age limit of the school law, and entitled to go to school and draw public money. besides, "old man stebbins owns nigh onter six eighties in the deestrick, an' pays more school tax nor ary other man in dundas township, an' it hain't no more nor fair 'at ef he wants to send the hull family, he orter be 'lowed ter, coz he hain't sent no one ter school fur more 'n ten year, only one winter, when si hodges done chores fer him fer his board, an' went ter school," explained old uncle billy wetzel to a company of objecting neighbors, as they all stood together by a hitching post in front of the church, waiting for "meetin' to take up," whittling and discussing local affairs meantime. so the five young weavers, headed by "dodd," became members of the "fall school in deestrick four, dundas township," and were marched off for the day, five times a week, with dinner for the crowd in a wooden dinner pail, which was the special care of twins number one. this laxity regarding twins number two would have been rebuked in a city where there is a superintendent kept on purpose to head off such midgets as these, who creep in under the legislative gates that guard the entrance to the road to learning, but no such potentate held sway in dundas township, so the little bow-legged pair went to school unmolested and began, thus early, the heavy task of climbing the hill of knowledge, starting on their hands and knees. is it, or is it not, better so? amos waughops (pronounced wops, but spelled w-a-u-g-h-o-p-s, such is the tyranny laid upon us by those who invented the spelling of proper names, and who have upon their invention the never-expiring patent of custom), had charge of the school that fall. he had been hired for six months, beginning the last week in august. school was begun thus early for the sake of getting an extra week of vacation during the indian summer days of november, when the school would close for a while to give the boys and girls a chance to "help through corn-shucking," and still get in days enough in the school year to be sure to draw school money. amos had but one reason for being a school teacher, and that was, he was a cripple. like the uncouth richard, he had been sent into the world but half made up, and a club foot, of immense proportions, rendered locomotion so great a task that he was compelled, per force, to choose some occupation by which he could earn a living without the use of his legs. he had been endowed by nature with what is commonly known as "a good flow of language." he learned to talk when very young and his tongue once started, its periods of rest had been few. from a youth he was noted for his ability to "argy." he was the hero of the rural debating society and would argue any side of any question with any man on a moment's notice. if the question happened to be one of which he had never heard and concerning which he knew nothing, such a condition did not embarrass him in the least; he would begin to talk and talk fluently by the hour, if need be, till his opponent would succumb through sheer exhaustion. he had been to school but little, and had not profited much by what instruction he had received while there. it was an idea early adopted by him that a "self-made man" was the highest type of the race, and to him a self-made man was one who worked like the original creator--made everything out of nothing and called it all very good. so it was that, being ignorant, despising both books and teachers, and yet being able to talk glibly, he came to the conclusion that words were wisdom, and a rattling tongue identical with a well-stored mind--a not uncommon error in the genus under the glass just now. i am sure i shall be pardoned, too, if i still further probe in this direction, and unfold a little more the nature of the circumstances that had to do with the evolution of "dodd" while he went to school to amos waughops, in "deestrick four." as the plot unfolds, and it shall appear what kind of a pupil-carpenter amos really was, you may wonder how it happened that such a blunderer ever got into that workshop, the school room, and had a chance to try his tools on "dodd." wait a minute, and verily you shall find out about this. he was the orphan nephew of two farmers in the district, men who had taken turns in caring for him during his childhood. these men were school directors and had been elected to their positions for the very purpose of getting amos to teach the "fall-and-winter school." this had further been made possible by the fact that two winters before the young man had "got religion," and his friends in the church had an eye on him for the ministry. to work him toward this goal they had resolved that he, being poor, should teach their school to fill his purse; and so glorify god through the school fund, and his uncles had been chosen directors to that end. hush! don't say a word! the thing is done, time and again, all over the country! the matter had been set up for the year before, but the examiner of teachers had vetoed the plan by refusing a certificate to teach to the young man who talked so much and knew so little. this official had asked the candidate, when he came for examination, to add together / , / , / , and / , whereupon he wrote: "since you cannot reduce these fractions to a common denominator, i adopt the method of multiplying the numerators together for a new numerator, and the denominators together for a new denominator= / ! this, reduced to the greatest common divisor, or, add numerators and denominators= / !" please do not think that i am jesting, for i have copied this quotation verbatim from a set of examination papers that lie before me as i write, papers that were written before the very face and eyes of an examiner in this great state of illinois, by a bona fide candidate for a certificate, on the th day of december, in the year of grace, ; the man who wrote them being over thirty years of age and having taught school for more than half a decade! this is a truthful tale, if nothing else. so amos did not teach the first year that his friends and relations wanted him to. his friends and relations, however, had their own way about it after all, for they met and resolved that it should be "amos or nobody," and they got the latter. that is, they asked the examiner to send them a teacher if he would not let them have the one they wanted. the examiner asked them what they would pay for a good teacher and they replied, "twenty dollars a month!" the poor man sent them the best he had for that money, but it was of so poor a quality that it could ill stand the strain put upon it by the wrangling and angered patrons of "deestrick four," and it broke down before the school had run a month. this year they had tried the same thing again, and the examiner, in sheer despair, gave them their way, as perhaps the lesser of two evils. if any one thinks this an unnatural picture, please address, stamp enclosed, any one of the one hundred and two county superintendents of schools in illinois, and if you don't get what you want to know, then try iowa, or ohio, or pennsylvania, or even the old bay state. the quality is largely distributed, and specimens can be picked up in almost any locality where it is made possible by the system that permits such a condition. this was the teacher to whom "dodd" came on an october morning, just preceding his ninth birthday. amos had heard much of elder weaver and had boasted not a little of how he would "out argy" him the first "lick" he got at him, and he gazed on these small scions of so notable a stock with a feeling that the contest had already begun. he put the children into their seats somewhat gruffly when they appeared, as if resolved to paralyze his antagonist from the first. "dodd" had learned to read by this time, in spite of the hindrance imposed by miss stone in the chart class. indeed, the only redeeming feature in his career as a pupil up to date, was his natural love for reading. the child had a fondness for this art, a genius for it, if you will, which triumphed over all obstacles, and asserted itself in spite of all attempts to cripple it, or to bring it down to the level of his more limited attainments, or to raise these lesser powers to a line with his special gift. and in this respect, too, "dodd" was like other children, or other children are like "dodd." most of these individualities have special things that they can do ever so much better than they can do some other things. why not put them at the things that they can do best, and help them on in this direction, instead of striving to press them down from the line of their special genius, and up from the line of their mediocrity, so as to have them on one common level, as some would fain have all the world? as said, "dodd" had a special genius for reading. when he began to go to school to amos this fact appeared at once, and it speedily became a casus belli between the two, for amos was a blockhead with a reading book, and the boy put him terribly to shame before all the school. he could talk, but he could not read. "dodd" had come to school with a sixth reader. it was a world too wide for his small attainments, with its quotations from greek and latin orators, webster, clay, hastings, et al., but it was the only reader of the series used in amos's school that grandma stebbins could find in the carefully saved pile of old school books that were housed in the garret, the residuum of former school generations. so, with a sixth reader, the boy went to school. this is the common way of supplying children with school books in the rural districts. he brought, also, an arithmetic and a speller, but as his knowledge of the first branch only reached to that part of it which lies on the hither side of the multiplication table, and as "webster" is the chief speller used by children in country schools, and he could not go estray in that point, these facts need not be emphasized. as he brought a sixth reader, to the sixth reader class he went. this also is common in schools of this class. it is not supposed to be by those who talk learnedly before the legislature about "grading the country schools," and all that, but it is the way things are done in the country, as any one will find who will take the pains to go into the country and find out. it is understood by the patrons that it is the teacher's business to put the pupil to work with the books that he brings with him, and in putting "dodd" into the sixth reader amos only did as the rest do in this regard, that is all. this class was made up of four pupils, two boys and two girls, tall, awkward creatures, who went to the front of the room twice a day and read in a sing-song tone out of two books which were the joint possession of the quartette. the girls used always to stand in class with their arms around each other and their heads leaned together, as they swayed back and forth and rattled over the words of the page; and the boys leaned back against the wall, usually standing on one leg and sticking the other foot up on the wall behind them. "dodd" was a pigmy beside these, but he read better than any of them, and soon convinced amos that he, "dodd," must be taken down a peg, or he, amos, would find himself looked down upon by his pupils, who would see him worsted by this stripling. he strove to nettle the boy in many ways, but "dodd" bore the slings and arrows with a good deal of fortitude, and seemed to avoid a clash. the experience with his grandfather had had a very softening effect upon him, and he was slow to forget the lesson. he tried to be good, and did his best for many weeks. but amos could ill endure the condition into which affairs were drifting. every day the boy improved in his reading, till it got so that whenever he read all the school stopped to listen. this the teacher felt would not do, and besides this, he had met the parson, and "argyed" with him once, and it was the popular verdict that he had not come out ahead in the encounter. all of which tended to make him bear down on "dodd," till finally he resolved that he would have a row with the boy and that it should be in the reading class. do not start at this, beloved. the thing has been done multitudes of times, not only in the country, but in the city as well, and many a child has been made to suffer for the sake of satisfying grudges that existed between teachers and parents. so amos was bound to settle with "dodd." he watched his chance, and along in early winter he found what he was looking for. the reading class was on duty, and "dodd" was leading, as he had for several months. the lesson for the day was "the lone indian," and related the woes of that poor savage, who, in old age, returned to the hunting grounds of his young manhood, only to find them gone, and in their places villages and fenced farms. "he leaned against a tree," the narrative continued, "dodd" reading it in a sympathetic tone, being greatly overcome by the story, "and gazed upon the landscape that he had once known so well." he paused suddenly, and a tear or two fell on his book. "stop!" exclaimed amos waughops, brandishing a long stick which he always carried in his right hand and waved to and fro as he talked to the children, as though he were a great general, in the heat of battle, swinging his sword and urging his men to the charge, "what are you crying about? eh? look up here! look up, i say! do you intend to mind me?" the boy's eyes were full of tears, but he looked up as he was bidden and fixed his eyes on amos. this was worse than ever, and the teacher was more angry than before. "see here, i'll ask you a question, if you are so mighty smart. the book says that the indian 'leaned against the tree.' now, what is meant by that?" the question was so sudden and so senseless that "dodd" essayed no answer. this was amos's opportunity. he waved his stick again--the same being one of the narrow slats that had been torn from one of the double seats in the room, a strip of wood two inches wide, an inch thick, and nearly four feet long--and swinging it within an inch of the boy's nose, he shouted again: "the book says that the indian leaned against a tree.' what does that mean? answer me!" and again he made the passes and swung the slat. "i don't know," answered "dodd," just a little frightened. it was a little, but it was enough. amos felt that he had parson weaver on the hip and he hastened to make the most of his advantage. "do you mean to say that you don't know what it is to lean against a tree? why, where was you raised? what kind o' folks hev you got? your old man must be mighty smart to raise a boy as big as you be, an' not learn him what it means to lean ag'in' a tree." it was a savage thrust and it drew blood from the boy. "my dad may not be very smart," he retorted, fully forgetting the "lone indian," "but he's got gall enough to pound the stuffin' out o' such a rooster as you be." there was a sensation in the little school room, a dead pause, so still that the little clock on the desk seemed to rattle like a factory, as it hit off the anxious seconds of the strife it was forced to witness. this speech of "dodd's" was almost too many for amos. it smote him in his weakest part, and for a moment he was daunted, but he rallied, and with a few wild brandishes of the slat he felt that he was himself again, and once more led on to the fray. "see here, young man, you mustn't talk to me like that! don't you give me none of your methodist lip" (amos was not a methodist, and, though a candidate for the ministry, he cordially hated all outside his own denomination), "or i'll make you wish you'd never saw deestrick four. now tell me what it means to 'lean ag'in' a tree,'" and he glared at the boy and waved the slat again. "why, it means to lean up against it," returned "dodd," who was bound to do his best. "that's what i think it means; what do you think it means?" the tables were turned, and amos almost caught his breath at the dilemma. "what do i think it means?" he retorted; "what do i think it means? why, it means--it means--it means what it says; that he leaned ag'in' the tree, that is, that he assumed a recumbent posture ag'in' the tree!" it was a bold stroke, but amos felt that it had brought him safely over. "recumbent posture" was not a vile phrase, and he patted himself on the back, though he puffed a little at the exertion it cost him to hoist the words out of himself. but it was "dodd's" turn next. quick as thought he retorted: "well, that ain't half so easy as what the book says." the school giggled. amos lost all control, and, starting toward "dodd," he shouted: "i'll whip you, you little devil, if it's the last thing i ever do." but "dodd" was too quick for him. he shot down the room like an arrow, and out at the open door, and was off like a deer. with his club foot, amos waughops was no match for the boy with his nimble legs, and, flushed and beaten, the gabbler hobbled back to his desk. he looked toward the twins, all four of them, as if to wreak his vengeance on them, but he somehow felt that they were foemen unworthy of his steel, and forebore. as for "dodd," it was his last day of school with amos waughops. even the persuasion of his grandfather, for whom he had the greatest reverence, was insufficient to get him into the school house again that winter. he learned to do many things on the farm, and helped in out-of-door work in all the coldest days, suffering much from cold and storm, but all this he bore cheerfully rather than meet amos waughops and the slat again. under these circumstances his parents did not force him to school, and who shall say they did wrong by letting him stay at home and work? long suffering reader, you may frown at the introduction of this unfortunate man, amos waughops, into the thread of this story, but i can't help it if you do. i am telling the story of "dodd" just as it is, and i can't tell it at all unless i tell it that way. you may not like mr. waughops; you may not like his way of teaching school; you may say that i am cruel to harp on facts to the extent of intimating that the mere misfortune of being a cripple is not reason enough for being a school teacher; but i can't help this either, because it is true, and we all know it is. we lift up our eyes and behold the educational field all white for the harvest and even among the few laborers that are working, we see a large per cent of bungling reapers who trample under foot more grain than they gather, and whose pockets are full of the seeds of tares, which they are sowing gratis for next year's crop, as they stumble about. i am sure i pity a cripple as much as any one can, but children have rights that even cripples should be made to respect, and no man or woman has a right in the schoolroom merely from the fact of physical inability to work at some more muscular calling. i know there are many most excellent teachers who are bodily maimed, and whose misfortune seems to enhance their devotion to their profession and their success therein, but there are a multitude besides who are in the school room solely because they are the victims of misfortune, and for them there is little excuse to be made. amos waughops was a factor in the evolution of "dodd" weaver, and his like are found by the quantity in the rural schools of this and other states. we have had enough of them. it is all right for us to be kind and charitable to unfortunate people, but let us be careful whose money and means we are charitable with. when the state took charge of the schools it removed them from the realm of charitable institutions, though some people are very unwilling to acknowledge the fact, and it is a very common thing for the public funds to be still used indirectly for charitable purposes. they are so used on fellows like amos waughops and his cognates of the other sex. it is an abomination. chapter vii. the white drifts of winter grew gray and then turned black under the march sun that melted them down and drained off their soluble parts, leaving only a residuum of mud along fences and hedges where, a few days before had been shapely piles of snow. april came with its deluges of rain that washed the earth clean and carried off the riffraff of the previous season, making ready for another and more bountiful harvest. what a thrifty housekeeper nature is! "dodd" still stayed away from school, and through slush and mud and drenching rain worked like a little man. the fact is, he had secretly made up his mind never to go to school again, a conclusion that it is no particular wonder he had reached after his experience with amos waughops, as just chronicled. he observed that his ready work met the approval of both of his parents and grandparents, and he quietly hoped that they would let him alone and permit him to stay out of school so long as he continued to make himself useful on the farm. he said nothing about this, however. his training had not been such as to inspire confidence between himself and his parents, and already he had begun to think, plan and act for himself, unaided by their counsel or advice. nor is it an uncommon thing for many well-meaning and well-wishing parents thus to isolate their children from the holy of holies of their hearts and force them out into the desert of their own inexperience, to die there alone, or compel them to seek help from the heathenish crowd that is always camped around about within easy reach of such wandering ones. how is it in your own household, beloved? look it up, if you dare to! but one day when the boy and his grandfather were burning corn stalks in the field, making ready for plowing, the old gentleman broached the subject of school to "dodd," and, by dint of much persuasion, gained his reluctant consent to brave once more the trials of the school room and out himself again under the guidance of a teacher. a week later "dodd" made his third venture in the legalized lottery of licensed school teachers. he had drawn blanks twice and he was more than suspicious of the enterprise. he had no faith in it whatever. but the counterfeit always presupposes the genuine, and the same system that includes such specimens as miss stone and amos waughops in its wide embrace, enfolds also thousands who are the worthiest of men and women. after all, virtue is on top in this mundane sphere; if it were not so, this old planet would have gone to ruin long ago. let us look up! amy kelly bad been awarded the contract to teach the "spring and summer school" in district four, dundas township, on this particular year, and with timid, anxious steps she had walked six miles the first monday morning of the term to take charge of her pupils. it was her first school, and she was worried about it, as folks usually are about almost anything that is new to them and concerning which they are conscientious. some people never are worried, though. they are born in a don't-care fashion; they absorb the principle from the first, and it never wears out. others are anxious to begin with, but grow careless as they grow familiar with their surroundings. others are always anxious. they never do so well that they do not hope to do better next time, and they would almost decline heaven if they felt it to be a place where they must forever remain as they are. amy kelly was of the pattern last described. as her name indicates, she was irish. her father and mother came from "the old sod" before she was born, and they had won their way up from working at day's wages to being the owners of a snug farm, which was well stocked and thriftily kept. they spoke their native tongue to each other when in the secret recesses of their home, and talked with their children and the neighbors in a brogue so deeply accented that it would be useless for them ever to claim to be "scotch-irish," had they wished to make such pretensions--which they did not. indeed, these people would have been called "very irish" by the average observer. the old gentleman had red hair and only allowed his beard to grow about his neck, under his chin; wore a strap around his wrist, and smoked a short clay pipe. his wife was stout and somewhat red-faced, and in summer a stray caller would be likely to find her at work in petticoat and short gown, her rather large feet and ankles innocent of shoes or stockings. but she was a good housekeeper, for all of these things. no better butter than hers ever came to market, and her heart was warm and true, even if it did beat under a rather full form and beneath a coarsely woven garment. she had a cheery voice and a pleasant disposition, loved her husband devotedly, was proud of her family, both on account of its numbers and the health, brightness and good looks of her progeny; and her good deeds toward her neighbors, together with her general thrift and good nature, made her a great favorite in all the country-side. such was the family from which this young school miss was sprung. the girl was just eighteen when she went to her new work. she had received most of her education in a similar school, in a neighboring district, where she had always led her classes, but had spent two winters in a state normal school. she was a trim body, compactly built, had black hair and eyes, and a fresh, rosy complexion that is so characteristic of her class. she could ride a fractious horse, milk, sew, knit and cook, and had followed the plow more than one day; while during harvest and corn-husking she had many a time "made a hand." from this cause she was strong and well knit in all her frame, a perfect picture of young womanly health and rustic beauty. she had a soft, sweet voice and spoke without the slightest trace of a brogue, so surely does a single generation americanize such people, and was very modest and retiring in her manners. like her parents, she was a devout catholic. it was hardly seven o'clock on an april morning when this girl unlocked the schoolhouse door at the end of her long walk and let the fresh spring breeze blow into its interior. it was a small building, with one door, opening to the south, and six windows, two on each of three sides, all darkened with tight board shutters. she threw all these open and raised the sashes for a fuller sweep of the air, for the school-roomish smell was stifling to one accustomed to wholesome, out-of-door air. as soon as she felt free to take a long breath she began to examine the room in which she was to go to work. the floor was filthy beyond description. there was a hill of dry tobacco quids on the floor under the "teacher's desk," historical relics of the reign of amos waughops, and equally disgusting debris scattered all over the room, special contributions of the free american citizens of "deestrick four," who had held an election in the house a few days previous. moreover, the desks were, many of them, smeared with tallow on the top, patches of grease that told of debating societies, singing schools, and revival meetings of the winter before--blots that amos had never thought of trying to remove. the stovepipe had parted and hung trembling from the ceiling, while the small blackboard in the corner was scrawled all over with rude and indecent figures, the handiwork of the electors aforesaid. pray do not think i have painted this picture in too high colors, you fastidious ones, who dwell in fine houses and live in towns and have never seen sights like these. i have not. there are thousands of just such schoolhouses in this and every other state in the union, that open on an april morning just as this one did. it is a great pity that it is so, but so it is. i wish it were otherwise. but it isn't, and i sometimes wonder if it ever will be! amy took in the situation at a glance and resolved what to do forthwith. there was a house a quarter of a mile down the road, and thither she bent her sprightly steps. fifteen minutes later she returned with two buckets, a scrubbing brush, a broom and a mop. she rolled up her sleeves, disclosing an arm that you well might envy, my dear, you who delight in the display of such charms in parlor or ball room--charms which no cosmetics can rival--turned up the skirt of her neat calico dress, and pinned it behind her supple waist, donned a large coarse apron that she had borrowed with the rest of her outfit, and was ready for work. she righted the stovepipe--without swearing--and built a brisk fire. then she began to scrub. she had worked an hour, when she heard a voice and footsteps, and a moment later "dodd" and the young weavers darkened the door. "good morning!" she exclaimed, pausing a moment in her work and brushing back her hair with her arm, as she raised her flushed face, which was covered with a dew of perspiration; "you had better put your dinner pail out by the well, and then you can play in the yard a while, till i get the house cleaned up a little," and again she turned to her scrubbing. "dodd" stood in the door and looked at the girl in amazement. this was a new phase of the school teacher, sure enough. he thought of miss stone and wondered bow she would look, down on her knees and scrubbing, as this girl was. he stood in the door for some minutes, till, finally, amy arose and started to carry out a pail of dirty water and bring in a fresh one in its place. as she neared the boy he stepped to one side and let her pass, looking up into her face as she went by. she returned his glance and smiled, and "dodd" answered back with something akin to a blush, though the expression was such a stranger to his face that the superficial observer might have failed correctly to classify it at first sight. amy threw the water out, far into the road, and went to the well, "dodd" saw where she was going, and, running to the pump, he seized the handle and began pumping vigorously. "thank you," said amy, when the bucket was filled; "i hardly think you can carry the pail so full," she added, as "dodd" proceeded to grasp the pail with both hands to carry the water to the house. "better let me help you," she continued, taking hold of one side. "there, so; now we'll carry it together," and, one on either side of the bucket, they went into the house again. it may safely be said that the brief space of time occupied in going from the well to the school room, carrying half of that pail of water, was the proudest moment yet experienced by the hero of this story. for the first time in his life the spirit of chivalry arose in his bosom, and though the act he performed in response to its promptings was a very simple and menial one, yet it was enough to stir all the pulses of his boyish nature and to make of him, for the time being, such a little man as he had never before dreamed of being. it is william shakspeare, i think, who has it-- "from woman's eyes this doctrine i derive, they are the books, the grounds, the academies, from which doth spring the true promethean fire!" or words to that effect. "dodd," however, knew nothing of the great poet, but he did know that something in the kindly eyes of this honest irish girl made him want to do everything he could for her, and help her in every possible way. the most gallant knight could rise to no more sublime condition! when the pail was set down and amy was once more on her knees, "dodd" began to look about to see what else he could do. the girl took note of this, and soon set him to work. she had him go through all the desks and clean out all the places where the books were kept. when this was done she gave him something else to do, and to all her biddings he was most obedient. he worked with a will, and carefully, doing just as he was told to do, and feeling that much of the success of the enterprise on foot depended on his own exertions. it is such work as this that counts here below, and transforms the unfixed elements of human nature into character as enduring as the everlasting bills. it is a little difficult to realize this fact, just at the time of its happening, but the after years show the truth of the statement. the evolution that took place in "dodd's" soul that morning was a measurable quantity. by noon the dirty, not to say nasty, school house was clean and in order, and after dinner amy kelly began to arrange her classes and prepare for school work. during the forenoon she had learned the names of many of her pupils from their conversations with each other, and had put herself on such terms with them that the work of organizing her classes was easily accomplished, without annoyance to herself or the children. by four o'clock she had her work laid out for the entire school, and the children went home happy, rejoicing in the newly found treasure of a school teacher in whom they delighted. amy knew little of many things that are well worth knowing in this world, but she did know how to manage children and how to teach school. she was a girl of resources. "of such is the kingdom of heaven" among school teachers. chapter viii. it was no longer a task to keep "dodd" in school. he went every day, rain or shine, and was always eager to go. moreover, he studied well and learned rapidly. the multiplication table, that had been the bane of his school life, up to date, and which, under the stupid management of amos waughops and the over-wrought grube methods of miss stone, had floored him in every tussle he had had with it, now grew tractable and docile, a creature subservient to his will and quick to do his bidding, unhesitatingly. and what wonder, when amy taught him this early work in numbers by use of his memory rather than his reason; using a faculty that is strong at this period of life, rather than one which has hardly begun to sprout? did you ever think of that, dear devotee at the shrine of grube, or brother harris, or all the rest of the train who insist that a child's reason should "develop" largely before he has finished the first decade of his existence? these wise ones lay down a law (take up almost any printed course of study, nowadays, and you will find it all spread out in the first and second years' work) that every number must be mastered, in all its possible arrangements and combinations, from the very first time it is taken up. thus, one must be considered in all its possible correlations to all the universe, and the almighty himself, before two can be touched! so, as soon as the youth strikes a simple unit that ought to come to him like an old friend, he is straightway packed off to the ends of the earth with the digit and made to stand it up alongside of all manner of things, in the heavens above and, the earth beneath, and even in the waters under the earth. the little fellow tramps, and trudges, and compares, and contrasts, and divides, and combines, and eliminates, and expels, and extracts, and subtracts, and retracts, and contracts, and what not, until finally, he gets all mixed up and concludes that he never can know anything about it at all, and the dear old "one," that came to him at first as such a simple thing, is so tangled up with all creation that he gives it up as an entirely unknown and unknowable quantity, and begins to guess at it and when he comes to that point, look out! he has taken the first step in recklessness, and has begun his initial work as a liar! you don't believe this? then sit down to the following, which i clip from the "second year's work" in a "course of study" that lies before me: "learn to count to , forward and back, by 's, 's, 's, 's, 's, 's, 's, 's, and 's, beginning to count from , and also from each digit, respectively, up to the one used continuously, in each case." just buckle down to this for a while and see how it goes. see how long it will take you to master even a tithe of this, so that you can do it, even passably well, and then compare your own powers of mind with those of the child that you would fain cram with this "course" and see if there is not a reason why the children do not take to this "method." i know what you will say, at least to yourselves. "i have no time for such a pile of rubbish." you say well. neither have the children time for it. but amy knew nothing of grube, thank heaven, and gave none of it to "dodd." he learned to read better than ever, learned to spell, and took pride in standing at the head of his class. he plucked flowers for his teacher as he went to school, and his cheeks flushed as she took them from his band and set them in the glass tumbler on the table. he even thought in his little heart, betimes, that, when he got grown up, he would marry amy! rather young for such ideas? perhaps so; but these ideas begin to develop, often, when boys are very young. they don't say anything about it, out loud; but away down in the deep hiding-places of the heart--oh, well, we all know how it is, and what an influence such notions may have upon our lives. but for all of these things "dodd" weaver was still "dodd" weaver, and there were times when he suffered a relapse from his high estate. one of these times came as follows: it was a sultry forenoon in may, and "dodd" was restless and uneasy. he fidgeted about in his seat, teased the boy in front of him, and tripped up a little fellow who passed him on the way to a class. his teacher watched him for some time, and, at the last offense, concluded that it was best to give the boy a bit of attention. she came down to his desk and said: "it's a bad kind of a morning for boys, isn't it, 'dodd'?" the boy hung his head a little, and amy proceeded: "come here to the door a minute; i want to show you something." "dodd" wondered what was wanted, but arose, as he was bidden, and went to the door, "do you see that tree, away down the road?" said amy, pointing to a large maple that was more than a quarter of a mile away. "dodd" said that he saw the object pointed out. "well, now, i want you to start here and run to that tree just as fast as you can, and then turn right around and run back again, and i'll stand right here all the time and watch you, and see how long it takes you to go and come;" and she drew out her watch as she spoke. "dodd" looked at her for an instant, but the next moment he was off with a bound and ran his best, both going and coming. he returned presently, having made most excellent time. amy told him how many minutes he had been gone, and bade him take his seat. the boy was a little in doubt as to just why he was called on to perform this feat; but, between pondering over the affair and being tired from his race, he was a good boy all the rest of the morning! the girl had simply given the child a chance to work off his superfluous animal spirits, and, with this quantity reduced to a safety limit, he was himself again. what a pity there are not more teachers who appreciate the value of a safety-valve! the incident is but one of a score that illustrate the resources of amy kelly in the management of "dodd" weaver. she was always taking the boy by surprise. he was wayward and wilful at times, but her genius was equal to the emergency. she won him by her divine power to do just that thing, as her class always does, and as none others can. she was born to teach, or with the teaching faculty--with a genius for that work; and her success was marked from the first. she did for "dodd" weaver in a single term more than all the former years had done; she made a record in his character that will never be effaced. and do not say that i have overdrawn this picture, either. don't turn up your noses, my dears, because this girl came from a very humble and unpretentious irish family. i tell you, genius has a way of its own, and there is no accounting for it. it was a good while ago that a conservative old pharisee thought that he had forever silenced the followers of the greatest genius the world ever saw by putting at them the conundrum, "can any good come out of nazareth?" but good did come out of that barren country in spite of the conundrum! and so it keeps on doing, constantly. it comes from other places, too, and that is all right. the point is that we want to open our eyes and see it, no matter where it comes from. amy kelly was a godsend to "dodd" weaver. she came to him through the medium of a country school. she won the boy as such teachers always do win boys, and always will win them; and her reward ought to be great. it was only twenty-five dollars a month, reckoned on the order book of "deestrick four," but there is no telling what it will be on the "other side." but such as amy can afford to wait for that. chapter ix. "dodd" went to school to amy kelly faithfully all that summer. he was neither tardy nor absent during the term, and when school was over it seemed to him as though something was gone out of his life; something that he would have liked to keep always. but in the fall elder weaver was sufficiently rejuvenated to enter the field again, and after conference he once more set out on his peregrinations. for several years thereafter it was true of him as it is of so many of his kind--he was "just two years in a place, and then forever moving." this gave "dodd" a change of pedagogic administration on an average once a year; for each village would usually manage to change teachers on the off years, at least, when they didn't change preachers, and so keep up the principle of rotation in office, which is so dear to the average american heart. what a glorious thing the fickle will of the people is in some of its petty phases! a change of teacher once a year, however, is not beyond the average of pupils in this country. i know of schools where the pupils, change teachers six times a day, every school day in the year, besides now and then an extra when a principal or a superintendent turns himself loose on them for an hour or two in a term! dodd's quota of changes should not, therefore, be regarded as extravagant; that is, according to some of the "authorities." in after years the memory of those four months with amy kelly remained with the boy, an oasis in the trackless sahara of his school life. in this dreary expanse now and then a shadow of hope arose, as if to lure him on, as some new teacher came up over his horizon, but in the main these all proved delusions, mirages that glittered at phantom distances, but faded away into empty nothingness as he took a nearer view of them. this constant cheating of his vision, this deferring of his hope, in time made his heart sick, and he gradually relapsed into his old hatred of books and schools and school teachers and all that pertained thereto. there was prim miss spinacher, thin as a lath and bony, with hands that you could almost see through and fingers that rattled against each other when she shook one threateningly at a boy or girl. she had a hobby of keeping her pupils perpetually front face, and of having them sit up straight all the time, with folded arms, so that her school room always had the appearance of a deal board stuck full of stiff pegs, all in rows, every one as tight in its place as a wedge and never to be moved on any account whatever. right opposite to the school house where this woman taught was a rich man's residence, in the front yard of which there stood a marble statue, a bronze deer, a cast-iron dog and a stone rabbit. "dodd" used to look over to these when he was very tired from sitting up so straight so long, and wish that miss spinacher had a roomful of such for pupils. it would have been as well for her and "dodd" and the rest of the school if she had. perhaps it would have been better! yet you all know miss spinacher, don't you, ladies and gentlemen? again, he fell into the hands of mr. sliman, whose sole end and aim in life as a school teacher was the extermination of whispering. for this purpose he had devised a set of rules, which he had printed in full and sent all over town to every patron of the school. the "self-reporting" system was the hobby of this man. "dodd" told the truth to him for a few evenings, at roll-call, acknowledging that he had whispered, as he and all the rest of the pupils had; but he soon observed that it was the custom of most of the boys and girls to falsify about their conduct, and that they got great glory thereby. he took up this custom himself ere long. it troubled his conscience a good deal at first, but by dint of constant daily practice he got so that he could look his teacher squarely in the eye and answer "perfect" as well as any one, even if he had whispered the whole day through, and knew that the man who recorded his mark knew he had and set down a clean record for the sake of having a good score to show to visitors! oh, mr. sliman, you were very sharp, weren't you? you thought you did your little trick so cleverly that no one would find you out, but your kind always think that! it did make a fine showing for visitors, this clean whispering record of yours, and it was a fine thing for you to talk about at teachers' meetings, where you boasted to your fellows of what you had done, and looked so honest, and made them all feel so envious, as you drew forth your record-book from next your shiny shirt-bosom, and showed how there was no denying your statement, for the testimony was all down in black and white! it was all very nice, but it was very, very bad, for all that. you knew it was, too, and most of us who heard you brag knew it was; but that didn't make very much difference, because we were old and could stand it, and as for you--the less said the better. but not so with "dodd." here was where the harm came in, you wicked man. you evolved the lying element of this boy's nature. heaven knows that he had enough of this naturally, as i have plainly stated in the early chapters of this story; but you forced a hot-bed growth out of the seeds of falsehood that were lying dormant in "dodd's" young mind. amy kelly had covered these up, under the foundation walls of truth, so deep that if you had built on what she started the germs would have died where they lay. but no, you threw down the square blocks that amy had laid with so much care; you spread the dung of deception over the dying seeds, and by the help of the unnatural heat which this foulness generated, brooding down from above, you sprouted the germs of untruth in the boy's soul, and set a-growing plants whose roots run down into hell! you taught "dodd" weaver to believe that a lie was better than the truth; that it would serve him better; bring him more glory; make him stand better in the eyes of his fellows, and that no one could find him out in all this trickery and deception. "dodd" learned in your school; o, yes; he learned that which it took him many years to forget, and you are to blame for it. some day i hope you may be compelled to face that lying old record of yours and that lightning flashes of guilt may be made to blaze into your treacherous eyes from out those pages that looked so clean when you showed them off, while the thunder of outraged truth rolls about your head till your teeth chatter in your mouth and your bones shake in your deceitful skin. you see things must be made even somehow, and somewhere, and such a sinner as you have been deserves all this and more too. then, there was mr. sharp, who kept green and growing the shoots that mr. sliman had sprouted. "attendance" was mr. sharp's hobby. he kept a blackboard in the front hall of his school house, where it would be the first thing any one would see when he came into the building, and on this he scored the record of attendance every day. there was no harm in that, i am sure; but then, this teacher used to keep the clock a little slower than town time, and besides, be had a way of ringing bells and bells at morning and at noon, and of not counting as tardy any one who got into the building any time before the ringing of the last bell, which really did not go off until some minutes after it should have done; and then there was the back way of written excuses, by which a fellow could sneak up in the rear and rub out a mark that really stood against him, and not have it count on the board down in the hall; and absences of a certain character were not counted either. so, take it all in all, "dodd" saw clearly that the shown record and the real record were not the same things by a long way, but that it was the former on which mr. sharp relied for his power and glory with the patrons of the school, and before the board of education. so it was that mr. sharp watered what mr. sliman planted, and "dodd" had to stand it all. and then there was miss slack, and miss trotter, and mr. skimpole (a lineal descendant of the urbane harold), and mr. looseley, and mr. rattler, and striker, and bluffer, and smiley; all these took a hand at the mill that was rolling out the character of "dodd" weaver, and there are marks of their varied crankings upon him to this day. one year he fell into the hands of old mrs. heighten. she was a widow who had been rich, but was now poor, and who had a place in the schools because she needed it. she was so much like all the rest of this sort that she need not be further described, and were it not for one characteristic she should remain in oblivion, so far as this record is concerned. but for this i must have her out. she was poor and really a proud beggar of public charity, yet she was of such genteel and lofty birth and bearing that teaching was a bore to her. she really despised and hated her pupils, and they returned these sentiments with interest. there was always rebellion in her room, and to suppress it she resorted to all sorts of penalties and punishments. she used to make pupils stand on the floor and extend an arm on a level with the shoulder, and so hold a book till it seemed as if the arm would break off. she herself stood by with a pin in her hand, meanwhile, holding it at a slight distance below the extended arm and sticking it into the hand of the suffering one if the aching member were lowered an inch. o dante, you didn't begin to exhaust the possibilities of outrageous punishments in all you saw in the infernal regions. old mrs. heighten could give you several points that you never dreamed of, and not tax her powers of ingenuity very much either. yet "dodd" worked the genius of this respectable old beldame to the very verge of bankruptcy. she tried device after device upon the boy, till at last it got to be a kind of race between the two as to which should win. the old lady had no genuine interest in the welfare of her pupil. he annoyed her and she wanted to rid herself of the annoyance. that is a simple statement of the case from her side. as for "dodd," he delighted in tormenting her as he would in teasing a snake. to be sure there was danger in the sport, but boys are fond of danger, especially if it promises fun. so the days wore on, till at last the case became unbearable, and "dodd" was "suspended." oh! but that was hard on the boy! it hurt him terribly! the suspension came when the skating of the winter was the very best, and "dodd" skated the vacation away, and felt, oh, so badly about being out of school! when the week of suspension was over he came back, fuller of the devil than ever, and during a single forenoon did more mischief than he had before been capable of perpetrating in a month. he was fourteen now, a stout chunk of a boy, awkward, defiant, and reckless. he stayed in school two days this time, and was again suspended. he came back once more after that and was then expelled. he left school with a whoop and was on the streets most of the time thereafter. it was then that his reputation as a bad boy began to grow rapidly. he frequented the depot of the town and was on speaking terms with the railroad employes of the line. he chewed tobacco in great mouthfuls, swore a great deal, and spent his days in loafing. he had plans for going on the road as a brakeman when he became a year or two older. every day he sunk lower and people shook their heads and said, "how his mother's heart must ache!" but old mrs. heighten drew her $ a month just the same, right along; and her daughter amanda, who never did an honest day's work in all her life, but lived in idleness, supported by the aforesaid $ --she was the pride of the town. she went to church every sunday and sang in the choir, and at charity fairs she always stood behind the prettiest table, dressed in the prettiest clothes, and smiled and blushed and seemed so innocent and coy. and there were rich young men who hung about her, and amanda smiled on them, too, and people said, "what a lovely girl!" and her mother hoped that her daughter might marry one of these rich young men; it didn't make much difference which, so long as he was rich and could keep amanda in idleness, while she could go and live on his bounty and quit the school room that she hated and have a rosewood coffin and plenty of carriages at her funeral. but until all these things were accomplished the old lady "had to have a place," and amanda lolled about in idleness. meantime "dodd" "waxed worse and worse." do you see any relation between "dodd" and amanda, good folks? if you do, remember that this boy was only one of scores of pupils that had to suffer, substantially as he did, that the poor and proud mrs. heighten and her lazy daughter amanda might continue to keep up appearances, and still have a chance to sponge a living off some man at the expense of a legal relation which it is sacrilege to call marriage. out upon such proud and lazy frauds, every one of them, whose worthless lives are sustained by the destruction of the characters of children like "dodd" weaver, and all the rest who fall under such tuition! chapter x. so it was that "dodd" got into the street and achieved the reputation of being a boy that no teacher could do anything with. in the year or two that followed he made several starts at school, but his reputation always preceded him, and the old story was told over again--one or two suspensions, then "expelled." so time went on till "dodd" was nearly seventeen. he was almost a man grown now--a swaggering, profane, vulgar fellow, who ate his meals at home and slept there, usually, but further than that lived apart from his parents, who every day regretted that ever he had been born. you all know this boy, don't you, beloved? he is in every town that i know of, and there are duplicates and triplicates, not to say centiplicates, of him in some of our larger cities. i wonder if it is worth while to try to do anything with these boys, or for them? the machine has dropped them, or thrown them out. they will not run through the great educational mill known as the "graded system." they seem destined to go to the bad, and it seems to me the tendency of the machine, and some of its managers, is to let them go. yet they ought not to go. as there is a god in heaven, they ought not to. but the machine does not care so very much for these things, either for the boys or for the personage just mentioned, whose name the managers revere enough to teach the children that it should always be written with a capital letter, but further than that do not trouble themselves much about it. the machine is built on the theory that the pupils are made for the schools, rather than the schools for the pupils, and that the order of the grades must be maintained, no matter what becomes of the graded. what is it to this great mill if the pupils do fall out of the hopper? so long as the mill grinds and the grinders can hold their places at the crank; so long as they can draw their pay, escape public censure, dodge behind a stack of examination papers when individual complaints appear, shield themselves from responsibilities by records and marks, keep the promotions in order, graduate a class a year in good clothes and with pretty speeches, see each of those who have been ground through go out into the great world armed with a diploma tied up with a blue ribbon, and so following--so long as the machine can do all this, what is the use of paying any attention to "dodd" weaver and such incorrigibles as he, who refuse to go into the mill and be ground? what, indeed? however, you know the story of "the ninety-and-nine." at least you ought to know it. it has an application in these premises. but elder weaver shifted his base of operations once more, and "dodd" had another chance. he had now got so far down on the ladder of his descent that he was counted almost dangerous. his father feared him, and he was even the terror of his brothers and sisters. in a word, he was a hard case. it was the town of emburg in which the parson was stationed this time--one of those towns so common all through the west, places that start out with a boom and the prospect of being municipalities of at least , inhabitants in a few years; whose founders lay out into town lots all the land that joins them and sell these at fabulous prices to those who are credulous enough to buy; and which finally settles down to a quiet village of about , souls, with a depot, stores, seven churches, and a school requiring about ten teachers to take care of its pupils. mr. charles bright was principal of the emburg schools the fall that parson weaver came to take charge of the methodist episcopal church at that place. he was years of age, a nervous, sensitive man, both of which characteristics had been intensified by severe work in the school room. he was less than the average height and thin in flesh, the scale beam tipping at when he stood on the platform to balance the weight. his face was thin and his beard scattered, but his large black eyes were as keen as a lance, and they always seemed to see everything that came within the range of vision. he was fairly educated, but in no sense a great scholar. his patrons called him "professor," but he made no claim to the title, and it was offensive in his ears when applied to himself. he was characterized with excellent common sense, and, best of all, was a man of resources. he was an excellent classroom worker, managed his school well, and was held in high esteem by his fellow-teachers and his pupils. above all, he was a man whose personality impressed itself upon those with whom he associated, and whose character was strong and wholesome, making itself felt upon his pupils continuously. to this man came parson weaver on a memorable morning, when the following dialogue ensued, after the two had made themselves known to each other: "i have a son," said the parson, "whom i should like to send to school to you." "certainly," replied mr. bright, "send him along, and we will endeavor to take care of him, amongst us." "yes," said the elder, "but i am grieved to be obliged to say that my boy is very wayward. he has been expelled from school so often, and has had so much trouble with his teachers that i doubt if you can do anything with him. i thought, however, that i would come and speak to you about him, and if you were willing to try him, at least for a little while, i should be under great obligations. for, really, it is a terrible thing, sir, for one to feel that he must give up a first-born son and see him go down to destruction. and yet i am compelled to say frankly to you that i fear our boy is almost beyond hope." this was said in an agonized tone that told how deeply the sorrow had taken hold of the father's heart. there is a sentence somewhere that reads, "if thou canst, have mercy on us and save our son, for he is grievously tormented." the world is much the same now as it was a good many years ago, isn't it? "how old is your boy?" asked mr. bright in a quiet, measured tone. "nearly seventeen," replied the parson, "but he is greatly behind in his school work. as i said, he has been turned out of school till he hates it, and, to tell the truth, he has done little but roam the streets for the last few years. i feel that i ought to be ashamed, being his father, to make such a confession, but it is the truth, and i felt that you ought to know about it." "yes," said mr. bright thoughtfully. "if you could take charge of him yourself," continued the father almost imploringly. "i know it is asking a great deal, and that perhaps it will be impossible for you to grant what i ask, for i am aware that my boy is not advanced in his studies as far as the average of the pupils that recite to you, and i have long since learned, by sad experience, the inexorableness of the present graded school system, which forces pupils into their places strictly according to their examination records, regardless of all other contingencies. i beg your pardon, if i seem to speak harshly," he quickly added, fearing that he might have reflected too severely upon the gentleman to whom he was speaking. "you need offer no apology," returned mr. bright. "i regret as much as you can the too rigorous ways that have fallen upon our schools." "well, will you give the boy a trial?" asked the parson, bringing the issue to a point. "most certainly," returned mr. bright, and then the gentlemen wished each other "good-morning," the parson going home and the teacher turning to his desk again. it was not until the following monday morning that "dodd" weaver made his appearance in the school room. his father had urged him to go sooner, but he cared little for the wishes of his sire, and took his time in this, as he did in all else. "dodd" came late to school when he did come, and evidently counted on making a sensation on his first appearance. he was very shabbily dressed, and had purposely added to his generally slouching appearance by deliberately "making up" for his debut. his hair was long, and he had tangled and frowzed it all over his head till it looked like an ungainly pile of corn silk. his face was grimy, a big quid of tobacco bulged one cheek out, while stains of tobacco juice made the corners of his mouth filthy. he wore no collar, one coat sleeve was half gone, his vest was on wrong side outwards, his pantaloons were ragged, he had a shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, the former unlaced, and the latter smeared to the top of the boot-leg with yellow clay; a leg of his pantaloons bagged down over this, being held up on the inside of his leg by hanging it over the boot-strap! you who have not taught school, and are not familiar with boyhood at this stage of its evolution, may insist that i have made "dodd" up like a crazy creature for his grand entry into mr. bright's school room. perhaps i have. but i have presented him to you as he presented himself to the school, for all of that. i am myself inclined to think that his mental state, at this time, bordered close upon insanity! the book remarks about a young man at this stage of his existence, that he had to "come to himself" before his reformation, as though he had been away from himself during his lawless and outrageous career. i am inclined to think that boys are often a good deal nearer insane than they get credit for being, at this period of their lives. there is a psychological condition just here that it is worth while for teachers seriously to consider. so, tricked out in this disgusting fashion, "dodd" slouched into mr. bright's school room about ten o'clock in the forenoon, and flung himself into a seat. the pupils looked up as he entered, and their first impulse was to laugh---a result which, would have suited "dodd" exactly. but a glance at the school from mr. bright's quick eye checked the risibilities of his pupils, and, this emotion dying out, there came instantly in its place a disgust and almost a horror of the loathsome person who had dared to disgrace the school room with such a figure as "dodd" presented. a silence like death fell upon the room, and all held their breath for an instant after the boy was seated. under this silence "dodd" became embarrassed. it was exactly the reverse of what he had counted on. he meant to disturb the school. instead of this, he found the school disturbing him. he shuffled uneasily in his seat, glanced furtively out from under the shaggy hair that was matted over his forehead, cleared his throat in a restless and seemingly defiant manner, but finally blushed to the roots of his hair as he felt the eyes of three-score decent people, all bent upon him at once. he stretched his neck up out of his collar-band a little, turned his head about as though something were choking him, then dropped his chin upon his breast, shrugged up his shoulders, and half hid his face from the eyes whose looks he fain would shun. all this really took place in much less time than it takes for me to tell it. mr. bright was hearing a class in geometry when the boy entered, and a handsome, intelligent girl was in the midst of a demonstration when the door opened and the interruption caused thereby took place. the pupil paused in her recitation, the end of her pointer resting upon the board at the angle under consideration, and she stood thus during the brief interval remarked above. as "dodd's" head dropped mr. bright turned his glance to the girl again, and said: "if the angle at a--" upon which she took up the demonstration where she had broken off, and finished it as though nothing had happened. after that, other pupils recited, the lesson ended, the class was dismissed, other classes were called, and the regular routine of the day's work went on without change, as though teacher and pupils were entirely unconscious of the presence of a stranger among them. when recess came, mr. bright went down to the desk where the boy was seated, accosted him in a civil manner, and told him that if he would remain a few minutes after school was dismissed at noon he would talk with him about his work and assign him to his place in the school. then he left him, and devoted himself to the other pupils during the brief intermission. "dodd" did not leave his seat during this recess. he sat as he had finally settled himself, except that he now and then raised his head and gazed defiantly over the school room. the pupils paid no attention to him whatever, and he really felt himself as much alone as though he had been in solitary confinement in a dungeon. the recess ended, the school was in order again; the recitations went on as usual, an hour and a quarter went by, noon came, the session closed for dinner, the pupils left the room in groups, till all were gone, and for the first time "dodd" weaver and mr. charles bright were alone, face to face. chapter xi. mr. bright took a small piece of blank paper from his table, a rectangular slip about four inches long by two inches wide, cut expressly for the purpose for which he proceeded to use it, and went down to the desk where "dodd" sat sulking and defiant. "please write your name and age on this slip of paper," he said to the boy. "i can't write!" grumbled "dodd," with a surly sneer and a wag of his head. "i see! you have no pencil," returned mr. bright. "you can use mine," and he slipped that article into "dodd's" hand as he spoke. as soon as he had done this, he went to the rear part of the room and began looking over some work upon the blackboard. he did not look toward the boy to see if he obeyed, but his ears were on the alert. for a little while "dodd" sat unmoved, and made no sign that he intended to write at all, but as mr. bright kept working at the board, the boy gradually relaxed his unyielding mood, and after a few minutes wrote his name in a very neat hand. he even added a little flourish in one corner of the paper. mr. bright heard the pencil moving on the desk and his blood ran quicker in his veins, though he showed no outward sign of the fact. he felt that in the first crossing of swords he had won. that was all. he heard the pencil drop upon the floor, where "dodd" let it lie. but he still devoted himself to his work on the board. he knew that the name was written. it was all he had asked. as for "dodd," he almost wondered how he happened to write at all. he had made up his mind to be as mean and outrageous as possible when he came to school, and here he had done the very first thing he had been asked to do! when he replied to mr. bright that he could not write, he fully intended to have a knock-down with the gentleman rather than put pencil to paper. he even thought over hastily, how quickly he could "put a head on the light weight" who had brought him the bit of paper. for "dodd" was strong now and prided himself on his skill with his fists. but the pencil was in his hand, and, before he was aware, his fingers clasped it. his hand instinctively took the position for writing, and somehow or other, there came to his mind, just at that instant, the memory of amy kelly, and of how she had held her soft, plump hand over his, as she taught him to hold a pen. if he had observed closely, he would have seen that this was where the first break came in his rebellion. it was the sunshine of amy's character shining down through the dark clouds that had closed in about "dodd" weaver's soul, that first tempted his timid, shrinking, almost forgotten real self out into the light again. habit completed what memory began, and his hand moved, though almost against his will, as if guided by an impulse beyond himself. perhaps it was so guided! he wrote the name; but he did no more. when the pencil dropped to the floor he would not touch it again. nothing could have induced him to do so. he would have fought a duel sooner than have picked it up. his real self, so weak and so nearly dead, shrank back, exhausted by its single effort, and his bad nature took control of him again. but mr. bright finished the work at the board, and then went up the aisle. he stooped and picked up the pencil, took the slip from the desk, with a courteous "thank you," and moved on to his own table. he had tallied one point. i wonder if he did this all by himself, or if there was another hand behind it all. certain it is this man did not plan all this campaign that ended so successfully. he had not counted on the boy's refusing to write his name. it was like a flash, that it came to him to answer "dodd's" refusal as he did. nor did he really intend to put the pencil into the boy's hand when he offered it to him. but, somehow, he did just that, and it was the saving fact in the case. had he laid the pencil on the table, "dodd" would never have picked it up. much less would he have reached for it, or taken it from mr. bright's hand. but, with the pencil in his hand, he wrote. we say mr. bright did as he did "instinctively." that may be a good word for it. but i wonder if such "instinct" as this doesn't reach away over to the other side, even into the realm of inspiration, whose fountain head is the spirit of the great "i am." be this as it may, though, mr. bright had won. he was thankful for his victory--thankful, but not proud. perhaps this is another thing that goes to show that there was help from without that made for him in the fight. "dodd" was disappointed that mr. bright did not compliment him on his writing, for he had written very well and knew that he had. but this, mr. bright took as a matter of course, and gave no word of commendation for it. it was not time for that yet. "dodd's" starved real self, if fed with what might once have been wholesome food for it, would have been choked, perhaps to death, by a bit of praise, just then, and a wholesome sense of merit would have been changed into a detestable conceit. a teacher has to be so careful about these things. mr. bright seated himself at the table, transferred the name to his register, then took another bit of paper and began writing on it, remarking as he did so: "you will please occupy the seat in front of you this afternoon, and hereafter. i have written a list of the books you will need," he added, picking up the strip he had just been writing on, "and you will please procure them this afternoon. you will recite with the entering class in this room, according to the programme that is on the board behind my desk." but "dodd" did not move a muscle while mr. bright spoke. he did not look up, even when reference was made to the programme. he made no response when assigned his seat, or to his place in school. he sulked and frowned and stood out against everything, and was sullen and malicious to the last degree. to all this, however, mr. bright paid no heed. he stepped down to the boy's desk again, put the list of books upon it, then turned and left the room abruptly, without a word. the act was so sudden, so unlike what "dodd" had expected, that it left him, for a moment, utterly nonplussed. he was vexed that he had not been able to get into a fight with a man who had left him alone; and yet, as he raised his eyes cautiously, to make sure that mr. bright was really gone, he smiled in spite of himself, at the absurdity of the situation! he felt his cheeks wrinkle up, good-naturedly, as the smile crept over his face from above (i think smiles do come from above), and was angrier than ever. he checked his rising good nature with an oath, and raising his arm, he struck the desk a tremendous blow, that made the cover bound again, and the room echo with the thud. then he rose, grinding his teeth as he got up, and slowly and noisily banged his way out of the room. not till three days after this did he appear again in the school room. during this time he loafed about the town and took particular pains to be where mr. bright could see him and have a chance to reprove him. but though his teacher met him several times, he gave "dodd" no other word than such greeting as true politeness dictated. this was worse than ever, for the boy, who was really "spoiling for a row" by this time. the machine, or the machine man, would have had a row with him. mr. bright was not a machine man. did you ever hook a big fish, when angling with a light rod and line? if you ever did, and have succeeded in landing your game, then you know something about the situation which i am now noting. you see, when the odds are so much against you, you have to do as you can, and not as you would like to, with the wily fellow at the other end of your weak tackle. that is, if you accomplish what you ought to wish to accomplish, if you fish at all! of course, there is a quick way of deciding who shall win, you or the fish, and that is to pull away, with might and main, straight for shore, and undertake to drag your captive to you by sheer muscle, brutally matching your strength against his. but if you try this, you know that the chances are a thousand to one that you will part your line and lose the best end of it, and your game along with it. you can do this, if you choose, of course--this is a free country; but if that is your way of fishing, you had better give up any little pet idea that may be lurking about you, that heaven made you for a fisherman. perhaps you might make a fair superintendent of school machines, but you ought not to fish! or, you may despise the fish, if you choose, and when he has left you, you may gloat over the fact that "anyhow you have stuck something into his gullet that will stay there, and that he can't get away from." you may hope that the trailing line will tangle to a bush and hang the creature. all this you may do, and yet, of what avail is it all? it benefits neither you nor the fish! but if you know your business you can give your game his own way, suiting your motion to his, till you wear him out, and then he is yours. that is good fishing, and the good thing about it is that it gets the game! "dodd" was hooked. his staying away from school was the first tug that he gave the line that caught him. mr. bright let him run. he ran for three days, and then gave up on that tack. the fisher reeled in the line and watched for the next break. chapter xii. but on thursday morning "dodd" came to school again. this time he went to the other extreme in the matter of clothes, and came into the room dressed like a dandy. he had failed to make a sensation, so far, and he had not been used to that sort of thing recently. for years he had been the cause of something unusual, every few hours, and in ways about as he chose. as it was now, he seemed to have lost his knack at this art, and to have fallen into the condition of an ordinary individual, concerning whom no one cared particularly. this annoyed him greatly. he had come to think he was of some great consequence in the world, by reason of his being so frequently talked to, and prayed over, and reasoned with, and pampered in a thousand ways by those who were really afraid of him; and now, to be set aside without a word or a look, except such as all other pupils got, this was a sore stroke to his vanity. you see, everybody grows proud of his own attainments, in course of time, no matter what they are, and is anxious to have his fellows appreciate them to their fullest extent, and to acknowledge their excellence in his particular case. so when he fails to secure a recognition of his supposed talents, then he is cut to the very quick. "dodd" felt that his eccentricity had not yet been fully acknowledged in the emburg school, and he reached still further for the object of his desire by playing the fop rather than the tramp, on his second entry to the school room. but it was not a success. the pupils had evidently "sized him up" pretty accurately, on his previous entry, and his second appearance was a more signal failure than the first. he did little with his books during the day. he had not come to school to learn. that was the last thing he thought of doing. he was there to make a fuss if possible,--a row, trouble, a sensation; these were what he was after. he went mechanically to his classes, but paid no attention to what was said or done in them. he hoped, though, that mr. bright would put a question to him about some of the lessons. he was aching for a chance to snub mr. bright, or defy him, by telling him that he didn't know. but he got no questions from his teacher that day, nor for some days after. there are many ways, so many ways, of tiring out a fish, before landing him! so the day wore on, the first whole day in school for "dodd" weaver, for several years. at recesses he unbent a little, but he was only accosted by some of the youngest pupils of the room, and he felt uneasy and out of place among the larger and more advanced members of the school. it was nearing four o'clock, and the closing work of the day was pressing. mr. bright was more than busy with his class, and the room was quiet, the pupils devoting themselves to their work assiduously. "dodd" sat listless for some time, but he finally straightened himself up quietly, his face lighted with interest, and it would have been evident to any one watching him (no one was watching him just at this time) that he was about to do something. he was. his desk was in the row of seats next the wall, and there was only a narrow aisle between him and the blackboard. he could reach across this easily. he reached across. he picked up a piece of crayon and began drawing lines on the board. he moved his chalk carefully, and it made no sound. yet his movements attracted attention, shortly, and one pupil, and another, and another, turned to watch him. when "dodd" found that he had finally succeeded in securing an audience he felt that his point was gained. he winked to a few of the boys about him, and even half smiled at a somewhat coquettish girl whose eye he happened to catch. he was winning his way, and he hastened to make the most of his opportunity. he had not made a half-dozen strokes with the crayon till every one saw that his sketch was a caricature of mr. bright. this gentleman was not handsome. his features were angular and somewhat irregular, and upon every one of these individualities the graceless artist enlarged at will. he turned up the nose, and set the stray bits of whiskers, and dotted the cheeks, at war one with another. he even went further, and with a few clever strokes sketched a dwarfed body for the life-sized head. he worked rapidly and turned now and then to view his subject. and all this time mr. bright was unconscious of what was going on. he sat with his face more than half turned away from "dodd," and was devoting all his energies to the elucidation of a problem that was particularly troublesome to the advanced class in algebra. he had no thought of the "order" of his school room. he was too busy trying to help the boys and girls who sat before him, to have time to trouble himself with the rest of the pupils, who were well able to care for themselves between recitations. this was his way of "maintaining order." but presently he became aware, by soul or ear, that something was wrong about him, somewhere. for an instant he could not make out what it was, so deeply was he engrossed in his work. then, like a flash, it came to him that it was "dodd"! he turned his eyes quickly to where the boy sat, and had the good fortune to catch that young gentleman in the very act of adding the finishing touches to his sketch, with much flourish and circumstance. so much elated was "dodd," that for an instant he forgot where he was, and for more than a minute after mr. bright caught sight of what he was doing, he continued to put in new lines, every one of which added to the grotesqueness of the picture. meanwhile the school saw the situation and began to enjoy it hugely, though now at "dodd's" expense. presently the young man looked up from his work and, glancing quickly to the teacher, saw that he was fairly caught. like lightning he swept the brush, which he held in his left hand, over the picture, and it was gone. then he squared himself in his seat. but it was too late. he had overshot the mark. he heard a sneer of disgust from the pupils instead of the laugh he had counted on. he was down again. he was vexed at the result, and his face drew on an air of injured vexation, after the manner of his kind. then mr. bright said, stepping down to "dodd's" desk, and speaking in a low tone, to the boy only: "the picture was very good; very much better than i could have made. i see you have a good deal of ability with the chalk; i am glad to know it. if you care to try your hand on the board, you are welcome to do so at any time; only please do not try to take the attention of the pupils from their studies by your pictures, as you did just now," and without another word he resumed the point under consideration when the interruption took place. "dodd" tried to look defiant, but to little purpose. there was nothing left to defy. i have seen men strike so hard at nothing at all that they have fallen headlong themselves, dragged down by the force of the blow they had intended for another. "dodd" was down, and it was his own hand that had put him there. and it is so much better that way! yet two points had been gained by this encounter. mr. bright had discovered that "dodd" had a genius for one thing at least, for the sketch was really a remarkably strong one--so strong that the subject of it would have been glad to have preserved it; and "dodd" was fully convinced that he had no ordinary man to deal with in the person of mr. charles bright. with these two new points developed, the party at the reel end of the line began slowly to "wind up," yet again, and the party of the second part let him wind. chapter xiii. rome was not built in a day nor is a character formed in one round of the sun. a man never reaches a great height at a single stride, and many times he slips and falls back, even after he has been climbing a great while. this is a thing that is common to the race. "dodd" weaver possessed this trait. i say that he did, and shall proceed to prove it, in two ways, which i plainly state for the benefit of the two classes of people who can only see the same set of facts from opposite points of vision. for the practical people, those who believe only what they see,--the unimaginative and severely scientific, if you will,--i present in proof of the proposition stated above, the record of the boy's life up to this point--the bare facts that have transpired. for those who bow down at the shrine of pure logic, who accept no conclusion but such as has been hoisted into place by a lever of syllogism, with a major premise for a fulcrum, and a minor premise on the long end of the bar,--for these, i submit the familiar form: a--all men slip and fall back into old ways, more or less (chiefly more), when striving to change a course of life that has become fixed by habit. b--"dodd" weaver (socrates) was a man (or near enough so to come within the range of the first term above). c--therefore; "dodd" weaver (soc.) slipped and fell back into old ways, more or less (chiefly more), when striving to change a course of life that had become fixed by habit. the form will bear study. i am glad to record just here, too, though it may be counted a digression, that for once the facts in the case and the logical conclusion reached concerning the same tally exactly. what a blessed thing it would have been for the martyrs, all through the ages, if there had always been such happy coincidence between logical sequence and actual facts! but what were the world without martyrs? i have heard it said that pure logic has a mission to perform in this world. the record of its doings so far shows that, chiefly, it has been engaged in reaching conclusions that did not tally with actualities, and in leading its devotees to persecute those who accepted facts rather than its ultimatum. it is this that has fostered more persecution in the past than all other forms of bigotry combined. even religion herself has often fallen a prey to this false god, and the most relentless of religious wars have been waged with a logical difference as a basis. nevertheless, pure logic has its use. i have used it to prove that "dodd" weaver did not spring from groveling to grace without some set-backs, i have done obeisance to logic. i can now move on peaceably, i trust. mr. bright made a point with "dodd" by his quick discovery of the boy's genius with the chalk. in a few days he scored another, when he found how well he could read. indeed, it was here the teacher and pupil first felt their souls flow together freely, for an instant. it was the old "sam weller's valentine" selection that the class was laboring with. the boys and girls tugged at the dialogue, but in the main got little from it. it came "dodd's" turn to read. he had taken in the whole scene and was full of the spirit of the piece. his place of beginning was at the words with which "sam" begins his letter, and, commencing there, he read, assuming a high-pitched voice: "lovely creeter!" the school broke out into a laugh, as did also mr. bright. "dodd" raised his eyes for an instant to catch the cause of their mirth, only to meet the approving smile of the teacher, and the slightest nod of admiration from him. he flushed with a glow of wholesome pride, and the next instant shouted, in the deep, husky guttural of "old tony": "stop! a glass o' the inwariable, my dear!" and so he continued with the dialogue. it was a revelation to the school, this reading of "dodd's." after the first floating breath of laughter had passed over the room, every pupil was full of attention, and was listening to the reading of this proverbially bad boy. "dodd" read to the end of the letter and then sat down. mr. bright said, "very well!" and marked him / ! the two walked home to dinner together, at noon! for many weeks after this "dodd" continued as he had begun, and grew in favor with the pupils in general and with mr. bright in particular. he came regularly to school, studied fairly, and advanced quite rapidly in his work. this was very satisfactory to his parents, who saw their son, whom they had mourned as worse than dead, once more "clothed and in his right mind." the elder was happy and felt that at last the personal influence of one good man had done for "dodd" what a half dozen revival conversions had failed to do for him. perhaps he did not say it just that way, even to himself; but we often hear voices within us saying things that we dare not say ourselves, even to ourselves. it was a voice within that said this to the parson. i merely record the fact without further comment. why should anyone comment on such a fact? but there came a day--there are always days a-coming. there came, too, a deed, and there are always deeds a-coming. it was in this wise. school had just begun, after dinner, when suddenly "dodd" weaver arose to leave the room. there was nothing remarkable in this, for it was not unlawful for pupils to leave mr. bright's room without special permission. they were permitted to come and go at pleasure, subject, always, to the direction of the teacher in each or every case. mr. bright did not notice the young man till he had nearly reached the door; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that there was no good reason for his going out. "why are you leaving the room, 'dodd'?" he inquired, a trifle abruptly. "to get a drink of water," returned the boy. "you need not go," remarked mr. bright. "a young man of your years should attend to that at the proper time. you may take your seat!" it was a little thing, but it was so sudden that it "riled" "dodd" to the very depths. quick as a flash he returned: "i'll go out whenever i ---- please for all of you, you ---- ---- ---- ----," and here followed a string of blasphemous words which good taste says i must not write, though the truth is, "dodd" said them, very loudly, before a whole school full of young ladies and gentlemen, who had to hear them. but then, good taste has some rights which i am bound to respect, and i put dashes where "dodd" put most shameful oaths. if a thunderbolt had fallen into that still school-room it would not have produced greater consternation among the pupils than did these words of "dodd's." he turned pale with anger, and glared at mr. bright, as he, "dodd," stood with his hand on the doorknob. "all right;" returned mr. bright, "do just as the 'other-fellow' says about it," and he turned to his class again. "dodd" stood with his hand on the doorknob for a full minute, then turned, and slowly walking to his seat, sat down! but mr. bright did not even look that way. and this was all there ever was of this episode. mr. bright never once mentioned the occurrence to "dodd" afterwards. he did not even reprimand him before the school nor did he speak to any pupil of what had happened. he had won, and yet the odds were so nearly against him that be felt it best to be silent. this might not have been your way, beloved, but it was mr. bright's way, and he was able to manage it. some months thereafter, he had occasion one day to reprove a rough pupil for profanity on the play-ground, and the pupil came back at him with: "you'd better talk to 'dodd' weaver about swearing if you are so anxious about it. he cursed you to your face and you didn't say a word." but mr. bright only replied: "that is my affair, but you must not swear on the play-ground. do you understand?" the young man concluded that he understood, and said so. and that is how this teacher was perhaps logically inconsistent, but nevertheless just, and able to take care of his school according to the individual needs of his pupils. happy is that teacher who can do so much! but the machine cannot do so much, nor can the men who run the machine. the machine is logically correct and consistent, according to the laws of the medes and persians. it "treats all pupils alike." allah be praised! yet a single man like mr. bright is worth whole battalions of machines. thank god! i must take space, just here, too, to explain a phrase quoted by mr. bright, just above, namely, the "other-fellow." the quotation marks are there in deference to dr. holmes, who is responsible for the idea that mr. bright had made familiar in his school. that idea was as follows, when elaborated by this teacher, and was presented to his pupils on a monday morning, a few weeks after "dodd" had entered school. i give this as mr. bright paraphrased it, rather than in the words of the "old master" in the "poet at the breakfast table," where he first came across it. "dr. oliver wendell holmes says," mr. bright remarked to the school, "that in every one of us there are two persons. first, there is yourself, and then there is the other-fellow! now one of these is all the time doing things, and the other sits inside and tells what he thinks about the performance. thus, i do so-and-so, act so-and-so, seem to the world so-and-so; but the other-fellow sits in judgment on me all the time. "i may tell a lie, and do it so cleverly that the people may think i have done or said a great and good thing; and they may shout my praises, far and wide. but the other-fellow sits inside, and says, 'you lie! you lie! you're a sneak, and you know it!' i tell him to shut up, to hear what the people say about me; but he only continues to repeat, over and over again, 'you lie! you lie! you're a sneak, and you know it!' "or, again, i may do a really noble deed, but perhaps be misunderstood by the public, who may persecute me and say all manner of evil against me, falsely; but the other-fellow will sit inside, and say, 'never mind, old boy! it's all right! stand by!' "and i would rather hear," he used to add, "the 'well done' of the 'other-fellow' than the shouts of praise of the whole world; while i would a thousand times rather that the people should shout and hiss themselves hoarse with rage and envy, than that the 'other-fellow' should sit inside and say, 'you lie! you lie! you're a sneak, and you know it!'" this was what mr. bright said to his pupils on a monday morning, and it made a wonderful impression upon them. the same thought always will make an impression upon people if only it can be got to them. after this, he let the "other-fellow" manage his school. you can see how effective it was, my dear, by observing what it did for "dodd," as i have just related. it was even more powerful, if possible, with the other pupils. i commend this "other-fellow" to your notice, ladies and gentlemen, and especially to yours, beloved, who are teachers of young men and women. you can't use him to so good an advantage among the younger pupils, but if you can once get him to take control of your larger boys and girls, you have put them into most excellent hands. for, see; he will ply the lash when it is deserved, and lay on heavily where you would hardly dare to lift a finger. does mary whisper too much? quietly ask her to settle the score with the "other-fellow." is john doing something that he should not do? hand him over to the same authority. and if you can do this, and can succeed in making this personage the absolute monarch of your school, whose assistant you are, then be happy, and teach school just as long as you can afford to. you are a god-send to any company of young people among whom your lot is cast. but if you are a stranger to the "other-fellow" yourself, don't try to introduce him to any one else. it is not well for strangers to attempt familiarities, yet i have known such attempts, even in the school room, and by those high in authority, even among the machines. but mr. bright had succeeded in putting this personage into his school as head master, and he had wrought wonders, even in so hard a case as that of "dodd" weaver. his presence in any school will always work as it did in this case. it takes a man or a woman of character to use this power, though! chapter xiv. i most heartily wish that i could go on with this tale without recording any further lapses on the part of its alleged hero, but i can't. the facts in the case will not warrant such a continuation. nor do i admit that it was "dodd's" methodist blood that occasioned these fallings from grace. i have known men, women and boys, and whole herds of other people besides, even those who were firm believers in the tenet "once in grace, always in grace," who yet had their "infirmities" about them, and whose feet still clung to the miry clay, though they did think their heads were in heavenly places! on the whole, after observing human nature pretty closely for some time, even till gray hairs are with me to stay, i am inclined to believe, with mr. emerson, that "virtue itself is apt to be occasional, spotty, and not always the same clear through the piece." this may be another case where facts do not tally with logical conclusions based upon dogmatic theological reasoning. yet if the fact is thus, my dear reader, you need not be alarmed, so far as you are concerned. ask yourself if it isn't true, in your case, at least, that you have slipped down from the lofty places of your desire and aspiration many a time, even when you have done your best to keep in your high estate. human nature! that is the key to this condition. how to handle this unstable quantity so as to keep it up continually, this is a problem for the ages. so "dodd" slipped again, just as such boys are continually apt to do, and mr. bright bore with him patiently, and "worked him," as a wise teacher can and will. the machine cannot and will not bear with boys and "work them." it "suspends" them and "expels" them. the "other-fellow" held "dodd" to his work for days and weeks, but, finally, even this power lost its grip, for a time. it happened--as such things usually do, when the teacher is doubly busy--that "dodd" began whittling a stick at his desk and covering the floor all about with the litter, in a most shameful and slovenly manner. mr. bright discovered the fact just as he was in the midst of a class exercise in which twenty pupils were taking part, all being at the board at the same time and working together under pressure of his rapid dictation. he had no time to stop then and there to put a pupil into order. he was flushed and excited with his class work, holding his boys and girls up to the vigorous drill he was giving them, and he scarcely paused to say to "dodd": "put up that knife and go to work!" he did not wait to see it he was obeyed. he had not time. the next act of "dodd's" that he was conscious of was his opening the door to leave the room. he saw at once that this move was made simply to kill time, and to get rid of study, and as "dodd" was in the very act of closing the door behind him, mr. bright called out to him: "come back and take your seat!" but "dodd's" only answer was to slam the door as hard as he could and dash down stairs, three steps at a jump. mr. bright rushed out after him at the top of his speed. in his haste to make time, and catch the fugitive, if possible, he revived a custom of his youth and slid down the banister, making the time of an arrow in his descent. then he ran out of the hall, in still further pursuit. but he was too late. he ran around the house, but at the corner he lost the trail, and though he circled the building three times, and listened, and dodged back and forth, to surprise "dodd" if possible, he could get no clue to his whereabouts. he went into the cellar and looked all about, peering into the furnace-room and coal-bin, but nowhere could he find the crafty object of his search. finally he gave up and returned to the school room. he came in out of breath and perspiring, and met the inquiring eyes of his pupils as he went back to his desk. "i could not find him," he said to the school, wiping his dripping face with his handkerchief. then he turned to the class on duty and resumed the exercise he had broken off so abruptly. i do not know what would have happened if mr. bright and "dodd" had met in the heat of this encounter. it is useless to speculate on what would have occurred. some of the boys, waiting in the room they had just left, offered to bet two to one on the master if it came to business. and, indeed, there were no takers at that, for mr. bright had a prowess which would have stood him well in stead if he had had occasion to use it. but he did not. i am glad that he did not. because, it is at such times as this that men get beside themselves, and are apt to do desperate things. i have known men who had to go behind bars and stay there for many years because they did meet the man they were after, under much such circumstances as i have just detailed. i remarked a few paragraphs above something about virtue being "occasional," and we have all need to pray, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." but fate, or foreordination, or good fortune, or destiny, or providence, or luck, whichever one of these presided on this occasion,--suit yourselves as to this, o infidel or orthodox! capitalize them all, since some of you will have it so--elected that these two people should not meet till they had both cooled off a little. i hope these same powers may be as kind to you if you ever have a like need of their good offices. many a man has been made or broken by the smile or frown of one of these deities which are so entirely beyond our control, and which still make so important a part of our lives. i state facts again, without further moralizing. indeed, i could not moralize on this theme if i tried. i don't know any one who can, though the world is full of people who constantly try to. they all fail. the mystery is as great now as it was in the days when eve happened to walk up to the tree where the serpent and the apples happened to be together. one should take off his hat when he speaks seriously of these things. they are stupendous! nor should you blame mr. bright too much for doing as he did. hear the story out before you pass judgment. he was only a man. you are under the same condemnation, my self-contained critic! i will admit without argument, however, that the machine would never have slid down a banister in pursuit of a fleeing pupil. never! it never concerns itself enough about the doings of any individual pupil to follow him an inch for any cause whatever. the machine would have sat still and let the boy run. then it would have suspended him the next morning and expelled him a few days later. the machine always has regular ways of doing things. it has all the rules for its movements set down in a book. but mr. bright was very anxious about "dodd" weaver. when he came to reflect, he was glad that he had not met him while in pursuit of him. yet the question remained, what should be done when they did meet? he thought about this, deep down in his soul, all the rest of the morning. when noon came he was as much as ever at a loss how to proceed. one of the worst features of the case, as he thought about it, was this: "dodd" had been going to school to him now a year and a half, and he had begun to think that he had a permanent hold upon the boy. but here it was again, back in the same old notch, and as bad as ever. it does take so long to make anything permanent in the way of character! you have found it so yourself, haven't you, beloved? in your own case, i mean. but on his way home to dinner mr. bright saw mrs. weaver out in the yard, and remembering how much a mother may sometimes do for her son, he went over and took her into counsel on the case. the machine would not have done this either. it is a rule of the mill not to consult with parents. if parents wish consultation, let them talk to a stack of examination papers, or a record-book. this will soon cure them of their desire to consult. mrs. weaver heard mr. bright's statement with tear-filled eyes. she had seen "dodd" improve in every line of his life, for some months, and had begun to form bright plans for the future of her redeemed first-born. but, alas! here seemed to be the end of all her hopes. however, she tried to apologize for her son, and, in any event, she begged mr. bright not to give "dodd" up yet. but the master shook his head gravely. "and another thing," pursued mrs. weaver, "i think it will be best not to let 'dodd's' father know anything about this. he is such a passionate man that i am sure he would fly into a rage and attempt to beat the boy if he should find it out. and he and 'dodd' are so much alike! if they should get into a quarrel, i fear that one might kill the other before they could be parted." yet these persons were father and son, and one of them was a successful minister and a devout man--most of the time, "you see," mrs. weaver continued, "that my husband has such a high opinion of you as a man, and he knows that you have done so much for 'dodd,' that if he should find out how abominably the boy has treated you, he would be ten times more angry than ever. so let us keep the matter to ourselves, if possible. i will see 'dodd' as soon as he comes home, and will try what i can do. and if prayer, or--" "there, there," broke in mr. bright, quietly, as the brimming eyes of the woman before him began to overflow, "do what you can with the boy, and i will not give him up till i have to;" and so saying, he went on to dinner. but in a country town news travels fast. as soon as school was out at noon, three-score tongues were busy retailing the mild scandal to attentive listeners, whenever met. parson weaver sat in the postoffice, reading a "daily" that had just arrived, when a boy came in, and not noticing the elder, began to tell the tale to the knot of men who stood about. they heard the story through, with many "i-told-you-so" nods, and then, one by one, slipped out of the office. last of all parson weaver went also. he went straight to mr. bright's house and pulled the door bell impetuously. the teacher admitted him, and began immediately to try to soothe the infuriated feelings of the parson, who was really very angry. "i hope the matter may come out all right," said the teacher, "for i trust that 'dodd' will see things as they are, when he comes to himself." "tell me just what happened," said the parson, with a kind of desperation. mr. bright carefully went over the particulars. when he had finished, he added: "i shall be very grateful to you for anything you can do to help us all out of this dilemma and get 'dodd' on his feet again. for what we must do, in any event, is to save the boy." "i shall do all in my power," returned mr. weaver, "but i thought he was doing so well with you, and now he is all at sea again," and with a groan he left the house. mr. bright sat down to dinner and ate a few hurried mouthfuls. he had just risen from his slight repast, when a twin weaver burst into the room and shouted out: "pap wants you to come over to the house as quick as you kin," and having thus said, he turned and ran. mr. bright remembered the words of "dodd's" mother, and he feared that father and son had closed in deadly conflict. he hurried down the street, and made all haste toward the parsonage. chapter xv. when parson weaver left mr. bright's house he went directly home. "dodd" was there before him, and when the elder arrived he found the boy and his mother together, both apparently indignant and excited. "to think that he should have struck you over the head with a stick," exclaimed mrs. weaver, "and then should have the face to come here and trump up a story about your running away! i always did more than half suspect that man of lying, and i have found him out now!" "why, what is this?" inquired the parson, with a puzzled look. "mr. bright has been striking 'dodd' over the head with a stick," explained mrs. weaver; "just see where he hit him!" she pushed the hair back off her son's forehead as she spoke, and revealed a long red streak, made, apparently, by a blow from some solid substance. elder weaver was dumbfounded. "tell me all about this affair," he demanded of "dodd," as he led the way to another room, leaving mrs. weaver to go on with her housework. "all there is of it," answered "dodd," "old bright gave me some of his lip because i couldn't do an example, and when i tried to explain he got mad and hit me over the head with a club, and so i got up and left." "is that the actual truth of the matter?" asked the elder, anxiously. "you don't think i'd lie about a thing like that, do you?" said "dodd." "you can see where he hit me," he proceeded, himself revealing the welt on his forehead. this mark was too much for the good parson. he might have doubted "dodd's" word, but there was no disputing the mark. now a welt raised by a teacher on the body of a child will drive that child's parents to madness quicker than anything that i know of. the elder grew very angry, and resolved to see the end of this as soon as possible. calling a younger member of the household to him he whispered in his ear: "run up to prof. bright's as fast as you can, and tell him to come down here as quick as possible." he would bring "dodd" and his teacher face to face, and then see. it was this messenger that had brought the teacher to the parsonage on the double-quick. "dodd" saw his little brother shoot out of the door, and he was in a worse dilemma than ever. whether to run, or to stay and face it out; to lie some more, or to confess the lie he had already told; these were the things he grew more and more anxious about every minute. but presently he caught sight of his teacher hurrying down the street, and almost before he knew it he said: "it's all a lie i've been giving you, old man! bright never hit me a lick!" "but the mark!" almost shrieked the parson. "i done it myself," explained "dodd," laconically, "to give you and the old woman a stand off with!" it was just as "dodd" said this that mr. bright opened the door and entered the room. "dodd" was seated near one corner, and his father, having just heard from the boy's own lips a full confession of his wholesale lying, began raving like a maniac. he swung his arms wildly, weeping and shouting as he strode about the room: "my son! my son! would to god that you had filled an early grave, or that i had died for thee! o, my son! my son!" and uttering such lamentations he continued to rave. "why, what is this?" exclaimed mr. bright, rather at a loss to know just what to say or do. "o professor," almost yelled the parson, "my boy has lied to me! lied to me!! lied to me!!!" and again he paced the room and tore his hair. coming around again to where mr. bright stood, he went on: "he told me that you struck him with a club, and showed me a mark on his head where he said you had hit him, and then, when i sent for you, and he saw you coming, he confessed that it was all a lie! a lie!! a lie!!! o, my god, my boy! my lost, my ruined boy! a liar!" he shrieked again. "in hell they shall lift up their eyes in torm--" "stop!" commanded mr. bright, confronting the almost lunatic parson; "stop raving and sit down, and let us talk about this business like sensible people," and he led mr. weaver to a chair as he spoke. "now 'dodd,'" said mr. bright, speaking to the boy for the first time since he had called him back in the school room, "tell me about this." "dodd" hesitated a minute, eyeing his teacher defiantly, and finally grumbled: "i have not got anything to tell." at this the parson came very near going off into another paroxysm, but a look from mr. bright checked him, and be sank back into his chair, almost in collapse. then mr. bright spoke, directing all his attention to "dodd." "my boy," he said, "it is useless for either of us to go over what has been said and done in the last hour or two. i need not tell, nor need i ask you to tell, how thoroughly outrageous your conduct has been. but i want to say this to you right here: i want you to steady yourself right down as soon as you can and get to thinking reasonably about this matter. there is only one thing that i am afraid of in this affair, and that is that it will result in great loss to you, if you are not careful. you have insulted your fellow students, you have defied the reasonable authority of the school, and you have lied to your parents. i don't care anything about what you have done to me, or said about me--let that go; but i do care about the other things, and i am anxious to have you make them right as soon as possible, before it is too late." you know, good people, that when a bone is broken, the thing that needs to be done is to set it as soon as possible; if it is left out of place very long, it is ten times as hard to put it right again as it would have been at first, and, even if set at last, it is apt to grow together imperfectly, or perhaps make a crooked limb ever after. the sooner a fault is redressed, the better for all parties to it. "so now i have this to say to you," mr. bright went on: "i don't want you to drop out of school on account of this occurrence. this is what you are in danger of doing, and it is the very thing you ought not to do. you have been doing well in your work for a good while now, and you can't afford to let this affair break you off." "well, i guess it won't hurt anybody but myself, and that is my own business," said "dodd" sulkily. off, away off as yet. drawn, but unwilling to come. seeing, knowing what he should do, but, ruled by some rebellious devil, persistently turning away and doing the other thing. it is the way of perverse human nature. call it "total depravity," "original sin," "infirmity," "the natural man," i don't care what, only this--recognize the condition and deal with it, when you come squarely up against it, so that it will not ruin its victim. "the very thing i am fearing," returned mr. bright. "in one sense it is nobody's business but your own what becomes of you; in another sense, it is the business of a great many. young man, i tell you again to get out of your present defiant mood as soon as you can. i know that your life for the past few months has had more of genuine enjoyment for you than you have experienced for years previous to this time. i don't say this boastfully, i say it thankfully. and what i am anxious for is to have you keep going in the same way. just think it over, and see what there is before you. on the one hand, a return to your place in school, and with that a continuation of all that you have so much cared for; on the other hand--but i leave that for you to think out. there are two ways right here, and you must choose which one you will take." "well, what have i got to do if i go back?" asked "dodd," yielding ever so little. "you must apologize to the school for your conduct and pledge to your fellow students your word of honor that hereafter you will behave like a gentleman." "dodd" gave his head an angry toss and was about to speak when the parson sprang to his feet, and, rushing across the room, shouted: "he shall do it, or i will disown him, and he shall never enter my house again, but shall be--" "sit down, sir!" exclaimed mr. bright, almost forcing the distracted parson into his chair. mr. weaver sat down and was silent. mr. bright proceeded: "so now, my boy, here it is for you to choose, and you must use your own judgment about it." but "dodd" looked down and said nothing. it was a critical moment. a soul was at stake, and fiends and angels were striving together for it. mr. bright was the captain of the heavenly host, and devoutly he stood, waiting the issue. there are no rules laid down in the machine guide books that lead up to this high estate, nor does the machine manager care so much for marshaling angelic forces as he does about controlling the election of a member of the board from the --th ward. as mr. bright spoke his last words a silence fell upon the group. the father sat with his hands over his face, "dodd" gazed at the carpet, and the school teacher bowed his head reverently. for nearly a minute this impressive calm brooded over all. then mr. bright felt in his soul that the tide was turned in his favor. he advanced towards "dodd" and extended his hand. "come!" he said. the boy did not raise his eyes, but he did lift his hand, just a little--only a little--and mr. bright grasped it with all the fervor of his thankful soul. he drew "dodd" towards him, and he arose, hesitatingly. they walked out of the room hand in hand, nor did they break their clasp till they reached the school-room. when people are too weak or too timid to go alone they musk be led; yes, sometimes they must be carried! but, led or carried, the point always to keep in mind is this, that the nearly dead are to be made alive again, the lost are to be found. and this is the test that must be set over against all systems and institutions that have to deal with unformed characters. the everlasting question must be put again and again, does this, that or the other save, find, restore, or benefit the individuals that come under its influence? whatever does this, is good; whatever fails to do this is not good. it is fair to ask what the machine does in this regard! chapter xvi. it was a trying time for both "dodd" and mr. bright as they walked together, hand in hand, towards the school-house. the trouble was that neither of them could say anything. mr. bright felt that words might only mar the matter, and "dodd" was too busy thinking of what was just before him, to say a word. the master realized the situation, and counted their steps, almost, as they walked along. presently he felt "dodd's" hand working nervously in his own, as if to break their clasp. his heart sank, but, inspired by that same power which had so often come to him in an emergency, he said: "what is it 'dodd'?" "i can't apologize," returned the boy; "i don't know what to say," and his lips trembled as he spoke, while tears welled from his eyes. how many things there are that interpose between us and our duty! you have found it so in your own experience, haven't you, my friend? "say that you did wrong this morning; that you are sorry for what you did; that you apologize for your action, and that you pledge your word of honor to your fellows that you will be a gentleman in school in future," said mr. bright. the nervousness was no longer in the hand, and both "dodd" and mr. bright felt that they were about to win in the strife. they quickened their steps, and were shortly in the school room. but there was a trial yet, and one that i fear would have been insurmountable for a good many of us, brave men and women though we think we are. as teacher and pupil entered the room they discovered the three members of the board of education seated upon the platform. one of the number had heard the story told by the boy in the postoffice, and had hastened to make up his mind that "dodd" should be expelled from school. he hurried to see the other members, and for the first time since mr. bright had been in charge of the emburg school, this educational triumvirate appeared, in a body, in his school room. their presence was exceedingly annoying, just at this moment--the very time when they should have kept their hands off. but this is apt to be the way with boards of education in towns of the emburg stripe. i ought to take room, just here, too, to say that the president of the board was really glad that an issue had come, and that they could now rid the school of parson weaver's boy. the fact is, this man was deacon in a church of a denomination other than that to which the parson belonged, and the rivalry between the two sects had been brisk, not to say thoroughly bitter and almost mean, for a long time. anything that would disgrace the family of the pastor of the opposing church would weaken the influence of the church itself, and the same would redound to the glory of the church in which the deacon officiated. i grant that this is a side issue, but side issues are often of more moment, in cases like this, than are main issues. as "dodd" and mr. bright came in, the deacon rose to meet them. the school was already in order, and "dodd" went on to his seat. mr. bright turned to his own desk to meet the advancing president of the board. "can we have a word with you, before school takes up?" said the deacon, drawing down the corners of his mouth and looking particularly pious and exceedingly virtuous, as he thought. "wait a few minutes," replied mr. bright, crowding past the man in the effort to reach his desk. "but we prefer to speak to you now," urged the president. "the matter is very pressing." "i will attend to it presently," answered mr. bright, and then, ignoring the dignitary who addressed him, he turned to the school and said: "before we begin the regular work of the afternoon, 'dodd' weaver has a word to say." a deep silence fell upon the school at these words. the pupils all seemed to feel that they stood in the presence of a great strife. one naturally holds his breath under such circumstances. then "dodd" stood up in his place, and the latent manhood, that had long lain dormant within him, asserted itself. in a clear though somewhat subdued voice, he said: "i want to apologize for what i did this morning, and i pledge you my word of honor that hereafter, so long as i am a member of this school, i will behave myself." his voice trembled somewhat towards the close, but he went bravely through to the end, and then sat down. then mr. bright bowed his head, and said: "our father in heaven, whose weak and erring children we all are, bless the boy whose confession we have just heard, and help him to keep his word of honor like a man. and help us all, in all our strifes with evil and with wrong, that we may come out of them better, and stronger, and purer, even as our master was made perfect through suffering, amen." that was all! perhaps there were dry eyes in the room just then. if so, they did not appear, after a pause of an instant, mr. bright said: "you may go on with your work," and the pupils turned to their books again. in five minutes more the hum of the busy school room was as if nothing uncommon had happened, and classes were reciting as usual. the deacon and his fellow-members sat upon the platform till recess, listening to recitations, and then left; the president remarking to the teacher as they went out, that they "thought the school was doing very well!" "dodd" and mr. bright walked home together after school was out. "where do you suppose i hid?" asked "dodd," as they walked along. "i have no idea," returned mr. bright. "i ran down cellar, and, crawled part way up the airshaft back of the furnace," said "dodd." and that was the last that was ever said about the affair by either teacher or pupil. chapter xvii. for a few months after the event just narrated "dodd" went to school to mr. bright, and during the whole time he deported himself as a good and faithful student should. but with the next meeting of the conference, parson weaver was shifted again, and with him went the hero of this story. (i think "dodd" may justly be called a hero after so bravely doing what he did in the presence of the school and the board of education, as just told.) mr. bright also left emburg the following year, and so he and "dodd" drifted apart, as people are all the time doing in this wide, wide world. the parson had now been so long in the service that he was promoted to a city pastorate, at this turn of the ecclesiastical wheel of fortune, and so it fell out that "dodd" went to the city to live. a more unfortunate thing could hardly have happened to him. yet his lot was such as is common to most boys who go from country to city life. they drift into the town where everything is new, strange and rare to them, just at that age when they are the most curious, the most on fire with new-born and wholly untamed passions, and the least able to resist temptation. the glitter and tinsel of city life have thus a charm for them which falls powerless upon young men who have been familiar with such sights from their youth up, and the ignis fatuus of gilded pleasures lures them into the quagmires of sin before they are aware, where hosts of them sink down to death in the quicksands of a fast life. "dodd" was not an uncommon boy. when he went to the city, he did as hosts have done before him, and as hosts will continue to do. i suppose god knows why! yet the young man did not go all at once into by and forbidden paths. few folks do. neither do they come out of such ways by one great leap. there are those who preach a different doctrine. either "dodd" or his father made a fatal mistake, too, on going to town. neither of them arranged to have the boy get to work, as soon as he entered his new life. the elder thought his son was getting large enough to look out for himself, and "dodd" waited awhile to look around. so, between the two, the cup of salvation that the boy should have quaffed, fell, and was broken. "dodd" drifted about the town for many days, seeing what he could see. his memory of mr. bright was still fresh and nourishing, and it often held him from wrong, where his natural inclination would have carried him clear over the line that separates evil from good. an iron, well heated, will hold its heat long after it is taken out of the fire. it grows cold, though, after a while. so the boy began to circle about in the outer edge of the whirlpool that sucks in its victims so relentlessly and remorselessly, always, in the city. i wish i did not have to tell the tale of still another descent into avernus, of this boy of the checkered career. but i have started out to paint the picture exactly as it is, and i dip my brush in black again with a sigh. you have to do the same thing in telling, even to yourself, the story of yourself, don't you, my reader whose blood has iron in it, and whose pulses beat fast? i am not writing of a sluggish-veined person, nor for people of that complexion, good people though they are. "dodd" had never been to the theatre. he was curious to go, and now that he came within reach of this class of amusements he was all anxiety to gratify his desire in this direction. he said nothing to his father or his mother about this, however. indeed, it would have availed little if he had; that is, as these amusements were always looked upon by the parson and his good wife. they would have contented themselves by anathematizing the play-house and forbidding "dodd" attendance at such places; probably ending up their dissertation by declaring to the boy that it was his "natural heart, which is enmity against god," that led him to desire such sinful diversions. so, one night "dodd" went alone to the theatre. truth to tell, and to his credit be it said, he chose a reputable place for his maiden visit. the play was "london assurance." it was well done, and the boy, who really possessed much innate dramatic genius, enjoyed the performance greatly. he felt ill at ease, however, while in the place, and went very quietly to bed when he reached home. indeed, as he lay awake for an hour or two after retiring, unable to sleep because of the vivid visions of the play that his highly wrought imagination and memory represented to his mental eyes, he resolved that he would never again go to see a play, but would stop with a single taste of the pleasure. having made this resolve, be went to sleep content. how easy it is to make good resolutions, and to be content and satisfied in them when out of the reach of temptation. but the next day, as he went about the city, he saw "othello" billed for that evening. he was restless in an instant. he talked the matter over with himself something as follows, considering whether or not he should go and see the "moor of venice:" "'dodd,' you are a fellow who cannot rest contented until you have seen what there is to see in the line of plays upon the stage. there are two kinds of dramas--tragedy and comedy. you saw comedy last night. go and see tragedy tonight and that will cover the whole field. you will then have seen it all and will be satisfied." so that night, tuesday evening, he went to see the tragedy. don't ask about his resolve of the night before; just ask how you yourself have done scores of times, under similar circumstances, when you have sworn off, but when the trial came, have concluded not to count that time! "dodd" enjoyed "othello" as much as he did "london assurance." but that night he pledged himself again not to pursue the pleasure further, as he had now seen it all. the next day, however, he found "uncle tom's cabin" billed. now even "ministers went to see this play," the bills said. "dodd" saw "topsy," "eva," "marks," and "uncle tom" that night! thursday he found "ten nights in a bar-room" billed. he knew the story, and was anxious to see the characters in it upon the stage. he saw them. friday, his friend john oller, from emburg, was in town, and "dodd" confessed to him that he had been four times to the theatre. john said: "well, 'dodd,' i never went, and i want to go. come and go with me to-night." the boys followed "marble heart" through to the end that evening. saturday they went down town together, and "zoe, the octoroon girl," was on for matinee. they took it in. saturday night was set for "hamlet," and that melancholy dane died in their presence before the city clock rang in the sabbath morning. here is the story for you, good people. seven times to the theatre in one week, for a boy who had been to such a place but seven times in all his life. it is the way of human nature. i suppose that when adam and eve really got to eating the forbidden apples, they ate, and ate, and ate. at least, this quality has been transmitted to their descendants. now, the bad thing about this affair, was not that "dodd" had been to the play-house seven times, but that he had been there clandestinely. when a person begins to sneak about anything, he is on the down grade to perdition, and the brakes are all off. the result of this excess of "dodd's" was a still further dissipation. it is usually that way. the theatre soon had a fascination for him that he could not withstand. he went whenever he could get money enough to buy a ticket. after awhile he began to frequent places of amusement of a low grade. the "variety" performance attracted him, and he became an habitual attendant at such places. here he formed acquaintances and made friendships that were not to his advantage, to say the best thing that can be said of them; and with these companions he drifted down the descent he had started on so unthinkingly. here, also, he learned to drink, a vice which he had heretofore escaped. so he kept on, down, and down. he needed money for the gratification of his desires, and to procure it he began to venture a little now and then on some gaming device. he was cautious and shrewd, and his early "investments" were fortunate. he won small sums at various times, and was elated with his success. he loitered much about the "bucket shop," and now and then took a "deal" as some friend gave him a "pointer." he was fortunate here, also, and even though so young, his vivid imagination began to picture the fortune he should some day make in this way. he suddenly dropped his country ways, dressed flashily, and took on, with marvelous aptitude, the customs and manners of metropolitan life. and still he kept his own counsel. the great gulf fixed between himself and his parents grew wider and wider. it was through this gap that the devils entered in and took possession of his soul. the book has it that wicked men wax worse and worse. it was so with "dodd." his love of liquor grew upon him with wonderful rapidity. he began drinking to excess, his eyes became bloodshot, his hand became unsteady, and his step halted. but the better part of the young man rebelled at this retrogression. he passed many an agonizing night alone, pledging himself to stop; hoping, longing for his true life of a few months before, and cursing his present condition. the "other fellow" was faithful to him, too, calling loudly to him to turn about, to go the other way, to "be converted." but as is usual in such cases, after a night of such agony he would take one drink in the morning, just to steady his nerves down, and one being taken, the rest followed in course through the day, as they had done the day before, and the day before that. he was drunk a good share of the time. it happened one night as he was going home, or rather as he was trying to go home, being in a very mellow condition, that is, he "stackered whiles"--that he was accosted by a polite and pleasant voiced, young gentleman, who took his arm kindly and walked with him several blocks. as they walked he told "dodd" that he was on his way to attend a revival meeting, and asked him to go along. just then "dodd" "took a bicker," and in the lurch, he knocked a book out from under the arm of his companion. it was a bagster bible! but the two went on together to the meeting. they went well to the front of the congregation, the guide steadying the wavering steps of the man he was leading. "dodd" sat down, and after a brief rest began to come to himself, and to realize where he was. he hung his head for shame, and wept as the service progressed. he was weak, unnerved, a wreck. he looked at his shattered self, and groaned in spirit over the ruin that he saw. he longed to break away from the terrible bondage that held him in its thrall. he cried out in spirit, in an agony, for help in this time of his great need. the sermon came on. the minister seemed to "dodd" to be talking straight at him. (indeed, the gentleman had observed his entrance to the church, and frequently had him in mind as he made this point or that, in his remarks.) under the enthusiastic eloquence of this man "dodd's" anguish increased till he was almost in a frenzy. it was when he had reached this point that the speaker uttered the following words: "young man, whoever you are, no matter how cursed with sin or polluted with iniquity you may be, put your trust in jesus and all your sins will be blotted out. are you a drunkard, with an appetite for drink that is gnawing your life away? throw yourself into the arms of jesus, and he will take away your appetite for strong drink and give you strength to overcome all the temptations of your former life. let the light of jesus once shine into your soul, and neither cloud nor storm shall ever enter there again. all will be brightness and purity. old things will have passed away, and all things will become new. i offer you this salvation to-night, o, weary, sin-sick soul. take it, i beseech of you. let the sun of righteousness break in upon you at this hour, and never will you be in darkness again." the man glowed under his theme, and his audience warmed with his impulsive appeal. "dodd's" soul grew hopeful. all these things promised were the very things he was longing for. he had pledged himself time and again to stop wrong doing, and had broken his word in every case. he hated himself for this, and he stretched out his hands for salvation from his miserable estate. here, help was offered. why should he not take it? and then the great congregation arose with a sound as of a rushing, mighty wind, and all sang together, with an effect that must be seen to be realized, "just as i am, without one plea," etc. you know what followed, do you not, ladies and gentlemen? "dodd" weaver "indulged a hope" before he left the church. chapter xviii. if it were not for clouds and storms what a sunshiny world this would be, to be sure! but there are clouds and storms everywhere that i know anything about. there are legends of lands of perpetual sunshine, i know. i have visited such climates. i have found clouds and storms there also. the natives have told me that such were exceptional. doubtless they were, but the clouds shut out the sunshine there, just the same as they do elsewhere, and i took a terrible cold once, one that came near being the death of me, from going off without an umbrella, in a country where i was positively assured it never rained--at least, not at that season of the year. so the result of all this is that i have learned to distrust the tales of eternal fair weather in any spot on all this green earth, no matter how strongly they may be backed up by the affidavits of good, well-meaning, and otherwise truthful men and women. it is so easy to state an opinion that is not based upon a sufficient number of facts to warrant its assertion. what has happened to me in the matter of sunshine and storm, in this weather-beaten world, happened to "dodd" weaver in his religious experience. he started out boldly in his new life. he hoped and trusted that he had entered into a physical, mental, and spiritual condition in which all that he had been he might not be; all that he should be he might become; all that he ought to hate he would hate; all that he ought to love he would cherish. he longed to believe and he tried to believe, that he had entered into that land of perpetual sunshine which had been promised him by the minister and his friend. he hoped, and really expected, to dwell there henceforth, beyond the reach of clouds, and storms, and tornadoes. but everybody knows that there were no good grounds for his expecting such continuous, perpetual, and unbroken fair weather in his formerly storm-swept sky. the question strikes one, then, why should he have been promised this, and why led to hope for and expect it? see what came of this too generous inducement held out to an anxious soul. for some days, while "dodd's" newly developed fervor ran high, he lived in the blessed light. for this light is blessed, and it shines with a divine warmth into the souls that are open to receive it. the fact remains, however, that clouds and storms--but i need not trace the figure further; you all know about it. so, almost before the young man was aware, he was under a cloud. it happened on this wise: for many weeks he had been drinking freely and both smoking and chewing tobacco to excess. the first thing he did, after his hopeful conversion, was to quit all these stimulants at once. his intense religious zeal held him up for a few days, but at the end of that time his strongly formed appetites assorted themselves. he could scarcely sleep, so hungry was he for a chew, or a smoke, or a drink! these were the weaknesses that had driven him to seek for help through the consolations of religion. he had been promised this help, and in no equivocal terms either. he had been told, even from the pulpit, that if he would put his trust in the lord all these temptations would depart from him. he had done this as well as he knew how to. he had at least made an honest effort in that direction. his lips were parched for liquor, and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth with a longing for a quid of fine-cut. and so the clouds overspread "dodd's" sky--clouds of doubt and distrust, out of whose lurid depths leap lightnings that blast like death! he doubted, first of all, the honesty of the men who had promised him more than he found himself the possessor of. we always begin by doubting some fellow-mortal. as the process progresses, it leads us, ultimately, to doubt god. but these men had meant to be honest--there is no doubt about that. they had told the young sinner of that which they believed would help him. they knew, of course, that he would have trouble with his old habits, after a while. perhaps they hoped that he would get over them somehow. perhaps they did not think very much about it. in either case, they said nothing. the patient was suffering. they gave him medicine that would afford him the quickest relief, without regard to the permanency of the apparent cure. what an amount of such doctoring has been done through the ages. stand up in your graves, you armies of dead men that have thus been dealt with, and nod a "yes" with your grinning skulls! the clouds grew thicker. "dodd" went to his newly formed friends and told them frankly of his condition. the minister advised him to be much alone and in prayer. the young man told him that there was no need of his suffering from such appetites, because, he himself--the young man aforesaid--could keep from such evil practices easily enough, and if he could, "dodd" could. certainly! "dodd" acted on the advice of the minister, and went home and shut himself up alone in his room to pray. he tried, but the words seemed to go no higher than his head. did you ever think that when the master received his severest temptation it was when he was alone? let a man who is tempted beware of trying to win a victory shut up in a room by himself. the devil has him in a hand to hand fight, in such case, and thereby increases several fold the probability of winning the battle. "dodd" tried to pray. he strove alone, as in an agony. he besought the power that he had been told to invoke, to take from him the horrible thirst that was gnawing within him. he wept, he pleaded, he begged. the gnawing kept on. there was once one who prayed "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." it did not pass. then, indeed, the clouds did grow dark. "dodd's" doubts left the earth, and reached even to heaven. he not only doubted the men who had led him to the promised relief; he doubted even the power of religious experience to save a tempted man, and the reality of religion itself. from this point it is but a step to the supreme doubt of all! if only the boy had expected a storm, he might have weathered it. if, in this hour of his trial, some faithful soul could have lived with him, day and night, and never left him for an hour, till the storm was over, he might have come through. neither of these things happened, however. he struggled on for several days. he gave up finally. he came home one night drunk, almost to the verge of insanity. there had been a cyclone in the land of promised eternal sunshine. "dodd" weaver's bark lay upon its beam ends, and the jagged rocks of infidelity pierced its battered frame. you have seen such wrecks by the score, have you not, good friends? chapter xix. and now the victim of these adventures was in a worse case than ever. up to this time neither religion nor its lack had played any particular part in his being. he had been a bad boy, truly, but in his former low estate he had thought little of anything that pertained to another world, or to the future in this. now he disbelieved all things--man, immortality, heaven, god. it is a condition which few fail to experience, in a greater or less degree. i wonder if it is necessary that i pause here, just an instant, and interlard a remark regarding the scene through which i have just traced "dodd" weaver. i do so, in any event. in what has been said, i would not have it understood that i rail at, or deride, or impeach the honesty of the men who tried to help "dodd" out of the sad condition into which he had fallen. neither would i underrate the value of religion, in such experiences, nor impugn its power to save sinking souls from death. but i cannot help reiterating the fact that multitudes of young men have drifted on to the rocks of infidelity as "dodd" did, because they have been promised too much by religious enthusiasts. there is such an experience as genuine religion, and it is the most blessed estate that a soul can aspire to. there is a place for prayer in the divine economy of god's providence. but neither religion nor prayer can help a soul that is sick unto death with the malady of doubt. "dodd" was thus circumstanced. it was the zealous overstatements, the ultra promises, the unwarranted inducements held out to him, which, unrealized, threw him into this condition. and then doubt is such a breeder of its own kind! as a single bacterium will, in a few hours, under favorable conditions, develop millions like unto itself, and poison a man's blood to the last drop, even so doubt grows in the soul, when once its germs are planted there, and its noxious growth blights all one's being, bringing death hurriedly, if its course is not stayed. "dodd" weaver was in a state of mind highly favorable to the development of unbelief. the false promises of his well-meaning friends sowed the seed of distrust within him, and the crop was not long in ripening. the fact is, truth is so loyal to itself that it will not suffer distortion, even for the apparent purpose of doing god service. it can no more be swerved than god can! if that point is clear, i go on with this narrative. but "dodd" had seen enough to understand that if he expected to live long he must stop short of absolute debauchery, and he rallied somewhat from the first awful overthrow that came when the clouds burst over his head. he drank more moderately, and was seldom drunk. he returned to his old haunts, however, and kept on in the main as he had before. the only difference was that he loitered in a way now where before he had rushed along at top speed. he began, too, to look about for something to do. he was anxious for a job in a store or an office, where be could wear good clothes and not have to work hard at manual labor. this is a common desire of country boys who go to town to live. the trouble was, however, that he knew next to nothing of business of any kind. was this the fault of his education, thus far? his school education, i mean. i ask the question. he finally concluded to take a course in a school that advertised to fit a person to engage in any business whatever in three months, without regard to age, sex, or previous condition. he went to this school. i have no quarrel with institutions that make a business of fitting young men and women to engage in commercial pursuits. i know of many excellent institutions of this kind. but i nevertheless submit the record of "dodd" weaver in his connection with this college, so called. the man at the head of the institution was a brisk, nervous sort of person, a shrewd fellow, and given to much flourishing with a pen, which was to him much mightier than any sword. he could whirl off a scroll-winged eagle on a blank sheet of foolscap, in a twinkling--a royal bird, with a banner in his beak, on which was inscribed "go to ---- college," and which the king of birds was bearing towards the sun for advertising purposes. he could also add a column of figures with wonderful rapidity, and occasional accuracy! he was a believer in lightning methods and processes everywhere. his own education had been wrought out on that plan. he was seeking a fortune by the same route. he drew crowds of boys into his school. it was through them he made his money. "dodd" had much skill with a pen, as will be remembered by his sketching mr. bright's face on the board one afternoon. he took to the practice in writing with some alacrity, but for the rest of the work he soon did as the others did--studied little, and in lieu of a recitation listened to a long and disjointed talk by "the professor." he was held to no account for his work, and whether it was right or wrong made little difference. he found that his teacher would profess to know things of which he knew he was ignorant, and, in a word, that there was an air of shoddy, not to say dishonesty, about the whole institution. this did not trouble him greatly, however. it was only in keeping with what he conceived he had finally discovered the whole world to be--a gigantic sham--and he mentally remarked to himself "i told you so," and drew an unusually large spread-eagle upon a fresh sheet of foolscap. he stayed three months in the school and then graduated. his diploma was handed to him by a venerable gentleman who delighted in the appellation "president of the board," while an orchestra, composed of young ladies of the school, all of whom were learning to play the violin, by the "short method," discoursed most execrable music from an improvised platform that had been built in the church, for the occasion. six other pupils came through with "dodd," and their going out was used as an advertisement to lure still another half dozen to fill the places left vacant. the young man came forth from this experience more the slave of doubt and distrust than ever. but the worst feature of all was that this infidelity in "dodd's" soul was poisoning his whole life. honor was to him now only an empty name, but policy was a quality to be held in high esteem. truth was to be used if convenient, but if a lie would serve a better purpose for the moment, it would be brought into service without hesitation or scruple. fortune was his goddess, if he did deference to any unseen power; tricks and chicanery were to him helps to rapid and boundless wealth. "let the sharpest win, and may the devil take the hindermost," these were the tenets in his creed, if he had a creed. armed with such ideas of life, "dodd" weaver set out to battle with the world. he had also his diploma! chapter xx. in the course of a few weeks "dodd" secured a clerkship that was much to his mind. it was, however, one greatly in advance of his ability to manage, with his present attainments. if he had believed that fidelity, honesty, and attention to business were the prime factors of success, he might have mastered the situation, perhaps. he did not so believe. on the contrary, he held that the more he could shirk and get out of, and still draw his salary, the sharper he was. he acted in accordance with his belief. people usually do! but business is business. "dodd" found his employer an exact man--one who required service by the card. this the young man could not, or rather would not render. he blundered in his work on more than one occasion, and resorted to tricks to bolster up his carelessness or inefficiency. the result was that after a few weeks' service he was discharged. he was chagrined, mortified, angry. but he "cheeked it through," as the young men of his class would say. it is bad business, this "cheeking." he loafed about once more, as formerly. he took a "deal" on the curbstone occasionally, or now and then ventured a few pieces of silver upon the black or red. he was back in the old notch. for more than two years "dodd" led this reckless, wasteful existence. he was of age now, and his father had felt it his duty to tell him that he must shift for himself. mrs. weaver mildly protested, but the weaver family was large, and though the elder commanded a fair salary, it cost money to live, and every mouth to be fed counted one. so "dodd" took a room down town, and then if the devil went to sleep, sure of his victim, you do not wonder, do you? yet the great majority of young men in large cities room down town. details of degradation are always revolting. i will not trouble you with what happened during these years of exile of this young man. his story is like that of thousands in like case. his evil habits grew upon him, and held him tighter and tighter in their thrall. still, he dressed well, went much into fashionable society, and saw much of life. he was one of the boys, and he held his place among them by hook or by crook. he was never brought to face a court on criminal charges. he may never have been guilty of such acts. if not, is it not remarkable? it was when "dodd" was well down the steep he was descending that he chanced, one day, to meet his old teacher, mr. bright. more than three years had passed since they had seen each other, and each had changed with time. mr. bright had grown not a little gray, and his devotion to his profession had caused the marks of his craft to become deeply seamed in his face. his former pupil we have followed, day after day, and we know well enough what he looked like. the two passed a hearty greeting, "dodd's" disbelief in mankind leaving him for the moment, consumed by the positive integrity of the man whose hand he held. each took a searching look at the other, with mental reservations in each case, as thus: "dodd": "gray--hard worker--not up to snuff--square as a brick." mr. bright: "flashy clothes--shambling gait--a look in the eye that is not direct." these are the things they thought. they spoke of other matters. mutual inquiry led to the disclosure of the whereabouts of each, and what each was doing though in this last item "dodd" drew largely upon his imagination, informing his teacher very indefinitely as to the calling in which he was engaged. mr. bright had moved to the city, having been called to take charge of an important educational institution located within its corporate limits. he had a home of his own, and said he should be glad to see "dodd" there. "dodd" said he would call on mr. bright. he did so. and now began one of the most perplexing series of circumstances that i have yet had occasion to record. "dodd" came to see his teacher, who was really anxious to have a sober talk with him, and the two spent an hour together. when they separated, "dodd" had five dollars of mr. bright's money in his pocket! he had "struck" his former preceptor for a loan. i do not say that he had deliberately stolen this money. perhaps he meant to pay it back sometime; but he had long been used to borrowing, and the impulse was almost irresistible to borrow whenever he came where he could. sometimes he returned these loans; oftener he did not. his sense of right and wrong in such matters was not very keen at this time. and so he began to sponge off mr. bright. he came to visit him frequently, and often left with a dollar or two extra after the interview. at first mr. bright did not fully realize the depth of degradation which "dodd" had reached. he made these small loans as he would have given money to a son of his own, had he had one. he talked with the young man, and once or twice hinted that he feared all was not as it should be. but "dodd" evaded an issue, and so the days went by. but one evening these two people met, and the truth stood revealed. "dodd" was drunk. mr. bright knew a good deal about human nature, but he had had no experience with the peculiar vice of drunkenness. his heart went out towards "dodd," and, taking the boy's arm in his own, he led him to his house. he would care for the prodigal with his own hand, and restore him if possible. so he gave him the best chamber, and bathed his head, and watched with him till far into the night. the next morning they talked it all over. "dodd" was penitent, even to the extent of tears and bitter weeping. he pledged mr. bright that this should be the last time; that he would reform now. he confessed that for years he had been a miserable sinner in the matter of drink, but declared that now he would break off. in a word, he did the usual thing on such occasions. mr. bright heard his pledges with a swelling heart and a thankful soul. he fondly hoped that he might save the young man yet. you may have had like hopes under similar circumstances, my gentle reader. the scene ended with "dodd's" leaving mr. bright's house in the afternoon of the following day, accompanied by any amount of good advice and even prayers for his future good behavior. he took with him also a ten dollar note which he had borrowed from his benefactor, just to get a start with. chapter xxi. the wise mr. george has remarked that "by no possibility can one really use up his living in advance." "that is," he explains, "it is as impossible to anticipate the products of one's labor, and live them up before they are earned as it is to eat to-day the egg that is to be laid to-morrow." i do not dispute the egg part of this proposition, but i must protest that if it is impossible for a man to anticipate the products of his own labor, and to live them up in advance, it is quite possible for him to anticipate the products of what some one else has already earned, and to live them up most effectually. the only impossibility in the premise is for this some one else ever to get his own again. this statement should pass for an axiom, since it needs no proof. you have had dollars of your own that have been appropriated thus, have you not? and of all habits that tend to demoralize a man, this one of dead-beat borrowing is the worst. it will sap the last germ of manhood out of a soul sooner than anything else i know of. it is one of the meanest vices in society, and one of the most prevalent among a certain class of young men. i will not say that every person who asks to borrow money from a friend without offering security is a dead-beat. such a statement might be somewhat wide of the mark. i only assert that i have always found it so! it was not without misgivings that mr. bright advanced "dodd" the ten dollars spoken of in the last chapter. but alas, poor man, he was yet blind to the fact that whoever thus assists a person in the condition in which "dodd" now was does that person more harm than good. there is any amount of light nonsense current on this point. see how the method worked in this case. "dodd" really meant to do better when he left mr. bright's. people in this condition always do mean to do better. he had made pledges to his friend and he hoped to keep them. it takes more than hoping to succeed in such eases, however. i would by no means intimate that when a drunkard signs the pledge he is always lying and does not mean to keep it. on the contrary, i think the great bulk of those who thus write their names with a trembling hand, do, at the time of writing, really mean to keep all that they promise. but as a rule they change their minds when the trial comes, and "don't count this time!" this statement is a sad one, but it is terribly true. there is a reason for it. and the chief reason is that these "unfortunates," as they are called, get into the habit of being carried when they should walk on their own feet. your drunkard is always expecting sympathy, and help, and upholding. he leans down on you; he lies down on you. he pleads misfortune, disease, or something, and makes himself out a poor, weak victim of circumstances. he asks for help, and of a kind that most suits himself. he should not get such. help he should have, but of a kind that will make him help himself. because, when such a person is merely helped by another he becomes helpless himself, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. it was so with "dodd" weaver. the kind offices of mr. bright had really wrought him harm. he had thus been able to get money for some weeks, and as he lived only for the moment now, this "accommodation" kept him in his low mode of life. it is the study of a lifetime how to deal justly with people in his condition. if you doubt my word, try it. you will be convinced. "dodd" did intend to do better after leaving mr. bright's. but he went right down town and took a drink to brace up on. this also is common. it was two days after this that the young man came once more to appeal to his benefactor. he was in trouble again, and according to the law i have just noted he came for relief to the source from which help had before come. there is no record of how long a man can thus abuse the kindness of a friend. sometimes death alone ends the scene. but mr. bright was not a man to be trifled with when once he had taken in the situation. he heard "dodd's" story with disgust. the young man had been drunk again, and in a brawl had struck an antagonist with brass knuckles. for this offense he said the police were in search of him, and would probably find him. he asked mr. bright to let him have money to pay his fine, and so keep him out of jail. he could not bear that disgrace, he declared. but mr. bright was unmoved. he sat looking at "dodd" for a moment in silence, and then said: "not one cent, young man!" "but i shall have to go to jail," faltered "dodd," in a broken voice. "you may go there, and stay there, for all of me," exclaimed mr. bright, in a burst of righteous indignation, as all the past years rose up before him and the memory of them floated before his vision. "i have given you the last cent that i ever shall. you deserve to go to jail, and it is probably the best thing that can happen that you should." "but my mother!" pleaded "dodd." "it is a fine time for you to plead your mother now, isn't it?" replied mr. bright. "how much you have considered her and her feelings in the last few years," he continued. "when you have been drunk on the streets; when you have abused the hospitality of a gentleman; when you have lied to me and obtained money from me under false pretenses, then was the time for you to plead for sparing your mother. you did nothing toward that then. i will not help you now." mr. bright spoke firmly, and in a straight-forward tone. "dodd" shrank under his words as though they were lashes on a bare back. but once more he pleaded: "i don't know who will help me if you don't, and some one must help me, for i can't suffer this disgrace." "well, no one shall help you if i can prevent it," replied mr. bright. "what you need, young man, is to help yourself. if you haven't virtue enough left to do this, you might as well go to jail, or into your grave--it doesn't make much difference which. you are of no manner of use in this world as you are now. you are worse than useless, you are a dead load to your friends, your acquaintances, and society." mr. bright laid on tremendously, now that he had begun, and "dodd" writhed under his strokes. the last flagellation left them both out of breath, and there was silence in the room for some minutes. it was mr. bright who spoke first: "'dodd,' my boy," he said, "i need not tell you how it pains me thus to talk to you, you for whom i have striven so hard, and from whom i had hoped for so much. you are naturally bright, but you are fickle by nature, and, so far, you have lacked the manhood to correct this fault. you are the only one who can ever do this. so one else can do it for you. if ever you stand up like a man, it must be on your own feet. i tried to teach you this long ago. i think i failed. at least is seems so now. you did stand for a while though, my boy, and i would to god you could do so again." "dodd" sat in his chair shedding bitter tears; he began feebly: "help me this once," he begged, "and before god, i promise you i will never give you cause to be ashamed of me again." "keep your pledges to yourself," returned mr. bright. "i want none of them. they are of no value whatever. you have come to a time now when you must do something more than pledge, though there was a time when your word was good, and i would have taken it, unquestioned, on any occasion. but that time is past. it may come again, but the chances are against it." "you are making me out a monster," interlarded "dodd," with an attempt at injured innocence in his voice. "and that is just what you are," said mr. bright. "you have grown out of all semblance to the true type of a man. you are wicked, deceitful, weak, vacillating, and untruthful. so long as you retain these qualities there is no hope for you. perhaps a punishment of a term in jail may serve to bring you to a sense of your condition. if it will, it is the best thing that can happen to you. anyhow, i am willing to see it tried." "so you will not give me money to pay my fine?" groaned "dodd." "not one cent," again answered mr. bright, as he showed the young man to the door. chapter xxii. as they walked through the hall, however, "dodd" dragging himself along reluctantly, a kindlier mood took possession of the school teacher. he paused, and, turning to the young man, said: "see here. i have a plan that has just come to me, and i will give you the benefit of it. i am convinced that you will never be any better than you are now if you continue to live in this city. your companions are here, and so are your old haunts and associations. i will do this for you. i will go to your room with you and help you get together whatever clothing you have. then i will go with you to the depot, and will buy you a ticket to the farthest point from here that ten dollars will take you to. i don't want to know where that place is. i don't want ever to see you or hear from you again, unless you are a different man. i want to give you one more chance to stand on your own feet. that is all i have to say. you may take it or leave it, as you will." "dodd" hesitated a minute, and then said: "i'll take it." "very well," replied mr. bright, putting on his coat and hat; "i am ready, and will go with you now." "i might say good-bye to your family," said "dodd"; "they have been so kind to me." "i prefer that you should not," replied mr. bright. "i have no desire to have you know them further. you have forfeited all claim to their respect, or regard, or courtesy even, and if you never redeem yourself, i do not care to have them see you again!" it was a terrible thrust. it was like a sword in the bones to the recipient of the cutting words. "dodd" reeled under them as though smitten with a veritable blade of steel. but they were doing good work for this abnormal young man. these cuts, made by the sword of truth, when wielded by the hands of mr. bright, laid open to "dodd" weaver the secret recesses of his own soul, and he saw there such foulness as he had never before suspected. not one word had his former teacher said to him which was not true. his final refusal to permit him to say adieu to his family, "dodd" felt was just and strictly in accordance with his deserts. this hurled him down to where he belonged, and made him realize what a wretch, what an outcast, he was. don't you suppose, good people, that it would be a great deal better, all around, if we each one got what we really deserve just when we deserve it? but we don't; and so we flatter ourselves that because the desert does not come to-day it will not come to-morrow, not next day, and we hope it will never come. and so we keep on in our wrong ways. the book has it: "because sentence against a wicked work is not executed speedily, therefore the hearts of men are fully set in them to do evil." this was written a long time ago, but it is as true to-day as it ever was. i think that even the most confirmed skeptic would admit the truth of the passage. so mr. bright went with "dodd" to his lodgings, helped him pack, and got him to the depot. they escaped the police. this was not a hard thing to do. it seldom is, if one has really been doing wrong. "here is ten dollars," said mr. bright to the ticket agent. "i want you to give me a ticket to a point the farthest away from the city possible for that money." "what line?" inquired the somewhat surprised official. "i don't know, and i don't want to know," returned mr. bright. "i want a ticket such as i have described, and i want you to tell me which train to take to reach the destination, though i don't want to know what the destination is." the agent looked puzzled for a minute, but as the bill was a good one, and other passengers were waiting, he picked out a ticket, stamped it, and thrust it out under the glass, with the remark: "take the train that leaves from the other side of the middle platform." mr. bright folded the ticket without looking at it, and taking "dodd's" arm, started for the train, which was already waiting. as they went along, "dodd" said: "let me see where i am going to, please!" "not now," returned his guide, and they boarded the train. the conductor came in presently, and to him mr. bright spoke in a subdued tone. "here is a ticket for this young man," he said. "i want you to take it, and see to it that he reaches the destination that this piece of paper calls for. don't ask me what that is. don't let me know. but take the ticket, and do as i ask." the official looked wise for a minute, then took the ticket and passed on. "dodd" and mr. bright sat in the same seat in the car till the train was ready to go. not much was said; for the time of words was not then. but just as the bell rang for leaving, the elder man took the hand of the younger, and clasped it almost passionately. the eyes of the two met. "dodd" remembered the day when they walked to school together, hand in hand. "my boy," whispered mr. bright, "if ever the time comes when you can stand on your own feet, let me hear from you and know of your success; but if you continue in the old way, let the world be as a grave to you, so far as i am concerned; and never let me hear from you again. but," he added, as he turned away, "i faintly trust the larger hope." and without another word he left the car. he went directly home. it was many a year before he referred again to that day. there was a hissing of pent-up air as the engineer tried the brakes before moving out his train, then a slow motion of starting, then away and away. "dodd" weaver sank back in his seat, and pulled his cap over his eyes. he did not cast one lingering look behind. indeed, what had he to care for, in all that great city? "i faintly trust the larger hope," repeated "dodd" to himself, as the train rushed along. he remembered the day when they had read the lines in the reading class of mr. bright's school. chapter xxiii. on a christmas morning, ten years after the scenes recounted in the last chapter, mr. bright was surprised to receive a letter addressed in "dodd's" well known characters. he broke the seal without comment, wondering what story of destiny he held in his hand. a thrill of joy suffused him as, on unfolding the sheets of the bulky manuscript, a bill of exchange fell upon the table. it was the most favorable sign he could have desired. it augured all that followed. [remark (as reads the foot-note in scott's bible): the first sign of regeneration in a man who has been a dead-beat is the payment of his honest debts.] mr. bright opened the letter and read as follows: new york city, december , -- mr. charles bright. dear sir:--enclosed i hand you exchange, payable to your order, to the amount of $ . , the sum due you for money advanced to me years ago, with legal interest on the same. respectfully, d. w. weaver. this was the first page of the epistle, brief, business-like, and to the point. but having thus entered a voucher for his manhood, and, as it were, won the right to speak further, on the second page there was a continuation as follows: beloved teacher: what precedes will tell you where i am. you told me the last time i saw you, that if ever i redeemed myself, you would be glad to hear from me. i believe you, and hence i write. i can never commit to paper all that i have to say to you; words spoken face to face can only tell what is in my heart; but neither the written nor the spoken word can convey to you a tithe of the gratitude i feel for all that you have done for me. as i look back i can hardly understand how you ever bore with me as you did, with me who abused you to such unbounded lengths. nevertheless, the more i fail to understand this, the more thankful i am to you. i am sure you will care to know something of my career in the past ten years, and i briefly relate the principal items of interest. and first, let me say, i have entirely quit the use of liquor. from the day when you left me in the car, limp as a whipped dog, to this very hour, i have not tasted intoxicating drink. i mention this first, because a breaking away from that habit was the first step toward a better life. had i not stopped there, short off, i know that all hope of further reformation would have been vain. a drunkard has nothing, absolutely nothing, on which to build a new life, so long as he continues to be a slave to drink. but with the abandonment of this vice, i began to change my other habits, and by degrees i have gained a mastery over them. it has been a long, hard fight, and i am well aware that there are battles yet to be waged; but i have reached the point where i have ceased to be afraid of myself--of my baser nature. as cardinal wolsey says to cromwell: "i know myself now." you remember we used to read the lines out of the old reader when i went to school to you at emburg. i cannot tell you how much i thank god for the help that has come to me. but i am forced to say that you are entitled to almost equal thanks. and, indeed, as i review the past, i know that without you, even the god of heaven could not have received the gratitude i now give him. for you were the means by which i was lead to a point where i could receive his aid. it is you, therefore, my benefactor and my noble friend, whom i have first to thank. i say this in simple justice to you, who bore with me so long and patiently, and who remained faithful to me when it seemed to me you were terribly unjust and cruel. but to my history: when you left me on the train, i cared next to nothing as to what became of me. i don't believe i should have lifted a finger to save my life had the train been wrecked. i would not deliberately take my own life, but if it could have been taken from me i should have given it up without a regret. i cared not for man, and as for god, i neither feared such a being nor believed in his existence. but your words stung me like burning lances. they were true, every one of them, and the "other fellow"--indeed, i have not forgotten him, nor has he forgotten me, and for this i have to thank you, also,--took them up and kept saying them over to me, as i rolled along to my destination, which as yet i did not know. i tried to be rid of them, but it was useless. the truth had been told me for once in my life, and i saw myself as i really was. it was not an inviting sight, but it is one i should have been forced to see, long before. i reached the end of my journey, a place which, as you would not know its name then, it is perhaps well that you should never know. i had no money, and i was hungry. ordinarily, i should have struck some one for a loan, but your words rang in my ears, and i would not do it. i applied for a job of work that i knew i could do. i got it, and did it as well as i knew how to. i hide my face even now, for very shame, as i confess that it was the first time, for years, that i had done as well as i knew how to do. i got my pay, and ate an honestly earned, though frugal supper, that evening. i think you will understand me when i tell you that i went to bed happier that night than i had before for a long time. the "other fellow" said, "it is all right, old boy! stand by!" i did "stand by," and i have been standing by ever since. and first, as i learn you are still teaching, i want to ask you never to give up your boys, nor your way of managing them. you can never know how much you did for me in the emburg school. those old days come back to me almost every hour, and their essence is a part of my being. i know that you must have thought, ten thousand times, that all your work was lost, and counted for nothing. you had every reason in the world for thinking so, and doubtless did think so. but i want to beg of you now, in the name of the new life that has eventually come to me through the medium of those old school days, not to be discouraged. i tell you, my dear teacher, that not one of such words and deeds will fail, at last, of reaching the purpose for which it was primarily intended. so please be patient with the boys, and keep on as you were, years ago, and do not be discouraged because it is long till the harvest. it will ripen in due time. the reapers shall come also, bearing their sheaves, and it is at your feet that they will lay them down. but i wish especially to thank you for your wisdom and faithfulness in our last interview. on that occasion you struck the key note to the whole situation when you virtually kicked me out of your house, and told me that if i ever got up i must climb for myself. that was a new doctrine for me then, but i understand it thoroughly now. it is sound doctrine too, though it takes long to see it so. you were wise, too, to watch me till i got out of town on that september afternoon. if you had given me ten dollars at your home and told me to buy a ticket, i doubt if i should have done it, even if i had promised to, and meant to do so when i promised. the chances are i should have spent the money for drink, and then have gone to jail. that is the way of a man such as i was then. an habitual drunkard is not to be trusted, not even by himself. i shudder as i write these things, and i only reveal them to you, hoping that they may, perchance, be the means of your helping some one else. i never refer to these scenes to others; in fact, no one here knows of these painful pages in my history. you will care to know what i am doing. i have a studio here on broadway, and am painting portraits. the old gift, that you were the first to discover in me, when you said a kind word for my burlesque sketch of you on the board, at emburg (how often i do get back to that old school-room), at last proved my salvation. gradually i found that i had talent in this direction, and i am making the most of it. carefully and honestly i took up the work, and with perseverance i have attained my present success. i have studied with the best artists here, and my work is well received. at the latest exhibition at the academy i was the winner of the first prize, and this fact has already brought me more business than i can well attend to. i am delighted with my work, but shall never rest satisfied till a picture of yourself hangs in my room where it can watch me as i pursue my daily task. because, it is you who inspired me even to try to be a man and to do something in the world. the credit is yours. my father and mother are still in illinois. i have communicated with them several times recently. the children are grown, and several of them have left home. i hope to see the family all together on the day you receive this letter. i may also see you before i return to new york. i cannot close this letter without telling you further of the change that has come to me in my religious and spiritual life. you know how blasphemously unbelieving i was ten years ago. i thought then that i had full cause for being so, but i was wrong there, as in all else. i wandered far and long, but as i began to do what i believe was god's will, i began to know the doctrine, as the book says we shall. i am happy now in a religious life which i once believed it impossible for any one to experience. these are the main features in my life. so now i wish you adieu, and pray the good father in heaven to bless you all the days of your life. your calling is the most noble in all the world, and i do you but justice when i say that you are wholly worthy of your profession. remember me to your family, which i trust i may now have your permission to mingle with again (ah! that day); and believe me, ever sincerely yours, "dodd." mr. bright read the letter through to the end, then fell on his knees and in silence rejoiced and gave thanks. you may talk about rewards, good people, but will you measure out in dollars about the worth of feelings that filled the heart of mr. charles bright on this occasion? it is only in the coin of the everlasting kingdom that such a result can be told. the next day the bank passed $ . to the credit of the schoolmaster. the check was good! there was a joyous dinner at elder weaver's house that same christmas day, the family being united again, the prodigal returned, and bringing with him a wife newly wedded. leave them at dinner. only god and the members of the household should look upon such a scene. "dodd" and his wife also spent a day with mr. bright, on their way to their home in the metropolis. it was a joyous occasion, all hearts overflowing with such pleasure as there is among the angels, over one sinner that repenteth. chapter xxiv. in a snug home in a suburb of new york city dwells "dodd" weaver with his faithful and devoted wife. they have one child, a boy, named charles bright. their home is happy and full of the sunlight of love. "dodd" is devoted to his profession, and serves it faithfully. he has a marked talent in his calling, and is succeeding well. he may never become famous, but what is fame? he is earning an honest and excellent living, and that is much for one with his start in life. he looks over the path he has come with thankfulness as well as with horror. he hopes, too, that when his own son shall come to go by the highway of life, he may be able to take him by the hand and lead him along the dangerous places that he found along the road, or, at least, to point out the pitfalls for the child, and so save him from the evil that so sorely, beset himself. but every day, the thing that now looms up through the life of this now busy man is the personal character and influence of his old teacher, mr. bright. this never leaves him nor forsakes him. it is like an anchor to his soul. it saved him from total wreck in his voyage of life. it held him from ruin when the waves and billows swept over him. why should he not revere such a source of help; such an everlasting tower of strength? but his memory of the machine brings no such consolation or help. why should it? answer, if you can, you who have faith in the mill itself, or whose business it is to make it grind. as "dodd" touches his brush to a bit of ruddy color on the pallet at his side and tinges the cheeks of a beautiful face that smiles from the easel before him, i draw the curtain that shuts him out of your sight and mine, beloved, and that closes him into the sacred radiance of his own happy home. let us leave him there within the veil, within the veil. addenda [for school teachers only.] as i vexed no one with a preface at the beginning of this story, i allow myself the privilege of a few reflections at its close. if the evolution of "dodd" has seemed slow, or if it has appeared, sometimes, as if the life, whose growth i have traced, began on a very low plane and progressed almost imperceptibly, let it be remembered that this is the ordinary course of nature. it is the way of the world. from the primordial germ to the soul of a man is a long, long distance; and often and often, in the upward march of life, the path seems to turn upon itself and go backward. it is even so in the life of every one who eventually reaches the goal. the way to final victory is marked by a succession of advances, battles, and retreats. this also is ordained. the physical body of man, from the time of its inception till the close of its career, passes through all the varied stages of animal life--the germ, the cell, and the changes that these are subject to in animal existence--that is, being the highest form of material life, man bears, in his own body, marks of all previous conditions. even so, in his spiritual body, each individual exemplifies "the total world since life began," and every soul must span the space from the first man, adam, to the quickened spirit of a son of god. people whose business it is to develop human souls should remember that. again: how to help weak and tempted humanity so as to build it up, to make it strong and able to resist temptation, is a problem that has never yet been fully solved. whether it is better to hold up an awful example before the gaze of the suffering ones, and to relate to them the certainty of a like conclusion to their own career if a like course of life is persisted in; whether it is better to point out the success that some tempted and tortured men have reached, by devious ways that led through flame and darkness, and from which the victims have escaped only as by fire, like brands plucked from the burning,--which of these ways is the better, heaven only knows and has never revealed. it is well enough, though, to remember that the master was tempted in all points, like as we are, and that it is said of the saints in glory that they came to their reward through great tribulation. there can be no greater tribulation than for one to be born with a nature that is intrinsically false, fickle, passionate, impulsive--in a word, such a nature as "dodd" naturally possessed--a nature far away from the line of truth and right; a nature such as multitudes of boys are born with in this wide, wide world of ours. to guide safely into the port of rest souls thus weighted down with depravity is a task for gods and men to compass--if they can. the chances of wreck are many fold to one; but now and then the harbor is made, thank god! it has seemed best to me to tell the tale of one such voyage of life. there is no denying that the journey was a perilous one, such a one as would probably wreck ninety-nine out of one hundred crafts attempting it; yet, for all of that, there is joy over the one that comes through. i am aware that "dodd" weaver has had more chances than any one person ought ever reasonably to expect. but providence is sometimes bountiful in opportunities, even to prodigality. "dodd" doubtless had more chances than he ought to have had, in the strict line of justice; but we must all plead guilty to the same charge, in a greater or less degree. it is likely, however, that no more opportunities have come to any of us than were necessary to bring us safely to our journey's close. "there is a divinity that shapes our ends." i am glad "dodd" weaver had as many chances as he had. i am glad he didn't need any more of the same sort, for they might not have been forthcoming. there is such a thing as being too late. my hope for you, beloved, is that you, too, may have chances, and that you may take them while you can. i would that you might reach the goal of success in life by a shorter route than "dodd" had to take; but if not, then may you come by the way he trod. the road is not unused, you will not be alone in your travels. one last word regarding the public school, for whose sake all this has been set down: in the evolution of character, in these last days, this institution has come to be a most important factor. to it has been assigned a task equal to, if not exceeding that of any other agency that has to deal with human nature. it is more important than can be set forth that it do its work well. it is not so doing now, however, to nearly the extent of which it is capable. too much it has become a mere machine, a mill for grinding out graduates. as such it is unworthy its high estate. as such it now exists, in multitudes of cases. as such it should no longer be tolerated. from such a condition it must be redeemed. the system has largely lost sight of the grandest thing in all the world, namely, the individual soul. it addresses itself to humanity collectively, as a herd. in this it makes a fatal mistake, one that must be corrected, and that speedily. and for you, teachers, you who have the destinies of these schools in your hands, keep your eyes and ears open, and your souls alive to the possibilities of your profession. let no machine nor method crush out your own individuality, and suffer no power to induce, or to force you to make a business of turning a crank that runs a mill whose office it is to grind humanity to one common form, each individual like every other, interchangeable like the parts of a government musket! understand, first, last, and all the time, that characters cannot be manufactured like pins, by the million, and all alike; neither can salvation be handled in job lots. it is also true that wholesaling education can never be made a success. because, personal character is all there is in this world that amounts to anything in the final resolution of things. it is not money, nor governments, nor machines, that are of value in the last analysis. it is character! it is individuality! it is men! to secure these things this old world turns over once in twenty-four hours, and swings around the sun in yearly revolution. for these, tides ebb and flow, the land brings forth, and the clouds float in the sky. to these all forces are but servants. for these christ died. and like begets like, in the public schools as elsewhere. it is character in the teacher that begets character in the pupil. the machine makes after its own kind also, and both it and its products can be measured with a line. the soul cannot be measured with a line. so the ultimatum is personality, individuality, and character, in every teacher and pupil in the public schools, and freedom of each to develop in his own way, and not after a pattern made and prepared by a pattern maker. if the public school live long, its friends must take these items into account and act on them. it is its only salvation. the end.